I’ve been inspired by these tales, both in writing and visual representations. The painting below, The Lilypad Princess, was in part influenced by what would eventually evolve into Learie’s tale within Domus Exsulis – my dreams of those long-ago empires of Srivijaya, Sailendra and beyond:

This issue of Anansi’s Trail is by no means extensive. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the wealth of tales found within South East Asia. I suspect that it will be, at the very least, a series in two parts, since I would like to devote more space to other regions in South East Asia. It has been interesting looking for the translations; most of the sites I found were a mixed bag. I found the most helpful sites were by bloggers who wove translations along with personal anecdotes about how the stories figured in their life. Other sites are businesses with pages devoted to explaining the stories behind names. I thought this was peculiarly appropriate; after all, folktales and legends will continue to be woven into the practicalities of everyday life, whether we acknowledge them or not. To a certain extent, tourism commodifies these stories. Whether for better or worse, I leave it for others to decide. I’m more interested in dreaming rich, textured dreams which I will then transfer onto either visual or text-based mediums!

Thailand

While I was stalking the folklore and myths of Thailand and Indo-China, I came across a reference to the Himmapan Forest which intrigued me. The Himmapan Forest is said to exist somewhere between India and Nepal. Stories about the forest are steeped in both Buddhist lore and local folktales, and many of the figures in Thai art which have these hybrid animals are said to live within this mystical forest. I was particularly taken by the Thep Kinnaree and would like to do a visual representation of it someday! There are many other creatures within the Himmapan Forest, however, and here are artistic depictions of Thai mythical creatures such as the Naga, the Hong, the Kinnaree, and the Garuda (some cross-over with Indonesia here). Life in Vientiane has an intriguing account of the Himmapan Forest, describing it as a “secret palace” where there are people who are half-bird and half-human.

Indonesia

Nusantara Folklore is an Indonesian website which collects and displays folklore from all countries in the Nusantara region.

A fascinating page offering the basics of Indonesian Myths and Folktales, connects it to Indian Mythology. In particular, the writer explores the evolution of the Five Pandawas who were found in the Mahabarata and the Bhatarayuda within Indonesian folklore.

I also discovered a page about the Myths of Origins and the Deluge of Indonesia, I was particularly taken with this, because I’d been looking up different versions and manifestations of the Deluge. It’s inevitable that an archipelagic region would have tales such as these.

This waterlogged tale from Indonesia is about a very different sort of watermaiden, found within the Legend of Lake Toba, which I referenced within my poem, Golden Apples, a kind of trans-cultural paean to the wild woman/storyteller.

Malaysia

Unbeknownst to most of the western world, the Malay Archipelago had more than one woman warrior or queen in its arsenal of tales. In Hikayat Panji Semarang, the entire heroic romance in old Indonesian Malay features a female princess who cross-dresses as a man so she can be a warrior! One of the most famous Malay female warrior queens is Cik Siti Wan Kembang. I found it interesting that the most helpful pages on Cik Siti Wan Kembang were anecdotal blog posts but it was inevitable. Daring to Speak Bahasa is a thoughtful post which touches on malay folklores and legends. The blogger writes about how the legends personally affected and influenced her, delving into the complexities of Malaysian race politics. On the other hand, Reunited in Negeri Cik Siti Wan Kembang is a less political blog post detailing a journey into Kelantan, with foodbloggery and a painting of the warrior queen.

Another strong female icon within Malay folklore is The Princess of Mount Ophir, or Puteri Gunung Ledang. This story revolves around a princess (or demigoddess) who lived up a mountain and who swore to take no one as her husband. Of course, such an oath would be a challenge to most powerful patriarchs, and so the legend was born. The Fairy Princess of Mount Ophir (Puteri Gunung Ledang) features both the story and the popular culture references in Malaysia by Sejarah Melayu, which is in itself an extensive site dedicated to the documents, archival research and folktales behind and surrounding the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals) manuscript. Malacca Tourism’s pithy and concise (as well as accurate) version of the Puteri Gunung Ledang tale is also a helpful read, particularly because it doesn’t serve up the overblown, romanticized versions that now exist due to popular culture. Like many of these tales, mysticism is tied with a message about the abuse of power.

Another example of this may be found in the Mahsuri stories.The legend of Mahsuri is the prototype tale of the virtuous wife who has been wronged by nobility, due to gossip, ill-will and the abuse of power. Up till the late-80s, it was said that the island of Langkawi was put under a curse for seven generations by Mahsuri, which is why it could never develop. Around the 1990s, there was a tourism boom on Langkawi, and it was said that the curse had lifted. Many of the attractions on the island revolve around Mahsuri’s story, and there is also a musical about the whole thing, which I saw as a kid. Here’s a fairly accurate and decently written rendition, for the website of an Australian Satay House, of all things!

One of the things I love about the stories of the Far East as well as those of South East Asia is the deep romanticism mixed with pragmatism. There are elements within these tales which are very much public-spirited, containing elements of therapy or catharsis. Happy endings are not typical or required; some tales may be moralistic, while others are peculiarly enigmatic. The legend of Ulek Mayang has always been one of my favourite stories, and is particularly enigmatic. The story is part of a ritualistic performance that includes song, dance and mantras. Like many, I was first introduced to it via a dance performance on a school concert day. The story put chills through me, as it should, because it was both otherworldly and incredibly sad, filled with the human longing for different realities. This is pretty much consistent in other East Malaysian performances, such as the Mak Yong. The story is of the relationship between the fishermen and the spirits of the sea (or mermaid princesses), and is about seven playful sea princesses who caused the fishermen to go unconscious. There are mantras within this performance which has all the hallmarks of psychotherapeutic healing linked to ritual (The book, Religious and Social Ritual: Interdisciplinary Explorations edited by Michael B. Aune and Valerie DeMarinis has very good examples and explanations of this. I’ve used it before in my Masters in Literature thesis, and it will likely be helpful for those of you interested in ritual.). Here’s a page with a clear, concise and well-written exposition of the legend.

For further reading, First Day Covers has a page on Malaysian folktales, served in concise paragraph form. Also, here’s an interesting variation of the Raja Bersiong (fanged king) story I was not aware of, related to the origins of the town, Baling. And yes, Raja Bersiong is another wicked king, who developed a penchant for human blood in his curry after a cook accidentally cut his hand while cooking a royal feast.

Africa has Brer Rabbit, Malaysia has its own, witty little mammal, Sang Kancil. The fragile mouse-deer is an iconic figure within Malaysian folktales and children of different races would have been told these stories both at home and at school. Most of the tales are about resourcefulness when you’re outwitted by bigger and stronger animals in the forest. Sejarah Melayu details the connection between the Kancil and the legend of the founding of the Malacca Sultanate by Parameswara. I’ve always been interested by the significance of the tree within this tale. The Sultanate takes its name from the Malacca tree, but the entire experience is mystical.

Outwitting a Crocodile seems to be the most well-represented Sang Kancil tale on the world wide web, but I am interested in finding more.

Cambodia

Cambodia evokes images of a hidden empire within a tropical forest, with sacred apsaras guarding its ornate, stonework enclosures. I was enchanted by the following sites which gave me a glimpse into Khmer folktales which were a mixture of folk wisdom and Buddhist beliefs.

Khmer Folktales by My Cambodia News.

A page of Khmer Folktales by Cornell University’s South East Asia Outreach division.

Khmer Fashion Lab’s translated Khmer folktales.

To Sell a Donkey (folktale).

Phillipines

Alamat, A Phillipine Folktales, Myths and Legend Page is a site that lists out the different folktales, myths and legends according to different elemental domains, featuring creation myths as well as legends. Beautiful in both its organisation and its sentiment, I would definitely list this as a must-visit if you’re interested in pinoy myths and folklore. For something a little older, Folktales from the Phillipines by D.L. Ashliman provides interesting reading and context, while, for something more local, there’s a blog dedicated to Pinoy folktales.

Yet another visual reference for The Difficulties of Courtship and along the same vein as Grafted: Spirit of the Wood. Painted in 2007. I like documenting mythic themes and artistic continuity within my own work. This originally started as a piece for Nemus Animae, but it evolved into its own story which kind of encompasses my metaphysical predilections amongst other things. All things organic surround us, how do we connect to it all?

I thought I would offer a visual reference point to a running motif in more than one of my paintings, and which wound up in The Difficulties of Courtship. This painting was completed sometime in 2001-2002. To a certain extent, I’ve been constructing my own inner network of signs and mythic resonances, and this was one of the earlier seeds. I consider this a flawed piece, as are most of my pieces. I do love it for what it signified to me at the time and what it signifies to me still, but I would really like to do a traditional medium, fine art version of it. As for The Difficulties of Courtship, I’ve been getting some interesting responses to the painting as different people see different things in it. I like this! It’s the multiple possibilities/perspectives that excite me, and even if my execution is flawed, if I’m somehow telling a story, that’s good enough for me.

We tend to have these aesthetic preconceptions based on how things are packaged; I was first introduced to Cabinet des Fées when my writing buddy Stace Dumoski got her beautiful fairytale with hybrid Polynesian and Thousand and One Nights motifs published there. And so, I never saw Cabinet des Fées as being predominantly Eurocentric, particularly when the online journal was named Scheherazade’s Bequest, pertaining to one of my favourite fictionalised storytellers, she of the Thousand and One Nights. But again, this has to do with aesthetic and cultural templates in our heads. My aesthetic will be forever different because I came from a mixed-race, hybrid, multi-cultural background. When I hear “fairytales” I have so many different associations; my early childhood was lived in two countries, and filled with fairytale books from various cultures, inclusive of the old (scary) Grimm, the Andrew Lang books, stories from Asia and Africa, the Middle East and Russia. But it does give me an additional set of triggers, so I’m aware of that privileged viewpoint and conscious about it. It allows me to discern the hybrid and oriental elements within the tales of Madame d’Aulnoy and the rest of the French salon fairytale tradition, for instance.

However, growing up, I learned that when most people hear “fairytales”, they believe it heralds the bowdlerised, whitewashed versions that is dished out by popular culture. This has been talked about a bit in Adaptation Studies also, and Julie Sanders has written some good stuff about it. I don’t think this is inherently wrong or that we should fault people for having been brought up within this cultural schemata, but I also think that as people grow older and more self-aware, the time then comes to smash these markers. My argument for this site and for most of my life has been about the nature of fairytales themselves. They are, in themselves, hybrid creatures, made for cultural overlap and cultural assimilation, and because they are so ripe for experimentation, we can, and should experiment. There are many fairytale scholars who talk about the inherent hybridity and overlapping schemata within fairytales; I’ve posted a review of Jack Zipes on this site, and there are various others, such as Marina Warner and Maria Tatar who delve into these cultural markers as well.

