Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Hope Bernard, "Spaces of the Corseted Body"
Hope Bernard
Imagination and the Spaces of the Corseted Body:
Gaston Bachelard and the Images of Home
Women in the Victorian era were in a tight spot. Cultural norms of the day required women to fit the fashionable ideals present in society. Already in a marginalized and contained space economically and politically, women remained stationed in a physically constricted space individually. The infamous corset manipulated and morphed women’s bodies into a culturally accepted (however unnatural) form. Did the garment restrict, even harm women’s bodies to the point of injury? Of course it did; the garment represents just one of the numerous efforts both women and men have made to attain a socially acceptable body.
Since the corset’s main purpose is to press the torso into a predetermined shape, in this article I study the corset in terms of the space it takes up and the space it leaves clear; the ways it both enslaves and sets free; and how it both enervates and empowers. In this article I sift through the numerous images comprising the corseted Victorian female body in order to reveal a poetics of the corseted form. Considering the space of the corset requires a methodology appropriate to the study. I have chosen to use the ideas of Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space. According to Bachelard, images of home create an experience of intimate places, depending on the locations within the home. Taking his ruminations on space and applying them to the corset, I make an analogy between the female body and the idea of home. The body is a site of much recent scholarship in the fields of theatre and performances studies, and can be analyzed as many different things including a text, an instrument of inscription, and a nexus of images. I believe the concept of home can be readily seen in/on the body. With this in mind, I explore the ways in which examining the corseted Victorian female body as an image of home can be a useful tool and heuristic for interpreting the history of the corset.
“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard 5). So the French philosopher begins his journey to delve into the spaces of the house, which in turn provide images of home. Interspersed with scores of poetry verses, Bachelard’s text draws on poetic images to analyze the spaces within the home in regards to imagination. The home is above all a place for daydreaming (6). Daydreams allow us to join the imagined with the actual, and create spaces that have elements of both. What we remember, what we know, what we see, and what we forget all meld together to generate our individual notions of home. If the home in question here is the female body, how do these elements fit together to produce an image that is at once actual and imagined? Let us now look back at this image of home, the Victorian corset.
A History of the Corset
The phenomenon of the corset boasts of a dynamic history. While art and fashion historians have studied the corset to analyze what impact it had upon women and society as a whole, their studies have focused primarily on its social, psychological, physical, and economic effects. These historians have emphasized the physically debilitating effects of the corset and speculated on the use of the corset to enforce a patriarchal society, and how it kept women in their literal and figurative places. Art historian David Kunzle, however, posits another theory in his book Fashion and Fetishism. He argues that some women used corsetry (specifically tight-lacing) to claim their sexual agency in order to free themselves from the ties of marital and maternal life. According to Kunzle, “the young girl of the late Victorian era tight-laced in protest against the stereotyped social role awaiting her, and in hopes of attracting a man for whom companionship and erotic pleasure weighed more than parenthood and family” (Kunzle 45). Though he describes several different ways that women could use the power of the corset to shape their own destinies, his theories conflict with theories of scholars who deny that women could gain agency in such a tightly controlled patriarchal society.
Valerie Steele, a prominent fashion historian, rejects both the oppressive qualities of the corset and the freeing qualities of the corset in her book Fashion and Eroticism, and calls for a critical analysis that does not bow to the author’s ideological stance (Steele 161-162). Steele explores the spectrum of opinions in the Victorian era on the subject of corsetry. According to Steele, some opposed the corset and others defended it, but Steele argues that one must not overlook the large middle population who made up the majority of society. This majority “condoned or actively approved of ordinary corset wearing, but denounced the practice of ‘tight-lacing’ (a term that was variously interpreted by the different segments within this group)” (162). As we shall see, the fine line between corsetry and tight-lacing depended on the space between the corset and the body. This almost indecipherable distinction between good uses and bad uses marks just one matter surrounding the contested space of the corset.
A more recent study of the corset, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset by Leigh Summers, surveys and evaluates different kinds of archival evidence in order to answer the question of why this painful, unnatural, restrictive, and sometimes harmful piece of clothing was so popular. She discusses the simple, more obvious reasons—the ever-present vanity of human kind—as well as more complex economic issues—corsetry factories sometimes employed women, creating spaces for females to have economic freedom, though still physically bound by the corset. The quest for a suitable silhouette figured into many Victorian women’s lives, both those women in the middle classes and those in the working classes:
“Corsetry was essential, not just in constructing femininity, but in constructing a class-based identity and subjectivity. Corsetry was prized by fashion-conscious, middle-class women because it crafted the flesh into class-appropriate contours. That is, corsetry operated to hide any “course” abdominal bulges from view, while it smoothed the hips and created the small, circular (rather than oval shaped) waistline that supposedly denoted good breeding. The well-corseted body, in tandem with suitable clothing, gave an immediate first impression of gentility. It operated, to the distress of many middle-class women, in exactly the same way for their working class sisters.” (Summers 9-10)
Because of the unbiased strength of the corset, working-class women could attain an attractive shape as easily as middle- and upper-class women; the corset acted as a social leveler. The shape-changing power of the corset gave the working-class women hope of a vertical move up the ladder of society; however, corsets themselves varied much in quality and in design. Summers goes on to trace the control and manipulation of the shape of women’s bodies throughout the time period. During the Victorian era, the corset created the hourglass or “wasp waist” effect on women’s bodies. As times “progressed,” women became (semi) liberated from the constraints of the corset. During the late-nineteenth century, women started practicing gymnastics and other exercises requiring looser-fitting clothing that did not inhibit movement. The corsets were dropped almost overnight and the garment became a piece of history. Of course, the shift was in fact not so quick. Manufacturers (usually male) designed special “exercise corsets” so women could participate in gymnastics while appearing to keep their cultivated figures. Over time the corset morphed into the smaller, yet similarly useful girdle, then eventually these artifice of control became unfashionable altogether.
What stepped into its place is fascinating. Instead of manipulating a body into a predetermined shape by means of material clothing, women sought the desired shape through diet and exercise, and sometimes surgery. The body was (and is) expected to be firm, flat, and in the shape of an hourglass without the help of external constraints. Women today nurture (or torture) bodies into shapely submission so as to create an accepted body without the corset. Steele details the shift from the slenderizing corset to the slender body:
“For both the High Victorian and the Edwardian periods, the ideal of feminine beauty (though different in details of physique and fashion) was a draped ideal- the existence of a beautiful body had largely to be inferred from the appearance of a woman in fashionable dress. The Twenties illustrates a shift to the opposite extreme: Much more of the body was revealed, so that, in effect, clothing only succeeded in its object of enhancing feminine beauty when worn on a nearly ideally suitable body.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 239)
Clothing formed the “draped ideal” and was therefore accessible to more women; the ideal shape could be attained through the correct application of clothing, so it did not automatically exclude women of certain body types. More women could attain the ideal shape. This accessibility however was limited to those who could afford to buy the corset in the first place. But even with the economic limitations, Summers argues that in addition to upper-class and middle-class women, working class women also wore corsets and many homemade versions were replicated from patterns in magazines. Summers gives evidence that even female prison inmates had access to corsetry, and were required to wear them. “So great was the purview and popularity of corsetry that unfortunate working-class women incarcerated in prisons or asylums could not escape its reach, even if they had wanted to.” (Summers 16). From the external corset of cloth to the internal corset of a shapely figure, from the richest parlors of Victorian England to the dirtiest prisons of the same age, beauty knew/knows no bounds.
Victorian fashion can be placed in an approximate 100-year period from about 1820 to 1910 (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 51). The period preceding Victorian fashion, the Empire period, displayed classical or Greek features: high waistlines and straight skirts that created a “vertical silhouette.” Undergarments (like the corset) had traditionally dictated the outline of the figure:
“The corset had existed for centuries, but its contours changed over time. During the eighteenth century, the corset formed a heavily boned V-shape. When the Empire mode dominated in France, the corset became lighter and shorter, evolving into something more akin to a linen bust-support […] After about 1806, the corset was again boned and fitted with a busk, flattening the stomach and hips. With the development of Victorian fashion, the corset again constricted the waist, but the shape was now closer to that of an hourglass.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 54-55)
The evolution of shape continues through this period, starting with the more vertical line, moving to an hourglass. As the fashion progresses, it begins to squeeze in the middle, while expanding the top and bottom of the silhouette. Corsets emphasize and draw attention to “secondary sexual characteristics” such as the hips, breasts, and buttocks (Steele 34). It is these secondary sexual characteristics that attract the opposite sex, Steele argues. In the primal urge to draw a mate, visual stimuli can play a large role in the courting process. It would seem then that the breasts and hips would be the focus of the physical figure of the female form. But it seems that the spotlight settles on the small waist at the center of the image. What can we read about this tiny center, this miniature, cinched core? This quest to stay within the boundaries of beauty is close to the heart, and I believe, therefore, close to the bodily home. At this point let us enter into this home of the body, this house of beauty, and see what the phenomenon of the corseted body poetically fills out.
Miniature Centers and Dynamic Cores
Bachelard’s inquiry into poetic space includes an intriguing exploration of miniatures. What is small can be of magnificent proportions, imaginatively:
“One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large and what is small. By analyzing several examples, I shall show that miniature literature—that is to say, the aggregate of literary images that are commentaries on inversions in the perspective of size—stimulates profound values.” (Bachelard 150-151)
He is noting a paradox. How can something small be grandly stimulating? How can something tiny be experienced as huge? Bachelard locates this concept in our notion of possession and control. But with that control comes deep meaning: “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I posses it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature” (150). Consider a tiny insect. It is small and almost inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But peer at the insect through a magnifying glass, and suddenly the bug is immense. Looking closely at the tiny insect reveals a world replete with miniatures now exposed as rich and detailed. The poetic value shifts from the grand images of nature to the miniature bug, as the insect is now the center of our universe, and consequently now possessed in all its value by the observer. If the tiny waist of the corseted woman is a miniature image filled with enriched value, upon observation, the viewer can imagine total possession of the valuable object. Because it is the tiny center of the woman, one can imagine control over this profound value. For to have the center is to possess the core; and at the core is its value.
If the waist of the female corseted body is the center, this small core encapsulates the value of the whole being. Bachelard explicates this notion by means of an example from Cyrano de Bergerac, as the title character muses on the value of the apple:
“This apple is a little universe in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than the other parts, gives out the conserving heat of its globe; and this germ, in my opinion, is the little sun of this little world, that warms and feeds the vegetative salt of this little mass.” (Bachelard 151)
Bachelard then concludes, “The apple itself, the fruit, is no longer the principle thing, but the seed, which becomes the real dynamic value” (151). Applying this idea to the female form, the whole being of the female is no longer the “principle thing.” Visually and aesthetically, the waist is now the center, the core, and the seed. It has the dynamic value. The seed of the apple gives life and indeed is life. The center of a woman holds this dynamic value as well. From the center, from the stomach/womb comes life. Every person on earth is born from the center of a woman. But upon closer examination, it seems that the corset and also Victorian society assisted in the shielding and seclusion of women’s life-giving abilities, even though human kind depends on these abilities for survival.
For many Victorian women, pregnancy meant the end of social life. Society considered a pregnant woman appearing in public offensive, and relegated the woman with the growing child inside her womb to the home. Bachelard’s image of home is thereby doubly expressed in the pregnant corseted woman; for the Victorian female, the domestic sphere was her locus of interaction, and if her center began expanding, she was forced back into a real “home.” It is as if Victorian society thought of the female as requiring shelter and needed to be held captive. The notion of a woman as miniature and possessing dynamic value can be equated with a man’s desire to possess the woman as a doll. According to Bachelard, “the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys” (149). This concept problematizes the concept of woman as the center, because if the woman’s waist ceases to be miniature, the man must then grow up. He can no longer imagine the woman as a toy, as a tiny thing to possess. The woman now possesses the ability to create life from the dynamic center, which is a powerful place, real or imagined. If there is a real child on the way, forcing the center outward, the man can no longer imagine himself as a child at the center. Home is now a fearful place, one that is mysterious and threatening. Therefore, the expecting woman must stay hidden in the real home until she becomes the imagined, emblematic home once again.
It is believable then that the corset aided in veiling pregnancy. Manufacturers designed special corsets to keep the pregnancy hidden for weeks, even months. Because of the social stigma of pregnancy, women took drastic measures to cover the visual aspects of gestation. Summers devotes a chapter of her book to the inspection of the maternal body and the effects of corsetry:
“The corset was, moreover, integral in maintaining pregnancy taboos. Its fundamental, if rarely acknowledged, charter was to reduce the size of the body, disguise “unfeminine” bulges and prevent, whenever possible, the pregnant body from attracting public notice […] Clearly, many Victorian women hid their swelling bodies, while others understood that unwanted “obstructions” or pregnancies might be interrupted by the application of stout and tightly laced corsetry.” (Summers 60-61)
Staying within the acceptability of the strict social conventions, the corset could hide the pregnancy for a period of time, allowing the woman to go about her life without fear of breaking social norms. Hostile to the natural development of gestation, the corset held the woman’s body in during a time when she most needed to expand. Aesthetically, the pregnant stomach created a visual picture in total opposition to the fashion of the day. Instead of an hourglass with the center being the smallest part, the figure now shifts to a circular form, with the center being the largest part. The value of the miniaturized center is gone, because the imagined tiny core is no longer present. The space eventually can go back to its culturally expected form, when the child is born. Then, after the appearance of the new child, there exists a new human being also in possession of a new dynamic core. The seed has been carried on, and the effects of the pregnancy and birth are now separate from the shape of the mother. The center can again retract, providing an image of youthfulness and virginity, despite the obvious child in tow. Value has once again returned to a small core, with the duplicated dynamic core present in the new child, a miniature herself.
Like a picture within a picture, the tiny core of a woman replicates over and over again through her subsequent children. In the case of some Victorian females, the woman becomes pregnant and but then strives to hold in the enlarging space of life. However, after a daughter is born, there is a new female with a new miniature center. As the mother can now again be a toy, a miniature plaything for men, the daughter now plays with toys that inscribe the value of the dynamic core into the imagination of the child. Many female dolls made in the years from 1850-1900 came with corsetry. The small toy, though not real, had the correct proportions and value-weighted center of the ideal Victorian female. The dolls popular in this time period fell into two categories: the baby doll and the adult fashion doll. Both of these dolls further reiterated the child’s knowledge and embodiment of her role in society. A woman may be used as an object, either for sex or procreation. According to Summers:
“[Historian Ardyce Masters] believes that the baby doll/fashion plate doll trend was actually a backlash against feminists who were subverting prevailing stereotypes of women as naturally maternal or narcissistic. Fashion-plate dolls were (and still are, of course) influential in formulating childhood expectations of appearance and behavior. The nipped-in waists and broadened hips of the “adult” dolls would have (subconsciously at least) insinuated in female children their future roles as sexual objects, and instilled in them the desire to retain or accomplish at any cost that unnatural feature, the tiny doll-like waist. Doll corsetry would have been instrumental in this process.” (Summers 73)
Though the doll may have participated in a process that inscribes gender roles into children, in a way the corseted doll doubly contributes to girls’ unnatural body expectations. The dolls in this scenario were made out of porcelain and cloth. The porcelain head, neck, arms, and legs connected to the torso, a cotton-stuffed form. The miniature corset simply rested on the semi-rigid doll body. Similar to my argument above, the doll possesses the corseted-body-without-the-corset so desired today. Many women tirelessly strive to achieve the hard, muscular look that shows the containment of the flesh without any external constraints. But the doll has this self-contained look in addition to the external restraint of the corset. For female children, grasping the corseted doll and imagining their own bodies to match could create an expectation that only the inanimate could actually achieve. Even the perfectly crafted doll was expected to wear the restraining corset (if only to give the appearance of a dignified, refined female form, since the corset was useless on the doll). There was no hope for natural bodies, and no hope for female freedom. Even the perfect body was in need of alteration, and not good enough on its own.
A doll sporting corsetry does not “experience” the pressure and tightness that a live woman with corsetry must bear. For the doll, the corset does not actually hold in anything. The corset merely rests on the contained, rigid form of the doll. From a human perspective, however, the corset’s power lies in its binding strength. Without intense pressure and without a constant push and pull the corset will not work. Shaping the torso into an hourglass requires a committed concentration on the part of the wearer. The wearer must give into the tight garment, simultaneously allowing herself to be reformed while restraining herself in order to achieve the desired shape. Everyday, the corset-wearing woman or another person must pull tightly at the corset strings, binding her up in this powerful piece of clothing. One day, the wearer might choose to have the laces tied a little looser; the effect may have been visible to the outside as an excess of flesh, or it may have been undetectable. But the woman knew. She could feel extra room for breath and a slightly less constricted torso area. The agency some women possessed to either allow for a more roomy application of the corset, or to stretch the lacing to its maximum binding power allows a possibility for control over their own miniature cores.
The designs of corsets changed considerably from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century corsets included holes lining up the back which were staggered on each side of the corset; this meant that the lace must be pulled through one hole on one side, then through another hole on the other side. By the nineteenth century, the holes appeared opposite each other. The wearer could now tie the laces in a criss-cross pattern, applying equal pressure to both sides of the corset at once. The woman being laced was no longer yanked from side to side, but pulled straight back. Additionally, this design allowed women to tighten their own corsets (provided the slack laces remained in the corset before she donned the garment), as long laces could be manipulated from the front as well as the back. Peter and Ann Mactaggart, authorities on the subject of corset design, postulate that after this change women did not need to hold onto anything (a bedpost, a chair, etc) while being laced up. Many art pieces and cartoons from the Victorian period depict a corset-wearing woman grasping onto a bedpost, holding on for dear life as another person pulls with great force on the strings. Instead of being thrown off balance by the criss-cross pulling, the woman in the nineteenth century could remain steadfast on her own. Past the eighteenth century, according to the Mactaggarts, “[…] unless the woman tightened her own stays, which she could do, she was passively involved and there was in any case no reason, except perhaps tradition, for her to hold onto anything” (Mactaggart 46). The idea that a woman was only “passively involved” in her corset-donning experience seems an understatement, for the woman on the business end of the corset was involved physically, emotionally, and psychologically. The transformative power of the corset imprinted its mark on the center of the woman. Though heartily encouraged by society at large, a woman still made the choice to place her body in the corset and lace up the strings (or allow the strings to be laced up) in order to shrink her waistline by force. Some may have found this authority freeing, as a smaller and smaller dynamic core presented more and more opportunities, whether social, economic, or otherwise. The commanding strength of the corset may have extended vicariously to the mental and emotional state of the woman, granting her confidence and possibilities she may have not otherwise received. As Bachelard posits, “tininess soon appears to be the habitat of primitive strength” (165); the miniature center of the corseted woman may have housed this primitive strength in imagination as well as Victorian reality.
Protection from Within and Without
Following the outline of the corset from the small, constrictive circle of the waist, let us now journey around to the back of the corset, to the aforementioned taut lines of lacing, crossing back and forth from the bottom all the way to the top. A rigid knot of ties results, holding the material and boning tightly against the body. Corsets could be made with the cheapest hardwearing fabrics and metal or the most expensive silks and whalebone, complete with trim. The shape of the corset remained somewhat consistent, though manufacturers did apply many structural and decorative changes throughout the corset’s run. In general, the function of the corset is to force physical matter to a place where is it not naturally located. This means pushing the waist inward, as if the torso can somehow shrink to the size of the un-flesh-covered spine. To lace up a corset, therefore, requires strength. One must pull at the laces until the muscles and fat pick a side, either above or below the waist, anywhere but the center. Once laced, the woman bearing this garment has little mobility and room even for breath. As Steele notes, there seems to have been a subjective line of balance that should be observed when taking part in this foundational garment. “Many—perhaps most—doctors defended the ‘moderate’ and ‘legitimate’ use of the corset, while vigorously opposing tight-lacing or the ‘abuse’ of the corset” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 167). Success or failure of applying the corset hovered perilously between the two extremes. How closely fitted should the corset be, and how tightly pressed should the body become? I find Bachelard’s chapter on drawers, chests, and wardrobes useful here, as he explores the hidden places of the house. The house that is the female form, whether comfortable in a “moderate” corset or pained with the effects of tight-lacing, has much to hide, and consequently much to reveal.
