by Marie Shelton, University of Notre Dame

The summer before I started college, I quit my job and boarded a Greyhound from San Diego to Boston. The journey took two and a half days. I stopped in LA, Vegas, Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and New York to refuel. When I finally arrived in Boston, I felt I had been hit by a bus, instead of having taken a ride on one.

Stops were often in the middle of the night. I would unfold myself out of the seat like a bent paperclip, wake up my limbs, and do laps around the station, only to discover that those stations were often in the armpits of town – unkept and seedy. And in the wee hours, I wanted nothing more than to get back to my seat on the Greyhound.

I often think back and wonder, what was the most pleasurable part of that trip? Getting off the bus, or getting back on it?

Cheaper than the cost of driving or flying, taking a Greyhound bus feels as ubiquitous to the American experience as eating apple pie, but unlike apple pie, the Greyhound is, at best, an unconventional indulgence. On the one hand, boarding a Greyhound allows one to economically mobilize, to see the country, or to just get out – and to derive aesthetic pleasure from being transported by an icon across the American landscape. For a moment, one may even feel a flicker of something like freedom. On the other hand, the practical particulars of that journey, including loss of personal space, of time, or energy, very quickly conduce to feelings of exhaustion, and of the loss of the self. Just as the bus casually crosses state lines, onboard the bus, there is no escaping the challenge to one’s personal boundaries, at least not without looking like a total snob.

The Greyhound continues to be the site of many individual odysseys that, for a brief moment in time, merge. The Greyhound bus, from its 1914 nascence to now, has and continues to imbue the American cultural landscape with a distinctly literary set of questions. We might think of the Greyhound as the site of unique social transactions that help to shape a developing, democratic self. Characters who have the privilege of developing, as it were, do so in direct relation to their social restraints. This curious phenomenon is at least as ancient as Homer’s Odyssey (in relation to Odysseus), and appears as well in Frank Capra’s 1934 pre-code film, It Happened One Night, in relation to Ellie Andrews.

Book XII of the Odyssey features the dualistic impasses of pleasure and compulsion and of freedom and imprisonment when Odysseus and his crew face the alluring song of the sirens – a song that otherwise compels men to steer their ships into ruin. It is a test, and Odysseus passes it only by filling his crew’s ears with wax. He then has them tie him to the ship’s mast, as they row the ship to safety. This scene has been written on extensively by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectics of Enlightenment as a moment that “mediates between self-preservation and self-annihilation.” Early in their work, they point to this moment in The Odyssey to allegorize what they mean by “dialectic of enlightenment,” which posits an age-old inquiry about the awakening and representation of the individual subject in relation to their social setting. Odysseus’s humanity in this scene is ironically represented by a continuum of restrictions to one’s personhood. Odysseus must violently deny the primal, pleasure-seeking self by having his body strapped to the ship’s mast in order to survive. But Horkheimer and Adorno are also quick to note that, in these actions, Odysseus is also individuating himself from his hoi polloi crew. Unlike the crew, who cannot listen because Odysseus has oppressively rendered them both senseless and practical (by filling their ears with wax), Odysseus allows himself to listen. In a setting of universal constraint (or death), Odysseus insists on exacting pleasure from the art of the Sirens’ song, even as he is bound to the ship’s mast, and this humanizes him.

We can read this configuration of a ‘privileged place’ within a social predicament alongside Ellie Andrew’s Odyssey-like journey on a Greyhound bus – a journey that allows her to make distinctions between merely illusory pleasure and the real thing. Ellie, played by Claudette Colbert, leaves her rich father, who insists on an annulment from her shotty marriage, by jumping off his boat. She so desires to be with a man that she hardly knows that desire absurdly compels her overboard. She washes up in Florida, hoping to get to New York to have a proper wedding, unencumbered by her father’s garrulous disapproval. With little money in her pocket, she boards a Greyhound and finds a strange bedfellow in Peter, played by Clark Gable. He is a tramp of a journalist, and she will, of course, fall in love with him instead.

The film’s exposition alone can be read alongside Book XII to suggest that Ellie appears to damn herself from the start. The siren’s song of the illusion of a pleasurable marriage to a wealthy New Yorker quite literally draws Ellie off a ship – not exactly into ruin, but certainly onto a Greyhound and beyond. On a meta-narrative level, her entire story is predicated upon falling into a pleasure trap. Part of the pleasure of the film, furthermore, arises from Ellie’s protracted realization that that which compelled her to jump ship – the rich husband she hardly knows– is actually only an illusion of pleasure. The delusional ephemerality of her condition is further indicated by the suggestion that her marriage remains unconsummated. In the opening scene, her father wants her to get an annulment, as opposed to a divorce. There is a heavy narrative suggestion here that she has not had sex with her husband yet.

Her intimacy with Peter on the Greyhound, on the other hand, alongside Peter’s loyal assistance in getting Ellie to her destination, runs counter to this background charade. Even if she and Peter do not have sex, it is still deeply ironic that she is so frequently depicted sleeping with Peter on her way to the husband whom she has not slept with.

One of the most heartbreaking ways that loyalty is depicted in the Odyssey happens to be through a greyhound dog: Odysseus’s faithful friend, “Argos.” Greyhound Lines Inc. adopted the image of a greyhound dog in 1929, just five years before the premiere of It Happened One Night, citing that the buses looked like “those dogs streaking by.” But even if the Greyhound bus company does not explicitly allude to Homer’s canine, the film is certainly conflating Peter with the bus he rides on, and in so doing, they make him Homeric. He is a wandering tramp of a journalist onboard of a Greyhound, loyally assisting a woman on her journey of self-discovery. 

Argos features most pointedly in Book XVII, when Odysseus is disguised and cannot acknowledge him. Odysseus has not seen him since before the Trojan War, and Argos falls into neglect.

… a hound that lay there raised his head and pricked up his ears, Argos, the hound of Odysseus, of the steadfast heart, whom of old he had himself bred, but had no joy of him, for ere that he went to sacred Ilios. In days past the young men were wont to take the hound to hunt the wild goats, and deer, and hares; but now he lay neglected, his master gone, in the deep dung of mules and cattle, which lay in heaps before the doors, till the slaves of Odysseus should take it away to dung his wide lands. There lay the hound Argos, full of vermin; yet even now, when he marked Odysseus standing near, he wagged his tail and dropped both his ears, but nearer to his master he had no longer strength to move. Then Odysseus looked aside and wiped away a tear.

–Homer, Odyssey, Book 17, 290-327

Argos was that loyal friend Odysseus felt compelled to leave, seeking some other pleasure. Now, that friend is neglected: mangey and slow. This too appears to be the sad stakes for narratives of pleasure and compulsion. Those who get left behind suffer in direct proportion to those who orient their ships toward the siren’s rocks. What both greyhounds suggest in relation to one another are narratives that are concerned not only with adducing new and threatening forms of pleasure, but the loss of pleasures past.

It Happened One Night inverts this heuristic: in contrast to Argos’s tragic ending, our heroine’s journey begins with a light-hearted lurch: tight shots of the bus’s interior set the stage for some sort of disruptive action jarring the mundane flow of the Greyhound. When Ellie appears, the suspense is giggle-worthy: where other passengers pass through the crowded aisle with great dexterity, Ellie, in her naïve, snobbish care not to not touch other people, enters the scene looking clumsy and vulnerable. Intimacy is all but willed into hilarious being through the space and social dynamics of the Greyhound. 

True to form, as the journey kicks into gear, the tottering Ellie falls backwards into Peter’s lap. Their faces slowly come together, as if for a kiss, before she scrambles to her feet. Peter recognizes Ellie as that ‘famous heiress’ in the papers he helps to write and he clearly knows that, socially, she in unfamiliar with scenes of accidental intimacy that prevail onboard the Greyhound. No one is going to strap her to ship’s mast so she can enjoy being tantalized from afar, and her embarrassment is a tell of her privilege. Peter cheekily grins and famously remarks, 

“Next time you drop in, remember to bring your folks!”

