Bells 2019 11 PDF
Bells 2019 11 PDF
Bells 2019 11 PDF
BELGRADE
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE &
LITERATURE
STUDIES
VOLUME XI
2019
Belgrade, 2019
Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies (Belgrade BELLS)
2019 – Volume XI
Editor-in-Chief:
Nenad Tomović (University of Belgrade)
Editorial Board:
Radojka Vukčević (University of Belgrade), Zoran Paunović (University of Belgrade),
Jelena Vujić (University of Belgrade), Aleksandra V. Jovanović (University of Belgrade),
Biljana Ðorić-Francuski (University of Belgrade), Biljana Čubrović (University of Belgrade),
Jelisaveta Milojević (University of Belgrade), Ivana Trbojević Milošević (University of
Belgrade), Novica Petrović (University of Belgrade), Milica Spremić Končar (University
of Belgrade), Nenad Tomović (University of Belgrade), Mirjana Daničić (University of
Belgrade), Nataša Šofranac (University of Belgrade), Sergej Macura (University of Belgrade),
Aleksandra Vukotić (University of Belgrade), Stephen Regan (Durham University), Istvan
Kecskes (State University of New York), James Shiff (University of Cincinnati), Aleksandra
Nikčević Batričević (University of Montenegro), Vesna Bratić (University of Montenegro),
Nina Sirković (University of Split), V. Bharathi Harishankar (University of Madras), Frédéric
Dumas (Université Stendhal UFR d’Etudes anglophones, Grenoble), Ulla Kriebernegg
(University of Graz)
Reviewed by:
Radojka Vukčević (University of Belgrade), Vesna Bratić (University of Montenegro)
Aleksandra V. Jovanović (University of Belgrade), Biljana Dojčinović (University of
Belgrade), Katarina Rasulić (University of Belgrade), Milica Spremić Končar (University
of Belgrade), Nenad Tomović (University of Belgrade), Aleksandra Vukotić (University of
Belgrade)
Proofread by:
Charles Owen Robertson
Published by:
Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade
Graphic design:
Biljana Živojinović
Printed by:
Čigoja štampa, Belgrade, Serbia, 2019
CONTENTS
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EDITORIAL PREFACE
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Editorial Preface
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Theoretical and
Applied Linguistics
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Andrijana Broćić*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
This paper explores the conceptualization of a subset of emotion concepts related
to positive self-evaluation – pride, self-respect, self-esteem and dignity in English and
ponos, samopoštovanje and dostojanstvo in Serbian – via a metaphorical scenario
referred to in the paper as “the possession of a precious object scenario”. The
analysis was performed within the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor
Theory and is based on the data obtained from general corpora. The results
indicate a high level of productivity of the metaphorical scenario in the structure
of pride and self-respect in both languages, as well as the salience of the elements
of ‘destruction’, ‘theft/loss’ and ‘defence/preservation’ within the scenario. The
analysis also sheds light on some of the potentially manipulative aspects of the
structuring of collective pride, dignity and honour via this scenario in Serbian
public discourse, pointing to a need for further research in that direction.
*
E-mail address: andrijana.brocic@gmail.com; andrijana.brocic@fil.bg.ac.rs
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1. Introduction
This paper is based on a much larger study into the conceptualization of self-conscious
emotions in English and Serbian (Broćić 2018a).
For a detailed account of this conceptual phenomenon see e.g. Klikovac (2004), Kövecses
(2010[2002]).
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The English data for the analysis were excerpted from the British
National Corpus (henceforth BNC), whereas the Serbian examples
were gathered from the electronic Korpus savremenog srpskog jezika
(henceforth KSSJ, [Corpus of the Contemporary Serbian Language]).
Both corpora are relatively evenly balanced across different genres
of written languages and are approximately of equal size (the
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Table 1. The object metaphor and the ‘precious possession’
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scenario (quantitative data)
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The ‘precious
the object
possession
metaphor The ‘precious
scenario’ the object
English Serbian possession
metaphor
% relative to scenario’
% relative to object
all metaphors
metaphors
Representative English and Serbian examples were selected to illustrate the pertinent
conceptual mappings. The Serbian examples (or parts thereof) are followed by word-
for-word translation into English.
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Broćić’s (2018a: 148–161) corpus-based analysis of the metaphors structuring pride has
identified four cognitive models associated with the concept of pride in both English and
Serbian: 1) pride/ponos 1: ‘an immediate emotional reaction to something’ and ‘enduring
emotional response to something’; 2) pride/ponos 2: ‘self-respect’; 3) pride/ponos 3:
‘(stubborn) preoccupation with personal worth’ and 4) pride/ponos 4: ‘excessive pride
and a sense of superiority’. As argued by Kövecses (1986), ‘balanced pride as immediate
response’ – which is the equivalent of the above ‘pride/ponos 1’ – is a cognitive reference
point in the domain of pride insofar as a number of related concepts (such as dignity,
self-esteem, vanity etc.) derive from it; this form of pride is also the most prototypical
example of the emotion category.
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E:
(16) England boss Taylor has made no secret of his admiration
for the pride and passion Adams puts into his efforts for his
country
(17) you either do it yourself and preserve your precious dignity
(18) Indirect Rulers ranked self-respect above all the other blessings
they could bestow, wealth, health, and the conveniences of
modern life paling by comparison
(19) She valued her self-respect too highly to accept dross when she
knew she must seek for gold
(20) ...they also bring corresponding rewards in the way of job
satisfaction and self-esteem
S:
(21) Naravno, Koštunica i Ðinđić nisu, niti će ikada razumeti da
srpski nacionalni ponos, čast i dostojanstvo vrede mnogo više od
američkih dolara
‘Koštunica and Ðinđić never understood, nor is it likely that
they ever will, that Serbian national pride, honour and dignity
are a great deal more valuable than US dollars’
(22) I jedne i druge krasi junaštvo, ponos i veliko srce
‘Gallantry, pride and a big heart adorn them’
(23) Majkl Korleone nema osobine koje su krasile njegovog oca Vita,
dostojanstvo, uzvišenost
‘Michael Corleone is not possessed of the qualities that adorned
his father Vito, dignity, excellence’
(24) Ceo svet se divio moralu, hrabrosti i ponosu građana
‘The whole world admired the citizens’ morality, courage and
pride’
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The Serbian lexeme obraz ‘cheek’ is figuratively used to represent one’s honour, pride
and honesty, as defined by the Dictionary of the Serbian Language (RSJ, 2007).
Therefore, a person who has ‘cheek’ is honourable and reputable, while being without
it or having ‘a thick cheek’ points to one’s lack of dignity and sense of shame (RSJ).
The dictionary definitions thus highlight the connection between the concepts of pride,
dignity and honour on the one hand, and moral integrity, on the other, i.e. that pride,
dignity and honour frequently derive from having strong moral principles. Similarly, the
link between pride/dignity and honour is also highlighted in the English dictionaries.
For example, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists ‘the state or quality of being
worthy of honour or respect’ as one of the sense descriptions of the lexeme dignity, while
honour is given as one of the synonyms of the lexeme pride. (For a more detailed analysis
of the sense descriptions of dignity, honour, dostojanstvo ‘dignity’ and čast ‘honour’ in the
authoritative English and Serbian dictionaries see Broćić 2018a: 162–168).
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the general populace can be spurred into action and even driven to acts of
violence in defence of the precious possession (73, 74).
What can also be observed from the Serbian examples is that
in the context of attack and defence, (collective) pride and dignity
frequently collocate with honour, and metonymically obraz ‘cheek’,
indicating that all three lexemes are closely related in meaning.
As regards ‘the recovery of the precious possession’ element, it is
obvious that the experiencer is, once again, predominantly portrayed
as passive in relation to this act, as was the case with ‘giving pride-
object to somebody’. As evidenced above, this is especially true of the
conceptualization of collective pride and dignity (e.g. 67, 71, 81).
5.4. Summing up
It is also noteworthy that the realizations of the defence metaphor account for as many
as 22% of all the examples (metaphorical and non-metaphorical alike) containing the
lexeme dostojanstvo ‘dignity’ in the Serbian sample.
The diversity of the pertinent metaphorical expressions is taken to be a major indicator
of the productivity of a particular metaphor. In this respect, it is interesting to note that
the corpus-based studies of the metaphorical structure of happiness in English point to
an elaborate metaphorical substructure pertaining to the first element of the scenario.
Namely, as shown by Stefanowitsch (2006b), the element of ‘trying to acquire happiness’,
i.e. trying to attain happiness is searching/hunting for something, is realized via a a wide range
of lexical items: for instance, sought-after happiness, pursuit of, search/quest for happiness,
X chase after happiness, X be in search of/pursue/seek/reach out towards/snatch at/buy
happiness etc. (p. 48). Stefanowitsch further interprets his findings against a backdrop of
dominant cultural values, claiming that this metaphor “forms part of a pursuit-of-happiness
model which is strongly entrenched in English-speaking cultures” (p. 43). We can therefore
conclude that specific emotion concepts can differ with respect to the prominence of
particular submappings or elements within a single, underlying scenario.
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6. Concluding remarks
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References
based on individual lexical items collocating with emotion nouns (e.g. boiling/simmering
anger, anger boil/simmer in X > anger is a hot fluid in a container (Stefanowitsch 2006b:
19); X be obedient to rage/frustration dominate X > rage/frustration is a controller/
superior (Ogarkova & Soriano 2014b: 100)).
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Sources
Андријана Броћић
Сажетак
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UDC
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Ksenija Bogetić*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
The linguistic practices in young people’s computer-mediated communication
(CMC) have attracted great interest both in linguistic scholarship and in public
discourse, and are expected to exert the richest influences on language in the new
millennium. Nevertheless, youth’s own perspectives on language and technology
are rarely explored in their own right, beyond sensationalist popular descriptions
of a “whatever generation” (Baron 2002) oblivious to the rules of language when
communicating online. The present paper draws attention to this gap, by focusing
on one specific phenomenon – the parodic stylization of teenagers’ language online
by teenagers themselves, found to be a common practice in personal blogs written
by American youth. The first part of the paper focuses on the pragmatic features
of stylizations and their quotative marking, extending insights into quotation
marking as one major ongoing change in all varieties of English (Tagliamonte
2016); the second part presents a discursive analysis of the stances and social
ideologies indexed by the teenagers’ stylizations. Overall, the findings highlight
great metalinguistic awareness in an online context where it was little expected,
and strongly challenge the view of youth CMC as linguistically “whateverist”.
*
E-mail address: ksenija.bogetic@fil.bg.ac.rs
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1. Introduction
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2. Stylization
The concept of stylization has been developed and studied from various
perspectives in the past few decades. Originally, it was associated with
the literary criticism of Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin 1981; see also Vološinov
1973). For Bakhtin, stylization is a clear example supporting his widely
cited claim that “our speech ... is filled with others’ words, with varying
degrees of otherness” (Bakhtin 1986: 89). However, as Coupland (2001)
shows, the effects of stylization can be realized, and analyzed, much more
locally than Bakhtin suggested: in specific communicative contexts and
at specific linguistic/semiotic levels. In sociolinguistics and discourse
analysis, this more local focus on stylization and style got a more prominent
place following the Labovian work on stylistic variation (Labov 1972). In
variationist sociolinguistics, styles were defined on a scale of formality and
informality: the more formal the situation, the more prestige variants are
used by speakers.
Over time, more ‘multidimensional’ (Cameron 2000) approaches to
stylization have been developed. Alan Bell made a great contribution to
the study of style with his ‘audience design’ theory (Bell 1984), in which
he showed that stylistic variation derives from and mirrors interspeaker
variation. More specifically, Bell draws on accommodation theory (Giles &
Smith 1979) and argues that stylistic choices are essentially the speakers’
response to their audience, typically involving convergence towards the
addressee’s way of speaking. However, Bell also identified a different kind
of style shift that he termed ‘initiative’, in which speakers make creative
use of language that converges not to the addressee, but to an absent
reference group. This kind speaking in the voice of third parties “as if
this is me,” or “as if I owned this voice” (Coupland 2001) has been most
thoroughly analyzed in Ben Rampton’s work (Rampton 1995, 2010, 2011,
2017) on language crossing. Rampton uses the term language crossing
for styling the language of an absent reference group, when the speaker
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“God save our gracious Queen. God save our noble Queen. God save the Queen” (British
national anthem).
“Oh my God! It’s no big deal!”
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the social context and conventional language practices from which those
messages emerge.
In all the studied examples, stylization evokes a specific ideological
persona of the teen. Slobe (2018) analyzes a more specific, parodic
stylization of the US white girl by middle-aged white women, concerned
with the way that girls’ language sounds, and intent on saving them from
it. Their stylizations, Slobe shows, rest on exaggarated linguistic and
especially phonetic qualities, and problematize them as sounding infantile
and unprofessional, constructed as emblematic of the US white girl today.
The mock mimesis is made stronger through the absence of any quotative
marking, and a contrast between the mocked teen girl language and
“proper” adult language.
Outside of the anglophone context, Staehr’s (2015) work on
metalinguistic and stylistic practices among Danish youth interacting on
Facebook offers a rare description of stylization on the part of young people
themselves. Stylization is used by the observed teenagers to bring about
stereotypical associations of Danishness, and also to present stereotypical
use of the spoken “street language” of youth. In addition, interestingly,
Staehr here offers examples of youth styling adults, specifically, styling
what they see as old-fashioned language associated with the elderly.
Altogether, Staehr demonstrates how this situated use of linguistic features
is connected to stereotypical categories, with sociolinguistic stereotypes
being actively re-interpreted by the adolescents.
The process of styling youth appears to have become a common
discursive strategy in discussions about language, as well as a part of the
social construction of youth CMC. The practice is closely related to another
major ideological process – the enregisterment (Agha 2003, 2007) of
internet language as a uniform, distinct variety of language (to be discussed
in more detail in 4.2.3). In the process of stylization, youth internet
language essentially emerges as a variety that is differentiable within a
language as a specific register (Agha 2003). As adult practice, stylization
of youth taps into the existing tendencies in sociology and psychology
where youth is “continually being represented as different, Other, strange,
exotic and transitory—by and for adults.” (Griffin 2013: 25). However,
the fact that young people themselves, as I will show below, participate in
stylization practices of their own demographic, highlights new dimensions
of language ideology, indexicality and enregisterment, while challenging
some dominant assumptions about youth and CMC communication.
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The data were collected on two occasions (2013 and 2016) as part of related
studies addressing youth linguistic practices in personal blogs, taken from
a popular teenage website Mylol.com. The motivation behind this work
was my observation, while studying the linguistic practices in personal
blogging in general, of the surprising frequency with which the bloggers
directly assessed their peers’ internet language, engaging in metalinguistic
characterizations of such language. For the purpose of the present analysis,
from the initial random sample I created a sub-corpus of 133 blog posts
that in some form mention “language” (about 40% of the random sample;
all written by different authors); out of these, a total of 116 blog posts was
retained for analysis, limited to those written by U.S. youth, with writers
aged 13-19 (words total: 16,312).
Mylol.net is a social networking website aimed at teenagers. The site
advertises as currently “the #1 teen dating site in the US, Australia, UK
and Canada”. While mainly functioning as a dating site, Mylol.com offers
a variety of other content, with a prominent place given to personal blogs.
The blogs deal with everyday themes, often related to love problems and
(un)fortunate searches for a partner on the site itself. Blogs contain links
to user profiles; they are interactive, allowing viewers to post comments,
though this option often remains unused on the site. Site users often use
more of its aspects, such as blogging, interacting with other bloggers and
chatting in chatrooms. More recently, the site appears to be converging
toward mobile use, but the blogs and similar segments more compatible
with desktop interfaces do not seem to be losing popularity. At the time of
writing, the site had more than 300,000 users total.
Examples of stylization were collected in a separate Excel file,
together with surrounding context. The analysis of stylization in the blogs
is informed by the discourse-analytic approach, with some quantification
given for illustration. It presents basic facts to do with frequency and
length, then turns to types of quotation markers drawn upon, extending
insights on quotations markers in online English, and finally presents a
discursive analysis of the posts. I follow Coupland (2001) and Jaspers
(2011) in seeing stylization as a symbolic practice projecting identities
other than those current in the speech event. It must be acknowledged that
Though it allows profiles for users up to 29 years of age; users in their twenties are nevertheless
rare.
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the material used is undoubtedly partial and not taken to represent views
of all teenagers; conversely, it emphasizes the importance of considering
the multiplicity of youth identities and CMC contexts, rather than a
homogenizing view of “digital youth”. The broader aim is to draw attention
to adolescents’ styling practices, which challenge some prevailing views of
youth, language and technology.
4. Analysis
The analysis reveals that in nearly half of the blogs in the analyzed corpus
(53 blog posts, or 44%) stylization is present, sometimes with more than
one instance in a single post – 62 instances of stylization in total; 59 of these
are clearly to do with other young people’s language use in the blog posts or
online more broadly, as seen in context or the accompanying commentary.
The findings show that stylization is a prominent metalinguistic strategy
employed by the blog writers. The ubiquity of parodic re-eanactments
and concerns over language is surprising both given the type of discourse
(dating site posts) and the existing lay and scholarly beliefs on teenagers’
language attitudes.
The majority of stylized utterances include multiword segments or
full sentences.
multiword
single (phrases and whole two+-sentence
Total
word sentence sentence stretches
segments)
6 43 11 2 62
The remaining three are brief comments whose meaning/function is somewhat less
evident.
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(2) be like And they are like brrrrr boi dats it.
(3) Ø (zero quotative So tired of all this. Yo supp u, and all
– no overt marker used) that fake bum talk.
The overall distribution of quotative forms is shown in Table 2.
Quot. % N
be like 58.1 36
be all 16.1 10
Ø 11.3 7
go 6.5 4
say 4.8 3
other6 3.2 2
Total 100 62
The category includes the quotatives occurring in only one instance (specifically: write,
think).
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quotatives in the 2000s (Tagliamonte & D’Arcy 2004: 501); while there
has subsequently been less research on its contemporary use, the present
findings suggest further expansion. Also, contrary to earlier research
(Tagliamonte & Hudson 1999, Buchstaller & D’Arcy 2009), be like does not
seem constrained by grammatical person (used in 1st, 2nd and 3rd person
subjects) or tense, which suggests its further grammatical diffusion within
the quotative cohort. Functionally, it is important again to bear in mind
that the examples studied here represent the mimetic, voiced enactment
of ‘mocked other’ personas; this nevertheless remains in line with initial
findings on expressive quotes as being the main environment for the
occurrence of be like (Romaine & Lange 1991).
The formal marking of others’ speech in the youth stylizations allows
a glimpse into the other comparatively new quotative markers in English,
within the context of expressive, stylized quotes. Quotative be all, for
example, remains underresearched in the sociolinguistic literature, though
existing findings suggest it is already well established in many variants of
English (e.g. Rickford et al. 2007, Blackwell & Tree 2012). The present
data show that this quotative newcomer, so far mostly observed in spoken
language use, is widespread in written, online American English as well,
at least in the age group studied. It is suitable for marking the mimetic
quotative content, but more limited than be like, occurring solely in 3rd
person, present tense contexts in the data. Similarly, the quotative go
is found four times in the corpus, but only in 3rd person, present tense
contexts, suggesting its grammatical expansion and diffusion are still
limited. Finally, some new quotatives recently found to be on the rise are
absent from the corpus. Specifically, Cheshire et al. (2011) have identified
a new quotative, this is followed by a personal pronoun in its oblique form,
e.g. in this is me, this is him, as spreading in youth language. Its complete
absence from the corpus, despite numerous quotative and stylizing contexts,
suggests that the variant is still limited to British (youth) English; it may
also be dispreferred in mimetic contexts such as stylization (the examples
in Cheshire et al. do suggest it is used in non-expressive, factual retellings
of others’ words, though much more data are needed).
The traditional quotative say is comparatively less frequent, though
it does occur three times and does not seem constrained by grammatical
factors; this further supports the findings that the use of quotative say is
decreasing in colloquial English, but not vanishing (Tagliamonte 2016).
Finally, a proportion of stylized utterances (third in terms of frequency) are
actually inserted without any quotative markers, as in:
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(4) Like i said b4 i wnt to know u & find sum 1 dat i cud
trust & just talk to. Personally, this just gives me the creeps.
How will you talk to me if I can barely understand what you are
saying?
The reading of such examples as stylized utterances rests on the clear
distinction between their orthography and the orthography of the rest of
the text, which implies no need for further demarcating the “me” from
the “not me”; they are still typically referenced through deictics (this),
personal pronouns (you), often with general extenders (e.g. ... and stuff,
and that, blah blah), and a metacommentary preceding or following the
utterance. Many of such metacommentaries (as in 4) involve hypercorrect
spelling and punctuation, along with careful use of complex grammatical
structures. In the example given, punctuation through quotation marks is
absent, though many zero-quotative as well as other stylizations include
marking through punctuation as well.
All the quotatives observed introduce the same pragmatic content, that
of stylized mock quotations. The strong preference for be like, in particular,
is likely to be related to its general expansion in U.S. (youth) English,
rather than the stylizing content it marks. Overall, discursive analysis of
the examples does not reveal differences in positioning or content among
the different types of quotative marking used.
Further, stylization represents a specific type of quotative content, and
needs to be understood in the local discursive and social context. In the
rest of this paper, its social an ideological meanings in teenagers’ personal
blogs are explored in more detail.
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The major repeated association between the stylized language use and the
post writers involves lack of intelligence (for illustration, dumb is the single
most common adjective in the corpus, typically used in the comments
following the stylized utterance):
(5) JackMan
What’s with everyone going msg me pls? Not only are you
begging like a total loser, but you write in this baby lingo
showing you’re another dumb kid with no writing skills and no
prospects.
(6) Tam
Cmn jst pics nw. Sooooo.......You hate vowels or your IQ
doesn’t allow a proper sentence?
Associations with a lack of intelligence often go hand in hand with
immaturity and poor prospects in adult life, echoing internalized adult
ideologies on youth and language already widely documented in American
and British public discourses (e.g. Squires 2010). The post below sums up
these major associations in a longer metacommentary, taking an equally
sarcastic stance.
(7) JasonS
The fuck is wrong with everyone today not knowing how to spell?
I mean, are you just THAT fucking lazy that you can’t press 3 keys
to spell out you? Then there’s those people that think it’s “cute”
to spell like a fucking 4 year old. Guess what? It’s NOT fucking
cute it just pisses people off and makes you look like a god damn
retard. Quit making up these god damn ridiculous words like
fucking “lurve” What the hell is a “lurve”? [...] I hate to break
it to you all, but even though you may think that spelling in these
ways is “cool” or convenient, it will get you nowhere in life but a
shitty fucking job paying minimum wage with no hours.
While the contrast between the stylizations of others’ writing and own
posts, emphasized by using hypercorrect spelling, punctuation and
grammar is common, the foul language is one aspect of a colloquial tone
often preserved, adding to the forceful and adversarial position.
The pseudonyms have been anonymized throughout.
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(15) Fiona
Anwers:
Q: Whatcha doin then?
A: Im sowwy.. I only understand proper grammar:(
(16) soz
To hiya h sup I can only say Pardon?, I only bother to reply to
messages in English.
The first example is an excerpt of a post in which the author lists the
most common questions she’s been asked to chat or blog about. Stylizing
the language of some of her peers, Fiona sets this type of language use
in opposition to proper grammar. Her sarcastic use of baby-like language
further contributes to the association of this type of writing with childishness
and immaturity. The second example similarly involves a rejection of
communication with the post writers that use CMC contractions, constructed
as a variety not belonging to messages in English.
The enregisterment of the variety allows for its parodic reconstruction,
with users expected to be able to read the humorous and ‘not real’ use.
However, misunderstandings can occur, as (17) complains about in her blog:
(17) idonteven
C’mon, guys. Are you all really this oblivious? I realize sarcasm is
poorly displayed on the internet. But there are just some instances
were [sic] it should be just.. OBVIOUS. “Aye boiz hmu if u
wnt a deep lovin women to exchnge dirty txts wit! We
can Kik if thts cool #YOLOJESUSSWAG” What kind of tit
would actually read that bunch of jargon, process it, then think to
themself ‘Wow, this babe is talking srs bsns! [...]
In similar distinctions between youth internet language and “proper
language”, oneself and others, issues of authenticity are also often brought
up more explicitly.
(18) Max
The only problem is, that to find a legitimately REAL person
sustaining life on this site, I have to swim through the hundreds
of derps that can’t even spell the word ‘gorgeous’ correctly.
[...] I shouldn’t have to waste a good sum of my time trying to
understand what you’re trying to tell me through your gibberish-
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5. Discussion
The analysis has shown that stylization works as a specific type of parodic
quotation, which merits attention both in terms of language form and the
social meanings it indexes. From the perspective of quotative marking, the
analysis has brought some new insights into the present-decade quotatives
in youth American English, as well as into quotative marking in online
written discourse, which has been comparatively less researched so far.