“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life” (Bachelard 78). The most obvious correlations between my project and Bachelard’s are here: chests, bottoms, and organs. He seems to be describing the corset in detail. But underneath the bodily images, Bachelard comments on the secret places of the house and the mind. Describing the various places to hide things in the house, he details the intimate space of the wardrobe. The secret spaces of the wardrobe are mysterious, sacred, and protecting. Most of all, the spaces are not open to just anybody (78). The corset shields the female form from public view. Only a select few may bear witness to what lies beneath the sturdy whalebone armor, and that is a virtue of the wardrobe.
The corset creates a physical barrier between the inside and the outside. Clothing, of course, achieves this as well. But the corset has a fortress-like quality about it that protects and keeps out, just as much as it keeps in. The famous story of the Romanov family’s execution shows the sheer physical power corset held. Those ordered to complete the execution took the family down to a room prepared for the murders. At the signal, the executioners each shot the family member he had been assigned to kill. According to an eyewitness, the females survived the first round of bullets. The executioners had aimed for the hearts in order to minimize the amount of blood spilled. Imagine their surprise when the women did not die immediately. During the second round of bullets:
“The bullets from the pistols ricocheted off something and jumped about the room like hail. When the tried to finish off one of the girls with bayonets, the bayonet could not pierce the corset. Thanks to all of this, the entire procedure, including “verification” (feeling the pulse, etc.), took around twenty minutes. […] When one of the girls was being undressed, it was noticed that the bullets had torn the corset in places, and diamonds could be seen in the holes.” (Bos 1)
The corsets in this story provided a shield against violence, one that gave a few extra moments of life to the Romanov women. The corsets confounded the men who were charged with the task of penetrating the life center of their intended victims. Like a modern day bulletproof vest, the corset held in the body as well as their stash of material wealth. Some suppose the women were trying to smuggle their own jewels out of the house to sell were they able to break free. But maybe they knew the corset provided, in this time of captivity and uncertainty, protection against the outside world. Again, like the bulletproof vest, the corset cannot protect completely, but it creates a powerfully protective barrier around the space that matters. When the corset is compared to a wardrobe, it carefully guards a woman’s prized possession of life—the heart.
Additionally, the image of the house also applies to the corseted Romanov women. Bachelard’s house can be a refuge against the external elements, a place where one can hide in solitude from the storm. The house, when under duress, can possess immense imagined as well as physical power to protect the inhabitants from the outside:
“And so, faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats.” (Bachelard 46)
It is hopeful, is it not? One might want to imagine and to believe that such unconditional protection could be available during times of great terror. But from the annihilation of the Romanovs to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it is clear that some houses (the houses that protect our hearts individually and the houses that protect our families communally) have a limit to withstanding violence. The Romanov’s corsets provided limited protection against violence, and ultimately not enough for survival. Their corsets may have caused even more pain to the women; though the sturdy garments did allow them a few extra moments of life during the chaotic execution, these moments were wrought with horrendous pain and suffering of all kinds. The (relatively) quick death from a bullet to the heart may have been preferable to the slow, agonizing demise resulting from a bayonet to the throat. But however impending their deaths may have been, those few extra moments of life they experienced, thanks to the corset, were moments of life nonetheless. With life comes a flicker of hope, however dim that glint may be. Would they have chosen the certain, yet faster death from the gun, or the more excruciatingly slow, yet hopeful death from the knife? We can never know for sure. The corset may be an image of home, sheltering and guarding. But it still cannot fully protect its inhabitant from the world.
Inversely, women also required protection from the strength of their own corsets. “Corset shields” promised the buyers bodily protection from the dangers of a broken corset. A corset shield is two pieces of metal covered with material and riveted together in an “X” shape. Placed under the corset, the corset shield helped ward off impending breakage and consequent injury:
“The purpose of the corset shield was, according to patent lodged in 1893, “‘to preserve [the corset’s] shape and lessen liability of breakage of the [corset] ribs, and second to protect the body of the wearer from abrasion by the protruding ends of ribs in case of the breakage thereof’.” (Summers 28)
The corset protected the wearer from outside harm, but because of its sheer force caused damage to the wearer as well. The secret space of the corset/wardrobe protected as well as harmed while bringing the wearer a sense of safety as well as fear.
In addition to the occasions that the corset may have protected against physical harm (both from the inside and from the outside), the garment also protected the more intangible treasure of moral propriety as well:
“What was certain was that it was also a moral restraint: corsets ensured that women controlled their physical appetites and reminded them to restrain their moral ones. This is not a retrospective reading. Fashion magazines constantly pointed out to their readers that “‘the corset is an ever-present monitor indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint; it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feeling’.” (Flanders 309)
Loose women wore loose strings, so to speak. A tightly held female locked up with strong ties gave the appearance that the keys to only one man, her husband, would be granted. The body was closed up, and able to opened by the husband only. It was his wardrobe, his desk, and most of all, his chest. All the intimate space, all the hidden secrets belonged to him alone. Additionally, unlacing of the ties was often times linked with lovemaking:
“The erotic appeal of the corset extended far beyond its role in the creation of a fashionable and seductive figure. As an item of lingerie, it was associated with intimate moments and the act of making love. […] The act of unlacing a corset (as the prelude to sexual intercourse) or lacing it up (afterwards) was the theme of many erotic prints; and the pushing of stay lace through the holes of the corset was itself a kind of symbolic enactment of intercourse.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 174-175)
Viewing the female body as the wardrobe, the husband can unlock the secret drawer, reach inside, and then close it back up when he is finished. As a precaution against a straying wife, the husband may lace up/lock up his wife tighter and tighter. Ironically, the small-waisted woman most likely garnered more attention from other men as a result of her tiny center (maybe to the chagrin of her husband). This attraction and attention may have been difficult for a woman to resist, but as surmised the corset brings with it an aura of moral goodness which could enable a woman make a statement of chastity without saying a word. At once sexually attractive and morally pious, the corseted waist most likely held the gazes of male as well as female passersby. Just like the mysterious wardrobe, it leaves the spectator thinking, “I wonder what’s inside?”
In many cases, the corset included ornate decoration and embellishments. These decorations did not serve to physically hold the waist in any tighter. But could they have served another purpose? Bachelard posits that a lock on a wardrobe or chest is more than just physical—it holds imagined power as well:
“These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of the intuitive sense of hiding places. It is not merely a matter of keeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold. And how it defies indiscretion when it is covered with ornaments! What “complexes” are attached to an ornamented lock!” (Bachelard 81-82)
Corsets that included jewels or embroidery added to the imagined safety of the locked up wardrobe. The more ornately decorated a lock is, the greater the psychological power of the wardrobe. Imaginatively, the corseted woman presented a place of secrets, and a place of hiding. In the case of the pregnant woman, much more than just imagination could be in hiding. But even a non-pregnant body hides much in the hidden recesses. Man desires these spaces to be his own. The outline of a corset may have turned away would-be thieves looking to delve into the secret spaces of a woman’s chest. Like the treasured possessions that the man hides away in the spaces of the wardrobe, the body was to be hidden under lock and key, opened for secret pleasure to those with access:
“Chests, especially small caskets, over which we have more complete mastery, are objects that may be opened. When a casket is closed, it is returned to the general community of objects; it takes its place in exterior space. But it opens! […] From the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning. And quite paradoxically, even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension—the dimension of intimacy—has just opened up.” (Bachelard 85)
Here Bachelard again invokes the image of the miniature, stating that smaller drawers give the image and the feeling of more control. A woman with a tiny waist can be more easily opened, closed, and in a sense more easily controlled. When the man unlaces the woman’s corset, all outside matter ceases to exist. The now uncontained flesh holds all power, and holds the dynamic value of the possessed core.
The translation into English from French gives a startling image to Americans, as the translator uses the word “casket” to mean “small box.” The word “casket” in America holds a very specific connotation that brings images of death, burial, and containment. Even though the first definition in the Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language specifies “casket” as “a small box or chest, as for valuables”, I believe the second definition of “casket” prevails in most American minds: “a coffin, especially a costly one” (“Casket”). A woman in Victorian England may have been contained in her own casket after all. The main difference in translation though, is a crucial one: the American meaning of the word “casket,” as opposed to the British meaning of “small box,” is never meant to be opened after it has been closed. Was wearing a corset akin to being buried alive? In both places one must struggle valiantly for each coveted breath. It makes one wonder if the women wearing corsetry felt sealed for all eternity, trapped in a contained existence, unable to freely live.
“Home is Where the Heart Is”
And it is this very confined, solitary space that the corset ultimately shrouds. The center of the woman, and the center imagined by the man both find their way back to the small waist, the tiny core. At the center live strength, solidarity, and resolve, no matter what the size. Maybe it is this home-like space that Victorian women and men sought to inhabit. Bachelard muses:
“All the space of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative […] But in the daydream itself the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like about all still to be possessed.” (Bachelard 10)
The “heartwarming space” inside the corset is a physical space that warms and surrounds the organ of the heart. The analogy of the female form in this case is troubling. Bachelard describes a space that seeks to be “possessed.” Earlier I had surmised that the man desires to possess the tiny “toy” of the woman, the woman who feeds his imagination with her miniature waist. But maybe the corset represents a woman’s desire to possess her own body, physically and mentally. Binding herself up in tight corsetry is an act of will, one that protects that space of the center and of the heart, while keeping it small and contained at the same time. This inscription upon the body thereby creates a text for the world to read. A corseted body, when undressed, shows the red marks from the boning and tight laces. The body may have suffered permanent scars resulting from a broken corset. An internal imprint has been made as well, as the corset presses the waist inward while forcing the organs and flesh away from the center. It is as if the reader/writer chose to underline central words of the text, pressing deep into the body to make a lasting impression. The impression in turn radiates outward, as the woman walks through town, carefully parading her small waist. Frailer, now, and with limited mobility, the woman’s power seems to loosely fall away as the strings of the corset pull tighter and tighter. But far from powerless, the woman still holds the strength of imagination, as Bachelard suggests. And imagination is at the heart of home.
If the body is our home, we may agree with Bachelard in his conclusions about the embodiment of the house:
“The house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. […] But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.” (Bachelard 15)
Bachelard returns in his imagination to the house in which he was born. What a fitting description for the home we find in the dynamic core of the woman. As each individual inhabits her body, the gestures unique to her become inscribed upon this house. The corset succeeds in engraving, physically, mentally, and metaphorically, a text upon the body that the world may read. The engraving of the corset draws many images of socially acceptable behavior, refinement, and virginity. As each string is laced up the back, the garment adds another layer of cloth and meaning onto the body. Deeper and deeper, the corset cuts, struggling to reduce, to condense, and to erase bodily excess altogether. Was the ultimate goal of corsetry to shrink the waist to nothing, to make it disappear? If this was the case, the body would eventually be split into two parts, each with no center. Corsetry took center stage in a fierce yet delicate battle, a labor to get at the core, closer and closer to the intimate essence of the center. Dynamic and valued above all, the core gives life and is life. Restricting or freeing? Killing or resurrecting? Enervating or empowering? The corset, at once so violent and so serene, is a nexus of images braided together to form a contested site that contains freedom, oppression, and all the complexities of home.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon P, 1994.
Bos, Carole D. “Where is Anastasia?” Awesome Stories. Awesome Stories Internet Productions, Inc. 25 Jan. 2006. http://www.lawbuzz.com/tyranny/anastasia/anastasia_ch1.htm.
“Casket.” Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Kunzle, David. Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-lacing, and Other Forms of Body-Sculpting in the West. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982.
Mactaggart, Peter and Ann Mactaggart. “Ease, Convenience, and Stays, 1750-1850.” Costume. 13 (1979), 41-51.
Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
---. Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
---. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
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Hope Bernard holds a PhD in Theatre from Bowling Green State University. She was the assistant editor of Theatre Topics for two years and has work published in Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey. Hope is grateful to have the opportunity to work with Reconfigurations, as her interests often cross disciplinary boundaries in methodology and subject.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
Imagination and the Spaces of the Corseted Body:
Gaston Bachelard and the Images of Home
Women in the Victorian era were in a tight spot. Cultural norms of the day required women to fit the fashionable ideals present in society. Already in a marginalized and contained space economically and politically, women remained stationed in a physically constricted space individually. The infamous corset manipulated and morphed women’s bodies into a culturally accepted (however unnatural) form. Did the garment restrict, even harm women’s bodies to the point of injury? Of course it did; the garment represents just one of the numerous efforts both women and men have made to attain a socially acceptable body.
Since the corset’s main purpose is to press the torso into a predetermined shape, in this article I study the corset in terms of the space it takes up and the space it leaves clear; the ways it both enslaves and sets free; and how it both enervates and empowers. In this article I sift through the numerous images comprising the corseted Victorian female body in order to reveal a poetics of the corseted form. Considering the space of the corset requires a methodology appropriate to the study. I have chosen to use the ideas of Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space. According to Bachelard, images of home create an experience of intimate places, depending on the locations within the home. Taking his ruminations on space and applying them to the corset, I make an analogy between the female body and the idea of home. The body is a site of much recent scholarship in the fields of theatre and performances studies, and can be analyzed as many different things including a text, an instrument of inscription, and a nexus of images. I believe the concept of home can be readily seen in/on the body. With this in mind, I explore the ways in which examining the corseted Victorian female body as an image of home can be a useful tool and heuristic for interpreting the history of the corset.
“All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard 5). So the French philosopher begins his journey to delve into the spaces of the house, which in turn provide images of home. Interspersed with scores of poetry verses, Bachelard’s text draws on poetic images to analyze the spaces within the home in regards to imagination. The home is above all a place for daydreaming (6). Daydreams allow us to join the imagined with the actual, and create spaces that have elements of both. What we remember, what we know, what we see, and what we forget all meld together to generate our individual notions of home. If the home in question here is the female body, how do these elements fit together to produce an image that is at once actual and imagined? Let us now look back at this image of home, the Victorian corset.
A History of the Corset
The phenomenon of the corset boasts of a dynamic history. While art and fashion historians have studied the corset to analyze what impact it had upon women and society as a whole, their studies have focused primarily on its social, psychological, physical, and economic effects. These historians have emphasized the physically debilitating effects of the corset and speculated on the use of the corset to enforce a patriarchal society, and how it kept women in their literal and figurative places. Art historian David Kunzle, however, posits another theory in his book Fashion and Fetishism. He argues that some women used corsetry (specifically tight-lacing) to claim their sexual agency in order to free themselves from the ties of marital and maternal life. According to Kunzle, “the young girl of the late Victorian era tight-laced in protest against the stereotyped social role awaiting her, and in hopes of attracting a man for whom companionship and erotic pleasure weighed more than parenthood and family” (Kunzle 45). Though he describes several different ways that women could use the power of the corset to shape their own destinies, his theories conflict with theories of scholars who deny that women could gain agency in such a tightly controlled patriarchal society.
Valerie Steele, a prominent fashion historian, rejects both the oppressive qualities of the corset and the freeing qualities of the corset in her book Fashion and Eroticism, and calls for a critical analysis that does not bow to the author’s ideological stance (Steele 161-162). Steele explores the spectrum of opinions in the Victorian era on the subject of corsetry. According to Steele, some opposed the corset and others defended it, but Steele argues that one must not overlook the large middle population who made up the majority of society. This majority “condoned or actively approved of ordinary corset wearing, but denounced the practice of ‘tight-lacing’ (a term that was variously interpreted by the different segments within this group)” (162). As we shall see, the fine line between corsetry and tight-lacing depended on the space between the corset and the body. This almost indecipherable distinction between good uses and bad uses marks just one matter surrounding the contested space of the corset.
A more recent study of the corset, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset by Leigh Summers, surveys and evaluates different kinds of archival evidence in order to answer the question of why this painful, unnatural, restrictive, and sometimes harmful piece of clothing was so popular. She discusses the simple, more obvious reasons—the ever-present vanity of human kind—as well as more complex economic issues—corsetry factories sometimes employed women, creating spaces for females to have economic freedom, though still physically bound by the corset. The quest for a suitable silhouette figured into many Victorian women’s lives, both those women in the middle classes and those in the working classes:
“Corsetry was essential, not just in constructing femininity, but in constructing a class-based identity and subjectivity. Corsetry was prized by fashion-conscious, middle-class women because it crafted the flesh into class-appropriate contours. That is, corsetry operated to hide any “course” abdominal bulges from view, while it smoothed the hips and created the small, circular (rather than oval shaped) waistline that supposedly denoted good breeding. The well-corseted body, in tandem with suitable clothing, gave an immediate first impression of gentility. It operated, to the distress of many middle-class women, in exactly the same way for their working class sisters.” (Summers 9-10)
Because of the unbiased strength of the corset, working-class women could attain an attractive shape as easily as middle- and upper-class women; the corset acted as a social leveler. The shape-changing power of the corset gave the working-class women hope of a vertical move up the ladder of society; however, corsets themselves varied much in quality and in design. Summers goes on to trace the control and manipulation of the shape of women’s bodies throughout the time period. During the Victorian era, the corset created the hourglass or “wasp waist” effect on women’s bodies. As times “progressed,” women became (semi) liberated from the constraints of the corset. During the late-nineteenth century, women started practicing gymnastics and other exercises requiring looser-fitting clothing that did not inhibit movement. The corsets were dropped almost overnight and the garment became a piece of history. Of course, the shift was in fact not so quick. Manufacturers (usually male) designed special “exercise corsets” so women could participate in gymnastics while appearing to keep their cultivated figures. Over time the corset morphed into the smaller, yet similarly useful girdle, then eventually these artifice of control became unfashionable altogether.
What stepped into its place is fascinating. Instead of manipulating a body into a predetermined shape by means of material clothing, women sought the desired shape through diet and exercise, and sometimes surgery. The body was (and is) expected to be firm, flat, and in the shape of an hourglass without the help of external constraints. Women today nurture (or torture) bodies into shapely submission so as to create an accepted body without the corset. Steele details the shift from the slenderizing corset to the slender body:
“For both the High Victorian and the Edwardian periods, the ideal of feminine beauty (though different in details of physique and fashion) was a draped ideal- the existence of a beautiful body had largely to be inferred from the appearance of a woman in fashionable dress. The Twenties illustrates a shift to the opposite extreme: Much more of the body was revealed, so that, in effect, clothing only succeeded in its object of enhancing feminine beauty when worn on a nearly ideally suitable body.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 239)
Clothing formed the “draped ideal” and was therefore accessible to more women; the ideal shape could be attained through the correct application of clothing, so it did not automatically exclude women of certain body types. More women could attain the ideal shape. This accessibility however was limited to those who could afford to buy the corset in the first place. But even with the economic limitations, Summers argues that in addition to upper-class and middle-class women, working class women also wore corsets and many homemade versions were replicated from patterns in magazines. Summers gives evidence that even female prison inmates had access to corsetry, and were required to wear them. “So great was the purview and popularity of corsetry that unfortunate working-class women incarcerated in prisons or asylums could not escape its reach, even if they had wanted to.” (Summers 16). From the external corset of cloth to the internal corset of a shapely figure, from the richest parlors of Victorian England to the dirtiest prisons of the same age, beauty knew/knows no bounds.
