ACTA 
NEOPHILOLOGICA
54. 1-2 (2021)
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ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA
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3Contents
Contents
The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking 
Initiative: Isabella’s Soliloquy in Act IV of The Spanish Tragedy  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  � 5
Jonathan S. Rebetz
James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night: 
Poems 1970-1973 and Georg Trakl’s Poetry � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 15
Igor Maver
Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 33
Dieter Fuchs
The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley�  �  �  � 57
Danica Čerče
“I am not what I am”: Corpus-based Analysis of Shakespeare’s 
Character Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice�  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  � 69
Teja Furlan, Monika Kavalir
Responses to Gone with the Wind among Slovenians on the Other Side
of the Atlantic � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 87
Janko Trupej
Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally 
and in Slovenia � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 99
Polona Ramšak
Un-taming the Shrew: A Modern Take on Shakespeare’s 
The Taming of the Shrew�  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  115
Kübra Baysal
Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of 
R� Kipling’s “If” � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 123
Eldar Veremchuk
The Genealogy of Civilization � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 139
Boštjan Marko Turk
Le sage et son mystique� Regard croisé dans la correspondance 
d’Henri Pourrat et Jan Čep �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  153
Jan Zatloukal
La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique chez deux écrivains 
francophones d’origine chinoise  � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 165
Florence Gacoin-Marks
Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960) lettore di Stendhal e il pubblico 
della società di massa alle soglie della Terza epoca �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  �  179
Dana Božič
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5
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-21Kyd T.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.5-14
The Price That Women in Renaissance  
Drama Pay for Taking Initiative: Isabella’s 
Soliloquy in Act IV of The Spanish Tragedy
Jonathan S. Rebetz
Abstract
The article is a close reading of Isabella’s soliloquy in act IV of The Spanish Tragedy by 
Thomas Kyd. Pointing at the difference between the role of women in Early Modern re-
ality and their function in contemporary plays, it demonstrates the perversity of a society 
where women were regularly marginalized and where, even in theatre, their transgressions 
of the boundaries imposed on them by the patriarchal social apparatus led to extremely 
unfavourable repercussions. Isabella, emotionally crushed by the foul murder of her son, 
decides in her helplessness to take her own life. In a world dominated by men, she does 
not quietly accept her passive role, but works within its limitations to become a character 
that takes action, albeit action that ends her life. Before making the symbolic gesture of 
stabbing herself, she exclaims against the circumstances which drove her to it. Her speech 
can be seen as one of the climactic points of the play.
Keywords: Renaissance drama, Senecan tragedy, Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, patri-
archy, soliloquy, suicide
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6 Jonathan S. Rebetz
INTRODUCTION
The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is a play in the tradition of Senecan trage-
dy, and it is fairly loyal to its mother genre (Bevington 3). There are properties, 
however, that differentiate it from the prototypical Senecan play: it is meant to 
be staged; it disregards the unities of time, place, and action; and it brings the 
violence from behind the curtains into plain view. Violence itself is an impor-
tant part of the revenge tragedy, a genre that The Spanish Tragedy initiated (Lamb 
33–37), and in tandem with eloquent, powerful speeches written in perfect iam-
bic pentameter, it resonates particularly strikingly. One such powerful speech can 
be found in the second scene of act IV of The Spanish Tragedy. Isabella, driven to 
despair by the foul murder of her son and her husband’s seeming incompetence 
to revenge Horatio’s death, decides to end her life. She goes to the scene of the 
original crime, the garden of her own house, takes her anger out on the arbour in 
the garden where her son was hanged, calls once more upon Hieronimo to pursue 
the deaths of Horatio’s killers, and stabs herself in the chest. In her pre-suicide so-
liloquy, Isabella is equated to the arbour she destroys. The (double) perversity1 of 
laying harm first upon her symbolic self, then upon her physical self, reflects the 
perversity of a society in which women seemingly had no power to act, despite 
their irrepressible impulse to do so.
THE VOICE OF WOMEN AND THE DUTY OF KINGS
Act IV is the last act of the play. Previously, the Portuguese Viceroy’s son, Prince 
Balthazar, had led a rebellion for Portuguese independence, but his forces were 
defeated and he himself was taken prisoner by the oppressing nation. Lorenzo, 
the Spanish king’s nephew, and Horatio, son of the Knight Marshal, dispute over 
who captured Balthazar. Lorenzo essentially takes credit for something he had 
no part in, but the King nevertheless gives half of the spoils of victory to him. 
Furthermore, he leaves Balthazar in Lorenzo’s charge, which infuriates the real 
captor Horatio.
To complicate matters, Lorenzo’s sister Bel-Imperia falls in love with Hora-
tio (despite having previously loved his best friend Andrea, an officer who fell in 
battle under Balthazar’s sword), and all the while, Balthazar himself is becoming 
enamoured with Bel-Imperia. When Lorenzo discovers Horatio and Bel-Impe-
ria’s romantic connection, he does not dawdle but immediately starts convincing 
the Portuguese heir to help him to get rid of Horatio. This goes in line with the 
Spanish king’s decision that a marriage between Balthazar and Bel-imperia would 
1 Suicide was at the time seen as an abhorrent act and a deadly sin (Steltzer 67–68).
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7The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
be an excellent way to repair the peace with Portugal.2 Lorenzo and Balthazar 
calculatingly murder Horatio, stabbing him and hanging him from an arbour in 
his family’s garden. When Horatio’s parents find him thus assassinated, his moth-
er Isabella loses her mind. Even though her husband Hieronimo later learns the 
identity of their son’s killers and even though he is the Knight Marshal, the execu-
tor of the law, he cannot find justice for Horatio. Sadly, even his high office is none 
compared to the authority of the King – the King himself, it must be underscored, 
being tied by blood to one of the responsible parties.
In the second scene of act IV, Isabella, disappointed with her husband and the 
world, decides to end her life and stabs herself in the chest. Her tragic if self-in-
flicted demise foreshadows the violence that is to follow, but also, and more im-
portantly, sheds light on the helplessness of women in an aggressively male world. 
Renaissance women were treated legally and socially as inferior to men and had 
no obvious channel to voice their disagreement with this discriminatory order. Of 
course, “critiques of sexual inequality and tentative proposals for rectifying women’s 
inferior social roles” were nascent in 17th-century Europe, and they had started to 
pave the long way to equality (Gwyneth Ross 276–77), but the average genteel Re-
naissance woman’s voice was mainly restricted to her household, while the house-
hold was represented outwardly by the pater familias. As such, it was nearly impos-
sible for a woman to become a renowned philosopher of womanhood, a humanist 
fighter for the feminist cause, an intellectual star of literary salons. Such women 
did exist, and their names are now famous,3 but they are the brilliant exception to a 
rather unfair rule. Isabella of The Spanish Tragedy is unfortunately not one of them. 
She desperately has something to exclaim in a public forum but cannot not do so 
because of her situation as a woman. Wanting to express her tragic helplessness, her 
character turns to the audience with the most moving soliloquy of Kyd’s tragic play.
Isabella begins her speech by expressing her impatience and frustration, ex-
claiming against the “monstrous homicides” (4.2.1). Homicides can either be the 
persons committing murder or the acts of murder themselves. The ambiguity in 
meaning makes Isabella denounce both at the same time, which is efficient and 
carries much rhetorical weight. The idea is that homicide is a monstrous deed, 
which makes anyone performing it monstrous by association. A great portion of 
Isabella’s vocabulary, in fact, has several possible meanings; this makes her speech 
rich in allusion and metaphorical association. Line 2, for example, contains two 
graphically very similar words, piety and pity: “Since neither piety nor pity moves 
/ The King to justice or compassion” (4.2.2–3). Both emotions are associated more 
with the feminine than with the masculine, and indeed in Isabella’s eyes the King 
2 Indeed, a morganatic marriage between Horatio and Bel-Imperia would be much less fortuitous.
3 Christine de Pizan, Mary More, Batsua Makin, Lucrezia Marinella, to list just four.
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8 Jonathan S. Rebetz
does not feel them, or is at least unmoved by them. The two near-homographs 
become truly illustrative when we look at them closely. According to the Oxford 
English Dictionary,4 “piety” had two groups of meanings at the time when the 
play was written: one was related to “the quality of feeling or showing pity”, while 
the other was related to devotion, as in the “faithfulness to the duty naturally owed 
to someone”. The second definition adds a layer of meaning to what Isabella is 
conveying: it hints at the King’s duty as the sovereign to be reverent to God, the 
source of his power, and, accordingly, to rule justly, punishing those who deserve 
to be punished. Since “pity” not only means “the disposition to mercy or compas-
sion”, but also “a ground or cause for pity”, Isabella is implying that because the 
King is not acting compassionately despite having good cause to do so – in her 
mind, acting compassionately would mean finding and punishing Horatio’s mur-
derer – he is neglecting his divine duty.
Frustrated with the King’s passivity, Isabella decides to act herself, and in doing 
so, she transgresses the boundaries of her traditional gender role. Most Renais-
sance scholars agree that it was untypical of women in Early Modern society to 
undertake operations beyond the domestic sphere (Camden; Fletcher; Rose). Bib-
lical “evidence” in support of this hierarchy was often put forward,5 mainly, but not 
exclusively, because it was difficult to argue against the Holy Scriptures. And even 
though The Spanish Tragedy in its entirety does not closely observe a Christian vi-
sion of the world – its eschatological crux essentially being a Classical pagan one 
(Aggeler 330) – orthodox beliefs nevertheless pervade the work. The orthodox pa-
triarchal structure of Renaissance society meant that possibilities for women were 
very restricted: they had fewer legal rights, virtually no access to education, and no 
real professional opportunities. Their submission to male authority was regarded as 
a necessity and, as it was mentioned earlier, they were mostly limited to the con-
fines of their household. If decision-making and taking up various forms of action 
were tasks dispensed to men, women were expected to wait for male authorization 
or, better yet, intervention. This had been the case ever since the Middle Ages gave 
way to the Renaissance and “the relations of the sexes were restructured to one of 
female dependency and male domination” (Kelly 20). Even though she was “in 
charge” of her house and household, the married woman was legally still in potes-
tate mariti.6 Such a subdued position was naturally a great source of frustration for 
powerful women, as can be seen in the example of Isabella.
4 All subsequent definitions of lexical items are taken from that source.
5 The commonest references were the story of Adam and Eve from Genesis (e.g. Gen 2:5–7 and Gen 
2:15–24) and the letters of Saint Paul (e.g. Eph 5:22–30 and Col 3:18–19).
6 Before getting married, of course, she was under the authority of her father. The only women who 
did not have to answer to anyone in this manner and who enjoyed relative independence were 
widows.
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9The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
ISABELLA’S ACTION AND ITS SYMBOLISM
Isabella of The Spanish Tragedy is torn between being an active and being a passive 
character. Working within the limitations of being a woman, she wants to “re-
venge [herself ] upon [the] place / Where thus they murdered [her] beloved son” 
(4.2.4–5). Since on her own she is unable to prosecute the culprits legally or kill 
them in a duel (or some other form of physical confrontation),7 the main object of 
her wrath becomes the garden arbour. One could imagine this arbour as “a bower 
or shady retreat, of which the sides and roof are formed by trees and shrubs close-
ly planted or intertwined” or as “lattice-work covered with climbing shrubs and 
plants”. Either explanation works within the context of this speech and play. The 
former is supported by the use of vocabulary in the passage, while the latter would 
be easier to build and use onstage.8 The arbour reappears several times in the play 
and at this point of the narrative symbolically refers both to the past and to the 
future. Horatio was hanged from it, so it symbolizes him, the unfair circumstances 
of his death, and, through synecdoche, death itself.9
As for its future signification, it is when Isabella revisits the arbour that the 
reader gets a hint at what she is about to do. Even without the connection to the 
two previous deaths, one might suspect the development of the scene: an arbour, 
being an arch-like construction, adopts the symbolism of the arch; arches, looking 
somewhat like doors, are symbolic passageways, symbols of transition (O’Connell 
and Airey 10), and since transition in tragedy is seldom something other than 
death, the arbour is a foreshadowing of Isabella’s suicide. It emphasizes Isabella’s 
determination to take action, even if this means her simultaneous demise. The 
stage directions call for Isabella to cut down this arbour while she exclaims, 
Down with these branches and these loathsome boughs
Of this unfortunate and fatal pine!
Down with them, Isabella, rend them up. (4.2.6–8)
Then, in line 9, Isabella mentions burning “the roots from whence the rest is 
sprung”. This directly refers to the roots of the growth on the arbour, but it is 
7 As a woman she would not be educated at arms.
8 The arbour they used in the Renaissance production would likely have looked like a hybrid between 
the two kinds of arbours described above, but a question arises when talking about the staging of 
this particular scene. Would Isabella actually destroy the arbour onstage? Two arguments speak 
against this supposition: one is pecuniary (despite it being made of wood, building a new arbour 
for every performance would be simply too expensive and inefficient), while the other is dramatur-
gical (the noise of axing down the arbour would interfere with the gravitas of the words being said, 
possibly even drowning them out).
9 This symbol is enhanced when the arbour likely reappears as the gallows where Pendringano is executed.
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10 Jonathan S. Rebetz
also a metaphor later repeated in lines 35 and 36 that go: “And as I curse this tree 
from further fruit, / So shall my womb be cursèd for his sake.” It is not hard to 
see that in both cases Isabella is making a metaphorical parallel between a woman 
and a fruit-bearing tree. In Latin, the word for tree, arbor,10 is feminine because it 
gives birth to leaves and fruit.11 Both women and trees are begetting entities, so 
to speak. Line 9 is a variation of this metaphor. It replaces (α1) the tree and (β1) 
its fruits by (α2) the roots and (β2) the parts of the tree that are not the roots but 
spring from the roots. Isabella sees herself as the roots that gave birth to Horatio, 
but more broadly, she identifies herself with the arbour in its entirety. This identi-
fication is at the very heart of her speech. By cursing and felling the arbour which 
has, she finds, complotted her misery, she is, in fact, attacking herself. With this 
desperate act she is pointing at the twistedness of the society that does not leave 
her any alternative ways of asserting that she is an active character.
A woman taking an active role in the action of the play is actually a crucial me-
chanic in Renaissance drama. In many plays of the period, “women […] seem con-
tinually to be evading what is expected of them” (Eisaman Maus and Bevington 
xxxvii), sometimes to a greater and sometimes to a minor extent. If Isabella does 
not exactly take action against the murderers of her son, she does not mourn in a 
closed chamber either. She will not be one of those grieving mothers whose loss has 
rendered them hopeless and inert, she will not passively pine away in silence and 
submission – she will do something, even if it is just symbolic. This break with social 
convention is not unique to her character. In Renaissance drama – as opposed to 
contemporary Early Modern reality – it is quite common for women to act contrary 
to the expectations of the misogynous society. By doing so, they rise above the mun-
dane and often render themselves more interesting than their male counterparts 
(against whom they have, among other things, a numerical disadvantage12).
Even if one restricts oneself to The Spanish Tragedy, one can find another ex-
ample of such female unconventionality. Bel-Imperia is in fact even more re-
bellious than Isabella. She constantly defies her male relations: first by taking a 
morganatic lover, then, after the former dies, by getting involved with his friend 
despite all interdictions. Following her involuntary betrothal to the Prince of 
Portugal, she ruins the wedding by first killing the Prince, then herself. In the 
context of Renaissance theatre in general, “play after play contains unforgettable 
10 The Latin arbor is in fact not an etymological predecessor, but merely a distant cousin of the En-
glish arbour. The OED traces the origins of arbour to the Latin herbarium, a collection of grass and 
herbs. It is evident that the word has undergone great change of signification and form.
11 Grammatical gender in Latin is interestingly based partly on semantic criteria, which is relatively 
rare and does not hold true for languages that developed from Latin (cf. French un arbre).
12 For almost all English Renaissance plays it holds true that there are fewer female roles than there 
are male roles.
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11The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
portraits of strong-minded, articulate, intelligent women [whose] very transgres-
siveness makes them dramatically interesting” (Eisaman Maus and Bevington 
xxxviii). In fact, their transgressions frequently prove decisive for the denoue-
ment. They themselves, however, are dealt with in the spirit of the time: one 
need only remember the fates of the Duchess in The Duchess of Malfi and Bea-
trice-Joanna in The Changeling, who “elude patriarchal control by joining them-
selves to servingmen […] and transgress both class and gender hierarchies” (Su-
zuki 43). They are severely punished for their guilt – guilt, which from today’s 
perspective is dubious at best.
Returning to the soliloquy of Act IV, when Isabella enumerates the parts of a 
tree, this is a clear demonstration of her earnest wish to take action:
I will not leave a root, a stalk, a tree,
A bough, a branch, a blossom, nor a leaf,
No, not an herb within this garden plot. (4.2.10–13) 
After she has razed the arbour with the ground, she wants that piece of garden to 
stay forever empty and unproductive (again, she is playing with the double mean-
ing of words, “fruitless” signifying both). Her wish is that the soil there remain 
barren and that “whosoever / imagines not to keep it unmanured,” (4.2.14–15) be 
blissless. The unnatural stress in lines 14 and 15 makes for an eerie tone that goes 
very well with her curse: the traditional foot in Renaissance drama is an iamb, re-
peated five times, but lines 14 and 15 both begin with a trochee, and only then 
continue with four iambs. This breaks up the rhythm in a peculiar, cacophonous 
way. There is also a metaphor hidden in lines 14–16: just as Hieronimo is not 
tending to justice for their son, no one should take care of the garden.
Strong imagery follows to support this demand. All the senses are evoked: the 
rustling wind can be heard and felt, the unpleasant odours smelled, the swirling 
snakes seen. All will keep away from this ungodly place “for fear to be infect”. The 
word infect means not only “tainted with disease”, as from a snake bite, but also 
“morally corrupted”. Isabella suggests that even by approaching, people could be-
come contaminated with vice. They will therefore rather stand at a distance and 
solemnly discuss the importance of the unlucky garden plot. The plot is, of course, 
unlucky through association to Horatio. Isabella exclaims: “Ay, here he died, and 
here I him embrace. / See where his ghost solicits with his wounds / Revenge on 
her that should revenge his death!” (4.2.23–25). The use of the present tense in 
line 23 is meaningful. She says “embrace”, not “embraced”. She is not referring to 
scene 2.5, where she and Hieronimo found Horatio in the garden and discovered 
he was dead. The tense indicates that she is embracing Horatio as she speaks, al-
though we know he is not there anymore. Horatio is on a different metaphysical 
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12 Jonathan S. Rebetz
plane, but she can nonetheless see him. Because she is so close to death herself, 
the boundaries between this world and the other are blurred for her, so she sees 
Horatio’s ghost and reads in his wounds a cry for vengeance – vengeance that she 
as a woman sadly cannot bring to fruition.
Isabella then hails Hieronimo, declaring that “sorrow and despair hath cit-
ed [her] to hear Horatio plead with Rhadamanth” (4.2.27–28). Her careful use 
of law-specific vocabulary in lines 22–27 is very important. She says that Hora-
tio’s ghost solicits, the personified Sorrow and Despair cite, and Horatio himself 
pleads. These evocations of the judiciary process put her – in anachronistic terms, 
of course – in the middle of a courtroom, where she, too, is on trial. She is being 
accused of not avenging Horatio’s death, although this accusation is clearly unfair. 
Hieronimo is the male character, he is the one with administrative power, he is 
the one with the ability to administer justice, he is the one who can make him-
self heard outside the sphere of his household. Alas, he does not do so because he 
is too afraid of the king. Not acting despite having the ability to act, he is failing 
their son more than Isabella is failing him by committing suicide. It is no wonder 
Isabella chides Hieronimo for this with her final words:
Make haste, Hieronimo, to hold excused
Thy negligence in pursuit of their deaths
Whose hateful wroth bereaved [Horatio] of his breath.
Ah, nay thou dost delay their deaths,
Forgives the murderers of thy noble son,
And none but I bestir me – to no end. (4.2.29–34)
CONCLUSION
Isabella – despite her passive role as a woman and even though it was ultimately 
to no avail – still did more than the (supposedly) active male Hieronimo. With 
a terrifying symbolic gesture she showed that the murder of her son remained 
unpunished. Her misplaced retribution through self-sacrifice speaks strongly of 
the time’s societal structure: it points out the inability of women to voice their 
grievances, help themselves, take action into their own hands, and it stresses 
their reliance on men to act in their stead. In this light, Isabella’s son’s solicita-
tion for her to do something – which is of course only a figment of her grief-
struck imagination – is unfair. Horatio pressures Isabella into action, knowing 
perfectly well she cannot act.
As the close reading of this passage has proved, Isabella is a hapless victim 
of a world dominated by male violence, forced to destroy herself because of the 
sins of others. Nevertheless, what she does can readily be described as active and 
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13The Price That Women in Renaissance Drama Pay for Taking Initiative
dynamic, even if her actions fall somewhat short of Bel-Imperia’s. But what unites 
both is the headlong termination of their earthly existence, which comes hand 
in hand with their transgression of gender boundaries and links them to other 
“disorderly” women in Renaissance drama. Speaking in more general terms, The 
Spanish Tragedy reveals the paradox of women’s marginalization in contemporary 
reality and their prominence in dramatic works, even if that prominence always 
comes at an excessively high price.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aggeler, Geoffrey. “The Eschatological Crux in The Spanish Tragedy.” The Journal 
of English and Germanic Philology, vol. 86, no. 3, 1987, pp. 319–31.
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Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800. Yale 
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Holy Bible. King James Version, Barnes & Noble, 2018.
Kelly, Joan. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” Women, History, and Theory, U of 
Chicago P, 1984.
Kyd, Thomas. “The Spanish Tragedy.” English Renaissance Drama: A Norton An-
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Lamb, Margaret. “Beyond Revenge: The Spanish Tragedy.” Mosaic: An Interdisci-
plinary Critical Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 1975, pp. 33–40.
Law, Jonathan, and Elizabeth A. Martin. The Oxford Dictionary of Law. Oxford 
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O’Connell, Mark, and Raje Airey. “The Gateway.” Symbols, Signs & Visual Codes, 
Southwater, 2009, pp. 10–11.
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Accessed 10 October 2021.
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14 Jonathan S. Rebetz
Rose, Mary Beth. Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Literary and His-
torical Perspectives. Syracuse UP, 1986.
Ross, Sarah Gwyneth. The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance It-
aly and England. Harvard UP, 2009.
Steltzer, Emanuel. “Social Implications of Love Suicide in Early Modern English 
Drama.” Critical Survey, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 67–77.
Suzuki, Mihoko. “Gender, Class, and the Social Order in Late Elizabethan Dra-
ma.” Theatre Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, 1992, pp. 31–45.
Jonathan S. Rebetz
University of Ljubljana
jonathan.rebetz@student.uni-lj.si
Cena, ki jo morajo ženske v renesančni drami plačati, če prevzamejo 
pobudo: Izabelin samogovor v IV� dejanju Španske tragedije
Prispevek je poglobljena analiza Izabelinega samogovora v IV. dejanju Španske tragedije 
Thomasa Kyda. Članek pokaže razkorak med podrejeno vlogo žensk v renesančni dobi 
in njihovo pomembno funkcijo v dramskih delih tistega časa ter obelodani perveznost 
družbe, kjer so bile ženske marginalizirane in kjer je celo v dramatiki vsakršna prestopitev 
mej, ki jim jih je določil patriarhat, imela zanje izjemno neugodne posledice. Izabela, ki jo 
čustveno grudi pokvarjeni umor njenega sina, se v svoji nemoči odloči, da si bo vzela živ-
ljenje. V svetu, ki ga vodijo moški, glasno zavrne svojo predpisano pasivno vlogo in znotraj 
njenih omejitev najde dejanje, ki bo vsaj na simbolični ravni aktivno. Preden se zabode, 
vzklikne proti okoliščinam, ki ji vežejo roke in so jo do tega pripeljale. Njen samogovor je 
ena klimaktičnih točk dramskega dela.
Ključne besede: renesančna dramatika, seneška tragedija, Thomas Kyd, Španska tragedija, 
patriarhat, samogovor, samomor
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15
James McAuley’s Verse Collection  
Music Late At Night: Poems 1970-1973 and 
Georg Trakl’s Poetry
Igor Maver
Abstract
The article discusses James McAuley’s translations of the poems by the Austrian poet 
Georg Trakl (1887-1914), as well as the latter’s influence on McAuley’s own late verse in 
Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973. This is especially true of Trakl’s collection of verse 
Music in the Mirabell Garden translated by McAuley. Some of James McAuley’s early and 
later work also bears an indelible stamp of Trakl’s poetry.
Keywords: James McAuley, Georg Trakl, Australian poetry
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111(94).09-1McAuley J.:821.112.2(436).09-
1Trakl G.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.15-32
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16 Igor Maver
MUSIC IN THE MIRABELL GARDEN
James McAuley’s posthumously published book of Georg Trakl’s poems, rendered 
in his superb English translations and entitled Music in the Mirabell Garden: Georg 
Trakl (Trakl 1982), was published six years after the death of this acclaimed Aus-
tralian poet. The ‘Tasmanian’ poet Gwen Harwood contributed the Introduction, 
Larry Sitsky supplied the music score for the accompanying book in a double set, 
“A song cycle for soprano and eight players”, John Olsen provided the drawings, 
and John Winter did the editing, printing and design. John Winter’s poem “Print-
ing James McAuley during the Falklands War” (Winter 1989), another important 
point of reference published in the book, consists solely of three stanzas, of which 
the first one gives a description of his rather monotonous routine of printing that 
remains curiously indifferent to everything else that may happen around it, in-
cluding the war. The war for the Falkland Islands between the United Kingdom 
and Argentina in the South Atlantic took place in the middle of 1982:
Your prose moves neither 
Left nor right, but drives 
Straight down the page ...
In the middle of the second stanza, however, there suddenly emerges a violent in-
trusion of contemporary events, whereby the previous monotony is shattered, cre-
ating a strong startling effect, art does seem to make a difference after all.
Ravens fly blood-splashed and 
Stick cracked beaks through crazed 
Heads of children gone silly
As geese on an Atlantic green.
Your Trakl holds steady – 
Scarce a change in the copy – 
But tells the horror in order
As in disorder too.
The ravens that “fly blood-splashed”, and which are so frequent in Trakl’s po-
etry, metaphorically stand for the military (British and Argentinian airplanes, 
raiding the Falklands and each other’s navy). “Geese on an Atlantic green” could 
be interpreted as airplanes and soldiers-parachuters in their khaki uniforms be-
ing dropped from the sky. Still, Winter’s subtle poetic puns and double-enten-
dres in this extract are perhaps harder to grasp. What the poet must also have 
had in mind were John Olsen’s drawings in Music in the Mirabell Garden, depict-
ing Trakl’s imagined phantasmagoric and nightmarish atmosphere, where ravens 
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17James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
literally “stick cracked beaks trough crazed / Heads of children”. The juxtaposition 
of the two situations is not without foundation: Trakl’s vision was haunted by the 
monstrosities of the Great War, whereas Winter feels uneasy today, about the then 
waged Falkland War, which has been extremely rarely reflected upon in poetry. It 
seems as if the poet feels that McAuley’s translations of Georg Trakl’s lyric reflect 
a constant penchant for horror in human nature, by telling “the horror in order as 
in disorder too”. Nevertheless, the final stanza brings in a more promising and op-
timistic tone, as it suggests a possible way out. The solution offered is art, however 
unconclusive its role may be in influencing and changing real life:
It is time to put the press to bed. 
Tomorrow, with platen, ink damped paper, 
Black art in three dimensions,
We’ll try to set things right.
As mentioned earlier, the Australian composer Larry Sitsky completed the music 
score for Music in the Mirabell Garden in December 1977, and it should be noted 
that it was commissioned by the German Goethe Institute in Australia. A sepa-
rate book of music sheets, the photocopies of Sitsky’s manuscript, thus accompa-
nies the translations. Sitsky makes a specific point in the Prefatory Note by saying 
that “verbal, visual and auditory effects were intended to merge”. His Programme 
Note gives a good insight into the genesis of the book:
The translations from Georg Trakl are by the eminent Australian poet James 
McAuley; only a few short months before McAuley’s death, I corresponded with 
the poet, and outlined my desire to see some of his Trakl translations. McAuley 
not only sent me a great number of these translations but also a long text of a spe-
cial broadcast he had prepared dealing with Trakl, a poet with whom he closely 
identified for many years. My librettist, Gwen Harwood, considers these transla-
tions to be among the best available of Trakl in the English language.
Indeed, Sitsky and Harwood have had a long-standing collaboration in musical 
projects. As Harwood points out in the Introduction, Sitsky’s first opera from 
1965 was modelled on the eponymous Edgar Allan Poe’s horror story and is ti-
tled The Fall of the House of Usher (the early Trakl’s prose is likewise very much 
reminiscent of Poe), while the second one was titled Lenz (1970), describing “the 
breakdown of a poet’s mind”. 
Affinities between Trakl and Sitsky are numerous. Gwen Harwood in the In-
troduction gives a short biography of Trakl in his native Salzburg, including the 
incestuous relationship with his younger sister Margarete ( James McAuley in his 
essay on Trakl uses the diminutive name Gretl (McAuley 1975). Both Grete and 
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18 Igor Maver
Georg were throughout their lives persecuted by the fear of madness, they were 
said to have been involved in an incestuous relationship in which she was not 
strong enough to resist and committed suicide, but Trakl’s family life, including 
his mother and his much-indebted father, was extremely complicated. The an-
guished and isolated Trakl, who had very early taken refuge in drugs and alco-
hol, was in 1914 called up as a reserve officer and a war pharmacist at the Gali-
cia front during World War One. Overcome by the grief of his sister’s death and 
the victims of the battle of Grödek, which he so movingly depicted in his poem 
“Grödek”, he was taken to a military hospital in Cracow mentally disturbed, and 
there he poisoned himself at the age of 27. Parallel traits can certainly be drawn 
between him and the English ‘Trench’ Poets, who describe the atrocities of French 
battlegrounds and their battle trenches.
James McAuley himself commented on the reasons for being attracted to Trakl’ 
s sometimes difficult and hermetic poetry laden with despair. It was his “intense 
longing for redemption” that drew him to Trakl, McAuley admits (cf. Harwood), 
quoting his own poem “The Tomb of Heracles”:
Look, cranes still know their path through empty air; 
For them their world is neither soon nor late;
But ours is eaten hollow with despair.
The main feature that drew McAuley to Trakl, then, was the image of the world 
as decay, death and utmost despair, although the fons et origo of these, of course, is 
to be looked for elsewhere with both poets. Harwood (1982) is also quite right in 
emphasizing Trakl’s “image-filled expressionist poetry”, in which images interact 
as colours in a painting often resulting in strong synesthetic effects. The Symbolist, 
later even Expressionist and above all Romantic-Decadent quality of both Trakl’s 
and the late verse by McAuley is one of the common features of both. McAu-
ley’s indebtedness to Trakl’s usage of the so-called “colour-language” (Macainsh 
1985) is discussed here, as well as McAuley’s translations partly in a thematic 
comparison with their German originals (see Macainsh 1984). McAuley’s poetic 
response to Trakl’s poetry is examined as reflected in McAuley’s collection Music 
Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973, published posthumously in December 1976, two 
months after the poet’s death (McAuley 1976). 
MCAULEY’S VERSE SYMBOLISM AND DECADENCE
Carmel Gaffney examined Trakl’ s impact on McAuley’s later poetry and finds 
that contrasts rather than similarities are, in fact, more obvious between them 
(Gaffney 1976). She further maintains that “both are also aware of the divided 
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19James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
soul caught helplessly between despair and affirmation” (Gaffney 1976, 407). True, 
Trakl and McAuley are good examples of divided “Romantic souls in agony”. Im-
portant issues were raised by Noel Macainsh, namely that McAuley’s later verse 
can be directly linked with his early poems, when the poet was very much under 
the influence of two other Austrian poets: Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George 
(Macainsh 1985, 331). This is true of McAuley’s short statements, pauses that 
separate the description of individual impressions and especially the adoption of 
George’s punctuation, i. e. full-stops between the enumerated or juxtaposed im-
pressions from the natural landscape: “The late sky clears ... wet pavements shine 
...” (McAuley 1975, 204). Macainsh points out that McAuley was fully aware of 
this connection:
It seems that in the last decade I have some full circle back to the kind of poem 
I began with, but with a greater depth of experience which has brought me 
closer to fulfilling the persistent desire to write poems that are lucid and mys-
terious, gracefully simple, but full of secrets, …. (Ibidem.)
James McAuley’s early poems were since 1935 until 1938 for the most part pub-
lished in the University of Sydney literary magazine Hermes. Apart from the par-
allels on the simply formal level, one can notice a certain continuation as far as 
themes and the mood of the poems are concerned. By 1936 the themes of woeful 
passion, love and death emerged in his verse, showing strong, sombre influences of 
the French Symbolists in which despair is also one of the basic traits as in Music 
Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973 (1976), not to forget the visible use of symbolic 
elements, coupled with subtle colour language. The last line in French in McAu-
ley’s “Broken Incantation” (1936), for example, is taken from Jean Moréas’s fa-
mous poem “Nevermore”:
(Blood, blood on the lips and on the eyes, 
Blood in the heart in the brain!)
Come away, come away, my beloved,
For the springtime is over and gone
Et l ’hiver fauche sur les landes. (McAuley qtd in Coleman 1980, 7)
Not only can the link between the Symbolists (Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud) 
and James McAuley be drawn along these lines, for the Decadent late Romantics, 
too, represented a significant source for the young and the old McAuley. In 1938 he 
wrote an MA thesis on the Symbolist poets and was very much familiar with the 
French Decadent poets, especially Charles Baudelaire, on whom McAuley mod-
elled some of his early works: “Ange Plein de Gaîté” from 1938, for example, takes 
its theme from Les Fleurs du Mal, No. XLV, from Baudelaire’s poem “Réversibilité”.
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20 Igor Maver
In a book on McAuley, Leonie Kramer gives a historiography of his interest in 
Trakl. McAuley translated his first poem “Winter Nightfall” (“Ein Winterabend”) 
in 1958 (Kramer 1988, xviii), returning to him only in 1970, saying that Trakl had 
produced “perhaps the finest poetry written in our century” (Ibidem.). Kramer 
comments upon McAuley’s essay “The Poetry of Georg Trakl”, which includes 
several translated poems and where McAuley draws a clear distinction between 
Trakl’s early lyrical pieces and the later Expressionist poems, echoing a very per-
sonal, expressive, clearly subjective and distorted vision of reality inspiring pain 
and fear of the imminent Great War, the suffering and casualties it brought, and 
its aftermath. Although Trakl wrote over one hundred poems, McAuley was sole-
ly interested in the lyrical ones. It should be emphasized that McAuley’s remark 
about Trakl’s Decadence mostly eluded critical reviews of McAuley’s work. He 
himself writes that in Georg Trakl’s work “traces of the stage properties of ear-
ly twentieth-century literary Decadence linger here and there” (McAuley 1975, 
202). The Decadent and Symbolist quality most certainly helped to incite McAu-
ley to translate the Austrian poet from Salzburg, considering Art as a contempla-
tive refuge from the world of strife and pain. As a result of the desire for an artis-
tic haven, Symbolist poetry showed a keen sense of mortality and a sense of the 
malign power of sexuality.
MUSIC LATE AT NIGHT: POEMS 1970-1973
Looking closely at James McAuley’s poems from Music Late at Night: Poems 
1970-1973 (McAuley 1976) in terms of the affiliations it has with Trakl’s po-
ems in McAuley’s translation from Music in the Mirabell Garden (McAuley 1982), 
there are some distinct characteristics of poetic diction hold true for both poets. 
In the opening poem “World on Sunday” there are an irregular but still very per-
sistent use of rhyme, short statements, powerful Imagist imagery with Impres-
sionist undertones, and a recurrent use of the image of the moon set against the 
ever-changing sky, both taking on explicitly symbolic significance:
Brown lilac, roses filled with rain; 
Hayfever streaming off mown grass ... 
Disordered beds where we have lain; 
Life and death offered at Mass; ...
It isn’t easy to explain.
I turn back from the sunset stain.
A huge moon yellow like dull brass 
Lengthens my shadow down the lane.
(Music Late at Night 3)
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21James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
A huge moon, “yellow like dull brass”, bears an ominous significance for the poet, 
“lengthening his shadow” and thus reducing his existence from a real human being 
to a shadow. The reference to the “sunset stain” is interesting, for the common stock 
metaphor from the Romantic arsenal is turned upside down. Generally pleasant is, 
for the speaker, the “stain” of Man’s mortality, a sight one should turn away from. On 
the other hand, the simile used for comparing the moon to dull brass is not all that 
startling, but its recurrent use makes it a symbol in the collection.
“Nocturne” is a beautifully rendered Impressionist depiction of the melanchol-
ic feeling with the absent poetic persona. This time the setting is clearly set in 
Australia, probably McAuley’s Tasmania. It should be said that McAuley tried to 
balance out the European/Salzburg settings of the poems in the discussed col-
lection by moving freely between the Salzburg and Australian locales, to no det-
riment of the poems themselves. Moreover, this procédé highlights the ‘Mirabell’ 
poems much more effectively against the Australian pieces. We see the gull fly and 
casuarinas sigh, while the omnipresent moon is, once again, “congealed in cloud”, 
where it hangs motionless:
A gull flies low across the darkening bay. 
Along the shore the casuarinas sigh. 
Resentful plovers give their ratcheting cry
From the mown field scattered with bales of hay. 
The world sinks out of sight. 
The moon congealed 
In cloud seems motionless. 
The air is still.
(Music Late at Night 5)
In the poem “Private Devotions” we see the poet’s characteristic treatment of the 
moon. The grey clouds are still there, but it is essential to note the poet’s possi-
ble reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley and his short lyrical “The Waning Moon”, 
which by extension also determines the poet’s own stance:
Gathered starlings chatter loud
In the late night; the clocktower chimes; 
Ghostly-pale a full moon climbs
Out of the folds of linen cloud.
(Music Late at Night 6)
And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who tatters forth, wrapped in a gauzy veil, 
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain, 
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22 Igor Maver
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass -
(Percy Bysshe Shelley,  
“The Waning Moon”, 1961)
The “ghostly-pale” moon thus in both cases “climbs out of her chamber”, shrouded 
in her “gauzy veil”. This is perhaps a rather unexpected image for McAuley, but its 
recurrent use in the collection elevates to the stature of a symbol. It can be said it 
stands for a hypersensitive, isolated and lonely Romantic poet, shunned by soci-
ety at large because of his difference, and as a result of this, overtaken by despair. 
We would contend that such symbolism probably entitles us to place McAuley, 
regardless of other labels, also among the Neo-Romantics, particularly in his later 
stage. However, his Romantic quality is enriched with the elements of Symbol-
ism, and the echoes of Decadence. It is an interesting mixture indeed, and a very 
successful one, too.
In “Autumn Images” clouds fill the enormous sky, whereas in the poem “Madon-
na” the sky “runs cracks of jagged glare”. Its oppressive presence is very much remi-
niscent of Baudelaire’s le ciel qui pèse comme un couvercle (Baudelaire 1963). The poem 
“Winter Drive”, probably written by McAuley upon learning about the death of the 
Australian poet Kenneth Slessor (Coleman 1980, 108), is of seminal importance for 
this line of analysis, as well as a genuine lyrical neo-Romantic gem:
Fallow fields, dark pewter sky, 
Steady light on the wet plain, 
Evening falls in freezing rain 
With a promise and a lie.
Promise in the leaden sky,
In the leaden fields’ bleak shine, 
In the slate vats full of wine,
In the knowledge that we die.
But the lie is in the soul,
And it rots the world we have. 
Till there’s nothing left to save.
Dying world and deadened sky, 
Traffic roars beyond control. 
What is left to make us try?
 (Music Late at Night 8)
The final verse of the first stanza clearly reveals McAuley’s ambivalent attitude 
towards despair, subsumed in the image of rotting decay, which makes it different 
from Georg Trakl’s all-embracing pessimism. McAuley, unlike Trakl, always al-
lows for at least a spark of hope, “a promise”, although he accepts the inevitability 
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23James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
of a “lie”. Contrary to what one would expect, the poet still finds promise in the 
“leaden sky”, regardless of his awareness that everybody must die. This leads us to 
believe that his attitude to death is rather one of stoical acceptance, very much in 
the sense of Michel de Montaigne’s thoughts on death, suggesting that everyone 
should get used to the idea of dying (cf. Montaigne’s essay “Sur la Mort”, Essais). 
The double aspect and consequent interchangeability of hope and despair is in 
keeping with McAuley’s Romantic strain, attributing the “promise” to the natural 
element, the sky and the landscape, however leaden they may seem. The root of 
all evil, the “lie”, is in his view to be found in the condition humaine of every single 
individuum. To die “rots the world we have” and the poet sees no immediate solu-
tion to this state. The concluding ontological question into the purpose of Man’s 
existence thus remains merely on the rhetorical level. As it will be shown later, 
Trakl’s attitude is different in so far as there is no trace of hope, for Trakl is caught 
in the impasse of the capitalized Despair and Decay, both being reflected in the 
landscape of his Weltschmerz that cannot be individualized.
Geographical references are, on the other hand, perfectly clear in the poem “In 
the Gardens”, which was written during James McAuley’s visit to Trakl’s native 
Salzburg in 1973. The Mirabell castle and park (gardens) are set in the heart of 
the old town of Salzburg, not far from Trakl’ s home, now turned into a museum 
boasting exquisite eighteenth-century monuments from the Salzburg archi-episco-
pal reign, with the citadel crowning the city of spires and turrets. The gardens with 
its rose garden, orangerie (now a palm house) and statues (of dwarves), fountains re-
flect the French-type of a symmetrical jardin à la française and represent a symbol of 
power and glory in “a fearful symmetry” of the Baroque period of Prince-Archbish-
ops: the garden was built in 1606 by Dietrich Wolf. The speaker of the poem “In the 
Gardens” practically follows in Trakl’s “footprints,” brooding over the transcendence 
of the vision of the nymph’s “blank eyes”, so much reminiscent of Trakl’s “faun” who 
looks “with dead eyes after / Shadows that glide into the dark”:
Softly gleams the lily-pond.
A late bee hovers round the rose. And the 
gentle nymph’s blank eyes Seem to seek 
and see beyond
The park, the city, and the skies.
(Music Late at Night 10)
Ancestral marble has gone grey. 
A birdflight wavers into space.
A faun looks with dead eyes after 
Shadows that glide into the dark.
(Georg Trakl, “Music in the Mirabell Garden”)
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24 Igor Maver
In the next poem of the collection Music Late at Night, “Watercolour,” we are 
suddenly transposed back to an unmistakably Tasmanian setting in which we 
find McAuley’s masterly use of the colour-language. He juxtaposes the Mira-
bell Garden and a familiar garden from back home in Tasmania, growing “in 
the rock pools”, where “over mussel-beds the tide flows”. The reader notices the 
various shades of that are attributed to Australian setting, with the ever-pres-
ent symbol of the moon rising in “darker blue”. The brightness of typical Aus-
tralian light and sharp contrasts that can be seen in Australian water-colour 
art and painting are set in contradistinction to the “soft gleam” of the Mirabell 
pond in Salzburg:
The sky, the bay, are filled with blue. 
In the rock pools a garden grows. 
Over mussel-beds the tide flows.
A cormorant sinks in the blue ... 
What colours wink in the wet sand -
Sparkles of violet, green and blue? 
Above a headland of dark pines
A white sea-eagle holds the view.
Whatever it was we thought we knew 
Grows hazy as the sun declines.
The moon comes up in darker blue.
(Music Late at Night 11)
“Morning Voluntary” introduces the atmosphere of snow, cloudy skies and a gen-
erally cold atmosphere, of which perhaps “very little can indeed be said”:
Clouds have a brown look of snow. 
Cat comes limping from the shed.
The white birch with arms outspread, 
Having changed its wealth for gold, 
Drifts it down into the mould.
Stalky vines glow darker red ...
Very little can be said.
Cold inconstant breezes blow. 
Starlings comment in a row. 
Spots of black invade the red.
(Music Late at Night 12)
Leonie Kramer maintains that the colours in McAuley’s poems frequently assume 
a liturgical significance (Kramer 1988, xxv), which can be sustained with McAu-
ley’s own statement about the colour-language and synesthesia in Trakl’s poems:
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25James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
In Trakl’s world, colours take on meanings. The colours of life tend to become 
tainted and suffused with evil suggestions: for example red, the red of blood, the 
red of the red blouses of girls, has often a negative value. So too has yellow. The 
good colours are those of heaven: the blue and gold of the sky and the sun are 
named as God’s colours. But also white, the cold glitter of stars, or the white of 
bloodless flesh or ghosts, often implies a purity superior to the colours of life. 
(McAuley, 1975, 221)
In a Structuralist analysis Noel Macainsh, however, points out that colour is in 
this McAuley’s collection the most significant metaphoric feature and device:
The function of colours in the late poems is not fulfilled simply in suggestions 
of sense impressions but also in their prompting of reflection. Colours, which 
are themselves general impressions, gain specific meaning from their context, 
from their empirical origin. (Macainsh 1985, 339)
Another possible explanation of the colour-language in “Morning Voluntary” 
can be given. In this poem there are three basic colours: white, identified with 
coldness of snow and clouds, thus representing a negative value in terms of hos-
tile natural phenomena; red, likened to the elemental life force, energy and élan, 
which can, along with its creative impetus also be ultimately considered destruc-
tive for Man; and black, which seems to be the very distillation of the poeticiz-
ing subject’s despair. How are we, then, to interpret the crucial and mysterious 
statement “Spots of black invade the red?” In the physical landscape red leaves 
get black autumnal spots, but the reference is also to the poet’s cancer (black) in-
fected blood (red). In the landscape of the mind, black is one aspect of his con-
science, eating into his vital forces (“red spots”), massively destroying them and 
leaving behind but a “decay”. In Bergsonian terms one could even draw a parallel 
between the clash of the “deep” and “surface” ego within the poet’s mind, as it 
can be found, for example, in Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir or in the colour red-
black imagery of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. In any case, it is for each reader 
to project his own associations into the full understanding of the usage of colours 
in McAuley’s discussed later verse, which, in turn, depends largely on the civili-
zation and cultural background horizon of the reader and the significance they 
ascribe to each individual colour.
“Motel, Burnie” brings the reader back to Tasmania again, as well as “Saturday 
Morning,” in which he introduces the adjective “sodden”. The same epitheton or-
nans is employed in the next poem, “In Northern Tasmania”, which depicts a pas-
toral idyll disturbed by an ominous “silent raven”, symbolizing the poet’s under-
current of despair. The image of a raven is also used in “Saturday Morning”, and 
one unfortunately gets the impression that it is, like the adjective “sodden”, used 
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26 Igor Maver
all too frequently, in one poem after another. Still, the impression and sensibility 
of these poems is again a very Romantic one.
The concluding poems in Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973 are the record 
of James McAuley’s trip to Salzburg, a veritable pilgrimage to Trakl’s hometown. 
In his essay on Trakl he, for example, gives us direct references to the places, stat-
ues and the like he was not able to find while in Salzburg in 1973 (McAuley 1975, 
222). The imagery used before is in these poems enriched by auditory effects. The 
church bell chimes in Trakl’s and McAuley’s poetry signify sadness (cf. also Rowe 
2000), Weltschmerz, supposedly mourning, without precisely indicating for whom 
the Donne-like tolling of the bells is intended. The poem “Trakl: Salzburg II. In the 
Mirabell Garden” is thus directly inspired by Trakl, describing rather the “tableaux 
of lust and violence” in a grey Baroque marble, with the indispensable ominous bell-
strokes that “pulse the air”. The description of the graves, mortality and its intima-
tions and the waning flowers in the churchyard (“Trakl: Salzburg III. In a Village 
Churchyard”) unequivocally affiliates McAuley’s poem to Gray’s “Elegy Written in 
a Country Churchyard,” which also shows McAuley’s (pre)Romantic bent:
Their graves have holy-water stoups, for prayer; 
And little lamps they try to keep alight
To make the bed of darkness faintly bright;
And flowers of course, renewed with constant care.
 (Music Late at Night 19)
The title poem of the collection (and the last one “Autumn on the Wachau”) 
Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973 bears a clearly Traklean stamp: the shades 
of black, white and red colours, decay, “the soulless music” of bells and clouds of 
grief and despair. The poet evidently wrote this poem in the small hours, when 
even the moon “sails cold” and the empty streets wait for the new day to com-
mence, for a new beginning. But this time there will be no second chance, be-
cause the despair is just too overpowering, “the rigid silence is complete”. The 
music that the speaker of the poem ‘hears’ in the Mirabell Gardens is the music 
of silence, late at night, announcing the arrival of the end, death, and strongly 
reflecting McAuley’s knowledge of his incurable disease of which he died only 
three years later:
Black gashes in white bark. 
The gate is clouded with spicy prunus flowers.
The moon sails cold through the small hours. 
The helpless heart says, hold and wait. ... 
Again that soundless music: a taut string, 
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27James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
Burdened unbearably with grief
That smiles acceptance of despair.
(Music Late at Night 23)
Comparing Georg Trakl’s poems from the book of James McAuley’s translations 
Music in the Mirabell Garden with McAuley’ Music Late at Night, only the most 
obvious similarities shall be pointed out as regards the use of imagery and themes, 
most of which are also contained in McAuley’s own essay on Trakl. He devoted 
more than one page in the essay to Trakl’s fine and probably best known poem 
“Grödek”, speaking in greater detail about the significance of red colour:
The scene is the battlefield named in the title, with the sound of the guns, the 
cries of the wounded and dying, the day ending in a red sunset like the gathered 
blood of the slain. Night falls, the moonlight and stars appear over the battle-
field; in the darkness the poet’s sister appears to welcome the souls of the heroes 
who died in battle. (McAuley 206)
The imagery of the poem is, in fact, quite Imagistic, in its shocking concreteness, 
reminding us of similar procédés used by the American writer Stephen Crane, a 
precursor of Imagism in prose in The Red Badge of Courage:
A darker sun; night embraces 
Dying warriors, the wild complaint 
Of their broken mouths.
Yet quietly there gathers in the pasture-ground 
Red cloud, in which dwells an angry god,
Red blood gathers, lunar coolness.
All roads lead into black corruption.
