Allegory Revisited

ALLEGORY REVISITED
ANALECTA HUSSERLIANA
THE Y E A R B O O K OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH
V O L U M E XLI
Editor- in-Chief:
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Belmont, Massachusetts
ALLEGORY VOLUMES
Book 1 Allegory Revisited: Ideals of Mankind

Book 2 Allegory Old and New: In Literature, the Fine Arts, Music
and Theatre, and Its Continuity in Culture
A L L E G O R Y R E V I S I T ED
Ideals of Mankind
Edited by
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECK A
The World Phenomenology
Institute
Published under the auspices of

The World Institutefor AdvancedPhenomenologicalResearchandLearning
A-T . Tymieniecka, President
W
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA , B.V.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Allegor y revisite d: i d e a l s o f mankin d / e d i t e d b y Anna-Teres a

Tym i en 1ecka.
p. cm . — (Analect a Husserlian a ; v . 41 )
Include s index .
ISBN 0-7923-2312- 2 (H B : a l k . paper )
1. A l l e g o r y . 2 . L i t e r a t u r e — H i s t o r y an d c r i t i c i s m .
I . T y m i e n i e c k a , A n n a - T e r e s a. I I . Series .
PN56.A5A4 3 199 3
8 0 9 ' . 9 1 5 ~ d c 2 0 93-1059 3
ISBN 978-94-010-4388-5 ISBN 978-94-011-0898-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-0898-0
All Rights Reserved

© 1994 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1994
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1994
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice

may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
THE THEME I Passions Soaring toward Ideals xi
PART ONE
IDEALS ELEVATING REALITY
MARLIES KRONEGGER I Allegorical Journeys toward the

Wholeness and Unity of the Sea: Marguerite Yourcenar 3
ROSEMARIE KIEFFER I Life and Myth: The Mother in Chinghiz
Aitmatov's Literary Creation 17
SARA F. GARCfA-G6MEZ I In Humble Conformity: Cipher and
Vision in Jorge Guillen's Poetry 31
SITANSU RAY I Women in Taser Desh (The Land of Cards):
Tagorean Ideals towards Humanistic Liberation 59
PART TWO
THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE ENHANCED
DANNY L. SMITH I War and the Body in Lysistrata: Marriage

and the Family under Siege 65
KATHLEEN HANEY I Allegorical Time 79
KATHRYN L. McKINLEY I The Roman de la rose:
Psychological Interiority in Medieval Allegory 93
JOAN B. WILLIAMSON I Allegory in the Work of Philippe de
Mezieres 107
VIRGINIA M. FICHERA I Allegory and the Performative in
Jacques Ie Fataliste 123
KATHARINE G. MacCORNACK I Subjective Experience in
Allegorical Worlds: Four Old French Literary Examples 133
v
vi T ABLE OF CONTENTS
PART THREE
FREEDOM, DESTINY, THE SOARING OF THE SOUL
JORGE GARCfA-G6MEZ I Type and Concept in Lazarillo de

Tormes: Self-Knowledge and the Spanish Picaresque Narrative 145
RICHARD HULL I Ortega y Gasset, Phenomenology and Quixote 179
DA VID L. MOSLEY I Music and Language in Joyce's "The
Dead" 191
MARJORIE HELLERSTEIN I Between the Acts: Virginia Woolf's
Modern Allegory 201
HANS H. RUDNICK I Camus' Caligula: An Allegory? 213
ERIN MITCHELL I Beckett's Waiting for Godot as Allegory 227
BRUCE ROSS I A Poetics of Absence: Kabbalist Allegory in
the Poetry of Paul Ce1an, Edmond Jabes, and David Meltzer 241
PAUL ALEXANDRU GEORGESCU I Nouvelle Approche a
l' Allegorie avec Reference a Octavio Paz et Marin Sorescu 267
PART F,OUR
ALLEGORY, A LITERARY ENIGMA
JERRE COLLINS AND RAYMOND WILSON I The Broken

Allegory: Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child as Narrative
Theodicy _ 277
RA YMOND J. WILSON III I Ricoeur's "Allegory" and
Jakobson's Metaphoric/Metonymic Principles 293
J. ROBERT BAKER I The Radiant Veil: Persistence and
Permutations 303
LEO RAUCH I Imagery and Allegory in Philosophy 315
SHONA ELIZABETH SIMPSON lOne Face Less: Masks, Time
and the Telling of Stories in Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand
Child 325
VICTOR KOCA Y I Literary Criticism as Allegory: Sartre's Saint
Genet 333
PART FIVE
ANNEX
MICHAEL BARBER / The Fragmentation and Social Recon-

struction of the Past in Toni Morrison's Beloved 347
TABLE OF CONTENTS vii
J6HANNA TH. EIRfKSD6TTIR HULL / "We Are Not the

Same": Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and the
Phenomenological Reduction 359
MElLI STEELE / Explanation, Understanding and Incom-
mensurability in Psychoanalysis 367
ALICJA HELMAN, WAC LAW M. OSADNIK, LUKASZ
PLESNAR AND EUGENIUSZ WILK / Some Remarks on the
Application of Ingarden's Theory to Film Studies 377
ROGER L. BROOKS / Phenomenology and Matthew Arnold: An
Uncollected Episode 399
INDEX OF NAMES 405

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks are due to my assistant Louis T. Houthakker for his precious

help in preparing this volume for production and to Robert Wise for
proofreading and the preparation of the index.
A-T.T.
ix
A 1992 conference dinner at the World Phenomenology Institute. Clockwise from the left: Hendrik Houthakker, Marlies
Kronegger, Thomas Ryba, Joan Williamson, and Rimma Telcherova.
THE THEME
PASSIONS SOARING TOWARD IDEALS:

Allegory and the Ideals of Mankind
Why yoke allegory and the ideals of humankind? What has happened
to human ideals anyway? As for allegory, it seems to have vanished from
the cultural and artistic expression of our times altogether. Yet the
question arises: can human life reach its full compass without ideals
and without the allegories that incarnate them?
Let me submit a brief argument vindicating them both for all times
and cultures.
In our progressive common exploration of how the elemental passions
of the soul on the wings of the creative imagination give rise to the
life of the human spirit, we could not fail to encounter ideals, and allegory
too as the poetic form incarnating and conveying ideals. However, the
allegory that pervaded classical literature, art, culturallsocietallife appears
at present to be quaint, antiquarian, a remnant of the past. As for ideals,
the tum of modem civilization away from idealization and apotheosis,
away from searching for and marveling at unusual, extraordinary, out-
standing happenings and individuals, seems to have cast them into
oblivion. Ideals are now so diluted they have at most but a faint reality.
They have been, in fact, swept away from life and from literary
criticism as well. The tum of our civilization away from a focus on
"greatness" and toward an appreciation of the "common" human being
seems to follow from the "revolt of the masses" against political and
social tyranny, oppression, social injustice of all kinds, on the one hand,
and the rise of the universal recognition of the claim to dignity of every
human being regardless of social prerogatives, power, station in life, etc.,
on the other. Hence, the dismantling of the entire culture of apotheosis
which carried Western civilization to its heights. In the wake of the
discovery that all human beings are worthy of respect, that everyday
life calls for power of will, the surmounting of difficulties, courage,
and perseverance deserving of as much praise as the deeds of great
kings and heroes, greatness has been less exalted and extraordinary deeds
of exceptional human beings given less social importance. It is average,
common individuals that have become the focus of appreciation, their
xi
xii THE THEME
struggles for existence in everyday life; a scaled-down standard has

superseded exceptional, heroic, superhuman standards.
The sublimation of individual characters and the exaltation of their
virtues and their subsequent apotheosis have given way to a tendency
to see and appreciate characters, acts, conduct in a "pedestrian," matter
of fact way that recognizes their concrete merits but leaves them open
to sharp criticism. In our social life of today nobody, not even those
holding the highest office, is immune to the exposure of indiscretions,
to the sharpest criticism, suspicion, and even calumny.
The exaltation and apotheosis of outstanding persons due to their
virtues is even condemned by contemporary attitudes as being supportive
of abuse of power, the exploitation, neglect, and cruel treatment of people.
But how and why would allegory, just by presenting an idealized image
of human beings, of character, dispositions, talents, moral virtues, aes-
thetic beauty, by highlighting deeds meeting human need, and with all
its power to stimulate people to demand the utmost of themselves,
necessarily be an instrument advancing domination over the people?
But first, how and why is the putting of leaders at an aesthetic distance,
the raising up of some human beings beyond their faults and weaknesses,
bestowing on them the largest possible proportions, even impossible
heroic proportions in an apotheosis, accomplished, and, second, how does
this portraiture exercise a unique fascination upon individuals and
societies to a degree that with this heroism in view people throw
themselves into battle, risking their lives with enthusiasm, worshiping
a leader, accepting and justifying extreme hardship, unjust demands,
and even being willing to withstand torture and sacrifice their lives?
Allegoric apotheosis, in fact, creates models of exemplary conduct,
infuses aspirations, raises banners under which to live and die.
With this succinct inquiring statement about the nature and status of
allegory, we touch upon its origin as well as its unique role in the progress
of the human spirit as it frees itself from the constraints of nature, worldly
coercion, empirical reality at large and soars toward our 'higher'
aspirations.
In raising the question of allegory, we have, however, simultane-
ously entered the present-day discussions revolving around the origin
of language and its function in mediating between reality and the human
mind.
In fact, the dismantling of the intellectual orientation that interprets
life, the world, the meaning of human existence, etc. through allegory
THE THEME xiii
- which in Occidental cultural history performed a 'metaphysical' role

- seems to coincide historically with the shift in scientific and philo-
sophical thinking at the end of the nineteenth century away from lofty
speculative concerns to empirical, concrete, positivistic concerns. Faith
in a higher human destiny was replaced by faith in concrete facts. I submit
that one great reason why allegory is diminished today and can no longer
fulfill its existential role in people's lives, neither personally, nor socially
or culturally - unless it has been appropriated to lend some color to
the utopias of vain ideologies - is that with the advance of science and
technology the speculative functions of the mind have been channeled
in the one direction of the discovery and implementation of new and
better praxis, that is, solely toward utilitarian concerns. In contrast, with
the full-fledged unfolding of the mind under the aegis of imaginatio
creatrix (where the intellect serves as the 'architect' of its projects-in-
progress drawing upon all the sentient, emotional, affective resources
molded by the aesthetic and moral senses of the specifically human mean-
ingfulness), there emerges out of the complete field of human experience
the spirit, which naturally becomes involved in idealizing and allego-
rizing.
This shift has certainly undermined the validity of the metaphysical
vision of human life in contemporary culture, the vision that had from
antiquity pervaded individual human existence. With traditional meta-
physics being denounced as vain, because seemingly not grounded in
the reality of facts (seemingly floating above them, rather), the specu-
lative function of the human mind and metaphysical speculation in
particular were dismissed. This is true whether reality be envisaged as
the reality of facts - in a neo-positivistic, empirical, analytic fashion -
or in a phenomenological way, that is, in the reinvestigation of the
workings of the human mind with an emphasis on the primordial status
of empirical cognition and priority then being given to the intellect as
it follows the unfolding of the mind to the detriment of the status of
the passions and emotions. If metaphysics were to make a comeback
in this narrow phenomenological investigation, it would have to be as
a strictly intellectual outgrowth of the mind. The hermeneutic procedures
of contemporary philosophies and the stress on the concrete text in
literary theory have given a seemingly final blow to the speculative
functions of the mind.
Husserl's turn toward the life-world and abandonment of inquiry into
intellectual constructs for the sake of a descent toward the ante-
xiv THE THEME
predicative, that is, toward the exploration of the origins of mental life
in the pre-constitutive, pre-intellectual, 'pre-logical' empirical/vital sphere
of the psyche, coincided with the hermeneutical emphasis on the text and
narrative expression - literary, social, artistic - and their origins.
Metaphor and symbol, which mediate between the 'concrete' and the
'meaningful,' lose force with the privileging of concreteness. The recog-
nition that it may be otherwise is a most propitious turn in philosophy,
one presciently apprehended by Jean Wahl almost half a century ago. For
the present the more speculative spheres of the mental life remain in
the shadows and their role in and validity for human culture and exis-
tence is not apprehended by most.
Although phenomenological descent to the primordial functions of the
psyche has with certain authors (e.g., Paul Ricoeur) been accompanied
by a revaluation of the emotional and affective spheres in the constitu-
tion of meaning, yet because it is only an elaboration of Husserlian
investigation, which gives priority to the intellect, the passions have
not come into their own here. Their unique role in the 'cultivation' of
the psychic primary material, in processing it into the specifically human
meaningfulness of life, is not grasped. Full intelligence encompasses
not only the strictly rational, intellectual stream, for the affective also has
a role, a critical one, in the emergence and life of the SPIRIT.
Allegory is crucial to the cultivation of the human spirit, to commu-
nicating and spreading it.
In our preceding investigations we have focused precisely on the
neglected sphere of the elemental passions, inquiring into their essen-
tial role in giving the moral and aesthetic significance of life in lyrical,
affective, emotive, lived concreteness having intelligible form.
In doing so we have been hinting at ideals without spelling out their
significance in the subliminal workshop. This was precisely because
we were focusing on human depths, and ideas are like the sun - they give
their full light when on high. And yet, my latest study into the origin
of morals, namely, a consideration of the emergence of virtues ("Virtues
and Passion," in Ragione Pratica, Liberta, Normativita, Rome: Herder/
Lateran University, 1992) finds ideals to be the backbone and beacons
of the specifically human significance of life; thus we have all along,
without remarking on it, been dealing with ideals in our literary studies
- in a positive or negative fashion. This is the import of my quest after
the origin and genesis of the moral/aesthetic significance of life in the
creative forge where the subliminal passions surge and go to work:
THE THEME xv
although ideals, the highest accomplishment of the mind, are ultimately

the fruit of the speculative imaginative powers, they are not fancy, vain
speculation. On the contrary, they have their roots in the subliminal forge
together with all the other factors of the specifically human signifi-
cance of life. Yet they take a particular course. Ideals do not merely
unfold spontaneously. Ideals are the fruit of the cultivation of the main
threads of the human significance of life. In their final phase they may
be speculatively worked out, but they develop along all the concrete lines
of the work that the human mind undertakes in its intersubjective/social
interaction, all of which is naturally put to the service of the cultiva-
tion of the life of the spirit: human culture.
It is in this perspective that we in this collection pursue our investi-
gation of the passions of the soul in their creative manifestations in
literature and the fine arts and grope for points leading to the discovery
of the roots and genesis of the ideals that the human mind has proposed
throughout history to enliven human endeavors from within and make
them shine without.
It is the concomitant function of allegory to give already concretized
ideals their imaginary expression; in allegory our ideals vibrate and
glimmer, throwing off myriad rays that disseminate the innumerable lines
of the cultivation of the mind.
ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA
PART ONE
IDEALS ELEVATING REALITY

Lunch at Cronkhite Graduate Center, 1991. Front row: Maija Kule, Rosemarie Kieffer; in the back: Marlies Kronegger, A-T.
Tymieniecka, Sarah Garcfa-G6mez and Jorge Garcfa-G6mez.
MARLIES KRONEGGER
ALLEGORICAL JOURNEYS TOWARD THE

WHOLENESS AND UNITY OF THE SEA:
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR
Every island is a world unto itself,

a universe in miniature.
INTRODUCTION
Marguerite Yourcenar's allegorical journeys deal with myths of creation

in both East and West, and suggest three degrees in literary and artistic
creative aspirations: the Divine, the human, and the demonic. To them,
in the relationship among living beings, correspond the categories of
Love, possession, and sadism. Love is seen as compassion, as sympathy,
as play that blends love with all the arts, with poetry, painting and
calligraphy.
It is time to raise the question of literary and artistic allegorical
journeys as the language of the human spirit. What we should like to
convey, in a study devoted to the most intimate relationships between
literary and artistic creations and life, is the living force of literature
and art. Yourcenar's literary and artistic allegorical journeys toward the
sea are grounded in the physical world but come to full bloom in the
world of the spirit, in the illumination and orchestration of concrete nature
and all the arts. Our study will describe Yourcenar's notion of Classical,
Christian and Oriental ideas of World Harmony. Her Gesamtkunstwerk
goes back to various sources: 1) Greek myths and legends of creation;'
2) Christian liturgy, which gathered the community on the stage of the
Church to represent the universe and to profess their gratefulness to
the Creator. In Negro spirituals,2 in American Baptist Churches, she
applauded the most deeply felt emotions of both singers and dancers;
3) the Max Reinhardt stage productions of Faust, The Magic Flute, The
Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, etc. at Salzburg, Austria. She saw
not only the embodiment and incarnation of meaning, but also listened
to the voices of greed and ambition as well as to those attuned to a
more harmonious orchestration of redemption and salvation; 4) Chinese
and Japanese painting, calligraphy, theatre and alchemy. Yourcenar
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 3-15.

© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
4 MARLIES KRONEGGER
observed that the outer and inner worlds are made to be an indivisible
unit. With Chinese artists she had found that vital spirit which is the
foundation of the Chinese Tao. 3 She feels as much in tune with Chinese
painters as with Christian mystics, when meditating on the workings of
the universe. To her, Chinese calligraphy and painting has no relation
to ordinary language, but is the pictorial and allegorical expression of
sacred knowledge.
In "How Wang-Fo was Saved",4 Yourcenar transfers all grandeur to
the art of the painter and the creative process. In Wang-Fo's and his
disciple's journeys, contemplations of nature and art as both a presence
and as another world are affirmed. The road of walking, in Yourcenar's
text,5 can be transfigured into religious values, as every road can
symbolize the road of life, and any walk a pilgrimage, a peregrination
to the center of the world. Those who have renounced their houses,
such as Wang-Fo and his disciple, proclaim by their wandering, by their
constant movement, their desire to leave the world: they have chosen
the quest, the road that leads to the center, the supreme truth.
Yourcenar defines allegory as a hidden myth, the allusion to myth,
the movement from the real world to the oneiric one. 6 To Yourcenar,
the sources of artistic creation are mysterious, hidden, and approach-
able only through a difficult journey. She evokes the mythical road
through the heavens traversed by Parmenides at the beginning of his
philosophical poem On Nature or Dante's pilgrimage. 7
1. WESTERN APPROACHES: ALLEGORICAL JOURNEYS TOWARD

WHOLENESS WHICH HAVE AFFINITIES WITH YOURCENAR'S
VISION: PINDAR, DANTE, ROUSSEAU MOZART
1. Pindar
According to Yourcenar, the Greek poet Pindar is probably more explicit
than any ancient Greek poet about the aims, nature, and dignity of his
art. 8 He views himself as practising a poetry of truth rather than of
falsehood, of praise rather than blame, of inherited gifts and god-given
inspiration rather than rationally acquired technique. But beside these
explicit statements, there is also an implicit poetics. This appears not
in direct statements about poetry but rather in myths and in the form
of symbolic and allegorical utterance which these myths contain. Pindar
makes tangible the elusive origins of poetry by establishing a network
ALLEGORICAL JOURNEYS: MARGUERITE YOURCENAR 5
of coherences between cosmogonic creation and the foundations of polit-

ical and social order.9 The same myths of origin are particularly important
in the oriental tale we are going to discuss.
Human events here move into what Eliade calls "sacred time", the
remote moment of first beginnings (illud tempus) when human life stands
close to the energies of creation. lO Pindar's conception of his poetry as
that of the painter Wang-Fo is, as we shall see, the vehicle of enduring
truth, aletheia, and related to this time of creative origins. The poet
unveils to men the timeless energies of the gods and cosmic spirits as
they have been operative in myths and allegories, and in the creator
himself who realizes those energies in the present moment of his journey.
At the same time Pindar is also aware that his poetry emerges from
an act of human effort. Thus beside the poetry of truth there is also the
poetry of craft, guile, and deception. A number of the Odes dramatize
this tension or conflict between the different views of the creative
processY This tension is due, in part, to Pindar's place at the histor-
ical moment between an oral and an increasingly literate culture. The
one sponsors a poetry of inspiration, the other a poetry of textuality.
The role of Medea in the Fourth Pythian Ode brings together these two
voices of the poet and resolves them on the side of the creative ordering
power of Zeus as the source of authority and therefore of Truth.
2. Dante's Pilgrimage
Not only the creative process of Pindar's allegorical journeys interested
Yourcenar. She discovered in Dante's pilgrimage from Inferno to
Paradiso another path to a gateway which opens and makes possible
the passage from one mode of being to another, from one existential
situation to another. Dante's doctrine of religious redemption and the
resurrection of the body had culminated, at the end of the seventh canto
of the Paradiso in the allegory that the human spirit is a direct and
therefore indestructible creation of God, while the human body is an
indirect production, through the medium of heavenly spheres, and there-
fore changeable and destructible. Since God is the ultimate aspiration
of the soul, it is only in the identification or attunement of its will with
the will of God that the perfection of its joy and the fulfillment of its
desire reside. This is what Dante, the Pilgrim, learns from the blessed
souls through Piccard's utterance, which sums up the very nature of
heaven:
6 MARLIES KRONEGGER
Frate, la nostra volonta quieta

virtu di carita (Paradiso, III. 70-71)
And, in one of the most famous tercets of the poem, he foreshadows

the end of Wang-Fo's journey:
E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace:

ell' e quel mare al qual tutto si move
cio ch'e la cria e che natura face. (ibid., 85-87)
The poet perceives love to be the vital principle emanating from the
Creator and keeping all that exists in perfect harmony, as the law that
governs the universe and reduces all multiplicity to unity. We shall
discover in the painter Wang-Fo a similar message: his love for nature
and art reveals his fundamental tendency to unify the manifold, to bring
the chaos of the emperor's mind, of his desires and passions, of his
political and social life to order and harmony with everything-there-is-
alive. 12 And this message is also in Dante's final tercets:
Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,

legato con amore in un volume,
cio che per l'universo si squadema;
sustanze e accidenti e lor costume,
quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo

che cio ch'i dico e un semplice lume.
(Paradiso, XXXIII, 85-90)
This kind of fusion and illumination takes Yourcenar to the Chinese

painter's experience of love as a cosmic force which links together every-
thing-there-is-alive. This oneness with nature has also been recorded
by Rousseau on his island in the Lake of Bienne.
3. Rousseau: Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire

Both Rousseau and Yourcenar experienced on their islands the boundary
between two worlds, when the creator has indeed transcended him- or
herself in an experience which cannot be formulated in words. The
great extension of their faculties appears in their emotional response to
nature, in an inward communication with the sacred in nature, in an

act of co-creation. Like Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling at the ending
of the oriental tale, they experience an attunement to nature having at
once penetrated to the innermost reaches of their own existence and to
a region beyond this world, at the boundary between Being and
Nothingness. This revolution in human feeling is recorded in Les Reveries
d'un promeneur solitaire:
I rowed into the midst of the lake, when the water was calm: and there, stretching myself
out at full length in the boat, my eyes turned towards heaven, I let myself go and wander
about slowly at the will of the water, sometimes during many hours, plunged into a
thousand confused but delicious reveries, which, without having any well-determined
object, nor constancy, did not fail to be in my opinion a hundred times preferable to all
that I have found sweetest in what are called the pleasures of life.13
Like Wang-Fo and Ling, Rousseau in listening to the flux and reflux
of the waves, becomes completely at one with nature, a permanent state,
the duration of which increases the charm to the point of finding there
the supreme felicity. Rousseau's and Wang-Fo's creations are obedient
to the sense of eternity when the sacred governs their form, and to the
sense of immortality when they are inspired by the cosmic spirit.
Rousseau, Yourcenar as well as Chinese artists aim at suggesting, through
the subtle use of the ephemeral, that eternity in which man is swallowed
up as his gaze loses itself in the mist that blurs the land- or seascape.
Theirs is an art of the moment, but of an eternal moment. All is in a
continuous flux on earth. There is nothing solid there to which the heart
could attach itself. They all enjoy the flux of water, its continuous sound,
swelling at intervals, and striking ceaselessly ears and eyes, it makes them
feel attuned to nature with pleasure without taking the trouble to think.
They discover peace, as the senses do not err, and only judgment errs.
4. Yourcenar: En Pelerin et en etranger (1989)

In the above-mentioned journeys toward salvation, a poetic ideal of
Pindar, a religious quest of pilgrims in Dante's Paradiso, a total immer-
sion of the self in Nature with Rousseau, all roads lead to the
sanctification of life. Yourcenar, in her essays, En pelerin et en etranger 14
completes this quest for unity and wholeness in her discussion of opera
and theatre performances in which the final act either sanctifies or
condemns the hero. She insists on the sanctifying force of love, refer-
ring to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro and The Enchanted Flute; to
8 MARLIES KRONEGGER
Goethe's Faust, when mystical ecstasy reveals the sacredness of love.

In all cases she praises, there is the transmutation and transfiguration
of elementary passions and vices (of lust for power, hatred, greed,
ambition, laziness, etc.) into love and spiritual salvation, something not
granted, however, to Mozart's Don Giovanni or Moliere's Don Juan.
II. AN ORIENTAL JOURNEY: TO THE BORDERLINE OF

SALVATION
The salvation of Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling takes us to another

borderline between the visible and the invisible. The title of this Taoist
tale, Comment Wang-Fo fu sauve (1978) contains the word salvation in
the sense of inner reform, according to oriental (Taoist, Buddhist,
Confucian) ideas. IS Yourcenar, once again, summarizes her thinking about
the human condition in the dimension of perfection and spirit of eternity
as idealized in the painter Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling.
Let us now turn to the beginning of Yourcenar's tale and see the
landscape in which the painter Wang-Fo's life unfolds as if it were seen
in a scroll painting. He has extended his sympathy to his disciple Ling
who joins him, giving up wealth and family, on the road to the Kingdom
of Han. Their road is the road of life, their walk together a pilgrimage
to capture the external beauty of nature in contemplation. Both Yourcenar
and Wang-Fo invite the eye not to rush along, but to rest awhile and dwell
with them in enjoyment of their revelation. Contemplation brings peace.
Because the painter Wang-Fo is tranquil in regard to life, his passions
do not lead him into confusion and temptation, and because he is tranquil
in regard to death, his spirit does not leave him. Wang-Fo's sketches
are perfect even though unfinished. Their perfection springs from the
intensity of emotion which the contemplation of nature excites in him.
Wang-Fo loves the image of things and not the things themselves. He
knows how to carry his emotional intensity to its highest pitch. Wang-
Fo and Ling are in tune with the successive rhythms of summer rains,
and we see how Ling is slowly transformed by his close relationship
to the universe. First we see Ling carrying Wang-Fo's sketches as if
they were the heaven's vault, sketches of snow-covered mountains, of
torrents in spring, and of the face of the summer moon. Slowly Ling
learns how to be attuned to nature, the only knowledge worth acquiring;
then Wang-Fo leaned out to make Ling admire the live zebra stripes of
lightning, and Ling, spellbound, stopped being afraid of storms. He is
all of a sudden exempt from sorrow, when he finds his wife hanging from
the branches of the pink plum tree with the scarf that was strangling
her. The scarf floated in the wind, entangled with her hair. Ling also
learns to smile, when Wang-Fo follows with delight the hesitant trial
of an ant along the cracks in the wall. Ling's horror of this creature
vanished into thin air. Wang-Fo's and Ling's tranquillity on their
pilgrimage seems to exclude any possibility of conflict.
In the final allegory of this Taoist legend, both love and hatred find
their fulfillment.
1. The labyrinthian path into the abyss: from love to sadism:

The Celestial Dragon
The Celestial Dragon, in his youth locked up in solitary confinement with
Wang-Fo's paintings, had delighted in their beauty and the sense of
eternity which radiated from them. Once he had left his world of
seclusion with the paintings of Wang-Fo, all his life turned into the
quest to experience the same beauty in the Kingdom of Han. He failed
to see his beauty in nature, but was in possession of a beautiful palace
which contained all the exterior characteristics of nature's harmony: there
were countless squares and circular rooms whose shapes symbolized
the seasons, the four cardinal points, the male and the female, longevity
and the prerogatives of power. The emperor seemed to be in posses-
sion of all earthly desires, of grandeur and the obedience which
everybody and everything owed him. However, he sinks ever deeper
into the inferno of savagery, an imbecilic and destructive rivalry with
Wang-Fo's creative spirit. The Chinese emperor's ambitions resemble
those of the spirit of the young Renaissance, the period when faith in
man's infinite powers was enormous.
For Yourcenar, man is not the measure of all things (exemplified by
the emperor), but at the border of what cannot be experienced. Quoting
Pico di Mirandola, the author contrasts two concepts of perfection and
salvation, current during the Renaissance. The one ideal is that of
political power and the other is that of self-improvement and self-
knowledge - which is realized by both Wang-Fa and his disciple Ling.
I have given you, 0 Adam, no fixed abode, and no visage of your own, nor any special
gift, in order that whatever place or aspect or talents you yourself will have desired,
you may have and possess them wholly in accord with your desire and your own decision.
Other species are confined to a prescribed nature, under laws of my making. No limits
10 MARLIES KRONEGGER
have been imposed upon you, however; you determine your nature by your own free
will, in the hands of which I have placed you. I have placed you at the world's very center,
that you may the better behold from this point whatever is in the world. And I have
made you neither celestial nor terrestial, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, like a free
and able sculptor and painter of yourself, you may mold yourself wholly in the form of
your choice. 16
The ambitious Chinese emperor echoes the Renaissance ideal of the

human condition, placing man at the center of things, and the earth at
the center of the universe, and China in the heart of the world. The
Chinese emperor, then, exclaims: "I imagined the world, with the
Kingdom of Han at the center, to be like the flat palm of my hand crossed
by the fatal lines of the five Rivers. Around it lay the sea in which
monsters are born, and farther away the mountains that hold up the
heavens".17 And to help him visualize these things he used Wang-Fo's
paintings. The emperor's quest to discover the beauty in nature as
recreated in Wang-Fo's paintings remains unanswered. Instead, his
jealousy of and hatred for the painter deepen, and he accuses the painter
of being to blame for the unhappiness which the emperor created himself:
You lied, Wang-Fo, you old imposter. The world is nothing but a mass of muddled
colors thrown into the void by an insane painter, and smudged by our tears. The Kingdom
of Han is not the most beautiful of kingdoms, and I am not the Emperor. The only
empire which is worth reigning is that which you alone can enter, old Wang, by the
road of One Thousand Curves and Ten Thousand Colors. You alone reign peacefully
over mountains covered in snow that cannot melt, and over fields of daffodils that cannot
die ... 18
2. From Love to Hatred - the Emperor, Messenger of Evil Triumphant

The emperor, incapable of spiritual awakening, illustrates the allegory
of a sick man's obsession with a beauty he cannot attain. He takes the
way in which he is led, slowly and fatefully, to self-destruction, in the
burning heat of egotism. Suddenly he exclaims: "And I also hate you,
Wang-Fo, because you have known to make yourself be loved".19 In
hatred, disgust, greed, possessiveness, the passionate emperor incapable
of controlling himself, is threatening to burn out Wang's eyes, the two
magic gates that open unto Wang's kingdom, and to cut his hands off,
the two roads of ten forking paths that lead to the heart of Wang's
kingdom. While these threats remain unrealized, the emperor, however,
does have Ling's head cut off, which falls like a cut flower. The emperor
makes a last attempt at inner reform to capture Wang's spirit. Being
fascinated by one of Wang's unfinished sketches, he wishes, for the

last time, to learn Wang-Fo's secret of recreating the way the sun trembles
and changes on the stream as it flows by. The emperor realizes the
painter's inspiration: his perception of infinity goes far beyond human
senses.
3. Toward Transcendence
Thus, for the emperor, the world has been reduced to the category of
an object, whereas for the painter, nature with trees, mountains and rivers
are transparent ciphers for the inaccessible realm of transcendence.
Yourcenar constructs an imaginary self-transcendence in the form of a
projection of the painter and his disciple into a mystical union with the
cosmos. Their attunement with nature is an instrument by means of which
the spiritual values of existence are to be recreated. Wang-Fo's belief
in the harmony and oneness of nature leads him back to the Primal Unity,
the Source, the ineffable principle of life. His contemplation of the
heavens and of nature, the rising and setting of sun, moon, and stars,
the cycle of day and night, and the rotation of the seasons confirms the
existence of laws of nature. He has discovered a sort of divine legisla-
tion that regulates the pattern in the heavens and its counterpart on
earth.
Wang's journeys are an art of living in harmony with the laws of
Tao, the Way. Wang-Fo's and Ling's spiritual growth toward total
harmony is an inner way of achieving the inner spiritual growth of
sacredness, and of exemplifying the perfect blending of sacred values:
eternity and beauty. In an age of de spiritualization which denies sacred
inwardness, Wang-Fo's and his disciple's claim is to live the sacred
truth found in nature.
4. From Power and Immanence to the Great Beginning in

Transcendence
The traditional allegory of the sacredness of religious and political power
viewed as a triumph over the universe vanishes with the emperor's
greed for power. The emperor assumes a new existential situation. He
regards himself solely as the agent of history, and he refuses any appeal
to transcendence. For Wang-Fo and Ling, however, transcendence is a
movement of existence toward being which can be defined neither as
pure immanence, "In-der- Welt-sein", nor as pure transcendence in its

theological sense of "Ausser-der- Welt-sein". It arises out of a con-
sciousness of a possible world of transcendence experienced in what
Yourcenar calls the boundaries of existence. Wang-Fo discovers that
consciousness is not the whole of reality; there is a realm lying beyond
our conscious knowledge of the world which cannot be comprehended
as a datum of consciousness. It can only be defined negatively as the
antithesis of consciousness. Anmt-Teresa Tymieniecka, in her Logos
and Life, defines transcendence when discussing the profound Chinese
intuition in which the moral and cosmic intermingle. Without an opening-
up which occurs in the very heart of creative orchestration brought to
its peak, such as in Wang-Fo's art, the Human Condition might not be
able to take off from the chain of life, and man would never be able to
move beyond the point of the brute animality which characterizes the
emperor. 20
Wang-Fo's and Ling's desire to find the sacred in total attunement with
the cosmic spirit makes the universe their home. Wang-Fo and Ling return
to the "Great Beginning".21 Wang-Fo is the perfect man who knows no
distinction between true and false, no differences between good and
bad as these are oriented by external principles or concerns; he is the true
man of the great beginnings which are the real root of Heaven. 22
5. Death and Transcendence

From the Japanese author Mishima, Yourcenar adopts the view that death
and transcendence resemble a ripening fruit. Death is conceived of in
terms of an organic development fulfilling an inner law. It is no
catastrophe. It is not tragic, as it belongs to the organic development
of the individual personality. Both Wang-Fo and the emperor illustrate
two ways of dying. The emperor is said to have ten thousand lives by
being metamorphosed generation upon generation, as he is actually very
tied to the earth without any sense of the eternal. Even the drowning
of the emperor turns out to have been not an accident as reported, but
he re-emerges, keeping in his heart a little of the bitterness of the sea.
Then, the level of the water in the palace dropped unnoticed around
the large vertical rocks that became columns again.
In contrast, Wang-Fo with his sense of eternal beauty is to be meta-
morphosed into an eternal situation. He is part of the cosmic spirit with
his love and total immersion in the beauty of nature, as the following
passage explains, when we see that Wang-Fo is not the mysterious

ferryman on the boat that is bound for the underworld. On the contrary,
Ling and his master sail alive and well to the land beyond the waves:
The painting finished by Wang-Fo was leaning against a tapestry. A rowboat occupied
the entire foreground. It drifted away little by little, leaving behind it a thin wake that
smoothed into the quiet sea. One could no longer make out the faces of the two men sitting
in the boat, but one could still see Ling's scarf and Wang-Fo's beard waving in the breeze.
The beating of the oars grew fainter, then ceased, blotted out by the distance. The Emperor,
leaning forward, a hand above his eyes, watched Wang's boat sail away until it was nothing
but an imperceptible dot in the paleness of the twilight. A golden mist rose and spread
over the water. Finally the boat veered around a rock that stood at the gateway to the
ocean; the shadow of a cliff fell across it; its wake disappeared from the deserted surface,
and the painter Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling vanished forever on the jade-blue sea
that Wang-Fo had just created. 23
The story unwinds as a slowly moving spiral in which figures glimpsed

in the immediate foreground with the passing of time disappear in the
distance. The entire allegory of the legend fades away into the twilight
mists of what might have been, or seemed to be. Nothing seems to be
what it was. Nothing is really what it seems. We see Wang-Fo and his
disciple vanish forever on the jade-blue sea that Wang had just created.
They became a part of the natural rhythm of the sea, because they knew
how to lose themselves in nature's painting.
The final contemplation of the painting transcends the limits of art. Its
perfection, here, belongs to the marvelous and miraculous order of the
Taoist legend and is as enigmatic as Greek myth. Wang-Fo's creation
is sacred, an art that gives us the assurance that the world holds a secret,
which art transmits but does not disclose. He returns with his disciple
to those things that are hidden. With Wang-Fo art comes into its kingdom,
and genius into its empire.
A new allegory is born from the magic of color, in Wang-Fo's and
his disciple's journey to the end of night in communion with the
Unknown.
CONCLUSION
Yourcenar's Taoist tale illustrates that from the beginning of time the
study of Nature was more important for man than the administration of
human society, and that his moral integration depended much more on
his integration with the natural cosmos than on his political relations with
other men. With Chinese painters as much as with Greek poets and
Christian mystics, Yourcenar feels in tune when meditating on the

workings of the universe. For her, allegory in literature and art is an
instrument of communication between mankind and the irrational life
of the universe. We have seen that the painter lives on a twofold plane:
he shares in love with human existence and, at the same time, in a
transhuman life, that of the cosmos. His existence has been open to the
world as he lives in tune with cosmic rhythms that define the universe.
His escape with his disciple signifies access to a superhuman mode of
existence and being. For the emperor, on the contrary, the cosmos has
become opaque, inert, mute, and it transmits no message and holds no
cipher.
We may ask ourselves: Can oceans show their depths within? Can
artists and poets expose their depth? We have arrived at the end of our
journey toward the wholeness of the sea. The boundaries between land
and sea are reinstated, separating the possessive ruler from the creative
artist. In all Yourcenar's work as in the Taoist tale, "How Wang-Fo
Was Saved", the aim of creation is not defeat, resignation or despair,
but rather the eternal victory of the painter's creative spirit over the inex-
orable lust and greed of the political ruler.24
Michigan State University
NOTES
1 Marguerite Yourcenar. La couronne et la lyre, presentation critique et traduction

d'un choix de poetes grecs (Paris: Gallimard, 1979): "For both the Greek and the king,
the miraculous was a natural part of life, as the very structure of reality was permeated
by the sacred".
2 Fleuve pr%nd, sombre riviere, les Negro Spirituals (Paris: Gallimard, 1964).
3 Laurence Sickman and Alexander Soper, The Art and Architecture 0/ China (Penguin,
1971).
4 Marguerite Yourcenar, 'Comment Wang-Fo fUt sauve, Nouvelles Orientales (Paris:
Gallimard, 1938).
5 Josyane Savigneau, Marguerite Yourcenar (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 14. Le voyage,
"ce bris perpetuel de toutes les habitudes, cette secousse sans cesse donnee 11 tous les
prejuges".
6 Marguerite Yourcenar, 'Le grand chemin', L'Oeuvre au noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
7 Marguerite Yourcenar, En peterin et en etranger (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) et La
couronne et la lyre.
S Pindare (Paris: Gasset, 1932).
9 Marguerite Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, Conversations with Matthew Galey, trans.
Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 94; all mankind shares the same
flow: "I learned ... that literary groups and society coteries bound together by polit-
ical, religious, or other such ideas are like fortuitously gathered clumps of seaweed in
that greater ocean, life".
10 M. Eliade, Le sacre et la profane (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
11 Charles Segal, Pindar's Mythmaking. The Fourth Pythian Ode (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), p. 92: "Pindar draws on the age-old imagery of birth from the
primordial waters"; With Open Eyes, p. 162. Yourcenar admires in Greek prosody "a
continuous melody, a rhythm in which lines create the illusion of sliding into one another,
with varied caesuras. In this way the rhythm of the line itself, or rhythm in the usual sense,
becomes intertwined with the rhythm of the phrase".
12 Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka. Logos and Life, Creative Experience and the Critique of
Reason, Book I (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988). Tymieniecka bases the notion of co-naltre and
religere (to be born together, to loom, to weave) on the creation of links with every-
thing-there-is-alive.
13 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary (New York: Brentanos, 1927), p. 34.
14 Op. cit., pp. 91-99.
15 With Open Eyes, p. 119: "in certain oriental methods of contemplation, where the
object is to empty the mind completely in order to achieve a level of serenity in which
objects are reflected as in the surface of the calm sea".
16 The Abyss (L'Oeuvre au nair) trans. Grace Frick in collaboration with the author.
(Wiltshire: Redwood Burn Limited, 1984), p. 3.
17 Marguerite Yourcenar, 'How Wang-Fo Was Saved', Oriental Tales (Guernsey:
Guernsey Press Co., 1986), pp. 11-23.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 A-T. Tymieniecka, Logos and Life. The Three Movements of the Soul, Book 2
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), p. 201.
21 Ibid., p. 202.
22 Ibid., p. 223.
23 Oriental Tales, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
24 Like Yukio Mishima, in After the Banquet (1960), the painter chooses submission
not to society or a political ruler, but to the universal principle of his path. While Kazu
in Mishima's novel, goes back to the source of spiritual solace and refreshment, her garden
and the restaurant, the stream of the painter's energy merges with the wholeness and
unity of the sea.
ROSEMARIE KIEFFER
LIFE AND MYTH: THE MOTHER IN CHINGHIZ

AITMATOV'S LITERARY CREATION
Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was born on 12th of December 1928

in Sheker, a village in the Soviet Republic of Kirghizia. Both his parents
were literate and had enjoyed schooling in a society of oral tradition.
It is remarkable that the future writer's mother, although belonging to
a Muslim society with nomad way of life, with authority and power
exercised above all by men, had been given access to education. As to
Chinghiz Aitmatov's father, he was one of the first Communists in
Kirghizia, devoted to a cause which in his eyes was great; in the late
thirties he was invited to Moscow in order to receive higher instruc-
tion in Marxist philosophy and there, in the Soviet capital, Torekul
Aitmatov in 1937 was arrested; he disappeared.
Chinghiz, the eldest of his four children, later on dedicated one of
his books - Materinskoje pole, Mother Earth - to his living mother
and his dead father, saying of the latter that he, the son, does not know
where Torekul is buried. Presumably Torekul Aitmatov died in prison
or in a concentration camp. In his son's books the theme of the young
boy who has lost his father at war or by human or political oppression
and injustice appears more than once, and most clearly and openly in
"I dol she veka dlitsia dien", A Day Longer than a Century (1981).
There two small boys lose their father who is made a prisoner by Stalin's
police because he has started writing down, for his children, his memories
of his participation in partisan fighting in Yugoslavia. This father, longing
for his dearly loved children, dies of a heart disease soon after his
arrest, a heart attack, of a broken heart, so to speak, because his love
for his sons was so deep and passionate that he could not bear to be
separated from them and deprived of the fulfillment of his paternal duties.
During the Second World War, the adolescent Chinghiz Aitmatov lived
in his home village Sheker, where he entered into acquaintance with
sorrow and suffering: for he was made, at the age of fourteen, secre-
tary of the village administration and as such had to deliver to the
bereaved families the official note announcing the death of a father,
son, husband or brother. He also knew the grievous experience of hunger
and poverty, his own and that of all those who were still living in the

18 ROSEMARIE KIEFFER
village after all the able-bodied men had gone to join the Red Army.
At that time the boy Chinghiz came to know how strong and coura-
geous women can be. He also met with dedicated old men and
adolescents, and with veterans of the army who had come back from
the war, having lost an arm or a leg but still able to take part in the
hard work which was being done by the rural population at home.
The first story Chinghiz Aitmatov was to write, in opposition to Soviet
war literature in general, given to celebrating heroes eager to fight and
to die for their country and their fellow citizens, tells us of a young soldier
born in Central Asia who refuses to risk his life in a war the Russians
are having with the Germans, a war he himself, so he says, has nothing
to do with. Therefore he becomes a deserter and hides in the moun-
tains in the vicinity of his village. Chinghiz Aitmatov had difficulties
in getting his story published, and before the publication the young writer
had to shorten it considerably. Only recently has he published the
complete version of "Litcom k litcu" (From Face to Face).
Before turning to literature, the young man had studied the natural
sciences, zoology and veterinary medicine, and he had worked for some
time as a zoo technician, a specialist in animal breeding. He has a very
great knowledge of animals, both tame and wild - this knowledge is
helpful in the creation of allegory and myth - and the writer says that
he endeavours to describe the animal according to its own experience
of life, instead of imitating other writers who are interested in animal life
but describe animals with too human a view and within a human inter-
pretation.
In the early fifties Chinghiz Aitmatov began to publish his first
writings. He used his Kirghiz mother tongue with great art. In a short
autobiographical note which he wrote in 1971 he said that his paternal
grandmother, a wonderful woman, introduced him into the language
and the culture, the customs and the oral poetry, of Kirghizia. But thanks
to his open-minded parents, Aitmatov as a small boy acquired a good
knowledge of Russian - therefore he is able to write his books indif-
ferently in the Kirghiz or in the Russian language and to himself translate
his books from one of these languages into the other.
When he had discovered his vocation for literature, Aitmatov went
to Moscow and studied at the Gorki Institute of Literature. After finishing
this course of introduction to writing and literary creation, he worked
for some time as a journalist, having been made a correspondent of
Pravda in Kirghizia. This activity brought him the opportunity to observe
LIFE AND MYTH 19
modern life in his country, contemporary existence in all its aspects.

He published a series of books which met with great success: Face to
Face, Dzhamilja, Mother Earth, Good-bye, Guisary, The White Steamer,
and although orthodox Soviet critics quite often reproached him with
his lack of reverence for official virtue - Aitmatov, for instance, has often
denounced alcoholism and the brutality of Soviet everyday life -
Chinghiz Torekulovich's narrative or rather epic qualities have found very
wide recognition, and not only in his native Kirghizia or the Soviet Union.
He has been translated in many other countries, into more than ninety
different languages. The author himself bears great responsibilities in
Soviet literary life; he became a member of the Supreme Soviet in
Moscow and, at the time of "perestroika", he was invited by Mikhail
Gorbachev to be one of the president's personal counselors. But suddenly,
the event may seem puzzling, Chinghiz Aitmatov left Moscow and the
Soviet Union and he came to the small Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
to carry out among us the duties of Ambassador of the Soviet Union. Last
month, in March 1991, President Vaclav Havel paid an official visit to
Luxembourg - and for three days the city of Luxembourg had the honour
of offering its hospitality to two outstanding writers who both, though
in different literary ways, have fought, and fight, for the benefit of the
humanist values which are dear to all of us. Ambassador Chinghiz
Aitmatov, since his arrival in Luxembourg, has already finished a book
he was preparing at the time of his departure from Moscow, a book which
he has written in cooperation with his Japanese friend Daisaku Ikeda,
who is one of the most distinguished representatives of Buddhism in
Japan.
Aitmatov is deeply interested in religious experience and in spite of
his being the descendent of Muslim ancestors, he is interested above
all in Christian meditation and is attracted by the figure of Christ. In
the novel Plakha (The Execution Block, or The Place of Execution),
which appeared in Moscow in 1986, Aitmatov depicts a young Russian
hero, Avdi Kallistratov, who is a modern Christ - and, mutatis mutandis,
somewhat similar to Dostoievski's Idiot, Prince Myshkin. Aitmatov, child
of a Marxist society and schooling, in the course of years is said to
have become a fervent reader of Hegel's treatises, and this preference
expresses itself in the reasoning of Christ in the visions of his badly
hurt and suffering hero Kallistratov as well as in the thoughts and words
of Kallistratov himself. Furthermore I would like to suggest that - through
Hegel - there seems to have arisen some connexion between the search
of Aitmatov and that certain mystics such as, for instance, Meister
Eckhart in Western Europe.
But besides Avdi Kallistratov, Plakha has a second hero - or rather
heroine - and she is not a human being, not a woman, but a she-wolf,
Akbara, and I have been told that critics in the Soviet Union have averred
that Aitmatov described Akbara, her life, her experience, her problems,
with more care with more love, with more success, than he did those
same aspects of his hero - his human hero - Avdi Kallistratov, despite
the fact that in this important novel the young man stands for Jesus Christ
for Akbara - the Great - hers is the expression, the allegory, the image
of life and of nature.
Born as a member of a community rooted in tradition and Muslim
religion, Chinghiz Aitmatov has met with women oppressed by custom
and masculine domination. In 1962 the already famous author, in a
Kirghiz newspaper - Sovietskaya Kirghizia - published an article of
severe criticism directed against the authorities, both local and
Communist, of his native village Sheker. A young girl of fifteen had been
surprised by two adult men on her way from school. One of the two
scoundrels had forced her, against her will, to marry him, with the
approval of several male members of the victim's family, her elderly
mother not having been consulted whereas her father had long ago been
killed during the war.
During a certain number of years the young woman had struggled
in vain to win back her freedom. When her husnand, a drunkard and a
dangerous brute, had badly hurt another woman in a fit of rage, the young
woman, her torturer being in prison, had succeeded, in company of her
two children, in establishing professional life in her home and she had also
established herself in a home of her own with her sons. But when her
criminal husband was released from prison, he came back to fetch her and
the two boys. He took the children, but the young woman herself, after
having hidden for some days in her old mother's barn, managed at last
to escape and to flee from the region where none of her kin had ventured
to defend her against the violence of a drunken criminal. Chinghiz
Aitmatov accuses openly and with a sad indignation his fellow citizens
of Sheker for having witnessed and accepted this tragedy and crime.
In his first very successful tale already, Djamilja, which he published
at the end of the fifties, and which was greeted by the French poet
Louis Aragon as the most beautiful love story of our times, Chinghiz
Aitmatov had taken sides with his heroine Djamilja who opposes the code
LIFE AND MYTH 21
of custom and tradition, abandoning her soldier husband whom she was
forced to marry, and leaving the village community together with the man
with whom she had fallen in love, Danijiar, an orphan, a man without
family and without land, who after being wounded at war had come as
a labourer to the young woman's village. Thus Chinghiz Aitmatov is
in favour of real, of true, love, and he often delights in painting the
birth of emotion in the hearts and in the bodies of adolescents, of both
boys and girls.
But the figure of the mother has acquired a very particular impor-
tance in his books. In the first story I have mentioned, "From Face to
Face", the deserter is living on the poor food his wife, subject to all
the deprivations of war, manages to save, to spare for him. But as he
badly wants to eat some meat, he steals the only cow belonging to a
poor woman, a soldier's widow with three small children. He kills the
cow to satisfy his appetite, and he also brings part of the meat to his
family, revealing to his wife that he is responsible for the crime the whole
village is greatly upset about. In deep indignation and sorrow the young
woman, carrying her baby son in her arms, leads the pursuers to her
husband's hiding place and, facing him with desperate boldness - for he
is armed and dangerous - by her moral superiority she obliges him to
surrender. Aitmatov does not speak in the name of the Soviet state, but
he condemns the deserter because the latter has betrayed the human com-
munity which has brought him up, because, in order to save his own
life, the deserter steals the cow which gave her milk to the small children
who are the bearers of hope, the future generation which possibly will
be better - in the moral and intellectual sense - than the present one.
The forces of evil in our world are apt to extinguish and destroy
such hope. In his novel A Day Longer than a Century (Idolshe veka dlitsia
den - the book in the author's eyes is one of his most significant
writings), the modern heroes, men and women of the end of the 20th
century, living near a space centre in Kazakhstan, listen to an old old
tale or legend telling about the Mankurt and about a devoted mother
who tried to save her son who had been made a slave, a Mankurt by
the enemies of his people.
The tribe of the enemies has developed a particularly cruel and hideous
way not of brainwashing but of brain destroying. The prisoners of war,
if they are young and strong, are tortured in a subtle way - so that they
will lose all consciousness of their past life and their personal identity.
Then they will serve their masters as useful and reliable slaves. The young
man whose mother is the principal character of the legend, has suffered
torture, has lost his memory, and works as a guardian of a huge camel
herd for the enemies. At home his mother believes that her lost son is
still alive and when she hears that travellers have seen a young mankurt
- this is the name given to the victims of brain destruction - she hopes
and fears that he may be her son - and that he will not be able any
more to recognize his mother. But without hesitating she leaves her home,
and riding on her beautiful white she-camel Akmea, she goes searching
for her son in the desert steppe of Central Asia. She discovers the young
man in the midst of the enemies' herd; she talks to him, in vain, but
the enemies, having found out that their mankurt is being talked to by
an unknown woman, give the young man a bow and arrows. His hands
have kept memories the mind has lost, and next time his mother comes
to see him and try to call him back to life - by telling him his father's
name - Donenbai - her son, the mankurt, kills her with one of his arrows.
While the mother is dying, her white scarf flies away just like a
bird, a bird crying: My name is Donenbai. The dead mother, says the
legend, was buried in a cemetery which afterwards was called "Ana-belt",
the Mother's Resting Place.
In Aitmatov's novel, this ancient cemetery is situated on the property
of the space centre, and when his heroes want to bury a dead friend at
Ana-belt - for they are attached to a venerable custom - they are not
allowed to enter the ground of science and technology. The guards tell
them that anyway the old cemetery Ana-baIt, the Resting Place of the
Mother, will be destroyed. This announcement conveys the meaning
that man in his will to conquer and to dominate does not hesitate to
kill the earth, his life, his mother.
Chinghiz Aitmatov notes that mankind strives towards conquest,
wealth, power, and therefore fosters war, oppression, slavery, and he
himself suggests that instead of wanting passionately to have, to possess,
we should try to be - to become real human beings finding our fulfil-
ment in love and creation - and thus he expresses an idea, an ideal, which
is in accordance with Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka's vision of human nature
and vocation.
The mother, in Aitmatov's thought, is the bearer of nature, of life,
of creation. As he has excellent knowledge and a deep understanding
of nature, he uses this advantage to express his ideas by the way of
images, allegories and myths taken from the mineral, the vegetal and,
above all, the animal world.
LIFE AND MYTH 23
Relating to the Second World War, Aitmatov has written a short

novel called materinskoje polje (Le champ maternel, in the French trans-
lation, "Mother Earth," I would say). This book he has dedicated to his
parents, to his father Torekul and his mother Nahima. The heroine
Tolgonai is bereaved by the war of her husband and her three sons. In
the course of the story Tolgonai repeatedly leaves her village and goes
to the fields where she talks to the earth; she asks her why men fight
and kill each other, and the field, the earth answers Tolgonai: Mankind
is responsible for wars; I myself am willing to feed equally all human
beings and to keep them alive.
Today, having reached his creative maturity, the author says of Mother
Earth: "This is but war literature". All the same, the importance he
attributes to the source of life, to the earth, is not to be underrated. In
other books he has taken up the same subject, though with perhaps
more literary skill and more passionate inspiration.
Poslie skaski, (After the Fairy Tale) is the original title of a book
first published in the early seventies, which has become well known under
a second title, The White Steamer. The hero is a child. Aitmatov dearly
loves children, his own children and all other children too. The seven-
year-old boy has been abandoned by his parents who, having divorced,
have chosen to begin a new life without the burden of a child. The boy
has found a home in the mountain forest above the beautiful lake
Issyk-Kul in Kirghizia, with his maternal grandfather who is a kind but
weak man who allows himself to be dominated by his second wife who
very much dislikes the unfortunate child. The boy himself has a friendly
character and enjoys his acquaintance with a young lorry-driver, for
instance, who tells him about his work. But the child discovers a kind
of spiritual nourishment in two tales which he often tells himself, the first
one being of his own invention, the second having been told him by
his grandfather. First the fatherless boy imagines that he will transform
himself into a fish and dive down, in the waters of the mountain stream,
to the beautiful lake Issyk-Kul where his father is working as a sailor
on board of a splendid white steamer. Approaching the ship, the fish
will take again its human shape, and the father will be delighted to see
before his astonished eyes in the waters of the lake his seven-year-old
son whom he has been longing for for a long time. . . .
The second tale is an old Kirghiz legend which Chinghiz Aitmatov
has adapted to the message he wants to deliver to his readers. Formerly,
so says the legend, the Kirghiz people lived somewhere in Siberia but
these tribes were attacked and killed by a cruel enemy. Two members
only of the slaughtered people survived, a boy and a girl. The two
children were adopted by a beautiful female reindeer whose little ones
just had been murdered by human beings, and the sorrow stricken mother,
in search of her offspring, gave her love and her protection to the two
children. She reared them with great care, and when they had grown
up, they married and became the ancestors of a new Kirghiz people.
The beautiful Reindeer Mother became a kind of deity or totem or
mythical ancestor of the tribe. The descendants were bound by a sacred
oath to respect her life as well as the life of all her reindeer children.
But in the course of time they lost their respect for religious and moral
ties. They started killing reindeer animals, and the beautiful Reindeer
Mother, full of wrath, turned away from them, left their country, taking
away with her all her reindeer children. Furthermore she announces
that never will she come back to the treacherous and ungrateful Kirghiz
people.
The small boy who no more has a mother, who is longing for affec-
tion and for tenderness, is fascinated by his grandfather's tale, by the
character of the great, the beautiful and kind Reindeer Mother, and he
secretly wishes and hopes that in spite of her being angry she will come
back all the same and that he, the small boy, will meet her out in the
forest and that she will become his loving friend. And suddenly the
tale comes true: A reindeer family, a male, a female and their little
one, appears in the forest, and the boy sees with his own eyes the
marvellous being, the Reindeer Mother he so often has imagined in his
daydreams. He is overwhelmed by happiness, but his joy will not be
of long duration.
The grown-up members of the family, his mother's sister, her husband,
his grandfather's second wife, being all persons without any intellec-
tual concern, decide to kill one of the animals and eat it. As the
grandfather knows best how to handle a gun, they order him to kill the
female reindeer. While the adults rejoice in eating and drinking plenty
of vodka before they go to sleep among the remnants of their greedi-
ness, with the Reindeer Mother's head, her antlers and her hooves lying
all about, the child, completely lost and horror-struck, aimlessly wanders
about and all of a sudden turns to the torrent and enters into the water
- we know that he wanted to become a fish and swim out into the
lake Issyk-Kul and approach the white steamer carrying his sailor
father. But he will not reach the lake alive; the mountain waters seize
LIFE AND MYTH 25
the child and struggling without any success the small boy is carried
away....
The French translation of this short novel has been made by a well-
known translator of Russian literature, Lily Denis, and the back cover
of the first edition bears the following statement: "This book wherein
the mother is completely absent, is a most beautiful hymn to maternal
love".
Chinghiz Aitmatov uses the allegory of the Reindeer Mother in order
to express his admiration for the love a mother is able to give, and this
animal mother also stands for nature, as the origin, the source of life,
for life owes its appearance to love, and in the same way literature and
the other arts are products of love, of intellectual and spiritual passion.
Here again I would like to point out a resemblance between Aitmatov's
views and Professor Tymieniecka's philosophy.
Having incarnated life in the person of the Reindeer Mother, Aitmatov
apparently discovered himself to be on a path fully satisfactory to his
temper with this literary device. Therefore he continued the experiment,
renewing it in the short novel which he himself called in Russian Pegi
pios beguchi krajem morja - his titles more than once happen to have
a poetic rhythm (The Piebald Hound Running along the Sea-Shore).
But the French translation's title became, after a song mentioned in the
book, "Blue Mouse, Give Me Some Water", and the German editor
published the book under the title "The Boy and the Sea", alluding, I
presume, to Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.
Three grown-up men belonging to a tribe established in Siberia on
the shores of the Okhotsk Sea, sail out with a young boy called Kirisk
who is to be initiated into both sailing and seal hunting. The village is
situated near a rock which resembles a dog, a piebald dog, running
along the sea; this rock marks the point of departure and return of the
hunters.
The small group - Kirisk, his father, a cousin and Organ, the chief
of the tribe, spend a first day which is propitious, and the boy is proud
of his new experience. But then the human beings are surprised by a
violent tempest followed by a black mist (fog) which stays on for several
days and the three men, although they have a great experience of the
sea, are absolutely lost. Helplessly they are driven from side to side in
a total and cold darkness. They suffer terribly from the lack of drink-
able water. Finally the three adults, first the eldest of the tribe, Organ,
then the cousin and after him the boy's father drown themselves, hoping
that perhaps the adolescent will survive. This is what happens: The mist
dissolves, the sun returns, and using his new knowledge which he has
acquired during the awful days and nights, Kirisk tries to steer his boat,
and after some time the piebald dog running along the seashore appears
before his eyes. A new day begins, writes Aitmatov at the end of his
story. Three men of the elder generation have perished, but the fourth,
the young man, will assure the continuation of life.
During the trip on the sea, Organ, the chief of the tribe, meditates
and abandons himself to the stream of memory and imagination. His tribe
is said to have been founded by the union of a man who was physi-
cally handicapped - he was lame and somewhat rejected by the
fellow-members of the group - and the Great Fish-Woman - velikaya
jentchina-ryba - who lives in the sea and who is the mother of all life.
She chose this man to be her mate. He she espoused, taking him as the
father of her future offspring.
While Organ, the old chief of the tribe of seal hunters, is sailing and
teaching young Kirisk, from time to time he seems to doze, and then there
appears before him the vision of the Great Fish-Woman, a vision he
has already seen very often in his life, and he dreams that he is swimming
side by side with the Great Fish-Woman and that she loves him as
passionately as he loves her and that she is willing to stay with him
and that great happiness will arise from their union. But at that moment
his dream is interrupted and the Great Fish-Woman vanishes into a far
away distance.
When Organ sacrifices his life for the sake of young Kirisk, the reader
may have the impression that the hero is rejoining the Great Fish-Woman
in the depth and the darkness of the sea. Life often has been said to
have come out of night and of water - Chinghiz Aitmatov has given a
new poetic expression to this old opinion about mankind's origin. The
subject matter of the book has been given to him by Siberian tradition
- for he has travelled much throughout the Soviet Union and every-
where he has shown a keen interest in the local imagination.
In his latest novel Plakha (The Execution Block or The Place of
Execution) Aitmatov has used, I believe, his own imagination and created
a third animal character, totem and force, to represent the Great Mother
of all Beings, as he himself writes at the end of his book. In "Pegi
pios", the Great Fish-Woman chooses for her husband a lame man. One
might think of Venus and Vulcan. In Plakha, a female wolf represents
the fertility of nature. The Romans pretended that the divine twins,
LIFE AND MYTH 27
Romulus and Remus, were brought up by a wolf mother, but I believe

that I would be wrong in trying to compare Aitmatov's wolf Akbara,
the Great, to the Roman wolf. The similarity is fortuitious - or else it
is to be looked for in the depth of human imagination. . . .
Plakha is a rich and intricate novel. I have mentioned the Christ-
like figure of Avdi Kallistratov - Aitmatov has a deep attachment to
Russian classical literature. On the other hand, Akbara the wolf, as I have
said, stands for the life of nature - there is a mysterious link between
the destiny of Avdi and the life of Akbara!
In a world where modern man ruthlessly destroys nature, Akbara
and her mate - they are living in the desert steppe of Kazakhstan - do
not succeed in rearing their wolf cubs and preserving them against the
brutal intervention of man.
First, three cubs are killed while men are murdering thousands and
thousands of harmless taiga antelopes. During this monstrous butchery
one wolf cub is shot by one of the hunters, or butchers, and two are
trodden down by the antelopes running in panic for their lives.
The wolf parents leave the region and settle down on the banks of a
river. Thence they are expelled by men planning to build a factory. Whilst
the plants near the river are being burnt down by the human newcomers,
three wolf cubs out of five perish in the fire. The two others are taken
away by their parents who cross the river carrying each a little one in
his mouth. During the crossing of the water the young animals
suffocate. So once again Akbara has lost a complete litter through the
fault of human beings.
The adult wolves finally go to the mountains of Kirghizia, near the
lake Issyk-Kul, and here Akbara gives birth to four children, one of
which, a she-wolf, has her mother's extraordinary blue eyes. A drunken
shepherd steals the wolf cubs while their parents are out hunting; he sells
them and spends the money on vodka. The loss of her children drives
Akbara to madness. She keeps wandering about at night, howling at
the moon - for the wolf goddess is living there. After her faithful
companion has been shot, Akbara finally steals a human baby, a little
boy, for the loving mother in her seeks desperately for a living object
of tenderness and she wants a child to feed on her milk. So she runs
off with the baby boy on her back. The child's father, in despair, fires
several shots at the running wolf. He approaches and finds his dead
son near the dying wolf - and Boston - this is a name used in Kirghizia
- cannot bear the sight of Akbara's blue eyes. He has killed his own
son while killing Akbara, the Great Mother of All Life, "Die Grosse
Mutter alles Seienden", says the German translation. Aitmatov tells us
that in killing nature, we are killing ourselves. We are killing ourselves
out of mere greed and love - a false love - of possession and of power.
The latest tale Aitmatov has published, appeared last year in Moscow.
A German translation has very recently been published in Zurich,
Switzerland, by Unionsverlag. Aitmatov has introduced his story "The
White Cloud of Chinghiz Khan" into a new edition of his novel A Day
Longer than a Century. Chinghiz Khan prepares the conquest of Europe.
A strange fortune-teller announces that a white could will accompany
him on his way and that it is up to him to find the ways and means to
assure the presence of the cloud, for the cloud is the sign of his success.
The ambitious chief travels with a great many officers and soldiers and
the army is followed by a certain number of women. But Chinghiz
Khan has forbidden all his companions, or rather his subjects, to beget
children, for the birth of babies would hamper the accomplishment of the
chief's ambitions. In Aitmatov's eyes the begetting of a child is a phe-
nomenon of divine character, and he opposes Chinghiz Khan, the
man of cruelty and destruction. He tells of the beautiful young Dogulang
who embroiders the fierce and glistening dragons on the emperor's flags.
Dogulang is a very gifted artist and as such a creator. But as a woman
she has fallen in love with a young officer, and a son is born to them,
Kunan. The young woman is sentenced to death and she goes to the
execution place - she will be hanged on the back of camel - she goes
towards the camel without betraying the father of her child. At the last
minute the young man denounces himself, and the two lovers are
executed together, united in death.
Their child is taken away by the elderly slave servant, Altun. She flees
to the desert, carrying in her arms the orphan baby. When Kunan demands
his milk, Antun, having nothing to offer the starving child, finally allows
him to take her barren breast - a miracle happens - her love for the
child whose parents have been killed by the monster of war makes milk
appear in her and she is able to feed and to save the child.
As to the white cloud which had followed the cruel warrior Chinghiz
Khan, it seemed to have disappeared. The conqueror abandoned his
original plan, leaving the conquest of Europe to his heirs. In reality the
cloud had not at all disappeared. It had left Chinghiz Khan to follow
Altun and the baby Kunan, for the cloud's task consisted in the protec-
tion of life.
LIFE AND MYTH 29
The flaming dragons which Dogulang, the artist, the lover, the mother,
had embroidered on Chinghiz Khan's banners, as to them, they were
not the hostile dragons of treasure-keeping and destruction, but the
guardians of fertility, the builders of life. Therefore, in her encounters
with Erdene, her companion, Dogulang used to call the young man "her
flaming dragon".
The Grand-Ducal Institute, Luxembourg

SARA F. GARCfA-G6MEZ
IN HUMBLE CONFORMITY: 1
CIPHER AND VISION IN JORGE GUILLEN'S POETRY
Emilia de Zuleta, one of the most careful and perspicacious students of

Guillen's poetry, has established the existence of three distinct thematic
clusters in his work. As she says, the "first one comprises being, time,
and love ... The second one includes chance, chaos, suffering, death,
and memory ... The third one involves imminence, enjoyment, jubila-
tion, God, and the devil".2 According to her, the third thematic cluster
is clearly identifiable in Cdntico, Clamor, and the rest of Guillen's poetic
production thereafter, while the first two appear throughout his entire
work.3
In my opinion, Zuleta's classification is interesting both for what it
mentions and for what it leaves out. It is surprising to discover that
creatureliness is conspicuous by its absence from it, even though this
theme is already apparent in the very dedication of Cdntico. A reason-
able explanation for this omission could be that this critic thought the
theme in question to have been appropriately encompassed by one or
another of the clusters she refers to, and yet I believe this would be a
mistake. In fact, I contend that creatureliness is the best standpoint one
can adopt for the full appreciation of topics like being or time in Guillen's
poetry. As Emilia de Zuleta hereself indicates, his approach is "philo-
sophical in character, inasmuch as it presupposes definite epistemological,
metaphysical, and ethical views,,4 on the part of the author. By the same
token, one may wonder about the key transcendental idea or experi-
ence which, as is the case with every philosophical position, could be
identified as our guide as we strive to follow Guillen in his attempt to
descipher and give expression to reality.
According the Marta del Carmen Bobes Naves's sound judgment on
this matter, "the search after essential reality is one of the constants of
Cdntico".5 Amado Alonso, for his part, places Guillen's motivation and
achievement squarely within the orbit of phenomenology, a philosoph-
ical movement of central importance to contemporary thought. 6 But,
even if one comes to accept this last point as correctly presenting the
stance at the basis of Guillen's poetry, one would still have to consider
it insufficient to say that his poetry consists in just coming face to face

32 SARA F. GARCfA-G6MEZ
with things. This opinion would fail to take into account one's con-
sciousness of things, for consciousness - so far as it is intentional - is
a fundamental openness to things and thus the locus where the living
experiences of being, time, and other such themes would take place. In
my judgment, the consciousness involved in leading one's life qua
creaturely existence is precisely the foundation supporting the "philo-
sophical" position that Guillen embodies in his poetry.
Now then, the notion of creatureliness is far from clear, especially
if one looks at it as a poetical motif. Creatureliness means, above all,
dependence. It is well nigh impossible to speak of creatureliness without
referring to a creator, even if only by allusion, for creatureliness also
means having a share in a universe arising from an act of creation.
Let me now attempt to determine more exactly in what sense these
two meanings of "creatureliness" interpenetrate in the works by Gulillen
to be examined here. In order to do this, one has to pay attention to
the basic evidence by means of which we learn that man has a feeling
of creatureliness about himself. There is incontrovertible testimony
relevant to this in Cantico 7 as well as in ... Que van a dar a la mar,8
books which respectively convey the two opposite sides of one's
experience in terms of an ongoing dialectical exchange. On the basis
of these two works, one may come to appreciate how it is that the
consciousness of dependence arises as one faces both life and death. Even
if it is true that sometimes the stress is placed on one or the other side,
it is nonetheless the case that, as part and parcel of one's awareness of
living, one has some sense of one's possible death, just as one's veiled
anticipation of death implicates one's awareness of living. This seems
to be a privilege of human beings, and yet, since many are or grow
oblivious of it, it is necessary that some - be they philosophers or poets
- cultivate the dimensions of our being which actively allow us to keep
alive to it.
Even though the title of this study is inspired by a line in Cantico, I
am going to focus my analysis on poems belonging to . . . Que van a
dar a La mar, a collection named after a verse well known to lovers of
Spanish poetry. The title of this collection, which could be translated
as " ... flowing into the sea", evokes a time-honored tradition in Castilian
letters9 and most certainly reflects the poet's concern with Jorge Manrique
as the classical representative of the Spanish poetic meditation on death.
One may agree that there is a thematic unity and continuity to Guillen's
work,1O but this position is not at all incompatible with the hypothesis
IN HUMBLE CONFORMITY 33
that the poet's manner of dealing with death undergoes various elabo-
rations in ... Que van a dar a La mar. In fact I would argue that such
developments are also found in Cantico's successive versions and
amplifications, although, to be sure, in each case they may appear
different, as a function of the perspectives characteristic of the work in
question.
Among the novel thematic elaborations I have in mind, I would like
to insist on a few as being most important. Such topic variations are
not independent, of course, of those identified by Zuleta,11 but they are
now to be unified in terms of man's creaturely self-experience, which
is the subject under scrutiny here. Let me just mention the following:
1. creatureliness and being as the fruit of gift-giving; 2. creatureliness
and temporality; 3. creatureliness and uncertainty; 4. creatureliness,
mortality, and hopefulness. I will in fact follow the thematic order just
given in my own analytic presentation. I will therefore begin my
examination with creatureliness and being as the fruit of gift-giving. In
doing so, I am not exactly following Guillen's own order, for, in choosing
to open his collection with the poem "Lugar de Lazaro", he is signaling,
as the title itself suggests, that he is going to be concerned, first of all,
with creatureliness and mortality. My choice however is to employ this
long poem as a means of bringing my analysis to a conclusion, for reasons
that will then become apparent.
The capacity for wonder is central to Guillen's poetic experience. It
amounts to his being consciously open to what can only be described
as the unhoped-for. The un hoped-for is, by definition, an occasion for
astonishment, since it is precisely that for which one cannot be ready
in terms of one's projects and concomitant anticipations, given its
insurmountable gratuitousness. In approaching reality as that which is
in no way owed us, or as the result of sheer gift-giving, Guillen presents
us with something that is variously at work throughout his entire poetic
production, and which brings us ever increasingly close to his own
creaturely experience of being "in humble conformity". The theme of
temporality, on the other hand, even though it is well deserving of a
special section, cannot be treated in isolation from the notion of gift-
giving and its correlate, the concept of the unhoped-for. In fact,
temporality, in conjunction with the latter, will give rise to a manifold
of novel possibilities, which are inherent in our own sense of creature-
liness. Accordingly, these will be the first two themes to be subjected
to analysis in what follows.
CREATURELINESS AND GIFT-GIVING
Guillen has been characterized as the singer of being. Criticism has not
been oblivious to this fundamental sense of Cdntico; indeed, critics
have underscored it. 12 To this end, a favored point of reference is his
verse, "To be, just to be. That's enough".13 Such criticism is, for
the most part, of one mind in accepting the view that Guillen's is an
"essential realism", to use Marla del Carmen Bobes Naves's own
formulation. 14 This is how she explains what this means:
Generally speaking, realism is a stance by which someone is inclined to dwell on things,
thus having the opportunity of gathering details about and preparing careful descrip-
tions of things. In this fashion, one avoids the risk of "interpreting" them. But there is
another form of realism, which consists in looking for the standpoint from which a thing
is best defined: . . . the poet would [then] be in search of a characteristic . . .
[which, once found] he would use as a sign for the whole of the thing, or as a name
substituting for it in fact. IS
In doing this, the poet's purpose seems to be, to use Amado Alonso's
phrasing, to achieve a "happy fusion between the unity of the partic-
ular and the unity of the universal". 16 In fact, this critic has characterized
Guillen as an "essential poet", for, as he insists, his poetry "has a much
higher aspiration than [just] grasping reality at surface, say, as donning
the feathers of a hummingbird or a peacock". 17 And he immediately adds:
He is not intent on covering something up ... [but] on dis-covering it. His aim is to
un-cover the purpose behind the fleeting features reality actually exhibits, so as to be
able to catch its secret sense by surprise. In brief, he seeks its structure or essence. I8
Perhaps this was the reason why originally some thought of Guillen as
another Valery,19 the French poet concerned with essences, whom Guillen
had translated into Spanish. Soon enough, more perspicacious critics
noted the great difference between the intellectualistic poets of
Symbolism and Guillen, who inmersed himself in concreteness in order
to sing of it undaunted and full of passion. 20 Even Guillen himself did
object to his work being twinned with the pure poetry of the French:
"I have opted for a mixed, complex poetry", he says. "I have chosen
to make poems endowed with poetry and other human things as well
... ", that is to say, a "sufficiently pure [poetry]", as he clarifies. 21
This poetry does not keep the subject of the experience without, and
yet one may wonder how it is that the subject can be validly rendered
manifest. Pedro Salinas, Guillen's contemporary and good friend,
provides us with an admirable answer when he says:
The active principles at work in Guillen's poetry are these: love for all, love for things,
joy for the fact that they exist and permit us to enjoy them, and gratitude for their
existence. Man's exultation in being leads him to become joyfully conscious of exis-
tence by means of acts through which he possesses those realities that he also joyfully
perceives to be outside himself.22
In other words, I would summarize the opinion of some critics by saying

that the most impressive thing about Guillen is his characteristic manner
of poetically being in the midst of things, that is to say, his special way
of sensing them as wondrous revelations of a living totality. Taken as
a whole, things are to us, according to Guillen's experience, the result
of gift-giving; they are experienced by us as so many gifts or present-
ations. In fact, if Guillen sings of being, it is primordially because he
has un-covered its d6xa or glorious gratuitousness. As critics have pointed
out, Cantico is pervaded by a style of contemplation that fixes itself
on the most singular reality of what is individual and concrete, so as
to transcend it by dis-closing it at every turn as the manifestation of
the superabundance characteristic of embodied being. Cantico is thus the
innocent expression of a consciousness that knows itself to be the point
of convergence of all those realities which, transmuted into words,
dis-close to us their wealth at full. 23
The poetry collected under the title of Cantico is a sustained act of
thanksgiving. Innocence, however, is not a state in which one can abide.
The harmony between man and the universe is not complete, and the
loss of innocence is the price one pays for coming to this realization.
Even in Cantico this loss is progressively reflected,24 as the collection
grows from version to version in the way a child progressively matures
into a man. 25 One now has to come to terms not so much with man's
wonderment or astonisment, as with his sense of estrangement, the
moment he realizes that he is radically alienated, radically other. As
Emilia de Zuleta points out, the last edition of Cantico still speaks of
the "joy of being part of the chain of being",26 and yet it is no longer
tenable to say, as Amado Alonso did before, that "the dense shell covering
things up is, for this poet, so much clear water".27 Not only must one
recognize the spontaneity proper to the reality seized upon by poetic
consciousness, but one is also to acknowledge the mysteriousness
characteristic of the isolation of human creaturely existence.
Let us now turn to ... Que van a dar a la mar, where one finds the
complaint of a man who has become conscious of the fact that he is
out of place. Indeed, this is expressed by words indicating a state of
perplexity following upon the discovery, on the poet's part, that he may
lose his own self-identity. He asks:
Who would I be if once

could I change myself
to don one of the thousand
shapes that I do not consent to be? (p. 43)
The reality of the poet's own death has now made its appearance, and,
consequently, nothing can any longer have the same significance for him.
His eyes are presently wide open, having foresaken paradise. Here we
have his reaction to it: he protests; he is tempted to rebel. And then he
adds: "It terrifies me, it hurts me, it humbles me".
And yet, if innocence is lost, a sense of depth is gained instead.
Accordingly, the theme of the gratuitousness of being comes to its most
exact formulation, as it is proposed from the standpoint of the nothing-
ness and chaos lying in wait for us. There is one poem, among those
belonging in the second part of this collection, which contains a metaphor
that befits what has been called the "place of man in the universe".28 I
have in mind Guillen's "Una exposicion", where one witnesses the
turmoil caused by some fish at the bottom of their bowl, a turmoil that
is itself a reflection of the reality of the sea (p. 46). The poet ponders
over how the tiny fish, by means of their multi-colored display, deliver
themselves to us in terms of a "scene" that is a gift to an "intruder
[who] knows it" (p. 47). These small animals "flutter in their longing
... / [They] go about exploring ... flaunting/ their color, ever more
intense" (ibid.). Unknowingly, the fish are fulfilling a particular destiny
in the midst of their own superabundance, namely, in that "gratuitous-
ness of grace/ that turns into beauty" (p. 48). The individual beings which
thus "make the beginning of a hustle and bustle" (ibid.) encounter their
respective solitudes or engage in coupling them, as "their worlds, a
creation of their own" (p. 49), persist in being and grow strong.
Confronted with this spectacle, the human witness, "only a man", faces
up to his own creatureliness: "Creation permeates me. I am dependent",
he states. Moreover, he acknowledges that he too is a "chance resident
of this planet" (ibid.), one among many "characters in a portrait, in an
order", and this is so as he is dragged along by the life stream, the "origins
[of which] remain unknown" (ibid.).
Now it seems as if the joy of Cantico came to be extinguished in verses

that give vent to the poet's fears:
Neither those fish - there, as under-the-water

fabulations -
nor I, a fabulator behind the pane,
make our passage, key in hand,
through the swirling waters, clouds
of dust.
Wandering, we just make our passage. (ibid.)
But with man a case can be made for hope, the hope of meaningful-
ness: "Behind appearances, won't there still be a spring! from which
all waters flow ... ?" (p. 50). Man is both supported and rebuffed by
an order he fails to understand. "Who knows" (p. 51) whether vibrating
as an element in "supreme conformity to an unknowable god" (ibid.)
is truly our own disposition. The only response possible here is to say,
"I hope" (ibid.), a remark which, despite everything, is much more than
a simple, vague form of self-consolation.
A human being is not, however, like a rose, "which is already dying!
at its own right moment! when it yields to springtime ... " (p. 42).
This humble manner of passivity does not suit a man, although he can
learn from other beings, like the rose itself, so as to be able to take up
for himself the destiny of dependence. He would do so by transforming
such fatefulness into something of his own in an act of thoroughly
self-aware acceptance. But this requires that he assume the unknown
character of his destiny, as well as the mystery inherent in it, namely,
its beckoning promise of a response.
This matter of acceptance is of the greatest importance in the present
context. It has nothing to do with resignation; in fact, it is just the
opposite, for it is an affirmative, active principle. Indeed, it is a new
manner of participating in being, which is given to us precisely in this
now we are holding fast to, and yet this insistent engagement of ours
cannot succeed in dissolving our awareness of the fleetingness of the
moment in which we are living. Actually, this is the conclusion arrived
at by Guillen at the end of his poem "Dawn of the Tired Man", as he
resists meaninglessness. These are his words there: "[the] marvels of this
world! are still standing ... ! It is fortunate to be forced! to live too.l
I accept." (p. 33). Or again, as he puts it in his "A Little Dawn Song
for My Companion":
Companion, chase sleep away,

wake up; there is still some living to do.
Get ready soon,

clarity is waiting for us.
In the clouds, the sun

is hurling its invitation at us.
Go on living; choose it over standing still.
Wake up: there is still some living to do. (p. 143)
Dawns here may not have the triumphant character they exhibited in
Cantico, but they are nonetheless a summons to life. Accordingly, a
will to accept life carries the day. As Guillen says elsewhere, "the new
day ... awaits" (p. 80). Even if one knows that it too shall pass, that
there will be a last day, one is still in good time: "Let it come, come,
more, even more, more" (ibid.).
It is not enough, however, for the morning to bring back light to the
world. A friend has died; one is sick with loneliness; human suffering
is part and parcel of reality itself. Or in Guillen's words:
A man, almost always a Harlequin,

made of unequal portions,
where goods and evils
sing out of tune. [ ... ] (ibid.)
At last, the "festival" of the day becomes the "ruby of a cloud, a well
set death", and this creature of a man, just like the day, just like the
rose "at its own right moment", readies himself to come to term. "I am
not about to run away", he says. A rose dies in the bosom of a garden
that abides; the poet too finds meaning for his life in the continuity of
the whole: "If I enjoy things no more, someone else will.! Existence sticks
to its guns. It is summoning the one who once was young, and the
young man too ... " (p. 144). Diligently one is thankful for one's
health, and one proclaims every new beginning as a "green bough".
Mornings have become "triumphant" once more, even if contradictions
are part and parcel of the integral truth: "Joy and sadness: it's a new day"
(ibid.).
This creaturely being, this man who knows himself to be mortal, has
taken up his existence voluntarily and has accepted his fate, that is to
say, the fact that he "should die/ as a chord does in the unfolding of
one inescapable concert ... No complaints" (p. 147). These words
come from Guillen's poem "I am mortal", in which we hear him accept,
as his very own, the fact of being conformed to the reality of which
he is a part. One can then see not only Creation (which surrounds us),
but also one's own being as a present-ation, as the fruit of an act of
incomprehensible gift-giving. This is how he conveys this realization:
Here I am, in body and soul,

just a single indivisible being,
a marvel to behold - while I live,
and still am ... (p. 148)
Indeed, the name of a possible Creator may just be barely audible in

the "I hope" we heard before, and yet the experience undergone by this
creaturely being, so far as he is part and parcel of a whole issuing from
gift-giving, cannot be expressed except in terms of thankfulness. In
Cantico, Guillen came to know being as a gift, and he did so by means
of that most uncommon joy it brings about. Now, in confronting death,
he fully recognizes the gratuitousness of the "useless" superabundance,
say, of the blue of the fish, a perception that leads him to reflection
(cf. p. 51). Creation is always free, an act of free invention. In fact,
creaturely being is characterized by a sense of belongingness which is
at once both necessary and unjustified, even as it is the condition to be
accepted if one is to play the game at all.
CREA TURELINES S AND TEMPORALITY
As Emilia de Zuleta has insightfully remarked, the present is the

fundamental form of time in Cantico. As she says, "it is eternity regarded
through the prism of manifold motivations ... To use one of Bachelard's
images, one would have to say that it is as if the poet were seeking
time as condensed in the myriad holding places of space".29 Now, this
is not hard to understand, for the present is the time of innocence,
primordial time. This is how Guillen himself speaks of that golden first
40 SARA F. OARCfA-06MEZ
age: " ... immortality under way! ... the present was a future! warm
with its own fabulations" (p. 40). But the present is also the only manner
of temporality in which being manifests itself at full. In my opinion,
the attempt to make the present firm, as it is observable in Cantico,
does not result from the poet's will to render the fleeting moment eternal,
or to arrest the passing of time, as Emilia de Zuleta suggests. 30 If the poet
gathers the present and saves it, it is only because it itself is truth, constant
affirmation, perfect consummation. One can find evidence of this in
the very poem Zuleta chose from Cantico to illustrate her point:
[ ... ] It was I,
as the center of the fleeting moment,
of so much about me,
who saw everything
perfected, as befitting a god. 3 !
One finds here the harmony proper to a totality consisting of a

contemplator's present and the present of a reality that offers itself to him
as existing moment to moment. The experience of eternity, "befitting a
god", is not born of the poet's decision, but results from his opening
up to a presence constituting itself as a whole "perfected" at the very
fleeting moment when contemplation is effected. 32
Accordingly, one could think of time as an aggregate of present
moments, of present-ations. In fact, this seems to be the case with things,
such as the stone (which "is not extinguished") or a flower (which
"always returns"), and with the continuous resurrection of the sea (cf.
p. 72). But this is hardly enough when human life becomes the center
of attention. As Guillen says in his poem "The Grace of Time", time
"gathers up in the soul", even to the point of becoming one with our
own being (p. 71). The present becomes less and less of a present; it
belongs increasingly less to itself as human life becomes laden with
the past: "With the monotony! of a time buried in my time", the time
that "I drag along as it drags me along with it", as Guillen chose to
put it in his poem, "The Dawn of the Tired Man" (p. 33). And in another
poem entitled "A Long Time", he adds that, once the years pregnant with
"boundless hope" have passed, our "days grow shorter ... " (p. 52).
In fact, one's life is now to take place as in a "fort under siege", a
recognition which the poet himself alludes to in the title of yet another
poem, "State of Siege" (p. 129). The hour of mortality has now struck.
The ciphering of life takes a different look at this point, and one's
vision of it, as the fruit of one's attempt to un-ravel it, is transmuted
into something else as well. The present is then lost to us, for
everything "is on its way to oblivion", as Guillen asserts in his poem
"In Haste" (p. 41), and now "goods and evils match each other" (ibid.).
But this manner of living is "no life", complains the poet in "Clover-
7" (p. 110). One is thus necessarily confronted with the task of restoring
the pre-existing harmony in order to regain the composure of one's being.
Our time is a sea which is engaged in "repelling its own perpetual
forgetfulness" (p. 44). One is however always running the risk of
surrendering, as one grows "oblivious to oneself in every stroke", as is
suggested in the very title of the poem, "Sea of Forgetfulness" (ibid.).
It is right, then, to resort to memory. Memory is time grown conscious
of itself; it is temporality taken up. As the instrumentality employed in
one's effort to remember, memory is however a failure, for it succeeds
in saving nothing: "If it is no more, then it's just a story" (p. 151).
Moreover, memories, regarded in themselves, may fail us too (ibid.),
for one is never sure whether "all of it is [nothing but] a legend", a
fear expressed by Guillen in a poem which begins with another famous
verse from Jorge Manrique, "Those garments in the old style ... "
(p. 38). To be sure, this is the truth, but not the whole truth. In fact,
in this very poem, Guillen declares this truth to be suspect, when he
asserts that, despite everything, the past does indeed survive, or in his
words:
Gone are the hours

of that swift-moving past
which never comes to an end:
everlasting it becomes beyond my grasp.
With every heartbeat

still alive in me
it restores the presence
of those now lost. 33
If in one place Guillen speaks ill of his memory for betraying its implicit
promise (cf. p. 151), elsewhere he sings its praises: "Tower still standing/
surrounded by the grass of ruination.! I, inner dweller, shall not neglect!
your boundless wealth" (p. 119). In fact, he goes even further, as the
title here suggests, for he sees it as "Culmination".
How could one possibly account for this? The explanation is simple:
much more than sheer remembering is involved, for the genuine
abidingness of what has been is playing a role too. This is how he
brings this point home to us in "Clover-8", when he speaks of his life
with his beloved: "We were truth. And this did abide" (p. 113).
It is only when he is confronted with his wife's death that the mystery
is resolved. He may charge his childhood memories with being "Images
in a mirror ... / Seductions in a fish bowl" (p. 37), but this is not
possible with the presence of his dead beloved. As he says in "Clover-
4", "Everything is true. Midday" (p. 92). Childhood's "concluded time"
barely survives as a fringe or margin of present consciousness,34 even
if it may be restored, as if "pierced by sunlight" (ibid.), when it is brought
back to life in memory. At this point, it is fundamentally past, if we
take this to mean the actualization of something that has passed, i.e.,
the presentation of an absent present. But there is another kind of past,
a past I would call active, which is an indispensable ingredient of every
actual present. We find an indication of this in Guillen's poem
"Encounter", which brings to words the poet's experience of the time
when his life-long wife came for the first time into his world: "Parting
of the waters;/ I can't imagine my life flowing/ from a deeper wellspring"
(p. 86). A past of this sort may be recaptured in the actual present solely
as a destiny fulfilled, which can be so grasped only from the stand-
point of the present. It now appears, lively and throbbing, as an essential
dimension of my life, and yet it could have very well remained unful-
filled (cf. ibid.). "[We] were gradually arising/ as a complete reality",
Guillen hastens to add. Thus he points to himself as the final outcome
of a process that was allowed to come to fruition in all its
potentialities, precisely as the virtualities which made up that lived
moment itself. As he says, "I could have been other than I am"
(ibid.).
In his poem "Love and Music", Guillen summarizes this entire process
as an interplay of three tempi and three corresponding times: 35 "[Every
being that] fulfills its promise/ an alliance it forms/ with that future borne
by the present" (p. 105). A present such as this, laden as it is with an
operative past, is quite different from the one we found characterized
before as the accomplished moment of perfection. We are not con-
fronted now with an eternal dimension alien to time, but with one which
is being constituted in the midst and by means of time. This is a dynamic

kind of eternity. "Such was our joy/ that it endures ... ", Guillen tells
us in "Clover-7", finally able to proclaim his triumph as he says, "There
is [a] power [capable of] overcoming nothingness" (p. 111).
Accordingly, time as such does not cease; it does not refuse its own
elapsing from yesteryear to this day, and neither what was gained nor
what was lost in that passage is set aside. As Guillen puts it, "How
different are yesteryear and today!! Yesteryear lies in the depths: We
two were one" (p. 112). And he adds: "Is my life a life of keeping
company with you?/ ... I follow you along the paths of the past;! I
have no other future" (p. 110). The truth about time is therefore revealed,
for time is now seen as that which saves reality by transforming it. This
is the reason why the poet speaks as follows in his poem "With me",
which is dedicated to his departed beloved:
With me you still remain alive,

touching you, almost, with my outstretched hand,
feeling you under the truth-baring sun
There you are, deep as thought;

there you are beating within me. (p. 121)
And then he adds, "Your present being is not yesteryear's" (ibid.). Most
precisely he now gives formulation to the actual situation he is in: "You
did not come back to life" (ibid.). No, the beloved has not come back;
rather she is still alive, albeit transformed and incorporated into the
innermost domain of the poet's being. This is how Guillen expresses
it: " ... You force me to make friends/ with someone who truly exists
in me" (ibid.). But the transformation taking place is twofold: on the
one hand, the beloved abides in the words of the poet: "You are resisting
at the emplacement of your name/ ... my lips are your abode" (p. 95);
on the other hand, she is an integral part of the self-consciousness
proper to the poet's life:
Sometimes I can have you in my life

still with such delight
that the one I once was again is now alive
So long was my time your time

that you abide in me forever:
If I do not follow in your footsteps,
from myself I take to flight. (ibid.)
But Guillen had clarified this point before, when he said that to be is
"also having been" (p. 102).
In view of this, a most important question must now be raised, namely,
what is the nature of what one has been and yet survives as part and
parcel of what one still is? To answer it, one must return to Cantico, even
if only briefly. There, in Guillen's "Salvation of Springtime",36 one
finds "one of the great love songs in Spanish poetry", as Pedro Salinas
has characterized it. 37 In my opinion, this poem can become most instruc-
tive if read from the standpoint of the collection now under scrutiny,
for, in "Salvation of Springtime", one comes face to face with the only
present time which, in the whole of Cantico, is not completely at one
with itself. The poet, so to speak, tastes this fact or, more exactly, has
aforetaste of it as a fateful calling: " ... so much of the driving power
moving me into my destiny/ runs into your world!,,38 What one is after
is no doubt much more than the fulfillment of one's desire, for one is
also engaged in the overcoming of the fleetingness of the moment by
means of one's conscious assumption of whatever is attainable through
it. To put it in Guillen's own words: "Love is perfect:/ it takes delight
in its own boundaries"; "the perfection of a fleeting moment! tirelessly
demands we attaint an unending truth,,;39 one feels in " ... today's joy/
an inevitable tomorrow",40 and this is so for the sake of one's beloved.
Finally, "what is eternal, and what is present, indistinguishable,! reach
deep down",41 in that peace in which one reaps one's fitting reward. In
light of all this, it is possible to say that "all is well,,42 for a finite,
creaturely being, but this is precisely the point Salinas insightfully makes
when he says that Guillen "rejects all exclusive conceptions of love,
namely, both the purely spiritual and the purely sensual notions of it,
and he is thus able to appreciate love as the goal and culmination of
our yearning to be".43
One may indeed wonder how any such salvation by way of love can
ever be effected. In this connection, Guillen insists, "the flesh is more
expressive" ,44 and it allows the individual to plunge into the totality of
creation. He tells us, further, that "our hands ... are also engaged in
contemplation" ,45 and he hopes to be allowed "to share in order" .46
Finally, he brings his poem to a close by means of a litany of praises

of his beloved, who is conceived as the mediatrix between the poet and
the harmony of the All.
This kind of experience is very different from the one which involves
pure sensual passion, by means of which man would fall into the
temptation of losing himself in another, certainly not as a way of
becoming perfectly integrated into the totality of all there is, but as if
the other were a self-enclosed world. The illustration of this point - by
means of a classical example, I should add - cannot be missing in
Guillen's work. We find it in his "Melibea's Orchard" (pp. 175 ff.), where
the denial of gift-giving leads to final perdition, and even to the point
of bringing about the annihilation of time and of life itself.
The love between Calisto and Melibea is marked by despair and frenzy.
Life is an impossible affair for these lovers when they are apart from
one another. The present can be borne by them only when they are in
the company of each other; in fact, every other form of living the times
of their lives is a way of dying. As Melibea says, "Oh, time not yet mine,!
detain not my beloved", a sentiment analogously expressed by Calisto
when he asserts, "I drag myself inside caves;/ breathless am I among
the people/ separating us from our night [together]" (p. 190). They thus
live in the midst of contradiction. Even Melibea seems to be frightened
when she asks, "Is this love, Calisto?" (p. 189), and then she complains
thus: "Would you have me hurt?/ Am I not already here with you?"
(p. 190). Even the moment of union will not suffice: "Terrifying is
your presence/ your very presence ... " (p. 187).47 There is no way to
quench these fires; their destructive violence would annihilate anything
deemed to be an obstacle. As Guillen has it: "Oh, if only there were
no other world! but this orchard" (p. 185), or again, "Oh, no rim to my
horizon beyond your body" (p. 187). Death comes up repeatedly, perhaps
because the lovers harbor the thought that only death can do away with
their predicament, which is "a sea ever raging after water" (p. 183).
How could they otherwise bear this "joy ever returning, time and time
again", (p. 184), one which however offers no hope of satiating their
desire?
Here we find no evidence of that harmoniousness that before had
allowed us to attain the salvation of springtime. Time thus becomes a
sheer present, for it is a present barren of any promised tomorrow, or
even of any memory of yesteryear. This craving for mastery would spoil
any possible experience of gift-giving, even when a lover finds solace
46 SARA F. GARCIA-G6MEZ
here and there (e.g., "I lose my way among such wonders", says Calisto).
Not content with receiving the gift being offered, anyone like Calisto
or Melibea would strive to possess it. The result cannot be anything
but despair, an outcome to which such desire is fated, since it refuses
to be ruled by any bounds, i.e., by the limits which were once acknowl-
edged as occasions for disclosure. 48
And yet Melibea at least gets a glimpse of the salvation love could
bring, for she says, "Love shall keep us" (p. 179). "With you I'm born;
I know myself" (p. 184), she adds later on. In fact, the sense of her
being is sealed and assured by this encounter, and her insight is put
into simple words: "In your arms time does not pass" (p. 188), or again,
"I am because of you" (p. 189). At this point, she is not only capable
of gratefully receiving the gift of love, but she turns herself into a gift:
"My clarity is all yours" (p. 190). She even feels entitled to an impos-
sible promise: "I, yes, I will not pass" (p. 182).
This notwithstanding, the fleeting moment that Melibea assumes as
her self-projection into eternity (cf. ibid.) is yet to be redeemed. When
she hears of Calisto's death, she is totally overcome by desolation, for
she is unwilling to accept the very possibility that any other reality might
exist for her (cf. p. 193). In disbelief, she acknowledges the fleeting-
ness of irretrievable time: "How is it that, suddenly, our joy has been
extinguished?" (ibid.). She feels lost; she lived for him and because of
him, but this is no longer possible. Or as she phrases it: " ... for no more
do I depend ... / on your day, on your sun, on your eternity" (ibid.).
Having been betrayed by a time that is now gone, she seeks death, as
the only certain form of eternity she may presently share with her
beloved:
... My blood
so intently flows into his sea,
so swiftly are my yearnings on their way,
that I do not know how J can yet
endure sufferings in this world . . . (ibid.)
The sense of these words is, no doubt, very different from the meaning
of a verse well known to students of Spanish mysticism, a line of which
we are however reminded of here. 49 Indeed, what Melibea desires is not
so much to be liberated from temporality as to transform it into a
perpetual setting. No wonder she comes to proffer this supplication:
" ... my lips touching your lips.! Calisto, my beloved, bring me back!
triumphant into the world/ you will light up once again for my sake"
(ibid.).
As we have seen, it is possible to speak of a genuinely abiding present
only if we approach time in the perspective of Cantico, which is that
of grateful acceptance. The present proper to gift-giving, which is the
time operative there, is not coextensive, however, with the temporality
of human existence. We can only come to identify our time with the
abiding present if we, so far as we are creaturely beings, acknowledge
our boundaries and take them up into our own lives. If we succeed in
doing this, we then live our daily lives in terms of acceptance and thus
allow time to become our proper destiny. If not, death conquers by
becoming the ally and support of fleetingness, as moment after moment
vanish into the past. 50
CREATURELINESS AND UNCERTAINTY
Now then, sincerity is one of the essential aspects of the life of anyone
who accepts creatureliness in full. In this context, sincerity amounts to
one's self-avowal of the nature of the situation in which one lives. Is
living the domain of pure light? Or is it the realm of mere shadows?
Sincerity is the means by which one can gain access to the mystery of
life, that is, of a life which is always at risk. Guillen, for one, does not
hesitate to acknowledge the whole truth about living, as he does in his
poem "I Am Mortal", when he says:
I am poorer than Lazarus.

Ignorance has power greater than hope.
Poor and lost man that I am,
I know not even how to hope . . .
And yet here I am, my calling
always disposing me to wonders. (p. 148)
Nothing is concealed, nothing is denied; everything is given its rightful

name: "ignorance", "hope", "calling", "wonders".
Emilia de Zuleta has spoken of themes in Guillen's poetry which
one could characterize as negative, for they oppose or are inimical to
being. I have in mind the topics of "chance and chaos", "suffering",
and "death". Coming face to face with them is precisely what makes it
impossible for someone to continue to enjoy his originary innocence.

