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Journal of Literature
and Art Studies
Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30)
David Publishing Company
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DAVID PUBLISHING
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Journal of Literature
and Art Studies
Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30)
Contents
Literature Studies
The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in The Flight From the Enchanter 325
XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua
Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities 338
Robin McAllister
Translation of Allusions in Fortress Besieged 345
ZHANG Qun-xing
Girl Power in Cashore’s Graceling 351
Suryo Tri Saksono, Syarifah, SS
Art Studies
A Study of the Styles of Early Taiwanese Bamboo Chairs According to the Methodology
of Style 359
Shih-Hsing Wu, Ying-Pin Cheng, Chi-Hsiung Chen
Crises of Socialism in China and Chinese Rock in 1980s: The Case of CUI Jian 375
WANG Xiang
Never, Ever Break Up a Family 384
Steven William Schaufele
Special Research
Revisiting Contemporary Judaism in Modern Israel 396
Uri Zur
From Sex Objects to Heroines—A Tough Road for Female Characters in Video Games 409
Adam Flamma
Argentina and Brazil: Laws as Mediators of Social Identities 418
Yussef Daibert Salomão de Campos
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836
May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 325-337
The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in
The Flight From the Enchanter∗
XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua
Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China
Iris Murdoch is a renowned female novelist and philosopher in the 20th century English literature. In her literary
creation, she has a preference for male narration and holds a reserved attitude to women’s movements with
reluctance to be considered as a feminist writer, which permits her realistic depiction of female characters and
dispassionate thought on women’s problems. This paper, with the interpretation and redefinition of the concepts as
consciousness, identity, and self in Murdoch’s philosophy, analyzes the fragmented self of three female figures in
The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) respectively from the perspectives of self-consciousness, identity, and self
and reveals that the fragmentation of female selfhood is mainly due to the overwhelming male dominance in the
gender relationship.
Keywords: Iris Murdoch, identity, female selfhood, fragmentation
Introduction
Historically, both the patriarchal culture and discourse were of the opinion that female biology had its own
defects and limitations. “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”, said Aristotle, “we should
regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). For St. Thomas,
woman was renounced as an “imperfect man”, an “incidental being” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Besides, “a man
is in the right in being a man; it is woman who is in the wrong” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Women were
marginalized and disparaged with these defects. Consequently, both in the Victorian age and in the early 20th
century, the popular image of the ideal wife/woman came to be “the Angel in the House”. They were expected to
be devoted and submissive to their husbands just like the Angel: passive and powerless, meek, charming,
sympathetic, pious, self-sacrificing, and above all—pure. In the modern society, the outbreak of the two world
wars and the advancement of women’s movement brought the dramatic changes of the women’s roles
domestically and socially. The long-established traditional female selfhood has been disintegrated under the new
social and cultural circumstances.
Although Murdoch insisted on her status of not being a feminist, she explored the crisis of female identity
∗
Acknowlegements: The paper is supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”, Project No.
DUT14RW 212 and No. DUT12RW401.
XU Ming-ying, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology.
SUI Xiao-di, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology.
AN Xue-hua, master, associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology.
DAVID PUBLISHING
D
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD326
and its consequence, the fragmentation of the female selfhood as the major themes in her novels. In her opinion,
the process of the disintegration of the female selfhood is irreversible, and the roots of this disintegration are
formulated at a much deeper level than the roots of the disintegration of the male selfhood in contemporaneous
texts. While they do share a sense of cultural crisis, the very core of this crisis is defined as the dualism inherent in
the patriarchal system, a dualism that justifies women’s continual exclusion from the power and their
appropriation for the purposes of the male imagination and male desire.
This paper is intended to discuss the female characters’ disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity,
and disintegrated self and to demonstrate women’s fragmented selfhood in Murdoch’s early novel The Flight
from the Enchanter (1956). The symbolic title of the novel reinforces the sense of restriction, of being confined,
and of the desire for independent self. It underlines the basic theme of imprisonment and escapes which is
common to most of Murdoch’s novels where physical confinement is not a necessary adjunct of enslavement;
moral and spiritual compulsions are more devastating; and the enchanters of the novels ensnare the hearts and
minds of the female characters around them as surely as the settings enclose them.
The Disruption of Women’s Self-awareness
The philosophical state of self-awareness holds that one exists as an individual being, while
self-consciousness is a preoccupation with oneself as an acute sense of self-awareness (Lipka & Brinthaupt, 1992,
p. 228). That is, self-awareness in a philosophical context is being conscious of oneself as an individual, while
self-consciousness is being excessively conscious of one’s appearance or manner. Self-awareness Theory states
that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal
standards and values. However self-consciousness is not to be confused with self-awareness. We would not
become self-conscious until we could function as objective evaluators of ourselves.
In some context, self-consciousness may affect the development of identity in varying degrees, as some
people are constantly self-monitoring or self-involved, while others are completely oblivious about themselves
(Branden, 1969, p. 42). Both private and public self-consciousness are frequently distinguished by psychological
terms. Private self-consciousness is a tendency to introspect and examine one’s inner self and feelings. Public
self-consciousness is an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, which can result in self-monitoring and
social anxiety. As relatively stable personality traits, private and public self-consciousness are not correlated just
because that an individual is high on one dimension does not mean that he or she is high on the other (Bernd,
2004, p. 30).
Murdoch shares with Romantic writers an interest in individual consciousness and how it operates. In
Romantic fiction, this preoccupation is expressed through the representation of “problems of consciousness, of
vision and perception” (Jackson, 1981, p. 51). In Murdoch’s fiction, the interest in “character dispersal and
fragmentation” (Jackson, 1981, p. 86) is an aspect of the destabilized sense of self evident during the Romantic
period. This destabilization surfaces in descriptions of sightings, material, and immaterial, of the self or an ideal
other that can be interpreted as an externalization of the self.
What Annette lacks is the self-awareness, the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself
as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. The Flight from the Enchanter opens with
Annette Cockeyne’s decision to leave her “expensive finishing-school in Kensington” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7).
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 327
“Learning nothing here” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7) is Annette’s reason to leave her school and “enter the School of
Life” to “educate [herself]” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). Her departure is also partly because of her lack of interest in
the teaching mission of this expensive college which is to teach “to young women of the débutante class such
arts as were considered necessary for the catching of a husband” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). All these remind the
reader of her immaturity as a girl of 19 years old.
A false impression on Annette is that she is an invulnerable character with a charmed life and even without
any physical scars. But actually Annette is a nymph-like young girl who has insufficient self-awareness and feels
homeless and nationless. Annette had once said to the young women at Ringenhall: “I have no homeland and no
mother tongue. I speak four languages fluently, but none correctly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). In spite of her perfect
French and English, Annette “liked to think of herself as a waif. Even her appearance suggested it, she noted with
satisfaction” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 63-64). In Demetriou’s theory of cognitive development, self-awareness
develops systematically from birth through the life span and it is a major factor for the development of general
inferential processes (Demetriou). That is, the previous experiences, especially those in the childhood, are of
great influence on the systematic development of one’s self-awareness. In Annette’s memory, “the sensations of
childhood” include “the loneliness and boredom and fear of strange places, the hurry and the noise of a world
which was never her own, the alien odour of the expensive hotel and the long-distance train. These were the thing
that had prefigured the present moment” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 267). Annette’s experiences in her childhood cast
shadow on her present sense of instability and make her lack of sense of belonging. When asked to go back home,
she said: “Home! Cam’ Hill Square isn’t my home. I have no home. I’m a refugee!” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 271).
Self-awareness makes people align their behavior with their standards, and the failure to live up to their
personal standards will result in a negative effect. When Annette evaluates and compares her current behavior to
her internal standards and values, she feels completely confused and lost. “The idea of growing up had always
been for Annette the idea of being able to live at her own pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). To her disappointment,
she can achieve this aim in no way. Although Annette tries her best to protect her body in the physical sense, she
fails to gain access to greater self-awareness in the spiritual sense. In order to reinforce her sense of being an
individual being, Annette turns to establish the relationship with other fingers, especially male characters, which
proves to make her live at others’ pace instead of at her own.
Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes
the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as the way to set up the
appropriate relation with men and protect herself. So when Rainborough asks her what she is going to do for her
living, Annette tells him that she has no idea and she is not good at anything “in a helpless feminine way about
which Rainborough could not decide whether it was natural or the effect of art” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). In
Rainborough’s eyes, “Women pick up these conventions at such an early age, …they’re almost bred in
them”(Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). Then he cannot help wondering “how can anyone who has travelled so much be
so appallingly juvenile?” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). The fact that Annette has no concern about her future source
of income shows us her conventional thinking of male and female social roles and division of labor, which leads
to her willingly enslavement in androcentric fantasy.
Lack of self-awareness makes Annette not only have no idea about the future life, but also fail to recognize
the present reality as she lacks the sense of ownership of her own body and of self-protection. Although Annette
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD328
is kind and caring to the people around her, she seldom receives any care, concern, respect, or love from them,
especially from the male. Her brother Nicholas arrangs his friend to “deflower” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) Annette
when she is 17 just to make her “rational about these things” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Nicholas expects her not to
“build up an atmosphere of mystery and expectation” about sex, because that will only make her “neurotic”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Contrary to his expectations, Annette attends a number of adventures since that time,
which bring her “neither delight nor grief” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) but the misconception of the appropriate
relationship between the sexes. “The mystery was displaced, but it remained suspended in Annette’s vision of the
future, an opaque cloud, luminous with lightning” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). This misconception hinders her from
establishing a positive and normal self-recognition in the male-female relationships. He has no favorite for
Annette at all, and what he does is just for his own lust without the consideration to Annette’s feeling and respect
to her as a woman. Annette’s reaction is also a sign of her female weakness. Murdoch (1956) depicts the female
inferiority to the man regardless of their higher social status or even prominent family background. The sexual
offense of the refugee Jan to Annette is a case in point. Although Rosa dislodges Jan from her house, Annette’s
terrified feeling does not arouse her any sympathy.
Dominated by the androcentric fantasy, Annette desires nothing as fervently as to become the enchanter
Mischa’s captive. Mischa is unmoved by the schoolgirl heroine playing out “her fated role of international
waif-adventuress” (Sullivan, 1986, p. 77). Annette, on the other hand, experiences in Mischa’s presence “a daze
of beatitude” and feels “with a deep joy, the desire and the power to enfold him, to comfort him, to save him”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 215). That is, perhaps because she is truly an elfin child, or because she belongs to the people
who “seek evil simply because they want adventure” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 32). It requires Calvin’s cynicism to
make her realize that the “notion that one can liberate another’s soul from captivity is an illusion of the very
young” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 240).
Annette’s every effort to make herself more self-conscious is to build up some kind of relation with the male
and prove her own existence by their treatment to her. Unfortunately, Annette receives no love and support but
indifference from the people around her when she is struggling for the establishment of her self-consciousness.
Abandoned not only by Mischa, but also by Rosa and her brother Nicholas, Annette begins to toy with the idea of
suicide. The photograph of her brother Nicholas is no longer enough to shield her. In her genuine aloneness,
Annette regrets that she will be “forever shut away” from “the world of the chamber maid and the cyclist and the
little strange hotel” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). She tries “to persuade herself that she felt ill” (Murdoch, 1956, p.
157), but “unfortunately she did not feel ill, only extremely miserable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157). Finally, she
“attempted to weep” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157), yet this proves equally “unsatisfactory” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157).
Having lost all reason to exist, Annette throws her jewels into the river. With this symbolic gesture, Annette gives
vent to her conviction that “death could not change her now more than she was already changed” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 267) and she stages her suicide. Here, fate or chance intervenes. Her parents arrive and whisk Annette off the
Europe and security. On yet another train Annette looks, in the same way she always will.
Our last glimpse of the family is in the south of France as the Orient Express transports the recovered
Annette away from the events of the novel to the land of Cockeyne. With this splendid tableau of an enchanted
family frozen in a state of utter inaccessibility, the story of the Annette Cockayne comes to an end. The
question whether Annette has graduated from the “School of Life” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7) and “learnt more
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 329
since she left Ringehall than [she] ever did while [she was] there” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 217), as her brother
believes, remains unanswered. Most probably, she is still the unscarred mermaid murmuring “enchanted”
through the ballrooms of Europe, ever enchanted by her temporarily sustained glimpses of real life out of the
windows of trains, always again to return to her land of jewels and opulence (Sullivan, 1986, p. 79). It seems
that everything returns to the beginning, but Annette has been changed by the happenings after she dropes
out of the school.
Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes
the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as how to set up the
appropriate relation with men and protect herself. In the struggling process of establishing her private
self-consciousness as a young lady, Annette tends to introspect and examine her inner self and feelings. With
an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, Annette fails to set up her public self-consciousness because
of her unawareness of the real root of her dilemma: patriarchy.
The Marginalization of Women’s Identity
Since female identity is the central concern of Murdoch’s novels, as has been already mentioned, it is
necessary to define an individual identity and the female self-identity of Murdoch’s female characters. One’s
identity, in Hall’s view (2004), can be thought of as a particular set of traits, beliefs and allegiances that, in short
or long term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being, while subjectivity implies always
a degree of thought and self-consciousness about identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and
often unknowable, unavoidable constraints on our ability to fully comprehend identity. Subjectivity as a critical
concept invites us to consider the question of how and from where identity arises, to what extent it is
understandable, and to what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence and control
(Hall, 2004, pp. 3-4). Following Hall’s definition and Murdoch’s understanding of identity, the particular set of
traits, which will give Murdoch’s female characters a constant personality and mode of being, is the autonomy
and androgyny. To be autonomous means to sticking to her own voice and keeping her own life course; to be
androgynous means to go beyond her gender constraints, living with the androgynous mind of a “full balance of
femaleness and maleness, nurturance and aggression” (Showalter, 2004, p. 264). However, there are a lot of
constrains and restrictions preventing the female characters to retain this identity, namely, the historical, social,
cultural and biological ones.
The characterization of refugees in Murdoch’s novels is greatly influenced by her experiences in war time.
After the completion of her own degree at Oxford in 1942, Murdoch went straight into the Civil Service as an
Assistant Principal in the Treasury, living, and working in wartime London. When the war ended, she felt the
need to do some social work to help those who had been displaced and disorientated in the conflict, so she went to
work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). While working for UNRRA in
Brussels and then Innsbruck from 1945 to 1946, she saw people deported to almost certain death and survivors
who would never return to their homes. There is little doubt that during this time she came face to face with many
of the horrors and cruelties that man inflicted upon man, which left an indelible impression on her mind.
Throughout her novels there are depictions of exiles and refugees, illegal immigrants who have fled the horrors of
their own country, men and women trying to escape from their past. For some of them, a line drawn on the map of
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD330
Europe can make the difference between life and death. Yet they are not always sympathetically portrayed. In
The Flight from the Enchanter, the Lusiewicz brothers have minds which appear to be permanently distorted by
their early experiences, and the young dressmaker, Nina lives in permanent fear of being deported and is finally
destroyed by the fear.
It is of special significance to study the female identity in Murdoch’s characterization of Nina as a woman
refugee under the dual oppressions. The autonomy for the female characters includes making their voice heard
and freedom to choose their own life. So having their voice is the foremost step for female autonomy. Nina’s
refugee status unvoices her completely. Nina’s sensitivity to her illegal status leads her to strive for the
integration to the people around by mimicking their appearance, speaking their language and complying with the
etiquettes. Nina insists on speaking English “politely and firmly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) when Annette induces
her to speak other languages, although “a charming and quite undiagnosable foreign accent” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82)
reveals her true origin. Besides, she dyes blonde her “dark straight hair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) and “long downy
hairs” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) on her arms, which makes her look like “a small artificial animal” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 82) with “a brown complexion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82).
But when it comes to the legal document, all the efforts Nina takes seems to be futile. “She stared at her
passport, and it seemed to her suddenly like a death warrant. It filled her with shame and horror” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 288). The sight of the old picture on it reminds Nina of “the worst days of her fear” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289).
She feels that an “anxious, haggard and fearful” “younger black-haired Nina stared back” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289)
at her present golden-haired self. The passport evokes her miserable memories of being exiled in the past and
indicates that she has “no official existence” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289). Both nationality and gender hinder Nina
from establishing her own identity by depriving her of the right to voice herself and choose her own life.
Illegal status deprives Nina of having a say as she is not an existence being in the political sense in this
country, while the repression which Mischa imposes upon her “condemned” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) her love to
silence, so she has no right to express her love as a woman. She dare not leave her name and address to the
governmental agency because “she had the refugee’s horror of the power and hostility of all authorities and of
their mysterious interconnection with each other” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “if she left her name at Australia
House Mischa Fox should not be told of this within twenty-four hours” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). When Nina is
discovered by Mischa in a textile factory, her need for a livelihood and protection makes her pliable to his wishes.
Nina knows it well that it is impossible to achieve an “independent establishment and a clientele” (Murdoch,
1956, p. 151) without Mischa’s help. Once she realizes that her love for Mischa is not reciprocated, she resolves
to leave England to gain “freedom from slavery, rather that freedom in an abstract or philosophical sense”
(Rabinovitz, 1978, p. 285). The only hope for her is to flee from England and never see Mischa again, then she
could escape from him. What attracts her most is that the future new life will be “in every way the reverse of her
present life” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “she would live in their midst a life of openness and gaiety, respected
as a worker and loved as a woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). To fulfill her plan, she decides to appeal to Rosa for
assistance for “her regard for Rosa was augmented by an astonished respect for a being who had once been under
Mischa’s spell and had freed herself without migrating to the Antipodes” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 156). Rosa’s
indifference to her pleas ruins her hopes. When the deportation order is likely to come, her only possible
escape is death.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 331
Nina’s choice to commit suicide is due to her identity crisis both as a citizen and as a woman. Besides Nina’s
refugee status and her fear of deportation, patriarchal oppression from Mischa is also the primary cause of her
tragedy. There is an important difference between the crisis of the female identity and the crisis of the male
identity in contemporaneous canonical texts. The male refugees Lusiewicz brothers also experience a loss of
identity as the consequence of their illegal status. With Rosa’s help, they “rapidly showed a remarkable aptitude
with machines, …learnt to speak English with confidence and charm” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). And even “[t]heir
appearance improved” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Meanwhile, Nina proves herself to be “a good dressmaker …
patient, good-tempered, humble, discreet, fast, an exquisite worker, and…inexhaustibly imaginative” (Murdoch,
1956, p. 81) after Mischa helped her settle down and rent a house for her. As refugees, all of them try their best to
learn the language, work hard and be obedient to their sponsors in order to integrate into the local life and start a
new life. However, the male-female different positions in the patriarchal society make their life paths quite
different. After their settlement, the Lusiewicz brothers change their attitude to their sponsor Rosa from “with an
inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48) to with aggression by conquering
her body and controlling her mind. Yet, Rosa recovers quick from “the first shock of her despair” (Murdoch,
1956, p. 58) and accepts the change from being a conqueror to a prey for fear of losing the brothers.