Which is why I think Erzebet is absolutely right, that sometimes we do have to be obvious to smash these preconceived ideas about fairytales. I’m not saying the appropriations should be dominated by any one culture, I love the fairytales of Europe as much as I love the tales from the Americas, my Asia, and of course Africa. I love the commonality which feeds the markers of human experience, and the fact that fairytales were always meant for the people. However, I think that if we’re going to be in the business of mythic and fairytale appropriation for our art or our music or writing, it is really, really time to be more bold.

I suspect that I will, at some point develop this painting further, but for now, this is as complete as it gets. You may click through the above image to access a bigger version on deviantart.

Jarhane (and his twin Jehan) were on the feature painting for The Faerie Lord’s Bower over at Domus Exsulis circa 2000-2001, before I took the painting down because I was unhappy with the proportions. In part, this is a pictorial demonstration of what I’ve been gnashing my teeth about for years. The fact that people assume that if one is writing about faeries or mermaids etc, they must needs exist only in one culture – an Eurocentric culture. Jarhane was supposed to be a faerie from Borneo (just like Hrelgar the dragon and Ungu the orangutan were from Borneo), but he evolved into something else, and right now, it seems like he’s either scaring a girl faerie away or awakening her from slumber. Who knows what is truly going on here? Not me! But I’m looking forward to finding out. I do hope he’s not scaring her away, because I’ve always been fond of these East Malaysian twins, since I first painted them. Then again, they were in the Bower, where all the naughty faeries, watermaidens, and sorceresses from more than one culture congregate in a neverending revel.

Here’s the work in progress from an earlier incarnation of this post!

In other news, related to Domus Exsulis and the WIP novel that had been given the working title of Saltwater Orphee - I’ve decided to name the novel Watermaidens, and those of you who have been keeping track would know exactly why. The novel does not belong solely to the Orphee, who has moved quite a ways off the centre stage – even if that mythic trope still informs the backstory. And I have more than one protagonist. Anywho, the name is apt for more than one reason and it does help seal the direction and depth the story has taken over the past couple of years. Also, the Watermaidens have been getting cheekier and more insistent in both my fictive and visual imagination, so how could I deny them? After all, did they not have me declare that the Fourteenth of February shall henceforth be known as Official Watermaidens Day?

Watermaidens began as a project that wove together three novellas I had written together, all of which had ties to Alta Exsilii (the Sea of Exiles), and of course, the element of water. However, Watermaidens has now turned into a distinct novel with its own unique character. The storytelling process has been instructing me and educating me about the world I created, and I am looking forward to seeing where it leads me, after I finish writing my phd dissertation. I have a good feeling about both of these tales and a solid plan.

The Caretaker’s Tale and The Dragon Who Thought She Was a Tree: Two Novellas will be released early next year, on this website in various ebook formats under The Mythogenetic Grove Press. I’ll hammer out the details with regards to pricing and other practical matters later on. I suspect the title will be shortened also, because there’s a very strong possibility both novellas will experience a fictive mind-meld. Watermaidens, on the other hand, will be a traditional (in so far as the medium goes, not the content) manuscript which I will be looking to submit, either to agents or editors, assuming I get to do everything the right way and produce a manuscript that I can be proud to submit.

As mentioned, all this will be happening in 2011, after I finish my phd. dissertation, but there will still be short, impromptu storytelling fragments posted in Domus Exsulis as part of my pledge to bring more content to this site, and to keep my fictive muscle (and my spirits) going with virtual word-busking. There’s a tip jar over there if you want to toss me a few coins, and word-of-mouth will help as well, but only if you want to, and only if you feel you’ve gotten something from the stories. For now, do enjoy the changes on all four of the sites!

Love,

The Ninny One and her elemental helpers

The sad news above is coupled with (hopefully) good news. I have – for quite some time now – been thinking of having a separate chapbook, whether print or digital, featuring the first two novellas. Both Kieran and Erna’s tale *do* provide the back-story for my novel in progress based in Domus Exsulis, but also, I want to move this hypertextual experiment to a more traditional form. I want to say “print” form, but since I envision it primarily as an e-text, it’s more sensible to say a more “linear” and traditional form. To that effect, I’m happy to announce another storytelling project for The Mythogenetic Grove:

The Caretaker’s Tale & The Dragon Who Thought She Was a Tree: Two Novellas

It makes sense to have them within the same digital chapbook, particularly since the events, to a certain extent, run concurrently. Kieran, a hybrid Australian of Chinese-Eurasian descent and Erna, a Himalayan dragon, have always been central to the many-threaded narration of Domus Exsulis. I started it in `97 based on my love for the classics, mythology and all things gothic, creepy and strange in folklore and fairytales. It was set on an island, the very same island to which Cupid had Zephyrus bring Psyche. I mused about the function of the island in folklore, fairytales and mythology and my love for The Green Serpent was partially because it hybridized that very same island with the Pagodes. It was also based on my love for Maurice Ravel’s musical visions. But wait, is that all? No! I had various locales, with stories which straddled indo-chinese, celtic, Indian and African mythologies as well as South East Asian and Malay. I did not make it explicit because, being a hybrid, mixed-raced and mixed-culture writer, I had hoped that the complexities of the connections between races would be sufficiently implicit. However, I’ve realised recently that perhaps I do need to fully flesh out this world, perhaps I do need to be more direct about what I’m doing here.

This will be my self-publication experiment; the stories have been on the web for over 13 years. It’s not a dramatic risk, but it’s not risk-free, either. It’s a leap, but one I am willing to take, as I need to start revolutionising the way I’ve been distributing my stories online, outside of my plans for traditional publishing. My goals as a writer have always been both the traditional AND indie routes – I think for my more experimental pieces of writing, I would prefer to have more autonomy. This doesn’t mean I’m planning on sacrificing on quality – the stories will be substantially different once in an ebook format. They’ve been placed on the daunting “to be re-written” list but since the raw material and storytelling framework is there, it shouldn’t take as long as completing a frigging novel! My plan is to provide a more concrete closure for both stories, making the narration richer and with more atmosphere. Both Kieran and Erna’s tale deserve more depth, I believe, and the framework has already been laid out. There is still a decent amount of fiction left on Domus Exsulis. Newer pieces and fragments that cross-refer with each other. I suspect more fictive pieces will be posted, now that there’s a lacunae of opportunity left. Right now, Millah, the mother of one of the protagonists of Watermaidens is having a fine day over at Domus Exsulis. Read her account in Better than Mathematicians. Anyway. My aim is to write more spontaneous fictive pieces in the name of virtual word-busking. They won’t be perfect, but they’ll fit within the grand scheme of the stories I’ve been telling since Day One.

On another, not too distantly related note: In keeping with my pledge to offer more readable and informative content on this blog, I’ve cleaned up and formatted a couple of the papers I wrote during my M.A. in Literature, making them as suitable as possible for blog posts. I’ve updated the style formatting on them but may have overlooked a bit since this is my busy time as a Ph.d. student. A couple more may be posted once I’ve unearthed the “Works Cited” lists, but for now, do enjoy what’s there.

One of the primary considerations in postcolonial literature is that of home, and culture. Much has been said about the search for (or negation thereof of) the self in existentialist literature; in post colonial writers this search goes to a whole new level, as different cultures often seem to vie for attention within the psyche of the character, or writer. For Homi Bhabha, this search is one that may perhaps be reconciled by finding a meeting place in between cultures. Taking due note of this, this paper examines the site for Bhabha’s theories of cultural location in relation to two works by postcolonial writers. The first is Sons for the Return Home by Albert Wendt, and the second is The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul. Both these texts are illustrative of the condition of hybridity set out by Bhabha in his work The Location of Culture. In The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul writes about the condition of “Arrival”, basing it around the surrealist painting by de Chirico, which is of the same title as his book. The image is both bleak and ambiguous:

A classical scene, Mediterranean, ancient-Roman – or so I saw it. A wharf; in the background, beyond walls and gateways (like cutouts), there is the top of the mast of an antique vessel; on an otherwise deserted street in the foreground there are two figures, both muffled, one perhaps the person who has arrived, the other perhaps a native of the port. The scene is of desolation and mystery; it speaks of the mystery of arrival. (Naipaul 98)

This mystery runs at the heart of the work. He contemplates the idea of arrival, and the question of whether one can ever truly arrive at any given destination. One of the most autobiographical of Naipaul’s oeuvre, at its heart is the question of self, of the pose worn by the writer and of the dichotomy between that and the self of history.

Brett Nicholls argues that within Bhabha’s work there is a break with the diasporic theory, mostly because for him the return to the homeland is not central as it is for other postcolonial scholars’ (17). Perhaps this is related to Bhabha’s own experience as a migrant. This argument is interesting to look at in relation to both the works being studied, primarily because one deals with the idea of return and the other with the idea of arrival. Both of these works deal with migration. In Wendt’s work, the question the protagonist has to ask himself pertains to the location of home – whether one can ever return back to the homeland. Juniper Ellis comments that Wendt’s narration suggests the manner in which general “conceptions of nature, gender, race, and representation “ can either evoke, or encroach upon the idea of home, or the absence of a home (par 13). And indeed, much of the ideas that the reader gets about how the Samoans identify the loss of home, is via the introduction of an alien sexual culture, even as the protagonist becomes assimilated into a new home via his emotional/sexual relationship with the pakeha girl. Finally, is the Polynesian legend of the shaping of the isles that brings this home to the reader, because that too involves what takes place between two consenting adults of the opposite sex. For the protagonist, he finds that home for him is situated within his physical embodiment of this mythic, larger than life coupling. This becomes the site for Wendt’s protagonist’s search for an identity as well as his cultural ‘epiphany’.

