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| <subfield code="a">(Re)writing History: Early Fiction</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Work overview</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">COPYRIGHT 2000 Twayne Publishers, COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngugi wa Thiong'o</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The River Between (Novel)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Secret Lives and Other Stories (Short fiction collection)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">A Grain of Wheat (Novel)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Literary styles</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Popular romances</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Bildungsroman</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Coming of age</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Colonial Africa, 1870-1960</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Mythical mode</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Autobiographical fiction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Historical fiction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Modernism</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">African fiction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Literary characters</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Religious literature</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">African folklore</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="t">Ngugi wa Thiongo</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="d">New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1695-5</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1887-4</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="g">p. 22-45</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Twayne's World Authors Series 890</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="u">http://find.galegroup.com/openurl/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&req_dat=info:sid/gale:ugnid:metatest&res_id=info:sid/gale:GVRL&ctx_enc=info:ofi:enc:UTF-8&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:unknown&rft.artnum=CX1387500011</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Chapter Two: (Re)writing History: Early Fiction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Introduction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ’s narrative powers are immediately apparent in his often-autobiographical apprentice novels drafted while he was a student at Makerere University College. The stories in Secret Lives, collected and published in 1975, have a loosely chronological organization beginning with Gĩkũyũ myths and moving to the Emergency in the 1950s, and on to the post-Emergency, independence, and postindependence periods. After his early short stories, some of which explore themes developed in the novels, Ngũgĩ’s first-written, though second-published, novel was The River Between, an earlier version of which won the East African Literature Bureau competition. Weep Not, Child, also written when the precocious Ngũgĩ was in his early twenties, is still considered by some to be his masterpiece. These relatively short, tightly organized apprentice novels are somewhat formulaic and diagrammatic, only hinting at the sustained and multifaceted brilliance of A Grain of Wheat, a novel that completes and concludes his first stage as a novelist. The liberal, ameliorative political stance of most of Ngũgĩ’s writing in this first part of his career is striking given the radical shift in his later work.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Early Short Stories in Secret Lives</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">It might appear from Ngũgĩ’s earliest writings that he is primarily a religious writer. One of his first written stories, “Mugumo” in Secret Lives, takes as its starting point the sacred tree of the Gĩkũyũ people, which is also the site at which Ngũgĩ’s last novel, Matigari, ends. The River Between, Ngũgĩ’s first-written novel, originally had the working title “The Black Messiah.” Like all of his writing, however, these works’ references to religion, both Gĩkũyũ and Christian, indicate the central role of the spiritual in the lifeways of all Kenyans, a role that the Mau Mau fighters and Ngũgĩ himself in his last novels attempted to use to convey political messages. Ngũgĩ said after writing A Grain of Wheat that he employs Christian and African mythology in his writing “as a frame of reference, as the only body of assumptions I can take for granted, especially in the area I come from” (Sander and Munro, 54). Ngũgĩ’s early fictions are deeply colored, moreover, by a powerful moral consciousness; their heroes are divided men. Facing a terrible dilemma, caught between rival claims, these characters are buffeted by the realities of Kenya’s history.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ writes in the preface to Secret Lives that the stories partly “form my creative autobiography over the last twelve years and touch on ideas and moods affecting me over the same period. My writing is really an attempt to understand myself and my situation in society and in history.” Although he has confessed modestly to being not “particularly good” at writing short fiction (Sander and Munro, 54), Ngũgĩ was raised in an oral culture in which storytelling was woven into the pattern of daily life. His short stories, however, with their careful handling of plot reversals and climaxes, in some ways more closely resemble the literary tales of Edgar Allan Poe, though with a modernist and in some cases a postmodernist bent. David Cook and Michael Okenimkpe persuasively demonstrate Ngũgĩ’s skillful, intuitive grasp of the genre, and Kimani Njogu points out that one of the most distinctively postcolonial features of Ngũgĩ’s novels is that they are a fabric of embedded tales and stories like those in Secret Lives, a contention that is especially true of Petals of Blood.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The first story in Secret Lives, “Mugumo,” published earlier in Origin East Africa as “The Fig Tree,” is about a woman who, motivated by passion, has married, against the advice of her family and friends, a man who already has three wives. She has left him after he beats her savagely when she fails to become pregnant. When first published, the story had an epigraph taken from two of D. H. Lawrence’s poems, “Figs” and “Bare Fig-Trees,” the latter slightly misquoted. The two poetic fragments conjure the “nude fig-tree” with its inward-folding flowers and fruit. The womblike fruit indicates the fig tree’s role as an aid to fertility in Ngũgĩ’s story. “Mugumo” evokes a sensuous engagement with nature, focusing on a woman who has stolen her mate’s soul and must recognize her own fault and humbly return to her abuser. Ngũgĩ supersedes Lawrence’s perverse Freudian fantasy of the relations of the sexes by introducing the Gĩkũyũ genesis story, the myth of the founding couple Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi, Mount Kenya, and the sacred fig tree. Ngũgĩ leaves some Gĩkũyũ words untranslated and does not explain the context of Gĩkũyũ myth, as if he is already writing for an audience at least partly familiar with Kenya, even if reading in English. In the Secret Lives edition of the story, he changes some references to the “tribe” into the “nation” or the “people,” perhaps reflecting his growing disenchantment with the colonial propensity to dismiss all social problems as products of “tribalism” (Cook, 76; Secret Lives, 7).</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">While Ngũgĩ’s portrait of the central character, Mukami, balances a critical perception of traditional polygamy with a type of biological determinism (her destiny is motherhood), there is a strong sense that her developing child will have a role in creating the future of the nation. Ngũgĩ’s respect for traditions and customs is clear, as is his interest in female experience, though this story (like “And the Rain Came Down!”) ends with a barren woman seemingly rewarded with pregnancy for her humble acceptance of village customs, biological destiny, and male authority. Here, Ngũgĩ, writing in the early 1960s, is decidedly more conservative in his account of gender relations than writers like the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta will be in the 1970s in the powerful, tragic, and ironically titled The Joys of Motherhood, or than Ngũgĩ himself will be in his assertions of female agency in his later novels. In this early story, Ngũgĩ’s interest is clearly in the fate of the nation, unborn at the time of writing, and also in the tension between individual aspiration, and familial and communal obligation. Furthermore, “Mugumo” suggests Ngũgĩ’s fiction’s early obsession with the notion of a savior or messiah who will liberate his people from all forms of oppression.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Other early stories by Ngũgĩ deal with a common theme in much African writing from this period, the confrontation between tradition and modernity. In “The Village Priest,” Joshua, a failed priest, feels trapped between the white missionaries, settlers, and colonial officers on the one side and the traditional rainmakers, medicine men, and prophets on the other. Joshua’s reaction to the traditional challenge to his Christian faith leads to an action that has the potential for reconciliation but causes despair, self-loathing, and shame—the same emotional and intellectual hiatus at which Ngũgĩ’s first two novels conclude. Joshua has embarked on a journey, as do the protagonists of The River Between and Weep Not, Child, eventually leading indirectly to self-discovery. Before this final momentary epiphany—experienced as a humble, contrite response to the white missionary Livingstone’s sympathy for Joshua’s moment of doubt at the mugumo tree—he desperately contemplates running away. He has sacrificed himself for the “condescending sympathy” of a living stone (Secret Lives, 27).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">“The Black Bird” is another story about a man driven to desperation over his ideological crisis, in this case a split between his commitment to modern science and his belief in the necessity of making a sacrifice to cleanse his grandfather’s violation of an old prophet’s ritual objects. As in “The Village Priest,” the setting here is named as Limuru; the ridges surrounding it, of such importance in The River Between, represent ideological conflict. The story’s ending, the fated Mangara’s committing suicide to assuage the curse of his family, is more detached than that of The River Between because the events are relayed through the perspective of an observing narrator, who presents the tale, resembling a ghost story, from an unconvincing stance of objective disbelief that changes to final anxiety.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">“The Martyr” also laments divided loyalties, both personal and societal, and it is Ngũgĩ’s first story to address the Emergency. The Gar-stories, white settlers, have just been murdered, and the old settler widow, Mrs. Hill, liberal if patronizing in her view of Africans, is warned to be on guard by her friends. The second part of the story examines the sense of historical grievance felt by Mrs. Hill’s houseboy, Njoroge, whose ancestral lands have been appropriated by his condescending employer. He is party to a plan to murder her in the evening, but recalling her simple acts of humanity, Njoroge resolves to warn her of the danger and then enter the forest to join the Mau Mau forces. At the very moment of his kindly assessment, she is thinking of how she too has previously overlooked the harsh realities of his life, but ironically, hearing a knock at the door, her resolution to change her attitude buckles into raw, instinctive fear, and she opens the door, simultaneously firing her gun and murdering her would-be savior. Ngũgĩ presents the tension of the Mau Mau period and its historical antecedents as a tragic muddle of mixed perceptions, limited points of view, and missed opportunities for mutual cultural understanding. He shows how the settlers appropriated Gĩkũyũ land, regarding it as unoccupied, when the Gĩkũyũ had only left it temporarily because of a famine; Njoroge knows the land is rightfully his. Each character views the other across the “rift” of racial and cultural difference, seeing no more than a stereotypical embodiment of the settler or the houseboy. The coming conflagration is merely the result of a tragic failure of communication, that the story implies might have been patched over. The liberalism of the story and its “balanced” presentation of highly sensitive issues, a quality often admired in Ngũgĩ’s fiction before Petals of Blood, contrasts sharply with the strident, utterly uncompromising political stance of the later fiction.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">A similar reduction of historical injustice to a lapse in communication lies at the heart of “Goodbye Africa,” an account of a white couple, during Africanization, remembering and bidding farewell to the climactic events of their 15 years in Africa. The couple’s moments of solitary confession, his of a murder, hers of a love affair, collide. The man feels tormented by the memory of a once-beloved African laborer whom he drove himself to torture and murder for being a Mau Mau suspect. He writes out this agonized recollection, but after his wife’s confession of a love affair with the same man, he burns his account. He now knows he has murdered his wife’s lover. Both characters, we assume, will bury the wreck of their past lives in Kenya. “Goodbye Africa” again takes a liberal, evenhanded position, showing the dire effects of oppression on both the oppressed and the oppressor. The Emergency has destroyed human relationships, families, and noble aims. The story suggests, nevertheless, that the legacy of sexual betrayal, especially across ethnic lines, is more devastating than the memory of murder and the campaign of terror of which it was a part.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Past and present injustice in “The Return” leads the protagonist to bitter stasis. In many respects, the story is a companion piece to “Goodbye Africa,” demonstrating the dire consequences that everyone, innocent and guilty, endured as a result of the disruptions of the Emergency. Kamau has fought against the colonial authorities, has been detained without trial and subjected to hard labor and beatings, and has now returned to find that his village has been wiped out and that his wife has run off with his old rival Karanja (here Ngũgĩ employs an anti—romance plot convention anticipating A Grain of Wheat). Tricked out of his land in the past, Kamau now feels betrayed by his family and community, who have believed lies circulated about him and watched his wife depart. His despair at this legacy of deceit and misfortune, equally enacted by the colonial powers and by his neighbors and friends, leads him to thoughts of suicide, until he accepts his position and realizes that his past has been lost forever. He stands brutalized and disillusioned but also relieved on the brink of the future. The conclusion here is more ambivalent than in the version of the story published in Origin East Africa, in which, as at the end of Weep Not, Child, Kamau’s mother arrives to forestall his possible suicide (Cook, 58—59).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">“A Meeting in the Dark” again features an internally conflicted protagonist, John, but the story is more complex in its handling of cultural contexts. John is about to depart for study at Makerere University College, but his lover Wamuhu is pregnant, and his father is a strict Calvinist preacher who will not permit the marriage, a change in his son’s status that might also make him ineligible for a bursary. John feels tortured by guilt but paralyzed by indecision. He refuses to accept responsibility for his dilemma, and ultimately, when goaded beyond endurance into action, he murders Wamuhu. Ngũgĩ’s early fiction frequently portrays individuals imprisoned in the special hell of indecision reserved for the timid, dreading the day of trial and madly scheming to escape it, then failing miserably when put to the final test.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">John in “A Meeting in the Dark” is torn between the law of the church (which becomes the law of his father, forbidding him to marry a circumcised girl); the law of traditional marriage that dictates he should marry a virgin, though he may previously have slept with her; the law of his own sexual desires; and finally his ambition for education and social status. He envies the poor illiterates of the town who he thinks identify fully and effortlessly with traditional aspirations, though clearly even his father is “a product of the disintegration of the tribe due to the new influences” (68). John’s dilemma is that of the Gĩkũyũ, many of whom are now “coated with the white clay of the whiteman’s ways”; “the tribe had nowhere to go to. And it could not be what it was before” (62). In this temporal interregnum between past and future—and between the competing laws of church and father, tradition, desire, and personal ambition—John arrives at an irritated, frustrating indecision. Like Njoroge in Weep Not, Child, John is troubled before the catastrophe at the story’s end by dreams of angels wrestling, and he feels that the gods of both the Calvinistic missionary Carstone and his own people are powerless to help him. He blames Wamuhu for seducing him, just as his father, Stanley, blames his wife for their premarital sexual relationship; and in the final confrontation with Wamuhu, his father’s rage, pulsing in John’s blood, causes him to murder his lover and their own unborn child. The tragic, melodramatic deus ex machina results from his fateful indecision and his emotional inheritance. Even here he relinquishes responsibility, a sign of bad faith, as if the murder were an accident and not the destructive result of his compromises. John’s angst and alienation, however, are more personal than political or ideological. The story’s seemingly pat closed ending merely synthesizes its unresolved ideological conflicts.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The River Between</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">In The River Between, Ngũgĩ’s first novel (though it was not published until 1965, after Weep Not, Child), he develops a number of the themes of “A Meeting in the Dark.” This short novel has the economical structure of a short story, and its terse, understated prose style delivers the full impact of sometimes fantastical incidents. As in “A Meeting in the Dark,” the novel has a decisive and climactic closure, but it is ideologically conflicted and leaves a number of the novel’s themes unresolved. As in a number of Ngũgĩ’s early short stories, the novel introduces opposing forces, such as tradition and modernity, and the two ridges representing conflicting belief systems. This somewhat formulaic program suggests that in the novel, Ngũgĩ is working out ideas, and its inconclusiveness shows an unwillingness to pose simplistic solutions to complex problems with deep historical roots. The novel focuses on a young man, full of fire and promise, who aspires to be his people’s savior, but whose career falters in moral compromise, frustration, and fatal indecision.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The River Between is concise and compact and, unlike Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (another deftly organized first novel that Ngũgĩ greatly admired, which voices indigenous perspectives on African culture and introduced generations of readers to the worlds of African literature), provides only spare details about the society’s economy and customs, the appearance of the village, and the telling commonplaces of daily life regarding dress and food. Ngũgĩ’s focus is on conflict, within and between individuals. Cultural context is imparted through brief descriptions of Gĩkũyũ ceremonies, like the second birth and circumcision, and the routine of the Christian week. The spirit of place is conveyed through nearly allegorical description of the two ridges, the site near the river where circumcision takes place, and the sacred ground near the mugumo tree. Like the river that both unites and separates the two ridges, Waiyaki (the novel’s protagonist) may be, as Charles Nnolim suggests, “the human ‘River Between.’ “</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">In many ways a coming-of-age novel, a scaled-down bildungsroman, the novel has a sharply delineated narrative structure. The first of two main narratives is a social and political story, Waiyaki’s quest to develop educational opportunities in the district and his conflict with Kabonyi about the identity of the savior foretold in Gĩkũyũ prophecy. The second major narrative is a type of Romeo and Juliet beside the Great Rift Valley. It tells of Waiyaki’s love for Nyambura, who comes from a family starkly different from his, representing an opposing faction on a separate ridge. Unlike Wamuhu in “A Meeting in the Dark,” whose being circumcised makes her in John’s father’s opinion an unfit bride, Nyambura is not circumcised, and this renders her unsuitable for Waiyaki in the opinion of his supporters. The River Between’s story lines follow the life cycle of Waiyaki from his school days and his circumcision, to his failure to graduate and his initial career steps, to his final desire to marry. He must find his identity and his place in society amid conflicting community forces and differing interpretations of the wishes of ancestors and prophets, and of the role of history itself.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The novel begins with an almost ritualistic retelling of Gĩkũyũ history, present in one form or another in many of Ngũgĩ’s novels, and of the prophecy that inspires and torments Waiyaki. We learn of the ancestor of the tribe who cleared the forests “at the beginning of time,” of the period when women were the sole owners and rulers of everything and the men rebelled against them, and of Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi, the father and mother of the Gĩkũyũ. Mingled with this mythical oral history of the Gĩkũyũ in chapter 1, though not conveyed in a style that conjures the richness of orature, is the account of the seer Mugo wa Kibiro, who prophesied the arrival of “a people with clothes like butterflies” (River, 2); that is, the invasion of the colonizers, who do not actually appear in the novel. The people of the ridges are introduced as proud guardians of secrets, rituals, and magic powers. Waiyaki’s father, Chege, takes him to the sacred grove by the mugumo tree from which they survey the land and Waiyaki learns that he is the offspring of Mugo wa Kibiro, and the last of his line. The seer prophesies that Waiyaki’s descendants will study the ways of the white men to use their own methods to defeat them and thereby save the people. Waiyaki, Chege declares, is the savior.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The River Between is the story of the intersection of this mythic past with colonial history. The latter is indicated by the missionary Livingstone’s school, Siriana, and by references to taxes and a government post. Livingstone, unlike the older missionaries who fought against Gĩkũyũ customs, but to some degree like Waiyaki himself, advocates accommodation with tradition and gradual change. The confrontations of the past, however, are carried into the present in the rivalry between the convert Kabonyi and his son Kamau, representing one ridge, and Chege and Waiyaki, representing the other. This rivalry, which heats up after Kabonyi renounces Christianity and becomes a zealous promoter of Gĩkũyũ traditions, concerns the designation of either Kabonyi’s son or Waiyaki as the true savior. Both young men also compete for the affection of Nyambura. The prophecy’s ultimate outcome and the fate of Waiyaki are, however, to some extent anticipated in Chege’s complaint that the words of the true prophet, like Mugo wa Kibiro, are always ignored and disdained by the people. The novel complicates its handling of Gĩkũyũ prophecy and colonial history by drawing parallels between these narratives and biblical stories, such as when it equates the colonial dispossession of the Gĩkũyũ’s land with the Israelites’ slavery and bondage in Egypt, and their pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. Mugo wa Kibiro’s second prophecy, about the coming of a Gĩkũyũ savior, is linked to Isaiah’s foretelling the coming of Christ. Most significantly, Waiyaki is the African messiah for Joshua’s daughters Muthoni and Nyambura, and he is even finally betrayed by a character resembling Peter, his friend Kinuthia. This identification of Waiyaki and Christ, an incomplete biblical allegory, is obscured somewhat by Muthoni’s terrible death, an indirect consequence of her attempt to unite the people of the two ridges, the believers in tradition and the Christian converts. Both sides exploit her death for their own purposes; each justifies its cause on the site of Muthoni’s dead body.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Waiyaki is thrown into the dilemma that consumes him by a variety of conflicting forces: his respect for his father and tradition, his love for Nyambura, and his appreciation of the power of Gĩkũyũ and biblical prophecy. He feels he must be the savior his father intended and bridge the gap between the Kameno and Makuyu ridges, and between tradition and modernity, but he is thrown off balance by his father’s death and his father’s rival Kabonyi’s breaking with the church and becoming an advocate for tradition and a vocal contender for Waiyaki’s authority in the community. He is caught in a series of binary oppositions: the two ridges, the colonial school Siriana and the independent school Marioshoni, a duty to the community and personal desire, and even the gap between himself and Nyambura that is “as big as the one dividing Kameno and Makuyu” (River, 78). Waiyaki feels he is the savior, the sent one, the promised one, and the black messiah, as the figure is variously identified, but his passion is muffled by indecision. He is as often confused and equivocal as he is inflated by messianic aspirations.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Waiyaki’s colonial education, the weapon that Mugo wa Kibiro predicted the savior would wield against the colonial forces, leads Waiyaki away from his prophesied destiny and exacerbates his internal division. In fact, he even forgets about the experience at the mugumo tree. Because of the number of years he has spent at the mission school, he has not learned to dance and has not participated in the rituals that would have bound him to his people. His education in the ways of his people has given way to his Westernized schooling. With the increased Christian zeal in the community resulting from the reaction to Muthoni’s death, Waiyaki must leave Siriana. He desires more strongly than ever now to fulfill the prophecy to unite the ridges and reconcile old antagonisms, but “he did not know himself” (River, 86). He vacillates and second-guesses his every thought and action. For example, after he takes the oath of allegiance to preserve the purity and togetherness of the tribe, he blames himself for failing to seize the opportunity the oathing provided to speak of reconciliation. He resigns from the traditional council, the Kiama, and then regrets resigning. Feeling guilty at another missed opportunity to preach tolerance and unity, and resolving to speak his mind at the following year’s parents’ conference, he wonders for what purpose he will ask the parents to unite. He even dreams fondly of his beloved Nyambura, who wants a religion of unity, but his dream includes tearing her to pieces. He speculates about speaking to the people whom she wants to bring together, but he doesn’t know what to say. He knows a new political awareness is needed, but he is too mystified and frightened by forces in the country to realize it. Waiyaki comes closest to a really coherent resolution with his notion that while all foreign things are not innately evil, their truth must be reconciled to the people’s traditions.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The ultimate failure of Waiyaki’s reforming mission of reconciliation may stem from the historic ineffectiveness of prophets, which Chege laments. Ironically, Waiyaki is the name of a nineteenth-century Gĩkũyũ leader who fought against the British incursion into Gĩkũyũ country. In the novel, Waiyaki’s appetite for compromise, however, entices him to promote a political movement of liberation from colonialism that will respect both tradition and Western education while also allowing him to marry Nyambura, a proposal that a broad cross section of the people categorically refuses to accept because she is uncircumcised. Furthermore, he restrains the people’s anger against Kabonyi, who is probably behind the rumors about Waiyaki’s ritual contamination through involvement in Muthoni’s death after her circumcision. His desires are paradoxical, and he will not make vital compromises to achieve his principal ends. Finally, in a kind of reversal of the story of Pilate’s judgment, Waiyaki is given over to the justice of the Kiama and likely ritually executed. Waiyaki embodies the contradictions and conflicts of his people at this moment in history to such an extent that he cannot make vital decisions and sacrifice either his enemy or his beloved, and he is fashioned as a kind of sacrificial Christ.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The novel’s closure is ambivalent. The much-vaunted unity and reconciliation are impossible with a weak leader who is as internally divided as Waiyaki, pulled by both a commitment to traditional values and a devotion to Western education and individual freedom. The novel’s account of Waiyaki’s existential crisis of identity at the critical moment of his campaign is befuddled by the complication of his relationship to his beloved and by portentous biblical parallels. The River Between examines powerful historical forces focused in a single individual, but Waiyaki’s personal problems obscure the novel’s handling of these forces and their cultural contexts. Waiyaki is a figure clearly designed to embody the people’s historic aspirations, but he is also a very modern, even Westernized intellectual tortured by personal angst and middle-class choices. He even speculates on eloping to Nairobi with Nyambura in an escape that would resolve nothing, so common in D. H. Lawrence’s novels. In this respect, the novel is ideologically conflicted, its political implications muddled. It is unclear whether Waiyaki’s somewhat unrealistic agenda of overthrowing the colonial forces through the spread of Westernized education is being criticized, or whether his Utopian scheme of achieving a Gĩkũyũ cultural renaissance and at the same time marrying the despised Nyambura is being undermined. Is Waiyaki’s program, as far as it is ever elucidated, too radical or not radical enough, and what is the alternative? Is his story a cautionary tale about the danger of investing unrealistic hopes in any savior? Various implications are suggested in the novel, and Waiyaki’s final, vague demand for militant action is closest to the program of Ngũgĩ’s final novels, in which the individual’s private torment is submerged in the progress of an entire community. The River Between’s conflicts are resolved, however, in a somewhat contrived, destructive final confrontation. The longed-for savior will be martyred by his uncomprehending people ostensibly because of his inability to separate public duty and private affection. Finally, the novel subsumes the political in the personal.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The River Between notably contains two powerful female characters, who generate Waiyaki’s most coherent solutions to the area’s problems. They embody Gĩkũyũ history and a vision of the future. Muthoni clearly strives for reconciliation between Gĩkũyũ ritual and Christian practice, and her horrible death renders her a martyr for her cause, a Christlike sacrifice prefiguring Waiyaki’s own probable death. Similarly, Muthoni’s sister Nyambura wants a religion of unity and recognizes Waiyaki as a messiah. Waiyaki may be inspired and motivated by witnessing the female rebellion, undertaken by Muthoni, and emboldened by Nyambura’s virtual worship. The crux of his fall from power, however, also relates to these women, particularly to their position regarding circumcision. He faces accusations of being ritually unclean for aiding Muthoni after her botched circumcision and later for wishing to marry the uncircumcised Nyambura. Although male and female circumcision is not described in the novel, the ceremony is of central significance.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Female circumcision, or genital mutilation as it is often called in the West, is the operation of cutting away a woman’s clitoris, and sometimes also the inner and outer lips of the vagina. Traditionally, female circumcision is equated with male circumcision, and with a ritual initiation into the adult life of the community. The Gĩkũyũ believed that the uncircumcised woman would have difficulty in conception, and that uncircumcised girls’ uncontrolled sexual desire would create social chaos. Concerns relating to hygiene and even odor were used to justify the practice, though perhaps the strongest force behind it was the weight of tradition itself. In A Grain of Wheat, for example, the missionaries’ criticism of female circumcision is considered an attack on “the roots and the stem of the Gikuyu society” (Grain, 83); the astute Kihika in that novel realizes that Europeans, and not the Bible, oppose the practice on cultural grounds, though claiming it violates Christian beliefs. Western outrage against the practice continues to grow, and much has been written on the subject. Jomo Kenyatta, in Facing Mount Kenya, his anthropological study of the Gĩkũyũ (a book that influenced Ngũgĩ), does not oppose the practice. Clitoridectomy, however, is not exclusively Kenyan or even African and was advocated, for example, by some radical doctors, such as Isaac Baker Brown, in Victorian England as a “cure” for masturbation. Missionaries in Kenya opposed the practice, as we see in The River Between, and historically the banning of circumcised girls from mission schools provided a critical impetus behind the formation of the Gĩkũyũ Independent Schools Association. Theodore Natsoulas explains that the Gĩkũyũ “wished to maintain deeply held customs such as female circumcision and at the same time send their children to western-style schools which they saw as the only road to advancement in colonial society.” The maintenance of a practice still common in large parts of Africa that seems cruel, unnecessary, and dangerous to many must be considered in terms of its connection with notions of traditional cultural identity, and even as an act of resistance to perhaps well-meaning but also condescending criticism from abroad.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The River Between appears to take an ameliorative approach to the problem, though in a newspaper article from 1962, Ngũgĩ referred to female circumcision as a “brutal” practice (Lindfors 1981, 28). The novel seems to recognize that the practice should and will end, but that it will happen gradually. Waiyaki acknowledges just before the novel’s catastrophe that “circumcision of women was not important as a physical operation. It was what it did inside a person. It could not be stopped overnight” (River, 142). This passage implies that female circumcision will be stopped, but it still stresses the value of initiation. A modified ritual, in which a pinprick and the loss of a few drops of blood are substituted for radical excision, has been suggested, and in some parts of Africa there has been a grassroots movement to abandon the practice. In The River Between, Ngũgĩ takes a radical position on circumcision for a novel published in 1965. The novel represents the tragedy of a woman’s death as a result of the practice, the scandal that taints Waiyaki when he assists the dying victim, and the consequences for him and his mission when he declares his intention to marry an uncircumcised woman.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Weep Not, Child</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The River Between’s abrupt, perplexing ending anticipates what may be read as its sequel, Weep Not, Child, written after the first novel (composition began around January 1962), but published in 1964, the year before The River Between. Weep Not, Child, which follows the earlier novel in terms of historical chronology and develops many of the same themes, is a historical novel but also, like its predecessor, a tightly controlled, largely autobiographical coming-of-age novel with a mythic dimension. The narrative continues Ngũgĩ’s project of exploring Kenya’s historical consciousness, by anatomizing its effect on one representative family group. Njoroge’s story of the destruction of educational promise and national optimism, and the shattering of a family, unfolds on the eve of the darkest days of the Emergency, which is presented here primarily as a conflict wreaking destruction on inter-African relations, and not as an anticolonial revolutionary struggle. The Mau Mau struggle in the novel is, as Ngũgĩ characterized it a few years later, a “civil war” (Sander and Munro, 52). In another interview, Ngũgĩ said that he attempted in Weep Not, Child “to show the effect of the Mau Mau war on the ordinary man and woman who were left in the villages. I think the terrible thing about the Mau Mau war was the destruction of family life, the destruction of personal relationships. You found a friend betraying a friend, father suspicious of the son, a brother doubting the sincerity or the good intentions of a brother, and above all these things the terrible fear under which all these people lived” (Pieterse and Duerden, 121).