But the situation is completely different in Nina’s case. Without her voice being heard, Nina, as a woman,
has no capability to change the pattern of her relationship with Mischa and consequently has no freedom to
choose her own life path. Nina has no way to decline Mischa’s monthly allowance for his excuse that “his
‘inconvenient ways’ were possibly damaging to her business” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). As “a good organizer
and a good business woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), Nina has an ambitious plan to enlarge her business since
“her range of contacts was now very considerable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). But without any doubt, this plan
displeases Mischa apparently, which makes it clear that any plan of this kind will violate Mischa’s expectations to
Nina. Her love for Mischa has been transformed “into a strange emotion which had in it more of terror and
fascination than of tenderness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) and “an emotion more mixed with puzzlement and
curiosity” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), which becomes the source of distress for Nina because “his personality made
it impossible for her to open her heart to anyone” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154). In great anxiety, Nina has a nightmare
in which her sewing machine turns into an unstoppable monster which savages both her and an endless cloth map
of all the countries in the world.
Nina’s aphasia states as a refugee for the land of her birth and her enslavement as a woman for the gender of
her birth makes her autonomy establishment impossible. Moreover, to be androgynous remains slightly out of her
reach, which is the last question she thinks about before she kills herself. As she sits on the window-sill, she looks
at a crucifix and thinks the idea that death is the end is not “senseless blackness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 291) for
Christ, as it will be for her. She throws herself out of the window with a broken and marginalized identity. The
same political guile for the removal from the scene of the illegal immigrants Jan and Stefan destroys Nina, who
becomes the innocent victim, the scapegoat who suffers not merely for the sins of others but also for their neglect.
Her act of self-destruction becomes a response to a general feeling of hopelessness for which she finds no outlet,
neither in her unsatisfactory relationship with Mischa nor in any meaningful activity.
Murdoch illustrates the destructive female identity through depicting Nina’s plight and her tragic ending. As
a typical example of doubly marginalized women, Nina is powerless to struggle against destiny of being
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD332
marginalized by the political authorities and controlled by the masculine hegemony regardless of her unremitting
efforts to integrate with the new environment and her willingness to mingle with the new culture. Besides,
through the characterization of Nina, Murdoch also tends to unravel the lack of mutual assistance among women
to struggle with their marginalized identity and survive the male dominance in this novel.
The Disintegration of Female Self
While Murdoch depicts Annette Cockeyne’s disruptive self-consciousness and Nina’s marginalized identity,
her main concern is the portrayal of the female protagonist in this novel: Rosa and her disintegrated self in the
process of her flight from the enchanter. Murdoch’s moral philosophy is premised on the reality of the
individual self, so much so that she starts that “the central concept of morality is ‘the individual’” (Murdoch,
1970, p. 30). Distinguished from Romanticism, Murdoch holds the opinion that the individual as a
self-in-relation is renewed in the context. While Modernism emphasizes on “formal autonomy” (Waugh, 1989,
p. 79) and holds identity as “transcendence of history through symbol and self as a construction of language”
(Waugh, 1989, p. 79), Murdoch focuses on the self in relation. In her novels, she portrays how individual
consciousness functions in people as moral beings, and the effect this has on their perception of reality, rather
than the social and historical conditions in which her characters operate. “Underlying Murdoch’s moral
philosophy is a concept of the individual as the ‘owner’ of their ‘inner life’ and of inner activity as morally
significant” (Widdows, 2004, p. 21). So the self in Murdoch’s fiction is a fixed entity that is built in the relations.
Compared with Annette and Nina, Rosa Keepe has a stronger sense of self-consciousness and self-identity
since she knows who she is and what she wants better. Unfortunately, she still fails to obtain integrated self for
her personal weaknesses in specific and female limitations in general obstruct the building of her in-relation self.
The following analysis will mainly focus on three pairs of relationships: Rosa and the Lusiewicz brothers, Rosa
and Mischa, and Rosa and other female characters in the novel.
Though educated, the heroine Rosa is willing to work on the assembly line in a factory instead of being a
journalist or a teacher because she is unable to stand her mother’s disappointment at her failure to be “a fanatical
idealist” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) and her own at to be “a good teacher” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). She still makes
this choice “in a mood of self-conscious asceticism” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) although she knows it well that
working in the factory is an experience of almost unbearable affliction and a kind of modern slavery. The
machines in Rosa’s factory never stop, day or night. She fears being “caught in the machine” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 42).
Here she has a secret about the refugee Lusiewicz brothers, who arrive “dejected and colourless, like
half-starved, half-drowned animals” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Except Rosa, no one shows any interests in them at
that time. As a dutiful protector, Rosa guides them, gives them financial support, teaches them English and treats
them as her children. “Then after a while Rosa found herself becoming oddly secretive and possessive about the
pair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46) .With her help, the brothers have been making big process and becoming popular in
the factory, which brings Rosa mixed feelings: “with interest and pleasure at first, and later with sadness”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). The brothers treat her at first “with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious
awe. They were like poor savages confronted with a beautiful white girl” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 48-49). Their
dependence upon her makes Rosa even worried at the degree of her power over them. They need her permission
to the simplest things and they make no choice without her opinion just like her slaves. This power makes Rosa
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 333
feared as well as joyful. Overwhelmed by their primitive adoration and their abject respect, Rosa feels “like the
princess whose strong faith released the prince from an enchanted sleep, or from the transfigured form of a beast”
(Murdoch, 1956, p. 54) and in return for their devotion, she showers the brothers with love.
Contrary to Rosa’s expectations, her role as an enchantress is of short duration. Once “the mastery had
passed to the brother” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 60), Rosa becomes their property. They begin to thrive and make their
own conquests, including Rosa, whom they share sexually. Gradually and almost without awareness on her part,
Rosa changes from mother-surrogate to sister-surrogate. What helps her to accept the role reversal is her ability to
overcome the “physical sensation” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “that numb paralysis which is the deliberate
dulling of thought by itself” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) and the painful fear of losing the brothers. When they retell
Rosa their experiences of raping their school teacher by turns and abandoning her just to revenge her for
humiliating them in the class, which leads to her death directly, Rosa is so anesthetized while she is “empty of
thoughts and feelings” and experiences “a kind of triumph” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 78). Consequently, she does not
resent the brothers and accepts without demur “the rules of the new regime” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) which Jan
and Stefan “made plain to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “gentle tact” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57). After her
acceptance of the grotesque reversal of roles, Rosa uses the machines in the factory as instruments to immobilize
her feelings. Nevertheless, the brothers’ more and more excessive behaviors, such as uninvited visit to Rosa’s
house and assaulting Annette sexually there, drive Rosa to reach the point where she confronts herself with the
realization that she is unable to break the black spell the Poles hold over her. In the relationship between Rosa and
the brothers, Rosa functions as a power figure at first because of the superiority of her social status, but she soon
descends to the enchanted because of the inferiority of her female gender. The formation of her self faces a great
challenge and becomes instabilized in this process of reversal.
In utter frustration, she resorts to the powers of Mischa whose marriage proposal she refuses ten years ago to
run away from his control. She tells about her plight with reservation, however Mischa asks no question but her
permission to use any method he likes. Rosa “felt as if she were selling herself into captivity” (Murdoch, 1956,
p. 262). “But to be at his mercy was at that moment her most profound desire” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 262). Mischa
then manipulates SELIB, the Special European Labor Immigration Board, to have Stefan deported. To her
consternation, Rosa discovers that after all these years she is still very fond of Mischa and would not mind to be
rescued by him. As she approaches her former lover whose enchantment she believes to have disappeared, she is
“quite ready to acknowledge herself to be under a spell … [and] she knew that even if at that moment Mischa was
oblivious of her existence, yet he was drawing her all the time” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 257). As she attempts to
solve her personal problem, Rosa has either not yet gained the “degree of self-knowledge” (Rabinovitz, 1978,
pp. 330-331) necessary “to achieve morality or love” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331), or is not fully aware of
her “moral strength and weakness to be able to overcome the vicissitude of a moral crisis” (Rabinovitz, 1978,
pp. 330-331).
At “a point of disequilibrium where rest was no longer possible” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 292), Rosa
impulsively travels south herself to join Mischa at his villa in Italy. She feels compelled by the enchanter whom
she like to be reunited with. But Rosa does not return to Mischa thanks to Calvin Blick’s interference. He
shows the photographs of Rosa with the Lusiewicz brothers, telling her Mischa has seen them, though he tells
Hunter he has not. Looking at the photograph Calvin has taken of her, Rosa is able to recognize the flaws in her
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD334
obsession with Mischa. Many years ago, Rosa “put herself under the enchanter’s spell because she thought he
was in touch with reality” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 49) and is satisfied with her lot until she senses “that Mischa
was not merely in touch with reality but had power over it, and then she began to fear him” (Whiteside, 1964,
p. 49). Calvin comforts her that she “will never know the truth” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 304) because “[r]eality is a
cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 305), and therefore, she “will read the
signs in accordance with [her] deepest wishes” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 304-305), just like everybody else. Rosa
retorts that this view is a surrender of his power.
Rosa’s final triumph is in her inexplicable act of turning back from Mischa even though he is waiting for
her. Now that he has transformed Rosa into the “real” woman worthy of his love, she reveals herself to be
tougher than he has thought and succeeds in shattering his ephemeral formula for control by her unexpected
assertion of freedom. However, Rosa’s decision is one of pure renunciation. Nonetheless, Rosa does make one
vital gain and discovery. She can choose to be free of Mischa and to recognize herself as a free agent. She says
to Calvin, whose name tolls predestination, “in the past I always felt that whether I went towards him or away
from him I was only doing his will. But perhaps it was all an illusion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 308). Years ago,
Rosa refuses Mischa’s offer of marriage and flees from Mischa because she fears the ultimate consequence of
his control over her as much as she dreaded the intimacy of married life. Years later, Rosa goes back willingly
to be under his control and protection. The journey from flight to regression reveals the incapability of Rosa’s
disintegrated self to find a balanced position in the patriarchal male-female relationship.
Moreover, the deficiency of Rosa’s sense of self hinders her from establishing a healthy and normal
relationship with other female characters. Rosa has no easy-going and cheerful characters since she “never
wanted other human beings to come too near” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48). The intimacy with the person makes her at
times feel horrible. She lives with her brother Hunter and her schoolfriend’s daughter Annette, whom “had never
yet occupied very much of Rosa’s attention” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). Rosa shows no caring and love to Annette
as expected from a female seniority to a young girl, but the hostility and indifference from a jealousy same-sex
peer. Annette’s “kittenish” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66) ways both charm and irritate Rose for they remind of “her
memories of herself at that age” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). She often likes to be accompanied by Annette, yet the
child makes her uneasy. Although she knew that her sarcasm make Annette feared, she becomes more inclined to
“prick and bite her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). When Jan offends Annette sexually in her upstairs room, Rosa’s
first reaction is to pretend not to have heard Annette’s cry for help. When she is urged to see what is happening
upstairs, she just gets Jan away by striking his face. Then “without a glance at Annette” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163),
she descends “at a leisurely pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163). What Rosa really cares about is not Annette’s terrible
state of mind as a victim of sexual assault but her own jealousy for the brothers’ betrayal and their interests in
other women. She feels greatly relieved for “after the incident with Jan, …a certain coldness in her reception …
had almost immediately vanished and everything had seemed to be as usual” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 245). In the
party at the Mischa’s, the tripping dancing of Mischa and Annette irritates her so much that she ruins the party by
breaking the fishbowl into pieces. Her next gaffe comes as:
Rosa shook herself like a dog. Her hair, which had been loosened by the struggle, cascaded down her back. She had
been cut in the arm by some of the broken glass on the floor. People gathered round her. As she stood there looking at the
blood upon her arm her eyes slowly filled with tears. (Murdoch, 1956, p. 213)
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 335
After the party, Mischa drives to the seaside with Annette to comfort her and then sends her back to Rosa’s
house. The sight of Mischa’s coat on Annette makes Rosa so annoyed that:
Suddenly Rosa turned into Annette’s room and began to drag open the drawers of her dressing-table. She seized an
armful of clothes and hurled them down into Annette’s face. Then pulling out one of the drawers entire she upended it at
the top of the stairs. (Murdoch, 1956, p. 220)
With no attention to the fragility of Annette’s body and mind, Rosa commits these crazy behaviors which
make Annette so physically and mentally broken that she rolls down the stairs and hurt her leg. Rosa’s madness
proves her to be a completely self-centered woman showing no concerns to any other people or events only when
they violate her own life, which makes it impossible for her to have a wholeness of self.
Nina is another victim of Rosa’s misanthropy. Every time after her attempts to plea for Rosa’s help, Rosa
always has the same reaction: care nothing about what Nina says and forget her completely soon after her visits.
In Mischa’s villa in Italy, Calvin Blick shows Rosa a newspaper report of Nina’s suicide, remarking that
“someone ought to have explained things to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 306). Obviously, Rosa bears responsibility
for Nina’s death in two ways. At first, She herself unleashed Mischa’s power, authorizing him, to “use any
methods” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 256) to protect herself and Hunter from Stefan. Secondly, because she was so
rapturously abstracted at the thought of seeing Mischa, she failed to attend to Nina’s plea for help: “I have some
problems… I would like to ask your advice” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 259). However, Rosa replies merrily: “Life is a
series of problems! …Never be afraid to ask for advice, …People try to be far too independent of each other. I’m
just going in now to ask Mr. Fox’s advice” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 259-260). Nina’s death is in part as a result of
Rosa’s inattention, in part because Rosa enlists Mischa and his methods. This moment of unexpected moral crisis
made to see her responsibility for Nina’s death, she is ready to perceive the destructive consequences of the
enchanter in herself and others.
The closing chapter is melancholy, though it contains good as well as bad news. On her return from Italy to
rainy London, Rosa goes straight to see Peter, free of the moral and emotional ties which have bound her to
Mischa. From him she learns that Camilla Wingfield has died, leaving her all the shares of the Artemis and an
annual income of £500 if she will edit the journal. The Artemis has been saved from Mischa, and Rosa has been
saved from the factory and given a new purpose. However, a bilingual inscription has been discovered which is a
key to the Kastanic script and proves Peter’s work on it to be futile. Peter is stoical: “One reads the signs as best
one can, and one may be totally misled. …It was worth trying. Now I can go back to my other work in peace.
There’s nothing to be sad about, Rosa” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 315). But Rosa is sad because Peter Saward rejects
her offer of marriage because he knows that Rosa is merely seeking a safety-net. The novel ends with Peter
showing Rosa the photographs of the lost world of Mischa’s childhood and “she saw the pictures through a
gathering haze of tears” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 316).
Conclusions
The Flight from the Enchanter starts from Annette’s running away from her finishing school to enter the
school of life, which directly points to the theme of the novel: Flight, with the central plot that a feminist
magazine called Artemis is close to closure due to a lack of readers. All the people’s lives in the novel revolve
around the mysterious figure of Mischa Fox, a frightening figure of power. As for the female figures in this novel,
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD336
what they flee from is not only the power or enigma of Mischa Fox, but also their fragmented selfhood.
Regardless of her wealthy and decent family background, spoiled but rootless Annette is confronted with lack of
love and attention from her parents, her brother, her guardian Rosa. Meanwhile, her gender makes her unable to
escape from the economic exploitation, emotional control and sexual assault of the male. So she is thirsty for love
and attention to prove her existence even at the cost of her life. From her, Murdoch depicts women’s inability to
introspect and examine their inner self, desires and feelings in order to know themselves as an individual. The
worried immigrant dressmaker Nina endures double oppressions—racial and sexual oppression. Though she is
more financially successful than the Polish brothers who have the same immigrant status as her, she can’t reverse
the position of the controller and the controlled as they do just because of the female weaknesses. In spite of her
economic independence, the confinement of her spirit disables her to be definable and recognizable in the
relations. The main female character Rosa, fierce and strong-minded, is too indulgent in her own world to know
the reality. Her status as a power figure, due to her racial privilege, in the life of two Polish brothers is soon
destroyed by the gender advantage of the male. Then she is occupied by the malformed relationship with two
Polish brothers without their admiration and attachment to her as they have before. Frightened by the gradually
out-or-control situation, she turns to the power of her former lover Mischa Fox, the male force, to help her get rid
of the entwinement of these brothers. In this novel, Murdoch reveals that no matter what kind of backgrounds
they have, women are not powerful enough to overcome the gender advantages of the male and the suppression
imposed by the male domination on them. Moreover, Murdoch expresses the women’s desire to flee from the
situation where they are and from the fragmented selfhood for reconstruction.
In modern mass society, a conception of individuality appears hopelessly outmoded to many philosophers.
Instead, Murdoch embraces the idea that selfhood is the outcome of relational activities, beginning with infant
nurturance, extending to language, and culminating in reflexive consciousness, in which selves become
self-aware. In The Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch avoids approaching the female plights in the aspect of
financial dependence, less human right, family squabbles, parenting and other issues as many other feminist
writers do. Instead, she reveals the deconstructive female selfhood in the modern society caused by the historical,
social and economic changes. Regardless of their origin and background, what these female characters in
common is their attempt to escape from “an enchanter”, who usually imposes physical confinement as well as
mental and spiritual confinement on them. Their disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity, and
disintegrated self of the female characters fail all of them to complete the wholeness of female self and obstruct
their way to human goodness.