In Naipaul’s work, the author seeks to explore this idea of arriving in a foreign state and the process of belonging or of seeking ones’ identity on a soil different from the homeland. The sense of ‘difference’ he feels is heightened mostly because he is looking at his chosen home as both an arrival and a writer. It is thus as a writer that he has to confront this dichotomy between ideal and actual states of being. As we move further into the texts of these novels, we find ourselves deconstructing the ideas or ideals of “homeland” or “nationhood” as well as those of cultural stereotypes. As Naipaul comments of one of his earlier travels within The Enigma of Arrival:

In Puerto Rico there had been the Trinidad Negro in a tight jacket on his way to Harlem. Here was a man from Harlem or black America on his way to Germany. In each there were aspects of myself, but with my Asiatic background. I resisted the comparison; and I was traveling to be a writer. It was too frightening to accept the other thing, to face the other thing. It was to be diminished as a man and writer. Racial dimunition formed no part of the material of the kind of writer I was setting out to be. Thinking of myself as a writer, I was hiding my experience from myself; hiding myself from my experience. And even when I became a writer I was without the means, for many years, to cope with that disturbance. (Naipaul 126-127)

Naipaul writes about the condition of being Other. In particular, he writes about his struggles against seeing himself as other, as he himself has categorised the people mentioned above. The condition of wanting to be seen as more than just a stereotype or caricature is also the need to be acknowledged as one’s own self, whatever that may mean to many different people. I wish to explore these conditions within my paper as a seeking for a cultural location, either in a place one is arriving at, or at a place one is returning to. I hope to finally determine the context, or rather, the site at which an awareness of identity is reached within both these texts, and to further illustrate this final epiphany, or discovery of cultural location, by looking at it in relation to Bhaba’s The Location of Culture. Bhabha enunciates this need for acknowledgement in relation to Toni Morrison’s ghost in Beloved, who enunciates her desire for identity (Bhabha 16). The recognition of self, is, in the end – to Bhabha, something that signals emancipation from the master-servant duality which delineates the postcolonial condition of being (16). Such a recognition – he feels could only come after understanding the interstices between the hybrid condition of cultural dichotomy.

Private and public, past and present, the psyche and the social develop an interstitial intimacy. It is an intimacy that questions binary divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially opposed. These spheres of life are linked through an ‘in-between’ temporality that takes the measure of dwelling at home, while producing an image of the world of history. This is the moment of aesthetic distance that provides the narrative with a double edge, which like the coloured South African subject represents a hybridity, a difference ‘within’, a subject that inhabits the rim of an ‘in-between’ reality. (Bhabha I 13)

Bhabha posits that in between the world of the coloniser, and the colonised – is the liminal space. Bhabha’s liminal space is the epistemological space in between two absolutes, of the canon against the Other. This space is created by diaspora, which I read as the condition of people moving out from one country (parent state of being) to the other and then back again. This diaspora is mirrored both in The Enigma of Arrival as well as in the Sons for the Return Home. An arrival is never merely arrival to the postcolonial immigrant, nor can return ever truly be a return back to the cultures before the state of colonisation – as is poignantly evoked in Wendt’s work. Before I begin to explain this condition, however, it would be helpful to first see the conventional definitions of postcolonial theory and to see how Bhabha is either aligned with or diverging from this central idea. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin statethat:

We use the term ‘post-colonial’, however, to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is a continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression. (2)

The “aggression” refers to the manner in which imperialistic culture has assimilated previously politically dominated countries. In a sense, post-colonial studies are concerned with the impact on separate cultures after it has been touched, or “tainted” with the imperial forces so mentioned. Whether positive or not, it is something that has to be dealt with. The authors of The Empire Writes Back continue by saying:

We also suggest that it is most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted. In this sense this book is concerned with the world as it exists during and after the period of European imperial domination and the effects of this on contemporary literature. (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Helen Tiffin 2)

The introduction then justifies post-colonial theory from the diasporic angle. The diaspora referred to is the movement of from colonised nations to that of the coloniser. It concerns itself with the engagement of post-colonial societies with “imperial experience” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 6) and how this contributes to the overall condition of cultural hegemony. This refers to the manner in which English language and culture has been used and assimilated into the nations which emerged out of the colonised mass of the British Empire. The use of English in countries which have other native tongues becomes a primary consideration for post-colonialists, and the emergence of a new condition caused by the meeting of native with non-native, colonising tongue is that of the “Place/displacement” dichotomy. This dichotomy begs the question, as old as hybrid states of being are, to be asked, “Who are we?” “What, if any is the location of our identity?” “What do we exist in relation to?” I will not pretend to be able to wholly answer these questions. However, I will attempt to show the context of these questions within the works being studied, as well as the site of the “answer” of these questions. The answer, I believe, lies in the pockets of epiphany, or self-realisation within both The Enigma of Arrival and Sons for the Return Home. Within both these moments, which I shall unfold later in this paper, lies that particular cultural location for each protagonist.

In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha seeks to explore both these questions and the place that the diasporic inhabitants of postcolonial nations may call their own. While detractors of Bhabha’s theories do state that the postcolonial argument serves as a mere apologia for privileged academics sitting in comfortable chairs, I believe that the search for a cultural space or location is a valid one. In the Introduction to The Location of Culture, Bhabha stresses that it is imperative that there be:

[a] need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood- singular or communal- that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha I 1-2)

For Bhabha, the ideas of origins, and nationhood are constructs, or a veil. If one lifts the veil one can see that what it covers are the processes, the spaces between ideas or ideologies which in the end define a person. An important element to be taken into consideration in trying to determine these spaces is that of time. Indeed, one of the things that defines his slant on postcolonial and colonial discourse is the element of temporality. In “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”, Bhabha reiterates that his emphasis within his formulations of “complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’ is on the “temporal dimension” (Bhabha II: 292). The following excerpt shows the reason for this focus:

The focus on temporality resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes; it provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a people, a nation, or a national culture. It is neither the sociological solidity of these terms, nor their holistic history that gives them the narrative and psychological force that they have brought to bear on cultural production and projections. It is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy – and an apparatus of power – […]
(Bhabha II: 292)

The ‘epistemic violence’ has been located by Foucault as “the redefinition of sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century” – referring to the French Revolution (Spivak 243). Spivak questions this Foucauldian definition because it does not consider the “dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine” (Spivak 25). This engine is that of coloniser/colonised, as much as it is about Master and Servant. Bhabha, in turn, felt that Foucault was Eurocentric in his definition in that he spatialised the temporal gridlines of what was then called “modernity” (243). While spatial considerations are always present within the mind of the exile or the prodigal returnee, the true force of identity lies in memory. Nicholls suggests that in reading Franz Fanon into his theory of The Location of Culture, Bhabha is exposing that, when seen within a temporal context, the meeting space is where the coloniser takes over from the various histories of black or coloured people in the world (9). This too, is the site of Spivak’s “epistemic violence” which pushes the colonised into the role of the subaltern. According to Nicholls, what has been revealed via this reading is:

[a] discontinuous temporal gap between the white world of the coloniser and the black world of the colonised. The gap reveals that the black world arrives too late, it is always one step behind in the myth of progression that sustains the white sense of superiority. (9)

In order to go around this status quo, both the protagonists of Naipaul and Wendt’s book take a fragmented, cyclic way of narration which always brings the reader back to the roots of Trinidadian-Indian/ Samoan-Polynesian, to challenge and question the paradigms of culture which set the protagonists apart. This temporal manifesto is very evident within Sons for the Return Home, where the sparse beginning of the story very deceptively leads the reader into assuming that it is a simple “boy meets girl story”. It is not long into the reading, however, that the reader begins to be aware that while it is about the meeting of a boy with a girl, the meeting is made complicated as it becomes the ground for the dialogue of two disparate cultures. The process of “Being” within both the male and female characters are slowly brought to the reader’s attention via the recount of their personal histories, the histories of their family as well as that of their race. The boy is Samoan, and has come to New Zealand with his family because he must continue his studies there. He brings with him the history, or rather, the “myth” of what being Samoan is. He is then thrust into the life of being a polarised other, an immigrant and a “coconut”. The shock of leaving the native land is also shown in the reactions of his father; during their voyage to New Zealand, he comes across the shocking (to him) sight, of two men in a sexual clinch (6). His response to this is instantaneous and intense (in the negative sense of the word).

A wave of vertigo hit the man. He turned and fled back down into the cabin.

He vomited into the sink. His son woke up because of the noise and started sobbing again. He went over and told him to be quiet. The boy wept softly into his pillow. The woman woke and the man told her what he had seen. She clung to him and cried.

They never again walked the decks; they remained in the cabin for the rest of the voyage. (Wendt 6)

The shock that the father experiences is the shock of “contamination”; this is a very graphic example of how cultural clashes can affect the unwary, especially in activities as essential and as defining to culture as the sexual activity. In his son, this cultural shock of a sexual nature is resolved, as his union with the pakeha girl brings him a little closer to being a “New Zealander”. This strikes a resounding chord with what has been explicated in Bhabha’s theories; the essence of temporality brings home the fact that a nation, or a narrator, is never wholly a singular, uncontaminated, unmixed being. The temporality of mixing cultures of exposure to other races “produces a continual slippage into the categories of “people, minorities, or ‘cultural difference’” (Bhabha II 292). These categories can be found to be “continually overlap[ping] on the act of writing the nation” (292). What can be gathered from this overlapping of cultural differences is that a nation is essentially a “measure of the liminality of cultural modernity” (292). In both Naipaul and Wendt’s works, the cultural stereotypes are examined. In Sons for the Return Home, the reader is introduced to it via the mixed-race relationships of the protagonist with his Caucasian girlfriend – exposing the gender stereotypes of what a Samoan man and what a “white” girl represents. This is the crux of the following excerpt from Wendt’s work:

It was all so familiar (and ridiculous) he thought. The type of New Zealand man he’d always disliked, attempting to prove his masculinity in public, the rugby player and surfie who. Suffering from fear of his own inadequacies as a male, believed the racist myth of black virility, and who as now trying to convince himself (and his friends) that the myth wasn’t true. The whole history of the pakeha had been cursed with this fear, and all the Maoris and other minority groups had to pay for it. All pakeha women who went out with Polynesians and blacks were considered nymphomaniacs after the super-sized whang. Conversely, all pakeha men who took out Polynesian women were after the expert fuck. (Wendt 125)

The irony within the above passage was that the protagonist too had no choice, based on his own experience but to categorise the New Zealander in such manner. This irony is also found within Naipaul’s work, the author has to deal with the realisation that although he sees himself as a writer – he is also perceived as Other, and the attempt to escape this perception in turn causes a sense of separation – or isolation from the rest of the world. The Other here, of course, is that of the Black, or coloured man, who is seen as a sexual threat in the eyes of the white man, a sexual stereotype which Fanon made note of in his Black Skin, White Masks. This is what Bhabha calls the “fetish of colonial discourse” (78) referring to Fanon’s categorisation of this fetish as an “epidermal schema”, which refers to the skin (78). Bhabha also notes that this element of “Other” ness can also be related sexual relations, and thereby enforcing sexual stereotypes such as the passage recently sited. These are the hurdles which need to be overcome before the location of both self and culture can be approached, because to Bhabha, this is what lies behind the rigid walls of stereotypes. The main thing to look for here, Bhabha would posit, is ambivalence and ambiguity, because this is what lies in wait, the vacillation between states caused by the act of stereotyping (66).