Like the tilting of Argos’s head toward Odysseus, the lurch of the Greyhound bus is all that it takes for Ellie to recognize true, concrete pleasure – even if just for a moment. And Ellie’s social stumble invites our vicarious enjoyment. She immediately performs her embarrassment and musters a show of anger at her predicament, but we know better. She has just looked pleasure in the face, and any driving compulsion to get to her husband, as it were, peters down. 

It is worth mentioning that these implicitly erotic moments onboard the Greyhound – quiet and humorous mediations of self-preservation and self-denial, from falling asleep next to a stranger to falling into their lap– become explicit as the narrative progresses. Thanks in part to its pre-code lack of censorship, Capra’s film rebelliously shows how Peter and Ellie’s sexual relationship develops in direct contradiction to the stagnant social mores of high society. Their relationship begins on a moving Greyhound, where it is more socially acceptable to be more intimate with one’s neighbor and then transitions to a scene in a single Depression-era hotel room. It is here that Peter famously constructs the “Walls of Jericho,” a makeshift privacy partition, between their two twin beds. In the film’s closing shot, the intimacy that bloomed between them on the Greyhound is symbolically consummated in an image of those sheets tumbling down. 

By pairing The Odyssey and It Happened One Night, we can appreciate how the Greyhound bus, like its more canonical seagoing counterpart, functions as a site of intimacy and varying power relations. And we can see how faithful, greyhound-like characters (like Peter) act as key mediators for an individual’s development. Ellie’s narrative arc is attached not to the pursuit of pleasure alone (like Odysseus with the song of the sirens), but to her burgeoning ability to differentiate between illusory pleasure and the genuine article. Ellie achieves with loyal Peter a fruitful humility that Odysseus never really achieves, and she chooses a less privileged life when she decides to marry him. When the “Walls of Jericho” fall, she remains, as it were, buoyed on by the freedom of her greyhound. 

Amândio Reis
Universidade de Lisboa

Henry James’s final ghost story features a very important—but pointedly lost and irretrievable—epistolary text. James’s expatriate protagonist, Spencer Brydon, is dogged in his pursuit of a projected, All-American Doppelgänger, and haunted by the memory of an unopened letter. This letter is mentioned only once in the story, but its significance for the protagonist, as it fills his obsessive conjectures, is remarkable: 

the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I’ve been sorry, I’ve hated it—I’ve never known what was in the letter (Complete Stories, Library of America, 1996, vol. V: 706). 

At the level of Spencer’s psychology, the burned letter may be understood as a parallel to his double, a figure of the unknown and the what-could-have-been, shrouding the character’s mind in his obsession with an impossible form of past futurity. At the level of literary form, the cloud of fire and smoke surrounding the letter, its undisclosed emissary, its lost contents, and Spencer’s unconfessed “reasons” to destroy it, turn it into the symbol of an epistemic gap that is central to the Jamesian ghostly. 

In a process of gradual unveiling that ultimately resists our conventions regarding narrative closure, the action of “The Jolly Corner” fundamentally consists of a quest for knowledge of something hidden. Spencer is literally in search of his inexistent self: an irresistibly mysterious figure that, soon after his return from Europe, he speculates may be conjured up from the latent memories and projections brooding in the rooms and surfaces of his cherished, and now significantly empty, childhood home in New York. After a prolonged game of hide and seek, Spencer at last encounters the object of his tireless search, but what he finds is violently different from what he expected:

The face, that face, Spencer Brydon’s?—he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!—He had been “sold,” he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face of a stranger. (725)

The way Spencer’s double, defying his deepest hopes, escapes elucidation—“It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!”—is after all not far removed from the hero’s own initial statement, in which he admits to be irremediably shut upon himself:

“Everyone asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.” (697)

Therefore, the inner Spencer, the one who inhabits the dark chambers of thought, desire, and infinite possibility, remains to the end disjointed—“Such an identity fitted his at no point”—strange, and ungraspable, even to, and in spite of, himself. This complete lack of identification between Spencer and his alternative self may be evidence of the futility of his quest (as he initially believes), or it may be exactly the “point” of it, as is finally suggested by Alice Staverton—Spencer’s only friend in America and his hypothetical lover—, when she lucidly asks him: “‘Isn’t the whole point that you’d have been different?’” (730). 

In any case, Spencer’s hope of clarification as to the shape of his life not-lived seems to have been erased or moved back into the dark chamber from where it never really left, pointing to a state of things that had earlier been inferred by Spencer in a moment of adumbration:

He found all things come back to the question of what he personally might have been, how he might have led his life and “turned out,” if he had not so, at the outset, given it up. (…) “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep forever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made something of me as well. Only I can’t make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn some important letter unopened. I’ve been sorry, I’ve hated it—I’ve never known what was in the letter. (706)

With this turn, the narrator invites us to see the burned letter as an adequate simile, conceived by Spencer, of his own frustrated meditation. On a deeper level of repressed signification, it is a central figure, if not the central figure of the story: its dark kernel. Just as Spencer figures as a detective of unreadable texts, his shadowy double becomes associated with forfeited experience and lost epistemology. In “The Jolly Corner,” the double is an epistemic element; not “real,” as creatures of fantasy become real in that genre, but “real” as an apparition of the hero’s consciousness. James makes the double an allegorical image of the story itself, wherein fictionality is rendered visible.

If Spencer’s double literalizes the metaphorical dimension of narrative and literary language, Spencer himself is inextricable from the aesthetic theory implicit in “The Jolly Corner.” From the moment Spencer sets foot on the American scene, and well before he meets his sought-after apparition, he is a figure of duplicity. As both investigator and object of the unknown, the reader now understands Spencer’s self-inventory as an unreadable text.

Ultimately, Spencer’s dubious constitution, partly materialized in his role as an interpreter and partly expressed in his role as an object of interpretation, is bound to remind the reader of their own peering over the ghostly threshold of the story. They can only take an inquisitive look at the unfathomable depths of its protagonist, and, perhaps like Alice—picking up the scarce but cogent enough clues—envision with Spencer, not a clear image, but the spoils of a story and the shape of its hero’s own disfiguration.

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Summary in Portuguese

A última história de fantasmas de Henry James contém um texto epistolar importante, mas enfaticamente perdido e irrecuperável. O expatriado que protagoniza a história, Spencer Brydon, está determinado na busca pela projecção do seu Doppelgänger essencialmente americano, assim como é assombrado pela memória de uma carta queimada antes de aberta. Esta carta é mencionada uma única vez ao longo da história, mas a sua relevância para o protagonista, na medida em que preenche as suas obsessivas conjecturas, é notória. Ao nível da psicologia de Spencer, a carta queimada pode ser entendida como um paralelo do seu duplo, uma figura do desconhecido e do que poderia ter sido, encobrindo a mente da personagem na sua obsessão com uma forma impossível de futuridade pretérita. Ao nível da forma literária, a nuvem de fogo e fumo que envolve a carta, o seu emissário não identificado, o seu conteúdo perdido, e as “razões” de Spencer para a destruir, inconfessas, transformam-na no símbolo de uma lacuna epistémica que é central na concepção Jamesiana do fantasmagórico.

Brian Gingrich

There is a moment in “Babette’s Feast,” one of the best-known stories by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), when a character named General Lorens Loewenhielm stands up, slightly drunk at the end of a lavish dinner, and gives a speech to the other guests, all elderly members of a pious religious sect. The reader may not have noticed, but hardly one instance of actual dialogue has taken place in the story’s first thirty pages. And here too the speech is one-sided. The General delivers a monologue:

“Mercy and truth, my friends, have met together,” said the General. “Righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

He spoke in a clear voice which had been trained in drill grounds and had echoed sweetly in royal halls, and yet he was speaking in a manner so new to himself and so strangely moving that after his first sentence he had to make a pause. For he was in the habit of forming his speeches with care, conscious of his purpose, but here, in the midst of the Dean’s simple congregation, it was as if the whole figure of General Loewenhielm, his breast covered with decorations, were but a mouthpiece for a message which meant to be brought forth.