Such events are the means by which dis-order is presented to us, as if
through a glass darkly, and they constantly remind us of the fragility
of human life: "I am to be and to live by way of survivals" (p. 149),
Guillen tells us. They are the signs by which to recognize a measure
of irrationality in life, an apparent failure of order therein: "Countless,!
no purpose to them,! ciphers; so many filtrations of chaos/ time and again
re-born" (ibid.). The vision we form is darkened, since we live on "a
perilous planet" (ibid.). Now, such negative irruptions can only foster
doubt and make us wonder whether our initial joy was just a deception.
Guillen refuses to accept this conclusion, and he goes on to proclaim the
" ... mastery of Supreme Creation", which is man's dwelling place (ibid.).
The poet takes root in life, for, as he says, "I give up fervors of no
kind" (p. 144). This attitude brings about his own positive conforma-
tion, an assertion involving the most far-reaching meaning of the word,
for "conformation" is meant here to signify the adoption for oneself of
the forms of reality on the basis of which one is to proceed in life. In
his poem "To Begin with" ("Por de pronto"), Guillen puts it this way:
"Fallacy, I know you.! Living is more than dying,! or even than a dying
not yet" (p. 169). To be sure, one must courageously face life and declare
it to be "in the companionship of death" (p. 167), and yet living still
makes us submit, for it "calls and lays claim on us" (p. 169). In
"Triumphant Mornings", one can also find some of the most signifi-
cant questions that may be raised about man's critical situation, such
as the following: "Does the power guiding men! vanish ... ?" (p. 144).
Moreover, in his poem "I Am Mortal", Guillen asks whether his most
intimate being will abide "unfinished" (p. 147). In his "Hotel of Two
Worlds", there is even a verse in which he admits his uncertainty about
such ultimate matters: "How am I to know?", he says there (p. 172).
But is it nonetheless permissible to hope? We find the answer in "To
Begin with", when he tells us that "the most daring ones do dream"
(p. 169). In fact, in order for us to do so, certainty is no requirement:
" ... to be a man:/ This will do as a goal" (ibid.). And yet, in "Struggling
Sea", we hear a faint complaint:
Again I come to regard you, oh sea,

as you struggle in the midst of wave and foam,
unceasingly.
Year after year, your color blue, and

your color green, persevere,
always in the bloom of youth,
throughout their countless transformations.
It is I, engaged in a match with time,

who am the [only] looser. (p. 164)
It is not just that man has knowledge of his mortality;51 what matters most
is that he is concerned with the salvation of his individual self. Is this
possible for man? In "The Way of Parents", we read: "My children
bring me my salvation:/ My fate is not just to die" (p. 130). One can
then reject meaninglessness without harboring the fear of self-decep-
tion. Or as the poet himself puts it:
Oh, supreme reality!

Making me fit within its bounds,
it hurls me away from my own limits
towards a future without term. (ibid.)
Self-acceptance need not be a matter of arbitrariness, for" ... it is

only fair/ that someday/ I come to an end" (p. 149). This does not mean,
however, that a man should renounce his own individual destiny. In
light of "To Begin with", one could say that the finite sort of immor-
tality that man can achieve by himself is apparently enough, for he
asks: "Is it 'my lot ... / to build for myself, with words,! an eternity, a
haven?" (p. 168). Accordingly, this creaturely being is free to strive
after some kind of permanence without having thereby to pay the price
of inauthenticity. Moreover, there is room for hope. In fact, he who is
engaged in the business of living does not experience death as a reality.
These are Guillen words:
These fragile moments

are spelled out, one by one,
in the abstract ticking of my clock.
They are passing away
without being concerned
with ulterior collapse,
without harboring the abeyant beating
of a gasp. (ibid.)
Elsewhere, in his poem "Living", Guillen affirms, with the composure

born of a conviction, "I will die in just one moment, without a fight,!
submitting to an ordering most correct,/ while each and every thing
follows its own path" (p. 59). And then he adds: "I accept! my condi-
tion as a man" (p. 60).
"A PLACE FOR LAZARUS": OF CREATURELlNESS, DEATH,

AND HOPEFULNESS
As I pointed out at the beginning of this study, I chose to deal with the
opening poem, "A Place for Lazarus" last, for Lazarus's experience, as
presented by Guillen, can be seen as the summation and synthesis of
the entire collection here under examination. Let me now attempt to show
this.
"A Place for Lazarus" consists of four parts: first of all, we encounter
Lazarus face to face with his own death; secondly, we are confronted
with the event of his resurrection; thirdly, we accompany him along
the experiences of his new life, and, finally, we listen to his prayer.
It is to be noted that the order followed in the poem is the opposite
of that normally found in everyday life, for here one encounters Lazarus's
death first, and only then do we gain access to life. In my opinion, this
arrangement is not a mere matter of accident, or the result of the poet's
arbitrariness. I suspect that, on the contrary, the ordering is itself an
expression of Guillen's poetic insight, for it may very well be the case
that one can only come to know being at full from the standpoint of
non-being, and the plenitude of life from the point of view of death,
although the reverse dialectic is also at work, for only he who once
was alive can possibly recognize his death. Here, as experienced by
Lazarus, death has a negative visage. To use Guillen's words, "under
the sun, [Lazarus] knows not, nor will he know,! ... of any piercing
light" (p. 12). And the poet adds: "Suddenly, far removed ... ", for
" ... he is himself no more, an unwilling betrayal" (ibid.), subsisting
somehow in "dire aloneness" (p. 14), as the "tattered remains of a past"
(ibid.); "Lazarus he was, now so little like Lazarus is he ... " (p. 17).
This negativity is being constituted in the poem basically in terms
of time, and yet of a time the temporality of which is one of absence.
As Guillen chooses to express it, "Only poorly does the present manage
to be buoyed up in a world like that" (p. 13), and then he insists that
"he dwells now - if it is 'now' - in his own redoubt" (p. 14). It is only
in reference to Lazarus's having been that he can presently be something,

if he is anything at all in this improbable "now". Hence, one comes to
see the importance of memory, or, in Guillen's words: "Lazarus, barely
alive, just remembering [he was]" (ibid.). Memory, as a power and
domain so intimately connected with one's own identity, seems to be
the very last thing one comes to lose, and yet it is always something at
risk, for" ... what is alien to me is now so much alieni that it plunges
into oblivion, comes to extinction" (p. 15). In fact, the last peril one is
to confront is precisely timelessness, for "Eternity consumes one's
memories" (ibid. ).52
One should underscore the fact that Lazarus's condition at this point
is that characteristic of someone who is "awaiting the arrival of the
Son" (p. 15). No doubt this is a transitory manner of being between
the plentitude of life and the fullness of death. Everything known to
him, however, has been left behind. But what does his loss amount to?
Guillen succeeds in presenting it with masterly simplicity, when he speaks
of it as " ... that happy harmoniousness between one's being and the
totality of being" (p. 12). And yet, in Guillen's view, " ... living is an
everyday affair, and living again one soon re-Iearns" (p. 19). This is
ultimately the reason why Lazarus returns to life without fanfare, despite
the mediation of a remarkable and most unusual miracle. Even in the eyes
of others does Lazarus display his everyday appearance. Or in Guillen's
words: so accustomed are they to his living among them, that he is now
present to them " . . . without visible marks of legend/ now almost
forgotten" (p. 24). It is nevertheless legitimate to ask whether there is
any trace of the time he spent away from this life. As is the case with
any genuine experience, it is not possible, properly speaking, to put it
into words (cf. p. 19). To rehearse an answer, Lazarus is thus doomed
to go into the strangest of monologues, in which he "wonders, compares,
suffers, dreads,! commends himself to his God,! entreats" (p. 24). And
he does this by being only too cognizant of his complete ignorance
about both life and death, despite the fact that he has had direct
experience of the two. Meanwhile, in amazement, he has come to accept
the fact that a miracle has occurred, and yet the miracle in question is
not that of his own resurrection, but the one which takes place every
morning when a new day is re-born. To say it with Guillen, " ... as
he awakes,! the manly freshness of the sun is always renewed for him,!
in the wind blowing over the flowing waters" (p. 21). This is indeed
an occasion for wonderment, and yet he finds it "persuasive" (ibid.).
He is confronted with a present consisting of successive advents, which

is the time characteristic of this style of self-conscious living. Or as
Guillen puts it, "It is the most common, a continuous performance;/
Lazarus yields to the stream of unceasing life" (ibid.). From the very
start, "to breathe again/ is a humble delight" (p. 19). In fact, Lazarus
"unassumingly smiles among his own" (ibid.) and would not care to
act "the part of the former dead" (p. 20), for "everything is simple" at
a home that "provides him with clarity and sweet sustenance,! with
support and companionship" (ibid.). In this space all his own, Lazarus
"enacts his sense of belonging, naturally;/ he feels at home, humbly,!
niched away in the corner the Father had given him" (p. 22).
Lazarus is pleased with his dependence on others and his capacity
to rely on the fidelity of things. Or as the poet puts it: "The house,!
and the table therein" (p. 20). Now, this is an old, established theme in
Guillen's poetic world,53 one by means of which he seeks to convey a
sense of wonder about concreteness, the "joy of abiding here" (p. 21).
But now, in terms of the experience of a man who has endured death,
the feeling (and attendant surprise) of being "assaulted/ by jasmine, by
orange blossoms" (ibid.) is maximized, and yet Lazarus's re-incorpora-
tion into the surrounding world is carried out, of necessity, with humility,
"without noticeable astonishment" (p. 23). He takes up "a life,
inevitably", a life where everything "is ordinary, its marvel lying within"
(ibid.). As a virtue proper to creatureliness, humility is born from one's
awareness that one shares in a mystery, as well as from one's acknowl-
edgement of indebtedness: "Thus Lazarus was all of a piece - an earthly
creature of God" (p. 24), as Guillen chooses to express it. "I am, because
I here abide" (p. 26), avows Lazarus. In fact, I would go as far as to
say that he has taken great delight in uttering this phrase, which makes
so clearly manifest his own inner truth. 54
In a place of his own, Lazarus rises as a privileged man (cf. p. 25).
Silence has taught him about the world, and has thus made its hustle
and bustle apparent to him, "as so much muddleness/ over against that
concealed background" (ibid.). And yet his privileged condition may
be shared by any man, provided he is capable of making dreadfulness his
own, for man is the only animal cognizant of death. Guillen tells us
that "no man is at peace who remembers/ ... that which cannot be
spoken" (p. 24). This kind of recollection, however, is quite different
from the act of remembering by which one tries to preserve what is
already gone. This form of remembrance is part and parcel of one's
present, the other side of it, if you will allow me to put it this way; it
is the presentation of the possible absence of any actual present, espe-
cially when it is carried to the limit and renders the absence of temporality
itself available to man.
At that point, Lazarus has no choice. He can resort to nothing but
prayer, by which he opens up to an altogether Other, for only He, if
anyone, could have the answers of which man is deprived and in need.
But, above all, Lazarus's prayer is an act of thanksgiving:
Were the morning wind to blow

between the sun and the grassy meadow,
my joy would rise to You,
to You, the inventor of all.
It is You who present me with the gifts
of the whirl and flurry at the river banks,
and, under moving shadows,
the love for all of life. (p. 26)
One thus comes to experience every thing as a gift (and thus one suspects
the presence of a Giver), but one does it simply by recognizing who
and what one is: "Lazarus is poor indeed.! Between mind and skin! are
my fervor and my weakness" (ibid.). Moreover, at that point one is
ready to confess to what one fears the most. The poet expresses it by
means of a question: "My immortality!! is it really mine?" (p. 28).
When all is said and done, only one thing is left for him to do, as he
endures a state of confusion, unable as he is "even to entertain the
thought" of a promised Eternal Life. But this one thing is precisely
what Lazarus takes up at the end of his prayer, when he asserts, "I want
to believe this to be true" (p. 29).
Lazarus has thus been established for us as a prototype of human
creaturely existence, for in him we can make out the essential features
by which the basic human condition is to be recognized when it is taken
up at full in someone's life. Those features are: gratefulness, sincerity,
fearfulness, and hopefulness. Gratefulness would arise in our lives as
the correlate of our experience of the gratuitousness proper to anything
real, a dimension which would not be manifest to us, were we not to
acknowledge that our reality is under constant threat, indeed so much
so that it could be characterized as being "under siege" (p. 129).
Consequently, time is being established for us as the domain of all that
which is done and undone in our lives (cf. p. 28). In other words, time
is that which drags away what is apparently being offered, at every
turn, as a gift to us. In fact, it is constituted as forming the set of
primordial conditions that ought to be satisfied if present-ation is to occur
in anyone's life. Having come to this realization, a man becomes afraid
for himself, but this is tantamount to saying that he is now face to face
with the task of resolving the problem of how it is possible for anyone
to attain salvation, when reality both passes away and abides, when it
is both the river and its banks. One finds here the true significance of
the figure of Lazarus, for he occupies his own place in full with utter
simplicity; he is perfectly at home in the location defined by his spatial
and temporal coordinates, and yet he remains open to the possibility of
transcending any such determinations. 55
Coram, N.Y.
NOTES
1 This title has been conceived after a text by Jorge Guillen that reads: ..... with how
much pleasure do! I consent to living;! with how much creaturely faithfulness! do I feel
myself being! in humble conformity ..... (..... con que voluntad placenteral consiento
en mi vivir;1 con que fidelidad de criatural humildemente acordel me siento ser ... ").
Vide his Cantico (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), p. 12. All translations found in this
paper are mine.
2 Emilia de Zuleta, Cinco poetas espaiioles (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1971), p. 135.
3 For the most comprehensive edition of his poetry through 1968, cf. J. Guillen, Aire
nuestro (Milan: All'isegna del pesce d'oro, 1968).
4 E. de Zuleta, op. cit., p. 124.
5 Marfa del Carmen Bobes Naves, Granuitica de "Cantico" (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta,
1975), p. 146.
6 Cf. Amado Alonso, Materia y forma en poes(a (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1969), p.
317.
7 Cantico first appeared in 1928; the second version was published in 1936; the third
edition dates from 1945, while the fourth and final edition made its appearance in 1950
(Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana). The first version consisted of seventy-five poems,
and the last one of three hundred and thirty-four. Cf. E. de Zuleta, op. cit, pp. 109-110.
I shall be using the edition published by Seix Barral (Barcelona: 1974).
8 In this study, I shall avail myself of the text of . . . Que van a dar a la mar as
published in 1960 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana). This collection consists of
seven parts, of which I would like to underscore the first and the last, both consisting
of one poem each ("Lugar de Lazaro" and "Huerto de MeJibea", respectively), and the
fourth, "In Memoriam", which is dedicated to his late beloved. Henceforth, whenever I
cite any poem (or part thereof) taken from this collection, I will refer to the page numbers
of that edition in the text of the study itself.
9 Cf. Pedro Salinas, Jorge Manrique 0 tradicion y originalidad (Barcelona: Seix Barral,
1974), pp. 43 ff.
10 Cf. E. de Zuleta, op. cit., pp. 122 ff.
11 Cf. supra, p. 32 and note 2.
12 Cf. Pedro Salinas's comments on Joaquin Casalduero's critical evaluation of this notion
in the former's Literatura espanola del siglo XX (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1972), pp.
165 ff.
13 J. Guillen, Cantico (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1974), p. 18.
14 M. del Carmen Bobes Naves, op. cit., p. 133.
15 Ibid., p. 135. Elsewhere she also says: "Gullen presents things by means of
locutions that function as pointers, such as this rose, this balcony, this flower, ... but
he gradually leaves the circumstances of the world behind, and ... , step by step, he
introduces words which express characteristics and abstract qualities, terms the signifi-
cance of which has progressively less to do with the ostensive value of his original
expressions" (Ibid., p. 134).
16 A. Alonso, op. cit., p. 318.
17 Ibid., p. 316.
18 Ibid.
19 Cf. Concha Zardoya, Poes{a espanola del siglo XX (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1974),
II, p. 168.
20 Ibid., pp. 173-74.
21 Apud E. de Zuleta, op. cit., p. 115; J. Guillen, "Poetica" in Poes{a espanola (Madrid:
Signo, 1934), pp. 342 ff.
22 P. Salinas, Literatura espanola del siglo XX, p. 174.
23 Cf. J. Guillen, Lenguaje y poes{a (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1972), pp. 145 ff. For
Guillen, the unnamed is, as long as it remains unnamed, unknown. The miracle of being
achieves its consummation by means of poetic diction. As he says, "There you have a
meadow ... and a bird, and, all of a sudden, in the midst of such peace, a bird's song
rises. Is there anything more to this? Indeed, for a man is feeling the meadow, the
afternoon nap, and the bird, and he fuses it all somewhere between his eyes and his
soul. This intuition would not be fully realized were it not for one word, 'clarity' ....
Everything is now in place and lit up ... [It is] the moment the spirit and the world
meet" (p. 147). And then he adds: "This locution, 'clarity', succeeds in increasing the
intensity of the sunlight by means of its own proper light, and, in consequence, that
spot in the middle of the countryside, during that clear afternoon, lights up once and for
all ... " (ibid.).
24 Cf. E. de Zuleta, op. cit., p. 136: " ... the moments of exultation and plenitude of
being are fewer, proportionately speaking, in the final version of Cantico than in its
1928 edition".
25 Cf. P. Salinas, Literatura espanola del siglo XX, p. 167.
27 A. Alonso, op. cit., p. 320.
28 Cf. Max Scheler, Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (Bern: A. Francke, 1928).
30 Ibid.
31
Ibid. Cf. "Las doce n el reloj", Cantico, p. 476.
32 Here is another example, taken from "Vuelo" ( ... Que van a dar a la mar, p. 153):
"And, suspended, its wings yield! to clarity, to deep transparency,1 there where the flight,
released from the beating of wings,1 remains, delivered to sheer pleasure, to its falling,
and it plunges into its passing,! the pure fleetingness of a moment of life". Thus one is
witness to the seagull's flight as it brings itself into perfection, into the univocity of the
now that the poet seizes upon.
33 Emilia de Zuleta seems to confine her analysis to the negative side of memory. Cf.
op. cit., pp. 158 ff.
34 For the meaning of "margin" and "fringe", cf. Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of
Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1964), pp. 309 ff.; William James,
The Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), I, p. 258. One should not strictly
abide by James's notion of "fringe" in the commentary I am developing here, although
I do keep it in mind throughout.
35 I could as well refer to other passages in which this topic is spoken about in various
ways. Let me just quote a few: "My living now confirms, in full,! the words of yester-
year,! for truer they are today" (p. 92); "That winter we spent in ParisI earned eternity
for us" (p. 93); "My past cannot be done away with, it! substantially sustains my present"
("Mi pasado irremplazablel Sustenta en sustancia el hoy") (p. 119).
36 J. Guill~n, Cantico, pp. 94 ff.
37 P. Salinas, Literatura espanola del siglo XX, p. 174. Joaquin Casalduero is here quoted
in this connection.
38 J. Guill~n, Cantico, p. 102.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., p. 101.
42 Ibid.
43 P. Salinas, Literatura espanola del siglo XX, p. 175.
44 J. Guill~n, Cantico, p. 97.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., p. 98.
47 The text is faithful to its literary original, namely, that passage in La Celestina where
Melibea also complains of Calisto's inordinate carnal desire: "Look, my love, how
agreeable it is for me to see you at peace; yet, your roughness I cannot enjoy; ... your
dishonest hands make me weary when they go past what is reasonable" (Fernando de
Rojas, La Celestina [Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968], II, p. 181).
48 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, rev. ed. (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1931), B, iv, 3, pp. 225 ff. Here Hegel's subject is desire. In
order to grasp the relevance of what he says to the present discussion, one should keep
in mind his notion of pseudo-infinity, as the sheer or fruitless repetition which is not
overcome by synthesis of any kind.
49 The verse in question ("muero porque no muero") has been traditionally attributed
to St. Theresa of Jesus, a universal mystical doctor of the Catholic Church.
50 It is now clear that the basic nexus of the poem is this: the joining of Melibea's
hopelessness and the despair of Calisto's passion. Now, a connection of this sort is not
just a matter of fact to be acknowledged, but also the context that gives rise to a
desperate effort on Melibea's part to retrieve what has been lost, as well as to the false
hope that death may be the way for her finally to gain the right of citizenship in the
"paradise" her beloved embodies. All of this Guillen conveys when, in the voice of the
Night, he asks, "Has Love destroyed the lovers?" (p. 195).
51 Of all creatures on earth, only man possesses knowledge. In the poem "The Most
Childish One of All", Guillen describes a cat as follows: "An innocent creature! busy
with the fashioning of paradise,! who else could be more absolutely ignorant of death?"
(p. 134). In Guillen's opinion, the animal is blessed, a condition that is most simply
characterized by him when he says, "Go on playing,! oh mortal creature bereft of gods:!
obliviousness is your heaven" (Ibid.).
52 There are many examples one could present to illustrate the importance of memory's
role in permitting the re-ligation of the now of death with one's past life. Guillen affirms
that "Something still stands: consciousness is saved indeed" (" Algo sigue: conciencia sf
se salva", p. 13). And this is one's only consolation when one is " ... just a shade in a
sunless place ... "(p. 14), "a shape ... belonging to no one. Solitude, marked by solitude".
(p. 13).
53 Cf. Marfa del Carmen Bobes Naves, op. cit., pp. 134 ff.
54 As E. de Zuleta has shown (op. cit., p. 136), Guillen believes that "abiding here [estar]
is more than being [ser]". One could say that one "is" to the extent that one "abides at
the level proper to one's circumstances", to use the title of one of the poems in Guillen's
Cantico. For the kindred notion of "level proper to one's times", cf. Jose Ortega y Gasset,
La rebelion de las masas, i, c.3 in Obras Completas (Madrid: Revista de Occidente!
Alianza Editorial, 1983), IV, pp. 156 and 162 and "Misi6n de la universidad", i, ibid.,
p. 321.
55 I do not wish to bring this study to a conclusion without acknowledging the
assistance my husband, Jorge Garcia-G6mez gave me in translating both this paper and
Guillen's poems into English. Let me take this opportunity to express my gratitude to
him for his help and support.
SITANSU RAY
WOMEN IN TASER DESH (THE LAND OF CARDS):

TAGOREAN IDEALS TOWARDS HUMANISTIC
LIBERATION
Taser Desh,' which apparently means the land of cards, is a marvel-

lous allegorical-metaphorical drama written by Rabindranath Tagore
(1861-1941) in 1933. Movement towards humanistic liberation in
general and women's emancipation in particular is the main theme of
Taser Desh.
The land of cards stands for pre-renaissance stagnant and passive
society, full of prejudices, strictures of dos and don'ts, suppressed
and inactive souls, aversion to work, laziness to the extreme, unjudging
addiction to narrow scripturalism at the cost of human will, the more
strictly so in the case of womenfolk.
The stranger, an overseas Prince, comes to the land of cards as a
messenger of awakening and reformation. By virtue of his daring out-
spokenness and youthful adventurous bearing, he surcharges the hearts
of the cardfolk including the queen of the land of cards with the
stimulation of the vital will (ichchha in Bengali) so long dormant in
their heart. Some sort of evocation is poured into their passive souls. The
young princesses of that land were formerly just like stone-idols, lifeless
and insensate. They first learn to feel themselves as soon as the stranger
Prince sings to them - "0, the insensate beauties! Receive into your heart
this restless youth ... " The king and some of his Royal officers become
angry and want to banish the stranger Prince from the Kingdom of Cards.
It is the Queen who first of all protests against the royal ruling of the
stranger's banishment.
Along with the Queen, all the womenfolk start a movement against
the dogmatic rules of the Card-Kingdom.
Heratani,2 the most adventurous of all card-women, openly disobeys
all sorts of puritanic taboos. Tagore portrays her character as domi-
nating her male consort counterpart Ruitan. 3
Dahalani 4 first pretends to be strictly adhering to the so-called moral
codes and constitutionalism of the Card-Kingdom. But a little exchange
with Tekkani 5 and Iskabani,6 two young outspoken card-women, leads
her to discover that she herself is also in favour of liberation from

© 1994 'Kluwer Academic Publishers.
60 SITANSU RAY
bondage. Chiretani,1 another daring card-woman, courageously revolts

agains the caste-cult and status-cult.
When the script-writer Dahala 8 tries to plead for the restoration of
peacefulness in the land of cards, it is Haratani who protests against
the lifelessness of the so-called peace. This sort of peace is, according
to her, just like the old and worn out trunk of a dead tree, which must
be cut down.
The Queen herself takes the leading part in the struggle against the
dead weight of the king's domineering monarchy. She wins support
from almost all the corners of men and womenfolk. The king alone
becomes furious and proposes to enforce emergency. Then and there
the Queen says that the womenfolk know the tactics of regulating the
psyche of the menfolk at least in their domestic and private realms.
The Tekka-virgins 9 shout that as soon as emergency is enforced, they
would jointly organise civil disobedience.
When the King reminds the Queen in a rebuking tone that excite-
ment is the most serious offence in the Card-Kingdom, the Queen replies
that excitement itself is the concomitant of the phenomenon of enjoy-
ment. In a rebellious tone she adds that the chain of bondage has so
long been called an ornament and supreme bliss an offence. So, things
must change and the tables must be turned. Haratani again sarcasti-
cally comments that silence has been being taken as a sign of honesty
in the tradition of the Card-Kingdom. It is high time to reform it.
So, the Queen, the card-women along with the card-men start a
movement against the king and his mechanical officialdom with a view
to proclaim the triumph of human volition over lifeless bureaucracy. They
acclaim and applaud will and freedom.
In the end, the King submits to the cause of humanistic liberation,
mainly initiated by the Queen and the women-folk of Taser Desh.
Superb lyrical songs, sometimes accompanied by dancing make the
drama enjoyable throughout.
It is noteworthy that Tagore dedicated this drama to Netaji Subhash
Chandra Basu whose mission was to inflict newer life into the heart of
our mother land.
Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India

WOMEN IN TASER DESH 61
NOTES
1 Rabindranath Tagore, Taser Desh (1340 B.S., 1933); Edition with musical notation
(Visva-Bharati, 1357 B.S., 1950).
2 The feminine form of Haratan (the hearts of the playing cards).
3 The Diamond.
4 The feminine form of Dahala (the 'two') of the cards.
5 The feminine form of Tekka (the ace).
6 The feminine form of Iskaban (the spades).
7 The feminine form of Chiretan (the club).
8 The 'two' of the playing cards.
9 The ace.
PART TWO
THE MYSTERIES OF LIFE ENHANCED

Some of the participants in the 1991 conference. Front row from the left: Bruce Ross, Manuel Vlisquez-Bigi, Jadwiga Smith,
Rosemarie Kieffer, Marlies Kronegger, Lois Oppenheim. In the back: Bill Smith, Hans Rudnick, Kathryn McKinley.
DANNY L. SMITH
WAR AND THE BODY IN LYSISTRATA:

MARRIAGE AND THE FAMILY UNDER SIEGE
Aristophanes' "Peace" plays collectively show war to be that condition

wherein the individual, the private needs and the body are subsumed
and potentially consumed by the needs of the many, the public good or
the body politic. Yet if to make war is to ask the citizen to sacrifice
(potentially) the private body for this greater communal good, then to
make peace is in Lysistrata a consummation obtained only when the body
politic pays due attention to the body private and addresses the social
and sexual needs brought on by war itself.
Throughout the play sexual union itself, teasingly, is never dramatized;
but lovemaking and love's union become continual metaphors for
peacemaking and a united Hellas. Eros is enlarged from its generally
private context into a public, politically active one; hence Lysistrata
becomes far more than an Aristophanic version of "Make love not war".
What unfolds is a portrait of the civilizing force of feminine domestic
tranquillity at war with warfare and at odds with a male hegemony
forgetful of its duties and best interests; as such the play defends marriage
and the family, attacks senseless warfare, and provides a dialectic on
the art of negotiation. The value of such a play both to fifth-century
Athens and to the West should have been and still should be evident,
yet ironically this most popular of Aristophanes' plays too often is seen
(mistakenly) by modern audiences as being merely prurient. 1 The kind
of reaction or lack of reaction to the play might speak as loudly about
the state of the family today as it did in the fifth-century B.C.
Presented for the Lenaea in 411 B.C. at that bleak period of the
Peloponnesian War - the Athenian fleet destroyed in Sicily, the final
defeat at Aegospotami only seven years away - Lysistrata has every right
to be a polemic for peace and an apology for family life. As a comedy
it cannot bluntly do this, of course. While it has a tragic air about it
because of the perilous circumstances of the war, it has as a comedy
an affectionate witty charm in its treatment of the ridiculous, the bawdy,
and the improbable. For the Greek audience (unlike the modern audience)
the play's bawdy wit is inseparable from its tragic historical context:
one hinges upon the other.2
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XU, pp. 65-77.

66 DANNY L. SMITH
The desperate situation with the war and the absence of the men
produced a tension in both the oikos and the polis the urgency of which
is metaphorically portrayed as the growing sexual tension between
Athenian and Spartan husbands and wives. As unrequited needs grow
more desperate, this tension is felt even by the strong and idealistic
Lysistrata herself when she emphatically cries: "~tvTl'ttmj..!€V, t\
~P(xXtO"'tov 'toi) A.6you" (715).3 Translated as modestly as the text
permits: "To sum it up in a word, we're dying to get laid".
This bawdiness serves to point out some serious facts about bodies,
families and wars. Like most of Aristophanes' work Lysistrata is, as
Joyce would put it, jocoserious: comic with a serious side. It is the
story of a strong and beautiful Athenian wife, Lysistrata, her name
meaning Disbander of Armies, who in league with representative wives
of the chief belligerent Grecian cities - friend and foe - conspires to
end the Peloponnesian War by proposing that the women deny their
men (and themselves) sexual intercourse. In conference the women
rebel at such a drastic measure, but Lysistrata finds her first ray of hope
in her worthiest ally, the Spartan Lampito, whose name has the appro-
priate connotation of torch-bearer, shining or lustrous one.
Appreciating the difficulty of the strategy, Lampito nonetheless senses
the possible kinship between eros and thymos; thus her reference to
Menelaus' giving up the sword at the sight of Helen's breasts seems to
win the day. The Athenian and Spartan desire peace equally. These strong
enemies, potentially strong allies can reunite Helas if their eros can be
redirected toward proper, familial concerns.
So it is that Lysistrata and Lampito, allied, successfully persuade the
rest of the women - dismissing with a bawdy joke the intrusive but starkly
real possibility that the men might simply leave or ignore them. Together
the women swear to deny the men sexual favors while exciting them
at every opportunity, to be unresponsive if forced, and to thus induce
them to sue for the armistice.
However, we next see Lysistrata leading the battle not in her bedroom
but on the Akropolis. The war is held on these two fronts and with two
armies as well, for the project includes those beyond concupiscence;
the hemichorus of old women do their part by seizing the Akropolis
and the state treasury and defending the hill against an opposing hemi-
chorus of old men. So it is that for the rest of the play women young
and old defend the Akropolis against first, old men whose impotent attack
upon locked gates is with logs they appropriately cannot lift and fires
WAR AND THE BODY IN LYSISTRATA 67
they cannot light; second, against a commissioner or proboulos and his

inept Keystone Kops policemen; third, against their own lack of resolve
brought on by extended abstinence; and fourth, against Kinesias, the
sexually starved and hence determined husband of Lysistrata's cohort
Myrrhine. (The old men are doused with a water they find none too pure;
the policemen beat a ridiculous retreat; Lysistrata lectures the commis-
sioner in a verbal agon, comparing affairs of state to household duties;
she bolsters the morale of her flagging followers by producing a parody
of an ornithological oracle, a lewd but favorable sign from the gods;
and Kinesias - who desperately wants his wife and only his wife - is
teased to a sexual frenzy before once again his wife Myrrhine, leaving
him frustrated, reminds him to vote for the truce.) Finally a Spartan
herald, attempting to cover his prominent state of sexual excitement,
announces his country's intention to sue for peace.
The women have won, all male delegates of both sides being physi-
cally incapacitated. The old men, wet and naked from their dousing,
are comforted, clothed, kissed and reconciled; and the leader of the
hemichorus of old women removes from the eye of the leader of the
old men a biting insect, the figurative source and symbol of his anger. 4
Then the younger men are led off, willingly by the hand - or if unwilling
then by the other appropriate handle - to negotiate their concessions,
Spartan and Athenian together. At this point we see "Peace" or
"Reconciliation" (ilta.AAa.rfl) led in, personified by a beautiful naked
lady, and the negotiators, enraptured now with peace, indeed lustful for
her, chart their disputed hills and valleys on her body, the topography
continually punned as anatomy.
The play, appropriately, concludes with banqueting, song and dance
- physical needs, however, not plainly satisfied. Once the peace is agreed
upon, needs, drives, prominent erections (and the sexual unions one might
expect) are all missing. Kenneth Dover cites the fact that sexual activity
on the Akropolis would have been sacrilege, that the play must end on
a note other than satisfaction of the pressing need. 5 My point is that
the need is satisfied - allegorically. Everything in the play leads to the
conclusion that private and political worlds finally consummate a union.
The combatants possess "Peace" politically through the desire to possess
her sexually, though throughout the play marital love is always more
the issue than possessive lust. The insistent urge, as insistent as it is, is
only the beginning of something greater. In this scene, as Athenian and
Spartan negotiate their mutual desire for possessions and territories,
68 DANNY L. SMITH
wondrous buttes, happy hills and pleasant valleys, the lands come to
be perceived not merely as one's own polis, i.e. a possession, but as one's
beloved, by analogy part of one's oikos or household (though, of course,
not part of one's own self or flesh as the sexual later comes to be
understood in the Christian world).
Nonetheless, union is consummated when peace is made and the
separation healed between the sexes, between the oikos and the polis, and
the body public and private. Inasmuch as peace serves the body politic,
the body private is in analogy served; thus sexual activity is not only
inappropriate on the Akropolis, it is no longer immediately compelling.
Eros and sophia, as Douglass Parker points out in the preface to his trans-
lation, are united here for the political good. This equation, he says,
is not blind sexual gratification, the force that drives the water through the rocks, any
rocks, but love in its civic manifestation - the bond between husband and wife. Once
this is established and identified with the City itself, Aristophanes can and does develop
it into other areas. He can turn it around to show the wife and mother's proper share in
the State, broaden it into a plea for Panhellenism, push it beyond sex entirely ... to its
irreducible residue. The neural itch is only the beginning; the goal is a united City and
a unified Hellas at peace . . . .6
In a similar context S. C. Humphreys notes that the potentially tragic

world of Lysistrata and the indeed tragic world of Euripides' Trojan
Women are both symptomatic of a socially ravaged condition wherein the
oikos and the polis are estranged and split into camps of softness and
hardness. 7 She also reminds us how instructive to a healthier balance
between oikos and polis is that tender and poignant scene in Homer's
Iliad where Hector in his armor embraces his wife Andromache and their
infant son Astyanax. 8 The child, frightened by the nodding plume of
his father's helmet, cries out and is comforted by Andromache, who begs
her husband to take care, reminding him what his death would mean
not only for Troy but for their family personally. Unlike the situation
in Lysistrata, here the cruel tension between oikos and polis is tempered
with softness and the fact that even in this long war the hero knows
for whom and for what he is fighting. Hector's defense of the polis is
a defense of the oikos, for he knows that his hardness is in defense
of the tenderness he embraces. The lack of such knowledge and
assurance, as evidenced in the Peloponnesus, and for that matter in the
U.S. experience in southeast Asia, is the harbinger of the worst kind of
defeat, precisely because it begins at home.
For evidence in the play that Aristophanes lauds love over sex, and
that he sees tenderness, marriage and the family as essential to peace

and the city, we need only note the fantasy of Lysistrata's project (in
contrast to its probability). The possibility of extramarital sex or the
prospect of the men ignoring the women's boycott is glossed over. To
be sure, the probability of the women's revolt in the bedroom and on
the Akropolis is as fanciful as birds building a city and forcing the
surrender of the gods (as in Birds), or a farmer flying on the back of a
dung-beetle to Mt. Olympos to plead for peace (as in Peace). Yet the
fantastic construct of the plot of Lysistrata remains amusing, even enlight-
ening, despite its unrealities. 9
For instance, if the men have been off to war for months at a time,
obviously absent from their wives, then how could a sex-strike deprive
them further? The wives' decision to deprive their husbands could hardly
further increase an already ardent desire, unless the men cease fighting
and come home. Seizing the treasury might precipitate this. But if all
the men are as incapacitated as is Kinesias the comic husband, in
absolutely desperate need and as much in motion as his name in Greek
implies, and this only after six days of forced abstinence, how then did
they ever survive the months at war?lO And thus is raised the most telling
improbability: the men neither find nor apparently seek sexual gratifi-
cation outside of marriage, and the women assume they will not.
Prostitution is alluded to once as a possibility, but only obliquely (957).
There may be one or two allusions to male autoeroticism; and homo-
sexuality, the culturally acceptable recourse personified in Kleisthenes
(a favorite target of Aristophanes) is portrayed only as a comic last resort.
All these recourses are shown to be last resorts; once deprived every male
longs for the signing of the truce so that he might be reunited with his
wife.
The union of the man and wife are, of course, emblematic of the
reunion of the family torn asunder in war. The homosexuality extant in
the culture is largely downplayed because, while private, it fundamen-
tally is not and never can be political, at least not in the classic sense
of what is meant by politics. Cities are made of families in the aggre-
gate, with wealth, honors and duties inherited by sons, and with families
allied one to another through marriages. The allegory of peacemaking
as sexual union is essentially a defense then of marital love and the
family. Only in procreative marriage is the private need intrinsic to the
political. Herein lies an intersection between nature and convention,
one later reflected in traditional Christianity as the intersection between
70 DANNY L. SMITH
spiritual and physical realities said to be embodied in the sacrament,

and portrayed in the erotic loveliness of the Song of Solomon in its
elevation of marital love as a metaphor for Christ's affection for His
chosen. Eros and the body, rather than being denied, may be affirmed
in marriage - for Aristophanes in ways requisite to a healthy polis -
and for the medieval Christian in ways conducive to his understanding
of the world as sacramental.
Thus in Lysistrata private desires and the frivolous things thought
pertinent only to the domestic world take on unusual significance to
the polis. It is comic but nonetheless apropos that Lysistrata refers to
slippers and gowns as weapons, and that on the Akropolis she rallies
her troops as a kind of "market militia" of "battle-hardened bargain
hunters" ... "grocery grenadiers" and "doughgirls".l1 Thus the audience
is prepared for Lysistrata's famous speech to the commissioner in which
she describes affairs of state as analogous to the prime affair of the
Grecian goodwife's household - that of carding wool and spinning thread.
Another appropriate irony lies in the fact that the police are defeated
by fruits and vegetables hurled at them, the mundane domestic world
triumphing over the pompous military one. Moreover, one woman
desperate to return home feigns advanced pregnancy with the helmet
of Athena under her garment. The marital and the martial concerns, then,
like the private and the public good, come to be mingled and identi-
fied with one another. In this way the feminine world is exalted as a
stabilizing force which all along has comprehended the masculine world.
Thus Lysistrata can encourage her followers with an oracle that promises
they will be socially and sexually on top for a change. For who knows
warfare's costs better than women? They have paid taxes in money and
foodstuffs, felt the absence of their men, and suffered the loss of baby
boys trained for then devoured by war's machinery. The further
sacrifice entailed in the Peloponnesian War promised only the loss and
not the safeguarding of these domestic necessities.
So it is that just as he does in Acharnians and Peace, Aristophanes
in Lysistrata shows the drastic and fantastic measures needed to return
a community to its senses. As in the Ekklesiazousai (or Women in
Assembly) the women have this good sense more than the men because
one, their world comprehends in microcosm the larger political world;
two, they can see political conflicts from a distance beyond the cycle
of injury and retaliation; and three, they are so well acquainted with
the costs of war, a widow's lot being worse than that of the fallen
soldier, and a maid without a man a lost commodity to the city. In the
Ekklesiazousai the result is a comic communism where all land, food,
wealth, and sex are shared, with the homeliest women getting first and
best rights. In Lysistrata the result is an elevation of marriage in the hopes
of allying Sparta and Athens as a couple cognizant of war's costs.
Surely this is the implication of the conclusion wherein Spartans and
Athenians sing together the praises of love, alliance, and their mutual
goddess Athena. The closing hymns to Artemis, Apollo, Zeus, Hera
and Dionysus surpass in length and beauty the invocations of gods'
powers commonly offered when men ask for victory in war. As if to
accent the point, the chorus of Spartans refers to Helen (as Lampito
the Spartan wife did earlier), strategically reminding the audience that
while eros can start a great long war it might also finish it (155, 1314).
Athens might also be meant to recall the cost to the city and the house-
hold exacted by protracted wars (whether they be against Troy or Sparta)
to the extent that with the end of heroic families like Menelaus' and
Helen's, and Hector's and Andromache's, every household can no longer
expect an Odysseus, nor every city a Lysistrata.
In victory over war, as opposed to victory in war, Aristophanes makes
an important point about peace and negotiation. The women go on a
sex-strike expressly to regain their sex lives. For the sake of peace the
women make war by asserting private needs over public ones, or by
causing them to be identified as public needs. As with Spartan and
Athenian men in need, private needs neglected erect themselves into
public prominence to the point where the public good cannot be main-
tained without giving such needs due attention. Yet the sexual needs
do not capture the attention of the men until their fulfillment is withheld.
Ironically Greek women, from what we know of the fertility cults and
the Tieresias sex change legend, were believed to enjoy sexual rela-
tions far more than men. The thinking was that they were less able to
abstain: men were assumed hardier, more able to endure privation than
their softer counterparts. J2 Thus if the personal sacrifice of the women
is greater than that of the men, and they still maintain the stronger
negotiating position - the upper hand of possessing the Akropolis -
then we might speculate on the political allegory for negotiation. The
point is repeated in the scene where "Peace" is, as it were, made
(politically through truce and allegorically through erotic desire) and
the two sides despite their urgency (or because of it) continue to contend
over particularly choice buttes, happy hills, voluptuous valleys, or
72 DANNY L. SMITH
luscious legs of land. Both sides want too much; with their eros the
spectre of aggression raises its head. But Lysistrata overrules them with
lectures apportioning blame, reminding them that without a truce there
will be no satisfaction for anyone. Uncontrollable eros is insatiable eros
- offering no satisfaction for man, woman, ruler and ruled. Ultimately
she says "Why fuss about a pair of legs?" referring to the sea walls of
Megara; and with the general assent the implication is that one side
possesses the upper body or territories, and the other side the lower,
with Sparta preferring the backside and Athens the front.
In this portion of the analogy Sparta and Athens do not become a
couple so much as they share a mutual love - peace embodied in a
celebration of the private joys identified with an equitable division of ter-
ritories. Such negotiation seems to be possible however, first from a
position of strength (the women's will to abstain must withstand the
assaults and pleas of the men, the women unsubdued by their presum-
ably greater needs) and second from a willingness to compromise. Such
compromise takes the form of give and take in assigning territories and
acknowledging blame for past encroachments. But the greatest evidence
of negotiation's exigency lies in the sacrifice of the women, who from
the outset can hardly steel themselves to take the oath of denial.
Appropriately the oath is a parody of similar ones a warrior might deliver
on a battlefield, for their warfare is equally real given that war is the
individual's potential sacrifice of the body private for the body politic.
In this way the bawdy communal comedy of the play celebrates both
sex and the city, their mutual alliance in marriage, and their possibili-
ties for creating a greater union. Furthermore woman is shown to be
not necessarily the weaker sex. She recognizes in Greek society a certain
subservient or secondary position - she is supposed to be ruled, and is
supposedly softer - but even the most benevolent tyrants find their
kingdoms in upheaval when subjects such as these present a unified
front.
For example, the women holding the Akropolis are as impregnable
as the citadel itself. The men who attack are ridiculous, and none more
so than the civic leader, the commissioner. In argument Lysistrata refutes
him; and appropriately even in his preferred masculine arena - martial
skills - the women defeat him, cocoon him in linens, and parade him like
a corpse. Women like Lysistrata can quickly develop a taste for combat.
If for a moment we are willing to forget that this is a comedy, we
might conclude that the political implication is that rulers - at least in
part - must rule through the consent of the governed. But this is the
kind of flight of fancy that the play allegorically leads to then abandons
in the midst of bawdiness. Yet we cannot escape the women's sense of
exasperation toward their men. The women supported the male hegemony
only on the pretext that the men go off to war to safeguard cherished
domestic concerns. Uncherished, neglected, those concerns fell into
jeopardy. The men exacerbated the condition by encouraging their women
to play the wanton (404-429): the commissioner cannot understand
why the wives should be in rebellion - aren't cobblers and jewelers
contracted for house calls while the husbands are absent? What wife,
he says, has right to complain?
Sex then is not the issue, marriage is. With the oikos in collapse no
security exists for the polis. Of course, Lysistrata and her cohorts do
not articulate the matter in this way; they simply resolve to do what it
takes to bring their men home. Yet incredibly, as combatants their erotic
appeal is not diminished but heightened. Women on such a battlefield are
comic for Aristophanes but not in what warfare does to them. Not
naturally prone to rebel they have all along apprehended the martial art
that now they defend with marital art. Such art is all the more potent
and all the more comic for being aimed at an enemy who should want,
and now desperately wants, to be an ally.
This is not to understate the power of eros in the play, for while
marriage is the main issue the stupifying power of eros nonetheless
propels every action. Almost every line contains a double entendre; every
translation varies widely in its search for vaguely equivalent sexual puns.
The folksy Spartan dialect is sometimes presented as Scots brogue by
English translators, sometimes backwoods Southern by Americans. Some
translators use modern obscenities, while others cushion with language
which - while not coy yet properly shocking - borders less on the
vulgar side. But one thing remains the same. Sex is what motivates the
negotiations; sex brings the men home; it is the motive force behind every
word and deed. But once we remember that all the actors in the play
are male, women's roles played by men in exaggeratedly padded female
attire, and that men's costumes featured the exaggerated leather phallus,
then once again we find ourselves looking for analogic design in an
eros so ridiculously portrayed. 13
To the Greek audience everything in the play was entertaining in the
comic but not prurient sense. It follows that besides the political analogy
of sex as union between the martial and domestic worlds, the erotic
74 DANNY L. SMITH
must belong to that world of the beautiful which for Aristophanes is every
reason to stop the fighting and get back to things which make up the good
life - things such as good wine, good food, wealth and finally the
company of a good wife. Ultimately as a comedy it is this reconfirma-
tion of the familial structure of community, the good life that goes with
it, and the purgatorial movement of the play from fragmentation to
union that justifies the sexual context, that necessitates it and warrants
it. That Aristophanes' various appeals to the good life were insufficient
to halt the Peloponnesian War may testify as much to the Greeks' divorce
from their proper familial concerns as to the fixated insanity of their
jealous quarrel.
In the final analysis, maybe Aristophanes was such a moralist and
maybe he was not. But the possibility exists that Lysistrata and her cohort
Myrrhine are meant to remind the fifth-century audience of their
contemporary priestesses on the Akropolis - the priestess of Athena
Polias, named Lysimache, and that of Athena Nike, named Myrrhine.
Kenneth Dover believes this religious connection coincidental, while
Hans-Joachim Newiger "prefers to see this as evidence not only of how
seriously the poet takes the fate of his native city ... but also as evidence
for the new stature which the play ... gives to women, although they
are politically without rights".14
Whether we hazard a guess or not, it can remain only a guess. But
our preference as to what we would like to believe might itself be
illuminating. Has the West retained its understanding of the oikos as being
fundamental to the polis? Or have the understanding and the reality of
the household and the city become things of the past? Why does a modern
audience too easily miss the meaning of Lysistrata in the distraction of
its sex jokes? Plainly, the erotic - which should point us back to the
richness of the oikos - points too many only toward the inner poverty
of the self and its gratification.
For a whole litany of reasons - some moral, some technological -
the traditional, nuclear family is on the decline in the West. This fact
is one which no one denies but too few lament. Moreover, the lack of
alarm may be exacerbated by the fact that liberal democracies have never
bequeathed much to families or dynasties, though historically this has
not stopped some well-established families from retaining perennial
power. In democratic regimes only the individual is granted political rep-
resentation, and while historically a measure of respect was by custom
and deference proffered heads of households, this political fact has
somehow metamorphosed over time into a cultural attitude of uncon-

cern if not open disrespect for households and their heads.
Instead of the family, the household, the clan, the kinfolk, and family
name - all which together meant oikos to the Athenian and familia to
the early Roman - we have now the individual. The lionization of the
individual yields a long list of stresses upon the family - from legal-
ized abortion, quick divorce, and child abandonment to distant, unknown
grandparents and the replacement of family conversation with TV. In
his article entitled "The Family as the Basis for Political Existence",
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen has a similar "rosary of woes" which includes
these and many other stresses on the family, every one of which, however
defensible it presumably may be, is erosive. He relates how the family
has historically prefigured the polity, and concludes by saying that he
is not a moralist, the role making him uneasy, but a political philoso-
pher looking for "laws, a living tendency, a nomos, in political existence".
As such he believes that the exclusive legal recognition of isolated
individuals is in danger of reducing the oikos, and by extension the polis,
to simply "an amorphous mass" of individuals "with neither family
traditions nor corporate memories".15 Without corporate memories our
world cannot read the Allegory of Lysistrate. Worse, in such a world
the woes militating against the family give us our own Peloponnesian
War against ourselves, begging the question as to how long or whether
the family can exist in the modern polity.
We might imagine Aristophanes thinking if not saying much the same,
both about himself and his fifth-century society. We might almost hear
him laugh, hear him deny that he is either a moralist or (Zeus forbid!)
a philosopher, political or otherwise. But in the laugh there would be a
sadness, even a bitterness one imagines, at the inability of Athens either
to produce or respond to a Lysistrata. She was fated to remain mere
fantasy.
Ambassador College, Big Sandy, Texas
NOTES
1 See for instance Kenneth J. Reckford, Aristophanes' Old and New Comedy, Vol. I
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1987) p. 308. Professor Reckford laments
the fact that "the modern sophisticated reader is too distracted by the sexual jokes and
the stripteases" to feel the force of the play's political and religious overtones (308). In
76 DANNY L. SMITH
respect to production as opposed to reading, he elsewhere recommends that in order to

preserve the play's wit and ridiculousness for the modern audience it might be played
using loaves of French bread or elongated balloons for the phalli and with an all female
cast "to bring out the basic fun and silliness with which sex is treated" (295).
2 For this tragic sense embedded in the language of the playas understood by fifth-century
Athenians, see Hans-Joachim Newiger, 'War and Peace in the Comedy of Aristophanes',
trans. Catherine Radford, in Yale Classical Studies, Vol. XXVI, Aristophanes: Essays
in Interpretation (London: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980) p. 229. When the women hear
what they must do to end the war, they are so chagrined that twice they respond with /)
7t6A£1l0~ ~p7t~'tm 'Let the war continue!' (129f.) Professor Newiger points out that in
autumn of 412 this identical cry resounded when Athens, despite her crushing defeat in
Sicily, marshalled the last of her financial reserves to rebuild her fleet. Aristophanes
has the women parrot the cry because they cannot bear the thought of making a sacri-
fice which to them is exorbitant. The women bear it for a good cause, but Aristophanes
teases his audience into wondering if they have borne their own taxation for a cause equally
good.
3 All citations are to Aristophanes Vol. III, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heineman,
1924).
4 Cedric Whitman, in Aristophanes and the Comic Hero (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1964) p. 213, observes that Dicaeopolis in Acharnians speaks of his fury
as eyes stung or "bitten" with soap and that the use of the verb "to bite" indicates a
figure of speech meaning that "to be 'bitten' in the eye is to be enraged".
5 Aristophanic Comedy (Berkeley: Univ. of Cal. Press, 1972) p. 153.
6 Douglass Parker, Four Comedies by Aristophanes, with William Arrowsmith and
Richmond Lattimore (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1969), pp. 2-3.
7 The Family, Women and Death (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 4. For
a discussion of this condition in fifth-century Greece, and a valuable discussion of oikos
and polis through a finely honed anthropological lens, see her entire first chapter.
S Ibid, p. 62.
9 The fantastic improbability of Lysistrata's project, given the realities of fifth-century
Greek society, has among others been observed by K. J. Dover, (cited above) pp. 159-160;
Jeffrey Henderson, "'Lysistrate': the play and its themes", in Yale Classical Studies,
Vol. XXVI, Aristophanes: Essays in Interpretation (London: Cambridge Univ. Press,
1980), pp. 168, 180; and Lois Spatz, Aristophanes (Boston: Twayne Pub., 1978), p. 94.
Professor Henderson formulates the question well when he asks why Aristophanes should
"go out of his way to flout dramatic logic". He sees the illogic, as do most, as evidence
of the comic playwright's selecting from reality that which supports a defense of marriage
and the family. The oikos is shown as being central to the polis; both are endangered
by protracted war. But one could add that Aristophanes suggests as well that the oikos
is as much besieged by infidelity as it is by the war. The playwright begs the question
not only of the feasibility of Lysistrata's project but of the likelihood of strong wives
like Myrrhine (and ardent husbands like Kinesias) in fifth-century Athens.
10 For further evidence that the issue is love not sex see Whitman, p. 209 (cited above)
when he observes Myrrhine's declaration to Kinesias (870) that though she indeed loves
him he does not apparently wish to be loved by her - remarkable in view of Kinesias'
helpless pleas for the sexual attention she denies him. In effect he cannot truly wish to
love her if he has not agreed to the truce. Whitman puts it well: "All she means is that
her husband ... , stands with the belligerents as a violator of the total vision, peace-
love-home. If he will not settle for the whole, he can do without the part".
11 From the uncommonly good translation of the play by Douglass Parker, (cited above),
p.37.
12 See Dover, p. 159 and Spatz, p. 94 (cited above).
\3 There is some debate as to whether female roles were played by paid hetaerae or male
actors dressed as women, especially when nudity was featured as with dtaAAa:yfJ. The
best treatment of the subject I have found is that of Laura M. Stone, Costume in
Aristophanic Poetry (New York: Arno Press, 1981). Her reading of the plays and her
examination of the (admittedly scant) terra-cotta statuettes of the period lead her to the
traditional view - that all women including nudes were played by men, the nude being
played by a man wearing padded false breasts and a leotard painted with ostentatious
nipples, navel and pubic hair easily visible to the back row of the theatre (p. 150). In
respect to the actors' wearing of phalli, the evidence seems more conclusive. Apparently
there were three kinds: the first the coiled or looped phallus; which could be untied to
produce the second, the loose or hanging phallus; and the third, the erect phallus made
of stiff leather painted red on the end. The hemichorus of old men would feature one of
the first two types, and the younger men the third, in the words of Professor Stone "as
a symbol for the frustration and despair which characterized the Athenian polis after
two decades of war" (p. 100).
14 Dover, p. 152, n. 3 (cited above); Newiger, pp. 235-6.
15 In The Intercollegiate Review 26.2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 9-16. Quotations are from
the conclusion (16).
KA THLEEN HANEY
ALLEGORICAL TIME
The contribution which literature has to make to phenomenology is

obvious. The topics of literature always involve the varieties of human
emotional experience. The evocativeness of the descriptions which
literature provides compose the aesthetic judgment which defines
literature and distinguish it from those varieties of writing which do
not continuously feed, inspire, inform, and civilize the reader. We read
literature to taste more deeply our humanity. The problem for the
phenomenological philosopher concerns reciprocity. Can phenomenology
make any contribution to the efforts of literature with perhaps a
contribution to literary theory? The phenomenologist cannot properly
respond to that question. Nevertheless, in a spirit of gratitude for the
many gifts of literature, this paper attempts an analysis of the senses
of time employed in allegories in the hopes that such analysis may be
of some use to literary theory.
The temporal structure of allegory essentially involves the interplay
of time constitutions, which is to say that, unlike other genres of liter-
ature, obviously an allegory has the meaning "allegory" if and only if
several senses of time are in play. These senses of time are not simul-
taneous, but intentional. Without such complex temporal intentionality
a story does not evoke an allegorical reading. So, an allegory requires
temporal modalities while some other types of writing may be meant
in a single verb tense, in a univocal intention.
Essentially, as we learn from St. Augustine, allegories require at least
two different meanings, supported by at least five distinguishable
intentionalities. The first meaning we loosely term the "literal" itself
an allegorical term since its meaning derives from the word "letter",
but, as we know, a letter of the alphabet derives its meaning from its
relationship with other letters each of which must be understood in their
union with each other. The "literal" meaning projects the audience into
a secondary "allegorical" meaning, if the piece is successful. The first
meaning, insofar as it displays elements of plot, relies on chronolog-
ical movements of events although this chronology may be conveyed
through flashbacks or other devices. A chronology of events comprises
A-T. Tymieniec/ca (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XU, pp. 79-92.

80 KATHLEEN HANEY
the basic story of the allegory, even if, as in magical realism, the
temporality of the chronology is thick with cross references rather than
the thin linear time of, say, realistic fiction or newspaper accounts.
If the chronology of the allegory need not be tied to a realistic sense
of time, we cannot ask of allegorical plots that they display the sense
of time privileged in the Newtonian, scientific constitution of time. We
do demand, however, that allegorical time display the ineluctable neces-
sity which Chesterton described in his essay, "The Logic of Elfland".
There are certain sequences or developments (cases of one thing following another), which
are, in the true sense of the word, reasonable. They are, in the true sense of the word,
necessary. Such are mathematical and merely logical sequences. We in fairyland (who
are the most reasonable of all creatures) admit that reason and necessity. For instance,
if the Ugly Sisters are older than Cinderella, it is (in an iron and awful sense) necessary
that Cinderella is younger than the Ugly Sisters. There is no getting out of it. Haeckel may
talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be ... the test of
fairyland ... is the test of the imagination. You cannot imagine two and one not making
three. But you can easily imagine trees not growing fruit; you can imagine them growing
golden candlesticks or tigers hanging on the nail. . . .
We believe in bodily miracles, but not in mental impossibilities. We believe that a
Bean-stalk climbed up to Heaven; but that does not at all confuse our convictions on
the philosophical question of how many beans make five.!
Or, as Lovejoy would have it, "Rationality has nothing to do with dates".
If the hero of an allegory saves the princess after slaying the dragon,
he cannot save the princess first although the sequence of the events may
be presented differently in the actual telling of the story. Thus, not even
the seemingly inchoate writings of magical realism can utterly dispense
with a chronological logic although the logic which supports the
chronology is not typically inductive tending toward the universal, but
necessity informing the particular. The fundamental possibility of the
allegory, required by its first referrent, includes a chronology of events
associated with its first "literal" meaning although this chronology need
not have much to do with the homogeneous time of the casuality iden-
tified with modern natural science.
In order to explain how allegory takes on the second level of meaning
which is requisite, we must identify other operative senses of time
functioning in the bestowal of the meaning, allegory. Our attention turns
now to the audience of the allegory which enlivens it and grants it its
secondary meanings. The audience to an allegory or any other literary
work must experience the story in its (the audience's) own lived time.
ALLEGORICAL TIME 81
The lived time of the audience, however, is not singular, unitary, and
contained, but multi-dimensional, intentional and proto-intentional.
The proto-intentionality of the time of the reader seems initially of
little interest to the analysis since this time is the continuously flowing
temporality which comprises the self-constitution of the subject as
audience, or, more basically, the self-constitution of the subject as subject.
Indeed, initially we may bracket this temporality although it is essen-
tial to the possibility of the allegory. Later, however, we must return to
the proto-intentionality of the audience as temporal subjects, time-
constituting and time-constituted, to render appropriate emphasis to
the significance of allegory in its dialectical aspects. For now, suffice
it to say that the audience of an allegory intends the story in lived
time although this time is not identical with so-called chronological
time which consists of homogeneous seconds, minutes, hours, days,
years, etc. Lived time can, in a rough and ready sense, be translated
into "clock" time as in "I was so engrossed in the book that I read until
three a.m."
Such a remark, of course, tells us nothing about allegorical functioning
or even if the engrossing reading is an allegorical reading although we
may have a suspicion that reading literature captivates because what
literature we read with great interest is literature in which we experi-
ence a living which lives for us as possible life. Initially, this point
lacks obviousness. We can imagine that an interesting literary work
does not require a self-reflexive dimension because we are accustomed
to underestimating the grandeur of great literature in overlooking the
significance of the intentional subject as audience.
While we are engrossed in allegorical literature, we are involved in
the first meaning surely, but not exclusively. The intersubjective dimen-
sion, the convergence of the two intentions, the meaning for the other,
the hero, say, and the meaning for the self is a blend of two streams of
temporality into the one noema of universalization/generalization, the
sphere of essential movement of the human soul. All experience has a
temporal dimension; temporality is the great river of convergence in
literature. Thus, what I shall refer to as allegorical time is the media-
tion of two streams of consciousness and a figure of the intersubjective
pairings in which we are able to find ourselves as human beings, each
one among many, sharing temporality through the possibility of owning
it in particularization, in individuation, and returning to the fusion of
82 KA THLEEN HANEY
shared meanings in dialectical moments in which we constitute self, other,

world, and time respectively.
Alleg.orical time is not time as understood by the natural scientist or
by the mundane ego, but neither is it the time of the pre-scientific natural
attitude. Allegorical time points beyond the natural world to a time in
which the soul can overcome itself in the moment in which it feels the
vastness of its real home. In order to achieve this meaning of the
omnitemporal, present in distinctions, we readily assume categories which
pigeonhole experience into the ordinary naturalism which serves as the
backdrop of our technologically interpreted and depreciated world, but
the return to more genuine sense of time which surges up when we release
ourselves from the doxic mode of being is not yet the sense of tempo-
rality which the allegory causes the reader to constitute. The present of
allegorical time has a universal omnitemporality which is, nevertheless,
available only through particularization which sees its own life in the one
life of the soul. Such seeing occurs in a pre-cognitive grasp of lived
time which must point beyond itself to transcend its perspectivity and
locus in order to become the possible co-subject of the allegory.
Strangely, this possibility necessarily involves its actuality since seeing
is an act which changes the subject who sees. If I can see myself in
the life of the allegory, I have in a real sense lived the life (and the
time) of the allegory in my experience although I have not climbed the
beanstalk or slain the dragon in actuality. In order for the allegory to
work, in order for the allegory to possess allegorical meanings, I must
have imaginatively undergone the experience. The ego which under-
goes experience always changes.
We may now say that allegorical time is founded in the subject who
co-constitutes the allegory, but allegorical time is not encompassed by
the discrete subject's acts. Allegorical time is co-temporality, consti-
tuted in the present as the presence of all who are aware of being in
this together, all who seek in their various arts to work out meaning
for human life. Art and allegory present universalization and transcen-
dence, but only through the particularizations of the artist (as the unitary
stream of consciousness co-created with his constitution of objectivity),
and the products, the allegories and the audience. The allegory is created
by its author; the work of making the allegory creates the author. Again,
the allegory is created by its audience; the audience is created by the
allegory which it tells itself.
The products of poesis require an intentional consciousness to enliven
ALLEGORICAL TIME 83
them or the embedded intentionality of the object remains latent. Without

intentional consciousness, there can be no subjective awareness, as we
learn from Husserl. Without operative intentionality, then, no possi-
bility for works of art pertains. At night, the Mona Lisa, too, rests.
The time which enlivens works of allegorical art is analogical in its
pattern and can be analyzed according to the classical formula for the
analogy of proportionality: A:B :: C:D. What is like between the
chronology of the allegory and the temporal stream which re-enlivens the
allegory is no specific likeness beyond the empty, indefinitely fulfill-
able pattern. Such possibility for self-reflexivity precisely engenders
the meaning, allegory. Allegory means for the actors who are its
characters, but necessarily means for the reader who reads the allegory
as an allegory, in the time of his reading, in the time of his life. We
shall return to this topic when we consider various levels of interpreta-
tion of allegories.
In an allegory, we must have available at least five streams of
temporality: 1. the lived time of the creative artist (the fallacious view
expressed in the notion that the concern with the artist's intention is a
fallacy aside), 2. the chronology of the tale which the artist tells, 3. the
lived time of the audience who reads until 3:00 a.m., say, with conse-
quences in performance of duties the following day, 4. the imaginatively
lived time in which the reader shares the life of the allegory, and 5. the
omnitemporality which the transcendent allegorical meaning presents
as exemplar. This last experience of time occurs in an arena of formal-
ization in which, as we have seen, this temporality is generated on the
basis of more fundamental intentions which engender the possibility of
allegorical reading. The audience, thus, reconstitutes the author's tale,
including the life of his protagonist and the audience's own life as an
instantiation of the exemplar presented in the allegory.
The creative or co-creative allegorical acts give insight into the human
condition, which Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka describes in Logos and Life,
Books 1 and 2. The allegories which instruct us, from the fables and fairy
tales which enrich our babyhood to the parables and poetry which haunt
our adult lives, activate the realization that our natural lives do not encom-
pass our being, but only support it. To recognize an allegory is to
co-create it as a meaning which means for me, too. Allegories move
me beyond my life at the moment into life as a stillness of motion in
which my subjective actions actuate universal patterns. The revelation
which lives in the fullness of allegorical time is that natural human life
84 KATHLEEN HANEY
implies an allegorical dimension in its meaning, that human life in praxis

is a kind of training or maturation, that the particular events of the indi-
viduated life serve as waystations towards the human destiny.
Perhaps this is enough theory for the moment and the further course
of the argument might be better advanced by illustrations from works
which I shall consider allegories. Many pieces, from various develop-
mental levels come to mind. Since my training is in philosophy, the
allegory which most freely pops into my mind is an early one, from
Plato's Republic. The Allegory of the Cave, cryptic and rich, reminds
us, as the poet said, that the "world is too much with us". Briefly, to
rehearse Plato's familiar tale: prisoners are chained by the neck so that
they can see only shadows reflected on a wall. Since the prisoners cannot
turn their heads, they cannot even see each other. The shadows on the
wall and the shadowy voices of their fellows are the prisoners' experi-
ence of "real life" . There is no other reality for them. One of the prisoners,
however, is forceably (through the discipline of liberal education)
unchained, dragged through the cave, past the fire which casts light on
the puppets in the parapet making the shadows, dragged up through the
mouth of the cave, thrust into the open, and blinded by the light of the
Sun until he becomes accustomed to seeing the real as it is revealed
by the light of the Sun. Plato concludes his story with the prisoner's
forced return to the cave where his fellows greet his rendition of his
travels with scorn and him with abuse. The clear allegorical or second-
level reading of Plato's tale is that we are all prisoners in such a cave,
imprisoned by our cultural interpretations, by our preference for the
visible over the intelligible, and, most perniciously, by the limitations
which are intrinsic to being human being.
In the time we spend reading Plato's allegory and reflecting upon it,
we recognize that our notion of time itself imprisons us. Were we to
do otherwise, were we to read Plato's words as a vignette concerning
the benighted, we would not read an allegory. When we understand that
our being is the universal subject of the little tale, we are awakened to
the transcendental intersubjectivity which is the fundamental telos of
human life, actualized in its recognition. This allegory then becomes
the allegory of human life. I, you, they, begin the journey not knowing
that there is anywhere to go. Humans are imprisoned. Through dread
events which we do not seek, birth and growth and the like, we are
thrust into the heart of the cave. The story itself, read allegorically, moves
us then through the cave to see that what we are accustomed to seeing
ALLEGORICAL TIME 85
is but shadows of the more genuine experiences which are their possi-
bility. The painful journey of interiority causes us to cast off the chains
of familiarity in the excruciating light of that which is, that which we
would prefer to believe.
Husserl's ill-famed transcendental phenomenological reduction is
another figure of an allegorical pattern. Although Husserl's method is
distilled of direct reference to other temporal beings, the phenomeno-
logical reduction is enlivened, nevertheless, by the lived time of the
subject who constitutes herself as an intentional subject, like other
subjects who are each the central possibility of their own meanings.
We may say here that Husserl's intellectual allegory does not carry us
to the heights of Platonic philosophy or we may say, allegorically now,
that Husserl's phenomenological method is a means for conducting the
journey outside the mouth of the cave. Husserl asks us to imagine
that we are responsible for the meanings which we may have made, to
understand our meanings as possible meanings, finally to find our
intellectual freedom in the exorcism of unexamined presuppositions and
to reconstitute our lived world in self-evidence.
In this statement, the transcendental phenomenological reduction is
a prosaic treatment of the allegory of the cave, but the allegory of the
cave is to be preferred as Plato requires an evocative seeing which is
necessarily emotional (at least aesthetic) as well as intellectual. Intel-
lectual seeing is the message of the vision of both; both Plato and Husserl
require an insight. Both propretics lead us to re-examine who we are.
The point persists. The allegory takes its meaning from the acts which
enliven it. Temporality finds itself in non-temporal intentions, the text
(we recall that etymologically literature is "written on stone") which must,
nevertheless, be constituted temporally by a temporal subject. The streams
of time of the allegory meet in the meanings in which we see that the
subject of the allegory is the subject who co-constitutes the allegory.
Further examination reveals that this subject is the particular subject who
so engages, but who may be any subject. In such stories, then, we may
begin to live our unique version of the human biography.
Allegory is unlike history since history tells us what has already
actually happened in a time past while allegory projects us into a future
which is not yet for us. History persists in the life of a people whether
or not they recognize the forces and influences which have already
constituted their lives. Allegory speaks to the individual of his possible
temporality, of the autobiography which his intentions have yet to write,
86 KATHLEEN HANEY
although they may have been written mutatis mutandis by other humans
about other humans (perhaps in the form of lions, or princes, or bats).
Allegorical time has a dimension which we have not yet considered:
the time of anticipation which is basic to the constitution of inner
temporality. According to Husserl's account of temporal constitution, the
moments "past", "present", and "future" are not homogenous units spread
out linearly. The time phases are not objective entities, but intentions.
The future arises out of the past, recollections generate anticipations;
all experience is of presence in an intentional present. To direct oneself
allegorically, is to recognize that certain intentions have to be constituted,
fulfilled, and sedimented if the soul is to be nurtured.
The recent resurgence of the political allegory in developing countries
suggests that allegorical dimensions can be multiplied in endless reflec-
tions of the pattern. J. M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K,
for example, is an account of a character who is an other to the culture
in which he is born which twice imprisons him in attempts to "reform"
him so that his otherness can be obviated and he become a useful citizen.
Twice he escapes the efforts to annihilate him as the individual, to make
him the slave. Michael K's life lends itself easily to an interpretation
as the life of the class of other, the people of color, in South Africa,
but is not exhausted by such a reading. Again, the movement of the
universalized class other must follow the movement of the particular
other. Freedom comes from resistence, resistence comes from the bodily
recognition that the human soul is only nourished by the food which suits
her, which she can solicit from the earth. Michael K dies of starvation
because, although he tries, he cannot stomach the food of oppression.
The will which seeks to obey finally cannot obey that which is unjustly
commanded.
Surely, this allegory can be filled in with the correlated meaning,
oppressed other - the black, the woman, the Jew, the Newfie - it need
not be restricted to a particular individual, yet it must apply to individ-
uals. Movement along the structure of isomorphic meanings of allegory
requires analogical activity. If allegorical analogies follow the pattern
of proper proportionality, they must be related by being related to a
common concept. (As A is to B, C is to D) How is A related to B?
larger than, C may also be larger than D; e.g., sight is to ocular vision
as (in)sight is to intellectual vision. Sight and insight are analogous by
both being the possibility of their analogons. " ... in analogy (of proper
proportionality) neither (extreme) defines the other, but the definition
ALLEGORICAL TIME 87
of one is proportionally the definition of the other". According to Thomas

DeVio, Cardinal Cajetan's definition.
If so, what is the concept which orders allegorical meanings? Human
life, human time, is the subject of allegory. Human life is the possi-
bility actualized in the particular protagonist of the allegory in its literal
universalization in a text; human time is actualized in the universal
meaning of the allegory particularized in an instantiation which lives
its possibility. If you will then, the real business of human life is the
transcendental content of allegorical experience. Allegories answer
questions about how to "spend" one's time.
The various temporal dimensions of allegories intend various stories
with several meanings as we see in the history of the genre, allegory.
In its earliest days, allegories maintained a syncretistic theology which
kept closed any approach to a philosophy of language since language was
employed as a means for revelation. As Angus Fletcher remarks, " ...
there seems to have been no way for the allegorist to gain perspective
to his own activity". He continues "the mode generally depends for its
force upon the belief that words have magical power". The allegorist
followed the fate of the poet; he was depreciated with the ascendence
of science as the privileged form of rationality. Indeed, his whole universe
of myths and pseudo-sciences fell under the spell of the Copernican
world-view. With the rise of the science of astronomy, came the fall of
the studies of the stars. In the historical time of the West, the allegory
struggled against the unhappy climate of scientific naturalism in the guise
of realism.
The time for allegory followed the career of the notion of ambiguity.
In the times of early modernism, ambiguity was despised. Later, after
Darwin and Baudelaire, ambiguity became the value of richness. Riches,
after all, take on the highest value when the temporal vector suffers
directional dislocation. When this valuation occurred, thinking about
allegory by allegorists led to the resurgence of the genre as a mode for
political dissent. The value of richness is refracted as political freedom
in this literature. Our earlier example, The Life and Times of Michael
K, can be read as a description of the situation of blacks in South Africa.
The rich ambiguity of allegorical interpretation allows for speech
concerning the silenced, but already the value placed on richness hints
at the more fundamental value of human life which unifies allegorical
meanings in the lived time of allegorist and the audience in the text which
they share.
88 KATHLEEN HANEY
The syncretism of allegories ensures that the temporal streams of artist,

protagonist, and audience need not be conflated. This syncretism pre-
serves the particular traits of the combining beliefs in isomorphic patterns
rather than homogenizing them into a new system which includes them
all in its stew. In the allegorical reading I am recommending, the times
of the subjects are as separate as their stories. The unity, the one human
life, exists only in instantiations. Its temporal essence transmutes itself
in each telling while the same motifs repeat in different keys and tempos.
Robert Magliola [Phenomenology and Literature, West Lafayette,
Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1977] explains the general intentional
structure of meaning in literature in Husserlian terms as follows: "just
as the meaning of a cat (Bedeutung) is the perceiver's sense (which
correlates to the cat), so too is the meaning of the author's sense (here
functioning as Bedeutung) the perceiver's sense, which correlates with
the author's sense".2
We add that when the author writes an allegory, the author's sense
must, of course, be distinguished from the literal meaning which is its
vehicle for conveyance. The literal meaning occupies a place of essen-
tial constitution which leads to and opens up the second meaning of
the allegory, the universal or omnitemporal meaning of human time and
passage. The chronology which supports a literal reading only inciden-
tally describes a sequence of events. The sequence of events compels
when the pattern refers to universal insights which the complete allegory
presents. Most details in plots or in lives only provide opportunities
for achieving a grasp (however tenuous) of human maturity. The
movement of the soul through its various stages, a temporal movement,
transforms individually constituted existential lives into figures of the
allegorical dimension of human temporality. The experience of such time
seems in retrospect to involve temporal stages, but such stages can only
be seen from the vantage of the spiral of time which continuously enacts
the passage from Plato's Cave and back again.
Such time constitution requires deaths. In the light of eternity which
shines outside the Cave, the time in the Cave acquires strictly instru-
mental value. On return, the newly dead temporality of former sojourns
in the Cave can be revitalized as presence to memorial past, but must
be lived in as the present past. The newly born presence in an allegor-
ical present negates the fullness of anticipating again the present as it
was. The past and its lived temporality cannot enjoy unmodified presence
any longer. If the soul has moved beyond its past, its present includes
ALLEGORICAL TIME 89
possibilities of living in other presences. The past presence loses its

hold on the soul which can return to it, but without the extravagant belief
which characterized its earlier dwelling within it.
The sense of allegorical time which has been latent in the analysis thus
far must now be spotlighted. Allegorical time is the time of the human
journey. In an irony pleasing to Plato, we now understand allegorical time
as a continuum leading to seeing through or discovering the omni-
temporal meaning of human life. On the most literal level, allegorical
time evokes the proper sense of human time. Allegorical time presents
events which lead to the recognition of the significance of death and
transcendence in human life. All other senses of time enhance or detract
from the meaning of time which allegories teach us. Regardless of the
circumstances, human life tends towards death which redeems itself in
human acquiescence. The continuous process of dying is one of Plato's
preferred definitions of philosophy. The supreme injunction of Christian
morality urges the death to self. The meaning of the identification of
the self and recognition of the limitations of self-knowledge is the central
insight of tragedy and the cipher which holds the meaning of individual
time constitution.
The enlivened time of allegories presents the ironic truth that human
life is growth through death to one self-understanding in favor of a
more insightful concept of self-identity. The association of allegory
with story or fiction only partially conveys the descriptive quality of
the awakened meaning of allegory. Perhaps we might better say that
allegory reveals the universal meaning behind or manifested in autobi-
ography or history as well as fictions. Allegories evoke the truth about
human life. Their time is finally the one time of human life.
The recognition that the time of allegory finally displays the essence
of human temporality requires all of the temporal constitutions which we
enumerated earlier. The fusion of meanings which comprise possible
interpretations (and exclude incompossible ones) to be given to the text
exhibits a mode of temporality which unites the various temporal intend-
ings which make the allegory possible. To the resuscitation of the allegory
by contemporary writers, we send our cheers, but we must require that
the temporality of allegory not be constrained by naturalistic or scien-
tific renderings of time. As Jean Gebser reminds us
To the perception of the aperspectival world time appears to be the very fundamental
function, and to be a most complex nature. It manifests itself in accordance with a given
consciousness structure and the appropriate possibility of manifestation in its various
90 KATHLEEN HANEY
aspects as clock time, natural time, cosmic or sidereal time; as biological duration, rhythm,
meter; as mutation, discontinuity, relativity; as vital dynamics, psychic energy (and thus
in a certain sense in the form we call "soul" and the "unconscious"), and as mental
dividing. 3
All these possible meanings enter into the nexus which is the temporality
of the text of the allegory. The limit of allegorical meaning is the limit
of human temporality in its essential meanings. Janus-like, the word of
the allegory has two faces and can be turned towards two different sets
of intentional meanings in temporal streams of constitution. For example,
the heart, the center of the soul's capacity for self-experience in one
telling, can become the heart which Harvey envisioned as "really" or
"simply" a mechanism for the circulation of blood (the earlier notion
of power has no place any longer in the Harvey telling). On the other
hand, an allegorical reading denies the notion of a single "real" or
"simple" filling in of the constitution of the allegory with one meaning.
The overarching recognition that allegory evokes is always grasped in
the temporal structures of the particulars who create and co-create its
truth: no single human time sums up the possibilities of time while no
human life occurs outside of the unique possibility which can appre-
hend its temporal dimension.
This new "literalism" to be granted to the interpretation of allegory
depends on superseding, in another sense of temporality, the time of
the plot or the life of the protagonist of the allegory with the temporal
streams which constitute the story so that the subject of allegory can
be seen to be the subject for allegory, the human subject who lives
temporally. This meaning of allegory becomes available in phenome-
nological analysis so that our hope expressed in the opening of the
paper may be fulfilled. Allegories are road maps which chart not only
spatiality, but also temporality. The universal possibility of time con-
stitution can become an expression of the particular life which resonates
with the omnitemporality of allegorical heroes located in the mythic time
which figures the structure of human temporality. The requirement for
participation in the activation of allegorical meaning guarantees that
the particular and the universal can be embodied only temporally as
the omni-temporal.
Allegories then contribute to the life of the phenomenologist through
providing her with the experience of the one human life in its permu-
tations. Literary theorists must evaluate the contribution which
phenomenology has to make to literature. I might suggest, however,
ALLEGORICAL TIME 91
that literature is informed through its dialectical discussion in the time

given to the search for its meaning. Such time given must always be given
by a subject or subjects; such reflection brings us close to what we
have taken to be essential to the meaning of allegory, the universal expres-
sion of human finitude in its overcoming through its participation in
its essence.
The way to such recognition cannot be through self-knowledge since
human "nature and character are in principle incompletely intelligible".4
The self cannot transparently or finally perform its three functions
simultaneously. The self may be the sought for ideal object of its
knowledge, the knowing subject who engages in pursuit of this object,
and the existential being to which this knowledge refers. She cannot,
however, intend more than one function deliberately in the foreground
of the horizon. She is, therefore, and on other grounds as well, forever
incomplete and, thus, incompletely rational. Philosophy, in the Socratic
mode, must always keep in mind the irony of the Delphic injunction.
Self-knowledge, the avenue of philosophy, limits the space of
philosophy. As all the confusion surrounding Plato's doctrine of Forms
suggests, philosophy never dwells for long in ineffability. The forms
can be glimpsed and imaged perhaps, but never directly. I remind us
of Socrates' brush with wisdom which he recounts at his trial. The oracle
of Delphi, who heard the words of the great god (Bow before the divine)
Apollo, said that no man was wiser than Socrates who learned that "real
wisdom is the property of God." [Apology, 23, a] Socrates understood
that "human wisdom has little or no value". In Socrates' paraphrase
the oracle would say, "The wisest of you men is he who has realized, like
Socrates, that in respect of wisdom he is really worthless". [23, b]
The philosopher necessarily understands his efforts as fatuous, thus,
his tone is ironic. The philosopher tells "likely stories" we learn from
Plato. The philosopher employs allegories when reason can see no further
than an amorphous shape to hold on to imagistically. The allegory signals
transcendence in the temporality of eternity in which its creator and
co-creator attend.
If present-day philosophers are not much as allegorists, perhaps the
problem is that not enough philosophers remember to be poets. Surely,
the early modern emphasis on epistemological justification and the late
modern anxiety about the impossibility of such justification fail to
encourage the wholeness of the philosopher. Nevertheless, truth, or that
which can be imaged linguistically about it, can be experienced through
92 KA THLEEN HANEY
the indirection of the poet. The great allegorists evoke in us the ironic
truth about their literal meanings. We acknowledge the truth of human
transcendence when we co-constitute the particular truth of an allegory
as an analogy to a transcendental meaning, a possible or universal
meaning which we acknowledge in its presence to a transcendental ego
who is nevertheless and always incarnate as a particular, temporalized
ego.
In reading allegories we transcend the naturalism which is the pre-
supposition of modern culture; we experience ourselves as transcendental
subjects in such acts. The temporality of allegory, of all the temporal
streams which meet in the text of an allegory making its set of analo-
gous meanings possible, transcends the other modalities of time which
it includes in the self-constituting stream of consciousness.
When is that time? The time of allegorical or transcendental meaning
must be transcendental time - possible time which is actually spent;
the audience intends the omnitemporal or the fictive in the allegory,
but the horizon of the constitution of the fictive involves both the Eidos
or the self-showing of the story and the subject which constitutes and
is constituted by the meanings she intends in a time which is no time
at all.
University of Houston Downtown

KATHRYN L. McKINLEY
THE ROMAN DE LA ROSE: PSYCHOLOGICAL

INTERIORITY IN MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY
The thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean

de Meun presents more fully than any other medieval allegory the
manifold conflicts both the lover, Amant, and beloved, the Rose,
encounter in the pursuit and often, avoidance, of love. Because the Roman
is the first medieval romance to focus exclusively on the interior
psychological processes, instead of on the superficial dynamic within a
cast of human characters, and is thus pure psychological allegory, it holds
a crucial place in the development of character in medieval literature
as it sanctions the treatment of psychology in character. The allegory
form with its very absence or minimization of a material world was the
perfect vehicle for the poet seeking to represent the world of the human
psyche which had not been extensively explored in medieval literature
until this time.
In the present discussion, my interest is not so much in the question
of whether allegorical character A in the Roman has a precise referent
B in the external world or even in the hazy middle ground between the
"sign" and the "signified", but in the poet's conscious manipulation of
the artifice of allegory to create a text which has meaning beyond those
"characters" and their support referents. In the Roman Jean, moreso
than Guillaume, exploits the structure of the allegory to represent not
only the beloved's conscious, but especially her subconscious, responses
to the lover who is in such determined pursuit of her. For the sake of
argument, I will be accepting the fiction of the Roman's allegory and
taking a traditional reading of the characters in this work, so as to direct
more attention to Jean's important contributions to the development of
medieval character through his organization and manipulation of the
allegory's artifice. It may be useful at first, however, to establish a rhetor-
ical and literary context for this allegory.
The Greek rhetorician Demetrius in his treatise, On Style, discusses
the way allegory hints at, rather than directly conveys, meaning:
There is a kind of impressiveness also in allegorical language. This is particularly true
of such menaces as that of Dionysius: "their cicalas [sic I shall chirp from the ground".
If Dionysius had expressed his meaning directly, saying that he would ravage the

94 KATHRYN L. McKINLEY
Locrian land, he would have shown at once more irritation and less dignity. In the phrase
actually used the speaker has shrouded his words, as it were, in allegory. Any darkly-
hinting expression is more terror-striking, and its import is variously conjectured by
different hearers. On the other hand, things that are clear and plain are apt to be despised,
just like men when stripped of their arguments.
Hence the Mysteries are revealed in an allegorical form in order to inspire such
shuddering and awe as are associated with darkness and night. Allegory also is not
unlike darkness and night.!
The phrase "darkly-hinting expression" is huponoumenon in the Greek

(from the verb huponoew, to suspect, guess at), also translatable as
"[the expression] conjectured, guessed at, suspected". Demetrius also
discusses in a related passage how suppression of a word or phrase, as
in aposiopesis, can "produce elevation, since some things seem to be
more significant when not expressed but only hinted at" (103). In the
Roman Jean in particular innovates with allegorical form in precisely this
way: he arranges the figures, digressions, and myths in such a way as
to suggest, albeit darkly, the internal landscape of the character.
As far back as Homer's Iliad, the traditional narrative device used
to convey a character's innermost struggles was the interior debate or
monologue, often portrayed as the psychological battle taking place in
the thoughts of the character. In the Iliad such a debate was most often
limited to the concerns of martial heroism. In Appollonius's Argonautica,
however, in which the love interest is brought to a position of promi-
nence within the epic, we see the character (Medea) giving vent to a
personal agon: her quandary over whether or not to help her beloved
Jason and so betray her father. Virgil's Dido and Ovid's many female
characters in the Metamorphoses' central books contributed further to the
development of the internal debate still incorporated in the epic form.
But the medieval romance form itself, dating in France from the
mid-twelfth century, gave final liberation to the internal debate. For the
first time, love is the central concern of a narrative genre, at least insofar
as plot is concerned, and presentation of the inner turmoil of lovers comes
to be requisite, not merely ornamental or diversionary. With the Roman,
finally, the "Arthurian supports" of the worldly quest are dropped,2
leaving us with the pure psychology of the lover's and beloved's inner
states, refracted through a highly complicated allegory. As Winthrop
Wetherbee has noted, the earlier romances had never attempted such
full-scale presentation of psychological states. 3 This innovation repre-
sents a landmark in the development of the medieval romance character,
ROMAN DE LA ROSE: MEDIEVAL ALLEGORY 95
because never after this is character drawn without attention to, and
portrayal of, the enormous complexity of human responses which
Guillaume and Jean inexorably establish.
The Roman's innovations are many. First, it explores far more
extensively than any previous romance the quandaries and psycholog-
ical stratagems of the beloved, since her personality is analytically
presented solely through the numerous characters of the allegory. C. S.
Lewis points out that Guillaume's innovation in thus representing the
lady's struggles is masterly:
... this ostensible banishment of the heroine from the stage does not prevent her from
being vividly present to an attentive reader throughout. ... If she takes no part in the
action, it is because her heart is most often the scene of the action. Any protracted
wooing involves a conflict not only between the man and the woman but between the
woman and herself; it is this second conflict which occupies the most interesting scenes
in the Romance. 4
Secondly, Jean, in his lengthy conclusion of the poem, builds greater
ambivalence into the psychology of both parties. Through the use of outer
landscape, digression and tragic myth to reveal inner change he incor-
porates, particularly in the beloved, a negative current which qualifies
the seeming "progress" of the lovers toward their union, and suggests
a subconscious set of doubts and uncertainties which are at work in
her.
Charles Muscatine has emphasized the notion of the psychological
terrain which the Roman portrays. He differentiates Guillaume's poem,
at least, from its allegorical predecessors (for example, Prudentius's
Psychomachia) by seeing in the Roman a new interest in the life within
the individual, rather than in external moral imperatives which create
the internal conflict:
[Prudentius'sj action is largely dictated by the prescriptive moral sense, from without. The
interest, as in moral allegory as late as Spenser's Faerie Queene, is to "fashion" the
reader "in vertuous and gentle discipline", and not, as in the Roman de La Rose, to
analyze the peculiar combination of forces in the individual mind and to display from
within the necessary interaction between its experiences and responses ... in strategy
these allegories are typically more medieval than Guillaume's; his is a species which nearly
resembles modern psychological fiction. 5
Many critics would argue that a romance or allegory cannot sustain the
psychological "realism" which Muscatine would seem to suggest. But
this is precisely the point: in the Roman, neither the lover's nor the
beloved's responses are particularly unique; in some way each is meant
to be stereotypical. What is striking, and yet profoundly accurate, is

the poem's penetrating look at the psychological responses of each -
but again, responses we might even call "generic" to each party. What
is new is not the individuation of a unique character's responses but
the exploration of the deeply psychological reactions and motivations
of the lover, for example, qua lover. 6
Although allegory was the literary genre of choice at the time the
Roman was written, as with any genre, it is very possible - perhaps
more likely - to write a weak, artificial allegory which limps along
predictably without having any particular profundity or relationship to
human experience. Were Guillaume and Jean portraying responses and
reactions which did not correspond to some common experience of
love, the Roman for all of its narrative beauty would have been dismissed
ultimately as pretty allegory or political soap-boxing. What made the
Roman so influential and widely read, among other things, was pre-
cisely its profundity and its complicated treatment of the then ubiquitous
subject of human love. 7
Several scenes from the Roman will illustrate the exciting terrain
this allegory yields, terrain which was new because it was psychological.
Since Guillaume's more traditional allegory of the lover in pursuit of
his rose has been more frequently addressed in criticism, I will focus
upon several passages from Jean's conclusion to establish (1) his
innovations with the allegory form and (2) his contributions to the
increasingly sophisticated craft of medieval characterization.
As Guillaume's half of the poem ends, Amant, having procured a long
sought-for kiss from the Rose, has been ousted from her presence, with
a castle thrown up in her defence. Jean's poem opens with a dejected
Amant, bewailing the woes of service to his cruel lord, Amor. Amant
then enters into a long, at times stichomythic, debate with Reason
(4221-4428). The lover is at odds with but simultaneously intrigued
by Reason's arguments about the nature of love. Although he enter-
tains her and her counsel for some time, he will finally reject the
imperatives of reason for the imperatives of love. If we consider the
longer view, that Amant will ultimately succeed in his quest for the Rose,
these numerous psychological conflicts along the way introduce an
undercurrent of doubt and reluctance - one which will resurface in
Chaucer's creation of Criseyde in his romance/tragedy, Troilus and
Criseyde. From the Roman Chaucer would learn how to invest the
character's thinking with the dark currents of doubt, and at his most
ROMAN DE LA ROSE: MEDlEV AL ALLEGORY 97
sophisticated moments, those of which the character is not wholly

conscious. The Roman, through the figures of its allegory, uncovers the
path such doubts take within both Amant's and the Rose's psyches and
reveals how manifold and extensive they are.
Reason begins with a series of charges against Amant's master and his
torments. She chides Amant, too: "you were a fool when you set out
on this affair. But undoubtedly you do not know the lord with whom
you are dealing" (4240-41).8 Proceeding to question him regarding the
nature of the God of Love, she confirms by his responses how little
Amant knows of him. Amant admits that Amor gave him the rules of
love and fled. Reason seizes the opportunity to instruct him and com-
mences defining love by a series of oxymoronic statements which
elucidate its essentially contradictory nature:
a state of rest both too fixed and too movable. It is a spineless force, a strong weakness
that moves all by its efforts. It is foolish sense, wise folly, a prosperity both sad and
pleasant. [4320-28)
The varied forms of debate and antithesis the romance uses in getting
at the nature of love reveal the complicated, not simplistic, view of
love which medievals had. If Reason is the voice of truth, or at least
Jean's version of it, what she reveals about the nature of love must
have some degree of truth to it, and certainly the oxymoronic speech
to which she is reduced will strike its readers as a convincing descrip-
tion of love. But even assigning Reason her B significance as "truth"
places us on particularly shaky ground: her very place as "Reason" within
the context of a romance seriously qualifies the "truth" she propounds,
for in this romance - as in any - it is Amor, or Cupid, who must be
the purveyor of truth. Her role in the fiction which Jean creates is to
attempt to head Amant off at the pass, to convince him with logic and
reason to abandon the "folly" of love. But her words have, finally, no
significance for Amant, for in some sense she cannot represent "truth"
to him. Even this small example reveals how complicated this partic-
ular allegory is and how dangerous a business it is to assign referents
or to assume that such equations can be made with facility.
Finally Reason tells Amant that he must flee Amor if he wants to
escape. When Amant admits that he doesn't understand and needs a better
definition of love, Reason begins the first of her many discourses by
stating that love corrupts nature by perverting the sexual act into a lustful,
not procreative, one:
Love, if I think right, is a sickness of thought that takes place between two persons of
different sex when they are in close proximity and open to each other. It arises among
people from the burning desire, born of disordinate glances, to embrace and kiss each other
and to have the solace of one another's body. [4376-86]
Thus the debate itself eventually leads into a long monologue (4429-
6900) by Reason as she discloses her views on various aspects of love.
Her extensive, digressive arguments are futile, finally, but serve at least
two purposes: (1) to reveal the extent to which doubt and regret inform
the discouraged Amant's thoughts as he considers the dangers of love,
and (2) to allow Jean to treat a variety of subjects, from Fortune to Wealth
to true happiness and so to incorporate some Boethian principles into
the counsels of Reason. Amant, true to his calling, will ultimately reject
these counsels, dismissing them as "foolishness".
The final battle in Jean's poem (15303-21780), which culminates in
Amant's victory, concerns the extensive struggle between Venus and
Resistance to level the tower encasing the Rose. As with much of the
Roman, the battle proper takes place within the Rose's psyche; in fact
the Roman reveals far more fully the internal psychology of the Rose
than that of Amant. In this final internal conflict, however, her debate
leans in favor of Amant. As the battle begins, Openness advances toward
Resistance; with this first advance, we receive the tip-off as to how the
battle will turn out.
Vestiges of the epic surface in this final battle in the Roman, as for
example in the opening description of Resistance. Consider the opening
lines:
Very humbly, Openness first encountered Resistance, who was very proud and courageous,
cruel and wild in appearance. He held a mace in his hand, and brandished it so proudly
and aimed such dangerous blows all around him that no shield could have held together
without being smashed to bits unless it had been a wondrous one. [15303-15]
It is common practice in the classical epic to describe with care the

various weapons the hero wields. Jean makes it a point throughout this
battle to detail each such weapon, giving each a name appropriate to
its allegorical "owner," as with Resistance's club (or mace) made from
the wood of Refusal, and his shield made of brutality and embroidered
with "outrageous treatment" (15320). One thinks of Achilles' shield,
so carefully described in Book 8 of the Iliad, or Aeneas's weapons, which
Vulcan toils over in Book 8 of the Aeneid, when Venus helps ready
Aeneas for the last battle against Turnus and the Rutulians. In the latter
work, Virgil painstakingly describes the craftsmanship of Vulcan:
ROMAN DE LA ROSE: MEDlEV AL ALLEGORY 99
[Aeneas] turned over in his hands

The helmet with its terrifying plumes
And gushing flames, the sword-blade edged with fate,
The cuirass of hard bronze, blood-red and huge -
. . . the polished greaves
Of gold and silver alloy, the great spear,
And finally the fabric of the shield
Beyond description.
[Aeneid 8. 839-47]9
Jean also includes in his final battle a truce of ten to twelve days much
like the twelve-day truce King Latinus calls between the Trojans and
the Rutulians in Book 11 of the Aeneid. As the epic trappings gradu-
ally fall away from romance form, it is significant that Jean would include
in his poem such an obvious allusion, or parallel, to the victorious
conclusion of the Aeneid. But it is not surprising, since the external,
martial warfare of the epic has been transformed into the internal, amatory
and thus psychological warfare of the romance. Jean uses the epic
material not only for the erudite literary allusion, but also for the new,
more psychological purposes he has for his allegory.
As for the psychological battle itself, Jean is unfailing in his intui-
tion regarding the Rose's receptiveness to Amant's approach. In the above
passage, although Openness initiates the battle, Jean's description of it
focuses almost immediately upon Resistance's threatening qualities and
array of weapons. The poet imbeds even the Rose's openness with uncer-
tainty: the narrative tells first, how "Very humbly, Openness first
encountered Resistance" (15303), only to shift to a IS-line description
of the terrors Resistance threatens. Despite Openness's first sally at
Resistance to force the gate, and despite her impressive armaments, her
lance made of timber of the forest of Cajolery, and her shield made of
supplication and carefully embroidered, Resistance overcomes her in their
skirmish. He breaks her lance and strikes her shield with such force
that she recoils, falling backward. Resistance then proceeds to heap
insults upon her:
I believed you before ... you filthy lady, you false slut, but it will certainly never
happen again. Your lying betrayed me, and because of you I allowed the kiss to give
comfort to the wanton young man ... it was a bad day for you when you came here to
attack our castle, for here you must lose your life. [15378-81]
Resistance's temporary victory and chi dings of Openness reveal the

self-chiding of the Rose, who initially welcomes Amant's approach but

quickly rallies her defenses and argues down the former willingness
which had allowed Amant's kiss.
Although Amant was successful in his quest for the kiss in Guillaume's
poem, the battle lines were heavily drawn against him there, as the fol-
lowing chart shows:
for against
pity Foul Mouth

Fair Welcoming Resistance
Jealousy
Shame
Fear
By contrast, the forces in Jean's final battle marshall themselves for

Amant as follows:
for against
Openness Resistance
Pity Shame
Delight Fear
Hide-well Chastity
Hardihood
Amor
Sweet Looks
Venus
In the column representing the Rose's defenses against Amant, only

four characters in all appear, and so are clearly outnumbered by two to
one. Not surprisingly, in Guillaume's poem it is just the reverse, with
the defenses of the Rose outnumbering her willingness. The Rose in
Jean's poem, then, comes to side strongly with Amant, ensuring Venus's
final victory as she storms the castle at the end of the poem; this again
presents no surprise. But what is telling in Jean's depiction of the battle
is that his beloved takes a third longer to give in than does Guillaume's,
despite the doubling of characters "within" her encouraging the lover;
where Guillaume's battle had covered over 800 lines, Jean's covers
1289 lines, excluding digressions. Clearly Jean is more interested in

subtle psychological interplay than is Guillaume. tO Far from Muscatine's
charge that the Lady "disappears" in Jean's poem/I she is clearly invested
here with great psychological complexity. Chaucer's adaptation of
Boccaccio's Criseida will show the same kind of extension of internal
conflict; Chaucer had not only Boccaccio's internal conflict but also
Jean's dilatory - but more important - highly ambivalent, model to
draw upon.
Midway through the battle, there is a general skirmish between
Security and Fear, at which point it looks as if the sides are equally drawn.
But this is the pivotal point in the struggle, because now Amor intervenes
to ask Sweet Looks and Openness to call for Venus's return. He then calls
the twelve-day truce. Jean, again manipulating the artifice, inserts here
a digression describing Venus and her counsel to Adonis, mirroring
Ovid's Venus-Adonis conversation in Book 10 of the Metamorphoses.
Venus's counsel to Adonis which "interrupts" the battle is actually one
of the many components contributing to the negative narrative tone which
Jean is building in tandem with the course toward the lovers' union.
Out on a hunt with Adonis, Venus enjoins him to hunt only the gentler
animals:
Harts and hinds, he- and she-goats, reindeer and fallow deer, rabbits and hares - these I
want you to chase .... But I forbid bears, wolves, lions, and wild boars. [15713-17]
Adonis ignores her warnings and pursues a boar which ultimately kills
him. While the narrator supplies a moral for this story - namely, that
one should believe his lover's words, which are "as true as history"
(15755) - there would seem to be another, larger purpose for the
inclusion of this tragic myth at this point in the poem: to continue to
add in ambivalence in the Rose's response to Amant's pursuit of her
but through digression rather than directly through the plot. Such
darkening of tone is not used to foreshadow a tragic ending ahead but
to contribute a sense of naturalism to Jean's depiction of human love.
The course of "events" leading up to the final consummation are much
more troubled and psychologically complicated than they are in
Guillaume and so provide room for a new, more complex problematic
type of character in medieval literature. 12
After Venus and Amor's unsuccessful attack on the Castle of Jealousy
that ends the truce, Jean launches into his last extensive digression in
the poem, that spoken by Nature (15891-20682). Again, it is Jean's orga-
nization and placement of this digression within his allegory which is

particularly provocative. Following Nature's long speech, Genius presents
two gardens successively, asking the barons of Love to choose for
themselves which is the better.
First he describes the garden of Mirth, partially represented by the
reign of Jupiter and the passing nature of earthly joys; next is the
portrayal of the Shepherd's garden, clearly intended to be the true garden
with its New Testament imagery of the shepherd, white lamb, and wolf,
and representing lasting joys. Despite the applause of Love's barons
following the description of the Shepherd's garden, the barons rush to
assist Venus in her final attack on the beloved. The ironies in this passage
are many: Genius, the proponent of procreative love, preaches a sermon
designed to illustrate the virtues of spiritual love; the barons are
unanimous in their praise of the Shepherd's garden but turn immedi-
ately to facilitate the very manifestation of the Garden of Mirth as the
poem comes to its ambivalent close.
On the level of plot this sermon obviously prepares Venus and Love's
barons for the last assault as well as foreshadows its ultimate victory. But
on a psychological level, it reveals the final uncertainties in the Rose and
her increasing, albeit reluctant, willingness to give in to sexual love.
For Jean to suggest that this is happening within the Rose by means of
Genius's double sermon to the listening barons is to manipulate the
allegory by depiction of outer landscape to suggest an inner change.
Chaucer employs a similar type of narrative indirection when he depicts
Criseyde entering the garden near the house after her long internal debate
in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde. There she hears the virtues of love
praised in the song of Antigone (again, a mythological heroine of tragic
associations) and only later does she acquiesce to her emerging love
for Troilus through a dream.
The attack of Venus and the barons commences with the end of
Genius's sermonizing, but only to be interrupted again for Jean's last
Ovidian digression concerning Pygmalion, Cinyras and Myrrha. The
retailing itself of these myths is in its own way ambivalent and two-sided,
typical of Jean. The Pygmalion myth presents a story of idolatry
appropriate to Amant's worship of the Rose, which has been commented
upon amply by critics. Much less frequently noted, however, but
extremely important to the ambivalent narrative tone Jean has been
developing, is the inclusion of the Cinyras/Myrrha story of incestuous
love. 13
Jean is following the genealogy given in Metamorphoses Book 10,

which presents Paphus, the daughter of Pygmalion, as the mother of
Cinyras. He does follow the line down to Adonis, son of King Cinyras
and his own daughter Myrrha. But this is not a slavish imitation of Ovid's
presentation of a family from mythology; instead, the retelling of this
chain of events from the tragic lament of Orpheus at precisely this point
in Jean's narrative only adds to the negative tone which he has been
incorporating all along into his version of the loverlbeloved quest. In
Ovid as well the Pygmalion story precedes that of Cinyras/Myrrha, but
it is not so clear that the Pygmalion story suggests principally how not
to love. In the Metamorphoses the Cinyras/Myrrha can be said to act
as a foil at some level to its preceding tale, qualifying the representa-
tion of successful human love with a portrayal of abnormal passion.
The question that needs to be asked is why Jean would choose to present
a distorted view of human love above and beyond the strategically placed
Pygmalion "cautionary tale" - particularly at the close of the Roman,
where the Rose is ostensibly inclining toward Amant. Not only is his
"quest" more psychologically complex in what it reveals of Amant and
especially the Rose, but it contains built-in ambiguities and ambivalences
which in themselves undercut the quest and seriously qualify the notion
of the "pure" love which Guillaume aimed to present.
Following the Pygmalion/Myrrha digressions, we return to the Rose,
whose resolve has seriously weakened while Amant's has strengthened.
The final victory of Amant is no surprise: Venus sets on fire and over-
throws the castle, and Amant enters the ivory castle and consummates
his passion with a willing Rose. Yet we can see the Rose's inner struggle
throughout the battle which makes up the entire poem, "writ large" across
the interplay of allegorical characters beginning with Openness and
running through Resistance, Pity, Shame, Delight, Hide-well, Fear,
Hardihood, and finally Venus, Amor, and Chastity as the battle for the
consummation of love reaches its climax. Amant's final victory is seen
by most to represent, if not a rape, a purely sexual victory.
Whatever Jean's intention with the final union of the pair, we can trace
the elaborate psychological stratagems both parties create on their way
to this union. Never before have the vagaries and reversals of psycho-
logical states been so thoroughly examined in romance, and never so
plausibly, as they are in the Roman. That is, the allegory does not present
in place of character an arbitrary or even simply light-hearted arrange-
ment of psychological attributes; instead, a close look at the sequence
of allegorical figures reveals markedly keen insight into the operations

'Jf the human psyche.
Because the Roman concentrates more upon the psychological than
the moral concerns of many medieval allegories, because it indirectly
presents to us more complicated character, it has a unique place in
medieval literature as it anticipates the more overtly, and sometimes
exclusively, problematic quality of modern literature. In the way in which
it provides a means to knowledge, rather than simply being a "container"
of it, it shares features with Biblical writing whose most powerful
significance is often, according to Jesse Gellrich, unexpressed. Although
Gellrich rightly claims that much medieval allegory, or at least medieval
allegorizing of biblical narrative, hypostasizes and so becomes the
relatively straightforward "container of meaning,,,14 the Roman, perhaps
because of its more secular orientation, provides an interesting excep-
tion: its most powerful contributions in its representation of the psyche
are those which remain unexpressed. Jean does not show the beloved's
most perplexing moments of ambivalence and reluctance by introducing
a character named Ambivalence; instead he searches for new means
within the narrative, including digression and tragic myth, to express
something of this reluctance within her. It is not strictly an omission
of comment, as we often find in the most dense Biblical writing, and
yet the usual equipment of allegory does not suffice, either. Gellrich's
description of Biblical writing's laconic nature could well describe the
latter part of the Roman:
Biblical writing differs because its "meaning," like the kerygmatic claim of the New
Testament, can have no words adequate to its value and sanctity, is not present in words
at all, but comes into being only in an adequate response. 15
When Jean begins to load his allegory with allusions to darker, tragic
myths and to signal changes within character by the presentation of a
different external location, such as the garden, these are new, more highly
sophisticated ways of suggesting the interiority and problematics of
character and ones whose influence would be felt in later medieval
characterization.
University of Delaware
NOTES
1 Demetrius, On Style, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 1973; Loeb Classical Library; in Aristotle, 23 vols.) Vol. 23, pp. 99-101.
2 C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford
University Press, 1936; rept. New York, 1968), p. 116.
3 Winthrop Wetherbee, 'The 'Romance of the Rose' and Medieval Allegory', European
Writers: The Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. William T. H. Jackson (New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983) 2 vols., Vol. 1, p. 324.
4 Lewis, Allegory of Love, p. 118.
5 Muscatine, 'The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance', PMLA
68 (1953), 1163. See also David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and
Authority in the First 'Roman de la Rose' (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), who investigates the precise identity of the Rose and of the NarratorlLover.
Hult at times imposes too rigorous a logic upon the allegory (one example: "If Bel Acueil's
fault lies exclusively in his having laid open access to the rose, why not simply expel
him ... and fortify the rose's protection?" [po 243]).
6 To some extent it is difficult to speak of a "generic" lover or beloved. However, as
the popularity of medieval (and modern) love literature attests, and the various works
on the art of love playfully suggest, there are some generalizations which can safely be
made.
7 Today over two hundred manuscripts of the Roman are still extant, according to Charles
W. Dunn, ed., The Romance of the Rose, by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun,
trans. Harry W. Robbins (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), p. xxv.
8 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles
Dahlberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
9 Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
10 This sophisticated assembly of psychological states proves Jean a superb allegorist,
and not the "bungler" Lewis claims he is (Allegory of Love, p. 141).
11 Muscatine, 'The Emergence of Psychological Allegory', p. 1182, n.48.
12 After Chaucer, Shakespeare adopts a similar technique, for example, in the bittersweet
closing lover's duet between Lorenzo and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, in which
the two refer to numerous mythological examples of slighted love: Cressid, Thisby,
Dido, Aeson [Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1974), V.i.6-14J.
13 Kevin Brownlee, 'Orpheus' Song Re-sung: Jean de Meun's Reworking of
Metamorphoses, X' (Romance Philology 36.2 (1982), 201-09) in his discussion of the
Pygmalion-Cinyras myths, mentions but does not comment upon the significance of the
latter - apart from its place in Ovid's text.
14 Jesse Gellrich, 'Medieval Interpretation and Mythology', Analecta Husserliana 18
(1984), pp. 186, 190.
15 Gellrich, 'Medieval Interpretation and Mythology', p. 191.
JOAN B. WILLIAMSON
ALLEGORY IN THE WORK OF

PHILIPPE DE MEZLERES
Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter's collection of essays

on ineffability and "the struggle of language to speak about dimensions
of reality which are ineffable, that is, which lie 'outside' the powers of
speech", opens with a citation from St. Augustine: "What can anyone say
about you, 0 Lord, and yet woe to him who says nothing". 1 St.
Augustine'S question aptly defines the problem facing Philippe de
Mezieres (c. 1327-1405) as he urged on fourteenth century society his
prescriptions for the reign of the Kingdom of God on the earth; and
one of the devices Philippe uses is the "inexpressibility topos", described
by Schotter as a medieval commonplace, employed by mystical poets
to express the Divine. 2
A writer himself, Philippe uses the imagery of writing paraphernalia
to develop the topos of the ineffable; and he thereby aggrandizes his
subjects without limitations imposed by description, in the way that poets
from antiquity had used this originally classical device. 3 Philippe conveys,
for example, the idea of the superlative virtue of the Virgin Mary by
noting the inadequacy of pen, ink and parchment. In phrases reminis-
cent of the Koran (Sura 3: 27), he writes that if all the sea were ink,
the plains of Syria were parchment and all the trees in the forest of
Fontainebleau were pens, yet they would not suffice for him to adequately
describe the Virgin.4 Elsewhere, in Le Songe du vieil pelerin, Philippe
comments that ink, pen and hand would fail anyone who attempted to
describe the flame of love and the marvellous works of the divine lady,
Charity: "Mais qui de la flamme amoureuse, enluminant les cuers des
vrayes amans <qui> de ceste sainte rayne et de ses doulces et mer-
veilleuses oeuvres vouldrayt escripre, et bien s'efforceroit, certes, ancre,
parchemin et la main lui fauldroit".5
This last description of the indescribable by the expression of the
impossibility of such description occurs in conjunction with a second
linguistic strategy for dealing with the unnamable: the use of allegory.6
Allegory is, in fact, Philippe's dominant mode for conveying the
ineffable. At this point let us remember that he was a late medieval author,
for whom allegory almost certainly meant what has been defined earlier
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, 107-121.