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Weep Not, Child mixes different histories: personal, national, and mythic. Much of the narrative traces Njoroge’s educational career, beginning with his delight at the prospect of entering primary school and wearing a school uniform. We follow his progress from Standard One at Kamae Primary School, to Kamahou Intermediate School, and finally to high school, the elite Siriana that, as in The River Between, resembles Ngũgĩ’s own Alliance. Njoroge is already a member of an exclusive minority, “the only boy in all that area who would go to High School.” Amid the increasingly bewildering turmoil and danger of the Emergency, Siriana is a place of shelter and escape, a “little paradise, a paradise where children from all walks of life and of different religious faiths could work together” (Weep Not, 115). The school seems distant from the troubles, even able to ignore a letter, presumably from Mau Mau leaders, demanding its closure. Siriana appears to lead a charmed life, antiseptically separated from the national trauma. The school’s headmaster is strict though evenhanded, but his racial bias is clear. Just after the school is described as a paradise, we discover that it is relentlessly Eurocentric and denigrates African cultural values. As in The River Between, the colonial education Siriana offers is represented as a potential unifying force, but one carrying a heavy load of barely disguised ideological baggage. The headmaster “believed that the best, the really excellent could only come from the white man. He brought up his boys to copy and cherish the white man’s civilization as the only hope of mankind and especially of the black races. He was automatically against all black politicians who in any way made people to be discontented with the white man’s rule and civilizing mission” (Weep Not, 115).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Immediately after this explanation of the scholastic “paradise,” the headmaster calls Njoroge out of class and delivers him to police officers who take him to the Home Guard post, the house of pain, where he is tortured to ascertain his knowledge about the murder of Jacobo, who supported and profited from the colonial presence. At the house of pain, the white settler Mr. Howlands holds “Njoroge’s private parts with a pair of pincers and [starts] to press tentatively” (Weep Not, 118) and then threatens him with castration. With the breaking of his body, Njoroge’s paradise is almost instantly lost, and the pace of the novel’s denouement accelerates. Realizing he is living in “a different world from that he had believed himself living in” (120), Njoroge descends into nihilistic despair, worsened by the indignity of having to do meaningless, low-status work. Ejected from school, with his family torn apart, Njoroge directs his rage toward Jacobo’s family. In a kind of trance, he walks through the night to Jacobo’s house to avenge his family through the destruction of Jacobo’s home, though this would mean the murder of Njoroge’s beloved Mwihaki, Jacobo’s daughter. Like Waiyaki, Njoroge harbors a barely suppressed murderous rage against his beloved. He abhors the very thing he loves. This misdirected desire to lash out and wound eventually initiates his own suicide attempt.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Kenya’s colonial history is presented in Weep Not, Child against the backdrop of African involvement in World War I and World War II. The novel appears to begin in 1945, just at the close of the second war, and 15 years after The River Between ends (Cook and Okenimkpe, 49). Haunting memories of wartime horror and loss are shared by Howlands and Njoroge’s father, Ngotho, who acted as a porter in the first war, clearing bush and making roads. Both men also endured the death of a son in World War II. These common losses might have drawn them together, and before the Emergency, they do share a brittle, unspoken respect; but this tentative bridge to communication is never crossed. The novel, like some of Ngũgĩ’s short stories dealing with the Emergency, suggests that the roots of colonial oppression and political discord lie in miscommunication and misunderstanding, as well as in fundamentals such as land. Njoroge is briefly a friend of the son of his torturer, and the beloved of the daughter of the man his brother murdered. Ngotho’s son Mwangi dies in the war, provoking the enduring resentment of Mwangi’s brother, Boro, who seeks revenge against all Europeans. Boro’s desire for vengeance is quickened by his bitterness at the loss of ancestral lands and his unemployment after the war, at a time when land is being given for the settlement of white soldiers. Boro has returned from the war schooled in the arts of violence, and this expertise, coupled with his personal animosity, fuels the developing conflict. His departure for Nairobi signals an acknowledgment of the capital as Mau Mau’s base, one severely affected by the colonial Operation Anvil in April 1954. The background for the crisis is related to the appropriation of land and to the privileges given white settlers and their supporters like Jacobo, such as permission to grow valuable cash crops like coffee and pyrethrum. The swiftness of the conflict’s escalation appears in the rapid-fire references in the course of a few pages to the chief’s assassination, Jomo Kenyatta’s arrest, the mysterious sightings of Dedan Kimathi, Mau Mau oathing, the color-bar, Home Guards, forest battles, the colonial policy of “divide and conquer,” curfews, Home Guard posts, and detention camps. After this deft sketching of the quickening national conflagration, the novel’s focus returns to the personal and mythic plots.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">As in The River Between, mythic history in Weep Not, Child includes the retelling of the founding myth of the Gĩkũyũ. The patriarch Ngotho, and not a professional storyteller, recounts the story of Murungu, the creator, and of the sacred mukuyu tree at the base of Kerinyaga, Mount Kenya, and the first man and woman, Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi, the children of the great one. Ngotho then tells of a catastrophic drought sent by evil forces as a punishment to Mumbi’s children, who neglected to offer ritual sacrifices. Ngotho repeats Mugo wa Kibiro’s prophecy about the coming of the whites and the potential savior’s being killed by the wicked. Later, these Gĩkũyũ myths are supplanted by references to biblical myth, and particularly to the story that has such resonance in Africa and the African diaspora, that of the prophet Moses leading the people of Israel out of bondage to the Egyptian pharaoh. Jomo Kenyatta, the charismatic leader of Gĩkũyũ and nationalist forces, is the black Moses. There are also references to the Second Coming of Christ, and implied references later to the parable of the prodigal son. With his belief in universal justice and his willingness to merge the essence of Gĩkũyũ and Christian myth, Njoroge awaits the coming of a hybrid prophet who can satisfy both political and spiritual longings. His search for this prophet, savior, or messiah intensifies during the time of national crisis that wrecks Njoroge’s family life and his personal dreams and aspirations. Jomo Kenyatta is the most obvious candidate, but another is the elliptical Dedan Kimathi, whose exploits circulate in fantastical rumors.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Conscious, however, of his own “vital role in the country” and “his task of comforting people,” Njoroge too feels a sense of election: “He felt a bit awed to imagine that God may have chosen him to be the instrument of His Divine Service” (Weep Not, 94, 95). He begins to identify with his biblical heroes Jesus and David, who defeats the giant Goliath. Njoroge is ever aware of the “responsibility for which he had prepared himself since childhood” to take care of his family and to realize his potential in the country (136). As a revolutionary agent of change, however, Njoroge is deeply flawed. He is a limited, fallible center of consciousness. He “dithers” (Cook and Okenimkpe, 50), and at best his messianic crusade simply expresses his “callow,” “adolescent romanticism” (Killam 1980, 48, 49). Njoroge’s perception of his own messianic sanctification, unlike Waiyaki’s, is clearly both narcissistic and deluded. He resembles the tarmac road that promises unlimited opportunity and breathtaking vistas but leads nowhere.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Another powerful prophetic force lies in Walt Whitman’s poem “On the Beach at Night,” from which the novel derives its title. The poem’s dramatic situation has a father and daughter observing the clouds in the night sky from the vantage point of a beach. At line 14, the poem shifts from third person, the point of view in which the land-and sky-scapes are described, to first person, just after the first reference to the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas in Greek mythology. In this myth, these seven sisters flee from the pursuit of Orion, until Zeus, the lord of the gods, takes pity and places them in the heavens as stars, though the lovesick Orion continues his tireless pursuit even in the night sky. In Whitman’s poem, the young girl watches the swirling, dark clouds and weeps at the seeming obliteration of the constellations. At line 14, the father directly addresses his daughter, a passage from which the novel’s epigraph and its title are taken. The father advises that the god Zeus, or the planet Jupiter, and the Pleiades shall emerge from the clouds and be victorious eternally though they have temporarily disappeared. In addition, Whitman’s speaker evokes a force or power that will endure even longer than the stars. In Weep Not, Child, this reassuring exchange between father and daughter is replayed silently in the final meeting of Njoroge and his mother. Njoroge, commanded by Ngotho on his deathbed to care for his mother, is about to commit suicide. In the novel, unconditional maternal love conquers despair over the worsening political situation, or the cloudy night that obscures the stars of hope for a brighter tomorrow. This theme is reinforced in the titles of the novel’s two parts: “The Waning Light” and “Darkness Falls.” Even in the darkest hour, the novel suggests, there is hope, though it may be obscured. More effectively than in The River Between, Weep Not, Child not only submerges but actively blends the personal and family plot with the communal and national story.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Njoroge has a messiah complex but also paradoxically a deep sense of guilt (Cook and Okenimkpe, 54). He knows he has betrayed his father’s trust and fears he has compromised family and community loyalty by loving Mwihaki, and especially by visiting her home, and indirectly by regarding Siriana as paradise and not actively fighting Jacobo. Njoroge’s relationship with Mwihaki links the novel’s personal and political concerns. The peasant son loves the daughter of his father’s enemy, a colonial sympathizer. In Weep Not, Child, the tension between fathers and sons complicates the Romeo and Juliet plot of The River Between. Ngotho’s son Boro blames his father personally for the loss of their ancestral land, and for what Boro regards as Ngotho’s cowardice in not defending his family. Boro also condemns Ngotho for refusing to take the Mau Mau oath, to which Ngotho objects because it seems to abrogate traditional ritual (and not because he is reluctant to face danger or assert his people’s political rights).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Partly as an act of love for his son, Ngotho accepts responsibility for Boro’s murder of Jacobo, and Boro returns to seek his father’s forgiveness. The suddenly childlike Boro becomes the prodigal son of the biblical parable, and Njoroge the faithful son who stayed home. After blessing Boro, Ngotho asks Njoroge to care for his mother, and then, weakened by his torture at the hands of Mr. Howlands, Ngotho dies. Ngotho’s torture has involved his castration, a symbolic end to his family line. At the close of the novel, Ngotho’s sons are all either dead (Mwangi) or awaiting execution (Boro) or in prison for life (Kamau) or in detention (Kori) or in a state of suicidal despair (Njoroge). Njoroge’s attempt to take his own life, at the sacred tree, represents the near annihilation of a people. At the end, Njoroge has lost faith in everything: education, Christianity, prophets, love, and himself. At this moment of utter hopelessness, a nuclear bomb of emotional desolation, his mother appears, recalling the novel’s title and its optimistic beginning, a faint glimmer of hope in the darkest moment of the nation’s history. Therein lies the seed of Kenya’s future.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">A Grain of Wheat</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ’s 1967 novel A Grain of Wheat is a great, mournful song of freedom. It deals with Kenyan independence and has a wide epic sweep, bringing together individual and communal aspirations and despair. In terms of structure and handling of historical context, the novel is a far more complex work than either of its predecessors. Like those novels, at the core of A Grain of Wheat lies the story of a troubled love affair. Here it is that of Mumbi, an idealistic, Christianized woman who identifies with the biblical Esther and Ruth; she is the sister of the revolutionary martyr Kihika and the wife of the morally compromised but repentant Gikonyo. We follow their developing love affair, the promise of their early marriage, and their separation during the Emergency when Gikonyo is detained for six years. His despair in detention leads him to confess secrets to the colonial authorities to obtain his release, upon which he is devastated to discover that during his imprisonment, Mumbi has given birth to the child of his rival, Karanja. At the end of the novel, a physically and morally chastened Gikonyo prepares to labor toward a reconciliation with his estranged wife. This story focuses the novel’s account of the conflicting blend of heroism and idealism, on the one hand, and opportunism and even treachery, on the other, lying behind the people’s actions in the struggle leading to national independence. This sacred day, paid for by tremendous sacrifice and suffering, seems somehow compromised by the advantages gained by traitors to the cause, and cheapened by profit-motivated association with business ventures.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Mugo is another central pillar in the novel’s construction, and frequently this image of the architecture of the house is used to conjure the reconstruction of the home of the family, community, and nation. Like many characters in the novel, such as General R. and Gikonyo, Mugo is a man who has been psychologically damaged by a ruptured family life. He is a motherless, fatherless child, whose very manhood was mocked by the aunt who raised him. He is one of the legion of the walking wounded. During the Emergency he betrayed Kihika to the all-powerful district officer, an action motivated by a desire to be spared a symbolic father figure’s wrath. Ironically, Mugo is regarded by everyone in Thabai village and its surrounding ridge communities as a great, morally upstanding hero and leader. While striving to live independently, he has entertained grand illusions of founding and leading a mission. Like the protagonists of The River Between and Weep Not, Child, he has at least for a time regarded himself as a member of God’s elect, as a Moses, though later he identifies more closely with Judas. By sheer accident or as a result of a deeply bruised respect for justice, Mugo has performed selfless and heroic acts, now well known, but he has also consciously betrayed Kihika, and the secret memory of his betrayal haunts Mugo’s days and provokes terrifying hallucinations, making the awed respect of the community seem hollow. He finally pays for his crime at a people’s trial presided over by General R. and Lieutenant Koina.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Structurally, unlike The River Between and Weep Not, Child, this novel is a series of intertwined snapshots or interrelated autobiographical narratives. In this respect it resembles the slowly developing portraits in George Lamming’s masterpiece In the Castle of My Skin, which Ngũgĩ greatly admired. Its form also resembles that of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, a correspondence noted by a number of critics. A Grain of Wheat recounts personal stories as memories triggered, as in stream-of-consciousness fiction, by incidental and accidental occurrences, or as confessions told to a seemingly sympathetic listener. The novel’s use of flashbacks underlies its psychological realism and emphasizes its theme of the omnipresence of historical memory. The novel employs the role of storytelling as a means of re-creating history and also as a method for obtaining psychological comfort and release (Nazareth 1974, 131; Pieterse and Duerden, 128). Frequently, as in the case of Gikonyo’s confession to Mugo (who is unwittingly the receiver of many personal confessions), the act of speaking reinforces the fundamental isolation and detachment of the penitent, despite the temporary relief speaking brings. These characters are haunted by their own traumatic histories and governed by them as by fixed stars, and they seem to be blinkered by a limited, solipsistic view of the world. This is especially true of Mugo, Karanja, and Gikonyo, who share a deeply ingrained sense of guilt, and the possibly mad Githua, the injured driver who invents a phantom heroic history for himself. As Mugo explains, “He invents a meaning for this life…. Don’t we all do that?” (Grain, 152). These characters can’t see beyond their own childhood traumas, or their painful guilt about a sudden cruel action, an unperformed gesture of comfort, or an outright act of treachery. They seek a type of self-forgiveness that is one of the Christian themes of the novel. Their obsessive private memories and confessions, however, do lead to a final public conflagration, a scene resembling the violent public accounting at the close of The River Between. The novel has two endings, the first dealing with the fate of Mugo, and the second with the future of Gikonyo and Mumbi. In the first ending, the private court of judgment gives way to the public trial of truth and justice. In the second ending, there is a recourse to the trial of private conscience and the desire for peace, forgiveness, reconstruction, and reconciliation. Just before the meeting on Independence Day, at which Mugo courageously confesses and after which he is taken away to face the punishment of his crime (a death that may well foster regeneration), the people of the community, in song, re-create their shared history, a history that opens and closes the novel and provides the lens through which the stories of individual anguish are viewed.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The novel concerns three historical periods, separated by approximately 13 years: the time before the Emergency, the time of the Emergency and detention and villagization, and the eve of independence. There are also references, as in Ngũgĩ’s first novels, to Gĩkũyũ and Mumbi (a symbolic reenactment of their union closes the novel) (Jan-Mohamed, 219), the seer Mugo wa Kibiro, and the time when women ruled the land, and also to early heroes of the Gĩkũyũ liberation movement and would-be national saviors such as Harry Thuku and Jomo Kenyatta. Harry Thuku gets the lion’s share of attention, perhaps because his story of initial idealism followed by a crushing seven-year imprisonment, release, and a conservative change of heart echoes the experience of Gikonyo. While the novel relates historical incidents such as the 1923 procession to Nairobi to free Harry Thuku and the resulting massacre, the 1950 Bata Shoe Factory strike, the daring Mau Mau assault on the police garrison, and the hunger strike at Rira detention camp leading to the beating death of 11 prisoners (the historic Hola massacre), it makes clear that these are only isolated fragments from the larger mosaic of the collective experience of oppression and resistance.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The quest for a hero, of such importance in The River Between and Weep Not, Child, is here undermined with bitter irony by the community’s elevating the sad and lonely traitor Mugo to the stature of great leader and even conscience of the people. This quest also finds a distorted reflection in the white district officer John Thompson, who sees Englishness as a state of mind and presumably pictures himself as the hero of his unwritten book, “Prospero in Africa.” Like his predecessor Thomas Robson, Thompson is corrupted by his position and brutalizes those in his power, ranting, in words echoing those of the megalomaniac Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “Eliminate the vermin” (Grain, 134). Another would-be hero, Gatu, commits suicide in detention. Furthermore, the new member of Parliament for the area is cynical and corrupt, lives comfortably in Nairobi, not his home district, and cheats Gikonyo and a collective of five in their attempt to buy Green Hill Farm from a departing white settler. Hope for a brighter future cannot be ensured by the redress of past grievances, and even the traitor Karanja escapes justice, though the failure of his suicide attempt may indicate his future in a purgatory of unrelieved remorse. He may have annihilated his identity along with his self-worth by wearing the hood under which he identified Mau Mau participants. Wambui, a woman who carried guns for the freedom fighters, even has second thoughts about the trial and punishment of Mugo. Amid the disillusionment with the past and the questioning of the promise of independence, shared by the freedom fighter Koina and the elder Warui, and shown in the equally pathetic and unrealistic aspirations of the peasants (Grain, 216), the only uncom-promised hero is Jomo Kenyatta, the burning spear, though he is a remote figure. More obviously, the novel’s hero is the grain of its title, the very notion of hope itself, which must die to bring forth new life. This grain is the legacy of the passionate freedom fighter Kihika, whose vision of a new Kenya is colored by his daily reading and revolutionary interpretation of the Bible.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The novel’s title, its epigraph, and its many chapter epigraphs are taken from the Bible. In addition, the characters’ speech contains biblical echoes. The novel’s epigraph, from 1 Corinthians 15:36, about the necessity of death for regeneration, and one of the last chapter’s epigraphs, from John 12:24, on the same theme, emphasize the notion that the sacrifice of men and women during the Emergency, and especially the martyrdom of people like Kihika, nourished the fruit of independence. A number of biblical references are indicated in the text as being underlined in Kihika’s Bible. Kihika, though opposing Christian meekness and the missionaries’ betrayal, is clearly inspired by liberation theology’s social gospel, the biblical fight against oppression and injustice interpreted especially in the life of Jesus and the Old Testament. The Old Testament story most frequently referred to here is that of Moses leading the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. These biblical stories maintain a type of intertextual relationship with the events in the lives of Gikonyo, Mumbi, and Mugo, stressing the ethical importance of their decisions and actions, and the mythical resonance of the struggle in which they have been involved. Links between biblical stories and Gĩkũyũ myth are also mentioned by Kihika, who identifies personally with Christ and relates the Mau Mau oath to baptism, and deaths in the struggle to the promise of eternal life contained in the Crucifixion. During the Mau Mau struggle, Christian hymns and Gĩkũyũ initiation chants and choruses similarly merged into Mau Mau liberation songs. Ngũgĩ does not draw on the merging of these two sources to inspire the transformative structure of A Grain of Wheat as he will do in his later, more obviously revolutionary novels, employing his Mau Mau aesthetics, but he does recount that the practice was common. Some scholars have found this novel’s seemingly sympathetic treatment of Christian themes incompatible with a strictly revolutionary purpose.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The use of Christian references is only one of the novel’s stylistic features that tie it to the tradition of the European novel. For example, unlike The River Between and Weep Not, Child, A Grain of Wheat (originally titled “Wrestling with God”) is full of recurring motifs and images. The central image is of sowing, cultivation, and harvest, significant in a novel dealing with the consequences of unjust land tenure and dispossession, but also clearly suggesting a positive, hopeful conclusion. The novel also makes many references to weather, particularly the cycles of rainfall and near drought. It contains the most extensive and poetically charged descriptions of landscape in any of Ngũgĩ’s novels, and a similarly heightened discourse is employed only to describe sexual encounters. Frequently, an elevated sensual awareness of nature is associated with an intense physical longing, and in Gikonyo’s case with religious rebirth or “a covenant with God” (Grain, 99), a feature of the work of D. H. Lawrence, which Ngũgĩ admired when he was contemplating the novel (Pieterse and Duerden, 123—24). The mythopoeic merging of personal emotion and landscape, however, is never allowed to run into a romantic personification, or anthropomorphization of nature. The novel instead balances poetic flights with wry, naturalistic detail about bodily functions and the odor of vomit, feces, and urine.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The novel’s imagery is grounded in social and political concerns. For example, the Mau Mau fighters refer to bullets as “maize grains” (Grain, 151). Agricultural imagery evokes the importance of land and the peasantry, just as the imagery of carpentry celebrates the importance of the working class. Gikonyo is a carpenter proud of his craft and his service to his community, who often undersells his labor to assist the needy. He renders a beautiful and functional knife for Mumbi’s mother and in detention meditates on carving a love gift for his wife. This gift is a traditional stool, but one based on a design he settles on in hospital, each of the stool’s three legs being sculpted in one of the following shapes: a father, a child, a pregnant woman. This design acknowledges his acceptance of his wife’s child with his treacherous rival Karanja, and Gikonyo’s renewed affection for Mumbi. The three figures support a platform on which he will tool the design of a river. Beside the river, he places an agricultural implement, rather than his first choice, a panga, or machete, indicating his renunciation of a desire for revenge and his willingness to work for personal, familial, and national reconciliation.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The landscape of the novel, like the stool’s design, bears the scars of a bloody history. Gikonyo’s final design is an artistic compromise, just as he has accepted a compromise in his personal life in forgiving Mumbi and acknowledging her child. The novel ends with a rejection of comfortable illusions, even those about the absolute purity of the movement that brought about liberation. Psychologically wounded characters like Gikonyo have moved beyond the sweet bitterness of isolation, selfishness, and disillusionment, a nursing of their sense of personal grievance, and a refusal to take responsibility for their thoughts and actions. In addition, given the many references to violent and contemptuous behavior of husbands to wives, Gikonyo significantly recognizes the rights of his wife to independent thought and action. He will not perpetuate exploitative master-slave relations in his marriage. This final acceptance of personal responsibility succeeds confession and a readiness for reconciliation, which was the official postindependence government line on the history of national grievances. As Mumbi and her parents agree, everyone must now embrace life, build the village and the market, cultivate the fields, and tend the children. This commitment to collective endeavor is indicated in the title of the final chapter, “Harambee.” Despite its seemingly harmonious, closed double ending, in which revolutionary aspirations are merged with Christian forgiveness, the novel is somewhat politically ambivalent and leaves unresolved questions about the fairness of a justice system that allows the Home Guard and colonial chief Karanja to escape while Mugo is tried. The novel also links traitors and collaborators with those “who ran to the shelter of schools and universities” as profiteers from the sacrifice of the peasantry (Grain, 68). The specter of the cheating, grasping, amoral member of Parliament on the horizon, his acts of plunder and hypocrisy unchecked and unpunished, further undercuts the satisfaction and resolve of the harmonious pull-together spirit that ends the novel, anticipating the social disillusionment of Ngũgĩ’s next phase.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Introduction: Kenyan History, Ngũgĩ’s Life and Career, Ngũgĩ and Postcolonial Studies</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Biography</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">COPYRIGHT 2000 Twayne Publishers, COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngugi wa Thiong'o</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="t">Ngugi wa Thiongo</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="d">New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="k">Twayne's World Authors Series 890</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Chapter One: Introduction: Kenyan History, Ngũgĩ’s Life and Career, Ngũgĩ and Postcolonial Studies</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Introduction</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">With Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o is one of the best-known African writers who emerged in Africa’s independence and postindependence climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Much of Ngũgĩ’s work conveys a sense of both the transcendent hope of independence and freedom, uhuru, and also the absolute despair that followed when this hope was compromised. Although he has not written an acknowledged masterpiece, a staple of college and university syllabi like Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, or, like Soyinka, won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Ngũgĩ has inspired a generation of writers and is celebrated for his stand on political and linguistic issues. It has taken some years for postcolonial and cultural studies to catch up with his position in areas such as curriculum reform and the importance of African languages and orature. Whereas Ngũgĩ’s popular reputation rests on his six novels, the first three written in a realistic mode and the last three in an allegorical mode, his place in the academic community rests increasingly on his six books of polemical essays. A close relationship exists between his theoretical and his novelistic work, and his novels often work out problems expounded in the essays. A highly versatile artist, Ngũgĩ is also a writer of plays, short stories, and children’s stories, and he has published a diary. Some of his most evocative and powerful writing is autobiographical. Most recently he has been involved in film and video, and in performance studies, attracted by these media’s ability to reach a wide African audience.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ is passionate about the need for African writing to speak to Africans in African languages and in readily accessible forms. While in many respects his position is close to that expounded by Achebe in “The Novelist as Teacher,” Ngũgĩ has always been alert to the ease with which the African teacher and intellectual may become assimilated into a Westernized elite and in turn be compromised in his or her relationship to the general public. Intellectuals and educators in Ngũgĩ’s novels are often ambivalently portrayed: on the one hand, they extend the prospect of technological advancement and freedom from poverty, but on the other, they mimic non-African values, act on selfish motives, hesitate at moments demanding decisive action, and even passively support those who exploit the common people. This ambivalence about the intellectual’s role is central to Ngũgĩ’s work, and he has argued that the intellectual’s position is not at the head but rather within the ranks of the “anti-imperialist cultural army.” Ngũgĩ’s conflicted intellectuals indicate a persistent questioning of the role of the artist and a longstanding uneasiness with Western narrative forms such as the novel and of Westernized education in African society. Since the early 1970s, Ngũgĩ has been a vocal advocate of African languages and African narrative forms. He has put his commitment into practice by publishing novels in Gĩkũyũ, his mother tongue; by exploring the possibility of collective authorship in some of his plays; and by incorporating diverse narrative techniques in his novels to make them accessible to a largely illiterate peasantry that can experience his writing only by hearing it read aloud. He has also been forthright in presenting his political views and in criticizing his nation’s government, at considerable personal cost. Just six months before his arrest in December 1977, he was asked by a Nairobi journalist if he feared repression for his writing, and he responded, “I have no such fears because I do believe that criticism of our social institutions and structure is a very healthy thing.” Being a social critic, he asserted, is the writer’s “duty.”</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ’s work is anchored in a concern for common people, especially the Gîkûyû people of Kenya, and for the land, which holds profound spiritual importance. In a memoir of a visit to Tanzania to research a film, Ngũgĩ writes movingly of the geography of East Africa, which for him bears the imprint of a human form:</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">A line drawing of a map of the physical features of Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania looks to me like a sketch of a bust of a human head wearing a slightly flat muslim cap whose slightly flattened top is the long border with Ethiopia. The neck rests on the Ruvuma river to the south. The back is formed by the tiny folds of the coastline on the Indian Ocean. The face is the line of lakes to the west from Malawi to Albert with Lake Tanganyika and Kivu making the outline of the chin and mouth. Lakes Edward and Albert form a retreating forehead. This strong human shaped head is facing into the heart and belly of the continent.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">This spectacular natural beauty, Ngũgĩ continues, “dominates the East African literary imagination” (Moving, 163).</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">It is outside Kenya, however, that most of Ngũgĩ’s novels have been written. Ngũgĩ is one of those writers who reenvision their homeland when they go abroad. The River Between and Weep Not, Child were composed in Uganda; A Grain of Wheat was written in England, and Petals of Blood in England, America, the Soviet Union, and Kenya. Matigari ma Njirũũngi (Matigari) was written in England. Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Devil on the Cross) was produced in Ngũgĩ’s homeland, but within the walls of a maximum-security prison. The location of the act of writing may account in part for the fondness for home, and the anguish of exile and return, so prevalent in his fiction. Ngũgĩ’s home area, Kenya’s Gĩkũyũ highlands, is one of the most beautiful in the world, and his appreciation of this landscape was heightened just before his detention by a long drive he took through the region. Poised on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, this area, with its dry, warm climate and fertile soil, though subject to sudden drought, was immediately attractive to potential European settlers in the early twentieth century. When Ngũgĩ was a child, Kenya had become a settler colony of England, and the ancestral lands of his people had been taken over. In 1967 Ngũgĩ signed a contract with Heinemann for a book on settler life in colonial Kenya, to be entitled “A Colonial Affair,” but he could not complete the project, finding himself unable to locate the correct tone, suspecting that his subject lacked any genuine “culture,” and angered that this historical colonial aberration was still very much alive in postindependence Kenya. Ngũgĩ does address settler culture in a number of his essays, and most extensively in Detained, and he has an intense loathing for the racist portrayal of Africans in the work of colonial writers such as Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), exceeded only by his animosity toward the tacit endorsement of such portrayals by the cultural policies of the postindependence authorities in Kenya.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">In the West, popular images of the geography of Ngũgĩ’s novels, reproduced in movies and television programs, display an achingly beautiful never-never land, remote from the anxiety and chaos of European cities, where the Western individual may arrive at self-realization. This sensual landscape sometimes provides the backdrop for the melodrama and lurid sexual excess in the lives of bored, rich settlers in the 1930s and 1940s—members of the Happy Valley set. This geography also surrounds pious missionaries, even from the world of basketball, who scout and train malleable Africans in the wonders of hoop magic and six-figure contracts, and who even, in their spare time, solve local “tribal” squabbles. Other stereotypical images of Ngũgĩ’s homeland glorify an Eden of teeming, myriad wildlife, including monstrous, demonic, man-eating lions—mythic recastings of the historical Tsavo incident. In these images, Kenya is a setting for the performance of the Westerner’s angst or awakening self-awareness, and Africa is the “dark continent,” a site of human prehistory, or a geographic tabula rasa devoid of recognizably human culture. In such representations, Africans are as much background as Mount Kenya. They become invisible, or merely part of an exotic “human zoo.” They are inscrutable and demonic, or merely childlike and easily manipulated. In his novels, Ngũgĩ writes against such Western stereotypes.