(Music Late at Night 46)
The Romantic convention of using a solitary figure walking in the natural land-
scape in a “pensive mood”, as Wordsworth would have it, with all the senses ab-
sorbing the tiniest details, is common to both Trakl and McAuley. The poems 
are set in autumn and at dusk, with a cold wind blowing in a cloudy, “leaden” sky 
where only a “ghostly-pale” moon can occasionally be discerned. Where Trakl uses 
a blackbird, McAuley has a raven. Trakl’s original well-known poem “Music in the 
Mirabell” (Trakl 1982), like most of McAuley’s poems, shows the effacement of a 
persona, whereas the meaning is conveyed to the reader, not through statements, 
but rather through descriptions and musical score of the words. It can be seen on 
a marble table (Trakl Gedichttafel) in the Mirabell garden itself, paying homage to 
this site that Trakl and later McAuley visited, as well as many other poet-hunters 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   27 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
28 Igor Maver
and art pilgrims: it was the central poem for McAuley late verse and the one that 
gave rise to his Trakl translations.
“Musik im Mirabell”
Ein Brunnen singt. Die Wolken stehn
Im klaren Blau, die weißen, zarten.
Bedächtig stille Menschen gehn
Am Abend durch den alten Garten.
Der Ahnen Marmor ist ergraut.
Ein Vogelzug streift in die Weiten.
Ein Faun mit toten Augen schaut
Nach Schatten, die ins Dunkel gleiten.
Das Laub fällt rot vom alten Baum
Und kreist herein durchs offne Fenster.
Ein Feuerschein glüht auf im Raum
Und malet trübe Angstgespenster.
Ein weißer Fremdling tritt ins Haus.
Ein Hund stürzt durch verfallene Gänge.
Die Magd löscht eine Lampe aus,
Das Ohr hört nachts Sonatenklänge.
(Georg Trakl, 1912)
Trakl’s poem “Suburb in the Föhn” clearly shows his Romantic “exoticized” nature 
and disposition. For one thing, he introduces elements of exoticism and down-
right orientalism, and a wish to escape to far-away, unknown places, such as, for 
example, the land with the “rose-coloured mosques”. The poet notices in the after-
noon sky the beams of piercing sunrays, emerging through a sporadic cloud, as on 
the paintings by the old Flemish painters. In his daydreaming he imagines them 
bringing a different kind of life. We sense a “Romantic” and downright orientalist 
nostalgia for the mediaeval past in “fine carriages, gallant horsemen”. The use of 
colours here possibly suggests the influence of Arthur Rimbaud, while a similar 
escapist theme can be found also in Trakl’ s poem “Decay” (“Thus over clouds I 
follow those far journeys”):
Out of clouds shimmering avenues emerge, 
Complete with fine carriages, gallant horsemen. 
The one sees a ship run aground against cliffs, 
And often there are rose-coloured mosques.
(Music in the Mirabell Garden 36)
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29James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
An example of Trakl’s Decadent streak, which has surprisingly passed almost 
unnoticed by the critics, is the “Farm-girl”. It is reminiscent of Baudelaire’s de-
piction of the beautiful and, at the same time, rotting aspects of an object, but 
even more so of E. A. Poe’s iconographic usage of the death of a young, beautiful 
woman (cf. “Annabell Lee”). The figure of the farm-girl thus appears in striking 
contradictions: youth – death and beauty – rotting decay. The distant tinkle of 
a bell, similarly to McAuley’s poems, indicates the state of mourning, while the 
originally blue sky gets covered by “black cloths”, as the farm-girl’s death becomes 
imminent. The imagery of decay used is Imagist and Decadent again, shocking 
but effective indeed: her mouth is compared to a wound, buzzing with flies, which 
brings Baudelaire to mind (“Une Charogne”, A Carrion), depicting putrefication 
(Baudelaire 1963, 44-46):
And the sky looked at the superb carcass
     Like a flower blossoming.
The smell was so strong that there on the grass
     You believed you might faint/…/.
(Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du mal 44-46)
And the bright blue of the sky.
And the wind brings to the window 
The distant tinkle of a bell.
Shadows glide across the pillow ... 
She breathes heavily in her pillow 
And her mouth is like a wound ... 
Clouds above the silent forests
That are covered with black cloths ...
She lies quite white in the darkness.
A cooing of doves sounds under the eaves.
Like carrion in bush and darkness
Flies are buzzing round her mouth.
(Georg Trakl, Music in the Mirabell Garden 22)
However, despite several common traits between Trakl and McAuley, Decadence 
remains one that did not specifically attract McAuley in composing his Music Late 
at Night Poems: 1970-1973, albeit he chose for translation many Trakl’s poems 
with Decadent themes and sensibility.
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30 Igor Maver
CONCLUSION
The parallels and literary affiliations between the Austrian poet Georg Trakl’s ear-
ly lyrical poems, many of which James McAuley from Australia masterly trans-
lated into English in the book of verse translations from Trakl’s verse Music in the 
Mirabell Garden, and McAuley’s later verse from Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-
1973, are manifold. Both poets display a ‘divided’ soul in a Romantic ‘agony’, torn 
between the depths of despair and (especially McAuley) affirmative hope, the rea-
sons of which are, of course, quite different for each of the two poets, whether the 
loss of religious belief or awareness of illness in McAuley’s case (Gaffney 1976, 
408), or the emotional imbalance that is enhanced by the Expressionist feeling of 
guilt and the horrors of the Great War in Trakl’s verse. They both use the descrip-
tion of the landscape, although in a much more elaborate and complex way than 
Eliot’s concept of “objective correlative” would have it. Landscape charged with 
an intrinsic symbolic negative value does not merely reflect the psyche of the poet, 
for it also influences the poet’s mind and mood (cf. Page 2014). The relationship 
of influence is, so it seems, a mutual one. The landscapes of despair, on the other 
hand, are darker in Trakl’s poems, because McAuley shows a somewhat ambiva-
lent attitude towards utmost despair and generally does not share Trakl’s Expres-
sionist violence, death, sexuality and the apocalyptic vision of the world. Both po-
ets, however, express more than just physical reality but rather their own subjective 
emotional experience of the moment.
The “ghostly-pale” moon and “leaden” sky are present in the verse of both po-
ets writing out of decay, the moon possibly representing their solitary neo-Ro-
mantic nature, isolation and outcast state, which in turn throws them into dis-
gust (Trakl) and despair (McAuley). It is rather paradoxical to describe McAuley 
the poet as a neo-Romantic, especially since McAuley the critic expresses such 
a “commensurate distrust of the Romantic emphasis on feelings which, while it 
has unfortunate tendencies to undervalue the expression of strong personal feel-
ing in works of literature, is justified to the extent that it reminds us that a culture 
of the feelings which is hostile to the intellect is itself suspect” (Robinson 1983, 
206). Still, comparing the two poets, relatively far apart chronologically, one can 
contend that they were Romantics at heart, with Symbolism being more explic-
it in McAuley and Decadence and Expressionism in Trakl, although they were 
both fascinated by the German Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) journal group 
of Expressionist artists, especially the painters Franz Marc and Wassily Kandin-
sky. This holds true only for McAuley’s late poetry which has been discussed here, 
and which can be related to his early poetic attempts. It is therefore interesting 
to see how, after decades of different preoccupations, he returned to his original 
poetic stance. Through Georg Trakl’s Decadent strain and fin de siècle affiliations 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   30 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
31James McAuley’s Verse Collection Music Late At Night
(George, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, since his strongest literary affiliation lies with this 
particular Symbolist French poet), whom McAuley translated into English in 
the collection Music in The Mirabell Garden: Georg Trakl, it is possible to establish 
James McAuley’s fascination with these poets as well. James McAuley’s collection 
Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973 published after his demise thus belongs to 
some of the finest verse he wrote. Trakl was a major literary influence on McAu-
ley’s late poetry, whose verse was (linguistically and culturally) mediated through 
McAuley’s verse translations of the Austrian poet, thus working both ways.
Acknowledgment
The author acknowledges the financial support from the Slovenian Research 
Agency (research core funding No. P6-0265).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baudelaire, Charles. “Une Charogne”/ “A Carrion”, Flowers of Evil. Double-lan-
guage edition by Wallace Fowlie. New York: Bantam Books Inc., 1963. 44-46. 
Coleman, Peter. The Heart of James McAuley. Sydney: Wildcat Press, 1980.
____. Coleman, Peter. The Heart of James McAuley: Life and Work of the Australian 
Poet (rev. ed.). Cleveland, Qld.: Connor Court Publishing, 2006.
Gaffney, Carmel. “Music out of Decay: McAuley’s Later Poetry and Georg Trakl”, 
Southerly, No. 4 (1976): 407-419. Revealing were also McAuley’s comments on 
Trakl on ABC Radio in October 1973.
Harwood, Gwen. “Introduction to Music in the Mirabell Garden”. Cf. Trakl.
Kramer, Leonie. James McAuley. St Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press, 
1988.
Macainsh, Noel. “Music in the Mirabell”, Quadrant, No. 19, September (1984): 
18-23.
____. “The Late Poems of James McAuley”, Southerly, No. 45/ 3, September 
(1985): 330-342.
McAuley, James. “The Poetry of Georg Trakl”. The Grammar of the Real: Selected 
Prose 1959-1974. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975. 
____. A Map of Australian Verse: The Twentieth Century. Melbourne: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1975. 
____. Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1976. 
Also contained in Time Given: Poems 1970-1976.
____. Time Given: Poems 1970–1976. Canberra: Brindabella Press, 1976.
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   31 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
32 Igor Maver
____. “Broken Incantation”, qtd in Peter Coleman, The Heart of James McAuley. 
Sydney: Wildcat Press, 1980.
Page, Jean. “Writing from the Periphery: the Haunted Landscapes of James 
McAuley”, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Vol 14, 
No 1(2014), https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/
issue/view/773.
Robinson, Dennis. “The Traditionalism of James McAuley”. Australian Literary 
Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, (1983), doi: 10.20314/als.48d17f69b4.
Rowe, Noel. “James McAuley: The Possibility of Despair”, Southerly 60.2 (2000): 
26–38.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poems of Shelley. Thomas Hutchinson (ed.). London: 
Oxford University Press, 1961.
Trakl, Georg. Music in the Mirabell Garden: Georg Trakl; translations, images and 
songs [by] James McAuley, Larry Sitsky, John Olsen, Gwen Harwood. Ho-
bart: University of Tasmania, The New Albion Press, 1982. Only 330 copies 
of the book were published, with hand-set text, printed by hand on goat-skin 
parchment with floriated initials.
Winter, John. “Printing James McAuley During the Falklands War“, Westerly, No. 
2, June (1989): 79.
Igor Maver
University of Ljubljana
Igor.Maver@ff.uni-lj.si
Zbirka Music Late at Night: Poems 1973-1976 Jamesa McAuleyja in 
poezija Georga Trakla
Članek obravnava angleške prevode avstralskega pesnika Jamesa McAuleyja iz poezije 
avstrijskega pesnika Georga Trakla (1887-1914), kakor tudi Traklov literarni vpliv na 
McAuleyjevo lastno ustvarjanje v posthumni zbirki Music Late at Night: Poems 1970-1973. 
To velja predvsem za Traklovo pesniško zbirko prevedene poezije v angleščino Music in 
the Mirabell Garden, sicer pa nekatere zgodnje in pozne pesmi Jamesa McAuleyja prav 
tako kažejo močan pečat Traklove simbolistične in kasneje tudi ekspresionistične poezije.
Ključne besede: James McAuley, Georg Trakl, avstralska poezija
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   32 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
33
Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
Dieter Fuchs
Abstract
This article fuses a survey of the play’s most important standard interpretations with those 
aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating about this text: the conflict of 
England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture in the early modern period; the 
meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatricality of Renaissance court life; the play’s 
reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of reformation dis-
course. To elucidate some aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion 
of Hamlet, the article will bring two important topics into focus: the courtly discovery of 
perspective and the dying Hamlet’s request to tell his story to the afterworld at the end 
of the play.
Keywords: Shakespeare, Hamlet, revenge, modern subject, reformation discourse, me-
ta-drama, manipulation of perspective, never-ending narrative loop
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-21Shakespeare W.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.33-55
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   33 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
34 Dieter Fuchs
In this article, I am going to present my thoughts on Hamlet from a twofold van-
tage point: I intend to fuse a survey of the play’s most important standard inter-
pretations with those aspects which may be considered particularly fascinating, 
innovative and thrilling about this text. In the case of Hamlet, these fascinations 
include the conflict of England’s catholic past with the rise of protestant culture 
in the early modern period; the meta-dramatic dimension of the play; the theatri-
cality of Renaissance court life documented in this text; and last but not least the 
play’s reflection of the emerging modern subject triggered off by the rise of refor-
mation discourse. As I shall argue, all these aspects present a set of heterogeneous 
voices that articulate a national identity crisis Elizabethan England had to face at 
the time when Hamlet was written. And it is this polyphonic multiplicity of voic-
es that makes Shakespeare’s Hamlet a most fascinating drama. To elucidate some 
aspects which tend to be overlooked in the scholarly discussion of Hamlet, I will 
bring two important topics into focus: first, the courtly discovery of perspective 
and its manipulative management which I will call ‘observed observation’; sec-
ond, the dying Hamlet’s request that his confidante Horatio tells his story to the 
afterworld at the end of the play. This final request does not only transform the 
drama into a narrative, but first of all into a never-ending story: as the tale to be 
told after its end concludes with Hamlet’s request to tell his story, each end trig-
gers off a new beginning in a cyclical – i.e. infinite, self-repetitive, procrastinat-
ing – narrative loop of Derridean différance. But let us begin with some standard 
background information.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600 and 1601. Whereas the 1590s, follow-
ing the victory over Spain in 1588, were the boom years of Elizabethan England 
as a nascent nation state, the turn of the seventeenth century may be considered a 
time of collective crisis. Everyone knew that the reign of Elizabeth I was drawing 
towards an end in the near future owing to the fact that the Queen was approach-
ing the age of 70 at that time. As the Virgin Queen had no children, there was no 
lineal successor, and the House of Tudor would die out as soon as the aged Queen 
would pass away. As Elizabeth refused to name an heir to the throne, nobody 
knew what the future would bring.
To secure the ownership of Hamlet for Shakespeare’s theatre troupe, the Dan-
ish play was entered into the Stationer’s Register in 1602. As far as the editorial 
history of the play (cf. Schülting 533-4) is concerned, the earliest textual variants 
are a quarto edition from 1603 (Q1), a more recent quarto from 1604/5 (Q2) 
and the folio-edition of Shakespeare’s collected works from 1623 (F). As the first 
quarto is only half as long as a modern text edition would be, scholars considered 
it a rather faulty pirated copy reconstructed from Hamlet as it was performed in 
the playhouse. In its brevity, however, this allegedly ‘bad’ quarto also has its assets: 
it gives us an idea about early modern theatre practice. Whereas we tend to enact 
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35Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
textual monuments and attend performances of plays that last up to three or four 
hours, the Elizabethans were not so patient. They wanted to hear a concise and 
thrilling story in a performance that should not exceed a maximum of about two 
and a half hours (cf. Castrop 107).
As the second quarto was considered more reliable than the first one – and as 
it contains about 230 lines that are not to be found in the folio text – traditional 
editorial policy tended to conflate it with the folio. More recent editions such as 
The Arden Shakespeare edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor in 2006, however, 
acknowledge these textual variants as various stages of the play as a dynamic text 
– stages that respond to the political and socio-cultural climate of their respective 
times of performance by way of topical allusion.
The second quarto, for instance, was printed one or two years after Queen 
Elizabeth’s death and may respond to her successor James I, who – with a grain 
of salt – may be considered a real-life counterpart of Hamlet: when James was a 
young man, his mother, Mary Queen of Scots had a lover who murdered her hus-
band in 1567. When the murderer and the widowed Queen married soon after, 
the young James was left in the Hamlet-like situation of the dispossessed son and 
prince (cf. Schwanitz 2006: 16).
Having very briefly considered the textual history of the Danish play, I will 
now proceed to the source material of the Hamlet-plot used by Shakespeare (cf. 
Schülting 534-5). Although Hamlet has an exceptional reputation among Shake-
speare’s works, its plot is far from original. Shakespeare is not an original play-
wright as far as the invention of plots is concerned. Very often Shakespeare bases 
his plots on pre-existing stories. The originality of his art lies in the way he re-
writes, re-contextualizes and recombines his source material; and this is also the 
case in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s Hamlet-plot is based on three major sources.
The first one is the Historica Danica – a late twelfth century Danish chronicle 
written by a scholar who called himself Saxo Grammaticus. Saxo tells us about 
the Danish Prince Amleth who takes revenge on his uncle. Amleth’s uncle killed 
his elder brother the King of Denmark in order to become king himself; and to 
disinherit the murdered king’s son and heir Amleth, the uncle marries his broth-
er’s widow, which medieval and early modern culture considered an incestuous 
and thus unnatural match. And this constellation of the challenged family triad 
of father, mother and son constitutes the Hamlet-plot in a nutshell. In contrast 
to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the medieval Prince Amleth does not hesitate to kill his 
uncle by way of revenge and becomes the new King of Denmark. Revenge is pre-
sented as a legitimate means to restore justice.
When we compare Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the medieval source material 
from Saxo Grammaticus, we not only discover that the Bard, too, presents the 
constellation of the disturbed family triad as the structural backbone of his play. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   35 6. 12. 2021   11:36:06
36 Dieter Fuchs
We also discover that Shakespeare deviates from the medieval chronicle when he 
debates revenge as a problematic issue. Whereas the Amleth-figure from the His-
torica Danica is more than ready to take revenge, and becomes king to sanction 
his semi-anarchic deed, Shakespeare’s Hamlet suffers under the ethical problem 
of private justice and procrastinates his retaliation as long as possible. To atone 
for the fact that the code of honour requires him to kill the avuncular murderer 
Claudius to requite his father’s unnatural death, Hamlet dies after he has accom-
plished his revenge. Thus the ethical debate of private justice may be considered 
one of the most important aspects of the Shakespearean rewriting of the medieval 
Amleth-tale. So what does this ethical dilemma look like?
If the state apparatus fails to restore justice by way of law and order, the only 
way to do so is via private revenge. If we restore justice in this way and requite 
a crime against our family with the same deed, however, we become involved in 
criminal action ourselves: if we kill the person who murdered a member of our 
family we become killers ourselves. Is there a way to cope with the semi-anarchic 
paradox that we have to engage in the crime of homicide in order to avenge a 
murder and restore justice? And what about the matter of sin? On the one hand, 
the Old Testament of the Bible recommends to take “an eye for an eye, a tooth for 
a tooth,” and so on (Exodus 21; 24); this would mean that to requite murder with 
homicide may be considered an appropriate way to restore justice. On the other 
hand, the New Testamentarian Jesus renounces this archaic code and commands 
us to love and forgive our neighbours: “[…] whosoever shall smite thee on thy 
right cheek, turn to him the other also” (Mt 5; 39). So what’s to be done to cope 
with this aporia? And what about the Biblical passage: “[v]engeance is mine, I will 
repay, saith the Lord” (Romans 12; 19)? This is one of the unresolved questions 
that interest Shakespeare most when he rewrites the medieval Amleth-case. But 
let us let us return to the documentation of Shakespeare’s source material.
The second version of the Hamlet-story relevant for our context is a collection 
of French Romance tales: Belleforest’s Histoires Tragiques from 1570. Whereas the 
medieval Prince Amleth from Saxo Grammaticus survives and becomes king to le-
gitimize his vindictive restoration of justice, Belleforest’s early modern Hamlet-fig-
ure dies like his Shakespearean counterpart after he has accomplished his revenge.
The third source for Shakespeare’s play is the so-called Ur-Hamlet from ca. 
1589. This is a Hamlet-drama whose text has not survived, and we may speculate 
about its content and authorship only. A German adaptation of the Ur-Ham-
let from 1710, however, still exists, and this variant gives us some clue what the 
lost play may have looked like. The German adaptation is entitled Der Bestrafte 
Brudermord. The authorship of the Ur-Hamlet is usually attributed to Thomas 
Kyd, who founded the Elizabethan genre of revenge tragedy, and we will see that 
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is deeply imbued with the aesthetics and conventions of 
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37Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
revenge drama – the sub-genre which debates the ethical problem of private jus-
tice mentioned above.
As the foundational text of the Ur-Hamlet is lost, we have to look at another 
prototype of revenge tragedy in order to find out more about the generic conven-
tions at work in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587) 
as the earliest surviving source of Elizabethan revenge drama. The generic fea-
tures presented in this play include the appearance of ghosts, the play within the 
play, the revenger’s feigned madness and his deferral of revenge up to the very 
end. Revenge tragedy applies these aspects as a means of an ethical debate which 
may not only be attributed to the Biblical background mentioned above. It may 
also be attributed to the classical tradition represented by the Stoic philosopher 
and playwright Seneca. As a playwright, Seneca wrote eight drawing room trag-
edies dealing with the excessive violence resulting from uncontained passion as a 
vicious circle of revenge and counter-revenge; as a Stoic philosopher, by contrast, 
Seneca suggests self-moderation and self-control as a way to contain the dilemma 
of private justice represented in his plays.
Having considered the source material of the Hamlet-plot and the generic 
context of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in terms of revenge tragedy, let us now take a look 
at the play as such.
The play opens with the newly-wed couple of Hamlet’s widowed mother Ger-
trude and his uncle Claudius. Hamlet’s father has recently died under suspicious 
circumstances, and his younger brother Claudius has succeeded the Danish throne 
by way of marriage policy. Although Prince Hamlet would have been the lineal suc-
cessor as his royal father’s son and heir, he was dispossessed of his father’s crown by 
the uncle. As Denmark is an elective rather than hereditary kingdom, Claudius has 
succeeded in gaining the support and the votes of the royal court. And as a clever 
politician, Claudius treats Hamlet like a beloved son in order to get the young man’s 
support to fashion himself as the allegedly legitimate successor to the throne.
Yet there is something fishy about all that, and this makes Hamlet suspicious and 
gloomy: his father’s all too unexpected and sudden death is followed by an all too 
sudden marriage of the late king’s widow with her late husband’s younger brother 
– an aspect which may not only be considered a sacrilege owing to the already not-
ed circumstance that early modern culture regarded the match of a widow with her 
brother-in-law incestuous; the sacrilege lies also in the fact that the widow skipped 
the obligatory mourning year: rather than spending at least one year mourning for 
her late husband in prayer and chastity, Hamlet’s mother Gertrude remarried only 
two months after the funeral, or as the Shakespearean text puts it:
[…] The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. (1.2.179-80) 
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38 Dieter Fuchs
And rather than pray and fast, the widow and the late husband’s brother drink, 
feast and have sex: the funeral is followed by a never-ending orgy of lust, gluttony 
and lechery. In addition to this posthumous profanation of his father’s honour, 
Hamlet will soon have to find out that his father was murdered by none other 
than Claudius. To restore justice, Hamlet feels obliged to take revenge on Claudi-
us, but he procrastinates his revenge over and over again. This delay may be con-
sidered one of the generic features of revenge tragedy mentioned above. Whereas 
other revenge plays present rather flat characters and apply the delay of action as 
a cliff-hanger to build up tension, however, this is not the case in Shakespeare’s 
Hamlet. In contrast to the standard pattern of revenge tragedy, Hamlet presents a 
highly individualized main character whose philosophical scepticism makes him 
delay his revenge over and over again.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Freudian scholar Ernest Jones 
(1910) attributed Hamlet’s deferral of vindictive action to the Oedipus complex. 
According to Freud, every son loves his mother. Being the first woman he meets, 
the son feels sexually attracted to her. Rather than making love to the son, how-
ever, the mother makes love to the son’s father and this fills the son with jealousy; 
mortal jealousy that results in filial fantasies of patricide. According to Freud, 
every son dreams of killing his father and making love with his mother. Seen from 
such an Oedipal vantage point, Ernest Jones argues that Hamlet hesitates to take 
revenge on his uncle, since Claudius committed the very deed the young prince 
dreamt of in his own Oedipal fantasies: to kill his father. Rather than overthrow-
ing his father himself, the uncle has already done that and that’s why Hamlet sub-
consciously sympathizes with Claudius. So far so good.
Psychologically interesting as such a Freudian analysis may be, one cannot 
but note the a-historical dimension of such an approach. Historicists argue that 
Shakespeare’s early modern plays must not be viewed from the ‘presentist’ van-
tage point of early twentieth-century psychology. Rather than that, one has to 
acknowledge the Elizabethan approach to the human psyche that Shakespeare 
was familiar with. According to the Elizabethans, the human body consists of 
four bodily liquids or humours, and it is the mixture of these humours that reg-
ulates man’s psychological disposition: the mixture of blood, phlegm, yellow bile 
and black bile. The respective predominance of one of these four liquids consti-
tutes four major character types: the hearty sanguine, the sluggish phlegmatic, the 
hot-tempered choleric and the gloomy melancholic. Hamlet is a melancholic if 
not to say the most famous melancholic of world literature.
Melancholics are said to be gloomy intellectuals who cannot cope with prac-
tical life. Their intellectual brilliance makes them undecided as they find as many 
pros and cons when they debate a problem, and this makes them hesitant like 
Hamlet. Rather than making a clear-cut decision, they think rather than act – and 
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39Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
this thought-tormented disposition brings them to the verge of insanity despite 
their intellectual genius. Thus it is owing to his melancholic un-decidedness that 
Hamlet procrastinates his revenge over and over again. Although he reflects on 
what is to be done, there always remains a feeling of doubt and uncertainty. To 
stress this disposition, Hamlet’s exterior appearance looks like that of a school-
book melancholic: he is skinny and pale, dressed in black, has a gloomy facial ex-
pression and is presented as a thought-tormented reader of books. Rather than 
being brought to the brink of madness by fits of depression, however, Hamlet 
applies the melancholic inclination to insanity as a means of disguise. As he says, 
Hamlet puts on an “antic disposition” (1.5.173) and plays the madman in order to 
deceive his antagonist and to find out more about his father’s all too sudden death 
– and it is this fondness for acting and role-play that makes Hamlet a paradigmat-
ic theatre-man like Shakespeare and the Hamlet-drama a play about role-playing 
– role-playing in the theatre and the empirical world alike. We will have to con-
sider this meta-dramatic aspect of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in detail later on.
Having attributed Hamlet’s unwillingness to take action, and to procrastinate 
what is to be done, to his melancholic disposition, we can now move on to Ham-
let’s encounter with his father’s ghost as another stock motif of revenge tragedy. 
The ghost confirms the suspicion that “[s]omething is rotten in the state of Den-
mark” (1.4.67) as far as the late king’s enigmatic death and the speedy remarriage 
of the widow with the younger brother are concerned:
Ghost. I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotty and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, Hamlet, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love–
Hamlet. O God!
Ghost. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
Hamlet. Murder!
Ghost. Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural.
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40 Dieter Fuchs
Hamlet. Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.
Ghost.   I find thee apt,
And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed
That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf
Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear.
‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown.
Hamlet.  O my prophetic soul! Mine uncle?
Ghost. Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts–
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power
So to seduce! – won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen. (1.5.9-46)
There is, however, something suspicious as far as the authority of this ghostly rev-
elation is concerned. On the one hand, the ghost tells Hamlet the pre-history of 
the murder and commands him to take filial revenge, as the traditional code of 
honour would have it. On the other hand, Hamlet is asked not to “[t]aint” (1.5.85) 
or burden his mind. But as already noted, the restoration of justice by way of re-
venge cannot but produce further guilt and cannot but burden one’s conscience. 
Thus the words of the ghost as an otherworldly messenger turn out to be as par-
adoxical as the problem of revenge – and this ambivalence brings us to an impor-
tant aspect: the topic of religion, which is the focus of Stephen Greenblatt’s study 
Hamlet in Purgatory (2001). To understand the Hamletian relevance of the con-
cept of purgatory mentioned in the title of Greenblatt’s book on Hamlet, let us 
reconsider some of the lines quoted above:
Ghost. I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. […] (1.5.9-13)
The paternal ghost claims to come from purgatory and reminds the son to take 
revenge on the murderer Claudius so that his poor soul will eventually come to 
rest. It is, however, not only the shame of his unavenged murder that makes the 
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41Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
ghost of Hamlet’s father live in purgatory for some time. As Hamlet’s father was 
poisoned while asleep, he had no chance to confess his sins to a priest in order 
to prepare for death and the afterworld; rather than being delivered from evil 
with the help of a priest and immediately proceeding into heaven, the unprepared 
king’s soul has to go to purgatory in order to be cleansed of the un-confessed sins 
committed on earth. The purgatory as the poor souls’ waiting room for heaven is 
a deeply catholic concept – and this brings us to Greenblatt’s reading of Hamlet 
as a play that features an early modern power struggle triggered off by the rise of 
protestant discourse: the conflicting memory of England’s catholic past with the 
new power and knowledge produced by the reformed religion.
From the protestant vantage point of Hamlet’s Denmark and Shakespeare’s 
England alike, the ghost as a representative of the Roman Catholic religion is 
seen as an agent of evil rather than a poor soul waiting to be delivered of its sins. 
Protestantism rejects the catholic notion of purgatory as an iconoclastic and si-
moniac institution. ‘Simoniac’ is an adjective that refers to the deliverance of sin in 
exchange of money – a widely spread catholic practice that triggered off the prot-
estant movement at the beginning of the sixteenth century. As the Pope needed 
huge sums of money to build Saint Peter’s Cathedral and the Vatican Palace, the 
sinners were offered Papal letters of indulgence in exchange of money: rather than 
to confess and pray, a poor soul could pay her way to heaven; and to make the sin-
ners willing to pay rather than pray, purgatory – or the more suggestive German 
term ‘Fegefeuer’ – was invented to make them afraid of a period of hell-like fiery 
tortures to atone for their un-forgiven (i.e. un-paid) earthly sins, or as the Ger-
man Simoniac preachers of indulgence famously put it: “When money in the box 
resounds, the soul then from the fire bounds.” And this is, of course, a corrupt and 
evil practice the protestant reformers tried to abolish with good reason.
To stress further the ambivalence of the father’s ghost with regard to catholic 
Purgatory, Hamlet is fashioned as a representative of the reformed religion: he 
studies at the University of Wittenberg where Martin Luther initiated the Prot-
estant movement in 1517. In contrast to the deliverance of sin by catholic rituals 
of pardon, reformed discourse locates the conflict of good and evil within the iso-
lated individual’s conscience. Thus the conscience-struck individual has to cope 
with his guilt without the assistance of confessions and other penitent rituals such 
as letters of pardon to be bought with money. Seen from this vantage point, the 
encounter of the conscience-struck protestant son with the fatherly ghost from 
the catholic past represents the early modern reformatory conflict in a nutshell. 
As can be seen from the ghostly appearance of Hamlet’s father from purgatory, 
the old religion and its consolatory rituals forbidden by the protestant state appa-
ratus were not yet dead and lived on in the minds of the Elizabethans – hence the 
ghost’s conflicting identity as a poor soul to be assisted and remembered by the 
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42 Dieter Fuchs
living via prayer and a hellish demon from the pre-reformed past calling for the 
mortal sin of murder disguised as revenge to lead Hamlet’s protestant soul astray.
When the catholic rituals were forbidden by the Elizabethan state, the cultural 
memory of the pre-reformed past was secularized, stored and re-enacted in the 
playhouse – an aspect which can be observed not only from the catholic subtext 
of Hamlet, but also from the genre of English Renaissance drama as such. As the 
English tradition of early modern drama emerged from Catholicism, the Elizabe-
than plays derived from the pre-reformed morality plays and mystery cycles func-
tioned as a storehouse of the old religion. In fact, there are many facets that show 
that a dramatic performance in the early modern playhouse may be considered a 
secularized substitute of the catholic mass – and this brings us to the next topic 
relevant for our Hamlet-analysis: meta-drama.
When the new religion teaches Hamlet to listen to his conscience, the author-
ity of the ghostly voice from the catholic past is challenged by reformed discourse. 
As the metaphysical sphere has lost its absolute power in this way, it is Hamlet 
himself who has to find out whether the ghost has told the truth or not. As the 
ghost might turn out to be a devilish trick to induce him to murder and lead his 
soul astray if seen from the protestant point of view, Hamlet looks for empirical, 
or circumstantial evidence to find out the truth about his uncle’s putative guilt. 
And as a means to reveal the truth, Hamlet stages a play within the play to be 
performed before Claudius and his court. To “hold as ‘t’were the mirror up to na-
ture” (3.2.22) – or to make visible what otherwise cannot be seen – Hamlet asks 
the meta-dramatic actors to stage the murder of his father in exactly the way he 
was told by the ghost. If Claudius is the murderer, he will recognize his deed per-
formed on stage, panic and reveal his guilt by way of psychological evidence. Or 
as Hamlet puts it “[t]he play’s the thing [w]herein I’ll catch the conscience of 
the King” (2.2.606-7). Should Claudius be innocent, however, he will consider 
the performance a mere piece of fiction and remain emotionally untouched. It 
is owing to this tricky dimension that Hamlet’s meta-dramatic play is called ‘the 
mousetrap.’ And of course Claudius panics when he sees his murder re-enacted 
on stage. As a secularized form of white magic or exorcism, the play reveals what 
cannot be seen (cf. Greenblatt and Schwanitz 2006: 63). The revelatory or confes-
sional function that used to be monopolized by the old religion has now become 
absorbed by the playhouse. And according to Dietrich Schwanitz (1993 & 2006), 
this secularized revelatory function may be attributed to the early modern discov-
ery of perspective at work in the mousetrap-scene as a play within the play.
As we will see now, it is owing to Hamlet’s management of perspective that it 
is only he and the audience of the play proper – and not the meta-dramatic au-
dience – who recognize Claudius’s panic as a revelation of guilt. When in the in-
serted play the player king is poisoned while asleep, the audience in the playhouse 
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43Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
and the meta-dramatic audience on stage observe the performance from con-
flicting points of view. The audience in the playhouse is familiar with Hamlet’s 
vantage point and recognizes the re-enactment of the murder of Hamlet’s father 
by Claudius as it was told by the ghost. The meta-dramatic audience on stage, in 
contrast, remains ignorant of this aspect: owing to Hamlet’s management of per-
spective, it interprets the scene the other way round, as Hamlet as the stage di-
rector calls the meta-dramatic murderer the king’s nephew rather than the king’s 
brother (cf. 3.2.232): to foster his revenge strategy as a madman in disguise, Ham-
let makes the meta-dramatic audience believe that the staged regicide presents his 
allegedly mad self as the new king’s nephew rather than Claudius as the late king’s 
brother as the murderer. Owing to Hamlet’s theatrical management of perspec-
tive, the meta-dramatic spectators think that the mad prince stages the play as a 
barely disguised threat to kill his uncle Claudius in order to usurp the throne and 
to become king himself. Thus it is only Hamlet and the audience in the playhouse 
proper who decode Claudius’s panic as a circumstantial proof of his guilt, whereas 
the meta-dramatic audience on stage attributes the king’s reaction to his nephew’s 
“antic disposition” (1.5.173) as a madman.
Hamlet’s management or manipulation of perspective is not only inextrica-
bly tied to meta-drama, which, like Elizabethan drama in general, reveals what 
cannot be seen by way of the secularized white magic of the catholic past – a de-
velopment which may be traced back to the already noted fact that early modern 
English drama emerged from the rite of the catholic mass via the mystery and 
morality play tradition. Hamlet’s management or manipulation of perspective is 
also inextricably tied to his strictly secular experience as a courtier – and this 
brings me to the next important aspect: early modern court life, which may be 
considered a secularized meta-drama in its own right.
Whereas medieval culture determined a person’s rank in society by the right 
of birth and lineage, early modern culture invented the court as a new political 
sphere where the aristocrats had to vie with their peers for their authority in terms 
of impression management (Goffman 1959). As the monopoly of courtly power 
is in the hands of the monarch, the courtiers cannot fight for their political posi-
tion by way of open combat, which would challenge the proto-absolutist power of 
the king. Rather than that, they have to represent their merit by carefully staged 
performances of a public image. Image-propaganda – or Renaissance Self-Fashion-
ing as Stephen Greenblatt (1980) puts it – becomes the new strategy to present 
oneself as a person of authority to the proto-absolutistic ruler, to appeal to him, to 
advise him and thus to have a share in the execution of stately power. Like players 
on the theatrical stage, aristocrats become actors in a political drama performed at 
court. This dramatization of early modern culture in terms of courtly role-play is 
not only foregrounded by the ambiguous term ‘to act’ – which may refer to action 
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44 Dieter Fuchs
proper, the assumption of a theatrical role, or feigned activity – but, first of all, by 
the extremely popular early modern metaphor of the ‘world as a stage’ presented 
in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for instance:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts […] (2.7.139-42)
Be it on the stage of the playhouse proper or the stage-like situation of the court, 
stage-like role-play, or performativity, determined one’s social rank in the early 
modern period. And this role-play involved the insight that one not only observes 
others, but that one is simultaneously being observed while observing the others 
(cf. Schwanitz 1993). It is this experience of the new secular sphere of the early 
modern court fused with the medieval white magic of the catholic mass, which 
leads to the discovery of perspective and induces Hamlet to stage his meta-drama 
as a mirror technique presented from the various vantage points we considered 
above. Owing to his mastery of theatrical enactment, or Renaissance Self-Fash-
ioning, Hamlet is presented as the champion of the Danish court – as an ideal 
gentleman schooled in the courtly mirror technique of observed observation:
O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th’observed of all observers, quite, quite down! (3.1.153-57)
Having discussed the rise of court culture and the growing awareness of perspec-
tive, let me now complement these observations with two contrasting philoso-
phies of court life: the idealist stance of Neo-Platonic humanism and the strictly 
realist vantage point of Machiavellianism. When Ophelia calls Hamlet a soldier 
and scholar in the text passage quoted above, she refers to the Neo-Platonic ide-
al of the humanist gentleman politician – a concept which may be traced back to 
an early modern standard work on courtly behaviour: Baldassare Castiglione’s Il 
Cortegiano (1528), or The Courtier (1561), adapted and translated for Elizabethan 
England by Sir Thomas Hoby. Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, in contrast, cherishes 
the counter-approach elucidated in Machiavelli’s The Prince ([ca. 1513] 1532). 
Whereas Hoby propagates the ideal of gentlemanly fairness and ethical integrity, 
Machiavelli sanctions courtly intrigue and dissimulation as an amoral but high-
ly efficient key to power. Although Machiavelli does not recommend this policy 
of betrayal for its own sake, he is realistic enough to see that politics is a dirty 
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45Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
business, in which one can only survive by way of intrigue and counter-intrigue as 
a wit combat of observed observation. To shed light on this Machiavellian ambiv-
alence, Shakespeare’s Claudius is, on the one hand, presented as a sinister murder-
er – a coward, who poisons his brother while asleep rather than challenging him 
in fair combat. On the other hand, however, the selfish murderer has his positive 
sides as a pragmatic and effective politician. Whereas the late king waged a mean-
ingless war against Norway, Claudius as a court professional succeeds in solving 
this conflict by way of diplomacy and thus contains further bloodshed among his 
people as a civilising process.
***
Considering all the contexts looked at so far, I would argue that the delay of 
Hamlet’s revenge may be attributed to a whole cluster of unresolved socio-cul-
tural, philosophical and religious tensions at work in the Elizabethan period. As 
shown by Jonathan Dollimore (1984), these tensions – which I exemplified in the 
fields of religion, court life and so on – may be considered parts of a large-scale 
conflict: a conflict between the traditional belief in a world metaphysically or-
dered by divine justice – E.M.W. Tillyard’s The Elizabethan World Picture ([1942] 
1948) – and a set of new, strictly secular and amoral approaches to worldly power 
such as Machiavelli’s political philosophy. It is this conflict of metaphysical and 
empirical concepts of the world, which may be considered an important context 
of the turn of the seventeenth century national identity crisis mentioned by way 
of introduction – a crisis which culminates in the final years of Queen Eliza-
beth’s reign when Shakespeare’s Hamlet was written and performed on stage. Thus 
Hamlet’s delay of action articulates an epistemological crisis – a feeling of ubiq-
uitous doubt, which culminates in the unresolved question what the future will 
bring when the House of Tudor has died out owing to the childless queen’s death 
in the near future. Should the queen be succeeded by an incompetent ruler, all of 
the sixteenth century’s achievements in the fields of power and knowledge would 
have been in vain and the nascent English nation state as an emerging global play-
er would be reduced to provincial meaninglessness.
When every claim of truth turns out to be contingent, the only certainty 
that remains is the radical doubt represented by Prince Hamlet. To overcome 
his scepticism and to take action, Hamlet must cease to think and substitute his 
doubt by way of spontaneous un-reflected action. In other words: he must turn 
off his melancholic brain to be able to act. Hamlet’s thought-ridden dilemma 
culminates in the best-known monologue of world literature – the famous “to 
be or not to be” speech:
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46 Dieter Fuchs
To be, or not to be; that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And, by opposing, end them? […] (3.1.58-62)
Owing to the fact that the only certainty in life is death as its inescapable end, 
Hamlet doesn’t see any meaning in his revenge project either, and debates suicide 
as an alternative. Whereas Seneca as the classical model of revenge tragedy con-
siders suicide an honourable means to flee worldly affliction, Hamlet casts doubt 
not only on the classical but also on the Christian tradition, which considers su-
icide an unpardonable sin resulting in hellish damnation. Although he doubts 
the Christian concept of the human soul’s afterlife in heaven or hell, Hamlet still 
cannot be hundred percent certain about the finality of death. It is owing to his 
“dread of something after death” that he refrains from putting his life to an un-
natural end:
[...] Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of ?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought (3.1.78-82)
As Hamlet attributes his resolution to stay alive to “conscience” – which makes 
“cowards of us all” – his father’s ghostly voice from the catholic past is challenged 
by the protestant rise of the modern self. Although it still affects his thoughts, 
the authority of the catholic fatherly generation becomes more and more substi-
tuted by the reformed son’s psyche. As already mentioned, the protestant move-
ment interiorizes the conflict of good and evil within the isolated individual’s 
conscience rather than to exteriorize it as a catholic theatrum mundi enacted as 
a public spectacle of mankind or Everyman. Thus the conscience-struck indi-
vidual has to cope with his guilt without the assistance of priests and penitent 
rituals, whose morality play-like white magic even succeeds in overcoming the 
mortal sin of Everyman’s rejection of God and his grace. It is owing to this rea-
son that the conscience-struck Hamlet may, up to a certain point, be called the 
first modern individual.
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47Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
Hamlet’s thoughts about being and non-being are interrupted by the appear-
ance of Ophelia. Hamlet and Ophelia were lovers before the late king was mur-
dered and the young prince is about to break up the match. We can only speculate 
why Hamlet rejects the woman who truly loves him. Is it to foster his disguise as a 
madman and not to involve the beloved woman in the crisis of his life, which will 
not only result in the vindictive killing of Claudius, but also in his own death as a 
most likely ‘collateral’ damage? Or has Hamlet become a misogynist owing to his 
mother’s betrayal of her late husband’s love? Does he renounce Ophelia because 
he generalizes his mother’s unfaithful fickleness as a characteristic feature of every 
woman: “[…] frailty, thy name is woman–” (1.2.146)?
It is, however, not only because of her cruel lover – but also because of her 
equally cruel father – that the young woman will not survive the rejection of her 
love; Ophelia’s father is the king’s courtly advisor Polonius who instrumentaliz-
es his daughter to spy on Hamlet on behalf of Claudius. Most likely this is the 
reason why Hamlet rejects her: being surrounded with court spies, he mistakes 
Ophelia for a courtly collaborator rather than a forced victim (cf. Schwanitz 2006: 
65). And to stress the pimp-like way in which Polonius utilizes his daughter to spy 
on Hamlet, the young prince treats her like a whore in fact – an aspect which is 
conveyed by way of linguistic punning and wit. Hamlet’s “[g]et thee to a nunnery” 
(3.1.123), for instance, puns on the fact that ‘nunnery’ is an Elizabethan slang 
word for brothel rather than a catholic institution of chastity. This makes Ophelia 
a victim of phallogocentric misogynist discourse.
As a further facet of the meta-dramatic dimension already looked at, it is not 
only Ophelia who spies on Hamlet. Her father Polonius, too, tries to find out more 
about the young prince’s uncanny behaviour by way of (un-)ob-served observation. 
Polonius, however, is presented as a parody of the paradigmatic court Machiavelli-
an. Rather than manipulating others by snaky words as a means of intrigue, he is a 
man of many but meaningless words: someone who talks without saying anything. 
In his disguise as a madman, Hamlet shows that the blathering old Polonius is a 
foolish opportunist who agrees with anything his princely superior says:
Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius. By th’mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius. It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet. Or like a whale.
Polonius. Very like a whale. (3.2.364-70)
The only friend who remains true and faithful to Hamlet is his confidante Ho-
ratio who – like the young prince – studied at Martin Luther’s University of 
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48 Dieter Fuchs
Wittenberg. In contrast to the courtly manipulation of language as an unreliable 
means of intrigue and deferral of meaning, Martin Luther as the translator of the 
scriptures insists on the representational stability of the word. As can be seen from 
the Lutherian maxim “sola scriptura”, the only way to salvation is the study of 
the eternal truth of God’s word written down in the Bible – hence the protestant 
rejection of confessional rituals in favour of meditative self-examination. Rather 
than using the priest as a go-between, the only way to salvation is to study the 
scriptures and thus enter a private dialogue with God to explore one’s conscience. 
Thus it is protestant book culture and the written word that guarantees Horatio’s 
integrity as Hamlet’s only trustworthy friend.
Claudius, in contrast, tries to embrace the Biblical word and prays in vain to 
God to atone for his sin of regicide. As a Machiavellian courtier he fails to medi-
tate the scriptural words and thus reveals his fall from grace as an obdurate sinner:
My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go. (3.3.97-8)
When Hamlet sees Claudius at prayer without being seen himself, this situation 
would be the perfect opportunity to perform his revenge as an unobserved observ-
er. But the thought-tormented prince hesitates and refrains from action when he 
realizes that his enemy tries to communicate with God to confess his capital sin 
of regicide in order to avoid damnation and hellish pain after death:
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying,
And now I’ll do’t,
 He draws his sword
and so a goes to heaven,
And so am I revenged. That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
[...]
No!
 He sheathes his sword
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hint.
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
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49Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
That has no relish of salvation in’t,
Then trip him that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes. […] (3.3.73-95)
Eleanor Prosser (185-9) considers Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius at prayer 
a most sinister act. As Hamlet decides to wait in order to slay his uncle in the 
state of sin and corruption rather than repentance and prayer, Prosser concludes 
that the young prince wants to send his uncle to hell: that he wishes to kill both 
body and soul of his antagonist. This would be a Machiavellian practice and would 
denounce Hamlet’s integrity as a conscience-stricken prototype of the emerging 
modern individual. Prosser, however, fails to acknowledge the principle of vindic-
tive equity emphasized by the radical protestant faction of the Puritans: as can be 
seen from the Old-Testamentarian dictum “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” 
(Exodus 21; 24) cherished by Puritan doctrine, revenge has to requite an act of in-
justice by way of strictly measured vindictive compensation. Applied to Hamlet’s 
revenge, this means that Claudius has to die in the state of sin owing to the fact 
that the poisoning prevented Hamlet’s father from making his peace with God 
(cf. Schwanitz 2006: 95-6 & 143). Owing to his sudden death while asleep, Ham-
let’s father could not prepare for the after-world and confess his sins – hence his 
already mentioned confinement in Purgatory. By way of dramatic irony, however, 
Hamlet does not know that the praying Claudius tries in vain to communicate 
with God and remains in a state of mortal sin.
In the next scene Hamlet enters his mother’s closet to confront her with the 
guilt inherent in the betrayal of her late husband. What Hamlet does not know, 
however, is the circumstance that he once more becomes an observed observer in 
a meta-dramatic scene. Even in his mother’s most private room, Polonius is hid-
ing behind a curtain to spy on the young prince on behalf of his Machiavellian 
master Claudius. And, owing to a misunderstanding, the voice of the unseen but 
talkative Polonius is heard. For Hamlet it is obvious that the only man that might 
be found in his mother’s most private room must be Claudius and he stabs the 
unseen person through the curtain. As we can see once more, Hamlet’s revenge 
must be spontaneous – an automatic reaction before he has a chance to think. 
Unfortunately, however, he has killed the wrong man: Ophelia’s father. Having al-
ready been let down by Hamlet, Ophelia will be driven into madness, despair and 
suicide by the passing of Polonius.
Moving from the plot-centred to the structural level, Hamlet’s killing of Polo-
nius may be again considered in terms of the meta-dramatic mirror technique al-
ready mentioned: having caused the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia and insulted 
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50 Dieter Fuchs
the Polonius family honour, Hamlet induces Polonius’s son Laertes to take re-
venge. Thus the young prince becomes simultaneously the subject and object of 
revenge. Constituting a parallel plot, the issue of revenge and counter-revenge is 
presented as a vicious cycle of honour that nobody can escape. Like all the me-
ta-dramatic aspects mentioned so far, this doubling technique holds “the mir-
ror up to nature” (3.2.22), as it debates the topic of revenge from conflicting, 
subject-centred vantage points of fallible, and hence mixed characters. To show 
that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.251-52), 
even Hamlet as a fairly knowledgeable character makes mistakes, happens to be-
come involved in crime and becomes a villain from Laertes’ point of view, where-
as Claudius as a stage villain proper has, politically speaking, some positive sides 
such as his already mentioned diplomatic talent. And, owing to the fact that the 
topic of revenge functions as the mere tip of an iceberg-like set of much more 
serious epistemological and socio-cultural tensions, this mirror technique shows 
that there are no simple answers to the complicated problems Elizabethan society 
has to face around 1600.
To stress both the complexity and omnipresence of these problems, Shake-
speare’s play even adds a third revenge plot and thus presents a kaleidoscopic set 
of reflections and refractions of this issue. This third revenge plot focuses on the 
Norwegian Prince Fortinbras who seeks to take military revenge for his father’s 
death in a battle against Denmark under the rule of the late king. Whereas the 
young Hamlet is circumspect and refrains from action, the hot-tempered Fortin-
bras is ready to act – and it is only owing to Claudius’s diplomacy that peace be-
tween Denmark and Norway is restored as a civilising process. But let us return to 
the central plot of Hamlet’s revenge on Claudius.