“Man, my friends,” said General Loewenhielm, “is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble . . .” Never till now had the General stated that he trembled; he was genuinely surprised and even shocked at hearing his own voice proclaim the fact. “We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. [. . .] (Anecdotes 52)

The speech goes on a bit longer, but it does not become more coherent. It is brilliant, in fact, in its hollowness; cliché and cryptic. One’s eyes glaze over, yet it seems to contain something important. The response of the other guests at the dinner suggests that the author is aware of the effect and intends it: “The Brothers and Sisters had not altogether understood the General’s speech”—and yet, “his collected and inspired face and the sound of well-known and cherished words had seized and move all of their hearts” (53).

It is difficult to characterize this effect among other speech acts and presentations of thought in literature. It is not soliloquy, parody, travesty, free association . . . It may bear a likeness to something in drama (the speech of the madman or fool) or something in epic (the rhapsodist inspired by Muses), but the genre and occasion are different. The General speaks, his voice is clearly his own, and yet the words and his manner of speaking are unfamiliar to him. He is possessed, we might say—his speech is possessed, he himself remains conscious—but that only raises more questions. How? certainly comes to mind; but still more: By whom? and From where?

In fact, small hints in the story suggest that the words come from the “Dean,” the now-deceased founder of the sect to which the Brothers and Sisters belong, who earlier in the story spoke a similar phrase: “Mercy and Truth, dear brethren, have met together. Righteousness and Bliss have kissed one another” (23–24). The suggestion is that the General, enraptured by the feast and in the Dean’s pious circle, becomes a fervent “mouthpiece” for a “message” sent forth by the Dean himself. Loewenhielm can only look on with surprise as the dead man’s words now flow out of him.

But it can’t be that simple. For one thing, the Dean is not mentioned here, not by the General and not by the narrator. His influence is far from explicit. The repetition of his phrase suggests not so much that he is its source as that a common source stands behind both him and the General. Both men would seem to be mouthpieces for a divine message. And the General is not even simply a mouthpiece. The more he speaks and reflects on the message, the more he seems to interfere with it. He talks at such length and in such a searching manner that the words fall together in a confusion that is evidently his own. His very utterance of the word “grace,” a word that would seem to stand for the message meant to flow through him, becomes, as he utters it, an object for his own befuddled regard. And then, one must reckon with the fact that the General is, thanks to Babette, pretty well intoxicated. His ecstasy is both grave-immortal and comical-worldly. The audience of his speech cannot not know which parts are the divine message and which are his wine-drunk distortions.

Technically, the problem here is a matter of written speech attribution. A matter of quotation marks. Say that there is an inverse correlation between, on the one hand, the number of inverted commas surrounding a speech and, on the other, the degree of distortion and the extent to which the speaker “owns” the words in it. Quotation marks promise minimal distortion, minimal claim to ownership by the speaker. If one were to take seriously the suggestion that the presentation of Loewenhielm’s speech is a quotation (of the General) of a quotation (of the Dean) of a quotation (of some greater divine message), one would transcribe it as not “Mercy and truth . . .” but “‘“Mercy and truth . . .”’” The words are marked as borrowed property transmitted verbatim, displaced but not appropriated or distorted. The General would be an active agent consciously quoting someone else. Yet in the story itself the General is charmingly clueless. No extra layers of inverted commas demarcate his speech; no degree of ownership, agency, or distortion is specified. We just know that he is speaking strangely—in abstractions that, because they do not suit his character, do not cohere—and we know that he knows it. Meanwhile, the source of the message remains hidden, and we can still do little better than call his speech possessed.

This effect of possession defines, to some extent, nearly everything spoken by characters in Dinesen’s stories. To a great extent, it defines speeches like those in “The Immortal Story,” where humans performing a fictional tale speak dialogue that the reader cannot identify as the tale’s or their own; or speeches in “Tempests,” where a young actress finds that she can communicate best with her mentor by speaking to him in the role of Ariel—both the Ariel of The Tempest (whose words she speaks in italics) and Ariel from the book of Isaiah (whose voice she seems to assume). To a broader extent, possession defines the many stories-within-stories that Dinesen narrates in the manner of the Arabian Nights, introducing tellers offering tales whose contents are repeated indiscriminately, with or without quotation marks, later on. Still more broadly, however, this effect is to be seen in Dinesen’s very concept of a character in a story. Her characters remain at a distance, not quite on our level, not quite human. They open their mouths to utter words that seem only partly their own. They speak as if they were, to an unknowable degree, possessed by another discourse—as if they were reciting fragments from a foreign, sacred, or ancient script.

Dinesen herself seems uncertain where this script lies. She voices her uncertainty through her characters. At the end of “The Cardinal’s First Tale,” the person to whom the cardinal has been speaking, listing the virtues of stories as opposed to novels; the person who has heard the cardinal proclaim that it is only the story which can answer the cry in all of our hearts—“Who am I?”—; this person asks the cardinal how he knows whom he, as a storyteller, actually serves; the cardinal has no clear answer. And then, the end of “The Immortal Story”: a clerk picks up a large seashell and lifts it to his ear; he hears a low and deep surge—something, one may say, without origin, carried by the ocean between ships and sailors, fluid and timeless or immortal—; the clerk realizes that he has heard the sound before, long ago, and he asks, “But where?”

Where? Who? To ask this of a piece of writing seems, for Dinesen, to confer upon it the proper status of story. Her script is one that, invisibly, possesses, but one that, elusively, is never wholly recited, performed, or possessed.

Works Cited
Dinesen, Isak (Karen Blixen). Anecdotes of Destiny. 1958. New York: Vintage, 1993.
—Last Tales. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1991.

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Summary in Portuguese

Há um momento em “Babette’s Feast”, um dos contos mais conhecidos de Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), em que o personagem do General Lorens Loewenhielm se levanta, um pouco embriagado no fim do sumptuoso jantar, e oferece um discurso aos restantes convidados, todos eles membros idosos de uma seita religiosa. O leitor pode não ter reparado, mas não houve quase nenhum diálogo efectivo nas primeiras trinta páginas da história. E também neste caso o discurso é unidireccional. […] É difícil caracterizar este efeito entre outros actos de fala e representações do pensamento em literatura. Não se trata de solilóquio, paródia, disfarce, associação livre… Pode aparentar algum traço do drama (o discurso do louco ou do idiota) ou da épica (o rapsodo inspirado pelas musas), mas o género e a ocasião são diferentes. O General fala, a voz é claramente a sua, e, no entanto, as palavras e a sua maneira de falar não lhe são familiares. Ele está possuído, podíamos dizer — o seu discurso está possuído, enquanto ele permanece consciente —, mas isso só levantaria mais questões. Como? é a pergunta que nos ocorre, certamente; mas também, ainda mais: Por quem? e De onde?

Bernardo Diniz Ferreira

Bringing together Machado de Assis’ “The Mirror” and Clarice Lispector’s “If I Were Me” begs a comparison between two techniques of selfhood: the mirror and the dialogue. Both are timeless engenderers of alternate selves, houses of reflection. Machado’s tale unfolds their difference; Lispector’s provides an interesting answer and counterpoint to Machado’s handling of selfhood as a tragedy of mistakes.

We might think of self with two premises: a self can be an inner entity who beholds, in its own phenomenal space, the world, as well as become the beheld object itself. Our self beholds a self, and this beholding can take the form of a tension between what we believe ourselves to be and those actions which we might deem out of character. This inside/outside dichotomy frames the opening to “The Mirror,” in which two places are characterized by a distinct quality of light: “the room was small and lit by candles, whose glow mingled mysteriously with the moonlight streaming in from outside.” Like the soul, these two qualities of light “mingle mysteriously,” and this new double-light grounds the text’s central questions of legibility, resting between (if not the mirror and the lamp) the mirror and the candle.