Wendt’s protagonist is looking at his fellow Samoan through Western eyes, which shapes his own perception of himself and other people, as Others. He finds himself examining critically what he perceives to be unsanitary habits, slovenliness and obesity (178). In this manner he finds that the home he longed for had never existed, except perhaps as a mythical spectre within his mind. This engenders the sense of ambivalence at this point of the novel. The ambivalence is reinforced by the startling abandonment of Samoan culture by his mother, who had been a vanguard for all things Samoan in New Zealand.

Samoa, our beloved home, is about two thousand miles from this cold country, their mother explained. (It was the middle of their third winter in New Zealand, and they were gathered in the sitting room near the electric heater, having just finished their evening prayers. They all wore thick pullovers and woolen slippers; the boys had blankets wrapped round them. Their mother’s talk about Samoa and New Zealand was given often now, especially during the winter months. ) In Samoa, the sun shines nearly all the time, she said. It never gets cold. She warned her sons never to get caught in New Zealand rain. You can die of pneumonia, she said. (Wendt 74)

Ironically, the sense that a Samoan should be Samoan is what his mother instills in him, making him wary of contact with both the pakehas and Maoris of New Zealand. This sense is reinforced in him thanks to his first few encounters with the pakehas. In trying to save an old homeless man from a bunch of boys who are attacking him for being foreign, the boy and his brother are verbally assailed in turn by the man, who is obviously scared of their “foreign”ness. The irony of the situation is made even more obvious by the old man’s struggle to name what is Other, on finally screaming “Don’ touch me! Ya – ya dirty Nazis!” (29). The indication here is that being foreign is bad, highlighted further when the boy asked his teacher what a “foreigner” was, having heard the term “dirty foreigner” leveled at the old man. The teacher replies that a foreigner is someone who comes from another country. This, juxtaposed against the question “What is Nazis” gains a special significance. The man is just a “dirty foreigner” because he is still white, even though he is “foreign”, he is not Other. What is perceived as Other is something that seems to be so vile the only word that comes to the old man’s mind is “Nazis”, that embodiment of evil in the twentieth century. In Wendt’s protagonist, he found that his answer lay in shying away from any contact with the pakeha, until the entrance of the girl into his life. In Naipaul, the answer lay in walling himself off from the world, within the pose of an artist and a writer.

This realisation of how the outer world perceives a coloured person is also seen in Naipaul’s work. In it he keeps telling himself that he is a writer, in a kind of walled of personality trying to find a kind of anchor in the shifting tides of the world. But even he cannot totally escape this sense of Other-ness, not even in a book that seems to want to submerge itself into vivid descriptions of the English countryside and country living, but cannot do so that easily. In “The Journey”, the segment of the novel that intriguingly follows the lovingly detailed English countryside in “Jack’s Garden”, the writer mentions his first brush with this awareness. He is given a cabin to himself in what he perceives to be the “higher class”. However, later, he is woken by the sound of an angry Negro, protesting being placed in the same room as he was (125). It is then that Naipaul begins to realise that he too, is constructed as a coloured Other:

His voice was rising. He said, “It’s because I’m coloured you’re putting me here with him.”
Colored! So he was a Negro. So this was a little ghetto privilege I had been given. (125)

The shock of it comes like a slap in the face, not unlike what Franz Fanon, whom Bhabha quotes extensively in The Location of Culture must have faced. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon talks about how the Black man becomes an objectification of difference, even as he is told, when he resembles the white man, that he is different from the rest of his species. This instance is cited in “Interrogating Identity” within The Location of Culture. Bhabha calls this instance “the white man’s artifice inscribed on the black man’s body” (45). He posits that there is a kind of ambiguity in the ambiguous object which is like, and yet not like the white man, and paradoxically, like, but not like the black man. This too is where the liminal space of Bhabha emerges (45). This ambiguity can be sensed very keenly in the personality of the first-person narrator of the with the Enigma of Arrival. The protagonist is both excited and alienated by his landscape, which he loves. It is slowly, through the act of ‘experiencing’ that he manages to become one with it and not feel, alien.

The solitude of the walk, the emptiness of that stretch of the downs, enabled me to surrender to my way of looking, to indulge my linguistic or historical fantasies; and enabled me, at the same time to shed the nerves of being a stranger in England. Accident – the shape of the fields, perhaps, the alignment of paths and modern roads, the needs of the military-had isolated this little region; and I had this historical part of England to myself when I went walking. (19)

Earlier on in “Jack’s Garden” he had called himself a “stranger with the nerves of a stranger”; this is perfectly natural here, this alien-ness, but we are not made to feel the stinging shock of the Other-ness of color just yet. This happens in the encounter I have earlier stated between Naipaul and the black man on the ship. Bhabha, in the third chapter of The Location of Culture, “The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism” notes that unlike the discourse of Other-ness with relation to the male/female dichotomy, the fetishism is not fixed on the absence/presence of the penis. Instead, it is focused on the skin, with all the ideal qualities that is affixed to being “white”. As Bhabha states, this is an important element within the subject of colonial discourse (66). It is this idea of “colour” which places the colonised in his or her place, just as it is the absence of a male sex organ which places the woman in hers. He again cites Fanon, who states that when a subject is position within these cultural stereotypes, he is relegated to the Either/Or treatment (73). This means that the coloured man is either a negative energy as the epitome of the Other (ie; the Black/Coloured person), or he is a new man who is “different” from his race, a pseudo-white (73). I read the implication to mean that the subject is rarely seen from the stand of what he truly “is”. However, it is hard to ignore this reality of cultural stereotyping as well as the dichotomy of “Either/Or” as Naipaul discovers. He had fixed ideas of being a writer, and in striving to not become a caricature of a colonial Hindu, he ended up becoming a caricature of the “Or”, the new man who tries to negate his original, cultural self (146).

It was […] the idea given me by my education- and by the more “cultural”, the nicest, part of that education […] that the writer was a person possessed of sensibility; that the writer was someone who recorded or displayed am onward development. So, in an unlikely way, the ideas of the aesthetic movement at the end of the nineteenth century and the idea of Bloomsbury, ideas bred essentially out of empire, wealth and imperial security, had been transmitted to me in Trinidad. To be that kind of writer (as I interpreted it) I had to be false; I had to pretend to be other than I was, other than what a man of my background could be. Concealing this colonial-Hindu self below the writing personality, I did both my material and myself much damage. (Naipaul 146)

This self beneath the writing personality is not wholly Naipaul, but neither is the self that he calls his “writing self”. Kermode, in his article, “In the Garden of the Oppressor” mentions Naipaul’s self-consciousness of his role as an author. Indeed, this seems to be a primary consideration in the work. Therefore, it is appropriate that I pick as my “site” for the location of culture within his work, that of the “worlds” he contained within himself as a writer (147). The protagonist realises that the essence of who he was could be found within the sum of his memories, and experience, and this is located within the temporal state of being. As the revelation slowly seeps in, he begins by writing down his earliest and simplest memories:

I wrote very simply and fast of the simplest things in my memory. I wrote about the street in Port of Spain where I had spent part of my childhood, the street I had intently studied during those childhood months, from the security and distance of my own family life and house. (147)

Then, over time, the slow acknowledgement of self.

[…] I defined myself, and saw that my subject was not my sensibility, my inward development, but the worlds I contained within myself, the worlds I lived in […] (147)

Here, the liminal space may be pinpointed as being within Naipaul’s self. This is the place where the different memories, first of being a colonial Indian living the life of an immigrant, and second, being a writer educated in the British way, converge and meet, enabling him to dip out of its wellspring to create his writings. This state of being is one that can only be acknowledged in that temporal and yet strangely non-temporal being within the self. As Bhabha notes in the introduction to The Location of Culture, it is here that:

[t]he present can no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future, no longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-pressence, our public image, comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its minorities. (4)

It is this in-between space too, that Wendt’s protagonist confronts in his seat on the aeroplane. Having renounced both his mother and his motherland, he finds himself being in no man’s land, and returning to New Zealand where he had earlier , unknowingly fixed his location, as being within the self of the pakeha girl he loved. It is she who brings the reality of New Zealand into his consciousness, by introducing him to his “country of exile” via their trek through the countryside (83). It is through her that he can begin to fully apprehend the stories that roil under the surface of what was previously perceived as the other side of the coin, of being coloniser as opposed to colonised (87) . This is as opposed to the farce of his mother, trying to make him apprehend a motherland (76) that he finds increasingly harder to relate to, especially after the much awaited “return”. Because a wholly different return had occurred earlier on, just like the myth of the first woman and the first act of love, his home had come to him via the pakeha girl.

For you, she has become an extension of who and what you have grown in through knowing her. Without her, you would be much less than you are now. As you walk the main street of this city which, through loving her, you have learnt to accept, under the dark dome of this sky that covers this country, which through loving her, you have grown to know in all its moods and sickness and loneliness and joy and colours and cruelty, this is what your heart tells you. She is you; the very pores of your breath. Without her, this city, this country would be a barren place of exile (129).