References
Beauvoir, S. de. (1953). The second sex. H. M. Parshley (Trans. & Ed.). London: Jonathan Cape.
Bernd, S. (2004). Identity in Modern society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Branden, N. (1969). The psychology of self-esteem. New York: Nash Publishing Corp..
Demetriou, A., & Kazi, S. (2001). Unity and modularity in the mind and the self. London: Routledge.
Hall, D. E. (2004). Subjectivity. London: Routledge.
Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The literature of subversion. London: Methuen.
Lipka, R. P., & Brinthaupt, T. M. (Eds.). (1992). Self-perspectives across the life span. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Murdoch, I. (1956). The flight from the enchanter. London: Chatto & Windus.
Murdoch, I. (1970). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 337
Rabinovitz, R., & Murdoch, I. (1978). Six contemporary British novelists. G. Stade, (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press.
Showalter, E. (2004). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Beijing: Foreign Language
Teaching and Research Press.
Sullivan, Z. T. (1986). The demonic: The Flight from the Enchanter. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Iris Murdoch: Modern critical views (pp.
71-86). New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
Waugh, P. (1989). Feminine fictions: Revisiting the postmodern. London: Routledge.
Whiteside, G . (1964). The novels of Iris Murdoch. Critique, 7, 27-47.
Widdows, H. (2004). The moral vision of Iris Murdoch. Hampshire: Ashgate.
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836
May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 338-344
 
Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities
Robin McAllister
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA
Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges’ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a
fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges’s poetics of reading and dreaming require another poetics of the work
as a text that calls attention to its own artifice. In reading Borges’ fiction, the separate roles and identities of reader, writer,
and work of fiction merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities and are transformed into a single act of dreaming,
which assumes cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. In the dominant role given to the reader, the work of fiction as an object
or work of art does not exist unless it is read. There is no determinate text, only a version of our own we re-write and
invent every time we read the text. The author’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as
artificial as the writing of the fiction. As writers and readers we are composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and
artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that
text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only
imminent within it.
Keywords: Borges, poetics, reading, Berkeley
He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most
arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more
arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind. (Borges, 1962, “The Circular Ruins”)
It is hazardous to think that a co-ordination of words (philosophies are nothing else) can have much resemblance to
the universe. It is also hazardous to think that one of those famous co-ordinations does not resemble it a little more than
others, even in an infinitesimal way. (Borges, 1966, “Avatars of the Tortoise”)
Introduction
Dreaming and stories that are mere co-ordinations of words are clues to the riddle of Borges’ poetics of
fiction, his concepts about the roles of the writer and the reader in creating a work of fiction. In our ordinary
world of reading Borges, we uncritically take for granted the separate existence of the story as an object apart
from us, a book we are opening in our hands to begin reading, the previous existence of the writer who created
it, and our own autonomous existence as readers about to sit down, momentarily try to detach our attention
from the distractions of the actual reality surrounding us, and immerse ourselves in reading the story,
momentarily and, alas, only temporarily leaving behind one reality and entering into the mode of consciousness
we find in reading a work of fiction. But in the world of Borges’ fiction all these separate roles and identities
merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities. The separate existences of a reader, writer, and book are
transformed into a single act of dreaming.
Any account of Borges’ “poetics” of fiction, his concept—implicit or explicit in his stories, essays, and
Robin McAllister, associate professor, Department of English, Sacred Heart University.
DAVID PUBLISHING
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poems—of what the fiction is, must take into account not just the extraordinary role he attributes to the reader,
but another almost hidden, often denied concept as well, the fiction, not just as a text, but as a work of art, a
“co-ordination of words”, that calls attention to its own artifice. However, the reader’s power to dream the work
of fiction into existence emerges as Borges’ preferred poetics, and the idea of the work as a co-ordination of
words is forgotten or repudiated. In the world of Borges’ fiction, the reader can assume fantastic roles: A
dreamer, a failed writer, an unrequited lover, and a blind “magus” who creates and destroys, a consciousness on
the verge of vision and annihilation, a copier and a creator, a simulacrum dreamed into existence by a prior text,
even a fictional role constructed out of literary topoi and metaphysical problems to resolve the problem of
trying to represent a vision of the universe that cannot be put into words.
The Role of the Reader
One of these roles, the Reader as Writer, is the subject of a famous essay by the late Rodrigues Monegal
(1972), who attributes the concept of the Reader as Writer to Gerard Genette:
…Criticism is an activity as imaginary as fiction or poetry… Nevertheless, it is possible to attempt another reading of
these texts, and of the famous “Pierre Menard”, and instead of taking literally the conclusions of those critical articles, or
the ironies of the story, perhaps to see in these short pieces the foundation of another aesthetic discipline, based not on the
creation of the literary work but on its reading—instead of an aesthetics of the work of art, an aesthetics of its reading. This
approach to Borges’ work has been favored by the Nouvelle Critique since Gerard Genette’s article, “La literature selon
Borges”. Taking as his starting point the final lines of “Pierre Menard”, Genette has emphasized the importance of the
Borgesian intuition that the most delicate and important operation of all those which contribute to the writing of a book is
reading it. He concludes his analysis with these words: “The genesis of a work in the time of history and the life of an
author is the most contingent and most insignificant moment of its duration … The time of a book is not the limited time of
its writing, but the limitless time of reading and memory. The meaning of books is in front of them and not behind them; it
is in us: a book is not a ready-made meaning, a revelation we have to suffer; it is a reservation of forms that are waiting to
have some meaning, it is the `imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced”, and that every one of us has to produce
for himself. (p. l05)
Certainly Borges seems to confirm this “approach, of whose validity there is no question” in an essay like
“A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”, where he rejects the notion of fiction as merely a “verbal structure”, a
“combinatory game”:
Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; it is
the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images
it leaves in his memory. The dialogue is infinite … Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that
no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. (Borges,
1962, p. 213)
Indeed the reader seems to determine the text, rather than the text determining our reading:
One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is
read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read in the year
two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like. (Borges, 1962, pp. 213-214)
We seem to discover this kind of reader as a writer in the protagonist of “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote”: “To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and,
consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the
experiences of Pierre Menard” (Borges, 1962, p. 40). Menard, “author” of the Quixote, is not just a writer, but
BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES
 
340
also a reader, when he produces a Quixote identical in text with the original but different, indeed richer, in
meaning: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer”
(Borges, 1962, p. 42).
Like a reader Menard “copies” a text word for word, but, like a writer, he transforms it. Borges’ fiction
requires a reader who is both a translator and a creator—or re-creator. Borges (1962) confirms Rodrigues
Monegal’s discovery of “an aesthetics of fiction based on the reading of the text”:
Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of
reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose
applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid … This technique fills
the most placid works with adventure. (p. 44)
The text of the Quixote stays identical, but the way Menard recomposes it changes it completely,
transforming it with deliberate anachronism into a symbol or sign of Menard’s time, not Cervantes’. But does
this technique of deliberately anachronistic reading actualize a revelation in the fiction that otherwise remains
merely imminent? Or is not it rather a playful fantasy reading in which we readers find ourselves with powers
of creativity autonomous from the text or the writer? An “adventurous” reading, we shall discover, is not just an
entertaining fantasy, but one which takes on cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. The reader as writer will
assume fantastic, cosmogonic powers of creation and annihilation in poems like “Amanecer” and stories like
“The Circular Ruins”.
Perhaps, as Rodriguez Monegal (1972) asserts, there can be no question of the validity of this approach,
but, if so, the consequences are startling. The meaning of a story, “El Aleph” (1957), for example, is not what
Borges, the writer, may have intended, a meaning determined within the context of his other stories and essays
and limited by the historical moment in which he wrote, but whatever preconceptions and associations the
reader brings to the story as a reader from his own personal time and situation. It is impossible—or
delusional—to think that the reader ever reads or could read Borges’ “El Aleph” and write an essay about
“it”—such an object or determined text does not exist—merely a version of “El Aleph” the reader re-writes and
invents every time he reads the text of that title. There are as many “El Alephs” as there are readers, and Borges
becomes only one of many other readers of his own story. Criticism and scholarship does indeed become a
branch of fantastic literature.
Berkeley
It is hardly surprising that Borges, the radically idealist Borges of an essay like “A New Refutation of
Time” (1981) or stories like “Tlon, Ukbar, OrbisTertius” (1981), should deny that the fiction exists as a “verbal
structure” or an “object”. For the radical idealist Borges, a world of objects or material reality is only possible
through a perceiving consciousness that constitutes and sustains a “representation” (in the Berkeleyan sense of
framing an “idea”), as in one of several quotations Borges cites from Berkeley:
But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a
closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you,
more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the
idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think them all the while? This therefore is
nothing to the purpose: it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does not shew
that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 180)
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A previous quotation from Berkeley in the essay “A New Refutation of Time” implies that the work of
fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is “perceived” by a reader:
Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this
important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose
the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceivedor known; that
consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit,
they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit—. (Rodriguez Monegal,
1981, p. 181)
This quotation from Berkeley amounts to no less than a metaphysical argument for the priority of the
reader, as a constitutive and sustaining consciousness, over the text as an autonomous “object”, an object that
only exists in so far as it is seen or imagined by a sustaining consciousness, whether that of the writer, the
reader, or the eternal spirit. This reader as Berkeleyan eternal spirit might be the ancestor of Genette’s and
Rodriguez Monegal’s reader as writer, whose reading actualizes the “imminence of revelation”, a reader who
will appear over and over again in Borges’ essays and fictions as a dreamer or writer who dreams a vision of
the universe into existence.
Cosmogonic and Apocalyptic Reading
If the reader resembles Berkeley’s perceiver, he creates or dreams the universe he exists in, the fiction he
reads. When the reader reads she creates little worlds, microcosms. His reading is cosmogonic, world-creating,
and creative; no wonder the reader “writes” or re-creates the fiction he reads. Such a Berkeleyaneternal spirit
appears in the poem “Dawn” (1981). This poem resembles the type of “meditational poem” familiar to readers
of 17th Century English poetry. It is a poem of philosophical speculation, the record or account of a revelation
in the form of an idea that has occurred to the poet. Through the poet’s use of the first person “I”, the reader
enacts or re-lives the constitutive mind or consciousness of a blind poet, an insomniac—unable to lose
consciousness and sleep—who wanders through the streets of Buenos Aires, sustaining the entire city in his
mind, until others awaken and carry on his metaphysical burden. If the poem or fiction resembles an idea, like
Berkeley’s or Schopenhauer’s, it can only exist if it is dreamed into consciousness by an individual dreamer or
reader: “…Since ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or river, the previous
speculation … dominated my reason and projected the following whim… ” (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 6)
The content of this poem is not the city of Buenos Aires at dawn, but a mental act, a revelation, at first only a
presentiment, then an idea of a prior writer or philosopher, which unexpectedly finds renewed existence as it is
reformulated and thought in the mind of the poet. There are no emotions or feelings in the poem, only
perceptions, memories, acts of reflection and speculation. The poem imitates or enacts a mental process of
creating a poem.
Like Berkeley’s mind that frames or constitutes “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth”
(Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 181), the speaker in “Dawn” is an impersonal wanderer who sustains the entire
city of Buenos Aires in his consciousness and also threatens it with annihilation if he ceases to constitute or
dream it. Perhaps the physical blindness of the speaker (not necessarily just an autobiographical reference)
emphasizes the constitutive, fabricating process of perception that makes possible the vision of the city
sustained in his “dreaming” (Borges, 1962, p. 208) consciousness. This poem, like many others, moves from
revelation, dreaming, and creation to a moment of apocalypse and annihilation, particularly the annihilation of
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personal consciousness. The poet or reader, who reads, and in reading, re-lives and reconstitutes the poem,
exhibits cosmogonic and apocalyptic powers of creativity. The city only exists as long and in so far as it is
sustained in the wakened consciousness of the poet. Similarly the reader might suppose that the poem, like an
idea, only exists in so far as it is read, or rethought, transformed in the mind of a new reader, and, if the reader
ceases reading the poem, it ceases to exist.
Visible Unrealities
Another constitutive, sustaining consciousness appears in the story “The Circular Ruins”, where the
epigraph after the title, before the story even begins, evokes the reader’s cosmogonic, apocalyptic powers as a
Reader: “And if he left off dreaming about you… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45). The writer has left it to the reader to
complete this interrupted quotation, and, if he does so, “you would cease to exist”. The opening lines of the
story—“No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45)—are footnotes to the
Berkeleyan quotations above. The protagonist or dreamer of this story is a powerful magician, evocative of a
Hermetic magus, who dreams a man into existence only to discover at the end of the story that he too is being
dreamed. The magician who dreams a man into existence resembles both a writer and a reader. The infinite
regress through which this story is fabricated—the dreamer within a dreamer includes the Reader as Berkeleyan
constitutive and sustaining consciousness (the creative “unanimous night” out of which a poem, like “Dawn” or
a story like “The Circular Ruins” can emerge). The new element in this myth of dreaming a fiction into
existence is the idea that our dreaming is dreamed. The logic of this infinite regress is unavoidable: The reader
is dreaming the story into existence, almost as if it was an actual reality, but the reader’s dreaming is dreamed,
by Borges or by the fiction as a text for the reading. The reader’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of
vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. The illusion of reality the reader succumbs to is
only the result of enchanting himself into taking his “dreamed son” as an autonomous being. The reading would
appear to be determined by a prior text or by the writer’s “combinatory games” (Borges, 1962, p. 213) with his
verbal structure, not merely the evanescent and vanishing mental vision of the Eternal Spirit’s consciousness.
As writers and readers the readeris composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental
perceptions and ideas.
We begin to see here in this story, as in the “tremendous conjecture” of “Dawning” that denied or rejected
poetics of the poem or fiction as a prior text, repudiated by Borges as a mere “verbal algebra”. The magician of
“The Circular Ruins” exercises his cosmogonic powers in dreaming another man into existence and “imposing”
him on reality:
The purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to
dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his
mind…. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 124)
This apparition, nourished by the very mental life of the dreamer, starts out a dream or fiction, but
“gradually, he began to accustoming him to reality”. The language used in this story for the process of
dreaming subtly implies that, if the dreamed man resembles a fiction, the work of fiction is not just a “copy” of
reality, but interpenetrates with reality, gradually assuming its own autonomous existence along with the rest of
the universe generated by the dreaming Consciousness. The climax and conclusion of the story is a sudden
revelation that contradicts this illusion of actual presence or existence. The dreamer encounters a “visible
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unreality” when the fire encircling the ruins of the burned temple does not burn but only caresses his flesh:
He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or
combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone was
dreaming him. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 127)
The Magician in “The Circular Ruins” anticipates another Magician in Borges’ essay (devoted to a history
of the idea of infinite regress), “Avatars of the Tortoise”:
“The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so
complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I
conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as
firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and
eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (Borges, 1962, p. 208)
This architecture of the dream is the text of the fiction, a text that requires artifice in our fabrication. No
matter how much Borges rejects and repudiates the concept of the fiction as a “mere verbal algebra,” the Writer
and Reader, like the dreamer in “The Circular Ruins”, resemble Novalis’s Magician, and certain poems of
philosophical speculation and stories like “The Circular Ruins” constructed out of philosophical puzzles and
paradoxes resemble those “philosophies” Borges evokes in “Avatars of the Tortoise”:
It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the
universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious co-ordinations, one of them—at least in an
infinitesimal way—does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others. I have examined those which enjoy a certain
prestige; I venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I recognized some trait of the universe.
According to this doctrine, the world is a fabrication of the will. Art—always—requires visible unrealities. Let it suffice
for me to mention one: the metaphorical or numerous or carefully accidental diction of the interlocutors in a drama … Let
us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities
which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno. (Borges,
1962, pp. 207-208)
That is, the universe should exhibit, like the fiction “The Circular Ruins”, the “visible unrealities” of
Zeno’s dialectic, the principle of infinite regress.
Conclusions
In the dreamed and dreaming world of Borges’ fiction, objects, ideas, and people do not retain their
separate roles and identities but merge, exchange roles, and symbolize each other through such co-ordinations
of words as the avatars of infinite regress he discusses in “Avatars of the Tortoise”. One idea or poetics, like
dreaming, can resemble or require it’s opposite. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate,
and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to
actualize the revelation only imminent within it.
References
Borges, J. L. (1957). El Aleph (The Aleph). Buenos Aires: Emece.
Borges, J. L. (1960). Otras inquisiciones (Other inquisitions). Buenos Aires: Emece.
Borges, J. L. (1962). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings. D. A. Yates, & J. E. Irby, (Eds.). New York: A New
Directions Book.
Borges, J. L. (1966). Other inquisitions: 1937-1952. (R. Simms, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press.
Borges, J. L. (1967). A personal anthology. A. Kerrigan, (Ed.). New York: Grove Press.
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Borges, J. L. (1970). The Alephand other stories 1933-1969: Together with commentaries and an autobiographical essay. (N. T.
di. Giovanni, (Ed.), Trans.).New York: Bantam.
McAllister, R. (1962). Borges’ “El Aleph” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher: Two studies in Gothic romance”. In A. R.
Becker (Ed.), Visions of the fantastic. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press.
Rodriguez Monegal, E. (1972). Borges: The Reader as Writer. TriQuarterly, 25, 102-143.
Rodriguez Monegal, E., & Reid, A. (Eds.). (1981). Borges, a reader: A selection from the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. New
York: Dutton.