The findings generally confirm further expansion of the relatively novel
informal quotatives such as be like or be all (cf. Tagliamonte and D’Arcy
2009, Buchstaller 2015) and a decline of traditional quotatives such as
say. The findings must be interpreted within the context of mimetic re-
enactments created by teenage authors and directed at a teenage readership.
As the changes in the quotative system continue to progress, more nuanced
studies will be needed, taking into consideration the contextual, pragmatic
and interpersonal factors involved.
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Ksenija Bogetić: Stylized quotations as parodic practice in teenage dating blogs
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References
64
Ksenija Bogetić: Stylized quotations as parodic practice in teenage dating blogs
65
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66
Ksenija Bogetić: Stylized quotations as parodic practice in teenage dating blogs
Source
http://www.mylol.net/
67
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Ксенија Богетић
Сажетак
68
UDC
doi
Milica Vitaz*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
In this paper we present part of the research done for the purposes of a doctoral
thesis in the field of English language teaching (ELT). In it we show the comments
and opinions of students who were exposed to revising grammar and vocabulary
through educational games. These students were all attending English as a
subsidiary at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade. Their comments were analyzed,
categorized and then interpreted. The comments included student statements on
why they liked or disliked certain games, and their suggestions on how certain
games could be improved. Some actual samples of these comments are also
provided to better illustrate their positions and views when it comes to using
games in learning a foreign language.
1. Introduction
Games have been part of educational systems all around the world for
centuries. We encounter them in ancient Egypt and Greece (Johnson 1907:
26) and in China over 5000 years ago (Mungai, Jones & Wong 2005: 1).
*
E-mail address: milica.vitaz@fil.bg.ac.rs
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The first games were used to help soldiers practice their strategic skills
(Gredler 2004: 571). They also hold their rightful place in the realm of
foreign language teaching. They are often associated with fun, but their
educational value, especially in the domain of learning foreign languages
must not be forgotten (Richard-Amato 1988: 147). They became most
prominent in the field of ELT with the communicative approach in the
1970s (Simović 2012: 678). However, long before the 1970s we encounter
suggestions about using games for the purposes of learning a language.
For example, Locke (1902: 130–133) talked about using dice in teaching
children how to read and write. Letters could be put on the different sides
of dice, and then the dice are rolled and words are formed from the given
letters.
In the past some authors held the view that in schools there should be
a clear difference between studying and playing games (Carr 1902: 38).
For a long time, learning was considered to be a serious activity and as such
it was the opposite of fun and play (Lee 1995). However, even then there
were people who recognized the importance of learning through games.
Hall (1904: 231) believed that we should avoid or postpone teaching
children that there is a clear difference between playing and working.
Making games part of the learning process is the way to help children find
enjoyment in serious work (Johnson 1907: 18). Groos (1912: 399) warned
us that: “… a discerning educator could not afford to ignore so important a
coadjutor [as games].” Nowadays, the position that games are for playing,
and classes for learning, has long been abandoned, but we believe that
there are still some educators who want this distinction to exist (Vitaz
2017: 39).
When most people think about games they think about children, as if
children are the only ones who can and should enjoy playing games. It is
similar when it comes to people’s attitudes towards education: games are
a welcome part of lessons if the students are children. Mungai, Jones and
Wong (2005: 1) hold the same view, but they say that things are slowly
changing in terms of the age of students with whom games are used.
Gasser and Waldman (1979: 53-54) maintain that, as long as we explain
the purpose of using a game in class, adults too can enjoy a game, unafraid
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Milica Vitaz: Using Games to Revise Grammar and Vocabulary
that they will feel childish. Lee (1986: 3), in his classification of games,
refuses to define them by the age group they are appropriate for, saying
that experience has shown how some games meant for children were quite
enjoyable for adults, especially if the adults are able to clearly see the
educational purpose of those games.
We strongly believe that educational games can be beneficial when
used with adults. Compared to young children, adults are more inclined to
provide the teacher with detailed and comprehensive feedback about the
games they are exposed to. This feedback is valuable to a teacher in terms
of planning lessons, choosing new games or adapting the ones that have
already been used. This is why we chose to do our research with young
adults, and analyze their opinions.
3. Research methodology
Ten ELT games were used with students at the Faculty of Philology,
Belgrade University. These students all attended English as a subsidiary
language course in the school year of 2014-2015. They were in their 1st year
of studying English at the faculty and there were 71 students who took part
in the experiment. Five games were connected to revising grammar and
five to revising vocabulary. The table below presents the list of games used
(Vitaz 2017: 179-180). Alongside, we have included the reference books
where these games and their descriptions could be found. Some are very
popular games in the domain of ELT, while others are not so prominent.
Grammar Vocabulary
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There is one grammar game we used which is not described in any ELT
game books that we had access to. It is the Card Game. We encountered
this one at a teacher conference. Its description can be found in the author’s
doctoral thesis (Vitaz 2017: 174).
The students were exposed to one game per class, and the classes
lasted for ninety minutes each. The games themselves lasted from 10 to 40
minutes. Immediately after a game was used, students were given a piece
of paper and they were asked to write down what they thought about the
game. Their comments are valuable in terms of determining what students
expect from using games in ELT. Furthermore, the comments help the
teacher decide which games need to be improved or excluded.
4. Results
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Milica Vitaz: Using Games to Revise Grammar and Vocabulary
4.1 Advantages
4.2 Disadvantages
Translation of comment 1:
Not all the games used were agreeable, fun and engaging. In their comments, students singled
Very creative! As I said to my colleagues from group 3, ‘the writer
out some of the characteristics which made some of the games less interesting. For example,
in me is screaming for joy’. The restrictions, especially the blurry
the students did not enjoy the games which meant they had to write or say long sentences, the
ones, give us enough scope to create small works of art. The use
games which were not very creative, but rather repetitive. The work done in bigger groups
of structures and grammar points was the goal, but its presence
(ten to twelve people per group) was also disliked. The students consider such activities to be
was unnoticeable and was accepted with ease. Thank you for a
wonderful class!
73
4.2 Disadvantages
Not all the games used were agreeable, fun and engaging. In their
comments, students singled out some of the characteristics which made
some of the games less interesting. For example, the students did not
enjoy the games which meant they had to write or say long sentences, the
games which were not very creative, but rather repetitive. The work done
in bigger groups (ten to twelve people per group) was also disliked. The
students consider such activities to be less useful than others.
Some students disliked certain activities for what we would describe
as external reasons or factors. They said that it was too warm in the
classroom, or that they were not in the mood for playing a game at that
particular moment; that they were exhausted. At first glance, we might
think that these comments are irrelevant, and that they do not refer to the
games themselves, but we would be wrong to think that. For example, some
authors see the use of games as a way of providing students with a break in
learning (Susser 1979: 57). Steinberg (2009: x) recommends using games
as a way to rest and relax after some more demanding activities. Similarly,
Ersoz (2000) considers games to be a way of doing something useful while
taking a break from learning. Lee (1995) says games are a break from
learning, which then helps students go back to learning feeling refreshed
and helps them endure. But if we are to compare this to the abovementioned
student comments, we need to understand that sometimes the students
are too tired to be able to play and enjoy a game, and that doing a more
traditional exercise would suit them better.
Some games were, according to students, unclear, and thus they were
thought of as uninteresting, difficult and not so useful. These were also the
games which lasted a bit longer. In this case, it is the teacher’s job to stage
the explanation of a certain game, or to make it shorter if he/she notices
the game is taking too much time.
74
4.2 Disadvantages
Not all the games used were agreeable, fun and engaging. In their comments, students singled
out some of the characteristics which made some of the games less interesting. For example,
the students did not enjoy the games which meant they had to write or say long sentences, the
Milica Vitaz: Using Games to Revise Grammar and Vocabulary
games which were not very creative, but rather repetitive. The work done in bigger groups
(ten to twelve people per group) was also disliked. The students consider such activities to be
Picture 2. A comment about the Card Game
the mood for playing a game at that particular moment; that they were exhausted. At first
4.3 Suggestions
glance, we might think that these comments are irrelevant, and that they do not refer to the
about
use of games how some
as a way games students
of providing could be
withimproved and changed.
a break in learning For
(Susser 1979: 57).those games
that(2009:
Steinberg meant doing work
x) recommends usingingames
bigger
as a groups
way to rest(e.g. the after
and relax Card Game
some more or Chinese
Whispers)
demanding students
activities. Similarly,recommended playing
Ersoz (2000) considers gamesthem
to bein a smaller groups, which
way of doing
would
something make
useful while more
taking a of them
break involved,
from learning. instead
Lee (1995) says of them
games are awaiting
break from a long time
for their turn. Some games that were a bit more dynamic
learning, which then helps students go back to learning feeling refreshed and helps (e.g. Chain Story)
them
made it impossible for students to correct their mistakes.
endure. But if we are to compare this to the abovementioned student comments, we need to
The suggestion
was to devote some time at the end of an activity to error correction.
understand that sometimes the students are too tired to be able to play and enjoy a game, and
that doing a more traditional exercise would suit them better.
Picture 3. A comment about Charades
Some games were, according to students, unclear, and thus they were thought of as
uninteresting, difficult and not so useful. These were also the games which lasted a bit longer.
In this case, it is the teacher’s job to stage the explanation of a certain game, or to make it
shorter if he/she notices the game is taking too much time.
Picture 2 – A comment about the Card Game 75
Translation of comment 2:
I did not like this game. We did not understand immediately what we were supposed
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Translation of comment 3:
I quickly memorized the phrases and the words, and I had fun as
well! The only advice that I have is that every student should get his
own turn to try and explain one word/phrase, and I think in this
way more people would be actively involved.
5. Conclusion
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Milica Vitaz: Using Games to Revise Grammar and Vocabulary
References
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Milica Vitaz: Using Games to Revise Grammar and Vocabulary
Милица Витаз
Сажетак
79
80
UDC
doi
Lia Efstathiadi*
School of English
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstract
This report concerns vocabulary development and its cognitive underpinning in 49
young Greek learners (M = 7 years, 8 months), after two years of intensive exposure
to L2 English. The data come from an experimental school for the teaching of
English in Thessaloniki, implementing innovative teaching methodologies. Testing
took place in Grade 2, when participants had received significant L2 exposure
(approximately 300 hours). We measured L2 vocabulary (comprehension,
production) and working memory (WM), the phonological store in particular,
since this shares close links with early L2 vocabulary development (Gathercole &
Alloway 2008). Due to the demanding nature of the L2 communicative classroom
regarding attention resources, we also investigated the role of the central executive
of WM in early FL vocabulary development.
*
E-mail address: economid@enl.auth.gr
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Over the past thirty years learner performance and differential success in
SLA and FL learning have been attributed to various contributing factors
(for a review see Dörnyei 2005; Ehrman, Leaver & Oxford 2003) such
as instructional context (Wesche 1981), age at which instruction begins
(Johnson & Newport 1989), motivation (Dörnyei 2005; Dörneyi & Skehan
2003), personality traits (Gardner 1990), FL aptitude (Carroll 1981). More
recently, the interest of academia has shifted to executive functions and
their role in FL learning.
This article forms part of longitudinal research with a cognitive
orientation that explores the involvement of various mental skills in L2
vocabulary development and narrative writing. The present study examines
early FL learning (EFLL) taking place in a formal context, i.e. a partial
immersion school offering optimal conditions (qualified teachers, input
flood, small size of FL classes) and bilingual education to its students. It
investigates the outcome of a two-year period of intensive L2 exposure
in terms of vocabulary growth (comprehension and production in oral
discourse) and seeks to explore whether, apart from the phonological
store of working memory (see section 1.3.1), there are other cognitive
skills underpinning the early (between the ages of 6 and 8) learning of an
additional language.
In the following sections, we sketch out the theoretical framework
of the study, touching upon issues such as the age factor and the early
introduction of a FL in a formal setting, the intensification of FL programmes
through the employment of teaching approaches such as CLIL (Content and
Language Integrated Learning), and finally the contribution of cognitive
skills, in particular WM, to the process of starting learning a FL very early.
The age factor has been at the heart of a long-standing debate in SLA
literature (for a review see Singleton & Ryan 2004) and constitutes one
of the crucial variables that can affect the learning outcome, in a SL or a
FL setting. In a discussion of the age effect on FL learning, Muñoz (2010)
argues that this has been primarily studied in natural settings, i.e. in cases
The same cohort of students was tested in Grades 1, 2 and 6 of primary school.
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In recent years, scientific research has been exploring the link between
executive functioning and FL learning. The three most frequently researched
executive functions with respect to adults (Miyake et al. 2000) and children
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Lia Efstathiadi: Early Foreign Language Learning
(Lehto et al. 2003; Monette, Bigras & Guay 2011) are Working Memory,
Inhibition and Shifting (for a review see Sawyer & Ranta 2001), due to
their close relevance to L1 acquisition and L2 learning (Andersson 2010).
This study concentrates on and further explores the contribution of various
constituents of Working Memory to early FL learning.
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Lia Efstathiadi: Early Foreign Language Learning
The data form only part of the findings of longitudinal research exploring
the involvement of various cognitive skills in L2 vocabulary development
and narrative writing. The present study was carried out at the end of the
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Lia Efstathiadi: Early Foreign Language Learning
All participants were Greek speakers, living in the same low to middle-
class neighbourhood in the western part of Thessaloniki. The exclusionary
criterion applied upon recruitment was that of monolingualism: bilingual
and trilingual children or children with previous knowledge of English were
excluded to avoid any confounding effect the additional language(s) might
have on their English performance. The 49 informants (23 boys and 26
girls) came from three Grade 2 classes. Their mean age, standard deviation
and range were the following: M 7 years, 8 months; SD 3 months; range: 7
years, 2 months to 8 years, 2 months.
Due to the young age of the participants, informed consent was obtained
from the parents. Informants were located by means of a questionnaire and
a letter distributed at the beginning of Grade 1 (via the school principals
and teachers) to the students’ parents/guardians. The letter explained the
purpose of the research and emphasised that participation was optional,
participants would be seen in hours falling outside the school’s core
program (i.e. Greek language, English language, Mathematics) and all
data would be codified to ensure confidentiality. Twenty-one students
were excluded because parental consent was not obtained or because they
were not monolingual.
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The phonological loop was tested via the forward digit span test and two
non-word repetition ones. In the forward digit span and recall test (Wechsler
1991) participants listened to series of digits (one digit per second) which
they had to repeat in the same order. Presentation began with two digits in
a series; two trials were presented at each level of difficulty. With a correct
report of the sequence, the length of the next was increased by one digit.
Level of difficulty gradually increased, reaching a maximum of nine digits
in eight trials. The test was discontinued when both trials at a given level
were incorrectly recalled. All successful responses were taken into account
(Μασούρα, Gathercole & Μπαμπλέκου 2004). One point was allocated for
every successful response and half a point for a partially given correct
response (right digits, wrong order). Maximum total score: 16 points.
Nonword repetition tasks involve the spoken presentation of artificial,
void of meaning words, conforming to the phonotactics of a language.
Nonword repetition is a reliable measure of PSTM capacity (Baddeley,
Thomson & Buchanan 1975) and a good predictor of vocabulary learning
and other language skills during the early school years (Gathercole &
Adams 1994; Gathercole & Baddeley 1993; Gathercole et al. 1992; for
a review see Baddeley, Gathercole & Papagno 1998). Nevertheless, what
is documented is that nonword repetition tasks yield stronger relations
to vocabulary scores than digit span ones (Gathercole 1999) due to the
lexical unfamiliarity of the items. In this sense, they are much closer to the
situation the FL learner faces in the beginning, where all verbal material is
novel (Baddeley 2003; Baddeley, Gathercole & Papagno 1998).
The two tasks used were: a) The Children’s Test of Nonword
Repetition (Gathercole & Baddeley 1996), hereafter Nonce_Eng. and b)
The Test of Nonword Repetition for Greek-speaking children (Maridaki-
Kassotaki 1998), hereafter Nonce_Gr. Each consists of 40 nonwords which
were auditorily presented to the informants. They listened to the words
once and had 5 seconds to repeat each with full accuracy (all phonemes
correct). Responses were recorded, coded and scored by the two native
speakers (Greek, English) involved in the test. Each nonword correctly
repeated was given a point; phonological deviations from the target form
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The capacity of complex WM (or the central executive) was tested by the
Backwards digit recall task (Wechsler 1991) and a Listening and Recall test
based on the one originally developed by Daneman and Carpenter (1980).
Both tasks combine processing with concurrent storage.
a) The backwards digit span task: The test employs the same
procedure as the forward condition in all respects except that
participants are required to recall the spoken digits in the reverse
order (Alloway & Alloway 2010; Gathercole 1999; Nevo & Breznitz
2011). The transposition of order requires the involvement of
executive-attention resources (St. Clair-Thompson 2010) and
imposes a substantial WM load on both the central executive and
the phonological loop (Gathercole 1999; Kormos & Sáfár 2008).
Two practice trials were given to ensure participants understood
the concept of reverse. There is a maximum of eight digits in overall
seven trials. The test was run and scored the same way as in the
forward condition. Maximum total score: 14 points.
b) The Listening span and Recall task: The task is a dual measure
of WM for language (Baddeley 1996). The test requires the
active maintenance of information in the face of simultaneous
processing and interference and thus recruits executive attention-
control to combat interference (Conway et al. 2005). The task
used is a modified version of the listening span test administered
by Χρυσοχόου (2006) and requires the recall of semantically and
phonologically unrelated words. The test consists of six difficulty
levels. Participants were told they would be presented with
increasingly longer sets of sentences. One practice trial was given at
The list was designed by Tsimpli and Peristeri (personal communication).
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Sit down, or formulaic expressions such as How are you? I’ m fine, thanks,
etc. The two tests were carefully designed to tap into the same thematic
fields and tested whether participants could recall and produce a number of
nouns (Szpotowicz 2010), action verbs (in the present progressive form),
and adjectives they had been taught (Okalidou et al. 2011).
The receptive task was implemented first and comprised 15 slides.
Children were asked to point to the picture that was being named (e.g.
Point to the yellow pencil) or to do exactly what they were told (e.g. Show
me your fingers). A digital stopwatch was used to record the time each
needed to complete the test. For each individual a scoring sheet was kept
on which we recorded their responses (correct, incorrect, not given) and
the duration of the test (minutes, seconds).
The students’ production was tested second. 15 slides displayed a
number of different objects, actions, etc. The researcher asked 15 questions
and tried to elicit as many answers as possible, with the help of the pictured
objects or actions in the slides. 11 questions elicited a corresponding
number of individual words, each credited with one point (e.g. What is
this? A horse); the other four elicited chunks of words (e.g. Where is the
boy sitting? On the bed) that were awarded 2 points each.
3. Findings – Discussion
a) FL_Receptive: Maximum score for this test was 15. The scores
of the participants were distributed in three categories: a) those
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below the median quartile (³7), b) the scores between the median
and lower limit of the upper quartile (8-11; M-Q3 range hereafter),
and c) those of the upper quartile (12-15). Figure 1 illustrates
learner performance with respect to time duration and score, with
each cycle representing one case.
[Figure 1: FL_Receptive: Time duration and score]
What becomes clear is that 34 students (69.4%) scored in the upper
quartile, 11 students (22.4%) scored in the M-Q3 range and 4 students
(8.2%) scored below the median quartile.
b) FL_Productive: Maximum score for this test was 19. The scores
were also distributed in three categories: a) those below the
median quartile (³9), b) the scores of the M-Q3 range (10-14),
and c) those above the upper quartile (15-19). Figure 2 illustrates
participants’ performance in terms of score and time duration:
[Figure 2: FL_Productive: Time duration and score]
Figure 2 shows that only 16 students (32.7%) scored in the upper quartile,
18 students (36.7%) scored in the M-Q3 range and 15 students (30.6%)
scored below the median quartile.
The findings suggest that FL production was more difficult than
comprehension. Of the 69.4% of the students who scored above the
upper quartile in the receptive test, only 32.7% scored equally high in the
productive. The difficulty students experienced was also reflected in the
time required to complete the task. While they finished the productive test
in a range of 100 to 363 seconds, they needed almost half this time for the
receptive task (overall range: 60-198 seconds).
c) Participants’ combined performance in the two FL skills
Table 2 below shows the combined performance of participants in the
two tests. What appears in bold, marks the number of students whose
performance did not mark any difference (i.e. they performed equally poor,
average, or good) in the two tests: 4 scored below median, 2 scored in the
M-Q3 range, while 16 students scored above the upper quartile.
[Table 2: Participants’ combined performance in the two FL
tests]
Of the 11 students that scored in the M-Q3 range in the receptive test, 9
scored worse (below the median quartile) in the productive test. Also, of
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the 34 students that scored above the upper quartile in the receptive test,
2 students scored below median and 16 scored in the M-Q3 range in the
productive test. The chi-square analysis revealed a statistically significant
difference in learners’ performance between the two tests, i.e. between
the cases that did not manage to go to a higher quartile with those that
actually scored significantly worse in the productive test: χ2 = 33.051,
df = 4, p < .001.
The findings confirm previous studies (Lundberg & Lindgren 2008,
as cited in Nikolov & Mihaljevic Djigunovic 2011) on early FL vocabulary
learning. With meaning-focused interaction, spontaneous production
emerges very slowly in the first two years and substantial time is needed
before learners develop creative and fluent speech with reasonable accuracy
and breadth (Blondin et al. 1998). Fall-backs have been reported for both
comprehension and production after the first year of FL schooling, with
development in the first year being faster than in the second. These have
been attributed to the small amount of time spent on English (1-4 hours
per week), the different didactic approaches adopted (Goorhuis-Brouwer
& De Bot 2010) and/or the teachers’ frequent code-switching between the
native language and the FL (Lundberg 2010).
First, the internal relations found between the FL_Total (aggregate score),
FL_Receptive, and FL_productive were found to be significant, with
coefficients ranging from .66, to .96, indicating the internal validity of the
tests.
The aggregate FL score correlated strongly with Nonce_Gr. (r = .40,
p < .01), confirming previous findings that demonstrate a link between the
loop and FL vocabulary learning (Masoura & Gathercole 1999; Μασούρα,
Gathercole & Μπαμπλέκου 2004). It also associated with Listening Recall
(r = .36 p < .05), indicating the relation between CWM and FL vocabulary
acquisition (St. Clair-Thompson & Gathercole 2006).
Under closer examination, FL comprehension and production shared
stronger to more moderate associations with both PSTM and CWM. FL_
Receptive correlated with Nonce_Gr. (r = .42), Nonce_Eng. (r = .33), and
Listening Recall (r = .44). This last finding suggests the direct involvement
of CWM in the regulation of attention during FL comprehension (Kormos
& Sáfár 2008). FL production correlated with Listening Recall (r = .42)
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4. Concluding remarks
The present study examined whether at a very early stage of FLL, apart
from the often reported phonological loop, the mechanism of WM that is
responsible for the allocation of attention, can also explain FL vocabulary
learning. The findings indicate the active role of the central executive from
the earliest stages of this process; this is important, since, in addition to
directing attention, the central executive performs various other high-
level regulatory executive functions such as planning actions, solving
problems and reasoning logically (Baddeley 1986; Kimberg, D’Esposito &
Farah 1997); as such, it may determine the learning potential of young
children.
Regarding the FL performance of participants, the study confirmed
that comprehension and production are two distinct processes that follow
different trajectories; the latter is more arduous and takes more time to
emerge than the former. Although the FL programme followed by the
experimental school was intensive, we should keep in mind the following:
a) two years of FL exposure is a rather short period as the relevant literature
suggests; in incidental vocabulary learning, learners need to encounter
novel vocabulary in context multiple times before sizable gains emerge
(Webb 2007), b) literacy in the FL, which can accelerate FL performance
(Johnstone 2009) was still absent at the time of testing, c) children as
young as these, have not yet developed the full and complex range of their
learning strategies (Cole & Cole 2001), to be able to further support this
process. Hence, the results primarily reveal the vital contribution of critical
cognitive skills to early FL vocabulary growth and not the FL competence
of the young learners that is still developing.