Victorian fashion can be placed in an approximate 100-year period from about 1820 to 1910 (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 51). The period preceding Victorian fashion, the Empire period, displayed classical or Greek features: high waistlines and straight skirts that created a “vertical silhouette.” Undergarments (like the corset) had traditionally dictated the outline of the figure:
“The corset had existed for centuries, but its contours changed over time. During the eighteenth century, the corset formed a heavily boned V-shape. When the Empire mode dominated in France, the corset became lighter and shorter, evolving into something more akin to a linen bust-support […] After about 1806, the corset was again boned and fitted with a busk, flattening the stomach and hips. With the development of Victorian fashion, the corset again constricted the waist, but the shape was now closer to that of an hourglass.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 54-55)
The evolution of shape continues through this period, starting with the more vertical line, moving to an hourglass. As the fashion progresses, it begins to squeeze in the middle, while expanding the top and bottom of the silhouette. Corsets emphasize and draw attention to “secondary sexual characteristics” such as the hips, breasts, and buttocks (Steele 34). It is these secondary sexual characteristics that attract the opposite sex, Steele argues. In the primal urge to draw a mate, visual stimuli can play a large role in the courting process. It would seem then that the breasts and hips would be the focus of the physical figure of the female form. But it seems that the spotlight settles on the small waist at the center of the image. What can we read about this tiny center, this miniature, cinched core? This quest to stay within the boundaries of beauty is close to the heart, and I believe, therefore, close to the bodily home. At this point let us enter into this home of the body, this house of beauty, and see what the phenomenon of the corseted body poetically fills out.
Miniature Centers and Dynamic Cores
Bachelard’s inquiry into poetic space includes an intriguing exploration of miniatures. What is small can be of magnificent proportions, imaginatively:
“One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large and what is small. By analyzing several examples, I shall show that miniature literature—that is to say, the aggregate of literary images that are commentaries on inversions in the perspective of size—stimulates profound values.” (Bachelard 150-151)
He is noting a paradox. How can something small be grandly stimulating? How can something tiny be experienced as huge? Bachelard locates this concept in our notion of possession and control. But with that control comes deep meaning: “The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I posses it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature” (150). Consider a tiny insect. It is small and almost inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. But peer at the insect through a magnifying glass, and suddenly the bug is immense. Looking closely at the tiny insect reveals a world replete with miniatures now exposed as rich and detailed. The poetic value shifts from the grand images of nature to the miniature bug, as the insect is now the center of our universe, and consequently now possessed in all its value by the observer. If the tiny waist of the corseted woman is a miniature image filled with enriched value, upon observation, the viewer can imagine total possession of the valuable object. Because it is the tiny center of the woman, one can imagine control over this profound value. For to have the center is to possess the core; and at the core is its value.
If the waist of the female corseted body is the center, this small core encapsulates the value of the whole being. Bachelard explicates this notion by means of an example from Cyrano de Bergerac, as the title character muses on the value of the apple:
“This apple is a little universe in itself, the seed of which, being hotter than the other parts, gives out the conserving heat of its globe; and this germ, in my opinion, is the little sun of this little world, that warms and feeds the vegetative salt of this little mass.” (Bachelard 151)
Bachelard then concludes, “The apple itself, the fruit, is no longer the principle thing, but the seed, which becomes the real dynamic value” (151). Applying this idea to the female form, the whole being of the female is no longer the “principle thing.” Visually and aesthetically, the waist is now the center, the core, and the seed. It has the dynamic value. The seed of the apple gives life and indeed is life. The center of a woman holds this dynamic value as well. From the center, from the stomach/womb comes life. Every person on earth is born from the center of a woman. But upon closer examination, it seems that the corset and also Victorian society assisted in the shielding and seclusion of women’s life-giving abilities, even though human kind depends on these abilities for survival.
For many Victorian women, pregnancy meant the end of social life. Society considered a pregnant woman appearing in public offensive, and relegated the woman with the growing child inside her womb to the home. Bachelard’s image of home is thereby doubly expressed in the pregnant corseted woman; for the Victorian female, the domestic sphere was her locus of interaction, and if her center began expanding, she was forced back into a real “home.” It is as if Victorian society thought of the female as requiring shelter and needed to be held captive. The notion of a woman as miniature and possessing dynamic value can be equated with a man’s desire to possess the woman as a doll. According to Bachelard, “the tiny things we imagine simply take us back to childhood, to familiarity with toys and the reality of toys” (149). This concept problematizes the concept of woman as the center, because if the woman’s waist ceases to be miniature, the man must then grow up. He can no longer imagine the woman as a toy, as a tiny thing to possess. The woman now possesses the ability to create life from the dynamic center, which is a powerful place, real or imagined. If there is a real child on the way, forcing the center outward, the man can no longer imagine himself as a child at the center. Home is now a fearful place, one that is mysterious and threatening. Therefore, the expecting woman must stay hidden in the real home until she becomes the imagined, emblematic home once again.
It is believable then that the corset aided in veiling pregnancy. Manufacturers designed special corsets to keep the pregnancy hidden for weeks, even months. Because of the social stigma of pregnancy, women took drastic measures to cover the visual aspects of gestation. Summers devotes a chapter of her book to the inspection of the maternal body and the effects of corsetry:
“The corset was, moreover, integral in maintaining pregnancy taboos. Its fundamental, if rarely acknowledged, charter was to reduce the size of the body, disguise “unfeminine” bulges and prevent, whenever possible, the pregnant body from attracting public notice […] Clearly, many Victorian women hid their swelling bodies, while others understood that unwanted “obstructions” or pregnancies might be interrupted by the application of stout and tightly laced corsetry.” (Summers 60-61)
Staying within the acceptability of the strict social conventions, the corset could hide the pregnancy for a period of time, allowing the woman to go about her life without fear of breaking social norms. Hostile to the natural development of gestation, the corset held the woman’s body in during a time when she most needed to expand. Aesthetically, the pregnant stomach created a visual picture in total opposition to the fashion of the day. Instead of an hourglass with the center being the smallest part, the figure now shifts to a circular form, with the center being the largest part. The value of the miniaturized center is gone, because the imagined tiny core is no longer present. The space eventually can go back to its culturally expected form, when the child is born. Then, after the appearance of the new child, there exists a new human being also in possession of a new dynamic core. The seed has been carried on, and the effects of the pregnancy and birth are now separate from the shape of the mother. The center can again retract, providing an image of youthfulness and virginity, despite the obvious child in tow. Value has once again returned to a small core, with the duplicated dynamic core present in the new child, a miniature herself.
Like a picture within a picture, the tiny core of a woman replicates over and over again through her subsequent children. In the case of some Victorian females, the woman becomes pregnant and but then strives to hold in the enlarging space of life. However, after a daughter is born, there is a new female with a new miniature center. As the mother can now again be a toy, a miniature plaything for men, the daughter now plays with toys that inscribe the value of the dynamic core into the imagination of the child. Many female dolls made in the years from 1850-1900 came with corsetry. The small toy, though not real, had the correct proportions and value-weighted center of the ideal Victorian female. The dolls popular in this time period fell into two categories: the baby doll and the adult fashion doll. Both of these dolls further reiterated the child’s knowledge and embodiment of her role in society. A woman may be used as an object, either for sex or procreation. According to Summers:
“[Historian Ardyce Masters] believes that the baby doll/fashion plate doll trend was actually a backlash against feminists who were subverting prevailing stereotypes of women as naturally maternal or narcissistic. Fashion-plate dolls were (and still are, of course) influential in formulating childhood expectations of appearance and behavior. The nipped-in waists and broadened hips of the “adult” dolls would have (subconsciously at least) insinuated in female children their future roles as sexual objects, and instilled in them the desire to retain or accomplish at any cost that unnatural feature, the tiny doll-like waist. Doll corsetry would have been instrumental in this process.” (Summers 73)
Though the doll may have participated in a process that inscribes gender roles into children, in a way the corseted doll doubly contributes to girls’ unnatural body expectations. The dolls in this scenario were made out of porcelain and cloth. The porcelain head, neck, arms, and legs connected to the torso, a cotton-stuffed form. The miniature corset simply rested on the semi-rigid doll body. Similar to my argument above, the doll possesses the corseted-body-without-the-corset so desired today. Many women tirelessly strive to achieve the hard, muscular look that shows the containment of the flesh without any external constraints. But the doll has this self-contained look in addition to the external restraint of the corset. For female children, grasping the corseted doll and imagining their own bodies to match could create an expectation that only the inanimate could actually achieve. Even the perfectly crafted doll was expected to wear the restraining corset (if only to give the appearance of a dignified, refined female form, since the corset was useless on the doll). There was no hope for natural bodies, and no hope for female freedom. Even the perfect body was in need of alteration, and not good enough on its own.
A doll sporting corsetry does not “experience” the pressure and tightness that a live woman with corsetry must bear. For the doll, the corset does not actually hold in anything. The corset merely rests on the contained, rigid form of the doll. From a human perspective, however, the corset’s power lies in its binding strength. Without intense pressure and without a constant push and pull the corset will not work. Shaping the torso into an hourglass requires a committed concentration on the part of the wearer. The wearer must give into the tight garment, simultaneously allowing herself to be reformed while restraining herself in order to achieve the desired shape. Everyday, the corset-wearing woman or another person must pull tightly at the corset strings, binding her up in this powerful piece of clothing. One day, the wearer might choose to have the laces tied a little looser; the effect may have been visible to the outside as an excess of flesh, or it may have been undetectable. But the woman knew. She could feel extra room for breath and a slightly less constricted torso area. The agency some women possessed to either allow for a more roomy application of the corset, or to stretch the lacing to its maximum binding power allows a possibility for control over their own miniature cores.
The designs of corsets changed considerably from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century. The eighteenth-century corsets included holes lining up the back which were staggered on each side of the corset; this meant that the lace must be pulled through one hole on one side, then through another hole on the other side. By the nineteenth century, the holes appeared opposite each other. The wearer could now tie the laces in a criss-cross pattern, applying equal pressure to both sides of the corset at once. The woman being laced was no longer yanked from side to side, but pulled straight back. Additionally, this design allowed women to tighten their own corsets (provided the slack laces remained in the corset before she donned the garment), as long laces could be manipulated from the front as well as the back. Peter and Ann Mactaggart, authorities on the subject of corset design, postulate that after this change women did not need to hold onto anything (a bedpost, a chair, etc) while being laced up. Many art pieces and cartoons from the Victorian period depict a corset-wearing woman grasping onto a bedpost, holding on for dear life as another person pulls with great force on the strings. Instead of being thrown off balance by the criss-cross pulling, the woman in the nineteenth century could remain steadfast on her own. Past the eighteenth century, according to the Mactaggarts, “[…] unless the woman tightened her own stays, which she could do, she was passively involved and there was in any case no reason, except perhaps tradition, for her to hold onto anything” (Mactaggart 46). The idea that a woman was only “passively involved” in her corset-donning experience seems an understatement, for the woman on the business end of the corset was involved physically, emotionally, and psychologically. The transformative power of the corset imprinted its mark on the center of the woman. Though heartily encouraged by society at large, a woman still made the choice to place her body in the corset and lace up the strings (or allow the strings to be laced up) in order to shrink her waistline by force. Some may have found this authority freeing, as a smaller and smaller dynamic core presented more and more opportunities, whether social, economic, or otherwise. The commanding strength of the corset may have extended vicariously to the mental and emotional state of the woman, granting her confidence and possibilities she may have not otherwise received. As Bachelard posits, “tininess soon appears to be the habitat of primitive strength” (165); the miniature center of the corseted woman may have housed this primitive strength in imagination as well as Victorian reality.
Protection from Within and Without
Following the outline of the corset from the small, constrictive circle of the waist, let us now journey around to the back of the corset, to the aforementioned taut lines of lacing, crossing back and forth from the bottom all the way to the top. A rigid knot of ties results, holding the material and boning tightly against the body. Corsets could be made with the cheapest hardwearing fabrics and metal or the most expensive silks and whalebone, complete with trim. The shape of the corset remained somewhat consistent, though manufacturers did apply many structural and decorative changes throughout the corset’s run. In general, the function of the corset is to force physical matter to a place where is it not naturally located. This means pushing the waist inward, as if the torso can somehow shrink to the size of the un-flesh-covered spine. To lace up a corset, therefore, requires strength. One must pull at the laces until the muscles and fat pick a side, either above or below the waist, anywhere but the center. Once laced, the woman bearing this garment has little mobility and room even for breath. As Steele notes, there seems to have been a subjective line of balance that should be observed when taking part in this foundational garment. “Many—perhaps most—doctors defended the ‘moderate’ and ‘legitimate’ use of the corset, while vigorously opposing tight-lacing or the ‘abuse’ of the corset” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 167). Success or failure of applying the corset hovered perilously between the two extremes. How closely fitted should the corset be, and how tightly pressed should the body become? I find Bachelard’s chapter on drawers, chests, and wardrobes useful here, as he explores the hidden places of the house. The house that is the female form, whether comfortable in a “moderate” corset or pained with the effects of tight-lacing, has much to hide, and consequently much to reveal.
“Wardrobes with their shelves, desks with their drawers, and chests with their false bottoms are veritable organs of the secret psychological life” (Bachelard 78). The most obvious correlations between my project and Bachelard’s are here: chests, bottoms, and organs. He seems to be describing the corset in detail. But underneath the bodily images, Bachelard comments on the secret places of the house and the mind. Describing the various places to hide things in the house, he details the intimate space of the wardrobe. The secret spaces of the wardrobe are mysterious, sacred, and protecting. Most of all, the spaces are not open to just anybody (78). The corset shields the female form from public view. Only a select few may bear witness to what lies beneath the sturdy whalebone armor, and that is a virtue of the wardrobe.
The corset creates a physical barrier between the inside and the outside. Clothing, of course, achieves this as well. But the corset has a fortress-like quality about it that protects and keeps out, just as much as it keeps in. The famous story of the Romanov family’s execution shows the sheer physical power corset held. Those ordered to complete the execution took the family down to a room prepared for the murders. At the signal, the executioners each shot the family member he had been assigned to kill. According to an eyewitness, the females survived the first round of bullets. The executioners had aimed for the hearts in order to minimize the amount of blood spilled. Imagine their surprise when the women did not die immediately. During the second round of bullets:
“The bullets from the pistols ricocheted off something and jumped about the room like hail. When the tried to finish off one of the girls with bayonets, the bayonet could not pierce the corset. Thanks to all of this, the entire procedure, including “verification” (feeling the pulse, etc.), took around twenty minutes. […] When one of the girls was being undressed, it was noticed that the bullets had torn the corset in places, and diamonds could be seen in the holes.” (Bos 1)
The corsets in this story provided a shield against violence, one that gave a few extra moments of life to the Romanov women. The corsets confounded the men who were charged with the task of penetrating the life center of their intended victims. Like a modern day bulletproof vest, the corset held in the body as well as their stash of material wealth. Some suppose the women were trying to smuggle their own jewels out of the house to sell were they able to break free. But maybe they knew the corset provided, in this time of captivity and uncertainty, protection against the outside world. Again, like the bulletproof vest, the corset cannot protect completely, but it creates a powerfully protective barrier around the space that matters. When the corset is compared to a wardrobe, it carefully guards a woman’s prized possession of life—the heart.
Additionally, the image of the house also applies to the corseted Romanov women. Bachelard’s house can be a refuge against the external elements, a place where one can hide in solitude from the storm. The house, when under duress, can possess immense imagined as well as physical power to protect the inhabitants from the outside:
“And so, faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, it girds its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats.” (Bachelard 46)
It is hopeful, is it not? One might want to imagine and to believe that such unconditional protection could be available during times of great terror. But from the annihilation of the Romanovs to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, it is clear that some houses (the houses that protect our hearts individually and the houses that protect our families communally) have a limit to withstanding violence. The Romanov’s corsets provided limited protection against violence, and ultimately not enough for survival. Their corsets may have caused even more pain to the women; though the sturdy garments did allow them a few extra moments of life during the chaotic execution, these moments were wrought with horrendous pain and suffering of all kinds. The (relatively) quick death from a bullet to the heart may have been preferable to the slow, agonizing demise resulting from a bayonet to the throat. But however impending their deaths may have been, those few extra moments of life they experienced, thanks to the corset, were moments of life nonetheless. With life comes a flicker of hope, however dim that glint may be. Would they have chosen the certain, yet faster death from the gun, or the more excruciatingly slow, yet hopeful death from the knife? We can never know for sure. The corset may be an image of home, sheltering and guarding. But it still cannot fully protect its inhabitant from the world.
Inversely, women also required protection from the strength of their own corsets. “Corset shields” promised the buyers bodily protection from the dangers of a broken corset. A corset shield is two pieces of metal covered with material and riveted together in an “X” shape. Placed under the corset, the corset shield helped ward off impending breakage and consequent injury:
“The purpose of the corset shield was, according to patent lodged in 1893, “‘to preserve [the corset’s] shape and lessen liability of breakage of the [corset] ribs, and second to protect the body of the wearer from abrasion by the protruding ends of ribs in case of the breakage thereof’.” (Summers 28)
The corset protected the wearer from outside harm, but because of its sheer force caused damage to the wearer as well. The secret space of the corset/wardrobe protected as well as harmed while bringing the wearer a sense of safety as well as fear.
In addition to the occasions that the corset may have protected against physical harm (both from the inside and from the outside), the garment also protected the more intangible treasure of moral propriety as well:
“What was certain was that it was also a moral restraint: corsets ensured that women controlled their physical appetites and reminded them to restrain their moral ones. This is not a retrospective reading. Fashion magazines constantly pointed out to their readers that “‘the corset is an ever-present monitor indirectly bidding its wearer to exercise self-restraint; it is evidence of a well-disciplined mind and well-regulated feeling’.” (Flanders 309)
Loose women wore loose strings, so to speak. A tightly held female locked up with strong ties gave the appearance that the keys to only one man, her husband, would be granted. The body was closed up, and able to opened by the husband only. It was his wardrobe, his desk, and most of all, his chest. All the intimate space, all the hidden secrets belonged to him alone. Additionally, unlacing of the ties was often times linked with lovemaking:
“The erotic appeal of the corset extended far beyond its role in the creation of a fashionable and seductive figure. As an item of lingerie, it was associated with intimate moments and the act of making love. […] The act of unlacing a corset (as the prelude to sexual intercourse) or lacing it up (afterwards) was the theme of many erotic prints; and the pushing of stay lace through the holes of the corset was itself a kind of symbolic enactment of intercourse.” (Steele, Fashion and Eroticism 174-175)
Viewing the female body as the wardrobe, the husband can unlock the secret drawer, reach inside, and then close it back up when he is finished. As a precaution against a straying wife, the husband may lace up/lock up his wife tighter and tighter. Ironically, the small-waisted woman most likely garnered more attention from other men as a result of her tiny center (maybe to the chagrin of her husband). This attraction and attention may have been difficult for a woman to resist, but as surmised the corset brings with it an aura of moral goodness which could enable a woman make a statement of chastity without saying a word. At once sexually attractive and morally pious, the corseted waist most likely held the gazes of male as well as female passersby. Just like the mysterious wardrobe, it leaves the spectator thinking, “I wonder what’s inside?”
In many cases, the corset included ornate decoration and embellishments. These decorations did not serve to physically hold the waist in any tighter. But could they have served another purpose? Bachelard posits that a lock on a wardrobe or chest is more than just physical—it holds imagined power as well:
“These complex pieces that a craftsman creates are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of the intuitive sense of hiding places. It is not merely a matter of keeping a possession well guarded. The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves. A lock is a psychological threshold. And how it defies indiscretion when it is covered with ornaments! What “complexes” are attached to an ornamented lock!” (Bachelard 81-82)
Corsets that included jewels or embroidery added to the imagined safety of the locked up wardrobe. The more ornately decorated a lock is, the greater the psychological power of the wardrobe. Imaginatively, the corseted woman presented a place of secrets, and a place of hiding. In the case of the pregnant woman, much more than just imagination could be in hiding. But even a non-pregnant body hides much in the hidden recesses. Man desires these spaces to be his own. The outline of a corset may have turned away would-be thieves looking to delve into the secret spaces of a woman’s chest. Like the treasured possessions that the man hides away in the spaces of the wardrobe, the body was to be hidden under lock and key, opened for secret pleasure to those with access:
“Chests, especially small caskets, over which we have more complete mastery, are objects that may be opened. When a casket is closed, it is returned to the general community of objects; it takes its place in exterior space. But it opens! […] From the moment the casket is opened, dialectics no longer exist. The outside is effaced with one stroke, an atmosphere of novelty and surprise reigns. The outside has no more meaning. And quite paradoxically, even cubic dimensions have no more meaning, for the reason that a new dimension—the dimension of intimacy—has just opened up.” (Bachelard 85)
Here Bachelard again invokes the image of the miniature, stating that smaller drawers give the image and the feeling of more control. A woman with a tiny waist can be more easily opened, closed, and in a sense more easily controlled. When the man unlaces the woman’s corset, all outside matter ceases to exist. The now uncontained flesh holds all power, and holds the dynamic value of the possessed core.
