ACTA 


NEOPHILOLOGICA 


50. 1-2 (2017) 

ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA 

ISSN 0567-784X 

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Contents 


Contents 

Margaret Atwood’s Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Novels 
with Psychological and Mythic Influences: The Archetypal Analysis 
of the Novel Surfacing 5 
Andrejka Obidic 
Fortified Fiction: Writers and Drink 25 
Wojciech Klepuszewski 
The Black Madonna in the Italian American Artistic Imagination 37 
Elisabetta Marino 
An Australian Poet in Italy: A D Hope’s Byronic View of Latter-day Italy 57 
Igor Maver 
Understanding South African Xenophobia Through the Prism of 
J M Coetzee’s Summertime ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’ 69 
Polona Zajec 
The Iconic American Western in Film and Literature 83 
Ali Shehzad Zaidi 
Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality of Orphaned Children and 
Images of Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English and Canadian 
Literature 95 
Irena Avsenik Nabergoj 
Names in Literary Translation: A Case Study of English Versions 
of the Slovenian Tale Martin Krpan 137 
Darja Mazi – Leskovar 
Übersetzung oder Adaption: Fallbeispiel Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901)
Tanja Žigon 
153 
Die Darstellbarkeit des Bösen: Zu George Taboris Holocaust-LiteraturŠpela Virant 
173 
Beatrix, un roman courtois au sein du cycle de la croisade 189 
Tadeja Dermastja 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111(71).09-31Atwood M. 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.5-24 

Margaret Atwood’s Postcolonial and Post-
modern Feminist Novels with Psychologi


cal and Mythic Influences: The Archetypal 


Analysis of the Novel Surfacing 

Andrejka Obidic 

Abstract 

The paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels 
from the psychological perspective of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes and from 
the perspective of Robert Graves’s mythological figures of the triple goddess presented in 
his work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1997). In this regard, the 
paper focuses on the mythic and psychological roles embodied and played by Atwood’s 
victimized female protagonists who actively seek their identity and professional self-realization 
on their path towards personal evolution in the North American patriarchal 
society of the twentieth century. Thus, they are no longer passive as female characters 
of the nineteenth-century colonial novels which are centered on the male hero and his 
colonial adventures. In her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels, Atwood further 
introduces elements of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths and revives different literary 
genres, such as a detective story, a crime and historical novel, a gothic romance, a comedy, 
science fiction, etc. Moreover, she often abuses the conventions of the existing genre 
and mixes several genres in the same narrative. For instance, her narrative The Penelopiad(2005) is a genre-hybrid novella in which she parodies the Grecian myth of the adventurer 
Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope by subverting Homer’s serious epic poem 
into a witty satire. In addition, the last part of the paper analyzes the author’s cult novel 
Surfacing (1972 (1984)) according to Joseph Campbell’s and Northrop Frye’s archetypal/
myth criticism and it demonstrates that Atwood revises the biblical myth of the hero’s 


quest and the idealized world of medieval grail romances from the ironic prospective of 
the twentieth century, as it is typical of postmodernism. 

Key words: Margaret Atwood, Canada, Edward Said’s postcolonial theory, postcolonialism, 
Linda Hutcheon, postmodernism, feminism, Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology, myth-
ic/archetypal criticism, Northrop Frye, Joseph Campbell, Robert Graves 

1 MARGARET ATWOOD AS A POSTCOLONIAL AND 

POSTMODERN FEMINIST AUTHOR 

1.1 Introduction: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman’ and 
Major Influences on Margaret Atwood’s Work 
Margaret Atwood is one of Canada’s most prominent and prolific contemporary 
novelists who have achieved international acclaim. She is also a celebratedCanadian poet, short story writer, national critic of cultural politics, cartoonist,
watercolorist and environmental activist, who is greatly concerned with humanrights. Owing to her impressively successful literary oeuvre and her critically 
praised, best-selling novels, she has received numerous prestigious literaryawards. As a consequence, now in her seventies, she enjoys the privilege of beingcanonized not only in Canada, where she is a cultural icon and media celebrity1 
because of her keen public appearances on television, but also in the UnitedStates, where she is an American author whose creative masterpieces are taughtat school on a regular basis or, sometimes, banned from it because of their nightmarish 
contents. 

Margaret Atwood, daughter of an entomologist and professor of Zoologyat the University of Toronto, was born in Ottawa in 1939 and spent an important 
part of her childhood in the wilderness of northern Ontario and Quebec,
where her scientist father conducted research. As a child she was initially home-
schooled by her mother, a nutritionist by profession. Greatly encouraged by heracademically driven parents, she read books of different literary genres profuselyfrom an early age and loved especially comic books, folk tales, myths, Andersen’s 
and Grimm’s fairy tales, which all significantly inspired her creative writing lateron. In 1946, her family moved to Toronto, where she finally attended primaryand secondary school regularly (full-time). She received a Bachelor of Arts inEnglish (honors) and minors in philosophy and French from Victoria College, 

1 
According to York (qtd. in Howells, 2006: 37), Atwood has become a ‘Thing’. On the one hand,
she is celebrated and admired as a literary and media superstar, on the other hand, she is the target 
of nasty comments and hostile attacks of many journalists who trash her for everything she does in 
the public eye. 


University of Toronto, where she became acquainted with Robert Graves’s The 
White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myths (1997)2 and Jungian analytical 
psychology together with his archetypal theory of the collective unconscious. 
At the university, she also met the literary critic and professor NorthropFrye whose lectures about myth/archetypal criticism deeply influenced her asa student and writer. After winning a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, she pursued 
her graduate studies at Radcliffe College, Harvard University, where shereceived a master’s degree in Victorian literature. At Harvard, she also startedworking on a doctoral thesis, however, owing to her busy schedule as a writerand editor at the publishing House of Anansi Press in the early 1970s, she didn’t 
manage to complete the dissertation on ‘The English Metaphysical Romance’of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Nevertheless, she reused the doctoralresearch material in her novels. She also taught creative writing and literature atseveral universities across Canada and the United States before she could make 
her living from professional writing. 

1 2 Margaret Atwood as a Postcolonial Critic of Cultural Politics 
and Postcolonial Novelist 

Atwood became of age as a writer in the second half of the twentieth century 
when Canada, as a post-war independent state3, was still struggling with the 
missing national identity owing to its colonial (i.e. cultural) subordination to 
the former British empire. In addition, its colonially conditioned mentality was 
gradually evolving from cultural into economic and political subservience to the 
fast-expanding capitalist market of the American superpower. Concerned with 
this national problem, Atwood greatly contributed to the theorizing of Canadian 
identity in the 1970s by writing a controversial literary and critical study Survival, 
published by the House of Anansi Press in 1972, in which she presented the 
typically recurring themes of Canadian literature because she wanted to prove to 
the skeptical Canadian readership that Canadian literature had its own literary 
tradition4 and, according to her, it represented the expression of Canadian identity. 

2 See also Robert Graves’s Greek Myths. 
3 Canada came into being as a Confederation in 1867, but it finally succeeded in becoming totally 


independent from the United Kingdom only in 1982 by way of the Canada Act. 
4 When Atwood attended school in her youth and, later, when she studied English and literature at 

the university, Canadian literature was not on the syllabus. In the fifties, a lot of Canadian writers 

had to go abroad if they wanted to publish their books and be successful as authors because the 

book market simply did not exist or was too small in Canada where Canadian readers preferred 

to read American and British imported literature and magazines. From this perspective, they were 

not interested in buying and reading Canadian literary books since they were not conscious about 


In her study, she also pointed out that Canada, as a nation, was still a colonial 

(i.e. cultural) victim of the former British master (i.e. victimizer) and was on its 
way to becoming the future victim of the neocolonial hegemony of the United 
States. In this regard, her political discourse, based on the victim/victimizer relationship, 
corresponded to the concept of dichotomy introduced by Edward Said’s 
postcolonial theory (1978) since it confirmed Said’s binary opposition between 
the superior, positive, colonizer and the (culturally, economically and politically) 
inferior and negatively represented colonial Other. In her decolonizing counter-
discourse, Atwood further stated that Canada, as the colonial (i. e. exploited) 
Other, should reject the victim position5 and the colonially oppressive British and 
American masters and become a creative non-victim. She also suggested that Canadian 
authors should no longer write books in which Canadian characters were 
represented just as passive colonial victims and failures, which was typical of postcolonial 
authors who imitated the negative discourse patterns of British colonial 
novels in the early stage of decolonization according to Homi Bhabha’s concept 
of mimicry (1996).
From this perspective, Atwood totally subverts the British colonial canon of 
the nineteenth century in her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels of the 
twentieth and twenty-first century since she, in terms of the postcolonial feminist 
theoretician and critic Gayatri Spivak (1988), allows her female (subaltern) 
characters to speak with an authoritative voice, and be active protagonists of her 
narratives. This was impossible in colonial literature of the nineteenth century 
because it was conventionally centered on, positively represented, male heroes, 

themselves as Canadians. More specifically, they were not concerned with their national identity 
and some of them even believed that Canadian literature and its literary tradition didn’t exist at all. 
However, Atwood, who wanted to become a poet and a writer, discovered that this wasn’t the case 
in the library of Victoria College where she had access to Canadian poetry and its tradition and 
she finally learned about Canadian literature and its tradition at the library of Harvard University.
This convinced her that Canada had its own distinctly shaped culture and national identity that 
was expressed in their literary tradition. By writing a guide about recurrent themes of Canadian 
literature in her critical study Survival (1972), which she helped to publish together with the 
House of Anansi Press, she significantly contributed to promote Canadian literature in her home 
country and abroad. In the second half of the twentieth century, the Canadian Council also began 
to financially support the Canadian book market and the publishers (the House of Anansi Press 
and Coach House) who focused on publishing Canadian authors and their – typically Canadian – 
regional themes.This gradually contributed to the development and booming of Canadian national 
literature, which also helped to forge the Canadian national identity. 

5 
In her study, Atwood distinguishes four ‘basic’ victim positions which gradually enable the 
oppressed victim to overcome the situation of crisis and evolve into a free individual: in the first 
phase, the victim is in denial, in the second phase, he/she acknowledges the fact of being a victim,
but attributes this position to a higher power, such as God, Nature etc.. In the third phase, the 
person refuses it as unavoidable – and in the fourth phase, he/she no longer needs to participate in 
the Victim/Victimizer game because he/she has become a creative non-victim. 


the European adventurous colonizers – although the male protagonist prevails 
even in Chinua Achebe’s postcolonial patriarchal novel Things Fall Apart (1958(2009)), written in the twentieth century. In this type of literature, especially in 
the colonial literary canon of the nineteenth century, female characters usually appeared 
in passive secondary roles of no importance. Since they were oppressed by 
the European colonial victimizer and the patriarchal system of their country, they 
were colonized two times as victims and, therefore, endured double colonization 
from the feminist point of view.

In Atwood’s novels, however, her female characters no longer appear in such 
secondary roles, but are usually active heroines who, metaphorically speaking,
struggle to survive the double colonization since they are still victimized by the 
North American postcolonial patriarchal society of the twentieth century and 
oppressed by their domineering partner, with whom they struggle for power in the 
battle between the sexes. In some cases, they are also stifled by relatives and members 
of the Canadian family, which is usually a trap from which the protagonists of 
Canadian literature cannot escape according to Atwood’s critical study Survival. 

Thus, her female protagonists are still victims, but – on their profoundly personal 
(i.e. psychological) journey of self-discovery – they seek their female identity 
or even the Canadian cultural and national identity like the unnamed heroine 
in the nationalistically oriented, cult, novel Surfacing (1972 (1984)). In their 
struggle, they become empowered as human beings and find a unique way to 
stay alive in harsh patriarchal and political environments. In this regard, some of 
the protagonists just survive like the unnamed handmaid in The Handmaid’s Tale 
(1986) and Rennie in the Caribbean jail in Bodily Harm (1984), whereas others 
grow psychologically and evolve into an artist like – the unnamed illustrator in 
Surfacing, Joan, the writer and poet, in Lady Oracle (1987) and Elaine, the painter, 
in Cat’s Eye (1989). More specifically, the last three heroines appear in Atwood’s 
novels of female development in which the protagonist reaches self-realization in 
her artistic profession and conquers the status of a creative non-victim, as Atwood 
points out in her study Survival. 

2 MARGARET ATWOOD AS A WRITER OF POSTMODERN 

PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVELS 

The Canadian literary critic Linda Hutcheon, the author of The Canadian Post-
modern (1990) and A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art 
Forms (2000)6, classifies Atwood as a postmodern novelist who is very versatile in 

Linda Hutcheon is also the author of A Poetics of Postmodernism (2003) and Narcissistic Narrative: 
The Metafictional Paradox (1984). 


reviving different narrative genres, such as a crime novel in Bodily Harm, a historical 
novel in Alias Grace (1996) and The Blind Assassin (2001), a detective story in 
Surfacing, a gothic romance in Lady Oracle, a science fiction (or dystopian) novel 
in The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake (2003), a fairy tale in The Robber Bride 
(1994), etc.. According to her and Howells (2000), Atwood further challenges 
the conventions of these genres so that she departs from the genre conventions 
or mixes different genres together within the same novel and, thus, creates a new 
hybrid genre by parodying the existing genre or genres in the novel like, for instance, 
in her novella The Penelopiad (2005). In this way, she revises ancient myths,
legends, fairy tales, etc. and modernizes them by giving them a new meaning with 
a contemporary parodic or ironic twist from the point of view of the twentieth 
and twenty-first century, as it is typical of postmodernism.

 In her novels, most of her postmodern female protagonists also appear as retrospective 
first-person limited narrators, who are no longer reliable story-tellers,
while the endings of her novels are usually open and can be interpreted in several 
ways. In many of her works, such as The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, Life Before Man 
(1996), Bodily Harm and The Penelopiad (2005), she experiments with multiple 
narrative perspectives and intentionally signals her method of narration to the 
twenty-first century reader, which is a distinctive feature of postmodern writing.
For this reason, her novels, which often include a narrative framework, are usually

classified as polyphonic metafictions. Atwood further infuses them with playful 
wit, satiric black humor, irony and literary allusions (intertexts) from other 
literary works, fairy tales and folk tales, which is characteristic of postmodern 
self-reflexive writing (i.e. fiction about fiction, conscious of itself – its fictionality 

– and allusively referring to previous literary works of fiction). From this point 
of view, Atwood’s postmodern metafictional narratives emphasize the linguistic,
discoursive, social and ideological construction of reality according to Berger and 
Luckmann (1988) since they no longer correspond to external reality in realism 
or personal reality in modernism. 
Regarding the narrative structure and technique, Atwood’s novels are usually 
fragmented stories which no longer observe a linear timeline of traditional novels 
of realism. In these, the plot of the story typically started at the beginning, reached 
a turning point in the middle with the complication of events and was resolved 
towards the end, whereas in Atwood’s postmodern novel, the reader usually follows 
the stream of consciousness – more precisely – the internal monologue of 
the main narrator and heroine who, in this double function, gradually recounts her 
life and slowly unveils the personal trauma of her childhood and adolescence by 
means of flashbacks. In this way, the grown-up protagonist revives and remembers 
the significant previous events that traumatized her in the past. Atwood, thus,
scrutinizes the wounded psyche of her victimized heroines who have the moral 


obligation to heal from their psychological trauma and resolve themselves as human 
beings. For this reason, her works are also analyzed as psychological novels 
according to Steals (1995) since they involve the protagonist’s personal growth 
and individuation in terms of Jung’s analytical psychology.

More specifically, Carl Gustav Jung (1961) was also the first to introduce 
the theory of archetypes. These are ‘primordial images’ of the collective unconscious 
and recurring patterns of potential psychological behavior that is transmitted 
through the unconscious from one generation to another. As far as this is 
concerned, all human beings are born with this type of inherited knowledge of 
psychological behavior, which the ancient ancestors expressed in myths. Furthermore, 
Jung, as the precursor of the Anglo-American myth criticism, together with 
the major archetypal critics – Northrop Frye (the author of Anatomy of Criticism 
(1957)), Joseph Campbell ( Jung’s follower) and Robert Graves (the author of 
Greek Mythology (1958)) – made a great impact on Atwood and, consequently, she 
used their archetypal ideas in her literary creations. For this reason, the characters 
in her novels embody the Jungian archetypes and correspond to Graves’s mythological 
figures presented in his study The White Goddess. Therefore, the following 
part of the paper analyzes her literary characters and heroines according to Jung’s 
theory (which deals with archetypes, such as the Jungian shadow7, persona, anima, 
animus, self, hero’s mythic quest, trickster, archetypal pattern of death and rebirth, 

In the work Negotiating with the Dead (2002: 35–37, 176–178), Atwood speaks about the process 
of writing and admits that she, as an artist, possesses a double personality like Dr. Jeckyll and Mr.
Hyde. In this case, the dark side of her personality corresponds to the Jungian shadow. As she 
further explains, friends and family know her as Peggy, whereas the one who secretly writes for her 
is her shadowy evil twin, which she also defines as her doppelgänger and alter ego in terms of Jung’s 
theory of archetypes:

By two, I mean the person who exists when no writing is going forward – the one who walks 
the dog, eats bran for regularity, takes the car in to be washed, and so forth – and the other, more 
shadowy and altogether more equivocal personage who shares the same body, and who, when no 
one is looking, takes it over and uses it to commit the actual writing. (Ibid. 35)

Who was I then? My evil twin or slippery double, perhaps. I am after all a writer, so it would 
follow as the day the night that I must have /…/ at best a mildly dysfunctional one /…/. (Ibid. 36)

You might say I was fated to be a writer – either that, or a con-artist or a spy or some otherkind of criminal because I was endowed at birth with a double identity. Due to the romanticismof my father, I was named after my mother (Margaret); but then there were two of us, so I hadto be called something else. Thus I grew up with a nickname (Peggy), which had no legal validity,
while my real name – if it can be called that – sat on my birth certificate, unknown to me, tickingaway like a time-bomb. What a revelation it was for me to discover that I was not who I was!
And that I had another identity lurking out of sight, like an empty suitcase stashed in a closet,
waiting to be filled. (Ibid. 36) 

/…/ I caved
The /J/eckyll hand, the /H/yde hand, and the slippery double
in to Fate, and embraced my doubleness. (Ibid. 36–37) 



etc.) and Graves’s classification of the triple goddess who is divided into the following 
three mythological images: 1. the innocent maiden Diana, 2. the sexually 
attractive or seductive Venus and 3. the evil, authoritative and destructive Hecate. 

2 1 Atwood’s Novels According to Jung’s Theory of Archetypes 
and Graves’s Mythological Images of the Triple Goddess 

In Atwood’s novel The Edible Woman, which is a witty satire, the heroine Marian 
MacAlpin8 embodies Graves’s mythological figure of the innocent maiden Diana 
and is victimized by her patriarchal domineering fiancé Peter, a prospective lawyer, 
who wants to fully possess her and annihilate her female identity after their 
marriage. She is also oppressed by the expectations of the Northern American 
contemporary consumer society (of the 1960s) which believes that university-educated 
women like Marian should leave their jobs and take care of their husband 
and children after being married. Thus, they should become devoted (sacrificial) 
slaves of the domestic household since the sexist patriarchal society of the sixties 
didn’t allow them to have a career and fulfil themselves in their profession. From 
this perspective, Atwood’s protofeminist9 social satire, written in the late sixties,
made fun of socially constructed myths of femininity which dictated how a woman 
should be and behave. For this reason, Marian feels that she is being exploited 
and consumed (eaten away) by the egotistic wishes of her fiancé and the ideological 
norms of the cannibalistic patriarchal society, which explains Atwood’s 
humorous title of the novel as well. Although Marian wears a social mask of the 
Jungian persona archetype and, hence, acts to please Peter and her parents, she 
feels alienated from her inner self after her engagement. So, as a consequence, she 
becomes anorexic and refuses to eat. 

In her witty novel, Atwood parodies and, thus, revises the conventions of a traditional 
comedy in which a young couple in love usually gets married after someobstacles are resolved between the parents of the spouses. In Atwood’s anti-comedy, 
on the contrary, Marian betrays her fiancé by making love to Duncan – whoappears in the Jungian role of her positive shadow archetype (alter ego) accordingto Gupta (2006: 22, 24, see also Grace 1980: 93, Macpherson 2010: 28). As far asthis is concerned, he helps her see that she has become a passive victim. After this 

8 
According to Cooke (2004: 39) and Macpherson (2010: 26), Atwood intertextually refers to

Marian as Alice from Lewis Carroll’s fairy tale Alice in Wonderland in chapter 22 of The Edible 

Woman. 

9 
Atwood’s novel anticipates the ideas of the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. In 
this regard, Betty Friedan was the first to express the dissatisfaction of post-war women who had 
to stay at home as married mothers and give up their jobs in order to look after their family in her 
ground-breaking text The Feminine Mystique (1963). 


realization, she calls off the wedding and, thus, regains her individual identity because 
she refuses to become a subservient wife. In Atwood’s anti-comedy the ending 
is also reversed, since Marian’s pregnant friend Ainsley gets married instead of her. 

In the novel Lady Oracle, which is a witty anti-gothic satire, the heroine Joan 
Foster is victimized by her monstrous dominating mother Fran. She embodies 
Graves’s mythological figure of the authoritative Hecate and the Jungian negative 
mother archetype, whereas Joan corresponds to Graves’s figure of the innocent 
Diana since her wicked mother doesn’t love and accept her as a fat little girl.
Owing to her traumatic childhood experience, Joan has become alienated from 
her inner self and as a grown-up person develops different multiple personalities 

– which enable her to escape from her unloved self. In the public eye, she is a 
successful poet while she secretly writes costume gothic romances under the pen 
name of Louisa K. Delacourt and imagines to live the life of her gothic heroines.
She is also a former fat child since she manages to lose weight with the help of 
aunt Lou, who embodies her good (surrogate) mother archetype, and she, thus,
transforms herself into a beautiful slim woman, who incarnates Graves’s seductive 
Venus. From this point of view, she also represents the Jungian anima – the ideal 
image of a woman in a male psyche, whenever she falls in love. She further fragments 
her personality by multiplication since she always invents a new personality 
for her new patriarchal lover, with whom she struggles for power, or she even tries 
to please her husband Arthur in the traditional role of a subservient wife. As an 
artist, she always finds a way to withdraw from her oppressive partners – who 
don’t fulfill her desire of being loved – and usually escapes into her gothic world 
of fiction. According to Cook (2004: 92–93), Atwood intertextually refers to her 
as the Little Mermaid from the fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen and, thus,
identifies Joan’s escapism with the mermaid’s drifting around in Andersen’s story.
In the end, Joan regains her lost identity and heals from her past trauma after 
confronting the ghost of her death mother since she realizes that her multiple 
personalities resemble the monstrous Hecate heads of her mother. According to 
Grace (1980), Joan is also a parody of Graves’s triple goddess (Diana–Venus–
Hecate) because of her multiple, intentionally exaggerated, personalities which 
make her character appear comic and larger than life in comparison to flat gothic 
heroines that Atwood parodies in her witty anti-gothic satire. In this way, Atwood 
revises the conventions of costume gothic romances since, according to Cooke 
(2004: 91), Joan is no longer a tragic (i.e. gothic) victim of unrequited love like 
“The Lady of Shalott” from Tennyson’s ballad, to which Atwood intertextually 
refers to in her comic version, or a passive heroine who is conventionally saved by 
a gothic hero and marries him in a simplistic and predictable plot with a happy 
ending. On the contrary, Atwood’s comic parody focuses on the idea that the protagonist 
Joan must actively resolve her problems on her own. 


The novel The Robber Bride is another parody of gothic romances in which theheroines Charis, Roz and Tony seek their female identity since they are alienatedfrom their inner self owing to their repressed childhood trauma. They are victimsof the gothic villainess Zenia, the Jungian anima and Graves’s sexually attractiveVenus, since she steals their husbands by seducing them in the role of a femme fatale 
and discards them after a brief love affair. According to Atwood (qtd. in Steals1995: 208–209), Zenia represents the ideal and dreamy image of a woman that thethree heroines themselves long to be and their alter ego, the evil Jungian shadow,
because she mirrors the evil side of their personality that they have learned to repress. 
However, in the positive role of their shadowy double, Zenia teaches them animportant lesson since she makes them realize that they tried to please their husbands 
in the traditional role of a subservient wife, whereas their men ungratefullyleft them for her, their opposite, who refused to be dominated by them. Zenia, thus,
makes them see that they were not saved by their marriage like passive heroines ofgothic romances, but they actually saved their partners by marrying them becausethey took care of them. According to Howells (2000: 147) and Steals (1995: 198),
Atwood’s novel, thus, revises the conventions of the gothic genre and also parodies 
Grimm’s fairy tale The Robber Bridegroom, in which the evil groom lures his prospective 
brides into the woods where he eats them. However, in Atwood’s version, theman-eating role is reversed since Zenia replaces the villain of the fairy tale, as thetitle of the novel suggests, by seducing and sexually devouring the husbands of thethree heroines.Thus, the cruel teacher Zenia, to whom Atwood (qtd. in Steals 1995:
200) intertextually refers as the biblical prostitute Jezebel and the Jungian tricksterfigure from folk tales, also forces them to face the psychological trauma from thepast and relive their suppressed pain that enables them to eventually heal and regaintheir lost identity. According to Wilson (2000: 224), Zenia, like Joan in Lady Oracle,
embodies all three mythological figures of Graves’s triple goddess – the seductiveVenus, the destructive Hecate, and the innocent Diana who immigrated to Canadain her childhood as a victim of Jewish persecution during World War II.

In the novel Cat’s Eye, which is a fictive biography, the heroine Elaine Risley 
is victimized by Cordelia, who bullies her at school with the help of two schoolmates. 
Owing to her persistent verbal abuse, Elaine loses her identity (positive 
self-image) and becomes alienated from her inner self. According to Cooke 
(2004: 108, Gupta (2006: 120) and Steals (1995: 209), Cordelia represents her 
alter ego, the Jungian shadowy double, and embodies Elaine’s evil potential. For 
this reason, in the second part of the novel, the two, who are twin souls, switch 
places. In reference to Cordelia, Atwood intertextually alludes to William Shakespeare’s 
tragedy King Lear, in which Lear punishes his daughter Cordelia because 
she doesn’t show him her love the way her sisters Goneril and Regan do. More 
specifically, Cordelia uses Elaine as a scapegoat for her frustration at home where 


she is physically abused by her dominating patriarchal father, who plays the role 
of king Lear. In his eyes, she is not worthy of his love since she is not as successful 
as her more accomplished and beautiful sisters Goneril and Regan. Furthermore,
Elaine is a victim of Mrs. Smeath, who represents the puritanical Toronto with 
its strict moral rules of Christian behavior, since she treats Elaine as a sinner 
owing to her lack of religious up-bringing. According to Steals (1995: 186) and 
Cooke (2004:109), Mrs. Smeath, thus, embodies the Graves’s evil and authoritative 
Hecate, who is conventionally played by the dominating grandmother in 
Canadian literature, as Atwood’s points out in her study Survival. 

In the second part of the novel, however, Elaine becomes Cordelia’s victimizer 
and succeeds in transforming herself into an accomplished painter, whereas Cordelia 
gradually falls into despair that ends with her death. At the end of the novel,
the middle-aged Elaine, who has healed her childhood trauma with the creative 
power of her artistic work, realizes that Cordelia was just her father’s victim while 
Mrs. Smeath only observed the moral (bigot) convictions of society.Therefore, she 
forgives them and abandons her revenge. According to Howells (2000: 144–145),
Atwood’s novel is a bildungsroman like James Joyce’s work A Portrait of the Artist 
as a Young Man. However, Atwood’s narrative replaces the traditional role of 
a male protagonist with that of a female one and, thus, focuses on the heroine’s 
psychological growth and artistic development from her childhood to maturity.

 In the realist novel Life Before Man, which is a social chronicle, the heroine 
Elizabeth Shoenhof, her husband Nate and Lesje Green, her co-worker at the 
museum, are involved in a love triangle since Nate has a love affair with Lesje 
while Elizabeth is in a love relationship with Chris Beechman, also a college from 
the museum. However, Elizabeth and Nate stay together as a married couple owing 
to their children.They are,thus,trapped by their family,which is also a typical 
theme of Canadian literature according to Atwood’s study Survival. In Elizabeth’s 
case, the traditional roles between the spouses are reversed since she is the head 
of the family and, thus, unconventionally appears in the dominating role that is 
usually played by a patriarchal partner, whereas her husband Nate and lover Chris 
lean on her for emotional support in the pleasing role that is typical of a subservient 
wife. Although she possesses an aggressive male personality and knows how 
to survive in a tough urban environment, she is a victim of her tyrannical aunt 
Muriel, who embodies Graves’s authoritative Hecate and represents Toronto’s 
puritanical morality with rigid religious behavior like Mrs. Smeath in Cat’s Eye. 
In spite of the fact that her aunt took care of her as a child who was psychologically 
traumatized by the sudden tragic loss of her mother and sister, Elizabeth 
feels alienated from her inner self in her adult life because she cannot forgive her 
aunt’s strict religious and moral up-bringing in her childhood. For this reason,
she cannot open up to her lover and really love Chris – who commits suicide in 


order to punish her cold behavior. Even at the end of the novel, she cannot forgive 
her dying aunt because she has turned into her, the cold and authoritative Hecate 
figure. However, she unconventionally succeeds in getting out of the family trap 
(from which the Canadian literary character usually does not escape according to 
Atwood’s study Survival) since she separates from her husband and decides to 
take care of her children without his help.

In the postcolonial novel Bodily Harm, which is a political narrative, the heroine 
Rennie Wilford is a victim of her dominating grandmother, who embodiesGraves’s authoritative Hecate figure and represents the rigid religious moralityof Canadian bourgeois society like Mrs. Smeath in Cat’s Eye and aunt Muriel in 
Life Before Man. Owing to her strict and traumatic up-bringing, Rennie, who is atravel journalist by profession, flees from Griswold and remains alienated from herinner self even in her adult life. In her symbiotic love relationship with Jake, sheemotionally leans on him for protection and tries to please him. Jake, who is anaccomplished designer and business owner, also makes her feel invincible since heembodies Rennie’s ideal image of a man in her female psyche or the Jungian animus 
according to Gupta (2006: 101–102). However, she soon realizes that she hasbecome a victim of his sadistic sexual games, in which he always plays the victor/
victimizer, whereas she always ends up being his sexual slave. Moreover, she is acancer survivor and, hence, decides to flee from her dull everyday life to the Caribbean 
islands.There, she recovers her lost sexuality with Paul, an American CIA spyagent and drug smuggler, but she ends up in Caribbean jail owing to her involvement 
in Paul’s trading American weapons in exchange for Caribbean drugs. Fromthis perspective, Atwood parodies and, thus, revises the predictable plot of gothicromances according to which Rennie should be conventionally saved by Paul, thegothic hero. Instead, in her political and anti-gothic novel, Paul turns out to be avillain and not Rennie’s rescuer. In the narrative, Atwood also criticizes the American 
involvement in the violent politics of the Caribbean postcolonial dictatorialregime which suppresses the uprisings of the communist party and the humanrights of their citizens with the help of the army and police. As far as this is concerned, 
Atwood further shows that, owing to the economic and political partnership 
between Canada and the United States, Rennie is automatically considereda political prisoner of the Caribbean totalitarian regime simply because she is aCanadian citizen. In her political novel, Atwood, thus, demonstrates how the totalitarian 
power politics of the Caribbean oppressive government and Jake’s sexual 
power politics work. According to her, they both can do harm to innocent humanbeings like Rennie and get away with committing evil acts without punishment.

In the multi-perspective novels Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin, Atwood revives 
a historical genre since she depicts various historical events of the Canadian 
past in the background of both novels. More precisely, in Alias Grace, she fictionally 


constructs the life of Grace Marks, a nineteenth-century Irish (immigrant) servant 
girl who was convicted of having helped to murder her employer Thomas Kin-
near and his housekeeper and mistress Nancy Montgomery. Grace Marks is, thus,
a historical figure (of Canadian culture) who was sentenced to life imprisonment 
and spent most of it in a lunatic asylum. In Atwood’s fictionalized version, based 
on documented facts, Grace recounts her personal life story to Doctor Simon 
Jordan. He further tries to unlock her memory since she suffers from amnesia and 
cannot remember the double murder. From this point of view, she embodies the 
elusive Jungian trickster archetype because she reveals to the doctor just what has 
already been said about her during the trial. She, thus, remains an enigmatic figure 
till the end of the story since she keeps the reader wondering whether she is an 
innocent victim of circumstances or a cold-blooded murderer. 

The novel The Blind Assassin is a mosaic (i.e. genre-hybrid) narrative like Alias 
Grace. More specifically, it is a family saga which is set in the Canadian fictionaltown of Port Ticonderoga and depicts Toronto’s historic events of the 1930s and 
1940s in the background of the novel.The heroine Iris Chase is a victim of her richindustrialist husband Richard Griffen, a sexual bully whom she marries when sheis only eighteen years old in order to save her father, a button-factory owner, frombankruptcy. From this perspective, she embodies Graves’s innocent maiden Dianabecause she sacrifices herself for the good of the family according to Cooke (2004:
148). In reality, her arranged marriage turns out to be just a trap in which she, asa young wife and virgin, is repeatedly abused by her violent patriarchal husband.
He also rapes and impregnates her younger sister Laura, a minor, who is later incarcerated 
in a lunatic asylum and forced to undergo an abortion by Richard. Forthis reason, the revengeful sister Iris ruins her husband’s political career by publishing 
a scandalous novel entitled The Blind Assassin about a supposed love affairbetween her sister Laura and the Communist agitator Alex Thomas – althoughthe novel is really about her secret love affair with Alex. In addition, the rumorsabout Richard’s sexual involvement with Laura, initiated by Iris, force her husbandto commit suicide. She is also ‘the blind assassin’ of her sister Laura, as the title ofthe novel-within-the-novel suggests, since she informs Laura about the death ofher beloved Alex and accidentally reveals to her that she had a secret (extramarital)
love affair with him which brakes Laura’s heart and causes her suicide. 

Unlike the historical narratives Alias Grace andThe Blind Assassin about the Canadian 
past, The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian social satire and speculative novel (alsoscience fiction) which refers to the fictive future of the United States. As Atwood’s 
later dystopian trilogy (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood (2012) and MaddAddam 
(2013), it deals with a futuristic post-apocalyptic and nightmarish world whichmirrors our (high-tech) society of today in an exaggerated way and, as a catastrophicvision of our future, it criticizes the evils already present in our contemporary world. 


More precisely, in Awood’s Orwellian dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale, the heroine 
Offred is a victim of Gilead’s Christian fundamentalist regime in which she servesjust as a surrogate mother for reproduction or a two-legged womb. In the role of ahandmaid, she has no human rights and is assigned to the Commander Fred andhis wife Serena Joy, a couple from the ruling elite, since they cannot have childrenowing to the toxic pollution of their technologically overdeveloped world. In hernovel of the 1980s, Atwood recreates the strict moral and religious world of the seventeenth-
century New England’s Puritans and intertextually refers to the Puritancommunity described by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. In his novel,
innocent people are portrayed as prisoners oppressed by the rigid religious norms oftheir theocratic world from which they cannot escape like citizens in Atwood’s dystopian 
world of Gilead’s totalitarian theocratic republic (founded by the extremistAmerican New Christian right of the 1980s on the east coast of the United Statesin the year 2000). However, the protagonist of Hawthorne’s novel Hester Prynnemanages to survive in the harsh religious surroundings because she refuses to die inside 
her inner self like Atwood’s handmaid Offred – who tries to remember the life 
before the regime when she was a university-educated American citizen and a happily 
married mother. By remembering her past, she reconstructs her identity, whichis a form of therapy that helps her survive and maintain her sanity. In her work,
Atwood also intertextually refers to the biblical handmaid Bilhah – the surrogatemother for Rachel’s baby in the Old Testament owing to Rachel’s infertility. Bilhah’s 
role is, thus, fulfilled by Atwood’s protagonist Offred, who also embodies Graves’sinnocent maiden Diana in the forced sexual intercourse with the Commander, whilethe sterile wife Serena Joy fulfills the role of Rachel. In addition, Atwood’s dystopia,
published in 1985, criticized the conservative ideas of the American religious partyof the 1980s since its members represented the puritanical values of America andwere against contraception, abortion, pornography and homosexuals. They also advocated 
the traditional values of the patriarchal system according to which womenshould stay at home and look after their family. They, thus, wanted to force womento give up their basic human rights, as it is shown in Atwood’s nightmarish narrativevision that can be compared to the existing world of Islamic religious fundamentalism 
of the 1980s. 

In the multi-voiced and genre-hybrid novella The Penelopiad, Atwood parodies 
the Odyssey, Homer’s original version of the Grecian myth about the adventurer 
Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope. In her comic satire, the story is retrospectively 
told from the sarcastic and ironic perspective of Penelope, who also 
addresses the twenty-first century reader from the Grecian Underworld after her 
death, while her maids, who have no voice in Homer’s original epic poem, sarcastically 
and ironically comment her unreliable metafictional narrative in different 
genres. More specifically, Atwood’s mythological novella repeats the well-known 


mythic story of Antiquity with the same literary characters, setting on Ithaca,
major events and further continues Homer’s original text by adding new events.
As far as this is concerned, her parody gives prominence to the hanging of Penelope’s 
twelve maids, which is only briefly mentioned in Homer’s version as a 
minor event, while Atwood’s Queen Penelope no longer appears as a faithful wife 
since she is rumored to have slept with her suitors during Odysseus’s absence from 
home. In addition, she is viewed as a shrewd liar, who plays the role of the Jungian 
trickster archetype, like her husband. In her parodic revision of the Grecian 
myth, Odysseus is acquitted of having murdered Penelope’s suitors and of having 
ordered the hanging of the innocent maids in the videotaped process (more specifically, 
a burlesque travesty) that takes place in the twenty-first century court 
of law. In her witty satire, Atwood ridicules the idealized heroic past of the epic 
genre and the double moral standard of the Grecian patriarchal ideology. As far as 
this is concerned, the immoral husband Odysseus was allowed to cheat on his wife 
on his mundane adventures away from Ithaca, whereas his wife Penelope, a rich 
aristocratic woman, had to remain faithful to him in order to be respected in his 
patriarchal kingdom where she just increased Odysseus’s wealth by marrying him. 

3 THE ARCHETYPAL ANALYSIS OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL 
NOVEL SURFACING 

Atwood’s novel Surfacing is a detective story in which the unnamed heroine (i.e.
the surfacer) searches for her missing father, a retired botanist, in the wildernessof Quebec. However, from a more personal and feminist prospective, she seeksher authentic inner self and her female identity which she lost owing to her pastrelationship with a patriarchal married man who forced her to undergo an abortion. 
For this reason, the novel corresponds to a psychological quest narrativesince the surfacer travels back in time and dives into the unconscious side of her 
psyche in order to remember and heal her past trauma. Her psychological journeyinvolves a renovation of her personality according to Jung’s analytical psychology 
and follows Joseph Campbell’s monomyth about the hero’s adventures presented 
in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1973). For this reason, her journey isa mythic quest as well. More specifically, Atwood’s three-part novel corresponds 
to Campbell’s three-part schema of the hero’s separation from society in thefirst part, his iniciation and later illumination (i.e. revelation of self-knowledge)
in the second part and the return of the hero to civilization in the third part. It,
thus, coincides with Campbell’s mythic quest structurally and thematically.

Furthermore, the surfacer also follows the mythic pattern of personal transformation 
which derives from the Bible (i.e. The Book of Jonah) and it is known as a 


heroic quest which involves death and rebirth and Jung’s personality renewal within 
the process of individuation. Moreover, the surfacer’s quest for individuation, which 
coincides with Campbell’s mythic schema, also corresponds to Frye’s romance journey 
which describes the same transformation as the biblical story of Jonah. For thisreason, Pratt classifies the narrative Surfacing as a novel of rebirth and transformation 
in her work Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction (1981). In reference to the 
surfacer’s archetypal journey, Atwood further alludes to Galahad’s search for the 
holy grail in medieval quest romances which deal with the same biblical (mythic)
pattern of personal transformation as well. Since the twentieth-century heroine ofthe novel revives the grail motif in her memory search of the aborted baby, Atwood’s 
quest narrative also corresponds to the definition of a grail romance (also quest romance) 
according to Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, as it will be demonstrated in thefollowing paragraphs with the detailed analysis of the novel.

According to Frye, specifically, the surfacer’s grail quest starts with a perilous 
journey into the dangerous Canadian wilderness, where she starts her inner 
search for her self and the external search for her missing father. This also indicates 
Campbell’s first part of the hero’s adventure – his separation or departure 
from society. In the initial phase, the surfacer is alienated from her parents, her 
inner self and emotions because she has suppressed the memory of her traumatic 
abortion and pushed it into the unconscious part of her psyche. In this regard, her 
initial psychological state corresponds to Frye’s agon which indicates her conflict 
with the unconscious side of her self or the Jungian shadow. For this reason, she 
has also lost her identity and feels psychologically divided into two halves – the 
head, and the body which represents her heart and feelings – “The other half, the 
one locked away was the only one that could live; I was the wrong half, detached,
terminal. I was nothing but a head.” (Surfacing, 102). She also perceives herself 
as a powerless and innocent victim of her previous dominating patriarchal partner, 
the married art teacher, with whom she had an affair. In the second phase 
of Campbell’s iniciation, the surfacer discovers her father’s rock drawings which 
guide her to the lake where she dives into the water in order to find her missing 
father. However, at the same time, she figuratively dives into her unconscious 
realm where she discovers her psychological shadow: “My other shape was in 
the water, not my reflection but my shadow /…/” (Surfacing, 165). According to 
Christ (1976: 322), the lake offers her “redemption” (Surfacing, 16) since, under 
water, she finally faces her suppressed traumatic event and, thus, confronts the 
shadowy part of her self by acknowledging the death of her aborted baby – “/…/ 
dark oval, trailing limbs. It was blurred but it had eyes, they were open /…/ it was 
dead.” (Surfacing, 165). The dead baby also caused her emotional death, which 
corresponds to Frye’s definition of pathos. Ironically, the lost baby represents her 
“evil grail” (Surfacing, 165) as well. Since she gains this self-knowledge with the 


help of her father’s guidance, she considers it his gift. At this stage, her self-revelation 
also indicates Campbell’s illumination. However, his father’s gift is not 
enough for her to heal her split. So, under the spiritual guidance of her dead 
mother, she also finds a picture of a woman with a baby inside her belly, which 
she considers her mother’s gift, and decides that she will conceive a baby with her 
present non-patriarchal partner Joe. She, thus, makes love to him in the role of a 
goddess according to Frye (qtd. in Pratt 1981: 138) and Campbell’s divine sexual 
union. During her intercourse, she heals her split by rejoining the two halves – the 
head with the body and integrates them as part of her selfhood: 

I guide him into me, it’s the right season, I hurry. He trembles and I can feel my 
lost child surfacing within me, forgiving me, rising from the lake where it has 
been prisoned for so long /…/ the two halves clasp, interlocking like fingers,
it buds, it sends out fronds. /…/ I will be able to see it: it will be covered with 
shining fur, a god /…/. (Surfacing 190–191) 

According to Pratt (1981: 157), her godlike baby is the re-found grail that 
represents her elixir of life and enables her psychological transformation or rebirth 
since she finds her authentic self and, thus, her female identity in the new regenerative 
role of a mother.

 In the second half of Campbell’s inciation, which he calls atonement with the 
divine parents, the surfacer leaves the lover Joe and her friends. She escapes into 
the wilderness, where she loses her sanity, becomes one with nature and reconciles 
with the memory of her drowned father, who was found dead in the lake, and her 
lost mother, who died of cancer long time ago. In a shamanic trance, she imagines 
to see the ghosts of her divine parents and forgives them for having died and 
having left her too soon. She realizes that they are no longer “gods” (Surfacing,
220) and lets go of their innocence which she attributed to herself as well – /…/ 
Our father, Our mother /…/ they dwindle, grow, become what they were, human.
/…/ their totalitarian innocence was my own.” (Surfacing, 220). According to Fry,
the romance journey is based on the innocence and idealization which the hero 
usually attributes to his happy childhood and to the divine images of his good and 
spiritually guiding parents from childhood at the beginning of his romance story,
whereas the end of his journey is usually indicated by the loss of his childhood 
innocence and idyllic past. This corresponds to surfacer’s reconciliation with her 
dead parents who were just mortal beings and her disillusionment with the previous 
partner since she admits that she worshipped and idealized him as a god like 
her parents – although he was just an average person with flaws.

 According to Grace (1980: 109), the surfacer’s parents and her aborted baby 
represent her psychological conflict or the Jungian shadow which she resolves by 


consciously confronting the loss of her dead baby together with the death of her 
parents. By letting go of their ghosts, she finally heals her divided self and achieves 
wholeness in the psychological process of Jung’s individuation – although her 
personal growth and transformation will continue all her life. At the end of her 
journey, she also gives up the belief that she is a powerless victim – “/…/ above all,
to refuse to be a victim /…/” (Surfacing, 222) – and, thus, conquers the non-victim 
position, as Atwood points out in her critical study Survival. In the third 
part of Campbell’s schema, the hero conventionally returns to civilization and, in 
the protagonist’s case, her non-patriarchal lover Joe comes to look for her in the 
Canadian bush in order to take her back to town since she has no other choice,
as Atwood suggests at the end of the narrative – “/…/ withdrawing is no longer 
possible, and the alternative is death.” (Surfacing, 222) 

4 CONCLUSION 

As it was demonstrated in the archetypal analysis, the novel Surfacing follows 
the textual world of the heroic quest according to Campbell’s (also Frye’s and 
Jung’s) mythic schema. Her quest also corresponds to the mythic pattern of personality 
renovation present in the Bible (and in medieval quest romances) sincethe protagonist (surfacer) imitates the biblical (mythic) quest in her contemporary 
world of the twentieth century. However, Atwood’s version revises the 
ancient (mythic) story of the hero’s quest by introducing a new ironic meaningaccording to which her heroine realizes with disillusionment that her adult lifeis full of deceptions and no longer idyllic like her perfect and happy childhood.
In this novel, as in many other ones, Atwood subverts the traditional roles ofcolonial novels in which male protagonists appear in the main adventurous role.
As far as this is concerned, the female characters of her postcolonial and post-
modern narratives, which are often multi-voiced and genre-hybrid metafictions,
no longer play passive figures in secondary roles of no importance, as it wastypical of the nineteenth-century colonial canon. On the contrary, they mostlyappear as active and positive heroines in search of their female identity andself-realization like the surfacer, the quester of Surfacing, who pursues her goalof personal transformation and, in her particular case, the male partner Joe playsthe supportive role of a helper. 

REFERENCES 

Achebe, C. (1958) 2009. Things Fall Apart. New York: W. W. Norton. 
Atwood, M. 1972 (1984). Surfacing. London: Virago. 


Atwood, M. 1984. Bodily Harm. Toronto: Seal Books. McClelland and 

Stewart-Bantam. 
Atwood, M. 1986.The Handmaid’s Tale.Toronto: McClelland and Stewart-Bantam. 
Atwood, M. 1987. Lady Oracle. New York: Ballantine. 
Atwood, M. 1987. The Edible Woman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart-Bantam. 
Atwood, M. 1989. Cat’s Eye. New York. Bantam. 
Atwood, M. 1994. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland-Bantam. 
Atwood, M. 1996. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday. 
Atwood, M. 1996. Life Before Man. London: Vintage. 
Atwood, M. 1996. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: 

Anansi. 
Atwood, M. 2001. The Blind Assassin. London: Virago. 
Atwood, M. 2002. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge: CUP. 
Atwood, M. 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday. 
Atwood, M. 2005. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Atlantic: 

Canongate.
Atwood, M. 2009. The Year of the Flood. New York: Doubleday. 
Atwood, M. 2013. MaddAddam. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann T. 1988. Družbena konstrukcija realnosti: razprava iz 

sociologije znanja. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba. 
Bhabha, H. K. 1996. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. 
Campbell, J. 1973. The Hero with a Thousands Faces. Princeton: Princeton Univer


sity Press.
Christ, C. P. 1976. Margaret Atwood: The Surfacing of Women’s Spiritual Quest 
and Vision. In Signs 2, no. 2, pp. 316–330. 
Cooke, N. 2004. Margaret Atwood. A Critical Companion. London: Greenwood 

Press. 
Frye, N. 1957. The Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
Grace, S. 1980. Violent Duality. Montreal: Vehicule Press. 
Graves, R. 1992. The Greek Myths: Complete Edition. London: Penguin. 
Graves, R. 1997. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. London: 

Faber & Faber. 
Guha, R. & Spivak, G. 1988. Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford: OUP. 
Gupta, R. 2006. Margaret Atwood. A Psychoanalytical Study. Berkshire: New Dawn. 
Howells, A. C. 2000.Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret At


wood’s Novel. In Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. Edited by R. M. Nischik. 
New York: Camden House, pp. 139–156.

Hutcheon, L. 1990. The Canadian Postmodern. Toronto: OUP. 2000. A Theory of 
Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: 
University of Illinois Press. 


Jung, C. G. & von Franz, M. L., eds. 1961. Man and His Symbols. New York: 
Doubleday.

Macpherson, H. S. 2010. The Cambridge Introduction to Margaret Atwood. Cambridge: 
CUP.

Pratt, A. 1981. Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction. Brighton: The Harvester 
Press. 

Said, E. 1978. Orientalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 

Steals, H. 1995. Margaret Atwood’s Novels. A Study of Narrative Discourse. Basel: 
Francke. 

Wilson, S. R. 2000. Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works. In: 
Margaret Atwood’s Works and Impact. Edited by R. M. Nischik. New York: 
Camden House, pp. 228. 

Andrejka Obidic 
Ljubljana, Slovenija 
andreja.obidic@gmail.com 
Psihološki in mitski vplivi v postkolonialnih in postmodernih (feminis


ticnih) romanih Margaret Atwood: Arhetipska analiza romana Na površje 

Clanek raziskuje mitske in psihološke razsežnosti v postkolonialnih in postmodernih 
ter žanrsko hibridnih pripovednih delih Margaret Atwood v okviru arhetipske 
kritike, medtem ko analiza avtoricinega romana Na površje natancneje prikaže, 
kako Atwood mitske prvine v tem delu posodobi. 

Kljucne besede: Margaret Atwood, Kanada, postkolonialna teorija Edwarda 
Saida, postkolonializem, Linda Hutcheon, postmodernizem, feminizem, psihologija 
Carla Gustava Junga, mitska/arhetipska kritika, Northrop Frye 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: [821.111(73).09:821.111.09]:178.1 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.25-36 

Fortified Fiction: Writers and Drink 

Wojciech Klepuszewski 

Abstract 

Part of what is usually labelled as drink/ing studies comprises literature and the way 
drink is rendered in literary works. In many cases such works are written by writers who 
themselves are drink-dependent. This article focuses on such fiction an such writers, acknowledging 
American literature, extensively discussed in various studies, and bringing 
to the fore some British novelists who largely remain at the margin of critical interest in 
this respect. 

Key words: Alcohol, literature, fiction, writers, addiction. 


The fact that alcohol in many literary works flows in abundance inevitably leads tothe question of the writer-drink-literature nexus. This particular junction may produce 
a variety of outcomes, though one has to bear in mind that while some writers’drinking propensity may trigger a literary representation, not every drink-dependent 
writer will necessarily write about addiction; conversely, a non-addicted writermay find interest in incorporating drink as a theme.Thus, the literary rendition maybe utterly irrespective of the writer’s habits, though of course, as the history of literature 
shows, the reverse is mostly true and when this is the case, literature becomes“an indirect outlet for the author to express ideas rooted in his own life experience.”
(Rostkoff 2002: 224).The most extreme variant of this peculiar life-writing brew arethose writers who exemplify an organic fusion in this respect, meaning that what is areal-life feature is transposed to the fictional realm they create. In other words, eachof these writers “transforms alcohol into ink” (Voelker 1997: 23), leaving a literaryimprint of their own drinking habits. Obviously, this does not apply to writers forwhom drink becomes an impediment, incapacitating their creativity or even leadingto a complete writer’s block, but to those who find some inspirational value in drink.
This point is frequently discussed by scholars and critics, such as John Booth, theeditor of Creative Spirits: A Toast to Literary Drinkers (1997): 

The relationship between drink and writing is well established. It is all things 
to all writers: an encouragement, a support, a solace, a spur, an excuse. For some 
lucky individuals drink is liberating, galvanizing the imagination to life so the 
words pour, filling the white emptiness of the page. (1997: 1) 

Much similar, but more empirically reinforced stance is expressed by the editor 
of Drink to Me Only (1982), Aland Bold, if only because of his great affection for 
both drinking and literary matters (cf. Smith 1983: 1697), the two collections of 
his poems, Society Inebrious (1965) and A Pint of Bitter (1971) being the literary 
outcomes of such fusion, and confirming Bold’s expertise in the field: 

There are few subjects authors are so eloquent about as drink: it not only loosens 
the tongue, its spirit constantly materializes on paper. Drink has inspired 
authors to spectacular feats of artistic invention; it has also encouraged a limitless 
loquacity or induced a wordless depression and despair. (1982: 1) 

Bold’s and Booth’s anthologies are two examples of drink-themed compilationswhich allow the reader to become familiar with a large number of texts reflecting 
this particular literary and biographical aspect in poetry, drama, fiction andmiscellaneous non-fictional pieces. There are also numerous critical studies, butthey usually focus on American writers, with such legendary drinkers as Hemingway, 
Bukowski, McCullers, and Kerouac. Their novels reflect the authors’ drinking 


habits, most often in the form of protagonists who consume prodigious amountsof alcohol, as happens in Raymond Chandler’s detective novels featuring Philip 
Marlowe, a typical barfly. Marlowe’s preferred drink is bourbon, but as we learn 
from, for instance, The Long Good-Bye (1953), he is ‘never fussy about drinks’ (1978:
18), easily accepting brandy, or mixes such as a whiskey sour. Marlow representsa philosophical type of drinker, often making comments concerning the act ofdrinking with all its implications, a good example being The Big Sleep (1939), inwhich he explains that “you can have a hangover from other things than alcohol”
(159). Raymond Chandler himself had a long history of drink dependence, with“blackouts, or alcohol-induced amnesia, when he drank heavily.” (Hiney 1997: 62).

Whereas Chandler’s protagonist is simply a detective who drinks heavily, in moreextreme variants the main characters fall at the very bottom of the social ladder, as isthe case in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and its sequel Doctor Sleep (2013), theformer featuring Jack Torrance, with an alcoholic history behind, while the latter hisson Danny, who inherited this particular feature from his father and, unsurprisingly, 
is referred to as, “a drunkass alcoholic” (2014: 89). Sam Leith writes about bothbooks being a reflection of King’s struggle with addiction, and defines The Shiningas “a book by a drinking alcoholic about an alcoholic in the grip of white-knuckleabstinence” and Doctor Sleep as “a book about a recovering alcoholic written by a recovering 
alcoholic.” (2013). Stephen King’s own achievement in the field of alcohol 
consumption is impressive, particularly if one considers his alcoholic “stunts” such asdrinking “a case of 16-ounce beer cans a night” (Rolls 2009: 81). In his On Writing: A 
Memoir of the Craft (2000), Stephen King openly admits to being drink-dependent: 

Holy shit, I’m an alcoholic, I thought, and there was no dissenting opinion from inside 
my head – I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even 
realizing (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself.( 2002: 88) 

While some alcoholic writers left a noteworthy literary reflection of their 
drinking habits in fiction, others also contributed works of an autobiographical 
nature. The point in case is certainly Jack London’s alcoholic memoir, John Barleycorn 
(1913), in which he writes of his addiction taking roots in the very childhood: 
“I was five years old the first time I got drunk” (1913: 16). A related type 
of fiction are ‘recovery memoirs’, such as Asylum (1935) by William Seabrook, a 
journalist and traveller who decided to spend some time at an asylum in 1933, to 
treat his acute alcoholism1, the record of which is left in Asylum. Considering that 

Although Seabrook managed to stay sober for a while, there was a relapse into drinking which he 
described in his last book, No Hiding Place; An Autobiography (1942), one of the reflections there 
being an ominous projection of the finale to his own life: “What do drunkards do? They... drink...
themselves... to... death.” (1942: 385). 