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836
May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 345-350
Translation of Allusions in Fortress Besieged
ZHANG Qun-xing
Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China
The wide application of Chinese and foreign allusions is a big feature of QIAN Zhong-shu’s only novel and
masterpiece Fortress Besieged, which was first published in 1947. The paper makes an attempt to categorize and
analyze the strategies in translating allusions adopted by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao in the only English
version. The strategies include literal translation, literal translation plus endnote, literal translation plus explanation
added in the text, interpretation of the implied meaning plus endnote, and interpretation of the implied meaning in
the text. In particular, the strategy of literal translation plus endnote is mostly adopted. This is indicative of the
translators’ wish to be as faithful as possible to the source text. What’s more, the literal translation strategy and use
of endnotes is of a big help to communicate the Chinese culture to foreigners.
Keywords: allusion, Fortress Besieged, translation strategies
Introduction
QIAN Zhong-shu ranks among the most important writers and literary critics in the 20th-century Chinese
literature field. His masterpiece and only novel of his whole life Wei Cheng (1991), with the English translation
of Fortress Besieged, which was published in the year of 1980 by Indiana University Press, enjoys high
reputation home and abroad. The theme of the novel derives from a French old saying which reads “people who
are outside the fortress want to break into it, while those who are trapped in the fortress desire to escape”. It is a
comedy of manners with much picaresque humor, as well as a scholar’s novel, a satire, a commentary on
courtship and marriage, and a study of one contemporary man. It can be compared to The Scholars (1749) in the
1940s of China. Hsia (1961) highly praised the novel’s comic exuberance and satire, acclaiming it as “the most
delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature; it is perhaps also its greatest novel” (p. 441).
QIAN Zhong-shu, from a special perspective, offers a realistic description of the contradictory state of mind
and character flaws of the middle-class Chinese intellectuals deeply influenced by the Western and Chinese
cultures in the Republican era. QIAN’s enormous knowledge, rich imagination, and humorous satire make a
vivid impression on readers of one generation after another. In particular, the wide use of Chinese and foreign
allusions stands out as a big feature of Fortress Besieged, making it a unique literary masterpiece in China’s
modern literature history. The application of allusions helps to depict characters, stimulate plot development,
highlight the ironic effect, and deepen the theme of the novel.
ZHANG Qun-xing, associate professor, Foreign Languages School, Beijing Information Science and Technology University.
DAVID PUBLISHING
D
TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED346
Definition of Allusion
Allusions have long been cherished as the crystallization of specific cultures. According to Webster’s New
Collegiate Dictionary (1973), allusion is an implied or indirect reference to someone or something. Barton and
Hudson (1997) defines allusion as “an indirect or explicit reference by one text to another text, to a historical
occurrence, or to myths and legends” (p. 9). Leppihalme (1997) defines allusion as “a figure of speech that
compares aspects or qualities of counterparts in history, mythology, scripture, literature, popular or
contemporary culture” (p. 6). As Wheeler (1979) puts it, “allusion helps to elucidate the meaning of each text and
to indicate the literary modes and conventions in which its author works” (p. 5). Allusions have been widely
applied in literature as one figure of speech. When an allusion is incorporated into another context, it acquires a
double meaning, and its original meaning gives way to the secondary meaning closely related to the context. In
short, allusion is an economical means of calling upon history, mythology, Holy Scriptures and other literary
works that author and reader are assumed to share (Dastjerdi & Sahebhonar, 2008).
Allusions usually derive from such origins as historical events, mythology, literary works, popular legend or
folklore, fables, customs, and old sayings. The writer who adopts an allusion not only reuses the language of the
original source, but also deliberately intends that the reader should recover the source context and appreciate the
semantic interplay between the original and the new use. Apparently, allusions, as culture-bound elements, resist
translation, and rendering them successfully depend largely on the translator’s familiarity with their reference.
Thus, allusion poses a troublesome challenge for translators. The famous Israeli translation theorist Lefevere
(1992) argues that allusion is what cultures “develop their own shorthand”, and its translation points to “the final,
real aporia” (p. 56). Translating allusions is a demanding task due to the fact that allusions have specific meanings
in the culture and language in which they arise but not necessarily in others. Allusive meaning is likely to be lost
in translation from one language into another if only the surface referential sense is rendered into the target
language. Translation of allusions, thus, involves two language cultures as well as literary and pragmatic aspects
on the textual level. Indeed, translating allusions is a challenging task. Without appropriate translation, allusions
may turn out to be the cause of much confusion for target readers especially when they know little about the
source language and culture.
Translation Strategies of Allusions in Fortress Besieged
Since its publication in 1947, Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, Japanese, German,
Russian, and some other languages. The English version, issued in 1979, is a joint effort of Jeanne Kelly and
Nathan K. Mao. Their translation has made Fortress Besieged the first Chinese novel ever listed in the
Penguin Classics.
According to statistics, there are more than 100 allusions descending from many sources in the novel. Some
derive from ancient stories, including fairy tales, legends, historical events, religious stories, fables, and so forth;
some come from poetic lines, statements of literary classics home and abroad, like works of ancient philosophers
such as Confucius, Sijing (The Book of Songs) (n.d.), The Bible (n.d.), Aesop’s Fables (n.d.), Arabian Nights
(n.d.), and etc.; some develop from the names of famous historical figures, names of places and things, people’s
titles, and so on; and some are from proverbs and old sayings. The content of the allusions also covers a wide
range, including literature, philosophy, religion, medicine, biology, and military tactics. The wide use of allusions
TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED 347
in Fortress Besieged makes it an extremely challenging job to translate. The English version Fortress Besieged
can be regarded as a good example of literal translation. Generally speaking, most of the allusions are translated
literally. Annotation, endnote in particular, is another widely used strategy. Besides, interpretation of the implied
meaning directly in the text is also used by the translators. In the following, the specific strategies adopted in the
English version will be analyzed with examples.
Literal Translation
When it comes to some allusions originating from Chinese ancient stories or poems, translators translate
literally (see example (1)-(3)):
(1) 他心境不好,准责备儿子从前不用功,急时抱佛脚,也许还来一堆“亡羊补牢,教学相长”的
教训,更受不了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 202)
If his father were in a bad mood, he would undoubtedly rebuke him for not having studied harder before and
only cramming everything in at the last minute. There might even be admonitions about “Repairing the fold after
the sheep are lost”, or “One learns as one teachers” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 210).
(2) 这真是“有缘千里来相会”了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 4)
It is certainly a case of “fate bringing people together from a thousand li away” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 6).
(3) 他虽然知道唐人“欲穷千里目,更上一层楼”的好诗,并没有乘电梯。(QIAN, 1991, p. 303)
Tough he knew the lovely T’ang poem, “For a thousand li view, ascend another flight of stairs”, he did not
take the elevator (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 316).
QIAN Zhong-shu not only used Chinese allusions, but also well knew English ones. As to those familiar to
English readers, the translators directly adopt literal translation (see example (4)-(5)):
(4)“也许人家讲你像狐狸,吃不到葡萄就说葡萄酸。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 132)
“Some people might say you are like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes and complained that they were
sour” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 137).
(5) 上第一课,他像创世纪里原人阿大(Adam)唱新生禽兽的名字,以后他连点名簿子也不带了。
(QIAN, 1991, p. 201)
At the first class Hung-chien was like Adam in the Book of Genesis calling out the names of the newly
created animals. After that, he didn’t even bring his roll book (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 208).
The allusion adopted in Example 1 comes from Aesop’s Fables, “The Fox and the Grape”, which is a
well-known story to the western readers. In Example 2, Adam and Book of Genesis are household names to
English speakers. Therefore, word for word translation would not hinder the readers’ understanding.
Literal Translation Plus Endnote About Background Information
Endnote is a commonly used translation compensation strategy, especially in translating culture-bound
elements. A great number of allusions applied in the novel are closely related to ancient Chinese culture.
Translators offered many endnotes to introduce to target readers the relevant background information, including
the origins, related stories or persons, after literally translating the allusions in the text (see example (6)-(8)):
(6) 方鸿渐笑道:“《毛诗》说:‘窈窕淑女,寤寐求之;求之不得,寤寐思服。’他写这种信,
是地道中国文化的表现。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 80)
“As the poem from the Book of Odes goes, ‘The noble young lady,/Waking and sleeping he sought her;/He
TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED348
sought her but could not find her,/Waking and sleeping he longed for her’. His letters are a manifestation of
genuine Chinese culture”, Hung-chien said with a grin (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 83).
Endnote: Literally, to harbor the amorous thoughts of spring. An allusion from the Book of Odes (Shi jing),
a collection of 305 songs dating from about 1100 to 600 B.C. The arrangement is attributed to Confucius, who
considered the book a model of poetic expression (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 360).
(7) 鸿渐给酒摆布得失掉自制力道:“反正你会摆空城计”。(QIAN, 1991, p. 89)
Under the influence of alcohol, Hung-chien had lost his self-control, as he blurted out, “Anyway, you could
always pull the ‘empty-town bluff’” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 91).
Endnote: A reference to a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in which Chukuo Liang, left to
defend a town with no soldiers, feigned nonchalance by playing music in the tower on the town walls to give the
enemy commander the impression that the town was confident and well prepared for an attack (Kelly & Mao,
2011, p. 363).
(8) 遯翁一天听太太批评亲家母,灵感忽来,日记上添上了津彩的一条,说他现在才明白为什么两
家攀亲要叫“结为秦晋”…… (QIAN, 1991, pp. 299-300)
One day after hearing his wife criticize Mrs. Sun, Tun-weng in a sudden inspiration added a splendid
passage to his diary stating that now at last he understood why two families seeking a marriage alliance called it
“joining together as Ch’in and Tsin” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 312).
Endnote: During the Ch’un Ch’iu period (722-481 B.C.), the royal families of the states of Ch’in and Tsin
formed marital alliances one generation after another. Thus the phrase, “joining together as Ch’in and Tsin”,
means to be allied in marriage (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 373).
Literal Translation Plus Endnote Serving as Explanation
In some endnotes, translators offer a clearer explanation about the meaning of the allusion without
presenting the relevant historical or cultural information. In the text its literal meaning is translated (see example
(9)-(11)):
(9) 苏小姐理想的自己是:“艳如桃李,冷若冰霜,”…… (QIAN, 1991, p. 13)
Miss Su, who pictured herself in the words of the familiar saying, “as delectable as peach and plum and as
cold as frost and ice”, … (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 16).
Endnote: A standard description of a woman who appears cold and stern. It usually describes a virtuous
maiden or widow (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 355).
(10) 以后飞机接连光顾,大有绝世侍人一顾倾城、再顾倾国的风度。(QIAN, 1991, p. 36)
Later, the planes kept coming in much the same manner as the peerless beauty whose “one glance could
conquer a city and whose second glance could vanquish an empire” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 40).
Endnote: An expression which describes superlative beauty; it is equivalent of Helen of Troy in Western
literature (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 358).
(11) 鸿渐道:“啊哟,你又来了!朋友只好绝交。你既然不肯结婚,连内助也没有,真是‘赔了
夫人又折朋’。” (QIAN, 1991, p. 278)
“Ai yo! There you go again. I might as well cut off my friends. Since you refuse to get married, I don’t even
have a wife. It’s a true case of ‘Losing a wife, and having one’s friendship destroyed’” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 289).
TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED 349
Endnote: Losing at both ends, from a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (Kelly & Mao, 2011,
p. 372)
Literal Translation Plus Explanation Added In the Text
Translators, on several occasions, directly explained a few allusions to make a supplement to help target
readers understand the true meaning (see example (12)-(14)):
(12) 他所说的“让她三分”,不是“三分流水七分尘”的“三分”,而是“天下只有三分月色”
的“三分”。 (QIAN, 1991, p. 107)
The “three parts” referred to in “give in to her three parts” was not the “three parts” of “three parts water,
seven parts dust”, but rather the “three parts” as in “There are but three parts moonlight in all the world”, which
simply means total surrender (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 109).
(13) “这次走路真添了不少经验。总算功德圆满,取经到了西天……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 179)
“… we’ve really gained a lot of experience during this trip. Ultimately everything came out well, and we
reached the Western Paradise [Buddhist heaven]… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 186).
(14) 斜川笑道:“别胡闹,我对教书没有兴趣,‘若有水田三百亩,来年不作猢狲王’;你们为
什么不陪我到香港去找机会?”(QIAN, 1991, p. 123)
“Don’t by silly”, said Hsieh-chiuan with a smile, “I’ve no interest in teaching. As they say, ‘If I had three
hundred mou of paddy fields, I wouldn’t be a monkey king [i.e., teacher] next year’. Why don’t you both go to
Hong Kong with me and look for something there?” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 126).
Interpretation of the Implied Meaning Plus Endnote
As to some allusions of a typical Chinese tradition, like Buddhism, translators directly explain the implied
meaning in the text with endnotes made to introduce some relevant cultural information (see example (15)-(16)):
(15) 只可惜这些事实虽然有趣,演讲时用不着它们,该另抱佛脚。(QIAN, 1991, p. 33)
Such a pity that while these items of information were all very interesting, they could not be used in the
lecture. He would have to read something else (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 36).
Endnote: Literally, “clasp the feet of Budda”. The idiom means that when someone gets into trouble through
lack of due preparation, he seeks help at the last critical moment (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 357).
(16) 这事不成,李梅亭第一个说“侥幸”,还说:“失马安知非福。……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 66)
When the plan fell through, Li was the first to say, “Thank God”, adding, “It may be a blessing in
disguise… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 170).
Endnote: Literally, “just like the old frontiersman losing a horse, who knows but that which seems a
misfortune may be a blessing in disguise” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 354).
Interpretation of the Implied Meaning
Some allusions are translated by directly explaining the implied meaning without endnotes added outside
the text. But this strategy is seldom applied (see example (17)-(20)):
(17) 那女人平日就有一种孤芳自赏、落落难合的神情——大宴会上没人敷衍的来宾或喜酒席上过
时未嫁的少女所常有的神情——此刻更流露出嫌恶,黑眼镜也遮盖不了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 3)
Ordinarily the young woman had a rather conceited, aloof expression, much like that of a neglected guest at
a large party or an unmarried maiden at a wedding feast (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 5).
TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED350
(18) “换句话说,像方先生这样聪明,是喜欢目不识丁的笨女人。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 75)
In other words, someone as intelligent as Mr. Fang would prefer a stupid, illiterate woman. (Kelly & Mao,
2011, p. 78).
(19) 辛楣道:“今天本来也请了董太太,董先生说她有事不能来。董太太是美人,一笔好中国画,
跟我们这位斜川兄真是珠联璧合。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 84)
Hsin-mei said, “I also invited Mrs. Tung, but Mrs. Tung said she was too busy to come. Mrs. Tung is a
beauty and a good painter. She and Hsieh-ch’üan make a perfect couple” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. P86).
(20) “……‘莫遣佳期更后期’,这话很有道理。……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 223)
“…As they say, ‘Don’t put off what is best done now’. That’s quite right… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 231).
Conclusions
Most of the allusions in Fortress Besieged are classical, historical, literary, and cultural allusions which are
not to be understood from superficial perusal. In the English translation, Kelly and Mao mainly adopt the strategy
of literal translation plus endnote. This is indicative of the translators’ wish to be as faithful as possible to the
source text. More than 200 endnotes facilitate the readers’ understanding of the novel. Without them, QIAN’s
fabulous satire would at times become inaccessible to comprehension. Besides, the literal translation strategy is
also of a big help to communicate the Chinese culture to foreigners.
References
Barton, E., & Hudson, A. (1997). A contemporary guide to literary terms with strategies for writing essays about literature. Boston
and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Dastjerdi, H. V., & Sahebhonar, S. (2008). Lost in translation: An intertextual study of personal proper-name allusions. Across
Languages and Cultures, 9(1), 41–55
Hsia, C. T. (1961). A history of Modern Chinese fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, rewriting and the manipulation of literary fame. London and New York: Routledge.
Leppihalme, R. (1997). Culture bumps: An empirical approach to the translation of allusions. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
QIAN, Z. S. (1991). Wei Cheng. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House.
QIAN, Z. S. (2011). Fortress Besieged. (J. Kelly, & N. K. Mao. Trans.). Beijing: Foreign Langauge Teaching and Research Press.
Wheeler, M. (1979). The art of allusion in Victorian fiction. London: Macmillan Press Ltd..
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2014.5 journal of literature and art studies

  • 1.