The above passage marks a sea-change in the protagonist, one which signposts a wholly different sense of location, one which is situated within the aesthetic apprehension of another, one that would culminate at the end of the novel, where he is found speeding through the skies in a plane. The myth of Samoa had died with the realisation that the myth of his grandfather’s greatness was tainted with an abortion. Furthermore, his mother was not what she claimed to be, the bastion of Samoan culture and pride. Instead, she had been the one who had instigated the pakeha girl to commit the abortive act that had alienated her from him. As Ellis comments, “Wendt’s novel ends with the protagonist suspended between countries, balancing history, myth, and invention” (par 58). This is the overt, external symbol of the liminal space, where the protagonist had “nothing to regret” as he confronted “a new beginning” – of a home which was located within himself. This included adopting the Maori myths of his new homeland, a significant milestone in the protagonist’s searching for his particular nexus of culture. The balance is also reflected within Naipaul’s work. Naipaul confronts the idea, that “life and man” is a mystery and that the location that is to be sought is in the fact that the world is remade with every generation (354). He considers that the only constant is death, and what arises before and after it, for those who remain after (354). For Naipaul it is this consideration, that brings home to him who he is, and which intriguingly, brings us back to the beginning of the text. In the ambiguous ways of both post colonial texts and the theories of Bhabha, we begin to find the sense of finally arriving at the end of Naipaul’s novel, seen in conjunction with “Death” and departure. In Wendt’s novel, the sense of return, is the sense of departing the motherland, which has in the end, died for the protagonist. This synchronicity in themes is intriguing, showing a commonality in two writers from different climes. In both, the liminal space, the location of culture, as I have hoped to show within this paper – is located within the self.

Works Cited

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G, & Tiffin, H. 1989. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and
Practice in Post-colonial Literatures. London: Routledge.
Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Ellis, Juniper. Return to Exile: Locating Home .Jouvert: a journal of postcolonial studies, vol. 2:2 (1998).
Kermode, Frank. In The Garden of the Oppressor. The New York Times 22 March 1987.
Naipaul, V.S. The Enigma of Arrival. London: Viking Press, 1987.
Nicholls, Brett, 1997. ‘Disrupting Time’. Southern Review (30), 4-25.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.
Wendt, Albert. Sons for the Return Home. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 1973.

Disclaimer: I wrote this ages ago when I was still a clueless M.A. in Literature student, so please bear it mind this is not a good example of a lit assignment and don’t steal, kids! However, it’s informative enough for a blog post, and covers some of the ideals and aesthetics which influenced me as an artist and writer as well. The formatting is all over the place and I’ll likely clean it up to meet w/ M.L.A. standards when I have the time. Also bear in mind I don’t write like this anymore, as being a Ph.d. student has taught me that you must have a strong academic voice and secondary sources are there only as scaffolding, not to obliterate your own eye, voice and perspective.

Introduction and Overview

This paper will focus on the Romantic aestheticism as encapsulated within “cult of feeling and its emphasis on the imagination”, as embodied in one of the arguably, finest poets of the movement, John Keats. For the purposes of this paper, his letters as well as his poems shall be examined. The poems mentioned will include “ Ode On a Grecian Urn”, “On First Looking Upon Chapman’s Homer”, “Endymion”, “Ode to Autumn”, “The Eve of St Agnes” as well as “Ode to a Nightingale”.The period of activity during the eighteenth and nineteenth century representing a shift of consciousness in European thought is referred to as the Romantic Movement. Prior to the movement, the predominant belief in European culture was that the universe was something that could be understood and quantified with a judicious application of reason. This could also be referred to as the belief that there is a place for everything, that logic and reason should dictate everything. This mindset presupposed a sane and ordered metaphysical universe in which everything that should be done has already been done . Irving Babbit observes that the Romantic Movement in France was a reaction against Classicism, that is, “All that is not Voltaire” . In England, Romanticism was seen as a reaction against the “artificial over-refinement of Neo-classicism” (Furst:31). Morse Peckham asserts that Romanticism is part of an organic movement away from the philosophical mindset of Europe (Peckham:14). Furst remarks that Romanticism took the place of the Neo-classical ideas, which incorporated “rationalism, traditionalism” as well as “formal harmony”. Instead, the Romantics stressed on the importance of individualism, emotion as well as the imagination.

“Hence, the old ‘rules’ of ‘good taste’, regularity and conformity gave way to the unbridled creative urge of the original genius, and the ideal of a smooth beauty was scorned in favour of a dynamic outpouring of feeling” (Furst: 27-28)

Peckham felt that the movement, “whether philosophical, theologic or aesthetic” succinctly refers to the revolution of the European consciousness against “thinking in terms of static mechanism and the redirection of the mind to thinking in terms of dynamic organicism.” As such, the values embraced by the movement incorporate “change, imperfection, growth, diversity, the creative imagination” as well as “the unconscious”. It was subsequent to the French Revolution’s clarion call for “liberty, fraternity and equality” that this organic movement away from the old regime of thought became apparent. Lillian Furst states that this brought about the “affirmation of the overriding importance of the individual”, representing a crisis of conscience characteristic of the period, which in turn became a “crucial turning point in the history of society as well as literature”. Part of this change involved a reorientation in the way one looked at and described nature. The language of the common man became utilized to show a fresh, dynamic look at a model of nature that was no longer perceived as “mechanistic” and dead. It was, rather, seen as changing, growing, and with a life and soul of its own, rather like that of the individual.

In 1795, an important voice in the Romantic Movement, John Keats, was born. Three years later, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads made its appearance in the spring of 1798, and launched the naturalistic trend of which Furst wryly notes is virtually synonymous with the general notion of Romantic poetry, whether fallacious or otherwise. (Furst:83). The Advertisement of Lyrical Ballads states that the poems were to be considered as experiments, that they were written chiefly with a view towards finding out if everyday language could be adapted to the aesthetic purposes of poetry . The Lyrical Ballads heralded a new approach to nature, which was symptomatic of a reorientation of thought, away from the “universally recognized” feudalistic social order in Europe prior to Rousseau and the French Revolution.

Instead of sticking to “gaudiness and inane phraseology” , poets like Wordsworth attempted to employ their imagination to better describe nature and experience with all its spiritual and sublime undertones. As Furst states, the natural universe was seen no longer as passive, but rather, as an animate being. It was against this dynamic backdrop that Keats the schoolboy, as yet unknowing, grew up. In a much quoted line from the “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, the adult John Keats states:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” –that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

The idea that what the mind’s eye grasps as beauty is also an indication, or embodiment of a deeper truth is one of the cornerstones of Romantic thought. The apprehension of this beauty requires the exercise and the implementation of an active imagination. This imagination acts predominantly as “an image-making force”. Furst reiterates that this is a “fundamental generalization that applies almost without reservation throughout Europe”(Furst:171). The manifestation of this “image-making” force is very much evident in the works of John Keats, where symbols and ornaments of a rich and active mind point the way towards a deeper impulse. As the poet states in one of his earlier poems, Endymion:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

Keats is perhaps one of the most effective advocates of beauty as being something outside of the rational scheme of things espoused by the Age of Enlightenment. His mature poetic style shows a marriage between imagination, timing, and poetic craftsmanship. His aesthetic sensibilities include the usage of metaphorical as well as mythological imagery, which are pointers of a sort, to a kind of deeper Truth, which this paper shall attempt to glean. As with the other Romantics, for Keats, the image assumes “a central position in the creative process as the tangible expression of unconscious impulses and therefore as the chief carrier of meaning” (Furst:171). This meaning, according to Furst, is an integral part of the poetic structure of their work. It is not mechanically superimposed, as pretty conceits, as the poets of the Augustan period (chiefly Pope) were wont to do. She elucidates this by adding;

“This use of images is indeed as much a hallmark of Romantic art as its individualism, its cult of feeling and its emphasis on imagination from which the profusion of images springs .”(Furst:171)

Keats and the Romantics

The life of Keats may be divided into several key periods during which he was exposed to various experiences and influences, shaping the way he perceived the world, the poet and his craft. For the purposes of this paper only his educational background and his early literary influences shall be delineated, in order to show how his aesthetic sensibilities were shaped.

Between the years of 1803-1811, Keats attended the Clarke School at Edmonton. It was during the last eighteen months of this stint that his interest in poetry and the intellect developed. Before this, he was more interested in other pursuits, namely, games and fighting. He applied himself to his studies with an intensity of focus that would become characteristic of his poetry. It was also during this period of time that his love for the classics and mythology blossomed. Following his schooldays at the Clarke school, he was apprenticed to a surgeon. During this period of time, he composed a number of his juvenilia which, according to Finney, conformed to the “thought, imagery, genre, metre, and diction of the second half of the eighteenth century”, much of which was influenced by his enthused reading of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. This reading, Finney notes, was inspired by the eighteenth century’s Romantic Movement, “the first stage of which was a revival of the genres of Renaissance poetry”.

A reading of Chapman’s translation of Homer, which was introduced to him by his friend and literary confidante, Mr. Clarke was a milestone in the young poet’s early life. Clarke described Keat’s delight in the translation as particularly intense “even to shouting aloud, as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination” (Houghton:13). It occasioned his working on the Sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen:
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold
Oft of one wide expense had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

The above poem is suffused with the fresh voice Keats injects into his impression of a work of classical scholarship, as well as the fine detail that arose from his imaginative faculties. The realm of the imagination is given the color gold, to symbolize both the presence of the Roman deity Apollo and the sense of richness and wonder. What is also interesting is the way he positions himself as a reader. He is depicted as an astronomer amazed by the revelation of a new planet, or as the Spanish conquistadors awestruck upon sighting the Pacific for the first time. This bears another interesting allusion to gold, that of El Dorado, the fabled South American city of gold.

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific –and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The idea of the sublime sense by Keats is evoked by the allusion of gold and by the words “pure serene” which is breathed in by the poets after listening to Chapman’s Homer. Evert asserts that the poem affords the reader an interesting glimpse into the way Keats translates his experience into “culturally established terms of classical myth.” There is here, a hint as to one of the building blocks of Keats’s technique, which assimilates both the literary and natural experience, in order to stimulate his poetic imagination (Evert:38). This is very much in keeping with the Romantic Movement where, nature and myth are starting points, or pointers towards a much deeper state of consciousness. This deeper state leads to what Wordsworth would call “the sublime” and which Keats’s refers to as ‘Truth”. Keats’s aesthetic sensibility includes symbols, and metaphors, which are a synthesis of the way his mind works both in observing and conceptualizing. An important statement regarding this can be seen through a letter written to his friend Bailey in 1817.

