EFL Journal (10.2) 6.00 PM PDF

The EFL Journal
Languages • Literatures • Linguistics

Volume 10 Number 2 June 2019
Edited by
Jibu Mathew George
CONTENTS
Editor’s Comments
1. “World” literature: Why? Wherefore? – 1

A conversation with David Damrosch
2. M. E. VEDA SHARAN 15
Epistolary endeavours: Letters in the making of
Anglo-American modernism
3. RATAN T. MOHUNTA 37
Digital cultures and our Posthuman future:
Looking beyond anthropocentrism
4. SANGEETHA PUTHIYEDATH 59
Signification of specular surfaces in Margaret Atwood’s
The Edible Woman and Surfacing
5. ABHISHEK CHATTERJEE 79
Anxiety of the lens: Silent cinema and American
Neomodernist poetry
6. JIBU MATHEW GEORGE 91

By-product maximalism, template automatism, ontological
criticism, and a versatility theory of religious belief:
Towards understanding religion in its fundamentals
7. BOOK REVIEW 113

The EFL Journal
As has been the practice of EFLJ for the last three years, every third
issue of the journal is devoted to literary studies, and, sometimes, allied
intellectual concerns in the humanities at large. This issue brings to the
reader six articles and a book review. The first piece is the transcript of
David Damrosch’s interactive session with Ipshita Chanda, Amith Kumar
P. V., Kailash C. Baral, Shilpa Sajeev, Ananya Dutta, Abhishek Varghese,
Elizabeth Baby, Rishvik Chanda, and Rupesh Jhabak. This conversation
takes up fascinating issues related to the definition of and rationale for
“World Literature”, especially in relation to “national” literatures,
comparative literary studies, the north-south divide, elitism, and aesthetic
as well as linguistic nuances of the works, to which, Damrosch observes,
one needs to pay critical attention.
M. E. Veda Sharan discusses the role of letters exchanged between
Modernist writers in the making of Modernism as a movement, and,
more importantly, in literary history. “The letter”, he argues, “was in many
ways the anvil on which the writers forged their work before offering it
to the reading public”. The exercise, in a sense, reveals the genetic ‘pre-
history’ of Modernism. Veda Sharan’s article also provides insights on
the working of Modernist little magazines and their literary significance.
As stated above, EFLJ also addresses larger concerns in the humanities,
and has published research articles from philosophy and cultural history.
True to this objective, Ratan T. Mohunta presents a philosophco-historical
enquiry into “the patterns of change” affecting our “species being” (as
well as their futuristic implications) ushered in by the unprecedented
technological developments of our time, biotechnology in particular. While
contextualizing his arguments against historical anthropocentrism and the
new age of the Anthropocene, Mohunta attempts to take the debate
beyond the usual theoretical endeavours in the humanities and social
sciences to grapple with “the ‘now’ and the ‘yet to be’ phenomena”.
Sangeetha Puthiyedath examines Margaret Atwood’s use of “reflected
images” in her early novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, “from
the vantage of popular and religious beliefs regarding mirrors and specular
surfaces”. Her article illustrates how for Atwood’s protagonists caught
in crises, this literary device serves the purpose of reflection and prognosis.
Abhishek Chatterjee traces the influence of cinema and its aesthetics on
American Neomodernist poetry. His article interestingly argues that the
Neomodernist fascination with the cinema was “limited to the aesthetics
of the silent film era, and marked by an overarching fear of Ekphrasis”.
Pertinently, it also examines “Modernism’s failed attempts to curtail the
populist and propagandist trends in cinema to suit [its] own aesthetic
ideals”.
In an attempt to demonstrate unexplored possibilities in reasoning about
religion, Jibu Mathew George proposes certain methodologically
productive concepts—by-product maximalism, template-automatism, free
ontology, and so on—in relation to Max Weber’s celebrated idea
“Disenchantment of the World” (Entzauberung der Welt). He also
suggests an ‘ontological criticism’ of religious texts and theological
doctrines, a promising exercise on the boundaries of literature, philosophy,
and religious studies, as well as a versatility theory of God-conceptions.
In a departure from earlier practice, this issue also contains a book review.
Two scholarly volumes—Culture, Language, and Identity: English-
Tamil in Colonial India, 1750 to 1900 (Vol. 1) and Language, Culture,
and Power: English-Tamil in Modern India, 1900 to Present Day
(Vol. 2)—edited by C. T. Indra and R. Rajagopalan, have been reviewed
under the heading “Gained in Translation.”
1
“WORLD” LITERATURE: WHY? WHEREFORE? –

A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID DAMROSCH
Shilpa Sajeev: Professor Damrosch, in your essay “What is World

Literature?”, you have said that texts transcend the national sphere and
go into the realm of World Literature. So, how do we understand this
concept of a national sphere? Is there a criterion to understand this? If
so, then, would it be a linguistic understanding of ‘nations’? I ask this
because that does not seem to really hold good for a country like India,
or Sri Lanka. In the latter case, we have both Sri Lankan Tamil and
Indian Tamil. So, then, how do we understand the ‘national sphere’, as
passing through this ‘national’ stage seems to be the prerequisite for
being finally called ‘World Literature’?
David Damrosch: That is a good question. In “What is World
Literature?”, I was not very precise in talking about what is a ‘national
literature’. It was a convenient term, but too vague. This is because even
the question “what is a ‘nation’?” is not one question, particularly when
you are talking about pre-modern literatures where you don’t have nation
states, anyway. So I think I am going to fudge the question by saying
that being national or local or regional, on various scales, can very much
depend on the circumstances. So let’s say, in the classical Arabic tradition,
or even in Modern Standard Arabic, Arabic literature is not necessarily
primarily part of a nation, but you could say a kind of Arab cosmopolis
or “Arab world literature,” and then it enters a further scale of ‘World
Literature’ when it gets translated outside Arabic and gets read beyond
the Arab cosmopolis.
You can say that Naguib Mahfouz is very important to Egyptian literature
but is also a modern Arab writer, important to modern Arab writing
generally, who becomes a Nobel Prize winner and then becomes a world
figure beyond the Egyptian and “Arab” worlds. So there are also
paradoxical cases of writers who become famous abroad but get forgotten
at home, or are censored at home, or can’t even get published at home.
The EFL Journal 10:2 June 2019.

©2019 The English and Foreign Languages University
2 David Damrosch
So Kafka becomes a world writer before he becomes a German writer,

since in the Nazi period, he was not publishable, not read in Germany;
he first became well-known abroad, in the English translations by the
Scottish translators, the Muirs.
So I should say that the whole question of “what is a ‘nation’?” still
needs to be taken up properly and developed.
SS: You talk about the figure of the ‘secular’ writer as appealing to
comparatists. That’s why, perhaps, a figure such as the Thai novelist
Kukrit Pramoj does not really ‘fit into’ the framework of ‘World
Literature’ (because he is a practising Buddhist, which informs his
writing). This appears to be a trend seen because of our aspiration for
political correctness. Is this a problem? If so, why is it a problem?
DD: I think that the political issue is not different from a structural issue,
and it has something to do with aesthetic issues as well. In the history of
the arts, it is very often the case that when a culture first encounters
another culture, each can go in one of two particular directions. They
may be drawn towards a version of the things they already do, or else
they gravitate towards the exotic ‘other’ thing because it is different and
‘opposite’.
You can see this already in Herodotus when he goes to Egypt. His account
gives a nice mixture, because it shows the universality and also the
absolute otherness that he perceives in Egyptian culture. He is also
envious of its history because he does not have this depth of history. Or
again, in Cubism, the Cubists were first interested in African art for the
qualities of abstraction that seemed like what they wanted to do
themselves, but then a generation later, there was an interest in what was
not European, and they could appreciate a much greater range of African
art and artistic practices with different aesthetics, a different social
purpose that you can learn something different from. The question of
Kukrit Pramoj and politics is not unlike an aesthetic issue. Similarly
Goethe, when he is first reading Shakuntala and getting excited about
Kâlidâsa, or when he is reading Chinese novels, he is looking for
something that he can use. He is a great practical writer. So he finds
Kâlidâsa’s prologue and says “I could use this myself,” and so the
“World” literature: Why? Wherefore? 3
prologue to Faust is inspired by that. As a poet he also identifies with

Hafiz, in almost embarrassingly personal terms. So too Ezra Pound finds
in Chinese poetry what he is wanting to have in American poetry, while
he is less responsive to what is ‘other’ to his own needs.
But this is only one aspect of the full appreciation of a distant work, and
I think we need to do more today than find only the reflection of what
we already thought or felt before we encountered the new work. Too
often, even very progressive critics ventriloquize their pre-existing views
through their choice and analysis of works. As an example, in their recent
book Combined and Uneven Development, the Warwick Research
Collective selects novels that illustrate their reading of what Trotsky
said novels should look like, while they will ignore those novels that do
not conform to that [norm], even if those novels are written by the very
same authors. That to me is the problem. It is the same problem when a
liberal humanist lover of Western masterpieces goes to find similar
masterpieces elsewhere, and Kâlidâsa becomes “the Shakespeare of
India”. With Kâlidâsa, Western scholars typically read the Shakuntala,
and ignore a Meghadûta or Kumarasambhava or anything that is too
religious. So it is a very selective Kâlidâsa. This over-selectivity can be
aesthetic or political, including the politics of a secularist person’s
religion. My idea is to always push yourself to see authors who don’t
ventriloquise what we already think. We need to read major authors
deeply, not just see them in one dimension, but in multiple dimensions.
SS: To, perhaps, burst an ‘echo’ bubble?
DD: Yes, exactly, the ‘echo’ bubble. Perhaps, I am being a bit polemical
to my friends who do Postcolonial Studies when I say that having your
heart in the right place does not necessarily keep you from exoticizing
the other. I use the example in What is World Literature? of Rigoberta
Menchú, which is shocking to me. When she was a little-known
Guatemalan activist, seeking support in Europe, she met up in Paris with
the French anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, and together they
created her remarkable testimonio, Me llamo Rigoberta, which created a
huge impact. But it is really the work by Burgos, primarily as a writer.
Burgos totally wanted to help to promote Menchu, and so did Verso, the
publisher of the English translation. Then she won the Nobel Prize in
4 David Damrosch
1992, and subsequently wrote a sequel, which she could really control
herself. She called this new book Rigoberta: la nieta de los mayas or
The Granddaughter of the Maya, though she was no longer a daughter,
because she had moved out of her village, writing in Spanish, moving
into a cosmopolitan world. The progressive British publisher Verso again
wants to bring this out, but now Rigoberta: la nieta de los mayas becomes
‘Crossing Borders’! And the picture of Rigoberta on the cover becomes
a little bit of airport art, where she looks like a child, almost like a picture
a kid drew of another kid. We are talking about a Nobel Prize winner,
here; imagine doing this to Tagore or Pamuk! It is not going to happen!
So we really have to burst this global bubble and think about the echo
bubble in how we present these authors and how we think of them. And
the battle is half won or lost from the time the book’s cover is designed.
Abhishek Varghese: The question comes from a statement that you
made at your lecture at University of Hyderabad on “Debating World
Literature”, where you stated that in order to resist the predominance of
European languages such as English, French, and German in translation,
the comparatist must broaden his framework of study by learning newer
languages. But let us suppose a scholar from a third world country who
does not have access to marginal languages or literatures in the way a
person from first world does. What is his stake in the World Literature?
DD: There are several aspects to that question. I do believe that
comparatists should learn languages apart from their immediate context
– for example, Indian scholars learning Chinese and Chinese scholars
learning Indian languages (Hindi, Sanskrit, and so on). It is perfectly
possible to learn newer languages; people can travel and explore other
languages and cultures. I would absolutely disagree that there is less of
a reason for a scholar from the third world to learn other languages from
the global south in this day and age.
Another aspect of this question is that in order to resist the major-power
emphasis of too much scholarship, it is important, for instance, that
Chinese scholars learn Vietnamese, and vice versa. Plenty of Vietnamese
scholars know Chinese. There is no reason why the Chinese can’t do
that as well, as they are nearby and share great traditions with the
Vietnamese.
There is another side to this question. One of the most interesting essays
in the recent ACLA [American Comparative Literature association] report
on the state of the discipline of Comparative Literature was by an
‘Africanist’ who says it is almost impossible to learn most African
languages anywhere outside Africa. But even there you are not learning
most of the languages, and outside Africa there are almost no courses
and no texts in most African languages. So, one has to visit these places,
and spend time there. It is a very difficult process. We have only begun
to do the kind of language study we need to do and to form networks of
people who can accomplish that and learn more languages.
The hegemony of English is a good thing if it connects people across
cultures, and it is a terrible thing if it loses the local connection with
different languages. Orhan Pamuk has been translated into sixty
languages, and half of his translations were made from English. I once
asked him about this, and he replied that he would much rather have a
novel translated from Turkish into Vietnamese through English than not
be translated at all, or to be badly translated, as there are few, if any,
literary translators who know both languages. So, English is extremely
important for circulation of modern literatures globally. At the same time
we should not just give into that in terms of not trying to learn new
languages. Bhavya Tiwari, now teaching at the University of Houston,
wrote her dissertation on Indian writers and World Literature, and she
found that most translations of Tagore made into different Indian
languages are made from English, not from Bengali. Even if it wouldn’t
be difficult to find a translator fluent both in Bengali and say, Malayalam,
publishers don’t do it, they default to English. So, this is a great example
of how bad it is to be passive about giving in to global English as much
as it is a good example: thanks to global English some Bengali texts can
be circulated and read abroad, and we can then inspire more students
outside India to learn Bengali. We have students in Comparative
Literature today who study Bengali texts despite their diverse native
heritage, and it inspires them to learn the language thanks to translation.
That somewhat is a rambling answer to a good question.
Elizabeth Baby: How can World Literature open up to more pluralistic
understandings without marginalizing and homogenizing other
literatures?
6 David Damrosch
DD: I think we have a lot of responsibility to bring the cultural contexts

very much alive and not just exoticize the other. We need a mixture of
cultural groundedness and “outward-looking-ness”. The younger scholars
today who are doing exciting work tend to be grounded in one or two
areas that they know quite well, and then they also have enough idea of
World Literature to then contextualize and frame what they know deeply
in a world context. I think it is not just a matter of skimming across the
surface of a bunch of literatures, but really having a grounding and then
also being able to connect intelligently beyond our home base of
knowledge.
Amith Kumar: In continuation of what was asked earlier, is there
something like literatures of the global north and literatures of global
south? Thereby, we are dividing World Literature into two hemispheres
where obviously the north is hegemonic and powerful and its literature
is being imposed on the south, and the south is described as marginalized,
third world, Postcolonial, whatever way we look at it. So, isn’t there
within World Literature [the question of] how we may have to look at
the literatures of the north and literatures of the south? Is it dividing
World Literature and trying to create boundaries within it?
DD: I think “yes” and “no”. I think of a number of colleagues from
smaller European countries who are very alive to the fact that this north-
south dichotomy doesn’t work for them. We can talk about the fact that
Dutch literature used to be ignored by Comparative Literature, which
was largely focused on major European countries. Now Dutch literature
is ignored by Postcolonialists because it is not third world. So it is still
an obscure smaller literature, and its great works are unknown outside
the country even if they have been translated, because people are not
paying attention. So in that sense the divide is too simple; it is not enough
to open Comparative Literature to China and India if you are still ignoring
Vietnam, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Tibet. In that sense Chinese literature
is not at a disadvantage in relation to English and French literatures in
the same way that probably both Tamil and Dutch literature are. So I
think it is interesting to think of correlations and connections that can be
made across these divides.
Kailash C. Baral: Actually, the whole debate is much more complex.

There is a parallel concept—the transnational. How does literature get
transnational? We have just had a very good example of Arabic: there
are so many Arab-speaking countries, and any author writing in Arabic
is owned by all these countries as an Arabic writer. Like that, we have
diasporic writers, and we are accepting them because they are writing in
English; so, there are Indian writers in Australia and Canada. We also
have regional literatures. Now the question asked depends on which
position it is asked from. So, what is happening in India? You look at the
way in which Indian writers in English have been privileged; the works
of vernacular writers in translation are not getting the same kind of
advantage or privilege among Indian languages. And somehow we have
to think deeply within the boundary of Indian geography, diversity
included. What kind of tactics do we select to teach because each text
has a message? Take for example, Pamuk, who started or aspired to
become a global writer. Therefore, he was using the experience of his
tradition but thinking how the global audience would take his work.
Like that there are different layers of this argument. Now what has
happened? Where has global literature come to at this moment? I
personally question whether these divisions [in ways] of looking at the
literary corpus of the world might not have helped. That is where you
see everything is politics. For example, we are doing Postcolonial Studies,
and suddenly some people are not getting space in that; … then we have
started another formulation, like the Global South, and there is a dialogue
between the [countries of the] Global South and the way of having nothing
to do with the West. And, who are the people at the forefront of this?
Ngugi, for example, is sitting in an American university and saying, on
the one hand, to abolish these English departments, that you don’t have
to write in English. At the same time, he is also talking about global
literature, and is also at the forefront of south-south dialogue. I think we
have a small piece in India, it was written by Tagore, a small essay—
among all his essays this is very small—called World Literature or
Viswasahitya. If we look at it from a different perspective, he says that,
we care for humanism—that is the kind of language … used. Goethe has
said that we must read all the poetry written by anyone from everywhere.
For academic purposes, this nomenclature is fine. We do need to have a
boundary somewhere. [We also need] to classify different kinds of
8 David Damrosch
writing, and classify whether we are from this area or that area. But
global literature carries a different kind of impulse.
DD: When Tagore emphasizes the universalization of literature, he is
fighting back against the British policy to divide and conquer India,
which becomes a question of linguistic division in India. Tagore says
that the universal is a way of fighting against the colonial linguistic
separations.
Ipshita Chanda: Also against nationalism, actually. He specifically says
that if we put barriers between your field and my field, your language
and my language, then it is easy to think that ‘this’ literature is ours and
‘that’ literature is yours.
Rishvik Chanda: Earlier you were talking about the idea of the global
author. So, we were wondering how to work with this idea. Our questions
would be: what are the different criteria by which we can perceive a
person as a global writer? Can we think, for example, of Kipling as a
global author? In the twenty-first century a lot of the politics and the
political systems have changed. For example, we have a different
approach to the idea of the global author than the idea that was prevalent
in the era of colonization. So, how have things changed?
DD: Exactly, and clearly things are still changing. All of these questions
are very much related to how we have to pluralize and specify our terms.
A global author could mean an author who writes for a global audience
from early on, whether that is Kipling in the nineteenth century or Orhan
Pamuk today. Pamuk set out to reach a global audience from early on,
even though he is also a Turkish writer and writes always in Turkish,
setting his work almost entirely in Turkey itself. Yet he was clearly
thinking of himself as a global writer early on and always sought to
meet people from outside. On the other hand, a global writer could be
primarily just staying in one place but having a global viewpoint and
thinking globally, perhaps specifically critiquing the global system itself.
Alternatively, a global writer could be someone who is now a figure in
global World Literature but who never was in their lifetime, Dante being
an example. He didn’t even think of himself as a European writer, and
he never heard of the Americas—whole continents he didn’t even know
existed.
Then there is also the question of the popular writer versus the elite
writer. I think there is not enough attention in World Literary Studies to
the kinds of global fiction that are not so elite. There is a lot of interest
in, say, Tagore or Rushdie or Pamuk, but detective fiction is rarely
discussed. I have just co-edited a book on Crime Fiction as World
Literature. This topic was suggested by Louise Nilsson, a postdoctoral
scholar who was visiting at Harvard. She is a sociologist from Sweden,
interested in the sociology of literature and in “Nordic noir”—this
tradition that has become so popular thanks to Stig Larsson, Henning
Mankell and others. It is so interesting to think about this kind of global
writing which is almost undiscussed in World Literary Studies today.
Detective fiction writers are totally aware of each other in networks that
are genre-based rather than based in cultural capitals. So it is not so
much like what Pascale Casanova talks about, the world republic of
letters, in which a book needs to become famous in Paris or New York.
Detective fiction is much more mediated through the Frankfurt Book
Fair, or just networks of fans, websites, and literary agents who sell
fiction. So we find the Israeli crime fiction writer D. A. Mishani playing
on the work of the Russian Boris Bakunin, in a book endorsed by the
Swede Henning Mankell, who had not met him but I believe had an
agent in common. This is a wholly other kind of globalization of the
genre, which is not mediated by the Nobel Prize committee, but probably
by a literary agent or a Frankfurt Book Fair or the Jerusalem Book Fair
or the Jaipur Literary Festival; these settings are how these people meet
and create and become global figures.
RC: I was wondering about the relationship between World Literature,
Postcolonialism, and Comparative Literature. It seems to me that, in a
way all their endeavours are similar, that is, to expand the horizon, in a
way to include the marginalized, stuff like that. So how do Comparative
Literature and World Literature fit into the equation? Is the former the
method, and the latter, the body of work which one studies?
DD: A lot of the best work now involves a creative inter-animation of
comparative method, Postcolonial political perspective, and World
Literature material, broadly speaking. During the 70s and 80s, there was
a good deal of uneasiness between Comparative Literature and
10 David Damrosch
Postcolonial Studies; Postcolonialists often felt that the comparatists were

liberal humanists who didn’t care that much about politics, while
comparatists often felt that the Postcolonialists were monolingualists
who didn’t care much about language and literariness. I remember being
some years ago at a meeting of the African Literature Association which
was meeting in Guadeloupe. It was a very nice creative idea to meet at a
very nice place with a theme of the African diaspora. I went to a number
of panels with scarcely a single paper that dealt with more than one
language, and in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, with little work; we were
crossing the boundaries between Francophone, Hispanophone, and
Anglophone writing.
I think it is particularly important today to keep language, and languages,
at the forefront of our studies, even as the best work will be infused with
the politics and awareness of the imbalances of cultural power that were
first discussed deeply in Postcolonial Studies whether by [Edward] Said,
[Gayatri] Spivak, and [Homi] Bhabha, and are now taken up by [Franco]
Moretti and [Pascale] Casanova in terms of the world that is “one but
unequal.” So I think that World Literature can be partly the material and
partly a perspective on how things circulate in the world. It should be
informed politically but also very sensitive to language and to the
aesthetic.
Rupesh Jhabak: Talking about the hegemonic role that the West plays
in the ideological landscape of the world, with the tools of money and
technology, it seems almost as if a project is underway to create a
technological infrastructure that will be able to make sustainable a so-
called world culture, perhaps, in the near future. Does not then World
Literature stand the risk of becoming a cultural aspect of this economic
requirement?
DD: This is something that is very much a concern. Erich Auerbach
already worried about this in his 1952 essay “Philology and
Weltliteratur”—translated by Edward and Marie Said—and Gayatri
Spivak was talking about precisely this in her book Death of a Discipline.
Emily Apter further develops this theme in her recent book, Against
World Literature. That is absolutely what happens with both the
publishing of World Literature and the study of World Literature when it
is done badly. It gets watered down, becomes Disney-fied, and becomes

exoticized. Publishers do it, translators can do it, and scholars can do it.
And our job is to not make those mistakes and to do it better. Many
people are finding productive new approaches today. A scholar who
recently taught at our Institute for World Literature, Francesa Orsini, a
specialist in North Indian literatures at SOAS [School of Oriental and
African Studies], is very creative in these things. She and a Parisian
colleague have a grant of 2.5 million Euros for a project for a kind of
multilingual World Literature [Multilingual Locals and Significant
Geographies: For a New Approach to World Literature]. She and her
team are exploring three project areas, which are North India, the
Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa, chosen partly because there are people
in SOAS to work with and to make a little network together. They thus
have three test areas for studying multilingualism and how the world
works in these areas, and how these kinds of literatures get into the world.
Now you can see this is a complex situation, in which these scholars in
SOAS, who have the resources to do that, are still in a kind of
hegemony—of Anglophone hegemony—further backed by funding from
the European Union, building in part on a certain Western discourse of
World Literature, and of theory. But, also, she is working against the
division of the area—that was a lot of the problem in the old colonial
enterprise—and she and her colleagues are working with these languages
and cultures very deeply, and this is very creative and exciting work. So,
there are events centred within the heart of the former British Empire—
SOAS is just a couple of blocks away from the British Museum.
I do think that if we succumb to the market, that is a bad thing. But I also
think that literature has the potential to be one of the great counter-market
forces. This is something already that Pascale Casanova is analyzing in
her The World Republic of Letters, that literature has its own value system
which does not just follow the market. She is celebrating the independence
of literature from the market, at least potentially, and different kinds of
circulation. Her emphasis very much is not the centre disseminating out
to the periphery but that a lot of the creative action happens from the
peripheries, and move into the centre. That is also the theme of Sigrid
Löffler’s recent book in German on the “New World Literature” [Die
neue Weltliteratur und ihre Erzähler].
12 David Damrosch
She is really talking about immigrants coming into England and to the
Continent and recreating literature that way. So, it is very much my
utopian view, but I think it is also a pragmatic view, that we can push
against the market and that literature provides us a privileged position to
do that.
Ananya Dutta: What is the status of the untranslated work in World
Literature? Some works might not be translated due to various factors
such as economic exigencies. Then, are they excluded from World
Literature? That brings us to the question “what are the limitations of
World Literature”?
DD: I think there are two different aspects. There is no reason for every
work to be circulated as World Literature. Many great works of literature
really are best read locally. They are written locally, they have a life
locally, and it is a nice but secondary thing if they happen to be read
abroad. One good example is James Joyce. His most global work is
Finnegans Wake, but it is very hard to translate. It is a global work with
fragments of dozens of languages (and a huge use of Indic material),
and is very hard to read outside the Anglophone world. Dubliners is a
much more local work, but it has been far more influential around the
world. It moved much more easily and the prose is [comparatively] simple
to translate. That said, there is now a new Chinese translation of
Finnegans Wake, which just came out and is amazing. On each facing
page there are footnotes to explain what the translator had to do to play
with the puns, and that is brilliantly done. Remarkably, when it came
out, it sold some twenty thousand copies.
Then there are other examples from the Norse world. One of my favourite
authors is Snorri Sturluson, a great author of the thirteenth century, who
made the greatest compilation of mediaeval Germanic myths, The Prose
Edda. In translation a lot of people have read it. W. H. Auden was
fascinated, and J. R. R. Tolkein based a good deal of his mythology on
this text; the names of the Dwarves were taken from Snorri. Therefore,
this is a work of World Literature par excellence, while on the other
hand Snorri is the same person who wrote Heimskringla, a history of the
kings of Sweden. No one reads it outside Sweden; who cares about the
history of the kings of Sweden unless they are Swedish? In fact, hardly
anyone reads it in Sweden anymore either. That is the same person whose
one work is a classic of World Literature and another work is very much
localised.
It does not bother me that Heimskringla isn’t a global success. Yet there
are many works of literature that ought to be read outside their local
contexts and for whole series of reasons, haven’t been translated, or
have been poorly translated, or well-translated but poorly understood
and soon forgotten. Our job is to fight against the market forces and
cultural imperialism that neglect works that ought to be read abroad.
Kukrit Pramoj has been well-translated, but nobody is paying attention
because he does not fit into the categories of Southeast Asian Literature
for people who look at Southeast from outside. I think we can do that,
and our job is to do that.
REFERENCES
Apter, E. 2013. Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability.

New York: Verso.
Auerbach, E. 1969. Philology and Weltliteratur. Trans. Edward Said and Maire
Said. The Centennial Review 13.1, 1-17.
Casanova, P. 2004. The world republic of letters. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise.
Cambridge, ‘MA: Harvard University Press.
Damrosch, D. 2003. What is world literature? Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Damrosch, D., D’haen, T. & Nilsson, L. 23 Feb 2017. Crime fiction as world
literature. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Löffler, S. 2013. Die neue Weltliteratur und ihre Erzähler [The new world
literature and its narrators]. München: C. H. Beck Verlag.
Moretti, F. 2000. Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review 1 (Jan-Feb),
54-68.
Orsini, F. 2015. The multilingual local in world literature 67. 4, 345-374.
14 David Damrosch
Tagore, R. 2001.Viswasahitya. Selected writings on literature and language.