  • 2. Journal of Literature and Art Studies Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30) David Publishing Company www.davidpublishing.com PublishingDavid
  • 3. Publication Information: Journal of Literature and Art Studies is published monthly in hard copy (ISSN 2159-5836) and online (ISSN 2159-5844) by David Publishing Company located at 240 Nagle Avenue #15C, New York, NY 10034, USA. Aims and Scope: Journal of Literature and Art Studies, a monthly professional academic journal, covers all sorts of researches on literature studies, art theory, appreciation of arts, culture and history of arts and other latest findings and achievements from experts and scholars all over the world. Editorial Board Members: Eric J. Abbey, Oakland Community College, USA Andrea Greenbaum, Barry University, USA Carolina Conte, Jacksonville University, USA Maya Zalbidea Paniagua, Universidad La Salle, Madrid, Spain Mary Harden, Western Oregon University, USA Lisa Socrates, University of London, United Kingdom Herman Jiesamfoek, City University of New York, USA Maria O’Connell, Texas Tech University, USA Soo Y. Kang, Chicago State University, USA Uju Clara Umo, University of Nigeria, Nigeria Jasmina Talam, University of Sarajevo, Bosnia Manuscripts and correspondence are invited for publication. You can submit your papers via Web Submission, or E-mail to literature.art@davidpublishing.org, art.literature@yahoo.com. Submission guidelines and Web Submission system are available at http://www.davidpublishing.org, www.davidpublishing.com. Editorial Office: 240 Nagle Avenue #15C, New York, NY 10034, USA Tel: 1-323-984-7526, 323-410-1082 Fax: 1-323-984-7374, 323-908-0457 E-mail: literature.art@davidpublishing.org, art.literature@yahoo.com Copyright©2014 by David Publishing Company and individual contributors. All rights reserved. David Publishing Company holds the exclusive copyright of all the contents of this journal. In accordance with the international convention, no part of this journal may be reproduced or transmitted by any media or publishing organs (including various websites) without the written permission of the copyright holder. Otherwise, any conduct would be considered as the violation of the copyright. The contents of this journal are available for any citation, however, all the citations should be clearly indicated with the title of this journal, serial number and the name of the author. Abstracted/Indexed in: Database of EBSCO, Massachusetts, USA Chinese Database of CEPS, Airiti Inc. & OCLC Chinese Scientific Journals Database, VIP Corporation, Chongqing, P.R.C. Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory LLBA Database of ProQuest Summon Serials Solutions Google Scholar J-GATE Publicon Science Index Electronic Journals Library (EZB) Subscription Information: Price (per year): Print $520 Online $320 Print and Online $560 David Publishing Company 240 Nagle Avenue #15C, New York, NY 10034, USA Tel: 1-323-984-7526, 323-410-1082. Fax: 1-323-984-7374, 323-908-0457 E-mail: order@davidpublishing.com Digital Cooperative: Company:www.bookan.com.cn David Publishing Company www.davidpublishing.com DAVID PUBLISHING D
  • 4. Journal of Literature and Art Studies Volume 4, Number 5, May 2014 (Serial Number 30) Contents Literature Studies The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in The Flight From the Enchanter 325 XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities 338 Robin McAllister Translation of Allusions in Fortress Besieged 345 ZHANG Qun-xing Girl Power in Cashore’s Graceling 351 Suryo Tri Saksono, Syarifah, SS Art Studies A Study of the Styles of Early Taiwanese Bamboo Chairs According to the Methodology of Style 359 Shih-Hsing Wu, Ying-Pin Cheng, Chi-Hsiung Chen Crises of Socialism in China and Chinese Rock in 1980s: The Case of CUI Jian 375 WANG Xiang Never, Ever Break Up a Family 384 Steven William Schaufele Special Research Revisiting Contemporary Judaism in Modern Israel 396 Uri Zur From Sex Objects to Heroines—A Tough Road for Female Characters in Video Games 409 Adam Flamma Argentina and Brazil: Laws as Mediators of Social Identities 418 Yussef Daibert Salomão de Campos
  • 5.
  • 6. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 325-337 The Fragmentation of the Female Selfhood in The Flight From the Enchanter∗ XU Ming-ying, SUI Xiao-di, AN Xue-hua Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China Iris Murdoch is a renowned female novelist and philosopher in the 20th century English literature. In her literary creation, she has a preference for male narration and holds a reserved attitude to women’s movements with reluctance to be considered as a feminist writer, which permits her realistic depiction of female characters and dispassionate thought on women’s problems. This paper, with the interpretation and redefinition of the concepts as consciousness, identity, and self in Murdoch’s philosophy, analyzes the fragmented self of three female figures in The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) respectively from the perspectives of self-consciousness, identity, and self and reveals that the fragmentation of female selfhood is mainly due to the overwhelming male dominance in the gender relationship. Keywords: Iris Murdoch, identity, female selfhood, fragmentation Introduction Historically, both the patriarchal culture and discourse were of the opinion that female biology had its own defects and limitations. “The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”, said Aristotle, “we should regard the female nature as afflicted with a natural defectiveness” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). For St. Thomas, woman was renounced as an “imperfect man”, an “incidental being” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Besides, “a man is in the right in being a man; it is woman who is in the wrong” (Beauvoir, 1953, p. xviii). Women were marginalized and disparaged with these defects. Consequently, both in the Victorian age and in the early 20th century, the popular image of the ideal wife/woman came to be “the Angel in the House”. They were expected to be devoted and submissive to their husbands just like the Angel: passive and powerless, meek, charming, sympathetic, pious, self-sacrificing, and above all—pure. In the modern society, the outbreak of the two world wars and the advancement of women’s movement brought the dramatic changes of the women’s roles domestically and socially. The long-established traditional female selfhood has been disintegrated under the new social and cultural circumstances. Although Murdoch insisted on her status of not being a feminist, she explored the crisis of female identity ∗ Acknowlegements: The paper is supported by “the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”, Project No. DUT14RW 212 and No. DUT12RW401. XU Ming-ying, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology. SUI Xiao-di, Ph.D., associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology. AN Xue-hua, master, associate professor, School of Foreign Languages, DalianUniversity of Technology. DAVID PUBLISHING D
  • 7. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD326 and its consequence, the fragmentation of the female selfhood as the major themes in her novels. In her opinion, the process of the disintegration of the female selfhood is irreversible, and the roots of this disintegration are formulated at a much deeper level than the roots of the disintegration of the male selfhood in contemporaneous texts. While they do share a sense of cultural crisis, the very core of this crisis is defined as the dualism inherent in the patriarchal system, a dualism that justifies women’s continual exclusion from the power and their appropriation for the purposes of the male imagination and male desire. This paper is intended to discuss the female characters’ disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity, and disintegrated self and to demonstrate women’s fragmented selfhood in Murdoch’s early novel The Flight from the Enchanter (1956). The symbolic title of the novel reinforces the sense of restriction, of being confined, and of the desire for independent self. It underlines the basic theme of imprisonment and escapes which is common to most of Murdoch’s novels where physical confinement is not a necessary adjunct of enslavement; moral and spiritual compulsions are more devastating; and the enchanters of the novels ensnare the hearts and minds of the female characters around them as surely as the settings enclose them. The Disruption of Women’s Self-awareness The philosophical state of self-awareness holds that one exists as an individual being, while self-consciousness is a preoccupation with oneself as an acute sense of self-awareness (Lipka & Brinthaupt, 1992, p. 228). That is, self-awareness in a philosophical context is being conscious of oneself as an individual, while self-consciousness is being excessively conscious of one’s appearance or manner. Self-awareness Theory states that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. However self-consciousness is not to be confused with self-awareness. We would not become self-conscious until we could function as objective evaluators of ourselves. In some context, self-consciousness may affect the development of identity in varying degrees, as some people are constantly self-monitoring or self-involved, while others are completely oblivious about themselves (Branden, 1969, p. 42). Both private and public self-consciousness are frequently distinguished by psychological terms. Private self-consciousness is a tendency to introspect and examine one’s inner self and feelings. Public self-consciousness is an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, which can result in self-monitoring and social anxiety. As relatively stable personality traits, private and public self-consciousness are not correlated just because that an individual is high on one dimension does not mean that he or she is high on the other (Bernd, 2004, p. 30). Murdoch shares with Romantic writers an interest in individual consciousness and how it operates. In Romantic fiction, this preoccupation is expressed through the representation of “problems of consciousness, of vision and perception” (Jackson, 1981, p. 51). In Murdoch’s fiction, the interest in “character dispersal and fragmentation” (Jackson, 1981, p. 86) is an aspect of the destabilized sense of self evident during the Romantic period. This destabilization surfaces in descriptions of sightings, material, and immaterial, of the self or an ideal other that can be interpreted as an externalization of the self. What Annette lacks is the self-awareness, the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals. The Flight from the Enchanter opens with Annette Cockeyne’s decision to leave her “expensive finishing-school in Kensington” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7).
  • 8. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 327 “Learning nothing here” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7) is Annette’s reason to leave her school and “enter the School of Life” to “educate [herself]” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). Her departure is also partly because of her lack of interest in the teaching mission of this expensive college which is to teach “to young women of the débutante class such arts as were considered necessary for the catching of a husband” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7). All these remind the reader of her immaturity as a girl of 19 years old. A false impression on Annette is that she is an invulnerable character with a charmed life and even without any physical scars. But actually Annette is a nymph-like young girl who has insufficient self-awareness and feels homeless and nationless. Annette had once said to the young women at Ringenhall: “I have no homeland and no mother tongue. I speak four languages fluently, but none correctly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). In spite of her perfect French and English, Annette “liked to think of herself as a waif. Even her appearance suggested it, she noted with satisfaction” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 63-64). In Demetriou’s theory of cognitive development, self-awareness develops systematically from birth through the life span and it is a major factor for the development of general inferential processes (Demetriou). That is, the previous experiences, especially those in the childhood, are of great influence on the systematic development of one’s self-awareness. In Annette’s memory, “the sensations of childhood” include “the loneliness and boredom and fear of strange places, the hurry and the noise of a world which was never her own, the alien odour of the expensive hotel and the long-distance train. These were the thing that had prefigured the present moment” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 267). Annette’s experiences in her childhood cast shadow on her present sense of instability and make her lack of sense of belonging. When asked to go back home, she said: “Home! Cam’ Hill Square isn’t my home. I have no home. I’m a refugee!” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 271). Self-awareness makes people align their behavior with their standards, and the failure to live up to their personal standards will result in a negative effect. When Annette evaluates and compares her current behavior to her internal standards and values, she feels completely confused and lost. “The idea of growing up had always been for Annette the idea of being able to live at her own pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). To her disappointment, she can achieve this aim in no way. Although Annette tries her best to protect her body in the physical sense, she fails to gain access to greater self-awareness in the spiritual sense. In order to reinforce her sense of being an individual being, Annette turns to establish the relationship with other fingers, especially male characters, which proves to make her live at others’ pace instead of at her own. Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as the way to set up the appropriate relation with men and protect herself. So when Rainborough asks her what she is going to do for her living, Annette tells him that she has no idea and she is not good at anything “in a helpless feminine way about which Rainborough could not decide whether it was natural or the effect of art” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). In Rainborough’s eyes, “Women pick up these conventions at such an early age, …they’re almost bred in them”(Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). Then he cannot help wondering “how can anyone who has travelled so much be so appallingly juvenile?” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 132). The fact that Annette has no concern about her future source of income shows us her conventional thinking of male and female social roles and division of labor, which leads to her willingly enslavement in androcentric fantasy. Lack of self-awareness makes Annette not only have no idea about the future life, but also fail to recognize the present reality as she lacks the sense of ownership of her own body and of self-protection. Although Annette
  • 9. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD328 is kind and caring to the people around her, she seldom receives any care, concern, respect, or love from them, especially from the male. Her brother Nicholas arrangs his friend to “deflower” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) Annette when she is 17 just to make her “rational about these things” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Nicholas expects her not to “build up an atmosphere of mystery and expectation” about sex, because that will only make her “neurotic” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). Contrary to his expectations, Annette attends a number of adventures since that time, which bring her “neither delight nor grief” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64) but the misconception of the appropriate relationship between the sexes. “The mystery was displaced, but it remained suspended in Annette’s vision of the future, an opaque cloud, luminous with lightning” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 64). This misconception hinders her from establishing a positive and normal self-recognition in the male-female relationships. He has no favorite for Annette at all, and what he does is just for his own lust without the consideration to Annette’s feeling and respect to her as a woman. Annette’s reaction is also a sign of her female weakness. Murdoch (1956) depicts the female inferiority to the man regardless of their higher social status or even prominent family background. The sexual offense of the refugee Jan to Annette is a case in point. Although Rosa dislodges Jan from her house, Annette’s terrified feeling does not arouse her any sympathy. Dominated by the androcentric fantasy, Annette desires nothing as fervently as to become the enchanter Mischa’s captive. Mischa is unmoved by the schoolgirl heroine playing out “her fated role of international waif-adventuress” (Sullivan, 1986, p. 77). Annette, on the other hand, experiences in Mischa’s presence “a daze of beatitude” and feels “with a deep joy, the desire and the power to enfold him, to comfort him, to save him” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 215). That is, perhaps because she is truly an elfin child, or because she belongs to the people who “seek evil simply because they want adventure” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 32). It requires Calvin’s cynicism to make her realize that the “notion that one can liberate another’s soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 240). Annette’s every effort to make herself more self-conscious is to build up some kind of relation with the male and prove her own existence by their treatment to her. Unfortunately, Annette receives no love and support but indifference from the people around her when she is struggling for the establishment of her self-consciousness. Abandoned not only by Mischa, but also by Rosa and her brother Nicholas, Annette begins to toy with the idea of suicide. The photograph of her brother Nicholas is no longer enough to shield her. In her genuine aloneness, Annette regrets that she will be “forever shut away” from “the world of the chamber maid and the cyclist and the little strange hotel” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 63). She tries “to persuade herself that she felt ill” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157), but “unfortunately she did not feel ill, only extremely miserable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157). Finally, she “attempted to weep” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157), yet this proves equally “unsatisfactory” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 157). Having lost all reason to exist, Annette throws her jewels into the river. With this symbolic gesture, Annette gives vent to her conviction that “death could not change her now more than she was already changed” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 267) and she stages her suicide. Here, fate or chance intervenes. Her parents arrive and whisk Annette off the Europe and security. On yet another train Annette looks, in the same way she always will. Our last glimpse of the family is in the south of France as the Orient Express transports the recovered Annette away from the events of the novel to the land of Cockeyne. With this splendid tableau of an enchanted family frozen in a state of utter inaccessibility, the story of the Annette Cockayne comes to an end. The question whether Annette has graduated from the “School of Life” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 7) and “learnt more
  • 10. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 329 since she left Ringehall than [she] ever did while [she was] there” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 217), as her brother believes, remains unanswered. Most probably, she is still the unscarred mermaid murmuring “enchanted” through the ballrooms of Europe, ever enchanted by her temporarily sustained glimpses of real life out of the windows of trains, always again to return to her land of jewels and opulence (Sullivan, 1986, p. 79). It seems that everything returns to the beginning, but Annette has been changed by the happenings after she dropes out of the school. Insufficient self-awareness results in Annette’s inability to overcome the androcentric fantasy and impedes the growth of her selfhood because she has no clear idea about herself, her life as well as how to set up the appropriate relation with men and protect herself. In the struggling process of establishing her private self-consciousness as a young lady, Annette tends to introspect and examine her inner self and feelings. With an awareness of the self as it is viewed by others, Annette fails to set up her public self-consciousness because of her unawareness of the real root of her dilemma: patriarchy. The Marginalization of Women’s Identity Since female identity is the central concern of Murdoch’s novels, as has been already mentioned, it is necessary to define an individual identity and the female self-identity of Murdoch’s female characters. One’s identity, in Hall’s view (2004), can be thought of as a particular set of traits, beliefs and allegiances that, in short or long term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being, while subjectivity implies always a degree of thought and self-consciousness about identity, at the same time allowing a myriad of limitations and often unknowable, unavoidable constraints on our ability to fully comprehend identity. Subjectivity as a critical concept invites us to consider the question of how and from where identity arises, to what extent it is understandable, and to what degree it is something over which we have any measure of influence and control (Hall, 2004, pp. 3-4). Following Hall’s definition and Murdoch’s understanding of identity, the particular set of traits, which will give Murdoch’s female characters a constant personality and mode of being, is the autonomy and androgyny. To be autonomous means to sticking to her own voice and keeping her own life course; to be androgynous means to go beyond her gender constraints, living with the androgynous mind of a “full balance of femaleness and maleness, nurturance and aggression” (Showalter, 2004, p. 264). However, there are a lot of constrains and restrictions preventing the female characters to retain this identity, namely, the historical, social, cultural and biological ones. The characterization of refugees in Murdoch’s novels is greatly influenced by her experiences in war time. After the completion of her own degree at Oxford in 1942, Murdoch went straight into the Civil Service as an Assistant Principal in the Treasury, living, and working in wartime London. When the war ended, she felt the need to do some social work to help those who had been displaced and disorientated in the conflict, so she went to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). While working for UNRRA in Brussels and then Innsbruck from 1945 to 1946, she saw people deported to almost certain death and survivors who would never return to their homes. There is little doubt that during this time she came face to face with many of the horrors and cruelties that man inflicted upon man, which left an indelible impression on her mind. Throughout her novels there are depictions of exiles and refugees, illegal immigrants who have fled the horrors of their own country, men and women trying to escape from their past. For some of them, a line drawn on the map of
  • 11. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD330 Europe can make the difference between life and death. Yet they are not always sympathetically portrayed. In The Flight from the Enchanter, the Lusiewicz brothers have minds which appear to be permanently distorted by their early experiences, and the young dressmaker, Nina lives in permanent fear of being deported and is finally destroyed by the fear. It is of special significance to study the female identity in Murdoch’s characterization of Nina as a woman refugee under the dual oppressions. The autonomy for the female characters includes making their voice heard and freedom to choose their own life. So having their voice is the foremost step for female autonomy. Nina’s refugee status unvoices her completely. Nina’s sensitivity to her illegal status leads her to strive for the integration to the people around by mimicking their appearance, speaking their language and complying with the etiquettes. Nina insists on speaking English “politely and firmly” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) when Annette induces her to speak other languages, although “a charming and quite undiagnosable foreign accent” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) reveals her true origin. Besides, she dyes blonde her “dark straight hair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) and “long downy hairs” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) on her arms, which makes her look like “a small artificial animal” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82) with “a brown complexion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 82). But when it comes to the legal document, all the efforts Nina takes seems to be futile. “She stared at her passport, and it seemed to her suddenly like a death warrant. It filled her with shame and horror” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 288). The sight of the old picture on it reminds Nina of “the worst days of her fear” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289). She feels that an “anxious, haggard and fearful” “younger black-haired Nina stared back” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289) at her present golden-haired self. The passport evokes her miserable memories of being exiled in the past and indicates that she has “no official existence” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 289). Both nationality and gender hinder Nina from establishing her own identity by depriving her of the right to voice herself and choose her own life. Illegal status deprives Nina of having a say as she is not an existence being in the political sense in this country, while the repression which Mischa imposes upon her “condemned” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) her love to silence, so she has no right to express her love as a woman. She dare not leave her name and address to the governmental agency because “she had the refugee’s horror of the power and hostility of all authorities and of their mysterious interconnection with each other” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “if she left her name at Australia House Mischa Fox should not be told of this within twenty-four hours” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). When Nina is discovered by Mischa in a textile factory, her need for a livelihood and protection makes her pliable to his wishes. Nina knows it well that it is impossible to achieve an “independent establishment and a clientele” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 151) without Mischa’s help. Once she realizes that her love for Mischa is not reciprocated, she resolves to leave England to gain “freedom from slavery, rather that freedom in an abstract or philosophical sense” (Rabinovitz, 1978, p. 285). The only hope for her is to flee from England and never see Mischa again, then she could escape from him. What attracts her most is that the future new life will be “in every way the reverse of her present life” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155) and “she would live in their midst a life of openness and gaiety, respected as a worker and loved as a woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 155). To fulfill her plan, she decides to appeal to Rosa for assistance for “her regard for Rosa was augmented by an astonished respect for a being who had once been under Mischa’s spell and had freed herself without migrating to the Antipodes” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 156). Rosa’s indifference to her pleas ruins her hopes. When the deportation order is likely to come, her only possible escape is death.