Having been challenged by Hamlet’s meta-dramatic Mousetrap-play and Po-
lonius’s death to be avenged by his son Laertes, Claudius decides to get rid of 
his nephew, who proves to be an increasingly uncontainable danger. To get rid of 
Hamlet, Claudius asks his nephew’s schoolfellows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 
to accompany the prince on a sea-journey to England and to deliver a secret letter 
to the English monarch. In this letter Claudius asks the English crown to execute 
Hamlet without a legal trial. By way of coincidence, however, Hamlet finds and 
reads the epistle and substitutes the names of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for 
his own. During the journey, he thus saves his life and returns to Denmark as a 
sea-changed person.
The experience of his imminent death changes Hamlet’s philosophy of life and 
makes him less hesitant to act – and this aspect is stressed when he meets the two 
gravediggers. Being about to prepare Ophelia’s funeral, the gravediggers happen 
to dig up the skull of the court jester Yorick whom Hamlet remembers from his 
infant days. When Hamlet sees his former friend’s skull, he becomes aware of the 
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51Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
vanity of life (which, by the way, is a catholic concept that enters his protestant 
mind). The only thing that is certain and cannot be avoided in life is death – and 
it does not really matter whether this happens sooner or later:
[...] There’s a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis
not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it 
be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. […] (5.2.165-68)
It is owing to this insight into the vanity of life that Hamlet faces his uncle’s 
counter-intrigue without fear. As Hamlet challenged his uncle by way of the me-
ta-dramatic Mousetrap performance, Claudius decides to requite this challenge 
and stages a meta-dramatic duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Of course this al-
leged sports-event offers Laertes a barely disguised means of killing Hamlet in 
revenge for Polonius and Ophelia. Should Hamlet survive the duel, Claudius and 
Laertes have two Machiavellian backup plans: on the one hand, Laertes poisons 
his rapier so that even a minor wound will lead to the prince’s death; on the oth-
er hand, Claudius prepares a poisoned cup of wine. Although Claudius’s scheme 
seems watertight, two unexpected things happen: both Hamlet and Laertes suf-
fer a minor scratch by the poisoned rapier and Hamlet’s mother Gertrude drinks 
the poisoned cup of wine to the health of her son. As the poison works quickly, 
Gertrude dies in a trice and Laertes tells Hamlet that they are both doomed to 
die an equally speedy death by poison. And it is owing to his imminent end that 
Hamlet is finally able to perform his revenge on Claudius. As there is no more 
time for thoughtful introspection, he strikes Claudius with the rapier. To take due 
revenge for his father’s death by poison, he forces his murderous uncle to drink the 
remaining part of the poisoned wine.
Although Horatio offers to embrace the Stoic ideal of suicide to die together 
with his best friend, Hamlet asks him to stay alive and report his cause to the liv-
ing – he wants posterity to know the truth hidden behind his vindictive role-play 
in order to restore his honour and the legitimacy of his revenge: what began as the 
drama of Hamlet thus ends as a narrative to be told by Horatio. Although the dying 
Hamlet says that “the rest is silence” (5.2.310), his story lives on by way of Horatio’s 
testimony. As the end of the Hamlet-drama coincides with the request that Horatio 
tells Hamlet’s tale from its beginning once again, the end is simultaneously the be-
ginning, and this makes Shakespeare’s Hamlet a never-ending story that perpetuates 
itself into eternity (cf. Hawkes 312 & Schwanitz 2006: 147) as a Mobius strip: ∞.
***
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52 Dieter Fuchs
Having approached the end of my illustrative analysis of Shakespeare’s Ham-
let, let me conclude with a few afterthoughts. I approached the Shakespearean text 
with a special focus on the aspects of its scholarly interpretation that fascinate me 
most: the afterlife of the catholic past, meta-drama, the early modern discovery of 
perspective, the theatricality of court life and the emerging condition of the mod-
ern subject triggered off by the rise of the protestant religion. I have argued that 
the topic of revenge in general and all these aspects in particular elucidate the so-
cio-cultural and epistemological tensions that late sixteenth and early seventeenth 
century Elizabethan England had to face – tensions which may be attributed to 
the conflicting voices of the ghostly fatherly generation from the catholic past and 
the new generation of protestant sons such as Hamlet as the focal point of the play.
As my survey focuses on a historicist reading of Hamlet as a play that reflects and 
articulates the crises of early modern culture, I have omitted some of the more tra-
ditional approaches such as the New Criticism which, for instance, focuses on the 
play’s timeless poetic imagery of poison and rottenness; or Jan Kott’s (1964) ‘presen-
tist’ approach that considers Hamlet our contemporary rather than an early modern 
character. And it would have equally gone beyond the scope of this article to offer a 
survey on the stage history of Hamlet and the numerous rewritings of the play such 
as Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). Conversely, a sketch of 
the afterlife of Ophelia in Romantic and Victorian art and poetry had to be omitted.
What has to be mentioned, however, is the special relevance of Hamlet for 
Germany. Hamlet is not only a character that inspired the art of Goethe and oth-
er German imitators of Shakespeare. In the context of German history, Hamlet 
also becomes a political persona who contributed greatly to the making of the 
German nation as a national identity formation process in the nineteenth cen-
tury. In the Vormärz-period (1830-1848), Germany was a territory of scattered 
small states rather than a unified nation and, according to the poet Freiligrath, 
the Germans failed to succeed in the making of a unified nation state owing to 
their Hamlet-like thought-tormented disposition, which made them unwilling to 
act: “Deutschland ist Hamlet” (1844): hence the proverbial self-identification of 
Germany as a Hamletian country of great thinkers and poets (i.e. ‘das Land der 
Dichter und Denker’). Considering the two world wars that followed the making 
of the German nation state, however, one must say that it would have been better 
if Germany had remained in this thought-tormented passivity rather than tak-
en nationalist action. No matter if one affirms or critically rejects the Hamletian 
identification of Germany, one has to stress the historical relevance of the Hamlet 
figure as a secular German national saint adopted from England.
Whereas the Germans idolized Hamlet as a play to give answers to the ques-
tion of nineteenth and early twentieth century national identity, my historicist ap-
proach focused on the questions the Shakespearean play addressed to Elizabethan 
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53Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
England as a collective identity crisis at the turn of the seventeenth century. And 
this brings me back to the Oedipal dilemma of the challenged family triad men-
tioned at the outset in order to bring my remarks full circle.
As already mentioned, a Freudian character analysis constitutes an anachronis-
tic endeavour similar to the celebration of Hamlet as a romantic and post-roman-
tic German national saint. If we generalize Freud’s character-centred approach in 
terms of Jungian archetypes and the collective unconscious, however, the Oedipal 
dilemma seems to offer some clue to the interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet 
indeed. From a Jungian point of view, the constellation of the dispossessed son 
recurs in any family triad. Like the never-ending text of Hamlet re-told by Ho-
ratio over and over again, the Oedipal or Hamletian conflict is re-enacted every 
generation anew. Owing to its timeless cyclicality, the recurrence of the Oedipal 
dilemma may be thus considered a symptom of both socio-cultural crisis and re-
generation: to continue the reproductive circle of death and life, the father figure 
representing the past generation, old age and sterility has to be overthrown by his 
filial successor representing the future generation, youth and fertility. The absence 
of this Oedipal mechanism thus indicates that the regenerative conflict of young 
and old has come to a standstill and that a community is about to age and die 
rather than to reproduce and renew itself.
In late sixteenth and early seventeenth century England, this standstill is rep-
resented by the absence of the conflict of father and son and the omnipresence of 
the pseudo-mother figure of the ageing but childless Virgin Queen who rejected 
the family triad by her refusal to marry. If a prince is dispossessed by a fatherly 
usurper and betrayed by his royal mother, this is a dynastic scandal such as the one 
experienced by the young Prince James sold out by Mary Queen of Scots in 1567. 
If there is no son and no father figure at all owing to the queen’s virginity, how-
ever, there will be a national collapse: the country will be reduced to orphan-like 
helplessness when the great mother figure of the queen has to die. This is the al-
ready noted trauma that paralyses Tudor England around 1600 – and I would 
argue that Shakespeare’s Hamlet articulates this unspeakable horror vision as a 
layer of meaning which tends to be overlooked. Focusing on the struggle of the 
son-like prince and his pseudo-fatherly uncle resulting in mutual death, we tend 
to pay too little attention to the passing away of the Danish Queen Gertrude as 
an unchaste, or all-too human counterpart of the English Virgin Queen Eliza-
beth. Shakespeare’s management of perspective directs our gaze at the tragedy of 
Hamlet as the dispossessed son, but distracts our focus from the death of the royal 
mother figure Gertrude and thus diverts our attention from the imminent death 
of the Great Queen enacted on stage before our eyes.
As a possible affirmation of James of Scotland succeeding the English Queen 
in 1603, the throne falls to the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras after the Danish 
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54 Dieter Fuchs
dynasty has died out. On the other hand, however, James’s agency as the potential 
successor of the Great Queen is deconstructed by presenting the moribund Ham-
let as a counterpart of the young James dispossessed by his actual mother Mary 
Queen of Scots.
And of course this is a further example of Shakespeare’s meta-dramatic art of 
perspective derived from courtly culture – a cross-eyed art of confusion, which 
both directs and escapes our eyes by holding “the mirror up to nature” (3.2.22). 
T.S. Eliot called Hamlet “The Mona Lisa of Literature” (144) to express his dissat-
isfaction with Shakespeare’s Danish play, which he considered an artistic failure 
owing to its radically foregrounded subjectivity; I, in contrast, would argue exactly 
the other way round. I would claim that – although both pieces of art emerged 
independently of each other – Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa elucidates Shake-
speare’s art of the emerging modern subject as an ‘objective correlative’: Like 
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Leonardo’s Gioconda-Portrait confuses its observer by its 
cross-eyed interplay of conflicting subject-centred vantage points.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Text Editions
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary 
Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 653-690.
____. As You Like It. The Complete Works. Ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1988. 627-652.
Secondary Sources
Castrop, Helmut. “Aufführungszeit und -dauer.” Shakespeare Handbuch. Ed. Ina 
Schabert. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. 107.
Dollimore, Jonathan. Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of 
Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester, 1984.
Eliot, T.S. “Hamlet.” Selected Essays, 1917-1932. London: Faber, 1932. 141-6.
Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 
1959.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Hamlet in Purgatory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
____. Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chica-
go Press, 1980.
____. “Shakespeare and the Exorcists.” Shakespearean Negotiations: the Circulation of 
Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. 94-127. 
Hawkes Terence. “Telmah.” Ed. Patricia Parker & Geoffrey Hartmann. Shake-
speare and the Question of Theory. New York: Methuen,1985. 310-32.
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   54 6. 12. 2021   11:36:07
55Hamlet – A Never-Ending Story
Jones, Ernest. “The Oedipus-Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A 
Study in Motive.” The American Journal of Psychology 21.1 (1910): 72-113.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. London: Methuen, 1964.
Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1967.
Schülting, Sabine. “Hamlet.” Shakespeare Handbuch. Ed. Ina Schabert. 4th ed. 
Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. 533-44.
Schwanitz, Dietrich. Shakespeares Hamlet und alles was ihn für uns zum kulturellen 
Gedächtnis macht. Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2006.
____. “Shakespeare Stereoskopisch: Die Schule des Sehens und die Optik der 
Praxis.” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 129 (1993): 134-49.
Tillyard, E. M. W. The Elizabethan World Picture. 4th impr. London: Chatto and 
Windus, 1948.
Dieter Fuchs
Universität Wien
dieter.fuchs@univie.ac.at
Hamlet: nikoli zaključena zgodba
Članek združuje pregled najpomembnejših sandardnih interpretacij s tistimi vidiki, ki 
bi lahko bili še posebej fascinantni o tem tekstu: konflikt angleške katoliške preteklosti s 
protestantsko kulturo v obdubje zgodnje modern, meta-dramatsko dimenzijo igre, teatra-
ličnost renesančnega dvornega življenja, itd.
Ključne besede: Shakespeare, Hamlet, maščevanje, pripovedna zanka, reformacijski 
diskurz, meta-drama
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57
The Critique of American Racism in  
Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
Danica Čerče
Abstract
Written in the light of critical discourse about the social value of literary sympathy and 
against the backdrop of critical whiteness studies, the article deals with John Steinbeck’s 
non-fiction book Travels with Charley in Search of America. Framed by an interest in how 
the writer responded to the racial separation in the United States, the article demonstrates 
that this work, which is often dismissed as a “charming portrayal of America,” is a serious 
intervention in all sites of discrimination and domination. 
Keywords: American literature, John Steinbeck, destabilising whiteness, cross-cultural 
relationality
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111(73).09-992Steinbeck J.:141.74
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.57-67
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58 Danica ČerČe
American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, among others, contends that good lit-
erature is “disturbing” in a more effective way than history and social science writ-
ing usually are (359). The key to better understanding of the issues embodied in 
the represented worlds of literature is imaginative sympathy, by which readers 
respond to the experiences of the characters with more powerful emotions, dis-
concertment and perplexity, and which can lead them to confront with their own 
thoughts and “alter some of [their] standing judgments” (363). Written in the 
light of this view and framed by an interest in how John Steinbeck responded to 
the public dynamics of racial separation in the United States in his Travels with 
Charley in Search of America (1962), hereafter referred to as Travels, the article will 
demonstrate that this seemingly “bland travelogue” (Parry 150) or “charming por-
trayal of America,” as the book was introduced to Slovene readers, is a troubling 
critical commentary on several aspects of American society, engaging readers to 
dismiss some experiences, particularly the intense racial hatred, as detrimental and 
unacceptable. 
Steinbeck became famous for his Depression-era novels The Grapes of Wrath 
(1939), In Dubious Battle (1936) and Of Mice and Men (1937), each a hard-hitting 
critique of the capitalist dynamics of corporate farming in California, exposing 
the agricultural system that produced flagrant violations of migrant workers’ civil 
and human rights. Working as a labourer and spending a lot of time with migrant 
workers, ranch hands and Mexican immigrants, Steinbeck was well-equipped for 
sensitive depictions of their powerlessness, poverty and victimisation, as well as 
for their desire to retain their dignity or settle land of their own. Particularly The 
Grapes of Wrath, the cornerstone of Steinbeck’s 1962 Nobel Prize award, func-
tioned as a “distress call,” arousing readers towards action to halt social injustice 
(DeMott 148).
Later in his career, no longer willing to be the chronicler of the Depression-era 
subjects, Steinbeck went afield to find new topics and new forms, which indicates 
that his achievement as a writer extends well beyond the modes and methods of 
traditional realism or documentary representation. Just when many critics were 
commenting that his best writing was behind him, Steinbeck drew attention with 
his final works of non-fiction, Travels and America and Americans (1966). The 
analysis of critical evaluations of the two works reveals that the former is usually 
described as a “private discourse” (Heavilin and Pugh vi), thus not a reliable rep-
resentation of America, and the latter as a “more thorough attempt […] to analyse 
the nation and its people (Hughes 87). This study will show that Travels also deals 
with several key social ills of the time, including pollution and the degradation of 
the environment, overpopulation, the threat of atomic war and racism. 
When Steinbeck was writing Travels, racism was a particularly searing social 
problem in the United States. The desire to confirm a vital sense of identity and 
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59The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
self-worth that James Baldwin articulated in his non-fiction book The Fire Next 
Time (1964) was expressed by a number of other black Americans experiencing 
the debilitating aspects of racism in the country. Reading Travels reveals that, 
despite the shift in thematic and philosophical orientation in Steinbeck’s later 
works, the writer remained susceptible to any kind of oppression and continued to 
confront the social context in which “people were doing injustices to other people” 
(Steinbeck 1989, xxxiii). By challenging what Sara Suleri calls the “master-myth” 
about “the static lines of demarcation” between empowered and disempowered 
cultures (112), Travels envisages a space where alternative discourses of race can 
exist. 
WRITING DARKNESS
In Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain wrote that “travel is fatal to prejudice, 
bigotry, and narrow-mindedness and many people need it sorely on these ac-
counts.” Steinbeck did not need travelling on any of these accounts. What urged 
him to set out on a few-month-long road trip around the United States described 
in Travels was his desire to “learn about his own country,” as he explained in his 
25 May 1960 letter to his friends Frank and Fatima Loesser (Steinbeck and Wall-
sten 666). His idea about the journey had been conceived about six years earlier 
than he loaded his truck named after Don Quixote’s famous steed Rocinante and 
left New York in the company of his wife’s French poodle Charley. As Steinbeck 
confessed to his literary agent Elizabeth Otis in June1954, he realized that he had 
“lost track of the country,” having been “cut off for a very long time (Benson 767). 
Similarly, Steinbeck reveals early on in Travels that for several years, he was writ-
ing about the America he remembered, but “the memory is at best faulty, warpy 
reservoir” (11). 
According to Sally E. Parry, Steinbeck must have felt that the America he “had 
known and loved was veering onto a dangerous path” (148) and it did not take 
him long to realize that his concerns and fears had been fully justified. Even be-
fore witnessing the country at its worst, he was bitterly disappointed by what he 
saw. Constantly comforting himself with the view that his perception of America 
was unique to his own experience, influenced by the factors in his life at a giv-
en time – the view that resembles the theories introduced by Louise Rosenblatt 
and Wolfgang Iser of how readers participate in the creation of texts they read – 
Steinbeck was hoping in the existence of other realities of American society in 
addition to how he perceived it. As he observes not long after leaving home, his 
representation of the country “is true until someone else passes that way and re-
arranges the world in his own style” (70), recalling how his impressions of Prague 
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60 Danica ČerČe
were considerably different from those of Joseph Alsop, a famous journalist he 
talked to during his return flight to America. However, the demonstration of in-
tense racial hatred Steinbeck stumbled upon in New Orleans, following the in-
tegration of the city’s schools, shattered the last shred of his confidence when he 
most needed assurance that what he had feared was not true. 
Compelled by curiosity and fear to witness the scene of Southern mob vio-
lence, Steinbeck got involved in a conversation with a white taxi driver whose 
intolerance, savagery and crude energy fully uncovered the citizens’ contempt for 
black Americans, hidden behind the façade of civilization and appearing under 
various guises, or manifested in blatant and insidious forms:
‘Why, hell, mister. We know how to take care of this. […] Out to take them out.’ 
‘You mean lynch them?’ 
‘I don’t mean nothing else, mister.” (Steinbeck 1962, 219) 
When observing the howling crowd, mirroring the racially stratified, segregated 
and polarized society, Steinbeck searched in vain for the faces of kind and gentle 
people he knew and had spent time with – of those who would not hesitate to 
protect “the small, scared, black mite” (223) and oppose the wilderness of segre-
gation and disfranchisement. To his dismay, all he could see were faces of those 
thirsty for “watching any pain or any agony” and enjoying in it (223).
The “show of Cheerleaders,” as Steinbeck refers to the cheering of the mad-
ding hordes that accompanied the insulting screaming of white women at a small 
black girl and the white man who “dared to bring his white child to school” (221), 
is in several ways reminiscent of the incident in Georgia depicted in James Wel-
don Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. As the brutal 
execution of the mob’s black victim in Johnson’s novel, which robbed the narrator 
of his hope and left him humiliated, bewildered and embittered by an unbearable 
shame, so did the incident in New Orleans more than half a century later affect 
Steinbeck so deeply that he decided to return home to escape the ugliness he had 
experienced. As he writes, his journey “was over before [he] returned […] and 
left [him] stranded far from home” (236). Remembering the Cooper’s, a decent 
and respected black family from Salinas, Steinbeck was not prepared for the kind 
of America in which the blacks were considered “an inferior race” (212) and – in 
Toni Morrison’s words – merely allowed “a shadowless participation in the domi-
nant cultural body” (129). His perception of black identity based on his memories 
of Mrs. Cooper’s shining kitchen, Mr Cooper’s honest running of his small truck 
business and the three boys’ outstanding performance at school did not match the 
derogatory representations he encountered. His first thought was that “the au-
thority was misinformed” referring to them as “dirty,” “lazy” and “dishonest” (212). 
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61The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
Witnessing a precarious borderline between the two races and cultures and 
sensing numerous areas of contestation arising from the politics of polarity, Stein-
beck envisioned the consequences of the boiling tension: “Could there be no re-
lief until it burst,” he asks himself, bewildered by the most logical answer (231). 
In this state of mind, Steinbeck was not different from black American poet and 
activist Langston Hughes, who in his poem “Dreams Deferred” (published as part 
of the 1951 volume-length Montage of a Dream Deferred) asks a similar question 
and predicts the inevitable result: “What happens to a dream deferred? / Does it 
dry up / Like a raisin in the sun / […] / Or does it explode?” 
Racial polarization in its overt or covert forms is not the only threat and in-
dicator of society in a state of conflict that Steinbeck encountered on his travel 
across the United States, but it surely was the one that saddened and worried him 
most. After observing the “insane rage” of the New Orleans crowd, he writes:
No newspaper had printed the words these women shouted. On television the 
soundtrack was made to blur or had crowd noises cut in to cover. But now I 
heard the words, bestial and filthy and degenerate. […] My body churned with 
weary nausea, but I could not let an illness blind me after I had come so far to 
look and hear.” (Steinbeck 1962, 222–223)
Indeed, Steinbeck never let himself be blind for miseries arising from unbridled 
egoism and the arrogance of power, although several critics whose expectations 
were based entirely on The Grapes of Wrath suggested the opposite, wondering 
what changed the spirit and opinion of a man who had, until then, “represented 
the best in America” (Lustig 3–4). Neither did this journey veil Steinbeck’s vi-
sion; the evidence of legal and cultural barriers of racism and the ongoing repro-
duction of colonial differences made him feel “helpless” (223) and “ill with […] 
sorrow” (224).
However, what seems to have worried Steinbeck even more than the whites’ 
authoritative rhetoric was the recognition that the dominant European discours-
es that had relegated the blacks to a subordinate status were deeply ingrained not 
only among the whites but also among the blacks themselves. The latter’s “massive 
psycho-existential complex,” as Frantz Fanon refers to the psychological internal-
ization of the illusion of white superiority (xvi), is particularly well seen in the ep-
isode in which Steinbeck tries in vain to establish a conversation with an old black 
man whom he offered a ride. Rather than being involved in a talk, the old man re-
quests to be “let down,” finding walking safer than riding with a white man (230). 
“I was foolishly trying to destroy a lifetime of practice,” realizes Steinbeck, allud-
ing to the deeply rooted ideology underpinning slavery and white supremacy. He 
recalls a similar experience years before, when his black employee in Manhattan 
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62 Danica ČerČe
did not help a tipsy white woman, fearing a false accusation: “If I touched her, she 
could easy scream rape, and then it’s a crowd, and who believes me? […] I’ve been 
practising to be a Negro [sic!] a long time (230). 
Michel Foucault points out that a “limit is discovered not by tracing already 
existing boundaries but by crossing them.” In this way, transgression “forces the 
limit to face its imminent disappearance to find itself in what it excludes” (35). 
Witnessing what George Lipsitz recognises as “the exclusionary concept of white-
ness,” held in place to preserve the “racialised nature of social policy in the United 
States” (4–5), Steinbeck conveys a similar idea through the confession of an elder-
ly white man from the South, who admits that it is hard for whites and blacks to 
“change a feeling about things” (226), whereas in day-to-day interactions across 
the colour line, there are some acknowledgements that this can be done: 
“I have an old Negro [sic!] couple […]. Sometimes in the evening we forget. 
They forget to envy me and I forget they might, and we are just three pleasant 
… things living together and smelling the flowers.” (227) 
Clearly, in line with his own view that an artist has to come forward when he or 
she is needed (Lisca 860), Steinbeck promotes a vision of broader humanity, with 
no division between “man and beast” and “black and white” (227). He wanted 
America to be for “everyone, white and black […], all ages, all trades, all classes” 
(231). That black Americans will demand and reclaim what has been withheld 
from them is particularly evident in Steinbeck’s discussion with a passionate black 
student, a potential “conscious antagonist,” as Edward Said refers to an individu-
al who, “compelled by the system to play subordinate or imprisoning roles with-
in [the society],” reacts by “disrupting it” (335). The student is not satisfied with 
Martin Luther King’s “teaching of passive […] resistance” (234). As he says, “I 
want it faster, I want action, action now” (234). 
Although Steinbeck seems somehow reluctant to draw a general conclusion, 
reminding the reader again that he is not presumptuous to consider his portray-
al of the South as undeniably correct, he closes his reflection in line with Walter 
Mignolo’s view that “there are no democratic possibilities without undoing the 
colonial and imperial differences” (392), predicting the inevitability of change:
“I know it is a troubled place and a people caught in jam. And I know that the 
solution when it arrives will not get easy or simple. I feel with Monsieur Ci Git 
that the end is not in question. It’s the means - the dreadful uncertainty of the 
means.” (Steinbeck 1962, 235)
In her famous speech delivered at the “First Conference of Black American Writ-
ers” in 1959, black American playwright and activist Lorraine Hansberry said: 
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63The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
“All art is ultimately social. One cannot live with sighted eyes and feeling heart 
and not know or react to the miseries which afflict this world.” In line with this 
assertion, Hansberry used the stage to advocate a political imperative for liber-
ation of black people from their subordination. In Travels, Steinbeck does not 
explicitly call for change but sees the inevitability of it – “The breath of fear was 
everywhere. I wanted to get away, a cowardly attitude, perhaps, but more coward-
ly to deny” (231). However, this makes the book no less important in terms of its 
social relevance; French critic Pierre Macherey has even noted that “what is im-
portant in the work of literature is what it does not say” (86). Steinbeck does not 
say but nevertheless compels readers to face up to and confront the actions that 
have institutionalized group identity in the United States through the creation of 
social structures that protect the privileges of whites at the expense of communi-
ties of colour. As other Steinbeck’s works, Travels gives evidence that Steinbeck 
never ceased to denounce any kind of injustice and tyranny. Moreover, he man-
aged to cut through readers’ “self-protective stratagems,” as Nussbaum refers to 
the self-protective strategies that keep the knowledge about people and society 
provided in a literary work at a distance (359), while urging them to see and react 
to that knowledge. 
Although not as “deeply engaging” and “utterly consuming” as The Grapes of 
Wrath (DeMott 148), Steinbeck’s acknowledged masterpiece, Travels is a power-
ful critical account of contemporary American society, exposing the dissonances 
between American ideals and reality. The book is particularly effective in drama-
tizing the cross-racial encounter and serves as a sort of brief on the country’s po-
litical, institutional and cultural reproduction of white privilege and entitlement. 
By offering a reader a way of experiencing the ongoing dialectic of self and ‘other’ 
accepted by the people of the South “as a permanent way of life” (Steinbeck 1962, 
231), while creating bonds of identification and empathy, Steinbeck manages to 
make readers see and respond to the social maladies unveiled in the book with 
strong emotional reaction. In this sense, and in line with Nussbaum’s views about 
political and ethical implications of literary imagination, reading Travels “will not 
give us the whole story about social justice, but it functions as a “bridge both to a 
vision of justice and to the social enactment of that vision” (364). 
TRAVELS ON EAST EUROPEAN MARKETS
In post-war communist Eastern Europe, literature was considered an impor-
tant locus for ideological discourse and one of the paths to social progress (Čerče 
2018). Literary works that were in accord with the officially promoted precepts of 
social realism were manipulated by communist propagandists, whereas those that 
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64 Danica ČerČe
lacked historical substance of class struggle, scientific inquiry and philosophical 
debate or instigated any ideological doubts were subjected to fierce criticism and 
consigned to oblivion. In the 1940 and early 1950s, Steinbeck was among those 
American authors whose writing appealed to and unwittingly served the ruling 
communist regimes. The credit for his popular acclaim went to the social necessity 
and documentary integrity of his Depression Era novels, particularly The Grapes of 
Wrath (1939), which not only conformed to but also strengthened the bleak pic-
ture of the United States that had been systematically presented by the state-con-
trolled media in these countries (Kopecký 205). 
Travels, on the other hand, was among the works that failed to meet the cri-
teria of political correctness. The marginalization of the book was also connected 
with the fact that it was published in the climate of critical antipathy and even an-
tagonism towards Steinbeck due to his venturing into new topics and forms in his 
later works and his anti-communist stance in the 1950s and 1960s. In Slovenia, 
for example, where the only translation of the book dates from 1963, hardly any 
critical interest was paid to what an anonymous author of the 1964 Knjiga book 
review dismissed as a “charming portrayal of America” (9). Among those few who 
reviewed Travels were Marija Cvetko and Slavko Rupel. Cvetko observes that 
“many would be ashamed of this work” and reprimands the author for his “luke-
warm personal involvement and the lack of intensity of his critical insight” (7). 
However, and despite discrediting Steinbeck on ideological grounds, Cvetko still 
depicts the book as a “unique piece of travel writing,” highlighting the author’s 
“caring and painful engagement with the issues discussed” (7). Rupel expressed a 
similarly contradictory view, lamenting over the lack of communist rhetoric and, 
at the same time, praising Steinbeck’s sincere stance in discussing American for-
eign policy and its domestic problems (15). 
Clearly, and unlike in other East European countries, where the writer was 
repeatedly under critical attacks for his ideological deviations already in the late 
1940s, in Slovenia, a relatively positive reception of Steinbeck’s works continued 
well into the 1960s. As Petr Kopecký has observed, in the early 1960s, a “small 
backlash against the tendency to discredit Steinbeck” was also seen in the for-
mer Czechoslovakia (211). For example, reviewing Travels, Czech critic Antonín 
Přidal argues that the book clearly demonstrates that Steinbeck “was not politi-
cally naïve,” as he was dismissed in several ideologically charged reviews, and iron-
ically concludes that he would probably have done better “by writing textbooks of 
political economics instead of novels” (51). 
It was not until after the democratic changes in communist Eastern Europe at 
the beginning of the 1990s that Travels, just as several other works by Steinbeck 
that had formerly been received with scepticism, prejudice and misunderstand-
ing or had been neglected altogether, got the possibility to be assessed from new, 
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65The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
insightful and politically unbiased perspectives of contemporary critical engage-
ment. However, and although Steinbeck is currently enjoying a renewed level of 
acceptance, my recent statistical evaluation of relevant bibliographies (2017) has 
shown that, unlike several other works by Steinbeck, Travels has not yet attracted 
many translators or reviewers in European post-communist countries. 
CONCLUSION
This discussion has shown that Travels, a presumably “charming portrayal of 
America,” is a serious social commentary on the diversity and complexity of 
American society in the early 1960s. Inspiring distrust of the country’s moral 
conventions and promoting dialogue and interconnectivity as antidotes to cultural 
collisions, it is no less reliable, responsible and responsive than America and Amer-
icans, the work Travels is often compared to. Given that several ethical questions 
about societal, political and cultural violence and abuse Steinbeck raises during 
his road trip continue to haunt us all in the 21st century, Travels participates in a 
larger cultural conversation about race, gender and class relations, facilitating the 
recognition that “difference […] does not allow for indifference” (Lévinas 61), let 
alone discrimination. If not for anything else, it is for this humanistic view that 
Travels deserves to be more widely translated and disseminated. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. London: Penguin, 1964.
Benson, Jackson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Penguin 
Books, 1984.
Cvetko, Marija. “John Steinbeck: Potovanje s Charleyjem.” Tedenska tribuna, 24 
March 1964. 7.
Čerče, Danica. John Steinbeck in East European Translation: A Bibliographical and 
Descriptive Overview. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 
2017.
Čerče, Danica. “Ideološko zaznamovana recepcija Steinbeckovi del v Vzhodni 
Evropi.” Jezik in slovstvo 63.1 (2018): 90-101.
DeMott, Robert. Steinbeck Typewriter: Essays on His Art. Troy, New York: The 
Whitston Publishing Company, 1997.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto P, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology Knowledge. London: Tavistok, 1972.
Hansberry, Lorraine. “Scars of the Ghetto.” Monthly Review 16.10 (1965): 
588–591.
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66 Danica ČerČe
Heavilin, Barbara A. and Scott Pugh. “‘The Beacon Thing’: Musings on John 
Steinbeck, America and Light.” Steinbeck Review 16.2 (2019): v–xiv.
Hughes, Langston. Montage of a Dream Deferred. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 
1951.
Hughes, Robert S. “Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley and America and Americans: 
‘We Have Never Slipped Back, Never.’” Steinbeck Quarterly 20 (1987): 78–88.
Knjiga. “John Steinbeck: Potovanje s Charleyjem.” Knjiga 1–2 (1964): 9.
Kopecký, Petr. “The Literary Front of the Cold War: John Steinbeck as an Ideo-
logical Object in the Eastern Bloc.” Comparative American Studies 9.3 (2011): 
204–216.
Lévinas, Emmanuel. Ethique et Infini: Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo [Ethics and 
Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo]. Paris: Fayard, 2004.
Lipsitz, George. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit 
from Identity Politics. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006.
Lisca, Peter, ed. The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism. New York: Viking, 1972.
Lustig, Arnošt. “Našel John Steinbeck pravdu.” Rudé parvo, 29 January 1967.
Macherey, Pierre. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge, 2006.
Mignolo, Walter. “On Subalterns and Other Agencies.” Postcolonial Studies 8.4 
(2005): 381−407.
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Nussbaum, Martha. “The Literary Imagination.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting 
Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David Richter. New York: Bedford/St. Mar-
tin’s, 2000. 355–365.
Parry, Sally E. “Into the Heart of Darkness: Travels with Sinclair and John.” John 
Steinbeck and his Contemporaries. Eds. Stephen E. George and Barbara A. 
Heavilin. Lanham et al.: The Scarecrow P, 2007. 145–151.
Přidal, Antonin. “Připad Steinbeck.” Host do domu 2 (1965): 50–51.
Rupel, Slavko. “John Steinbeck: Potovanje s Charleyjem.” Primorski dnevnik, 12 
Jan. 1964.
Said, Edward. Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
Steinbeck, Elaine and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: 
Viking, 1989.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Press, 1939.
Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley in Search of America. [1962]. London: Pan 
Books, 1965.
Steinbeck, John. Potovanje s Charleyjem. Trans. Meta Gosak. Ljubljana: Državna 
založba Slovenije, 1963.
Steinbeck, John. Working Days: The Journal of The Grapes of Wrath, 19381–941.” Ed. 
Robert DeMott. New York: Viking Press, 1989.
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67The Critique of American Racism in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley
Suleri, Sara. “The Rhetoric of English India.” The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Eds. 
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. London, New York: Rout-
ledge, 2003. 111–113.
Twain, Mark. Innocents Abroad. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 
1869.
Danica Čerče
Univerza v Ljubljani
danica.cerce@ff.uni-lj.si
Kritika ameriškega rasizma v Steinbeckovem Potovanju s Charleyjem
Prispevek se ukvarja z neleposlovnim delom ameriškega pisatelja Johna Steinbecka, Tra-
vels with Charley in Search of America. Z izhodiščem v kritiški misli o družbeni vlogi lite-
rarne empatije in opirajoč se na postkolonialno kritiko, raziskuje, kako se pisatelj odziva 
na rasizem v ZDA. Končna ugotovitev je, da knjiga nikakor ni »očarljiv portret Amerike«, 
kot so jo omalovažujoče označevali nekateri kritiki, ampak resna problematizacija vseh 
oblik diskriminacije in dominantnega diskurza.
Ključne besede: ameriška književnost, John Steinbeck, destabilizacija evropocentrizma, 
medkulturnost
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Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   68 6. 12. 2021   11:36:08
69
“I am not what I am”: Corpus-based  
Analysis of Shakespeare’s Character  
Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice
Teja Furlan, Monika Kavalir
Abstract
The paper uses keyword analysis as the empirical basis for the characterization of Shake-
speare’s character Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice. The aim of the paper is to deter-
mine how Iago’s manner of speech reflects his deceitful and manipulative nature and how 
it differs from the speech-styles of non-deceitful prominent characters: Othello, Cassio, 
Roderigo, Desdemona and Emilia. Keywords for the chosen characters are based on the 
corpora of character speech and the Sketch Engine tool is used to process the data. The 
results are then interpreted and discussed on the basis of six interconnected points of 
discussion: focus, adjectives, use of the expression Moor, references to the handkerchief, 
poisoning-the-ears technique, and pronouns, all of which confirm that Iago’s manipula-
tive nature is indeed evident in his speech and that there is a clear difference between his 
speech-style and the speech-styles of other, non-deceitful, prominent characters.
Keywords: characterization, corpus linguistics, keyword analysis, Othello, William 
Shakespeare, Iago
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 81'322:821.111-21Shakespeare W.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.69-86
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70 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
INTRODUCTION
A fictional character is brought to life in the mind of the reader or spectator 
through their actions and their words, and this relationship is particularly intrigu-
ing when there is a mismatch between the two. The aim of this paper is to use 
keyword analysis to determine whether the cunning, deceitful and manipulative 
nature of Shakespeare’s character Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice is evident in 
his speech-style and if so, how Iago’s speech-style then differs from that of some 
of the other, non-deceitful, prominent characters within the play, such as Othello 
and Cassio.
The first part of the paper reviews the existing literature on characterization 
in Othello and proposes keyword analysis as an attested method of corpus sty-
listic research. In the methodology section, the preliminary steps of the study are 
described alongside the specific parameters used within the Sketch Engine tool. 
In the third part of the paper, the quantitative results of the keyword analysis are 
given in the form of tables with keywords for each of the chosen characters: Iago, 
Othello, Cassio, Roderigo, Desdemona and Emilia. These statistical results are 
then discussed, interpreted and compared to previous studies in the fourth, qual-
itative and final part of the paper.
LITERATURE REVIEW
As one of Shakespeare’s prominent works, Othello has been extensively analyzed 
and interpreted, with the character of Iago receiving much of the scrutiny. Re-
cently, the development of corpus stylistics has brought with it new ways of ap-
proaching familiar texts and there are already a host of studies examining various 
Shakespearean characters. This section summarizes what has so far been proposed 
about Iago (and to a lesser extent other characters in Othello) as well as the current 
developments in corpus stylistics.
The master and the puppets: characters in Othello
As pointed out by John W. Draper in his article “Honest Iago,” there is a gen-
eral agreement among scholars and critics of Shakespeare across centuries, from 
Johnson, Coleridge, Swinburne and Shaw to Bradley, Canning, Herford, Stoll and 
Winstanley, as well as visible German and French writers and academics, that Iago 
is “a villain of the deepest dye” (724). There is thus a consensus that Iago is a villain-
ous, manipulative, dishonest and deceitful character, even if researchers may disa-
gree on his motives. In his article “Iago—An extraordinary honest man,” Weston 
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71“I am not what I am”
Babcock for instance agrees that Iago is an exceptionally clever manipulator (299–
300; 301) yet ascribes this behaviour not to his wickedness but to his frustration 
stemming from a socially inferior rank of which he is constantly reminded by oth-
er characters, something also apparent in the characters’ use of thou and you (298).
Bradley, Arenas and West, on the other hand, characterize Iago not as a 
wronged or understandably envious man but as a psychopathic schemer. A. C. 
Bradley in his Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth chooses what Are-
nas describes as a “humanizing approach to literary characters” (Arenas 43) and 
arrives at similar conclusions as Arenas does in his article “Causal attribution and 
the analysis of literary characters”, where he uses Covariance Theory of Causal 
Attribution (CTCA) to review Bradley’s claims about Iago. Arenas thus uses a 
cognitive approach to confirm Bradley’s characterization of Iago as an exception-
ally clever schemer with a tendency to deceive (Arenas 56; cf. Bradley 211) and 
succeed at it (Arenas 59; cf. Bradley 192), turning other characters, primarily Oth-
ello, into his puppets (Arenas 57; cf. Bradley 195). Fred West goes a step further in 
his article “Iago the Psychopath”, stating that there was great interest in (what we 
now know as) the field of psychology during Shakespeare’s time (27), that Shake-
speare himself must have been familiar with it (34) and that he constructed Iago 
as a clinically accurate example of a psychopath (27). West also revises Bradley’s 
description of Iago and claims that it clearly depicts Iago as a psychopath (33) 
even though Bradley never uses the term himself. Similarly, Marvin Rosenberg 
in his article “In defense of Iago” analyzes Iago as having a neurotic personality. 
Rosenberg uses a psychoanalytic approach and relies upon the theoretical contri-
butions of Karen Horney to explain Iago’s manipulative scheming (151) and his 
exceptional abilities as well as his desire to deceive (152) as a consequence of a 
“severe function disorder” (155).
Earl L. Dachslager, on the other hand, points out that what makes Iago a su-
perb character is precisely the elusiveness of his motives (5), which are also, he 
claims, rather unimportant as he merely does what he is supposed to do as a dra-
matic character: perform his function of the villain (10). In a similar manner, in-
stead of focusing on Iago’s motives, Jacobsen, Beier, Altman and Vickers focus 
on Iago’s superb rhetorical skills which he uses to gain power over other charac-
ters. In the article “Iago’s art of war: the ‘Machiavellian moment’ in Othello,” Ken 
Jacobsen writes that Iago’s smooth and convincing manipulation (502) is largely 
informed by Machiavelli’s text The Art of War (498). Iago, as analyzed by Jacobsen, 
employs Machiavelli’s military techniques transferred to the level of speech in or-
der to gain power over other characters, as military strategy (Iago as the general) 
and rhetoric (Iago as the orator) are closely connected (505). 
Benjamin V. Beier in the article “The art of persuasion and Shakespeare’s two 
Iagos” similarly describes Iago as “the play’s exemplary sophist” (36) since his 
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72 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
goals as well as his methods are unethical and his skill of manipulation extraordi-
nary (38), and claims that it is through Iago (especially in comparison with Iachi-
mo from Cymbeline) that Shakespeare explores the dangerous powers of sophistry. 
Brian Vickers in “Power of persuasion” marks Iago as “Shakespeare’s greatest rhet-
orician” (434 qtd. in Beier), and in his study The Improbability of Othello, Joel Alt-
man, labelling Othello as the most intimate portrait of “rhetorical anthropology” 
(22), analyzes Iago’s great skills of manipulation on the basis of the Greek sophists 
Protagoras, Gorgias, and Isocrates (23). In “Talk, small talk and silence in Othel-
lo,” Robert Frost uses discourse analysis to characterize Iago as a manipulative and 
cunning initiator of dialogue based on the manner Iago chooses to get Othello’s 
attention. Iago is also described as an initiator in Alexander G. Gonzalez’s article 
“The infection and spread of evil: some major patterns of imagery and language in 
Othello.” Gonzalez analyzes Iago’s technique of infecting other characters with his 
manner of speech and thought and then letting them finish his job for him (37). 
Iago’s status as a villainous master manipulator is thus largely agreed upon by 
a majority of scholars and critics employing various methodological tools. Seen 
either as a wicked man, a wronged man, a psychopath or the Devil itself, Iago 
is commonly regarded as a deceitful, lying and cunning character. Othello, on 
the other hand, is commonly thought of as a good, noble and trustful character, 
not unintelligent yet not as sharp as Iago (cf. Bradley 189), which is why he also 
fails to recognize Iago’s intrigue. He is, however, not to be blamed for his inabil-
ity to see through Iago’s manipulation, as none of the characters are in fact able 
to see through him (cf. Bradley 192; Arenas 56; Jacobsen 508; Draper 725–6; 
Beier 43, 46-7; Rosenberg 152), not even his wife Emilia, whose love for and 
loyalty to Desdemona proves crucial in the end (cf. Bradley 239–40; Babcock 
301; Jacobsen 529). Emilia and Desdemona are commonly regarded as likeable 
characters (cf. Gonzalez 39), as is the character of Cassio (ibid.), who is regarded 
as a good-natured and handsome character loyal to Othello (cf. Bradley 238–9). 
One of the least important characters per se yet crucial for Iago’s plan is the 
character of Roderigo, who primarily functions as Iago’s most easily manipulat-
ed tool (cf. Gonzalez 46).
Corpus stylistic approaches to Shakespeare
Despite developing rather late compared to other areas of corpus research, cor-
pus stylistics has had an important impact on literary critical work since the 
early 2000s. What is more, Sean Murphy, Dawn Archer, and Jane Demmen 
demonstrate that corpus stylistic methods to Shakespeare are “well established” 
with a number of different studies already undertaken in this vein (224). An 
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73“I am not what I am”
important contribution to corpus stylistic studies of Shakespeare is the 2020 
special issue of Language and Literature, entitled Shakespeare’s Language: Styles 
and meanings via computer, which offers a selection of corpus-based studies of 
Shakespeare’s plays.
One such corpus-based approach, also used in this paper, is keyword analy-
sis, used early on in Shakespearean stylistics by Jonathan Culpeper, whose cor-
pus-based study “Computers, language and characterisation: An analysis of six 
characters in Romeo and Juliet” from 2002 this paper is largely informed by. In 
his innovative study, Culpeper analyzes the dialogue in Romeo and Juliet using 
keyword analysis to demonstrate how this computational approach can be used 
to determine the speech-styles of different characters. He also emphasizes how 
function words such as pronouns can be an important factor in determining 
style (27). “Style,” as explained by Culpeper, “is a matter of ‘frequencies’, ‘prob-
abilities’ and ‘norms’” (12). Style-markers can be equated with words whose fre-
quencies in the text under investigation are significantly skewed compared to 
their frequencies in some reference text(s), which corresponds very well to the 
statistical notion of “keyword” (cf. Culpeper, “Keyness” 30). In his 2009 article, 
Culpeper analyzes key part-of-speech and key semantic domains in addition to 
keywords, once again using Romeo and Juliet to illustrate how these additional re-
search techniques may be of great contribution to keyword analysis with regard 
to characterization.
Keyword analysis can thus be used as a starting point for characterization, as 
“the text for each character is highly likely to constitute a different, and some-
times radically different, kind of style” (Culpeper, “Keyness” 31). In their study 
“Depictions of deception: A corpus-based analysis of five Shakespearean charac-
ters,” for example, Dawn Archer and Mathew Gillings also use keyword analy-
sis, in combination with some additional techniques, to characterize five decep-
tive Shakespeare’s characters: Aaron, Tamora, Lady Macbeth, Falstaff and Iago. 
Their findings reveal that the five examined characters exhibit different deceptive 
speech-styles consistent with their different character traits. They also confirm a 
correlation between Shakespeare’s depictions of deceptive language and a real-life 
use of deceptive language features. They analyze Iago on the basis of six keywords: 
money, purse, Roderigo, lieutenant, sleep, and angry, and discuss how these keywords 
reveal Iago’s cunningness although this may not be readily apparent (253–4). They 
also examine the characters’ use of pronouns and find that, across the board, de-
ceptive characters statistically overuse other-oriented references (e.g., you, he, she, 
him) as opposed to non-deceptive characters, who predominantly use self-ori-
ented references (e.g., I, me, my). Furthermore, they find that this feature is, even 
among the deceitful characters, especially typical for Iago, who proves to be par-
ticularly skilful at keeping himself out of others’ focus (261).
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74 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
METHODOLOGY
Keeping in mind its historical nature and potential problems such as spelling 
variation and the existence of various editions of Othello, the online version pub-
lished on The Complete Works of William Shakespeare1 webpage was used. This was 
followed by the choice of characters to be examined and compared to Iago and 
the compilation of corpora and reference corpora. First, the three most prominent 
male characters were included who are characteristically different from Iago, that 
is, not presented as cunning and deceitful: Othello, Cassio and Roderigo. Then the 
two most prominent female characters were added, Desdemona and Emilia. Ex-
cluding stage directions and other non-speech material, six different corpora were 
compiled, each consisting of the lines spoken by the target character only: Iago 
Corpus, Othello Corpus, Cassio Corpus, Roderigo Corpus, Desdemona Corpus 
and Emilia Corpus. Each character corpus was then paired with a correspond-
ing reference corpus, consisting of a combination of all the lines spoken by other 
characters.
Sketch Engine was selected as the tool to be used for corpus analysis, and each 
character was examined for seven different types of keywords as the “key items 
that reflect the distinctive styles of each character compared with the other char-
acters in the same play” (Culpeper, “Keyness” 34): 
• positive single-words (with the parameter for the rare-common focus set at 
1000)
• negative single-words (rare-common focus: 1000)
• positive multi-words (rare-common focus: 1000)
• negative multi-words (rare-common focus: 1000)
• positive common/grammatically oriented single-words (rare-common focus: 
1000000)
• negative common/grammatically oriented single-words (rare-common focus: 
1000000)
• positive rare/lexically oriented single-words (rare-common focus: 0.001)
Here, the term multi-words refers to combinations of two words. Positive key-
words are items that are overrepresented in a character’s speech compared to other 
characters’ lines, and negative keywords are items that a character uses less com-
monly than the other protagonists. When it comes to the last group of rare/lexi-
cally oriented keywords, only positive single-words were considered, since positive 
as well as negative rare multi-words turned out to be extremely similar or identical 
(e.g. Roderigo) to keywords (1000): (negative or positive) multi-words, probably 
1 http://shakespeare.mit.edu/index.html
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75“I am not what I am”
due to the smallness of the corpora. It is for the same reason that the minimum 
frequency was set to 1 and only the top 10 keywords were considered with some 
interesting and interpretatively important exceptions discussed below. The attrib-
ute for all of the corpora was set to lemma. 
The last step was to deal with spelling variation, which has been deemed “per-
haps the greatest obstacle in the statistical manipulation of historical texts” (Cul-
peper, “Romeo and Juliet” 14). In this case, using a single play facilitated the ma-
nipulation of the data, as the small size of the datasets allowed manual scrutiny 
(cf. Culpeper, “Keyness” 31), so examples of spelling variation which were parsed 
incorrectly, such as ti or t for tis, for instance, were rare and did not present an issue 
as the concordances in such cases were simply manually checked.