Ed. Sisir Kumar Das and Sukanta Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Warwick Collective. 2015. Combined and uneven development: Towards a new
theory of world literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
David Damrosch is Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at
Harvard University. His books include What Is World Literature? (2003), The
Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh (2007),
and How to Read World Literature (2009). He is the founding general editor of
the six-volume The Longman Anthology of British Literature, and of The
Longman Anthology of World Literature, coeditor of The Princeton Sourcebook
in Comparative Literature (2009), editor of Teaching World Literature (2009)
and of World Literature in Theory (2014), and director of the Institute for World
Literature (http://iwl.fas.harvard.edu/).
David Damrosch was interviewed by Shilpa Sajeev (SS) and Ananya Dutta
(AD), PhD scholars; and Elizabeth Baby (EB), Rupesh Jhabak (RJ), Rishvik
Chanda (RC), Abhishek Varghese (AV), students of the Masters Program in
Comparative Literature, at the English and Foreign Languages University,
Hyderabad. Also participating in the conversation were Ipshita Chanda, K. C.
Baral and Amith Kumar P. V., Professors from the department of Comparative
Literature and India Studies, English and Foreign Languages University,
Hyderabad.
15
M. E. VEDA SHARAN
EPISTOLARY ENDEAVOURS: LETTERS IN THE

MAKING OF ANGLO-AMERICAN MODERNISM
ABSTRACT: The letters between the writers who came to be called Modernists offer
deep insights into the collaborations, conflicts, cooperation, and camaraderie that informed
the Anglo-American writers of the early twentieth century. From saving themselves
from reinventing the wheel to innovating and sustaining their ideas and ideals, the letter
played an invisible albeit central role in literary history. It also often reflected the personal
preferences and conflicts that animated them. The letter was in many ways the anvil on
which the writers forged their work before offering it to the reading public. This article
attempts to explore some of the ways the letters came to be at the heart of Modernism as
we know it.
KEYWORDS: modernism, letters, anthology, little magazine, poetry, manifesto, “best”
0. INTRODUCTION
Literary history has been under fire for some time now, notably through
such books as David Perkins’s Is Literary History Possible? His answer
is in the negative, but he insists we continue to writer them all the same.
As for what came to be called “Modernism”, many of its prime works
appeared in the anthologies of the time—but some of these works were
reprinted from the little magazines that originally hosted them. While
the anthology was certainly the most conscious and determined initiative
of this phase of literary history, we shall, therefore, also have to look at
the little magazine.
Often the little magazine and the anthology were at the heart of the
collaborations, competitions, and conflicts among poets. Almost
exclusively, the magazines and the anthologies were the only means by
which the writers could reach their readers. This explains the centrality
of the two modes of publication in the making of ‘Modernism”, and the
attempts of the writers to gain or retain control of these organs. In other

16 M. E. Veda Sharan
words, the anthology and the magazine were two sources of literary
history in real time, and sometimes they were so important as to even
mark it for them. Ezra Pound, for example, recognizes the dawn of the
“new” poetry in 1908, which for him was an “early distinguished date”
(Pound 1928: 104) because The English Review, edited by Ford
MadoxHueffer, carried at this time some of the best contemporary writers
such as Anatole France, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and himself among
others (Pound 1928: 104), and also discovered D. H. Lawrence. Again,
writing to Michael Roberts in July 1937, Pound advised him to read the
editions of this little magazine in its first two years: “Until you have
done that, you will be prey to superstition. You won’t know what was,
and you will consider that Hulme or any of the chaps of my generation
invented the moon and preceded Galileo’s use of the telescope” (Paige
1971: 296; Pound’s emphases). This confession-like statement is a
revelation of the power play and personal involvement of the writers
themselves with literary history, and their anxiety to influence and cast
it in their own image. It also establishes the little magazine as one of the
important sites on which a Modernist literary history might find a source
that is comprehensive, and also confers on it an authenticity that is unique.
Moreover, the better sorts of little magazines were usually impartial in
the face of some of the most noisy polemics and propaganda of self-
promoting groups.
Most of the canonical texts of the movement that came to be called
“Modernist” first made their appearance in journals similar to the English
Review and later, in collections and anthologies that may be later gathered
by a host of professional editors. Behind the work lay many endeavours
in bewildering forms and variety. These include, apart from little
magazines such as Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Little Review, and
The Exile, letters and prizes which were offered by a variety of sources
like individuals and foundations. I shall argue that an examination of
these endeavours can afford us a better understanding of the dynamics
of “Modernism” in the making. Due to paucity of space, I shall limit
myself to a close study of the letters of a few poets like Ezra Pound
primarily for their role in editing poems and advising fellow poets towards
developing a new poetic. The magazines and anthologies were usually
the products, some of a permanent nature, of carefully elaborated
Epistolary endeavours 17
manifestos, and were the records of plans and proposals that were very
often outlined and even detailed for the first time in these epistolary
campaigns. The little magazine, especially, was an inventory of sorts by
which the writers could take stock of those works that would go into the
anthologies and literary history while exploring public responses to their
work. Often little magazines aimed to gather the “best” flowers of the
age, though a poet like Pound would be more into “harvesting” (Paige
1971: 126). It is worth emphasizing again that most of these initiatives
were initially conceived and developed through correspondence between
poets themselves, or between poets and editors of some little magazines.
1. CORRESPONDING IDEAS AND AGENDAS
The circumstantial or contingent nature of the letter should not blind us

to its urgent literary concerns and qualities, for, even as it embodies the
personality of the writer, it is sometimes informed with considerable
artistic merit. For example, quoting a letter from William Vaughn Moody,
Margaret Anderson places it in the American tradition for its style and
raciness (Anderson I. 1 Mar. 1914: 24-25). She admires in it “Moody’s
remarkable gift of metaphor, his constant striving to ‘win for language
some new swiftness, some rare compression,” his belief in the positive
acceptance of life, his paganism, ‘deeply spiritual, and as far as possible
removed from the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it’”
(Anderson Mar. 1914: 25). In other words, the Moody letter is an
anticipation of some of the most important qualities we associate with
“Modernism”, such as the sincerity in expression and commitment to
language that distinguished the writers. Anderson justifiably concludes,
“Certainly with two such authentic voices to boast of as [Walt] Whitman’s
and Moody’s, this young country of ours has reason to be proud”
(Anderson Mar. I. 1 1914: 25). Clearly, the letter lies at the heart of the
American identity, the assertion of which is a governing, not to say
obsessive, theme in Anglo-American literature of the twentieth century.
Further, in its anticipation of the “Modernists” and their ideas, this letter
deserves some attention.
While it is not Anderson’s purpose to analyze Moody’s letter closely, we

may discover in it the signs of a typically American language taking
sustenance from the soil almost literally when, for example, the poet
tells a correspondent, Daniel Gregory Mason, to “keep your sand”. He
is anticipating Pound’s own epistolary efforts to keep his correspondents
rooted in their commitment to literature. To such typically American
idioms and language, Moody attributes his poetic themes and rhymes:
“I could say other things not utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have
often said to myself, with a reedy tremolo perhaps, but swelling into a
rising diapason, ‘The dark cellar ripens the wine’”, an aphoristic idea
into which, in the style of the “Modernists”, he puts so much of himself.
The simple diction of the line and the perfectly controlled rhythm presage
the Imagists and their contemporaries, and vindicate their claim that
true literature is timeless and universal. Again we realize that Moody
too, like the writers of the twentieth-century renaissance, had experienced
the thrills and travails of dedicating himself to the difficult art of poetry,
when, continuing the cellar metaphor, he writes, “And meanwhile after
one’s eyes get used to the dirty light, and one’s feet to the mildew, a
cellar has its compensations” (Moody qtd. in Anderson Mar. 1914: 24).
In the context, the words, “a cellar has its compensations” is worthy of
Robert Frost as an understated and wry observation. When he says a
little later, “I have seen what I have seen”, we remember Robert Lowell’s
“my eye has seen what my hand has done” (qtd. in Heaney 1980), a
reference to the sacrifices and suffering poetry entails for the poets, and
their dear ones. Anderson’s observations on Moody are, once again, a
witness to her amazing critical insight and ability to anticipate the future
trends of poetry.
2. EDUCATIVE EPISTLES
A more prolific correspondent is Ezra Pound whose letters are often full
of exhortations to their recipients aimed at instilling in them a sense of
urgency, goading them to produce their “best”, and to publish it as soon
as possible. These letters are remarkable for the effacement of the
personal, and reflect a whole-hearted dedication to the arts. Their writer
might, for instance, regret Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” going to Alfred

Kreyemborg’s Others anthology, but he wanted the poem printed without
any delay, even before his own Catholic Anthology (1915), in which he
would have naturally preferred to print it, was out. In a sense, Pound
was permanently engaged in editing proto-anthologies, mock-
anthologies, trial-anthologies ... somehow making and unmaking
anthologies all the time, although the items he discovered, recommended
or finally decided against, would later be preserved in some more regular
anthology or the other, even if the real collectors might be others. This
obsessive anthologist, unsurprisingly, became the author of The Cantos,
arguably the single-author anthology of “the longest poem in the English
langwidge”, as he was proud of claiming. Often his letters were invitations
to his poet-friends to criticize his work ruthlessly, and sometimes he
wrote such ruthless criticism himself. But the humane aspect was always
present—he did not criticize the work when a writer was hopelessly
bad, or at least, warned the recipient, William Carlos Williams in one
instance, to destroy the letter, dated May 1909, for, the contents were
surely unpalatable: “I hope to God you have no feelings. If you have,
burn this before reading it” (Paige 1971: 7; Pound’s emphasis). Having
said that, we must also note the impatience and despair with which Pound
addressed some of his correspondents, or even bullied them, when they
would not do what he thought was appropriate, or put off work that
demanded immediate action. Thus, after a six-month-wait, he implored
Harriet Monroe to print “Prufrock” immediately, and angrily refused to
let her insult Eliot by asking him to change what, in the editor’s view,
was a “pessimistic” ending, and “write down to the public” (Paige 1971:
44). It might be noticed in passing that Louis Untermeyer, an influential
American anthologist, and Hart Crane, in their correspondence, while
recognizing Eliot’s genius, could isolate his ideas and quarrel with them,
an indication of the immense variety of “Modernism” and its protagonists
who came from all sections of the literary world. Doubtless, the
unexpected similarity of ideas significantly confirmed each other in the
opinions of editors and poets. For Pound and Eliot, however, no editor
could tamper with the programme and agenda of “Modernism” to please
the reading public, an idea echoed by Yeats in his poem “The Grey Rock,”
which appeared first in Poetry of April 1913 (21-25). Pound’s anthological
instincts working again, sought for Yeats the best poem award of the
year. After the reprimand quoted above, he (Pound) goes on to provide

Monroe with valuable insights into the work, as he explains, in a manner
that is indistinguishable from an anthologist’s introduction: “‘Mr.
Prufrock’ does not ‘go off at the end.’ It is a portrait of failure, or a
character which fails, and it would be false art to make it end on a note
of triumph. ... For the rest: a portrait satire on futility can’t end by turning
that quintessence of futility, Mr. P. into a reformed character by breathing
out fire and ozone” (Paige 1971: 50).
The theme that Pound expounds here establishes, incidentally, the idea
that “Modernism” is not merely an ivory tower “art for art’s sake”
ideology, but is rooted in its commitment to truth, not to say social issues.
His elaboration implicitly assumes a deadwood of taste and expectation
of old themes and forms carried over from an earlier age. The initiatives
the poets launched were, in considerable measure, intended to clear away
these cobwebs so the new poetry could get underway, a task many
anthologies, pedagogic or otherwise, would themselves address along
many different and even conflicting ideas. At the heart of the letter was
the idea of a “true” art that marks the renaissance poets and some readers
saw. Letters such as this about “Prufrock” were, on Harriet Monroe’s
own admission, landmarks in her “modernization” (Monroe 1938: 268),
and advancement to newer themes. As we shall see below, W. C. Williams
and D. H. Lawrence too were to write such “educative” letters to her. In
a remarkably generous and frank reminiscence, she says, “During the
first year or two, Ezra’s pungent and provocative letters were falling
thick as snow flakes. ... Thus began the rather violent, but on the whole
salutary, discipline under the lash of which the editor of the new magazine
felt herself rapidly educated, while incrustations of habit and prejudice
were ruthlessly swept away” and adds the grateful remark which would
be echoed by many later writers: “Ezra Pound was born to be a great
teacher” (Monroe 1938: 268). We may note, for the record, that Eliot’s
“Prufrock”, however, was tucked away in the middle pages of Poetry in
June 1917—in fact it was the very last work in the poetry section (130-
135), and immediately after it began the prose articles. But occupying
prime space at the beginning of the issue were two homesick and lovesick
poems by an Ajan Syrian, an elegy by Arthur Davison Ficke addressed
to Rupert Brooke, two poems on nature by Bliss Carman and some rather
conventional Petrarchan sonnets by one Georgia Wood Pangborn. These

were, of course, extremely old, time-tested, and safe themes that Pound,
as we shall see, warned William Carlos Williams to steer clear of, and
were written in verse forms that were sure to encourage just the kind of
tastes that the “Modernists” were struggling to make the readers outgrow.
The editor herself, in spite of the ruthless “lash”, was often a reluctant
learner, to say nothing of the ordinary contemporary reader.
3. THE LETTER IN HISTORY AND THE HISTORY IN THE LETTER
The letter was not, however, limited to explanations and urgings; it

became a literary history in miniature, simultaneously elucidating and
explaining the writer’s poetic principles and was, in important ways, an
extension of the anthology’s work of “educating” the readers, be they
editors, critics, or students in the classroom. D. H. Lawrence, writing to
Edward Marsh, editor of Georgian Poetry, sums up the “Modernist”
efforts against the inertia and some of the antagonistic forces arrayed
against it such as what he called the “habituated ear” of the reading
public:
It is the lapse of the feeling, something as indefinite as
expression in the voice carrying emotion. It doesn’t depend
on the ear, particularly, but on the sensitive soul. And the
ear gets a habit, and becomes waste, when the ebbing and
lifting emotion should be the master, and the ear the
transmitter. If your ear has got stiff and a bit mechanical,
don’t blame my poetry. ... Well, I don’t write for your ear.
This is the constant war, I reckon, between the new
expression and the habituated and mechanical transmitters
and receivers of the human constitution (Moore 1962: 243-
244; Lawrence’s emphasis).
The fact that Lawrence contributed to little magazines and anthologies
as varied as Poetry and The Little Review and the Georgian and the
Imagist collections is an affirmation of his faith in the pivotal role of
these as the preservers, makers, and markers of taste. Here, in the letter
to Marsh, is a confluence of ideas between the Imagist writers, Robert

Frost, and Lawrence himself. The Imagists with their acceptance that a
“new cadence means a new idea” (Some Imagist Poets 1915: vii) as a
cardinal principle of their poetry, would be much closer to Lawrence.
Sometimes Pound would use the letter to edit the work of a poet like Iris
Barry, commenting at length on the strengths and weaknesses of her
poems with an astonishing meticulousness, richly illustrating in the
process, some of his several poetic theories. He urged her to be less
descriptive and put in more verbs into her poems, just as the primitives,
and good writers of later ages did (Paige 1971: 82). Pound’s letters,
indeed, were the closest that he came to formulating a manifesto, apart
from his contribution to Blast and a few other occasional publications.
“A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” (qtd. in Monroe 1938: 298-301) is worth
noting; it is more of a prohibitory list than a manifesto which it is
sometimes taken to be. Writing to Harriet Monroe, whom he had served
as an adjunct editor from England, Pound was given to formulating
something of a theory of poetry. In her autobiography, A Poet’s Life
(1938), she quotes one such letter, which she declares to be his “artistic
creed” in so many words. Written as early as January 1915, it asserts:
There are two ways of existing in la vie literaire; as De
Gourmont said some while since: “A man is valued by the
abundance or the scarcity of his copy.” The problem is how,
how in hell to exist without overproduction. In the Imagist
book I made it possible for a few poets who were not over-
producing, to reach an audience. That delicate operation was
achieved by the most rigorous suppression of what I
considered faults. ... Obviously such a method and movement
are incompatible with effusion, with flooding magazines
with all sorts of wish-wash and imitation and the near good.
If I had acceded to A. L’s [Amy Lowell] proposal to turn
“Imagism” into a democratic beer garden, I should have
undone what little good I managed to do by setting up a
critical standard. ... My dissociation with [sic] the
forthcoming Some Imagist Poets book, and my displeasure,
arises again from the same cause, which A. C. H. [Alice
Corbin Henderson] aptly calls “the futility of trying to impose

a selective taste on the naturally unselective.” ... My problem
is to keep alive a certain group of advancing poets, to set the
arts in their rightful place as the acknowledged guide and
lamp of civilization. The arts must be supported in preference
to the church and scholarship. Artists first, then if necessary,
professors and parsons. Scholarship is but a handmaid to
the arts. My propaganda for what some may consider
“novelty in excess” is a necessity. There are plenty to defend
the familiar kind of thing. … (Pound qtd. in Monroe 1938:
367).
Writing to Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial, Pound returned to the
views he expressed to Harriet Monroe: “The Scylla and Carybdis [sic]
of magazining, are A. to get the barrels too full, and NOT to be able to
use feature stuff the instant it arrives, and B. au contraire NOT to have
enough A.I. stuff on hand” (Thompson 1964: 90). In brief, the attempt
of the writers was to collect the “best” and present it to the reader who
had a sense of literature. The letters also draw our attention to the elitist
inclinations of Pound and his friends. Repeatedly there is, as we have
seen in the letter about “Prufrock” addressed to Harriet Monroe, a disdain
for the lazy, conventional reader. It is perhaps noteworthy that Pound
wanted to present “advancing poets” to readers, by which expression he
presumably means poets suffused with the new ideas, such as Eliot, and
who were also fired by a desire to learn the art called poetry.
The best poetry published naturally demanded the best criticism possible.
It is worth noting that many major poets themselves were influential
critics such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, for example. Their efforts in this
direction may be said to represent their “exhibits” in criticism. However,
most poet-critics considered criticism inferior to poetry. Pound, for
example, complained once “Not so much crit. as creat” [sic] (Paige 1971:
240). Yet, he presented the critic with a short but explicit and full-fledged
manifesto, and the site chosen to expound it on was again the letter:
Substance of manifesto:
1. The critic most worthy of respect is the one who actually
causes an improvement in the art he criticizes.
2. The best critic is the one who most focuses attention
on the best work.
3. The pestilence masking itself as a critic distracts
attention from the best work, to either secondary work
that is more or less “good” or to tosh, to detrimental
work, dead or living snobisms [sic], or to infinite essays
on criticism. (Paige 1971: 241; Pound’s emphasis)
The intensity of the language, among other things in the letters shows,
as few other sources can, how comprehensive, anxious, and
uncompromising Pound was in his attempts to popularize and promote
literature. The picture of “Modernism” that emerges from these letters
where the writers are contemptuous and solicitous in turns about the
common reader, is complex and far from neat, but it is certainly more
representative of the facts. The varied recipients of the letters—fellow-
poets, editors, and patrons, to mention a few—illustrate the immense
range of people involved in “making it new”, and the numerous efforts
and strategies the enterprise demanded. Pound’s own attempts to focus
attention on the “best” work appeared in such anthologies as the ABC of
Reading (1934) and From Confucius to Cummings (1964), co-edited
with Marcella Spann.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Pound’s letters are a faithful
reflection of literary history. They do, however, record the growth of his
poetic ideas in their formative phases in real time. He writes to Amy
Lowell, for example, seeking her permission to use her poem “Garden”
for an anthology he was “cogitating” (Paige 1971: 24). Later on, he puts
the Imagist phase and its anthology, Des Imagistes (1914), in perspective
by declaring that the Imagist principles were good “for a time” (Paige
1971: 55). Again he notes that the contributors to the Imagist collection
have not “gone on; have [not] invented much since the first Des Imagistes
anthology. H. D. has done work as good. She has also (under I suppose
the flow-contamination of Amy and Fletcher) let loose dilutations and
repetitions, so that she has spoiled the ‘few but perfect’ position she
might have held on to” (Paige 1971: 114). He was, in other words,
frequently giving contemporary artists, publishers, patrons, and readers
the chance to go forth and “be really modern” (Paige 1971: 24) and to
stay that way without exhausting the patience or sympathy of readers by
forcing inferior work on them. The letters, therefore, functioned as notes
towards miniature anthologies, mental literary histories, guides, and
bibliographies for himself and his fellow-writers among other things.
They were meant to “educate” the recipients about what to write and
how, but nevertheless reflected Pound’s own compulsive writing and
reading habits. He meticulously listed out to W. C. Williams, for example,
in October 1908, the subjects already dealt with by poets of yore, and
were now dead issues. The blasé tone in which he recounted these subjects
is unmistakable, and was intended to shame the addressee into abandoning
them. Going solely by this evidence, Pound should be credited for
painstakingly assembling poetic clichés and for warning fellow-poets of
their continuing menace:
Here are a list [sic] of facts which I and 9,000,000 other
poets have spieled endlessly:
1. Spring is a pleasant season. The flowers, etc, etc, sprout,
bloom etc. etc.
2. Young man’s fancy. Lightly, heavily, gaily, etc. etc.
3. Love, a delightsome tickling. Indefinable etc.
A) By day etc. etc. etc. B) By night etc. etc. etc.
4. Trees, hills etc. are by provident nature arranged
diversely, in diverse places.
5. Winds, clouds, rains, etc. flop thru and over ’em.
6. Men love women. (More poetic in the singular, but the
verb retains the same form.)
(In Greece and Pagan countries men loved men, but
the fact is no longer mentioned in polite society except
in an expurgated sense.) I am not attracted by the Pagan
custom but my own prejudices are not materiapoetica.

Besides I didn’t get particularly lascivious in A.L.S.
However, in the above six groups I think you find the
bulk of the poetic matter of the ages. Wait—
7. Men fight battles, etc. etc.
8. Men go on voyages.
Beyond this, men think and feel certain things and see
certain things not with the bodily vision. About this
time I begin to get interested and the general too
ruthlessly go to sleep? To, however, quit this wrangle.
(Paige 1971: 45)
It is interesting to speculate briefly on “Spring”, the first item on this
list. Pound and his correspondent understood each other pretty well. In
1922 and 1923 respectively appeared two long poems, or rather, two
poetic sequences: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and William Carlos
Williams’s Spring and All. Neither poet, sensibly enough, avoided spring
at Pound’s instance. Both, as a matter of fact, reworked the seasonal
cliché in their respective “anthologies”—both The Waste Land and Spring
and All are arguably anthologies. While Eliot’s poem is more of an
annotated edition of dead poems complete with line numbers, notes, and
references, Spring and All only appears less so, but it is a book of twenty-
seven lyrics dispersed among passages of prose, notes and fragments of
discursive prose and the poet’s commentary. Another way to read Pound’s
list of poetic clichés is to go through these two sequences to see how not
only Spring, but all the other items appear and disappear as though in
the pages of a new Golden Treasury. That the poets themselves were
subliminally working on the principles of an anthology is evident by the
following remark. Here is William Carlos Williams on Marianne Moore:
Unlike the painters the poet has not resorted to distortions
or the abstract in form. Ms. Moore accomplishes a like result
by rapidity of movement. A poem such as “Marriage” is an
anthology of transit. It is a pleasure that can be held firm
only by moving rapidly from one thing to the next. It gives
the impression of a passage through. (Williams 1970: 313).
The new poetry, with its new requirements, was developing its own forms
of composition which retained the anthology at the core.
In fact, the idea of “Spring” appeared as early as 1918, in Kora in Hell,
a book and title that Williams discussed with Pound himself: “I am
indebted to Pound for the title. We had talked about Kora, the Greek
parallel of Persephone, the legend of Springtime captured and taken to
Hades. I thought of myself as Springtime and I felt I was on my way to
Hell (but I didn’t go very far)” (Williams 1970: 3-4). The poet had
symbolically rescued “Spring” from the hell of being clichéd and misused.
This episode emphasizes again that the poets in search for subjects, never
exclude a possibility for ever. The poets were also remarkable for their
insistence on the use of these subjects in an original way (as the self-
identification of the poet with spring illustrates) as an important
characteristic of good verse. As late as 1928, Pound found Spring still
fresh and blossoming in the works of young poets like R. C. Dunning
whose “Threnody in Sapphics” he printed in the second edition of his
Exile (Pound 1927a: 31).
4. THE MAKING AND MARKETING OF MODERNISM
Many “Modernists” were loath to reveal to the general reader anything

but the finished product, be it a manifesto or a poem itself. More often
than not, the making of these nevertheless required collaboration, and
the letter was perhaps the only place where this could be realized at
length without any feelings of inhibition. Thus, Pound advised Iris Barry,
in a letter dated July 1916, in the same painstaking and itemized manner
as he did to Williams, what modern poetry should be in its essential
features, one of the few times he came closest to formulating a manifesto:
The whole art is divided into:
a. Concision, or style, or say what you mean in the fewest
and clearest words.
b. The actual necessity for creating or constructing
something; of presenting an image, or enough images
of concrete things arranged to stir the reader. (Paige