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Kenyan History</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The story that lies behind much of Ngũgĩ’s writing is one of dispossession and the struggle for justice and restitution. The theft of Kenyan land by the British, particularly after World War II, and the attempt to reclaim it in the 1950s, which led indirectly to Kenyan independence and then to the later disillusionment with the results of this independence, belong to Ngũgĩ’s story. Although, unlike Achebe in Things Fall Apart, Ngũgĩ has not attempted a fictional re-creation of Gĩkũyũ life before first contact with outsiders, his work’s historical grounding, which may have been influenced by Achebe, lies in the destructiveness of contact with the British. Narratives of European contact begin with long-standing links along the coast of present-day Kenya between Arab and Portuguese sailors. Until the nineteenth century, however, most of Kenya was a blank space on the map of English exploration, the uncharted land between Mombasa and Lake Victoria. By the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, what we know as Kenya was being “transformed from a footpath 1,000 km (600 miles) long into a colonial administration.”</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Britain’s colonization of Kenya was an outgrowth of imperial expansion in the area in the later nineteenth century, often referred to as the Scramble for Africa, the attempt to forestall German expansion in the district, and the search for the sources of the Nile. British missionary and antislavery sentiments and commercial enthusiasm for ready access to the promised riches of Uganda led to discussions about East African free-trade zones and the military establishment of political influence. There was even widespread media fascination. For example, Henry Morton Stanley’s famous mission to “find” the explorer Dr. Livingstone (who was never really lost) was funded by the New York Herald. The Herald and London’s Daily Telegraph financed later expeditions, and Stanley’s carefully crafted dispatches in the popular press and his extravagant “multimedia” books of exploration made him an international celebrity. With the appetite for carving out spheres of interest in the area and the subsequent territorial acquisition of vast tracts of land at the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 came a mania to define boundaries and create maps. In this climate, the British East African Association was created, emphasizing the first part of Livingstone’s rallying cry, “Commerce and Christianity.” The British kept the cost-effectiveness of empire ever in mind, initially allowing a chartered company, the Imperial British East Africa Company, to rule the region. A protectorate was proclaimed only in 1895 after the balance of potential costs and revenues of other suggested private schemes had been weighed. Before this period, the fertile agricultural lands of the Gĩkũyũ had been largely protected from European influence by the power of the sultan of Zanzibar, the hostility of local populations as a result of the historic threat of slave raiders, and the dread of the military prowess of the Gĩkũyũ’s pastoral neighbors, the Masai. With the Masai’s military stature declining at the turn of the century owing to the effects of civil war, the devastation of smallpox and rinderpest (Lonsdale, 22–23, 51), and the growing appetite for global imperial expansion, even this barrier to foreign incursion began to collapse.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Accounts of travelers, adventurers, and explorers in the region at this time invoke the dread of dangerous, warring tribesmen in the interior. Joseph Thomson, exploring the region in 1883 for the Royal Geographic Society, wrote in Through Masailand that the Gĩkũyũ were “murderous and thievish.” The self-proclaimed “king of the Kikuyu,” John Boyes, labeled the Gĩkũyũ “fickle and treacherous.” Thomson and Boyes recount similar tales of using Eno, a bubbling antacid drink, to amaze the locals, who the authors claim saw it as a medicine to produce white children or as magically boiling water that only the powerful white medicine man could consume without harm. Such tales rapidly became a type of white mythology confirming the naïveté and innocence of indigenous peoples and affirming the coolness of the European facing the hazards of deepest, darkest Africa. John Boyes, however, was a highly suspect figure even to the British authorities and was nicknamed “Who eats beans” by some of his Gĩkũyũ “subjects,” a possible reference to his facility at producing verbal as well as intestinal gas (Boyes, 126).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The prospect of an ascent of Mount Kenya, the sacred mountain of the Gĩkũyũ, lured to Gĩkũyũland the geographer Halford John Mackinder, whose access to the interior was greatly aided by the building of the new Mombasa to Lake Victoria railway. In his diary of 1899, the publication of which may have been suppressed to cover up the extrajudicial “execution,” or murder, of eight porters during his expedition, Mackinder repeatedly notes parallels between the territory of the Gĩkũyũ and England’s green and pleasant land, though he also compares the Gĩkũyũ themselves to animals. Gĩkũyũ country, with its fertile red soil, is for him an Edenic “rough apple orchard” (Mackinder, 116), though at the time of his expedition, the land was in the grip of a drought that caused widespread famine. The latter is referred to by Ngũgĩ in Petals of Blood as “the famine of England.” Mackinder is happy he has had the foresight to have porters carry a large assortment of British canned food, justified by his maxim: “On safari it is all-important to provide cheerful encouragement in times of discouragement” (Mackinder, 33); he wards off morbid thoughts when facing possible starvation or a “native” attack by reading Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Dealing with his porters, however, he placed greater reliance on “the moral suasion of my Mauser” rifle (159). Mackinder’s successful ascent of Mount Kenya contributed to the vogue for adventure tourism in British East Africa and the perception of the region, referred to since 1920 as Kenya, as a boundless European playground. In his account, we can perceive an untroubled myopia regarding the history and culture of a people and a place, a conscienceless willingness to appropriate land, and a ready resort to violence.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Some of those who came to East Africa for adventure returned after the turn of the century to settle in the highlands of Kenya for the life of a self-fashioned landed gentry. Theodore Roosevelt was one of those fired with enthusiasm at the prospect of transforming this area, seemingly so geographically similar to Europe, into white man’s country. Cecil Rhodes had dreamed of a continuous sphere of British influence extending from the Cape to the Nile, believing that raw, young Englishmen would readily carve out such a corridor of power, lured by the promise of “gunpowder and glory.” Certainly the prospect of vast tracts of fertile land, with a railway to the coast, assurances of a passive African population who would provide cheap labor, and land deals made particularly generous to offset the competition from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand swelled the approximately 12 European farms in Gĩkũyũ territory at the turn of the century to a total European population of about 3,000 in Kenya by 1914, and 9,000 by 1919 Although the government of Kenya Colony, created in 1920, was mandated to protect the interests of the indigenous population, the settlers were anxious to assert their own exclusive rights as landowners and taxpayers. They also wanted to maintain the large reserve of cheap African labor for their increasingly lucrative plantation crops, from European vegetables to coffee and tea, and by 1930 pyrethrum, a type of chrysanthemum.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Partly to impel Africans to labor on European farms (located on land appropriated from Africans), a hut tax was introduced at the turn of the century, and paramount chiefs were installed in disregard of traditional familial and clan social structures to collect it. Grievances over taxes, labor, and land led to the formation of African associations that evolved into nationalist associations. The Gĩkũyũ, for example, had a system of agriculture that entailed land rotation, and they had different notions of land tenure and ownership from those of the Europeans. For the Gĩkũyũ, land was a common inheritance and could not be bought or sold, as Ngũgĩ explains in A Grain of Wheat. Instead of being temporary tenants, as the Gĩkũyũ regarded them, the Europeans believed that they had absolute rights over the land, and the settlers soon banded together even against the colonial government for what they saw as protection of their interests, which meant dominance over the African population. The settler response to Gĩkũyũ grievances was a denial that their lands had ever been farmed by the Gĩkũyũ, though even early European visitors had noted how intensively the Gĩkũyũ cultivated their land. The settlers also had recourse to the old rhetoric of the European’s “civilizing” mission in the area. Different perceptions of land tenure and ownership had contributed to the influx of white settlers, as had the decimation of the Gĩkũyũ by smallpox, drought, and famine, which had also afflicted the Masai. Furthermore, the historic animosities between rival national groups, such as the Gĩkũyũ and the Masai, and the Gĩkũyũ’s own internal rivalries between various groups on different ridges, examined by Ngũgĩ in The River Between, were fully exploited by the Europeans. For some settlers, the solution to the “native problem” was clear. At the turn of the century, Frank Hall, who would later be a district commissioner, wrote of the difficulty of an attempt to “exterminate” the Masai and conducted a number of punitive expeditions against the Gĩkũyũ, wiping out whole villages.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The Mau Mau insurrection during which Ngũgĩ was raised and which provides in many ways the starting point of his fiction was the final explosion of many decades of accumulated grievances. Expropriation of land, virtually enforced labor, and the levying of taxes without representation were causes of bitterness, exacerbated by prohibitions against raising certain lucrative cash crops such as coffee, the enforcement of apartheid-like laws entailing the carrying of pass cards, wage discrimination based on race, and the at best patronizing and paternalistic attitude of some Europeans. Kenyans who had served the British as carriers in World War I and as soldiers in World War II returned home with a developing sense of national identity, with a sharper understanding of their overlords’ vulnerable humanity, and after 1945 with skills in modern warfare. To the weight of lost land, taxation, and general dissatisfaction, moreover, was added the burden of unemployment, especially among the increasing numbers migrating from impoverished rural areas to the city of Nairobi, the new center for the poor and dispossessed, as the unemployed ex-soldier Boro does in Weep Not, Child. A rapidly growing population further exacerbated the effects of unemployment, even among those educated in mission schools and later in independent schools. To the unemployed’s bitterness and frustration was added a further source of injury. Those who had sacrificed so much for their colonial masters and bristled under an unfulfilled sense of entitlement were outraged when, after the wars, they saw waves of European settlers taking the lands of African families. For the unemployed, this insult reconfirmed a growing impatience with the glacial pace of ameliorative change. At this time, aware of the climate of political dissatisfaction in his homeland, Jomo Kenyatta, who would be the first prime minister of independent Kenya, returned from study at London University, where he had written an anthropological study of the Gĩkũyũ, Facing Mount Kenya. Formerly active in the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA) and the Independent Schools Association, in 1946 Kenyatta became president of the Kenya African National Union and principal of Githunguri Training College. For Kenyatta, as for the young Ngũgĩ, national political aspirations were tied directly to the importance of formal education. Although by 1948 there were four African members in the colonial governor’s legislative council, references to Mau Mau were already appearing.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The term “Mau Mau,” by which the movement is now generally known, is of questionable and bewildering origin. A film documentary entitled Mau Mau, including interviews with former Mau Mau fighters such as Karari Njama, argues that the movement was largely a creation of hostile settler forces, and that armed resistance was organized only after the settlers created the myth of an African secret society and this myth was given official support by the British government. The more formal name for the movement’s military wing was the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), and the KLFA and Dedan Kimathi, one of its main leaders, in his 1953 Mau Mau Charter, disdained the term “Mau Mau.” J. M. Kariuki, in “Mau Mau” Detainee, identifies “Mau Mau” as a term of abuse, a children’s phrase, though possibly also an anagram of warning. Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, in Mau Mau from Within, support these possible interpretations, though further suggesting that the term may refer to the practice of oathing or even to greed in overeating. In his foreword to Robert Buijtenhuijs’s Mau Mau: Twenty Years After, the Myth and the Survivors, the historian Ali A. Mazrui adds to these suggestions the idea that the initials of “Mau Mau,” when reversed, spell out “Underground African Movement,” and that the sound of the phrase echoes that made by a black cat at night, or even that it may be a corruption of Mao Tse-tung. The clearest conclusion to be drawn from such a bewilderment of differing interpretations is that the term’s origin is obscure, and that, although the leadership disliked it, “Mau Mau” has stuck and is now employed by former members of the movement.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The Mau Mau period in Kenya is still hotly contested. Controversial aspects include the movement’s composition, its leaders’ ideological grounding and cohesion, its reliance on spiritual ritual and guidance, its similarity to other popular historic uprisings, and most importantly its role in bringing about independence. Interpretation of the movement and the strategic use of such interpretation as a weapon of war began well before the movement ended. The potent legacy of the struggle between Mau Mau and colonialism continues to be fought over by various camps of historians, politicians, and cultural intellectuals. Even Ngũgĩ’s own position has undergone a dramatic shift. A pro-colonial interpretation of Mau Mau had dominated in Kenya’s school history texts, at least until the mid-1970s, and this is an interpretation Ngũgĩ has contested in his Njamba Nene series of children’s stories. Research on the period, however, is hampered by the covert nature of the movement, the illiteracy of many participants, the pervasiveness of colonial propaganda, and the fact that in Kenya today Mau Mau historiography remains highly politically sensitive. Wunyabari O. Maloba, in a generally thorough and balanced study that concludes with a plea for further analysis, argues that while Mau Mau was a “nationalist, anticolonial, peasant movement,” motivated by economic distress, it lacked a unified political ideology or an “intellectual revolutionary cadre” (Maloba, 16). Although Barnett and Njama stress the predominance of illiterate peasants in the active forces and trace a critical internal schism between Stanley Mathenge and Dedan Kimathi to the clash between illiterates and literates, Kimathi himself was clearly a rebel intellectual, maintaining an archive (sealed until 2013) and forging international links, though he has never been afforded the status of a Che Guevara, Mao Tse-tung, or Amílcar Cabral.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ has sought to garner recognition for Kimathi’s heroic role, to downplay the significance of Kenyatta, and to emphasize the importance of the oral history of Mau Mau and of oathing. Maloba criticizes Ngũgĩ for interpreting Kimathi and the KLFA as socialist (Maloba, 173—74). The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Maloba argues, lacks “any historical evidence” (174). He overlooks, however, the similarities between the play’s handling of Kimathi’s trial of his brother and its treatment in Barnett and Njama’s Mau Mau from Within (379–80). Maloba, moreover, clearly discounts references in the play’s preface to the gathering of the oral record, something he admits is lacking in his own study, which demonstrates a general distrust of oral sources, of such importance in establishing the history of a popular movement composed largely of illiterate peasants. Maloba offers a detailed account of the sexual and spiritual elements of various oathing ceremonies, unleashing the power of violated taboos (98-113), though he admits his evidence is based partly on material elicited through torture by colonial authorities, a factor that understandably leads J. M. Kariuki to discount the existence of so-called “advanced oaths” (Kariuki, 52-73). In Weep Not, Child, Ngũgĩ acknowledges certain elders’ discomfort about the inappropriate use of traditional ritual and especially oathing by the young. Elsewhere, however, writing of oathing’s justification, he echoes Chairman Mao’s famous dictum: a revolution is not a dinner party. Colonial and neo-colonial historians seized on the oathing rituals to confirm the nature of an organization that they regarded as a criminal, culturally atavistic, demonic, communist secret society that had no legitimate grievance but sought Gĩkũyũ supremacy and might even be a manifestation of mass hysteria (see Rosberg and Nottingham, 320-47).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The Mau Mau movement began as an organized drive for land and freedom, as its formal name indicates, advocating the necessity of violence as the only effective means to achieve its goals. By 1952, it became an underground organization, and on October 20, 1952, the new colonial governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, declared a state of emergency, allowing detention without trial and an increased number of capital offenses, one being for the administration of oaths. Jomo Kenyatta was detained, tried, and convicted of managing the movement, though the prosecution witnesses were well rewarded for their testimony, and the principal witness later recanted (Trench, 235 —37). The armed struggle moved to the Aberdares and Mount Kenya, where the movement was organized in cells, a more effective strategy for a flexible guerrilla war, the last resort of the downtrodden and dispossessed. To cut off support for the fighters in the forests, the colonial authorities inaugurated a scorched-earth policy at the forest edge and initiated “villagization,” whereby Gĩkũyũ were placed in fenced and moated compounds (217–67). Following the capture and confession of the Mount Kenya military leader “General China” (Itote, 161-99; Odinga, 118), in 1954 Operation Anvil rounded up tens of thousands of supposed Mau Mau members and sympathizers in Nairobi, one of the main bases of support. The prisoners were detained in camps, in brutal conditions that attracted attention in the British press. Colonial troops were rewarded in cash for each Mau Mau suspect killed, and corpses were put on public display. There was some Gĩkũyũ resistance to Mau Mau among Christian groups and the educated, and among elderly Gĩkũyũ who were suspicious of false traditionalism. The active military operation of the movement largely ended in 1956 with the capture, trial, and execution of Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi. Statistics of the precise number of Europeans and Africans killed in the conflict vary enormously; however, probably fewer than 100 Europeans (who made up only about 1 percent of the population), but more than 10,000 Africans, lost their lives. The state of emergency ended in February I960.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The late 1950s and early 1960s saw some redistribution and consolidation of tiny parcels of Gĩkũyũ land—collectively known as the Million-Acre Settlement Scheme—and other colonial efforts to settle African grievances. These measures may have been contrived to placate the new African middle class and may have succeeded in dividing Kenyans at independence more sharply along class lines. The road to a new Kenya was cleared by the declaration of independence in Ghana in 1957, and after the Lancaster House conference in 1962, Kenya became independent on December 12, 1963. A year later, the country was declared a republic, with Jomo Kenyatta the president of a virtual one-party state. Kenyatta reiterated his presumed desire to work for reconciliation between the previously warring groups. After independence, Kenyatta was visited by Sir Evelyn Baring, governor of Kenya during the Mau Mau period, and Baring mentioned signing the order for Kenyatta’s detention on the president’s table. Kenyatta replied: “In your shoes, at that time, I’d have done exactly the same. And I’ve signed a good few Detention Orders on it myself” (Trench, 236). Kenyatta’s response has a resonance for Ngũgĩ’s career, because it was Kenyatta’s successor as president, Daniel arap Moi, who signed Ngũgĩ’s own detention order in 1977 when Moi was minister for home affairs, though that was a number of years after the first flowering of the promise of independence. In the years just after 1963, many settler farms were bought by Kenyans, often government ministers or individuals who had been loyal to the colonial authorities, and a new elite was rapidly being created. In 1978 Kenyatta died, and Ngũgĩ, who had protested against the social disintegration Kenyatta fostered, was released. Kenyatta’s successor has become Ngũgĩ’s nemesis, and his regime has so threatened Ngũgĩ that he has lived in exile for nearly two decades. Ngũgĩ was released in a group of 16 political detainees that included three former members of Parliament, one of whom, Wasonga Sijeyo, had been in detention since 1969. President Moi announced the “amnesty” on the 15th anniversary of Kenyan independence, though the detention legislation, the Preservation of Public Security Act, remained in force; and in a speech marking the occasion, Moi reiterated his willingness to enact the law to preserve “peace, unity and stability.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ has witnessed many of the tumultuous events in his nation’s history, and his writing reflects the despair of the colonial years and the brutal attempt to crush the Mau Mau resistance movement, the enormous promise at the dawn of independence, and the growing disillusionment as it seemed that little was changing in the succeeding years and that domestic corruption and exploitation were replacing colonial oppression. This period, which for Ngũgĩ still continues (save that it is increasingly characterized by the aggressive involvement of multinational corporations), is neocolonial: colonial structures remain in place though the operators have changed. Such a historical trajectory could not have been anticipated at the time of Ngũgĩ’s birth.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ’s Life and Career</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ was born on January 5, 1938, in Kamĩrĩĩthũ, Limuru. His mother was the third of his father’s four wives, and Ngũgĩ was one of 27 brothers and sisters. He attended both independent Gĩkũyũ and Christian mission primary schools. During the Mau Mau struggle, his stepbrother was shot and killed, and in 1954 his elder brother joined the Mau Mau fighters in the forest. Owing to her son’s participation in the struggle, Ngũgĩ’s mother was tortured at a Home Guard post. Amid this turmoil, Ngũgĩ entered Alliance High School in 1955, one of the best mission schools in the country, where he was warned by the headmaster not to become a political agitator. For a brief period, Ngũgĩ became a devout Christian. A sense of guilt about his enjoyment of comfortable school life in this time of familial and national crisis informs some of Ngũgĩ’s early fiction. His brother wrote from the forest, however, encouraging Ngũgĩ to focus on his education. His interest in politics and Christianity developed further, and he began writing fiction and reading widely, especially the novels of Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Leo Tolstoy, in addition to popular thrillers. Ngũgĩ returned from school to find his home and village wiped out and his family relocated, part of the colonial government’s “villagization” policy. This alienating homecoming was one of the landmark experiences of Ngũgĩ’s life.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">After a brief stint as a primary school teacher, Ngũgĩ entered Makerere University College in Uganda, and he began to read extensively in African and Caribbean literature, though his special subject for his B.A. was Joseph Conrad, with a focus on Nostromo. He continued to write short stories and plays. It was an exciting and fertile period for Ngũgĩ, though as Peter Nazareth, Ngũgĩ’s near contemporary at Makerere, recalled: “There was a heavy colonial pall over the place.” In 1961 he wrote “The Black Messiah,” which was revised and published as The River Between four years later. He began to write columns for a variety of Nairobi newspapers. In 1962 he wrote Weep Not, Child, and his play The Black Hermit was performed in Kampala in the Ugandan independence celebrations and published by Makerere University Press. He entered Leeds University in England, researching Caribbean literature and especially the writing of George Lamming. As he explains in the preface to Secret Lives, Ngũgĩ found himself unable to grapple in fiction with the Brontë landscape around Leeds. Peter Nazareth, who was also studying at the university during the same period, recalls the Leeds experience for African students as intellectually challenging, due in part to a shared interest in the work of Frantz Fanon, but personally demoralizing. Nazareth’s own personal situation was different from Ngũgĩ’s, but his response to Leeds may give some indication of Ngũgĩ’s experience there:</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Deep disillusionment. The first big shock was when I got to Leeds. I had never really imagined an industrial city like that. I’d read about it in Lawrence and Dickens but could not imagine an England as nasty as that. Colonialism had persuaded us that England was a perfect place, a developed country where everybody was happy, had perfect knowledge, had good houses…. Otherwise, how were they ruling us? When I got there, it was a real shock to see Leeds. The buildings looked like giant cockroach shells. People used to say that Leeds was a place where you woke up to the sound of birds coughing. The city hall was completely blackened with soot. Before I left, they were cleaning it up so there was this very black building guarded by white lions. Symbolic, perhaps. (Nazareth, 88)</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Whatever his personal feelings about his residence within the former colonial power, Ngũgĩ was very productive. Although his Leeds University project on Caribbean literature was never completed, he did publish some essays from it in his collection Homecoming. He also wrote A Grain of Wheat, though he was already becoming somewhat disenchanted with writing novels in English, a language that few of his fellow Kenyans would be able to read. He began to be deeply influenced by the writings of Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. Engels had deplored the squalor of industrial Manchester in the 1840s in The Condition of the Working Class in England, published when he was just 24. The similarly youthful and resourceful Ngũgĩ published Weep Not, Child in 1964, The River Between in 1965, and A Grain of Wheat in 1967.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In 1967 Ngũgĩ joined the English Department of University College, Nairobi, its first African faculty member, and in 1973 he became its first African head of department. During his years at Nairobi, the department structure and curriculum were revised to focus on African languages and literatures. In these years, Ngũgĩ gave a variety of lectures throughout Africa and around the world, some of them included in Homecoming, published in 1972. In 1970, This Time Tomorrow, a collection of plays, was published, his last book to appear under the name “James Ngugi,” though he did not change his name legally until 1977. In 1976 he completed Petals of Blood, his longest novel, at the Yalta guest house of the Soviet Writers Union and began work with the Kamĩrĩĩthũ Community Educational and Cultural Centre, where parts of his play, The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, cowritten by Mĩcere Gĩthae Mũgo, were performed. With Ngũgĩ wa Mĩriĩ, and based on the lived experience of the Centre’s participants, he wrote Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want), which was a great success. In December 1977, Daniel arap Moi, Kenyan vice president and minister for home affairs, signed Ngũgĩ’s detention order, and he was imprisoned without charge or trial in Kamĩtĩ Maximum Security Prison.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Detention was a devastating and also a transforming experience for Ngũgĩ, who began writing Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ (Devil on the Cross) in Gĩkũyũ on the prison’s rough toilet paper; but upon his release, he was denied further employment at the University of Nairobi, and he was briefly imprisoned again in 1981 and also in 1982, the year now-president Moi declared Kenya a one-party state. In 1980 Ngaahika Ndeenda and Caitaani Mũtharaba-inĩ were published; Detained, an account of his prison experience including a diary, and Writers in Politics were also published. The Nairobi production of Ngũgĩ’s collectively authored play Maitũ Njugĩra (Mother, Sing for Me) was suppressed by the government. This period of intense creativity and repression culminated in the 1983 publication of Barrel of a Pen, a collection of essays focused on the increasingly hostile political atmosphere in the country.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Living in exile in London since 1982, Ngũgĩ has worked for the release of political prisoners in Kenya. In 1986 rumors circulated in Kenya about Ngũgĩ’s involvement with the radical political group Mwakenya. Matigari ma Njirũũngi (Matigari) and Decolonising the Mind were published. In 1987 Ngũgĩ chaired Umoja, an umbrella group of radical Kenyan organizations. The African Communist reported in the following year the formation of Umoja Wa Kupigania Democrasia Kenya (United Movement for Democracy in Kenya) at a meeting in London on October 20, 1987. The report included excerpts from a statement read by Ngũgĩ: “Umoja, which now brings together the resistance abroad under one umbrella, is an anti-imperialist organisation wholly committed to the restoration of our national sovereignty, the building of a truly democratic Kenya and the restructuring of the economy for the social progress of the Kenyan people. Umoja is not a new party but a support movement for the struggle at home.” Ngũgĩ continued to unite his political and literary commitments.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Although Ngũgĩ has not published any fiction since Matigari, he has issued revised editions of some of his earlier work, and he continues to lecture and to publish collections of essays. In 1993 Moving the Centre and in 1998 Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams appeared, the latter a series of lectures delivered at Oxford University in 1996. His interest in film, begun in the mid-eighties, has developed, and with Manthia Diawara he has directed Sembene: The Making of African Cinema. Ngũgĩ’s exile has led him from Kenya to Britain and America, where he has taught at Yale, Smith, and Amherst. Since 1992 he has been professor of performance studies and Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, having declined an offer of tenure at Yale. He has also been guest artist at the Tisch School of the Arts. Beginning in 1994, he has edited Mũtiiri, a New York University-based Gĩkũyũ language journal of literature and culture, cofounded by Ngũgĩ and his wife Njeeri. In April 1994, Ngũgĩ was the subject of “the largest conference on an African writer ever held in the United States or anywhere, for that matter, including Africa itself,” in the words of the conference convenor and Ngũgĩ scholar Charles Cantalupo.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ and Postcolonial Studies</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In addition to being a novelist and playwright, Ngũgĩ has been a journalist and a teacher, and a postcolonial theorist. “Postcolonial” is a problematic and much-debated term because it seems to give undue influence to the colonial experience in the formerly colonized nation’s history and to make this traumatic past the genesis of all future developments. The term also lumps together a diverse collection of global historical and political experiences and national literatures, such as those of Kenya, Canada, Jamaica, India, and New Zealand, and might appear to homogenize important differences while ostensibly celebrating difference and diversity. The discipline of postcolonial studies is sometimes criticized as the creation of the Western academic establishment, which has defined and delimited the field in a kind of intellectual colonization, a process mimicking the historical actions of the imperialists. Such a colonization is thus regarded as being in some ways even more insidious because it still more skillfully disguises its actions behind a smoke screen of benevolent intentions and appears to speak often in highfalutin terms for the oppressed of the postcolonial world. The postcolonial project, however, openly acknowledges the inevitably contested terrain in which it works. It stresses the deep cultural roots of Western imperialism, the historical trauma of colonialism and the difficulty of the transfer from colonialism to independence, the importance of history generally, and by implication the complications of moving beyond a colonized mentality. Both the writing in postcolonial countries and the critical practice that engages with it, moreover, are, as writers such as Chris Tiffin and Stephen Slemon point out, explicitly political. Postcolonial literary and critical practices are enmeshed in the realities of the postcolonial condition, and they aim to facilitate the process of decolonization.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ’s polemical essays obviously advance the postcolonial project. They also frequently elaborate positions that form the basis for his fiction, and his essays have often been used somewhat uncritically to interpret his fiction. Ngũgĩ has long been an important figure in postcolonial studies. His essays consider the special position of the African writer in relationship to tradition, language, audience, history, and the state. He is best known in this connection for his advocacy of African languages and the political commitment of the African writer. He has declared categorically that for him to write fiction in English is to foster a neocolonial mentality. For Ngũgĩ, a language is the repository of cultural memory, allowing its speakers to possess their world and providing them with a voice to address both ancestors and the generations yet unborn. English was the language of the colonizer, and linguistic imperialism was one of the aims of the Philological Society of London, which initiated the Oxford English Dictionary in Victorian England. Ngũgĩ advocates linguistic decolonization. Although he has not abandoned English entirely and continues to lecture and to publish critical work in English, Ngũgĩ is an enthusiastic supporter of African language developments, such as the Gĩkũyũ journal Mũtiiri, and much of his writing and public speaking has attacked linguistic colonization. Writing in African languages for Ngũgĩ is a blow against oppression, a political act, especially in a continent with a colonial legacy in which the postcolonial writer has so often been regarded as an enemy of the state. Ngũgĩ, moreover, has focused attention on the linguistic and material plight of his own country and of Africa generally, and in his last collection of essays, he reaffirms the power of artistic freedom in the struggle against oppression.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">A concern for his readers motivates Ngũgĩ’s linguistic preoccupations. In his novelistic practice since 1977, he has written primarily for a mass African audience, and he responds to critics who protest that writing in Gĩkũyũ reaches only a portion of even a Kenyan audience by explaining that he intends his writing to be translated from Gĩkũyũ into Swahili and other African languages. He has been somewhat less candid in acknowledging the difficulties faced by writers who do not have his international stature in finding a market for their work and in having it translated. The question of whether to write in African languages is a serious one for the African writer, as Albert S. Gérard has noted: “This is the dilemma of the African writer today: either he may use a European language and thus gain recognition (and financial reward) from a worldwide audience, but at the risk of cutting himself off from the very roots of all but the most esoteric creative flowering, the common experience of his own society; or he may use his own mother tongue, stoically shun the appeal of the world market, remain one of the inglorious Miltons of the present age, but help his own people’s advance into the age of mass literacy, and pave the way for future achievements and renown.” While somewhat sheltered by his international stature, Ngũgĩ has made his position clear and has supported other writers. He gave editorial assistance in the late 1960s to a number of journals, including Zuka, which encouraged submissions in East African languages, though accompanied by English translation; and he has encouraged writers in other ways, though sometimes, because of his notoriety, with disastrous consequences. Ngũgĩ has also worked collaboratively and has welcomed the informal public reading of his work to illiterates. He has chosen both the language of his last novels and their narrative form—transformed tales from the Bible, for example—to make his fiction readily comprehensible by a mass Kenyan audience. More recently, he has been magnetized by the potential of popular theater and video to attract a mass, often illiterate, audience. In 1983 he wrote in Barrel of a Pen that “modern technology (e.g. video, cinema, television, radio) should make it possible to actually reclaim the positive aspects of tradition and peasant cultures which are withering away under the pressures of the economic exploitation” (Barrel, 78). Ngũgĩ today celebrates cyberspace as a medium for performative orature (Penpoints, 118).