RESULTS OF KEYWORD ANALYSIS
Table 1: Keywords for Iago
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
negative 
keywords 
(1000):  
single- 
words
keywords 
(1000): multi-
words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-
words
common/
grammati-
cally orient-
ed keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/
grammati-
cally orient-
ed keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 Roderigo Iago good lieutenant honest Iago you my mark
2 lieutenant heaven good name o thou he I thief
3 Moor willow noble nature good night in me trash
4 may thou noble lord good Iago his O sometimes
5 which O honest man virtuous 
Desdemona
him thou second
6 mark husband fair Desdemona whole 
course
be Iago directly
7 his die inclining  
Desdemona
o devil a do degree
8 yourself me lusty Moor thou diest and have clink
9 money my great ability good faith Cassio heaven chair
10 Cassio deed timorous accent good lady as it apt
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76 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
Table 2: Keywords for Othello
keywords 
(1000): sin-
gle-words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-
words
common/
gram-
matically 
oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/gram-
matically ori-
ented keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 thy lord honest Iago o heaven of you moon
2 Iago Moor whole course good 
liutenant
the him story
3 once him o devil good lord thou he soft
4 thee may st thou noble lord thy lord earth
5 turn help o thou virtuous 
Desdemona
Iago I wake
6 thou alas gentle  
Desdemona
other course O be pitiful
7 handkerchief willow brave Iago good faith she his oh
8 whose his o brave Iago warlike isle her in heed
9 heaven he such acco-
modation
heavenly 
light
thee will yond
10 moon watch old  
acquaintance
nether lip my Moor wont
Table 3: Keywords for Cassio
keywords 
(1000):  
single- 
words
negative key-
words (1000): 
single-words
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-
words
negative key-
words (1000): 
multi-words
common/
gram-
matically 
oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/
grammati-
cally oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 ha lord virtuous 
Desdemona
good night the do ship
2 drunk say good Iago honest Iago me her past
3 reputation thy divine  
Desdemona
o heaven I as exquisite
4 general Cassio bold Iago good 
liutenant
of lord expert
5 Bianca as good  
ancient
sweet Desde-
mona
Iago Cassio enemy
6 save husband haste- 
post-haste 
appearaance
good lord here you drinking
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77“I am not what I am”
7 bold when own power-
ful breath
noble lord general say divine
8 ancient these powerful 
breath
honest man ha if arrive
9 God handkerchief poor caitiff st thou drunk thy Fore
10 Iago her great  
contention
whole course reputation not worser
Table 4: Keywords for Roderigo
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-
words
common/
grammati-
cally oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/
grammati-
cally oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 signior love lascivious 
Moor
good night I the wheel
2 return Cassio wise consent honest 
Iago
have he votarist
3 Barbatio lord fair daughter o heaven me love unkindly
4 reason speak great  
devotion
good 
liutenant
will for tush
5 myself see inhuman dog o thou if Cassio transport
6 issue such much  
experience
sweet Des-
demona
it a torment
7 tell there full fortune good Iago but his tie
8 jewel must good guard good lord to lord thinkest
9 courtesy upon common hire noble lord not by thicklip
10 house their knave of 
common hire
honest 
man
can as suppliest
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78 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
Table 5: Keywords for Desdemona
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
keywords 
(1000): 
multi-words
negative key-
words (1000): 
multi-words
common/
gram-
matically 
oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/
grammati-
cally orient-
ed keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 willow Desde-
mona
good night honest Iago I the unkind-
ness
2 lord she good faith o heaven my and falsely
3 Emilia more green willow good liutenant lord she sing
4 praise Iago noble Moor o thou him her unpin
5 sing up dear absence sweet Desdemona do of trespass
6 him devil finger ache good Iago me it sooth
7 talk ti (tis) last article homest man willow this morn
8 bad thus such baseness st thou not a more
9 lose which unkind 
breach
virtuous  
Desdemona
you ti (tis) education
10 alas nothing maid call other course so more dinner
Table 6: Keywords for Emilia
keywords 
(1000):  
single- 
words
negative 
keywords 
(1000): 
single- 
words
keywords 
(1000): multi-
words
negative key-
words (1000): 
multi-words
common/
gram-
matically 
oriented 
keywords 
(1000000)
negative
common/
grammati-
cally orient-
ed keywords 
(1000000)
rare/
lexically 
oriented 
keywords 
(0.001)
1 husband of good madam good night husband of villany
2 villany sir o villany honest Iago have to frailty
3 jelaous much o heaven good Iago O and despite
4 madam one t Iago (“give it 
to Iago”)
noble lord lord in yonder
5 lady at cruel Moor honest man she me wicked
6 alas these dull Moor st thou for him west
7 false him o thou dull 
Moor
virtuous  
Desdemona
do be wedlock
8 us night thou dull 
Moor
other course speak the wayward
9 lie yet great affinity o devil some love wager
10 speak Othello filthy bargain thou diest it I venture
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79“I am not what I am”
FROM KEYWORDS TO KEY CHARACTER TRAITS
Generating a list of keywords “does not in itself constitute an analysis” (Bondi 3) 
and “only by examining the usage of those keywords can [one] determine whether 
a keyword has anything to do with characterisation” (Culpeper, “Romeo and Juli-
et” 18). The characterization of Iago as a deceitful character is carried out by com-
paring his keywords to the keywords of the other five examined characters. The 
interpretative analysis of the obtained data is divided into six (interconnected) 
points of comparison: focus, adjectives, the use of the expression Moor, references 
to the handkerchief, poisoning-the-ears technique, and pronouns.
Focus
Iago’s top three keywords (1000: single-words), referred to here as the character’s 
focus, are Roderigo, lieutenant, which refers to Cassio, and Moor, which refers to 
Othello. The three unlucky characters in Iago’s focus all end up fighting, wounded 
and/or dying either of each other’s or their own hand, which goes to prove how 
successful a manipulator Iago is, as this is one of his goals (cf. Beier 39).
Othello’s top keywords (1000: single-words), in comparison, show his preoc-
cupation with Iago, as Iago is his second top keyword. Furthermore, Othello’s first 
keyword is thy which is used predominantly to refer to Iago and Desdemona, or 
to Emilia, speaking to her about Iago, for example in the often repeated phrase 
“thy husband”. As honest Iago is Othello’s top multi-word keyword (1000), his 
preoccupation with and what seems a kind of dependency on Iago can again be 
interpreted as proof of Iago’s successful manipulation of Othello (cf. Arenas 57; 
Bradley 196–7; Gonzalez 37). Cassio, on the other hand, does not seem to pay 
much attention to Iago as his top three keywords are ha, drunk and reputation, yet 
his lack of attention (cf. Bradley 238) makes him just as easy a pray (Gonzalez 
46). It is also clear that Cassio ignorantly trusts Iago, as good Iago is Cassio’s sec-
ond multi-word (1000) keyword, which again confirms Iago’s manipulator status.
Adjectives
At first glance, some keywords may seem irrelevant for the present analysis yet 
they prove to be important tools of manipulation when considered in context 
(Archer and Gillings 252). The adjectives Iago uses point to his manipulative 
nature as they are either flattering or pejorative, often about the same referent, 
depending on the situation Iago finds himself in (cf. Jacobsen 507 on Iago’s ad-
aptation of his manner of speech to different interlocutors). The group of the 
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80 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
most interesting and relevant keywords for this point are the positive and negative 
(1000) multi-word keywords.
As pointed out by Archer and Gillings, to disguise his ill intentions regarding 
Cassio, for instance, Iago cunningly refers to him as good lieutenant, but only after 
he has already revealed his cunning scheme2 to the audience (253). In this situa-
tion the flattering adjective thus clearly points to his manipulative MO (cf. Frost 
on Iago’s increasingly ironic use of noble lord). Another subtle proof of his manip-
ulation is the way he describes Desdemona. As he is carefully trying to convince 
Othello of her infidelity yet retain the façade of good intentions, he calls her fair 
Desdemona and inclining Desdemona but never virtuous Desdemona, a phrase which 
we in fact find in his negative keywords. Lastly, adjectives reveal further evidence 
of his success in Othello’s top multi-word keyword (1000): honest Iago. This makes 
it clear that Othello, just like the other characters, trusts him (cf. Bradley 192; 
Arenas 56; Jacobsen 508; Draper 725–6; Beier 43, 46–7; Rosenberg 152) which is 
additional proof of his successful manipulation.
Moor
Not unlike adjectives, the use of the arguably pejorative expression Moor by different 
characters is another interesting feature. As pointed out by Maggie Bayles in “Othel-
lo: The ‘Other,’” the expression Moor functions as an othering device used in tandem 
with animalistic and hyper-sexualized imagery evident in expressions such as black 
ram3 and thicklip (cf. Roderigo’s keywords) to continuously emphasize Othello’s posi-
tion of an outsider. As mentioned above, Moor is Iago’s third top keyword (1000), as 
this is a common expression he uses to talk about Othello to other characters. When 
he is speaking to Othello directly, however, he uses the fourth top multi-word key-
word (1000), noble lord, again revealing his deceitful nature, as argued already by Frost. 
Tables 7, 8, and 9 list additional negative keywords (1000, multi-words) for Moor.
Table 7: Iago’s negative keywords (1000) multi-words featuring Moor
24 cruel Moor
25 dull Moor
26 lascivious Moor
27 noble Moor
28 o thou dull Moor
29 thou dull Moor
2 “with as little a web as this will I / ensnare as great a fly as Cassio” (2.1.157)
3 “An old black ram / is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.89–90)
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81“I am not what I am”
Table 8: Othello’s negative keywords (1000) multi-words featuring Moor
25 cruel Moor
26 dull Moor
27 lascivious Moor
28 lusty Moor
29 noble Moor
30 o thou dull Moor
31 thou dull Moor
Table 9: Cassio’s negative keywords (1000) multi-words featuring Moor
33 cruel Moor
34 dull Moor
35 lascivious Moor
36 lusty Moor
37 noble Moor
38 o thou dull Moor
39 thou dull Moor
As we can see, Iago somewhat carefully only ever uses the expressions Moor and 
lusty Moor even when he is speaking to other characters. He is, it seems, always 
careful not to reveal his villainous nature (cf. Bradley 216; Dachslager 6). If we 
then examine the usage of other expressions featuring the word Moor in the tables 
above, we see that lascivious Moor is used by Roderigo, noble Moor interestingly 
by Desdemona and the rest, cruel Moor, dull Moor, o thou dull Moor and thou dull 
Moor by Emilia. This seems to suggest that it is in fact Iago’s wife who dislikes 
Othello the most. However, as proposed by Culpeper in his “Romeo and Juliet” 
article, “[a]n important factor … in determining whether keywords relate to a par-
ticular character or not is whether they are localised or well-dispersed throughout 
the play” (39). Emilia uses all those labels in the final act, where Othello, enraged 
by jealousy that Iago instills into him, murders Desdemona, so they are rather an 
expression of her distress in this particular situation (cf. Bradley 240) and not so 
much a reflection of her general dislike for Othello (cf. Culpeper 2009, 41 with 
regard to the character of Romeo). What is more interesting although less appar-
ent is that Cassio never, not once, uses the expression Moor, which additionally 
even appears as his thirteenth single-word negative keyword (1000), and only ever 
refers to Othello as general, which is his fourth top single-word keyword (1000). 
This suggests that Cassio is an honest character and reinforces the interpretation 
that he is truly devoted to Othello (cf. Bradley 238–9; Gonzalez 39).
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82 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
Handkerchief
Further evidence of Iago’s successful manipulation, as well as Cassio’s ignorance 
of it, can be found in the presence and absence of the keyword handkerchief. The 
handkerchief is used by Iago to seemingly prove to Othello that Desdemona is 
having an affair with Cassio yet it does not appear in his keywords. Iago only sub-
tly plants the idea in Othello’s – at the time already manipulated and thus suspi-
cious – mind4 (cf. Bradley 186; Jacobsen 519; Beier 43): “Tell me but this, / Have 
you not sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries in your wife’s 
hand?” (3.3.443–5). It is Othello who then becomes preoccupied with it (cf. Beier 
41; Gonzalez 47–8): it appears in seventh place among his single-words (1000) 
keywords. Cassio, however, has no idea about Iago’s plan (cf. Bradley 239), which 
is supported by the fact that handkerchief not only does not appear within his pos-
itive keywords, but even appears in his negative single-word (1000) keywords and 
thus emphasizes his ignorance as well as the success of Iago’s cunning plan.
Poisoning the ears
Subtle planting of ideas into other characters’ minds seems to be Iago’s speciality 
(cf. Jacobsen 521; Beier 41) and yet additional proof of his cunningness (cf. Arenas 
56; Bradley 192; Jacobsen 517) as apparent in his speech ( Jacobsen 528; Gonza-
lez 36–7). This aspect of his subtly manipulative speech (cf. Jacobsen 516) can also 
be observed in his frequent use of expressions such as may, mark and see (Iago’s 
eleventh positive single-word keyword: 1000), all of which appear on his list of 
keywords (single-words: 1000), also in combination with sometimes (cf. handker-
chief ), appearing in his rare or lexically-oriented keywords (0.001), which further 
points to his careful and indirect smooth-talking and manipulation (cf. Jacobsen 
502; Beier 40, 43).
Instead of bluntly telling his victims what he wants them to believe, Iago care-
fully guides them towards certain conclusions in such a way that the victims think 
they saw everything on their own: “You shall observe him / And his own courses 
will denote him so / That I may save my speech: do but go after / And mark how 
he continues” (4.1.229–32). First, he delicately pours the poison, all the while 
making sure he is efficient yet not too direct: “Foh! one may smell in such a will 
most rank / Foul disproportion thoughts unnatural / But pardon me; I do not in 
position / Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear…” (3.3.238–41). Then he 
provides further guidelines such as: “Didst thou not see her / … didst not mark 
that?” (2.1.246–7), or, “I say, but mark his gesture” (4.1.77), “And mark the fleers, 
4 “The Moor already changes with my poison” (3.3.335).
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83“I am not what I am”
the gibes, and notable scorns / That dwell in every region of his face” (4.1.72–3). 
He thus carefully creates and then controls the situation yet cunningly positions 
himself outside of it, presenting himself merely as an objective observer.
Pronouns
A similar technique can also be observed in the most interesting and perhaps the 
most telling feature of all, Iago’s use of pronouns, especially when compared to 
other characters. Pronouns normally appear in the positive and negative gram-
matically-oriented single-word keywords (1000000) presented below.
Table 10: Pronouns among positive and negative grammatically-oriented sin-
gle-word keywords (1000000)
Iago
+
- Othello+ - Cassio + - Roderigo + - Desde-
mona +
- Emilia + -
1 you my you I I
2 he I him me her he my
3 me thou he I me she
4 his thy him her
5 him thou I she me
6 you me him
7 she his his
8 her
9 thee thy you
10 my I 
As proposed by Archer and Gillings, the pronouns are divided into “(singular and 
plural) self-oriented references and (singular and plural) other-oriented referenc-
es” (257). The findings confirm their claim that other-oriented references are more 
typical of deceptive characters as they suggest that the character is “taking the fo-
cus away from himself ” (261). Especially telling is the fact that the pronoun I ap-
pears among Iago’s negative keywords and his positive keywords consist mostly of 
other-oriented pronouns such as you, he, his and him (ibid.).
In contrast, other, non-deceitful, characters predominantly tend to use self-ori-
ented references, something particularly obvious in Cassio’s, Roderigo’s and Des-
demona’s speech, which further supports Archer and Gilling’s findings although 
these three characters were not included in their research. Othello, interestingly, 
does not use self-oriented pronouns. That, however, is rather the consequence of 
him being completely taken in by Iago’s schemes (cf. Arenas 57). He consequently 
mainly focuses on Desdemona (thy, she, her). He also tends to focus on Iago, but 
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84 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
in a non-threatening, dependent way. This goes to prove that Iago’s cunning and 
manipulative nature is indeed expressed in his speech and stylistically differenti-
ated from the speech of other, non-deceitful characters.
CONCLUSION
Keyword analysis is a useful and already established method in the research of 
stylistic features of language, including when it comes to the characteristics of 
fictional characters’ speech. In this paper keyword analysis is used to determine 
whether the status of the villainous character Iago from Shakespeare’s tragedy 
Othello, the Moor of Venice as a manipulative puppet-master is also reflected in 
his speech-style. This is confirmed on the basis of six points of discussion: fo-
cus, adjectives, use of the expression Moor, references to the handkerchief, poi-
soning-the-ears technique, and pronouns. While keyword analysis is a form of 
computer-assisted research and the interpretation of the data requires a certain 
amount of subjectivity, all of the discussed features show that Iago’s cunning na-
ture is indeed reflected in his speech and that there is a clear difference between 
his speech-style and the speech-styles of other, non-deceitful, prominent charac-
ters, especially Othello and Cassio.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Altman, Joel B. The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shake-
spearean Selfhood. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Archer, Dawn, Mathew Gillings. “Depictions of Deception: A Corpus-based 
Analysis of Five Shakespearean Characters.” Shakespeare’s Language: Styles and 
meanings via computer, special issue of Language and Literature 29.3 (August 
2020): 246–274.
Arenas, Enrique Cámara. “Causal Attribution and the Analysis of Literary Char-
acters: A. C. Bradley’s Study of Iago and Othello.” Journal of Literary Semantics 
39.1 (2010): 43–66.
Babcock, Weston. “Iago--An Extraordinary Honest Man.” Shakespeare Quarterly 
16.4 (Autumn 1965): 297–301.
Baker, Paul. “Keywords: Signposts to objectivity?” The Corpus Linguistics Discourse: 
In honour of Wolfgang Teubert. Eds. Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlberg. 
Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2018. 77–94.
Bayles, Maggie. “Othello: The ‘Other.’” Confluence, 30 March 2018, confluence.
gallatin.nyu.edu/context/interdisciplinary-seminar/othello-the-other. Web. 28 
June 2021.
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85“I am not what I am”
Beier, Benjamin V. “The Art of Persuasion and Shakespeare’s Two Iagos.” Studies 
in Philology 111.1 (2014): 34–64.
Bondi, Marina. “Perspectives on Keywords and Keyness: An Introduction.” Keyness 
in Texts, special issue of Studies in Corpus Linguistics (SCL) 41 (2010): 1–18.
Bradley, Andrew Cecil. Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King 
Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1919. Project Gutenberg, gutenberg.org/
files/16966/16966-h/16966-h.htm. Web. 24 August 2021.
Culpeper, Jonathan. “Computers, Language and Characterisation: An Analysis 
of Six Characters in Romeo and Juliet.” Conversation in Life and in Literature: 
Papers from the ASLA Symposium, Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliquee 
(ASLA). Eds. U. Melander-Marttala, C. Ostman and Merja Kyto. Uppsala: 
Universitetstryckeriet, 2002. 11–30.
Culpeper, Jonathan. “Keyness: Words, Parts-of-speech and Semantic Categories 
in the Character-talk of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.” International Journal 
of Corpus Linguistics 14.1 (2009): 29–59.
Dachslager, Earl L. “The Villainy of Iago: ‘What you know, you know.’” CEA Crit-
ic 38.3 (1976): 4–10.
Draper, John W. “Honest Iago.” PMLA 46.3 (1931): 724–737.
Frost, Robert. “Talk, Small Talk and Silence in Othello: Robert Frost Applies 
Techniques Adopted from Discourse Analysis to the Way Characters Speak in 
Othello.” The English Review 14.1 (2003): 28–30.
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of Imagery and Language in ‘Othello.’” South Atlantic Review 50. 4 (1985): 
35–49.
Jacobsen, Ken. “Iago’s Art of War: The ‘Machiavellian Moment’ in Othello.” Mod-
ern Philology 106.3 (2009): 497–529.
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der, Status and Genre in Shakespeare’s Plays.” Shakespeare’s Language: Styles 
and meanings via computer, special issue of Language and Literature 29.3 (Au-
gust 2020): 223–245.
Rosenberg, Marvin. “In Defense of Iago.” Shakespeare Quarterly 6.2 (1955): 
145–158.
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Nelson, 1996, shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/full.html. Web. 22 April 2021.
Vickers, Brian. “The Power of Persuasion: Images of the Orator, Elyot to Shake-
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West, Fred. “Iago the Psychopath.” South Atlantic Bulletin 43.2 (1978): 27–35.
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86 Teja Furlan, Monika kavalir
Teja Furlan
Monika Kavalir
University of Ljubljana
monika.kavalir@ff.uni-lj.si
»Tisto pa več nisem jaz«5: korpusna analiza Jaga iz Shakespearove 
tragedije Othello
Prispevek na podlagi analize ključnih besed obravnava Jaga iz Shakespearovega Othella. 
Namen prispevka je raziskati, kako se v Jagovem načinu govora odraža njegova manipu-
lativna narava in kako se njegov govor potemtakem razlikuje od govora nemanipulativnih 
osrednjih likov, in sicer Othella, Cassia, Roderiga, Desdemone in Emilije. Diskusija te-
melji na analizi ključnih besed posameznih dramskih likov z orodjem Sketch Engine in je 
razdeljena na šest medsebojno povezanih delov: fokus, raba pridevnikov, raba izraza Ma-
ver, omemba Desdemoninega robčka, Jagova tehnika zastrupljanja ušes in raba zaimkov. 
Raziskava potrjuje, da se Jagova manipulativna narava resnično zrcali v njegovem govoru, 
ta pa se tudi jasno razlikuje od govora ostalih obravnavanih likov.
Ključne besede: karakterizacija, korpusno jezikoslovje, analiza ključnih besed, Othello, 
William Shakespeare, Jago
5 Shakespeare, William. Othello. Trans. Milan Jesih. Mladinska knjiga, 1996.
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87
Responses to Gone with the Wind  
among Slovenians on the Other Side  
of the Atlantic
Janko Trupej
Abstract
The article discusses the reception of the novel and the film Gone with the Wind in se-
rial publications published by Slovenian immigrants in the United States of America. 
The analysis encompassed relevant articles that appeared in publications with different 
ideological orientations before the mid-1950s, i.e. until the onset of the modern African 
American civil rights movement. The reception by Slovenian Americans is compared with 
the contemporary general reception of the novel and the film in the United States. Taking 
the historical context into consideration, the article also endeavours to establish the rea-
sons for the differences in the reception.
Keywords: Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, Slovenian Americans, serial publica-
tions, reception, American literature
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111(73).09-31Mitchell M.:[070:314.151.3-
054.72(73=163.6)]
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.87-98
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88 Janko TrupeJ
INTRODUCTION
In the 1930s, several writers from the former Confederate States of America pub-
lished novels dealing with the Civil War—some of them tried to rehabilitate the 
image of the South (Gómez-Galisteo 15–16). Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 best-
seller Gone with the Wind, along with David O. Selznick’s extremely successful 
1939 Hollywood production of the same name, are examples par excellence of the 
latter endeavour.1 Gone with the Wind has had considerable influence on the gen-
eral public’s perception of the antebellum American South, the War Between 
the States and its aftermath (Gómez-Galisteo 60, 69–70, 177; Schuessler; Stew-
art). However, some aspects of the narrative that initially may not have been per-
ceived as particularly problematic became an issue as audiences’ ‘horizon of ex-
pectations’2 about the portrayal of black people in fiction changed along with the 
gradual changes regarding the (un)acceptability of racism in society; for decades, 
Gone with the Wind has thus been challenged on the grounds of exhibiting racist 
attitudes towards African Americans, using racial slurs, perpetuating racial stere-
otypes, etc. (see, e.g., Asim 131–33; Gómez-Galisteo 7, 57–60, 177–78; Haskell 
19–20, 32, 205–11; Ryan 22, 26, 48; Sova 167; Stewart).3 In spite of such criti-
cisms, both the novel and the film have remained popular (Gómez-Galisteo 3, 
101; Haskell 4–6; see also Wiley, “Epilogue” 424–26), although not as critically 
acclaimed as they once were (Gómez-Galisteo 176); however, habent sua fata li-
belli: in 2012, the Library of Congress (N. N.) included Gone with the Wind in an 
exhibition entitled Books That Shaped America.
The present article will analyse the reactions to Gone with the Wind (both the 
book and the film) in serial publications published by Slovenian immigrants in 
the USA before the mid-1950s.4 A study about the reception of Mark Twain’s 
works among Slovenian Americans showed that the ideological orientation of 
1 For instance, Jacqueline Stewart stated that the film “looks back nostalgically at idyllic days that are 
no more (because they never were)”.
2 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Baldick 116) defines this concept—as used by 
Hans Robert Jauss—as “the set of cultural norms, assumptions, and criteria shaping the way in 
which readers understand and judge a literary work at a given time. It may be formed by such 
factors as the prevailing conventions and definitions of art (e.g. decorum), or current moral codes.”
3 The controversy has intensified recently: in June 2020, amid Black Lives Matter protests, HBO 
removed Gone with the Wind from its streaming service, citing the film’s ‘racist depictions’ as the 
reason. When it was made available again, the film was accompanied by two videos of scholars 
discussing its historical context (Stewart; see also Schuessler).
4 By the time Gone with the Wind again made major headlines upon the film being re-released for 
the centennial of the beginning of the Civil War in 1961, many Slovenian immigrant serial publi-
cations had ceased to exist. In addition, some are not available in the Digital Library of Slovenia, 
which was used to compile the corpus for the present analysis.
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   88 6. 12. 2021   11:36:10
89Responses to Gone with the Wind among Slovenians on the Other Side of the Atlantic
a particular publication profoundly influenced the way the author was perceived 
(Trupej, “Ideological” 143–50), while a study about the Slovenian reception of se-
lected novels including racist discourse established differences between the pre- 
and post-World War II responses to Gone with the Wind on the territory that 
now constitutes the Republic of Slovenia (Trupej, “Recepcija” 222–24).5 It can 
therefore be presumed that the discourse about Gone with the Wind in Slovenian 
American publications may also have been influenced by ideology.
To establish a frame of reference, an overview of the contemporary general re-
ception of Gone with the Wind in the United States will be presented first. After-
wards, the responses to the novel and the film by Slovenians across the Atlantic 
will be analysed, and the possible reasons for the differences between the recep-
tion in different serial publications will be discussed.
THE INITIAL RECEPTION OF GONE WITH THE WIND IN THE 
SOURCE CULTURE
Gone with the Wind became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1936 
and would eventually go on to sell more copies than any other literary work in 
the United States of America up to that point; it received numerous positive re-
views (even garnering comparisons to classic works of world literature, includ-
ing War and Peace and Vanity Fair), and was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize and 
the American Booksellers Association prize (Gómez-Galisteo 17–18; see also 
Haskell 22–23; Jeff; Schuessler; Wiley, “Prologue” XXII–III).6 However, critical 
opinions about the novel’s artistic value were also expressed;7 an aspect of Mitch-
ell’s writing that was frequently criticized was her journalistic prose style or even 
lack of style (Gómez-Galisteo 25, 28; Haskell 23). Furthermore, some, for in-
stance the scholar L. D. Reddick (qtd. in Gómez-Galisteo 22), warned that be-
cause of its immense popularity, this novel—“written with a passionate sectional 
and racial bias”—might influence the public’s perception of the Civil War and the 
Reconstruction, while influential literary critic Malcolm Cowley (qtd. in Haskell 
23) declared it “an encyclopaedia of the plantation legend”. While communist 
and other left-wing reviewers offered particularly severe criticism of Mitchell’s 
5 The novel was translated into Slovenian twice: the first translation by Mirko Košir (under the 
pseudonym M. Rožič) was published in 1939/1940, and a retranslation by Janko Moder was pub-
lished in 1965. After World War II, the film was also shown in Slovenian cinemas.
6 Gone with the Wind has sold more than 28 million copies worldwide (Haskell 6) and has been 
translated into over 30 languages (Gómez-Galisteo 22).
7 For instance, commenting on the novel, F. Scott Fitzgerald (one of the uncredited screenwriters for 
the film) stated that he “felt no contempt for it, but only a certain pity for those who consider it the 
supreme achievement of the human mind” (qtd. in Haskell 159).
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90 Janko TrupeJ
portrayal of slavery and racial relations, this issue was largely glossed over in the 
mainstream media at the time of the novel’s initial publication (Gómez-Galisteo 
57, 59), and Gone with the Wind was also referred to in positive terms upon the 
author’s death in 1949 (see Wiley, “Epilogue” 423–24).
The writer herself rejected criticism of her portrayal of African Americans in 
Gone with the Wind, remarking that “most of the negro characters were people of 
worth, dignity and rectitude” (Mitchell 65).8 She later asserted that she never had 
the intention of ‘insulting the Race’; quite the contrary, Mitchell claimed that her 
“relations [with African Americans] have always been those of affection and mu-
tual respect” and that throughout her life, she often tried to help them in different 
ways.9 Furthermore, she stated that the African Americans she knew personal-
ly had expressed positive opinions about the book, and she speculated that Gone 
with the Wind was a pawn in the game of the radical left trying to incite Southern 
African Americans to join the Communist Party (Mitchell 223–24). She also ex-
pressed disapproval of the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, while at the 
same time praising its predecessor: 
The original Klan grew from a bitter necessity and Southern people respected 
it for they owed much to it. The present day Klan was a despicable organization 
and one abhorrent to all decent Southerners. In the early 1920s we suffered 
much from Klan activities here in Georgia. […] I personally would feel very 
sorry if the moving picture version of “Gone With the Wind” helped even in a 
small way to bring it back to life. (Mitchell 119)10
Groups advocating for the rights of African Americans, for instance the National 
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), raised objections 
against Gone with the Wind immediately after its publication ( Jeff; Schuessler), 
and after the film was announced, they began to demand that certain racist ele-
ments of the novel be excluded. As a result, its racism was somewhat toned down; 
for instance, the slur ‘nigger’ is never used, and the Ku Klux Klan is complete-
ly absent from the movie (Asim 144–45; Gómez-Galisteo 59; Haskell 202–3; 
Jeff; Ryan 70–71; Schuessler; Stevens 367). Upon the film’s release, some Afri-
can Americans praised it for eliminating some of the racism ( Jeff ), while others 
8 Gone with the Wind screenwriter Sidney Howard praised the characterization of African Ameri-
cans, claiming they were “the best written darkies […] in all literature” (qtd. in Mitchell 28).
9 For an overview of Mitchell’s support of African American individuals and institutions, see Gó-
mez-Galisteo (60). However, in her youth, she reportedly asked to be removed from a class which 
was also attended by a ‘Negro’ student (Haskell 200).
10 Through both parents, Mitchell descended from prominent Atlanta families, and thus had heard 
stories about ‘Mr. Lincoln’s War’ and the ‘Lost Cause of the Confederacy’ from a very young age 
(Gómez-Galisteo 16, 23, 27; see also Haskell 106, 194; Wiley, “Prologue” XXI).
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   90 6. 12. 2021   11:36:11
91Responses to Gone with the Wind among Slovenians on the Other Side of the Atlantic
condemned the film and picketed it (Haskell 214; Jeff; Ryan 71).11 Despite such 
controversy, it became one of the most successful motion pictures of all time and 
received ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Ac-
tress, which was awarded to Hattie McDaniel for her role as Mammy (Haskell 5, 
31–32)—she was the first African American ever to get nominated ( Jeff ). How-
ever, even after she won an Oscar, she was criticized, for instance, by the president 
of the NAACP for portraying a stereotypical black character (Haskell 214).
RESPONSES TO GONE WITH THE WIND IN SLOVENIAN 
AMERICAN SERIAL PUBLICATIONS
Gone with the Wind was sporadically mentioned in the conservative newspaper 
Ameriška domovina. In 1937, it is referred to as an interesting and frequently dis-
cussed novel in one article,12 as a best-seller in another,13 while an article published 
the following year reports that a certain Slovenian American female claimed that 
she had read the novel in only two days and that one of her friends needed four 
days to finish it.14 In 1949, Ameriška domovina reported that sales of the novel had 
reached six million copies, which made it second only to the Bible in all-time sales 
figures.15 When reporting on Mitchell’s death, the newspaper erroneously stated 
that she wrote “one of the greatest films”16 (she did not participate in writing the 
screenplay at all), and that she played the main role in it—Scarlett O’Hara was 
portrayed by Vivien Leigh.17
Several times the novel and/or film were mentioned in Catholic serial publica-
tions. In Glasilo K. S. K. jednote, Vital Vodušek mentions that Gone with the Wind 
is a best-seller,18 while someone writing under the name ‘Father Kapistran’ reports 
on the meticulous research that Mitchell supposedly conducted before she decid-
ed on the name ‘Gerald O’Hara’ for one of the important characters; she want-
ed to make sure that no one with this name lived in Savannah then or had lived 
11 See Stevens (367–70) for a more detailed overview of the reactions to the film Gone with the Wind 
in African American serial publications.
12 N. N. Margaret Mitchell. Ameriška domovina, 25 May 1937, p. 3.
13 N. N. Rev. Vital Vodušek. Ameriška domovina, 9 October 1937, p. 4.
14 N. N. Eleanor Suhadolnik. Ameriška domovina, 31 March 1938, p. 6.
15 N. N. Gone with the Wind Hits 6 Million Sale [sic]. Ameriška domovina, 25 February 1949, p. 5.
16 Quotations not originally in English were translated by the author of the present article.
17 N. N. Margareth [sic] Mitchell umrla. Ameriška domovina, 17 August 1949, p. 1.
18 J. Z. Rev. Vital Vodušek, Missionary, Travels to aid Daraga Seminary. Glasilo K. S. K. jednote, 13 
October 1937, pp. 7–8.
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92 Janko TrupeJ
there in the past.19 The following year, Kapistran claims that the novel “is popular 
only by [sic] artificial advertising”.20 Nova doba remarks that Gone with the Wind 
is both the longest and the most expensive film in history21 and later reports on 
its success at the Academy Awards.22 This newspaper also reports on the re-release 
of the film, stating that people cannot seem to get enough of it, since—according 
to a survey—30% of those who already saw Gone with the Wind on the big screen 
during its original theatrical run, plan on seeing it at the cinema again.23 In Ave 
Maria, another Catholic newspaper, someone writing under the name ‘Friar Fritz’ 
expresses the following sceptical opinion about the novel: “Books of ‘Mein Kamp’ 
[sic] and ‘Gone with the Wind’ calibre are mere fleeting fads. Didn’t the last men-
tioned certainly ‘hit the breeze’ awfully fast?”24 
Neither the novel nor the film received much attention from the editorship of 
the monthly magazine for Slovenian American youth titled Mladinski list.25 The 
only semi-noteworthy mentions of the novel come from letters sent to the mag-
azine by its readers: John Poklar Jr. refers to it as a ‘good book’,26 while Jennie H. 
Padar states that what she remembered the most about Georgia’s exhibit at the 
1939 New York World’s Fair were copies of Gone with the Wind in many different 
translations.27 
Gone with the Wind was not prominently featured in Enakopravnost either; 
this liberal newspaper reports that when Kurt Schuschnigg—former Austrian 
chancellor of Carinthian-Slovenian descent28—was held under house arrest by 
the Gestapo in 1939, he read Gone with the Wind;29 in an article a decade later, it 
is mentioned in passing that Mitchell is one of the authors who addressed issues 
concerning black people.30
19 Kapistran, Father. For God, home and country. Glasilo K. S. K. jednote, 29 March 1939, p. 8.
20 Kapistran, Father. For God, home and country. Glasilo K. S. K. jednote, 6 March 1940, p. 8.
21 N. N. Random Statistics. Nova doba, 7 February 1940, p. 6.
22 N. N. Najboljši film. Nova doba, 6 March 1940, p. 2.
23 Monitor, Fraternal. Take a Tip From “Gone with the Wind”. Nova doba, 26 November 1941, p. 7.
24 Fritz, Friar. Let’s Review the Catholic’s [sic]. Ave Maria, February 1942, pp. 38–39.
25 Mark Twain’s work (especially his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which addresses the is-
sue of slavery), was discussed a few times during the same period in Mladinski list; in some of 
the articles about Twain, socialist/communist sympathies were expressed (see Trupej, “Ideological” 
148–49).
26 Poklar, John. His Hobby is Reading. Mladinski list, March 1939, vol. 18, nr. 3, p. 32.
27 Padar, Jennie H. The New York World’s Fair. Mladinski list, October 1939, vol. 18, nr. 10, pp. 13–14. 
28 The Slovenian version of his last name is ‘Šušnik’.
29 N. N. Dr. Šušnik je žrtev nezaslišanega sadizma nacijskih [sic] gestapovcev. Enakopravnost, 17 
November 1939, p. 1.
30 N. N. Hrup julija meseca. Enakopravnost, 27 December 1949, p. 3.
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93Responses to Gone with the Wind among Slovenians on the Other Side of the Atlantic
In Zarja, a magazine published by the Slovenian Women’s Union of Ameri-
ca, Gone with the Wind is described as an interesting novel that turned its author 
into a millionaire and earned her the Pulitzer Prize,31 while in a later article it is 
mentioned that the novel is set during and after the Civil War, and its protago-
nist Scarlett O’Hara is characterized as “selfish, wilful, magnetic and daring”.32 
Furthermore, Zarja reports that in the northern United States, there are calls to 
boycott the film because it allegedly misrepresented the Union Army’s actions in 
the South; the article—which was published shortly after Nazi Germany invaded 
Poland—concludes that the value of the film is in showcasing the grim realities of 
war, which should make people strive for peace.33
A few noteworthy articles mentioning or discussing Gone with the Wind were 
published in the progressive newspaper Prosveta. Mary Jugg refers to it when dis-
cussing the status of women in the United States; she remarks that “[a]ccording to 
Margaret Mitchell’s highly interesting and lengthy novel, ‘Gone with the Wind’, 
the status of American women since the Civil War period has changed in no small 
degree.”34 Anna P. Krasna—a self-proclaimed reader of belles-lettres—reports that 
at the book fair in the Rockefeller Center in New York, Gone with the Wind was 
prominently displayed and received considerable attention. She states that she 
overheard a man declaring the following about the novel:
It is American, it does not propagate anything new, and it does not condemn 
anything old in the social sense. […] The romance is presented in a romantic 
way, but at the same time in a way that makes it appear really modern. This ap-
peals to our sophistical [sic] bourgeoisie, which took to the book like crazy. All 
our women who want to be perceived as cultured, modern and sophistical [sic] 
have Gone with the Wind in their hands while on the train, in a waiting room or 
when meeting somebody.
On the other hand, Krasna also reports on seeing a group of primary school chil-
dren being led to the stand where Gone with the Wind was displayed, and one of their 
teachers heaping the highest praise upon the novel—even proclaiming it an ‘unsur-
passable historical study’. The author of the article rejects this notion and concurs 
with the former sceptical opinion; she goes on to criticize the American South be-
cause of its racism, lynchings, poor working conditions for labourers, etc.35 Even more 
severe criticism of the novel was expressed in the same newspaper by John Spelich:
31 N. N. Ali se je izplačalo spisati novelo “Gone with the Wind”? Zarja, June 1937, vol. 9, nr. 6, p. 168.
32 N. N. Gone with the Wind. Zarja, May 1937, vol. 9, nr. 5, p. 160.
33 N. N. Popis civilne vojne je povzročil ostro debato. Zarja, October 1939, vol. 11, nr. 10, p. 320.
34 Jugg, Mary. Women’s Round Table. Prosveta, 14 October 1936, p. 8.
35 Krasna, Anna P. Književni semenj. Prosveta, 23 November 1936, p. 4.
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94 Janko TrupeJ
A young woman, Margaret Mitchell wrote a novel a few months ago. That, in 
itself, is no new thing. This book, “Gone with the Wind,” marches on and on 
until it arrives at more than a thousand pages. It is just a good ordinary novel, 
a novel that one can take or leave alone. Like more than a million other folks, I 
tried to read “Gone with the Wind” and never get [sic] far enough to find out 
who it was that had gone with the wind nor where they went. I’ll bet anything 
that ninety per cent of the folks who tried to read this best seller stopped on 
some pretext or other before getting halfway through. I know during my partial 
reading of the book, I was looking for a good excuse to lay the thing down. I’d 
leave it at a word even if the word had to do with sipping a glass o [sic] suds. 
But everyone said, “Oh, you must read Gone with the Wind,” so I tried to. In 
my humble opinion, it is an excellent book—to block open the door so the cat 
can come in. Yet, in spite of my opinion, this novel has sold more than a million 
copies. The reasons are, we think, due to a rather extraordinary good press agent 
and the well-known sheep-like tendencies of the human race. Those are our 
sentiments and we will have to stand pat.36
However, not all the writing on Gone with the Wind published in Prosveta was as 
dismissive as the above examples; for instance, in 1940 it is simply reported that 
everybody is going to the cinema to see the film.37
Perhaps the most ideologically charged condemnation of the novel appeared in 
the socialist oriented newspaper Proletarec, where the author of the article states 
that, having read the book, he or she has no intention of going to see the film 
based on it, since it glorifies the aristocratic slave-holding society of the American 
South. In the continuation, the author quotes lengthy passages from an article38 
by James Dugan, which begins as follows:
The issues of the Civil War were not solved by Appomattox; a decade of social 
struggle ensued in the South to decide whether the Negro was really to be free 
as an economic, political, and social man. It is the era of Reconstruction, ‘The 
Tragic Era’ of reactionary usage, which is most vilified in the literature of the 
Bourbons, now embalmed in the four hour film ‘Gone with the Wind’. The pic-
ture brings up in typical distorted form the hated symbols of Reconstruction — 
the carpetbagger, the Freedman’s Bureau, the slogan ‘Forty Acres and a Mule,’ 
the increased taxes upon the landholders and the Union Army in occupation. 
The shocked bitterness of the slaveholders at finding themselves suddenly liv-
ing in a democracy, and the forms of their counter-democratic action, such as 
the KKK, are idealized in ‘Gone with the Wind’.
36 Spelich, John. Mohawks 573. Prosveta, 15 June 1938, p. 6.
37 Fifolt, J. F. Off the President’s Bat. Prosveta, 14 February 1940, p. 7.
38 This article was originally published in the Marxist magazine New Masses (Dugan 28–30).
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95Responses to Gone with the Wind among Slovenians on the Other Side of the Atlantic
The ensuing passages of the article by Dugan condemn the film by referring to par-
ticular scenes as evidence for the above claims.39 However, not all the mentions of 
Gone with the Wind in Proletarec are ideologically charged. For instance, the newspa-
per reports that Vivien Leigh won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best 
Actress for her performance in Gone with the Wind.40 Furthermore, when discussing 
the contemporary economic system and the way it affects the working class, two arti-
cles in Proletarec state that some people do not want to acknowledge the reality of the 
situation, instead opting for the same modus operandi that Scarlett O’Hara had when 
she said: “I’ll not think about that today; I’ll think of it tomorrow.”41 Towards the end 
of the 1940s, Raymond S. Hofses again expresses a more critical opinion, remarking 
that “[i]n reading such books as ‘Gone with the Wind,’ one gathers that slavery was 
altogether tolerable for those who lived in the upper strata of the slave class.”42
CONCLUSION
Gone with the Wind was frequently mentioned/discussed in Slovenian American 
serial publications from 1936, when the novel was published, to 1940, i.e. the year 
after its big screen adaptation was released. In later years, Gone with the Wind was 
seldom mentioned, although a few noteworthy articles appeared in 1949—the 
year of Mitchell’s untimely death.
The conservative newspaper Ameriška domovina reported on the great commercial 
success of Gone with the Wind, praised the narrative and voiced no critical opinions 
about it. The Catholic oriented newspapers Nova doba, Ave Maria and Glasilo K. S. 
K. jednote also focused on the novel’s and film’s commercial success, but the latter two 
publications expressed some doubts about Gone with the Wind’s artistic value.
Gone with the Wind was mentioned only in passing in the youth magazine 
Mladinski list and the liberal newspaper Enakopravnost. It was discussed some-
what more at length in the women’s magazine Zarja, but the articles about it do 
not have a clear ideological agenda.
The situation was markedly different in the progressive newspaper Prosveta 
and the socialist newspaper Proletarec, where—although not all mentions of the 
novel and/or film were ideologically charged—Gone with the Wind was severely 
criticized both for its alleged lack of artistic value and for clearly favouring the 
status quo ante bellum as far as social and especially racial relations are concerned. 
39 J. D. “Gone with...” Proletarec, 14 February 1940, p. 6.
40 N. N. How Did Your Favorite “Star” Rank This Year? Proletarec, 15 January 1941, p. 6.
41 N. N. Labor, Capitalism And [sic] Socialism. Proletarec, 1 July 1942, p. 6; Hofses, Raymond S. 
Bluffing Is a Great Profession. Proletarec, 23 April 1947, p. 6.
42 Hofses, Raymond S. Reflections. Proletarec, 8 September 1948, p. 6.
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96 Janko TrupeJ
The lack of criticism of Gone with the Wind in most Slovenian American serial 
publications can perhaps be at least partially attributed to the fact that Sloveni-
ans only began to immigrate to the United States in large numbers after the Civil 
War and the Reconstruction had ended (Drnovšek 17), and thus had little to no 
personal involvement in the events from the period in which the narrative is set. 
Furthermore, Slovenian immigrants mainly settled in the Midwest and Northeast 
(Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, etc.), not the South—a further possi-
ble reason why even right wing Slovenian American publications did not have a 
highly ideological agenda when reporting on Gone with the Wind, as opposed to 
publications in states where racial segregation was in full effect, for instance Geor-
gia, where the story takes place. The newspapers Proletarec and Prosveta—the for-
mer being openly socialist and the latter with clear socialist sympathies (Pogačar 
345–46, 350)—were exceptions; this is in line with left-wing organizations, for 
instance the Communist Party USA, frequently supporting African Americans’ 
struggles against discrimination during the inter-war period (Ling 118, 125–27; 
Waldrep 136, 142, 163).
It can thus be concluded that ideology did somewhat influence Slovenian 
Americans’ criticism of Gone with the Wind, while the lack of critical opinions 
in the majority of publications may be attributed to historical and geographical 
reasons.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ameriška domovina / American Home. Cleveland, Ohio: J. Debevec, 1919–2008.
Asim, Jabari, The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why. Boston: 
Houghton Mifflin, 2007.
Ave Maria. Lemont, Illinois: Družba sv. Rafaela za slovenske izseljence v Amer-
iki, 1909–2016.
Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford/New York: 
Oxford University Press, 2001.
Drnovšek, Marjan. “Pojav množičnega izseljevanja Slovencev v Združene države 
Amerike.” Množično izseljevanje Slovencev v Združene države Amerike. Ed-
ited by Marjan Drnovšek and Vilma Brodnik. Ljubljana: Zavod Republike 
Slovenije za šolstvo, 2002, pp. 7–19.
Dugan, James. “Reconstruction and GWTW.” New Masses, vol. 34, no. 6, 1940, 
pp. 28–30. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1940/
v34n06-jan-30-1940-NM.pdf (Accessed 17 January 2021).
Glasilo K.S.K. jednote / Official Organ of the Grand Carniolian Slovenian Catho-
lic Union. Cleveland, Ohio: Kranjsko-slovenska katoliška jednota, 1915–1946.
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Gómez-Galisteo, M. Carmen. The Wind Is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Re-
writings of Gone with the Wind. Jefferson, North Carolina/London: McFar-
land & Company, Inc., 2011.
Haskell, Molly. Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. New Haven/
London: Yale University Press, 2009.
Jeff, Leonard J. “‘Gone with the Wind’ and Hollywood’s Racial Politics.” The Atlan-
tic, December 1999. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/12/
gone-with-the-wind-and-hollywoods-racial-politics/377919/ (Accessed 7 
February 2021).
Ling, P. J. “A White Woman’s Word: The Scottsboro Case.” Race on Trial: Law 
and Justice in American History. Edited by Annette Gordon-Reed. Oxford/
New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 118–38.
Mitchell, Margaret. The Scarlett Letters: The Making of the Film Gone with the 
Wind. Edited by John Wiley, Jr. Lanham/Boulder/London/New York: Taylor 
Trade Publishing, 2014.
Mladinski list: mesečnik za slovensko mladino v Ameriki / Juvenile: Monthly Mag-
azine for the Young Slovenes in America. Chicago, Illinois: Slovenska narodna 
podporna jednota / Slovene National Benefit Society, 1922–2015.
N. N. “‘Books That Shaped America’ Exhibition to Open June 25.” Library of 
Congress, 2012. https://www.loc.gov/item/prn-12-123/ (Accessed 17 January 
2021).
Nova doba: uradno glasilo Jugoslovanske katoliške jednote / New Era: Official Organ of 
the South Slavonic Catholic Union. Cleveland, Ohio: J.S.K. jednota, 1927–1945.
Pogačar, Timothy. “Izseljenski tisk v Ameriki v digitalni dobi: slovensko-ameriški 
časopis Prosveta.” Slavistična revija, vol. 65, no. 2, 2017, pp. 343–53. https://srl.
si/ojs/srl/article/view/COBISS_ID-64390754 (Accessed 12 January 2021).
Proletarec: glasilo Jugoslovanske socialistične zveze: list za interese delavskega ljudstva. 
Chicago, Illinois: Jugoslovanska delavska tiskovna družba, 1906–1952.
Prosveta: glasilo Slovenske narodne podporne jednote / Enlightenment: The Publication 
of the Slovene National Benefit Society. Imperial, Pennsylvania: Slovenska narod-
na podporna jednota / Slovene National Benefit Society, 1908–.
Ryan, Tim A. Calls and Responses: The American Novel of Slavery since Gone with 
the Wind. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008.
Schuessler, Jennifer. “The Long Battle over ‘Gone with the Wind’.” The New York 
Times, 14 June 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/movies/gone-
with-the-wind-battle.html (Accessed 11 January 2021).
Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds. New York: 
Facts on File Inc., 2006.
Stevens, J. D. “The Black Reaction to Gone with the Wind.” Journal of Popular Film, 
vol. 2, no. 4, 1973, pp. 366–71.
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98 Janko TrupeJ
Stewart, Jacqueline.“Why we can’t turn away from ‘Gone with the Wind’.” CNN, 
25 June 2020. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/12/opinions/gone-with-the- 
wind-illuminates-white-supremacy-stewart/index.html (Accessed 12 January 2021).
Trupej, Janko. “Recepcija štirih ameriških romanov in njihovih slovenskih prevodov v 
luči ideologije rasizma.” Primerjalna književnost, vol. 38, no. 2, 2015, pp. 213–35.
Trupej, Janko. “Ideological Influences on the Reception of Mark Twain among Slove-
nians across the Atlantic.” Acta Neophilologica vol. 52 no. 1–2, 2019, pp. 141–52.
Waldrep, Christopher. The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Pun-
ishment in America. New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Wiley, John, Jr. “Prologue: The Making of a Masterpiece.” The Scarlett Letters: 
The Making of the Film Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell. Edited by 
John Wiley, Jr. Lanham/Boulder/London/New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 
2014, pp. XIX–XXVIII.
Wiley, John Jr. “Epilogue: Tomorrow Is Another Day.” The Scarlett Letters: The Making 
of the Film Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell. Edited by John Wiley, Jr. 
Lanham/Boulder/London/New York: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014, pp. 421–27.
Zarja: uradno glasilo Slovenske ženske zveze v Ameriki / The Dawn: Official Organ 
of the Slovenian Women’s Union of America. Chicago, Illinois: Slovenska ženska 
zveza / Slovenian Women’s Union of America, 1929–.