  • 12. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 331 Nina’s choice to commit suicide is due to her identity crisis both as a citizen and as a woman. Besides Nina’s refugee status and her fear of deportation, patriarchal oppression from Mischa is also the primary cause of her tragedy. There is an important difference between the crisis of the female identity and the crisis of the male identity in contemporaneous canonical texts. The male refugees Lusiewicz brothers also experience a loss of identity as the consequence of their illegal status. With Rosa’s help, they “rapidly showed a remarkable aptitude with machines, …learnt to speak English with confidence and charm” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). And even “[t]heir appearance improved” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Meanwhile, Nina proves herself to be “a good dressmaker … patient, good-tempered, humble, discreet, fast, an exquisite worker, and…inexhaustibly imaginative” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 81) after Mischa helped her settle down and rent a house for her. As refugees, all of them try their best to learn the language, work hard and be obedient to their sponsors in order to integrate into the local life and start a new life. However, the male-female different positions in the patriarchal society make their life paths quite different. After their settlement, the Lusiewicz brothers change their attitude to their sponsor Rosa from “with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48) to with aggression by conquering her body and controlling her mind. Yet, Rosa recovers quick from “the first shock of her despair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 58) and accepts the change from being a conqueror to a prey for fear of losing the brothers. But the situation is completely different in Nina’s case. Without her voice being heard, Nina, as a woman, has no capability to change the pattern of her relationship with Mischa and consequently has no freedom to choose her own life path. Nina has no way to decline Mischa’s monthly allowance for his excuse that “his ‘inconvenient ways’ were possibly damaging to her business” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). As “a good organizer and a good business woman” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), Nina has an ambitious plan to enlarge her business since “her range of contacts was now very considerable” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153). But without any doubt, this plan displeases Mischa apparently, which makes it clear that any plan of this kind will violate Mischa’s expectations to Nina. Her love for Mischa has been transformed “into a strange emotion which had in it more of terror and fascination than of tenderness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154) and “an emotion more mixed with puzzlement and curiosity” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 153), which becomes the source of distress for Nina because “his personality made it impossible for her to open her heart to anyone” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 154). In great anxiety, Nina has a nightmare in which her sewing machine turns into an unstoppable monster which savages both her and an endless cloth map of all the countries in the world. Nina’s aphasia states as a refugee for the land of her birth and her enslavement as a woman for the gender of her birth makes her autonomy establishment impossible. Moreover, to be androgynous remains slightly out of her reach, which is the last question she thinks about before she kills herself. As she sits on the window-sill, she looks at a crucifix and thinks the idea that death is the end is not “senseless blackness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 291) for Christ, as it will be for her. She throws herself out of the window with a broken and marginalized identity. The same political guile for the removal from the scene of the illegal immigrants Jan and Stefan destroys Nina, who becomes the innocent victim, the scapegoat who suffers not merely for the sins of others but also for their neglect. Her act of self-destruction becomes a response to a general feeling of hopelessness for which she finds no outlet, neither in her unsatisfactory relationship with Mischa nor in any meaningful activity. Murdoch illustrates the destructive female identity through depicting Nina’s plight and her tragic ending. As a typical example of doubly marginalized women, Nina is powerless to struggle against destiny of being
  • 13. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD332 marginalized by the political authorities and controlled by the masculine hegemony regardless of her unremitting efforts to integrate with the new environment and her willingness to mingle with the new culture. Besides, through the characterization of Nina, Murdoch also tends to unravel the lack of mutual assistance among women to struggle with their marginalized identity and survive the male dominance in this novel. The Disintegration of Female Self While Murdoch depicts Annette Cockeyne’s disruptive self-consciousness and Nina’s marginalized identity, her main concern is the portrayal of the female protagonist in this novel: Rosa and her disintegrated self in the process of her flight from the enchanter. Murdoch’s moral philosophy is premised on the reality of the individual self, so much so that she starts that “the central concept of morality is ‘the individual’” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 30). Distinguished from Romanticism, Murdoch holds the opinion that the individual as a self-in-relation is renewed in the context. While Modernism emphasizes on “formal autonomy” (Waugh, 1989, p. 79) and holds identity as “transcendence of history through symbol and self as a construction of language” (Waugh, 1989, p. 79), Murdoch focuses on the self in relation. In her novels, she portrays how individual consciousness functions in people as moral beings, and the effect this has on their perception of reality, rather than the social and historical conditions in which her characters operate. “Underlying Murdoch’s moral philosophy is a concept of the individual as the ‘owner’ of their ‘inner life’ and of inner activity as morally significant” (Widdows, 2004, p. 21). So the self in Murdoch’s fiction is a fixed entity that is built in the relations. Compared with Annette and Nina, Rosa Keepe has a stronger sense of self-consciousness and self-identity since she knows who she is and what she wants better. Unfortunately, she still fails to obtain integrated self for her personal weaknesses in specific and female limitations in general obstruct the building of her in-relation self. The following analysis will mainly focus on three pairs of relationships: Rosa and the Lusiewicz brothers, Rosa and Mischa, and Rosa and other female characters in the novel. Though educated, the heroine Rosa is willing to work on the assembly line in a factory instead of being a journalist or a teacher because she is unable to stand her mother’s disappointment at her failure to be “a fanatical idealist” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) and her own at to be “a good teacher” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). She still makes this choice “in a mood of self-conscious asceticism” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47) although she knows it well that working in the factory is an experience of almost unbearable affliction and a kind of modern slavery. The machines in Rosa’s factory never stop, day or night. She fears being “caught in the machine” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 42). Here she has a secret about the refugee Lusiewicz brothers, who arrive “dejected and colourless, like half-starved, half-drowned animals” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46). Except Rosa, no one shows any interests in them at that time. As a dutiful protector, Rosa guides them, gives them financial support, teaches them English and treats them as her children. “Then after a while Rosa found herself becoming oddly secretive and possessive about the pair” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 46) .With her help, the brothers have been making big process and becoming popular in the factory, which brings Rosa mixed feelings: “with interest and pleasure at first, and later with sadness” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 47). The brothers treat her at first “with an inarticulate deference which resembled religious awe. They were like poor savages confronted with a beautiful white girl” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 48-49). Their dependence upon her makes Rosa even worried at the degree of her power over them. They need her permission to the simplest things and they make no choice without her opinion just like her slaves. This power makes Rosa
  • 14. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 333 feared as well as joyful. Overwhelmed by their primitive adoration and their abject respect, Rosa feels “like the princess whose strong faith released the prince from an enchanted sleep, or from the transfigured form of a beast” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 54) and in return for their devotion, she showers the brothers with love. Contrary to Rosa’s expectations, her role as an enchantress is of short duration. Once “the mastery had passed to the brother” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 60), Rosa becomes their property. They begin to thrive and make their own conquests, including Rosa, whom they share sexually. Gradually and almost without awareness on her part, Rosa changes from mother-surrogate to sister-surrogate. What helps her to accept the role reversal is her ability to overcome the “physical sensation” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “that numb paralysis which is the deliberate dulling of thought by itself” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) and the painful fear of losing the brothers. When they retell Rosa their experiences of raping their school teacher by turns and abandoning her just to revenge her for humiliating them in the class, which leads to her death directly, Rosa is so anesthetized while she is “empty of thoughts and feelings” and experiences “a kind of triumph” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 78). Consequently, she does not resent the brothers and accepts without demur “the rules of the new regime” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) which Jan and Stefan “made plain to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57) with “gentle tact” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 57). After her acceptance of the grotesque reversal of roles, Rosa uses the machines in the factory as instruments to immobilize her feelings. Nevertheless, the brothers’ more and more excessive behaviors, such as uninvited visit to Rosa’s house and assaulting Annette sexually there, drive Rosa to reach the point where she confronts herself with the realization that she is unable to break the black spell the Poles hold over her. In the relationship between Rosa and the brothers, Rosa functions as a power figure at first because of the superiority of her social status, but she soon descends to the enchanted because of the inferiority of her female gender. The formation of her self faces a great challenge and becomes instabilized in this process of reversal. In utter frustration, she resorts to the powers of Mischa whose marriage proposal she refuses ten years ago to run away from his control. She tells about her plight with reservation, however Mischa asks no question but her permission to use any method he likes. Rosa “felt as if she were selling herself into captivity” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 262). “But to be at his mercy was at that moment her most profound desire” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 262). Mischa then manipulates SELIB, the Special European Labor Immigration Board, to have Stefan deported. To her consternation, Rosa discovers that after all these years she is still very fond of Mischa and would not mind to be rescued by him. As she approaches her former lover whose enchantment she believes to have disappeared, she is “quite ready to acknowledge herself to be under a spell … [and] she knew that even if at that moment Mischa was oblivious of her existence, yet he was drawing her all the time” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 257). As she attempts to solve her personal problem, Rosa has either not yet gained the “degree of self-knowledge” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331) necessary “to achieve morality or love” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331), or is not fully aware of her “moral strength and weakness to be able to overcome the vicissitude of a moral crisis” (Rabinovitz, 1978, pp. 330-331). At “a point of disequilibrium where rest was no longer possible” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 292), Rosa impulsively travels south herself to join Mischa at his villa in Italy. She feels compelled by the enchanter whom she like to be reunited with. But Rosa does not return to Mischa thanks to Calvin Blick’s interference. He shows the photographs of Rosa with the Lusiewicz brothers, telling her Mischa has seen them, though he tells Hunter he has not. Looking at the photograph Calvin has taken of her, Rosa is able to recognize the flaws in her
  • 15. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD334 obsession with Mischa. Many years ago, Rosa “put herself under the enchanter’s spell because she thought he was in touch with reality” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 49) and is satisfied with her lot until she senses “that Mischa was not merely in touch with reality but had power over it, and then she began to fear him” (Whiteside, 1964, p. 49). Calvin comforts her that she “will never know the truth” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 304) because “[r]eality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 305), and therefore, she “will read the signs in accordance with [her] deepest wishes” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 304-305), just like everybody else. Rosa retorts that this view is a surrender of his power. Rosa’s final triumph is in her inexplicable act of turning back from Mischa even though he is waiting for her. Now that he has transformed Rosa into the “real” woman worthy of his love, she reveals herself to be tougher than he has thought and succeeds in shattering his ephemeral formula for control by her unexpected assertion of freedom. However, Rosa’s decision is one of pure renunciation. Nonetheless, Rosa does make one vital gain and discovery. She can choose to be free of Mischa and to recognize herself as a free agent. She says to Calvin, whose name tolls predestination, “in the past I always felt that whether I went towards him or away from him I was only doing his will. But perhaps it was all an illusion” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 308). Years ago, Rosa refuses Mischa’s offer of marriage and flees from Mischa because she fears the ultimate consequence of his control over her as much as she dreaded the intimacy of married life. Years later, Rosa goes back willingly to be under his control and protection. The journey from flight to regression reveals the incapability of Rosa’s disintegrated self to find a balanced position in the patriarchal male-female relationship. Moreover, the deficiency of Rosa’s sense of self hinders her from establishing a healthy and normal relationship with other female characters. Rosa has no easy-going and cheerful characters since she “never wanted other human beings to come too near” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 48). The intimacy with the person makes her at times feel horrible. She lives with her brother Hunter and her schoolfriend’s daughter Annette, whom “had never yet occupied very much of Rosa’s attention” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). Rosa shows no caring and love to Annette as expected from a female seniority to a young girl, but the hostility and indifference from a jealousy same-sex peer. Annette’s “kittenish” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66) ways both charm and irritate Rose for they remind of “her memories of herself at that age” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). She often likes to be accompanied by Annette, yet the child makes her uneasy. Although she knew that her sarcasm make Annette feared, she becomes more inclined to “prick and bite her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 66). When Jan offends Annette sexually in her upstairs room, Rosa’s first reaction is to pretend not to have heard Annette’s cry for help. When she is urged to see what is happening upstairs, she just gets Jan away by striking his face. Then “without a glance at Annette” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163), she descends “at a leisurely pace” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 163). What Rosa really cares about is not Annette’s terrible state of mind as a victim of sexual assault but her own jealousy for the brothers’ betrayal and their interests in other women. She feels greatly relieved for “after the incident with Jan, …a certain coldness in her reception … had almost immediately vanished and everything had seemed to be as usual” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 245). In the party at the Mischa’s, the tripping dancing of Mischa and Annette irritates her so much that she ruins the party by breaking the fishbowl into pieces. Her next gaffe comes as: Rosa shook herself like a dog. Her hair, which had been loosened by the struggle, cascaded down her back. She had been cut in the arm by some of the broken glass on the floor. People gathered round her. As she stood there looking at the blood upon her arm her eyes slowly filled with tears. (Murdoch, 1956, p. 213)
  • 16. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 335 After the party, Mischa drives to the seaside with Annette to comfort her and then sends her back to Rosa’s house. The sight of Mischa’s coat on Annette makes Rosa so annoyed that: Suddenly Rosa turned into Annette’s room and began to drag open the drawers of her dressing-table. She seized an armful of clothes and hurled them down into Annette’s face. Then pulling out one of the drawers entire she upended it at the top of the stairs. (Murdoch, 1956, p. 220) With no attention to the fragility of Annette’s body and mind, Rosa commits these crazy behaviors which make Annette so physically and mentally broken that she rolls down the stairs and hurt her leg. Rosa’s madness proves her to be a completely self-centered woman showing no concerns to any other people or events only when they violate her own life, which makes it impossible for her to have a wholeness of self. Nina is another victim of Rosa’s misanthropy. Every time after her attempts to plea for Rosa’s help, Rosa always has the same reaction: care nothing about what Nina says and forget her completely soon after her visits. In Mischa’s villa in Italy, Calvin Blick shows Rosa a newspaper report of Nina’s suicide, remarking that “someone ought to have explained things to her” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 306). Obviously, Rosa bears responsibility for Nina’s death in two ways. At first, She herself unleashed Mischa’s power, authorizing him, to “use any methods” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 256) to protect herself and Hunter from Stefan. Secondly, because she was so rapturously abstracted at the thought of seeing Mischa, she failed to attend to Nina’s plea for help: “I have some problems… I would like to ask your advice” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 259). However, Rosa replies merrily: “Life is a series of problems! …Never be afraid to ask for advice, …People try to be far too independent of each other. I’m just going in now to ask Mr. Fox’s advice” (Murdoch, 1956, pp. 259-260). Nina’s death is in part as a result of Rosa’s inattention, in part because Rosa enlists Mischa and his methods. This moment of unexpected moral crisis made to see her responsibility for Nina’s death, she is ready to perceive the destructive consequences of the enchanter in herself and others. The closing chapter is melancholy, though it contains good as well as bad news. On her return from Italy to rainy London, Rosa goes straight to see Peter, free of the moral and emotional ties which have bound her to Mischa. From him she learns that Camilla Wingfield has died, leaving her all the shares of the Artemis and an annual income of £500 if she will edit the journal. The Artemis has been saved from Mischa, and Rosa has been saved from the factory and given a new purpose. However, a bilingual inscription has been discovered which is a key to the Kastanic script and proves Peter’s work on it to be futile. Peter is stoical: “One reads the signs as best one can, and one may be totally misled. …It was worth trying. Now I can go back to my other work in peace. There’s nothing to be sad about, Rosa” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 315). But Rosa is sad because Peter Saward rejects her offer of marriage because he knows that Rosa is merely seeking a safety-net. The novel ends with Peter showing Rosa the photographs of the lost world of Mischa’s childhood and “she saw the pictures through a gathering haze of tears” (Murdoch, 1956, p. 316). Conclusions The Flight from the Enchanter starts from Annette’s running away from her finishing school to enter the school of life, which directly points to the theme of the novel: Flight, with the central plot that a feminist magazine called Artemis is close to closure due to a lack of readers. All the people’s lives in the novel revolve around the mysterious figure of Mischa Fox, a frightening figure of power. As for the female figures in this novel,
  • 17. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD336 what they flee from is not only the power or enigma of Mischa Fox, but also their fragmented selfhood. Regardless of her wealthy and decent family background, spoiled but rootless Annette is confronted with lack of love and attention from her parents, her brother, her guardian Rosa. Meanwhile, her gender makes her unable to escape from the economic exploitation, emotional control and sexual assault of the male. So she is thirsty for love and attention to prove her existence even at the cost of her life. From her, Murdoch depicts women’s inability to introspect and examine their inner self, desires and feelings in order to know themselves as an individual. The worried immigrant dressmaker Nina endures double oppressions—racial and sexual oppression. Though she is more financially successful than the Polish brothers who have the same immigrant status as her, she can’t reverse the position of the controller and the controlled as they do just because of the female weaknesses. In spite of her economic independence, the confinement of her spirit disables her to be definable and recognizable in the relations. The main female character Rosa, fierce and strong-minded, is too indulgent in her own world to know the reality. Her status as a power figure, due to her racial privilege, in the life of two Polish brothers is soon destroyed by the gender advantage of the male. Then she is occupied by the malformed relationship with two Polish brothers without their admiration and attachment to her as they have before. Frightened by the gradually out-or-control situation, she turns to the power of her former lover Mischa Fox, the male force, to help her get rid of the entwinement of these brothers. In this novel, Murdoch reveals that no matter what kind of backgrounds they have, women are not powerful enough to overcome the gender advantages of the male and the suppression imposed by the male domination on them. Moreover, Murdoch expresses the women’s desire to flee from the situation where they are and from the fragmented selfhood for reconstruction. In modern mass society, a conception of individuality appears hopelessly outmoded to many philosophers. Instead, Murdoch embraces the idea that selfhood is the outcome of relational activities, beginning with infant nurturance, extending to language, and culminating in reflexive consciousness, in which selves become self-aware. In The Flight from the Enchanter, Murdoch avoids approaching the female plights in the aspect of financial dependence, less human right, family squabbles, parenting and other issues as many other feminist writers do. Instead, she reveals the deconstructive female selfhood in the modern society caused by the historical, social and economic changes. Regardless of their origin and background, what these female characters in common is their attempt to escape from “an enchanter”, who usually imposes physical confinement as well as mental and spiritual confinement on them. Their disruptive self-consciousness, marginalized identity, and disintegrated self of the female characters fail all of them to complete the wholeness of female self and obstruct their way to human goodness. References Beauvoir, S. de. (1953). The second sex. H. M. Parshley (Trans. & Ed.). London: Jonathan Cape. Bernd, S. (2004). Identity in Modern society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Branden, N. (1969). The psychology of self-esteem. New York: Nash Publishing Corp.. Demetriou, A., & Kazi, S. (2001). Unity and modularity in the mind and the self. London: Routledge. Hall, D. E. (2004). Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Jackson, R. (1981). Fantasy: The literature of subversion. London: Methuen. Lipka, R. P., & Brinthaupt, T. M. (Eds.). (1992). Self-perspectives across the life span. Albany: State University of New York Press. Murdoch, I. (1956). The flight from the enchanter. London: Chatto & Windus. Murdoch, I. (1970). The sovereignty of good. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  • 18. THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE FEMALE SELFHOOD 337 Rabinovitz, R., & Murdoch, I. (1978). Six contemporary British novelists. G. Stade, (Ed.). New York: Columbia University Press. Showalter, E. (2004). A literature of their own: British women novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Sullivan, Z. T. (1986). The demonic: The Flight from the Enchanter. In H. Bloom (Ed.), Iris Murdoch: Modern critical views (pp. 71-86). New York: Chelsea House Publishers. Waugh, P. (1989). Feminine fictions: Revisiting the postmodern. London: Routledge. Whiteside, G . (1964). The novels of Iris Murdoch. Critique, 7, 27-47. Widdows, H. (2004). The moral vision of Iris Murdoch. Hampshire: Ashgate.