References
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APPENDIX 1: THE RECEPTIVE TES
Slide 2: Winnie i
Slide 1: The boy is having a bath
Slide 2: Winnie is angry
Slide 2: Winnie is angry
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APPENDIX 2: THE PRODUCTIVE TEST_
Belgrade BELLS APPENDIX 2: THE PRODUCTIVE TEST_SA
APPENDIX 2: THE PRODUCTIVE TEST_SAMPLE SLIDES
Slide 1: What is the girl
Slide 1: What is the girl do
Slide2:1:
Slide
Slide 2:The
The boy
boy
What isandand
the
the the
gi
girl
Slide 2: The boy and the girl are very … (happy)Slide 3: This is an … (airp
Slide2:3:The
Slide Thisboy
is an
and…the
(a
Tables
Tasks Mean SD
Score Productive
Total
³9 10-14 15-19
Count 4 0 0 4
³7
% of Total 8.2% .0% .0% 8.2%
Score Count 9 2 0 11
8-11
Receptive % of Total 18.4% 4.1% .0% 22.4%
Count 2 16 16 34
12-15
% of Total 4.1% 32.7% 32.7% 69.4%
Total Count 15 18 16 49
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Figures
Figures
Figure 1: 1:
Figure FL_Receptive:
FL_Receptive:Time
Timeduration andscore
duration and score
Figure 2: FL_Productive:
Figure 2: FL_Productive:Time
Timeduration andscore
duration and score
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Lia Efstathiadi: Early Foreign Language Learning
Лија Евстатиади
Сажетак
Овај рад бави се развојем лексике и когнитивним основама тог развоја код
49 младих ученика грчке националности (просечне старости 7 година и 8 месеци),
након што су током две године били интензивно изложени енглеском као другом
језику. Подаци су прикупљени у експерименталној школи за учење енглеског језика
у Солуну, у којој се примењују иновативне методе наставе. Тестирање је обављено у
другом разреду, када су учесници били довољно изложени другом језику (у просеку
300 сати). Мерили смо лексику другог језика (разумевање и продукцију) и радну ме-
морију, нарочито памћење везано за фонологију, пошто је оно уско повезано са ра-
ним развојем лексике другог језика (Gathercole & Alloway 2008). Пошто је природа
комуникативног приступа настави другог језика захтевна у контексту одржавања
пажње, такође смо се бавили улогом централног извршиоца радне меморије током
раног развоја лексике страног језика.
Кључне речи: рани развој лексике страног језика, интегрисано учење садржаја
и језика (CLIL), фонолошкo краткорочно памћење, централни извршилац
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Literary and Cultural Studies
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Alexander Shurbanov*
University of Sofia
Sofia, Bulgaria
Some fifteen or sixteen years ago, as I was preparing for the translation
of Hamlet, John Updike’s recent prequel to Shakespeare’s play, Gertrude
and Claudius, was brought unexpectedly to my notice. A publisher, who
had just returned from the Frankfurt Book Fair, called to ask me if I would
read the novel and let her know whether it was worth translating into
Bulgarian. A few days later I phoned back to say that not only would I
strongly recommend the book for publication but I would very much like
to translate it myself. My translation of Updike’s book was published early
in the next year, 2003, and my rendition of Hamlet appeared in 2006 to
be staged six years later at the National Theatre in Sofia, where it is now
approaching its hundredth performance. But for a few months in 2002
I had interrupted my work on Shakespeare’s play to immerse myself in
Updike’s novel. In hindsight, it was only right to do the prelude before the
main story. And so began my love affair with Gertrude and Claudius.
The task of translation is complex and problematic in principle, for it
presupposes transferring a set of ideas, images, atmospheric suggestions
and stylistic effects from one language into another and from one culture
into another across often formidable distances in space and time. The
*
E-mail address: a.shurbanov@gmail.com
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There are, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. But in the first case the English title was borrowed from
the poem’s ancient precedent and in the second the heroine is a goddess while the hero
is a mere mortal.
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***
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***
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Hamlet with his “confident laugh… exposing short, neat, efficient teeth”.
But the portrait of Feng/ Fengon/ Claudius is the most prominent and
most interesting of all: “His teeth were irregular but seemed strong and all
in place.” And again: “Feng laughed, his teeth uneven but thrilling in that
red mouth, there between his triumphant mustache and pointed Italianate
beard.” Later we hear that “… he arrived erect and mussed in the room, his
wolfish teeth sheepishly grinning in his speckled oval beard”. And we are
reminded again of the irregularity of his teeth, often described as “wolfish”,
with a focus on his sharp canines.
In contradistinction to the predatory maws of the kings, Corambus’s
mouth looks more like that of a sheep: “… he had one of those wet lower
lips that appear slightly out of control, spraying softly on certain sibilants,
drifting to one side or another when relaxed.” This tell-tale feature of the
old councilor is brought back to our notice as often as he appears on the
scene.
His daughter Ophelia’s lips and teeth, though markedly different, are
also manifestly in view:
The girl had a lovely upper lip, turned both inward and outward
like a plucked rose petal, slightly crumpled by the infusion of
sweet plumpness, and it was fetching, Gertrude thought, the way
it rested tentatively closed on the lower, leaving an open triangle
through which her teeth dimly gleamed.
Here the aggression of the strong men is replaced by erotic lure.
Gertrude, is also revealed by a telling glimpse of her mouth:
Had her beauty a flaw, it was a small gap between her front teeth,
as if too broad a smile had once pulled the space forever open.
Gap-tooth has, of course, been traditionally considered a sign of
sensuality and lust in women. It was Chaucer’s Wife of Bath who once
said:
But yet I hadde alwey a coltes tooth.
Gat-tothed I was, and that bicam me weel,
I hadde the prente of Seinte Venus seel.
As help me God, I was a lusty oon…
The image patterns in the novel are pervasive and intricately woven. These
thematic chains should be detected and diligently reproduced in translation
without fail.
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***
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***
As Prof. Donald Greiner informs us, Updike revised Of the Farm for a new, Ballantine
edition, which was going to be published in 2004. If he had already begun thinking
about the revision of his early novel while working on Gertrude and Claudius, some
details of the former may have unintentionally flowed into the latter.
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***
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***
As Donald Greiner puts it, John Updike is “an artist of the highest order”.
His ability to create a new language to suit the central preoccupation of
each of his novels is truly astounding. The register in which Gertrude and
Claudius is written is clearly raised above the colloquial level and it keeps
the audience at an arm’s length – quite different in this respect from the
Rabbit novels. Each of the three parts of the Hamlet book starts with the
refrain “The King was irate”, setting from the first line the formal tone of
the narration. The studied abstract language of generalizations strives to
drown in its cerebral element all concrete observations and actions. This is
how the narrator usually speaks:
They would talk, many a time of their growing daughter, the
radiant fruit of one such clipping – the child’s piecemeal
assumption of mobility and speech, the dropping away of
treasured mispronunciations and lisped coinages as she gathered
to herself more correct language and adult manners.
Here, in their own, more modest castle, they advanced with more
caution, without the King’s paternal protection, attempting to
domesticate the outrage their bodies were plotting.
The characters tend to express themselves in much the same
rarefied conceptual manner.
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***
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dark places in his text but also an important addition of a few sentences
in the closing section of the novel, which, as Professor Greiner has pointed
out, is important for the central message of the work because it amounts
to Gertrude’s final exoneration:
She was happier wed. Like a broad-beamed ship she lightly rode
in the safety of harbor. Her venture into the defiance and protest
of adultery had been, like his years of southern wandering, an
excursion, an exploration of her nature that, its question settled,
need never be resumed.
The inclusion of this definitive comment on the heroine’s character in my
translation did make the Bulgarian version of Gertrude and Claudius, as
Updike himself wrote to me, “the most authoritative foreign edition” of the
novel and, in fact, even a more complete one than the original American
edition, to be equaled in this respect for the English-speaking world
only a decade later. It seems to me that Updike made this special gift to
commemorate his romance with the “Bulgarian Poetess”, whom he briefly
met in Sofia back in 1964 and had not forgotten for the intervening almost
forty years. Bulgaria had not forgotten him either. Whereas he was virtually
unknown in my country when he happened to visit it, seventeen of his
novels and a collection of short stories have been published and republished
since then in Bulgarian translation. In the year of the publication of my
translation of Gertrude and Claudius Blaga Dimitrova died at the age of
eighty-one. Six years later, in 2009, I was asked by a Sofia paper to write
an obituary for John Updike. A generation of important writers divided
by the Iron Curtain and defying this ignominious division through their
dedication to the higher principles of their art, was inevitably becoming,
together with its period, part of the past.
Younger writers both east and west have a lot to learn from this brave
and gifted generation. In his writing John Updike demonstrates the highest
kind of professionalism that his younger colleagues would do well to
emulate. His perfectionist care for the uses of language, the fine sensitivity
to stylistic modulation, the ability to move with grace in an intertextual
medium and spark off meanings at every turn are the distinctive qualities
of his best work. And so is the meticulous study of the life material from
which his literature arises.
It is sad that the bulk of critical attention devoted to Updike is
confined to the Rabbit novels, with which he first came to public notice.
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References
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James Plath*
Illinois Wesleyan University
Bloomington, IL
Unites States of America
Abstract
George Hunt observed that often the central character in an Updike novel is an
unsuccessful or failed artist, a propensity that began in 1963 with Peter Caldwell
in The Centaur. The main character, Caldwell/Chiron, is both human and centaur,
and all of the characters have mythic identities, including Caldwell’s adult son,
Peter, who narrates the novel and is assigned the role of Prometheus. Yet, because
Peter is torn between abstract expressionist ambitions and mimetic inclinations
that underscore a love of detail, he is as much of a centaur, metaphorically
speaking, as the elder Caldwell, and an examination of his divided artistic self
further illuminates Updike’s declaration that “the book as well as the hero is a
centaur.”
*
E-mail address: jplath@iwu.edu
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John Updike once told The Paris Review, “My first thought about art, as a
child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn’t exist
before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of
refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central
magic, its core of joy” (Plath 1994: 45). Yet, as George Hunt notes, often
the central character in an Updike novel is an unsuccessful or failed artist
(Hunt 1980: 153), a propensity that began in 1963 with The Centaur’s
Peter Caldwell.
The Centaur was Updike’s tribute to his father, Wesley, a funny and
popular teacher at Shillington High School who nonetheless had problems
controlling his classes. Students liked him but also disrespected him, to use
the current vernacular. In the novel, George Caldwell is not only a science
teacher but also Chiron, the centaur. In fact, all the main characters in the
novel have mythic counterparts, including Peter, who at one point lies on
“his rock” (175) and we begin to understand that he is also Prometheus, who
tried to help mankind by giving them fire, and whom Zeus subsequently
punished by chaining him to a rock so an eagle could eat his liver, day after
day. Peter, who appropriately lives in Firetown and daily feels a growing
dread of his father’s mortality eating away at him, shares the narrative
duties with an omniscient narrator that we come to realize is also Peter. The
novel alternates between Peter’s and George’s points of view and between
mythic and realistic chapters. Without the mythic component added to an
otherwise essentially realistic non-chronological narrative, Updike has said
that there would be no book. “It seemed to me to fit a kind of experience
that I’d had: my father’s immersion in the world of Christian morality, in
trying to do the right thing and constantly sacrificing himself, always going
off to church meetings, and yet complaining about it all the time. There
was an ambivalence that seemed to make him very centaur-like.”
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The novel’s title could have been plural. While Updike assigns Peter
the mythological role of Prometheus, the fact that Peter is a divided artist
also makes him as much of a centaur—metaphorically speaking—as the
elder Caldwell. Peter is, by his own admission, “an authentic second-rate
abstract expressionist” (102-103), though ironically he is drawn not to
the large canvases upon which he struggles to create non-representational
images, but to life’s small details that show how much he exalts in the
world of recognizable objects and figures.
On the simplest level, as Jack De Bellis summarizes, Peter is “a dual
figure” insomuch as he is both a Pennsylvania high school student and
also a twenty-seven-year-old New York-based artist “whose recollections
of his fifteen-year-old self form the narrative” (De Bellis 2000: 85). What
complicates Peter’s story and links it to Updike’s underlying motif of death,
however, is the other duality—the mythic component—for it is the classically
trained artist, Peter, who is a visionary when it comes to “painting” his
father and the other residents of Olinger in glorious detail as gods and
mythical characters. Yet, Peter fails at creating an image vocabulary that
derives exclusively from his imagination, and his “vast canvases—so oddly
expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless transmuted into art—with
sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light” (268).
This passage from the text illuminates the ironic reason why Peter is a failed
abstract expressionist: he sees the blank canvases and raw materials that
mock him as having “sharp rectangular shoulders.” In other words, he sees
a recognizable human form in those blank canvases because his orientation
as an artist is to “paint” using familiar images from the world around
him. His talent is not abstraction, but in pictorially and representationally
describing his father’s world on a grand scale that links humans to the gods
in a “painted” narrative that’s worthy of the enormous history paintings
by Old Masters. It’s precisely because his ambition and natural talent and
orientation do not line up that he is divided as an artist and frustrated by
his inability to achieve the artistic goal he’s set for himself. Frustrated by
art this way, Peter is himself a centaur, even as picturing these mythic/
realistic images of his father and community make him, quite literally, the
creator of centaurs. As Updike described the novel, “It’s an experiment
very unlike that of Ulysses, where the myth lurks beneath the surface of the
natural events. In a way the natural events in my book are meant to be a
kind of mask for the myth” (Plath 1994: 51). Updike himself is an artist
divided, for his first ambition was to become a graphic artist rather than a
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Peter’s love of detail and the play of light is evident throughout the
narrative. As he watches his father in the snow at night he notices that the
“streetlight touched with a row of steady flecks the curve of his knit cap:
the way Vermeer outlined a loaf of bread” (149). Peter not only tends to
see things as Vermeer did, he is also emotionally connected to Vermeer’s
way of seeing—so much so that after a 4-H Club meeting his mother forced
him to attend, Peter would “plunge at home into my book of Vermeer
reproductions like a close-to-drowned man clinging to the beach” (74).
Details excite and reinvigorate him. Recalling a drive with his father in a
snowstorm, Peter draws energy from the world around him that enables
him to continue his “painted” narrative recollection: “Vases and burnished
furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary
bread lay sequined with pointillist dabs of light” (78). Peter continues,
“Among these images which the radio songs brushed in for me the one
blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously
covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made
the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through
the expectant space of our singing nation” (78). Prior to this passage Peter
had admitted to being a failed abstract expressionist, but songs on the
radio help him to remember his past with the same kind of detail as his
artistic hero, and that descriptive detail generates a burst of razzle-dazzle
poetics—more word painting, if you will—that eventually leads him to feel
more positive about the blank canvas in front of him.
There is another complication, though. As Updike writes, “I think
that initially art was tied in with theology and has to do with an ideal
world: the artist is in some way a middleman between the ideal world and
this, even though our sense of the ideal... is at present fairly dim” (Plath
1994: 51-52). In The Centaur, readers witness Peter grappling not only
with figurative versus non-figurative art, but also with the implied dialectic
between that which is real and that which is only an illusion or imperfect
copy of an ideal that exists in a different realm.
In his fiction, Updike has often alluded to or specifically mentioned
Plato’s famous analogy of the cave and its concept of shadows versus ideal
forms. In Plato, shadows are the objects of the world, a false reality, and
people are imperfect copies of ideals that lie in the realm of pure spirit.
In Updike, a similar sense of the world’s shadowy, insubstantial nature is
held in sharp contrast to the world of ideals, though the unique mythic/
contemporary nature of The Centaur adds another layer of complexity. In
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the mythic chapter, a three-pointed arrow flies through the air, piercing
Chiron/Caldwell’s ankle; in the contemporary version, it’s a paper airplane
that flies through the air—one heavy and dark, the other airy and light (4,
41). Likewise, while the class laughs at Chiron/Caldwell after he’s shot and
limping, “Caldwell’s strange silhouette”—that is, his heavy, dark, shadow
self—“took on dignity” (6). Peter is sensitive to shadow as Other, for when
his father picks up a dirty and rough-mannered hitchhiker and starts
talking to the man about his son, Peter remarks, “I vividly resented that
he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow
of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one
extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker
seemed an unendurable strain” (83). Later, on another drive, when George
tries to get their stalled car up a hill in a snowstorm, Peter sees/says, “My
father’s shadow hurriedly tried all the gears” (149). And when his father’s
clenched fists tighten on the steering wheel, defeated once again by life,
“it frightens Peter to see his father’s silhouette go out of shape this way” as
the “snow holds them fast in its phantom grip” (260).
In perhaps the most revealing reference to shadows in relation to light,
when the adult Peter is lying next to his black mistress, he thinks back to
a time when he was a teenager waking in the morning from a dream in
which Penny, a classmate he found attractive, had been with him by a tree.
“The top buttons of her blouse were undone,” he recalls, and it’s clear to
readers that Peter was trying to finish the dream while masturbating and
recalling an earlier incident when he found his hand “between her warm
thighs which were pressed together; it seemed to dawn on her slowly that
my hand was there, for a minute passed before she begged, ‘Don’t,’ and
when I withdrew my hand, she looked at me like that. Only that was in
shadow and this was in brilliant light” (50). Peter’s reimagined daydreams
are more brilliant than reality itself. His remembered sexual incident with
Penny occurs in darkness, while the reimagined scene unfolds in “full
light,” made more real by a corresponding fullness of language—so real
that the “pores on her nose showed” before she became “unnaturally still”
as Peter’s mother interrupts him. But the lesson is clear: Art is superior to
actuality, associated with light rather than darkness and shadow—with the
ideal forms that Plato described, rather than the shadows on the wall of
the cave. That notion is reinforced later in the novel when Peter thinks,
I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the
walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree;
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when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb
that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at
this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife,
one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It
was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing
seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art (61-62)
In this transcendent passage, shadow acquires the same sense of solidity
and realness as light. Art renders both more solid, more permanent. As
Terrence Doody notes in his essay on reification in Updike, “to Updike
and to his characters haunted by death, things offer a stability that may
not amount to immortality, but that does seem firmer than human life”
(219). Yet, while things themselves can break or deteriorate, art has the
potential to extend life. In The Centaur, when Chiron and Venus talk about
the gods, Venus quips that they are “Perfect only in our permanence.” Art
for Updike and Peter is Olympian, a chance to preserve seconds, moments,
lives. Though Peter’s desire to become a painter “embarrassed” his father
(89), ironically that desire may have been partly fueled by a desire to keep
George Caldwell alive, to give him the kind of immortality that a young
boy thought his father deserved. But it is also ironic that Peter keeps him
alive not by abstraction, but by painting a narrative rich and textured as
anything his childhood artistic heroes painted. Though young Peter begins
as a painter of landscapes and then stalls as a non-representational artist,
he finally succeeds in word-painting a portrait of his father that would have
been considered the highest achievement in the old hierarchy of genres: a
history painting of his father and others from this small Pennsylvania town
drawn mythically, on a grand scale.
Eikons, or images, according to Plato, are the shadows of reality. But a
more recent philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, believes quite the opposite of what
Plato implies to be true for art:
Far from yielding less than the original, pictorial activity may be
characterized in terms of an “iconic augmentation,” where the
strategy of painting, for example, is to reconstruct a reality on
the basis of a limited optic alphabet. This strategy of contraction
and miniaturization yields more by handling less. In this way, the
main effect of painting is to resist the entropic tendency of the
ordinary vision—the shadowy image of Plato—and to increase
the meaning of the universe by capturing it in the network of its
abbreviated signs. (Ricoeur 1976: 40-41)
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divided structure of The Centaur. And Updike’s fiction has displayed such
a tendency toward the dialectic that to seek such an easy resolution in
Updike is, as Peter senses of his desire to paint in the manner of abstract
expressionists, like straining to say the unsayable.
References
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Џејмс Плат
Сажетак
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Pradipta Sengupta*
M.U.C.Women’s College Burdwan
West Bengal, India
Abstract
Only a very few writers have explored the full gamut of middle-class suburb
life, warts and all, as John Updike, and even fewer have run the whole gamut of
sexual experience as he has. With his avowed preoccupation with the “three secret
things” of sex, religion, and art, Updike has examined the single aspect of sexuality
through varied reference frames at varying stages of life: boyhood, adolescence,
manhood, and old age. If A Month of Sundays and S. offer a ritualization of sexuality,
Roger’s Version offers a scopophilic examination of sexuality in terms of the sexual
phantasizings of Roger Lambert. Updike’s Villages (2004) reemploys the use of
sexuality on different spatio-temporal parameters, chronicling the kaleidoscopic
ken of the old Owen Mackenzie’s sexual encounters, reminisced and replenished
through his memories and dreams, and operating on his psychic planes. Lured and
intrigued by the “monstrous miracle” of sex, Owen experiences a thrill analogous
to a conquest in his erotic adventures with a battalion of mistresses, and his wives.
And yet his is not a case of gerontophilia, for in his present dotage he is more
interested in relishing those libidinal experiences in his memories than in having
further erotic advances. Updike deals with Owen’s psychic sexuality in an artistic
way that dovetails into his present old age. At once a faint autobiographical
projection of Updike, and a dim shadow of his early heroes turned old, Owen
prefers contemplation of the carnal carnival to direct action. Applying the insights
of Psychoanalysis, this paper would seek to analyse and justify the nature of these
memories and dreams to suggest how Updike reckons with sexuality with greater
*
E-mail address: pradiptasg.eng@gmail.com
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panache evinced through the psychic lens of an aged hero who remains satisfied
with erotic emotions recollected in tranquillity.
Of the “three great secret things” sex, religion, and art, it is the treatment
of sexuality of which Updike was a true connoisseur. Updike has examined
the single aspect of sexuality through varied reference frames at varying
stages of life: boyhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age. If A Month
of Sundays and S. offer a ritualization of sexuality, Roger’s Version offers a
scopophilic examination of sexuality in terms of the sexual phantasizings of
Roger Lambert. Updike’s Villages (2004) reemploys the use of sexuality on
different spatio-temporal parameters, chronicling the kaleidoscopic ken of
the old Owen Mackenzie’s sexual encounters, reminisced and replenished
through his memories and dreams, and operating on his psychic planes.
Updike deals with Owen’s psychic sexuality in an artistic way that dovetails
into his present old age. At once a faint autobiographical projection of
Updike, and a dim shadow of his early heroes turned old, Owen prefers
contemplation of the carnal carnival to direct action. The fact that Updike
had his divorce from his first wife Mary Pennington in 1976, and that he
remarried Martha Ruggles Bernhard in 1977, make Villages a significant
element in Updike’s second conjugal innings, as also in his oeuvre. It is at
once Updike’s autobiographical journey down his memory lane to review
his life after almost three decades, and an attempt to examine sexuality
through the lens of an aged hero who finds an alternative for his diminished
sexuality in the phantasizings, memories, and dreams of his previous erotic
encounters. Commenting on Updike’s treatment of sexuality, Brian Duffy
argues, “Villages has the added relevance of being Updike’s last extended
examination of the topic, and even has a valedictory ring about it”, and
examines the novel as a representation of male sexuality (Duffy 2015: 3).
This paper attempts to analyse and justify the nature of these memories
and dreams to suggest how Updike reckons with sexuality with greater
panache evinced through the psychic lens of his aged hero who remains
satisfied with erotic emotions recollected in tranquillity.
In his memoir “The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood” Updike refers to his preoccupation with
“three great secret things”, namely sex, religion and art. Interested readers may find this
memoir in Updike’s Assorted Prose (See Updike 1979: 151-187).
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Adam Begley (2004), “It Takes a Village, or Three”. Rev. of Villages, by John Updike. New
York Observer 25 Oct. 2004: 10.
Michiko Kakutani (2004), “Another Updike Trip to His Kind of Suburbia”. Rev. of Villages,
by John Updike. New York Times 22 Oct.2004: E 33.
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John Updike (2004), “Showing Ordinary Life as Being Worth Writing About It”. Interview.
Academy of Achievement. 12 June 2004. Web 18 Oct. 2018.<http://www. achievement.
org/autodoc/page/updoint-1>.
Donald Greiner (2015), “Updike in Love”. John Updike Review 4.1 (Fall 2015): 43-60.
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fountain of human memory and dream. The plot and the narrative exhibit
conspicuous resemblances to the traits of dream.
II
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III
Updike had made sporadic use of dream in his oeuvre. In Rabbit, Run while
making love with Ruth, Rabbit dreams of his sister Mim getting dissolved into
his wife Janice. Haunted by the dissatisfaction of a second-rate marriage,
Rabbit dreams of appearing before a court where his mother is the judge.
Rabbit’s mother Mary is haunted by some horrible dreams induced by the
effects of L-Dopa in Rabbit Redux. In Couples, a novel which along with
Marry Me, can be said to be literary precedents of Villages, Piet dreams
of flying in a luxurious plane (Updike 1968: 284-285). Dream also makes
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IV
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notices how the two female guests he is talking to, one of them seated
beside him and the other standing, are both dressed in painted china, rigid
carapaces with shiny sculptural edges, as if they are eighteenth-century
figurines” (Ibid.115). When discomfiture overtakes him for being “ill-
dressed”, Owen finds to his amazement that he party was hosted in “his
house” on Patridgeberry Road, Middle Falls, and that he happens to be “the
mysterious host, humiliatingly ill-clad with a porcelain suit” (Ibid.116). If
Freud talks about the displacement in a dream, Owen’s house provides the
displaced space for the party. In his next major dream Owen is haunted by
an apprehension of losing his wife Julia:
Somewhere in his thick net, the dream, there is his rapidly
burgeoning relationship with Julia, compact, firm, decisive,
surprisingly sexy Julia, but he keeps losing her, it is just too hard
to keep up the precarious secret connection— the hurried, hard-
breathing phone calls, the panicky trysts where the edges of this
town merge with the edges of another— and weeks go by, in his
dream, without any connection being made, and his love object
sinks deeper and deeper beneath the surface of the everyday...
