XXXIV Aedean Conference (Almería 2010)
PANEL: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE (Coordinator: Juan Carlos Hidalgo)
SESSION 1
Freakery and the Spectacle of the Divergent Body in Hilary Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien
Lin Elinor Pettersson (University of Malaga)
“Remarkably Unpolitical”: Really? Contextualising a Political Reading of Jane Austen’s 'Lady Susan'
David Owen (University Autonoma Barcelona)
SESSION 2
Arrabalian Echoes in Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman
María José Díez García (University of Salamanca)
The Hyperreality of Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association Henry J. Waugh Prop."
Esther Claudio Moreno (University Complutense Madrid)
SESSION 3 (ROUND TABLE)
Brave New World Re-Explored: Aldous Huxley's Critique of Utopian Thought
Bernfried Nugel (University of Münster)
Participants: Bernfried Nugel, Chair (University of Münster, Germany), James Sexton (Camosun College, Victoria, Canada) and Jesús Gómez López (University of Almeria)
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
ABSTRACTS
Freakery and the Spectacle of the Divergent Body in Hilary Mantel's The Giant, O'Brien
Lin Elinor Pettersson (University of Malaga)
This paper undertakes the examination of freakery as a social construct in Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien (1998). The novel is based on the life of Charles Byrne, an Irish giant who in the eighteenth century made his living as a human exhibit in the London freak shows. Mantel recycles the past to re-imagine the giant’s history and reconsider “the freak” as a human being. The author is mainly concerned with the question of human value and power relations in this novel, and I argue that she engages the reader to take a stand by offering two parallel stories be the abused and the abuser. I will focus on the performative aspects of the representation of the giant and how this concerns his status as a human being. His in-between status and doubtful nature is materialized in his ambiguous body and symbolized in a moment of historical transition. The view of physically disabled people as freaks relies heavily on how they are represented to the public. Mantel centres the narration outside the spectacle of the freak show and offers the reader insight into the life of the man behind the freak. She uses the historical novel both to revise history and to comment on the present, and thereby involve the reader to reflect over the human question.
Keywords: Hilary Mantel, The Giant, O’Brien, Freakery, Humanity
“Remarkably Unpolitical”: Really? Contextualising a Political Reading of Jane Austen’s 'Lady Susan'
David Owen (University Autonoma Barcelona)
“Lady Susan” is not usually seen as a political text, nor indeed is Austen often seen as a political writer. But this paper contends that the internecine warring between Lady Susan’s antagonistic sisters-in-law is used by Austen precisely to reflect the broader political struggles in late C18 England, following the French Revolution. Lady Susan Vernon and Catherine Vernon battle for control of family, estate and moral terrain, replicating the wider discord that was occurring amongst the ‘siblings’ of the national family. The generally accepted critical view has conventionally understood this text to be primarily ‘about’ Susan Vernon’s escapades, to the detriment of all other characters. My assessment of the novella challenges Susan’s exclusive centrality, positing instead that Austen’s concern actually lies with the constant conflict between the two Vernon women, whom I see as equally central. By locating their discord within a traditional, rural English family, threatened by the machinations of an urbane socialite, Austen delineates the Jacobin destructiveness facing conservative England, and emphasises the need for the nation to respond, as one family, in order to heal itself and avoid calamity. By considering the political context in which the novella was written, this reading sees Lady Susan as a conservative call to arms that not only affirms its political character and that of its author, but that also highlights the intensity of Austen’s early ideological expression that would so thoroughly be submerged in her later work.
Keywords: Jane Austen. “Lady Susan”. Jacobin/Anti-Jacobin Factions. French Revolution. Politics and the Novel.