  • 19. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 338-344   Borges’ Poetics of Visible Unrealities Robin McAllister Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA Close reading and inter-textual analysis of Borges’ essays, fiction, and poetry suggest a poetics of visible unrealities, a fiction that calls attention to its own artifice. Borges’s poetics of reading and dreaming require another poetics of the work as a text that calls attention to its own artifice. In reading Borges’ fiction, the separate roles and identities of reader, writer, and work of fiction merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities and are transformed into a single act of dreaming, which assumes cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. In the dominant role given to the reader, the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is read. There is no determinate text, only a version of our own we re-write and invent every time we read the text. The author’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. As writers and readers we are composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it. Keywords: Borges, poetics, reading, Berkeley He comprehended that the effort to mold the incoherent and vertiginous matter dreams are made of was the most arduous task a man could undertake, though he might penetrate all the enigmas of the upper and lower orders: much more arduous than weaving a rope of sand or coining the faceless wind. (Borges, 1962, “The Circular Ruins”) It is hazardous to think that a co-ordination of words (philosophies are nothing else) can have much resemblance to the universe. It is also hazardous to think that one of those famous co-ordinations does not resemble it a little more than others, even in an infinitesimal way. (Borges, 1966, “Avatars of the Tortoise”) Introduction Dreaming and stories that are mere co-ordinations of words are clues to the riddle of Borges’ poetics of fiction, his concepts about the roles of the writer and the reader in creating a work of fiction. In our ordinary world of reading Borges, we uncritically take for granted the separate existence of the story as an object apart from us, a book we are opening in our hands to begin reading, the previous existence of the writer who created it, and our own autonomous existence as readers about to sit down, momentarily try to detach our attention from the distractions of the actual reality surrounding us, and immerse ourselves in reading the story, momentarily and, alas, only temporarily leaving behind one reality and entering into the mode of consciousness we find in reading a work of fiction. But in the world of Borges’ fiction all these separate roles and identities merge and exchange roles, powers, and identities. The separate existences of a reader, writer, and book are transformed into a single act of dreaming. Any account of Borges’ “poetics” of fiction, his concept—implicit or explicit in his stories, essays, and Robin McAllister, associate professor, Department of English, Sacred Heart University. DAVID PUBLISHING D
  • 20. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   339 poems—of what the fiction is, must take into account not just the extraordinary role he attributes to the reader, but another almost hidden, often denied concept as well, the fiction, not just as a text, but as a work of art, a “co-ordination of words”, that calls attention to its own artifice. However, the reader’s power to dream the work of fiction into existence emerges as Borges’ preferred poetics, and the idea of the work as a co-ordination of words is forgotten or repudiated. In the world of Borges’ fiction, the reader can assume fantastic roles: A dreamer, a failed writer, an unrequited lover, and a blind “magus” who creates and destroys, a consciousness on the verge of vision and annihilation, a copier and a creator, a simulacrum dreamed into existence by a prior text, even a fictional role constructed out of literary topoi and metaphysical problems to resolve the problem of trying to represent a vision of the universe that cannot be put into words. The Role of the Reader One of these roles, the Reader as Writer, is the subject of a famous essay by the late Rodrigues Monegal (1972), who attributes the concept of the Reader as Writer to Gerard Genette: …Criticism is an activity as imaginary as fiction or poetry… Nevertheless, it is possible to attempt another reading of these texts, and of the famous “Pierre Menard”, and instead of taking literally the conclusions of those critical articles, or the ironies of the story, perhaps to see in these short pieces the foundation of another aesthetic discipline, based not on the creation of the literary work but on its reading—instead of an aesthetics of the work of art, an aesthetics of its reading. This approach to Borges’ work has been favored by the Nouvelle Critique since Gerard Genette’s article, “La literature selon Borges”. Taking as his starting point the final lines of “Pierre Menard”, Genette has emphasized the importance of the Borgesian intuition that the most delicate and important operation of all those which contribute to the writing of a book is reading it. He concludes his analysis with these words: “The genesis of a work in the time of history and the life of an author is the most contingent and most insignificant moment of its duration … The time of a book is not the limited time of its writing, but the limitless time of reading and memory. The meaning of books is in front of them and not behind them; it is in us: a book is not a ready-made meaning, a revelation we have to suffer; it is a reservation of forms that are waiting to have some meaning, it is the `imminence of a revelation that is not yet produced”, and that every one of us has to produce for himself. (p. l05) Certainly Borges seems to confirm this “approach, of whose validity there is no question” in an essay like “A Note on (toward) Bernard Shaw”, where he rejects the notion of fiction as merely a “verbal structure”, a “combinatory game”: Those who practice this game forget that a book is more than a verbal structure or a series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. The dialogue is infinite … Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that no single book is. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships. (Borges, 1962, p. 213) Indeed the reader seems to determine the text, rather than the text determining our reading: One literature differs from another, prior or posterior, less because of the text than because of the way in which it is read: if I were granted the possibility of reading any present-day page—this one, for example—as it will be read in the year two thousand, I would know what the literature of the year two thousand will be like. (Borges, 1962, pp. 213-214) We seem to discover this kind of reader as a writer in the protagonist of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”: “To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the Quixote seemed less arduous to him—and, consequently, less interesting—than to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard” (Borges, 1962, p. 40). Menard, “author” of the Quixote, is not just a writer, but
  • 21. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   340 also a reader, when he produces a Quixote identical in text with the original but different, indeed richer, in meaning: “Cervantes’ text and Menard’s are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer” (Borges, 1962, p. 42). Like a reader Menard “copies” a text word for word, but, like a writer, he transforms it. Borges’ fiction requires a reader who is both a translator and a creator—or re-creator. Borges (1962) confirms Rodrigues Monegal’s discovery of “an aesthetics of fiction based on the reading of the text”: Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution. This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid … This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. (p. 44) The text of the Quixote stays identical, but the way Menard recomposes it changes it completely, transforming it with deliberate anachronism into a symbol or sign of Menard’s time, not Cervantes’. But does this technique of deliberately anachronistic reading actualize a revelation in the fiction that otherwise remains merely imminent? Or is not it rather a playful fantasy reading in which we readers find ourselves with powers of creativity autonomous from the text or the writer? An “adventurous” reading, we shall discover, is not just an entertaining fantasy, but one which takes on cosmogonic and apocalyptic risks. The reader as writer will assume fantastic, cosmogonic powers of creation and annihilation in poems like “Amanecer” and stories like “The Circular Ruins”. Perhaps, as Rodriguez Monegal (1972) asserts, there can be no question of the validity of this approach, but, if so, the consequences are startling. The meaning of a story, “El Aleph” (1957), for example, is not what Borges, the writer, may have intended, a meaning determined within the context of his other stories and essays and limited by the historical moment in which he wrote, but whatever preconceptions and associations the reader brings to the story as a reader from his own personal time and situation. It is impossible—or delusional—to think that the reader ever reads or could read Borges’ “El Aleph” and write an essay about “it”—such an object or determined text does not exist—merely a version of “El Aleph” the reader re-writes and invents every time he reads the text of that title. There are as many “El Alephs” as there are readers, and Borges becomes only one of many other readers of his own story. Criticism and scholarship does indeed become a branch of fantastic literature. Berkeley It is hardly surprising that Borges, the radically idealist Borges of an essay like “A New Refutation of Time” (1981) or stories like “Tlon, Ukbar, OrbisTertius” (1981), should deny that the fiction exists as a “verbal structure” or an “object”. For the radical idealist Borges, a world of objects or material reality is only possible through a perceiving consciousness that constitutes and sustains a “representation” (in the Berkeleyan sense of framing an “idea”), as in one of several quotations Borges cites from Berkeley: But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them. I answer, you may so, there is no difficulty in it; but what is all this, I beseech you, more than framing in your mind certain ideas which you call books and trees, and at the same time omitting to frame the idea of any one that may perceive them? But do not you yourself perceive or think them all the while? This therefore is nothing to the purpose: it only shews you have the power of imagining or forming ideas in your mind; but it does not shew that you can conceive it possible the objects of your thought may exist without the mind. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 180)
  • 22. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   341 A previous quotation from Berkeley in the essay “A New Refutation of Time” implies that the work of fiction as an object or work of art does not exist unless it is “perceived” by a reader: Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind that a man need only open his eyes to see them. Such I take this important one to be, viz., that all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind—that their being is to be perceivedor known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit—. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 181) This quotation from Berkeley amounts to no less than a metaphysical argument for the priority of the reader, as a constitutive and sustaining consciousness, over the text as an autonomous “object”, an object that only exists in so far as it is seen or imagined by a sustaining consciousness, whether that of the writer, the reader, or the eternal spirit. This reader as Berkeleyan eternal spirit might be the ancestor of Genette’s and Rodriguez Monegal’s reader as writer, whose reading actualizes the “imminence of revelation”, a reader who will appear over and over again in Borges’ essays and fictions as a dreamer or writer who dreams a vision of the universe into existence. Cosmogonic and Apocalyptic Reading If the reader resembles Berkeley’s perceiver, he creates or dreams the universe he exists in, the fiction he reads. When the reader reads she creates little worlds, microcosms. His reading is cosmogonic, world-creating, and creative; no wonder the reader “writes” or re-creates the fiction he reads. Such a Berkeleyaneternal spirit appears in the poem “Dawn” (1981). This poem resembles the type of “meditational poem” familiar to readers of 17th Century English poetry. It is a poem of philosophical speculation, the record or account of a revelation in the form of an idea that has occurred to the poet. Through the poet’s use of the first person “I”, the reader enacts or re-lives the constitutive mind or consciousness of a blind poet, an insomniac—unable to lose consciousness and sleep—who wanders through the streets of Buenos Aires, sustaining the entire city in his mind, until others awaken and carry on his metaphysical burden. If the poem or fiction resembles an idea, like Berkeley’s or Schopenhauer’s, it can only exist if it is dreamed into consciousness by an individual dreamer or reader: “…Since ideas are not like marble, everlasting, but ever-renewing like a forest or river, the previous speculation … dominated my reason and projected the following whim… ” (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 6) The content of this poem is not the city of Buenos Aires at dawn, but a mental act, a revelation, at first only a presentiment, then an idea of a prior writer or philosopher, which unexpectedly finds renewed existence as it is reformulated and thought in the mind of the poet. There are no emotions or feelings in the poem, only perceptions, memories, acts of reflection and speculation. The poem imitates or enacts a mental process of creating a poem. Like Berkeley’s mind that frames or constitutes “all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth” (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 181), the speaker in “Dawn” is an impersonal wanderer who sustains the entire city of Buenos Aires in his consciousness and also threatens it with annihilation if he ceases to constitute or dream it. Perhaps the physical blindness of the speaker (not necessarily just an autobiographical reference) emphasizes the constitutive, fabricating process of perception that makes possible the vision of the city sustained in his “dreaming” (Borges, 1962, p. 208) consciousness. This poem, like many others, moves from revelation, dreaming, and creation to a moment of apocalypse and annihilation, particularly the annihilation of
  • 23. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   342 personal consciousness. The poet or reader, who reads, and in reading, re-lives and reconstitutes the poem, exhibits cosmogonic and apocalyptic powers of creativity. The city only exists as long and in so far as it is sustained in the wakened consciousness of the poet. Similarly the reader might suppose that the poem, like an idea, only exists in so far as it is read, or rethought, transformed in the mind of a new reader, and, if the reader ceases reading the poem, it ceases to exist. Visible Unrealities Another constitutive, sustaining consciousness appears in the story “The Circular Ruins”, where the epigraph after the title, before the story even begins, evokes the reader’s cosmogonic, apocalyptic powers as a Reader: “And if he left off dreaming about you… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45). The writer has left it to the reader to complete this interrupted quotation, and, if he does so, “you would cease to exist”. The opening lines of the story—“No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night… ” (Borges, 1962, p. 45)—are footnotes to the Berkeleyan quotations above. The protagonist or dreamer of this story is a powerful magician, evocative of a Hermetic magus, who dreams a man into existence only to discover at the end of the story that he too is being dreamed. The magician who dreams a man into existence resembles both a writer and a reader. The infinite regress through which this story is fabricated—the dreamer within a dreamer includes the Reader as Berkeleyan constitutive and sustaining consciousness (the creative “unanimous night” out of which a poem, like “Dawn” or a story like “The Circular Ruins” can emerge). The new element in this myth of dreaming a fiction into existence is the idea that our dreaming is dreamed. The logic of this infinite regress is unavoidable: The reader is dreaming the story into existence, almost as if it was an actual reality, but the reader’s dreaming is dreamed, by Borges or by the fiction as a text for the reading. The reader’s reading is not a spontaneous evocation of vision, but an artifice, as artificial as the writing of the fiction. The illusion of reality the reader succumbs to is only the result of enchanting himself into taking his “dreamed son” as an autonomous being. The reading would appear to be determined by a prior text or by the writer’s “combinatory games” (Borges, 1962, p. 213) with his verbal structure, not merely the evanescent and vanishing mental vision of the Eternal Spirit’s consciousness. As writers and readers the readeris composed of texts and schemata, alphabets and artifacts, not merely mental perceptions and ideas. We begin to see here in this story, as in the “tremendous conjecture” of “Dawning” that denied or rejected poetics of the poem or fiction as a prior text, repudiated by Borges as a mere “verbal algebra”. The magician of “The Circular Ruins” exercises his cosmogonic powers in dreaming another man into existence and “imposing” him on reality: The purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural. He wanted to dream a man; he wanted to dream him in minute entirety and impose him on reality. This magic project had exhausted the entire expanse of his mind…. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 124) This apparition, nourished by the very mental life of the dreamer, starts out a dream or fiction, but “gradually, he began to accustoming him to reality”. The language used in this story for the process of dreaming subtly implies that, if the dreamed man resembles a fiction, the work of fiction is not just a “copy” of reality, but interpenetrates with reality, gradually assuming its own autonomous existence along with the rest of the universe generated by the dreaming Consciousness. The climax and conclusion of the story is a sudden revelation that contradicts this illusion of actual presence or existence. The dreamer encounters a “visible
  • 24. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   343 unreality” when the fire encircling the ruins of the burned temple does not burn but only caresses his flesh: He walked toward the sheets of flame. They did not bite his flesh, they caressed him and flooded him without heat or combustion. With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he also was an illusion, that someone was dreaming him. (Rodriguez Monegal, 1981, p. 127) The Magician in “The Circular Ruins” anticipates another Magician in Borges’ essay (devoted to a history of the idea of infinite regress), “Avatars of the Tortoise”: “The greatest magician (Novalis has memorably written) would be the one who would cast over himself a spell so complete that he would take his own phantasmagorias as autonomous appearances. Would not this be our case?” I conjecture that this is so. We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false. (Borges, 1962, p. 208) This architecture of the dream is the text of the fiction, a text that requires artifice in our fabrication. No matter how much Borges rejects and repudiates the concept of the fiction as a “mere verbal algebra,” the Writer and Reader, like the dreamer in “The Circular Ruins”, resemble Novalis’s Magician, and certain poems of philosophical speculation and stories like “The Circular Ruins” constructed out of philosophical puzzles and paradoxes resemble those “philosophies” Borges evokes in “Avatars of the Tortoise”: It is venturesome to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing more than that) can resemble the universe very much. It is also venturesome to think that of all these illustrious co-ordinations, one of them—at least in an infinitesimal way—does not resemble the universe a bit more than the others. I have examined those which enjoy a certain prestige; I venture to affirm that only in the one formulated by Schopenhauer have I recognized some trait of the universe. According to this doctrine, the world is a fabrication of the will. Art—always—requires visible unrealities. Let it suffice for me to mention one: the metaphorical or numerous or carefully accidental diction of the interlocutors in a drama … Let us admit what all idealists admit: the hallucinatory nature of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: seek unrealities which confirm that nature. We shall find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno. (Borges, 1962, pp. 207-208) That is, the universe should exhibit, like the fiction “The Circular Ruins”, the “visible unrealities” of Zeno’s dialectic, the principle of infinite regress. Conclusions In the dreamed and dreaming world of Borges’ fiction, objects, ideas, and people do not retain their separate roles and identities but merge, exchange roles, and symbolize each other through such co-ordinations of words as the avatars of infinite regress he discusses in “Avatars of the Tortoise”. One idea or poetics, like dreaming, can resemble or require it’s opposite. The reader requires a prior text to copy, translate, and recreate, and that text only exists as a fictional microcosm in so far as it is being read by a Reader who is able to actualize the revelation only imminent within it. References Borges, J. L. (1957). El Aleph (The Aleph). Buenos Aires: Emece. Borges, J. L. (1960). Otras inquisiciones (Other inquisitions). Buenos Aires: Emece. Borges, J. L. (1962). Labyrinths: Selected stories and other writings. D. A. Yates, & J. E. Irby, (Eds.). New York: A New Directions Book. Borges, J. L. (1966). Other inquisitions: 1937-1952. (R. Simms, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. Borges, J. L. (1967). A personal anthology. A. Kerrigan, (Ed.). New York: Grove Press.
