Littérature et espaces (with Juliette Vion- Drury and Jean- Marie Grassin)

Transcription

1 Geocriticism

2 ALSO BY BERTRAND WESTPHAL Le monde plausible. Espace, lieu, carte Austro- fictions. Une géographie de l intime L œil de la Méditerranée. Une odyssée littéraire Roman et Évangile Littérature et espaces (with Juliette Vion- Drury and Jean- Marie Grassin) La géocritique mode d emploi (editor)

3 Geocriticism Real and Fictional Spaces Bertrand Westphal Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr.

4 geocriticism Copyright Les Éditions de Minuit, English translation copyright 2011 by Robert T. Tally Jr. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. First published in France as La Géocritique: Réel, Fiction, Espace by Les Éditions de Minuit First published in English in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the United Kingdom, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Westphal, Bertrand. [Géocritique. English] Geocriticism : real and fictional spaces / Bertrand Westphal ; translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. p. cm. Originally published in French as La géocritique: réel, fiction, espace. 1. Space in literature. 2. Geography in literature. 3. Geographical perception in literature. 4. Geography and literature. 5. Geocriticism. 6. Literature, Modern History and criticism Theory, etc. I. Tally, Robert T. II. Title. PN56.S667W '.9332 dc Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: May Transferred to Digital Printing in 2013

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7 Contents Translator s Preface: The Timely Emergence of Geocriticism Introduction 1 1 Spatiotemporality 9 2 Transgressivity 37 3 Referentiality 75 4 Elements of Geocriticism Reading Spaces 149 Notes 171 Index 187 ix

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9 TRANSLATOR S PREFACE The Timely Emergence of Geocriticism In recent years, space along with such related concepts or practices as spatiality, mapping, topography, deterritorialization, and so forth has become a key term for literary and cultural studies. The nineteenth century had been dominated by a discourse of time, history, and teleological development (following in the Hegelian tradition) and by a modernist aesthetic that enshrined the temporal, especially with respect to individual psychology (à la Marcel Proust s In Search of Lost Time). But after the Second World War, space began to reassert itself in critical theory, rivaling if not overtaking time. The spatial turn 1 was aided by a new aesthetic sensibility that came to be understood as postmodernism, with a strong theoretical critique provided by poststructuralism, especially in French philosophy, but quickly extending into various countries and disciplines. Moreover, the transformational effects of postcolonialism, globalization, and the rise of ever more advanced information technologies helped to push space into the foreground, as traditional spatial or geographic limits were blurred, erased, or redrawn. In this context, critics and theorists had to develop novel interpretive and critical models to address what Fredric Jameson, referring specifically to Edward Soja s illuminating study, has called the new spatiality implicit in the postmodern. 2 In the churning wake of the postmodern condition or perhaps, now, post- postmodern condition we are understandably interested in making, reading, and revising our maps. Space is, well, timely. Thus, it is also timely that Bertrand Westphal s Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces appears (now in English). Westphal, who directs the research team devoted to Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles at the Université de Limoges, has long advocated a geocentered approach to literature and cultural studies, which would allow a particular place to serve as the focal point for a variety of critical practices. Thus, Westphal s edited collection on the Mediterranean 3 looked at the various depictions of that multifaceted zone whether