108 JOAN B. WILLIAMSON
by Isidore of Seville, for example, as alieniloquium, representing one

thing by another, as Gerard J. Brault has reminded us. 7 Philippe uses
the literary format of allegory in this sense. He uses it to present his vision
of a reality we cannot yet see without veils.
In this, Philippe de M6zieres, of course, was heir to a long tradition.
We find allegory already in the Bible, where abstractions are personified,
e.g., "Doth not wisdom cry? And understanding put forth her voice?
She standeth in the tops of high places", 8 although this use of the feminine
pronoun is possibly merely the grammatical consequence of the feminine
gender of abstract nouns in Latin. The medieval practice of multiple
levels of scriptural exegesis favored the allegorical mode, while the 4th
century Psychomachia of Prudentius gave impetus to allegory as a
narrative genre. A discussion of the development and analysis of allegory
is not appropriate here, having been amply chronicled by others. 9 I
mention simply a few works whose influence Philippe certainly expe-
rienced. In addition to the Bible (which he cites often) and its
interpretation, there is the De Consolatione philosphiae of A. M.
Severinus Boethius (480-524), with his persona of Lady Philosophy
(Reason), echoed in the figure of Divine Providence in Philippe's Songe
du vieil pelerin, as it is by Faith and Revelation in the De Consolatione
theologiae by Philippe's contemporary, Jean Gerson. There is the
monumental 13th century Roman de la Rose of Guillaume de Lorris
and Jean de Meun, to which Philippe refers by name several times in
his writings. 10 There are, particularly, the Pelerinage de vie humaine,
the Pelerinage de l'ame and the Pelerinage de Jesu Crist of Guillaume
de Deguileville, whom Philippe calls the "noble moisne de Chaalis"
and from whom he draws some of his imagery of the pilgrim of life, such
as the scarf, staff and little white cake. ll There is intertextuality between
these and Philippe's writings.
James I. Wimsatt has defined Middle English Literature as typically
didactic, abstract, allegorical, encyclopedic and idealistic. 12 This defines
the work of Philippe de M6zieres equally well. Wimsatt has also
presented the different forms of allegory occurring in Middle English
Literature and these forms too are found in Philippe's writings. Medieval
literature may contain topical, scriptural and personification allegory:
in the first, fictional characters and story represent the doings of historical
people; in the second, allegory is written in imitation of the allegory found
by medieval exegetes throughout the Bible; and in the third, personifi-
cations, along with objectifications, represent abstract concepts. 13 On
ALLEGOR Y AND PHILIPPE DE MEZIERES 109
another level we see that, in addition to love allegory and psycholog-

ical allegory, there is also revelation allegory in which direct divine
revelation is needed to solve problems. 14 Philippe de Mezieres' narra-
tive allegories contain elements of all of the above, with a strong presence
of personification/objectification allegory.
Philippe de Mezieres was a prolific writer, composing works in both
Latin and French, which are all informed by religious fervor. He wrote
tracts for the celebration in the West of the originally Eastern Feast of
the Presentation of the Virgin; he sent his nephew a missive on the duties
of the priesthood; he composed a book on the virtue of the sacrament
of marriage, which is in large part a meditation on the Passion of Christ;
and he wrote a vast treatise in the genre of instruction for a prince, Le
Songe du vieil pelerin, that provides an encyclopedic view of the world
of his day. His other writing centered on the establishment of his chivalric
order of the Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, works that were to make
of him the foremost crusade propagandist of the end of the fourteenth
century.15 He left two redactions in Latin and two in French on the rules
of his order. 16 His Oratio tragedica ... is a lament on the issues of his
day, particularly the occupation of Jerusalem.17 His Letter to King Richard
II essentially urges the English King to make peace with France so that
together they might go on crusade to free Jerusalem; 18 while his Epistre
lamentable et consolatoire sur Ie fait de la desconfiture LacrimabLe du
noble et vaillant roy de Honguerie par Les turcs devant la ville de
Nicopoli, addressed to the Duke de Bourgogne in 1396 is a last call to
rally Europe to the idea of crusade. 19 Basically he aspires to the coming
of the kingdom of God upon the earth.
Philippe made much use of allegory. We consider here three of his
works that consist essentially of a complex web of allegories intricately
intertwined. In Le Livre de La vertu du sacrement de mariage, composed
between 1384-89, he writes of four kinds of marriage, commemorating
the four reasons why we should love one another. These marriages are
the spiritual marriage of God and the rational soul, created in the image
of God, in the act of creation and confirmed in baptism; the spiritual
marriage of Christ and our humanity, which was consummated in the
Incarnation; the spiritual marriage of Christ to the Church and the Virgin
Mary, standing for the Church; and the spiritual marriage of man and
woman. Thus marriage between man and woman is shown as a kind of
mirror of the other three marriages. But these other marriages are not
presented directly, for they are represented by the marriage of the Fine
Ruby to the Fine Diamond, where the ruby is Christ and the diamond
is sometimes the Virgin Mary, other times the Church. The spiritual
marriage of Christ to the Church and the Virgin Mary, the Passion of
Christ, is narrated figuratively as a doleful wedding.
These four kinds of marriages are presented as in a four-faceted mirror:
in the first facet we see the fine ruby in relation to the diamond, and
then the marriage of the Ruby to the Diamond, for first Philippe talks
of the properties of these stones, then he narrates their union as allegorical
figures. In the second facet we see the wedding of the Queen, both mother
and spouse of her King, and the difficult task of Redemption. In the
third facet we see the virtue of spiritual marriage between men and
women and, through exempla and figures, moralizations on the maladies
that afflict women unfaithful to Christ and their mortal husbands and
on the remedies to these ills. In the fourth facet we see the virtue of
spiritual marriage between God and the rational soul, the reason why
the soul must love God (according to Hugh de St. Victor in his allegorical
De arrha animae, from which Philippe draws the tale of Vashti, repu-
diated by Ahasuerus and replaced by Esther), and the mirror for married
ladies that is Petrarch's story of Griselda, the Marquise de Saluce.
Thus we see already, not only that certain unions represent others,
but that the mystic (who equated human activity with divine) and the
lapidary and alchemist (who discursed on properties and unions of
precious stones) are also become a physician, writing of moral quali-
ties as of diseases and their remedies. The indirect presentation, where
all these things are seen as it were in a mirror, is echoed by the allegorical
system of using exempla and tropes. To these allegorical approaches
already indicated, Philippe adds: the figure of the author as gardener
and pharmacist, gathering flowers, herbs and spices for the physician's
remedies; the sailor on the sea of life, discursing on the compass, the
lodestone and the stars; the unworthy cook, inadequately assisting in
the preparation of lordly dishes; the bumbling musician who can pump
the bellows for others to play the instruments; the narrator of stories of
virtuous and wicked women; the inarticulate, but aged writer portrayed
in the picture of an old, tattered book, with broken back and corners
gnawed by rats; the miraculous writing of the names of Jesus on the hearts
of those constant in prayer; the allegorical war of the Biblical Jeroboam
and Rehoboam against Solomon, and that of Adonay against Sathael with
the attendant sufferings of Bethsheba, which Philippe claims to have
drawn from St. Augustine's De Civitate Dei, but which is not found in
ALLEGORY AND PHILIPPE DE MEZIERES 111
any extant texts; and the allegory of the life and Passion of Christ
presented as part of the divine plan of Redemption, to which we will
return later.
The dedication miniature on the opening page of the book emblem-
izes the evocative nature of the whole work. That this was Philippe's
intention is determined by the certainty that he was himself involved
in the production of this miniature, as I have shown elsewhere. 20 In this
miniature, Philippe, on bended knee, offers his book to his donors with
one hand while pointing with the other to an infilled quatrefoil overhead,
thus signifying that the content of the book and the letters YHS in the
quatrefoil are connected. These gold letters, outlined in black, have
penned in black ink within them the scene of the Crucifixion: the letters
representing the name of Christ crucified conjure up that act.
Philippe returns to some of this imagery in his Letter to King Richard
II, written in 1395, almost certainly by royal command, to urge the
widowed King of England to marry the juvenile daughter of the King
of France and so achieve peace. We have again the allegorical value of
the Ruby and Diamond, here transposed to represent the two kings.
Alchemy operates in this work also, for fine balm is transmuted into
the carbuncle and the lodestone into the diamond. Again the author is
lapidary and physician, with moral evils represented as poisons and
wounds. Again there is scriptural allegory, with the brothers Moses and
Aaron as a concordance of the two Kings. Esther, Abigail, and Ruth
are offered as examples of virtuous wives, as are also, in what Philippe
terms the New Covenant, Helena, wife of Constantine the Great, and
the humble Griselda. Philippe opposes in this work the Delectable
Orchard to the Garden of Horror and Perils. The first is a kind of fertile,
benevolent island of the blessed such as that passed by St. Brendan on
his voyage, or the land of the Bargamains which King Alexander once
visited, but left in peace. The second, a place of foreboding and threat-
ening nature, where sin, strife, cold, want and sterility reign, is host to
blood-sucking leeches in its rivers and voracious locusts in the air.
Philippe explains the concordance of these two gardens: they represent
respectively the road to Paradise and the road to Hell, as did St.
Augustine's two cities in his De Civitate Dei.
Le Songe du vieil pelerin, finished in 1389, contains also a rich web
of allegory. There is so much symbolism in this work that the author
offers an eight and a half page list of allegorical figures to enable the
reader to keep their identities clear in this long, two-volume work. The
author, in a waking vision, divides into two allegorical halves: Ardent

Desire and Good Hope, who are guided by a figure of divine interven-
tion, Divine Providence, to seek the return of virtues, presented as
divine ladies, who had fled the wicked earth. Essentially a personifica-
tion allegory, this work takes the reader on an immense world journey,
in which appear other symbolical concepts: the perilous sea, with a
volcanic island standing for Hell; the ship of state representing the four
estates of France, with the officers on board standing for members of
French society; the King's four-wheeled battle chariot, drawn by four
allegorical creatures and attended at its wheels by divine ladies; the chess
board, with its sixty points representing the private and public duties
of the French King, Charles VI, and his choice of officers; divine
consistories at which the relative merits of various cities and states are
judged. Added to these are allegories, to mention some of the most
important, of precious stones; of the Biblical parable of the talents,
developed in a system of forges for the minting of currency; of the
clock by which Nature governs; and the four winds representing vices
except for the East Wind taken for the grace of the Holy Spirit; and of
two latter-day Moseses: the author as a failed Moses, and Charles VI,
first a Moses rapt to Mount Sinai where Truth presents him with the
tablets of the law, and then a Moses in apotheosis, bedecked in the
jewelled gifts of the divine ladies.
Animal symbolism is much in evidence in this work, with some
animals representing vices, such as the bat that stands for Lucifer; others,
serving virtually as heraldic devices, signify historical personages, such
as the black boar who represents the Duke of Lancaster. Philippe fre-
quently uses animal symbolism, the ability to anthropomorphize them
serving his allegorical purpose.
Nowhere has he used animals allegorically to greater effect than in his
description of the unicorn in the Livre de fa vertu du sacrement de
mariage. Following the tradition of the medieval bestiaries, Philippe
makes of the legend of the unicorn tamed by the maiden an allegory
of the Incarnation of Christ. As I have explained elsewhere, in Philippe's
version the mirror that the Virgin holds up to the unicorn is both the
mirror of her shining virginity and humility and a mystical hymen,
symbolizing the virginal conception of Christ. 21 The Unicorn laid not only
its head and horn in the Virgin's lap, but, with its whole body and soul
become infinitely small, passed through the mirror to the virginal chamber
of her womb, without breaking, deteriorating, nor besmirching in any
ALLEGORY AND PHILIPPE DE MEZ[ERES 113
way the shining mirror, which became more resplendent after than before
for she carried in her body the Light of the world. 22 With the eroticism
of the mystic, Philippe presents here a comprehensible allegory of the
mystery of the Incarnation, with its attendant mystery of the virgin
birth, for the unicorn was an animal in which medieval people implic-
itly believed, yet which none claimed to have seen in the flesh.
Philippe reaches both literary and mystic heights in his use of the
allegory of light, as we see in the allegory of the unicorn, where he
incorporates Christ's own words: "I am the light of the world".23 Our
author proffers many images of light. His imagery of allegorical chariots
illustrates their eye-arresting quality. First there is King Charles' royal
battle chariot, which represents the King's military duties. 24 This chariot
is, with the four creatures that draw it: the eagle, the lion, the ox and
the beast in human form, an evocation of Ezechiel's vision, which we
recall was all light and fire. 25 And there is the chariot of fire in which
Queen Charity departs at the close of the consistory in Paris, with its
deliberate reference to Elijah's chariot of fire: "un charyot de feue et
de flambe, comme fist Helyas Ie prophete, qui rendy si grant clarte
voire par maniere d'espart horrible et de tonnaire".26
Philippe's use of the imagery of light is particularly appropriate in
didactic works which present life from a religious point of view, for,
as Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka reminds us, the imagery of light occurs
naturally in connection with the working of the intellect and con-
sciousness, where comprehending is often referred to as the act of
seeing.27 Tymieniecka also reminds us that light symbolizes the sacred. 28
That this is so for Philippe is also exemplified by the closing words of
his allegory of the unicorn, as we have seen.
The Scriptures are full of the imagery of light representing God,
particularly the Gospel of John and Book of Revelation in reference to
Jesus Christ, frequently cited by Philippe in his writings. From such
scriptural statements the early Church, starting in the sixth century with
Dionysius the Areopagite and continuing through Abelard and St.
Bernard, developed a philosophy that God is light. 29 George Duby has
treated this development magisterially in Chapter 5, "God is Light:
1130-1190", of his book The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society,
980-1420, to which I here refer the reader.30
Continuing in this tradition, Philippe makes a rich contribution to
the iconography of light. In Le Songe du vieil pelerin, he equates light
with understanding. When the preternatural light surrounding the divine
Queen, Charity, is extinguished as she departs from the scene, Philippe

presents the contrasting darkness that ensues as an eclipse: "que l'eure
de midy fust transmuee en un instant quant a clarte a I' eure qui est
appellee chien et loup", commenting that the shadows are those of
ignorance: "Assez tost apres l'esclipse sustouchee, et ou dit consistoire
regnans les tenebres d'ignorance de la grant perte de Doulce Amour la
royne et de sa suer Sapience". 31
Philippe underlines the concept of light as understanding when he
modifies the natural etymological pun on Charles VI's name, which
derives Carolus from "caro lux", and offers the etymologically incor-
rect "clara lux", clear light: "Par droit nom de baptesme que tu es
appelle Lumiere: car Charles en Latin, qui est Kalolus (sic), selon son
interpretacion vault autant a dire comme clara lux, cliere lumiere". 32
Emphasizing the idea of the light of understanding, Philippe stresses
that the symbolism of Charles' name means that as he is enlightened
he must then illuminate his people:
Se donques, Beau Filz, tu es cliere lumiere, enluminee de lassus du Pere des lumieres,
sicomme Ie dit saint Jacques I' appostre en sa canonique, par raison en ceste lumiere
premierement tu te doiz cognoistre et toy aymer en Dieu, selon Ie dit de Hue de Saint
Victor, car charite commaince a soy mesmes. Apres tu dois cognoistre et aimer tes subgiez
qui so nt, ou doivent estre, enluminez de ta cliere lumiere. 33
An idea Philippe repeats in his use of the image of a chandelier:

car tu es, Beau filz, la cliere lumiere de Francois, assize et ordonnee sus Ie chandelier
de la mageste roy ale des blanches fleurs dorees, de laquelle lumiere des Ie premier jour
de ta nativite, come il fu dit dessus, tous les Gallicans s' attendent estre enluminez. 34
In Philippe's works light also points to and emanates from the divine,
as in the Bible Moses encounters God in the form of the burning bush. 35
In Le Songe du vieil pelerin the pilgrims are guided by light to the hermit,
Arsenius, who instructs them on how to reach the heavenly ladies they
seek.36 The divine ladies themselves exude light: Divine Providence,
shining like the sun,37 first approached the Old Pilgrim; Truth shines with
light;38 and Charity is clad in a sable coat of shining fire. 39
The allegory of Moses in Le Songe du vieil pelerin is perfused with
light. Charles VI is shown as Moses in apotheosis, the horned Moses,
as he stands before his people, his head in an aureole of light reflected
from the bejewelled gifts of the divine ladies.40 But light is particularly
associated with the Godhead as Charles VI is rapt into his Mount Sinai.
In recollection of the Biblical thunder and lightning enveloping God's
encounter with Moses,41 Charles is hidden from the view of his people
by light:
Encores est escript que la montaigne resplendissoit et fumoit et que Ie peuple n'osoit
regarder en hault; c' est assez proprement la clarte et lumiere diverse du cercle des cham-
brieres qui reluisent come I' arc en ciel. Lesquelles chambrieres en leur resplendeur rendent
une fumee selon la diversite de leur vertu, aus ungs terrible et aux aultres maldisposez
tres redoubtee. 42
In writing of light Philippe exploits medieval notions concerning the

properties of stones. It is in Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage
that we see the fullest development of his thought and where he proffers
his version of the theology of God as light. Drawing on the authority
of Albertus Magnus, Philippe ascribes to the diamond and the carbuncle
particularly special attributes, which he exploits allegorically as he makes
the Diamond the Virgin Mary and the Carbuncle Christ. Philippe makes
of the three kinds of rubies (the ruby, the carbuncle and the balas ruby)
the three persons of the Trinity, representing the mystery of this rela-
tionship by reference to Albertus Magnus's claim that the carbuncle
and ruby were engendered in the balas ruby.43 The carbuncle, writes
Philippe, is Jesus Christ, for it is the source of its own light and
therefore shines in the darkest of night.44 While this of course is not
true, Albertus Magnus, Philippe's source again, does make the claim
that "when it is really good it shines in the dark like a live coal, and I
myself have seen such a one".45 What is to the point is that this quality
was generally attributed to the carbuncle in the Middle Ages, as attested
by the carbuncle on Alexander's tent in Le Roman d'Alexandre: "Deus
pomiaus i a tieus qui sont bon par nature,! Li uns est d'un charboucle,
qui luist par nuit obscure" (Branch 1, vv. 1954-55).46
This self-generating light of the carbuncle ignites with the flame of
Charity (for Philippe cites John's definition that God is love)47 on the
Cross where Christ showers the blaze of his redemptive love on the
whole world:
Qui pourroit estimer la flambe d'amour ardant de nostre Fin Rubin et de la Fine
Escarboucle resplandissant et donn ant lumiere a tout homme qui vient en ce monde,
voire resplandissant en la croix et estandant ses bras pour embracier et atraire a lui I' umaine
generacion, encores resplandissant d'une lumiere et clarte merveilleuse qui en ce monde
jamais ne fu trouvee: ce fu quant il pria a Dieu, son pere, qu' i pardonast a ceulx qui Ie
crucifioient, lesquelx estoient ses anemis mortelz?48
Philippe has understood the significance of Christ's words: "I am the

Way, the Truth and the Light",49 words, furthermore, that Philippe himself
paraphrases. 50
The sacrifice of Christ on the Cross is the climax of the Redemption
theme, as told in the allegory of the Four Daughters of God, a
personification of Psalm 84 (Vulgate numbering), v. 11: "Misericordia
et Veritas obviaverunt sibi: Justitia et Pax osculatae sunt".51 A rabbinical
allegory, a debate over whether to create the world, becomes in Christian
hands a presentation of the plan of Redemption. Strife among the four
daughters over their causes being or not being served by the Redemption
is settled when Christ offers to take man's place in the Atonement. But
first the virtues visit the earth to find one acceptable to God, one who
has enough love to expiate man's sin. Finding none they return to God
where the Son of God offers himself.
Popular in the Middle Ages, the first redaction of this allegory was
by Hugh of Saint Victor (1097-1141) and the second by Saint Bernard
(1091-1153), whom Philippe identifies as his source in Le Livre de la
vertu du sacrement de mariage. 52 Thus it is that a document that was
part of the rise of mysticism, written by two theologians who were among
the first mystics, lies at the heart of Philippe's writings; for this allegory
runs as a leit-motif through his writings, providing its remarkable unity
of reference, indeed through his very life's work, if we are to believe
the explanation of his vocation as he describes it in De la Chevallerie
de la Passion de Jhesu Crist. For the four supernal queens, Divine
Providence, Predestination, Dispensation and Divine Permission, all
daughters of God, who give Philippe in this work his mandate for a
chivalric order in their crystal palace, are surely born of Mercy, Peace,
Justice and Love. 53
This allegory occurs in Philippe's Letter to King Richard II 54 and
also lies behind Le Songe du vieil pelerin. In this work, Charity and
Wisdom, accompanied by Truth, Mercy, and Justice, had fled the earth
finding its sinfulness inhospitable to them. When Ardent Desire and Good
Hope find them on the Holy Mountain, they cannot persuade them to
return. Leaving Queens Charity and Wisdom behind, Queen Truth and
the Ladies Peace, Mercy, and Justice tour the earth with the pilgrims
to see if there is any place where they can set up a forge wherein to
mint their coinage struck with the sign of tau. Charity and Wisdom
descend for the investiture, as it were, of Charles VI as Moses. Then
all the supernal ladies depart, leaving behind their lieutenants to assist
in the reformation of the world. Thus Le Songe is essentially a retelling
ALLEGORY AND PHILIPPE DE MEZIERES 117
of the allegorical voyage of the Four Daughters of God, set, however,

within the time frame of the fourteenth century.
The allegory is also prominent in Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement
de mariage, where Philippe tells it directly. He narrates briefly the
altercation between Justice and Truth on the one hand and Peace and
Mercy on the other as to God's pardoning humanity for sin, attributing
the theme to St. Bernard. 55 Some folios further on,56 Philippe again
addresses the matter of the Redemption by telling a story of the Council
of the prophets, kings and patriarchs of the Old Testament in the prison
of Jeroboam.57 This after having just narrated the fall of Satan from
Heaven and humanity'S subsequent sin as the rebellion of Jeroboam,
Solomon's eldest son, against his lord and father, and how he managed
to get his younger brother to rebel also. 58 Jeroboam, called Vigilant, is
Satan. The younger brother, Malavise is Adam. At the time of the
consistory of the patriarchs, all Adam's descendants are imprisoned in
the prisons of Jeroboam. They meet to seek a way to obtain God's
forgiveness. Isaiah, Job, Ezekiel, Moses and David all speak the words
they do in the Bible. It is decided that David will approach God. He does,
supported by the angels, and obtains God's forgiveness, for Justice, Peace,
Truth and Mercy dwelt with God. David returns to earth, is reminded
by Solomon of Mary, whom God finds beautiful. Then follows the
Annunciation where Mary accepts the mission asked of her. Thus the
allegory of the Four Daughters of God occupies an important place in
Philippe's meditation on the Passion of Christ.
In attempting to ascertain what allegory means for Philippe, we are
fortunate that he himself addressed the questions of what he means by
and how literally he expects his readers to accept his allegories. But he
is not simplistically clear. Writing of his idea to found his Order of the
Passion of Jesus Christ, he narrates that it seemed to him that he entered
a crystal palace in spirit, "en esperit" and there saw the four ladies who
gave him his mandate to found his chivalric order. 59 The significant
phrase here is "en esperit". Philippe perhaps uses this phrase in the
sense it is used in the Book of Revelation, where John writes of being
in the spirit when he experiences visions. 60
Philippe is undeniably a mystic. In Le songe du vieil pelerin, he
informs the King that after drinking the wine of the sacrament he may
find himself ravished in spirit, made one with the spirit of God:
Beau Filz, se tu prendras cestui precieux calice reveramment, comme il appartient, et

sans riens hesiter, par adventure tu te trouveras si yvres que tu seras raviz en ton esperit,
fait un avec l' esperit de Dieu, selon la sentence du benoist Pol de Tharse. 61
The phrase "en ton esperit" obviously has mystic significance here, a
reading confirmed elsewhere by his belief that Paul along with St
John the Evangelist and others pierced the heavens to visit with God. 62
Such writing, comments Coopland in his introduction, "takes us into
regions remote from ordinary experience", for "the possibility of
such absorption is of the essence of mysticism as it appears in all
religions" .63
Yet we must not necessarily always take the phrase "en esperit" in
its mystical sense. Philippe surely did not anticipate that his readers would
all have the qualities of mystics. He writes of the faculty of the imagi-
nation, which let us remember, was not a term restricted in the Middle
Ages to fantasy as it is today, but referred rather to the intellectual process
itself. When he writes: "vous peserez bien en la balance de vostre
ymagination",64 he recognizes this quality of the mind; and it is possible
and indeed quite probable that at times when he used the term "en
esperit", he was inviting at least some of his audience to turn to this
faculty of the mind.
He quite clearly has an intellectual meaning in mind when, referring
to the spirit that gives life for St. Paul, he tells his readers not to take
literally (i.e., as literally true) all that is said figuratively and in con-
templation:
Et vous, mes dames seculers lisans ceste gracieuse matere, ne penses pas que tout ce
qui est dit de lui et par figure et contemplacion soit avenu tout a la lettre alegant sou vent
au propos de la sainte Escripture, car saint Paoul I' apostre dit que la lettre ocyt et
I'entendement et esperit vivifie. 65
We do not of course fully comprehend what being "in the spirit" means
in the Book of Revelation, nor the effect the Eucharist has on the mystic's
apprehension of the divine, but it is clear from the passage of the Livre
de la vertu du sacrement de mariage just cited that for Philippe this
phrase, at least in this context, indicated seeing immaterial things
presented physically in a non-physical way: a graphic analogy for
allegory.
Philippe uses allegory both to awaken the creative faculty in his
reader's mind and to evoke the experience of the mystic. He himself cites
the Bible's approach to naming the unnamable: "Eye hath not seen nor
ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things which
ALLEGOR Y AND PHILIPPE DE MEZ[ERES 119
God hath prepared for them that love him". 66 Allegory is the only way
he has to treat of such things: the alternative is silence.
Long Island University
NOTES
1 Confessions, I, vi. Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, ed. Peter
S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), p. l.
2 Schotter, 'Vernacular Style and the Word of God: The Incarnational Art of Pearl', in
Hawkins-Schotter, Ineffability, pp. 23-34, (p. 28).
3 Marjorie Garber, "The Rest is Silence': Ineffability and the 'U nscene' in Shakespeare's
Play', in: Ineffability, pp. 35-50, (p. 35).
4 Philippe de MlSzi~res, Le Livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage, f. 43. This text
is contained in Paris, Biblioth~que Nationaie, MS. fr. 1175. All citations from this work
are taken from the edition which I am completing.
5 Philippe de MlSzieres, Le Songe du vieil pelerin, ed. George W. Coopland, 2 vols.
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969), Vol. 1, p. 212.
6 The word "linguistic" is used advisedly, for, as Edwin Honig says, allegory "is a
genre beginning in, focused on, and ending with 'words, words'''. Edwin Honig, The Dark
Conceit: The Making of Allegory (N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1966), p. 15.
7 The Religious Content of the Chansons de Geste: Some Recent Studies, in:
Continuations. Essays on Medieval French Literature and Langauge in Honor of John
L. Grigsby, ed. Norris J. Lacy and Gloria Torrini-Roblin (Birmingham, Alabama: Summa
Publications Co., 1989), pp. 175-86 (p. 181).
8 Prv 8: 1-3.
9 Useful titles are: 'Dante's Letter to Can Grande', tr. Nancy Howe in Essays on Dante,
ed. Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968), pp. 32-47; Angus Fletcher, Allegory:
Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1964); Edwin Honig, The Dark
Conceit: The Making of Allegory (N.Y.: Oxford UP, 1966); Maureen Quilligan, The
Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell, UP, 1979); Paul de Man,
Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust (New
HavenILondon: Yale UP, 1979); Paul Ricoeur, Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. Lewis
S. Mudge (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983); William Schweiker,
Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (N.Y.: Fordham
UP, 1990); Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their
Posterity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1966); James I Wimsatt, Allegory and Mirror:
Tradition and Structure in Middle English Literature (N.Y.: Pegasus by Western Publishing
Co., 1970).
10 E.g., Le Livre, ff. lv, 92, 103.
11 Le Livre, ff. 111 v and 112 respectively. Ed. J. J. Stiirzburger (London: for the
Roxburghe Club, 1893, 1895, 1897), 3 vols.
12 Allegory and Mirror, p. 17.
13 Allegory and Mirror, p. 23.
14 Allegory and Mirror, pp. 57, 61-90, 91-116, and 117-136, respectively.
15 Aziz Atiya, The Crusade of Nicopolis (London: Methuen, 1934), p. 24.

16 Described and partially published by Abdel Hamid Hamdy, Philippe de Mezieres
and the New Order of the Passion, in 3 parts, rpt. Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts, Alexandria
University, Vols. 17 (1963) and 18 (1964).
17 Contained in Paris, Biblioth~que Mazarine, MS. 1651.
18 Ed. George W. Coopland (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976).
19 Partially published in Oeuvres de Froissart: Chroniques, ed Henri Marie Bruno Joseph
L60n Kervyn de Lettenhove, 15 vols. 1867-77 (Brussels: V. Devaux et Cie, 1872), Vol.
16, pp. 414-523.
20 Joan B. Williamson, 'Paris B. N. MS. fro 1175: A Collaboration between Author
and Artist', in: Text and Image, ACTA, Vol. 10 (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center of Medieval
and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1986),
pp.77-92.
21 This description is taken from Joan B. Williamson, "The Lady with the Unicorn and
the Mirror", in: Reinardus, Yearbook of the International Reynard Society for the Study
of the Beast Epic, Fable and Fabliau, Vol. 3 (1990), pp. 213-35, (p. 232).
22 Le Livre, ff. 74v-75.
23 Jn 8: 12; 9: 5.
24 Le Songe, Vol. 2, pp. 166-68.
25 Ez 1: 5-15.
26 Le Songe, Vol. 2, p. 494.
27 The Passions of the Soul and The Elements in the Onto-Poiesis of Culture; Logos
and Life, Book Three (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), p. 83.
28 The Passions of the Soul, p. 93.
29 As proclaimed by In 1: 5.
30 Tr. Eleanor Levieux and Barbara Thompson [from Le Temps des cathedrales; L'art
et la societe 980-1420 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976)] (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981), pp. 97-135.
31 Vol. 2, p. 494.
32 Le Songe, Vol. 2, p. 131.
33 Le Songe, Vol. 2, pp. 131-32.
34 Le Songe, Vol. 2, p. 165.
35 Ex 3: 2.
36 Vol. I, p. 191.
37 Vol. I, p. 89.
38 Vol. I, p. 201.
39 Vol. I, p. 203.
40 Vol. 2, p. 484.
41 Ex 19: 18 "And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended
upon it in fire: and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole
mount quaked greatly".
42 Le Songe, Vol. 2, p. 128.
43 Le Livre, f. 133. Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, tr. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 19(i7), p. 75.
44 Le Livre, f. 14. Letter to King Richard ll, pp. 90-91. In this lallt instance Philippe cites
the authority of Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, p. 78.
45 Book of Minerals, p. 77. In n. 2 to this page Dorothy Wyckoff, the translator, offers
three possible explanations for such a claim: that Albertus was repeating an old story
coming by way of Pliny from Theophrastus of a stone that burns when wet, or recalling
a trick he has seen, either a trick with a doctored stone or an optical trick.
46 The Medieval French 'Ronum d'Alexandre', 5 vols. 1937-42, Version of Alexandre
de Paris, Texas, ed. E. C. Armstrong, D. L. Buffum, Bateman Edwards, L. F. H. Lowe,
Elliott Monographs 37, rpt. of Princeton: Princeton UP, 1937 (New York: Kraus, 1965),
Vol. 2, p. 44. Arthur Harden has also chronicled other mentions of the carbuncle in
Medieval French Literature, particularly the epic, in 'The Carbuncle in Medieval
Literature', Romance Notes 2 (1960-61), pp. 58-62.
47 "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love". I In 4: 8. Le Livre, f. 41.
48 Le Livre, f. 16.
49 In 14: 6.
50 "Vie, Verit6 et Voie a vie pardurable", Le Livre, f. 16.
51 "Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other".
52 F. 38. While Philippe clearly knew Guillaume de Deguileville's treatment of the
allegory in his Pelerinage de Jesu Crist, for Charity and Wisdom, Deguileville's addi-
tions, occur in Le Songe, there is no reason to doubt Philippe's claim.
S3 Paris, Bibliotheque de l' Arsenal, MS. 2251, f. 7v.
54 P. 88.
55 Ff. 37-39.
56 Ff. 50v-55.
57 Philippe claims to have this narrative from the as yet unidentified Table des Pauvres.
58 Le Livre, ff. 46v-50v.
59 De la Chevallerie de La Passion Jhesu Crist, Paris, Bibliotheque de l' Arsenal, MS.
2251, f. 7v.
60 E.g., In 1: 10; 4: 2.
61 Vol. 2, P 171. Philippe's reference to Paul in this passage should be taken as an
indication of our author's intention, for the Holy Spirit bestowed freely on this apostle
the gifts of mystic contemplation, as Jacques Maritain reminds us (La Pensee de Saint
Paul [Editions de la Maison Fran~aise, Longmans, Green & Co., 1941], pp. 21-22).
62 Le Livre, ff. 14, 63.
63 Vol. 2, pp. 7-8.
64 F. 16.
65 Le Livre, f. 55. The allusion is to Paul 2 Cor 3: 6, which reads: "Who hath made us
able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter,but of the spirit: for the letter
killeth, but the spirit giveth life".
66 Le Livre, f. 78 refers to the citation from 1 Cor 2: 9.
VIRGINIA M. FICHERA
ALLEGORY AND THE PERFORMATIVE IN

JACQUES LE FATALISTE
"Je n' appartiens It personne et j' appartiens It tout Ie

monde. Vous y etiez avant que d'y entrer et vous y
serez encore quand vous en sortirez."
The inscription on the castle in Jacques Ie Fataliste,l cited at the

beginning of this study, will serve as "pre"-text for a work of reflec-
tion on language. After a brief presentation of certain theoretical
suppositions, we will attempt to describe the sphere of activity of these
two sentences, that is, to enumerate the questions and challenges they
suggest. The analysis is thus a linguistic and rhetorical examination of
the "literary meaning" of the inscription. The inscription will be examined
in the surrounding "context" of a longer excerpt from the book. The
passage chosen is typical of the novel in that the "narrator" reviews
the actions of Jacques and his master in a dialogue with the "reader".2
The text itself successively furnishes interpretive matrices of a referen-
tial, logical, and rhetorical nature.
In the wake of the discussion of the "forces" of language by J. L.
Austin, certain linguists (Lakoff and others) tend to consider the per-
formative aspect (the illocutionary forces) as inherent in every statement,
in every language or speech act. From a Saussurian perspective, the
performative is an attempt to "control" the representations engendered
by the concepts or signifieds of linguistic signs. Bally proposes that
" ... un concept virtuel de chose, de proces ou de qualite doit, pour
etre actualise et devenir un terme de l'enonciation, etre identifie avec une
representation reelle du sujet parlant".3 We therefore conclude that the
linguistic sign as performative evokes a context and representations in
the mind of the interlocutor who then attributes them to the speaker.
The performative acts as a "constraint" or restriction on the decoding
of these representations. As a constraint, the performative helps to recon-
stitute representations of the speaker but it can just as well give rise to
hesitations on the part of the interlocutor as to the exact interpretation
of those representations.
Every literary text is performative in that it furnishes representations

124 VIRGINIA M. FICHERA
to control. It would appear, however, that the interlocutor never succeeds

in achieving an absolute certainty, in diminishing the set of possible
representations to a single satisfying representation because the speaker,
too, is a representation and not a referent. It follows then that our aim
must be to draw out the possible but uncertain alternatives explicitly
posed by the written statement. In the course of this discussion, Austin's
notion of the performative will be completed by the overview refined
by Derrida in his article entitled "signature evenement contexte".
The excerpt begins as follows:
Et les voila embarques dans une querelle interminable sur les femmes; I'un pretendant
qu'elles etaient bonnes, l'autre mechantes: et ils avaient tous deux raison; [etc.]
The concept itself of "une querelle interminable" is realized throughout

the paragraph by the performative "pretendre" which juxtaposes radically
opposed semes in a general description of women. But the "represented
narrator" does not invite us to decide between these "positive" or
"negative" representations because "ils avaient tous deux raison" and "ils
auraient pu faire Ie tour du globe ... sans s' accorder". This part of the
excerpt presents both a "referential" matrix offering a choice of opposing
representations called "interminable" or uncertain and a formal or logical
matrix which links these polarized semes while forbidding a choice
between them.
The "narrator" continues by means of the following transition: "ils
furent accueillis par un orage qui les contraignit de s'acheminer ... ".
The performative "contraindre de s'acheminer" echoes "embarques"
and "faire Ie tour du globe" by underscoring the concept of "voyage".
The "voyage" is then superimposed upon or added to the concept of
reading by the sentence: "Quand je vous aurai dit que c' est a Pontoise
ou a Saint-Jacques de Compostelle en serez-vous plus avance?" By
collapsing these two "voyages" into one (the voyage of Jacques and
his master and ours as the interlocutor "constrained" by a linear text), the
"narrator" leads us:
... vers un chateau immense, au frontispice duquel on lisait: "Je n'appartiens a personne
et j'appartiens a tout Ie monde. VOllS y etiez avant que d'y entrer et vous y serez encore
quand vous en sortirez."
We have tried to reconstruct approximately the performative context

which precedes the inscription without stopping to examine the role of
the "represented reader" which will be discussed later in the essay. A
ALLEGORY AND THE PERFORMATIVE 125
simple reading of the conjunctions which constitute the inscription give

one the impression of metaleptic paradoxes of possession or property,
of presence and closure. The "shifters" indicate at least two interlocu-
tors Ge-vous) and a spatial context (y); the temporal element is introduced
by the opposition of the verb tenses and by "avant" and "encore". It
would be difficult to "represent" to oneself the concepts of this inscrip-
tion without having recourse to other performatives, that is, to the
surrounding sentences. But does the context formed by those sentences,
this discourse-tale told by a "represented narrator", help us to control
the representations or does it insist on maintaining an uncertainty or
indecision?
We know that the quotation is an inscription on a castle; the "je" refers,
it would seem, to the edifice in question and the "vous" to the "voyageur",
therefore to any reader. The inscription then appears doubly performa-
tive because it simultaneously presents itself as a paradoxical statement
to be interpreted and as the only description of the castle. The inscrip-
tion and its "context", like the "querelle interminable sur les femmes",
is situated within two matrices, referential and formal. But how does
one imagine such a castle and integrate it into a referential matrix?
What mental image should be assigned to it? The first part of the inscrip-
tion is paradoxical because knowing to whom a castle belongs does not
figure in its representation. On the other hand, every experience of
material and physical closure contradicts the second half of the inscrip-
tion. In the given "context" of an encounter during a voyage it seems
impossible to be there before coming in or to stay there while leaving.
The only possible physical exception would be a presence which would
precede the establishment of the closure. The presuppositions of the usage
of the words in question render impossible a representation of the castle.
However, the reader represented in the text operates within the
referential matrix while not caring about the problems of the represen-
tation of the castle and the "narrator" responds by taking up the matrix
we have labeled formal or logical.
Entrerent-ils dans ce cMteau? - Non, car I'inscription etait fausse, ou ils y etaient avant
que d'y entrer. - Mais du moins ils en sortirent? - Non, car I'inscription etait fausse,
ou ils y etaient encore quand ils en furent sortis.
The "narrator" articulates the second conjunction of the inscription ("Vous

y etiez avant que d'y entrer et vous y serez encore quand vous en
sortirez") as ~p V P and ~q V q. This use of the matrix does not take
us very far for it simply rewrites the original conjunction by means of

the logic of non-contradiction. Once again, the "narrator" blocks any
attempt to stabilize a single representation within one or the other of
the matrices. Then, the same structure and the same mechanisms are
repeated (as they are throughout the novel):
Et que firent-ils Ia? - Jacques disait ce qui etait ecrit 11I-haut; son maitre ce qu'il voulut:
et ils avaient tous deux raison.
To summarize: the excerpt from Jacques Ie Fataliste is presented to

the reader as a performative text to decipher. On the level of its
signifieds, the text presents a "represented narrator" who tells a story
while depending on a logical matrix containing the principle of willed
ambivalence. The "represented reader", on the other hand, is obsessed
with a referential matrix; he wants to know and he wants facts to be
unique and unequivocal. The inscription, like the rest of the excerpt,
resists the work of the performative because it is not reducible to a
satisfying representation corresponding to a "reality". Up to this point,
the two matrices, both referential and formal, the tools of every reader,
fail on the diegetic level (within the story) and on the extra-diegetic levels
where we find ourselves as reader-interlocutors.
Just when the text seems condemned to an eternal repetition of this
"structure" which we have outlined, the "narrator" suggests a third matrix,
a rhetorical matrix, as the possible resolution of the first two, based on
"Ie vrai sens de l'inscription". It concerns "une vingtaine d'audacieux
... qui pretendaient, contre de droit commun et Ie vrai sens de l'inscrip-
tion, que Ie chateau leur avait ete legue en toute propriete". This second
use of the performative "pretendre" puts us on the trail of a new attempt
at decoding: the inscription as allegory of the relationships between
"presence" and property:
"Je n'appartiens 11 personne et j'appartiens 11 tout Ie monde. Vous y etiez avant que d'y
entrer et vous y serez encore quand vous en sortirez."
The first sentence is the "premise", the second sentence, a "conclu-

sion" from the first which plays on two "meanings" of "presence":
"presence" as property or possession (a "metaphorical" or "metaphys-
ical" meaning) and "presence" as physical and referential presence.
Insofar as one does not possess something, one is not "present" therein.
Therefore, referring to the castle, the inscription communicates the
following: insofar as it belongs to everyone, everyone "is" always there
(in the "metaphorical" sense), therefore, you "are" always there. The
inscription could just as well have formulated a second "conclusion":
"Vous n'y etiez pas apres y etre entre et vous n'y serez pas meme avant
que d'en sortir". For, insofar as the castle belongs to no one, no one
will ever "be" there (in a "metaphorical" or "metaphysical" sense),
therefore, "vous n'y serez jamais". The "vingtaine d'audacieux" wanted
physical presence ("[ils] s'etaient empares des plus superbes apparte-
ments") to equal possession and possession of the castle to be theirs
exclusively. Their interpretation is against "Ie vrai sens de l'inscrip-
tion" because physical presence is not pertinent to the inscription; only
"metaphorical or metaphysical" presence is at issue and "metaphorical"
presence is not necessarily coterminous with physical presence.
This rhetorical matrix is, in a sense, the result of an abstraction of
the other two matrices, referential and logical: the concepts are
"metaphorized" rather than represented and logic applies to this second
metaphorized meaning. Thus the inscription lends itself rather easily to
rhetorical classification. With respect to the referential matrix, the inscrip-
tion is a metaleptic paradox; with respect to the formal matrix, it is a type
of enigma. Since Du Marsais places enigma on the side of allegory,4
the inscription can be read allegorically as the "narrator" subsequently
suggests.
In continuing our linear reading, we notice that the "narrator" takes
up the old structure while seemingly abandoning allegory as amuse-
ment and "la ressource ordinaire des esprits steriles". He lets us choose
among several representations of a referential nature as to the "dernier
gite de Jacques et son maitre". Then he declares to us (to us and the
"represented reader") that "quoique tout cela vous paraisse egalement
possible, Jacques n'etait pas de cet avis: il n'y avait reellement de possible
que la chose qui etait ecrite en haut". How should one interpret this
last sentence whose frequency (and existence) in the book endow it
with this same quality of inscription? What is "ecrit Ht-haut" or "en haut"?
The referential and formal matrices permit two interpretations: one
"literal", the other "figural". Literally, what is "ecrit nl-haut" refers to the
linear pages which include the sentence in question. The representation
would in that case be the exact reference of the sentence. Figuratively,
the sentence is a metaphor of fate and of destiny, a metaphor often used
with this meaning in the history of the French language, indeed of several
occidental languages. Therefore, the sentence could even refer to the
inscription under consideration, to the possibilities enumerated just
before the sentence on the same page, etc. If we shift to the rhetorical
matrix, Du Marsais states that metaphor becomes allegory if it is "con-
tinuee".5 "11 n'y avait reellement de possible que la chose qui etait ecrite
en haut" could be doubly allegorical if we consider the metaphorical
meaning (already an allegory) as the allegory of the literal meaning.
The "fatalism" of writing would be the fact that it can and even must
refer to itself.
Since "ce qui etait ecrit la-haut" can refer to the inscription, it, too,
can be considered an allegory of writing. The inscription would then have
two possible meanings (which the text leaves us free to choose between)
which reintegrate it into the "ambivalent" structure of the whole passage,
if not of the entire book. The inscription on the castle, as a quotation,
can be allegorized in any other context, even with respect to itself. Insofar
as (written) language belongs to everyone, everyone can "be" in it as a
possible reader or writer. Insofar as (written) language belongs to no one,
it has no need of the "presence" of readers and writers. By slightly
modifying the syntax of the sentence, we can rewrite and reinterpret it
in the following manner:
'Ie' n'appartiens(t) ~ personne et 'j' 'appartiens(t) ~ tout Ie monde. 'Vous' y etiez (etait)
avant que d'y entrer et 'vous' y serez (sera) encore quand 'vous' en sortirez (sortira).
This second allegory of the inscription as a reflection upon itself, this
word play (which could seem "forced") reminds us in a striking manner
of the general view of language and the performative formulated by
Derrida. In his article "signature evenement contexte", Derrida speaks
of the
possibilite de prelevement et de greffe citationnelle qui appartient ~ la structure de toute
marque, parlee ou ecrite, et qui constitue toute marque en ecriture avant m8me et en dehors
de tout horizon de communication semio-linguistique; en ecriture, c'est-~-dire en
possibilite de fonctionnement coupe, en un certain point, de son vouloir-dire "originel"
et de son appartenance ~ un contexte saturable et contraignant. Tout signe, linguistique
ou non linguistique, parle ou ecrit (au sens courant de cette opposition), en petite ou
en grande unite, peut 8tre cite, mis entre guillemets; par l~ il peut rompre avec tout
contexte donne, engendrer ~ l'infini de nouveaux contextes, de fa~on absolument non
saturable. 6
We have seen that in the literary text under examination the two "alle-
gorical" sentences are given as quotations. Allegory depends on the
citationality of the text since allegory presupposes at least two contexts
(one of which is always "absent" or virtual, suspected or implied): the
context of its "literal meaning" and the context of its "figurative

meaning".
The correspondances between this text by Diderot and Derrida's
theoretical text are so strong that they appear equivalent. While
criticizing Austin, Derrida postulates that the performative cannot be
defined according to criteria of success or failure based on intention
and context and on the exclusion of the "infelicities" of language:
.. , la generalite du risque admise par Austin entoure-t-elle Ie langage comme une sorte
defosse, de lieu de perdition externe dans lequella locution pourrait toujours ne pas sortir,
qu'elle pourrait eviter en restant chez soi, en soi, 11 l'abri de son essence ou de son
telos? Ou bien ce risque est-il au contraire sa condition de possibilite interne et positive?
ce dehors son dedans? la force m~me et la loi de son surgissement?7
Derrida thus situates "presence" (and "absence") in the definition and

functioning of writing:
Pour qu'un ecrit soit un ecrit, il faut qu'il continue 11 "agir" et ~tre lisible m~me si ce qu'on
appelle l'auteur de l'ecrit ne repond plus de ce qu'il a ecrit, de ce qu'il semble avoir
signe, qu'il soit provisoirement absent, qu'il soit mort ou qu'en general il n'ait pas soutenu
de son intention ou attention absolument actuelle et presente, de la plenitude de son vouloir-
dire, cela m~me qui semble s'~tre ecrit "en son nom", On pourrait refaire ici l'analyse
esquissee tout 11 l'heure du cote du destinataire,8
If we examine Diderot's text in a more general manner, we

constantly find the same preoccupations, the same relationships of
presence and absence. The "represented narrator" always insists on the
pluri-possibility of contexts, facts, meanings, etc. The "represented
reader" wants to reduce the number of contacts, facts, meanings, etc.
to constituent controllable units of a single meaning. He is thus "naive"
and incapable of accepting what Derrida calls these "contextes sans aucun
centre d'ancrage absolu"9 imposed upon him by the "narrator" and writing
itself. Throughout Jacques Ie Fataliste, potentially or actually decep-
tive contexts are at issue (of which the story of Gousse and the episode
with Nicole are just two examples). The "represented character" of
Jacques reveals himself to be more docile than the "reader": he likes
to talk and he firmly believes in a quotation from his captain that "tout
ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas etait ecrit Hi-haut".
The performative acts as the necessity and the possibility of inter-
pretation in the pluri-possibility of contexts. Language must be interpreted
but its necessary context is situated outside of a single context: its outside
is within. In Jacques Ie Fataliste every statement is performative with
the value of a quotation (the characters and the initial incident themselves
are "quoted" from a novel by Sterne). The text defines itself by
thematizing its definition and the processes of its functioning by means
of "voices" as representations of the "situation of writing" while
simultaneously unraveling as a casual story about "something else".
But if it manages to define itself and thematize itself, it is only by
constituting itself as a performative context which is at once a single
context and the negation of the singularity of context as the condition
of its existence. Diderot and Derrida transform texts into enactments
of the allegory that is all language but at the price of the irony of the
text which must "fatally" constrain itself to a context in order to affirm
that it is not, by its very nature, subject to the constraint of a single
context.
NOTES
1 Denis Diderot, Jacques Ie jataliste et son maitre in: Oeuvres Romanesques, 6d.
H. B6nac (Paris: Garnier, 1962), p. 513.
2 Diderot, pp. 513-514.
3 Charles Bally, Linguistique gemffrale et linguistiquejranrraise (Bern: A. Francke, 1944),
p.78.
4 C6sar Chesneau Du Marsais, Traite des Tropes in: Le Nouveau Commerce: 15/16, 1970,
pp. 141-142.
5 Ibid., p. 139.
6 Jacques Derrida, "signature 6v6nement contexte", in: Marges de la philosophie (Paris:
Minuit, 1972), p. 381.
7 Ibid., p. 387.
8 Ibid., p. 376.
9 Ibid., p. 381.
BIB LIDG RAPHY
Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words, Oxford: 1962.

Bally, Charles, Linguistique genera Ie et linguistique jranrraise, Bern: A. Francke S. A.,
1944.
Bochenski, 1. M., Precis de logique mathimatique, Pays-Bas: F. G. Kroonder, 1948.
Derrida, Jacques, 'La cloture de la repr6sentation', L'Ecriture et la difference, Paris: Seuil,
1967.
- - , 'signature 6v6nement contexte', Marges de la philosophie, Paris: Minuit, 1972.
- - , 'signature, event, context', Glyph I, 172-197.
Diderot, Denis, Jacques Ie jataliste et son maitre in: Oeuvres Romanesques, ed. H.
B6nac. Paris: Garnier, 1962.
Dubois, J. et al., Rhitorique generale, Paris: Larousse, 1970.
ALLEGOR Y AND THE PERFORM A TIVE 131
Ducrot, Oswald, Dire et ne pas dire, Paris: Hermann, 1972.

- - , La Preuve et Ie dire, Paris: Mame-"Reperes", 1973.
- - et Todorov, Tzvetan, Dictionnaire encyclopedique des sciences du langage, Paris:
Seuil, 1972.
DuMarsais, C6sar Chesneau, Traite des tropes in: Le Nouveau Commerce: 15/16, 1970.
Fontanier, Pierre, Les Figures du discours, Paris: Flammarion, 1968.
Genette, G6rard, 'Fontieres du r6cit', Communications: 8, 1966.
Kavanagh, Thomas M., The Vacant Mirror: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth
Century, Vo1. elv (Banbury: The Voltaire Foundation, 1972).
Man, Paul de, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality", in: Interpretation, M. C. S. Singleton,
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
Ohmann, Richard, 'Speech Acts and the Definition of Literature', Philosophy and Rhetoric:
IV, 1, 1971.
- - , 'Speech, Literature, and the Space Between', New Literary History: IV, 1, 1972.
- - , 'Literature as Act', Approaches to Poetics, ed. S. Chatman, New York: Columbia
University Press, 1973.
Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique generale, Paris: Payot, 1972.
Searle, J. R., 'What Is a Speech Act?', in: The Philosophy of Language, London: Oxford
University Press, 1971.
Vendler, Zeno, 'Les Performatifs en perspective', Langages: 17, 1970.
KATHARINE G. MacCORNACK
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IN ALLEGORICAL

WORLDS: FOUR OLD FRENCH LITERARY EXAMPLES
The phenomenological epoche formulated by Edmund Husserl is

fundamental to his egological philosophy. Allegory as a literary genre
in the middle ages can be elucidated by a phenomenological approach
which focuses particularly on the epoche. This study will consider three
types of "bracketing" which are essential to the entire understanding
of the transcendental ego, and discuss them in light of allegorical
literature, specifically, four Old French texts from the thirteenth century:
Raoul de Houdan's Dream of Hell, 1224, Huon de Mery's Tournament
of the Antichrist, 1234, Guillaume de Lorris' Romance of the Rose, 1230,
and Jean de Meun's continuation or conclusion of the same, 1270. First,
I will discuss bracketing the external world in order to focus on the
perceptions of the conscious ego. Second, I will discuss the bracketing
of the ego itself, the "je" or "I" of allegory. Thirdly, I will discuss the
notion of intersubjectivity and bracketing objects in experience.
In a first step towards the transcendental ego, the epoche requires a
complete bracketing of the external world in order to reach the con-
sciousness, the eye, the transcendental ego that perceives, knows, sees,
and observes. In a lucid explanation of Husserlian phenomenology,
Terry Eagleton points out that the dismissal of all beliefs of the
existence and reality of an external world "in order to allow complete
concentration on phenomena as they appear before any "interpretations
of beliefs are attached to them". 1 This idea he borrows from Descartes
whose philosophical breakthroughs he honors as the sine qua non of
phenomenology. In order to examine the phenomena in the world, we
must first dismiss the existence and reality of the world so that we may
focus on pure cogitata.
In the Paris Lectures, Husserl posits a fairly straightforward presen-
tation of the task of the philosopher who seeks to understand reality: "We
thus begin, for himself and in himself, with the decision to disregard
all present knowledge".2 The "decision" is based on a rejection of
Descartes' premise that the existence of the world is apodictic. 3 Husserl
insists that the only apodictically certain phenomenon is the ego which
alone can create the world. He poses the essential question "Has not

© 1994'Kluwer Academic Publishers.
134 KATHARINE G. MacCORNACK
the coherent and unified totality of our experience been at times debased
as a mere dream? Is it not the case that occasionally something manifests
itself as a sensory illusion?"4
Medieval allegory responds affirmatively to this question because
the literary texts create worlds, perhaps illusory in nature, through the
medium of a dream. The texts ignore the external world of reality and
create allegorical worlds: Hell, the City of Despair via the mystical,
marvellous forest of Berceliande, and a garden of love. In order to
create meaning therefore, representation must be allegorical, that is, it
must occur in an other-worldly setting. The idea of dream allegory is that
one must get away from the world in order to represent and understand
how it functions. In the Dream of Hell, dreams are presented as being
occasionally full of fables but sometimes, they are realised: "En songes
doit fables avoirl Se songes puet devenir voir". (v. 1-2) The prologue
of the Tournament of the Antichrist states that the heart commands one
to act against one's will. This has nothing to do with love, "cuer" or
"heart" really corresponds to the mind of an urge within the soul. "Mon
cuer, qui sovent me comandel Faire autre chose que mon preul Me fist
faire aussi come veu/ Que je en Berceliande iroie". (v. 55-59) Guillaume
de Lorris' Romance of the Rose and the continuation by Jean de Meun
are also examples of dream allegory.
Husserl begins the Paris Lectures with a formal statement about the
personal nature of philosophy whose first task is to "attempt from within
to destroy and rebuild all previous learning".5 Jean de Meun clearly
proceeds in like manner by rejecting Guillaume's text as pure folly, and
by remodeling the genre towards a philosophical debate which parodies
the original allegory of love. The destruction of previous allegorical texts,
especially religious ones in favor of secular ones, is the ultimate goal
of the late thirteenth century writer of allegory. The idea is to "bracket"
all previous textual worlds and to create new ones.
All four allegories insist on the veracity of dreams. In Gullaume's
prologue, the author-narrator states: "Maintes gens dient que en songesl
N'a se fables non et men~ongesl Mes l'en puet tex songes songierl Qui
ne sont mie men~ongier". (v. 1-4) "I car endroit moi ai je creance.l
que songes soit signifiance.l des biens as gens et des anuisl Car li plusor
songent de nuisl Maintes choses couvertementl Qu'il voient puis
apertement". (v. 15-20) Some comments made by Husserl are very
similar to the medieval interest in dreams and their interpretations, and
the notion of veracity. "Whatever may be the veracity of the claim to
SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE IN ALLEGORICAL WORLDS 135
being made by phenomena, whether they represent reality or appearance,

phenomena in themselves cannot be disregarded as mere 'nothing",.6
Even phenomena experienced in a dream, representing "reality" or
"appearance" have meaning and existence. Husserl adds that "On the
contrary, it is precisely the phenomena themselves which, without
exception, render possible for me the very existence of both reality and
appearance". 7
This, indeed, is the aim of these four allegorical texts whose dream
structures render possible the representation of phenomena to the ego.
In the prologues, the veracity of dreams is stressed by an author-narrator
who introduces the dream-text as a rendition of his own dream. When
the texts end, with the exception of Gullaume's work which is unfinished,
the dream ends, the dreamer wakes up, and the explicit appears indicating
the conclusion of the work. There is no epilogue, no gloss at the end,
but rather, an abrupt termination. When the dreamer awakes, the text
reaches its closure. The last two lines of Jean de Meun's Romance of
the Rose read: "Atant fu jors et je m'esveillel Explicit li Romanz de la
Rose". (v. 21780-21781) Raoul ends in eleven lines after the dream ends:
"Congie prient Raouls, si s' esveillel Et cist sontes fault si a point!
Qu'apres ce n'en diroie point . . . ". (v. 672-674) After this, he
introduces his next allegory which is also a dream text. Beyond the
content of the dream, symbol of the exclusion of the outside world as
an existing entity, there is little or no text, only a short prologue focusing
on the veracity the reader should attribute to dreams, and an even shorter
end statement which merely exists to inform the reader that the story
is limited to the dream text.
Allegory by nature and design in the medieval period suggests an
attempt to represent a significant truth. As the eminent medieval scholar,
Daniel Poirion, points out in his preface the Old French edition of the
Romance of the Rose, it is the term "significance" or "meaning" in the
prologue about dreams that is the sign that the text is an allegory. The
genre is thus a producer of meaning, one that is only possible to reach
through the vehicle of allegory. The root of the term altos in Greek means
"other". Allegorical texts mean something other than what they say.
All allegories present a superficial narrative which actually means
something other than what it says. This "other" meaning occurs within
the context of a created allegorical world which is different, separate, and
unlike the external world.
The creation of "other worlds" in allegory, especially in the case of
our four medieval dream allegories, is possible only because of the

existence of the dreamer who dreams a dream which is a representa-
tion of a "world". These allegorical texts cannot exist without a first
person narrator who can experience the dream. It is the dreamer who
must distinguish between veracious and false perceptions in his dream,
his own consciousness. It follows then that the reader would accept the
allegorical challenge to decipher the enigma of the dreamer's experience.
As Husserl points out: "Any distinctions that I draw between veridical
and illusory experience, and between reality and appearance, occur
themselves within my own sphere of consciousness".8 The dreamer and
the reader must interpret the dream, which of course, occurs within the
sphere of consciousness of the narrator, "I".
The epoche which allows the "I" to perceive worlds and to reflect
seriously and truthfully of cogitationes and on their phenomenological
content is compared to an experience of psychology by Husserl: "We
are clearly dealing with a train of thought parallel to what the world-
centered psychologist calls inner experience of the self.,,9 The world of
medieval allegory experienced in the dream is an experience of a first
person narrator, "I". It is an experience of the narrator's own sphere of
consciousness.
The exclusion of the external world to the purpose of concentrating
on the self, the ego's sphere of consciousness, is, of course, the essen-
tial element of phenomenology, a philosophy based entirely on the
experience of the ego as the ultimate method to understand the
phenomena for the philosopher. Husserl notes: "It is the ego which, while
it suspends all beliefs about the reality of the world on the grounds that
these are not indubitable, discovers itself as the only apodictically certain
being".10 Hence, all understanding must come from the individual
experience of the ego.
Yet according to Husserl, it is difficult, if not impossible to objectively
view one's own ego without the epoche, or the bracketing of the ego
so that the transcendental ego may observe the experience of its own ego.
We have now reached the second aspect of phenomenology which lends
itself will to an elucidation of medieval French allegory. The action of
stepping back or removing one's perceptions away from the ego towards
a transcendental ego which then grants objectivity to the perceiving
experiencing subject is a perfect model of the self-reflexive nature of
allegory.
Maureen Quilligan, a medieval scholar of Old English allegory writes
"Allegory is (and always has been) the most self-reflexive and criti-
cally self-conscious of the genres, and because its purpose is always to
make its reader correspondingly self-conscious, the reader necessarily
belongs in its description"Y "Self-relexive" and "self-conscious" describe
both phenomenology and allegory. The two narrative voices in allegory
express a dual existence of the "J" speaker/narrator whose dream
narrative is a reflection on his "self" or his "consciousness". The "J" is
used throughout the entire text yet there is a clear distinction between
the I of the prologue who addresses the reader as a story teller and writer,
and the "J" who is a dreamer, the protagonist and narrator of the dream.
This distinction ressembles the one made by phenomenology between
the empirical and the transcendental ego. As Husserl explains: "The
phenomenological reduction thus tends to split the ego. The transcen-
dental spectator places himself above himself, watches himself, and
sees himself also as the previously world-immersed ego"Y
The epoche renders possible the conception of the transcendental
ego as an observer of existence, including the ego, that is external to
the world in the manner that a reader is external to a book. In the four
medieval allegories under consideration, one can clearly see the self-
reflexive nature of the ego at work in a world created by the ego. The
reader observes with the objectivity of transcendence along with the first,
effaced "I" of allegory. Both share the authority to observe and create
by interpretation.
In the two religious allegories, the Dream of Hell and the Tournament
of the Antichrist, the ego is a Christian mind who steps back to observe
himself, in fact his soul, and the battles which ensue within. The world
created in the dream is perceived and experienced by the ego who travel
through space like a pilgrim in search of an admonished and redeemed
soul, or Christian identity. The "I", or the transcendental ego, is the
observer and interpreter on the dream, the speaker of the prologue, and
by nature, the reader. Following the tradition of the fourth century
Psychomachia by Prudentius, Raoul de Houdan and Huon de M6ry
represent the battle between the vices and the virtues within the Christian
soul. The experience of the ego is that of the dreamer wandering through
Hell and the city of Despair, experiencing abstract ideas and notions
through his encounters with personified characters such as Envy, Pride,
Vain Glory, Anger, Charity, and Hatred. On another textual level, the
"I" who is awake, observes and begins to interpret the dream, some-
times through interruptions in the narrative. The reader of allegory by
definition becomes the ultimate observer and interpreter of the text as

slhe identifies with the "I" in this medieval form of didactic literature.
The "I" of Guillaume's Romance of the Rose is a young man in his
twentieth year. The dreamer is complex in that he begins as a mere
dreamer but is transformed within the dream into a lover. The wall around
the garden shuts out those qualities inimical to love, thus compartmen-
talizing the realm of consciousness. Inside the garden, one finds only
qualities which favor love. Some scholars maintain that the allegorical
reading of this text requires a detailed analysis of the thought process
which goes on within a woman's psyche when she attempts to decide
whether to welcome or refuse her lover. If we step back to the "I" of
the prologue, we see in the dream-text, both the "Is" ego as a lover
and the psyche of the women and of other objects, or personified
abstractions. Husserl claims "my natural life becomes merely one part
of or one particular level of . . . my transcendental life".13 As the
transcendental ego observes its natural life, the ego, it perceives not
only itself on another level or in another form, but also, other objects.
The most important point to be noted at this junction is the inten-
tionality of experience, the extent to which the world, and even parts
of the self, are constructions of the ego. Through the epoche "I reach
the ultimate experiential and cognitive perspective thinkable. In it I
become the disinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and
its life" .14 That "disinterested spectator", who may observe and inter-
pret the world and himself, is the effaced "I" of allegory who appears
in the prologue.
"All that which exists for me exists by virtue of my cognitive
consciousness; everything is for me the experienced of my experiencing,
the thought of my thinking, the theorized of my theorizing, the intuited
of my intuiting. Everything that is exists for me only as the intentional
objectivity of my cogitationes" .15 In other words, all objects in the world,
and the world itself are creations, the cogitata of the transcendental
ego. Allegory proceeds on this same fundamental principle of pheno-
menology. In the four medieval allegories, the "I" narrator, story teller
creates the dream and all the phenomena of the dream through his
perceptions and observations. The text is the world, a world of the
"I-pole" and the protagonist is the ego. The other objects in the created
world lead us to the third point of his paper, bracketing objects in
experience other than the ego, and the notion of intersubjectivity.
Phenomenology, although egological, insists that the intersubjectivity
precludes the danger of solipsism. Objects perceived by the transcen-

dental ego are the cogitata of the cogitationes. This premise shows that
the fundamental epistemological problem of an external world is that
of transcendence, the ego's ability to reach out beyond reason, beyond
the senses, to the real and permanent world outside. Phenomenology
maintains that through epoche, transcendence is possible, and that the
transcendental ego may create the world through intentionality.
The essence of consciousness is intentionality which means that the
ego intends the objects of his consciousness. Now consciousness acts like
a stream between the subject and the objects. There is no meaning to
the isolated ego. To be a subject means to confront an object, just as it
follows that to be an object means to be perceived by a subject. According
to Husserl: "Intentional analysis is the disclosure of the actualities and
potentialities in which objects constitute themselves as perceptual units" .16
In this quote, the father of phenomenology brings up both the importance
of the constitutional problem of intentionality and the notion of a "horizon
of expectations". The ego perceives only what it can expect within the
potential of certain horizons.
Just like the ego of experience, the "I" of the four allegories has no
meaning in and of itself, or by itself. By its existence, it proves that
there is meaning because to bracket the ego, means that it has meaning.
In the two religious allegories, the allegorical world and the existence
of an observing "I" render possible a meaningful literary text with an
interpreter inside the soul of the meditating Christian. In the two
allegories of love, the gardens and the "I" lover/dreamers allow for a
literary text filled with meaning to be interpreted. However, the "I"s
by themselves are meaningless if they do not perceive objects, person-
ified abstractions, and interact with them. The encounters of the I's
with the characters in the four allegories are producers of meaning in
an intersubjective manner. The congregation of the ego interacting with
other entities creates a populated world, and allows for experience on the
part of many objects.
Intersubjectivity and the transcendental realm aim to avoid solip-
sism. There are four important points which prove that the world is not
solipsistic discussed in the Paris Lectures. 17 First, the idea that space
occupied by other minds is experienced space. Second, that the ego's
experience of other minds discloses them as being interlaced with nature.
Third, that other minds appear to the ego as experiencing the same
world that it experiences. Fourth, and finally, other persons appear to
the ego as entities that experience the ego in turn. Ergo, the world is
intersubjective, not solipsistic.
Allegory proceeds in like manner. The I's in the four texts encounter
abstract entities with whom they engage in discursive exchanges. At
the City of the tavern in Raoul's Dream of Hell, "I" becomes embroiled
in a physical struggle with Drunkenness. In the Christian, didactic setting,
the experience of "I" is that of the mind's experience with that weak
aspect of human nature, and the temptations of the world. If anything,
this allegorical text exaggerates intersubjectivity by presenting the "I"
with so many opportunities to experience the minds of others who are
easily recognized as Envy, Usury, and named characters who possess evil
qualities. Yet all these abstract entities remain constructions of con-
sciousness. All the personified abstractions are part of the nature of the
world represented, part of human nature.
The third and fourth points are particularly interesting with respect
of Jean de Meun's Romance of the Rose. Other minds appear to the
ego as experiencing the same world that it experiences. In the garden
of love, the lover hears diatribes on numerous subjects including
Averroism, Narcissism, political debates within the Universities in the
mid-thirteenth century. These diatribes are delivered by thinking minds
who appear in the form of personified abstractions such as Nature,
Genius, Reason, and also by and old woman. These personified abstrac-
tions and other characters share the allegorical space with the
dreamerllover who is very much aware of their presence, their influ-
ence, and their advice to the forlorn lover. The intersubjective interactions
of characters within the dream text are really different philosophical
and literary ideas being propounded by the author in allegorical form. He
tries to show the relationship between philosophy and writing love poetry
in his satirical allegory. The characters of his allegory appear to the
dreamerllover as entities that experience the ego in turn. They encounter
him, give him advice, and even try to win him over as a disciple of
their respective doctrines.
In conclusion, the phenomenological epoche helps to make this
possible. The dream text creates an allegorical space or world which is
removed from the external world. Therefore, it can represent that world
and others by distancing itself from it into a realm which is closer to
the truth. The transcendental ego alone can achieve objectivity. In
allegory the I-pole of the first person narrator sets up the essential liaison
between objectivity and subjectivity. The numerous objects in the world
besides the ego appear in allegory as perceptions of the subject and in

turn, as objects who perceive and experience the subject.
The phenomenological epoche, although a very modern philosoph-
ical notion, helps to explain how medieval allegory functions. Perhaps
its greatest strength is the fact that is can so do without ignoring the
original context and without imposing anachronistic notions to inter-
pretation.
Hofstra University
NOTES
1 Eagleton, 1983, Ch. 2.

2 Husserl, Paris Lectures, 1979, tr. and ed. Koestenbaum, p. 4. Henceforth, PL.
3 PL p. 6.
4 PL p. 6.
5 PL p. 4.
6 PL p. 7.
7 PL p. 7.
8 PL p. 31.
9 PL p. 12.
\0 PL p. 4.
11 Quilligan, 1979.
12 PL p. 16.
13 PL p. 16.
14 PL p. IS.
15 PL p. 31.
16 PL p. 19.
17 The four following points are made in Husserls passage devoted to Intersubjectivity
and the transcendental realm.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

Husserl, Edmund, The Paris Lectures, tr. and ed. P. Koestenbaum (The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1970).
Huon de Mery, Le tornoiement de /'Antechrist, ed. P. Tarbe (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints,
1977).
Jean de Meun and Guillaume de Lorris, Le Roman de La Rose, ed. D. Poirion (Paris:
Garnier-Flammarion, 1974).
Quilligan, Maureen, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1979).
Raoul de Houdan, Le Songe d'Enfer, ed. P. Lebesgue (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974).
PART THREE
FREEDOM, DESTINY,
THE SOARING OF THE SOUL
JORGE GARCfA-G6MEZ
TYPE AND CONCEPT IN LAZARILLO DE TORMES:

SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND THE SPANISH
PICARESQUE NARRATIVE
Despite the disputes and controversies that seem to prevail in the

criticism devoted to the Spanish picaresque literature, one can at least
identify a contention that - to all appearances - is subscribed to by all.
I have in mind, of course, the thesis that the genre in question begins
to take shape with Lazarillo and is finally established with Guzman de
Alfarache, possibly the highest accomplishment in picaresque fiction.l
Even if one were to accept this notion, it would still be true that a basic
assumption would have to be admitted along with it, namely, the view
that the picaresque narrative is essentially autobiographical. Now, this
presupposition is, at best, only suspected, and it is thus never provided
with any justification. This may very well be due to the fact that such
a foundation would prove elusive to anyone who adopts a sheer histor-
ical approach, whether the critic in question stresses the contene or the
form of the works under scrutiny. 3 This is all the more surprising when
one sees such critics affirming and emphasizing - in one way or another
- the autobiographical dimension as intrinsic to this kind of fiction. No
one appears to have wondered - so far as I know and in the sense
specified below - about the meaning of asserting that the form (and
even the significance of works of this sort) is inherently autobiograph-
ical. In other words, nobody seems to have been intent on determining
how this unusual manner of narration could have possibly arisen at the
historical moment in which it did (and precisely as a defining aspect
of the new genre). My purpose here is not however to resume a histor-
ical inquiry into these matters, however promising such a venture may
look from this point of view, since, in all probability, an endeavor of
that sort would again make us oblivious of the question at hand.
Moreover, I do not believe that a task of such magnitude - no matter how
useful and attractive it may be - is within my grasp. But neither do I
propose to devote my attention to establish in full the possibility of
autobiographical narratives when they are cast in the picaresque mold.
An enterprise of this sort is certainly beyond the scope of a study like
this, and it would no doubt exceed my competence. I shall therefore limit

146 JORGE GARCIA-G6MEZ
my endeavors to clearing the way toward the formulation of the problem

I have just mentioned; in fact, I will be more than satisfied if I succeed
in indicating the basic meaning of one of the conditions rendering the
picaresque genre possible.
First of all, let me point to a characteristic aspect of the Spanish
picaresque that sets it apart from the mere folk tales arguably functioning
as its suitable antecedent, or from the roman comique or adventure story
that will succeed it. I have in mind the fact that both Lizaro and Guzman,
as protagonists of picaresque novels, stand out as genuine individuals.
This acknowledgement amounts to saying that they are neither charac-
ters whose structure is merely confirmed in action nor names serving
as symbolic devices to refer to a meeting point of operative forces and
eventuating life-episodes. The genuine rogue is a "human incarnation"4
giving himself shape along the way of living; in fact, in doing so, not
only does the rogue discover himself for what he is, but he also makes
a beginning in that direction by means of his commerce with others, even
to the point of becoming a "watchtower from which to contemplate
human life",5 a moment and an achievement where the path going from
individuality to generality in human life loops the 100p.6
And yet one should not push this notion so far that, as a result, the
relatedness or similarity between Lazarillo and Guzman - regarded
from the standpoint of their purpose or orientation - would keep the
essential differences between them from view. The roguish world, as a
relatively stable social given, is precisely the point of departure that
both Guzman's author and narrator take for granted, while this cannot
be said at all in connection with Lazarillo. 7 Americo Castro, with his
usual exacting perspicacity, characterizes the lived presupposition of
Aleman's work as the presence of "an opaque world bereft of values".8
It is, so to speak, as if Lazaro - as he learns to live and fashion himself
- were trying out a new trade for the first time. Accordingly, his entering
the world is characterized by a "conciseness and freshness" altogether
impossible in the case of Guzman de Alfarache, even if it is the case -
as in fact it is - that both are engaged in an endeavor that is formally
the same. This one can gather from the fact that Guzman comes to his
venture already in possession of "ideologies and morals".9
Let me attempt to clarify this point and say, for the sake of argument,
that this position rests on the following theses: first, that Lazaro, strictly
speaking, is no rogue but, at best, a precursor of this kind of man;lO
second, that Guzman, by contrast, not only relies on the availability of
TYPE AND CONCEPT IN LAZARILLO DE TORMES 147
a roguish world, but also comes to formulate the universal lessons that
may be learned from his experiences therein. Even then, one should
not insist on this view to the point of presuming that the narrator (that
is to say, Guzman himself after his conversion has taken place, but
without however having abandoned the world of rogues as his presup-
posed background) has transmuted his own experience of such a world
into an "object" of contemplation and explication. This extreme change
would be tantamount to having taken a qualitative leap beyond the level
of someone who just endures the events of his life, and to intently
proceeding in the direction of the fashioning of concepts about it. Such
an occurrence would certainly transform what is undoubtedly a genuine
novel into a treatise in matters psychological and moral, but no such thing
does in fact or need take place. Marias, for one, formulates this restric-
tion when he says that "these two novels are narratives that bring into
play - without any theoretical purpose in mind - two different ideas of
human life, two ideas which in fact one can identify and attempt to
discover in them".l1 My goal here is precisely to carry out an examina-
tion of the intimate nexus existing between living and the lessons one
may learn about living, for, in my opinion, one cannot come to terms
with what is involved in these matters, unless one succeeds in distin-
guishing - with sufficient clarity and justification - between living,
reflecting, learning a lesson about living, and developing a theoretical
account of human life.
To this end, I believe our departure should be made on the basis of
a brief presentation of the grounds rendering possible the originality of
this new narrative genre. As Castro contends, it seems that the only
way of seriously recounting the life of an insignificant man - if one hopes
both to achieve verisimilitude and open a way to interpretive success -
is to approach such a life as an individual affair as opposed to those
mythical or fabulous elements that would surround it in medieval epic
poetry, or in contrast with the dismembering undergone by it in the hands
of a PuJci or a Rabelais. Now, by "individual" we are not to under-
stand, as in classical literature, whatever is peculiar or accidental about
life, but, also and above all, that in the absence of which no unique
life could arise, and the set of eventualities without which no one could
forge his own proper destiny. Or to put in Castro's own words: "He is
going to carry it out as an individual, as a person who stands up to be
counted ... [as] 'a man with his own measure of risks and of good or
ill fortune"'Y And yet Lazaro, that first imaginary specimen of the
new breed of man, does not show himself to be someone who is ready-
made, but is a man engaged in fashioning himself. Further, he is not
somebody who merely endures the events of his life, but a man who -
in order to fashion himself - has to think himself through (to the extent
that it is possible for him to do so in the given situation) and - in the
process - seek an understanding of the world as a would-be instrumen-
tality of his own self-fashioning. In other words, the originality
characteristic of the new approach seems to involve - at least to begin
with - living and learning how to live by distancing oneself - however
minimally at first - from what oneself and one's world already are. As
Castro points out, this insignificant sort of a man, daring as he does to
consider himself important enough to fashion a life of his own, does
not live it through as a "plain and naIve endeavor".13 Quite the contrary:
for such a feat to be accomplished, for the life of this sui generis man
(and the relating of it to which it amounts) to meet with success, it is
necessary, in my opinion, that reflection (that is, ingenio or wits, as
Lazaro refers to it in the First Tractate of his narrative) should come to
establish itself as the locus of self-fashioning. One could say, by way
of paradox, as Castro for one does most correctly, that the autobio-
graphical mode and style of Lazarrillo goes hand in hand with the
anonymity of its author. 14 Accordingly, what really matters is not the
identity of the author, but the monumental effort of recounting an insignif-
icant life. Now, the first step in the direction of understanding this attempt
would amount to identifying the sources of the acts of reflection, if reflec-
tion is seen as the "setting" where a life constitutes itself for itself.
Naturally, the term "reflection" is here taken to signify an oft-repeated
process already unfolding at the inception of a long search after a kind
of self-knowledge that involves wisdom about a world that is still on
its way toward itself. The genre under examination would not be possible,
except if one has moved beyond a level of living where reflection is a
process just occasionally engaged in, and yet it can arise without the
aid of a universalizing manner of reflection that would keep the whole
gamut of human affairs in view. In my opinion, here lies the first element
of difference separating Lazaro and Guzman (and thereby linking them
in the realm of things, people, and events which is the correlate of non-
occasional reflection). It seems to me that this is precisely the point Castro
is advancing when he asserts that Lazarillo's tone "is ironical and sar-
castic, rather than didactic and moralizing", 15 as is in fact the case with
Guzman. Bataillon himself remarks that there is "a great distance"
TYPE AND CONCEPT IN LAZARlLLO DE TORMES 149
between "the na'ive and comical denial of honor", which we find in

Lazarillo, and "the reasoned denial of worldly honor to which the young
Guzman will bring himslf".16 This notwithstanding, one should insist
on the fact that both characters (and the two novels woven out of their
lives) move within the same realm, namely, that which is the correlate
of non-occasional reflection; in fact, it is on that basis that they consti-
tute themselves and their own world in reciprocity or interaction. 17
Finally, let me point out that this new style of living that projects itself
beyond automatisms of one kind or another, and which endeavors to
transcend mere reactivity and occasional reflection, is responsible for
producing a remarkable effect in the lives of both the character and
narrator of the work. I am referring to what M. Merleau-Ponty used to
call the ambiguity of existence l8 and Bataillon, within the confines of the
picaresque narrative, presents as a condition to be met by the narrator,
a condition in which he always finds his allegiance " ... divided - to
a greater or lesser degree - between the amorality of the actions he is
recounting and the morality of received doctrine or of acquired experi-
ence".19 The rogue's life thus becomes - in terms of the style of living
which has been turned into fiction in this manner - a guide or model
for human experience, that is to say, the type in light of which it is to
be patterned if certain worldly requirements are satisfied. 20
AN EXCURSUS ON THE NOTION OF TYPE
In terms of all this, one can clearly grasp the outline of of the task con-
fronting us. Let me formulate it as follows: one cannot understand the
role or function of the rogue in the constitution and development of
the picaresque genre, unless one has formulated a concept of what it is
for something to exhibit a typical appearance, or for someone to enact
a typical form of conduct. But I can go even further and say that one
cannot account for the specific modality of what arises thereby (i.e.,
the rogue as a grounded or possible style of human existence), unless one
has grasped the essence of typicality. But if this is true, then it would
follow that the genre in question - at least so far as one of its funda-
mental dimensions is concerned - would remain, when all is said and
done, a brute or unintelligible fact, if a clarification of the typical were
to be missing. Let me then proceed to make some basic remarks about
types in general, the relevance of which to the picaresque narrative I hope
to make apparent later.
In our customary, everyday dealings with the world, we find ourselves

