Jour nal of Literature
and Ar t Studies
Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30)
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Jour na l of Lit e rat ure
a nd Ar t St udie s
Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30)
Contents
Literature Studies
The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in The Flight From the Enchanter 325
XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua
Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities 338
Robin McAllister
Translation of Allusions in Fortress Besieged 345
ZHANG Qun-xing
Girl Power in Cashore’s Graceling 351
Suryo Tri Saksono, Syarifah, SS
Art Studies
A Study of the Styles of Early Taiwanese Bamboo Chairs According to the Methodology
of Style 359
Shih-Hsing Wu, Ying-Pin Cheng, Chi-Hsiung Chen
Crises of Socialism in China and Chinese Rock in 1980s: The Case of CUI Jian 375
WANG Xiang
Never, Ever Break Up a Family 384
Steven William Schaufele
Special Research
Revisiting Contemporary Judaism in Modern Israel 396
Uri Zur
From Sex Objects to Heroines—A Tough Road for Female Characters in Video Games 409
Adam Flamma
Argentina and Brazil: Laws as Mediators of Social Identities 418
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 325-337
The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in
The Flight From the Enchanter
∗
XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Iris Murdoch is a renowned female novelist and philosopher in the 20th century English literature. In her literary creation, she has a preference for male narration and holds a reserved attitude to women’s movements with reluctance to be considered as a feminist writer, which permits her realistic depiction of female characters and dispassionate thought on women’s problems. This paper, with the interpretation and redefinition of the concepts as consciousness, identity, and self in Murdoch’s philosophy, analyzes the fragmented self of three female figures in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) respectively from the perspectives of self-consciousness, identity, and self
and reveals that the fragmentation of female selfhood is mainly due to the overwhelming male dominance in the gender relationship.
Keywords: Iris Murdoch, identity, female selfhood, fragmentation
Introduction
Historically, both the patriarchal culture and discourse were of the opinion that female biology had its own
defects and limitations. “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”, said Aristotle, “we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). For St. Thomas,
woman was renounced as an “imperfect man”, an “incidental being” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Besides, “a man
is in the right in being a man; it is woman who is in the wrong” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Women were marginalized and disparaged with these defects. Consequently, both in the Victorian age and in the early 20th
century, the popular image of the ideal wife/woman came to be “the Angel in the House”. They were expected to be devoted and submissive to their husbands just like the Angel: passive and powerless, meek, charming,
sympathetic, pious, self-sacrificing, and above all—pure. In the modern society, the outbreak of the two world wars and the advancement of women’s movement brought the dramatic changes of the women’s roles
domestically and socially. The long-established traditional female selfhood has been disintegrated under the new social and cultural circumstances.
Although Murdoch insisted on her status of not being a feminist, she explored the crisis of female identity
∗
Acknowlegements: The paper is supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”, Project No. DUT14RW 212 and No. DUT12RW401.
XU Ming-ying, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages,DalianUniversity of Technology. SUI Xiao-di, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages,DalianUniversity of Technology. AN Xue-hua, master, associate professor, School of Foreign Languages,DalianUniversity of Technology.
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and its consequence, the fragmentation of the female selfhood as the major themes in her novels. In her opinion,
the process of the disintegration of the female selfhood is irreversible, and the roots of this disintegration are formulated at a much deeper level than the roots of the disintegration of the male selfhood in contemporaneous
texts. While they do share a sense of cultural crisis, the very core of this crisis is defined as the dualism inherent in the patriarchal system, a dualism that justifies women’s continual exclusion from the power and their
appropriation for the purposes of the male imagination and male desire.
This paper is intended to discuss the female characters’ disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity,
and disintegrated self and to demonstrate women’s fragmented selfhood in Murdoch’s early novel The Flight
from the Enchanter (1956). The symbolic title of the novel reinforces the sense of restriction, of being confined,
and of the desire for independent self. It underlines the basic theme of imprisonment and escapes which is common to most of Murdoch’s novels where physical confinement is not a necessary adjunct of enslavement;
moral and spiritual compulsions are more devastating; and the enchanters of the novels ensnare the hearts and minds of the female characters around them as surely as the settings enclose them.
The Disruption of Women’s Self-awareness
The philosophical state of self-awareness holds that one exists as an individual being, while
self-consciousness is a preoccupation with oneself as an acute sense of self-awareness (Lipka & Brinthaupt, 1992, p. 228). That is, self-awareness in a philosophical context is being conscious of oneself as an individual, while
self-consciousness is being excessively conscious of one’s appearance or manner. Self-awareness Theory states that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal
standards and values. However self-consciousness is not to be confused with self-awareness. We would not become self-conscious until we could function as objective evaluators of ourselves.
In some context, self-consciousness may affect the development of identity in varying degrees, as some people are constantly self-monitoring or self-involved, while others are completely oblivious about themselves
(Branden, 1969, p. 42). Both private and public self-consciousness are frequently distinguished by psychological terms. Private self-consciousness is a tendency to introspect and examine one’s inner self and feelings. Public
self-consciousness is an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, which can result in self-monitoring and social anxiety. As relatively stable personality traits, private and public self-consciousness are not correlated just
because that an individual is high on one dimension does not mean that he or she is high on the other (Bernd, 2004, p. 30).
Murdoch shares with Romantic writers an interest in individual consciousness and how it operates. In Romantic fiction, this preoccupation is expressed through the representation of “problems of consciousness, of
vision and perception” (Jackson, 1981, p. 51). In Murdoch’s fiction, the interest in “character dispersal and
fragmentation” (Jackson, 1981, p. 86) is an aspect of the destabilized sense of self evident during the Romantic period. This destabilization surfaces in descriptions of sightings, material, and immaterial, of the self or an ideal
other that can be interpreted as an externalization of the self.
What Annette lacks is the self-awareness, the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 327
“Learning nothing here” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7) is Annette’s reason to leave her school and “enter the School of
Life” to “educate [herself]” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). Her departure is also partly because of her lack of interest in the teaching mission of this expensive college which is to teach “to young women of the débutante class such
arts as were considered necessary for the catching of a husband” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). All these remind the reader of her immaturity as a girl of 19 years old.