1971: 90)
Neither ideas is new to poetry, but such repetitions served to keep some
of the aims of the movement to “modernise” constantly before the poets.
Continuing with the handiness that the letters provided, it may be said
that a poet could indicate to an editor the best way the poems should be
presented to the public. D. H. Lawrence wrote to the Harriet Monroe
how he would like a poem of his published in the little magazine, a letter
that, incidentally, illustrates the poet’s own selective instincts, at least as
far as his own poetry is concerned: “No, you mustn’t cut it (“Ballad of
Another Ophelia”) in two. It is a good poem. I couldn’t do it again to
save my life. Use it whole or not at all” (Moore 1962: 288). Pound, too,
similarly staved off tragedy from befalling some his favourite poems,
again, through letters: “You might also concede the constructive value
of my kicking about mutilations. Propertius and Mauberley were cut,
but on the strength of my howling to high heaven that this was an outrage,
Eliot’s Waste Land was printed whole. In which I also participated.
Dragging my own corpse by the heels to arouse the blasted spectators”
(Paige 1971: 230). The problem of “mutilations” was particularly
pernicious in the usual anthologies because the editors often gave no
indication to the reader that the poem was an excerpt, and that it could
mean something else in its original context. The menace sometimes
appeared in the form of altered punctuation which diluted the meaning
of the poem in such a way as to pander to the lazy or incompetent readers
who may otherwise be confused or irritated by the new demands that
literature was making. Lawrence, again, complained to Harriet Monroe
that a poem, “Unster Goth”, in Poetry was “unbeautifully ugly” (Moore
1962: 295).
The effort against the conventional poet, and the general reader’s
obsession with beauty, it might be mentioned, was one of the few ideas
that united the “Modernists” in the early decades of the twentieth century
leading to the group-forming tendencies among poets who had little else
in common. If we remember that the poet-editors of this time rarely felt
the need for, or took the trouble to provide introductions or prefaces, the
collation of such occasional pronouncements the letters provide can be
invaluable for the reader, facilitating a better appreciation of the themes,

and the new directions poetry was taking. The publication of anthologies
or manifestos by schools of poets would naturally lead to competition
with editors of anthologies brought out by other schools, and the letter
was the place where we can see the rival poet-editors elaborating their
predilections, and frankly venting their frustrations and animosities. They
might also discuss the reception of their work. We find Pound, the editor
of the Catholic Anthology and Des Imagistes, telling Lewis in a letter
that some important people did not approve of Blast: “The P.M. [Asquith]
don’t [sic] for one. Though attempts have been made with some success
to convert him to milder faces (or persona)” (Materer 1985: 46). This
comment assumes a new significance when we remember that Edward
Marsh had boasted that the Prime Minister’s car was seen at the bookshop
that was stocking The Georgian Anthology on the day it was released.
And sure enough, a little later, we get an insight into “the dark and
backward abyss” of Pound’s mind, revealing the rivalries and differences
of opinion with the editor of the Georgian Poetry when he (Pound) writes
to Lewis a few days later, in August 1916, “The Eddie-Marsh-Asquith-
Beerbohm-Trees section of society does not favor an advance in thought”
(Materer 1985: 55). The point is that the letters were literary criticism,
literary histories, and histories of reading at the same time, all contributory
to the spirit of the anthology.
The sharing of experiences and expertise in getting work published,
especially in the face of a conservative establishment, was inevitable if
literature was to make any progress. Plans to get around such forces had
to be made continuously and innovatively, and to communicate these,
the letters were probably the easiest and fastest way available at the
time. Pound, again, aiming to get the “best” material for the Dial, wrote
to Scofield Thayer that they might invite a writer like Gauthier Villars
“to write something that will pass the U. S. postal authorities” (Thompson
1964: 51). This, again, is an attempt at the anthology, deploying an
acclaimed name as a kind of a Trojan horse to storm the conservative
camp. The letters of these poets had become a crucial part of the strategy
for literary survival that had to be continued from issue to issue, from
poem to poem, and also, somehow earn a living for themselves in the
process. Sometimes, magazines and institutions made efforts, desultory
and sporadic perhaps, to help the artist make ends meet or relieve him/
her from the need to earn a living through other means. One of these was
the awarding of prizes for the “best” poem. It was an initiative to inspire
good poetry, and was at least fairly successful, and here too, the letter
played some part in drawing the attention of the correspondent to their
existence.
Finding that their appeal was limited to the elite few, writers needed all
the assurance, help, and camaraderie they could get, and the letters were
the best means available in the short run to garner these. These letters
also played a crucial role in informing, educating, canvassing support,
and encouraging each other in their attempts to produce the “best”. They
sometimes also served to insulate them against public criticism when,
for example, praise from a respected author would please a writer more
than the accolades of the masses. Yeats, for example, was flattered when
Robert Louis Stevenson praised his “Lake Isle of Innisfree” as his
(Stevenson’s) encouragement was, for him, worth more than popular
applause (Kelly 1986: 404). On other occasions, the letter would carry a
plaintive report even as it informed a fellow writer about a new
publication. Eliot, in one instance, writing to Conrad Aiken, perhaps
with some envy at the success of the Georgian anthologies, enquires,
“As for literature, have you seen our Katholik [sic] Anthology? (Elk[in]
Matthews). It has not done very well, in spite of the name of Yeats”
(Eliot 1980: 125). Such incidental remarks sometimes shed light on the
poets’ perceptions of the canon, and the writers’ concern with “interpretive
communities.” In other words, the poets themselves were making and
unmaking mental anthologies of sorts, some details of which the letters
give away. In a more important sense, the letter was a trans-Atlantic
literary newspaper and provider of the most recent information about
the arts, saving the writers’ time which they would have otherwise spent
in reinventing the wheel. Pound, for example, told William Carlos
Williams that his work, though good, would be unacceptable in London
because it was already passé: “As proof that W.C.W. has poetic instincts
the book is invaluable. Au contraire, if you were in London and saw the
stream of current poetry, I wonder how much you would have printed?”
(Paige 1971: 7). This is precisely the point that Williams himself makes
in his letter dated October 26, 1916 to Harriet Monroe, protesting against
her tendency to select and edit poems in a way that pleased her readers:
“... I hereby object to your old-fashioned and therefore vicious methods”
(Thirlwall 1957: 39). Williams seems to have learned such lessons from
the “divine Ezra” (Thirlwall 1957: 65). The point is that the letters were
a useful redaction in a fairly detailed manner, of the ideas, hitherto implied
or implicit, about producing the “best” and presenting them in the most
effective manner and helped position the magazine as the maker and
marker of literary taste. Helpful to the reader as notes, introductions and
elaborations of poetics, individual poems and books, the letter played a
pivotal role for the correspondent when it was written, and continues
now to make crucial contributions to the understanding of literature.
Demanding no strict adherence to any genre or diction, the letter brought
forth the talents of the writers incidentally, but in an illuminating manner.
Personal by nature, it was also a rallying point for a nationalistic tradition
and a language of its own, as mentioned above. While it cannot replace
literary history per se, it can function as a valuable guide in verifying
and correcting it.
5. CONCLUSION
In their letters quoted above, we have seen D. H. Lawrence and Robert

Frost privilege the ear over the eye as the more important faculty in the
appreciation of poetry. The fact that these poets came from either side of
the Atlantic attests to the universality of this preference. It would be
interesting to trace the origin of this penchant for the ear as the receptive
mode for poetry in the years immediately preceding the age we call
“Modernism”. We remember that the Golden Treasury (1861) of F. T.
Palgrave was compiled entirely on the single criterion of the lyrical quality
of its poems. Palgrave’s anthology would not have been out of place in
a country where formal training in public speaking was being imparted
to young men from the upper middle classes who intended to take up
careers that required it (Morrisson 1996: 27). The emphasis in the early
twentieth century was, however, entirely different. While Palgrave hoped
that even the poor and the labouring classes would find some solace in
his anthology, the elocutionary skills that were on offer in the universities,
legitimized further by the recommendations of the Newbolt Report, were

honed on the dialects of the middle and upper classes. Indeed, they were
designed to perpetuate and accentuate the class differences between these
classes and the poor (Morrisson 1996: 27). The emphasis of these courses
was on the “pure voice” which by definition was uncontaminated by
any accretions from the lower classes. The “elocutionary communities”
(35) that Morrisson mentions, participated in the recitation of poetry as
well. The young Modernist poets saw in these communities a ready
audience to educate and experiment on. In 1909, the Poetry Recital
Society or the Poetry Society for short, was formed, which “attempted
to institutionalize and professionalize the discourses of elocution and
recitation, to attain the power of consecrating taste and ‘culture’, and to
influence the London school system’s efforts at verse recitation”
(Morrisson 1996: 32). In spite of its hostility to Modernist poetry, the
Society consented to host it (Morrisson 1996: 32). The preference was
for a depersonalized voice where the speaker was not seen, a characteristic
feature of such important Modernist texts as Eliot’s Waste Land and
Pound’s Cantos.
Both these texts were based on a formidable amount of erudition and
were, therefore, exclusivist. The ventriloquism of the speeches of the
lower classes was often patronizing and degrading. Eliot placed the
“demotic” along with the “glut and tar” of industrial societies in the
Waste Land. This poem was, we remember, to be called “He Do the
Police in Many Voices”. Nor did the similarity end there. When Ezra
Pound lectured on the troubadours, the fee he charged was equally
discouraging at “£1 1s, slightly less than the weekly wage of the average
male industrial worker” (Rainey 1999: 36). The point is that the elitism
of the institutions training people in speaking or elocutionary skills had
a counterpart in the lectures and the written works of the new poets at
every level.
An examination of the letters, little magazines, and other publications of
the Modernists betray an ambiguity towards the reading public that is
not often noticed. This may complicate literary history, but is surely
closer to facts. This explains why they devoted considerable efforts
towards gaining ever wider audiences and readers by demanding, for
example, lower taxes on their publications, as Pound and some others

did. At the heart of these efforts was optimism, however sporadic, about
the public’s ability to enjoy poetry. Elitist as these societies were, “Monro
and the contributors to his magazines appropriated contemporary
discourse about verse recitation in order to put it to use for the
popularization of new experimental poetry” (Morrisson 1996: 38). For
him, the panacea to the unpopularity of poetry was skilful recital of verses.
He then turned the conventional idea of reading poetry in books on its
head:
We make a regular practice of reading poetry aloud, and
anyone who wishes to stroll in and listen may do so ... we
are absolutely certain that the proper values of poetry can
only be conveyed through its vocal interpretation by a
sympathetic and qualified reader. Indeed so obvious does
this appear that we regard the books on sale in the shop
merely as printed scores for the convenience of refreshing
the memory in hours of study or indolence. (qtd. in Morrisson
1996: 37)
Later, Monro would change his demand for a “sympathetic and qualified
reader” to the poet’s own voice. He also made the poetry reading sessions
more accessible by charging only nominal fees or offering free tickets to
those who bought the Poetry and Drama (Morrisson 1996: 43). Monro
won the support of a wide spectrum of writers and critics who praised
him for their own reasons. For Francis Macnamara, a poet, public reading
of their poetry “is the only way for poets to learn” (qtd. in Morrisson
1996: 43). Pound’s own reading at the society was not pleasurable, largely
due to the tastes of the audience, but he was sure of its usefulness in
helping him achieve his dearest aim of concision in expression (Morrisson
1996: 43). By bringing poets and readers face to face, the Poetry Society
played a unique role in the popularization of the new poetry. The
anthological nature of the Society is unmistakable, and letters were at
the foundation of all these achievements.
REFERENCES
Anderson, M. C. 1914 (1 March). Announcement. The Little Review 1, 1-2.
Anderson, M. C. 1914 (1 March). Review of “Some letters of William Vaughn
Moody.” The Little Review I, 24-25.
Anderson, M. C. (Ed.). 1966. The Little Review. New York: Kraus Reprint
Corporation.
Anderson, S.1914. A new note.The Little Review 1, 23.
Eliot, V. (Ed.). 1980. The Waste Land: A facsimile and transcript of the original
drafts, including the annotations of Ezra Pound/T S Eliot. London: Faber
and Faber.
Faulkner, P. (Ed.). 1986. A modernist reader: Modernism in England 1910-
1930. London: Batsford.
Ford, B. (Ed.). 1961. The Pelican guide to English literature: The modern age.
Vol. 7. Manchester: Pelican.
Heaney, S.1980. Preoccupations: Selected prose 1968-1978. London: Faber
and Faber.
Henderson, A. C. 1912. Editorial comment: A perfect return. Poetry 1.1, 89-91.
Kelly, J. (Ed.). 1986. Collected letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. 1, 1865-1895. London:
Clarendon Press.
Materer, T. (Ed.). 1985. The correspondence of Ezra Pound: Pound/Lewis: The
letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. New York: New Directions.
Monroe, H. 1938. A poet’s of life: Seventy years in a changing world.
Moore, H. T. (Ed.). 1962. The collected letters of D. H. Lawrence. 2 Vols. London:
Heinemann.
Morrisson, M. 1996. Performing the pure voice: Elocution, verse recitation,
and modernist poetry in prewar London. Modernism/Modernity 3.3, 25-
50.
Paige, D. D. (Ed.). 1971. Selected letters of Ezra Pound 1901-1941. London:
Faber and Faber.
Palgrave, F. T. (Ed.). 1861. The golden treasury of the best songs and lyrics in
the English language. London: Macmillan.
Pound, E.1912a, October. Status rerun. Poetry 1.1, 123-127.
Pound, E. 1912b.Tagore’s poems. Poetry 1. 2, 92-94.

Pound, E. 1913. Some don’ts by an Imagiste. Poetry 1. 6, 200-206.
Pound, E. (Rev.). 1914a. February. Poetry 2.4, 145-151.
Pound, E. 1914b.Don’ts for critics.The Little Review 3.1, 24-25, 12-14.
Pound, E. 1914c. S. H. G. Letter. The Little Review 1.6, 54.
Pound, E. 1916. Das schonepapiervergeudet. The Little Review 3.7, 16-17.
Pound, E. (Ed.).1927a [1967]. The Exile. New York: The Johnson reprint
Corporation.
Pound, E. 1927b [1967]. Editorial. The Exile 1. New York: The Johnson Reprint
Corporation. 88-92.
Pound, E. 1928 [1967]. Editorial: Data. The Exile 4. New York: Johnson Reprint
Corporation. 104-117.
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Pound, E. 1955. Literary essays of Ezra Pound. T. S. Eliot (Ed.). London: Faber
and Faber.
Pound, E. 1960. Yeats, the man and the masks. London: Faber and Faber.
Pound, E. and Spann, M. (Eds.). 1964. From Confucius to Cummings. New
York: New Directions.
Pound, E. 1979. Vortex: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press.
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Routledge.
Rainey, L. 1999. The cultural economy of modernism. In M. Levenson (Ed.),
The Cambridge companion to modernism (pp. 33-69). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Some imagist poets.1966. New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation.
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York: McDowell.
Thompson, L. (Ed.). 1964. Selected letters of Robert Frost. New York: Henry
Holt.
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Directions.
M. E. Veda Sharan is Professor in the Department of ESL Studies at The English

and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. His research and teaching cover
literary studies as well as English Language Education. He has long teaching
experience spanning intermediate to PhD levels.
M. E. Veda Sharan
sharandipity@gmail.com
37
RATAN T. MOHUNTA
DIGITAL CULTURES AND OUR POSTHUMAN

FUTURE: LOOKING BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRISM
ABSTRACT: The twentieth century was an age of great political shifts that culminated
in the two World Wars, however, the turn of the century saw revolutionary developments
in the fields of computer technologies and biotechnologies. Philosophers and scientists
admit that the new technological revolution has, in fact, altered our modes of “thinking
and being” in unimaginable ways. While scholars in the humanities and social sciences
work overtime to develop new theories to explain the “now” and the “yet to be”
phenomena, others engaged in interdisciplinary research insist that the human species
has indeed entered a new age of the “Anthropocene”. Earlier theories also grappled with
the idea of social and cultural change, but the pace of change spurred by new technologies
has left theorists baffled. While information and communication technologies altered
our understanding of space and time, biotechnology is aiding humans to change the very
essence of “species being”. Given such a context, this article will attempt a philosophical
enquiry into the patterns of change affecting the nature of being.
KEYWORDS: anthropocentrism, digital culture, human-animal, posthuman, cosmology
0. INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND

THE QUESTION OF HUMAN NATURE
The human species has arrived at a definitive moment in its history and
the history of planet earth. The claims made by scientists and technocrats
about the amazing achievements of humankind in the last century and a
half, do not match well with progress or the lack of it in other spheres of
human life. As urban societies become more digitized and alienation
becomes a shared human condition, the social, cultural, and economic
spheres begin to show more disparities and internal fissures. There is a
general sense of discontent with various cultures associated, directly or
otherwise, with the dominant culture of capitalism. One would suggest
that it is absolutely futile to analyze the present with a single referent of
the past. At the high point of technological development, environmental

38 Ratan T. Mohunta
disasters stare at us ominously, threatening to dislodge us from the

certainties of geological habitat. Faced with such a possibility, it is now
imperative upon us to think beyond geocentric notions of time and space
in order to understand the human in the word “humanity” and to ask the
question “what is human about humans?”. As one tries to do away with
familiar binaries arising from anthropocentric thinking, one should also
acknowledge that it is time to reconsider the idea of anthropocentrism.
In the introduction to his book Anthropocentrism, Rob Boddice asserts
that it is important to retain the tension between the idea of “termination
of anthropocentrism” (Boddice 2011: 1) and the usefulness of the term.
He argues that the tension is necessary because it helps one answer the
question “what is anthropocentrism?” According to him, the term could
be expressed as a “charge of human chauvinism, or as an
acknowledgement of human ontological boundaries. It is in tension with
nature, the environment and non-human animals (as well as non-humans
per se)” (2011: 1). The term, however, continues to be ambiguous by
placing itself delicately in contrast with “other worldly cosmologies,
religions and philosophies” (1) and also by expressing limits to “humans’
understanding of the world” (1). Hence, the question necessitates a serious
enquiry into the epistemological and ontological problems related to the
term. In his article “What is this Quintessence of Dust?” Boria Sax delves
into the meaning of the word human by referring to Diogenes’s answer
to Plato, who defined man as a “‘two-footed featherless animal’” (Sax
2011: 21). Diogenes walked into Plato’s academy the next day with a
plucked chicken claiming “this is Plato’s man” (2011: 21). Chickens
were “a common sacrificial offering” (21), he avers, while arguing that
the plucked chicken, taken as a symbol, suggested “a definition of
humanity not in terms of physical properties but in terms of our alienation
and fear” (21). Is it alienation from nature that causes fear? Or, is it the
guilt of violating human limits that urges one to acknowledge the
primordial power of nature? The moral-ethical imperatives forced by
the plucked chicken therefore begin to define the human.
None can disagree with Sax’s suggestion that the meaning of the word
human keeps changing not only from one historical period to another
but also with context. All kinds of identities, both new and old, get rolled
Digital cultures and our posthuman future 39
into the idea of the human as societies change with time. So, from a
moral-ethical or cultural perspective, the term human may draw its
meanings from theology, metaphysics, art, literature, law, and also
perhaps from politics; whereas, from a biological point of view, it may
derive meanings as a species-being distinctly different from other species
in the natural world. Sax suggests that “the use of fire, the taboo against
incest, politics, the making of tools, the understanding of death, [and]
the use of language” are some of the characteristics that distinguish
humans from animals. It is a complex term that clearly defies simple
definitions. Nevertheless, Sax believes that one can arrive at some
consistency in its meanings in etymology and myth, given its origin in
Latin humus, meaning “Of the earth,” and the mid-15th-century French
word humain. He traces the etymological evolution of the term in three
stages. In its initial stage, humanity did not carry the meaning of a “species
being” constituted primarily in terms of “transience and vulnerability”;
humans were seen “not as existing in relation to ‘animals’ but, if anything,
to deities” (Sax 2011: 22). In the second stage of late antiquity, “animals
rather than human beings emerge as the major template” (22) against
which humans define themselves. And, in the third stage around the
Renaissance, the idea of the human is “expanded to embrace new
technologies and cultural products” (22). In its latest connotation, the
term human refers “less to an organism, than a sphere of existence”
(23).
The etymological and theological derivations of the term human in the
European context as well as in non-Western mythologies of “the Chinese,
the Rwandan, the Maori and the Inca” (Sax 2011: 24), suggest that
humans were “made by deities from earth or clay” (24). However, this
argument about the evolution of the meanings of the term in no way
undermines or rejects the idea of the human as a biological “species
being”. This is made amply clear by Sax at the beginning of his article
where he states that “it is impossible to untangle the biological meanings
of the word from moral, theological, metaphysical, social, poetic, and
legal ones” (21). To underscore this point, he suggests that the
etymological definitions “contain little or nothing that could distinguish
human beings from animals, which also may be created from earth”
(24). Moreover, he claims that ancient literatures and myth provide ample
40 Ratan T. Mohunta
evidence to corroborate this argument. He suggests that the sphinx, the

mythical mermaids that appear in European, Asian and African folklore
of Europe, and the werewolf of old English folklore are good examples
from mythology that reinforce the thin line demarcating the human and
the animal world. We can add the Indian Elephant God Ganapathy to the
above to complete the list.
Other stories of creation found in theologies of Semitic religions and in
ancient Greek mythology point to an unequal relation between humans
and gods. For the Greeks, humans were mortal creatures seeking
immortality through their beliefs and gods were immortal agents wielding
superhuman powers. Sax affirms this point by stating that in such stories,
human beings are placed “in relation to powers that are both far greater
and more stable than our own, exemplified … in earthquakes or violent
storms” (Sax 2011: 24). Furthermore, he suggests that the creation of
human beings “is rarely presented without foreboding in mythology and
religion” (24). From “the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer to the Book of
Job and the Book of Proverbs in the Bible”, the story has been one of
“incessant laments of the human condition” (Sax 2011: 24). Creationist
visions of the world then have always emphasized the frailty and
vulnerability of humans compared to the superiority of gods and nature.
Therefore, from a philosophical point of view, the recognition of this
vulnerability from experience through the ages, should have led humans
to turn to another referent: the animal.
The human-animal binary is conveniently used by many even to this
day to reinforce anthropocentric ideas. Sax says that we are still very far
from internalizing the idea of the human as animal, though scientists
“now classify humankind among the animals” (2011: 26). Quite often,
the comparison of humans and animals is preferred by both scientists
and philosophers of the Enlightenment “to highlight an essential
difference, which may be anything from a taboo against incest to speech”
(26). Sax quotes a passage from Derrida’s The Animal that therefore I
am to show how Derrida differs from those who prefer to use the phrase
“non-human animal” on “either scientific or humane grounds” (Sax 2011:
26). Discussing the human-animal binary, Derrida presents an imagined
instance of him being naked in front of a cat and ponders over the sense
of shame enveloping him in that circumstance. However, he quickly

regrets being ashamed when he realizes that the animal is naked too but
is not consciously aware of its nakedness. He argues that “the property
unique to animals and what in the final analysis distinguishes them from
man, is their being naked without knowing it” (Derrida 2002: 373).
Derrida insists that clothing being “proper to man … one of the
‘properties’ of man” (2002: 373), is “inseparable from all the other forms
of what is proper to man” (373). In his view, dressing is yet another of
many distinguishing traits like logos, speech, reason, and so on that
humans claim to help establish the difference with the animal. Expressing
disgust at such preposterous claims, Derrida argues that “the gaze called
animal” (381) offers to his sight “the abyssal limit of the human: the
inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man” (381). Put simply, he suggests
that the limits of the human are tested always by the limitless animal.
However, he is not convinced about the word “animal” being used to
refer to all life forms put together; he dismisses such usage arguing that
the word is “an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have
given themselves the right and the authority to give to another living
creature” (392). Derrida suggests that it would be better to substitute the
word “animal” with “animot,” which would capture the essence of
multiplicity of life forms. He coins this new word to refer to “neither a
species nor a gender nor an individual” (409); on the contrary, “it is an
irreducible living multiplicity of mortals” (409).
Acknowledging Derrida’s reservations on the human-animal divide, Sax
points out that he intuitively recognized but did not fully manage to
articulate the notion that “an ‘animal’ is only meaningful in relation to
human beings, as a sort of image in a distorting mirror” (Sax 2011: 26).
In other words, the meaning of the word “animal” becomes useful as
long as it serves to define the essence of human beings by contrast rather
than by similarities. Sax quotes extensively from Greek mythology to
explain this point. He narrates the story of the character Enkidu in
“Gilgamesh, the world’s most ancient surviving epic”, to suggest that he
could arguably be the “the first of countless figures in mythology that
straddle the growing divide between animal and human being” (2011:
27). However, Sax rightly suggests that this transition to a human identity
42 Ratan T. Mohunta
“is accompanied by alienation, sadness, and loss of physical abilities”

(27). He substantiates the idea of human-animal divide by referring to
Plato’s dialogue Protagoras, and concludes that it is possible to testify
through myth that “the drive to dominance” is indeed “a product of frailty”
(28).
From Gilgamesh to Plato to the 16th-century French philosopher Rene’
Descartes, who grounded the human in modern Western philosophy and
metaphysics, the story about humans remains more or less the same.
Descartes believed that “animals were automatons, while human beings
had immortal souls,” and that the “essence of a human being was
imperfection in relation to God” (Sax 2011: 29). This logically implies
that Descartes too, in spite of his deeply anthropocentric views,
maintained a certain ambivalence in the relations among gods, humans,
and animals. However, as European exploration of the world in the 15th
and 16th centuries revealed the cohabitation of animals and humans in
distant lands, the debate on the human-animal conundrum became more
intense in the Western world. Sax argues that the first attempt to
distinguish humans from animals on a scientific basis was made by the
Amsterdam anatomist Nicolaas Tulp, who in 1541, after dissecting the
corpse of an orangutan that was given to him, declared that it “was the
satyr of Greco-Roman mythology” (Sax 2011: 29). This ambiguity and
ambivalence in the human-animal relation continued through the history
of colonization before racism became the haunting malady of Western
culture. The ignominious events of Nazism and the Jewish Holocaust
raised the question of humanity again; for a brief historical moment then,
the “question of what is human even appeared to have been settled”
(Sax 2011: 30). He suggests that the massive technological and cultural
developments of the 21st century “compel us to address it once again”
(30). However, he refuses to hazard such an enterprise in the present
context since any exclusion from the category of the human would mean
the “denial of legal status and protection” (30).
1. TOWARD A NEW COSMOPOLITANISM:

BREAKING THE HUMAN-ANIMAL BINARY
How can one address the question of the “human” in the 21st century
when race, ethnicity, class, caste, region, and religion become crucial
determiners of human identity? Differential identities within the broad
general identity of the species being called the human have now begun
to assert themselves to claim a specific, distinct human identity. Hence,
the challenge for social scientists and humanities scholars is to develop
a new discourse, shedding all the old presumptions of universal humanity
and false notions of shared cultural practices. In his essay entitled “Toward
a Non-Anthropocentric Cosmopolitanism”, Gary Steiner attempts to
develop a meaningful debate on civil society that deviates positively
from the ones initiated by the Enlightenment philosopher Kant. The latter
sought to emphasize the importance of “autonomy, equality, reciprocity,
and mutual respect for any viable system of political decision making”
(Steiner 2011: 81). He argues that our modern ideal owes an “indirect
debt to an ancient cosmopolitan ideal according to which human beings
are morally superior” (81), and therefore have a “natural prerogative to
use non-human beings to satisfy human needs” (81). Steiner critiques
Kant’s cosmopolitanism, calling it a simple modification of the ancient
cosmopolitan ideal “in accordance with the liberal humanist notion of
the individual that had developed through the reflections of the Christian
humanists in the Renaissance, and those of Descartes and the social
contract thinkers in modernity” (Steiner 2011: 81). He suggests that
ancient cosmopolitanism, enlightenment cosmopolitanism, and our
“contemporary ideal of civil society” are “essentially anthropocentric”
(81). Anthropocentrism, he rightly argues, never posed any problem to
Western philosophical tradition that conceived society as “being
concerned exclusively with human relationships and activities” (81). For
many of us today, it still does not pose any problem whatsoever. However,
for those seriously concerned with “the fortunes of non-human animals”
(81), it is a matter of serious controversy. They ask why the concept of
society or community is “restricted to human beings” given the fact that
“many of our activities and cultural practices involve the subjection and
exploitation of animals” (81).
44 Ratan T. Mohunta
Steiner argues that if we go by the “ancient cosmopolitan ideal advanced

by the Stoics”, then animals would be “categorically excluded from the
sphere of justice” (2011: 82). He refers to early Greek writers such as
Hesiod to suggest that humans shared a peaceful cohabitation “not only
with one another but also with animals” (82). They lived “as if they
were gods, without having to struggle for their existence, and without
having to kill and eat animals” (82). So, when did this fall from grace
happen, and when exactly did humans turn violent and bloodthirsty?
According to Steiner, it was Zeus who saw the necessity “to impose dike
or the law of justice and peace” (2011: 82). In Steiner’s reading of Hesiod,
Zeus “placed all human beings in the sphere of justice and expressly
excluded all animals” (2011: 82). Raising serious ethical questions on
the violence that characterizes the Western experience, Steiner bemoans
the history of Western civilization as one marked by “a conspicuous
tension between fanciful depictions of a peaceful ideal state and the
factum brutum of violence” (82). Seeming to build a clear case against
the cultural practice of non-vegetarianism, he mentions the statistical
data of “53 billion land animals … slaughtered for the sake of the welfare
and enjoyment of human beings” (Steiner 2011: 82). Steiner refers to
John Rawls’s argument on justice and suggests that his position is more
or less the same as that of the Stoics. According to him, Rawls “simply
gives modern expression to the Stoic doctrine of cosmopolitanism”
(Steiner 2011: 83). However, while Rawls conceived the world in
“secularized, presumably godless terms”, the Stoics presumed the cosmos
“to have been ordered by the gods” (2011: 83). Hence, one can conclude
that there are, at least two categories of anthropocentrism: one that places
humans and non-human animals in relation to god to arrive at meanings
of the human, and another secularized version that places humans only
in relation to animals but continues to believe in the supremacy of the
former.
Whichever way one tries to look at the problem, one arrives ultimately
at some variety of anthropocentrism. So, how does one understand the
“human” in the present context where humans have developed a new
relationship with animals and nature in general? As masters of domestic
pets, as consumers of meat, as nature conservationists deeply concerned
about ecology and wildlife or as star gazers peering through telescopes
to wonder at astronomical phenomena like eclipses, humans have always

maintained a dubious relationship with nature. It has always been
objectified and subjected to human analysis. Ecology and environment
are still seen as domains of scientific enquiry rather than as a branch of
humanities. Is the scientific community sceptical about the rights
approach to nature and animals adopted by humanists? Richard W. Bulliet
refers to the present time as the age of “postdomesticity” in his book
Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers. He probes the idea of domesticity
and “postdomesticity” by locating it in the context of 21st-century
American society. He defines domesticity as the social, economic, and
intellectual characteristics of communities whose members consider
“daily contact with domestic animals (other than pets) a normal condition
of life” (Bulliet 2005: 3). His reference obviously is to the agricultural
life led by most Americans in a bygone era. For most of the developing
world however, it happens to be “contemporary reality” (3). He suggests
that people in domestic societies took killing of animals for granted and
experienced “few moral qualms in consuming animal products” (3).
Bulliet rightly suggests, in the age of “postdomesticity”, people live far
away, “both physically and psychologically” from animals that produce
their “food, fiber and hides” (2005: 3), never witnessing the “births,
sexual congress, and slaughter of these animals” (3). Yet, they maintain
a loving relationship with their domestic pets “often relating to them as
if they were human” (3). A second characteristic of postdomesticity,
according to Bulliet, is the continuing practice of consuming animal
products with an accompanied sense of guilt, shame, and disgust about
“the industrial processes by which domestic animals are rendered into
products” (3). He further adds that “fantasies of sex and blood” (2005:
3) are among some of the unconscious reactions to the changes brought
by transition to postdomesticity in America. Bulliet’s study draws an
interesting connection between postdomesticity and increasing violence
and casual sex among young American adults across nationalities and
races.
One can conclude that postdomesticity, by ushering in changes in human-
animal relation, altered the way humans understood themselves. The
earlier understanding of humans that came from reflection on the inferior,
46 Ratan T. Mohunta
distorted, non-human other, now gave way to a reflection on the

differential relations with the human other. The rapid technological
developments that inaugurated the digital age by the turn of the 20th
century changed the latter vision further by doubly alienating humans;
first from their fellow human beings, and next from their own selves. As
Baudrillard suggests, we are now condemned to experience the social in
its unending implosions on television screens and even more on social
media sites visited on our smart phones. This debilitating estrangement
forced by digital technologies on human societies now necessitates a
revision of theory per se, to develop one that can incorporate ideas from
all disciplines to philosophize on what theorists refer to as the posthuman
condition.
2. INDUSTRIAL MODERNITY AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL MAN
In the chapter entitled “The Technological Turn” of his book