- in one fashion or another - immersed and absorbed in what is going
on in our surroundings. Unlike an animal, however, we are not thereby
necessarily tied to such a world, as if we were just a part thereof. Rather,
what happens is that our attention is focussed on the things and events
of this world in terms of a sketch of them we have "made" or grown into,
on the basis of lessons we have learned about it, and in view of a network
of projects we have accordingly generated. In other words, in our
commerce with the circum-stance,21 we always arrive at it from both a
past and a future and, therefore, never as dispossessed of a habitual
wisdom and conjectural means of anticipation about the worldly business
that is to (or may) be transacted by us in our surroundings. But just as
any consideration of automatic manners of conduct and ways of being
absorbed in a world of which we would be integral parts cannot do justice
to what is specifically human, neither would any position holding that
a lesson learned by us in the past, or a formula we have proposed to
anticipate our future reality, is such that we are able to keep at bay -
by way of a contemplative distancing - our dealings with the world.
The kind of situation in which we actually and customarily lead our
everyday lives lies somewhere between the two extremes of absorption
and detachment, for, though it is true that we approach our surroundings
with a certain wisdom and projective schemes of some sort and thus fore-
armed with creatures of our own making, it is nonetheless the case that
the relevant "knowledge" in question is more in the style of an implicit
endowment, the product of a sort of intellectual-actional gesture towards
the world by means of which we grope the reality of things. But it is
precisely in this incipient worldly wisdom that types already play a
fundamental role. Accordingly, if one can correctly say that the rogue
is a human type, one must nevertheless hasten to add that the materials
out of which he would fashion himself and the attitude toward life he
would exhibit are themselves the results of an elaboration of experi-
ence on the basis of typical re-sources. One is then bound to reflect at
least for a moment on the foundations and consequences of this view.
To find oneself living in a particular world is tantamount to encounter
oneself already acting therein, and this implies, at least, that one is
familiar with the given world. To see oneself relating to the world in
familiar terms presupposes a degree of simplification or reduction of
the world contents to the level of typical things, events, and compo-
nents. When one perceives this or that, when one interprets a situation
in this or another sense, when one makes a decision or anticipates a

certain result in view of a projected action, one does not do it on the
grounds of a detailed acquaintanceship with the world, but only on the
basis of a typical wisdom about it on which one relies. This is the
reason why Alfred Schutz asserted that types " ... are more or less
anonymous ... ; and, the more anonymous they are, the more objects
of our experiences are conceived as partaking in the typical aspects". 22
But such a position means that, when one is dealing with otherness of
some kind, one's manner of comportment with regard to it rests upon
pre-established "knowledge". Now, the "agent" behind the latter is no
doubt "humanity" at large, which is to include my very own ways of
being at a certain already-elapsed moment of my life, which now
functions as an anonymous fund, or as a form of wisdom that is being
relied upon but belongs to no one in particular. 23 It is, further, a manner
of implicit knowledge that encompasses and organizes anything coming
my way,24 without this fact requiring that I distance myself from what
appears in order to establish - in some creative way - what it is that is
now appearing. To a certain extent, the world (that is to say, what is to
eventuate in the world) is already pre-delineated as to its typical com-
portment even before anything in particular makes its actual appearance
therein. Strictly speaking, a type is a pre-conceptual anonymous system,
in terms of which one's worldly experience is patterned before the fact.
Accordingly, the formula that would convey the sense of any type would
be something like this: the totality of features and manners of com-
portment, in terms of which things, events, or persons are pre-delineated,
and on the basis of which one anonymously anticipates any of them at
a given juncture of one's life.
From this point of view, one should say that worldly things or events,
and even human beings, are thus given to us - without exception, and
prior to any attempt on our part to render a theoretical account of them
- precisely as they appear. Now, such modalities of givenness function
in the way of presuppositons and, therefore, are characterized by the
"unquestioned (although always questionable) assurance of an uncon-
tested belief ... ".25 Hence, the certitudes on which one lives are a
priori with respect to the acts by means of which one actually comes
to experience the world in this or that way; such certitudes constitute,
a fortiori, the support required by any act of reflection one may perform
and, in consequence, by any predicative clarification of the appearances
in question. 26 Now then, even if one comes to cast doubt on the typical
152 JORGE GARCfA-G6MEZ
appearances the world may be exhibiting at a certain juncture of one's

experience, even if one does so for very specific reasons (to wit: that
the world, as it actually presents itself to us at that point, is at odds
with the anonymous expectations inherent in one's usual manner of
conduct), and even if, as a result, one is motivated to reflect (and the
ego properly so called consequently arises and is constituted as implanted
in the world), one would nonetheless have to say that one does all that
precisely on the basis of the very same anonymous, typical grounds
that would have then reached a crisis point.
The role played by one's anticipation of the contents of the world in
terms of typicality is so fundamental that, even if the object making its
appearance has never been experienced before, one would have never-
theless to approach it as a function of one's already established
endowment, that is, one would have to proceed on the grounds of a
"preknowledge which might be undetermined or incompletely determined
as to its content, but which will never be entirely empty". 27 Such a
priori "generic" worldly contents, the origin of which is anonymous
and which point to a pre-established and pre-predicative phase of one's
worldly experience, are nothing but the types or outlines of things, events,
or human beings whose comportment one may anticipate. One is
therefore confronted here with a most important root of one's worldly
consciousness, so far as the latter discloses some content or other. Every
thing, event, or human being is given always as a part of the world, never
as a separate existent; in other words, any such objects become manifest
with reference to "the world as the unquestioned horizonal background
of all possible experiences of existents within it ... ".28 According to
Schutz, this is the radical position proper to Edmund Husserl's
phenomenology, provided one is aware, in saying this, that the world
as fundamentum inconcussum of possible experience is never given as
such in everydayness. Equivalently stated, it is a basis of encounters,
the explicit formulation of which is not required for the enactment of
ordinary living. One's gaining access to such a foundation by means of
judgment is not necessary for worldly experience successfully to unfold,
as the Cartesians by contrast seem to have believed. For such purposes,
we are only in need of a context familiar to us in terms of its typical
lineaments, a context that is indeed taken for granted in every actual
experience of determinate objects or aspects thereof, and precisely as a
co-constituent to which the appearing and lived qua/e of things is
conformed. Or to put it otherwise: no worldly item would normally
deliver itself to our conscious grasp simply "as an objectivity as such,

but as an existent of a particular type: as a thing of the outer world, as
a plant, as an animal, a human being, a human product, and so on".29
It is in this way that the world is constituted in terms of totalities and
sub-contexts of objects at various "generic" levels, if one is allowed to
refer in that fashion to the natural sorts into which the objects of one's
worldly experience would be spontaneously "classified" prior to any
act of reflection. One can even go as far as asserting that these various
settings of typical likeness and difference determine and thus de-fine -
pre-reflectively - the worldly dimensions one is eventually required - for
specific reasons and purposes - to distance oneself from and contem-
plate. Typicality, to the extent that it is a basic comformant and feature
of our worldly experience, renders the emergence of the ego properly
so called possible at any juncture of one's experience, provided there
are additional or sufficient reasons for its arising. Worldly experience
according to type thus establishes motivations and boundaries for possible
reflection.
No worldly item, therefore, comes our way, with every new turn and
twist of our experience, as if it were a matter of sheer surprise, for
what the future now holds in store for us is already pre-given a priori
to us so far as its typical lineaments are concerned. This assertion simply
means that what I have learned about the world becomes - in terms of
its "generic" or typical aspects - an anticipatory matrix of worldly appear-
ances. This achievement is possible on the basis of idealizations or
simplifications expressible by means of the principles, "and so on" and
"I can once again", which are, respectively, the objective and subjec-
tive formulations of two basic descriptive requirements to which our
natural or fundamental attitude toward the world (and our attendant
comportment) are conformed. 3D Now, this assertion makes it quite clear
that idealization and anticipation involve "activities" that are a priori
with regard to conceptualization and reflection properly so called, if
we take "a priori" in both its temporal and logical senses. Accordingly,
our meaning-laden performances by which we are intimately involved
with the world are more basic and ineradicable that one could have
suspected at first glance, or on the basis of traditional philosophical
and scientific contentions. Our "typifying" consciousness of the world
precedes the conceptual and theoretical levels of awareness and is
therefore anterior (again in the twofold sense of the word) to any
judgment one may form about the world and its contents and comport-
ments. And this is so much so that, at least, " ... the expectation
of recurrent typical experiences is required for the full meaning of
familiarity of my knowledge".3J In consequence, to say that I live at
the world is tantamount to contending that my commerce therewith
consists in my relating to it on the basis of my familiarity with the
circumstance, such manner of familiarity essentially requiring that
whatever "novelty" may come to be experienced by me be assimilated
to my worldly wisdom, i.e., to what is already established about my
specific openness to the world, at least so far as the typical features
and manners of comportment of the latter are concerned. 32 But this view
implies that, in living at the world, I proceed on the basis of an implicit
trust, of something "settled" that I simply take for granted,33 even if it
is true that such certainty is only provisional or for the time being, that
is to say, until I come to grief by being sufficiently at odds with worldly
phenomena in terms of my projects and attendant anticipations. 34
Accordingly, it is possible to identify two aspects of life coming to
form a dual unity on the basis of a system.atic interconnection, namely,
that holding between the subjective and objective sides of our worldly
experience. In other words, there is an ongoing verification, in the context
of everydayness, of the mutual belongingness of my provisional
certitude about the world and the objective face thereof. At this primordial
level, the reciprocity in question amounts to the minimal sense of
mundaneity one lives by, namely, the absence of chaos 35 that is signaled
by the fact that novelty finds a niche in one's experience, so far as the
latter is pre-formed on the basis of typicality, whatever the degree and
nature of the adjustments involved may be. It is as if we were always
in possession of a latent wisdom, which would remain inarticulate to a
point and yet serve to introduce and prepare us for worldly appearance,
thus subjectively disposing us to believe in the world in some
pre-determined fashion. Therefore, this having at our disposal an a priori
outline of the basic contents of the world can be re-activated at any
moment, if the given circum-stances so require and permit. 36 Let us try
to see this point by means of an example:
If we see a dog we anticipate immediately his future behavior, his typical way of eating,
playing, running, jumping, etc. Actually, we do not see his teeth, but even if we have never
seen this particular dog, we know in advance what his teeth will look like - not in their
individual determination, but in a typical way, since we have long ago and frequently
experienced that "such like" animals ("dogs") have something like teeth of this or that
typical kind. 37
TYPE AND CONCEPT IN LAZARlLLO DE TORMES 155
This realization allows us, finally, to gain access to a fundamental

dimension of the processes involved in constituting the realm of typi-
cality. This is so important that, if we were to neglect or ignore it, we
would not be able significantly to apply any of our findings to picaresque
fiction. Let me try to show what I have in mind. Permit me to start by
delimiting the way of "generalization" on the basis of immediate expe-
rience which is at work here, for this is of fundamental importance for
our purposes. On the one hand, one has an anonymous, pre-reflective
type; on the other hand, one has a concept (say, that of "dog", as opposed
to the manner of being and the individual worldly occurrences apper-
taining to an actual dog). Between these two extremes, one can identify
certain intermediate activities and the products thereof. If one is living
in terms of the attitude one usually adopts toward the worldly (to wit:
that of receptivity with regard to such items and events), what one
actually does is spontaneously to admit whatever is given, and one does
so as a function of the practical schemata that are already part and
parcel of one's endowment, namely, on the basis of the patternings and
patterns by means of which one's subjectivity qua receptivity conforms
itself beforehand to the world (say, in terms of the type 'dog'). Conscious
living may nonetheless take up an active dimension, although, even in
that case, it would undergo such a transformation on the basis of the
typical patternings and patterns of receptivity, and by virtue of the
motivations inherent in this fundamental layer of experience. If this
actually comes to pass, conscious life would gain greater knowledge
by distancing itself somewhat from the familiar so as to be able to
pronounce itself on it and eventually say, "this is a dog". "In other words,
on active intention aims now at grasping that which was previously given
in passive congruence ... ",38 that is to say, by means of what had
been experienced before by way of typified anticipation and consequent
confirmation. The passage, then, from receptivity to first-degree activity
consists in one's distancing oneself from the subject matter of experi-
ence, precisely as acquired, in order to grasp it in the light of an empirical
concept (e.g., "dog"). And yet this transition from a type or implicit
"concept" to the level of explicit generality (say, the practical, generic
notion of a dog) is nonetheless to be grasped in terms of the "univer-
sality" characteristic of its product. The concept in question - functioning
as it does at the empirical level - does not yet exhibit a reflexive
character by which it would somehow point to its own conceptual nature,
but it is just confined to being the means of directing one's attention
to the corresponding subject matter it serves the purpose of grasping (i.e.,

towards the worldly comportment one has received from without by
way of the typical anticipation and confirmation proper to the perfor-
mances of one's spontaneous sensibility, so far as it is an intrinsic
dimension of one's projective engagement with the world). It is thus
that an empirical concept may arise and cast some light on the material
side of one's worldly experience.
It is no doubt in principle possible to take the further step toward
generality which consists in apprehending the universality of the empir-
ical concept ("dog") ut sic, provided, of course, one performs another,
higher-order act of judging (namely, "this is an object belonging in the
class 'dog' ").39 If this takes place, our conscious lives will not be limited
to spontaneously experiencing the world on the basis, say, of the type
'dog'. We will then be able to proceed under the guidance of an empir-
ical concept or articulated type ("dog"), and even to turn reflectively
from such an illuminating grasp to its relevance and applications in the
world. 40 Naturally, this eventuality would open up the possibility of
exercising even higher forms of subjective activity that would be
correlated with certain higher-order conceptual products, which would
result from generalization, particularization, and the attendant logical
processes of coordination and opposition (e.g., along the two direction-
alities illustrated in the Tree of Porphyry). Were such things come to pass,
then one would elaborate, as a consequence, empirical concepts (and even
cognitive and practical rules) of ever increasing generality (i.e., one's
actional maxims and recipes, and the so-called species, genera, and
differences at their basis, all of which - the most universal inclusive -
would be concepts about our familiar world). Such products would arise
on the basis of developments dependent on the types conscious living
constitutes as it spontaneously and anonymously relates to the world
of everydayness. 41
Accordingly, one could describe this process, at the predicative level,
as the transition from our everyday experience of the familiar to the
formation of individual judgments of perception, valuation, and action
(e.g., "this is a dog [after its own fashion]"), to the advancement of
generic-typical judgments (e.g., "this is a dog [like others],,), and
eventually to the making of higher-order judgments (such as, "a dog is
. . . ,,).42 Such propositions and the correlative judgings are like beams
of light that clarify and articulate our acquaintanceship with the world,
so far as it is already established in terms of typicality. They are products,
therefore, that conscious life fashions by keeping the everyday world

in view, even if reflection is the means required to succeed in that venture.
Consequently, they are affected a radice by the contingent and somehow
uncertain character of our familiar relationship with the world and of
what issues therefrom, for such acquaintanceship is the ultimate source
from which such products did and do emerge. Such products are no
doubt predicative in character, and yet the concepts they involve are only
empirical in nature, for that is the kind of means one employs to sort
out the contents of the realms of contingency, without however being
required therefor to abandon the level of experience in question or to
forsake its basic tenor. Now, this may prompt us to raise another question,
namely, that concerning the possibility of a different style of concep-
tualization and of an "art" of forming concepts that would be governed
by other rules and have other goals. I have in mind what Husserl called
ideation. 43 But, be that as it may, what concerns us here, for the purposes
of the present investigation, is the customary, everyday manner of
experiencing the world, so far as it is a familiar context that consists
of types and related empirical generalities about various typified manners
of living, and thus involves typified rules that govern our conduct therein,
because such things matter not only for the sake of constituting (and
clarifying the constitution of) the commonsensical world in terms of
which we lead our everyday lives, but are also important if we are to
determine and establish the possibility of imaginary human lives. Human
lives, be they merely fictive, such as Lazaro's, or actually projective, like
yours and mine, must begin to bring themselves about by shaping them-
selves on the basis of the only one thing we can rely upon at the level
of primordiality, namely, the world with which we have become familiar,
that is, the world so far as it is typified, not only by being conformed
to my life, but to other lives as well. But this could not have been oth-
erwise, since what ordinary mortals - real or fictive - encounter in their
lives presents itself as already pre-formed, since anything that may
become food for thought for me or any other fellow in particular precedes
one's life, as it must, so far as it is, at least in part, the fruit of the
actions and passional responses of various men and the object of many
conscious lives, Lazaro's included.
The passage from a life led on the basis of typicality (as given in
receptive experience) to the vita activa properly so called (as practiced
at various levels of generality, on the basis of the "nature" of things
and man) is a matter that ought to be examined in terms of both Lazarillo
and Guzman. In fact, it is in the latter work that something of the greatest
significance occurs in this repect, namely, that an unsuspected level of
universality is attained, for the rules Guzman formulates and the
conclusions he arrives at (i.e., his lessons in morality and his moral
criticisms) result from his keeping humanity as a whole in view, and
not just the experience of a given individual or group of individuals,
or even the manner of living proper to some "kinds" of individuals.
This notwithstanding, the process of generalization to which Guzman
subjects his worldly experience (and its typical grounds) will still answer
to the description I have already presented in abstracto, even when he
moves - as he often does - at rarefied levels of generality. And yet, if
one wishes adequately to grasp what he is doing when he is thus con-
ducting his affairs at the outermost boundaries of everyday experience,
one must keep in mind the distinction between the most universal exten-
sive concepts about matters human (which Guzman is capable of
elaborating and in fact elaborates often enough) and any intensive
concepts of man ut sic (which are beyond the grasp of anyone moving
on the basis of typified experience, no matter how broad the scope of
his interests may come to be). In this study, however, I shall limit myself
to showing concretely how typification and generalization immediately
based on the typical are characteristically at work in Lazarillo, leaving
the more ambitious task of examining Guzman's universal concerns for
another occasion.
THE ROGUE AS A HUMAN TYPE
Following Salillas's lead,44 Valbuena remarks that the rogue is not just
a human type, but one that is characteristic of Spain as well. 45 This
critic sees most clearly - at least so far as Lazarillo is concerned - that
typicality is at work at that level of experience in which one is most
immediately in touch with individual, contingent reality, a realization that
accounts for the view that the "blind man's deceptions, the priest's
exaggerated avarice, and the squire's pomposity do not amount to either
generalizations or dehumanized caricatures".46 They are, in every case,
just portraits of men and thereby simplifications or idealizations of forms
of living bordering on the formulaic; in short, they are types developed
on the basis of typified contents. Lazaro's judgments concerning his
various masters, asserts Valbuena, "imply some degree of generaliza-
tion",47 that is to say, they presuppose one's having effected a transition
from the level of the typical received to that of the typical judged. In
Guzman's case, I would hasten to add that what is reached is the highest
level of generalization attainable by man without transgressing the bound-
aries of typical existence. In other words, the "watchtower from which
to contemplate human life" that Guzman does become is simply the result
of the maximal degree of generalization possible within the realm of a
life proceeding merely on the basis of the typical, for, were the protag-
onist of this narrative to take even one step further, he would be ipso
facto engaged in a qualitatively different enterprise, namely, in formu-
lating a philosophical anthropology, a task with which he is not
concerned, even by implication or as acting out of hybris. 48
Americo Castro recognizes the nature of this human predicament when
he says - if I am permitted to translate his words into my own terms -
that living at the world on a typified basis (including therein the nexus
of experience one acts upon when one has progressed to the predica-
tive level) "is nothing superadded to this work by way of moral
commentary, but is something [already] incorporated into Lazarillo's own
style of living".49 This is possibly Castro's way of expressing the
difference between Lazarillo and Guzman and of accounting for the
structural difficulties that Aleman, the author of the latter work, was
bound to face in it,50 but Castro would have erred had he taken such
dissimilarities as evidence for the existence of a qualitatively distinct
manner of proceeding, that is, as if in Guzman one were witnessing a
passage from generalization on the basis of typification to another style
of conceptualization. I do not believe this transition occurs at all. I
would contend, rather, that what Castro has said about Lazaro and the
self-recounting of his life is also valid for Guzman, inasmuch as Castro
asserts that Lazarillo makes sense and is possible by virtue of the fact
that the protagonist and the world in which he lives (whether one has
in mind a fictively constructed one or its historical original) embody
the "deeply rooted and far-reaching sense that life is a difficult affair".51
Neither someone who is sufficient in himself nor anyone who feels at
home in the world could possibly lead his life in terms of self-fashioning,
since, for this approach to be possible, one would have pervasively to
experience the world's resistance to one's projects and come to develop
the consequent feeling that living is a difficult affair, even if this con-
dition is not enough to account for self-fashioning as a style of living.
Moreover, the very art of composing such novels seems to derive one
of its motifs from a "literary character based upon an energetic will [to
be] which is inherent in his consciousness of being and in his aware-

ness of his desire to persevere in terms of his own conatus to be".52 In
my opinion, the right approach to these matters would involve dealing
with self-consciousness as a matter of self-projection and the concomi-
tant and necessary attempt to make the world conform to one's projects,
a layer of activity and experience that presupposes the reception and
assessment of the "facts" of this world in terms of the sense that living
is a difficult affair. All these events would form part of the life of
someone (whether real or fictive) whose world is, to begin with, just a
contexture of types, of a man whose manner of thinking in fact originally
consists in receiving and evaluating things and people on the basis of
typicality.53
A conclusive way of making these determinations naturally lies in
resorting to actual texts taken from Lazarillo, even if only briefly. In
the First Tractate, for example, one discovers that Lazaro's mother has
decided to "lean on good people so as to be like them ... ",54 as Lazaro
himself will do later, having then learned his lesson well. Now, this
practical or moral maxim (however justified it may be, and whatever
the socio-economic significance it may have) is not the fruit of reflec-
tive activities engaged in by the person adopting it. This is certainly
not the case, for Lazaro's mother finds such a rule already pre-formed
in the world she inherits, since it is already giving shape to the lives
of the people of the times, to the extent that they tacitly accept it as a
guideline for their own actions. By contrast, it may very well be that
the blind man, on commenting upon the meaning and significance of
his teachings for Lazaro's life, can be seen as capable of doing so, because
he has already effected a transition from a style of living based on mere
typification to another which proceeds under the guidance of formu-
lated rules, whether of his own making or of somebody else's, but rules
which are nonetheless the fruits of reflection. This interpretation is
consistent with his remark to Lazaro that "much advice useful in life will
I be giving yoU".55 He seems to have in mind indications of practical
import, not merely ad hoc evaluations of this or that singular event. In
other words, they are maxims to govern one's conduct in the world,
which, however restricted their applicability may be, must have some
range of significance and thus presuppose not only that we are in the
sphere of practical judgment, but as well that there is a fund of estab-
lished types concerning various ways of living in the world to serve as
their support and foundation. Consider this example. In the Second
Tractate, Lazaro speaks of hunger, a figure and anticipation of one's

and the other's death. Death, however, is not signified there as a mere
matter of fact. On the contrary, it is faced as an opportunity to learn a
typical, practical lesson befitting the station of a cleric's assistant, which
is what Lazaro had then become. In fact, it is the "doctrine" to be learned
from such experiences. On those occasions, one ought to pray to God
to take the sick person from this world, since in wakes one usually eats
to one's heart's content. 56
Here and there Lazaro is carried away, by his pensive disposition,
to extremes of generalization. In fact, such "excesses" almost make him
a match for Guzman, although he accomplishes what he does solely on
the basis of his own subjective resources, and this is an essential
difference bteween the lives of the two characters. One can learn to appre-
ciate this as one hears Lazaro speak as follows: "To how much misery,
misfortune, and disaster are we liable who are born in this world! And
how short is the enjoyment of our pleasures in this hard life!,'57 If one
reflects on these words, it is not difficult to discover that they do not
amount to expressing a formulaic rule of conduct (although they no doubt
imply one); their significance is much more than that, for they convey
an understanding of life taken as a whole, an understanding indeed which
has been arrived at on the basis of the typification of man's experience
at a world in the making. In fact, it is this essential condition of the world
which motivates the adoption of such an extensive attitude toward it.
To top it all, if one lends an ear to what Lazaro has to say in the
concluding Tractate, one finds that, at that point, he acknowledges and
accepts the maxim that has governed his mother's life since the loss of
her husband. To be sure, this is true, and yet there he does much more,
for he also identifies for us the typified basis that served as support
and foundation for the practical recipe that recommended to her that
she should lean on good people, namely, that a master (in this case he
has in mind San Salvador's archpriest), precisely because he is a master,
owes his servant protection and the fulfillment of the promises he made
to him, i.e., Lazaro. 58 In my opinion, these few indications are suffi-
cient to suggest that the thesis I am advancing is not without foundation.
THE BIRTH OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS
So far I have stated more than once that leading one's life on the basis
of typified grounds - which is the primordial style of living for human
beings in this world - and any reflective acts and products originating
therefrom (in the various senses and levels already identified) establish
the setting in which the ego properly so called is to emerge as the
counterpart of the world. In other words, my contention is that
self-consciousness - as an explicit event and not just as a structural
concomitant or dimension of every conscious act - makes its appear-
ance as such, whenever a man effects a transition from living on the
grounds of receptivity to living by means of an endeavor to build a world
on the basis of typified foundations. Let me now try to show that this
position is warranted.
In the First Tractate, one finds a most surprising passage, as Lazaro
himself acknowledges, when he says that the event he is going to speak
about happened when he was "quite young". I have in mind the episode
in which he recounts his own reaction to and judgment of the conduct
of his little brother. The latter was afraid of his father because of his very
dark complexion, a feeling he endured without having taken notice of the
fact that this was also true of himself. Now, this is Lazaro's comment
on this paradoxical but common human predicament: "How many people
must there be in the world who are in flight from others, because they
do not see themselves!"s9 It is to be noted, first of all, that the event in
question is not merely approached in terms of some already available,
formulaic rule (say, as expressed in some proverb or other, like "when
the next house is on fire, it's high time to look to your own", or a biblical
injunction, such as "Why do you look at the mote that is in your brother's
eye, with never a thought for the beam that is in your own", Lk. 7:3).
Rather, a reflective act has suddenly been performed by Lazaro, an act
characterized by a polarity or dual directionality, since its fruit - the
judgment Lazaro makes of mankind - is at once about self and others.
Man seems to be that oddity in Nature who, upon seeing another who
does not see himself, and precisely insofar as that other does not see
himself, succeeds also in grasping his own self as subject to a similar
fate. Self-consciousness is thus born, and henceforth it develops and
becomes progressively elaborated, and yet this is rendered possible -
to the degree and in the sense that it is - without self-consciousness
coming to lose its anchorage in circumstance and typicality. This is
then the primordial or worldly sense of the intentiveness of living, and
out of it self-consciousness is to emerge and the ego proper to be
constituted as such, if and when they do in one's life.
Later in the same Tractate, the notion of reflective consciousness is
not only present and at work, but its signifiance is also underscored. In
fact, it becomes articulated by means of the notion of "wits", as the author
examines the nature and effects of the blind man's teachings. In my
opinion, it is no accident that the first master Lazaro comes to serve is
a blind man. It may very well be necessary to have a teacher who is
not conscious of the world in the usual way, or who is not occupied
with appearances as one normally is, if one wants to start one's way to
self- and world-knowledge on a sound footing. Indeed, this marks the
inception of his career as a man. Now, the "doctrine" contained in the
event presented by Lazaro as "bumping one's head hard against a devil
of a bull,,60 is, no doubt, his "first lesson in mistrust" (as Bataillon rightly
says),61 and yet it is much more than that. It is not just that the stone
involved gathers in itself the hardness of the world, as Bataillon insight-
fully hastens to add, but that thereby one is also confronted with a
transition to another level of experience, in which not only does one
gain knowledge of the world, but discovers oneself too as being already
engaged in knowing about the world. There is no better way of putting
this across than Lazaro's very own when he asserted that, at that moment,
" ... it seemed to me that I had awakened from the simple-minded-
ness in which I had been, as if asleep, from childhood, as I then said
to myself ... ".62 Such simple-mindedness can only amount to the mind's
naive directedness to things and events and to one's mental absorption
in them, a condition that is now displaced by the act to which one may
refer by means of the formula, "I said to myself that ... ", to use Lazaro's
own words, but this phrase only gives expression to the birth of
self-consciousness in his life. 63
The reason that would allow us legitimately to espouse the oft-repeated
thesis that the autobiographical modality is the narrative form essential
to the picaresque genre 64 is found precisely here, if I am not mistaken,
for explicit self-awareness and the consequent articulation of one's own
life can only result in the inner, growing coherence of a self-recounting
life65 and, accordingly, in the unity thereof, whether the life in question
is real or fictive, as it is re-enacted in memory or constituted in
memorative fantasy, respectively.66 Therefore, the essence of this novel
(and, in general, the nature of genuine picaresque fiction) is constituted
around a center, namely, the explicity self-conscious living of the pro-
tagonist, since the author has turned his main character into a "self-aware,
albeit opportunistic fashioner of his own destiny".67 Now, self-con-
sciousness is not only a presentation, but a justification as well, for the
self-fashioner in question is also functioning as examiner of himself;68

in consequence, what is at work here is something that exceeds the
bounds of a mere spectacle, for a spectacle, after all, may very well come
to vanish, in which case a significant style transformation would con-
comitantly have to take place, as the author would then be constrained
to proceed from a first- to a third-person narrative modality, were he
to persist in developing his story line.
A BRIEF EXAMINATION OF THE SQUIRE'S TRACTATE
In my opinion, a self-contained analysis of selected passages taken from

this Tractate will be sufficient not only to bring this study to a satisfactory
conclusion, but as well to secure in principle the means for a sound
demonstration of the thesis I am propounding. Let me now attempt to
show that this is so.
As Castro for one remarks, a sense of solitude is the counterpart of
the self-fashioning attitude proper to the protagonist of this novel, at least
until Lazaro meets the squire. At that juncture, and for the first time,
someone becomes a problem for Lazaro,69 for none of his previous
masters had given him cause to face this side of living, despite the fact
that it is fundamental. And this is the reason why - so argues Castro -
a crucial transformation in both character and novel happens precisely
at this point. I contend that this view is justifiable, if by "problem" one
does not intend to signify this or that thing or occurrence in life, or
one or another feature of someone's conduct, but rather the sense a life
proposes for itself as a whole at a given crucial moment of its unfolding.
What is at stake here is nothing but the meaning of living as such for
someone in particular. In spite of the obvious differences separating them,
master and servant nevertheless place themselves "in the same sphere
of life,,70 in order to make sense of themselves and be able to fashion
their respective lives. Now then, Castro, in his employment of the word
"sphere", does not seem to be referring to a special area of things and
events, since, were that the sense of his position, he would have to defend
a view opposite to the one he is actually advancing, for, from that
standpoint, their lives are in fact far from resembling each other. Perhaps
the servant's proximity to his master which Castro has in mind has
more to do with the attitude one adopts in living than with anything
else, inasmuch as the squire "is the only human type motivated by an
internal movement of aspiration, in the absence of which a dialogue
between ... [master and servant] would have been impossible".71 As

opposed to the blind man, the cleric, and the dealer in papal bulls, who
are all one in their efforts to be what they already are individually, both
Lazaro and the squire consist of a will, a yearning to live; in fact, they
insist on being that which they are not as yet, but feel they have to
become, on the basis of "an inherent, dramatic drive".72 This is ultimately
the reason why Lazaro can in his mind do justice to his master, despite
the remarkable differences existing between them, even to the point of
mutual incompatibility, for what separates them lies not so much in the
sheer appearance their lives would present to an onlooker, as in their
respective life projects. In other words, the purely formal identity of
self-projection that holds between them and the material coincidence
of their lives (to the extent and only to the extent that each consists of
a will to be what he is not as yet) allow Lazaro mentally to re-create
or re-enact his master's life sense, his inner feeling of directionality. This
does not mean, of course, that master and servant must have the same
life project in order to understand one another, for, as one can easily
see, the squire's is that of an existence with honor, a goal that is entirely
alien to Lazaro. Rather, they only coincide in the feeling-equivalent of
their respective self-projections. But if they had not had this in common,
then Lazaro would have found it impossible to understand his master and
take pity on him.73 In other words, it is enough therefor that their lives
resemble each other insofar as they characteristically share in being a
will to live and in feeling that they are living in terms of a conatus,
even if the actual content of their will or yearning and of the matching
feeling is altogether different, as it happens in fact. That is precisely what
permitted the servant to speak in this way with the ring of truth: "Would
that God take as much pity on me as I did on him, for I felt what he
was feeling . . . ".74
At this point, Castro proceeds to interpret the passage in question in
the most radical of fashions, a manner of conduct on his part which, at
first glance, seems to be based not only on an error, but even on
something more serious, namely, a deliberate distortion of the literal sense
of the text. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, Lazaro is preoccupied with
hunger, given both the immediate setting of the event and the theme
that is a constant concern throughout the Third Tractate. One should
not overlook the fact that it is right here that Lazaro is presented eating
the beggar's morsels he has been forced to secure for himself, since
the squire has failed to procure the food he owes his servant by virtue
of the fact that he is his master. And Lazaro does what he does right
under the eyes of his master, who is famished, as his servant knows
only too well. At that moment, both master and servant share some-
thing in common, their hunger, and Lazaro feels what the other is feeling,
and he therefore understands his master and is thus capable of taking
genuine pity on him. In other words, he senses in the squire's eyes and
face the very hunger that presses on him and, on that basis, is able to
have a glimpse at what both his master's need and the servant's action
signify with regard to the master's life sense. And yet Castro contends
that if the author could speak directly to us, he would undoubtedly tell
us that "when the squire came to life in my fantasy, I felt what he was
feeling".75 If one wants to do justice to both this critic's interpretation
and the novel itself, one must take care of coming to terms exactly with
the meaning of the passage. To this end, it is necessary to keep in view
not only the immediate narrative context (which is defined by hunger),
but as well the global sense lying at its basis. I have in mind precisely
the general project de-termining the squire's life, namely, that manner
of existing which is for the sake of honor, a goal which accordingly
becomes the measure of that life too. The squire essentially is an endeavor
to be himself, that is to say, the self he is not as yet. Consequently, he
is as well the striving in which he engages to fashion himself in the world
within the boundaries established by that fundamental purpose, apart from
which one would not understand either this Tractate or Lazaro's own
life sense, since, as one can see, he is able to fill his master's shoes
and thereby to understand him and take pity on him, inasmuch as they
co-incide in endeavor and self-projection, though not in a concern for
honor, which is the specific content of the master's yearning only. Now
then, the action of filling his master's shoes is not, of course, a perfor-
mance by which the servant would actually attempt to lead his own life
according to the style or in terms of the life project which are the squire's
own. For the goal intended, no such venture is necessary at all; it will
be sufficient to re-create the style or project in question in one's fantasy
or imagination, an accomplishment characterized by being not only
required in fact in order to understand another, but also by being highly
paradoxical, for it would produce a distance from the other76 without
which the event of identifying with the other77 could never occur
(granting, of course, that this would only take place in terms of the inten-
tional correlate of an imaginative noesis, never as a real worldly event).
In a manner reminiscent of Jose Ortega y Gasset's, Castro thus
conceives the "substance" of living as fantasy, which Ortega takes - when

imagination is regarded in general - as the source and radical form of
reason (i.e., the "faculty" of rendering an account).78 Accordingly, it is
in principle possible to understand otherness, whether what is involved
is a man or - through the mediation of a man, myself or another - the
things and events of one's world. As Lazaro imaginatively rehearses
living in the squire's own way, he manages to understand him as he
understands himself, i.e., anticipatorily and from within, even if it is only
momentarily and in nuce; in other words, he feels what the squire is
feeling. Or to put it otherwise: what Lazaro has gained access to (albeit
only in actu exercito, and at best as a practical, living rule of interpre-
tation) is a general law governing human life, whether real or fictive,
by way of intrinsic structuring, to wit: that I understand another, I feel
what he is feeling, or I share in his life by savoring it in terms of its
own flavor, which becomes accessible to me to a point, just as it is
accessible to him to begin with, namely, by the foretasting of imagina-
tive anticipation and self-projection. But then this could not have been
otherwise, for understanding myself can only succeed, in principle, if and
only if I am born and created in my fantasy, just as coming to terms
with another may be taken as a genuine enterprise, if and only if I see
him emerge in my imagination in terms of my own self-projection.
Now, this is not what the squire signifies just for Lazaro or the reader,
that is, it is not a problem that merely exists in his eyes or in ours,
even if it includes the specific terms of its possible resolution; it is as
well the meaning he has for the narrator who is engaged in the elabo-
ration of the story line of the novel, whether one thereby means Lazaro
(i.e., a fictive character) or the real author of the work. To understand
someone (whether real or fictive), one must attempt to see him from
within and, at least to start with, in his own terms, never purely as a mere
thing or occurrence eventuating in the world. This effort is tantamount
to creating or re-creating someone in one's imagination, the measure
of one's success at this endeavor being precisely the extent to which one's
creative or re-creative image is a foretaste of the life sense in question
in terms of its self-projection. This is of course signaled by one's degree
of failure in conforming oneself to the world in general (if the partic-
ular someone happens to be myself) or to other embodied selves (as a
function of one's actual or possible social and personal intercourse with
them, whether they be real or fictive). But if someone is to engage in this
manner of comportment with regard to the squire, he would have no
alternative but to take pity on him and thus tum him into the object of
God's own pity, for what is involved therein is nothing but doing justice
to the squire, inasmuch as a finite judge (e.g., Lazaro) stands under the
aegis of the infinitely just One, and his consequent pity under His all-
encompassing mercy.
But what lies behind all this? I would say that no more and no less
than a series of reflections conducted on the basis of typicality (e.g.,
honor, hunger, or some other constituted experiential type). The manner
of reflection involved here is that by means of which one seizes upon
the world as a domain of precarious resources and correlatively grasps
one's life as a difficult affair. And yet this kind of reflection accomplishes
something else too, namely, the co-emergence and establishment of a
particular ego before a world and of a special world before an ego, so
far as they are bound to one another in the indissoluble unity of a life
experienced as a difficult affair. In other words, one is not being con-
fronted with just a universal, empty structure applicable in the case of
any human life in any given setting. On the contrary, the dual unity being
constituted is eventuating in the provisional contexture of a man's life
hic et nunc, whether or not it is a fictive character who is involved, as
he comes to discover that self-knowledge, self-projection, and worldly
acquaintanceship are aspects and phases implicating one another within
a dual totality already and necessarily at work before reflection.
It is on this basis that one can explain what would otherwise appear
most surprising or even unintelligible. F. Lazaro Carreter, for one, tells
us that this is "the first time, and nearly the only time, that a rogue
took pity on someone".79 I contend that this opinion can only result
from having misunderstood the character's basic life attitude, or would
at best arise as the expression of a mere onlooker's assessment of the
protagonist's conduct. This notwithstanding, I believe it would be possible
for this critic to salvage his own judgment, were he to separate it from
the context defined in terms of the conflict between reality and appear-
ance in the squire's life80 (a context with which that critic seemed to
be concerned at one point),81 so as to allow himself to realize that his
interpretive discomfiture is nevertheless on target, for it in fact has
nothing to do with some idiosyncratic occurrence in his life, but is
rather the required subjective counterpart of what can be objectively
characterized as an enigma, as the critic in question himself sees. 82 In
other words, one should keep in focus the secret and mysteries to
be unraveled by means of a de-ciphering venture in which one's
imagination (Lazaro's or the reader's) would engage. And yet Lazaro

Carreter fails to grasp this consequence with the measure of clarity
that alone could do justice to the discovery of the enigmatic character
of life made by the main character himself, as one must realize if the
relationship between the squire and his servant is permitted to unfold
freely. But then this is as it should be, for the results of this critic's
analysis appear to have been pre-determined the moment he chose to
focus his examination on the morphological dimensions of the novel
and the material side of the two lives involved in the Tractate here
under scrutiny, for his decision could only overshadow the formal struc-
tures at work in the existence of both characters, structures which, if
clarified, would allow us to understand life from within and open the
door to a theory of human life as such, as the necessary means of
justification of character and novel, and of human experience as reflected
therein.
Finally, let me turn my attention to some details found in this Tractate,
details that are relevant to the correct understanding of the sense of the
chez soi that is established as one reflects about the typical aspects of
this world. One can in fact gain access to such an "abode" in terms of
the conflict that develops between Lazaro and the squire. Let us bring
to mind that scene in which Lazaro, consumed by the expectation of a
meal at the end of a day of fasting, and without any evidence of food
about, surprises his master already preparing for bed. The first reply
his master makes to Lazaro amounts to a trivial justification for not
providing the expected sustenance (e.g., it is late, it is dangerous to go
out and buy food at such a late hour, and the like), but the defensive
reaction of the squire is soon matched by the servant's halfway hypocrisy,
when he says that he "knows how to spend a night, and even longer, if
need be, without a bite to eat".83 The squire then responds by formulating
a rule in view of which it is possible to survive in the kind of world it
has fallen to them to live in, for at that moment he says that "there is
nothing in the world helpful in living a long life, except having little
to eat".84 One must however learn to appreciate the genuine signifi-
cance of this practical principle in the life of the squire, for he does
not bluntly advance it; rather, he tones it down in the spirit of discre-
tion, so as to make it subjectively compatible with his own existence
as the self-projection of a life for the sake of honor. And yet this artifice
does not escape Lazaro's notice, for, in his heart of hearts, he takes it
for what it really is, namely, "a rule of necessity". 85 But whatever its
purpose (consolation) or origin (necessity) may be, the maxim in question

is a norm to govern one's life that takes into account certain typical
characteristics of the world in general and of the roguish world in par-
ticular.
One can also approach the conflict between reality and appearance
in the life of the squire from the standpoint of a reflection that is per-
formed on the basis of typicality. Lazaro, for example, is not content with
being good at ruses and schemes of various kinds, especially those that
permit him to pierce through the looks and manifest behavior of people
down to their innermost motives. He also wants to reach even further,
for he desires, in turn, to grasp the secret shape the squire traces for
himself as he anticipates his own life, and yet he does not rest his case
even at that level, for, practically minded as he always is, he wants -
should he be successful at this venture - to transform his discoveries into
a lesson by which to understand many in one sweep (himself included
were he to be led into temptation too). In my opinion, this is the only
way in which one can understand the two judgments Lazaro makes about
the squire's sense of honor, although, to be sure, they go well beyond
that. First, he cries out: "Great, oh Lord, are such secrets as Thou fash-
ionest which people know nothing about!", and immediately thereafter
he exclaims: "Oh, Lord, how many men of that ilk Thou seemst to have
scattered about in the world who would suffer for rotten honor what
they would not for thy sake!,,86 This notwithstanding, Lazaro is capable
of taking pity on his master and on other members of his guild,87 since
he has grasped not only the sense of such typical manners of worldly
comportment, but also the meaning they have come to have in the squire's
own life, precisely as a function of the latter's individual life-project.
Moreover, he succeeds in comprehending, by the same token, the rela-
tionship between sustenance and honor, in terms of a rule that is grounded
in certain typical structures of the established everyday world. And yet
his understanding of these things (and his pity, which is grounded therein)
can never be connected with abstract knowledge of any kind, but is rather
a concrete wisdom exercised on the basis of his familiarity with worldly
typicality, and by lending on ear to his own sense of living qua self-
projection. It is thus that he comes to learn a lesson about himself that
was beyond his reach for as long as his "knowledge" about living was
based on the teachings of other masters, such as the blind man or the
cleric, since the sine qua non for it was the event of being born to himself,
which is the concomitant of re-creating another's life project in his
fantasy. I have in mind the sad conclusion Lazaro arrives at as the net
result of his life experience up to that point, and which he formulates
by saying: " ... what good is it to me that my misfortune has been
that I have never had any joy unmixed with anxiety?,,88 This is a remark-
able lesson, for it does not permit him to lead a life of rest and
contentment, but is rather what prods him to harbor suspicions about
the future (which will prove well founded judging by the events imme-
diately following) and to transform his life into a problem for itself.
To dispel any doubt about this point, it is enough to see how the Tractate
comes to a head, as Lazaro reflects on the true significance of what
had already occurred in his life in the service of the squire. 89 Let us
hear about it as it is given expression by means of a value judgment
he formulates on that occasion about his life:
... my third master left me, and, when that happened. I finally realized how base my
miserable life was . .. [In fact] my lot was turned inside out, since, being able to take
care of my duties only poorly, my master left and took flight from me, the opposite of
what usually happens, for it is servants who abandon their masters. 90
In this fashion, Lazaro comes not so much to an unplesant, though

consistent finding about himself and his life, as to a paradox. I am not
however thinking of this or that thing or occurrence in life as possibly
paradoxical, but rather of life itself as paradoxical, a view that must
be spelled out, lest one misunderstand not only Lazaro and the story of
his life, but also and above all the essence of human life itself. The
paradox consists in discovering that solitude is inherent in human
existence, for even if it is the case, as in fact it is, that life is the endeavor
to overcome solitude, it is nonetheless true that the goal of such an
effort is unattainable, at least in terms of the resources (both objective
and subjective) which are available to us, so far as they are constituted
by our own power at any given juncture of our lives. It is remarkable that
Lazaro should come to this realization already in the Third Tractate
(in fact, it is the climax thereof), for it is there that Lazaro's active,
reflective subjectivity is established, for the first time and at full, as he
attempts to re-create in his fantasy the squire'S own projective life-
sense. Perhaps what the servant accomplishes at that point is the highest
achievement of which human life is capable on its own, provided that,
in saying this, one understands life essentially to involve the encounter
(conflictual or not) of two solitudes, namely, the act by which one takes
pity on another and therefore on oneself. Accordingly, it is probable
that Lazaro did then reach a plane (never exceeded or overcome in the
rest of the work), at which he would have been set to begin the consti-
tution of the human as such, but this state of readiness is never acted
upon by him, for that would have led Lazaro to the sphere of ultimate
reasons with which one could articulate a theory of human life, an affair
that is both alien to his life sense and beyond the competence and scope
of any fictive narrative.
Let these remarks serve the purpose of underscoring, once again and
for the last time, the conviction which has motivated this study, namely,
that reflection on oneself and on otherness (be it a thing, aspect, occur-
rence, or human life), when it is conducted without being oblivious to
the mutual belongingness inherent in this duality, is possible ultimately
on the basis of typical forms of human conduct and worldly things and
events, and that, accordingly, unless one ventures into a theoretical
endeavor (precisely the sort of effort that is alien to everyday living,
whether real or fictive), reflection not only proceeds on the grounds of
typicality, but must also time and again drink of the waters of typified
motivation from which it departed in the first place. And Lazaro knew
this only too well, as one can gather from his own words when he
acknowledged that he also reflected (or "contemplated", to use his own
expression). At that point, he became cognizant of the fact that he had
usually pondered over concrete situations, agents, and other practical
factors, and that he had done so as he led his life in terms of a typified
context of virtualities for action. In fact, by formulating his findings about
his life to himself precisely at that juncture, he was able to tender to
us his most far-reaching and masterful teaching about living: "I often
used to contemplate the calamitousness of my life", he then said, "for,
having broken loose from the clutches of despicable masters for the
sake of improving myself, I ended up in the service of one that not
only did not provide for me, but whom I had to provide for".91
Long Island University, Southampton, N. Y.
NOTES
1 Cf. Angel Valbuena Prat, "La novela picaresca" in La novela picaresca espanola
(Madrid: Aguilar, 1962), pp. 11-79; Alexander A. Parker, Los picaros en la literatura
(Madrid: Gredos, 1971); Claudio Guillen, "Toward a Definition of the Picaresque" and
"Genre and Countergenre", Literature as a System (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1971); Fernando Lazaro Carreter, Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca (Barcelona:

Ariel, 1972).
2 Cf. C. Guillen, lac. cit.
3 Cf. F. Lazaro Carreter, op. cit.
4 A. Valbuena Prat, lac. cit., p. 13.
5 This is the subtitle to the second part of Mateo Aleman's Guzman de Alfarache in
La novela picaresca esponola, ed. A Valbuena Prat, p. 38.
6 Cf. A. A. Parker, op. cit., p. 65.
7 Ibid., p. 13.
8 Americo Castro, "Perspectiva de la novel a picaresca" in Hacia Cervantes, 3rd. ed.
(Madrid: Taurus, 1967), p. 119. Cf. Marcel Bataillon, Novedad y fecundidad del "Lazarillo
de Tormes" (New York: Las Americas Publishing Co., 1968), pp. 100-101.
9 Julian Marias, "Pr610go", La picaresca espanola (Barcelona: Nauta, 1968), p. 7.
10 Cf. A. A. Parker, op. cit., p. 17.
11 J. Marias, loc. cit. The emphasis is mine. Cf. M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 102. The
nickname of "doctor in picaresque philosophy", by which Guzman is characterized in
this context, would not amount to anything but rhetorical exaggeration, were it not for
the fact that it contributes to making it difficult to distinguish between occasional reflec-
tion and reflection properly so called, inasmuch as it makes it identifiable - by sheer
nominal implication - with the theoretical level of human thinking.
12 A. Castro, loc. cit., p. 120.
13 Ibid., p. 128.
14 A. Castro, "El 'Lazarillo de Tormes"', op. cit., p. 145.
15 Ibid.
16 M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 100. Cf. Guzman de Aifarache, Part I, ii, c. 3 and La vida
de Lazarillo de Tormes, Third Tractate in La Novela picaresca espanola, ed. A. Valbuena
Prat.
17 I do not wish to sidestep the view according to which one of the possible reasons
for being "endowed" with keen wits (and for the establishment of reflection) lies in the
ressentiment proper to the context determined by the conflicts involving the question of
"purity of blood" during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. About this question, cf.
A. Castro, "Perspectiva de la novela picaresca", op. cit., pp. 121-22; La realidad historica
de Espana, 2nd. ed. (Mexico: Pomia, 1962), cc. 2 and 3; J. Marias, loc. cit., pp. 10 ff.;
Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. W. W. Holdheim (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe,
1961). However important this problem may be, it is nonetheless peripheral to the topic
under discussion here.
18 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La structure du comportement (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1942); PMnomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945);
Alphonse de Waehlens, Une philosophie de l'ambigurte (Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1970).
19 M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 104. Cf. A. A. Parker, op. cit., p. 60: this author argues
that the ambiguity becomes, in the case of Guzman, a genuine structural duality, by
virtue of the fact that the work assumes the life style and kind of commentary befitting
the religious experience and writing characteristic of Spain at the time, as it happens,
say, in Mal6n de Chaide's Conversion de la Magdalena); also vide pp. 78, 80-81, and
82-83.
20 Cf. A. A. Parker, op. cit., p. 173; vide pp. 76-77 for a consideration of the con-
scious experience of life's ambiguity, specifically in the context determined by the enjoy-
ment of temptation, one's falling into sin, and the lessons derivable therefrom.
21 Cf. Jose Ortega y Gasset, EI hombre y la gente in Obras Completas (Madrid: Revista
de OccidentelAlianza Editorial, 1983), VII, c. 1.
22 Alfred Schutz, Reflections on the Problem of Relevance, ed. R. M. Zaner (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970), p. 57. Henceforth I shall refer to this work as Reflections.
23 Cf. J. Ortega y Gasset, op. cit., c. 9.
24 Cf. Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University
Press, 1964), Part I, c. 2, § 3; Part IV, cc. 1 and 3.
25 Alfred Schutz, "Type and Eidos in Hussed's Late Philosophy" in Collected Papers,
III, ed. I. Schutz (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 94.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 95.
29 Ibid.
30 Cf. A. Schutz, Reflections, p. 58; Edmund Hussed, Formal and Transcendental Logic,
trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), § 74; Experience and Judgment,
ed. L. Landgrebe, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1973), §§ 51b, 58, and 61.
31 A. Schutz, Reflections, p. 58.
32 Ibid., pp. 58-59.
33 Ibid., p. 61.
34 Ibid., p. 62.
35 Cf. Osborne Wiggins, Jr., "On the Genetic Roots of Perceptual Typicality", Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal (New School for Social Research, New York), I, No.1 (Spring,
1972), p. 2. Wiggins presents here a notion of the greatest interest, namely, that the
mundaneity of the natural wodd as a constituted product rests on the fact that types are
not just experiential "systems" consisting of qualitative or physiognomical traits (i.e., those
aspects which together form the pre-conceptual equivalent of logical comprehension),
but wholes endowed with "extension" as well. If this is so, one can then begin to under-
stand how they come to integrate themselves into totalities called Sachverhalten (states
of affairs) by Husserl, which would serve to support and ground further possible
elaborations to be conducted at the logical level proper, both in terms of "abstraction" (and
thus of concept formation in its two aspects of connotation and denotation) and judgment.
Cf. E. Hussed, Experience and Judgment. passim.
36 Cf. A. Schutz, "Type and Eidos in Husserl's Late Philosophy", p. 96.
37 Ibid., p. 97. It is to be noted that Schutz puts certain words in quotes. He seems to
be doing it for the purpose of avoiding a possible confusion, namely, that of the sense
of certain experiences (e.g., "dogs" and "such like" animals) with the concepts that
would be their correlatives (e.g., the notions of dog, animal, and likeness). The acts of
meaning (and their correlative senses), so far as they belong in the domain of typicality,
would thus precede the corresponding concepts both temporally and "logically", thus
"performing" the function of necessary conditions rendering the elaboration of such
concepts possible. Cf. ibid., p. 100.
38 Ibid., p. 102.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., p. 103.
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., pp. 107 ff. Cf. E. Husser!, Experience and Judgment, Part III, cc. 2-3.
44 Cf. Rafael Sali11as, EI delincuente espanol, apud A, Valbuena Prat, loco cit., p. 19.
45 A. Valbuena Prat, loco cit.
46 Ibid., p. 23.
47 Ibid. Unfortunately, Valbuena takes Lazaro's judgments to be instinctual reactions,
an assessment resulting from inexactitude of thought or a failure to reflect on the
experiential processes I mentioned above.
48 Ibid. Valbuena errs once more when he adds that Guzman, by contrast with Lazaril/o,
"raises the satirical presentation of each occupation to the level of a general theory ... "
Cf. ibid., pp. 24, 26, 31, and 37.
49 A. Castro, "El 'Lazarillo de Tormes''', op. cit., p. 147.
50 Cf. A. A. Parker, op. cit., pp. 72 ff.
51 A. Castro, "El 'Lazarillo de Tormes' ", op. cit., p. 157. Cf. M. Bataillon, op. cit.,
p. 12.
52 A. Castro, "El 'Lazarillo de Tormes' ", op. cit., p. 166.
53 This is not the place to examine the roots that the characters and events of Lazarillo
have in folklore (cf. M. Bataillon, op. cit., C. 2), the author's employment of proverbs
and their sources (cf. F. Lazaro Carreter, op. cit., p. 112), or the traditional morpholog-
ical origins at play in the composition of this work (cf. F. Lazaro Carreter, ibid., C. 2).
Such inquiries are undoubtedly valid and promising from the standpoint I have adopted
in this study, and yet I must set them aside, as I have to confine myself to two things
and to two things only. First of all, an analysis of that sort would also involve either an
examination of the types to which the real or fictive story line conforms itself in fact,
and of which the author avails himself, or a consideration of the role played in it by
forms constructed on the basis of typicality. Secondly, I would like to join Bataillon in
affirming, given the relevance of his point to what I have said so far, that "Lazarillo's
exaggerated naivete, together with his considerable cunning, is, therefore, one of the
fundamental character traits the author has taken over from tradition" Cop. cit., p. 28;
cf. pp. 43-44). Moreover, this critic agrees in principle with the view I have advanced
in the text, as he asserts, although only on the grounds of folklore, that "Lazaro, the
blind man, and the squire are genuine characters [that is to say, they are poetically verisim-
ilar) ... because they conform their lives to time-honored types for characters of that sort"
(Ibid., p. 61). Immediately thereafter, the same critic refers to a remark that the French
philosopher Alain made, and which he takes to be most illuminating in this context, for
he had said that "copying good drawings is no worse, as an initiation into drawing, than
drawing directly from Nature". I can well agree with this contention, since both approaches
to the art involve, to begin with, a measure of typification (Concerning the notion of poetic
truth or inner coherence, cf. ibid., p. 59).
54 La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, p. 85.
55 Ibid., p. 86.
56 Cf. ibid., p. 92.
57 Ibid., p. 94.
58 Cf. Ibid., p. 111.
59 Ibid., p. 85.
60 Ibid., p. 86. Here the author tells of the episode in which the blind man is presented
as tricking L~zaro into approaching a stone statue of an animal shaped like a bull, which
was found near a bridge just outside the city of Salamanca. He then and there proceeded
to provoke L~zaro's curiosity by claiming that, were his servant to put his ear to the
stone, he would hear it bellow. As Uzaro did, his master pushed his head hard against
the stone to teach the gullible boy to be "even wiser than the devil".
61 M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 54.
62 La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, p. 86. Cf. p. 89: "I laughed to myself, and even though
I was just a boy, I greatly appreciated the blind man's discretion". In this regard, a passage
taken from the concluding Tractate may prove instructive. I have in mind the one begin-
ning with the words, '''Look: if you are my friend ... '" (p. 111). In this section, one
can clearly see that explicit self-consciousness is a function of one's awareness of
otherness, and ne';er just a concomitant dimension of experience or even an empty form
thereof. In my opinion, F. L~zaro Carreter is the critic who has grasped, with the greatest
insightfulness, the role self-consciousness plays in the elaboration of this novel and in
the establishment of the protagonist's unified self. He is right on target in his analysis
of the book, even when he emphasizes the structural import of the letter serving as a
prologue to the work, inasmuch as it provides it with a suitable frame, for what could
possibly be the meaning of the radical novelty (this is L~zaro Carreter's own way
of characterizing the event) of making a letter public which is about one's own
private life, if it does not signify that human life is ex post facto seen as an affair of
self-constitution? Now, the product of such a process would have to be a totality appearing
before the self in question as a destiny of its own making, even if one acknowledges -
as the author and the character of the novel both do - that this result is accomplished
only within the confines of an established world in the making (rather than in detach-
ment from and independently of any particular world), a discovery that is correlated
with the feeling that living is a difficult affair.
63 This too may very well be the meaning of what Maqueda's priest says to L~zaro as
he discharges him from his service at the end of the Second Tractate, for he tells him
that " ... I do not want to keep with me so diligent a servant. You could not have
become what you are, unless you had been first in the service of a blind man". (La vida
de Lazarillo de Tormes, p. 96).
64 Cf. C. Guill~n, "Toward a Definition of the Picaresque", op. cit., pp. 81-82 and 93;
M. Bataillon, op. cit., c. 3; A. A. Parker, op. cit. p. 57 (for his objections and reserva-
tions, vide p. 39); F. Uzaro Carreter, op. cit., pp. 13 and 69 ff.)
65 Cf. M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 59.
66 Cf. ibid., p. 55.
67 Ibid., p. 68.
68 Cf. F. Uzaro Carreter, op. cit., p. 126. Concerning the role played by "wits" and its
importance, vide J. Marias, loco cit.; R. Salillas, op. cit., pp. 324-25 (apud A. A. Parker,
op. cit., p. 12).
69 Cf. A. Castro, "El 'Lazarillo de Tormes' ", op. cit., p. 163.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 164.
72 Ibid.
73 I will have to return to this point which, in many opinion, is crucial. Cf. infra, pp.
178 and 183.
74 La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, p. 100.
75 A. Castro, "EI 'Lazarillo de Tormes' ", op. cit. p. 165.
76 That is to say, the separation required by the distinction between an image of someone
(whether of myself or of another, which would be the product of my "art" of creation
or re-creation, respectively) and my global sense of self-projection, insofar as the latter
involves a pre-imaging conatus to be somebody unique.
77 This event is brought about by means of the employment and fashioning of a unity
of sense endowed with an internal caesura, which thus corresponds to the distance between
my image of someone and myself qua self-projection in actu exercito.
78 Cf. J. Ortega y Gasset, "Ideas y creencias" in Obras Completas, V, pp. 383 ff.
79 F. Lazaro Carreter, op. cit., p. 133.
80 For the conflict between reality and appearance in the context defined by the squire's
self-projection for the sake of honor, please compare pp. 96 and 99 with pp. 103-104
of La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes.
81 Cf. F. Lazaro Carreter, op. cit., p. 146.
82 Cf. ibid., p. 147.
83 La vida de Lazarrillo de Tormes, p. 98.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., p. 99.
87 Ibid., p. 101.
88 Ibid., p. 102.
89 It is worth noting that, in doing so, the narrator's standpoint (that is, the standpoint
of the narrator of his life Lazaro has now become) takes precedence or prevails over
that of the subject of the life whose past events are presently being recounted and assessed.
The self-distancing this brings about not only underscores the activity of reflection
Lazaro is engaged in, but also points to the fact that he has thereby achieved a new
level of reflection, namely, that concerned with his very life as self-projection. This
does not mean that he cannot, by the same token, learn about the generic traits life exhibits
or gain access to practical rules of general import for the leading of his own life, nor
does it signify, for that matter, that he has abandoned, by conducting a kind of
reflection characterized by such a high level of concentration and degree of self-direct-
edness, the sphere of thinking and action in which one proceeds primarily on the basis
of typicality. The change in question only amounts to maximizing what is possible in a
life grounded in typicality, a level of achievement which is perhaps only exceeded, and
then only as to degree, by a life such as Guzman's and those maxims that allow him to
"contemplate human life". And yet in neither case would one enter the theoretical plane,
for that would have transmuted the narrative - assuming that were at all possible - into
a fictive treatment of the intellectual education of man, if not into an outright philosophico-
anthropological and ethical discussion of man as such.
90 La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, p. 105. The emphasis is mine.
91 Ibid., p. 10 1. Again, I have decided not to conduct an examination of the traditional
and folk motifs that are at work in this Tractate, since my purpose has been primarily
to carry out a static, not a genetic constitutive-phenomenological analysis thereof. For such
topics and questions, cf. M. Bataillon, op. cit., p. 42; F. Lazaro Carreter, op. cit., pp.
138-39, 141, and, above all, p. 144, where this critic deals with the folk theme of a
dark, gloomy abode in connection with the motif of death, both insofar as this section
of the novel involves a traditional type and to the extent that it is relevant to Lazaro's
own life sense (Cf. La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, pp. 102-103). It is to be noted
that, on the basis of the theory of typicality I sketched out above (cf. supra, pp. 161
ff.), one may assert that Lazaro appears only to reach the predicative levels expressible
by the judgment forms, "this is a '" and "this is a", or the individual and generic
judgment-forms employed in everyday experience, respectively (where a' is an
individual moment of an individual substratum, and a a universal moment for the abstract
identification of individuals), but never the typical-generic plane as such, which seems
to be the province of Guzman. Cf. A. Schutz, "Type and Eidos in Husserl's Late
Philosophy", op. cit., pp. 102-103.
RICHARD HULL
ORTEGA Y GASSET, PHENOMENOLOGY

AND QUIXOTE
Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote is important for the trans-

mission of phenomenology into literary criticism.! Ortega wrote
Meditations "to explain Husserl's phenomenology" (Obras completas,
273, n. 2, cited in Silver 9). For Ortega, phenomenology meant giving
up positivism, natualism and realism to discover the "world of things
which I must be personally conscious of" (Basdekis 11). In Ortega's early
career, "the breaching of traditional ethical naturalism was tantamount to
sacriligious transgression, [but then] Ortega was thrust, ... into ...
phenomenological ontology ... tracable to Husserl's 'rigorous new
science' ... a 'stroke of good fortune,' as Ortega described it" (Basdekis
75). This new Ortega, in a version of Husserl's phenomenological
reduction, "forces his reader ... to disjoin himself from the physical
world around him, insulating him from any association with his recog-
nizable natural world" (Basdekis 12).
Ortega faults what he calls "extreme empiricism" because, in viola-
tion of Husserl's principle that science must be presuppositionless, it
begins by asserting a reality and then proceeds to derive knowing from it ... Knowing
cannot be derived from being for the simple reason that the positing of being is a
cognitive act, a theoretical one that receives its truth-value from that of knowledge in
general (P&A 85-86).
This knowledge in general, that which is accepted as knowledge or reality,

must be seen as a problem. But empiricism fails to see this problem; it
passes too quickly beyond sensations by referring them
to an ideal order ... that we call a spatial-temporal order.... In general what is sensed
is the very opposite of what is objective, its pure phenomenon ... the objectification of
such phenomena consists in their referral to the single spatial and temporal order where
they are coverted into quantitative relationships with a "meaning" - in other words,
where they exist (P&A 88-89).
Ortega goes on to claim that "there is a deeper, prior level" than this
single ideal order (P&A 92).
Though Ortega doesn't apply this thinking directly to Cervantes' novel,
it can help us see that Don Quixote is about this deeper level of strange

'© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
180 RICHARD HULL
objects, a level prior to considerations of existence or reality. The

existence of Quixote's giants, castles and Mambrino's helmet is not
what's in question. The question about these things is not whether they
are but what they are. Quixote thinks their surface, what is available to
empirical observation, has been altered by enchanters. The question of
Quixote's lady-love, Dulcinea, on the other hand, may be whether she
exists. She may not exist, but in phenomenological fashion, Quixote
teaches us that we can nevertheless contemplate her in her ideal form,
suspending all question of her existence.
Ortega's 1913 article, "On the Concept of Sensation" tells us that
Husserl's phenomenology "differs from the common approach to psy-
chology because it is exclusively concerned with essences not existences"
(P&A 106).
In every individual object ... there are two elements: one, what the object is ... and
the other, its existential moment. ... This second element is what makes an object a
fact ... we can set aside this element which individualizes and makes the object a fact,
so that only the object remains (C of S 104).
Citing Husserl's Ideas, Ortega goes on to say

the "natural attitude" in an act of perception consists in believing that something is
really there before us, and that it belongs to a realm of things we believe to be real and
which we call the "world" (C of S 105).
The phenomenological attitude, on the contrary, can be aware of the thing

without ascribing reality. "Before they are real or unreal, objects are
objects, that is, immediate presences for consciousness" (C of S
109-110).
The preface to Ortega's Meditations is indebted to the chapter in
Husserl's Ideas titled "The Thesis of the Natural Standpoint and its
Suspension" (Basdekis 82). There Husserl says of the standpoint to be
suspended,
I am aware of a world .... I discover it immediately, intuitively, I experience it. Through
sight, touch, hearing, etc., in the different ways of sensory perception, corpororeal things
... are for me simply there . .. real object are there, definite, more or less familiar, agreeing
with what is actually perceived (Ideas 101).
Ortega is like Husserl in wanting to suspend this Natural Standpoint. "We

must discard the passive type of vision which is satisfied with surfaces,"
Ortega says. "This requires that the spectator establish a certain distance
between himself and the phenomenon viewed, and that, in addition, he
PHENOMENOLOGY AND QUIXOTE 181
will or desire (intend) the inwardness, depth, concealed dimension"

(Basdekis 23). Quixote's books of chivalry are like the phenomenolog-
ical method in that they separate him from the phenomena of windmills
and inns, so that he sees the inward depth of the giants and castles that
he wills and desires.
Ortega's Meditations is famous for discovering in Don Quixote a
perspecivism, in which our perceptions are bound by historical dis-
course or habits of perception. That is, we can't go to things themselves,
but only as phenomena. Ortega points out that we perceive phenomena
through our categories, epistemes, or life horizons.
We judge a man's actions absurd without perhaps realizing that maybe they're reactions
to things before him that we don't see .... This, gentlemen, is the Cervantean way of
approaching things: to take each individual with his landscape, with what he sees, not with
what we see - to take each landscape with its individual, with the one who can fully
see it. Thus Don Quixote ... says to Sancho: "Finally Sancho, what to you looks like a
barber's basin, looks like Mambrino's helmet to me, and to someone else it'll look like
something else. (Ortega, "Temas", 8-9, my translation).
Because Quixote'S landscape is influenced by his books of chivalry he

sees giants, while Sancho who has read nothing sees windmills. Ortega
says the windmills "rise and gesticulate above the horizon in the
bloodshot sunset. These mills have a meaning: their 'sense' as giants"
(Meditations, 141).
Ortega wants Spain to adopt some of Quixote'S "love for the
perfection of the love object" in the place of "the hate" associated with
the "facts of nineteenth-century positivism".2 The perfections Quixote
loves in Dulcinea are in the attitude he has adopted, and Ortega must
have thought quixotic loving could change his own loved object, Spain,
by calling into being some of the desired perfection. Expecting people
to be better than they are may encourage them to actually become better.
Ortega criticizes the nineteenth century for its "positivist, realist or
naturalistic worldview," for paying "homage to 'facts', deifying reality"
(Basdekis 29-30). Don Quixote had been considered the foundation of
novelistic realism, but Ortega insisted that such art
should not be called realism because it does not consist in the emphasis on the res, on
the things, but on the appearance of things. It would be better to call it "apparentism",
illusionism, impressionism (Meditations 84).
Ortega shared this rejection of nineteenth-century positivism with

Husseri. Silver calls the Meditations' efforts to bracket positivism
182 RICHARD HULL
"jousting with the nineteenth century" (135). In The Dehumanization

of Art, Ortega considers realism "an epiphenomenon and the classical
nineteenth-century novel, a degenerate form" (Silver 143).
But Ortega's target, like Husserl's, is broader than nineteenth-century
positivism. In Ideas, published two years before Ortega's Meditations,
Husserl criticized "modern empirical science", and "the 'Positivists'"
who are "not willing, being bound by their prejudices, to recognize"
eidetic images "as valid, or indeed as being present at all" (86-87). Ortega
criticizes twenty centuries of Latin Mediterranean culture for its
"sensism," its "determination to imitate reality," and its "inability, or
refusal, to see past mere impressions" which it associates with reality
(Basdekis 24). As Basdekis puts it, with the reduction, Husserl divested
"himself of more than two thousand years of philosophy ... Ortega
... of the same number of years of esthetic speculation" (51). Aristotelian
verisimilitude was the natural standpoint Ortega wanted to put out of
action.
Describing the natural standpoint to be suspended, Husserl says we
set up in common an objective spatio-temporal fact-world as the world about us that is
there for us all, and to which we ourselves none the less belong . ... I find continu-
ously present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which
I belong, as do other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This "fact-
world" ... I find to be out there (Husserl, Ideas 105-106).
The scandalous implication Ortega draws from Don Quixote is that

there may be some Quixote in our fact-world who doesn't relate to it
the same way we do, and that there may be more than one fact-world.
The worlds of the books of chivalry and novelistic realism are not only
different genres of literature, but contradictory fact-worlds. Ortega's most
important point in Meditations is just this perspectival one, that there
are several different fact-worlds. Foucault would call them epistemes.
Ortega did not discuss these epistemes in terms of power, but the
shift in Foucault, from the epistemological concern of The Order of
Things to the study of fact-worlds with regard to questions of power,
might have been discovered in either Husserl or Don Quixote.
Emphasizing by inverted commas, that for someone in the natural attitude
there is only one world, Husserl says" 'The' world is as fact-world always
there; at the most it is at odd points 'other' than I supposed, this or
that under such names as 'illusion', 'hallucination', and the like, must
be struck out of it" (Ideas 106). Don Quixote shows the curate and canon,
and indeed the Spanish Inquisition, striking out whatever is other than
supposed. 3 Their burning of Quixote's books is explicitly compared to
the Inquisition's burning of heretics and expulsion of "undesirable races."
The canon says Quixote has to be locked in a cage because his books
of chivalry have taken him "beyond the bounds of common sense" and
promises to release him if he will only "come back into the bosom of
common sense" (490-491). The curate and barber put their mis-
treatment of Quixote in the medical language of sickness and cure, but
the "cure" they have in mind consists in his returning to their natural
standpoint and giving up the standpoint he's derived from books of
chivarly. Presumably they would have also locked up Husserl for
suspending their natural standpoint. When Sancho objects to their caging
his master, they threaten to lock him up too if he doesn't return to their
common sense.
Husserl says of the natural standpoint, "we set it ... out of action,"
we "disconnect it," "bracket it" ... make "no use" of it" (Ideas, 108).
It is this bracketing that allows Ortega to set aside Aristotelian
verisimilitude, and the curate and canon's realism, to entertain the
possibility of another reality. Ortega's program in respect to the argu-
ments of the curate and canon is Husserl's: "Every thesis related to
... objectivity must be disconnected and changed into its bracketed
counterpart ... so long, that is, as it is understood ... as a truth
concerning the realities of this world" (Ideas, 110-111).
We might go beyond Ortega, and consider the ideation by which
Quixote constitutes Dulcinea. She appears to Quixote "as a wholly ideal
reality, as an 'essense' immanent to consciousness, detached from the
real world" (Edie 242). In what may be the earliest example of the
phenomenological reduction, Quixote tells the Duchess that
God knows whether Dulcinea exists on earth or not, or whether she is fantastical or not.
These are not matters where verification can be carried out to the full .... I contem-
plate her in her ideal form (760).
Quixote'S love thus explicitly suspends the natural attitude. For Husserl
sensations are the "occasion for ... a definite and peculiar kind of
experience of a realm of essence-objects" (Welch 236). In Dulcinea,
Quixote has just such an essence-object. He explains himself by
bracketing the question of Dulcinea's existence to insist that he experi-
ences essentally or eidetically.
Thus Ortega was following Quixote when he came to vehemently
184 RICHARD HULL
oppose literary realism. Ortega's Meditations put less emphasis on

Sancho's debunkng of Quixote's idealism and on the realist destruction
of chivalric fantasy, and emphasized instead the ways Quixote works
to displace and reverse the fact-world. The essence of Don Quixote
then is not the degrading of Quixote and books of chivalry, but its
giving us a character who doesn't go along with the fact-world. Husserl
says we "make 'no use'" of "experience as lived", and calls for "a certain
refraining from the thesis of the material world (Ideas, 108-109).
Such refraining might be called quixotic, since it is the Don's salient
characteristic.
ORTEGA'S CRITIQUE OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION
It is Hussed's suspension of the natural standpoint that makes Ortega's

Meditations on Quixote possible. Nevertheless Ortega critiques this
suspension, objecting that to suspend the "thetic or actualizing character"
of consciousness "is to eliminate what is most basic to it and hence to
all consciousness". The suspending consciousness doesn't have
any superior right to invalidate the primary consciousness reflected upon ... it makes
no sense for one consciousness to invalidate the other.... Hallucination and perception
have as such inherently equal rights (Obras Completas, VIII, 274-75, n., cited in Silver
10).4
Equal rights for hallucination means refraining from the verisimilitude

so dear to Don Quixote'S curate and canon. But with help from Max
Scheler, Ortega found what he considered a weak point in Husserl's
suspension of the natural attitude. Ortega "would not accept Husserl's
idea that consciousness could simultaneously 'mean' the world and
transcend itself" (Silver 92-93). Husserl repeatedly referred to the
reduction "as though it were merely the supression of an existential
judgment" (Silver 92). Scheler pointed out that
if the factor of reality must be nullified ... then it must above all be clear what the moment
of reality itself is .... Merely to suppress existential judgment is child's play. It is quite
another thing to set aside the factor of reality itself by putting out of operation those
(involuntary) functions which furnish it. To accomplish this requires very different
techniques" (Scheler 315-16).
Ortega's position, against both Scheler and Husserl, is that there can
be no such techniques (Cf. Silver 76-77). Thus Ortega returned from
Husserl's bracketing of natural to an unbracketed nature, even though
that meant returning to the natural attitude. He rejected what he saw as

Cartesian and Kantian idealism in Husserl's reduction, finding in it "the
metaphysical assertion" that the being of the natural world was consti-
tuted by consciousness (Cf. Silver 77).
Ortega in effect historicized the natural standpoint Husserl wanted
to suspend. It became the involuntary pre-selected faculties and obsta-
cles determining the backwardness about concepts he called Spanish
Impressionism and Mediterranean Man. Ortega wanted to see some-
thing in Don Quixote that "the nineteenth century had been unable to
perceive" (Silver 116), "the Spain that could have been" (Meditations
106). Since for Ortega the life world "was in essence temporal and, hence,
historical, it could only be narrated, never "bracketed," or "reduced"
(Silver 77-78). Ortega at this point agreed with Scheler that "we are
dealing ... with an action through which the factor of reality, and not
only the judgment of reality about it, disappears" (Scheler 316, cf.
Silver 92). This disappearing act would have made realism just another
genre on the same level as Quixote'S books of chivalry. And Don Quixote
does ridicule and parody not only the conventions of books of chivary
but also those of realism.
Ortega, however, wants to insist that the acts that produce the factor
of reality are not merely acts of consciousness. He rejects as "positivistic"
what he takes as Husserl's "insistence on passive seeing and his demand
that everything appear - on the surface - essentially." The example of
"the woods" in Meditations "shows that we do not get to the 'essence'
of 'the woods' descriptively, but by 'being in the woods' ourselves and
narrating the story of how we got there, and that "there is no complete
reduction" (Silver 137).
I would here raise Foucault's point about power. Don Quixote shows
the social production of the factor of reality by acts of book burning,
torture and the burning and expUlsion of heretics and undesirable races
- all the acts that coerce. Husserl says that "In relation to every thesis
and wholly uncoerced we can use this peculiar epoche" (Ideas 109),
but Cervantes' Spain was a Spain coerced. Quixote'S knight errantry
shared with the Inquisition a desire to coerce the will, coerce percep-
tion. When Quixote tries to force the silk merchants at swordpoint to
"believe, confess, affirm, swear, and defend" "that there is not in all
the world a fairer damsel" (78) than Dulcinea, he is imitating not so much
his books of chivalry, as the world-constituting procedure of the
Inquisition. Phenomenological theory must learn to distinguish between
186 RICHARD HULL
the acts that make any reality at all possible, and the policing of
realities by coersive insistance on a particular one. Don Quixote shows
that the acts that produce the factor of reality are not merely acts of
consciousness. They are also a plethora of inquisitorial acts that coerce
consciousness. The acts that strike out the odd other which disturbs the
natural standpoint.
Silver insists that "Meditations is science and philosophy, episteme
and not doxa" (124). My point too is that it is episteme. The histori-
cally and culturally conditionned "attentional and inattentional zones
of consciousness" (Silver 124), that Ortega terms Germany's mists and
Spain's impressionism are very like Foucault's epistemes, the historical
a prioris that condition perception. They are phenomenal fields, histor-
ically determined ways of relating to the world. To see more than one
of them is to bracket truth.
ORTEGA'S PESSIMISM
But we must wait for Foucault to carry out Husserl's reduction in respect
to Don Quixote. Ortega says that "Although the realistic novel was born
in opposition to the so-called novel of fantasy, it carries adventure
enclosed within its body" (Meditations 137). Ortega does a great service
by noticing this ontological priority of fantasy, which hasn't gone away
but is still there inside "reality". But in the end Ortega discounts fantasy.
He sees "the novel" as the "absorption" (Meditations 139) of fantasy
and all that he values by positivism. Because he finally can't accept
Husserl's collapse of the phenomenon-noumenon distinction, reality
eats up his values. Ortega's pessimism in the Meditations results from
his belief that consciousness can't transcend itself because it "means" the
world. He doesn't consider the possibility that consciousness might
transcend itself by ceasing to 'mean' the world. Foucault in The Order
of Things has it the other way around. We can't mean the world because
we transcend it in the episteme. We can't even see the episteme that molds
our perceptions because we are in it. For both Ortega and Foucault, a
pure reduction is impossible.
Ortega ends his Meditations complaining of
the insufficiency ... of all that is noble, clear, lofty - this is the significance of poetic
realism. Surrounding culture ... lies the barbarous, brutal, mute, meaningless reality of
things. It is sad that it should reveal itself to us thus, but what can we do about it! It is
real, it is there: it is terribly self-sufficient. Its force and its single meaning are rooted
in its sheer presence ... reality is a simple and frightening "being there". It is a presence,
a sediment, an inertia. It is materiality (144-145).
Silver says, "The pessimism of this passage has never been satisfacto-
rily explained" (158). But I would point out that this surrender to material
reality distinguishes Ortega not only from Foucault, but from the Husserl
prepared to bracket reality. Is it that Ortega saw how relevant the Quixote
was for the reduction but hesitated when faced with the possibility of
carrying it out? Deeply fascinated as he was, did he let himself be
recaptured by 19th-century positivism?
What appalled Ortega was the possibility that a passive conscious-
ness might be invaded by phenomenal sensations and destroyed. The year
before he published Meditations, Ortega denounced "extreme empiri-
cism", for thinking that "being is sensation; knowing, its correlative
act, is feeling", for in such empiricism "man ceases to be an agent and
becomes mere passivity. (SCI 83). Ortega calls this passivity "subhuman".
Silver concludes Ortega as Phenomenologist with the observation that
Ortega was forced to accept determinism because he accepted "percep-
tion as passive constitution, as the passive genesis of meaning ... one
that was not one's own" (159-160). In accepting determinism, Ortega
himself fell into "extreme empiricism". Phenomenology's collapse of
"Kant's phenomena-noumena distinction" which had so attracted Ortega
(Silver 55), had only seemed to offer the collapse of the realism-fantasy
distinction, had only seemed to deny the realistic novel the right to
discredit another genre. But Ortega, who saw the disirability and rele-
vance of Husserl's suspension of the natural standpoint to Quixote, was
unable to suspend it himself. Like Quixote in his deathbed conversion,
Ortega loses his joust with reality. He says,
invaded by the external, we may be driven out of ourselves, left with our inner selves
empty .... The reality of the adventure is reduced to the psychological ... it is vapor
from a brain, so that its reality is rather that of its opposite, the material (Meditations
85, l39).
Ortega lost his joust with the 19th century when he abandoned the epoche.
So I would not term the Ortega of the Meditations a phenomenologist,
but a reluctant extreme empiricist. It is an extreme empiricist who tells
us the novel is "destruction of the myth" and that in it "reality, which
is of an inert and meaningless nature ... is changed into an active
power of agression" (Meditations 139). This assertion of innert and mean-
ingless reality is a return to the natural standpoint. What Bakhtin,
188 RICHARD HULL
following Ortega, calls "novelization" is the epistimic shift from a magic

world to "our" consensus reality, which is policed by such authorities
as the Inquisition and the KGB, and the discrediting of other discourse
as insane. Don Quixote's metaphor for what Bakhtin calls novelization
is racism, bookburning and auto da fe. Ortega ends Meditations on
Quixote by saying that "reality" has "a violent temper" (163). Maybe
he should have said that about the realists. The advantage of Husserl' s
suspension of the natural standpoint was that it pointed out the
subjectivity that constitutes this violence.
Ortega says that,
In Quixote the balance of poetic sensibility was already tipping towards the side of
bitterness .... The nineteenth century ... has compressed the world.... To live is to
... allow the material environment to penetrate into us, to drive us out of ourselves
(Meditations, 164-165).
To Ortega's "what can we do about it?" we can answer with Husserl:

suspend the natural standpoint. The phenomenological standpoint shows
that realism is, as Husserl put it, "one-sided, closed" merely "a partic-
ular transcendental attitude ... a certain habitual one-sidedness" (Crisis
205).
In spite of Ortega's backtracking, his real contribution in Meditations 5
derives from HusserI's not going along with the thesis of the material
fact-world. The phenomenological reduction puts out of action the
program proposed in the prologue to Don Quixote: to "destroy the
authority and influence that books of chivalry have in the world" (47).
Since Quixote's salient characteristic is his not going along with the
fact-world, the phenomenological reduction might be called quixotic.
In fact Silver calls Husserl "the most quixotic of philosophers" (67).
As Ortega made clear, Don Quixote is about perspectives presented
in the guise of literary genres: books of chivalry, pastoral romance,
picaresque, realism. To say with Ortega and Bakhtin that the realist novel
is a kind of privileged meta-perspective, or meta-genre, is to refuse
Quixote'S suspension of the natural attitude. This refusal presents itself,
especially in the burning of Quixote's books, and in the canon of Toledo's
diatribe against books of chivalry, as metalanguage. Any privileging of
the genre of realism depends on the possibility of this metalanguage. And
Ortega's final privileging of realism over the other genres resembles
that of Bakhtin who says that once the realist novel
came into being it could never be merely one genre among others, and it could not erect
rules for interrelating with others in peaceful and harmonious co-existence.... A lengthy
battle for the novelization of the other genres began, a battle to drag them into a zone
of contact with reality. (39)
The difficulty with this privileging of the natural attitude is that, as

Roland Barthes pointed out, there is no metalanguage, no privileged
position. Or as Ortega himself said in criticizing the phenomenological
reduction: "it makes no sense for one consciousness to invalidate the
other."
Because it presents reality as a generic function, Don Quixote helps
us take up the phenomenological standpoint. Ortega learns from it that
"the real things, the realities do not move us but rather the representa-
tion of their reality ... the poetic quality of reality does not lie in the
reality of this or that particular thing, but in reality as a generic function"
(144). That is, it is the constituting of a world that is poetic. Setting
the canon's one-sidedness aside, as Quixote does in his sample adven-
ture of the burning lake in which the knight plunges into the ontological
dark, enables delight. This delight comes not so much from the flowered
meadows and fresher radiance of the sun, wonderful as they may be,
as from the bracketing of consensus reality, the realization that the natural
standpoint is not the only possible one. Husserl showed how reality is
constituted as a thetic function. Don Quixote shows how realism as a
literary genre is constituted, the way realism as genre or life world or
archive or episteme makes you put words to things. The epistemic or
ontological shifts from genre to genre in Don Quixote make for a comedy
in which we may realise that reality is what you see through your genre.
Indiana University Northwest
NOTES
1 Basdekis calls Ortega's Meditations "one of the earliest attempts to apply" Husserl's
philosophy as rigorous science "to the novel" (17).
2 "Ortega spoke in Meditations on Quixote of raising Spanish consciousness by training
the categorial imagination through the exercise of a kind of Husserlian 'free variation'
- the Ortegean 'meditation'" (Silver 130).
3 In this they are operating like Thomas Kuhn's normal science.
4 Ortega's objection parallels Roland Barthes' observation in Elements of Semiology
(1967), that, "any metalanguage could be put in the position of a first-order language
and be intgerrogated by another metalanguage" destroying "the authority of all metalan-
guage" "None stand apart in the place of Truth" (Selden 74-75). Ortega's thrust is the
190 RICHARD HULL
same: the undermining of the authority to discredit (a consciousness or a fictive text)

by reference to Truth or Reality.
5 Silver says "the major thrust of Meditations on Quixote" is to urge "on Spain a
qualified acceptance of ideality," and that "it mattered little if that phenomenological
ideality was itself, as Ortega had Cervantes say, a fiction" (121).
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Barthes, Roland, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975).
Basdekis, Demetrios, The Evolution of Ortega y Gasset as Literary Critic (Lanham,
Maryland: University Press of America, 1986).
Edie, James M., 'Transcendental Phenomenology and Existentialism', Phenomenology:
The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 237-251.
Findlay, J.N., 'Phenomenology and the Meaning of Realism', Phenomenology and
Philosophical Understanding, ed. Edo Pivcevic (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975),
pp. 143-158.
Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce
Gibson (London: Unwin, 1931, rpt. 1967).
- - , The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An
Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern
Lacan, Jacques, Le semina ire Livre Xl: Les quatres concepts Jondamentaux de la
psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973).
Marias, Juli!in, Jose Ortega y Gasset: Circumstance and Vocation (Norman, 1970): full
and important commentary on the Meditations.
Ortega y Gasset, Jose, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin,
ed. Julian Marias (New York: Norton, 1961).
- - , The Dehumanization of Art and Other Writings on Art and Culture (Garden City,
New Jersey: Doubleday), n.d.
- - , Phenomenology and Art, trans. Philip W. Silver (New York: Norton, 1975).
- - , 'Temas del Escorial', Mapocho IV, No.1 (1965): 5-21.
Scheler, Max, 'Idealism and Realism', in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David
R. Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973).
Selden, Raman, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (UP of Kentucky,
1985).
Silver, Philip W., Ortega as Phenomenologist: the Genesis of Meditations on Quixote
(New York: Columbia UP, 1978).
Welch, E. Pari, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (New York: Columbia UP, 1941).
DA VID L. MOSLEY
MUSIC AND LANGUAGE IN JOYCE'S "THE DEAD"
Joyce's work as a writer testifies to his interest in the acoustical

properties of language and the attempt to incorporate musical devices and
strategies into literature. Likewise, his activties as a singer, coupled
with his life-long interest in vocal music, placed him in touch with the
more conventional merger of word and tone. Much has been made of
the lyrical language, musical allusions, and possible musical structures
to be found in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; however, Joyce's attempt
to conflate the codes of music and language in his short story "The Dead"
has not been adequately addressed. Given Joyce's interest in musico-
literary interrelationships, it is not surprising that "The Dead" draws
heavily upon musical sources and exhibits certain musical characteris-
tics. Richard Ellmann has said of the story, "In its lyrical melancholic
acceptance of all life and death offer, 'The Dead' is a lynch pin in Joyce's
work" (252). This essay will elaborate upon those "lyrical" qualities
mentioned by Ellmann and their phenomenological and semiotic
implications.
The analysis of "The Dead" which follows will show that in this
story Joyce was experimenting with three properties commonly associ-
ated with musical counterpoint: simultaneity, repetition, and autonomy
versus interdependence. These contrapuntal properties are typically
displayed in tonal music in the following manner: simultaneity is present
in the concurrent interaction of two or more melodic voices in coun-
terpoint, repetition is present in the way a tonal composition is limited
to the twelve tones found in the chromatic scale and must employ these
according to the conventional hierarchy of consonance and dissonance,
and autonomy versus interdependence is present in the way the con-
current voices in counterpart are apprehended as two or more individual
melodic statements and, at the same time, as a single integrated
polyphonic texture.
As Zack Bowen has shown in his Musical Allusions in the Works of
James Joyce, "The Dead" is deeply indebted to many musical compo-
sitions. The story's title is believed to refer to Thomas Moore's Irish
Melodie "0 Ye Dead!" in which the living and the dead sing of their

192 DAVID L. MOSLEY
envy for one another's state of being in alternating stanzas. The story
itself contains a number of different dances, a piano competition piece,
an aria from Bellini's I Puritani, and the haunting rendition of the
folksong "The Lass of Aughrim" which serves as the catalyst for the
story's epiphany. Thus the story's musical allusions are eclectic in both
their style and performing forces - indeed we would expect nothing
less from Joyce. No less interesting, however, are the linguistic events
in this story. "The Dead" begins with the awkward and eventually aborted
conversation between Gabriel Conroy and Lilly, the caretaker's daughter.
This encounter is followed by Gabriel's conversation with the Irish
nationalist Miss IvOfs, the dinner-table conversation about music and
Gabriel's own dissembling speech, his conservation with Gretta about
her lost love Michael Furey, and Gabriel's own final meditation on life
and love. When divided into the two realms of music and language,
the narrative progression of the story might be diagrammed in the
following manner:
MUSIC: -waltz- -piano-dance-aria- -sona-
LANGUAGE: conversation- -discussion-speech- -conversation-meditation
Fig. 1a. The musical and linguistic events in "The Dead".
This diagram shows that there are five music events and five linguistic
events in the story, yet anyone familiar with this particular work, or
Joyce's style in general, knows that these distinctions are not so easily
made. For instance, the conversation between Gabriel and Lilly takes
place concurrently with the waltz, during the piano piece Gabriel reviews
his coming speech, the dance of Miss Ivors and Gabriel is dominated
by their discussion of literature and languages, the Bellini aria sung by
Julia Morkan is a hybrid expression involving both music and language,
the after-dinner discussion is concerned with music and musicians,
Gabriel's speech ends with the singing of a short song, Bartell D' Arcy's
performance of "The Lass of Aughrim" - like the Bellini aria - is a hybrid
expression, the conversation between Gabriel and Gretta following the
party is the result of having heard the prior folksong, and Gabriel's
final meditation is a piece of prose which aspires to music. Given the
way in which almost all of the events in this story are simultaneously
musical and linguistic, it is therefore more instructive and efficacious
MUSIC AND LANGUAGE IN JOYCE'S "THE DEAD" 193
to divide the story into the following five categories: music, music and
language, musical language and music, and language.
MUSIC: -waltz-
MUSIC AND LANGUAGE: -pi~aria- -song-
MUSICAL LANGUAGE: -mediation
LANGUAGE AND MUSIC: -<liscussion-speech- -<x>nversation-
LANGUAGE: conversation-
Fig. lb. The musico-linguistic events in "The Dead".
Joyce also employs a limited and highly repetitive lexicon of acoustic

signifiers throughout the story which contribute to his attempt to conflate
the codes of music and language. "The Dead" begins with the clang of
the wheezy hall door bell and it concludes with the nearly silent snow
fall accompanied by Gretta's breathing. Between these localized acoustic
occurrences, Joyce repeatedly uses acoustic signifiers of five different
types. The story contains twenty-three references to laughter and sixteen
references to the tone of voice of various characters. These references
are distributed fairly evenly throughout the text. The story also contains
numerous references to the sounds of dancing, clapping, and rattling.
All of these last three acoustic signifiers are introduced in the first
pages of the story, but subsequent references to them are grouped
according to the tripartite division Joyce imposes upon "The Dead" by
means of a row of periods between paragraphs in the text. All but one
of the references to the sounds of dancing come from the first section
of the story, all but one of the references to the sound of clapping or
applause from the second section, and all but one of the references to
rattling occur in the story's third section. The specific occurrences of
these acoustic signifiers is diagrammed below:
194 DA VID L. MOSLEY
1 . . . . . . . . . 1112 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3132 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
o
D O D
c c
c c CC c
R
R R R
II l
l l III l III l lllll
l llll
T T T T T T T TT T T T TT T
T
175 .•.. 180 ..•. 185 .... 190 •... 195 .... 200 ..•. 205 .... 210 ...• 215 •... 220 .. 223
Fig. 2. The repeated acoustic signifiers in "The Dead".
In this diagram the numbers at the top represent the page numbers
of the three parts of the story as delineated by Joyce and the numbers
at the bottom represent the printed page numbers in the Penguin
paperback edition of Dubliners. D = the sounds associated with dancing,
C = clapping or applause, R = rattling, L = laughter or laughing, and
T = tone of voice. All of these signs stand for acoustic phenomena, or
sounds in time, i.e. they demonstrate those properties shared by a musical
composition and a literary expression. Some of them - like dancing
and clapping - are more typically associated with music, while others
of them - like laughing and the tone of a speaker's voice - are more
typically associated with language. The sound of rattling is a seemingly
more neutral phenomenon in relation to music and language, and its
significance will be addressed below.
Taken as a whole, this diagram of the acoustical signifiers in the
story shows a progression from dancing-to-clapping-to-rattling which
is underpinned by consistent references to laughing and tone of voice.
When viewed from a musico-literary perspective, this progression moves
from active musical participation to a more passive response to musical
performance to the experience of a purely acoustical phenomenon. The
references to rattling are the most significant from a hermeneutic per-
spective since many of them come in relation to Mr. Browne - a character
frequently associated with death, and in relation to the various carriage
rides at the end of the story - frequently associated with the traditional
Irish death coach (Torchiana, 237-38). Furthermore, the final exhala-
tion of air from a dead body is conventionally referred to as the "death
rattle" and this connotation is surely in the reader's mind at the end of
the story as Gabriel's meditation is accompanied by Gretta's deep-drawn

breaths of sleep.
Figure 3 combines and abbreviates Figures Ib and 2. It illustrates
Joyce's ever sharper focusing upon musico-literary phenomena, as well
as the progression of acoustical signifiers which culminates in Gabriel's
meditation.
1 . . . . . . . . . . 12 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 32 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
-walz-
-piano<lan:e-aria- -son;;!-
0--·-·-----------------------------------------------0
c--------------------------------------------c
R-------------------------------------------------------------R -meditation
L-------------------------------------------------------------------------L
T------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------T
-dscussion-speech- -ronversation-
conversation-
175_ ... 180 ...• 185 .... 190 .... 195 .... 200 .... 205 .... 210 .... 215 .... 220 .. 223
Fig. 3. The musico-linguistic events and the repeated acoustic signifiers in "The Dead".
The final secion of "The Dead", which Joyce delineates with a double-
space between the paragraphs on the forty-seventh page of the story (page
221 in the Penguin paperback edition), strives to be musical in both its
form and content. This passage is most frequently referred to as the
epiphany for the story. Significantly, Joyce's own theory of literary
epiphanies bears some resemblance to the characteristics of counter-
point with which he is experimenting in this story.
In his Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man, Joyce has Stephen Daedalus describe an epiphany in the
following manner, "By epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifes-
tation whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself", and a bit later Stephen concludes, "This is
the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognize that the object is
one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite
structure, a thing in fact; finally, when the relation of the parts is
exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recog-
nize that it is that thing which is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps up to us
from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object,
the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object
196 DAVID L. MOSLEY
achieves its epiphany" (Werner, 48). While this description seems to

outline three steps in the epiphanic moment, Joyce also emphasizes the
sudden and momentary nature of the epiphany - the way the integral
and composite nature of the object or emotion is perceived simultane-
ously. Just as musical counterpoint involves the simultaneous presentation
of multiple melodic statements, the literary epiphany involves the simul-
taneous presentation of multiple hermeneutic perspectives. Furthermore,
the recognition that the literary epiphany is both a composite structure
and, at the same time, one integral thing is analogous to the way coun-
terpoint is both a combination of autonomous melodic lines and an
integrated, or interdependent, whole.
Another aspect of Joyce's epiphanies which is often commented upon
is their use of common objects, events, or observations. Joyce touches
upon this when he refers to "vulgar" (in the classical sense of the term)
words or gestures, and Umberto Eco alludes to this feature of Joyce's
epiphanies in his Aesthetics of Chaosmos when he states, "The epipha-
nies of Dubliners are key moments that arise in a realistic context. They
consist of common facts or phrases but acquire the value of a moral
symbol ... " (25). How else but by repetition do the words, gestures,
and facts of Joyce's epiphanies achieve their vulgarity or commoness?
Through the simple gazing upon Gretta's hair, face, and clothing in
the story's final pages, Gabriel gains insight into the past, the present,
and the future. He has observed these aspects of his wife's appearance
repeatedly in the preceding pages of the story - once upon their arrival
at the Morkan sister's home and again while gazing at Gretta on the
staircase as she listens to Bartell D' Arcy singing "The Lass of Aughrim"
- but they become a vehicle for symbolic meaning at the end of "The
Dead". Gabriel's revery is interrupted only by the soft taps of the falling
snow against the window. The snow, too, has been a constant com-
panion throughout the story - it is on Gabriel's coat and shoes as he
arrives at the party and he gazes at it longingly through the window
following his dance with Miss Ivors. Yet as Gabriel recalls the obser-
vation of his niece, Mary Jane, that the snow is general (or falling
simultaneously) all over Ireland, the snow becomes both a symbol of
paralysis and death, as well as a symbol of interconnection and life.
What then is the result of Joyce's attempt to interpolate musical
characteristics into the prose of "The Dead" and what does this attempt
show us about the possible conflation of the codes of music and
language? Joyce's use of simultaneity, repetition, and autonomy versus
interdependence are an attempt to invest literature - a linguistic

phenomenon - with characteristics specific to counterpoint - a musical
phenomenon. Inasmuch as Joyce is successful in finding linguistic
analogues for these musical characteristics and incorporating them into
his prose, both locally and structurally, his attempt is successful on
the phenomenological level, i.e. Joyce's "The Dead" exhibits certain
characteristics common to music. Semiotically speaking, however,
Joyce's attempt is a failure, indeed it is doomed from the outset. The
problem lies in the irreconcilable differences between the codes of music
and language. Musical pitches, or pitch-configurations, are almost entirely
iconic; they stand only for themselves and may be interpreted only in
relation to one another. Conversely, linguistic terms, or statements, are
almost entirely symbolic; they always stand for something else and
may be interpreted in relation to that for which they stand. (There are,
of course, exceptions such as the mimetic musical figure or the
onomatopoetic word, but they are of little consequence to this discus-
sion).
As a musically-competent writer, Joyce was most certainly aware of
these properties of music and language. Indeed it seems that the
phenomenological similarity and semiotic incompatibility of music and
language may have been a guiding metaphor for Joyce as he wrote "The
Dead". These similarities and incompatibilities make for an interesting
interpretation of Gabriel and Gretta, and Joyce's treatment of their
marriage. Gabriel is a logocentric individual - he makes his living in
the academy, he writes reviews for the paper, and he spends his leisure
time polishing his languages while touring the continent. Gabriel has little
patience for, or insight into, music. His speech easily distracts him
while listening to his niece's piano performance, and when the dinner-
table conversation turns to music and musicians Gabriel becomes silent.
Gretta, on the other hand, is extremely sensitive to musical expressions.
Despite the fact that Bartell D' Arcy's performance of "The Lass of
Aughrim" is of an inferior quality - D' Arcy is hoarse and unsure of
the words - this music transports Gretta into the past and the emotional
intensity of her attachment to Michael Furey.
Joyce's identification of Gabriel with language and Gretta with music
is no simplistic equation of masculinity with reason or femininity with
emotion:, indeed, Gabriel's mother is less musically sensitive than he,
and Michael Furey, as his name suggests, was probably more emotional
than Gretta. Rather, the incompatibility between Gabriel and Gretta as
198 DAVID L. MOSLEY
marriage partners may be viewed as analogous to the incompatibilities

between the codes of music and language. Joyce makes this painfully
obvious in the dramatic climax of the story when Gabriel, while watching
Gretta listen to the performance of "The Lass of Aughrim", likens her
appearance to a painting which he would title "Distant Music".
In the final sentence of this story, which is remarkable for both its
verbal euphony and its exceptional grammatical structure, Joyce
approaches an iconic type of linguistic expression: "His soul swooned
slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and
faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and
the dead". Yet, despite its acoustic beauty and structural symmetry, this
statement remains a linguistic construct referring to the snow and its
metaphorical meaning in the context of this story. The sentence is
emblematic of the manner in which music and language are phenome-
nologically analogous yet semiotically incompatible. Like a musical
passage, this sentence consists of articulated sounds in time. Phenome-
nologically speaking, some of these sounds - like the <s> in soul,
swooned, slowly, and snow - exhibit a relation to one another which
seems extraneous to the meaning of the terms themselves. However, it
is obvious that Joyce did not ignore the significance of these terms as
he selected them, and we cannot read or speak them outside of a semiotic
context. In and of itself, music can be no more than iconic. This is not
to suggest that music is meaningless, only that its meaning is self-
reflexive. On the other hand, language can be no less than symbolic. This
does not mean that linguistic expressions have no self-relfexive char-
acteristics - such as striking alliterative patterns or singular grammatical
constructions - but these self-reflexive characteristics are always
overshadowed by the semiotic relation of linguistic expressions to an
external reality.
The decade on either side of the progression from the 19th to the
20th centuries saw unprecedented and ubiquitous social and intellec-
tual fragmentation accompanied by a multiplicity of analytic categories
by which these so-called "modern" movements defined themselves. This
fragmentation and multiplication of categories distorted and eventually
denied any coherent historical, cultural, or religious context in relation
to which an aesthetic expression may be interpreted on an allegorical
level. There seem to have been two common responses to this state of
affairs: (1) the author could work with a disjointed and chaotic grab-
bag of symbols, or (2) the author could turn the vehicle for aesthetic
expression bacl upon itself thereby employing that vehicle as a context

in relation to which the aesthetic expression might be interpreted
allegorically.
It seems that in his short story "The Dead" Joyce attempts such an
approach to allegory, in which the literary vehicle itself is allegorized
by highlighting the semantic disparity between the referentiality of
language and the self-reflexivity of music. Thus the interpersonal dis-
parity between Gabriel and Gretta is an allegory of the semantic disparity
between language and music, and on another level the semantic
disparity between language and music is an allegory of the ontological
disparity between referentiality and self-reflexivity, and on yet a third
level the ontological disparity between referentiality and self-reflex-
ivity is an allegory of the disparity between experience and emotion. It
is this third level which constitutes the true subject of Gabriel's medi-
tation at the conclusion of the story. For just as the last sentence cannot
truly become music, so Gabriel is unable to escape his logocentrism
and the external existential realities of his life in order to gain access
to Gretta's realm of musicality, self-reflexivity, and emotion.
Goshen College
REFERENCES
Bowen, Zack, Musical Allusions in the Works of James Joyce (New York: Oxford
Eco, Umberto, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, trans. E. Esrock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Ellmann, Richard, James Joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
Joyce, James, Dubliners (New York: Penguin, 1967).
Torchiana, Donald, Backgrounds for Joyce's Dubliners (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1986).
Werner, Craig H., Dubliners: A Student's Companion to the Stories (Boston: Twayne,
1988).
MARJORIE HELLERSTEIN
BETWEEN THE ACTS:

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MODERN ALLEGORY
The standard definition of allegory, according to Joel Fineman in his

essay "The Structure of Allegorical Desire", is embodied in Quintilian's
statement, "Allegory (is) what happens when a single metaphor is
introduced in continuous series". (Allegory and Representation, p. 30)
Then, using Roman Jakobson's amplification that "allegory would be the
poetical projection of a metaphoric axis onto the metonymic" (p. 31),
Fineman emphasizes the relationship between metaphor and metonymy:
at certain points in the structuring of the continuous metaphor, interac-
tions with other metaphors or symbols create further suggestions which
lead to a sequence of related meanings, a metonymy of development.
U sing this formula, the points of interaction create revelations, leading
to other revelations, and we have allegory.
Traditional allegory was the concatenation of understood symbols
assembled in narrative form and intended for moral instruction. In a
modern allegory, belief is questioned and moral instruction becomes
mostly criticism of the past with little to comfort confused minds. Virginia
Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, was written during a time of moral
anguish and physical threat, for herself and for the world. Any serious
fictional work would have to reflect the dilemmas and moods of that
time, 1939-1941. The novel is set in a day in June, 1939, before World
War II began, but Virginia Woolf was still writing it in the spring of 1941
when England was under bombardment - and she had pretty much
finished it except for a final polish - when she committed suicide in
March of that year. The dilemma of peace/war had been resolved:
England was at war and invasion was a real threat. Was this a time
between the acts of life and death? Were the acts of the pageant a
recapitulation of the lived past before the destroyed future? Were we
being given intense insights into the lives of the Oliver family and their
friends before the final act of destruction, with only dubious hints of
regeneration?
Beginning with the title, the controlling metaphor which provides
the form and is the source for the ripples of connected meaning in the
novel is life-as-theater. Theater holds life at a distance; theater allows for
A·T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 201-211.

202 MARJORIE HELLERSTEIN
a temporary if ambiguous catharsis. In form, the novel is scenic, shifting

from the thoughts and actions of the family and the audience, back to
the scenes of dramatic poetry with background music that they are
watching as a performance, then back to more interaction between family
members, friends, and audience, then back to scenes of exaggerated
melodrama or parodies of old comedy. Just as this amateur pageant of
history begins at an arbitrary point, shows us selected eras of literary
or social events, and concludes sometime in the future, so the family story
begins the evening before the performance, is revealed at intervals during
the performance, and concludes after the performance. About twenty-four
hours have been allowed for us to grasp the family history and its
problems. Time is compressed for both performances - historical and
family. The place in which the pageant of history is being given connects
the two performances. It is the home of the family and has been theirs
for over one hundred years. Thus this place, Pointz Hall, is the first source
of metonymic connection between the stories: English history has affected
Pointz Hall and personal history is affecting its owners. A second
metonymic connection is the game of love that is played in several scenes
in the pageant and is also played among the members of the family and
their friends. A third metonymic connection is directly related to the
metaphor of theatre - its illusionistic goal: as we will see, the villagers
create illusions of royalty and riches, and the family and their friends
hold back from revealing themselves, creating images and illusions of
their selves. A fourth metonymic connection is artistic creation: the writer
Miss La Trobe is an artist who creates this work for her own needs and
purposes, and the audience plays its role as listeners and reactors, com-
pleting the artistic connection.
In a traditional allegory, journeys and changes of place marked
significant moments of revelation. In this allegory, the landscape of Pointz
Hall must be imagined as changing for the different time periods that
are dramatized. In the real life story, the cows, swallows and airplanes
that invade the performance at unexpected times transform the passive
land into a scene of action. In the real life story, the place seems stable;
three generations of Olivers live there and are involved with the church,
the villagers, and their own ancestors. But they are uneasy with each
other, and the heir to Pointz Hall, Giles, has despairing thoughts about
approaching catastrophe. The villagers and the county families partici-
pate in this annual event, this ritual, but after the performance their
thoughts are anxiously on the future: "It all looks very black.... No
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MODERN ALLEGORY 203
one wants it - save those damned Germans ... " (Between the Acts,
151).
In this modern allegory, there is no firm absolute set of beliefs. Instead,
there are several ways of confronting the world, represented by the major
protagonists of the family story. Bart Oliver, the patriarch of the family,
loves his son, though he does not try to understand him, and is disap-
pointed in his grandson, whom he calls a "crybaby". He loves his dog
and he dreams of his life in India. He believes in societal obligations
and allows the pageant to be put on every year for the past seven years
at Pointz Hall, though he prefers his quiet pattern of existence. His
hard-headed practicality is opposed to his sister Lucy's ethereal reli-
giousness, and he insults her more than once by striking at her faith:
"When she said, "pray", he added "umbrellas". (23) When she guesses
that the meaning of the expression 'touch wood' might come from the
gods of mythology, he says "superstition". But brother and sister love
each other and share memories of the past. They are bound to the place
and to each other with variations of love and hate. The lovelhate bond
is shown as existing between all of the couples in the family story, and
it is the theme of the several comic parodies in the pageant.
It is Isa, the daughter-in-law, who observes to herself that all plots
of literature and of life are variations on the emotions of love and hate.
She is a secret poet and a loving mother, though she does not parade
her motherliness. She too is occasionally offended by her father-in-law,
and her married life is at present unhappy. For whatever reasons, not
made clear in the novel, she and her husband are not able to communi-
cate with each other, and she has developed a crush on a neighboring
gentleman farmer. She has had almost no communication with this man,
Mr. Haines, but she sentimentalizes him in her thoughts and in her poetry.
A condition of love and hate exists between husband and wife, perhaps
to be resolved in the future, as the final words of the novel suggest:
" ... Left alone together for first time that day, they were silent. Alone,
enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they
had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might
be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen,
in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night". (219)
Giles Oliver, her husband, is in a constant state of anger - over the
fact that he is a stockbroker rather than a farmer, over the horrifying
prospects for the world that he reads about in his daily paper. He is
charming - to their flirtatious guest Mrs. Manresa - and he is violent
- smashing with his shoes a snake who is choking while trying to swallow
a toad - "Action relieved him". (99) Some of his rage is irrationally
directed against his aunt, Lucy Swithin, who had laughed at his
profession of buying and selling and who represents for him " ... old
fogies who sat and looked at views over coffee and cream when the whole
of Europe - over there - was bristling like ... " (53); he can't think
of the word, except the inadequate one "hedgehog". His father is also
an old fogy, but he exempts him from "censure". He had loved his wife
furiously, and now what has happened? Love and hate mingle in his
emotions, but he expresses himself through rage rather than through Isa's
way of partial withdrawal by silence and secret poetry.
The aunt, Lucy Swithin, has found her salvation in religion and nature
and a feeling of unity of all time: "Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves
- all are one. If discordant, producing harmony - if not to us, to a gigantic
ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus . . . we reach the conclusion
that all is harmony, could we hear it. And we shall". (175)
Lucy has an all-forgiving nature and does not recognize love and
hate. Of all the family members, she makes the closest connection to
Miss La Trobe, the writer and director of the pageant. She seeks Miss
La Trobe out during an intermission to tell her how the re-creation
of history had made her feel. She is a conciliator for several of the
characters - Isa, William Dodge, Miss La Trobe - along with her insights
of oneness. Indeed in one scene a sort of harmonizing of feeling is
expressed by three of the most unhappy people in the group - Giles,
Isa, and their homosexual visitor, William Dodge:
"He said (without words), "I'm damnably unhappy".