Janko Trupej
Jurklošter
janko.trupej@gmail.com
Odzivi na V vrtincu med Slovenci na drugi strani Atlantskega oceana
Članek obravnava recepcijo romana in filma Gone with the Wind v serijskih publikacijah 
slovenskih izseljencev oz. zdomcev v Združenih državah Amerike. Analiza je zajemala 
relevantne članke, ki so bili objavljeni v publikacijah z različnimi ideološkimi usmeritvami 
do sredine petdesetih let 20. stoletja, tj. do začetka intenziviranja afroameriškega giban-
ja za državljanske pravice. Recepcija v slovensko-ameriških publikacijah je primerjana s 
splošno sodobno recepcijo romana in filma v ZDA. Upoštevajoč zgodovinski kontekst so 
v članku obravnavani tudi razlogi za razlike v recepciji.
Ključne besede: Margaret Mitchell, V vrtincu, ameriški Slovenci, serijske publikacije, re-
cepcija, ameriška književnost
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   98 6. 12. 2021   11:36:11
99
Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity  
and His Reception Internationally and  
in Slovenia
Polona Ramšak
Abstract
Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author of Japanese descent who has established himself glob-
ally as an award-winning writer of bestselling books. This article deals with the hybrid-
ity of the author, who is both Japanese and English, a popular writer who stirs reader 
emotions but is at the same time respected by critics. The article begins by addressing 
the ‘Japaneseness’ in Ishiguro’s work that is both obvious and skilfully concealed. In the 
second part, the article examines the reception of Ishiguro’s work by Slovenian readers 
and discusses potential reasons for their seeming lack of response.
 
Keywords: Kazuo Ishiguro, Slovenian reception, globalisation, national identity
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09Ishiguro K.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.99-114
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100 Polona Ramšak
INTRODUCTION
The second half of the 20th century brought a significant change for the British in 
the character of their literary and national identity: the novel in English super-
seded the English novel in importance but also in persuasiveness. Once found in 
the margins of canonical literature, the new literatures in English now enjoys the 
limelight. Post-colonial English and black British literary works are being read 
and critically acclaimed. Even though contemporary English novelists are im-
portant, those that dictate the parameters of literary debate and attract the most 
attention are the non-English novelists who write in English (Shaffer 2007: 15). 
Part of this context is Kazuo Ishiguro, an Englishman from Japan who has seem-
ingly achieved the perfect inclusion of people who immigrate at an early age. He 
is Japanese, while his speech and etiquette are British. Nevertheless, his accent and 
manner of speaking reveal his Japanese upbringing. In this article, we will ana-
lyse Ishiguro’s hybridity and its potential influence on his reception by Slovenian 
readers.
JAPANESE-ENGLISH ORIGIN
A comprehensive approach to Ishiguro’s work cannot afford to overlook the au-
thor’s hybrid identity. His first novel, A Pale View of the Hills, is set in Japan and 
England, the second one, An Artist of the Floating World, in Japan, whereas The 
Remains of the Day takes place in England alone. The Unconsoled moves to a cen-
tral European city, and When We were Orphans is set partly in England and partly 
in Shanghai. All these novels deal with the themes of self-discovery and disap-
pointment; they are all pensive and concerned with the past. Ihab Hassan (1989: 
160) wonders if The Remains of the Day is a novel about the Japanese vision of 
England or, rather inconspicuously, an English version of Japan. Watching Ste-
vens, the butler, and his obsession with dignity and loyalty, we are reminded of a 
Japanese samurai or ronin. In ancient Japan, a ronin was a free servant who vol-
untarily remained bound to his master. Gregory Mason (1989: 49) defines this 
class of people as homeless samurai who hold on to the long-gone code of hon-
our, as people who maintain existential dignity while all around them traditional 
values are crashing. By serving his feudal lord, Stevens seems a prototype of this, 
almost completely embodying the “bushido” values, i.e., the rules of samurai life. 
His approach to fulfilling his duties, his attitude towards his father, and his loy-
alty to Lord Darlington link him to Hagukare, the collection of rules and anec-
dotes depicting correct samurai behaviour. Stevens can thus be seen as an uptight 
English butler, a parody of a parody, similar to Wodehouse’s Jeeves, or someone 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   100 6. 12. 2021   11:36:11
101Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
completely different – a covert Japanese samurai (Bay 2010: 23-33). Similarly, in 
A Pale View of the Hills, the protagonist’s father is appalled by the lack of respect 
and blind obedience of his former students after the war because he expects bush-
ido to remain valid.
Several characters in Ishiguro contribute to a broad perspective of ‘Japaneseness’ 
with their stereotypical and non-stereotypical behaviour and thinking. They are fre-
quently in conflict with the change in their values, mostly because of the war. These 
old-fashioned values are often the remains of Japanese ethics, followed by the sam-
urai class. Ishiguro’s imaginary Japan leans on the samurai ethics. In his stories “The 
Summer after the War” and “A Family Supper”, the young protagonists deal with 
the bitter reaction of their older relatives to the decay of traditional Japanese values, 
replaced by American influence. The latter even depicts a samurai suicide.
In A Pale View of the Hills, Etsuko, the narrator, moves to England from Japan. 
After her daughter’s suicide, she recollects the time she spent in Nagasaki. On the 
one hand, Etsuko represents the post-WWII change, moving to a better place 
and marrying a businessman, while at the same time, she remains dependent on 
her husband, keeping the façade of a happy marriage, thus proving the stereotype 
of Japanese families being patriarchal. The novel features another Japanese stere-
otype: that working women are to be pitied and despised. 
An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s only book set entirely in Japan, depicts 
a post-war Japan still ruled by old structures and samurai values. The sisters Setsu-
ko and Noriko embody a struggle between different values. Setsuko behaves in the 
typically Japanese way, respects the elderly and accepts traditional values but at the 
same successfully manipulates conversation to get what she wants. Noriko open-
ly jokes about their father, while wanting to become the stereotypical Japanese 
housewife. The protagonist Masuji Ono recognizes this conflict, since he once had 
to choose between his own path and following bushido. He deals with questions 
of filial respect, loyalty to his own sensei1 and in the end even seppuku.2
Ishiguro’s penultimate novel The Buried Giant is set in fantasy England after 
the rule of King Arthur. It focuses on forgotten crimes through the parable of a 
dragon that uses its mist to cloud people’s memories. The giant in the title repre-
sents repressed ethnic tensions. Again, Ishiguro is concerned with countries and 
their dark past, whether Britain, Japan or another country. 
In some of his interviews, Ishiguro stresses that he is no expert on everything 
Japanese. He even admits that his Japanese is insufficient to read Japanese news-
papers. When asked if he was conscious of his language and tone, since there is 
something Japanese that always comes across in his style, Ishiguro replied:
1 A teacher (in martial arts).
2 Another term for hara-kiri.
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102 Polona Ramšak
At the beginning of my career it was quite deliberate. A Pale View of Hills was 
set in Japan. My characters were Japanese, so of course they had to speak in a 
Japanese kind of English. And in An Artist of the Floating World, the characters 
were not only Japanese but they were meant to be speaking in Japanese even 
though it was written in English, so I spent a great deal of energy there find-
ing an English that suggested there was Japanese being spoken or translated 
through. Maybe some of that effort has stayed with me. I use a formal, careful 
kind of English, but to some extent that may just be my natural or preferred 
way of using the language. For example, the butler in Remains of the Day is Eng-
lish, but he often sounds quite Japanese. And I thought that was fine, because 
he is a bit Japanese. (Chang 2015)
On Ishiguro’s ‘Japaneseness’, the critics disagree. Haruki Murakami, a leading Jap-
anese author, says that The Remains of the Day “looks like a Japanese novel – in its 
mentality, its taste, its colour,” (cited in Iyer 1994: 58), while Kenzaburo Oe, an-
other Japanese literary legend, mentions that Ishiguro’s books make him feel that 
the power of the characters is not very Japanese, that the books are about people 
from England (Oe & Ishiguro 1991: 115).
Ishiguro sees the biggest difference between Japan and England in the peace 
and quiet of the English countryside.
The kind of England that I create in The Remains of the Day is not England 
that I believe ever existed […] What I’m trying to do there […] is to actually 
rework a particular myth about a certain kind of mythical England […] an 
England with sleepy, beautiful villages with very polite people and butlers […] 
taking tea on the lawn […]. (Su 2009: 174)
Hunnewell (2008: 184) adds that to Ishiguro, Japan seems dizzily full of images 
and sounds, whereas England emerges as rural, simple, black and white.
In the early 1980s, Ishiguro was often mentioned alongside Timothy Mo and 
Salman Rushdie as one of the three writers to whom one had to pay attention 
because they were adding new layers to the British literary landscape. The critic 
Bruce King (1991: 192) congratulated them for bringing interculturalism to the 
general cultural milieu. Since they were bringing new, non-English voices to the 
literary discussion, their attracting attention was no surprise. 
Caryl Phillips, a Kittitian-British novelist, (1997: xv) believes that Ishiguro’s 
early prose creates conditions that provoke genuine intercultural dialogue and ex-
change. He chose nine pages of The Remains of the Day for his anthology Extrav-
agant Strangers: A Literature of Belonging. In the preface, he claims that for many 
British people, to accept the idea that their country has a long, complex history 
of immigration would be to undermine their basic understanding of what it is to 
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103Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
be British. The excerpt features Stevens pondering the nation’s greatness. Phillips 
explains that even though Ishiguro’s life might seem unburdened with the signs 
of the Empire, his work often expresses a microscopically precise care for the na-
ture of Britishness (see Sim 2009: 125, 126). Despite the importance of the Brit-
ish part of his identity, critics rarely say Ishiguro is a British author, period. He is 
usually identified as a Japanese-British author, this description serving to stress 
his interculturality and composite identity.
Identifying potential influences in the contemporary globalized literary cos-
mos, in which a clear impact of an author or work on another one can rarely be 
singled out, is a sensitive speculation. Yet in the case of Ishiguro, we can identify a 
few potential sources of influence. Ishiguro himself claims to have read much Jap-
anese literature, albeit in English translation, especially twentieth-century novel-
ists, such as Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965), and 
Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972), so certain similarities with the three Japanese 
authors are unsurprising. 
An obvious similarity between Soseski and Ishiguro is their mixed origin. The 
gap between Soseki’s Eastern roots and Western cultural integration was a pre-
dicament with which he was obsessed his whole life. As a child, he focused on 
Chinese fiction and poetry and rejected learning English, despite the new wave 
of enthusiasm for everything Western. At sixteen, he changed his mind only to 
become the second student ever to graduate in English from Tokyo University. 
While remaining reserved about his knowledge of the language and believing that 
he would never truly master it, in 1900 the Japanese government chose him for a 
fully funded pilot study programme in England (Gessel1993: 45, 46). Later in his 
career, Soseki used his writing to oppose the Japanese tendency to mimic all that 
is Western, in which he saw the suppression of national pride and a serious threat 
to Japanese values and morals. Ishiguro fought this battle in the opposite direction 
as a Japanese writing in English, and he is constantly reminded of his Japanese 
heritage, even though he sees himself primarily as an Englishman.
Coping with change is a motif that connects Ishiguro to Junichiro Tanizaki, 
who began writing as a result of his enthusiasm for the West. He is popular among 
Japanophiles in the US, while according to Gessel (1993: 48), most Japanese read-
ers resent this controversial author, who in his early novels touches on the deli-
cate subject of incest, fantasizing about his own mother, and other erotic and sex-
ual extremes, which inspires controversy in contemporary Japanese society. His 
themes differ from Ishiguro’s, but similarities can be found in Tanizaki’s 1944 novel 
Makioka Sisters, where a family struggles to keep their integrity during the war. So-
cial changes and their influence on individuals are a frequent theme with Ishiguro, 
but the stability and integrity of his families and individuals are seriously disturbed 
and have none of the permanence and stability shown in Makioka Sisters.
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104 Polona Ramšak
Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize for litera-
ture, also shares characteristics with Ishiguro, particularly the isolation of his char-
acters, one of Kawabata’s most typical, possibly autobiographical features. Ishiguro 
(1986: 2) believes that Kawabata strove for traditional Japanese prose under the 
influence of European realism, a tradition that valued lyricism, mood, and reflec-
tion, not just plot and characters. The influence of this style can be seen through-
out Ishiguro’s work, particularly in A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating 
World, where the mood is created by thoughts and words that are never uttered.
Kawabata’s passivity during the war, war propaganda and support for the army 
are reflected in Ishiguro’s novels, but he never stresses exterior events. He too fo-
cuses on the individual’s inner struggle, not the struggle of a group of people or a 
nation. Kawabata’s observation about war can be linked to Ishiguro’s third novel:
I consider that my life after the war consists of ‚remaining years‘ and that these 
remaining years are not mine but a manifestation of the tradition of beauty in 
Japan. (cited in Gessel 1993: 180)
This reminds us of Stevens’s reflection on the pier at the end of The Remains of 
the Day:
Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back 
so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best 
of what remains of my day. After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking 
back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might 
have wished? (Ishiguro 1990: 244)
In Ishiguro’s novels, the plot moves smoothly back and forth through events 
stretching across decades of the protagonist’s life, through different worlds, the 
past, the present or dreams, spinning a huge web of personal and historical trau-
ma. This is true whether the protagonist is a grieving mother, an aging artist, a 
professional butler, or a world-renowned pianist. Ishiguro admits that moving to 
England was what made him want to write about Japan, because the memories 
had started to fade (Sim 2009: 10). Later, this feeling of alienation and removal 
became one of his trademarks:
There was a part of me that wanted to find out if my acceptance was condi-
tioned on the fact that I was acting as mediator to Japanese culture. I wanted to 
see if people could appreciate me purely as a novelist as opposed to a Japanese 
novelist. (Su 2009: 159)
Sim (2009: 19-21) summarizes Ishiguro’s claim that he does not see himself 
as a Japanese writer but as a writer about common topics. His multicultural 
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105Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
background makes him a writer without a home. Ishiguro says that the realisation 
that he has never belonged to either country or society gave him the opportunity 
to become an international writer, but at the same time he felt enormous relief 
once he moved his story environment from Japan to England.
In a 1991 TV interview with Clive Sinclair, Ishiguro enumerated his most 
influential Western literary influences as George Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and 
others, claiming that his work originates from the Western realistic tradition. Ma-
son (1989: 48) explains that with his ironic distance, Ishiguro evidently shows his 
deviation from the Japanese experience and identification as a Western writer. The 
distance between the past and the present and all the unspoken that lies between 
comprise the golden thread of all his novels.
Ishiguro displays a more pensive and indifferent attitude than the previous-
ly mentioned Japanese authors. His novels show the necessity to face the past, 
although this can be a difficult and complex process. He does not only focus on 
after-war changes but also the broader transitions: he researches psychological 
dilemmas of Western and Japanese culture because he feels close to them both. 
Etsuko from A Pale View of the Hills, Ono from An Artist of the Floating World and 
Stevens from The Remains of the Day are all representatives of individuals that have 
faced their past.
In his conversations with Kenzaburo Oe, Ishiguro explains that he was forced 
to write more internationally because of his lack of knowledge about Japan. In 
Oe’s opinion, Ishiguro’s style has a double structure with two or more intertwined 
elements, which Oe finds more English than Japanese (Ishiguro & Oe 1991: 115-
118). Furthermore, Oe believes that a real novelist should be international: “My 
conclusion is that, rather than being an English author or European author, you 
are an author who writes in English …” (ibid.).
Ishiguro was also influenced by Japanese films, especially by Ozu Yasujirō, 
which shows in many of his novels, especially in An Artist of the Floating World. 
Just like young people in Ozu’s films from the same time, Masui Ono’s grand-
son is excited about American pop culture. Ono’s daughter Noriko, who has 
difficulty finding a life partner, is reminiscent of Ozu’s films Late Spring and 
Early Summer, which focus on finding husbands for unrelated characters named 
Noriko. In the films, Noriko is played by the Japanese actress Hara Setsuko. 
Mausi Ono’s daughter is called Setsuko, which might suggest the source of in-
spiration (Medhurst 2015).
Kawabata’s succinct point that despite his Japanese origins, he is not a Japa-
nese writer and despite writing in English, he is not an English writer is indeed 
an essential part of Ishiguro’s artistic identity. However, Slovenian readers still see 
Ishiguro mainly through this prism of double nationality, which might present an 
obstacle for relating to his work.
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106 Polona Ramšak
CRITICISM AND AWARDS
Moreover, the critical image of Ishiguro often centres on the fallacy reducing him 
to his cultural background. After his first two novels, critics described him as “an 
English writer with Japanese influences”, and later turned the definition around 
by characterizing him as “a Japanese who writes in English in a style that is more 
English than the English” (Patey 1991: 135). This focus on the influence of Jap-
anese philosophy and culture on Ishiguro’s work often leaves Ishiguro speechless. 
When critics insist that his novels are firmly set in the British literary tradition, 
that is equally erroneous. In reality, Ishiguro should be viewed simply as one of the 
new international writers who offer readers formerly unknown worlds.
If critics initially praised Ishiguro’s taciturnity, his refined sense of time, and 
the quiet tones of his Japanese heritage, later novels seem to trigger mixed reviews. 
The Unconsoled was lauded by many for its ambition, excitement, and humour, 
while others claimed the novel was too long and did not appeal to the reader. 
James Wood even wrote in The New Yorker: 
His previous novel, Never Let Me Go (2005), contained passages that appeared 
to have been entered in a competition called The Ten Most Boring Fictional 
Scenes. […] But in his new novel [The Buried Giant] Ishiguro runs the great 
risk of making literal and general what is implicit and personal in his best fic-
tion. […] The problem is not fantasy but allegory, which exists to literalize and 
simplify. The giant is not buried deeply enough. (Wood 2015)
The London Review of Books went the other way: 
In An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro’s most accomplished and moving 
book, and one of the best novels published in the Eighties, the cinematic effect 
is used with even greater sensitivity, leading to the creation of a world of subtle 
perceptual richness unsurpassed by either Ishiguro’s other work or the works of 
most of his contemporaries. (Chaudhuri 1995)
Ishiguro has received many awards for his literary work. His first novel A Pale 
View of the Hills won the Winifred Holtby Prize from the Royal Society of Liter-
ature. For his second novel, An Artist of the Floating World, Ishiguro was awarded 
the Whitbread Prize, and for his third, The Remains of the Day, he received the 
prestigious Booker Prize in 1989. He was also awarded an OBE as well as the 
French title of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2008, The Times 
placed him on the list of the 50 best British writers since 1945. In fact, most of his 
works were nominated for prestigious literary awards. In 2017, Ishiguro was the 
recipient of both the American Academy of Achievement Award, and the Nobel 
Prize for Literature. A year later, he received the gold and silver star of the Order 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   106 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
107Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
of the Rising Sun and was appointed Knight Bachelor for services to literature. 
Such an abundance of awards should normally guarantee an enthusiastic response 
among foreign-language readers; however, the reception in Slovenia, dealt with in 
the following section, failed, at least partly, to meet this expectation.
RECEPTION IN SLOVENIA
Only three of Ishiguro’s novels have been translated into Slovene: The Remains of 
the Day, When We Were Orphans, and Never Let Me Go. The Remains of the Day was 
published by Cankarjeva založba in 1995, six years after it was written. The trans-
lator Srečko Fišer was awarded the Sovre Award for the translation. When We Were 
Orphans (Ko smo bili sirote, translated by Ingrid Kovač Brus) was published in 2005 
by Celjska Mohorjeva družba, five years after its original publication. On the Mo-
horjeva website, the novel is classified as “Japanese literature” and is accompanied 
by Samo Rugelj’s (2005) review from Bukla magazine, in which he explains that 
the novel was short-listed for the Booker Prize and that it offers literature lovers a 
magical journey into the time between the wars. In his review in Večer, Matej Bo-
gataj finds the novel very British, very English, meticulous, bitter, and a little cyn-
ical. Ishiguro’s sixth novel, Never Let Me Go (Ne zapusti me nikdar), was translated 
by Katarina Jerin and published by Učila International in 2006, the same year that 
the novel was first published in the UK. The novel was also reprinted once. Joker 
magazine says that the novel is futuristic and triggers in readers a scary awareness of 
something that could actually happen or may already be happening. The Portal besed 
community categorize it as science-fiction but stress the importance of the charac-
ters’ feeling and emotions, their thoughts, experiences, and hopes. They also believe 
there are inconsistencies in the manner of narration. The novel is also mentioned 
on the web page of RTV Slovenia, but not before 2009, that is four years after it 
was published. The article was prompted by the premiere of the film based on the 
book and was scheduled for 2010. The article mentions Ishiguro’s numerous literary 
awards, the success of The Remains of the Day, a short summary of the novel and an 
interesting contemplation about the characters in Never Let Me Go:
What probably surprises us most as the observers of the fate of the three friends 
is their resigned and calm acceptance of their own destiny, of which the world 
is in denial because it is too big a burden to be accepted without the feeling of 
guilt. But guilt is something that the world cannot allow, because there is no 
way back to the dark ages where spouses, partners, and friends were dying from 
cancer or heart disease. It is thus easier to see Hailsham students as expenda-
ble ‘freaks’, just the opposite from what the reader sees in them. (M.K. 2009, 
translated by P.R.)
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108 Polona Ramšak
Despite numerous awards and the broad success of Ishiguro’s novels and films, 
Slovenian readers remain lukewarm towards his prose. Comparing the Sloveni-
an reception of his work in 2016 and four years later, after he received the No-
bel Prize, there is almost no difference in the enthusiasm of Slovenian readers, at 
least judging from book loan numbers in Slovenian libraries and the supply of 
his works in Slovenian bookshops. In 2016, EMKA, the online bookshop with 
the largest stock in Slovenia, yielded fifteen hits for “Ishiguro”. That same year, 
some Ishiguro novels were available in Slovene, English, Croatian, Hungarian, 
Italian, Serbian, and French; there were also two volumes of his short stories in 
English and three films on DVD. In 2000, Radio Slovenia produced a short radio 
play Maestro by Draga Puc that included the translation of a short excerpt from 
The Unconsoled. In 2002, Ingrid Kovač Brus made a literary portrait of Ishiguro 
for RTV Slovenija, which was aired again in 2014 when the writer celebrated his 
60th birthday. The newspaper Delo published an article in 2016 about Ishiguro’s 
latest novel The Buried Giant, explaining that Ishiguro seemingly got the idea for 
the novel from the crumbling of ex-Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide.
After receiving the Nobel Prize in 2017, Ishiguro briefly appeared in the Slo-
venian media. The newspaper Dnevnik called him “a careful investigator of the 
depths of human emotions”, referring to the motivation of the Nobel Prize Jury 
which saw Ishiguro as someone “who, in novels of great emotional force, has un-
covered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world” (Šučur 
2017, translated by P. R.). Laura Paukovič (2018) of Mladina believes that in Slo-
venia, Ishiguro is still best known as the Japanese who received the Nobel Prize for 
literature. He does not, however, enjoy the same recognition as Haruki Murakami, 
who is generally better appreciated and more widely read. This seems quite unjust, 
firstly because Ishiguro’s works can not only contend with Murakami’s but surpass 
them in bravura, and secondly because Ishiguro is not primarily Japanese. 
The newspaper Delo offered a few excerpts from translated interviews with 
Ishiguro after the award, dealing with the writing of The Remains of the Day, the 
reasons for writing through memories, his origin as an author and his attitude to 
England and Japan. Alenka Koron (2019) included Ishiguro in her book Razgl-
edi na tuje, comprising nine discussions about important world literature works 
or authors of the 20th and 21st centuries that stimulate reflection on the state and 
dilemmas of contemporary Slovenian prose. Radio Slovenia 1 prepared an insight 
into the “surprising Nobel award winner” with Nejc Gazvoda, the director and 
author of the play Ljudje kot smo mi that was based on The Remains of the Day and 
staged in the Anton Podbevšek Teater in 2017.
By January 2021, Ishiguro’s recognition in Slovenia had somewhat improved. 
EMKA has twenty-one hits for “Ishiguro”. The Slovenian translation of The Re-
mains of the Day is unavailable, indicating either the enthusiasm of Slovenian 
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109Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
readers to keep a copy in their private libraries or a lack of interest from publish-
ers who do not see Ishiguro as a source of revenue.
The same is true for the other two Slovenian translations: apart from his other 
novels and two volumes of short stories in English, which can be bought, four vol-
umes presenting Ishiguro in a literary-historical and genre context are available. 
Holdings in Slovenian libraries are slightly better in 2021 than in 2016. Ishiguro’s 
novels are now available in Korean, German, and Spanish, and in a Slovenian 
Braille edition. The loan numbers, however, are not in the thousands, as is the case 
with more popular authors and titles. Never Let Me Go was loaned 955 times in 
the last two years, When We Were Orphans 456 times and The Remains of the Day 
1116 times. Other Ishiguro novels in English rarely leave the libraries – each few-
er than 50 times in the last two years. The question looms whether the Nobel Prize 
for literature is relevant at all to the average reader and to what extent it influences 
the popularity of an author. A glance at comparable reception studies shows that 
there is no identifiable rule regarding the popularity of internationally acclaimed 
authors with the Slovenian readership. The 2013 Canadian Nobel Prize winner 
Alice Munro, for example, was first translated into Slovene about four decades 
into her writing career (2 short story collections), and the Nobel Prize stimulated 
three more volumes in three consecutive years; her popularity in Slovenia, howev-
er, is still not huge (Mohar 2016: 134-136). The contemporary British playwright 
and 2005 Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter is, on the other hand, one of the modern 
playwrights most frequently translated into (and staged in) Slovene (Onič 2016b: 
167); however, most of his opus was translated before the Nobel Prize, with only 
few re-translations after that. The translations and stage productions suggest his 
popularity with theatre professionals, since his style allows for great creativity 
(see Onič 2016a), while this is – despite a slight growth after 1999 – still not ful-
ly reflected in performance numbers (Gavez 2016: 58). The situation is different 
with earlier Nobel Prize winners, whose popularity was established over the dec-
ades and now often provides too strong competition for more recent authors like 
Ishiguro or Munro. Such an example is Hemingway, whose celebrity status and 
associations with the Isonzo front in A Farewell to Arms contributed to his pop-
ularity in Slovenia (see Maver 1990). According to Zupan (2020: 144-145), the 
total loans of Hemingway’s 40 Slovene editions, averaging around 1000 per year, 
increased by 20% in the last two decades. This figure is almost 3 times higher than 
the Ishiguro average, and even though Hemingway partly owes the high numbers 
to the inclusion of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the Slovene Matura examination in 
the early 2000s, his popularity is still high; it will be interesting to follow the same 
phenomenon with Ishiguro, whose Never Let Me Go has just entered the Matura 
this year. Such reception unpredictability can further be shown through the pop-
ularity of authors who are not major award winners but commercially extremely 
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110 Polona Ramšak
successful, like Karl May, who was – similar to Ishiguro – the author of bestsellers 
and popular in Slovenia in the past but much less so in recent decades (Trupej 
2020), or Edgar Allan Poe, increasingly popular in Slovenia in the inter-war pe-
riod, with a peak in the 1960s, despite his extraordinarily low popularity in the 
USA, his home country (Zupan 2015: 121).
In Slovenia, most Nobel Prize wins for literature from 2000 to 2021 meant at 
least one new translation, possibly a newer piece of the laureate’s work. Among 
few exceptions in the last twenty years, is the 2012 Chinese Nobel Prize winner 
Mo Yan, who received no attention from Slovenian booksellers. Ishiguro, too, al-
most went unnoticed. In the year after the award, the old translation of The Re-
mains of the Day was reprinted, but his twenty-eight-year opus following that was 
overlooked. 
E-mail correspondence with the publisher and editor Samo Rugelj (2021) re-
veals that he is not surprised by the weak response to Ishiguro in Slovenia. He be-
lieves that a foreign author only stays alive if adopted by a strong publishing house 
with an interested editor and a constant translator. Otherwise, s/he will slowly 
fall into oblivion. Ishiguro was shared by three publishers, yet nobody “took him 
under their wing”. Andrej Ilc (2021), the editor at Mladinska knjiga, agrees with 
Rugelj and adds that the lack of Slovenian interest in Ishiguro, even after the No-
bel Prize, could be attributed to sparse and irregular translations as well as a lack 
of advertising for authors of his type. Again, there are exceptions, like the Cana-
dian multi-genre author Margaret Atwood, whose world-wide popularity needs 
no advertising, and whose positive reception is guaranteed even without a Nobel 
Prize in Literature (Mohar et. al. 2021, Onič et al. 2020).
Another possible reason for Ishiguro’s lower popularity could be the “Japa-
neseness” of his works; however, it would be a challenge to measure how much 
Japanese culture per se appeals to Slovenian people and to what extent a Slovenian 
reader recognizes the Japanese touch in Ishiguro’s work. Even when blended with 
the geographically, historically and culturally more familiar English culture, it still 
has an air of remoteness and alienness, particularly if elements of futurism and 
science-fiction are added to the mix. 
CONCLUSION
Ishiguro’s global success can be attributed to his immense range of themes and 
his biculturalism, which appeals not only to the Japanese but also to the global 
reader. He is among the handful of authors who have both sold millions of books 
and received heaps of critical praise. His books have been translated into 40 lan-
guages, and his BookScan records show more than 1.4 million copies from 1998 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   110 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
111Ishiguro’s Japanese-English Identity and His Reception Internationally and in Slovenia
to 2017. Critics first focused mostly on the influence of Japanese philosophy and 
culture on his work and praised the quiet tones of his Japanese heritage blended 
with quintessential Englishness, while his later works received mixed reviews, 
The Buried Giant even facing an accusation of being written only to capture wid-
er audiences. But his last novel Klara and the Sun leads the ‘Booker Dozen’ as by 
far the standout bestseller of the 2021 longlist. It has been called brilliant by the 
critics, although it feels quite similar to Never Let Me Go, again exploring what 
it means to be not quite human. Then again, Ishiguro did reveal ‘his dirty little 
secret’ in a 2015 interview – that he tends to write the same book over and over 
(Preston 2021).
Despite his world-wide fame, Slovenians remain relatively cold towards Ishig-
uro. Only three of his novels have so far been translated into Slovenian, and judg-
ing by the library statistics, only the first of the three made even a moderate im-
pression on Slovenian readers. After receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 
2017, Ishiguro was briefly in the Slovenian media limelight. He is still often mis-
taken for Haruki Murakami, who is the more widely known author of Japanese 
origin. This is surprising in the time of globalisation, since his cosmopolitan, in-
ternational work appeals to global readers. The reason for this lukewarm reception 
in Slovenia cannot be pinpointed, but there are several possible factors that might 
contribute to this. It could be the Japanese traits in literature that at first glance 
seem British or perhaps the lack of interest in or understanding of Japanese cul-
ture in Slovenia. More likely it is just the lack of interest from Slovenian publish-
ing houses who have not seen Ishiguro as someone worth investing in.
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Polona Ramšak
Celje
Po.ramsak@gmail.com
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114 Polona Ramšak
Ishigurova japonsko-angleška identiteta ter njegov mednarodni in 
slovenski sprejem
Kazuo Ishiguro je britanski pisatelj z japonskimi koreninami, ki se je po vsem svetu uve-
ljavil s svojimi romani, črticami in scenariji ter postal eden izmed najbolj nagrajenih pi-
sateljev knjižnih uspešnic. Prispevek obravnava pisateljevo hibridno poreklo, ki je hkrati 
angleško in japonsko, in sposobnotm da s svojim delom vznemirja bralce, istočasno pa ga 
kritiki spoštujejo. Poleg vpogleda v sprejemanje njegovih del v Sloveniji se članek ukvarja 
tudi z vprašanjem, zakaj je tukajšnja njegova branost nižja od pričakovane.
 
Ključne besede: novi britanski roman, slovenska recepcija, globalizacija, narodna identita
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   114 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
115
Un-taming the Shrew: A Modern Take on 
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew
Kübra Baysal
Abstract
This article discusses the adaptation film, Shakespeare Retold: The Taming of the Shrew, as 
compared to original play, The Taming of the Shrew, by Shakespeare by highlighting the 
different modern perspective of the film. Likely to be interpreted as a valuable addition to 
the play with the ending it proposes and the way it handles the issue of taming, the film 
brings the play to the attention of the modern audience by clarifying the vague details and 
contextualising it in the modern English. In this respect, the article aims to bring the film 
and the play into focus by introducing a fresh and lively re-interpretation of The Taming 
of the Shrew to the Shakespearean drama studies.
Keywords: Shakespeare, adaptation, film, modern interpretation, feminism 
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-22Shakesepeare W.:791
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.115-121
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   115 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
116 Kübra baysal
Planned as a remaking of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy play, The Taming of the 
Shrew, the film, Shakespeare Retold: The Taming of the Shrew, is produced by “Shake-
speare Retold Series” of BBC in 2005 and is directed by David Richards, written 
by Sally Wainwright and starred by Shirley Henderson in the role of Kate and 
Rufus Sewell as Petruchio (IMDb “ShakespeaRe-Told”). Reflecting a very mod-
ern, innovative and entertaining version of the original play along with a modern 
language preserving the general frame of the key dialogues in the play, the film 
presents some distinct changes as well as new perspectives to the play. Clarifying 
the originally ambiguous end of the play or imagining what may have happened 
in Kate and Petruchio’s marriage afterwards, which seem to satisfy or even tingle 
the expectations of the modern audience, the film keeps the most crucial details 
such as names, places and the general plotline as they are in the original source, 
which possibly serves to preserve its credibility as a Shakespearean adaptation. 
The Taming of the Shrew can be considered a distinct play when compared to 
Shakespeare’s other plays. It is known as the “most adapted” play but which also 
cannot be performed “straight” due to the ambiguities in the “wife-taming plot” 
(Stevens 491) and the mysterious silence of the female protagonist, which are in-
terestingly unearthed if not completely dissolved in the film version. With this 
perspective, the film has a nice touch for presenting alternatives to the audience 
and clarifying ambiguities. There are certain alterations in the film as a modern 
re-telling of the play. 
To begin with, the story takes place in London instead of Padua and Katharina 
Minola, or rather, Kate, is an MP who feels she is forced to change her lifestyle 
and get married to be able present herself as a more sympathetic politician to the 
public and to become a candidate to the position of Prime Minister. On the oth-
er hand, also diverging from the original source, Bianca is a super model who is 
adored by a lot of men, which nevertheless keeps the difference of sisters alive as 
in the original source. Furthermore, Kate and Bianca have a mother, Mrs. Minola, 
who is not oppressive and arrogant towards Kate as Baptista Minola of the play, 
who speaks of getting rid of Kate with Bianca’s suitors as seen in Gremio’s words: 
I am agreed, and would I had given him the
best horse in Padua to begin his wooing that would 
thoroughly woo her, wed her, and bed her, and rid 
the house of her. Come on. (I. i. 144-7) 
In contrast with the father figure, Mr. Minola of the film is a modern, open-mind-
ed and a more affectionate parent figure towards Kate. Another different point in 
the film is that Lucentio, whom Bianca meets on the plane, is a handsome Italian 
youth much younger than Bianca and seemingly naïve, but who indeed has the 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   116 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
117Un-taming the Shrew
ulterior motive to get her money through marriage. Also being different from the 
play, Bianca does not marry Lucentio as when she asks for a marriage contract, 
he pretends to be offended despite his materialistic pursuits. Thus, their romantic 
affair ends abruptly. Finally, Hortensio, who is named Harry in the film, is both 
Bianca’s manager and suitor offering Petruchio to marry Kate, which partially 
complies with the original text. However, at the end of the film, he marries Mrs. 
Minola, which is quite a twisty addition to the original source. 
In the same line, despite being true to the main plotline, the production does 
not always remain compatible with the text. It mostly appeals to the taste of the 
twenty-first century audience with Petruchio’s “turbulent childhood experienc-
es” and the domination of the issues such as the twenty-first-century politics and 
gender roles (“The Taming” par. 6). What is more, the film presents characters, 
especially the protagonists, in a distinctly dramatic manner. Despite following 
the original source, Kate is reflected as an extremely aggressive person in the film. 
She insults people and says “swivel” whenever she is mad at them and even slaps 
her assistance in the first scene of the film. Furthermore, she topples tables at a 
restaurant because a couple ask for an autograph from Bianca and she smashes 
the guitar on one of Bianca’s guests in one of her house parties, which points out 
that Kate’s aggression. In fact, the scenes of violence seem a bit excessive in the 
production, probably for encouraging the comic effect on the modern audience 
as a comedy film. The actress in the film, Shirley Henderson, in that respect be-
comes “a magnificent shrew who manages to make her pretty face utterly shrewish 
through a kind of tense gurning which is as funny as it is effective while shouting 
‘swivel’” (“A Review” par. 4). With this in mind, whenever Kate feels trapped in 
language to express her reaction, she applies to physical force as “[h]er aggression 
arises from the category of shrew itself, because the behaviour her sister displays 
can look desirable only in comparison to extreme displays of feminine aggression 
[in Kate]” (Crocker 148). In other words, she is made as such shrewish a character 
in the play and the film--with the latter emphasising her aggression-- that she is 
presented in a sharp contrast with her feminine sister, Bianca. From another per-
spective, through her anger, bitter tongue and physical force “Shakespeare molds 
her to the needs of farce”(Coppélia 88), which creates the comic relief through her 
extremely aggressive physical reactions. 
On the other hand, Petruchio is depicted as slightly different from the orig-
inal character. He, who wants to warn off his wife-to-be, Kate, about his real 
character and to tame the shrew, appears in transgender clothes on their wed-
ding day. Despite being explained in the play that Petruchio is in cross dress, his 
appearance and behaviours in those clothes are exaggerated for its comic effect 
once again, for which role the actor, Rufus Sewell, gets nominated for the best 
actor by the BAFTA Television Awards (“A Review” par. 4). Petruchio in the 
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film is in the complete costume with the make-up, nail polish and fishnet socks 
in full contrast with the masculine way he walks and talks. He shocks the crowd 
mostly including Kate’s family, acquaintances, colleagues and politicians with his 
appearance and violent behaviours. Through an alternative point of view, he may 
be showing Kate that he is an extraordinary man, so she should at once realise 
his difference from the other men and act as such. In other words, “Petruchio is 
more afraid of looking conventional than queer or weird […] in unusual and ri-
diculous clothes at the wedding […] so as to suggest that just as Katherine can be 
feminine in being aggressive and shrewish, Petruchio can be masculine in dress-
ing as a woman” (Villano 279-280). In that respect Kate and Petruchio emerge 
to be an extraordinary couple both transgressing the gender codes and managing 
to preserve their roles in marriage although they switch the roles in the film as a 
modern couple after they have children. So, both Rufus Sewell and Shirley Hen-
derson bring about “multidimensionality” to the original characters “as they vac-
illate between vulnerability and toughness, but it is their mutual respect which 
wins the day” (“A Review” par. 4).
Likewise, Petruchio and Kate’s relationship as reflected in the film starts at a 
party, which can be regarded the epitome of the modern popular culture. They 
meet at Bianca’s party upon Hortensio’s plan and soon they get stuck in the eleva-
tor. As in the original play, Petruıchio starts taming Kate right at the first moment 
they meet, calls her Kate insistently despite her aggression that he should call her 
Katharina or Ms. Minola, which is quite similar in the original source:
PETRUCHIO. You lie, in faith, for you are called plain Kate,
And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst.
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate
(For dainties are all Kates)—and therefore, Kate. (II. i. 193-7)
In the same vein, with Petruchio’s method of calling Katharina as Kate, it is con-
venient to dwell on the word “cate” for it means commodity, something to be 
bought and sold, which is Kate’s case especially in the play as her father wants to 
give her like a commodity to anyone who wants to take her. So, Petruchio “lik-
ens Kate’s planned domestication to a domestication of the emergent commodity 
form itself, whose name parallels the naming of the shrew” (Korda 109) which is 
also observed in the following lines: 
PETRUCHIO. She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything. (III. ii. 236-8)
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119Un-taming the Shrew
Upon the naming incident in the film as followed by the taming process, Petru-
chio even more daringly tells Kate that he wants to sleep with her right then and 
there. He says he likes everything about her, which drives her extremely mad and 
breaks her will one step at a time, which reflects Petruchio’s sexist attitude towards 
Kate in the film. Then again, in one of the funny scenes, Petruchio acts like a mad 
man in the street and yells at people when he is with Kate as a method to tame 
her. Likewise, as previously stated, he wears woman’s clothes at their wedding to 
embarrass and tame her even better and thus emerges as Kate-the-politician’s 
trans-gender husband in public. 
By the same token, Petruchio forces Kate into a game of submission when he 
takes her to Verona for their honeymoon, where the taming shall be completed, 
and Kate is finally to be transformed into the submissive wife. He treats her arro-
gantly leaving her hungry, tired and sleepless while he constantly humiliates her. 
With the brutal attitude towards his shrewish wife, Petruchio succeeds “in fash-
ioning Katharine to suit his pleasure” and thus leaves the “subjection of a wilful 
woman to the will of her husband” (Crocker 144). As he makes Kate change the 
flat tyre, chases her in the mansion where they stay for their honeymoon, threat-
ens to rape her, shouts at her and finally throws her suitcase into the pool, the 
process of taming the shrew is in the last phase. Until the end of the third act, 
Kate resists the patriarchal oppression and arrogance of Petruchio as an opin-
ionated young woman and prefers to see him hanged rather than marrying him. 
But she gets married and “tamed” soon as she eventually complies with what-
ever her husband says. She passes Petruchio’s tests and learns how to love and 
accommodate him within the confines of Elizabethan [also the modern, since 
the film is set in a modern context] marital conventions (Greenwood 73). After 
they consummate their marriage, Petruchio keeps taming her and says “moon is 
shining” although it is the sun and Kate finally agrees with him, which is almost 
the same with the play: “Petruchio. Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines 
the moon!/ Katherine. The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now” (IV. v. 3-4). 
Moreover, Kate has turned from the sharp-tongued woman with principles into 
a wife kissing her husband in the office among her colleagues, which is the direct 
opposite of the scene in the play: “Petruchio. First kiss me, Kate, and we will./ 
Kate. What, in the midst of the street?” (V. ii. 147-8). Similarly, as the family has 
gathered before Bianca’s wedding to discuss whether Bianca should have a mar-
riage contract with Lucentio, Kate surprises everyone with her famous soliloquy 
about the need for a wife’s submission to her husband’s will. Thus, Petruchio has 
proven Kate’s loyalty to him since she accepts whatever he says, holds his feet 
and kisses him as in the play: “Katherine. And place your hands below your hus-
band’s foot;/ In token of which duty, if he please, /My hand is ready, may it do 
him ease” (V. ii. 193-5).
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120 Kübra baysal
Nevertheless, the ending of the film forges a great irony and introduces a val-
uable addition to the play along with the general plotline that exposes Petruchio’s 
successful taming of shrewish Kate thoroughly. When Kate tells Petruchio that 
she is pregnant to triplets at the end of the film, she lays some conditions to him 
that she will not give up her career for kids and that he must raise them, which 
conveys her feminist stance to the modern audience as a young woman with a 
strong mind:
Kate: I’m pregnant.
Petruchio: What? That’s amazing!
Kate: However, you’ll have to look after them because I’m not giving up my career.
Petruchio: Yes! No, you can’t.
Despite her previous unconditionally submissive behaviours, Kate stands her 
ground as a woman, a wife and a mother and eventually comes to an understand-
ing with her husband. More surprisingly, despite his plan of taming Kate, Petru-
chio becomes the one sitting at home and taking care of children, cooking and 
doing the dishes in the end while Kate runs the country as the Prime Minister. 
Hence, from a feminist perspective, the ending of the film is somewhat satisfac-
tory when compared to the original source. After all, Kate proves that she is not 
“as conformable as other household Kates” (II. i. 293). Yet, she “appears to be hap-
pily subdued, basking in the stability and love provided by her relationship with 
Petruchio” (“The Taming” par. 5) and the initially unfitting couple have morphed 
into a great happy family. 
All in all, as a reproduction of the play, the film ShakespeaRe-told: Taming of the 
Shrew is brilliantly interpreted, enriched and lightened with its humorous mood, 
lively music and modern-day characters. This version appears to be more appeal-
ing and mind-opening than the original source as the audience gets to see Kate 
and Petruchio after the original play ends, as a married couple with children and 
Kate as a strong woman, who achieves what she desires in her life whereas Petru-
chio emerges to be a kind, dedicated as well as funny husband and father as op-
posed to his representation as a misogynist and oppressive patriarchal figure in the 
play. In short, the film version is more life-like and the characters are more asso-
ciable in the end, which draws the attention of the modern audience. 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“A review of the Shakespeare Retold series”. The Compulsive Reader. January 29, 
2007. http://www.compulsivereader.com/2007/01/29/a-review-of-the-shake-
speare-retold-series/ (Accessed 16 April 2016). 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   120 6. 12. 2021   11:36:12
121Un-taming the Shrew
Crocker, Holly A. “Affective Resistance: Performing Passivity and Playing a-Part 
in ‘The Taming of the Shrew’” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 2 (2003): 
142-159. 
Greenwood, Cynthia. “Chapter 7: Taming of the Shrew” The Complete Idiot’s Guide 
to Shakespeare’s Plays. Pennsylvania: Alpha, 2008. 
Kahn, Coppélia. “‘The Taming of the Shrew’: Shakespeare’s Mirror of Marriage” 
Modern Language Studies. Vol. 5, No. 1 (1975): 88-102.
Korda, Natasha. “Household Kates: Domesticating Commodities in The Taming 
of the Shrew” Shakespeare Quarterly. Vol. 47, No. 2 (1996) 109-131. 
Shakespeare, William. The Taming of the Shrew. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1990.
Shakespeare Retold: Taming of the Shrew. Dir. David Richards. Perf. Shirley Hen-
derson, Rufus Sewell, Jaime Murray and Stephen Tompkinson. BBC Dra-
ma Group, 2005. Film. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0453555/ (Accessed 17 
April 2016).
Stevens, Andrea. The Taming of the Shrew (review). Shakespeare Bulletin, Vol. 28, 
No. 4 (2010): 491-495.
“The Taming of the Shrew – Shakespeare Retold”. Shakespeare in Film. June 25, 2008. 
http://www.shakespearefilms.com/the-taming-of-the-shrew-shakespeare-re-
told/ (Accessed 16 April 2016).
Villano, Bianca Del. “Weird and Queer on tv: The Taming of the Shrew between 
William Shakespeare and Sally Wainwright” Testi e Linguaggi. Vol. 7 (2013): 
267-281.
Kübra Baysal
Ankara Yildirim Beyazit University, Turkey
kbaysal@ybu.edu.tr
Razveljavitev trmoglavkine ukrotitve: moderni pogled na Shakespea-
rovo Ukročeno trmoglavko
Članek se ukvarja s filmsko adaptacijo Shakespeare Retold: Taming of the Shrew (2005) v pri-
merjavi z izvirno igro in se osredinja na moderno perspektivo filma.Članek skuša v študije 
o Shakespearu vnesti nov focus pri interpretaciji filma in komedije Ukročena trmoglavka.
Ključne besede: Shakespeare, adaptacija, film, sodobna interpretacija, feminizem
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123
Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach 
to Interpretation of R� Kipling’s “If”
Eldar Veremchuk
Abstract
The paper reveals the moral code, extolled in the renowned Kipling’s poem “If ” by means 
of cognitive interpretation. The author’s message containing his idea of moral code is un-
raveled in minimum meaningful spaces of the poem (usually one or two lines), which are 
analyzed in depth. Each space highlights the trajector features of character and the corre-
sponding reference frames (domains), which serve as background for their understanding. 
The peculiarity of moral concepts consists in the fact that they are based on the evaluative 
component and therefore they form binary oppositions. The antagonist for the moral con-
cept within such opposition serves as its benchmark, since the essence of a moral value is 
revealed only when it is contrasted to its opposite, therefore the paper makes an attempt 
of alignment trajector domains with the benchmarks. In order to delve into the Kipling’s 
understanding of moral code the distinguished ethical values were arranged in the form 
of field model. The nucleus of the model comprises most frequently actualized values from 
the moral code, while periphery includes values with lower rate of actualization. Along 
with cognitive analyses of Kipling’s moral doctrine the paper highlights the peculiarities 
of poetic narration, which include abstract dictum, use of subjunctive mood and symbol-
ism. Particular attention is also paid to the use of personification and metaphor.
Keywords: R. Kipling, moral code, character feature, ethical value
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.111.09-1Kipling R.:17
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.123-137
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124 Eldar VErEmchuk
INTRODUCTION
One of the salient aspects of Kipling’s literary heritage along with imperialism 
and colonialism is his focus on human values that underlie moral principles. Its 
quintessence is revealed in his effervescent poem “If ”, published in 1910 in the 
collection of stories “Rewards and Fairies” in the chapter “Brother Square Toes”. 
Originally meant to be the testament of the writer to his beloved son, it ultimate-
ly appeared to become the code of behavior bestowed upon the whole humanity. 
“It is in ‘If ’ that his ethical code is most resonantly expressed (Mathhews, 1971, 338). 
Unlike in his many other literary works in “If ” Kipling takes the mantle of 
moral mentor providing the readers with the code of conduct, which highly cor-
relates with Christian norms of behavior. The inspiration for the characteristics of 
an ideal person, which he describes within the framework of Muscular Christian-
ity, was taken from Leander Starr Jameson, who failed in his raid in 1865-1896 
against the South African Republic. As Longford (1982) mentions “Jameson was 
later to be the inspiration and hero of Rudyard Kipling’s poem If…”. R. Kipling him-
self acknowledges this fact in his autobiographical work “Something of myself ”: 
“Among the verses in Rewards was one set called “If ”, which escaped from the book, and 
for a while ran about the world… They were drawn from Jameson’s character, and con-
tained counsels of perfection most easy to give” (Kipling, 1990, 146).
It’s worth mentioning that for the time being there exists a number of studies, 
dedicated to the analysis of Kipling’s “If ” from different approaches and with the 
use of different methodological apparatus. Having analyzed the recent researches, 
we came to the conclusion that the subjects of investigation were different: stylistic 
devices and expressive means, which contribute to conveyance of the author’s mes-
sage (Grasso, 2009; Memon, Tunio & Awan, 2021); poet’s world outlook (Sharma, 
2019); correlation of values extolled in the poem with the religious and philosophic 
world picture (in particular with the Hindu Bhagavad Gita concept of sthitapragna, 
(Shastry, 2019)); poem’s intertextuality (Kemp, 1998). It should be noted that the 
subject of research sometimes was quite unusual, like in (Graham, 2016), where 
a hypothetical supplement to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If ”, scripted by the judge 
during the Jacob Zuma rape trial in 2006, is analyzed. Particular attention is paid 
to theoretical and practical peculiarities in translation of “If ” (Weissbrod, 2009; 
Veretelnyk, 2016). There are studies in which Kipling’s “If ” was not the subject of 
research by itself but was analyzed for formulating the basic principles of moral 
psychology of self-belief (Smith, 2006). The value of “If ” in the writer’s literary 
legacy is not overestimated, when we say that it became a ‘landmark’ of his philos-
ophy and outlook. It is proved by the fact, that the name of this poem is included 
in the heading of a fundamental book “If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American 
Years”( Jasanoff, 2019), dedicated to the author’s life and literary estate. 