Seabrook was a travel writer, contributing short texts to Cosmopolitan and Reader’s 
Digest, as well as writing numerous books, such as Adventures in Arabia (1927) orThe Magic Island (1929), Ryan Holiday’s definition of the memoir as a “travel book 
where the journey is inward instead of outward” (2015) seems most appropriate.
In fact, Asylum is full of Seabrook’s reflections on this particular self-exploration: 

So long as any man drinks when he wants to and stops when he wants to, he 
isn’t a drunkard, no matter how much he drinks or how often he falls under the 
table. The British upper classes were constantly and consistently mildly stewed,
from father to son, in Parliament and Pall Mall for nearly the whole of the 
eighteenth century. It isn’t drinking that makes a drunkard. I had drunk for 
years, enthusiastically, and with pleasure, when I wanted to. Then something 
snapped in me and I lost control. I began to have it when I didn’t want it. I 
couldn’t stop when I wanted to. (1935: 53) 

At the time, Seabrook’s book was famous enough to be noticed by another 
alcoholic writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, who mentions it in his 1936 essay “The 
Crack-Up” (cf. Wilson 2009:71). However, the real profusion of recovery memoirs 
appeared in the second part of the twentieth-century and continues to do so.
There are numerous examples of such in America, to mention Caroline Knapp’s 
Drinking: A Love Story (1996), Note Found in a Bottle: My Life as a Drinker (1999),
written by Susan Cheever, whose father was John Cheever, an alcoholic writer 
too. In Britain, among the examples worth mentioning is the novelist known for 
his continuation of the Bond series, John Gardner, and his autobiographical Spinthe Bottle (1964), and more recently, John Sutherland’s Last Drink to LA (2001).

 However, all of these, written by struggling alcoholics, belong to the realm of 
non-fiction. As far as fiction is concerned, at least fame-wise, nothing compares 
to Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano 
(1947), seminal books by writers who both took refuge in the bottle. Charles 
Jackson’s The Lost Weekend (1944) features Don Birnam, a failed writer and alcoholic 
who is both comforted and confronted by alcohol. John Crowley asserts that 
the novel is a unique masterpiece of writing about alcoholic addiction, and that its 
“canny portrait of the alcoholic remains unsurpassed.” (1993: 3). However, what 
made the book one of the most iconic renderings of the theme was the subsequent 
screening of the film version (1945), directed by Billy Wilder and awarded four 
Oscars. Paradoxically, it all started by accident: 

Billy Wilder was on his way by train to New York for a holiday in the spring 
of 1944. He picked up a copy of Charles Jackson’s novel The Lost Weekend at a 
kiosk during a stopover at Union Station in Chicago. Wilder sat up all night 
reading it. By the time he reached Pennsylvania Station in new York City the 


following morning, Wilder had finished the book. He was convinced that it 
would make an engrossing movie. (Phillips 2010: 71) 

The immense success of the film exceeded the interest in the novel as such. 
Blake quotes Jackson, who complained that people would tell him how much 
they adored ‘his’ film, with no mention of reading the book. (cf. 2013: xviii). Judy 
Cornes, in her study Alcohol in the Movies, 1898-1962: A Critical History, writes 
that the film version of the novel “allows us to experience viscerally the slow disintegration 
of a sensitive, intelligent writer” (2006: 126), which sound as if the 
film were a brilliant version of an average novel, rather than equally brilliant novel.
From the present perspective, both the novel and its film adaptation seem equally 
harrowing with their picture of the main protagonist’s gradual fall into the 
drinking abyss. This process begins with Birnam having to fight the ever-growing 
shortage of drink supply (“one warm drop crawled like slow syrup through the 
neck of the bottle”; 1998: 40), only to reach the alcoholic nadir in the bout of 
delirium tremens, referred to as “a disease of the night” (154). However, these are 
the most glaring, almost clinical examples of alcoholism, but Jackson’s novel offers 
a whole range of alcoholic intricacies: 

When the drink was set before him, he felt better. He did not drink it immediately. 
Now that he had it, he did not need to. Instead, he permitted himself 
the luxury of ignoring it for a while; he lit a cigarette, took some envelopes out 
of his pocket and unfolded and glanced through an old letter, put them away 
again and began to hum, quietly. Gradually, he worked up a subtle and elaborate 
pretense of ennui: stared at himself in the dark mirror of the bar, as if lost in 
thought; fingered his glass, turning it round and round or sliding it slowly back 
and forth in the wet of the counter; shifted from one foot to the other; glanced 
at a couple of strangers standing farther down the bar and watched them for 
a moment or two, critical, aloof, and, as he thought, aristocratic; and when he 
finally did get around to raising the glass to his lips, it was with an air of boredom 
that said, Oh well, I suppose I might as well drink it, now that I’ve ordered 
it. ( Jackson 1998: 16) 

Much as the protagonist of his novel, Jackson had a history of drinking and 
struggling with alcoholic addiction, resulting in joining the AA and being hospitalised 
at the beginning of 1950s. As Bailey notes in his biographical study,
Jackson “was indeed Don Birnam, and only two episodes in The Lost Weekend 
were purely fictional (to wit: he never pawned his girlfriend’s leopard coat to get 
liquor money, nor did he stand up the hostess of his favourite bar because of an 
alcoholic blackout.”); 2013: 4). It is interesting to notice how the novel translates 
Jackson’s own alcoholic problems as a writer, with Birnam being both a tormented 


alcoholic and an equally tormented would-be novelist.This is so because he is obsessed 
with writing a novel he wants to call “In a Glass” (“The Bottle” in the film 
version), obviously based on his autobiographical experience. More to the point,
he also refers to other writers afflicted with alcoholic addiction, such as Fitzgerald 
(1998: 136-138).

In a similar vein, Jackson’s British counterpart, Malcolm Lowry, is “brilliantly 
insightful about the lure of alcohol” (Morrison 2013) in Under the Volcano. Much 
as The Lost Weekend, Lowry’s novel became a classic of the alcoholic genre, also additionally 
popularised owing to its successful film version directed by John Huston 
in 1984. Jackson’s and Lowry’s protagonists have much in common: they both 
have a gargantuan thirst to quench, suffer from auditory and visual hallucinations,
and in both cases the readers can observe their final degradation. Otherwise, the 
two novels have different styles, their alcoholic methodologies, as it were, belong 
to two different worlds: 

The Lost Weekend is a portrait of alcoholic psychology and occurs entirely within 
the mind of its main character, Don Birnam. In Malcolm Lowry’s however,
Geoffrey Firmin’s morbid alcoholism is part of a metaphorical web that illuminates 
both his individual experience of alcoholism and the human condition in 
a modern world shadowed by looming disaster. (Pratt 2015: 803) 

In fact, Jackson’s novel is a down-to-earth case study, almost a textbook for 
students of psychiatry, imbued with tiny details of alcoholic behavioural pattern,
whereas Under the Volcano is allusive and metaphorical, if not mystical at times: 

the Consul is engaged in a struggle of almost epic significance against dark,
demonic, terrifying forces that are in large part represented or bodied forth by 
hallucinations. More heroic still, the Consul struggles not so much to avoid 
succumbing to the hallucinations as to make sense of them. Birnam’s intelligence, 
though acute, is applied to less titanic aims: mainly to finding the means,
financial and physical, to go on drinking. (Gilmore 1982: 287) 

Lowry’s novel is so much soaked with alcohol that Sam Jordison wonders 
whether there has been “a more alcoholic book than Under the Volcano?” (2013). It 
is, in fact, one of two novels Lowry managed to publish during his life, and one 
for which he is best known. It comes as no surprise that when a friend met drunk 
Lowry in London and asked him “what was next” he replied that he was working 
on “Under Under the Volcano.” (cf. Max 2007). In fact, Lowry did write another 
contribution to drink literature in the form of an autobiographical novella, Lunar 
Caustic, its source of inspiration being Lowry’s stay at a psychiatric ward of New 
York Bellevue Hospital in 1936. He continued revising Lunar caustic prior to his 


death in 1957 (cf. Knickerbocker 1979: 291, 292), but it was published posthumously 
in the Paris Review (1963) by Margerie Lowry and Earle Birney. This 
dark and bizarre story features Bill Plantagenet whose choice of a drinking den 
is rather morbid and disturbing, for he “likes drinking in churches particularly”
(1979: 296). Even after leaving the hospital where Bill was taken for detoxification, 
he returns to his ultimate alcoholic sanctuary to plunge back into addiction: 

He entered a church he knew, gazing about him. In the painting above, Christ 
was being offered a drink; he stood a while in meditation. The thought even 
of vinegar sent the blood coursing through his veins. There was only one other 
person there, a woman in black, kneeling. Here was his opportunity. When so 
much suffering existed, what else could a man do? With a guilty, flurried, yet 
triumphant motion he took a long draught of whisky.” (345) 

The part which seems a direct imprint of Lowry’s own alcoholic ordeal, and 
which probably reflects his own observations while in hospital is the depiction of 
the DTs, which Donald Goodwin, who specialises in medicine and writes extensively 
on alcoholic writers, considers a superb literary rendition (cf. 1994: 48): 

He needed a drink desperately. He did not know whether his eyes were closed 
or open. Horrid shapes plunged out of the blankness, gibbering, rubbing their 
bristles against his face, but he couldn’t move. Something had got under his bed 
too, a bear that kept trying to get up. Voices, a prosopopoeia of voices, murmured 
in his ears, ebbed away, murmured again, cackled, shrieked, cajoled; voices 
pleading with him to stop drinking, to die and be damned. Thronged, dreadful 
shadows came close, were snatched away. A cataract of water was pouring 
through the wall, filling the room. A red hand gesticulated, prodded him: over 
a ravaged mountain side a swift stream was carrying with it legless bodies yelling 
out of great eye-sockets, in which were broken teeth. Music mounted to a 
screech, subsided. On a tumbled bloodstained bed in a house whose face was 
blasted away a large scorpion was gravely raping a one-armed Negress. His wife 
appeared, tears streaming down her face, pitying, only to be instantly transformed 
into Richard III, who sprang forward to smother him. (299) 

Lowry and Jackson are undoubtedly two icons in the realm of drink literature,
but there are numerous other examples worth critical attention. As American literature 
has been well documented in critical studies concerning drink-dependentwriters and the way they depict alcoholism in fiction2, the British focus seems tooffer more avenues that have not been properly acknowledged. The list of British 

See, for example, Alcohol and the Writer (Donald Goodwin, 1988), The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and 
the American Writer (Tom Dardis,1989) or Writing Under the Influence: Alcoholism and the Alcoholic 
Perception from Hemingway to Berryman (Matts Djos, 2010). 


writers3 who were alcoholics is impressive, though some of them remain obscure,
while many others are largely neglected in this particular aspect. Of those Britishnovelists in whose life alcohol played as important a role as in their fiction twonames are often mentioned. The first one4 is Evelyn Waugh, of whom his biographer, 
John Wilson, writes that “drinking detracted from his performance”, and thathe “loved drunken abandon” (2001: 22, 28). Donat Gallagher, in his collection ofEvelyn Waugh’s non-fiction, includes an essay entitled “Drinking”, in which Waughgives an account of his early affection for alcohol: “It was at the university that I tookto drink, discovering in a crude way the contrasting pleasures of intoxication anddiscrimination.” (1983: 609). This affection was to be continued in later years and issuperbly reflected in Brideshead Revisited (1945), which was filmed in 2008, directedby Julian Jarrold. The novel portrays Sebastian Flyte, whose family is not only ofan aristocratic descent but also devoutly Catholic, and Charles Ryder, of a rather 
opposite background. Both young men forge a kind of friendship with a muchdeeper undertone on the part of Sebastian, and both of them partake in alcoholicbinges organised by Sebastian, whose appearances in the novel are best described ina phrase used by his sister, Cordelia: “Old Sebastian on the spree again” (2000: 289).

 Another British novelist for whom “heavy drinking was a part of his life” (Booth1997: 15) is Graham Greene. The drink theme in his fiction is particularly well-expounded 
in three novels: The Power and the Glory (1940), whose protagonist is referred 
to as a ‘whisky priest’, not without a reason of course; Our Man in Havana 
(1958), with its famous scene of Captain Segura and James Wormold playing a gameof draughts with miniature bottles of Scotch and bourbon; and The Honorary Consul(1973), namely Charles Fortnum, an alcoholic whose “veins run with alcohol, notblood.”(2000: 44).Greene was exceptionally lucky with the film industry,because allthe above were filmed, the first one as The Fugitive (1947, John Ford), a rather freeversion of the novel, the second and third under the same titles: Our Man in Havana 
(1959, Carol Reed) and The Honorary Consul (1983, John Mackenzie). Obviously, the 
fact that both Waugh’s and Greene’s novels have their film versions is conducive to 
their general appreciation, though at the same time, as the case of The Lost Weekend 
shows, it is often much to the detriment of the literary precursor’s reception.

 Much less apparent in the drink context is William Golding, though he did 
struggle with addiction for a long time. In the review of Golding’s biography, 
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst underlines the following: 

3 The Irish legacy of drink literature and drink-dependent writers offers enough material for a 

separate study; hence, it is not included here. 
4 The missing name here is Kingsley Amis, because his overall contribution in the drink context,

biographical and literary (including non-fiction) deserves a separate study. In fact, such work is 

now in progress (cf. Klepuszewski, Wojciech. The Proof is in the Writing: Kingsley Amis’s Literary 

Distillations. To be published 2017/18). 


At no stage does John Carey refer to Golding as an alcoholic, but it is worth 
noting how often his account repeats the words “drink”, “drank” and “drunk”,
creating a rhythm sadly suggestive of someone who may have enjoyed a drink 
but needed it even more. (2009) 

Some of Golding’s fiction offers interesting drink themes, including the characters’ 
alcoholism, an example being The Paper Men (1984), whose protagonist,
Wilfred Barclay, is an alcoholic writer. In fact, the opening pages of the novel 
immediately outline his bibulous nature: 

I must interrogate the bottles. If it proved necessary, I must sneak out of the 
back door – no, the conservatory was quieter – get to the dustbin, ashcan, poubelle, 
whatever one chose to call it and, not to elaborate, count the empties. For 
the truth was that already I did not believe in the bottle still full but with the 
cork drawn. (1984: 9) 

Interesting drink imagery can be found in The Inheritors (1955), a deeply disturbing 
novel in which the Neanderthals, Lok and Fa, discover the lure and the 
power of alcoholic drink: 

His nose caught the scent of what they drank. It was sweeter and fiercer then 
the other water, it was like the fire and the fall. It was a bee-water, smelling of 
honey and wax and decay, it drew toward and repelled, it frightened and excited 
like the people themselves.There were other stones nearer the fire with holes in 
their tops and the smell seemed to come particularly strongly from them. Now 
Lok saw that when the people had finished their drink they came to these and 
lifted them and took more to drink. The girl Tanakil was lying in front of one 
of the caves as if she were dead. A man and a woman were fighting and kissing 
and screeching and another man was crawling round and round the fire like a 
moth with a burnt wing. (Golding 1981: 172) 

However, among many numerous British writers who could be mentioned in thecontext discussed in this article, two figures deserve special attention, namely JeanRhys and Patrick Hamilton, both recognised critically, though one could hardly callthem mainstream writers, particularly Hamilton. Rhys and Hamilton are both sadfigures, their lives entirely alcohol-ridden, their literary talent resulting in brilliantnovels which remained forgotten for decades. Jean Rhys, after publishing some ofher best novels, disappeared and indulged for years in solitary drinking, but was rediscovered 
and properly acknowledged. Rhys had a long and tragic history behind,
alcoholism and prostitution included. As Elaine Savory writes in her study: 

She gradually became a serious alcoholic and in middle age was arrested for disturbing 
the peace and was briefly confined in a woman’s prison for psychiatric 


evaluation. Many assumed she had died when she disappeared from public viewfor decades, so when she reappeared, there was talk of a “reincarnation.” (2009: ix) 

Rhys herself describes her daily routine as determined by the drink intake:
“One day drunk, two days hung-over, regular as clockwork.” (quoted in Angier 
1985: 92). In the drink context, some of her novels, particularly After Leaving 
Mr Mackenzie (1931) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939), offer interesting study 
material, with the main protagonists being vulnerable females, lonely and depressed 
in Paris, alcohol being of consolatory value, though the protagonist of 
Good Morning, Midnight, Sasha Jansen, is trying to drink herself to death thus 
establishing an escape route from her failed life: 

I’ve had enough of these streets that sweat a cold, yellow slime, of hostile people, 
of crying myself to sleep every night. I’ve had enough of thinking, enough 
of remembering. Now whisky, rum, gin, sherry, vermouth, wine with the bottles 
labelled ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus. ...’ Drink, drink, drink. ... As soon as I sober up 
I start again. (2000: 37) 

Even more disturbing is the case of Patrick Hamilton whose life perfectlymatches his fiction. His alcoholic intake often amounted to three bottles of 
whisky daily (cf. Holroyd 2006: xx), which worsened his condition to such anextent that it disabled him from writing, leading to his death at the age of 58,
cirrhosis of the liver being mostly to blame. Hamilton planned to write an autobiographical 
account of his alcoholism in Memoirs of a Heavy Drinking Man” 
(cf. Jones 2008: 5), but this was never completed; instead, there is an imprintof his life left in numerous novels. His fiction, much as his life, is drowned inan alcoholic haze, with the characters forever frequenting bars and pubs. Themost pathographical novel of all is Hangover Square (1941), in which George 
Harvey Bone’s obsession is so intense that drinking becomes part and parcel ofhis reasoning: “hadn’t he got something to drink and think about?” (2001: 139).
The monumental trilogy published in 1935 as Twenty Thousand Streets Under the 
Sky is similarly disturbing, though at the same time heart-rending, the hub ofthe story being The Midnight Bell, a pub in which the main characters’ fortunesintertwine while drink flows in abundance. 

Any discussion on the writer-drink-literature nexus is partly speculative, because 
it is difficult to quantify the extent to which fictional themes have their 
source in the writers’ own alcoholic background. However, in most cases, this 
personal background is reflected in fiction, which is as ‘fortified’ as the authors’ 
own lives: their personal stories, drinking patterns, and struggles with addiction 
conspicuously rendered in their novels. The fact that they are written from experience 
additionally validates their genuineness in the context of drink literature. 


Apart from numerous American novelists who have been extensively discussed in 
critical studies, and such iconic alcoholic writers as Lowry or Jackson, there are 
writers whose lives and works in the alcoholic context, have either not been considered 
at all, or largely ignored, without full acknowledgement of their personal 
entanglement and contribution to the field of drink literature. This is particularly 
true as regards the British writers, many of whom perfectly fit the context. Jean 
Rhys and Patrick Hamilton are just two examples, but there are numerous other,
to mention Henry Green, or Julian MacLaren-Ross.The short space of this article 
does not allow for a detailed analytical dissection of the writer-drink-literature 
nexus, but it does signal that there are still novelists and novels worth further 
critical recognition in this respect. 

REFERENCES 

Angier, Carole. Jean Rhys. New York: Viking, 1985.
Blake Bailey. “Introduction to The Lost Weekend.” New York: Vintage Books, 2013. 
Chandler, Raymond. The Long Good-Bye. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books in as


sociation with Hamish Hamilton, 1978.
Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. New York: Vinatage Crime/Black Lizard, 
1992. 
Douglas-Fairhurst, Robert. “William Golding: the Man Who Wrote Lord of the 
Flies by John Carey: review.” The Telegraph, 28 August 2009.
Gilmore, Thomas B.1982. “The Place of Hallucinations in Under the Volcano.”

Contemporary Literature 23: 285-305. 
Golding, William. The Inheritors. London: Faber and Faber, 1981. 
Golding, William. The Paper Men. London: Guild Publishing, 1984.
Goodwin, Donald W. 1993. “Alcohol as Muse.” Dionysos, Vol. 5 No 1, 1993, pp. 

3-14. 
Greene, Graham. The Honorary Consul: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 

2000. 
Hamilton, Patrick. 2001. Hangover Square. London: Penguin, 2001. 
Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997. 
Holroyd, Michael. “Introduction to The Slaves of Solitude.” In Hamilton, 2006. 

xiv-xiv. 
King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 

2002. 
King, Stephen. Doctor Sleep. New York: Gallery Books, 2014.
Knickerbocker, Conrad. 1979. “Foreword to Lunar Caustic.” In, Lowry, 1979. 

291-293. 


Leith, Sam. 2013. “Doctor Sleep by Stephen King – review.” The Guardian, 30 
September.

London, Jack. John Barleycorn. New York: Century Company, 1913. 

Lowry, Malcolm. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place and Lunar 
Caustic. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979.

Max, D.T. “Day of the Dead: Malcolm Lowry’s mysterious demise.” The New 
Yorker, December 17, 2007.

Morrison, Blake. 2013. “Why do writers drink?” The Guardian, 20 July.

Pratt, David C. “Role of Alcohol in Literature.” In Martin, Scott Christopher.
(Ed.), The Sage Encyclopedia of Alcohol: Social, Cultural, and Historical Perspective. 
Thousand Oaks, CA.: SAGE Publications, 2015. 798-804.

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. London: Penguin, 2000. 

Rolls, Albert. Stephen King: A Biography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2009. 

Savory, Elaine. Jean Rhys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 

Seabrook, William. Asylum. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. 

Seabrook, William. No Hiding Place. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1942. 

Waugh, Evelyn. Brideshead Revisited. London: Penguin Books, 2000. 

Wilson, John Howard. Evelyn Waugh: A Literary Biography, 1924-1966. London: 
Associated University Presses, 2001.

Wilson, Edmund (ed.). The Crack-Up: Nonfiction by F. Scott Fitzgerald. New 
York: New Directions Publishing, 2009. 

Wojciech Klepuszewski 
Koszalin University of Technologyklepuszewski@poczta.pl 
Okrepljena proza: pisatelji in pijaca 

Del tega kar je oznaceno za študije pitja zajema književnost in nacin na katerega 
je pijaca opisana v literarnih delih. V mnogih primerih so takšna dela izpod peresa 
avtorjev, ki so sami odvisni od pijace. 

Kljucne besede: alkohol, književnost, proza, pisatelji, zasvojenost 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 27.312.47:7+821(=131.1)(73) 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.37-56 

The Black Madonna in the Italian American 
Artistic Imagination 

Elisabetta Marino 

Abstract 

This essay sets out to explore the image of the black Madonna in Italian American artistic 
and literary expressions, providing thought-provoking examples of how this holy icon 
of universal motherhood has been persistently associated with the articulation of empowering 
strategies, with antagonism towards any kind of patriarchal restraints, with the 
healing of deeply ingrained divisions (of gender, class, ethnicity), and with the celebration 
of diversity in unity. 

Key words: Black Madonna, Italian Americans, Patriarchy, Otherness 


Over the centuries, considerable scholarly efforts have been devoted to unravel 
the mystery that surrounds the image of the black Madonna, whose category 
“appears to be an unstable one,”1 as Melanie Rose Landman has underlined, after 
stating that “there is no definitive explanation for the blackness of black Madonnas.”
2 Mostly dating back to the Middle Ages, between the Eleventh and the 
Fourteenth centuries (even though some frescoes, paintings, and even a few sculptures 
can be ascribed to the first centuries of the Christian Era3), Bizantine-style 
icons as well as wooden, stone, and metal statues of the black Madonna (with 
Asian, European or African features) are to be found in 35 countries all over the 
world, according to a survey carried out by Ean Begg (a former Dominican priest 
and currently a Jungian analyst), who has compiled a valuable but still incomplete 
list of more than 450 representations of the dark Virgin with her holy infant,
all renowned for their miraculous power.4 This rather modest figure is probably 
underestimated for several reasons: first of all, the elusive definition of what a 
black Madonna really is (her skin colour ranges from pitch black to lighter hues 
of brown). Moreover, several images have undergone substantial transformations 
and can no longer be visibly identified as black; indeed, when the first or even later 
attempts at restoration were undertaken, a fair number of pictures and statuettes 
were not just cleaned: they were literally repainted, whitened. Since their complexion 
seldom reflected the predominant ethnicity of the sites where they were 
worshipped (mainly in Europe), due to the customary connections between darkness 
and sin, beauty/purity and the immaculate candour of a virgin,5 their peculiardusky colour was often rejected and denied, conveniently believed to be unintentional, 
accidentally caused either by the smoke of incense, candles and fires, or by 
layers of dirt and ashes, or even by the oxidation of some of the pigments used in 
old paint.6 Nevertheless, it should not pass unnoticed that, despite the superficial 

1 Melanie Rose Landman, “An Investigation in to the Phenomenon of the Black Madonna” (PhD 
diss., University of Roehampton, 2012), 7. 
2 Ibid. 

3 
St. Luke, the Evangelist, was credited with painting the oldest and most truthful portraits of Mary,
symbolically darkened with grief. Compare Monique Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery: Change 
in the Meanings of Black Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” The American 
Historical Review 107, no. 5 (2002): 1422. 

4 Ean Begg, The Cult of the Black Virgin (New York: Penguin, 1996), 3. 
5 Black Madonnas have been commonly perceived as ugly and imperfect. As Scheer recalls, J.W.
Goethe, for example, voiced a sense of “esthetic disappointment” while looking at the “Moorish 
colour” and the Egyptian and Abyssinian features of some representations of the Mother of God.
Scheer,“From Majesty to Mystery,” 1438. Even Karl Marx described black Madonnas as “the most 
disgraceful portraits of the Mother of God.” H.F. Peters, Red Jenny. A Life with Karl Marx (New 
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 114. 
6 Scheer, “From Majesty to Mystery,” 1418. 


changes in their appearance, in popular imagination these church-whitened icons 
are still revered and almost defiantly referred to as black Madonnas.7 

Numerous black Madonna sanctuaries and pilgrimage sites are located in It-
aly,8 especially in the Southern regions, where the vast majority of immigrants to 
the US came from. Nostalgia for the cherished homeland of one’s ancestors mingled 
with an unbending devotion to Catholicism may be regarded as two of the 
most evident and plausible reasons for the surprising interest in Black Madonnas 
displayed - as it will be shown in this essay - by several Italian American scholars,
artists, and writers, through their critical inquiries, creative projects, and fictional 
as well as non fictional narratives. As Edvige Giunta has highlighted, however,
especially Italian American women authors (but also some of their male counterparts) 
assert in their works “their power to rewrite Catholicism and, blending 
it with old and new mythologies, employ it as a vehicle for self-exploration and 
artistic affirmation.”9 Remarkably enough, Italian American artists and intellectuals 
have not been drawn towards the sorrowful, silent, meek and selfless image of 
the mater dolorosa, emulated by so many domestic angels appeased in their ancillary 
position.10 Quite the opposite: they seem to have deliberately elected as their 
collective and individual protective icon an ancient, potent, and enigmatic female 
figure, whose curious and puzzling colour seems to correspond to the dark complexion 
of the newcomers from Sicily or Calabria, who exhibited on their faces 
“a different kind of white than those of the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture,”11 in 
the words of Fred Gardaphé, and therefore resisted assimilation (or, as one may be 
tempted to define it, annihilation) into the melting pot.

Given what has been argued to far, this essay sets out to explore the image of 
the black Madonna in Italian American artistic and literary expressions, providing 
thought-provoking examples of how this holy icon of universal motherhood has 

7 
This is the case of the black Madonnas of Lucerna, Avellino, Chiaramonte Gulfi and Montenero, 
to name a few. 

8 
According to Mary Beth Moser, there are 125 Black Madonnas in Italy but, in her view, the count 
is constantly rising. Mary Beth Moser, Honoring Darkness. Exploring the Power of Black Madonnas 
in Italy (Vashon Island, Washington: Dea Madre Publishing, 2008), 128. 

9 Edvige Giunta, Writing with an Accent. Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (New York: 
Palgrave, 2002), 104. 
10 Compare the essay by Mary Jo Bona entitled “Mater Dolorosa No More? Mothers and Writers in 
the Italian/ American Literary Tradition.” 

11 
Fred Gardaphé, Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture (Albany: State University 
of New York Press, 2004), 6. The most infamous epithets usually hurled at Italian Americans were 
WoP (without papers, a reference to the status of illegal immigrant), Dago (a corruption of the 
Spanish name Diego), and Guinea,“a reference to inhabitants of a coastal area is Western Africa as 
the ‘Guinea Negro.’” Salvatore J. LaGumina et al., The Italian American Experience: an Encyclopedia 
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 319. 


been persistently associated with the articulation of empowering strategies, with 
antagonism towards any kind of patriarchal restraints, with the healing of deeply 
ingrained divisions (of gender, class, ethnicity), and with the celebration of diversity 
in unity. Some of the most comprehensive investigations into the history and 
significance of black Madonnas - carried out (not by chance) by two American 
scholars of Italian ancestry, namely Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum and her disciple 
Mary Beth Moser - will provide the necessary information to contextualize and 
support the analysis of relevant artistic productions and literary texts.

A “womanist/feminist cultural historian,” as she often describes herself,12 since 
the beginning of the 1990s, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum has been actively engaged 
in researching and uncovering the meaning of black Madonnas, primarily focusing 
on the Italian scenario. By delving into vernacular traditions (i.e. the history/
herstory of subordinated Others, of those who have been left out and marginalized), 
in her pioneering study entitled Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion & 
Politics in Italy (1993), she maintains that “Black Madonnas may be considered a 
metaphor for a memory of the time when the earth was believed to be the body 
of a woman and all creatures were equal.”13 As Chiavola Birnbaum points out,
the unusual colour of black Madonnas is actually “the ancient colour of regeneration,”
14 reminiscent of the different shades of brown of the fertile Earth. Besides,
it recalls the primordial Dark Mother nurturing all creatures, belonging to a time 
before history, when communities were classless, and humans were not alienated 
from one another and from nature. 

As Chiavola Birnbaum remarks in her volume, after visiting many sanctuaries 
in Italy dedicated to the Black Madonna, she realized that most had been built 
on (or, at least, in the proximity of ) heathen temples and holy sites consecrated to 
primeval Goddesses: among them, the Phoenician Astarte, the Sicilian Ibla, the 
Egyptian Isis, the Anatolian Cybele, the Roman Ceres or, in Greek mythology,
Demeter, one of whose many names was Melaina, the Black One, “in a clue to 
the origin of black Madonnas.”15 Hence, in her view, cultural hybridity, dynamism, 
and syncretism (whose corollary is the “mixing [of ] pagan and Christian 
beliefs”16) are all attributes inextricably linked with the cult of the black Madonna.

The historian also places a strong emphasis on the powerful nature of this 

12 See, for instance, the back cover of her seminal volume entitled Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion 

& Politics in Italy. 
13 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion and Politics in Italy (Boston: 

Northeastern University Press, 1993), 3. 
14 Ibid. 
15 Ibid., 37. 
16 Ibid., 51. 


feminine icon of the sacred: a close examination of popular, unofficial prayers and 
peasant rituals (including those aimed at dispelling the evil eye, malocchio) reveals 
that the black Madonna is widely acknowledged as the most effective figure in 
providing emotional and physical support, as well as in exorcising evils, fiercely 
chastising offenders, and redressing wrongs.17 Furthermore, Chiavola Birnbaum 
observes that in Italy, the sanctuaries of brown and black Madonnas are unmistakably 
“located in areas known for religious heresy and characterized by politics 
of equality and justice,”18 the latter being “the central value that emerges from 
studying the earth mother;”19 “for me,” comments the scholar, “the image of black 
madonnas [...] counters racism and sexism and connotes nurturance of the ‘other’ 
in contrast to the violence toward the ‘other’ that has historically characterized established 
religious and political doctrines.”20 Consequently, the whitening of black 
Madonnas (which implies a profound subversion of their nature) is interpreted 
by her as a calculated attempt on the part of a patriarchal institution such as the 
Roman Catholic Church to control and subdue their undermining potential, thus 
“reduc[ing] the Madonna to a great saint embodying virginity and obedience.”21 

Following in the steps of her friend and mentor, Mary Beth Moser has offered 
her valuable contribution to casting light on the mystery of black Madonnas. In 
her Honoring Darkness. Exploring the Power of Black Madonnas in Italy (a volume 
that combines scholarly erudition and personal recollections), she further investigates 
the origins of the dark colour of sculptures and portraits,22 by highlighting 
the possible connection between the black Madonna and the bride featured 
in the Song of Songs, who portrays herself as black but beautiful: “nigra sum sed 
formosa,”23 a sentence that is also inscribed on the base of the statue of the black 
Madonna of Tindari (a small village which is part of the municipality of Patti, 
in Sicily). Quoting the studies of Margaret Starbird, Moser also notices that 
the dark-skinned Mother may be identified with Mary Magdalene, “the ‘other’ 
Mary,”24 while her child could be the fruit of her unrecognized union with Jesus 

17 Ibid., 139. 
18 Ibid., 33. 
19 Ibid., 23. 
20 Ibid., 12. 
21 Ibid., 40. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum further deepened her analysis in the second part of her


volume entitled Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers (San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 
2001), 115-248. 
22 Moser also mentions the already listed unintentional reasons often cited for the dark colour (dirt, 
paint deterioration, and smoke). Moser, Honoring Darkness, 4. 
23 Ibid., 5. Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum had also hinted at this bond. Chiavola Birnbaum, Black 
Madonnas, 40-41. 
24 Moser, Honoring Darkness, 6. 


Christ. In the Italian peninsula, the archaic cults of the African Goddess Isis, of 
the black Goddess Artemis of Ephesus, of Demeter, of Cybele (the Great Mother 
of the Gods), of Hera, of the Goddess Mefiti (“an Italic divinity who dispelled 
evil spirits”25), and of the indigenous Vitulia (often assimilated to Hera) somehow 
all merged with the adoration of the black Madonna. Moser also reminds her 
readers that the Sumerians worshipped the great Goddess Inanna, known for her 
dark visage, while Hindus have a deep reverence for dark Kali who, like the black 
Madonna, is both a creator and a destroyer. Besides being the emblem of “the 
primordial darkness before light,”26 therefore, the colour black is unquestionably 
linked with majesty and power: as the scholar emphasizes, in fact,“one of the most 
notable characteristics about Black Madonnas is their power.”27 

The large number of ex-votos in fulfillment of vows bears witness to the enormous 
influence exercised by the dark Mother of God when supplicants appealfor her intercession.28 Some of the miracles listed by Moser, however, reflect the 
Madonna’s “potentially dangerous power,”29 namely her unusual willingness topunish with great force any form of abuse or violation of her sacred person (aswhen her very blackness was teased and her authority belittled).30 In time, thesestories have been altered and some of the most problematic aspects (especiallythose concerning the divine Mother’s anger) have been strategically erased: asMoser elucidates, “perhaps, like the alteration of the dark color of the images,
the elimination of the details of the stories is a kind of an ‘emotional whitening,’ 
a gradual removal of the Madonna’s ‘full’ range of power, including those we 
might consider to be negative.”31 

Finally, like Chiavola Birnbaum, also Moser devotes ample sections of her 
volume to what may be termed the hybrid nature of the black Madonna (“[she] 
crosses boundaries of time, geography, ethnicity, class, and religion”32), and to her 

25 Ibid., 18. 
26 Ibid., 15. 
27 Ibid., 3. 
28 As Moser underlines in another essay, “the clear message is that these powerful Madonnas can be 


called upon in the hour of need. No request is beyond her capacity.” Even though many have been 

stolen or lost, over ten thousand ex-votos are displayed in sanctuaries dedicated to black Madonnas 

in Italy. Mary Beth Moser, “Blood Relics: Menstrual Roots of Miraculous Black Madonnas in 

Italy,” Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture (2005), accessed January 2, 2017, http:// 

www.metaformia.org/articles/blood-relics/. 
29 Moser, Honoring Darkness, 84. 
30 For a full list, see pp. 80-82. See also Maria Famà’s poem entitled “The Black Madonna of Tindari,” 

analized in the conclusive part of this essay. 
31 Ibid., 79. 
32 Ibid., 127. 


inclusiveness, her extraordinary capacity to upset hierarchies, to bridge the divides, 
and to blur cultural borders in the name of equality and justice: “the Black 
Madonna,” concludes Moser, “has traditionally been worshipped by those who 
were ‘other’ and not of the dominant culture.”33 

Removed from their motherland, ostracized by the dominant society, often unfairly 
treated, disempowered, and stigmatized, many Italian American immigrants 
have frequently resorted to the protection of the black Madonna (a mythical traveler 
through cultures and identities, just like them) to overcome traumas and heal 
deep wounds. As Italian American writer Maria Terrone explained, when asked 
about the importance attached to black Madonnas by the Italian ethnic communities 
across the US, “instead of the Madonna being on a pedestal, this version is 
real and approachable.”34 Evidence of popular devotion may be gathered by observing, 
for instance, the cult of the black Madonna of Tindari in the New York 
metropolitan area, around Manhattan’s East Thirteenth Street. As Joseph Sciorra 
has pointed out, on September 8, 1905, a group of Sicilian immigrants from Patti 
(near Messina) celebrated the first festival in honour of the black Madonna 
in New York. The following year they commissioned a stucco statue inspired by 
the famous wooden sculpture, as well as establishing the Pattese Committee for 
the Most Holy Virgin of Tindari (Comitato Pattese alla Vergine SS. del Tindari). 
The statue was soon offered to the church of the Salesian fathers on the Twelfth 
Street, but it was unexpectedly declined;35 hence, it was stored in a basement until 
1913, when a small storefront chapel was created at 447 East Thirteenth Street.36 
The chapel remained in existence until the late 1980s; since most of the original 
community members had passed away, the committee was dissolved, money 
was donated to the sanctuary in Tindari, and one of the devotees was entrusted 
with the statue. Interestingly enough, however, in 2004 a younger generation of 
Italian Americans, including artists (such as B. Amore and Annie Lanzillotto) 
and scholars (George Guida and Joseph Sciorra, among others), started a new 
tradition: every September 8, they meet where the storefront chapel used to be, 

33 Ibid. Moser observes that marginalized individuals and groups, such as the femminielli (transsexuals),

are particularly devoted to her. In her 2007 volume, Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, another 

prominent scholar who has devoted time and efforts to the study the black Madonna, defined 

her as “the great equalizer,” adding that “before her, gender, race, class, and ethnic origin are not 

debilitating distinctions but a foundation of strength.” Malgorzata Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black 

Madonna in Latin America and Europe, Tradition and Transformation (Albuquerque: University of 

New Mexico Press, 2001), 11. 
34 Maria Terrone, e-mail message to author, December 10, 2016. 
35 As reported in Sciorra’s article, “the ecclesiastical authorities did not encourage the yearly street 

festivals.” Joseph Sciorra,“The Black Madonna of East Thirteenth Street.” Voices: The Journal of New 

York Folklore 30, no. 1-2 (2004): 16. 
36 It could accommodate up to twelve people. 


now a gay bar called Phoenix; they chat, drink beer, dance pizzica, celebrate the 
black Madonna, and discuss current political and social issues. In Joseph Sciorra’s 
words, they are “adopting and transforming the religious and cultural legacy of 
those early twentieth century immigrants in the service of the ongoing journey in 
search of self, community, and the divine.”37 

The same spirit informs the work of Alessandra Belloni, dancer, percussionist,
performance artist, and author of a folk opera entitled Il viaggio della Madonna 
Nera (the voyage of the black Madonna), completed in 1991. When Luisa Del 
Giudice interviewed her, in 1997, the artist highlighted the pivotal role the black 
Madonna had played in her personal awakening, besides underlining the miraculous 
power of the universal Mother as a communal healer: “the fascinating thingabout the Black Madonna [is] that… she has the power to heal even people with 
serious social problems, drug problems, alcoholism.”38 In the same interview, Belloni 
meaningfully described the black Madonna as a “contemporary”39 figure, close 
to her worshippers and perfectly aware of the evils that affect modern society. It 
is not surprising, therefore, that the memory of the dark Virgin, as symbolically 
representing the Earth, is entwined with current ecological concerns in the artist’s 
imagination: “the Madonna, the Great Mother Earth […] who is ecologically 
dying… […] We’re destroying it.”40 

From performing to visual arts: Gian Bachero is probably one of the most 
striking Italian American painters who have dealt with the theme of black Madonnas. 
Interviewed by Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, he focused on the multicultural, 
hybrid nature of the Dark Mother, almost perceived as a transnational subject;
thus, in his view, the blackness of the Madonna of Tindari is “Indian-Brazilian,
Ethiopian, Spanish, Gypsy, Southern European, but yet [she] could be of India.”41 

37 
Joseph Sciorra, “Black Madonna Chapel and Phoenix Bar,” accessed January 2, 2017, http://www.
placematters.net/node/1416. Joseph Sciorra has also curated the travelling exhibition entitled 
“‘Evviva la Madonna Nera!’: Italian American Devotion to the Black Madonna,” promoted by 
the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. The exhibit, designed by visual artist B. Amore,
consists of three triptychs examining the following themes: “La Madonna Nera in Italy and 
Europe,” “La Madonna Nera in the New World,” and “La Madonna Nera Rediscovered.” For 
further information: http://qc.edu/calandra/evviva-la-madonna-nera-italian-american-devotionblack-
madonna. 

38 Luisa Del Giudice, ed., Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans (New York: Palgrave 
Macmillan, 2009), 236. 
39 Ibid., 237. 

40 
Ibid., 236-237. Every year, Alessandra Belloni leads a pilgrimage to the sacred sites of the black 
Madonna in Southern Italy, as a sign of devotion to her inspirer. http://www.alessandrabelloni.
com/voyage_of_the_black_madonna_tour_in_southern_italy/ 

41 
Chiavola Birnbaum, Black Madonnas, 42. One of the most noteworthy paintings by Gian Bachero 
is entitled Black Madonna of Italy. 


What is more, “she is Third World but mother of all,”42 a daring statement that 
aims at unsettling stereotypical perceptions, at dismantling the very notions of 
center and periphery, while investing everyday life with a sacred meaning.

As far as literature is concerned, the three volumes of the series entitled

She is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/ Feminist Spirituality

(published in 2005, 2009, and 2012) certainly deserve to be mentioned. Celebrating 
the Divine She in all her manifestations (the black Madonna is just one 
of them), these anthologies feature short stories, poems, excerpts of novels, recollections, 
critical pieces, illustrations and artwork by women artists across theworld, including well-known Italian American authors such as Louisa Calio43 
and Marguerite Rigoglioso.44 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum is the editor of the first 
volume and the co-editor of the second; the third anthology was co-edited byMary Beth Moser45. As Chiavola Birnbaum wrote in her Note on the Style for 
She’s Everywhere, Vol. 1: 

In my view we can be considered seers and seekers who remember our oldest 
mother, a black woman of Africa, as well as look forward to a new world formed 
by her values. Some of us think of ourselves as midwives helping give birth to a 
new time when justice with compassion, equality, and transformation – like the 
“she” in our title – are everywhere.46 

One of the most poignant and ground-breaking narratives featuring the black 
Madonna is probably No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (1992)
by Susan Caperna Lloyd, who is also a filmmaker and a photographer.This memoir 
chronicles the author’s quest for identity (as both an Italian American and a 
woman), as well as being a captivating travelogue, a hybrid genre in itself that,
according to Valentina Seffer, “bridges documentary narrative and personal experience, 
the encounter with the Other with the exploration of the self.”47 

42 Ibid. 
43 Louisa Calio is a writer, a multimedia performance artist, and the author of two poetry collections:
In the Eye of Balance (1978), and Journey to the Heart Waters (2014). She has also written an 
autobiographical novel which has not been published yet: Lucia Means Light. 
44 Marguerite Rigoglioso has published two acclaimed critical studies: The Cult of Divine Birth in 
Ancient Greece (2009), and Virgin Mother Goddesses of Antiquity (2010). 
45 The second co-editor, Mary Saracino, is the author of a novel entitled The Singing of Swans (2006),
whose controversial main character, Ibla, worshipped the Black Madonna with fervid devotion. 
46 Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, ed., She is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/ Feminist 
Spirituality, Vol. 1 (Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2005), xxii. 
47 Valentina Seffer, “Identity on the Threshold: the Myth of Persephone in Italian American Women’s 
Memoir” (PhD diss., The University of Sydney, 2015), 100. Edvige Giunta has described the volumeas “a complicated feminist search in which personal story, myth, and history overlap.” Edvige Giunta,
“Persephone’s Daughters.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 33 (2004): 770. 


Caperna Lloyd first travelled to Italy (the land of her forefathers) in 1983, whenshe was struck by the Easter Procession of the Mysteries (Misteri) in Trapani (Sicily). 
Her religious and personal pilgrimage allowed her to reconnect with her grandmother 
Carolina Caperna who, as the author notices in a letter addressed to her,
placed on the opening page of her travel account, was “a grieving Madonna andlong-suffering mother,”48 who even resembled “the Pietà”49 the moment her husband 
died in her arms. As the writer soon realized, however, Carolina Caperna, “animmigrant Madonna surrounded by her portatori”50 (the male family members, in 
need of her protection51), was actually a powerful woman, who had bravely left hercountry in search for better prospects, just like the Madonna during the Easter Procession, 
actively striving to restore her happiness by looking for her lost son throughthe streets of Trapani. As Mary Jo Bona has argued, Caperna Lloyd’s numerous 
pilgrimages to Sicily have enabled her to “revise the mother dolorosa role writteninto the script of an Italian woman’s life;”52 the patriarchal ideal of womanhood embodied 
by the submissive and obedient Virgin Mary, is therefore replaced with anicon of self-empowerment: the black Madonna, a new model for the writer.

The narrative opens with a chapter entitled Processione. Before moving to Trapanito watch the Mysteries, the author witnesses another procession in the nearby cityof Marsala, and she is immediately captivated by the Madonna, so different fromthe passive and mournful figure she was familiar with, due to her Roman Catholicupbringing: “she was dark and angry. She was powerful and struck me as morelike Demeter than Mary.”53 In her effort to foster a more woman-focused society, 
Caperna Lloyd offers a revolutionary interpretation of Christ, identified by heras Persephone: “after all, one of Persephone’s names, in the early Greek language, 
meant ‘saviour.’”54 Once in Trapani, she finds out that, the processione is “not really the 

48 
Susan Caperna Lloyd, No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily (San Francisco: Mercury 
House, 1992), ix. The book is dedicated to the author’s mother, “in memory of Grandmother 
Carolina.” Ibid., v. 

49 Ibid., ix. 
50 Ibid., 9. Portatori are carriers of platforms bearing the statues of saints during processions. 
51 The book’s title actually refers to an insightful episode in Caperna Lloyd’s life. When her 


grandmother passed away, her father decided to place a picture of himself and his son in the coffin,
so that the blessed soul of his departed mother could continue to nurture the men of the family.
After feeling left aside and deserted (she was literally not in the picture), the writer eventually 
realized that she could act as her own protector, being an independent and self-sufficient woman.
When her time arrives – as she ironically remarks - she hopes to “rise up and be free,” with no one 
to care for, with no pictures in her grave. Ibid., ix. 

52 Mary Jo Bona, By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian America (Albany: 
SUNY Press, 2010), 57. 
53 Caperna Lloyd, No Pictures in My Grave, 3. 
54 Ibid. 


story of Christ’s death. It is about his Mother, Mary:”55 in the vernacular version of 
the biblical events, the Madonna seems to hold a central place, forcefully rejectingher traditional subordinate position. Incidentally, it should not be overlooked thatin a variant of this chapter, published one year before (in 1991) as a short story, theMadonna of the procession in Trapani is also depicted as “dark, Moorish-looking;”56 
in truth, only her mantle is black. Mesmerized by the scene before her, CapernaLloyd longs to take active part in the processione, refusing to play the role of themere spectator. Being a woman, however, she is denied this privilege which, onthe other hand, is easily granted to both her husband and son, on account of theirgender. Throughout the subsequent chapters of No Picture in My Grave the author 
undertakes a long journey, meaningfully on her own, which takes her to ancientarcheological sites (where the Dark Mother was venerated), and to the sanctuary ofthe Black Madonna of Tindari, where she finally regains her potenza, the power she(like many other women) had progressively lost in a male-dominated world: 

Women like my grandmother had a primitive strength in their blood. Were 
they all, at heart, Amazons … or Cybeles, Demeters, or Black Madonnas? 
But in a patriarchy and, especially in Carolina’s loss of her roots by coming to 
America, they had forgotten the real depth of their power. […] Ultimately, with 
this Madonna and my journey to Sicily, I seemed to look into the uncharted 
world of my own soul. 

I left the Sanctuary and, with the other pilgrims, felt strengthened.57 

Caperna Lloyd’s memoir follows a circular path and it ends where it had begun, 
with the processione. Only this time the author is given the possibility to 
re-write her own story with a different conclusion: no longer an observer, she 
miraculously manages to get invited to carry one of the heavy platforms, thus 
accomplishing the demanding task with precision, power, and grace, just like the 
other portatori. As she proudly states in the very final page of her volume, “I had 
become the Goddess I had sought. And it seemed right and proper that she had 
rejoined the world of men.”58 

Multimedia artist Chickie Farella59 has acknowledged both Lucia Chiavola 
Birnbaum and Susan Caperna Lloyd as essential sources of inspiration for her 

55 Ibid., 10. 
56 Susan Caperna Lloyd, “No Picture in My Grave: A Woman’s Journey in Sicily.” Italian Americana 
9, no. 2 (1991): 250. The short story’s title places an even stronger emphasis on gender issues: it is 

a woman’s journey, not a spiritual one. 
57 Caperna Lloyd, No Pictures in My Grave, 140-141. 
58 Ibid., 188. 
59 I take this opportunity to warmly thank Chickie Farella for allowing me to read her manuscript. 


work entitled Ciao Giulia, a still unpublished manuscript, even though two long 
excerpts were released in 1999 and in 2011.60 In her opinion, the recurring presence 
of black Madonnas in Italian American literature (especially in the output of 
women writers) may be explained by noticing the pivotal connection that binds 
them with authors who grew up in a patriarchal context, namely a history of darkness, 
abuse, and shame: 

the common thread is usually patriarchal abuse, physically and/or mentally during 
childhood and/or marital relationships. Adding insult to injury these women 
including myself have been assuming the blame and responsibility FOR thisabuse. […] For example, I get a nasty beating from a boyfriend…I wake up onthe floor with him kneeling over me with his hands cupping his crying face and anose full of snot saying… “Why do you always make me have to beat you?” […]
Eventually, we will get sick and tired of being sick and tired of the blame andshame for the darkness. There is a point when female victims who carry and passMITOCHONDRIAL ENERGY, have a CHEMICAL MEMORY JOG inducing 
an AWAKENING in us to take ACTION through our INTUITION.61 

In Ciao Giulia, the black Madonna (an emblem of resistance, nurturance, and 
healing) vigorously helps the protagonists to carve their way out of tragedy.

In the first published excerpt, Carmie and her cousins Jackie and Gina, three 
Sicilian American women from Chicago, decide to leave for a black Madonna 
pilgrimage in Sicily, organized by a women’s group insightfully called Demetra.
They are planning to conclude their journey in Comiso, to attend a march against 
a nuclear missile plant and domestic violence which, on March 8, 1983, is supposed 
to gather women from all over the world. In Farella’s narrative, devotion 
to the black Madonna is coupled with both the responsibility for the safeguard of 
the planet’s ecological equilibrium (given the correspondence between the Dark 
Mother and the Earth that has already been observed in previous sections of this 
essay), and the peaceful battle for women’s rights and dignity. Quoting a provocative 
passage of the story, “women, like all oppressed peoples, like the slaves, like black 
people today are in revolt. It is a revolt without bloodshed and without death because we 
are life.”62 Moreover, the pilgrimage enables every protagonist to come to terms 
with the personal struggle each of them is going through: Carmie is facing cancer,
Jackie is grappling with repressed memories of child abuse, Gina is anxious to 
break free from an overprotective and stifling home environment. 

60 The first one is entitled “Ciao Giulia,” the second, “Castration or Transformation? (from Ciao 
Giulia).” 
61 Chickie Farella, e-mail message to author, December 11, 2016. 
62 Chickie Farella, “Ciao Giulia.” Voices in Italian Americana 10, no. 1 (1999): 150. 


In the second published excerpt, Farella delves into the theme of justified anger, 
another attribute of the black Madonna. Giulia (a background character in 
the first story) is raped by Antonio, the man chosen by her father and brother 
for an arranged marriage. The three Sicilian Americans, therefore, chase after the 
offender, only to find him inside “the oldest Marian sanctuary in all Italy, Santa 
Maria Adonai, where Christians hid in the 3rd century to escape persecution;”63 it 
goes without saying that the ancient shrine, located in Brucoli (near Syracuse), is 
dedicated to the black Madonna. Pointing a knife at the rapist’s penis (as if sheintended to castrate him) right in front of the image of the holy Mother, Jackie 
seems to perform an alternative, cathartic ritual which, far from coming across as 
ruthless and blasphemous, is endowed with the miraculous power to transform 
all the participants (hence the title “Castration or Transformation?”): Antonio,
repentant of his crimes, begs for forgiveness, while the three girls (who obviously 
refrain from indulging in the very violence they want to be rid of ) feel purified,
relieved, and healed. The story ends with a song, a sort of new choral hymn glorifying 
active womanhood: 

Siamo donne We are women 
Siamo tante We are many
Siamo stufe We’ve had it 
Tutti quanti!
Tutti quanti!
And that means all of us......all of us!64 


In his 2006 article on Louisa Ermelino’s The Black Madonna, Dennis Barone 
defined the novel as “a transitional step,” leading the author “from male-centered 
narrative to a female centered one.”65 The heroines of the novel set in New York 
are, in fact, three Italian American women, Teresa, Magdalena, and Antoinette,
three Madonnas with a child (or a step-child, in the case of Madgalena) who, in 
turn, are profoundly devoted to the dark Mother of God (each of them cherishes 
either a small statue or a sacred image of the black Virgin Mary).

In her volume, Ermelino looks into the most curious and mysterious qualities 
of the black Madonna which, as Sigrid Ulrike Claasen has underlined, “appear 

63 Chickie Farella, “Castration or Transformation? (from Ciao Giulia),” in Reconstructing Italians in 

Chicago: Thirty Authors in Search of Their Roots and Branches, eds. Dominic Candeloro, and Fred 

Gardaphé (Chicago: Italian Cultural Center at Casa Italia, 2011), 202. 

64 Ibid., 208. 
65 Dennis Barone, “We’ve always Been Different: Louisa Ermelino’s Spring Street Trilogy and Italian 


American Women’s Writing,”Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 48,no.1 (2006): 25.Ermelino’s 

debut novel was entitled Joey Dee Gets Wise (1991); The Black Madonna is her second novel. 


in the form of paganism, in particular the superstitious belief of the evil eye.”66 
But it is not just the folkloristic, almost humorous side of the Italian malocchio 
and fattura (incantation) that captivates the writer’s imagination (Antoinette, for 
instance, firmly believes that Teresa, the mother of sickly Nicky, is always on the 
verge of casting a spell on her son Jumbo, because he is so healthy and big). What 
the author really wishes to explore is the possibility to employ vernacular religion 
as a “safety net”67 (borrowing the expression from Theodora Patrona), providing 
the female characters with the necessary tools to fight for justice and equal opportunities. 
Hence, Zia Guinetta, one of the Italian protagonists of the story who 
lives in the village of Castelfondo (in Lucania), successfully uses witchcraft mixed 
with devotional practices (prayers to the black Madonna of Viggiano) to catch a 
good husband, Zio Carmelo. This singular combination of orthodoxy and paganism68 
actually saves her from need and humiliations, meaningfully perpetrated 
by an official representative of the Roman Catholic Church: “Zia Guinetta had 
been the housekeeper of a local priest who took her in when she was orphaned 
as a young child. She had cooked his food and cleaned his house and aborted his 
babies, until the day she saw Zio Carmelo coming home from the fields.”69 Furthermore, 
another authoritative member of the patriarchal institution (a friar) is 
held responsible for Magdalena’s mother desertion of her family: he had lured the 
poverty-stricken woman into sin by showing her his selection of French wines,
and “a room where sausage and cheese hung on ropes from the ceiling.”70 As the 
story proceeds, young Magdalena becomes Zia Guinetta’s pupil and disciple, besides 
turning into the most faithful follower of the black Madonna once settled in 
the US, as the wife of Amadeo (Zia Guinetta’s Italian American nephew71). 

As Theodora Patrona has emphasized,“the final part of The Black Madonna foregrounds 
the beginning of a new era: intermarriage as a social reality and the dismantling 
of the ethnic ghetto.”72 Jumbo, now grown into a huge but simple-heart


66 Sigrid Ulrike Claasen, “The Black Madonna Figure as a Source of Female Empowerment in the 
Works of Four Italian-Canadian Authors” (PhD diss., Université de Sherbrooke, 1997): 18. 
67 Theodora D. Patrona, “The West in Italy/ Italy in the West: Italian American Women Writers and 


the Ethnic Heroine,” in The West in Asia and Asia in the West: Essays on Transnational Interactions,

eds. Elisabetta Marino, and Tanfer Emin Tunç ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015), 81. 

68 The black Madonna commands her to sacrifice a black goat and to wear a sliver of the animal’s 

thigh-bone around her neck. Louisa Ermelino, The Black Madonna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 

2001), 114. 
69 Ibid., 89-90. 
70 Ibid., 131-132. 
71 Zia Guinetta had actually pushed her nephew into the marriage with the much younger Magdalena 

to secure her grip on Amadeo’s American money, thus protecting her own interests. 
72 Patrona, “The West in Italy/ Italy in the West,” 85. 


ed man, falls in love with Judy, a Jewish girl, a despicable mazzucriste (a Christkiller) according to Antoinette and Teresa. The two women hope that Magdalena’s 
“dark power”73 will succeed in breaking their newly-formed union; however, shesimply replies that she will “pray to the Black Madonna for Jumbo’s happiness.”74 
Ermelino here introduces another distinctive quality of the black Madonna, namely 
her tremendous ability to create bonds, to unblock channels of communication,
to build bridges across the community divides. As a result, the narrative ends withthe dawning of a new, multicultural society, incarnated in Jumbo and Judy’s child, 
whose name and identity are both meaningful and fluid: Sol, Solomon, for his Jewish 
relatives, Sal, Salvatore, for the Italian side of the family.