Technological Nature, Peter Kahn Jr. presents a brief evolutionary history
that explains how humans “began to create, use, and love technology”
(Kahn Jr. 2011: 27). While he agrees that we have been, for some time
now, a “technological species”, he finds it odd that our technologies do
not “always appear to advance our lives” (27). He furthers this argument
through the example of workers in “Cuban Cigar” factories that “made
their way to Florida” (27) in the late nineteenth century, to demonstrate
how technology and changing modes of production alter our relations
with machines. The cigar factories, he states, carried over with them a
“unique tradition of the ‘lector’” (27), who gave workers their daily
dose of readings, mornings and afternoons, from texts they chose. This
hired reader, well paid by the workers, gave morning readings that
typically comprised of “political tracts” and afternoons “comprised a
classical repertoire including Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Cervantes” (27).
These educative performances by the lectors “helped ease the monotony”
(27) and boredom of routine work. This tradition was, in a way,
therapeutic because the readings not only educated the illiterate workers
in political events, they “also led to interesting conversations at the day’s
end” (27) which they carried back to their families.
Kahn argues that the factories were relatively small and “had little
technology” (2011: 27); cigars were made by hand, and the “lector could
be heard easily by all” (27). The workers had found a way of staying
“engaged and alive” in a world that was “mundane and repetitious” (27).
However, with greater competition and technological innovation, cigar
making became mechanized, the factories became bigger and more noisy;
soon the lector’s voice drowned and disappeared from the scene
altogether. With the emergence of the “modern assembly line” (28),
humans became robots; technology that was supposed to “reduce human
drudgery, became our masters” (28). Kahn digs out an enlightening source
of the word “robot” to suggest that the term “was coined by the Czech
playwright Karel Èapek in the 1920s to refer to the mechanized
dehumanization of industrial labor” (2011: 28). However, the impact of
technology on human societies can be viewed typically from three
perspectives. The Marxist view of economic determinism and capitalist
exploitation would hold the profit- hungry capitalist responsible for
human degradation. The capitalist himself would argue that he is the
generator of wealth and creator of jobs for the proletarians and the middle
class. A third group, more crucial perhaps, comprising of a large
population of greedy consumers would demand “cheaper and cheaper
consumer goods, without care as to their origins” (28).
Technology has indeed come a long way from the early times of the “Ju/
wasi digging stick” of the Bushmen of Kalahari to the more complex
technologies of computation and microelectronics that have given rise
to “computers, cell phones, Wi-Fi, satellites, search engines, software
agents, telesurgery, robot warriors, and thought-controlled prosthetics”
(Kahn 2011: 28). It is true that we cannot survive without technology,
but it is truer that we cannot survive without nature. Therefore, it is
important to understand how our relation with nature might have altered
with the impact of technology. Kahn tries to understand how and why
the long period of technological evolution has remained more or less
stable, and in recent times grown “rapidly to escalate, increasingly so in
its sophistication and pervasiveness” (2011: 30).
Technological innovation clearly gave an edge to humans over animals
and increased their chances of survival. However, this theory of adaptation
48 Ratan T. Mohunta
through constant innovation can be challenged with the idea that change
happens only when it is inevitable. Kahn quotes Elizabeth Thomas, who
suggests that “‘change for its own sake is undesirable, experiments are
risky, and life is tenuous enough without departing from what is known
to be helpful and safe’” (Thomas 2006; qtd. in Kahn 2011: 33). Kahn
adopts an ambiguous stand on technology, admitting, to a great extent,
its advantages but nostalgically declaring that “with almost all
technologies we not only gain but lose” (33). Like Western scholars of
Ecocriticism who attempt a symbolic turn to nature, having experienced
exhaustion in a world of technological rat race, Kahn suggests that
technology strikingly diminishes “the richness and variety of the human-
nature interaction patterns” (33). It is true that humans are now more
technologically determined than ever before; Homo sapiens have indeed
come too far to make an ontological return to nature.
Since there is no running away from realities of the contemporary,
technological world we inhabit, understanding its contingencies would
perhaps give one a better perspective. In the introduction to his book
Digital Culture, Charlie Gere suggests that a new digital age was
inaugurated by computer scientists in America after World War II. In its
early years when computer memory space was less, “programmers used
abbreviations as much as possible” (Gere 2002: 10). “Years” were
encoded in only two digits, so 1935 became only 35, and the year 2000
problem became “the Y2K bug”. The myth of a complete crash of
operating systems that would lead to Armageddon as the world entered
the third Christian millennium was exposed when nothing really
happened. “Beliefs of apocalypse” faded the moment people, both
conservatives and liberals, realized that stocks on Wall Street did not
really fall. Nevertheless, the abbreviation Y2K proved a different point
that “the love of abbreviation, which caused all the problems in the first
place, was now a part of computer culture” (2002: 12). Almost all forms
of mass media, television, film, or recorded music which determine mass
or popular culture today are converging with the internet and video games
to “produce a seamless digital mediascape” (Gere 2002: 14). Alongside
this development, governments, factories, supermarkets, warfare, and a
host of other major and minor power structures are managed with the
aid of digital data technologies.
3. TRANSITION TO THE DIGITAL AGE
The transition to the age of digital cultures is accompanied by a more

crucial transition to political power networks. The digitization of every
sphere of human activity, such as insurance, social services, utilities,
real estate, leisure and travel, credit arrangements, employment,
education, law, and so on, has changed the cultural and political landscape
of all societies across the globe. Gere rightly argues that the “convergence
and integration” (2002: 14) of culture and politics with digital technology
produces “a kind of fast-forward effect” (14). Things begin to change at
an alarming pace, creating conflicting emotions of “euphoria and terror”
(15). Such reaction has nothing to do with the “shocking pace at which
things happen” (15). On the contrary, it is only a symptom of the mind’s
inability to register any set of events comprehensively when compressed
in time. In their constant quest for innovation, digital technologies render
earlier modes of human transactions and negotiations completely
redundant. Gere rightly argues that these events of historical change
therefore throw “extraordinary challenges to the preconceptions through
which our existence is negotiated” (15). He cites the examples of “the
annihilation of physical distance and the dissolution of material reality
by virtual or telecommunication technologies” (15). Demonetization
announced by the Indian Prime Minister on 8 November 2016 is a good
example of dematerialization of currency. Digitization of capital was
one of the intended goals of such an exercise. When money transcends
its material form in paper or in metal, it assumes a new reality that exists
only in spirit. In a strange twist of irony, digital technology is here to
prove Marx right: “all that is solid melts into air.”
Dramatic changes induced by technology work as political shock therapy
to populations generally unaware of the structures of political economy.
They jerk them out of their complacency and throw existential questions
in their face. In the midst of all the confusion created by cultures of
capitalism, technological advancement in cybernetics and robotics are
trying to inaugurate a so-called new posthuman age. Interventions of
digital technology in everyday life have, no doubt, created a new digital
culture. Gere admits that the two are interrelated, but suggests that “digital
technology is a product of digital culture, rather than vice versa” (Gere
50 Ratan T. Mohunta
2002: 17). He tries to establish a delicate difference with Gilles Deleuze,

who maintained that “‘the machine is always social before it is technical’”
(Gere 2002: 17). Not allowing the technical to be absorbed easily into
the social, he forces a historical analysis of the social circumstances that
gave birth to digital culture. He rightly points out that the specific form
of contemporary digital culture we are witness to is “a historically
contingent phenomenon, the various components of which first emerge
as a response to the exigencies of modern capitalism” (18). These
components were brought together by exigencies of the Second World
War and the Cold War when early computational techniques and
information technology assisted military operations.
One cannot but acknowledge the disruptive force of digital culture and
technology. In the last chapter entitled “Digital Culture in the Twenty-
first century”, Gere presents a stunning account of how art, urban
architecture, religion, and postmodern methods of terror warfare all merge
to form kitsch. He refers to an exhibition opened by the artist “Wolfgang
Staehle on 6 September 2001” at “the Postmasters Gallery” (2002: 207)
in New York. Staehle, a recognized “pioneer of art involving the internet”,
had founded a bulletin board called “THE THING” (207) in 1991, which
had then become an influential forum “for the discussion of new media
art and theory” (Gere 2002: 207). At the postmasters’, he put on show a
unique practice he had developed over the years of projecting “high
resolution digital images” that came from “a real-time live feed, refreshed
every few seconds” (207) on to the gallery walls.
For this occasion he chose three such real-time images; “one of the
Fernsehturm, the distinctive and recognizable television tower in Berlin;
one of Comburg, a monastery near Stuttgart; and a view of Lower
Manhattan from a camera positioned in Brooklyn” (Gere 2002: 208).
Gere suggests that these images, “seen in normal circumstances” (2002:
208), bring a sense of stillness “despite being more or less live” (208).
At the same time, they bring into question “the difference between live
and still imagery, and the broader issues of time and representation”
(208). Gere states that “the stillness was shattered” (208) five days later
when the twin towers of the World Trade Center were reduced to nothing
in a most extraordinary fashion. Staehle did not particularly appreciate
“the fame or even notoriety” (208) the terror event brought to his exhibit.
However, as Gere remarks, it helped articulate an important connection
“between the real-time technology used by Staehle and the context in
which the attacks took place and were received” (208).
4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISE:

BREAKING FREE FROM CARTESIAN DUALISM
We come back therefore, to the same question of where to place the

human in a complex world that has blurred the difference between the
real and the virtual. Is it really possible to extricate the human from this
complex montage of historical events, art, architecture, religion, terror,
metaphysics, and technology? Is being human now, only an act of
contingency? Timothy K. Casey, in “Nature, Technology, and the
Emergence of Cybernetic Humanity”, cautions us that “the problem of
the natural and our relation to it is far from settled” (Casey 2005: 35),
though humans claim that they are on the verge of permanently altering
the human genome. Theologians and moral philosophers would detest
such an enterprise and consider it the final chapter in the “Western
subjugation of nature for human ends” (Casey 2005: 35). Casey, however,
contends that genetic engineering and the “prospect of constructing our
bodies” (35) raises fundamental questions about our humanness and our
place “in the larger scheme of things” that we cannot ignore so easily. It
is indeed a challenge to our understanding of nature. In order to get a
clear perspective, one would require some effort and a conscious
distancing from the ever-changing flux of events which “only history
can provide” (35). Casey traces the root of the problem to “assumptions
about the human and the natural” that are part of a long tradition that
goes back to the “early modern quarrel with Aristotle and his
anthropomorphic conception of nature” (2005: 36). He locates the history
of the quarrel in “medieval industrial life” and in the failure of Cartesian
dualism to “rescue human freedom” from “metaphysical determinism”
(36). Descartes and others quite rightly “discerned in Galilean science”
(36) the power to liberate humans from the metaphysics of Aristotle, but
failed to invert the duality of mind and matter.
52 Ratan T. Mohunta
To substantiate his point on what Derrida would prefer to call “the

metaphysics of presence”, Casey uses the arguments of Marx and
Heidegger. He regards them as two seminal thinkers who stand out in
direct opposition to “the Western philosophical bias against productive
praxis” (2005: 36). He states that they were able to “twist free of
Cartesianism and its false choice between a wordless idealism and a
physicalism inhospitable to human autonomy and spontaneity” (2005:
36). At a historical juncture where humans have entered the “ultimate
technological frontier” where they themselves become “material to be
shaped and reinvented through feedback mechanisms” (36), the deeper
affinities that existed between Marx and Heidegger have become clearer.
Tracing the origin of technological growth in Europe to mediaeval
Christianity, Casey quotes extensively from the work of Lynn White Jr.
to suggest that European creativity in engineering was partly because of
its close integration with the “ideology and ethical patterns of Latin
Christianity” (White 1978; qtd. in Casey 2005: 38). He argues that at the
core of this ideology was the idea of an architect-engineer-God who
commanded humans to “subdue nature and ‘complete’ the original
creation” (White 1978; qtd. in Casey 2005: 38). The religious sanction
given to greater mechanization placed humans in a pivotal role next to
God himself. Out of these theological underpinnings grew a positive
conviction about “the dignity and spiritual value of labor” (White 1978;
qtd. in Casey 2005: 38) that was initially manifested in monastic life.
Casey argues that “The great technological innovations” of the 15th and
16th centuries, grew out of the “medieval mechanical tradition” (White
1978; qtd. in Casey 2005: 38).
Casey rightly traces the epistemological breaks between Galileo,
Descartes, David Hume, and Kant to suggest that “we can and do know
the world, not in spite of, but precisely because we are deeply implicated
in the creation of its causal structure and of the language of mathematics
through which it is expressed” (Casey 2005: 43). He argues firmly that
the logical consequence of this epistemology is what confronts us today:
“the technological creation of a new or second nature” (44). Aristotle’s
physics, that saw everything in the world as moving “toward its proper
place” by way of actualizing “its ontological possibilities” (2005: 44),
was dismissed by modern Newtonian physics that exposed such
assumptions by positing “ontologically neutral forces of gravity and

inertia” (Casey 2005: 44). Newton used these concepts to explain all
cosmological phenomena and even terrestrial movement. In the new
scheme of things, places are only points on a grid always in relation to
each other. The idea of being in neutral space with no reference to what
Newton believed was “the sensorium of God” (Casey 2005: 44) created
a senselessness of being. The invisible power of Technology instills a
new fear of the cosmos as the “march of disenchantment” (44), prompted
by modern science, casts humans “into a vast homogeneous space” (44).
As long as humans imagined the whole of objective reality as a huge
cosmic home to which they legitimately belonged, they could feel secure
about themselves and find stable meanings for their being in the universe.
However, with the “technological rearrangement of the natural order”
(Casey 2005: 45), humans become homeless spectators who mutely watch
the collapse of “Aristotle’s finite universe” (2005: 45). Casey rightly
points out that traditional cosmologies always discussed the human
condition and established a place for humans in essentialist terms or in
the language of philosophy. The present-day postmodern humans,
however, are “haunted by a Cartesian metaphysics” that disconnects them
from the world (2005: 45) and makes them feel homeless beyond nature,
although they “exercise immense power over it” (2005: 45). He argues
that modernity, with its emphasis on “detachment and objectivity” (45),
helped establish a power relation between humans and nature. The logical
corollary to this relation would be the realization that any attempt to
reconnect oneself to the objective world on any other terms would be
“pure sentimentality and nostalgia” (45). Casey sentimentalizes the
romantic longing to reconnect to nature by reminding us of the etymology
of the word “nostalgia”, which, derived from Greek, means “return to
one’s home or country” (45).
5. CONCLUSION:
THE COMMON SEARCH OF HEIDEGGER AND MARX
It is in this context of a longing for homecoming that Marx and Heidegger

stand together as strange companions to reject Cartesian dualism. The
54 Ratan T. Mohunta
rational animal of ancient idealists who Descartes transformed into the

“disembodied consciousness” was one who imagined the world as
completely detached from material activities of labour. For Marx,
however, humans differentiate themselves from other species by their
ability to make and use tools. For him, the species essence of humans
was always “technological in character” (Casey 2005: 46). Casey
recognizes the relevance of Marx to our understanding of “animal
laborans” (2005: 46): the idea that humans are basically labouring animals
that use tools to produce and reproduce their modes of existence. Even
in the alienating mode of capitalist, industrial production, the “species
essence” of humans continues to be “technological in character” (2005:
46). Marx’s belief that work itself is the “satisfaction of our species
essence” (Casey 2005: 47) has its origin in the “revaluation labor in
medieval monastic life” (47). However, he radically altered this Christian
idea by “dropping its theological justification” (47), and limiting it to
the human sphere. In his view, the true expression of the human essence
is found in the economic sphere. However, since this expression is robbed
of its essence by capital, Marx insists on the socialization of capital
which would reverse the cycle to recover the essence. For Marx, therefore,
socialism is one way of recovering the human from the digitized “homo
economicus” of the technological world.
Casey uses a point made by Heidegger in an essay entitled “The Question
Concerning Technology,” to suggest that technology cannot merely be
“an instrument subject to human control” (2005: 50). He argues against
“the instrumental conception” that perceives tools and technological
processes as “neutral tools” (2005: 50) whose virtue lies in the hands
and minds of its users. According to him, technology is inherently “a
historically conditioned mode of revealing or truth” (50). Modern
technology however, reveals itself as different from its earlier form by
challenging nature to “yield its energy sources to be stored for later human
use” (50). By putting unreasonable demands on nature, humans transform
all natural energy to what “Heidegger calls Bestand – a stock or standing
reserve of energy resources’ (Casey 2005: 51). Influenced heavily by
Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power, Heidegger, views mechanization
as the ultimate power humans exert over nature. Casey modifies
Heidegger’s proposition to suggest that the nature of this mastery “cannot
merely be equated with mechanization and mass production” (Casey

2005: 51). On the other hand, it must be found in the kind of mass-
produced beings that “possess no inherent ontological standing apart
from human consumption and production” (51).
The ideas of Marx and Heidegger converge on the economic determinism
of humans as “producers and consumers”. However, the latter diverges
from Marx by insisting that the “mode of revealing in modern technology
eludes human comprehension and control” (Casey 2005: 51). Humans
appear to be under the spell of technology. Heidegger names this
“Gestell”, which is nothing but the “essence of modern technology”
(Casey 2005: 51). It does not lend itself to any instrumental analysis as
attempted by Marx; rather, it indicates that being in a technological age
means to be able to calculate scientifically and control technically. The
technological human, by attempting to gain absolute control over nature,
alienates himself even more as he erases all difference between himself
and nature. As if resisting these humanizing efforts, nature appears to
hide itself in a “mode of revealing” (2005: 52). It appears to conceal
itself from “human making and knowing” (52). Casey argues that this
character of nature called “physis,” in Heideggerian terms, refers to the
capacity of nature to “bring itself forth from out of itself in ways that
remain ultimately impenetrable to Western science and technology”
(2005: 52). Casey suggests that modern technology has “an air of hubris
about it” (52); a tendency to push both humans and nature beyond possible
limits of sustenance. Marx dreamt of a possible liberation of humans
through technology but Heidegger, much like Nietzsche, tried to sound
a note of caution about the limits of human control.
To disregard human limits and surrender one’s will to the instrumentality
of technology, is to deny nature its role in determining human life. At
the same time, to deny technology its rightful place in the natural history
of the world would be to cherish antediluvian thoughts about going back
in time to the Paleolithic age. Pledging our faith in the unlimited
possibilities of genomics and robotics raises ethical questions that take
us back to anthropocentrism. Marx and Heidegger belong to the German
philosophical tradition that allows them to ask questions of Dasein by
placing humans in a historical continuum of change. While the latter
56 Ratan T. Mohunta
raises ethical questions concerning the nature of technology, Marx, with

his immense faith in the power of humans to alter history, calls for
socialization of technology. Both of them were deeply concerned about
how human societies were shaping up under the influence of technology.
Whenever technology grows threateningly powerful, the question of the
“human” becomes more relevant. If Darwinian science tells us about a
million-year journey of life, technological revolution, with its brief history
of less than three hundred years, seems to centre humans dangerously
close to extinction. The philosophical questions that technology throws
at us today are entirely different from those encountered by Marx,
Heidegger, and Nietzsche in an earlier age.
In the last chapter of Casey’s book, Langdon Winner shares the scepticism
of many twentieth-century philosophers that the quest of humans to
dominate nature is “likely to backfire” (Winner 2005: 385). He refers to
the works of two authors he considers very important for assessment.
The first reference is to the French sociologist and theologian Jacques
Ellul, who, in the last chapter of The Technological Society (1965),
expresses his concern over the shape of things to come. The new
technological world has autonomously evolved in such a way that man
has lost “‘all contact with his natural framework with nature’” (Ellul
1965; qtd. in Winner 2005). In his view, the new order was supposed to
work “‘as a buffer between man and nature’” (Winner 2005: 385).
Autonomous science, developing independently with total disregard for
history, might lead humanity to an unfortunate fate designed by nature.
Ellul believes that a technicist approach to nature will only call for a
“‘complete reconstitution’” (Ellul 1965; qtd. in Winner 2005) of the
human being so that he becomes “‘the objective and (also the total object)
of techniques’” (Ellul 1965; qtd. in Winner 2005).
Winner’s second reference is to Lewis Mumford’s book The Myth of the
Machine: The Pentagon of Power (1970). He uses the argument of
Mumford to suggest that several centuries of human effort in various
scientific and industrial projects has helped create what he calls “‘The
Mega Machine’” (Mumford 1970; qtd. in Winner 2005:). In his view,
the mindless acceleration towards a more technocratic society will only
“anticipate the future trajectory” (Winner 2005: 386) of a system that
gave humans the taste of space mission along with the horrific experience
of Hiroshima. Winner rightly suggests that the “nightmare of
philosophers” is now widely embraced by scientists as a “fascinating,
plausible, desirable, and perhaps even necessary project in biotechnology
and information technology” (2005: 386). Humans are no longer reluctant
to abolish the word “human” from “human being”. As new terminologies
of “posthuman”, “metahuman”, and so on, begin to circulate among
scientists and philosophers, transcending the “human” is not regarded
anymore as “a distasteful possibility, much less a manifestation of evil”
(Winner 2005: 386).
REFERENCES
Baudrillard, J. 2001. Simulacra and simulations. In M. Poster (Ed.), Jean

Baudrillard: Selected writings (pp. 169-187). Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Boddice, R. 2011. Introduction: The end of anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism
(pp. 1-21) Leiden: Brill.
Bulliet W, R. 2005. Hunters, herders and hamburgers: The past and future of
human-animal relationships. New York: Columbia University Press.
Casey K, T. 2005. Nature, technology, and the emergence of cybernetic humanity.
In H. W. Baillie and T. K. Casey (Eds.), Is human nature obsolete?:
Genetics, bioengineering, and the future of the human condition (pp.
35-67). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Derrida, J., & Wills, D. 2002. The animal that therefore I am. Critical Inquiry
28.2, 36-418.
Gere, C. 2002. Digital culture. London: Reaktion Books.
Kahn, Jr., H. P. 2011. Technological nature: Adaptation and the future of human
life. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Sax, B. 2011. What is this quintessence of dust?: The concept of the ‘human’
and its origins. In Rob Boddice (Ed.), Anthropocentrism (pp. 21-37).
Leiden: Brill.
Steiner, G. 2011. Toward a non-anthropocentric cosmopolitanism. In Rob Bodice
(Ed.), Anthropocentrism (pp. 81-117). Leiden: Brill.
58 Ratan T. Mohunta
Winner, L. 2005. Resistance is futile: The posthuman condition and its advocates.
In H. W.
Baillie and T. K. Casey (Eds.), Is human nature obsolete?: Genetics,
bioengineering, and the future of the human condition (pp. 385-413).
Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Ratan T. Mohunta is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of

English at St Aloysius College (Autonomous), Mangaluru, Karnataka. He has
been teaching for more than twenty-five years. His Doctoral Thesis is entitled
“The Theory of the Postmodern: A Dialectical Study of the Notion of the Death
of Society”. He has published research articles extensively on diverse topics
and presented numerous papers at national seminars. His areas of interest include
Marxist literary theory, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, modernism,
postmodernism, identity politics, and migration. He has produced two modules
on the historical background of the twentieth century and one on the poetry of
Hardy and G. M. Hopkins. These are available on MHRD’s online portal called
E-PG Paathshaala. He has been recently recognized as a PhD research guide by
Mangalore University.
Ratan T Mohunta
ratanmohunta@gmail.com
59
SANGEETHA PUTHIYEDATH
SIGNIFICATION OF SPECULAR SURFACES IN

MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE EDIBLE WOMAN
and SURFACING
ABSTRACT: Margaret Atwood’s early novels, The Edible Woman and Surfacing, deal
with a young protagonist caught in a moment of crisis that fundamentally challenges her
identity, precipitating a crisis in selfhood, forcing her to anatomize her subjectivity. In
these novels, Atwood deftly employs the image of the protagonist reflected on a specular
surface as an objective correlative to tease out multiple significations involved in such a
crisis and the consequent rupture and alienation that the character undergoes. Atwood’s
use of reflected image is examined from the vantage of popular and religious beliefs
regarding mirrors and specular surfaces. The experience of one’s self as subjectively
tormented and objectively defined and judged triggers strikingly different responses in
Marian and in the unnamed narrator in Surfacing. This article explores both the distinctive
and shared aspects in their response to such an inner crisis: what it reveals about their
interiority, their self-reflexivity, and the prognosis for their future.
KEYWORDS: specular surface, identity, image, mirror, interiority, reflexivity, gender
0. INTRODUCTION
The construction of identity and the manner in which society strives to

exert control and impose agency over one’s identity is a recurring theme
in Margaret Atwood. Although written over a period of almost forty
years, her novels tend to repeatedly revisit the question of identity
formation. Though the question of one’s identity has been an issue since
the Enlightenment, it acquired an unprecedented urgency in the twentieth
century. The issue became politicized, and the struggle has been to
understand the different ways in which identities are socially valued,
interrogated, and replicated. Extending this concern to the question of
control over female subjectivity and female bodies, Atwood tries to
unmask the myriad ways in which society attempts to appropriate and
control the narrative of identity formation. She is perceptive enough to