Arrabalian Echoes in Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman
María José Díez García (University of Salamanca)
During the nineties, British drama enjoyed a significant renaissance. The so-called “in-yer-face aesthetics” emerged through the disturbing plays of the younger generation of writers. When his debut play, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, was opened in 1996, Martin McDonagh, the now Oscar-awarded writer/director, was then considered as one of the most promising playwrights of the decade. Certainly, most of McDonagh’s plays, set in an uncomfortable rural Ireland, involve gruesome representations of excessive violence onstage. They contain the ingredients necessary for evoking the most unexpected emotional responses in the audience: exaggerated cruelty, gore elements and dark humour. Out of London/the Uk, innovative forms of theatrical transgression have also happened in the second half of the twentieth century. There is no question about the significant role of Fernando Arrabal when considering the avant-garde theatre. During his 'panic period', Arrabal stages likewise savage grotesqueries which assault audience’s senses. Therefore, in this paper I will analyze what some of the most relevant features of McDonagh’s most recent published play The Pillowman (2003) are, as well as I will briefly explore the Arrabalian echoes/tropes present in the play, by paying particular attention to El Laberinto (1956), one of his pre-panic plays clearly inspired by Kafka’s surrealistic world.
Keywords: Martin McDonagh, Arrabal, in-yer-face-theatre, shock tactics, theatrical transgression, theatre of cruelty
The Hyperreality of Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association Henry J. Waugh Prop."
Esther Claudio Moreno (University Complutense Madrid)
Baudrillard defines postmodernity as the time of simulacra, of the substitution of the real by the signs of the real. Based on Saussure, he states that the order between signifiers and meaning has been inverted in postmodern society, so the signifier, the referent, the icon, precedes the meaning, the referee, the real basis of the sign. Thus, the simulacra give rise to an autonomous and self-sufficient world, what Baudrillard calls “hyperreality” and Henry Waugh, the protagonist of Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” materializes in his imaginary baseball game. Henry, an unsuccessful office clerk, cuts himself from reality in a simulated life, in this case a baseball game which “re-creates” his existence and works as an escape route from a grey and humdrum life. Throughout the novel we witness the recreation of a hyperreal world, the Universal Baseball Association, where the signs of the real substitute what they represented until one day, all of a sudden, they overrun reality. In the enigmatic last chapter of the novel, Henry disappears and the only characters remaining are the descendants of his players one hundred years later. Like the postmodern subject, they find their lives meaningless because they only have the signs of what the game originally meant. By taking his imaginary world to the extreme, Henry becomes the archetype of the pessimistic and, at times, exaggerated baudrillardian thinking. Hyperreality is the order of a hedonistic, narcissistic and consumer society, where the nonexistent is real because fiction seems to be the only possible reality for characters like Henry who need to be surrounded by a solipsistic fantasy in order to deal with life. Traditionally considered a novel about creativity and demythologization, we intend to offer an interpretation about the boundaries between reality and fiction in the time of virtual reality.
Keywords: hyperreality, postmodernism, simulacrum, escapism, solipsism.
SESSION 3 (ROUND TABLE)
Brave New World Re-Explored: Aldous Huxley's Critique of Utopian Thought
Bernfried Nugel (University of Münster)
Participants: Bernfried Nugel, Chair (University of Münster, Germany), James Sexton (Camosun College, Victoria, Canada) and Jesús Gómez López (University of Almería)
Aldous Huxley’s world-famous negative utopia Brave New World (1932) is still widely praised for its amazing topicality even in our 21st century. Dystopia as well as anti-utopia, Brave New World satirizes seemingly positive concepts, such as genetic and social engineering, community, identity and stability, technological and cultural progress, the pleasure principle including free love and happiness induced by drugs as well as pleasant substitutes for religion. Huxley offers no easy solutions but, as he put it himself in his 1946 foreword to the novel, a thought-provoking impossible choice between the insanity of the brave new world and the lunacy of a primitivistic society in an Indian reservation. Above all, instead of pleading for optimistic blueprints of a perfect society in the vein of H.G. Wells, Huxley rather aimed at a fundamental critique of utopian thought. I. As chairman of the Round Table I propose to give a very brief overview of the categories in which Huxley’s anti-utopianism manifests itself in Brave New World (BNW). These are: (1) Process