"So am 1", Dodge echoed.
"And I too", Isa thought.
They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle".
(176)
It is Miss La Trobe, the writer and director, who is using the resources
of that insular community to express the whole of England, and she is
a complete outsider. She is a recent inhabitant of the village. She had
lived with an actress and had recently separated from her; she has a
foreign-sounding name and her physical presence makes the villagers
uneasy, though they make fun of her behind her back. To them she is
"Bossy" the domineering director. Miss La Trobe's relationship with
her audience is paradoxical. She has very definite dramatic effects in

mind, yet she seems indifferent to the composition of the audience that
her drama is addressing. She does look for individual reactions and is
relieved and even overjoyed when someone responds. She notes, for
example, that Bond, the cowman, looks "fluid and natural", when the rest
of the audience looks cold and withdrawn. She knows that for a total
effect she needs a continuity of connection with her audience, and
interruptions like taking time for tea fill her with rage. Such interruptions
cater to the needs of the audience on a crass level rather than to her
own needs: "She had agreed to cut the play here, a slave to her audience
... she had gashed a scene here ... " (94).
For Miss La Trobe the audience is a curse and a necessity. She needs
them in order to have someone to experience her work and to be affected
by it. As part of her esthetic of arousing reactions, she also wants the
environment, the immediate reality, to affect the audience - arranged,
of course, by the director. As an artist, Miss La Trobe wants to control
her audience and at the same time to release them. As an artist, she
also has aspirations for her own pleasure, for her sense of "glory", as
she calls her personal feeling of a sense of success.
When the audience does not respond, as in the scene in which she
makes them sit and wait, with nothing happening on stage, allowing them
to absorb their surroundings and the reality of their beings, she is in
despair, "This is death death death, she noted in the margins of her
mind ... " (180). As Miss La Trobe and the audience suffer during
this scene, rain begins to fall and people act ... "nature ... takes her
part" (181). This time the site has saved her, but the uncertainties of
the outdoor setting, which Miss La Trobe had chosen over the barn,
develop into near catastrophes. The artist had thought she was in control,
of the place, of the rhythm of the movement of her work, of the audience
reaction. She discovers that she is not in control: the site is windy and
more than once the wind carries the sound away and music and voices
become unintelligible; when the audience responds incorrectly or
indifferently, she thinks, " ... a vision imparted was relief from agony
- for one moment, one moment" (98).
More than once during the performance she feels that her vision has
escaped the audience and that she has failed. Other times she is very
satisfied, as when a voice exclaims after a very silly parody of an
eighteenth century play, "All that fuss about nothing!" She thinks,
" ... the voice had seen; the voice had heard". (138-9) A moment
later she is despair because the sound has again failed to reach the
audience. Then the cows begin to bellow and "they filled the empti-
ness and continued the emotion . . . " (140). She is elated but
apprehensive: " ... time was passing. How long would time hold them
together?" (151)
Miss La Trobe is the metaphor of the artist. This solid unique woman
represents an abstraction as well as a real person. The real and the
meaning of a real person are metonomycally connected in her creative
actions. In her solitary cottage room, as she wrote the material, she tested
the reactions she wanted with her own reactions; she matched the rhythms
of her language with the rhythms of her internal music. Then her created
product was put into the marketplace and was exposed to failure and
indifference. In her relationship with the audience, she goes through
the emotional highs and lows that every writer, especially Virginia Woolf,
has endured. She mostly gets little pleasure from the relationship, but
sometimes a revelation comes from the relationship, a truth of life for
herself and for a member of the audience. Lucy Swithin seeks her out
during an intermission and says, "What a small part I've had to play! But
you've made me feel I could have played ... Cleopatra!" Miss La
Trobe mentally restates Lucy's meaning: "You've stirred in me my
unacted part . . . you've twitched the invisible strings . . . Glory
possessed her. Ah but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings;
she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a
cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a re-created world.
Her moment was on her - her glory". (153)
This metaphor of the artist brewing bodies and voices - real beings -
and re-creating a world is the ultimate artistic goal, at least as Virginia
Woolf defined that goal. Audiences experience the re-creation differently,
perhaps like Lucy, who has a personal sense of imaginative possibility,
or perhaps like Isa, who does not feel emotionally attached to the drama
but rather to the incidentals of the drama - the people watching, the place,
the natural element. She also projects her personal unhappiness onto
the actions, the environment. When the rain falls, Isa thinks of it as tears:
" ... all people's tears, weeping for all people". (180) That moment
for Isa and for the reader is a metonymic juncture - scene, rain, self,
world - and thereby a moment of allegorical revelation.
Patricia Maika, in her book discussing the influences of mythology on
Between the Acts, sees the novel as a re-creation of ritual drama, which
was converted by the Greeks from religious worship to art. The ritual
was a participatory event, when all people tried to invoke the gods to
give them the basic elements of survival - water, sun, fertile earth. She
believes that all the characters and their actions, real and role-playing,
refer back to ancient gods - Greek, Oriental, pre-historical - and
that Woolf was trying to express the "collective emotion of the world
community". (Maika, 57)
As I have pointed out, the real world was very much on Woolf's mind,
either shown through the characters and the members of the audience,
or through extraneous elements in the setting, such as the airplanes.
The pageant is certainly also a ritual, a repetition of an event for that
community for the benefit of the church. But its mystical implications
are not developed. The ritual's connection with the artist and the
observers gives it a significance far beyond that of religious worship
to placate the gods; nothing is expected to change because of this
gathering of faithful, except that this moment of life has been prepared
by the past and has a phenomenological being as itself. To participate
in that moment of phenomenological time, the audience must open itself
up to every suggestion.
In the beginning of the pageant, England is personified as a child
and then as a young girl. The villager/actors sing of building, planting,
going on pilgrimages (and Chaucerian pilgrims are shown). Merry
England, comments Mrs. Manresa. Queen Elizabeth appears and evokes
the Elizabethan Age and Shakespeare. The actress/Queen has problems
with her head-dress and her ruff, the gramophone plays loudly and
merrily, and the audience laughs. The village idiot has been given lines
to speak, and some of the audience fear that he will do something
"dreadful". A recognition scene is acted, mocking Shakespearean
language, but just the invocation of Shakespeare causes both Giles and
Isa to murmur remembered lines from the plays.
Two long scenes in the pageant consist of satiric parodies of eighteenth
century comedies of manners and of nationalistic Victorian farce or
operetta. The names of the characters are sometimes grossly satiric -
Lady Harpy Harradan, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, Mrs. Hardcastle. The values
expressed in the playlets are either viciously materialistic, as in the
comedy Where There's a Will There's a Way, or are blindly imperial-
istic and paternalistic, as in the Victorian musical comedy, in which
the lovers plan to convert the heathen. The audience recognizes the
emptiness of the values of the eighteenth century play, but it is made
uneasy by the Victorian spoof. There are people present who remember
208 MARJORIE HELLER STEIN
with affection Victorian times and are not ready to judge those
times.
Woolf's irony is an exposure of the ridiculous pleasures and hollow
values of the past, but it is not cutting satire. The villagers perform
vigorously, and the beauties of the natural scene, the lilting sound of
the music - when it can be heard - and the snatches of popular song
all create a pleasant atmosphere which tempers the criticism. Awkwardly,
people feel or express decent sentiments. The Rev. Streatfield ("their
symbol; themselves; a butt, a clod ... ", 190) says hesitantly at the
end, "We act different parts; but are the same". (192)
The life-as-theater metaphor is the major metonymic ironic connec-
tion between the pageant and the family/audience story. For one thing,
theater and life both depend on illusion. In the pageant, the costumes
look beautiful but are made of dish towels, beadspreads, silver scouring
pads, and fake beads. The shopkeepers of the village are transformed
by the roles they play in the pageant. And the conclusion of the pageant
brings the action right to the audience. They must analyze and they
must participate.
The conclusion has several parts: (1) the audience is made to
experience itself and its environment in a communal silent way; (2) the
audience must translate symbolic acts; (3) the audience must experi-
ence itself through accidental flashes of reflected images, and (4) the
audience must listen to a disembodied voice commenting on all of the
above.
The conclusion is titled "Present Time, Ourselves". Nothing at first
happens. The audience talks to each other and reads the program. People
gradually become aware that the empty scene is deliberate. Behind a tree,
Miss La Trobe reads her script to herself: "try ten mins of present time.
Swallows, cows, etc". "She wanted to expose them as it were, to douche
them, with present time reality. But something was going wrong with
the experiment". (179)
The audience fidgets; Miss La Trobe is in agony and hates them.
And then the rain rescues her. Isa, who sees the rain as tears, had heard
a voice during intermission reciting the nursery rhyme 'The King is in
his counting house' and she now wishes she could sacrifice all her
treasure "on the altar of the rain-soaked earth ... " to stop the tears. Then
she notes that something is happening. There is a ladder, a wall, and a
man with a hod on his back, then a woman, then a black man, then a
coffee-colored main in a turban. The audience applauds, taking this
gathering of people as a futuristic flattering tribute to "ourselves ... Each

of us a free man; plates washed by machinery; not an aeroplane to vex
us; all liberated; made whole ... " (185). And then, amidst great
cacophony, children burst from the bushes and flash all sorts of reflec-
tors - mirrors, shiny surfaces - at the audience.
The audience reacts: "Ourselves? But that's cruel. To snap us as we
are, before we've had time to assume ... And only, too, in parts ...
That's what's so distorting and upsetting and unfair" (164). A voice from
the bushes comments on the disconcerting images: "Look at ourselves,
ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how's this wall, the great
wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here
the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps, and fragments like our-
selves?" (188).
The pageant ends; the audience disperses, talking about themselves,
about mundane things, about Rev. Streatfield's interpretation of the
pageant and about their confusion, about why they are left with questions
about the meaning of the pageant.
The conclusion of the pageant is open to wide interpretation, and
the novel-story concludes as the day concludes. What is the meaning
of this review of history? What is the future of the world? What is our
reality? The ritual has opened up seething underground pools. The Gods
have not spoken.
Judy Little in her essay, "Festive Comedy in Woolf's Between the
Acts", also suggests that "the form and meaning of this novel are partly
derived from the patterns of fertility and fertility rites" (Little, 26). But
she concludes that the ritual patterns are sometimes mocked and the
pageant is "to some extent a burlesque of all pageants" (26). There is
little of the joy and the sense of renewal that should could from the
enactment of such seasonal rituals. She believes that the novel is enacting
Woolf's ideas as she expressed them in her book Three Guineas, ideas
that attack the patriarchal values of war, power, and competition.
But by the time that the book was finished, as I have said, the attack
on war and power values was beside the point. The world was at war,
and England was under heavy attack. Woolf was very aware of the danger
to herself and to her husband Leonard if the Nazis should invade England.
Of course the psychological reasons for war could still be condemned,
but the fact of war could not be ignored. In spite of her essay-books A
Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Woolf did not think of herself
as a crusader. Her young friend Benedict Nicolson had written to her:
"You must educate your public. Taste and appreciation can never improve
until attitudes of mind are changed ... ". She answered him on August
24, 1940: "Why have I failed to do that?" And she further notes
that the great poets of the nineteenth century had failed to influence
politics ... "And so we drifted into imperialism and all the other horrors
that led to 1914".
"How can we", she asks, "if we remain artists, give them (our readers)
that education or change their conditions?"
Woolf's way of confronting the past and making people uneasy about
it is through mockery. Much of Between the Acts is parody and ironic
comment. Truth is attempted in the conclusion, but it is difficult to
confront. It is not quite understood; it is not quite believed. It is con-
verted to 'meaning'. Illusion, however, is useful. Illusion in drama and
in life can be an encouragement to our inner nature, our imaginations.
In real life, illusion can function temporarily to arouse our feelings,
especially when it is partially deception. Old Bart Oliver has admired
Mrs. Manresa for her lustiness and her seeming frankness. Then at the
end he notes that she is wearing make-up which now seems "plated"
and he feels deceived, as though this exposure has "ripped the rag doll
and let the sawdust stream from his heart". (202) This image can be
endlessly examined for what it tells us about the dangers of illusions,
the lifelessness that can lie beneath its surface. But Bart wants his own
illusions and deceptions; he wants the particular reality of his dog, paper,
and the peaceful environment of Pointz Hall, though he does not face
up to what his paper and his son's attitudes should tell him: that there
will be no peace and perhaps this very environment will disappear.
Giles the son thinks of the oncoming war with rage and frustration,
and thinks of himself as a coward, so he reacts to his frustrations
violently. He also thinks he wants to be a farmer and that his role as a
stockbroker is one he must play, without belief, in order to make a living.
He is in limbo between what he thinks are his real feelings and what
he assumes as a required role.
Mrs. Manresa calls herself a "wild child of nature" and imagines
that because she tears off her stays and rolls in the grass at home that
she is truly free and honest. Yet she reveals little about her past life.
Isa deliberately keeps her inner self secret. Few people, especially
her husband Giles, know that she writes poetry and thinks poetry
throughout most of her daily activities. She is on the surface charming
and sensitive to other people, but she thinks of herself as very unhappy
in the world. Her personal life and the troubles of the world make her
unhappy.
Lucy Swithin wants peace and harmony in the world under God, and
so she imagines that it exists or will surely come to exist soon.
All of the characters can be seen as metaphors, concrete in their
vividness of realization, but at the same time embodiments of illusion,
of the failures of human connection, of the dichotomy of the external and
the internal life. The dark side of this modern allegory is that people
as well as what they symbolize may be annihilated by the coming conflict.
Civilization may be annihilated. Will it be rebuilt? Virginia Woolf did
not wait to see.
Massachusetts College of Art, Boston
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ed. Bloomfield, Morton W., Allegory, Myth, and Symbol (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen J., Allegory and Representation, selected papers from the English
Institute, 1979-80 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Kelley, Alice van Buren, The Novels of Virginia Woolf; Fact and Vision (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1971, 1973).
Little, Judy, 'Festive Comedy in Woolfs Between the Acts', in: Women and Literature
5 (Spring, 1977), 26-37.
Maika, Patricia, Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and Jane Harrison's Conlspiracy (Ann
Arbor, London: UMI Research Press, 1984, 1987).
Woolf, Virginia, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1941).
HANS H. RUDNICK
CAMUS' CALIGULA: AN ALLEGORY?
Allegory is a manner of speaking or, more appropriately, a technique

of writing in which the narrative "obviously and continuously" refers
to another "simultaneous" and consistent "structure of events or ideas".l
In the literal sense of the original Greek word allegory, we are using a
"speaking-the-other" technique (Greek: alios = other; agoreunein = to
speak publicly). The allegorist is consistently pursuing another narra-
tive which, at the same time, on a second level of understanding, extends
clearly beyond the obvious surface meaning of the first.
There are other literary devices that do not speak directly, such as
ambiguity and allusion, but they are different from allegory since they
are not consistently referring to and corroborating the same point,
however well hidden, throughout the narrative.
Camus' Caligula might be categorized as a complex allegory with a
continuous and consistently developed socio-cultural message that plays
the madness of the tyrant against the allegory's ironic reversal of turning
the tyrant into a teacher. On the stage it is the madness of the tyrant
that provides the dire entertainment, and it is the underlying allegory
pointing toward the teacher who provides the moral instruction and
intended deeper message of the drama. On the surface the emperor
Caligula personifies the tyrant in thought and deed. The longer we
observe him, the more ruthless he seems to become. Only every now
and then, most obliquely, does Camus remind the audience gently of
the other meaning he intended to convey in his play.
The first version of Caligula, Camus' first drama, had the subtitle
The Meaning of Death and was written in 1938 after a reading of
Suetonius' De vita Caesarum. He had written the drama for the Theatre
de l'Equipe which he had founded in Algiers. The play, however, was
never performed there. It was revised and published in 1942 during the
German occupation of France and, finally, performed for the first time
with Gerard Philipe as Caligula in Paris at the Theatre Hebertot on
September 26, 1945 after WW II had ended.
Hardly has any modem drama been more misinterpreted than Camus'
Caligula. The overwhelming majority of critics, Germaine Bree is one

214 HANS H. RUDNICK
of the few exceptions among the American critics, understood Camus

only as the author of The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) and of The Stranger
(1942) and interpreted his works accordingly. The critics' formula of
interpretation of this drama has been that the human being is confronted
with a life that is absurd, that the human being is fighting against this
condition, but that the struggle is as futile as Sisyphus' rolling the stone
up the hill. 2
It may be tempting to interpret the drama according to a formula
based on the existential absurdity of life, although Camus himself had
clearly warned against philosophical or political interpretation in one
of his forewords, particularly since la resistance against the German
occupation was no longer a political subject, as, for example, it still
had been the case with Anouilh's Antigone (performed in 1944) when
censorship had still to be taken into account. Caligula was performed
after the end of WW II when France was free again. Camus had
called Caligula "a tragedy of knowledge", knowledge in the sense of
understanding the human condition. He characterized this drama in the
preface to the American edition as the "history of a suicide on a higher
plain and simultaneously as the history of the most human and tragic
of all errors" (underlining and translation are mine).3 Camus himself
insisted on the simultaneity of meaning that is so characteristic of
allegory. It will be our task in this context to illuminate this simul-
taneity, but before we plunge into that, more on the nature of interpreting
allegory.
Allegorical interpretation as a method of criticism relies on allegory
as a structural element in narrative. The allegorical aspect has to be
present within the narrative, it should not be added by critical inter-
pretation alone, although all critical commentary, in a sense, entails
allegorical interpretation through the attribution of meaning to events and
ideas within the given context. However, it is important to remember that
allegory's absence or presence is determined by the initial creative act
of the poet who intentionally must have placed it there. Allegorical inter-
pretation itself will remain one of several interpretations, particularly
since we are dealing per definitionem with a simultaneity of meanings
anyway.
The moment at which the reader or critic notices that (s)he is dealing
with an allegory occurs when the simultaneity of meaning is discov-
ered or posited. In Christian hermeneutics this moment was posited rather
than discovered. It is marked by the desire to obtain meaning from
CAMUS' CALlGULA: AN ALLEGORY? 215
scriptures that can be related to the life of Christ. St. Paul was the first
to point to the Old Testament as a source that would support such a
premise if read as an allegory. Later St. Augustine formulated this premise
most succinctly when he stated that "in the Old Testament the New
Testament is concealed; in the New Testament the Old Testament is
revealed". Such hermeneutics established a relationship between texts
that were hitherto considered separate revelations. The new premise of
interpretation made it possible to join the Old and the New Testaments
into one book that is called the Bible.
Reading the Old Testament as an allegory made the Bible as a
combination of the Old and New Testament possible. The simultaneity
of related meaning, particularly in the Messianic passages, was posited
and consistently carried through. The potential of multiple meanings was
reduced and focussed on statements related to the life of Christ and his
teachings.
Dante faced related, and possibly graver, problems in justifying the
literary relevance and truth-value of his Divine Comedy. In his famous
"Letter to Can Grande della Scala" Dante refers to Aristotle's
Metaphysics in which the philosopher says that "as a thing is related
to existence, so it is related to truth".4 Relatedness is the key term which
connects existence with truth in the hermeneutic process. Dante is well
aware of the fact that in some cases there is a one-to-one relation between
the truth and the thing itself. He says "the truth about a thing ... is a
perfect likeness of the thing as it is".s But this argument would not
serve Dante's purpose of justifying the Divine Comedy's truth-value
which must be supported in another way. Consequently Dante con-
tinues:
Now of things which exist some so exist as to have absolute being in themselves; others
so exist as to have a being dependent on something else, by some kind of relation, for
example, "being at the same time" or "being related to something else", like the
correlatives "father and son", "master and servant", "double and half", "whole and part",
and the like ... and because the being of such depends on something else, it follows
that the truth of them also depends on something else; for if we have not knowledge of
half, we can never understand double, and so of the rest. 6 (Emphasis added.)
It is clear that Dante steers away from the one-to-one truth relation in
which things reveal their existence and meaning directly. He looks toward
the "other" truth relation, the figurative one, that is characteristic of
literature and allows "a being at the same time", which is so important
to us in this context, namely, it is that already-referred-to simultaneity
216 HANS H. RUDNICK
which entails more than the surface meaning of the words, reaching
well beyond the one-to-one truth relation.
Dante continues his apology of the Divine Comedy to Can Grande:
... be it known that the sense of this work is not simple, but on the contrary it may be
called polysemous, that is to say, "of more senses than one"; for it is one sense which
we get through the letter, and another which we get through the thing the letter signi-
fies; and the first is called literal and the second allegorical . . . .7
Allegory is "speaking-the-other" that lies beyond the literal. Allegory

is part of figurative language that does not really mean what it literally
says. With regard to the Divine Comedy Dante explains:
The subject of the whole work, then, taken in the literal sense only, is "the state of souls
after death" without qualification, for the whole progress of the work hinges on it and
about it. Whereas if the work be taken allegorically the subject is "man, as by good or
ill deserts, in the exercise of the freedom of his choice, he becomes liable to rewarding
or punishing justice." ... The form or method of treatment is poetic, fictive, descrip-
tive, digressive, transumptive; and likewise proceeding by definition, division, proof,
refutation, and setting forth of examples. 8
Adopting an allegorical interpretation leads in the case of the Divine

Comedy beyond the straightforward description of "the state of souls
after death" to the other, the poetic statement of the mediaeval human
condition which directs the moral meaning of the subject to the "blessed
souls" alone 9 who are invited to follow the exemplum that is presented
before them and behold God.
Torquato Tasso defended his poetry during the Renaissance as Dante
has done by arguing its allegorical meaning. The idea that major poetry
contained several levels of meaning which could be accessed through
allegorical interpretation had become commonplace.
However, historically speaking, when the Aristotelian notion of poetry
as an imitation of nature gained ground, poetry was understood to
represent the general and the typical so that it was no longer addressing
the truth-value of its statements indirectly as allegory did.
During the Romantic period, under the influence of Goethe, Friedrich
Schlegel, and Coleridge, poets emphasized their subjective and psycho-
logical powers of creativity by translating abstract ideas into poetic
imagery. In the wrong hands, this conception denies allegory its place
within poetic language since the interpreter is encouraged to read for
the meaning not by searching for it via allegory, but rather by identi-
fying the idea behind the poet's creative impulse directly. Consequently,
CAMUS' CALIGULA: AN ALLEGORY? 217
allegory lost its ground as a central device of figurative language during

the Romantic era and has not fully recovered since. The direct encounter
with experience now served as the touchstone for great literature, whereas
before indirect statements invited a decoding of literary language and
of the meaning of events it dealt with. Symbolism replaced allegory in
Moby Dick, for example, but symbolism did not maintain the high level
of continuity and certainly not the simultaneity so central to allegory.
Kafka among the modems, however, seems to have remained close to the
traditional requirements for allegory.
What is it that kindles a modem writer's interest in allegory? The
reasons may be the same that drove Dr. Johnson to write the Lives of
the English Poets during the last twenty years of his life. The Lives
covered English poetry after its "golden age".l0 Arguing a theory of
"decline" must have been tempting writes Walter Jackson Bate, who
continues:
But to surrender to such a temptation was to fold one's hands before historical deter-
minism, and deny what Johnson most prized as a moral premise: the ability of man to
remain a "free agent" and to determine within limits his own destiny. There is conse-
quently the effort to see this period sympathetically for what it is. 11
Later Bate places Dr. Johnson in William James' category of the "second-
born" who only fulfill themselves laboriously and with despair in the
shadow of the genial "once-born" whose lives develop effortlessly in
serenity and harmony:
The life of Johnson ... is almost a prototype or exemplum of the [second-born). But
the universality of its force is to be found in the fact that all human attainment is, to
some extent, "second-born". The moral of its struggle is the freedom of the human spirit,
however adverse the circumstances, to evolve its own destiny. It is this as much as anything
else that increasingly leads us to think of Johnson almost as an allegorical figure, like
Valiant-for-truth in Pilgrim's Progress . ... To Johnson as to few others we may apply
Keats' remark about Shakespeare - that he "led a life of Allegory: his works are the
comments on it".12
Linking the struggle of the "second-born" to the human condition and

to the defense of the freedom of spirit in the Western tradition so that
the individual can continue to determine its own destiny, has revital-
ized allegory's role in literature and established not only a criterion of
value for the individual work of art, but also for its cultural role within
society. If Keats praises Shakespeare's greatness for having led a life
of allegory during his time and Bate attributes the same greatness to
218 HANS H. RUDNICK
Dr. Johnson, then it can be safely said that Albert Camus increasingly
emerges also as one of those major figures of his time who have, as
artists, lived a life of allegory and whose works provide ample proof
of it.
The relatively convenient formula of interpreting life as being absurd
and concluding that there is nothing else for humankind to do than keep
on rolling that Sisyphean stone cannot do justice to Camus' superior
achievement as a writer and thinker. The fact that existentialist writers
strove to popularize their philosophies by translating them into literary
works of art has turned into a myth that has stifled a better understanding
of Camus' achievement. As Caligula is simultaneously emperor and actor,
he performs, in exact accordance with the earlier subtitles of the play,
as joueur "a tragedy of knowledge" on Le sens de La mort. As emperor
he displays the cruelty of the tyrant, as actor he performs a masquerading
game playing an ambitious moral teacher of the nation on an allegor-
ical level. The responsibility he feels as a ruler for the well-being of
his people holds both roles together. But on the surface, as he shows
the cruelty of the apparent madman, the meaning remains obscure and
drifts into the absurd if it is not further questioned. From beginning to
end, Caligula is self-searching. We find him looking into the mirror at
the very beginning and at the end of the play. Contemplating himself
in the mirror is more than a superficial narcissistic exercise for Caligula.
The loss of Drusilla, his sister and lover, has made him aware of a
simultaneity within him, a contradiction that pits the pretended secure
self of the emperor against the helplessness of the human being, Caligula.
Although he is still very young, "as an emperor, he was perfection's self',
says Cherea (p. 819),13 but now, after Drusilla's death, he has that "queer
look in his eyes" (the Old Patrician speaking, p. 819). Like Lear, he
has been reported by peasants "last night not far from Rome, rushing
through the storm" (Scipio, p. 820). Connecting Caligula's life to imag-
ination and the power of ideas, Cherea reasons "That young man was too
fond of literature" (p. 820). But the First Patrician adds assuringly "we'll
make him see reason" (p. 820). This is a far-reaching statement since
it will be Caligula himself who will desperately try throughout the play
to teach the patricians reason.
In true Camus fashion, the attentive audience and the interpreter of
this tragedy are forced to ask themselves "whom do you believe in this
play?" We are hearing one line, when we are actually to listen to the
other. It is modern allegory at its best. The simultaneity of meaning
remains in effect throughout the tragedy. Whose death, to revert to the

original subtitle, is this all about? Is it Caligula's death? Or is it the
death of the patricians? Whose allegory is this? Is the "history of a suicide
on a higher plain" the death of Caligula, self-sought by his tyrannical
behavior, or is it the death of the human individual, representatively
shown by the passivity and submissiveness of the patricians? Is this
"history of the most human and tragic errors" the history of Caligula's
errors or that of the patricians? The hermeneutical question will
continuously beckon.
Although seeming distraught to his courtiers, Caligula states
I have never felt so lucid. What happened to me is quite simple; I suddenly felt a desire
for the impossible .... Things as they are, ... are far from satisfactory. . .. The
scheme of things ... is quite intolerable. . .. I want the moon, or happiness, or eternal
life. (pp. 820-821)
Subsequently Caligula claims that he has found "a truth that makes the
moon essential" to him. When Helicon, patronizingly, inquires what his
truth is, Caligula tonelessly answers "Men die; and they are not happy".
Characteristically for an allegory, Helicon replies by referring to the
surface meaning of Caligula's words and ignores potential deeper
meaning. Ease up, Helicon seems to say "This truth of yours doesn't
prevent [the people over there] from enjoying their meal" (p. 821). But
Caligula quickly answers with determination
All it proves is that I'm surrounded by lies and self-deception ... I wish men to live
by the light of truth .... I've the power to make them do so. For I know what they
need and haven't got. They're without understanding and they need a teacher; someone
who knows what he's talking about. (p. 821)
Caligula, assuming the role of a teacher, determined to pursue his goal

without delay, asks Helicon to help him "In the way ... of the impos-
sible". Helicon submissively answers that he will do his best.
Up to this point Caligula has not yet found an issue to prove his
point and determination. Helicon, going out to lunch, says as much
when he calls Caligula "an idealist ... who follows his bent, and no
one can foresee where it will take him" (p. 821). Caesonia, "the old
trusted mistress" and Scipio agree that they must save him, because it
was Caligula who had frequently told Scipio "that the only mistake one
makes in life is to cause others suffering" (p. 821). It is, however, exactly
the double meaning of such a statement that, again, reflects the charac-
teristics of allegory. Whose suffering is meant here? Is it the emperor
220 HANS H. RUDNICK
Caligula suffering from the actions, behavior and "lies" of his subjects,
or are the subjects suffering from CaUgula's madness and tyranny? As
it turns out a short time later, the tragedy will foreground the suffering
of the subjects and depict Caligula as the pain- and death-inflicting tyrant.
Caligula's issue is presented to him when the Intendant points out that
the treasury needs urgent attention. Bursting into ironic laughter, Caligula
mockingly exclaims "The treasury of prime importance". The Intendant's
"Yes, indeed" (p. 821), two simple, affirmative words give Caligula the
motif for everything that happens from now on in the tragedy, since
Caligula is determined to show how secondary, at best, the treasury is
in relation to values that define the human condition, i.e., fighting his-
torical determinism, remaining a free agent, determining one's own
destiny, and maintaining and safeguarding human dignity. In Caligula's
words, the human condition is addressed when he says to the Intendant
listen well, you fool! If the treasure has tantamount importance, human life has none.
That should be obvious to you. People who think like you are bound to admit the logic
of my edict, and since money is the only thing that counts, should set no value on their
lives or anyone else's. I have resolved to be logical, and I have the power to enforce
my will. Presently you will see what logic's going to cost you. I shall eliminate
contradictions and contradicters. (p. 822)
Following the Intendant's value system which places the treasury above
human life and well-being, Caligula will from now on follow the laws
of reason, upon which this pernicious value system is grounded. By
driving the logic of reason to the absurd, he fulfills the role of the idealist
moral teacher who fights for the preservation of human dignity by, in
a consistent manner, continuously insulting this dignity. Allegory is at
work again. The masquerade of the apparent madman and tyrant conceals
the champion of truth, human dignity, and freedom. This is a true and
committed teacher. Caligula knows that he cannot simply like a preacher
tell his patricians and citizens what is right and what is wrong. To
appropriate the values that define the human condition, he expects each
of his people to know and feel militancy for these values themselves.
Caligula's idealism motivates him to teach his citizens in a truly
allegorical manner, on the technique and content levels, by "doing the
other", and not just "telling the other" as a person who supposedly "liked
literature too much" might have done. Caligula is a moral teacher and
a realist. He knows that if his people do not make the human condition
their primary concern on their own, his self-imposed mission and mas-
querade will fail miserably. He is well aware that this will be his tragedy.
As the tragedy progresses Caligula feels compelled to resort to more

and more cruelty in the hope of forcing his advisors and subjects to stand
up against his "madness" and come to the rescue of the most fundamental
attributes that define the human condition. From disinheriting the patri-
cians' children and giving the proceeds to the state (p. 822), to demanding
that Mucius' wife make love with him (p. 826), to declaring a famine
at will (p. 827), to forcing Mereia to poison himself after he has refused
to give an honest answer concerning his "logic" (p. 828), to accepting
the Third Patrician's hypocritical offer of his own life so that his be spared
from death from a stomach disorder (p. 836), Caligula desperately
continues preying on the fear of the patricians in the hope of bringing
his message home to them. But he realizes "the game is up, honor,
respectability, the wisdom of the nations, gone with the wind! The wind
of fear has blown them all away. Fear ... is a noble emotion, pure and
simple, self-sufficient" (p. 826).
"The wisdom of the nations" can be nothing else but the value system
of the Western tradition with its overriding emphasis on the freedom
and dignity of the individual and its creative powers. Of Caligula's
people, in Caligula's own words, "Not one of [them] has the spunk for
a heroic act" (p. 826). Mucius who will permit Caligula to humiliate
and violate his wife without protest, meekly remarks as if he were
distracted "My wife ... but ... I'm very fond of her". Caligula simply
replies "But how ordinary of you! So unoriginal! ... By the way, when
I came in just now, you were hatching a plot, weren't you?" (p. 826).
Mucius does not reply and when his wife is led away a moment later,
"his movement of revolt is quelled", as the stage directions say, by
Caesonia asking Mucius to refill her glass with wine. When the First
Patrician refers to "how eloquently" Caligula "spoke just now of
courage", which Mucius obviously did not exercise, Caesonia reveals that
Caligula is writing a book, "Quite a big one" that will certainly rank
among our Latin Classics" (p. 826). Giving the first hint that Caligula
knows about his own tragic end, the book's title is "Cold Steel". For
the time being, however, the title will be understood not allegorically,
but literally as a murderer's description of his deeds.
The conspirators are beginning the plotting of Caligula's murder. They
do not want to act as individuals, they think that, to be safer, they "need
to be two hundred" (p. 828). The poet Scipio, whose father was killed
by Caligula, has good reason to join them but refuses, although he is
encouraged in an ambiguous way by Helicon. Fearing nobody, killing
222 HANS H. RUDNICK
Caligula or being killed by him - "either way out will do" for Scipio.
He meets Caligula alone and their conversation quickly turns to Scipio's
poetry which had meant nothing to Helicon. Caligula, however, listens
when Scipio modestly tells him that his poetry dealt with Nature. Asking
"And what has Nature done for you?" Caligula finds out that "It consoles
[Scipio] for not being Caesar" (p. 828). His genuine interest in Scipio's
mind awakened, Caligula finds out that the poem "spoke of a certain
harmony"; and, feeling in tune with the poem, Caligula defines the
harmony as being "between one's feet and the earth" (p. 829). Both
men continue quoting complementary lines until Scipio confesses that
"All I know is that everything I feel or think turns to love". Caligula
responds instinctively "That, Scipio, is a privilege of noble hearts -
and how much I wish I could share your ... " and here is exactly the
point where Caligula catches himself, he changes his tone and com-
pletes his sentence with "your limpidity. But my appetite for life is too
keen; Nature can never sate it. You belong to quite another world ....
You are single-minded for good; and I am single-minded - for evil"
(p. 829). Caligula's earlier statement that "the same eternal truths appeal
to us both" is brutally withdrawn and further invalidated when he admits
that he was playing an actor's part. But Scipio breaks through this barrier
again by screaming at Caligula and chastizing him for "gloating" over
his success. After Scipio's outburst both men seem to understand each
other's situation. Scipio has maintained his dignity as an individual;
Caligula confesses that his only consolation is his scorn (p. 829).
In the following scene Caligula appears in the attire of Venus. All
patricians bow their heads except Scipio who has resolved to tell the truth
and call Caligula's appearance blasphemy. Caligula retorts that men have
been playing the absurd roles of the gods to perfection and that he is now
wearing the foolish, unintelligible face of a professional god. He denies
that he is a tyrant; he has averted three wars; he claims that he respects
human life (p. 831). It is Scipio again who moves Caligula to confess
the moral teacher's motif behind his actions when he again accuses
Caligula of blasphemy. Caligula explains that it is, rather, "dramatic
art. The great mistake you people make is not to take the drama serious
enough. If you did, you'd know that any man could play lead in the divine
comedy and become a god" (p. 831). Scipio again shows the best
understanding of Caligula's motifs when he states that Caligula "had done
everything that was needed to rouse up against [himself] a legion of
human gods", now ready to kill. Caligula admits "I've done everything
needed to that end" (p. 831).
Having "always known what will kill" him, Caligula still continues
wanting the moon, although Helicon warns him that a plot is planned
by Cherea. The plan is confirmed by another patrician, but Caligula keeps
on painting his toenails, rejecting the plot as a joke, and being submis-
sively affirmed by the Old Patrician when Caligula insists that it must
be a joke. Facing the mirror again, Caligula confirms his determination
to follow "where logic leads ... I must go on" (p. 833). The conspir-
ator Cherea is called before Caligula. Both men are speaking frankly,
Cherea admits that he was wrong about Caligula and that he is awaiting
his sentence. But Caligula burns the evidence, accuses Cherea of play-
acting, of having been another ''joueur'' when he "opened" his heart,
and sets him free nevertheless "to follow out the noble precepts we've
been hearing wherever they may take" him (p. 834).
Cherea makes his choice, most likely the expected one; he continues
the conspiracy. Scipio, however, seems not to join the assassins' cause.
But hypocrisies continue everywhere; in a poets' contest Scipio proves
for the last time that he seems to be the only one who understands
Caligula's motifs.
By strangling Caesonia, Caligula removes the last witness of happi-
ness; he has not chosen for himself the murderous kind of happiness since
"you see me still freer than I have been for years, freed as I am from
memories and illusion" (p. 839).
Yet it is pain and disappointment that speak in Caligula's words since
he is now aware of his failure as tyrant and moral teacher. Both roles,
have not led to the desired results. The patricians keep plotting rather
than stopping their lying and speaking the truth instead. Cherea was
clearly given the chance of finding his way to honesty, but he does not
accept Caligula's offer of understanding. He rather continues with the
plot together with the others under the cloak of secrecy without giving
Caligula's motifs the benefit of the doubt. Only Scipio, the poet, in
spite of his justified hatred toward Caligula, seems to have obtained some
understanding. He vaguely seems to feel, not by logic but by empathy
with Nature, that he has to act as a human being, as an individual,
following his own will and inclination. He may be the only person who
might help mankind to a better understanding of the human condition not
on the basis of logic, whose dismal failure Caligula has so well proven,
224 HANS H. RUDNICK
but rather on the basis of the anthropological values represented by the

individualism and creativity of the Western tradition. Caligula had wanted
to force this point as tyrant and moral teacher, but he failed because he
applied the indirect method of allegory that based its success on the
intelligence, subtlety, empathy, and self-criticism of the human individual
as it had been conceived in the Western tradition. In the end, however,
Scipio will disappoint this secret hope in his understanding since he
will be one of the very first to drive his dagger into Caligula.
Caligula now "freed ... from memories and illusion" thinks that
"nothing lasts" (p. 839), and in a final desperate burst of violence he
strangles Caesonia, the symbol and only survivor of his happiness. In this
deconstructive frenzy he continues the allegory, turning it, in effect,
against himself
I live, I kill, I exercise the rapturous power of the destroyer, compared with which the
power of a creator is mere child's play. And this, this is happiness; this and nothing
else - this intolerable release, devastating scorn, blood, hatred all around me; the glorious
isolation of a man who all his life long nurses and gloats over the ineffable joy of the
unpunished murderer; the ruthless logic that crushes out human lives ... to perfect at
last the utter loneliness that is my heart's desire (p. 839).
Caligula now knows that Helicon had failed him and, looking with
distress into the mirror for a last time, he realizes "I won't have the moon
... If I'd had the moon, if love were enough, all might have been
different" (p. 839/40). But logic, at this moment the unspoken other,
has destroyed it all. "All I need is the impossible to be", but "My freedom
isn't the right one". Hearing the assassins near, Caligula hurls a stool
at his reflection in the mirror and commends himself "To history,
Caligula! Go down to history". As the conspirators converge on him,
eagerly led by Scipio and Cherea, Caligula shrieks "I am still alive!"
(p. 840), indicating that the concept of the other will not die with him,
but that it will live on in spite of Caligula having used the wrong means
to bring this other's simultaneity out.
Caligula's early statement that "Men die; and they are not happy"
(p. 821), a situation he wanted to remedy by asking for the moon, meant
to restore love and happiness, turns out to apply also to Caligula's own
death after all this struggle. Being disguised as a tyrant, and hoping to
play the moral teacher, Caligula's mission has failed; and it was intended
to fail. Camus, in his 1955 lecture given in Athens "On the Future of
Tragedy", stated that "many writers . . . are concerned with providing
our times with its tragedy"Y His "Caligula" is such a tragedy defined
as "conflict, a frenzied immobility, between two powers, each of which
wears the double mask of good and evil". The simultaneity of allegory,
of what is said, and the other that is not said, surfaces again in this
definition by Camus. In his view tragedy occurs when man enters into
conflict with an order that is, in this case, instituted in society. This
conflict will only be resolved when man accepts the "mystery of exis-
tence" which includes recognizing the limitations of man and
acknowledging "the order where men know without knowing", best
exemplified in Oedipus' statement of acceptance after his blinding: "All
is well". Caligula goes down in history as an individual who now knows,
but who, for his individualism's sake and that of the tradition of Western
man, keeps on struggling until the last breath.
Caligula's struggle is against the power, the stifling efficiency of power
that rationality has amassed in human society. This is why he wants to
drive logic ad absurdum. He struggles to obtain the moon, the symbol
for emotion, love, and happiness. Man has embraced the power of reason
to a degree that makes him forget his limitations. Camus sees the only
hope in a gradual transformation of individualism, in Caligula to be
accomplished by a tyrant-teacher, so that the individual may slowly
recognize under the pressure of events and examples that man defi-
nitely has limits. Camus reasons,
The world which the individual of the 18th century thought he could conquer and
transform by reason and science has in fact taken shape, but a monstrous one. Rational
and excessive at one and the same time, it is the world of history. But on achieving this
degree of hubris, history has put on the mask of destinyY
It is destiny in the sense of man being helpless to shape this force any
longer. A character like Caligula struggles heroically like a Greek hero
bringing about a rebirth of Greek tragedy in France, Camus argues.
Giraudoux and Gide are contributing to the same cause. But Oedipus'
"All is well" has not yet been reached, Camus continues. Caligula is
still a "highly individualistic" mind suffering "derision" and, to use
Camus' words, "highly mannered literary transposition" .!6 Allegory is
a vital part of this transposition, and, again in Camus' words, "The
right explanation is always double, at least. Greece teaches us this,
Greece, to which we must always return. Greece is both shade and
light".!? And the struggle between reason and feeling remains unresolved,
intentionally. Camus himself said of the tragedy "I never solve the
226 HANS H. RUDNICK
dilemma".18 I might add, deconstruction does in a way, pragmatism does,

analytic philosophy does, but phenomenology will not; it leaves the
solution to the individual and to its powers of understanding and self-
interpretation.
Southern Illinois University
NOTES
1 Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Alex Preminger et al. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 12.
2 See, e.g., Germaine Br~e, Camus (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1961),
particularly Ch. 16, pp. 147ff. Also Johannes Pfeiffer, Sinnwidrigkeit und Solidaritiit
(Berlin: Die Spur, 1969), especially Chapter 10, "Die Riickwendung zum naturbestimmten
Denken der griechischen Antike", pp. 86ff, and Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor
Executioners, trsl. by Dwight Macdonald (Philadelphia: New Society, 1986).
3 The French text merely reads: "Caligula est l'histoire d'un suicide superieur. C' est
l'histoire de la plus humaine et de la plus tragique des erreurs". See 'Preface ~ l'~dition
americaine du theatre', in: Albert Camus: Theatre, Recits, Nouvelles, preface par Jean
Grenier, textes etablis et annotes par Roger Quilliot (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliotheque de
la Pleiade, 1967), p. 1730.
4 As quoted from Dante's 'Letter to Can Grande della Scala', in: Lionel Trilling, Literary
Criticism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 80.
5 Ibid., p. 80.
6 Ibid., p. 80.
7 Ibid., p. 80.
8 Ibid., p. 81.
9 Ibid., p. 82.
10 Walter Jackson Bate, The Achievement of Samuel Johnson (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1955), p. 56.
11 Bate, pp. 56-57.
12 Bate, pp. 61-62.
13 Subsequent parentheses with page numbers refer to Camus' Caligula in English as
translated by Stuart Gilbert and printed in Masters of Modern Drama, ed. by Haskell
M. Block and Robert G. Shedd (New York: Random House, 1962), pp. 819-840.
14 Albert Camus, 'Sur l'avenir de la tragedie', in: Theatre, Recits, Nouvelles, pp.
1701-1728.
15 Ibid., p. 1709.
16 Ibid., p. 1710.
17 Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. by Philip Thody and trans. by Ellen
Conroy Kennedy (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 357.
18 Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, p. 362.
ERIN MITCHELL
BECKETT'S WAITING FOR GODOT AS ALLEGORY
In a tradition of phenomenological readings of Beckett's Waiting for

Godot, critics argue that the play stands in mimetic or even symbolic
relation to "the human condition",! an argument that tacitly depends upon
the romantic valorization of the symbol, upon an intrinsic unity between
appearance and essence which retains a quasi-sacred function. In such
readings, the play has a symbolic relation to existential phenomenology,
and existential phenomenology itself is assumed to have a transparent
relation to the human condition. Phenomenological critics imply or even
contend that "the value of negative images becomes transmuted through
Beckett's artistry into a positive affirmation of human dignity,,2 thus
participating in what Leo Bersani calls the "culture of redemption", which
assumes that "a certain type of repetition of experience in art repairs
inherently damaged or valueless experience". 3
Critics who assign humanistic existentialist values to Beckett's texts
place Beckett within a tradition he resists and radically undermines,4
but poststructuralist critics5 are beginning to reevaluate the "culture of
redemption" as it is expressed by the existential humanist tradition. One
way in which to question the humanistic existentialist critical tradition
is to rigorously apply some of the hints contained within the more
textually aware readings of that tradition itself. Some of those hints
lead to a deconstructive reading of the allegorical structure of the play.
A reading of Waiting for Godot as allegory will point out the disso-
nance between the literal and proper meanings of characters in the play,
and will show the co-presence of a discourse that undermines the
metaphor 'man' by emphasizing such dissonance, and of a discourse
that attempts to counter the pathos engendered by the first discourse. The
second, counter-discourse resorts to strategies of referentiality, including
the creation of history and identity, and the invention of a eudaemonic
ethics based on localized needs. Estragon consistently voices the first
critical analytical discourse, while Vladimir consistently voices the
second, thematic and exhortative discourse.
Readers of Waiting for Godot often imply that their symbolic readings
suppress another possible, dialectically rigorous, reading of the play.

228 ERIN MITCHELL
Those who interpret the playas an existential humanist document

themselves problematize the unity of symbol and symbolized that their
arguments otherwise postulate, and raise the question of whether the best
interpretation of the play is indeed one that depends upon symbols and
insists on the referentiality of the literary text. The deconstructive moves
within such interpretations themselves jeopardize symbolic readings, and
the attendant claims about the play's "redemptive" epistemology, ethics
and aesthetic qualities when they suggest that the play can be read as a
structurally self-cancelling allegory.
The first hint that the play does not perform a symbolic function comes
when critics of the existential humanist tradition postulate an intertextual
relation between it and the philosophical texts of Hegel, Heidegger and
Sartre. While the relation between such philosophical texts and the
outside world remains an open question, the claim that the play's capacity
to symbolize the human condition is mediated by philosophical texts
suggests that the play is itself a textual extension of other texts rather
than an unmediated reference to the human condition. The play then
becomes another text in a series of texts.
This tradition of Beckett criticism also recognizes features within
the play itself that imply the possibility that the literary text is rhetor-
ical rather than referential. Differentiating, for instance, the "absurd"
surface of the play itself from the "verisimilitude" such absurdity marks, 6
thus pointing to a dissonance between the surface appearance of the
"bums" on stage and the ostensible symbolic function they serve. The
literal meaning of the characters, subhuman bums, does not coincide with
their proper meaning, full human subjectivity, and such readings acknowl-
edge a difference between the literal and proper meanings of the
characters. 7 Such a clash between the literal and the proper meanings
of the characters implies that the synthesis of the two in the figurative
does not occur; that the figure (the symbol) attempts to heal a "fissure"
that is internal to it.
Most readings that assign humanist status to Waiting for Godot evade
the consequences of acknowledging such dissonance between the literal
and proper meanings of the characters; they explain the characters'
"subhuman" appearance as a result of their previous histories and of their
symbolic function. Such readings argue that suffering has caused the de-
generation of full human subjects into the subhuman bums on stage, thus
assuming some pretextual time not represented on stage, and subsuming
the dissonance between the literal and proper meanings of the characters.
WAITING FOR GODOT AS ALLEGORY 229
The characters' appearance as "bums" is explained by recourse to a

theory of half-symbols. An entire tradition of reading the play asserts that
Estragon and Vladimir "each serves as a symbol for only half the human
subject".8 In such readings, Estragon becomes a symbol of only the
corporeal half of the human subject, and/or of consciousness of itself,
and Vladimir becomes a symbol of the higher functions of conscious-
ness, and/or of consciousness for itself. Such a widely accepted
interpretation of the characters dilutes the power of the symbol to
symbolize the entire essence, but leaves the unity of half-symbol and
half-symbolized intact; a subhuman character becomes an adequate
symbol for half a human consciousness or half a dialectic. By forcibly
combining the two characters into a composite figure for "conscious-
ness of and for itself', existential humanist critics try to reconcile the
characters' literal status and proper meaning.
The dissonance between literal and proper meanings that such inter-
pretations of the play acknowledge and suppress suggests that Waiting
for Godot is structured like allegory. In his study of allegory, Paul de
Man contends that such use of a "literal sign which [has representa-
tional value and power but] bears no resemblance to ... and does not
coincide with the proper meaning"9 is a feature, not of symbolism, but
of allegory. Some readings of the play suffer the consequence of such
dissonance when, as happens in allegorical texts, the proper meaning
of the text and of the characters distracts from and forecloses the initial
divergent literal meanings. When Estragon and Vladimir's literal
meanings (two separate subhuman bums) are foreclosed by their proper
meaning (a single human existential subject), incommensurabilities
between the characters are subsumed in a notion of their unity. When
existential humanists read the two characters as a composite figure of
"the body and soul of a single individual", 10 they treat relations between
Vladimir and Estragon as if they are themselves complementary or
dialogic relations between constituent parts of a symbolized.
With this insistence that Vladimir and Estragon together are a symbol
of the unified human subject, existential humanist readings deny the
incommensurability of Vladimir and Estragon's voices. While sometimes
acknowledging their dialogic or dialectical relationship, interpretations
of the play sometimes back away from the dialectical rigor of their dis-
coveries, thus domesticating the dialectic, and refusing to acknowledge
the full effects of a negation admitted but softened by critics of Waiting
for Godot.
230 ERIN MITCHELL
By reading the dialectical relationship between Vladimir and Estragon

as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between modes of con-
sciousness in the unhappy consciousness and in the full human subject,
such critics do propose dialectical rigor and radical, even deconstruc-
tive strategies, however. Hegelian dialectical rigor and the discovery of
Heideggerian chiasmatic structure, especially allusions to the Master-
Slave dialectic,l1 often complicate symbolic readings of the play, but such
chiasmatic configurations are often viewed as redemptive allusions to the
cross and to Christianity!2 and as a progression towards the Hegelian
Absolute. 13 Some critics even go so far as to read the playas an instance
of negative theology, interpreting the playas "literary nihilism [which]
. . . taken to an extreme, approaches the condition of 'negative
theology,,,/4 and explaining that Beckett is a "literary nihilist ... [who]
is a mystic manque".!5 Such maneuvering toward transcendence and/or
the external world obscures the consequences of the curtailed dialectic
within the text itself.
Without the retreat to the extratextual and away from the discovery
of an intratextual dialectical relationship between Vladimir and Estragon,
readers discover that the characters' voices negate one another in a
dialectic that moves in chiasmatic traces not toward the transcendence
of a unified symbol and extratextual reference, but towards mutual
subversion. While Estragon insists that there is "nothing to be done"
except to sleep and wait, Vladimir encourages reminiscence and
conversation. Vladimir retains a sense of linear history, and tries to
make his history the history of an ethical person. He attaches often
contradictory ethical percepts to silly behavior associated with local-
ized needs. He hopes that having a memory and sustaining an ethos
will exhibit his virtue and lead to happiness. Estragon consistently negates
such hopes, voicing the impossibility of Vladimir's recourse to a
referential system of needs and eudaemonic ethics. While Vladimir
continues to generate an "exhortative and thematic,,!6 discourse, Estragon
undermines the authority of Vladimir's discourse of praxis.
In order to counter the pathos of Estragon's refrain. "Nothing to be
done" and his repetition of "nothing" throughout the play, Vladimir
implies that they wait voluntarily, and that they might stop waiting at any
time they choose. He suggests that they can indeed choose to leave,
but that they choose to wait, saying "I'm curious to see what he [Godot]
has to offer. Then we'll take it or leave it".!7 He pretends that he and
Estragon wait out of some curiosity to hear the outcome of their "vague
supplication" (18). He reassures Estragon that they are not (yet) tied to
Godot, and that they could take a vacation in the Pyrenees were it not
for their curiosity. Despite their inability to leave the stage even when
they say "let's go" at the end of both acts, Vladimir believes that they
have options.
Vladimir's discourse, insisting as it does on the possibility of choice,
becomes the privileged discourse in existentialist humanist criticism. Such
critics often take Vladimir's attempt to disguise fate as choice too
seriously, and thus jeopardize the accuracy and dialectical rigor of their
arguments. While admitting that Estragon has a dialectical relation with
Vladimir, such interpretations do not sufficiently account for the decon-
structive power of Estragon's voice. When existential humanists contend,
for instance, that the pair is left "to their own existence, to exercise
their freedom by exercising whatever choice is left to them in their bare
essential condition,,18 and even that "the tramps are authentically keeping
their options while waiting,,19 and "cannot 'revolt' against the world
created by their choices", 20 such critics assert that the two characters
do have a choice of whether to wait or go, and then argue over whether
such a "decision" to wait is authentic 21 or inauthentic. 22
Such critics thus mysteriously endow fictional characters with the
capacity for free and responsible choice, while not explaining what
choices might be left to two bums trapped on a stark stage. It is no
surprise, then, that despite some critical warnings that the characters
do not exhibit existential freedom and responsibility, but nihilistic
solipsism,23 existential humanists often attribute choice to figures that
do not have it, and then find themselves disappointed by the charac-
ters. They rather oddly lament, for instance, their inability "to scare up
the courage to project a future of their own",24 and thus accede, both
in their attributions and disappointments, to the hopes of Vladimir.
Some critics read Vladimir's insistence on the character's capacity
for choice as if it somehow becomes an ethical imperative for the
audience. While the audience sees only the most trivial mock-choices
being made on stage, and never sees the "decision to wait" being made,
existential humanist critics go along with Vladimir's desperate hope
that he and Estragon can make choices, and implicate the audience itself
in free and responsible choices not actually enacted on stage. Existential
humanist critics then extend the capacity for choice even to the audience,
again reading the playas an unproblematized reference to the "human
condition" when they insist that "we must always choose, even in the
232 ERIN MITCHELL
emptiness of the world of Godot".25 Such critics continue to insist that

a choice must be made by the audience of the play, without explaining
how such choices, not seen by the audience, can suddenly become the
audience's.
When readers of Waiting for Godot relinquish the idea that such a wait
is chosen by the characters, and the notion that such a "decision" made
in pretextual time somehow impels the audience to choose, they fully
emphasize the admission that the characters "must continue to suffer
the interminable period of their waiting"26 found and elided in existen-
tial humanist work. When critics view Vladimir's hopes as bathetic
nonsense, they begin to see waiting as a condition from which there is
no escape and little relief. Waiting, then, is not a necessary consequence
of a philosophical system's definition of the human subject, but a
structural imperative of the text itself. In such a "temporal predicament
in which man's self-definition is forever deferred",27 it is not man's
choice, but the rhetorical structure of allegory (itself a representation
of man's temporality28) that the play exhibits.
While Estragon recognizes that waiting is a predicament that makes
choice, self-definition, and self-determination impossible, Vladimir insists
throughout the play that there is something, anything, to be done in order
to counter the pathos of Estragon's recognition. Immediately after
Estragon "opens" this cyclical play by saying "Nothing to be done",
Vladimir announces this agenda, saying, "All my life, I've tried to put
it from me, saying, Vladimir, be reasonable, you haven't yet tried
everything. And I resumed the struggle" (9). Indeed, the audience sees
him trying "everything" to counter the negativity of Estragon's discourse
throughout the play. Instead of allowing Estragon to sleep through an
endless wait that neither of them can will or annul, Vladimir encour-
ages Estragon to eat, argue, agree, exchange insults, commit suicide,
tell stories about the past, and stay awake.
Vladimir contends that the two figures are indeed men, and that
memory of unique personal histories, and an ethos, will prove their
more than merely figural status.
Unlike Estragon, who confuses himself with figures long dead, and
cannot distinguish one muckheap from another, Vladimir insists on the
differences between days and places. Vladimir posits an identity with a
narrative of specific events in a unique personal history of continually
recounting the events of the day before, although Pozzo and the boy
forget who he is from day to day. When Vladimir begs to exist in the
memory of another, and thus for recognition, Pozzo exclaims that "the
blind have no notion of time. The things of time are hidden from them
too" (86). For Vladimir, unlike Pozzo, history is not a series of discon-
nected and static pictures, but a narrative that refers to events,
intersubjective recognition, and, ultimately, to a self. Vladimir reminisces
about events in Macon county and the Vaucluse, urging Estragon to
join him until Estragon snaps, "I am not a historian" (65), and under-
mines the value of tracking events and of the identity that history seems
to guarantee.
Vladimir tries to counter Estragon's dismantling of personal history
and identity of recourse to another referential discourse. That discourse
is centered around needs as well as an eudaemonic vocabulary and an
ethical praxis. Vladimir remains convinced that the world is structured
around a system of localized needs, such as hunger, that he can fulfill.
He feeds Estragon a blackened radish and a carrot, but finds that meals
cannot obviate the tedium of the wait, or distract them for long.
Vladimir then attempts to solidify the happiness he feels at the
beginning of the play's second act; he tries attaching random ethical
precepts to pragmatic and contingent behavior. He faults Estragon for
being beaten, and views the beatings as a result of Estragon's failure
to seek happiness. When Vladimir cries, "You must be happy too, deep
down, if you only knew it" (60), he implies that the will to happiness,
and an attendant eudaemonic ethics, can change a world. He demands
a great deal from a rather slapdash series of pronouncement about charity
and violence.
Vladimir's ethical pronouncements about charity and violence
are extemporaneous, naive, contradictory, silly, and unsystematic. He
alternates between advocating humane action and condoning revenge and
violence for the sheer fun of it; he congratulates himself on his own
compassion and kicks Pozzo in the crotch. Estragon's begging for chicken
bones is a "scandal" at the beginning of the play; Vladimir superciliously
says, "We are not beggars" (36). Pozzo's treatment of Lucky is equally
a "scandal"; when Lucky begins to cry after an instance of Pozzo's
nonchalant cruelty, Vladimir sputters reproachfully, and offers to wipe
Lucky's tears. Estragon's begging goes unreproached at the end of the
play, however, and Vladimir contradicts his own earlier horror and
squeamishness about violence. Gleefully listening to Pozzo's urgings that
Estragon "pull on the rope [around Lucky's neck] as hard as he likes"
and "give him a taste of [the] boot, in the face and privates" (87),
234 ERIN MITCHELL
Vladimir tells Estragon to "Let him have it" (88). A referential dis-
course to eudaemonic ethics, generated to counter the pathos of
Estragon's negativity, descends into an endorsement of brutality and
collapses under its own self-contradictions.
Unlike Vladimir, who attempts to establish history, identity, and an
eudaemonic ethical praxis, Estragon refuses to define, or determine
himself, and hesitates even to assert that he is a man or that he exists.
Estragon's "critical analytical language,,29 destabilizes the referentiality
of the metaphor 'man'. 30 Estragon first deconstructs the metaphor 'man'
when he compares himself to Christ; he points out the disjunction
between his own narrative (literal meaning) and the narrative of Christ's
life (proper meaning) in an allegory. While "Gogo ... recogniz[es] the
differences between his own condition and the life of Christ; Christ
lived in another country, and there they crucified quickly",31 such
disjunctions suggest, not that Estragon will be redeemed by his similarity
to Christ, but that Estragon is a repetition of Christ that "comprehends
difference,,32 and that Estragon can "no longer negate ... [and] no longer
recapture,,33 himself in the figure of Christ. Such non-identical repeti-
tion thus liberates Estragon from the figure of Christ as Estragon
emphasizes differences between himself and Christ, and makes an
allegorical comparison rather than a symbolic one.
Despite their recognition of such an inexact repetition, some critics
treat Estragon's comparison of himself to Christ as if it had the episte-
mological consequences of symbol rather than allegory. Reading
Estragon's suffering as an exact replication of Christ's suffering, that
duplicated suffering becomes a reflection of the audience's suffering
and of human suffering in general. Given this presumed transparent,
mimetic relation between the suffering of fictional characters and
humankind, critics can thus move to a claim that the play "provides an
insight into the nature and universality of human suffering",34 and go
on to claim that such knowledge is itself redemptive. Many existential
humanists then generalize about the way in which epistemology redeems
both the audience and the "pessimistic" ideas in Beckett's work, con-
tending that, for instance, "our knowledge of our own suffering is the
source of all dignity",35 but not explaining how Estragon attains dignity
through a knowledge of Christ's suffering or his own.
Such readers of Waiting for Godot do not explain how Estragon's
knowledge of suffering becomes "our" knowledge; they assume a
transparently symbolic correspondence between the suffering of different
figures, and thus elide the epistemological consequence of a discourse

which actually focuses on the incommensurability of Estragon's suffering
and Christ's suffering, of a critical analytical discourse which subverts
the metaphor 'man' by pointing to the dissonance between the literal
and proper meanings of the comparison between Christ and Estragon,
and produces a negative epistemology.36 Estragon points out that suffering
itself is not strictly equal to knowledge of suffering, and questions the
applicability of universal terms such as "the human condition" or 'man'
to himself and to Christ. It is a questioning that results not in a redemp-
tive knowledge of suffering, but in a knowledge that metaphors such
as 'man' are inherently unstable. The intention of allegory is not
epistemological, but opposed to discovering truth;37 allegory thus has
"troubling epistemological consequences,,38 which existential human-
ists tend to ignore.
Estragon shows the epistemological consequences of allegory as he
continues to deconstruct the metaphor 'man' when he playfully makes
other characters into allegorical figures. He calls Pozzo "Abel" when
Pozzo falls, and thus directs attention to Pozzo's momentary status as
victim, but Pozzo is helpless only sometimes in the second half of the
play. He calls Lucky "Cain" after Lucky kicks him, but Lucky is often
more slavish than murderous. He renames himself "Adam", thus making
a joke about his own denominational powers, which he doesn't usually
possess or have much patience for. He thus undermines the referen-
tiality of names themselves, suggesting that names do not denote a single
individual or even a human being. Names "are empty of meaning, but
somehow inexhaustible in their potential for meaning and interpreta-
tion. They seem to move freely from one linguistic environment to
another ... but as they do this, they imperceptibly forfeit their apparent
identity".39 Estragon gleefully robs names of their contexts and meanings
by transporting names from a Biblical context into the context of the play.
He compares Pozzo and Lucky to characters whose attributes, and stories,
they do not share, thus foregrounding the difference between Pozzo and
Lucky's literal meanings and their proper meanings. Estragon forecloses
their literal meanings with the allegorical tags he pastes onto them;
readers are diverted into thinking about Cain and Abel rather than about
Pozzo and Lucky.
Estragon's renaming points toward figural meanings, narratives of
Biblical figures who themselves have both literal and proper meanings;
such representations create not symbols, but allegories. Estragon finds
236 ERIN MITCHELL
that "the allegorical image is not constituted ... by its capacity to

represent something ... instead, it is constituted by the fact that it cannot
correspond to a referent".4o By foreclosing the literal meanings of his
allegorical figures, Estragon questions whether Pozzo, Lucky and
Estragon exist merely for the purpose of conveying proper meanings;
whether they are men, or emblems for other men irretrievably lost in
the past who are themselves emblematic.
Estragon questions the referentiality of the word 'man' even more
directly than in these allegories of naming. When, in one of his frenzies
of activity, Vladimir suggests that Estragon tryon his boots, Estragon
complies, but jokes about Vladimir's pretense that they are human beings.
He asks, "We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impres-
sion we exist?" (69). Estragon's discovery that the word 'man' does
not apply to characters like themselves makes Vladimir's insistence
that "we are men" (82) especially poignant.
Rather than revealing the "existence of a moral ideal,,41 Vladimir's
discourse, which views the world as structured around a system of needs
and eudaemonic ethics, shows a "continuity from sensory to ethical
hierarchies,,42 that culminates only in a discourse of eudaemonic ethics
and contingent praxis. Such a referential discourse alternates with a
discourse, voiced by Estragon, which deconstructs the metaphor 'man',
and explicitly examines the characters' merely figural status. Waiting
for Godot thus exhibits "the co-presence of thematic, exhortative
discourse with critical analytic language [which] points to an inherent
characteristic of all allegorical modes".43 The mutual negation of such
discourses does not symbolize an external world, but points to an
intra-textual dialectic, and to a reading of the playas allegory. When
Waiting for Godot is read as an allegory in which two warring
discourses undermine each other, readers find that, while existential
humanist critics' symbolic readings of the play are both helpful and
hopeful, they only begin to account for Beckett's critique of referentiality,
and for Estragon's disturbing voice.
Northwestern University
NOTES
1 For examples of this pervasive tradition in Beckett criticism, see especially Eugene
Kaelin, The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett, Analecta
Husserliana Vol. XIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981); Eugene Kaelin, 'A Theory of
Contemporary Tragedy', ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, The Existential Coordinates of
the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, Analecta Husserliana Vol. XVIII (Dordrecht:
D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 341-361; Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning
of Being (London: Macmillan, 1984); David Hesla, The Shape of Chaos (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1968).
2 Kaelin, The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett, p. xx.
3 Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990), p. 1.
4 Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory, and Text (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1988), pp. 196-198.

5 See critics such as Steven Connor, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1988); Leslie Hill, Beckett's Fiction in Other Words (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1990); Angela Moorjani, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett,
North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature 219 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Thomas Trezise, Into the Breach: Samuel
Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990).
6 Kaelin,' A Theory of Contemporary Tragedy', p. 357.
7 I am using terms for the tripartite structure of language explained by Paul de Man,
who writes that "When Horner calls Achilles a lion, the literal meaning of the figure
signifies an animal of yellowish brown color, living in Africa, having a mane, etc. The
figural meaning signifies Achilles and the proper meaning the attribute of courage or
strength that Achilles and the lion have in common and can therefore exchange." See
Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke
and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), p. 65 n.
9 de Man, p. 74.
10 Kaelin,' A Theory of Contemporary Tragedy' , p. 357. Also, see Hesla, pp. 199-228.
11 Ibid., p. 358. Also, see Hesla, p. 198.
12 Ibid., pp. 357-358. Also, see Butler, pp. 196-205.
13 Butler, pp. 194-206.
14 Ibid., p. 204.
15 Ibid., p. 204.
16 de Man, p. 209.
17 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), p. 18. Further
page references will be made in parentheses in the text.
18 Kaelin, The Unhappy Consciousness, p. 159.
19 Butler, p. 54.
20 Ibid., p. 96.
21 Ibid., p. 177. Butler contends that '''waiting' seems an appropriate metaphor for
Dase in's comportment towards Being".
22 Kaelin, Unhappy Consciousness, p. 160. Also, see Hesla, p. 199.
23 Ramona Cormier and Janis L. Pallister, Waiting for Death: The Philosophical
Significance of Beckett's 'En Attendant Godot' (University: University of Alabama Press,
1979).
24 Kaelin, Unhappy Consciousness, p. 166.
25 Butler, p. 96. Also, see Kaelin, Unhappy Consciousness, p. 166.
238 ERIN MITCHELL
27 de Man, p. 199.
28 See Paul de Man, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality', Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971).
29 de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 209.
30 Ibid., p. 199.
31 Kaelin, 'A Theory of Contemporary Tragedy', p. 358.
32 Gilles Deleuze, Difference et Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, 1968), p. 36.
33 Michel Foucault 'Theatricum Philosophicum', ed., Donald F. Bouchard, trans., Donald
F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 184.
34 Kaelin, 'A Theory of Contemporary Tragedy', p. 358.
35 Kaelin, Unhappy Consciousness, p. xx.
36 de Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 72.
37 Walter Benjamin, 'Allegory and Trauerspiel', trans., John Osborne, The Origin of
German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977), p. 229.
38 Ibid., p. 71.
39 Hill, p. 53.
40 Jesse Gellrich, 'The Structure of Allegory', ed., Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, The
Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, Analecta
Husserliana Vol. XVIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), p. 515. Gellrich paraphrases one
of the arguments of Joel Fineman, 'The Structure of Allegorical Desire', ed., Stephen J.
Greenblatt, Allegory and Representation (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 1981), pp. 26-60.
42 de Man, Allegories of Reading, p. 211.
43 Ibid., p. 209.
REFERENCES
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot (London: Faber and Faber, 1956).
Benjamin, Walter, 'Allegory and Trauerspiel', The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans.
John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 159-235.
Bersani, Leo, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990).
Connor, Steven, Samuel Beckett: Repetition, Theory and Text (Oxford: Basic Blackwell,
1988).
Cormier, Ramona and Janis L. Pallister, Waiting for Death: The Philosophical Significance
of Beckett's 'En Attendant Godor' (University: University of Alabama Press, 1979).
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference et Repetition (New York: Columbia UP, 1968).
de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke
and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
de Man, Paul, 'Rhetoric and Temporality', Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric
of Contemporary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971).
Foucault, Michel, 'Theatricum Philosophicum', ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald
F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays
and Interviews (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
Gellrich, Jesse, "The Structure of Allegory", ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, The Existential
Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, Analecta Husserliana Vol.

XVIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 505-519.
Hill, Leslie, Beckett's Fiction in Different Words (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990).
Kaelin, Eugene, "A Theory of Contemporary Tragedy", ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,
The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition: Poetic-Epic-Tragic, Analecta
Husserliana Vol. XVIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1984), pp. 341-361.
Kaelin, Eugene F, The Unhappy Consciousness: The Poetic Plight of Samuel Beckett,
Analecta Husserliana Vol. XIII (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1981).
Moorjani, Angela, Abysmal Games in the Novels of Samuel Beckett, North Carolina
State in the Romance Languages and Literature 219 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1982).
Trezise, Thomas, Into the Breach: Samuel Beckett and the Ends of Literature (Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1990).
BRUCE ROSS
A POETICS OF ABSENCE: KABBALIST ALLEGORY

IN THE POETRY OF PAUL CELAN, EDMOND JABES,
AND DAVID MELTZER
This paper is an exploration of Kabbalist ideas in the work of three Jewish

poets, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes, and David Meltzer. Their poetry
recovers the central dialectic of exile and redemption, absence and
presence, embedded in Jewish thought and experience. But more, the
breach of the Holocaust comes to undermine and transform this dialectic
that was maintained throughout the Diaspora. Especially for Celan and
Jabes, who experienced the disruption of the Holocaust, the dialectic
becomes a question of faith at all. A huge question mark at the center
of being. The answer for Celan, the exiled Rumanian, is a poetics of
negative transcendence in his role as a witness. The answer for Jabes,
the exiled Egyptian Jew, is an endless Talmudic questioning. Despite
his own ruminations over modern lower-case holocausts, Meltzer, an
American born in the late thirties, develops a passionate devotional
poetics based on his studies in Kabbalah. Each of these poets attempts
to secure the illumination of allegorically higher ground. Their poetry
is the testament of their struggle.
PARDES
all things are less than

they are,
all are more.
- Paul Celan,
'Cello Entry,l
The justification of allegory in the Judaic tradition is offered in Zohar,

the main text of Jewish mysticism, in a section on the hidden meaning
of the Torah:
... the Torah it was that created the angels and created all the worlds and through
Torah are all sustained. The world could not endure the Torah if she had not garbed herself
in garments of this world.

242 BRUCE ROSS
Thus the tales related in the Torah are simply her outer garments, and woe to the man
who regards that outer garb as the Torah itself, for such a man will be deprived of
portion in the next world. 2
The central paradox of Jewish mysticism, concretized in the theosophic

stream of Kabbalah, is the simultaneous conditions of divine transcen-
dence and divine immanence. According to Kabbalah, as noted in this
passage from Zohar, man's consciousness would be overwhelmed if God
revealed Himself in His totality. Man cannot know God in his essence.
And yet man must not limit himself to a merely literal engagement with
reality and its representation in the sacred text. Man must seek higher
meaning. Hence the dialectic of absence, Celan's "less", and presence,
Celan's "more". And hence the need for and justification of allegory,
the means through which to understand absence and presence.
The traditional mode of Kabbalist allegory is pardes, an acronym
for the four levels of its interpretation: peshat (literal), remez (allegor-
ical or philosophical), derash (hermeneutical or ethical), and sod
(mystical).3 Together these levels of interpretation help to elucidate the
system of polarities generated by the antithesis of absence and presence:
literaVfigurative, commonplace/mystical, reality/word, text/interpretation.
These polarities inform the work of Celan, Jabes, and Meltzer, each of
whom would have been familiar with Kabbalist allegory. Celan through
Zohar, the work on Kabbalah by Gershom Scholem, and the Hasidic tales
retold by Martin Buber,4 if not through his traditional Jewish child-
hood. Jabes through the Talmud and works on Kabbalah, including
Scholem. 5 Meltzer's involvement with Kabbalah is straightforward. In
his book of poetry 6, which is dominated by Kabbalistic thought, he
describes his Kabbalah as an "English-American Kabbalah received via
translation into language complexly reduced from Kabbalah's primary
source: Hebrew".6 He also notes of earlier poetry: "These six works
reflect my involvement with Kabbalah and mark a further attempt to
integrate some of its patterns and symbols into my work".? Meltzer in
fact alludes to the Kabbalist allegorical method and links it with the
genetic code in each of us: "Paradise, the garden, PaRDeS, the anagram,
pre-/coded in the lights of our creation".8 Thus for Meltzer, the means
of interpretation is part of the condition of men, the "sperm prophets"
of the next line of this prose poem from 6. This affirmation is voiced
by Jabes in "The Unmasked Hand": '''There is,' the sage said also. 'no
transparency/ which has never, at least once,! been unmasked,,,.9
A POETICS OF ABSENCE 243
The basic polarity of literal/mystical occurs often in Celan, Jabes,

and Meltzer. It is the "two doors of the world": "the green thing into your
Ever" and the "thing that's uncertain" of Celan's "Epitaph for Fran~ois"
(79). The equation of the mystical with darkness and night, a charac-
teristic inversion of Celan, is expressed in "Landscape" (73) where the
poplar trees are opposed to their reflections in the "Black ponds of
happiness." Jabes echoes this conceit in "Black Salt": "Day multiplies
mirrors. Night abolished them".l0 A more pessimistic consideration of
the here non-polysemous literal is in Jabes The Book of Questions: "In
the flaming log there is the ardent Word of God and! the doomed word
of man."ll The opposition of literal and mystical is usually clear-cut
and optimistic in Meltzer's poetry: hawks and angels,12 an earthly garden
and a heavenly garden,13 and an unseen angel and a seen angel. 14 Meltzer
underscores the linguistic complexity inherent in the polarity. One of
his poetic aphorisms is: "The written tree and the tree in front of me.
Literal and metaphorical"Y This complexity is humorously evoked in
a section of the book Knots. The narrator is caught between the literal
and metaphoric, the physical and the spiritual, in a dream that surreal-
istically reenacts the Fall:
Half the apple's in my mouth, the other half

still stuck to the branch,
bends with my body. I
dangle over familiar voids.
Words & angels gang together,
watch, whisper, take bets, pray. 16
Language and poetry, however bound to the literal presentation of the

world, are able to help interpret and represent the hidden meaning of
that world. Celan puts this dilemma of the divided nature of reality as:
"ILLEGIBILITY/ of this world. All things twice over" (321). Jabes
puts it this way: "Constantly in a foreign country, the poet uses poetry
as an! interpreter" (31). These poets, as if obeying the caveat of Zohar,
pursue the mystical meaning of the universe that is hidden in the
phenomenal world. As Meltzer puts it: "Fire lights nothing.! It is the light
below the light longed for".17 For Celan, it is the "higher", "deeper",
"later" of "Crystal" (67). It is for him, as with Jabes and Meltzer, a
mystery adhering to language itself and expressible in poetry:
244 BRUCE ROSS
THE TRUMPET PART

deep in the glowing
lacuna
at the lamp height
in the time hole:
listen your way in

with your mouth. (343)
The lacuna here may allude to the Kabbalistic belief that the Torah was
written in white fire. The black letters of the text are the Oral Law.
The true Torah is hidden in the white space surrounding the text and
will be revealed in the Messianic Age. ls The mouth in the poem would
thus be uttering holy text or a poem in order to reach the white fire of
the inner mystery of the universe.
EXILE
The Kabbalist term for exile is galut (absence). It can be applied to the
Diaspora or the exile of Jews from Israel. It can be applied to the state
of the Jew as outsider or other. It can also be applied to the corrupt
state of thought, speech, and the written word. In esoteric terms, these
exiles are precipitated by the alienation of the Shekhina, the feminine
aspect of Divinity. The Shekhina, or Divine Presence, has exiled herself
because of Israel's moral corruption. In the cosmogonic ideas of the
influential sixteenth-century Kabbalist Issac Luria exile is inherent in the
created world because of the primordial catastrophe, the breaking of
the vessels (shevirat ha-kelim). Portions of the original light of creation
burst their containers and were captured by matter. To end the exile of
the Shekhina the Jewish nation must follow the tenets of its faith. To
end the exile of the fallen light rituals must be enacted to release the light
from matter.
Both Celan and Jabes experienced the Diaspora as Jews, Celan
displaced from his native Rumania by the Holocaust and Jabes exiled
from his native Egypt by the Suez crisis. Celan develops his poetics of
negative transcendence from the unspeakable reality experienced in the
Holocaust. Jabes creates his poetics of questioning from the realiza-
tion, precipitated by his enforced exile from Egypt, that to be a Jew is
to write. Meltzer has never experienced the Diaspora. His exile is
an internal one. His Kabbalist poetics is built upon the struggle to

transcend the limits of his heartfelt adherence to the ideas of Kabbalah
as they come in contact with the secular values of the modern age. The
long-lasting Diaspora, lamented by the Polish poet Jozef Wittlin: "We
have been on trial for our life for so many years,! Our age-long
execution grinds on without your verdict,,/9 is a bitter reality for Celan
and Jabes. In "Crowned Out" Celan accordingly memorializes the
"names, watered! by every exile" and the "ghetto-rose ... I ... immortal
with so manyl deaths died on morning errands" (209). Meltzer, on the
other hand, is busy raising the sparks of fallen light: "no stone unturned!
no star unmarked! no life-line left in exile".20
There is a consistent tone of melancholy and longing found in much
Jewish poetry. The image of the absent God, often addressed in prayer,
serves as a focus of these emotions. Jean Wahl's "Prayer of Little Hope"
is typical: "I never needed more your help to cornel And you were
never more deaf and more dumb".21 It is also expressed in Robert Friend's
"The Practice of Absence" in which God is equated with silence:
Therefore do I faithfully
practice Your absence
listening for the silence

in the water's voices 22
Joseph Brodsky cynically addresses the Jewish striving for the exiled
God in "A Jewish Cemetery Near Leningrad". Commenting on the Jewish
dead he notes: "Perhaps they saw further. Perhaps they believed
blindly".23 But such striving persists even within the spiritually annihi-
lating experience of the Holocaust. Paul Celan's main poetic conceit is
to invert the traditional psalm of praise. In "Tenebrae" the collective voice
of suffering declaims: "Our eyes and our mouths are so open and empty,
Lord! ... Pray, Lord.! We are near" (113). In such conditions God is
silence and must address men in order to establish a circuit of faith.
Celan's tone is bitter: "they did not praise God,! who, so they heard,
wanted all this,! who, so they heard, knew all this" (153). His theolog-
ical position is expressed in "Zurich, The Stork Inn" (157). In the poem
he rejects Nelly Sachs' idea of a compassionate, responsive God 24
and ironically offers a prayer for his God, one who is "death-rattled"
and "quarrelling". This God who "does not come" (193) is more than
246 BRUCE ROSS
absence. He is equated with death and in one poem, like the Cannanite
god Moloch to whom children were sacrificed, this God lives off of death:
"in the death! of all those mown down! he grows himself whole" (161).
In the most well-known of Celan's inversion poems, "Psalm" (175),
God is Niemand (No one) and man becomes Niemandsrose (No one's
rose). The rose is a coventional symbol of the Jewish people, the Biblical
rose of Sharon. 25 In Celan the symbolism is inverted. The grace offorded
the Jewish people becomes the suffering and exile of these people: the
"ghetto-rose" of "Crowned Out" and the abandoned and anguished
Niemandsrose of "Psalm". The brilliant color of the typically red rose
provides a clear symbol, as metaphoric blood, of the decimated Jewish
people. Meltzer responds to this symbolism in a poem addressed to
Celan's "Psalm". It begins: "Paul's niemandsrose! I place in Art's
brassbell". Meltzer has placed a rose as a tribute in a jazz musician's
instrument, which is sitting on a stand. The poem ends: "the hom's silent!
& the rose! white like paper".26 Meltzer has poetically exorcized Celan's
prayer of despair. Celan's red rose has become a white one, a symbol
of purity. The concluding simile is perhaps an allusion to the mystical
White Torah, a reading supported by the silence of the hom. God's silence
is here communication of a mystical dimension rather than the
demarcation of absence. In Celan silence is the confirmation of exile.
In Meltzer silence is the mode of entrance to the mystical realm. In Jabes
silence provokes tentative explorations of that mode confirmed in
Meltzer. The early despair of deferred hope of the narrator of Jabes'
"Song for a Rainy Evening" (15): "Hopeless! the man was waiting!
... A man was weeping! for his loved one ... " becomes a tentative
reaching for faith in The Book of Questions: "'Silence is the kemal of
noise. Therefore, God, who is hard silence, cannot be heard, only
accepted as the fruit colors are accepted by the hours of the trees'"
(189).
Jabes' many fictional rabbis in The Book of Questions comment on
the relationship between man, word, and God. Reb Pinch as says: "'My
God, I am reduced to You.! I have exiled the word'" (128). Reb Tal
says: "All letters give form to absence. Hence, God is the child of His
Name" (47). In one of his own essays, Jabes states: "Once out of the
mouth, the word is in exile".27 Language, the human word and the word
of the sacred text, seems to flee into silence and absence. Michel Eckhard
describes this linguistic absence, which in Kabbalist terms is galut
ha-dibbur, as a "semiotique de rupture". 28 The hallucinatory condition

of animated language, however a given tenet of Kabbalah, is received
as a perplexing absence by Jabes, even in the early poetry. In "Emergency
Exits" the words hide the sought for inner truth: "I seek, with words,
to grasp poetry;/ but, already, it has taken refuge in/ them" (26). Words
create absence. Words also help avoid the reality of absence: "The
sentence dresses up the word which dresses up the/ letter which dresses
up absence" (38). Language, the literal word, obstructs man's search
for inner truth, however uncertain that truth is: "The word denies man
the poem: rumoured growth of the/ rose" (42).
The literal world is a world of absence. It maintains a tyrannical
control over our perception through the insistent claims of the senses,
Zohar's garments. Therefore one finds himself in a fallen world. As Jabes
declares in "The Pact of Spring": "I've no earth/ but the earth Hence
the day/ finds no aperture".29 Celan portrays this condition as an
existential purgatory evoked as a "bitten-through! eternity penny, spewed!
up" and a boat ride with "sand voices" and scorpions (261). Accordingly,
Meltzer addresses the violent and brutal events of our contemporary
world that undermine spirituality: "0 Divine Throne booby trapped ...
o Tree of Life chainsawed". 30 Here soldiers "U zi one/ too many of the
ten! Signs taught to be Law"Y But Meltzer's tone is one of commen-
tary, rather than expressed despair, positioned as he is in a Kabbalist
devotional poetics. He can even be humorous about the exiled condi-
tion of man in the guise of a metaphysical comedian of the fallen world:
"Kaballah pilfered by Lilith's dancers ... Kaballah pilfered in Hollywood
labs ... All this goes on. The pilfer continues. Green radium ... A Bomb
... A-Bomb. Its light gives birth to TV".32 Samuel Beckett and Victor
Borge meet via Kabbalah in this send up of our popular culture. Meltzer's
spiritual distance is represented in one poem 33 as an angel who tells
the narrator about the spiritless world in which men are depicted as
"Golems empty of angels". Opposed to actual and projected violence
("Swords upraised. War movies".) is the complex image of a burning
prayer shawl. This image resonates with the various levels of the Judaic
galut. Yet it also symbolizes, as it should in Meltzer, spiritual purifica-
tion and passion.
248 BRUCE ROSS
THE HOLOCAUST
I live. I breathe. I love people.

But I lose my taste for life
When I remember that this thing happened!
Men tortured children!
- Naum Korzhavin,
'Children of Auschwitz 034
The question, Why did the Holocaust happen? provides the sub-text to
Jabes' modern classic The Book of Questions, nominally the narrative
of two Holocaust survivors, one of whom has become insane because
of experience such as those addressed in Korzhavin's poem. Theodor
Adorno has asserted that no poetry could be written after Auschwitz. 35
Elie Wiesel has stated that with the Holocaust the Covenant of the Jewish
people with God has been broken for '''the first time in history"'. 36
This breach is existentially and theologically different from the Diaspora
in all of its valences. 37 And yet poets continue to write poetry and Jews
continue to maintain their faith in God.
Paul Celan's parents died in a concentration camp. He himself survived
the Holocaust in a work camp. Edmond JabCs was evacuated from Egypt
to Israel during the Holocaust. David Meltzer was too young to directly
experience the effects of the Holocaust. But each of these poets is able
to bare witness, however belated, to the enigmatic question underlying
this event. Celan, closest to the event, uses complex figurative devices
to express his witnessing. Jabes, further from the event, can offer a
more straightforward metaphor: "Sweep away the leaves.! Sweep away
the Jews".38 Meltzer, completely distanced from the event, is able to
use journalistic description:
Bodies skeletons
bakery-white
bones pouches
piled-up in
Army trucks
moving out of
Auschwitz
Buchenwald39
At the center of the Holocaust, for the Jew, is the willed destruction
of a people's faith. Thus descriptions of the event are infused with
figurative expression of the undermining of the emotive centers of that
faith. Celan accomplishes this through inversions of theological ideas and
spiritual language. "Death Fugue", one of Celan's most anthologized
poems, masterfully has a concentration commander take on the roll of
God in the Last Judgment:
He calls out more sweetly play death is a master from

Germany
he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke
you will rise into the air
then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined (63)
These lines also allude to the fact that classical music was played by
prisoners while other prisoners marched to the crematoria. Celan's
inversion registers his outrage. The image of the crematoria smoke is a
central symbol of the destruction of faith. In "Radix, Matrix" (187) we
have "the murdered, that looms/ black in the sky," the Jew the heir to
a god of nothingness ("Niemandes Wurzel"). In "The Straitening" (141)
the Jew (Wort) simply wants to develop his spirituality ("shine" ("wollt
leuchten, wollt leu chen") but is destroyed: "Asche.! Asche, Asche.! Nacht.!
Nacht-und-Nacht". ("Ash.! Ash, ash.! Night. Night-and-night".). Meltzer
appears to respond to this event in more grotesque yet equally
terrifying language: "A defaced soul. The book tom out of him. The veins
pulled out. Nervous system rootsystem removed. A million crows scatter
like buckshot". 40
Celan's "The Lock Gate" (169) uses traditional Judaic ritual concepts
to serve as a memorial for the Holocaust victims, the "lost word" of
the poem. This word, which represents the murdered Jews as well as
the undermining of Jewish faith, is connected in the last three stanzas
of the poem with the death of his sister, with Kaddish, the prayer for
the dead, and Yiskor, the memorial service for the dead. Celan's aim is
to let memory act as a witness, to "save the word", as the poem states
it. And in traditional and Kabbalist belief, such rituals are believed to
facilitate a soul's progress in the afterlife. Celan must communicate the
"late-minded things" that in one poem (335) could not be believed until
the narrator presented himself as a representation of those horrors, a
shadow ("als Schatten"). In "Ash-glory" the hopelessness of this
250 BRUCE ROSS
situation is powerfully lamented: "No one/ bears witness for the/

witness".41 Jabes echoes Celan's despair as a witness to the enormity
of the Holocaust: "There can be no salvage/ after the world drowns in
blood.! Only with our own arms/ can we swim, back again, to death".42
Jabes similarly uses surrealist imagery in other poems to evoke the event.
In "Song of the Last Jewish Child" (23), a presentation of the child's
semi-mystical final thoughts, that child matter-of-factly declares: "My
father was hung from a star". In "Little Song for the Dead Soldier's
Stubborn Hand" (24) the narrator exclaims: "All those stars, his victims".
For J abes a modified surrealism served to express such horror in his early
period as a poet. But after his exile, when he turned to fiction as his main
outlet, he gave up surrealism because images, such as a dismembered
mannequin, seemed morally inappropriate after the Holocaust. 43 For
Celan, wrenching surrealist images world always be appropriate for
depicting the indelible memory of the event: "Set your flag at half-
mast,! memory.! At half-mast! today and for ever" (97).
David Meltzer is a belated witness to the Holocaust. Meltzer echoes
Celan's "Psalm" in a poem from Shema (1982). Here angels of death pre-
cipitate the Holocaust. Meltzer addresses God with anger: "Your
holocaust! 0 genocidal Maker". But for the Kabbalist Meltzer, the
greatest tragedy of the event is the withdrawal of the sacred words of
divine creation. Thus the poem ends with a description of these angels
without language: "no word/ no name," the latter phrase a literal trans-
lation of one of Celan's strongest words for the absent God. 44 The idea
of genocide and linguistic collapse being linked occurs in another poem:
"dead empty bodies on sidewalks/ random letters without a word to
form".45 With the Holocaust metaphysical chaos is established. And death,
the literal reality, effaces mystical, language-bound reality. Meltzer is also
a witness to modern human and global disruptions, such as war, that
resemble the spiritual devaluation of the Holocaust. This association is
expressed as a simile in a section of A Midrash: "Foam of impact
fragments into angels & demons/ rising like Dachau smoke into the
sky, into Paradise".46 Here modern war, the napalm of the Vietnam War,
becomes another Holocaust. Meltzer's reading of modern catastrophe
through Celan and the Holocaust is evident in other poems. One poem,
a memorial to the dead of Hiroshima, asserts, "I remain one of them!
as never before".47 This is a strong echo of a poem by Celan which
uses the bitterness of the almond as a symbol of the Holocaust (75).
That poem concludes: "Make me bitter.! Count me among the almonds".
The counting invokes the selection process of the concentration camps.

Celan, and later Meltzer, side with the victims. Another poem invokes
Celan's "Psalm" in its depiction of a god who lives off of death: "war's
fast food". Like Celan, Meltzer as narrator addresses this God and offers
the depicted destruction as "psalms to YoU".48
TREE OF LIFE/TEXT OF LIFE
Paul Celan, Edmond Jabes, and David Meltzer each develops a poetics
based on the Heideggerian view that poetry is a revelation of being.
But this view becomes colored, more or less directly, with Kabbalah as
these three poets develop their respective poetics. Celan states his intent
in almost a paraphrase of Heidegger: " ... I ... write poems: in order
to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was, where I was going,
to chart my reality". 49 Jabes echoes this poetics in the refrain of the
great early poem "Slumber Inn" but incorporates a clear reference to
traditional spirituality: "Avec mes poignardsl voles a l'angel Je bfitis
ma demeure" ("With the daggers II pilfered from an angel! I build my
dwelling,,).5o Meltzer directly applies Kabbala in his mystical poetics.
Accordingly, in the volume 6 he describes his Kabbalistic poetic explo-
rations with a fellow poet: "[We were] turning reality into a midrashic
webwork, a mystic companion shadowing us and our works, overseeing
our energies with tolerance".51 Recently he has written of the "language
mysticism (writing/reading/intoning/alphabet) that [he sees as] central
to kabbalistic practice".52 He had linked this mysticism to his poetry in
6: "I mark letters on blue lines of a Spiral Notebook. Trying to write
the history of everything. From the beginning to the end. To discover
the letters of my name. My soul".53 The key to this mysticism and
Kabbalist allegory in our three poets is cited as an epigraph from Zohar
in Meltzer's volume Yesod: '''Happy are those who are worthy to sing
song in this world! They will be found worthy to sing it again in the
world to come. This hymn is built up out of 22 engraved letters and of
10 words of creation, and all are inscribed in the Holy Name, and they
are the completion and harmony of that Name'''. 54 Zohar here refers to
the three principal ideas in the Kabbalist interpretation of reality. The
first is that the world was literally created by a divine alphabet of
twenty-two letters, making the Torah, especially, a sacred text with
mystical significance in each of its letters and words. The second is
that the original metaphysical structure of the universe was composed
252 BRUCE ROSS
by ten divine nodes of light, sefirot. The third is that there is a recip-
rocal relationship between man and God in which man can participate
in creating harmony in the universe by practicing the orthodox faith
and enacting esoteric mystical activities. The first principal generates the
letter-number mystical hermeneutics, gematria, and might be called the
Text of Life. The second principle, the sefirot, is refered to in Kabbalah
as the Tree of Life which exists as the structure of the universe, the
cosmos, and as the structure of man himself, the microcosmos. 55 Man's
relationship to divine reality is established through his interpretation of
the divine alphabet and through his communion with the cosmic Tree
of Life.
Meltzer links these concepts with the traditional system of Judaic
allegory in a passage from Knots, his most Kabbalistic book of poetry:56
In my 32nd year
counting numbers watching
22 letters dance on a wall chart.
Energy goes in & out of 10
ineffable sefira.
Electric radiant systems
I walk thru,
carry beneath my skin,
sing Paradise Pardes 57
Seven stanzas later he again refers to the process of Kabbalistic allegory:

"Tracking down 32 lights/ 0 eternal pinball metaphor".58 The metaphor
here refers to the myth of first creation in which the sefirot were created
by a zigzag flow of light like a metal ball moving down a pinball
machine. Kabbalist pardes in part interprets the significance of the energy
exchanges in the sefirot of the Tree of Life. In the early "Colour of My
Song" Jabes is probably refering to this Tree: "I sing a song/ The branches
know/ the stones forgot" (20). In The Book of Question this identifica-
tion is clearer: Reb Odel states: "You shall build a synagogue out of a
tree. But when you touch the fruit you will possess the Word" (267).
In another section a poem declares: "God rests in man,! as man rests
under a tree.! And the shadow, by grace of God, is man/ in the tree,
and tree in man" (76). Meltzer alludes to the four worlds that support
the Tree of Life in Asaph: "CREATION, FORMATION,/ IMPROVI-
SATION/ poet's art musician's art! ... 0/ TREE OF LIFE".59 The
poem, celebrating jazz music, omits the first world of divine light,
Emanation, from the Kabbalist scheme of the four worlds. It also trans-
forms Action, the fourth world in which man and visible creation exist,
into the specialized action of artistic creation, "IMPROVISATION".
Celan's "The Poles" (345) appears to refer to the Tree of Life. These
poles "inside us! insurmountable" lead to the "Gate! of Mercy," the sefirot
that conveys divine compassion into the world, Chesed. Michel Eckhard,
accordingly, has described JaMs' poetry as "une sorte d'arbre sephiro-
tique".60 Meltzer's poetry, moreover, consistently uses esoteric concepts
relating to the Tree of Life: In one place he names two of the sefirot,
"Cochmah (Wisdom) & Bina (Judgment)".61 In another he uses the
esoteric term for divisions within the Tree, parzuJ (faces).62 He even
defines sefirot in a way that underscores the cosmic!microcosmic rela-
tionship: "Sefiroth: the tree's ten branches, the man's ten fingers! reach
out to pull the harp's strings, shape song, sing.,,63 The flow of divine
inspiration in Meltzer's poetics also acts like a muse. That flow is
consistently expressed in the imagery of light in our three poets. In
Celan's "Tabernacle Window" (215) the "mortal-! immortal soul of
letters" are invoked. These letters are concretized in the last stanza: "Beth,
-that is! the house where the table stands with! the light and the Light".
"Beth" is both the Hebrew word for house that usually designates a
synagogue and the name of the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet,
the equivalent to our letter "b". This letter begins the first word of the
Bible, borashees (beginning), in the phrase, "In the beginning God
created the heaven and the earth". In Kabbalist thought this creation
was effected through a flow of divine light. In every synagogue that light
is symbolized by the ner tamid, the "eternal flame", that is the lower case
first "light" of the poem's last line. The upper case second "Light"
represents the actual essence of divine reality. This latter light is evoked
in Jabes' "Unmasked Hand": "'There is a sun in us,' said a sage.!
'Morning is unaware of it, and yet it has! made of my life a perpetual
morning ("un perpetuel matin"),,,.64 Both JaMs and Meltzer use silence
as a mode for engaging this higher case light. JaMs declares: "In silence,
as in sleep, live, love, die outside the world" (27). Meltzer is more
explicit: "No mystery but the silence of! numbers & letters waiting our
touch".65 That mystery, unfortunately, elicits the paradox of absence
and presence.
The Jewish people are the people of the Book. What we term the
Text of Life refers to that Book, Torah, and its Kabbalist interpreta-
254 BRUCE ROSS
tions as they evoke a sacred linguistic universe, mysteries of creation,

and the relationship between man and God. Celan unites these ideas in
"Les Globes" (211): "All the script! on those faces into which! whirring
word-sand drilled itself - tiny eternities,! syllables". The pain of the
Diaspora, God's exile, is balanced by the sacred langauge of creation,
linguistic presence. The relationships between man and language and
between the absence and presence of poetic or divine inspiration are
Jabes' compulsive themes. In "Oars and Sails" he states: "The word
carried the book within itself, as man the/ universe" (40). Jabes links
the Mallarmean idea that the world exists to be put into a book with a
poetics of the word based upon Kabbalah. This logos-like word is
archetypal and therefore extends beyond its representations, the material
world: "Word survives sign,! and landscape, ink.! ... Roads. The infinite"
(9). And yet Jabes further complicates these already complex ideas by
using "word" as the failed linguistic tool that can never clearly express
divine reality: "Words roll out ribbons of shadows around the light we
won.,,66 Therefore there must be interpretation and mystical experience.
Volume one of The Book of Questions concludes with the summary
statement of the primacy of the upper case Book: "Man does not exist.
God does not exist. The world alone exists through God and man in
the open book" (402). Earlier, two Rebs address the mystery of a
spirituality that is expressed through language. Reb Sayod says: "My
soul, you move in words as day moves in gestures of gold. I speak. Is
this not proof that you exist?" (189). Reb Dassa offers the obverse view
of the spiritual nature of language: "To stop living in order to be the living
verb - is that what you call dying for the immortality of the words of
the soul?" (267). Each of these statements is an interrogative because
of the unsettling duality inherent in language as sign/representation and
of spiritual reality as absence/presence. In effect Jabes is examining
the spiritual consequences of the Saussurean separation of the linguistic
sign from its represented reality. This sense of deferred connection and
ontological distance is continuous throughout Jabes' work. Meltzer
confirms the reality of an absent spirituality implied in the Text of Life
and language by invoking the myth of the White Torah:
What else can I say to you?
White paper is Heaven.
Draw upon it.
Create letters.
Make your mark. 67
Likewise, in a section of a poem on the thirteenth-century Kabbalist

Abulafia, Meltzer notes of this Kabbalist: "Moved letters & names/
over the paper earth.! Made his mark in white ink".68 Abulafia designed
a great proportion of the few remaining recorded exercizes in classic
Kabbalist meditation. These exercizes included chanting divine words,
particularly different Hebrew names for God. Meltzer describes one of
his own such exercizes: " ... making words, singing, naming,! squinting
at light emanating from a page".69 Meltzer conveys here his direct contact
with the divine mystical light. That which created the universe. That
which is the inner Text of Life. That which is presence.
The Text of Life is predicated on two Kabbalist theories of creation.
The first we have already discussed. Here a primordial ray of divine light
enters a void. This light sets up the system of the sefirot in concentric
circles. 70 The second theory was developed by Isaac Luria. Here creation
begins with a willed withdrawal of God from himself in order to allow
room for the creation of the four worlds. This process is termed zimzum,
Hebrew for contraction. This primordial act of withdrawal establishes the
archetype for the absence/presence paradox in all of its manifestations.
Each of our poets alludes to both of these creative processes in their
poetry. The exile of language may be expressed in terms of the Lurianic
cosmic absence that permits creation. In "And with the Book from
Tarussa" Celan links this process in the Jewish mythic consciousness:
"Those-/ of-the-Name-and-Its/ Round-Abyss.! Of! a tree, of one", to
linguistic absence: "language-scale, word-scale, home-/ scale of exile". 71
Jabes' aphorism, "Render the word visible, that is to say, black", seems
to invoke zimzum. Meltzer compresses both theories of creation in
relation to the creative act: "A point that is light until all self-ness or
consciousness is disintegrated into a sheet of paper awaiting a word".72
Jabes specializes in expressing the paradox of cosmic absence/presence.
"A Circular Cry" coolly states the paradox:
final circle
becomes an all-embracing
point,
then an imperceptible point;
yet unbelievably present;
yet majestically absent. 73
In a section from Recital this primordial opposition is expressed as a

256 BRUCE ROSS
vivid conflict: "Indelogeable presence.! Inviolable absence.! Laquelle

I' emporteraJ sur I' autre?" ("Indelible presence.! Sacred absence.! Which
will sweep away/ the other?,,).74 Zimzum can be represented by blackness
and by nothingness, the latter a representation of ayin, God as an
unrepresentable essence. The blackness can also be associated with the
black flame that Zohar states creation began with. 75 Jabes seems to echo
these symbols in his comment: "Invisible, since she is black in the
black, poetry will make use of her voice in order to show herself" (28).
In "Mandorla" (189) Celan presents the central paradox of absence/
presence in terms of ayin, God as absence, and the Shekhina ("to dwell"),
God as presence: "In Nothing - what dwells there? The King.! There
the King dwells, the King. There he dwells and dwells". In 6 Meltzer
presents the technical term for the God that withdraws in zimzum, the
Or En Sof, or "infinite light": "Ain. Ain Sof. Ain Sof Aur.fln the Name
is the garden contained in the wound".76 The "wound" is the primor-
dial space of contraction. The "Name" is the "Ain Sof Aur" or perhaps
ayin. The "garden", in this extended metaphor, is pardes, Hebrew for
"garden", the method of Kabbalist allegory. Through pardes the mys-
teries of cosmic creation could be deciphered. Elsewhere, Meltzer puts
it this way: "One appropriate angel.! Appears in the center of a star.!
In the center of a circle.! In the center of a name". 77 To understand the
nature of God, one mediates on his names. If one understands his nature,
one understands the mystery of cosmic creation which began as a point
of emptiness and evolved as circles of light, the Tree of Life. Or,
according to Meltzer: "Take off the tree.! Circle by circle. Repeating
hoops. Track time. The/center core returns us to the mystery we travel
in circles/ to solve".78 Here the sefiriotic Tree of Life that one finds within
oneself as a mirror of the cosmic Tree becomes a text of Life that leads
one to the secrets of creation.
The Text of Life is also the Bible and the twenty-two sacred letters
of the alphabet through which creation was effected. If one understands
the inner meaning of Biblical letters and words through gematria, the
numerical hermeneutics, and Biblical phrases and sentences through
pardes, the allegorical mode of interpretation, he could comprehend
the divine plan of existence. In Celan's "Tabernacle Window" (215) a
cosmic-like eye summons the sacred alphabet: "musters the letters and
the mortal-/ immortal soul of letters,! goes to Aleph and Yod and goes
further". "Aleph" is the name for the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet
and here represents that alphabet as a divine as well as a human
manifestation. "Yod", the first letter in the Tetragrammaton, reinforces

this dual nature of the alphabet and of reality. For in Kabbalist thought,
this letter represents the point of contact between absolute divine
transcendence and the first divine manifestation into transcendent thought,
or in seferiotic terms, from the Or En Sof, infinite light, or, sometimes,
Keter ("Crown"), pure thought, to Chochmah ("Wisdom"). In a later
poem, Celan depicts the divine presence, Shekhina, within the letters:
" ... what came near us, alone,! becomes part of the great script of
syllables ("die grof3e Silbenschrift"),,.79 Jabes' Reb Gaon associates his
own spark of divinity with the alphabet and his personal birth with cosmic
creation: "'The story of my soul is that of the letters of the alphabet.
Their shape let my senses perceive their advance across time and space
towards their union in the word, at the foreseen hour and place of my
birth'" (BQ, 88). The Kabbalist association of the interrelationship of
all things through the divine alphabet is already expressed in Jabes' early
Mallarmean aphorism, "The fall of a word can lead to the fall of a
book" (32). One of Meltzer's own Rebs asserts that the alphabet is the
final ground of all being: "'Look into the sun & burn your eyes out.
That's what you see. The imprint of Aleph pulsing behind burnt lids until
you die"'.8o Meltzer transforms gemartria into a poetics of being in which
words have spiritual transparency and all words are related to one another.
He expresses this linguistic interrelationship this way: "Wherever.
Anywhere. A letter emerges. We shall love it. Disrobe it. Follow it
wherever it goes. Into the next letter. The next. The next".81 He expresses
linguistic inviolability ("spark") this way: "A single spark is a letter
wed to another letter until a word is formed. A single world is a word
I spend days travelling thru".82 The Kabbalist act of mystical hermeneu-
tics becomes a mystical poetics of being in Meltzer. In Luna (1970) he
describes this Kabbalist poetics: "The alphabet is a burning circle & I
am in its center/ Trying to pull out all the perfect letters/ & shape them
into new worlds before they are lost ... ".83 More than an equation of
divine and poetic creation, the process described here alludes to the
Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Creation") which is the earliest speculative
text in Hebrew. 84 This work is a kind of primer of number and letter
mysticism. The book uses the structure of a circle as the key to its
hermeneutics: "Twenty-two basal letters: they are placed together in a
ring, as a wall with two hundred and thirty-one gates ... and thus it
comes about that the whole creation and all language proceed from one
combination of letters". 85 Meltzer's relation to poetic language as a
258 BRUCE ROSS
revelation of being is analogous to the Kabbalist's relation to Sefer

Yetzirah s ring as a revelation of being, each reading the Text of Life.
Further, the use of the circle as a metaphor of the original cosmic creation
in Meltzer, as in Celan and Jabes, becomes informed with the hermeneu-
tics of the Sefer Yetzirah, Meltzer's "numbers & letters waiting our
touch".86
In Kabbalah the relationship between man and God is a reciprocal
oneY The Jewish adage, Do a good deed and create an angel, do a
bad deed and create a devil, conveys the commonality of the belief in
such an exchange across human and divine realms. God is, in one of
his manifestations, transcendent, metaphysically distanced from man.
As Jabes has it: "For the steeple, the earth is an inaccessible bed" (40).
Yet this manifestation is aware of man: "Air reads the water" (40).
Further, Kabbalist thought provides a symbolic complex for God's
transcendent connection with the world by means of the Hebrew letter
"vav", the third letter of the Tetragrammaton, which, when written, looks
like a long, slightly tilted, vertical line. Meltzer presents the Kabbalist
symbolism of this letter in 6: "Vav is the third letter of the
Tetragrammaton: YHVH. Between two Hays. It is a Yod-holding staff,
crowned by Yod. Yod and Vav become ithyphallic glyphs of immediate
and cosmic transmission".88 To elaborate, Yod, the first letter of the
Tetragrammaton, shaped like a little comma, brings absolute divine
transcendence into the four-lettered name of God. Vav conveys this divine
flow along its staff-like form into the last sefirot, Malchut ("Kingdom"),
the physical manifestation of the universe, including men and their world.
Kabbalists would elicit this transmission to help heighten their spiritu-
ality. A paradox underlying this symbolism, addressed by Jabes' Reb
Assor, is that all of manifest creation is divine because it was created
by God out of his own transcendent reality: "'We cannot see God ...
because He is everywhere" (BQ, 381). This paradox further compli-
cates the absence/presence enigma and the nature of allegorical
interpretation.
But Kabbalist, as well as every practicing Jew, attempts to contact
the supernal essence of God. In Celan's "Havdalah", which is the closing
service of the Sabbath and the name of the braided candle of that service,
the connection from the lower to the upper world through ritual is
described:
from below, a
light knotted into the air -
mat on which you set the table, for the empty
chairs and their
sa bbath splendor, for -
their glory.89
This "Luftmatte" is a symbol of God's transcendence, described in the

poem as "splendor" ("Sabbatglanz"), which is contacted through the
candle's flame. Meltzer transforms such ritual into the creative act of
poetry: "Send a river back to God & call it a poem.! Stand back, say, I've
done it.! I've sent the river back to God".90 The Kabbalist term
yicchudium ("unifications") describes an esoteric process for this upward
directed flow of spirituality. In this process the Kabbalist attempts to
reunite the Godhead Israel with the Shekhina by mediating on the
Tetragrammaton. The first letter, Yod, represents Godhead. The second
letter, Heh, represents the Shekhina. The ithyphallic Yod and the opened,
curved Heh establish a sexual coloring to this process already present
in the traditional King/Queen, groomlbride, and father/mother designa-
tions for these two letters. 91 Meltzer evokes this process: "Hymn
to Him & Her combined. That's the/ permutation.! There is no one, no
other. There is only the both! together".92 The purpose of this process
is to bring momentary peace into the world in a prefigurement of the
end of the exile of the Shekhina. The technical term in Hasidic Kabbalah
for this act is hashwa' ah ("equalization,,).93 Here the paradox of
God's absence from creation, that is, from himself, is for a period
resolved. The divine nature inherent in all manifested being is made to
reveal itself. Yet until the Messianic Age such revelations are only
fleeting. Man must continually be aware of the cosmic separation and
continually attempt to encourage the reciprocal flows of divine and
human spirituality.
Meltzer's Reb Eleazer confronts this condition: '''My keeping silence
was the means of building the/ sanctuary above & the sanctuary
below'" .94 In two poems, Celan, like Meltzer, conceives this process in
terms of poetic creation. In "Speak, You Also" (99) the Shekhina Muse
is contacted and brought down:
260 BRUCE ROSS
Upward. Grope your way up.

Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer.
Finer: a thread by which
it wants to be lowered, the star:
to float farther down, down below
where it sees itself gleam: in the swell
of wandering words.
The Shekhina star can be annihilating to those who make contact with
her. In "Go Blind" (239) this experience is expressed by Celan in terms
of blindness and poetic dissolution. Shekhina, as the metaphoric eyes
of eternity, "drowns what helped images down/ the way they came,!
in them! fades what took you out of language". But the poet "allowed"
this transcendent experience to occur, even at the expense of his poetry,
which is ironically called "nothing" ("Nichts") in the concluding word
of the poem. The exchange between God and man is most graphically
symbolized in the Star of David, two vertically intersecting triangles, one
facing upwards, one facing downwards. Celan refers to the Star of David
in his overview of Judaic spirituality in "Tabernacle Window" (215).
Meltzer evokes the spirituality of this symbolism by animating the Star
of David with metaphoric spiritual light:
shimmering
triangles
move together
point into point
move together
into Star of David
shimmering triangles 95
Through yicchudim man promotes the unification of the spiritual realm

by sending up the metaphoric light of his mystical exercises and orthodox
practices. This in turn brings the divine light of the spiritual realm down
to man in the act of hashwa'ah. The word "shimmer" in Meltzer's
depiction is appropriate. This process, like flickering light, is not con-
tinuous. It is maintained within the central paradox of Judaism, the
simultaneous absence and presence of God.
CONCLUSION
When men will agree about the meaning of each word,

poetry will no longer have a reason for being.
- Edmond Jabes, 28
The reality of the absence/presence dialectic sustains Judaism. It provides

the rationale for the practice of hermeneutics. It generates the myth of
the divine exile and of the ending of that exile in the Messianic Age. And
yet how is one to respond to Adorno? What sustains meaning, what
sustains being-at-all after the Holocaust? How can there be faith? How
can there be poetry? How can there be a spiritual hermeneutics? Each
of our three poets has responded to these questions in his own way.
Through the emotion of outrage Paul Celan develops a poetics of
witnessing and mystical absence. Through an act of metaphysical
speculation Edmond Jabes develops a poetics of an endlessly deferred
mystical presence. Through an act of spiritual faith David Meltzer
develops a poetics of mystical presence. Each of these poets is moreover
supported by the Text of Life, the mystical-linguistic universe of the
People of the Book that is determined by absence and presence, by the
literal and the mystical. Meltzer expresses it this way: "The Book is
the mystery and rite; an iconographic book encoded with an alphabet
of condensed energies . . . One can read a text . . . using the PaRDeS
formula, a methodology - a hermeneutical system - for reading/receiving!
interpreting a constantly shifting text, a constantly appearing/disap-
pearing/presence/absence" .96 The Israeli Talmud scholar Adin Steinsaltz
addresses this consistent enticement of the Book of Life in the stream
of mystical and mainstream Judaism: "In Torah study, it is not only
that one thinks in terms of Torah, but also that the Torah thinks within
oneself. It is an object that becomes a subject, capable of expressing itself
in one's own thoughts and actions".97 Most Jewish survivors of the
Holocaust ceased practicing their faith. But in at least one case, recorded
in the true accounts of the collection Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust,98
a Hasidic youth who gave up this faith because of his experiences during
the Holocaust, is transformed by Steinsaltz's "object that becomes a
subject". The youth, after his release from a concentration camp, was
pressured into reading the Torah during a makeshift religious service
because no one else was able to: "As he stood before the holy scrolls,
262 BRUCE ROSS
he felt the letters reach out from the parchment, fixing him in their grasp,
riveting him to the spot in front of the Torah. He finished reading and
wanted to step down, but the letters would not let him go; their grip
on him was firm". A long time after this event, this youth became an
observant Jew again. Similarly, under more charitable conditions, David
Meltzer testifies to the transforming power of the Text of Life and its
accompanying mystical-hermeneutical tradition: "The power of those
words in the Zoharitic books matched with the condensed hints of the
Sefer Yetzirah finally, once more, enabled me to sit still in the backyard
and watch universes conduct the actual business of the poem in broad
daylight".99 In Meltzer, for this moment, the Text of Life finally becomes
the Text of Being.
Empire State College
NOTES
1 Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea, 1988), p. 253.
Copyright © 1983 by Michael Hamburger. All quotations by permission of Persea Books,
Inc. All Celan poems cited in this paper are from this edition, unless otherwise noted.
2 Zohar, the Book of Splendor, ed. Gershom Scholem (New York: Schocken, 1963), p.
121.
3 See Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Meridian, 1974), pp. 172-173. And
see Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, On the Essence of Chassidus (New York: Kehot,
1978), chp. 10 for an interpretation of a Hebrew prayer according to pardes.
4 John Felstiner, "Paul Celan: The Strain of Jewishness", Commentary 76, no. 4 (April
1985), 53, 54.
5 See Paul Auster, "Book of the Dead: An Interview with Edmond Jabes" in The Sin
of the Book: Edmond Jabes, ed. Eric Gould (Lincoln: Univ. Nebraska P., 1985), p. 4.
And see Edmond Jabes, From the Desert to the Book, Dialogues with Marcel Cohen, trans.
Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1990), p. 20 for a description of Jabes' early
Jewish practice.
6 David Meltzer, 6 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1976), p. 139.
7 Ibid., p. 126.
8 Ibid., p. 111.
9 Edmond Jabes, if there were anywhere but desert, trans. Keith Waldrop (Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill, 1988), p. 95.
10 Edmond Jabes, A Share of Ink, trans. Anthony Rudolf (London: Menard, 1979), p.
33. All Jabes poems cited in this paper are from this edition, unless otherwise noted.
11 Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions, Vol. I, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover,
NH: Wesleyan Univ. P., 1991), p. 264. Hereafter cited as BQ.
12 Meltzer, 6, p. 47.
13 Ibid., p. 97.
14 David Meltzer, Tens, Selected Poems, 1961-1971 (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973),
pp. 146-147.
15 Meltzer, 6, p. 135.
16 Meltzer, Tens, p. 121.
17 Ibid., p. 117.
18 See Scholem, Kabbalah, p. 174.
19 Voices Within the Ark, The Modern Jewish Poets, An International Anthology, ed.
Howard Schwartz & Anthony Rudolf (New York: Avon, 1980), p. 1074. Hereafter cited
as VA.
21 VA, p. 925.
22 Ibid., pp. 780-781.
23 Ibid., p. 1088.
24 See the discussion of this poem in Jerry Glenn, Paul Celan (New York: Twayne, 1973),
pp.112-113.
25 See the discussion of this symbolism in Zohar, p. 118.
26 David Meltzer, The Name, Selected Poetry, 1973-1983 (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow,
1984), p. 81.
27 Edmond Jabes, 'There is such a thing as Jewish Writing', in Sin of the Book, p. 29.
28 Michel Eckard, 'Je btttis ma demeure d' Edmond Jabes: ecriture, silence, eri', in J abes,
Le Livre Lu en Israel (Paris: Point Hors Ligne, 1987), p. 127.
29 Jabes, if there were, p. 53.
30 Meltzer, The Name, p. 152.
31 Ibid., p. 169.
32 Meltzer, 6, p. 85.
33 Ibid., p. 19.
34 VA, p. 1103.
35 See a discussion of this statement in relation to Celan's poetry in Glenn, Paul Celan,
pp.35-6.
36 Cited in Pesach Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic
Thought (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1990), p. 4.
37 But see Schindler, Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust for a study of how the Hasidic
community experienced the Holocaust within the context of their own traditions of
belief.
38 VA, p. 895.
40 Meltzer, 6, p. 133.
41 Paul Celan, Speech-Grille and Selected Poems, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New
York: Dutton, 1971), p. 241.
42 Jabes, if there were, p. 99.
43 See Jabes, From the Desert, p. 13 for a narrative of this event.
45 Ibid., p. 172.
48 Ibid., p. 173.
264 BRUCE ROSS
49 Paul Celan, Collected Prose, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986),
p.34.
so Jab~s, if there were, p. 3.
51 Meltzer, 6, p. 137.
52 In personal correspondence, January 31, 1992.
53 Meltzer, 6, p. 89.
55 See Z'ev ben Shimon Halevi, Adam and the Kabbalistic Tree (York Beach, ME:
Samuel Weiser, 1974) for an exhaustive study of the Tree of Life.
56 As editor of Tree Books Meltzer has published many works on Kabbalah, including
his own Kabbalistic poetry. He is also the editor of anthologies on classical Kabbalah
(1976), the writings of the early Kabbalist Abulafia (1976), and ancient texts, prayers,
and stories (1981, 1984).
58 Ibid., p. 111.
59 Ibid., p. 131.
60 Eckhard, '''Je biitis ma demeure"', p. 127.
62 Meltzer, 6, p. 40.
63 Ibid., p. 135.
64 Jab~s, if there were, p 95.
66 Jab~s, if there were, p. 25.
67 David Meltzer, Luna (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970), p. 57.
69 Ibid., p. 147.
70 See Zohar, pp. 27-8 for a description of this process.
71 Celan, Speech-Grille, pp. 207-208.
72 Meltzer, 6, p. 135.
73 VA, pp. 894-895.
74 Edmond Jab~s, Le Seui/, Le Sable, Poesies completes 1943-1988 (Paris: Gallimard,
1990), p. 332. My translation.
75 Zohar, p. 27.
76 Meltzer, 6, p. 74.
77 Ibid., p. 27.
78 Ibid., p. 57.
79 Paul Celan, Last Poems, trans. Katharine Washburn and Margaret Guillemin (San
Francisco: North Point, 1986), p. 89.
81 Meltzer, 6, p. 88.
83 Meltzer, Luna, p. 58.
84 See Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 23-30 for an exhaustive discussion of this work.
85 Rabbi Akiba ben Joseph, The Book of Formation, trans. Knut Stenring (New York:
Ktav, 1970), p. 20. And see the illustration of the ring of letters, numbers, and gates, p.
31.

87 See Lawrence Fine, 'The Contemplative Practice of Yihudim in Lurianic Kabbalah'
and see Rachel Elior, 'HaBaD: The Contemplative Ascent to God', in Jewish Spirituality,
From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York:
Crossroad, 1987), pp. 67-98, 157-205 for descriptions of this exchange in Lurianic and
Hasidic thought.
88 Meltzer, 6, p. 128.
89 Celan, Speech-Grille, p. 199.
91 See Scholem, Kabbalah, pp. 11-12 for a discussion of these terms.
93 See Elior, "HaBaD", p. 167 for a discussion of the term.
94 Meltzer, Luna, p. 52.
95 Meltzer, 6, p. 98.
96 In personal correspondence, January 31, 1992.
97 Adin Steinsaltz, The Long Shorter Way, Discourses on Chasidic Thought, trans.
Yehuda Hanegbi (Northdale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1988), p. 28.
98 'The Grip of the Holy Letters', in Yaffa Eliach, Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust
(New York: Avon, 1982), p. 239.
99 Meltzer, 6, p. 134.
PAUL ALEXANDRU GEORGESCU
NOUVELLE APPROCHE A L' ALLEGORIE AVEC

REFERENCE A OCTAVIO PAZ ET MARIN SORESCU
Face a l' allegorie, pendant les deux dernieres siecles, I'histoire et la

critique litteraire ont emis des jugements puissamment contrastants, les
condamnations les plus serveres sucedant aux eloges les plus vifs.
Desprecio y maravilla, cette alternance n'est pas un mouvement exclu-
sivement lyrique.
L' admiration etaite reservee a la longue et glorieuse carriere de la
litterature allegorique au Moyen Age et a l'epoque du baroque, quand les
aspects fondementaux de la condition humaine (l'amour, la redemption,
la recherche de la felieite, la mort), de meme que les grandes tensions
existentielles (la foi et Ie peche, les victoires et les calamites), ont
cristallise d'une maniere tantot emblematique, tantot proliferante, dans
les oeuvres et des chef-d'oeuvres comme La divina com media, Las
danzas de la muerte, Le roman de La rose, The Pilgrim's Progress, Le
Criticon.
En echange, on portait des jugements nettement depreciatifs ou on
gardait un dedaigneux silence sur les produits artificiels et abstraits, froids
et fastidieux, surgis durant les epoques classique et neoclassique, comme
resultat de la sclerose rationaliste qui affectait Ie genre allegorique. Des
ecrivains de la plus haute autorite ont signe alors des vrais certificats
de deces, avec indication precise des causes. Les critiques etaient graves
et pertinentes, mais il ne faut pas oublier qu'elles visaient la phase descen-
dante de I' allegorie. On lui a reproche, par exemple, la recherche du
particulier dans la generalite et non a l' envers, comme procedent les
arts (Goethe), la liaison facile de l'esprit figure a celui non-figure (Jean-
Paul Richter), la camouflage artistiques des idees philosophiques
(Coleridge) et l'inclination a l'abstraction, "opposee a la poesie pure,
originaire" (Novalis).
Pendant cette eclipse de deux siecles, les fonctions de I' allegorie,
specialement la designation de l'universel par l'intermediaire du parti-
culier et la correlation du plan figural et de celui des significations
profondes, one ete assumees par d'autres figures et modalites expres-
sives, en premier lieu par Ie symbole, Ie my the, la parabole ou l'ironie,
mais aucune d'elles n'a pu s'approprier la capacite de reunir la person-

268 PAUL ALEXANDRU GEORGESCU
nification prestigieuse et l'exemplarite irresistible, propres a l'allegorie

en sa phase ascendante.
Vne analyse attente et nuancee me parait necessaire pour comprendre
pourquoi et comment sont possibles une vie renouvellee de I' allegorie
et une nouvelle approche exegetique a cette resurrection.
Deux causes expliquent, au niveau historico-social et esthetico-
litteraire, la longue et quasi totale absence de l'allegorie au dix-neuviene
siec1e. D'une part, l'esprit du monde, Ie Weltgeist, comme on disait alors,
et Ie background, comme on dit maintenant, etaient, a cette epoque, imbus
de progres materiel, de succes scientifiques, de positivisme et de (relative)
stabilite, donc foncierement hostiles a un art emblematique et archety-
pal qui s'etait nourri d'inquietudes metaphysiques et de tensions
historiques. D'autre part, sur Ie plan artistique, les courents litteraires
dominants, de sens oppose, empechaient l'etablissement d'une liaison
allegorique entre Ie signifie et Ie signifiant. En effet, Ie realisme d'une
maniere calme et Ie naturalisme de fa~on exasperee ajoutaient aux
eventuelles images allegoriques un nombre aussi grand que possible de
determinations concretes, amplifiaient les situations exemplaires par
des details suppIementaires et dilataient les personnages archetypaux
moyennant l'etude psychologique. L'art mimetique s'emparait ainsi du
plan figural et expulsait l'art allegorique a force de proliferer les faits
et les circonstances. De l'autre direction, sur Ie plan des significations,
des obstacles et des blocages se sont aussi produits. Au commencement
du siecle, aux yeux des romantiques ce n'etait plus Ie dechiffrement
intellectual des signes qui etait exemplaire, mais l'epanouissement des
passions tumultueuses, soustraites au controle rationnel, tandis qu'a la
fin du siecle, Ie symbolisme embrumait les sens, estompait les situa-
tions et les contours des personnages. Naturellement, infuser l'ineffable,
introduire des elements fluides, des nuances obscures, infinitesimales,
dans un genre litteraire aux structures bien etablies et significations
clairement decoupees, c'etait Ie rendre impossible.
En notre siec1e, la situation change inexorablement. Les deux guerres
mondiales ont apporte des epouvantes et des attentes apocalyptiques plus
terribles que celles moyenageuses et 1e long cortege de terreur et horreurs
totalitaires ont impose une confrontation du Bien et du Mal beaucoup
plus dechirante que celle du baroque.
Dans ce contexte de calamites superlatives, l'allegorie ne pouvait
plus etre ignoree, mais non plus etre assumee directement, en son
ancienne forme. Elle devait etre appelee a une nouvelle vie, mais pour
NOUVELLE APPROCHE A L' ALLEGORIE 269
Ie moment comme partie integrante de certains systemes artistiques

dont Ie sens general, malgre leur indeniable interet et valeur, demeurait
descendant. C'est ce qui est arrive effectivement du aux deux courants
litteraires principaux surgis dans la premiere moitie du siec1e et lies
par un intermediaire genial: Franz Kafka.
Le premier courant - l' expressionisme allemand - a fait appel aux
elements qui compo sent l'allegorie, mais illes a detournes vers la crispa-
tion violente, vers Ie geste spasmodique. II a commence par user des
procedes proches a l'allegorisme, comme la geometrisation de l'espace
et Ie maniement des personnages hypostasies, mais il a vite fait de les
subordonner aux propres preferences et obsessions: la volupte du
cauchemar, I' appetit de violence paroxistique, la brutalite qui ne peut
conduire qu'a la perplexite. Tout cela ne pouvait eviter de suspendre
l'allegorisme - une modalite toujours precisement intentionnee et parfois
meme demonstrativement dirigee.
Sous l'influence de l'expressionisme, Kafka a aussi incorpore des
elements allegoriques dans la figuration de ses romans: Ie chateau est une
image qui designe Ie pouvoir absurde, mysterieux, impenetrable et la
metamorphose de Samsa en insecte, une embleme de la deshumanisation.
Pourtant, quand il s' agit de traiter artistiquement de pareils themes, la
stylisation qui "essentialise" se combine avec un mimesis manie d'une
maniere particulierement subtile, strategique. Bien sur, Ie realisme de
Kafka est plutot apparent, trompeur, mais il est a la fois si insidieux, si
envoutant, que la lecteur ne s' apperc;oit meme pas quand il a abandonne
l' allegorie. Cet abandon reste definitif a la suite de l' annulation des
valeurs dans Ie plan significatif. Non seulement que Ie romancier ne
fournit aucune exlication des enigmes presentees, mais il rend impossible
toute demarche humaine en ce sens. La comprehension des faits est
exc1ue, Ie cMteau reste indechiffrable. Kafka aneantit Ie sens de
I' allegorie avic les moyens de I' allegorie.
Apparu apres la deuxieme guerre mondiale, apres les deportations et
les camps d'extermination, I'existentialisme a exprime l'angoisse et
I'absurde de l'existence avec des procedes apparentes a I'allegorie (voir
la ville emblematique, I'espace ferme de La Peste d' Albert Camus ou
Ie personnage archetypal Beranger de Eugen Ionesco) et pourtant, surtout
dans Ie theatre de Samuel Beckett, les sens allegoriques disparaissent,
l'humanite devient quelque chose de sordide et d'ecoeurant - la celebre
"nausee" - et tout a' acheve en balbutiements, inconscience et animalite.
L' allegorie est soumise, elle-aussi, a l' aneantissement.
Aujourd'hui, dans les genres litteraires majeurs - la poesie, Ie roman,

Ie the§.tre -l'allegorie n'est plus menacee d'etre exclue et degradee, mais
plutot d'etre associee et absorbee par les modalites expressives "voisines"
et semblables, deja indiquees et par rapport aux queUes elle doit se
delimiter. Ainsi a l' egard du symbole, l' allegorie accuse une absence -
elle manque d'ouverture vers l'infini - et une difference - la precision
des contours; pour ce qui est du my the, elle ne recourt pas au sacre, au
primordial; enfine, elle surpasse la parabole par l'elevation et Ie carac-
tere essentiel du theme. Quant a l'ironie, l'allegorie ne connait pas
l'incongruence logique, la discordance entre l'intention et l'expression.
Tout de meme, si l'on adment que Ie systeme allegorique s'est flexibilitise
et que ses composants peuvent exister et foncitionner en combinaison
avec des modalites differentes de representation et d'expression, alors on
peut observer des !ignes allegoriques dans les oeuvres des plus grands
narrateurs hispanoamericains: la ligne emb16matique chez Borges (Zahir),
la ligne "condition humaine essentialisee" chez Sabato (la secte des
aveugles), la ligne archetypale dans Cien anos de soledad de Garda
Marquez.
La symbiose entre l'allegorie et d'autres genres et modalites litteraires
se revele plus etendue et ses consequences plus surprenantes de ce
qu'on pouvait penser. 11 est possible et divertissant de Mceler des "fils
allegoriques" dans les genres mineurs, mais si populaires de nos jours.
La litterature d'anticipation, la science fiction, oscille entre deux termes
de base, dont le deuxieme est de provenance allegorique: entre l'inquie-
tude cosmique et la salvation morale, entre la peur panique causee par
les maitres du technicisme monstreux ou par des robots revoltes et
l'archetype du "non contamine" d'antan. Dans les narrations du type
western et dans les romans policiers, la lutte entre Ie bien et Ie mal se
deroule en des formes nalves et stereotypes, les personnages archetypaux
sont faciles a reconnaitre sous des deguisements pittoresques, reduits
parfois a un seul detail (pipe, violon, moustache), tandis que l'inten-
tion moralisante existe meme dans les "series noires" qui pretendent la
nier, de la meme fa~on qu'un athee existe comme theologue a rebours.
Ces fils sont integres dans un ensemble qui, tout entier, n'est pas
allegorique et maintient l'allegorie dans une conjonction descendante.
Cette resurrection partielle, symbiotique, de l' allegorie a determine un
remarquable revirement exegetique accompli en deux vagues, dont la
premiere a porte sur Ie probleme general de l'allegorie et sur les
connexions avec les modalites "voisines": Ie symbole, Ie my the, la
parabole. Des travaux qui actualisent Ie theme et systematisent Ie materiel

concernant l'allegorie, il faut mentionner specialement les livres de Angus
Fletcher (Allegory. The Theory of a Symbolic Mode, New York, 1970),
Jean Pepin (My the et allegorie, Paris, 1958), Vera Calin (L'allegorie et
les essences; en roumain, Bucarest, 1969). La seconde vague reunit des
etudes approfondies et originelles, par Ie theme aussi bien que par la
position personnelle des auteurs. Les titres meme sont significatifs: Paul
de Man: Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion et Joel Fineman: The Structure
of Allegorical Desire, publie dans Ie recueil Allegory and Representation,
Baltimore, 1981, ainsi que "The Rhetoric of Temporality" de Paul de
Man, en Theory and History of Literature, vol. 7 (Minneapolis, 1983),
p. 187.
Par rapport a. cet etat de l'actualisation de l'allegorie, comment se
presente la nouvelle approche promise par Ie titre de notre communi-
cation? Je puis la resumer en trois theses:
1. La resurrection de l'allegorie signifie sa transformation en un
ample systeme integrateur et ascendant. II va s'associer, en de nou-
velles configurations et avec des convergences inedites, des elements
symboliques, mythiques et paraboliques.
2. Ce systeme transreel operera avec une typologie de l'allegorie
fondee sur les compos ants essentiels de la condition humaine et
representee par les emblemes et les personnages respectifs: la recherche
(Ie chemin, le pelerin); la lutte (l'armure, Ie chevalier); Ie travail commun
(Ies outils, Ie compagnon); les fonctions (Ie sceptre, Ie livre, la balance);
Ies rOles (Ie theatre, Ies acteurs). Ce sera une serie ouverte a Ie forma-
tion de nouveaux types.
3. Vis-a.-vis de l'allegorie traditionnelle, Ie systeme transreel posedera
deux qualites supplementaires, requises par Ie modernite: la mise en
situation, qui correspond a. l' entree au systeme et l' acte d' assumer
emotivement I'allegorie, qui equivaut a. la replique du systeme aux
sollicitations du dehors et meme a. son propre fonctionnement.
Les systemes allegoriques - au fond, transreaux - que nous pro-
posons pour definir la poesie de Octavio Paz et celIe de Marin Sorescu
se caracterisent par la region ou elles se meuvent et par Ie centre qui
les genere. Le poete mexicain evolue a. l'interieur d'une ontologie
prodigieuse dont Ie centre est donne par l'invention de la lumiere. Quant
a. Marin Sorescu, il a surpris des ses commencements lyriques, par une
metaphysique burlesque dont Ie centre n'est pas constitue, par un
point, mais par un arc, l' arc-en-ciel du monde (au fond, une echelle
au ciel plus speciale, ascendante et descendante, avec des marches

colorees).
L'invention de la lumiere signifie que la poesie d'Octavio Paz
commence par l' allegorie de l'itineraire. Le poete parcourt un chemin
eblouissant a partir dela mexicaine Piedra de sol (pierre faite de soleil),
en passant par Ie temple indien, v~tu de la lumiere opaline du mystere
et de la meditation, jusqu'aux reflets diamantins, tranchants, de l'Occident
europeen. Si l'on passe de l'itineraire horizontal a celui vertical, sort
en relief Ie sens ascendant de l'invention: la lumiere pazienne monte
de la transparence des phenomenes Ii la fulguration des essences. Enfin,
ainsi que nous avertit Ie premier poeme de son recuil intitule Libertad
bajo palabra (Liberte sur la parole), Ie poete invente les sortes et les
formes de la lumiere: "Ie midi", "Ie lendemain", "l'aube qui sauve",
"les d6lires solaires", aussi bien que les "associes" de la lumiere: l'air,
les oiseaux, les nuages, les ombres. Ce n'est pas etonnant que Ie poeme-
compendium Blanco declanche toute la chromatique du monde. Est-ce
l'invention de la lumiere un aspect essentiel de la condition humaine?
Bien sur et peut-~tre elle est decisive pour Ie pouvoir de creation de
l'homme, parce que si la lumiere, semblable a la parole, fait sortir les
choses du neant, cela signifie qu'en l'inventant, Ie poete invente la parole,
invente la poesie.
Si l'on examine la poesie de Marin Sorescu, recent laureat du prix
Herder, en perspective du systeme transreel ebauche sous I' embleme
de l' arc-en-ciel, Ie resultat est un panorama fascinant. Les themes et
les procedes allegoriques acquierent en ses poemes une relevance et un
brillant peu habituels. Quand il "met en situation" l'heroicite du peuple
roumain, (Les hommes), Ie poete Ie fait avec une familiarite pittoresque
et une tendresse retenue plus proches au sublime que tout hymne
glorificateur. Quand il "assume emotivement" la beaute feminine de Leda,
il termine Ie poeme par une surprenante et delicieuse piroutte: "Quelle
garce/Cette Leda.lC'est a cause d'elle quelLe mond est si beau. Le theme
de l'itineraire est traite d'une maniere pascalienne (Le chemin), tandis
que Ie theme de la lutte rev~tit la figure d'un deconcertant jeu d'echecs
contre Ie destin. En ce qui concerne Ie theme du "travail commun", la
relation est renversee de fac;on surprenante avec des echos emotifs en
cMne; Ie poete engage les hommes a aviver Ie feu sacre en jettant "au
soleil ami", quelques brindilles parce que "Le voici qui vacille/sur nos
visages/en les faisant plus beaux et plus laids". L' arc-en-ciel porte ce
jeu doux-amer la haut, ou la priere des hommes rec;oit la benediction
(Hymne). Revenu sur Ia terre, Ie poete remedie a I'absurde des chaises

(allusion a Eugene lonesco?), puisque "Les chaises son tres n!ceptives/A
la poesie/Si I'on sait les ranger". Et Ie jeu se poursuit avec des elements
naturels (J'ai lie). Le poete bande les yeux des arbres, des oiseaux, du
soleH, mais celui-ci decouvre sa cachette, Le comble allegorique est
atteint dans les deux poemes ou deux genies poetiques, Shakespeare et
Eminescu, deviennent les emblemes de la creativite humaine. Ces poemes
sont actuellement presents dans les plus exigeantes anthologies poetiques
du monde.
Marin Sourescu a aussi ecrit des pieces de theatre jouees sur les scenes
de Suisse, de I' Autriche, de I' Angleterre, de I' Allemagne, etc. Comme
dramaturge, Marin Sorescu erige, sous I' arc-en-ciel emblematique, la
verticalite h6rolque et propose Ie pal rendu celebre pra Vlad Dracula
ou bien - comme echo des terribles preuves subies par notre peuple
pendant Ie totalitarisme: l' espace ferme, Ie ventre de la baleine qui avale
lona. La fin de la piece est hautement significative: arme d'un couteau,
lana dechire Ie ventre de la baleine. La derniere replique a une resonance
proph6tique: "nous sortirons d'une maniere quelconque a la lumiere".
Universite de Bucarest, Roumaine

PART FOUR
ALLEGORY, A LITERARY ENIGMA

JERRE COLLINS AND RAYMOND WILSON
THE BROKEN ALLEGORY: DORIS LESSING'S

THE FIFTH CHILD AS NARRATIVE THEODICY
The idea that narrative occurs when a "text" provokes the reader to
construct a "story" is a familiar and an established notion. At its simplest,
the story, which is the abstracted sequence of events, renders the events
into chronological order, while the text, which is a written or spoken
discourse, presents the events out of chronological order. Traditionally,
the "sense" that a story makes, its intelligibility, has been discussed in
terms of plot (the intelligible shape of the action), character (for example,
"she is the kind of character who would do such a thing, or respond in
such a way), and theme ("what the story means is ... "). The produc-
tion of meaning involves a complex interaction between text and the
reader's interpretive strategies.
In this paper we shall focus on the textual side of this interaction,
and on those texts which provoke the reader to construct - not only
the first story - but also a second story. In this second story, plot,
character, and theme are re-figured: in other words, the second story
will have meaning different from the first story's. The second or "other"
story we will call the "allegorical story" or "the allegory".
An early thinker who noticed the difference between text and story
was E. M. Forster, who in Aspects of the Novel defined story as "a
narrative of events arranged in their time sequence", and a plot as "a
narrative of events" not necessarily in their time sequence, with "the
emphasis falling on causality" (Forster 86). Forster may not have
envisioned story and plot as simultaneous features of the same literary
work. Once the move to simultaneity is made, we can say roughly that
the story is the action itself, and the plot is how the reader learns of
the action. Dorrit Cohn lists the "correspondence between principle
variations" of the distinction which "anglophone critics commonly label
as 'story' and 'discourse'" as follows: Tomashevsky - fabula and sjuzet
(Lemon and Reis 66), Barthes - functions + actions and narration (1977
85-88), Genette - story (histoire) and narrative (recit) + narrating
(narration) (71-76), Chatman - "story" and "discourse" (19), Prince -
narrated and narrating, Rimmon-Kenan - story and text + narration,
Bal - fabula and story + text (Cohn 1990 177).1

278 JERRE COLLINS AND RAYMOND WILSON
As abstractions, stories are simpler than the discourses from which

they are abstracted. Having constructed the simplified form, a reader more
easily notices similarities. Thus, the similarities among a series of stories
might lead readers to say that they all belong to a sub-genre: for example,
the "hard-boiled detective novel". Readers would not be saying that all
the stories are versions of the same story, simply that a reader benefits
from noting the similarities in the different stories and grouping all similar
stories in a sub-genre with a single name. Allegorical stories (second
stories) tend to be even more simplified constructions from the text
than stories. Certain aspects in these "other" stories recur so often that
we may fruitfully think of the stories in which they occur as
variations of a single story which we will call an ur-story. Typical of
ur-stories is "the Hero story", of which the Oedipus story might be a
variation, or the Christ story. Ur-stories recur often because they serve
a function that needs repeated emphasis in a culture, for example a
legitimating function.
Ur-stories occur as allegories, we suggest, in part because the legiti-
mating function they serve is less efficiently served by straightforward
intellectual argument. The allegorical form is efficient for this purpose
because as a second-level story it can conceal (or at least not draw
attention to) aspects which are awkward to the legitimating function
and which would be harder to avoid in intellectual discourse. Since the
first story includes all the necessary elements of plot, character, and
theme, "gaps" or omissions or inconsistencies in the allegorical plot,
allegorical characters, and allegorical themes can easily pass unnoticed.
However, certain texts function to expose this duplicity and thus to
undermine the effectiveness of the allegory in all similarly functioning
texts.
Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child provokes the reader to construct an
allegorical story which falls into the "suffering servant" ur-story, but it
does so in a way that "breaks" the allegorical tool. By revealing how
the ur-story of the suffering servant legitimates political, social, and
economic inequality, Lessing's novella actually undermines its own
legitimating allegorical dimension and that of other legitimating texts.
The novella thus exposes works of fiction which function allegorically
as narratives legitimating Western capitalism.
The "story" which a reader might construct from the text of The
Fifth Child is that of Harriet and David who marry and plan a happy
life based on the concept of a large family. Through the births of their
THE BROKEN ALLEGORY 279
first four children, their plan works; and the atmosphere of a happy family
attracts parents, in-laws, cousins, friends, and even barely-introduced
strangers to the house parties that occur every holiday. The fifth child,
Ben, whom Harriet calls an "alien", "Neanderthal baby", threatens to
destroy this happiness even during the pregnancy (50, 53). As the threat
becomes actuality, members of the family decide that Ben must be insti-
tutionalized. Grandparents act quickly to make arrangements, and when
the other children realize Ben is gone, they react with "[h]ysterical relief'
(76). Harriet, after brooding over three-year-old Ben being "a prisoner
somewhere", decides to investigate (79). She finds Ben drugged uncon-
scious in a small, windowless room, "naked, inside a straightjacket", and
covered with excrement (82). A worker tells her that a drug injected to
control the children gradually "kills them" (85). The stronger ones, like
Ben, get "bigger shots" and die faster. Harriet decides to take Ben home.
As a consequence of Ben's presence, Harriet and David abandon
their dream of a large, happy family; in addition, the family blames
Harriet for causing their unhappiness by bringing Ben back from the
institution. The novella ends with the older children all finding ways
to move out of the family home early, and with Harriet and David waiting
listlessly for the teenaged Ben to become bored and move out into the
ever more pervasive criminal surface of society.
Lessing's text provokes the reader to construct some such story as
we have just told. However, we suggest that the text also provokes a
second story, the allegorical story. Lessing repeatedly invites the reader
to see significance beyond the overt, exact words on the page. For
example, the novella provokes the reader to find explanations for events
while the characters simultaneously offer the reader a dilemma between
two unsatisfying modes of explanation. Harriet's typical method of
explaining events surfaces when her sister gives birth to a Down's
syndrome baby, Amy: Sarah's quarreling with her husband "had probably
attracted the mongol child", Harriet says, which David characterizes as
"silly hysterical thinking", no doubt echoing most reader's attitudes (22).
However, David's own explanation is merely an equivalent to saying that
these things cannot be explained: he says that "the genes have come
up with something special this time" and that from "a chance gene", they
had simply suffered "bad luck" (53, 117, 118). This is also unsatis-
fying, and no better than Harriet's attempt. To Harriet's insistence that
she and David were being "punished" for the hubris of presuming they
could be happy, David replies: "Stop it Harriet! Don't you see where that
thought leads? Pogroms and punishments, witch-burnings and angry Gods

- !" When she persists, David says, "I'm not going to be dragged back
into the Middle Ages" (118). By prompting us to see meaning, and
offering a dilemma between two proposed but unsatisfying explana-
tions, the text incites us to construct an allegorical story for an
explanation.
The narrative voice of the story stays very close to Harriet's point
of view, rarely directly contradicting Harriet's perceptions and judgments.
However, when we "step back" from Harriet's position, we can see that
the text prompts a third explanation of the story's events, one that is
not developed by any character in the story.
As the first children are born in close succession, Harriet becomes
more and more exhausted. When a fifth child is conceived (by accident),
Harriet is angry and overwhelmed by the prospect of yet more demands
to be made on her. When the foetus and then the child turns out to be
exceptionally active, demanding, and unresponsive, her anger and gUilt
and exhaustion constellate in her perception that Ben is alien and hostile
to her, that he is somehow "not human ... different from us" (lOS).
Indeed, Ben is "different". He is diagnosed as "hyperactive" (63, 100),
and is probably also marginally retarded - though according to one
specialist he is "within the range of normality" (104). Many of the details
of Ben's behavior and of his difficulties in learning are characteristic
of children with severe Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
For instance, Harriet notes that Ben's "attention was held by the [TV]
screen unpredictably, and according to no pattern that Harriet could
see, usually only for a minute or two" (109). In particular Ben has trouble
organizing time in meaningful ways: he cannot follow and then repeat
stories, and he cannot "get the hang of" games (114-15). Ben works
hard, and for the most part unsuccessfully, at learning the complex behav-
ioral codes that structure social interaction:
He watched the children, particularly Luke and Helen [the oldest children), all the time.
He studied how they moved, sat down, stood up; copied how they ate ... When the
children watched television, he squatted near them and looked from the screen to their
faces, for he needed to know what reactions were appropriate. (68)
Harriet thinks most behavior does not need to be learned but simply
comes naturally, and so she perceives as "unnatural" a child who cannot
easily learn to respond as other children do.
Neither Harriet nor the rest of the family are prepared for the
exceptional demands and disruptive behavior of an ADHD child, and

Lessing excludes from the novel anyone who could explain ADHD
adequately and help them learn to cope with Ben in constructive ways.
Consequently, they come to feel, as David puts it, "It's either him or
us" (74).
Even though these textual details and their interpretation do provide
a satisfying explanation of the events of the story, and of the charac-
ters and their interactions, Lessing de-emphasizes this explanation by
having no character take it seriously. For example, when Ben is disruptive
at school, the headmistress says to Harriet, "He is hyperactive, perhaps?
Of course that is a word that I often feel evades the issue. To say a
child is hyperactive does not say very much!" (100).
The first story does finally have a consistent, satisfying explanation.
Thus the second or "other" story is a metonymic allegory rather than a
metaphoric allegory, in which the first story "drops out" or becomes
meaningless once the second story is constructed. Nevertheless, Doris
Lessing seems determined not to let readers stop with the construction
of the first story. By a variety of means, her text prompts readers to an
"other" or allegorical reading.
In addition to provoking the readers to find meaning and then having
characters provide conflicting, unsatisfying explanations, the text prompts
readers to move toward constructing an allegorical reading by means
of the apparent genre violation contained in Harriet's interpretation of
Ben's ontological status. To some extent, the reader knows what kind
of story to construct from the text because of genre considerations. When
the text varies from the expectations aroused by its genre, the text tends
to provoke the reader to begin constructing a second story. Harriet's
original metaphorical reference to Ben as a "Neanderthal baby" becomes
literal. She imagines that he willed himself born. She insists to a
specialist, "He's not human is he?" and says that we "don't know what
kind of creatures different from us have lived on the planet", and asks,
"How do we know that dwarves or goblins or hobgoblins, that kind of
thing, didn't really live here?" (105-06). Although Lessing had presented
similar possibilities in her science fiction and fantasy series "Canopis
in Argos: Archives". The Fifth Child in most other ways conforms to
the genre of realism - a highly standard. typical realism. The genre-
boundary trespass involved in Harriet's explanation. standing uncorrected
initially by any satisfying realistic explanation, leaves the reader
searching for a better explanation, and likely to seek one by constructing

a parallel allegorical story.
In a similar way, the nightmarish sequence of Harriet's trip to rescue
Ben - the graphic and repulsive description of the ward of "monsters",
of Ben's room and of the room he is washed in, and the account of all
the children in the institution being kept permanently drugged into uncon-
sciousness - these details taken together transgress the boundary of
realism. These details do not "fit" the first story, which is a realistic
one, so they tend to prompt a second story. Indeed, early reviewers of
the novel did not call for a reform of abusive child-care institutions,
nor did they chastise Lessing for depicting child-care institutions in
an exaggeratedly negative fashion; instead, they read these details as
allegorical. We shall discuss their readings later in this paper.2
Harriet's reading of the events of her life indicate that she is con-
structing a second story in order to interpret the events; she thus models
the process for Lessing's readers. Several incidents illustrate how such
modelling provides invitations to construct the second, allegorical, story.
First, on their first visit after buying their new house, David and
Harriet have a strong impulse to make love on the bed left by the previous
owners; they hesitate because they know Harriet has to work for them
to afford this big house, but they go ahead anyway. As they make love,
Harriet thinks that David is taking possession, not just of her, not just
of the house, but "of the future in her" (10). Taking possession of an
abstract future is a move to the allegorical level of meaning. Since the
narrative voice stays close to Harriet's point of view, her move to the
allegorical level prompts us to read at the same level.
Second, during her difficult pregnancy with Ben, Harriet hears David
tell the children a story about a little girl lost in the woods. The girl looks
at her reflection in a pool and sees a strange girl, not her own face,
and the little girl thinks this strange girl is going to pull her down into
the pool. Harriet interprets the story as allegorically representing how
David is feeling about her (45).
Third, when Ben is three years old, Molly (David's mother) and
Frederick (Molly's second husband) tell Harriet and David that Ben must
be placed in an institution, speaking in a tone which implies they are
being "threatened". Molly says that such things "can be arranged".
Angela (Harriet's sister) calls the elder couple's proposal "typical
upper-class ruthlessness". When Frederick and Molly offer to make the
arrangements, "Angela [says], with a kind of bitter appreciation of them,
'Sometimes when I'm with you I understand everything about this

country"'. To this Frederick and Molly reply, "Thank you" (73-74). Here
a number of the characters see their actions as having not only a
realistic or practical dimension but also an allegorical dimension - and
the allegory is a political one.
That Lessing may be signalling the reader to construct a second,
allegorical story in the situation, the story of how the upper class acts
in general to maintain its position, is further indicated by David's
response when Harriet later tells him that the institute was murdering
Ben. David "deliberately" says, "I thought that was the idea", and then
adds, "What did you suppose was going to happen? That they were going
to turn him into some well-adjusted member of society and then
everything would be lovely?" (87).
Finally, Harriet deeply resents the family's attitude that she had been
irresponsible. She especially resents the family's thinking that her having
saved Ben from murder made everyone else in the family unhappy,
even though she also believes that her action has destroyed their
happiness. Harriet feels she is "the scapegoat" (117).
Although Harriet proposes the scapegoat allegory to represent her own
situation, it more aptly applies to Ben and to what the family tried to
do with him, before Harriet brought him back from the institution. In
ancient times a goat was ritually loaded with all the sins and faults of
the population and then the goat was killed; thus the gods would have
their revenge and the people would be able to live in peace. In
justifying taking Ben to the institution, David says, "It's either him or
us" (74).
If Lessing is strongly signalling us to construct a second story from
her text, she may also be hinting that we construct an allegory based
on Ben as Harriet found him at the institution; we have already remarked
that the specific descriptions of that sequence do not fit well in the first
or "realistic" story. The situation could be an allegory for those of
humanity who must suffer so that the rest can be happy. Ben, not Harriet,
is thus the allegorical scapegoat.
Invitations to construct this particular allegorical story exist. Lessing
spreads the implication of the story to all of Western capitalism when,
in the story's final lines, Harriet thinks that she and David might see
Ben in any crowd scene on television, from any modern city (132-33).
Lessing may be suggesting that the un-sacrificed scapegoat symbolism
applies to all of Western civilization, not just to England. Also, Harriet
wonders if Ben might even yet end up sacrificed to science. If the sci-
entists tried to keep him, they would have to drug him, in which case
he'd end up looking like a slug in a cloth shroud, like she had found
him in the tiny room in the institution (132).
If we accept these invitations and try to construct this second story,
what would be its function? We suggest that it would function as a
"theodicy". Humans need to experience the world as orderly, as mean-
ingful. If those aspects of life - sickness, suffering, death, great
deprivation - which seem to be most disorderly and least meaningful,
cannot be experienced as meaningful or as forming part of a larger
order or nomos, then the human world threatens to collapse, and with
it the human in that world. Originally, "theodicy" designated a theoret-
ical discourse which explained the existence of evil. In The Sacred
Canopy, Peter Berger expands the concept to include any explanation
of anomie phenomena in terms of religious legitimation, "of whatever
degree of theoretical sophistication" (53). But deprivation, suffering, and
death can be made meaningful in secular terms as well as in religious
ones. Anomie - the experienced lack of meaning, lack of meaningful order
- occurs when the discourses by which a person makes sense of the world
begin to fail in their function. Any discourse which helps the reader
explain effectively those things which threaten anomie, would be a
theodicy, so a narrative which explains the discrepancies and thereby
removes the threat of anomie, we will call a narrative theodicy. Typically,
a narrative theodicy would serve its nomic function by the indirect
method of provoking its readers to construct an allegorical story, a second
story that parallels the first story which all narratives provoke. To make
our term clear, we must ask: in Western democracies, what threatens to
cause anomie? In other words, what incongruence must be explained?
One source of anomie is that the ideology of equality posited as a
"given" fundamental principle, conflicts with an evidently, unequal
distribution of scarce resources: not only of "goods" but of "power,
dignity, prestige, honor, purity", as Victor Turner enumerates them (152).
The discrepancy creates a need for narrative theodicies to "make sense"
of the felt scarcity; they must legitimate the prevailing distribution.
A minimal theodicy would show that poverty is in the unavoidable
"order of things"; a "strong" theodicy would show poverty not only as
a necessary evil but as contributing to the proper order of things - for
example, by showing how poverty punishes or expiates moral failure.
In the Western world, for centuries, the Bible has embodied the
collection of narratives that made sense of the world and of human life.
In particular, the story of Jesus, interpreted as the divine "suffering
servant", as God become man to redeem men from sin through suf-
fering and death, has served as an extremely powerful theodicy. However,
it has in the last few decades been subject to what Berger calls "the
disintegration of the plausibility of theodicies legitimating social inequal-
ities" (60).
In the meanwhile, the suffering-servant allegory continues to help
people in Western, capitalist societies to avoid anomie, but in secular-
ized form. The process of secularizing starts with certain parallels: first,
populations of the third-world or the underclasses of the first-world
countries "serve" the (economic) needs of the first-world countries;
similarly, the suffering servant serves the (religious) needs of humankind.
Second, all or part of these populations or underclasses suffer, and this
suffering is somehow linked to their situation of service; the same can
be said, of course, of the suffering servant. Finally, privileged Westerners'
benefiting from the exploitation of third-world people or of people in
the underclasses of one's own country (blacks, women, the poor) must
be made homologous to sinful humanity's being redeemed by Christ,
the "suffering servant".
In some such way the suffering servant allegory becomes "typical",
with secular and religious versions having similar but not identical plot,
characters, and themes. At the level of abstraction reached by allegor-
ical stories, a few discrepancies can be easily elided, especially if the
payoff from grasping only the similarities is a reduction of anomie.
In fact, several early reviewers retell the story of David, Harriet, and
Ben as a secularized, politico-economic version of the suffering servant
allegory. For some reviewers, Ben's unintelligent, hostile behavior
supplies a justification for the suppression of those he represents: the
underclasses are a threat while being essentially sub-human. Carolyn
Kizer observes that support for this reading would come from the
outcome that Ben, the "monster child" finds his "true home in the
monster-company of the underclass: the uneducable, the unemployed, the
rootless, whose vacuity leads them inevitably to drugs, violence and
crime" (5). D. A. N. Jones notes that Ben is "unacceptable to Harriet's
kind, the supposedly superior class in Britain, Europe, and the United
States", but that Ben "is welcomed, as a leader, by members of the
inferior classes - 'the uneducable, the unassimilable'" (31). Paul Grey
speculates that "maybe Ben represents a dangerous, violent streak in
the species that must be either tamed or excluded from the realm of
civilized life" (6). The allegorical reading is also made even more
specific: the liberal solution of "throwing money" at situations has failed,
so now the only alternative to complete ruthlessness is unacceptable
reduction of privileges and luxuries for the ruling class. Through Ben's
infancy, Harriet had clung to the belief that by spending enough of her
time and energy on Ben (the equivalent of tax money spent on the
underclass), she could tame, train, educate Ben to function to the benefit
of the family. Carolyn Kizer notes the parallel: "liberals still hang on
to the hope that, with enough massive infusions of money we can repair
the infrastructure, educate, train, and house the ignorant, the unskilled,
the homeless" (6). The goal of this effort is to make the underclass
function in a way that is useful to the ruling class. However, Harriet's
attention to Ben deprives the other children and her husband of her
time and energy, which they resent. This is the equivalent of the taxpayer
resenting his or her money being spent the way "the liberals" want (6).
By pointing out that the cause is hopeless and that no matter what "we"
spend on "them", the Bens of the world will never become useful citizens
but will always remain sub-human threats to "decent people", the
narrative theodicy justifies the proposed solution: cut off funds and deal
with the underclass with ruthlessness instead. Increasing police
brutality, applied almost randomly to members of this "dangerous" under-
class might be seen as a manifestation of the proposed ruthlessness.
Narrative theodicies, operating by provoking readers to construct an
ur-story on the allegorical level, might be more effective than purely intel-
lectual ones for two reasons: (1) the mechanism might not be obvious,
and (2) discrepancies might not be evident. A single ur-story may be
abstracted from a large variety of surface texts. For a Marxist like Fredric
Jameson, a "master code or ur-story" exists for all modern texts (22).
It is "the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm
of Necessity" (19). The capitalized abstract nouns suggest that this
ur-story operates only at the level of allegory. The variation of narra-
tive theodicy represented by Lessing's novella may be more powerful
than an intellectual one because readers can abstract elements of the
ur-story (that suffering is expected and "right" for the suffering servant)
while ignoring any awkward, hard-to-explain dis-analogies to the Christ
story.
Just as the Biblical version of the theodicy concerning the "suffering
servant" explains why the "servant" must "suffer", i.e., the need to
atone for the sins of humanity, so too the secular version explains why
the underclass must suffer - but the explanation is quite different: that
the underclass is violent and undeserving by nature. The secular version
thus contradicts the belief that the sufferer must have unique creden-
tials that make his suffering redemptive for all, e.g., that as the Son of
God, anything He does has universal significance, or that He can will
his suffering to "count" against humanity's deficit.
Because a narrative theodicy links the capitalist to the Biblical stories
surreptitiously, the need for any explanation of such differences usually
escapes detection. In its intellectual form a theodicy would be obliged
to explain such discrepancies in terms of historical, economic, polit-
ical, racial-genetic-physical, geographical, and religious elements.
William James in "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life" engages
in a manoeuver of defamiliarization similar to Lessing's when he
suppresses such rationalization in the intellectual version of the
secularized suffering servant theodicy:
[Ilf the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's
and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on
the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should
lead a life of lonely torment, ... [would we notl immediately feel, even though an impulse
arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its
enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain? (275)
The narrative theodicy in The Fifth Child initially suppresses aware-

ness of the discrepancy in the reason for suffering. The family can be
free from suffering only if Ben suffers, but not because he is "taking
on" their deserved suffering: rather, he is the cause of their suffering, and
his exclusion causes their release from suffering. The text, however,
by insisting that Ben's exclusion from the family means that he must
suffer, and suffer terribly, evokes the particular second story of the
suffering servant.
As we have said, the process of secularizing must subtly draw
parallels between (a) exploiting third-world people or those in the under-
classes of one's own country (blacks, women, the poor), and (b) being
redeemed by the "suffering servant". The process of Ben the individual
coming to "stand for" the oppressed classes, operating beneath the
reader's attention level, if not outright unconsciously, would reduce
anomie and so generate pleasure for the reader. Because it strengthens
our sense of an ordered world, a nomos, and reduces anomie, the second
story produces a glow of relief and happiness which then infuses every
action in the surface text with a pleasurable effect on the reader and
with a sense of greater meaningfulness than the surface offers to purely
cognitive functioning. We might compare this mechanism to that of
Roland Barthes's "bliss" in The Pleasure of the Text and to Sigmund
Freud's "pleasure principle" in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, at points, does produce a glowing
feeling of meaning beyond what is literally said; however, most readers
also report that the novella makes them highly uncomfortable. This
double effect can be explained by the way the novella reveals its own
allegorical process. Like Heidegger's hammer, which is most tool-like
when the carpenter does not have to think about it but simply uses it,
so too narrative as a tool for understanding usually goes unnoticed.
Heidegger points out that it is when the hammer breaks that we begin
to notice it as a tool (98-102). So too, when a narrative "breaks", fails
to work as we expect, we have the best chance of noticing how it
functions as a "tool" of understanding. Thus, to expose the way in
which narratives allow readers to make sense of the world, writers
sometimes deliberately "break" part of their narratives (our usual
tool). The breaking of the tool is characterized by what Shklovsky
called ostranenie or defamiliarization. Gerald Bruns points out that
Shklovsky's defamiliarization is the opposite, or the un-doing, of allegory:
"Shklovsky's way of putting" the anti-poetic force of modernism "is to
say that the task of art is to make the stone stony, that is, to keep us
from experiencing an object as something other than it is; as if the task
of art were to free us from allegory or the semantic transparency of
particulars" (xi).
Because the modern secular allegory relies on the reader suppressing
part of the more traditional version of the suffering servant allegory, such
a breaking occurs when a text reveals how it encourages the abstrac-
tion not only of a "story" or chronological retelling of text events, but
also, at a deeper level, of an ur-story, and how, further, a text can
encourage or discourage the inclusion in this allegorical story of certain
meaning-bearing elements of plot, character, and theme.
A symbolic evocation of reading a second, allegorical story in her text
may be Lessing's description, near the end of the story, of the family's
table (129-31). That the table should be taken as more than merely a
realistic one, is indicated by Harriet's changing perception of the table's
shape and brightness. When Harriet remembers the days before Ben
came, the table seems to widen and lengthen, surrounded by smiling
faces, and her dream then was of a family in harmony; the table seems
to darken when she thinks of Ben, the alien destroyer. As she looks
into the table, Harriet realizes that if she had let Ben die, so many
people would have been happy, but she could not do it (131). On this
occasion the clear surface darkly reflects her face, and she quickly pulls
back so as not to see herself. In thus having Harriet repeat the gesture
of the girl in David's story, whom Harriet allegorized as a representa-
tion of herself, Lessing once again seems to validate an allegorical
reading of her novella. Harriet likes better than the surface the under-
pattern of the wood's grain which shows through the shiny surface. How-
ever, at places the surface is scarred from events in the family's life.
The reflection of Harriet's face on the surface corresponds to the
first story, and her quick withdrawal to remove that image corresponds
to the reader's move away from that story. The underlying patterns
parallel the allegorical structure initially constructed by the reader: the
"suffering servant" narrative theodicy. The gouges and marring from
daily life parallel the dis-analogies that mar the "natural" pattern of the
underlying wood, and reveal the flaw in their legitimating process.
Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child embodies an allegorical story, and this
story falls into a specific ur-story of the "suffering servant", but it does
so in a way that "breaks" the allegorical tool. By revealing how the
ur-story of the suffering servant legitimizes inequality, the novella
actually undermines its own legitimizing allegorical dimension and that
of other legitimizing narratives. Lessing's novella thus functions as a
critique of similar works of fiction which serve as theodicies. Harriet
mentally defends herself: "By everything they - the society she belongs
to - stood for, believed in, she had had no alternative but to bring Ben
back from that place. But because she had saved him from murder, she
had destroyed her family" (117). By Harriet's overt notice of the
contradiction between the rationalization of Ben's treatment and her
society's basic values, and by the reader's endorsement that, to be true
to those values, Harriet had to rescue Ben, Lessing's novella deliber-
ately fails to make Ben's suffering and anticipated death at the institution
seem "natural", "inevitable", and "right". This failure exposes a similar
failure on the allegorical level with regard to the "other" characters
Ben "stands for". David's admission that he knew the institution meant
death for Ben contributes to the exposure.
By conspicuously failing to enable the reader to perceive what Ursula
Le Guin in a similar story ironically calls "the terrible justice of reality"
(283), the novella suggests a similar failure of all Western capitalist

theodicies. The New York Times Book Review quotes Doris Lessing as
discouraging an allegorical reading of The Fifth Child; however, the
situation is not as simple as Lessing there suggests (Kizer 5-6). The
novella first provokes the construction of the allegorical second story,
but, then, by exposing its own mechanism, the text undermines the
allegorical construction and ultimately makes it untenable. The net effect
thereby warns against a particular, too-easy allegorical justification of the
"ruthlessness" by which the privileged classes in the West maintain
their position. By showing Harriet as not persuaded by the rationale
presented by the family nor being seduced by the emotional benefits
which acceptance would have conferred, the novella undermines the
ability of the secularized "suffering servant" allegory to legitimate
conditions of Western capitalist inequality, no matter what the surface
text in which it occurs.
University of Wisconsin- Whitewater

Loras College
NOTES
1 Dorrit Cohn has proposed a three-level structure for historical texts - "reference!
story!discourse" - in which the reference level is not the events of history but the
documents from which the historian constructs his or her story. In this construction, the
reference level could not be a construction of the reader, since the reader would have
no access to the documents. The positing of a third level (or aspect) to account for allegory
is, perhaps, even more defensible than a third (reference) level to account for history.
The reader constructs the second story in a way analogous to the way that he or she
constructs the first story.
2 Jerre Collins adds a personal note: Many people know, from their own experience,
of a different kind of institutional care for severely handicapped children. When close
relatives of mine had a very severely brain damaged child, they searched for, and found,
an institution that could provide the intensive care he would need: Misericordia Hospital
in Chicago, Illinois. I've been to Misericordia a number of times, and like Harriet, I
have walked down a "nightmare ward" (81) of terribly disfigured children - but the
walls were brightly painted, and decorated with colorful decals and mobiles. The children
were mostly awake, many were alert, and there was a lot of interaction between staff,
visitors, and the children. Staff members were clearly trying to build a sense of community
and were trying to include each child, and have each child include the others, in that
community. Misericordia is by no means unique in its ambition to provide humane care
for damaged human beings. Part of the prompting to allegorize Lessing's text comes
from her omission of possibilities and details, however "realistic", that would clash with
the second story emerging from the text.
REFERENCES
Bal, Mieke, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, trans. Christine von
Boheemen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).
Barthes, Roland, 'Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives', Image-Music-
Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday, 1977), pp. 79-124.
- - , The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (NY: Hill, 1975).
Berger, Peter L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1969).
Bruns, Gerald, 'Introduction', Theory of Prose by Victor Shklovsky, trans. Benjamin
Sher (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalky Archive Press, 1990).
Chatman, Seymour, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1978).
Cohn, Dorrit, 'Signposts of Fictionality: A Narrative Perspective', Poetics Today 11.4
(Winter 1990): 775-804.
Forster, E. M., Aspects of the Novel, 1927 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955).
Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, trans. and ed. James Strachey (NY:
Norton Library-Norton, 1961).
Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, 1972, trans. James E. Lewin
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).
Grey, Paul, 'Home is Where the Horrors Are', Rev. of The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing,
Time 4 March 1988: 86.
Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, 1927, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(NY: Harper, 1962).
James, William, 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', The Will to Believe: And
Other Essays in Popular Philosophy . .. 1897 (NY: Dover, 1956), pp. 184-215.
Jameson, Frederick, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981).
Jones, D. A. N., 'Alien', Rev. of The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, The New York Review
of Books 35 (30 June 1988): 30-31.
Kizer, Carolyn, 'Bad News for the Nice and Well-Meaning', Rev. of The Fifth Child by
Doris Lessing, New York Times Book Review 3 April 1988: 5-6.
Le Guin, Ursula, 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Ornelas', The Wind's Twelve Quarters
(NY: Harper, 1974), pp. 275-284.
Lemon, Lee T. and Marion J. Reis, eds. and trans. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four
Essays (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).
Lessing, Doris, The Fifth Child, 1988 (New York: Vintage International-Random House,
1989).
Prince, Gerald, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (Amsterdam:
Mouton, 1982).
Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Methuen,
1983).
Turner, Victor, 'Social Dramas and Stories about Them', Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn
1980): 141-168.
RA YMOND J. WILSON III
RICOEUR'S "ALLEGORY" AND JAKOBSON'S

METAPHORIC/METONYMIC PRINCIPLES
Paul Ricoeur denies symbolic effect to expressions where the original

sense of an expression is destroyed in the process of interpretation, calling
such discourse "allegory", the mere "rhetorical" and "didactic" proce-
dure in which the literal meaning is "eliminated once it has done its job".
Such language is a vehicle, or a ladder: "Having ascended the ladder",
says Ricoeur, "we can then descend it" (Ricoeur 1976: 55).1 Ricoeur thus
employs two categories, and if we are to have two categories - one in
which the initial sense is destroyed (Ricoeur's "allegory"), and the other
in which the original meaning is retained and added to the second
meaning (Ricoeur's "symbol") - I believe it is more helpful to subject
symbolism to Roman Jakobson's paradigm, establishing two forms of
symbolism, each signaled by contextual cues: the metaphoric symbol,
in which the literal expression is discarded, and the metonymic symbol
in which no such discarding occurs.2
As Terence Hawkes explains, Jakobson "felt able to propose that
human language in fact operates in terms of two fundamental dimensions
whose characteristics are crystallized in the rhetorical devises of metaphor
and metonymy" (Hawkes 1972: 78).3 Relating metaphor to similarity,
Jakobson opposes a metaphoric principle (something replacing another
thing which it resembles) to a metonymic principle which Jakobson
related to contiguity (the deletion of something to leave another
thing which is in the same sequence). In metaphoric writing, Jakobson
suggested, the writer selects among several similar alternatives; the writer
can select either "boy" or "lad" for example: "selection between
alternatives implies the possibility of substituting one for another", and
the unchosen alternatives thereby become available for metaphoric
replacement, and thus, "selection and substitution are two faces of the
same operation" (Jakobson and Halle 1975: 60). This formulation leaves
a problem. Although Roman J akobson applied his metaphoric and
metonymic principles to all of language, Jakobson's principles have not
yet been applied to symbolism.
I suggest that this is because of a Catch-22 that this line of theoret-
ical thought has reached: (1) the best way to envision a metaphoric

294 RA YMOND 1. WILSON III
symbolism would be by analogy to figurative metaphor, and the best way

to envision a metonymic symbolism would be by analogy to figurative
metonymy; but (2) after broadening, Jakobson's principles apply to much
more than metaphor and metonymy as distinct figures. Ideas of Paul
Ricoeur and David Lodge can be used to refocus on figurative metaphor
and figurative metonymy so that these figures can be used to define
metaphoric and metonymic symbolism, without abandoning or radically
changing Jakobson's valuable system. 4
Ricoeur and Lodge provide ideas for understanding metaphor and
metonymy respectively. Paul Ricoeur's analysis of metaphor as "imper-
tinent predication" narrows Jakobson's metaphoric principle so that it can
closely outline figurative metaphor, and David Lodge's idea of metonymy
as "unusual deletion" narrows Jakobson's metonymic principle to cover
only figurative metonymy.
I. METAPHOR
Because Jakobson's metaphoric (replacement) principle applies to all

of language, it draws too large a circle for clearly delineating metaphor
as a figure. To make the circle smaller, we must add the idea of
difference to that of replacement. Writing of figurative metaphor, Paul
Ricoeur notes that "metaphor is the result of the tension between two
terms in a metaphorical utterance" (Ricoeur 1976: 50). If one says, "A
lad is a boy", one does not create the figure of metaphor because not
every statement of identity or similarity creates a figurative metaphoric
relationship. As the word "metaphor" has traditionally been used, only
the equating - or close comparison - of literally unlike things creates
the figure. For example, in the sentence, "The man is a rock", we assume
that the reader's mind intuitively and instantly rejects the literal reading
since human beings have none of the physical hardness and inertness
of rocks; men differ so much from rocks that the literal reading becomes
impossible. "It is this process of self-destruction or transformation which
imposes a sort of twist on the words, an extension of meaning thanks
to which we can make sense where a literal interpretation would be
literally nonsensical" (Ricoeur 1976: 50).5
Ricoeur also points out that figurative metaphor is not a word but a
full sentence with definite predication, and that the predication flouts
the "logical distance between two far flung semantic fields ... creating
a semantic shock which, in turn, sparks the meaning of the metaphor"
RICOEUR'S ALLEGORY AND JAKOBSON'S PRINCIPLES 295
(Ricoeur 1978: 7). After rejecting the literal interpretation, the reader,
guided by what Ricoeur calls the strategy of "absurdity", finds an unex-
pected overlap in meaning, such as firmness of character and emotional
stability of the man, parallel to the rock's physical firmness and
stability (Ricoeur 1976: 50). The importance of context is clear because
if we had been talking about American football, then, "John is a rock",
might have meant that John has huge muscles and cannot be moved
out the center of the team's defensive line. In either case, we do not
believe that any real rock actually existed as a referent to the word "rock"
which appeared in the text.
II. METAPHORIC SYMBOL
Having employed Ricoeur's tension concept to identify the area covered

by metaphor proper, within the circle of Jakobson's metaphoric principle,
we can establish a metaphoric symbol to be like a metaphor except that
the author writes only the vehicle and implies the predication which
connects the vehicle to the (much different) tenor. Let us look at an
example: in Delmore Schwartz's poem "The Heavy Bear that Goes with
Me", the narrator describes a bear that sleeps with him, eats with him,
follows him all day, pawing his wife and kicking his friends; we must
decide that no bear is literally present and interpret the bear as a symbol
for the narrator's body because the literal interpretation makes no sense.
This abolition of the literal identifies the figure as metaphoric; and
because Schwartz only implies and does not say "is my body", the
poem has symbolism, not figurative metaphor. Thus the idea, "the bear
equals the body" constitutes metaphoric symbolism. The same metaphoric
process mystifies young Stephen Daedalus when he asks how a woman
can be a Tower of Ivory, in Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man.
A metaphorically symbolizing author implies by context - both textual
and extra-textual: Schwartz's bear appears in a poem with a sub-title "The
testament of the body", and "Tower of Ivory" appears in a litany of names
of the Blessed Virgin. Thus, moving from Ricoeur's definition of
metaphor to define a metaphoric symbol reveals the process by which
an expression becomes metaphorically symbolic, i.e., a self destruction
of the literal meaning and replacement by the symbolic meaning.
This analysis, in emphasizing context as the author's means of
implying impertinent predication, provides an alternative to Ricoeur's
296 RA YMOND J. WILSON III
definition of symbol; he has written that the absence of the explicit

"impertinent predication" must mean that only "a single movement"
can exist in symbols, a movement which assimilates the reader "to the
second signification by means of, or through, the literal one", and that
a symbol "is so constituted that we can only attain the secondary
signification by way of the primary signification, where this primary
signification is the sole means of access to the surplus meaning" (Ricoeur
1976: 55). In opening out this definition, the contextual explanation of
the reader's access to "the second signification" has the advantages of
requiring neither an inherent hidden signification in the original expres-
sion, nor a mystic ability on the part of the maker of a metaphoric symbol.
In Ricoeur's "symbolism", the literal meaning is never rejected as absurd,
neither before nor after the reader discovers the symbolic meaning, a
feature suggestive of something closer to a metonymic symbol in which
no discarding of the literal meaning occurs. However, since replace-
ment of the literal meaning does occur in some literature, Ricoeur must
dump the residual not covered by his definition of symbolism somewhere,
and he uses the category of "allegory" for this dumping.
III. METONYMY
As his metaphoric principle does for metaphor, Jakobson's metonymic

principle also draws too large a circle for clearly delineating figurative
metonymy. To draw a smaller circle, within Jakobson's idea of contiguity,
we can apply David Lodge's concept that figurative metonymy adds
the notion of unusual choice to the contiguity of the metonymic prin-
ciple. In preparation for this point, we need to understand Lodge's claim
that, despite appearances, metonymy operates by deletion and not by
replacement; only metaphor operates by replacement. Lodge explains that
both metaphor and metonymy appear to operate through replacement;
however, the true replacement in metaphor contains the element of dif-
ference while metonymy's apparent replacement does not. Lodge says
that
in the sentence 'Keels ploughed the deep', ploughed is a metaphorical equivalent for
the movement of ships, derived from similarity, while keels and deep are synecdochic
and metonymic equivalents for 'ships' and 'sea' respectively, derived from contiguity .
. . . ploughed violently and illogically forces one context (the earth, agriculture) into another
(the sea, navigation); keels and deep do not have the same effect of transgression and
rupture (Lodge 1977: xiii).
Because plow replaces crossed, the reader's mind must discard the
plow once this vehicle has taken the reader to the ideas of the ships'
motion through the sea; in contrast, the reader's mind retains the keels
and the element of the sea being deep, even after these vehicles have
taken readers to the ideas ships and sea because these have not replaced
the other elements but are simply what is left after the other elements
have been deleted.
The usefulness of Lodge's concept for narrowing Jakobson's general
metonymic principle can now emerge. "Metonymy and synecdoche are
produced," says Lodge, "by deleting one or more items from a natural
combination, but not the items it would be most natural to omit" (Lodge
1977: 76). In the "notional sentence, The keels of the ships crossed the
deep sea", the word "plowed" could only enter by metaphorically
replacing "crossed"; but the sentence contains redundancy, so that, under
Jakobson's broad (metonymic) contiguity principle, some of its elements
would become candidates for elimination - most likely "keels of" and
"deep", leaving "The ships crossed the sea". In contrast, the maker of
a figurative metonymic sentence decides to keep "keels" and "deep"
and to eliminate "ships" and "sea", leaving "Keels crossed the deep". 6
Just as the metaphoric principle of all language is narrowed to figura-
tive metaphor by adding Ricoeur's "impertinent predication" to the
guiding principle of similarity, so the metonymic principle is narrowed
to figurative metonymy by adding Lodge's "unusual deletion" to the
guiding principle of contiguity.
IV. METONYMIC SYMBOL
Distinguishing between a figurative metonymic thought sequence and

a metonymic symbol requires a further step. An inadequate explana-
tion - parallel to that of metaphoric symbolism - might be that the
writer names only the part and does not name the whole. The non-naming
explanation is inadequate because one never names the whole, even in
simple metonymy: for example, the phrase "a fleet of twenty sail" does
not mention the ships. The concept of an "identifying association"
will provide a more useful explanation of the process in metonymic
symbolism.
Elements in a sequence must be "identifying" to be figurative
metonymy. Not every element in a sequence will imply the whole. One
can write, "The lookout saw fifty sail to the southwest", and expect
298 RAYMOND J. WILSON III
readers to know that "sail" stands for "ships", part for whole; however,
one would not have the same expectation of, "The lookout saw fifty
nail to the southwest", even though nails are also parts of wooden sailing
ships. Therefore, I would like to suggest that an author makes a
metonymic symbol when he or she takes a part that is inherently non-
identifying and makes it into an identifying element of the sequence,
as the analysis of an example from Robert Frost can reveal.
In Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", no absurdity
immediately forces us to discard the sleigh, pony, and woods as we did
Schwartz's bear, and we apparently need not posit a symbol of yearning
for death. Yet if the narrator literally did lie down and allow the snow
to cover him, he would literally die. The yearned-for action is part of a
sequence, a whole, for which the single moment described in the poem
can stand, and that whole reminds us of a larger human desire for rest
and freedom from care which some psychologists tell us is part of a desire
for a return to the quiet of the womb, for a peace which we can only
obtain in death, a desire which conflicts with a natural instinct for life.
The poem, which really is about a pause for a moment by the woods,
portrays only a tiny moment of a life-structuring conflict of forces. We
do not have simple figurative metonymy since the stop is not in itself
an identifying part of the sequence. If we are to interpret symbolically,
we must understand what transforms it into an identifying part, perhaps
Frost's somber choice of words or his choice of punctuation to permit
"lovely, dark and deep" to be read "lovely because dark and deep", a
reading which "lovely, dark, and deep" does not encourage. Perhaps a
reader can intuit when an element has become "identifying", but it would
be desirable to have more specific criteria for judging when symbolism
is metonymic. Fortunately, we can draw such criteria from David Lodge's
analysis of a piece by George Orwell.
David Lodge draws his example from George Orwell's "A Hanging",
which is a work on the margin between short fiction and the personal-
experience essay. In it, a stick held by the prison's superintendent
"acquires symbolic force by its repeated appearance", revealing "the
psychological tensions and moral contradictions of his situation" in
supervising the hanging. We have a metonymic symbol because the
stick is an object "entirely appropriate to its context", resulting in such
slight "violations of decorum" that "we scarcely register them as such
and the symbolic effect of the stick is almost subliminal" (Lodge 1977:
113-14). To put it in other words, (1) the stick is an element of the
sequence leading to the conclusion that capital punishment is barbaric;

(2) the stick alone does not immediately identify the entire sequence to
which it belongs; (3) the author has done something with the context
to transform the stick from a non-identifying part to an identifying
element. Orwell's analysis agrees with my claim that the reader's mind
retains the vehicle in metonymic symbolism: Lodge asks us how we
would react if the superintendent had done much more "bizarre" things
with the stick, "e.g. holding it between his legs like a phallus, or aiming
it at the prisoner like a gun". Alternately, "suppose Orwell gave the
superintendent not a stick but a cricket bat" which would have been "quite
out of place in this context". Then, says Lodge, the removal of any
sense of "natural contiguity" would have made the object "a metaphor-
ical rather than a metonymic symbol". In my proposal, calling the bat
a metaphoric symbol would assume that the reader infers, Oh, there's
really no cricket bat present, or some equivalent; while Lodge is not
specific on this point, he supports it by implication when he says that
"such alterations would transform the text from the metonymic mode
of realism or confessional documentary to the metaphoric mode of black
comedy or satiric fantasy" (114). We can infer that a reader could
maintain the realistic mode only by deciding that the narrator's seeing
the superintendent's bizarre actions (or the narrator's seeing a cricket bat)
has resulted from a sudden hallucination brought on by the narrator's
horror at the impending execution.
Since a metonymic symbol fits well into its context, this type of
symbolism has no requirement for a comparison to shock readers by
connecting elements from far-separated semantic fields, and thus it
removes all tension between similarity and difference. Expanding Lodge's
insight, we can envision the reader moving through nesting levels of
context, guided by the relationship of element to the sequence to which
it belongs, including the relationship of part to whole; not faced with a
self-destructing literal interpretation, such as a cricket bat at a hanging,
the reader's mind is not seeking a similarity within literal difference. The
transformation of a non-identifying part of a sequence into an identifying
association, combined with unusual deletion, draws a circle narrow
enough to nest the metonymic symbol within the principle of
contiguity.
300 RA YMOND 1. WILSON III
V. CONCLUSION
Metaphoric symbolism confers the advantage of flexibility. In metaphoric

symbolism, almost any word can become the vehicle for any tenor,
provided that the writer constructs a text that implies the tenor by cuing
the reader to some corner of overlapping meaning. In metonymic
symbolism, however, each tenor has available a far more limited number
of contiguous elements which can possibly be transformed by context
into identifying associations. Under Jakobson's paradigm, Ricoeur's
"allegory" is metaphorical symbolism and Ricoeur's "symbolism" is
metonymic symbolism. These observations require modification of
Ricoeur's comment that metaphor is "liberated language" while sym-
bolism is "bound", although Ricoeur attributes the boundedness of
symbol to "the capacity of the cosmos to signify" directly, thus limiting
the range of symbolism (Ricoeur 1978: 59). In my analysis, only
metonymic symbolism would be bound, while metaphorical symbolism
is as unbound as metaphor itself.
Loras College
NOTES
1 Ricoeur further explains his distinction between allegory and symbol in The Symbolism
of Evil (16).
2 Hans Osterwalder, T. S. Eliot: Between Metaphor and Metonymy: A Study of His Essays
and Plays in Terms of Roman lakobson's Typology, 1978, gives an excellent summary
of Iakobson's thought, focused for literary analysis (4-23); Osterwalder employs the
metonymic-metaphoric split to analyze Eliot's plays on the levels of structure, theme,
characterization, syntax, semantics, and morpho-phoneme; however, Osterwalder is not
interested in the application of the metonymic-metaphoric principle to symbolism, which
is at issue here. Osterwalder quotes Victor Erlich who draws on Iakobson to discuss the
metonymic quality developed in 19th century realistic fiction in the attempt to create "a
world-picture grounded in science and common sense" (Erlich 101). Christine Brooke-
Rose, in A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: lakobson' s Method Extended and
Applied to Free Verse, 1976, applies aspects of Iakobson's system; while mentioning
individual metaphors in Pound's poem, she is interested in this book neither in the
metonymic-metaphoric split, nor in symbolism.
3 Classical rhetoricians reserved "metonymy" for strict contiguity - "the crown" for
"the king" - and used "synecdoche" to describe part for whole - "sail" for "ship" - a
distinction preserved in all the standard literary handbooks (Abrams 1957: 36; Cuddon
1977: 385; and Lemon 1971: 73-74). In Metaphor, Terence Hawkes supplies an
excellent brief historical survey of the concept from Plato to the late 1960s; Hawkes points
out how Iakobson differs from the classical theorists. For Iakobson, both "metaphor and
metonymy can be sub-divided into other figures (simile is a type of metaphor, synec-
doche a type of metonymy) but the distinction between them remains fundamental, because
it reflects the fundamental dimensions of language itself' (79). We might benefit from
keeping in mind, however, that in the original usage, metaphor and metonymy fell into
a dauntingly long list of figures, no two of which formed an exhaustive dichotomy of
all language. In expanding the meaning of the terms "metaphor" and "metonymy" to trans-
form them from specific tropes into principles of all language, Jakobson, in effect, uses
both "metaphor" and "metonymy" metaphorically.
4 My pre-assumptions for this essay are (I) that exploring the concept of metaphoric
and metonymic symbolism is valuable, and (2) that such an exploration has not yet been
done.
5 In The Rule of Metaphor, Ricoeur spells out his differences with Jakobson (Ricoeur
1977: 173-75 and 191-93), but Ricoeur eventually holds that perceiving tension as the
essence of metaphor (his position) is compatible with Jakobson's concept of resem-
blance as a guiding principle (Ricoeur 1977: 193-200).
6 I am in the debt of Professor Jerre Collins of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
for the observation that if a person wished to connect the deletion principle to syntax,
that person could argue that major syntactic features such as subjects, main verbs, and
direct objects are not "usually" deleted, while minor syntactic features such as preposi-
tional phrases and adjectives are "usually" deleted. In that case, Lodge's notional primary
sentence would have to be The ships with their keels crossed the deep sea. Usual deletion
of minor syntactic features would leave The ships crossed the sea, while unusual deletion
would leave The keels crossed the deep. This would be a slight modification of Professor
Lodge's formulation, with the advantage of further systemitizing it.
REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H., A Glossary of Literary Terms (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1957).
Brooke-Rose, Christine, A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto: lakobson's
Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse, De proprietatibus litterarum, Series Minor
26 (The Hague: Mouton, 1976).
Cuddon, J. A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977).
Erlich, Victor, 'Gogol and Kafka: A Note on 'Realism' and 'Surrealism", For Roman
lakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Morris Halle (The
Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 100-108.
Hawkes, Terence, Metaphor, The Critical Idiom (London: Methuen, 1972).
Jakobson, Roman, 'Linguistics and Poetics', Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 350-77.
Jakobson, Roman and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton,
1956).
Lemon, Lee T., A Glossary for the Study of English (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1971).
Lodge, David, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology
of Modern Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977).
Osterwalder, Hans, T. S. Eliot: Between Metaphor and Metonymy: A Study of His Essays
302 RA YMOND J. WILSON III
and Plays in Terms of Roman lakobson's Typology, Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten,

Swiss Studies in English 96 (Zurich: Francke, Verlag, Bern, 1978).
Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil (1967), trans. Emerson Buchanon (Boston: Beacon,
1969).
- - , Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas
Christian University Press, 1976).
- - , The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in
Language (1975), trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello,
SJ. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
- - , "Imagination in Discourse and Action", The Human Being in Action: The
Irreducible Element in Man II, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analecta Husserliana
Vol. VII (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel, 1978), pp. 3-22.
J. ROBERT BAKER
THE RADIANT VEIL:

PERSISTENCE AND PERMUTATIONS
Allegory has such a curious history. Although its roots antedate

Quintilian, he provides a definition which proves remarkably cogent and
stable: "Allegory, which is translated in Latin by inversio, either presents
one thing in words and another in meaning, or else something absolutely
opposed to the meaning of words" (qtd. in Fletcher 74). It is, in other
words, a discourse in which words have multiple meanings. As it evolved,
allegory itself came to have multiple meanings, for it unfolded both as
a rhetorical mode and as a hermeneutical enterprise; thus, its history
became an allegory. As a method of writing, allegory tries to express
the deep, mostly inarticulate predicament of being human. As a strategy
of understanding, it seeks to render intelligible texts that a culture finds
scandalous, illogical, or shameful.! Both functions of allegory are con-
cerned with what Maureen Quilligan calls "the often problematic process
of meaning multiple things simultaneously with one word" (26).
Peculiar and problematic, the history of allegory is one of continued
vicissitudes. Allegory flourished in the middle ages both as a rhetor-
ical form and a hermeneutical endeavor. Scripture provided a rich source
for both allegory and allegoresis. Its account of salvation history provided
a model for the progress of the individual soul and so gave impetus to
allegories which traced that same progress; Prudentius and Dante each
wrote allegorical narratives which narrated the development of the
individual in grace. Simultaneously, the great project of interpreting
Scripture flowered in the three-fold method espoused by Hugh of St.
Victor and in the four-fold method articulated by Dante.
The Renaissance saw an apogee of allegory in The Faerie Queene and
the beginning of its decline. In this age allegory was adopted by
Protestants as a narrative mode, an adoption that culminated in John
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Even so the decline of interest in allegory
continued and reached a nadir with the Romantics, who dismissed
allegory as an artificial, even aberrant, trope. The Romantics valorized,
instead, the symbol as an organic figure more suited to the intimate
connection between mind and nature. Coleridge, trying to assess the
weakness of allegory wrote, "Now an allegory is but a translation of

304 1. ROBERT BAKER
abstract notions into a picture-Iangauge which is itself nothing but an

abstraction from objects of the senses; the principal being more worth-
less even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and the former
shapeless to boot" (661). After his unfriendly assessment, Victorians
and Modernists continued largely to reject allegory, even though
Americans persisted in employing it as a shape for accounts of their
singular experience, as in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and in
Melville's Moby Dick.
In the postmodern age, though, allegory has undergone a resuscita-
tion and perhaps even a second flowering. Novelists unabashedly use
it as a mode. Thomas Pynchon turns to allegory in Gravity's Rainbow
to critique culture and to trace its debilitating effects on individuals, while
Beckett and Kafka before him use the Protestant confession and meta-
morphosis as allegories of radical alienation. Flannery O'Connor and
Joyce Cary, on the other hand, return to a traditional use of allegorical
narrative to trace the progress of the soul in a world increasingly alien
and hostile, with O'Connor finding religious faith the end of such
progress and Cary resorting to irony. Beyond the revival of allegory as
a mode, theoreticians, especially deconstructionists, embrace the term
to describe linguistic features of the text.
Some account of this unexpected revitalization is necessary, for even
so opposed a pair as Walker Percy and Paul de Man both employ allegory,
Percy as a narrative method to ponder "Is she a gift and therefore a
sign of a giver?" (Coming 360) and de Man as a partial answer to his
own question: "Why is it that the furthest reaching truths about ourselves
and the world have to be stated in such a lopsided, referentially indirect
mode?" ("Pascal's" 1). In this light, an account is needed not only of
the resurgence of allegory in a postmodern setting, but also its permu-
tations as a mode and its adoption by theoreticians. Such an account might
be initiated by locating the allegory in Percy's The Second Coming,
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Cary's To Be a Pilgrim and measuring
how Paul de Man's deployment of allegory compares with traditional
allegorical writing and exegesis.
Such an account should take note of two varieties of allegory, strains
that Dante called the allegory of poets and the allegory of theologians.
The allegory of poets is an allegory of "this for that" in which the literal
sense is a fiction, serving only to express a second, more important
meaning (Singleton, "Dante's" 80). This type of allegory, resting on
the disjunction between signifier and signified, between sign and thing,
PERSISTENCE AND PERMUTATIONS 305
anticipates Saussure's theory of linguistics in which the relation between

these is utterly arbitrary and differential. The allegory of theologians,
on the other hand, posits the truth of the literal sense in itself; here
literal events reflect a second meaning without themselves being
denigrated. It is an allegory of "this and that" (80). Such allegory assumes
a correspondence of signifier and signified, a similarity between word
and event, between event and meaning. Walker Percy's semiotic theory
draws on the principles of this kind of allegory to suggest that sign and
object are linked in a relation of quasi-identity and that this relation unites
speaker and hearer, author and reader in a relation of intersubjectivity
as they become co-knowers and co-celebrants of reality. Both the
semiotics of Percy and the allegory of theologians affirm and even
demand the literal reality of the other, whether that other is text, world,
or person.
The allegory of poets and that of theologians both rely on C. S. Lewis's
definition of allegory as a narrative mode in which "it is essential ...
that the literal narrative and the significacio should be separable" (1).
The literal and its significance are not identical. Carolyn van Dyke
amplifies this separation, seeing it as the distinguishing characteristic
on which theorists and writers agree: "the early theorists are describing
and the allegorists are producing a perception of semantic double
exposure: expecting a single, particular referent, the reader finds a
multiple or syncretic one" (201). The double exposure, however, is
perhaps more true of the allegory of theologians, which adds significance
without obliterating or curtailing the literal. Van Dyke goes on to refor-
mulate Lewis's definition in structuralist terms and so delineate the
other type of allegory: "Allegory bases itself frankly on the disruption
of signifier and signified and therefore renounces the illusions of semantic
unity and directness prompted by such modes as symbolism" (27). Paul
Smith, in trying to account specifically for the persistence of allegory
in postmodemism, notes the same disjunction: "it is the nature of allegory
to stress discontinuity and to remark the irremediable distance between
representation and idea" (106).
While this may be true particularly of postmodem allegories, it
neglects the other tradition of allegory represented by St. Augustine
and Dante. For van Dyke and Smith, the literal sense becomes
altogether fictive, existing only to express a second meaning from which
it is absolutely distant. For St. Augustine, on the other hand, the literal
remains valuable in itself even as it reflects and signifies another
306 1. ROBERT BAKER
meaning. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine distinguishes between

signs and things, but takes notes of things that
are things in such a way that they are also signs of other things. There are other signs
whose whole use is in signifying, like words. For no one uses words except for the purpose
of signifying something. From this may be understood what we call "signs"; they are things
used to signify something. Thus every sign is also a thing, for that which is not a thing
is nothing at all; but not every thing is also a sign. (1.2)
The literal level of words mediate things and events, which in their
turn, signify other things so that "in this process of perpetual conver-
sion, res themselves thus become signa, transitory vehicles moving
toward a divine destination" (Whitman 79). An analogue may be found
in the incarnation which insists that Jesus is simultaneously fully human
and fully divine; neither of his natures subverts or frustrates the other.
Just so, in this tradition of allegory, the literal is not effaced or
abrogated by the second or allegorical meaning; both exist at once as
on a palimpsest.
Disruption and disjunction do occur in such allegories, but they are
likely to signal the protagonist's failure to read aright the literal events
he experiences or to manifest his devaluation of the world. In The Second
Coming, Percy describes disjunction as a psychological state experienced
by Will Barrett, who is alienated from the comforts and satisfactions
of family, friends, and culture and feels "so bad in good environments
that [he] prefer[s] bad environments" (Message 1). Percy employs a
mimetic allegory to show that Barret fails to understand the signs which
constitute his world and his own particular history. In To Be a Pilgrim,
Cary pictures a similar divergence as Tom Wilcher's inability to make
sense of a long-passed childhood and of a vanishing social order, and
his need to heal the distances between past and present, memory and
under-standing. In Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon expands the distance,
moving from the field of personal psychology to that of cultural
experience; he turns towards the more Platonic allegory of poets, using
its constitutive disjunction to figure the increasing psychic disintegra-
tion and ultimate dif-fusion of Slothrop. Paul de Man, in Allegories of
Reading and elsewhere, stretches the platonic allegory, focusing on its
inextirpable appearance in linguistic structures and suggesting the
impossibility of fixing a reality beyond the radical disjunction of
signifier and signified.
Novelists and theorists are, however, remarkably harmonious in
affirming the ethical nature of allegory. Gay Clifford represents an
PERSISTENCE AND PERMUT A nONS 307
exception when she argues that the purpose of allegory changes even
though its methods are static: "in the overwhelming majority of modern
narratives using allegorical methods - ambiguity moves towards doubt,
towards denial of the possibility of meaning independent of but shared
by author, hero, and reader; in The Faerie Queene, in common with most
allegories until the eighteenth century, ambiguity generates certainty,
conviction, the affirmation of meaning and value" (l05). She is cer-
tainly correct about the "continuity of method", but her sense of a
"discontinuity of purpose" seems not altogether exact, for even allegories
and theories that deny the possibility of meaning do not end simply in
ambiguity: they ask, just as traditional allegories do, for the reader to
be moved to action and response.
This didactic, homiletic feature of allegory has long been recognized
and has been a source of distaste for some readers. Allegory is addressed
to a reader or audience. The protagonist's struggle to understand events
reflects the reader's effort to understand the text. It is as if what the reader
sees with the eye and reads with lips must be converted into action in
his or her own life. Percy's The Second Coming, for example, closely
resembles the homiletic, spiritual aspects of medieval allegory: in tracing
the progress of Will Barrett, indeed, in the making of Barrett's soul, Percy
seeks not only to overcome the malaise of alienation so pervasive in
the twentieth century by representing and so sharing it, but also to bring
his readers to Barrett's own unstoppable affirmation at the end of the novel.
Even the more drastic allegory suggested by de Man in which the
possibility of meaning ends in dispersion, diffusion, and irrecuperability
has an ethical cast in its concern with the plurality of meaning. That
plurality, like its referential counterpart in more traditional allegory,
demands a choice, that is, an interpretation or engagement by the reader.
The reader must participate. Just as the allegories of Prudentius, Dante,
and Bunyan seek to move the reader "to belief and action" (Quilligan
220), de Man's allegories require the participation of the reader, for the
reader must enter the fray of allegorical narrative, electing now this
signification, now that; and any reader, according to de Man, willy nilly
finds him or herself forced to choose among the radical multiplication
of significations possible in the linguistic allegory that is any text. In this,
its purpose is as ethical as that of Prudentius, Dante, or Bunyan.
Contemporary allegories are also notably consistent in following
Dante's prescription that locates allegorical narrative in a digressive
method and a transumptive style ("Can Grande" 100, cf. Honig 4).
308 1. ROBERT BAKER
Method includes characterization, setting, and action as formal elements.