60 Sangeetha Puthiyedath
acknowledge the complex manner in which such a process unfolds and

resists the temptation to locate its impetus within a single overarching
narrative such as patriarchy. This is particularly true with regard to
Atwood’s protagonists in The Edible Woman and Surfacing. These two
novels have widely different themes, yet, they do share certain critical
features, motifs and concerns. These texts centre around a young female
protagonist caught in a moment of crisis that fundamentally challenges
her identity. They chronicle events that precipitate the crisis and the
protagonist’s struggle to come to terms with it. The challenge is often
from within, but reinforced from without. I propose to show how this
insider/outsider conundrum is captured in the metaphor of an image
reflected on a specular surface. I will also explore the implications
inherent in the image of a woman watching her own reflection, its
symbolic value, and significantly, what it reveals about her self-
reflexivity.
Atwood’s female protagonists like Marian McAlpin in The Edible Woman
and the unnamed narrator in Surfacing are not ‘victims’ in the
conventional sense. Nor are they positioned in opposition to oppressive
male characters who attempt to control them. They are presented as
intelligent, independent, women who compromises their independence,
for certain material or emotional “gains”. Marian is a woman who has a
promising career with a marketing research company, and the narrator
in Surfacing is an artist who does illustrations for a publishing company.
The other female characters also initially appear to be empowered.
However, as the story unfolds, these women find themselves in a double
bind. On the one hand, they experience a strong urge to assert their identity
and proclaim their equality by taking their rightful place in society
alongside men; on the other hand, they feel crippled by society and
societal expectations that severely restrict the role of women. The women
themselves appear to lack clarity. In fact, they often collude with their
male counterparts and willingly script their narrative of subjugation (of
themselves) and oppression (of other women). Patriarchal society appears
to have appropriated their subjectivity and they function as an extension
of the male order, actively reinforcing it in the process. This is evident in
some form or the other in the various protagonists of Atwood’s fiction.
None of them can legitimately claim mere victimhood—they are
Signification of specular surfaces... 61
definitely victims, but also oppressors. However, making women

compromise their autonomy should be read within the larger context of
patriarchy and in women’s desire to be accepted within a dominant
heterosexual framework.
1. REFLECTION & REFLEXIVITY IN THE EDIBLE WOMAN
Atwood employs the reflection of the individual’s image on a specular

surface as an objective correlative to indicate the loss of identity or the
absence of a separate independent identity. I use the term “specular
surfaces” (from Latin speculâris) because the reflection is often viewed
not in a mirror, but on a shiny surface. The reflection of the protagonist
in the novel portends a split—a rupture in the character’s construction
of her selfhood and identity. Atwood uses the metaphor of specular
surfaces at crucial junctures in the narratives to mark a departure, or
change in the configuration of the protagonist’s interiority. For instance,
in The Edible Woman, Marian sees herself reflected in her lover’s eyes
soon after she accepts his proposal: “A tremendous electric blue flash,
very near, illuminated the inside of the car. As we stared at each other in
that brief light I could see myself, small and oval, mirrored in his eyes”
(Atwood 1986: 83). For Marian, this portends a significant shift. From
that point on, her identity becomes conflated with that of Peter. Atwood
appears to indicate that Marian’s acceptance of Peter’s proposal has
cataclysmic implications as far as her interiority and autonomy are
concerned. Atwood has carefully built up this premise by introducing
the reader to Marian’s married friend Clara who is suffocating under the
burden of her domesticity so much so that she has ceased to be a person
in her own right and exists as a colonized space in the thrall of her children,
already born or waiting to be born.
Peter’s proposal of marriage to Marian is marked as significant by
Atwood, and is accompanied literally with thunder and lightning. As
she watches herself “small and oval, mirrored in his eyes” (Atwood 1986:
83), she is unaware that the moment marks the end of her life as she has
lived it, up to that moment. Atwood leaves the reader in no doubt about
Marian’s loss of independence once she is engaged. In fact, the reader
does not hear her say “yes” to the proposal of marriage (Atwood 1986:
83) because her acceptance also marks her complete loss of voice. As
Sharon Rose Wilson pertinently observes, “In The Edible Woman, Marian
is symbolically mouthless. Resembling the expressionistic figure in
Edvard Munch’s The Scream (Boston Museum of Fine Arts) as well as
the Bride in “The Robber Bridegroom”, Marian closes her ears to her
distress and is passive while we feel the effect of her mad world. We
never hear her say “yes” to her engagement” (Wilson 1993: 84).
Marian’s engagement marks a departure for her selfhood. By accepting
Peter’s proposal, Marian appears to accept the rigid frames imposed by
society and abjures her claim to a separate identity. This is symbolically
presented as her image reflected in Peter’s eyes. Showing Marian’s loss
of identity through this reflection, Atwood appears to draw upon a whole
tradition that exists in both religious and literary texts regarding the
phenomenon of reflection. Mirrors or specular surfaces derive their
symbolic importance from the ancient belief that persons or objects are
magically linked to their reflections. In European iconography, the
significance of mirrors is ambiguous. It is often connected with self-
understanding and reflexivity, but it also has negative connotations: “On
the one hand, they appear in the hands of the deadly sirens of antiquity,
or of Luxuria, the personification of lust and vanity; on the other hand,
they are also attributes of the virtues of self-knowledge” (Biedermann
1992: 223).
Viewing one’s reflection has also been traditionally associated with self-
knowledge and understanding. The reflection of the person viewed by
himself effects a distanciation between the observer and the observed,
thus freeing the mind for impartial observation of the self, which is
thought to result in better self-understanding. The Greek philosopher
Plato was emphasizing this aspect when he observed that a mirror, “by
producing an immaterial form … invites the mind to free itself from
what is perceived by the senses and to ascend to the world of ideas”.
Commenting on the innate ability of an image to focus on the essential
and the significant, he observes: “[a]lthough itself devoid of reality, a
reflection provides access to the thing it signifies. It is not an optical
illusion but a revelation of something hidden, an apparition rather than
an appearance” (Melchior-Bonnet 2005: 6063). Significantly, both

Eastern and Western sacred texts also link mirrors with self-knowledge.
Atwood critically and playfully inverses the concept of image associated
with self-understanding. For her, a person’s image captured on a specular
surface seems to indicate a rupture and an alienation from the self. The
protagonist’s absolute lack of understanding of her ‘self’ is underscored
through an image projected on a surface that she views as an outsider.
This resonates with the pre-Christian belief that a mirror can capture
your soul. Commenting on some of the beliefs associated with the mirror,
Melchior-Bonnet (2005) observes:
In ancient Greece … looking at one’s reflection or seeing it
in a dream could lead to death or be a premonition of death.
An old European tradition requires that mirrors in the house
of someone who has died be covered, to prevent them from
absorbing the soul and forcing the deceased to remain on
Earth. The fear of having one’s portrait painted or photograph
taken, widespread all over the world, stems from the same
concern: the soul represented by its image may be imprisoned
by a stranger and subjected to evil spells. (6064)
The association of a mirror with death is quite complex. In some societies,
a reflection in the mirror provided a means to cheat death. This assumption
can be traced to the belief in the existence of a double: “This mysterious
spiritual double, as close as possible to the bodily self, was a
representation of the idea of the soul and offered the possibility that one
could deny death by splitting in two. Yet whereas the double guaranteed
immortality and implied fertility, it also continually reminded a human
being of the end; it was the spectre of repressed death” (Melchior-Bonnet
2005: 6064). Explaining the horror invoked by a dream of a mirror in
some societies, Aeppli says that such dreams are considered as omens of
death: “Some part of us is missing because in a mirror we stand outside
ourselves. This brings about a primal feeling that our soul has been taken
from us. Those who gaze at themselves in a mirror for a long period of
time become transfixed and feel impaired. ... Some people cannot bear
to look at themselves in a mirror. Some few, like the Narcissus of myth,
‘lose themselves’ when they gaze at their image in the water”
(Biedermann 1992: 223).
Once we see Marian reflected in Peter’s eyes, she appears to undergo a

spectacular transformation, a kind of death of her previous self. She not
only loses her voice but also her sense of agency. She appears to be as
startled as the reader by this change in herself. “I heard a soft flannelly
voice I barely recognized, saying, ‘I’d rather have you decide that. I’d
rather leave the big decisions up to you’” (Atwood 1986: 90), replies
Marian to Peter’s query about the date of their marriage. From that point
on, it appears as though there is a reversal in relationship between the
real and the reflection. Marian appears to have shrunk into a two
dimensional reflection of herself. This loss of substance is emphasised
by her loss of narrative voice. Once she agrees to get married, Marian
loses the privileged position of the first-person narrator and becomes a
mere character in her own tale. Cast in the classic tripartite form of crisis,
climax, and dénouement, The Edible Woman marks the shifting position
of Marian vis-à-vis her own subjectivity through the shifts in the narrative
voice. Once Marian gets engaged, her first-person narrative in past tense
is replaced with first person narrative in present tense, just as the active
self is replaced by a passive self—one that leaves all important decisions
to Peter.
The relationship between power, language, and identity is seminal in
The Edible Woman. Becoming symbolically mouthless, Marian enters
an “infans period” and starts unconsciously enacting a role that leaves
her bewildered and confused. Lacan’s famous rejoinder to Freud that
“the unconscious is structured like a language” holds a key to Marian’s
breakdown of language. Interestingly, Lacan uses the phrase “infans
period” to describe a child in the mirror stage. David Hall, explicating
Lacan, says, “Sometimes used literally and other times metaphorically
by Lacan, the concept of the “mirror stage” points to the continuing
human desire for self-sufficiency and agency that is always dialectically
bound with, and undercut by, feelings of powerlessness and
fragmentation” (2004: 80). The very image reflected in the mirror, which
promotes a feeling of cohesion and identity, is at odds with the perception
of the body, which the child experiences as fragmentary. Language, which
is used to bridge this contradiction, will engender only frustration. To
comprehend this, one ought to explore Lacan’s distinction between the
“ideal ego” and the “ego ideal”. While in the “ideal ego”, the subject
watches his own reflected image, which appears as bounded, whole,

and complete, at odds with his own fragmented reality, in the “ego ideal”
the subject imaginatively transports himself to the reflected image and
watches himself from that vantage. This can precipitate a significant
devaluation in the subject and his life might suddenly appear repulsive,
vain, and useless. Lacan associates the former with the imaginary order,
and the latter with the symbolic order. With her acceptance of Peter’s
proposal, Marian effectively forsakes the imaginary order for the
symbolic one and hence her breakdown of language and her alienation
from her body.
Marian’s recognition of her predetermined role, however partial, occurs
during her engagement party at Peter’s house. Meekly following Peter’s
suggestion, she goes to Peter’s house after refashioning herself in the
image he has of her, but is shocked into acknowledging its absolute
betrayal to herself by Duncan’s blunt question: “Who the hell are you
supposed to be?” (Atwood 1986: 239). Answering such a question
involves acknowledging the extent to which Marian had allowed others,
especially Peter, to mould her subjectivity. A flustered Marian is hardly
in a position to correctly appraise the situation. Instead, she attempts to
flee the question by running away and engaging in a sexual encounter
with Duncan. Returning from this highly unsatisfactory encounter, her
questions unanswered and re-echoing in her mind, Marian bakes a cake
shaped like a woman and offers it to her friends. Marian’s attempt at
exorcising the body that defines her subjectivity is a desperate attempt
to escape her double bind. Her friends do not hear the silent cry embodied
in the attempt. Peter is shaken and disgusted when Marian offers the
cake to him and leaves abruptly without touching it. Ainsley is similarly
disconcerted when she is offered the cake. She accuses Marian that by
eating it she is rejecting her femininity. Significantly, this section which
chronicles Marian’s escalating eating disorder and her second flight from
Peter is presented in third person—a voice—which we have to assume
is Marian’s.
The objectification of the feminine subject, to which many feminist
theorists of subjectivity have drawn our attention to, finds an objective
correlative in the woman-shaped cake. However, Atwood presents it as
a charged symbol that defies easy interpretation. It is not Peter who eats
the cake but Marian who plunges “her fork into the carcass, neatly
severing the body from the head” (Atwood 1986: 273). This line, which
foregrounds the underlying cannibalistic imagery involved in the woman-
shaped cake, complicates the identification of Peter and Marian as the
perpetrator and victim. Instead we are left with the problematic possibility
that both aspects are contained within Marian just as Peter simultaneously
occupies the position of the victimizer and the victim. Marian does not
realize her complicity in her predicament. Ignoring her interiority, she
searches for extraneous reasons and momentarily convinces herself that
Duncan will help her escape. However, Duncan, to whom she appeals
for a way out, insists that she finds her own path, “Don’t ask me, that’s
your problem”, perceptively remarking, “it ought to be obvious ... that
I’m the last person to ask” (Atwood 1986: 263-264). Marian’s lonely
return from the depths of the ravine from “absolute zero” back into the
world of “giant expressway” and “familiar bridge with subway cars
moving on it” (Atwood 1986: 265), despite its overtones of Demeter-
Persephone myth, does not involve the possibility of renewal and rebirth.
The novel ends by problematizing Marian’s dilemma but refuses to hold
out any possibility of self-redemption. Marian fails to read herself and
persists in interpreting her actions within the rhetoric held out by society.
Her refusal to confront her terrifying inability to eat, or her identification
with the objects that are consumed, spoils the possibility of understanding
her dilemma and rewriting her own subjectivity. Instead, by objectifying
her problem as Peter, she trivializes the issue and buries it. Marian’s
reluctance in questioning her motives or her refusal to enter into a
discussion about the reasons behind her actions are symptomatic.
Marian is a woman who lives by the strict edicts of what is acceptable to
society. However, strangely enough, when Marian indulges in bizarre
behaviour like crying in the bar, or running away from Peter, or hiding
under the bed in Len’s apartment, she never pauses to examine what
motivated her into behaving in that manner. This refusal to question her
motives or even to acknowledge a problem is the key to her interiority.
Marian’s interiority is a space that is unexplored. It is merely the sheer
force of circumstances that compels her to encounter it. The difficulty
with Marian is that in her attempt to conform she suppresses her deepest
emotions. Later, when these emotions compel her to act in what she
considers an irrational manner, she can hardly comprehend the force
behind the action or locate it within the larger context of predicaments
faced by women. Marian’s refusal to acknowledge her situation as being
symptomatic of women and her obstinate refusal to see the larger picture
denies her the possibility of redemption. Thus, at the end of the story, we
see a Marian who has come full circle without any substantial take-
away from her experience. The Edible Woman does not end with a sense
of Marian having achieved something. Atwood herself has drawn
attention to the absence of closure for Marian: “The Edible Woman is a
circle” (Sandler 1977: 14). Marian’s desire for self-sufficiency and agency
is undermined, repeatedly, by feelings of powerlessness and
fragmentation. However, the real tragedy is that Marian needs a Duncan
to point it out to her.
2. SYMBOLIC DEATH AND REBIRTH
Surfacing, Atwood’s second novel, takes the question of agency over

one’s subjectivity to an altogether different level. While Marian is, to an
extent, a willing collaborator in her own subjugation by the society, as is
evidenced by her internalization of the patriarchal ideology that attempts
to fix the female body, the unnamed narrator in Surfacing is a passive
witness who allows the feminine body to be appropriated and encoded
through an unquestioning acquiescence to societal norms. Surfacing
chronicles her attempt to go back to her roots in a desperate attempt to
deterge and depurate herself, and to do that she needs to travel back to
her origins. It begins as a reluctantly undertaken journey back to her
parental home located on an isolated island in the middle of a reservoir
with her partner and another couple. However, it turns out to be a symbolic
journey that helps reclaim her past as well as her selfhood. Written as a
travel narrative, it maps a symbolic death, a descent into an elemental
pre-linguistic world and an emergence from the chrysalis—a renewal or
rebirth.
The opening sentence, ‘I can't believe I’m on this road again’, announces
the journey motif and the beginning of the quest. “The narrator starts off
in the diseased southern city and travels north to the wilderness and to
health”, observes Catherine Sheldrick Ross in “Nancy Drew as Shaman:
Atwood’s Surfacing”. Like the dying white birches and the southern
city, which she has purportedly come from, the narrator is sick from
within. It takes a while for the narrator and the reader to recognize this
fact, and with the recognition, the healing process begins. However, to
recognize the rot within, is in itself, a huge challenge and in the beginning,
the narrator actively resists the deconstructive potential of such
knowledge. The travel motif prepares the reader for the narrator’s journey
into a metaphorical interior. The very absence of a name for the
protagonist is denotative, as it holds a clue to the lack of ownership that
she experiences about herself. Raised in semi-seclusion, pulled by the
contradictory impulses of a father who swore by logic and reason, and a
silent mother whose links to the natural world was her biggest strength,
the narrator is unsure where to locate herself. Her inability to
communicate with her neighbours because she cannot speak French is
indicative of her larger inability to communicate, and foreshadows her
later loss of voice.
The setting of the novel, a remote and isolated island, plays a seminal
role in determining the trajectory of the narrative. The inscape of the
narrator is projected on to the boundary-less horizon of the island
surrounded by the waters of the reservoir where the blue sky merges
with the blue water. The landscape where the boundaries remain
amorphous and shifting is an apt symbol for the selfhood of the narrator.
When the narrator first returns to the island, her selfhood, as she
experiences it and as the reader experiences it through her words, is an
amorphous entity that lacks clear boundaries and a definite identity. This
impinges on the reader most forcefully when she encounters the shifting
reality of the narrative. The story that is narrated is repeatedly undermined
by a later version, leaving the reader without an authoritative account of
events. The sole access the reader has to truth is through the multiple
versions that the narrator chooses to communicate, and there is no
possibility of accessing another narrative voice, a cross-reference, or a
different perspective.
The location with its emphasis on purity (albeit facing an imminent threat
through human intervention) is in keeping with the structure of a quest
narrative. The place holds within it the possibility of rejuvenescence. To
metaphorically enter that world, the narrator has to prove herself worthy
of it, and she does so by peeling off layers of lies and subterfuge that she
had acquired to survive in the world of men. Her narrative marks her
transformation, and gives the reader an indication of her perilous journey
to the brink of insanity, and back. However, to reclaim agency over
herself, the narrator has to lay to rest the many ghosts of her past and to
deconstruct the walls she has positioned between truth and the narrative
which she has constructed. In the beginning, the language employed by
the narrator weaves a web of lies that catches not only the unwary reader
but also herself in its deceitful loops. The most determinative subterfuge
that she practices is on herself. The protagonist’s distance from reality
can be measured by the numerous lies that she tells the reader about
herself, which presumably she believes as well. “I sent my parents a
postcard after the wedding, they must have mentioned it to Paul; that,
but not the divorce” (Atwood 2009: 24), she says about her past. Later,
the reader understands that there was no marriage or divorce, only a
brief affair with a married man. The reader is also informed that she has
a child who is living with the father after the divorce. It turns out to be a
tragic projection of wish fulfilment on her part because the reader later
learns that the narrator had to undergo an abortion at the insistence of
her lover and that the child was never born. The reader’s inability to
access truth is an extension of the narrator’s own struggle with truth,
which she has hidden under layers of narratives, and should be read as
an attempt to insulate herself from the pain of reality. The obvious ruptures
and contradictions that ensue are papered over by facile explanations
that challenge logic. The narrator’s increasingly difficult attempts, to
ignore the slippages and breakages in her narrative are further challenged
when she moves into a space that has no cultural scaffolding and
boundaries. The island and the forest encircled by water ensure a space
and time beyond the confines of routine living. They function as a giant
specular surface that reflects her life back to her in all its stark reality.
Healing, for the narrator, begins with her acceptance of her past. In order
to do this, she has to come to terms with both her parents. She has to
search not only for her missing father, but also for her metaphorically
missing mother. “In Surfacing, the narrator must come to accept her
relationship with the maternal that she has wilfully repressed; she must
relinquish her socialised fear of the feminine and the natural, and learn
to embrace them instead”, argues Fiona Tolan, adding that “this process
requires the resurfacing of her memories of her mother, which results in
a re-examination of her mother’s power” (2007: 50-51). The mother of
the narrator is presented as a woman with strong bonds to nature and its
rhythms. She is a nurturing presence, holding within her, life-giving
potential. The narrator, as an unborn baby had shared her mother’s life-
affirmative force which she acknowledges, when she recounts her
mother’s ability to bring her son back to life: “She leaned over and reached
down and grabbed him by the hair, hauled him up and poured the water
out of him” (Atwood 2009: 91). She also remembers how her mother
protected her family by frightening away the wild animals with “arms
upraised as though she was flying, and the bear terrified” (Atwood 2009:
99). Tolan recognizes that the narrator attributes “a witch-like potency”
to her mother who brought back her son from death. In this, she is unlike
her daughter, whose complicity in the death of her unborn child creates
a self-loathing, which prevents her from being open to her mother, even
as she lay dying, cut off from nature, enclosed in an antiseptic hospital
room with no windows. In this context, the narrator’s later rejection of
civilization, and its trappings, can be seen as a desperate attempt to
reconnect with her mother, and everything that she stood for.
The absent father, the font of reason, the scientist who had an explanation
for everything, is a counterpoint to the intuitive mother. The narrator is
as vague about his whereabouts as she is about his identity. For instance,
she is not sure whether he worked for the government or a paper company.
The only fact that she knows for sure is that he is missing. When her
search for him leads her to his sketches, she is quickly convinced that he
has lost his mind and considers the possibility that he must be wandering
in the forest, insane. Surprisingly, she also thinks that he might pose a
physical threat to her friends. When she comes across the letter from Dr
Robin M. Grove thanking her father for his sketches and photographs,
she is forced to acknowledge that far from being mad her father was
actually documenting ancient pictographs. This discovery eventually
leads her to the discovery of her father’s death: “It was there but it wasn’t
a painting, it wasn’t on the rock. It was below me, drifting towards me
from the furthest level where there was no life, a dark oval trailing limbs.
It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open, it was something I knew
about, a dead thing, it was dead” (Atwood 2009: 182).
The shock of suddenly coming across her father’s drowned body forces
the narrator to experience a metaphorical death, wherein she descends
into a state of nonexistence. The narrator rejects the company of her
friends and retreats into a world of wilderness, where she consciously
rejects all stamp of civilization from her body. She rejects the tinned
food that had provided their sustenance so far and even goes so far as to
discard her clothes and destroy them. Remarking on the creative aspect
of the week-long sojourn of the narrator on the island, Heidi Slettendahl
Macpherson (2010) observes: “These seven days are metaphorically
significant, in that the narrator’s world isn’t created, but essentially
dismantled” (31). Going back to the origins, she feels that she is created
anew, but for a rebirth; she needs to metaphorically purge the grime that
she has accumulated over the years and has to purify herself. As C. S.
Ross observes, “The narrator of Surfacing follows this ritual pattern of
the descent into a watery underworld and the return, as she puts it, ‘with
secrets.’ … The narrator … dives down into even more water in a
shamanistic ritual of descent and return. She is searching for what she
calls “the power”. “For this gift, as for all gifts, [she] must suffer”
(Ross1980: 9). She ritualistically burns all traces of her past, her drawings,
the Quebec Folk tales, her photographs, her father’s sketches, his books;
smashes the cutlery and plates and rips open her clothes, blankets and
jackets. She discards her clothes and shoes and allows the warm rain to
wash and purify her. “Not until she can break down the distorting barriers
between self and the other, or until she can leave the island to immerse
herself in the water, can she hope to establish a new complete self”,
observes Sherrill Grace (1980: 103-4). Grace pertinently points out:
“Water is important as the entrance to redemption and as the medium of
metamorphosis, but it is finally only water, quiet like the trees, non-
human, insufficient, ‘asking and giving nothing,’ and the resolution that
the narrator is searching for has to emerge from within” (104).
Being in a state of extreme communion with nature, the narrator feels

she could connect once again with her dead mother and her dead father,
a bond that had been severed along with the abortion of her child. In this
state of expiation, she feels that all her past sins are forgiven, and she
feels renewed and ready for a new birth: “I can feel my lost child surfacing
within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has been prisoned
for so long, its eyes and teeth phosphorescent; the two halves clasp,
interlocking like fingers, it buds, it sends out fronds” (Atwood 2009:
209). The narrator has found a way to heal the rupture within her, and in
this, she is helped both by her father and her mother. Grace observes:
“Her father’s gift is the truth of her abortion discovered when she sees
his body ... her mother’s gift is organic and contextual, a picture of the
baby in its mother’s womb” (1980: 103). The narrator cannot be complete
until she is reconciled with her past, rediscovered both her parents and
recognized their signification in the context of her life.
The narrator’s unquestioning acceptance of society, had made her partakes
of the divisive way in which people live their lives by cutting themselves
off from the environment, from other people, from the past, from their
culture, even from their own bodies, and in a fundamental way from
“themselves”. She realizes the destructive potential of such living, not
merely to oneself, but to the environment as well as all the beings that
inhabit it. This realization brings with it an encompassing compassion
that allows her to accept not only the island and the forest with all its
living creatures, but more significantly allows her to comprehend that
living involves not merely a giving up of society and a return to nature,
but a return to society with the wisdom gleaned from nature. This
understanding is the gift of the land she receives when she allows herself
to become one with it:
Not until she can break down the distorting barriers between
self and the other, or until she can leave the island to immerse
herself in the water, can she hope to establish a new complete
self. What the narrator in Surfacing has rediscovered is the
context for herself and the destructiveness of opposites. She
is prepared to start loving, talking, trusting, establishing an
extensive context that will include others. (Grace 1980: 107)
Once the narrator accepts that her place is not amongst the trees of the
jungle but in society, she is ready to go back. So when Joe comes alone
to find her at the end of the novel, although she hides from him, she is
ready for him and acknowledges his significance in the scheme of things:
“what is important is that he’s here, a mediator, an ambassador, offering
me something: captivity in any of the forms, a new freedom?” (Atwood
2009: 250) Her newfound wisdom is evident when she asserts that she
needs to carry with her the knowledge gained from her retreat: “This
above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing.
I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless and because
of it nothing I can do will ever hurt anyone” (Atwood 2009: 249).
3. CONCLUSION
The encounter with her interiority is made possible for the narrator
through the specular surface provided by the lake. It takes the narrator
on a perilous journey that pushes her into the frontier of sanity and
insanity, but she emerges triumphant, her quest successful, her ruptured
self, rendered whole once again. The novel, while remaining provisionally
open-ended in keeping with the Atwoodian tradition, ends with the strong
suggestion of a new beginning and a new birth. Compared to Marian in
The Edible Woman, the mysterious narrator of Surfacing remains elusive
till the end, and as Grace (1980) points out, “[i]n a disconcerting sense
we cannot say that we know this character with whom we share intense
experiences; the voice, though clear, comes from a distance” (98). We
never learn her name or anything about her appearance. The narrative
voice in Surfacing is also remarkable for its complete lack of emotion.
Although the narrator records the journey and their sojourn in the island
in great detail, she refuses to share her feelings or her emotional reactions
even while undergoing traumatic experiences like the discovery of her
father ’s drowned body. Surfacing has been described as an
epistemological and religious quest as well as a psychological and social
one. Quest for an inner self, with its mythic overtones is a solitary journey,
and everything—the landscape, her fellow travellers, her journey towards
realization—is mediated through the narrator’s consciousness. The other
characters occupy a peripheral space, and the focus is unrelentingly on

the inner landscape of the narrator.
The protagonists in both The Edible Woman and Surfacing lead a life
that is totally devoid of self-reflexivity. They do not probe into the
impulses behind their actions, nor do they analyze their thoughts or
behaviour. In other words, their knowledge of themselves is severely
restricted by the unthinking manner in which they lead their lives. It is in
this context that we should examine the significance of specular surfaces.
The introduction of the protagonists’ reflected image, at a crucial juncture,
appears to force a shift in their perspective, by holding a mirror to their
inner reality. The protagonists’ refusal to acknowledge this reality, and
its suppression, create conflicts, which manifests as outer conflicts. These
conflicts cannot be resolved unless the character recognizes it as a product
of an inner turmoil and takes steps to resolve it. The specular surfaces
and the image reflected on them, function as catalysts that force the
protagonist to pause and to relook at or reflect on her life. How these
characters respond appears to depend upon their spiritual readiness. While
the unnamed narrator in Surfacing is successful in unconditionally
looking at her past life, accepting it, and moving forward to a holistic
life based on self-reflexivity and acceptance of herself, Marian, in The
Edible Woman, is unable to either examine her actions or understand
herself. Surfacing remains open-ended in keeping with the Atwoodian
tradition, but it ends with the strong suggestion of a new beginning and
a new birth. Acknowledging this, Atwood observes, “Surfacing is a spiral”
(Atwood, qtd. in Sandler 1977).
1
The mirror is a powerful symbol. It is considered as an instrument of knowledge and of
self-reflection, speculation, even hallucination. Because it reflects an image of the self,
that the eye is unable to see directly, to reveal an unseen “other”, religions have made
the mirror central to the mystical life and knowledge of self.
2
According to Saint Paul (1 Cor. 13: 12), the knowledge that mankind has of God here
on Earth is like an image “seen through a glass darkly”: the mirror gives no more than an
indirect image of the Truth. At the end of time, however, humans will see the vision of
God not through the intervening reflection, but clearly, face to face. Teresa of Ávila
describes this union in the mirror: “My entire soul appeared before me like a clear mirror,
back, top and bottom, everything was lit up. In the center appeared Jesus Christ”
(Autobiography, ch. 49). Islamic mysticism, inspired by Neoplatonism, has not ignored
the reflection, that likeness by which individual essence sees itself as part of the divine
being. According to a famous hadith, the more the reflective surface of the soul is purified
by asceticism, the more it will be fit to reproduce the truth faithfully, so that the believer
actually becomes a mirror for another believer. Buddhism has made “mirror knowledge”
one of the four stages of the path of Awakening, along with three other kinds of knowledge:
of equality, of clear-sightedness, and of the task to be completed. The mirror is used
metaphorically in the Mahayana literature to suggest that Reality contains everything in
the same way that a mirror contains images (Melchior-Bonnet 2005).
3
Water is an enigmatic symbol having both positive and negative associations. In many
traditions (Egyptian, Indian, Semitic) it is associated with myths of origin. Water also
symbolizes purification, renewal, and rebirth. It is often, also linked with destruction as
in the tale of Noah. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the ocean itself is represented as an adversary
of Yahweh. At times beneficent and at others maleficent, close to the principles of life
and to creative power but nonetheless capable of destruction, a relative of gods and
monsters, water bears within it all the ambiguities of the sacred (Rudhardt 2005).
4
The adjective “reflexive” is frequently confused and used interchangeably with its near
synonym, “reflective”. In its present usage, “reflection does not possess the self-referential
and second-level characteristics of reflexivity. ... A related confusion occurs with the
term self- consciousness, which denotes primary awareness of self rather than the
consciousness of self-consciousness characteristic of reflexivity – what Fichte described
as the ‘ability to raise oneself above oneself’”. Reflexivity involves what Maurice
Natanson defines as “methodological solipsism”, that is, the examination of all experience
from the perspective of the self-aware ego, in contrast to “metaphysical solipsism”,
which claims that the individual is the sole reality (Babcock 1974: 241-243).
REFERENCES
Atwood, M. 1986. The edible woman. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart.