A false impression on Annette is that she is an invulnerable character with a charmed life and even without any physical scars. But actually Annette is a nymph-like young girl who has insufficient self-awareness and feels
homeless and nationless. Annette had once said to the young women at Ringenhall: “I have no homeland and no mother tongue. I speak four languages fluently, but none correctly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). In spite of her perfect
French and English, Annette “liked to think of herself as a waif. Even her appearance suggested it, she noted with satisfaction” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 63-64). In Demetriou’s theory of cognitive development, self-awareness
develops systematically from birth through the life span and it is a major factor for the development of general inferential processes (Demetriou). That is, the previous experiences, especially those in the childhood, are of
great influence on the systematic development of one’s self-awareness. In Annette’s memory, “the sensations of childhood” include “the loneliness and boredom and fear of strange places, the hurry and the noise of a world
which was never her own, the alien odour of the expensive hotel and the long-distance train. These were the thing that had prefigured the present moment” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 267). Annette’s experiences in her childhood cast
shadow on her present sense of instability and make her lack of sense of belonging. When asked to go back home,
she said: “Home! Cam’ Hill Square isn’t my home. I have no home. I’m a refugee!” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 271). Self-awareness makes people align their behavior with their standards, and the failure to live up to their
personal standards will result in a negative effect. When Annette evaluates and compares her current behavior to her internal standards and values, she feels completely confused and lost. “The idea of growing up had always
been for Annette the idea of being able to live at her own pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). To her disappointment, she can achieve this aim in no way. Although Annette tries her best to protect her body in the physical sense, she
fails to gain access to greater self-awareness in the spiritual sense. In order to reinforce her sense of being an individual being, Annette turns to establish the relationship with other fingers, especially male characters, which
proves to make her live at others’ pace instead of at her own.
Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes
the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as the way to set up the appropriate relation with men and protect herself. So when Rainborough asks her what she is going to do for her
living, Annette tells him that she has no idea and she is not good at anything “in a helpless feminine way about which Rainborough could not decide whether it was natural or the effect of art” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). In
Rainborough’s eyes, “Women pick up these conventions at such an early age, …they’re almost bred in them”(Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). Then he cannot help wondering “how can anyone who has travelled so much be
so appallingly juvenile?” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). The fact that Annette has no concern about her future source
of income shows us her conventional thinking of male and female social roles and division of labor, which leads to her willingly enslavement in androcentric fantasy.
is kind and caring to the people around her, she seldom receives any care, concern, respect, or love from them,
especially from the male. Her brother Nicholas arrangs his friend to “deflower” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) Annette when she is 17 just to make her “rational about these things” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Nicholas expects her not to
“build up an atmosphere of mystery and expectation” about sex, because that will only make her “neurotic” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Contrary to his expectations, Annette attends a number of adventures since that time,
which bring her “neither delight nor grief” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) but the misconception of the appropriate relationship between the sexes. “The mystery was displaced, but it remained suspended in Annette’s vision of the
future, an opaque cloud, luminous with lightning” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). This misconception hinders her from establishing a positive and normal self-recognition in the male-female relationships. He has no favorite for
Annette at all, and what he does is just for his own lust without the consideration to Annette’s feeling and respect to her as a woman. Annette’s reaction is also a sign of her female weakness. Murdoch (1956) depicts the female
inferiority to the man regardless of their higher social status or even prominent family background. The sexual offense of the refugee Jan to Annette is a case in point. Although Rosa dislodges Jan from her house, Annette’s
terrified feeling does not arouse her any sympathy.
Dominated by the androcentric fantasy, Annette desires nothing as fervently as to become the enchanter
Mischa’s captive. Mischa is unmoved by the schoolgirl heroine playing out “her fated role of international waif-adventuress” (Sullivan, 1986, p. 77). Annette, on the other hand, experiences in Mischa’s presence “a daze
of beatitude” and feels “with a deep joy, the desire and the power to enfold him, to comfort him, to save him”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 215). That is, perhaps because she is truly an elfin child, or because she belongs to the people who “seek evil simply because they want adventure” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 32). It requires Calvin’s cynicism to
make her realize that the “notion that one can liberate another’s soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 240).
Annette’s every effort to make herself more self-conscious is to build up some kind of relation with the male and prove her own existence by their treatment to her. Unfortunately, Annette receives no love and support but
indifference from the people around her when she is struggling for the establishment of her self-consciousness. Abandoned not only by Mischa, but also by Rosa and her brother Nicholas, Annette begins to toy with the idea of
suicide. The photograph of her brother Nicholas is no longer enough to shield her. In her genuine aloneness, Annette regrets that she will be “forever shut away” from “the world of the chamber maid and the cyclist and the
little strange hotel” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). She tries “to persuade herself that she felt ill” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157), but “unfortunately she did not feel ill, only extremely miserable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157). Finally, she
“attempted to weep” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157), yet this proves equally “unsatisfactory” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157). Having lost all reason to exist, Annette throws her jewels into the river. With this symbolic gesture, Annette gives
vent to her conviction that “death could not change her now more than she was already changed” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 267) and she stages her suicide. Here, fate or chance intervenes. Her parents arrive and whisk Annette off the
Europe and security. On yet another train Annette looks, in the same way she always will.
Our last glimpse of the family is in the south of France as the Orient Express transports the recovered Annette away from the events of the novel to the land of Cockeyne. With this splendid tableau of an enchanted
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 329
since she left Ringehall than [she] ever did while [she was] there” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 217), as her brother
believes, remains unanswered. Most probably, she is still the unscarred mermaid murmuring “enchanted” through the ballrooms of Europe, ever enchanted by her temporarily sustained glimpses of real life out of the
windows of trains, always again to return to her land of jewels and opulence (Sullivan, 1986, p. 79). It seems that everything returns to the beginning, but Annette has been changed by the happenings after she dropes
out of the school.
Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes
the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as how to set up the appropriate relation with men and protect herself. In the struggling process of establishing her private
self-consciousness as a young lady, Annette tends to introspect and examine her inner self and feelings. With an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, Annette fails to set up her public self-consciousness because
of her unawareness of the real root of her dilemma: patriarchy.