(Ibid.189)
At a deeper level, it hints at Owen’s subconscious fear of losing his first wife
Phyllis, and ipso facto, may be related to Updike’s loss of his first married
life with Mary. If Phyllis is physically killed, and replaced by Julia, Mary
is metaphorically obliterated from Updike’s conjugal cosmos and actually
replaced by Martha. In the final major dream of the novel Owen is whisked
off to “some kind of classroom setting, he was delegated by the teacher to
take a pencil or a textbook to Barbara Emerich, who is sitting alone in a
corner, at one of those chairs with a broadened arm of yellow oak to write
on” (Ibid.306). Sensing her unresponsiveness when Owen went closer, he
felt “out of the shadowy space between her lap and her downturned face,
that she was willing to have him kiss her. She expected it but acted on the
expectation only by maintaining a stubborn stillness, her mouth clamped
shut on her sunny smile, with its single grey tooth” (Ibid.307). The dream
stimulates his memory of his first wife Phyllis, and brings back to his mind
how at MIT, he would date with her, prior to their marriage (Ibid.307).
That said, dream is also a strong stimulant of memory, and this is amply
attested to by this dream.
Apart from forming the texture of this novel, the dreams and the
mellifluous memories of Owen’s sexual encounters, serve some aesthetic
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phases of Owen’s life loosely correspond to it. During his liaison with Elsie
Seidel, at Willow, Owen’s libido stemming from his Id, overtakes him, and
he nibbles at the slight opportunity of enjoying the deliciousness of her
anatomy: “Now, with Elsie in the car, he had real nakedness to deal with”,
and “[w]ith each date she gave him an inch or two more of herself that he
could claim as his henceforth; there was no taking back these small warm
territories” (Updike 2004: 64). This phase of Owen’s life at Willow bears
resemblance to what Freud calls Id. Owen’s affair with Phyllis Goodhue
takes a realistic turn— or what comes close to the play of Ego dominated
by reality principle— when he marries her. Thus his life at Middle Falls
loosely corresponds to Ego. And his final phase of married life with his
second wife Julia at Haskell Crossing loosely resembles the state akin to
the Freudian concept of the Superego. If Superego is guided by a morality
principle, at their mature conjugal life Owen becomes more compassionate,
more considerate, and more careful about his wife Julia than he used to
be earlier. A sensitive and sympathetic husband, Owen, shares his dreams
with Julia, and “wants to describe all this to Julia, to make her laugh”
(Ibid.36). He becomes so much dependent on her that when he “discovers
that Julia is out of bed, he goes forth in search of her” and becomes agog
with impatience to put up with her absence (Ibid.34). Similarly when he
dreams about “something dangerous in her (Julia’s) speed”, he grows
anxious about her, and his heart leaps “in fear that she might slip on wet
leaves and fatally crash” (Ibid.36, 37). Chastened and matured by the
mellowness of his ripe age, he becomes sobered and mild, at least in his
act, if not in his thoughts. Thus, one may be tempted to compare it with
the Freudian phase induced by Superego. The younger Owen driven by
the libidinal drives of Id, finds his Ego dominating his conjugal life with his
first wife Phyllis, leading to their separation through her death, until he
finds his Superego predominating and acting as a balancing force to lead
him a complacent and relatively stable relationship with his second wife
Julia in the final setting, Haskells Crossing. As Updike puts it: “Phyllis had
hoisted him up into Cambridge and the snob life of the mind, and Julia
into Haskells Crossing and the life of the bourgeois repose” (Ibid.317).
Hopping from woman to woman, from bed to bed, Owen finally finds his
solace in and settles down with his second wife Julia.
Furthermore, if the nature of dream is always intangible, and,
somewhat mysterious, the same holds true of the very concept of village.
Owen’s previous admission that “the villages he has lived in have been sites
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this time enacted on the psychic planes. But although less intense than
his literary predecessors, Owen’s sexual encounters are “programmed”, so
much attuned to his career in computer technology.
Conclusion
References
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Прадипта Сенгупта
Сажетак
159
160
UDC
doi
Radojka Vukčević*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
One of the key questions to be discussed in the context of the 1968 protests is that
of the American Dream. It has been woven into the fabric of everyday life, playing
a vital role in who Americans are, what they do, and why they do it. It has always
had the strongest influence on American individual and collective life. The focus
of this paper will be to what extent it really exists and to what extent it is a product
of the American imagination. How far has its imaginative territory reached? How
much has the changing face of the Dream informed politics, everyday life and
even the nation’s identity itself? How have Americans created themselves through
an idea that no one can completely define but everyone wants a piece of?
The notion of the American Dream can be traced back to the Depression and
WWI when it ironically also faced its biggest threats. Here, the focus will be on
the counterculture years of the late 1960s and 1970s, when it was put to the
greatest test since this idiom was coined. Finally, the Dream will be followed from
the year 2000 up to today, showing that it is as powerful and relevant as ever.
It seems that the Dream will not only continue to be a compelling part of the
American landscape, but is also taking a global form. It will most probably serve
as a central guiding force for both Americans and others across the globe in the
years to come.
*
E-mail address: vukcevicradojka@gmail.com
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Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
Etc. And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
Like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
By Langston Hughes
Introduction
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of the Dream itself kept reminding many in the US of the need for protest
and change whenever it was threatened with destruction or corruption.
The strongest and most alarming crisis happened in 1968 when Martin
Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and this was followed by the eruption
of anti-war and student protests in the US, the UK, and across the world.
The responses in the light of the American Dream kept coming from many
genres in literature, film, theatre, performing arts, visual arts and music.
They have never stopped creating their own history to become increasingly
relevant and very strong today targeting, among other things, some of
today’s most challenging issues, such as the environment, economics, and
the changing relationships between the US, UK, and Europe. What they
never ceased to do is to raise the old question:
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Samuel points out that the Dream is not real but “the guiding mythology
of the most powerful civilization in history.” (Lawrence 2012: 1) It is, as
he believes, the best way to understand America, and, most probably, its
social, historical, political, and cultural roots and routes of the current
moment, and its potential futures. Real or not, a quick Google search done
in 2012 returns 67 million hits. Current debates on health insurance and
Social Security, the role of government, and the personal loss that comes
“with a foreclosure are certainly stepped in the dynamics of the Dream, a
proof of its resiliency and enduring relevance.” (2) The twenty-first century
only followed the previous one with the American Dream serving as the
backbone of great social movements (New Deal, the Great Society). It was
also the backbone in the cases of the counterculture and feminist and civil
rights movements with its grounding in the ideal of equal opportunity, and
it will play an important role in any major economic, political, or social
encounter. It promises, especially with the rise of multiculturalism and
global migrations, to become “a key denominator and unifying force.” (3)
History
The American Dream is as old as the world, and it can be traced back to
the birth of civilization. However, as it is well known, it was defined in 17th
century America and formally articulated in the Declaration of Independence
and Constitution. The concept of the American Dream included many
things: meritocracy versus aristocracy, the position in life which is earned
not inherited, key words and concepts such as opportunistic, self-reliant,
pragmatic, resourceful, aspirational, optimistic, entrepreneurial, inventive.
The Dream encompasses many desires ranging from some of the oldest
such as owning a piece of land to that famous desire of the Great Gatsby:
to reinvent oneself. The list of successful and unsuccessful dreamers is
long. James Truslow Adams is credited with first using the phrase while
Dale Carnegies, Newman Vincent Pale and Horacio Alger have served as
some of the loudest spokesmen. Some historical figures such as Jefferson,
Franklin and Lincoln, and among a myriad of illustrious characters who
made the American Dream come true and became the embodiment of the
Dream: Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Irving Berlin, Sam Walton,
Ray Kroc, Mickey Mantle, the Jackson Five, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Hugh Hefner, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump and Barack
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1960–1970
The history of the American Dream is long and exciting. Nevertheless, the
focus will be on the counterculture years of the late 1960 and 1970s which
witnessed an intense investigation of the state of the American Dream.
Revolutionary times worked together on developing the American Dream
but now people were more independent and it became more of a solitary
affair. The standard of living was lower, and “combined with the social and
political chaos of the past few years, was a clear sign that the American
Dream was in decline.” (73) The key question often raised at that time
waited for an answer if it would recover, when and how? That is why the
sixties put protest in its focus both as a weapon and a metaphor (Вукчевић
2018: 481-485).
One of the answers came from President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965,
who proposed to create a “Great Society” while emphasizing the democratic
foundation of the Dream. J. R. Wiggins, editor of the Washington Post, just
two weeks after Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1965 State of the Union message
wrote:
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protest their exclusion from the American Dream.” (77) Robert T. Pickett,
“a twenty-year-old prelaw student at Kent State took advantage of the
opportunity to share the information with Vice president Hubert Humphrey
when he visited the university in 1968.” (76) Humphrey, a candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination along with Senator Robert F. Kennedy
(NY) and Eugene McCarthy (MN) referenced the American Dream in his
speech before eight thousand students, during which many black “militants”
and one hundred Vietnam War protesters walked out. As Samuel Lawrence
quotes: “You say you believe in the American Dream. I do not believe in
the American Dream simply because the American Dream does not believe
in me. If it did believe in me we wouldn’t have had any riots in Newark
or Watts… the American Dream to me is the American nightmare…What
will you do to restore my faith and my people’s faith in America and the
American Dream if you are elected?” (77) Some conservative political
leaders interpreted racial unrest and violent war protests as signs that the
country was out of control. Samuel quotes the words of George Romney in
early 1968, the governor of Michigan and Republican presidential candidate
who said that America was facing “a crisis in the American Dream at home
and the American mission in the world.”(77)
Two leading voices, two men who deeply believed in the American
Dream were soon assassinated: Martin Luther King Jr, who preached in
Memphis the night before expressing his faith in the Promised Land, and
Robert Kennedy, committed to the American Dream principles (individualism,
self-reliance, self-discipline and unending self-improvement). Their deaths
made many fear the threatening death of the American Dream. However,
this did not happen. Samuel Lawrence quotes the comic description of
the changes in the American Dream, by saying that instead of dreaming
rich, they “began to dream hip”, and suggested that the mainstream
was adopting the counterculture’s mantras to find him/herself and “do
their things” instead of defining themselves by the things they owned.
The quintessential American Dreamer was now the bearded hippie, “the
realization that one was a member of the bourgeoisie a major hummer.”
(79) They wanted to liberate their “wild, free avant-garde persona from
sodden prosperity … the nouveau-riche generation having given birth to
the nouveau-avant generation.” (79)
Nevertheless, Samuel Lawrence argues that this was not an easy task
for many individuals, for the pursuit of the persona is but a version of the
American Dream, and many simply did not know how to become flower
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children, and quotes Morton who concludes that “for at least a segment
of the adult population and a good many young people, the upwardly
mobile, materialistic American Dream was decidedly out, replaced by a
modern hedonistic and spiritual version.” (79) In spite of many dystopian,
negative and tragic voices, many optimistic still prevailed either as a call
for a utopian paradise or a place of a happy, united and serene America.
Many responses to the idea of the American Dream came from the
film industry. Samuel Lawrence singles out the role of John Wayne (True
Grit, The Cowboys, The Green Berets) describing him as a “soothing tonic
for the decade long nightmare that was Vietnam.” (89) This was not the
case with some of the greatest films of the late 1960s and 1970s which
the American Dream turned upside down; “by featuring criminals as
antiheroes, the Anti-Paradise of the counterculture years was an ideal
climate for cinematic outlaws to pursue wealth and power” (Bonnie and
Clyde, 1967; The Producers, 1968, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,
1969; The Sting, 1973; Paper Moon, 1973; and The Godfather trilogy). (89)
Some other films (The Graduate, 1967; Easy Rider, 1969) glorified brave
characters who broke the norms of the establishment while the Dream
spinning out of control, a corrupt system encouraging individuals and
institutions to do whatever necessary to succeed, was depicted in films like
Nashville (1975) and Network (1976). Finally, he singles out Rocky, the film
which redeemed them all, as its hero fights against all odds to reach the
top, “endorsing the traditional values of the Dream along the way.” (90)
It is a celebration of the American Dream, and like many other films from
this period it served as a stabilizing force for a “severely shaken” American
Dream. It came as a remedy after “the angst of the early seventies—
Vietnam, Watergate, the Arab oil embargo, economic ‘stagflation,’ a fading
but lingering countercultural movement, rise in crime and civil unrest, and
demand for minorities to have their voices heard—Americans were more
than ready for narratives that reaffirmed their faith in the nation’s ideals.”
(91) Thus, Rocky, released five months after the nation’s bicentennial
(1976) reminded the people (immigrants most of all) that the American
Dream could still come true: it celebrated it.
It was very much alive for the white ethnic groups (Jews, Irish
Catholics, Italians, Poles and Germans) who had higher incomes than the
Episcopalians. The American Dream was also true for the “eastern and
southern European Catholics—for whom by definition it was not supposed
to work well.” (100) The door of multiculturalism was more widely open
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among the working class hitting the economic wall by Bruce Springsteen
(Darkness on the Edge of Town; The River, Nebraska) with the saddest and
most serious album about the American Dream Born in the U.S.A, about
economic hope, security, and community. TV also responded to the tough
times of the early 1980s. In the era of Dallas, The Waltons, and Soap, a new
realistic show called The American Dream (ABC, 1981) addressed money
issues, unplanned babies, and sick relatives. Film reacted to the American
Dream by reinforcing the domestic orientation in Steven Spielberg’s 1982
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, as well as in The Wizard of Oz and Scarface. The
search for the American Dream in this decade is best expressed in two films
about baseball: The Natural (based on Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel)
and the 1989 Field of Dreams (based on W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless
Joe).
A good way for women and people of color was franchising while
other minorities (Koreans and other Asian-Americans) were defining their
American Dream in more traditional ways. They were not concerned with
the future the way many American intellectuals were, such as Philip Moffitt
who asked if the dreams of Generation X would be any different from baby-
boomers’ dreams, and suggested re-articulation and redefinition of the
American Dream which would answer the postmodern promises, embrace
American traditional values but also adjust to the “new self-image—a view
of tomorrow that reflects the lessons of the last fifty years.” (122) This is
only one of the voices in pro and con discussions constantly reexamining
the place and definition of the American Dream in the 1980s. Perhaps the
strongest voice came from the TV show thirtysomething, a major hit for
ABC in the late 1980s and early 1990s, especially popular among “young
urban professionals who related to the characters’ ‘yuppie angst’”. (133),
the generation which was fighting with uncertainty and alienation while
pursuing the American dream. It was not easy to find out how real it was
but for Thomas Cangelosi of the New York Times it was easy to conclude
that intellectualism was boring, idealism impractical, and emotionalism
self-destructive, so that “his generation has decided to swallow a pill
delivering a heavy dose of conservatism and simplicity.” (134)
The 1980s made the American Dream cross the borders of the US
and enter the space of Europe and the question is asked if the American
Dream should be renamed the European Dream. Many Europeans enjoyed
a lifestyle resembling the standard of the American Dream, while many
Americans did not. The American Dream became more and more privatized,
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illustrating the concentration of wealth and widening gap between the rich
and the poor. The myth was still present but “the reality greatly different,
especially among the middle class for whom the Dream meant so much.”
(135) One of the omnipresent moments: rethinking and re-creating the
American Dream was waiting for its time at the very end of the 20th and
the beginning of the 21st century.
The very end of the 20th century learnt from the very successful
production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1999), with its 274
performances and a number of Tony Awards, that the American Dream
was still the American guiding mythology in everyday life. Still, at the
beginning of the 21st century it was an elusive, slippery thing, coming and
going like a thief in the night. (137)
The beginning of the last decade brought creativity, compassion and
connection as hallmarks of the 1990s’. The early 1990s did not bring
prosperity and abundance as people expected. The implosion of the
American Dream was best illustrated in film, especially by Michael Moore’s
1990 Roger and Me, which was described more as a social commentary
than a documentary. (138) Moore said that the film is about the American
Dream:
The dream itself isn’t good because it’s a dream, it’s not reality.
Being able to own your home and own your car is not the reality
of being in control of your own life, because they can snap it from
you just like that. I don’t want you to be angry about the dream
being gone. I want you to be angry about the lie of the dream,
the illusion that’s created, the illusion that by having a few things
of wealth that somehow you’ve made it and you’re secure for the
rest of your life. (Moore in Lawrence 139)
It was becoming clear that the American Dream was an illusion that the
Americans had created for themselves, and the discovery that upward
mobility was “difficult if not impossible for a big chunk of Americans
was a devastating blow to belief in the American Dream”. (139-140) An
old demand for its restoration reentered the scene. Many voices for its
affirmation were heard. The voice of protest came as a result of the fact
that the American Dream started to mean an ideal of prosperity – not
liberty!
In the meantime, while fighting for its traditional meaning the
American Dream made an emotional bond with sports, baseball most of all!
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However, even greater was the one it shared with movies. The documentary
Hollywoodism that aired on A&E in 1998 “wonderfully captured the
intimated relationship between movies and the American Dream, showing
how much DNA they had in common.” (153) Hollywood’s Jews expressed
the Dream’s longing for happiness, success, and acceptance (producers:
William Fox, Adolph Zukor of Paramount, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner,
etc.). The spread of capitalism and the global economy had much to do
with the transnationalism of the Dream which, for those staying in the US,
meant more hard work to achieve it. It was illustrated by Linda Schaffer’s
1996 documentary American Dream with celebrities (Michael Jordan, Mel
Brooks, Gloria Steinem, and Maya Angelou) who showed that they still
had not made it. Neither have many of the interviewed minorities, first of
all Native Americans or Asian Americans.
The American Dream kept rising and falling, proving to be too perfect
to happen although America was more prosperous in 1995 than 1945.
Quoting Robert J. Samuelson, Lawrence writes: “That the ‘Good Society’ of
the 1950s and ‘Great Society’ of the 1960s (as well as the counterculture,
it could be said) never fulfilled their full promises—continually rising
incomes, stable jobs, and the end of poverty, racism, and crime—was
disappointing if not traumatic to the nation … exposing the American
Dream as a fantasy”. (157) The gap between the “haves” and the “have-
nots” kept growing as well. Self-reliance once again became a key marker
of the American Dream while individual initiative, personal responsibility
and talent became the new necessities. The American Dream came to a full
circle from its origins to the personal freedom.
Politicians found it a useful device to get elected, Democrats and
Republicans equally. Thus, both Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, 1996 candidates
for President “were clearly trading on Martin Luther King’s concept of the
Dream, specifically his ‘The American Dream’ speech made in 1961 at
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech made in
1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial”. (159) Clinton and Dole relied
on King’s use of the American Dream having in mind that its power relies
on the nation’s well-known founding principles (“that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”).
The end of the century (1997) brought “the good old days” with
prosperity, the end of recession, while many families “were catching up
to where they had been in terms of their standard of living, the American
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Dream once again in their sights.” (162) However, the end of the century
opened another arena for its realization – cyberspace. It opened many
things the dreamers had wished for: freedom, success, prosperity, it became
the place of limitless opportunities. Cyberspace opened itself to the many
all around the globe and as Kenji Sato said in 1997, it “has become the
ultimate embodiment of the American Dream.” (163) This new promised
land, relevant for people around the world, incorporated the same values
of the United States at its best. (Trump as the embodiment of the 1990s).
The Americans themselves were not just creating but they were living it.
(165) As soon as they crossed over into a new century, they started living
the American Dream in a way they did not expect or foresee.
Even with the economy crashing in the early 2000s (much like in
the early 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s), Americans were determined to keep
their Dream alive. Both the advantages and the disadvantages of being
born in the United States were greater than in many other countries with
“the polarity of class here making social mobility more possible in parts of
Europe”. (171) Still, both classes needed it even as an illusion, which was a
very useful and valuable one. That is why “the mythology of the American
Dream persisted, with a Bill Clinton or Bill Gates taken as incontrovertible
proof that the country was a level playing field on which anyone could
potentially rise to the top.” (171)
It was true that the American standard of living was the highest
in history, but it was not without social problems, including high rates-
of divorce, teen suicide, violent crime, prisoners, and depression. (172)
Making more money was not a strong substitute for happiness, some of the
authors point out (Myers, Schwartz), while others like Rifkin compare the
European choice of happiness over money with the American, illustrating
it by saying that Americans “live to work” while “Europeans work to live”.
The question Rifkin raises asks who was better suited to meet the challenges
of the 21st century. (173) Still, he understands the “European Dream” as
superior to the American Dream (paid vacation, maternity leave, free or
cheap health care, housing assistance, and tuition reimbursement from the
government). He insisted that the American model of success and values
(religious, patriotic, independent), that the tradition of isolationism,
individualism, and self-sufficiency were not in “sync with where the world
headed, he went further, with Europe’s more communitarian approach
better designed for the world of tomorrow.” (174)
The American Dream, as it has previously been pointed out, was
slowly changing its color: it was becoming more and more the dream of
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Latino Americans, Asian Americans and others. Soon it was very present
in popular culture. The rise of television news helped to popularize the
American Dream (Peter Jennings’s 1998 book The Century; Tom Brokaw’s
1999 book The Greatest Generation Speaks). In 2001 Dan Rather produced
The American Dream Stories from the Heart of Our Nation, which was
even more of an ode to American mythology. The American Dream was
expressed in TV shows like Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and Survivor
but it was the 2002 American Idol “that most compellingly expressed the
essence of the American Dream in the first decade of the twenty-first
century …tapping into a cultural nerve that reflected many aspects of the
Dream, including our unabashed worship of celebrities and that we all
perhaps had the potential of becoming one.” (181) In 2006 it became ripe
for parody with the film American Dreams, the show which turned the
American Dream upside down. It was not the same with the TV show The
Sopranos, that revealed the depth and range of the American Dream. It
had a wide reception (5 books of criticism from different points of view),
and in one of them it is said that “no other TV show had gone to the dark
side of the Dream like The Sopranos... the series palpably illustrating what
could and did go down when ambition lost its moral footing.” (181)
Popular music (especially hip hop, with its adoration of money and
the luxuries it could buy) was also a central repository of the American
Dream in the media of the 2000s. Among many, Bruce Springsteen was
now recognized as an authentic national treasure. Over the course of
three decades, he created answers to the American Dream through his
responses to 9/11, the 2002 album The Rising, “solidified his role as
‘America’s conscience, questioner and consoler.” (182) Many books were
written about him and he and his music were almost synonymous with the
American Dream. Jimmy Guterman’s Runaway American Dream, Robert
Coles’s Bruce Springsteen’s America, and Jim Cullen’s Born in the U.S.A.
“each expressed this point in different ways, canonizing Springsteen as the
Boss not just of pop music but, for a whole generation, of the American
Dream as well.” (183)
Bruce Springsteen sang about the working class, many white collar
workers also saw the American Dream vanishing “as corporate America
slashed staff to cut costs or for more urgent reasons.” (183) The gap between
the richest and the poor was widening and dragging the Dream down
“with the big bulge in the middle falling further behind the top percent of
income earners and doing everything they could to avoid becoming part
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Radojka Vukčević: Revolutionary Vibes of 1968 and the American Dream
of the bottom 20 percent.” (187) This made Zuckerman compare the early
twenty-first century with the Gilded Age. 15% of Americans now possessed
85% of the nation’s wealth, “with the bottom half accounting for just 2.5
percent of total household net worth.” (187)
Hip hop music is another example of how perceptions of the meaning
of the American Dream have changed over the decades from its socially and
racially aware protest songs in the 80s to a “Get Rich or Die Trying” vision
of the American dream in the new millennium. Over the decades capitalism
dulled hip hop’s razor sharp social and racial criticism, pushing it into the
mainstream’s grip. At present time, hip hop music is the mainstream in
the true sense of the word (especially in the USA) – all global pop stars
collaborate with hip hop rappers and producers, it is the quick formula for
success. It is an interesting phenomenon that hip hop is at the moment the
most popular music genre, even though the messages that mainstream hip
hop conveys are devoid of deeper meaning and focus solely on material
and corporeal pleasures, comforts and gain, which is an indicator of the
Zeitgeist of the American Dream.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the drawn-out war in Afghanistan, the
economic downturn of 2008, myriads of political scandals, the international
immigration crisis, racial tensions, and marginalized citizens have all set
the stage for events that have people trying to capture the illusive American
Dream. Protests are on the rise in the US. Some recent examples are:
• Colin Kaepernick and other US football players who knelt
during the national anthem to protest police violence against
African-Americans, they were making a gesture of humility, of
pain and distress but these players have been strongly criticized
for disrespecting the flag and fallen service members.