Atwood, M. 2009. Surfacing. London: Virago.
Babcock, B. A. 2005. Reflexivity. In Lindsay Jones (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of
religion (pp. 7647-7651). 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale.
Biedermann, H. 1992. Dictionary of symbols: Cultural icons and the meanings
behind them. Trans. James Hulbert. New York: Facts on File.
Bouson, B. J. 1993. Brutal choreographies: Oppositional strategies and
narrative design in the novels of Margaret Atwood. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press.
Davies, Madeleine. 2006. Margaret Atwood’s female bodies. In C. A. Howells
(Ed.), The Cambridge companion to Margaret Atwood (pp. 58-71).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grace, S.1980. Violent duality: A study of Margaret Atwood. Montreal: Vehicule

Press.
Hall, D. E. 2004. Subjectivity. New York: Routledge.
Macpherson, H. S. 2010. Cambridge introduction to Margaret Atwood.
McCombs, J., and Palmer, C. L. (Eds.). 1991. Margaret Atwood: A reference
guide. Boston: G. K. Hall.
Melchior-Bonnet, S. 2005. Mirror. Trans. Paul Ellis. In Lindsay Jones (Ed.),
Encyclopaedia of Religion (pp. 6063-6065). 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson
Gale.
Meyers, D. T. 2002. Gender in the mirror: Cultural imagery and women’s agency.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Palumbo, A. M. 2009. On the border: Margaret Atwood’s novels. In Harold
Bloom (Ed.), Bloom’s modern critical views: Margaret Atwood (pp. 21-
34). New York: Infobase.
Ross, C. S. 1980. Nancy Drew as shaman: Atwood’s Surfacing. Canadian
Literature 84, 7-17.
Rudhardt, J. 2005. Water. In Lindsay Jones (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion
(pp. 9697-9709). 2nd ed. Detroit: Thomson Gale.
Sandler, L. 1977. Interview with Margaret Atwood. The Malahat Review 41,
165-74.
Schaub, D. 2000. “I am a place”: Internalised landscape and female subjectivity
in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing. In Danielle Schaub (Ed.), Mapping
Canadian cultural space: Essays on Canadian literature. Jerusalem: The
Hebrew University Magnes Press.
Tolan, F. 2007. Margaret Atwood: Feminism and fiction. New York: Rodopi.
Wilson, S. R. 1993. Atwood’s fairy-tale sexual politics. Mississippi: University
Press of Mississippi.
Sangeetha Puthiyedath is an Assistant Professor with the English and Foreign

Languages University, Hyderabad. She has an MA in English Language and
Literature from Calicut University and an MA in Political Science from Madras
University. For her MPhil Dissertation, she did an Ecofeminist study of Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness (Central University, Pondicherry). Her PhD Thesis was on
Interiority and the Dialogic elements in the novels of Margaret Atwood. She
has presented a number of papers both in India and outside India. Her interests
include Religion and rituals, Identity politics, Gender studies, and Ecocriticism.
She has published articles on Ecocriticism and Gender Studies. Currently she is
working on a collection of short stories from the Upanishads.
Sangeetha Puthiyedath
sangeetha@efluniversity.ac.in
78
79
ABHISHEK CHATTERJEE
ANXIETY OF THE LENS:
SILENT CINEMA AND AMERICAN NEOMODERNIST POETRY
ABSTRACT: American Neomodernist poetry, exemplified by the works of the quartet

of Marianne Moore, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Hilda Doolittle, broke
from the classicism of Paleomodernists, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, to locate, in
the advent of cinema, a radical potential for a ‘new renaissance’ spirit. Their poetry was
markedly inspired by the silent cinema as they also actively engaged with the medium,
with Marianne Moore writing about Naturalist cinema in the influential film magazine
Close Up, and Hilda Doolittle producing and acting in the silent film Borderline. This
article argues that fascination with the cinema among the American Neomodernists was
limited to the aesthetics of the silent film era, and marked by an overarching fear of
Ekphrasis, which is the synthesis of various art forms. This Ekphrastic fear was
exacerbated by the advent of the Talkie era, with the amalgamation of diegetic sound
with the moving image. Through the analysis of selected cinematic poems such as Moore’s
“The Fish”, Stein’s “If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”, Williams’s “Right
of Way”, and Modernist experiments with cinema such as Un Chien Andalou and
Borderline, the article interrogates Modernist poetry’s engagement with early cinema
and Modernism’s failed attempts to curtail the populist and propagandist trends in cinema
to suit their own aesthetics ideals.
KEYWORDS: ekphrasis, modernist poetry, cinema, neomodernism, interart, cine-poetry,

surrealism, talkies
0. INTRODUCTION
The Modernist turn in the arts at the beginning of the twentieth century
coincided with the early development of the silent cinema. The film
form, as it evolved into the Talkie era, combined the aesthetics of music,
painting, and drama that before its advent existed as near monolithic
entities. No art form before cinema had so successfully managed this
Ekphrasis, which is the synthesis of different art forms. The Western
aesthetic tradition has historically been marked, especially in the case of
German Romantic Idealism, by an ‘Ekphrastic fear’ of ‘interart’
interactions. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, in Laocoön: An Essay on the

80 Abhishek Chatterjee
Limits of Poetry and Painting, famously argued against such synthesis.

This article will explore the manner in which Modernist poets, especially
certain poets associated with Neomodernism (as opposed to the
Paleomodernism 1of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, which was more
concerned with rewriting the past) were enthused by the advent of the
silent cinema and went on to reject the later Ekphrastic turn in the medium
that in its nascent stage had influenced their own work. Through the
analysis of texts by four major American Neomodernist poets, Marianne
Moore, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, and Hilda Doolittle,
the article examines the manner in which they were influenced by the
silent cinema.
I argue that, while these Neomodernist poets viewed the advent and
evolution of the silent cinema, with awe and hope for the Modernist zeal
for the unorthodox, they were disillusioned with the emergence of the
Talkie era. The article traces this disillusionment to cinema’s shift in
mimetic basis from painting to narrative, and from its initial promise of
being a site of radical experiments in representation, to its metamorphosis
into a tool of political propaganda and mass culture. My thesis holds
that this was symptomatic of the fear of Ekphrasis, as the Talkie era
represented an amalgamation of various art forms, which reduced the
‘essence’ of individual forms, to spectacles for the popular appetite.
Experiments with the camera and vision in the late nineteenth-century
showed that the human retina retains an image of what flashes before
our eyes for a second, before it disappears in what came to be known as
the ‘persistence of vision’. From the first films by Lumière brothers to
the end of 1920s, cinema was mostly ‘silent’, with only non-diegetic
sounds; for example, an orchestra in the background. The Talkie era
began in 1927 with The Jazz Singer, and sound became an integral part
of the image.
1. MARIANNE MOORE’S “THE FISH” AS A ‘SILENT CINE-POEM’
Marianne Moore’s poetry bears the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s theory

and practice of the montage. An enthusiast of nature films and animal
documentaries, Moore contributed an article on Naturalist Cinema
Anxiety of the lens 81
entitled “Fiction and Nature”, in the influential film magazine Close

Up. Her ‘animal poems’ such as “The Fish” and “The Jerboa” are
representative of the cinematic influence.
To illustrate my thesis, I analyze “The Fish” as a ‘silent cine-poem’, and
a cinematic picture of marine life. Naturalist cinema sought to represent
nature within a frame, but its aspirations to objectivity was limited to the
frame, thereby highlighting the impossibility of objective representation.
The aesthetics of silent cinema, thus, was consistent with the aims of
Modernist poets. In Moore’s poem, the fish wade through the aquatic
atmosphere, much like the movement in the poem itself, and she describes
the atmosphere underwater in minute detail by focusing on the movement
of a school.
Each stanza, constructed in the syllabic metre, looks like a fish, in the
tradition of concrete poetry that is explicitly visual in nature. The
typographical elements in the poem stand out against the words that
uncover the microcosmic violence of the sea (“bespattered”, “marks of
abuse”, “burns, and hatchet strokes”, and so on). The spatial juxtaposition
is suggestive of the poem as fish moving through a sea of words. Moore’s
poem, much like a painting, brings forth stills of marine life, in a manner
that quite anticipates underwater photography. The fish are not described;
instead the perspective operates like a camera attached to the fish, giving
the reader a montage of shots depicting underwater life. As the school
travels, there are vivid images of the fish moving through “black jade of
the crow-blue mussel-shells”, and the shells are depicted opening and
shutting, while the barnacles are represented in a play of light and shadow.
Though Moore describes colours and shapes, there is no mention of
sound. The sea is turquoise, the crabs are like green-lilies, and the
toadstools look like submarines; however, the sea in Moore’s poem is
absolutely silent. As in “The Jerboa”, Moore emphasizes the
interdependence and independence of the creatures living underwater. It
is a picture of harmony without sound. The poem is illustrative of
Moore’s, and in general the Neomodernist poets’, resistance to Ekphrasis
that threatened to mix sound and image.
2. SYNESTHESIA IN GERTRUDE STEIN’S PORTRAIT OF PICASSO
Figure 1: Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein (1905-1906)

Gertrude Stein saw in cinema a dual ability to focus and fragment attention
through shots in a continuous barrage of images, and her poetry was
significantly influenced by the bodily semiotics of the early silent films
of Charles Chaplin that saw the actor perform bodily and facial
contortions to portray humour on screen. In 1905, the Modernist painter
Pablo Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein that depicted her face
like a mask, with an ambiguous physical resemblance to the subject’s
face. Stein was deeply moved by the portrait and felt it to be an authentic
reproduction. Picasso’s portrait of Stein is representative of his ‘Rose
Period’, and marked the beginning of his experiments with Primitivism.
The texture of the painting is so solid that it looks like a sculpture. In his
sittings for the painting with Stein, Picasso felt that he could not capture
the ‘essence’ of her face to his satisfaction. This was an artistic frustration
that stemmed from competition from the camera, with its claims to
objective representation, leading Picasso to eventually make the portrait
in Stein’s absence with Primitivistic techniques, using his study of African
masks for inspiration.
Gertrude Stein wrote “If I told him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” in
1923 in response to Picasso’s portrait of her. Written almost two decades
later, the poem is an attempt to represent Picasso as a man and an artist.
The images in the poem come in flashes, consistent with Stein’s appraisal
of cinema (the form of cinema before the Modernists became disillusioned
with it) as a medium that constantly focuses and fragments attention.
The poem is marked by a tension which is a result of competition between
the poet and the camera. The opening line, “Would he like it if I told
him”, is an anxious question for a painter and a poet in the age of
mechanical reproduction that could capture the likeness of the world in
an instant. The repetition of the words ‘exact’ and ‘exactitude’ stems
from this anxiety to compete with the camera to capture the ‘pure’ essence
of the subject. Stein compares the artist’s eye to the shutter of the camera,
using alliteration in a series of spluttered lines: “Shutters shut and open
so do queens. Shutters shut and shutters and so shutters shut and shutters
and so and so shutters and so shutters shut and so shutters shut and
shutters and so. And so shutters shut and so and also. And also and so
and so and also” (Lehman 2006: 14-15).
The mechanical shutter is compared to a vaginal site of reproduction
that attempts to create an “exact resemblance”. The shutter opens and
closes, with the promise of delivery every single time, while the human
mind struggles to reproduce what it sees. The poem is marked by a
constant tension of representing ‘exactness’ in the ‘present’, and grapples
with the question of how time can be frozen into a portrait when the
subject is a transient entity. Each shot is a depiction of the ‘exact’ present
of the subject, and with the portrait, Stein attempts to link a series of
present moments of the subject in succession in suspended time. Once
again, sound has no place in this scheme of things, for diegetic sound
would bind the shots on a timescale, thereby defeating the radical
representational potential that Modernist poets saw in cinema.
However, the feelings that the images stimulate within the reader creates
a synesthetic experience of sound in the mind, much as how the motor
automatism of Chaplin’s early silent films sought to elicit laughter from
the audience. Sound here is non-diegetic just as the instrumental music
in the background of silent films. Representation thus evokes sound from
the consciousness of the reader in repetition and alliteration: “He he he
he and he and he and and he and he and he and and as and as he and as he
and he. He is and as he is, and as he is and he is, he is and as he and he
and as he is and he and he and and he and he” (Lehman 2006: 43-44).
Every shot of the subject stimulates feelings in the reader, and here the
visual effect is designed to generate hysterical laughter. Stein’s “If I told
him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso” is thus a cine-poem that exists in
a complicated relation to the cinema of its time, one that demonstrates a

powerful resistance to Ekphrasis, and is illustrative of how Modernist
poets and artists attempted to channelize their anxiety produced by the
advent of cinema by engaging with it so that they could rein in the medium
to suit their own needs.
3. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AND

SURREALIST SILENT CINEMA
William Carlos Williams was deeply influenced by the work of Cubist

painter Juan Gris, and believed that “the artist must be his own spectator”
(McCabe 93). Williams’s collection of poetry, Spring and All (1923)—a
hybrid collection of both poetry and prose—bears similarities to surrealist
cinema. I will compare his Poem XI in Spring and All, entitled “Right of
Way” with the silent surrealist film Un Chien Andalou [The Andalusian
Dog], released in1929.
Williams’s poem “Right of Way” begins with an identified speaker and
observer who proclaims that he is passing with ‘nothing’ on his mind
except the security of his “right of way” provided by the law. In essence,
the speaker is asserting that he is a ‘good subject’ of the State, who in
turn enjoys protection from the State. The “right of way” has been
naturalized in the mind of this travelling subject. The poem begins with
an establishing shot of the moving subject with reference to a road. As
the speaker describes his ‘looking’ at an elderly man, who in turn smiles
and looks away “to the north, past a house” (9), the frame of representation
of the poem moves in a specific direction like the panning of a movie
camera. From the speaker, the poem cuts to a shot of the old man looking
north, and from here the poem moves to the object of the old man’s
gaze: “a woman in blue/ who was laughing/ and leaning forward to look
up/ into the man’s/ half averted face” (10-15). The poem then ventures
into a complicated realm of abstraction where we see all three levels of
attentiveness: the poet’s (the director’s) own attentiveness to the text,
the protagonist’s (the speaker’s) attentiveness to the subjects of his gaze,
and the subjects’ attentiveness to each other. Then the poem shifts
perspective abruptly to a physically lower plane. The focus is suddenly
on an eight-year-old boy, and this shot cuts to his act of looking at the
middle of a man’s belly. It is revealed that the object of the boy’s gaze is
a watch-chain. From here, the poem cuts to a long shot of the speaker’s
own ruminations of his ‘optical unconscious’.
The reader is finally ‘shown’ that the speaker is seeing the things that he
has described in the poem from the inside of a vehicle moving at
considerable speed along a wet road. The speaker says that he moves on
until he sees “a girl with one leg/over the rail of a balcony” (27-28). The
poem ends with this ambiguous image. Williams’s poem operates by
equating the view from inside of a fast moving car to a film, where an
image is constantly replaced by another. Looking out from a moving
vehicle is here equated with the act of viewing a motion picture, and as
the poem progresses, Williams increases the pace of the poem with swift
cuts until it reaches a point of blur, a veritable bokeh. The poem
exemplifies the Neomodernist poets’ fascination with silent cinema and
its potential of representing experience. In this extremely cinematic poem,
sound is conspicuously absent. The vehicle, especially considering the
noisy cars of the 1920s, makes no sound. Nobody says anything. There
is laughter, but it is represented visually. Sound is irrelevant in this
experimental cine-poem.
A similar creative disorientation is also seen in Un Chien Andalou [An
Andalusian Dog], jointly directed by the Surrealist filmmaker Louis
Bunuel, and the painter Salvador Dali. This silent film has a ‘plot’ driven
by Freudian free association, and unfolds like a dream to the soundtrack
of an orchestra, the most prominent of which are Richard Wagner’s
“Liebestod” and Vicente Alvarez & Carlos Otero et son orchestre’s
Argentinian Tangos. The film begins with a title card: “Once Upon a
Time”, which is a traditional opening of a narrative, but from the second
scene, the film begins to consciously shock its viewers. We see a man,
played by Bunuel himself, sharpening a razor in diagonal strokes, after
which he goes on to test the sharpness of the blade on his own thumb.
The film then cuts to the face of a woman, with her eyes fixed on the
camera. In a sequence of parallel cuts, we see a hand slice the woman’s
left eye with the razor and a follow-up shot of a cloud bisecting the
moon in the night sky. Watching Un Chien Andalou gives the viewer a
sense of looking out of a fast-moving car into an unfamiliar landscape.

The film, like Williams’s poem, operates at different levels of
attentiveness. We are looking at a film, whose events are mostly depicted
from the gaze of its two main characters: a man and a woman. In a
striking scene, we see the couple looking out of their balcony at a woman
standing on the street below, prodding a severed hand with a stick, as
people on the road form a circle to look at her. A policeman arrives and
puts the severed hand in a box and hands over the box to the woman.
The woman, wearing an expression of mysterious sadness, holds the
box to her chest; and then very abruptly gets run over by a passing car,
as the couple voyeuristically ‘enjoy’ the scene from the balcony.
4. HILDA DOOLITTLE’S BORDERLINE AND

THE ‘MODERNIST DA VINCI’
Hilda Doolittle’s avant-garde aesthetics concerns itself with slashed and

torn bodies in her attempts to depict hysteria in her poetry and on screen.
She wrote an article in the influential film magazine Close Up on a film
she contributed to making, and acted in, called Borderline (1932), made
by the Pool Group, comprising Hilda Doolittle, Kenneth Macpherson,
and Annie Winifred Ellerman. Considering its time, it could have been
easily been made as a Talkie, but Doolittle and Macpherson chose to
make a silent film. Other than Borderline, no other film made by the
Pool group survives, and the film itself was presumed to be lost after
World War II before being rediscovered in 1983. Doolittle’s poetry often
attempts to reinterpret and reverse political myths, such as her poem
Leda. In silent cinema, Hilda Doolittle saw a potential to reverse myths
(McCabe138) and Borderline in direct opposition to the most popular
and blatantly racist silent film of the time, D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a
Nation, by radically taking on issues of race and sexuality.
Filmed using avant-garde techniques influenced by Eisenstein’s theory
of montage, the film begins with a liberal white couple taking a black
couple as their tenants in a town dominated by xenophobic white people.
Amid this racial tension, Adah, the black woman has an extramarital
affair with Thorne, a white man—a source of great trauma to Adah’s
husband, Pete, and Throne’s wife Astrid, who is represented as a hysteric.

Pete tries to reconcile with Adah and fails. Adah walks out of the marriage
and leaves the town. This extramarital, inter-racial affair is an opportunity
for the racial hatred of the general white population to surface.
Meanwhile, Astrid, during a fit of hysteria on seeing her husband
preparing to leave her, attacks Thorne. She cuts his face with a knife,
and in the ensuing scuffle dies. It is not clear if Thorne kills her by
accident or whether she dies of natural causes. Thorne is charged for her
murder, but is acquitted later. The entry of the black couple in the town
is seen as the larger cause of the death of a white woman and the
breakdown of a white marriage. Fuelled by the townsfolk’s hatred of
Pete—because of his race and his wife’s illicit inter-racial affair—the
Mayor orders Pete to leave town. More than the narrative, the aesthetic
significance of Borderline is in the manner of its making. Hilda Doolittle
herself plays Astrid, the hysteric. The film constantly shows images of
slashed and torn bodies. The cuts are very fast, with extensive use of
light and shadow. The director uses a combination of the Soviet method
of ‘clatter montage’, which is marked by a very fast juxtaposition of
frames to create an effect of images being superimposed upon each other,
and G. W. Pabst’s mode of German psychological realism (Deming 2009).
Hilda Doolittle writes in an essay in Close Up that everything about the
film, including its characters is ‘borderline’. She observes that Astrid
and Thorne “are borderline social cases, not out of life, not in life; the
woman is a sensitive neurotic, the man, a handsome, degenerate
dipsomaniac” (Doolittle 1998: 221). Doolittle points out that Pete and
Adah dwell on a racial borderline since “they are black people among
white people” (Doolittle 1998: 221). The gestures of the actors are greatly
exaggerated. The frame often focuses on exclusive body parts of the
actors like their hair, fingers, and shoes. The camera gives a lot of attention
and space for different facial expressions; all greatly exaggerated to depict
different psychological states of the characters. The film radically stands
against racial intolerance, at a time when it was difficult to do so because
most mainstream films would ignore race or simply eulogize white
supremacy like the films of D. W. Griffith. The film frames its black
protagonists in mostly their full forms (as opposed to the depiction of
fragments of white body parts) and against natural backgrounds such as
gardens or in relaxed indoor conditions.
According to Hilda Doolittle, the Scottish director Kenneth Macpherson

is the ideal prototype of the film director for his versatile gifts of painting
and writing. Doolittle ascribes the Renaissance spirit of Leonardo da
Vinci to her vision of virtues of the ‘ideal filmmaker’. Arguing that
cinema in the Talkie era exists as a “a present-day gutter offshoot of the
stage (Doolittle 1998: 255)”, Doolittle observes that the modern era of
specialization is ironically devoid of the ‘greatness’ of the Renaissance
artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer, or the English
pictorial satirist William Hogarth. The Renaissance ideal of da Vinci is
that of a multidisciplinary artist who approaches every discipline with
absolute artistic integrity. Hilda Doolittle argues that cinema cannot be
allowed to change irreversibly to the Talkie form and has to be saved by
a Renaissance spirit “that we may not be ashamed to confess openly we
were ‘thrilled’ about” (Friedberg 229), advocating instrumental music
in montage, and the accompaniment of eastern classical music—such as
allegro, fortissimo, or the piano—as a background non-diegetic sound
with visuals projected on screen.
5. CONCLUSION
The discussion here demonstrates how the camera was both a cause of
fascination and anxiety to Modernist poets, especially in light of Hilda
Doolittle’s belief that the hegemony of the camera has been the “property
of monsters”, in the hands of the racist D. W. Griffith and propagandist
filmmakers such as Leni Riefenstahl. Doolittle asserts that cinema is
also a counter to the sedate populism of mainstream cinema to chart a
new beginning where they could “write our novels and plays in pictures”
(231). Incidentally, Borderline, which got the widest release of all the
Poole films, was a major critical failure, after which Macpherson never
made a film again, and Doolittle, like the other Modernist poets who
were initially enthusiastic about cinema, distanced herself from the
medium. Borderline stands as an epitaph to the Modernist artists’ failed
attempts to rein in the function and nature of cinema. As evidenced in
the course of this article, Modernist poetry’s experiment with cinema
changed the nature of poetry forever. The poets discussed here were all
influenced by silent cinema, and also directly engaged in the medium as
an extension of their poetic aesthetics. Yet all the poets discussed in this
article make use of the visual aspect of early cinema while totally ignoring
the possibility of diegetic sound. The great Modernist engagement with
cinema ended with the irreversible entry of sound in film, which was in
their view, as I hope to have demonstrated, was a form of Ekphrasis that
far from a perfect synthesis reduced the aesthetic integrity of the
individual art forms.
1
Frank Kermode distinguished between the ‘Paleomodernism’ of T. S. Eliot from the
‘Neomodernism’ of mainly American poets such as William Carlos Williams and Gertrude
Stein, who rejected the classicism and elitism of the Paleomodernists.
REFERENCES
Deming, R. Summer 2009. Lost and found: Richard Deming on Kenneth

Macpherson’s monkeys’ moon. Artforum International 47.10.
Donald, J., Friedberg, A. & Marcus, L. 1998. Close up, 1927-1933: Cinema
and modernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Doolittle, H. 1998. Borderline: A pool film with Paul Robeson. Donald, J.,
Friedberg, A. & Marcus, L. (Eds.), Close up, 1927-1933: Cinema and
modernism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, M. W., et al. 2018. The Norton anthology of poetry. London: W. W.
Norton & Company.
Hopkins, D. 2004. Dada and surrealism: A very short introduction. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kalaidjian, W. B. 2005. The Cambridge companion to American modernism.
Kermode, F. 1971. Modern essays. London: Fontana.
Lehman, D. 2006. The Oxford book of American poetry. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
McCabe, S. 2004. Cinematic modernism: Modernist poetry and film. Cambridge:
Picasso, P. 1905-06. Gertrude Stein. www.metmuseum.org/en/art/collection/
search/488221. Accessed on 19 July 2019.
Richardson, M. 2006. Surrealism and cinema. Oxford: Berg.

Roth, C. H. Ekphrasis and memory. Varieties of unreligious experience.
vunex.blogspot.com/2006/08/ekphrasis-and-memory.html. Accessed on
27 November 2011.
Simpson, D. 1988. The origins of modern critical thought: German aesthetic
and literary criticism from Lessing to Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Williams, W. C. 2011. Spring and all. New York: New Directions.
Abhishek Chatterjee teaches English at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore.