The black Madonna is also remarkably present in the works of male writers. A 
long chapter entitled “The Black Madonna” is included in Tony Ardizzone’s 1999 
much-praised novel: In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu.“Arguably the most radical”75 
section of the volume, in Mary Jo Bona’s opinion, the chapter is narrated in the 
first person by Anna Girgenti, the daughter of Luigi, one of Papa Santuzzu’s seven 
children who, one by one, had emigrated to “the marvelous new land [that] was 
called La Merica.”76 

Following her mother’s death in childbirth (she had delivered a stillborn child 
and had passed away a few hours later), Anna shares years of misery with her father, 
until such time as he decides he can no longer care for an adolescent daughter.
77 Anna is then sent to an orphanage where, after some time, she experiences 
visions of the black Madonna, for seven consecutive days.This “dark and beautiful 
woman”78 - “her face as dark as a womb”79 – appears to her wearing simple clothes 
(“a plain brown cloak […] like any common girl”80) to announce the beginning ofa new order: 

There are three orders to time through which the world must pass before its 
end […].These orders of time correspond to the three faces of God: the Father,
the Son, and the Holy Ghost. During the first order of time, she said, the world 
was created and governed by the Father. During the second, it was redeemed by 

73 Ermelino, The Dark Madonna, 228. 
74 Ibid. 
75 Bona, By the Breath of Their Mouths, 34. 
76 Tony Ardizzone, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (New York: Picador, 1999), 8. 
77 He nearly kills her when he mistakes her menstrual blood for a sign of defloration. 
78 Ibid., 247. 


79 Ibid., 255. Only the first time she appeared with her dark, thick lipped, and curly child. 
80 Ibid., 251. Only when the priests are watching she shows herself “wearing her blue robe as well as 
a gold, multipointed crown.” Ibid., 254. 


the Son. The world was now entering the cusp of its third and final order, to be 
perfected and ruled by her.81 

In Ardizzone’s narrative, therefore, the black Madonna refuses to be viewed 
simply as the chosen vessel of redemption: conversely, she takes an active role and 
proclaims herself part of the holy Trinity: “I am all of these things, all at the same 
time. Jesù and I are twin souls, and one with God the Father.”82 

As Christina Marrocco has elucidated, however, “for Catholicism, a monotheistic 
and patriarchal belief system, the idea of a female deity as creator is profane.”83 
Anna Girgenti’s words are, therefore, harshly questioned by the church hierarchy ina lengthy and disconcerting passage that allows Ardizzone to explore issues of gender, 
ethnicity, and class. Anna’s only advocate is, not by chance, a young and “dark 
priest,”84 who tries to defend her from the accusations of blasphemy, heresy, hysteria, 
delirium, and madness. Thus showing all his contempt for the poor, one of thewhite-haired priests wonders: “Why would the Holy Mother reveal her most sacredpersonage to someone like this?”85 Then, another priest passes a sexist remark, aimedat demeaning the Madonna as a woman: “Mary can hardly be thought of as equalto Jesus since she was born a mere woman.”86 Finally, the skin-colour of the VirginMary is ridiculed and despised in a thoroughly racist and disturbing dialogue: 

“The girl further claims that the spirit’s face was coloured! She herself called it 
a Black Madonna!” 

“A Coloured Madonna?” the second priest said. 
“She’d have us believe the Blessed Virgin was coloured?” the third priest said 
with a laugh. “A Negro?”87 

When the dark priest challenges them, by recalling the tradition of black Madonnas 
in Italy, one of the archbishops sarcastically replies: “I met a local priest 
who made it his business to uncover statues of this so-called black-faced Madonna 
and have them repainted white”88 or destroyed as “false idols.”89 

81 Ibid., 255. 
82 Ibid., 256. 
83 Christina Marrocco, “The Evil Eye in Italian American Literature: Magic, Religion, Gender, and 


Rhetoric” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2011): 199. 
84 Ardizzone, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, 257. 
85 Ibid., 256. The emphasis is mine. 
86 Ibid., 258. 
87 Ibid. 
88 Ibid., 259. 
89 Ibid. 


In Ardizzone’s novel, however, the sincere belief of subaltern people prevails,
and a sense of justice (often connected with the icon of the black Madonna) is 
restored. Eventually, the miraculous Madonna nera of the orphanage is acknowledged, 
at least in popular devotion (“Not even the Pope will be able to paint her 
face white”90). As for Anna Girgenti, she takes the vows and moves to Africa, the 
mythical land of the Dark Mother of all; as she explains towards the end of the 
chapter, “more than once I saw the Madonna in the face of the beautiful Eritrean 
people for whom it was my blessing to care.”91 

Sicilian American poet Maria Famà has dedicated two poems to the black Madonna 
of Tindari, both included in her 2013 collection entitled Mystics in the Family. 
Her interest in the Dark Mother of God was ignited when she was a child: 

I grew up with images of the black Madonna of Tindari all around me. In fact, I 
remember one gift my grandfather gave me when I was a little girl. It was a little 
night light with the image of the black Madonna of Tindari with her statement 
written at the bottom NIGRA SUM SED FORMOSA. My maternal 
grandfather, Pietro Guaetta, when visiting his sister, Antonia, in Sicily, picked 
this gift out especially for me. This little gift fired my imagination. The black 
Madonna of Tindari was our powerful protector. […] As an adult, I learned of 
other black Madonnas in Italy and other countries who are always advocates 
for the poor and the abused.92 

In the poem entitled “The Black Madonna of Tindari,” Famà delves into thesubject of xenophobia, by offering an example of how the black Madonna “tookgentle/ vengeance”93 on a pilgrim who had dared to mock her dark complexion:
“I traveled so far to see someone blacker than me!”94 The poem continues withthe distressing - albeit only temporary - disappearance of the baby in her arms,
miraculously transported to a patch of land in the middle of the sea. In theconclusive words of the poem, “The Black Madonna of Tindari taught/ thatracism is a sin.”95 

“I am not White,” the second poem, stems from Famà’s awareness of her 
deeper roots, of her intimate connection with the peoples of Africa (as a Sicilian), 
and with the African American experience (as an Italian American). Asshe observes, 

90 Ibid., 269. 
91 Ibid. 
92 Maria Famà, e-mail message to author, November 10, 2016. 
93 Maria Famà, Mystics in the Family (New York: Bordighera Press, 2013), 13. 
94 Ibid. 
95 Ibid. 



Growing up in the USA, one is always part of and surrounded by black culture.
From the earliest days of the USA, African American culture has been a powerful 
influence although black people were enslaved and discriminated against 
even when freed.Their struggles to gain civil rights in the mid-20th century had 
a significant influence on Americans, most especially artists, scholars, intellectuals, 
and those people committed to justice. My grandparents and parents, as 
immigrants, were horrified to observe the injustice against black people here in 
their adopted land.96 

Hence, in her poem Famà remembers how “Sicilians left for other lands/ trying 
to escape poverty, injustice;”97 she recollects the time when they were called 
“coloured,” and were “lynched in the South.”98 She also recalls the sad moment 
when, marginalized and ashamed of themselves, Italian Americans strived to annihilate 
their ethnic identity and stayed quiet, standing apart “from those darker 
sisters and brothers.”99 In the very last lines, however, the image of the black Madonna 
of Tindari, apparently forgotten by the newer generations, reappears as an 
active and powerful instrument of individual and social reform, as a compelling 
reminder that we all originated from the same dark womb of Mother Earth. Inspired 
by this potent icon of justice, equality, nurturance, and healing, the poet can 
light-heartedly celebrate her hybrid self and proudly state: “I am Sicilian/ I am 
not white.” 

BIBLIOGRAPHY 

Ardizzone, Tony. In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu. New York: Picador, 1999. 

Barone, Dennis. “We’ve always Been Different: Louisa Ermelino’s Spring Street 
Trilogy and Italian American Women’s Writing.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary 
Fiction 48, no. 1 (2006): 19-30. 

Begg, Ean. The Cult of the Black Virgin. New York: Penguin, 1996. 
Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Black Madonnas: Feminism, Religion and Politics in Italy. 
Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993.
Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers. San 
Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001.
Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola, ed. She is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/ 
Feminist Spirituality, Vol. 1. Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2005. 

96 Maria Famà, e-mail message to author, November 10, 2016. 
97 Famà, Mystics in the Family, 14. 
98 Ibid. 
99 Ibid. 



Bona, Mary Jo. “Mater Dolorosa No More? Mothers and Writers in the Italian/ 
American Literary Tradition.” Voices in Italian Americana 7, no. 2 (1996): 1-19. 

Bona, Mary Jo. By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian 
America. Albany: SUNY Press, 2010.

Claasen, Sigrid Ulrike. “The Black Madonna Figure as a Source of Female Empowerment 
in the Works of Four Italian-Canadian Authors.” PhD diss., Université 
de Sherbrooke, 1997.

Del Giudice, Luisa, ed. Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans. New 
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Ermelino, Louisa. The Black Madonna. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001. 

Famà, Maria. Mystics in the Family. New York: Bordighera Press, 2013. 

Farella, Chickie. “Ciao Giulia.” Voices in Italian Americana 10, no. 1 (1999): 139-154.

Farella, Chickie. “Castration or Transformation? (from Ciao Giulia).” In Reconstructing 
Italians in Chicago: Thirty Authors in Search of their Roots and Branches,
edited by Dominic Candeloro, and Fred Gardaphé, 201-208. Chicago: Italian 
Cultural Center at Casa Italia, 2011.

Gardaphé, Fred. Leaving Little Italy: Essaying Italian American Culture. Albany: 
State University of New York Press, 2004.

Giunta, Edvige. Writing with an Accent. Contemporary Italian American Women 
Authors, New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Giunta, Edvige. “Persephone’s Daughters.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary 
Journal 33 (2004): 767-786.

LaGumina, Salvatore J., Frank J. Cavaioli, Salvatore Primeggia, and Joseph A. Varacalli. 
The Italian American Experience: an Encyclopedia. New York: Routledge, 1999.

Landman, Melanie Rose. “An Investigation in to the Phenomenon of the Black 
Madonna.” PhD diss., University of Roehampton, 2012.

Lloyd, Susan Caperna. “No Picture in My Grave: A Woman’s Journey in Sicily.” 
Italian Americana 9, no. 2 (1991): 245-267.

Lloyd, Susan Caperna. No Pictures in My Grave: A Spiritual Journey in Sicily. San 
Francisco: Mercury House, 1992.

Marrocco, Christina. “The Evil Eye in Italian American Literature: Magic, Religion, 
Gender, and Rhetoric.” PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 2011.

Moser, Mary Beth. Honoring Darkness. Exploring the Power of Black Madonnas in 
Italy. Vashon Island, Washington: Dea Madre Publishing, 2008.

Moser, Mary Beth. “Blood Relics: Menstrual Roots of Miraculous Black Madonnas 
in Italy.” Metaformia: A Journal of Menstruation and Culture (2005),
accessed April 25, 2017. http://www.metaformia.org/articles/blood-relics/.

Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe, 
Tradition and Transformation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico 
Press, 2001. 


Patrona, Theodora D. “The West in Italy/ Italy in the West: Italian American 
Women Writers and the Ethnic Heroine.” In The West in Asia and Asia in the 
West: Essays on Transnational Interactions, edited by Elisabetta Marino, and 
Tanfer Emin Tunç, 79-91. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2015.

Peters, H.F. Red Jenny. A Life with Karl Marx. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. 
Saracino, Mary, and Mary Beth Moser. She is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing 
in Womanist/ Feminist Spirituality, Vol. 3. Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2012.

Scheer, Monique. “From Majesty to Mystery: Change in the Meanings of Black 
Madonnas from the Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries.” The American Historical 
Review 107, no. 5 (2002): 1412-1440.

Sciorra, Joseph. “The Black Madonna of East Thirteenth Street.” Voices: The Journal 
of New York Folklore 30, no. 1-2 (2004): 14-17.

Sciorra, Joseph. “Black Madonna Chapel and Phoenix Bar.” Accessed April 25,2017. http://www.placematters.net/node/1416.

Seffer, Valentina. “Identity on the Threshold: the Myth of Persephone in Italian 
American Women’s Memoir. PhD diss, The University of Sydney, 2015.

Williams, Annette Lyn, Karen Nelson Villanueva, and Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum.
She is Everywhere! An Anthology of Writing in Womanist/ Feminist Spirituality,
Vol. 2. Bloomington, IN: IUniverse, 2009. 

Elisabetta Marino 

University of Rome “Tor Vergata”
marino@lettere.uniroma2.it 
Crna madona v italijansko-ameriški umetniški imaginaciji 

Študija raziskuje podobo crne madone v italijansko-ameriški umetniški in književni 
produkciji. Navaja pomenljive primere, kako je bila ta sveta ikona univerzalnega 
materinstva nenehno povezana z artikulacijo strategij opolnomocenja, z 
nasprotovanjem vsakršnim patriarhalnim omejitvam. 

Kljucne besede: crna madona, italijanski Americani, patriarhalnost, Drugost 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111(94).09-1 
Hope A. D.:821.111.09Byron G. G. 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.57-68 

An Australian Poet in Italy: A D Hope’s Byronic 
View of Latter-day Italy 

Igor Maver 

Abstract 

The article examines the classicism of the poet A.D. Hope, especially in relation to his fascination 
with the work of Lord Byron, notably Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and its sections 
set in Italy in Rome. Hope’s insistence on the European source of Australian literature 
in the classical antiquity found expression in several of his poems in direct intertextual 
references to Byron’s work. 

Keywords: Australian poetry, lord Byron, A. D. Hope 


In memory of Veronica Brady (1929-2015), a 

great Australian scholar and friend, and of our 

happy hours on the Ljubljanica river in Ljubljana,

tasting the bounties of food and drink and enjoying 

the urban landscape while talking of Oz. 

A. D. Hope (1907-2000) is usually described as an Augustan poet, because of his 
frequent usage of allusions from classical, Graeco-Roman and the later neo-classical 
English literary traditions, as well as because of his insistence on the explicitly 
formalist poetic manner.To be sure, Hope in his poems tried to revive the classical 
poetic ideal, although the unabashed identification with Lord Byron’s (anti)
hero Childe Harold also shows just one aspect of his admiration of the ‘Byronic 
hero’: his mordant satirical wit. The long epistolary poem “A Letter from Rome”
(Hope 1972), written upon A. D. Hope’s visit to Rome as part of his first European 
‘Grand Tour’ in 1958, is, in fact, based on a pre-text, which therefore serves 
as an intertextual model as well as a formal impetus, Byron’s work Childe Harold’s 
Pilgrimage (Byron 1957 edition). Parallels between the two poetic oeuvres are to 
be found especially in the last Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The 
last two Cantos are usually considered to be more analytical and objective than 
the first two, which are typically Byronesque, narcissistic and subjective.
In “A Letter from Rome” Hope in ottava rima depicts Italy trough the ‘historical’ 
eyes of Lord Byron and the later Victorians — John Ruskin, Walter Pater, 
Robert Browning, Henry James and, like the discontented Byron, complains 
about the obvious “barbarian” behaviour and indifference of the present-day Italians. 
The poem’s epigraph is thus very much to the point: 

“Rome, Rome! thou art no more / As thou hast been!” 

That Roma non è più come era prima 

Which Byron heard the Roman workmen sing 

Gives scope to write on anything at all 

Since Romulus and Remus built their wall. 

(“A Letter from Rome”) 

It is significant to note that the quotation in Italian used by Hope is almost identical 
with the one in Byron’s letter to John Hobhouse (Venice, January 2 1818):“Andwhen we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament ofthe labourers’ chorus, Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non è come prima! ...”

The author, A. D. Hope, does not comprehend Rome historically, but in a romanticized, 
partly fictitious, preconceived way, where the past is considered very 
much part of the present, as was typical of the Victorian admirers of Rome in the 


previous century. It may be worth noting that such eclecticism is also typical of 
Hope’s own age, i.e. postmodernity, and literature produced within the postmodern 
paradigm (Cf. Krevel 2016, 177-180).

 Identically, Australian visitors’ response was in the 19th century “colonially 
and provincially predetermined” as regards the pre-formed images of spirit and 
without a proper connection with reality (Pesman 1983). The ‘reality’ they saw 
was the English/classical slanted one. Hope, an Australian, is essentially doing 
the same thing so brilliantly in poetry some 130 years later, although clad in an 
ironical stance. The image of Italy was for these visitors clearly ambivalent; they 
were suddenly confronted with two Italies, the country of Art and Beauty, and 
on the other hand the “barbarian” country of contemporary Italians, supposedly 
disinterested in art. A. D. Hope is clear on this point: 

And Italy from which the West arose, 

Falls prey to new but more barbarian foes ... 

Surely no sadder irony than this 

Which brings that noble, intellectual voice 

To drown in trivial and distracting noise. 

(“A Letter from Rome”) 

Hope, a poet and an Australian, on Italian ground for the first time from the 
Antipodes, attempts to discover his real, “lost ego,” although, to his great surprise,
he finds that technocratic, industrialized Italy cannot be what he has been looking 
for. This dichotomy can be observed in the entire Hope’s poetic opus, namely the 
vision of Art that is being endangered by modern, overtechnicized civilization. In 
the process of the reinterpretation of the classical ideal, ancient Greece and Rome 
are regarded by him not merely as the source, but also as the cradle of European 
culture: “Athens perhaps begot, Rome was the womb.”

The last Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage recounts Byron’s journey to Romein 1817 and in an elegiac tone tells of classical antiquity and the fall of civilizations: 

The commonwealth of kings, the men of Rome And even since, and now,

fair Italy! 

Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can 

decree; Even in thy desert, what is like to thee? 

(Canto IV, 26) 

The most pungent lines suggest Byron’s scheme of changing generations, with 
a gradual decline in all kinds of standards. In Byron’s case there is a glimpse of 
the fall of Athens and Rome, with a hint that London may soon follow, as well as 


Sydney and Melbourne that agonize in a ‘cultural cringe,’ as we on the other hand 
learn from Hope.

The fourth Canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is symmetrical: in form it 
constitutes a kind of debate between Art and Nature in two almost equal parts,
the first being concerned with Venice and the journey to Rome, the second with 
Rome itself. The two are completed by a coda, Byron’s famous apostrophe to the 
ocean, which also found an expression in Hope’s verse. 

The ruins of Rome almost inevitably suggest the themes of grandeur and decay, 
the triumph of time, of the transcendence of human limitations by Art. Art 
and Nature are contrasted and blended in the landscape of mighty ruins. In this 
poetic discussion Byron is particularly concerned with literature, sculpture and 
architecture ( Jump 1973). Lord Byron’s Don Juan, which was humorously introduced 
by A. D. Hope in Hector Munro’s Don Juan in Australia (1986), also 
features Nature’s ambivalence and the possible ultimate reconciliation between 
Art and Nature; the ruin in particular is a significant Romantic object of human 
contemplation, for it visibly demonstrates the power of time both to conquer and 
to transform the monuments of human greatness. 

Oh Time! the beautifier of the dead, 
Adorner of the ruin, comforter 
And only healer when the heart hath bled ... 
(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) 


Sea imagery is in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage frequently combined with that 
of wreckage and destruction. The ocean assumes the metaphorical value of the 
passage of time and change. Byron towards the end of the work apostrophizes 
the ocean in a visionary mood (“the type and symbol of eternity”) and contrasts 
the sea’s sublime permanence with the inevitable fall of empires and civilizations: 

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee 

Assyria-Greece-Rome-Carthage-what are they? 

Thy waters wash’d them power while they were free, 

And many a tyrant since, their shores obey 

The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay 

Has dried up realms to deserts — not so thou; 

(Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) 

A. D. Hope maintains that his retelling of the last strophes from Childe Harold’s 
Pilgrimage (“Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll!”), entitled “The 

Ocean to Lord Byron” as a proof of his fondness to rely on Byron’s poetic models, 
sprang out of his ‘ecological’ awareness:“It was after finding that it was impossible 
to sit on the delightful beaches of the Algarve without getting fouled with pellets 
of ships’ oil and disgusted by the garbage strewed about by tourists that I meditated 
the ocean’s reply”. 

Byron’s original statement, on the other hand, expressed the typical Romantic 
communion of Man with the paramount element — Nature (“I love not Man the 
less, but Nature more”), while in Hope’s ecological answer it is transformed into 
a modern Man’s physical ‘destruction’ of Nature, “spreading wastes less horrible 
than Man’s:” 

There’s pleasure in those pathless woods no more, 

The woods themselves are cut for pulp or scrap. 

As for the raptures of the lonely shore, 

Pick any place you like upon the map, 

The tourist trade has caught it — view the lap 

Of Ocean ankle-deep in trash and cans. 

Nor can the deep sea music match the crop 

Belched from transistors. Time and circumstance 

Wreak havoc and spread wastes less horrible than Man’s. 

(A.D. Hope, “The Ocean to Lord Byron”) 
According to René Wellek until the end of the 19th century the notion ofclassicism had rarely been used(Wellek 1970; also Žigon) and English neo-classicists 
did not call themselves that.T. S. Eliot’s contentions in the essay “Whatis a Classic?” (1944), however, are strongly reminiscent of some of those A. D.
Hope expressed in “A Letter from Rome.” In it he describes his return to the‘source,’ for he sees ancient Italy as a cultural, physical and metaphysical cradleof European civilization from which, by extension, the Australian civilizationhas gradually also emerged. 

Yet here am I returning to the source.That source is Italy, and hers is Rome,The 

fons et origo of Western Man; 

Athens perhaps begot, Rome was the womb, 

Here the great venture of the heart began. 

Here simply with a sense of coming home I have returned with no explicit plan 

Beyond a child’s uncertain quest, to find Something once dear, long lost and 

left behind. 

(A. D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”) 

Ancient (pagan) gods and myths are in “A Letter from Rome” aestheticized,
used in a playful, allegorical manner.The superscription onto Byron’s model Childe 
Harold’s Pilgrimage is explicitly stated by Hope. Prior to his departure to Italy he 
had carefully read Byron’s work (“which is sometimes no more than Baedeker in 
verse”), whose (anti)hero he identifies with on his journey. 

I’ve just re-read Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Which offers, almost equally 
combined, 
The shrewd, the silly, the noble and the sage, 
The stamp of genius and the touch of sham ... 
And one specially is in my mind 
The limping man, the legend of his age. 


(A. D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”) 
On the pilgrimage Hope just as “the limping man” tries to find the lost “primordial 
link,” which is why he is instinctively drawn to lake Nemi in central Italy,
to the place of the alleged Diana’s grave with the holy oak and its Golden Bough: 

It ends with Nemi and the Golden Bough What instinct led him there? I like 
to think What drew Byron then 
Is what has drawn me now ... 

The allusion is, of course, to the bulky anthropological study of ancient myths 
by Sir James G. Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890), who postulated the principle of 
the cultural exchanges and the oscillations in fertility and sterility, the rise and fall 
of civilizations. Hope uses the ‘myth’ in the scenes depicting the legendary priesthood 
of Diana’s shrine by the lake. 

There’s nothing now at Nemi to evoke Sir James G. Frazer’s memorable scene 

The sleepless Victim-king, the secret oak; A market garden spreads its tidy 

green 

Where stood Diana’s grove, no voices spoke ... 

However, the evocation of the myth causes some sort of inexplicable tension 
due to the fact that there is nothing left by the lake that would remind him of 
the past or Byron’s visit. The “force” and “insistence” is felt by Hope as fate, which 
is according to him quite different from Byron’s “calm and cherished hate.” A. D.
Hope in “A Letter from Rome” refers to his “obsession,” with the ritual “baptism”
in lake Nemi, which signifies a symbolic initiation of an Australian (poet) into the 
system of European ur-myths. They appear to him as more or less inexplicable 


entities, but he persuades himself that he has to perform “Europe’s oldest ritual of 
prayer;” he wades into the water to be baptized. 

I seemed constrained, before I came to drink 

To pour some wine upon the water’s face, 

Later, to strip and wade out from the brink ... 

I was possessed, and what possessed me there 

Was Europe’s oldest ritual of prayer. 

(A. D. Hope, “A Letter from Rome”) 
Byron’s original description of the lake as an ‘objective correlative’ is this: 

Lo, Nemi! ravell’d in the woody hills 

So far, that the uprotting wind which tears 

The oak from his fondation, and which spills 

The ocean o’er is boundary, and bears 

Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares 

The oval mirror of thy glossy lake; 

(Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage) 

Throughout his poetic career Hope had been writing poetry which drew uponthe resources of European mythology, particularly ancient Greek mythologyand literature (Cf. Kramer 1979). He remembers “the beginnings of mythologybetween the ages of four and five” (Hope 1976). Hope further contends thatthe most characteristic phenomena of the modern world — high technology,
industry, science, entrepreneurialship — do not offer a good possibility to createnew myths but rather hasten the development of “the aristocratic art of satire”
(Hope 1965), which Hope explicitly cherished (e. g. his brilliant mock-epicDunciad Minor). Still, the poet’s experience at lake Nemi near Rome, thoughclearly important and visibly effective, is not particularly striking to the readerof “A Letter from Rome” and is in fact less impressive than other parts of thepoem which have so far been quoted, for example the ‘fons et origo’ section. It has 
none of the conviction of Wordsworth’s ‘revelation’ poems and hardly matches 
the strength of Byron’s meditation inspired by Lake Nemi at the end of Childe 
Harold’s Pilgrimage.

In Australian criticism simple caricatures frequently emerge, portraying Hope 
in bold apodictic strokes as neo-classical, Parnassian, anti-modernist, and the 
like. Such categorizations, however, do point to the one indisputable element of 
Hope’s poetry, namely that it is essentially “strategically restless and subversive” 


(Wallace-Crabbe 1990). In quite a few of his poems, (e. g. “Conquistador,” “The 
Kings,”“Flower Poem”),however,there are Decadent and fin-de-siècle undertones. 
Critics have for the past twenty years found Hope the architect and the purveyor 
of neoclassical ideas in Australian poetry, but how to explain, then, the ‘romantic 
agony,’ the agony of the divided soul in his poems, particularly the penchant 
towards modelling some of his satirical poetic pieces on Lord Byron’s verse: this 
applies, for example, to “A Letter from Rome” or his satirical Byronesque rhymes 
in the introductory verses to his friend Hector Munro’s mock-epic Don Juan in 
Australia (Hope 1986). The link that seems to be particularly strong between Byron 
and Hope is not in the Romantic traits, but rather in the scintillating satirical 
impulse, which is essentially characteristic of both poets.

Lord Byron’s early work shows that his self-esteem was shattered when Hours 
of Idleness were savagely attacked by the influential Edinburgh Review. Byron’s 
counter-attack on literary critics in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers owed more 
to the tradition of Aleksander Pope’s The Dunciad than to that of his Romantic 
contemporaries, for he greatly admired the 18th century satirist Pope; on the other 
hand, it is also known just how much A. D. Hope appreciated Pope. Byron is 
said to have admired “Gifford inordinately, and Pope almost to idolatry, yet his 
own tastes were really quite different from either” (Yarker 1975). Every satirical 
description of the world implies an ideal one: every assault on the way things are 
depends upon the understanding that they can be better. Satire thus somehow 
springs from the divided self or the Romantic divided soul to be found both 
in Byron and Hope. The exaggerated, mock-epic, burlesque satiric style which 
achieves its major effects by exploiting the contrasts between radically different 
levels, the heroic and the commonplace, is an important element linking the poetry 
of Lord Byron to that of A. D. Hope.

Byron’s Don Juan is indeed very much indebted to Augustan poetry, althoughin some views not so much in the part represented by Alexander Pope but bythat of Jonathan Swift (England 1974). One may question with enough reason, 
why Byron chose satire, on account of which he is today even more highlyvalued than for his explicitly Romantic pieces, satire as an important mode ofexpression, especially in the ‘English’ Cantos of Don Juan, which are rich in satirical 
relevance and resonant with literary allusions? One possible answer maybe found in the fact that 18th century satire was rather static, while the overallRomantic feeling and Zeitgeist was dynamic: Byron, in using a somewhat ‘Romanticized’ 
satire, thus tried to find a modus vivendi, a poetic form that shouldgive his well-loved form of satire a sense of flow and clearcut forward movement. 
In this respect the standards of Popean satire were accommodating andflexible enough to embrace new experiences, those of Byron and, much later,
those of an ardent admirer of his, A. D. Hope. The poetic paradox of Byron and 


Hope cannot be better exemplified for, even if the subject-matter is Romantic,
the (satirical) mode and mood of their verse tend to be Augustan. It is paradoxical 
that Hope’s strong subjectivity and Romantic personal choice be clad inclassical values, which is, in fact, his true classicism.

Another possible line of comparison between Byron and Hope could be drawn 
with respect to the Byronic hero phenomenon. Peter L.Thorslev (1962) classified,
on the one hand, 18th century hero types (the child of nature the hero of sensibility, 
the gothic villain), and Romantic hero types (the noble outlaw, Faust, Cain,
Satan and Prometheus) on the other. Hope’s heroes, however, do not fit into any 
of these categories. The complex Byronic hero, a curious mixture of those mentioned, 
is the direct ancestor of many of the pessimistic or nihilistic heroes and 
philosophical rebels to be found in French Romantic and Decadent literature,
who frequently occur in Hope’s verse. 

The persona of Don Juan does retain many of the characteristics of the Byronic 
hero which is why it is no coincidence that Hope took him as a model inhis introduction to Hector Munro’s mock epic Don Juan in Australia (Munro 
1986). He is sceptical and defiant, but as the poem develops, it takes on specificcharacteristics, especially because Don Juan becomes strongly tolerant for allhis satirical wit. Hope namely finds it impossible to properly introduce LordByron’s Don Juan to “the ocker world,” strongly ridiculing Australia as “an aridwasteland of its sporting scene:” 

HECTOR, MY FRIEND, you strike me dumb with wonder, 

You who so late and neatly cooked the goose 

Of the philosophers, now turn to plunder Lord Byron’s Don Juan to introduce 

His hero to the ocker world ‘down under,’Where, in vain Hope’s of playing fast 

and loose 
You bring within the range of observation 
Love, politics and Woman’s Liberation, 
Sunbaking and, contriving not to bore, 
The arid wasteland of its sporting scene, 
Feats that might well have tasked the Burlador 
Of Seville, if like little Wilhelmine, 
He asked “What do they love each other for, 
Since ‘having sex’ is what they really mean? 
For love below the Line’s a thing of snatches 
To make a nice break between cricket matches. 


(A. D. Hope, Introduction to Hector Munro’s Don Juan in Australia) 

A. D. Hope’s literary affiliations with Lord Byron’s poetry are, thus, at least 
threefold, as exemplified by his long epistolary poem “A Letter from Rome,” Introduction 
to Munro’s Don Juan in Australia, and Byron’s works Childe Harold’s 
Pilgrimage and Don Juan. 
First, Hope’s ‘Romanticism’ is comparable to the mood of Childe Harold in his 
palimpsestic superscription of Byron’s original texts. Byron’s frivolous sensibility 
does not emanate from Hope’s verse, but it is significant to note that both poets 
possibly felt they were self-imposed ‘outcasts’ from their respective societies. The 
second contention is that A. D. Hope relied on an exaggerated, Baroque classicism, 
typical of the late Victorian period, classicism that remains on the level of 
sheer decoration, ornament and form, whereas the content may well be Romantic.
In the third place it can be maintained, mutatis mutandis, that the Popean satirical 
value of Byron’s and Hope’s verse is possibly the strongest link between their literary 
achievements, one that instructs us about their own position in native lands,
about Byron’s ‘physical exile’ from the shores of Albion and Hope’s deliberate 
‘spiritual exile’ from Australia, which enabled them both to take a critical attitude 
towards their homelands, respectively.

The central emphasis in A. D. Hope’s poem “The Damnation of Byron” is on 
the man-woman relationship, a theme not entirely absent also from “A Letter 
from Rome,” in which it takes the form of a rather banal contemporary love story 
between Louise, an American student of art history, and the native Italian Alessandro. 
Hope’s nihilistic experience of eroticism, reduced primarily to its sexual 
aspect (e. g. the femme fatale figure), is in some ways again reminiscent of Byron’s 
stance. In “The Damnation of Byron” Hope as early as 1934 prophetically anticipated 
his own creativity. Indeed, on the grand Shakespearean stage of life he has 
daily performed his Don Juan, doomed to the searching, lifelong artistic ‘pilgrimage’ 
of Childe Harold: 

Through the Infernal Fields he makes his way 

Playing again, but on a giant stage, 

His own Don Juan; pursuing day by day 

Childe Harold’s last astonishing pilgrimage. 

(A. D. Hope, “The Damnation of Byron”) 
LIST OF WORKS CITED 

Byron, Lord. 1957 edition. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in The Poetical Works of Lord 
Byron. London: Oxford UP, 179-252. 


England, A. B. Byron’s Don Juan and Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1974. London: 
Associated University Presses, 1974. See also Paul G. Trueblood, Lord 
Byron. 1969. New York: Twayne.

Hope, A. D. Collected Poems 1930-1970. 1972. Sydney: Angus and Robertson,
129-148. All subsequent references are to this edition.

Hope, A. D. Native Companions. 1976. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1976, 10. 

Hope, A. D. The Cave and the Spring. 1965. Adelaide: Rigby, 1965, 67, 91.

Wallace-Crabbe, Chris. 1990. True Tales and False Alike Work by Suggestion:
The Poetry of A. D. Hope, Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 14/4, (October), 

415. 
Jump, John, ed. 1973. Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan. London: 
Macmillan. 

Kramer, Leonie. 1979. A. D. Hope. Melbourne: Oxford UP. 

Krevel, Mojca. 2016. Navzocnost v casu: A Tale for the Time Being in postmoderna 
paradigma, Primerjalna književnost, Vol. 39/2, 173-189. 

Munro, Hector. 1986. Don Juan in Australia. Hawthorn: Hudson. 

Pesman, Roselyn. 1983. Australian Visitors to Italy in the 19th Century,”-
Gianfranco Cresciani ed. Australia, the Australians and the Italian Migration.
Milan: Franco Angeli Editore, 137.

Thorslev, Peter L. 1962. The Byronic Hero. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 
Press. 

Wellek, René. 1970. The Term and Concept of Classicism in Literary History,
Discriminations — Further Concepts in Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 55. 
Cf. also the study of Hope’s classicism by Noel Macainsh,The Suburban Aristocrat: 
A. D. Hope and Classicism, Meridian 1, (May 1985), 19-29.

Yarker, P. M. 1975. Byron and the Satiric Temper. John D. Jump ed., Byron: A 
Symposium. London: Macmillan, 78.
Žigon,Tanja. Dunajcanka v Ljubljani: medkulturno delovanje Hedwig pl. Radics- 
Kaltenbrunner. Dve domovini (2012): 36, 157-168. 

Igor Maver

University of Ljubljana, SloveniaIgor.Maver@ff.uni-lj.si 



Avstralski pesnik v Italiji: byronovski pogled na sodobno Italijo A D 
Hopa 

Clanek intertekstualno raziskuje klasicizem v poeziji avstralskega pesnika A.D.
Hopa, še posebej v povezavi z delom lorda Byrona Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 
odseki tega dela, ki so postavljeni v Italijo. 

Kljucne besede: avstralska poezija, lord Byron, A. D. Hope 

The author acknowledges the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency 
(research core funding No. P6-0265). 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.111(680).09-312.6Coetzee J. M. 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.69-81 

Understanding South African Xenophobia 
Through the Prism of J M Coetzee’s Summertime 
‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’ 

Polona Zajec 

Abstract 

The xenophobic violence and discrimination that greets African migrants in post-apartheid 
South Africa highlights a social and political issue that threatens the idea(l) of the 
open pan-African society. The article looks at this xenophobia through the lens of J. M.
Coetzee fictionalized memoir Summertime ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’ and tries to develop 
a new understanding of South Africa’s relationship to the African ‘other’ – or to the 
‘other’ Africa, relevant not only in the context of postcolonial studies but also in a more 
global perspective on social and cultural responses to processes of migration. 

Keywords: South Africa, xenophobia, J.M. Coetzee, post-apartheid, postcolonial studies, 
migration 


As the most developed country on the continent, South Africa is often referredto as the ‘Europe’ of Africa in terms of being the desired final destination ofthousands of people. Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, a Nigerian writer, claims thatSouth Africa served as an inspiration to the rest of Africa: “White people orno white people, it was an African country; it was an African star” (Nwaubani2015). People migrate from all parts of the African continent to South Africabecause they are fleeing political oppression or conflicts in their home countries.
They seek economic opportunities and a better life that can only be offered tothem there and not in their home country. Many wish to study at the high quality 
educational institutions in South Africa. Or sometimes, it is a combinationof all of these. 

However, one cannot overlook Nwaubani’s use of the past tense when she talks 
about South Africa as the African star since the relationship between the refugees, 
asylum seekers, and the host population is strained because of the socio-economical 
environment in South Africa, with high unemployment, poor service 
delivery and economic inequality. Since the fall of the apartheid system in 1994 
there have been continuous xenophobic attacks on foreigners. The destruction of 
immigrant-owned property, burning down their small shops, roadside stalls, and 
even their houses, became common practice and culminated in the 2008 riots that 
started in the township of Alexandra on the outskirts of Johannesburg. In these 
xenophobic raids over 60 people were killed and over five thousand people were 
forced to flee their homes (Nwaubani 2015). Many ended up living in refugee 
camps as they were afraid of re-integration and some even decided in favor of 
voluntary deportation to their home countries.

Seven years passed and little changed. Between 2008 and 2015, approximately 
350 people had been killed (Blood at the end of the rainbow). As foreigners are 
seen as scapegoats for the decline of South African economy, in 2015 between 
March and May, another wave of xenophobic attacks hit the country that left 
seven people dead and thousands displaced and fleeing their homes again (World 
Report 2017). Government and public schools are reluctant in admitting or accepting 
refuge and asylum seeker students (UNHCR Operation in South Africa 
2). The 2016 Amnesty International’s Annual Report on South Africa noticed 
that “Police used excessive force against protesters. Torture, including rape, and 
other ill-treatment of people in police custody continued to be reported. Xenophobia 
and violence against refugees, asylum-seekers and migrants resulted in 
deaths, injuries and displacement. Many incidents involved the targeted looting 
of foreign-owned small businesses in townships” (South Africa 2016). In 2016,
in Pretoria, 12 migrants were seriously injured and hundreds displaced in a mob 
raid against them, and in the Western Cape the looting of foreign businesses was 
prominent during the whole year. 


In general, the attacks are most common in urban areas in Gauteng, Kwazulu-
Natal, the Eastern and Western Cape, and especially in townships of Johannesburg, 
Durban and Cape Town. Nevertheless, the violence has now spread and 
has become common practice in urban and rural areas across the land. In order 
to limit the attacks Amnesty International suggests “educating civil servants on 
the rights and documentation of foreign nationals; strengthening the capacities 
of institutions managing migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers; ensuring leaders 
make responsible public statements; and education campaigns in schools to promote 
cohesion” (South Africa 2016).

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 
and the South African Department of Home Affairs, in 2015, there were 
above 300.000 refugees and around 800.000 asylum seekers in South Africa (2015 
UNHCR). The majority of refugees originate from Zimbabwe, Somalia, Ethiopia, 
Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Cote d’Ivoire (UNHCR 
Operation in South Africa 1). According to Statistics South Africa 2016 
Community Survey the population of South Africa is 55.7 million, including 1.6 
million people born outside of its borders, which equals 2.8% of its population 
(Grant, Pampalone and Brodie). However, the United Nations Department of 
Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) reports that the number of international 
migrants living in South Africa is 3.24 million, or 5,8% of the entire population 
(Grant, Pampalone and Brodie). Due to the lack of concrete statistical information 
other humanitarian organizations give information that, additional to official 
figures, the number of undocumented migrants alone is around two million (Brodie). 
Altogether, there could be between five and six million foreigners in South 
Africa, either legally or illegally.

Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu’s post-apartheid dreams seem far from 
reality as South Africa’s diversity is seen more as a source of division than richness 
and strength. In response to the 2015 attacks Tutu stated: “Our rainbow nation 
that so filled the world with hope is being reduced to a grubby shadow of itself.
The fabric of the nation is splitting” (Blood at the end of the rainbow). Stuart 
Hall’s theory of articulation highlights that things are always made to mean in a 
certain context. Different things convey different meanings in different times or 
situations. By putting themselves in opposition to other Africans, South Africans 
instate themselves as the centre, as an ideal to which Africa should strive. In South 
Africa, the African ‘other’ is presented as non-human, almost bestial. These dominant 
articulations of superiority construct realities with material effects. Xenophobia 
in modern South Africa serves as a good example of how fast people are 
willing to forget the past when it suits them.

During apartheid many South Africans were forced to flee the country to other 
parts of Africa because at home they were discriminated. Now, when the tables 


have turned, many makwerekwere, as foreigners from other parts of Africa are derogatorily 
called, are fleeing their war-torn countries to seek sanctuary, and South 
Africans could be the ones offering safe haven; instead, they discriminate and 
work against them (Zajec 48). Almost everybody in Africa has an opinion about 
South Africa. On the one hand, because so many of the African countries were 
involved in the struggle against the apartheid regime, today’s reality as its final result, 
is disappointing. On the other hand, South Africans feel like they have been 
fighting for their rights and freedom for so long, only to see and feel like someone 
else is reaping its fruits.

John Maxwell “J. M.” Coetzee is probably the most famous living South African 
writer. His 2009 Booker Prize shortlisted fictionalized memoir Summertime 
‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’ offers an interesting insight on South Africa in the 
1970’s . With the apartheid regime in full swing one can already sense the origins 
of xenophobia gripping the nation today. For the fictional John Coetzee the National 
Party never cared or set out to save their ‘civilization’ as “Behind a smokescreen 
of patriotism they are at this very moment sitting and calculating how long 
they can keep the show running (the mines, the factories) before they will need 
to pack their bags, shred any incriminating documents, and fly off to Zürich or 
Monaco or San Diego,” because there “under the cover of holding companies with 
names like Algro Trading or Handfast Securities they years ago bought themselves 
villas and apartments as insurance against the day of reckoning” (5-6).

In Summertime, characters describe their experiences with John, Coetzee’s fictional 
alter ego. Sophie, his lover and fellow lecturer at the University, describes thatJohn was not interested in the liberation of the blacks under apartheid, thought hewas sympathetic to the cause. She claims he was a fatalist and had utopian visionsfor the ‘New South Africa’ that couldn’t have come true. Broadly speaking “a discourse 
of the ‘New South Africa’ involves concepts such as democracy, deracialisation, 
reconciliation and unity. Economically, it conveys notions of reconstruction,
development and upliftment. Socio-politically, it is aligned with building the nation,
and nationalism is a vital element of the discourse” (Harris 177).

Edward Said once noted that the capacity of imperial narratives to reinvent 
themselves, barely disguised, in the political and economic executives of globalism 
and new world orders, should be a constant source of concern and attention 
(Featherstone 170). The fictional John disclosed to Sophie his romanticized 
version of Africa, something that has for him been lost long ago in Europe; “His 
philosophy ascribed to Africans the role of guardians of the truer, deeper, more 
primitive being of human kind […] What his position boiled down to […] was 
old-fashioned Romantic primitivism. In the context of the 1970s, of the liberation 
struggle and the apartheid state, it was unhelpful to look at Africans in his way”
(Coetzee 231). It was a role they were no longer willing to play. 


South Africa’s political transition to democracy has exposed the unequal distribution 
of resources and wealth in the country. In the post-apartheid era people’s 
expectations have been raised and the disillusionment that followed resulted in 
discontent and indignation. People are now more conscious of their deprivation 
than ever before. Tshitereke notes that “This is the ideal situation for a phenomenon 
like xenophobia to take root and flourish” (qtd. in Harris 171). When the 
state represents undocumented, and also documented, African immigrants as parasites 
to the system, they are seen as the ones blocking the post-1994 national 
re-building process (Harris 176).

Thus, xenophobia can be understood as the product of social transition, as a 
defence against the anxiety induced by ‘the unknown’ (Hobsbawm 264). It can 
also be seen in the light of South Africa’s search for an identity going from “a past 
of racism to a future of nationalism” (Harris 175). Xenophobia is a central feature 
of nationalism since it is “a form of violence and violence is the norm in South 
Africa” (Harris 180). Throughout history violence and nationalism go hand in 
hand as “The struggle to create the nation-state is a struggle for the monopoly of 
the means of violence. What is being created - a nation state - is itself a means of 
violence. The triumph of a particular nationalism is seldom achieved without the 
defeat of alternative nationalisms and other ways of imagining peoplehood” (qtd.
in Harris 182).

In Summertime John assesses that “politics […] brought out the worst in peopleand also brought to the surface the worst types in society” (Coetzee 228). Despitethis, he believes that people “will never abandon politics because politics is too convenient 
and too attractive as a theatre in which to give play to our baser emotions.
Baser emotions meaning hatred and rancor and spite and jealousy and bloodlustand so forth,” and sees politics as “a symptom of our fallen state and expresses thatfallen state” (Coetzee 229). South Africans may just be adopting the culture ofviolence they were experiencing during apartheid. This is a culture in which interactions 
and relations are resolved in a violent instead of non-violent manner, “aculture in which violence is proffered as a normal, legitimate solution to problems[…] as a legitimate means to achieve goals particularly because it was legitimizedby most political role-players in the past” (Harris 179). For John “Nothing is worthfighting for because fighting only prolongs the cycle of aggression and retaliation”
(Coetzee 230). The experience of hostility may generate further hostility throughthe deployment of coping strategies such as isolation, superiority and bitterness.
Exclusion, alienation, and hostility operate in a complex, ongoing spiral and, asJulia Kristeva comments, “just because one is a foreigner does not mean one iswithout one’s own foreigner […] As enclave of the other within the other, otherness 
becomes crystallized as pure ostracism: the foreigner excludes before beingexcluded, even more than he is being excluded” (qtd. in Harris 181). 


As apartheid has left deep scars in the minds of South Africans, their dominantgroups define national legitimacy by stigmatizing foreigners. Using the strategy ofexcluding foreigners, they conquer and preserve their political power. While the 
common enemy ‘apartheid’ is defeated, the threat of outsiders has re-emerged. Because 
the victims of the socio-economic inequality and poverty cannot reach therichest that hold power, they react to the ones closest to them using high unemployment, 
competition for jobs, for education, even for women, as excuses to justify theirattacks. Harris calls this the scapegoating hypothesis of xenophobia (171).

Xenophobia can also be seen as a consequence of apartheid South Africa’s 
seclusion from the international community (Harris 172). Because apartheid 
isolated its citizens from nationalities beyond, foreigners represent the unknown 
to South Africans. With the political transition, however, South Africa’s borders 
have opened up and the country has become integrated into the international 
community. This has brought South Africans, after a long period of international 
isolation, into direct contact with the unknown, with foreigners. John comments 
that the National Party felt like foreigners “held the Afrikaners in contempt and 
would turn a blind eye if they were massacred by the blacks, down to the last 
woman and child” (Coetzee 5). Therefore, “Alone and friendless at the remote 
tip of a hostile continent, they erected their fortress state and retreated behind its 
walls: there they would keep the flame of Western Christian civilization burning 
until finally the world came to it senses” (Coetzee 5).

According to Harris’s isolation hypothesis, the interface between previously 
isolated South Africans and unknown foreigners creates a space for hostility to 
develop, since: “When a group has no history of incorporating strangers, it may 
find it difficult to be welcoming” (qtd.in Harris 172). In the novel Sophie notes 
how South Africans are isolated from the rest of the world and show “little or 
no interest in the rest of Africa: Africa was a dark continent to the north, best 
left unexplored” (Coetzee 222).Consequently, discussing foreigners appears as a 
very uncanny topic surrounded by mystery, by a fundamental disturbance that 
defamiliarizes, challenges beliefs and assumptions, producing alienation effects.
Contemporary xenophobia can even more prominently be seen through the prism 
of internal isolation, the isolation of South Africans from South Africans, as a 
consequence of apartheid. The brutal environment created by apartheid with its 
homeland systems and enormous emphasis on boundary maintenance has impacted 
people’s ability to be tolerant of difference (Harris 172). Harris emphasizes 
that “Due to the creation of strict boundaries between South African citizens, as 
well as between the country and other nations, South Africans might be unable to 
accommodate, and indeed tolerate difference” (173).

While differences exist, how differences are categorized is always a result of 
politics and power and not a question of biology. These dominant articulations, 


generalizations, and stereotypes that are commonly offered regarding Africa and 
African foreigners offer insight into the hostility that meets this group and show 
how opinions can be manipulated. Africa above their country is seen “as ‘the troubled 
north’, a vague space marked by wars, woes and poverty. In this way, South 
Africa is divorced from the rest of the continent. Africa appears as a negative 
space ‘out there’, totally separate from the space ‘in here’ […] a negative collective 
force without specific form or identity thereby representing an easy object of 
blame and anxiety” (Harris 175). This is mirrored in the words of Coetzee’s fictional 
father who has nothing but disdain for the continent to the north of them;
“Buffoons is the word he uses to dismiss the leaders of African states: petty tyrants 
who can barely spell their own names, chauffeured from one banquet to another 
in their Rolls-Royces, wearing Ruritanian uniforms festooned with medals they 
have awarded themselves. Africa: a place of starving masses with homicidal buffoons 
lording it over them” (Coetzee 4).

The state’s and the media’s negative attitude towards black foreigners, and the 
use of the language of ‘contamination’, convince people that they threaten the nation 
by endangering its ability to provide resources, employment possibilities, and 
the levels of crime. They set up images of Africans as carriers of disease, especially 
the HIV/AIDS epidemic with South Africa being the country with the highest 
HIV prevalence in the world and almost six million people infected, and more 
recently Ebola. As such “the African foreigner is represented as a physical disease 
that literally threatens the body politic with contamination” (Harris 176). Neocosmos 
similarly looks back on apartheid’s anti-rural and pro-urban characteristics 
that “ruralized and devalued black lives […] whilst urbanizing and valuing white 
lives […] The post-apartheid state simply shifted this rural/urban binary opposition 
to Africa/South Africa, such that Africa is perceived as rural and backward 
and South Africa as urban and modern” (Matsinhe 298, cf. Maver 2013).

Frantz Fanon observed that the colonized have distorted views of themselves 
thanks to the colonial past. Bearing this in mind, Matsinhe describes that “longer 
than elsewhere in Africa, in South Africa one was born into, and became part of,
a colonizing figuration, born of a colonial birth, living a colonial life, and dying a 
colonial death” (300). However, in the novel, Martin, who describes meeting John 
in 1972, while they were being interviewed for a job at the University of Cape 
Town talks about this legal, but illegitimate presence in South Africa: “We had an 
abstract right to be there, a birthright, but the basis of that birthright was fraudulent. 
Our presence was grounded in a crime, namely colonial conquest, perpetuated 
by apartheid. Whatever the opposite of native or rooted, that was what we 
felt ourselves to be” (Coetzee 209-210). Martin considers his position as a South 
African as even slightly comic since his ancestors “had tailored away, generation 
after generation, to clear a patch of wild Africa for their descendants, and what 


was the fruit of all their labours? Doubt in the hearts of those descendants about 
title to the land; an uneasy sense that it belonged not to them but, inalienably, to 
its original owners” (210).

Nevertheless, the long colonial past can be closely linked to the idea of South 
African exceptionalism, where South Africa is presented as a kind of European 
outpost. Lazarus writes that “For most whites in South Africa, of course South 
Africa was not really in Africa at all. It was a “Western” society that just happened,
accidentally and inconsequentially, if irritatingly, to be situated at the foot of the 
dark continent” (610). This entitlement of the white settlers is especially clear in 
the case of the so-called ‘original Cape colony’. John, “Like many whites […] 
regarded the Cape, the western Cape and perhaps the northern Cape along with 
it, as standing apart from the rest of South Africa. The Cape was a country of 
its own, with its own geography, its own history, its own languages and culture”
(Coetzee 232). In this mythical Cape, Africans were seen as aliens. John echoes 
Lazarus’s thinking as “he had no feeling for black South Africans […] They might 
be his fellow citizens but they were not his countrymen. History - or fate, which 
was to him the same thing - might have cast them in the role of inheritors of 
the land, but at the back of his mind they continued to be they as opposed to us” 
(Coetzee 232; emphasis added).

Matsinhe speaks of a ‘social unconscious’ when the colonized fantasize of 
becoming the colonizer (301). The idea was perpetuated as far as claiming that 
because of the high level of industrialization, or the highly valued democracy,
South Africans are different, even having lighter skin than other Africans, and 
will be able to solve their own problems not following in the footsteps of doom 
of other African states. Replaying past experiences, the weaker groups “measure 
themselves with the yardstick of their oppressor […] always looking at one’s self 
through the eyes of others […] And once the ideals of the oppressor become the 
aspiration of the oppressed, the oppressed has become a cultural clone of the oppressor” 
(Matsinhe 302). It might be that South Africans merely adopted the only 
pattern ever known to them. A pattern, where you can be either the oppressor or 
the oppressed, and there is no middle way.

However, identification with the oppressor goes hand in hand with self-hatred 
and self-destruction. Fanon wrote: “I am a white man. For unconsciously I distrust 
what is black in me, that is, the whole of my being” (qtd. in Matsinhe 302).
Such thinking can lead to anger and violence, directed either towards oneself or 
to ‘the other’ since “Aversion to those who resemble the self externalizes self-contempt, 
and projects negativity of self accrued through generations of vilification 
to the other. From this point of view African foreign nationals are feared, hated 
and distrusted not because they are different, but because they resemble the former 
victims of apartheid” (Matsinhe 302). Freud called this the ‘narcissism of 


difference’, when the contempt for ‘the other’ is within us, especially if ‘the other’ 
resembles us (Matsinhe 309).

The legacy of apartheid, the growing HIV/AIDS epidemic, ignorance and illiteracy, 
poverty, growing inequality, the growing number of shanty towns and 
townships, or the increasing rape and crime rates are just a few problems South 
Africa is facing. In this light, the idea of South Africa as the richest, economically 
and technologically powerful, and most educated state on the continent 
is surprising. However, drawing on Marx’s ‘commodity fetishism’ asserting that 
through practical experience inverted experience is born, Hage points out that the 
collective ‘we’ can experience what ‘I’ on itself never could (201). 

‘I’ can be uneducated, poor and weak, but ‘we’ can still be wise, rich and strong.
People always strive to be just as the “people who within their communal milieurepresent the best of the best” (Hage 201). This process of selection comes with anegative side effect - repression. While creating a perfect ‘racialized community’,
one must suppress negative, unpleasant, underdeveloped members and focus onlyon the brilliant ones. Hage emphasizes that “along with the positive anesthetization 
of the self comes the process of negatively aestheticizing the other, the onewho is being racialized as inferior” (202). In this sense,“one systematically repressesthe whiteness of the other and the non-whiteness within the self to end up witha white self and a non-white other […] through this selective aestheticization,
racialized thought manages to create a sense of absolute difference between selfand other” (Hage 202). Matsinhe explains the ideology of makwerekwere as externalizing 
internal oppression seeking “to make visible the invisible object of fear”
(310). For him, the roots of such an ideology are found in “the psychological realmof ego-weak characters who construct their identity by denigrating others [in needof ] scapegoats to externalize what cannot be sublimed” (qtd. in Matsinhe 310).

In Summertime, John Coetzee dreamed of “a day when everyone in South Africa 
would call themselves nothing, neither African nor European nor white nor 
black nor anything else, when family histories would have become so tangled and 
intermixed that people would be ethnically indistinguishable” (233). While his 
wishes might be too optimistic it is important to observe that what might at a first 
glance seem as a very specific and local problem in South Africa, can also be seen 
in a more global context, as the problems they are facing are universal.The history 
of violence and discrimination against African migrants in post-apartheid South 
Africa describe what has become a social and political issue that threatens the 
idea(l) of the open pan-African society. The idea to look at xenophobia through 
the lens of one of the most established contemporary South African writers and 
to develop a new understanding of South Africa’s relationship to the African 
‘other’ – or to the ‘other’ Africa – is relevant not only in the context of postcolonial 
studies but also in a more global perspective on social and cultural responses to 


processes of migration. How a continent, and within it a country, is packaged or 
stereotyped, transcends a simple postcolonial frame when the main players are 
put on a global stage. South Africa’s case study can provide global signifiers, give 
a humanizing perspective, and serve as a human rights narrative overreaching a 
simple hatred of foreigners looking forward, using the mistakes of the past as 
learning steps for the future. 