• Recent women’s marches (in the US and abroad) have been in
response to inequality that women (of all ethnicities) face in
the workforce and in society.
• The March for Our Lives, in March 2018, drew record
numbers of people protesting against gun violence (especially
in schools) and for gun law reform. It is important to point out
that these marches were completely organized through social
media within a short amount of time.
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Conclusion
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Radojka Vukčević: Revolutionary Vibes of 1968 and the American Dream
is positive as long as they compare it with the other parts of the world
where it has a strong impact. It is also positive as long as they protest
while asking who stole their American Dream (the 2011 documentary Who
Stole the American Dream?) or organizing protests like the Occupy Wall
Street movement and the civil protest at the Wisconsin Capitol in early
2011. It is now being studied retrospectively as well: the assassinations of
Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; gay rights, women’ rights and
civil rights; the Black Panthers and the Vietnam War; the New Left and
the New Right. The Year 1968 has been studied from the vantage points
of its historical, political and social legacy. Special attention has been
focused on how protest itself has transformed in the US, from Students
for a Democratic Society and the Civil Rights Movement in the late 1960s,
through the Women’s Movement in the 1970s, towards the contemporary
visibility of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. (See: Reframing 1968:
American Politics, Protest and Identity).
The very cultural history of the American Dream supports American
optimistic beliefs reminding us that the American Dream would always
recover in the past. The incessant waves of immigrants to the US will breed
ground for the American Dream as they believe in the mythology most
strongly, while politicians will continue to employ it in their campaigns.
This optimism is supported by a 2010 survey in which it is said that 34
percent of Americans believed that in spite of the bad economy they had
achieved it. Above all, it must be pointed out that creativity is the most
important social and economic currency, and one’s imagination to develop
new and original ideas and things is the best recipe for success, which will
never go out of fashion!
The American Dream will survive and perhaps even flourish in the US
in the future because the American Dream is not solely American. It will be
shared with other countries. The Americans have invented and mastered
the fine art of the American Dream, but many countries globally enjoy
their own interpretations of it. As the world plunges further into the 21st
century, the American Dream is on the way to becoming the Global Dream
as it embodies the most essential issue such a dream should contain – to be
crowned as an ethical Dream!
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References
Chomsky, N. (2017). Requiem for the American Dream, Created and edited
by P. Hutchison, K. Nyks & J. P. Scott, New York Oakland London: Seven
Stories Press.
Halliwell, M. and N. Witham (eds.) (2018). Reframing 1968: American
Politics, Protest and Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Hughes, L. “Harlem”. Zangrando, J.S. and R.L. Zangrando. “Black
Protest: A Rejection of the American Dream” (2018), <http://about.
jstor.org/terms>, downloaded from 34.248.21.60, (16 June 2018)
12:42:38UTC.
Lawrence, S. R. (2012). The American Dream: A Cultural History. Syracuse
New York: Syracuse University Press.
Вукчевић, Р. (2018). Историја америчке књижевности. Нови Сад:
Академска књига; Матица српска – Друштво чланова у Црној Гори.
Wagner-Martin, L. (2013). A History of American Literature. Oxford: Willey-
Blackwell.
Радојка Вукчевић
Сажетак
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Radojka Vukčević: Revolutionary Vibes of 1968 and the American Dream
Иако се трагови Америчког сна могу пратити далеко раније, рад је ставио ак-
ценат на контракултуру с краја шесте и седме деценије двадесетог века, када се сан
нашао на највећој проби од тренутка када је скован. У раду се даље пратио историјс-
ки преглед развоја Америчог сна и посебан акценат стављен је на период од 2000. до
данас да би показао да је Амерички сан и даље снажан и релевантан. Истраживање
је исто тако показало да ће Амерички сан и даље трајати не само у Америци, већ
глобално. Највероватније ће имати централну и водећу улогу и за Американце и за
многе друге становнике овог света у годинама које су пред нама.
Кључне речи: Амерички сан, контракултура, протести 1968, жанр, Cyberspace,
глобални поглед
181
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Aleksandra V. Jovanović*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
In the spring of 1968 a wave of revolt spread across the world. Although problems
were different from society to society, people from Europe to America to Africa and
beyond seemed to have some shared concerns – the repudiation of the dominant
regimes and mainstream ideologies at all levels of society and culture. The paper
deals with the impact of the ideas of ’68 and generally the spirit of the ’60s which
produced some profound changes in society and art. The special focus is on the
impact of the global spirit of change on the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia from
the perspective of the artistic endeavors of young artists in Belgrade who were
committed to initiating a new artistic language through the art of performance.
*
E-mail address: aleksandra.jovanovic@fil.bg.ac.rs; ningi@sbb.rs
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In the year 1968 the spirit of social discontent fueled riots against the
dominant political and social ideologies worldwide. Mainly young people
felt the necessity to act against social injustice and conservative patterns
of behavior at many levels of social life, political, educational, artistic, to
name but a few. Although the problems of the world communities were
various and different, the spirit of rage and the sense of commitment
were globally present. In his comprehensive study about that period,
1968: The Year That Rocked the World Mark Kurlansky explains that “at a
time when nations and cultures were still separate and very different…
there occurred a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the
world” (2004: 9).
Certainly, the wave of revolt had been accumulating all through the
decade of the sixties. Speaking about the situation in America the historian
Randall Bennett Woods claims that, “[t]he fundamental cleavages in
American society and basic flaws in the nation’s approach to international
affairs came to the surface” (Woods 2000: 16). There were many issues
which plagued the social life at the time: the cold war agenda, the war in
Vietnam, the brutality of the Soviet regime after the Prague Spring events,
among others. The societies responded through the rise of the civil rights
movements, liberal activism in Western societies and various movements
against racism, totalitarianism and ignorance on the global scene. Kurlansky
writes, “[w]here there was communism they rebelled against communism,
where there was capitalism they turned against that” (2004: 9).
Apart from political and economic agendas, the voices calling for
change affected other spheres, too. In the artistic sphere the demands
were for a radically different approach to creation and interpretation. In
the literary world, John Barth published an essay in 1967 entitled “The
Literature of Exhaustion”. Barth wrote about conservativism in the literary
approach, both at the level of representation and that of interpretation. In
England at about the same time David Lodge published “The Novelist at
the Crossroads” (1969) in which he also posed questions on the limits of
representation. Lodge saw the traditional way of writing as incapable of
accommodating new ways and perspectives. “[Worldwide] people were
rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only that desire to
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rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established
order, and a profound distaste for authoritarianism in any form” (Ibid.).
Protests were famously concentrated round university buildings and
campuses. The unofficial symbol of 1968 were the events at the Parisian
universities. The well-known events of May 1968 actually began in March
the same year at the suburban university of Nanterre. The protesting
group at first included some 150 students, along with some poets and
musicians. However, later they were transferred to various locations, most
significantly to the central university of the Sorbonne. All through April
that year students protested with sit-ins at many spots in Paris. Ultimately
in June they were supported by the 6000 workers all round France and the
protest became general.
One of the famous slogans of the Parisian protests, “under the
cobblestones, the beach”, indicated the degree of the rage of the protesters,
while the saying “kill the cop in your head” reveals its true nature. They
fought for new critical practice, and the critical interrogation of the notion
of freedom which they considered a part of the bourgeois ideology, that
is a product of liberal capitalism. Contemplating the revolutionary 1968,
art professor Sami Siegelbaum cites the claim of Louis Althusser, one of
the favorite philosophers of the 1968 protests. Siegelbaum explains that
through the notion “all men are free, so the laborers are free this ideology
exploits, blackmailing them with freedom so as to keep them in harness,
as much as the bourgeoisie’s need to live its own class rule as the freedom
of those it is exploiting” (Althusser in Siegelbaum 2012: 69). The sense of
alienation from society stemmed from the abstract nature of social relations.
For instance, society offered some abstract “freedom”, without being really
free to think, contemplate, interrogate and create. Demonstrators felt
that the procreator of that social lethargy was the regime. This general
idea backed the thoughts and actions in various spheres of social life, like
education and art. French artists desperately explored new ways of dealing
with the reality. Siegelbaum further explains that, “artists in May ’68 had
largely been defined by escalating attempts, beginning around 1965, to
formulate a collective critical practice, in their capacity as painters, capable
of overturning the modernist emphases on heroic individual creation and
formal innovation” (2012: 65).
All through the sixties artists took dramatic and radical actions as
they explored new ways of artistic expression. They were generally against
formalist artistic movements, abstract art and the thoughts locked in symbols
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as they were not enough to express new ideas and relations. That April in
Paris, on the eve of the student revolt and the general strike, a French artist
Daniel Buren produced a photograph of his own street installation that he
had placed some days earlier on a corner next to the École des Beaux-Arts
in Paris. The photograph showed a billboard plastered with overlapping
posters with his own poster of vertical stripes on top. Buren placed around
200 such posters at various Parisian locations so as to show his disgust with
the institutional gallery and museum spaces with the intention to show the
incongruity between socially acceptable art and its true autonomy.
There were many examples of how new artistic language interrogated
old cultural concepts and strived to engage the audience in a cultural
dialogue about the values of society. Here is an example of an artistic way
to deal with gender policy. At the peak of the riots, on May 4th the 24e
Salon de Mai opened at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In a
dominantly conservative gallery the artist Lea Lublin displayed her baby
son Nicolas who was born the year before. The work was called simply
Mon fils (My Son). The explanation was simple, “[This is] a moment of my
everyday life in an artistic site ... I exhibited myself with my son” (Lublin
in Spencer 2017: 68). In the gallery space he was shown along with his
crib, nappies, clothes, and toys. The tension between the domestic and
public, womanhood and patriarchy, acceptable and shameful summon the
narrations of motherhood and femininity in general in an array of readings
– feminist, Marxist, psychological, among others. This simple installation
which has seemingly nothing to do with anger and rage was a powerful
statement of feminism and the right to a voice.
The rise and formulation of the new artistic practice entertained
thoughts, ideas and stories inside the artistic space. The emerging genre of
performance akin to the art of installation proved from the start to be able
to accommodate narratives in various lingual, acoustic or visual forms,
“acknowledges that writing is somehow related to inscription” (Freeman
2007: 4). In the center of the performance was the performing artist as the
originator of meaning which is created in front of the audience. In such a
way from the start the genre of performance has developed into “a moving
laboratory in which to develop and test radical ideas, images and actions,
a conceptual territory that grants us special freedoms (aesthetic, political
and sexual)” (Gómez-Peña: 2000).
In Belgrade, the capital of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia at
the time, 1968 was the year when rebellious sentiments from the global
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Someone exhibited an old blanket with holes, another, the door to his
studio. Raša Todosijević exhibited his beautiful girlfriend as an artifice.
Marina Abramović exhibited a peanut in its shell. That peanut as an art
object marked her artistic transformation, as she confessed later. As it
protruded from the wall it left a tiny shadow. She called the piece Cloud
With Its Shadow. About the piece she wrote: “As soon as I saw that little
shadow I realized two-dimensional art truly was a thing of the past … that
piece opened a whole different dimension,” [implying that the shadow
was a part of its being], “being there and not there, changing with the sun,
making it alive” (Abramović 2016: 39). In the years to come the space of
the SKC along with the surrounding streets and parks would become the
artistic arena for the young art.
If one compares the artistic-social dialogue in Belgrade with the
Parisian one it is clear that, regardless of the approach, the concerns were
pretty much the same. Buren’s billboard that was made illegible by many
layers of posters exposed the illegibility of old art. Art historian Hal Foster
“viewed it as a riddle, asking, ‘How are we to mediate these image-events?’”
(Foster in Sigelbaum 2012: 53). By accentuating the incommunicability,
that is the alienation of old art, Buren as many others at that time called
for a new creative language and along with it a new concept of space to
both house and produce such art.
Belgrade artists fervently discussed, “the art that was changing
dramatically” (Abramović 2016: 37). They debated conceptual art, art
povera, body art, or just “complain[ed] about the art [they] were being
taught” (Abramović 2016: 36). In her memoir Marina Abramović writes:
My little group of six talked about the Conceptualists in the
United States (where people like Lawrence Weiner and Joseph
Kosuth were making pieces in which words were as important as
objects); the Arte Povera movement in Italy, which was turning
everyday objects into art; and the anti-commercial, anti-art
Fluxus movement in Germany, whose stars were the provocative
performance and Happening artists Joseph Beuys, Charlotte
Moorman, and Nam June Paik. There was a Slovenian group
called OHO that rejected art as an activity separate from life:
any part of life at all, they believed, could be art. They were
doing performance art as early as 1969: In Ljubljana, an artist
named David Nez did a piece called Cosmology, where he lay
inside a circle on the floor, with a lightbulb suspended just over
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his stomach, and tried to breathe in tune with the universe. Some
members of OHO came to Belgrade to speak about their beliefs;
(Abramović 2016: 37)
The art of the six artists was loosely connected by their repudiation of
conservatism in art. In that again reminiscent of the French revolutionary
activities of 1968. Rejecting formalist aesthetics as static and unproductive,
ill-adapted to express social tension. It was these artists that presented
art “swaying between idealisation and alienation, criticism, irony and
aggression” (Becker in IRWIN 2006: 394). Most influential from the group-
of-six were Marina Abramović and Raša Todosijević. Together they formed
the nucleus of the avant-garde activity in Belgrade. They also worked
within the broader context of performance artists who were active at that
time and whose works SKC also welcomed in their famous Happy Gallery.
So, the new artistic scene in Yugoslavia started to gain shape. The
young artists created performances in which they expressed the frustration
and confinement which they felt living and working with the socialist
restrictions. One of Raša Todosijević’s performances was entitled Decision
as Art. The very notion of decision as refers to art recalls socialist paradoxes
– the idea that everything is calculated, decided in advance and imposed
on the citizens. The performance includes the static female model, several
plants and a fish in its pool. It also contains inscriptions on a banner:
“decision as art”, “salt” and “fish”, written in several languages. First,
the artist paints the plants, while his partner in the performance is just
passively sitting. Then he pulls the fish out of its pool, as the fish is slowly
dying from the lack of water, the artist drinks water until he is sick, then he
vomits and drinks again. The fish expires while he stands upright holding a
torch until he cannot hold up his arm any longer. The performance is about
suffering and endurance. He shares the agony of the dying fish. His absurd
martyrdom stands for the absurdity of understanding art as a calculated
act, a decision, a closure. This could serve as a powerful metaphor for the
misery of living under the regime where everything is a matter of decision,
where there is no humour, no freedom to create. Defining his endeavor
Raša Todosijević said in an interview:
My performance is not based on the wish to demystify anything,
it rather seeks to irritate an individual by addressing its negative
side in order that he becomes aware of it – your anger after the
performance is that negative side of yours. (Todosijević 1990:
160)
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“That killed me. The endurance artist in me, the walk-through-walls child
of partisans, had so wanted to go to the very last second, until the end”
(Abramović 2016: 256). Finally, the metaphor implies how she survived
and surpassed the widespread spirit of misunderstanding of her work at
home – without being discouraged in what she was doing.
Arguably, in the scope of Marina Abramović’s world the metaphor
could be read with reference to the walls of words and cultural symbols. In
her oeuvre, Marina Abramović has never stopped before the walls which
would limit expression and ban signification. In this respect, the walking-
through-walls metaphor sums up various aspects of her artistic agenda
– to go deeper into the realm of meaning, to explore the silence which
lurks behind the labels and symbols of the dominant (socialist) culture and
society, that is to puncture its walls. She actually tried to push the walls
which guard the all-too-familiar meaning of the words we know, actions
we perform and rituals we undertake. The anger led the way through the
wall as the despair of the limited meaning led Beckett’s Molloy, the agony
which he feels before the walls which limit the signification of the words
of the language. In that, many of Abramović’s strivings were reminiscent
of Beckett’s words, “All I know is what the words know”. Thus, the aim
to efface the cultural symbols was sometimes achieved by repetition, at
other times by re-contextualization, or reflection, but the effect is always
the displacement of the original signification so that it produced new
readings.
In the mid-seventies, Marina Abramović performed Lips of Thomas
(1975) on a public square in Belgrade. She stood with her navel exposed
and a carved five-pointed star around it. Apart from being a symbol in
its own right, a five-pointed star was central to the Yugoslav flag. As it
is both a communist and religious (pagan) symbol it evokes narrations
of both communism and faith. Her ritualistic, silent martyrdom contains
several allusions. First of all, the star, then the act of martyrdom and the
name of Thomas. St. Thomas, also called “Doubting Thomas”, does not
believe in the actuality of Christ’s suffering. The performing artist showed
her genuine wounds and she truly suffered and endured her suffering in
a ritual reminiscent of a religious act. Besides, her suffering was silent, in
an act which dissociated body and voice, in the way that socialist society
used to deprive its people of their own voice, speaking in their person. The
fragmentation of soul created passive personalities. The artist’s martyrdom
stood for her “religious” readiness to redeem their humanity for them. She
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performed this piece, with some variations, a couple more times during
her long career.
The symbol of the five-pointed star appeared to inspire and intrigue
Abramović in this period with its many-faceted reality and heavy emotional
charge. A year earlier, 1974, Abramović performed one of her Rhythm
series, Rhythm 5, in the courtyard of SKC with the famous contemporary
artist Joseph Beuys in the audience. That time Abramović used fire. Beuys
actually warned her that fire is highly risky in a performance. However, she
placed two wooden frames in the shape of a five-pointed star. Filled them
with wood shreds which she soaked with gasoline and set them aflame.
First she walked around the outer frame as in a ritual. Then as if to cleanse
her body before some mystic initiation she cut off her hair and nails and
threw them into the fire. Next, she just lay in the inner frame. Her body
just fitted in the frame so she looked as if she was crucified. Her symbolic
sacrifice on that occasion proved to be almost deadly as she fainted from
the lack of oxygen. She was symbolically sacrificed, as the young people
were sacrificed under the socialist regime. Like her own, their martyrdom
was meaningless.
In 1975 Marina Abramović performed Lips of Thomas, or Thomas Lips
again, in Innsbruck. That second performance was more complex. It had
several stages. The audience was offered the instructions,
MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ
THOMAS LIPS
Performance.
I slowly eat 1 kilo of honey with a silver spoon.
I slowly drink 1 liter of red wine out of a crystal glass.
I break the glass with my right hand.
I cut a five-pointed star on my stomach with a razor blade.
I violently whip myself until I no longer feel any pain.
I lay down on a cross made of ice blocks.
The heat of a suspended heater pointed at my stomach causes the
cut star to bleed.
The rest of my body behind to freeze.
I remain on the ice cross for 30 minutes until the public interrupts
the piece by removing the ice
blocks from underneath me.
Duration: 2 hours
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References
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Александра В. Јовановић
Сажетак
У пролеће 1968. читав свет био је захваћен таласом протеста. Иако су пробле-
ми били различити од земље до земље, изгледало је да народи од Европе до Америке
и Африке и даље деле неке заједничке фрустрације које су их ујединиле у фронт
непријатељства према владајућим режимима и доминантним идеологијама на свим
нивоима друштва и културе. У раду се расправља утицај идеја протеста 1968. и уоп-
ште духа шездесетих из којих су потекле неке корените промене у друштву и умет-
ности. Посебна пажња посвећена је утицају који је глобални дух промене имао на
Социјалистичку Републику Југославију из перспективе уметничких истраживања
тада младих уметника који су стварали у Београду у намери да пронађу нови умет-
нички језик кроз жанр перформанса.
Кључне речи: 1968, политика, идеологија, уметност, перформанс, језик
198
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Milena Kaličanin*
Nina Miladinović**
University of Niš
Faculty of Philosophy
Niš, Serbia
Abstract
The paper deals with the notion of moral corruption in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It
hopefully proves that the roots of the protagonist’s moral corruption stem from
diverse social and historical circumstances rather than from his innate capacity for
evil, as some critics suggest. By offering the chronicles of crimes and portraying
the relationships with the female characters, Macbeth’s pangs of conscience are
utterly exposed. The paper also includes a detailed account of the notion of guilty
conscience and what it uncovers about the protagonist’s psyche and the nature of
his supposed wickedness.
*
E-mail address: mkostic76@gmail.com
*
E-mail address: miladinovic.nina@gmail.com
Prepared as a part of the project Modern Trends in Researching English Linguistics and
Anglophone Literature and Culture, conducted at the University of Niš – Faculty of
Philosophy (183/1-16-1-01).
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Macbeth’s Wrongdoings
As Kamčevski points out in his work ’Stars, hide your fires...’ – A Study in
Shakespeare’s Psychological Method (2010), two very different Macbeths
can be perceived at the beginning and at the end of the play. Namely,
Macbeth undergoes a tremendous psychological shift during the course
of the play. In order to appreciate the extent of his change it is important
to sketch a portrait of Macbeth as he is shown prior to all the crimes he
eventually committed.
Macbeth himself appears on the stage for the first time in the third
scene of Act I. The play opens with the appearance of the three witches, the
weird sisters, who inform the audience that they intend to meet Macbeth
upon a heath ’When the battle’s lost and won’ (I, i, 348). Knights notes in
his work Macbeth as a Dramatic Poem (1933) that these words signify the
kind of metaphysical pitch-and-toss that is about to be played out with
good and evil (Knights 1933: 191). Likewise, the weird sisters here utter
the words which will echo through the entire play: ’Fair is foul, and foul is
fair’ (I, i, 348). Their words imply confusion and contradictions. Knights
comments yet again on the witches’ words in his work Some Shakespearean
Themes (1960) and states that they suggest the reversal of values which
will mark the entire play and which are associated with the premonitions,
disorder and moral darkness into which Macbeth will plunge himself
(Knights 1960: 122). The supernatural opening of the play is succeeded by
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a scene in a camp near the battlefield where the audience learns something
about Macbeth’s character for the first time. We glimpse Macbeth from
the account of the unnamed sergeant who gives the report of the ongoing
battle to King Duncan and his two sons. He states that Macbeth killed the
rebel Macdonwald and describes him as follows: ’brave Macbeth – well he
deserves that name – ’ (I, ii, 348). He goes on to say that the two generals,
Macbeth and Banquo, continue to fight vigorously against the unexpected
assault by the Norwegian army. Thus, the image we get of Macbeth at the
very beginning of the play is that of a courageous warrior, loyal to his king
and devoted to the destruction of his enemies. The Sergeant conveys the
image of Macbeth’s warlike skills in combat against the traitor by saying
that Macbeth ’unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps / And fix’d his
head upon our battlements’ (I, ii, 348). Moreover, the king learns from the
Scottish nobleman Ross that a final victory over the Norwegian intruders
has been won and decides to award Macbeth with the title of the Thane of
Cawdor. Such an image of Macbeth as an epic hero begins to waver and
alter from the very first time he appears in the play and as the audience
sees him interact with the witches.
Macbeth appears on the stage for the first time accompanied by
Banquo and they meet the three witches. The witches hail Macbeth with
three titles, the Thane of Glamis, the Thane of Cawdor and the king-to-be.
After such an address, Banquo’s words reveal Macbeth’s reaction: ’Good
sir, why do you start, and seem to fear / Things that do sound so fair?’ (I,
iii, 348) The very fact that Macbeth winces at hearing the witches address
him as the future king could be seen as the first manifestation of his guilty
conscience. We may guess that he has had thoughts of kingship before
the encounter with the witches and thus was startled at hearing his secret
desire verbalized. The witches then prophesy that Banquo shall not himself
be king but shall be the father of many kings and then they vanish into thin
air. Macbeth and Banquo rejoin the king and other noblemen and the first
prophecy comes true as the king greets Macbeth with the title of the Thane of
Cawdor. The king shows sincere gratitude and favor to the two generals and
promises them advancement in their positions and success and they all start
towards Macbeth’s castle. Once the first prophecy comes true, Macbeth’s mind
begins its toil to decide whether he should act towards its final fulfillment or
not. However, at this point, he is still far from the fatal decision.
If left to himself and to the dilemma that the witches have produced in
his mind, Macbeth would, quite possibly, have refrained from committing
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the crime of regicide. However, straight from the influence of the witches’
prophecy, he moves to the influence of his ambitious wife, Lady Macbeth.
Booth states in his work Shakespeare’s Tragic Villain (1951) that Macbeth
should have simply waited for the third prophecy to come true, without
doing anything himself, for if the witches were right about the two titles he
gained, then the third and most desired title would also have become his
(Booth 1951). However, he is urged to act by his wife from whom we learn
something more about Macbeth’s nature:
...Yet do I fear thy nature.
It is too full o’ the milk of human kindness
To catch the nearest way. Thou wouldst be great;
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly,
That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
And yet wouldst wrongly win. (I, v, 350)
Thus we learn that Macbeth is just and kind though admittedly ambitious.
However, his wife is there to corrupt his better nature and convince him to
murder the king.