Allegory's concern with reading and rereading constitutes another irre-
ducible feature common to many contemporary allegories.
Nicholas Wolterstorff points out that fictional "characters are kinds"
(132); this may be especially true of allegorical characters who remain
essentially personifications. For all their fidelity to living persons, they
persist as decided abstractions, representing values and states of being.
Honig says, "Before we know who he is we discover what he is. We
are asked to recognize him first by physical signs: his clothing, his
burden, the paraphernalia he carries" (81). The quiddity of such
characters may well account for the ease with which they fall into
obsession.
If we were to meet an allegorical character in real life, we would say of him that he
was obsessed with only one idea, or that he had an absolutely one-track mind, or that
his life was patterned according to absolutely rigid habits from which he never allowed
himself to vary. It would seem he was driven by some hidden, private force; or, viewing
him from another angle, it would appear that he did not control his own destiny, but
appeared to be controlled by some foreign force, something outside the sphere of his
own ego. (Fletcher 40-41)
Allegory's characters derive in part from personification. Their appear-

ance in contemporary novels reflects the mode's roots in personification;
protagonists often signal their allegorical nature by their very names so
that Will Barrett is not merely a name, but also a sentence affirming
the mystery that Barrett will bear. Similarly, Tom Wilcher signals the
vacillations of Cary's protagonist and Slothrop heralds the entropy and
chaos toward which narrative and character descend.
As a second formal element, the setting in allegorical narratives is
at once concrete and dreamlike, and so, as Clifford (3) remarks, "unsafe"
or, at least, unstable. This apparent contradictoriness of allegorical
landscapes may be rooted in the fundamental nature of allegory, the
doubleness at its heart. Clifford and Rosemund Tuve point out how
allegorical landscapes are filled with visual details, and twentieth century
allegories present landscape as a plenum of particulars. Percy has been
lauded as a novelist of manners, among other things; Cary has recorded
the minutiae of a passing patriciate; and Pynchon with encyclopedic
gravity has chronicled a culture. At the same time, critics have observed
the dreamlike, unfamiliar quality of allegorical landscapes, and authors
of contemporary allegories present landscapes as ethereal and strange.
Barrett, in his alienation, finds the everyday world obscure and enigmatic.
In one of the most unexpected moments in contemporary literature, he

literally falls out of a cave and into a greenhouse. Wilcher discovers
the familiar hedgerows and lanes of Tolbrook deracinated by Robert's
nightmarish modernization; his familial estate is virtually unrecognizable
as Robert transforms the saloon into an equipment shed. Slothrop ranges
over post-war Europe, a Europe where not only the usual and expected
borders but also the customary orders of sequence and causality have
disappeared after the collapse of the Third Reich. In his world, the
explosion of the rocket precedes the sound of its approach.
The action of allegorical novels constitutes a third formal element
and is itself an allegory, for the action fuses two orders by projecting
the inner life and playing it out in the empirical world. Contemporary
allegories, like their antecedents, begin with waking or dreaming. Fletcher
proposes that this start points to the hero's isolation (348), and Honig
that dream or sleep is a prerequisite for allegory. Such sleep may precede
the novel as it does with Dante who comes to himself at the start of
The Divine Comedy. It suggests a prior stage of life from which recovery
is demanded; it may be a condition of being so caught up in the demands
of the quotidian that one is abstracted, unable to decipher the significance
that lies within the mundane. It certainly is an inchoate state in which
one is unaware of and oblivious to reality. Barrett suffers from petit
mal seizures from which he must recover or awake. Wilcher returns to
Tolbrook to awaken memory and conscience. Gravity's Rainbow begins
its epic sojourn with Pirate Prentice waking from a literal sleep in
war-time London. Dreaming, too, suggests a stirring from ordinary
preoccupations and an initiation into meaning. As with Bunyan, it is a
vision of ultimate truth and reality; it releases the protagonist from
abstractions and allows him or her to penetrate to the significant. Here,
too, allegory's ethical nature is revealed, for every reading, in fact, is a
kind of waking, a stirring from the ordinary concerns of ordinary life and
a rousing to the demands of facticity and meaning.
After the awakening of the protagonist, allegorical action proceeds
into a progress or a battle (Fletcher 151), both of which are concerned
with the troublesome dilemma of being human and both of which are
episodic and repetitive (Fletcher 35, Clifford 19). Thus, Barrett, appearing
like Redcross Knight, wanders the edges of a golf course, searching
for an answer to the question of the Jews' whereabouts and seeking
confirmation of God's existence. Wilcher, on the other hand, faces both
a generational conflict with Robert and a contest between augmenta-
310 1. ROBERT BAKER
tion and growth, between letter and spirit. Slothrop's romantic adven-
tures, though they end in irresolution and dissipation, resemble those
of Barrett. Slothrop, too, is another Redcross, one who never reaches
Gloriana's court.
Progress or battle, all allegorical action ends with apocalyptic vision
meant to be transformative. They end this way because ultimate meaning
and reality, even when empirical as in with Dante, are not wholly deci-
pherable. Fletcher, J. Hillis Miller, and Gerald S. Bruns all point to the
mystery before which allegories must come to a close. Bruns has
suggested that the radiant veil of allegory may be more a protection of
readers from the awesome truth towards which they tend than a failure
of the allegorical enterprise ("Allegory" 125). Just as Moses could not
look upon the face of God and live, readers cannot see directly the
luminous reality transfigured in the words of allegory. Allegories,
traditional and postmodern, are concerned with an inviolable belief which
cannot be fully personified or articulated. Their endings in the face of
these mysterious truths are connected with their ethical impulse, for
allegory can be completed only in the life of the reader, a point also
suggested by Tuve (15) and Josipovici (40). The reader quests and battles
in the very act of reading which, paradoxically, may never be finished
in this life.
In style contemporary allegories appear remarkably similarly to
Mishnah and its concern with glossing and reglossing. Quilligan writes
that all allegories signal that they are about language (15) and that they
are texts (25). They are also about the ability of language to reveal or
rejuvenate meaning. Usually, they take up a prior text, pondering its
meaning, offering commentary on it, and interpreting it by rewriting or
reading it. 2 Quilligan maintains that the Bible is the pre-text of allegories,
but the world as God's other book is also a pre-text for allegories (Honig
28, Josipovici 38, Clifford 64). Allegories announce themselves, their
concern with language and their grounding in a pre-test through the image
of reading and re-reading (cf. Tuve 54). Cowan makes Dante's and
Vergil's reading of the inscription over the portal of hell paradigmatic
of this allegorical manoeuver (21). The act of reading functions not unlike
a memento mori or a monk's inscription of the details of monastic life
into the illustrated margins of copied texts. It is an emblem of allegory,
a reminder of its self-allegorization (cf. Bruns, "Hermeneutics" 384), and
also an image of the reader of allegory (Josipovici 41, Quilligan 241
and 263).
Style also has to do with rhetorical or figurative language. In alle-

gorical narratives this language is related to their preoccupation with
design rather than mimesis. The concern is not with truth, but with, as
Carolyn van Dyke suggests, journey (180) or pattern. Thus, allegorical
narratives recognize themselves as fictions (Gellrich 513) and as acts
of language rather than closures of meaning. They use what Fletcher
labels as epideictic rhetoric (121) to present obscurity and clarity together
(73), thus, in their langauge, becoming allegories of themselves.
Finally, there is the adoption of allegory by deconstructionists, specif-
ically by Paul de Man, who in The Resistance to Theory observes that
"allegory names the rhetorical process by which the literary text moves
from a phenomenal, world-oriented to a grammatical, language-oriented
direction" (68) and who, in Allegories of Reading, argues that all writing
is allegorical, has meaning by "a preordained agreement" that is "con-
tractual, never constitutive" (204). De Man does not depart from several
aspects of traditional definitions of allegory - its polysemy and its
ambiguity. However, he does go further, insisting that allegory - in fact,
all writing - is linguistic and involves the loss of dyadic reading. He
contends that the literal and allegorical meanings of a text "fight each
other with the blind power of stupidity" (Allegories 76), and he denies
the possibility of any reading establishing definitively the truth or error
of a text.
With these formulations, de Man quits conventional conceptions of
allegory. The linguistic excludes the ontological and hermeneutical
approaches that allegories themselves call for. This exclusion may stem
from what Bruns has called the post-Enlightenment attitude ("Problem"
162). Moreover, the loss a dyadic reading does not result ipso facto in
complete indeterminacy or utter nihilism. As an alternative, both Charles
Sanders Peirce and Walker Percy postulate intersubjectivity as a possi-
bility beyond dyadic readings. De Man's sense of the conflict between
levels of meaning also does not accord with earlier understandings of
allegory which see it as working more often than not by addition, a
"this plus that" (Singleton, "Dante's" 79, cf. 80). Cowan even suggests
that, in this way, allegory is a device of bonding (30). Finally, de Man's
idea of the indecipherability of allegory and all texts neglects allegory's
usual ethical basis in which the reader must complete the text by deciding
in his or her own life the truth or error of an allegory. It may well be
that de Man uses "allegory" when "enigma" or "irony" might be closer
to the collapse to which he points.
312 1. ROBERT BAKER
Soul's progress or enigma, allegory continues its strange history in the

twentieth century. It appears in highly traditional, recognizable forms and
in largely innovative, unfamiliar practice. Closer examinations may
provide a sense of how these two trajectories overlap and diverge and
of how the strange, protean history of allegory becomes even stranger.
University of Notre Dame
NOTES
1 Maureen Quilligan and others identify this second sense of allegory as allegoresis. See,
for example, her The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979),
pp.29-32.
2 In this way, even allegorical narratives may share in the conservative strategy of
allegoresis, a strategy which Gerald L. Bruns discusses in 'The Problem of Figuration
in Antiquity', in: Hermeneutics Questions and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan
Sica (Amherst: U. of Massachusetts Pr., 1984).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante, 'The Letter to Can Grande', Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, ed.
Robert S. Heller (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P, 1973).
St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill, 1958).
Bruns, Gerald S., 'Allegory and Satire: A Rhetorical Meditation', New Literary History
11.1 (1979): 121-132.
Bruns, Gerald S., 'The Hermeneutics of Allegory and the History of Interpretation',
Comparative Literature, 1988 Fall; 40 (4): 384-95.
Bruns, Gerald S., 'The Problem of Figuration in Antiquity', Hermeneutics: Questions
and Prospects, ed. Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica (Amherst: U. of Massachussetts P,
1984), pp. 147-64.
Cary, Joyce, To Be a Pilgrim (New York: Harper, 1942).
Clifford, Gay, The Transformations of Allegory, ed. William Righter, Concepts of
Literature (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974).
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. H. J. Jackson The Oxford Authors
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985).
de Man, Paul, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979).
de Man, Paul, 'Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion', Greenblatt 1-25.
de Man, Paul, The Resistance to Theory, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 33
(Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota P, 1986).
Fletcher, Angus, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1964).
Gellrich, Jesse, "The Structure of Allegory", The Existential Coordinates of the Human
Condition: Poetic - Epic - Tragic: The Literary Genre, ed. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka,
PERSISTENCE AND PERMUT A nONS 313
Vol. 18 of Analecta Husserliana (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1984), pp.

505-519.
Greenblatt, Stephen J., ed., Allegory and Representation (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP,
1981).
Honig, Edwin, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1959).
Josipovici, Gabriel, The World and the Book: A Study of Modern Fiction (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1971).
Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963).
Miller, J. Hillis, 'The Two Allegories', Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W.
Bloomfield (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981), pp. 355-370.
Percy, Walker, The Message in the Bottle (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975).
Percy, Walker, The Second Coming (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980).
Pynchon, Thomas, Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973).
Quilligan, Maureen, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1979).
Singleton, Charles, 'The Irreducible Dove', Comparative Literature 9 (1957): 129-135.
Singleton, Charles, 'Dante's Allegory', Speculum 25 (1950), 78-86.
Smith, Paul, 'The Will to Allegory in Postmodernism', Dalhousie Review 62.1 (1982):
105-22.
Tuve, Rosemund, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 1966).
van Dyke, Carolyn, The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic
Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985).
Whitman, Jon, Allegory: The Dynamic of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1987).
Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 'Was Macduff of Woman Born?: The Ontology of Characters',
Religion and Literature 12.2 (1980): 123-139.
LEO RAUCH
IMAGERY AND ALLEGORY IN PHILOSOPHY
Let me begin by offering three texts for comparison. The first is

Macbeth's soliloquy: "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow ... ".
The second is Plato's Myth of the Cave. And the third is a passage of
straight philosophic prose (which I shall recite momentarily). The shared
theme that runs through all three texts is the illusoriness of so-called
"reality", and the consequent failure in most of our efforts to lay hold
of the truth. Consider Macbeth's words, "Life's but a walking shadow,
a poor player ... ", and let us set this notion alongside Plato's descrip-
tion of the shadow-play on the far wall of the cave, and how the prisoners
mistake those shadows for the truth.
As we well know, Plato (in Book VII of The Republic) has one of
the prisoners set free, and he is dragged, forcibly, up the rough and
steep path into the light of day. Outside the cave, he is temporarily blinded
by the sun. Gradually he begins to open his eyes, but only to look at
objects, their shadows and reflections, not at the sun itself. Finally his
is able to adjust his eyes so that he can look directly at the Sun, to
"see" it as the true source of the real and the good. When he goes back
down into the cave, the other prisoners see that his eyes are now useless
there. His earlier expertise at "shadow-telling" is now destroyed, since
he has grown accustomed to the sun's light. They deride what he has
done to himself, and they therefore swear to kill anyone who will try
to free them and lead them upward into the daylight of reality.
The implicit suggestion is that there is a reality outside the cave,
and a light in which to see it, even if men refuse to see it. Macbeth's
vision (in Act V, scene V) is more despairing: There is no such reality
and no such light. What light there is, is the faintly flickering gleam of
illusion: "And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty
death". Macbeth himself has had other moments of epistemic doubt:
"Is this a dagger than I see before me ... ?" But in that case his problem
was merely to distinguish the hallucinatory experience from the "real",
and there was as yet no question but that the "real" is indeed real. Here
in the "Tomorrow" soliloquy, however, it is the very status of the "real"
that is made the problem. Unlike Plato's text, Macbeth does not suggest

316 LEO RAUCH
that there is yet another "reality" to render this one false. Rather, it is
our "reality" itself that is false - and there is no other.
Both these texts rely heavily on metaphor as a way of presenting a
philosophic insight. We may try to put that insight into words: What
are Shakespeare and Plato saying? Why should we seek to put this "into
words" when what they are saying is already in words? Yet their use
of metaphor invites us to "translate" their metaphor into straight
"meaning", i.e. into philosophic prose. Here, then, is the third text, prior
to deconstruction and presumably exhibiting what it really is that the
other two are saying:
The putative realities routinely accepted by common sense are not realities at all, but
are snares and illusions. The confidence we place in them is unjustified, and it should
be dispelled. Further, such misplaced confidence impedes our search for what is truly real.
As long as a belief in "common-sense reality" persists, any attempt to arrive at truth is
likely to fail.
Is this what the other two texts "mean"? And how do they go about
"meaning" it?
I will bypass the thorny question of whether a translation of a poetic
text into its literal "equivalent" needs justification (assuming that such
an "equivalence" is valid). It seems obvious that if a metaphoric text is
a "covering" of its literal meaning, then its translation into literal terms
is a "discovering" or disclosure of what is implicitly there. Of course, we
may question this: the relation between the two is not unambiguously
that between figure and ground (or the metaphor and its base). On the
other hand, one would not want to insist that a literary text is entirely
sui generis - as though the underlying meaning of "Tomorrow, and
tomorrow, and tomorrow", etc. actually is "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow", etc., and nothing more. This approach would retain the poetic
dimension (which would be lost in translation) - yet would make it
invisible.
Clearly, the Macbeth text - although it does have its poetic flight -
does not employ elements of the fantastic, while the Plato text does.
(I am relying, here, on Tzvetan Todorov's notion of the fantastic, as
the "hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of
nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event". The Fantastic,
p. 25). Thus Macbeth talks about us in almost prosaic and naturalistic
terms, and his only departure from the prosaic is to the level of metaphor,
not the fantastic. That is, we are the fools whose way to dusty death
has been lit up by those countless yesterdays. It is the theme that is
IMAGERY AND ALLEGORY IN PHILOSOPHY 317
reiterated - at the level of the fantastic - in the Nietzschean Eternal

Return, except that there is in the Macbeth character none of the
Nietzschean "yea-saying" in the face of this despair. Plato, on the other
hand, does employ the fantastic, in the unbelievable and supernatural
metaphor of the Cave-scenario: prisoners are kept in a cave from birth,
chained so that they cannot see one another; their voices reverberate
off the far wall, and the prisoners think it is the shadows themselves
that are speaking. Their supposed "communication" with one another
is therefore delusive: individuals never speak to one another in a way
that enables them to identify themselves - whether to themselves or to
others. Further, some of the prisoners develop considerable skill in
"identifying" the shadows - but they never identify them for what they
really are (i.e. mere shadows). Thus their cognitive "expertise" is delusive
as well.
With this, there is the implicit suggestion that men could be "enlight-
ened" by some external power, even if it took something like a forced
"conversion". Plato's use of a fantastic scenario makes it possible for
us to explore his metaphor for its farther implications. Not so in the
Macbeth soliloquy. Lacking the element of the fantastic, the soliloquy
"means" no more than it says - namely, that there is nothing that we
can be "enlightened" to, and that the inevatibility of death renders all
such effort nugatory, the message to be finally disclosed "signifying
nothing". Thus we may see a fundamental difference that is made possible
with the use of the fantastic: to convey a vision whose "additional"
meanings are there for us to disclose in the dramatic terms of the
fantastic scenario itself.
A further difference between our two literary texts is in the degree
of possible agreement or denial on our part. As for agreement, we might
respond to either text by saying, "Yes, human life is like that ... ".
We might even fortify our agreement by supporting it with the third
text mentioned earlier, i.e. the piece of philosophic prose. Thus we would
say, "Yes, human life is like that - because the putative realities routinely
accepted by common sense are not realities at all, but are snares and
illusions ... " etc. But notice that although agreement on our part is
possible, and even expected (I presume) by each of the literary authors,
the scope of our denial is far more limited. Thus, in response to Macbeth's
soliloquy we might try to say (with the typical freshman), "It just isn't
so, that life is [nothing] but a walking shadow. That's only the way he
sees it. Life is more than that . . .".
318 LEO RAUCH
So a denial of the Macbeth text is "possible", however fatuous that

denial might be. Now consider the Cave-scenario. Is denial at all possible
here? Can anyone (even a freshman) say, "It just isn't so, that we're
all prisoners trapped in a cave ... I mean, I personally don't hang around
caves ... ". That is to say, a denial is possible only if we mistakenly
relate to the scenario in literal terms. And then an instructor would have
to explain, patiently, that the Cave-scenario is not intended literally, to
depict you or me, or any other individuals, but that it is meant to reflect
the essence of human existence, the human situation in the light of
insurmountable limits to human knowing, etc.
At one point, Socrates' interlocutor interrupts to say, "These are
strange prisoners", and Socrates responds with the pregnant words: "Not
so strange, but very much like ourselves". Here Socrates seems to be
resisting the attempt, on the part of his interlocutor, to see this as a
fantastic situation that is not at all applicable to ourselves in our natural
environment. But that would be the case only if Socrates did not indeed
regard the fantastic as applicable to ourselves in a direct way, through
metaphor. So even though he would appear to be making a straight-
forward empirical claim (i.e. Those prisoners are like ourselves), it is
evident that Socrates is speaking in broad metaphoric terms, about human
knowledge and its self-imposed limits. This being so, it makes no sense
to try to deny, literally, what Socrates is saying in his own language of
metaphor.
Only by translating the scenario into its prosaic "equivalent" can we
attempt a denial. Thus, if someone were to utter our third text, the
philosophic passage that begins: "The putative realities routinely accepted
by common sense are not realities at all ... ", we could easily deny
this in the manner of G. E. Moore, who rejected all such skepticism about
common-sense reality by saying: "Here is one hand, here is another".
Thus the advantage Socrates has in resorting to the use of the fantastic
is that it cannot be denied by Moore's simple gesture - unless, that is,
you first translate the Cave-scenario into the prose of our third text,
and thereby make it vulnerable to denial. Plain talk can be denied; poetry
can't.
Here, then, we see another basic function of the fantastic in philo-
sophic texts: i.e. to present a vision for which no denial is possible.
But if nothing about x can be denied, in principle, can x be said to
assert anything? If the fantastic vision cannot be false, can it even be
true? In philosophic jargon we might ask of it: If it cannot be falsified,
how can it be verified? If no falsifying conditions can be stipulated, in

principle, then no verifying conditions can be posited either. Then it
makes no difference with its supposed contrary - and then it is mean-
ingless!
In the early years of this century, Anglo-European philosophy -
emanating from the Vienna Circle and Cambridge University - made a
sharp distinction between semantically legitimate and illegitimate modes
of utterance: empirical statements, i.e. those susceptible of verification
in experience, were deemed legitimate; illegitimate was all figurative,
connotative and speculative (metaphysical) discourse. The condemnation
included all religious, political and literary utterances. Clearly no sentence
in a novel can be verified if it is fiction, nor can it be falsified. Hardy's
novel could conceivably contain the words, "Casterbridge is one hundred
miles from London", (it doesn't), but that so-called assertion could be
neither true nor false. Every judgment in the area of literary criticism,
too, was deemed to be unverifiable. Considered in cognitive terms, as
knowledge claims, all such utterances were condemned as being radi-
cally meaningless. The advocates of this policy were fond of quoting
the closing words of David Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding: in regard to any work other than a mathematical or
empirical work, Hume advises us to commit it to the flames, "for it
can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion".
In this view, up-dated to the terminology of twentieth-century seman-
tics, the only acceptable mode of speech is offered by the strictly
denotative language of science, with words that have but one meaning.
Not only was this the only legitimate game, it was the only game in town
- and the only town to play it in was the town that boasted, as its main
attraction, the Verification Theory of Meaning. (According to this theory,
the meaning of an utterance is nothing but a description of its mode of
verification, so that the utterances that are in principle not verifiable
on empirical grounds, are to be consigned, comme chez Hume, to the
outer darkness of utter meaninglessness.)
But the later Wittgenstein, having coined the phrase "language game",
went on to show that there were many more games in town, each with
its unique criteria of intelligibility. Religious, political and literary lan-
guages thus were (almost) restored to semantic respectability. Our three
texts - the Macbeth, the Plato, and the prosaic philosophic passage -
could now be related by means of a Wittgensteinian metaphor: Consider
the prosaic philosophic passage (presumably containing the literal
320 LEO RAUCH
meaning of the two figurative passages) as the central "city", the

businesslike Manhattan of language. Now Macbeth's poetic "restatement"
of the prosaic passage (although that restatement violates the strict
propriety of denotative language), can be seen as the nearby boroughs,
the pungent Bronx and Brooklyn of language use. And then Plato's
fantastic "version" of the central message, in its unbridled recasting of
the bald denotative statement, constitutes - qua fantastic - the fragrant
and glowing upper Hudson River valley of philosophic vision (although
it is for that very reason not to be taken at face value, but is to be subject,
at least in principle, to translation into terms that, say, Fifty-seventh street
can understand).
There still are the relics of the earlier age - A. J. Ayer and Karl Popper
- who still regard metaphysics (along with the fantastic, from which most
metaphysical utterances can hardly separate themselves) as deplorable
lapses of acceptable semantic conduct. By all means, they would say,
let us keep such lapses out of Manhattan, where the real work of science
and scientific philosophy is carried on and is too busy for the aromatic
seductiveness offered by figurative language.
What about the sweeping metaphysical visions, the stirring thought-
structures - unverifiable though they may be - of Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz,
Hegel? In these systems, it is the massive presence of the fantastic that
condemns them. Nodding to Hamlet's words to Horatio about there being
"more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy",
one Cambridge wag characterized such visionary philosophizing as "the
dream of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth".
As I see it, there are at least three ways to use the fantastic in philo-
sophical texts - three language-games we can play, each with its own
set of rules for what is semantically acceptable. That is, we can use the
fantastic to: (a) illustrate, (b) confirm, and (c) explore - although it is
likely that there are other such uses as well.
The first of these - the illustrative use of the fantastic - serves the
purpose of illustrating a philosophic doctrine with an example, as Plato
does with his Myth of the Cave. His doctrine posits a division between
two worlds: the "real" world which is accessible to reason alone, as
against the illusory world of sensation and ordinary experience. The great
advantage of the illustrative use of the fantastic for this dualistic doctrine
is that the fantastic imagery can be metaphorically applied to all the other
versions of such a doctrine and all other forms of dualism with which
it may be isomorphic. For teaching purposes, this has great economy: the
one cave-story can be used for any dualistic vision that may come along.
Dualism is an approach that is frequently seen in philosophy - for
by dividing the world into two (of anything) you automatically confer
an order and meaning upon the totality. Thus we can divide the world
into shadow and substance, body and soul, matter and mind, matter and
form, female and male, Hellenes vs barbarians, the this-worldly and
the other-worldly (or the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded", in
the words of William James), or light vs darkness (a la Plato). We can
even tum dualism back on itself, when we divide the world into two kinds
of people: those who divide the world into two kinds of people, and those
that don't.
If Plato's cave-story can be applied to almost all the other dualisms
one can think of, then that fact shows us that they are the same in essence.
Of course, the illustrative use of the fantastic in no way confirms the view
it illustrates; and this limitation would seem to reflect the fact that it
cannot be denied either. Qua illustrative, the fantastic has no cognitive
limits - but for that very reason it is limited in what it genuinely asserts.
The second use of the fantastic I call the confirmative use, namely that
of confirming an exploratory hypothesis. For example, one of the most
persistently troubling issues arising from the dualistic approach involves
the Mind-Body Problem: How can the body, which is mass occupying
space, interact with mind, which is massless, immaterial, and non-spatial?
(I am talking not about the brain, but about the mind, and that very
distinction is a further aspect of the problem.) How can an immaterial
thought, immune to material causation, make my material arm move?
The depth of the problem can be seen in some of the extreme means
employed to "solve" it. Thus, Descartes posits a pineal gland as the
point-like "place" of interaction between a spatial and a non-spatial
context. Other philosophers have denied the dualistic approach altogether,
as a way of ridding themselves of the problem: thus, George Berkeley
says there are no bodies, only minds; David Hume says there are no
minds, only bodies. With either approach the "problem" of mind-body
interaction is eliminated - but the result is an impasse which was
characterized by one British wit as: "no matter ... never mind ... ".
Perhaps the most fantastic "solution" is to admit that there are minds
and bodies, but to deny that there is any interaction at all between them.
322 LEO RAUCH
Rather, in this view, mind and body belong to two worlds entirely
independent of each other, the mental world and the corporeal world,
each with its own history distinct from the history of the other - and
the two "worlds" have been synchronized by God at the Creation (like
a film director synchronizing voice and image at the beginning of each
"take"), so that on the occasion of a rock colliding with my head (that
occasion being a corporeal event), I will feel pain (a mental event),
even though there is no causal connection between the two events at
all or between the two worlds and their inventories.
This Occasionalist doctrine, advanced by Arnold Geulincx
(1624-1669) and Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), is sufficiently non-
causal (and therefore non-natural) to qualify as fantastic: created things
cannot cause anything to happen; only God can, and he has synchronized
the two independent worlds so that their respective "occasions" coincide
conveniently.
Yet the presence of the concept "God" in an explanation indicates
the breakdown of explanation, not its success. Thus the explanatory
hypothesis (here, the utter separability of mind from body) is "confirmed"
by the use of the fantastic (here, God), except that the fundamental
activity of God in synchronizing the two worlds is not confirmed, in turn,
because there is just no way of doing so. What remains is a "confirma-
tion" that is a triumph of the human speculative imagination, in all its
silliness. By resorting to "God" we go beyond the need for other
"confirmation" in the strict sense, but we thereby succeed in imagina-
tively "confirming" whatever we wish.
The third use of the fantastic I call the explorative, with the purpose
of generating new hypotheses from existing ones. This is one of the most
constructive uses of the fantastic in philosophy, using it in order to see
where a hypothesis may lead. An example of this approach is provided
by Spinoza. We begin with the tenet that God is infinite. He must
therefore be infinite in every sense - because if there were a sense
wherein God is not infinite then He would be limited in that sense, and
thus He would not be infinite. Therefore there is no thing and no place
that is not God - for if there were a thing or a place that is not God
then these too would limit God. Therefore all is identical with God,
and God is immanent in everything. Therefore there is only one entity,
and that is God. And if there is only God, then God is the only substance,
and then you and I are merely "modes" of God. And then everything
that occurs is the working out of God's will, and whatever occurs could
not be other than it is. Then it makes no sense to pray to God to inter-
vene to change anything, since God cannot change the order He has
established, an order that is identical with His own nature. Therefore there
are no miracles. All is one, all is God, and there is nothing else.
This approach does appear to erase the distinction between nature
and the supernatural - along with the distinction between the Creator and
the created - since the one substance is causa omnium rerum and is
also causa sui. But if the "cause of all things" is also and at the same
time the "cause of itself', then what is called "nature" defies the ordinary
sequence of cause and effect, and thus negates all "naturalistic" (i.e.
conventional) explanation. (Thus Todorov's sense of the fantastic, as that
for which no natural explanation will serve, applies here.) From the
identity of Creator and created, the implication is that there is no dis-
tinction at all between the terms "God" and "nature". They are two names
for the same entity: Deus sive natura. Then everything occurs with total
necessity, and nothing is contingent - since anything contingent would
set a limit to the infinitude of God, and such a limitation is unintelligible.
Again: all is one, all is God, and there is nothing else.
Here is monism with a vengeance, and it dissolves (rather than solves)
every dualistic problem you could suggest. God is not at all transcen-
dent of nature, but rather is nature - and then mind and body are merely
two inseparable "attributes" of one identical God. What is so remark-
able about this fantastic system (again, taking the term "fantastic" in
Todorov's sense of that which is inexplicable in any but supernatural
terms) is the inevitability with which the implicit consequents follow
from their antecedents. One need only be moved by passion (i.e. the need
to follow an idea to its farthest implications) and the intellectual courage
to face its implications, whatever they might be. Of course, Spinoza's
passion and courage (in this sense) were matched by not one in his
time - but this fact in no way diminishes the explorative value of the
fantastic in philosophy.
To be sure, what we have in Spinoza is not a fantastic scenario
reflecting a perfectly intelligible theory - as in Plato's Myth of the
Cave - but a fantastic theory itself. This is made all the more fantastic
when we realize that it is merely the spelling out of implications already
inherent in a theological commonplace, i.e. God's infinitude. That com-
monplace item of doctrine seems altogether innocuous, and is even a part
of everyday religious jargon. What got him ostracized and excommu-
nicated was not that commonplace, but the fantastic spelling out of its
324 LEO RAUCH
implicit and necessary consequents. We have seen some of the bizarre

implications of that otherwise innocuous vision - i.e., that there is a God,
who yet does not precede his Creation; that there is a God, yet there
can be no prayer and no miracles, etc. How bizarre this is might be
seen if we were to construct a scenario that began with a God of
righteousness who yet invented the device in Kafka's "Penal Colony".
Yet we may say that it is precisely the point, in employing the fantastic
in philosophy, to cast light on that very strangeness - a light that is
there for us only when we climb out of the Cave.
Babson College
SHONA ELIZABETH SIMPSON
ONE FACE LESS: MASKS, TIME, AND THE

TELLING OF STORIES IN TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S
THE SAND CHILD
Sitting cross-legged in a circle, the men and women train their eyes on
the figure in their center. Breathless, the day itself holds still around them
for a second, a half-second, waiting. And into the expectant silence the
voice of the storyteller speaks; the day resumes its normal bustle, but
the seated listeners only lean forward a fraction more. They would not
want to miss a single word.
There is something fascinating in the figure of the storyteller. And
whether the actual telling takes place in a girl scout camp in Colorado,
or in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, or even in a market square in
Marrakesh, the teller of stories has captured the imaginations of writers
worlds apart in space and time.
Tahar ben Jelloun's The Sand Child revolves around the central figure
of the storyteller with his circle of listeners. Tahar ben Jelloun is a
Moroccan novelist, poet, and essayist who now lives in Paris as a French
national. He claims Beckett and Borges as his major influences, yet is
at the same time deeply indebted to the Arab literary tradition, espe-
cially that of the Thousand and One Nights with its series of open-ended
stories. The Sand Child begins when an eighth daughter is born to a
Muslim man in the ancient city of Marrakesh on the edge of the Western
Sahara; this man announces to the world he has had a son, not a daughter,
and brings up the girl as his son, naming her Mohammed Ahmed. This
grants the child freedoms unknown to the other women of her society,
but obviously forces her to hide her true identity. The Sand Child is
the story of this girl/boy Ahmed, and is told through the voices of
different storytellers who repeatedly interrupt each other and are all
competing to reveal what really happened to Ahmed. She may have
died alone but at peace with herself, writing her journal. Or she may have
been forced to join the circus as a freak, where she was violently raped
and eventually committed suicide. Or she may be the faceless woman
who visited Borges' library and read the Koran there. Through the
open-endedness of all the stories, the voices and narratives gradually
accrue until the reader becomes to wonder about the identity of the

© 1994 Kluwer Academic
326 SHONA ELIZABETH SIMPSON
storytellers themselves: they mayor may not be the same person, who
mayor may not be the person whose story they tell.
By raising such questions, the novel becomes an allegory about the
act of storytelling itself, and draws into question the dominant princi-
ples of the culture which produced it - and eventually its own authority
as a work.
The city of Marrakesh is the southernmost large city in Morocco. It
is seen as the transition between the Arabic civilized north and the desert.
In it is a square, the Djemma Fna, or Place of the Dead, where a twenty-
four hour circus occurs, complete with jugglers and acrobats - and always
the storytellers, begging for money, bantering with the crowd, refusing
to reveal the outcome of their stories until they are paid. The first
storyteller in The Sand Child, a professional in the market square, says
he has Ahmed's own journal which she wrote in private, in a culture
where the written word occupies a highly prestigious position; yet the
kernel of her story becomes the seed for all the other oral, publicly told
stories which make up The Sand Child.
It speaks of a woman exiled from her society because of her sex and
forced to wear a mask; The Sand Child builds itself out of the image
of a mask hiding some inner rottenness or corruption. Amar, one of
the later non-professional storytellers, discusses the Arabic word for
corruption:
It is applied to materials that lose their substance and virtue - like wood, for example,
which retains its outer surface and appearance but is hollow. There is nothing inside; it
is undermined from within; tiny insects have nibbled away at everything under the bark.
(112)
Ahmed's disguise as a man has hidden her true self since birth. Not
knowing her real face, she feels like "a mistake, an absence ... a little
pile of sand, a hollow tree trunk" - a body without soul or a destiny (116).
Ahmed (as a man) would have liked to bum "away his masks, would
be naked, shroudless, buried straight into the earth, which would eat
his limbs until it brought him back to himself" (4). His whole life
consisted of "the need to make himself mask upon mask" (61). Even
Fatuma, an older women who claims to have had a similar experience
to Ahmed's, and thus suggests someone Ahmed could have become, uses
the same images when she explains "I would change my image, change
my face, but keep the same body, and exult in wearing that mask" (129).
The freedom the mask provides - freedom from the confinement of being
TAHAR BEN JELLOUN'S THE SAND CHILD 327
female in this society - initially excites her, as it does Ahmed. But

eventually, she realizes that "one cannot move from one life to another
simply by crossing a bridge"; to become a woman, to find her real
identity, she has first to rid herself of her past, of what she was, "enter
into oblivion and remove all traces" (131). To escape the masks, she
has to destroy the past, change her life, her name, her habits, her
traditions, her god, everything she had been up until then. But destruc-
tion of the past can take place only through a re-conception of the
notion of time.
Ahmed, trying to efface the past in order to be reborn, attempts to
do so by writing her (his?) story down in a journal. Writing brings
peace to Ahmed's troubled mind; she aspires "to calm and serenity -
especially to write" (96). On the other hand, silence or the act of
not-writing is linked repeatedly to madness in Ahmed's mother, whom
"madness and silence ravaged" (63). This woman is described as sinking
"into a gentle, silent madness" and we later find out that the silence is
caused by deafness; she had poured hot wax into her ears (68, 99).
Only by writing, only by thus speaking in an otherwise silent world, could
Ahmed avoid madness and at last "speak, exist in his truth, live without
a mask" through his letters and journal (62).
The act of writing itself holds great significance in the Arabic
civilization of which Ahmed is a part. The hour of writing, "the moment
when the rooms and walls, the streets and floors ... are moved by the
profusion of words, ... is a solemn hour, when everyone withdraws to
meditate and to record the signs struck by the syllables" (81). Written
words thus have the strength to move stones; even punctuation marks
have power, an attitude the storyteller demonstrates when he remarks that
there are only "a few commas holding us back" from an adventure.
And it is heresy to change the written word of God, the Koran, although
Ahmed got "great pleasure out of undermining all that ferver, mistreating
the sacred text" (25). Written words themselves are given a corpore-
ality which the spoken word does not have. In the mosque, sentences
are written on the carved ceilings. This is a literal feature of much Islamic
architecture which incorporates script (usually passages from the Koran
or the ninety-nine names of Allah) into the actual ornamental design
of the walls. Calligraphy thus plays an important part in interior design.
The last storyteller of the book - the man in the blue turban - further
links words to solidity by saying that "each stone is a page of writing"
(25, 162).
But beyond just stones, the words written in a book seem to take on
a body of their own. Ahmed describes how she can feel sentences
"stroking [her] skin, touching [her] at the most sensitive points of [her]
body" (71). The first storyteller warns us that we can gain access to
the story "only by traversing my nights and my body. I am that book. I
have paid with my life to read its secret ... I felt the book become
embodied within me" (5). The blind troubadour, a later speaker, asks,
"if I had died, would they have found a corpse or a book?" (154), for
books are his life and his body. Finally, Ahmed, trying to discover her
body, explains at one point that her "body was that page and that book.
In order to waken, it had to be fed, filled with syllables and emotions"
(86-7). So her writing becomes inseparable from her search for her
new identity, her gender, her sex, her body. It also becomes the text
we have before us: The Sand Child.
By this time, however, the "truth" of any kind of writing has been
called into question. With the confusion of the storytellers' identities,
their individual authority cannot be trusted. For instance, when the second
storyteller interrupts the first, he reveals that the first was reading not
from the unexpurgated notebooks of Ahmed but from the Koran, saying
"it's very peculiar - he looks at the verses and reads the diary of a
madman, a victim of his own illusions" (49). Changing the words of
the Koran implicates the first storyteller in heresy; moreover, the
suggestion that the Koran contains Ahmed's story implies that this story
is perhaps central to the Arabic people, since it is contained in their
holy book. After the second storyteller dies of a broken heart, at least
five other voices emerge to continue the story in five different ways.
All the versions are different, from Salem's account of a violent rape
to the twelfth century poet quoted by Borges - who actually appears
as one of the storytellers. Salem, the first to speak, claims that he only
"suspects" what happened; he does not "know" the truth (106). Yet his
version appears as believable as those of the previous storytellers, and
he himself later believes his own story as the truth which he has somehow
discovered, saying to his friends, "I didn't want to tell you the end of
the story when I found out about it" (110, italics mine). This casts doubt
upon the truth of anyone's story. So, when Amaer says that Salem is
wrong, and that he, Amar, knows the true ending of the story, we have
our suspicions before he begins; moreover, he claims he has rescued
the manuscript from the dead body of Ahmed herself in the morgue -
but we have already heard at least two other claims for authentic manu-
scripts, and the authority of both has been questioned (110). Later, Amar
himself admits that he mixes his "own imagination" with the manu-
script (123). Even Borges, the blind troubadour, readily confesses that
telling stories means "falsifying or altering other people's stories" (133).
The distinction between author and character breaks down further
when ben lelloun himself appears as the man in the blue turban, the
last storyteller. As he speaks, we realize that he was also the first, the
man who "dared to recount the story and destiny of the eighth birth"
(159). He describes how he left in "the middle of the story" and how,
when he came back, "the story was already over" (159). Like Pirandello,
the first and the last storyteller has lost control over the story he began;
he explains near the beginning that he does "not know where the story
is leading" (44). In the course of his telling, the story actually overthrows
him, chooses other tellers, so that he must sit amongst the audience
and listen as the next storyteller, a former "member of the audience",
admonishes, "Don't trample over our storyteller. Let him go" (59, 50).
The difference between audience and reader, character and teller
becomes even more tenuous when the first storyteller addresses his
listeners as "readers" and they respond as such (27). In addition, because
first person voices narrate the entire book, some confusion exists between
speakers; at certain points, the identity of the storyteller almost seems
to fuse with that of Ahmed. For example, at the beginning of the chapter
entitled "The Man with a Woman's Breasts", Ahmed begins speaking
directly, without any sort of framing device. Hislher words, "My retire-
ment has lasted long enough", immediately follow a section in which
the storyteller makes such comments as "I see a moth escape from the
handwritten words" (82, 80). The tone of the two chapters is similar,
the words are related; their speakers cannot be readily distinguished. The
presence of a voice which appears to be none other than an omniscient
author's only adds to the confusion. This voice, which doesn't belong
to any of the characters, not even any of the storytellers in the book,
describes that cleared square (102), the reactions of Amar and Fatuma
to Salem's story (110), and the blind troubadour: "The man who spoke
was blind. He did not seem to have a cane ... " (133).
The authority of anyone voice is destroyed by the presence of so many
conflicting claims to "the truth", so the "true" version of Ahmed's death
and life cannot be established. The story of Ahmed has become many
stories; concomitantly, Ahmed as a character disappears as his or her self
becomes increasingly fractured. Ironically, it is only through this loss
of self that Ahmed at last finds himself free. As the fragmentation of

perspective accrues, Ahmed speaks more and more often of wanting to
lose his "face and its image forever" (ben Jelloun 116). He "no longer
knew what kind of a creature he" is since he can no longer see himself;
he has no reflection in mirrors (115). But the very fact that his "face is
disappearing" leaves him saying to himself, "Don't try to hold on to it,
let it go; you'll be better off without it, one face less" (116).
Fatuma links the disintegration of self to the breakdown of linear
time by speaking of her desire to be "suspended, without past or future"
and explains that the only way to achieve this state is to get rid of the
self: "It would be good to have a spare face - or better still, no face at
all. We would just be voices", she says (128, 125). This last phrase
exactly describes the events of the novel - every character becomes "just"
a voice, telling its "scrap of the story" (159). In the eight months and
twenty-four days after the second storyteller dies, Ahmed becomes not
one person but many, a host of voices. Rather than finding a new face,
s/he wants just to lose all faces. S/he has different names in all the
different versions of her story, ranging from Mohammed Ahmed to
Lalla Zahra to simply the letter "A" - as Amaer says, this "might have
been Aysha, Amina, Atika, Alia, Assia ... " (113). Fatuma, ben Jelloun
himself, all the storytellers identify with some aspect of Ahmed's story
and so with Ahmed's character. Similarly, the narrative no longer follows
a linear progression; deaths and births jumble together in the mouths
of different tellers - we are not sure if Ahmed is even one person. There
is no coherence, no way to fit the different versions together. Indeed, how
could a history of a person be possible when the person has ceased to
exist as a single subject?
Thus, by a confusing and circuitous route, The Sand Child has arrived
at a fluidity of existence where individual identity and time are also
circular, contrasting with the traditional Aristotelian ideas of linear time.
This Western idea of linear narrative - and thus of the act of writing
itself - comes under criticism by the end of The Sand Child. Fatuma
(the older Ahmed) loses "the big notebook to which" she had consigned
her story, but it turns out that it is only through that loss that she gains
access to the garden of eternity where she describes stories as being swal-
lowed by the sea and "where not a word must enter" - a place of no
words, no stories, no face, no time (132). The man with the blue turban,
the last and first storyteller, reveals written words to be just another mask,
like that of body and time. He presents the final notebook, saying "every-
thing is here", but the book is blank: "nothing remains of what time
consigned this book" (157-8). Everything in nothing, the book emptied
of its writing is empty of the past, of the lives of Ahmed which had
been pieced together. Yet its emptiness, its missing words are, for the
storyteller, "the first signs of [his] deliverance. In the end [he], too, forgot
everything" (164). Forgetting, then, is deliverance. Ahmed tried to escape
the past and all the masks it created by writing; but only by losing that
writing did s/he succeed. It seems that written words, then, are the final
mask; the full moon which "burns away" Ahmed's masks at the begin-
ning of the book is the same one which "effaces the words" of the final
notebook (1, 158). Because the written word is held in such weighty
esteem by the culture Ahmed is trying to shed, freedom from it creates
the final escape from that culture and the gender roles it imposes. And
although the speaker at the end is the storyteller, not Ahmed, he, too,
could only escape the power the story had over him through its efface-
ment and disappearance, through its transformation into a completely
oral tale.
So not even the author is to be trusted as a messenger of the "Truth".
In fact, no such thing as "truth" exists; both novels replace the idea of
truth with the telling of stories. As Samuel Beckett himself said, one
of the only certainties in life is the inability to keep silent (the others
are the existence of birth, death, and some form of living in between).
The need to tell tales - this perhaps takes a step towards explaining
the centrality of the storyteller in two cultures as different as that of
The Sand Child and our own, the importance of that person "mysteri-
ously touched by the magic wand of wisdom and reciting, of
remembering, of reinventing and enriching tales told and retold through
the centuries" as Mario Vargas Llosa explains in The Storyteller (165).
For the world is perhaps nothing more than a story. Or, indeed, nothing
less.
However, the destruction of the written word cannot be entirely
believed in in the novel, since it cannot escape the simple fact that it
is actually written. The author is highly conscious of his position as
writer; he actually figures in the novel as a character, as a storyteller
telling stories about other storytellers. Tahar ben Ielloun links himself
to the untrustworthy figure of the first storyteller, who stops at a key
point in the narrative to ask for "bread and dates" like a modern-day
Scheherezade before he will finish his story (12). As a direct result of
this self-portrayal within the structure of the novel, the authority of the
authors' own tales comes into doubt. Ultimately, he thus acknowledges

that this book is only a story, and that the storyteller must make his living
- even to the point of writing a sequel, The Sacred Night, which seems
to be nothing more than an apology to the critics who accused him of
exoticizing Morocco and Islam for his French audience.
The Sacred Night turns its back on the fluidity of narrative and gender
taking shape in The Sand Child. Ahmed gives a first person account of
her own true story, basically saying all the storytellers in The Sand
Child got it wrong and telling the readers what "really" happened. The
Sacred Night ends with Ahmed as a woman who has had a forced
clitorectomy - the female version of castration - while in prison. While
the first book presents gender as socially constructed, the sequel destroys
all the multiplicity such a view creates, making a woman sex-less. In
the last scene of the book, Ahmed finds herself worshipping a man called
The Saint, a man whose feet she used to wash.
Tabar ben lelloun should be criticized, then, not for his attack on Islam
but for giving in to his critics and pinning down the fluidity, the multi-
plicity of sexuality and voices he left so intriguingly open in The Sand
Child.
Duke University
VICTOR KOCA Y
LITERARY CRITICISM AS ALLEGORY:

SARTRE'S SAINT GENET
Lents, paresseux, maussades, les faits s'accommodent

a la rigueur de I' ordre que je veux leur donner mais il
leur reste ext~rieur. J'ai I'impression de faire un travail
de pure imagination.
Antoine Roquentin commenting on his biography of the
Marquis de Rollebon
Sartre, La Nausee.
Sartre's intention in writing Saint Genet, originally conceived as an

introduction to Gallimard's Complete Works of Genet, is best revealed
by the following oft quoted passage:
To show the limits of psychoanalytic interpretation and of marxist explanation and that
only freedom can account for a person in his or her entirety, to make this freedom visible
in its struggle with destiny, at first crushed by its own fatalities and then turning against
them in order to digest them little by little, to prove that genius is not a gift but a
solution invented in cases of despair, to rediscover the choice a writer makes of himself,
of his life and of the meaning of the world up to and including the formal traits of his
style and of his composition, and the structure of his images, the uniqueness of his
tastes, to follow in detail the history of a liberation: that is what I wanted; the reader
will decide whether I have succeeded. 1
It is perhaps useful to remind our readers of Sartre's intentions in
composing Saint Genet because these intentions must form the backdrop
of any comments as to what Sartre actually achieved in writing this
monumental work. It is our contention, however, that Sartre's work on
Genet is allegorical in character.
It is perhaps surprising to hear Sartre's reading of Genet called an
allegorical reading in the sense that allegory usually means a metaphor-
ical or even a symbolic interpretation of a text as opposed to a literal
or more "serious" type of interpretation, but it is more and more evident,
especially in the light of recent biographical research done on Genet's
life, that Sartre's reading is less an exposition of Genet's life and work
than it is an attempt to make Genet conform to Sartre's psychoanalyt-
ical approach to literary criticism. The definition of allegory that I shall
use is a general one, expressed in the following passage taken from the

© 1994' Kluwer Academic Publishers.
334 VICTOR KOCA Y
Encyclopedia Universalis: "Far from representing naive or primitive

thought, or on the contrary an artificial yet sophisticated technique, it
[allegorical thought] reflects an anxious and audacious search for a reason
in history".2 To the extent that Sartre attempts to reduce or transform
Genet's life and work so as to make them both conform to a general
set of principles, his Saint Genet is allegorical. I will speak of two
levels of allegory in Sartre's work, the first being Sartre's reading of
Genet, of which I will give a brief resume, and the second level refer-
ring to the techniques Sartre uses to develop his reading, techniques taken
from historical, literary and philosophical disciplines.
According to Sartre, Genet's life can be divided into three parts
which correspond to the major divisions of Sartre's work: namely, the
miserable vagabond, the legendary hero of his acts and poems, and the
synthesis of these first two parts which, of the vagabond, makes the
writer. Sartre calls these three parts the three "metamorphoses" of Genet.
According to Sartre, Genet, a ten year old child, is caught stealing;
what exactly he was stealing remains unknown. He is condemned by
the adoptive family which is raising him and ultimately by the whole
of bourgeois society which defines Being according to a person's
possessions while at the same time forbidding theft. Genet's goal then
in stealing, according to Sartre, was the procurement of things by which
Genet would be able to define himself. The result, however, is that Genet
is humiliated. The child is traumatised. In Sartre's work this theft is
transformed into a rape, first, since in Genet's case both activities (theft
and rape) involve being surprised from behind, and second, because in
French the two words are similar: "vol" becoming "viol" by the simple
insertion of the vowel "i". (The two terms are not related etymologi-
cally however, "voler" - to steal - being a metaphorical use of the verb
"voler" - to fly - which comes from the Latin word "volare"; and "violer"
- to rape - having its root in the Latin noun "vis" meaning force or
violence.)
The outcome of this humiliation, of this symbolic rape, is Genet's
desire to do evil. He wishes to become the thief that society sees in
him; he wants to be the Other that society has created with respect to
his own subjectivity; in short he wants to be object-like. Hence, his
consciousness is reduced to that of an object-like creature. He doesn't
understand the world, he doesn't understand the use of tools. He doesn't
understand the communicative use of language. He becomes homosexual
in order to advance his pursuit of evil, in order to be as thing-like as
LITERAR Y CRITICISM AS ALLEGORY 335
possible, which implies that Genet becomes a passive homosexual in

order to reach the epitome of abjection whereby, like the child surprised
in the act of stealing, he can once again be taken from behind, each sexual
act repeating and symbolizing his early childhood theft and the resulting
humiliation he suffered. 3
Genet eventually realizes, according to Sartre, that evil in itself, in
its pure form, is impossible because evil is non-being and cannot, there-
fore, be attained by an act which in itself is good, for every act
participates of the Good. Genet becomes an aesthete. He sees beauty
in crime. He discovers his virility (although he remains homosexual)
and learns the use of tools which helps him to break into other people's
houses, at least in his novels. (In actual fact there are few reports of
Genet's activities as a thief and most of those known border on the
comical. One such report has Genet snatching a suit off a clothes rack
and bolting out the door, closely followed and soon overtaken by a
policeman. Other accounts have Genet, a pupil, stealing worthless objects
which he would redistribute to his classmates.)4 Genet soon learns,
however, that the aesthetic pleasure of his thefts, as beautiful as they may
be in themselves, are insufficient to make of him, in the eyes of those
who see him objectively (i.e., everybody but Genet himself), a subject
which thinks and feels.
In order to realize the perfect union of subjectivity and objectivity 5
Genet must undergo yet another metamorphosis, and this time he becomes
a writer. As a writer Genet can explain his acts, condemn himself and
yet make of his own acts, acts of glory, which he can then sing about;
while the reader, that Other who looks and judges, can still scorn Genet,
can still make of Genet an execrable thief and vagabond, an object of
fear and hatred. According to Sartre, Genet as a writer is playing a
game in which Genet emerges ever victorious. The child who was the
object of a metaphorical rape and this Other created by the condemning
judgements of a whole society are finally reunited, and Genet at long last
can taste revenge.
My comments on Sartre's reading of Genet will be directed at three
different aspects of his work, the historical inaccuracy with regard to
Genet's life, the method of literary analysis used, and Sartre's implicit
moral philosophy. Sartre's Genet begins his adult life at the age of ten
when the child is surprised stealing some object, probably of little value. 6
Sartre doesn't mention, however, that Genet was a good pupil who, at
the age of thirteen, received his certificate of primary studies with
336 VICTOR KOCA Y
"mention bien". 7 This may not seem like much of an accomplishment but
it shows that Genet was a gifted or at least a serious child, and one
must take into consideration that such an achievement was rare for
children placed with adoptive families during their school years. 8 This
means that Genet was able to continue his studies in spite of an earlier
humiliation and that the traumatic consequences of his earlier theft would
have been delayed for at least three years.
One might object that the importance of an event in one's life is
not measured by a value inherent in the event itself but rather by the
importance that the subject attributes to the event, and in a sense this
is correct. But at the same time it is misleading to formulate, as Sartre
does, such a consequential hypothesis based on, at best, sketchy evidence.
Is it true, for example, that Genet's adoptive mother did not hesitate to
steal?9 In any case, in the manuscript form of The Thief's Journal, Genet
refers to his adoptive parents as "good people", a compliment rare in
Genet's work. 10
One might add, as Albert Dichy and Pascal Fouche point out, that
Genet's adoptive parents were neither farmers nor important land owners
as Sartre affirms. Rather, Charles Regnier was a carpenter - his workshop
was on the ground floor of his home - and his wife, Eugenie, kept a
tobacco store also in their own home. 11
As an adolescent Genet is placed in a correctional institute after
repeatedly running away from the school in which he was placed sub-
sequent to receiving his primary diploma. Genet manages to escape
from this institute, Mettray, the subject matter of his novel Miracle of the
Rose, and, according to his so-called autobiography, he joins the French
Foreign Legion. In fact, Genet never belonged to the Foreign Legion
but to an elite regiment of the French Army and his military career
spanned some six years, after which he deserted and led the life of a
beggar thief, in France and Spain especially, but in other countries as well.
Sartre would have us believe that everything in Genet's life points
to his solitude, to his complete isolation from any form of social life,
and reiterates the metaphorical rape he experienced in childhood. Sartre
would also have it that Genet's "metaphysical intuition" orients him
towards a vague Platonic realism;12 that is to say that Genet is a kind
of object wanting to be a saint. He does not know the use of tools,
those instruments fabricated by men in society that speak of our
integration in that very society.13 For Genet, according to Sartre, tools
are merely objects without function. And neither does Genet under-
LITERARY CRITICISM AS ALLEGORY 337
stand nature which, in any case, is only an extension of society for

Sartre. 14
The result of Genet's isolation is that he is exiled from nature as
well as from miracles in the sense that miracles make us aware of our
isolation and Genet is not aware of his. At the age of eighteen Genet
is a kind of non-human being. Born into a society which condemns
him, raised by a family to whom he must be grateful, he becomes a
sort of monster or rather a pure thing that understands nothing in his own
society. He is the ghost errant of a man in search of the impossible,
absolute evil, or so Sartre would have us believe. Love for Genet is
only a pretext for eroticism.
Rejected by society Genet throws himself, perhaps miraculously, into
the medieval feudal system. He escapes bourgeois society and values
by cultivating his own solitude, which, however, does not evolve. In
solitude he is obliged to reflect upon his memories of youth and on his
previous, rather happy life in society. Speaking of Genet's early life Sartre
concludes with the following remark: "Whence an essential feature of
this adolescence: Genet has no history. Or, if he does have one, it is
behind him" .15 It is precisely behind Genet, however, that Sartre finds
Genet's history which he presents in psychoanalytical fashion.
Besides being historically inaccurate Sartre's reading of Genet can also
be said to be based on a dubious method of literary analysis. The his-
torical information which Sartre uses to analyse Genet is gleaned in those
works Genet completed prior to the publication of Saint Genet in 1952,
which means that Sartre did not take into consideration most of Genet's
plays. This is important in that the later plays are more directly, or at
least more apparently concerned with aesthetic vision than are the earlier
novels; and the more aesthetic character of the plays, it can be argued,
helps to form an interpretation of Genet's objectives in writing the novels.
In retrospect, one could argue that this aesthetic character even domi-
nates the biographical data (often inaccurate) presented in his works.
In an interview with Hubert Fichte, Genet claims, for example, that his
objective in writing was not so much to reveal his own life as it was
to express his relation to the language in which he wrote. 16 That is to
say, that when writing his novels Genet was perhaps more interested in
aesthetic effect than Sartre's biographical reading of his work would lead
us to believe.
For the purposes of his psychoanalytical reading of Genet, Sartre
considers the events told in the novels to be the life of Genet. For Sartre
338 VICTOR KOCA Y
Genet's works are the expression of Genet the author such that Genet,
while still an object for others, becomes a creator of characters in his
efforts to become God-like. He is the creator of characters and at the
same time he is the characters he writes about. In Sartre's words this
author who resembles Proust because of his homosexuality, his quietism
and his Platonism, is also a host of literary characters including Stilitano,
Bulkaen, Divine, Harcamone, Erik and Querelle - all characters from
Genet's prose works.
I would object to this type of criticism. The characters in Genet's
works are characters created by Genet. In this sense they are perhaps
revealing as to Genet's psyche, but they do not constitute Genet himself,
his life and his aspirations, as Sartre suggests. That is to say that Sartre's
psychoanalysis is in fact a psychoanalysis of characters in literary works
that Sartre then substitutes for Genet himself. One must remember,
however, that the author and narrator of a literary work are separate.
When one reads a novel one is not reading the life of the author, one
is reading a text composed in accordance with certain of the author's
goals which I will call aesthetic. 17 The novel may contain a vision or a
metaphysics of life but the content of the work cannot be taken for real
events that would constitute the real life of the author.
Sartre's "biographical" reading of Genet's works is all the more
puzzling since Sartre claims that it would be absurd to explain Genet
according to his impulses when it is precisely against these very impulses
that Genet hopes to rediscover his autonomy.18 According to Sartre, Genet
is false, a liar, a pervert, a virus and a parasite. 19 The real subject of
Genet's novels, says Sartre, is the progressive dissolution of the exterior
world in the mind of the poet. Genet's work up to the point of the
publication of Saint Genet represents for Sartre ten years of literature
equivalent to a psychoanalytical cure. 20 Genet, the "little masturbator"
in Sartre's words, transforms the nightmarish joy of masturbation and
homosexuality into a literary form which cures him and allows him to
know real happiness?1 While it may be possible to understand litera-
ture as the rather naIve expression of the unconscious, I would argue
that Sartre's endeavour is contradictory in that Sartre completely anni-
hilates the autonomy of the author, an autonomy which, he says, Genet
was supposed to have achieved through the writing of his novels. That
is to say that Genet's work cannot be a conscious attempt to produce
works of literary value, and at the same time represent a rather uncon-
scious or animalistic pouring forth of his own history. It would seem
LITERARY Cf\.~ 'ICISM AS ALLEGORY 339
that unconscious or unreflective expression in and for itself could not

constitute a psychoanalytical cure of any form, and that the attempt to
write literature, that is works of aesthetic value, precludes the type of
reading that Sartre makes of Genet's works. The aesthetic endeavour
implies the willing production of a represented world or at least the
willing transformation of the real world which cannot then be reduced
to the simple expression of reality.
The allegorical character of Saint Genet is yet more apparent on a
philosophical plane. Although Sartre never wrote the work on ethics
he once planned to write, one can perhaps consider Saint Genet as a
step in a moral direction. Succinctly put, Sartre's moral philosophy is
Kantian in its form and vocabulary. Like Sartre, Kant believed that the
human being is an actor in the world in the sense that human beings must
act of necessity if they are at the very least to continue to exist. Further,
all interests are practical according to Kant; even speculative thought
is complete only when it fulfills practical ends.
Unlike Sartre's moral philosophy, however, Kant's moral law implies
a conception of the sovereign good founded on the inclination and natural
needs of man. The sovereign good cannot be a material object because
if it were, the concept of the sovereign good would no longer be "pure";
if the goal of an action were a real object, or even the pleasure or
happiness of the actor in question, the maxim of the corresponding action
could not be universal, thereby giving rise to eventual antagonisms. In
Kant's philosophy the sovereign good transcends us; its pursuit describes
an infinite moral progression. One must understand, however, that the
notion of sovereign good is founded not on a transcendent God but in
reason itself.
It is not my objective here to pronounce judgement on the Kantian
moral law, but to show that Sartre's conception of ethics is similar to
Kant's although not quite as convincing. For Sartre, as for Kant, the
human being is an actor who realizes his potential only through his
own acts; however, while Kant proposes the sovereign good as the goal
of all action, in Saint Genet Sartre proposes the Good as that by which
all acts are judged. The Good in Sartre's thought is not the Kantian
sovereign good - a concept which transcends our very acts - it is
Existence itself. Existence is Good. Therefore, what is produced and
comes into existence is also Good, as is the act by which something is
made to exist. Instead of founding his moral law, as Kant did his, on
the notions of Freedom, God and Immortality, Sartre founds his moral
340 VICTOR KOCA Y
law on the notions of Freedom, Existence, and Nothingness. Con-

sequently, Sartre's moral law (which is usually expressed as follows:
"if I want freedom for myself I want freedom for every other individual")
replaces the Kantian notion of sovereign good with an object, exis-
tence, although in an absolute sense. This creates a problem in that one
cannot make absolute existence the object of a particular act. One must
propose a particular object to be realized, thereby introducing material
existence into the notion of the sovereign good, thereby causing the entire
moral framework to collapse.
In Saint Genet Being is Good, Evil is Non-Being, although it is true
that Sartre equates Being not with the natural world but with the social
system, because the social system is created by human beings it would
seem. 22 Evil then becomes the equivalent of imaginary space because
both are negations according to Sartre. Even beauty is Evil for, like
Evil, it is mere appearance posing for an absolute Good. According to
this definition of good and evil, acting, which is already the beginning
of being, is an engagement of one's freedom and therefore participates
in the Good. Murdering a child, a scene from one of Genet's novels, is
not in itself evil because it involves an act by which the actor realizes
his freedom by participating in the world; it is rather the thought of killing
the child that is evil.
Obviously a complete understanding of Sartre's ethics, if such is
possible, would involve much more than a reading of Saint Genet. It is
interesting, though, to take note of some of the comments made about
Sartre's philosophy in general. Iris Murdoch, for example, recognizes the
Kantian form of Sartre's moral imperative, and adds that Sartre's moral
law goes beyond that of Kant for, as she says, "Kant did not specify
precisely what the categorical demand of reason would be in any par-
ticular cases of treating a man as an end".23 Or, commenting on Sartre's
notion that all values depend on freedom, Herbert Spiegelberg writes
that "in cases like these Sartre seems to be starting from original and
significant observations, only to be carried away to paradoxical formu-
lations bordering on the nonsensical". 24
The outcome of Sartre's moral philosophy for the understanding of
Genet, is that Genet as a youth is involved in the impossible pursuit of
evil for Evil's sake. Because every act by definition participates in the
Good, Genet's endeavour is hopeless, his goals are illusory. According
to Sartre the realization of Evil is impossible, the Being of Evil is
nonsense. It is evident, then, that Genet's failure is not so much Genet's
failure as such, as it is the result of Sartre's paradoxical reasoning. As
LITERARY CRITICISM AS ALLEGORY 341
Kant makes quite clear, Being in itself cannot be considered the sover-
eign good. The sovereign good is not a thing created or a social system;
rather, these are usually, and perhaps naIvely, the expression of an attempt
to realize the sovereign good.
My comments here have been directed at three different aspects of
Sartre's Saint Genet, the historical, the literary, and the philosophical.
It is my contention that historical inaccuracy, questionable literary
methods and philosophical paradox make of Genet, at times God-like,
at times thing-like, an entity polarized between the concepts of hero
and saint, criminal and traitor, passive and active homosexual, the evil
of consciousness and the consciousness of evil, and simple good and evil.
That is to say, Sartre's Genet seems to float about, carried this way and
that by Sartrian dialectics, such that Sartre's Genet becomes, simply
put, an attempt to make the details of Genet's life and work take the shape
of Sartre's thought. Etienne Souriau defines literary allegory as a
narration in which the characters represent ideas;25 in the sense that
Sartre's Genet is the expression of Sartre's philosophy, his reading of
Genet is allegorical.
My objective here is not to condemn the practice of allegorical
criticism, which perhaps invariably becomes a philosophical reading of
a literary work, nor is it to condemn Sartre's reading of Genet, for Sartre's
goal is not so much to reveal Genet's life history to the reader as it is
that of "making sense" of Genet. That is to say, in Saint Genet Sartre
is attempting to find "a reason in history", an endeavour which corre-
sponds to the definition of allegory in the Encyclopeadia Universalis
cited at the beginning of this paper. I would add, however, that Sartre's
reading of Genet is more a game of smoke and mirrors than a comment
on Genet's life and works. My objective is to show that Sartre's reading
of Genet is in fact allegorical, that it transposes Genet as a man and as
an author into the realm of Sartrian dialectics, such that Saint Genet is
more a working out of Sartre's own moral philosophy than it is an
exposition of Genet's attempts to produce literature. This particular work
of Sartre's is perhaps more valuable for understanding Sartre than in
coming to terms with Genet's literary works. Succinctly put, Sartre wants
to make of Genet a kind of object-thing, a being devoid of subjectivity.
Hence his exaggerations: Genet belonging to the French Foreign Legion
rather than being a member of the French Army, or Genet the orphan and
bastard as opposed to Genet's childhood happiness and "good results"
at school. Sartre's reading of Genet is in fact based on the illusion that
a human being can be at one time an object in-itself and at another
342 VICTOR KOCA Y
time an object for-itself, and on the consequent illusion that the foremost
desire of man is to unite the for-itself and the in-itself in a kind of
supernatural transcendence of the human condition. It would, however,
be quite possible to understand Genet, the author, as an example of "evil"
according to Kantian morals, as expressed by Jean Lacroix, whereby evil
results when the free-will accords supremacy to the senses over and above
reason. 26 In this respect one could discuss the theme of sensuality in
Genet's works in an attempt to understand Genet himself, although such
an endeavour would of course be extra-literary. On the aesthetic level,
it would be possible to discuss Genet's portrayal of rites and ceremonies
in the context of Bataille's work on eroticism as the source of ritual.
Or, one might consider Genet's works from the perspective of the
individual's desire for love taking the form of the written word. These
approaches are only suggestions but would all constitute, if properly done,
a study of an aspect of Genet's work which could then be useful for
understanding Genet. A "complete" understanding of Genet would,
however, seem impossible.
To conclude I would like to reiterate a suggestion made by Richard
Webb who composed an annotated bibliography of Genet criticism
(published in 1983). According to Webb, Genet's reputation up to the
1960's was based almost entirely on newspaper and magazine articles
because academic work on Genet was scarce. It may be, according to
Webb, that Sartre's Saint Genet stifled criticism for almost a decade.
In any case, it is time to return Genet to literature, literature to Genet.
St. Francis Xavier University
NOTES
1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Saint Genet (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), p. 645. All references to this
work, although given in English, are to the French edition. Translations are mine.
2 Translation is mine.
3 For Sartre homosexuality is not biologically or physiologically determined, but is rather
the result of a choice. One decides to be homosexual, for whatever reason according to
Sartre, and one is therefore responsible for this choice. Needless to say, many scholars
would reject this aspect of Sartre's thought in so far as it applies to Genet.
4 Dichy, Albert, and FoucM, Pascal, Jean Genet Essai de chronologie 1910-1944 (Biblio-
theque de litt~rature fran((aise contemporaine de l'universit~ de Paris 7: 1988), p. 48-53.
5 According to Sartre's existentialism every human being desires the unity of the
for-itself and the in-itself (Cf. Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes
& Bowes, 1953, 1961), p. 68. Hence, Sartre makes of Genet at first an object, then a
LITERAR Y CRITICISM AS ALLEGORY 343
subject, and finally the union of objectivity and subjectivity in the form of a writer.
6 For Sartre this theft constitutes Genet's "original choice", his desire to become
somebody by asserting his own will. The notion of original choice distinguishes, according
to Sartre, existential psychoanalysis from empirical psychoanalysis although both methods
attempt to reconstruct the totality of the individual (Cf. Paul Perron and R. Le Heunen,
'La Psychanalyse existentielle', in: J. Le Galliot, ed., Psychanalyse et langages litteraires
(Editions Fernand Nathan, 1977), p. 157-186. However, according to Merleau-Ponty,
the notion of original choice is a contradiction. If one can "choose" the choice must
originate somewhere, in the individual's past, in social norms etc. (Phenomenologie de
la perception), p. 501-502. See also W. Desan, The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1954). One might add that Sartre's notion of a "pre-reflexive conscience"
is, for H. Spiegelberg, the equivalent of the psychoanalytic unconscious [The
Phenomenological Movement, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965), p. 487.]
7 Moraly, J. -B., Jean Genet, la vie ecrite (Paris: La Difference, 1988), p. 19.
8 Dichy, op. cit., p. 53.
9 Sartre, op. cit., p. 20.
10 Dichy, op. cit., p. 31.
11 Ibid., p. 30.
13 Ibid., p. 290.
14 In our society, according to Sartre, Nature is only the reflection of a paid holiday.
The man from the city on holiday thinks he is "surprising" vegetables in their wild
habitat and minerals enjoying their freedom. If a peasant happens across the field, he
too becomes a vegetable (Sartre, op. cit., p. 300). Sartre wishes, it would seem, to draw
our attention to the impossible overcoming with respect to human beings of the gulf
that exists between man and Nature. In La Nausee this theme is represented by the
notion of "nausea".
16 Fichte, Hubert, Jean Genet (Frankfurt am Main und Paris: Qumran Verlag, 1981).
17 In his book, The Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye makes a similar distinction
between factual and non-factual genres. He writes: "What we have been calling assertive,
descriptive, or factual writing tends to be, or attempts to be, a direct union of Grammar
and logic" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1973), p. 245. Frye continues:
"Literary prose results from the use within literature of the form used for discursive or
assertive writing" (ibid., p. 263). Sartre seems not to make this distinction when dealing
with Genet.
19 Ibid., p. 278, p. 373, p. 578.
20 Ibid., p. 662.
21 Ibid.,p.617.
22 Ibid., p. 181.
23 Iris Murdoch, op. cit., p. 68.
24 H. Spiegelberg, op. cit., p. 487.
25 Souriau, Etienne, Vocabulaire d'esthetique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1990).
26 Lacroix, Jean, Kant et Ie kantisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (Que
sais-je), 1966, 1991), pp. 89-90.
PART FIVE
ANNEX
MICHAEL BARBER
THE FRAGMENTATION AND SOCIAL

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST IN
TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED
Families reunited around a holiday meal annually rediscover the frag-

mentation of the family history into diverse and at times conflicting
memories, and they regularly set about socially reconstructing their
common past, often without attending to the phenomenological under-
pinnings of such processes. In a similar fashion, the reader of Toni
Morrison's novel Beloved finds herself rushing forward toward the
discovery of a hidden past remembered and interpreted through the
diverse perspectives of its characters. With the help of phenomeno-
logical concepts, I intend to explore the factors involved in the
fragmentation and social reconstruction of the past in Beloved. Finally,
I will consider how fiction itself can entail a kind of social reconstruc-
tion of the past and thereby situate Beloved with reference to current
discussions of allegory.
1. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE PAST
"Reconstruction", as I employ the term, implies no idealistic creation

of a past which mayor may not be there. On the contrary, even for
Morrison's fictional characters, the past stands there in all its massive-
ness, waiting to be apprehended, as Sethe tells her daughter, Denver.
Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going
on. So clear. And you think it's you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It's when
you bump into a rem emory that belongs to somebody else. Where I was before I came
here, that place is real. It's never going away. Even if the whole farm - every tree and
grass blade of it dies. The picture is still there and what's more, if you go there - you
who never was there - if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen
again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. 1
In addition, this past exerts its power whether one is aware of it or not,
as, for instance, when Sethe's spirit fell down under "the weight of
things she remembered and those she did not" or when Sethe's sudden,
surprising recollection of her mother's hanged body impels her to "do
something with her hands because she was remembering something she

348 MICHAEL BARBER
had forgotten she knew".2 Edward Casey reiterates Sethe's realistic notion
of the past when he observes that dominant paradigms of memory, which
mistakenly reduce it to a passive, photographic copying of the past, at
least correctly appreciate that the past is not manipulable, neutral matter
without any form or life of its own. 3
However dense the past may be, it breaks down for successive gen-
erations who no longer have access to the lived present of their ancestors
and who can recapture that past incompletely only through scattered,
partial memories. When Paul D arrives and Sethe informs Denver that
Paul knew her father, Denver's thoughts roam this chasm between
generations separating her from a father she never knew.
They were a twosome, saying "Your daddy" and "Sweet Home" in a way that made it
clear both belonged to them and not her. That her own father's absence was not hers. Once
the absence had belonged to Grandma Baby - a son, deeply mourned because he was
the one who brought her out of there. Then it was her mother's absent friend. Only
those who knew him ("knew him well") could claim his absence for themselves. 4
Because we can never become contemporaneous with predecessors in the
strict sense, as Alfred Schutz noted in The Phenomenology of the Social
World,S Denver is forced to construct an inadequate composite of her
father on the basis of the fragmentary memories of his mother, his spouse,
or his friend.
Not only is the past perceived through piecemeal memories across
generations, but it is also refracted through the diverse memories which
agents carry as they pass from the status of consociates who share the
same time and space to that of contemporaries who share the same time
only. While the passage of history effects the decomposition of the past
in the first case, spatial relocation produces it in the second. The night
when the Sweet Home companions execute their escape illustrates this
dispersion of the past into diffuse memories. The group had hatched their
plan months before, with Sixo and Thirty-Mile Woman obtaining the
information, with Paul D and Halle's whole family agreeing to it, and,
of course, with the constant necessity for modification in the light of
unforeseen events, such as Sethe's developing pregnancy. In the intimacy
of a group-relationship between consociates, such as these face-to-face
relationships developed from the time of Mr. Garner, interactors can
check signals and revise plans immediately. Such group relationships
are quite fragile, though, as the dissolution of this group since the con-
tingent occurrences of Mr. Garner's stroke and Mrs. Garner's illness lead
to the ultimate dissolution of the group.6
FRAGMENTATION AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 349
The failure of the escape plan transforms this group of tightly-knit

consociates into distant contemporaries. Paul D, Thirty-Mile Woman, and
Sixo are discovered at the creek by the schoolteacher and six whitemen.
The Woman escapes never to be heard from again, Sixo is executed,
and Paul D is forced to pull a wagon with a bit in his mouth like a
horse. Meanwhile, the nephews drain the milk from Sethe's breasts,
and she informs Mrs. Gamer, undergoes a punitive flogging at the hands
of the nephews, and finally, to the surprise of all, escapes with her
children. The only face to face relationship remaining occurs when Paul
D, pulling the cart, sees Halle by the chum, speechless and deranged,
his face smeared with butter. At this point, with their consociate
connections shattered, each surviving member of the escape-plot,
separated from the other members, relates to them as contemporaries,
sharing the same temporal period, but spatially far distant from each
other, beyond any possibility of communication, even through letters.
Each person, particularly Paul D and Sethe, is left with memories
coalescing into a construct of the others, memories of what was supposed
to have occurred that evening but did not, and untested beliefs about what
the other did or where the other was.?
Sethe, for instance, remembers that Halle failed to show up as
promised, and she interprets this as his abandonment of her and the
children for a better way of life - a belief corroborated, in her opinion,
when Paul D arrives and makes no mention of Halle's death. Of course,
Sethe's construct of Halle must be revised when Paul D divulges his
memories of Halle by the chum, his face covered with butter - events
inaccessible to Sethe until her meeting with Paul D eighteen years later.
Furthermore, Paul D himself never understood Halle's madness until
eighteen years later when he learned of Sethe's being drained of her milk
and assumed that Halle had helplessly witnessed it. s The rushing sequence
of events on the night of the escape constitutes a dense and complex
past whose memories and interpretations could have easily been
adjudicated, had the circle of consociates remained intact. But when those
events disband this circle and cast these consociates forth as remote
contemporaries, their past splinters into a kaleidoscope of fragmented
memories and interpretations which await the possibility of assemblage
it some future date which chance mayor may not bring about.
Part of this fragmentation of the past results from the fragmented
character of the perception in the present. Sethe fails to understand Halle's
not appearing when he should have the night of the escape because she
350 MICHAEL BARBER
does not know that he presumably was witnessing the very event she
endured on the ground, but from a perspective hidden from her - in
the loft. In the perceptions of the present, one's spatial perspective on
an scene or object prevents one from seeing that scene from another
perspective, and at times it even prevents one from even realizing that
someone else may be seeing that scene from a different perspective.
This fragmented character of perception, which Husserl emphasized, is
frozen and preserved in memory especially if consociates cannot
exchange positions and arbitrate perceptions because they have been
suddenly removed from each other and transformed into contempo-
raries. Of course, not only one's position in space and time, but also those
social affiliations and personal interests which make up one's bio-
graphically determined situation affect what one grasps in the present and
what is often perpetuated in memory.9
The past is fragmented not only in the sense that memories inade-
quately mirror the fullness of the past, but also in the sense that often
the remembered events themselves possess a kind of directionality that
seems to find no known fulfillment. For instance, Sethe remembers that
the Sweet Home group all shared a common project aimed at escaping
and finally ending up in a state of freedom somewhere, but in the house
on Bluestone Road prior to Paul D's arrival, she knows that this project
was fulfilled only for her and her children. Regarding the others, she
is left with only memories of their projects aiming almost emptily at a
goal of whose attainment or non-attainment she would never have known,
had Paul D not found her. Similarly Baby Suggs remembers how the past
physical features of her children indicated trajectories of development,
whose outcomes she can only imagine because the institution of slavery
ripped these children from out the face-to-face intimacy of the family
and converted them into contemporaries in another locale.
Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with own
- fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize
anywhere. She didn't know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how
they held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What color did Famous'
skin finally take? Was that a cleft in Johnny's chin or just a dimple that would
disappear soon's his jawbone changed? Four girls, and the last time she saw them there
was no hair under their arms. Does Ardelia still love the burned bottom of bread? All
seven were gone or dead. 10
In addition to metamorphosing consociate intimacy into contemporary

anonymity, both the institution of slavery and the emancipation meant
to correct it introduced a mobility that compounded the difficulties of

recovering the past through any interchange of memories. Under the
emancipation "odd clusters and strays of Negroes wandered the back
roads and cowpaths from Schenectady to Jackson ... running from
dead crops, dead kin, life threats, and took-over land," chased by debt
and "talking sheets", each's past history of sorrow anonymous to the
other. As a result of such mobility, Baby Suggs, when liberated, wonders
how even to begin to try to find out what happened to her family. After
two years of messages written by the preacher's hand, the results are
"pitiful" since she only finds out that the home of her original owner,
Whitlow, was gone, and that she could not write to her daughter's
slaveowner, named Dunn, "if all you know was that he went West"Y
The trauma of the past, particularly under the brutality of slavery,
prolongs this disintegration of the past into so many repressed, uncom-
municated memories. Paul D buries his haunting memories in sex and
work or locks them in the tobacco tin in his chest so tightly that "nothing
in this world could pry it open". For Sethe, every mention of her past
life hurt. In touching on the questions the schoolteacher posed in his effort
to tabulate the animal features of the slaves, Sethe breaks off her
conversation with Denver, who had come to recognize that the "single
slow blink of her eyes, the bottom lip sliding up slowly to cover the
top; and then a nostril sigh like the snuff of a candle flame" were all
signals that "Sethe had reached the point beyond which she would not
go". With the arrival of Paul D, whose "blessed" manner prompted
women to tell him about a past they did not communicate with others,
Sethe finds herself "tempted" to trust and remember. She does reveal
herself to him, but only gradually and cautiously, mentioning, for
instance, cryptically at first only that she went to jail rather than go
back to Sweet Home after schoolteacher found her. As Paul D recounts
his final sight of Halle, both he and Sethe together realize that "saying
more might push them both to a place they couldn't get back from". Since
the sharing of memories involves the coming back to life of a deadened
traumatic past and "anything dead coming back to life hurts", it would
have been more expectable that these characters would have remained
self-enclosed with the puzzle-pieces of their past lying adjacent to each,
never to be fitted together. 12
A final cause for keeping the past secret, especially one's guilty past,
is the anticipation that the recipient of revelations of the past might
pass moralistic judgment upon it. Sethe exemplifies the obverse of this
352 MICHAEL BARBER
principle, when, pressed about Stamp Paid's newspaper clipping, she

reveals the horrific central event of the book to Paul D because she detects
in his eyes an every-ready love, "easy and upfront, the way colts, evan-
gelists and children look at you: with love you don't have to deserve".
But her trust and openness prove to be misplaced since Paul rebukes
her for behaving like an animal in the murder of her daughter. Actions
such as Paul D's immature condemnation do more to suppress any sharing
of the past rather than to promote its divulgence and reintegration. In
contrast, the compassion requisite for bringing to light the past can be
developed through the accumulation of experiences which lead one to
alter earlier rigidity, as in the case of Stamp Paid, whose discovery of
a young girl's scalp in the river leads him to regret his earlier harshess
with Baby Suggs's despair and resignation over white people's cruelty.13
2. THE SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST
According to Paul Ricoeur,14 narrative, as a legitimate modality of the

poetic act examined by Aristotle, attempts to bring concord to the
distentio animi which Augustine unearthed and bemoaned. Morrison's
work has illuminated a falling to pieces of the past which goes beyond
the mere unfolding of time in individual consciousness. The past
splinters into memories in the passage from one generation to another
or from the intimacy of consociates to the anonymity of contempo-
raries, who look back to a moment of rupture when all the knowledge
and limitations of a consociate present were frozen and who wonder
whether the past projects of others have ever found fulfillment. Such
memories, particularly those of trauma or guilt, may be destined to remain
isolated, concealed fragments unless their bearers find empathetic subjects
who elicit disclosure.
Morrison's narrative, though, also shows this disintegration of the past
being overcome. Generations overlap and talk with each other. Hence,
Paul D and Sethe inform Denver about the father she never knew, and
Denver learns from Baby Suggs that her father was an "angel man",
who liked runny eggs, loved animals, tools, and crops, learned to read,
and fixed a pully so his disabled mother could stand in the morning. After
Sethe's mother's hanging, Nan, her companion on the slave ship from
Africa, acquaints Sethe with her mother's unique love for Sethe from
the moment of birth. Paul D, who cannot remember his own mother
and father, envies four families of slaves who had been together for a
FRAGMENT A nON AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 353
hundred years in Maryland, preserving their past across four genera-

tionsY
Morrison's narrative style represents this rebuilding of the past across
generational barriers in an interesting fashion. Morrison usually presents
a third-person narration in which the narrator describes "from inside" the
character's thoughts and feeling. 16 For example, Denver's initial recol-
lection of the story of her birth, whose details she could only be aware
of because of conversations with Sethe, includes the feelings Sethe had
during the escape such as the feeling of the "little antelope" within her,
the clanging of her head, or the alive sense of her own nipples. At one
point within Denver's recollections, Sethe goes back to her own memories
of her own mother picking crops while Sethe was being cared by an
eight-year-old child. The narrator's third person perspective mutes itself
by making Denver appear to be relating her own inner thoughts and
then elides the differences between Denver's recollecting and Sethe's
in such a way that we are not sure whether Sethe is narrating herself
or whether we are obtaining Denver's recollection of Sethe's recollec-
tions. 17 This narrative method resembles actual processes of memory in
which, as Max Scheler has observed, it is often impossible to distin-
guish what has come from others and what is our own. 18
But more importantly, Denver's memory of her mother's memory of
her mother points to a remarkable feature of human consciousness, which
Edmund Husser! analyzed under the rubric of intentional implication. 19
Not only are acts and their objects embedded within other acts, but one
generation's memories of the previous generation can be embedded in
the memory of a third generation subsequent to both these previous
generations. Perhaps the greatest remedy for the unravelling of the past
through time is to be found in human consciousness itself which can
encompass in a single moment the thoughts of diverse people of diverse
times.
While individual consciousness gathers the dispersion of the past by
including within itself the memories of a society of persons, the recovery
of a lost past also relies on persons and circumstances outside of
consciousness. The mere circumstance of sweating on the way to Baby
Suggs's Clearing brings to mind Sethe's perspiration upon awakening
on the banks of the Ohio just before meeting Stamp Paid. Trees, railroad
tracks, doors, white stairs, or a corner of the house call up personages
and events now long gone. At times, the mere silent proximity of another
person, associated with past occurrences, recalls those occurrences, as
354 MICHAEL BARBER
for instance, when Paul D's and Sethe's nearness to each other in bed
stirs private memories of Sweet Home which they do not communicate. 2o
Of course, the sympathetic presence of another unlooses pent up
memories for a mutual reconstruction of the past, as Sethe's reflection
on Paul D illustrates:
His waiting eyes and awful human power. The mind of him that knew her own. Her
story was bearable because it was his as well - to tell, to refine and tell again. The
things neither knew about the other - the things neither had word-shapes for - well, it
would come in time: where they led him off to sucking iron; the perfect death of her
crawling-already? baby.21
Not every confidant needs to be as intimate as Paul D, since it is pre-

cisely Beloved's distance from the events or perhaps her mere thirst
for hearing them that evokes Sethe's extensive narratives on her past.
Even the imagined addressee of an apology can provide an atmosphere
for the disclosure of events to which no one else has been privy, as Sethe's
long explanation to a Beloved she imagines to be present exemplifies.
Denver learns things she had never heard about her moth's mother just
because she happens to be a third party present during Sethe's recounting
of memories elicited by Beloved's unique inviting attitude. All these
interpersonal dynamics not only draw out memories which fill gaps in
information and contribute to a fuller reconstruction of the past, but, as
we have seen, shared memories amplify understandings and force revised
interpretations of the past, as, for instance, Paul D's discussion of Halle
in his insanity and Sethe's account of her being drained of milk mutually
complement each other.22
3. FICTION AND THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST
As much as discourse across generations, intentional implication, and

diverse interpersonal relations free and reintegrate the past, the past in
its fullness is never completely recovered. Whenever a child learns of his
parent through a grandparent or of a grandparent through a parent, such
knowledge will always be filtered through the selective mechanisms of
a narrator, such as the spatio-temporal locus or ideological stance
constituting his or her biographical situation. Similarly, circumstances
summon only memories associated with those circumstances and not
others, and different listeners encourage partial revelations at different
times. In the context of what Charles Cooley dubbed the "looking-
glass" effect, that is, the fact that interactors perceive how the other
perceives them, interactors open or withhold themselves accordingly.
Hence, Sethe is at first circumspect with Paul D and only gradually
releases information to him as she grows in trust for his non-judgmental
attitude toward her. Similarly there are things she reveals to no one but
the imagined presence of Beloved in her apology near the end of the
nove1. 23 Because, as Morrison's novel portrays, interactors disclose only
part of their personality and part of their memories in any relationship
and because anyone (character or reader) must often rely on the testi-
mony of eyewitnesses, insiders, analysts, and commentators who were in
positions to which she lacks access and yet whose interests and view-
point may vary from her own, she always has the sense that the full
past exceeds whatever she can reconstruct of it. 24
Of course, Morrison, as any practitioner in the art of narrative, is quite
aware of this and utilizes it to her advantage, preserving narrative
continuity through her muted third person narrator who yields the
narrative role to diverse characters at opportune moments. The central
thread of the novel 25 commences with Denver retelling the story of her
birth in the third section and continues this line in a conversation with
Beloved in section eight up until Amy Denver's departure. Sethe assumes
the narrative thread in private memory in section nine, which covers
the segment from the Ohio River crossing to the arrival at Baby Suggs's
house. The narrative resumes in section fifteen, dealing with the arrival
of Sethe, the neighborhood feast, and Baby Suggs's anticipation that
something ominous was about to happen - all this from Baby Suggs's
viewpoint. As the narrative progresses from daughter to mother to
grandmother, there is an increasing movement toward safety and con-
solidation in the family with the two younger generations finding shelter
under the wing of a protective matriarch. This build-up, though, only
serves to heighten the tragedy of the schoolteacher's arrival and Sethe's
murder of her daughter. Morrison augments the reader's sense of the
brutality of those climactic events by replacing Baby Suggs as narrator
with, of all people, the schoolteacher and his nephew. In climactic section
sixteen, the frequent use of "nigger" and other derogatory terminology,
the constant comparison of black people to animals who "will go wild
when mishandled", and the incomprehension of the nephew who can
see no reason why Sethe did what she did - these and many other
details remove the reader from seeing things through Baby Suggs's
motherly viewpoint and shock him into seeing these brutal events through
356 MICHAEL BARBER
the violent, racist eyes of the schoolteacher and his nephew. The crowning
blow is that the perpetrators of injustice misunderstand the very events
their injusticl.. !-tas brought about. Thus, the author alone determines the
order of narrativn and the viewpoints through which the narrative unfolds
for maximal artistic effect.
On the other hand, due to the narrator's descriptions of characters
"from inside" the reader is given privileged access, for instance, to the
private, unspoken memories of Sethe and Paul D as they lie next to
each and to the private reflections of Denver, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs,
and the schoolteacher. The reader sits in on conversations between Denver
and Beloved, Sethe and Paul, Stamp and Paul - conversations from which
all the other characters are absent. Morrison in effect invites the reader
to join the enterprise of reconstructing the past with the characters, who
rebuild their own past alone and together, and at the same time she equips
the reader with much more abundant resources for that task.
On the other hand, the reader recovers a fictional past which is doubly
interpreted - by the characters and by the author's ordering of those
characters. Hence, for example, the reader is never given Sethe's own
understanding of the birth of Denver, which is conveyed only indirectly
through Denver. Nor does the reader have access to Sethe's full inter-
pretation of the events from her arrival at Baby Suggs's house to the
arrival of the schoolteacher. Furthermore, there are details of which the
reader, as well as the characters, can never be sure, such as Paul's belief
that Halle's madness resulted from his having seen Sethe drained of
her milk. For all the reader's privileges, even at the end of the novel
he has the sense that the fictional past exceeds the reconstructed past
which the novel makes possible.
This sense of an incomplete reconstruction against the horizon of a
richer fictional past takes on new significance when one considers the
reciprocal overlapping between history and fiction, the quasi-historical
moment of fiction changing places with the quasi-fictive moment of
history, which Paul Ricoeur has so insightfully depicted. Ricoeur
observes:
And does not the difficult law of creation, which is "to render" in the most perfect way
the vision of the world that animates the narrative voice, simulate, to the point of being
indistinguishable from it, history's debt to the people of the past, to the dead. 26
The quasi-history in Morrison's fiction conjures up in imagination the

real history of slavery. The incompleteness of this fictional past hints
FRAGMENT ATION AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION 357
at the tragic real past of slavery, whose immensity will remain anony-
mous forever. And Morrison's painstaking efforts to reanimate in fiction
the voices and visions of the victims of slavery discharges a debt to
real voices and real visions which will never be seen or heard. While
the past unravels and recedes into oblivion and the last of the slave
narratives are compiled, Morrison has proved that fiction, while
attempting neither to be history nor to represent its inexhaustibility, can
nevertheless convey something of the past, aid in its reconstruction, stand
in its place, and prevent it from being forever forgotten.
4. BELOVED AND ALLEGORY
Morrison's narrative resembles allegory in that her characters and

situations are not themselves real, but rather "stand in" for another, the
millions of anonymous slaves whose massive suffering will never find
an adequate voice. And yet, unlike allegory, this story does not coordi-
nate its many details with specific references to a simultaneously existing
system of beliefs, as is usually the case with allegories. However, the
motives often prompting allegory appear here. Allegories arise when
ordinary straightforward language breaks down because it has grown
stale or because it cannot express the numinous, communicate when
repression threatens, or suit an author's stylistic preferences. In Beloved
too, ordinary language runs up against its limits. How does one give voice
to those who can no longer speak for themselves, how does one speak
what can never be adequately spoken, how does one make vividly present
the silent, forgotten past? Beloved "appresents" - to use Husserrs term
- experiences which become present even while remaining absent.
Whether Beloved is authentic allegory depends on a clearer consensus on
the meaning of allegory.
St. Louis University
NOTES
I Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 36.

2 Ibid., p. 61, p. 98.
3 Edward Casey, Remembering. A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 268, p. 275.
4 Morrison, p. 13.
358 MICHAEL BARBER
5 Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and
Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 207.
6 Morrison, pp. 221-229.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., pp. 68-69.
9 Edmund Husseri, Ideas, General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R.
Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 124; Alfred Schutz, The Problem
of Social Reality, Collected Papers. Vol. 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 9.
10 Morrison, p. 139.
11 Ibid., pp. 52-53, 143-147.
12 Ibid., pp. 17,35,37-38,41-42,58,71-72,99,113,172.
13 Ibid., pp. 161-165, 180, 187.
14 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 31.
15 Morrison, pp. 12-13, 62, 207-209, 219.
16 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David
Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 88-89.
17 Morrison, pp. 29-31.
18 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, trans. Peter Heath (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1954), p. 245.
19 Husserl, pp.269-270.
20 Morrison, pp. 21-27,39,90.
21 Ibid., p. 99.
22 Ibid., pp. 58, 61, 191-198.
23 Ibid., pp. 42, 161-165, 193.
24 Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, pp. 18,41,317; Studies in Social Theory,
Collected Papers, Vol. 2 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1964), pp. 132, 253.
25 The first strand of narrative begins with Paul D and Sethe recalling the events at Sweet
Home leading up to the escape. A third strand involves Paul D's experiences at Sweet
Home after Sethe's departure, including his time in Georgia and his wanderings prior to
his arrival at Sethe's.
26 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 192.
J6HANNA TH. EIRfKSD6TTIR HULL
"WE ARE NOT THE SAME":

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR'S SHE CAME TO STAY AND
THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION
Under the hegemony of realism allegory has been rejected as an abstract

moralizing kind of art that neglects concrete specifics. I think of it
rather as a suspension of the concrete specific fact-world in order to
see the ideal-object or idea behind them. The parallel between Beauvoir
herself and Fran~oise, the professional-woman character in the novel,
is obvious but we shouldn't make the common mistake of thinking the
novel is autobiographical. Instead it is autobiography bracketed in the
sense of allegory, of the phenomenological reduction. The novel, then,
is a kind of Cartesian meditation or phenomenological reduction in the
form of an allegory.
She Came to Stay (L'Invitee) describes a flaw in the women's move-
ment, a tragic lack of solidarity between women. It is a version of Hegel's
master-slave dialectic in The Phenomenology of Mind, cited in the
epigram of the original, French-language version of the novel: "Each con-
sciousness seeks the death of the other". What's interesting, though, in
Beauvoir's use of Hegel is the process she makes her heroine, Fran~oise,
go through. The difference between Hegel and Beauvoir, and it paral-
lels the difference between Hegel and Husserl, is that Hegel conducts
the master-slave dialectic to "absolute spirit", but Beauvoir's Fran~oise
does not transcend the master-slave conflict, and She Came to Stay does
not achieve utopian sisterhood, but ends in murder. Fran~oise says that
if one wants to affirm oneself, "timid words and stealthy acts" are not
sufficient (500-501). One must efface the other consciousness. Because
Fran~oise has not achieved the phenomenological standpoint but remains
in the natural standpoint, she has to strike Xaviere out of her world.
Beauvoir's literary device is to remove herself from the story, giving
it as mostly told by Fran~oise. At the beginning of the novel, Fran~oise
describes her consciousness as a world that she has created, giving us
to know first that this is the natural world she lives in, the world of
facts, and that she is in control of her own world whose facts she has
organized and dominates. Husserl's description of the natural stand-
point to be suspended in the reduction sounds like Fran~oise's world:

360 J6HANNA TH. EIRiKSD6TTIR HULL
I am present to myself continually as someone who perceives, represents, thinks, feels,

desires, and so forth; and for the most part herein I find myself related in present expe-
rience to the fact-world which is constantly about me. But I am not always so related,
not every cogito in which I live has for its cogitatum things, men, objects or contents
of one kind or another . . . the natural world, the world in the ordinary sense of the
word, is constantly there for me, so long as I live naturally and look in its direction.
(Ideas 104)
Fran~oise is living in her own world. It is difficult for her to conceive

of people as existing when they are not present. This is like Husserl's
saying the natural world is there for me as long as I look in its direc-
tion. And in the beginning of She Came to Stay, this is how Fran~oise
sees her world. But Husserl's "not every cog ito in which I live" raises
the possibility there is more than just the one!
In describing the fact-world of the natural standpoint to be brack-
eted, Husserl says
Whatever holds good for me personally, also holds good, as I know, for all other men
whom I find present in my world-about-me.... I understand and take them as Ego-subjects,
units like myself, and related to their natural surroundings. But this in such wise that I
apprehend the world-about-them and the world-about-me objectively as one and the
same world, which differs in each case only through affecting consciousness differently.
Each has his place whence he sees the things that are present, and each enjoys accord-
ingly different appearances of the things. (Ideas 105).
But Fran~oise's natural world is in constant danger of falling apart. The
things that are present in it are not enjoyed by her fellow ego-subject
Xaviere, not even apprehended as being in the world-about-her. As the
different appearance of the things becomes gradually clearer to Fran~oise,
she realizes that Xaviere has her own fact-world based on her own dif-
ferent natural standpoint. So the differences in the appearance of things
are more than different perspectives on the same things in the same world;
they are things in different fact-worlds.
For each, again, the fields of perception and memory actually present are different, quite
apart from the fact that even that which is here intersubjectively known in common is
known in different ways, is differently apprehended, shows different grades of clear-
ness, and so forth. (Ideas, 105)
A different kind of clearness is what Fran~oise seems to have perceived

in Xaviere's behavior. Fran~oise is confronted with a being who is not
yet complete, and who is behind her in terms of development. Xaviere's
"we are not the same", however, is the manifestation of the jolt that
hurdles Fran~oise into insecurity - because it means that there is another
"WE ARE NOT THE SAME" 361
world, and the existence of another world threatens her fact-world.