“The Mirror,” in accordance with Jacobina’s compulsive misreading, is a willfully obverse retelling of Plato’s Symposium. A number of men gather after dining and happen to discuss the nature of the human soul. Aside from Jacobina, they do it in a cordial and friendly way, as the opening paragraph stresses twice, juxtaposing the relaxed mood of the meeting with the depth of the philosophy at play. Someone will propose that the soul should be doubled — Jacobina reprises the role of Aristophanes’, whose beautiful contribution imagines humans as lonely souls seeking their ancestral pair. But while Jacobina’s monologue claims to be about the duality of all souls, he does not realize that he speaks as someone who has reached his goal in singularity, not only as a result of his weird tale, but also because he refuses to engage in dialogue — a sharp departure from Aristophanes. In a paratextual coincidence, the tale that follows “The Mirror” in the 1882 collection is titled “Alcibiades’ Visit.” In Plato’s text, Alcibiades arrives late to the debate, much like in Machado’s book he arrives only when the tale is already over. In “The Mirror” he cannot join the discussion, as its end had already been precipitated by the protagonist’s sudden disappearance.

Other references further weave this string of misunderstandings: the off-hand remark that “the best definition of love is not worth a girlfriend’s kiss” inverts the main point of Diotima’s lesson on Erôs, that through the love of beauty, the lover can progress from the desire for earthly bodies up until the Form of love itself, the beauty of beauty – a girlfriend’s kiss is the first step towards a philosophical understanding of love. Another reversal: contrast the two mules who philosophize while shaking away flies with Socrates, the original gadfly of Athens. These are two examples of Jacobina’s materialism and anti-intellectualism, traits of a character who defines his humanity by his uniform and converses on the condition that others do not answer him: “I never engage in arguments,” he says, “but if you will listen in silence, I can tell you about an episode in my life that demonstrates the issue in question in the clearest possible terms.”

Mirror and discourse become two distinct, mutually reinforcing, techniques of selfhood, of self-making. Like Bram Stoker’s count (roughly contemporary to Machado’s collection), Jacobina’s absent reflection stands for an inhumane absence of soul. Their vampiric quality is similarly grounded on class parasitism and social hierarchy. The mirror-object — and its historical baggage — melds this individuative process into the formation of collective identity: in 1808, the Portuguese court was exiled in Brazil. The outcome of the pressure and demands of hundreds of newly-arrived courtiers is mixed: Brazil’s global standing as a colony is reinforced (its independence imminent) but so is the weight of slavery on a society already dependent on such labour practices. The Portuguese mirror, in which you “still see the gilding, eaten away by time,” reflects Jacobina, a man whose fragile identity is null without slaves to prop it up.

But what mirrors are like when alone, paraphrasing Rilke, can also be the source of the inexhaustible thing, of poetry — of the ability to jump over the mere reflection and engender oneself out of nothing. Jacobina briefly recognizes, but fails to espouse, such a possibility. Obsessed with the exterior soul, he takes up writing, unavailingly; on being inquired on his nourishment, he retorts that he vociferously recited verses — but his list of chosen works betrays mindless quantity rather than quality, it suffers from the same problem as the paper — an imbalance between the black ink of the text and white paper of the page, content and form:

At one point, I considered writing something (…) But the style, like Auntie Marcolina, would not come. Sœur Anne, sœur Anne… Nothing at all. All I could see was the ink turning blacker and the page whiter.

Purely physical and deprived of the feeling of poetry, he abandons all poetic endeavors, brags that by putting on the uniform, he managed to overcome the six remaining days of solitude without feeling them. As he had noted before, “facts will explain the feelings, facts are everything.”

In Clarice Lispector’s text, conversely, to feel is the appropriate point of departure for the ethical inquiry – even as it displaces the practical task of finding the “important” paper. There are no Jacobinean false-dichotomies: the paper — its importance and storage — may fall squarely on that world of “facts,” but the promise of knowing selfhood rests on the recognition of the external action of safekeeping the paper:

When I don’t know where I have kept an important paper and the search becomes useless, I wonder: if I were me and I had an important paper to keep, which place would I choose to keep it? Sometimes it works. But sometimes I get so impressed by the phrase “if I were me,” that the search for the paper becomes secondary, and I start to think, I mean I start to feel.

Unlike Jacobina, Lispector proposes that the real self is a blindspot between what we are and what we do; or it is both, or neither, simultaneously.

In another text titled “Fernando Pessoa Helping Me” (21 September 1968), she compares (unfavourably) the writing of weekly columns to the writing of books, remarking that she cannot but reveal who she truly is whenever she signs her name. “Will I lose my secret intimacy?” If so, “what to do?” A quote from Pessoa brings a modicum of solace: “To speak is the simplest way of becoming unknown.” The doubling of the self, for Lispector, starts with a conversation-opening question. As the text opens, she asks herself, and promptly asks us as well, for despite the monologue nature of the weekly newspaper column, what follows should be a conversation with a world of readers — a notion she expounds in a different text (“To Be a Columnist,” 22 June 1968). Lispector talks to us, her readers, and thus also to herself.

This dialogic technique of selfhood creates a self, just as it erases another. One is brought forth in the posing of a question, alternatives disappear as it answers. “If I were me I would give everything I have,” she writes. The becoming of who one is represents this entry into the ineffable feeling, larger than thought, a form of self-estrangement: one un-knows in order to know oneself; we risk becoming unrecognizable to our acquaintances and to ourselves. Lispector’s emphasis on this dialectic returns the reader to the tension Machado underscores on the matter of style – which Jacobina pointedly lacks. To have a style is also to be recognizable when doing something new. Our friend or beloved does something we could not have predicted, but which we, nevertheless, recognize as their character: we recognize their ‘signature’ style. It is crucial to preserve spaces in which we might become unrecognisable. Friendly conversation among equals and essayistic writing are two examples of performative stages where character might rehearse it(s)self freely.

Lispector’s essay ends with a smile, an odd reaction for someone just now so close to the “full pain of the world” and also the opposite of Jacobina’s terror. Might the difference be explained also by a distinct approach to the necessity of pain? Lispector’s leap of faith involves a harmonization of the pain before, and the pain after – to become who we are is to enter a dialogue of pain and feeling: the pain of the world, of this new-self firmly rooted in it, but also the pain once held in our not-self, out of feeling’s sight. “I pinched my legs, but the effect was only a physical sensation of weariness or pain, nothing more,” says Jacobina. When he (feverishly roleplaying as the wife of Perrault’s Bluebeard) calls for “sister Anne,” might he be looking for this secret room, whose door, as the tale goes, is opened by a key dipped in blood? But he, not Bluebeard, had concealed this haunted room. He fails to realise that he should rather, like Lispector, call – ask – for himself. And if in-between the pain of the world and our secret pain lies the pain of others, this too is ignored by Jacobina, who quickly discards the notion of meeting with his aunt.

In describing the real self, Lispector does not once use the verb to feel. This true “I” experiences and has (a uniform, perhaps), but it does not feel. In the final sentence, however, it is reused twice, in a gradating retreat: I felt myself smiling is an involuntary movement that the second “felt” has delivered unto a familiar shape. The bridge of feeling leads to an unknown; would feeling be waiting for us on the other side? There may be solace in believing that it is reserved for the self who is not yet – and that its loss might be a price too incommensurable to pay in order for one to become who one believes themselves to be.

Summary in Portuguese

A aproximação entre “O Espelho”, de Machado de Assis”, e “Se eu fosse eu”, de Clarice Lispector”, solicita uma comparação entre duas técnicas de individuação: o espelho e o diálogo. Ambos são eternos fabricadores de eus alternativos e moradas da reflexão. O conto de Machado explora a diferença entre eles; o texto de Lispector oferece uma resposta e um contraponto interessantes ao tratamento de Machado da individuação enquanto tragédia de enganos. Podemos pensar no eu a partir de duas premissas: um eu pode ser uma entidade interna que, no seu próprio espaço fenoménico, observa o mundo, ou pode tornar-se o próprio objecto da observação. O nosso eu observa um eu, e esta observação pode assumir a forma de uma tensão entre aquilo que acreditamos ser, nós mesmos, e certas acções que possamos julgar como incaracterísticas. Esta dicotomia interior/exterior enquadra a abertura de “O Espelho”, na qual dois espaços são caracterizados por meio de uma distinção na natureza da luz: “a sala era pequena, alumiada a velas, cuja luz fundia-se misteriosamente com o luar que vinha de fora.” Tal como a alma, estas duas qualidades da luz “fundiam-se misteriosamente”, e esta nova dupla luz alicerça as questões centrais, no texto, de legibilidade, colocando-se entre (se não o espelho e a lâmpada) o espelho e a vela.

[Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1955]

Maria Apostolidou
University of Ioannina   

Coming across The Talented Mr. Ripley for the first time, the unsuspecting reader might anticipate a story about a central character named Ripley or, in other words, a novel that focuses on the life and opinions of a specific person. As the reading progresses, however, the reader’s expectations fall apart; the protagonist’s consolidated identity as prescribed by the title —a man, Anglo-Saxon in origin, socially reputable (Mr. Ripley)— is systematically destabilized and undermined, and, eventually, proven to be non-existent. At the end of the novel, the reader is left with a strong sense of the oxymoron that lies in the choice of a such a restrictive, bold, and fixed title for a novel which focuses on the unstable, the indefinable, the perpetually elusive.

Ripley’s shady, semi-clandestine lifestyle provides him with a first-class opportunity to unfold his talent in pretense and disguise, and to render, finally, this liquidity and this ongoing displacement into existential and ontological choices. And, although the distance between such acts as, on one hand, accounting fraud and, on the other, the murderous usurpation of another’s identity and property, may be long, Ripley covers it with a certain ease. Both cases seem to be governed by some common rules and terms, which the hero has managed to conquer to the highest degree. These rules and terms are no other than the natural, primordial laws of adaptability and camouflage, laws that, when applied in nature, ensure to the fittest organisms not only survival and longevity, but also superiority over other organisms. Thus, alternating among names, qualities, addresses, habits, physical appearance and attitude, Ripley demonstrates a unique readiness to meet the challenges of every moment. His clothes, accessories, and make-up, his astute reflexes, as well as his impressive ability to penetrate into the interlocutor’s, or the victim’s, mind and soul can only be read as evidence of camouflage, as signs of his unparalleled adaptability and alertness. Especially when he delves into his interlocutor’s mind, when he tries to read his/her thoughts, to anticipate his/her possible questions, objections and maneuvers, his virtuosity in the struggle for survival really reaches its peak; in such moments, the narration, while diffracted in the possible parallel realities devised by Ripley’s productive mind, becomes suffocating and vertiginous, illustrating thereby the trap meticulously set up for both the interlocutor and the reader.

Ripley’s tendency to invent realities, to elaborate possible scenarios, to camouflage himself, and to hide behind façades, should be understood with reference to his predilection for theater and performance. His overall behavior, manners, and attitude are the results of a systematic —if not voyeuristic— observation of others, and of impeccable imitation; his clothes, as well as the interiors of his personal spaces, function as theatrical costumes and sets, the presence and arrangement of which are never accidental, but rather serve a specific purpose. This way, Ripley turns out to be a director not only of himself, but also of the life and behavior of the people surrounding him; without being perceived he manipulates them through the projection of imaginary situations, encouraging the formation of specific feelings and thoughts and dictating specific reactions, always, of course, in his own interest.

If Ripley does nothing more than reactivate his innate, primordial tendencies and if, for him, the path to prosperity runs through deception and violence, then his behavior and mentality should not be measured against a morale imposed by social or religious decorum. Considered in the perspective of natural law and of fundamental animal instincts, this way of living is disentangled from the need of moral judgment, from the need to be classified as “good” or “bad”. Ripley kills, lies, pretends, forges, imitates, moves from one place to another, only to survive and to ensure his supremacy over his competitors. In so doing, he behaves, mutatis mutandis, as any other living creature in nature.

This amoral assessment of Ripley’s demeanor strips the hero of any degree of “satanic greatness”. His delinquent action may stem from rational and clear thinking; yet it does not serve a sublime purpose, nor is it part of a plan of common good and salvation, as, for example, is the case of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The murders committed by Ripley and the hijacking of other people’s identities are not foreshadowed by his initial portrayal (before he leaves America), but they arise impulsively as results of his vigorous instinct for self-preservation. It is this absence of depth and of ideological background in Ripley’s criminal behavior and the dimension of primitivism it entails, that render him not an attractive villain, but an essentially banal one. Moreover, unlike the heroes of romanticism and of aestheticism, Ripley doesn’t seek in a dead or abused body any kind of morbid pleasure or of aesthetic satisfaction. From this perspective, Ripley’s activity seems to fall directly into the realm of the “banality of evil”, to invoke Hannah Arendt, not because it comes from an ordinary person in a recurring mode, but rather because it is an instinctive, mechanical reaction, almost imposed by the struggle for survival.

And yet, there is also a tender side to Ripley, aspects of which can be traced in his attitude towards Clio and towards the Greenleafs. Especially with the former, who is presented as a talented artist, he develops a fraternal, platonic relationship which is opposed to the rather shallow and —if not carnal— certainly more materialistic and sordid relationship between Dickie and Marge. His sensitivity is most fully unveiled in his childlike admiration for the various emblematic European cities. His admiration for Europe, his keenness to explore it, and the care with which he chooses to integrate European art into his everyday life, show that for him, as for Clio, Europe, taken as a cradle of art and culture, becomes a locus amoenus. This is a place where one can, and should, seek relief from misery and where one can, and should, experience the pursuit of the sublime, the elegant, the ideal. It is obvious that this idealization of Europe stems from his disdain for the “American way of life”, which is considered equivalent to conformism, materialism, and superficiality. To Ripley, Marge serves as a stereotype of the American Way with her studied lightness, her obsessive consumption (of food, perfumes, household appliances), all complemented by her insistence on having an affair and, possibly, a conventional marriage with Dickie. Dickie’s alienation from Ripley, and his reevaluation of Marge and of his American friends, could be interpreted as a progressive abandonment of the bohemian life and as a gradual shift towards the conventional, conservative, and ‘settled-down’ American lifestyle.

 All this fluidity and disintegration are, lastly, reflected by the narrative; as the traditional, third-person point of view is often interrupted by phrases in direct speech (often in Italian), by letters, as well as by newspaper articles. The narrating consciousness merges into a polyphonic novel that combines different registers: the elaborate diction of both original and spurious letters, the pomposities of journalism, the cold language of the authorities, the emotional language of people, the puzzling language of pretense and concealment. All these elements coalesce, but the result is not a clearer, more objective, and multifaceted depiction of reality. On the contrary, the novel offers only a hyper-realism, defined by heightened ambiguity and, finally, negation.

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For the Greek version please read below

Ο κ. Ripley και η κοινοτοπία του ταλέντου

[Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1955]

Μαρία Αποστολίδου
Πανεπιστήμιο Ιωαννίνων

Ξεκινώντας τον Ταλαντούχο κύριο Ripley, ο αναγνώστης περιμένει να διαβάσει μια ιστορία με έναν κεντρικό ήρωα ονόματι Ripley, ή, με άλλα λόγια, ένα μυθιστόρημα που έχει ως επίκεντρο τα έργα και τις ημέρες ενός πολύ συγκεκριμένου προσώπου. Ωστόσο, καθώς προχωρεί η ανάγνωση, οι προσδοκίες του αναγνώστη διαψεύδονται˙ η παγιωμένη ταυτότητα του πρωταγωνιστή έτσι όπως αυτή προδιαγράφεται από τον τίτλο —άνδρας, αγγλοσαξονικής καταγωγής, κοινωνικά ευυπόληπτος (κύριος)— αποσταθεροποιείται και υπονομεύεται συστηματικά, για να αποδειχτεί, τελικά, ανύπαρκτη. Έτσι, στο τέλος πια του έργου, μένει στον αναγνώστη η αίσθηση ενός οξύμωρου το οποίο προκύπτει από την επιλογή ενός τίτλου τόσο περιοριστικού, στιβαρού και συγκεκριμένου για ένα μυθιστόρημα με θέμα το ασταθές, το μη προσδιορίσιμο και το διαρκώς διαφεύγον.