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125Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
Considering abundant scope of the multifaced studies of Kipling’s “If ”, we 
posit that at least one thing remains away from the focus of scientific inquisition: 
the reconstruction of the moral code, embedded in the poem within the frame-
work of the cognitive paradigm.
The purpose of the given paper is to delve into the moral code of Kipling’s 
ethical doctrine by means of cognitive interpretation of his renowned poem “If ” 
and to unravel the conceptual domains that underlie his understanding of hu-
man values.
In order to achieve the aim of the study it is necessary to carry out the follow-
ing objectives:
• to single out the traits of character, which are revealed in the stanzas of the 
poem;
• to relate them to the corresponding domains (moral concepts);
• to establish the antagonistic reference frames, against which the moral values 
are understood in the context of the poem;
• to reveal the binary character of values interconnection;
• to create field model of values, actualized in the verse. 
The object of research is Kipling’s landmark poem “If ”, while the subject of inves-
tigation is the moral code, actualized in its stanzas.
The realization of the research goal is achieved by means of field stratification 
methodology. It entails determination of the human qualities, embedded in the 
lines of the poem and their arrangement in the field model. Throughout the whole 
poem each element of ethical code is revealed in abstracts, consisting out of one or 
two lines, therefore these fragments will be considered as minimum pieces of tex-
tual analysis. Each minimum piece unravels the author’s vision of a human moral 
trait, which is objectified within the space of the verse. From the prerequisites of 
cognitive approach each trait is actualized in mind in relation to a certain refer-
ence frame – domain. Therefore, the steps of cognitive analysis will be the follow-
ing: distinguishing the actualized moral feature; relating it to the corresponding 
reference frame (domain); unravelling the antagonistic benchmark trait (which 
can be expressed in the verse explicitly and implicitly); interpretation of the in-
terconnections among values; arranging the values in the field model according 
to the principle of nucleus / periphery stratification. We posit that employment 
of field stratification method is productive for cognitive interpretation of “If ”, 
since it enables to determine and stratify R. Kipling’s moral code, revealed in the 
poem, into several layers: the most essential features form the nucleus, while the 
less essential ones constitute the periphery. The underlying principle of field strat-
ification is based on the quantity of actualization cases of the particular concepts, 
which will be discussed further in details.
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126 Eldar VErEmchuk
COGNITIVE INTERPRETATION OF KIPLING’S “IF” 
Analysis of the minimum pieces presupposes highlighting the target character 
trait that is emphasized on. We call this trait ‘trajector trait’, as it occupies salient 
position in the conceptual space of the verse. The trajector trait on the cognitive 
level is understood against certain informational background (reference frame), 
which serves as a conceptual domain. Under the term domain we understand a 
concept, the knowledge of which is necessary to understand the target concept 
(idea) – moral trait, brought up by the author in the poem. As the analysis proved 
the domains for character features are moral values (concepts) that underlie them. 
Trajector traits and their domains are expressed either explicitly in the poetic space 
of the verse or on the level of implication and they are contrasted to their oppo-
sites – benchmarks. Within the framework of the given paper in sake of avoiding 
ambiguity we single out the character traits, which have adjectival lexicalization, 
while the names of conceptual domains have nominal character and are capital-
ized. To illustrate this thought, consider the following example. For instance, the 
trajector trait, which is expressed in a poem line can be “good-wishing”. It is un-
derstood by the reader against the domain KINDNESS, as awareness of kind-
ness is essential for understanding this feature. The benchmark in this example is 
EVIL as one cannot understand what is good without knowledge of what is bad.
Now we proceed to cognitive interpretation of the poem itself. The opening 
very first lines reveal the first traits of character, which build up R. Kipling’s 
moral code:
If you can keep your head when all about you 
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. 
“Keeping one’s head” is defined as the ability to stay calm despite great difficul-
ties. Therefore, the character traits, which are referred to in this case are “calm”, 
“peaceful”, “unruffled”, “nerveless”. The corresponding underlying conceptual do-
main is COMPOSURE. The benchmark characters, objectified by the antithesis 
are “nervous”, “angry” and “irritable”, which all belong to the domain ANGER.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too
In the following two lines “being confident”, “convinced” and “faithful” is opposed 
to being “doubtful”, “distrustful” and “suspicious”. The positive features are un-
derstood against the domain FAITH, while the antagonistic domain is DOUBT. 
Moreover, in these line R. Kipling airs one more important idea that confidence 
in oneself should not be blind and unsusceptible to criticism from the others, 
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127Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
therefore the other moral characteristic, extolled in these lines is “being conced-
ing”, that is being able again and again put at question one’s rightness for the sake 
of verification.
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
This line highlights PATIENCE as an integral part of moral code that is con-
trasted to ANXIETY, which is the benchmark for “being able to wait”. It is im-
mediately followed by:
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Since inability to wait for the result often forces a person into achieving it in 
illegal ways, which in this line are generalized by the word lie, poet puts these 
two traits in the complementary position. In this piece R. Kipling points out to 
not only being honest in general, not subsiding to lies, but also to the necessi-
ty not to lie back if the person becomes lied about, that is not to take revenge. 
Therefore, the underlying conceptual domains are HONESTY and MERCY. 
The benchmark traits are “lying”, “revengeful”, while LIE and VENGEANCE 
are benchmark domains. The idea of being unrevengeful finds its continuation 
in the following piece: 
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating
Here the author asserts the greatest virtue of a person – “being kind” – the trait 
which is understood against the concept GOOD. But since R. Kipling in the 
abovementioned line appeals not to the general good, the conceptual domain may 
be narrowed to BENEVOLENCE. Importantly, this line, like the previous one, 
also underlines “being kind” and “not doing bad in return” even though the person 
is treated reversely. This is possible if one doesn’t take grudge upon his offender. The 
benchmark for these traits is “spiteful” within the domain MALEVOLENCE.
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise
The final line of the stanza summarizes the necessary condition for all above-
mentioned – “being modest and simple” in your ways. Without HUMILITY and 
SIMPLICITY all the aforementioned virtues would lose sense, since PRIDE and 
VANITY (the benchmarks) destroy all the spiritual gainings.
The next stanza makes a transition from speculative plane to the action plane. 
The opening lines are arranged in a way that a proposition is followed by a counter 
proposition (Sharma, 2019):
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128 Eldar VErEmchuk
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim
They unravel the author’s idea about not being passive and that mere contempla-
tion is not enough, it should yield real actions. One should not be overwhelmed 
only with thoughts and stay in servitude of his dreams. The landmark charac-
ter, preached in these lines is “efficient” and it is understood within the domain 
DEEDS, while the benchmark trait is “pensive” within the domain CONTEM-
PLATION. R. Kipling contrasts active life position to passive dreaming. It’s 
worth saying that starting from the next piece there is no longer explicit oppo-
sition of landmark virtues with benchmark vices, expressed by antonymic lexical 
units. This, though, does not mean that the lines do not express such oppositions, 
but rather hints that the poet leaves their understanding to the background life 
experience of the readers.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same
The target feature articulated in this piece is “phlegmatic” in the positive sense of 
being not carried away by success, as well as not being frustrated by failures. The 
even deeper target feature might be “wise”, which enables understanding that 
everything in life is transient. The domains EQUANIMITY and WISDOM do 
not have explicit benchmarks, like in the first stanza, but they are rather contrasted 
to the absence of such qualities. It should be noted here Kipling uses metaphorical 
personification of dreams (which are Masters), and Triumph with Disaster (which 
are impostors) that contributes to understanding of his message. Metaphorical 
comparisons operate like ‘bridges’ on the cognitive level joining two different con-
cepts, which on the associative level have some common features. The poet im-
plores that dream should not be one’s master – that is one shouldn’t be controlled 
by his dreams (as masters normally control and rule their servants). Triumph and 
Disaster are called impostors (on the basis of disguising themselves), as they ‘lie’ 
to a person by their inconstancy (Memon & Tunio, 2021). Neither triumph nor 
disaster can be permanent and absolute in philosophic understanding, but they 
rather interchange one another, so one shouldn’t be carried away by any of them. 
Moreover, in the long run, triumph can appear to be a disaster and vice versa.
The landbark “being unruffled”, expressed in the previous piece, further evolves 
in the next lines:
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
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129Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
This message reaches its height in the next piece, which can be understood 
against the reference frame of STOICISM: 
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools,
Even when not only words of a person were corrupted but also all the results of 
his actions were demolished, a person needs to remain calm. To the landmark 
“being unruffled” Kipling adds features “endurable” and “persistent”, which are 
deedful revelation of stoicism. The actualized ethical values that lie behind these 
features are domains COMPOSURE, FORTITUDE, STOICISM and PER-
SEVERANCE. Stoic spirit of the stanza is also maintained by employing meta-
phor ‘worn-out tools’ (Memon & Tunio, 2021), which are obviously not the build-
ing instruments but the spiritual forces of a person, which like real material tools 
can have certain durability and capability, therefore they can be worn-out or bro-
ken. High moral tension of the end of the second stanza finds it further rise and 
achieves its climax in the third stanza:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss.
Using the gambling metaphor (Grasso, 2009) R. Kipling asserts not blind reckless 
risk but rather the ability not to be too bound to one’s achievements and not to 
be afraid to lose everything for the sake of the higher goal. Therefore, the target 
feature is “bold” rather than “adventurous”, which is objectified against the con-
ceptual domain DARING. Next line:
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
reiterates stoic spirit, ability to take the “second go” (Sharma, 2019), accentuat-
ing on the target features “persistent”, “endurable” that are the result of FORTI-
TUDE, which is emphasized by NON-COMPLAINING:
And never breathe a word about your loss.
The next piece expresses the climax of spiritual tension
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
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130 Eldar VErEmchuk
Fortitude is amplified by the will-power and author’s idea is understood 
within the domain WILL, since it becomes the kernel of personality, exhort-
ing him to action. Stoicism, which overwhelms the whole verse, emphasizes the 
ideas of Muscular Christianity, which according to (Shastry, 2019) had a very 
strong effect on him.
In many ways, Rudyard Kipling’s concept of the Empire is similar to a popular con-
cept in the Victorian Era, i.e. Muscular Christianity. In its purest form, Muscular 
Christianity emphasized upon humanitarian values, as opposed to a ‘might-is-right’ 
policy that some imperialists believed in (ibid).
It’s worth mentioning that Muscular Christianity conception is sustained by the 
stylistic device of personification, Will in particular. As stated in (Memon & Tu-
nio, 2021) Will acts as an inner force of a person, embedded in his soul by God 
that governs and gives orders.
The final stanza changes its mood from overcoming deprivation and adversities 
to being able to stand up to seeming success in life, which sometimes appears to 
be even more difficult:
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
The target feature here is “being tenacious” and “convinced in one’s own beliefs”, 
while the following line suggests “being modest and non-sophisticated”:
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch
The domains HUMILITY and SIMLICITY, which entail character “being meek” 
form a certain lining of the poem, since these ideas were expressed in the first stanza, 
but in the final stanza they are emphasized even more vividly. The next line:
If all men count with you, but none too much
preserves the implication that seeming success should not dazzle and one should 
not care about achieving respect and recognition among ‘crowds’ of people.
The following lines:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run
reiterate the idea of deedful, not merely speculative life, because all the virtues are 
dead if they do not yield proper actions. And the final piece ultimately brings to 
the denouement of the diction:
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131Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son.
In these lines, which the poet addresses both to his son and all humanity (Shar-
ma, 2019) R. Kipling imparts that having all the above mentioned virtuous at-
tributes, one can become the triumphant ‘host’ of the Earth, which is though not 
the ultimate goal. What really matters is that one will become a Human from the 
capital letter as an embodiment of humanity and morality, which is higher than 
all the worldly material pursuits and achievements. Therefore, the final lines infer 
the paramount target feature of the whole poem – “humane”, which is project-
ed upon the domain HUMANIZM that is understood as a repository of virtues, 
image and likeness of God. The generalized results of cognitive interpretation are 
given in the Table 1. 
Table 1: Constituents of ethical code in Kipling’s “If ”
Poem lines Trajector  character 
Domain
 (reference frame)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
calm
unruffled
COMPOSURE
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too
convinced
faithful
open-minded
FAITH
CONCEDING
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, patient PATIENCE
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, honest unre-
vengeful
HONESTY
MERCY
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating kind
unrevengeful
BENEVOLENCE
MERCY
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise modest
unsophisticated
HUMILITY
SIMPLICITY
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim efficient ACTING
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same
phlegmatic
wise
EQUANIMITY
WISDOM
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
unruffled
calm
STOICISM
COMPOSURE
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools
unruffled
endurable
resilient
COMPOSURE
FORTITUDE
RESILIENCE
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss bold DARING
And lose, and start again at your beginnings persistent PERSEVERANCE
And never breathe a word about your loss resilient NON-COMPLAINING
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132 Eldar VErEmchuk
Poem lines Trajector  character 
Domain
 (reference frame)
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
strong-willed
endurable,
persistent
tenacious
WILLPOWER
FORTITUDE
PERSEVERANCE
TENACITY
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue convinced CONVICTION
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch humble
unsophisticated
HUMILITY
SIMPLICITY
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you forgiving
not vulnerable
MERCY
FORTITUDE
If all men count with you, but none too much humble HUMILITY
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run
appreciating
efficient
APPRECIATION
ACTING
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son
mighty
humane
MIGHT
HUMANISM
Particular attention should be paid to poetic diction in general, in which we 
can highlight three peculiarities. Firstly, the diction itself is abstract, that is 
the reader does not have a particular image that underlies the poetic narration. 
It contributes to the fact that the ideas, expressed in the poem bear the most 
general character and refer not to anything concrete, but make up an edifice of 
moral conduct. Every reader, delving into it can find his own associations, pro-
jecting the tenets upon the reference frame of his life, which makes the poem 
universal.
Secondly, the diction in carried out not conventionally – in the Indicative 
Mood, like in most of prosaic and poetic works, but in the Subjunctive Mood, 
making it sound hypothetical, although attainable as R. Kipling uses Condi-
tional I in anaphoric reiteration (If…; If you can…). Such type of diction helps 
the author to achieve the ultimate goal – convey the message that the moral 
code, encompassed within the lines is not something given to a person or taken 
for granted, but it is something that can be achieved only through ardent fight 
of human spirit.
Thirdly, the diction is symbolic. R. Kipling uses symbols to carry away his 
genuine message from the literal meaning of the words he uses. To such sym-
bolic lexical units belong: “knaves” (symbolize all the enemies and ill-wishers of 
a person along with the bad circumstances, which might corrupt the real state 
of affairs), crowds (symbolize masses of average philistine people), kings (sym-
bolize current authorities, who are in power), common touch (symbolizes unso-
phistication and simplicity).
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133Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
FIELD MODEL OF KIPLING’S ETHICAL CODE
Creation of the field model of the ethical code, revealed in Kipling’s “If ”, presup-
poses employment of field methodology, which is extensively used in cognitive 
studies. The principle of field model is based on the actualization quantity of a 
concept within a certain textual space. In our paper the model includes the con-
ceptual domains (see Table 1 3d column), which are actualized in the stanzas of 
the poem, constituting the moral code. The field organization of ethical code con-
sists of nucleus, which includes the most frequently actualized ethical concepts 
and periphery, to which belong concepts with lower rate of actualization.
The nucleus of moral code comprises ethical concepts, which are actualized 
most frequently in the poem and they include: COMPOSURE, MERCY, HU-
MILITY, FORTITUDE. All of them are actualized three times, which can be 
seen from the Table 1. We argue that affiliation of these particular concepts to the 
nucleus is not random, because these concepts are interconnected on the cognitive 
level. Composure presupposes being calm and unruffled. Calmness means that a 
person doesn’t fly into anger, even if there is a reason for it, so that means that 
he is able to forgive, i.e. to express mercy. A forgiving person does not normally 
think high of himself, since he sees his own flaws, and this enables him to forgive 
faults of others. Therefore, in order to forgive one has to be humble. All the three 
above-mentioned characteristics are impossible for a weak person, since a weak 
person easily flies into temper, he is impatient and revengeful out of fear and at 
last for the same reason he is afraid to seem less important than he is. Therefore, 
fortitude is the integral feature of the moral code.
The periphery of moral code field comprises close periphery, which includes 
moral concepts, which are actualized twice – SIMPLICITY, ACTING, PER-
SEVERANCE and distant periphery, which contains moral concept, actualized 
only once – BENEVOLENCE, FAITH, CONCEDING, PATIENCE, HON-
ESTY, EQUANIMITY, WISDOM, STOICISM, RESILIENCE, DARING, 
NON-COMPLAINING, WILLPOWER, TENACITY, CONVICTION, 
APPRECIATION, MIGHT. It should be mentioned, though, that peripheral 
status of moral concepts in the field stratification model does not indicate their 
general unimportance in the moral code but rather shows that for the author 
these values bear secondary character in his message. Moreover, if to look closer, 
all the peripheral concepts are directly connected with the nucleus ones. For ex-
ample, RESILIENCE, STOICISM and WILLPOWER are closely related to 
FORTITUDE and PATIENCE, NON-COMPLAINING to COMPOSURE 
etc., therefore these values are located on the periphery, since they relate to the 
ones from the nucleus with the broader semantic scope. 
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134 Eldar VErEmchuk
BINARISM OF MORAL CODE IN KIPLING’S “IF”
Ethical code is a system, which is highly based on evaluation, which is polar by 
its nature. Therefore, ethical concepts, having positive or negative evaluative ba-
sis form binary oppositions. The essence of a binary opposition consists in the 
fact that its members serve as reference frames for each other. As it was stated 
above, the use of antithesis on the stylistic level triggers binarism on the con-
ceptual level. This means that every trajector trait along with the corresponding 
trajector conceptual domain is a part of a binary opposition. The antagonistic 
member of opposition is also a character trait, which relates to the correspond-
ing background (domain). The antagonistic traits and domains are called bench-
mark traits / domains as they serve as a certain standard or point of reference, 
against which the target traits / domains are compared. For instance, a person 
is bold when he compares himself to a coward, or a person can be called strong 
only in relation to a weak one. Thus “weak” is a benchmark for “strong”, or “cow-
ard” is a benchmark for “bold”.
Binarism of the moral code extolled in the poem “If ” is revealed explicitly 
and implicitly. Explicit binarism is aired by R. Kipling himself by means of an-
tithesis, which is observed throughout the first stanza and in the first two lines 
of the second one. In the rest of the poem the benchmark traits are implicit and 
the reader can understand them only based on his own moral experience. The 
results of the benchmark analysis are represented in Table 2. Explicit bench-
marks are typed in bold.
Table 2: Benchmarks of the ethical code in Kipling’s “If ”
Target Domain
(reference frame)
Benchmark trait Benchmark domain
COMPOSURE Angry
irritable
ANGER
FAITH
CONCEDING
distrustful suspicious DOUBT
PATIENCE impatient ANXIETY
HONESTY
MERCY
lying revengeful LIE
VENGEANCE
BENEVOLENCE
MERCY
spiteful MALEVOLENCE
HUMILITY
SIMPLICITY
sophisticated SOPHISTICATION
ACTING pensive CONTEMPLATION
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135Moral Code of a Person: Cognitive Approach to Interpretation of R. Kipling’s “If”
Target Domain
(reference frame)
Benchmark trait Benchmark domain
EQUANIMITY
WISDOM
exulted EXULTATION
STOICISM
COMPOSURE
Weak
agitated
WEAKNESS
DISTURBANCE
COMPOSURE
FORTITUDE
RESILIENCE
weak APATHY
DARING Faint-hearted COWARDICE
PERSEVERANCE idle APATHY
NON-COMPLAINING complaining PITY
WILLPOWER
FORTITUDE
PERSEVERANCE
TENACITY
Weak
idle
WEAKNESS
APATHY
COWARDICE
CONVICTION hesitating DOUBT
HUMILITY
SIMPLICITY
Vain
arrogant
VANITY
ARROGANCE
MERCY
FORTITUDE
sensitive VENGEANCE
VULNERABILITY
HUMILITY proud PRIDE
APPRECIATION
ACTING
Neglecting
idle
NEGLECT
APATHY
MIGHT
HUMANISM
poverty
inhumane
NEED
INHUMANITY
CONCLUSIONS
In his everlasting poem “If ” R. Kipling managed to create an edifice of moral 
mettle, which provides the tenets of virtue and worth irrespective of the epoch 
or geographical location, making it the legacy of the whole humanity. The pecu-
liarities of poetic narration include abstract dictum, use of the subjunctive mood 
and symbolism. Sometimes R. Kipling also uses metonimical personifications 
(Triumph, Disaster, Will) and metaphors (like ‘worn-out tools’). The latter op-
erate like ‘bridge’ on the cognitive level, joining two different concepts that on 
the associative level have some common features. The interpretation through the 
prism of cognitive methodology enabled to distinguish trajector (target) human 
features, which constitute R. Kipling’s moral code. From the cognitive perspec-
tive every character trait is understood against referential background – concep-
tual domain, for instance feature “forgiving” is understood against the reference 
frame (domain) MERCY etc. The use of field stratification methodology made 
it possible to distinguish concepts that form the nucleus of Kipling’s moral 
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136 Eldar VErEmchuk
code, to which belong COMPOSURE, MERCY, HUMILITY and FORTI-
TUDE. The peripheral values, revealed in the poem, are closely connected to 
the nucleus ones and their remoteness from the nucleus is explained by their 
lower frequency of actualization in the analyzed text. Such stratification in re-
vealing of the moral code in “If ” makes it an outstanding piece of poetry, com-
pared with the other ones, attempting at unravelling ethical values. It should 
also be emphasized that moral values bear salient evaluative mark, therefore 
they form binary oppositions, for example: FAITH / DOUBT; STOICISM 
/ WEAKNESS. The antagonistic member of the opposition – the benchmark 
serves as a conceptual verification for the target value with positive evaluative 
mark. For instance, ‘doubting’ is the benchmark for the trajector quality ‘faith-
ful’; benchmark vulnerable – for the trajector trait ‘strong” etc. The benchmarks 
of the moral code in “If ” are expressed both explicitly and implicitly, depend-
ing on the level of their relevance. Explicit benchmarks are expressed by means 
of antithesis, like or being lied about – don’t deal in lies; or being hated – don’t give 
way to hating, while implicit ones are not named by the author and are left for 
the reader’s individual decoding, which is based on his background experience. 
The perspective of the further studies can be combination of cognitive approach 
with the deconstructive analysis.
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“If ”. Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal(3), 161-186.
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Eldar Veremchuk
Zaporizhzhia National University, Ukraine
Eldar.veremchuk@gmail.com
Osebni moralni kod: kognitivni pristop pri interpretaciji Kiplingove 
pesmi “If”
Članek odkriva moralni kod, ki ga slavi Kiplingova pesem “If ” s pomočjo kognitivne in-
terpretacije. Avtorjevo sporočilo, ki vsebuje njegov pogled na moralni kod, se pokaže v mi-
nimalnih smiselnih enotah pesmi (često enega ali dveh verzov), ki so natančno analizirani.
Ključne besede: R. Kipling, moralni kod, značajska podoba, etična vrednost
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139
The Genealogy of Civilization
Boštjan Marko Turk
Abstract
Civilization is a concept that ontologically defines the individual and the communities in 
which it develops. The most global civilization is the one that has emerged in the West. 
Civilization is not something static, but an organism that draws its roots from the distant 
past. In this sense, it is fundamental to answer the question of what are the constitutive 
elements that define Western civilization. This question only makes sense if it is asked in a 
historical perspective. In this direction the Freemasonry, A Very Short Introduction is a cru-
cial one. It presents the analysis revealing how the history of freemasonry is related to the 
evolution of Western identity. It has to be read in the light of Niall Ferguson’s monograph 
The West and the Rest. The present text does so. The book then brings to light the contri-
bution of the brotherhood to the intellectual habitus of what is called the Judeo-Christian 
civilization, at the present time still predominant on the Planet. 
The intellectual apparatus of the Freemasonry, A Very Short Introduction permits to elu-
cidate the history of the masonic movement and its influence on events that seem uncon-
nected and coincidental. Thus, this article tries to explain certain historical turning points 
in South-Eastern Europe, precisely in the light of the masonic alliances, in particular the 
case of the Illyrian Provinces and the first Slovenian poet, Valentin Vodnik, and secondly, 
what concerns the emergence of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which the author of the 
article defines as the result of the masonic strategy (the Grand Lodge of France and the 
Grand Orient of France).
Keywords: Andreas Önnerfors, freemasonry, Western Civilization, Southeast Europe, 
Illyrian Provinces, Valentin Vodnik, Charles Nodier, Napoleon, Kingdom of Yugoslavia
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 930.85
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.139-152
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140 Boštjan Marko turk
A key question that arises in postmodernity, and especially in the 21st century, is 
that of civilizations. This question implies  the question of the genesis, identity and 
persistence of Western civilization. The last one appears as a cultural factor.  This in-
cludes arts, sciences, the use of technology, ethics and morals. Throughout its history, 
the culture of the West has co-shaped the social and political entities on the planet, 
with few exceptions. Western civilization is thus, in historical terms, the most global 
civilization we know. The question of its genealogy is therefore of primary impor-
tance, since it answers the question of its ontology and its viability.
Trying to understand what has shaped our cultural milieu, we cannot ignore the 
influence of the various associations of masonic orientation. Freemasonry: A Very 
Short Introduction is a work that synthetises the question of masonic groups and 
the genealogy of Western civilization. Namely, there is a thread running through 
the entire book that would be perceived by an attentive reader as the focal mes-
sage. This is the analysis, which reveals how profound the history of Freemasonry 
is related to the evolution of Western identity. The book brings to light by way of 
explanation the contribution of the “brotherhood” to the intellectual, moral and 
political habitus of what is called the Judeo-Christian civilization, at present pre-
dominant on the Planet. 
In fact, during the High Middle Ages, the Freemasons, while building secu-
lar and sacred buildings, were noted for the use of architectural elements that are 
indicative of the Western civilization. The starting point is Gothic architecture, 
which was built according to the principles of stonework combined with some 
specific knowledge, which was relayed to future generations. The architectural in-
spiration goes hand in hand with the idea of its transcendental foundation. 
The Temple of Solomon, based on the Word (1 Kings 7:1-5), is crystallized in 
the syntax of the “Word of the Master”. It constitutes the spiritual basis of the 
thought that shapes the architecture of the buildings. The hand that chisels the 
stone is in harmony with both. There is also the narrator who transmits knowl-
edge. In the absence of print, this skill is crucial. One of the roots of modern ped-
agogics was born with the buildings that pierced the sky for the first time since 
the time of the pharaohs. 
Another important feature of medieval craft guilds was that, in a time of 
widespread illiteracy and an absence of printed books, practical and applied 
know-how was orally transmitted and treated as privileged insider knowledge, 
constituting the secrets of a trade. Medieval society was organised into strict 
hierarchies and thus knowledge within the guilds was transferred vertically 
from master to journeyman to apprentice. The craft guild was a professional, 
social and religious fraternity, as well as representing a community of knowl-
edge. (Önnerfors 38)
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141The Genealogy of Civilization
The two elements of civilization, the sense of the divine, transmitted through 
speech, and the dissemination of knowledge coincide in the focal intentions of 
the first brothers. 
Implicitly the book Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction is the revelation that 
the communities of the masonic guilds presupposed the necessary use of skills 
which, in later centuries, helped to articulate Western civilization in such a way 
that it became the dominant model of the world. In this sense, another source can 
be drawn upon. This is Civilization, The West and the Rest. (Ferguson 2011) It of-
fers an interesting parallel: 
In 1500 the future imperial powers of Europe accounted for about 10 per cent 
of the world's land surface and at most 16 per cent of its population. By 1913, 
eleven Western empires controlled nearly three-fifths of all territory and pop-
ulation and more than three-quarters (a staggering 79 per cent) of global eco-
nomic output. (Ferguson 5) 
This phenomenon can be explained by the introduction of methodological ele-
ments that other civilizations did not know. The West in the morphological sense 
is not different from China, India, Turkey and other similar great empires. The 
difference is a matter of methodology: competitiveness, the scientific method, the 
ethics (of work), respect for the rule of law, medicine and consumerism are the six 
elements that Niall Ferguson calls the “killerapps”, by analogy with software. We 
consider that only the first four are crucial: the other two are either embedded in 
them (consumerism) or came later and are derived from the first four, being cre-
ated as a result.1 If we take into account Niall Ferguson’s analysis, we can see that 
the contribution of Freemasons, especially from the time when the industrial age 
began, is more than notable: 
The scientific image of freemasonry gave it a central place in the Enlightenment 
ideas of the period. Freemasonry is saturated with key Enlightenment concepts 
such as progress, perfectibility, and cosmopolitanism. On an individual level, 
freemasonry aims to promote a morality of autonomy, responsibility for the 
self, and moral example. These ideas are heavily influenced by classical stoicism: 
attaining a strong control of the passions and a mastery of the emotions while 
facing personal fate and any unforeseen challenges. (Önnerfors 46)
The excerpt bears noteworthy similarities with Fergusons’s apprehension of large 
issues that assured the triumph of the West. The Knowledge and its transfer within 
the group are essential to increase competitiveness. In addition, a positive attitude 
1 See the case of medicine. 
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142 Boštjan Marko turk
towards science and its promotion is also of paramount importance. Freemasonry 
doesn’t lack a spiritual platform that accompanies and gives meaning to the devel-
opment of science. We have mentioned three of them. In addition to spirituality, 
we should indicate moral autonomy, which is the innate concept of the so-called 
rule of law in every human being. Besides: ethics is the punctum saliens of the fra-
ternity. It is the irreducible common denominator of masonic orientation, defend-
ing and recommending the concepts of good behavior. It is not a philosophical 
belief, but a practice that exists only incarnated in action: 
There is no coherent ideology or doctrine of freemasonry. Rather, the fraternity 
is characterized by a considerable conceptual inclusiveness promoting an ethics 
of action; that is, an ethics of application rather than theory. (34)
Furthermore, Niall Ferguson identifies Isaac Newton as one of the key figures 
in the expansion of the West. But he was more than just a scholar. Aristotle, Py-
thagoras, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal (and others) were scientists who explored 
both the spiritual and material worlds and had a widely developed sense of the 
transcendent. It was not until the 19th century that science began to be separat-
ed from faith. In this sense, there are masonic temples dedicated to Newton; it 
cannot be said with certainty that he belonged to the masonic fraternity. But his 
views were similar to those of Freemasonry, which explains why so many ceremo-
nial buildings have been dedicated to his name. 
It is known, however, that Isaac Newton belonged to the Rosicrucian move-
ment. It had a profound influence on his philosophical thinking. For this reason, 
he should have been close to Freemasonry, by logic: 
Under the surface of Protestantism, mystical currents of religiosity emerged, 
such as Rosicrucianism, which radically individualized the spiritual and per-
sonal encounter with the divine and charged it with strong symbolism. One of 
the master themes of the period was the search for secret and revealed analogies 
and correspondences between microcosm and macrocosm, heaven and earth, 
visible and invisible, divine and human. (Önnerfors 43)
Like thinkers and scientists, Newton was open to the immaterial dimension of 
the visible world. Just as he was aware of the general correlation between “heaven 
and earth, visible and invisible, and divine and human”,2 he was aware of the com-
plexity of the universe in its true grandeur. Newton was a part of the era that saw 
the greatest expansion of science in the modern sense of the word. Freemasonry 
followed the same path: 
2 Quotation supra. 
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143The Genealogy of Civilization
Modern freemasonry (which throughout this book will also be referred to as 
the ‘brotherhood’ or ‘craft’) became a global movement in the 18th century 
and its ideas have since created a considerable social, cultural, and political im-
pact. Since its official inception in 1717, without any formal governing body, 
it spread throughout the world as a prominent feature of associational life. It 
became one of the largest non-governmental secular organizations. (8)
The architect of the universe is also the architect of the civilization. Science, reli-
gion and art are inseparable parts of the complex historical structure. The diachro-
ny of creation is synchronously actualized. Their interaction constitutes the build-
ing blocks of civilization. As it reflects the meaning that transcends all experience, 
it can only be conceived on an a priori, transcendental text: consequently from one 
of the sacred books. Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction cites the movement’s 
essential bibliographical reference, its canonical fundus. More importantly, James 
Anderson’s book is based on an older text, the Gothic Constitutions.3 At the begin-
ning of Anderson’s Constitutions is the argument that man’s creation as the image of 
God is related to the major skills the origin of which is contemporary with man’s: 
Adam, our first Parent, created after the Image of God, the great Architect 
of the Universe, must have had the Liberal Sciences, particularly Geometry, 
written on his Heart; for even since the Fall, we find the Principles of it in the 
Hearts of his Offspring, and which, in process of time, have been drawn forth 
into a convenient Method of Propositions, by observing the Laws of Propor-
tion taken Year of the World 1. 4003 before Christ from Mechanism: So that 
as the Mechanical Arts gave Occasion to the Learned to reduce the Elements 
of Geometry into Method, this noble Science thus reduced, is the Foundation 
of all those Arts, (particularly of Masonry and Architecture) and the Rule by 
which they are conducted and performed. (Anderson 7-8) 
Canonical texts have the advantage of offering several levels of reading: in the 
case of the Bible, there are four levels of interpretation, which Augustine of Dacia 
describes as follows: “Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria, Moralis quid agas, quo 
tendas anagogia.” 
Mutatis mutandis, the myth of Solomon’s Temple is based on the Word and on 
the tradition. It is one of the most eminent buildings in the Bible whose symbol-
ism can be grasped at several layers of interpretation. And again: on a literal level 
the temple was built, demolished and then rebuilt. The challenge is all the greater 
because from the point of view of symbolic meaning the building is constantly 
under construction. To build the Temple is to establish the civilization, through 
3 Cf: https://www.masoniclibrary.org.au/research/list-lectures/86-gothic-constitutions.html, re-
trieved May 10, 2021.
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144 Boštjan Marko turk
the knowledge entrusted to man at the moment of creation. In this context, the 
field of symbolic interpretation is as wide as possible, since its point of reference 
is at the limit of the ineffable, it is what is expressed by a structure typical of He-
brew: “Sanctum Sanctorum”. (Önnerfors 72) Thus: 
The art of building, architecture, and geometry are all represented as exemplify-
ing divine power and interference in human conditions exercised by the ‘Great 
Architect of the Universe’ (GAOTU). All important buildings mentioned in 
the Bible or known to the editor through classical literature and existent his-
torical remains are linked to the science of masonry. Construction and re-con-
struction are used as powerful metaphors, not as an abstract philosophy, but 
as an ethics of action in the service of humanity. Geometry and architecture 
occupy a civilizing function as expressions of divine order, providing a potential 
pattern ‘for all nations’ to follow and disseminate to distant cultures as far as 
Africa or India. (49-50) 
In this sense, Freemasons present themselves as one of the builders of Western 
civilization. The history of the movement begins with the text of civilization, the 
Bible (the creation of Adam, Genesis 3). This is the transition from the transcend-
ent to the rescendent order: it was realized once and for all. The mandate of the 
movement was born at this precious moment. The Constitutions of James An-
derson provide the proof of this by placing the movement at the very heart of 
Judeo-Christian civilization. 
But what is the civilization? We are aware of the arbitrary nature of the choice: 
however, the most academically noteworthy opinions in this regard were given by 
Paul Valéry (Valéry 1960) and André Malraux. (Malraux 1971) For the purpose 
of this discussion, we would rather quote Michel Onfray: his thought seems closer 
to the present moment: “Civilization is everything that crystallizes around a fic-
tion that is itself rooted in a spiritual text. It is sacred, transcendent: it can be the 
Talmud, the Koran, the New Testament or the Bhagavat-Gita. There is no civili-
zation without religion, which is its constitutive factor.” 4
The civilization cannot survive without the transmission of the genealogy, based 
on a sacred text: this task has been entrusted to the masonic movement in primis.
In Constitutions, genealogy is placed at the heart of the matter. It is the su-
preme modus operandi of the guild: 
Freemasonry claims to possess privileged secrets and to transmit them internally. 
According to the narrative of The Constitutions, knowledge (transcending that of 
the average person) has been handed down via an uninterrupted chain of initiates 
4 Onfray, Michel - LGL - Michel Onfray présente son nouveau livre : Décadence. Youtube. January 21, 
2017.
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145The Genealogy of Civilization
from biblical times. These initiates have each then had to endure pressure both 
externally from others in their society and internally from their own human need 
to communicate with others and share these secrets. (Önnerfors 57)
Evoking the ancient masonic texts, the Freemasonry: A Very Short Introduction ex-
ploits the apparatus of analogy to open it up to the very sources of masonic tra-
dition and identity, sources synonymous with the first paragraph of Anderson’s 
work, cited above: 
Anderson’s mythological account of freemasonry establishes a grandiose genealo-
gy throughout the entire spectrum of intellectual history, encompassing the secu-
lar, Christian, and pagan. Thus, he constructs a narrative in which freemasonry is 
in possession of eternal ancient wisdom and uncorrupted knowledge of religion 
(‘philosophia perennis’ or ‘prisca theologia’), handed down by generations of sage 
men united over the centuries and millennia in a privileged chain of initiates from 
almost every important religious and philosophical tradition. (51)
If this transmission is cut off, the civilization begins to collapse. Assuming that 
the genealogy is no longer in place; that the transmission of knowledge, skills and 
secret protocols is lacking, we enter the zone that represents the negation of the 
civilization as it has developed from the initial moment. Michel Onfray notes in 
this regard: 
As soon as we cease to have the memory of our ancestors, as soon as we no 
longer know how to recount our genealogy, as soon as we are lost as to what 
made us or constituted us, civilization sinks. We no longer care about the histo-
ry we no longer care about the past. In this hatred of the past, in this impossible 
present and in the configuration of a future for which we don’t know what it 
will lead to, we are in the situation of a civilization that is collapsing. 5
This would lead to a logical conclusion which can be uttered as a syllogism. We 
shall formulate it in the form of a question. If Freemasons have been a consti-
tutive element of the civilization since its beginning, will the end of civilization 
herald the end of freemasonry? The significance of Freemasonry: A Very Short In-
troduction lies in the fact that it indicates the genealogy of the movement and, 
in this way, implicitly warns of the dangers facing the movement if this geneal-
ogy is ever lost. 
Freemasonry - A Very Short Introduction not only raises general issues, but also 
addresses more specific ones. The book provides a framework for understanding 
cultural-political developments in countries that were not part of the European 
5 Onfray, Michel - Interdit d’inerdire - Le Naufrage de notre civilisation. Youtube. March 3, 2021. 
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146 Boštjan Marko turk
alliance. The entry into modernity, through the Enlightenment, is an essential 
step, especially from the point of view of peoples who were still searching for their 
identity. Le Compte-rendu de la Loge serbo-française Général Peigné, written for the 
fiftieth anniversary of Yugoslav freemasonry, mentions the first Slovenian poet, 
Valentin Vodnik, among the Freemasons of this region. Thus, “Among the Slovenes, 
let us revive the memory of B.6 Valentin Vodnik, the great poet of the Illyrian period, so 
that the Slovenes understand the decisive role played by French freemasonry in the res-
urrection of their nation.” (Spalaikovitch 17)7 Until now, Valentin Vodnik’s mem-
bership in freemasonry has been questioned, if not denied.8 His case is revealing 
in the sense of the coincidence of two characteristics that Fremasonry: A Very Short 
Introduction highlights as essential features of the movement. Firstly, Vodnik’s po-
etry is oriented towards peaceful contentment with oneself and the universe. It 
expresses self-confidence, the joy of living and working without concern for ma-
jor social, political or spiritual issues. Its values are Epicurean, happiness is within 
reach, man is intrinsically content with himself. In this sense, the title of his most 
important poem is The Satisfied Carniolan. 9 The poet’s worldview can be explained 
by the following quotation: 
However, there is also an epicurean element, with the philosophical terms of 
‘felicity’ and ‘happiness’ (derived from the Greek concept of ‘Eudaimonia’) oc-
cupying a prominent place in masonic ideology and symbolism, such as the 
omnipresent ‘Temple of Felicity’. (Önnerfors 46) 
To communicate his inner form to the whole nation, another moment was crucial 
for Vodnik: if the first moment was comparable, in terms of Roman mythology, to 
the goddess of happiness, Felicitas, the second moment bears the mark of a deity 
whose actions are unpredictable. Her name is Fortuna.* Valentin Vodnik was at 
his best during the time of the Illyrian provinces, established by Napoleon. They 
covered the territory of Slovenia, Istria, Kraina and Dalmatia. Again, Vodnik’s en-
gagement can be considered in accordance with the following: 
At the turn of the century, Napoleon revived freemasonry in France and aligned 
the brotherhood closely with the ruling establishment. Thus, he created the 
ideological basis forging an elite in service to the universalist (and expansive) 
project of the French Republic and later Empire. This patriotic enthusiasm, 
6 The letter B stands for brother. 
7 All translations from French to English have been made by the author of the following article. 
8 Cf: Binder, Dieter et al. The history and symbolism of the free masons. Celje: MD, 2008 and Resman, 
Gregor. Freemasonry and politics in Slovenia: a historical rewiev. Ljubljana: FDV, 2021. 
9 Cf: https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadovoljni_Kranjec, retrieved May 10, 2021. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   146 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
147The Genealogy of Civilization
where humanist values of the Enlightenment were married with ideas of na-
tional independence and self-assertion, spilled over into a number of typically 
mid- and late-19th-century national freemasonries (…). (17-18) 
Valentin Vodnik’s intellectual activity, id est, that which influenced the genesis of 
Slovenian cultural identity, could emerge in the context of the revitalization of the 
Freemasonic movement under Napoleon. The peak of the poet’s work can be traced 
back to the years 1809-1812, when the Austrian monarchy no longer interfered 
with Slovenian territory. The French authorities made it possible to use Slovene 
in public: Vodnik’s native language became the language of education. Primary 
and secondary schools were established. Valentin Vodnik thanked Napoleon with 
the ode Illyria revived.10 Illyria is personified as a woman who wakes up and tells 
Napoleon her glorious but forgotten history. The poet gleefully notes that Napo-
leon has revived an old heritage and that Illyria will become the heart of Europe. 
In this context, one should not overlook the fact that Charles Nodier, who edited 
the newspaper Le Télégraphe Officiel, was active in Ljubljana during the same peri-
od. Nodier, one of the most influential Frenchmen in the region, belonged to the 
Grand Orient de France.11 Le Télégraphe Officiel also published Illyria revived: “No-
dier’s note was printed next to the text, drawing attention to the merits of the poem 
itself, as well as to Vodník as an already renowned poet.” (Kos 115)
After the restoration of the Austrian monarchy, Vodnik’s situation deteriorated 
considerably. He was banned from public service. Until the second half of the 19th 
century, Slovene was removed from schools and offices and relegated to the status 
of an auxiliary language. The available sources do not yet allow us to classify Vod-
nik within the concrete masonic obedience. However, it is highly probable that he 
belonged to one of the French lodges established in Ljubljana during the Illyri-
an provinces. The extrait from the Compte-rendu shows that the Grand Lodge of 
France was well aware of Vodnik’s activities: therefore, the most likely explanation 
is that Vodnik was a member of this Lodge or of one of its obediences. 
The Apparatus of Freemasonry: A Very Short History can also be used to explain 
more important political changes that freemasonry triggered in the 19th century 
and the first half of the 20th century. We shall consider the following part: 
At the outset of the 20th century, freemasonry changed from its original and 
dynamic 18th-century global network to an integrated phenomenon of elite 
sociability confined within individual national states and empires. Masonic 
universalism of the earlier period had changed into diverging and mutually 
10 Cf: https://sl.wikisource.org/wiki/Ilirija_o%C5%BEivljena, retrieved May 10, 2021.
11 Cf: https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/bourgogne-franche-comte/doubs/besancon/liberte-con-
science-250-ans-franc-maconnerie-besancon-633078.html, retrieved May 10, 2021. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   147 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
148 Boštjan Marko turk
exclusive national definitions of what constituted universal civilization. The 
British, French, and German empires all competed for their specific versions of 
world culture. (Önnerfors 25)
The text allows to understand the development of events in the southwestern part 
of the Balkan Peninsula during and after the Great War. It permits furthermore 
to place them in relation to the general development of the masonic paradigm. 
The less known documents could be used to apply the thesis to concrete historical 
material. It is about the transfer of the culture, identity and political will of France 
to the territory of the rising Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The Grand Master of the 
Grand Lodge of France, General Paul Peigné, played an essential role. When the 
Franco-Yugoslav Atelier bearing his name was founded in 1925, it was announced: 
Our ideal in founding this Atelier was to strengthen our relations with the 
Balkan nations in order to fortify the state of peace, by bringing the Balkan 
peoples a little closer each day to the intellectual and moral centre which France 
represents in their eyes. (Spalaikovitch 6) 
But the French went further: they wanted to transmit French culture to the Yu-
goslav youth: they wanted to educate it in its own spirit, Freemasonry being one 
of the necessary elements of cultural and general identity. It is striking that the 
introduction to the world of French cultural identity and the introduction to free-
masonry are almost synonymous: 
We propose to recruit from among the Yugoslav university youth in Paris, wise 
minds who would complete their university education with a masonic educa-
tion. The young students who are with us, even those who are more active in 
their studies, do not satisfy them enjoying our restaurants, cafés and bistros. 
When they return to their country, they have admired our monuments, our 
gardens, our capital, but the essence seemed to be out of grasp for them. We 
want them to be able to enter freemasonry, to follow our work, to get to know 
our masonic spirit and even to create family relationships among our masonic 
brothers. (6-7) 
The goal was to become French at the same time as a freemason. 
Over the course of the decades, representatives of the Grand Lodge of France 
and the Grand Orient have convincingly succeeded in recruiting Yugoslav youth. 
The document in question gives an account of the history of the masonic move-
ment in Serbia. In this regard, the First Master of the Serbian-French Lodge, 
Venerable Gabriel Scellier, provides an analysis of Serbian freemasonry. He re-
veals the extent to which Freemasons are involved in the upper echelons of Serbi-
an politics, science, art and literature: 
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149The Genealogy of Civilization
Almost all your scientists, writers and statesmen have belonged or still belong 
to freemasonry. In every government, several ministers are freemasons. This is 
also the case in the present Cabinet, chaired by the great statesman Pašić. Af-
fection for freemasonry is one of the strong guarantees that Yugoslavia will 
follow the path of progress and strive to establish justice and peace, as well as 
the general welfare of the people, wherever they may be in the world. (6-7)
Aa soon as in the second half of the 19th century, Paris had serious ambitions 
in the southwestern Balkans. The path to realization passed through the Grand 
Lodge of France, and more precisely through a chance meeting, as Compte-rendu 
testifies: 
In the tragic hours of the 1870-71 war Paul Peigné had under his direct orders a 
young officer, Prince Pierre Karađorđević, who had also graduated from Saint-
Cyr. They have formed a lively friendship. This officer, thirty years later, was 
King of Serbia. (6-7) 
When the royal house of Karađorđević came to power in Serbia (1904) and Peter 
became king, cooperation intensified. Peter Karađorđević turned Serbia away from 
Austria-Hungary and towards France. Freemasons played a key role in this, “orches-
trating radical political changes.” (Önnerfors 122) At the end of the First World 
War, the Grand Lodge of France and the Grand Orient supported the creation of a 
new state, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, with Peter Karađorđević becoming its mon-
arch. This completely transformed political relations in South Eastern Europe. 
Referring to the Resolution (Lebey 1917) passed by the Congress of Freema-
sons of the Allied Countries between 28th and 30th June 1917, based on Wilson’s 
theses on the self-determination of peoples, the two Lodges prepared a special 
document for the Paris Peace Conference (1919), demanding that the Confer-
ence establishes a State of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. (Peigné 1919) They have 
also drawn borders on the map. The first proposal was respected, the second one, 
especially in the southwest of the new state, was not. 
The state survived until the Second World War. It was during the reign of King 
Peter and his successor, Alexander, that the Kingdom of Yugoslavia made signifi-
cant cultural and economic progress. It was a step towards civilization: Serbia, the 
backbone of the Kingdom, was irreversibly transformed. From a rural Eyalet inte-
grated into the declining Ottoman Empire, it became a power that, as part of the 
Entente, successfully confronted the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1914-1918. 
All this would not have been possible if the French Republic had not invested 
Serbia (the Yugoslav Kingdom) with the civilizational achievements, synonymous 
with the cultural and economic infrastructure. As the historical documents reveal, 
the role of freemasonry, and in particular of the Grand Lodge of France and the 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   149 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
150 Boštjan Marko turk
Grand Orient de France, was of fundamental importance. 
Freemasonry – A Very Short Introduction is an effective tool for confronting the 
mortgage imposed to the movement, as it itself diagnoses it in the final chapter: 
From the margins of public debate, the issue of freemasonry has moved into 
mainstream media and governmental decision-making processes, where ste-
reotyped images have been recycled, images that are likely to remain for the 
foreseeable future. (Önnerfors 123)
The book allows us to place the brotherhood in the precise historical contexts 
in which it has taken shape, in time, refuting the prejudices. Its main advantage 
is therefore providing a starting point for understanding the real nature of the 
movement and, above all, its contribution to the formation of civilization, in dif-
ferent historical contexts, however implausible they may seem.12 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anderson, James. 1734. The Constitutions of the Free-Masons. Philadelphia: Masonica.
Binder, Dieter et al. 2008. The history and symbolism of the free masons. Celje: MD.
Ferguson, Niall. 2011. Civilization, The West and the Rest. London: Penguin.
Kos, Janko. 1990. Valentin Vodnik. Ljubljana: PZ.