10 x Translator s Preface using classical myth, modern fiction, historical works, tourist brochures, or something else to form a pluralistic image of the place. After all, a place is only a place because of the ways in which we, individually and collectively, organize space in such a way as to mark the topos as special, to set it apart from the spaces surrounding and infusing it. Our understanding of a particular place is determined by our personal experiences with it, but also by our reading about others experiences, by our point of view, including our biases and our wishful thinking. (For instance, on my first trip to London, I remember being disappointed at landing at Heathrow on a bright and sunny summer s morning; steeped as I had been in Dickens and others, I felt that it was somehow wrong that London wasn t rainy and foggy happily, the rain and fog soon came.) Drawing on interdisciplinary methods and a diverse range of sources, geocriticism attempts to understand the real and fictional spaces that we inhabit, cross through, imagine, survey, modify, celebrate, disparage, and on and on in an infinite variety. Geocriticism allows us to emphasize the ways that literature interacts with the world, but also to explore how all ways of dealing with the world are somewhat literary. The geographer and not just Borges s famous mapmakers who tried to create a map coextensive with the territorial empire it purported to represent is a kind of writer ( earth- writing being what geography is, literally), and the representational techniques used in such sciences are often analogous, if not identical, to those used in so- called imaginary writing. In my brief review of Westphal s La géocritique, I noted that all writing partakes in a form of cartography, since even the most realistic map does not truly depict the space, but, like literature, figures it forth in a complex skein of imaginary relations. 4 Indeed, the realistic London of Dickens or Paris of Balzac are part of what I call the literary cartography of the world, but so is Amaurotum, capital city of Thomas More s Utopia, or Minas Tirith, capital of Gondor in J. R. R. Tolkien s Middleearth. So is William Faulkner s Yoknapatawpha County, which would seem to combine the referential space of Faulkner s own Oxford, Mississippi, with the imaginary spaces traversed by fictional Compsons, Bundrens, and Snopeses. But really, all places are like Yoknapatawpha, combining the real and the imaginary. As Westphal points out, the referentiality of fiction (and other mimetic arts) allows it to point to a recognizable place, real or imaginary or a bit of both at once, while also transforming that place, making it part of a fictional world. In this sense, geocriticism allows us to understand real places by understanding their fundamental fictionality. And vice- versa, of course. We understand fictional spaces by grasping their own levels of reality as they become part of our world. Westphal draws heavily upon the insights of poststructuralism and postmodernism, among other nonscholastic schools of thought, but Westphal insists on a kind of referentiality that a Baudrillardian hyperreality was to have

11 Translator s Preface xi permanently done away with. Westphal takes such an argument seriously, and he certainly does not attempt to return to an unsophisticated notion that fiction is able to offer a mirror reflection of the real referent out there. Rather, Westphal understands that the referentiality operating between fiction and the real world is characterized by constant movement, or oscillation, as he puts it, whereby one can never really fix or pin down the referent only the text of God could purport to do such a thing but neither does one simply abandon the effort. Indeed, the inability to fix a referent in a literary text makes the project of geocriticism all the more worthwhile, as the critic may look at the multiple, well nigh infinite, variety of texts that refer to a place in order to shape the vision (an ever- shifting image) of the real- and- imagined place, as Soja has dubbed it. 5 This also encourages further explorations. As Westphal elaborates in more detail in Chapter 4, geocriticism will involve what he calls multifocalization and polysensoriality, among other things, insofar as the approach moves beyond merely a single author s perspective (e.g., Joyce s Dublin or Dostoevsky s Saint Petersburg) and engages all five senses. By bringing together multiple authors, including multiple genres and disciplines (e.g., reading tourist brochures alongside Homer in examining Mediterranean spaces), the geocritic orchestrates a number of different points of view, allowing diverse perspectives to flesh out, to round out, and perhaps to overcome the stereotyping or otherwise limiting images of a given place. By taking time to focus on senses other than merely the visual, the geocritic can register the sensuous plenum of a place, where the fragrance of jasmine commingles with the flavor of some Proustian tea- soaked cookie, or the texture of the cobblestones echoes the bone- rattling clamor of horse- drawn hearses (in a nursery rhyme exhumed and reiterated for the epigraph of Neil Gaiman s The Graveyard Book). These senses do not overthrow, but rather supplement, the kingdom of the visual, of le regard (which, out of deference to the tradition of Sartre and Foucault, among many others, I have for the most part translated as the gaze ), rendering the polysensorial place more completely realized in our fictional interactions. Of course, the idea of completing the geocritical analysis of a place is as false as the idea of fixing it in a permanent, unchanging, and static image. If failure is inevitable, then the goal must be to fail in interesting ways. And geocriticism presents interesting ways to engage with the spaces of fiction and reality. The title of this book, here and in the original French edition, is deceptively categorical. This book does not once and forever provide a definitive answer to the question, What is geocriticism? Geocriticism surveys a territory, speculates about others, suggests possible paths to take, and argues in favor of certain practices and against others, all while peregrinating around multiple discourses of space, place, and literature. In a world in which fiction may be as reliable as any form of understanding the world, what grounds do we have for analysis?