Ο σκιώδης, ημιπαράνομος τρόπος ζωής του Ripley τού παρέχει τη δυνατότητα να ξεδιπλώσει την έφεσή του στην προσποίηση και τη μεταμφίεση και να αναγάγει, τελικά, τη ρευστότητα και τη διαρκή μετατόπιση σε υπαρκτικές, οντολογικές επιλογές. Και, μολονότι η απόσταση ανάμεσα στις λογιστικές απάτες και στη δολοφονία και την υφαρπαγή της ταυτότητας και της περιουσίας ενός ανθρώπου είναι μεγάλη, εντούτοις, ο Ripley τη διανύει με σχετική ευκολία, καθώς και οι δύο περιπτώσεις φαίνεται να διέπονται από κοινούς κανόνες και όρους, τους οποίους ο ήρωας έχει φροντίσει να κατακτήσει στον υπέρτατο βαθμό. Αυτοί δεν είναι άλλοι από τους φυσικούς, αρχέγονους νόμους της προσαρμοστικότητας και του καμουφλάζ, νόμους που, στη φύση, αξιοποιούνται από τους ποικίλους οργανισμούς για την εξασφάλιση όχι μόνο της επιβίωσης και της μακροημέρευσής τους, αλλά και της υπεροχής τους έναντι των άλλων οργανισμών. Έτσι, ο Ripley επιδεικνύει μοναδική ετοιμότητα στο να ανταποκριθεί στις προκλήσεις κάθε στιγμής, αλλάζοντας όνομα, ιδιότητα, διεύθυνση, συνήθειες, εξωτερική εμφάνιση και ύφος. Τα ρούχα, τα αξεσουάρ, το μακιγιάζ, τα οξυμένα αντακλαστικά, καθώς και η εντυπωσιακή ικανότητά του να ψυχογραφεί τον εκάστοτε συνομιλητή ή το εκάστοτε θύμα του δεν μπορούν να διαβαστούν παρά ως αδιάσειστα τεκμήρια καμουφλάζ, ως αποδείξεις της απαράμιλλης προσαρμοστικότητάς του. Ειδικά όταν ψυχογραφεί τον συνομιλητή του, όταν προσπαθεί να προβλέψει πιθανές απορίες, ενστάσεις και κινήσεις του, η δεξιοτεχνία του στον αγώνα της επιβίωσης φτάνει πραγματικά στο απόγειό της˙ πρόκειται για στιγμές κατά τις οποίες ο λόγος της αφήγησης, καθώς διαθλάται στις παράλληλες πιθανές πραγματικότητες που κατασκευάζει ο Ripley στο μυαλό του, γίνεται ασφυκτικός και ιλιγγιώδης, εικονοποιώντας με τον τρόπο αυτό την παγίδα που μεθοδικά στήνεται τόσο στον συνομιλητή, όσο και στον αναγνώστη.

Η τάση του Ripley να επινοεί σενάρια και να κρύβεται πίσω από προσωπεία θα πρέπει να συσχετιστεί με την έλξη που του ασκεί το θέατρο, το ματαιωμένο του όνειρο. Όλη του η συμπεριφορά, οι τρόποι, το ύφος είναι αποτελέσματα συστηματικής —ηδονοβλεπτικής θα λέγαμε— παρατήρησης των άλλων και, εν τέλει, άψογης μίμησης, ενώ τα ρούχα του και το εσωτερικό των προσωπικών του χώρων λειτουργούν ως θεατρικά κοστούμια και σκηνικά, η παρουσία και η διαρρύθμιση των οποίων δεν είναι ποτέ τυχαία αλλά εξυπηρετεί συγκεκριμένη σκοπιμότητα. Έτσι, τελικά, ο ίδιος ο Ripley εξελίσσεται σε σκηνοθέτη όχι μόνο του εαυτού του, αλλά και της ζωής και της συμπεριφοράς των άλλων προσώπων, στον βαθμό που, ανεπαισθήτως, μέσα από την προβολή επίπλαστων καταστάσεων, τους υποβάλλει συγκεκριμένα συναισθήματα και συγκεκριμένες σκέψεις και τους υπαγορεύει συγκεκριμένες αντιδράσεις, πάντοτε, βέβαια, προς το συμφέρον του. 

 Αν λοιπόν ο Ripley δεν κάνει τίποτα άλλο πέρα από το να επανενεργοποιεί έμφυτές του αρχέγονες ροπές και αν για αυτόν, ο δρόμος για την προσωπική ευημερία περνά μέσα από την εξαπάτηση και τη βία, τότε η νοοτροπία του δεν θα πρέπει να αποτιμηθεί με βάση μια ιδέα περί ηθικής επιβεβλημένη από το κοινωνικό ή το θρησκευτικό decorum. Τοποθετημένος, αντίθετα, στην προοπτική του φυσικού νόμου και των πρωτογενών ζωικών ενστίκτων, αυτός ο τρόπος ζωής απαλλάσσεται αυτομάτως από την ανάγκη ηθικού προσδιορισμού, από την ανάγκη για χαρακτηρισμό του ως «καλού» ή «κακού». Ο Ripley σκοτώνει, ψεύδεται, προσποιείται, πλαστογραφεί, μιμείται, μετακινείται προκειμένου να επιβιώσει και να εξασφαλίσει την υπεροχή του έναντι των ανταγωνιστών και, υπό αυτή την έννοια, συμπεριφέρεται, τηρουμένων των αναλογιών, όπως ένας οποιοδήποτε έμβιος οργανισμός μέσα στη φύση. 

Αυτή η αμοραλιστική θεώρηση της δράσης του Ripley τον απογυμνώνει από οποιαδήποτε διάσταση «σατανικού μεγαλείου». Η παραβατική του δράση προκύπτει μεν κατόπιν λογικής και διαυγούς σκέψης, δεν υπηρετεί δε κάποιον υψηλό σκοπό και δεν εντάσσεται σε ένα σχέδιο κοινής ωφέλειας και σωτηρίας, όπως π.χ. συμβαίνει με τον ντοστογιεφσκικό Raskolnikov στο Έγκλημα και τιμωρία. Οι δολοφονίες που διαπράττει ο Ripley και η οικειοποίηση, εκ μέρους του, αλλότριων ταυτοτήτων δεν προμηνύονται από τη σκιαγράφηση του χαρακτήρα του πριν αναχωρήσει για την Ευρώπη, αλλά προκύπτουν παρορμητικά ως αποτελέσματα του ενεργού ενστίκτου της αυτοσυντήρησης. Ακριβώς αυτή η απουσία βάθους και ιδεολογικού υπόβαθρου από την εγκληματική συμπεριφορά του Ripley και η διάσταση της ζωικότητας, του πρωτόγονου και ενστικτώδους που εμπεριέχει τον καθιστούν έναν απολύτως κοινότοπο και καθόλου γοητευτικό «κακό» ήρωα. Επιπροσθέτως, σκοτώνοντας και εξαπατώντας, ο Ripley δεν αντλεί, κατά το πρότυπο ενός ήρωα του ρομαντισμού ή του αισθητισμού, κάποιου είδους νοσηρή ηδονή, ούτε αναζητά την αισθητική ικανοποίηση που ενδεχομένως προσφέρει το νεκρό ή το κακοποιημένο σώμα. Κατόπιν τούτων, η δράση του Ripley θα μπορούσε να ενταχθεί στην περιοχή του «κοινότοπου κακού», έτσι όπως αυτή περιγράφηκε από τη Hannah Arendt, στον βαθμό πουείναι όχι τόσο συνηθισμένη και επαναλαμβανόμενη, όσο αντίδραση ενστικτώδης και μηχανική.