Fran~oise's idea for overcoming this insecurity is just what Husserl
says we all do from the natural standpoint. In Husserl's terminology,
Fran~oise's reaction to the threat of Xaviere "leaves standing the general
thesis of the natural standpoint" (Ideas 106).
We don't know, even in the framework of Fran~oise talking, whether
she actually perceives Xaviere, or how much Xaviere is a figment of
Fran~oise's imagination, how much she writes Xaviere down and controls
her as a ghost or a spirit, and behaves differently because Fran~oise
already feels Xaviere as a pain and obstruction thrust into her own
fact-world, as Fran~oise's whole story becomes, instead of a natural
world, a bracketed one, an allegory of women fighting each other while
struggling to find a common world to live in, but discovering that we
are not the same.
Husserl says of the natural standpoint to be bracketed that
"The" world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points "other" than I
supposed, this or that under such names as "illusion", "hallucination", and the like, must
be struck out of it, so to speak; but the "it" remains ever, in the sense of the general
thesis, a world that has its being out there. (Ideas 106)
For Fran~oise, Xaviere is the odd point other than she supposes, and
she strikes her out of her world. She says "Xaviere must die for me to
exist".
Underlying the narration of Fran~oise's world is an abyss. We are
aware of her world's frailty and we can see that there is a constant
struggle against encroachment. Fran~oise 's world starts out with a
description of how hard it is to imagine people outside of her world.
In the novel, every relationship between man and woman is grossly
flawed. Her own with her husband, and with his many women friends,
goes in a constant cycle from one of his affairs to the next. Pierre explains
that this is supposed to expand human relations to include the whole
world into one happy relationship. We see through this deception, even
if Fran~oise doesn't. Beauvoir indicates the hopelessness of all rela-
tionships, since in the novel there isn't a single one that's happy - only
a general gloom, giving the novel a bitter ironic tone.
But one implication of Husserl's description of the natural stand-
point is that striking out the odd other that doesn't fit into our normal
world, even if it is an inevitable reaction against bad treatment, blinds
us, because the other can have something to tell us. The effacing of
362 J6HANNA TH. EIRfKSD6TTIR HULL
one individual by another, like the suppression of the consciousness of

a tribe, sex, race or culture by another, results in a one-sided con-
sciousness that has on principle to be transcended in the phenomeno-
logical reduction.
Franr;oise says, that "The world belonged to her" (12). I want to
emphasize that this is the world available to her in the natural standpoint.
She has marked her territory, and "Nothing was real except her own
life" (13). She is a professional who loves her work; but she is also a
woman who loves her man. Her work is tied to his. "You and I are
only one" (29) they say to each other. Thus it seems an ideal relation-
ship. However it's Pierre who's famous, Pierre who directs and acts in
plays. And Franr;oise worries about Pierre's career more than he does
about hers.
Pierre says of his philandering, "Outside of my relationship with
you, everything is frivolous and a squandering" (29). Since these women
are not part of Franr;oise's world, they pose no problems until Franr;oise
and Pierre invite Xaviere to live with them. Then she becomes part of
Pierre's relation with Franr;oise. However, even if Pierre is the object
of contention in this triangle, he isn't a full character, but a sort of prop
sketched with a few strokes. The novel turns on the struggle between
the two women over this man (prop).
Xaviere poses the problem of intersubjectivity. Though Franr;oise
wants to help others, she doesn't want to be "an image in the head
of another" (18). What she wants is to define herself and her own
world.
Xaviere is the image of Franr;oise's own repressed consciousness at
the same time that she is her opposite. Xaviere is a traditional woman:
ignorant, uneducated, needing protection, and, her uncle says, of no use
except for having babies. The modern couple, Pierre and Franr;oise want
to take care of Xaviere and help her. However, instead of becoming
like them, she all of a sudden obtrudes. Franr;oise became aware of her
own suppressed hostility. "But there was nothing to be done, there was
no way to turn back. Xaviere existed" (83).
Because of Franr;oise' need to avoid seeming jealous, there are two
Franr;oises in the novel, the one she describes - the Franr;oise without
jealousy, who wants to expand the family and help Xaviere - and the
suppressed Franr;oise who feels anguish. This Franr;oise is told of in
the third person. This Franr;oise knows that the well-defined comfort-
able world of the first Franr;oise is an illusion. In the end this Franr;oise
in spite of herself has become an image of ugliness and betrayal, an image

of all that she did not want to be. With Xaviere's accusation. "You have
really had me" (498), Fran~oise has to admit what she is: "I was jealous
of her. 1 took Gerbert [Xaviere's boyfriend] ... 1 did that. It is me" (499).
The two narratives meet at the moment Xaviere reveals what Franc;oise
has suppressed, and Fran~oise knows that she has to kill. But to kill
Xaviere, who has ripped Fran~oise's world apart, means to kill knowl-
edge, to wipe out the odd other that has surfaced involuntarily in
consciousness.
Xaviere speaks of things Fran~oise conceals, her dark, repressed side
and her fears, completing Franc;oise's conscious view of herself. Xaviere's
judgement is Fran~oise's only means of being complete and unified.
But Fran~oise and Xaviere's love for the same man prevents sisterhood
and solidarity. Xaviere is the odd point "other" than Fran~oise supposed,
and so, like an "illusion" or "hallucination", must be struck out of the
world of Franc;oise's natural standpoint.
Xaviere, this young woman who is nobody, has, however, a very strong
personality. She rejects all demeaning things that women in her position
have to do if they want to succeed. She doesn't want a low class job
and rejects all alienating jobs where she can't define herself. The jobs
Franc;oise and Pierre find her are blind alleys, while they themselves
escape the alienation of such jobs for the prestige and liberating joy of
creative work.
For Xaviere to live a life of leisure, someone else must work, and
that is what Fran~oise and Pierre do. But Xaviere also wants an exclu-
sive love. Franc;oise can not give her absolute attention because she has
her own world, her theatre and Pierre. And Xaviere has no means to
defend herself except the old method of women, hiding her thought,
not saying everything, attracting a man. So she restricts her world to
her room by isolating herself and is supported by two concerned people
who do not understand her.
Xaviere is a real person, but she is also a fantasy, a kind of play-
thing the two toy with as with an imaginary child. Because a relationship
with a fantasy is a non-relationship, Xaviere is wounded and dies as
the couple's fantasy is repressed and finally effaced. As "illusion" or
"hallucination", a real person is "struck out of" their life. This ghost
in the house reveals that Fran~oise is jealous and capable of hatred.
Xaviere maintains that instead of helping others, Fran~oise destroys them.
Because Fran~oise covers up exactly those things Xaviere talks about,
Xaviere is allegorically her repressed side. When Franc;oise sees her

own dark soul unveiled, sees she's "the same person" as Xaviere, she
says, "Xaviere existed, the treason existed. It existed in the flesh and
blood, my criminal face" (501).
Xaviere has effaced Franc;oise when she imposes a negative image
on the world Franc;oise has constituted. Franc;oise kills to find her positive
self-image again. '''How can I?' thought Franc;oise ... how could it
be that a consciousness existed that was not her own? Well then, it was
she who did not exist.' She repeated: 'She or I'" (503).
But though Franc;oise kills Xaviere, she is really struggling against
Pierre. Franc;oise's natural standpoint is threatened not only by Xaviere.
It is contingent, determined from the start by her need to please Pierre.
Franc;oise's world as projected by Beauvoir is not her own, because
Pierre, like Xaviere, is an "other" who makes demands. The flaw in
Franc;oise's world is that a woman who competes for a man must please
him. She must make herself convenient to his needs, and so the defin-
ition is his. And though the use a man makes of a weak woman is
different from what he can make of a woman he has to confront on his
own level, a woman who doesn't know anything, but has a dark soul, can
be as interesting as an intelligent female novelist. Pierre takes pleasure
in making the women compete, telling one what the other says, in order
to stir them up and make his game more interesting.
There are no children in the novel, but Xaviere, in contrast to the
mature Franc;oise, is the "kid" who is not yet formed. Thus the conflict
between the two women is a family scene, Xaviere's position being
that of an adopted child. Perhaps Franc;oise kills out of a woman's fear
of being replaced by her child, a fear Beauvoir explains in The Second
Sex:
In her flesh she feels the truth of Hegel's words: "The birth of children is the death of
parents" .... This projection of herself is also for the woman the foreshadow of her
death. She expresses this truth in the fear she feels when she thinks of childbirth; she
fears that it will mean the loss of her own life. (555)
As Nietzsche said, helplessness can be a power, and it is thus that parents
find the helplessness of children attractive. The infantile appeal is also
part of female submission and a weapon. Xaviere's childish helpless-
ness is interesting and captivating, a weapon in her competition for Pierre.
Fran.;;oise. on the contrary, is interesting because she has developed her
intelligence. But the intellectuality of such a woman is fragile. She cannot
always defend herself against the child-woman.
This competition between women, wrathful inuendoes in a verbal fight

between a young flirt and a mature woman, a struggle of suppressed
emotions, is sometimes very malicious and catty. A discussion of WW
II turns into a hateful confrontation.
Fran~oise looked with some repulsion at the fresh cruel face "If one is not interested in
people, I wonder what is left", she said.
"Oh! but we are not made the same way", said Xaviere while sizing her up with a
look of spite and malice. Fran~oise kept quiet. The conversations with Xaviere degener-
ated at once into hateful confrontations. What became clear in Xaviere's tone of voice,
in her shifty smiles, was now quite another thing than childish and capricious hostility:
a true hatred of a woman. (482-483)
Fran~oise has acquired a new awareness, and she acts in her own interest.
She must defend herself against Xaviere's accusation that she is a criminal
and a traitor, but her manner of doing so (murder) shows that in the
end Xaviere was right. Fran~oise strikes out what is at odd points other
and threatens her natural standpoint. For hatred has no place in her world.
But Fran~oise deceives herself. The murder then is an attempt to return
to the natural standpoint, but it can't succeed. The act of reaching
awareness of one's own consciousness is simultaneously a mystifica-
tion of this knowledge and self-affirmation by murder.
The most striking aspect of the novel is this depiction of a human
being who learns that another consciousness exists. Fran~oise wants
solidarity and sharing, and for this reason, struggles against her desire
to dominate. However she also wants to affirm herself. Xaviere, on the
other hand, defends her own, and since she was invited to stay, takes
what she thinks is offered. She does not want expanded relationships even
among the three. There is then a conflict between those who are for
themselves alone, and others who hope for an expansion towards social
consciousness. What Husserl calls illusion or hallucination, self-con-
sciousness doesn't regard as real, Hegel says. Both philosophers
point out that what doesn't fit is cancelled or struck out. And both
philosophers propose transcending the one-sided state of mind, in a
transcendental reduction for Husserl, in Aufhebung for Hegel.
As Fran~oise tells Pierre, the philosophical and social theme of the
realization of the consciousness of the other is difficult to express. How
can one communicate one's solidarity, one's humanitarian and moral
emotions? Fran~oise is torn apart by her discovery that the other, to whom
she has extended her hand, looks at her with hatred. She feels fear and
a strange isolation. With all the compromises she has had to make in
order to extend that hand, she runs the risk of losing her own identity
and fails to accomplish the social solidarity she aimed for.
The cry of the novel is from the abyss of the loss of self. Fran~oise
has so closely tied her life to Pierre that, "she stopped being someone;
she did not even have a face any longer" (216). She never said I, but,
"Our past, our future, our ideas". Pierre had his own life, but she "stayed
there, separated from him, separated from all, and without ties to herself".
She feels "at her feet this abyss that hollows itself ever more until it
reaches the stars".
At the end, all the themes dissolve into a scene of anguish. Fran~oise
doesn't have the force to perform the phenomenological reduction and,
with the help of a new consciousness, rise to a higher level. She has
returned to Xaviere's level, hoping only for happiness at Pierre's side.
But if Hussed is right, we should not strike out what is at odd points
other than we expect, but see the other as the evidence of the possi-
bility of another standpoint than the natural one. And thus by killing
Xaviere, Fran~oise has killed her own possibility of seeing. Fran~oise
sleeps after having killed, but this sleep is ambiguous. Does she rest
because she is tired or does her sleep indicate loss of consciousness,
the murder of perception?
Indiana University at South Bend
REFERENCES
de Beauvoir, Simone, The Second Sex, ed. and trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage
Books, 1974).
- - , L'invitee (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse
as She Came to Stay (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1967).
Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Bailie (New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1967).
Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, tr. W. R. Boyce
Gibson (London: Unwin, 1931, rpt. 1967).
MElLI STEELE
EXPLANATION, UNDERSTANDING, AND

INCOMMENSURABILITY IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
In his landmark studies of Freud and psychoanalysis, Paul Ricoeur argues

for the distinction between meaning and force, between hermeneutical
understanding and causal explanation in psychoanalysis. If the psyche
is a text, this text is not one that can be addressed in simply an exeget-
ical manner.
The economic model ... preserves something essential, which a theorising introduced
from outside the system is always in danger of losing sight of, namely, that man's
alienation from himself is such that mental functioning does actually resemble the
functioning of a thing. This simulation keeps psychoanalysis from constituting itself as
a province of the exegetical disciplines applied to texts - as a hermeneutics, in other words
- and requires that psychoanalysis include in the process of self-understanding
operations that were originally reserved for the natural sciences (Proof, 261).
Ricoeur talks about the need for the analysand to take up the causal
explanations provided by the analyst in the process of "working through"
so that causes can be understood as motives. l Ricoeur thus works to
mediate the opposite between these two approaches that inform the
well-known debate between Gadamer and Habermas. 2 What neither
Ricoeur, Gadamer, nor Habermas discusses satisfactorily is what the
dynamics of this linguistic exchange look like. These dynamics are not
simply produced by the conflict between analyst's explanation'S and
the analysand's justification but by the conflicts in axiological vocabu-
laries that constitute the self. The goal of this paper is to sketch such
an account by bringing in the work of Charles Taylor and Richard
Rorty. In the first section of the paper, I layout Rorty's challenge to
traditional readings of Freud, and then I offer a critique and an enrich-
ment of this view.
Rorty praises Freud for liberating the theory of the self from any telos,
universal ethical law or fundamental moral being. However, it is not
the conclusion that our identities are both plural and contingent that
makes Freud's contribution unique - Hume, for instance, had already said
this. The key to Freud is the idea of the unconscious. This idea is much
more interesting and threatening than Humean mental chaos because
"it looks like somebody is stepping into our shoes, ... like a person is

368 MElLI STEELE
using us rather than a thing we can use" (FMR, 4). By defining the
unconscious in this way, Rorty wants to do away with those moments
in Freud where he buys into the old oppositions between higher and lower
faculties that go back to Plato. For example, Freud says that "our
intellect is feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our
instincts and affects" (14: 301, quoted Rorty, FMR, 7) However, this is
just a replay of Hume's claims that "reason is, and ought to be, the
slave of the passions" (quoted Rorty, 8).
Relying on Davidson's essay "Paradoxes of Irrationality", Rorty
defines the unconscious as a separate person, and by person he means
" a coherent and plausible set of beliefs and desires" (FMR, 4). This is
radically different from post-structuralist challenges to Freud such as
those of Lacan and Derrida, which define the subject in terms of the sign. 3
The unconscious is not seething caldron of animal instincts or drives
but an alternative cluster or package of beliefs - that is, an alternative
self. The premise is that beliefs do not occur in isolation but in groups.
Rationality is a matter of acting in accordance with one's reasons, a matter
of internal coherence rather than a behaviorist norm.4 The disjunction
between the conscious and unconscious selves means that they can
have only a causal relationship with each other rather than a rational
justificatory relationship. That is, they have a relationship of force rather
than of argument. The story told by the conscious self is not only
different but incommensurate with the one told by the unconscious self
- e.g. a story of the mother as "long-suffering object of pity" versus
another that shows her as a "voracious seductress" (FMR, 22). Rorty
characterizes this tension between selves as "competing stories". What
Davidson and Rorty are trying to solve here is a problem that philoso-
phers have long raised with regard to Freud - that he brings together
the agent's internal reasons for an action with causal explanations of
that action. 5 For example, if Ernest Jones were to ask a real life Hamlet
why he is waiting to kill Claudius and Hamlet replies "Conscience doth
make cowards of us all", Jones may interpret this generalization as a
defense against certain unconscious motives rather than accepting
Hamlet's maxim at face value. Jones' causal explanation points toward
a second, unconscious self that has a different cluster of beliefs and
that tells a different story. Rorty does not want to jettison Freud's causal
language but to revise the way causality is theorized. He does so by
making the conscious and unconscious selves "part of a single unified
causal network, but not of a single person" (FMR, 5). Predicting an
EXPLANATION, UNDERSTANDING AND INCOMMENSURABILITY 369
individual's behavior requires knowledge of all of these selves, "but

only one of these persons will be available (at any given time) to intro-
spection" (FMR, 5). Although he does not address the problem of
heterogeneity within the self - e.g. introjection - this account does not
rule out the possibility of more complex causal relationships.
The analyst ferrets out the story of the unconscious self and links
the two selves through a third narrative - what Habermas calls a "general
interpretation" of the story of development - a story that may use causal
language about "drives", "cathexes", etc.; however, the analysand cannot
use such causal language in his/her self-image but can only compare
the two stories. 6 Rorty does not discuss the nature or validity of this third
narrative, as Habermas does, for Rorty's concern is not with "correcting"
the distorted communication but with generating new stories. Rorty's
view replaces Freud's hierarchical conception of the relationship of
consciousness and the unconscious - e.g. the famous archaeological
metaphor that speaks in terms of the unassimilated fragments of the
past that press against the conscious activity of the present - with a
"lateral" metaphor in which two languages, two selves are trying to speak
at the same time. This move permits us to give Ricoeur's causal force
a hermeneutic face at the same time that it does not reduce force to
meaning. Rorty's revision of Freud's language needs to be distinguished
from Derrida's deconstruction of it. Whereas Derrida's reading searches
for rhetorical aporias in Freud's texts, Rorty seeks to rework or "improve"
those Freudian formulations that are still caught up in a positivistic or
foundationalist enterprise. Before developing and assessing this account,
we need to look at Rorty's view of our ethical vocabulary after the
Freudian revolution.
Freud undermines the accepted meanings of such words as "love",
"compassion", and "goodness" by offering detailed accounts of how such
vocabulary operates in personal histories. Philosophers' attempts to
establish universal laws or moral essences collapse under these accounts.
For example, when Freud discusses the "'narcissistic origin of com-
passion' he gives a way of thinking of the sense of pity not as an
identification with the common human core which we share with all other
members of our species, but as channeled in very specific ways toward
very specific sorts of people and very particular vicissitudes" (CIS,
31-2).7 Thus, Freud explains how we can "take endless pains to help
one friend and be entirely oblivious of the greater pain of another" or
why our ability to love is limited to particular kinds of people and objects
370 MElLI STEELE
(CIS, 32). Although this may seem like an uncontroversial claim, Rorty's
stakes are higher, for he wants to break down, with Freud's help, the
philosophical distinction between "moral deliberation" and "prudential
calculation". Rorty wants to dissolve the field of ethics so that it, like
science, literature and other fields, becomes merely a source of vocab-
ulary that we use for certain purposes. In this way, Rorty claims that
Freud sees "science and poetry, genius ... psychosis ... morality and
prudence not as products of distinct faculties but as alternative modes
of adaptation" (CIS, 33). (I note in passing that Rorty sets up a straw
man here by connecting these fields to mental faculties - like Kant -
rather than making them different practices.) In the last move, Rorty
has reduced all ethical vocabulary - indeed, all kinds of language - to
their adaptational or utilitarian value. This is what Freud himself does,
as Ricoeur points out: Freud made "no separation between the utili-
tarian enterprise of dominating the forces of nature (civilization) and
the disinterested, idealist task of realizing values (culture)" (PCC, 304).8
The other value that Rorty takes over from Freud is that of negative
freedom - that is, freedom from restraint. In Civilization and Its
Discontents, Freud says, "The liberty of the individual is no gift of
civilization. It was greatest before there was any civilization .... The
urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and
demands of civilization or against civilization altogether" (42-3). This
view that culture only inhibits rather than enables establishes a negative
freedom, a freedom as opportunity rather than a freedom as capacity.
Rorty takes this over when he says that the postmodern cultural critic
looks for new ways for rewriting himself/herself. Rorty/Freud's self is
liberal self for whom maturity will consist "in an ability to seek out
new redescriptions of one's own past - an ability to take a nominal-
istic, ironic, view of oneself" (FMR, 9). The value of psychoanalysis
is just like that of "reading history, novels or treatise in moral philos-
ophy" - that is, as "a way of getting suggestions about how to describe
(and change) oneself in the future" (FMR, 10). It is not that I oppose
this liberty but want to point out its thinness and its relationship to Freud.
Rorty tries to build an ethics on Freud rather than seeing the ways in
which the linguistic practice of psychoanalysis is incommensurate with
ethical practices. This is not just a matter of Freud's own reluctance to
set himself up as a cultural critic, but of the important tension between
the practices of ethics and psychoanalysis that makes them at once
conflicting and mutually informing. The fact that Freud discussed almost
every field in the social sciences and humanities does not mean that he
retheorized these disciplines from within but that he challenged them
from the outside. Ricoeur phrases this relationship nicely, "Freud grasps
the whole of the phenomenon of culture - and even human reality -
but he does so from a single point of view. We must therefore seek the
limits of the principles of Freudian interpretation of culture in terms of
the 'models' - topographic-economic and genetic - instead of in terms
of the interpreted content" (PCC, 323). For example, in "The Relation
of the Poet to Daydreaming" Freud avoids the problem of creativity
and "explores the limited problem of the relations between the pleasur-
able effect and the technique employed in producing the work of art"
(Ricoeur, Freud, 167). The analyst and the philosopher stand in
different if not autonomous cultural spaces from which they read the
social text. Before illustrating what I mean by "the conflicting and
mutually informing" relationship between ethics and psychoanalysis, I
need to link language and value so that ethics is removed from the narrow
study of obligation in philosophy or instinctual repression in psycho-
analysis as well as from Rorty's facile notion of redescription and
connected to the phenomenology and textuality of existence.
The best place to begin is with the problem of description versus
constitution. That is, is the language that you use to discuss an object
describing that object or constituting that object? I will discuss this
issue in terms of three complementary concepts - the game, the practice,
the strong evaluation. The game, the most public of the three, is also
the most straightforward. If you go to a football game with a friend
who has no idea about the rules of the game and you both narrate and
describe what takes place during a touchdown, you will not be describing
the same thing. Your friend will be describing physical movements, while
you will be describing activities that gain their sense from the rules of
the game. This is not an epistemological matter of "point of view", which
assumes that various spectators see the same object differently. It is an
ontological matter of the language that constitutes subject and object.
If I do not share a certain language game with another person, even if
we speak the "same" language in many other respects, the two of us
do not refer to the same objects.
The notion of "practice" - which I borrow from Alasdair MacIntyre
- brings gets us closer to ethics since a practice includes the idea of
a game but also requires both participation and a certain kind of
satisfaction. MacIntyre defines a practice as
372 MElLI STEELE
"any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through
which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to
achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, an partially definitive
of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and
human conceptions of ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. . . .
Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming
is" (187).9
A practice is not simply an activity that a subject chooses to take up

but a system that constitutes a moment of subjectivity.
However, the constitutive dimension of linguistic and social prac-
tices does not emerge only in the institutionalized ways covered by
MacIntyre's practices but throughout our dialogues. To get some sense
of this, I'll borrow Charles Taylor's idea of "strong evaluation", which
he uses to attack various strains of contemporary philosophy that attempt
to flatten ethical language into utilitarianism. I take my example from his
essay "What Is Human Agency". In this piece, he analyzes two ways
of talking about losing weight. In one, I say to myself, "I should loose
weight because anyone who has so little control over his appetites is
not an admirable person". In the second, I adopt a utilitarian formula-
tion and say to myself, "I should loose weight because the quantity of
pleasure I get by eating is less than the pleasure I get from doing certain
things I want to do". These two formulations or language games-
constitute the situation and the self in radically different ways. As Taylor
says, "the human agent not only has some understanding (which may
be also more or less misunderstanding) of himself, but is partly con-
stituted by this understanding" (Papers, I, 3). Taylor challenges Rorty's
notion of description. For the latter, the question value is an external
matter of the end to which the description is put, while for Taylor (and
me) value is constitutive as well. lO But what are the consequences of
this constitutive theory for psychoanalysis?
First, it means that Freud's distinctions among kinds of language use
- e.g. scientific (truth), artistic (fantasy), religious (delusion) will have
to be modified. (See his distinction between science and world-view in
"The Question of a Weltanschaung" in The New Introductory Lectures.)
Rorty's work argues for such a revision, in which literary texts (and
fantasy) are given referential power to disclose the world and not just
engage readers. Thus, ethical and axiological matters will not be so
closely connected to the analysis of instinctual repression and the estab-
lishment of the super-ego. Not all ethical practices are part of the story
of repression; many are better characterized in the way Freud talked about
art, as sublimation. ll
For the cultural critic and the analyst, this theory involves a compli-
cated recognition of incommensurate languages of constitution, that of
the conscious versus that of the unconscious self (e.g. Rorty's stories
about the pitiable versus the seductive mother). Obviously, the choice
of a language game for constituting the self and its evaluations is
intimately bound up with the Oedipal narrative of repression, not simply
with certain linguistic practices that we adopt. We can imagine such a
narrative in the example cited above weight loss and self-esteem. My
point is simply that the differences in these various language games
need to be recognized by the language game of the analyst. (We can
see a vivid example of this kind of analysis in Roy Schafer's The Analytic
Attitude.) The analysand does not take over the language of the analyst
in the same way he/she can accept the account of an alternative self,
for the analyst's language is designed to cut across such linguistic/ethical
constitutions and not to offer an alternative language for the analysand.
As Ricoeur says, Freud defines the cultural sphere of art, morality, and
religion "by way of the 'economic' function rather than their object",
which he calls "the price for assuring a unity of interpretation" (PCC,
311). Instead, analyst and analysand work together to construct a fourth
language that helps reconcile the language game of the conscious self
with that of the unconscious. Calculative considerations such as pain
and adaptation enter into this construction, but they do not determine
it. An evaluative language of constitution must be negotiated, so that
the analysand not only accepts the unwelcome story of his/her uncon-
scious self but discovers a self/language game that constructs a
meaningful existence. The analysand must not simply "understand" what
the unconscious self is saying but find a site and language for
integrating this story into a new one. We can clarify this problem by going
back to the example of losing weight. Let's say that during the course
of analysis the analysand discovers that the "admirable person" charac-
terization is part of a crippling story of guilt and that the analysand
now wants to invent a new vocabulary of value. Utilitarian talk about
quantities of satisfaction will not necessarily be a workable alternative
since such talk may make no sense to the analysand. This idea of the
language of constitution poses a difficulty for causal accounts and leaves
an untheorizable lacuna in the theory of psychoanalysis as self-reflec-
tion (Habermas). The "hidden story" that the process of working through
374 MElLI STEELE
unfolds becomes available only through a utopian dimension involved

in the projection of the new self (the fourth narrative that I speak of
above). Making psychoanalysis simply a process of emancipation through
understanding ignores the linguistic positionality of all constructions.
Rorty's philosophical subject fails to recognize the incommensurability
between the linguistic practices of the analyst and those of philosophy.
In terms of disciplines, this means that ethical philosophy (the analysand),
after having listened to the story of its unconscious and to the story of
the analyst, must reconstruct its ethical vocabulary and not try coopt
the critique of psychoanalysis by trying to be philosopher and analyst
simultaneously. Taylor discusses the manifold ways that this Cartesian
desire to step outside of ourselves and objectify ourselves appears in
contemporary philosophy and social science, and we can see Rorty
repeating this by trying to work from a site that is outside disciplinary
boundaries and that speaks in terms of "redescription", which serves
as his ultimate metaphor that trumps all others. That is, once all
disciplines are reduced to matters of vocabulary then "redescription" takes
the place that Kant gave to philosophy - the site of adjudication for
the claims of various spheres of knowledge. Unlike Kant, Rorty's
"adjudication" is done in terms of language for a certain use rather than
in terms of reason. Hence, a redescriber "simply asks himself the same
question about a text which the engineer or the physicist asks himself
about a puzzling physical object: how shall I describe this in order to
get what I want?" (Consequences, 153).
By bringing Rorty's notion of the unconscious and Taylor's post-
Heideggerian views on language to Ricoeur's mediation of understanding
and explanation, we can open up an important new problematic for
rethinking the relationship of language and psychoanalysis. When we
read literary, biographical, historical works, we can now read for the
conflicting pressures of the various selves in the seams of discourse
and the way these selves seek languages of constitution.
University of South Carolina
NOTES
1 Some philosophers have developed Wittgenstein's suggestions about the difference

between the language games of movement and of action. Hence, in Ricoeur's words
"our motives for acting can in no way be assimilated to the causes by which we explain
natural events. Motives are reasons for our action, while causes are the constant antecedents
of other events from which they are logically distinct" (Proof, 262). (See David Bloor's
discussion of Winch and Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge).
Ricoeur correctly points out that this overlooks "the very paradox of psychoanalytic theory,
namely, that it is the becoming unconscious as such that requires a specific explanation
so that the kinship of meaning between conscious and unconscious contents may be recog-
nised. Now, the explanatory schema capable of accounting for the mechanisms of
exclusion, banishment, reification, etc. completely challenges the separation of action
and movement, along with the dichotomy between motive and cause" (Proof, 262).
Psychoanalysis "calls for an explanation by means of causes in order to reach an under-
standing in terms of motives ... To say, for example that a feeling is unconscious is
not just to say that it resembles conscious motives occurring in other circumstances; rather,
it is to say that is to be inserted as a causally relevant factor in order to explain the
incongruities of an act of behavior, and that this explanation is itself a causally relevant
factor in the work - the working through - of analysis" (Proof, 263.). Ricoeur follows
Michael Sherwood's The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis, which distinguishes
among four types of "causally relevant factors": 1. origin, 2. intermediate stages (genesis
of a symptom, libidinal structure), 3. its function (compromise formation), 4. signifi-
cance (e.g. substitution or symbolic value).
2 See Ricoeur's "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology", Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences, where he attempts to mediate the positions of Gadamer and Habermas.
See Calvin Schrag's chapter "Understanding and Explanation as Ways of Interpretation"
in his Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity for a sensitive analysis of
Ricoeur's mediation.
3 For example, Lacan says that the subject is "defined as the effect of the signifier" (Four
Fundamental Concepts, 207). For Derrida's readings of Freud, see Joseph Smith and
William Kerrigan, eds., Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature.
4 See Donald Davidson "Paradoxes of Irrationality" and "A Coherence Theory of Truth".
3 See the "Introduction" to Philosophical Essays on Freud for a summary.
6 Habermas' opposition between the "general interpretation" of reconstructive science
and hermeneutics that he proposes in Knowledge and Human Interests has been attacked
to the point where Habermas has now softened his claim. See Seyla Benhabib, Critique,
Norm, and Utopia, chapter 7 for an excellent discussion. She concludes, "What
distinguishes rational reconstructions from both hermeneutic and deconstructivist accounts
is not their special philosophical status, but their empirical fruitfulness in generating
research, their viability to serve as models in a number of fields, and their capacity to
order and explain complex phenomena into intelligible narratives" (269).
7 In chapters two and three of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty tries to make
Freud's insight about the peculiarities of compassion a justification for ethnocentrism,
but there is no necessary connection between the two.
8 In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud looks at the instinctual sacrifices civiliza-
tion demands and the ways in which civilization compensates people for these sacrifices.
This economic point of view feeds utilitarianism.
9 There is much in MacIntyre's controversial work that I do not accept - e.g. his
narrative of the "fall" from a unified tradition and his redemptive use of narrative itself;
however, the concept of the practice can be extracted without subscribing to these other
376 MElLI STEELE
notions. As Richard Bernstein says, "MacIntyre and Nietzsche [whom MacIntyre sets
up as an unacceptable relativist] look like close companions. For Nietzsche himself portrays
for us a variety of practices, their internal goods, and what is required to excel in these
practices" (Philosophical Profiles, 126).
10 I develop the relationship of language and value in: 'Lyotard's Politics of the
Sentence', Cultural Critique 16 (1990): 193-214 and 'Value and Subjectivity: The
Dynamics of the Sentence in James' The Ambassadors', Comparative Literature 43 (1991):
113-43.
11 Richard Wollheim distinguishes three means of instinctual renunciation (Freud, 157).
REFERENCES
Davidson, Donald, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge." Truth and
Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Ed. Ernest Lepore.
New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
- - , "Paradoxes of Irrationality." Philosophical Essays on Freud. Eds. James Hopkins
and Richard Wollheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York:
Norton, 1961.
Habermas, Jurgen, Knowledge and Human Interests. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971.
Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy. Trans. David Savage. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1970.
- - , "Psychoanalysis and the Movement of Contemporary Culture." Interpretive Social
Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. [PCC]
- - , "The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic Writings." Hermeneutics and the
Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1982.
- - , Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
[CIS]
- - , "Freud and Moral Reflection." Pragmatism's Freud. Eds. William Kerrigan and
Joseph H. Smith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. [FMR]
Taylor, Charles, "What Is Human Agency?" Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Wollheim, Richard, Sigmund Freud. New York: Viking, 1971.
ALICJA HELMAN, WACJ;,AW M. OSADNIK, J;,UKASZ PLESNAR,
AND EUGENIUSZ WILK
SOME REMARKS ON THE APPLICATION OF

INGARDEN'S THEORY TO FILM STUDIES
I.
Roman Ingarden has created a phenomenological approach to art that can

adequately meet the most basic and most general problems of art in a
way that by far supersedes all previous attempts. Another problem
concerns the extent to which Ingarden's answers can be accepted, but the
very fact that these answers have been given sufficiently determines
the unique position of Ingarden's system.
We will distinguish three basic reasons which make contemporary
researchers challenge Ingarden's system in spite of their admiration for
it and some unvoiced conviction that this system might prove most
efficient in many fields as it provides ready answers.
The first reason is of an ideological and methodological nature. It is
represented by Henryk Markiewicz and Jerzy Pelc. Neither accepts
Ingarden's conception of the mode of existence of a literary work of
art as an intentional object. According to Pelc, there is no need to
construct a special category of objects for the work of art because it
can be treated as a real object, i.e., as a thing. He draws conclusions about
the structure of a work in general and disagrees with Ingarden's theory
of strata. Pelc rejects the basic assumptions of the theory of strata and
tries to reveal inconsistencies in Ingarden's line of reasoning. Nonetheless
he would like " . . . to preserve some scientifically valuable ideas
contained in Ingarden's theory of strata, especially those which can be
connected with the process of perception". 1
Henryk Markiewicz adopts Ingarden's theory to a greater extent.
According to Markiewicz, there is no Marxist ontology and the cate-
gory of reflection of reality is too broad to be used in identifying the
modes of existence of a work. The definition of a literary work of
art that Markiewicz suggests combines the views which take it to be
a thing with those which treat a literary work of art as an intentional
object. 2
Markiewicz expresses the opinion that Ingarden's system should be

378 A. HELMAN, W. OSADNIK, L. PLESNAR, E. WILK
supplemented and further developed rather than totally rejected in favour

of other theories. Ontological problems and the inherent failings of the
system could be either solved or eliminated by incorporating Ingarden's
conception into a broader and more general framework, which could
supposedly be obtained by a specific synthesis of phenomenology and
Marxism.
The second reason that evokes criticism is the historical limitation
of Ingarden' s system. For example, abstract art does not fit into Ingarden' s
concept of specificity according to which arts differ in quantity and in
relationships among their strata. Hence abstract painting, which differs
from objective painting in the number of strata, would have to be regarded
as a separate art form. Ingarden's theory, which is discussed as a pheno-
menon occupying a boundary position, accommodates film, but there
is no room for opera, vocal music, happening, abstract art, etc.
The third reason for the critique of Ingarden's system is closely
connected with analytical procedures. It should be mentioned that the
concept of strata attracted considerable attention from the beginning as
it promised to provide a key to the method of analysis whereby the
most important features of a work would be revealed.
II.
Ingarden did not write much about film. There is one chapter or actually
a section in his main work 0 dziele literackim. In 1947 he wrote Kilka
uwag 0 sztuce Jilmowej which was soon thereafter published in French
and in Czech. The Polish version appeared 12 years later at a time when
theoretical discussions had little chance of success as Polish film pub-
lications were almost exclusively devoted to current affairs. That did
not seem to be an appropriate starting point for instilling Ingarden's
theory into the field of film studies, and this is the main reason why
the first attempts to adapt Ingarden's conception for film theory did not
come from filmologists.
As early as the 1930s, that is, before the appearance of Kilka uwag
o sztuceJilmowej, Ingarden's students, Boleslaw Lewicki and Zofia Lissa,
while making use of his ideas, presented their own approaches to the
work of film. Lewicki used the concept of strata in his Budowa dziela
Jilmowego 3 while Zofia Lissa investigated the problem of film music
by dividing a work into strata. 4 Both of them were influenced by
Ingarden's 0 dziele literackim in which he made several pertinent
INGARDEN'S THEORY AND FILM STUDIES 379
observations. Ingarden described the "cinema spectacle" as a work of

art akin to literature, in which the means of representation available
are similar to those of painting. The cinema spectacle, an intentional
formation like any other work of art, has two strata: that of recon-
structed visual manifestations and that of represented objects. Ingarden,
writing in 1927, obviously referred to the silent film. Lewicki and Lissa
had to take sound film into consideration which convinced them of the
necessity to modify the schema of strata. As a result, both of these
scholars came to regard strata in a different way from Ingarden who
(discussing sound film in his Kilka uwag ... ) did not increase the number
of strata. He argued that side by side with visual manifestations there
appear aural ones while spoken language is nothing more than the actual
speech of the people represented in the film.
Lewicki distinguishes three strata in a work of film: 1) the revealed
objects; 2) the represented schematic object realm; and 3) the cinema
language. He tries to follow Ingarden's definition of the stratum, arguing
that "stratification is derived from the film itself but the complexity
and heterogeneity of the film material make it very difficult to adhere
to Ingarden's theory". Lewicki agrees with Ingarden only as far as the
stratum of the represented objects is concerned. The stratum of the
revealed objects corresponds in Lewicki's interpretation to the sound
stratum in a literary work, it is "a mobile wave of visual and sound
disclosures".5 The stratum of language, in fact covering stylistic elements,
has no equivalent in Ingarden's schema unless we decide, following
Barbara Mruklik,6 to regard it as a far-reaching modification of the
stratum of manifestations. Furthermore, Lewicki includes sound among
the "screen phenomena" but goes on to suggest that in some definite
cases speech evokes the appearance of the strata of meanings and of
representations in a work of film.
The development of Lewicki's views on the structure of the work of
film clearly demonstrates that he was not satisfied with his modifications
of the schema of strata. He solved these difficulties thirty years later when
it was only the term "stratum" that was left out of Ingarden's theory.
He discerned the following strata as constitutive of the film: 1) picture;
2) sound; 3) human speech; 4) music. He was obviously not concerned
about the meaning of Ingarden's notion of the stratum. 7 Ingarden held
that the essence of the stratum consists in its requiring other strata and
in the various elements' necessarily being organically bound. Lewicki's
division, as Aleksander Jackiewicz noted,S seems to follow the order
of the making of a work: it destroys the integrity of the film texture by

distinguishing, as its distinct materials, the visual and sound elements.
Zofia Lissa, who followed Ingarden's theory of strata in her 1937
work, reaffirmed her adherence to it many years later when she returned
to the problem of film music in her work Muzyka i film. 9 She modified
Ingarden's assumptions considerably and did not follow his solution of
the problem of sound as presented in Kilka uwag . ...
Lissa identifies the visual sphere and the auditory one. The former
is divided into two strata, i.e., the stratum of visual impressions, and
the stratum of psychic content. The auditory sphere comprises four
phenomena, i.e. music, noise, human speech and silence. These dif-
ferent phenomena are characterised by different ontological properties;
and more importantly, not all of them are of the nature of a stratum.
According to Lissa, music in film has in principle two strata, just like
noises and human speech. The interaction and even unity of spheres in
the sound film, in spite of ontological heterogeneity, is, in Lissa's view,
a result of the synthetic nature of film. It is synthetic not only because
it binds together the elements of different arts and establishes new rela-
tionships between them, but also because "it synthesises the different
ontological properties of these arts". 10
Lissa does not provide definition of the stratum, implying that she
follows Ingarden's usage. But she must, in fact, views it differently
because, according to the definitions and descriptions of strata provided
by Ingarden, a piece of synthetic art cannot be stratified.
In his Kilka uwag 0 sztuce filmowej Ingarden stated explicitly that,
in his view, the sound film contained the same strata as the silent one.
Nonetheless, some interpreters, notably Aleksander Kumor, still believed
that a greater part of Ingarden's system could be exploited or modified
for the purpose of film analysis; than Ingarden himself had envisaged;
Aleksander lackiewicz ll and Alicja Helman 12 also considered the
possibilities of applying Ingarden's concept of strata to analytical practice.
Aleksander Kumor, just as did his predecessors, did not end the dis-
cussion by drawing conclusions from what Ingarden had to say about
the art of film, but expanded on it. 13 Being acquainted with the results
obtained by literary theoreticians and musicologists, he tried to approach
the problem in a different way. His point of departure is Ingarden's
work 0 budowie obrazu and his goal was "to lean on the intentionality
of a picture (with respect to its mode of existence) and its stratification
(with respect to its structure)", as he was convinced that only the visual
qualities define the film picture. Failing to find a suitable definition of

the film picture in Ingarden's writings, Kumor resorted to the concept
of the aesthetic dose as developed by Stefan Szuman. 14 Kumor con-
fronts Ingarden's assumptions about the painted picture (mainly about
the paintings with literary subjects) with a film picture in an attempt to
discover their common and distinctive features. "A necessary feature
which makes a film picture different from paintings", he asserts, "is
the multiplicity of mutually transformable manifestations".15 However
in the course of the analysis, Kumor comes to the following conclu-
sions: "movement generally exists in a painting; the aesthetic appeal of
movement in a painting can be identical with or similar to film
movement; it is legitimate to look for laws common to both these arts
or to carry out transfer manipulation" .16
Kumor, with his contrastive point of view, neither criticizes Ingarden's
approach nor modifies the original ideas taken from his works. In a
way, Kumor's work lends support to the thesis that the film theory can
derive more from Ingarden's system than Ingarden himself might have
wished. A contrastive approach enables for Kumor to transcribe
Ingarden's theory into the language of film theory in a fairly straight-
forward way, although he had to go beyond Ingarden's theory to reach
the goal set in his work.
lackiewicz tries to expand Ingarden's system of strata and to find
out whether and to what extent the system can be used in analytical
practice.!7 He finds it necessary to expand the system as Ingarden's
schema takes no account of the "phonophotographicity" of film, nor of
its conceptual level. lackiewicz suggests that the "phonophotograph-
ical or audio-visual stratum comes first, as it constitutes the whole work,
including all other strata". This is followed by both of the strata discussed
by Ingarden. Finally comes "the fourth, subordinate stratum, that of
conceptualization and meanings".!8
lackiewicz rejects both the philological method with its sui generis
opting for a "grammatical" analysis of a film work of art and the
treatment of film as a synthetic formation where the division into strata
follows the suggestions of Lewicki's theory. He considers Ingarden's
theory of strata to be the only conception which could prove useful in
the theory of film.
lackiewicz is not only the author of an essay published in Wst~p do
badania dziela filmowego, but also the head of the group that prepared
this book. This group was preoccupied with the possibility of applying
Ingarden's concepts to solving various problems in the theory of film.

As a result of the studies conducted by this group, two more filmolo-
gists - Andrzej Ochalski 19 and Alicja Helman 20 took up this problem.
Of all filmologists, Andrzej Ochalski comes closest to Ingarden's
views. In his paper,21 Ochalski prepared a " ... test of efficiency of
the phenomenological method in the study of a film work of art".22 He
singled out those points and elements in Ingarden's conception that allow
for a broad interpretation without falling into contradiction with the basic
theses of the system. As a result, Ochalski was able to use the device,
useful both theoretically and methodically, of introducing "recorded
reality" into the work (intentional object). To this end, he endorsed
Jackiewicz's opinion that the number of strata should be increased by
two. He also stressed the fact that "film is the only intentional object
which contains not the intentionally projected reality ( ... ) but rather
its mechanical copy".23 Ochalski's final conclusion is not completely
satisfactory because of its metaphorical character, but it nonetheless
serves to define the specific nature of time in film, which was the goal
of his paper.
Alicja Helman abandoned her original plan of exploiting the schema
of strata in the analysis of a film work of art.24 Because this seemed
impossible to attain, she adopted a conception, taken from the theory
of music, whereby a work is divided into co-efficients (not elements)
whose resultant constitutes the form of a work.
Stefan Morawski's extreme views expressed in the paper lngar-
denowska koncepcja sztuki filmowej can be taken as a good example
of the anti-Ingardenian opposition. Morawski begins by saying that
he does not call into question Ingarden's aesthetics but merely the
"legend" created by his supporters. The latter claim that Das literarische
Kunstwerk and the second volume of Studia z estetyki offer revolutionary
suggestions about the art of film which can be used to found a Polish
theoretical schoo1. 25 This view in Morawski's opinion is without foun-
dation. He critically evaluates Ingarden's basic assumptions and comes
to the conclusion that they are all incorrect: "a work of film does not
consist of manifestations, represented objects and events; it is not
intentional and it is not unreal".26 Confronting Ingarden's views histor-
ically with theories propounded at that time and earlier, Morawski says
that such a comparison " ... is not favorable for Ingarden. Whatever
he had to say about the theory of film in his essays had already been
said before, supported by more convincing arguments and developed
against a broader background".27 It might seem that an evaluation of

this sort would lead to the conclusion that the theory of film should no
longer bother with Ingarden as his inconsiderable contribution to the
development of the theory of film has already been properly assessed.
This, however, is not the case. Morawski says: "Even if one rejects
Ingarden's basic tenets, it does not follow that his individual conclu-
sions about the specific nature of film are meaningless ( ... ) I am
convinced that Ingarden's aesthetic system allows for the derivation of
features of film art that he never specified". 28 In conclusion, Morawski
stresses that "the inspiration which Ingarden's aesthetics is able and
should offer has not, as yet, been properly exploited by the theory of
film.,,29 The reader no longer knows what the aesthetics is able to and
should offer, so Morawski proposes a few suggestions of his own that,
in a sense, amount to the withdrawal of his criticism. Ingarden's analyses
of works of literature, painting and music are very precise and they set
the standard for those students of art who would want to analyse a musical
or a literary film. Morawski thinks it would be particularly desirable to
"re-analyse the identity of the film work, in view of Ingarden's sug-
gestions" as well as the question of the form and content. But he goes
on to add that "this is not a full survey of problems which can be
derived from Ingarden's aesthetics". These problems await a film theo-
retician who "would re-analyze all of Ingarden's theory in his own way
reaching for what is of greatest value in present day studies of film".30
III.
In the mid-seventies the problem of the phenomenology of cinema was

re-thought and re-discussed by the Silesian-Cracow group of filmologists
headed by Professor Alicja Helman. Using formal methods, the group
demonstrated that a film can be described as a multi-stratified object.
This argument was based on several assumptions:
(AI) Every film work is a semantically multi-stratified object
consisting of:
- a representational stratum
- a registered stratum (a stratum of registered reality)
- a presented stratum
- a communicatory stratum.
(A2) The representational stratum is the ideally schematized material
object of signs (the dynamic structure of multi-coloured or black and
384 A. HELMAN, W. OSADNIK, 1:.. PLESNAR, E. WILK
white patches and lines, as well as of speech sounds and non-verbal

sounds).
(A3) The registered stratum, the presented stratum and the communi-
catory stratum are theoretical constructions (or quasi-intentional objects)
and:
- the registered stratum, on the ground of premises given by the
representational stratum, contains reconstructed true physical reality,
recorded on the film reel. Its components are all kinds of real, material
objects, processes and events.
- the presented stratum, being an equivalent of Ingarden's stratum of
presented objects and their vicissitudes is composed of characters
(impersonated by the actors, puppets or drawings), all their statements,
their motions and their activities and the objects "played" by the props
and the scenery, etc. Within this stratum such "elements" of film work,
such as the plot and the story are formed, and with regard to that
stratum we may speak of the so-called "content" of film (in the par-
ticular sense of this term, which was examined by Ingarden in his
paper "The Form and the Content of a Literary Work,,).31 This stratum
comprises what we call in the standard theory of literature and film
studies "the represented world".
- the communicatory stratum contains the so-called sense or the idea
of a film, i.e., the state of affairs (or the structure of states of affairs)
imparted by the previous strata, especially by the presented stratum.
(A4) The registered stratum and the communicatory stratum are not
composed of signs. The represented stratum is exclusively made up of
so-called introducing symbols which are not yet linguistic signs. This
shows that the conceivable language of film (if it exists) may function
only within a representational stratum. The other strata could at best
be recognized as its models.
As was pointed out, we can only speak about the quasi-linguistic
nature of filmic communication and, consequently, the problem of the
relationship between language and quasi-language has to be discussed. 32
For this reason semantically-interpreted language a construct (denoted
by L s ), whose dictionary consists of:
(1) unitary terms which are the names of all elementary units,
(2) predicates denoting the single, binary or n-ary relations of the
representational stratum, and
(3) the logical constants of the functional calculus.
In this semantically interpreted language L s , the description of a

representational stratum will be the conjunction ofthis language's atomic
sentences. 33 Using language L s , we can determine the syntactic categories
of particular elements of the representational stratum and provide the
semantic-syntactic analysis of the film work of art. 34
The starting point for the considerations of the syntactic description
of a film work must therefore be the assumption of the necessity of trans-
forming the given language L (equipped with formation and deduction
rules) into a semantically interpreted language Ls.
In the following we make these initial assumptions:
(1) We distinguish in the screen phenomenon the representing struc-

ture
(2) We assume object reference rules for expressions of language L,

thereby transforming language L into a semantically interpreted
language Ls (unitary terms denote elementary units, predicates
denote single-, bi- or multi-term relations S" ... , Sm' T" ... ,
Tn; moreover, the dictionary of language Ls includes the logical
constants of the narrower functional calculus.
(3) The basic principle of the syntactic description of a screen phe-
nomenon is the transference of the given expression of language
Ls to the denotation of this expression in the film phenomenon
(the unitary terms of the screen phenomenon are its elementary units,
the single- or multi-term predicates are the properties or relations
S" ... , Sm. T" ... , Tn; the atomic sentences of the screen
phenomenon are the states of affairs occurring in it and corre-
sponding to the atomic sentences of language Ls - called elementary
states of affairs; the logical connectives of the screen phenomenon
are logical relations between the states of affairs of the screen
phenomenon corresponding to the connectives of negation and
conjunction of language Ls ). Hence, the object of syntactic descrip-
tion is the structure
(Me = Ue; N,C)
where Ue is the set of elementary states of affairs either asserted

386 A. HELMAN, W. OSADNIK, t... PLESNAR, E. WILK
or negated in the description, N - the single-term relation of

negation, and C - the bi-term logical relation of conjunction. 35
The presuppositions adopted above are accompanied by the following

assumptions, which are also valid in subsequent reasoning:
(1) The kind of explication used here is the humanistic interpretation

(as understood by J. Kmita).36
(2) In the "analysis" of the screen phenomenon of interest to us, we
are dealing with a peculiar kind of humanistic interpretation, namely,
with sign interpretation, the explanans of which, according to J.
Kmita, should include the assertion that the dominant value
in the given order, i.e., the sense of the interpreted sign, is the
communication of a (more or less) specific state of affairs; this
explanans should contain the description of (i) the sign competence,
(ii) the object knowledge coupled to this competence, and (iii)
knowledge of the sign receivers which assumes, most importantly,
that these receivers have an analogous competence and object
knowledge.
The idealizing status of the communication scheme combines, in the case

of film, with the idealizing concept of iconic sign. This is understood
by W. Lawniczak3? as an idealizing schematization of the various concrete
substrates in this sign with, what is universally referred to as the iconic
sign, there always being a certain structure of the same kind as the
representing structure of a work of art.
The researcher, having at his disposal a certain knowledge Kn , as a
rule is interested in selected, unitary states of affairs (understood as
assertions that the selected object is the carrier of selected properties
Cl , . . . , Cn). Hence, in addition, we do not pursue a full interpretation
indicating communicative sense, but a partial interpretation, the
explanandum of which consists of the characteristics of certain unitary
states of affairs of the representing structure of the work of art, and the
characteristics of certain unitary states of affairs of the represented
structure. The fundamental question, irresistibly coming to mind here,
is one concerning the rules governing the hierarchization and stratifi-
cation of the above-mentioned states of affairs of interest to the
researcher. To answer this question, we will make use of the general
notion of the humanistic structure and of the notion of the instrumental

subordination relation.
We will describe the general notion of the humanistic structure as
follows. Let S be the sense of a product of a relevant complex rational
activity. We will say that fragment F j of product P is its direct instru-
mental component if (i) fragment F j is an element of the set of fragments
(F I , • • • , Fn) combining to form P, and (ii) each of the fragments F I ,
... , Fn has a property (complex of properties) in which occurrence
is a necessary condition sufficient for the realization of sense S. By
elaborating this definition we may state that:
(1) The above assertions become legitimate after first being relativized
with respect to specific knowledge;
(2) Product P is a hierarchized whole; in other words, the relation of
direct instrumental subordination determines the so-called levels
which constitute finite sets of components which we explicate as
follows: the zero level (denoted Qo) identical with P and realizing
sense S, may be treated as the sum of the family of sets whose
elements are fragments denoted, respectively, F I 2II , ... ,P, F n2l1, ... ,P (i.e.,
fragments belonging to the second level, this being indicated by
the numerator of the superscript; its denominator indicates the
fragment of the first level, which is, of course, treated as a finite
set - to which it belongs as a set element). The first level may be
treated analogously as the sum of a family of sets, the elements
of which are fragments of the third level, denoted F 3/1 , .. ,P and
treated as a fragment of fragments of the second level. Proceeding
analogously, we may define fragments of the limit level by writing
F mll , ... ,P, where the terms (1, ... , n), (1, ... , m) and (1, ... , p)
denote finite sequences: the n-, m- and p-elements, respectively.
As we can see, the researcher is in fact interested in elementary states

of affairs (or conjunctions of elementary states of affairs) of the form
(A, B) where A denotes a given elementary unit or a pair or a trio, etc.,
of units, and B, stands for the specific property of the previously dis-
cussed repertoire SI' ... , Sm' T I , ... , Tn. Considering the fact that
language Ls is a semantically interpreted language (according to the rules
given at the beginning of the present considerations), we may say that
the researcher-analyst of the film work focuses his attention on the atomic
sentences of the representing structure and the denotations thereof, i.e.,

on the elementary represented states of affairs. We shall now try to
explicate the assumptions which are implicit, so to speak, in the
above reasoning and which may form the basis for distinguishing an
analytical procedure with reference to a film work.
(1) The object of an analytical description cannot be the full set of

features of a given work since such a description would not be
feasible; the researcher-analyst is interested only in selected features.
Hence, during analysis, our concern is with the process of schema-
tization; consequently, as already mentioned, the objects of
explication are states of affairs.
(2) During analysis the researcher first captures the sense of the work
as a whole (in our terminology the sense of the zero level, Qo) and
only in subsequent stages discovers the senses of further levels, right
down to the limit level.
In the context of the above two statements it is altogether natural to

ask about the criteria governing the selection, hierarchization and ordering
of the separate levels. There also arises the question of more precise
definitions of the character of the separate levels.
It turns out that, in practice, the analytical procedures will be per-
formed on two planes and will proceed in two directions as the senses
of the properties of the separate fragments are best recognized, alternately
on the plane of the representing structure, or on that of the represented
structure. This last claim lets us distinguish two groups of fragments.
I. The first group consists of a finite set of the fragments drawn first
of all from the plane of the representing structure; we will call it the
"stylistic" group. (We not only refer the notion of style to the plane of
the representing structure, but also to specific rules organizing the
represented structure of the film work of art).
II. The second group consists of a finite set of those fragments which
are drawn mainly from the plane of the represented structure. We will
call it the "semantized" group in view of the fact that the represented
structure is basically a semantic model of the "text" of the screen
phenomenon (representing structure).
"The notion of style", writes Helman, "appeared ( ... ) in theoret-
ical reflections on the material of film art when it became necessary to
stress the factor of human intervention; the element of creation".38 E.
Panofsky thus described the essence of the notion of film style: "To
take control of and photograph unstylized reality in such a manner that
the result has style: this is what the task consists of" .39 Developing this
direction of thought, and at the same time referring it to the group of
"stylistic" fragments we have just distinguished, we may say that the
atomic sentences of a screen phenomenon (which are in the metalanguage
adopted for Ls) have the form:
(1) (ai' K)
(2) «ai' a), K k)
(3) «ai' aj , ak)' K l), etc.,
(where a i denotes a specific unitary term of a screen phenomenon, and

Kr the predicate of a screen phenomenon); these are the limit levels of
these same "stylistic" fragments and may be described as follows: (i)
the unitary terms mentioned above usually do not enter sentences of
film phenomena which denote the elementary represented states of affairs
which are subject to the most generally understood relations of diachro-
nous transformation (discussed below); (ii) the unitary terms present in
sentences denoting elementary represented states of affairs which are
subject to relations of diachronous transformation are assigned here to
the predicates of screen phenomena denoting relations from the previ-
ously defined repertoire T[> . . . , Tn.
As the group of "semanticized" fragments, we may say that the atomic
sentences of a screen phenomenon constituting the above-mentioned
fragments denote those elementary represented states which are subject
to the most generally understood "relations of diachronous transforma-
tion". The assumptions of these relations may be presented as follows:
in order to formulate a language serving to describe dynamic screen
phenomena and to construct a semantic method of diachronous analysis
thereof, we make use of praxeological treatments of the theory of events
(we have in mind here the suitably modified conceptions of G.H. von
Wright 40 and E. Leniewicz 41 ) and we introduce the language of clas-
sical sentential calculus, namely:
1. AS THE NONSPECIFIC PART OF THIS LANGUAGE:
(i) connectives of classical sentential calculus:

- , A, V, ~, == interpreted as, respectively, "it is not true that ... ",
" ... and ... ", " ... or ... ", "if ... then ... ", " ... iff ... ";
(ii) event variables P, c, r, ... ;
(iii) functor of event identity, =, interpreted" ... is identical with
· .. ".,
(iv) functor of event non-identity, *" , interpreted " ... is not
identical with ... ";
(v) time indices of events i,}, k • ... ;
(vi) functor of event negation, , , interpreted "non-occurrence of
· .. at time ... ";
(vii) functor of event transformation, T, interpreted" ... trans-
forms into ... ";
(viii) functors of subtypes of event transformations: Z, D, B. P
interpreted respectively as " ... preserves ... ", " ... complements
· .. ", " ... generates ... ", " ... transforms into ... ";
II. ELEMENTARY FORMULAE OF EVENT TRANSFORMATIONS:
(i) persistence of event p: pjTpj.

(ii) termination of event p: pjTp'j.
(iii) emergence of event p: p'jTpj.
(iv) non-appearance of event p: p'jTp'j'
III. CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PRIMARY TERM

(POSTULATES PI-P6):
(PI) PiTpj -? Pi Tpj

If the first event transforms into the second. then the first event
is the earlier one
(P2) PiTpj == - (PiTp'j V p'jTpj V p'jTp')
Only one of the listed four cases of event transformation can
take place
(P3) pjTpj A pjTPk -? pjTpk
Transitivity of the transformation relation
(P4) PiTpk -? [piT(p V p')} A (p V p')} Tpki
Decomposability in time of event transformation
(P5) pjTpk -? (p V p') jTpj
Deterministicity of event transformation
(P6) pjTpj -? pjT (p V P')k
Infinite character of event transformation
IV. DEFINITIONS OF SUBTYPES OF EVENT TRANSFORMATIONS:
(Dl) PiZqj == (PiTpj A qiT%) - preservation of events

df
(D2) pfJqj == (PiTp'j A qiTq) - complementation of events
df
(D3) PiBqj == (PiTpj A q'(Tq) - generation of events
df
(D4) ppqj == (PiTp'j A q'(Tp) - transformation of events
df
V. RULES OF INFERENCE: WE ASSUME
(i) the rules of substitution, detachment and replacement from

classical sentential calculus;
(ii) specific rules of the system of event theory: rules of omission,
of double negation, of substitution, of replacement, of detach-
ment, and of model construction.
In turn, to interpret the semantic language of events, we reduce the
meaning of the term T (and of its derivatives) to the relations of co-
succession and co-occurrence of events, and the meaning of the term
"event" to the previously identified (on a synchronous plane) represented
states of affairs of a film work. Thus, the model of the discussed language
takes the general form:
where Us is a finite set of distinguished represented states of affairs

and the sign "<" denotes the relation of temporal precedence. Based
on the assumption adopted earlier, it is possible to prove, among other
things, the following three tautologies:
(Tl) PiP% A r!3% ~ pfJrj

(T2) PiZqj A PiBrj ~ qiBrj
(T3) pfJqj A P'Pqk ~ PiZqk
Tautologies (Tl )-(T3) turn out to be useful in explaining the arrange-

ments of "semanticized" fragments of a film work. (Tl) demonstrates the
problem of diachronous "combination" of represented states of affairs;
(T2) shows the "separation" - in the diachronous plane - of represented
states of affairs, while (T3) shows the syntactic regularities of "sequences".

These three tautologies may also provide a basis for the distinction among
"semanticized" fragments of three groups called:
(i) the "semantically cumulating" type
(ii) the "semantically dispersive" type, and
(iii) the "semantic discourse".
To conclude, we must settle an issue that is not only of terminolog-
ical importance. It was established in discussions on the linguistic and
nonlinguistic character of the film message, that on the grounds of film
work ontology, the system of film communication is of a quasi-
linguistic character. 42 Let us look at this problem from the viewpoint
of our needs. If we follow B. Stanosz and A. Nowaczyk 43 and hold that
all languages are derivatives of the system:
(A, Z, G)
where A is a finite set of symbols called the alphabet, and Z is an

infinite subset of the set of all finite sequences formed of elements of
alphabet A, and G is the structure assigned to sentences from Z; and if
we then simplify by identifying the alphabet with the dictionary, then
we refer the above system to the previously distinguished group of
fragments. If we further observe that subset Z is finite, then we may
definitively state that the distinguished groups and types of fragments are
not so much languages as codes. They satisfy the conditions for the
infinity of the set of signals and there is a finite number of ways of
interpreting them.
Summing up, we have distinguished for analytical purposes the
following codes in the film work:
(I) Stylistic codes

(II) "Semanticized" codes
(i) cumulating codes
(ii) dispersing codes
(iii) discoursive codes.
This is a greatly simplified picture of the assumptions of the research

program preceding the syntactic-semantic analysis of a film work. We
have elaborated on the present remarks in a larger work44 wherein we
introduced, inter alia, notions such as: the synchronous system of rep-
resenting structure S (performing a tentative typology of these systems

as well and applying them to concrete films), the synchronous system
of represented structure, and, finally, the "semantized" codes described
above, based on diachronous courses of a film.
Referring to these theses and assumptions it can be noticed that there
is a clear distinction between two semantic models of the representational
stratum. The first one, closely connected with the registered stratum,
consists of the reconstruction of the physical objects with given special
and time positions, and is of an empirical character. The second one,
i.e., the presented stratum, lacks such a character. In order to avoid
misunderstanding, it should be clearly stated that the "empirical" does
not mean the material presence of the objects creating the film work, i.e.,
the theoretical reconstructions of real objects only penetrate into the
film work, while the objects themselves are situated outside the film
work. However, the existence of causal connections and correspondence
between reality (undergoing the process of registration) and what has
already been registered, guarantees that the representational stratum
will be of an indirectly empirical character. Consequently, this allows
us to treat the stratum as being similar to the real world.
In order to characterize the diachronic language of events in a film
work of art from the semantic point of view, we should first define the
term "event". We presuppose that "event" (the state of affairs) relates
to the temporal status of the synchronic plan. We also presuppose that
the definition of time (in the context of the theory of identity) denotes
the set of moments, M, previously ordered by the relation W';
C = (M,W').
df
According to Ingarden 45 we distinguish:
- things which "last" in time

- processes of intervallic character
- events which are momentary.
We should also point out that Ingarden defines an interval as a set of

moments (or more precisely, an interval is allocated by two limiting
moments).
Treating an "event" as momentary is quite common in philosophy
and semiotics. R. W6jcicki46 for example, defines events by means of

things and moments:
z = (a,m).
In other words, the event Z is the thing a in a moment m.
In a film work, the problem of moments, events and things is
examined, - according to the Polish tradition - in the context of a film
still. B. Lewicki describes this in the following way: "Each motionless
picture - a film still - comprises implied elements of motion. We read
from this ( ... ) what has been before, as well as what will come after
( ... ). The proper selection of film stills guarantees the existence of
what is called "the film essence". This selection is the most important
element of film essence, and it can always be reconstructed. The motion-
less form of a film still embraces the whole function of a film picture,
treated as an element of the text of reproduced reality. In other words,
the series of film stills is the most important element of the reconstructed
film essence".47 The same idea has also been discussed by Ingarden,
and we shall enlist his theory for further theoretical and practical
investigations. He claims the picture to be of momentary character, and
one can rarely speak of time in that respect. It is only pictures with a
literary theme that have the feature of the 'present', the 'past' and the
'future'. This depends however, on the type of event transmitted by means
of a picture.48
The semioticians of the Tartu School deal with the problem in a similar
manner. According to V. V. Ivanov, a film model based on the impres-
sion of a motion continuum originates as a sequence of non-consecutive
pictures. 49
In our analysis of 'semanticized' codes, we deal mainly with the
state of affairs of the representing structure on a level Qo' The crite-
rion for distinguishing these states of affairs is the principle of the
identicality of represented elements. According to that principle, we
can formulate the synchronic systems of a represented structure. The
identicality of represented elements (described, however, by means of
various predicates) only allow us to find the SUbtypes of synchronic
systems with indices of events. What will for us be most important in
the representing structure are the individual terms of the screen pheno-
menon and its predicates. We shall also follow W. Lawniczak's principle,
according to which "the description of the representing structure ( ... )
is preceded logically (from the point of view of methodological studies)

by certain semantic presuppositions. ( ... ) They determine what the
subject of such a description should be".50
According to J. Kmita's theory about the so-called "first degree
procedure", we shall analyze the representing structure with a view to
identifying the linguistic features of the text. This interpretative model
presupposes these features to be the explanandum. The answer, i.e., the
explanans, should comprise the characteristics of the sense of these
features, that is, the form of only this and no other represented reality.51
While analyzing the represented structure we shall apply Kmita's
"second degree procedure". This indicates the interpretation (explana-
tion) of these features of the represented reality which are considered
in the explanans of interpretations of the first degree. These features
will make up the explanandum in the second degree. The explanans,
on the other hand, will comprise (still in the second degree) mainly the
characteristics of the communication sense of these features. 52
From a pragmatic point of view, we should keep in mind that the
represented structure relates to specific subjective knowledge and artistic
competence.
The Jagiel/onian University

The University of Alberta
The Silesian University
NOTES
1 Pelc, J. (1958), "0 istnieniu i strukturze dziei'a literackiego" ('The Literary Work: Its
Structure and Mode of Existence'), in: Studia Filozoficzne, no. 3, pp. 130-131.
2 Markiewicz, H. (1970) Gtowne problemy wiedzy 0 literaturze (Main Issues in Literary
Studies) Krak6w.
3 Lewicki, B. (1935) Budowa dzieta filmowego (The Structure of a Work of Film), in:
Zycie Sztuki, no. 2.
4 Lissa, Z. (1937) Muzyka i film (Music and Film), Lvov.
5 Lewicki, B. (1964) Wprowadzenie do wiedzy ofilmie (Introduction to Film) Ossolineum.
6 Mruklik, B. (1968) "Teoria filmu Bolestawa Lewickiego" (Bolestaw Lewicki's Film
Theory), in: Wsp6tczesne teoriefilmowe (Contemporary Film Theories), ed. by A. Helman.
Warsaw.
7 Lewicki, B. (1964), op. cit.
8 Jackiewicz, A. (1966) "Uwagi 0 metodologii badania dziet'a filmowego" (Remarks about
the Methodology of Film Studies), in: Wstep do badania dzieta filmowego (Introduction
to the Study of Film) ed. by A. Jackiewicz. Warsaw.
9 Lissa, Z. (1964) Muzyka i film, op. cit. and Estetyka muzyki Jilmowej (The Aesthetics
of Film Music) Krak6w.
10 Lissa, Z., (1964) op. cit.
11 J ackiewicz, A., (1966) op. cit.
12 Helman, A. (1970) 0 dziele filmowym (On the Film Work of Art) Krak6w.
13 Kumor, A. (1959) "Obraz malarski i obraz filmowy" (Painting and Film), in:
Kwartainik Filmowy, no. 3.
14 Szuman, S. (1949) "Poj~cie dawki estetycznej" (The Notion of Aesthetic Dose),
Przeglad FilozoJiczny, no. 1-2.
IS Kumor, a. (1959), op. cit., p. 60.
16 Kumor, a. (1959), op. cit., p. 71.
17 Jackiewicz, A. (1966), op. cit.
18 Jackiewicz, A. (1966), op. cit.
19 Ochalski, A. (1966) "Struktury czasowe w dziele filmowym" (Temporal Structures
in the Work of Film), in: Wstep do badania dzieta Jilmowego, op. cit.
20 Helman, A. (1975). "The Influence of Ingarden's Aesthetics on the Theory of Film",
in: R. Ingarden and Contemporary Polish Aesthetics, Warsaw, pp. 97-98.
21 Ochalski, A. (1966), op. cit.
22 Ibid., p. 29. (The test was also applied to Ingarden's method of analysis of a literary
work of art: see: Ingarden, R. (1966). "The Form and the Content of a Literary Work",
in: Studia z estetyki., T. 2. Warsaw.)
23 Ochalski, A. (1966), op. cit., p. 162.
24 Helman, A. (1966) "Z zagadnien metody analizy dziela filmowego" (The Method
of Analysis of a Film Work of Art), in: Wst~p do badania dzieta filmowego, op. cit.
25 Morawski, S. (1958) "Ingardenowska koncepcja sztuki filmowej" (Ingarden's Theory
of the Art of Film), in: Kwartalnik Filmowy, no. 4 (1985).
26 Ibid., p. 28.
27 Ibid., p. 25.
28 Ibid., p. 28.
29 Ibid., p. 31.
30 Ibid., p. 32.
31 Ingarden, R. (1966) "Forma i trese, dzieia literackiego" (The Form and Content of
a Literary Work), in: Studia z estetyki, T. 2. Warsaw.
32 Osadnik, W.M.; Plesnar 1:.. (1988) "La naturaleza cuasi-linguistica de la comunica-
tion filmica", Semiosis, Vol. 21, pp. 77-109.
33 Ibid., p. 95.
34 Ibid., p. 96.
35 Ibid., pp. 96-97.
36 Kmita, J. (1971) Z metodologicznych problem6w interpretacji humanistycznej (On
Methodological Problems of Humanistic Interpretation) Warsaw.
37 Lawniczk, W. (1975) "Struktura humanistyczna" (The Humanistic Structure), in:
Kmita, J. Wartosc, dzieto, sens. Warsaw.
38 Helman, A. (1978) Kilka uwag 0 stylu w filmie (Some Remarks on Style in Film).
Kino, no. 4.
39 Panofsky, E. (1972) Styl i mednium w filmie (Style and Medium in Cinema). Warsaw.
40 Wright, G.H. von (1963) Norm and Action. New York.
41 Leniewicz, E. (1975). Pr6ba jormalizacji teorii zdarzen. I. System teorii zdarzen

(On Formalization of a Theory of Events), in: Prakseologia no. 2154.
42 Plesnar, L (1980). "J~zyk logiki a j~zyk filmu" (Language of Logic and Language
of Film), in: Problemy semiotyczne jilmu, Helman, A.; Wilk, E. (eds.) Katowice.
43 Nowaczyk, A.; Stanosz, B. (1976) Logiczne podstawy j~zyka (Logical Principles of
Language), Wrocl:aw.
44 Wilk, E. (1984), 0 analizie semiotycznej dzietajilmowego (On the Semiotic Analysis
of a Film Work of Art), Katowice.
45 Ingarden, R. (1958), "0 budowie obrazu" (On the Structure of Image), in: Studia z
estetyki. T. 2. Warsaw.
46 W6jcicki, R. (1978), Metody jormalne w problematyce teoriopoznawczej (Formal
Methods in Cognitive Theories), Warsaw, p. 374.
47 Lewicki, B.W. (1977). "Elementy analityki filmowej" (Analytical Methods in Film
Studies), in: Wsp6tczesne problemy metodologiifilmu, Helman, A.; Malczewska, A., (eds.)
Katowice, pp. 20-2l.
48 Ingarden, R. (1958), op. cit., pp. 90-9l.
49 Ivanov, V. V. (1977). "Kategoria czasu w sztuce i kulturze XXw" (The Category of
Time in Twentieth Century Art and Culture), in: Znak, styl, konwencja, Gtowinski, M.
(ed.) Warsaw, p. 274.
50 Lawniczak, W. (1975), Teoretyczne podstawy interpretacji dziet sztuki plastycznej
(Theoretical Principles of the Interpretation of Visual Art), Poznan. pp. 25-26.
51 Kmita, J. (1971), Z metodologicznych problem6w interpretacji humanistycznej, op.
cit., p. 65.
52 Ibid., p. 66.
ROGER L. BROOKS
PHENOMENOLOGY AND MATTHEW ARNOLD:

AN UNCOLLECTED EPISODE
Matthew Arnold was a man of mystery. He was not conscious of this

fact; but in his bearing, manner, and conversation, he produced this
image. There are reasons, I think, for this. Arnold was Celtic in origin;
and the imaginative mind, the reflective bent, and the interest in the
supernatural that we associate with Celtic natures were his. Furthermore,
Arnold grew up in the Lake Country of England, the haunt of the
Romantics. And here as a young man, he was sensitive and receptive
to the legends and tales of the weird and uncanny happenings of the
area. His walks often carried him far from home and alongside the lakes
on dark and misty nights where his imagination mingled with the
unnatural sounds and scenes of the area.
In his early poetry there is evidence of extensive reading and even
research in legends, myths, and superstitions. In these early efforts one
encounters, for example, a mysterious voice in the night along the Nile
in ancient Egypt ("Mycerinus"), the wandering, restless, searching spirit
of an 18th century Oxford student ("The Scholar Gipsy"), and such
non-human creatures as neckans ("The Neckan") and mermans ("The
Forsaken Merman") - all subdued, of course, for a purpose larger than
mere excitement and mystery. But the presence of these and other things
suggests Arnold's unmistakable interest and concern.
Later in life, when he traveled a great deal, Arnold deliberately placed
himself in the way of the unfathomable and the eerie. And it is in the
accounts of his travels that we get some indication of his attitude toward
these things. In Genoa Arnold sought out the dark, narrow staircases
of Gothic towers, but he was quick to condemn them as unpleasant and
unattractive.! During his lecture tour of the United States in 1883-1884,
he criticized severely the superstitions and customs of the country; yet
he made certain that Salem was included in his tour - the city, he noted
humorously, that was "famous for its witches"? In England, while visiting
with Moncure Grant Duff, he wrote to a member of his family that one
of the guest rooms in the large, old house was "hung with tapestry and
haunted", one of the Grant Duff family having committed suicide there.
Another guest, Sir John Lubbock, the astronomer, was given the room
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.). Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 399-403.

400 ROGER L. BROOKS
instead of Arnold because Arnold quipped, "as a man of science he is

supposed to be exempt from all superstitious fears".3 In such instances
as these and many more, there is evident an attempted disinterested-
ness - the guise that Arnold wore as a literary critic - and a sense of
humor, but there is also evident an insatiable inquisitiveness concerning
mysterious things - an inquisitiveness that often thrust Arnold past
propriety. Some would say, of such moments, that he challenged fate.
It is of such an instance that I wish to relate, a mysterious moment
in Matthew Arnold's life that is not recounted in any of the biographies
or noted in his correspondence or unpublished diaries. And if it had not
been mentioned by John Guille Millais in the little-read biography of his
famous father,4 I am sure that it would have remained well buried in the
past. Although the account by Millais is brief, the role that Arnold played
in this dramatic episode is quite clearly related. From Arnold's published
and unpublished correspondence I know what happened before and after
this account; and from a general knowledge of his thoughts and attitudes,
I can clarify details and provide transition when it is necessary. But the
essential facts of the case have not been changed or distorted; they are
exactly the same as those recorded by John Guille Millais.
In October of 1887 Matthew Arnold was several months into his
retirement enjoying the freedom from school inspecting and a comfort-
able schedule of writing and speaking. That fall, as in many previous
ones, he looked forward to a holiday of Salmon fishing with his old
friend John Everett Millais or,perhaps, Moncure Grant Duff. It was an
invitation from the former that reached him first, and Arnold packed
his fishing gear and caught an early train to Scotland. He arrived at
Birnam Hall, the Millais home, in Murthly to find himself on this
occasion one of numerous guests. It was Millais' habit to invite groups
to Murthly on impulse. To some, such as Arnold, he wrote an invita-
tion; to others he extended an invitation as he encountered them; he
was rarely conscious of the size of the party until it had actually arrived.
It is difficult to identify all the members of this particular party from
Millais' sketchy account, but they seem to have been John Everett Millais,
Lord Wolseley, a certain Mr. Crabbe, and George Stibbard, three friends
that he had brought from London, John Guille Millais, the son, and his
"old college friends" Edgar Dawson, Arthur Newton, and a third that
he identified - for reasons that will be understood later - only by the
initials "E. S.". In addition, there were Matthew Arnold, Mrs. Millais,
two of the Millais daughters, and finally a second "initialed" guest,
PHENOMENOLOGY AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 401
Miss G. S., perhaps a sister to the E. S. previously mentioned. The

afternoon was spent lightly, and it passed quickly. But when evening
began to surround Birnam Hall and the mist began to rise in the nearby
moors and heaths, the guests prepared for dinner. One by one they seemed
to have gathered in the drawing room until dinner was announced. Then
the family and friends made their way into the large, beamed dining
hall and around the table. But no sooner had they been seated for dinner,
than they were startled by a sharp cry from Miss G. S. When all hearts
were calmed, the mysterious visitor called attention to a fact that had
been overlooked by the other guests. Thirteen had gathered for dinner.
Her apprehension could not be relieved. The gentlemen, especially Mr.
Millais, attempted to laugh her out of her superstition. But she was
adamant, muttering repeatedly something about a painful experience
on a former occasion when thirteen were present for dinner. Seeing that
nothing could be done with Miss G. S., Millais asked John Guille, his
only son at home, to go and dine in the drawing room nearby. After he
had left the dining room, the dinner was served; but the gaiety that had
characterized the evening earlier was not to return. Miss G. S. was
extremely uncomfortable and throughout the dinner insisted that some
calamity would surely happen.
When dinner was finished and the ladies were about to rise, John
Guille returned to the dining room. As he entered he found Matthew
Arnold "discoursing learnedly" on the subject of superstition. Arnold
might have been speaking of ancient Greek culture and the importance
of the superstitious elements that it had embraced, a subject that he often
discussed, but I suspect that on this occasion his comments were limited
to the startling event of the evening and to the origin of the particular
superstition of thirteen at dinner. If this were the case, he was probably
speaking of the Last Supper when Christ gathered around Him the twelve
disciples. On that ominous occasion thirteen had gathered for dinner, and
everyone knows the consequences of that eventful evening. Regardless,
when John Guille returned, Arnold was heard to laugh and say, "And
now, Miss S - -, the idea is that whoever leaves the table first will die
within a year, so with the permission of the ladies, we will cheat the Fates
for once. I and these fine strong lads (here he pointed to Edgar Dawson
and E. S.) will all rise together, and I think our united constitutions
will be able to withstand the assault of the Reaper". Accordingly, the
three men then rose, and the ladies left the room.
The men probably remained around the table laughing, smoking, and
402 ROGER L. BROOKS
discussing rather late into the night superstition and its hold on people.
The following day, however, the events of the previous evening were
undoubtedly lost in the pleasure of fishing and the attempts by Millais
and his guests to hook an elusive Salmon "calf' in a nearby Murthly
stream.
On the third day, it seems, Arnold returned to London, refreshed by
the holidays, to be lost once more in his writing and speaking engage-
ments. Time passed quickly and the year came to an end as Arnold,
now at the summit of his career, enjoyed the favorable attention of the
critics and governmental recognition for his contribution to English
literature. But the greatest pleasure to Arnold was the freedom that he
had received from the very rigid and confining work of the Education
Office. His retirement now left him with time to enjoy his family and
friends. And at the turn of the year, his only sorrow, perhaps, was the
absence of his married daughter Fan. But the unhappiness was brief,
for he soon learned that he would see her in April when she came to
England from America for a visit. With this expectation, the next few
months passed quickly; and Arnold and Francis Lucy, his wife, went
to Liverpool in April to meet the ship. But Arnold did not live to
experience the reunion. An observer who saw him fall said that he was
hurrying to catch a tram and in mid-step collapsed. The "Fates" to
which Arnold had alluded the previous October seemed to have grasped
command, for he died almost instantly, some six months after the dinner
at Birnam Hall.
Your thoughts now turn quickly to the two young men who rose and
stood alongside Arnold at Millais' home - Mr. E. S. and Edgar Dawson.
To learn how the "Fates" dealt with them, we must turn again to John
Guille Millais' account. It appears that E. S. was a promising young writer
who prior to the holiday in Scotland had dramatized with great success
a novel by a famous authoress of the day. Later, however, after his
adaptation was placed on the stage, the authoress forced him to withdraw
his play for the presentation of her own. Disappointed and despondent,
he wandered off to the United States, traveled briefly, but ultimately
arrived in New York City where he was shortly found shot to death in
his hotel room. Whether he was killed by his own hands or those of
another, no one ever learned. The police were baffled in their investi-
gation although they were inclined to favor murder.
Finally, what happened to Edgar Dawson, the third and last member
of the seemingly fated three? To John Guille Millais, it appeared that
PHENOMENOLOGY AND MATTHEW ARNOLD 403
Dawson, at least, would outlive the year. Shortly after the notorious
dinner he had gone out to Australia for the benefit of his health. And
as the twelfth month approached, his letters described his recuperation
and traced his preparations for returning to England. Soon he booked
passage and actually sailed aboard the Quetta, a steamer leaving
Melbourne and scheduled to arrive in England before the end of the
fatal year. But the steamer never reached its destination! It foundered
on one of the thousand reefs off the coast of New Guinea, and not a single
person survived to relate the details of this mishap.
And now what can be said of these things? For those waning months
of Arnold's life, did his thoughts ever return to Birnam Hall and the
incident there? Or during the wintry nights that followed was he ever
awaked by a fitful, tortuous dream concerning the event? Or in the course
of his writing, was he, like the ancient Pharaoh of his poem, "Mycerinus",
ever interrupted by an unknown voice, whispering, "A little space, and
thou art mine" (1. 106)? I cannot say. I have searched Arnold's published
and unpublished letters and the unpublished diaries in an effort to shed
more light upon this episode. The few letters coming down to us from
1887 and 1888 refer often to Millais, but there is no mention of the
visit or the dinner. The diaries for the same period are sketchy, but
there is enough information to suggest several visits to the North in
1887 and one in particular during October, but Arnold's host is not
identified. In short, I have searched all of the Arnold material that is
now available to the public, but I can add very little to that which I
have given you today. Needless to say, I shall continue my search, but
at this time I can only say to you what Arnold's late grandson said to
me when I called the account to his attention, - "It is a remarkable
coincidence". The moral or conclusions, if there are any, to be drawn
from all of this, I leave to you.
Baylor University
NOTES
1 Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848-1888, ed. George W. E. Russell, 2 vols. (London:

Macmillan, 1895), II: p. 94.
2 Letters, II: pp. 72-73.
3 Letters, II: pp. 72-73.
4 Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Mil/ais (New York: F. A. Stokes Co., 1899), II:
pp. 183-184.
INDEX OF NAMES
-A- Basu, N.S.C. 60

Aaron III Bataille, G. 342
Abel 235 Bataillon, M. 149, 163, 173, 175, 176, 178
Abelard 113 Bate, W.J. 217, 226
Abigail 111 Baudelaire, C. 87
Abrams, M.H. 300, 301 Beckett, S. 227, 239, 247, 269, 304, 325,
Abulafia 255, 264 331
Adam 117 Bellamy, E. 287
Adorno, T. 248, 261 Bellini, V. 192
Aitmatov, C. 17-29 Benac, H. 130
Aitmatov, N. 23 Benhabib, S. 375
Aitmatov, T. 17, 23 Benjamin, W. 238
Akiba ben Joseph 264 Berger, P. 284, 285, 291
St. Albertus Magnus 115 Berkeley, C. 321
Aleman, M. 146, 173 St. Bernard 113, 116, 117
Alonso, A. 31, 34, 35, 54, 55 Bersani, L. 227, 237
Anouilh, J. 214 Block, H.M. 226
Appollonius 94 Bloomfield, M.W. 211
Aragon, L. 20 Bloor, D. 375
Aristophanes 65-77 Bobes Naves, M. del C. 31, 34, 54, 55, 57
Aristotle 182, 184, 215, 216 Boccaccio, G. 101
Arnold, F. 402 Bochenski, l.M. 130
Arnold, F.L. 402 Boethius 108
Arnold, M. 399-403 Borge, V. 247
St. Augustine 79, 107, 110, 111, 215, 305, Borges, J.L. 270, 325, 328, 329
306, 312 Bouchard, D.F. 238
Auster, P. 262 Duke de Bourgnone 109
Austin, J.L. 123, 124, 129 Bowen, Z. 191, 199
Averroes 140 Brault, G.J. 108
Ayer, A.J. 320 Bree, G. 213, 226
St. Brendan 111
-B- Brodsky, J. 245
Bachelard, G. 39 Brooke-Rose, C. 300, 301
Bakhtin, M.M. 187, 188, 190 Brownlee, K. 105
Bal, M. 277, 291 Bruns, O.S. 288, 291, 310-12
Ballard, E.G. 91 Buber, M. 242
Bally, C. 123, 130 Buddha 8
Barthes, R. 189, 190,277,288,291 Bunyan, J. 303, 307, 309
Basdekis, M. 179-82, 189, 190 Butler, L. St. J. 237
405
406 INDEX OF NAMES
-C- Demetrius 93, 94, 105.

Cain 235 Denis, L. 25
Cajetan 87 Derrida, 1. 124, 128, 129, 368, 369, 375
Calin, V. 271 Desan, W. 343
Camus, A. 213-226, 269 Descartes, R. 133, 152, 185,321,366, 374
Can Grande della Scala 215, 216, 226 Dichy, A. 336, 342, 343
Cary, I. 304, 306, 307, 312 Diderot, D. 129, 130
Casalduero, I. 55 Pseudo-Dionysius 113
Casey, E. 348, 357 Dover, K.J. 67, 74, 76, 77
Castro, A 146, 147, 148, 159, 164, 165, Dostoyevski, F. 19
173, 175-77 Dubois, 1. 130
Celan, P. 241-265 Duby, G. 113
Cervantes, M. de 179, 185, 190 Ducrot, O. 130
Chaide, M. de 173 Du Marsais, C.c. 127, 128, 130, 131
Charles VI 112-16 Dunn, C.W. 105
Chatman, S. 277-291
Chaucer, G. 96, 101, 102, 105 -E-
Chesterton, G.K. 80 Eagleton, T. 133, 141
Cleisthenes 69 Eckhard, M. 246, 253, 263
Clifford, G. 306, 308-10, 312 Meister Eckhart 20
Coetzee, I.M. 86 Eco, U. 196, 199
Cohn, D. 277, 290, 291 Edie, I.M. 183, 190
Coleridge, S.T. 216, 267, 302, 312 Eliach, Y. 265
Collins, 1. 290, 301 Eliade, M. 5, 14
Confucius 8 Elijah 113
Connor, S. 237 Elior, R. 265
Cooley, C. 354 Eliot, T.S. 300
Coopland, G.W. 118 Ellman, R. 191, 199
Copernicus 87 Eminescu, M. 273
Cormier, R. 237 Erlich, V. 300, 301
Cowan 310, 311 Esther 111
Mr. Crabbe 400 Evans, G.B. 105
Cudden, I.A. 300, 301 Ezekiel 113, 117
-D- -F-
Dante 4-7,215,216,226,303-5,307,309, Felstiner, J. 262
310 Fichte, H. 337, 343
Darwin, C. 87 Findlay, J.N. 190
David 117 Fine, L. 265
Davidson, D. 368, 375 Fineman, J. 211, 271
Dawson, E. 400-3 Fletcher, A. 87, 271, 303, 309-12
de Beauvoir, S. 359-366 Fontanier, P. 131
Deguileville, G. de 108 Forster, E.M. 277
Deleuze, G. 238 Foucault, M. 182, 185, 186, 187, 238
de Man, P. 131, 229, 237 238, 271, 304, Fouch~, P. 336, 342
306,307,311,312. Fourier, C. 287
INDEX OF NAMES 407
Friend, R. 245 Helman, A. 380, 382, 383, 388, 395-97

Freud, S. 288, 291, 367-76 Hemingway, E. 25
Frost, R. 298 Henderson, J. 76
Frye, N. 343 Hesla, D. 237
Hill, L. 237, 238
-G- Homer 68, 94, 237
Gadamar, H.-G. 367, 375 Honig, E. 119,307,308, 309, 310, 313
Galey, M. 14 Houdan, R. de 133, 137, 141
Garber, M. 119 Hugh of St. Victor 110, 114, 303
Garcia-G6mez, J. 57 Hult, D.F. 105
Garcia Mru-quez, G. 270 Hume, D. 318, 321, 367
Gebser, J. 89 Humphreys, S.C. 68
Gellrich, J. 104, 105, 238, 311, 312 Husserl, E. 83, 85, 133-36, 138, 141, 152,
Genet, J. 333-343 157,174, 175, 179-84, 186-190,353,
Genette, G. 131,277,291 357, 358, 359-61, 365, 366
Gerson, J. 108
Geulincx, A. 322 -1-
Gide, A. 225 Ingarden, R. 377-397
Giraudoux, J. 225 lonesco, E. 269, 273
Glenn, J. 263 Isaiah 117
Glowicki, M. 49 Isidore of Seville 108
Goethe, J.W.v. 8, 216, 267 Ivanov, V.V. 394, 397
Gorbachev, M. 19
Gould, E. 262 -J-
Grant Duff, M. 399, 400 Jabes, E. 241-265
Green, A. 265 Jackiewicz, A. 379, 381, 395, 396
Greenblatt, S.J. 211, 313 Jackson, H.J. 312
Grenier, J. 226 Jackson, W.T.H. 105
Grey, P. 285, 291 Jakobson, R. 201, 293-302
Guilltn, C. 172, 173, 176 James, W. 56, 217, 287, 291, 321
Guilltn, J. 31-57 Jameson, F. 286, 291
Gurwitsch, A. 56, 174 Jeroboam 110, 117
Jesus Christ 19, 27, 89, 109-111, 113,
-H- 115-17, 137, 215, 234, 235, 278, 285,
Habermas, J. 367, 369, 373, 375 286, 306, 401
Halevi, Z. ben S. 264 St. John the Evangelist 117, 118
Halle, M. 293, 301 Johnson,S. 217,218
Hardy, T. 318 Jones, D.A.N. 285, 291
Harvey, W. 90 Jones, E. 368
Havel, V. 19 Josipovici, G. 310, 313
Hawkes, T. 293, 300 Joyce, J. 66, 191-199, 295
Hawkins, P.S. 107, 119
Hawthorne, N. 304 -K-
Hegel, G.W.F. 19,56,228,230,320,359, Kaelin, E. 236-238
365, 366 Kafka, F. 217, 269, 304, 324
Heidegger, M. 228, 230, 288, 291, 374 Kant, I. 185, 187,339,340,342,370,374
408 INDEX OF NAMES
Kavanaugh, T.M. 131 Marias, J. 147,173,190

Keats, J. 217 Markiewicz, H. 377, 395
Kelley, A.v.B. 211 Marx, K. 286, 377, 378
Kerrigan, W. 375 Virgin Mary 107, 109, 110, 117,295
Kizer, C. 285, 286, 290, 291 Meltzer, D. 241-265
Krnita, J. 386, 395-97 Melville, H. 304
Kockelmans, J. 190 Merleau-Ponty, M. 149, 173, 343
Koestenbaum, P. 141 Mery, H. de 133, 137, 141
Korzhavin, N. 248 Meun, J. de 93-105, 108, 133-35, 140,
Kuhn, T. 189 141
Kumor, A. 380, 381, 396 Mezi~res, P. de 107-121
Millais, Mrs. J .E. 400
-L- Millais, J.E. 400-02
Lacan, J. 190, 368, 375 Millais, J.G. 400-02
Lacroix, J. 342, 343 Miller, J.H. 310, 313
Lakoff, G. 123 Mishima, Y. 12
Duke of Lancaster 112 Moliere 8
Lawniczak, W. 386, 394, 396, 397 Moore, G.E. 318
Lazaro Carreter, F. 168, 169, 173, 175-178 Moore, T. 191
Lebesgue, P. 141 Moorjani, A. 237, 238
Le GalIiot, J. 343 Moraly, J.-B. 343
Le Guin, U. 289, 291 Morawski, S. 382, 383, 396
Le Heunen, R. 343 Morris, W. 287
Leibniz, G.W. 320 Morrison, T. 347-358
Lemon, L.T. 277, 291, 300, 301 Moses Ill, 112, 114-16,310
Leniewicz, E. 389, 397 Mozart, W.A. 7, 8
Lessing, D. 281-291 MrukIik, B. 379, 395
Lewicki, B.W. 378, 379, 394, 395, 397 Murdoch, I. 340, 342, 343
Lewis, C.S. 95, 105, 305, 313 Muscatine, C. 95, 101, 105
Lissa, Z. 378-80, 396
Little, J. 209, 211 -N-
Lodge, D. 293, 296-299, 301 Newiger, H-J. 74, 75, 77
Lorris, G. de 93-105, 108, 133-35, 137, Newton, A 400
141 Nicolson, B. 209
Lovejoy, A.O. 80 Nietzsche, F. 317, 361, 376
Lubbock, J. 399 Novalis 267
Luria, 1. 244, 255, 265 Nowaczyk, A. 392, 397
-M- -0-
MacIntyre, A. 371, 372, 375, 376 Ochalski, A. 382, 396
Magliola, R. 88 O'Connor, F. 304
Maika, P. 206, 207, 211 Ohmann, R. 131
Malczewska, A. 397 Ortega y Gasset, J. 166, 167, 174, 177,
Malebranche, N. 322 179-190
Mallarme, S. 257 Orwell, G. 298, 299
Manrique, J. 32, 41 Osadnik, W.M. 396
INDEX OF NAMES 409
Osterwalder, H. 300, 301 Regnier, C. 336

Ovid 94, 101, 102 Regnier, E. 336
Rehoboam 110
-P- Reinhardt, M. 3
Pallister, 1.L. 237 Reis, M.J. 277, 291
Panofsky, E. 389, 396 Richter, 1.-P. 267
Parker, A.A. 172, 173, 175 Ricoeur, P. 293-302, 352, 356, 358, 367,
Parker, D. 68, 76 370,371,373,375
Parrnenides 4 Righter, W. 312
Parshley, H.M. 366 Rimmon-Kenan, S. 277, 291
Pascal, B. 272 Rojas, F. de 56
St. Paul 118, 215 Rorty, R. 367-375
Paz, O. 267-273 Rousseau, 1.-1. 6, 7, 15
Peirce, e.S. 311 Rudolph, A. 263
Pelc, 1. 377, 395 Ruth 111
P6pin, l. 271 Russell, G.W.E. 403
Percy, W. 304-07,311, 313
Perron, P. 343 -S-
Petrarch 110 E.S. 400, 401, 402
Pfeiffer, 1. 226 Miss G.S. 401
Philipe, G. 213 Sabato, E. 270
Pico di Mirandola 9 Sachs, N. 245
Pindar 4,5,7, 14 Salillas, R. 158, 175
Pirandello, L. 329 Salinas, P. 34, 44, 55, 56
Pivkevic, E. 190 Sartre, 1.-P. 228, 333-343
Plato 84, 85, 88, 89,91,306,315,316,317, Saussure, F. de 123, 131,254, 305
320, 321, 323, 368 Savigneau, 1. 14
Plesnar, L. 396, 397 Schafer, R. 373
Poirion, D. 135, 141 Scheler, M. 55, 173, 184, 185, 190, 353,
Popper, K. 320 358
Porphyry 156 Schindler, P. 263
Preminger, A. 226 Schlegel, F. 216
Prince, G. 277,291 Schneerson, M.M. 262
Prudentius 95, 108, 137, 303, 307 Scholem, G. 242, 262
Pulci, L. 147 Schotter, A.H. 107, 119
Pynchon, T. 304, 306, 308, 313 Schrag, e.O. 375
Schutz, A. 151, 152, 174, 178, 348, 358
-Q- Schutz, I. 173
Quilligan, M. 136, 141,303,307,310,312, Schwartz, D. 295, 298
313 Schwartz, H. 263
Quilliot, R. 226 Searle, l.R. 131
Quintilian 201 Segal, C. 14
Selden, R. 189, 190
-R- Shakespeare, W. 105, 207, 217, 273, 316
Rabelais 147 Shapiro, G. 312
Reckford, K.J. 75 Shedd, R.G. 226
410 INDEX OF NAMES
Sherwood, M. 375 -V-

Shklovsky, V. 288, 291 Valbuena Prat, A. 158, 173, 175
Sica, A. 312 Val~ry, P. 34
Sickman, L. 14 van Dyke, C. 305, 311, 313
Silver, P.W. 179, 181, 182, 184-190 Vargas Liosa, M. 331
Singleton, C. 304, 311, 313 Vend!er, Z, 131
Smith, J. 375 Virgil 94, 96, 105, 310
Smith, P. 305, 313 Vlad Dracula 273
Socrates 91 von Wright, G.H. 389, 396
Solomon 110, 117
Soper, A. 14 -W-
Sorescu, M. 267-273 Waehlens, A. de 173
Souriau, E. 341, 343 Wahl, J. 245
Spatz, L. 76 Webb, R. 42
Spenser, E. 95 Welch, E. P. 183, 190
Spiegelberg, H. 340, 343 Werner, C.H. 196
Spinoza, B. 320, 322, 323 Wetherbee, W. 94, 105
Stanosz B. 392, 397 Whitman, C. 76
Steinsaltz, A. 261, 265 Whitman, J. 306, 313
Stibbard, G. 400 Wiesel, E. 248
Stone, L.M. 76 Wiggins, O. 174
Szuman, S. 381, 396 Wilhelmson, F.D. 75
Wilk, E. 397
-T- Wimsatt, J.1. 108
Tagore, R. 59-61 Winch, P. 375
Tahar ben Jelloun 325-332 Wittgenstein, L. 318, 374
Tarbe, P. 141 Wittlin, J. 245
Torquato Tasso, 216 W6jcicki, R. 394, 397
Taylor, C. 367, 372, 374 Wollheim, R. 376
St. Teresa of A vila 56 Lord Wolsely 400
Thody, P. 226 Wolterstorff, N. 308, 313
Todorov, T. 131,316 Woolf, L. 209
Tomashevsky, B. 291 Woolf, V. 201-211
Torchiana, D. 194, 199
Trezise, T. 237, 238 -Y-
Trilling, L. 226 Yourcenar, M. 3-15
Turner, V. 284, 291
Tuve, R. 308, 310, 313 -Z-
Tymieniecka, A-T. 15,22,25,113,237, Zaner, R. 174
238, 302, 312 Zardoya, C. 55
Zuleta, E. de 31, 33, 35, 54-57
-U-
Ukeda, D. 19
Analecta Husserliana
The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research
Editor-in-Chief
Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka
The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning,
Belmont, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
1. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Volume J of Analecta Husserliana. 1971

ISBN 90-277-0171-7
2. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Later Husserl and the Idea of Phenomenology.
Idealism - Realism, Historicity and Nature. 1972 ISBN 90-277-0223-3
3. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenological Realism of the Possible
Worlds. The 'A Priori', Activity and Passivity of Consciousness, Phenomenol-
ogy and Nature. 1974 ISBN 90-277-0426-0
4. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana. A Spectrum of Specialised Studies
Establishing the Field of Research. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0628-X
5. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Crisis of Culture. Steps to Reopen the
Phenomenological Investigation of Man. 1976 ISBN 90-277-0632-8
6. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Self and the Other. The Irreducible Element in
Man, Part I. 1977 ISBN 90-277-0759-6
7. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Human Being in Action. The Irreducible Element
in Man, Part II. 1978 ISBN 90-277-0884-3
8. Nitta, Y. and Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds.), Japanese Phenomenology.
Phenomenology as the Trans-cultural Philosophical Approach. 1979
ISBN 90-277-0924-6
9. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Teleologies in Husserlian Phenomenology. The
Irreducible Element in Man, Part III. 1979 ISBN 90-277-0981-5
10. Wojtyla, K., The Acting Person. Translated from Polish by A. Potocki. 1979
ISBN Hb 90-277-0969-6; Pb 90-277-0985-8
11. Ales Bello, A. (ed.), The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology.
1981 ISBN 90-277-1071-6
12. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature.
Selected Papers from Several Conferences held by the International Society for
Phenomenology and Literature in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Includes the
essay by A-T. Tymieniecka, Poetica Nova. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1312-X
13. Kaelin, E. F., The Unhappy Consciousness. The Poetic Plight of Samuel
Beckett. An Inquiry at the Intersection of Phenomenology and literature. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1313-8
14. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human
Condition. Individualisation of Nature and the Human Being. (Part I:) Plotting
the Territory for Interdisciplinary Communication. 1983
Part II see below under Volume 21. ISBN 90-277-1447-9
15. Tymieniecka, A-T. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), Foundations of Morality,
Human Rights, and the Human Sciences. Phenomenology in a Foundational
Dialogue with Human Sciences. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1453-3
16. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Soul and Body in Husserlian Phenomenology. Man
and Nature. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1518-1
17. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Phenomenology of Life in a Dialogue Between
Chinese and Occidental Philosophy. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1620-X
18. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Existential Coordinates of the Human Condition:
Poetic - Epic - Tragic. The Literary Genre. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1702-8
19. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Part
1:) The Sea. From Elemental Stirrings to Symbolic Inspiration, Language, and
Life-Significance in Literary Interpretation and Theory. 1985
For Part 2 and 3 see below under Volumes 23 and 28. ISBN 90-277-1906-3
20. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense in the Communal Significance of
Life. Investigations in Phenomenological Praxeology: Psychiatric Therapeutics,
Medical Ethics and Social Praxis within the Life- and Communal World. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2085-1
21. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Phenomenology of Man and of the Human
Condition. Part II: The Meeting Point Between Occidental and Oriental
Philosophies. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2185-8
22. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Morality within the Life- and Social World. Interdis-
ciplinary Phenomenology of the Authentic Life in the 'Moral Sense'. 1987
Sequel to Volumes 15 and 20. ISBN 90-277-2411-3
23. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. Part
2: The Airy Elements in Poetic Imagination. Breath, Breeze, Wind, Tempest,
Thunder, Snow, Flame, Fire, Volcano ... 1988 ISBN 90-277-2569-1
24. Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book I: Creative Experience and the
Critique of Reason. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2539-X; Pb 90-247-2540-3
25. Tymieniecka, A-T., Logos and Life. Book II: The Three Movements of the
Soul. 1988 ISBN Hb 90-277-2556-X; Pb 90-247-2557-8
26. Kaelin, E. F. and Calvin O. Schrag (eds.), American Phenomenology. Origins
and Developments. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2690-6
27. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man within his Life-World. Contributions to
Phenomenology by Scholars from East-Central Europe. 1989
ISBN 90-277-2767-8
28. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Passions of the Soul. Poetics of the
Elements in the Human Condition, Part 3. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0180-3
29. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Man's SelJ-lnterpretation-in-Existence. Phenomenol-
ogy and Philosophy of Life. - Introducing the Spanish Perspective. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0324-5
30. Rudnick, H. H. (ed.), Ingardeniana II. New Studies in the Philosophy of
Roman Ingarden. With a New International Ingarden Bibliography. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0627-9
31. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Moral Sense and Its Foundational Significance:
Self, Person, Historicity, Community. Phenomenological Praxeology and
Psychiatry. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0678-3
32. Kronegger, M. (ed.), Phenomenology and Aesthetics. Approaches to Compara-
tive Literature and Other Arts. Homages to A-T. Tymieniecka. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0738-0
33. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Ingardeniana III. Roman Ingarden's Aesthetics in a
New Key and the Independent Approaches of Others: The Performing Arts, the
Fine Arts, and Literature. 1991
Sequel to Volumes 4 and 30 ISBN 0-7923-1014-4
34. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Turning Points of the New Phenomenological
Era. Husser! Research - Drawing upon the Full Extent of His Development.
1991 ISBN 0-7923-1134-5
35. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserlian Phenomenology in a New Key. Intersubjec-
tivity, Ethos, the Societal Sphere, Human Encounter, Pathos. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1146-9
36. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Husserl's Legacy in Phenomenological Philosophies.
New Approaches to Reason, Language, Hermeneutics, the Human Condition.
1991 ISBN 0-7923-1178-7
37. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), New Queries in Aesthetics and Metaphysics. Time,
Historicity, Art, Culture, Metaphysics, the Transnatural. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1195-7
38. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), The Elemental Dialectic of Light and Darkness. The
Passions of the Soul in the Onto-Poiesis of Life. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1601-0
39. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Reason, Life, Culture, Part I. Phenomenology in the
Baltics. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-1902-8
40. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Manifestations of Reason: Life, Historicity, Culture.
Reason, Life, Culture, Part II. Phenomenology in the Adriatic Countries. 1993
ISBN 0-7923-2215-0
41. Tymieniecka, A-T. (ed.), Allegory Revisited. Ideals of Mankind. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2312-2
Kluwer Academic Publishers - Dordrecht / Boston / London

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The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

Book 1 Allegory Revisited: Ideals of Mankind

Published under the auspices of

Allegor y revisite d: i d e a l s o f mankin d / e d i t e d b y Anna-Teres a

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No part of the material protected by this copyright notice

MARLIES KRONEGGER I Allegorical Journeys toward the

DANNY L. SMITH I War and the Body in Lysistrata: Marriage

JORGE GARCfA-G6MEZ I Type and Concept in Lazarillo de

JERRE COLLINS AND RAYMOND WILSON I The Broken

MICHAEL BARBER / The Fragmentation and Social Recon-

J6HANNA TH. EIRfKSD6TTIR HULL / "We Are Not the

INDEX OF NAMES 405

Thanks are due to my assistant Louis T. Houthakker for his precious

PASSIONS SOARING TOWARD IDEALS:

struggles for existence in everyday life; a scaled-down standard has

- which in Occidental cultural history performed a 'metaphysical' role

although ideals, the highest accomplishment of the mind, are ultimately

IDEALS ELEVATING REALITY

ALLEGORICAL JOURNEYS TOWARD THE

Every island is a world unto itself,

Marguerite Yourcenar's allegorical journeys deal with myths of creation

A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 3-15.

1. WESTERN APPROACHES: ALLEGORICAL JOURNEYS TOWARD

of coherences between cosmogonic creation and the foundations of polit-

Frate, la nostra volonta quieta

And, in one of the most famous tercets of the poem, he foreshadows

E'n la sua volontate e nostra pace:

Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna,

quasi conflati insieme, per tal modo

This kind of fusion and illumination takes Yourcenar to the Chinese

3. Rousseau: Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire

nature, in an inward communication with the sacred in nature, in an

4. Yourcenar: En Pelerin et en etranger (1989)

Goethe's Faust, when mystical ecstasy reveals the sacredness of love.

II. AN ORIENTAL JOURNEY: TO THE BORDERLINE OF

The salvation of Wang-Fo and his disciple Ling takes us to another

1. The labyrinthian path into the abyss: from love to sadism:

The ambitious Chinese emperor echoes the Renaissance ideal of the

2. From Love to Hatred - the Emperor, Messenger of Evil Triumphant

fascinated by one of Wang's unfinished sketches, he wishes, for the

4. From Power and Immanence to the Great Beginning in

pure immanence, "In-der- Welt-sein", nor as pure transcendence in its

5. Death and Transcendence

passage explains, when we see that Wang-Fo is not the mysterious

The story unwinds as a slowly moving spiral in which figures glimpsed

Christian mystics, Yourcenar feels in tune when meditating on the

Michigan State University

1 Marguerite Yourcenar. La couronne et la lyre, presentation critique et traduction

LIFE AND MYTH: THE MOTHER IN CHINGHIZ

Chinghiz Torekulovich Aitmatov was born on 12th of December 1928

A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 17-29.

modern life in his country, contemporary existence in all its aspects.

Relating to the Second World War, Aitmatov has written a short

Romulus and Remus, were brought up by a wolf mother, but I believe

The Grand-Ducal Institute, Luxembourg

Emilia de Zuleta, one of the most careful and perspicacious students of

A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana XLI, pp. 31-57.

CREATURELINESS AND GIFT-GIVING

In other words, I would summarize the opinion of some critics by saying

Who would I be if once