The Marginalization of Women’s Identity
Since female identity is the central concern of Murdoch’s novels, as has been already mentioned, it is
necessary to define an individual identity and the female self-identity of Murdoch’s female characters. One’s
identity, in Hall’s view (2004), can be thought of as a particular set of traits, beliefs and allegiances that, in short or long term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being, while subjectivity implies always
a degree of thought and self-consciousness about identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and often unknowable, unavoidable constraints on our ability to fully comprehend identity. Subjectivity as a critical
concept invites us to consider the question of how and from where identity arises, to what extent it is understandable, and to what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence and control
(Hall, 2004, pp. 3-4). Following Hall’s definition and Murdoch’s understanding of identity, the particular set of traits, which will give Murdoch’s female characters a constant personality and mode of being, is the autonomy
and androgyny. To be autonomous means to sticking to her own voice and keeping her own life course; to be androgynous means to go beyond her gender constraints, living with the androgynous mind of a “full balance of
femaleness and maleness, nurturance and aggression” (Showalter, 2004, p. 264). However, there are a lot of constrains and restrictions preventing the female characters to retain this identity, namely, the historical, social,
cultural and biological ones.
The characterization of refugees in Murdoch’s novels is greatly influenced by her experiences in war time.
After the completion of her own degree at Oxford in 1942, Murdoch went straight into the Civil Service as an Assistant Principal in the Treasury, living, and working in wartime London. When the war ended, she felt the
need to do some social work to help those who had been displaced and disorientated in the conflict, so she went to
work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). While working for UNRRA in Brussels and then Innsbruck from 1945 to 1946, she saw people deported to almost certain death and survivors
who would never return to their homes. There is little doubt that during this time she came face to face with many of the horrors and cruelties that man inflicted upon man, which left an indelible impression on her mind.
Europe can make the difference between life and death. Yet they are not always sympathetically portrayed. In
The Flight from the Enchanter, the Lusiewicz brothers have minds which appear to be permanently distorted by
their early experiences, and the young dressmaker, Nina lives in permanent fear of being deported and is finally
destroyed by the fear.
It is of special significance to study the female identity in Murdoch’s characterization of Nina as a woman
refugee under the dual oppressions. The autonomy for the female characters includes making their voice heard and freedom to choose their own life. So having their voice is the foremost step for female autonomy. Nina’s
refugee status unvoices her completely. Nina’s sensitivity to her illegal status leads her to strive for the integration to the people around by mimicking their appearance, speaking their language and complying with the
etiquettes. Nina insists on speaking English “politely and firmly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) when Annette induces her to speak other languages, although “a charming and quite undiagnosable foreign accent” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82)
reveals her true origin. Besides, she dyes blonde her “dark straight hair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) and “long downy hairs” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) on her arms, which makes her look like “a small artificial animal” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 82) with “a brown complexion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82).
But when it comes to the legal document, all the efforts Nina takes seems to be futile. “She stared at her
passport, and it seemed to her suddenly like a death warrant. It filled her with shame and horror” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 288). The sight of the old picture on it reminds Nina of “the worst days of her fear” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289).
She feels that an “anxious, haggard and fearful” “younger black-haired Nina stared back” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289)
at her present golden-haired self. The passport evokes her miserable memories of being exiled in the past and indicates that she has “no official existence” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289). Both nationality and gender hinder Nina
from establishing her own identity by depriving her of the right to voice herself and choose her own life. Illegal status deprives Nina of having a say as she is not an existence being in the political sense in this
country, while the repression which Mischa imposes upon her “condemned” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) her love to silence, so she has no right to express her love as a woman. She dare not leave her name and address to the
governmental agency because “she had the refugee’s horror of the power and hostility of all authorities and of their mysterious interconnection with each other” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “if she left her name at Australia
House Mischa Fox should not be told of this within twenty-four hours” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). When Nina is discovered by Mischa in a textile factory, her need for a livelihood and protection makes her pliable to his wishes.
Nina knows it well that it is impossible to achieve an “independent establishment and a clientele” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 151) without Mischa’s help. Once she realizes that her love for Mischa is not reciprocated, she resolves
to leave England to gain “freedom from slavery, rather that freedom in an abstract or philosophical sense” (Rabinovitz, 1978, p. 285). The only hope for her is to flee from England and never see Mischa again, then she
could escape from him. What attracts her most is that the future new life will be “in every way the reverse of her present life” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “she would live in their midst a life of openness and gaiety, respected
as a worker and loved as a woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). To fulfill her plan, she decides to appeal to Rosa for
assistance for “her regard for Rosa was augmented by an astonished respect for a being who had once been under Mischa’s spell and had freed herself without migrating to the Antipodes” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 156). Rosa’s
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 331
Nina’s choice to commit suicide is due to her identity crisis both as a citizen and as a woman. Besides Nina’s
refugee status and her fear of deportation, patriarchal oppression from Mischa is also the primary cause of her tragedy. There is an important difference between the crisis of the female identity and the crisis of the male
identity in contemporaneous canonical texts. The male refugees Lusiewicz brothers also experience a loss of identity as the consequence of their illegal status. With Rosa’s help, they “rapidly showed a remarkable aptitude
with machines, …learnt to speak English with confidence and charm” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). And even “[t]heir appearance improved” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Meanwhile, Nina proves herself to be “a good dressmaker …
patient, good-tempered, humble, discreet, fast, an exquisite worker, and…inexhaustibly imaginative” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 81) after Mischa helped her settle down and rent a house for her. As refugees, all of them try their best to
learn the language, work hard and be obedient to their sponsors in order to integrate into the local life and start a new life. However, the male-female different positions in the patriarchal society make their life paths quite
different. After their settlement, the Lusiewicz brothers change their attitude to their sponsor Rosa from “with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48) to with aggression by conquering
her body and controlling her mind. Yet, Rosa recovers quick from “the first shock of her despair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 58) and accepts the change from being a conqueror to a prey for fear of losing the brothers.