The translation into English from French gives a startling image to Americans, as the translator uses the word “casket” to mean “small box.” The word “casket” in America holds a very specific connotation that brings images of death, burial, and containment. Even though the first definition in the Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language specifies “casket” as “a small box or chest, as for valuables”, I believe the second definition of “casket” prevails in most American minds: “a coffin, especially a costly one” (“Casket”). A woman in Victorian England may have been contained in her own casket after all. The main difference in translation though, is a crucial one: the American meaning of the word “casket,” as opposed to the British meaning of “small box,” is never meant to be opened after it has been closed. Was wearing a corset akin to being buried alive? In both places one must struggle valiantly for each coveted breath. It makes one wonder if the women wearing corsetry felt sealed for all eternity, trapped in a contained existence, unable to freely live.
“Home is Where the Heart Is”
And it is this very confined, solitary space that the corset ultimately shrouds. The center of the woman, and the center imagined by the man both find their way back to the small waist, the tiny core. At the center live strength, solidarity, and resolve, no matter what the size. Maybe it is this home-like space that Victorian women and men sought to inhabit. Bachelard muses:
“All the space of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed, desired, and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us, and precisely because the human being wants them to remain so. He knows instinctively that this space identified with his solitude is creative […] But in the daydream itself the recollection of moments of confined, simple, shut-in space are experiences of heartwarming space, of a space that does not seek to become extended, but would like about all still to be possessed.” (Bachelard 10)
The “heartwarming space” inside the corset is a physical space that warms and surrounds the organ of the heart. The analogy of the female form in this case is troubling. Bachelard describes a space that seeks to be “possessed.” Earlier I had surmised that the man desires to possess the tiny “toy” of the woman, the woman who feeds his imagination with her miniature waist. But maybe the corset represents a woman’s desire to possess her own body, physically and mentally. Binding herself up in tight corsetry is an act of will, one that protects that space of the center and of the heart, while keeping it small and contained at the same time. This inscription upon the body thereby creates a text for the world to read. A corseted body, when undressed, shows the red marks from the boning and tight laces. The body may have suffered permanent scars resulting from a broken corset. An internal imprint has been made as well, as the corset presses the waist inward while forcing the organs and flesh away from the center. It is as if the reader/writer chose to underline central words of the text, pressing deep into the body to make a lasting impression. The impression in turn radiates outward, as the woman walks through town, carefully parading her small waist. Frailer, now, and with limited mobility, the woman’s power seems to loosely fall away as the strings of the corset pull tighter and tighter. But far from powerless, the woman still holds the strength of imagination, as Bachelard suggests. And imagination is at the heart of home.
If the body is our home, we may agree with Bachelard in his conclusions about the embodiment of the house:
“The house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits. […] But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting.” (Bachelard 15)
Bachelard returns in his imagination to the house in which he was born. What a fitting description for the home we find in the dynamic core of the woman. As each individual inhabits her body, the gestures unique to her become inscribed upon this house. The corset succeeds in engraving, physically, mentally, and metaphorically, a text upon the body that the world may read. The engraving of the corset draws many images of socially acceptable behavior, refinement, and virginity. As each string is laced up the back, the garment adds another layer of cloth and meaning onto the body. Deeper and deeper, the corset cuts, struggling to reduce, to condense, and to erase bodily excess altogether. Was the ultimate goal of corsetry to shrink the waist to nothing, to make it disappear? If this was the case, the body would eventually be split into two parts, each with no center. Corsetry took center stage in a fierce yet delicate battle, a labor to get at the core, closer and closer to the intimate essence of the center. Dynamic and valued above all, the core gives life and is life. Restricting or freeing? Killing or resurrecting? Enervating or empowering? The corset, at once so violent and so serene, is a nexus of images braided together to form a contested site that contains freedom, oppression, and all the complexities of home.
Works Cited
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon P, 1994.
Bos, Carole D. “Where is Anastasia?” Awesome Stories. Awesome Stories Internet Productions, Inc. 25 Jan. 2006. http://www.lawbuzz.com/tyranny/anastasia/anastasia_ch1.htm.
“Casket.” Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2003.
Kunzle, David. Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight-lacing, and Other Forms of Body-Sculpting in the West. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982.
Mactaggart, Peter and Ann Mactaggart. “Ease, Convenience, and Stays, 1750-1850.” Costume. 13 (1979), 41-51.
Steele, Valerie. Fashion and Eroticism. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.
---. Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
---. The Corset: A Cultural History. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
Summers, Leigh. Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
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Hope Bernard holds a PhD in Theatre from Bowling Green State University. She was the assistant editor of Theatre Topics for two years and has work published in Theatre Journal and Theatre Survey. Hope is grateful to have the opportunity to work with Reconfigurations, as her interests often cross disciplinary boundaries in methodology and subject.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
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Erika M. Nelson, "Traumatic Traces"
Erika M. Nelson
Traumatic Traces in Crumbling Structures and Invisible Spaces
There have been no words.
—Suheir Hammad
Trauma leaves one speechless and lost. One becomes keenly aware of the limits of language, and a sense of disorientation, even futility, seems inextricably linked to the experience of trauma. Usually productive approaches to life appear inadequate at addressing and articulating loss and healing that, which is irreparably broken asunder. Trauma shakes our sense of security in the world and dismantles otherwise reliable roadmaps of physical and psychological structures, thus forcing a radical reorientation. As much as language fails and silence threatens to overwhelm us, nonetheless, it is to words we turn in our attempts to sort out such experiences. Often we return to art and poetry. Art, as Daisaku Ikeda suggests, gives voice and form to “a voiceless cry in the depths of our souls, waiting for expression”[1] that helps “restore our lost or distorted humanity” (83).
In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, a day commonly understood as a “day that shook the world,”[2] poets were among the first to struggle to express the effects of organized terrorism aimed at destroying human life. One such poet, the young Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad shared her piece “First Writing Since”[3] publicly a week after the attacks. The poem’s first lines capture the stunned collective silence of Ikeda’s inaudible outcry:
“1. There have been no words.
I have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of Canal Street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and DNA.
not one word.”
Mutlu Konuk Blasing points out in her book, Lyric Poetry: the Pain and Pleasure of Words,[4] that poetry is a radically public language (4) able to inhabit the gaps in language and experience. Furthermore, poetic conventions sanction language use that “undoes, even as it reinstitutes” the poetic subject within “a history of communal acknowledgment of a shared trauma” (62). As such, it keeps the “unassimilable trauma […] still audible” (62), constituting “a willed return to a site of pain,” not in order to “dwell on loss or retrieve what is lost” but as “an affirmation of loss” (62). Blasing argues that “poetry wills to reopen the wound, to repeat the violence that opens the history of the human subject, so that we can re-cognize our selves in the experience” (62) within the “specialness” of poetry that “remembers a personal and communal history in language” (64). Through the “groundless ground” of poetry, we learn “the will to lose again, to choose language again” (62).
In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva similarly underscores how one overcomes depression generated by loss by learning “how to lose.”[5] For Kristeva, this translates to the willingness to leave the memory of the lost unity between mother and child, an archaic memory of primal connection in existence before the occurrence of an inevitable emotional separation, and to re-establish a new unity that compensates for the loss in the realm of imaginative representations, i.e., in the world of language and symbols.
Through willfully creating and destroying imaginative structures, poetry facilitates this learning process: poems re-assemble fragments into architectural monuments in language and rhythm of a collective human history. In traumatic times when physical structures literally collapse and radically obliterate landscapes that once existed, poetry imaginatively retraces and revisits these invisible spaces, recreating the loss as a means to fight forgetting. Among the crumbling structures, amidst the invisible spaces, the human voice survives and rises out of the rubble.
One such voice is of the Croatian poet Dragica Rajčić, who writes in German, the language of her adopted country Switzerland. In her collection of poems entitled Post Bellum,[6] Rajčić chronicles in minimalistic style glimpses of a woman’s everyday life against the backdrop of the Balkan war, presenting with candor the stark realities of modern warfare, the post-war ruins of one’s homeland, but also the ways that daily life re-emerges out of such destruction. Her signature style of visibly “brocken” German (Rajčić writes in grammatically and orthographically incorrect German) conjure up unexpected connotations and associations. In the places where the conventional map of language fragments, new meanings emerge. For instance, in the poem “Hunderste Gedicht ohne trenen” (Hundredth poem without tears), the word “trenen,” as it is not capitalized as one expects of the homophonic noun “Tränen,” (German: tears) suggests the verb “trennen” meaning “to separate” in place of tears. Co-joining tears with separation, Rajčić laconically asserts that this poem, along with ninety-nine others, courageously defies the obvious inclination to mourn.
Revealing her work’s conscious, simultaneous writing and “unwriting” of the past, Rajčić’s Post Bellum portrays a woman’s personal struggle with war’s fracturing of loyalties and its shattering of personal dreams. Giving voice to feelings of exclusion and exploitation, Rajčić commands lyric’s intimate language of emotional experience in its barest form to bear witness to individual lives. Against the barbarity of war, she fights with her arsenal of humanity. Speaking for the collective personal voice of those who could not speak, out of the void of stories and testimonies not told, Rajčić tells stories of lives forever changed by the war. In her work, war is ever-present. Yet the specifics of war, i.e., the political reasons and rationale for war, remain vague and uninteresting, and are only referenced indirectly in the titles of a few poems with the naming of places and years. As for instance in her poem, “Bosnia 95,” where Rajčić writes:
Bosnien 95
“Die lateinische wort für krieg fehlt mir
spaeter ein
jetzt suche ich kinder hose
schneide rechte bein ab
nähe zu die offnung
mit unsichtbaren garn
auf meine zunge liegt
unferlezt
ein unerhörtes
Gebett.”
Bosnia 95
“The Latin word for war comes to me
later
now I’m looking for children’s pants
cut the right leg off
sew up the opening
with invisible thread
on my tongue lies
uninjured
an unheard of
prayer”
The speaker cannot remember the Latin or learned word for war, suggesting that she cannot or will not sustain the required intellectual rigor for theoretical discussions of warfare. She does not even choose the correct gender for the noun “word,” choosing the feminine form “die” in place of the neuter “das.” The feminine word, associated with war, does not occur to her (”fällt ihr nicht ein”). Written as a homophone: “fehlt ihr nicht ein,” (fehlt = German: missing) the line addresses that which is missing. Thus, war does not make logical sense to her feminine sensibility and invokes only a sense of loss. Her focus is on the task at hand: with invisible thread she sews up the gaping opening of the cut children’s pants. Mending that which has been torn wide open, she nonetheless maintains a prayer on her tongue: “Gebett” is introduced here with two tt’s, like “Bett” (German: bed) and thus invokes a sense of this prayer being imbedded and uninjured on the tongue. Nonetheless, the simple word unverletzt, (German: uninjured) is misspelled, undermining again the poet’s assertion of safety. Her prayer goes unheard, (unerhört = German: unheard) at the same time that she cries out at the injustice (unerhört = German: shocking, outrageous). The senselessness of war, the chronicling of it and naming it in Latin is revealed as having nothing to do with the immediate albeit mundane and necessary tasks at hand, those of everyday life—of caring and childrearing—which continue on, unnamed by any Latin term, relentlessly commanding the speaker’s attention and propelling her forward, motivated by the unheard and outrageous wish for something better.
Rajčić’s work is not limited by concerns of political correctness. For her communication is central, as is the process of recuperating, recovering and rebuilding from bits and pieces—if only in language itself – what she calls “a house, nowhere”:
Ein haus, nirgends
“wenn
Traumatic Traces in Crumbling Structures and Invisible Spaces
There have been no words.
—Suheir Hammad
Trauma leaves one speechless and lost. One becomes keenly aware of the limits of language, and a sense of disorientation, even futility, seems inextricably linked to the experience of trauma. Usually productive approaches to life appear inadequate at addressing and articulating loss and healing that, which is irreparably broken asunder. Trauma shakes our sense of security in the world and dismantles otherwise reliable roadmaps of physical and psychological structures, thus forcing a radical reorientation. As much as language fails and silence threatens to overwhelm us, nonetheless, it is to words we turn in our attempts to sort out such experiences. Often we return to art and poetry. Art, as Daisaku Ikeda suggests, gives voice and form to “a voiceless cry in the depths of our souls, waiting for expression”[1] that helps “restore our lost or distorted humanity” (83).
In the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, a day commonly understood as a “day that shook the world,”[2] poets were among the first to struggle to express the effects of organized terrorism aimed at destroying human life. One such poet, the young Palestinian-American Suheir Hammad shared her piece “First Writing Since”[3] publicly a week after the attacks. The poem’s first lines capture the stunned collective silence of Ikeda’s inaudible outcry:
“1. There have been no words.
I have not written one word.
no poetry in the ashes south of Canal Street.
no prose in the refrigerated trucks driving debris and DNA.
not one word.”
Mutlu Konuk Blasing points out in her book, Lyric Poetry: the Pain and Pleasure of Words,[4] that poetry is a radically public language (4) able to inhabit the gaps in language and experience. Furthermore, poetic conventions sanction language use that “undoes, even as it reinstitutes” the poetic subject within “a history of communal acknowledgment of a shared trauma” (62). As such, it keeps the “unassimilable trauma […] still audible” (62), constituting “a willed return to a site of pain,” not in order to “dwell on loss or retrieve what is lost” but as “an affirmation of loss” (62). Blasing argues that “poetry wills to reopen the wound, to repeat the violence that opens the history of the human subject, so that we can re-cognize our selves in the experience” (62) within the “specialness” of poetry that “remembers a personal and communal history in language” (64). Through the “groundless ground” of poetry, we learn “the will to lose again, to choose language again” (62).
In Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Julia Kristeva similarly underscores how one overcomes depression generated by loss by learning “how to lose.”[5] For Kristeva, this translates to the willingness to leave the memory of the lost unity between mother and child, an archaic memory of primal connection in existence before the occurrence of an inevitable emotional separation, and to re-establish a new unity that compensates for the loss in the realm of imaginative representations, i.e., in the world of language and symbols.
Through willfully creating and destroying imaginative structures, poetry facilitates this learning process: poems re-assemble fragments into architectural monuments in language and rhythm of a collective human history. In traumatic times when physical structures literally collapse and radically obliterate landscapes that once existed, poetry imaginatively retraces and revisits these invisible spaces, recreating the loss as a means to fight forgetting. Among the crumbling structures, amidst the invisible spaces, the human voice survives and rises out of the rubble.
One such voice is of the Croatian poet Dragica Rajčić, who writes in German, the language of her adopted country Switzerland. In her collection of poems entitled Post Bellum,[6] Rajčić chronicles in minimalistic style glimpses of a woman’s everyday life against the backdrop of the Balkan war, presenting with candor the stark realities of modern warfare, the post-war ruins of one’s homeland, but also the ways that daily life re-emerges out of such destruction. Her signature style of visibly “brocken” German (Rajčić writes in grammatically and orthographically incorrect German) conjure up unexpected connotations and associations. In the places where the conventional map of language fragments, new meanings emerge. For instance, in the poem “Hunderste Gedicht ohne trenen” (Hundredth poem without tears), the word “trenen,” as it is not capitalized as one expects of the homophonic noun “Tränen,” (German: tears) suggests the verb “trennen” meaning “to separate” in place of tears. Co-joining tears with separation, Rajčić laconically asserts that this poem, along with ninety-nine others, courageously defies the obvious inclination to mourn.
Revealing her work’s conscious, simultaneous writing and “unwriting” of the past, Rajčić’s Post Bellum portrays a woman’s personal struggle with war’s fracturing of loyalties and its shattering of personal dreams. Giving voice to feelings of exclusion and exploitation, Rajčić commands lyric’s intimate language of emotional experience in its barest form to bear witness to individual lives. Against the barbarity of war, she fights with her arsenal of humanity. Speaking for the collective personal voice of those who could not speak, out of the void of stories and testimonies not told, Rajčić tells stories of lives forever changed by the war. In her work, war is ever-present. Yet the specifics of war, i.e., the political reasons and rationale for war, remain vague and uninteresting, and are only referenced indirectly in the titles of a few poems with the naming of places and years. As for instance in her poem, “Bosnia 95,” where Rajčić writes:
Bosnien 95
“Die lateinische wort für krieg fehlt mir
spaeter ein
jetzt suche ich kinder hose
schneide rechte bein ab
nähe zu die offnung
mit unsichtbaren garn
auf meine zunge liegt
unferlezt
ein unerhörtes
Gebett.”
Bosnia 95
“The Latin word for war comes to me
later
now I’m looking for children’s pants
cut the right leg off
sew up the opening
with invisible thread
on my tongue lies
uninjured
an unheard of
prayer”
The speaker cannot remember the Latin or learned word for war, suggesting that she cannot or will not sustain the required intellectual rigor for theoretical discussions of warfare. She does not even choose the correct gender for the noun “word,” choosing the feminine form “die” in place of the neuter “das.” The feminine word, associated with war, does not occur to her (”fällt ihr nicht ein”). Written as a homophone: “fehlt ihr nicht ein,” (fehlt = German: missing) the line addresses that which is missing. Thus, war does not make logical sense to her feminine sensibility and invokes only a sense of loss. Her focus is on the task at hand: with invisible thread she sews up the gaping opening of the cut children’s pants. Mending that which has been torn wide open, she nonetheless maintains a prayer on her tongue: “Gebett” is introduced here with two tt’s, like “Bett” (German: bed) and thus invokes a sense of this prayer being imbedded and uninjured on the tongue. Nonetheless, the simple word unverletzt, (German: uninjured) is misspelled, undermining again the poet’s assertion of safety. Her prayer goes unheard, (unerhört = German: unheard) at the same time that she cries out at the injustice (unerhört = German: shocking, outrageous). The senselessness of war, the chronicling of it and naming it in Latin is revealed as having nothing to do with the immediate albeit mundane and necessary tasks at hand, those of everyday life—of caring and childrearing—which continue on, unnamed by any Latin term, relentlessly commanding the speaker’s attention and propelling her forward, motivated by the unheard and outrageous wish for something better.
Rajčić’s work is not limited by concerns of political correctness. For her communication is central, as is the process of recuperating, recovering and rebuilding from bits and pieces—if only in language itself – what she calls “a house, nowhere”:
Ein haus, nirgends
“wenn
stück
für stück
glaube
von Wortern
herunter fehlt
was mache
ich da
ich sammle Silben
baue Ihnen
ein haus, nirgends”
A house, nowhere
“When
piece
by piece
faith
in words
falls down missing
what do I do
then there
I gather syllables
build them
a house, nowhere”
This construction of a “house, nowhere” is the attempt to take action in language, with language to create against the very threat of destruction and non-existence. As she builds, piece by piece, faith of words not in words, (Rajčić chooses the preposition “von” not the anticipated “an”), there is the moment here in the poem when the pieces fall down: “herunter fällt”, actually written as “fehlt” (German: missing), which introduces a break and rupture in the assumed understanding of the poem. Here, the process of creating and rebuilding even poems themselves as things fall apart is simultaneously a process of building something of value out of what is missing: the elusive wish of creating a “home” that can withstand loss— a tower, fortress, or sanctuary of words. As the world around her falls apart, the very crumbling of her world becomes part of an inexorable reality she must accept as truth.