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Polona Zajec 

Vienna 
polonazajec@gmail.com 


Povzetek 

Ksenofobicno nasilje in diskriminacija, ki pricakata afriške migrante v Južnoafriškirepubliki po padcu apartheida, opozarjata na socialni in politicni problem, ki ogrožaidejo odprte (pan)afriške družbe. Clanek obravnava to ksenofobijo skozi objektiv

J.M. Coetzeejevih fiktivnih spominov Summertime ‘Scenes from a Provincial Life’ in 
poskuša razviti novo razumevanje južnoafriškega odnosa do ‘drugih’ Africanov ali 
‘druge’ Afrike pomembno ne samo v okviru postkolonialnih študij, ampak tudi zaradi 
globalnega pogleda na družbene in kulturne odzive na migracijske procese. 
Kljucne besede: Južnoafriška republika, ksenofobija, J.M. Coetzee, post-apartheid, 
postkolonialne študije, migracije 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 791.223.1:821.111(73).09 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.83-94 

The Iconic American Western in Film and 

Literature 

Ali Shehzad Zaidi 

Abstract 

This essay examines representative stories of the American Western genre in both film 
and literature in light of various literary influences, including The Bible and classical epics 
such as Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and The Odyssey. These stories relate the dynamic tensions of 
characters caught between righteous and unrighteous anger, between home and longing 
for the road, and between the imperative to survive and the impulse to sacrifice oneself 
for others. 

Keywords: American Western, The Western, Gilgamesh, High Noon, Hombre, The Iliad, 
The Odyssey, Shane, “The Tin Star,” Unforgiven 


The Western is a genre that explores our relationship to the land, community, and 
self. Generally regarded as unique to the United States, the Western has literary 
forbears that share its epic representation of the themes of friendship and anger.
This essay examines four iconic stories of the American West, as portrayed in two 
novels, a short story, a movie script, and their film incarnations. In these stories,
violence may serve to restore a fragile social order or alternately convey the rage 
inherent in a corrupt society.

The Bible is a dominant influence in the genre of the Western. The hero of the 
Western is sometimes given to the kind of retributive justice described in The Old 
Testament: “eye for eye tooth for tooth” (Exodus 21:24), but often shows forbearance 
under provocation, heeding Jesus’ admonition to turn the other cheek. However, 
when compelled to fight, the hero wreaks terrible vengeance on his enemies 
in order to uphold the communal good and redress injustice. At such moments of 
courage and self-sacrifice, the hero appears semi-divine. Friendship has a special 
place in stories of the The Old Testament such as the one between Jonathan and 
David (1 Samuel 18-20). The Old Testament condemns unrighteous anger in such 
passages as Psalms 37: 7-8 (“Cease from anger, and forsake wrath. / Fret not yourself; 
it does nothing but harm; / For evildoers shall be cut off; While those who 
wait upon the LORD shall possess the land”) and Proverbs 15:1 (“A gentle answer 
turns away wrath; But harsh words stir up anger”).

The epic Gilgamesh is another literary precursor of the Western. Its earliestextant texts are from around 2100 BC (Mitchell 5). Gilgamesh represents thetransition of humanity from a savage to a civilized state. This epic prefigures thetension within the cowboy, between the longing for freedom and his search forhome and community. The taming of the West implies the taming of men; andthis very process defines Gilgamesh. When Gilgamesh, the king and protector ofthe city of Uruk, hears of the approach of Enkidu, a savage and powerful manof mythical powers and proportions, he sends a priestess, Shamhat, to tame Enkidu 
through her love-arts. Enkidu’s formidable powers are attenuated throughthe sexual pleasure that he experiences with the priestess after which Enkidu’s“life-force was spent, / his knees trembled, he could no longer run / like an animal, 
as he had before… he knew that his mind had somehow grown larger, /
he knew things now that an animal can’t know” (Gilgamesh 79). The eponymoushero-king vanquishes Enkidu in a ferocious battle after which they become bestfriends. Their archetypal rivalry and friendship anticipates the male bondingseen in Westerns. 

The Homeric epics, composed about the eighth century BC, also anticipate the 
narratives of violent masculinity in the Western. The Iliad does not glorify war. Instead 
the epic portrays warriors as petulant, childish, and given to self-destructive 
rage during the Greek siege of Troy, as can be seen in the epic’s opening passage: 


The rage of Achilles – sing it now; goddess, sing through me 

the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief 

and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters, 

leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs 

and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished. (Iliad I: 1-5) 

Rage is Achilles’ vulnerability, symbolized by his heel, the only part of his body 
in which an arrow can kill him, hence the expression Achilles heel. The Trojan War 
reaches a turning point when the Trojan prince Hector slays Patrocles a close 
friend of the Greek warrior Achilles. This prompts Achilles to join the war and 
kill Hector, whose corpse he drags behind his chariot. Although he does not possess 
the self-mastery that characterizes the archetypal hero, Achilles nonetheless 
returns Hector’s corpse to his grieving father, King Priam. Another Homeric epic,
The Odyssey, tells of the survival, endurance, and resourcefulness of a Greek king 
who embarks on a ten-year journey home after the Trojan War. The opening lines 
of The Odyssey characterize its hero: 

Tell me, Muse about the man of many turns, who many 

Ways wandered when he had sacked Troy’s holy citadel; 

He saw the cities of many men, and he knew their thought; 

On the ocean he suffered many pains within his heart, 

Striving for his life and his companions’ return. (The Odyssey I. 1-5) 

Odysseus possesses the divine restlessness of the cowboy who is at the same 
time drawn to family and community.

A famous short story that dramatizes this tension between yearning for freedom 
and duty to community is John M. Cunningham’s widely anthologized “The 
Tin Star” which first appeared in Collier’s Weekly in 1947 and which pays homage 
to its literary ancestors.This tale of an aging sheriff, who dies in a showdown with 
a recently pardoned criminal and his gang of outlaws, was reincarnated in the 
film High Noon (1952) which won four Academy Awards. “The Tin Star” opens 
in medias res: “Sheriff Doane looked at his deputy and then down at the daisies 
he had picked for his weekly visit, lying wrapped in newspaper on his desk. ‘I’m 
sorry to hear you say that, Toby. I was kind of counting on you to take over after 
me.’” As the story unfolds, the reader learns that Jordan, an outlaw that SheriffDoane had sent to jail, has been freed early and is on his way to town where he is 
likely to provoke a duel with the sheriff. Doane intends to lay the daisies on his 
wife’s grave. Flowers symbolize life’s beauty and evanescence (Ferber 74-76). The 
daisies, which “were drooping markedly” as the sheriff leaves his office and heads 
for the cemetery, anticipate his death (“Tin Star” 214). 


The sheriff is handicapped because he suffers from gout, making it difficult to 
handle his gun, and because the residents of the town are too afraid to assist him.
The mayor comes to the office to persuade the sheriff to leave town rather than 
face death. Shortly afterwards, a second deputy named Staley stops by to tender 
his resignation. Doane is resolved to stay but laments his thankless job: “They 
don’t even hang the right ones. You risk your life catching somebody, and the 
damned juries let them go so they can come back and shoot at you. You’re poor all 
your life, you got to do everything twice, and in the end they pay you off in lead.
So you can wear a tin star. It’s a job for a dog, son” (“Tin Star” 209). Toby as well 
harbors no illusions about his job, which he describes as “trying to keep the law 
so sharp-nosed money-grabbers can get rich” (“Tin Star” 209), yet the deputy, like 
his boss, refuses to quit in the face of mortal danger. Theirs is the timeless lament 
of the public servant who longs for freedom but is compelled to protect his community, 
a dynamic tension that harkens back to the characters in Gilgamesh and 
the Homeric epics.

During the office scene, the sheriff remarks to his deputy “Maybe the pen 
changes a man” (“Tin Star” 211). The line refers both to the sheriff ’s forlorn hope 
that Jordan might have become reformed during his time in jail, and to the writer’s 
craft that made “The Tin Star” exemplary in its genre. Because he represents 
the law, Sheriff Doane must restrain his anger, in keeping with the lessons imparted 
by The Bible and The Iliad. When Doane reaches his wife’s grave in a cemetery 
at the town’s outskirts, Jordan shows up to goad him into a fight. When asked 
if he had any objections to Jordan being in town, Doane declines the challenge,
saying “You haven’t done anything, Jordan. Except get drunk. Nothing to break 
the law” (“Tin Star” 215). Jordan continues to taunt him, setting the stage for the 
showdown in town during which an already wounded Sheriff Doane will take a 
bullet in the back and give his life to save his deputy. With the threat to the town 
removed, Toby immediately assumes the role of his savior and mentor when he 
becomes the new sheriff. 

Throughout the story, Sheriff Doane is attuned to the presence of larks that 
soar above the squalor of the violent town like ethereal beings.The lark symbolizes 
the inner sense of freedom and integrity that enables Douane to endure his job.
The sheriff tells his deputy, 

It’s all for free. The headaches, the bullets and everything, all for free. I found 
that out long ago… But somebody’s got to be around and take care of things…
I like it free. You know what I mean? You don’t get a thing for it. You’ve got to 
risk everything. And you’re free inside. Like the larks. You know the larks? How 
they get up in the sky and sing when they want to? A pretty bird. A very pretty 
bird. That’s the way I like to feel inside. (“The Tin Star” 210) 


These words convey the sense of a man who is confined by his job but who remains 
spiritually free and who is at peace despite the stress of the upcoming show-
down.The image of his outstretched hands suggests that Doane is a Christ-figure: 

Doane’s eyes came again to the flowers, and some of the strain went out of his 
face.Then suddenly his eyes closed and he gave a long sigh, and then, luxuriously, 
stretched his arms.“Good God!” he said, his voice easy again.“It’s funny how 
it comes over you like that.” He shook his head violently. “I don’t know why it 
should. It’s not the first time. But it always does.” (“The Tin Star” 212) 

The words “It’s not the first time” suggest a recurring pattern of suffering for 
the sheriff who finds solace in the beauty of the natural world.

The lark is associated with yearning and ascension to heaven (Ferber 104-05).
Doane’s ability to rise above bitterness and self-pity into a realm of love recalls the 
words of Shakespeare’s famous sonnet: 

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, 
I all alone beweep my outcast state, 
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, 
And look upon myself, and curse my fate, 
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, 
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d, 
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, 


With what I most enjoy contented least; 
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, 
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, 
Like to the lark at break of day arising 
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate; 
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings 
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. (“When in disgrace”) 


The lark augurs glad tidings, abundance, and the lifting of earthly burdens 
(Palmer 212). The image appealed to the Romantics: Shelley and Wordsworth 
both wrote poems titled “To the Skylark” in which the skylark embodies happiness 
and light. When, at the cemetery, the drunken Jordan takes aim at the lark 
in an effort to show that he is sober enough to fight, he mumbles,“Damn it, I can’t 
see!” when he misses it (“The Tin Star” 215). Jordan’s words recall both his failure 
to kill the lark as well his own wretched spiritual state. At the end of the story,
Douane‘s last words are about a “pretty bird” – the lark – as he sacrifices his life for 
Toby, his deputy, a friend who will carry on his legacy. 


In the film High Noon (1952), the stakes are higher for the sheriff since he is 
newly married and has even more reason to quit his job.The sheriff defers domesticity 
just long enough to fulfill his task. Despite the cowardice of the townspeople 
and his isolation in the face of danger, the sheriff fulfills his destiny and rids the 
town of the criminal gang. At the climax, his wife intervenes with a shotgun to 
save her husband’s life, ferociously shooting a gunman in the back, against her 
own Quaker principles. The sheriff tosses his badge aside in disgust but only after 
he has accomplished his bloody task. Like other Hollywood films produced in the 
midst of the Cold War, High Noon performs an ideological function by turning a 
pacifist into a violent heroine. The film lacks the rich symbolic depth of “The Tin 
Star” in which the sheriff ’s sacrifice lends the story poignancy and meaning. 

Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane (1949) is another trailblazing story about a reluctant 
gunslinger, set in Wyoming in 1889, a time when the end of the open grazing 
range was in sight. The renowned A. B. Guthrie Jr. wrote the screenplay of the 
1953 film by the same name. The novel received critical acclaim while the film 
received an Academy Award for cinematography. The eponymous hero is in every 
sense the very opposite of the braggarts who like to fight. To the rancher’s men,
he initially seems like a peaceful cowhand, but Shane soon proves that he too can 
brawl and handle a gun. Shane refuses to be provoked, containing his anger, but 
he will resort to violence when he must. 

In the novel, we see the mysterious protagonist of Shane through the eyes of 
Bob Starrett who was a boy at the time of the story but a man at the time of its 
telling. Shane appears seemingly from nowhere and strikes up a friendship with 
Bob’s father, Joe Starrett, one of several homesteaders who had come into conflict 
with a powerful rancher named Luke Fletcher. Shane is the kind of archetypal 
cowboy that Philip Ashton Rollins describes as “a man with guts and a horse” and 
who possesses the reserve that, according to Rollins, typifies the cowboy (66-67).
Shane’s monosyllabic, and almost certainly pseudonymous, single name, heightens 
the man’s mystery. As Rollins points out, in the West it was customary “to 
accept at face value whatever name the stranger or acquaintance cared to put forth 
as his own” (68).

Shane is invited to remain with the Starrett family and he soon becomes a 
close family friend. Marian, Joe’s wife, is attracted to Shane and the novel dramatizes 
her inner struggle through dialogue, such as in this exchange between Marian 
and Joe: 

“Do you think I don’t know, Marian?” 

“But you don’t. Not really. You can’t. Because I don’t know myself.” (Shane 203)

The novel also leaves much to the reader’s imagination with regard to the facial 
expressions in the scene in which, after the brawl with Morgan’s men, Bobby hears 
his mother exclaim, “Did ever a woman have two such men?” (Shane 202). The 


narrator, the adult Bobby, then relates how “The two men stared at her and then 
at each other in that adult knowledge beyond my understanding” (Shane 202).
Shane’s ferocious combat with Joe Starrett over who would get to fight Fletcher’s 
men recalls the epic combat between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Shane becomes 
Joe’s true friend and will risk his life to protect his host and the homesteaders.

The novel conveys Shane’s rootedness in the land through his language, such 
as when he tells Bobby, “Fletcher has made this a straight win or lose deal. It’s 
the same as if he’d kicked loose a stone that starts a rockslide and all he can do is 
hope to ride it down and hit bottom safe” (Shane 206). His language has an earthy,
pictorial character that creates a vivid connection to place that is epitomized in 
the reference to the stump that cannot be budged despite Joe’s strenuous efforts.
Shane overcomes the allure of domesticity in order to fulfill his calling. Shane 
safeguards the homesteaders but declines to stay on, in part because he has killed 
several men which would bring down the law on him. Ever a man of mystery,
Shane disappears into the mountains from which he had emerged, ready to resume, 
like Odysseus, his wanderings.

Owing in part to the nature of the medium, the film departs from Jack Schaefer’s 
novel in small ways. In the film, Joe Starrett’s son is named Joey possibly to convey 
the son’s resemblance to a father who is trusting and simple and good. The film’s 
visual power is apparent from the outset when Joey aims his unloaded rifle at a 
deer only to find Shane in the sights. This dramatic moment suggests all at once 
Shane’s hunted aspect, a sense of menace, and the element of surprise. The film 
achieves the same effect in the novel, that of Marian as an unknowable woman,
not so much through dialogue as through what is left unspoken. After the ferocious 
fight in which Shane knocks Joe unconscious, Marian and Shane shake 
hands and exchange looks. Is Marian’s expression that of a wife thankful that a 
stranger has prevented her husband from dying in a shoot out? Or is her look that 
of a complicit lover? 

In the film, unlike in the novel, Joe and Shane manage to budge the stump. Themoment is emblematic of the friendship and power that enables them to overcomeFletcher’s hired men after a series of bloody encounters. Like the novel, the filmbonds the viewer to the land. In a funeral scene, the land is almost sentient as thecamera sweeps across the mourners with a mare that is suckling a foal in the foreground 
and snow-clad Wyoming mountains in the distance. The film preserves asense of mystery as Shane rides off into the twilight, transfigured by the moonlight.
The film masterfully furthers the Shane legend and complements the novel.

The desert is more than just a decorative backdrop in Elmore Leonard’s novel 
Hombre (1961) and in its film version (1967) by the same name. Water is a 
precious resource whose scarcity spurs the dramatic tension. The suffering of 
the thirsty travelers parallels that of the Apaches who have been banished to a 


reservation where a corrupt government agent, the aptly named Dr. Favor, has 
stolen the funds that might have provided for their bare subsistence. The film’s 
opening scene, absent in the novel, prefigures both the role and fate of the central 
character, John Russell, a white man who had been raised among the Apaches. As 
Russell and a fellow Apache look on, a black stallion leads a herd of horses towards 
a water hole. When the horses begin to drink at the water hole, Russell bars 
a gate to trap the horses inside the corral. Russell will be trapped by circumstances 
when he leads a group of travelers to safety in the desert at the cost of his own life.

In the novel, the MacLaren girl, who had spent several months as a captive 
of the Apaches, provides insights into the motivation and character of Russell.
She also serves as a bridge between the world of white Americans and that of the 
Apaches. She refuses to side with Dr. Favor against Russell when Favor tries to 
hold on to the saddlebag under the pretense that “It’s my money.” Upon hearing 
this, the MacLaren girl bursts out: “Your money. After you stole it! We’re supposed 
to side with you to protect money you stole” (Hombre 95). Her absence 
from the film detracts from our understanding of Russell, for in the novel, it is the 
MacLaren girl who gives Russell hope for a future of moral renewal.

The film preserves some of the novel’s best dialogue, such as when Favor utters 
a richly evocative line just before he takes Mendez’s shotgun: “Where money is 
concerned you don’t know anybody” (Hombre 122). His words reveal more than 
just his own greed. They also anticipate our discovery of the hidden motive that 
compels Russell to risk his life, namely, the starving Apaches on the reservation.
Another instance of engaging dialogue is when Russell tells his companions to 
watch out for Dr. Favor: “If he tries to leave with nothing, shoot him once,” If he 
takes the saddlebag, shoot him twice. If he picks up the water, empty your gun”
(Hombre 100). In the film, Russell delivers the line deadpan. However, the film 
necessarily omits the subsequent reflections of the first person narrator, Carl Allen,
a former employee of a nearby stagecoach company: “(I have thought about those 
words since then and I am sure Russell was having a little fun with us when he 
said that. Part serious, part in fun. But can you imagine joking at a time like that? 
That of course was the reason no one even smiled. He must have thought we were 
dumb.)” (Hombre 100-101). This last sentence recalls a key narrative technique of 
many American Western writers, namely the use of a first person narrator whose 
limited understanding of the events at hand compels the reader to engage more 
deeply with the story to help create its meaning.Though somewhat myopic, Allen 
comes to sense the measure of Russell’s sacrifice for his people.

The film expertly uses dialogue and the starkly barren landscape to characterize 
the mysterious John Russell. In a desert scene, Jessie, the former caretaker of the 
boardinghouse that Russell had promptly sold upon assuming ownership, tells 
Russell: “You haven’t moved a muscle in the last hour. Don’t you ever get tired? 


Don’t you ever get hungry? Don’t you ever get thirsty? Are you for real?” (Ritt).
Her words allude to the man’s strange persistence which, we will learn, arises from 
a quest for justice. The travelers misjudge Russell when he declines to surrender 
the money in exchange for the life of Mrs. Favor. To the MacLaren girl in the 
novel and Jessie in the film, Russell appears callous, even inhuman, towards the 
woman tied up by the bandits and baking in the hot sun when he says “Go ask 
that woman what she thinks of human life. Ask her what a human life is worth at 
San Carlos when they run out of meat” (Hombre 161).

Russell had maintained his cool in the waiting room as he awaited the stage 
coach. He had refused to intervene when a gunslinger intimidated a passenger to 
give up his ticket. This is because acting in anger would have interfered with his 
larger purpose and much greater justice. In the end, Russell saves the life of Mrs.
Favor but loses his own. Both the film and novel heighten Russell’s mystery by 
sparing us the formulaic last words of a dying hero. The fatally wounded Mexican 
asks to be told the name of the man that he just killed, affirming Russell’s grandeur.
The survivors will safeguard the money and bring Dr. Favor to justice, having 
learned that Russell had never intended to steal it. In Hombre, violence ultimately 
proves restorative, tracing the outline of a man whose courage was forged in the 
raw injustice meted out to indigenous people.

Unforgiven (1992), a commercial success that won four Academy Awards as 
well as critical acclaim, was directed by Clint Eastwood who had been given its 
unproduced film script a decade earlier. This bleak film is an unforgiving portrait 
of Wyoming in 1881. It subverts the devices associated with the Western,
undercutting the notion of the redemptive power of violence. The film strips the 
American West of its Hollywood glamour, revealing that region to be violent and 
unredeemed. 

Unforgiven opens with a harrowing scene in which a cowboy repeatedly slashes 
a prostitute with a knife. In the aftermath of the crime, the sheriff arrives and 
attributes the deed to “hardworking boys that was foolish” and had gotten carried 
away. Impunity, we soon discover, extends to the sheriff himself. Sheriff Daggett 
is a sadistic brute who rules the town of Big Whiskey unchecked. The prostitutes 
cannot expect justice from the authorities.Their haggard faces reveal longstanding 
sadness and despair. The women are trapped in a loveless world. They are slaves 
to the saloon owner and the raunchy cowboys who take their pleasure with them.
The bitter women offer a one thousand dollar reward to whoever kills the two 
men responsible for harming the unfortunate girl. “Just because we let them ride 
us as horses, doesn’t mean we have to let them brand us as horses,” one prostitute 
exclaims (Unforgiven). 

Will Munny, a former hired killer, hears about the reward from a young man 
nicknamed the Schofield Kid. Will ekes out a living as a pig farmer, an occupation 


perhaps best suited to his erstwhile profession. His wife is dead and he has two 
children to support. The Schofield Kid pretends that he has killed five men, believing 
that a history of violence raises his stature. Will does not romanticize 
murder. He recalls that his deceased wife had cured him of wickedness. Will had 
nearly been killed in one encounter. “I thought I was dead,” Will recalls, “but I 
found out I was just in Nebraska” (Unforgiven).

The Schofield Kid, ever eager for a fight, is fascinated by Will’s gun slingingpast, and asks Will if he had been scared during one of his notorious fights. Tellingly, 
Will replies, “I can’t remember. I was drunk at the time” (Unforgiven). In 
this fashion, Unforgiven conveys an anti-heroic vision of the American West. The 
film exposes the falsification of the American West through the mythologizing 
of violence. An awe-struck biographer discovers the complications of truth when 
he hears another version of English Bob’s life story from Sheriff Daggett, who 
had driven the gunslinger out of town. Unlike formulaic westerns in which killing 
appears as a kind of sport, Unforgiven reminds us that killing is unnatural and that 
fear accompanies violence. Will readily confesses, “Everybody can be scared. If he 
wasn’t scared then he just wasn’t no carpenter” (Unforgiven). This allusion to Jesus 
confirms fear as human. 

We soon discover in this film that violence is not a regional pastime, but a national 
pathology. The passengers in the train headed to Big Whiskey discuss the 
assassination of President James Garfield which took place in 1881, the year of the 
events in the film. English Bob uses the occasion to pick a fight. He tells the passengers 
that in England, as opposed to the United States, it would be considered 
uncivilized to shoot persons of substance. Violent death, English Bob declares,
ought to spare the affluent. He proposes that the United States would be better 
governed by a king. His provocative remarks are meant to provide an opportunity 
for Bob to show off his shooting skills.

Together with the Schofield Kid and his former partner Ned Logan, Will 
hunts the two cowboys responsible for slashing the girl. Logan no longer has any 
taste for killing and pulls out of the deal. Nonetheless, Will and the Schofield 
Kid manage to avenge the prostitute and collect the reward money. The financial 
windfall comes at a terrible price. Logan is caught and tortured to death by SheriffDaggett. Will risks all to avenge his friend in a shoot out that, out of sheer luck,
culminates in the death of the sheriff and several of his cronies. In a memorable 
scene, Will responds to Sheriff Daggett plea, “I don’t deserve to die this way,” saying 
“deserving has got nothing to do with it” just before he kills him. The violence 
in the film is as nightmarish as that in The Iliad. 

There is a wistful sense of possibility when the slashed girl meets Will. But 
the two are not destined to love. There is no place for love in their world. After 
the murder of the two cowboys that had slashed the prostitutes, angry townsmen 


hurl a brick through the window of the saloon, shouting “murdering whores.”The 
girl will live out her life trapped and unloved. Will, it is said, made his way to San 
Francisco, escaping the unrelieved grimness of the American West. The meaning 
of the title of Unforgiven extends beyond lives of its unredeemed characters to 
indict a corrupt society that deserves to remain unforgiven. The film memorably 
strips violence and the American West of glamour, revealing deep underlying 
human sorrow. 

The archetypal patterns that give the American Western transhistorical significance 
continue to remerge in other guises as we explore new frontiers such as in 
space travel or in virtual worlds. The themes of friendship, courage, self-mastery,
violence, redemption, community, and wanderlust that are the enduring legacy of 
the American Western are also integral to ancient literary traditions. In reaffirming 
our bond to the earth and to others, the American Western deserves to remain 
etched in our collective cultural memory. 

WORKS CITED 

Cunningham, John M. “The Tin Star.” In The Western Story: Fact, Fiction and 

Myth. Ed. Philip 
Durham and Everett Jones. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975: 209-22.
Ferber, Michael. A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge 

University Press, 1999.
Gilgamesh. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York, Atria, 2004.
High Noon (film). Dir. Fred Zinneman. Stanley Kramer Productions, 1952. 
Hombre (film). Dir. Martin Ritt. Twentieth Century Fox, 1967. 
Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Free Press, 2011. 
Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Albert Cook. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. 
Leonard, Elmore. Hombre. New York: William Morrow, 2012 (1961). 
Palmer, Jessica David. Animal Wisdom. London: HarperCollins, 2001. 
Peoples, David Webb. Unforgiven (film script), 1984. Eastwood The World Wide 

Web Page. http://www.clinteastwood.net/filmography/unforgiven/script/unforgivenscript.
txt (Accessed 20 Sept. 2016).
Rollins, Philip Ashton. The Cowboy. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 
1997 (1936).
Schaefer, Jack. Shane. Ed. James C. Work. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 
1984. 

Shakespeare, William. “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes.” In Literature: 
Craft & Voice. Ed. Nicolas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse. New York: 
McGraw-Hill, 2012: 843. 


Shane (film). Dir. George Stevens. Paramount Pictures, 1953.

The Old Testament: An American Translation. Ed. J. M. Powis Smith. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1927.

Unforgiven (film). Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 1992. 

Ali Shehzad Zaidi 

State University of New York at Canton 
zaidia@canton.edu 


Ikonicni ameriški western v filmu in književnosti 

Prispevek raziskuje žanr ameriškega westerna skozi reprezentativne zgodbe v filmu 
in v književnosti.Te zgodbe prikazujejo dinamicno notranjo napetost junakov,
ki jih po eni strani vlece domov in ki po drugi strani vseeno hrepenijo po odhodu 
v širni svet. 

Kljucne besede: Ep o Gilgamešu, Iliada, Hombre, Tocno opoldne, Shane 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: [821.111.09:821.111(71).09]:2-185.2-053.2 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.95-135 

Children Without Childhood: The Emotionality 
of Orphaned Children and Images of 
Their Rescuers in Selected Works of English 
and Canadian Literature 

Irena Avsenik Nabergoj 

Abstract 

This article deals with literary depictions of social, political, cultural and religious circumstances 
in which children who have lost one or both parents at birth or at a later age 
have found themselves. The weakest members of society, the children looked at here are 
exposed to dangers, exploitation and violence, but are fortunate enough to be rescued by 
a relative or other sympathetic person acting out of benevolence. Recognizing that the 
relationship between the orphaned child, who is in mortal danger, and a rescuer, who 
most frequently appears unexpectedly in a relationship, has been portrayed in narratives 
throughout the ages and that we can therefore speak of it as being an archetypal one, the 
article focuses especially on three novels by Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist (1837–1839),
David Copperfield (1849–1850) and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – and in Fugitive 
Pieces (1996) by Canadian writer Anne Michaels. Charles Dickens earned the reputation 
of a classic writer through his original literary figures of orphaned children in the context 
of the rough capitalism of the Victorian era of the 19th century. Such originality also 
distinguishes Anne Michaels, whose novel Fugitive Pieces portrays the utterly traumatic 
circumstances that a Jewish boy is exposed to after the Germans kill his parents during 
the Holocaust. All the central children’s lives in these extreme situations are saved by generous 
people, thus highlighting the central idea of both selected authors: that evil cannot 
overcome good. Rescuers experience their selfless resolve to save extremely powerless and 
unprotected child victims of violence from life-threatening situations as a self-evident 


moral imperative. Through their profound and deeply experienced descriptions of memories 
of traumas successfully overcome by central literary figures in a spirit of compassion 
and solidarity, Charles Dickens and Anne Michaels have left testaments of hope against 
hope for future generations. 

Keywords: Charles Dickens, emotions, memories, Anne Michaels, holocaust, orphaned 
children, rescuers, trauma, adoption, the victory of good. 

INTRODUCTION 

In recent decades, the number of academic studies on the nature, role, education,
and social position of children throughout history has increased, and there has 
been a parallel increase in fiction about children and about childhood.The history 
of children and childhood has birthed a new research area that offers critical insights 
into the human past by aligning itself with the global emphasis on interdisciplinary 
aspects as well as on contemporary social experiences. Thus, historians,
beginning in the early 1960s, began to be interested in life experiences of the past,
as revealed by family relations, religious experiences, various forms of education,
along with experiences from working life, sports and leisure, and other areas. Adding 
their voices to historians’ have been scholars from especially anthropology 
and sociology. Children and adolescents who, with rare exceptions, were excluded 
from active politics have become visible in studies focusing on family, school, as 
well as children working in factories and fields.

Investigating the presence of children in history became an exciting area for 
new social research in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the fruits of which studies 
were first extensively unveiled in the three books of the Encyclopedia of Children 
and Childhood: In History and Society (2004). Edited by Paula S. Fass, this monumental 
work includes no less than 445 expert articles dealing with childhood under 
various aspects in both historical and social terms; it has significantly changed 
the vision of history, while providing insights into how our ancestors thought 
about children in the past. Some other recent studies are relevant.1 

Such research has turned to extremely diverse material that had previously 
been overlooked, including registers and wills, in poetry, novels and other works 
of literary fiction, in the thoughts of various philosophers and psychologists (from 
Plato and Aristotle through Erasmus, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 

Cf. Coveney 1967; Pollock 1983; Cunningham 1995; Banerjee 1996; van der Geest 2004; Immel 
2006; Stearns 2006; Georgieva 2011. A particularly crucial aspect of childhood is gender, and many 
new insights into childhood were made in terms of gender in the 1970s and 1980s. Cf. Prim. Fass 
2004, Volume 1, xi–xv (Preface). 


Sigmund Freud, John Dewey and Jean Piaget); in diaries, pictures and photographs; 
in games and in many other material and immaterial forms from the 
past. Researchers are striving to understand children around the world, and their 
research thus extends to various parts of the world, all the way to Africa, Latin 
America, China, India and Australia; they also take into account great religious 
traditions, such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also the early church fathers 
and the innovations of Protestantism, even as they pay attention to intercultural 
perspectives when it comes to names, sexuality, adolescence, and so forth.

In the West, childhood is presented in an in-depth manner that dates from ancient 
Greece and Rome, through the Middle Ages, through early modern Europe 
and European colonialism, right up to the modern world. Also considered are 
historical circumstances that are strongly reflected in fiction about children and 
childhood, including revolution, oppression and war.2 

In this article, we proceed from the image of the child and childhood as an 
important literary theme, albeit while limiting ourselves to the image of the orphaned 
child in modern English and Canadian literature. Two authors who depicted 
orphans in particularly trying socio-political circumstances are the focus of 
this article – namely, Charles Dickens, who depicts children given over to criminals 
in poor parts of London, and Anne Michaels, who depicts the trials and tribulations 
of a young Jewish boy who experienced the violent death of his parents 
during the Holocaust. 

THE CHILD AND CHILDHOOD AS A LITERARY THEME 

In the last decades of the 19th century, researchers increasingly discovered the crucial 
role childhood plays in defining and shaping culture. In 1960, the French historian 
Philippe Ariès, in his work L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime,
published in English in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood, encouraged historians to 
think about childhood (“as an invention, a historically driven phenomenon, not 
a transcendent category”). He argued that before the 17th century childhood was 
invisible and that European society gave shape to childhood as part of a wider 
process of social differentiation.3 This raises the fundamental question of what the 
concept of childhood actually means. In dealing with different aspects of childhood, 
researchers usually define this word in relation to its opposite, adulthood. 

2 
The main research direction of looking various aspects of childhood is determined by attempts 
to answer the question of what childhood means. Researchers have most often defined this word 
in relation to its opposite, adulthood. Some have tackled the question of the essence or nature of 
childhood. 

3 
See Fass 2004, Volume 1, xi–xii; Georgieva 2011, 10. 


By “childhood” they denote an earlier period of human life in which we acquire 
experiences and adopt behaviours that prepare us for the adult period of “active”
life. Though the duration of childhood is not fully defined, it is also known that 
the concept of childhood has changed over the centuries – a change that also literary 
fiction has documented. From the treasure trove of world literature this article 
looks more closely at works of English and Canadian literature.

Childhood has long been one of the central themes in English literature. We seeits presence in lyric poetry of the Elizabethan period, in such Shakespeare plays asRichard III, King John, Macbeth, The Winter’s Tale,4 and in John Dryden and Alexander 
Pope.The importance of the subject of childhood greatly increased with the riseand development of the novel, gaining prominence through the 18th century; in the 
19th and 20th centuries it has stimulated seminal works that have proven crucial fora critical understanding of the literary production of individual periods. In the 19th 
and 20th centuries, also literature aimed at children was produced.

From the 18th century forth, the child was either a subject or an object of 
popular writing. This writing mirrored the dichotomy of childhood, which was a 
symbol of growth and development on the one hand, and of the regression and 
ignorance of the world on the other. Authors such as James Janeway (A Token for 
Children, 1671–72), disseminated the doctrine of original sin through the 17th 
century. They created a moralistic, religiously-oriented vision of childhood that 
was based on the theory of man’s “Fall” and original sin, and looked on children 
with pessimism. At the same time, childhood was seen as the most decisive period 
in shaping the foundations of spirituality and constructing true faith.

In contrast to this type of thinking, 18th-century thinkers promulgated intellect 
and ratio as the highest of virtues. This century became a period of transition in 
which childhood became the highest symbol of the purity of nature, reason and 
the soul, as well as of the triumph of human congenital delicacy. Contrary to the 
thinking of previous centuries, childhood was perceived more positively and soon 
became a popular subject of the sentimental novel. The poverty and misfortune 
of innocent, virtuous children who possess a clear inner insight was the subject of 
many literary works of writers such as Elizabeth Bonhôte (in her 1769 Hortensia, 
or, The Distressed Wife). During this period, the idea emerged that in childhood 
the concepts of imagination, sensibility and nature were combined into one. In 
the literary representations of childhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his novel 
Emile (1762)5 proved strongly influential. Sentimentalism appeared not only in 
literature of the 18th century but also in literature of the 19th century, for example, 
in works by the writer George Eliot (1819–1880). 

4 Cf. Partee 2006. 
5 Cf. Georgieva 2011, 11. 


The theme of childhood in the 19th and 20th centuries was a prominent one 
in many authors. To mention just a few of them: William Blake (1757–1827),
Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794); William Wordsworth (1770–
1850), “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”
(1807) and “We Are Seven” (1789); George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), Don 
Juan (1817–1824); Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Oliver Twist (1837–1839),
David Copperfield (1849–1850), Great Expectations (1860–1861); Thomas Hardy 
(1840–1928), Jude the Obscure (1895), Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855), Jane Eyre 
(1847); Henry James (1843–1916), What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Turn of the 
Screw (1898); Lewis Carroll (1832–1898), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865),
Through the Looking-Glass (1871), and Sylvie and Bruno (1889–93).

Important literary works about children and childhood also emerged in the 
United States and Canada, for example, in the works of Mark Twain (1835–1910) 
and William Faulkner (1897–1962). Twain’s novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 
(1876) and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) deal with stories of childbirth, 
the isolation of children in society and the pursuit of freedom in the face of 
social conformism. In Light in August (1932), meanwhile, Faulkner describes the 
poverty-stricken life of the orphan Joe Christmas.

In the 20th century, the subject of childhood became popular in a number of 
very different genres, from C.S. Lewis’s (1898–1963) descriptions of childhood – 
however indirect – during wartime, to works composed by children themselves,
even Anne Frank’s (1929–1945) Diary of a Young Girl (1947).

Among more recent North American authors, we pay special attention here to 
Anne Michaels (1958), who in the novel Fugitive Pieces (1996) addresses the issue 
of saving a Jewish child named Jakob during the Holocaust, after the Nazis killed 
his father, his mother and his sister Bella. Michaels crafts the novel by focusing on 
the emotionally harrowing experience of the murder of the Jewish family and the 
story of the child, whose life was saved by Athos, a Greek archaeologist.

In the (necessarily limited) space of this article, we limit ourselves to assessing 
the literary renderings of child orphans in Victorian England in the threeafore-mentioned Dickens novels, while also considering the emotional motivation 
for rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust as well as Jakob’s emotionally-
coloured memories, as depicted by Anne Michaels in Fugitive Pieces. Thus,
we concentrate on the literary representations of child orphans who are savedby a benevolent adult. In the relationship between a helpless child and a rescuer,
we see profound emotional bonds that go beyond the meaning of a single lifestory and that are, rather, a universal symbol of “hope against hope” in the mostfragile of life’s situations. Memories of traumatic childhood events engenderdeep feelings towards acts of sacrifice, which entails genuine human inclinationstowards compassion and love. 


ARCHETYPAL IMAGES OF THE CHILD-ORPHAN AND 
THEIR RESCUERS 

Louie W. Attebery, basing his insights on the similarities of structure and content 
he discerned in life stories of orphaned children and their rescuers, makes use of 
Jungian archetypes, among them, also that of the orphan: 

Let me posit the notion that the orphan is one of these archetypes without now 
examining the rich psychological or emotional ontogeny of it. The orphan may 
be described as having lost physically or emotionally one or both biological 
parents and being endangered as a consequence; moreover, he usually seeks and 
finds companionship of some kind. He is frequently isolated from his place.
Then depending upon how deeply he partakes of the heroic archetype – we 
are reminded by Jung that “clear-cut distinctions and strict formulations are 
quite impossible in this field” – the orphan may set himself to doing heroic 
deeds. Typically, as the orphan matures he experiences either an apotheosis or 
an atonement, in the sense of being re-united or re-identified as belonging and 
no longer alienated. In the beginning the orphan is likely to be innocent, i.e., 
nocence has not yet replaced ignorance; he does not willfully and knowingly sin.
(Attebery 1970, 206–207) 

Among ancient examples, Attebery cites the Bible stories of the “orphan” Adamafter his expulsion from paradise, of Joseph of Egypt, whose brothers sold him intoslavery, and of Moses, who was saved from certain death by the Pharaoh’s daughter.

Such rescuer figures appear throughout all periods of human history and culture. 
We even talk about the archetypes of the child–rescuer relationship. Among 
the most famous examples of such an archetype is the biblical example of Moses,
who, like all Hebrew boys, was sentenced to death by the Pharaoh. He was, however, 
saved by the Pharaoh’s compassionate daughter, who violated her murderous 
father’s command and thus exhibited a vanquishing nobility that transcended all 
racial, social and cultural limitations (Exodus 2:5–10).

The example of Moses, who was condemned to death by a nationalistically-
minded ruler but who was saved through an act of natural kindness that has 
universal value, ideally fits the common ancient tradition of the ancient Middle 
East. According to this tradition, widows and foreigners received special protection 
from the supreme deity and great kings, meaning that providing such 
protection was considered a general injunction for all people. In Mesopotamia the 
protector of the weak was the god Shamash, in ancient Egypt it was the sun god 
Re or Amon-Re, in ancient Israel it was the Yahweh. As Charles Fensham argues, 

Yahweh is described in Old Testament literature as the protector of the weak 
par excellence.With direct apodictic style of command and prohibition Yahweh 


takes the weak under his protection. This is one of the important ethical doctrines 
of the Old Testament, but definitely not unique in comparison with conceptions 
in neighboring cultures. The only basic difference is that Yahweh is 
regarded as the only protector. He is even placed in opposition to the gods of 
foreign nations and hailed as the only true Supreme Judge of the world (Ps. 82).
(Fensham 1962, 137–138) 

Kings in all the civilizations of the ancient Middle East were considered direct 
representatives of God on earth. Because kings and lesser nobility often failed to 
observe the commandment to protect the weak, prophets arose to explicitly remind 
them of their task.The prophetic voice in Deuteronomy 10:17–18 says,“The 
Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, 
who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan 
and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.”6 

The prophet Isaiah, meanwhile, beseeches the following: “Learn to do good;
seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (Isaiah 
1:17). The prophets’ words apply not only to rules but to all people. A profound 
awareness of the need to protect the weakest members of society is also prevalent 
in the Wisdom tradition. In Proverbs 23, 10, the anonymous author says, “Do 
not remove an ancient landmark or encroach on the fields of orphans, for their 
redeemer is strong; he will plead their cause against you.”

Collective societies did not foreground protection of the weak, such as widows 
and orphans – hence the importance of morally-aware prophets and other humane 
individuals. Charles Fensham emphasizes that displaying such humanity 
towards the weak was “a common policy” in the ancient Middle East and notes 
that it reached its peak in the prophetic message of the Hebrew Bible: 

In the Israelite community this policy was extended through the encouragement 
of the high ethical religion of Yahweh to become a definite part of their 
religion, later to be inherited by Christians and Muslims. (Fensham 1962, 139) 

THE ORPHANED CHILD IN SELECTED WORKS OF 

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE 

The generous and noble rescuers of orphaned children in literature, which are 
often a reflection of real life in a depersonalized and often criminal society, are 

The Bible quoted in this article is The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments 
with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: New Revised Standard Version. Nashville: 
Nelson, 1989. 


the foremost examples of this ancient moral tradition.7 Among modern American 
instances, Attebery lists Huck from Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn. William 
Blake (1757–1827) is the first major English literary creator to address the theme 
of the orphaned child. Blake’s strongly symbolic poems show the contradictions 
between the time when the child experiences the immediacy of life from a state 
of innocence and when the child grows up to encounter the trials, suffering and 
brutality of society, and asks rhetorical questions. Particularly interesting is his 
depiction of a critical judgement of the role of patriarchal protectors, where, rather 
than natural intimacy, social and religious conventionality are at play, including 
in connection with various types of abusive behaviour towards children. Mariam 
Radhwi summarizes Blake’s basic views on the role of human nature and the natural 
environment as follows: 

Besides the natural world, nature in Blake’s Songs includes human nature. Innocence 
focuses on innocent human nature and promotes a positive outlook of 
life, to the extent of accepting injustice and misery and emphasizing human 
love. Experience stresses humans’ darker side, such as jealousy, hatred, and their 
potential for destruction. (Radhwi 2011, 217) 

The poet George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) most concretely manifested his 
views on childhood in his great epic Don Juan (1817–1824). The poem’s hero is 
an idealised individual of great talent, albeit one who despises society and social 
institutions. Don Juan is depicted as a wealthy orphan who suffers under a protective 
mother striving to keep him pure and to shelter him from maleficent influences. 
The character of Don Juan points to Byron’s pessimistic character: 

The hero here, Don Juan, is a precursor to modern existentialists, who argue 
that the feelings, thoughts, and emotions of the individual are where meaning 
is to be found. An existentialist worldview can lead to a nihilistic one – in other 
words, a world-view in which nothing has meaning. In Don Juan, for instance,
Byron seems to believe that humans constantly live under the burdens of despair, 
emptiness, and futility. (DeRouen 2011, 245) 

The English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) wrote very critically 
about Victorian society. Most of his characters are tragic individuals who 
struggle in the clash between their passions and their social circumstances. In the 
novel Jude the Obscure (1895), Hardy focuses his social criticism on the matter of 
sexuality and marital life.The main character of this novel is the orphan Jude from 

The relation between helpless, unprotected children and a benevolent rescuer strongly evokes theNew Testament allegory of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10,30-35). Cf. Welch 1999; Gribble 2004;
Roukema 2004; James 2007. Cf. also the excellent article on the nature of empathy: Cavanagh 1995. 


the English countryside who dreams of an academic career. He travels to the city,
which is most alluring to him, but soon has a love affair with Arabella, who is in 
search of a husband. When Arabella finds out that Jude will not be able to satisfy 
her material expectations, she leaves him. Jude then enters into a love affair with 
his cousin Sue, with whom he lives in an extra-marital relationship and has children. 
Not least on account of his conflicted nature, a series of critical situations 
occurs that precludes him from entering university.

Through Jude’s story Hardy aims to show how social circumstances lead to 
homelessness,a nomadic existence,unemployment,poverty and ruin.The circumstances 
of the novel show “that class structure and moral code are not solely affecting 
the protagonists from without, but they are rather a part of the collective 
subconscious within the individual” (Schares 2011, 512). The course of the story 
demonstrates that 

[a]though there seems to be nothing more desirable to both of them than being 
together, there are always events preventing this – up to the tragic ending.
Why this has to be, the novel refuses a definite answer, but there is far more to 
it than foreshadowings of dark hereditary family pathology. The novel reaches 
deeply into the psychology of its protagonists and offers various explanations 
and hints. (Schares 2001, 512) 

The question is whether social circumstances are truly the main reason why thedream of a young person cannot be realized. In this case, does the main reason notlie in the contradictory character of the protagonist himself, in the rash decisionsand in the lack of purity such as that one sees in the character of Oliver Twist? IfJude did not have the fortune that Oliver Twist did, namely, of finding a rescuer whoacts out of pure love, and a reliable advisor, it cannot be merely the result of socialcircumstances, but also of his inner strength in terms of achieving a stable life.

The American writer Mark Twain (1835–1910), in his novel The Adventures of 
Huckleberry Finn (1884, 1885), describes the adventures of the boy Huckleberry 
Finn, who became an orphan when his mother died and his father left him. He 
was adopted by the Widow Douglas. Throughout the work, the motif of the intense 
loneliness of an abandoned boy is repeated. Twain’s next novel, The Adventures 
of Tom Sawyer (1876), has Tom as the main character: 

The major character is Tom, who stands for the resourceful, clever, and courageous 
American adolescent who loves to break rules, face the unknown, and 
give full play to his impulses. Accompanied by Huck Finn, Joe Harper, and 
Becky Thatcher, he has to confront Injun Joe, who, in the end, is trapped in 
a cave and dies. Tom is supported by his generous aunt Polly and the towns 
people. (Sorop 2011, 1085) 


In both works the author describes the adventures of an abandoned child by 
highlighting the child’s innocence. The child acquires life experience through situations 
that he does not choose himself, though each child also encounters people 
who show compassion and mercy.

William Faulkner’s (1897–1962) novel Light in August (1932) is the story of 
Joe Christmas and his life path, on which he encounters both cruelty and understanding. 
His mother dies during childbirth, and with her death the child is struck 
by the cruel path of homelessness. When his grandfather Eupheus found out 
years before that his daughter had run away with a man and become pregnant, he 
did not want her to keep the baby. Thus, after the daughter’s death in childbirth,
he took the boy to the door of an orphanage, leaving him there on Christmas day 
(hence the name Christmas). Joe Christmas experiences a difficult life path of 
social isolation, which is made all the more so difficult because he is of mixed race.
How cruel racial discrimination in the American society of his time was is shown 
when the white woman Joanna Burden was allegedly murdered because she did 
not cohort with white people but with black people. According to the judgement 
of the people, only a black man could have committed this murder. Parallel to Joe 
Christmas’s story is that of the poor girl Lena Grove, whose parents died when 
she was twelve years old. She was rejected by her acquaintances after she became 
pregnant, though unmarried, and when the father, Lucas Burch, left her; however,
others are merciful towards her in her time of distress: 

Society, as this novel shows, can be cruel and heartless, particularly toward individuals 
who do not conform. But, as seen with Lena, that is not entirely true.
Ultimately, the human heart has enough compassion so that society will not 
destroy itself. (Cornell 2011, 427) 

THE ORPHANED CHILD AND HIS RESCUERS IN THREE 
DICKENS NOVELS 

In three of his novels – Oliver Twist (1837–1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850)
and Great Expectations (1860–1861) – Charles Dickens depicts in a similar way 
the figure of an orphaned child who is saved by good people from his brutal environment 
of heartless oppressors. In all three novels, Dickens reveals the obvious 
contradictions brought about by rough capitalism: on the one hand are ruthless 
owners of factories and estates, on the other, impoverished workers.The mass poverty 
of the majority of the population had serious consequences for many families,
but the most affected were children who had prematurely lost their parents. In 
an atmosphere of unscrupulous capitalism, they experienced especially harrowing 


destinies. In the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens writes in the shadow of the publication 
of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, joining his voice to those of those 
who protested on behalf of the poor and to their defenders.

The story of the novel Oliver Twist depicts the harrowing life story of the eponymous 
boy of unknown birth whose identity is not revealed until near the end ofthe narrative. After the boy’s mother dies in childbirth, Oliver is sent to a miserableorphanage, where he is often beaten. From there he is moved to an adult home, andafter a while, Mr. Sowerberry, an undertaker, takes him on as an apprentice. AfterOliver suffers an unbearable situation also during his apprenticeship, where he isbeaten, he flees from the countryside into the unknown. For a while, he wandersthe poorer quarters of London and survives by begging, until he is noticed by JackDawkins, nicknamed “the Artful Dodger,” and introduced to his “benefactor,” theJewish exploiter Fagin. Fagin, in whose company are also the Artful Dodger, BillSikes and Sikes’s loved one Nancy, earned his living through money brought tohim by orphans whom he had steal and prostitute for him. Fagin and the membersof his gang also attempt to turn Oliver into a thief, but Oliver is resolute and firmin his sense of what is honest, so they are unsuccessful in this.

When one day the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates rob old Mr. Brownlow 
of his handkerchief in front of a book stall, the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates 
manage to escape, while Oliver, who only happened to be with the young thieves,
is captured and brought before the magistrate. Mr. Brownlow senses the boy’s 
honesty and protects him, taking him into his care. But Fagin’s gang tracks Oliver 
down and abducts him. They constantly endeavour to corrupt him, but the boy 
remains equally good in spite of all these experiences.

When Bill Sikes needs an agile assistant because he wants to break into a 
house, Fagin assigns this role to Oliver. On the night of the burglary, when Oliver 
has to climb into the house through a tiny window and open the house for the 
others, the butler Giles shoots him. The burglars Sikes and Toby Crackit flee in 
panic, leaving Oliver alone on the doorstep. But the owners of the Maylie household 
see innocence in the gentle child, protect him again and take him into their 
care; Oliver becomes very emotionally tied to his benefactors. However, the leader 
of the gang Fagin and Monks, also a member of the London criminal world, continue 
to pursue Oliver. Monks even attempts to erase all traces of Oliver’s birth,
receiving from the leader of the house in which Oliver lived a gold locket that 
belonged to Oliver’s mother; he throws it into the river. In this way he, as Oliver’s 
half-brother, wants to acquire all of the property that belonged to Oliver’s father. 
When Nancy, who has in the meantime moved to Oliver’s side, reveals Monks’s 
secret to Rose Maylie, Sikes murders her with a knife on discovering her betrayal.

But the prosecution of Fagin’s gang soon follows. Sikes hangs himself, and all 
the other members of the gang of burglars are caught. Of the young thieves, only 


Charley Bates repents. Fagin is sentenced to death by hanging, and the other boys 
are sentenced to forced labour. The novel ends happily. Oliver is adopted by the 
generous Mr. Brownlow, who uncovers the secrets of Oliver’s roots. It turns out 
that Rose is the younger sister of his mother Agnes, meaning that she is Oliver’s 
aunt; Monks disappears from Oliver’s life and succumbs to a live of debauchery 
and crime. Diana Chlebek notes: 

Dickens’s treatment of the themes of childhood, survival, and work are among 
his greatest accomplishments in this work. Oliver Twist was the first British 
novel to focus on the character of a child and to give the English pauper child a 
voice. It thus has a special status in the history of British literature and culture.
(Chlebek 2011, 341) 

One side of reality is the unsustainable situation in a Victorian society that 
exploited poor children to serve the profits of the landowners, while depersonalizing 
them, closing all doors to them that might lead to a normal development and 
future, meaning that many children ended in misery. In extreme cases of being 
unprotected and in danger, the other side of reality is shown: compassion for the 
weakest that awakens in generous people who turn out to be rescuers and saviours.
Oliver, however, is not depicted as just any orphan but as an exceptional example 
of an “angelic” child. That is precisely the decisive factor in why the “saviours”
recognized in him a person worthy of trust and generosity. Generous people enter 
the picture when a child – a pure-hearted orphan – is most in need of compassion 
and a loving companion.That is why,the family hearth of the rescuers,so to speak,
reveals the most profound of humanitarian emotions, which Dickens shows most 
subtly in this literary narrative.

Oliver’s nobility is seen throughout the novel; it is reflected not only in his 
rejection of Fagin’s criminal ways, but also in the boy’s contact with various people 
and in the purity and good-heartedness of his thinking. For example, there is the 
scene in which Oliver, a few days after the failed attempt to break into a house,
lies wounded by the house. The Maylie family takes pity on him, takes him in 
and thereby protects him against the hand of justice. In chapter 29, the author 
presented two ladies from this family: one old, the other young, the 17-year-old 
generous orphan, Miss Rose Maylie. It seems that the girl – an orphan, like Oliver 
– is portrayed with a similar subtlety in terms of her good-hearted, generous 
and gentle character, which may further reveal his strong affection for the poor,
especially to orphans.

In chapter 33 the writer describes the circumstances of a sudden illness that 
befalls the orphan Rose. Oliver is compassionate and stands by her side. It seems 
inconceivable that she might die, and he tells Mrs. Maylie: “I am sure – certain 


– quite certain – that, for your sake, who are so good yourself; and for her own; and 
for the sake of all she makes so happy; she will not die. Heaven will never let her 
die so young” (Dickens 2008, 258). John Gordon reads Oliver’s belief that Rose 
cannot and must not die as an infallible law of kindness: “Oliver’s intuition cannot 
be wrong. His instinctive sense that Rose will live comes from a clairvoyant core.
He knows this, and in knowing he effects it – works, in the physician’s word, ‘a 
miracle’” (Gordon 2011, 22–23).
In the final chapter Dickens describes a few moments from the lives of good 
people, from the lives of those who remain happy through all ordeals: Mr. Brown-
low, who adopted Oliver and truly came to love him, and his late mother Agnes.
Dickens concludes his book with a description of the happy and affectionate love 
which Oliver has received: “I have said that they were truly happy; and without 
strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code 
is Mercy, and whose great attribute is Benevolence to all things that breath true 
happiness can never be attained” (Dickens 2008, 439–440).

The personation of the Good in the character of Oliver Twist evokes the category 
of those exceptional personalities we like to deem charismatic. Dickens 
shows this charisma through aesthetic approaches that provide a sense of the 
functioning of the transcendent and the sublime. The figure of Oliver evokes the 
rich European tradition of art that arrives at the sublime. David Ellison, in his 
book Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature: From the Sublime to 
the Uncanny (2004), addresses the complex relationship of ethics and aesthetics 
in the literature of Romanticism and Modernism. Stephen Jaeger, meanwhile, in 
his book Enchantment: On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West (2012),
masterfully deals with cases that reveal the possibilities of artistic representation 
of the charming, the charismatic and the sublime in texts and images.8 

Dickens’ work David Copperfield is one of the first novels to show with such 
psychological profundity and with such great sympathy the thoughts and feelings 
of the child in his development from early childhood to adulthood. It begins 
with the description of the idyllic childhood of the young boy David who, born 
six months after the death of his father, had a rather sanguine existence with his 
loving mother and the servant Clara Peggotty.

But the happiness of his early childhood is destroyed through his mother’s 
second marriage, to Edward Murstone, who is not inclined to the child. He sends 
David to Peggotty’s relatives in Yarmouth. When he returns, he is subjected to 
the emotional and physical cruelty of his new father, who also tyrannizes David’s 

Roland F. Anderson, in the article “Structure, Myth, and Rite in Oliver Twist” (1986), uncovers in 
the novel Oliver Twist a possible influence on the author of the biblical Eden whereby Christian 
spirituality subtly merges with the world of the fairy tale to lead to a happy end for the main hero. 


poor mother. When David tries to stand up to him, he is sent to the Salem House 
boarding school run by the sadistic teacher Creakle.

When David’s mother also dies, Mr. Murdstone sends him to work at a wine 
merchant in London. But David’s landlord Wilkins Micawber is arrested for debt 
and sent to jail for several months. During this time nobody cares about David, so 
he decides to escape from London. He finds refuge in Dover with his only cousin,
the eccentric, but kindly Aunt Betsey Trotwood. In spite of Murdstone’s attempt 
to regain custody over David, she does give him up but provides a normal life and 
good education for him. He is sent to a better school under the leadership of Dr.
Strong, who is found of instilling honour and self-confidence.