But the situation is completely different in Nina’s case. Without her voice being heard, Nina, as a woman, has no capability to change the pattern of her relationship with Mischa and consequently has no freedom to
choose her own life path. Nina has no way to decline Mischa’s monthly allowance for his excuse that “his
‘inconvenient ways’ were possibly damaging to her business” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). As “a good organizer and a good business woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), Nina has an ambitious plan to enlarge her business since
“her range of contacts was now very considerable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). But without any doubt, this plan displeases Mischa apparently, which makes it clear that any plan of this kind will violate Mischa’s expectations to
Nina. Her love for Mischa has been transformed “into a strange emotion which had in it more of terror and fascination than of tenderness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) and “an emotion more mixed with puzzlement and
curiosity” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), which becomes the source of distress for Nina because “his personality made it impossible for her to open her heart to anyone” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154). In great anxiety, Nina has a nightmare
in which her sewing machine turns into an unstoppable monster which savages both her and an endless cloth map of all the countries in the world.
Nina’s aphasia states as a refugee for the land of her birth and her enslavement as a woman for the gender of her birth makes her autonomy establishment impossible. Moreover, to be androgynous remains slightly out of her
reach, which is the last question she thinks about before she kills herself. As she sits on the window-sill, she looks at a crucifix and thinks the idea that death is the end is not “senseless blackness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 291) for
Christ, as it will be for her. She throws herself out of the window with a broken and marginalized identity. The same political guile for the removal from the scene of the illegal immigrants Jan and Stefan destroys Nina, who
becomes the innocent victim, the scapegoat who suffers not merely for the sins of others but also for their neglect.
Her act of self-destruction becomes a response to a general feeling of hopelessness for which she finds no outlet, neither in her unsatisfactory relationship with Mischa nor in any meaningful activity.
marginalized by the political authorities and controlled by the masculine hegemony regardless of her unremitting
efforts to integrate with the new environment and her willingness to mingle with the new culture. Besides, through the characterization of Nina, Murdoch also tends to unravel the lack of mutual assistance among women
to struggle with their marginalized identity and survive the male dominance in this novel.
The Disintegration of Female Self
While Murdoch depicts Annette Cockeyne’s disruptive self-consciousness and Nina’s marginalized identity,
her main concern is the portrayal of the female protagonist in this novel: Rosa and her disintegrated self in the process of her flight from the enchanter. Murdoch’s moral philosophy is premised on the reality of the
individual self, so much so that she starts that “the central concept of morality is ‘the individual’” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 30). Distinguished from Romanticism, Murdoch holds the opinion that the individual as a
self-in-relation is renewed in the context. While Modernism emphasizes on “formal autonomy” (Waugh, 1989, p. 79) and holds identity as “transcendence of history through symbol and self as a construction of language”
(Waugh, 1989, p. 79), Murdoch focuses on the self in relation. In her novels, she portrays how individual consciousness functions in people as moral beings, and the effect this has on their perception of reality, rather
than the social and historical conditions in which her characters operate. “Underlying Murdoch’s moral
philosophy is a concept of the individual as the ‘owner’ of their ‘inner life’ and of inner activity as morally significant” (Widdows, 2004, p. 21). So the self in Murdoch’s fiction is a fixed entity that is built in the relations.
Compared with Annette and Nina, Rosa Keepe has a stronger sense of self-consciousness and self-identity since she knows who she is and what she wants better. Unfortunately, she still fails to obtain integrated self for
her personal weaknesses in specific and female limitations in general obstruct the building of her in-relation self. The following analysis will mainly focus on three pairs of relationships: Rosa and the Lusiewicz brothers, Rosa
and Mischa, and Rosa and other female characters in the novel.
Though educated, the heroine Rosa is willing to work on the assembly line in a factory instead of being a
journalist or a teacher because she is unable to stand her mother’s disappointment at her failure to be “a fanatical idealist” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) and her own at to be “a good teacher” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). She still makes
this choice “in a mood of self-conscious asceticism” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) although she knows it well that working in the factory is an experience of almost unbearable affliction and a kind of modern slavery. The
machines in Rosa’s factory never stop, day or night. She fears being “caught in the machine” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 42). Here she has a secret about the refugee Lusiewicz brothers, who arrive “dejected and colourless, like
half-starved, half-drowned animals” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Except Rosa, no one shows any interests in them at that time. As a dutiful protector, Rosa guides them, gives them financial support, teaches them English and treats
them as her children. “Then after a while Rosa found herself becoming oddly secretive and possessive about the
pair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46) .With her help, the brothers have been making big process and becoming popular in the factory, which brings Rosa mixed feelings: “with interest and pleasure at first, and later with sadness”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). The brothers treat her at first “with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe. They were like poor savages confronted with a beautiful white girl” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 48-49). Their
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 333
feared as well as joyful. Overwhelmed by their primitive adoration and their abject respect, Rosa feels “like the
princess whose strong faith released the prince from an enchanted sleep, or from the transfigured form of a beast” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 54) and in return for their devotion, she showers the brothers with love.
Contrary to Rosa’s expectations, her role as an enchantress is of short duration. Once “the mastery had passed to the brother” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 60), Rosa becomes their property. They begin to thrive and make their
own conquests, including Rosa, whom they share sexually. Gradually and almost without awareness on her part, Rosa changes from mother-surrogate to sister-surrogate. What helps her to accept the role reversal is her ability to
overcome the “physical sensation” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “that numb paralysis which is the deliberate dulling of thought by itself” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) and the painful fear of losing the brothers. When they retell
Rosa their experiences of raping their school teacher by turns and abandoning her just to revenge her for humiliating them in the class, which leads to her death directly, Rosa is so anesthetized while she is “empty of
thoughts and feelings” and experiences “a kind of triumph” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 78). Consequently, she does not resent the brothers and accepts without demur “the rules of the new regime” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) which Jan
and Stefan “made plain to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “gentle tact” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57). After her acceptance of the grotesque reversal of roles, Rosa uses the machines in the factory as instruments to immobilize
her feelings. Nevertheless, the brothers’ more and more excessive behaviors, such as uninvited visit to Rosa’s house and assaulting Annette sexually there, drive Rosa to reach the point where she confronts herself with the
realization that she is unable to break the black spell the Poles hold over her. In the relationship between Rosa and
the brothers, Rosa functions as a power figure at first because of the superiority of her social status, but she soon descends to the enchanted because of the inferiority of her female gender. The formation of her self faces a great
challenge and becomes instabilized in this process of reversal.