Πάντως ο Ripley φαίνεται να διαθέτει και μια συναισθηματική πλευρά, όψεις της οποίας διακρίνονται στη στάση του απέναντι στην Clio και το ζεύγος Greenleaf. Ειδικά με την πρώτη, η οποία —ας τονιστεί— σκιαγραφείται ως αξιόλογη καλλιτέχνιδα, αναπτύσσει μια αδελφική, πλατωνική σχέση, που τίθεται στον αντίποδα της μάλλον ρηχής και, αν όχι σαρκικής, σίγουρα πάντως περισσότερο υλικής και ιδιοτελούς σχέσης Dickie – Marge. Η ευαισθησία του Ripleyξεδιπλώνεται πλήρως στον σχεδόν παιδικό θαυμασμό του για τις διάφορες εμβληματικές ευρωπαϊκές πόλεις. Ο ενθουσιασμός του για την Ευρώπη, η προσδοκία του να την εξερευνήσει και η φροντίδα με την οποία ενσωματώνει την ευρωπαϊκή τέχνη στην καθημερινή του ζωή φανερώνουν ότι για αυτόν, όπως και για την Clio, η Ευρώπη, ως λίκνο της τέχνης και του πολιτισμού, είναι ένας locus amoenus, ένας τόπος όπου κατεξοχήν κανείς μπορεί και οφείλει να απαλλαγεί από τη μιζέρια, να αναζητήσει την καλαισθησία, να βιώσει το ιδανικό και το υψηλό. Είναι φανερό ότι σε αυτή την εξιδανίκευση της Ευρώπης υπόκειται η περιφρόνηση του αμερικανικού τρόπου ζωής που θεωρείται ισοδύναμος με τον κομφορμισμό, τον υλισμό και τη ρηχότητα. Τυπική εκπρόσωπός του η Marge με την αφόρητα ενοχλητική, για τον Ripley, ελαφρότητά της, την προσήλωσή της στην κατανάλωση αγαθών (φαγητό, αρώματα, οικιακές συσκευές), καθώς και την επιμονή της στη σύναψη ερωτικού δεσμού και, πιθανώς, συμβατικού γάμου με τον Dickie. Σε ό,τι αφορά αυτόν τον τελευταίο, η απομάκρυνσή του από τον Ripley και η επανεκτίμηση της συντροφιάς της Marge και των Αμερικανών φίλων θα μπορούσε να προσληφθεί ως εγκατάλειψη, εκ μέρους του, του μέχρι πρότινος μποέμ βίου και ως σταδιακή μεταστροφή του προς τον συντηρητικό και νοικοκυρεμένο αμερικανικό τρόπο ζωής.

 Όλη αυτή η ρευστότητα και ο κατακερματισμός αναπαρίστανται, τέλος, και αφηγηματικά, καθώς η παραδοσιακή, τριτοπρόσωπη αφήγηση διακόπτεται πολύ συχνά από ευθύ λόγο (συχνά στα ιταλικά), από επιστολές και από δημοσιεύματα εφημερίδων. Όλα αυτά τα στοιχεία συνθέτουν, τελικά, ένα πολυφωνικό μυθιστόρημα που συνδυάζει διαφορετικά επίπεδα λόγου (τον υπολογισμένο λόγο των γνήσιων και των ψευδεπίγραφων επιστολών, τον πομπώδη λόγο της δημοσιογραφίας, τον ψυχρό λόγο των αρχών, τον συναισθηματικό λόγο των προσώπων, τον αινιγματικό λόγο της προσποίησης και της απόκρυψης), με σκοπό όχι την πολύπλευρη και άρα διαυγή και αντικειμενική απόδοση της πραγματικότητας, αλλά, αντιθέτως, την περαιτέρω συσκότισή της και, ακόμα περισσότερο, την ίδια την αναίρεσή της.

Thoughts on Displacement in Britten’s Owen Wingrave

Bianca De Mario
Università degli Studi di Milano

1971, May 16^th. Owen Wingrave, an opera for television composed by Benjamin Britten, directed by Brian Large and Colin Graham and produced by John Culshaw, is broadcast on BBC Two England. Much like The Turn of the Screw the subject was inspired by an unusual ghost story of the same title by Henry James (1892), later adapted for the stage (The Saloon, 1910), and transposed into a libretto by Myfanwy Piper. 

^{I looked around among all the stories that I could think of immediately, for a story which would be most suitable to the medium television. […] It needed a story which would show individuals reacting, to show there are reactions to each other, where the events could be a personal, private kind, rather than big and public which obviously a big stage needs.} 

As Britten explains in Extracts from ‘Music now’, a documentary about the opera making-of, he was attracted by the «bombshell» dropped by a young fellow in the middle of a family. This dramatic factor, generating an unstoppable chain of personal reactions, is Owen Wingrave’s ultimate decision to quit Sundhurst, the Royal Military Academy. As the last descendant of a glorious family, Owen will break the long military tradition of his family, thus precluding his financial future as heir and, consequently, the engagement with his self-absorbed fiancée Kate Julian. 

Before considering how the composer and the TV director draw their audiovisual portrait of Owen, it is worth considering how Henry James’s source text was positioned to influence the artistic choices of Britten and Large.

Owen Wingrave immediately shows the characteristics of a thinker, who finds peace in reading and intellectual pleasure, a noble spirit who has learned «the “immeasurable misery” of wars». He is a displaced soul in that formidable «family circle», a constellation built around and devoted to highfalutin military glory. It’s not by chance that, Paramore, the living temple of the Wingraves, with its stifling paintings and its uncanny rooms, conceals horrible secrets about the violent death of a father and his young son. Longing for justice, Owen Wingrave, bends his eyes on his mentor, Spencer Coyle, and confesses his feelings about Paramore. 

^{«Oh, the house – the very air and feeling of it. There are strange voices in it that seem to mutter at me – to say dreadful things as I pass. […] I have started up all the old ghosts». (chapter 3)}

Constantly insulted by the suffocating circle of the living and oppressed by the portraits of his military ancestors which seem alive, Owen decides to challenge Paramore’s curse, by entering the ‘liminal zone’: the room where Oliver Wingrave lost his life, after accidentally (?) killing his son, who didn’t want to defend the family honor. Owen takes this action following a final argument with his fiancée, apparently to demonstrate that his pacifism has nothing to do with fear or cowardice. This explanation should be taken cautiously: first because James delivers the explanation by way of reported speech by young Lechmere – who, as his name indicates, is an inauthentic character addicted to flattery. Secondly because a payback for an insult would be too superficial an action for a character whose «superior wisdom» and integrity are constantly repeated. 

«To my sense he is, in a high sense of the term, a fighting man», answers Spencer Coyle to Kate, after a brief discussion. Owen’s extreme action could therefore be intended more as an act of rebellion, rather than a simple proof of courage: a revolt against Paramore and its family system, against this claustrophobic salon and a crushing past with its hereditary defects. The room is a haunted and liminal space, and Owen’s legitimate rage against his constricted life does not exclude, in my opinion, a need of freedom that exceeds – and probably demands – self-destruction. 

After these considerations, some excerpts from Britten’s opera for television (J. Barnes 2003) render this portrait of Owen’s existential displacement even more forcefully. The score by Benjamin Britten (in a sense, a displaced soul himself) is like a storyboard with the camera script, revealing a televisual composition thought.

Since the very beginning, the family’s attachment to military tradition is clear: the Prelude, with its martial theme, percussive and strict, resounds with the opening credits, with the Wingraves’ emblem on the back, then a close-up tracking shot starts on the family portraits. We are guided by the winds on this gallery and, portrait by portrait, the sustaining chord is enriched by a new note, till the tone row is reached on the image of colonel Oliver Wingrave, Owen’s father, dead on the field. 