Lebey, André. 1917. Congress of the Masonic Societies of the Allied and Neutral Na-
tions on June 28th, 29th and 30th, 1917: Grand Orient de France: Grande Loge de 
France. Paris: Mangeot
Malraux, André. 1971. Les Chênes qu’on abat. Paris: Gallimard.
Önnerfors, Andreas. 2017. Freemasonry - A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press.
Peigné, Paul. 1919. Les revendications nationales des serbes, croates et slovènes 
présentées aux FF des pays alliés par les FF serbes, membres de la R.L. N°288 Cos-
mos. Paris: Émancipatrice.
Resman, Gregor. 2021. Freemasonry and politics in Slovenia: a historical rewiev. 
Ljubljana: FDV. 
Spalaikovitch, Miroslav. 1925. Compte-rendu de la Loge franco-yougoslave Général 
Peigné No 540 depuis sa fondation. Paris: L’Emancipatrice. 
Valéry, Paul. 1960. « Regards sur le monde actuel et autres essais », in Œuvres II. 
Paris : Gallimard. 
12 The case of Serbia and the Balkans at the end of 19th century, for example. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   150 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
151The Genealogy of Civilization
INTERNET SOURCES
Web pages
https://france3-regions.francetvinfo.fr/bourgogne-franche-comte/doubs/besancon/
liberte-conscience-250-ans-franc-maconnerie-besancon-633078.html, retrieved 
May 10, 2021. 
https://www.masoniclibrary.org.au/research/list-lectures/86-gothic-constitutions.
html, retrieved May 10, 2021. 
https://sl.wikisource.org/wiki/Ilirija_o%C5%BEivljena, retrieved May 10, 2021. 
https://sl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zadovoljni_Kranjec, retrieved May 10, 2021. 
Youtube 
Onfray, Michel - LGL - Michel Onfray presents his latest essay: “Decadence”. 
Youtube. January 20, 2017.
Onfray, Michel - Interdit d‘interdire - Le Naufrage de notre civilisation. Youtube. 
March 3, 2021.
Boštjan Marko Turk
University of Ljubljana
Bostjan-marko.turk@guest.arnes.si
Genealogija civilizacije
Ključno vprašanje, ki se zastavlja v postmoderni, še posebej pa v 21. stoletju, je vprašanje 
soočenja civilizacij. To vprašanje nujno implicira vprašanje o genezi, identiteti ter obsto-
jnosti zahodne civilizacije. Ta se identificira kot kulturni dejavnik, v najširšem pomenu 
besede. Kultura se namreč na splošno nanaša na oblike človeške dejavnosti in simbolične 
strukture, ki dajejo taki aktivnosti pomen. V najširšem pomenu označuje izraz  kultu-
ra vse produkte posameznika, skupine ali družbe inteligentnih bitij. Sem spadajo umet-
nost, znanost, raba tehnologij ter etika in morala. V tem smislu je kultura zahoda skozi 
zgodovino sooblikovala družbene in politične entitete na planetu, z redkimi izjemami. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   151 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
152 Boštjan Marko turk
Zahodna civilizacija je tako v zgodovinskem smislu najbolj globalna civilizacija, kar jo 
poznamo. Vprašanje o njeni genealogiji je tako prvenstvenega pomena, saj odgovarja tudi 
na vprašanje o njeni ontologiji in o njenih sposobnostih preživetja. 
Ključne besede: Andreas Önnerfors, prostozidarstvo, zahodna civilizacija, jugovzhod-
na Evropa, Ilirske province, Valentin Vodnik, Charles Nodier, Napoleon, Kraljevina 
Jugoslavija
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   152 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
153
Le sage et son mystique�1 Regard croisé 
dans la correspondance d’Henri Pourrat  
et Jan Čep
Jan Zatloukal
[V]vous êtes un vrai sage et un courageux. 
J’aurais dû le devenir, moi aussi […]. 2 
On le sent vraiment poète […] A la fois 
très paysan, très lettré, très mystique. 3 
Abstract: The Sage and His Mystic� A Look at the Correspondence 
Between Henri Pourrat and Jan Čep
Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) is inextricably linked to his region of Auvergne and his work 
as well as his personality have left an indelible mark there. Although his influence grad-
ually faded away after the Second World War, it can be measured by a veritable mass of 
letters exchanged with countless correspondents. He enjoyed a reputation as a writer, the 
success of which was confirmed by the award of the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie 
Française to the whole of Gaspard des montagnes in 1931 and by the award of the title of 
Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1928. 
1 Cette partie du titre est un clin d’œil au livre d’Henri Pourrat Le Sage et son démon, Paris, Albin 
Michel, 1950. 
2 J. Čep à H. Pourrat, 19 décembre 1958.
3 H. Pourrat à L. Gachon, 27 octobre 1935.
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.133.1-6Pourrat H.:929Čep J.
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.153-163
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   153 6. 12. 2021   11:36:14
154 Jan Zatloukal
Jan Čep (1902-1974) was the translator of his works into the Czech language. Pourrat 
had sympathy for him because of the poetic inspiration that Čep drew from the same 
sources as him-self, that is, from the rustic world of the countryside, from its myths and 
legends. Pourrat perceived Čep as mystical because his work emanates from the deep 
metaphysical dimension. Faith thus plays the role of a bridge between the two men. For 
both of them it is the moving force in their lives. This is a full literary and spiritual contact 
that this article highlights.
Keywords: Henri Pourrat, Jan Čep, Gaspard des montagnes, rustic inspiration, mysticism, 
metaphysics
Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) est indissociablement lié à sa région d’Auvergne et 
son œuvre de même que sa personnalité y ont laissé une trace indélébile4. Son in-
fluence dans la région fut telle qu’Alexandre Vialatte n’hésite pas à écrire après la 
mort de l’écrivain ambertois avec humour : 
La vraie Auvergne ne date guère de Pourrat. Avant lui, Vercingétorix avait eu 
une idée confuse de cette province, mais il n’avait eu que le temps de mourir 
pour elle. Pourrat lui a consacré sa vie. Pourrat c’est «  le chef-lieu du Puy de 
Dôme » comme écrivait une écolière. (Vialatte – Pourrat, 2008, 31)
Quoique son influence s’éteigne progressivement dès la Seconde Guerre mondiale 
on peut la mesurer sur une véritable masse de lettres échangées avec d’innom-
brables correspondants5. De nos jours le Centre Henri Pourrat recense plus de 
20 000 plis reçus de 1800 correspondants différents.
C’était Claude Dalet, ancien conservateur du Centre, qui tenta la classification 
des correspondances d’Henri Pourrat (Dalet, 2011, 9-19). Il en distingue plusieurs 
cercles : celui des amis d’Auvergne reliés par le même cadre régional (p. ex. Joseph 
Desaymard, Alexandre Vialatte, Lucien Gachon)  ; celui autour des revues aux-
quelles Pourrat contribuait (p. ex. Jean Paulhan pour La Nouvelle Revue Française, 
frères Leblond pour La Vie, Luc Estang pour La Croix) ; celui formé des auteurs 
des collections « Champs » et « Campagne » dirigées par Pourrat ; celui autour du 
Trésor des contes. Le seul cercle « non français », mentionné dans cette classifica-
tion, serait celui constitué de ses amitiés suisses avec Ramuz en tête. Il y a quelques 
4 « La contribution a été créée avec le soutien du ministère de l’Éducation, de la Jeunesse et des 
Sports de la République tchèque accordé par UP à Olomouc (IGA_FF_2020_023). »
5 Christian Morzenowski parle d’un véritable « foyer » épistolaire et d’une sorte d’« épicentre » 
littéraire qui s’était cristallisé autour de la personne et de l’œuvre d’Henri Pourrat (Morzenowski, 
2011, 25).
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155Le sage et son mystique
années, les correspondances dépassant les frontières de l’hexagone sont en train 
d’être enrichies par celle échangée avec Jan Čep (1902-1974), écrivain et premier 
traducteur tchèque de Gaspard des montagnes6. 
Rappelons qu’en 1932, au moment où s’ouvre leur correspondance, Jan Čep est 
un jeune écrivain de 30 ans ayant sur son compte plusieurs recueils de nouvelles, 
bien accueillies par la critique qui reconnaît en lui un rénovateur de la littérature 
rustique. On apprécie sa vision nouvelle de la campagne spiritualisée où l’homme, 
se débat entre l’attraction vers l’au-delà et l’attachement vers les choses d’ici-bas ; 
on loue surtout son art comme celui d’un observateur insolite et d’un écrivain 
d’une puissance poétique, ce qui le fera désigner par F. X. Šalda « poète du regard 
matinal » (Šalda, 1934/35). 
Pourrat, quant à lui, a déjà dépassé la quarantaine et jouit d’un renom de l’écri-
vain, dont le succès fut confirmé par l’attribution du Grand Prix du Roman de 
l’Académie Française à l’ensemble de Gaspard des montagnes en 1931 et par la re-
mise du titre de Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur en 1928. Il est, certes, connu 
surtout grâce au succès des quatre volumes de Gaspard, mais loin d’être l’écrivain 
d’un seul livre. A son compte des livres aussi divers que les Montagnards, long 
poème de la Grande Guerre qui lui valut le Prix Archon-Desperouses en 1919 ; 
Les jardins sauvages (1923) dédié à Jean Angéli, ami des plus proches tombé dans 
cette guerre ; de nombreux essais portant sur l’Auvergne et la paysannerie dont 
Dans l ’herbe des trois vallées (1927), Ceux d’Auvergne et surtout La Ligne verte 
(1929). Il est aussi un contributeur assidu aux nombreuses revues dont la Nou-
velle Revue Française, Sept, La Vie intellectuelle. Depuis son « université d’Ambert » 
(terme de Lucien Gachon), il anime la vie littéraire et intellectuelle de l’Auvergne 
et devient un mentor encourageant de jeunes écrivains régionaux dont il préface 
les œuvres. Sa maison du Petit Cheix est alors un véritable carrefour de rencontres 
non seulement pour ceux d’Auvergne mais aussi pour les visiteurs parisiens ou 
même ceux d’au-delà des frontières hexagonales dont sera aussi Jan Čep. 
LE TCHÈQUE AUX YEUX ILLUMINÉS
Le 6 juillet 1932 depuis Saint-Saturnin, petit village près d’Angoulême, Jan Čep 
envoya sa première lettre à Henri Pourrat. Il lui écrit en humble traducteur de 
Gaspard des montagnes pour « quelques difficultés de texte, quelques expressions 
régionales et quelques faits locaux » (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 28) et, avec une timidi-
té qui lui est propre, sollicite auprès de l’auteur un rendez-vous. Ce sera le 5 sep-
tembre qui verra la première rencontre entre les deux écrivains. 
6 Correspondance Henri Pourrat – Jan Čep (1935-1958). Ce n’est qu’un mot pour l ’amitié (éd. Jan 
Zatloukal), Cahier Henri Pourrat 29, Société des Amis d’Henri Pourrat, Clermont-Ferrand, 2014.
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156 Jan Zatloukal
Grâce aux cahiers journaliers dans lesquels Pourrat notait, ne serait-ce que très 
brièvement, les événements qui traversaient ses jours, nous avons son témoignage 
du moment de la rencontre. L’annotation du 5 septembre laisse entrevoir non seu-
lement les activités de la journée, les sujets de leurs conversations, mais trahit aussi 
les premières impressions que Čep fit à son hôte : « Jean Čep. Bois de l’Enclos. 
Florian. La vie paysanne. Visage beau, clair, osseux. Yeux illuminés, graves. Parler 
difficile. »7 Plus largement il s’épanche le jour même dans la lettre à Vialatte : 
Aujourd’hui, la visite d’un tchèque aux yeux assez illuminés qui hait l’Amérique 
et les voyages, traduit maintenant Gaspard, après avoir été paysan en sa jeunesse, 
et ensuite disciple d’une sorte d’apôtre catholique de la vie agreste, traducteur 
de Léon Bloy. (Vialatte – Pourrat, 2006, 255)
Hormis la physionomie remarquée par Pourrat (visage osseux, les yeux illuminés) 
et la difficulté de s’exprimer en français (parler difficile) c’est notamment l’origine 
paysanne qui intéresse Pourrat et la figure de Florian, cet « apôtre catholique de 
la vie agreste » que Pourrat s’identifiera avec son propre idéal de l’éducation basée 
sur le contact direct avec les « choses vertes » de la nature. Pour ce qui est de deux 
objets de répulsion – l’Amérique et les voyages – le premier semble valoriser la 
France représentant le sol de la vieille Europe chrétienne et solidaire contre l’in-
dividualisme et le libéralisme pragmatique et en découlant le relativisme noétique 
de l’Amérique. Le deuxième peut paraître paradoxal chez quelqu’un qui voyageait 
assez souvent et pour qui ces voyages et ses séjours à l’étranger donnaient l’occa-
sion d’échapper aux occupations et aux ennuis de l’existence quotidienne et ainsi 
de produire son œuvre dans la relative tranquillité.
Il semble que l’amitié entre les deux hommes fut liée presque immédiatement 
comme le prouve non seulement le souvenir de Čep mais aussi la dédicace inscrite 
par Pourrat dans l’exemplaire de Dans l ’herbe des trois vallées offert à Čep avant son 
départ : « à Jean Čep, le jour de notre rencontre, et tout heureux de me sentir en 
communion de goût et d’idées avec lui. » (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 226)8 Après son 
retour en Tchécoslovaquie, Čep remercie Pourrat pour « le don d’une sympathie 
immérité » (Ibid., 31) et encore longtemps il éprouvera ce sentiment d’être peu 
digne de l’amitié si naturellement offerte par l’écrivain auvergnat. 
La première visite ne reste pas sans écho dans la correspondance de Čep. A Jo-
sef Florian, disciple tchèque de Léon Bloy et infatigable propagateur de son œuvre, 
qui lui demande le portrait de l’écrivain auvergnat, Čep donne cette description : 
7 Le manuscrit est déposé au Centre Henri Pourrat dans la Bibliothèque du Patrimoine du Cler-
mont-Ferrand.
8 Toutes les dédicaces retrouvées d’Henri Pourrat à Jan Čep sont transcrites dans Annexes de l’édition 
mentionnée (Pourrat – Čep, 226-233).
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157Le sage et son mystique
Il est de haute stature, il a la barbe noire (il laisse pousser sa barbe). Mais en 
réalité il ne paraît pas aussi robuste que sur ces portraits [des Nouvelles lit-
téraires]. Il est pâle, amaigri, parle lentement et à voix basse – je dirais presque 
qu’il a de faibles poumons. Il m’a dit sans que je lui demande qu’il fût catholique 
(« pratiquant »), bien qu’il ait eu une période de scepticisme dans sa jeunesse. 
(Actuellement il a l’air d’avoir quarante ans). Il est marié, il a une femme bien 
jolie et très naturelle et une petite fille d’à peu près trois ans.9 
LE SAGE ET LE MYSTIQUE 
Nous voulons maintenant nous poser la question comment les deux amis se per-
cevaient mutuellement, ce qu’ils représentaient l’un pour l’autre, et, pourquoi ils se 
sentaient si proche l’un de l’autre.
Pour Pourrat Čep est doté avant tout de la triple caractéristique inscrite dans la 
dédicace de la Porte du verger : il est poète, croyant, paysan. Les correspondances 
parallèles de Pourrat nuanceront cette triade fondamentale (« c’est un paysan […], 
et très poète, très mystique » ; « A la fois très paysan, très lettré, très mystique » 
(Pourrat – Gachon III, 1994, 14, 47))
On voit que plus qu’un simple croyant, Čep est présenté aux amis de Pourrat 
comme « mystique ». C’est d’abord l’aspect visuel, la physionomie austère de Čep, 
dominé par le regard grave et perspicace, qui montre certains attributs d’un mys-
tique. Dès la première rencontre Pourrat se rend compte de son attitude anxieuse 
et rêveuse. Dans la scène de l’arrivée de l’abbé Jean, transposition littéraire de Čep 
dans le récit resté longtemps inédit et intitulé l ’Emigré, on voit bien comment 
l’écrivain ambertois percevait son traducteur : 
Il ne me voit pas d’abord, il passe l’œil sur cette place de bourgade, d’un air de 
dépaysement ou plutôt d’absence, comme envoûté par une idée qui le retire de 
tout pour l’avoir à soi seule. On m’avait dit : « Il est très triste et abattu, il semble 
porter sur soi en plus de sa souffrance toute la souffrance de son pays. » Mais c’est 
autre chose que tristesse et souffrance. Ou même que l’insomnie aux yeux creux : 
une sorte de solitude où il est descendu comme une pierre à travers l’eau. Le sen-
timent d’être seul comme on est seul quand on rêve ; on le sent à une distance un 
peu plus grande que l’an dernier de toutes choses ; il faut un peu plus longtemps 
pour que les questions lui parviennent, pour que son œil de moine mystique re-
connaisse les maisons, l’église, les tilleuls. Sa face dans son grain même tient da-
vantage de la pierre et comme il est lent à sourire. (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 236)
Pourrat porte particulièrement attention aux yeux, au regard de Čep. A la première 
entrevue il remarque la profondeur ou la perspicacité du regard de ce « Tchèque 
9 J. Čep à J. Florian, 24 novembre 1932 ; archives d’auteur, traduction du tchèque J. Z.
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158 Jan Zatloukal
aux yeux assez illuminés ». La scène citée souligne son côté mystique : solitude 
assurant l’éloignement du monde, assumant la souffrance des autres, gravité silen-
cieuse. Son « œil de moine mystique » ne voit presque pas le monde extérieur, le 
mystique habitant un monde autre, un ailleurs d’où il a du mal à revenir. Il paraît 
d’ailleurs que la fascination pour les yeux de Čep ne soit pas uniquement le propre 
de Pourrat. Daniel Halévy fait une expérience semblable en confiant à Pourrat que 
c’était dans les yeux de Čep qu’il devina, qu’il a « touché » « l’imminent malheur » 
de son pays juste avant l’éclatement de la Seconde Guerre mondiale10. 
Mais il y a chez Čep aussi un autre regard que le regard physique, le regard au 
sens figuré. Čep est pour Pourrat celui qui voit et comprend plus que les autres, qui 
comprend à demi-mot, qui voit au-delà de ce qui est dit. Lorsque Pourrat publie 
en 1946 La Bienheureuse Passion, livre auquel il attribue plus d’importance qu’à ses 
livres précédents et qui, malgré tout, passe presque inaperçue en France, sans éveil-
ler l’intérêt de la critique ou du public, le poète mystique tchèque est un des rares 
« [qui] ont vu tout de suite » (Pourrat – Gachon V, 1996, 195).
Cette perception de Čep comme un mystique est renforcé chez Pourrat par 
ce peu qu’il a pu lire de l’œuvre de son ami, l’œuvre qui émane intensément une 
certaine dimension métaphysique. En novembre 1933 Čep envoie à Pourrat sa 
nouvelle « Nuit de Noël » qui a paru dans La Revue française de Prague dans la 
traduction de Michel-Léon Hirsch tout en avertissant Pourrat qu’il peut la regar-
der comme une sorte de « programme », comme sa « manière de voir l’histoire et 
l’espèce humaine ». (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 42) La nouvelle, dont la composition est 
fondée sur la base de la symphonie musicale, comme l’a brillamment démontrée 
Jan Wiendl (2013, 2014), beigne tout entière dans l’atmosphère onirique et mys-
térieuse où les vivants côtoient les fantômes des morts pour se diriger ensemble 
à travers les âges et par le paysage à la fois bien connu et transfiguré vers l’église 
paroissiale luisant dans les ténèbres de la nuit et attirant toute l’humanité pour 
participer au mystère de la nativité. 
Si Čep est pour Pourrat un poète mystique, un ami un peu mystérieux cou-
vert de silence et de tristesse mélancolique, Pourrat est pour Čep un sage dont la 
manière de vie paisible et confiante mérite d’être suivie. C’est dans une des der-
nières lettres à Pourrat où il l’exprime de pleine voix : « Vous êtes un vrai sage et 
10 « Je prévoyais pourtant ce qui nous attendait. Vous aussi sans doute. Mais prévoir n’est rien. Tout 
près de vous, j’ai fait mieux que prévoir, j’ai touché notre imminent malheur. Vous l’ignorez sans 
doute. Je l’ai touché dans les yeux de votre ami tchécoslovaque. Je lui ai dit, en lui serrant la main, 
devant le petit château de Mme de la Tour. “je souhaite que vous ne trouviez pas chez vous demain 
une trop cruelle épreuve.” Sans doute avais-je dit cela avec la tranquillité d’un homme qui croit 
jouir de quelque immunité, car votre ami m’a regardé bien en face, avec douleur et compassion, et 
m’a dit : “Je forme le même vœu pour vous.” Il voulait dire : “Prenez garde que ce sera votre tour 
demain.” Je ne crois pas que notre épreuve soit analogue. Mais elle sera grande – que sera-t-elle ? », 
D. Halévy à H. Pourrat, 3 octobre 1939.
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159Le sage et son mystique
un courageux. J’aurais dû le devenir, moi aussi […] » (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 205). 
Čep admire chez son ami plus âgé le courage, la discipline, la confiance, ces qua-
lités qui lui font souvent défaut, anxieux et vulnérable comme il est. Pourrat ancré 
dans son Auvergne se dresse devant Čep, « pèlerin sur la terre », comme la certi-
tude, comme un point solide dans son existence agitée : « Il y a une force d’apaise-
ment dans votre personnalité, de même que dans vos livres. » (Ibid., 63) Il semble 
d’ailleurs que les deux hommes sont conscients de cette différence de caractère : 
l’un en proie à l’angoisse, l’autre pourvu d’une confiance rassurante11. Il est aussi 
quelqu’un qui sait se mettre à la place d’autrui, qui sait vraiment porter l’oreille aux 
soucis de l’exilé Čep, les prend au sérieux, s’applique constamment à le réconforter 
et à le secourir. 
C’est là, en exil, que les lettres de Pourrat lui apportent la consolation dont il a 
tant besoin, lui remontent le moral, témoignent de la participation de Pourrat à sa 
vie « coupée comme par un couteau ». Dans son journal intime tenu en exil, Čep 
nota que chaque jour il souhaitait que le facteur lui apporte une lettre qui viendrait 
tout simplement lui donner un peu de joie. C’est Pourrat qui lui envoie de telles 
lettres. A leur lecture Čep ne s’abstient pas de réaction bien émotive : 
J’ai lu votre lettre les larmes aux yeux ; c’est peut-être la plus belle, la plus affec-
tueuse que j’aie jamais reçue de personne. […] C’est une telle voix que j’avais 
besoin d’entendre juste à ce moment-là. (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 163)
Le seul remède à l’hypersensibilité, selon Pourrat, serait le travail régulier, pas tel-
lement le gagne-pain, mais le travail personnel « qui pousse du dedans » qui tra-
duit le « besoin de changer la vie » et contribue ainsi à « l’avènement, à la venue du 
Règne » (Ibid., 142). Il ne cesse pas de l’encourager en dépit des échecs répétitifs 
auprès les éditeurs : 
Même si vous ne lui donniez que quelques minutes par jour, avec lenteur, l’œu-
vre avancerait. Cela vous aiderait. Ne laissez pas l’ennui, la gêne mordre sur 
vous, cher Jean. Il me semble que c’est un péché. » (Ibid., 159)
Pourrat est ainsi l’une des rares amitiés françaises qui redonne à Čep confiance 
en lui en tant qu’écrivain. Il l’encourage, malgré les échecs, à entreprendre d’autres 
projets littéraires tout en l’assurant que son français est « parfait » et que son rêve 
de devenir un écrivain d’expression française n’est pas inaccessible. 
11 Dans une lettre à Suzanne Renaud Pourrat saisit bien cette différence : « […] j’ai eu le plaisir de 
voir, d’avoir ici en octobre quelques jours mon cher Jean Č. Comme toujours assez triste et anxieux. 
Je le comprends bien. Mais j’ai plus de confiance et d’espoir que lui. » (Renaud – Pourrat, 2001, 18). 
Aussi dans une lettre à Čep, il reconnaît que sa confiance relève d’une grâce : « La grâce m’est faite 
de ne pas trop m’inquiéter. » (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 208).
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160 Jan Zatloukal
L’AMITIÉ OÙ LA DISTANCE ET LE TRAVAIL DU TEMPS 
N’EST POUR RIEN 
A la différence de la relation plus dramatique avec Bernanos, l’amitié entre Jan 
Čep et Henri Pourrat n’a pas connu de ruptures lors des vingt-six années de son 
existence. Sans doute aussi grâce à l’amitié au sens large qui pour l’écrivain auver-
gnat représentait une valeur suprême permettant de surmonter les différences de 
caractères, pardonnant avec indulgence les longs silences de son homologue12.
Trois piliers fondamentaux portaient la voûte de leur amitié, l’amitié dans la-
quelle « la distance et le travail du temps n’est pour rien » (Ibid., 55) : campagne, 
littérature et foi. Incarnant les trois composantes essentielles de l’existence des deux 
hommes, la valeur de paysannerie, le métier de l’écrivain et la philosophie de vie, ces 
trois mots assuraient qu’ils pouvaient se sentir dans une « étonnante intimité ». 
Pour tous les deux, la campagne de leurs pays natal représente la majeure source 
d’inspiration, Pourrat donnant vie aux forêts et montagnes du Livradois, Čep pei-
gnant la plaine de Haná avec ses chemins entre les champs dorés de blé. Mais 
l’univers paysan, en voie de disparition, représente aussi un trésor qui vaut d’être 
sauvé pour l’avenir. Les « choses vertes » de la nature et la « sève », cette sagesse 
paysanne, sont pour Pourrat une vraie culture de vie dont le fruit serait des rela-
tions interhumaines de meilleure qualité, moins dégradées par les atteintes néga-
tives de la civilisation urbaine. C’est pourquoi il souligne toujours à ses amis l’ori-
gine paysanne de Čep13. D’où aussi le rapport ambivalent des deux hommes envers 
la métropole française, ce Paris « redoutable et démoralisant » (Pourrat), « ce laby-
rinthe désespérant » (Čep). Refusant de participer à « cette énorme comédie so-
ciale » où « il s’agit d’établir son importance, de marquer son rang […] » (cité par 
Lauras, 1996, 50), Pourrat décida déjà en 1931 de ne plus fréquenter la capitale, lui 
préférant la vie retirée d’Ambert. Quant à l’exilé Čep, fixé à Paris pour le reste de 
sa vie, il n’est devenu, selon ses propres mots, qu’un «  mauvais Parisien ».
Le christianisme, leur foi chrétienne, joue le rôle de deuxième pont entre les 
deux hommes. Pour tous deux elle est une force mobile de leurs vies, auxquelles 
elle donne son plein sens. Tandis que pour Pourrat elle est un élément stabilisateur 
12 C’est l’amitié qui a permis à Pourrat de sortir de la crise profonde dans laquelle l’a enfoncé sa ma-
ladie et le drame de la Première Guerre mondiale. Il partage sa découverte dans la lettre à Joseph 
Desaymard du 11 avril 1923 : « Il y longtemps, depuis la guerre, que je suis tenté de dire le monde 
mauvais et de juger tout, le monde, la vie et tout, de façon pessimiste. Progressivement j’accentue, 
– ce qui ne veut pas dire du tout que j’ai des idées noires. Et je ne vois qu’une manière de s’en tirer, 
de se sauver : par amitié. Je suis arrivé à ces conclusions de 4 ou 5 façons différentes, mais je le vois 
encore mieux à cette heure, c’est par amitiés, par l’amitié, sous toutes ses formes (la patrie, l’esprit 
religieux, chrétien) qu’on peut donner un sens et du prix à la vie… » (cité par Lauras, 1996, 32).
13 « C’est un paysan, fils du paysan, et dont le frère reste fermier. » ; « […] il est de famille paysanne, 
il a labouré, gardé les vaches. » (Pourrat – Gachon III, 1994, 14, 47).
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161Le sage et son mystique
qui se manifeste par les vertus de confiance et d’espérance, pour Čep elle révèle 
notamment le paradoxe pascalien de l’incommensurabilité entre l’imperfection 
et l’insuffisance de l’homme et l’humanité pleine et parfaite incarnée par Jésus 
Christ. La foi ouvre ainsi pour Čep un abîme entre l’idéal de sainteté et l’existence 
corrompue de l’homme pécheur. D’où son sentiment de culpabilité, ses scrupules 
extrêmes, ses autocritiques permanentes. Ces conséquences opposées de la façon 
individuelle de vivre la foi, n’empêchent pas pour autant d’avoir les mêmes convic-
tions profondes, la même vision des choses essentielles de la vie et de la mort. 
La troisième clé de voûte dans l’amitié entre les deux hommes fut leur métier 
d’écrivain, la création littéraire. Malgré les différences apparentes de projets artis-
tiques – ouvrages bariolés et de grande envergure chez Pourrat (Gaspard, Trésor 
des contes) contre la forme brève de la nouvelle à thèmes répétitifs chez Čep – ; de 
méthode aussi – pour Pourrat l’écriture est l’affaire de volonté, il écrit péniblement 
en réécrivant et biffant abondamment, nécessitant de menu brouillons avant de 
donner la version définitive tandis que Čep semble avoir plus d’aisance d’écriture, 
si l’on en juge par l’observation de ses manuscrits d’où les ratures sont quasiment 
absentes – ; ils ont une conception similaire de la poésie, du rôle de la littérature et 
de l’écrivain. Leur œuvre à tous les deux n’est d’ailleurs pas concevable sans le fon-
dement de leur foi chrétienne, elle en est nourrie et portée sans toutefois en res-
sortir comme un élément incongru. L’éloge prononcé par Čep à propos de la Bien-
heureuse Passion pourrait représenter le comble de l’art pour les deux écrivains :
Vous avez su parler en poète, vous exprimer en langage très concret, très proche, 
très actuel. Vous avez fait sentir que le christianisme est une chose vivante et qui 
demande d’être vécue pour être comprise ; qu’il est infiniment plus qu’une phi-
losophie : qu’il doit être la vie même, ou il n’est rien. (Pourrat – Čep, 2014, 113)
Grâce à ces trois piliers – campagne, foi, création littéraire – et en dépit de toutes 
leurs dissemblances, la relation entre Henri Pourrat et Jan Čep fait partie des plus 
belles amitiés littéraires qui aient pu se nouer dans l’histoire des échanges culturels 
franco-tchèques.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Dalet, Claude. « Les correspondances d’Henri Pourrat », Cahiers Henri Pourrat 25, 
Actes du cinquantenaire de la mort de l’écrivain II, Clermont-Ferrand, Société 
des Amis d’Henri Pourrat, 2011, p. 9-19.
Florian, Josef – Čep, Jan. Correspondance, inédit, archives d’auteur.
Halévy, Daniel – Pourrat, Henri. Correspondance, manuscrit inédit du Centre 
Henri Pourrat, Bibliothèque du Patrimoine, Clermont-Ferrand.
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162 Jan Zatloukal
Lauras, Annette. Les travaux et les jours d’Henri Pourrat, Bouère, Dominique Mar-
tin Morin, 1996.
Morzenowski, Christian. « Présentation de la correspondance Henri Pourrat – 
Henri Bosco 1933-1958 », Cahiers Henri Pourrat 25, Actes du cinquantenaire 
de la mort de l’écrivain II, Clermont-Ferrand, Société des Amis d’Henri Pour-
rat, 2011, p. 25-45.
Pourrat, Henri. L’émigré, manuscrit du Centre Henri Pourrat (cote HP 38), Bibli-
othèque du Patrimoine, Clermont-Ferrand.
Pourrat, Henri. Cahiers journaliers, volume 14 du 1/1/1932 au 16/9/1939, manu-
scrit du Centre Henri Pourrat, Bibliothèque du Patrimoine, Clermont-Ferrand.
Pourrat, Henri – Čep, Jan. Correspondance (1932-1958). Ce n’est qu’un mot pour 
l ’amitié, Zatloukal, Jan (ed.), Cahiers Henri Pourrat 29, Clermont-Ferrand, So-
ciété des Amis d’Henri Pourrat, 2014.
Pourrat, Henri – Gachon, Lucien. Correspondance (1934-1939). Dalet, Claude 
(ed.), Cahiers Henri Pourrat 12, Clermont-Ferrand, Société des Amis d’Henri 
Pourrat, 1994.
Pourrat, Henri – Gachon, Lucien. Correspondance (1942-1946). Dalet, Claude 
(ed.), Cahiers Henri Pourrat 14, Clermont-Ferrand, Société des Amis d’Henri 
Pourrat, 1996.
Renaud, Suzanne – Pourrat, Henri. Correspondance (1947-1959), Auzimour, An-
nick, Lauras, Annette (eds.), Grenoble, Romarin, 2001.
Šalda, František Xaver. «  Jitřní zrak  », Šaldův zápisník, année VII, 1934-35, p. 
128-130.
Vialatte, Alexandre – Pourrat, Henri. Correspondance. Les Grandes Espérances 
(1928-1934), tome 4, Hadjadj, Dany (éd.), Clermont-Ferrand, Pu Blaise Pas-
cale, 2006.
Vialatte, Alexandre – Pourrat, Henri. Correspondance. De Paris à Héliopolis, mars 
1935-juillet 1939, tome 5, Coyault, Sylviane, Spiquel, Agnès (eds.), Cler-
mont-Ferrand, Pu Blaise Pascale, 2008.
Wiendl, Jan. « Cesta k umění Jana Čepa. Zastavení druhé nad povídkou Cesta na 
jitřní », in Hledači krásy a řádu. Studie skici k české literatuře 20. století, Filozofická 
fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, Praha, 2014, p. 195-207.
Wiendl, Jan. Sulla via per l ’arte di Jan Čep, Baiocchi, Paolo (trad.), Udine, Forum, 
2013.
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d’études slaves, 2014.
Jan Zatloukal
L’Université d’Olomuc, la Tchéquie
jan.zatloukal@upol.cz
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163Le sage et son mystique
Modrec in njegov mistik� Pogled na korespondenco med Henrijem 
Pourratom in Janom Čepom
Henri Pourrat (1887-1959) je neločljivo povezan s svojo pokrajino Auvergne, njegovo 
delo in osebnost sta tam pustila neizbrisen pečat. Čeprav je njegov vpliv po drugi svetovni 
vojni postopoma bledel, ga je mogoče meriti s pravo množico pisem, ki si jih je izmenjal z 
neštetimi dopisovalci. Kot pisatelj je užival ugled, katerega uspeh je bil potrjen s podelit-
vijo Velike nagrade za roman Francoske akademije za celotno delo Gaspard des montagnes 
leta 1931 in s podelitvijo naziva Chevalier de la Légion d‘honneur leta 1928. 
Jan Čep (1902-1974) je bil prevajalec njegovih del v češki jezik. Pourrat mu je bil 
naklonjen zaradi pesniškega navdiha, ki ga je Čep črpal iz istih virov kot on sam, tj. iz 
rustikalnega sveta podeželja, iz njegovih mitov in legend. Pourrat je Čepa dojemal kot 
mističnega, saj njegovo delo izvira iz globoke metafizične razsežnosti. Vera je tako med 
njima igrala vlogo mostu. Za oba je gonilna sila njunih življenj. Gre za polni literarni in 
duhovni stik, na katerega opozarja ta članek.
Ključne besede: Henri Pourrat, Jan Čep, Gaspard des montagnes, navdih kmetstva, mistika, 
metafizika
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165
La tension est-ouest comme ressort 
dramatique chez deux écrivains  
francophones d’origine chinoise 
Florence Gacoin-Marks
Synopsis
Dans le présent article, nous nous proposons donc de définir en quels termes la relation 
« est-ouest » s’articule dans deux romans écrits par des écrivains francophones d’origine 
chinoise à la fin du XXe : Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu de Ya Ding (1990) et Le Dit de Tian-yi de 
François Cheng (1998). Dans les deux cas, l’expérience de la rencontre entre les cultures 
française et chinoise est un ressort entre les cultures française et chinoise est un ressort 
dramatique essentiel et crée dans la littérature créée en France un espace littérature spéci-
fique, une sorte « d’entre-deux » que l’on peut considérer comme un sous-genre littéraire 
à part entière.
Mots-clés : littératures francophones, imagologie, relations est-ouest, écrivains fran-
co-chinois, Ya Ding, François Cheng, Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu, Le Dit de Tianyi
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 821.133.1.09-31
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.165-178
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166 Florence Gacoin-Marks
INTRODUCTION
En tant que terre d’accueil choisie par de nombreux exilés, la France a vu sa culture 
s’enrichir de nouveaux écrivains venus d’ailleurs mais écrivant en français à l’atten-
tion du lectorat francophone. Bien qu’étant dans une situation très différente, ces 
écrivains francophones ont en commun avec les autres, qui vivent hors de France, 
le fait d’introduire dans la littérature française un ailleurs, celui dont ils viennent, et 
d’approfondir la réflexion sur les relations entre cet ailleurs et la culture française.1
Le cas des écrivains chinois vivant en France et créant en français est parti-
culièrement intéressant du fait que la distance entre les deux cultures impliquées, 
plus largement entre l’Orient et l’Occident, est suffisamment grande pour per-
mettre une réflexion complète sur tous les aspects constituant une culture au sens 
large, depuis les plus quotidiens (les us et coutumes) aux plus abstraits (la concep-
tion de l’art, la philosophie de la vie). Mieux encore, dans leurs romans, la tension 
Est-Ouest remplit la fonction de ressort dramatique autour duquel s’organise l’in-
trigue dans son ensemble.
Dans le présent article, nous nous proposons donc de définir en quels termes la 
relation « est-ouest » s’articule dans deux romans écrits par des écrivains franco-
phones d’origine chinoise à la fin du XXe siècle : Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu de Ya Ding 
(1990) et Le Dit de Tian-yi de François Cheng (1998). Bien qu’elle soit théma-
tisée et interprétée différemment, cette rencontre entre l’Orient et l’Occident au 
cœur de ces deux œuvres présente un certain nombre de similitudes sur lesquelles 
il conviendra de s’arrêter.
Mais tout d’abord revenons sur l’intrigue développée dans les deux œuvres 
étudiées. Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu se présente comme un roman initiatique relatant 
l’arrivée du héros chinois en France et ses premières années d’exil. Il s’organise 
autour de trois relations sentimentales, de trois femmes, qui sont autant d’étapes 
dans son expérience de la vie en Occident. L’expérience s’achève sur une sépara-
tion (la troisième femme lui échappe et part pour l’Inde) et une intégration ratée 
à la culture occidentale. Dans Le Dit de Tian-yi, le narrateur transmet au lecteur 
le journal d’une de ses connaissances, le peintre Tian-yi, qu’il a connu alors qu’il 
vivait lui-même « le dur apprentissage de l’exil » en France. Cet exil est relaté dans 
la partie centrale du livre. Après avoir opéré la synthèse des cultures orientale et 
occidentale dans ses propres œuvres picturales, le héros rentre en Chine à l’époque 
de la révolution culturelle. 
Dans ces deux romans sur l’exil, la rencontre entre les cultures orientale et oc-
cidentale se déroule en trois étapes : la connaissance des stéréotypes chinois sur 
1 La présente monographie est le fruit de recherches effectuées dans le cadre du programme de 
recherche n° P6-0265, cofinancé à l’aide des fonds publics gérés par l’Agence nationale pour la 
recherche de la République de Slovénie.
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167La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
l’Occident, la rencontre avec la culture occidentale avant le départ pour la France 
et l’expérience immédiate de la rencontre directe entre l’Orient et l’Occident (ex-
périence du voyage ou de l’exil). Cet axe croissant ou ascendant est également un 
ressort dramatique important dans les deux œuvres étudiées parlant de l’exil.
CLICHÉS CROISÉS EST-OUEST
La représentation d’une culture étrangère en littérature est ce que le comparatiste 
français Daniel-Henri Pageaux appelle une image littéraire, c’est-à-dire « un en-
semble d’idées sur l’étranger prises dans un processus de littéralisation, mais aussi 
de socialisation » (Pageaux 1994, 60). Parmi ces images, il y en a une qui particu-
lièrement forte, c’est celle du stéréotype, appelée aussi cliché. 
Le stéréotype tient aussi son importance au fait qu’il s’agit la plupart du temps 
du premier contact avec l’étranger. 
Or, comme l’explique Daniel-Henri Pageaux, le stéréotype repose sur quatre 
mécanismes : 
• sur la transformation des signes culturels en signaux ne renvoyant qu’à une 
seule interprétation,
• sur la confusion entre l’accessoire (adjectif, attribut) et l’essentiel,
• sur « un abrégé emblématique d’une culture » (généralisation abusive),
• sur la confusion entre Nature et Culture, entre Être et Faire (Pageaux 1994, 
62-63).
On retrouve ces quatre mécanismes dans les stéréotypes présentés dans les romans 
de François Cheng et Ya Ding.
Stéréotypes des Chinois sur l’Occident (et sur la France en 
particulier)
François Cheng et Ya Ding évoquent rapidement les stéréotypes chinois sur la 
France, mais c’est surtout pour dénoncer la fausse image qu’ils véhiculent.
Ainsi, malgré la Seconde guerre mondiale qui y fait rage, le monde occiden-
tal est idéalisé : « Appel de l’Occident. Ou plus exactement de l’Europe. Malgré 
l’atroce drame qui s’y passait, on ne pouvait s’empêcher de l’idéaliser, d’y voir un 
sol ‘béni des dieux’ » (Cheng 1998, 91). De même, Paris est représenté come une 
« ville lumière », ce qui déçoit le héros à son arrivée dans la capitale française : 
« Je fus frappé par la couleur terne des rues de Paris, contrastant avec l’image de 
cette ville lumière que mon imagination avait magnifié » (Cheng 1998, 211). Le 
charme de Paris est réel, mais il se trouve ailleurs (Cheng 1998, 211).
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168 Florence Gacoin-Marks
Liang, le héros de Ya Ding est nourri de stéréotypes quand il quitte la Chine : 
il « se souvient du texte que leur professeur leur avait fait apprendre par cœur pen-
dant sa première année de français. ‘Le béret sur la tête, la baguette de pain sous le 
bras, et si possible râleur, telle est l ’image du Français moyen’ » (Ding 1990, 41). Or, il 
constate bien vite que « [p]ersonne ne porte de béret sur la tête, ni de baguette de 
pain sous le bras » (Ding 1990, 41).
L’inadéquation entre les stéréotypes et la réalité a pour effet de déstabiliser le 
héros qui croyait faire irruption dans un monde connu et se retrouve plongé dans 
l’inconnu : « – Paris, Paris… Machinalement, Liang se répète ce nom comme celui 
d’une personne à la fois chère, familière et inconnue » (Ding 1990, 42). 
Cette nouvelle image lui donne le vertige, fait d’autant plus ressortir le poids de 
cet héritage culturel inconnu (Ding 1990, 43). Opaque, la population paraît hostile, 
perd de son humanité, est décrite comme des « regards froids », des « visages fermés » 
et des « pas pressés ». Cette impression d’être face à un « monde d’étrangers » lui 
fait prendre conscience de son propre statut d’étranger : « Mais non, c’est lui, Liang, 
l’étranger ». Liang ne sait plus non plus quelle est son identité dans ce monde où il 
ne sait plus qui sont les êtres humains autour de lui : « Comment est-il perçu par 
ces étrangers ? Un jeune Japonais ? Un Asiatique ? Ou tout simplement un garçon 
brun, un rien auquel on ne fait même pas attention ». Et ne sachant plus qui il est, 
il ne sait plus comment il doit se comporter : « Comment va-t-il réagir face à eux ? 
Marcher discrètement en rasant les murs ? Garder une allure humble et avenante ? 
Éviter leur regard ? Ou faut-il se comporter comme il aurait fait dans les rues de 
Pékin, en chantonnant, les mains dans les poches, en prenant l’air d’être le maître 
du monde ? » Il ne sait pas comment se positionner par rapport aux autres : « [Q]ue 
faut-il inspirer à ses interlocuteurs ? L’amour, la pitié, ou la force ? Quelle prise avoir 
sur cette foule inconnue ? » (Ding 1990, 41). Il est « [u] n étranger dans un monde 
d’étrangers. [Liang] se sent lointain et intrus parmi ces corps humains dont il parle 
à peine la langue et dont l’esprit secret lui est à jamais fermé » (Ding 1990, 53). Dé-
savoués par la réalité, les stéréotypes des Chinois sur l’Occident sont donc moins 
une source de connaissance qu’une source de désemparement pour l’étranger en exil. 
Stéréotypes des Français sur l’Asie (et sur la Chine en particulier)
Dans ce cas, il s’agit d’une image littéraire inversée et indirecte, puisque ce sont 
les écrivains chinois qui la rapportent dans leurs romans. Son importance n’est 
pas moindre du fait qu’elle renvoie à l’exilé chinois sa propre image déformée par 
l’incompréhension interculturelle et lui permet de mieux évaluer à la fois ce qui 
séparent les cultures française et chinoise et quelle est la place qui lui est assignée 
au départ dans le pays où il est amené à vivre.
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169La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
« D’autres fins esprits, se targuant d’être connaisseurs, décrétèrent devant moi 
ce qu’est la pensée chinoise, la poésie chinoise, l’art chinois. Après les avoir 
écoutés, j’ai fini par saisir ce qu’ils exigeaient d’un Chinois. Qu’il soit cet être à 
l’esprit planant, vierge de tourments et dénué d’interrogations, au visage lisse et 
plat, béatement souriant, fait d’une autre substance que la chair et le sang. Son 
langage doit être délié, naturel, sans efforts accumulés, sans formes construites, 
d’une simplicité un peu naïve et son propos doit se ramener à quelque aimable 
sagesse » (Cheng 1998, 214-215).
Tan-yi déduit de ces stéréotypes – qui ne correspondent pas du tout à sa propre 
personnalité – le comportement qu’il doit adopter : « je me répétais qu’il faudrait 
désormais que je m’applique à être chinois, à me conformer à l’idée qu’on se fait 
d’un Chinois » (Cheng 1998, 215).
Le stéréotype décrit par Ya Ding dans son roman est un peu différent. Un per-
sonnage français décrit la Chine en ces termes : « C’est un pays si vaste, si mysté-
rieux, il est rempli de richesse et d’esprit. Les hommes de là-bas sont fins et sen-
suels ». Confronté à cette généralisation abusive, le héros comprend ce qui sépare 
l’Est de l’Ouest  : «  Je ne savais pas comment vous, les Occidentaux, vous nous 
voyiez ; nous sommes si lointains, si différents » (Ding 1990, 152). La généralisa-
tion abusive creuse les différences au lieu de les combler.
Fait intéressant : comme le remarque Muriel Détrie, la Chine décrite par les 
écrivains chinois vivant en France, une Chine rendue atemporelle par l’expérience 
de l’exil, « correspond plus ou moins à l’image idéale que les Français se font de la 
Chine traditionnelle sur la foi de certains romanciers français comme José Frèches 
qui puisent eux aussi leur inspiration dans la Chine historique ou légendaire  » 
(2004, 65).
LA RENCONTRE AVEC LA CULTURE OCCIDENTALE :  
ÉMOI PHYSIQUE, TRANSGRESSION MORALE ET CHOC 
DES CONTRAIRES
La Chine pré-communiste de Tian-yi est en contact avec la culture occidentale 
dont elle apprécie les apports dans tous les domaines. François Cheng revient 
sur l’histoire de la traduction des littératures occidentales en chinois, rappelant la 
phrase de l’intellectuel et écrivain Lu Xun conseillant aux jeunes de lire « le moins 
possible de livres chinois et le plus possible de livres étrangers » (Cheng 1998, 87), 
précisément pour élargir son horizon.
La véritable première rencontre directe avec la culture occidentale a donc lieu 
en Chine même, lorsque les jeunes Chinois se familiarisent avec les produits et 
les œuvres de cette culture, depuis le fumet des viennoiseries jusqu’aux romans 
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170 Florence Gacoin-Marks
de Balzac, en passant par les tableaux de Cézanne ou Van Gogh et les sympho-
nies de Dvořák ou Beethoven. Cette culture se présente tout d’abord comme 
une culture touchant tous les sens, qui bouleverse le corps, comme une culture 
transgressive, voire interdite et enfin comme une culture bouleversant l’esprit par 
sa représentation de la réalité, très contrastée par rapport à celle proposée par la 
culture chinoise. 
Une culture très « physique », mais transgressive, voire interdite
Tian-yi, le héros de François Cheng, découvre la culture occidentale dès son en-
fance. Celle-ci se présente à lui comme une culture très « physique », s’adressant à 
tous ses sens. Ainsi, il découvre les tableaux du Louvre grâce à des cartes postales 
rapportées par une tante :
Parmi les choses qu’elle avait rapportées de France et qu’elle nous montra en 
vrac, mon regard s’arrêta sur des cartes reproduisant des œuvres du musée du 
Louvre […], peintures représentant des nus, notamment deux tableaux, ayant 
pour figure principale une femme nue vue de dos. […] Oui, ces femmes nues, 
au cœur superbe, les premières que je voyais de ma vie, si étrangères et qui pour-
tant avaient instantanément remué en moi le sang le plus intime, comment les 
oublierais-je désormais ? (Cheng 1998, 47-48).
Physique, la culture occidentale est également considérée comme licencieuse et 
transgressive dans ce monde évitant toute mise à nu du corps comme des senti-
ments. Ainsi, les cartes postales du Louvre sont « ramassées en hâte par les grandes 
personnes présentes, surprises, outrées » (Cheng 1998, 47), comme si ces tableaux 
étaient des images pornographiques. Et il ne fait aucun doute qu’une partie de 
leur charme vient de cette transgressivité. Dans tous les cas, elles restent gravées à 
jamais dans l’esprit du personnage, elles l’ont ému « au point de tracer des sillons 
dans mon imaginaire » (Cheng 1998, 48). Fait amusant : il est plus impressionné 
par les dos nus plus que par les seins, partie du corps qu’il a déjà vue à plusieurs 
reprises quand les femmes chinoises allaitaient leur enfant.
On retrouve cette idée de la transgressivité de la culture occidentale plus tard, 
au cinéma : 
Les scènes d’amour, avec des femmes montrant sans retenue leurs attraits, et 
les baisers prolongés transperçaient la carapace de pudeur des Chinois jusqu’à 
la douleur. Dans le noir, les spectateurs subissaient le choc d’abord avec gêne 
et stupeur, puis avec ravissement  : ils sentaient le sang bouillir dans leurs 
veines et les fanges enfouies de leur imaginaire remonter à la surface (Cheng 
1998, 116). 
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171La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
Là encore, l’image passe par le corps pour frapper l’imaginaire.