In utter frustration, she resorts to the powers of Mischa whose marriage proposal she refuses ten years ago to
run away from his control. She tells about her plight with reservation, however Mischa asks no question but her permission to use any method he likes. Rosa “felt as if she were selling herself into captivity” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 262). “But to be at his mercy was at that moment her most profound desire” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 262). Mischa then manipulates SELIB, the Special European Labor Immigration Board, to have Stefan deported. To her
consternation, Rosa discovers that after all these years she is still very fond of Mischa and would not mind to be rescued by him. As she approaches her former lover whose enchantment she believes to have disappeared, she is
“quite ready to acknowledge herself to be under a spell … [and] she knew that even if at that moment Mischa was oblivious of her existence, yet he was drawing her all the time” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 257). As she attempts to
solve her personal problem, Rosa has either not yet gained the “degree of self-knowledge” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331) necessary “to achieve morality or love” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331), or is not fully aware of
her “moral strength and weakness to be able to overcome the vicissitude of a moral crisis” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331).
At “a point of disequilibrium where rest was no longer possible” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 292), Rosa
impulsively travels south herself to join Mischa at his villa in Italy. She feels compelled by the enchanter whom she like to be reunited with. But Rosa does not return to Mischa thanks to Calvin Blick’s interference. He
obsession with Mischa. Many years ago, Rosa “put herself under the enchanter’s spell because she thought he
was in touch with reality” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 49) and is satisfied with her lot until she senses “that Mischa was not merely in touch with reality but had power over it, and then she began to fear him” (Whiteside, 1964,
p. 49). Calvin comforts her that she “will never know the truth” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 304) because “[r]eality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 305), and therefore, she “will read the
signs in accordance with [her] deepest wishes” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 304-305), just like everybody else. Rosa retorts that this view is a surrender of his power.
Rosa’s final triumph is in her inexplicable act of turning back from Mischa even though he is waiting for her. Now that he has transformed Rosa into the “real” woman worthy of his love, she reveals herself to be
tougher than he has thought and succeeds in shattering his ephemeral formula for control by her unexpected assertion of freedom. However, Rosa’s decision is one of pure renunciation. Nonetheless, Rosa does make one
vital gain and discovery. She can choose to be free of Mischa and to recognize herself as a free agent. She says to Calvin, whose name tolls predestination, “in the past I always felt that whether I went towards him or away
from him I was only doing his will. But perhaps it was all an illusion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 308). Years ago, Rosa refuses Mischa’s offer of marriage and flees from Mischa because she fears the ultimate consequence of
his control over her as much as she dreaded the intimacy of married life. Years later, Rosa goes back willingly to be under his control and protection. The journey from flight to regression reveals the incapability of Rosa’s
disintegrated self to find a balanced position in the patriarchal male-female relationship.
Moreover, the deficiency of Rosa’s sense of self hinders her from establishing a healthy and normal relationship with other female characters. Rosa has no easy-going and cheerful characters since she “never
wanted other human beings to come too near” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48). The intimacy with the person makes her at times feel horrible. She lives with her brother Hunter and her schoolfriend’s daughter Annette, whom “had never
yet occupied very much of Rosa’s attention” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). Rosa shows no caring and love to Annette as expected from a female seniority to a young girl, but the hostility and indifference from a jealousy same-sex
peer. Annette’s “kittenish” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66) ways both charm and irritate Rose for they remind of “her memories of herself at that age” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). She often likes to be accompanied by Annette, yet the
child makes her uneasy. Although she knew that her sarcasm make Annette feared, she becomes more inclined to “prick and bite her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). When Jan offends Annette sexually in her upstairs room, Rosa’s
first reaction is to pretend not to have heard Annette’s cry for help. When she is urged to see what is happening upstairs, she just gets Jan away by striking his face. Then “without a glance at Annette” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163),
she descends “at a leisurely pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163). What Rosa really cares about is not Annette’s terrible state of mind as a victim of sexual assault but her own jealousy for the brothers’ betrayal and their interests in
other women. She feels greatly relieved for “after the incident with Jan, …a certain coldness in her reception … had almost immediately vanished and everything had seemed to be as usual” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 245). In the
party at the Mischa’s, the tripping dancing of Mischa and Annette irritates her so much that she ruins the party by
breaking the fishbowl into pieces. Her next gaffe comes as:
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After the party, Mischa drives to the seaside with Annette to comfort her and then sends her back to Rosa’s
house. The sight of Mischa’s coat on Annette makes Rosa so annoyed that:
Suddenly Rosa turned into Annette’s room and began to drag open the drawers of her dressing-table. She seized an armful of clothes and hurled them down into Annette’s face. Then pulling out one of the drawers entire she upended it at the top of the stairs. (Murdoch, 1956, p. 220)
With no attention to the fragility of Annette’s body and mind, Rosa commits these crazy behaviors which
make Annette so physically and mentally broken that she rolls down the stairs and hurt her leg. Rosa’s madness
proves her to be a completely self-centered woman showing no concerns to any other people or events only when they violate her own life, which makes it impossible for her to have a wholeness of self.
Nina is another victim of Rosa’s misanthropy. Every time after her attempts to plea for Rosa’s help, Rosa always has the same reaction: care nothing about what Nina says and forget her completely soon after her visits.
In Mischa’s villa in Italy, Calvin Blick shows Rosa a newspaper report of Nina’s suicide, remarking that “someone ought to have explained things to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 306). Obviously, Rosa bears responsibility
for Nina’s death in two ways. At first, She herself unleashed Mischa’s power, authorizing him, to “use any methods” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 256) to protect herself and Hunter from Stefan. Secondly, because she was so
rapturously abstracted at the thought of seeing Mischa, she failed to attend to Nina’s plea for help: “I have some problems… I would like to ask your advice” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 259). However, Rosa replies merrily: “Life is a
series of problems! …Never be afraid to ask for advice, …People try to be far too independent of each other. I’m just going in now to ask Mr. Fox’s advice” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 259-260). Nina’s death is in part as a result of
Rosa’s inattention, in part because Rosa enlists Mischa and his methods. This moment of unexpected moral crisis made to see her responsibility for Nina’s death, she is ready to perceive the destructive consequences of the
enchanter in herself and others.