“What the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be Truth, whether it existed before or not;-for I have the same idea of all our passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.” (Houghton:46)

To him, the imagination represents the ways by which a poet could quantify, or at least point towards his personal experience of the sublime. This again is in keeping with the Romantic emphasis on the imagination. Bowra asserts that the Romantic emphasis on the imagination is augmented by religious as well as metaphysical considerations, a reaction against the philosophical system of Locke and Newton, where God fit into their universal model. This is contrary to the Romantic mode of thought, which stresses on feeling and experience rather than reason and sophistry. This is made clear in Keats’s letter to his friend:

“I am more zealous in this affair, because I have never yet been able to perceive how anything can be known for truth by consecutive reasoning…” (Houghton:47)

In this letter he contends that a philosopher is only able to glean truth, or reason after having to deal with numerous objections and doubts. This is unlike the poet who is able to grasp it through sensation and feeling as can be observed in the following exclamation, “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!” (Houghton:47) For the Romantics, the imagination is a vital ingredient towards understanding existence. Thorpe opines that for Keats, “poetry has its genesis in imagination, and feeling is both its rudder and its sails.”

The “Cult of the Feeling”, the Sublime, and John Keats

Bowra observes that things of spirit were a major concern for the Romantics . It was ever their aim to “convey the mystery of things through individual manifestations,” thereby showing both meaning and worth. By this method, poets like Keats are appealing not to our logic, but to our senses because that is what they consider more reliable. Seen in the light of the social and political changes of the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the senses, and feeling could also be seen as more readily accessible and perceived by the common man. That is, as opposed to the rigid structures of reason and logic as espoused by Locke, and perpetuated by the poets of the Enlightenment. Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads bears testament to this viewpoint. A good example of this is Blake’s assertion that human imagination represents a world by which the finite mind of man can perceive what is infinite and divine (Bowra:89). Through the imagination, the Romantics, including Keats, aimed at perceiving as well as exploring the inner world of spirit, not the cardinal, Enlightenment world of Absolute Truth and Reason. This inner and unquantifiable world represents many things to the different poets of the Romantic age. But there appears to be a consensus of sorts, at least on the fundamental virtues of this. Bowra observes that the Romantics appeared to agree that they were seeking to find, via the imagination, an infinite, transcendental order. This order would not merely explain the world of appearances, or account for the existence of visible things. The aforementioned transcendental order includes the sublime effect things of beauty have upon the senses, involving the “sudden, unpredictable beating of the heart in the presence of beauty” (Bowra: 106). It is this effect which they felt to be unmistakable, fostering the “conviction that what then moves us cannot be a cheat or an illusion, but must derive its authority from the power that moves the universe”(Bowra: 106).

This may be observed in Keats’s letter to Bailey;

“ [F]or it has come auxiliary to another favorite speculation of mine, -that we shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we call happiness on earth repeated in a finer tone. And yet such a fate can only befit those who delight in Sensation, rather than hunger, as you do, after Truth . Adam’s dream will do here, and it seems to be a conviction that Imagination and its empyreal reflection is the same as human life and its spiritual repetition.” (Houghton:47)

It is apparent that Keats valued sensation over a methodical and cerebral quest for truth. He felt it to be more immediate and more accurate in the smaller, sensate glimpses into the sublime. The second thing to note is his notion of a “finer tone” . This speaks of the central idea that what is experienced on earth is but a shadow, a tantalizing hint of delights in the hereafter, that is, life after death. Wasserman notes that this idea of “Adam’s Dream” is derived from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, in which Adam tells of the Creation of Eve. (Wasserman:102) Throughout Keats’s poetry there are indicators of this “dream” in which he seeks to see what lies beyond the veil of mortality. There are undercurrents of this in Endymion, where the young shepherd is led by his dream of Phoebe, as well as in The Eve of St Agnes, where Madeleine is led into the rites that allow her to dream of Love’s Vision. It is therefore respectfully submitted that, part of Keats’s study, or philosophy of Beauty as truth stems from a curiosity or need to figure out what lies after death.

Evert remarks that critics and academics have often felt that Keats came late to an awareness of humanity, but the truth is that Keats repeatedly affirmed that he wrote poetry to sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man (Evert:82-83). This thought may also be discerned in Keats’s letter to Bailey, where he declares that “the simple imaginative mind may have its rewards in the repetition of its own silent working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness”. It is submitted that this shows that the poet is not merely writing about some highly developed or privileged individual, but rather, an ordinary man, capable of both feeling and imagination.

“…have you never been surprised with an old melody, in a delicious place, by a delicious voice, felt over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul?” (Houghton:47)

Evert asserts that the limitations to Keats’s humanist tendencies were very much the limitations on many other Romantics, that is, he tended to oversimplify the problems of human existence. He also felt that Keats’s humanitarianism was too intellectual, idealistic and abstract, but it did not mean that there was no humanitarianism at all (Evert:83). In fact, Evert felt that it is a significant feature of Keat’s organizing conception of reality that men could “participate in the orchestration of universal harmony”, as is seen in his early sonnet “To Kosciusko”. The sonnet portrays a man who has made choices, and who has consciously willed the pattern of his life. This poem, Evert asserts, displays Keats’s political liberalism which is linked to Keats’s friendship and admiration of Leigh Hunt, through whom he was introduced to the naturalistic style of poets like Coleridge and Wordsworth. Keats’s poetical landscapes are peopled with human figures such as the shepherd Endymion, and encompassing “the patriots of every land”. Evert feels that they are there as a guide for men towards a perception of a peculiarly Keatsian ideal of elemental harmony “in which, as creatures of the cosmos, all men are necessarily participants (Evert:84). Evert also cites Bush who found in Keat’s work a “progressive adaptation of myth to humanitarian symbolism’ sustained by a native ‘myth-making instinct’, an ability upon occasion to draw together into unity the separate strands of myth, nature and literature” (Evert: 19).

One distinction that ought to be made here is that, unlike some of the other poets, Keats’s outlook towards nature was unsentimental. Although mention has been made of Keat’s humanitarianism, he does not portray nature as participating in human suffering as some of the other Romantic poets are wont to do (Furst: 88). Furst observes that poets such as Coleridge had a tendency of considering nature primarily in relation to man, specifically themselves. This was a hallmark of the individualism that Romantics are known for, and which does not seem to be so much of a dominating factor as it is for his peers. Keats does use the imagery of nature to signify some kind of interior symbolism but there is, on his part, “a characteristic uprightness in facing reality that precludes any sentimentality. Far from expecting the participation of nature in human suffering, Keats recognized and accepted her ‘happy insensibility’” (Furst:86).

The use of symbolism in his poems denotes a kind of parallel between “the natural and the human sphere” but by no means is this to be taken as more than a parallel, or indicator. Therefore it is submitted that it is this humanitarian element in Keats which helped shape and mould his aesthetic sensibilities, for it drove him to find ways in which to reconcile both earthly experience with the sublime. Evert felt that the greatest virtue of Keats’s system of poetic metaphor was the extent of its accommodation. This included tests for itself, that is, of nature juxtaposed against myth and vice versa. Evert asserts that these tests serve to include the great variety of normal experience. This can be seen in the Ode to Autumn where Autumn, or rather, Nature is seen as a “Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;” who helps to ripen the fruits and plants

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

Autumn is something that can be perceived by humans, “sitting careless on a granary floor” or with her hair lifted by the wind, which is a personification of the actions of a winnow, separating the chaff from the grain. The whole poem represents an aesthetic appreciation of nature, with a wealth of description, one which is not affected by the plight of men and which does not affect it in turn.

“For the poet’s attempt, at all times, seems to have been to establish the relevance of every experience to a comprehensive, meaningful pattern in which the physical and spiritual aspects of life may be seen as coadunate members” (Evert: 66-67)

It would be wise to not read into Keats the didactic or any elements of propaganda. According to Keats there is one fundamental difference between an aesthete with the intellectual and the didactic, that is, the “Negative Capability” of a poem. In a letter to his brothers, dated the 22nd of December 1817, upon describing his impressions of Kean’s performance in Richard III. Keats asserts that he was suddenly struck with an insight as to what quality was needed “to form a man of achievement, especially in literature”. It was this quality that Shakespeare possessed in abundance,

“I mean negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” (Houghton: 67)

Keats criticizes Coleridge who “would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the penetralium of Mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge” (Houghton: 67). He felt strongly that a poet should not bully his readers into a certain philosophy. In a letter to Woodhouse dated the 27th of October 1818, he states that a poetical character (as distinguished from what he pejoratively refers to as “the Wordsworthian, or egotistical sublime”) is that it has neither self nor character.

“ A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually in for, and filling, some other body. The sun, the moon, the sea, and men and women, who are creatures of impulse, are poetical, and have about them an unchangeable attribute; the poet has none, no identity. He is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures” (Houghton: 160)

The absence of an ego or self allows the poet to delve into the meat of his imagination, of the impressions left by what he perceives. This is very clearly delineated in the following passage in his letter to Woodhouse.

“It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a very fact, that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature, How can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with people, if I am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then, not myself goes home to myself, but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me…” (Houghton:60)

Finney observes that Keats is very like Coleridge in his facilities of sensuous imagination as well as in his “keen organic sensibility to natural beauty”(Finney:583) The difference between him and Coleridge lies in the fact that his mind, he believed, was like Shakespeare in that it was negatively capable, and Coleridge’s mind was egoistic. According to Keats, the egoistic mind was ever striving to fit “imaginative intuitions of truth” into a rational system (Finney:583). The Keatsian view of the poet is very interesting when juxtaposed with that of Byron, with his smoldering dramatic persona who is very much a part of his poem, or Shelley, whose poems all bring forth his personal ideals. However, the one thing he did share with the other Romantics, whether he knew, or chose not to, was his insistence that poetry should flow naturally, spontaneously, rather like the rays of the sun. In a letter to John Taylor on the 27th of February 1818, Keats posited that “if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all”. Furst observes that Keats’s poetry does indeed appear natural, a result of an “imaginative transfiguration” which “evolves out of a precise observation of reality”. (Furst: 250). Keats’s “precise observation” goes hand in hand with the “Negative Capability” of a poet, who voids himself of Essence so that he can better understand, absorb, and therefore synthesize what he has grasped with his powers of both language and imagination. This acute observation coupled with an absence, whether conscious or not of any egoism, could be said to be at the core of Keats’s poetic modus operandi. “We hate” he says; “poetry that has a palpable design upon us” . This viewpoint is also directed against his peers, namely Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hunt.