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ must be regarded as one of the most significant interpreters of Frantz Fanon, whose work is so important for the influential postcolonial theorists Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. Fanon, a psychotherapist and theorist, counseled victims of torture and developed a view of colonialism that stressed that one of its most insidious and lasting consequences was the devastation of the psyche of its victims. He suggested that a deeply implanted sense of degradation and inferiority stunted the colonized individual. For Ngũgĩ, healing the trauma of colonialism is one of the functions of art. In Decolonising the Mind, he writes of the consequences of years of racism, legalized bigotry, and dispossession on the national consciousness. Although Ngũgĩ’s interests have moved beyond Fanon, his continuing advocacy of African languages and their use in aiding the process of decolonization has roots in Fanon’s thinking. Ngũgĩ remains sincerely committed to the ideals of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Ngũgĩ’s essays cite these great nineteenth-century political theorists extensively, and some of his characters, especially in his plays, sometimes appear to be merely mouthing communist slogans. After the demise of the Soviet Union, such zeal may seem at best dated and even fondly nostalgic, and Ngũgĩ has acknowledged, in Moving the Centre, his own exasperation that the merely 70-year-old term “socialism” should seem “old-fashioned” (Moving, 34). Readers of Ngũgĩ’s work must keep in mind Kenya’s recent history, and that a number of liberation movements in Africa have had Marxist roots; the Cold War was often fought not directly by the superpowers but by proxy, and sometimes by client states in Africa, with devastating consequences. Ngũgĩ celebrates the “African socialism” of Julius Nyerere, a socialism with a distinctively regional face.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ embodies the ambivalent position of the postcolonial intellectual. The difficulty of this figure’s position derives on the one hand from an association, through education and career, with Europe and the colonizers, and on the other hand from a newly acquired linguistic and cultural distance from the majority of the people. Writers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah suggest that the African intellectual’s association with Europe is inevitable and necessarily involves him or her in a conflicted ideological relationship; moreover, he regards the attempt to deny or escape from such an identification as ineffective and dishonest, the recourse of Fanon’s shortsighted “native intellectual.” African philosopher Tsenay Serequeberhan would agree: “To be a Westernized African in today’s post-colonial Africa means ultimately to be marked/ branded—in one way or another—by the historical experience of European colonialism. We should not try to ‘hide’ from this all pervasive element of our modern African historicity. Rather, our efforts to surmount it must begin by facing up to and confronting this enigmatic actuality. This then is the hermeneutic task of this study, for ultimately the antidote is always located in the poison!” Writers from Achebe to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have loudly deplored the postcolonial intellectual’s divorce from the people. Achebe has written that art separated from the reality of African society is “deodorised dog-shit,” and Spivak demands that intellectuals “learn to speak in such a way that the masses will not regard as bullshit.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ writes similarly in Devil on the Cross of the allure of intellectual food and the intellectual’s ability to mystify, to the extent that “a child …[may mistake] foreign shit for a delicious national dish.” Ngũgĩ frequently enjoins the African intellectual to interrogate the position of power from which writing and cultural expression originate. He recommends, in his latest collection of essays, tapping into the wisdom of intellectual ancestors such as Leo Africanus and Olaudah Equiano, and the “oral intellectual[s]” of the national past (Penpoints, 96). Ngũgĩ is always suspicious and even contemptuous, however, of attempts by “state intellectuals” (Decolonising, 102)—that is, those who blindly parrot the ideology of the neocolonial state—to appropriate cultural traditions and place them in antiseptic tourist-friendly cultural centers or museums. He demands that, as in the past, intellectual and artistic achievement be regarded as “communal property” (Writers, 2d ed., 143-44). Ngũgĩ’s African cultural intellectual, who resembles Antonio Gramsci’s “‘Organic’ intellectual,” must write in the language and idiom of the masses and must lead, but lead from within the cultural army (Writers, 1st ed., 31). Part of Ngũgĩ’s project in his various writings is to elevate revolutionary national intellectuals such as Dedan Kimathi into a position of spiritual leadership.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The postcolonial condition is characterized by hybridity, migration, and exile, and Ngũgĩ has lived in exile since 1982, first in England and then in the United States. While his exile has been productive, his separation from his homeland has left him feeling severed from his core audience, and uninterested in creating new fiction. In his exile, Ngũgĩ has become, like Salman Rushdie and Nuruddin Farah, a hybrid cultural intellectual, living between countries and cultures. The condition of hybridity, as postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha explains, may be stimulating, in that it intensifies the individual’s awareness of difference, but it is also dislocating in personal terms, rendering the familiar strange, and dividing the self. In his exile, Ngũgĩ has continued to focus on his homeland despite his geographic distance. This concern with the nation and its story, the national narrative, is of central importance in postcolonial theory and in Ngũgĩ’s work.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">His novels taken together form a people’s history of Kenya, even in his last novel Matigari projecting into the future. His novels’ history differs, however, from colonial or neocolonial versions of events, and his view of the Emergency, for example, has landed him in trouble with official historians. His novels offer a counterhistory, an alternative view that is in creative conflict with the official version. For instance, he has always stressed women’s participation in Mau Mau, and in Devil on the Cross he emphasizes women’s potential for revolutionary action. In 1986 Ngũgĩ participated in “The Challenge of Third World Culture,” a conference at Duke University; and in the same year, Duke’s Fredric Jameson published “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Although Jameson’s formulation and especially its catholic application of the monolithic phrase “third world” has attracted criticism, his notion of “national allegory” has proved remarkably buoyant. In his provocative and influential essay, which refers to Ngũgĩ’s work, Jameson suggests that “third-world literature” tells the story of the nation from which it emerges, and forms a national allegory, embodying or paralleling the development of the nation, and melding the private and the public. The national allegory, Jameson elaborates, ends with uncertainty regarding the future, a “crisis of closure.” Although Ngũgĩ’s narratives, especially his early ones, often end with such a crisis, their protagonists torn between rival responsibilities and obligations, they do suggest a conclusion. The protagonist’s dilemma must be experienced by, and resolved within, the reader. In his last novels, Ngũgĩ attempts to inspire the reader into taking responsibility for a collective homecoming to a newly liberated nation.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Ngũgĩ is an important theorist of postcolonial and African literature, but his last, most difficult narratives, with their ambitious closure, have not had the same enthusiastic response from some Western readers as have his earlier novels, which display more obviously the influence of writers like Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. In the last novels, Ngũgĩ has moved beyond realism and a focus on the private angst of troubled individuals to employ broad “type” characters who clearly represent portions of the public, common aspirations, or ideologies. The use of allegory clearly imbues these novels with a postcolonial—but also a postmodern—sensibility, self-consciously celebrating their own artificial, constructed nature, mimicking other (especially biblical) plots and phrases, and displaying an unwillingness to accept the “master narratives” of state-sanctioned historians.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Rhetoric, History, and Poetry</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Hobbes, Thomas</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Behemoth; or, A Dialogue on the Civil Wars (Nonfiction work)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="t">Thomas Hobbes</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Chapter Six: Rhetoric, History, and Poetry</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The Darker Side of Language</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The centrality of language to our humanity entailed, for Hobbes, dangers comprising philosophical confusion, deceit, and self-delusion. Language could be a bottle of buzzing philosophic flies or Pandora’s box of social evils, unhinged. It was at the root of most evil (De homine, 10.3). Much of Hobbes’s exultantly pessimistic sense of the wayward power of language is captured in his hostility to rhetoric or eloquence; it is displayed in his historical writings and refracted in his theories of poetry. These discrete topics are drawn together by fear of deviant word-use. The black magic of discourse had for him enormous explanatory and ad hominem power. If there could be no society without language, stable society without a stable language, then without rhetoric there could be no political conflict.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">With few exceptions, older studies on Hobbes singularly overlooked this dimension to his work, subjecting it to modernly established priorities and commending his linguistic sensitivity only for anticipating the protocols of contemporary philosophical analysis. The balance, however, has been more than rectified in recent scholarship. Rhetoric has been somewhat triumphantly rediscovered and seized upon by some as so central as to be the key to explaining just about everything in Hobbes’s work. This too has generated a mythic image of Hobbes as the arch rhetorician, to displace the mechanic philosopher. But it does add credence to Hobbes’s belief that our language can trap us like birds: the more we struggle the more we are belimed in words. For now, as in the seventeenth century, rhetoric remains a flighty beast uncertainly related to all sorts of terms from which it seems to be distinct, most crucially from philosophy, science, teaching, history, and poetry. Nothing illustrates the difficulties of making sense of rhetoric in such a semantic context than the writings of Thomas Hobbes.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Rhetoric, Eloquence, and Philosophy</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">A shadowy battle of the books between philosophy and rhetoric has long been projected with writers such as Cicero, Quintilian, and, closer to Hobbes’s own day, Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) extolling the primacy of rhetoric, with Plato and, it would seem, Hobbes and Locke, standing firmly by philosophy. But things have never been quite what they might seem. We need initially to distinguish two senses of rhetoric both carried along in Hobbes’s train of thought; rhetoric as eloquent technique, from rhetoric as the persuasive dimension of language use as a whole. For clarity I will reserve Hobbes’s preferred term “eloquence” for the first specific sense, and “rhetoric” for the more general persuasive function of language.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Traditionally eloquence was regarded as a teachable art essential for public life and was conventionally seen as comprised of three genera: forensic or legal, demonstrative or epideictic (the speech-making of ritualistic public occasions such as funerals and weddings), and deliberative, the discourse of the political assembly. There was common ground to all three justifying the broad classification of rhetoric. Each drew on patterns of assumptions shared by an audience, and each involved some sort of combined appeal to what was thought to be honorable, right, or useful. Each was predicated on probability and a degree of uncertainty, that the world might be other than it appears and that people might respond to it in different ways; and each was aimed at generating a certain sort of reaction from the targeted audience, a verdict, a sense of edification or delight, a decision to act. Each did so by describing or depicting the world and its possibilities in ways appropriate to the desired ends of discourse.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The differences, however, were held to be equally considerable. Each genus could be seen, as Hobbes rendered Aristotle, as having its own proper time: “To the Demonstrative, the Present. To the Judiciall, the Past, and to the Deliberative, the time to come”. Forensic and deliberative eloquence were also associated with different institutional settings, the law court and assembly respectively, and each appealed to audiences in different capacities. Each had a different sense of decorum, and developed different constitutive rules and strategies for success within them. According to Aristotle, each also had a different end. Forensic eloquence concerned guilt or innocence, deliberative eloquence had its end in action. Epideictic eloquence did not fit very easily in this pattern, but generally it had come to be associated with inventive display, ceremony, celebration, and delight. The general awkwardness involved in the generic distinctions is not the point here. Rather, what the genera reinforced was the notion that there could be different sorts of eloquence, identifiable in part through differing rules of argument, conventions, and techniques. There were, then, distinct teachable skills or arts for eloquence in public life. Thus as a specification of rhetoric as persuasion we find the learnable rules suitable for the law court or assembly: Hobbes’s eloquence.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The association of rhetoric or eloquence with teaching was also traditionally very close: eloquence could be taught and as a means of conveying information about the world, it could be seen as a medium of teaching. Concomitantly, the association with public participation was marked. The arts of eloquence are only needed where people participate, have choices, where knowledge is probable and action important. The point common to all forms of rhetoric, the end of eloquence, was to achieve some victory over the contingent responses of people, usually a victory over an alternative view. There was a continuing sense that in the arts of eloquence lay the civic equivalents of the teachable and portable skills of warfare.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">When Hobbes wrote of eloquence it was usually this fairly specific image and this sort of claim that he seems to have had in mind. Eloquence sought to shape opinion and move men to action. That is, with the exception of his Dialogue between a philosopher and a lawyer, his concern was with deliberative eloquence, for this was about projecting an image of “the time to come” with potential action “Exhortation and Dehortation.” (Briefe, 41) It was heady, wayward, and destabilizing. It was rightly associated most with democracies, which, as he remarked in The Elements of Law, are little more than aristocracies of orators punctuated with the “temporary monarchy of one orator” (Elements, 2.2.5.120). He usually made allusion to specific groups of people, opinion-makers or the victims of opinion-making, priests, sectaries, lawyers, and “democratical gentlemen” much enamored with ancient rhetorical theories of participation and liberty (Behemoth, 1.39).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Above all, Hobbes usually claimed, eloquence was not philosophy. One was a constellation of tricks and turns effecting opinion and seeking power through controlling actions. It relied on tropes and figures appropriate to the passions of the audience, and it was noted for exploiting equivocal terms and using language metaphorically. The other sought truth through the right ordering of clearly defined propositions and properly used language. Philosophy was rational, certain, and universal; eloquence was passionate, doubtful, and particular. Eloquence involved persuasion; philosophy was communicated by teaching or demonstration. There was, he held, a mighty difference between teaching and persuading, the principal sign of which was controversy (Elements, 1.13 3).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Yet, as technique, eloquence was a moveable feast; it could be used for good if made a subsidiary of demonstration. Hobbes’s contrasts were very much aimed at undermining or restricting eloquence’s credibility. And although this went against the grand claims of classical and Renaissance rhetorical theory, it was in keeping with the drift of the educational reforms associated with near-contemporaries such as Peter Ramus (1515–1572). The gist of these may be captured in the diminished scope of the notion of ornamentation. Traditionally, eloquence had been about ornamentation in the double sense of ornamenting an argument and verbally arming a speaker. Ornatus meant properly equipped. The associations were very strongly of warfare: arguments were won, opposition was vanquished. The rhetorician, as Lorenzo Valla had put it, was a general deploying discursive forces. Such metaphors remain with us and Hobbes certainly employed them, sometimes in order to contrast victory with truth and to implicate eloquence in violence. He did this, for example, in Of Libertie and Necessitie (Libertie, 241), where he took delight in reworking Bishop Bramhall’s military metaphors to suggest that the arguments gathered against Leviathan were forces looking one way, marching another and fighting amongst themselves. During his day, however, eloquence was assuming its now familiar place, restricted to the business of ornamenting in the sense of coloring something that was independently expressible. In sum, a dual sense of ornamentation could give an unexamined impression that eloquence was socially destabilizing and intellectually derivative.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The serious invention of argument was done by philosophy. Geometry appealed as a paradigm of philosophy for Hobbes because it obliged inexorably. Accept the rules and with their proper application conclusions necessarily followed. There was, therefore, no need for persuasion, ornamentation, any appeal to the passions, or recourse to verbal manipulation; understanding and following the rules was enough. This tightly textured discourse could thus easily be transmitted socially and lead to cumulative certain knowledge. It was the finest example of the potential stability and clarity of language. For just these reasons, it was in a sense supremely undemocratic. Opinions were not of equal value; the teacher had a proper authority by virtue of being a master of what could be taught. Hobbes’s vision was idealized and extreme. Most recognizable forms of discourse in Hobbes’s day, arguably including much of mathematics, exhibited a need for eloquence, and so some rhetorical dimension can be seen as intrinsic to them. This has a consequence for understanding Hobbes despite his privileging the image of geometry.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the Ambiguous Legacy of Adaptation</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Two of Hobbes’s early works illustrate different aspects of his attitude toward eloquence—his stupendous translation of Thucydides’s Peloponnesian Wars, a work born of deep and unqualified admiration that will be discussed below, and his translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, a work he regarded as exceptional in a double sense, exceptionally fine and thus an exception to the Aristotelian norm. His Briefe of the Art of Rhetoric is, however, very different from his translation of Thucydides, which Hobbes determined to make as accurate as possible. It is much more of a creative paraphrase and appropriation, a sufficient act of conceptual translation to render it a Hobbesian imprimatur on antiquity.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Un-Hobbesed, Aristotle’s Rhetoric remains perhaps the most fertile and important study of rhetoric, and although, like all his surviving works, only in note form, it was clearly and implicitly an attempt to restore the balance upset by Plato’s hostility to eloquence, to which Hobbes was altogether more sympathetic. Aristotle’s was an attempt to give a dispassionate survey of the functions of rhetoric, its presuppositions and limitations, its principal types and the skills proper to them. He explored both the techniques of eloquence and rhetoric, the persuasive dimension of language, itself necessary because it traded in probabilities and the contingencies of audience reaction.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">There are two main features of Hobbes’s Briefe. First is the deletion of detail. He omitted points irrelevant to English and subtle variations on themes, but secondly he ignored Aristotle’s discussion of the differences between the more logically certain dialectic and rhetoric, constrained as it is by the probable. He was then able to massage, as it were, Aristotle’s necessarily creative and contingent art into something closer to a teachable adjunct to philosophical demonstration. Insofar as eloquence was legitimate it had to be made to look more like philosophy and so come under its authority. In one sense, Hobbes’s Aristotle is Platonized, made to conform to Plato’s project of philosophical control. In another, it is made consistent with the diminished status of rhetoric in Hobbes’s own day. Hobbes’s Aristotle is a caged bird.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">His treatment of Aristotle’s central rhetorical concept of the enthymeme captures the transformation. Aristotle had argued that the enthymeme in rhetoric is analogous to the syllogism in philosophy. Each was a tripartite argumentative structure, a building block of discourse. Whereas, however, the syllogism provided a certain conclusion from its major and minor premises and might not have anything to do with genuine experience, the enthymeme was only a probable conclusion, often in the form of an injunction, derived from shared assumptions from experience. Having omitted Aristotle’s preliminary discussion of the differences between dialectic and rhetoric, Hobbes could proceed to regard the enthymeme as ultimately demonstrable. It was only “a short Syllogisme; out of which are left as superfluous, that which is supposed to be necessarily understood by the hearer; to avoid prolixity, and not to consume the time of publique businesse needlessly” (Briefe, 40). Thus theoretically a syllogism should be able to substitute for an enthymeme, which might be pithy but imperfect. Similarly, an “example” in rhetoric is a short (logical) induction. In effect, Aristotle’s Rhetoric came close to being good, that is philosophically compatible, eloquence. In the last analysis, “a Logician … would make the best Rhetorician” (Briefe, 39).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The uncertain status of rhetoric is captured in the definition Hobbes gives: “Rhetorique, is that faculty, by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beleefe in the hearer. Of those things that beget beleefe: some require not the helpe of Art; such as Witnesses, … and the like, which wee invent not, but make use of; and some require Art, and are invented by us” (Briefe, 40). Such a definition is not unduly problematic in the context of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, as it was but a preliminary to a discussion that embraced rhetoric and the specific rules of eloquence. For Hobbes and many of his generation, however, the more intellectually creative and general aspects of rhetoric had been reassigned to philosophy. So, Hobbes’s definition exemplifies early modern attempts to circumscribe rhetoric to ornamentation and to see it as a portable subordinate skill, but it does not do so securely. Its identification as a faculty about our capacity to make others believe us on any subject, see things as we do, spoke more of rhetoric than eloquence and opened the door to what Hobbes would formally exclude—the use of witnesses—and what he did not discuss—the process of describing the world, picturing a situation that is itself persuasive or prepares the ground for persuasion.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">These had been central notions for Aristotle and important for his claim that discourse should appear to be natural. Sharing presuppositions with an audience is intrinsic to the persuasive process as a whole. Hobbes’s rendition of Aristotle’s concern with language was restricted to what graces a discourse (Briefe, 115). The choice between terms, the whole problem of rhetorical redescription, was reduced by him only to a matter of balance. The problem of rhetorical redescription, its potential for restructuring whole visions of the world, had been at the heart of the more inflated claims for the rhetorician’s power and the deep suspicion that, as a corollary, was directed at eloquence. This was an issue that was to assume considerable significance for Hobbes. In the Briefe, however, the whole problem of redescription, or paradiastole, is reduced to a simple bland Polonian injunction: the chosen expression must be neither above nor below the thing signified (Briefe, 108). For such advice to be securely founded, there must be some access to the thing signified independent of discourse, a somewhat un-Hobbesian possibility. Hobbes sets down, for example, some of Aristotle’s guidelines for effective metaphorical redescription but, as John Harwood notes, omits Aristotle’s vital point that metaphor, in fact the most radical form of paradiastole, cannot be taught (Briefe, 109, 109 n).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The consequence of all this was to sustain in Hobbes’s later philosophy and accounts of eloquence a degree of ambiguity that has also left its mark on modern scholarship. In a number of works he attempted to write philosophy without eloquence, but because the distinction between eloquence and rhetoric was unstable, his philosophy can still be seen as having a rhetorical dimension. In Leviathan he expressed his distaste for eloquence, yet formally places rhetoric next to logic with both under the auspices of philosophy (Leviathan, 9.61). This situation was exacerbated by Hobbes’s doctrine that language could be seen as a form of action in the world, the fundamental means of processing impressions and getting others to act in concert with us (Elements, 1.13). As, in fact, he put it in the Briefe, without warrant from Aristotle’s text, “the end of Rhetorique is victory; which consists in having gotten beleefe” (Briefe, 41, 41 n). His understanding, to use a modern linguistic term, was of language as pragmatics; he adhered to a rhetorical understanding of language and its power despite his hostility to eloquence.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">This meant that how the world was presented in language assumed a far greater significance for Hobbes than it would have done to others who did believe that, for example, there was a direct access to truth against which language could be measured for deviance. Thus for Hobbes, in a preconditional or inescapable sense we all operate in the world on opinions shaped by and expressed in language, we act on “beleefe”; but he also used “opinion” as a term referring to ill-founded, usually eloquence-induced belief. In De cive, for example, a discussion of the internal causes of the collapse of government is a catalog of opinions and beliefs he considered seditious and erroneous. The argument is also prefaced with a general statement about action rendering it consistent with the movement of natural bodies. There must be a disposition internal to the actor or object, an external agent, and the action itself (De cive, 12). Since men are internally disposed to wayward behavior, the propagation or teaching of specific opinions causes them to believe certain things on which they act to the dissolution of the commonwealth. This, at one level, as we will see, is a very Thucydidean view of causation, not least because Hobbes had in mind the manipulation and misplacement of fears. It is also consistent with Hobbes’s seeing rhetoric as, in the broadest sense, a branch of philosophy (Leviathan, 9.61).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Nevertheless, in the context of Hobbes’s epistemology and ontology his whole argument might equally be called opinion designed to induce a firmer belief in obedience and a just fear of the sovereign. Such terms, however, are characteristically reserved for the powers of deliberative eloquence. In the word “opinion” is captured the compound sense of rhetoric/eloquence. As Quentin Skinner has pointed out, Hobbes’s whole state of nature can be seen as a condition of redescriptive anarchy, or radical paradiastole (Skinner 1996, 338–42). We all play Humpty-Dumpty because we think we are in charge of our own words, we describe anything as we wish, the paradox being—and it is an expression of Hobbes’s paradox of freedom—that we can persuade no one. In effect, we project private languages, marks that are never properly systems of public signs. Leaving the state of nature is opting for a linguistic order, creating a sovereign as an arbiter of meanings, of paradiastole and its limits. It is, I think, not too fanciful an extrapolation of the figure of the natural condition to see it as an exposé of the Olympian claims for rhetoric’s creative powers to which the sovereign is the only response as the font and arbiter of eloquence.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Hobbes’s equivocation with respect to rhetoric and eloquence is important in a number of ways. First, it made it easy for him to claim that eloquence and philosophy can be consistent with each other (Leviathan, “Review and Conclusion,” 483–84), which presupposes that they are in fact separate and indeed potentially in conflict. This is also a clear impression given in Leviathan, in which the almost arithmetically pure image of philosophy implies an opposition to eloquence: it is rhetoric misliked, a demonized means of delineating science. Conversely, he had held in the Briefe that the logician is the best rhetorician, rhetoric a portable means to an end, its enthymemes fundamentally respectable syllogisms, its examples philosophical inductions. Consistently with this, he would in Leviathan formally classify rhetoric next to logic as a branch of philosophy. This is altogether stronger than saying that, if well handled, rhetoric and philosophy can be made consistent with one another.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Second, the consequence for modern scholars, especially noting the color and passion of his style, his urgent exhortations, his mastery of metaphor and the tropes of eloquence, has been to see rhetoric everywhere, explaining all. But it is rhetoric in, of, and opposed to philosophy depending on context and the sense that seems most evident. Hence it provides no single key or solid foundation for understanding what attention to Hobbes as a plain philosopher has also failed to establish.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Rhetoric and History</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The unstable ubiquity of rhetoric is further shown if we turn to its other semantic neighbors, history and poetry. Rhetoric, as Hobbes argued in the Briefe, is very much a matter of finding the right examples, his short inductions. “Proofes, are in Rhetorique, either Examples, or Enthymemes” (Briefe, 40). And from the time of Aristotle, history was effectively a branch of rhetoric because it provided the principal source of examples. It was, to use Johann Vosius’s famous summary expression, “philosophy teaching by example.” Hence the importance Hobbes attached to Thucydides’s History, which he commended and defended as eloquence of the written word for the reader to meditate upon (History, xxiii). It exemplified the powers of rhetoric and the difficulties of deliberation in a democracy. To extrapolate with the aid of what Hobbes made of Aristotle: Thucydides did not need to lecture on the matter, because the examples were an immediate and powerful form of proof. Hobbes had not needed to provide a lecture on the matter, either, because in presenting the History, he was not engaging in what he would call the arts of eloquence, but offering what did not require “the helpe of Art.” He was proffering “Witnesses, Evidences, and the like, which we invent not, but make use of” (Briefe, 40). Thucydides was then a sort of witness, but had, somewhat awkwardly for Hobbes, himself been a creative one.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Thucydides’s History had drawn attention to the distinctive power of deliberative eloquence in the Athenian Assembly. He used set speeches to explain changes of opinion and courses of action. Such highly crafted exhibitions of eloquence did not purport to be literal accounts of what had actually been said on any given occasion; they were rather hypothetical and imaginative accounts of how the world and its possibilities would have needed to have been presented to an audience to explain its later conduct. This pivotal explanatory device was not lost on Hobbes. Thucydides, he remarked, puts us in the assembly by his own great skill so that we can understand the issues of deliberation. He had what, indeed, is a feature of Hobbes’s own style: a capacity to create a sense of immediacy. Thucydides thus wrote history that could act as an extension of our own experience, allowing us to draw out lessons for ourselves “and be able to trace the drifts and counsels of the actors to their seat” (History, vi). Indeed, as Gabriella Slomp has recently argued, there was much in Thucydides that Hobbes found convincing and that shines through in his translation. Most important is what Slomp calls the “controlled fear” seen as the cornerstone of peace. Obliterated or untrammeled fear proves equally disastrous, and eloquence exploits it. Hobbes would never depart from this assessment. That the whole war ended in disaster for Athens, that her conduct had been wayward, at times foolish, at others unjust, was explicable in terms of eloquence; and this is not anything that required a separate lecture, either from Thucydides or his translator. The facts and the chief witness, he would persuade us, speak for themselves.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Yet this is more problematic than it might seem. Hobbes’s own translation sought to be powerful and immediate; the use of modern political terms such as “state” for polis brought Thucydides into the present, and Hobbes introduced his main witness with an eloquently structured essay on his life and authoritative status (Skinner 1996, 244). This could hardly have been coincidental. It is clear that by putting the translation on the market after it “had lay long by me” (History, vii), Hobbes was attempting to help extend the experience of his countrymen, not least with respect to the potentialities of eloquence. He was fighting fire with Greek fire. The year of publication was singularly appropriate. In 1629 Charles’s relationships with his Parliament were disintegrating in acrimony, distrust, and above all mutual fear; eloquent opposition presented as counsel would push him in directions he did not like and it was certainly possible for the prejudiced eye to see the Parliament as some sort of hostile and unruly democratic assembly.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Much later in Leviathan Hobbes would express a view seemingly consistent with his earlier but compromised theory of history by remarking that in “good History, the Judgment must be eminent; because the goodnesse consisteth, in the Method, in the Truth, and in the Choyse of the actions that are most profitable to be known. Fancy has no place but only in adorning the stile” (Leviathan, 8.51). I will return to this comment in the context of Hobbes’s understanding of poetry, but meanwhile it is evident that the notion of rhetoric is made very difficult by its ambivalent relationship to history that can be included in rhetoric (a profitable choice of actions and exemplary proofs) and excluded from any art of eloquence (it is not invented and fancy finds no place). But as we will see, the evocation of a concept of fancy will not in the end help matters.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Given the slippage between rhetoric, philosophy, and eloquence, one cannot expect the relationship between history and philosophy to be as simple as first meets the eye. In its most beguilingly obvious formulation, history was seen by Hobbes and many others as a register of facts from which we might learn. These might be facts about nature or humanity. History itself was not philosophy, neither in certainty nor scope, though it might provide a reservoir of examples the philosopher might use. At the same time, history had been seen as a branch of rhetoric, or more precisely a resource for different forms of eloquence. A historian like Thucydides was a rhetorician, so the status of history as a form of discourse was uncertainly located between philosophy and rhetoric. In many ways, Hobbes’s views on history were conventional and express a widespread double ambivalence much explored in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and still with us. On the one hand, history is by turns claimed to be autonomous and subordinate to other moral ends. On the other, history is either the events of the past, Hobbes’s register of fact, or it is what historians have done with this register by selecting, describing, accounting for, and analyzing the evidence they have. It is in this latter process that any mere register of facts is transformed into something that might be construed as philosophy, rhetoric, or both.