It is stated in Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: Macbeth (2008)
that, in addition to his many crimes, Macbeth also committed a crime
against the ancient law of hospitality when he killed a guest in his house
whom he should have dutifully protected (Bloom & Marson 2008: 29).
However, the taunts of Lady Macbeth on the account of his masculinity
and the urgings of his own ambition overrule his finer judgment in the end
and he murders the sleeping king in his chambers. He murders him with the
daggers of the king’s own guards (who were at the time fast asleep due to
intoxication with wine arranged by Lady Macbeth) and then frames them
for the deed. In the morning, when the deed is discovered, Macbeth slays
the guards allegedly in his blind fury caused by the beloved king’s death.
Duncan’s sons flea the court after the murder fearing that whoever killed
their father will try to kill them as well. Their escape arouses suspicion of
their guilt and thus Macbeth is crowned the king of Scotland.
Having gained the crown does not bring Macbeth peace and ease of
mind. Given that the prophecies made to him by the witches all come true,
then the same must go for Banquo who is promised to be the father to the
line of kings.
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her council or informs her of his plans so as to spare her the knowledge of
his bloody intentions. Thus, Lady Macbeth’s demise begins and she commits
suicide by the end of the play, tortured by her awakened conscience.
Macbeth does not stop, however. He is somewhat appeased by the
assurances of the apparitions of his invincibility. However, all that comes
to the test when Malcolm and Macduff, aided by the English king, return
to Scotland with a besieging army. Having already committed the fatal
mistake of trusting the witches, Macbeth begins to lose himself and
appears half-mad near the end of the play. Knights notes that ’...it is not
only the besieging army that hems him in; he is imprisoned in the world
he has made’ (Knights 1960: 140). Macbeth’s adversaries cut down Birnam
Wood and use the boughs and leaves to camouflage the approaching
army. Thus, Birnam Wood indeed comes to Dunsinane Hill. In Act V, scene
VII, Macbeth commits the only murder in the play which the audience
actually sees; He slays the son of Lord Siward. It is significant that the
only murder committed by Macbeth the audience gets to see is the one
that can be justified, as it happens during the battle. This was cleverly
arranged by Shakespeare so that the audience could feel sorry for Macbeth
and attempt to justify his conduct. According to Sir Quiller-Couch in his
work Shakespeare’s Workmanship (1918) the only way the audience can
sympathize with Macbeth is if we suppose that his crimes proceeded from
the deadly influence of hallucinations (Quiller-Couch 1918: 178). The
play ends with Macbeth dying at the hands of Macduff who informs him
that he was not born by woman but ’...was from his mother’s womb /
Untimely ripp’d’ (V, viii, 357). At the very end of the play, Macbeth is killed
by the man born through Cesarean section and his reign comes to an end.
Malcolm reclaims the usurped throne of his father with the promise of the
new age for Scotland.
Macbeth is the shortest tragedy written by Shakespeare. Knights states
that there is nothing superfluous in this play and that the action moves
directly and quickly to the crisis and from the crisis to the full working out
of plot and theme (Knights 1960: 122). And yet, short and direct though
the play is, it proved to be sufficient to show the downfall of the man that
could have been great.
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The Weird Sisters are the characters who open the play. It has already been
stated how their chants and the usage of contradictions such as ‘fair is foul,
foul is fair’ and ‘when the battle’s lost and won’ (I, i, 348) symbolize the
moral confusion that pervade the entire play. Moreover, they inform the
audience that they are about to meet Macbeth, so we get the impression
that they have already mediated some sinister plan. The logical question
that rises is who or what these witches actually are. In the play they are
referred to as ‘the witches’ and ‘the weird sisters’, however, we should note
the meaning of the word ‘weird’ more closely as it used to mean something
quite different in Shakespeare’s day. According to Mabillard in her article
The Weird Sisters (2010) the word ‘weird’ in this play comes from the Anglo-
Saxon ‘wyrd’ meaning ‘fate’ which makes them the foretellers of Macbeth’s
destiny (Mabillard 2010). Furthermore, the word ‘fate’ immediately
raises the association with the Fates, the three mythological women, the
personifications of destiny, who were believed to have supremacy over
human fate, with the power to control or cut the threads of life.
The witches are thus wrapped in a veil of mystery and their physical
appearance does not help us much in interpreting them. The dreary
appearance of the witches, according to Kamčevski, reflects the darkness
of Macbeth’s intentions and their chanting signifies the loss of the moral
compass (Kamčevski 2010: 155). They can be interpreted as temptresses
that awaken Macbeth’s ambition and his hidden desires. Their temptations
continue when they next appear on the stage accompanied by Hecate, the
Queen of Witches, and produce from their cauldron a number of apparitions
that further mislead Macbeth.
Shamas compares the witches with the Great Goddess in her book
“We Three”: The Mythology of Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters (2007). Namely,
they correspond to the third form of the goddess – the hag. As such, they
represent femininity and the powers of the Goddess banished from the
patriarchal societies. It can be noted that the witches appear during the
battle and that they address the two generals, representatives of the
patriarchal world. The witches then represent the feminine aspect which
is marginalized and banished from this hierarchal system and which
abides in the world of nature and the elements. According to Holderness,
Potter and Turner in the book Shakespeare: The Play of History (1987), the
witches are in rebellion against this patriarchal system and all the taboos
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and distinctions that sustain it (Holderness, Potter, Turner 1987: 134). The
temptation of the witches is carried on by another representative of the
feminine in the play, Lady Macbeth.
Lady Macbeth appears for the first time in Act I, Scene V when she
receives a letter from Macbeth informing her of the witches’ prophecy. In
the soliloquy cited above she mentions the kind nature of her husband
which she fears and she decides to convince him to act towards the
fulfillment of the prophecy. The hypothesis that Macbeth and his wife
already had dreams of attaining the throne or even murdering Duncan
is once again made quite possible. Just as Macbeth winced at hearing the
witches name his hidden desire, Lady Macbeth proceeds to making plans
for manipulating her husband into murdering the king the moment she
reads the letter. Lady Macbeth prepares to act, and in order to do so, she
must set aside her conventional, feminine role, and must make use of
masculine characteristics, much like Queen Margaret in Richard III. Thus,
she invokes the spirits of murder as follows:
…Come you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty! Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman’s breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature’s mischief! (I, v, 350)
By this ominous request, Lady Macbeth expects to be ready to act and exert
influence which would not be possible if she kept her role as a female.
However, this ‘unsexing’ of her own will does not bring her the complete
fulfillment of her wishes as we will further show. Moreover, Sandra Gilbert
states in her article ‘Unsex Me Here’: Lady Macbeth’s ‘Hell Broth’ (2016) that
Lady Macbeth was, in a way, dehumanized by her unsexing as she stepped
out of the natural order in which ‘the milk of human kindness’ nurtures
moral feeling. Likewise, through this dehumanization, Lady Macbeth
further aligns herself with the three witches (Gilbert 2016). From the
moment of her unsexing, Lady Macbeth begins her fatal urging of Macbeth
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Till thou applaud the deed’ (III, ii, 353). The last time we see Lady Macbeth
onstage before her mental breakdown is at the feast when Banquo’s ghost
appears. Upon seeing the ghost (and as he is the only one who sees it),
Macbeth is overridden with guilt and he behaves strangely in front of the
other noblemen. Lady Macbeth appears yet again composed and aids him
by saying that his behavior is but a fit he has been having since his youth
and bids the noblemen pay no attention to it. She says apart to Macbeth
yet again: ‘Are you a man?’ (III, iv, 354).
This is the last we see of Lady Macbeth before her illness and eventual
suicide. It seems that she was firm in her intent and strong in will until she
achieved her goal. Having gained success, her downfall followed almost
instantly. This peculiarity of Lady Macbeth was noted by Freud in his work
Some Character-Types Met With in Psycho-Analytical Work (1916) and he
used her as an example of people ruined by success.
Freud notes how there are people who seem to fall ill at the moment
when they reach the fulfillment of a long-harbored wish. At the bottom
of such a paradoxical occurrence lies a deep-rooted feeling of guilt
which stems from their infantile sexuality. That is why, when their long-
yearned-for, forbidden wish comes true, they undergo a complete mental
breakdown. We should now recall Lady Macbeth’s words of how she would
have murdered the sleeping Duncan had he not resembled her own father.
It is possible that this was a hint at her infantile sexual feelings towards
her father that were not resolved and which have tortured her ever since,
culminating with her demise. A sexual wish towards a parent of the opposite
sex is normal for infants in the process of sexual development according
to Freud. At this stage, they already feel that this desire is shameful and
thus must not be expressed, which is why they feel guilt for harboring it.
When the infantile sexuality is not resolved and a person experiences a
fulfillment of another forbidden desire, it evokes the troubling memories
from this early developmental phase which can then cause psychological
damage.
The last time we see Lady Macbeth in this play is in her sleep-walking
scene. She has gone mad and in her sleep she begins to walk the castle and
attempt to wash her hands which she claims are blood-stained. There will
be more talk of this occurrence in the next segment dealing with guilty
conscience in Macbeth. For now, it is important to state that Lady Macbeth
who has previously been observed to say: ‘A little water clears us of this
deed’ (II, ii, 351) now makes a complete shift to the following words: ‘All
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the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this / little hand. Oh, oh, oh!’ (V, i,
356) After this, the audience learns that Lady Macbeth committed suicide
as the culmination of her illness.
The fact that the Macbeths had no children is very significant. Some
commentators claim that the issue of childlessness pervades the entire play
and indeed it plays a very prominent part. Macduff’s wife and children are
slain on the orders of the childless Macbeth. If we recall Lady Macbeth’s
mention of how she has known the love a mother feels for her child we can
only conclude that their child died or that she has had a child or children
by a prior marriage. However, we have no way of finding that out. If we
next consider Lady Macbeth’s taunting on account of Macbeth’s manhood,
it does not seem far-fetched to assume that he may have been either
impotent or sterile. It would also seem reasonable to assume that Lady
Macbeth came to regret her urging of the spirits to unsex her. This is what
Freud says about her illness:
I believe Lady Macbeth’s illness, the transformation of her
callousness into penitence, could be explained directly as a
reaction to her childlessness, by which she is convinced of her
impotence against the decrees of nature, and at the same time
reminded that it is through her own fault her crime has been
robbed of the better part of its fruits. (Freud 1916: 3018)
It is important to state, however, that even though Lady Macbeth, to use
Kamčevski’s words ’tipped the balance to the other side of the scales’
(Kamčevski 2010: 156) in convincing Macbeth to murder the king, she
cannot be taken as fully responsible for this crime. Indeed, as Gordić
Petković states in her foreword to Stefanović’s translation of Shakespeare’s
Macbeth: ‘The female influence, presented through the characters of the
witches and Lady Macbeth, cannot create ambition where there is no
ambition, but it can awaken it and move it to action.’ (Gordić Petković
2003: 18). Macbeth has all along had a wish to attain the throne as well as
the ambition to raise his position in society. The female characters merely
led him on into following his secret, corrupt desires. Given that Macbeth
himself was aware of his own vaulting ambition, during the course of the
play he can be perceived to be suffering from severe pangs of conscience
almost from his very first appearance on the stage.
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Bloom states that ‘Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does
evil, and that he must go on doing even worse’ (Bloom 1998: 517). From
his shudder at the witches’ mention of his kingly prospects we are aware
that Macbeth is not void of ambition, however, at the beginning of the play,
he is still far from being set on committing the crime.
At this point, murder is to him scarcely imaginable, and it can be
concluded that what unfixes his hair and makes his ’seated heart knock at
my (his) ribs’ (I, iii, 350) is precisely his conscience, the one that made him
shudder upon hearing the prophecy. Unfortunately, the thought of murder
is not destined to remain ’fantastical’ (I, iii, 350) to Macbeth for long, since
he swiftly moves to the persuasive influence of his wife.
Once Macbeth arrives with Duncan to his castle, the struggle to
decide whether he should or should not commit regicide begins. Macbeth
is perceived to be constantly changing his mind, and Lady Macbeth taunts
him incessantly as we have shown in the previous segment. Here we
should bear in mind that in Elizabethan England, conscience was viewed
as an instrument of providence. Thus, Macbeth fears damnation for the
mortal sin he is about to commit. Not only is Duncan the Lord’s anointed
ruler, his own cousin and guest, but there are also his undeniable virtues
to consider.
Duncan’s virtues and the goodness he expresses towards Macbeth
are, according to our protagonist, bound to cause his eternal damnation.
Likewise, Macbeth here admits that it is his own ambition that tempts him
and drives him towards the unpardonable crime. After further consideration
he tells his wife: ’We shall proceed no further in this business’ (I, vii, 351).
He appears to be on a moral see-saw, constantly moving between two
options none of which he deems acceptable. In the previous part we have
given an account of the fierce tauntings of Lady Macbeth and her iron will
to convince Macbeth to perform the deed, thus, it is not the least surprising
that she should succeed. Macbeth eventually claims: ’I am settled, and
bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.’ (I, vii, 351). His mind
is made up to follow her advice. Lady Macbeth instructs him to ‘… look like
the innocent flower / But be the serpent under it’ (I, v, 350). He begins to
act adhering to her instructions and the following words echo her sinister
advice: ’False face must hide what the false heart doth know’ (I, vii, 351).
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The first act ends with these words and the next act will see a new, changed
Macbeth – Macbeth the regicide.
Once resolved to murder Duncan, Macbeth experiences his first
hallucination. Namely, he perceives a floating dagger leading him on to
Duncan’s chamber. The dagger appears in the first scene of the act two, and
when the second scene commences the deed has already been performed
and thus not shown in the play. It has already been stated that Duncan’s
murder is not shown on the stage so that the audience can feel pity for
Macbeth. According to Gordić Petković, the act of murder has been omitted,
but not so Macbeth’s struggle before and after it (Gordić Petković 2003:
20). The sense of mental agitation roused by this inner struggle pervades
the entire play. Thus, the feeling of guilt is present through it all and it
provokes the hallucination of the dagger. The following is stated in Bloom’s
Shakespeare through the Ages: Macbeth (2008): ‘Macbeth has no powers
of introspection, so it is ironic that he frames this illusionary weapon
as a “dagger of the mind, a false creation.” It demonstrates once again
that there is a constant undercurrent of self-doubt, that he is tormented
on a deep and unconscious level’ (Bloom 2008: 31). It is indeed evident
that Macbeth is constantly in doubt and insecure concerning his actions
and decisions but he rarely pauses to examine them in detail. This lack
of introspection on Macbeth’s part makes it possible for Lady Macbeth to
sway him from his decision to let go of his bloody intention.
Macbeth appears on the stage after the murder of Duncan badly
shaken. He tells Lady Macbeth how the chamberlains awoke once and
before going back to bed said their prayers. Macbeth wanted to say ‘amen’
with them, but could not, the words remaining stuck in his throat. This
is another example of the divine concept of guilt; being that he killed his
king, he can no longer partake in prayer as the act of murder is a direct
violation of God’s law. Moreover, Macbeth claims that he heard a voice cry
out ‘…’Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep’’ (II, ii, 351). The voice
is yet another hallucination he experiences and the ensuing insomnia an
additional harbinger of his tormenting feeling of guilt. In his agitation,
Macbeth forgot to leave the chamberlains’ daggers next to Duncan’s body
and informs his wife that he cannot return to the scene of the crime. He
cannot stand to behold his hideous crime. Lady Macbeth, irritated by his
shrinking and repenting goes to the chamber to frame the chamberlains.
Macbeth examines his bloody hands with the feeling of guilt culminating.
The symbol of dirty hands appears several times throughout the play.
It signifies the guilt which stains the soul. The need to wash his hands and
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Macbeth has been compared with Doctor Faustus by many critics and
likewise termed an over-reacher. His ambition is, of course, undeniable
and evident throughout the entire play. As we have already shown, there
is an eerie link between Macbeth’s shudder upon hearing the prophecy
of the witches and the readiness with which Lady Macbeth starts making
plans for Duncan’s murder the moment she reads her husband’s letter.
This behavior indicates premeditation; it appears that both of them have
had dreams of attaining the throne and quite possibly of murder. Such an
interpretation sheds a new light on the events of the play. Gordić Petković
claims the following: ’If we accept such an interpretation, we perceive
quite differently the prophecy of the three unusual women: the witches
could then be a projection of Macbeth’s desires, that is, a fantasy or a
hallucination that reflects his hidden urges’ (Gordić Petković 2003: 22).
Once a person loses control of their ambition and lets their desires
and urges overshadow their better judgment, they are in danger of losing
themselves in the process, much like Macbeth. Kamčevski warns us: ‘We
saw the dark side of the ambition and how, unless controlled by the use of
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the moral code and humane means, it can come to control the ambitious
one’ (Kamčevski 2010: 161). Thus, we can say that Macbeth is guilty of
succumbing to his own ambition, aided by his wife’s taunting and the
misleading prophecy. If we consider now the influence of the witches and
their prophecy, one would be justified in remarking that Macbeth should
simply have waited for the third prophecy to come true on its own, without
his intervention and that the prophecy does not excuse him. However, Booth
states: ‘…it is also true that almost any man could be thrown off his moral
balance by such supernatural confirmations. His misunderstanding is thus
obvious and dramatically effective and at the same time quite forgivable’
(Booth 1951: 188-189). Dismissing the influence of the prophecy will not
do, for in a situation such as the one Macbeth experienced, where one is
faced with forces beyond human comprehension, it is not surprising that
one should be misled and eventually succumb to the lowest urges.
While the evil in Macbeth is undeniable, it should be more closely
defined. Like Faustus who signed his doom with his own blood, Macbeth
parts with his better nature through his greed. Knights states that ‘Macbeth
defines a particular kind of evil – the evil that results from a lust for power’
(Knights 1960: 120). It can be learned from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that
ambition, which in itself does not necessarily imply vileness, can easily
reach proportions harmful to one’s humanity. Macbeth is easily swayed
throughout the play as he does not engage in introspection and show a
faulty perception of his own personality which is just as dangerous as his
vaulting ambition.
We should recall Macbeth as we first saw him in the play. He is
described as a great warrior, fearless in battle and loyal to his king; we
should remember Duncan’s gratitude towards Macbeth and the honors he
bestows on him. However, this positive image of heroic Macbeth vanishes
from the audience’s memory the moment he begins to plot Duncan’s
murder. But it is undeniable that this too is a part of Macbeth’s character.
It is hard to imagine such valor and devotion in a man predestined to be
evil. If we set aside what he becomes at the end of the play, we would be
justified in saying that Macbeth was indeed an honorable thane fighting
for the king he pledged to follow. His reputation and past achievements are
very important to him and thus we should recall how Lady Macbeth used
to make all this depend on him murdering Duncan, as if it would all have
been in vain if he spared the king. Booth rightly notes how she shifts the
whole ground to the question of his valor and how she makes it appear that
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his whole reputation is at stake (Booth 1951: 189). With this in mind, we
perceive a new significance of Duncan’s murder. It was done not only for
the sake of the throne, but as a matter of personal reaffirmation. Kott states
that ‘Macbeth has killed not only to become king, but to reassert himself.
He has chosen between Macbeth, who is afraid to kill, and Macbeth, who
has killed.’ (Kott 1986: 73) The fact that he feels such a strong need to
prove himself uncovers his lack of self-knowledge and insecurity.
Macbeth as we see him in the play is a fully-grown man and a thane.
He is in a position to rule and influence other people and as such it is
expected of him to have a sense of direction and set principals and goals.
However, his insecurity and the ease with which he is swayed from his track
by his wife and the witches indicate the contrary. This is the fault George
Held finds with Macbeth in his work The Difference Between Macbeth and
Richard III (2014). He states:
…he lacks that quality which one associates perhaps above all
else with great political leaders: a sense of direction. In mid-
life he still has not worked out for himself the relative values of
things. Not knowing what he wants for himself, he can hardly
know what he wants for others. It is for this reason that he is so
easily imposed on by others, such as his wife and the witches. He
seeks direction from them since he does not find it in himself.
(Held 2014)
That Macbeth is not constituted to be a ruler proves true once again when
he becomes the king. His short reign was marked as a dark period in
Scottish history and he was termed ‘a tyrant’. Yet another possible source of
his insecurity has to do with his childlessness and it will be elaborated later
on in this paper. In order to consider Macbeth fully as a character, we shall
now take into account Macbeth’s personality prior to his encounter with
the witches. Based on his resistances to the pressure of his own ambition
and the manipulation of his wife and his constant feelings of guilt, we can
conclude that he is not thoroughly vile. Had it not been for the prophecy
and subsequently the influence of his wife, we can imagine how he would
have lived out his life as an honorable thane, loyal to the crown. According
to Booth, the victory of evil over potential goodness is a prominent element
of this tragedy. He states:
His crimes are thus built upon our knowledge that he is not a
naturally evil man but a man who has every potentiality for
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goodness. Indeed, this potentiality and its destruction are the chief
ingredients of the tragedy. Macbeth is a man whose progressive
external misfortunes seem to produce, and at the same time seem
to be produced by, the parallel progression from great goodness
to great wickedness. (Booth 1951: 184)
We can agree with Booth that Macbeth indeed was not a ‘naturally evil
man’ but that he nonetheless committed certain fatal errors that caused his
devastating corruption.
One of his errors undoubtedly is the fact that he succumbed to his
worst impulses. This is directly linked to his faulty self-awareness and a
certain gullibility exemplified in his swift surrender to his wife’s will. Booth
sees Macbeth’s errors as follows:
His tragic error, then, is at least three-fold: he does not understand
the two forces working upon him from outside; he does not
understand the difference between ‘bloody execution’ in civilian
life and in military life; and he does not understand his own
character – he does not know what will be the effects of the act
on his own future happiness. (Booth 1951: 189)
The effects on his psyche are devastating and lead to his ultimate demise.
However, such insecurity, self-doubt and moral confusion somehow do not
fit the character of Macbeth, the great and courageous thane from the
opening of the play. It seems as if we are missing a crucial piece of the
puzzle in viewing his disposition. The solution has been offered by many
critics (Bloom and Hughes among others) who found the answer to the
central problem of the play in the childlessness of the Macbeths.
It is evident that the Macbeths have no children, unlike Duncan,
Banquo and Macduff. At the very beginning of the play, what first incites
Macbeth’s anger towards Duncan is him naming his son Malcolm the Prince
of Cumberland. Macbeth states: ‘The Prince of Cumberland! That is a step
/ On which I must fall down, or else o’erleap, / For in my way it lies.’ (I, iv,
350) Though it does appear logical that if he is to be the new king, Duncan’s
heir is an obvious obstacle, there is something more sinister in his cry ‘The
Prince of Cumberland!’ (I, iv, 350). Macbeth is likewise a nobleman of
Scotland, and yet he does not have an heir. The significance of a male heir
for rulers is a known fact and throughout history many kings and their
queens anxiously awaited the birth of a son. Usually, the blame for the lack
of male heirs or childlessness was cast upon women. However, in the case
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Conclusion
In his works, Shakespeare brilliantly presents human nature and the key
problems we still face to this day. Though the modern world as we know it
differs greatly from the time in which Shakespeare wrote his plays, human
nature in essence has not changed. That is why in reading Shakespeare we
learn about ourselves and the world around us. Sever moral corruption
represents an acute problem nowadays, so it is important to understand the
true origin of moral degradation and endeavor to prevent it. The atrocities
of the two World Wars, the horror of the Holocaust and the ever-present
threat of nuclear destruction are indicators of the ever-present possibility of
evil and violence, and thus the need to know the origin of moral corruption
and how to prevent it is still a burning problem for the human kind.
The example of Macbeth shows that generalizations and demonization
of individuals do not solve the problem. To understand evil as being innate
is a deception which serves the function of concealing its true origin. It is
important to realize that moral corruption mostly stems from the society
and its fixed norms. Macbeth reminds us that we are all human and as
such are subjects to flaws and vice. Rather than bring out the worst in each
other, we should endeavor to enhance and encourage one another’s virtues
and potentiality for goodness.
Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis tells volumes about the nature of
our mental development and the significance of love and understanding
for the development of healthy individuals. Thus, we should note the
importance of showing love and affection to the people around us, for
the power to corrupt and induce evil lies in our hands and so does the
responsibility for its prevention. Rather than simply note the corruption
in others and ponder its origin and the question of whether it could have
been prevented, we should learn from the great works in literature and
ultimately be humane.
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References
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Milena Kaličanin and Nina Miladinović: Moral Corruption in Shakespeare’s Macbeth
Милена Каличанин
Нина Миладиновић
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Bojana Gledić*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
Aside from being Graham Swift’s most famous piece of writing and probably one
of the most praised British novels of the 1980s, Waterland is considered by many
critics to be the embodiment of the postmodernist novel. Linda Hutcheon used it
as an example to illustrate what she defined as “historical metafiction” and when
one thinks of Waterland it is usually in connection with history and the role it plays
in the life of ordinary people. It is interesting how, at first glance, the particular
kind of history Graham Swift is addressing in this novel seems to escape both
reader and critic. On further investigation, however, what does not escape is the
underlying presence of Empire in the novel, which is the reason why this paper
examines its versatile role in Tom Crick’s version of history.