David becomes a successful and respected writer. His first marriage to thelovely but naïve Dora Spenlow is an unfortunate one, as she dies soon afterthe wedding. After his wife’s death David lives for a time in Switzerland, andafter returning to England he meets his second wife, Agnes Wickfield. Thelove is mutual. In his marriage with the benevolent and wise Agnes he findstrue happiness and the two have five children. In the novel David Copperfield(which was his favourite of his novels), Dickens includes so many memories ofhis own unhappy childhood that the story is redolent of autobiography. DianaChlebek notes, 

[t]he book’s opening chapters are remarkable for the way they depict David’s 
child’s-eye view of his immediate environment, especially through the eccentricities 
of a toddler’s thought processes. The adult narrator also vividly recalls 
the emotional abandon that his childself shares with his young mother, who 
assumes the role of a delightful playmate rather than that of a dependable parent. 
Although David’s early years appear idyllic, the narrator emphasizes the 
insecure foundation of his childhood by describing his anxieties about his dead 
father and his uncanny child’s observations about his mother’s frail and unstable 
nature. (Chlebek 2011, 334–335) 

In the novel, Dickens paints a subtle picture of the natural need of a child for 
emotional benevolence in his darkest moments of childhood, at a time when he 
lost the replacement family of the Micawbers who gave him a room, care, but 
above all emotional support.

David shows a sign of adulthood when he is able to decide to travel, on foot 
from London, to his aunt in Dover. His aunt Betsey becomes his true rescuer, for 
she adopts him and provides him with a stable life with the possibility of unhindered 
education. David’s fortunate salvation with his benevolent aunt is all the 
more emphasized because many of the other children David knew were broken 
by life because they did not find a rescuer in childhood who might provide them 
with moral and material support.The consequences in their later life are shown as 


emotional anxiety and incapacity for harmonious marriage and for the stabilization 
of their careers. 

In the novel Great Expectations, the story of which takes place in Kent andLondon from the beginning to the mid-19th century, Dickens penetrates deepestinto the psychology of the orphaned child in his personal growth and developmentfrom earliest childhood on. The main character of the novel, a seven-year-old orphan 
named Pip, lives with his older sister and her friendly husband, Joe Gargery,
a blacksmith by profession, after the death of their parents. When one eveningbefore Christmas at the cemetery he cries for his parents, whom he never knew, hemeets the convict Magwitch. At Magwitch’s request, Pip brings him food, but theprisoner is soon caught. Magwitch has to go into exile in Australia, but at all timeshe maintains a very deep and emotional attitude towards the orphan Pip.

When he visits the wealthy Miss. Havisham, Pip falls in love with her adopted 
daughter, Estella, who is cold and spiteful. Nevertheless, he falls in love with 
her and dreams that he will become a wealthy gentleman who will be worthy of 
her. At first, he feels that Miss. Havisham is very much inclined to him, though 
at some point Pip must recognize that she aims for him to be a lowly worker in 
the family business. However, in the forge, Pip is unhappy and strives to improve 
his lot. One day the rich lawyer Jaggers appears with the unusual news that a 
secret benefactors has left Pip a great fortune. Pip has to depart immediately for 
London and begin his education there. He himself assumes that his secret hopes 
have come true and that his secret benefactor is old Miss. Havisham, and that she 
wants him to marry Estella.

In London, Pip meets the young Herbert Pocket and Jaggers’s clerk Wemmick.
The education continues under the mentorship of Matthew Pocket, Herbert’s father. 
A few years later, Pip finds out that his benefactor was not Miss. Havisham 
but Magwitch, who was once guilty of a crime and sentenced to deportation to 
Australia. Pip’s friendliness, when he was still a child, prompted the convicted 
person to dedicate his life to making a gentleman of Pip with the help of the 
wealth he earned in Australia. 

The story of Pip’s childhood shows no sign of hope at the start. In contrast,
Magwitch in exile maintains a very strong hope, reinforced by his emotional relationship 
with Pip. At some point he breaks the law and returns to England.
Estella disappoints Pip’s hopes of getting married, and marries Bentley Drummle.

Pip realizes that he has set his hopes on people who could not fulfil them, and 
that he has rejected his true benefactor Magwitch, whose sadness Pip mitigated 
after the convict was rejected by his homeland. In this emotional state, he makes 
a plan to help Magwitch escape, though Magwitch loses his life in the attempt.
Dickens’s descriptions of the contrast between Pip’s expectations of Miss. Havisham 
and Estella on the one hand and the resistance to the convict Magwitch 


on the other lead Pip to the recognition that happiness is not guaranteed by those 
who live in prosperity but by those who themselves have been deprived in one way 
or another. 

EMOTIONALITY OF CHILDREN DURING WAR AND 
MEMORIES OF POST-WAR TRAUMA 

The emotionality of children during a period of war is as complex a phenomenon 
as that of human nature at all times from birth to death. Anthropologists, psychologists 
and researchers, as well as artistic performers, creators of human life,
culture and religion and people from many other professional and scientific fields 
provide many general insights into the matter. The world of the emotions, which 
in various shades and contrasts are reflected in the war situation in interpersonal 
relations, are perhaps most suggestively revealed in a number of autobiographies,
diaries, memories and fictional literary works. A general study of the theory of 
children’s emotionality in war situations is discussed in Children and War: A Historical 
Anthology (2002). This book offers a historical context for periods when 
children were caught up in war. It shows them at home, during their active participation 
on the front and in other circumstances.

Affiliation with a race, nation, culture and religion significantly increases the 
complexity of children’s emotionality during the trials and tribulations of war on 
account of cultural, religious, educational and other surroundings. The emotionality 
of children is also strengthened by the appearance of rescuers who, in attempting 
to rescue children, also themselves enter into conflict situations. To better 
understand the literary approach of the Canadian author of Jewish heritage Anne 
Michaels in the next section of this paper, here we devote particular attention to 
the aspect of the emotionality of Jewish children in the period of the war as well 
as to their memories of trauma after the war. 

Jeffrey T. Zalar, in his article “Holocaust” (2004), cites the various emotional and 
spiritual shocks suffered by Jewish children during the period of the Holocaust:
hunger, sickness, forced labour, murder and the loss of parents. Older children 
took care of younger children. Parents attempted to hide their children from the 
Nazis in barns, pantries, basements, coal containers, cupboards, in walls, chimneys,
forests, caves and elsewhere. Forced labourers attempted to hide their children in 
factories. Some children were hidden, under the threat of death, by non-Jews who 
claimed them as their own, and hundreds were hidden in Christian schools and 
monasteries. In each case the children experienced fear and loneliness.

The most radical Nazi killing campaign was during the occupation of Russia 
in 1941. For this destruction the Nazis organized a reserve army and police and 


paramilitary groups of non-Jewish residents. In the initial phase of the Second 
World War, the Nazis left the children alive after killing their parents, placing 
the children in local buildings. Because this led to an unbearable and uncontrollable 
situation with orphans, they started to massacre them. Elsewhere during 
the occupation of Russia they recruited the healthy ones for forced labour, but 
immediately killed the sickly, and later they also killed their parents. After 1942,
the Nazis deported also Jews from Western European to the East. Most of the 
children were killed or murdered in gas chambers upon their arrival in the camps.
Healthy and slightly older children were sent to concentration camps for forced 
labour. At the concentration camp in Auschwitz, about 3000 twins were abused 
for horrific medical experiments under the guidance of SS doctor Josef Mengele.

The complexity of emotionality felt by Jewish children is shown in the collection 
Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in Postmodern World,
which was edited by Alan L. Berger and Gloria L. Cronin (2004) – especially 
in Berger’s chapter “Hidden Children: The Literature of Hiding” (pp. 13–53).
Three years later Diana L. Wolf published her important study about: Beyond 
Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar Families in Holland (2007). In the same 
year Mark M. Anderson’s article “The Child Victim as Witness to the Holocaust: 
An American Story?” (2007) appeared.

Berger, in his contribution “Hidden Children: The Literature of Hiding,” explores 
the various aspects of searching for identity experienced by children who 
lost their parents in the Holocaust and who had to go into hiding at rescuers’because of the great danger of being discovered by the Nazis.These children experienced 
great trauma, since they became orphans. They lived in constant fear and 
only a small percentage of the children was fortunate enough to survive: 

Approximately 1.5 million of the 1.6 million prewar Jewish child population 
in Nazi-occupied Europe were murdered. This means that only 6 to 7 percent 
of Jewish children lived through the Shoah. Hidden in a variety of places including 
farms, barns, cellars, pigsties, convents, and monasteries, their hiding 
experience invariably robbed them of their childhood. (Berger 2004, 13) 

From Stacy Cretzmeyer’s Your Name Is Renée (1999) and Elisabeth Gille’s 
Shadows of a Childhood (1998), Berger asserts: 

Four themes emerge from these written works: fear of abandonment by parents 
and by God; the psychic disorientation imposed by a new identity necessitated 
by the invention of a life history in order to survive; silence and a lack of understanding 
of why this happened to them; and a search for justice. While these 
themes do not receive equal weight in the works under discussion, each form a 
part of the mosaic of the legacy of hiding. (Berger 2004, 13–14) 


Among children who saved themselves by hiding in their rescuers’ hiding places, 
the question of identity proves particularly complex. The saved Jewish children 
found themselves in paradoxical circumstances, since they were torn from their 
original family circle and moved into an environment that was mostly not Jewish, 
but Christian. In the case of Christian rescuers, there was often an internal 
struggle between feelings of pure altruism and inherited anti-Jewish prejudices.
Somewhat older children still recalled Jewish rituals from within family circles 
and from the broader environs of the Jewish community. In the Christian environment 
of their new parents they were now witnessing Christian rituals, a Christian 
religious view, and an ambivalent attitude towards Jews. The consequence of 
this was that some Jewish children sooner or later reclaimed their Jewish identity,
while other rejected Judaism and accepted Christianity.

Ella Mahler, in “About Jewish Children Who survived WW II on the Aryan 
Side,” (p. 49) cites the example of the nine-year-old Jewish girl who exclaims,
“The Jewish God killed my parents. He burned my home. Jesus Christ saved me.”

The great danger that the Nazis and their collaborators might discover the 
children in their hiding places forced the parents (if they were still alive), the 
rescuers of the children, and the children themselves to consciously and unconsciously 
remain silent about their existence: 

Hidden children had to embrace silence, seek memory, and comprehend their 

identity in a morally distorted and chaotic world bent on their destruction.

Discouraged from speaking about their experiences after the war, the hidden 

children continued their silence. 

Many hidden children have an understandably ambivalent relationship to Jewish

identity. Being Jewish during the Holocaust meant being a target of murderers

and being deprived of elemental happiness. Being driven into hiding because of

their Jewish birth meant concealing their true identity. (Berger 2004, 15) 

The other side of the truth about the subsequent traumas of Jewish children 
who had been in Christian hiding places was the intolerance of the Jewish community 
itself towards children that converted to Christianity. For example, Saul 
Friedländer relates that he was “beaten by Jewish children because they thought I 
was different from them. So I belonged nowhere” (Friedländer 1979, 45).

Just how self-understood it was that those involved in the hiding of Jewish 
children kept silent about their existence is especially dramatically confirmed in 
the number of death sentences of rescuers who were discovered. Elisabeth Gille,
in her novel Shadows of a Childhood (1998), highlights on the example of Léa 
Lévy, a girl with a Jewish name who was hidden by nuns in Bordeaux the dangers 
to which rescuers were exposed. This Jewish girl went to their school soon after 
the Nazis arrested and deported her parents: 


The child’s rescuer, Pierre, is himself the brother of Sister Marthe, one of the 
convent’s nuns. Shortly after Léa’s arrival, Pierre is murdered by Nazis. Additionally, 
the author underscores the hardships faced by all parties in the hiding 
situation. For example, both Léa and the nuns had meager food rations, inadequate 
clothing, and lived under constant stress owing to the omnipresent 
danger of raids and arrest. (Berger 2004, 23) 

It is also understandable that the emotionality of children who were saved 
through hiding bred a galvanized sense of justice which manifested itself in the 
post-war period. Children thus affected very closely followed post-war judgements 
against Holocaust perpetrators and were clearly on the side of justice. It is 
therefore even more obvious that their psychological trauma was never completely 
overcome. 

At the end of his chapter, Berger summarizes some important effects of the 
intense emotionality of children who were saved by going into hiding, and of all 
the others who participated in saving them: 

Memoirs by hidden children attest to their determination to move out of the 
shadows and into the light of shared experience. Furthermore, these memoirs 
are an attempt to retrieve a fragment of their lost childhood in spite of the 
trauma that accompanies memory. (Berger 2004, 27) 

Another important emotional effect is the recognition of the power of kindness 
shown by rescuers: 

Because they were chosen for life and not selected for death, their testimony 
leads us to examine the actions of those whom Lawrence Baron terms “the 
moral minority,” those who engaged in rescue behavior. What prompted those 
who helped? Can their behavior be emulated? Is altruism an innate or a learned 
behavior? What of the religious ambiguity felt by certain of the helpers? 

… Goodness is a greater mystery than evil. Recognizing that one person’s actions 
can literally save a life prompts us to seek alternatives to following genocidal 
orders. Moreover, by recognizing goodness we develop a more genuine 
and far-reaching understanding of the nature of heroism and the heroic. …
(Berger 2004, 27) 

In an emotional aspect, we are most shocked by the opposition between the 
workings of evil and the goodness of the heart. It is shocking to recognize the 
immense extent of abuse of children carried out by individuals or groups: 

What greater abuse can be visited upon a youngster than murdering his or her 
parents and sending the child away from all that is familiar and nurturing? 


Nazism was in fact a deadly assault on the notions of parenting and childhood 
itself. It is important for hidden children to work through their Holocaust 
memories and thus learn how to mourn their losses. Further, it is also vital 
to acknowledge that children who were abused in their hiding homes do not 
necessarily become abuser themselves. Perhaps the most important legacy of 
hidden children will occur when people who hear their testimony seek to build 
a moral society that cherishes, rather than murders, children. (Berger 2004, 28) 

Diane L. Wolf, in the book Beyond Anne Frank: Hidden Children and Postwar 
Families in Holland (2007), describes a few examples of Jewish orphans in the 
periods during and after the war in the Netherlands. A sociologist, the author is 
more interested in the real stories of traumatized children than in the idealized 
diary of Anne Frank. She attempts to make the survivors come alive in the search 
for a new identity during the post-war period. The book is based on the testimonies 
of 70 Jews who survived the Holocaust by hiding out in non-Jewish families 
in the Netherlands. She summarizes the basic content thus: 

Hidden children were given up by their parents, usually as young children some 
as young as a few hours old, often to strangers who delivered them to non-Jewish 
Dutch families. They were openly or clandestinely hidden anywhere from 
one night to several years. Most children hid in more than one place, yet quite a 
few experienced the stability of being in one family for a long period.Their time 
in hiding was a period of danger when they were forced to adopt new identities 
that did not reflect their Jewish past and to adapt to the ways of a new family.
In some cases, these children formed strong emotional attachments to their 
hiding families and felt it was the best period in their childhood; in most cases,
however, close attachments did not develop. (Wolf 2007, 329–330) 

Because these children were taken in and hidden during the war, these children 
experienced more severe trauma after the war than during it. At that time,
the real trauma began for them, as children experienced a double identity in their 
conflicted interests, and they were also affected by post-war anti-Semitism, which 
also in the Netherlands showed a different face than that which can be read from 
Anne Frank’s diary. 

THE EMOTIONALITY OF AN ORPHANED JEWISH CHILD IN 

ANNE MICHAELS’S NOVEL FUGITIVE PIECES 

The contemporary Canadian poet and writer Anne Michaels was born in 1958in Toronto, Canada, the daughter of a Polish Jewish father. She gained the attention 
of the international public through her poetic style which maintains a balance 


between technical precision in presenting stories and profound meditation markedby a strong sense for humanity. Her works have been translated into more than forty-
five languages and she has received a number of international awards, includingthe Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Lannan Award for Fiction andthe Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She became most famous with her novel Fugitive 
Pieces (1996), which was well received by critics and literary historians. 

In Fugitive Pieces, her first novel, Anne Michaels engaged with a complicated 
range of interrelated questions. These questions relate to history, the role of the 
environment in which one lives, identity, pain and grief: “All of the pieces are in 
some way related to the tension between ambition and survival, in all senses of 
the two concepts – artistic, psychological, spiritual, and literal” (Wiman 2001, 90).
She lay the foundations for her future works in her first prose effort, in which 
she examines the relationship between history, memory and questions about how 
people remember past events and how they can, through love, overcome traumatic 
mental and spiritual conditions. Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith, in their 
article “Holocaust Literature and Historiography and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive 
Pieces” (2013), argue that 

Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces is a work of historical fiction in the genre of 
Holocaust literature. This genre is problematic in that writers (either “survivors” 
or those who were not there) are compelled to engage with the events of 
the Holocaust whilst lacking the authority to do so. Michaels uses fiction as a 
means to examine the multitude of ways in which events can be communicated 
and given meaning. She does not present history in binary terms of “truth” and 
“untruth” but as a battleground over the meanings with which recorded events 
are imbued. The preservation of meaning in events requires not only alternative 
historiographical works, but alternatives to hegemonic historiography such as 
music and geography. (Nesfield and Smith 2013, 24–25) 

At the heart of this poetic novel in two parts are two heroes, both Jewish and 
of Polish heritage: Jakob Beer and Ben. The point of departure in terms of memory 
in the first part is an event that took place in Poland in 1941, when the Nazis 
killed the parents of seven-year-old Jakob Beer and took away his sister Bella;
Jakob hid himself before running into the woods near the archeologic site of 
Biskupin. There he was found by the Greek geologist Athos Rousoss and smuggled 
away to the rescuer’s home in Greece, on the island of Zakynthos, where the 
two somehow survived until the end of the war, when he and Jakob Beer moved 
to Toronto, Canada.There, Athos received a post as a lecturer, while Jakob devoted 
himself to studying. After Athos’s death Jakob moved into Athos’s parents’ home 
on the island of Idhra and wrote down the memories that had prevented him 
from sleeping. Jakob dies in 1993 in a car accident in Athens. 


The hero of the second part of the novel is the Jewish Canadian professor Ben,
who is an admirer of Jakob’s poetry. Ben gets to know Jakob Beer through his 
professor Maurice, with whom he is friendly. He makes such a strong impression 
on Ben that he begins to become interested in his work. That helps him uncover 
suffering such as that with which Jakob had to deal in the past. Ben is also marked 
by the weight of the Holocaust, though he has his wife Naomi standing by his 
side. After Jakob’s death Ben travels to the island of Idhra and searches there for 
Jakob’s diaries, which serves as a basis for Fugitive Pieces. 

With her novel, Anne Michaels recalled the memory of the precious lives and 
the suffering of many Jews, such as Jakob Beer, his sister Bella, and his mother 
and father, Ben and some others. Many lost their lives in the Holocaust, and only 
a few, through the help of exceptional persons the likes of the Greek geologist 
Athos from Anne Michaels’s novel, managed to escape certain death. These generous 
people, through their love as well as material and spiritual help, sought to 
provide the survivors with security and help them overcome overwhelming memories, 
maltreatment, and thus to start a new life.

Alongside these preserved memories there are many diaries, manuscripts,
testimonies and memoirs that were lost or destroyed during the Second World 
War; “Some of these narratives were deliberately hidden – buried in back gardens,
tucked into walls and under floors – by those who did not live to retrieve them”
(Michaels 1996, 9). Some stories are retained only by memory, never having been 
written down or spoken, while other memories, such as Jakob’s in Anne Michaels’s 
novel, were discovered by chance.

The novel refers to the childhood memories of Jakob Beer when he, a seven-
year-old child, was saved by the geologist Athos Roussos near the archaeological 
remains at Biskupin while he was fleeing the German soldiers who hadjust killed his parents and taken away his fifteen-year-old sister. Jakob made itthrough a German patrol in a car driven by Athos and hidden under a blanket.
Athos, meanwhile, tricked the Germans by feigning illness. The horrific experience 
of Jakob’s family tragedy is always with him. The first-person narratorrecalls the events this way: 

My sister had long outgrown the hiding place. Bella was fifteen and even I 
admitted she was beautiful, with heavy brows and magnificent hair like black 
syrup, thick and luxurious, a muscle down her back. “A work of art,” our mother 
said, brushing it for her while Bella sat in a chair. I was still small enough to 
vanish behind the wallpaper in the cupboard, cramming my head sideways between 
choking plaster and beams, eyelashes scraping. 

Since those minutes inside the wall, I’ve imagined that the dead lose every sense 
except hearing. 


The burst door. Wood ripped from hinges, cracking like ice under the shouts.
Noises never heard before, torn from my father’s mouth.Then silence. My mother 
had been sewing a button on my shirt. She kept her buttons in a chipped 
saucer. I heard the rim of the saucer in circles on the floor. I heard the spray of 
buttons, little white teeth. 

Blackness filled me, spread from the back of my head into my eyes as if my 
brain had been punctured. Spread from stomach to legs. I gulped and gulped,
swallowing it whole. The wall filled with smoke. I struggled out and stared 
while the air caught fire. 

I wanted to go to my parents, to touch them. But I couldn’t, unless I stepped 

on their blood. 
The soul leaves the body instantly, as if it can hardly wait to be free: my mother’s 
face was not her own. My father was twisted with falling. Two shapes in the 
flesh-heap, his hands. 


I ran and fell, ran and fell. Then the river: so cold it felt sharp. 
The river was the same blackness that was inside me; only the thin membrane 
of my skin kept me floating. (Michaels 1996, 9–10) 


From this terrible experience forth, Jakob’s memories are indelibly overwhelmed 
by thoughts of the dead: 

The dead passed above me, weird haloes and arcs smothering the stars.The trees 
bent under their weight. I’d never been alone in the night forest, the wild bare 
branches were frozen snakes. The ground tilted and I didn’t hold on. I strained 
to join them, to rise with them, to peel from the ground like paper ungluing at 
its edges. I know why we bury our dead and mark the place with stone, with the 
heaviest, most permanent thing we can think of: because the dead are everywhere 
but the ground. I stayed where I was. Clammy with cold, stuck to the 
ground. I begged: If I can’t rise, then let me sink, sink into the forest floor like 
a seal into wax. (Michaels 1996, 10) 

Jakob is most struck by the disappearance of his beloved sister Bella, and he 
dreamed about her during the day when he slept buried in earth, and at night, as 
he walked on through the woods. He remembers her reading her favourite novels 
by Romain Rolland and Jack London, and it was unbearable for him that he could 
no longer hear her: “Filled with her silence, I had no choice but to imagine her 
face” (Michaels 1996, 11).

One grey autumn day Jakob, at “the end of his strength” and hungry, stopped 
just a few metres away from where Athos had picked up the weeping boy and 
carried him under his heavy coat and driven away with him. Jakob recalls: 


For miles through darkness in the back seat of the car, I had no idea where we 
were or where we were going. Another man drove and when we were signalled 
to stop, Athos pulled a blanket over us. In Greek-stained but competent German, 
Athos complained that he was ill. He didn’t just complain. He whimpered,
he moaned. He insisted on describing his symptoms and treatments in detail.
Until, disgusted and annoyed, they waved us on. (Michaels 1996, 13) 

During the drive the feverish Jakob thinks about his sister Bella and about 
his best friend Mones, though his thoughts are also ineludibly tied to Athos:
“But Bella clung. We were Russian dolls. I inside Athos, Bella inside me” (Michaels 
1996, 13).

Athos promises shelter to the young boy Jakob, who lies hungry and worn out 
in his car: 

Athos said: “I will be your koumbaros,9 your godfather, the marriage sponsor 

for you and your sons.…” 
Athos said: “We must carry each other. If we don’t have this, what are we.…” 
(Michaels 1996, 13) 


As Jakob approaches the home of his rescuer Athos and the faraway island of 
Zakynthos, his memories conjure up again and again images of his mother, father 
and sister Bella. Jakob says: 

I watched Athos reading at his desk in the evenings, and saw my mother sewing 
at the table, my father looking through the daily papers, Bella studying her 
music. Any given moment – no matter how casual, how ordinary – is poised,
full of gaping life. I can no longer remember their faces, but I imagine expressions 
trying to use up a lifetime of love in the last second. No matter the age of 
the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of emotion still unused turns a face 
young again. (Michaels 1996, 14) 

Eventually Jakob adapts to the new surroundings, but the whole time he recalls 
the traumatic event of the murder of his mother and father as well as the 
disappearance of his sister Bella; he does not know where she is, where and how 
or even if they murdered her or even whether she is still alive. Also on Zakynthos 
he lives in fear: 

On Zakynthos we lived on solid rock, in a high and windy place full of light.
I learned to tolerate images rising in me like bruises. But in my continuous 
expectation of the burst door, the taste of blood that filled my mouth suddenly, 

This Greek word refers to an individual who exchanges crowns over the betrothed in the Greek 
Orthodox wedding ceremony (along with other roles). 


many times a day, I couldn’t conceive of any feeling stronger than fear. What is 

stronger than fear; Athos, who is stronger than fear? 
On Zakynthos I tended a garden of lemon balm and basil in a square of light on 
the floor. I imagined the thoughts of the sea. I spent the day writing my letter to 
the dead and was answered at night in my sleep. (Michaels 1996, 15) 


The rescuer of the orphan Jakob – named Athos or Athanasios Roussos – is an 
extremely warm man who cares for Jacob as if he were his own son and reveals to 
him, through his immense knowledge, wisdom and spiritual depth, new life horizons, 
new intellectual directions in reflecting on the relationship between life and 
death, to living and dead nature, to time and history, to the past and the future.
Athos offers him the beginning of a new life: “Even as a child, even as my blood-
past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it,
I was being offered a second history” (Michaels 1996, 20).

Jakob has the child’s devotion to his caregiver: 

To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love. I followedAthos from one room to the other. I was afraid, as one who has only one personto trust must be afraid, an anxiety I could only solve by devotion. I sat near himwhile he wrote at his desk, contemplating forces that turn seas to stone, stoneto liquid. He gave up trying to send me to bed. Often I lay at his feet like a cat,
surrounded by books piled ever higher on the floor beside his chair. Late at night,
while he worked – a solid concentration that put me to sleep – his arm dangledlike a plumb line. I was soothed by the smells of bindings and pipe tobacco andthe weight of his safe, heavy hand on my head. His left arm reaching down toearth, his right arm reaching up, palm to heaven. (Michaels 1996, 15) 

This admiration gives rise to the utmost respect that Athos feels for the young 
boy Jakob. Athos did not want Jakob to forget his own language, so he had to 
repeat the Hebrew alphabet, but at the same time Athos also taught him Greek 
and English: 

Athos didn’t want me to forget. He made me review my Hebrew alphabet.
He said the same thing every day: “It is your future you are remembering.” He 
taught me the ornate Greek script, like a twisting twin of Hebrew. Both Hebrew 
and Greek, Athos liked to say, contain the ancient loneliness of ruins,“like 
a lute heard distantly down a hillside of olives, or a voice calling to a boat from 
a shore.” (Michaels 1996, 17) 

Jakob longed, “to cleanse [his] mouth of memory” (Michaels 1996, 17) and 
feel the new memories as truly his own even when speaking in what was for him 
a foreign language. Recalling Athos, Jakob says, 


By early morning Athos was often close to tears of admiration for his brave lineage, 
or for the future: “I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage 
sponsor for you and your sons…. We must carry each other. If we don’t have 
this, what are we? The 

spirit in the body is like wine in a glass; when it spills, it seeps into air and earth 
and light ... It’s a mistake to think it’s the small things we control and not the 
large, it’s the 

other way around! We can’t stop the small accident, the tiny detail that conspires 
into fate: the extra moment you run back for something forgotten, a 
moment that saves you from an accident – or causes one. But we can assert the 
largest order, the large human values daily, the only order large enough to see.
(Michaels 1996, 17) 

Jakob felt that Athos, in the four years of living in his room, “gave me another 
realm to inhabit, big as the globe and expansive as time” (Michaels 1996, 30). But 
he still felt Bella by his side: 

Athos didn’t understand, as I hesitated in the doorway, that I was letting Bella 
enter ahead of me, making sure she was not left behind. I paused when I ate,
singing a silent incantation: A bite for me, a bite for you, an extra bite for Bella.
“Jakob, you’re such a slow eater; you have the manners of an aristocrat.” Awake 
at night, I’d hear her breathing or singing next to me in the dark, half comforted, 
half terrified that my ear was pressed against the thin wall between the 
living and the dead, that the vibrating membrane between them was so fragile.
I felt her presence everywhere, in daylight, in rooms I knew weren’t empty. I 
felt her touch on my back, my shoulders, my hair. I turned around to see if she 
was there, to see if she was looking, to see if she was standing guard, though if 
anything were to happen to me, she wouldn’t be able to prevent it. Watching 
with curiosity and sympathy from her side of the gossamer wall. (Michaels 
1996, 23–24) 

At the same time, Athos believed that Jakob and he had saved each other.
In 1937 Athos had joined a group of archaeologists with the task of preservingwaterlogged structures in Biskupin. But soon after deciding to take Jakob homewith him, soldiers in Biskupin devastated the former fortifications and houses,
also killing five of Athos’s colleagues in the nearby forest, and sending the restto Dachau. 

Athos allows for an orphaned Jewish boy to find a substitute home, first in 
Greece, then in Canada, in the large city of Toronto. The compensation for the 
loss of his home in Poland in the essential circumstance that allows the orphan 
to hope for a new beginning. Dalia Kandiyoti, in Contemporary Literature (2004),
reads the novel Fugitive Pieces in this light and concludes: 


In Fugitive Pieces, the production of place has everything to do with the destruction 
of place: through consciousness of the destroyed, whose traces are in 
invisible corners, cracks, and depths, the displaced many produce a new sense of 
place for themselves. Invisible places are not only vertical metaphors or devices 
in the novel to signal deeper truths and meanings than what exist at the surface:
digging into place by valorizing its invisible traces reaffirms both the varied 
lives that were once on the surface and the profundity of the devastation. In this 
way, Fugitive Pieces can wrest place-based narratives from those who liquidated 
places and people and attempted to leave no traces. (Kandiyoti 2004, 327) 

Also in Toronto Jakob suffers from nightmares. One night, Athos hugs him 

and says, “Jakob, I long to steal your memories from you while you’re sleeping, to 

syphon off your dreams” (Michaels 1996, 54).
Jakob asks himself whether it is possible to read from someone’s face whether 

they are good or bad, or whether the truth lies on the face: 

A child doesn’t know much about a man’s face but feels what most of us believe 
all our lives, that he can tell a good face from a bad.The soldiers who performed 
their duty, handing back to mothers the severed heads of daughters – with 
braids and hairclips still in place – did not have evil in their faces. There was no 
perversion of features while they did their deeds. Where was their hatred, their 
disgust, if not even in their eyes, rolling invisibly back in their sockets, focused 
on the unanswerable fact of having gone too far? There’s the possibility that if 
one can’t see it in the face, then there’s no conscience left to arouse. But that 
explanation is obviously false, for some laughed as they poked out eyes with 
sticks, as they smashed infants’ skulls against the good brick of good houses.
For a long time I believed one learns nothing from a man’s face. When Athos 
held me by the shoulders, when he said, “Look at me, look at me” to convince 
me of his goodness, he couldn’t know how he terrified me, how meaningless the 
words. If truth is not in the face, then where is it? In the hands. In the hands. 

I tried to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words, with 
Athos’s stories, with all the geologic eras. With the walks Athos and I took 
every Sunday into the ravines. Years later I would try a different avalanche 
of facts: train schedules, camp records, statistics, methods of execution. But at 
night, my mother, my father, Bella, Mones, simply rose, shook the earth from 
their clothes, and waited. (Michaels 1996, 55) 

Jakob is still haunted by memories of the past, and he dreams of Bella’s hair, 
about the day the Nazis stormed into his parents’ house: 

Sitting at the table, my parents and Bella pretended calm, they who claimed so 
often to have no courage at all. They remained in their seats as they’d plannedthey would, if it came to that. The soldiers pushed my father over in his chair. 


And when they saw Bella’s beauty, her terrified stillness – what did they make 
of her hair, did they lift its mass from her shoulders, assess its value; did they 
touch her perfect eyebrows and skin? What did they make of Bella’s hair as they 
cut it – did they feel humiliated as they fingered its magnificence, as they hung 
it on the line to dry? (Michaels 1996, 62) 

Jakob eventually studied at the University of Toronto, busying himself with 
literature, history and geography. Later he earned money by translating. He was 
greatly affected by Athos’s death, recalling the following: 

On his last night, Athos had come home from giving a lecture on the conservation 
of Egyptian wood. It was about half past ten. He usually reported some 
observation of the evening, or even recounted the main details of his talk, but 
since I’d typed it for him earlier that day the latter was unnecessary, and he was 
tired. I heated some wine for him then went to bed. 

In the morning I found him at his desk. He looked as he often did, asleep in the 
middle of work. I embraced him with all my strength, again and again, but he 
would not come back. It is impossible to reach the emptiness in each cell. His 
death was quiet; rain on the sea. (Michaels 1996, 67) 

For many nights after Athos’ death, Jakob slept on the floor of his study. He 
felt that Athos’s work on Nazi archaeology was so disturbing that it sucked the 
life force out of him. Immediately after the war, when they began to get information, 
he, heavily affected, began collecting documents and asking himself endless 
questions which he hoped he would be able to answer with the help of everyone 
else. Jakob felt it was his duty to compile and edit Athos’s records of the 
SS-Ahnenerbe. 

In chapter VII, the final chapter of part one, which is titled “The Gradual 
Instant,” we learn that many years after Athos’s death and after his divorce from 
his first wife Alex, Jakob is torn between Canada and Greece. He researches,
writes, and publishes works from Athos’s legacy. When he meets his second wife 
Michaela he moves to the Greek island of Idhra, to the home of Athos’s parents,
and writes down his memories there. 

Also with Michaela he still feels the presence of Bella: 

Listening to Michaela read, I remember how Bella read poetry; how the yearning 
in her voice reached me as a child, though I didn’t understand the feeling.
I realize, half a century after her death, that though my sister never felt herself 
moving in a man’s hands, she must have already loved so deeply, so secretly, that 
she knew something about the other half of her soul. (Michaels 1996, 171) 

However, memories also of another loved one return: 


Each morning I write these words for you all. For Bella and Athos, for Alex,
for Maurice and Irena, for Michaela. Here on Idhra, in this summer of 1992, I 
try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer. (Michaels 1996, 113) 

To gaze into the future, trust, empathy and love are needed. In the novel Fugitive 
Pieces, Anne Michaels investigates the possibilities of love and faith after the 
Holocaust. Jakob Beer, who, as a seven-year-old child, was saved from the Nazi 
slaughter by becoming a fugitive in the Polish forests, where he was saved by the 
Greek geologist Athos, feels it is his life task to compose a memory of the past 
and of those he loved. 

He understands the power of love precisely because he lost it and then found 
it again. In the power of love, he wants to live a normal life, like everyone else,
after the trauma of the Holocaust. The greatness of the novel lies in its message 
that we do not need constant evidence of the reality of violence and horror, that 
a single example suffices. However, we need evidence of the truth of love and its 
fruit again and again. Contrary to Holocaust literature that focuses on the irreparable 
breakdown of the psyche, Fugitive Pieces sets as its main motivational aim 
the contemplating of complete and dubious experiences of healing.

For the writer Anne Michaels it was clearly empathy towards the victims of 
the Holocaust that dictated the decision to opt for such an extreme traumatic subject. 
Empathy helps her to discover the possibility of surpassing the usual scheme 
of irreversible mental breakdown. 

Mei-Yu Tsai’s “A Poetics of Testimony and Trauma Healing in Anne Michaels’s 
Fugitive Pieces” uses the correct approach – “This essay draws on critical theories 
of post-Holocaust testimony and postmemory in conjunction with the emerging 
sociological concept of ‘empathetic identification’ to investigate the implications 
of trauma healing in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces” (Tsai 2014, 50).

In her essay the author therefore wishes to investigate how empathetic testimony 
can help sustain life after a trauma: 

As a theoretical starting point in my reading of Fugitive Pieces, I turn to the 
psychoanalytical theory of testimony and postmemory – especially the works 
of Dori Laub and Marianne Hirsch – to examine how testimony in association 
with empathetic identification can help sustain life after massive trauma. (Tsai 
2014, 50) 

The truth about the reality of atrocity thus opens up the paradoxical possibility 
of the opposite pole of truth, which empathy and love make possible: the transformational 
possibility of a Holocaust memorial that will serve future generations.

Only the discovery of the truth about the incompatibility of the evil of the 
Holocaust can help in the search to heal a sick society. Here we must never ignore 


the other side of the truth, one which Anne Frank so explicitly points out in her 
diary entry of January 28, 1944: 

Going underground or into hiding has become as routine as the proverbialpipe and slippers that used to await the man of the house after a long day atwork. There are many resistance groups, such as Free Netherlands, that forgeidentity cards, provide financial support to those in hiding, organize hidingplaces and find work for young Christians who go underground. It’s amazinghow much these generous and unselfish people do, risking their own lives tohelp and save others. 

The best example of this is our own helpers, who have managed to pull usthrough so far and will hopefully bring us safely to shore, because otherwisethey’ll find themselves sharing the fate of those they’re trying to protect. Never 
have they uttered a single word about the burden we must be, never havethey complained that we’re too much trouble. They come upstairs every dayand talk to the men about business and politics, to the women about food andwartime difficulties and to the children about books and newspapers. Theyput on their most cheerful expressions, bring flowers and gifts for birthdaysand holidays and are always ready to do what they can. That’s something weshould never forget; while others display their heroism in battle or against theGermans, our helpers prove theirs every day by their good spirits and affection. 
(Frank 1995, 132–133) 

REAL-LIFE RESCUERS OF JEWS DURING THE 

HOLOCAUST, AND THEIR MORAL IDENTITY 

Mordecai Paldiel dedicates a paper to the non-Jewish and Jewish “righteous” ones 
who risked their lives to save endangered Jews. People who decided to save Jews 
in occupied countries were threatened not only by Germans but also by collaborators 
in those occupied countries. That is why Paldiel, at the outset of his article,
highlights the surprise that any of these Jews and rescuers managed to survive: 

Upon reflecting on the immensity of the Holocaust, one sometimes wonders 
how anyone managed to survive. There are, of course, those who made it by 
sheer luck; they somehow withstood the terrible inhumanities inflicted on 
them in the ghettos and concentration camps and miraculously came out alive.
At the same time, there is at least an equal number, if not more, of survivors 
who owe their survival to the good fate of having been extended a helping 
hand. Some were aided by Jewish networks and individual Jewish rescuers. But 
in the final account, for the undertaking to have been successful, one also needed 
the help of non-Jewish rescuers, for they enjoyed more flexibility. Unlike 


Jews, they had not been condemned to death at the outset simply for having 
been born. (Paldiel 2012, 134) 

The collective violence carried out by the Nazi authorities with the cooperation 
of collaborators of other nationalities also awakened a sense of justice and solidarity 
in some non-Jewish circles. The unexpected situation of distress awakened 
strong feelings of compassion and solidarity in good people, especially when this 
situation demanded immediate action. Among those who helped Jews in need, we 
find men and women, workers, simple farmers, intellectuals, diplomats, members 
of left-wing parties from the period before the war, active members of national 
organizations and some mindful members of Christian churches.

The more painful the testimonies of Jewish survivors of ghettos and concentration 
camps, the more gratifying the fact that in all countries there were others who 
strove, to the best of their abilities, and altruistically, to aid Jews. It is significant 
that there are many more anonymous ones who lost their lives in their attempts to 
save Jews than there are individuals who, in spite of the great risk, succeeded and 
survived.10 The rescuers aided threatened Jews because they felt an inner need to 
do so; they helped out of a basic sense of humanity: 

Rescuers apparently made little or no conscious decision when they rescuedJews. Conscious decision making entered only at a strategic level, focusingon how best to go about effecting the rescue, rather than on whether to attempt 
the rescue itself. The conscious element of rescue behavior thus appearsto be limited to arranging the specific daily logistics of rescue activity. Theinitial actions in sheltering Jews were usually described as spontaneous. Allour rescuers insisted that they simply saw no other option available to them.
Their awareness of life around them made it abundantly clear that there was 
the option of turning away Jews or of simply doing nothing. They knew thatmost people did exactly that. But they also knew they could not accept suchan option for themselves. The rescuers thus suggest that certain behaviorsarise spontaneously, resulting from deep-seated dispositions which form one’s 
central identity. This conclusion, if accurate, suggests that certain behaviors –
and these may well entail the most significant personal and political choiceswe make – are not the result of conscious choice at all. (Monroe / Barton /
Klingemann 1990, 113–114) 

10 
Since the 1980s, four seminal books about rescuers of Jews have appeared: Samuel P. Oliner in 
Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (1988); Pearl M. 
Oliner, Samuel P. Oliner, Lawrence Baron, Lawrence Blum (eds.), Embracing the Other: Philosophical, 
Psychological, and Historical Perspectives of Altruism (1992); Eva Fogelman, Conscience 
and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (1994); Kirsten Renwick Monroe, 
The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (1998). 


Also Eva Fogelman, in Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the 
Holocaust (1994), seeks an explanation for the question of motivation for thealtruistic behaviour of those who rescued Jews. She had discussions with more 
than three hundred rescuers, including such well-known figures as Miep Gies(known from the diary of Anne Frank), Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg,
as well as lesser-known individuals, such as the Polish minor Stefania Podgorska 
Burzminska, who hid and saved thirteen Jews in her home when she wasnot yet eighteen. A valuable general conclusion is that rescuers of Jews did notview their actions as exceptional and heroic but as something self-understood,
as something that one must do out of a sense of conscience (Fogelman 1994,60). When experiencing the extreme circumstances of suffering people, thereawoke such a strong empathy in them that they could not remain indifferent.
They worked spontaneously, out of compassion, that is, out of an inner sense ofmoral commitment. 

Recently, there has been an increasing number of studies highlighting the role 
of women as rescuers of their families. In his book Empathy in the Context of 
Philosophy (2010), Lou Agosta highlights the ethical extent of empathy. In connection 
with empathy in the circumstances of the Holocaust, meanwhile, Marion 

A. Kaplan, in her book Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany(1998), speaks of the reaction of Jews who lives in the extraordinary conditions 
of Nazi Germany. The author devotes much attention to the extremely important 
role of Jewish women who, with compassion, dedication and great effort,
saved members of their family. Much valuable information about these matters 
are provided by memoirs, interviews, and letters and diaries of Jewish women 
who experienced the anxieties of this time. In them, Jewish women highlight the 
difficulties of helping the family survive, of great emotional engagement, and of 
resourcefulness in seeking solutions in hopeless situations.11 
During the period of the rise and consolidation of Hitler’s power (1933–
1938), Jewish woman often played a more significant role in saving their families 
than men did. Women took care of their homes in both a physical and anemotional sense; they calmed terrified children and supported their husbands,
who more frequently than they succumbed to frustration and despair. Their encouragement 
of others was usually linked to the denial of their own worries.
There are many known examples of women proving to be rescuers of the family,
of having saved their family members from the brutality of authorities, working 

11 
In her study “Empathic Identification in Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces: Masculinity and Poetry 
after Auschwitz” (2002) Susan Gubar sums up the role of men and women survivors in Anne Michael’s 
novel thus: “Fugitive Pieces can be said to sustain a conventional approach to the catastrophe: 
Jewish survivors are presented as male protagonists, while female characters play supporting 

roles as sacrificial muses or nurturing helpmates” (Gubar 2002, 250). 


on the conviction that the authorities would be less harsh on them, since they 
were women.12 

CONCLUSION 

Although not all historians have agreed with Philippe Ariès that childhood, as we 
understand it today, did not exist at all until the Middle Ages, his research remains 
very important. It opened the possibility of exploring childhood, including the 
modern romantic idea of childhood innocence, as a social construct that changes 
over the course of history.

Images of childhood in literature, as well as in the fine arts, arise in particular 
cultural contexts and in response to specific historical moments. In the history of 
art, especially visual images of children were often marginalized, since they were 
rejected as being too sentimental and simple. However, in modern times, the image 
of the child has become one of the most emotionally powerful and contradictory 
images in Western consumer culture. Despite changing political, sexual and 
commercial forms, the image of the child and childhood has retained the message 
of innocence. 

In the figure of the child in the works of Charles Dickens we find the paradoxical 
phenomenon that the “worshipping” of the romantic cult of childish innocence 
utterly coincides with the unprecedented industrial exploitation of children.
This fact is clearly illustrated in the novel Oliver Twist to be a key cultural icon 
of Victorian childhood, as well as in the writer’s other considered works. Marilyn 

R. Brown assesses the contradictory attitude towards childhood during Dickens’s 
time thus: 
Romanticism’s exploration of the subjective self through the idealized state of 
the child sought a repository of sensitivities and sentiments thought to be lost 
or blunted in adulthood. While legal reforms (however ineffective they may 
have been initially) helped attract public opinion to the plight of factory children, 
capitalism discovered in middle-class children and their parents a ready-
made consumer class. 

12 
Among female rescuers or rescuers of Jews are: Klara Baic (Serbia), Jeanne Daman (Belgium), 
Johanna Eck (Germany), Antonina Gordey (Belarus), Suzanne Spaak (France), Karolina Juszczykowska 
(Poland), Bronislava Krištopaviciene (Lithuania), Sofia Kritikou (Greece), Maria Agnese 

Tribbioli (Italy), Caecilia Loots (The Netherlands), Irena Sendler (Poland), Sofka Skipwith (Rus


sia, United Kingdom), Anna Igumnova (Slovakia, Russia), Elisabeta Strul (Romania), Ludviga 
Pukas (Ukraine), Lois Gunden (United States). On females who have been declared “Righteous 
among the Nations,” see http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/righteous-women/index. 

asp (7.6.2017). 


A burgeoning industry in children’s toys, books, magazines, songs, clothes, and 
advice manuals for parents helped market the child as a symbol of progress and 
of the future. As state protection and the surveillance provided by its various 
institutions, including educational, medical, and legal, increasingly diminished 
the patriarchal power of fathers over their children, the bourgeois ideal of the 
family and of the protected place of the child within it was magnified. By the 
end of the century, primary school education was compulsory and free and 
child protection legislation was enacted. 

An ideal of sheltered childhood had become accepted by the middle classes 
and was finally extended, as a right, to poorer classes as well. Shifting attitudes 
towards working-class children could be seen in the writings of, among others,
Charles Baudelaire, Victor Hugo, and Charles Dickens. 

The constructed ideal of childhood innocence was, in many respects, a Victorian 
defense against advancing awareness of the sexual life of children and 
adolescents during the period when Freud himself was growing up. (Brown 
2004, 454) 

The lives of orphans as depicted by Charles Dickens in the Victorian era aredifficult, but orphans in the circumstances of the Second World War are even moredifficult – they are filled with worse anxiety, distress and suffering, as the proximityto death for those children becomes even more tangible. Many children lost theiryoung lives in the circumstances of the war, but some were fortunate enough tosurvive. Particularly tragic were the fates of Jewish children who, like the Jewishcommunity as a whole, were exposed to the Holocaust during the Second WorldWar. Most of these children lost their lives. At the beginning of the Second WorldWar in September 1939, the Nazis killed at least six thousand children aged up tosixteen in their program of euthanasia, with some of them being exposed to painfulexperiments. Because the Nazis wanted to “exterminate” the Jews, they were utterlymerciless. In the so-called “final solution” the Nazis killed 1.2 to 1.5 million Jewish 
children. In the many narratives, memoirs and diaries about the Holocaust, however, 
we can discover the surprising phenomenon that some Jewish children, despitebeing unprotected and in a state of weakness and, despite the brutality of evil thatthreatened them, maintained a strong hope or faith in the final victory of the good(see the diaries of Anne Frank and Helen Berr, among others).

While most Jewish children lost their lives during the Second World War,
many of them were orphaned due to the Holocaust. In her novel Fugitive Pieces,
Canadian writer Anne Michaels lays out one such shocking story. In it, she gives 
a voice to the Jewish boy Jakob, whose parents and sister were killed in Poland 
and who, frightened and fleeing, happens to be noticed in the woods by the Greek 
geologist Athos. Without hesitating, Athos decides to help the poor child and to 
save him from mortal danger, even if it means risking his own life. 


The writer Anne Michaels in her novel Fugitive Pieces asks where memory can 
help overcome the traumas that have marked the orphaned Jakob throughout his 
life. What sort of relationship must the afflicted person have towards the brutal 
past, to death, to those who perpetrated the evil? Is it possible to forgive the perpetrators 
if their victims are already dead and must therefore remain silent? Is it 
possible to heal the deep and wounded memory through love and thus give rise 
to a new life? Is it possible to take leave of the dead in order to remain with the 
living in a different, less painful way? Can trauma at least slightly be alleviated 
through the memory of the happy childhood that Jakob Beer spent in the circle 
of his Jewish family somewhere in Poland? How can the loving, moral and emotional 
support from generous people help victims overcome trauma and return to 
a “normal” life? 

In her novel Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels describes the contrast between 
the brutality of the Holocaust and the sacrificial benevolence of the rescuer of 
the surviving boy in the figure of the foreign intellectual. She puts the story into 
the broader framework of “typical” stories about saving an orphan. In their article 
“Holocaust Literature and Historiography in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces” 
(2013), Victoria Nesfield and Philip Smith argue: 

Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces makes no claim to be a truthful representation ofthe author’s life and experience. It does, however, follow many of the conventions 
of the Shoah genre despite it not being a Shoah testimony in the styleof most others. Michaels seems at times to be constructing a “typical” survivor’s 
tale through reference to other genuine testimony. Michaels’ literatureshares with the work of Wilkomirski and Defonseca the use of the Jewish 
orphaned child victim of the Shoah as a channel for the narrative. This motifcan most obviously be traced back to Elie Wiesel’s trajectory (even thoughWiesel did not lose his father until the end of his experience and survived inthe camps ostensibly as an adult despite being only 15). (Nesfield and Smith2013, 17–18) 

On a Greek island, Jakob Beer reveals to his rescuer Athos that he cannot 
longer remember the faces of his mother, his father and his sister Bella. However, 
he can clearly remember their expressions: “I can no longer remember 
their faces, but I imagine expressions trying to use up a lifetime of love in the 
last second. No matter the age of the face, at the moment of death a lifetime of 
emotion still unused turns a face young again” (Michaels 1996, 18). 

Jakob knows how central a place love had in the lives of his intimates who died 
and what a stark contrast this was to the unthinkable horror of the evil that 
befell them. The traumatic event of his mother’s and his father’s murder means 
that fear accompanies him for a long time on the Greek island of Zakynthos.
The only person he completely trusts is Athos, and he believes he “was being 


offered a second history” (Michaels 1996, 20), if only he is strong enough to accept 
it. He has a very strong relationship to and devotion for Athos, who helps 
him overcome his fear and to awaken the faith that there is “an invisible world,
just as real as what’s evident” (Michaels 1996, 49). 

In this world, even his loved ones that the war took away are alive. Jakob does 
not believe that they are buried in the earth, for he can feel them by his side: 

The dead passed above me, weird haloes and arcs smothering the stars.The trees 
bent under their weight. I’d never been alone in the night forest, the wild bare 
branches were frozen snakes. The ground tilted and I didn’t hold on. I strained 
to join them, to rise with them, to peel from the ground like paper ungluing at 
its edges. I know why we bury our dead and mark the place with stone, with the 
heaviest, most permanent thing we can think of: because the dead are everywhere 
but the ground. (Michaels 1996, 12) 

Nevertheless, it is not until many years later that Jakob senses he must somehow 
leave the dead behind in order to be able to write down the past, think about 
it, and devote himself to it: “Each morning I write these words for you all. For 
Bella and Athos, for Alex, for Maurice and Irena, for Michaela. Here on Idhra, in 
this summer of 1992, I try to set down the past in the cramped space of a prayer”
(Michaels 1996, 171). 

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Translated from Slovenian 

Irena Avsenik Nabergoj,

University of Ljubljana, ZRC SAZU, Univerza v Novi Goriciirena.avsenik-nabergoj@guest.arnes.si 


Otroci brez otroštva: custvovanje osirotelih otrok in liki njihovih 
rešiteljev v izbranih delih angleške in kanadske književnosti 

Prispevek obravnava literarne opise družbenih, politicnih, kulturnih in verskih 
okolišcin, v katerih so se znašli otroci, ki so že ob rojstvu ali pozneje v otroštvu 
izgubili enega ali oba starša. Kot najšibkejši cleni družbe so bili izpostavljeni 
grožnjam, izkorišcanju in nasilju, a so imeli sreco, da jih je rešil kak sorodnik ali 
kakšna druga socutna in dobrohotna oseba. Ob ugotovitvi, da opise odnosa med 
otrokom – siroto, ki je v smrtni nevarnosti –, in rešiteljem, ki se vecinoma pojavi 
nepricakovano, zasledimo v pripovedih vseh casov in da zato lahko govorimo o 


arhetipu razmerja med otrokom-siroto in rešiteljem, se clanek osredotoca predvsem 
na tri romane angleškega pisatelja Charlesa Dickensa Oliver Twist (1837–
1839), David Copperfield (1849–1850) in Great Expectations (1860–1861) ter roman 
sodobne kanadske pisateljice Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces (1996). Charles 
Dickens je dosegel sloves pisatelja klasika z izvirnimi literarnimi prikazi otroka 

– sirote – v okolišcinah grobega kapitalizma viktorijanske dobe 19. stoletja. Izvirnost 
odlikuje tudi Anne Michaels, ki v romanu Fugitive Pieces slika skrajno 
travmaticne okolišcine, kakršnim je izpostavljen judovski decek, potem ko Nemci 
sredi morije holokavsta ubijejo njegove starše. Vse osrednje otroške like iz skrajnih 
položajev rešijo plemeniti ljudje, s tem pa je poudarjena osrednja ideja obeh 
izbranih avtorjev: da zlo ne more premagati dobrega. Rešitelji svojo nesebicno 
odlocenost, da rešijo nemocne in nezašcitene otroške žrtve nasilja iz življenjsko 
nevarnih okolišcin, doživljajo kot samoumevni moralni imperativ. Charles Dickens 
in Anne Michaels sta s svojimi poglobljenimi in mocno obcutenimi opisi 
spominov na travme, ki so jih njuni osrednji literarni liki uspešno premagovali 
ob pomoci socutja in solidarnosti, prihodnjim generacijam zapustila testament 
upanja proti upanju. 
Kljucne besede: Charles Dickens, custva, spomini, Anne Michaels, holokavst,
osiroteli otroci, rešitelji, travma, posvojitev, zmaga dobrega. 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 81'255.4:821.163.6-32Levstik F.=111 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.137-152 

Names in Literary Translation: A Case 
Study of English Versions of the Slovenian 
Tale Martin Krpan 

Darja Mazi – Leskovar 

Abstract 

This article presents three English translations of the Slovenian tale Martin Krpan z Vrha 
(1858) by Fran Levstik and focuses on the translation of personal and geographical names 
with the aim of examining the application of domestication and foreignization translation 
strategies. The comparative analysis of the English names aims to find out if the cultural 
gap between the source and the target cultures has been diminishing over the years. The 
study also highlights the role of the chronotope that gives the work, one of the most frequently 
translated Slovenian texts, a distinctive cultural character. 

Key words: English translations of Martin Krpan, comparative analysis of translated 
names, domestication and foreignization strategies, chronotope. 


INTRODUCTION 

The Slovenian tale Martin Krpan z Vrha was written by Fran Levstik (183-1887),
a Slovenian writer, poet and playwright who was also a literary critic and a linguist.
The text was first published in Celovec1 – Klagenfurt in a fortnightly journal 
Slovenski glasnik/Slovenian Herald in 1858 and then in a book format. One of the 
author’s aims2 was to offer contemporary Slovenian writers and readers a model 
of an original tale based on folklore and national tradition (Boris Paternu, 1981;
Miran Hladnik, 2002). This tale, written for adult readers, exploits »traditional 
tales of fights between simple but brave giants from among the ordinary people,
and violent figures of foreign and noble origin« (Niko Grafenauer, 2004)3. The 
book already appeared interesting for translators in the 19th century, when the 
first translations were published. In 1917, it was illustrated, and since then it has 
been present in the market as a picturebook. Illustrated by various renowned artists, 
it has been considered primarily as a children’s book, however, its protagonist,
the eponymous Martin Krpan, became a folk hero and, towards the end of the 
20th century, even a national icon.Today the book is generally referred to as Martin 
Krpan and this shorter form of the title will be used also in the current context. 

This study focuses on the personal and geographical names in the three English 
translations. By uncovering the application of domestication and foreignization 
translation strategies that gave rise to the forms of the names, this paper aims at 
highlighting the bridging of the cultural gap between the source Slovenian culture 
and the English speaking target cultures. It may be indicative that the translators 
of Martin Krpan originate from four different English cultures.4 

The comparative analysis of translated names will additionally reveal if in 
the period from the mid 20th century, when the first English translation was 
published, to the start of the third millenium, when the second and the third 

1 
Names of places are given in the Slovenian traditional form. When other forms are used officially,
both names are quoted. As the town of Klagenfurt (situated in Austria) has a traditional Slovenian 
name Celovec, the name is given also in the Slovenian form. English names presented in this text 
are the ones to be found in the translation of Maja Visenjak-Limon and David Limon, if not 
otherwise stated. 