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Not surprisingly Hobbes’s own forays into history have a variable status within the unstable modality of his own intellectual world. If one rejects Hobbes’s claim that there can be artless evidence, just the presentation of fact, it is easy to see a rhetorical dimension to history, but even if one accepts the literal Hobbesian doctrine of history as a register of fact, history may still easily be construed as rhetoric as Hobbes understood it. This accounts, for example, for Hobbes’s highly ambivalent attitude to the inheritance of antiquity. Much as he loved its poetry and delighted in its languages, knowledge of it had been dearly bought. Its rhetorical potential for destabilization was unparalleled; antique authors had been given great authority and the recorded events of Greece and Rome were at once of the past and dangerously in the present as exempla of misunderstood liberty. So, we may say, for Hobbes, Thucydides had been among the few to glean the right rhetorical proof from history. Although Hobbes did not regard his own historical writings as eloquence, they were all examples and so rhetorical proofs. The Historia ecclesiastica was a proof of clerical corruption and an example of what can happen to any church and any religion when it is forsaken by its priests. The Historical Narration Concerning Heresy was a proof of the dangers of ancient philosophy contaminating early Christianity and an example of how a word becomes a political weapon. And that word is an example also of Hobbes’s attempts to purge the resources of eloquence. In the end we are entitled to suspect something altogether more specific behind the formal subordination of history to philosophy. Histories, to put the matter a trifle unfairly, were apt to disagree with Hobbes’s philosophical conclusions; one suspects that had they all been Thucydides, his image of Clio would have been considerably more elevated.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">History, Rhetoric, and Philosophy in Behemoth</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Behemoth, however, can be taken as perhaps the most instructive case of the problems in disengaging rhetoric, history, and philosophy from each other. Literally, Hobbes did not call it a history nor give it its familiar title. A single narrative history did not suit Hobbes’s purposes, but a pirated edition was published as a history of the civil wars just after his death. It comprises four dialogues between A and B. Throughout, it is the function of B to ask questions and accept the answers of A. The first two dialogues deal with the development of the civil war; the final dialogues, “drawn out of Mr. Heath’s Chronicle” (Behemoth, dedication to Lord Arlington), comprise an epitome of the war but are at one with the rest of the work. As a whole, Behemoth was a cautionary tale of civil disintegration and of the power of opinion, of the combustible nature of error conjoined with ambition and fear; as such, it exhibits conventional and long-standing beliefs that history should be relevant and instructive.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">If “The Discourse on the Beginning of Tacitus” (Three Discourses) was by Hobbes, it had a generally similar point: to commend the relevance of Tacitus’s analysis of the development of Augustan Rome from the dregs of the Republic. But the salutatory lessons had been more dispersed and urbanely presented by the young Thomas than those found in the histories of the old Hobbes. It is curious that in the aftermath of civil war, a Tacitean image of politics with its characteristic topoi of interest, fear, and corruption is not more evident than it is in Behemoth. A brief reference to Augustus (Behemoth, 3.115) might suggest a rough parallel with Cromwell, but Hobbes makes nothing of it. Perhaps Hobbes had ingested too well his own doctrines on the dangers of ancient models. It is more likely that such a pattern of extraneous allusion might, to use Hobbesian imagery from a different context, call up spirits difficult to control in the interests of the present fragile regime (see “The Poet and the Rhetor” in this chapter). Be this as it may, because of his close attention to social insecurity and causation, Behemoth is like Hobbes’s translation of the work of Thucydides, “the most politick historiographer that ever wrote.” And Hobbes clearly wanted Behemoth printed for much the same reason as he made his translation public. Each work was significant evidence of the language-induced precariousness of civilization. To recall, Hobbes had particularly commended Thucydides for his capacity to make the past immediate, a sort of extension of our own experience, thus rendering exhortatory lectures about it supererogatory. And, similarly suggesting that history is a sort of register of communal memory, he wrote in the preface to Behemoth, “There can be nothing more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war” (Behemoth, dedication to Lord Arlington).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The style of Behemoth is unelaborate, appropriate to the presentation of the rhetorical proofs of evidences and witnesses (Briefe, 40). Hobbes resiliently resists the imaginative possibilities the device of a dialogue put at his disposal. A and B are more austerely scholastic; they are author functions used simply to get the issues clear and the evidence down. Despite this, Behemoth is nevertheless not a bare register of facts and if an exercise in history, it is not history as Hobbes’s conception of history would seem to require it to be. It is partially in narrative form, but it narrates different themes according to the questions that B asks A. In Leviathan Hobbes had claimed that history requires the predominance of judgment, by which he meant discrimination and discretion. Although this may be a feature of Behemoth, the work is conspicuously marked by judgment in the different sense of bringing down moral verdicts upon the actors. These occur sometimes without any show of evidence, as when B remarks “I have seldom heard the word justice occur in their sermons” (Behemoth, 2.63). More often they arise plausibly in the narrative, not principally because the facts have been selected but because of Hobbes’s own preparatory choice of descriptive language concerning those involved.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Consider the following on the suspicions generated by Charles I’s queen Henrietta-Maria: “B. Strange injustice! The Queen was a catholic by profession, and therefore could not but endeavour to do the Catholics all the good she could: she had not else been truly that which she professed to be. But it seems they [unspecified enemies of the king] meant to force her to hypocrisy, being hypocrites themselves. Can any man think it a crime in a devout lady, of what sect soever, to seek the favour and benediction of that Church whereof she is a member?” (Behemoth, 2.61). Hobbes is here pleading a case before the “bar of history,” a metaphorical slide into forensic eloquence. Again, in more detail, the very character of Thomas Wentworth, earl of Strafford, as described by Hobbes makes the charges against him questionable and in need of explanation (Behemoth, 2.65). Such a man was surely innocent. Similarly, in the third and fourth dialogues, the chronicle materials are redescribed to reinforce the instructive themes: “B. What silly things are the common sort of people, to be cozened as they were so grossly! A. What sort of people, as to this matter, are not of the common sort? The craftiest knaves of all the Rump [Parliament] were no wiser than the rest.… For the most of them did believe that the same things which they imposed upon the generality, were just and reasonable.” We are back with the etiological centrality of belief and opinion (Behemoth, 4.158; compare Leviathan, 30.233). This delusion was especially marked, A continues, in those who had learning whose negative ideas on monarchy had been taken from “Cicero … and other politicians of Rome, and Aristotle of Athens, who seldom speak of kings but as of wolves” (Behemoth, 4.158). The counterpoint between A and B is more than a means of rehearsing Hobbes’s hostility to Aristotle and Cicero. It becomes a mechanism for presenting a typically provoking paradox about who really are the common people, who are guilty. In short, if we look for an example of what Hobbes calls history, it comes within the ambit of what he had understood rhetoric to be and for this it does not need to be more than occasionally eloquent.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">More than this, however, what has attracted scholars to Behemoth as history is its strong sense of causation, which in Hobbesian terms makes the history as much philosophical exemplification as it is rhetorical eloquence. And the causative structure is much as it had been set down in De cive: inherent disposition in conjunction with external force causes a specific reaction or form of behavior. The narrative sections provide accounts of the behavior described in such a way as to make plausible the inferences of dispositions and external pressures upon them. This is Hobbes moving from known effects to hypothesized causes in a way that makes the whole work philosophy, the whole civil war a fit subject for a resoluto-compositive method. Most of this mass of hypothesized causation, we should hardly be surprised, is more specifically a matter of dubious motivation and opinion or belief leading to disaster and injustice. This is illustrated simply enough from the passage just quoted on the Rump Parliament. B’s innocent prejudice about the common people becomes an explanation; paradoxically we are all potentially common people in this way, especially the uncommonly well educated from the universities. Damage to the monarchy and confusion about what really is justice had been brought about by exposure to dangerous beliefs inherited from antiquity. It was not, concludes A, lack of wit that made people “silly things.” You will not persuade “a subtle lawyer,” an “eloquent orator,” or a “ravishing poet,—all three types sat in the Parliament—that he has no wit. What such men lacked “was the knowledge of the causes and grounds upon which one person has a right to govern, and the rest an obligation to obey.” There was a “want of the science of justice” (Behemoth, 4.159–60).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Behemoth can be seen, then, as a set of philosophical dialogues about the power of eloquence working on ambitions and fears and at the same time as a persuasive work to teach the modern, Hobbesian science of justice. Even without eloquence, philosophy and rhetoric are two dimensions of the same historical discourse. Here, incidentally, emerges another parallel with Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides. Just as the translation put before English readers is an image of Athens as a horrible warning, so in occasional outbursts that had marked Hobbes’s more formal political theories, the authority of antiquity is seen as a cause of philosophical and civic confusion. In this way, albeit sporadically, Behemoth sided very clearly in the rhetorical battle between ancients and moderns. Despite, then, Hobbes’s assertive modal demarcations, Behemoth’s appearance of being driven by causal analysis does not stop its also being rhetoric and history. The problem with Hobbes’s rhetoric, eloquence, and history lies less with his practice than with the incoherence of his delineations of the intellectual world, which his practice could only exhibit.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Rhetoric to the Rescue of Public Philosophy?</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Excepting the translation of Thucydides, Hobbes’s essays on human history are all late works and so seem to confound the old view of a simple linear development away from Renaissance humanism toward modern science. They also give some support to the notion that Hobbes, having rejected rhetoric for science in his relative youth, returned to it. This apparent trajectory has been explained in different ways in important studies by David Johnston and Quentin Skinner. Johnston has emphasized the austerity of The Elements of Law, which was intended for manuscript circulation among a small, scientifically literate audience, and how by contrast Leviathan is dramatically rhetorical, a work designed for a public that could not live by science alone. Johnston is apt to use rhetoric in a very general sense, focusing on the end of persuasion rather than on the specifics covered by eloquence. Skinner has explored in detail Hobbes’s understanding of eloquence and his considered use of its tropes and figures, especially in Leviathan. His conclusion is that Hobbes came to believe that it was not possible to convince men by science alone; eloquence was a necessary evil of packaging. The optimism coming with the discovery of science was worn away to be replaced by a pessimism that took Hobbes back to a reliance on the Renaissance and ancient art of eloquence.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">There can be no doubt that Hobbes could think he had failed to get his science across to those who needed it. In Behemoth the question is asked why men cannot be taught “the science of just and unjust as divers other sciences have been taught from true principles and evident demonstration; and much more easily than any of those preachers and democratical gentlemen could teach rebellion and treason” (Behemoth, 1.39). To which it is bleakly replied, “But who can teach what none have learned? Or, if any man have been so singular, as to have studied the science of justice and equity; how can he teach it safely, when it is against the interest of those that are in possession of the power to hurt him?” (Behemoth, 1.39). From what I have argued, it should be clear that Johnston and Skinner focus on complementary and overlapping aspects of the rhetoric/eloquence problem in Hobbes, and so come to differing conclusions. But rhetorical proofs, historical examples, are found even in The Elements of Law and De cive, his most scientific works on politics. And The Elements of Law is additionally noteworthy for a sustained metaphor. In the form of a 25-line catechism, Hobbes likened the passions to an imagined race in which there is no other goal than “being foremost” (Elements, 1.9.21). It ends with the lines, “Continually to be outdone is misery. Continually to out-go the next before, is felicity. And to forsake the course, is to die.”</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The notions of rhetoric and eloquence, especially in their relationships to history as well as philosophy, may be too slippery to allow any neat movement through Hobbes’s stages of development. The quotation from Behemoth, however, might superficially allow a further possibility, that the use of eloquence is tied to an increasing sense of persecution. Such a neo-Straussian hypothesis may run thus: Hobbes tried to teach science (Elements and De cive), feared persecution, so dressed his lessons in a coating of eloquence to make them acceptable (Leviathan). Uneloquent Behemoth was itself publicly unacceptable, at least so Charles II feared, and Hobbes dutifully did not publish it. Such a theory, however, begs the question of whether there is any clear-cut change. If in the past Leviathan has been rendered too scientific, there is danger now in paying the same compliment to The Elements of Law in order to illustrate how rhetorical Leviathan really is! A persecution hypothesis seems doubly implausible in a way that neither the Johnston nor Skinner theses is. The sense, and it was real enough, of persecution comes after and largely in response to the most eloquent of Hobbes’s political works, Leviathan, which then had some of its tricks of eloquence removed when Hobbes translated it into Latin. As I have sought to indicate, Behemoth may not be marked by a high and obvious eloquent stylistic adornment but it certainly has a rhetorical dimension and pretty much as Hobbes’s Briefe would have understood it: it is a use of evidences for a clearly persuasive end, to achieve a victory for the king and for peace in “having gotten beleefe” about immediate history (Briefe, 41).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">We are left, I think, with the following incomplete and untidy picture: Hobbes did alter his style, his art, depending on his sense of audience, be it a semiprivate manuscript-reading one, a broad and unknown public one, an English- or a Latin-reading one. He did also claim to have lost faith in the possibility of teaching justice and equity by science alone. But he also carried with him ambivalences and confusions in his understanding of rhetoric to make any clear pattern of linear change for any single reason difficult and unnecessary to sustain. It may be better to see his works marked more by shifting emphases between inadequately distinguished dimensions of discourse than to see such dimensions as separate and assignable to periods of development. On this score it might also be noted that when Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he had hardly written anything, excepting translations intended to be published in English, so secure points of comparison for shifts in an English public style are difficult to find.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The Problem of Poetry</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Hobbes also carried with him to the end a love of Homer to match his affection for Thucydides, and his appreciation of poetry adds the final complicating dimension to his understanding of rhetoric. As I have suggested, Hobbes lived in a world in which the intellectual respectability of rhetoric was under question and in which it was increasingly reduced to a moveable art of elaboration (see “Rhetoric, Eloquence, and Philosophy” in this chapter). In this way, it might seem that effectively the last refuge for rhetoric was within poetry. A great deal has been written on the self-conscious adaptation of rhetoric to poetry, especially among metaphysical poets whose works were often self-contained exercises in argumentative eloquence and metaphorical ingenuity. Marvell’s exquisite “To His Coy Mistress” is in this sense an elaborate enthymeme. But the poet’s function, philologically related to that of the rhetor, was both an intellectually and religiously august one. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century terms there was nothing unduly pretentious in claiming that the rhetor or the poet might vie with the philosopher or the historian as an arbiter of truth. Sir Philip Sidney had made the case at length. As we might expect, given the insecure distinctions within Hobbes’s intellectual conspectus of the world, his work is something of a microcosm of the fluid status of poetry, at once distinct but not separate from its surroundings. An obvious identity, it is almost impossible to contain it within the contours of a map. Poetry was more than a form to which other intellectual pursuits such as religious devotion, husbandry, or philosophy might shape themselves, but less than an autonomous intellectual perspective on the world like theology or law or geometry; the sense of the aesthetic was always alchemically mixed with the moral.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">When Hobbes provided his Briefe of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he transposed some material from the Poetics, and because so much of the Rhetoric is concerned with style, meter, ornamentation, and metaphor and is illustrated from poets such as Homer (e.g., Briefe, 115–16), the dividing line between poetry and rhetoric can be most uncertain. Hobbes’s early Latin poem De mirabilibus pecci (c. 1636) is extraordinarily rich and metaphorically resonant. It is at once a symbolic country house poem, most famously exemplified by Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” and an elaborate epideictic celebration of the Cavendish heartland of the Peak district of Derbyshire. Full of allusion to classical poets, it assimilated Derbyshire to the ancient Mediterranean, and by implication bestowed a mythic heroic significance on the Cavendish family, not without wit and exploitation of the scatalogical potential suggested by the Peak district. In addition, it carried a dark undercurrent of concern about the transience of life and fame and the corruption of achievement and purity. It has proven largely resistant to effective translation, but seems to have been much appreciated during the seventeenth century, though not, it seems, by Hobbes. Much later, his Historia ecclesiastica, which has an undeniably direct and typical anticlerical deliberative force, also took verse form, even though Hobbes called it history. Late in life he translated Homer, which involved a poetic creativity as much as poetic replication. Shortly before Hobbes died he wrote a three-stanza love poem that John Aubrey quotes in full in his “Life.” It begins:</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">and ends</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Throughout his life poetry was by no means incidental to Hobbes, but, being Hobbes, it was important to theorize about what he loved. His ideas on the nature of poetry have commonly been held to be part of the shift toward an ordered Augustan sensibility and so in their own terms are important. They are set down most clearly in The Answer to the Preface before Gondibert. In this we see the relationships between rhetoric and philosophy are further complicated by Hobbes’s understanding of the poetic imagination.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The Answer is formally a thanks and address to Hobbes’s friend Sir William Davenant (1606–1668) and a compliment to his epic poem Gondibert, which would be left unfinished because its author apparently got bored with the enterprise. This might seem to make Hobbes’s flattering tribute fall flat on its face, especially as Davenant’s own judgment to stop rather than Hobbes’s encouragement to finish has been the one commended ever since. While Davenant would turn more successfully to opera, Hobbes would be tetchily embarrassed by his effusive praise of what contemporaries considered execrable verse. Hobbes’s Answer is an urbane, polished piece, marked by the disingenuous modesty characteristic of works written with one eye on the addressee and the other on the public world. It was effectively a letter unlike Hobbes’s more genuinely private correspondence. It was written around the same time that Hobbes was writing Leviathan, and deployed, though somewhat differently, some of the same conceptual distinctions. Care, however, is needed in making direct comparisons, for as Miriam Reik has remarked, the Answer had no pretensions to being a piece of formal philosophy.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The Answer begins by the author’s disclaiming any pretension to poetic capacity, and then through the medium of a flattering address specifies the roles and qualities of poetry for the wider public. “I never yet saw poem,” Hobbes exclaims, “that had so much shape of art, health of morality, and vigour and beauty of expression, as this of yours.” The only thing stopping it becoming as renowned as the Iliad or Aeneid is that these were written in immutable languages, a fate unlikely for any modern tongue (Answer, 456). His hyperbolic assessment, and the mirth it would generate among Restoration wits, is not the point. Rather, the question is what for Hobbes constituted poetry, good poetry, and how well this fits with his adjacent ideas of rhetoric, philosophy, and history.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Initially we find a firm distinction between philosophy and poetry, the former concerned with natural causes, the latter with human manners (Answer, 445). This is at one with what was being developed in Leviathan, neither poetry nor history is found in the table of sciences (Leviathan, 9). It is, however, rather unlike Hobbes to make such distinction in terms of subject matter. Poetry is then obscurely delineated from prose. There are three main types of poetry (heroic, scommatic, pastoral) and three structural forms (narrative, dramatic, comic). Not everything in verse form is poetry, sonnets and epigrams being but parts of a poem (Answer, 444). Leviathan, which after all has bigger fish to catch, is altogether more brisk, referring only to epic, sonnets, and epigrams exemplifying poetry. In neither work was Hobbes much interested in poetic taxonomy. In the Answer his focus was more on establishing the qualities and responsibilities of the office of the poet, especially the epic poet, through reference to the status of the ancient poet; and it is this that allowed him to develop a subtheme on the misuse of language in the present. We are back with the problem of eloquence very much more to the fore in Leviathan.</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The Poet and the Rhetor</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The result is to obscure the initially posited relationships between poetry, philosophy, and rhetoric. Poetry must exhibit decorum, treat its subject matter appropriately. There is no sense of untrammeled imaginative license. Singularity mars a work, though variety and novelty of imagery are to be commended (Answer, 453). Under such constraints, this is hardly the sense of originality we have now, but there is certainly some scope for creative figuration. Unnecessary ingenuity, however, to overcome purely self-inflicted “unprofitable difficulties, is great imprudence,” as when poets make their lines conform to a physical shape (Answer, 446–47). Here there is a clear dismissal of the pattern poem, and probably George Herbert’s development of it, one of the more baroque fancies of metaphysical poetry. Hence Hobbes’s admiration for Gondibert being written relentlessly in lines of 10 syllables. Such criteria of excellence as decorum, invention, and rhythm deriving from the purpose of poetry are supremely illustrated by Davenant’s work. The aim, specifically of the epic, is to celebrate, delight, and teach or adorn virtue by the presentation of exemplary figures. Such an understanding would lead Hobbes to sum up the virtues of epic in one word, discretion, consisting in the good order of all parts to the poet’s design. In such commendation of sober restraint we can see that there has been some sense in placing Hobbes with one foot on the road to Augustan theory, and, moreover, even some warrant for making him a figure of mechanical reductionism. More to the immediate point, however, the Hobbesian understanding of good poetry makes it little different from demonstrative eloquence, the celebratory display for the delight or edification of an audience and always appropriate to the subject matter; the funeral oration restrained by regret, the wedding speech or epithamalion exuberant with anticipation.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The coincidence of poetry and some forms of eloquence is reinforced by Hobbes’s deliberate evocations of the role of the poet in ancient Greece. Poets were effectively teachers, men of divine and spiritual authority (Answer, 448). It was from the authority of the poet that the claims of the rhetor were derived, becoming self-proclaimed teachers of virtue and magicians of language. Hobbes does not make explicit the historical connection between the spiritual authority of the poet and the magic of the rhetor, but he does draw on the familiar association of magic and rhetoric that had been with him for a long time. In The Elements of Law he had referred to rhetoric without judgment as similar to “the witchcraft of Medea, to cut the commonwealth in pieces” (Elements, 2.9.15.178). In the Answer he evokes the ancient similitude once more and turns it in a typically Hobbesian way against the dangerous eloquence of the present. In what appears to be an allusion either to Reginald Scot’s The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584) or Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, Hobbes comments on the danger sometimes to be feared from lack of verbal skill. Incompetent conjurers “mistaking the rites and ceremoneous points of their art, call up such spirits, as they cannot at their pleasure allay again; by whom storms are raised, that overthrow buildings, and are the cause of miserable wrecks at sea. Unskillful divines do oftentimes the like; for when they call unreasonably for zeal, there appears a spirit of cruelty … instead of reformation, tumult … Whereas in the heathen poets … there are none of those indiscretions to be found, that tended to the subversion, or disturbance of the commonwealth” (Answer, 448). Leviathan too would unfavorably compare the spiritual authority of the Christian priest with the heathen; the topos of magic would be used extensively as means of satirizing the Catholic Church and its abuse of priestly office (Leviathan, 47). In the Answer, however, Hobbes returns immediately to what it is appropriate for a Christian poet to use as ornamentation, rather than trying to speak through pure inspiration “like a bagpipe” (Answer, 448).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Philosophy and the Poetic Imagination</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Poetry, as it represents the human world, must be grounded in experience and this we have through memory. “For memory is the world, though not really, yet so as in a looking-glass, in which the judgment, … busieth herself in a grave and rigid examination of all the parts of nature … registering … causes, uses, differences, resemblances” (Answer, 449). Two things are important about this. First, Hobbes accepted that a sense of poetic plausibility is culturally variant and so he was far less rigid in his understanding of decorum than one might initially think (Reik, 140: Prokhovnik, 94). Newcastle would put the point simply and powerfully: even a word like “white” will conjure up different patterns of association and so provoke different reactions depending on education, experience, and disposition. It will not mean quite the same thing to a gallant who will think of a lady and a pious man who will imagine a surplice and soon be about his prayers with “holly Eiaculations” (Cavendish, 82; compare Elements, 1.5.2).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Secondly, however, this is clearly to suggest that judgment embraces philosophy. As Reik correctly insists, the vocabulary of fancy, imagination, and wit was unstable during the seventeenth century and varied according to context in Hobbes’s own arguments (Reik, 136–38). Hobbes postulated relationships between memory and fancy (imagination) in chapter 2 of Leviathan. Imagination, which the Greeks called fancy, is decaying sense; memory is effectively the same thing. In the “Review and Conclusion,” however, fancy and judgment are taken as complementary, being used “but by turns” (Leviathan, review and conclusion, 483). The Answer, however, suggests a sort of continuum, of memory, the looking glass of reality, judgment, and then fancy. Given the serious responsibilities of poetry, it must be grounded in judgment, “whereby the fancy, when any work of art is to be performed, finds her materials to hand and prepared for use” (Answer, 449).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Art can be taken in two senses here—as specifically referring only to the arts, such as poetry and painting, which one would expect from the immediate context; or, as artifice, to any form of human activity, thus covering poetry and philosophy, architecture, mapmaking, and engine-building. If art is taken specifically, there is an incipient contradiction with the initial contrast between poetry and philosophy; for, to repeat, poetry must build on judgment and that can be philosophical. If taken more generally, fancy is not being used as a defining quality of poetry at all, but in the preconditional sense given early in Leviathan. Yet Hobbes writes immediately in the Answer of the celerity of fancy, a phrase also cropping up in Leviathan (Leviathan, “Review and Conclusion,” 483), consisting largely of “copious imagery discreetly ordered … which most men under the name of philosophy have a glimpse of.” The emphasis on imagery associates fancy strongly with poetry, while men’s seeing fancy under the heading or name of philosophy indicates something more general and far more primordial, the very images that make the mind. This broader meaning of fancy is exploited immediately in a passage that is strongly reminiscent of chapter 13 of Leviathan. It is the fancy of man “that has traced the ways of philosophy, so far it hath produced very marvellous effects to the benefit of mankind” (Answer, 449). Hobbes proceeds to list engines, buildings, “the account of time, from walking on the seas,” and whatever has distinguished the civilization of Europe from the barbarity of the American Indians. Fancy has done all this guided by true philosophy. Commenting on this, Raia Prokhovnik remarks not only on the similarity with Sidney but concludes that in joint operation poetry and philosophy create “the achievements of civility” (Prokhovnik, 95). Where precepts (presumably philosophical ones) fail, as hitherto they have in “the doctrine of moral virtue,” then fancy must take on the philosophic role (Answer, 450).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Hobbes concludes the passage on fancy by saying that the epic poet whose fancy must be so well developed must be a philosopher, “to furnish and square the matter” (Answer, 450). Perhaps, one might think, to square the circle. For Hobbes seems here to be confounding not just what he began by saying in the Answer about philosophy as very different from poetry, but he is also contradicting his usual accounts of it in which precision of language and the exclusion of metaphor (“copious imagery discreetly ordered”) seem to be fundamental. This is a matter that needs discussion in its own right (see chapter 8, “The Matter of Metaphor”).</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">What is happening is that on the one hand Hobbes’s notion of metaphor is potentially unstable; it was normally used as a marker of nonphilosophical discourse, yet occasionally Hobbes allowed it some philosophical function (De corpore, 2.12). On the other hand, the notion of fancy has become an ambiguous mechanism whereby poetry, rhetoric, and philosophy are becoming entangled. Hobbes draws no distinction between fancy as a principal characteristic of poetry as opposed to, or building on, judgment and/or philosophy, and fancy as the imaginative capacity to order sense impressions in which sense it must have a prior status to judgment and so ipso facto be a feature of all organized human ratiocination (see also Elements, 1.10.4). He does, however, distinguish simple from compound fancy, remembrance, and association. In chapter 2 of Leviathan, Hobbes introduces both words, imagination and fancy, but makes only a philological distinction—one is Greek, the other Latin— and then goes on to refine imagination into understanding and regulated trains of thought. Thus when Hobbes distinguishes between poetry and history in terms of differing balances of fancy and judgment (Leviathan, 8.51), it is not clear what this can amount to. For in one sense, as in the earlier passage of Leviathan, fancy must proceed and permeate judgment; but in another sense, present in the Answer, fancy is contingent on prior judgment by degrees. It is this sense that Hobbes seems to be introducing into chapter 8 of Leviathan. In the “Review and Conclusion,” fancy has become a complement to judgment analogous to the strategic relationship between rhetoric and philosophy. Repairing to the Answer for clarification is not clinching, however, for there the vocabulary is even less discriminating and, as I have suggested, the terms memory, judgment, and fancy are related differently.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">It is also apparent that the same unstable relationship between philosophy and rhetoric/eloquence holds for philosophy and poetry in virtue of the general and particular senses that fancy can carry. In one sense this is analogous to rhetoric, in another it is analogous to eloquence. Skinner’s argument has been that by the time Hobbes came to write Leviathan he believed that philosophy could not succeed without the aid of eloquence. The Answer seems to suggest that where philosophy has failed as, according to Hobbes, it has in moral science, poetry has actually to take its place. Hobbes was not uniformly confident that political science had started properly with the publication of De cive. It also indicates that Hobbes’s skepticism about philosophy was altogether more profound than attention to eloquence alone as an argumentative aid can make clear. It might also illustrate that Hobbes had not thought through the relationships between rhetoric and poetry and these muddy his sense of philosophy and what it can do in the world. Something more than or instead of philosophy was needed, but then everything he says erodes the distinction between a reified philosophy and that something else. The more general consequence is that the placement of Hobbes on the way to the ordered world of Augustan poetics, and the image of him as a spokesman for poetry so decorous and formulaic that it left no room for the imaginative inspiration, is itself grossly reductive. Still evident is a Jacobean classicism and a resonance of Renaissance poetics (Reik, 155, 157; Prokhovnik, 95). In the ambiguities of fancy lay the decaying sense of the metaphysicals and even some mental anticipation of the romantics.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The argument of the Answer shows that poetry can be perilously close to demonstrative rhetoric and claims that poetry itself must needs be philosophy. Usually Hobbes regarded philosophy as nothing more than the ordered activity of philosophizing, but in the Answer it is close to taking on an objectified identity independent of this, and this disembodiment creates the verbal illusion that the poet can be a philosopher without ceasing to be a poet. Even noting Hobbes’s ambivalence about metaphor, the result is highly discrepant with his understanding of philosophy in terms of procedural method. And indeed in De corpore (De corpore, 1.3.4), he would point clearly enough to the philosophical error involved here, the creation of insignificant words by the mistaken projection of abstractions independent of their substantive characters. In modern parlance it is a form of reification or of category mistake. Hobbes’s collapsing philosophy into poetry in the Answer is no flippant or thoughtless aside, for once it is possible for the poetic fancy to take the place of philosophy, the sort of objections that Hobbes would voice in Leviathan about bad philosophy become relevant to judging a poem. Just as he complained about the meaningless vocabulary of philosophy, he lamented the verbiage of so much of our language: so many words, “like the windy blisters of troubled waters, have no sense at all.” As he had dismissed those philosophers who took their arguments from the authoritative books of the past, so he waved away those poets who rather than relying on “experience and knowledge of nature,” take from books “the ordinary boxes of counterfeit complexion” (Answer, 453). Yet Hobbes himself seems now and then to allude to Shakespeare. As Davenant was allegedly Shakespeare’s natural son, we may have here but an echoing conceit. When, however, he calls poets “painters” (Answer, 451) he is quoting the much quoted, a metaphor “defaced by time” “sullied with … long use” (Answer, 455).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">A Return to First Reckonings</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">This may seem to have been an unduly convoluted chapter, but then its topics have been subject to some undue ironing out. After such complexities, however, the privilege of some oversimplification of my own by way of brief summary: in most isolated passages where Hobbes deals with rhetoric, history, or poetry, their relationships to each other and to philosophy, are probably clear and univocal enough. An overview of the broad range of his comments, however, reveals considerable shifts, and not always over significant periods of time and sometimes within a single work. The upshot appears to be something like this: In one sense rhetoric is a part of philosophy and in another is inimicable to it. In its turn, history is excluded from rhetoric; in another, it is a form of rhetorical proof. So history, in a way, can become philosophy, teaching by examples. Similarly, poetry is excluded from philosophy but in another the poet must be a philosopher. Eschewing problems of motivation in Hobbes, confusions and changes of mind, the mechanism for all these slippery relationships, is, ironically, an insufficiently discriminate conceptual vocabulary. It is this that has made it impossible to treat the topics of history, rhetoric, and poetry separately. The very terms rhetoric, history, and fancy carry differing patterns of meaning and association with respect to the relatively stable, because much more formally explored, concept of science or philosophy. Hobbes insisted that philosophy involved taking all words back to first reckonings, but what he taught or what he would persuade us and what he did were rather different things.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Beyond the immediate mechanism of his own conceptual vocabulary, one needs to recall what I have called Hobbes’s official conspectus on the world (see chapter 2, “Sense Beyond Science”). This chapter has illustrated how his discussions of intellectual activities, their rules and relationships no less than juridical and religious practices, frequently shift into a concern with the offices of practitioners. Hobbes wrote as much of the poet or the rhetor as he did of poetry and rhetoric. In a world that delineated all social activity in terms of office, it was only to be expected that any one person was involved in complementary offices: a woman might simultaneously be parent, child, spouse, and trader. Naturally, this created problems but it carried with it a familiarity of multifaceted identity that might be taken into descriptions of the intellectual world as a tolerance of coalescent activities. Hobbes was always more than just one of those philosophers for whom he tried to legislate. He was no eclectic but perhaps in the end our more austere emphasis on philosophical coherence and the purity of intellectual demarcation, because we see him mainly as a philosopher, might, historically speaking, be excessive. This possibility needs to be borne in mind more than Reik’s specific comment about the Answer that we should make allowances because it wasn’t really philosophy (Reik, 146). The question becomes, what was Hobbes doing in Leviathan?</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="992" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Text: Yes</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Discovery of History and Ideas in Drama</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Work overview</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">COPYRIGHT 1999 Twayne Publishers, COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Egmont (Play)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Goetz of Berlichingen (Play)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Sturm und Drang movement</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Literary styles</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Power (Philosophy)</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Literary techniques</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Setting (Literature)</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">German drama</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">German writers</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Mythology</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Love</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">Historical drama</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="650" ind1="0" ind2="4"> | |