The closing chapter is melancholy, though it contains good as well as bad news. On her return from Italy to
rainy London, Rosa goes straight to see Peter, free of the moral and emotional ties which have bound her to
Mischa. From him she learns that Camilla Wingfield has died, leaving her all the shares of the Artemis and an annual income of £500 if she will edit the journal. The Artemis has been saved from Mischa, and Rosa has been
saved from the factory and given a new purpose. However, a bilingual inscription has been discovered which is a key to the Kastanic script and proves Peter’s work on it to be futile. Peter is stoical: “One reads the signs as best
one can, and one may be totally misled. …It was worth trying. Now I can go back to my other work in peace. There’s nothing to be sad about, Rosa” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 315). But Rosa is sad because Peter Saward rejects
her offer of marriage because he knows that Rosa is merely seeking a safety-net. The novel ends with Peter showing Rosa the photographs of the lost world of Mischa’s childhood and “she saw the pictures through a
gathering haze of tears” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 316).
Conclusions
The Flight from the Enchanter startsfrom Annette’s running away from her finishing school to enter the
school of life, which directly points to the theme of the novel: Flight, with the central plot that a feminist magazine called Artemis is close to closure due to a lack of readers. All the people’s lives in the novel revolve
what they flee from is not only the power or enigma of Mischa Fox, but also their fragmented selfhood.
Regardless of her wealthy and decent family background, spoiled but rootless Annette is confronted with lack of love and attention from her parents, her brother, her guardian Rosa. Meanwhile, her gender makes her unable to
escape from the economic exploitation, emotional control and sexual assault of the male. So she is thirsty for love and attention to prove her existence even at the cost of her life. From her, Murdoch depicts women’s inability to
introspect and examine their inner self, desires and feelings in order to know themselves as an individual. The worried immigrant dressmaker Nina endures double oppressions—racial and sexual oppression. Though she is
more financially successful than the Polish brothers who have the same immigrant status as her, she can’t reverse the position of the controller and the controlled as they do just because of the female weaknesses. In spite of her
economic independence, the confinement of her spirit disables her to be definable and recognizable in the relations. The main female character Rosa, fierce and strong-minded, is too indulgent in her own world to know
the reality. Her status as a power figure, due to her racial privilege, in the life of two Polish brothers is soon destroyed by the gender advantage of the male. Then she is occupied by the malformed relationship with two
Polish brothers without their admiration and attachment to her as they have before. Frightened by the gradually out-or-control situation, she turns to the power of her former lover Mischa Fox, the male force, to help her get rid
of the entwinement of these brothers. In this novel, Murdoch reveals that no matter what kind of backgrounds they have, women are not powerful enough to overcome the gender advantages of the male and the suppression
imposed by the male domination on them. Moreover, Murdoch expresses the women’s desire to flee from the
situation where they are and from the fragmented selfhood for reconstruction.
In modern mass society, a conception of individuality appears hopelessly outmoded to many philosophers.
Instead, Murdoch embraces the idea that selfhood is the outcome of relational activities, beginning with infant nurturance, extending to language, and culminating in reflexive consciousness, in which selves become
self-aware. In The Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch avoids approaching the female plights in the aspect of financial dependence, less human right, family squabbles, parenting and other issues as many other feminist
writers do. Instead, she reveals the deconstructive female selfhood in the modern society caused by the historical, social and economic changes. Regardless of their origin and background, what these female characters in
common is their attempt to escape from “an enchanter”, who usually imposes physical confinement as well as mental and spiritual confinement on them. Their disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity, and
disintegrated self of the female characters fail all of them to complete the wholeness of female self and obstruct their way to human goodness.
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (1953). The second sex. H. M. Parshley (Trans. & Ed.). London: Jonathan Cape. Bernd, S. (2004). Identity in Modern society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Branden, N. (1969). The psychology of self-esteem. New York: Nash Publishing Corp..
Demetriou, A., & Kazi, S. (2001). Unity and modularity in the mind and the self. London: Routledge. Hall, D. E. (2004). Subjectivity. London: Routledge.
Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The literature of subversion. London: Methuen.
Lipka, R. P., & Brinthaupt, T. M. (Eds.). (1992). Self-perspectives across the life span. Albany: State University of New York Press. Murdoch, I. (1956). The flight from the enchanter. London: Chatto & Windus.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 337
Rabinovitz, R., & Murdoch, I. (1978). Six contemporary British novelists. G. Stade, (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Showalter, E. (2004). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Beijing: Foreign Language
Teaching and Research Press.
Sullivan, Z. T. (1986). The demonic: The Flight from the Enchanter. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Iris Murdoch: Modern critical views (pp. 71-86). New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
Waugh, P. (1989). Feminine fictions: Revisiting the postmodern. London: Routledge. Whiteside, G . (1964). The novels of Iris Murdoch. Critique, 7, 27-47.
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 338-344
Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities
Robin McAllister
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA
Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges’ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges’s poetics of reading and dreaming require another poetics of the work as a text that calls attention to its own artifice. In reading Borges’ fiction, the separate roles and identities of reader, writer, and work of fiction merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities and are transformed into a single act of dreaming, which assumes cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. In the dominant role given to the reader, the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is read. There is no determinate text, only a version of our own we re-write and invent every time we read the text. The author’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. As writers and readers we are composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it.
Keywords: Borges, poetics, reading, Berkeley
He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind. (Borges, 1962, “The Circular Ruins”)
It is hazardous to think that a co-ordination of words (philosophies are nothing else) can have much resemblance to the universe. It is also hazardous to think that one of those famous co-ordinations does not resemble it a little more than others, even in an infinitesimal way. (Borges, 1966, “Avatars of the Tortoise”)
Introduction
Dreaming and stories that are mere co-ordinations of words are clues to the riddle of Borges’ poetics of fiction, his concepts about the roles of the writer and the reader in creating a work of fiction. In our ordinary world of reading Borges, we uncritically take for granted the separate existence of the story as an object apart from us, a book we are opening in our hands to begin reading, the previous existence of the writer who created it, and our own autonomous existence as readers about to sit down, momentarily try to detach our attention from the distractions of the actual reality surrounding us, and immerse ourselves in reading the story, momentarily and, alas, only temporarily leaving behind one reality and entering into the mode of consciousness we find in reading a work of fiction. But in the world of Borges’ fiction all these separate roles and identities merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities. The separate existences of a reader, writer, and book are
transformed into a single act of dreaming.