2 
In accordance with the purpose of this paper, the other goals, related to the national awareness 
and the political position of Slovenians in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, will not be taken 
into consideration here. Consequently, also the view that the ‘English salt’ that Krpan illegally 
transports, may have a metonymic significance and may well represent the import and proliferation 
of ideas of the non-German origin, will not be discussed in the current context. 

3 
Neither the pages in the Slovenian picturebook nor in translations are numbered. The editor,
Niko Grafenauer, wrote a one-page introductory presentation to the English translation of Maja 
Visenjak Limon and David Limon. 

4 
F.S. Copeland, of Irish-Scottish origin, Erica Johnson Debeljak, of American origin, Maja Visenjak 
Limon, of Slovenian descent, and David Limon, of English origin. 


translations were offered to the market, the openness of the English speaking 
audiences to the Slovenian culture has increased. These aims are based on the 
supposition that since throughout this period, sections of Slovenian culture have 
been losing their totally foreign connotations for an important section of the international 
literary audience; English5 readers may have also become more open 
to Slovenian literature. 

This paper also stresses the crucial role of the chronotope, the fusion between 
the setting and the temporal framework of the story, that gives to this literary 
masterpiece its distinctive cultural character. 

TRANSLATION OF PROPER NAMES: DOMESTICATION OR 
FOREIGNIZATION 

Proper names, whether names of persons or geographical names, have an important 
role in Martin Krpan. Geographical names may be considered as essential 
markers as they directly indicate where the story is located. Personal names which 
may »implicitly indicate to which culture the character belongs« (Nord, 2003 :
184) do not always perform the identifying function in this tale. This is true for 
the original and the translations. However, the English versions of the story, inevitably, 
indicate the applied translation strategies.

Domestication and foreignization rank among frequently applied translation 
strategies. When the culture of the original, referred to as the source culture, and 
the target culture i.e. the culture of the translation, share a sufficient field of common 
semiotic signs,6 so that no extensive adaptation of the text is required to 
be acceptable in the new reading context, foreignization tends to be the chosen 
strategy. Domestication, on the contrary, tends to be applied when the shared 
semiotic space is so narrow that it requires considerable adaptation of specific 
cultural features of the original. Any application of translation strategies mirrors 
the expected openness of the target audience to the culture of the original as it is 
expected to create the preconditions for the understandability of a text in the new 
literary environment.

The application of translation strategies depends also on the position the target 
and the source language have in a world context. If there is a considerable gap 
between the two with regards to their influence and impact, the first translations, 

5 The term English readers refers to English speaking audiences all over the world. 
6 Semiotic terminology seems to be particularly convenient for the discussion of cultural encounters 


between the source and target cultures, as Maria Nikolajeva proves it in her book Children’s 

Literature Comes of Age. Towards a New Aesthetic. 


especially those from peripheral or non-central languages,7 tend to be considerably 
domesticated. This is particularly true when the target language is English,
the world central language number one. When further rapproachement between 
cultures and literatures takes place, the subsequent translations tend to reflect the 
combination of domestication and foreignization strategies and perhaps even the 
predominance of the foreignization translation method.

Slovenian ranks among non-central languages and therefore the first translation 
of Martin Krpan is expected to be noticeably domesticated. The comparative 
analysis of names will uncover to what degree the translation strategies changed 
in the retranslations. 

MARTIN KRPAN – A PLOT PERSPECTIVE 

Martin Krpan is a tale of a Slovenian countryman who comes from Hilltop in 
Inner Carniola. The eponymous hero is of extraordinary strength and exceptional 
wit and he makes his living by smuggling English salt. As this is strictly prohibited, 
he becomes an object of suspicion to the authorities. On one occasion he accidentally 
meets the imperial carriage and with his strength impresses the Emperor 
so much that when a murderous warrior threatens the Court, Krpan is summoned 
to Vienna, in the hope that he can behead the killer. Krpan accepts the challenge 
but at the court he has to equip himself with his own weapons, a club of soft 
wood, and a butcher’s axe. He also has to send home for his mare, as no Viennese 
horse is strong enough to carry him to the battlefield. Applying an unexpected 
fighting strategy, he is successful: Vienna is saved and the whole court with it.The 
saviour is hailed by the citizens and the Emperor but his heroic deed is not given 
due tribute by the Empress and the minister »who kept the keys to the Emperor’s 
treasury« (translated by Maja Visenjak-Limon and David Limon). They both try 
to diminish the importance of Krpan’s act of heroism. Krpan therefore addresses 
the Emperor, saying:

 I’ve heard in church that every labourer is worthy of his hire. If you so will it,
then give me a letter that will be valid before every church and land authority,
and set your seal upon it, saying that I’m free to peddle English salt (translated 
by Maja Visenjak-Limon and David Limon). 

This is the translation of the following Slovenian lines: 

Division of languages according to the taxonomy of Johan Heilbron (‘Towards a Sociology of 
Translation: Book Translations as a Cultural World System’) and Pascale Casanova (‘Translation 
as Unequal Exchange’), is explained in Mona Baker’s (ed.) Critical Readings in Translation Studies 
(2010). 


Ampak vendar je vsak delavec vreden svojega placila, to sem v cerkvi slišal. Ce 
je vaša draga volja, dajte mi tedaj pismo, ko bo veljavno pred vsako duhovsko in 
deželsko gosposko; pa tudi svoj pecat morate udariti, da bom brez skrbi nosil 
angleško sol po svetu. 

Krpan thus obtains the official permit to peddle salt without restrictions or 
limitations. He is additionally freed from a cumbersome gift offered by the Empress 
just to embarrass him and rewarded with a purse filled with gold coins by the 
Emperor. Thus he is able to return home. Before leaving, however, he says to the 
Emperor that «if any such Brdaus should appear again, you know where Hilltop 
by Holy Trinity is« (translated by Maja Visenjak-Limon and David Limon). This 
reads in the original, »Ko bi se spet oglasil kak Brdavs ali kdo drug, saj veste, kje 
se pravi na Vrhu pri Sveti Trojici.«

The plot of this narrative reveals a harmonious interplay between facts and 
fiction, between mythical and realistic elements (Paternu, 1981). From the international 
perspective it is worth stressing that among mythical elements echoes 
of the Habsburg myth can also be found.8 Thus Martin Krpan transcends its 
national and temporal context, something which is confirmed also by translations 
published in various languages, twelve in all. The most recent renderings of the 
text into foreign languages are Martin Krpan från Vrh (2004), in Swedish, and 
Marutein Kurupan, (2006) in Japanese. 

THE CHRONOTOPE AND THE INTERPLAY OF FACTS AND 
FICTION 

The chronotope, the configurations of place and time of the narrative, plays a 
pronounced role in this tale. It does not only frame the story but it also gives its 
raison d’etre. This tale grows from the fictional setting that evokes the actually 
existing European territory situated between Trst/Trieste9, Vrhnika10 and Dunaj/
Vienna and it also evokes a period that had severely marked the Slovenian sense 
of identity.

The region, presented as the fictional location, has been important for trading 
from time immemorial. This is the area known for commercial routes connecting 
Central Europe with the Adriatic sea. In the book it is named Notranje, today it is 

8 See: Baskar Bojan, “Martin Krpan ali habsburški mit kot sodobni slovenski mit”(Martin Krpan or 

a Habsburg Myth as a Modern Slovenian Myth). 
9 Commercially important in Roman Times and in the following periods, especially under the 

Habsburg rule. 
10 A commercial port already in the Antiquity (https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/vrhnika) 


called Notranjska. The area is characterized by Karstic phenomena and one of its 
salient features is the lowest passage11 between the Southern and Central Europe.
It was therefore favourable for traditional transporting and peddling. It is a hilly 
region with villages also on the slopes or even the hilltops. Thus the name Vrh,
the only one that derives from the topographical features of the region.The names 
Vrh and Sveta Trojica have been fairly common in Slovenian territory. The name 
Vrh od Svete Trojice12, refers to a village and is generally known in Notranjska.

The temporal framework of the picturebook is determined by the mid – 19th 
century, the time in which Fran Levstik was an important literary figure, and by 
the historic circumstances which gave rise to the oral literary tradition which the 
author relied on in this narrative. The historic circumstances echoed in this tale 
derive from the historic fact that from 1382 most of the territory inhabited by 
Slovenians was ruled by the Habsburg dynasty. In the time of the invasions from 
the Ottoman Empire, this territory presented a kind of shield for the more central 
regions of the Habsburg Empire. Another fact derived from this historic reality 
was that the regions of Karst and Notranjska were among those Slovenian areas 
that were particularly afflicted by the raids of the Turks (Simoniti 1990: 88). History 
reveals as well that this territory played a role in the traffic of sea salt. Both 
historic experiences had therefore strongly marked the collective memory of the 
local population.

The time framework of this narrative is indicated by the author himself at the 
very start of the text13: 

An old man of my acquaintance would sometimes spin me yarns about times 
gone by, how people used to live and things that went on between them (Maja 
Visenjak Limon and David Limon). 

A man by the name of Mocilar used to tell me stories about the olden days,
about how people lived and what kind of things they kept by them (Erica 
Johnson Debeljak). 

Sometimes Mochilar would tell me of bygone days, how people used to live and 
how they got on with each other (F.S. Copeland). 

This reads in Slovenian: 
Mocilar mi je casi kaj razkladal o nekdanjih casih, kako so ljudje živeli in kako 
so imeli to in to rec med sabo. 


11 Postojnska vrata/Postojna Gate called also Adriatic Gate is a major mountain pass that allows for 
the lowest crossing (609–612 m) between Central Europe and the Mediterranean. 
12 The modern version is Vrh pri Sveti Trojici. 

13 
The introductory paragraph is given as rendered by the three English translators since it mirrors 
the variants not only in the presentation of the time frame, but also in the translation of a personal 
name, Mocilar. 


In the same introductory paragraph the indications of time and place become 
more precise. 

One Sunday afternoon, sitting on the bench in the shade of the linden tree, he 

told me the following tale: … (Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon).
One Sunday afternoon, as we sat on a bench in the shade of a great linden tree,
he related the following tale to me: … (Erica Johnson Debeljak).

One Sunday afternoon, as we sat on the bench under the lime tree, he told me 
the following tale (F.S.Copeland). 

This reads in the original: 

Nekoc v nedeljo popoldne mi je v lipovi senci na klopi pravil naslednjo povest … 

The chronotope is further explained in the following paragraph by the fictional 
narrator. 

There is a village in Inner Carniola known as Hilltop.There once lived a certain 


Krpan (Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon).
In the region of Notranjska there once stood a village called Vrh. A very long 
time ago, a strong and powerful man named Krpan lived in the village (Erica 
Johnson Debeljak).


There is a village in Inner Carniola, called The Peak. In that small village there 
lived in olden times Krpan, a powerful man and strong (F.S. Copeland).
This reads in the original:
V Notranjem stoji vas, Vrh po imenu. V tej vasici je živel v starih casih Krpan… 


When trying to establish facts related to the temporal framework of this tale,
it should be highlighted that from the Middle Ages onwards, Austria and the Republic 
of Venice were fighting for primacy in this part of Europe (Granda, 142).
Austria prohibited its citizens from trading with salt which was a monopoly of the 
Crown. Trafficking was one of the responses to the prohibition.

The time frame of the story is determined also by the visual narrative. Since the 
first illustration, created by Hinko Smrekar14 (1883-1942), the brutal warrior hasbeen viewed as a Turk. The gap existing due to the missing textual clue about theorigin of the foreign knight, the seemingly invincible killer, was thus filled by theillustration.15 Among other illustrators who presented the cruel knight as a Turk, it is 

14 A renowned Slovenian caricaturist who worked also as a graphic artist and illustrator. 
15 The presentation of Brdavs contributes essential information to the understanding of the book as a 
whole. This picturebook therefore ranks among those where the word and the image complement 
each other. This is one of the possibilities of the relationship between the text and the illustration 
as Maria Nikolajeva and Carol Scott explain in their book How picturebooks work. 


in the present context particularly worth mentioning Tone Kralj (1900-1975) whoseillustrations accompany several translations of this book. Kralj’s monumental realism 
corresponds so much to the story and to the characters of the hero and of the cruelintruder that his illustration acquired the status of the ‘standard’ one.16 Such a vision 
must have been the result of the Slovenian collective memory, strongly marked bythe raids of the Turks which were a real scourge in the 15th and 16th centuries. Itwas the time when the forces of the Ottoman Empire systematically raided andplundered the bordering regions of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.
The first raid on the Slovenian territory took place in 1408, as reported by Janez Vajkard 
Valvasor.17 Turks endangered the territory for more than 200 years. They wereremembered for plunder, arson, killing and hostage taking. When not massacred,
Slovenians were sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, or destined to be re-educated 
as janizaries. Thus, due to the Turkish invasions, an important section of theSlovenian rural population was lost.18 Additionally, the Slovenian chivalry suffered asevere blow and was considerably reduced during the wars that were waged againstthe Ottoman Empire. The raids on the Slovenian territory ceased only in 1593.19 

It is therefore no surprise that Slovenian culture, particularly literature and 
the arts, echoes this period full of tribulations for Slovenians and other nations of 
Southeastern and Central Europe. The experience that they had to endure represented 
a challenge for the rest of Christian Europe, aware as it was that its cultural 
roots were endangered. It can be presumed that this common experience is one of 
the main reasons why Martin Krpan has been frequently translated and retranslated 
into the languages of the neighbouring nations. 

TRANSLATIONS: FOCUS ON TRANSLATIONS INTO ENGLISH 

Martin Krpan ranks among those Slovenian literary works which have been translated 
comparatively often.The first translations, into Russian (1888 and 1891) and intoGerman (1893), were followed by translations into a further ten languages. However, 

16 
Probably because Tone Kralj was not only a painter, illustrator and a graphic artist but also a 

sculptor and architect. Martin Krpan represented a challenge for several other illustrators, and they 

all attributed Brdavs with the features that are associated with the Turks. 

17 
Johann Weikhard von Valvasor (1641 – 1693), whose work has been considered one of the main 
sources for the older Slovenian history, was a polyhistor from Carniola, the present-day Slovenia,
and a fellow of The Royal Society in London. His research and writings have been considered one 
of the main sources for the study of older Slovenian history. 

18 
From Vasko Simoniti's Turki so v deželi že (The Turks are already in the country) and Ignacij Voje’s, 

Slovenci pod pritiskom turškega nasilja (Slovenians under the pressure of Turkish terror). 
19 However, the Habsburg Empire was liberated from the constant threat of the Ottoman Empire 

only in 1683, after the Battle of Vienna. 


the real number of translations is much higher as, in the case of various languages,
the text has been retranslated several times. Retranslations in the neighbouring languages 
may have been the result of the special interest in the fictional representationof an aspect of historic experience that this geographical area had been directly confronted 
with. In the case of retranslations into other languages, it can be presumedthat the targeted public appreciated not only the factual and fictional aspects of thisnarrative, which are related to the experience of a wider part of South Eastern andCentral Europe, but also its transnational and transcultural aspects.

The three English translations were published in 1960 and in 2004. The 1960translation, entitled Martin Krpan, was the work of F.S. Copeland.20 It was followed 
by two translations, both with the same title as the original. They were publishedin the same year, 2004, but at different publishing houses: Erica Johnson Debeljakpublished her translation by Prešernova družba, and Maja Visenjak Limon and David 
Limon published theirs by Mladinska knjiga. The comparative analysis of thethree translations will focus on the translation of personal and geographical (topographical) 
names. The aim of this comparative analysis is double: to find out if thegap between the source and the target literary contexts has diminished from the mid20th century to the start of the third millenium; and to establish if in this periodthe openness of the English speaking audiences to the Slovenian culture has risen.

The first English translation (1960) of Martin Krpan may be expected to be 
largely adapted to the target readers’ cultural context, i.e., to that of the English 
speaking readers, and to be largely domesticated. The study of translation 
of names will show if later translations moved from domestication translation 
strategy21 to foreignization as this change of translation method is expected to be 
present also in the translation of personal and geographical names. However, no 
clear dichotomy between the two approaches is envisaged as domestication and 
foreignization are not mutually exclusive (Baker 2010: 115). Especially in the case 
of retranslations, the application of translation strategies will be viewed as a mirror, 
reflecting the bridging of the gaps between the source Slovenian culture and 
the target English cultures. In this context, the comparative analysis of personal 
and geographical names will be considered as a testimony to the changes in the 
application of these two translation methods. 

TRANSLATION OF PERSONAL NAMES 

Names are traditionally culture-bound and as such they deserve the special attention 
of translators and readers. This is particularly true in books that have 

20 Fanny Susan Copeland (1872–1970). 
21 In this context, the term ‘translation strategy’ will be used as an equivalent to ‘translation method’. 



146 Darja Mazi – Leskovarmulticultural contexts. Martin Krpan is a good example of such a literary workas the chronotope represents a geographical region where Slovenian, Germanand Italian cultures meet. The analysis of names as »culture markers« (Nord,
184) will reveal if also in this picturebook names »implicitly indicate to whichculture the character belongs« (ibid.) The names in the original and in translations 
will be therefore analysed also as to their culture of origin, to their sourcetradition. 
Translators approach the task of translating proper names in various ways.
When the target and the source language share the same script, as it is the case for 
English and Slovenian, names in the target text generally tend to be either reproductions 
of source names, i.e. without any change, or they are changed due to 
morphological, phonological or cultural adaptation to the target language (Bassnett 
and Lefevère; Nord). Accordingly, even though domestication and foreignization 
seem to be rather obvious in the translation of a particular literary work,
translation of names may not be so straightforward. Therefore translations may 
contain names which are clear equivalents as ‘John’ in the case of Slovenian ‘Janez’. 
On the other hand, equivalents may not be the choice of translators, as particular 
forms depend on several factors and not on translation strategies alone.
Accordingly, the comparative analyses of selected forms may also uncover other 
solutions, for example those originating from the translator’s creativity and this 
is likely also to reveal the skill and artistry of a particular translator. However, in 
this context, in accordance with the aim of this study, the latter aspect is not taken 
into consideration. 
The challenge posed by the translation of names in Martin Krpan was indicated 
above when the concept of the chronotope was discussed. Proper names are 
an essential source of the construction of the cultural setting in which the story is 
embedded. The appearance of the name Mocilar which was dealt with in various 
ways by the three translators is therefore also relevant in connection with the 
discussion of names. 
ORIGINAL 1960 F.S. Copeland 2004 Maja Visenjak 
Limon, David Limon 
2004 Johnson 
DebeljakMartin Krpan Martin Krpan Martin Krpan Martin Krpan 
Brdavs Brrdows Brdaus Brdaus 
Cesar Janez The Emperor John The Emperor Johann The Emperor Johan 
Minister Gregor Minister Gregory Minister Gregor Minister Gregor 
Jerica Yeritsa Yerica Yerica 
Mocilar Mochilar Substitution Mocilar 
Marjeta Maggie, Mag Marieta Marietta 
Klincar Klinchar Klinchar Substitution 
Darja Mazi – Leskovarmulticultural contexts. Martin Krpan is a good example of such a literary workas the chronotope represents a geographical region where Slovenian, Germanand Italian cultures meet. The analysis of names as »culture markers« (Nord,
184) will reveal if also in this picturebook names »implicitly indicate to whichculture the character belongs« (ibid.) The names in the original and in translations 
will be therefore analysed also as to their culture of origin, to their sourcetradition. 
Translators approach the task of translating proper names in various ways.
When the target and the source language share the same script, as it is the case for 
English and Slovenian, names in the target text generally tend to be either reproductions 
of source names, i.e. without any change, or they are changed due to 
morphological, phonological or cultural adaptation to the target language (Bassnett 
and Lefevère; Nord). Accordingly, even though domestication and foreignization 
seem to be rather obvious in the translation of a particular literary work,
translation of names may not be so straightforward. Therefore translations may 
contain names which are clear equivalents as ‘John’ in the case of Slovenian ‘Janez’. 
On the other hand, equivalents may not be the choice of translators, as particular 
forms depend on several factors and not on translation strategies alone.
Accordingly, the comparative analyses of selected forms may also uncover other 
solutions, for example those originating from the translator’s creativity and this 
is likely also to reveal the skill and artistry of a particular translator. However, in 
this context, in accordance with the aim of this study, the latter aspect is not taken 
into consideration. 
The challenge posed by the translation of names in Martin Krpan was indicated 
above when the concept of the chronotope was discussed. Proper names are 
an essential source of the construction of the cultural setting in which the story is 
embedded. The appearance of the name Mocilar which was dealt with in various 
ways by the three translators is therefore also relevant in connection with the 
discussion of names. 
ORIGINAL 1960 F.S. Copeland 2004 Maja Visenjak 
Limon, David Limon 
2004 Johnson 
DebeljakMartin Krpan Martin Krpan Martin Krpan Martin Krpan 
Brdavs Brrdows Brdaus Brdaus 
Cesar Janez The Emperor John The Emperor Johann The Emperor Johan 
Minister Gregor Minister Gregory Minister Gregor Minister Gregor 
Jerica Yeritsa Yerica Yerica 
Mocilar Mochilar Substitution Mocilar 
Marjeta Maggie, Mag Marieta Marietta 
Klincar Klinchar Klinchar Substitution 

147 Names in Literary Translation...
ORIGINAL 1960 F.S. Copeland 2004 Maja Visenjak 
Limon, David Limon 
2004 Johnson 
DebeljakJernej Bartholomew Yerney Jernej 
Štempihar Shtenpihar Shtempihar Štempihar 
Pegam Pegam Pegam Pegam 
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL NAMES 
The personal names used in the original are all of Slovenian origin or, without 
referring to the etymological origin of each of them, in their Slovenian form.
Original names thus do not reflect the presumed nationality of literary characters 
which are of Slovenian and German origin. The name of the giant, Brdavs, is 
presented as Brrdows in the first translation (1960). The double ‘r’ in spelling may 
indicate the translator’s aim to insist on a pronunciation that would evoke the 
original one.The tendency to keep the pronunciation of individual’s proper names 
similar to that of the original becomes even more obvious in the cases of the 
names Štempihar, Mocilar and Klincar. As all three contain letters absent from to 
the English alphabet, they are written with combinations of letters that are likely 
to make English readers imitate the original pronunciation. Thus there is ‘sh’ for 
the Slovenian ‘š’ (sibilant [.]) so that Štempihar turns into Shtempihar, and ‘ch’ for 
the Slovenian ‘c’ (affricate [t.]), thus Mocilar turns into Mochilar.The cited names,
appearing in the first English translation, are thus, contrary to expectations, partly 
foreignized: the spelling is anglicized with the intention of offering readers an 
impression of the original sound of Slovenian names.
Thus even in the first translation names are transformed in different ways.
They are entirely domesticated, when they are already familiar within an English 
cultural context. The name Gregor thus becomes Gregory and Jernej changes 
into Bartholomew. Conversely, in both 2004 translations, the quoted Slovenian 
names are kept and English readers are faced with foreignization. Whennames contain sibilants and affricates, Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon,
apply the same type of adaptation procedure as adopted by F.S. Copeland. EricaJohnson Debeljak, on the contrary, uses the Slovenian forms Mocilar and Štempihar, 
and keeps also the name Jernej. The translator thus introduces completeforeignization.
The 2004 translators used the same name for the giant: Brdaus. but different 
names for the Emperor. In the original, the Emperor himself is referred to either 
with his title or by title and first name. In translations, the title is followed 
by the name, either in the English form, as Emperor John (F.S. Copeland), or 
with Emperor Johann (Maja Visenjak Limon, David Limon) and Johan (Erica 
Names in Literary Translation...
ORIGINAL 1960 F.S. Copeland 2004 Maja Visenjak 
Limon, David Limon 
2004 Johnson 
DebeljakJernej Bartholomew Yerney Jernej 
Štempihar Shtenpihar Shtempihar Štempihar 
Pegam Pegam Pegam Pegam 
COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF PERSONAL NAMES 
The personal names used in the original are all of Slovenian origin or, without 
referring to the etymological origin of each of them, in their Slovenian form.
Original names thus do not reflect the presumed nationality of literary characters 
which are of Slovenian and German origin. The name of the giant, Brdavs, is 
presented as Brrdows in the first translation (1960). The double ‘r’ in spelling may 
indicate the translator’s aim to insist on a pronunciation that would evoke the 
original one.The tendency to keep the pronunciation of individual’s proper names 
similar to that of the original becomes even more obvious in the cases of the 
names Štempihar, Mocilar and Klincar. As all three contain letters absent from to 
the English alphabet, they are written with combinations of letters that are likely 
to make English readers imitate the original pronunciation. Thus there is ‘sh’ for 
the Slovenian ‘š’ (sibilant [.]) so that Štempihar turns into Shtempihar, and ‘ch’ for 
the Slovenian ‘c’ (affricate [t.]), thus Mocilar turns into Mochilar.The cited names,
appearing in the first English translation, are thus, contrary to expectations, partly 
foreignized: the spelling is anglicized with the intention of offering readers an 
impression of the original sound of Slovenian names.
Thus even in the first translation names are transformed in different ways.
They are entirely domesticated, when they are already familiar within an English 
cultural context. The name Gregor thus becomes Gregory and Jernej changes 
into Bartholomew. Conversely, in both 2004 translations, the quoted Slovenian 
names are kept and English readers are faced with foreignization. Whennames contain sibilants and affricates, Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon,
apply the same type of adaptation procedure as adopted by F.S. Copeland. EricaJohnson Debeljak, on the contrary, uses the Slovenian forms Mocilar and Štempihar, 
and keeps also the name Jernej. The translator thus introduces completeforeignization.
The 2004 translators used the same name for the giant: Brdaus. but different 
names for the Emperor. In the original, the Emperor himself is referred to either 
with his title or by title and first name. In translations, the title is followed 
by the name, either in the English form, as Emperor John (F.S. Copeland), or 
with Emperor Johann (Maja Visenjak Limon, David Limon) and Johan (Erica 

Johnson Debeljak). The retranslations introduce foreignization based on the German 
origin of the Monarch. Conversely, the name of the Emperor’s daughter,
Jerica, becomes Yeritsa in the 1960 translation and Yerica in both translations 
from 2004.Thus Yeritsa is domesticated, while Yerica has undergone only a partial 
domestication. 

It seems logical that the name of the eponymous character is not adapted.
However, the same is true for the name Pegam22 which appears only in order to 
foreshadow Krpan’s victory. 

TRANSLATION OF PLACE AND OTHER GEOGRAPHICAL 
NAMES 

SLOVENIAN 
ORIGINAL 
COPELAND VISENJAK 
LIMON, LIMON 
JOHNSON 
DEBELJAK 
Vrh pri Sveti Trojici The Peak by Holy 
Trinity 
Hilltop by Holy 
Trinity 
Vrh near Holy 
Trinity 
Notranje Inner Carniola Inner Carniola Notranjska 
Dunaj Vienna Vienna Vienna 
Trst Trieste Trieste Trieste 
Rim Rome Rome Rome 
Razdrto Broken Hill Razdrto Razdrto 
Golo Bare Hill Golo Goli 
Koper Koper Koper KoperVrhnika Vrhnika Vrhnika Vrhnika 
Ljubljana Ljubljana Ljubljana Ljubljana 
Reka Reka Rijeka Reka 

COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES 

The comparative analysis of geographical names reveals that in these three translations, 
most places are translated in the same manner.These include English forms 
of internationally known places such as Vienna, Trieste and Rome. The names of 
the Slovenian towns Koper, Ljubljana and Vrhnika are retained, a factor which 

22 
Slovenian folklore speaks about a giant Pegam who challenged Vienna and all the great knights and 
lords in the empire to fight him. »The giant slew whoever he could subdue« (translated by Johnson 
Debeljak) till he was defeated by a Slovenian, Lambergar. The tradition tells that Lambergar 
managed to be a winner in an unequal fight, like the one between David and Goliath, because his 
mother supported him with prayer. 


contributes to the foreignizing effect of the translations. Conversely, Krpan’s place 
of origin, his home village, is translated in three different ways. Only the second 
part of the name is translated identically by all of them. In the 1960 translation 
the domestication strategy is particularly underlined with a short commentary 
that accompanies the translations of the name Razdrto, translated as Broken Hill,
and Golo, rendered as Bare Hill. Each of these translations is accompanied with 
a footnote on the same page informing the reader that the translation is an »approximate 
rendering«.

The only name refering to a geographical region is Notranje which is translated 
in two ways: with the name established in historiography, Inner Carniola, by 

F.S. Copeland and Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon, and with the modern 
name, Notranjska, by Erica Johnson Debeljak. If the latter is an obvious foreignization, 
I dare say that the name used by historiography would also hardly sound 
less foreign to the majority of Non-Slovenian readers. This also proves that in the 
translation of any literary text, domestication and foreignization can be assigned 
their role and effect only within a larger linguistic, literary and cultural context. 
CONCLUSION 

This comparative analyses of the translations of names in the narrative Martin 
Krpan has turned out to be particularly interesting not only because the time span 
between the first translation and the retranslations was almost half a century, but 
also because the two retranslations, published in the same year, reveal a few aspects 
of the complexity of literary translation.

The comparative studies of personal names, place names and other geographical 
names reveal that the expectations built on theoretical premises regarding 
retranslations and the application of domestication and foreignization translation 
strategies were basically justifiable.The analyses reveal that within the three translations 
domestication and foreignization tend to complement each other and that 
foreignization is particularly pronounced in the area of geographical names. Most 
names of Slovenian places retain their original form. In the field of names of individuals 
only a few can be considered as »culture markers« (Nord, 184).The Emperor’s 
name, Johann, which in itself clearly indicates its linguistic origin within 
the Habsburg Monarchy, ranks among them. 

The analysis of personal names also reveals frequent adaptations of spelling 
which is anglicized with the intention of enabling targeted readers to derive an 
impression of the original sound of Slovenian names. Neither of the retranslations 
is based primarily on s single translation strategy. As expected, the degree of 
application of each of the highlighted translation strategies differs. Visenjak and 


Limon apply both domestication and foreignization strategies and it is likely that 
their translation may help the English reader to gain an impression of the sound 
of the Slovenian language.

The translation of names reveals that the cultural gap between the Slovenian 
and English speaking cultures has diminished and that since the start of the 21st 
century translators have expected English readers to be much better prepared for 
the encounters with Slovenian literature than their counterparts in the reading 
audiences in the second half of the 20th century. 

WORKS CITED 

Baker, Mona (ed). Critical Readings in Translation Studies. London and New York: 
Routledge, 2010.
Baskar, Bojan.“Martin Krpan ali habsburški mit kot sodobni slovenski mit” (Martin 
Krpan or a Habsburg Myth as a Modern Slovenian Myth). Etnolog 69. 75


90. Ljubljana: Slovenski etnografski muzej, 2008.
Levstik, Fran. Martin Krpan z Vrha. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1954.
Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevère, eds., Translation, History and Culture. London: 
Pinter, 1998.

Casanova, Pascal. »Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation 
as Unequal Exchange«, in Critical Readings in Translation Studies, ed. 
Mona Baker. London and New York: Routledge, 2010: 285-303.

Grafenauer, Niko. A Brief Introduction to Martin Krpan in Levstik, Fran. Martin 
Krpan translated by Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon. Ljubljana: Mladinska 
knjiga, 2004.

Granda, Stane. Mala zgodovina Slovenije (A Brief History of Slovenia). Celje: Mohorjeva 
družba, 2008.

Heilbron, Johan. »Towards a Sociology in Translation: Book Translations as a 
Cultural World System«, in Critical Reading in Translation Studies, Mona Baker 
(ed.). London and New York: Routledge, 2010: 304-316.

Hladnik, Miran. Pa zacnimo pri Krpanu (Let’s Start with Krpan). http://slovlit. 

ff.uni-lj.si/slovjez/mh/6reci.html . 
Levstik, Fran. Martin Krpan z Vrha. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1954. 
Levstik, Fran. Martin Krpan. Translated by F.S. Copeland. Ljubljana: Mladinska 

knjiga, 1960.
Levstik, Fran. Martin Krpan. Translated by Maja Visenjak Limon and David Limon. 
Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 2004.
Levstik, Fran. Martin Krpan. Translated by Erica Johnson Debeljak. Ljubljana: 
Prešernova družba, 2004. 


Nikolajeva, Maria. Children’s Literature Comes of Age: Toward a New Aesthetic. New 
York and London: Garland Publishing, 1996.

Nikolajeva, Maria and Carol Scott. How Picturebooks Work. New York and London: 
Garland Publishing, 2001.

Nord, Christiane »Proper Names in Translations for Children: Alice in Wonderland 
as a Case in Point.« In Meta, Translator’s Journal, Journal des traducteurs.
Traduction pour les enfants, Translation for Children. Ed. Riitta Oittinen. Meta,
Vol. 48, 1-2, mai 2003.

Paternu, Boris. Martin Kerpan z Verha. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1981. 

Sedej, Ivan. Martin Kerpan z Verha. Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1981. 

Simoniti, Vasko. Turki so v deželi že (The Turks are already in the country). Celje:
Mohorjeva družba, 1990.

Voje, Ignacij. Slovenci pod pritiskom turškega nasilja (Slovenians under the pressure ofTurkish terror). Ljubljana: Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete, 1996. 

Darja Mazi – LeskovarUniversity of Maribordarja.leskovar@guest.um.si 
Lastna imena v angleških prevodih slovenske povesti Martin Krpan 

Clanek se tematsko umešca med razprave o prevodih slovenskih literarnih besedil,
tocneje o prenosu lastnih imen v tuje jezike. Obravnava prevode Martina Krpana,
ki so izšli v anglešcini od leta 1960 do 2016 ter se osredotoca na osebna in geografska 
imena v treh ciljnih besedilih. Lastna imena so deležna posebne pozornosti 
prevajalske stroke, saj dokaj natancno pokažejo, v koliki meri so se prevajalci 
pri prenosu literarnega besedila odlocali za podomacitveno oziroma potujitveno 
prevajalsko strategijo. Zato študija v uvodnem delu predstavi oba osrednja prevajalska 
principa ter opozori, da je njun izbor v veliki meri odraz bližine oziroma 
oddaljenosti med izvorno in ciljno kulturo. Ker se izbrana povest uvršca med dela,
v katerih književni prostor in cas igrata bistveno vlogo, sta uvodoma predstavljena 
tudi kraj in cas dogajanja, prepletanje zgodovinskih dejstev, geografske danosti 
in umetniškosti, ki hoce biti tipicno slovenska. Primerjalna analiza lastnih imen 
pokaže, da so vsi prevajalci ohranili ime glavnega junaka, pri ostalih pa beleži 


nekaj odstopanj, ki so kulturno pogojena. Predvsem zaradi vecje rabe potujitvene 
strategije pri zapisu geografskih imenih lahko zakljucimo, da se je, po oceni prevajalcev, 
v zadnjih petdesetih letih zmanjšala oddaljenosti med slovensko, angleško 
in ameriško kulturo. 

Kljucne besede: prevodi Martina Krpana v angleški jezik, primerjalna analiza 
prevodov lastnih imen, potujitveni in podomacitveni prevajalski princip, prostor 
in cas dogajanja 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 81'25:821.163.6-32Alešovec J. 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.153-171 

Übersetzung oder Adaption: Fallbeispiel 
Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901) 

Tanja Žigon 

Abstract 

Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit den essayistischen Skizzen Laybacher Typen 
(Ljubljanske slike) aus der Feder des Publizisten, Dramatikers und Satirikers JakobAlešovec (1842–1901) auseinander, wobei hier der Frage nachgegangen wird, ob es sichbei der Übersetzung der behandelten Texte aus dem Deutschen ins Slowenische umeine (Selbst)übersetzung handelt oder man in diesem Zusammenhang doch lieber voneiner Adaption sprechen sollte. Anhand der Lebens- und Schaffensgeschichte des Au-
tors wie auch im Hinblick auf die im 19. Jahrhundert geltenden Normen in der slowenischen 
Übersetzungskultur wird gezeigt, dass es sich bei dem deutschen Ausgangstextüberwiegend um eine Textvorlage für die slowenische Version handelt, welche als eineZwischenstation zur originalen Produktion im Slowenischen zu verstehen ist. 

Schlüsselwörter: Selbstübersetzung, Adaption, Ausgangs- und Zieltext (Deutsch/
Slowenisch), Normen, Übersetzungskultur im 19. Jahrhundert 


EINLEITUNG UND EINIGE WORTE ZUM AUTOR DER 

UNTERSUCHTEN TEXTE 

Das wissenschaftliche Interesse im vorliegenden Beitrag widmet sich den Texten 
von Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901)1, dem slowenischen Erzähler, Dramatiker, Satiriker 
und Publizisten, über den sich sein Zeitgenosse Josip Vošnjak (1834–1911),
der slowenische Politiker, Arzt und Erzähler, in seinen Memoiren kritisch, aber 
teilweise auch ungerecht, wertend2 und damit sehr subjektiv äußerte: 

Alešovec war einer derjenigen in den Fluten des Lebens versenkten talentierten 
Menschen, die zu schlecht gelaunt waren, um ihre, ich würde sagen, animalischen 
Triebe zu zähmen. [...] Er hatte eine gute humoristische und satirische 
Ader, aber es fehlte ihm an der richtigen Bildung und an den eigenen Einfällen 
und Ideen (Vošnjak 1982: 627).3 

Jakob Alešovec wurde vor 175 Jahren, im Juli 1842 in Skarucna, einem kleinenDorf nicht weit von Laibach (Ljubljana) entfernt, geboren. Er wuchs in ärmstenVerhältnissen auf; während die Mutter den Haushalt führte, konnte der Vater mitseiner Arbeit als Handwerker kaum mehr als das Nötigste zum Überleben der Familie 
verdienen (Alešovec 1973: 5–9). Die Intelligenz des kleinen Jungen fiel demDorfpfarrer auf; dieser begann, Alešovec zu unterrichten und sorgte später dafür,
dass er mit Hilfe der finanziellen Förderung der Franziskaner die Volksschule imnahegelegenen Ort Stein (Kamnik) besuchen konnte. Von 1856 bis 1863 setzte 
Alešovec seine Ausbildung am Laibacher Gymnasium fort, jedoch schloss erdiese nie ab. Bereits als Gymnasiast gab er das deutschsprachige Schulblatt Die 
Schwalbe heraus (Alešovec 1973: 303). Zu dieser Zeit beherrschte er eher ein gebrochenes 
Slowenisch, denn nur in der Familie wurde untereinander Slowenischgesprochen, während man sich ansonsten auf Deutsch unterhielt (Vošnjak 1982:
15–16). Nachdem er die Schulbank verlassen hatte, verbrachte Alešovec zwei Monate 
in der Lehrerbildungsanstalt in Laibach und entschied sich danach, die Stelledes Hauslehrers bei Miroslav Vilhar (1818–1871), dem slowenischen Dramatiker, 
Erzähler und Politiker, anzunehmen, um seinen Lebensunterhalt bestreitenzu können. Er griff auch immer öfter selbst zur Feder und veröffentlichte seineersten Erlebnisberichte in den Blättern aus Krain, einer literarischen Beilage der 
Laibacher Zeitung. Bis in die 1860er-Jahre verfasste er seine Texte ausschließlich 

1 Sein Familienname kommt auch in anderen Varianten vor, und zwar Aleschouz, Alešovz, Alešovc. 
2 Zum Thema Emotionen in der Literatur vgl. Javor Briški (2012: 87–96). 
3 Der slowenische Text lautet: »Alešovec je bil eden tistih v valovih življenja pogrezlih talentiranih 


ljudi, ki so bili preslabe volje, da bi znali brzdati svoje, rekel bi, animalske nagone. [...] imel je dobro 

humoristicno in satiricno žilo, nedostajalo pa mu je prave omike ter lastnih misli in idej« [diese und 

weitere Übersetzungen v. T. Ž.]. 


auf Deutsch, erst Miroslav Vilhar begeisterte ihn dafür, Slowenisch zu schreiben.
So erschien im Jahr 1867 seine historische Skizze Kustoca in Vis [Custozza und die 
Insel Lissa], eine Beschreibung des Krieges an italienischen Kriegsschauplätzen imJahr 1866. Ferner versuchte sich Alešovec auch als Schauspieler, Dramatiker undÜbersetzer (Gostiša et al. 1967: 19–22) und übersetzte 1870 das Lustspiel vonGeorg Horn Glückliche Flitterwochen und Nestroys Zauberposse mit Gesang in 
drei Akten Der böse Geist Lumpazivagabundus oder Das liederliche Kleeblatt. Mitte 
der 1880er-Jahre wurde das Sehvermögen von Alešovec immer schwächer, so dasser schließlich erblindete. Seine Blindheit und sein Alkoholkonsum trugen zu seinem 
traurigen Ende in einer Laibacher Armenanstalt bei. Er starb vereinsamt undvon allen verlassen am 17. Oktober 1901. 

Es hat den Anschein, dass nicht nur seine Zeitgenossen, sondern auch die slowenische 
Literaturgeschichte Jakob Alešovec als einen widersprüchlichen Autor 
wahrgenommen hat, wohl auch deswegen, weil Alešovec in einer Zeit der nationalen 
Differenzierung bzw. Neupositionierung4 sowohl auf Deutsch als auch auf 
Slowenisch schrieb, aber auch wegen seiner bissigen Satire, mit welcher seine Texte 
durchdrungen sind und die niemanden schonte. Wegen sehr subjektiver Urteile 
und oft auch ungerechter und unbegründeter Angriffe auf jede und jeden wurde 
auch der künstlerische Wert der Texte von Alešovec oft hinterfragt. Durch negative 
Kritiken und Rezensionen seiner Werke,5 wurde er bereits zu Beginn des 20. 
Jahrhunderts zu einem damnatio memoriae verdammt. Doch trotz dieser Haltung 
der Literaturgeschichte ihm gegenüber muss festgehalten werden, dass Alešovec 
nicht ganz in Vergessenheit geraten ist, denn seine subjektiven Darstellungen 
geben oft schonungslos das Bild der sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Verhältnisse 
in der Landeshauptstadt Krain im 19. Jahrhundert wieder und beleuchten die 
kulturellen Zustände6 der damaligen Zeit von einer anderen Perspektive. Somit 
werden seine Texte des Öfteren als historische Quelle herangezogen, vor allem 
die im Weiteren analysierten Laibacher Typen.

Alešovec verfasste seine ironischen und satirischen kulturhistorischen Skizzen 
in den 1860er- bzw. 1870er-Jahren. Zunächst wurden sie 1869 im Feuilleton der 
Zeitschrift für vaterländische Interessen Triglav (vgl. dazu Žigon 2004; Žigon 
2007), welche Alešovec selbst redigierte, unter dem Titel Laibacher Typen veröffentlicht, 
zehn Jahre danach (1879) folgte die slowenische Fassung, die Alešovec 
zunächst im Feuilleton der konservativen Zeitung Slovenec [Der Slowene] und 

4 Zum Einfluss der gesellschaftlichen, historischen und politischen Zustände auf den Einzelnen vgl.

Maver 2015: 177–178. 
5 Besonders kritisch und negativ waren die Rezensionen der Ausgewählten Werke von Alešovec, die 

nach seinem Tode herausgegeben wurden (L[enart] 1910: 41; Jurkovic 1912: 219). 
6 Vgl. zum Thema Kulturdiplomatie z. B. Udovic und Podgornik 2016. 


im gleichen Jahr auch im Selbstverlag unter dem Titel Ljubljanske slike. Podoba 
ljubljanskega sveta pod drobnogledom [Bilder aus Laibach. Das Bild der Laibacher 
Welt unter der Lupe] herausgab. Der Autor selbst fungiert hier auch als Übersetzer 
des deutschen Textes. Doch soll hervorgehoben werden, dass in der slowenischen 
Fassung an keiner Stelle der deutsche Ausgangstext erwähnt wird und auch das 
von Alešovec aufs Neue verfasste Vorwort in der slowenischen Buchausgabe wird 
lediglich mit »Verfasser« (slow. »pisatelj«) unterschrieben und es wird völlig außer 
Acht gelassen, dass es sich um einen bereits in deutscher Sprache existierenden 
Text handelt; dies deutet auf einen relativ niedrigen Status der Übersetzungen in 
der slowenischen Übersetzungskultur (mehr zum Begriff Prunc 2008b) im 19.
Jahrhundert hin. 

FRAGESTELLUNG UND THEORETISCHE 
VORÜBERLEGUNGEN 

Anhand des Vergleiches des deutschen Ausgangs- und des slowenischen Zieltextes 
(Laybacher Typen vs. Ljubljanske slike) wird im Weiteren überprüft, ob es sich 
bei der slowenischen Übersetzung um eine Selbstübersetzung handelt oder eher 
von einer dem „Zielpublikum emotionell ansprechende[n] kulturspezifische[n] 
Adaption“ (Prunc 2007a: 170; vgl. auch Prunc 2008a: 117–119) gesprochen werden 
kann. Die Adaption ist in diesem Sinne als freieste Form der Übertragung 
eines Textes in eine andere Sprache (Prunc 2007b: 77) zu verstehen, denn der Text 
wird in der Zielsprache bzw. Zielkultur, wie Newmark schreibt, neu geschrieben,
also rewritten (Newmark 1995: 45). In so einem Falle wird dem Übersetzer die 
Freiheit zugestanden, gravierende Eingriffe in den Ausgangstext vorzunehmen,
den Text sehr frei zu lokalisieren, zu erweitern, bestimmte Textstellen auszulassen 
usw. Bereits die von Alešovec im Jahr 1874 veröffentlichte Kriminalgeschichte 
Iz sodnijskega življenja [Aus dem Gerichtsleben] – zum Schreiben dieses Krimis 
wurde Alešovec von Miroslav Vilhar ermutigt – kann als eine Art Adaption bzw.
Rewriting eingestuft werden. Obwohl der slowenische Literaturhistoriker Matjaž 
Kmecl (1975: 113) diesen Text für den ersten slowenischen Kriminalroman 
hält und betont, dass Alešovec damit in die slowenische Literatur zum ersten 
Mal die Figur eines richtigen Detektivs, eines schlauen, ehrlichen und konsequenten 
Ermittlers eingeführt habe, den es vorher in der slowenischen Literatur 
nicht gegeben habe, kann nicht übersehen werden, dass sich Alešovec von bereits 
existierenden ähnlichen fremdsprachlichen Texten inspirieren ließ und sich eine 
Reihe von deutschen, französischen und anderen historischen Sammlungen der 
Strafrechtsfälle zum Vorbild nahm, die man in seiner Zeit unter dem Namen Pitaval 
(Hladnik 1985: 196) kannte. 


Der Begriff Rewriting wurde im Zuge der kulturellen Wende in den späten 
1980er- und frühen 1990er-Jahren von André Lefevere (1992) in die Translationswissenschaft 
eingeführt, der zunächst noch den Begriff der Refraktion benutzte, 
womit das Adaptieren von Texten für ein bestimmtes Zielpublikum, eine 
bestimmte Situation oder Ideologie gemeint ist (vgl. dazu auch Prunc 2007: 255–
258). Es geht vor allem darum, wie fremde AutorInnen, diverse Texte und Konzepte 
in die eigene Kultur und Literatur eingehen, wie sie angeeignet und folglich 
rezipiert werden. In diesem Zusammenhang stellt Lefevere fest, dass jede Übersetzung 
eigentlich auch Rewriting sei und unter bestimmten Bedingungen zur 
Manipulation führen könne, was sowohl positive als auch negative Folgen habe: 

Translation is, of course, a rewriting of an original text. All rewritings, whatever 
their intention, reflect a certain ideology and a poetics and as such manipulate 
literature to function in a given society in a given way. Rewriting is manipulation, 
undertaken in the service of power, and in its positive aspect can help in the 
evolution of a literature and a society. Rewriting can introduce new concepts,
new genres, new devices and the history of translation is the history also of literary 
innovation, of the shaping power of one culture upon another (Lefevere 
1992: VII). 

Da die meisten Texte von Jakob Alešovec und damit auch seine Laibacher 
Typen bzw. Ljubljanske slike in einer Zeit der immer heftigeren slowenisch-deutschen 
Auseinandersetzungen im Land Krain (vgl. z. B. Matic 2002) entstandensind, kann die slowenische Übersetzung der Laybacher Typen auch aus der Sicht 
der Prozesse der slowenischen Sprach-, Literatur- und Nationalentwicklung betrachtet 
werden (vgl. Almasy 2016; vgl. auch Maver 2010, Maver 2015). Dasbedeutet, wenn man an das Normenkonzept von Gideon Toury anknüpft, derdas Übersetzen als normengeleitete Aktivität definiert (Toury 1995: 55–60), dassdie Vornormen in der slowenischen Übersetzungskultur im 19. Jahrhundert (vgl.
Žigon, Almasy und Lovšin 2017: 52–77) durch „ein Bündel (national)ideologischmotivierter Aufgaben“ (Prunc 2012: 86) gesteuert wurden. Man verfolgte das Ziel,
„den Einfluss des Deutschen auf die Sprache (und Denkungsart) zurückzudrängen“ 
(ebd.) und eine eigene slowenische Textproduktion aufzubauen, was „denÜbersetzungen von vornherein einen sekundären Status zuwies“ (ebd.). Fernerbemühte man sich „ein eigenes Verlagswesen aufzubauen und neue Leserschichten 
zu gewinnen“ (Prunc 2012: 87), doch wegen der Diglossie des Bildungsbürgertums, 
das ausgenommen der dramatischen Werke, „bei denen das Theater alsgesellschaftliches Ereignis seiner nationsbildenden Funktion nur durch slowenische 
Übersetzung gerecht werden konnte“ (ebd.), alle weiteren „literarische[n]
Werke im deutschen Original oder in deutschen Übersetzungen“ (ebd.) lesenkonnte, wurden zunächst „nur so genannte ‚niedrige‘ Genres (Gebetbücher und 


Katechismen, Sachbücher, Trivial- und Jugendliteratur) ins Slowenische übersetzt“ 
(ebd.; vgl. auch Hladnik 1993: 809).7 

Gerade wegen der diglossischen Situation in den mit der slowenischen Bevölkerung 
besiedelten Gebieten gab es im 19. Jahrhundert oft Fälle von Selbstübersetzungen 
der zweisprachigen AutorInnen, doch ist die Erfassung der Übersetzungen 
in Bibliographien und Bibliothekskatalogen mangelhaft bzw. können die 
übertragenen Texte gar nicht erfasst werden, denn der niedrige Status der Übersetzungen 
in der slowenischen Nationalkultur hatte zur Folge, dass viele Texte, 
auch Ljubljanske slike von Alešovec, nicht als Übersetzung kenntlich gemacht 
wurden (vgl. Prunc 2007a: 165–166).

Im Blick auf die übersetzerischen Vornormen griff man auf der Ebene der 
Ausgangsnormen vor allem auf die bereits erwähnte zielkulturelle Adaption zurück, 
was in keiner Korrelation zu der kulturellen oder sozialen Rezeptionsfähigkeit 
des Zielpublikums stand; so entschied man sich für eine Adaption meistens 
aus »handfeste[n] ideologische[n] Gründe[n]«, z. B., um das Identifikationsgefühl 
der LeserInnen im slowenischen Emanzipationsdiskurs zu stärken, wozu die 
Übersetzungen instrumentalisiert wurden (vgl. Prunc 2008a: 117). Dadurch wurde 
den ÜbersetzerInnen auf der Ebene der Operativnormen, die sich auf konkrete 
Entscheidungen beim Übersetzen beziehen, relativ große Freiheit gewährt.

Schließlich darf nicht vergessen werden, dass Alešovec die slowenischenTexte zehn Jahre nach der deutschen Erstveröffentlichung herausgegeben hat.
Nicht nur die zeitliche Distanz, die zwischen dem Entstehen beider Sprachversionen 
liegt, sondern vor allem die Tatsache, dass der Autor selbst auch Übersetzer 
des eigenen Textes war, lässt vermuten, dass es sich dabei nicht nur umeine übersetzerische, sondern auch um eine literarische Tätigkeit handelt. Eskann die Hypothese aufgestellt werden, dass der deutsche Ausgangstext demAutor lediglich als eine Vorlage für einen völlig neuen slowenischen feuilletonistischen 
Text diente. Jakob Alešovec bewegte sich nämlich zwischen zweiSprachen in Krain und wuchs in einer Zeit und Umgebung auf, wo der Bilingualismus 
die Norm war, worauf bereits hingewiesen wurde. Die Sprachewechseln, das hieß für Alešovec in eine andere Welt wechseln (Kupsch-Losereit1995: 1) – oder anders formuliert: Für Alešovec gilt, was Hokenson und Munson 
treffend formulierten, nämlich, dass „bilingual self-translators produce twotexts, often publish them under the same title, und usually consider them to becomparable versions“ (Hokenson und Munson 2007: 3). Ferner war auch die soziolinguistische 
Realität für Alešovec von großer Bedeutung; sie determinierte 

Aus diesem Grund, so Almasy, „bediente man sich des Genres der Lyrik oder griff auch zu 
historischen Romanen und Erzählungen, weil durch ersteres die kreative Schaffenskraft des 
Slowenischen bewiesen und durch zweiteres nationale Vorstellungen transportiert werden 
konnten“ (Almasy 2017: 127). 


ihn damals genauso wie das bei den ÜbersetzerInnen von heute in einer ähnlichen 
Situation der Fall ist, denn sie arbeiten und leben 

not in a hypothetical gap between languages, between source und target cultures, 
but in the midst of them; they combine several languages and cultural 
competencies at once, and constitute a mid-zone of overlaps and intersections,
being actively engaged in several cultures simultaneously. Hence every translator 
is ‚a minimal interculture‘ (Pym 1998: 181). 

Es ist hervorzuheben, dass es gerade bei SelbstübersetzerInnen zu sprachlichen 
und kulturellen Überlappungen par exellence kommt, und zwar sowohl innerpersönlich 
als auch in den Texten (Hokenson und Munson 2007: 4), was auch 
bei Alešovec deutlich zum Ausdruck kommt. 

DIE GESELLSCHAFTLICH-POLITISCHE UND KULTURELLE 
SITUATION IM LAND KRAIN 

In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts spaltete sich die Bevölkerung der slowenisch 
besiedelten Gebiete in zwei Parteien mit unterschiedlicher Auffassung 
der staatsrechtlichen Konzeption. Während die Altslowenen unter der Führung 
vom Tierarzt und dem Herausgeber der slowenischen Landwirtschaftszeitung 
Kmetijske in rokodelske novice (1843–1902), Johann Bleiweis (1808–1881), eine 
gemäßigtere, kompromissbereitere Haltung gegenüber der deutschen „verfassungstreuen 
Partei“,8 welche für die Vorrangstellung der deutschen Sprache und 
Kultur eintrat, befürworteten, forderten die „liberalen“ Jungslowenen die kulturelle, 
wirtschaftliche und politische „Wiedererweckung“ der Slowenen. Allerdings 
waren die heftigen slowenisch-deutschen Auseinandersetzungen u. a. auch auf 
dem Zeitungsmarkt zu spüren. In den 1860er-Jahren sind in der Krainer Hauptstadt 
neben der offiziellen und meist gelesenen Laibacher Zeitung noch zwei weitere 
deutschsprachige publizistische Organe erschienen, die miteinander konkurrierten: 
Triglav, eine Zeitschrift, die sich als „slowenisch“ deklarierte und auf 
Deutsch slowenische Interessen vertrat, und das Organ der Deutschen in Krain,
das liberal ausgerichtete Laibacher Tagblatt. Davon, dass die beiden Presseorgane 
auf völlig verschiedenen Seiten standen und dass Triglav unter der Redaktion von 

Zu dieser gehörten vornehmlich die Beamtenschaft, das in der Wirtschaft aktive Bürgertum 
und Repräsentanten freier Berufe in den Städten und Märkten, jedoch wurde sie auch von den 
slowenischen Liberalen wahrgenommen. Liberale forderten persönliche, politische und religiöse 
Freiheit, eine Demokratisierung des Lebens auf allen Ebenen, die Einschränkung der Macht der 
Kirche, sie plädierten für Fortschritt und Modernisierung der Wirtschaft und unterstützten die 
individuelle unternehmerische Initiative (Vodopivec 1987). 


Alešovec sehr kritisch gegen die Überzeugung der Krainer Deutschen von der 
Vorrangstellung der deutschen Kultur gegenüber der slowenischen antrat, legt das 
nachfolgende Zitat aus Triglav ein illustratives Zeugnis ab: 

Glückliches Alterthum, wo keine „liberalen“ Blätter erschienen! Beneidenswerthes 
Publikum, das darin nicht Lügen fand! Beneidenswerth die 
Gänse, die nicht das Bewußtsein hatten, daß ihre Federn in so elende Hände 
kommen, daß damit so schändliche Artikel geschrieben, so schamlose Lügen 
fabrizirt werden, als man im „Laibacher Tagblatt“, diesem ungezogensten der 
journalistischen Gassenbuben, dieser Mißgeburt aller Fratzen, die durch ein 
menschenähnliches Geschlecht voll der diabolischsten Eigenschaften gefüttert 
wird, begegnet (Anonym 1869: unpag.). 