| <subfield code="a">German history</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="t">Goethe</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="d">New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1685-6</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1815-7</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="g">p. 36-50</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Twayne's World Authors Series 884</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Chapter Three: Discovery of History and Ideas in Drama</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Götz von Berlichingen</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">In Strasbourg Goethe had learned from Herder that Shakespeare wrote histories. Herder's own essay on Shakespeare (1774) emphatically embraces this perspective. It was the synthesis of history and literature in the realm of ideas that recommended the Elizabethan dramatist to Herder, when he was working out his innovative philosophicocultural approach to history. In Herder's organicist scheme of cultural flowering and decay, Shakespeare, the greatest English poet at the apex of English might, proved a crucial point. Furthermore, in Herder's multicultural theory of literature Shakespeare was relevant even for foreigners—Germans—because his dramas were staged on a cosmic scene, within the frame of universal ideas. Their meaning was accessible to everyone. Thus Shakespeare could serve as a model to eighteenth-century German dramatists eager to shake free from French cultural supremacy.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">To an era enchanted by Rousseau's call back to nature, Shakespearean drama recommended itself by its characters. Unlike in French classicist drama, Shakespeare's figures were not abstractions designed to illustrate some moral thesis. They were Menscben, Natur: fully realized human beings. Goethe's Shakespeare speech emphasizes this aspect: “But I cry: Nature! Nature! nothing is so like Nature as Shakespeare's figures.” But, he hastens to add, they are not just your ordinary average people; nature here does not mean banal realism. Indeed they are overdrawn figures, nature enhanced to “colossal scale”(Goethe's emphasis): suitable models for the Sturm und Drang ideal of the oversized personality, the Kerl.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">From Herder's chronotropical perspective, where time and place (Zeitgeist and Lokalgeist) are constitutive factors in culture and art, Shakespeare was far superior to the banal daylight settings of French classicist drama in some nondescript antechamber or boudoir. Herder's essay vividly depicts Shakespeare's rich, deep, intense atmosphere. Created</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">through the special effects of dark, gloom, storm, heath, spooky castles, cemeteries, ominous birds, and supernatural phenomena such as witches and ghosts, this mood was designed to achieve maximum audience involvement, for the age subscribed to an aesthetic of affective impact. Literature, drama particularly, could and should change minds and souls and influence the shape of culture and the fate of nations. Shakespearean drama, it was believed, had helped make England great, whereas effete French classicist theater was the first step on the road to France's decline. If Herder's and even more so Goethe's Shakespeare essays sound derisory on the subject of French high culture, it was part of the campaign for a German national literature, for which emancipation from French dominance was a prerequisite.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">The experience of Strasbourg, capital of the Alsatian frontier region, with its deliberate cultivation of German tradition and scorn for official French superstructure, helped awaken the fledgling dramatist's national consciousness. It was at Strasbourg, too, and under Herder's guidance that Goethe first developed an interest in German history. Latin tomes on legal history were part of his law studies. But he also studied the Patriotic Fantasy of a minor provincial official at Osnabrück, Justus Moser, on the beauties of the medieval legal system of Faustrecht, the right of the strongest. Möser's glorification of this law of the jungle fit right in with the young intellectuals' ideal of the powerful individual. When Goethe, back in Frankfurt, chanced upon the idiosyncratic autobiography of a German knight, who seemed the perfect embodiment of fist-law lifestyle, the spark flew that ignited his revolutionary drama, Götz von Berlkhingen.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Yet Götz is more than a dramatized life story, as the title of the first version would indicate: Geschichte Gottfriedens von Berlkhingen mit der eis-ernen Hand, dramatisiert (History of Gottfried von Berlkhingen with the Iron Hand). It is the first historical drama in the modern sense of the term, for history itself is the true topic. Indeed the drama is about understanding the idea of history; it considers the question of the interaction of the individual with collective changes over time. It was a question Goethe found in Shakespeare, too, albeit under a more general cloak. At issue in Shakespearean drama he saw “the secret point (that no philosopher has yet seen or defined) where our individuality, our claim to free will, collides with the necessary course of the whole” (HA, 12:226).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Goethe's definition of history revises Herder's theological reading of Shakespeare from a secular perspective. For Herder, Shakespeare's drama represented a theodicy, an assertion of divine order within which</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">the individual had a preassigned place; it showed “what we are in the hand of the creator of the world—ignorant, blind tools… dark little symbols of the outline of a divine theodicy.” For Goethe's historical drama, there is no preordained hierarchy of ideas; rather, there is a contest between the individual and the whole that must remain inconclusive, because we do not know the ultimate purpose of human existence. More astounding yet, there is in Goethe's view no absolute good or evil in history: “what we call evil is only the other side of good, each is a necessary part of the other's existence and of the whole” (HA, 12:227). His own drama gives glorious play to evil in the fascinating figure of Adel-heid, the first femme fatale in German literature.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Götz von Berlichingen represents history as both a momentous whole and a highly particular event. The hero is at home in Franconia, Goethe's own home region. The region enters the play with its dialect and with its cities and towns, as the action moves between Würzburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Heilbronn, and the villages and castles engraved on regional consciousness through the events of the peasant war. (Even an upwardly mobile lawyer from Frankfurt appears, singing the praises of the new, “Roman,” law.) But the moment that came with Goethe's hero was a key moment in German national history, too, and Goethe's text involves that horizon of the whole. Götz's time was an era of crisis and transition. It brought the Reformation and the permanent division of Germany into Protestant and Catholic parts. Social and economic divisions exploded with the first violent class conflicts in the peasant wars and the knights' revolt. The empire began to break apart into a loosely constituted league of principalities, fiefdoms, and free imperial cities, which still made up the Germany of Goethe's time. Goethe placed his drama at a point of origin of his own historical consciousness. And indeed the passionate engagement of the poet in his text bears out the author's quest for roots, for origins. In a letter to a paternal Strasbourg friend he revealed that in his drama he aimed for a deeper knowledge of “our ancestors, whom we know unfortunately only from their tombstones.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">More than presenting the past, Goethe's drama stages history as a theater of ideas in which hot topics of Goethe's own time are confronted and contested. Under this aspect Götz von Berlichingen is a powerful cultural critique, and the enthusiastic reception by Goethe's contemporaries is due in large measure to this feature. There was, first of all, the longing for vitality and heroism of an age that saw itself as weakened by overrefined rococo civilization. There was the dream of freedom before</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">the era of revolutions could begin to develop definitions of freedom. There were questions of law and justice, of good and bad government, of religious versus secular claims, of class barriers and conflicts, of the will to power, and of generational and gender rights and responsibilities.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Beyond transacting contemporary issues in historical guise, Goethe succeeded in bringing the dead ancestors to life. This achievement accounts for the play's enduring popularity in Germanophone countries. A drama, Goethe knew, could not just be a reproduction of history; it had to be a new, original creation inspired by the individuality of the poet. The Shakespeare speech decreed that the new Prometheus must “bring to life [his creatures] by breathing his spirit into them” (Works, 3:165; Goethe's emphasis). So Goethe treated his historical sources with creative liberty. The real Herr von Berlichingen died at the ripe old age of 82, his honor restored after several campaigns for the emperor from peasant war days and survived by seven sons and three daughters. (His descendants today manage the annual Götz festival at Jagsthausen.) Goethe's hero dies a premature death in prison, his only son becoming a monk. Symbolizing the end of an era and of an ideal, his life and his line end at the same time as the life of the “old Emperor.” Here Goethe takes more poetic license: Emperor Maximilian died at age 60, before the peasant wars and more than 40 years before Berlichingen.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In addition to changing his sources, Goethe inserted into the historical lives of his characters his own poignantly personal experiences and fantasies. He invented the figures of Weislingen and the fatal Adelheid and around them created a subplot in the private sphere: a story of trust and betrayal, lust and temptation, desire and revenge. It was this invention that worked poetic magic on the Götz material, the magic we saw at work in Goethe's poetry of the time. The poetic imagination could charge up the dry historical data with the passion of lived experience and could transform a thoroughly pedestrian and not too truthful robber knight into a character of heroic stature and depth of soul that has made Götz a figure of identification for generations of Germans.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Finally, in Götz von Berlichingen history is not a tragedy. This is where Goethe's drama differs most notably from his model, Shakespeare, and where Herder's organicist vision asserts itself. Goethe called his second, published version of Götz a “Schauspiel”: simply “drama.” History is a natural process of growth and decay, and the end is implicit in the beginning; collective existence is in this respect no different from individual life. The dramatist's function is to describe, with empathy, the more or less satisfactory participation of individuals in the historical</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">process into which they are placed by birth and circumstance. The real interest of the drama lies in playing out this participation of individuals: spectacular or middling, with variations of grace and beauty, wisdom and folly, blindness and insight. And the ending, steeped in melancholy with the death of the hero, yet assures us that life will go on, even if Götz's family and the empire do not. The analogy between the dying Götz and the falling leaves of autumn contains the knowledge that new leaves will grow in spring. When Götz's friends look out into the future, their words play on the knowledge that a later period in history—Goethe's own—will revive Götz's ideals precisely in this, Goethe's drama.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The first impression of this drama in the Shakespearean style is of chaos, or at least of anarchy: 23 named characters, plus 10 other individuals, plus another 10 groups (such as peasants, citizens, and gypsies) throng in a total of 56 scenes, some only a few lines long. Yet the profusion of actions and personnel is not arbitrary. The drama is structured so that its architecture represents the essential idea of the text: one historical era's supercession by another in a violent struggle. This central idea is the organizing principle of the dramatic action, of the scenic representation, and of the constellation of characters, as two different worlds and their conflicting values are embodied and acted out. Amazingly in light of the value-laden perspective, the two worlds receive almost equal time on stage. Yet they are not neatly separated into acts, nor is there a regular pattern of alternation. Instead the “good” world of Götz on the one hand and the “bad” world of the antagonist Weislingen on the other are confronted, interacting and interweaving within each of the five acts. As a result, the threat of conflict remains ever present; an atmosphere of foreboding sustains high tension and audience involvement.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Act 1 is evenly split between the two worlds, drawing the starting line for the contest: the first half introduces Götz's world, and the second half introduces Weislingen's world. In the second act, long Weislingen scenes alternate with short Götz scenes. The central third act focuses on Götz. His world dominates the scene, but his world becomes a conquest of the forces ranged around the antagonist Weislingen. Twenty-two scenes of embattled Götz crowd this act, followed by a mere five scenes in act 4. Of these scenes, Götz's world, defeated and deprived, gets four scenes whereas victorious Weislingen is allowed only one. The moment of retardation at this point in the drama is realized in relaxation, in moral and philosophical reflection, and in weighing options for future action.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The hyperactive act 5 is in extreme contrast to the slow fourth act. The two worlds explode into new dimensions. The conflict expands to draw new worlds into the fray, including warring peasants, gypsy outsiders, and a secret system of justice. Although Götz and Weislingen are about equally involved in these new worlds, with Götz having a slight dominance, they cede their place of prominence to what was previously hidden from their and our view. Infra- and superstructures emerge: the underbelly worlds of peasants, gypsies, and underground justice and the metaphysical realm represented in saintly Maria, Götz's sister and Weislingen's rejected bride, the one figure who can link the worlds and values of the two antagonists.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The extraordinary fifth act stages the end of the world. Acts 1 through 4 play out, on the basis of opposition between individuals, the conflict between two value systems and the supercession of two historical eras. Now forces beyond individuals, values, and history take over, forces that Goethe would later call “demonic,” out of human control (HA, 10:177). In Goethe's view, demonic force could be defeated only by other demonic forces. In the fifth act, the peasant war unleashes unimaginable atrocity on both sides. It is this force that will destroy Götz. Weislingen falls victim to another demonic force: Adelheid's magic, the power of unfettered sexuality now exploding in a chain reaction of killings. The original version of the drama positively indulged in the Adelheid effect; the author himself, Goethe explained later, had been drawn into her demonic force field (HA, 9:571).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The apocalyptic vision of act 5 shows the world turned upside down (“if the world were turned around,” Young Georg had quipped in act 4), when the previously hidden is revealed. Lust of annihilation drives the peasant leaders and the leader of the opposing aristocrats, Weislingen. Unfettered sexual desire contaminates and kills Weislingen's servant Franz, Weislingen, and eventually Adelheid herself. The underbelly of the body politic shows up in the despised world of the gypsies and in the criminal court, which convenes at night in an underground location. For the final act is above all about judgment, just as the end of the world includes a Last Judgment. The final act includes five judgment scenes, plus constant questions of guilt, conscience, retribution, and vengeance. Quest of justice had béen the original cause of the peasant war, but the just cause overturned into sheer vengeance.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In the first judgment scene (5.4), Götz's decision to lead the peasants is condemned by his own wife, Elisabeth. With Götz's man Lerse arguing for the defense, Elisabeth makes the case against Götz: he has broken</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">his solemn promise, and he will never be able to forgive himself. Nor will his judges of peers forgive him, for the knight has betrayed his and their class. On the level of history, Götz's betrayal signifies the end of the feudal order. When knighthood, the foundation of this order, makes common cause with peasantry, knighthood abolishes its own world.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The second judgment scene (5.10) brings closure to the Weislingen plot in self-condemnation. Having been seduced to murder his master, servant Franz sentences himself and commits suicide. Weislingen sees divine retribution for his destructive life in his painful death by poison. Maria appears to her unfaithful fiancé as an avenging angel. The first in the long Goethean line of female redeemers, with such successors as Iphigenie and Faust's Gretchen, Maria nevertheless cannot offer Weislingen forgiveness, only forgetting. His crime is unforgivable, even before God: “Forget everything. May God forget everything you have done, as I forget everything you have done” (Works, 7:79).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The most spectacular judgment scene of all, which spawned a rich progeny in gothic dramas and novels, occurs when the secret court sentences Adelheid to death and dispatches the executioner. Whereas Weislingen found at least partial redemption, Adelheid is condemned absolutely. This court formalizes the need for redress in a world out of joint. The emphasis on ritual suggests that something still functions in the general dissolution, that basic values have remained. The anonymity of the masked court conveys impartiality, in contrast with the subjective motivations of the protagonists Adelheid, Weislingen, and Götz, with their finally destructive desires for power, ambition, and personal honor, respectively.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The last judgment, in the two concluding scenes, is passed on Götz, and it remains inconclusive. Formally sentenced to death, he is now pardoned by the arbitrary will of his archenemy, Weislingen, for the sake of his sister Maria. But Götz, in contrast with his self-righteous assurance after the trial at Heilbronn (4.5), judges himself severely. He has lost everything, including his good name. Although he still assigns blame elsewhere, to “them” (“They have crippled me more and more”), he yet acknowledges the judgment of God in his fate (“whomever God strikes down”). Twinned to the end to his antagonist, Weislingen, who also saw the hand of God in his downfall, Götz dies immediately after hearing of Weislingen's death, even with the same words: “my strength is sinking toward the grave.” The close of the drama ultimately appeals to the judgment of posterity. We, the readers of Goethe's piece of special</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">pleading, are called on, even threatened, to reverse the judgment of Götz's own time: “Woe to the century that spurned you!… Woe to coming generations that fail to understand you!” (Works, 7:80–82).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Egmont</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Götz was written down in a flash of genius during six weeks in 1771, as Goethe proudly remembers in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Egmont, the other historical drama undertaken during the Frankfurt years, took far longer—12 years—as the author no less proudly wrote from Rome on its completion in 1787. No 12 years brought more decisive changes for Goethe. The writing of Egmont accompanied these changes in a way that would make the drama a crucial text for the reading of the author's life when he came to reflect on it from the vantage point of the autobiographer. Dichtung und Wahrheit closes with young Goethe departing for Weimar under the sign of Egmont. As he ventures forth into the unknown, he quotes the most famous passage of the drama he is just then writing, appropriating his hero's view of self and world in the metaphor of Time's chariot.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The difference between Götz and Egmont measures the distance Goethe had traveled from carefree Sturm und Drang rebelliousness to the conflicts and compromises involved in government responsibility. The first drama, with its ancestor cult and nostalgic celebration of fist-law ideals, looks backward; the hero represents an era whose time had run out. Egmont, by contrast, the figure and the drama, explores an idea whose time was just dawning: freedom both as self-realization of the individual and as liberty in the political sense.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Where Götz in its search for origins narrowed the focus on Goethe's home province, the horizon of Egmont spans all of Western Europe, from the Netherlands to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Both dramas represent adjoining slices of the past: Götz's good old emperor (Maximilian I) was the father of Egmont's good old emperor (Charles V). But where Götz evokes the bygone time for its own sake, Egmont presents the past as a model for viewing the present and for looking out into the future, a lesson to be drawn from history. The drama ends with a vision of the goddess of freedom holding out the promise of liberation from Spanish repression for the United Provinces of the Netherlands, a struggle that took more than half a century to succeed. While Goethe was writing the bulk of his drama, from 1775 to 1782, the war of independence of the</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Netherlands was being replayed, in fast-forward speed, by the American Revolution.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">For Egmont is indeed theater of ideas as it explores and pits against each other in dramatic conflict the hottest ideas of the age, the ideas that were moving and making history. The late eighteenth century invented individualism and liberty as consequences of Enlightenment philosophy's call for personal autonomy. No one in Germany was more in tune with this project than the Sturm und Drang rebels. The restless young lawyer from the sleepy Imperial City of Frankfurt, acknowledged leader of the movement, could not help but get fired up by the rebellious ex-Europeans overseas. Immediately after the challenge laid down by the Continental Congress and passionately debated in the British Parliament (keeping in mind the speed at which news traveled in those days), Goethe announced his hatching of the Egmont plot: “I am getting everything prepared in order to begin, with the entry of the sun into aries, a new production, which shall have a tone all its own.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">It is no accident that of all the dramas of Goethe, whose genius he admired, Beethoven, the master of idea music, chose Egmont for his composition of incidental music and an overture. At the time of Beethoven's composition in 1809–1810, Austrians could well identify with the Flemish in Goethe's play. For the second time Vienna found itself invaded and occupied by Napoleon's armies, under miserable conditions. Beethoven's Egmont music, breathing the passion of freedom into Goethe's text, has been credited for the continuous success of this drama on stage all during the nineteenth century, much in contrast with the theatrical neglect of Goethe's other dramas.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Nor was the explosive force of ideas in Egmont lost on Goethe's contemporaries on the eve of the French Revolution. The Weimar friends reacted with acute discomfort; their objections to Klarchen's free morals covered deeper concerns. The duke, above all, was not happy with this result of the “untrammeled freedom of life and soul” his protégé was enjoying in Italy. The position of a minister at an absolutist court, no matter how enlightened, was incompatible with the ideas expressed in Egmont. Goethe himself had realized this earlier, during the last phase of writing at Weimar: “If I had to write it today I would write it differently, and perhaps not at all.” With that, he stopped work on the drama, consigning it to the heap of fragments from his days in Frankfurt. Egmont needed the untrammeled freedom of the Italian sabbatical.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The drama takes a two-pronged approach to the representation of the power of ideas in history. One is to select a suitable episode from the</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">past and shape it into a paradigmatic event, prefiguring significant aspects of the present. The other approach is to create a charismatic hero as carrier of the history-making idea: to invent a historical myth. The Sturm und Drang believer in the power of genius found it easy to imagine a charismatic hero. He had assembled a whole cast of such characters who had made history and around whom he was planning major works: Muhammad, Christ, Julius Caesar, and Egmont.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">To the student of history just emancipated from Christianity, it was obvious that a most effective power in history was martyrdom. Three of the four heroes he selected had been killed for their cause. The author of Götz von Berlichingen, who had meanwhile witnessed the astounding success of his flawed hero, knew all about mythmaking. In Götz, the construction of a legend was a matter of ancestor worship, of paying respect to past glory. In Egmont, the creation of a hero myth drives and organizes the drama, determining structure, character constellation, and the main events insofar as they are not preset by history. Not that Goethe hesitated to change history for the benefit of his mythical hero. He needed one outstanding figure, and so he simply deleted Count Hoorn, who shared Egmont's fate. And for the role his hero had to play he could not use the historical Egmont: middle-aged, portly, and balding, a married man with a dozen children. He needed a figure in splendid isolation, unattached and undefined. Such a figure could assume the meaning conveyed on him by the people, who needed him as a symbol of their ideal selves, embodying their hopes and dreams. So the drama constructs a mythic hero, a knight in shining armor.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The perspective of the paradigmatic event came with Goethe's position at Weimar. Moving in the circle of power politics and gaining a close-up view of major players, he could think himself for a while at least an active participant in the making of history. In early Weimar days the duke's closest adviser proudly writes in terms of his drama-in-progress: “We [the duke and I] had lots of good talk about past and future. Makes me feel like Margrete von Parma: I, too, foresee a lot that I can't change.” A little later Egmont served to stylize the games the German princes played during the Bavarian succession conflict of 1778, with Goethe and his duke in attendance at Berlin: “I seem to be getting ever closer to the essence' of drama, now that it concerns me more and more closely how the mighty play with men and the gods with the mighty.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The hero is not the only auratic figure; the duke of Alba, his antagonist, also is. Goethe's epoch had made exemplary tyrants of Alba and his master, King Phillip of Spain. Lovers of liberty—philosophers, Protestants,</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">and future revolutionaries—were expected to abhor them. Witness Schiller's Don Carlos (1785–1787) and the historical work that earned him a professorship at Jena, Geschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (The Secession of the United Netherlands from the Spanish Crown, 1788). Schiller's first work in the historical genre had been the translation of an essay on Phillip of Spain by the later French Revolutionary delegate Louis Sébastian Mercier. For Mercier, Phillip's reign is the incarnation of evil government. Repelled by his “superstitious and terrible despotism [and] cruel character,” the author aims to “spread far and wide the revulsion which has seized me.” Against such tyranny the revolt of the Netherlands is hailed as a paradigmatic “revolution which compelled the astonishment of Europe.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Concerning form, too, Egmont has come a long way from Götz, from drama as realistic presenting of the past to drama as a play of symbols, as symbolic action. Despite the blank verse adopted for Iphigenie and Tasso, the other dramas of the Weimar-Italian period, Goethe left Egmont in prose, but it is no longer the realistic, dialect-flavored prose of Götz. In Egmont, language is formalized, equalized. All characters speak alike: foreigners and native Dutch, simple soldiers, burghers, and high nobility. Gone, too, is the seemingly arbitrary structure. The five acts are built from few large scenic units. A pattern of recurring scenes with significant changes plays variations on a theme. Every act except the third begins with a scene of citizens. The first three acts conclude with a scene of Egmont's lover Klärchen, who after complete absence from act 4 opens and closes the fifth act in a metamorphic progression toward transcendence. The dramatic architecture is suggestive of musical composition. Considering Klärchen's songs, Egmont's prison monologues, and the triumphant conclusion, Schiller was not so far off when he saw this drama pass into opera (Wagener, 86). Egmont is Goethe's Eroica.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">A historical myth needs two constituent components. One is a figure suitable as carrier of an idea; the other is a situation of exceptional urgency to provoke the elevation of an average individual to heroic stature. The dramatic process of Egmont explores these two facets: One is the construction of Egmont as carrier of the idea of freedom, which in turn forges the people's identity as future carriers of revolution. For the second component, the drama investigates the kind of power that might generate a spirit of resistance, revolution, and freedom.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The nature of power is explored from several perspectives. We observe different levels of government in practice: the distant center in Spain and its projections on-site through various agents: the regent</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Margarete von Parma, the provincial governor Egmont, and the military executor Alba, Extensive dialogue on matters political undergirds practice with theory to demonstrate the mechanism of centralized, totalitarian government. The deteriorating relation of rulers and ruled is evident in the citizen scenes. Because the eventual result is revolution, the workings of the governing apparatus are slanted in such a way as to intimate their ultimately self-destructive quality. Actions, reactions, and reflections on the nature of power meet in the figure of Egmont. Participant, critic, and victim, he yet finally defeats the power that kills him.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The first act builds up the charismatic hero from three different perspectives. In the community ritual of the first scene, citizens and soldiers unite to profess themselves Egmont's constituency. He embodies their ideal selves and their civic desire for religious tolerance. Explicit myth-making occurs in a soldier's battle narrative with Egmont the heroic figure of national identity, when “we amphibious Dutch” slaughtered “the Welsh [equals French} dogs” (Works, 7:86). Music shares in mythmaking as the scene concludes with a chant in four-part harmony of civic ideals, culminating in “Freedom!” (Works, 7:89). The second scene, set in the regent's palace, views Egmont from the angle of threatened power. Against the regent's fear of conspiracy, revolt, and retribution from the distant power center, Egmont's provocative behavior stands out as an enigma that teases interpretation. With her effort to understand Egmont, Margarete adds an aura of mystery to the emerging hero myth. The third scene, at Klärchen's modest bourgeois home, opens with Klärchen's soldiers song, in which Egmont figures, if unnamed, as ideal ego. Continuing the mystification of Egmont, Klärchen's central question is how “the great Egmont,” whom all the Provinces idolize, can be at the same time “simply a man, a friend, and a lover?” (Works, 7:96–97). Finally, a real image of Egmont is introduced when Klarchen describes a woodcut of the battle of Gravelingen. The naive imagination in this piece of folk art represents a hero imago: Egmont is as big as the city tower and the British ships.