*
E-mail address: bojana.gledic@fil.bg.ac.rs; bojanadgledic@gmail.com
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1984: 143) With this character, Swift presented Crick with an opponent in
the battle on the meaning of history, but not in the form of Crick’s superiors,
who want to abolish the school subject of history, but as part of a new
generation, the one that will inherit the world from the likes of Crick and
his ancestors. Price is the founding president of “The Holocaust Club – the
Anti-Armageddon League” and Crick holds that Price’s pessimistic view of
the future is nothing new, it is the feeling that Saxon hermits felt, that the
people who built the pyramids felt, that Crick’s father and grandfather felt,
that Mary felt: “It’s the old, old feeling, that everything might amount to
nothing.” (Swift 1984: 233) Regardless of this fact, Crick does not seem
to believe that it was his generation’s responsibility to save the next one.
(Swift 1984: 223) He understands Price’s concerns, but holds his ground
when matters of history are concerned, because “we move in circles” (Swift
1984: 118), not knowing where salvation lies, and no one can really know
which way to turn. Crick is painfully aware of the fact that history causes
us to advance and retreat, but one should not let go of it all the same.
Furthermore, although he grew up in a place where “nothing is hidden
from God” (Swift 1984: 248) with the coming of adulthood he abandoned
the idea of a higher might and guiding force (Swift 1984: 203-204; 232)
so there is nothing else to comfort him but his own never-ending curiosity
and inquisitiveness.
What Waterland undoubtedly seems to illustrate is that personal stories
contribute to our perception of history as much as an official account does.
This would again draw our attention to the voices unheard and it could
be argued that Tom Crick has articulated this new approach to history in
the postmodern text. (Jovanović 2012: 194-195) In the words of Linda
Hutcheon: “Tom Crick is in some ways an allegorical representation of
the postmodern historian who might well have read, not just Colingwood,
with his view of the historian as storyteller and detective, but also Hayden
White, Dominick La Capra, Raymond Williams, Michel Foucault, and Jean-
François Lyotard.” (1991: 56) Tom appears to have been infected with all
the contemporary ailments of pessimism: “And there’s no saying what heady
potions we won’t concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won’t imbibe
in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.” (Swift
1984: 35) Furthermore, when compared to history, which has proven to be
a constant companion, “… the Here and Now, which brings both joy and
terror, comes but rarely – does not come even when we call it. That’s the
way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue,
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– only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” (Cowley 1965:
141) Tom Crick is achingly aware of this fact, and throughout the novel
he mentions it several times, first in connection with his mother’s death:
“And though, indeed, it only happened once, it’s gone on happening, the
way unique and momentous things do, for ever and ever, as long as there’s
a memory for them to happen in … ” (Swift 1984: 237-238) and “Yet
it is as it was, was as it is. Iswas. It’s the past! What stops but remains.”
(Swift 1984: 273), and then in the context of losing what he believes is
his unborn child: “But then we’ve already stepped into a different world.
The one where things come to a stop; the one where the past will go
on happening… … We’ll be here for ever.” (Swift 1984: 263) In order to
cope with the passing of time, people are forced to compartmentalize the
feelings and experiences from their personal pasts. It could be that the
selective view of collective or national history stems from this necessity, in
addition to it being intentional at times.
In the context of Graham Swift’s novels, the storylines of which heavily
rely on the past and its role in people’s lives, it is of vital importance to take
into account what kind of history paved the way for any kind of activity
that takes place in them. The lives of characters whose ancestors lived in
the disputably glorious time of the British Empire cannot be viewed in the
same light as we would view, for example, characters who belong to nations
that used to be colonized or oppressed in any other way. Neither can it be
said that Swift is an active critic of imperial policy, as the main focus of his
novels is not open criticism of such a societal structure and idea of progress,
but it is in the subtlety of his descriptions where one can find, if one looks
carefully enough, mild but visible criticism of all that Great Britain used
to stand for in the course of the centuries preceding the time frame of his
novels. According to Hutcheon, Waterland is “a didactic fictive lesson or
a meditation on history – or both. No historical characters populate this
book, but it is a profoundly historical work none the less, in both form
and content.” (1991: 54) The “real” history is constantly interlaced with
Tom’s and other characters’ personal stories: “Imperial myths and yarns,
ghost stories, narratives of progress, and delusions can all be contrasted
with material facts and counter narratives of failure. The grand narrative
of British glory and progress ends in the failures of the 1940s. … But in all
this, it should be noted that these illusions and these yarns have effects.
They shape history, events, and actions just as reality does.” (Malcolm
2003: 93) Taking into account all the above said, imperialism will play
a pivotal role in reconstructing the history of this novel and its characters.
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artists – they are always influenced by the moment in time in which they
are creating. As Edward Said put it: “I do not believe that authors are
mechanically determined by ideology, class, or economic history, but
authors are, I also believe, very much in the history of their societies,
shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different
measure.” (1994: xxiv) The end of Empire in the wake of which Graham
Swift was born has to have had a deep impact on his formative years, as
a person and as a novelist. Great writers always seem to be more deeply
aware of their surroundings than everyone else, so the overall sense of
disillusionment probably did not escape him. Yet, however talented, every
artist is still human, and people “cannot avoid representation”. (Hutcheon
1991: 54) What could be categorized as a drawback in Swift’s overall work
– the absence of a more “realistic” view of contemporary British society
– could in fact be the representation of a certain segment of British society
the world of which looks exactly as it is described. Graham Swift himself
has said that “It’s true that in a fundamental sense all fiction writing is
autobiographical, since where else does it come from but from within the
author?” (2009: 1) and when discussing one of Swift’s other novels, Last
Orders, one critic noticed that the world as presented in Swift’s fiction is
the world his narrators would see. (Malcolm 2003: 19) Waterland falls
under this category in its failure to openly address the pressing issues of
the British colonial era and its legacy.
Great Britain, as a country and a nation, has changed a lot during this
past century. The disappearance of the spirit of imperialism, along with
other, minor factors, was the driving force behind this change. After the
Second World War and the end of Empire, it was necessary to re-awaken
a renewed sense of the nation. As Stuart Hall put it, “National cultures
construct identities by producing meanings about “the nation” with which
we can identify; these are contained in the stories which are told about it,
memories which connect its present with its past, and images which are
constructed of it.”. (Hall 2000: 613) The construction of English identity
is visible in the stories of Tom Crick, and the story of some of his ancestors
and their fellow countrymen in a way tell the story of England (or Britain)
itself. Nevertheless, and in spite of the abundance of stories that Waterland
presents, it is in the untold stories of this novel that we look for the attitude
toward Britain’s questionable past. The silence in Waterland has been
recognized as one of the key elements of the novel’s impact on the reader
and the value of the novel as a whole (Bernard 1991: 108), the silence can
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90). According to the same author, Dick also “personifies the instinct to
flow backwards”. (2005: 90) We would agree to a certain extent with both
statements from the former sentence, but not the latter one. Dick is indeed
a hybrid, and trapped between yesterday and tomorrow, but not for the
reasons stated in this study; we believe that he is a symbolic product of
both worlds, the world of Empire and that of “regular folk” and that his
way of communicating is unintelligible for many because he is the keeper
of secrets and the key to a different world. In our opinion he is not flowing
forwards because he is a constant reminder that the idea of Empire will
never die. This could further be illustrated by John Schad’s equating Dick
with “posthistorical ‘Nostalgia’” which is “‘Too Big’ for the hole or void that
is the novel’s postmodern world”. (1992: 912)
Dick is a silent presence for most – Tom, the little man, the regular
person, confronts him and reminds him what he is a product of. The little
people may not always win, but sometimes they see reality in a different
way. In this sense, Tom would be one of those people who could have
predicted the inevitable end of Empire and colonial policies. Dick could
also be the face of Empire because, even though he does not talk, he has
a hidden message, which is obvious because he speaks to his motorcycle.
This could be just a coincidence, were it not for the fact that when Dick
disappears at the end of the novel it is this very same motorcycle that
remains behind like a silent, haunting presence the wheels of which will
keep on turning, even though someone else will be riding it. Dick, though
interpreted by the regular folk as someone not quite normal, could in fact
be the indecipherable policies and stands which were the product of a few
men which then took root in the masses. Even though Dick is described as
mentally challenged, his brother is forbidden to help him, which would be
very strange were it not for the fact that Dick is practically deified through
this act (in addition to repeatedly being referred to as “the saviour of
the world”, which equates him with God or Jesus Christ). His real name,
Richard (the middle name of his biological father), perhaps resonates
as that of Richard the Lionheart or other great English kings, while his
nickname, even though usually interpreted as pertaining to his sexuality,
could perhaps be indicative of all the qualities a phallic symbol carries with
it – manhood, power, courage, strength. The past, conveniently locked in a
chest, belongs to Dick and Dick is the only one who has a key. At the end of
the novel, Dick disappears, and one cannot be certain what has happened
to him. Perhaps one might conclude that, as a face of Empire, Dick could
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venture beyond the grotesque and see in Sarah, just as we do in Dick, one
of the many faces of Empire.
Ernest Atkinson, born in the floods of 1874, will be the complete
opposite of his grand ancestors, whom people generally did not approve
of. (Swift 1984: 140-141) Ernest shied away from politics and after the
brewery burnt down on Coronation Day in 1911 Ernest slowly withdrew
from public life, leaving Gildsey altogether in 1914. This, coincidentally,
corresponds with the beginning of the First World War which Ernest was
strongly opposed to. During the war, Ernest makes only one, fateful, public
appearance with his daughter during a military parade in the spring of
1915. The parade could not be carried out because of the commotion
his daughter Helen’s beauty caused. The story turns incestuous from this
point – the father falls in love with his daughter and begets a son who
he believes will be “the Saviour of the World”. (Swift 1984: 197) Pamela
Cooper holds that: “In Ernest’s regressive passion for Helen the trajectory
of imperialism is reversed; its expansive energies are redirected towards
an interior space of desire, neither subjective nor objective, but abject:
the body of the daughter. … this redirection aborts the narrative of self-
consistent individuation which shapes the plot of imperialism.” (1996: 380-
381) But what if Ernest Atkinson’s genuine love for Britain is embodied in
his love for Helen? What if Helen is all the forgotten beauty of a once great
country, and imperialism in its purest form is what he is striving towards?
What if he was hoping that by begetting a son, he would save what once
was sacred and unmarred? After all, Ernest had a special relationship with
his heritage, he could drink the Atkinsons’ famed beer and not get drunk.
(Swift 1984: 186) He initially appeared to be the most sober and reasonable
one in all his family. However, the original idea of Empire appears to have
turned in on itself in the figure of Ernest Atkinson and he himself seems to
have foreseen its end, killing himself and leaving his son a farewell letter
in which it is evident that he has his misgivings about beauty and Empire
(in it he tells Dick that he should not have children but that this is of no
importance because he will save the world (Swift 1984: 279-280)).
Almost like a commodity which belongs to everyone, Helen will be
passed on from the Atkinsons to the Cricks, moving from one class to
another, from a rich house to a poor one, keeping her kindness and her
poise in the process. She will bring up her sons by telling them beautiful
stories and she will maintain her special relationship with her firstborn.
Henry Crick’s very existence seems to depend on this beautiful woman
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who once again, like a powerful deity, rules the household like a silent
force to be reckoned with. Like the Empire, Helen was beautiful but she
perished and following her death her husband will cut ties with national
identity – he will claim not to remember anything about the war that he
took part in. For his part, Henry produces a son who questions History
while Helen will be the last to speak to her special son, giving him the
key to his (grand)father’s chest and with it the key to the past. This chest,
containing some of history’s well-kept secrets, will disappear in another
episode of epic flooding which will take place in 1947 and also claim the
life of Henry Crick. The lock keeper’s cottage will also disappear and the
dam which was a guard against the intrusion of history will become a thing
of the past.
The third important female character in the book, and perhaps the
most memorable one, is Mary Metcalf, Tom Crick’s childhood neighbour
and friend whom he subsequently marries and takes to London to be his
life companion. Mary and the little gang of friends, who had fun in their
little corner of the world while a war was raging in other parts of Great
Britain and Europe, are of vital importance to the story’s core. Freddie
Parr, Tom’s neighbour, could be considered an ordinary boy, Dick, Tom’s
brother, was different and special in every way, while Tom was somewhere
in between, neither here nor there, neither plain nor special. As one of the
little people, Freddie played no role in the workings of Empire, and the
baby Mary carried was most probably not his. He lost his life, presumably
at the hands of Dick, but this could perhaps have been an imaginary
scenario Tom had come up with due to the fear and jealousy he felt with
regards to his older brother. He was both afraid of him and unable to
understand him, so the story of Dick being a murderer could have been
nothing but a fabrication. Additionally, since we never really find out who
the father of Mary’s unborn baby was, Mary’s story about her telling Dick
that Freddie was the father of her baby could also have been a lie. But, if
that scenario did indeed happen, perhaps the Empire killed the little man.
On the other hand, even though Tom is not as special as Dick, and has no
secret undertakings, he still does play his role in the realm of Empire by
taking up the space of the novel and of the main character in the story,
which becomes His-story. He and Mary both grow up without a mother,
which could be taken to mean both their literal, biological mother, and
their motherland which experienced the beginnings of its end as Tom and
Mary reached their formative years. Mary’s baby, whose father we cannot
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be certain of, could be taken to mean the future of Great Britain as a great
imperial force. While Tom and Mary are walking towards the secluded
hut, planes are flying to Germany on their newest bombing spree. Mary’s
baby meets its end in Martha Clay’s hut, adorned by a yellowed newspaper
clipping with a photograph of Winston Churchill. And even though Tom is
instructed to stay outside, he stumbles into the cottage mid-procedure and
looks in the pail at the remains of the dead foetus, realizing that is what
the future looks like. Mary’s very name lends her the echo of sacredness,
presents her as the Holy Mother of God. She attends school in a convent,
she is educated by nuns, when she attempts to kidnap a baby in later life
Tom describes her as resembling the Holy Mother. She too is mystified,
when she disappears after the abortion of her baby, nobody knows how
she spent her time, not even her husband. There is a chance that she was
visited by Sarah Atkinson, which would imply a secret bond between the
women in Waterland (Mary will also be the one to nurse Tom’s father after
the death of his wife Helen). Women are often presented as mysterious
in Swift’s fiction, but in this novel perhaps even more so. In the course of
her lifetime, Mary loses not one, but two babies, one biological and one
imaginary, which was never hers to begin with. If we follow Mary’s life
story, with the thirty-six years in between the two incidents, it becomes
obvious that there will be no Second Coming. All her attempts to bear a
child are futile, and if she can be viewed as a face of Empire her role would
be to present its barrenness, she cannot give her husband (a man who
questions history) what he needs and she is empty.
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References
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Бојана Гледић
Сажетак
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Abstract
The main aim of the current research is to demonstrate how the communist regime
established in the Soviet Union after the October revolution and characterized by a
centralized state control over all social discourses, including literature, functioned
in practice. The paper focuses on reviews, prefaces and articles that accompanied
Soviet translations of Robert Burns, one of the most famous and beloved foreign
poets in the Soviet Union, their impact on readers and relevance for supporting
the official ideology. Due to the variety of materials on Burns published by the
Soviet press, the focus of the article is on those works that appeared in the
1930s-1950s when the official image of Burns was initially promoted. Similarity
among paratextual devices used by the authorities in the 1930-50s to promote an
ideologically favourable image of Burns included above all adaptations and even
fabrications of the poet’s biography and ideologically favourable interpretations
of Burns’s poems. The role of manipulative paratextual devices is significant,
considering that the target readers access to the world of foreign culture was
limited on the whole to literary translations.
*
E-mail address: natalia.vid@siol.net
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I. Introduction
The totalitarian regime established in the Soviet Union shortly after the
October Revolution of 1917 was characterized by centralized state control
with power over all aspects of private and public life, including the economy,
politics and the arts. From the first day of their rule, the Bolsheviks saw the
free word as a moral threat to their power. New ideological propaganda
dictated harsh restraints on literary production, aiming to purge Soviet
society of all expressions regarded as destructive to the new order. All
literature published in the USSR had to meet specific state-derived
standards, as the political situation created a highly controlled atmosphere
with the edicts of socialist realism. Censorship became a primary
mechanism of control; henceforth, literature and translations lost some of
their public identification with civil society and gained a formal place in
the official culture of the Soviet era. Following the new propagandistic role
of literature, Soviet writers were expected to advocate the six main virtues
of the official communist ideology: collectivism, discipline, love of work,
patriotism, proletarian internationalism and atheism (O’Dell, 1978: 16-18).
Soviet censorship severely suppressed any criticism of the current regime
which proved to be the longest lasting and the most comprehensive system
of state censorship in the twentieth century.
Bearing in mind the significance of literature for the promotion of
socialist values, the Soviet authorities considered literary translations as
ideological tools, inevitably influenced by an institution of censorship
and strict centralization. According to Goriaeva, “political censorship had
one more, perfect and unmistakable, method, i.e. ideologically corrected
translation /…/ which enabled a falsified projection of a development
of literature always interpreted according to Marxian-Lenian ideology.”
(Goriaeva 2009: 363) Similarly, Witt claims that,
To the field of translation studies the Soviet case generally
provides rich material for the discussion of topical matters linked
to issues of ‘translation and power,’ ‘translation and ideology,’
‘translation and empire,’ etc. In particular, Soviet practices
developed within the field of indirect translation, producing such
paradoxical entities as “original interlinear trots” and “secondary
originals,” supplies new perspectives on such key concepts as
source language, target language, authenticity, and translational
agency. (Witt 2001: 168)
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Russia’s long history of censorship has been well documented in numerous publications
both by Russian and Western experts. However, the actual records of the vast number
of books and newspapers that were subjected to strict censorship in Imperial Russia and
the USSR are still only accessible in special collections, the Russian language manual
catalogue card archive and printed lists deposited in the National Library of Russia in St.
Petersburg (pre-revolution period) and the Russian State Library in Moscow (the USSR
period).
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Even after this time, it was not uncommon for Soviet sources to use the term gosizdat to
describe the Russian Republic’s main publishing operation, regardless of its official name
at the time.
Publications of the Communist Party, Gosizdat, the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee, and scholarly writings of the Academy of Science were exempt from
censorship.
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editors, above it the directives of the police and the Party, which had to be
carried out rigorously (Blyum 2003: 7-8). The product of this system was
supposed to be a “pure”, ideologically transparent text that conformed in
every respect to the Party’s ideological aims and demands. Above Glavlit
stood the figure of the Party General Secretary, the head of the Soviet
Union, who presented the final level and whose verdict was beyond further
discussion (Blyum 2003: 8). Renamed several times, Glavlit functioned
until the 1990s.
In such an environment, “reading between the lines” and searching
for hidden meaning became crucial for the writing and reading process.
In order to justify their existence and to demonstrate their cautiousness
to prevent any suspicious text from being published, editors scrupulously
examined every line. According to Vladimir Solodin, chief Soviet censor,
editors’ demands of any kind (additions, comments, erasure) had to be
strictly followed. In his own words, he was trusted with tremendous power
over the fate of books and the fate of authors, and the writers feared him
(Stelmakh 2001: 583). In the case of political or economic publications,
it was easier to separate a harmful publication from a “good” one, taking
into account only ideological reasons. In the case of fiction, it was more
difficult for censors to judge.
The authorities also strictly centralized, censored and controlled the
publication and distribution of translations of foreign literature, as a part
of the publishing system. Translations of foreign materials had to pass a
special censorship control at the Foreign Literature Committee (Committee
for the purchase and distribution of foreign literature in the Soviet Union)
subordinated to Glavlit and were not permitted either in small local
libraries or even in private book collections. The Ministry of Culture had
the right to coordinate publication of translations by the Publishing House
of Foreign Literature (Izdatelstvo inostrannoi literatury), set up in 1946 to
publish Russian translations of foreign literature and also books on social
and scientific topics. The publishing house was linked to the All-Union
State Library of Foreign Literature, founded in 1948. It selected material
from the library and purchased a large number of foreign books and
journals from abroad, which were always censored by Glavlit (Gorokhoff
1959: 156-157).
There were one or two notable exceptions such as the Library of Foreign Languages in
Moscow.
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It should be noted that in the Soviet ideological environment, the term “usefulness” far
exceeded any poetic qualities.
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from the nineteenth century could no longer fulfil the new aesthetic
function of literature as a vehicle for ideological propaganda. Translations
of Burns’s poetry made in the Soviet Union would have to follow the main
ideological doctrines and include such features as a positive revolutionary
hero, heroic acts, optimism, references to communist slogans, omissions
of religious and erotic connotations and so forth. Following the official
ideological demands and striving to satisfy vigorous censors, Burns’s only
official Soviet translator, Samuil Marshak, significantly intervened with
the originals by deliberate omission, substitution and modification.10
Once Marshak began translating Burns’s poetry, the process of the
poet’s canonization started with a number of reviews and articles that
accompanied Marshak’s translations. Brian Kassof notes, in relation
to the early editions of the Bolshaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Great
Soviet Encyclopedia) that “the Bolsheviks were intense readers of signs
of all types, including paratextual cues,” (Kassof 2009: 59) and the use
of paratexts in the Stalin and post-Stalin era confirmed this statement.
According to Safiullina, “canonization means a set of obligatory norms
for creativity” (2012: 559) and canonization of selected foreign writers in
the 1930s formed an important part of official policy regarding translated
literature. In contrast to the canonizing process in Western art, a canon
in the Soviet Union was based on the official policy of Social Realism and
had strongly normative functions (Ibid., 559). In the canonizing process,
writers’ biographies were often adapted and used as a means of ideological
propaganda. Safiullina also states that canonization was not a result of
“any debate” but the leading role in the canonization process of the 1930s-
1940s belonged to Stalin, who personally decided which Western authors
could be translated and mediated in the Soviet Union (Ibid., 559).
In the nineteenth century, most of Burns’s love and nature lyrics were translated, but
his satires, democratic lyrics, which contained appeals to the sentiments of freedom and
citizenship, patriotic songs and ironic epigrams remained unknown to Soviet readers.
However, the undeniable literary quality of Marshak’s translations raises the
question of the potential to combine literary value with purely ideological
formations.
10
Ideological changes made by Marshak are thoroughly analyzed in Kaloh Vid’s researches
Ideological translations of Robert Burns’ poetry in Russia and in the Soviet Union (Maribor:
Zora, 2011) and “The reception of Robert Burns in Russia” In The reception of Robert
Burns in Europe, ed. Murray Pittock. (Bloomsbury: London, New Delhi, New York,
Sidney, 2014).
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to interpret not only Burns’s poetry but also his biography according to
ideologically acceptable standards, which meant, above all, to intensify his
“proletarian” background.
The importance of the term “proletarian” should be clarified here. In
1934, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers placed on record that
the future belonged to the international revolutionary literature, for it was
linked up with the struggle of the working class for the liberation of all
mankind.11 Thus, in the Soviet Union, the proletarian (almost the synonym
of lower class) family origin was considered not merely “trustworthy” but
absolutely necessary for acquiring a job, getting permission to travel abroad
and even simply avoiding imprisonment. In a similar manner, most foreign
writers translated in the Soviet Union either belonged to the working class,
or at least sympathized with it (e.g. London, Dreiser, Dickens, etc.).
Following this pattern, in a pathetic description of Burns’s early life,
Gutner intensified the poet’s origins. Thus, Burns’s father “the poorest of
Scottish farmers” was fighting “the ghost of poverty his entire life” and
finally died “broken in this unequal fight.”(Gutner 1938: 5) As Burns
needed to help his father, Gutner stated that, “the young boy had to work
as hard as slaves on ships” (Ibid., 5), using an overly expressive vocabulary
to stress the conditions of Burns’s early years and to demonstrate how
“proletarian” the poet’s family was.
Apart from this, Burns’s poetry was once again pronounced “useful”
(Ibid., 5) for a new socialist culture, while the poetic qualities of his work
were ignored. The critic also reminded Soviet readers that the main reasons
Burns could not assert himself successfully as a poet in England were his
sympathies for the French Revolution, or as Gutner states “revolutionary
passion and aggressive humanist pathos,” (Ibid., 7) which demonstrated
Burns’s open protest against the English aristocrats.
To stress Burns’s connection with the poor and with revolutionary
circles, Gutner permitted himself a few invented “facts” in his biography.