Any account of Borges’ “poetics” of fiction, his concept—implicit or explicit in his stories, essays, and
Robin McAllister, associate professor, Department of English, Sacred Heart University.
DAVID PUBLISHING
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poems—of whatthe fiction is, must take into account not just the extraordinary role he attributes to the reader, but another almost hidden, often denied concept as well, the fiction, not just as a text, but as a work of art, a “co-ordination of words”, that calls attention to its own artifice. However, the reader’s power to dream the work of fiction into existence emerges as Borges’ preferred poetics, and the idea of the work as a co-ordination of words is forgotten or repudiated. In the world of Borges’ fiction, the reader can assume fantastic roles: A dreamer, a failed writer, an unrequited lover, and a blind “magus” who creates and destroys, a consciousness on the verge of vision and annihilation, a copier and a creator, a simulacrum dreamed into existence by a prior text,
even a fictional role constructed out of literary topoi and metaphysical problems to resolve the problem of trying to represent a vision of the universe that cannot be put into words.
The Role of the Reader
One of these roles, the Reader as Writer, is the subject of a famous essay by the late Rodrigues Monegal (1972), who attributes the concept of the Reader as Writer to Gerard Genette:
…Criticism is an activity as imaginary as fiction or poetry… Nevertheless, it is possible to attempt another reading of these texts, and of the famous “Pierre Menard”, and instead of taking literally the conclusions of those critical articles, or the ironies of the story, perhaps to see in these short pieces the foundation of another aesthetic discipline, based not on the creation of the literary work but on its reading—instead of an aesthetics of the work of art, an aesthetics of its reading. This approach to Borges’ work has been favored by the Nouvelle Critique since Gerard Genette’s article, “La literature selon Borges”. Taking as his starting point the final lines of “Pierre Menard”, Genette has emphasized the importance of the Borgesian intuition that the most delicate and important operation of all those which contribute to the writing of a book is reading it. He concludes his analysis with these words: “The genesis of a work in the time of history and the life of an author is the most contingent and most insignificant moment of its duration … The time of a book is not the limited time of its writing, but the limitless time of reading and memory. The meaning of books is in front of them and not behind them; it is in us: a book is not a ready-made meaning, a revelation we have to suffer; it is a reservation of forms that are waiting to have some meaning, it is the `imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced”, and that every one of us has to produce for himself. (p. l05)
Certainly Borges seems to confirm this “approach, of whose validity there is no question” in an essay like “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”, where he rejects the notion of fiction as merely a “verbal structure”, a “combinatory game”:
Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. The dialogue is infinite … Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. (Borges, 1962, p. 213)
Indeed the reader seems to determine the text, rather than the text determining our reading:
One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like. (Borges, 1962, pp. 213-214)
also a reader, when he produces a Quixote identical in text with the original but different, indeed richer, in meaning: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Borges, 1962, p. 42).
Like a reader Menard “copies” a text word for word, but, like a writer, he transforms it. Borges’ fiction requires a reader who is both a translator and a creator—or re-creator. Borges (1962) confirms Rodrigues Monegal’s discovery of “an aesthetics of fiction based on the reading of the text”:
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid … This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. (p. 44)
The text of the Quixote stays identical, but the way Menard recomposes it changes it completely, transforming it with deliberate anachronism into a symbol or sign of Menard’s time, not Cervantes’. But does this technique of deliberately anachronistic reading actualize a revelation in the fiction that otherwise remains merely imminent? Or is not it rather a playful fantasy reading in which we readers find ourselves with powers of creativity autonomous from the text or the writer? An “adventurous” reading, we shall discover, is not just an entertaining fantasy, but one which takes on cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. The reader as writer will assume fantastic, cosmogonic powers of creation and annihilation in poems like “Amanecer” and stories like “The Circular Ruins”.
Perhaps, as Rodriguez Monegal (1972) asserts, there can be no question of the validity of this approach, but, if so, the consequences are startling. The meaning of a story, “El Aleph” (1957), for example, is not what Borges, the writer, may have intended, a meaning determined within the context of his other stories and essays and limited by the historical moment in which he wrote, but whatever preconceptions and associations the reader brings to the story as a reader from his own personal time and situation. It is impossible—or delusional—to think that the reader ever reads or could read Borges’ “El Aleph” and write an essay about “it”—such an object or determined text does not exist—merely a version of “El Aleph” the reader re-writes and invents every time he reads the text of that title. There are as many “El Alephs” as there are readers, and Borges becomes only one of many other readers of his own story. Criticism and scholarship does indeed become a branch of fantastic literature.
Berkeley
It is hardly surprising that Borges, the radically idealist Borges of an essay like “A New Refutation of Time” (1981) or stories like “Tlon, Ukbar, OrbisTertius” (1981), should deny that the fiction exists as a “verbal structure” or an “object”. For the radical idealist Borges, a world of objects or material reality is only possible through a perceiving consciousness that constitutes and sustains a “representation” (in the Berkeleyan sense of framing an “idea”), as in one of several quotations Borges cites from Berkeley:
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A previous quotation from Berkeley in the essay “A New Refutation of Time” implies that the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is “perceived” by a reader:
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceivedor known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit—. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 181)
This quotation from Berkeley amounts to no less than a metaphysical argument for the priority of the reader, as a constitutive and sustaining consciousness, over the text as an autonomous “object”, an object that only exists in so far as it is seen or imagined by a sustaining consciousness, whether that of the writer, the reader, or the eternal spirit. This reader as Berkeleyan eternal spirit might be the ancestor of Genette’s and Rodriguez Monegal’s reader as writer, whose reading actualizes the “imminence of revelation”, a reader who will appear over and over again in Borges’ essays and fictions as a dreamer or writer who dreams a vision of the universe into existence.