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The two long scenes of the second act expose the drama's twin focus: the prerevolutionary situation and the hero myth. Scene 1 presents the genesis of an abortive revolution. Ideas abound on civil rights, rule of law, equal treatment of citizens, constitution, and freedom of thought and religion, but these ideas are contested among the people whom they should unite. Instead of the four-part harmony in act 1 we hear a cacophony of voices clamoring for “privileges and freedom!” (Works, 7:103).Uninformed, uncommitted, divided by self and group interests,</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">the people are easily swayed by the demagogue Vansen. And the situation is not yet pressing enough. Only Jetter, the proverbially timid tailor, feels the oppression in nightmares and forbidden thoughts inspired by the cruel and unusual punishments executed for public intimidation. The right ideas have not yet found the right representative. Egmont proves himself the right leader, but he still stands for the wrong idea of submitting to force. A decent citizen, he argues, always has as much freedom as he needs (Works, 7:103). Egmont's words are enough to put down the riot, but they fall far short of an answer to the urgent issues raised in this scene.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The second scene, staging self-portrayal, completes the image of Egmont outlined by others in act 1: the hero assumes their image of him. Prodded by his anxious secretary, Egmont defines an ethos of individualism. Goethe has given his hero memorable metaphors for his self-definition: the sleepwalker on the roof, the warrior storming a mountain peak, the dizzying charioteer of time. Such images, with their indomitable courage, zest for life, self-confidence, and drive for maximum fulfillment of individual potential, impress us, Goethe's modern readers, who were raised on the individualist ideology. From other perspectives—the “pedestrian” Secretary's (Works, 7:108) and chess player Oranien's—such a view appears foolhardy, reckless, and lacking foresight. The confrontation with Oranien drives home the difference between politician and hero. Oranien, as one citizen remarked in the opening scene, would be a safe place to hide, but no one wants to be like this calculating realist. By contrast, Egmont is what everyone wants to be like: a hero fantasy, emblem of our ideal selves.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The third act continues the dual themes of the political and the personal but in a different register, contrasting power and love. The first scene presents a scathing critique of power from one of the power holders, as the regent Margaret of Parma reads the hidden truth in a letter from her brother, King Phillip, that announces the arrival of Alba. Imperialist despotism, in her reading, is a system of government that dehumanizes everyone it touches. Power sharers like herself are instrumentalized, mere tools to be thrown out when used up. The governed people are viewed as cannibals, animals, or monsters to be tamed or exterminated. Perfect servants are bestialized: Alba types thrive because they can gratify their sadistic lust by having citizens “racked, burnt, hanged, drawn and quartered” (Works, 7:115). A spooky atmosphere haunts this scene as the regent imagines the past and the future, with herself a “ghost” of lost power. Egmont's antagonist, the “hollow-eyed</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Toledan” (Works, 7:115), is built up to make a stark contrast with the beloved lover Egmont of the next scene.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">For this scene (3.2) stages the epiphany of the hero. Here, in opposition to the haunting absences in the circle of power, reigns the irreducible presence of love. Egmont appears to Klärchen in heroic splendor—dazzling court dress, Golden Fleece emblem of highest honor —yet the effect is not distancing but the intimacy of love. The two women represent the contrast between power and love: the regent, captive of power, against Klärchen, liberated through love. Klärchen's opening song sets this theme. And the scene closes with a restatement of the theme when Egmont contrasts his two selves: one captive of his public role in the sphere of power, the other free in the love of Klärchen.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The fourth act moves relentlessly toward darkness and death. The figure of Alba grows into a countermyth, so that the confrontation with Egmont takes shape as a mythic struggle between good and evil. The citizens in scene 1 initiate the mythification of Alba, whom they depict as huge cat and poisonous spider, and his soldiers as a satanic machinery of irresistible force. The second scene, in Alba's palace, shows the perfect machinery of military enforcement in action. Blind obedience and total secrecy hold the supreme commander in awe-inspiring distance. When he finally steps on stage, he appears as an auratic figure with a dark halo. The confrontation with this Alba compels Egmont to define himself as his antagonist and to become, finally, the representative of the right ideas, the hero image that the Dutch people need to sustain their revolt.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The Alba—Egmont debate on political theory works on ideas that Goethe's era saw in the Netherlands' rebellion: power relations and types of government, the people as permanently infantile or coming of age, and individual freedom and responsibility or historical necessity. The highlight falls on freedom, as Alba challenges Egmont to define it: “Freedom? a fine word, if only one could understand it! What kind of freedom do they want?” (Works, 7:132). The citizens' scenes already answered that question. Even if the people may not know what freedom means in the abstract, they know what it is not: everything that Alba's rule has imposed on them.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Now that the Egmont myth has been defined, act 5 installs it as a moving force in history. An emotionally intense performance of the hero's death creates a martyr, and a vision anticipates the history to be driven by the myth. The opening scene presents a people emasculated by fear, their cowardice shamed by a woman, Klärchen, whom they in</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">turn have to declare crazy to preserve their conviction of their helplessness. Yet the scene plays on two myths to intimate that all is not lost. Both the biblical story of Peter's denial (“Don't mention that name. It's deadly,” Works, 7:136) and the historical myth of Joan of Arc (Klärchen as “floating banner… leading warriors,” Works, 7:137) promise future redemption of the people from their abjection. Klärchen's suicide is not cast in terms of lost love but as a choice of liberty or death (“Egmont's freedom or death!” Works, 7:136). Yet although her death prefigures Egmont's, doubling the death of the hero, death for Klärchen means the end of hope, the end of time; for her, “the world comes to a sudden stop” (Works, 7:143) with the death of Egmont.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Egmont, by contrast, moves beyond hopelessness to a view of the future that envisages freedom and thus imparts meaning to his death. The victim turns into sacrifice. Ferdinand, Alba's son, is crucial to achieve this turn. Earlier, in his first monologue, Egmont was a private individual deprived of freedom, in prison. He reacted with fear of death and with the illusory hope of being freed by the people. Ferdinand's proclaiming Egmont his lodestar changes all that. The son of the despot lifts Egmont out of his private grief by reminding him of his public role. Ferdinand's rejecting his father and instead choosing Egmont's distant image as model demonstrates the power of myth. This victory of the symbol “Egmont” over “Alba” enables the victory vision at the end of the drama. On a conscious level Egmont has no hope that his death might liberate his people: “I fear it won't be so” (Works, 7:149). Only on a subconscious level, in a dream or vision, can he imagine such an outcome. The magnificent spectacle of virtual reality, complete with supernatural lighting and music, of the goddess of freedom crowning the hero, who, drawn into his own vision, marches to death as into battle at the head of his nation, has become the defining mark of this Goethean drama. Condemned by Schiller as a salto mortale into opera, it yet was undoubtedly the spark that inspired Beethoven's music.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Text: Yes</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Anhalt, Nedda G. De</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Mea Cuba: The “Proust-Valía” of History</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="k">Excerpt</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">COPYRIGHT 1999 Twayne Publishers, COPYRIGHT 2010 Gale, Cengage Learning</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante, G.</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Proust, Marcel</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Martí, José</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Mea Cuba (Essay collection)</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Literary styles</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Memory</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Literary techniques</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Slang</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Exile</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Literary themes</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Cuban history</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Spanish language</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Nostalgia</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Linguistics</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="a">Cuban literature</subfield> | |
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| <subfield code="t">Guillermo Cabrera Infante</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="d">New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1644-3</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="z">978-0-8057-1819-5</subfield> | |
| <subfield code="g">p. 188-209</subfield> | |
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| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Mea Cuba: The “Proust-Valía” of History</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Introduction</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">La historia no es lo que hemos hecho o hacemos sino lo que hemos dejado que los otros hagan con nosotros. Desde hace más de tres siglos nuestra manera de vivir la historia es sufrirla.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">[History is not what we have done or do, but what we have allowed others to do to us. For more than three centuries our way to live history is to suffer it.]—Octavio Paz, Puertas al Campo (Doors to the field]</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a master of language, is Cuba's Marcel Proust; Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, is his muse, as he writes in Mea Cuba. Through poetic imagination Cabrera Infante evokes time past, present, and future. Like so many Cubans, Cabrera Infante has suffered oppression and exile. He describes Cuban political history as “la madre de la infamia … una puta que dormía en el lecho de Procusto” (Mea Cuba [1992], 308) [“the mother of infamy … a whore who slept on Procrustes' bed” (Mea Cuba [1994], 272).] History is not his passion, it is his obsession.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante's critical attitude has made him malgre'lui, a historian of his time. Although he is not known as a historian, he has stood up against history. He has interpreted, translated, and written it. Mea Cuba is Cabrera Infante's chronicle of political events under Fidel Castro's communism, from 1959 to the 1990s, and a doorway to his prophetic predictions. As a sad trapped tiger, he has watched his country break and crumble before his eyes. Mea Cuba is part of Cuba's history and has made history, not in the manner of Robert Graves but akin to Arthur Koestler: Cabrera Infante represents the heroic figure of the lonely rider whose conscience demands perpetual spiritual rebellion against tyranny.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In 1992, the publication of Mea Cuba in Spain was greeted enthusiastically, and in a few months the edition was sold out. With such an auspicious beginning, one might have expected a reprint and a flurry of awards, but the Spanish publishing house did not reprint Mea Cuba. Cabrera Infante's followers were astounded that the hand of censorship and repression from Havana continued to have such a long, forceful reach. Mea Cuba is not only a great literary monument to the modern essay but a remarkable tour de force of memory allied to humor and the magical style that is perhaps Cabrera Infante's greatest gift. This book is important because Cabrera Infante, like Proust, reveals truth through the essential relationship between time and language.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The body of Cabrera Infante's work can be seen as a gigantic madeleine that encompasses the modern history of his beloved Cuba. Cabrera Infante has had a long love affair with Cuban slang and dialect and has managed to reinvent a native Cuban language. He faithfully captured and enlivened the language of everyman in his masterpiece Tres tristes tigres (1967) [Three Trapped Tigers (1971)]. In Así en la paz como en la guerra (1960) [Writes of Passage (1993)] he tried to make sense of the violence and cruelty that permeate Cuba's history. In 0 (1975) he claimed his right to fragment a chronology that is keenly observant of contemporary manners, songs, characters, and the trivia of Havana and London through the prism of time. In La Habana para un Infante difunto (1979) [Infante's Inferno (1984)] he shared with his readers the rapture of every smell and taste in Havana's streets, bars, nightclubs, and movie houses. He found his vocation in Havana, his Jerusalem of Gold, and an image of eternity. In Vista del amanecer en el trópico (1974) [View of Dawn in the Tropics (1978)] he fictionalized Cuban history in moving poetic prose impassioned with sea breezes. In Exorcismos de esti(l)o (1976) [Style exorcisms] he recaptured his love of freedom in spectacular concrete poems. In Arcadia todas las noches (1978) [Arcadia every night] he reminds us of the privileged time we spend watching films by the movie directors we admire, where we escape into other worlds. In Holy Smoke (1985) he mythified a Cuban invention, the cigar. In Un oficio del siglo veinte (1963) [A Twentieth Century Job (1991)] he reminds us that criticism in any country is inextricably bound with freedom of expression. And in his prose piece Delito por bailar el chachachá (1995) (Crime for dancing the chachacha] he captured the vital associative chain between melody and rhythm.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Mea Cuba is a collection of essays with a dystopian vision that has worked itself into many fields and has challenged Cuban political thought. Like other Hispanic writers, Cabrera Infante is prodded by the ghost of the poet, teacher, journalist, essayist, diplomat, soldier, and Cuban patriot José Martí (1853-1895). Both Cabrera Infante and Marti have left us with fragments of “master” literature; both have also proven themselves to be writers first, and writers of political essays second; and both are imbued with the desire to see Cuba free from tyranny. However, the effect of their writing could not be more different. Marti's texts are architecturally akin to sermons, solemn and vibrant with patriotism and emotion, while Cabrera Infante's writing is witty and erudite, dense and abbreviated, and always in the service of an artistic aim.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante's influence on linguistics is as important as his achievement as a writer; his writing stands as a total release from the bondage of gravity, solemnity, and inhibition. It is baffling and exhilarating. Mea Cuba resounds with satire and irony. Puns crowd each other with disciplined accuracy. His ingenuity places him in the company of writers such as Anatole France, Jonathan Swift, and George Orwell, whose respective works include L'Ile des Pingouins (1908) [The Island of Penguins], Gulliver's Travels (1854), and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">France's humorous brand of skepticism and prophetic bent are similar to Cabrera Infante's. France tells the story of amoral and inhuman penguins, clerical-soldiers greedy for power and ready to kill any dragon or to accuse any innocent man in order to keep their privileges. They blindly follow a religion, inspired by a virgin who in reality is a prostitute. They are always chanting patriotic hymns and repeating mottoes they do not believe. Like humans, the penguins are ready to burn at the stake anyone who does not step in line. Does this ring a bell? Of course, Anatole France's Island of Alca could be a copy of Castro's Cuba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Swift is closer to Cabrera Infante in his special brand of satire. Before Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, and while he was the dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin, he was already known in England as a political and satirical writer. Close to two hundred years ago on the floating island of Lipide, Swift spoke of two moons orbiting around Mars, but who believed him? Before writing his masterpiece Tres tristes tigres, Cabrera Infante was the “dean” of the literary scene as director of Lunes, the cultural supplement to a revolutionary magazine/newspaper in Castro's Cuba. In exile, Cabrera Infante assumed the role of a Cassandra who alerted the world to the repressive surveillance of Fidel Castro's police, the G2. This police force, coincidentally, bears the same name as that of Batista's own repressive forces. In Mea Cuba Cabrera Infante warns that Cuba had taken on the characteristics of Swift's “Laputa.” Homosexuals were tortured in the name of “rehabilitation,” a “double-think” technique of the party in the UMAPs. He also warns of the dangers of totalitarianism. In Nazi Germany Joseph Goebbels labeled the Jews “bacteria.” Cubans that run away into exile are classified by Castrian terminology as “gusanos” [worms]. In this “age of assassins,” who believed Cabrera Infante? It was 193 years before Swift was vindicated. For Cabrera Infante it will not be that long.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The title Mea Cuba is a double entendre. The author is both poisoned with a sense of guilt and, at the same time, has the possessiveness of a lover: Mea Culpa, Mea Cuba [My Fault, My Cuba]. Cabrera Infante shares a collective guilt with all Cubans. It is understandable, since Castro, like Hitler, could not have created chaos and destruction by himself. That is why guilt covers the bovine portion of the Cuban population that sided with the tyrant, as well as scholars and intellectuals who looked the other way when Castro made his grab for power. For Cabrera Infante, guilt will always be alive as the reminder of this collective crime.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante, like the French novelist Albert Camus, knew early privation and rejected the optimism of Christianity. He sees Cubans as if they were an unhappy Sisyphus condemned not to push the stone of Castro's regime but to hold the stone with all its weight. In Mea Cuba, Cabrera Infante—paraphrasing Anthony Burgess—stands like Homer breathing fire through his mortiferous puns: “la castroenteritis,” “la castradura que dura,” and “la espera estoica” He warns us that Castro's regime has converted Cuba into an Orwellian world with public and private Kafkaesque nightmares. Cabrera Infante, unlike so many English writers, is neither a utopian as was H. G. Wells nor a candid traveler like Edna O'Brien. This Homer is a sort of Roquentin who sees the results of a dogmatic revolution and is overwhelmed by its absurdity. He goes into exile and embraces freedom.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The essays in Mea Cuba are well orchestrated and could be heard as an opera containing memorable arias such as: “Lorca hace Hover en La Habana” [Mea Cuba [1992], 108-20) [“Lorca the Rainmaker Visits Havana” (Mea Cuba [1994], 87-96)]; “Yo acuso en el Wilson Center” (Mea Cuba [1992], 254-65) [“J'Accuse at the Woodrow Wilson Center” (Mea Cuba [1994], 231-38)]; “Voces cubanas, voces lejanas” (Mea Cuba [1992], 473–76) [“Hearing (Distant) Voices” (Mea Cuba [1994], 480-82)]; and “El ave del Paraíso Perdido” (Mea Cuba [1992], 481-84) [“The Bird of Paradise Lost” (Mea Cuba [1994], 489-91)]; among others. The overture, or opening movement, touches on nearly every major theme and symbol of the Mea Cuba essays and thrusts the reader into the Cuban political arena: “Aviso” (Mea Cuba [1992], 15) [“Notice” (Mea Cuba [1994], xii)]; “Génesis/Exodo” (Mea Cuba [1992], 16) [“Genesis/Exodus” (Mea Cuba [1994], 1)]; and “Naufragio con un amanecer al fondo” (Mea Cuba [1992], 17-19) [“Shipwreck with a Sunrise in the Background” (Mea Cuba [1994], 3-5)]. With each interlude the writer's tone intensifies in a crescendo, and the sound and fury of the puns wind their way into our minds and hearts. Certain melodies or themes create a devastating discord: the struggle between tyranny and freedom, Havana and Cuban literary figures recovered, spiritual and physical signs of exile. The tempo of the essays is treated by the author in different measures, playing the binary against the ternary. From a “Vivace,” “Presto,” and “Allegretto” in “La respuesta” (Mea Cuba [1992], 23-32) [“Answers and Questions” (Mea Cuba [1994], 11—19)], the speed moves to an “Andantino,” to be followed by an “Andante” in “Vidas para leerlas” (Mea Cuba [1992], 315-405) [“Parallax Lives” (Mea Cuba [1994], 329-416)], that leads to “Vida única” (Mea Cuba [1992], 406-35) [“Live Lives” (Mea Cuba [1994], 417—44)] in a “Larghetto,” and finally ends in the delicacies of tone required for a great finale with an unexpected “Adagio.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The essays in Mea Cuba are “reactive.” Cabrera Infante left Cuba in 1965 on a flight to Belgium, where he had been serving as cultural attaché.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">After he not only rejected the directrix of a castrating revolution but dared to openly criticize it as well, he himself was attacked by servants of the Cuban regime from all over the world. The first pages of Mea Cuba were written as a defense to these cunning articles. They comprise, as Alastair Reid aptly explained, miscellaneous letters, articles, conferences, memories, portraits, and essays. Yet the touching issue in them is the sensibility of a writer infused with nostalgia and the hope that, through telling the world his story, he can reestablish the credibility of his country and his beloved city, Havana. Cabrera Infante offers, at the same time, an “identity card” of Cuban history. This knowledge frees the reader from the “official” history in order to discover and become an accomplice to the real history of Cuba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante, like Proust, is obsessed with truth and time. Mnemosyne, the muse of memory and Cabrera Infante's muse, represents his imagination and a form of his rebellious attitude toward history. The truth about the past has to be preserved at all costs. When Combray and Balbec, the beloved cities of Proust's narrator in Remembrance of Things Past, appear from memory, they are seen from multiple vantage points: when he was young, when he was 20, and what he felt standing before a landscape. Havana also rises between past, present, and future in an original time as close to eternity as the memory of Cabrera Infante's narrator in Mea Cuba. The essence of this city is so rich that the Havana of his youth, the Havana he saw in ruins at the time of his mother's death in 1965, and the Havana he longs for are permeated with the same qualities, although seen under very different circumstances.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">History is supposedly written by the conquerors, and is not easily fathomed. Cabrera Infante expressed his vision of the Cuban regime that changes its embroidery each night: “se escribe y reescribe siempre: la tela en que Penélope borda la imagen de un Ulises constante, inconstante” (Mea Cuba [1992], 225) [“the eternal writing and rewriting the cloth of history on which a revisionist Penelope weaves the image of her constant (by night), inconstant (by day) Ulysses the crafty” (Mea Cuba [1994], 281)]. One of the gloomiest aspects of Cuban history is that after 38 years of tyranny, a great deal of truth has been crushed by silence, manipulation, and propaganda. The author of Mea Cuba knows about these dangers and wants to set the record straight. He clings tenaciously to dates, names, events, and his right to judge and condemn.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">OVERTURE</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Before the curtain rises in Mea Cuba, we hear a muted trumpet announcing two pivotal dates: Sunday, 28 October 1492, marking Columbus's discovery of Cuba in “Génesis,” and 3 October 1965, when Cabrera Infante left Cuba for good in “Exodo” (Mea Cuba [1992], 16) [“Exodus” (Mea Cuba [1994], 1)]. This second date prepares the overture for a story about a “Paradise” converted into a tropical communist “Inferno.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The curtain rises and Cabrera Infante explains the paradox of his life as the son of Communist Party founders in Cuba, growing up with the party's contradictions and inconsistencies and becoming a writer who is neither a politician nor a political writer but who chose to become the latter for ethical reasons. Cuba is, metaphorically, a drifting ship full of trapped rats trying to run away, with hysterical images of Fidel Castro and Adolf Hitler screaming, “This ship will not sink.” In “A propósito” (Mea Cuba [1992], 20-22) [“By the way” (Mea Cuba [1994], 6–8)], Cabrera Infante relates an incident in 1985 after a trip to Barcelona. Upon his return to London, he had trouble getting into his apartment, which had been ransacked, although nothing had been taken. A Scotland Yard detective identifies Cabrera Infante as an exile from Castro's Cuba. The detective informs him that he was indeed lucky; exiled Eastern European writers had been robbed of their manuscripts and even murdered, as in the case of Gregory Markov. Markov, an exiled writer, verbally attacked the ruling communist family in Bulgaria and was killed with a poison-tipped umbrella in London. The narrator graciously invites his uninvited guests to read Mea Cuba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">ACT ONE</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">A great many things are revealed rather quickly in this untitled first act—hidden scandals, secrets, and public memories. The situations, characters, and historical events are presented in a straightforward fashion where nothing is superfluous; nevertheless, the reader is provided occasional guidance. There are many issues and layers associated with the tyrannical power that had confiscated democracy in Cuba. The reader must know all and, like a Caruso, the author obliges with the full splendor of his voice. This is no mean task. Each act calls for an incessant but varied approach with reinforcement of words and melodies. There are 27 scenes, each one rising to a higher pitch. The prodigious vigor of Cabrera Infante's most ferocious prose is reserved for Castro, the major villain of this story. He uses language to corrode and denigrate the despotic power that has not only persecuted the author but has also expropriated the psyche of the Cuban people.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Disguised as an actor, Cabrera Infante confesses that for his task he has chosen the most difficult genre: comedy. His mottoes are from Marti, “About the tyrant say everything, say even more,” and from Shakespeare's Bottom in the second scene of the first act in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, “Yet my chief humor is for a tyrant.” He mocks and makes great fun of the tyrant, exactly as Proust did with Charlus, Bloch, Madame Verdurin, Norpois, and so many of his other characters. Descartes said: “Cogito ergo sum” [“I think, therefore, I am”]. For Proust and Cabrera Infante this might translate: I ridicule, therefore, I am. For Cabrera Infante alone, the phrase might be: Loquor ergo sum [I talk, therefore, I am].</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">An author's talent for parody is his secret weapon. In “La respuesta de Cabrera Infante” (Mea Cuba [1992], 23–32) [“Answers and Questions” (Mea Cuba [1994], 11–19)] an explanation is offered for the exile's choice. A country, Cabrera Infante says, is not only geography, it is history. And in Cuba, “La geografía era la misma, estaba viva, pero la Historia había muerto” (Mea Cuba [1992], 26) [“Geography was alive, but history had died” (Mea Cuba [1994], 14)]. In “La peliculita culpable” (Mea Cuba [1992], 61–62) [“EM. Means Post Mortem” (Mea Cuba [1994], 52–54)], the case of the short film P.M. is rested, the “Cuban Revolution” is efficiently dismantled, and its surreality is proclaimed. The revolutionary dream of “educational achievement” and “balanced diet” fail when certain books are forbidden, the press is repressed, and human rights are violated. The famous case of Heberto Padilla is exposed in great detail. Frightening statistics from 1964 are offered: more than 2,000,000 Cubans are obliged to belong to the CDR, which means they are spies. Since then more than 1,500,000 have fled the country, leaving an experiential void that has yet to be filled.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">For a brief moment Cabrera Infante steps back and lets a silent chorus of “official” absentee writers be humiliated by a UNE AC document announcing the 1968 expulsion of Cabrera Infante and pianist Ivette Hernández, both considered to be “traitors to the revolutionary cause.” The other document, explaining Julio Cortázar's opinion on the Padilla case, is a masterpiece of impure political naivete, or pure political cynicism, if you like. The author accepts the poet Ismail Hikmet's wise advice, “Travel. Be a presence with your absence,” and shares fascinating anecdotes and gossip—a “Who's Who” in the Cuban artistic panorama. An encounter with Franco's police meant: “Goodbye Madrid!—Hello London?” (Mea Cuba [1992], 108; Mea Cuba [1994], 450).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In “Lorca hace Hover en La Habana” (Mea Cuba [1992], 108–20) [“Lorca the Rainmaker Visits Havana” (Mea Cuba [19941; 87–96)], Cabrera Infante poeticizes the visit of the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca to Havana in 1930. His prose intermingles imagery from a photogtaph of Garcia Lorca taken by Walker Evans, which shows a well-dressed dandy in an elegant white suit; descriptions of Havana from Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not (1937), which he wrote in Cuba; descriptions of the surreal beauty of Havana written by traveler Joseph Hergesheimer; Jorge Luis Borges's impressions of Havana, taken from the Encyclopedia Britannica; and references to the city found in popular songs and nostalgia. He ends the essay with a description of the scene at a banquet in Havana held in honor of Garcia Lorca and interrupted by a sudden torrential rainstorm. Lorca, fascinated by the spectacle, stood up and, in respectful silence, paid tribute to nature. This “solo singing” will hold a place of honor for many readers as a Proustian trip: Havana lost, Havana regained.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In “La Habana para los fieles difunta” (Mea Cuba [1992], 120–25) [“Havana Lost and Found: A Dead City—or the City of the Dead?” (Mea Cuba [1994], 100–105)], the image of the city, as inconstant as the sea that surrounds it, has changed radically. It is the same Havana but transformed into a ghost of itself, a painted whore ready to greet tourists. Havana is a temptress and a tormented city. Can its essential integrity ever be recovered? In “El martirio de Marti” (Mea Cuba [1992], 126–31) [“The Martyrdom of Marti” (Mea Cuba [1994], 109–13)], the mythical figure José Marti, his exile and death, are expressed in triumphant prose. Marti, like Cabrera Infante, spent more time in exile than he spent in Cuba, but this exile allowed him to become one of the finest writers of the nineteenth-century, just as Cabrera Infante's exile has allowed him to become one of the finest writers of this century. Cabrera Infante explains exile not as a historical or geographical situation but as an emotional one. He defines exile as “una tierra que el escritor lleva siempre consigo” (Mea Cuba [1992], 127) [“a land that the writer carries with him always” (Mea Cuba [1994], 110)]. “¿Quién mató a Calvert Casey?” (Mea Cuba [1992], 131–56) [“Who Killed Calvert Casey?” (Mea Cuba [1994], 114–37)] is about the life and times of Calvert Casey, the remarkable Cuban writer who committed suicide in Rome in 1972. It is also a “J'Accuse” to a number of infamous tourists who, having received confidences from Cubans, did not keep their secrets, placing the lives of Cuban citizens in danger.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">“Entre la historia y la nada” (Mea Cuba [1992], 157–89) [“Between History and Nothingness” (Mea Cuba [1994], 138–72)] is an inventory of Cuban suicides. Except for Sweden, Cuba has the highest suicide rate in the world. Castro's Cuba is also one of the few countries in the world where executions by firing squad are performed on teenage boys, some as young as 16 years of age. In “El prisionero político desconocido” (Mea Cuba [1992], 215–19) (“The Unknown Political Prisoner” (Mea Cuba [1994], 196–200)], Cabrera Infante recalls the 1703 image of the “Man in the Iron Mask” to demonstrate that totalitarian policies mean total war against political prisoners. In “Prisioneros de la Isla del Diablo” (Mea Cuba [1992], 220–24) [“Prisoners of Devil's Island” (Mea Cuba [1994], 201–5)], Cabrera Infante makes a comparison between two islands converted into political prisons and two victims of a corrupt system. Alfred Dreyfus was the victim of conspiratorial military forces, and Gustavo Arcos was the victim of Fidel Castro. Cabrera Infante uses the image of “new blankets” in Cuban jails, as well as those in Nazi extermination camps, as a metaphor for an obscene vision in which Red Cross volunteers in Europe and political tourists in Cuba give glowing reports of conditions under the respective tyrannies to the “outside world.” Instead of an alarmed awakening, as in The Golden Cockerel, and an urgent warning: “Open your eyes and beware!,” the visitors parrot: “Cocorico!” [“Everything is fine and dandy!”] in order to protect the despicable Dondon kings.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">“Un retrato familiar” (Mea Cuba [1992], 224-30) [“Portrait of an Aging Tyro” (Mea Cuba [1994], 281-90)] refers to Carlos Franqui's extraordinary autobiographical-historic book Retrato de familia con Fidel (1981) [A family portrait with Fidel]. The portrait has a forceful “yang-like” description of Castro and reads like the cut of an ax. “Nuestro prohombre en La Habana” (Mea Cuba [1992], 233–38) [“Notable Men in Havana” (Mea Cuba [1994], 210-15)] is a personal criticism of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who succumbed to the fascination of totalitarian figures such as Fidel Castro and General Torrijos. This essay is an indictment of the fickleness and unpredictability of countries with democratic traditions, such as the contradictory practices of the United States, which treats its friends as enemies and invites citizens of enemy countries to give lectures and hold positions at universities.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The artists Jacques Louis David, a cynical French court painter, and Walker Evans, the American photographer who produced unforgettable images of Havana, provide the opportunity for an enjoyable discussion about clichés. One such meaningless expression for Cabrera Infante is “Latin America,” a term coined by Michel Chevalier, one of Napoléon Ill's bureaucrats in nineteenth-century France. The historical and social realities of the so-called “Latin American” countries do not coincide with artificial divisions; so for him there is only North, South, and Central America and Mexico.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante's pièce de résistance, “Yo acuso en el Wilson Center” (Mea Cuba [1992], 254-65) (“J'Accuse at the Woodrow Wilson Center” (Mea Cuba [1994], 231-38)], is not a thriller but rather a choker that might confuse someone trying to follow the story. Cabrera Infante is purposely obscure and deprives his readers of some important connecting threads. When Emile Zola wrote his famous letter to President Félix Faure in defense of Dreyfus, which was published in L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, the French novelist and intellectual engaged the reader with a prolonged detour for several pages and cinched his argument at the conclusion of his letter with a series of forcefully dramatic statements. Cabrera Infante has successfully improved upon this recipe for writing with unabashed frankness and passion. He meanders through a complex maze, moving in and out of gloomy passageways, onto twisted paths that lead to dangerous, overhanging cliffs before finally delivering the coup de grâce in his Cuban “I accuse.