Similarly, in Suheir Hammad’s poem, the poet confronts the distortion of her world after tragedy, melding it into an unusual harmony:
“evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.”
Gathering up from the fragmented and disorganized pieces left in the aftermath of violence, characterized by the countless photo collages and stories plastered all over the scene, beckoning people home, Hammad’s poem echoes among these stories:
“3. The dead are called lost and their families hold up
Shaky printouts in front of us through screens smoked up.
We are looking for Iris, mother of three.
please call with any information.
we are searching for priti, last seen on the 103rd floor.
She was talking to her husband on the phone and the line went.
please help us find George, also known as Ael.
his family is waiting for him with his favorite meal.
I am looking for my son, who was delivering coffee.
I am looking for my sister girl, she started her job on monday.
I am looking for peace.
I am looking for mercy.
I am looking for evidence of compassion.
any evidence of life.
I am looking for ife.”
As in Rajčić’s work, Hammad’s “home” is similarly complex and fraught with fragility, portraying a multitude of possible homes, equally traumatized. Hammad specifically addresses her own sense of alienation and belonging as an Arab New Yorker, occupying both spaces of insider and outsider simultaneously:
“I have never felt less American and more New Yorker, particularly
Brooklyn, than these past days.
The stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent
the dead as citizens first, not family members, not
lovers.
I feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only going to get darker.
The future holds little light.”
The unsettling tone warns of future attacks, misunderstandings born out of difference. Nonetheless, Hammad’s poem concludes with an affirmation of life, her poem acts as a testimony of such survival. Using the rhythm of her verse to create a fortified space within language, she concludes with a call to action:
“There is no poetry in this.
There are causes and effects.
There are symbols and ideologies,
mad conspiracy here, and information we will never know.
There is death here, and there are promises of more.
There is life here.
Anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but
breathing for sure.
and if there is any light to come,
it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace
and justice
after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix
has risen.
Affirm life.
Affirm life.
We’ve got to carry each other now.
You are either with life, or against it.
Affirm life.”
Hammad’s and Rajčić’s works encourage us to embrace survival in the face of trauma. Forging self-awareness, understanding, and courage, their poetry restores traces of hope and possibility in the willingness to lose again and speak out, expressing the voiceless cry that heals, as Hammad captures so exquisitely:
“I have not cried at all while writing this.
I cried when I saw those buildings collapse on themselves
Like a broken heart.
I have never owned pain that needs to spread like that.”
Notes:
[1] Daisaku Ikeda. The Way of Youth: Buddhist Common Sense for Handling Life’s Questions. (Santa Monica: Middleway Press, 2000) 83.
[2] The BBC characterized September 11, 2001 as “the day that shook the world” in the title to a book documenting the events from September 11, 2001 to November 13, 2001 (Baxter and Downing 2001). As mentioned in Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter’s Introduction in After Shock: September 11, 2001 Global Feminist Perspectives. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Eds. (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002) 11.
[3] Suheir Hammad. “First Writing Since,” in After Shock: September 11, 2001 Global Feminist Perspectives. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Eds. (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002) 115-120.
4 Multlu Konuk Blasing. Lyric Poetry: the Pain and Pleasure of Words. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
[5] Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 4-5.
[6] Dragica Rajčić. Post bellum: Gedichte. (Zürich: Ed. 8, 2000).
_____
Dr. Erika M. Nelson is currently the John D. MacArthur Assistant Professor at Union College, where she teaches German language, literature, and culture courses. Her doctoral research, completed at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on issues of identity construction and sound in Rainer Maria Rilke's Orphic poetry and was published as a book entitled Reading Rilke's Orphic Identity. Her current research explores transnational identity and poetry, German spa culture, and modern renditions of mythic figures in literature and film.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
was mache
ich da
ich sammle Silben
baue Ihnen
ein haus, nirgends”
A house, nowhere
“When
piece
by piece
faith
in words
falls down missing
what do I do
then there
I gather syllables
build them
a house, nowhere”
This construction of a “house, nowhere” is the attempt to take action in language, with language to create against the very threat of destruction and non-existence. As she builds, piece by piece, faith of words not in words, (Rajčić chooses the preposition “von” not the anticipated “an”), there is the moment here in the poem when the pieces fall down: “herunter fällt”, actually written as “fehlt” (German: missing), which introduces a break and rupture in the assumed understanding of the poem. Here, the process of creating and rebuilding even poems themselves as things fall apart is simultaneously a process of building something of value out of what is missing: the elusive wish of creating a “home” that can withstand loss— a tower, fortress, or sanctuary of words. As the world around her falls apart, the very crumbling of her world becomes part of an inexorable reality she must accept as truth.
Similarly, in Suheir Hammad’s poem, the poet confronts the distortion of her world after tragedy, melding it into an unusual harmony:
“evident out my kitchen window is an abstract reality
sky where once was steel.
smoke where once was flesh.”
Gathering up from the fragmented and disorganized pieces left in the aftermath of violence, characterized by the countless photo collages and stories plastered all over the scene, beckoning people home, Hammad’s poem echoes among these stories:
“3. The dead are called lost and their families hold up
Shaky printouts in front of us through screens smoked up.
We are looking for Iris, mother of three.
please call with any information.
we are searching for priti, last seen on the 103rd floor.
She was talking to her husband on the phone and the line went.
please help us find George, also known as Ael.
his family is waiting for him with his favorite meal.
I am looking for my son, who was delivering coffee.
I am looking for my sister girl, she started her job on monday.
I am looking for peace.
I am looking for mercy.
I am looking for evidence of compassion.
any evidence of life.
I am looking for ife.”
As in Rajčić’s work, Hammad’s “home” is similarly complex and fraught with fragility, portraying a multitude of possible homes, equally traumatized. Hammad specifically addresses her own sense of alienation and belonging as an Arab New Yorker, occupying both spaces of insider and outsider simultaneously:
“I have never felt less American and more New Yorker, particularly
Brooklyn, than these past days.
The stars and stripes on all these cars and apartment windows represent
the dead as citizens first, not family members, not
lovers.
I feel like my skin is real thin, and that my eyes are only going to get darker.
The future holds little light.”
The unsettling tone warns of future attacks, misunderstandings born out of difference. Nonetheless, Hammad’s poem concludes with an affirmation of life, her poem acts as a testimony of such survival. Using the rhythm of her verse to create a fortified space within language, she concludes with a call to action:
“There is no poetry in this.
There are causes and effects.
There are symbols and ideologies,
mad conspiracy here, and information we will never know.
There is death here, and there are promises of more.
There is life here.
Anyone reading this is breathing, maybe hurting, but
breathing for sure.
and if there is any light to come,
it will shine from the eyes of those who look for peace
and justice
after the rubble and rhetoric are cleared and the phoenix
has risen.
Affirm life.
Affirm life.
We’ve got to carry each other now.
You are either with life, or against it.
Affirm life.”
Hammad’s and Rajčić’s works encourage us to embrace survival in the face of trauma. Forging self-awareness, understanding, and courage, their poetry restores traces of hope and possibility in the willingness to lose again and speak out, expressing the voiceless cry that heals, as Hammad captures so exquisitely:
“I have not cried at all while writing this.
I cried when I saw those buildings collapse on themselves
Like a broken heart.
I have never owned pain that needs to spread like that.”
Notes:
[1] Daisaku Ikeda. The Way of Youth: Buddhist Common Sense for Handling Life’s Questions. (Santa Monica: Middleway Press, 2000) 83.
[2] The BBC characterized September 11, 2001 as “the day that shook the world” in the title to a book documenting the events from September 11, 2001 to November 13, 2001 (Baxter and Downing 2001). As mentioned in Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter’s Introduction in After Shock: September 11, 2001 Global Feminist Perspectives. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Eds. (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002) 11.
[3] Suheir Hammad. “First Writing Since,” in After Shock: September 11, 2001 Global Feminist Perspectives. Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Eds. (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2002) 115-120.
4 Multlu Konuk Blasing. Lyric Poetry: the Pain and Pleasure of Words. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
[5] Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989) 4-5.
[6] Dragica Rajčić. Post bellum: Gedichte. (Zürich: Ed. 8, 2000).
_____
Dr. Erika M. Nelson is currently the John D. MacArthur Assistant Professor at Union College, where she teaches German language, literature, and culture courses. Her doctoral research, completed at the University of Texas at Austin, focused on issues of identity construction and sound in Rainer Maria Rilke's Orphic poetry and was published as a book entitled Reading Rilke's Orphic Identity. Her current research explores transnational identity and poetry, German spa culture, and modern renditions of mythic figures in literature and film.
_____
RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume Three (2009): Immanence/ Imminence
_____
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Osita Ezeliora, "The Swedish Academy"
Osita Ezeliora
Literature and Language Studies
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
The Swedish Academy, the Politics of the Nobel Prize, and My Africa
May I resume this simple, innocent statement with a brief remark on the general misconceptions that have come to define Western perceptions of Africa and her children. Some of us had believed, uncritically, that contemporary global advancement in technology, particularly the developments in the audio-visual techniques in telecommunications and television would lead to a better understanding of our common humanity. Evidence abound, however, that commercialism, deliberate governmental propagandas and the irresistible urge to re-colonize the world through military engagements, and the cultural modes of films, radio and the whole tribe of the media department has continued to produce a greater number of “illiterates” across the world. You only need to listen to a typical American television talk show to observe how uninformed the average American is about anything else outside his immediate milieu. To him, his house is ‘the best in the world’, his army is ‘the best in the world’, his cottage is ‘the best in the world’, his backyard is ‘the best in the world’, his wrestler is ‘the strongest man in the world’, his food is ‘the sweetest in the world’, his city is ‘the most beautiful in the world’, and so, we might conveniently add, his stupidity is ‘the most profound in the world’.
The Igbo have a saying: it is the child who has never visited another man’s farm that beats his chest every morning to proclaim that his father’s farm is the largest in the world. This simple proverbial assertion leads ultimately to an understanding of the psychology of the Igbo in their quest for knowledge, adventure, and the sheer competitiveness for success that has come to mark him out, many observers and analysts say, as the most entrepreneurial and inquisitive of the black race. Thus the average Igbo would often remind his neighbour that ‘a widely travelled child has more wisdom that the grey-haired old man sleeping at home all his life’.
Why have I chosen to go this route? It is clear to me that the long history of the relationship that had existed between Africa and Europe has not diminished the jaundiced perception which most Europeans had, and still have of Africa since the middle ages: the patterns of ethnographic categorizations which had classified human intelligence on the basis of pigmentation appear, though, to be waning out in recent time: after all, mega-media structures in the likes of the CNN and the BBC acknowledged the ingenuity of an Igbo child-soldier of the Nigeria-Biafra war, Philip Emeagwali, whose resilience and resourcefulness has made available to the world the facilities of the International Network. What many Africans never imagined thus happened: the CNN acknowledging a black man as ‘Father of the Internet’. The world celebrated it; the American parliament honoured him; the presidency represented by the nation’s chief executive at the time, Bill Clinton, eulogised his accomplishments. For a while, we believed that pigmentation no longer matters--many of us still do: after all, the acceptance of the subalterns in areas previously preserved for the ‘untouchables’ is increasing geometrically; even inter-racial marriages is now taken for granted, given that it is not only very fashionable in some quarters, but also because such conjugal relationships have produced some of the most beautiful specie of humanity. Many white women, today, openly declare that black men make better husbands--a statement that would have raised eyebrows once upon a time. When, recently, news came that Professor Esogbue, another Nigerian scientist of Igbo extraction played very prominent role as part of the team of scientists that designed the un-manned space ship at NASA, it was jubilation galore all over the African continent. “At last”, many screamed, “they are beginning to give us the opportunity to prove our mettle”.
This brings me to the ultimate question: where is the place of SWEDEN in the recent efforts by world powers to demonstrate their humanity to the so-called third world countries? I am particularly concerned, here, with the Swedish connection with the many peoples of Africa. I’d like, at this point, to remind you that not many people in Africa, obviously for some slight phonological reason, know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. You might guess why: there is a ‘SWI’ in Sweden, and a ‘SWI’ in Switzerland. Again, as the Igbo would say, ‘because all lizards lie prostrate, it is difficult to tell which of them suffers from stomach-ache’. But while many people do not know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, a lot of Africans do know, however, that one of the two countries is notorious for encouraging African dictators, avaricious criminals and sundry rogues to defraud their nations and to loot their national treasuries. A lot of Africans know that the recurrent cycle of poverty that appear insurmountable in the continent is largely a making of one of the two countries, which also provide banking facilities for the looted funds from Africa. Are you then surprised that a large segment of the Western media would confine itself to feeding you only with information about famine in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, war in Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone, HIV/AIDS in the Southern African sub-region and, of course, the spectacular news about rape and crimes of all sorts in South Africa?
The western media might not necessarily be wrong in all of these negative images painted of Africa. Where we are worried is that the same media hardly remind their privileged audience that many Euro-American nations are accomplices in the continued perpetuation of crime, disease, structured patterns of impoverishment and, consequently, the continuing decimation of the African humanity. I do hope that Sweden is not the ‘SWI’ country that has brought so much pain to the people of Africa.
Somehow, believe it or not, I feel quite persuaded that Sweden and Switzerland are two separate countries. Like many of my friends and colleagues, we have come to venerate this Scandinavian nation for the visions, insights and cultural prognostications of one of her great leaders, Gustaf 111 who, way back in 1786, established the ‘Swedish Academy’ with the sublime goal of propagating and projecting the ‘purity, vigour and majesty of the Swedish language’ so as to ensure its ‘clarity, expressiveness and prestige’. In spite of the many problems she encountered at the beginnings, the Academy has survived for over two hundred years with eminent secretaries and administrators that include Nils Von Rosenstein (1786-1824), Bernhard von Beskow (1834-1868), Carl David of Wirsen (1884-1912), Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1913-31), Anders Osterling (1941-64), amongst others.
If any cultural engagement ever sold Sweden to the world, it is precisely the prestigious award of the Nobel Prize, especially for Literature that got included in the many functions of the Academy since the beginning of the 20th century. Within this period, over 90 writers have won the Prize in Literature, some of whom are Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neil, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Samuel Becket, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and the many other accomplished writers that, for reasons of space, would not be accommodated in this short essay. These awards, I believe, are well deserved, and the winners have all contributed immensely to the global understanding of our universal humanity in varying virtuosities.
But many observers have often wondered whether fairness is part of the game in the award of the Nobel Prize. This suspicion arises in discussions of the mentalities of the Swedish Academy in its relationship with Africans, especially in its perception of black African writers. A widely held view is that the Swedish Academy is not synonymous with the United Nations or the World Bank and that the issue of fairness does not arise. The Academy, it is argued, is an organization founded on the goodwill of a Swedish patriot and visionary who was determined to market the linguistic and cultural elegance of his people. To this end, no one has the right to interrogate the propriety of its decisions in matters of awarding laureates to whomever it chooses. It could decide to award the Nobel Prize to whoever dances to the tune of Europe’s intrigues and political calling. In recent time, however, even this view could be challenged: the world is aware of the refusal of Sweden to join the clamour for a European common currency, and we watched with dismay as one of her very charming daughters got assassinated recently for what appears obviously to be for her political beliefs. The world watched, surprised, because it is often taken for granted that such pattern of killings is only associated with the so-called third world countries of Africa.
A more commonly held view, however, is that as deserving as they are of the Nobel Prize, many black African writers might never win it because of their unrepentant attack on the European notion of superiority. Sometime in 1998, a renowned Polish-American scholar of African and English Literatures, Professor Bernth Lindfors during his occasional visits to Nigeria, had spoken frankly to an assembly of students at Ogun State University, Ago-Iwoye, on how he has often looked forward to Chinua Achebe winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at the turn of each year, and had prayed: “I hope he gets it in his life time”. He had probably read the minds of the thousands of students who were eager to ask him basic questions on the politics of such awards and, somehow, he was strongly of the position that if anyone actually deserves such an award in Africa, from Cape to Cairo, Chinua Achebe has to be the one.
This does not imply, of course, that Achebe is the only African writer so deserving of the award. Indeed, while Achebe rightly occupies a foremost seat for consideration, the Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiongo stands quite close to him, as does the Ghanaian Ayi kwei Armah and Nigeria’s Buchi Emecheta. But why has nearly all commentators on the politics of the Nobel Prize often hammered on Chinua Achebe as the most acceptable choice? It does seem that Achebe’s brutal frankness in matters of race relations, which, many claim, must have infuriated many Europeans, will always come into play. Achebe has never argued for a superior African black pigmentation just as he has never accepted its inferiority to anyone anywhere in the world. In an interesting essay he wrote in the late 1970s, ‘Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South’, he had averred: “Many Europeans have made enormous contributions towards the understanding of Africa in Europe. Some of them have even helped us to see ourselves anew in the freshness of an itinerant perspective” (Achebe 1988:16). Achebe, in this reaction to the many centuries of Europe’s refusal to listen to the subaltern, had cited the instance of a former British Governor of Rhodesia (Southern Africa) in the 1950s who, when asked to explain the “partnership” between black and white in his territory, had no hesitation in defining such partnership as the one that exists “between the horse and its rider!” (Achebe 15). For the British colonialist, the African would always be a horse! But is this position also true of the Swedish?
I dare not take a position on this last question, for, after all, the Swedish do not have the odious reputation of being colonizers--at least, not in my Africa. But the central point has been made: Europe’s audition to the African predicament through the course of history has been defective and selective; her vision is equally selective; Europe’s memory of Africa is selective just as her amnesia remains selective. It took a Chinua Achebe at the Belgium lecture to address this frustration on the part of Africans in their dealings with their white over-lords: “I realize that all white people cannot be exactly of one mind or equally guilty of too much transmission and too little reception; I realize that all Europeans did not participate to the same degree in the events of modern African history. But despite local qualifications that would be made here and there, I believe that the major outline of my thesis is correct” (Achebe 1988: 16).
Achebe’s thesis, which runs through his numerous imaginative writings and profound scholarship rests on the need for a common and universal humanity; it resides on the premise that pre-colonial Africa, with all its imperfection, did not hear of culture for the first time from Europe. In Things Fall Apart, a novel that has been translated into over forty languages, with over fifteen million copies sold, Achebe imaginatively reinvents a pre-colonial African society with a robust sense of values: a society that exemplifies the ingenuity of the often talked-about traditional African through an admirable sense of productive craft. Awka, one of the many towns East of the Niger, archaeologists have discovered, was notable for iron-smiting and was involved in magnificent technological inventions prior to the incursion of western civilization. The hoes and machetes used for agricultural purposes, and the weaponries used for the occasional wars that erupted in many of these societies were said to have been invented by these so-called traditional technologists. The culture of ‘gun salutes’ during the burial of ozo-titled men and other people of great accomplishments were part of a bourgeoning tradition that was in existence prior to the advent of Europeans to Africa. The design and invention of the nkpo-ani, the traditional ‘gun’ used during such festivities remains a historical fact. The immense archaeological findings in Eastern Nigeria especially at the sites in Igbo-Ukwu and the neighbouring towns of Ora-Eri, Amichi, Nnobi, amongst others, attest to a memory of productiveness that lasted over twenty centuries before the arrival of Western merchants, missionaries, and colonialist mercenaries. This epochal sense of inventiveness is evident in Achebe’s novels of pre-colonial Africa.
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe also presents a traditional society with a fine sense of entertainment that subsume wrestling contests, poetry, dance and music; a democratic society where the young is trained from childhood to “wash his hands properly” so as to be able to “dine with elders”; a society where agriculture enjoyed a pride of place and every member of the community, male and female, desires to be a champion of the farm, be it in yam, cassava, or cocoyam production. Achebe successfully presents of Umuofia an archetypal Igbo and, indeed, an African community with a profound sense of justice where “ there are no lawyers and there are no liars”. To a European reader-audience unfamiliar with aspects of African cosmological discourse that necessitates the supremacy of truth and honour in the absence of the western-type legalistic structures, the system would always be fascinating, if only such a person is prepared to listen.