of composition: authorial intention, sources and textual documents; early Huxley writings related to BNW (2) BNW as literary work of art: themes, structure, characters, style; dystopian and satiric elements; names of persons and places; setting: London vs. America (3) Genre aspects: comparison with H.’s other utopias and the literary tradition: (a) Ape and Essence (1948) (b) Brave New World: A Musical Comedy (1956) (c) Island (1962) (d) Morus to Wells (4) Critical reception: (a) Huxley’s own hints (1932 motto, 1946 foreword, Brave New World Revisited); (b) avenues of criticism: — utopia vs. satire — genetic engineering — social relevance: caste system, manipulation; pleasure principle, stability, technological progress — prophetic potential: see, e.g., Brave New World Revisited; cloning; standardization; over-organization; centralization / globalization — cultural dimension: modern state vs. Indian reservation; abolition of literature and the arts; religious substitutes; drugs. II. Within this framework I intend to focus on two exemplary perspectives, one from outside and one from inside the novel, for which I have invited two speakers from Canada and Spain respectively. The former deals with little-known early Huxley writings that were of import for the process of composition (see above, rubric 1), and the latter discusses a specific cultural dimension, the role of poetry in a dystopian milieu (see above, rubric 4b). Here are their abstracts: (1) I propose to present a survey of key pre-1932 essays, all of which served as sketches or drafts of ideas that would later be fleshed out in the novel. I will also discuss his little-known full-length play Now More than Ever (1931-32), and “Utopias, Positive and Negative,” both of which help to clarify his satirical intentions in BNW. Among those early essays which provide a rich context for his most famous dystopia, “Notes on Decoration” and “Puritanism in Art”—both published in 1930— provide an interesting architectural context, especially his hostility to the work of Le Corbusier, who could be considered the unacknowledged third person of the Fordian dispensations’s trinity, the other two being Ford and Freud. I will also refer briefly to Huxley’s amusing account of a brief exchange between Dalí and LeCorbusier as well as to Julio Camba’s essay “Los estados engomados” (ca. 1931). Two other short pieces, “Modern Amusements” (1928) and “Christ and the Present Crisis” (1932) invite parallels to some of D.H. Lawrence’s social commentary in Lady Chatterley’s Lover and in his essay “The Grand Inquisitor,” which will lead naturally into a discussion of Dostoevsky’s influence on BNW. “Pareto’s Museum of Human Stupidity” (1935) offers an opportunity to evaluate the influence of the Italian sociologist on both Now More than Ever and BNW. I will also illustrate my survey with various photos of contemporary satiric cartoons critical of both Communism and Capitalism, one of which appeared in Huxley’s review essay of The Mind and Face of Bolshevism. These materials, excerpted from my online teaching unit on BNW, will provide transition to a discussion of the satire on Ford and Lenin. (2) In his Poetics, Aristotle showed that the terms ‘poetry’ and ‘poet’ are not limited to verse but cover a much broader sense which involves all the different manifestations of literature. Thus, a novel is another mode of poetry and, consequently, a good novelist is, in some ways, a poet, too. In BNW, the Alpha social engineer Helmholtz Watson is quite unhappy with the World State, which he considers devoid of inspiration and conducive to a meaningless society. Therefore, he tries to find meaning in poetry, which he sees as a way of redemption for himself and for his surrounding world. He is fascinated by Shakespeare’s poetry. In this utilitarian simplicity ruled by the World State, which leads to abuse of technology and certain dehumanization, poetry or, at least, a poetic view of life through the eyes of Shakespeare is the only way to provide distinctiveness, self and truth to a humankind who is on the border of losing their essence and becoming what Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) called a simple “mass,” or quoting T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), “The Hollow Men.” With this approach, I will try to see the role of poetry, not merely as a form of literature restricted to rhythm and/or rhyme, but in its universal artistic dimension which appeals to the fundamental qualities of human beings: our consciousness of freedom, consciousness of individuality and consciousness of imagination. III. My specific contribution as chairman will concern a basic genre problem, i.e., the question to what degree Huxley’s dystopias are also anti-utopias. In my view, his adaptation of BNW as a musical comedy (1956) represents the culminating point of his anti-utopian thinking. By a brief analysis I hope to show that Huxley’s BNW musical pushes utopian concepts to their extremes and, by overtly ridiculing them, much more clearly demonstrates its anti-utopian character than the novel or Huxley’s second dystopia, Ape and Essence.