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In “EI nacimiento de una noción” (Mea Cuba [1992], 292–304) [“Hey Cuba, Hecuba?” (Mea Cuba [1994], 247-59)], Cabrera Infante submits that this is not the Age of Aquarius for Cubans but rather the Age of Exile. The narrator, as a cinematographic D. W Griffith, heralds the disquieting and improbable news. No one would have dreamed that for more than a century and a half, the island nation of Cuba has produced more exiles in America than any other country. A hundred years ago, when the Cuban people fought for their independence from Spanish rule, many great men and women went into exile abroad, including the poets José Maria Heredia, José Marti, Juan Clemente Zenea, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and the novelist Cirilo Villaverde. Others have opted for a so-called “exile on the inside” as in the cases of contemporary writers Julián del Casal, José Lezama Lima, and Virgilio Pinera.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">“¿Ha muerto el socialismo?” (Mea Cuba [1992], 304-7) [“Has Socialism Died?” (Mea Cuba [1994], 269-71)] is the author's personal response to a questionnaire and an eloquent analysis of ethical attitudes. The first act closes at a critical moment with “¿Qué cosa es la historia, pues?” (Mea Cuba [1992], 307-13) [“What is History, pues?” (Mea Cuba [1994], 272-77)] when the narrator, as director, presents the dramatis personae, and offers a summary of the subject backed up by a choral performance by the likes of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plutarch.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The compass of Act One keeps up with the laughing/crying pace of “Vesti la giubba” [Put on the clown costume], The narrator, as an “allegro agitato ed appassionato Pagliaccio” [happy, agitated, and impassioned clown], laughs for the love that has been destroyed and mourns the ruination of his city, jeering at the tyrant and his cowardly and treacherous accomplices, while crying with anguish for the thousands of men, women, and children who have drowned in the ocean while trying to escape from this “Paradise.” As the show must go on, the need for laughter becomes the dim hope that sustains this Pagliaccio in the face of an apparently desperate present and future.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">ACT TWO: VIDAS PARA LEERLAS [PARALLAX LIVES]</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The paronomasia or pun of this title is that it can also be read as “Vidas paralelas” [parallel lives]. In this section of the book Cabrera</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">is like Orpheus descending into hell in search of an intellectual and artistic elite in order to save Cuba from oblivion. When he looks back, the Euridices spring to life. A riot of color erupts across the stage as a cinematographer, a ballerina, and writers such as Lino Novás Calvo, Nestor Almendros, Enrique Labrador Ruiz, Gastón Baquero, José Lezama Lima, Reinaldo Arenas, Virgilio Pinera, Lydia Cabrera, and Alejo Carpentier form the cast. Unlike Lot's wife, they are not turned into pillars of salt, although Cabrera Infante makes no bones about liberally seasoning his gossip and anecdotes with plenty of salt. This is not the first time that he has paid tribute to great Cuban artistic figures. In Tres tristes tigres a chapter is devoted to remarkable parodies of literary styles. It remains one of the glories of the book. Cosi fan tutte? Not at all. This punster is a monster that enjoys mimicry, ever ready to unmask minor villains. If Proust enjoyed looking at portraits of famous artists, making funny comparisons with living persons, Cabrera Infante has made famous his verbal portraits. Carpentieri depiction is a good example of how to receive Tosca's kiss. In “Carpentier, cubano a la canona” (Mea Cuba [1992], 370-88) [Alejo Carpentier, a Shotgun Cuban (Mea Cuba [1994], 383-99)], the writer comes across as a “Castrato” courier who delivers his master's orders with virtuosity. Also a “four-letter” word reveals that Carpentieri French accent is faked when he forgets himself and swears in perfect Spanish. The scene shifts to a metro ride that confirms that the central character in this portrait truly lies like a prince. In the end, is this rake punished? Or la commediae finita? By no means.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">ACT THREE: VIDA ÚNICA</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The reader will unavoidably fall under the magic spell of Cabrera Infante's incredible capacity to sustain an even chord in order to capture time, memory, and nostalgia. The aim of this triumvirate is to project the sad, highly poetic and almost mystical air of the never-never land called “Exile.” The results show the tragedy of exile in a series of impressionistic essays that includes a farewell to the Cuban world champion chess player Capablanca and a satirical piece that fulfills Orson Welles's, George Orwell's, and Aldous Huxley's fantasies by depicting the Cuban exile community as being totally invisible to some scholars and intellectuals.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The conclusion of Mea Cuba is not a victory symphony, as in Julius Caesar, but rather reaches the ethereal heights of tender joy in “El ave del paraíso perdido” (Mea Cuba f1992], 481-84) [“The Bird of Paradise Lost” (Mea Cuba [1994], 489-91)], a love scene in which Cabrera Infante tries to relate to another author's soul. Blessed be the blue bird of nostalgic happiness because, with its exiles, it will be able to recover time lost. Memory will be free to wander and Cuba, an infinitely more powerful entity, reappears like some magical experience.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">This great finale could not be more Proustian. If Mea Cuba had ended with the essay “El exilio invisible” (Mea Cuba [1992], 477-81) [“The Invisible Exile” (Mea Cuba [1994], 483-88)], it could not have been more devastating. Instead, an unexpected turn is taken in the form of a glorious flashback. Cabrera Infante was looking for truth, and he has found it; if he was looking for truth through the essence of time, he has discovered the value of time past. The trip is over. Was an unexpected turn taken after all? No. When he cannot go back to the promised land he prays “Next Year in Jerusalem!”—a miracle might occur. How could he put a limit on an unlimited emotion? The ending of Mea Cuba is not an ending at all. It is a beginning. For Cabrera Infante, the only way to resurrect Havana is through time, memory, and writing, and this is exactly what he has done in Mea Cuba. As long as he longs, he will remember, and as long as he keeps writing about Cuba, the book of life will be an open one, a limbo without an end but with both a Genesis and an Exodus.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">ENCORE</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The influence of Proust on the work of Cuban writers has been profound. Despite the fact that Proust and Cabrera Infante had very different backgrounds, both came from homes in which their parents were sensitive to culture and their mothers gave them a sense of direction.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Marcel Proust was born in Auteuil into the French bourgeoisie. At home, he was surrounded by servants and members of his family, including his father Adrien Achilles Proust, a Catholic medical doctor, his Jewish intellectual mother, Jeanne Weil, and his younger brother Robert. The young Proust adored the provincial rustic life of Illiers, where his father's family had once owned a small grocery store.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante was born in Gibara in the province of Oriente, where he had a poor but happy childhood. His parents, Zoila Infante Castro and Guillermo Cabrera López, were communist intellectuals. In 1942, the then adolescent Cabrera Infante, along with his parents and younger brother Sabá, moved to Havana. Cabrera Infante fell in love with the urban charms of the city of Havana, which would later become an inspiration for his writing.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">As an adult, Proust led an active Social life. He found a kind of political salvation by defending Captain Alfred Dreyfus and Colonel Georges-Marie Picquart during the years of the Dreyfus affair. The collapse of France's moral values, coupled with Proust's poor health, reinforced his already pessimistic outlook on life. Near the end of his life, with only his housekeeper Celeste Albaret to help him, Proust secluded himself in his room and worked to prove that time lost could be recovered through writing. His desire to live in seclusion was to fulfill the obsession to finish his novel A la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927) [Remembrance of Things Past] and because of this obsession, he remained happily ignorant of world events.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante, along with his wife Miriam Gómez and his two daughters from a previous marriage, isolated himself in his London apartment in order to finish his work. His London apartment became his haven, or, as he said later on when he looked back to this period in his life: “If your country does not exist anymore, what do you say? My only country is this flat.” Although he may have lived like a hermit, Cabrera Infante, unlike Proust, was always well informed about world affairs. What is most admirable besides his gift of writing with humor and vivacity is the courage and honesty with which he attacks human rights violations and political repression in Cuba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Proust did not abandon the real world for an imaginary one. It is true that if he had not visited aristocratic homes, he would not have been able to recreate their ambiance and personality. But he did not use a historical event like the Dreyfus affair to create a literary fiction as did Roger du Gard with Jean Barois (1913). Proust took the opposite approach and went from the imaginary to the real. Cabrera Infante departs from reality toward the imaginary. The fact that Cabrera Infante's parents were founders of the Communist Party in their hometown and that the author took an active part in Castro's revolution made it possible for Cabrera Infante to recreate his experiences in Cuba with imagination and with an exceptional facility for detail.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Proust mocked the aristocracy. Cabrera Infante mocks the horrors and corruption of Cuba's ruling revolutionary elite. For Proust and Cabrera Infante, only artistic creation through the act of writing could bring personal salvation. Both authors have a highly individualized writing style and each has a most civilized wit. Both are vengeful and aggressive and enjoy ferocious ridicule. Both love digressions and surprise endings, and both are “visual” writers who adore music. Proust was a devoted student of painting and the natural world, while Cabrera Infante is a dedicated student of film and human nature. Both authors are thinkers who are usually seen as writers rather than philosophers. Both writers use language in unexpected ways and both are considered to be pivotal literary figures within their countries.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">One of the most striking similarities between Proust and Cabrera Infante is the way in which each writer is able to recreate his remembrances of childhood. For both men, the past intrudes on the present in the form of sensory experience told from the perspective of the adult reenacting, or reliving it. Each author recognizes and reveals that, through art, the past can be reconstructed and that the experiences of our youth can be revisited. For Cabrera Infante and Proust, art is the only path to salvation and the only remedy to fight the ravages of time. In essence, each man has only the past to write about because he truly leaves the past De Profundis. In A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust intertwines the artistry of Ulster the painter, Bergotte the writer, and Vinteuil the musician in order to give pleasure through their memories of time past. An image or fragrance, anything that could bring back the remembered scent of an old church or a city, was the perfect answer to Proust's dreams and wishes. Cabrera Infante has devoted most of his considerable skills to evoking, in a similar way, the essence of his beloved city of Havana. Exile tests his skills of imagination and his time of solitude is populated with thoughts and remembrances of Cuba that become more alive as they enter the realm of fiction. The city of Havana is presented as a projection of cinematic planes with varying structural tonalities. Is Havana a Balbec that the narrator remembers as a sacred place? For Cabrera Infante, Havana is not only a lost city but one beautified and magnified in legendary proportions through language.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Cabrera Infante's memory is like a garden full of ecstatic poetry for his country. It is the kind of revolutionary poetry that will cancel any discord between history and an idea. Proust transformed the denial of his mother's kiss into literature, while Cabrera Infante converts the denial of official history into capital “Proust-valia.” When Cabrera Infante writes, he attempts to revisit the experiences of his childhood, experiences that he believes will never betray him</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">POSTSCRIPT FOR THE CURIOUS</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">The prelude of “El ave del paraíso perdido,” the famous sequence of essays on exile in which Cabrera Infante uses sudden “flashbacks,” is one of his finest creations. The finale of the book is gentle and yet powerful and effective enough to convey, in essence, the message for the entire book.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In exile we tend to rescue or invent our own reality. This reality is recognized in a writer's imagination because his dreams and visions are waiting for him. Nostalgia is the most precious treasure an exile can possess. It is ours alone, yet at the same time, it unites our personal memories with those of others. Memory goes back to our conscience and, as Octavio Paz says, once we have conscience, we are free to make a choice. Cabrera Infante takes an unorthodox course, as he shares a cathartic literary experience through a sort of communion with another writer. In 1962 Cabrera Infante found a book in a bookstore in the old section of Havana that had been recommended by Borges. It was Allá lejos y bace tiempo (1938) [Far Away and Long Ago (1918)] by William Henry Hudson, the English writer who was born to American parents in Argentina and who became destitute and died in London.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">For Cabrera Infante, reading this book by Hudson was like sharing destiny. A book written by an exiled writer, any writer, is a book of exodus, and as Cabrera Infante remembers Hudson's book, his memory merges with Hudson's. It is the unity of sharing similar feelings and understanding the same ideas. As he reads Hudson's words, he sees a bird singing on the patio. “¿Es por casualidad un pájaro de Argentina?” (Mea Cuba [1992], 483) [“Is it by chance a bird from Argentina?”] Hudson asked his wife (Mea Cuba [1994], 491). No, it comes from childhood and past dreams and any exile can listen to its humming. The main difference between Proust's and Cabrera Infante's approaches is that Cabrera Infante's narrator does not reject his dreams and he embraces his past naturally. Proust's narrator rejects many of the things in which he believed after discovering that they were false.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">In Mea Cuba, one book is finished when another book is recovered. Images and words become one when Cabrera Infante travels a road similar to the one followed by Hudson, suffering similar heartaches and deprivations. The metaphor of seeing exile as a recovered book and traveling along a path with someone else through time and space is a beautiful spiritual adventure. Cabrera Infante has displayed great insight into the absurd nature of the history of an exile. He sees Cuba as the metaphor of a paradox: “Cuba es un paraíso del que huimos tratando de regresar” (Mea Cuba [1992], 475) [“Cuba is a paradise from which we flee by trying to return” (Mea Cuba [1994], 481).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">History is full of surprises and can be a nightmare. As Paz said, “La historia, por sí misma, no tiene sentido: es un escenario transitado sólo por fantasmas sucesivos. La historia es inhumana …porque su único personaje es una entidad abstracta: la humanidad” [History in itself has no meaning: it is a stage crossed only by ghosts, one after the other. History is inhuman …because its only character is an abstraction: humanity]. But history can also be a meeting place where, by revisiting the past, one can make amends and free the spirit. History does not necessarily have to end in chaos. In spite of Cuba's history of violence, treason, and greed for power and the great sadness and loss for the Cuban people, a human being can achieve a sort of identity and reconciliation. Recovering the past creates a transfiguration of his beloved island and that is the true significance of the book. It is based on two important premises: I remember, therefore I exist, and I am responsible, therefore I am free.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">If anyone wants to know what it was like to live on the island during those Castrian years, it is to Mea Cuba they must go. Mea Cuba may be an immense cantata that depicts the passion and death of Castro's communism. Or it may be an opera rich in disappointment with an unusually optimistic ending that must be heard. Mea Cuba, Cabrera Infante's masterpiece, is the evocation of a terrible era, an invocation of beloved voices, an accusation of a corrupt regime, a defense of human values, and a meditation on the significance of exile. Guillermo Cabrera Infante's testimony is an act of freedom</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Notes</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">1. Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was one of the greatest French novelists of the twentieth century, author of Les plaisirs et le jours (1896), A la recherche du temps perdu [Remembrance of Things Past] (1913–1927, seven volumes), and Jean Santeuil (1952, three volumes). The second volume of A la recherche du temps perdu, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, received the Prix Goncourt in 1920. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba (Barcelona: Plaza and Janés, 1992); Mea Cuba, trans. Kenneth Hall and Guillermo Cabrera Infante (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1994); hereafter cited in the text.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">2. Procrustes was a burglar who tied travelers to his bed and made them fit; if their legs were too short, he stretched them, if they were too long he cut them off. Procrustes has been used as a symbol of tyranny and enforced order. Cabrera Infante enhances this symbolism by depicting History as a whore in his bed</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">3. Robert Graves (1895–996) was an English poet and historian. The author of several volumes of poetry and critical essays, he is well-known for his serial adaptation of “I, Claudius” (1934).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Arthur Koestler (1905–1983) was born in Budapest, Hungary, and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He initially embraced Marxist ideals, which he later rejected. He is best known for the novel Darkness at Noon (1941), which criticized the Stalinist purges in Moscow.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">4. The Mexico City presentation of Mea Cuba supports this supposition. The 26 May 1993 event at the Cultural Center in San Angel was delayed by bomb threats, which required that police search the auditorium. Although many frightened people left, the place was packed. The presenters were Enrique Krauze, Carlos Monsivais, Alejandro Rossi, José de la Colina, and myself. I was the first to read a paper. No sooner had I finished than I was publicly insulted by the Castrian “macho squad” in the audience. Krauze, in sotto voce, requested that I not reply. Rossi replied saying that he felt personally insulted that a colleague, and the only woman on the panel, had suffered this aggression. When a telephone line direct to London was opened to the public for discussion, Cabrera Infante was also verbally attacked by the same squad. In Mexico City the aggression continued for days in other forms: phone calls to my home and derogatory articles in newspapers, such as ha jornada. Only José de la Colina came to my defense one week later in Novedades.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">5. The comparison of these writers can be found in the essay “Mea Cuba” by Nedda G. de Anhalt, published in the Mexican literary magazine unomásuno 818 (5 June 1993): 5.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">6. I am not implying that José Martí was without humor. His play “Amor con amor se paga” proves that he had humor. But his essays, though they give free reign to his passions, are serious.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">7. Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), born in Dublin, educated in Ireland, and the author of Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels, must have had some knowledge of the Spanish language. Naming the land Laputa (the whore) indicates that he did. Unfortunately, many Cubans have taken to prostitution as a way of survival with the blessing of Fidel Castro, who has publicly acknowledged in his speeches the “culture of our women prostitutes.” “They do it for pleasure, not for necessity.”;k goes without saying that this collapse of values is a consequence of the communist regime's failure and not the so-called “blockade,” which is really an “embargo” that does not prevent the regime from receiving goods from other countries.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">George Orwell (1903–1950) was born in India. His real name was Etic Blair. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and wrote Homage to Catalonia, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, The Road to Wigan Rier, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and the masterpieces Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">8. UMAP (Unidad Militar de Ayuda a la Producción) [Military Unit for the Aid of Production] was the Orwellian euphemism used by Castro's regime to name concentration camps thjpughout Cuba during the 1970s where homosexuals and other dissidents—religious and political—were detained</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">9. Other famous Cuban writers, such as Eugenio Florit, Gaston Baquero, Justo Rodriguez Santos, José Lezama Lima, and Enrique Labrador Ruiz embraced Christianity. Lorenzo Garcia Vega is a follower of Buddhism</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">10. Often, the greater the writer, the more difficult the translation. Joyce is one example. Cabrera Infante is another. These ingenious puns can be literally translated: “Gastroenteritis” [a sickness] (Mea Cuba [1992], 231; Mea Cuba [1994], 279); “castradura que dura” [castration that lasts] (Mea Cuba [1992], 265; omitted in Mea Cuba [1994]). But the author makes a brilliant double meaning with “dura” that at the same time is “hard” and “lasting.” “Espera estoica” [stoic wait] (Mea Cuba [1992], 468; Mea Cuba [1994], 470), in Spanish plays on a similar sound of the Russian “Perestroika.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">11. Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was a British pioneer and science-fiction novelist, best known for his novels The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man. Edna O'Brien is a contemporary British novelist.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">12. Roquentin is the main character in the novel La Nausee (1938), written by Jean Paul Sartre, winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in literature.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">13. Alastair Reid (b.1926), Scottish poet and author of Weathering, Passwords, Whereabouts, Supposing, To Lighten My House, I Will Tell You of a Town, Borges: A Reader (in collaboration with Emir Rodriguez Monegal), and An Alastair Reid Reader: Selected Prose and Poetry, in his article “Talking Cuba,” New Yorker Review(2 February 1995): 14–16.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">14. The idea of the author converted into a pedantic and cosmopolitan narrator is not to fool anyone but to enhance the author's critical dissection. Proust's narrator, for example, identified with Jewish Swann but maintained a distance from the Dreyfus affair, even though Proust was known to call himself the first “Dreyfusard.” Cabrera Infante's narrator is close to the author's ideas and feelings and is a sort of conscience.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">15. In Tres tristes tigres Cabrera Infante used a similar idea as a way of introduction with the master of ceremonies at the Tropicana nightclub. The MC presents guests who will be the characters in the story. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1967); Three Trapped Tigers, trans. Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with Guillermo Cabrera Infante (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">16. Reinaldo Arenas in an interview “Aquel mar una vez más” [That sea once more] referred to a similar incident that happened to him in his New York apartment. His window was left open and things were misplaced, although nothing was taken. He explained that the purpose of such actions was to create paranoia and a sense of persecution (Nedda G. de Anhalt, Rojo y naranja sobre rojo [Mexico: Editorial Vuelta, 1991], 144).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">17. José Martí in Versos sencillos, vol. 12, no. 38, of Gran Enciclopedia Marttana, 15 vols. (Florida: Editorial Martiana, 1978), 51. The verses are “Del tirano? / Del tirano / Di todo, di más!;y clava / Con furia de mano esclava / Sobre su oprobio al tirano.” William Shakespeare, A Midsummer-Night's Dream (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1870), 11.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">18. P.M. is a brief film in the style of free cinema produced by Sabá Cabrera, Cabrera Infante's brother, and Orlando Jiménez Leal that examines nightlife in Havana. It was the first work of art to suffer censorship and political judgment and was labeled counterrevolutionary. Later Jiménez Leal was the film director who, in collaboration with Néstor Almendros, directed Conducta impropia [Improper Conduct], a film that won the Human Rights Prize in Strasbourg in 1984.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">19. CDR stands for Comité de Defensa de la Revolución [Committee for the Revolution's Defense], to be read “committee of spies.”</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">20. UNEAC stands for Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas Cubanos [National Cuban Union of Writers and Artists].</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">21. Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) was a Spanish poet and playwright and the author of the Romancero gitano (1928) and the plays Yerma, Doña Rosita la soltera, and La casa de Bernarda Alba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">22. Walker Evans (1903–1975) was a famous North American photographer who, during the 1930s, traveled to Cuba to photograph the island. In 1934 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition that showcased Evans's photographs.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">23. In “Lorca hace llover en La Habana” I found a remarkable coincidence with a verse of the Cuban poet Gastón Baquero (Banes, Oriente 1918-Madrid, 1997) in his “Carta en el agua perdida” (Poesía completa [Salamanca: Fundación Central Hispano, 1995], 258–61), dedicated to García Lorca, in which Baquero says: “¡Un monumento de aguas quisiera levantarte!” [A water monument I would like to bestow upon you!]. That is exactly what Cabrera Infante has done in his essay “Lorca the Rainmaker Visits Havana.” The spiritual approach of both writers is touching, especially since this poem of Baquero was unpublished until 1995.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">24. “J'Accuse” was a most memorable defense of the French-Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus written by the French intellectual Emile Zola (1840–1902), author of 20 volumes known as Rougon-Macquart.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">25. Gustavo Arcos accompanied Fidel Castro in the same car during the Moneada Barracks assault in which he received wounds to his legs. He became the Cuban ambassador in Belgium in 1959 but was soon recalled by Castro to Havana, where he was accused, without any proof, of being a part of a conspiracy he knew nothing about. In 1982, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison, and his brother Sebastián was sentenced to 11 years in prison. For Cabrera Infante, Arcos is a “punished” hero.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">26. The Golden Cockerel or Le Coq D'or or Zolotoy Pyetushok is a Russian opera in three acts by Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), first performed in 1909. It is based on a fairy tale by Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), who had heard the story from his nurse. In Rimsky-Korsakov's fairytale land, King Dondon sits on his magnificent throne, but his army is no good and soldiers can be seen sleeping at their posts. An astrologer gives the king a golden cockerel that will be quiet when all is well but will crow when there is danger.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">27. Carlos Franqui, Retrato de familia con Fidel (Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1981).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">28. Cabrera Infante is not the only author to publicly criticize and question García Márquez's support of the Castro dictatorship. Another Cuban author and poet, Reinaldo Arenas (Holguin 1943—New York 1990) in Necesidad de libertad [Need for Freedom] (México: Kosmos, 1986), 65–69, shares Cabrera Infante's attitude, calling García Márquez a “vedette of communism” (67).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">29. Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) was a French court painter during the reign of Louis XVI who, for Cabrera Infante, symbolizes the artist as the opportunistic cynic. With Danton, Robespierre, and Saint Just, David exalted terror but was not decapitated as were the others. Cabrera Infante is obviously referring to the double standard that exists among many Cubans who had once worked for Batista and who now occupy important positions within the Castro regime. These same collaborators will certainly find a position within a new regime once Castro is no longer in power.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">30. “Guillermo Cabrera Infante: Interview with Armando Alvarez Bravo,” El Nuevo Herald (9 October 1991): ID, 4D.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">31. G. de Anhalt, Rojo y naranja sobre rojo, 228.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">32. José María Heredia (Santiago de Cuba 1803-Mexico 1839) was the author of many famous poems, including “Niágara,” “En el Teocalli” [In the Cholula Teocalli], and “Himno al desterrado” [Hymn to the Exiled], José Martí (1853–1895) was a Cuban spiritual leader and author of Ismaelillo, Versos sencillos [Simple verses], Lucía Jerez, Amor con amor se paga [Love with love is paid], and countless volumes of essays. Juan Clemente Zenea (Bayamo 1832-Havana 1871) was an outstanding poet and author of “Fidelia,” “A una golondrina” [To a swallow], “Las sombras” [The shadows], and “En días de esclavitud” [Slavery days]. Even though this poet had a Spanish safe-conduct from the minister of Spain in the United States, he was executed by firing squad by the Spaniards in Cuba.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (Camagüey 1824-Madrid 1873) became a literary precocity when at age six she created her first verses in honor of her father's death. She is the author of many beautiful poems, but “Al partir” [When you leave] is the most famous. She also wrote the novels Sab (1841) and Guatimozin (1846) and the plays Leoncia (1841), Alfonso Munio (1844), and Baltasar (1858), among others. Cirilo Villaverde (Pinar del Río 1812-New York 1894) created Cecilia Valdês (1882), the first great Cuban novel of the nineteenth century. Julian del Casal (Havana 1863—Havana 1893) was an outstanding poet and author of Hojas al viento (Leaves in the wind] (1880) and Nieve [Snow] (1890).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">José Lezama Lima (1910–1976) at the age of 21 wrote a remarkable poem entitled “La muerte de Narciso” [The death of Narcissus], As a leading cultural figure in Cuba, he founded several important literary magazines, including Verbum, Espuela de plata, Nadie parecía, and Orígenes. His books of poetry include: Enemigo rumor [Enemy's rumor] (1941), La fijeza [The fix] (1949), and Dador [Giver] (1960). He also wrote several collections of essays, including La expresión americana [The American expression] (1957), Tratados en La Habana (Treaties in Havana] (1958), and La cantidad hechizada [The bewitched quantity] (1970), but his masterpiece is the novel Paradiso (1966). Lezama Lima lived the last years of his life in Cuba in seclusion and literary oblivion imposed by Castro's cultural regime. Lezama Lima and Pinera are important Cuban writers and Cabrera Infante wrote an essay about them entitled “Tema del héroe y la heroína” (Mea Cuba [1992], 317–48) [“Two Wrote Together” (Mea Cuba [1994], 331—60)]. Virgilio Pinera (Cárdenas 1912-Havana 1979), creator of the “Theater of the Absurd” before Ionesco, was the author of several books of poetry, including Las furias [The furies] (1941), La isla en peso [The island in all its weight] (1943), La carne de René [The flesh of René] (1952), Pequeñas maniobras [Small maneuvers] (1963), and Presiones y diamantes [Pressures and diamonds] (1967); and numerous plays including “Falsa alarma” (False alarm] (1948). Because he was a homosexual, he suffered persecution. He was arrested in 1960 at his beach home in Guanabo, and his apartment was sealed.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">33. “Vesti la giubba” is the famous aria sung by the tenor Canio in the first act of Ruggiero Leoncavallo's opera Pagliacci (1892).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">34. Cabrera Infante, Tres tristes tigres [Three Trapped Tigers]. The section of the book is entitled “La muerte de Trotsky referida por varios escritores cubanos, años despues—o antes” (225–58) (“The death of Trotsky as described by various Cuban writers, several years after the event—or before,” (235–78)].</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">35. Julius Caesar is an opera in three acts by George Frederick Handel, first performed in London in 1724.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">36. In 1884 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was unjustly accused of treason to France. The case against Dreyfus was based on a piece of handwriting called Bordereau that was actually written by Esterhazy, the true spy. Dreyfus was imprisoned under the most inhuman conditions on Devil's Island. The false documents that the military presented in a “Secret Dossier” during both processes in order to “reinforce” Dreyfus's guilt highlight a paradox: France, the birth nation of freedom, equality, and fraternity was guilty of turning this French-Jewish officer into a martyr of injustice.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">37. Guillermo Cabrera Infante, “InFidelity with a Cuban Exile: Interview with Christian Tyler,” Financial Times (London) (19 November 1994).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">38. Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958) was the French author of Les Thibault, the story of a French family destroyed by the First World War (1914–1918) and Jean Barois, the great novel that recreates the events surrounding the Dreyfus affair and the experiences of the protagonist and his friends, the young French founders of a magazine. The novel, written in 1913, shows the point of view of a generation that saw its great hopes and expectations overshadowed by national and world events.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">39. Other similarities between Proust and Cabrera Infante do not concern this work. This essay tries to establish only general tendencies and influences.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">40. De Profundis is the title of a novel by Oscar Wilde (1856–1900) and it is used for its literary significance [very profound].</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">41. The pun “Proust–valia” is Cabrera Infante's in Mea Cuba. The author transforms the Marxist economic term of “plus-valia,” which appears in Das Kapital and refers to the difference between the value of a finished product and the salary of a worker, to an onomatopoetic “Proust-valia.” “Esa ojeada al pasado es lo que un marxista llamaría la Proust valía” (Mea Cuba [1992], 310). This play on words is lost in the English translation: “That slow glance at the past is what we could call Proust's sight” (Mea Cuba [1994], 274).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">42. William Henry Hudson (Quilmes, Argentina 1841-London 1922) was an author and naturalist who wrote on his personal experiences in bird watching and nature study in the remote regions of South America. His best-known novels are Green Mansions (1904) and The Purple Land (1885). Along with his autobiography, Far Away and Long Ago, they are vivid accounts of life in Argentina. Far Away and Long Ago (New York: E.P Dutton and Co., 1918) and Allá lejos y hace tiempo: relatos de mi infancia, trans. Fernando Pozzo and Celia Rodríguez de Pozzo (Buenos Aires: Casa Jacobo Peuser, 1938).</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="900" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">43. Octavio Paz, Puertas al campo [Doors to the field] (1966; reprint, Barcelona: Editorial Seix Barral, 1972), 47.</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| <datafield tag="992" ind1=" " ind2=" "> | |
| <subfield code="a">Text: Yes</subfield> | |
| </datafield> | |
| </record></zs:recordData><zs:recordPosition>5</zs:recordPosition></zs:record></zs:records><zs:nextRecordPosition>6</zs:nextRecordPosition></zs:searchRetrieveResponse> |
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