Whether it is in his Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Chike and the River, Girls at War, Anthills of the Savannah, Beware Soul Brother, Morning Yet On Creation Day, The Trouble With Nigeria, Hopes and Impediments, Home and Exile, or in his other numerous short stories, poetry, and essays scattered everywhere in Literary magazines, the search for justice, racial equality and the economic emancipation of humankind has always been the preoccupation of Chinua Achebe. Till date, Achebe remains the most venerated African novelist, dead or alive. This is an accomplishment that came with the long years of struggle, of resilience, and absorption of all kinds of criticism, be it constructive or otherwise. There is hardly any novelist-scholar who has inspired the over 500 million African audience and the rest of the world more than Chinua Achebe with respect to the propagation and projection of Africa’s cultural identity and racial equality. It is instructive that even Ngugi wa Thiongo--himself a worthy son of Africa and a deserving candidate for any literary award that has any claim to integrity--would pronounce Chinua Achebe as a major influence on him as a writer. The young Ngugi had not only read Achebe as an undergraduate during which period he says he has “a sense of the Igbo”, but also he had the privilege of meeting him in person during a seminar organised by the Makerere University, Uganda, in 1962.
“Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the two American presidents to have visited Nigeria while they were in office”, writes Prof. Harry Garuba, “each had course to refer to Chinua Achebe’s works when making policy statements to their Nigerian audiences” (Garuba 2003:276). Such is the veneration Achebe commands that practically every university that matters, as well as most African governments--from Nigeria to South Africa--have had to honour themselves in honouring him. One recalls that about ten years after Achebe’s insistence that Europe should learn to listen, if there must be proper dialogue between North and South, another leading African novelist from South Africa, Nadine Gordimer, in ‘Living In The Interregnum’, echoed a similar request when she asserts that the white in South Africa “has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood”, and suggests that “the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and frequent disappointment in oneself. A necessary learning process . . .”. Gordimer, of course, herself a Jewish white, is convinced that Africans never really slept in history per se, and so all superficial efforts to write the African off history would fail. So, she had suggested to the white world: “There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal . . . Without the will to tramp toward that possibility, no relations of whites, of the West, with the West’s formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past, because the past, for them, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them” (Gordimer 209-225).
The experience of South Africa is a matter of recent history and, as I am writing this piece, South Africa is celebrating her 10th Anniversary of democratic dispensation. Do we need to over-flog the beauty of listening instead of only transmitting, which Achebe had so much decried?
As the founding editor of William Heinemann’s ‘African Writers’ Series’, Chinua Achebe applied himself into editing the first one hundred titles of that series without charging a cent from the Heinemann’s publishing outfit; at the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, he founded at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, OKIKE: An African Journal of New Writing, a fine literary journal of creative writing and criticism that provided voice for the emerging African literary intelligentsia, and it is worthy of note that most of the major scholars and writers from Africa and beyond got their earlier endeavours published by OKIKE. Major contributors to African literary scholarship such as Isidore Okpewho, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, Ihechukwu Madubuike, Charles Nnolim, Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Romanus Egudu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Donatus Nwoga, Theo Vincent, Clement Okafor, Niyi Osundare, Juliet Okonkwo, Patrick Wilmot, Ossie Enekwe, amongst others, all appeared in OKIKE. Achebe also founded Aka Ikenga another journal in his Igbo language also at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He was also instrumental to the founding of the United States’- based African Commentary. The list is actually endless, and the obvious question is: who has done more towards the growth and development of African Literature? Who has inspired the emerging African writers more than the founding editor of the ‘African Writers’ Series’? Who has provided the finest space, within Africa, to the young scholars of African literature and culture more than the founding editor of OKIKE? Who has inspired young Nigerian writers more than the founding President of the Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA)?
Professors Emmanuel Obiechina, Eustace Palmer, Ernest Emenyonu, Dan Izevbaye, Bernth Lindfors, Wole Soyinka (a Nobel laureate), Oladele Taiwo, G.D. Killam, C.L. Innes, Simon Gikandi, Ali Mazrui, Biodun Jeyifo, Samuel Asein, Harry Garuba, Kalu Ogba, Theo Vincent, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, and the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, just to mention a few, have all honoured Chinua Achebe in very percipient essays and speeches that would challenge not only the visually impaired, but also even any literary magistrate caught in the web of selective and afflicted audition.
The world has since begun to acknowledge individual achievements without recourse to racial pigmentation. In spite of the general perception of American arrogance and what some see as her stupidity, that country will be atop the world for several years to come--and I wish her well. She deserves every bit of the progress she has made so far in ensuring her pride of place in scientific and technological advancement: she is there because she has recognized the beauty of our common humanity and has been able to bring out the best in the likes of Professors Emeagwali, Esogbue, Nnaji, and Oyibo. But will Sweden and the Swedish Academy ever concede to the theory of a common humanity? I feel reluctant to risk a response to this question, which, I believe, only the named institutions can. But I also feel tempted to respond in the affirmative; after all, there is one black man, Wole Soyinka, in the list of the Swedish Academicians. And as the Igbo would say, “ikwu amaghi, ibe ezi ya”(it is the duty of neighbours and relatives to advise an erring and confused brother). The Swedish Academy has done well by extending the frontiers of what was originally meant to be a project for the advancement of Swedish language and culture to writers all over Europe and beyond. The Academy deserves to be commended by anyone genuinely interested/trained in literature and criticism. In extending its frontiers beyond Sweden, however, its engagements might at a point in time, with good reasons, be seen as very political. Nothing probably suggests this widely held view than the Academy’s continued exclusion of black African writers whose literary accomplishments, many insist, outweigh those of many of the previous winners. Chinua Achebe and his “son”--Ngugi--have done excellently well in this regard.
Given my encounter with the works of many of the previous winners of the Nobel Prize, I believe that the Swedish Academy is an institution of profound honour. But it can no longer afford the luxury of subjecting this positive testimony of its integrity to suspicion. We are living in the African century, and there is no greater honour the Academy could do to itself as an institution than to honour the most revered African novelist(s). It’s time the Academy dropped the decadent mantle of Euro-modernism to embrace the classical imaginative output of black African writers and, especially, my Africa.
Works Cited:
Achebe, Chinua. ‘Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South’, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87. London: Heinemann, 1988.
Garuba, Harry. ‘Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society’. Public Culture. 15.2 (2003): 276.
Gordimer, Nadine. ‘Living in the Interregnum’. In Race and Literature. Charles Malan (ed). South Africa: CENSAL Publication, 15 (1988): 209-225.
Lindfors, Bernth. 1998. ‘Lectures’ at the Ogun State University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.
‘Swedish Academy, History of’, www.svenskaakademien.se/ENG/history/indexe.html.
‘Swedish Academy, The Nobel Prize in Literature – Laureates’, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/.
_____
Osita Ezeliora taught African and British literatures in Nigeria’s Ogun State University for about ten years. An Andrew W. Mellon scholar, he recently completed doctoral research on the new directions in Post-Apartheid South African Novel of English expression at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he currently teaches Post-Apartheid and Postcolonial literatures.
Literature and Language Studies
University of the Witwatersrand
Johannesburg, South Africa
The Swedish Academy, the Politics of the Nobel Prize, and My Africa
May I resume this simple, innocent statement with a brief remark on the general misconceptions that have come to define Western perceptions of Africa and her children. Some of us had believed, uncritically, that contemporary global advancement in technology, particularly the developments in the audio-visual techniques in telecommunications and television would lead to a better understanding of our common humanity. Evidence abound, however, that commercialism, deliberate governmental propagandas and the irresistible urge to re-colonize the world through military engagements, and the cultural modes of films, radio and the whole tribe of the media department has continued to produce a greater number of “illiterates” across the world. You only need to listen to a typical American television talk show to observe how uninformed the average American is about anything else outside his immediate milieu. To him, his house is ‘the best in the world’, his army is ‘the best in the world’, his cottage is ‘the best in the world’, his backyard is ‘the best in the world’, his wrestler is ‘the strongest man in the world’, his food is ‘the sweetest in the world’, his city is ‘the most beautiful in the world’, and so, we might conveniently add, his stupidity is ‘the most profound in the world’.
The Igbo have a saying: it is the child who has never visited another man’s farm that beats his chest every morning to proclaim that his father’s farm is the largest in the world. This simple proverbial assertion leads ultimately to an understanding of the psychology of the Igbo in their quest for knowledge, adventure, and the sheer competitiveness for success that has come to mark him out, many observers and analysts say, as the most entrepreneurial and inquisitive of the black race. Thus the average Igbo would often remind his neighbour that ‘a widely travelled child has more wisdom that the grey-haired old man sleeping at home all his life’.
Why have I chosen to go this route? It is clear to me that the long history of the relationship that had existed between Africa and Europe has not diminished the jaundiced perception which most Europeans had, and still have of Africa since the middle ages: the patterns of ethnographic categorizations which had classified human intelligence on the basis of pigmentation appear, though, to be waning out in recent time: after all, mega-media structures in the likes of the CNN and the BBC acknowledged the ingenuity of an Igbo child-soldier of the Nigeria-Biafra war, Philip Emeagwali, whose resilience and resourcefulness has made available to the world the facilities of the International Network. What many Africans never imagined thus happened: the CNN acknowledging a black man as ‘Father of the Internet’. The world celebrated it; the American parliament honoured him; the presidency represented by the nation’s chief executive at the time, Bill Clinton, eulogised his accomplishments. For a while, we believed that pigmentation no longer matters--many of us still do: after all, the acceptance of the subalterns in areas previously preserved for the ‘untouchables’ is increasing geometrically; even inter-racial marriages is now taken for granted, given that it is not only very fashionable in some quarters, but also because such conjugal relationships have produced some of the most beautiful specie of humanity. Many white women, today, openly declare that black men make better husbands--a statement that would have raised eyebrows once upon a time. When, recently, news came that Professor Esogbue, another Nigerian scientist of Igbo extraction played very prominent role as part of the team of scientists that designed the un-manned space ship at NASA, it was jubilation galore all over the African continent. “At last”, many screamed, “they are beginning to give us the opportunity to prove our mettle”.
This brings me to the ultimate question: where is the place of SWEDEN in the recent efforts by world powers to demonstrate their humanity to the so-called third world countries? I am particularly concerned, here, with the Swedish connection with the many peoples of Africa. I’d like, at this point, to remind you that not many people in Africa, obviously for some slight phonological reason, know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland. You might guess why: there is a ‘SWI’ in Sweden, and a ‘SWI’ in Switzerland. Again, as the Igbo would say, ‘because all lizards lie prostrate, it is difficult to tell which of them suffers from stomach-ache’. But while many people do not know the difference between Sweden and Switzerland, a lot of Africans do know, however, that one of the two countries is notorious for encouraging African dictators, avaricious criminals and sundry rogues to defraud their nations and to loot their national treasuries. A lot of Africans know that the recurrent cycle of poverty that appear insurmountable in the continent is largely a making of one of the two countries, which also provide banking facilities for the looted funds from Africa. Are you then surprised that a large segment of the Western media would confine itself to feeding you only with information about famine in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, war in Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone, HIV/AIDS in the Southern African sub-region and, of course, the spectacular news about rape and crimes of all sorts in South Africa?
The western media might not necessarily be wrong in all of these negative images painted of Africa. Where we are worried is that the same media hardly remind their privileged audience that many Euro-American nations are accomplices in the continued perpetuation of crime, disease, structured patterns of impoverishment and, consequently, the continuing decimation of the African humanity. I do hope that Sweden is not the ‘SWI’ country that has brought so much pain to the people of Africa.
Somehow, believe it or not, I feel quite persuaded that Sweden and Switzerland are two separate countries. Like many of my friends and colleagues, we have come to venerate this Scandinavian nation for the visions, insights and cultural prognostications of one of her great leaders, Gustaf 111 who, way back in 1786, established the ‘Swedish Academy’ with the sublime goal of propagating and projecting the ‘purity, vigour and majesty of the Swedish language’ so as to ensure its ‘clarity, expressiveness and prestige’. In spite of the many problems she encountered at the beginnings, the Academy has survived for over two hundred years with eminent secretaries and administrators that include Nils Von Rosenstein (1786-1824), Bernhard von Beskow (1834-1868), Carl David of Wirsen (1884-1912), Erik Axel Karlfeldt (1913-31), Anders Osterling (1941-64), amongst others.
If any cultural engagement ever sold Sweden to the world, it is precisely the prestigious award of the Nobel Prize, especially for Literature that got included in the many functions of the Academy since the beginning of the 20th century. Within this period, over 90 writers have won the Prize in Literature, some of whom are Sully Prudhomme, Theodor Mommsen, Rudyard Kipling, Anatole France, Romain Rolland, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Mann, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neil, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Samuel Becket, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee and the many other accomplished writers that, for reasons of space, would not be accommodated in this short essay. These awards, I believe, are well deserved, and the winners have all contributed immensely to the global understanding of our universal humanity in varying virtuosities.
But many observers have often wondered whether fairness is part of the game in the award of the Nobel Prize. This suspicion arises in discussions of the mentalities of the Swedish Academy in its relationship with Africans, especially in its perception of black African writers. A widely held view is that the Swedish Academy is not synonymous with the United Nations or the World Bank and that the issue of fairness does not arise. The Academy, it is argued, is an organization founded on the goodwill of a Swedish patriot and visionary who was determined to market the linguistic and cultural elegance of his people. To this end, no one has the right to interrogate the propriety of its decisions in matters of awarding laureates to whomever it chooses. It could decide to award the Nobel Prize to whoever dances to the tune of Europe’s intrigues and political calling. In recent time, however, even this view could be challenged: the world is aware of the refusal of Sweden to join the clamour for a European common currency, and we watched with dismay as one of her very charming daughters got assassinated recently for what appears obviously to be for her political beliefs. The world watched, surprised, because it is often taken for granted that such pattern of killings is only associated with the so-called third world countries of Africa.
A more commonly held view, however, is that as deserving as they are of the Nobel Prize, many black African writers might never win it because of their unrepentant attack on the European notion of superiority. Sometime in 1998, a renowned Polish-American scholar of African and English Literatures, Professor Bernth Lindfors during his occasional visits to Nigeria, had spoken frankly to an assembly of students at Ogun State University, Ago-Iwoye, on how he has often looked forward to Chinua Achebe winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at the turn of each year, and had prayed: “I hope he gets it in his life time”. He had probably read the minds of the thousands of students who were eager to ask him basic questions on the politics of such awards and, somehow, he was strongly of the position that if anyone actually deserves such an award in Africa, from Cape to Cairo, Chinua Achebe has to be the one.
This does not imply, of course, that Achebe is the only African writer so deserving of the award. Indeed, while Achebe rightly occupies a foremost seat for consideration, the Kenyan novelist, Ngugi wa Thiongo stands quite close to him, as does the Ghanaian Ayi kwei Armah and Nigeria’s Buchi Emecheta. But why has nearly all commentators on the politics of the Nobel Prize often hammered on Chinua Achebe as the most acceptable choice? It does seem that Achebe’s brutal frankness in matters of race relations, which, many claim, must have infuriated many Europeans, will always come into play. Achebe has never argued for a superior African black pigmentation just as he has never accepted its inferiority to anyone anywhere in the world. In an interesting essay he wrote in the late 1970s, ‘Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South’, he had averred: “Many Europeans have made enormous contributions towards the understanding of Africa in Europe. Some of them have even helped us to see ourselves anew in the freshness of an itinerant perspective” (Achebe 1988:16). Achebe, in this reaction to the many centuries of Europe’s refusal to listen to the subaltern, had cited the instance of a former British Governor of Rhodesia (Southern Africa) in the 1950s who, when asked to explain the “partnership” between black and white in his territory, had no hesitation in defining such partnership as the one that exists “between the horse and its rider!” (Achebe 15). For the British colonialist, the African would always be a horse! But is this position also true of the Swedish?
I dare not take a position on this last question, for, after all, the Swedish do not have the odious reputation of being colonizers--at least, not in my Africa. But the central point has been made: Europe’s audition to the African predicament through the course of history has been defective and selective; her vision is equally selective; Europe’s memory of Africa is selective just as her amnesia remains selective. It took a Chinua Achebe at the Belgium lecture to address this frustration on the part of Africans in their dealings with their white over-lords: “I realize that all white people cannot be exactly of one mind or equally guilty of too much transmission and too little reception; I realize that all Europeans did not participate to the same degree in the events of modern African history. But despite local qualifications that would be made here and there, I believe that the major outline of my thesis is correct” (Achebe 1988: 16).
Achebe’s thesis, which runs through his numerous imaginative writings and profound scholarship rests on the need for a common and universal humanity; it resides on the premise that pre-colonial Africa, with all its imperfection, did not hear of culture for the first time from Europe. In Things Fall Apart, a novel that has been translated into over forty languages, with over fifteen million copies sold, Achebe imaginatively reinvents a pre-colonial African society with a robust sense of values: a society that exemplifies the ingenuity of the often talked-about traditional African through an admirable sense of productive craft. Awka, one of the many towns East of the Niger, archaeologists have discovered, was notable for iron-smiting and was involved in magnificent technological inventions prior to the incursion of western civilization. The hoes and machetes used for agricultural purposes, and the weaponries used for the occasional wars that erupted in many of these societies were said to have been invented by these so-called traditional technologists. The culture of ‘gun salutes’ during the burial of ozo-titled men and other people of great accomplishments were part of a bourgeoning tradition that was in existence prior to the advent of Europeans to Africa. The design and invention of the nkpo-ani, the traditional ‘gun’ used during such festivities remains a historical fact. The immense archaeological findings in Eastern Nigeria especially at the sites in Igbo-Ukwu and the neighbouring towns of Ora-Eri, Amichi, Nnobi, amongst others, attest to a memory of productiveness that lasted over twenty centuries before the arrival of Western merchants, missionaries, and colonialist mercenaries. This epochal sense of inventiveness is evident in Achebe’s novels of pre-colonial Africa.
In Things Fall Apart, Achebe also presents a traditional society with a fine sense of entertainment that subsume wrestling contests, poetry, dance and music; a democratic society where the young is trained from childhood to “wash his hands properly” so as to be able to “dine with elders”; a society where agriculture enjoyed a pride of place and every member of the community, male and female, desires to be a champion of the farm, be it in yam, cassava, or cocoyam production. Achebe successfully presents of Umuofia an archetypal Igbo and, indeed, an African community with a profound sense of justice where “ there are no lawyers and there are no liars”. To a European reader-audience unfamiliar with aspects of African cosmological discourse that necessitates the supremacy of truth and honour in the absence of the western-type legalistic structures, the system would always be fascinating, if only such a person is prepared to listen.
Whether it is in his Things Fall Apart, No Longer At Ease, Arrow of God, A Man of the People, Chike and the River, Girls at War, Anthills of the Savannah, Beware Soul Brother, Morning Yet On Creation Day, The Trouble With Nigeria, Hopes and Impediments, Home and Exile, or in his other numerous short stories, poetry, and essays scattered everywhere in Literary magazines, the search for justice, racial equality and the economic emancipation of humankind has always been the preoccupation of Chinua Achebe. Till date, Achebe remains the most venerated African novelist, dead or alive. This is an accomplishment that came with the long years of struggle, of resilience, and absorption of all kinds of criticism, be it constructive or otherwise. There is hardly any novelist-scholar who has inspired the over 500 million African audience and the rest of the world more than Chinua Achebe with respect to the propagation and projection of Africa’s cultural identity and racial equality. It is instructive that even Ngugi wa Thiongo--himself a worthy son of Africa and a deserving candidate for any literary award that has any claim to integrity--would pronounce Chinua Achebe as a major influence on him as a writer. The young Ngugi had not only read Achebe as an undergraduate during which period he says he has “a sense of the Igbo”, but also he had the privilege of meeting him in person during a seminar organised by the Makerere University, Uganda, in 1962.
“Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, the two American presidents to have visited Nigeria while they were in office”, writes Prof. Harry Garuba, “each had course to refer to Chinua Achebe’s works when making policy statements to their Nigerian audiences” (Garuba 2003:276). Such is the veneration Achebe commands that practically every university that matters, as well as most African governments--from Nigeria to South Africa--have had to honour themselves in honouring him. One recalls that about ten years after Achebe’s insistence that Europe should learn to listen, if there must be proper dialogue between North and South, another leading African novelist from South Africa, Nadine Gordimer, in ‘Living In The Interregnum’, echoed a similar request when she asserts that the white in South Africa “has become highly conscious of a dependency on distorted vision induced since childhood”, and suggests that “the way to begin entering history out of a dying white regime is through setbacks, encouragements and rebuffs from others, and frequent disappointment in oneself. A necessary learning process . . .”. Gordimer, of course, herself a Jewish white, is convinced that Africans never really slept in history per se, and so all superficial efforts to write the African off history would fail. So, she had suggested to the white world: “There is no forgetting how we could live if only we could find the way. We must continue to be tormented by the ideal . . . Without the will to tramp toward that possibility, no relations of whites, of the West, with the West’s formerly subject peoples can ever be free of the past, because the past, for them, was the jungle of Western capitalism, not the light the missionaries thought they brought with them” (Gordimer 209-225).
The experience of South Africa is a matter of recent history and, as I am writing this piece, South Africa is celebrating her 10th Anniversary of democratic dispensation. Do we need to over-flog the beauty of listening instead of only transmitting, which Achebe had so much decried?
As the founding editor of William Heinemann’s ‘African Writers’ Series’, Chinua Achebe applied himself into editing the first one hundred titles of that series without charging a cent from the Heinemann’s publishing outfit; at the end of the Nigeria-Biafra war, he founded at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, OKIKE: An African Journal of New Writing, a fine literary journal of creative writing and criticism that provided voice for the emerging African literary intelligentsia, and it is worthy of note that most of the major scholars and writers from Africa and beyond got their earlier endeavours published by OKIKE. Major contributors to African literary scholarship such as Isidore Okpewho, Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, Ihechukwu Madubuike, Charles Nnolim, Wole Soyinka, Femi Osofisan, Romanus Egudu, Emmanuel Obiechina, Donatus Nwoga, Theo Vincent, Clement Okafor, Niyi Osundare, Juliet Okonkwo, Patrick Wilmot, Ossie Enekwe, amongst others, all appeared in OKIKE. Achebe also founded Aka Ikenga another journal in his Igbo language also at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He was also instrumental to the founding of the United States’- based African Commentary. The list is actually endless, and the obvious question is: who has done more towards the growth and development of African Literature? Who has inspired the emerging African writers more than the founding editor of the ‘African Writers’ Series’? Who has provided the finest space, within Africa, to the young scholars of African literature and culture more than the founding editor of OKIKE? Who has inspired young Nigerian writers more than the founding President of the Association of Nigeria Authors (ANA)?
Professors Emmanuel Obiechina, Eustace Palmer, Ernest Emenyonu, Dan Izevbaye, Bernth Lindfors, Wole Soyinka (a Nobel laureate), Oladele Taiwo, G.D. Killam, C.L. Innes, Simon Gikandi, Ali Mazrui, Biodun Jeyifo, Samuel Asein, Harry Garuba, Kalu Ogba, Theo Vincent, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, and the Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, just to mention a few, have all honoured Chinua Achebe in very percipient essays and speeches that would challenge not only the visually impaired, but also even any literary magistrate caught in the web of selective and afflicted audition.
The world has since begun to acknowledge individual achievements without recourse to racial pigmentation. In spite of the general perception of American arrogance and what some see as her stupidity, that country will be atop the world for several years to come--and I wish her well. She deserves every bit of the progress she has made so far in ensuring her pride of place in scientific and technological advancement: she is there because she has recognized the beauty of our common humanity and has been able to bring out the best in the likes of Professors Emeagwali, Esogbue, Nnaji, and Oyibo. But will Sweden and the Swedish Academy ever concede to the theory of a common humanity? I feel reluctant to risk a response to this question, which, I believe, only the named institutions can. But I also feel tempted to respond in the affirmative; after all, there is one black man, Wole Soyinka, in the list of the Swedish Academicians. And as the Igbo would say, “ikwu amaghi, ibe ezi ya”(it is the duty of neighbours and relatives to advise an erring and confused brother). The Swedish Academy has done well by extending the frontiers of what was originally meant to be a project for the advancement of Swedish language and culture to writers all over Europe and beyond. The Academy deserves to be commended by anyone genuinely interested/trained in literature and criticism. In extending its frontiers beyond Sweden, however, its engagements might at a point in time, with good reasons, be seen as very political. Nothing probably suggests this widely held view than the Academy’s continued exclusion of black African writers whose literary accomplishments, many insist, outweigh those of many of the previous winners. Chinua Achebe and his “son”--Ngugi--have done excellently well in this regard.
Given my encounter with the works of many of the previous winners of the Nobel Prize, I believe that the Swedish Academy is an institution of profound honour. But it can no longer afford the luxury of subjecting this positive testimony of its integrity to suspicion. We are living in the African century, and there is no greater honour the Academy could do to itself as an institution than to honour the most revered African novelist(s). It’s time the Academy dropped the decadent mantle of Euro-modernism to embrace the classical imaginative output of black African writers and, especially, my Africa.
Works Cited:
Achebe, Chinua. ‘Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South’, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-87. London: Heinemann, 1988.
Garuba, Harry. ‘Explorations in Animist Materialism: Notes on Reading/Writing African Literature, Culture, and Society’. Public Culture. 15.2 (2003): 276.
Gordimer, Nadine. ‘Living in the Interregnum’. In Race and Literature. Charles Malan (ed). South Africa: CENSAL Publication, 15 (1988): 209-225.
Lindfors, Bernth. 1998. ‘Lectures’ at the Ogun State University, Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria.
‘Swedish Academy, History of’, www.svenskaakademien.se/ENG/history/indexe.html.
‘Swedish Academy, The Nobel Prize in Literature – Laureates’, www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/.
_____
Osita Ezeliora taught African and British literatures in Nigeria’s Ogun State University for about ten years. An Andrew W. Mellon scholar, he recently completed doctoral research on the new directions in Post-Apartheid South African Novel of English expression at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, where he currently teaches Post-Apartheid and Postcolonial literatures.
Bill Freind, "Inquiring Minds Want to Know"
Bill Freind
Rowan University
Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Kent Johnson’s Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets
From the staged brawls on The Jerry Springer Show to rappers whose beefs occasionally turn deadly to the screaming heads on cable news shows, American culture has elevated public confrontation to a minor art form. Yet there’s one area that remains astonishingly genteel, at least in public: poetry. It used to be that poetic displays of anger and resentment were almost as common as bad love poems, as writers as diverse as Catullus, Dante, Pope, and Pound all demonstrate, but the satirical attack poem has largely vanished in America since World War II. In Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets, Kent Johnson shows that he’s doing his part to both resuscitate and renovate the satirical epigram. His epigrams are caustic and often very funny, but they’re much more than mere insults. Instead, they highlight the ways in which reputations are (or are not) made in contemporary poetry, as well as the attendant ambitions and partially-disguised careerism. Given its insights into the dynamics of fame, Epigramititis is simultaneously a deft critique and an ambivalent celebration of contemporary American poetry.
Johnson came to a sort of prominence for his role in the Araki Yasusada affair. Allegedly a Hiroshima survivor who had died in 1972, Yasusada achieved posthumous recognition when his poems were published in translation in a variety of journals in Europe and North America in the 1990’s. However, it soon came out that Yasusada was an invention and many readers now assume that Johnson, who holds the copyright, was in fact the author—a claim which Johnson denies. Instead, he insists that Tosa Motokiyu, a pseudonym for a person who is now dead, was the actual author. Not surprisingly, the possibility that a white man appropriated (or impersonated, or utilized—the choice of verb matters quite a bit) the voice of Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima led to some strong denunciations. Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that the Yasusada project displayed an extraordinary understanding of the complexities of the various factions and fiefdoms in both contemporary poetry and the North American academy. For instance, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada,[1] a collection of Yasusada’s work, provided the materials for its own mini-industry: it included not only poems, drafts and letters ostensibly written by Yasusada, but also a brief biography of Yasusada, essays by Marjorie Perloff[2] and Mikhail Epstein, and an interview with Johnson—practically a prepublished course packet. Its provocative use of issues related to race, gender and history seemed designed to elicit passionate debate and Johnson’s framing of these hot-button issues was so sharp that it amounted to a meta-commentary on the academic-poetic complex.
Johnson is continuing that commentary, in part by carving out a niche as the closest thing in contemporary poetry to a gossip columnist. Celebrity gossip is predicated on some mixture of admiration, contempt, jealousy and schadenfreude, and the skilled purveyor of gossip must intimately understand how the mechanisms of fame operate at that time. Consequently, gossip columnists exist in a kind of netherworld: they are recognized and, occasionally, even famous, but while they can make or break celebrities they are not quite celebrities themselves, since they are simultaneously inside and outside the economy of celebrity. That’s a pretty accurate analogy to Johnson’s role in the poetry world. On the one hand, the diversity and quality of his body of work should make him a major force in North American poetry. Johnson has published a book of translations of poems written in the poetry workshops organized by Ernesto Cardenal throughout Nicaragua during the Sandinista era;[3] edited a collection of contemporary Russian poetry;[4] co-edited an anthology of essays and poems by writers who examine the influence of Buddhism on their work;[5] translated, with Forrest Gander, two books by the extraordinary Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz;[6] and published a number of books of poetry including, in Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, what I think are some of the most powerful political poems written in English in the last thirty years.[7] On the other hand, Johnson has displayed an impressive ability to infuriate a wide range of poets and critics, which I believe is the central reason why he hasn’t received the recognition he deserves.[8] Johnson himself is well aware of his position, writing in the Author’s Note to Epigramititis “This book is fated to be assiduously ignored by the Poetry Establishment, ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental,’ the two sides of its ancient coin.”[9] Johnson doesn’t position himself as marginalized; instead he claims to be almost irrelevant. Still, Johnson states that his book will be “assiduously ignored” (emphasis added) and the adverb suggests a willfulness on the part of the “Poetry Establishment,” as if the mere presence of this book acts as an irritant or allergen, even if it isn’t being read. Although Epigramititis hasn’t received a large number of reviews, I’ve heard stories (and in a paper dealing with gossip, second- and third-hand stories are legitimate sources) of poets passing Epigramititis around at readings, looking up epigrams (their own and others) with a mixture of horror and fascination.
Those are the same emotions that Johnson seems to feel for the “celebrities” in the post-avant, as indicated by the epigraph by Catullus that opens Epigramititis: “Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? / nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.” Johnson offers no translation, but here’s one from Guy Lee: “I hate and love. Perhaps you’re asking why I do that? / I don’t know, but I feel it happening, and am racked.”[10]
While Catullus’ poem alludes to his conflicting passions for Lesbia, the lover who is the subject of much of his work, Johnson’s epigraph is about the poetry world, i.e., not just the poetry that is written and published, but also the ambitions, rivalries, and petty squabbling that are an inextricable but often overlooked part of that work. Furthermore, Epigramititis implicitly suggests why the poetic satire in North America has slipped into a coma: the poetry world is simultaneously all but invisible to the public at large and so fragmented that most readers will be unable to identify at least a few of the targets in Johnson’s poems, which highlights the deep irony in the entire concept of poetic celebrity. That means that Johnson’s epigrams, like the traditional epigram, are a kind of attempt to seize the mechanisms of poetic fame—both to praise those who deserve it (Johnson cites Eleni Sikelianos, Robert Creeley and Eliot Weinberger, as well as a few others) and to disparage those writers whose reputation, according to the epigrammatist, has exceeded or outlived their talent—even as the epigrams parody the desire for poetic reputation.[11] That’s a pose, of course, but it’s nonetheless an interesting revision of the epigrammatic tradition.
Epigramititis differs from traditional epigrams in another way: each poem includes a drawing or photograph on the facing page, but they’re metaphorical, not literal representations of the poet. These images are the equivalent of the paparazzo shot, that staple of celebrity journalism: the common denominator is that they are intended to make the subject look bad. Robert Pinsky is paired with a photo of a used car salesman, and Johnson discusses this in an interview with John Bradley that’s forthcoming at the journal Plantarchy:
“Now, let me say again, this has nothing to do with Robert Pinsky as a person—nor even as a poet, speaking in the main. I mean, Pinsky is a magnificently gifted person, I don’t think many people doubt that. But talent or personality have nothing to do with it: He has a starring role in the whole institutional drama titled “Poetry Biz and Its Discontents” and the soap opera (post-avant poets as the token minority characters) is just awful—a tragicomedy of stupid plot and embarrassingly cheap scenery. Exactly what used automobiles have to do with it, admittedly, I’m not certain, but I suspect there is some connection there . . . ”.[12]
Johnson's irony is unmistakable, since many people involved with post-avant poetries would doubt that Pinsky is a “magnificently gifted poet.” (I suspect Johnson himself is a doubter; I certainly am.) Additionally, Johnson’s professed confusion about why he might have paired Pinsky with a used car salesman echoes the epigram itself: “I, too, dislike him, / though I’m not sure why (37).
As poet laureate, and now as de facto poet laureate emeritus, Pinsky, as Johnson notes, continues to play a role in which he is required to bemoan the irrelevance of poetry in the US, while coming up with solutions (or, some might say, gimmicks) to change this state of affairs. The epigram, which reworks Marianne Moore’s widely anthologized “Poetry,” suggests that as poet laureate Pinsky is the visible face of poetry in the United States, while the image contends that Pinsky has attempted to foist poetry to a largely uninterested public, just as a sleazy car salesman might use the hard sell to move a lemon off the lot. I think Pinsky operates as a kind of shorthand for other poetry salesmen such as Ted Kooser, another former laureate; John Barr, the investment banker who presides over the more than $100 million endowment at the Poetry Foundation; and Dana Gioia, the former VP of marketing at General Foods who now directs the National Endowment for the Arts.[13] Each of these men has explicitly called for marketing poetry as if it were a product.[14] That’s where the irony of the photo really comes into focus: even a dismal used car salesman has a better sales record than these guys.
Pinsky’s epigram is somewhat anomalous, since the images and poems in Epigramititis more typically slide into outright mockery. For instance, John Ashbery gets a reproduction of Brian, the talking dog from the animated sitcom The Family Guy; Brian is holding a martini, a clear nod to the stories about Ashbery’s prodigious drinking. It’s a cheap shot, but in many ways both gossip and the epigram are based on the cheap shot. Byron later described English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as a “miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony,”[15] which is both largely true and exactly why we still read the poem: like gossip, the satire is sometimes more effective and more enjoyable when it’s not completely accurate. The comparison to Byron is apt on at least one level, since Johnson seeks a position that’s roughly analogous to Byron’s in the Preface to Don Juan, attacking the Language poets just as Byron savaged the Lakers. Charles Bernstein serves as Johnson’s Robert Southey, that is, the former radical who has sold out for mainstream respectability. Bernstein, who with Bruce Andrews co-edited the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, moved on to an endowed chair at the University of Buffalo and now holds an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania and has even appeared in television advertisement for The Yellow Pages.[16] Here’s Bernstein’s epigram:
“Pity the aardvark; he seems
at once lost in the Ivy of the zoo
and strangely at home, too” (35).
If for a good slice of the poetry reading public, “language poetry” is still a pejorative, Bernstein has somehow managed to move from outlaw to mainstream, a change that has at the very least complicated his trenchant critiques of official verse culture. The accompanying image extends the epigram: it is a picture of Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the Second International, who rejected violent revolution and instead celebrated reforms within the framework of parliamentary democracy. Bernstein’s deviations from orthodox Marxism led Lenin to attack him as a revisionist and opportunist. Would this be a fair analogue to a poet who has moved from the margins to the heights of Ivy League prestige? Maybe, but ultimately, there’s something a little absurd about comparing the Johnson-Charles Bernstein battles to those of Marx and Eduard Bernstein or Byron and Southey: the stakes in a squabble in the post-avant are nowhere near as high as in the splits in international Marxism or even in Byron’s attacks on the Lakers. It seems to me that that absurdity is precisely the point: Johnson has stated that “poetry’s political impact, at least in the United States, is going to be poignantly tiny”[17] but he seems deeply ambivalent about that. It may be that poetry’s ineffectuality is a part of its freedom: because it is unable to generate money, fame or political change, poetry remains off the national radar and as a result poets are largely free to do what they want without the influence of undue censure or praise. But if Shelley’s claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world was a bit of a stretch in the nineteenth century, it’s almost laughable in twenty-first century America. Poets may write political poems but their political power is nil.
That sense of political powerlessness provides the subtext of Johnson’s epigram on Stephen Burt:
“Poet and critic, we claim him
as our Randall Jarrell (the younger version).
Oh, goodbye, Helen Vendler, goodbye,
for you are their Matthew Arnold.
We wash you out of your shattered turret with a hose” (41).
The second line alludes to Burt’s celebration of Jarrell in his (i.e., Burt’s) book Randall Jarrell and His Age,[18] and the comparison of Burt to Jarrell is certainly a case of damning with very faint praise. The epigram also suggests that Burt has assumed Helen Vendler’s role as the unofficial Critic Laureate of the US, so Vendler (like the title figure in Jarrell’s famous poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”) is now another fatality of the poetry wars. It’s a funny epigram, I think, even if Vendler never had a fraction of Arnold’s stature.
But the poem’s humor is eliminated by the accompanying image, a photograph of charred bodies hanging from a bridge. These are the contractors from Blackwater International who in March, 2004 were shot in Fallujah, Iraq, their corpses set on fire then strung from a bridge above the Euphrates River. Johnson makes a similar move in a few places in Epigramititis: he chronicles or charges into the various skirmishes in the poetry world, only to point at political concerns which make the poetry “wars” seem absurd by comparison to the real and horrifying conflicts that continue around the globe. The photo offers no pat message; it is simply (simply?) an acknowledgment that these atrocities far exceed the squabbles of poets concerned with fame and ambition. As a result, the photograph implicitly calls into question the entire project of Epigramititis.
I think this has been one of the most overlooked aspects of Johnson’s work: while he has spent the better part of a decade critiquing and disparaging a variety of prominent poets and critics, his work also calls into question his own position. He mocks Helen Vendler by comparing her to Matthew Arnold, but in the book’s final epigram, entitled “The Epigramist,” he includes a Photoshopped image in which his own face is superimposed on Samuel Johnson’s. The epigram demonstrates that the gesture is clearly ironic:
“He’s offered, in decorus subjunctus, to Double Happiness,
The Poetry Project, The Bowery, and the KGB Bar,
that he fly to New York to share his Epigramititis.
He wonders how Martial would say: ‘So far, no cigar’.” (259)
Helen Vendler may be a watered down Arnold, but Kent Johnson, by his own admission, is no Samuel Johnson (and no Martial). The Author’s Note predicts that these epigrams will be assiduously ignored but this epigram implicitly drops the adverb. Maybe that’s for the best: epigrams have more force when they’re launched from beyond the margins.
_____
Notes:
[1] Johnson, Kent. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. New York: Roof Books, 1997.
[2] Perloff’s essay, “In Search of the Authentic Other: The Poetry of Araki Yasusada,” is an abridged version of an essay that originally appeared in the Boston Review 22.3-4, (1997): 26-33.
[3] Johnson, Kent. A Nation of Poets: Writing from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua. New York: West End Press, 1985.
[4] Johnson, Kent. Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992.