Im Jahr 1868 wurde Alešovec zunächst Mitarbeiter, später auch der verantwortliche 
Redakteur der deutschsprachigen Zeitschrift für vaterländische Interessen 
Triglav. Vornehmlich im Feuilleton der Zeitschrift nahm er sich die 
Freiheit und griff nicht nur die Deutschen in Krain an, sondern auch die mit 
diesen sympathisierenden liberalen Slowenen, die sog. Renegaten.9 Er kritisierte 
und verspottete sie, machte sich dadurch bei seinem Publikum immer unbeliebter 
und wurde dadurch bald zu einem Außenseiter, zu einem „einsamen Reiter“ 
(Lah 1991: 41–46). Er brachte, was ein typisches Merkmal der Feuilletonisten im 
Allgemeinen ist, immer alles aufs Papier, was ihm auf der Seele lag und ähnelte 
darin einem der damals wohl berühmtesten Wiener Feuilletonisten Ferdinand 
Kürnberger (1821–1879).10 

DIE TYPEN AUS DER LAIBACHER GESELLSCHAFT: EINE 
SELBSTÜBERSETZUNG? 

Im Februar 1869 begann Alešovec in der Zeitschrift Triglav in Fortsetzungen 
seine Texte zu den sog. Laibacher Typen zu veröffentlichen. Seine feuilletonistischen 
Betrachtungen waren scharfe gesellschaftliche Satiren, in welchen er sich 
als ein begnadeter Sprach-Flaneur erwies, welcher seinem Publikum das Spiel der 

9 
Die Slowenen, die mit den deutschen Liberalen sympathisierten, wurden oft auch als „nemškutarji“,
das ist „Deutschtümler“, bezeichnet (Grdina 1995: 263–285). Mehr zu den deutsch-slowenischen 
Beziehungen (Miladinovic Zalaznik 2002). 

10 
Ferdinand Kürnberger war Feuilletonist, Kritiker und Erzähler. Wegen seiner Teilnahme an 
der Revolution 1848 musste er aus Wien fliehen und lebte als Korrespondent und Kritiker in 
Deutschland. 1856 kehrte er nach Österreich zurück. Kürnberger gilt als einer der bedeutendsten 
Vertreter des Wiener Feuilletons. Seine kunstvollen Texte, die sich kritisch mit politischen,
kulturellen und sozialen Themen auseinandersetzten, prägten unter anderem Hermann Bahr und 
Karl Kraus (Wildhagen 1985). 


Individualitäten in verschiedensten Nuancen darbot. Seine Laibacher Typen können 
als ein eigenartiger Katalog von Menschen aus dem Laibacher gesellschaftlichen 
und beruflichen Leben verstanden und gelesen werden.

Bereits auf Makroebene sind zwischen dem Ausgangs- und Zieltext Unterschiede 
zu verzeichnen. Erstens wurde der slowenischen Fassung eine dreiseitige 
Einleitung [Uvod] vorausgeschickt, die in der deutschen Fassung nicht vorhanden 
ist, das bedeutet, dass sich der Autor auf der Ebene der Operativnormen 
erlaubte, den Text um einiges zu erweitern. Ferner versuchte er aber auch – in Bezug 
auf die Ausgangsnormen – das slowenisch patriotische Identifikationsgefühl 
der LeserInnen zu etablieren, indem er alles verspottete, was er mit Deutschtum 
assoziierte. In der Einleitung erklärte Alešovec seinem Lesepublikum, wie die 
Laibacher Typen klassifiziert werden bzw. in welche Gruppen die Laibacher Bevölkerung 
eingeordnet werden kann, und zwar sind das: a) die Herrschaften, die 
nur Deutsch sprechen; b) die Renegaten, die als verlorene Seelen gelten und ein 
gebrochenes Deutsch sprechen, aber meistens auch die Landessprache (Slowenisch), 
verstehen und (jedoch ungern) sprechen, und c) die Vorstadtmenschen, die 
unter Schicksalsschlägen zu leiden haben; diese kommunizieren untereinander 
auf Slowenisch und verdienen ihr tägliches Brot meist als Handwerker (Alešovec 
1911: I–III).

Die Methode, die Alešovec anwendet, die Menschen zu beschreiben, beschränkt 
sich also nicht nur auf eine einzige Gesellschaftsschicht, sondern erfasst 
alle, von den Hausherren, Beamten, Studenten über Dichter, Künstler, Redakteure 
bis zu den Damen, Hausfrauen, Müttern, reizenden Mädchen und Plaudertaschen, 
wie er die meisten Frauen bezeichnet. Wen auch immer Alešovec nicht 
mochte, der wurde gebrandmarkt und befand sich in seinen Augen auf einmal 
im „Klub der Renegaten“, die er besonders verachtete. Einen nach dem Anderen 
entwarf Alešovec vor den nicht wenig staunenden Augen seiner Leser die verschiedensten 
Laibacher Typen, die er jeweils mit selbst ausgedachten, oft ironischen 
„lateinischen“ bzw. „lateinisch klingenden“ Beinamen versah, die zugleich 
auch eine differenzierte Typsierung seiner Figuren bedeuteten, z. B.: der Pensionist 
(Spiritus familiaris), der Gastwirth [sic!] (Vampyrius), der Kaffeehausbesitzer 
(Homo Giftmischer), der Professor (Dominus omnipotens), der Student (Genius 
universalis), der Beamte (Homo pauper), der Doktor (Spiritus intrigans), die Welt- 
oder Salondame (Domina Luxuriosa) etc.

Die zweite Abweichung vom deutschen Ausgangstext auf der Makroebene 
stellt die Zahl der beschriebenen „Typen“ dar. Die in der deutschen Originalversion 
veröffentlichten Texte von Alešovec wurden in der Zeitschrift Triglav in 18 
Nummern (von Februar bis Mai 1869) abgedruckt. Da in einigen Triglav-Ausgaben 
Texte zu nicht nur einem, sondern zu mehreren Typen erschienen sind, kann 
festgestellt werden, dass in der deutschen Fassung 24 Typen aus der Laibacher 


Gesellschaft dargestellt wurden, während die spätere slowenische Version 29 Typenbeschreibungen 
enthält. Alešovec blieb somit dem Original nicht ganz treu;
in der slowenischen Ausgabe wurden folgende Typen hinzugefügt: jezicni doktor 
[ Jurist], duhovnik [Pfarrer], zasebnik [Privatunternehmer], privatni uradnik 
[Privatbeamter], predmešcan [Vorstadtmensch] und raznoterosti [Diversitäten] 
(Alešovec 1911).

Bei einer Vergleichsanalyse des deutschen und des slowenischen Textes auf der 
Mikroebene wurde vor allem auf die Fragen eingegangen, inwieweit verschiedene 
Elemente des Originals beim Übersetzen modifiziert wurden, was ausgelassen,
hinzugefügt, gekürzt, neutralisiert oder stereotypisiert wurde. In diesem Zusammenhang 
stellt man bereits beim ersten, einleitenden Bild bzw. beim ersten „Typen“ 
(Der Hausherr = Hišni lastnik ali gospodar) fest, dass der slowenische Text 
viel länger ist und nicht ganz dem Original folgt. Alešovec verändert nicht nur 
die quasi „lateinische“ Benennung des Hausherrn, er bemüht sich auch um eine 
zusätzliche Erklärung, nämlich, dass es sich um einen Hauseigentümer (slow. hišni 
lastnik) und nicht etwa um einen Mieter oder Ähnliches handelt und schickt 
dem slowenischen Text einen Absatz voraus, der in der deutschen Fassung nicht 
vorkommt.11 

Triglav, Jg. IV, Nr. 12, 9. Februar 
1869, unpag. 
Ljubljanske slike. Ljubljana 1911, S. 1. 
Der Hausherr 
(Herus domesticus) 
Hišni lastnik ali gospodar 
(Dominus domesticus) 
/Auslassung/
/Erweiterung in der slowenischen 
Fassung/ 
Brez hiš ni mesta. Zato moram tudi jaz priceti shišami – ali pravzaprav z njihovimi lastniki. Ti sovažni v trojem oziru: 1. placujejo hišni davek – toje dobro za mestno blagajnico; 2. imajo pod svojostreho ljudi, ki nimajo svojih hiš, in od teh dobivajo 
najemšcino – kar je za gospodarje dobro, kerbi jim brez tega hiše nic ne nesle; 3. So vsledtegavolivci za mestni, deželni in državni zbor. Razentega 
so gospodarji tudi jako nevarni ljudje; kajtice bi svoje hiše podrli – cesar bi se jim ne moglobraniti – bi ne imel nihce nikjer strehe, in mestaLjubljane ne bi bilo vec. „Mesto je naše,“ lahkorekó ti ljudje ponosno – in kdo jim bo oporekal?
Zato je spodobno, da tudi jaz postavim te ljudi vvrsti ljubljanskih slik na prvo mesto. 

11 Die Erweiterungen, Veränderungen, Auslassungen usw. sind in den Beispieltexten kenntlich 
gemacht (unterstrichen oder fett gedruckt). 


Es wird in dem neugeschriebenen ersten Absatz in drei Punkten lexikongemäß, 
jedoch äußerst ironisch, erläutert, warum die Hausherren so bedeutend sind 
und worin ihre Rolle im gesellschaftlichen Leben besteht: Erstens bezahlen sie 
die Immobiliensteuer, was die Stadtkasse kräftig unterstützt; zweitens beherbergen 
sie Mieter, die sich kein eigenes Haus leisten können, was wiederum dem 
Hausherrn zugute kommt, denn nur dadurch kann er sein Haus in Stand halten,
und drittens bilden die Hausherren den sog. Wahlkörper, dem die Macht der 
Entscheidungen zusteht.

Nach den einleitenden Worten geht Alešovec im slowenischen Zieltext zur 
Beschreibung des Hausherrn über und konstatiert: 

Triglav, Jg. IV, Nr. 12, 9. Februar 1869, unpag. Ljubljanske slike. Ljubljana 1911, S. 1. 
Seiner Abstammung nach gehört jeder Haus-Po rodu je vsak hišni gospodar, torej 
herr, folglich auch der in Laibach, zu den S äu-tudi ljubljanski, sesavka, in sicer po 
gethieren, und zwar sowohl der allgemeinen splošnih postavah sveta in tudi po po-
Welt-, als auch der besonderen Hausordnung sebnih hišnih zakonih. 
zufolge. 
Das letztere wissen und empfinden nament-To poslednjo lastnost obcutijo najhujelich die Parteien. Was seine grammatikalinajmeniki 
ali hišni gostaci. Posebna laschen 
Kenntnisse anbelangt, so liegt seine stnost hišnega lastnika je namrec ta, da 
Hauptstärke im S teiger n; so zwar, daß er hrepeni vedno više – z najmešcino, ki se 
stets nur den Superlativ im Auge hat und auf mu ne zdi nikdar previsoka. 
der Zunge führt, und dennoch ist er dabei der 
Ansicht, daß sein Superlativ den Parteien als /Auslassung/ 
Postitiv zu gelten habe. 

Wie aus der zitierten Stelle ersichtlich, handelt es sich beim ersten Satz um 
eine fast wortwörtliche Übertragung des deutschen Textes, doch bereits im zweiten 
Satz wird das Verb „wissen“ (poznati) ausgelassen; genauso wird der ganze 
Vergleich mit dem grammatischen Superlativ und den viel zu hoch gerechneten 
Mieten nicht ins Slowenische übertragen. Es heißt nämlich im slowenischen Text 
nur, dass die Höhe der Miete dem Hausherrn nie zu hoch scheint. Alešovec kürzt 
und formuliert den Ausgangstext um. Der Grund dafür könnte darin liegen, dass 
er dem „einfachen“ slowenischen Leser diverse Kenntnisse der deutschen Grammatik 
nicht zutraut und versucht deswegen mit einer knappen, klaren Aussage das 
Verstehen zu erleichtern. Auch im weiteren Verlauf des Textes fungiert Alešovec 
weniger als Übersetzer als als Autor eines neu konzipierten Textes. Es ist ihm 
wichtig, dem slowenischen Leser zusätzliche Informationen vorauszuschicken 
und darauf hinzuweisen, was er als Verfasser des Textes von den (meist deutschen) 
bürgerlichen Hausbesitzern hält. 


Bei der zweiten Typenbeschreibung (Der Handelsmann) wie auch in allen weiteren 
sind etliche Abweichungen festzustellen und die Treue zum Original verliert 
sich allmählich, so dass sie letztendlich nicht mehr vorhanden ist. Alešovec 
benutzt die deutsche Fassung als literarische Vorlage und lässt seinen feuilletonistischen 
Betrachtungen freien Lauf. Es entsteht ein neues literarisches Produkt,
bei dem man von einer Übersetzung gar nicht mehr sprechen kann. So wurde 

z. B. in der 23. Nummer der Zeitschrift Triglav der Dichter (Genius incognitus)
dargestellt – jedoch unterscheidet sich die deutsche Fassung gravierend von der 
späteren slowenischen: 
Triglav, Jg. IV, Nr. 23, 19. März 1869, 
unpag. 
Ljubljanske slike. Ljubljana 1911, S. 108. 
Der eigentliche Dichter (Poëta natus) ist 
heutzutage fast ganz ausgerottet. In seinem 
Urzustande ist er unabhängig, seine Begabung 
entschieden ausgesprochen. Er lebt 
nur von edlen Stoffen, er schafft nicht gegen 
Zeitungshonorar, auch nicht für andere, 
sein Beruf ist ihm selbst die größte Befriedigung. 
Gezähmt heißt er Hofdichter,
unterjocht – Theaterdichter; dann verliert 
er häufig seine Flügelweite, die gestutzten 
Flügel vermögen ihn nicht mehr über die 
irdische Athmosfäre zu erheben. Während 
er im Urzustande keine Schranken, keine 
Grenzen kannte, respektirt er gezähmt die 
Zensur, welche seine Werke der Oeffentlichkeit 
übergibt, ihn selbst aber in dunkler 
Zelle einsamen und erbaulichen Betrachtungen 
überläßt. Es gibt wenige, die sich 
nicht zähmen lassen, denn der Käfig, in 
dem sie dann wohnen, ist vom Gold, der 
Gesang des gefangenen Vogels tönt durch 
die ganze Welt und trägt ihm Bewunderung 
und Lorbeerkränze bei Lebenszeiten 
ein. Stirbt er im Urzustande, so wird er erst 
nach dem Tode entdeckt, man reißt sich 
um seine Fotografien und Manuskripte 
und leitet Sammlungen für sein Denkmal 
ein, welches dann nach langen Jahren erst 
zu Stande kommt […] 
Pesnik (Poëta natus) 
Pesnik je živalca, ki živi najrajši v tihotnemgaju, pa se vendar tuinsem preseli med viharnost 
cloveškega življenja. Pesnik prvevrste zbuja nežna custva in povzdiga srcazemeljske 
ruše držecega se cloveštva – protizvezdam, kamor se zaganja on s svojim letecim 
konjem „Pegazom“; druge vrste pesnikpa goni srca v boj cloveških strasti; le redek jetak, ki poje zgolj zase, kakor ptica v gozdu, neoziraje se okrog sebe, ga li kdo posluša ali ne.
O starih pesnikih se pripoveduje, da so jim 
bile rojenice Vile, in da so jim cebele nosile 
že otrocicem méd v usta, da se jim je cedili z 
njih. Zdaj pa je nekoliko drugace. Le redki 
so še taki, ki jih zibljejo Vile; zlasti Ljubljana 
pa se ne more bahati z njimi […] in to 
zato, ker je Ljubljana jako neugoden kraj za 
prave pesnike; prevec je še nemcurske megle 
nad njo. Tudi cebel ni vec okrog ust novorojenega 
pesnika, marvec le še muhe, ki 
si ogledujejo njegov obraz. Pravega pesnika 
je zato še težje najti nego pravega narodnjaka. 
Tudi ne poje ljubljanski pesnik toliko iz 
pravega nagiba, ampak veliko vec iz drugih 
vnanjih vzrokov, ki mu sprožijo pevsko žilo,
in ta potem drdra toliko casa, za kolikor je 
bila prej navita. Cas je pac prematerialen,
Slovenec prevec tlacen in zato se tudi pesnik 
ne more vzdigniti kvišku […] 

Alle Motive, Behauptungen und Beschreibungen, die im deutschen Text vorhanden 
sind und neutral das dichterische Schicksal wiedergeben, verschwindenim Slowenischen. Alešovec schreibt seinen Text neu, er betrachtet die Situationim Land Krain gleichsam mit „slowenischen“ Augen und lässt sich von emotionalen 
Eindrücken leiten, indem er alle auf Deutsch schreibenden Dichter undSchriftsteller angreift und ihren künstlerischen Wert in Frage stellt. Vor allemist er den Renegaten, d. i. den mit den deutschen liberalen Ideen sympathisierenden 
Krainern gegenüber, sehr bissig. Die deutschen Poeten in Laibach, soAlešovec, gäbe es nicht, „doch findet man ab und zu Einen, der irgendetwasaus verschiedenen Texten schmiedet und zusammendichtet, was jedoch keinenWert hat [...] Das Renegatentum besitzt keine Gedichte; und auch wenn eswelche besäße, so wären dies keine Gedichte, sondern Lieder heiserer Säufer“.12 

Im zweiten Teil seiner Laibacher Typen widmet sich Alešovec der Damenwelt, 
die ihn einerseits fasziniert, ihm andererseits aber große Angst macht.
Er schildert in der deutschen Version die junge Frau (Papilio carus), die Kaffeeschwester 
(Spatzus domesticus aut Rosenbachus), die Studentenfrau (Baba vorax) 
und auch die Kokette (Miles femininus), bei der er sich ironisch fragt, obsie „dem Thier-, Pflanzen- oder Mineralreiche angehört“, und konstatiert, dassdiese Frage auch „die Naturforscher bis jetzt noch unentschieden gelassen“ haben, 
denn „dem Thierreiche wäre sie insofern anzureichen, weil sie auf Raubund Eroberung ausgeht; dem Pflanzenreiche gehört sie in Folge ihrer Farbenpracht 
[...] an, während sie infolge ihres steinernen Herzens dem Mineralreiche 
zufällt“ (Triglav, Jg. 4, Nr. 29, unpag.). Interessanterweise kommt dieses Bildin der slowenischen Version gar nicht vor, was aller Wahrscheinlichkeit nachdamit zusammenhängt, dass Alešovec mit seiner Mutter eng verbunden warund sehr an ihr hing (Alešovec 1973), weshalb er unter den slowenischen „nichtbürgerlichen“ Frauen die Koketten nicht wahrnehmen konnte und wollte. Undwährend Alešovec im Schlusswort zu seinen Skizzen in der deutschen Fassungnochmals die Charakteristika aller Laibacher Typen zusammenfasst, sind seine 
slowenischen Abschlussgedanken eher eine Abrechnung mit den Lesern.
Allem Anschein nach hatte sein Publikum etliche Schwierigkeiten, sich mitden Laibacher Typen identifizieren zu können. Alešovec schließt seine slowenische 
„Abhandlung“ mit dem bedeutsamen Satz: Resnica oci kolje (Alešovec 1911:
263) oder, wie man das auf Deutsch formulieren würde (was Alešovec in derdeutschen Fassung jedoch nicht tat): Die Wahrheit sticht ins Auge. 

12 Der slowenische Text lautet: „[…] pac se najde tupatam kdo, ki nekaj skuje in splete iz raznih 

besedil, kar pa ni podobno nikomur [...] Renegatstvo nima pesmi; in ce jih ima, niso pesmi, ampak 

popevke hripavih pijancev“ (Alešovec 1911: 109). 


FAZIT 

Jakob Alešovec greift im Triglav-Feuilleton immer wieder die gleiche Problematik 
auf: Die deutsch-slowenischen Beziehungen, sein slowenisches Nationalbewusstsein, 
seine Überzeugung, dass die slowenische Sprache der deutschen ebenbürtig 
sei, und seinen Dissens mit der berühmten Äußerung Seumes, dass das 
Land Krain „das letzte Zipfelchen unsers deutschen Vaterlandes“ (Seume 1985:
150) sei. Bei Alešovec kann man von einem Grenzbereich sprechen: Er bewegt 
sich zwischen der Selbstübersetzung und Bearbeitung bzw. einer Fortschreibung 
seiner Texte, was mit seinen Erfahrungen und seiner Position auf dem kulturellen 
und politischen Feld in Krain zusammenhängt. Er nutzt den deutschen Text 
(eine erste – fremdsprachliche – Fassung) als Vorlage, um ihn auf Slowenisch 
fortzuschreiben (vgl. Lamping 1992: 221). Die Fortschreibung geht weit über 
das Original hinaus, sie entfernt sich sogar von ihm. Die von Alešovec angefertigte 
Übertragung der eigenen Texte ist somit weder eine Annäherung an das 
Original noch eine Verdoppelung oder ein Ersatz derselben. Es ist vielmehr eine 
Fortsetzung seines deutschen Werkes, eine gleichsam erneuerte Texterstellung.
Alešovec erweitert den slowenischen Text, erläutert die Situation und nutzt vor 
allem die Möglichkeit, die leitende Rolle des Deutschtums im Land Krain immer 
wieder zu hinterfragen, ironisch darzustellen und die Zustände in Laibach, wo 
das deutschsprachige Bürgertum eine wichtige Rolle im gesellschaftlichen Leben 
spielte, auseinanderzunehmen. In diesem Kontext sind seine slowenischen Texte 
gegenüber den Deutschen in Krain des Öfteren ungerecht und beleidigend. Eine 
solche Haltung hätte er sich in der deutschen Fassung gar nicht leisten können.
Seine Kritik des Deutschtums hält sich in der deutschsprachigen Version noch 
sehr in Grenzen, denn als verantwortlicher Redakteur und sogar Eigentümer der 
deutschsprachigen Zeitschrift Triglav hielt er sich an die Norm und hatte sein 
Zielpublikum vor Augen, also nicht nur die Slowenen, sondern auch die Deutschen, 
die sich über slowenische politische Ansichten informieren wollten. Zu 
viele bissige, emotionale, Deutsche in Krain angreifende und kritisierende Texte,
hätten für ein noch früheres Eingehen der Zeitschrift gesorgt.

Es steht fest, dass Alešovec selbst über die Wortwahl sowohl im Ausgangs- alsauch im Zieltext entscheiden konnte, fungierte er doch gleichzeitig als Autor undals Übersetzer des Originals – er war in dieser Hinsicht also sein eigener Herr. DieÜbersetzung verliert bei Alešovec ihren Status, auch weil das Original der Übertragung 
nur noch von fern ähnelt und eher eine im weitesten Sinne verstandenedem slowenischen Zielpublikum emotionell angepasste kulturspezifische Adaption(Prunc 2007a: 170; Prunc 2008a: 117–119) bzw. Rewriting darstellt. Diese ist allerdings 
als ein „Durchgangsstadium zu originaler Produktion“ zu verstehen, in dem„das zu übersetzende Original in des Wortes wahrster Bedeutung zum Prätext“ 


(Lamping 1992: 221) wird. Alešovec fühlt sich im Umgang mit dem eigenen Ausgangstext 
viel freier – und auch produktiver, was einerseits auf Kosten der Treuezum Original geht, andererseits aber einen neuen selbständigen Text entstehen lässt. 

LITERATURVERZEICHNIS 

Primärliteratur 

Alešovec, Jakob: Laibacher Typen. In: Triglav. Zeitschrift für vaterländische Interessen, 
Jg. 4, aufeinander folgende Nummern von Februar bis Mai 1869.

Alešovec, Jakob: Ljubljanske slike. Podoba ljubljanskega sveta pod drobnogledom [Bilder 
aus Laibach. Das Bild der Laibacher Welt unter der Lupe]. Ljubljana: Selbstverlag 
1879 (zweite Ausgabe Ljubljana: Katoliška bukvarna 1911; dritte Ausgabe 
Ljubljana: Rokus 2003).

Alešovec, Jakob: Kako sem se jaz likal [Meine Entwicklungsgeschichte]. Ljubljana:
Prešernova družba 1973 (erste Ausgabe Ljubljana: Selbstverlag 1884).

Anonym: „Unser Programm“. Triglav. Zeitschrift für vaterländische Interessen, Jg. 1, 
Nr. 1 (3. Januar 1865), S. 1.

Anonym: „Journalistische Mefisto’s“. Triglav. Zeitschrift für vaterländische Interessen, 
Jg. 4, Nr. 41 (21. Mai 1869), unpag.

Jurkovic, Joso 1912: „Jakoba Alešovca izbrani spisi“ [Ausgewählte Schriften von Jakob 
Alešovec]. Ljubljanski zvon [Laibacher Glocke], Jg. 32, Nr. 4 (1912), S. 219.

L[enart], L[eopold]: „Jakoba Alešovca izbrani spisi. 1. zvezek“ [Ausgewählte 
Schriften von Jakob Alešovec. Heft 1]. Dom in svet [Die Heimat und die Welt], Jg. 
23, Nr. 1 (1910), S. 41.

Vošnjak, Josip: Spomini [Memoiren]. Ljubljana: Slovenska matica 1982. 

Sekundärliteratur 

Almasy, Karin: „… za Boga in véro, za cesarja in domovino!« Kultura prevajanja in 
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casopis [Historische Zeitung], Jg. 70, Nr. 3–4 (2016), S. 490–590. 

Almasy, Karin: „…za Boga in véro, za cesarja in domovino!“ Translationskultur und 
ideologische Steuerung in slowenischen Schullesebüchern (1848–1918). Dissertation 
zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie an der Karl-Franzens-
Universität Graz 2017. 

Globocnik, Damir: „Alešovcev Brencelj – pri slovenski satiricni list“ [ Jakob Alešovec 
und sein Brencelj – das erste slowenische satirische Blatt]. Zgodovinski casopis 
[Historische Zeitung], Jg. 58, Nr 1–2 (2004), S. 7–45. 


Gostiša, Nevenka et al. (Hg.): Repertoar slovenskih gledališc 1867–1967 [Repertoire 
der slowenischen Bühnen 1867–1967], Ljubljana: Slovenski gledališki muzej 
1967. 

Grdina, Igor: „Die Rezeption der Deutschen und der deutschen Kultur beislowenischen Intellektuellen von der Aufklärung bis zur Moderne“. In:
Bister, Feliks J. und Peter Vodopivec (Hg.): Kulturelle Wechselseitigkeit in 
Mitteleuropa, Ljubljana: Oddelek za zgodovino Filozofske fakultete 1995, 

S. 263–285. 
Hladnik, Miran: „Svobodno po nemškem poslovenjeno. Popularni prevedeni žanri 
19. stoletja“. In: Drago Bajt et al. (ur.): Prešeren v prevodih. Zbornik društva 
slovenskih književnih prevajalcev 8/9, Ljubljana, DSKP 1985, S. 191–199.

Hladnik, Miran: „Der Einfluss des Bilinguismus auf die Auswahl der zu übersetzenden 
narrativen Gattungen am Beispiel slowenischer Literatur“. In: Frank,
Armin Paul, Horst Turk und Kurt-Jürgen Maaß (Hrsg.): Übersetzen, verstehen, 
Brücken bauen: geisteswissenschaftliches und literarisches Übersetzen im 
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Hokenson, Jan Walsh und Marcella Munson: The Bilingual Text. History and Theory 
of Literary Self-Translation. Manchaster (UK)/Kinderhook (NY): St. Jerome 
Publishing 2007.

Javor Briški, Marija: „Angst – Trauer – Zorn: ‚Emotionen‘ im Nibelungenlied“.
Acta neophilologica, Jg. 45 (2012), Nr. 1/2, S. 87–96. 

Kmecl, Matjaž: Od pridige do kriminalke [Von der Predigt bis zur Kriminalgeschichte]. 
Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga 1975.

Kupsch-Losereit, Sigrid: „Übersetzen als transkultureller Verstehens- und Kommunikationsvorgang: 
andere Kulturen, andere Äußerungen“. In: Salnikow,
Nikolai (Hg.): Sprachtransfer – Kulturtransfer, Text, Kontext und Translation.
Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang 1995, S. 1–16.

Lah, Andrijan: „Pripovednik in humorist Jakob Alešovec“ [Der Erzähler und Humorist 
Jakob Alešovec]. In: Mahnic, Joža (Hg.): Kopitarjevi študijski dnevi I.
Predavanja iz 1989 in 1990 [Kopitars Studientage I. Vorträge aus den Jahren 
1989 und 1990]. Ljubljana: Zveza kulturnih organizacij Ljubljana Šiška 1991,

S. 41–46. 
Lamping, Dieter: „Die literarische Übersetzung als de-zentrale Struktur. Das Paradigma 
der Selbstübersetzung“. In: Kittel, Harald (Hg.): Geschichte, System,
Literarische Übersetzung. Histories, Systems, Literary Translations. Berlin: Erich 
Schmidt 1992, S. 212–227.

Lefevere, André: Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary fame. 
London, New York: Routledge 1992.
Matic, Dragan: Nemci v Ljubljani. 1861–1918 [Die Deutschen in Laibach 1861– 
1918]. Ljubljana: Oddelek za zgodovino Filozofske fakultete 2002. 


Maver, Igor: „Die Bedeutung von Lord Byrons slowenischen Übertragungen am 
Fallbeispiel von France Prešeren: die nationale Wiedergeburt und das politische 
Bewusstsein der Slowenen im 19. Jahrhundert“. In: Heppner, Harald 
und Mira Miladinovic Zalaznik (Hg.): Provinz als Denk- und Lebensform: der 
Donau-Karpatenraum im langen 19. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main etc.: P. 
Lang 2015, S. 111–126.

Maver, Igor: „War and race in C. K. Stead’s Talking about O’Dwyer”. Journal of 
Language, Literature and Culture, Jg. 62 (2015), Nr. 3, S. 176–181.

Maver, Igor: „Byronism on the Slovene territory in the 19th century“. La questioneromantica, Jg. 2 (2010), Nr. 1, S. 99–108.

Miladinovic Zalaznik, Mira: Deutsch-slowenische Wechselbeziehungen, Ljubljana:
Oddelek z germanistiko z nederlandistiko in skandinavistiko Filozofske fakultete 
Univerze v Ljubljani 2002.

Newmark, Peter: A Textboox of Translation. New York etc.: Phoenix ELT 1995. 

Prunc, Erich: Deutsch-slowenische/kroatische Übersetzung 1848–1918. Ein 
Werkstättenbericht. In: Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, Bd. 53, 2007a, S. 163–175.

Prunc, Erich: Entwicklungslinien der Translationswissenschaft. Von den Asymmetrien 
der Sprachen zu den Asymmetrien der Macht. Berlin: Frank & Tim-
me 2007b. 

Prunc, Erich: Die Funktion der Übersetzung im Prozess der Nationswerdung.
In: Görner, Franz (Hg.): Stabilität in Südosteuropa: eine Herausforderung für die 
Informationsvermittlung. Berlin: Osteuropa-Abteilung der Staatsbibliothek zu 
Berlin 2008a, S. 114–124.

Prunc, Erich: Zur Konstruktion von Translationskulturen. Schippel, Larissa (ur.):
Translationskultur – ein innovatives und produktives Konzept. Berlin: Frank & 
Timme 2008b. 19–42. 

Prunc, Erich: Zur ideologischen Steuerung von Übersetzungsprozessen. Mednarodni 
simpozij ob 20. obletnici Avstrijske citalnice Maribor (25.–27. 11. 2010).
Breitenfellner, Helene in Mateja Škofljanec (ur.): Avstrija_Slovenija: kulturni 
stiki. Österreich_Slowenien: kulturelle Begegnungen. Maribor: Univerzitetna 
knjižnica Maribor 2012. 85–107.

Pym, Anthony: Method in Translation History, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing 
1998. 

Seume, Johann. Gottfried: Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802. München: 
DTV 1985. 

Toury, Gideon: Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: 
John Benjamins 1995.

Udovic, Boštjan und Ana Podgornik: „Cultural diplomacy of slavic European 
Union member states: a cross-country analysis“. Baltic journal of European studies, 
Jg. 6 (2016), Nr. 2, S. 117–136. 


Vodopivec, Peter: „O socialnih in gospodarskih nazorih nemškega mešcanstva 
na Kranjskem od konca 60. do zacetka 80. let 19. stoletja“ [Die sozialen und 
wirtschaftlichen Anschauungen des deutschen Bürgertums in Krain Ende des 
60er bis Anfang der 80er Jahre des 19. Jahrhunderts]. Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino 
[Beiträge zur Zeitgeschichte], Jg. 27, Nr. 1–2 (1987), S. 7–32 

Wildhagen, Andreas: Das politische Feuilleton Ferdinand Kürnbergers. Themen und 
Technik einer literarischen Kleinform im Zeitalter des deutschen Liberalismus in 
Österreich, Frankfurt am Main etc.: P. Lang 1985.

Žigon, Tanja: Nemški casnik za slovenske interese – Triglav (1865–1870) [Deutsche 
Zeitschrift für slowenische Interessen Triglav (1865–1870)], Ljubljana: ZZDS 
2004. 

Žigon,Tanja:„Eine slowenische Stimme in deutscher Sprache: Triglav, Zeitschrift 
für vaterländische Interessen (1865–1870)“. In: Miladinovic Zalaznik, Mira et al. 
(Hg.): Benachrichtigen und vermitteln: deutschsprachige Presse und Literatur in 
Ost-Mittel- und Südosteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. München: IKGS-Verlag 
2007, S. 97–110.

Žigon, Tanja, Karin Almasy und Andrej Lovšin: Vloga in pomen prevajanja ucbenikov 
v 19. stoletju: Kulturnozgodovinski in jezikovni vidiki [Die Rolle und Bedeutung 
der Schulbuchübersetzung im 19. Jahrhundert. Kulturhistorische und sprachliche 
Aspekte]. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba FF 2017. 

Tanja Žigon 

Universität Ljubljanatanja.zigon@ff.uni-j.si 


Prevod ali adaptacija: Primer Jakoba Alešovca (1842–1901) 

Prispevek obravnava esejisticne skice z naslovom Ljubljanske slike izpod peresa 
publicista, dramatika in satirika Jakoba Alešovca (1842–1901), pri cemer je 
v ospredju vprašanje, ali gre za (samo)prevod prvotnega nemškega besedila v 
slovenšcino ali pa smemo govoriti o adaptaciji. Upoštevajoc avtorjevo življenjsko 
zgodbo in ustvarjalno pot kakor tudi norme, ki so veljale v slovenski prevajalski 
kulturi 19. stoletja, analiza pripelje do zakljucka, da je nemško izhodišcno besedilo 
avtorju/prevajalcu vecinoma predstavljalo zgolj predlogo za nastanek slovenskega 


ciljnega besedila, ki jo smemo razumeti kot vmesno postajo na poti k izvirni literarni 
produkciji. 

Kljucne besede: samoprevod, adaptacija, izhodišcno in ciljno besedilo (nemšcina/
slovenšcina), norme, kultura prevajanja v 19. stoletju 

Translation or Adaptation: A Case Study of Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901) 

The present paper addresses the essay sketches entitled Ljubljanske slike by the 
publicist, playwright and satirist Jakob Alešovec (1842–1901). It deals with the 
issue whether the texts in question are (self )translations from German into Slovenian 
or whether they should rather be considered adaptations.Taking the biography 
and opus of the author into consideration along with the dominant norms 
of the Slovenian translation culture in the 19th century, the paper shows that the 
German source text can be seen more as a textual outline of the Slovenian text and 
can thus be regarded as an intermediary stage of original production. 

Key words: self-translation, adaptation, source and target text (German/Slovenian), 
norms, translation culture in the 19th century 

Der Beitrag ist im Rahmen des Forschungsprogramms Interkulturelle literarurwisseschaftliche 
Studien (P6-0265) entstanden; die Autorin erkennt die finanzielle Unterstützung 
seitens der Slowenischen Forschungsagentur. 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.112.2.09-2Tabori G.:341.485(=411.16) 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.173-187 

Die Darstellbarkeit des Bösen: Zu George 
Taboris Holocaust-Literatur 

Špela Virant 

Abstract 

Das künstlerische Schaffen George Taboris lässt sich nicht nur einer Kunstgattung oder 
einer Nationalliteratur zuordnen, doch gerade seine Interdisziplinarität und sein Kosmopolitismus 
leisteten im ausgehenden 20. Jahrhundert einen wichtigen Beitrag zur europäischen 
Kultur. Im Beitrag wird sein Stück Mein Kampf aus einer interkulturellen Perspektive 
im Kontext der jüdisch-deutschen Beziehungen in Österreich der Nachkriegszeit 
betrachtet. Die Uraufführung des Stücks, das gegen die Mythisierung Hitlers und die 
Viktimisierung der Juden anschreibt, fand in einer Zeit statt, in der der Opfer-Status des 
österreichischen Staates ins Wanken geriet und das Judentum in Wien neues Selbstbewusstsein 
erlangte. 

Schlüsselwörter: George Tabori, Dramatik, Holocaust-Literatur, Juden in Wien, Ironie 


Als sich im Jahr 2014 George Taboris Geburtstag zum hundertsten Mal jährte,
gab es keine große Feier anlässlich des Jubiläums. Es mag sein, dass der 2007 verstorbene 
Künstler noch nicht lange genug tot war, um sich an ihn zu erinnern. Der 
Grund für das Schweigen könnte jedoch auch an der Unklarheit bezüglich der 
Zuständigkeiten liegen, denn Tabori, eigentlich György Tábori, lässt sich schwer 
einordnen. Als Theaterregisseur berühmt geworden, wurde seine Arbeit zunächst 
von der Theaterwissenschaft aufgearbeitet, erst spät fand sein schriftstellerisches 
Werk Beachtung in der Literaturwissenschaft. Noch schwieriger als die Zuständigkeit 
der Disziplinen zu bestimmen, ist seine Zuordnung zu einer nationalen 
Literatur. Tabori, 1914 in Budapest in einer jüdischen Familie geboren, machte 
eine Ausbildung im Hotelgewerbe in Berlin, emigrierte nach London, arbeitete 
als Auslandskorrespondent in Bulgarien und dem Nahen Osten, erhielt die britische 
Staatsbürgerschaft und arbeitete während des Zweiten Weltkriegs für den 
britischen Nachrichtendienst, zog nach dem Krieg in die USA, zunächst nach 
Hollywood, dann nach New York, kehrte 1971 zurück nach Europa, arbeitete 
in Deutschland und Österreich, schließlich starb er 2007 in Berlin. Seine ersten 
literarischen Texte verfasste und veröffentlichte er in englischer Sprache. Die in 
Europa entstandenen Stücke sind jedoch nur in deutscher Übersetzung erschienen 
und in deutscher Sprache uraufgeführt worden, so dass sie praktisch als Originale 
gelten können. Die meisten davon übersetzte Ursula Grützmacher-Tabori,
die dritte seiner vier Ehefrauen.1 Taboris literarisches Werk lässt sich deshalb nur 
schwer einer Nationalliteratur oder einem Sprachraum zuordnen.

Obwohl im 21. Jahrhundert multikulturelle Ansätze, postkoloniale Studien 
und Migrationsliteraturforschung in die Literaturwissenschaft Einzug fanden,
orientiert sich die Literaturgeschichtsschreibung immer noch an Nationalliteraturen. 
Die Migrationsliteratur ist zum Gegenstand germanistischer Literaturwissenschaft 
geworden, insoweit Migranten in deutscher Sprache schreiben und 
sich ihre Texte der deutschsprachigen Literatur zuordnen lassen. Zwischen den 
Konzepten von Nationalliteratur und Weltliteratur hat sich in der Literaturgeschichtsschreibung 
nie ein multikultureller und multilingualer Raum aufgetan.
Taboris Werk lässt sich aus zwei Gründen nicht der sogenannten Migrationsliteratur 
zuordnen: Erstens weil diese Bezeichnung die Thematisierung der Migration 
vorausgesetzt, die nicht sein Thema war, zweitens wegen der Sprache, in der 
seine Texte verfasst worden sind. Auch seine Biographie suggeriert für ihn eher 
den altmodischen Begriff des Kosmopoliten. Doch gerade weil sich seine Arbeit 
einer Einordnung entzieht, leistete sie einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte 
im mitteleuropäischen Raum. Im Folgenden soll dieser Beitrag am 
Beispiel seines 1987 im Akademietheater in Wien uraufgeführten Stücks Mein 

Zu den biographischen Angaben über George Tabori vgl. Feinberg 2003 . 


Kampf dargestellt werden. Das Stück wird im Rahmen seines Gesamtwerks und 
der sozial-politischen Umstände in Österreich zur Zeit seiner Uraufführung verortet, 
wobei besondere Aufmerksamkeit nicht einer klar definierbaren nationalen 
Literatur und Kultur, sondern den interkulturellen jüdisch-österreichischen Beziehungen 
gewidmet wird.

Taboris erste, in englischer Sprache geschriebene Stücke Flight into Egypt 
(1953) und The Emperor’s Clothes (1953) waren nicht erfolgreich, doch er widmete 
sich danach trotz des Misserfolgs intensiv dem Theater und wurde Mitglied des 
von Lee Strasberg geleiteten Actor’s Studio, was auch später seine Arbeit prägte.
Den ersten großen Erfolg brachte die deutsche Erstaufführung des Stücks Die 
Kannibalen in Berlin 1969, während die englischsprachige Uraufführung ein Jahr 
zuvor in New York relativ unbeachtet blieb. Das Stück, in dem er die Erinnerung 
an seinen in Auschwitz getöteten Vater Cornelius verarbeitet, ist der Beginn 
seiner Auseinandersetzung mit dem Holocaust, der in seinen späteren Prosatexten 
und Theaterstücken immer wieder thematisiert wird, so auch im Stück Mein 
Kampf (1987). Seine Werke können durchaus zur Holocaust-Literatur gezählt 
werden, doch gehört er nicht zu den Zeitzeugen im engeren Sinne, denn er berichtet 
nicht über eigene Erfahrungen aus den Konzentrationslagern, er selbst war 
nie interniert. Er berichtet über seine Erfahrungen als Familienangehöriger der 
Opfer, über die Schwierigkeit, mit dem Leid geliebter Menschen und der Trauer 
umzugehen, ohne dieses Leid selbst erfahren zu haben. „Tabori, dessen Vater in 
Auschwitz starb, übernimmt weder in Schriften noch in (Selbst)Inszenierungen 
die Perspektive der Opfer, aber er vergegenwärtigt ihr Leiden.“ (Huth 2008: 120) 
In seinen Werken spricht er über das Sprechen über den Holocaust, um so auch 
über den Holocaust sprechen zu können. Dies ist ein Weg, Tabus zu brechen: 

Bis zur Aufführung von Taboris Kannibalen und wieder lange Zeit danach 
herrschte auf Deutschlands Bühnen und in den Bühnenmanuskripten entweder 
eine Fixierung auf die Täterfiguren oder aber ein Darstellungs-Tabu, das 
es verbot, differenziert gestaltete jüdische Figuren an den Schauplätzen ihres 
Leidens agieren zu sehen. (Stümpel 2000: 49–50) 

Das Stück Die Kannibalen zeichnet sich durch eine komplexe dramaturgische 
Struktur aus, die für die Schauspieler eine Herausforderung darstellt. Sie übernehmen 
die Rollen von Söhnen, die die Figuren ihrer im Konzentrationslager 
Auschwitz getöteten Väter spielen, um sie so besser zu verstehen und das Trauma 
der Überlebenden zu überwinden. Die Geschichte der Väter, die im Lager spielt,
ist makaber. Der Lagerinsasse Puffi isst heimlich ein Stück Brot, die Mitgefangenen 
ertappen ihn dabei und töten ihn unabsichtlich. Da sie sehr unter dem Hunger 
leiden, wollen sie ihn kochen und aufessen, aber einer der Gefangenen, der als 


Onkel bezeichnet wird, lehnt es ab. Er plädiert dafür, trotz der Not die Würde zu 
bewahren und er zeigt ihnen den Weg, durch das Erzählen und das Rollenspiel 
ihre Menschlichkeit aufrecht zu erhalten und sich nicht zu Menschenfressern 
machen zu lassen. Doch auch er stirbt bei einem Tumult. Ein Aufseher zwingt die 
Lagerinsassen das von ihnen gekochte Menschenfleisch zu essen. Einige, die vom 
Onkel umgestimmt wurden, weigern sich nun und werden in der Gaskammer 
getötet. Nur zwei gehorchen und überleben.

Tabori stellt dadurch die Zuschreibung und Verfestigung der Rollen von Opfer 
und Täter in Frage. Er zeigt, dass Opfer auch Täter sein können und dass sich 
Menschen nicht auf eine Rolle reduzieren lassen. „Taboris Juden sind brutal, grotesk 
und bisweilen auch geschmacklos. Dadurch gibt er ihnen ihre Menschlichkeit 
wieder, die ihnen durch Sentimentalisierung und Sakralisierung ihrer Leiden 
entzogen wurde.“ (Roth 2003: 141) Mit der Opfer-Problematik beschäftigte sich 
Tabori auch in anderen Stücken, die vor dem Hintergrund des Rassismus in den 
USA spielen oder die Problematik des Vietnam-Krieg thematisieren. Am deutlichsten 
wird dieses Thema jedoch in dem Stück Weisman und Rotgesicht (1991)
ausgearbeitet, in dem es sich herausstellt, dass der Indianer Rotgesicht eigentlich 
der Halbjude Goldberg ist, der schließlich die Rolle eines Cowboys übernimmt.
Tabori relativiert dadurch nicht das Leid der Opfer, sondern versucht eine erneute 
Viktimisierung durch Rollenzuschreibung zu verhindern. Dabei wird jedoch 
nicht davon ausgegangen, dass sich die Rollen abschütteln lassen, um den ‘wahren’ 
Menschen zum Vorschein zu bringen, sondern vielmehr von der Wandelbarkeit 
und Widersprüchlichkeit des Menschen, der nacheinander oder gleichzeitig 
mehrere Rollen spielen kann. Eben das müssen auch die Schauspieler in dem 
Stück Die Kannibalen tun. Der Wechsel zwischen verschiedenen Spielebenen, der 
durch Kommentare und Autoreflexionen begleitet wird, verweist auf die seit dem 
Holocaust ausgiebig diskutierte Frage nach der Darstellbarkeit der Grausamkeiten, 
die sich im 20. Jahrhundert in Lagern, Kriegen und Genoziden ereigneten.
Auf der autoreflexiven Ebene wird in Taboris Texten dem Erzählen und dem 
schauspielerischen Nacherleben eine heilende Wirkung zugesprochen, die, auch 
wenn das Dargestellte nie authentisch vermittelt werden kann, sowohl dem Einzelnen 
wie auch der Gesellschaft ein Weiterleben ermöglicht.

Das Gegenstück zu Den Kannibalen stellt das Stück Mutters Courage (1981,
Uraufführung 1979) dar, und zwar als Versuch, die Geschichte von Taboris Mutter 
nachzuerzählen, die sich der Internierung in ein Lager entziehen konnte und den 
Krieg überlebte. In dem Stück, dem ein Prosatext vorausging, erzählt der Sohn 
die Geschichte der Mutter, die es wagte, einem deutschen Offizier in die Augen 
zu sehen und zu behaupten, dass sie eigentlich einen Schutzpass habe und nicht 
ins Lager gehöre, wodurch sie gerettet wird. Die Mutter hört der Erzählung zu,
ergänzt sie und korrigiert nach Bedarf ihren Sohn. Diese Einwürfe führen auch 


hier eine autoreflexive Ebene in die Erzählung ein, die die Möglichkeiten des 
Erinnerns und die Funktionen des Erzählens auslotet. Die erzählte Geschichte 
selbst zeigt, wie sich ein System, das auf Entmenschlichung basiert, durch Mut 
zur Menschlichkeit unterlaufen lässt. 

Tabori beschäftigte sich immer wieder einerseits mit dem Holocaust und der 
jüdischen Identität, andererseits mit deren Darstellbarkeit in der Kunst wie auch 
mit den Funktionen der Erzählkunst und des Theaters im Allgemeinen. Beide 
Themenschwerpunkte werden im Stück Goldberg-Variationen (1994, Uraufführung 
1991) meisterhaft verflochten. Das Stück spielt im Theater, es zeigt die 
Entstehung einer Inszenierung und endet, als sich der Vorhang für die Premiere 
dieser fiktiven Inszenierung hebt. Mr. Jay, der fiktive Regisseur, der mit Jahwe assoziiert 
wird, will mit Hilfe seines Regieassistenten Goldberg, der den Holocaust 
überlebte, die Bibel auf der Bühne dramatisch darstellen. Diese Konstellation ermöglicht 
es Tabori all seine Kunstfertigkeit bei der Dialoggestaltung auszuspielen 
und mit leichter Hand, die vor Witz, Ironie, Zotte und Kalauer nicht zurückschreckt, 
komplexe Themen zu vermitteln.

In Taboris Gesamtwerk, in dem, wie aus der kurzen Darstellung ersichtlich,
die Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Holocaust und der jüdischen Identität immer 
wieder einen Schwerpunkt bilden, nimmt sein Stück Mein Kampf (1987), das zu 
seinem meistgespielten Text wurde, eine besondere Stellung ein, und zwar nicht 
nur wegen der Thematik und der Ausgestaltung des Textes, sondern auch wegen 
des zeitgeschichtlichen Kontexts, in dem die Premiere stattfand. Im Untertitel 
wird Mein Kampf als Farce bezeichnet.2 Der Aufbau ist, verglichen mit anderen 
Texten Taboris, relativ konventionell. Die Gliederung in fünf Akte erinnert an die 
traditionelle Dramenstruktur. Diese formelle Anlehnung an die Dramentradition 
hebt das Provokative des Stücks noch stärker hervor. Provokativ ist schon der Titel, 
der auf Adolf Hitlers Buch verweist, das, mit Ausnahme der 2016 erschienenen 
kritischen Ausgabe, in Deutschland und Österreich nicht nachgedruckt und 
verkauft werden darf. Provokativ ist auch der humorvolle und ironische Ton, in 
dem das Stück über die traumatische Vergangenheit spricht.3 Zwar wurde Hitler 
bereits 1940 von Charlie Chaplin in dem Film Der große Diktator parodiert, doch 
im deutschsprachigen Raum war im Kontext der Vergangenheitsbewältigung 
die Verbindung von Holocaust mit Humor bis zur Premiere von Taboris Stück 
praktisch unmöglich, da sie als despektierlich gegenüber den Opfern galt und 
den Verdacht einer Nähe zu Holocaustleugnern und Neonazisten weckte. Dieser 

2 In der Forschungsliteratur werden auch Begriffe wie theologischer Schwank (Pott 1997: 248–

269), Volksstück (Thunecke 1993: 246–272) und Tragödie (Liessmann 1997: 81) als mögliche 

Gattungsbezeichnungen in Erwägung gezogen. 

3 Zur Komplexität des Humors in diesem Stück vgl. Höyng 1998. 


Verdacht kam hier wegen seiner Biographie und seiner vorherigen literarischen 
Texte nicht auf. Die Gräuel werden in seinem Stück auch nicht verharmlost, sondern 
durch die Kontraste und Wendungen noch suggestiver vermittelt.

Das Stück zeigt die Genese des großen Diktators. Doch der fiktive Hitler 
wird in der Personenkonstellation zu einer Nebenfigur degradiert. Die Hauptfigur 
ist Schlomo Herzl, ein jüdischer Bibelverkäufer, dem zur Seite steht der 
jüdische Koch Lobkowitz, der an einem Gott-Komplex leidet und vielleicht auch 
tatsächlich ein Gott ist.4 Die Geschichte spielt am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts 
in Wien, im Männerasyl in der Blutgasse, wo alle drei, von Misserfolgen geplagt,
Zuflucht finden.5 Der dramatische Konflikt erwächst aus den Verwicklungen um 
Schlomos vermeintliche Autobiographie, die er als „Mein Kampf“ betiteln will,
aber nie wirklich schreibt. Am Beginn des Stücks, das auch als Inversion des Passah-
Festes interpretiert werden kann, indem statt der symbolischen Neugeburt 
des jüdischen Volkes der Holocaust ankündigt wird (vgl. Haas 2000: 161–198),
kümmert sich Schlomo um den jungen Hitler, der nach seinem Scheitern an der 
Kunstakademie sehr unbeholfen ist. Der Jude Schlomo macht Hitler zu dem, den 
die Zuschauer aus der Geschichte kennen: Er gestaltet seine Frisur und seinen 
Bart und er zeigt ihm den Weg in die Politik. Er beschützt ihn vor Frau Tod, die 
nach ihm sucht, doch es stellt sich heraus, dass seine Sorge unbegründet ist, da sie 
ihn nur als Zuarbeiter braucht. Im letzten Akt wird die Stimmung düster. Hitler,
der inzwischen bereits Erfolge feiert, sendet seine Gehilfen aus, um nach Schlomos 
Buch zu suchen, da er fürchtet, es könnte zu viel über ihn verraten. Die Suche 
bleibt erfolglos, aber die Gehilfen streichen die Wände braun und hinterlassen 
eine Vorahnung kommender Ereignisse, über die Schlomo zwar nicht Bescheid 
weiß, wohl aber Lobkowitz und die Zuschauer. Auf Lobkowitzs Anraten hin, der 
den Hunger der Konzentrationslager vorausahnt, verspeist Schlomo das geliebte 
Huhn, das von Hitlers Gehilfen geschlachtet wurde.

Neben der Literarisierung von Hitler verwendet Tabori in diesem Stück auchAnspielungen an historische Persönlichkeiten – Schlomo Herzel erinnert an 
Theodor Herzel, Hitlers Gehilfe Himmlischst an Heinrich Himmler. Die Personifizierung 
des Todes wird durch die Differenz zwischen dem grammatikalischen 

4 „Lobkowitz ist nicht Gott, aber das Spiel mit Lobkowitz ermöglicht es Herzl, mit Gott, dem 

echten, zu sprechen.“ (Scholz 2002: 112). Zur ausführlichen Diskussion des Verhältnisses zwischen 

Lobkowitz und Gott vgl. Scholz (2002: 111–116). 
5 Ivar Oxaal kommentiert Hitlers Aufzeichnungen, in denen er erzählt, er habe die Juden in Wien

anfangs gar nicht bemerkt: “This was a tricky way of attempting to make amends to the reader for

his earlier lack of racial awareness, because he knew, having himself lived in a men’s hostel north 

of the canal on Meldemannstrasse from December 1909, that the Brigittenau district contained

the major concentration of the highly visible, impoverished, Jews from Galicia.” (Oxaal 1987:

28) Die Naivität von Taboris junger Hitlerfigur steht nicht völlig im Widerspruch mit disem

historischen Bild. 


Geschlecht und dem Geschlecht der Figur verfremdet. Schlomos junge Geliebte 
Gretchen erinnert an die literarische Figur aus Goethes Faust, aber auch an 
Margarete aus Paul Celans Todesfuge.6 Dadurch werden auf der Ebene der Namensgebung 
historische Fakten mit Fiktion vermischt, was auch auf der Ebene 
der dargestellten Geschichte passiert, in der hinlänglich bekannte Daten ausHitlers Biographie mit Fiktion verwoben werden. Dadurch entstehen zahlreiche 
komische Effekte, vor allem aber eine durchaus ernsthafte Hinterfragungder Geschichtsschreibung, die zwar objektive historische Wahrheiten vermittelnwill, durch die Herstellung von Zusammenhängen und ihre Versprachlichung jedoch 
auch Interpretationsprozesse verwendet, wie sie in der Literaturproduktionund -rezeption zur Herstellung von Fiktion gebräuchlich sind. Taboris autoreflexive 
Texte, besonders beide Stücke, in denen er sich den Lebensgeschichtenseiner Eltern anzunähern versucht – also Die Kannibalen und Mutters Courage–, vermitteln das Ausloten der Möglichkeit, wie Fiktion sich der historischenWahrheit nähern kann, und zwar nicht durch verlässliche Vermittlung von Daten, 
die nur rational verarbeitet werden, sondern durch das Angebot, empathischdie Geschichte nachzuerleben. Der Holocaust ist ein Teil der Geschichte des 20. 
Jahrhunderts, der nur durch Zahlen und Daten in seiner Bedeutung und seinenFolgen nicht erfassbar ist. Erst ein empathischer, narrativer Vorgang macht dietraumatischen, der Heilung bedürfenden Nachwirkungen sowie die Warnungen 
vor möglichen Wiederholungen nachvollziehbar. Tabori vermittelt in seinenTexten nicht nur negative Gefühle, sondern stellt ihnen immer auch Liebe undSympathie gegenüber, sowie den Mut, sie im Alltag zu leben, auch auf die Gefahrhin, dass dadurch Figuren wie Schlomo naiv oder beschränkt wirken. Schlomosfreundschaftliche Zuneigung zu Hitler wird missbraucht und er sitzt am Endedes Stücks eindeutig als Verlierer vor dem geschlachteten Huhn, dem Symbolseiner liebenden Hingabe. Das Stück endet trotzdem versöhnlich kokett, wennauch nicht ohne Ironie: Gretchen küsst Schlomos Nase, den Körperteil, der vonden Nationalsozialisten als besonderes Rassenmerkmal der Juden oft karikiert 
wurde (vgl. Tabori 1994: 203).