Cosmogonic and Apocalyptic Reading
If the reader resembles Berkeley’s perceiver, he creates or dreams the universe he exists in, the fiction he reads. When the reader reads she creates little worlds, microcosms. His reading is cosmogonic, world-creating, and creative; no wonder the reader “writes” or re-creates the fiction he reads. Such a Berkeleyaneternal spirit appears in the poem “Dawn” (1981). This poem resembles the type of “meditational poem” familiar to readers of 17th Century English poetry. It is a poem of philosophical speculation, the record or account of a revelation in the form of an idea that has occurred to the poet. Through the poet’s use of the first person “I”, the reader enacts or re-lives the constitutive mind or consciousness of a blind poet, an insomniac—unable to lose consciousness and sleep—who wanders through the streets of Buenos Aires, sustaining the entire city in his mind, until others awaken and carry on his metaphysical burden. If the poem or fiction resembles an idea, like Berkeley’s or Schopenhauer’s, it can only exist if it is dreamed into consciousness by an individual dreamer or reader: “…Since ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or river, the previous speculation … dominated my reason and projected the following whim… ” (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 6) The content of this poem is not the city of Buenos Aires at dawn, but a mental act, a revelation, at first only a presentiment, then an idea of a prior writer or philosopher, which unexpectedly finds renewed existence as it is reformulated and thought in the mind of the poet. There are no emotions or feelings in the poem, only perceptions, memories, acts of reflection and speculation. The poem imitates or enacts a mental process of creating a poem.
personal consciousness. The poet or reader, who reads, and in reading, re-lives and reconstitutes the poem, exhibits cosmogonic and apocalyptic powers of creativity. The city only exists as long and in so far as it is sustained in the wakened consciousness of the poet. Similarly the reader might suppose that the poem, like an idea, only exists in so far as it is read, or rethought, transformed in the mind of a new reader, and, if the reader ceases reading the poem, it ceases to exist.
Visible Unrealities
Another constitutive, sustaining consciousness appears in the story “The Circular Ruins”, where the epigraph after the title, before the story even begins, evokes the reader’s cosmogonic, apocalyptic powers as a Reader: “And if he left off dreaming about you… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45). The writer has left it to the reader to complete this interrupted quotation, and, if he does so, “you would cease to exist”. The opening lines of the story—“No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45)—are footnotes to the Berkeleyan quotations above. The protagonist or dreamer of this story is a powerful magician, evocative of a Hermetic magus, who dreams a man into existence only to discover at the end of the story that he too is being dreamed. The magician who dreams a man into existence resembles both a writer and a reader. The infinite regress through which this story is fabricated—the dreamer within a dreamer includes the Reader as Berkeleyan constitutive and sustaining consciousness (the creative “unanimous night” out of which a poem, like “Dawn” or a story like “The Circular Ruins” can emerge). The new element in this myth of dreaming a fiction into existence is the idea that our dreaming is dreamed. The logic of this infinite regress is unavoidable: The reader is dreaming the story into existence, almost as if it was an actual reality, but the reader’s dreaming is dreamed, by Borges or by the fiction as a text for the reading. The reader’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. The illusion of reality the reader succumbs to is only the result of enchanting himself into taking his “dreamed son” as an autonomous being. The reading would appear to be determined by a prior text or by the writer’s “combinatory games” (Borges, 1962, p. 213) with his verbal structure, not merely the evanescent and vanishing mental vision of the Eternal Spirit’s consciousness. As writers and readers the readeris composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas.
We begin to see here in this story, as in the “tremendous conjecture” of “Dawning” that denied or rejected poetics of the poem or fiction as a prior text, repudiated by Borges as a mere “verbal algebra”. The magician of “The Circular Ruins” exercises his cosmogonic powers in dreaming another man into existence and “imposing” him on reality:
The purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind…. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 124)
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unreality” when the fire encircling the ruins of the burned temple does not burn but only caresses his flesh:
He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone was dreaming him. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 127)
The Magician in “The Circular Ruins” anticipates another Magician in Borges’ essay (devoted to a history of the idea of infinite regress), “Avatars of the Tortoise”:
“The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (Borges, 1962, p. 208)
This architecture of the dream is the text of the fiction, a text that requires artifice in our fabrication. No matter how much Borges rejects and repudiates the concept of the fiction as a “mere verbal algebra,” the Writer and Reader, like the dreamer in “The Circular Ruins”, resemble Novalis’s Magician, and certain poems of philosophical speculation and stories like “The Circular Ruins” constructed out of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes resemble those “philosophies” Borges evokes in “Avatars of the Tortoise”:
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious co-ordinations, one of them—at least in an infinitesimal way—does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others. I have examined those which enjoy a certain prestige; I venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I recognized some trait of the universe. According to this doctrine, the world is a fabrication of the will. Art—always—requires visible unrealities. Let it suffice for me to mention one: the metaphorical or numerous or carefully accidental diction of the interlocutors in a drama … Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno. (Borges, 1962, pp. 207-208)
That is, the universe should exhibit, like the fiction “The Circular Ruins”, the “visible unrealities” of Zeno’s dialectic, the principle of infinite regress.
Conclusions
In the dreamed and dreaming world of Borges’ fiction, objects, ideas, and people do not retain their separate roles and identities but merge, exchange roles, and symbolize each other through such co-ordinations of words as the avatars of infinite regress he discusses in “Avatars of the Tortoise”. One idea or poetics, like dreaming, can resemble or require it’s opposite. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it.
References
Borges, J. L. (1957). El Aleph (The Aleph). Buenos Aires: Emece.
Borges, J. L. (1960). Otras inquisiciones (Other inquisitions). Buenos Aires: Emece.
Borges, J. L. (1962). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings. D. A. Yates, & J. E. Irby, (Eds.). New York: A New Directions Book.
Borges, J. L. (1970). The Alephand other stories 1933-1969: Together with commentaries and an autobiographical essay. (N. T. di. Giovanni, (Ed.), Trans.).New York: Bantam.
McAllister, R. (1962). Borges’ “El Aleph” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher: Two studies in Gothic romance”. In A. R. Becker (Ed.), Visions of the fantastic. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press.
Rodriguez Monegal, E. (1972). Borges: The Reader as Writer. TriQuarterly, 25, 102-143.