[5] Johnson, Kent. Beneath a Single Moon. Boston: Shambhala Press, 2001.
[6] Saenz, Jaime. Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Saenz, Jaime. The Night. Trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
[7] Johnson, Kent. Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, Austin: Effing Press, 2005.
[8] Johnson’s provocations got him banned from the Poetics listserv at the University of Buffalo, as well as the British Poetry listserv; he also makes regular and often polemical appearances in the comments sections of a number of poetry blogs. In fact, Johnson’s comments on Kasey Silem Mohammed’s Lime Tree blog so enraged Mohammed that he banned Johnson and initially threatened to delete every comment that Johnson had ever made on the blog. Mohammed later relented on the deletions when he realized how difficult such a project would be, but he did in fact delete all of the discussion regarding Johnson’s banishment. For Johnson’s version of the exchange, see <http://www.blazevox.org/072-kj.htm>.
[9] Johnson, Kent. Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets, Buffalo: BlazeVox, 2007. 18.
[10] Catullus, “Carmen 85.” Catullus: The Complete Poems, trans. Guy Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 131.
[11] Johnson also has a number of ambivalent epigrams that seem as if they might be simultaneously praising and disparaging. For instance, Kenward Elmslie’s epigram reads
“Indeed, I am dying, but I am here to say
that his poems are miniature theaters,”
said a boy on fire, standing on a paper
stage. Bravo! Bravo! cried the poet-pilot
in a little plane, dark blue against a
dark-blue night sky. VIVA DELAUNAY!
[12] Bradley, John and Kent Johnson. “Epigramaphobia: A Conversation between John Bradley and Kent Johnson,” Plantarchy 5, forthcoming.
[13] Johnson’s epigram “The Poet Laureate” continues this conflation of those who would serve as spokespeople for poetry:
I can’t quite recall his or her name presently.
Is it Robert, Rita, or Billy?
Or is it Ted? No… Ted Hughes is dead.
He wears a helmet of hair in Hell.
I’m so silly (167).
The accompanying photo is of Laura Bush, who has attempted to promote both reading in general and poetry in particular. The poem suggests that the attempt to domesticate poetry for public consumption puts the American laureate in a position that’s analogous to the British laureate, whose job is to write verse for state occasions. The position of laureate makes these different poets indistinguishable from each other, and from the first lady, and suggests that they are at least tacitly complicit in the actions of the government that employs them.
[14] For an excellent analysis of the strategies of Kooser, et. al., see Evans, Steve. “Free (Market) Verse,” 29 July 2007 <http://www.thirdfactory.net/freemarketverse-all.html/>.
[15] Quoted in Byron: The Oxford Authors, ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 1021.
[16] This ad, as well as an eleven minute outtake with Jon Lovitz and two radio ads, are at PennSound. 29 July 2007 <http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein-YP.html>.
[17] Johnson, Kent. “Hoaxes and Heteronymity: An Interview with Kent Johnson.” By Bill Freind. VeRT 5, 29 July 30, 2007 <http://www.litvert.com/KJ_Interview.html>.
[18] Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
_____
Bill Freind is the author of American Field Couches (BlazeVox, 2008) and An Anthology (housepress, 2000). He lives near an abandoned golf course in South Jersey.
Rowan University
Inquiring Minds Want to Know: Kent Johnson’s Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets
From the staged brawls on The Jerry Springer Show to rappers whose beefs occasionally turn deadly to the screaming heads on cable news shows, American culture has elevated public confrontation to a minor art form. Yet there’s one area that remains astonishingly genteel, at least in public: poetry. It used to be that poetic displays of anger and resentment were almost as common as bad love poems, as writers as diverse as Catullus, Dante, Pope, and Pound all demonstrate, but the satirical attack poem has largely vanished in America since World War II. In Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets, Kent Johnson shows that he’s doing his part to both resuscitate and renovate the satirical epigram. His epigrams are caustic and often very funny, but they’re much more than mere insults. Instead, they highlight the ways in which reputations are (or are not) made in contemporary poetry, as well as the attendant ambitions and partially-disguised careerism. Given its insights into the dynamics of fame, Epigramititis is simultaneously a deft critique and an ambivalent celebration of contemporary American poetry.
Johnson came to a sort of prominence for his role in the Araki Yasusada affair. Allegedly a Hiroshima survivor who had died in 1972, Yasusada achieved posthumous recognition when his poems were published in translation in a variety of journals in Europe and North America in the 1990’s. However, it soon came out that Yasusada was an invention and many readers now assume that Johnson, who holds the copyright, was in fact the author—a claim which Johnson denies. Instead, he insists that Tosa Motokiyu, a pseudonym for a person who is now dead, was the actual author. Not surprisingly, the possibility that a white man appropriated (or impersonated, or utilized—the choice of verb matters quite a bit) the voice of Japanese survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima led to some strong denunciations. Nonetheless, I think it’s fair to say that the Yasusada project displayed an extraordinary understanding of the complexities of the various factions and fiefdoms in both contemporary poetry and the North American academy. For instance, Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada,[1] a collection of Yasusada’s work, provided the materials for its own mini-industry: it included not only poems, drafts and letters ostensibly written by Yasusada, but also a brief biography of Yasusada, essays by Marjorie Perloff[2] and Mikhail Epstein, and an interview with Johnson—practically a prepublished course packet. Its provocative use of issues related to race, gender and history seemed designed to elicit passionate debate and Johnson’s framing of these hot-button issues was so sharp that it amounted to a meta-commentary on the academic-poetic complex.
Johnson is continuing that commentary, in part by carving out a niche as the closest thing in contemporary poetry to a gossip columnist. Celebrity gossip is predicated on some mixture of admiration, contempt, jealousy and schadenfreude, and the skilled purveyor of gossip must intimately understand how the mechanisms of fame operate at that time. Consequently, gossip columnists exist in a kind of netherworld: they are recognized and, occasionally, even famous, but while they can make or break celebrities they are not quite celebrities themselves, since they are simultaneously inside and outside the economy of celebrity. That’s a pretty accurate analogy to Johnson’s role in the poetry world. On the one hand, the diversity and quality of his body of work should make him a major force in North American poetry. Johnson has published a book of translations of poems written in the poetry workshops organized by Ernesto Cardenal throughout Nicaragua during the Sandinista era;[3] edited a collection of contemporary Russian poetry;[4] co-edited an anthology of essays and poems by writers who examine the influence of Buddhism on their work;[5] translated, with Forrest Gander, two books by the extraordinary Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz;[6] and published a number of books of poetry including, in Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, what I think are some of the most powerful political poems written in English in the last thirty years.[7] On the other hand, Johnson has displayed an impressive ability to infuriate a wide range of poets and critics, which I believe is the central reason why he hasn’t received the recognition he deserves.[8] Johnson himself is well aware of his position, writing in the Author’s Note to Epigramititis “This book is fated to be assiduously ignored by the Poetry Establishment, ‘mainstream’ and ‘experimental,’ the two sides of its ancient coin.”[9] Johnson doesn’t position himself as marginalized; instead he claims to be almost irrelevant. Still, Johnson states that his book will be “assiduously ignored” (emphasis added) and the adverb suggests a willfulness on the part of the “Poetry Establishment,” as if the mere presence of this book acts as an irritant or allergen, even if it isn’t being read. Although Epigramititis hasn’t received a large number of reviews, I’ve heard stories (and in a paper dealing with gossip, second- and third-hand stories are legitimate sources) of poets passing Epigramititis around at readings, looking up epigrams (their own and others) with a mixture of horror and fascination.
Those are the same emotions that Johnson seems to feel for the “celebrities” in the post-avant, as indicated by the epigraph by Catullus that opens Epigramititis: “Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? / nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.” Johnson offers no translation, but here’s one from Guy Lee: “I hate and love. Perhaps you’re asking why I do that? / I don’t know, but I feel it happening, and am racked.”[10]
While Catullus’ poem alludes to his conflicting passions for Lesbia, the lover who is the subject of much of his work, Johnson’s epigraph is about the poetry world, i.e., not just the poetry that is written and published, but also the ambitions, rivalries, and petty squabbling that are an inextricable but often overlooked part of that work. Furthermore, Epigramititis implicitly suggests why the poetic satire in North America has slipped into a coma: the poetry world is simultaneously all but invisible to the public at large and so fragmented that most readers will be unable to identify at least a few of the targets in Johnson’s poems, which highlights the deep irony in the entire concept of poetic celebrity. That means that Johnson’s epigrams, like the traditional epigram, are a kind of attempt to seize the mechanisms of poetic fame—both to praise those who deserve it (Johnson cites Eleni Sikelianos, Robert Creeley and Eliot Weinberger, as well as a few others) and to disparage those writers whose reputation, according to the epigrammatist, has exceeded or outlived their talent—even as the epigrams parody the desire for poetic reputation.[11] That’s a pose, of course, but it’s nonetheless an interesting revision of the epigrammatic tradition.
Epigramititis differs from traditional epigrams in another way: each poem includes a drawing or photograph on the facing page, but they’re metaphorical, not literal representations of the poet. These images are the equivalent of the paparazzo shot, that staple of celebrity journalism: the common denominator is that they are intended to make the subject look bad. Robert Pinsky is paired with a photo of a used car salesman, and Johnson discusses this in an interview with John Bradley that’s forthcoming at the journal Plantarchy:
“Now, let me say again, this has nothing to do with Robert Pinsky as a person—nor even as a poet, speaking in the main. I mean, Pinsky is a magnificently gifted person, I don’t think many people doubt that. But talent or personality have nothing to do with it: He has a starring role in the whole institutional drama titled “Poetry Biz and Its Discontents” and the soap opera (post-avant poets as the token minority characters) is just awful—a tragicomedy of stupid plot and embarrassingly cheap scenery. Exactly what used automobiles have to do with it, admittedly, I’m not certain, but I suspect there is some connection there . . . ”.[12]
Johnson's irony is unmistakable, since many people involved with post-avant poetries would doubt that Pinsky is a “magnificently gifted poet.” (I suspect Johnson himself is a doubter; I certainly am.) Additionally, Johnson’s professed confusion about why he might have paired Pinsky with a used car salesman echoes the epigram itself: “I, too, dislike him, / though I’m not sure why (37).
As poet laureate, and now as de facto poet laureate emeritus, Pinsky, as Johnson notes, continues to play a role in which he is required to bemoan the irrelevance of poetry in the US, while coming up with solutions (or, some might say, gimmicks) to change this state of affairs. The epigram, which reworks Marianne Moore’s widely anthologized “Poetry,” suggests that as poet laureate Pinsky is the visible face of poetry in the United States, while the image contends that Pinsky has attempted to foist poetry to a largely uninterested public, just as a sleazy car salesman might use the hard sell to move a lemon off the lot. I think Pinsky operates as a kind of shorthand for other poetry salesmen such as Ted Kooser, another former laureate; John Barr, the investment banker who presides over the more than $100 million endowment at the Poetry Foundation; and Dana Gioia, the former VP of marketing at General Foods who now directs the National Endowment for the Arts.[13] Each of these men has explicitly called for marketing poetry as if it were a product.[14] That’s where the irony of the photo really comes into focus: even a dismal used car salesman has a better sales record than these guys.
Pinsky’s epigram is somewhat anomalous, since the images and poems in Epigramititis more typically slide into outright mockery. For instance, John Ashbery gets a reproduction of Brian, the talking dog from the animated sitcom The Family Guy; Brian is holding a martini, a clear nod to the stories about Ashbery’s prodigious drinking. It’s a cheap shot, but in many ways both gossip and the epigram are based on the cheap shot. Byron later described English Bards and Scotch Reviewers as a “miserable record of misplaced anger and indiscriminate acrimony,”[15] which is both largely true and exactly why we still read the poem: like gossip, the satire is sometimes more effective and more enjoyable when it’s not completely accurate. The comparison to Byron is apt on at least one level, since Johnson seeks a position that’s roughly analogous to Byron’s in the Preface to Don Juan, attacking the Language poets just as Byron savaged the Lakers. Charles Bernstein serves as Johnson’s Robert Southey, that is, the former radical who has sold out for mainstream respectability. Bernstein, who with Bruce Andrews co-edited the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, moved on to an endowed chair at the University of Buffalo and now holds an endowed chair at the University of Pennsylvania and has even appeared in television advertisement for The Yellow Pages.[16] Here’s Bernstein’s epigram:
“Pity the aardvark; he seems
at once lost in the Ivy of the zoo
and strangely at home, too” (35).
If for a good slice of the poetry reading public, “language poetry” is still a pejorative, Bernstein has somehow managed to move from outlaw to mainstream, a change that has at the very least complicated his trenchant critiques of official verse culture. The accompanying image extends the epigram: it is a picture of Eduard Bernstein, the leader of the Second International, who rejected violent revolution and instead celebrated reforms within the framework of parliamentary democracy. Bernstein’s deviations from orthodox Marxism led Lenin to attack him as a revisionist and opportunist. Would this be a fair analogue to a poet who has moved from the margins to the heights of Ivy League prestige? Maybe, but ultimately, there’s something a little absurd about comparing the Johnson-Charles Bernstein battles to those of Marx and Eduard Bernstein or Byron and Southey: the stakes in a squabble in the post-avant are nowhere near as high as in the splits in international Marxism or even in Byron’s attacks on the Lakers. It seems to me that that absurdity is precisely the point: Johnson has stated that “poetry’s political impact, at least in the United States, is going to be poignantly tiny”[17] but he seems deeply ambivalent about that. It may be that poetry’s ineffectuality is a part of its freedom: because it is unable to generate money, fame or political change, poetry remains off the national radar and as a result poets are largely free to do what they want without the influence of undue censure or praise. But if Shelley’s claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world was a bit of a stretch in the nineteenth century, it’s almost laughable in twenty-first century America. Poets may write political poems but their political power is nil.
That sense of political powerlessness provides the subtext of Johnson’s epigram on Stephen Burt:
“Poet and critic, we claim him
as our Randall Jarrell (the younger version).
Oh, goodbye, Helen Vendler, goodbye,
for you are their Matthew Arnold.
We wash you out of your shattered turret with a hose” (41).
The second line alludes to Burt’s celebration of Jarrell in his (i.e., Burt’s) book Randall Jarrell and His Age,[18] and the comparison of Burt to Jarrell is certainly a case of damning with very faint praise. The epigram also suggests that Burt has assumed Helen Vendler’s role as the unofficial Critic Laureate of the US, so Vendler (like the title figure in Jarrell’s famous poem “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”) is now another fatality of the poetry wars. It’s a funny epigram, I think, even if Vendler never had a fraction of Arnold’s stature.
But the poem’s humor is eliminated by the accompanying image, a photograph of charred bodies hanging from a bridge. These are the contractors from Blackwater International who in March, 2004 were shot in Fallujah, Iraq, their corpses set on fire then strung from a bridge above the Euphrates River. Johnson makes a similar move in a few places in Epigramititis: he chronicles or charges into the various skirmishes in the poetry world, only to point at political concerns which make the poetry “wars” seem absurd by comparison to the real and horrifying conflicts that continue around the globe. The photo offers no pat message; it is simply (simply?) an acknowledgment that these atrocities far exceed the squabbles of poets concerned with fame and ambition. As a result, the photograph implicitly calls into question the entire project of Epigramititis.
I think this has been one of the most overlooked aspects of Johnson’s work: while he has spent the better part of a decade critiquing and disparaging a variety of prominent poets and critics, his work also calls into question his own position. He mocks Helen Vendler by comparing her to Matthew Arnold, but in the book’s final epigram, entitled “The Epigramist,” he includes a Photoshopped image in which his own face is superimposed on Samuel Johnson’s. The epigram demonstrates that the gesture is clearly ironic:
“He’s offered, in decorus subjunctus, to Double Happiness,
The Poetry Project, The Bowery, and the KGB Bar,
that he fly to New York to share his Epigramititis.
He wonders how Martial would say: ‘So far, no cigar’.” (259)
Helen Vendler may be a watered down Arnold, but Kent Johnson, by his own admission, is no Samuel Johnson (and no Martial). The Author’s Note predicts that these epigrams will be assiduously ignored but this epigram implicitly drops the adverb. Maybe that’s for the best: epigrams have more force when they’re launched from beyond the margins.
_____
Notes:
[1] Johnson, Kent. Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada. New York: Roof Books, 1997.
[2] Perloff’s essay, “In Search of the Authentic Other: The Poetry of Araki Yasusada,” is an abridged version of an essay that originally appeared in the Boston Review 22.3-4, (1997): 26-33.
[3] Johnson, Kent. A Nation of Poets: Writing from the Poetry Workshops of Nicaragua. New York: West End Press, 1985.
[4] Johnson, Kent. Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1992.
[5] Johnson, Kent. Beneath a Single Moon. Boston: Shambhala Press, 2001.
[6] Saenz, Jaime. Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002; Saenz, Jaime. The Night. Trans. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
[7] Johnson, Kent. Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz, Austin: Effing Press, 2005.
[8] Johnson’s provocations got him banned from the Poetics listserv at the University of Buffalo, as well as the British Poetry listserv; he also makes regular and often polemical appearances in the comments sections of a number of poetry blogs. In fact, Johnson’s comments on Kasey Silem Mohammed’s Lime Tree blog so enraged Mohammed that he banned Johnson and initially threatened to delete every comment that Johnson had ever made on the blog. Mohammed later relented on the deletions when he realized how difficult such a project would be, but he did in fact delete all of the discussion regarding Johnson’s banishment. For Johnson’s version of the exchange, see <http://www.blazevox.org/072-kj.htm>.
[9] Johnson, Kent. Epigramititis: 118 Living American Poets, Buffalo: BlazeVox, 2007. 18.
[10] Catullus, “Carmen 85.” Catullus: The Complete Poems, trans. Guy Lee. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. 131.
[11] Johnson also has a number of ambivalent epigrams that seem as if they might be simultaneously praising and disparaging. For instance, Kenward Elmslie’s epigram reads
“Indeed, I am dying, but I am here to say
that his poems are miniature theaters,”
said a boy on fire, standing on a paper
stage. Bravo! Bravo! cried the poet-pilot
in a little plane, dark blue against a
dark-blue night sky. VIVA DELAUNAY!
[12] Bradley, John and Kent Johnson. “Epigramaphobia: A Conversation between John Bradley and Kent Johnson,” Plantarchy 5, forthcoming.
[13] Johnson’s epigram “The Poet Laureate” continues this conflation of those who would serve as spokespeople for poetry:
I can’t quite recall his or her name presently.
Is it Robert, Rita, or Billy?
Or is it Ted? No… Ted Hughes is dead.
He wears a helmet of hair in Hell.
I’m so silly (167).
The accompanying photo is of Laura Bush, who has attempted to promote both reading in general and poetry in particular. The poem suggests that the attempt to domesticate poetry for public consumption puts the American laureate in a position that’s analogous to the British laureate, whose job is to write verse for state occasions. The position of laureate makes these different poets indistinguishable from each other, and from the first lady, and suggests that they are at least tacitly complicit in the actions of the government that employs them.
[14] For an excellent analysis of the strategies of Kooser, et. al., see Evans, Steve. “Free (Market) Verse,” 29 July 2007 <http://www.thirdfactory.net/freemarketverse-all.html/>.
[15] Quoted in Byron: The Oxford Authors, ed. Jerome McGann. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 1021.
[16] This ad, as well as an eleven minute outtake with Jon Lovitz and two radio ads, are at PennSound. 29 July 2007 <http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bernstein-YP.html>.
[17] Johnson, Kent. “Hoaxes and Heteronymity: An Interview with Kent Johnson.” By Bill Freind. VeRT 5, 29 July 30, 2007 <http://www.litvert.com/KJ_Interview.html>.
[18] Burt, Stephen. Randall Jarrell and His Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
_____
Bill Freind is the author of American Field Couches (BlazeVox, 2008) and An Anthology (housepress, 2000). He lives near an abandoned golf course in South Jersey.
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