Taboris Theater und Literatur wurden im Kontext der Diskussion über die 
Darstellbarkeit des Holocaust bereits eingehend untersucht. Diese Diskussion 
wurde 1951 von Theodor W. Adornos Aufsatz Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft mit 
dem Diktum „nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch“ angestoßen 
(Adorno 1977: 30). Als Reaktion darauf haben sich drei Grundpositionen 
gebildet: Die erste vertritt eine Art Darstellungsverbot; die zweite, in Anschluss 

Eine ausführliche Studie zur Intertextualität bei Tabori bietet Alice Huth, die sich besonders 
auf Bezüge zu Shakespeare, Lessing und Kafka auf der Basis von Renate Lachmanns Theorie 
der Intertextualität konzentriert, und zwar „als Formen ästhetischer Auseinandersetzung mit 
Auschwitz“ (Huth 2008: 120). 


an Adornos spätere Antwort auf Enzensbergers Widerspruch, vertritt die Position, 
dass ein literarisches Engagement trotz der grundsätzlichen Undarstellbarkeit 
notwendig sei, um nicht in Zynismus zu verfallen; die dritte hingegen verweist 
auf eine Literatur, die keine Repräsentation des Leids ist, sondern sich hermetisch 
gegen eine realistische Widergabe von Wirklichkeit sperrt und nicht als 
Abbild, sondern als Ausdruck des Leids wahrnehmbar ist (vgl. Adorno 1973:
355). Dies kann nur durch eine Desautomatisierung der Wahrnehmung erreicht 
werden: „Künstlerisch zu erreichen sind die Menschen überhaupt nur noch durch 
den Schock“ (Adorno 1970: 476). Auf eine vierte Position verwies Ruth Klüger,
die nicht von dem Kunstrezipienten ausgeht, sondern von dem Autor, der die 
Literatur braucht, „um sich seelisch über Wasser zu halten“ (Klüger 1992: 126).
Tabori integrierte all diese Bedenken in seine Texte, ging nicht auf die bereits 
etablierte Hermetisierung ein, noch griff er zurück auf pure Abbildung, sondern 
fand neue Möglichkeiten, das Theaterpublikum zu schockieren.7 Durch Humor 
und Ironie, durchflochten mit Autoreflexion, schafft er eine lockere Atmosphäre,
die plötzlich in Düsternis umkippen kann. Schon dieses Umkippen schockiert.
Der zweite Schock kommt, wenn sich das Publikum seiner eigenen Rezeptionsvorgänge 
bewusst wird. Was von der Tabori-Forschung bisher jedoch weniger 
beachtet wurde, ist die Interpretationsmöglichkeit, dass Taboris Kombination von 
Humor und Autoreflexion die Debatte über die Darstellbarkeit des Holocaust 
selbst ironisiert und sie in die Tradition dessen einreiht, was Adorno in dem bereits 
erwähnten Aufsatz Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft als die absolute „Verdinglichung, 
die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte“ 
(Adorno 1977: 30), bezeichnete. Tabori gelang es, die Problematik des Holocaust 
und seiner Darstellbarkeit aus den in sich verschlossenen akademischen Debatten 
wieder in die Öffentlichkeit zu bringen. „In Taboris Theaterarbeit können 
die Witze zwar die Katastrophe überrumpeln, aber sie bringen das Trauma der 
Erinnerung nicht zum Schweigen.“ (Dahlke 1997: 154) Taboris literarische Aufarbeitung 
der deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte, die die Traumata nicht leugnet oder 
verdrängt, aber auch nicht auf Schuldzuweisungen und unversöhnlichen Vorwürfen 
insistiert, stieß in Wien in den späten 1980er Jahren auf offene Ohren, was 
in Bezug auf die Geschichte keineswegs selbstverständlich war. Die Inszenierung 
des Stücks im Akademietheater des Burgtheaters, also in der zentralen kulturellen 
Institution der spätbürgerlichen Selbstinszenierung, markiert einen Wendepunkt 
in der Nachkriegsgeschichte der deutsch-jüdischen Beziehungen, die in Österreich 
noch problematischer war als in Deutschland. 

Berghahn sieht in Taboris „Heiterkeit der Verzweiflung“ eine Nähe zu Adornos ästhetischer 
Theorie, zweifelt jedoch, ob „Adorno der polemischen Komik Taboris in allen Stücken zugestimmt 
hätte“ (12). 


Schon ein flüchtiger Blick auf die Statistik des Wiener Judentums zeigt die 
wichtigste Ursache für diese problematische Beziehung. Im Jahr 1848 lebten in 
Wien 4.000 Juden, im Jahr 1860 waren es 6.200, was etwa 2,2 % der Gesamtbevölkerung 
betrug, im Jahr 1923 schon 201.000, d. h. 10,8 % der Gesamtbevölkerung 
(vgl. Schubert 2008: 79). Das Bildungsniveau war recht hoch: „Im Studienjahr 
1889/90 waren an der Universität Wien 22 % der Studierenden an der 
juridischen Fakultät Juden, an der medizinischen Fakultät 48 % und an der philosophischen 
Fakultät 15 %.“ (Ebd.: 80) Doch „Ende 1945 zählte die Israelitische 
Kultusgemeinde keine 5.000 Mitglieder“ (Embacher 1995: 21).

Am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts stammten etwa 40 Prozent der Wiener Bevölkerung 
aus nicht-deutschen Gebieten der Habsburger Monarchie (vgl. Rozenblit 
1992: 13). Etwa 25 Prozent der jüdischen Bevölkerung stammte aus Galizien, die 
meisten jedoch waren assimiliert, gebildet und sozial und finanziell besser gestellt 
(vgl. ebd.: 12). Marsha L. Rozenblit sieht darin den Grund, dass in Wien radikaler 
deutscher Nationalismus nie populär wurde (vgl. ebd.: 13).In ihrer umfangreichen 
Studie zu den Juden Wiens in der Zeit zwischen 1867 bis 1914 stellt sie fest, dass 
sie in dieser Zeit bestrebt waren, „sowohl eine jüdische als auch eine europäische 
Identität herauszubilden, und sie waren ehrlich davon überzeugt, daß ihnen dies 
schließlich auch gelingen würde“ (Rozenblit 1989: 195). Steven Beller, der die 
Epoche bis 1938 untersuchte, vertritt die These, dass sich nicht nur die Juden der 
österreichischen Kultur anpassten, sondern auch die österreichische Kultur stark 
von ihnen geprägt wurde (vgl. Beller 1989: 70). Er macht jedoch darauf aufmerksam, 
dass man nicht vereinfachend von einem einheitlichen Einfluss ausgehen 
kann, sondern von einer Vielfalt von unterschiedlichen Arten, wie die jüdische 
Herkunft Einzelne in ihrer Ideenwelt beeinflusst hat (vgl. ebd.: 82–83). Er stellt 
fest, dass um 1900 die jüdische intellektuelle Elite die Modernität der Wiener 
Kultur entscheidend bestimmte: “it was indeed its Jews which made Vienna what 
it was in the realm of modern culture” (ebd.: 244). Hervorzuheben ist auch die 
Bedeutung der Juden für das österreichische Theater der Zwischenkriegszeit, vor 
allem die Bedeutung Max Reinhardts und des Yiddischen Theaters in Wien (vgl.
Silverman 2012: 172, 142).

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg fehlte nicht nur im Theater, sondern in ganz 
Österreich jene Schicht, die am Beginn des Jahrhunderts Wien zu einer modernen, 
weltoffenen Stadt machte, zum europäischer Zentrum von Kunst und Kultur.
Der Germanist Harry Zohn besuchte 1956 Wien nach langer Zeit und notierte: 

Heute befinden sich die Wiener Juden nicht mehr im Hauptstrom des Stadtlebens, 
sie können nicht länger den so wichtigen ´Sauerteig´ beistellen; im 
praktischen Sinn also ist das Nachkriegs-Wien eine ´Stadt ohne Juden´. Ich 
meinerseits hege keinen Zweifel, daß der Provinzialismus, welcher im täglichen 


Leben wuchert, die Verrohung des Geschmackes, die Verminderung des Kosmopolitismus 
der Stadt, in gewissem Maße der Dezimierung der jüdischen 
Bevölkerung zuzuschreiben ist. (Zohn 1956: 14). 

Dieses von Zohn beobachtete Absinken in die Provinzialität war für die Stadt 
sicherlich eine Katastrophe, doch die wenigen in Wien verbliebenen oder zurückgekehrten 
Juden hatten größere Probleme als die Verrohung des Geschmacks,8 
dazu gehörten: der „ ab 1948 immer offener auftretende Antisemitismus“ (Embacher 
1995: 87); die Spannungen zwischen den alt-österreichischen assimilierten 
Juden und den neu zugereisten Ost-Juden sowie zwischen Anhängern unterschiedlicher 
politischer Parteien und Ideologien; die Auswirkungen des problematischen 
Status Österreichs als erstes Opfer von Nazi-Deutschland, der es dem 
Staat ermöglichte, keine Wiedergutmachung zu zahlen.9 Erst Anfang der 1990er 
Jahre begann sich die Situation in dem Land, in dem nie eine gründliche Entnazifizierung 
stattgefunden hatte (vgl. Wistrich 1992: 241), zu ändern: „Im Juli 
1991 gab Bundeskanzler Franz Vranitzky im Rahmen einer Erklärung zu Jugoslawien 
eine vor allem im Ausland vielbeachtete Stellungnahme über Österreichs 
Mitverantwortung im ´Dritten Reich´ ab.“ (Embacher 1995: 260)

Die Demütigungen und Beleidigungen, die die Juden in Österreich durchden Antisemitismus (vgl. ebd.: 95) und die Freisprüche für Nazi-Verbrechererfahren mussten (vgl. ebd.: 252), schwächten ihr Selbstbewusstsein. Erst inden 1980er Jahren kommt es zu einem Generationswechsel: „Die überaltertenund in die Minderheit geratenen ‘Wiener Juden’ sahen sich allmählich von einer 
kritischen und selbstsicheren, jüngeren Generation abgelöst.“ (Ebd.: 256)
Eine Reihe von Veranstaltungen der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde in der ersten 
Hälfte der 1980er Jahre stärkte das neue jüdische Selbstbewusstsein,10 das 
sich von der Waldheim Affäre 1986, die als Katalysator für eine in breiteren Gesellschafsschichten 
stattfindende Vergangenheitsbewältigung gesehen werden 

8 
Vgl. auch die literarischen Darstellungen dazu: „Diese Kombination von jüdischer Vergangenheit 
und judenloser Gegenwart – und dazwischen die Geschichte des Holocaust – verursacht ein 
Spannungsverhältnis, das zugleich eines der Hauptthemen in den Romanen jüngerer jüdischer 
Autoren ist: der Dualismus zwischen Juden und Nichtjuden, der zum übergroßen Teil in 
Kommunikationsunfähigkeit gipfelt.“ (Kunne 2000: 274) 

9 
Vgl. dazu auch Robert Knight, der auf das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen der Selbstdarstellung des 
Staats als Opfer und dem Antisemitismus in der österreichischen Nachkriegsgesellschaft verweist 
(Knight 1992: 221). 

10 
„Den Schritt aus der Anonymität ins Rampenlicht der Öffentlichkeit drückte die Israelitische 
Kultusgemeinde durch die gemeinsam mit der Stadt Wien und dem ‘Jewish Welcome Service’ 
organisierte Ausstellung ‘Versunkene Welt’ (1984), dem Besuch des New Yorker Bürgermeisters 
Edward Koch (1984), der Eröffnung des Chajes Gymnasiums (1984) oder mit der 1985 in Wien 
stattgefundenen Tagung des ‘World Jewish Congress’ aus.“ (Embacher 1995: 257) 


kann (vgl. Mitten 1992: 268),11 nicht auf Dauer erschüttern ließ (vgl. Embacher 
1995: 260). 

Ende der achtziger Jahre konnte die Israelitische Kultusgemeinde die bishervergeblich beanspruchte Rolle einer moralischen Instanz gewinnen, was nichtnur auf den – sowohl auf jüdischer als auch auf nichtjüdischer Seite stattgefundenen 
– Generationswechsel, sondern hauptsächlich auf das in den achtziger Jahrenangeschlagene Opferimage Österreichs zurückzuführen ist. (Ebd.: 261) 

Auch Evelyn Adunka hebt die Veränderung innerhalb der jüdischen Gemeinde 
Wiens wie auch in ihren Beziehungen zum nicht-jüdischen Wien hervor, die 
Ende der 1980er Jahre vollzogen war. Sie berichtet über zahlreiche Veranstaltungen, 
die diese neue Selbstsicherheit ausdrückten. 

1990 fand erstmals ein jüdisches Straßenfest mit Musik, Ausstellungen und 
Ständen aus Anlaß des Jom Jeruschalajim statt, das seither in der Umgebung 
des Stadttempels und später im Palais Lichtenstein alljährlich wiederholt wird.
Eine selbstbewußte jüdische Gemeinde öffnete sich damit und zeigte sich ihrer 
Mitwelt in einer Form, wie es noch bis in die siebziger und achtziger Jahre 
völlig undenkbar gewesen wäre. (Adunka 2000: 527) 

Dieses Selbstbewusstsein, das Auftreten in der Öffentlichkeit und der Zugewinn 
an öffentlicher Bedeutung, die wahrscheinlich sowohl auf den in Zweifel 
gezogenen Opfer-Status Österreichs als auch auf den Generationswechsel zurückzuführen 
sind, darf jedoch nicht über die Tatsache hinwegtäuschen, dass Antisemitismus 
nach wie vor weiter Existierte. Umfragen zufolge bejahten im Jahr 
1973 21 Prozent die Frage, ob es besser sei, keine Juden im Land zu haben, im 
Jahr 1991 hingegen 15 Prozent der Befragten. Doch „1986 erklärten 35 Prozent 
der Befragten, sie stünden den Juden freundlich gegenüber, 1991 halbierte sich 
dieser Wert auf 18 Prozent, wohingegen sich die Ablehnung von sieben auf vierzehn 
Prozent verdoppelte.“ (Wassermann 2000: 312–313.)

Wenn die Uraufführung von Taboris Mein Kampf im Kontext dieses erstarkenden 
Selbstbewusstseins der jüdischen Gemeinde in Wien betrachtet wird,
dann erscheint die Aufmerksamkeit, die ihr zuteilwurde, im neuen Licht. Dieparodistische Darstellung Hitlers im ersten Teil des Stücks deutet auf eineselbstbewusste Position des Beobachters hin, der sich über den einst gefeierten 
und gefürchteten Diktator lustig machen kann. Es bedeutet nicht nur die 

11 
Ähnlich urteilt auch Matthias Konzett: „With Waldheim, finally, Austria’s silenced past became 
an open public theme and allowed writers to articulate their concerns with more national and 
international attention than ever before… Jewish themes and concerns now received more 
resonance in Austria.” (Konzett 2000: 323) 


Entmythisierung Hitlers, sondern auch eine Aufwertung seiner Opfer. Nochwichtiger ist jedoch die Ablehnung der Festschreibung von Opferrollen, dieTabori bereits durch seine früheren Stücke veranschaulichte, die aber erst jetztbei einem breiteren Publikum Gehör fand, das selbst die gesellschaftliche Lastder Rollenzuschreibungen sowohl der Opfer als auch der Täter einsah und sichdavon zu befreien suchte. Tabori leistete eine wichtige Vorarbeit mit seinenStücken, die zum Teil bereits in den USA entstanden sind. Die geographischeDistanz und die Erfahrung mit dem Rassismus und den Emanzipationsbewegungen 
in den USA verhalfen ihm schon viel früher zu den Einsichten, die inWien erst Jahrzehnte später verstanden wurden. Doch obwohl der Augenblick,
in dem die Uraufführung von Taboris nach langjährigem Schaffen ausgereiften 
Kunstwerk mit den gesellschaftlichen Prozessen in Mitteleuropa glücklichzusammenfiel, längst vergangen ist, so werden Rollen immer wieder von neuem 
zu- und -festgeschrieben, bestimmte Bevölkerungsgruppen kriminalisiert,
andere viktimisiert. Zehn Jahre nach Taboris Tod und drei Jahrzehnte nach 
der Uraufführung von Mein Kampf ließe sich dieses Werk wieder aktualisieren. 
Darüber hinaus sind seine Werke ein bleibender Beitrag zur literarischen Aufarbeitung 
von individuellen und kollektiven traumatischen Ereignissen. 

LITERATURVERZEICHNIS 

Adorno, Theodor W.: Ästhetische Theorie. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7. Frank


furt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.
Adorno, Theodor W.: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft. Gesammelte Schriften. B.

10. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977.
Adorno,Theodor W.: Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 6. Frankfurt 
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973.
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Feinberg, Anat: George Tabori. München: DTV, 2003. 


Haas, Birgit: Das Theater des George Tabori: vom Verfremdungseffekt zur Postmoderne. 
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Špela Virant

Universität Ljubljanaspela.virant@guest.arnes.si 


Upodobljivost zla: literatura holokavsta Georgea Taborija 

Prispevek z medkulturnega vidika obravnava dramsko delo Georgea Taborija,
zlasti igro Mein Kampf, ki se z ironizacijo upira mitiziranju Hitlerja in viktimizaciji 
Judov, v kontekstu judovsko-nemških odnosov v Avstriji po drugi svetovni vojni.
Igra je bila prvic uprizorjena leta 1987 na Dunaju, v casu, ko je status Avstrije kot 
žrtve nacizma postajal vprašljiv, Judje na Dunaju pa so prvic po vojni spet zaceli 
pridobivati samozavest. 

Kljucne besede: George Tabori, dramatika, holokavst, Judje na Dunaju, ironija 


The Representability of Evil: George Tabori’s Holocaust-Literature 

The article tries to read the plays by George Tabori from an intercultural point of 
view. The focus is on his play Mein Kampf, in which he uses irony to oppose the 
threatening mythologization of Hitler. It was first staged in 1987 in Vienna, when 
the status of Austria as a victim of Nazi-Germany became questionable and the 
Jews in Vienna regained their self-awareness for the first time after World War II. 

Key words: George Tabori, Drama, Holocaust-Literature, Jews in Vienna, irony 

Der Beitrag ist im Rahmen des Forschungsprogramms Interkulturelle literarurwisseschaftliche 
Studien (P6-0265) entstanden; die Autorin erkennt die finanzielle Unterstützung 
seitens der Slowenischen Forschungsagentur an. 


ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA UDK: 821.133.1'04.09-13:821.111'04.09-13 
DOI: 10.4312/an.50.1-2.189-201 

Beatrix, un roman courtois au sein du 
cycle de la croisade 

Tadeja Dermastja 

Synopsis 

Dans cet article on essaie d’exposer certains éléments du fabuleux dans la branche médiévale 
de Beatrix qui a été intégrée au cycle épique français de la croisade et la comparer au 
poème médiéval anglais portant le même titre. La question qui se pose dans ce sens est 
pourquoi le thème de cette chanson pouvait-il être intéressant dans les deux milieux littéraires 
et quelles sont les circonstances historiques et littéraires qui l’ont fait connu dans 
les différents cadres culturels européens. Il faudra aussi rechercher tous contextes de cette 
matière qui est entrée dans le genre épique, mais qui pourrait représenter un autre genre 
poétique médiéval ; que ce soit la poésie courtoise soit la poésie chevaleresque, la branche 
de Beatrix a été jointe aux chansons des croisades, celles-ci étant majoritairement les 
chansons de geste. La branche de Beatrix raconte l’histoire de la naissance du Chevalier 
au cygne, dont la légende était très répandue dans le continent européen, surtout sous la 
forme de la légende de Lohengrin. On démontrera que la matière de Beatrix était connue 
en Angleterre pour des raisons purement historiques et qu’en effet cette matière y a préexisté 
et elle lui a été rendue après s’être proliférée dans le continent. 

Mots-clefs: Chanson de geste, Godefroi de Bouillon, Cycle de la croisade, branche de 
Beatrix, croisades, poésie médiévale, fabuleux 


La chanson de geste s’appuie autant sur les chroniques que sur les légendes, elle 
s’éloigne pourtant des épopées homériques, demeurant à l’écart des mythologies 
où il y a les mélanges du monde des dieux et des hommes et s’approchant des 
sagas qui racontent les histoires des familles où le monde des dieux disparaît. La 
matière épique française est fortement basée sur l’époque carolingienne, les hagiographies, 
les traditions orales, les chroniques latines et sur l’idéologie féodale, 
ce qui crée une mythologie particulière, car elle implique l’imaginaire chrétien et,
très rarement, le monde ontologique provenant des légendes antérieures à la christianisation 
de l’Ouest. La pléiade des chansons de geste réunies aux cycles, fait 
partie de la matière épique du Charlemagne, ce qui représente la partie majeure 
des chansons de geste en France.

En dehors de la matière carolingienne qui est souvent reprise en trois cycles 
(Labarthe, 2006 : 83) se trouvent les épopées des croisades qui n’ont été étudiées de 
près que récemment et les chercheurs contemporains en distinguent amplement 
deux cycles (Labarthe, 2006 : 99 ; cf. Bender, 35-83) : le premier cycle comprendrait 
la Chanson d’Antioche en tant que chanson principale du cycle et le deuxième,
les chansons ayant pour noyau la chute de Jérusalem. Pourtant, ces classifications 
sont faites du point du vue historique et non-contextuel, parce que presque toutes 
les chansons de ce cycle relatent les épisodes de la vie du héros Godefroi de Bouillon, 
c’est pourquoi les classifications récentes redoublent la présence de certaines 
chansons dans les deux cycles (p.ex. les branches relatant l’enfance du héros sont 
dans les deux cycles) et Judith Labarthe constate que: « Les deux cycles forment 
un sous-genre épique non homogène. Ils sont constitués d’une série de formes limites,
se combinant chaque fois avec des genres apparentés comme l’historiographie, le roman 
chevaleresque, le conte ; la latitude dont jouit le genre épique s’y manifeste pleinement » 
(Labarthe, 2006 : 99 – 100).

Godefroi de Bouillon, chef militaire de la première croisade, représente l’actant 
principal de plusieurs branches de nature biographique auxquelles sontrajoutées les branches intitulés Beatrix et Elioxe (les deux représentent La 
Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne)1. Aussi celles qui puisent des éléments biographiques 
ne peuvent pas représenter la chanson de geste au sens propre, elles sontun mélange des genres, allant du conte au roman chevaleresque, transfigurantla chanson de geste en fabuleux des légendes du monde ontologique. Ce qui 

1 
Dans l’édition intégrale de tous les manuscrits du Cycle de la croisade, plusieurs auteurs américains 
ont donné les noms suivants aux manuscrits contenant les poèmes versifiés, publiées en huit volumes 
dans la publication de l’Université d’Alabama : La Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne (avec les versions 
d’Elioxe et de Beatrix), Le Chevalier au Cygne, La fin d’Elias, Les enfances Godefroi, La Chanson 
d’Antioche, Les Chétifs, La Chanson de Jérusalem ; s’ensuivent les « continuations » de Jérusalem : La 
Chrétienté Corbaran, La Prise d’Acre, La Mort Godefroi et La Chanson des Rois Baudouin. (Mickel et 
Nelson, 1977 : xi). 


serait intéressant d’analyser de plus près est ce fabuleux qui est entré dans leslittératures française, anglaise, espagnole et allemande, cette dernière inaugurantl’histoire du chevalier au cygne dans la saga de Lohengrin, interprété aussi enmusique wagnérienne. Bien que la légende de Lohengrin soit bien analysée dansle milieu allemand, il y a toujours quelques lacunes dans les études médiévalesanglaises et françaises à propos de cette matière. La question qui se pose estpourquoi a-t-on fait si peu de recherches du fabuleux des épopées des croisades,
même si celui-ci était très répandu à l’époque et assez populaire pour s’étaler en 
Europe occidentale et en Angleterre ?

L’herméneutique littéraire et les études de l’érudition du XIXe siècle laissaient 
de côté, dans une certaine mesure, les analyses plus approfondies de cette matière 
à cause des désagréments politiques trop nationalistes. Pourtant, Judith Labarthe 
reprend la constatation de David Jacoby que même au Moyen-Âge « les croisés, 
[...] apprécient d’ailleurs davantage les chansons d’outre-mer » (Labarthe, 2006 : 98) 
ce qui d’ailleurs confirme la popularité du cycle carolingien, mais qui prouve qu’à 
l’époque, l’armée croisée autant que la population qui l’accompagnait connaissait 
une pléiade de genres épiques. Dans les analyses des épopées, les recherches 
doivent nécessairement porter dans la même mesure aux faits historiques et à la 
science littéraire et c’est dans ces deux directions qu’il faut analyser le fabuleux du 
Chevalier au Cygne et surtout les faits qui répandaient sa popularité en France et 
en Angleterre et qui présentent une lacune d’analyses dans les sciences littéraires 
d’aujourd’hui. Ce fabuleux qui sera le sujet du présent article, n’est pas en majorité 
la légende du chevalier mystérieux qui se transfère dans un petit bateau mené par 
son frère en forme du cygne, mais le conte de sa mère, qui prend soit une forme 
divine soit une forme humaine et dont la branche fait partie initiale du Cycle de la 
Croisade qui commence par l’histoire biographique de Godefroi de Bouillon.

La matière pour ce conte qui comprend tous les éléments d’un conte de fée 
selon la Morphologie du conte de Vladimir Propp2 n’existe pas en version allemande 
du Lohengrin où le chevalier au cygne est le fils de Parzival allemand, pourtant 
on trouve le même conte ayant les noms différents en Angleterre, en Espagne et 
surtout en France (Lecouteux, 1998 : 105). Le sujet de l’analyse dans cet article 
porte sur une étude comparative de ce conte et de ses sources dans les littératures 
anglaise et française et sur l’actualisation de ces légendes fabuleuses médiévales.

Pour dévoiler le phénomène de leur présence sur le continent européen et en 
Angleterre, il faut présenter quelques points historiques et sommairement toucher 
au contenu du conte. Le manuscrit portant le titre latin Dolophatos, sive de Rege 
et Septem Sapientibus datant du XIIe siècle a été écrit par le moine lorrain Jean de 

2 
Surtout ses recherches des transformations des contes merveilleux. Voir Propp, La Morphologie du 
conte. Paris : Seuil, 1970, p. 172-249. 


Haute-Seille où on trouve sept contes indoeuropéens, le conte en question étant 
présenté le dernier, le septième (Nelson et Mickel 1977 : lxxxxii). Tout à la fin de 
son livre, l’auteur mentionne qu’il a utilisé le matériel de la tradition orale, ce qui 
peut, selon Huet, prouver que l’auteur a entendu ce conte d’un jongleur qui a déjà 
chanté des exploits de Godefroi de Bouillon incluant, parmi les chansons de la 
croisade, ce conte fabuleux de sa naissance (Ibid., cxiv).

Le récit du conte qui fait partie des chansons des croisades se résume ainsi :
Beatrix et le roi Oriant sont un couple sans enfants et de leur donjon ils observent 
une femme avec les enfants jumeaux. Beatrix médit de cette femme en disant que 
les enfants jumeaux doivent certainement être produits de l’adultère. Cette nuit 
même elle devient enceinte et par la suite elle accouche de sept enfants qui sont 
nés avec les chaînes en argent autour du cou. La mère du roi, Matabrune, est une 
femme d’une méchanceté extraordinaire et elle ordonne à son servant Macron 
de porter les enfants dans la forêt et les tuer. Celui-ci ne les tue pas, il les expose 
dans la forêt où il y a l’ermite qui sauve les enfants. Matabrune explique à son fils 
que pendant son absence, Beatrix a accouché de sept chiens et qu’elle doit être 
tuée. Le roi Oriant jette Beatrix à la prison. Après des années, un autre servant 
de Matabrune, Malquarés, trouve les enfants dans la forêt et immédiatement il 
reçoit l’ordre de la vieille reine d’apporter les chaînes. Il réussit, mais le garçon 
favori de l’ermite était dans la forêt avec lui. Les six enfants changent aux cygnes 
et s’envolent au marais de leur père. Mataburne donne les chaînes à l’orfèvre pour 
en faire les coupes, mais celui-ci trouve que les chaînes sont magiques et produit 
deux coupes d’une seule chaîne. Il garde les autres chaînes. Après quinze ans,
Matabrune convainc son fils de brûler Beatrix. Elle pourrait être sauvée au cas 
où elle trouve un champion pour la défendre. En ce moment un ange apparaît 
au garçon et à l’ermite qui leur explique la situation et envoie le garçon défendre 
sa mère. Celui-ci était élevé comme Perceval et il ne connaît rien des combats 
chevaleresques, mais il est instruit que Dieu le protégerait. Dès son arrivée dans la 
ville, il est baptisé au nom d’Elias et il gagne le combat, libère sa mère et garantit 
la transformation des enfants-cygnes qui reprennent la forme humaine. Seul un 
frère reste dans sa forme animale. Matabrune s’enfuit dans son château et Elias 
vient l’assiéger, il gagne de nouveau et Matabrune est brûlée au bûcher préparé 
pour Beatrix. En respectant la volonté d’un ange, Elias et son frère-cygne s’en vont 
par la mer et après encore une bataille victorieuse, ils arrivent à Nimègue.3 

La version du conte de Beatrix diffère de celle de Dolopathos et d’Elioxe dans 
plusieurs éléments et elle semble être adaptée pour pouvoir fonctionner dans 
l’épopée de la croisade et surtout dans les chansons qui touchent à la poésie de 

3 
Le texte est résumé d’après la lecture des manuscrits publiés en édition de « The Old French Crusade 
Cycle » (Nelson et Mickel, 1977 : 131 – 201). 


Godefroi de Bouillon. Les manuscrits en français pour la version de Beatrix se 
trouvent dans la Bibliothèque nationale4, dans la Bibliothèque d’Arsenal à Paris5 
et à British Museum à Londres6. Pourtant, il existe la branche de Beatrix en 
anglais, intitulé Chevalere Assigne et se trouve aussi à British Museum dans un 
seul manuscrit7 dans une version très abrégée, n’ayant que 370 lignes et menant 
l’histoire jusqu’à la reprise de la forme humaine des enfants-cygnes. Le manuscrit 
porte la date de la deuxième moitié du XIVe siècle et il est écrit dans l’accent de 
l’anglais moyen8 dans les vers allitérés. L’édition intégrale et annoté a été publiée 
en 1868 par Henry Gibbs. Le copiste du manuscrit anglais dit précisément qu’il 
puise la matière d’un autre livre : 

« The kynge hette oryens - as Þe book tellethe » (v. 7) 
« They kallede hym Enyas to name - as Þe book tellthe » (v. 270) (Gibbs, 1868 
: 1, 14)9 

Il est possible que le copiste ait utilisé des sources littéraires pour remanier 
la matière qui était très répandue en Europe, mais qui n’existait pas en langueanglaise. Cependant, c’est justement cette matière fabuleuse qui est venue d’Angleterre 
et elle lui a été rendue, après être imprégnée dans les chansons de geste.
Les raisons pour lesquelles elle est retournée en Angleterre résident dans le fait 
que les ancêtres et les descendants de Godefroi de Bouillon étaient liés à l’histoire 
d’Angleterre.

Avant la prise de la ville de Jérusalem en 1099 par les croisés et son titre du « 
roi de Jérusalem », Godefroi était le comte de Boulogne. Le père Eustache II, était 
parmi les soldats de Guillaume le Conquérant et à cause de ses engagements guerriers, 
il a reçu les propriétés en Angleterre, que sa mère Ide, béatifiée après sa mort, 

4 
Les manuscrits des fonds français aux indices 786, 795, 1621, 12569 (Nelson et Mickel, 1977 : xxiv 

– lxv) 
5 Portant l’indice de 3139 (Nelson et Mickel, 1977 : xlv). 
6 Portant les indices 3661 et 15 E VI. 
7 Portant l’indice Cotton Caligula A. II (Barron, 1967 : 25). 
8 L’accent dans le poème est soumis aux analyses. J.R.Hulbert qui cite R. Morris constate que « 
the Dialect [of Chevalere Assigne] in its present form is East Midland. But as we do not fint [other] 
East Midland writers adopting alliterative measures in the 14th century, I am inclined to think that the 
original English text was written in the N. or N.W. of England. » (Hulbert, 1921 : 5). Pourtant, C.
Moorman qui recherche le renouveau de la poésie allitérative du XIVe siècle en Angleterre constate 
que « twelve alliterative poems written between 1350 and 1400 in the Western and Notrhern Midlands 
[...] » et parmi ces douze poèmes en allitération il cite aussi la chanson de Chevalere Assigne (parmi 
Winner and Waster, Morte Artur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight etc.) 

9 
Le livre concerné peut être le manuscrit français 15 E VI à Londres, mais ce n’est pas évident 
(Barron, 1967 : 32). 


gérait bien après être devenue veuve.10 Ide de Boulogne a vendu quelques-unes 
de ses propriétés en Angleterre pour financer l’exploit de la croisade de ses trois 
fils, mais après celles-ci son fils aîné a eu la fille Mathilde qui est devenue la reine 
d’Angleterre après son mariage à Étienne de Blois11. La présence de la famille de 
Boulogne sur le territoire anglais est évidente aussi dans l’une des branches du 
Cycle de la croisade, celle de la chanson des Enfances Godefroi où on trouve le frère 
de Godefroi, Eustache à Londres pour son éducation chevaleresque. 

« Que Witasses l’aisnés ot .xii. ans acomplis, 
Moult estoit prox et sages, cortois et bien pris ; 
N’avoit si bel vaslet el regne Loéis. 
Par le los que li quens ot de ses bons amis, 
L’a al roi d’Engleterre por adober tramis. » (v. 761-765)12 


Le roi cité dans la chanson est un des rois capétiens, mais celui-ci n’est pashistoriquement contemporain à Godefroi de Bouillon (Mickel 1999 : 119). La 
grandeur historique de Godefroi réside dans le fait qu’il était le roi de Jérusalem. 
Son règne était très court et après sa mort son frère Baudouin a accédé au trône.
Un des chroniqueurs, Guillaume de Tyr, constate avec indignation dans la seconde 
moitié du XIIe siècle : « J’omets avec intention la fable du cygne, rapportée cependant 
dans un grand nombre de récits, et qui a fait dire vulgairement que les fils du comte 
Eustache avaient eu une naissance merveilleuse : mais une telle assertion paraît trop 
contraire à toute vérité » (Guizot, 1824 : 11).13 

De cela s’ensuit que les jongleurs ont, déjà à cette époque, relié l’histoire biographique 
aux récits légendaires.14 Du point du vue historique, la vie de Godefroi de 
Bouillon dévoile que c’était un homme très militaire, mais à la fois humble ; Guillaume 
de Tyr note qu’il a résigné à porter la couronne de la ville sainte en disant 

10 
Le comte Eustache II. de Boulogne a reçu douze fiefs dans le Hertford, l’Essex, le Norfolk, le 
Bedford et le Kent. Sur ce point, après les exploits militaires avec Guillaume le Conquérant, le 
comté de Boulogne a sa plus grande étendue (Dickès 2004 : 61). 

11 Ibid., 216. 
12 Les vers sont tirés de l’édition du XIXe siècle, faite par Célestin Hippeau qui était le seul à publier 
quelques manuscrits du fonds français, notamment celui portant l’indice 1621 qui fait partie du 
fonds français, mais sa publication porte le titre La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne et de Godefroi de 
Bouillon (Hippeau, 1969 : 28). 
13 Le texte en latin en original : »Praeterimus denique studiose, licet id verum fuisse plurimorum 
astruat narratio, Cygni fabulam, unde vulgo dicitur sementiam eis fuisse originem; eo quod a vero 
videatur deficere alis assertio.» Http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/williamtyre/9.html, consulté le 26 
juin 2017. 
14 Il y a une lettre de Guy de Bazoches vers 1175 constatant l’ascendance féerique de la famille de 
Bouillon, mais Guillaume de Tyr la rejette comme fabuleuse. (Gaullier – Bougassas, 2005 : 116) 


que « son extrême humilité le porta à ne point vouloir être distingué dans la Cité sainte 
par une couronne d’or semblable à celle que portent les rois » (Guizot, 1824 : 17). Même 
si Godefroi est mort après avoir régné une seule année, c’est son frère Baudouin 
qui a continué la régence à la ville sainte. Ce qu’il faut rechercher davantage c’est 
aussi la corrélation de la famille de Boulogne – Bouillon à l’établissement de l’ordre 
templier. L’ordre s’est développé au fur et à mesure de la « garde du Saint-Sépulcre 
» qui protégeait la communauté des chanoines du Saint-Sépulcre établie par Godefroi 
de Bouillon (Demurger, 2008 : 25). Plus tard, la reine Mathilde établissait 
des églises templières en Angleterre et supportait l’ordre des templiers.15 

En tant que héros littéraire, Godefroi occupe le rôle central dans presque toutes 
les chansons de la croisade, sauf dans les deux chansons fabuleuses de sa naissance 
qui ont été probablement jointes à posteriori dans le récit biographique de son enfance 
et dans La Chanson d’Antioche qui met en valeur d’autres héros importants 
pour leurs exploits militaires. Cette chanson est d’ailleurs la branche centrale du 
Cycle de la croisade et elle s’est probablement développée pendant la croisade ellemême. 
C’est la gloire de Godefroi de Bouillon qui a rendu populaires d’autres 
chansons, entre autres les récits légendaires de Beatrix et d’Elioxe. 

Le rôle de Godefroi en tant que héros littéraire semble être celui de Charlemagne, 
mais dans une mesure beaucoup plus restreinte. On y trouve aussi des 
éléments d’autres oeuvres littéraires médiévales, notamment de La Chanson de 
Roland. Les trouvères et les jongleurs y ont inséré le détail avec Perceval, ce qui 
montre qu’ils connaissaient le roman courtois. Ide de Boulogne joue aussi un rôle 
majeur dans le Les Enfances Godefroi, car étant la mère de Godefroi qui portait la 
couronne de Jérusalem elle pourrait prendre un semi – rôle de la sainte Marie, c’est 
pourquoi elle vit dans la littérature les moments qui ressemblent à ceux de Beatrix. 
Dans le Cycle de la croisade, elle est la petite-fille de Beatrix et la fille du Chevalier 
au cygne et avant la naissance de ses trois fils, elle est confrontée aux visions pareilles 
à celles de sa grand-mère, mais à ce point, le fabuleux qui semblait provenir 
d’un monde païen, prend l’aspect chrétien.

Dans le genre épique, les héros font souvent partie de l’au-delà (p.ex. Achille, 
fils d’un mortel et d’une nymphe) ou sont au moins à la recherche de l’immortalité 
(p.ex. Gilgamesh). Contrairement aux héros grecs antiques qui sont d’après Daniel 
Madelénat « des dieux déchus, ou des hommes promus » (Madelénat, 1986 : 54),
le héros médiéval et celui des chansons de geste françaises restent dans le cadre 
du réel, parce qu’il est souvent un roi, un chevalier, un noble, mais pareillement 
aux grands épopées antiques, ce héros provient parfois du monde ontologique, en 
possédant, comme le résume Charles Baudoin un signe de reconnaissance, qui se 

15 
À comparer : Chibnall, Marjorie, « Empress Matilda : Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the 
English » London : Blackwell Publishers, 1993. 


manifeste soit par l’origine royale du héros soit par son enfance mystérieuse et ses 
actes extraordinaires (Baudoin, 1952).

Pour le héros médiéval, il est nécessaire de garder un certain mystère chrétien,
impénétrable pour le public et qui crée une certaine distance car le Dieu chrétien 
ne peut pas coexister avec des hommes, mais dans les hommes. Daniel Madelénat 
en citant Hegel constate que le merveilleux doit « préserver l’indépendance [...] des 
actions humaines et des actions divines, afin que les dieux n’apparaissent pas comme des 
abstractions sans vie et que les individus humains ne soient pas dégradés au niveau de 
simples serviteurs. » (Madelénat, 1986 : 63). De cela s’ensuit que le seul héros qui 
puisse être capable à représenter un idéal chevaleresque dans le cas des chansons 
de geste, serait celui qui joindrait l’image de l’homme et l’hypostase du Dieu et 
Godefroi en est l’exemple par excellence. Même dans les drames modernes il y 
a toujours cette présence du surnaturel, c’est notamment Paul Claudel qui dit à 
propos de son drame aux dimensions épiques, Soulier de satin, que ses personnages 
surnaturels entrent dans sa composition, parce que leur présence lui a paru artistiquement 
nécessaire, « de même que dans l’Iliade l’absence des personnages de l’Olympe 
représenterait quelque chose d’absolument inconcevable » (Claudel, 1954 : 276). Le héros 
épique est souvent l’hypostase d’une nation, et souvent il est « dépourvu d’hiatus 
entre un moi et une persona, [...] il porte à leur plus haut degré les qualités requises par 
l’action [...] » (Madelénat, 1986 : 55) et c’est pour cette raison que Roland peut 
être à la fois courageux comme il sauve l’armée de Charlemagne, mais il a peur de 
sonner le cor, pour qu’on ne fasse pas de lui une « male chanson ».16 C’est pareil 
pour le chevalier au cygne, qui subit à l’interdiction mystérieuse : il quitte son pays 
avec son frère cygne après la question interdite de « la dame du Bouillon ».

L’histoire fabuleuse prend fin avec le départ d’Elias et sur ce point commencent 
les exploits guerriers, le thème central des épopées et des chansons de geste. L’épopée 
est aussi le mythe de la guerre, son herméneutique, et l’historiographie, pareille 
à celle des chroniques. Le conflit qui est l’immanence humaine y est mis au 
piédestal comme la vérité singulière de l’homme et la guerre qui, d’après la philosophie 
allemande de Marx et Hegel, repose « au coeur de la pensée et de la société, et en 
la justifiant comme voie vers la fin de l’histoire » (Ibid., 68). L’épopée trouve un point 
de lumière dans la sombre atmosphère de la guerre et c’est l’amour pour la gloire 
du héros, un amour sacré pour la reconnaissance parmi les siens.

Le but des chansons de geste était souvent le divertissement de la population 
noble à la cour, surtout lors des adoubements, les tournois, les banquets où il y 
avait les présentations des armes, des chevaux (Labarthe, 2006 : 78). C’étaient des 
occasions où tout le monde de la cour était présent et pour cela il est tout à fait 
vraisemblable que pendant les événements de société il y avait aussi les dames de 

16 V. 1014, La Chanson de Roland. 


la cour. Même si l’enchaînement des branches du Cycle de la croisade était faite 
à posteriori et il y a toujours quelques ambigüités dans leur disposition dans le 
cycle17, on peut définitivement constater que les deux récits de La Naissance du 
Chevalier au cygne étaient intégrés à l’histoire du héros parce qu’il nous reste deux 
manuscrits en prose, l’un datant du XIVe, l’autre du XVe siècle, ce dernier étant 
d’un grand intérêt pour Marie de Clèves qui se croyait la descendante de la famille 
Boulogne-Bouillon et qui intègre encore une petite partie des Enfances de Godefroi 
(Emplaincourt, 1989 : xiii - xxx).18 

La version anglaise ne possède que ce fabuleux qui pourrait présenter dans le 
cas de deux versions françaises, soit Elioxe, soit Beatrix le roman courtois indépendant. 
Où peut-on trouver la source de la légende qui ouvre l’histoire biographique 
de Godefroi et des croisades ? On vient de prouver que le récit légendaire de la 
famille Boulogne – Bouillon pourrait intéresser le monde des lettres anglaises,
mais il n’est quand même pas évident, si la légende pourrait intéresser un public 
plus large. Cathérine Gaullier – Bougassas en citant Georges Duby souligne qu’il 
y avait pratique au XIIe et au XIIIe siècles dans les familles aristocratiques de se 
trouver des ancêtres ayants une source généalogique féerique (Gaullier – Bougassas, 
2005 : 116) et elle cite encore les romans lignagers en anglo-normand qui,
de cette façon célèbrent une famille aristocratique. S’il y a, dans ce territoire, la 
tradition de ce genre, il n’est pourtant pas extraordinaire de trouver la légende des 
enfants-cygnes dans le territoire anglais.

La légende des enfants-cygnes elle-même est d’origine anglo-saxonne car aumoins les premières recherches de Jacob Grimm notent une courte légende duXe siècle relatant de la barque sans avirons qui porte un enfant (Lecouteux, 1998: 125). Les recherches de la source de la légende mènent à travers les légendessaxonnes où on trouve le héros Sceaf qui étymologiquement rappelle le nom deScandinavie et la région de Schleswig (Ibid., 126) et qui serait le fils des descendants 
du dieu nordique suprême, Odin. Ce héros est largement connu dans lessagas du nord et il semble être d’une très grande antiquité. Les deux récits, Isomberte 
espagnole et Beatrix française semblent être les remaniements d’Elioxe qui al’air d’être la plus proche à l’histoire de Dolopathos. Ce qui diffère Elioxe d’autres 

17 Voir supra. 
18 Il y a encore une autre référence à la généalogie mystérieuse de Godefroi de Bouillon. Celle dans 


La Chanson d’Antioche où il y a les vers (pendant le siège d’Antioche) : « – Sire ne parlés mais, qu’a 

mal nel tiegne on, / Molt est de grant parage, par Deu qui fist ne mon. / Vos avés bien oï qui il est ne qui 

non : / Son avie a duis un cisnes a Nimaie el sablon, / Enmi le plain gravier, el plus maistre donjon, / Tot 

seul en un batel, ainc n’i ot compaignon, / Bien cauciet et vestu d’un paile d’auqueton, / Plus reluisoit ses 

ciés que pene de paon, / Ainc Dex ne fist un home de si bele façon. / Le cors ot molt plenier, bien resambla 

baron. / L’emperere el retint par el gueredon / K’il dona moillier en ceste region, / Un soie parent d’un sien 

cosin Begon, / Tere bone et fegonde et l’onor de Buillon. », vv. 7450 – 64. (Duparc-Quioc, 1976 : 372). 


versions, c’est le manque presque total de l’élément chrétien, p.ex. le fait qu’Elioxe 
est une fée et d’autres éléments qui semblent provenir d’un monde païen et qui 
n’existent pas dans les versions ultérieures de Beatrix et d’Isomberte. Pourtant, les 
deux versions de Beatrix, anglaise et française, sont imprégnés avec de l’imaginairechrétien qui essaie vaguement de remplacer le mystérieux païen. Dans les deuxversions on trouve par exemple la biche qui miraculeusement aide l’ermite à sauver 
les enfants et qui est envoyée par le Christ ou par Dieu. La situation dans la versionanglaise quand l’ermite remarque les enfants : « And cryde ofte vpon cryste for sommesokour hym to sende, / Il any lyfe were hem lente in Þis worlde lengur. / Thenne an hyndekome fro Þe woode rennynge fulle swyfte, / And felle be-fore hem adowne Þey drow.e to 
Þe pappes; » (vv. 111-14)19, tandis que dans la française le trouvère décrit le mêmemoment (après la prière d’ermite au Dieu) : « Et quant li sains hermites ot sa proierefaite, / Este vous une cirge ki les enfans alaite / Que Dey i envoia [...] » (vv. 368 – 70)20. 

 Claude Lecouteux qui a fait une recherche historique-littéraire sur le mythe 
de la fée Melusine, a trouvé des faits importants dans la légende du Chevalier 
au Cygne où il exclut complètement les sources allemandes, car elles sont trop 
tardives et elles ne présentent pas, selon la théorie d’épopée de Labarthe, l’épiqueprimaire où la tradition orale est très transparente, mais secondaire, car les récits 
allemands sont clairement l’oeuvre des auteurs et ne font pas partie de la tradition 
orale (Lecoutoux 1998, 108)21. Lecouteux sort du fait que l’élément d’interdiction 
qui est présent dans la légende de la fée Melusine provient du monde celte et que 
l’interdiction dans le Chevalier au cygne provient du même modèle. L’interdiction 
a, selon lui, une marque de finité, du tabou, « une sorte de malédiction, un geis »22 , qui 
est présent déjà dans le récit de Beatrix parce que le frère ne va jamais reprendre sa 
forme humaine et cette « punition » cache en elle un mystère païen qui a sa propre 
loi fabuleuse. La douleur du cygne qui restera dans sa forme animale est terrible :
« But on was alwaye a swanne for fosse of his cheyne. / Hit was doole fot to se Þe sorow 
Þat he made ; / He bote hym self with his bylle Þat alle his breste blede, » (vv. 358 – 
60)23 et dans la version française « Li .I. [une chaîne] i a fali et cil seus est en paine ;
/ Par .III. fois est pasmés, puis brait a grant alaine, / A son bec se demaine, toute la cars 
li saine. » (vv. 1852 – 53)24. Le monde d’au-delà dans lequel se font ces restrictions 
restera fermé pour les hommes du réel, il se fait une substitution pour l’inconscient 
et essaie de se débarrasser de ce qu’on pourrait nommer providentialisme chrétien, 

19 H. Gibbs : Chevalere Assigne, 1868, 6. 
20 Nelson J. A., Mickel E.J., 1977, 139. 
21 À comparer : Labarthe, 2005 : 16. 
22 Le terme de « geis » désignant un tabou. (Lecoutoux, 1998 : 121). 
23 Gibbs, 1868 : 18. 
24 Nelson et Mickel, 1977 : 171. 



soit il restera, comme le note Georges Dumézil pour le terme d’épopée « en communication 
constante, dans les deux sens, avec les contes » (Dumézil, 2007 : 19). Dans 
Beatrix française autant qu’en anglaise on remarque le nom du chevalier Elias quiva mystérieusement perdre son prénom en entrant dans l’histoire française du 
Chevalier au cygne, mais il le regagne quand les continuateurs français (dans ce 
cas les jongleurs et les trouvères) inventent la chanson intitulée La Fin d’Elias où 
le protagoniste rentre dans le monde d’au-delà. Le héros porte le nom d’Enyas 
dans la version anglaise de Beatrix : « Go brynge hym to his fader courte & loke Þat 
may be cristened ; / And kalle hym Enyas to name for aw.te Þat may be-falle » (vv. 
204-4).25 La différence de la lettre n’est pas expliquée, ni pourtant la disparition du 
nom dans la version française. Cependant, les récits de Beatrix, version française 
et anglaise se ressemblent beaucoup et ils excluent la parenté de Perceval, ce qui 
est l’élément clé dans les versions allemandes. 

Cette mère qui a perdu sa caractéristique féerique dans les versions Beatrix,
représente l’élément clé pour découvrir l’inspiration du conte des enfants-cygnes.
Il faut souligner aussi que contrairement à la nature très militaire du Cycle de la 
croisade, cette branche semble très féminine, ayant le protagoniste féminin et on 
connaît des métamorphoses femmes-cygnes en France médiévale, autant qu’en 
Irlande.26 De même, cet élément d’interdiction provient du monde celtique ce qui 
a prouve Lecouteux dans l’explication du mythe de la fée Melusine. Mais l’une des 
sources les plus évidentes qui proviennent du monde celtique, sont des chaînes 
d’or ou d’argent qui sont innés aux enfants (surtout dans le récit d’Elioxe; et dans 
le Cycle de la Táin, où il y a les oiseux reliés par les chaînes dorées).

L’autre élément qui révèle des mythologies irlandaises est celui d’un petit navire 
sans avirons et Ferdinand Lot a découvert un récit irlandais datant du XVIIIe 
siècle qui raconte l’histoire du roi Lir où on trouve les métamorphoses des enfants-
cygnes, la marâtre démoniaque, les enchantements druidiques, les premiers 
saints chrétiens et à la fin de l’histoire les cygnes changent aux vieillards qui 
meurent (Lecouteux 1998 :120). À la base d’une recherche étymologique on découvre 
que la langue gaélique d’Ecosse donne pour le mot du cygne « eala » et en 
langue irlandaise « ela » (Matthews, 2002) ce qui pourrait présenter l’étymologie 
inexpliquée dans le contexte de la matière, pour Elioxe et Elias. Le conte irlandais 
ressemble – dans une certaine mesure – à un conte japonais, Urashima Taro, ce qui 
prouve que le matériel fabuleux provient d’inconscient et c’est surtout l’élément 
d’eau qui le rappelle et qui, dans le monde littéraire, fait penser à l’au-delà. Cette 
matière a pu entrer en continent en IXe siècle lors de l’installation des moines 
irlandais sur les bords du Rhin. Le poème de Beatrix qu’on trouve en Angleterre 

25 Gibbs, 1868 : 10. 
26 P.ex. Dans les lais de Graelent, de Guingamor et de Garin (Lecoutoux, 1998 : 118). 


contient ainsi les éléments celtes et anglo-saxons qui se sont répandus sur le continent, 
pris une nouvelle forme et rentrés à l’île. 

Ce transfert des sources n’a évidemment rien de particulier pour l’époque ; c’est 
l’importance du mythe et du récit qui prend un tel poids pour être toujours intéressant. 
Les épopées médiévales peuvent de nos jours être un point repère pour 
les chercheurs littéraires du genre épique car il y a toujours certains contextes qui 
doivent être transférés. Si l’on prend en considération le fait que les épopées médiévales 
étaient orales, les légendes comme celles-ci d’Elioxe et de Beatrix pourraient 
être transmises par le septième art qui représente aujourd’hui, pareillement 
aux épopées, « la voix » du peuple. 

BIBLIOGRAPHIE 

Barron, William R. J. : Chevalere Assigne and The Naissance du Chevalier au 
Cygne. Medium Ævum, vol. 36, No. 1, 1967, pp. 25–37. 
Bender, Karl – Heinz : « De Godefroy à Saladin ». Les épopées romanes, volume III, 
tome 1/2, fascicule 5. Heidelberg, 1986 : 35 – 83.
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les grandes épopées. Paris, Plon : 1952. 
Chibnall, Marjorie, « Empress Matilda : Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of 

the English » London : Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
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tions du Seuil, 2008.
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Éditions de Paris, 2004.
Dumézil, Georges : Mythe et Épopée I. L’idéologie des trois fonctions dans les 
épopées des peuples indo-européens. Paris : Quatro Gallimard, 2007.
Duparc-Quioc, Suzanne : La Chanson d’Antioche. Paris : Librairie orientaliste Paul 
Geuthner, 1976.
Emplaincourt Edmond A. : The Old French Crusade Cycle. Vol. 9: La Geste du Chevalier 
au Cygne. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989.

Gaullier-Bougassas Catherine : Le chevalier au Cygne à la fin du Moyen Âge. La 
tradition épique, du Moyen Âge au XIXe siècle. Éd. Suard François. Paris: Honoré 
Champion éditeur, 2005, pp. 115–146.

Gibbs, Henry H. : The Romance of the Cheualere Assigne. London : Early english 
text society, 1868.
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librairie, 1824. 


Hippeau, Céléstin : La Chanson du Chevalier au Cygne et de Godefroid de Bouillon: 
Vol. 1–2. Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1969.

Hulbert, James R. : The « West Midland » of the romances. Modern Philology, Vol. 
19, No. 1, 1921, pp. 1-16.

Zink, Michel, éd. : La chanson de Roland. Paris: Le livre de poche, 1990. 

Labarthe, Judith : L’épopée. Paris : Armand Colin, 2006. 

Lecouteux, Claude : Mélusine et le Chevalier au cygne. Paris : Imago, 1998. 

Madelénat, Daniel : L’épopée. Paris : Presses universitaires de la France, 1986. 

Matthews, John : Celtic totem animals. Boston: Red Wheel Press, 2002.

Mickel, Emanuel J. Jr. et Nelson Jan A. : The Old French Crusade Cycle, Vol. 1, La 
Naissance du Chevalier au Cygne. Alabama : The University of Alabama Press, 
1977. 

Mickel, Emmanuel J. Jr. : The Old French Crusade Cycle. Vol.3: Les Enfances Godefroi 
and Le Retour de Cournumarant. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 
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Moorman, Charles : The English Alliterative Revival and the Literature of Defeat. 
The Chaucer Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1981, pp. 85-100. 

Propp, Vladimir : La Morphologie du conte. Paris : Seuil, 1970. 

Tadeja Dermastja

Ljubljana 
tadeja.dermastja@gmail.com 


Beatrix, viteški roman v srciki cikla o križarskih vojnah 

V clanku so obravnavani nekateri elementi fantasticnega v srednjeveški veji pisanja 
o Beatrix, ki je bila integrirana v francoski epski cikel o križarskih vojnah in 
avtorica jo primerja z angleško srednjeveško pesmijo z enakim naslovom. Postavlja 
si vprašanje zakaj je bila tema te junaške epske pesnitve zanimiva v obeh literarnih 
okoljih in katere so zgodovinske in književne okolišcine, ki so vplivale na njeno 
prepoznavnost v razlicnih evropskih sredinah. 

Kljucne besede: chanson de geste, Godefroi de Bouillon, cikel o križarskih 
vojnah, srednjeveška književnost, Beatrix 


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