  • 25. BORGES’ POETICS OF VISIBLE UNREALITIES   344 Borges, J. L. (1970). The Alephand other stories 1933-1969: Together with commentaries and an autobiographical essay. (N. T. di. Giovanni, (Ed.), Trans.).New York: Bantam. McAllister, R. (1962). Borges’ “El Aleph” and Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher: Two studies in Gothic romance”. In A. R. Becker (Ed.), Visions of the fantastic. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press. Rodriguez Monegal, E. (1972). Borges: The Reader as Writer. TriQuarterly, 25, 102-143. Rodriguez Monegal, E., & Reid, A. (Eds.). (1981). Borges, a reader: A selection from the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Dutton.
  • 26. Journal of Literature and Art Studies, ISSN 2159-5836 May 2014, Vol. 4, No. 5, 345-350 Translation of Allusions in Fortress Besieged ZHANG Qun-xing Beijing Information Science and Technology University, Beijing, China The wide application of Chinese and foreign allusions is a big feature of QIAN Zhong-shu’s only novel and masterpiece Fortress Besieged, which was first published in 1947. The paper makes an attempt to categorize and analyze the strategies in translating allusions adopted by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao in the only English version. The strategies include literal translation, literal translation plus endnote, literal translation plus explanation added in the text, interpretation of the implied meaning plus endnote, and interpretation of the implied meaning in the text. In particular, the strategy of literal translation plus endnote is mostly adopted. This is indicative of the translators’ wish to be as faithful as possible to the source text. What’s more, the literal translation strategy and use of endnotes is of a big help to communicate the Chinese culture to foreigners. Keywords: allusion, Fortress Besieged, translation strategies Introduction QIAN Zhong-shu ranks among the most important writers and literary critics in the 20th-century Chinese literature field. His masterpiece and only novel of his whole life Wei Cheng (1991), with the English translation of Fortress Besieged, which was published in the year of 1980 by Indiana University Press, enjoys high reputation home and abroad. The theme of the novel derives from a French old saying which reads “people who are outside the fortress want to break into it, while those who are trapped in the fortress desire to escape”. It is a comedy of manners with much picaresque humor, as well as a scholar’s novel, a satire, a commentary on courtship and marriage, and a study of one contemporary man. It can be compared to The Scholars (1749) in the 1940s of China. Hsia (1961) highly praised the novel’s comic exuberance and satire, acclaiming it as “the most delightful and carefully wrought novel in modern Chinese literature; it is perhaps also its greatest novel” (p. 441). QIAN Zhong-shu, from a special perspective, offers a realistic description of the contradictory state of mind and character flaws of the middle-class Chinese intellectuals deeply influenced by the Western and Chinese cultures in the Republican era. QIAN’s enormous knowledge, rich imagination, and humorous satire make a vivid impression on readers of one generation after another. In particular, the wide use of Chinese and foreign allusions stands out as a big feature of Fortress Besieged, making it a unique literary masterpiece in China’s modern literature history. The application of allusions helps to depict characters, stimulate plot development, highlight the ironic effect, and deepen the theme of the novel. ZHANG Qun-xing, associate professor, Foreign Languages School, Beijing Information Science and Technology University. DAVID PUBLISHING D
  • 27. TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED346 Definition of Allusion Allusions have long been cherished as the crystallization of specific cultures. According to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (1973), allusion is an implied or indirect reference to someone or something. Barton and Hudson (1997) defines allusion as “an indirect or explicit reference by one text to another text, to a historical occurrence, or to myths and legends” (p. 9). Leppihalme (1997) defines allusion as “a figure of speech that compares aspects or qualities of counterparts in history, mythology, scripture, literature, popular or contemporary culture” (p. 6). As Wheeler (1979) puts it, “allusion helps to elucidate the meaning of each text and to indicate the literary modes and conventions in which its author works” (p. 5). Allusions have been widely applied in literature as one figure of speech. When an allusion is incorporated into another context, it acquires a double meaning, and its original meaning gives way to the secondary meaning closely related to the context. In short, allusion is an economical means of calling upon history, mythology, Holy Scriptures and other literary works that author and reader are assumed to share (Dastjerdi & Sahebhonar, 2008). Allusions usually derive from such origins as historical events, mythology, literary works, popular legend or folklore, fables, customs, and old sayings. The writer who adopts an allusion not only reuses the language of the original source, but also deliberately intends that the reader should recover the source context and appreciate the semantic interplay between the original and the new use. Apparently, allusions, as culture-bound elements, resist translation, and rendering them successfully depend largely on the translator’s familiarity with their reference. Thus, allusion poses a troublesome challenge for translators. The famous Israeli translation theorist Lefevere (1992) argues that allusion is what cultures “develop their own shorthand”, and its translation points to “the final, real aporia” (p. 56). Translating allusions is a demanding task due to the fact that allusions have specific meanings in the culture and language in which they arise but not necessarily in others. Allusive meaning is likely to be lost in translation from one language into another if only the surface referential sense is rendered into the target language. Translation of allusions, thus, involves two language cultures as well as literary and pragmatic aspects on the textual level. Indeed, translating allusions is a challenging task. Without appropriate translation, allusions may turn out to be the cause of much confusion for target readers especially when they know little about the source language and culture. Translation Strategies of Allusions in Fortress Besieged Since its publication in 1947, Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, Japanese, German, Russian, and some other languages. The English version, issued in 1979, is a joint effort of Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. Their translation has made Fortress Besieged the first Chinese novel ever listed in the Penguin Classics. According to statistics, there are more than 100 allusions descending from many sources in the novel. Some derive from ancient stories, including fairy tales, legends, historical events, religious stories, fables, and so forth; some come from poetic lines, statements of literary classics home and abroad, like works of ancient philosophers such as Confucius, Sijing (The Book of Songs) (n.d.), The Bible (n.d.), Aesop’s Fables (n.d.), Arabian Nights (n.d.), and etc.; some develop from the names of famous historical figures, names of places and things, people’s titles, and so on; and some are from proverbs and old sayings. The content of the allusions also covers a wide range, including literature, philosophy, religion, medicine, biology, and military tactics. The wide use of allusions
  • 28. TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED 347 in Fortress Besieged makes it an extremely challenging job to translate. The English version Fortress Besieged can be regarded as a good example of literal translation. Generally speaking, most of the allusions are translated literally. Annotation, endnote in particular, is another widely used strategy. Besides, interpretation of the implied meaning directly in the text is also used by the translators. In the following, the specific strategies adopted in the English version will be analyzed with examples. Literal Translation When it comes to some allusions originating from Chinese ancient stories or poems, translators translate literally (see example (1)-(3)): (1) 他心境不好,准责备儿子从前不用功,急时抱佛脚,也许还来一堆“亡羊补牢,教学相长”的 教训,更受不了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 202) If his father were in a bad mood, he would undoubtedly rebuke him for not having studied harder before and only cramming everything in at the last minute. There might even be admonitions about “Repairing the fold after the sheep are lost”, or “One learns as one teachers” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 210). (2) 这真是“有缘千里来相会”了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 4) It is certainly a case of “fate bringing people together from a thousand li away” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 6). (3) 他虽然知道唐人“欲穷千里目,更上一层楼”的好诗,并没有乘电梯。(QIAN, 1991, p. 303) Tough he knew the lovely T’ang poem, “For a thousand li view, ascend another flight of stairs”, he did not take the elevator (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 316). QIAN Zhong-shu not only used Chinese allusions, but also well knew English ones. As to those familiar to English readers, the translators directly adopt literal translation (see example (4)-(5)): (4)“也许人家讲你像狐狸,吃不到葡萄就说葡萄酸。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 132) “Some people might say you are like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes and complained that they were sour” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 137). (5) 上第一课,他像创世纪里原人阿大(Adam)唱新生禽兽的名字,以后他连点名簿子也不带了。 (QIAN, 1991, p. 201) At the first class Hung-chien was like Adam in the Book of Genesis calling out the names of the newly created animals. After that, he didn’t even bring his roll book (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 208). The allusion adopted in Example 1 comes from Aesop’s Fables, “The Fox and the Grape”, which is a well-known story to the western readers. In Example 2, Adam and Book of Genesis are household names to English speakers. Therefore, word for word translation would not hinder the readers’ understanding. Literal Translation Plus Endnote About Background Information Endnote is a commonly used translation compensation strategy, especially in translating culture-bound elements. A great number of allusions applied in the novel are closely related to ancient Chinese culture. Translators offered many endnotes to introduce to target readers the relevant background information, including the origins, related stories or persons, after literally translating the allusions in the text (see example (6)-(8)): (6) 方鸿渐笑道:“《毛诗》说:‘窈窕淑女,寤寐求之;求之不得,寤寐思服。’他写这种信, 是地道中国文化的表现。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 80) “As the poem from the Book of Odes goes, ‘The noble young lady,/Waking and sleeping he sought her;/He
  • 29. TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED348 sought her but could not find her,/Waking and sleeping he longed for her’. His letters are a manifestation of genuine Chinese culture”, Hung-chien said with a grin (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 83). Endnote: Literally, to harbor the amorous thoughts of spring. An allusion from the Book of Odes (Shi jing), a collection of 305 songs dating from about 1100 to 600 B.C. The arrangement is attributed to Confucius, who considered the book a model of poetic expression (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 360). (7) 鸿渐给酒摆布得失掉自制力道:“反正你会摆空城计”。(QIAN, 1991, p. 89) Under the influence of alcohol, Hung-chien had lost his self-control, as he blurted out, “Anyway, you could always pull the ‘empty-town bluff’” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 91). Endnote: A reference to a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms in which Chukuo Liang, left to defend a town with no soldiers, feigned nonchalance by playing music in the tower on the town walls to give the enemy commander the impression that the town was confident and well prepared for an attack (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 363). (8) 遯翁一天听太太批评亲家母,灵感忽来,日记上添上了津彩的一条,说他现在才明白为什么两 家攀亲要叫“结为秦晋”…… (QIAN, 1991, pp. 299-300) One day after hearing his wife criticize Mrs. Sun, Tun-weng in a sudden inspiration added a splendid passage to his diary stating that now at last he understood why two families seeking a marriage alliance called it “joining together as Ch’in and Tsin” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 312). Endnote: During the Ch’un Ch’iu period (722-481 B.C.), the royal families of the states of Ch’in and Tsin formed marital alliances one generation after another. Thus the phrase, “joining together as Ch’in and Tsin”, means to be allied in marriage (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 373). Literal Translation Plus Endnote Serving as Explanation In some endnotes, translators offer a clearer explanation about the meaning of the allusion without presenting the relevant historical or cultural information. In the text its literal meaning is translated (see example (9)-(11)): (9) 苏小姐理想的自己是:“艳如桃李,冷若冰霜,”…… (QIAN, 1991, p. 13) Miss Su, who pictured herself in the words of the familiar saying, “as delectable as peach and plum and as cold as frost and ice”, … (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 16). Endnote: A standard description of a woman who appears cold and stern. It usually describes a virtuous maiden or widow (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 355). (10) 以后飞机接连光顾,大有绝世侍人一顾倾城、再顾倾国的风度。(QIAN, 1991, p. 36) Later, the planes kept coming in much the same manner as the peerless beauty whose “one glance could conquer a city and whose second glance could vanquish an empire” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 40). Endnote: An expression which describes superlative beauty; it is equivalent of Helen of Troy in Western literature (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 358). (11) 鸿渐道:“啊哟,你又来了!朋友只好绝交。你既然不肯结婚,连内助也没有,真是‘赔了 夫人又折朋’。” (QIAN, 1991, p. 278) “Ai yo! There you go again. I might as well cut off my friends. Since you refuse to get married, I don’t even have a wife. It’s a true case of ‘Losing a wife, and having one’s friendship destroyed’” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 289).
  • 30. TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED 349 Endnote: Losing at both ends, from a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 372) Literal Translation Plus Explanation Added In the Text Translators, on several occasions, directly explained a few allusions to make a supplement to help target readers understand the true meaning (see example (12)-(14)): (12) 他所说的“让她三分”,不是“三分流水七分尘”的“三分”,而是“天下只有三分月色” 的“三分”。 (QIAN, 1991, p. 107) The “three parts” referred to in “give in to her three parts” was not the “three parts” of “three parts water, seven parts dust”, but rather the “three parts” as in “There are but three parts moonlight in all the world”, which simply means total surrender (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 109). (13) “这次走路真添了不少经验。总算功德圆满,取经到了西天……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 179) “… we’ve really gained a lot of experience during this trip. Ultimately everything came out well, and we reached the Western Paradise [Buddhist heaven]… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 186). (14) 斜川笑道:“别胡闹,我对教书没有兴趣,‘若有水田三百亩,来年不作猢狲王’;你们为 什么不陪我到香港去找机会?”(QIAN, 1991, p. 123) “Don’t by silly”, said Hsieh-chiuan with a smile, “I’ve no interest in teaching. As they say, ‘If I had three hundred mou of paddy fields, I wouldn’t be a monkey king [i.e., teacher] next year’. Why don’t you both go to Hong Kong with me and look for something there?” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 126). Interpretation of the Implied Meaning Plus Endnote As to some allusions of a typical Chinese tradition, like Buddhism, translators directly explain the implied meaning in the text with endnotes made to introduce some relevant cultural information (see example (15)-(16)): (15) 只可惜这些事实虽然有趣,演讲时用不着它们,该另抱佛脚。(QIAN, 1991, p. 33) Such a pity that while these items of information were all very interesting, they could not be used in the lecture. He would have to read something else (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 36). Endnote: Literally, “clasp the feet of Budda”. The idiom means that when someone gets into trouble through lack of due preparation, he seeks help at the last critical moment (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 357). (16) 这事不成,李梅亭第一个说“侥幸”,还说:“失马安知非福。……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 66) When the plan fell through, Li was the first to say, “Thank God”, adding, “It may be a blessing in disguise… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 170). Endnote: Literally, “just like the old frontiersman losing a horse, who knows but that which seems a misfortune may be a blessing in disguise” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 354). Interpretation of the Implied Meaning Some allusions are translated by directly explaining the implied meaning without endnotes added outside the text. But this strategy is seldom applied (see example (17)-(20)): (17) 那女人平日就有一种孤芳自赏、落落难合的神情——大宴会上没人敷衍的来宾或喜酒席上过 时未嫁的少女所常有的神情——此刻更流露出嫌恶,黑眼镜也遮盖不了。(QIAN, 1991, p. 3) Ordinarily the young woman had a rather conceited, aloof expression, much like that of a neglected guest at a large party or an unmarried maiden at a wedding feast (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 5).
  • 31. TRANSLATION OF ALLUSIONS IN FORTRESS BESIEGED350 (18) “换句话说,像方先生这样聪明,是喜欢目不识丁的笨女人。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 75) In other words, someone as intelligent as Mr. Fang would prefer a stupid, illiterate woman. (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 78). (19) 辛楣道:“今天本来也请了董太太,董先生说她有事不能来。董太太是美人,一笔好中国画, 跟我们这位斜川兄真是珠联璧合。”(QIAN, 1991, p. 84) Hsin-mei said, “I also invited Mrs. Tung, but Mrs. Tung said she was too busy to come. Mrs. Tung is a beauty and a good painter. She and Hsieh-ch’üan make a perfect couple” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. P86). (20) “……‘莫遣佳期更后期’,这话很有道理。……”(QIAN, 1991, p. 223) “…As they say, ‘Don’t put off what is best done now’. That’s quite right… ” (Kelly & Mao, 2011, p. 231). Conclusions Most of the allusions in Fortress Besieged are classical, historical, literary, and cultural allusions which are not to be understood from superficial perusal. In the English translation, Kelly and Mao mainly adopt the strategy of literal translation plus endnote. This is indicative of the translators’ wish to be as faithful as possible to the source text. More than 200 endnotes facilitate the readers’ understanding of the novel. Without them, QIAN’s fabulous satire would at times become inaccessible to comprehension. Besides, the literal translation strategy is also of a big help to communicate the Chinese culture to foreigners. References Barton, E., & Hudson, A. (1997). A contemporary guide to literary terms with strategies for writing essays about literature. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Dastjerdi, H. V., & Sahebhonar, S. (2008). Lost in translation: An intertextual study of personal proper-name allusions. Across Languages and Cultures, 9(1), 41–55 Hsia, C. T. (1961). A history of Modern Chinese fiction. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Lefevere, A. (1992). Translation, rewriting and the manipulation of literary fame. London and New York: Routledge. Leppihalme, R. (1997). Culture bumps: An empirical approach to the translation of allusions. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. QIAN, Z. S. (1991). Wei Cheng. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House. QIAN, Z. S. (2011). Fortress Besieged. (J. Kelly, & N. K. Mao. Trans.). Beijing: Foreign Langauge Teaching and Research Press. Wheeler, M. (1979). The art of allusion in Victorian fiction. London: Macmillan Press Ltd..