Keats declares, in the same letter to Reynolds, “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with it’s subject” (Houghton: 61). Therefore, another distinction should be made here between his attention to detail, and what the Romantic, particularly the Lake (chiefly Wordsworth, Hunt et al) poets or what he perceived the Lake poets to be: pedantic and petty in their descriptions. He asserts that this is what divides the Romantics from the Elizabethans. In his evaluation of his peers, he claims that they know “how many straws are swept daily from the causeways of in all [their] dominions, and [have] a continual itching that all the housewives should have their coppers well scoured”. He goes on to declare

“I will cut all this. I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular. Why should we be of the tribe of Manasseh, when we can wander with Esau? Why should we kick against the pricks when we can walk on roses? Why should we be owls when we can be eagles?”

The whole letter represents Keats’s aligning of his poetic tendencies towards that of a much earlier school, that of the Elizabethans. It could be surmised that what he writes here bears some continuity to the letters leading up to his much quoted “Negative Capability” epistle to his brothers, and that it very much reveals his idea of what poetry “should” be. It also can be read as a blueprint of sorts for works such as “The Eve of St Agnes” which blends Romantic sensibilities with Medieval richness. However, when looked from a broader perspective, it can be noted that English Romantic poetry, particularly those of Shelley, Blake, Coleridge and Keats, is considerably rich in imagery. Central to this is the use of emblematic imagery, such as Shelley’s Moth and the Flame, (In the “Desire of the Moth”). The concentration of imagery, Furst asserts, is “in consonance with the strong emphasis on the creative imagination as the organ for the intuition of the ultimate truths of human existence” . Furst comments that in all the Romantic poets, the ‘logic of the imagination’ is the undercurrent behind their works, active in their image-making faculties. The only differences are in that of extent, intensity and organization. Bowra notes of the Romantics that in their works, they aim to appeal to the whole range of intellectual faculties. He asserts that “[i]n them we see examples of what cannot be expressed directly in words, and [what] can be conveyed only by hint and suggestion.” (Bowra:95)

This goal, in Keats is resolved in an integrated aesthetic system in which myth provides a symbolic union for expressing the unity of all the physical and spiritual aspects of life, and Being. His own “experience in the worlds of nature, intellect and art” provided him with the locus for both elaborating on, and verifying the system. (Evert: 66-67) This is evident in the poem previously studied, “The Eve of St Agnes”. In the said poem, he weaves the influences of Renaissance poets such as Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare with his own ideas of sleep, beauty and the sublime. He also mirrors the contrast between worlds in exquisitely sensate detail, showing his power of observation to the extent and manner befitting his “Negative Capability” ideal. Keats’s focus on the “Negative Capability” of a poet, which brought him very close to the objectivity of his ideal, could therefore be said to be part of the Romantic goal, the reaching out to a kind of objective sublimity. In “The Eve of St Agnes”, the ballad is built of “tightly interlocking motives” which seems almost medieval in execution, but does, in fact, exalt the powers of the creative imagination (Furst:189).

The “Eve of St Agnes” was composed between the period of 1819-1820 when he was involved with Fanny Brawne. Finney asserts that this is the first poem in which Keats was inspired by his love for Fanny Brawne (Finney: 538). It has also been said to be the only complete and perfect long poem Keats ever composed (Finney: 540). As a poem it is rich in imagery and enlivened by both contrast and metaphor. It opens with a “bitter chill” in which

The owl for all his feathers, was a-cold
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold

There are four main characters in this poem. These characters are interesting when seen in juxtaposition to each other as they represent the old and new, in gazes locked in the past and worldly as opposed to the sublime. There is the warmth and vibrant sensuality of the lovers, Madeline and Porphyro, as well as the chilled and numb Beadsman. Last but not least there is the aged Angela, “weak in body and soul”. The tale bears hints of Shakespeare, Milton and Spenser, as it tells the tale of two lovers separated by feuding families. The central theme is that of Sleep. Madeleine is told that if she were to observe the traditional rites on St Agnes’s Eve she might have

[...] visions of delight
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright

These rites included going to bed without supper, disrobing:

And couch supine their beauties, lily white,
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven for upward eyes for all that they desire

It is here that Porphyro comes in, as he has enlisted the aid of Angela in order to hide himself in Madeleine’s chamber so as to be able to gaze at her. As Porphyro watches, Madeleine disrobes in order to receive a spiritual nocturnal vision of a dream-mate:

Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

What follows is a documentation of the chamber and Madeleine’s slumber, designed at evoking all the five senses, as Porphyro steals from his hiding place to prepare for her a feast, symbolic of the rich and sensuous earthly aspect of their romance.

And still she slept and azure-lidded sleep;
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd,
With jellies soother than the creamy curd’
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon,
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez, and spiced dainties, every one.
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

Wasserman feels that the importance of sleep in this particular poem is that it mirrors Keats’s idea of sleep, and dreaming. Within this sublime dreaming, the soul may glimpse into visions of beauty, which hint at truth and which symbolize the afterlife. In his poetry, and in his conceptualization, Keats was ever chasing this ideal. He also sought, in his intense retelling of experience and weaving of the ideas of the sublime with the beautiful in reconciling both worldly and spiritual pleasures. The blending of the two can be seen in the segment of the poem described above. Porphyro’s earthly feast is seen in juxtaposition to Madeleine’s dreaming, which echoes the “Adam’s Dream” of Keats’s epistle to Bailey. When she is awaken from her golden slumbers later, her initial thought is that of dread, and this reflects Keats’s thought that these mystical images are transient when seen in correlation with reality.

This thought can also be found in the “Ode to a Nightingale” where the voice of the Nightingale invokes sadness because it cannot succeed in keeping the poet in the “faery lands forlorn” of his imagination. The bird’s seeming immortality reminds Keats of his own immortality, as can be seen from the following lines

Forlorn! The very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my soul self!
Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! Adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades

He then asks plaintively if what he saw was “a vision or a waking dream”, and again this leads us back to the central imagery in “The Eve of St Agnes”, that of the dreaming and the waking, echoing Keats’s integral thought in his “Beauty and Truth” letter to Bailey (Houghton:47). Many critics have chosen to look at Keats’s poetry purely within the context of his aesthetic sensibility and sensuous richness. Wasserman feels this to be a mistake in that his work has a purpose, which, if not bullying or “palpable” as the poets he deplores, is at least indicative of a higher kind of truth, or rather, the “finer tone” of human experience and feeling. Part of this finer tone includes his vision of “Adam’s Dream”. It is therefore submitted that his masterly weaving of images, his concept of Negative Capability and even his humanitarianism leads us back to this core concept, of reconciling the image of afterlife with concrete human experience, that sublime “feeling” that is the impetus for Keats and the other Romantics.

Conclusion

This paper looked at the manifestations of the Romantic’s cult of feeling within the context of Keats’s aesthetic sensibility. In a sense, Keats was not so very different from the others because he too was shaped by the same exterior forces as the other Romantic poets. During the early stages of his poetic career he was influenced by the Lake poets thanks to his association with Leigh Hunt, and would account for the beginning of his interest in the naturalistic values of the movement. However, in after years, his keen intellect and sensitive appreciation of his surroundings and what he had read helped him to shape and refine the basic building blocks of what constituted the Romantic’s “cult of feeling”. This refinement included melding the aspects of his classical education with technical brilliance and the imaginative facilities of the Romantic poets. What he achieved has been lauded by critics as technically brilliant, or as a lush concentration of sensuous imagery and metaphor . However, this paper submits that there is much more to Keats’s aesthetic sensibility. While not overtly philosophical or mystical like other Romantic poets (for instance Coleridge, Blake and Shelley), Keats has managed to successfully weave in his humanitarian concerns without idealizing humanity. He acknowledged the inherent evil in humanity but also the necessity of that element and then went on to build his “Negative Capability” concept which basically calls for an expulsion of ego from the poet’s self. In this he was perhaps ahead of his individualistic Romantic peers. Finally, it is submitted that if Keats had not had such a tragically short life span, it would have been interesting to see how his ideas could have shaped and perhaps extended the ideas of Romanticism to new heights.

Selected Bibliography

1. John Keats, Selected Poems, London: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996.
2. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798(2nd Ed) London: Oxford University Press 1969 (reprinted in 1971 with corrections)
3. Lord Houghton, Life and Letters of Keats, London: Oxford University Press 1848(reprinted in 1953)
4. Lillian R. Furst, Romanticism in Perspective, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1969
5. ____________, The Critical Idiom: Romanticism, London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1976
6. Morse Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism: Collected Essays, Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1970
7. John Spencer Hill, Casebook Series: The Romantic Imagination, London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1977
8. Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1919(1957 reprint)
9. Rene Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950: The Romantic Age, London: Jonathan Cape 1955.
10. Claude Finney, The Evolution of Keats’s Poetry (Two Volumes bound as One) , New York: Russell & Russell 1936.
11. Earl R. Wasserman, The Finer Tone: Keats’ Major Poems, Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1953
12. Walter H Evert, Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965.
13. Bernard Blackstone, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1959.

Fairy tales have existed in the oral traditions of many civilizations before they were adopted, adapted and transcribed into the corpus of literature, and more recently, popular fiction. However, there appears a gap in the study of fairy tales, either as an important medium of discourse or as a literary form for children. In his thought-provoking work “ Fairy Tales and The Art of Subversion”, Jack Zipes aims to highlight this gap as well as to fill it with a detailed and illuminating study. He asserts that the gap is the failure of critics to study the historical development of fairy tales as a genre. He then sets out to examine how oral folk traditions have a certain subversive code that aim either at undermining or setting up a political and social order. His assertion is that humans create texts in order to gain sense on what has happened “on psychological, economic, cultural (…) levels” and that this is done in order to liberate the individual from the prescribed and conventional socio-historical texts (2). Ironically, the writers of the “literary fairy tale” in Europe have appropriated these same texts. This creates a kind of “literary discourse about mores, values and manners so that children would become civilized according to the social code of that time” (3).

Zipes begins by making a stand that his definition of the genre will not encompass the study of both the morphological and semiotic aspects of fairy tales by Vladimir Propp and Algirdas-Julien Greimas, respectively. He stresses the importance of providing a “methodologial framework for locating and grasping the essence of the genre, the substance of the symbolic act as it took form to intervene in the institutionalized literary discourse of society.” (4) This framework, obviously is one that can be filled by studying the development historically and Zipes rather effectively makes a case for this in “Fairy Tale Discourse”(1-12), the introductory chapter of the book. He points out that the fairy-tale evolves or devolves, according to the change in society and social stratas specifically, as Europe experienced changes during the course of its civilization. Through it the mores and values of the time are symbolized and imparted to young brains. Zipes claims that in this fashion “it is one of the cornerstones of our bourgeois heritage” (10). He subsequently makes it plain that the history that he intends to study is a “social history”, therefore not to be seen as a chronological survey, but more that of an “absent cause”(11).