He was a PhD student at The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU),
Hyderabad. Affiliated to the Department of Indian and World Literatures, his
research was an enquiry into the philosophy of literary travelling and the Modern
Travel Book. His research interests include issues in Bengali modernity,
transnational identities, memory and urban spaces, and folk revival music.
Abhishek Chatterjee
abhishek.chatterjee.023@gmail.com
91
JIBU MATHEW GEORGE
BY-PRODUCT MAXIMALISM, TEMPLATE

AUTOMATISM, ONTOLOGICAL CRITICISM, AND
A VERSATILITY THEORY OF RELIGIOUS
BELIEF: TOWARDS UNDERSTANDING
RELIGION IN ITS FUNDAMENTALS1
ABSTRACT: In an attempt to demonstrate certain unexplored possibilities in reasoning
about religion, this article proposes an array of methodologically productive concepts
for the study of the phenomenon—by-product maximalism, template-automatism, and
free ontology, to name a few. It also suggests a new hermeneutic towards religion in the
form of an ‘ontological criticism’ of religious texts and doctrines, and, above all, a
versatility theory of God-conceptions, mostly in relation to Max Weber’s celebrated
concept “Disenchantment of the World” (Entzauberung der Welt). This could not only
help us understand religion in its fundamentals but also pave the way for an integrative
re-interpretation of naturalistic and supernaturalistic accounts of the world-process, thus
offering a new perspective on intellectual/cultural history itself.
KEYWORDS: by-product maximalism, template automatism, free ontology, ontological

criticism, versatility, replicative inertia, independent perpetuation, additive irreversibility
0. INTRODUCTION
Whether or not gods are indispensable for religion depends upon how
we define the latter. If we concede that religion is about the supernatural,2
or at least primarily so, gods can indeed be said to be a component of the
religious repertoire. But if we claim that religion is about transcendence,3
and not the supernatural, gods are dispensable for religion. Further, where
gods are an indispensable presence, ideas about them are, more often
than not, assumed rather than articulated. Perhaps, this implicit ideation4
suffices for religion as a set of practices or as a way of life. This is more
pronounced in the case of certain religions than with others. Of course,
religion is not only about ideas but is also an ensemble of practices,

92 Jibu Mathew George
institutions, communities, and ways of life. This article proposes an array

of methodologically productive concepts—by-product maximalism,
template-automatism, and free ontology, to name a few—an ontological
criticism of religious texts and doctrines, and, above all, a versatility
theory of God-conceptions, mostly in relation to Max Weber’s celebrated
concept “Disenchantment of the World”. This could help us understand
religion in its fundamentals. Though the concepts enunciated here might
have relevance for religion in general, the discussion here is set in the
context of Judaeo-Christianity and its Ancient Near Eastern and Greek
Precursors. We shall begin by attempting a redefinition of religion,
especially with regard to its ideational part.
1. REDEFINING RELIGION IN TERMS OF VERSATILITY
A concept that has been in vogue in anthropological studies of religion

is “modularity”. According to the modular theory, religion is
conceptualized not as a single definitional feature but as a composite of
many elements (Eller 2007: 25-26). An example of modularity is Anthony
F. C. Wallace’s “building block approach” to religion. Wallace identified
thirteen observable universal behavioural complexes that provide a
minimal definition of religion (1966: 62-66). These include: prayer
(addressing the supernatural); music (dancing, singing, and playing
instruments); physiological exercise (physical manipulation of one’s
psychological state through, for example, sensory deprivation and
mortification of the flesh); exhortation (addressing another human being);
reciting the code (mythology, morality, and other aspects of the belief
system); simulation (a special type of symbolic manipulation found in
religious ritual); mana (transfer of supernatural power through contact);
taboo (religious proscriptions); feasts; sacrifice (immolation and
offerings); congregation (processions, meetings, and convocations); and
inspiration (recognition of religious experience as the result of divine
intervention in human life).5
If we may extend the anthropological concept of modularity to religious
ideas, in an act of simultaneous elaboration and restriction, we will be
able to redefine ‘supernatural’ religion and belief therein as a unique
By-product maximalism, template automatism, ontological criticism... 93
non-necessary convergence of concerns. I use the adjective non-necessary

advisedly: any given religion or religion at any given point of time need
not contain all of the following elements. Apart from being a world-
explanatory concept, the supernatural is a signifier-agglomerate, that is,
a grand repository of manifold concerns, urges, and aspirations. For
example, supernatural religion caters to what may be called a penchant
for embeddedness—the desire or need to see one’s experience as
meaningful part of a larger framework or ensemble, and the fear of the
left to itself. We may consolidate this versatility in a three-fold rationale
behind religious ideas: scientia (knowledge of the world-order); pragma
(action-orientation and divine intervention or even ‘consolation’); and
questa (transcendence, ecstasy, and aesthetic dimensions).6 If employed
discreetly, this is a methodologically versatile framework that can
subsume several approaches to religion, and can alter the very meaning
of the phenomenon. This versatility is not confined to the rationale but
applies to God-conceptions as well.
2. A CASE FOR THE ONTOLOGICAL CRITICISM OF

RELIGIOUS TEXTS AND DOCTRINES
In an earlier book, The Ontology of Gods: An Account of Enchantment,

Disenchantment, and Re-Enchantment, I had proposed that conceptions
of God across religions could be studied as an ontological continuum
that extends from the natural to the supernatural (George 2017: 33-38).
Available religious and quasi-religious schemata adumbrate a gamut of
meanings for the God-signifier—a continuum of God-conceptions with
varied ontological commitments (implicit in pre-theological religions):
a personal being, a logical necessity (e.g., philosopher’s God), a universal
intelligence, an impersonal cosmic force, an underlying principle, and a
heuristic metaphor for the operative logic of the world-process,7 which
consists of cosmic, historical, and personal trajectories. A conceptually
and existentially successful religion needs to mediate the extremes of
the continuum. The continuum includes intermediate metaphysical
entities and cognitively economical single-entity tropes (e.g.,
Anaximander’s Apeiron and Empedocles’s Phren) for the world-process;
impersonal principles (e.g., Greek logos, in the sense of governing reason

and organizing principle; arché, its antithesis being anankç, errancy and
irrationality; moira/fate, to which even gods are subject; and Egyptian
ma’at/order), some of which are personified, as well as contrapuntal
indications of a supra-theistic order within religion, illustrated by
methodical human actions which ‘obligate’ deities. This tropological/
explanatory continuum is extensible to modern concepts such as Friedrich
Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, whose “outworking” is the progress of both
consciousness and history; and Arthur Schopenhauer’s Will (all striving),
albeit with limited explanatory ambitions, and to notions of necessity
and contingency, implied as early as the Presocratics 8 (Aristotle’s
physikoi, as opposed to the theologoi).9
In the history of religion, movements along the ontological continuum
are held in check by collective, institutional regulation, and religious
dogma represents a historical solidification on the continuum. But owing
to the indeterminate nature of the object—the divine—and the free-
ontological dynamism (explained later) endemic to religious conceptions,
individual subjects and historical epochs can mediate and re-appropriate
received ontologies. Religious-institutional picture of the supernatural
is only the first-order mediation, a second-order reality in itself. Religious
subjects and historical epochs can further mediate the product of this
first-order mediation, subject received ontologies to scrutiny, and re-
appropriate inherited tropologies. Mediatory possibilities open up a
symmetric ontology, wherein the ‘being’ of God/gods lies in the
experientially induced and historically shifting symmetry between ideas
on the one hand, and an epoch, group, or individual subject on the other.
The different religious naturalisms10 cited by Jerome A. Stone (e.g.,
Mordecai Kaplan’s idea of God as the sum total of forces) are the result
of a symmetric ontology—the search for an alternative, experientially
valid signified for the traditional God-signifier. These religious
naturalisms include pantheism, panentheism, panpsychism, monism,
holism, process theology, emergentism, religious humanism, idealism,
integrationism, contextualism, biotheology, naturalistic mysticism,
religiopoetics, operational theism, and Owen Flanagan’s eudaemonistic
scientia, that is, a science of human flourishing (Stone 2008).
Religious/quasi-religious narratives and doctrines are guided by a cause-

warranted quasi-literary free ontology,11 rendered inevitable by the
singular ontological uncertainty/inaccessibility (not the ontological
uncertainty concerning the world-process to which religion is theorized
by reductive accounts as an antidote) and epistemological limitations
pertaining to the supernatural. Entities and concepts herein can be
multiplied (e.g., the first and second Sophia in Gnosticism, the demiurge
in Neoplatonism), and can change in potency and character, as from
inanimate to animate and from human to divine. This add-adjust-amend
ontology, akin to Ptolemy’s addition of epicycles and equants to his
cosmological picture, is discernible in archaic myths and the
transformations of Judaeo-Christian theology (e.g., the kenotic solution
for the problem of Jesus’s humanity/divinity), in both primary (scriptural)
and secondary religious narratives (e.g., hagiographies; and pious fiction,
exemplified by Acts of John, characteristic of early Christianity). Deism
is free ontology in the reverse mode. A similar free-ontological dynamic
is also found in modern theological models, say A. N. Whitehead’s and
Charles Hartshorne’s process theology, with postulations of God’s
“primordial” and “consequent” natures; and William Bernhardt’s
Operational Theism, wherein God is conceived as Dynamic Determinant,
and even in the mediaeval idea of God as “being itself”, encompassing
all reality, guided by logical viability and world-explanatory adequacy.
Here, one also needs to engage the assumed difference between a purely
narrative/formal unontological discourse (a fabula-matrix; not fabulism)
and a discourse with uncompromising ontological claims (an onto-
matrix). From literary studies,12 one can employ the recognition that
narratives can draw into the vortex of their internal dynamics the
distinction between the real and the unreal, and transmute them into
another binary: what is formally or aesthetically efficacious and what is
not. Such an ontological criticism of texts (e.g., The Bible; Enûma Eliš;
Pyramid and Coffin Texts, bases for the Book of Going forth by Day,
popularly called The Book of the Dead; Hesiod’s Theogony; and patristic
as well as scholastic texts) can reveal boundaries between the two matrices
to be porous. Same words and devices (e.g., metaphor, personification,
antonomasia, and allegory) can be used in both. These narratives and
doctrines can become ontologically ambivalent or self-conscious, or even
get de-ontologized, thus diluting their claims. Though purportedly guided

by “logic” (or epistemological convenience), even philosophical concepts
such as “the unmoved mover” and the unviability of “infinite regress”
are a subtype of free ontology, restricted only by historically limited
notions of “possibility”.
The methodological corollary here is an ontological criticism of religious
texts. Ontological criticism is a close analysis of textual/doctrinal
elements to determine the ontological status of entities and events, unravel
the workings of their free ontology, and crossovers between discourses
with uncompromising claims and purely narrative/formal discourses
(fabula-matrix) within them. It also involves an ontology of form that
negotiates between ‘manifest’ and ‘latent’ contents of religious ideas.13
A discerning literary critic can do this efficiently. Are religious metaphors
clarificatory or constitutive? Ontologically speaking, do they compromise
as they clarify? In any case, metaphors abstract selected meanings while
dealing with the ultimate, exclude others, and they become templates,
with minimal changes through history, for all future understanding
thereof.
Blatantly ideological motives embedded in religio-conceptual systems
(e.g., the divinity of rulers and Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten’s exaltation of
Aten above other gods and displacement of Amun in ancient Egypt, a
move opposed by the priests); their pragmatic compromises and
improvisations (e.g., the syncretism—cross-cultural borrowings,
sublations, promotions, demotions, equations, substitutions, and
rejections of deities—of Greek religion); “double (or multiple) nature of
divine identities” (Versnel 2011: 5)14; “commonplace oscillations between
superhuman and human aspects in divine nature” (Versnel 9); multiple
versions of systems; tensions between their local and universal variants;
intra-systemic pluralism and contestations, all imply that the religio-
conceptual systems of the Ancient Near East and Greece did not indicate
an objective order but an expediently negotiable pragmatic construct —
a need-induced, historically-propelled, culturally-driven free ontology.
It should be possible to analyze the implicit premises and ontological
assumptions of these systems, and thereby articulate and connect the
meta-codes that contain these premises and assumptions. Articulating
these ontological meta-codes can reveal a substratum of systemic self-

consciousness as well as ontological dynamism, and possibly, a
naturalistic subtext. Once the meta-codes are laid bare, one could ask:
what then were these religions? A set of practices founded on systemic
unselfconsciousness? Of course, one needs to be conscious of the ground
from which one studies previous ages, and factor in the possibility that
ontological consistency could be a modern expectation, not very relevant
to the functionally pragmatic ancients,15 but also that inconsistency has
different implications for practices and ideas, however implied the
latter is.
3. AN INTEGRATIVE RE-INTERPRETATION OF
NATURALISTIC AND SUPERNATURALISTIC ACCOUNTS
Ontological criticism of religious texts and doctrines could pave the way
for an integrative re-interpretation of naturalistic and supernaturalistic
accounts of the world-process itself. Naturalistic and supernaturalistic
accounts of the world-process, their presumed asymmetry (given the
closed structure of the former—but the paradigm of closed/open
structures itself could be inappropriate for ancient pre-theoretical
religions) notwithstanding, are analyzable as a movement along the
continuum rather than a rupture. Their lateral near-equivalence is
reinforced on praxis side by the view of ritual as technology, and
demonstrated by occupational and therapeutic magic. The fact/value
binary division—the ‘how’ question vs. the ‘why’ question—between
science and religion typifies complementarity. An integrative re-
interpretation of religious narratives and doctrines in conjunction with
their analogous philosophical, proto-scientific, and proto-historical
thought concerning the world-process could be fruitful. Examining
equivalences between naturalistic and supernaturalistic world-
explanations, and deciphering the implicit signifieds of the God-signifier
constitute a two-pronged approach to the ontological continuum. This
could begin with what may be simplified as a composite no-distinction
phase (fluid boundaries between natural and supernatural, between being
and non-being) of Ancient Near Eastern (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and
Israelite) and Greek religions. The re-interpretation could encompass

the Presocratics through exponents of ‘fundamental principles’, and
personal/impersonal, theistic/pantheistic orders, down to the self-reflexive
turn to the human subject (à la Immanuel Kant), mental principles, and
cultural, linguistic, and representational schemata as the ground of world-
theorization, with emphasis on mutual inflections and transitions as well
as the “second-order reflexivity” (Elkana 1986) of the Axial Age.16 In
this long-temporal philosophical hermeneutics of world/God-
conceptualizations, one ought to be critically conscious of the diversity
among the religio-philosophical developments of the Axial Age as well
as criticism of such a formulation itself (Provan 2013, MacCulloch 2006).
We shall discuss the ontological distinctions among these later, when
we take up the ontological insistence of Judaeo-Christianity, which I
consider one aspect of the second-order reflexivity.
Symptomatic categories of thought for such an integrative re-
interpretation include:
i) naturalistic accounts of the world-process in otherwise
‘enchanted’ ages (e.g., the Presocratics);
ii) rationalistic explanations of the supernatural (e.g., Euhemerus
and Hiwi-al-Balkhi);
iii) ambivalences between naturalistic and supernaturalistic
accounts (e.g., Plato’s ambiguities as to the nature of Ideas—
archetypal principles, abstractions, personifications, or beings—
and belated obeisance to deities, as well as the paradigm-shift
from the Platonic transcendence to the Aristotelian immanence of
Forms)
iv) indications of a universal rationality in Jewish Wisdom
literature;
v) theistic attempts to make faith compatible with reason (e.g.,
Philo of Alexandria, Moses Maimonides, and scholasticism);
vi) post-Enlightenment naturalizers of the supernatural (e.g.,
Hermann Cohen and Mordecai Kaplan, among theists, and Marx,
Nietzsche, Durkheim, and Freud, among atheists/agnosts);
vii) religion as proto-science (e.g., Theodor Adorno, Max
Horkheimer, and Stephen Jay Gould);
viii) historical oscillations between transcendent and immanent

conceptions of God, culminating in Spinoza’s identification of
God with nature (deus sive natura) and the Deistic restriction of
the deity to creation, envisioning a universe that works on its own
uniform and impersonal laws;
ix) religious counter-ideations (e.g., heresies and heterodoxies).
I view ancient and modern de-literalizing naturalizations (e.g., allegorical
readings of myths and secular/historical interpretations of apocalypse,
messianism, and the kingdom of God; Euhemerus and Giambattista Vico)
as well as retrospective deconstructions of religion (e.g., the Stoics’
identification of Zeus with the order of nature, Ludwig Feuerbach, and
Émile Durkheim) as self-conscious extremes of movement along the
continuum, where one can locate both naturalistic world-explanations
and naturalistic interpretations of the supernatural.
4. BY-PRODUCT MAXIMALISM
Once a system of religious ideas is established, it also achieves a

sufficiency—the divine is a fecund premise—to give rise to several other
secondary conceptions, phenomena, and developments: laws, ethics,
codes, institutions and hierarchies, structures of authority (e.g.,
Christomorphic royalty and the divine right of kingship) as well as
avenues of resistance (e.g., liberation theology, often without being named
so; and the alliance of Protestantism with resisting bodies such as
provinces, cities, and universities struggling for their liberties17), claims
of personal, social, and civilizational identity, cultural defences,
commercial interests, ideological appropriations, proselytization,
competitive theism (god vs. god), fanaticism, persecution, and religious
wars. These evoke but may have only minimal connections to the original
ontological basis, which they outgrow. I call this phenomenon by-product
maximalism.
The concept of by-product maximalism opens up the possibility that
atheistic objections to religion are essentially responses to the by-
products, such as ideological or institutional appropriations (a by-product
deviance), camouflaging the ontological question. Such responses, in

turn, and in course of time, could be directed against ‘primary’ religious
ideas also. If this is indeed the case, the nature and dynamics of atheism
is different from what it is widely supposed to be. But it may not be
possible to decide a priori—the decision necessitates historicization—
whether all of what we have provisionally designated as by-products of
religion are mere derivatives, which are extraneous to the original ideas,
or are integral to it, or both constitute an emerging whole. For example,
the monophysite doctrine became an expression of anti-imperial separatist
struggle against Byzantium, showing the potential of religious ideas to
become a vehicle for ‘proxy-concerns’. If religious ideas are considered
innately ideology-driven carriers of historical interests, the ethnic push
of Judaic ontology being typical, the relation between earthly purposes
and conceptual moves is reversed.
5. TEMPLATE AUTOMATISM
Further, once a coherent, that is, already negotiated and mediated,

ideational system is made available to the religious subject, it attains an
ontology-independent replicative inertia. A major factor in faith is the
fact that religion in its heyday encapsulated the whole of existence,
engaging it from cradle to grave, and even beyond—its large-compass
impetus. For instance, the way the Catholic Church organized the lives
of its members in mediaeval Christendom illustrates a totalizing structure.
The Church baptized, conducted marriages, prohibited divorce and non-
reproductive sexuality, and buried the body. It dealt with questions of
life and death, salvation and damnation, and actively engaged social and
ethical life. Every phase of economic activity, every day, month, and
season was given a religious significance—a religious calendrification
of quotidian existence. The Church had a saint to cater to every need,
and the calendar of feast days was crowded. Religious mythology was
comprehensive; if it proved otherwise, it expanded itself in a free-
ontological fashion. The psychorama of Biblical and hagiographic
narratives and imagery appealed to religious aspiration and imagination.
Magnificent cathedrals provided a sense of the sublime. The Church
also provided entertainment in the form of miracle-, mystery-, and

morality plays. That the Church once had political authority adds a new
dimension to this comprehensive organization of life. The organization
covered existence from its most elementary to the most metaphysical
dimensions. Besides, religions are launched by the extraordinary force
of their originary moment. But with increasing temporal distance from
the originary event, its reality weakens and calls for continual address.
Functionally, organization also perpetuates the force and appeal of the
originary event. That it succeeded in this—the continuity of almost two
millennia—was a stupendous achievement.
Comprehensive organization buttresses shaky faith, and helps it cross
the ontological barrier. It consists of rites, rituals, ceremonies, sacraments,
customs, traditions, conventions, vows, fasts, pilgrimages, cures, liturgy,
dogma and creeds, priesthood and pastoral care, instruction and discipline,
norms, values, roles and habits, community networks, and an order of
symbols and representations—a whole way of life, a template for
cognition and experience, a routinized cultural algorithm, a network of
effects. Weberian disenchantment had partly to do with the fact that with
the Reformation this organization was adversely affected when
Protestantism ‘de-clergified’ religion. The three solae (later five) —Sola
scriptura (by scripture alone), Sola fide (by faith alone), Sola gratia (by
grace alone)—and “Priesthood of all believers”, a cardinal doctrinal
principle of the Reformation, places the onus on the individual subject.
Ontological commitment arises within a collective-symbolic matrix, and
religion has had a ‘surrounded-by, passed-on’ character. However, what
often goes in the name of faith is this organization. Organization is
structure, and structure is not necessarily experience. The structures of
life-organization can become mere ‘casts’ in course of time. One just
needs to fit into the self-perpetuating system regardless of one’s
ontological investment. As such, ‘faith’ can persist despite ontological
anxieties, with nominal affiliations on the ontological questions
concerning divinity. I term this independent perpetuation, wherein
spiritual quests and organization of faith need not overlap, and can take
mutually independent and occasionally overlapping trajectories.
6. REASSESSING MAX WEBER’S DISENCHANTMENT AND

ANCIENT RELIGIONS IN RETROSPECT
In a lecture entitled “Science as a Vocation”, delivered at Munich in

1917, Max Weber, German sociologist, political economist, and
philosopher, outlined a process which Western civilization had been
experiencing for several millennia, and had reached a highpoint with the
scientific revolutions of modernity—”Disenchantment of the World”
(Entzauberung der Welt). Weber’s famous phrase, originally borrowed
from Friedrich Schiller, refers, on the one hand, “to a development within
the domain of religion from ritual and magic to ... paths to salvation
completely devoid of magic [e.g., Puritanism].” On the other hand, it
denotes “a broad historical development in the West according to which
knowledge of the universe is less and less understood by reference to
supernatural forces and salvation doctrines, and more and more by
reference to empirical observation and the experimental method of the
natural sciences” (Weber 2005: xxii-xxiii). Weber explains the process
as “an ever more wide-ranging understanding of the world’s occurrences
and events by reference to empirical observation, mechanical principles,
and physical laws rather than to the magical and supernatural powers of
spirits, demons, and gods” (316). Disenchantment is a result of the
rationalization and intellectualization which explains the workings of
the universe in terms of forces and factors which are internal to it. In
other words, the disenchanted world is one of “natural causality” (319).
The new world view (Weltanschauung) puts a premium on knowledge
obtained through verification and proof as opposed to understanding
based on the previous precondition of faith.
Indeed Weber has left complex and ambiguous ideas about
disenchantment, rationalization, and secularization, which could mean
a variety of things to various disciplines, and has triggered a plethora of
responses. Indeed, his theories, including that of the protestant ethic of
“this-worldly asceticism” (innerweltliche Askese) (Weber 1966: 166),
wherein he discovered the source of the capitalist spirit, are primarily
sociological in character. But his concept of disenchantment, especially
in the second of its two senses defined earlier, raises major ontological
questions. We have already discussed religious naturalism in this regard.
Naturalistic and supernaturalistic accounts of the world-process and

conceptions of God/divinity/the ultimate form part of the ontological
continuum. However, I would assign naturalism a longer historical
pedigree and significance rather than confine myself to its twentieth-
and twenty-first-century versions.
Besides, several non-supernatural posits of transcendence (e.g., the world
as a unity) are themselves supra-empirical. This necessitates a more
comprehensive and nuanced redefinition of categories than is available.
In The Ontology of Gods (9-10), I re-charter the semantic field of the
“natural” and the “supernatural” to factor in several supra-empirical posits
beyond deities and spirits: underlying cosmic designs; mana, an
impersonal power which can be transmitted or inherited; karma, self-
contained causality or fate; after-life; and metempsychosis, or
transmigration of souls. Though by some accounts, supernatural elements
may not be as indispensable for religion as for enchantment, and
disenchantment is often understood as “demagicization” (Bellah and Joas
2012: 20), I see the supernatural as that one factor which renders religion
a ‘singular’ discourse and phenomenon. In any case, the supernatural
mode constitutes one kind of transcendence. Indeed, religion,
supernaturalism, enchantment, and belief18 are not identical but show
both overlaps and divergences. Rather than borrow the too-sharp a
distinction, one may reconceptualize the relation between ‘primitive’
magical/ritualistic religions19 (ubiquitous enchantment of Weber’s
“mysterious incalculable forces” which disappeared with
disenchantment) and the ‘higher religions’ of transcendent ‘personal gods’
and subject-centred rational salvific praxis as two kinds of
‘supernaturalism’ with ontological continuities (A simple dichotomy,
exemplified by Karl Jaspers’ classical formulation of a transition in the
Axial Age/Achsenzeit from a narrative mythos to a reflective logos, is
the norm, and continuity is relatively unconventional).20 For instance,
the presence of a strong magical element in mediaeval Christianity and
its co-existence with belief in a personal God problematize Weber’s
original schema.
7. ONTOLOGICAL INSISTENCE OF
JUDAEO-CHRISTIANITY REVISITED
My well-considered choice of Judaeo-Christianity is premised not only

on its historical replacement, in Europe, of the cluster of cults and
practices labelled as paganism (the emergence of neo-paganism
notwithstanding) but also on the fact that the former marks a self-
conscious ontological distinction with its precursors and contemporaries
in insistence, intensity, and elaboration. The Axial Age (especially if
extended to patristic Christianity) was equivocal in respect of naturalistic/
supernaturalistic ontologies, with Presocratic materialism, the largely
agnostic Jainism and Buddhism, and a non-metaphysical Daoism on the
one hand; and Zoroastrian supernatural dualism, and the fervent theistic
insistence of prophetic Judaism and early Christianity on the other. A
late entrant into the ontological struggle of the Axial Age, with clear
signs of transition towards a disenchanted world view, post Xenophanes,
Leucippus, Democritus, Euhemerus, and Epicurus, among others,
Christianity marks a watershed in that it represents either a ‘reversion’
to the supernatural or an absence of cumulative historicity as far as
consciousness is concerned, and, therefore, a sign of historical non-
linearity. Normally, historical development has an element of additive
irreversibility (evident in the view that secularization is an irreversible
process), to which Christianity, in the above-mentioned trajectory, appears
to be an exception. Christianity inherited from, and elaborated upon,
Judaism, its ideational predecessor, a tradition of ontological insistence,21
to which it owes its historical efficacy in large measure:
i) a fastidious assertion about the reality of the ‘true’ God as
opposed to the unreality of presumptive ‘god-aspirants’22;
ii) the irreducibility of God to natural processes and explanations23;
iii) a meta-ontological address which effectively tackled the
possibly fabulous character (the fabulism that critics of religion
generally associate with mythico-religious narratives) at the heart
of its supernaturalism24;
iv) a paradoxical ingenuity which self-reflexively thematized
apprehensions concerning the (un)reality of the divine in the
deliberately unlikeliest situations and apparently the most illogical
manner.25
Contra Weber, this could reveal the irreducibility of salvation-religions

to rationalism and rationalization in pre-theoretical religions. Even the
protestant ethic of rationalized conduct has a supernatural element in
the other-worldly salvation towards which the conduct leads, and the
non-rational could be sought in precisely where Weber saw
rationalization.
It would be a different project altogether, and an ambitious one at that,
to ascertain whether Judaeo-Christianity, in raising the bar with its
ontological self-insistence (also an ontological settlement on the
aforementioned continuum), rendered itself incompatible with scientific
modernity, in comparison with the cosmo-theistic, implicit, non-credal
(Dowden 2000: 24), pragmatic, and expediently negotiable system of its
‘pagan’ precursors, whose ontological dispensability Christian apologists
(e.g., Clement of Alexandria) had successfully established (Seznec 1995:
12-13). Or, did it share the common vulnerability of all religions? Did
Christianity make it impossible for religion itself to revert to earlier forms
or proffer alternatives in a strong ontological sense? While I am conscious
of the received distinction between the theo-ontological framework of
Judaeo-Christianity and the cosmo-theistic understanding of pagan
religions, there obtains certain unorthodox connections the former could
have with: i) anthropomorphic polytheisms; ii) pre-theoretical, magico-
ritualistic religions; and iii) naturalistic world-conceptualizations. First,
magical rites had a constancy, predictability, and impersonality, which
are akin to a law-bound, naturalistic world order, and could be juxtaposed
with the caprice and arbitrariness of, say Olympian gods. Second, a
naturalistic order affords little possibility for reversal of the given, to
which personal gods amenable to human supplication furnish a solution.
Third, far from merely reifying the old “mysterious incalculable forces”
and erratic deities, Judaeo-Christianity presents a sovereign God who
purportedly rises above both the irreversibility of the naturally given
and the caprice of His divine precursors, and emphatically professes a
‘comprehensive’, providential divine overview of human destiny—a
narrative which is difficult to sustain in the face of its non-fulfilment in
the details of everyday existence. Christianity further changed the
paradigm by positing a “God, who invested, through the redeeming,
self-sacrificing Son, conceivably the most in human well-being” (George
2017: 51). Paradoxically, Judaeo-Christianity, coming chronologically