For example, he asserted that Burns first gave his poems with revolutionary
contexts to his countrymen, who were impressed and dismayed by his
brevity. In fact, no dates exist that confirm that Burns really did give his
poems to his countrymen. Moreover, ignoring the fact that Burns’s first
11
“Resolution on the Report of Maxim Gorky, the co-Reports of S. Y. Marshak and the
Report on the Literature of the National Republics. (Adopted at the Morning Session
on August 23, 1934),” Marxists Internet Archive 2004, accessed June 15, 2014.
http://www.marxists.org/subject/art/lit_crit/sovietwritercongress/resolutions.htm
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the founders of the communist ideology, Karl Marx, who “enjoyed reading
Burns’s poetry to his daughters.” (Ibid., 10)
Clearly, Gutner presented Burns as ideologically correct and made an
extensive and liberal use of ideologemes and lexical items that contained
reference to ideology or cultural norms in order to insert his evaluation of
Burns as a man and a poet.
Hence, Burns’s new role in Soviet translated literature required
further induction and transformations. In 1939, the first translations of
Burns by Samuil Marshak were published in Molodaya gvardiya (a literary
newspaper), accompanied by Alexander Anikst’s article “Robert Burns”.
Similarly to Gutner’s, this paratext made heavy use of ideologically marked
statements to describe Burns’s life, implicitly framing it in Soviet terms
and imposing the “correct” interpretation. In the introduction, Anikst once
again stressed Burns’s origins. The fact that Burns was a poor farmer’s
son was presented as one of the key factors in the development of the
poet’s “democratic spirit.”(Anikst 1939: 107) Further establishing the role
of Burns as a poet of revolution, Anikst emphasized his sympathy with
the French revolution. It is true that Burns admired the courage of French
revolutionists in the poem “The Tree of Liberty”, however, the statement
that his entire poetical heritage was denoted by the French revolution is a
huge exaggeration. The critic also mentioned the Scottish circle of those
who approved and supported French revolutionaries, supposedly led by
Burns (again a completely fabricated claim). It is not surprising that in
what follows, Burns was called “a poet of revolutionary democracy who
fought for lower classes.” (Ibid., 107)
Placing Burns among the most progressive strugglers for democratic
rights, Anikst emphasized his importance in the development of romantic
English literature – which is partly true. However, his statement that Burns
should be considered one of a few truly progressive romantic English poets
seems exaggerated. The term “progressive Romantic poet” (Ibid., 108) is
also problematic, as Anikst did not bother to explain what he actually
meant by this.
As Western authors translated in the Soviet Union were often presented
as victims of a capitalist system, shifting the focus of the analysis from
Burns’s poetic achievements to his social status, Anikst presented Burns as
a victim of the upper classes. In an attempt to add ideological cohesion to
this part of Burns’s biography, Anikst stated that the main reasons for the
poet’s alcohol problems were poverty and the suffering of the poor, which
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forced him to start drinking. As Burns saw himself as helpless and unable to
change anything or to improve the life of the lower classes, the “ugly reality
of bourgeoisie society destroyed the life of a genius, and was responsible
for his early death.” (Ibid., 108) Grief and society’s cruelty were the main
reasons for the poet’s early death, but as a canonized poet he could not be
presented as a complete pessimist and sufferer, Anikst stressed the cheerful
nature that helped Burns to cope with all obstacles with a smile on his face.
The last “strike” was the statement that Burns was successfully married
(only once), adored his wife, and could be praised for his exemplary family
life. (Ibid., 108) For obvious reasons, Anikst forgot to mention the fact that
Burns married Jean Armour when they already had several illegitimate
children and had numerous mistresses before marriage.
The canonization of Burns was further fostered by constant repetition
and consolidation of the same pattern. When the first collection of Marshak’s
translations was published in 1947, it was accompanied by a preface by
M. Morozov. While continuing the pattern already established by Anikst
and Gutner, Morozov introduced a new ideologeme, the image of enemies,
“anti-revolutionists”, who “continue to hate Burns and do everything they
can to diminish his importance.” (Morozov 1947: iii-viii) It is not surprising
that throughout Soviet history one of the ideological means of unifying the
people was the creation of the image of the enemy who was presumably
responsible for all misfortunes. Implying a familiar ideologeme, Morozov
presented Burns as a victim “haunted by his enemies who spread lies about
his life.” (Ibid., iv) Presumably, those fabricated claims about Burns were
later used by Scottish anti-revolutionary movements to slander the image
of Burns as a progressive revolutionary poet. Thus by drawing upon a
recognizable metaphor of the enemy, Morozov established the Soviet Union
as the only country that not only understood and appreciated Burns but
was also responsible for protecting his good name against the “enemies”.
Morozov’s preface also differs from the others in structure. Instead
of emphasizing Burns’ origins and the poor life conditions of his family,
Morozov stated that many Scots were forced to leave Scotland because of
impossible life conditions in the country with no freedom and democracy
(Ibid., iii). Clichés focused on the poor treatment of workers and economic
problems in Western countries were often to be found in the Soviet
discourse and served to confirm Soviet criticism of the West in contrast to
the prosperity of the proletarian class in the Soviet Union. In Morozov’s
perception, many of those who left Scotland carried the image of Burns
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Conclusion
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References
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Сажетак
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UDC
doi
Branislava Miladinov*
University of Belgrade
Faculty of Philology
Belgrade, Serbia
Abstract
Considering the chosen ballad paradigmatic of Cave’s verse narration, this paper
presents a close reading of the song’s lyrics that results in an analysis of narrative
techniques and strategies concerning mainly the aspects of voice and perspective.
Three types of narration can be recognized as systematically employed in the poem,
building generically multilayered text, and pointing toward various traditions in
dialog – from popular folk ballad, via Milton, Blake, Coleridge and Poe, to film
and news narration.
Keywords: ballad, murder ballad, Nick Cave, narrative analysis, narrator, focalization
1. Introduction
Murder Ballads, a conceptual album by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from
1996, their ninth in a row, is notorious of its death count – the highest in
Cave’s oeuvre, already abundant in death and dead. Let the numbers talk:
some 65 men, women, teenagers and children, as well as one dog – they
all die in many different ways. Statistically processed, it appears that every
*
E-mail address: brrrana@gmail.com
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minute of music leads to one death (Groom 2013: 81), which brings us to
6.5 persons perishing per song, or 7.2 persons per murder ballad (the last
song on the album, Dylan’s “Death is Not the End”, fortunately is not a
murder ballad). With regard to the brutality of the sung deaths, having in
mind the impasse of the ballad narrator who enhances the roughness of the
utterance, and that the verbalized scenes provoke the visual imagination
of the listener, the album could easily be “X” rated due to the pornography
of death, one cannot resist inquiry into why and how this particular album
launched its author into the orbits of MTV fame and commercial success.
Browsing various articles and comments concerning this question we arrive
at a number of answers and explicative hypotheses that can be sorted
out into several groups. One of the hypotheses is profoundly cynical: the
duet with at-the-time enormously popular Kylie Minogue was relentlessly
played over all imaginable media, giving it the classical status of a hit; the
supposition goes that hordes of listeners rushed to buy a vinyl or a CD, on
the assumption that the song was representative and expecting the whole
album to be of a similar ilk. This assumption is founded in the superficiality
and lack of musical expertise of the average commercial-pop consumer;
Cave himself, commenting on his albums one by one for the Australian
edition of Rolling Stone, suspected that those who purchased the CD for
Kylie would cry upon listening to it: “What the fuck have I bought this
for?” (Dwyer 1998). In another type of explanation the audience seems
to be treated with somewhat more respect, but not overestimated: here
commentary is based on the coupling of the source – traditional folk murder
ballads, orally transmitted as a mix of history and journalistic report, and
printed broadside and broadsheet murder ballads, analogous to the crime
pages in penny papers – and the appetite for specific narratives, fed by all
those media forms acquiring an audience by elaborate and embellished
naturalistic displays of violent death in its corporeal appearance and
visceral effect. This link, pointing towards the inherent perverse attraction
to depictions of death, seems primal as well as contemporary in its form
of spectacle, a timeless danse macabre or memento mori intended for the
Displayed statistics – nonetheless easily calculable – can be found on Wikipedia’s page
concerning the album.
Cave’s letter of rejection of the MTV award for the “best male artist”, stating that he does
not comply with putting his art in the competitive context – “My Muse is not a horse”
– has been widely cited.
Murder Ballads had been the best selling album of the band, until Dig, Lazarus, Dig!
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2. Overview
The ballad chosen to be closely analysed and interpreted here has all of the
abovementioned elements or aspects: a sensationalist and shocking event,
an exhaustive display of a dismembered body, inexplicable violence, and
a symbolical plane where themes of freedom and morality meet, domains
where God and the Devil collide, and all that in an opulent referentiality
and intertextuality. More to that, this ballad exploits various narrative
techniques in an intriguing manner, so that averting our eyes from the
‘what’ to the ‘how’ of the poem indicates interesting interpretive pathways
and strategies.
Apart from being the longest, “O’Malley’s Bar” is also formally the last
murder ballad of the album. Nevertheless, it is seminal in a certain way: it
was composed during the recording of the album Henry’s Dream, during
the tour for the next album Let Love In, and Cave himself, in an interview
for the Australian radio station Triple J, declared that the song could not
have been used for any of the existing albums, so the band “had to make
a record, an environment where the songs could exist” (Walker 1995). In
popular, critical or academic writing emphasis was unambiguously placed
on the traditional “Stagger Lee”, on the duets “Henry Lee” and “Where
the Wild Roses Grow”, as well as on “The Song of Joy” that was seen as
a continuation of the Red Right Hand theme – while “O’Malley’s Bar”
See: McCredden 2009, Rose 2013.
A phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost had been used in a somewhat mystic and prophetic
way in a song of the same name from the previous album: the song did subsequently
gain cult status in live performances, and the Red Right Hand became one of the most
interpreted images and concepts in Cave’s poetry.
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did not provoke any serious interest. The only exception is a quite recent
text about Nick Cave and the murder ballads tradition written by Nick
Groom, who reserves almost two whole pages in the final part of the text
for examination of “O’Malley’s Bar” in greater detail (2013: 91-92). He
assumes this song to be archetypal for Cave’s treatment of the genre: this
assessment approximates my estimate that “O’Malley’s Bar” is paradigmatic
of Cave’s narrative mode in poetry that agglomerates various poetics from
romanticism to postmodernism, together with the traditions of folklore,
satire and film narration, and is also paradigmatic for a myriad of themes
recurrent in his poetry. Furthermore, this ballad – being the last on the
album – concludes an important phase of Cave’s artistic work:
In the recent work there has been a turning away from the
theatricality and the savage irony that characterizes so much of
the earlier work. The sense of splitness and fragmentation has
also been lost – in terms both of the music and the lyrics – as
Cave has embraced a new aesthetic. In this new work, voice is no
longer something that is explored Gothically, in terms of Gothic
personae, instead the voice has become that of ‘authentic’ Cave,
crudely determined to express himself according to a half-baked
understanding of the imperatives of the Romantic Lyric. (McEvoy
2007: 80-81)
The ballad “O’Malley’s Bar” is a story about a mass murderer, a man who
enters a bar in his hometown, among familiar faces, orders a drink, and
then starts killing – O’Malley, his wife, and their daughter Siobhan, then
Caffrey, Mrs. Richard Holmes, as well as Mr. Richard Holmes himself, bird-
face Mr. Brookes, young Richardson, Jerry Bellows, Henry Davenport,
Kathleen Carpenter, and finally fat Vincent West. Triumphant in his fearful
power, while he screams “Fear me!” he can no longer be seen or heard – no
one is left alive. Meanwhile, fifty policemen have besieged the bar, and
the killer, who had just for a moment lifted the pistol with the last bullet
toward his head, obeys police orders, drops the gun, exits the bar and is
shoved into a police car. While the vehicle is moving away from the crime
scene, the killer finger-counts… And reaches number four. That is the
number used to define a mass murderer (at least in American criminology)
– a person who, in a relatively unified space and not a long stretch of time,
kills more than four people. Needless to say, there are twelve victims – as
http://crime.about.com/od/serial/a/killer_types.htm
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3. Word by word
The narratological terms and concepts used in this paper could be traced through
Rimmon-Kenan 2002, Prince 2003, and The Living Handbook of Narratology.
Although the ballad narration is (in glossaries, handbooks and encyclopedias) defined
by an impersonal heterodiegetic (third person) narrator, the truth is that even in the
standard, canonical ballad anthologies, such as Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
or Child’s collection, ballads narrated in the first person can be found.
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It might be a stretch, but the repeated “I am” in Cave’s song almost resonates with
Coleridge’s exemplification of Imagination in chapter XIII of Biographia Literaria, as
the universal creative principle within the finite mind recognized as a repetition of the
eternal creative act in the infinite ‘I AM’. The consequences of the thus grasped concept
of subjective power and freedom, in conjunction with the affirmation of the Self through
imagination, are radically different in Coleridge and Cave’s hero, as is to be shown.
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10
In Milton’s epic, the “red right hand” appears in Book II, 174, in the words of the angel
Belial who announces serious repercussions for the rebellion in Heaven. Milton took the
image from Horatio, where rubente dextra stands for Augustus’s hand that reestablished
Rome after the Tiber had flooded it and denotes his imperial power (Carmina I, 2). The
Red Right Hand is thus a hand that – although frightening – brings back structure and
balance into the world.
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11
Wolfgang Kayser, in his endeavour to define the grotesque as an aesthetic phenomenon
and a structure, whether defining grotesque as a compound or mixture of incongruous
elements, or as a disturbed relationship between the whole and its parts, always
emphasizes that the grotesque is an alienated world (Kajzer 1987: 258).
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– a killer – on the stage or on the screen as the Other. This act of self-
affirmation in thunder, beauty and light – all three being traits of Milton’s
Lucifer – has been additionally strengthened by the bang of the fist and
address to the present audience in a heightened tone, calling them friends
and neighbours, in a speech that reasserts the principle of love for thy
neighbour, or at least absence of anger and resentment (”I bear no grudge
against you!”). The appeal is accompanied by an erection, described again
as a division of the phallus from ‘I’. Leaving the sexual pathology of capital
offenders out of the discussion, the whole scene could be interpreted as an
autoerotic experience that causes an overflow of love upon the neighbours,
in a sort of triumphant discovery of one’s mission. Anyway, the mission
is not the vengeance upon fellow-citizens for something reproachful they
have done to the ballad hero and it makes an important constituent of the
story-logic. The protagonist has no ‘mundane’ reason for his killing spree.
It could be confirmed by succeeding lines, where the dismembered body
reassembles itself to become a man:
I am the man for which no God waits
But for which the whole world yearns
I’m marked by darkness and by blood
And one thousand powder-burns.
A Messiah who obviously recognizes no god and preaches in the name of
none, yearned by the world, represents an emblem open for interpretations
that tread the lines concerning absolute freedom – freedom from logic,
purpose and motivation, freedom from responsibility and from enslavement
to an imposed order. The sphere of unchained individual free will,
rebellion against authority, gratuitous action and hypertrophied selfhood
is the domain of the Prince of Darkness, so the analogy with Milton’s Satan
extends. But, it needs to be clarified that this is Satan read from Milton
by William Blake – marked by blood and scorched by gun-powder: he is a
revolutionary, a rebel against tyranny. Anyhow, it should never be out of sight
that the first-person narrator – the mighty ‘I’ of the speaker who addresses
the guests in the bar, and indirectly readers/ listeners – is painting a self-
portrait. In the seventh stanza of the ballad the second introduction of the
protagonist occurs: the first was executed by the narrator communicating
exclusively with the narratee/audience, painting the body by means of
distanced sight, perspective and lighting, while the second is the discourse
addressed to the characters in the fictional world, whereby the ‘I’ is situated
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when Mr. Richard Holmes, shot in the abdomen and knocked down on the
floor, whispers an apology, surprising even the gunman who nonetheless
politely accepts the apology and then calls off the conversation (turned
already into a blood-choked gurgle on the side of the casualty) with a shot
to the head.
After that, the assassination of another two wretched bar-lovers takes
place: Mr. Brookes, whose physiognomy reminds the killer of St. Francis with
the sparrows, and then Richardson whose youth suggests association with
the image of St. Sebastian pierced with arrows. The metaphorization of the
victims through Christian iconography styled in Medieval and Renaissance
painting intensifies the pictorial aspect of the ballad that heavily operates
on the framing, pose, gesture, cadre and lighting. Situating the casualties in
the field of artistic interpretation of myth seems to be analogous with self-
observation in the same context. Before he kills Brookes and Richardson,
the protagonist continues the self-introduction that begins to acquire the
form of fragmentary autofiction, disrupted by occasionally loading the
gun12 and forthcoming slaughter, finally completed somewhere at the
middle of the song with the shouting out of his name:
I’ve lived in this town for thirty years
And to no-one I am a stranger
[…]
I said, „I want to introduce myself
And I am glad that all you came”
And I leapt upon the bar
And shouted out my name.
The performance is at its culminating point. The narrator’s biographical
self, the one that lives in the town and is known by every fellow-citizen, the
mundane, the historical and temporal self, the one that is determined by a
point in space and time in the Cartesian universe, now is being replaced by
a new identity. A likely narrative that could be laid out might be about an
ordinary guy squeezed by existential needs, pressed by laws and customs
and overwhelmed by the structure that controls him: in such a context
the lack of free will of a man in a predesigned universe, where events
previously scripted take place, comes as a natural belief. The protagonist
12
Principles of probability and vraisemblance are astoundingly respected: after six bullets
fired (Siobhan was strangled, but Richard Holmes took two), the gun should be
reloaded.
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13
The Rolling Stones, “Sympathy for the Devil” (Beggar’s Banquet, 1968)
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exclusively for the guests of O’Malley’s bar (and every one of them has also
been named). The question remains – to whom this revelation of identity
above the carnage is intended: to a few left alive in the story- world, to
the narratee who populates the same discursive level as the narrator, or to
the audience who watches the performance or reads the lyrics. Possibly, to
the murderer himself? In other words, in what degree is this ballad just a
soliloquy overheard by the audience through the fourth wall?
The basic thought that the ballad, whose dominant narrative nature
should not be questioned, transmutes into lyric appears after this last self-
introduction of the hero – mainly in statements concerning the emotional
and psychological status of the killer during the smashing of Jerry Bellows’s
head with a giant ashtray, in the smiling observation of the weird scene
where the bullet in the chest of Henry Davenport un-seams his belly, along
with the shooting at divorced Kathleen Carpenter, and before the last
murder marked by another dialogue between the assassin and the victim.
But, lyric fullness is finally reached in a scene where the killer kneels
by the edge of a “steaming scarlet brook” sprung from Jerry Bellows’s
shattered head along the counter – in tears. The imagery and the lyric
tone are obviously a shift from the narrative norm of the former course of
the song. The space, a moment ago ruled by the murderer – dominated
by his appearance and the sounds – by thunder and gunfire, by the din
of breakage and smashing, by shrieks, falderal, laughter, screaming and
strange, pre-linguistic, inexpressive “hhhhh mmmhm” – now becomes a
locus of epiphany:
Well, the light in there was blinding
Full of God and ghosts of truth…
The divine light and the spectres of truth, whatever they might be,14
initiate the theme of insight, plunging into the soul of the murderer in
which the first signs of remorse are perceived. The step inside and into
the depths of the central subjectivity of the poem is clearly marked by
contrast to the indifferent outlook of the killer who steps from the counter
in cold blood and kills Kathleen Carpenter showing no remorse – although
remorse overflows within him. The pangs of conscience are represented
14
The already established analogy to Coleridge could be extended, perhaps, by drawing to
mind the ‘machinery’ of spirits and angelic hosts in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:
they appear as inhabitants inherent to Nature revealed in her true form by the imaginative
eye.
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does not see the dead as beautiful, but himself. There are no more eyes to
confirm his power and his will, so the mirror takes over the function of the
other’s gaze. And in the mirror stands a portly man – hair like raven wing,
muscles firm and tense, with a curl of smoke in the shape of a question
mark protracting from the pistol. The gun is a legitimate part of that mighty
body endowed with a powerful will and dark beauty. The helix of smoke
repeats in the later circular, swivelling motions of the killer, motions that
resemble dancing – ritual appropriation of territory by means of the body.
He advances, saturating the void with the voice:
Fear me! Fear me! Fear me!
But no one did cause they were dead.
Alone as a god, the stern and severe owner of the vindictive red right hand,
he screams until the police sirens and loudspeakers overcome. A voice
modulated through the microphone repeats like a machine the phrase
that appertains to every potential offender caught in actu. In a cinematic
denouement, the last tension shall be produced again by the hand that
raises the pistol to the head and seems almost human in that act. The
bestial angel full of wrath, the dark-side Messiah, finally does not leave the
scene in a blast and blood commanded by the red right hand, but – after
one “long and hard think about dying” – submits himself to the will of the
megaphone.
4. Types of narration
The prominent narrative features of the song have mainly been exposed
through the previous analysis, and we will now up in a more systematic way.
The story is rendered in a prominently episodic manner, by the consistent
chronological sequencing of executions in a single physical space and in
a short stretch of time. The sjuzet is encircled by the expositional self-
presentation of the narrator-protagonist, followed by the unpromising non-
dramatic and trivial action set out at the beginning, and with the public
scene of an arrest placed outside the main story space at the end. The
action of the song begins with the hero’s entrance into the bar, and ends
with his exit out of it. Naming the ballad after the location of events is not
merely conventional. The interior of O’Malley’s bar is a privileged space
where something out of the ordinary takes place – not only the slaughter
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16
More on the topic can be found in Ann Banfield’s texts about the empty deictic center.
17
Neutral discourse suggests reliability by resembling the discourses of science, especially
the empiric variety, as well as the discourse of the witness in court, who is to mediate
specific and exclusive directly acquired knowledge.
18
Combination, intertwining, and submersion of these two opposite styles of narrative
discourse is a remarkable feature of several stories of E. A. Poe – notably “The Black Cat”,
“The Imp of Perverseness” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” – all about murder in first-person
account by the killer. In “The Purloined Letter” detective Dupen describes his method as
expanding and surpassing the logic by poetry.
19
The term was introduced by Serge Dubrowski 1977, and since then it has entered
increasingly broad usage for a variety of autobiographical subgenres. It encompasses
diverse works such are Montaigne’s Essais, Rousseau’s Les Confessions, Wordsworth’s
Prelude and Sartre’s Les Mots.
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20
It is hard not to draw parallels with those of William Blake’s speakers who stand for the
qualities of Orc.
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5. Coda
Groom’s opinion is that this hero, like other protagonists of Cave’s murder
ballads, leaves his story without closure: “resolution is let to the legal
system, to a place beyond the end of the ballad, outside the text” by which
he “effectively shifts the entire literary and ballad tradition into a world
governed by legal institutions and moral values rather than one oblivious
of the law and humanity” (2013: 93). Other sources claim that Cave’s
characters are in a quest for sanctity, reaching for the sacral dimension – “the
holy, divine, hierophantic, epiphanic”– in a space of human corporeality,
eroticism and violence, and therefore in his songs recurrently appears “the
dark, lonely figure of a man caught up in desire for a divine source or balm”.
The sacred then might be “part prophetic Jesus, part father in the Christian
tradition, part old testament force of retribution, part metonym for human
love and sexual energy, part violent power with unknown capabilities, part
absence, part extension of the Cave ego” (McCredden 2009: 167, 168).
The resolution of the evil hero’s fate is in both types of interpretation seen
as a resignation of individual power and free will, and surrender into the
arms of either institutions and principles of human society, or to divine
power. Either way, the origin and the nature of evil remain unquestioned,
along with the satirical touch that lurks behind the dethronized spectacle
presenting the battle of good and evil in an egotistic, consumerist, media-
frenzied and pornophilic society. Therefore, “O’Malley’s Bar” could be
easily seen as a Blakean satire about the fallen man’s illusion that light and
darkness are somewhere outside himself, or as an ironic clash in which a
tall, dark and handsome prince of darkness, “self-begot and self-raised” by
his narrative, examines whether it is “better to reign in Hell than serve in
Heaven”.
References
Baker, J. H. (ed.) (2013). The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays. Bristol:
Intellect.
Dwyer, M. (July 1998). „Album by Album with Nick Cave”. Rolling Stone
Australia. No. 550. Sydney, NSW: Tilmond Pty Ltd. p. 41. (23 December
2016) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_Ballads#cite_note-3>.
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Сажетак
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Contributors
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Notes to contributors
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CIP – Каталогизација у публикацији
Народна библиотека Србије, Београд
811.111+82
BELGRADE English Language & Literature Studies / editor-in-chief
Jelena Vujić. – Vol. 1 (2009)– . - Belgrade : Faculty of Philology,
University of Belgrade, 2009– (Belgrade : Čigoja štampa). – 24 cm
Godišnje. – Drugo izdanje na drugom medijumu:
Belgrade English Language & Literature
Studies (Online) = ISSN 1821-4827
ISSN 1821-3138 = Belgrade English Language & Literature Studies
COBISS.SR-ID 170838540
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