12 xii Translator s Preface What methods can we use to make sense of things? Indeed, in his introduction, Westphal indicates his paradoxically tentative and yet bold project: this book is an attempt one trial, among many other possible ones to answer these questions, to capture if only fleetingly the mobile environment in a cautious, humble way. Geocriticism is an essay, in the strongest and broadest sense of the word, an attempt to make sense of things, to make sense of the ways we make sense of things, which is after all the role of the critic. As Frank Kermode has said, in a book dedicated to the study of temporality rather than to spatiality, but no less apt, It is not expected of critics as it is of poets that they should help us to make sense of our lives; they are bound only to attempt the lesser feat of making sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives. 6 So too with geocritics. Geocriticism offers Westphal s attempt, one among many he has made and will make, and one among the many being made or to be made by other critics (whether they would embrace the term geocriticism or not) working with real and fictional spaces, to make sense of the ways we make sense of our world, of our places in the world, and of our various and complex mappings of those worldly and otherworldly spaces. The final word in Geocriticism is quite fittingly the verb explore, for, notwithstanding the seemingly categorical title, Westphal intends for geocriticism to be an exploratory critical practice, or set of practices, whereby readers, scholars, and critics engage with the spaces that make life, through lived experience and through imaginary projections, meaningful. As is apparent by the rapidly growing library of books and articles devoted to such projects, 7 this is a timely moment for the emergence, and proliferation, of geocriticism. * * * In translating a book on geocriticism, I am made especially aware of the spatial significance of such a project. As most know, translation refers to a crossing over, much akin to what Westphal refers to as transgressivity in chapter 2. The Latin translatio means to carry over, which certainly implies border crossing, in more ways than one. In transporting Westphal s prose, I have endeavored to allow his style and language to come through as much as possible, while inevitably making a lot of changes in order to do justice to Westphal s thoughts now rendered in English. I have also modified the original by citing the English versions, where available, of the eclectic and wide- ranging array of texts that Westphal enlists in making his argument. Every translation is a mistranslation, of course, and just as no representation of a place can be a perfectly mimetic copy of the real location, no translation can really bring the original across the linguistic and cultural divides. I am painfully reminded that the Romance

13 Translator s Preface xiii languages, over time, allowed the carrying across of translatio to become the leading across of traduco, such that the French word for translation is a cognate for an English word (traduce) that suggests betrayal. Hence, the perfidy of translation, of transgression, which is a good enough reason for travelers and readers to explore the originals... not because they are pure or authentic, but in order to makes one s own translations, betrayals, and interpretations. In the meantime, I hope that this effort to carry Westphal s geocriticism across to other zones is a fruitful step in a larger movement conducted like geocriticism itself by multiple authors. I am grateful to Bertrand Westphal for his support at every stage of this project. I also want to thank Irène Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit and Georges Borchardt Inc. Brigitte Shull of Palgrave Macmillan has been an extremely patient and helpful editor, and I gratefully acknowledge her support. I have benefited immensely from the collegiality of my many colleagues at Texas State University, particularly Michael Hennessy and Ann Marie Ellis. I am especially thankful for the support of Reiko Graham, who has to put up with far too many questions, interruptions, non sequiturs, general complaints, and occasional rants, but who always manages to do so with love.