After his confession to Spencer Coyle, Owen – interpreted by Benjamin Luxton – is sitting in Hyde Park (Act 1, Scene 2 – after the Interlude I). He is reading and thinking aloud:

^{At last it’s out. No doubt old Coyle will rage,
but in the end he’ll see I’m strong,
not mad or weak…
Strong against war,
unwilling to prepare
my mind and body for destruction.
One little word: no!
And I am released for ever from all the
bonds of family and war.}

The Owen put forth in Piper’s libretto is not the indistinct figure who barely speaks in James’s story. His ardent rage against war is expressed from its first lines and this scene expresses his most intimate thoughts. The image fades to Miss Wingrave, Owen’s terrible aunt, when Spencer Coyle tells her about his nephew’s decision not to be a soldier. It’s a virtual tercet, connected by the image of horse soldiers, and that’s the moment where, against the ‘war representatives’ he sings his believe against war, by quoting Book IV of P. B. Shelley’s Queen Mab:

^{‘War is the statesman’s game,
the priest’s delight,
The lawyer’s jest…
(always soft)
And, to those royal murderers,
whose mean thrones are bought
by crimes of treachery and gore…
Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surround
Their palaces, participate the crimes
That force defends…
These are the hired bravos who defend
The tyrant’s throne… the bullies of his fear…
The refuse of society, the dregs
Of all that is most vile…
They cajole with gold,
And promises of fame, the thoughtless youth
Already crushed with servitude: he knows
His wretchedness too late…
Look to thyself,
priest, conqueror, or prince!
Whether thy trade is falsehood…}

A third peculiar moment in the opera is the dinner with Uncle Philip – interpreted by Peter Pears – and the family circle (Act I, Scene 7): the bombshell Britten was looking for. The scenery is black, and the characters are lit only by the table candlelight. The camera passes from one to another, allowing us to see everyone’s trembling close-up, while they express, almost a cappella, their feeling about this uncomfortable situation. At first Owen is an embarrassed victim, in this in crescendo rhythm of wisecracks and injuries, then the collective explosion on the word «Scruples» and its obsessive echoing makes him react. 

^{OWEN
(standing)
Yes, and more…
(with force)
I’d make it a crime to draw your sword
for your country, and a crime
for governments to command it.
SIR PHILIP
(rising)
There’s no more to be said, I’ll leave you now.
(Sir Philip turns and hobbles off helped by a manservant. The servants bow the company out with Owen slowly following.)}

These are only some examples of how the score, interpretively transformed by televisual scription and filmic direction, translates the musical text into a profoundly visual rhythm. Sounds, voices, and visuals shape Owen’s physical and intellectual being, as he tries not only to survive the buffeting of familial history, but to emerge as an individual in an imposing and suffocating context.

Beyond the critics to the first streaming of the work, Owen Wingrave represents not only an interesting example of the relationship between opera and television – placed «within the boundaries of the classical Hollywood film genre» (S. McKellar 1999) – but an example of how a theme like this finds success in its following transpositions and/or remediation. In 1973, Britten was asked to conduct the opera for the Covent Garden production: the composer thus reversed the standard passage ‘from stage to screen’. Thanks to this, today Owen Wingrave is a minor almost a classic of contemporary Anglo-American opera, particularly beloved by college companies.  Owen Wingrave’s status was further underscored by the 2005 Arthaus Musik DVD release, a film opera by Margaret Williams, a real remake of the first opera for television (same framing, same fades, same references) – though unnatural it could be to consider an operatic event within the cinematic category of remake.  
Apart from all the hybrid forms opera gets in the age of media converge, a sort of displacement within the remediation – displacement of narrative after the displacement of the self – what is here in question is the way the same subject, the theme of either the young pacifist-intellectual (or simply sensitive soul), reshapes him/herself by emerging from (or withdrawing into) overwhelming societal forces. 

---

Summary in Italian

Fighting the Circle.
Riflessioni su Owen Wingrave di Benjamin Britten

Bianca De Mario 
Università degli Studi di Milano

Il 16 maggio 1971 va in onda sul secondo canale della BBC Owen Wingrave, un’opera per la televisione commissionata a Benjamin Britten dall’emittente britannica e prodotta da John Culshaw, per la regia di Brian Large e Colin Graham. Proprio come The Turn of the Screw, il soggetto è tratto dall’omonimo racconto di Henry James, un’inconsueta ghost story (1892), adattata dallo stesso James per il teatro (The Saloon, 1910) con esiti piuttosto deludenti, e ora rivisitato per Britten da Myfanwy Piper. 

La «bomba» del dramma, così come la definisce Britten, il fattore che genera una serie di inarrestabili reazioni a catena, è la decisione del giovane Owen, ultimo discendente dei Wingrave, di abbandonare Sundhurst (Accademia Militare Reale), interrompendo così la solida tradizione militare della famiglia. Oppresso dalle ingiurie di questa cerchia familiare ingombrante e claustrofobica, Owen, per dimostrare che il suo antimilitarismo non ha nulla a che vedere con onore e coraggio, sfiderà la maledizione della dimora dei Wingrave, Paramore, entrando in una stanza maledetta e oltrepassando il confine vita-morte. 

Uomo mite e fiero intellettuale, già descritto da Henry James come individuo totalmente estraneo al contesto in cui si trova invischiato, Owen Wingrave diviene nella sua trasposizione operistica un personaggio totalmente fuori posto. Schiacciato da un’ingombrante tara ereditaria e soffocato da quel salotto che l’opera per la televisione ha saputo ricreare, Owen canta il proprio credo antimilitare, mentre la macchina da presa ci fa entrare, con la musica, nelle nebbie dei suoi pensieri, sino alla rivolta finale. 

Interessante esempio della relazione tra opera e televisione, l’opera di Britten conoscerà, nell’epoca della convergenza mediatica, vari adattamenti, in cui il tema dell’intellettuale estraneo e isolato nella società, trova un fertile terreno di rimodulazione. 

A poem by Paul Cunningham, inspired by the movie I know where I’m going! (1945) by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The movie was scheduled during INCH latest workshop on the theme of “Dispaced Selves”. You can find the italian translation at the bottom of the post .

I Know Where I’m Going

by Paul Cunningham

“Oh we live off the country. Rabbits, deer, a stray hiker or two.”
-Catriona Potts 

earth is deserting the earth, and somehow
   I’m smiling       aren’t I? 
just passing through a see-through acid rain
Am I falling to my knees, or rising to my feet?
I wake up in the baggage car, in a gyre’s blur
   In love?   Apple of your Kino eye, 
you’re sure keen on knowing where I’m going
   And don’t I know it!
I know it like the copper in my bones knows
the melting point, the exclamation mark
   of our sublime climate
alone, I charge through a mist of endless night,
and you insist on stars as I begin to end 
   You and I? This is my stop. 
It’s why I maintain a sharp tenor when I travel,
like a stranger’s reflection in any mirror or knife
   I’m just passing through

So dove sto andando

“Oh, viviamo fuori dal paese. Conigli, cervi, uno o due escursionisti sperduti. “
-Catriona Potts

la terra sta abbandonando la terra, e in qualche modo
   Sto sorridendo,     no?
solo di passaggio attraverso un pioggia acida trasparente
Sto cadendo in ginocchio, o mi sto alzando in piedi?
Mi sveglio nel vagone bagagli, in un vortice confuso
   Innamorata?    Luce del tuo Kino-Eye*,
hai proprio voglia di  sapere dove sto andando
   Come se non lo sapessi!
Lo so come il rame nelle mie ossa conosce
il punto di fusione, il punto esclamativo
   del nostro clima sublime
solo, mi avventuro nella nebbia di una notte senza fine,
e tu insisti sulle stelle mentre io comincio a finire
   Io e te? Questa è la mia fermata.
È per questo che mantengo un tono tagliente quando viaggio,
come il riflesso di uno sconosciuto in uno specchio o in un coltello
   Sono solo di passaggio

(italian translation by Sara De Simone)

* Kino-eye: Tecnica cinematografica sviluppata in Russia dal documentarista Dziga Vertov

AUTHOR’S BIO

Paul Cunningham is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the interlingual poetry collection, The House of the Tree of Sores (Schism 2 Press, 2020). His latest chapbook of poetry is The Inmost, forthcoming from Carrion Bloom Books in 2020. From the Swedish, he is the translator of Helena Österlund’s Words (OOMPH! Press, 2019) and two chapbooks by Sara Tuss Efrik: Automanias (Goodmorning Menagerie, 2016) and The Night’s Belly (Toad Press, 2016). His creative and critical work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day, Quarterly West, Bat City Review, DIAGRAM, Harvard Review, Kenyon Review, and others. He is a managing editor of Action Books, founding editor of Deluge, co-editor of Radioactive Cloud, and co-curator of the Yumfactory Reading Series in Athens, GA. He is a PhD candidate in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, an invited member of the International Network for Comparative Studies, and he holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Notre Dame.