The first area of European civilization that Zipes examines is that of the French salon fairy tale period, in “Setting Standards for Civilization”(13-44). The most prominent figure during this period was Charles Perrault, best known for “Sleeping Beauty” and “Ricky of the Tuft”. These tales were formed not merely to entertain but instruct the children of the nobility but to instruct and groom them towards fulfilling their social function. The highlights of this chapter is the author’s demonstration how the societal values and functions of the folk fairy tale has been distorted, adapted and refined to suit the needs of the noble storytellers and their audience. This can be seen especially in the tale of “ Little Red Riding Hood” a tale that had a long tradition in the French peasantry. The tale, which actually spelt out an archaic initiation ritual, was actually the spelling out of the rites of initiation that a needlework apprentice should go through, as well marking the onset of puberty and womanhood (30). He asserts that Perrault has whitewashed other dynamic elements such as the understanding of an individual’s animal nature as opposed to his/her cultural nature. In this manner a dynamic and empowering discourse for womanhood is turned into a “social codex”(28) in order to teach women their role in society, a submissive role aimed at maintaining the status quo. Zipes stresses that while his contemporaries did not always share Perrault’s views, there was a consensus by all of them that the fairy tale ought to be a medium that discussed proper breeding and behavior, one which centered on the nobility and which reinforced the patriarchal scheme of things.

I found this exploration to be one of the highlights and the salient points of the book, as it shows how the intent and purposes of the original folk tales had been distorted in order to suit the prevalent view. However, in my opinion his discussion of the variations of Apuleius’s “Cupid and Psyche” fable by Madame D’Aulnoy and her contemporaries is unsatisfactory. I was disturbed by the fact that he did not deal with these female storytellers as individuals in this particular work, as that would have reinforced the point he was trying to make. For instance, he claimed that the women writers “gave more expression to male needs and hegemony than their own” (38) by reinforcing the motifs of suffering, degradation and lessons in order to “create a marvelous model of prudence for young women” (37).

I felt that Zipes’ argument would have been better served if he had delved deeper into the motifs prevalent in tales such as “Laidronette” which he pegged as yet another tale in which the girl gets the prince as her reward while he gets everything. While a great part of this tale focuses on the Psyche-like Laidronette’s penance for her initial repugnance for the male protagonist, the ritual of appeasement is no less a feminist dynamic than that of the archaic Red Riding Hood supplanting her grandmother’s role and marrying the were-wolf. Furthermore, in the tale, the kingdom is given to both the male and the female, and it is only a narrow reading that would peg the tale as yet another example of a dominated discourse!

In the 19th century the fairy tale discourse morphed again in the hands of the Brothers Grimm as well as Hans Christian Anderson, who are the subject of the third and fourth chapters respectively. In “Who’s Afraid of the Brothers Grimm? Socialization and Politicization through Fairy Tales”(45-70), Zipes outlines the processes by which the Grimm brothers collected original folk tales in order to turn them into literary fairy tales. The tales were gathered from the educated middle class and were very strongly imbued with bourgeois ideals. These ideals were refined and reinforced by the brothers. Tales like the “Frog Prince” and “Snow White” which earlier dealt with sexual dynamics derived from archaic and matriarchal societies, were reformed in order to sugarcoat, if not bowdlerize the sexual element. Female protagonists were altered in order to reflect the virtues that morally upright bourgeois girls should have and the tasks they should carry out in order to achieve their goal.

So far, what is evident is that Zipes seeks to look at both the histories behind the creation of these literary fairy tales and the underlying social and political causes. In this respect he succeeds because he very convincingly as well as shows the social dynamics behind the telling, and subsequently re-telling of these tales. He continues his extensive study with “Hans Christian Andersen and the Discourse of the Dominated” (71-96), delving into how Andersen’s background contributed to a state of angst which in turn flavored the stories in his oeuvre.

Because his tales were infused with elements of both bourgeois ideals and that of the Protestant Ethic, his tales received a good response. Within tales such as “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Brave Tin Soldier” “The Little Mermaid”, and “The Red Shoes”, Hans Christian Andersen reinforced the ideals that espoused self-sacrifice, humiliation, meekness and a respect for authority. And yet within these tales there runs an undercurrent of his dissatisfaction for the nobility that grudgingly took him in but never fully gave him the credit he felt he deserved. This eye-opening study of the Danish storyteller effectively shows how conditions that arise out of social and political hierarchy affect the fairy tale discourse.

Fairy tales, as a discourse has thus been shown to be something that changes to suit the needs of a civilized Europe-whether directly or indirectly. Zipes does assert in subsequent chapters, this is by no means static. The later half of the nineteenth century, as succinctly disseminated by “Inverting and Subverting the World with Hope: The Fairy Tales of George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde and L. Frank Baum”(95-133) gave the relatively uniform progression of the fairy tale since the literary salon movements of France a start. This is reflected in the socialization of Europe and the addition of the New World (America) to the fray of storytelling in the Anglo-Saxon world (97). A breath of fresh air was brought into the field by the fairy tales of people such as Charles Kingsley, William Allingham, John Ruskin, Andrew Lang as well as William Morris. Their fairy tales, Zipes assets, were affected by “the development of a strong proletarian class, industrialization, urbanization, educational reform acts, evangelism, and the struggles against those forces which caused poverty and exploitation”(99). These forces in the end caused these writers to write in ways that went against “civilizing norms” which also is reflected in the strict upbringing of children.

Zipes makes his point by exploring the works of Macdonald and Wilde, showing how each made an appeal towards and utopia they dared not spell out, in the restrictive age that they both lived in. Both aimed to show how corrupt the social order was via their fairy tale and both challenged orthodox notions of sexuality. In Macdonald, this took center stage in tales that had non-stereotypical male and female protagonists, and in Wilde, tales such as “The Selfish Giant” were reflective of his homosexual tendencies. This illuminating chapter gains mileage especially since, as I have earlier shown, Zipes has made a case for the fact that fairy tales, from the sixteenth century onward has basically been working for the establishment/societal order.

This makes the contrast between the works of Macdonald and Wilde and those that preceded them even more salient. I would agree with what he is trying to say but a nagging doubt persists in the respect that I felt that the subversive elements that worked against the Establishment were present even during the literary salon period and onwards. One could compare the mutilation and suffering of protagonists in Wilde’s tales with that of the Madame d’Aulnoy’s for instance, where the macabre elements were a foil for her frustration with the patriarchal order. I felt that it was a shame that a case was made at the expense of other considerations, and that a development of these would have better served his case for the subversive effects of fairy tale discourse. I say this, even as I take into consideration the constraints of time, space and focus.

The two concluding chapters of this volume deals with fairy tale discourse in the Twentieth Century. In “The Fight Over Fairy-Tale Discourse: Family, Friction, and Socialization in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany” (134-169), Zipes shows how the discourse was utilized for two opposing ends in these two differing climates of German Life. Before Nazism had its grips on Germany, the fairy tale was beginning to develop a socializing process, aimed at creating politically motivated works aimed at improving the capacities of children in an ideological manner. This was aided by the onset of awareness of psychological concerns. In this fashion they became aware that fairy tales could be used to subvert young minds. However, for the Nazis, the fairy tales were sacred and the works of the Grimm brothers became icons of racial purity and excellence. The socialist and politically motivated experiments were banned. The gist of this segment of the book is the potential waiting to be unleashed within the elements of the fairy tale as a genre, the potential that is recognized by the Nazis as a threat and by the socialists as an aid. This chapter is a bridge to the next stage in the history of the genre. I also found it to be an effective foreshadowing as to the development of the genre, which is spelled out in the concluding chapter.

In considering “The Liberating Potential of the Fantastic in Contemporary Fairy Tales for Children”(170-194) Zipes pays a backward glance, first at the negative charges leveled against the genre by detractors. They find the tales to be “sexist, racist and authoritarian” as well as reflecting “the concerns of semi-feudal, patriarchal societies”. This places a kind of pressure on the genre to justify its existence and indeed, what is prevalent throughout the book is the way in which the author carefully builds a case for the said genre. He reinforces this in this last chapter by embarking on a discussion on the mystique and force behind the literary fairy tale. This hinges on the elements of magic and the uncanny. Zipes quotes and modifies Freud in order to show how it is this element of the uncanny is one of the “significant elements” of the fairy tale, which survives modification again and again in order to weave its way into the consciousness of either child or adult. This is the crux of Zipes’ argument , that “the very act of reading a fairy tale is an uncanny experience in that it separates the reader from the restrictions of reality from the onset and makes the repressed unfamiliar familiar once again” (174) .

Zipes equates this with a quest for home, which is psychological and nebulous in the first instance (within the reader’s mind) and which is social and value based in the second(within the tale)(174). He goes on to delineate the potential for liberation within the world of the fairy tale. Zipes asserts that it is a process of moving from a child’s inner world to the outer world via a process of identification and objectification of the canny within the uncanny (that is: all that is not familiar) thus acclimatizing the child to his role in life. This can be done in a regressive way, via the tales of Perrault and his contemporaries, or in a manner that reflects the “process of struggle against all times of suppression and authoritarianism”(178). Zipes is of course espousing the latter. The rest of the chapter outlines twentieth century efforts to rejuvenate the fairy tale, focusing primarily on the works of Michael Ende as well as feminist retellings of old tales.

This is an elegant and lucid volume, which would be a helpful guide to any scholar intent upon the field. However, I strongly feel it should be read together with more feminist works on the subject in order to better augment an understanding of the field of fairy tales as a genre. I also felt that he could have better made his case about the subversive potential in fairy tales as a tool for liberation if he had taken into account the fractured fairy tales of Angela Carter, which have been making its mark since the 1960s. Her output, since the sixties has made an impact in the field of story telling and her narratives, which mingles to the feminized elements of pre-Perrault fairy tales with the fractured, baroque writing of her contemporaries would have been a valuable addition to his already comprehensive history of the genre. I would however conclude by saying that this book has a lot to offer the scholar of fairy tales as well as makes a convincing case for the fairy tale discourse. It provides a historical survey, as well as an argument that reaches into the fields of social history as well as child psychology and he has managed to weave all these elements in order to come up with something that is very readable and moderately accessible.