as it did, at an opportune moment in history, immediately after Presocratic
postulations of necessity, placed personalism above naturalism, and
against the twilight of anthropomorphic gods and a frail, chaotic
polytheism, order above caprice—that too with a retrospective self-
reflexivity. The transcendent God came to designate both a caprice-
transcending supernal order and a way to circumvent the given order of
nature. The moment necessity takes the place of God and He becomes
identified with the regular order of nature, the world becomes
naturalistically disenchanted.
8. CONCLUSION
The historico-philosophical reflections presented here are meant to

demonstrate certain unexplored possibilities in reasoning about religion.
When it comes to research on religion, on the one hand, we encounter
popular micro-empirical studies (in this case, on each culture and/or
period) that often does not work out the implications of findings, and
raises the question “So what?” On the other, we find a narrow
philosophizing restricted to linguistic nitpicking and checking the logical
validity of propositions. While retaining the rigor of both, one needs to
eschew their exclusivism and usher in well-considered cross-fertilizations
among historical knowledge, philosophical reasoning, and hermeneutic
possibilities. Far from being a pragmatic eclecticism, this approach
facilitates an interface between history and philosophy, between
interpretation and empiricism, between concepts and texts. The approach
opens up philosophical reasoning (which, to a great extent, means taking
a thought to its logical conclusions with an eye for implications) from
mere “language-games” to lived history. The conceptual innovations
enunciated here outline one such direction. As indicated at the beginning,
though the discussion here is set in the context of Judaeo-Christianity
and its Ancient Near Eastern and Greek Precursors, and each religious
culture ought to be considered in its singular preoccupations and world
view, these concepts might have relevance for religion in general across
cultural boundaries.
1
I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Christian Tapp, University of Innsbruck, and Prof. Dr. Thomas
Schärtl-Trendel, University of Regensburg, for their insightful comments on some of
the ideas discussed here.
2
The term “supernatural” itself includes a spectrum of entities, including magical forces
which do not have the status of deities.
3
Drawing upon the work of Catherine Pickstock, Mayra Rivera, Walter Lowe, and Regina
Schwarz, Ingolf U. Dalferth makes a distinction between “vertical transcendence”, which
“suggests leaving the immanent world, leaving the phenomenal, for another world, either
in a transcendence to the heights or a transcendence to the depths”, and “horizontal [or
lateral] transcendence”, “the project of self- transcendence, the understanding that we
are incomplete, thrusting ourselves into an incomplete future” (Bellah and Joas 2012:
152-153). But according to Niklas Luhmann, for example, religions are not concerned
solely with transcendence nor merely with immanence but rather “with the distinction
as such” (1996: 20).
4
Though the word “ideation” has a Feuerbachian ring, this article makes no assumptions
regarding the truth of religious conceptions in either direction.
5
This list is based on James W. Dow’s tabulation, in “A Scientific Definition of
Religion,” of Wallace’s behavioural complexes.
6
I incorporate under questa Paul Ricoeur’s view of myth as a symbolic device to
“explore”possible worlds (rather than merely “explain”) that transcend the actual (1991:
490); and under the subcategory, aesthetic aspects, the quality of fascinans (the capacity
to fascinate), which, according to Rudolf Otto (1923), is one of the two characteristics
of the numinous, the other being tremendum (the capacity to invoke fear and trembling).
Questa, however, cannot be extricated from world-concern, but emerges in relation—
sometimes antithetical—to the world.
7
The world-process (I have found process metaphysics a more realistic explanation of
the world than its older substance-oriented counterpart), including its human component,
is prolific, multifarious, disparate, and often inscrutable. As the process in itself is
cognitively unviable, the temptation to explain its diversity in terms of a single entity or
principle has been quite strong in the history of thought.
8
According to Giorgio di Santillana, what Anaximander, for example, “meant and could
not express” by Apeiron’s ‘governance’ of the world’s occurrences was “automatic
control” (di Santillana 1961: 39; Drozdek 2007: 10ff).
9
As Adam Drozdek points out for Democritus and other Presocratics, “Necessity, in
effect, is God of philosophers” (2007: 107).
10
Religious naturalism denies any “ontologically distinct and superior realm (such as
God, soul, or heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning to this world, but [asserts]
that yet religious significance can be found within this world” (Stone 2008: 1).
11
See Jibu Mathew George, The Ontology of Gods, Chapter 8: “The Ontology of Religious
Narratives: Nuances, Potencies, and Crossovers”.
12
Being a meeting point of several disciplines, literary studies has a huge repertoire of
concepts and methods, many of which come in handy for an onto-hermeneutic analysis
of religious narratives and doctrines. From a philosophical perspective, literature and
religion have been viewed as discourses in which one can look for meanings instead of
referents. Such strong affinities are evident in George Santayana’s Interpretations of
Poetry and Religion, Kenneth Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology,
the Chapter “Religious Naturalism in Literature” in Jerome A. Stone’s Religious
Naturalism Today, the widespread allegorical interpretations of religious narratives, and
the ambivalence of gious systems about, as well as switch between, “Religious Naturalism
in Literature” in Jerome A. Stone’s Religious “Religious Naturalism Today” in Stone’s
Religious Naturalism Today (2008), the widespread allegorical interpretations of religious
narratives, and the ambivalence of religious systems about, as well as switch between
realistic and symbolic conceptions of its (supernatural) object, facilitating a two-plane
engagement. According to Santayana, religion differs from poetry and other products of
the imagination in its pragmatic effect. Religion “differs from a mere play of the
imagination in one important respect; it reacts directly upon life; it is a factor in conduct.
Our religion is the poetry in which we believe” (1989: 20). Similarly, Sallie McFague,
the author of Metaphorical Theology: Models of God in Religious Language, even
observes that “theological models are closer to literary models than to scientific models:
the model of God the father, for instance, is an initial metaphor that has become a model
through its extensive use and increasing explanatory usefulness” (Diller and Kasher
2013: 975).
13
Cf. Jan Assmann’s “semantic relocations” of ideas from the terrestrial to transcendent
sphere, in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel (Assmann 2000: 46-71).
14
Giving the example of Apollo, “the icon of anonymous divine foreknowledge or
predestination, an oracular voice rather than a personal god.... [and thus]a striking example
of brinkmanship”,Versnel uses the expression Doppelgleisigverfahren—a double track
procedure—for attempts to articulate their reality; 267-269).
15
For instance, with respect to the semantic ambiguity of allegory and image, Barbara
Borg argues that “it is immaterial whether personifications are conceived of as poetical
fictions or as divine figures. Just as in archaic and classical times the categories
‘(historical) fact’ and ‘fiction’ were not essential for the assessment of the ‘value’ of a
narrative, so, too, in visual art the fictionality of the representation is not seminal to the
appraisal of the degree of its truthfulness” (qtd. in Versnel 2011: 455).
16
In The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers introduced the concept of an “Axial
Age” (Achsenzeit) to denote a unique and pivotal period in the history of thought, during
which civilizations which were otherwise largely unconnected, witnessed parallel cultural,
philosophical, and religious developments with regard to understanding the world and
man’s place in it. The term originally referred to the period from 800 to 200 BC, but has
been extended since to cover the early years of Christianity, Islam being considered a
distant Axial echo. It is the age of ancient Greek philosophy from the Presocratics to
Aristotle, Zoroastrianism in Persia, prophetic Judaism in the Ancient Near East,
crystallization of Hindu thought, and emergence of Jainism and Buddhism in India, as
well as Confucianism and Daoism in China.
17
See Tarnas 2010: 262.
18
In the context of ancient Greek religion, Henk S. Versnel (2011: 539-540) contests the
claim of Rodney Needham and Wilfred Cantwell Smith that the term “belief” is
intrinsically a Western and Christian notion, and cannot be applied to many other religious
cultures. Addressing the question of belief in action-oriented ritualistic religion, Versnel
refers to the work of Donal Wiebe (1979), who forcefully argued that the study of
religion(s) “is impossible without use of the concept (category) of belief”; and of A.
Boyce Gibson (1970), for whom “Religion...is not a way of life imposed upon a state of
affairs; it is a way of life with a conviction about a state of affairs built into it” (Versnel
12). It appears safe to assume impossible without use of the concept (category) of belief”;
and of A. Boyce Gibson (1970), for whom “Religion ... is not a way of life imposed
upon a state of affairs; it is a way of life with a conviction about a state of affairs built
into it” (Versnel 12). It appears safe to assume that that religion as a way of life or set of
practices has an underlying metaphysics, albeit an implicit and non-systematized one—
an assumption which would hold good for pre-theoretical ritualistic, magical religions
as well.
19
As regards Ancient Near Eastern religions, Glen Holland observes that “the distinction
between religious and magical practices is ambiguous, and it is doubtful that ancient
Mesopotamians themselves would have recognized such a distinction or found it useful”:
Most of the rituals are usually classified as ‘magical’ by scholars rather than as
religious, in part because they are concerned with immediate practical results
and do not appear to reflect religious sentiment. ... the difference between
“religious” ritual and “magical” ritual depends on the intended result of the words
a person speaks or the actions a person undertakes. If the words or actions are
meant to please a god or other supernatural figure with the intention of persuading
the god to do what the person concerned wishes, then the actions are considered
religious. But if the words or actions are meant to force or compel a god or other
supernatural figure to do what the person wishes, then the actions are considered
magical. At issue is the intended effect on the gods, whether the god’s response
is voluntary or involuntary. (2010: 177-178).
20
Cf. the trinary model of superstition-religion-science offered by Jason Josephson-
Storm (2018).
21
Though the concept of ontological insistence builds upon Jan Assmann’s “Mosaic
distinction” (between ‘true’ and ‘false’ religions), the former is a four-fold addition.
22
The distinction that Yahweh makes is not between god and god, but between God and
no-God.
23
In the Book of Judges, Chapter 7, when the Israelites go for battle against the Midianites,
God insists that they not take too many people to battle, lest they claim that the victory
was achieved by the strength of numbers. God orders a selection process, and the Israelites
win with just three hundred men. Here God insists that events will not happen in the
natural course, and that the situation solely depends on Him. It has to be God plus or
contra natural processes.
24
I Corinthians 15: 14 presents St Paul’s such address.
25
God could demand the sacrifice of Isaac, and Abraham would still be the father of
nations. To ‘die’ with Christ is to have eternal ‘life’.
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Jibu Mathew George is Assistant Professor in the Department of Indian and

World Literatures, School of Literary Studies, The English and Foreign
Languages University, Hyderabad. He holds MA degrees in English Literature,
Philosophy and Religion, and Political Science, an MSc degree in Applied
Psychology, and is a PhD on James Joyce. His areas of research include meta-
questions in the humanities, philosophy and history of religion, continental
philosophy, philosophy of history, hermeneutics, philosophy of literature,
European cultural history, literary modernism, twentieth-century European
fiction in translation, twentieth-century literary theory, mythology and folklore,
life span psychology, and Holocaust studies. He is author of three books: The
Ontology of Gods: An Account of Enchantment, Disenchantment, and Re-
Enchantment (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Ulysses Quotîdiânus:
James Joyce’s Inverse Histories of the Everyday (New Castle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars, 2016); Why Do Things with Texts, and What to?:
Philosophical Meta-Reflections on Literary Studies (London: Anthem Press, in
press).
Jibu Mathew George
jibugeorge@efluniversity@ac.in
113
BOOK REVIEW
GAINED IN TRANSLATION
Culture, Language, and Identity: English-Tamil in Colonial India, 1750

to 1900 (Vol. 1) and Language, Culture, and Power: English-Tamil in
Modern India, 1900 to Present Day (Vol. 2), Edited by C. T. Indra and
R. Rajagopalan. London: Routledge, 2018.
When Hans-Georg Gadamer proposed the dialectical concept “fusion of
horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung) as a conversation or dialogue about
different cultures in the context of interpretation, he might not have
foreseen its full range of implications for a translator. But with the
emergence, or a belated recognition, of a whole ensemble of challenges
and possibilities surrounding equivalences, domestications,
interpretations, approximations, and “foreignizations”, the need for such
a hermeneutic dialogue—between and among languages, cultures, and
life-worlds (Lebenswelten)—in all its macro- and micro-intricacies forms
the crux of the theory and praxis of translation. As might be well known
to those who are into translation, such affinities could be especially
noticed in the nuances of the American preferential terminology
“Translating and Interpreting Studies”, and more so with the “cultural
turn” sketched, among others, by Susan Bassnett, who has written the
“Foreword” to the present volumes, and André Alphons Lefevere.
Uncanny though it might sound against familiar calls for ‘objective’
rendering of the original, translation becomes an arena for the unfolding
of “effective-historical” consciousness and reflections thereof. Critic
Idaikadar characterized the aphoristic feat of Thirukural in condensing
“profound truths” of existence in two lines as akin to “piercing a mustard
seed and pushing seven oceans into it” (Ambai 2009: 64, qtd. in Bassnett
2018: xiii-xiv). There has to be a reverse process of de-condensing and
unwinding—the onus which, it appears, is on the interpreter-translator.
Since “translation studies rejected the discourse of ‘faithfulness’ and
James Holmes dismissed the pursuit of equivalence as ‘perverse’”, the
114 Gained in translation
development of translation goals has moved, as it were, in the direction

of achieving what Jacques Derrida called “iterability”. The post-
structuralist term combines Sanskrit itera, meaning ‘other’, and Latin
iterare, which means ‘to repeat’, and denotes the capacity of texts to
produce new meanings in new contexts. The achievement of these goals,
even in English-Tamil translations, could be located on the continuum
that extends from fidelity to iterability, in the interstices of macro-theory
on the one hand and micro-praxis on the other (The charm of the present
work is in the detail!). The two volumes reviewed here—Culture,
Language, and Identity: English-Tamil in Colonial India, 1750 to 1900
(Vol. 1) and Language, Culture, and Power: English-Tamil in Modern
India, 1900 to Present Day (Vol. 2)—edited by two luminaries in the
field, C. T. Indra and R. Rajagopalan, are a theoretically well-informed
and commendably comprehensive (I shall return to the aspect of
chronological coverage shortly) historico-literary account of English-
Tamil translations. The volumes, as the blurb rightly claims, “examine
... the relationship between language and power across cultural
boundaries. [They] evaluate the vital role of translation in redefining
culture and ethnic identity”. The literary output covered by the first
volume emerges from the early phase of British colonialism, from the
mid-eighteenth to late-nineteenth century, when “the English-speaking
Christian missionaries and functionaries of the English East India
Company were [pragmatically] impelled to master Tamil, the local
language, in order to transact their business”. The companion volume,
as the title indicates, examines the developments that ensued, during the
period between 1900 CE and the present.
A challenge before those who endeavour to grapple with the nuances
and details of the “colonial transactions” (to borrow Harish Trivedi’s
term) between English and an indigenous language such as Tamil, with
a rich as well as ancient corpus of works, which have formed the basis
of a culturally (and even politically) well-articulated ‘heritage’, is to
factor in this long-temporality into the modern context. After all, the
British colonial rule in India had a temporal span of only two hundred
years. Temporally, beneath the textual surfaces, it is an exchange between
a couple of centuries and a few millennia. R. Rajagopalan’s “Introduction”
to the first volume effectively serves this purpose (It avoids the pitfalls
Book review 115
of an area where advocacy could be considered a prerequisite for

scholarship) while Bassnett’s “Foreword” informs the reader about the
many matrices within which translators operate. With an unusually
delicate understanding of the postcolonial intricacies of the historical
situation, which the editors have achieved, the essays in the book “explore
cultural, religious, linguistic and literary transactions” involved in selected
areas of translation activity. They are indeed able to demonstrate how
“[t]his interface between English and Tamil acted as a conduit for cultural
transmission among different groups”. For a cultural polity that now
seems increasingly marked by polarizing distances among different life-
worlds, essentialist non-engagement, and monomaniacal discourses, such
transactions could be telling eye-openers.
Volume 1 brings to the reader five critical essays on the pertinent aspects
of the period in question. The first is “Semio-Machi(a)nations and
Translation: India, 1500 to 1900” by A. Noel Joseph Irudayaraj. It offers
profound historico-linguistic-cultural insights into early translation, and,
more importantly, vital information on what transpired in proto-translation
practices—a pre-history of the period in the title. This is followed by P.
R. Subramanian’s “The Metamorphosis of Tamil-English Lexicography:
Dictionaries by Foreign Missionaries in the Period 1750-1900”, whose
characteristic feature is the flexibility of the classification schema that it
has adopted; “The Politics, Problems and the Beauties of Translating
‘The Holy Bible’” by V. Richard; “On Translating Moral and Ethical
Texts from Tamil to English” by R. Rajagopalan and C. T. Indra; and
Padma Narayanan’s “Literary Daughters and Their Lineage: A Study of
the Novels Saguna and Kamala [the first Indian novels to be translated
in Tamil] by Krupabai Satthianadhan in English and Tamil Translation”,
a meticulous ‘en-gendered’ reading; with a very brief Afterword from
Rathi Jafer. Volume 2, entitled Language, Culture, and Power, English-
Tamil in Modern India, 1900 to Present Day, larger of the two, and quite
understandably so, contains seven essays, including a “Conclusion” by
C. T. Indra. The essays are: “Toward a Third Language: Translating
Classical Poetry” and “The Rhetoric of Spontaneity: Translation of Bhakti
Literature” by Padma Srinivasan; “The Role of Little Magazines:
Translating Literary Texts and Texts on Literary Criticism from English
to Tamil, 1900-2000” by R. Sivakumar; “Translating Theory and
Conceptualising Subjectivity in the 1990s in Tamil Nadu” by R.

Azhagarasan; “Cultural Empowerment and Translation: A Study of Post-
1970 Ventures from Tamil to English” by R. Rajagopalan and C. T. Indra;
and “Mapping the Nuances of Language” by C. T. Indra and R.
Rajagopalan; with an “Introduction” and “Conclusion” by C. T. Indra.
The introduction to the second volume represents an interesting excursus
into the politico-cultural economy of Tamil/English—apt theorization
interspersed with literary history. Padma Srinivasan’s article on the third
language is commendable for its detail. Though there is not much of a
difference in quality between and among the essays, my personal
favourite remains R. Sivakumar’s essay on the role of little magazines—
a gem of a piece.
The wealth of information that the volumes provide the reader is immense:
for instance, the earliest references to translation practice itself going
back to Tolkappiyam (dated somewhere between 5th century BCE and
3rd century CE), “wherein Tolkappiyar refers to two kinds of language,
the ‘mudal’ (source) and the ‘vazhi’ (target) languages” (Indra and
Rajagopalan I: 6); early instances of print policing as in the case of pre-
publication scrutiny of manuscripts by the Governor-General’s Council
(19), repolyphonisation of the Indian languages resulting in the formation
of a cultural class of bilinguals known as dvibhashyagars (20), Fr Beschi’s
production of dictionaries for two distinct audiences, as well as reasons
thereof (42-43), and so on. It is particularly interesting to note the temporal
dimension: that translation meant different things at different points of
time in the history which the volumes narrate. The volumes show a
nuanced awareness of the unequal power relations implicit in colonial
translations, which every practitioner and theorist of translation ought
to reckon—especially in light of the ubiquity of postcolonial insights in
this regard. Translation, like ideological criticism, becomes a
“hermeneutic of suspicion”1 —an awareness particularly evident in V.
Richard’s essay on translating the Bible. Though not stated, the challenges
here also include those related to a dialogue between two world views—
that of a theo-ontological Judaeo-Christianity and the largely cosmo-
theistic Eastern religions. The work raises several interesting meta-
questions. For example, “Are older translations better than newer ones?”
(57). How do we decide? What are the criteria? The further task, that is,
Book review 117
what awaits the theorist of translation post this initial theorization, is

both philosophical and empirical. While to a non-native eye, G. U. Pope’s
and others’ (W. H. Drew’s and F. W. Ellis’s) translations of Thirukkural
might sound like exemplars of his namesake’s definition of wit (“What
oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”) within a colonial/
proselytization loop, Rajagopalan and Indra’s essay “On Translating
Moral and Ethical Texts from Tamil to English” tells us that the picture
is much more complex. The discussion of intricate issues of semantics
and imagery in the three translations (79-84) is a marvellous inspiration
for literary scholars studying multiple versions of texts, done here with
translations of Naladiyar by Pope and Ellis as well. One finds similar
comparisons in the appendix of Padma Srinivasan’s piece on the third
language in Volume 2. It gives the reader a feel of what it is to have to
move towards ‘a third language’. However, some of her assertions made
in the context of translation of Bhakti literature are debatable. For
example, the statement “To take the Lord Creator as a person, see him as
a Master, a Friend, or a Parent or Guru and, of course, as a Beloved is
something unknown to western thinking” (Indra and Rajagopalan II: 63;
emphasis added) sounds like a sweeping generalization. Cf. the tradition
extending from The Song of Songs to bridal metaphors in the New
Testament and Emily Dickinson’s intimately blasphemous “Banker,
Burglar – Father”.
Beyond doubt, the work is an exercise in literary history that can
contribute to the extension of the Indian literary canon. It is indeed a
treat for those who want an overview of the field with telling, if not
representative, selections. But not merely that! Though individual writers
are experts in their respective areas with long years of work therein,
thereby offering a view from within, fortunately one does not get a sense
as in the case of certain other edited collections that the whole is an
aggregate of individual scholarship. The reason for this achievement is
two-fold: (1) editorial commentary which lays out the book’s overall
schema for the reader; and (2) a division of labour which corresponds
seamlessly to the schema. Though the “Preface” claims that the volumes
“are NOT to be regarded as a chronological/historical survey of the
translations of works in various genres between Tamil and English and
vice versa”, the milestones, as it were, chosen by the editors/authors are
effective indicators of the whole journey and serve as foci for historical
theorization of pertinent concerns. This disclaimer is necessary,
nevertheless. Had this disclaimer not been there, surveyors/scholars of
any given genre might have noted lacunae. Here the micro-level
omissions, if any, serve the macro-narrative—and this, I would say, is
inevitable.
Foremost among the strengths of the volumes is their cross-disciplinary
appeal beyond translation studies—not only to scholars of linguistics,
literature, sociology, social anthropology, South Asian studies, colonial
and postcolonial studies, literary and critical theory, and cultural studies,
as claimed, but as a compendium of many test cases, also to those
interested in cross-cultural hermeneutics, and in the larger philosophy
of culture and writing. The focus “on situating a given text in the context
of its production and reception” could also serve as raw material and
trigger for an apparently unrelated field of critical enquiry—genetic
criticism.
1
“Hermeneutics of suspicion” is a term coined by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
It is a mode of interpretation which aims to reveal disguised meanings: “This type of
hermeneutics is animated by ... a skepticism towards the given, and it is characterized by
a distrust of the symbol as a dissimulation of the real” (Ricoeur 1981: 6). Ricoeur contrasts
this kind of hermeneutics with the “hermeneutics of faith”, concerned with the
“restoration” of meanings.
REFERENCES
Ambai. 2009. To pierce a mustard seed and let in seven oceans. In N. Kamala
(Ed.), Translating women: Indian interventions (pp. 63-67). New Delhi:
Zubaan.
Bassnett, S. 2018. Foreword. In C. T. Indra and R. Rajagopalan (Eds.), Culture,

language, and identity: English-Tamil in colonial India, 1750 to 1900
(Vol.1) and Culture, language, and power: English-Tamil in Modern
India, 1900 to present day (Vol.2), (pp. xi-xv). London: Routledge.
Gadamer, H. Truth and method. New York: Continuum, 1997.

Book review 119
Ricoeur, P. 1981. Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language,

action and interpretation. Ed. and trans. John B. Thompson. Cambridge:
The happening of tradition. Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy. Sec 3.2. https:/

/plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer/#HapTra. Accessed 1 September
2018.
Trivedi, H. 1995. Colonial transactions: English literature and India.

Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Reviewed by Jibu Mathew George

The English and Foreign Languages University
Hyderabad
120
121
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The EFL Journal

Languages • Literatures • Linguistics

1. “World” literature: Why? Wherefore? – 1

6. JIBU MATHEW GEORGE 91

7. BOOK REVIEW 113

“WORLD” LITERATURE: WHY? WHEREFORE? –

Shilpa Sajeev: Professor Damrosch, in your essay “What is World

The EFL Journal 10:2 June 2019.

So Kafka becomes a world writer before he becomes a German writer,

prologue to Faust is inspired by that. As a poet he also identifies with

DD: I think we have a lot of responsibility to bring the cultural contexts

Kailash C. Baral: Actually, the whole debate is much more complex.

Postcolonial Studies; Postcolonialists often felt that the comparatists were

is done badly. It gets watered down, becomes Disney-fied, and becomes

Apter, E. 2013. Against world literature: On the politics of untranslatability.

Tagore, R. 2001.Viswasahitya. Selected writings on literature and language.

EPISTOLARY ENDEAVOURS: LETTERS IN THE

KEYWORDS: modernism, letters, anthology, little magazine, poetry, manifesto, “best”

The EFL Journal 10:2 June 2019.

1. CORRESPONDING IDEAS AND AGENDAS

The circumstantial or contingent nature of the letter should not blind us

While it is not Anderson’s purpose to analyze Moody’s letter closely, we

might, for instance, regret Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady” going to Alfred

year. After the reprimand quoted above, he (Pound) goes on to provide

conventional Petrarchan sonnets by one Georgia Wood Pangborn. These

3. THE LETTER IN HISTORY AND THE HISTORY IN THE LETTER

The letter was not, however, limited to explanations and urgings; it

to Marsh, is a confluence of ideas between the Imagist writers, Robert

Corbin Henderson] aptly calls “the futility of trying to impose

custom but my own prejudices are not materiapoetica.

4. THE MAKING AND MARKETING OF MODERNISM

Many “Modernists” were loath to reveal to the general reader anything

of concrete things arranged to stir the reader. (Paige

invaluable for the reader, facilitating a better appreciation of the themes,

In their letters quoted above, we have seen D. H. Lawrence and Robert

legitimized further by the recommendations of the Newbolt Report, were

example, lower taxes on their publications, as Pound and some others

Pound, E. 1912b.Tagore’s poems. Poetry 1. 2, 92-94.

Williams, W. C. 1970. Imaginations. Webster Schott (Ed.). New York: New

M. E. Veda Sharan is Professor in the Department of ESL Studies at The English

DIGITAL CULTURES AND OUR POSTHUMAN

KEYWORDS: anthropocentrism, digital culture, human-animal, posthuman, cosmology

0. INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOCENTRISM AND

The EFL Journal 10:2 June 2019.

disasters stare at us ominously, threatening to dislodge us from the

evidence to corroborate this argument. He suggests that the sphinx, the

of shame enveloping him in that circumstance. However, he quickly

“is accompanied by alienation, sadness, and loss of physical abilities”

1. TOWARD A NEW COSMOPOLITANISM:

Steiner argues that if we go by the “ancient cosmopolitan ideal advanced

to wonder at astronomical phenomena like eclipses, humans have always

distorted, non-human other, now gave way to a reflection on the

2. INDUSTRIAL MODERNITY AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL MAN

In the chapter entitled “The Technological Turn” of his book

3. TRANSITION TO THE DIGITAL AGE

The transition to the age of digital cultures is accompanied by a more

2002: 17). He tries to establish a delicate difference with Gilles Deleuze,

4. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PREMISE:

We come back therefore, to the same question of where to place the

To substantiate his point on what Derrida would prefer to call “the

assumptions by positing “ontologically neutral forces of gravity and

It is in this context of a longing for homecoming that Marx and Heidegger

rational animal of ancient idealists who Descartes transformed into the