Plus prosaïquement, la culture étrangère parle tant à l’odorat qu’à la vue du 
jeune garçon quand il passe à côté d’une boulangerie française : « Moment de pur 
ravissement pour moi  ! Enveloppé de la chaude odeur retrouvée, je n’étais plus 
qu’yeux face aux choses lumineuses exposées dans les vitrines » (Cheng 1998, 94). 
Cette impression est complétée par un autre sens, le goût, subjugué par une « sa-
veur exotique » indéfinissable, mais « conforme à ce que j’avais intensément imagi-
né. » Il tire de cette première expérience un principe de vie qui ne le quittera plus : 
« En somme, la satisfaction de tout désir est dans le désir lui-même » (Cheng 
1998, 96). Il retrouvera plus tard cette idée chez Gide, dont la lecture permet aux 
jeunes Chinois d’éprouver dans leur corps «  l’expression favorite de l’écrivain ‘la 
soif étanchée’ », l’idée que « l’accomplissement de l’homme est dans le désir lui-
même » (Cheng 1998, 132). Par ailleurs, il est désormais « préparé à accueillir tout 
ce qui venait de plus loin » (Cheng 1998, 96).
Plus tard, l’intrusion de la culture occidentale en plein cœur de la Chine 
pré-communiste touche un nouveau sens du jeune homme : l’ouïe. En découvrant 
La Symphonie pastorale, Tian-yi y perçoit des « accents si souverains et conqué-
rants  ». Tandis que la musique chinoise est «  retenue et confidentielle, souvent 
plaintive », la musique occidentale « n’accompagne pas la nature ; il en déchire la 
peau, en transperce la chair pour ne devenir la pulsation même ». C’est donc dans 
son corps que le jeune homme ressent la culture occidentale : « Cette fois-ci, j’étais 
atteint au plus intime, au creux de mes entrailles » (Cheng 1998, 98)
La culture occidentale se définit donc avant tout par sa surabondance phy-
sique : elle est « matière » et « glorifie le visible », se différenciant ainsi de la culture 
extrême-orientale qui « par réductions successives, cherche à atteindre l’essence 
insipide où l’intime de soi rejoint l’intime de l’univers » (Cheng 1998, 96). Cette 
très grande différence a en partie pour origine le fonctionnement différent des 
langues chinoise et européennes. Comme l’explique François Cheng dans l’un de 
ses essais, « si les idéogrammes chinois suggèrent les choses qu’ils désignent par 
leurs graphies, les mots français, phonétiques, suggèrent les choses désignées par 
leur son. […] Chaque mot possède un rythme, une mélodie, capable de susciter en 
moi une image souvent très incarnée » (Cheng 2015, 29-30).
Après l’avènement du maoïsme intervient la première censure de la culture oc-
cidentale : « Pour ce qui concerne l’art occidental, on n’étudie plus que les peintres 
dont les thèmes paraissent ‘sûrs’, qui ont un contenu social : Le Nain, Millet, De-
lactroix pour avoir traité d’un rare sujet révolutionnaire, Courbet pour avoir par-
ticipé à la Commune de Paris » (Cheng 1998, 314). La sélection se fait selon des 
critères purement politiques, et non esthétiques, ce qui met fin au pouvoir de l’in-
fluence occidentale sur la culture chinoise. 
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Une culture qui bouscule la représentation de la réalité humaine
Sur un plan plus spirituel, la culture occidentale bouscule la représentation de la 
réalité humaine à laquelle les Chinois ont été habitués par leur propre culture. 
Dans le roman de François Cheng, le jeune peintre Tian-yi a le sentiment que 
la culture chinoise de son temps connaît une période de stagnation, qu’elle n’ap-
porte plus rien de nouveau. Selon lui, « [p]our le moment, le salut vient d’ailleurs, de 
l’étranger. Et en premier lieu, de l’Occident. C’est là qu’ont été formulées les interro-
gations et accomplies des créations que nous n’avons pas faites et que nous ne pou-
vons pas contourner » (Cheng 1998, 103). Cependant, le héros avertit le lecteur qu’il 
ne s’agit pas de prêter allégeance aveuglément à un Occident dont les travers ont ap-
porté tant de souffrances dans le monde, y compris en Asie, mais de se plonger dans 
les œuvres des « vrais créateurs, de ceux qui tentent justement de dévoiler le vrai. 
Leurs cris ou leurs chants, dans la liberté conquise, proprement inouïs pour nous, 
déchirent notre horizon. Oui, il faut bien cet extrême autre pour nous secouer, pour 
nous arracher à la partie dégénérée, pourrie, de nos racines » (Cheng 1998, 104).
Comme en Sibérie orientale, dans le roman Au temps du fleuve Amour (1994) 
de l’écrivain francophone d’origine russe Andreï Makine, c’est au cinéma que la 
culture occidentale apparaît dans toute sa différence, dans toute sa vitalité (Cheng 
1998, 115). Le film américain des années trente, dans toute son exubérance, fas-
cine les jeunes chinois. La culture chinoise semble statique, c’est donc la vitalité 
et le dynamisme de la culture occidentale au cours de l’histoire (Ding 1990, 74).
Changement constant, profusion des idées, c’est ce qui séduit le jeune Chinois, 
notamment chez Van Gogh : « je me sentais proche de Van Gogh, de cette repré-
sentation fragmentée des formes, de cette alchimie audacieuse des couleurs et de 
cette vision personnelle captée au cœur même du temps vécu ! Son œuvre réson-
nait en moi comme un appel fraternel. Ce bas monde, aussi provisoire soit-il, de-
mande à être exprimé. Malgré mon dénuement, je le ferai par la peinture » (Cheng 
1998, 105). Et c’est d’ailleurs ce qui va le pousser à intégrer cette culture par le 
biais de sa propre activité créatrice : « Avec toute la sympathie que je nourrissais 
pour Cézanne, pour Kandinsky, pour Klee, je devrais pouvoir sans trop de mal me 
glisser parmi mes contemporains, dans cet Occident en proie aux changements 
rapides, qui ne jurait que par la nouveauté » (Cheng 2015, 263).
Notons que, au départ, le jeune Tian-yi s’initie à la culture occidentale par l’in-
termédiaire de la culture la moins éloignée géographiquement : « La musique de 
Dvorak, originaire d’Europe centrale, avait pour effet de rendre moins lointain 
d’Occident extrême, en sorte que la terre russe paraissait presque proche » (Cheng 
1998, 102). 
Comme nous l’avons déjà vu, la littérature française, de Gide à Rimbaud, 
montre à Tian-yi que « l’accomplissement du désir de l’homme se trouve dans le 
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173La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
désir lui-même » (Cheng 1998, 132). Cette vision des choses va par la suite condi-
tionner sa lecture critique de Proust : « Contrairement à Proust, j’aurais écrit : ‘À 
la recherche du temps à venir ‘. La loi du temps, du moins ma loi à moi […] n’était 
pas dans l’accompli, dans l’achevé, mais dans le différé, l’inachevé » (Cheng 1998, 
206). Cet enseignement livresque permet au héros de mieux comprendre et expri-
mer l’histoire vécue avec l’Amante, la femme qu’il désirera sans jamais la posséder, 
rappelle un thème récurrent chez Gide, celui de l’amour inassouvi, au centre de La 
Porte étroite, notamment.
La culture occidentale exerce donc une influence d’autant plus considérable 
qu’elle fait bouger les lignes, apporte une réponse aux interrogations des jeunes 
Chinois sur la vitalité et le désir propres à leur âge et dont la culture chinoise, sclé-
rosée par les vicissitudes de l’histoire, ne parle pas. Cette culture vient donc com-
bler un manque.
Confrontation des mentalités: différences concernant les 
relations sociales
Les deux romans étudiés abordent le thème de l’exil. Munis des connaissances sur 
la culture occidentale acquises avant le départ de Chine, le personnage nouvelle-
ment arrivé à Paris se trouve confronté aux différences culturelles. Dans le roman 
de Ya Ding, cette question occupe une place centrale, tandis qu’elle n’est pratique-
ment pas abordée par François Cheng dans Le Dit de Tian-yi. 
Le récit du séjour de Liang à Paris est émaillé de constatation concernant les 
différences entre l’Orient et l’Occident en matière de relations sociales. Liang finit 
par en déduire qu’ « il a bien des choses à apprendre et à avaler s’il veut vivre en 
France ! » (Ding 1990, 278). Les conventions sociales diffèrent beaucoup. En voici 
un exemple parmi tant d’autres :
[E]n Occident, même entre amis, on ne se raconte pas tout, lui avait dit son 
professeur de français dès sa première année. C’est juste, d’ailleurs ; en Chine, 
tout est si public que chacun est pour l’autre comme une ampoule de mille kilo-
watts, et ne laisse aucune ombre sur sa vie privée (Ding 1990, 201).
Parfois, ces différences comportementales fascinent Liang par leur caractère so-
phistiqué : « Les Français ont l’habitude d’être en retard, pour se faire désirer, pour 
se montrer désintéressés, pour faire avancer les autres vers eux… Quel art des re-
lations, quelle subtilité d’esprit ! » (Ding 1990, 277).
Mais, en d’autres occasions, la vision occidentale des choses déçoit le jeune 
chinois. Constatent que personne ne songe à le retenir de faire une bêtise, il dé-
nonce l’hypocrisie consistant à faire mine de respecter la liberté de l’autre : « Alors 
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174 Florence Gacoin-Marks
c’est ça, l’Occident. On lâche facilement un ami sur la mauvaise voie, avec la meil-
leure des bonnes consciences, puisqu’on respecte l’indépendance de l’autre » (Ding 
1990, 269).
Dans tous les cas, ces différences entravent l’intercompréhension entre Liang 
et les Français qu’il est amené à côtoyer à Paris : « Il n’est vraiment pas dans son 
pays. Au moment où il croit avoir compris quelque chose, tout change » (Ding 
1990, 201). Le jeune chinois ne sait comment interpréter l’attitude de certains de 
ses interlocuteurs. Par exemple, une femme française qui appelle régulièrement un 
garçon est-elle amoureuse (comme le serait une femme chinoise se conduisant de 
la même manière) ? De même, un jeune homme peut-il téléphoner souvent à une 
fille sans avoir l’air de l’importuner (ce qui est « très mal vu en Chine) ?
Les relations sociales sont également compliquées par les différences linguis-
tiques. Ainsi, pour s’excuser de ne pas avoir assez pris en considération un éditeur 
parisien, le personnage se souvient de ce qu’il dirait en chinois, mais reste muet en 
français : « Mes yeux aveugles ne savent pas reconnaître la montagne Tai, disent 
toujours les Chinois pour s’excuser devant les grands personnages qu’ils ont négli-
gés par ignorance. Mais comment traduire cela en français ? » (Ding 1990, 252-
253). De même, face à l’utilisation généralisée du pronom possessif en français, le 
personnage finit par comprendre que cette catégorie de mots « n’a apparemment 
pas le même sens qu’en chinois » (Ding 1990, 267).
En réalité, la différence la principale différence entre les mentalités occidentale 
et chinoise semble d’ordre philosophique : le caractère entier des Occidentaux, où 
l’opposition entre le « oui » et le « non » est très nette, s’oppose catégoriquement à 
la recherche incessante de l’équilibre, du compromis, propre à la culture chinoise. 
Le personnage prend conscience de cette différence fondamentale en observant la 
forme du loquet d’une porte :
[I]l a été trompé par la forme du loquet qui est d’une courbe verticale. C’est 
un signe qui réveille chez les Chinois leur instinct de prendre la contrepartie, 
et d’appuyer vers le bas pour rééquilibrer les choses. […] Cela veut dire que 
l’instinct des Français est de continuer ce qui a déjà ét[é] fait dans un premier 
mouvement. Ils ont la mentalité de pousser les choses vers l’extrême, tandis 
que chez nous, se dit Liang, on ramène plutôt les choses vers leur état prim-
itif  ; deux esprits différents, l’un allant vers l’extrême, et l’autre vers l’équili-
bre (Ding 1990, 53).
Plus tard, il en fait la triste expérience lorsqu’il vexe un éditeur parisien par 
son indécision, interprétée comme du désintérêt, et non comme une marque de 
sérieux et de modestie comme en Chine (Ding 1990, 253). La rencontre directe 
avec la culture occidentale est source de difficultés dans tous les domaines de 
l’existence.
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175La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
DÉNOUEMENT DE LA RENCONTRE EST-OUEST : 
RECONCILIATION DES CONTRAIRES OU ILLUSIONS 
PERDUES ?
La rencontre est-ouest, ressort dramatique essentiel des deux œuvres romanesques 
étudiées, connaît deux dénouements très distincts.
L’échec de l’intégration: l’impossible cohabitation des contraire 
(Liang) 
Les difficultés que connaît Liang, le personnage du Jeu de l’eau et du feu, sont 
telles que le jeune homme « ouvre sa bouche, il a envie de cracher, cracher hors de 
lui son sang ou son âme chinoise ! » (Ding 1990, 211).
Dans son cas, l’issu du processus est malheureuse. Le seul moment de bonheur 
total connu par le personnage se produit lors d’un séjour au ski, dans le téléphé-
rique : « Dans cette ascension à ciel ouvert, Liang plonge dans un autre monde ; 
quittant la France, quittant cette terre, il retrouve la sienne, identique à lui, à son 
âme » (Ding 1990, 236). Un peu comme le héros d’Illusions perdues de Balzac, le 
héros n’a rien fait comme il le fallait pour réussir sur le plan professionnel et sen-
timental et se retrouve à la fin du roman dans le plus grand dénuement. Ayant 
échoué en tant qu’écrivain, il perd également la femme avec laquelle il pensait 
effectuer la synthèse entre l’Orient et l’Occident. Trop transformé par son ex-
périence pour pouvoir réintégrer la société chinoise et trop peu transformé pour 
avoir réussi à s’intégrer à la société française, il n’a plus d’identité : « Il n’existe plus, 
ni pour la Chine, ni pour la France ! » (Ding 1990, 289), « [il] n’a plus de chez lui, 
il n’a plus de patrie » (Ding 1990, 339). Dans son désespoir, le personnage imagine 
les conséquences de son acculturation sur son père, le voyant en pensée « [r]avagé 
par les difficultés de la vie, confit dans sa faiblesse, il se reconnaît plus ce fils occi-
dentalisé, traître à la sagesse, à la tradition millénaire, habitué au confort, au goût 
étranger, et aspirant à la passion. Un fils perdu ! » (Ding 1990, 339). La chaîne de 
la tradition – si importante dans la culture chinoise – se trouve brisée. 
La réconciliation des cultures chinoise et occidentale grâce à 
l’art (Tian-yi)
Au départ, Tian-yi, le héros de François Cheng, connaît des difficultés ana-
logues à celles rencontrées par Liang. Perdu dans Paris, il ne reprend espoir 
qu’après avoir retrouvé en plein cœur de la capitale française une nourriture fa-
milière (une soupe chinoise aux nouilles). Il s’écrit alors : « Oui, j’apprendrai à 
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176 Florence Gacoin-Marks
aimer cette ville où je vais vivre un certain temps. J’apprendrai à aimer ce pays 
qui se trouve au cœur de l’Europe occidentale. Ce sera une longue initiation. En 
attendant, il faut passer – je le pressens, je le sais déjà – par le purgatoire, sinon 
par l’enfer » (Cheng 2015, 212).
C’est le cheminement artistique qui sauvera le jeune peintre du sort mal-
heureux subi par Liang. Accaparé par l’idée de réconcilier tradition chinoise et 
peinture occidentale, il ne s’arrêtera pas aux difficultés liées à l’exil mais fera sur 
lui-même un travail de fond pour effectuer la synthèse entre les deux cultures 
en présence. Tout part des paroles du maître chinois qui enseigne ce qu’il maî-
trise, la tradition picturale chinoise : « D’abord, donc, posséder ce que la tradi-
tion offre de meilleur » (Cheng 2015, 231). La connaissance de sa propre culture 
n’est pas « un carcan », « un enfermement sur soi », elle est la base sur laquelle 
fonder sa liberté et se préparer « à la vraie rencontre avec un autre, à l’affronter 
sans se perdre » (Cheng 2015, 176). Le jeune chinois ne s’éloignera pas de ce 
chemin : « M’étant déjà familiarisé avec la méthode chinoise des ‘trois couches 
et cinq points’, j’étudiais avec application aux Beaux-Arts la manière occidentale 
de dessiner les portraits. » (Cheng 2015, 231). Il en est de même quand il ad-
mire la peinture italienne lors d’un court séjour à Florence et à Rome : « C’était 
fort de ma propre tradition et de mon expérience à Dunhuang que je parvins 
finalement à affronter cette autre peinture ; faute de quoi je me serais senti écra-
ser » (Cheng 2015, 243). C’est la culture étrangère qui permet au personnage 
de renouer avec ce qui fait l’essence de sa propre culture et d’apprécier à sa juste 
valeur – après l’avoir minoré - le rôle spécifique de cette dernière dans l’his-
toire (Cheng 2015, 250). C’est parce qu’il a réussi dans son esprit et ses propres 
œuvres la synthèse entre les cultures chinoise et occidentale que Tian-yi sort 
triomphant de son expérience d’exil interrompu par un retour en Chine pour 
raisons sentimentales. 
Néanmoins, on peut se demander si cette expérience réussie ne causera pas in-
directement sa perte en l’empêchant de s’adapter aux restrictions et à l’enferme-
ment caractérisant l’ère de la Révolution culturelle. Comme l’écrit Muriel Détrie, « 
[n]ourris de références françaises ou marqués par leur séjour en France, les person-
nages revendiquent le droit à la liberté, à l’individualisme ou à l’amour, se coupant 
par là de leur pays d’origine où ces mêmes droits ne sont guère reconnus » (2004, 
65). Lors du retour en Chine, Tian-yi doit faire face à cette saisissante régression. 
CONCLUSION
Les Chinois de l’ère contemporaine ont en commun d’être en contact indirect 
ou direct avec la culture occidentale. Comme le rappelle Tian-yi  : «  [j]’étais ce 
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177La tension est-ouest comme ressort dramatique...
Chinois du XXe siècle, depuis toujours ballotté, provoqué par la Chine, provoqué 
par l’Occident, provoqué par la vie » (Cheng 2015, 262-263). Bien que vécue dif-
féremment, l’expérience de la rencontre entre les cultures chinoise et française est 
un ressort dramatique important dans les romans écrits par les écrivains franco-
phones d’origine chinoise. Comme le note Muriel Détrie, « l’écartèlement entre 
deux cultures, deux pays, deux systèmes de valeurs, est un thème récurrent » (2004, 
65). Ces romans ont en commun avec les autres romans francophones le fait d’in-
troduire un ailleurs dans la vie littéraire française et de créer, comme le montre 
Lena Besinger dans son ouvrage, un espace romanesque spécifique, un entre-deux, 
et donc un genre littéraire « nouveau », émergeant. Cependant, à l’ère de la mon-
dialisation, les différences culturelles s’estompent et les contacts interculturels se 
multiplient. Nous pouvons donc nous demander si les œuvres étudiées ne sont 
pas, en quelque sorte, les derniers vestiges d’un monde en voie de disparition. Bien 
qu’on puisse se réjouir que la compréhension entre les peuples soit facilitée, on ne 
peut que déplorer l’appauvrissement et l’uniformisation culturels induits par cette 
nouvelle situation internationale.
BIBLIOGRAPHIE
Bibliographie primaire
Cheng, François : Le Dit de Tian-Yi, Paris, Le Livre de Poche, 1998.
Ding, Ya : Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu, Paris, Flammarion/Stock, 1990.
Bibliographie secondaire
Bisinger, Lena : Rencontre interculturelle dans le roman franco-chinois. Invitation au 
voyage d’un genre émergent, Berlin, Logos, 2016. 
Cheng, François : Le Dialogue, Desclée de Brouwer, 2002.
Cheng, François : Entretiens avec Françoise Siri, Paris, Albin Michel, 2015.
Delbart, Anne-Rosine : Les Exilés du langage. Un siècle d’écrivains français venus 
d’ailleurs (1919-2000), Limoges, Pulim, 2005.
Detrie Muriel : « Existe-t-il un roman chinois francophone ? », Le Magazine Lit-
téraire, n°429, 2004, p. 65-66.
Pageaux, Daniel-Henri : La Littérature générale et comparée, Paris, Armand Colin, 
1994.
Silvester, Rosalind / Thouroude, Guillaume (dir.)  : Traits chinois / lignes franco-
phones. Ecritures, Images, Cultures, Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, coll. 
«Sociétés et Cultures d’Asie», 2012.
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178 Florence Gacoin-Marks
Xiang, Weiwei : Interculturalité et intermédialité chez les auteurs francophones 
chinois. Thèse de doctorat, Université de Strasbourg, 2017.
Zhang, Yinde : « François Cheng ou dire la Chine en français », Revue de Littéra-
ture comparée, 2007/2, pp. 141-152 (dans l’article : Zhang, 2007a).
Florence Gacoin-Marks
Faculté des lettres de l’Université de Ljubljana
florence.gacoin-marks@guest.arnes.si
Napetost Vzhod-Zahod kot dramski vzgib za dva frankofonska pi-
satelja kitajskega izvora
V pričujočem članku razpravljam o značilnostih odnosom med Vzhodom in Zahodom 
v dveh romanih francoskih pisateljev kitajskega rodu, ki sta nastala ob koncu 20. sto-
letja: Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu [Igra vode in ognja] Ye Dinga (1990) in Le Dit de Tian-yi 
[Tianyin izrek] Françoisa Chenga (1998). V obeh primerih je soočenje francoske in 
kitajske kulture ključna dramska sprožilec. Poleg tega ustvarja v francoski književnosti, 
ki je nastala v Franciji, specifičen literarni prostor, ki ga lahko imamo celo za samostojno 
romaneskno podvrsto.
Ključne besede: frankofonske književnosti, imagologija, zahodno-vzhodni odnosi, fran-
cosko-kitajski pisatelji, Ya Ding, François Cheng, Le Jeu de l ’eau et du feu, Le Dit de Tian-yi
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   178 6. 12. 2021   11:36:16
179
Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960) lettore  
di Stendhal e il pubblico della società di 
massa alle soglie della Terza epoca
Dana Božič
Astratto
Nella prefazione all’edizione italiana del Rosso e il nero di Stendhal (1913), Massimo Bon-
tempelli (1878-1960), il traduttore del romanzo, presenta alcune sue opinioni relative al 
necessario rinnovamento culturale e letterario che costituirà poi il suo Novecentismo, di-
feso nella rivista letteraria “900” (1926-1927). Il presente articolo esplora come Bontem-
pelli, attraverso le osservazioni sulla vita di Stendhal e la tragica esperienza di Julien Sorel, 
traccia un parallelo implicito con il proprio momento storico, considerando il ruolo dello 
spirito rivoluzionario delle avanguardie in tale rinnovamento. Tuttavia, implica anche che 
ciò debba essere controbilanciato dall’idea classica di arte e letteratura, dove la tradizione 
è vista come un’intima e profonda continuità tra manifestazioni di inaspettata novità. 
Anche se Bontempelli simpatizzerà in seguito con il Futurismo italiano, è proprio tale 
equilibrio che rende la sua proposta culturale e letteraria per la “Terza Epoca”, il Nove-
centismo, unica nel panorama letterario italiano. Questo saggio considera i suoi scritti del 
1913 nel contesto della società di massa emergente, e quindi gli aggiustamenti editoriali 
e linguistici che furono necessari per l’edizione, e li paragona contemporaneamente alle 
riflessioni bontempelliane fatte sul tema negli anni a seguire.
 
Parole chiave: prefazione, novecentismo, avanguardie, Stendhal, pubblico di massa
ACTA NEOPHILOLOGICA  UDK: 82.09Bontempelli M.:821.133.1Stendhal
DOI: 10.4312/an.54.1-2.179-196
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   179 6. 12. 2021   11:36:16
180 Dana Božič
POSIZIONI SOCIO-LETTERARIE DI BONTEMPELLI 
ATTORNO AL 1913 
Massimo Bontempelli, scrittore, giornalista, traduttore e collaboratore editoriale è 
conosciuto soprattutto per il suo impegno letterario negli anni Venti quando, at-
traverso la rivista «900» (1926-27), lanciò la proposta per il rinnovamento e la spro-
vincializzazione culturale chiamata “novecentismo”. In realtà, non fu una teoria né 
una scuola e neanche un movimento (Bontempelli 1938: 38), bensì una tendenza 
che alle soglie della Terza epoca1 auspicava delle trasformazioni sul piano estetico, 
socioculturale e filosofico (Farinelli, 2014 e 2016). Le tesi originali di Bontempelli 
traspaiono del resto già da interventi di critica letteraria scritti all’inizio della sua 
carriera ovvero dalle sue prime prefazioni a opere altrui e da alcuni dei suoi primi 
articoli critici,2 le tesi che negli anni Venti costituiranno la base della sua proposta 
di rinnovamento, e che miravano non solo al superamento di schemi rigidi (ormai 
superati) connessi all’attività letteraria, ma anche e soprattutto al superamento di 
lasciti di poetiche ottocentesche, come ad esempio il naturalismo, che impediva-
no a suo giudizio la creatività nella scrittura. Inoltre il novecentismo auspicava il 
distanziamento dall’eccessivo soggettivismo che per tanto tempo aveva avvelenato 
le due dimensioni del Tempo e dello Spazio.3 Contemporaneamente egli punta-
va il dito sulle avanguardie europee e in particolare sul futurismo italiano4 che sul 
piano teorico aveva lanciato delle proposte estremamente rilevanti per il rinnova-
mento culturale dimostrando un atteggiamento dirompente verso la tradizione,5 
1 Bontempelli divide la storia culturale occidentale in tre epoche principali: la prima si estende dalla 
nascita di Cristo fino all’avvento del cristianesimo e ad essa risale la creazione dei miti omerici e 
preomerici. Quell’epoca “manterrà sempre una simpatia accesa [in Bontempelli], per aver foggiato 
personaggi così semplificati e inconfondibili da diventare [...] dei veri e propri stereotipi metaboliz-
zati e riutilizzati nel linguaggio comune” (Fabbri, 2008: 30). La seconda, chiamata romantica, inizia 
con il primo Settecento e si protrae nel primo Novecento; è vista infatti permanere nella cultura del 
decadentismo e finisce con la “rovente fiammata delle avanguardie primonovecentesche” (Fabbri, 
2008: 31). La terza, all’insegna di un vero novecento, diventa l’obiettivo da difendere. Per Bontem-
pelli movimenti come il cubismo e il futurismo rappresentano il periodo transitorio tra la seconda 
e la terza epoca (Bontempelli, 1938: 21). 
2 Si pensi ad esempio all’articolo “Grande e piccola critica” (Bontempelli, 1908: 128-140) e all’Intro-
duzione alla raccolta Il Poliziano. Il Magnifico. Lirici del Quattrocento (Bontempelli, 1910: I-V). 
3 Cfr. Bontempelli, 1910: 2-3. In quell’articolo, dal titolo “Un nuovo e un antico” apparso sul Mar-
zocco fiorentino, Bontempelli si oppone con tono polemico a un popolo di italiani pronti a imitare 
ogni nuova tendenza letteraria e ogni proposta di pensiero, specialmente se provenienti dal Nord, 
come quelle di Søren Kierkegaard, la cui opera viene vista (in modo del tutto parziale) come intrisa 
di un senso di malattia e di morbosità.
4 Sul Bontempelli futurista e sul suo allontanamento da tale movimento scrive Usher (2017); sul 
rapporto di Bontempelli verso il futurismo si veda anche Milanko (2018). 
5 Si pensi, ad esempio, al discorso su padri e figli che accomuna Bontempelli a quello svolto da Mari-
nelli nel primo manifesto futurista. Quell’atteggiamento di rottura non viene invece perseguito dal 
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181Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
ma che a livello estetico aveva deluso, così come avevano deluso altre avanguardie 
(Bontempelli 1938: 38). Bontempelli riconosceva l’impegno di tali movimenti nel 
processo di superamento di una cultura sentita come epigona, cosa che a un cer-
to punto lo portò ad avvicinarsi al futurismo italiano, e però le avanguardie non 
aprivano a suo giudizio una nuova epoca, bensì semplicemente chiudevano quella 
che stava alle spalle (Bontempelli, 1938: 355).6 Una delle principali ragioni era la 
loro incapacità di parlare al nuovo pubblico di massa e di conquistarlo. Curiosa-
mente, il ‘novecentismo’, pur essendo una tendenza con tratti d’avanguardia (Fa-
rinelli, 2014: 85-86), poneva la comunicazione con l’emergente pubblico di massa 
al primo posto (Bontempelli, 1938: 75-76). Quel nuovo tipo di rapporto era stato 
reso possibile attraverso i nuovi mezzi di comunicazione, i mass media, come ad 
esempio il giornale, alla cui terza pagina (al feuilleton) andava in particolare affida-
to il compito di proporre testi orientati al rinnovamento letterario e culturale7. Il 
nuovo pubblico, a differenza da quello borghese ottocentesco la cui vita quotidiana 
era regolata “a ritmo funerario” (Bontempelli 1938: 148), voleva essere soprattut-
to divertito. L’abisso tra i due secoli e le due mentalità, abisso causato anche dalla 
crescita esponenziale dei nuovi mezzi di produzione e dall’espansione delle città, è 
avvertito dallo stesso autore nell’articolo “Quel che bolle in péntola”:8 
Quando la sensibilità d’una generazione avverte decaduti [certi mezzi], ogni 
ostinazione nel tenerli in uso è inutile e delittuosa. Bisogna trovare, o meg-
lio, «lasciar nascere», i nuovi mezzi per interessare e divertire (commuovere) i 
contemporanei. (Perché è inteso che si scrive per i contemporanei, quella dei 
posteri è una favola messa in giro dagli impotenti.9 
movimento di Margherita Sarfatti con il suo ritorno all ’ordine (Barilli, 2008: 8): “[...] la Sarfatti non 
fu altrettanto pronta ad ammettere e a proclamare [la assoluta rottura con le correnti passatiste, 
come ad esempio il naturalismo o l’impressionismo, tipici della Seconda epoca], risultando così 
esposta al rischio di reintrodurre nel suo Novecento molte scorie del vecchio sensibilismo otto-
centesco [...].” Bontempelli, dall’altra parte, non “ammetteva concessioni” (Barilli, 2008: 8-9).
6 Cfr. anche Bontempelli, 1938: 277-278.
7 Cfr. Falqui, 1964. Non sorprende perciò che Bontempelli sceglie di pubblicare i romanzi La vita 
intensa (1920) e La vita operosa (1920) come romanzi a puntate: il primo sul supplemento «Ardita» 
della «Gazzetta del Popolo» nel 1919, e il secondo sulle pagine del settimanale «Industrie Italiane 
Illustrate» nel 1920. 
8 L’articolo è privo di data e del nome del quotidiano; è reperibile presso il Fondo Falqui alla Bib-
lioteca Nazionale di Roma e finora non è stato considerato dalla critica; la sua trattazione, qui, 
presenta una novità nel campo degli studi bontempelliani. 
9 Curiosamente, solo un anno più tardi della stesura della prefazione che esamineremo, intitolata Stend-
hal, appare su «La Nazione» l’articolo “Per i poveri letterati” (Bontempelli, 1914), che prenderà suc-
cessivamente, ne L’Avventura novecentista del 1938, il titolo “Prefazione scritta ventiquattro anni fa” 
(Bontempelli, 1938: 9-13) e avrà in quel contesto la funzione di articolo di apertura. Bontempelli vi 
lancia l’appello metaforico ai suoi contemporanei a “chiudere bottega” perché incapaci di adottare 
nuove strategie letterarie per affrontare il nuovo pubblico. I contemporanei sono da lui accusati di 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   181 6. 12. 2021   11:36:16
182 Dana Božič
La consapevolezza dell’importanza di un rapporto del mercato librario col pubblico 
e altre posizioni bontempelliane sulla letteratura che sarebbero poi confluite nel no-
vecentismo avrebbero portato Bontempelli a un proficuo sodalizio con l’editore Um-
berto Notari, e proprio a partire da quel lavoro prefatorio.10 L’imprenditore milanese 
non solo avrebbe rappresentato per lui una sicura fonte di guadagno, ma la nascente 
visione bontempelliana sul rinnovamento culturale si sarebbe sposata perfettamen-
te con quella di Notari: i due condividevano infatti comuni prospettive nell’ambito 
editoriale e letterario.11 Bontempelli si accorge presto del ruolo dell’editore, che è ap-
punto una figura da tramite tra scrittore e lettore: il compito principale dell’editore e 
dei suoi collaboratori sarebbe stato creare lo spazio “nel quale avviene l’incontro tra 
i testi degli scrittori e le esperienze dei singoli lettori” (Cadioli, 2012: 32). Si presu-
me che la prefazione fosse intesa appunto come un intervento di collegamento e che 
Bontempelli cercasse di promuovere, in quello spazio di incontro, non solo il capola-
voro stendhaliano in una maniera popolare ma anche la propria visione sul rinnova-
mento letterario e culturale. Inoltre, in un articolo del 1929 intitolato “Per esagerare”, 
Bontempelli noterà che “la libreria è la finestrella tonda dalla quale lo scrittore può 
spiare il suo pubblico” (Bontempelli, 1938: 74). Da questo pensiero poi traspare non 
solo la consapevolezza di quello spazio d’incontro, ma anche la percezione della re-
altà economica e cioè che il successo di uno scrittore è misurabile con il criterio delle 
vendite del suo prodotto ovvero con il grado di favore dei suoi lettori.12 
scrivere per la propria cerchia e non per il pubblico, di gettarsi “carponi a raccattar gli avanzi delle cene 
francesi o dei banchetti nordici” (Bontempelli, 1938: 10). ma soprattutto di negare al pubblico di let-
tori “il [...] sacrosanto diritto” (Bontempelli, 1938:10) a essere divertiti, interessati e scossi. Perciò non 
sorprende che questi continuino a rivolgersi alle “opere dei vecchi […]; vi trovava[no] più umanità e 
novità e modernità che nei vostri vient de paraître [...]” (Bontempelli, 1938: 10). 
10 Bouchard (2005: 392) considera il periodo tra il 1913 e il 1917 la “fase più intensa” delle loro col-
laborazioni. 
11 Durante la nostra indagine sono emersi degli articoli di Bontempelli degli anni Venti e Trenta dai 
quali traspare la sua stima per Notari non solo per le capacità di questo ultimo nel campo edito-
riale ma anche per le sue posizioni in ambito letterario: Bontempelli recensisce i suoi quattordici 
saggi come un’importante opera di orientamento novecentista che svolge funzione mitopoietica. 
L’articolo, dal titolo “Umberto Notari”, apparso sulla «Gazzetta del Popolo», è reperibile presso la 
Biblioteca Nazionale di Roma ed è privo di data. 
12 Ne scrive lo stesso Bontempelli nell’articolo “La crisi degli scrittori” (13 ottobre 1938, «Gazzetta 
del Popolo»), non ancora considerato dalla critica. Lo scrittore constatava in prima persona quanto 
fosse difficile vivere del proprio lavoro. La precarietà economica continuò ad affliggere lo scrittore 
comasco dagli anni dell’insegnamento ad Ancona fino a tutti gli anni Venti e si protrasse oltre la 
sua nomina ad Accademico d’Italia nel 1930. Ciò traspare dal carteggio Bontempelli-Della Per-
gola, conservato presso il Fondo Bontempelli-Della Pergola alla Biblioteca Comunale di Como, 
e dal carteggio Bontempelli-Arnoldo Mondadori, conservato presso la Fondazione Mondadori. È 
altrettanto rivelatorio della problematica anche il carteggio Bontempelli-Paola Masino reperibile 
presso il Getty Research Institute di Los Angeles (Cfr. Manetti, 2013). Si veda anche Cigliana 
(2005), Bouchard (2005) e Božič (2019). 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   182 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
183Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
Tutto ciò ci porta alla prefazione in questione che accompagnava la pubblica-
zione in versione italiana del romanzo stendhaliano Il rosso e il nero, del 1913, la 
quale nell’ottica orientata a un pubblico di massa aveva come attendibile un taglio 
“necessariamente divulgativo” (Bouchard, 2012). Entra in quella logica anche lo 
scarno titolo presceltovi: Stendhal. Nonostante la formula suggerisca solo un profi-
lo biografico dello scrittore francese, Bontempelli “riesce a delinearvi in nuce molti 
elementi di una poetica che, oltre ad essere riferibile a Stendhal, anticipa quella da 
lui attuata sia nei romanzi della maturità (in special modo Vita e morte di Adria e 
dei suoi figli) sia nel progressivo processo di costruzione di un ciclo autobiografico 
coerente che, intorno a Mia vita morte e miracoli, trova la sua definitiva imposta-
zione con il riassetto della propria opera nell’ambito della collana dei «Racconti 
di Massimo Bontempelli», da lui avviata presso Mondadori tra il 1938 e il 1943” 
(Bouchard, 2012). Nella nostra analisi andremo a cercare proprio quegli elementi, 
in particolare: la lungimiranza bontempelliana nel riconoscimento della ricezione 
di un’opera letteraria, il ruolo dell’immaginazione e della riflessione, e l’importan-
za dell’ispirazione nel processo della scrittura, per nominarne alcuni. E non solo: 
mostreremo che la posizione antiaccademica e anticanonica di Bontempelli e allo 
stesso tempo la consapevolezza del ruolo della società di massa nella ricezione 
delle opere letterarie lo avrebbero portato intenzionalmente a scegliere per i testi 
prefatori una scrittura anti-filologica, paragonabile a quella giornalistica - sinte-
tica, coinvolgente e comprensibile, privilegiando la schiettezza e la naturalezza.13 
Per una tale scrittura è caratteristica una struttura sintattica basata sulla paratassi, 
vicina al parlato e orientata a esprimere immediatezza - tutto ciò a un unico scopo: 
non perdere l’attenzione e l’interesse di chi legge.14  
Per la nostra analisi sarà necessario considerare gli studi svolti finora nel cam-
po di tale poetica, come ad esempio quelli di Bouchard, Cigliana, Farinelli e di 
alcuni altri. Attingendo alla teoria di Genette, disegneremo alcune caratteristiche 
principali del peritesto in questione, mentre sarà essenziale aggiungere l’apporto 
di alcuni studiosi, come Spinazzola e Cadioli, esperti di questioni socio-letterarie, 
e in particolare di dinamiche editoriali di pubblico di massa.15 
13 Piscopo (2001: 73) nota, che un tale stile emerge a partire dagli anni fiorentini (dal 1910 in poi): 
Bontempelli, lasciato il lavoro da supplente e immerso nella libertà intellettuale come giornalista e 
scrittore nel capoluogo toscano, sembra abbandonare la “sintagmaticità costruita su innervature e 
diramazioni di subordinate, a favore di una paratassi agile, svelta, prossima al parlato.”
14 Le osservazioni sulle posizioni critiche e socio-letterarie di Bontempelli, e sulle avanguardie, il 
novecentismo sono servite non solo ad illuminare il contesto in cui nacque la prefazione Stendhal, 
oggetto della nostra analisi, ma anche a dimostrare alcune scoperte pertinenti all’argomento affron-
tato che abbiamo fatto nel corso della ricerca dottorale e che eventualmente apriranno delle nuove 
prospettive sull’attività bontempelliana sia letteraria che critica e pubblicistica. 
15 L’argomento principale della ricerca dottorale in corso verte sul novecentismo bontempelliano e 
più specificamente sul rapporto di Bontempelli con il nuovo pubblico di massa, così come emerge 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   183 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
184 Dana Božič
LA PREFAZIONE STENDHAL COME SPAZIO DI INCONTRO 
FRA CRITICO E LETTORE 
L’edizione italiana de Il rosso e il nero (1913), tradotta e curata da Bontempelli, 
appartiene alla prima serie della collana «Gli immortali e altri massimi scrittori» 
diretta e curata da Luigi Luzzatti e Ferdinando Martini. Bontempelli per la prima 
volta non è solo il prefatore16 ma anche il traduttore del romanzo.17 Nonostan-
te ciò, nella prefazione non vi sono incluse osservazioni sulla traduzione stessa,18 
perciò, se seguiamo la terminologia di Gérard Genette (1989: 260), si tratta di 
una prefazione allografa ulteriore. Si potrebbe dire che entra tra le prefazioni di 
media lunghezza (quasi sei pagine di testo) rispetto alle altre svolte da Bontem-
pelli nell’arco della sua vita.19 In termini di ricezione una tale lunghezza, assieme 
alla impostazione discorsiva e al registro espressivo prescelti avrebbero facilitato 
la comprensione del testo al lettore. Una prima lettura rivela una forte messa in 
rilievo, da parte di Bontempelli, del legame tra Henri Beyle - Stendhal e Julien 
Sorel, il protagonista del romanzo, il che sarebbe dovuto anche al fatto che Il rosso 
e il nero, come sostiene nella parte introduttiva Bontempelli, sia “una specie di au-
tobiografia (Bontempelli, 1913: 11). Il titolo implicherebbe, metaforicamente, una 
serie di opposizioni che segnarono la vita di Stendhal, “entusiasmo e ipocrisia, l’e-
roico e il subdolo, Napoleone e i Gesuiti [...]” (Bontempelli, 1913: 11), e allo stesso 
tempo l’esperienza di una generazione, quella stendhaliana, tesa tra due momenti 
storici: il romanticismo e il classicismo. Con quelle osservazioni sul titolo, Bon-
tempelli anticipa al lettore i nodi principali su cui si soffermerà, svelando la sua 
strategia di creare curiosità e facilitare al contempo la comprensione del discorso. 
Dato l’ampio respiro dell’edizione, la parte principale delle pagine prefatorie 
presenta un ritratto biografico di Stendhal, ovvero Henri Beyle, come promesso 
in articoli apparsi sui quotidiani, a partire dal 1908, e nelle prefazioni stilate da questo scrittore a 
partire dal 1910 per varie case editrici. Per alcuni dati si sono dimostrati preziosi anche i carteggi 
tra i soggetti coinvolti, ad esempio tra Bontempelli e sua moglie Meletta, oppure tra Bontempelli 
e Arnoldo Mondadori. 
16 Bontempelli fino al 1913 aveva scritto la prefazione a Il Poliziano. Il Magnifico. Lirici del Quattro-
cento (Bontempelli, 1910: I-VI.) e la prefazione al dramma Fiorenza mia! Dramma in Quattro atti 
(Yambo, 1911: 5-6). Sono inoltre del 1913 le prefazioni ai Canti carnascialeschi (Bontempelli, 1913: 
9-20) e alle Prose di fede e di vita nel primo tempo dell ’umanesimo (Bontempelli: 1913: I-VIII.). 
17 Del suo lavoro da traduttore si è finora occupato François Bouchard (2005 e 2012). 
18 Come succede ad esempio nella prefazione di Felice Martini all’Asino d’oro (Apuleio, 1927: IX-
XVI.), che confronteremo in altra sede con quella di Bontempelli, tale scritto accompagna un 
volume delle Trasformazioni apuleiane uscito un anno più tardi (Apuleio, 1928: 17-22). 
19 Le più lunghe prefazioni bontempelliane hanno una lunghezza di circa venticinque pagine. La 
prima risale al 1910, mentre si presume che le ultime, a restare alla ricerca bibliografica finora svolta, 
sarebbero del 1947.
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   184 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
185Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
dal titolo del testo. La presentazione però, a parte offrire al lettore una cronolo-
gia essenziale della vita dello scrittore, tenta soprattutto di delineare il carattere 
di Henri, e a ciò che lo avrebbe motivato. La sua figura emerge da una dinamica 
familiare piuttosto complessa ed è quella di un uomo continuamente spinto ad al-
lontanarsi dalla società in cui viveva, a differenza di un altro scrittore su cui si era 
soffermato da poco Bontempelli, vale a dire Lorenzo il Magnifico,20 il cui carat-
tere si fondeva invece perfettamente con quello dell’epoca in un continuo Carpe 
diem per la coscienza del tempus fugit, ragion per cui il Magnifico era “insieme una 
espressione e una causa del suo tempo” (Bontempelli, 1913: 14).21
Per dipingere il quadro familiare di Henri e per descrivere le figure della real-
tà stendhaliana egli si serve di alcune strategie sintattiche e lessicali. In realtà, si 
tratta di un tentativo di trasmettere allo stesso tempo anche lo stato d’animo di 
Stendhal: dopo la morte prematura della madre, il giovanotto rimane solo con il 
padre, “magistrato di provincia, subdolo, arido, chiuso […]” e con una zia materna, 
“ipocrita, dispotica, collerica” (Bontempelli, 1913: 11). Henri quindi sviluppa un 
disprezzo profondo per la famiglia e il prefatore ce lo dimostra con una costruzio-
ne della frase in cui vengono elencati molti aggettivi. Lo stesso procedimento giu-
stappositivo vale per la rappresentazione della città natale, Grenoble: il presunto 
sentimento stendhaliano nei confronti di quell’ambiente è trasmesso attraverso un 
elenco asindetico di aggettivi che si incalzano a ritmo veloce: “quasi tutto il paese, 
erano quanto poteva esservi di provinciale, di borghese, di comune: bigotti, ava-
ri, retrogradi, senz’amore, senza simpatia” (Bontempelli, 1913: 11). Ne segue che 
il risentimento accumulato del giovane Henri si andrà calmando nell’inevitabile 
isolamento che per lui rappresenterà una condizione di tranquillità: 
[n]ell’isolamento aspro cui si trovava costretto, l’indole e la consuetudine del 
pensiero si svolsero solamente in intensità, ritraendosi dalle sensazioni del 
mondo esteriore sempre più esclusivamente verso l’interno, verso l’anima, verso 
i menomi movimenti del meccanismo dell’anima (Bontempelli, 1913: 12). 
La descrizione bontempelliana insiste sulla concentrazione interiore trovata dallo 
scrittore nella serenità della solitudine; il passo si oppone al quadro dell’ambiente 
20 La prefazione ai Canti carnascialeschi risale allo stesso anno; in essa Bontempelli presenta il si-
gnore fiorentino in perfetta fusione con la sua epoca, il Quattrocento fiorentino. (Bontempelli, 
1913: 9-20).
21 Se nel caso del Magnifico la forza creatrice emerge proprio dall’immersione del signore fiorentino 
nelle dinamiche della sua epoca, dal contatto diretto con le feste popolaresche per le vie di Firenze, 
l’ispirazione stendhaliana proviene dal rifiuto della società, da una condizione di isolamento e dalla 
riflessione. Bontempelli vede in Stendhal un emarginato che respinge la rigidità e la prevedibilità 
del costume borghese, aspetti da lui presi di mira molto esplicitamente in articoli successivi degli 
anni Venti e Trenta (Bontempelli, 1938: 148).
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   185 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
186 Dana Božič
soffocante da cui questi fuggiva, presentato poco sopra con altrettanta intensità. 
È significativo, nel passo citato, il dominante suono nasale “m” (MenoMi Movi-
Menti del MeccanisMo dell’aniMa) che sottolinea forse la componente intima 
raggiunta in una situazione di isolamento. Bontempelli qui interviene da narratore 
con una prosa incisiva e immagini vivaci, e fa dello scrittore di cui parla una sorta 
di personaggio calato nelle avventure della vita. Alcuni indizi di fiction sarebbero 
anche il discorso libero e i verba sentiendi come se l’autore cercasse di entrare nel-
la testa del personaggio, narrativizzando la prefazione che tradizionalmente ha in 
primis funzione informativa. Presumiamo che siano delle scelte stilistiche orienta-
te ad attrarre l’attenzione di lettori non specializzati e rispondenti allo stesso tem-
po anche a posizioni poetologiche. Ricordiamo che anni dopo, in un articolo del 
1931 riportato ne L’avventura novecentista, Bontempelli avrebbe formulato chia-
ramente la sua posizione in favore di una letterarizzazione del biografico. 
È di moda parlare male delle biografie romanzate. Esse hanno questo di buono: 
che tendono a presentare l’uomo come «personaggio», cioè piuttosto nella sua 
leggenda che non nella sua biografia anagrafica. Sono l’ultima liquidazione del-
la mania erudita che soffocava la nostra prima giovinezza; per la quale la fun-
zione suprema degli studi storici era l’«accertamento delle date» (Bontempelli, 
1938: 254). 
Tornando alla prefazione in questione, nei paragrafi successivi, in cui Bontempelli 
esplora le motivazioni della fuga di Stendhal a Parigi22 e le dinamiche sociali in-
contratevi, cominciano a trasparire più esplicitamente dei tratti della futura poe-
tica novecentista, in particolare l’apprezzamento dell’avventura come generatore 
narrativo che emerge dai casi della vita. Non è la fuga nella metropoli che fa tra-
boccare in Stendhal “il suo desiderio d’opera e d’entusiasmo” (Bontempelli, 1913: 
12), bensì il fatto che un anno dopo segua Napoleone in Italia. I combattimenti 
che Henri vive profondamente ed eroicamente, suscitano il manifestarsi dell’uo-
mo “d’azione ch’era in lui [...] d’un tratto” (Bontempelli, 1913: 12). Quella fase 
fu per lui “un periodo libero ed eroico: amò, viaggiò, combatté [...] Non pensa-
va a scrivere. Amava la lotta e il pericolo: adorava le donne e Napoleone” (Bon-
tempelli, 1913: 12). Si potrebbe parlare di un percorso liberatorio da un oppri-
mente ambiente borghese ottocentesco verso un mondo mentalmente più aperto. 
Come nota Bouchard (2005: 397), questo periodo d’azione di Stendhal in Italia 
presenta alcune curiosità ed è significativo perché suggerisce delle somiglianze 
22 Come osserva Zweig, nonostante Stendhal lasci la nativa Grenoble e suo padre “tenace calcolatore, 
freddo”, quest’ultimo “resta in vita per altri cinquant’anni sotto la pelle di Arrigo Beyle e continua 
a vagargli come un fantasma nel sangue; per cinquant’anni gli avi delle sue due anime, i Beyle e i 
Gagnon, lo spirito pratico e quello romantico, si battono di continuo in lui senza che l’uno possa 
mai completamente aver ragione dell’altro.” (Zweig, 2015: 42).
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   186 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
187Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
con il Massimo, protagonista de La vita operosa, del 1921, dedicandosi esclusi-
vamente all’azione, ma allo stesso tempo il periodo risulta “sterile” (2005: 397). 
Analogamente il Massimo del futuro romanzo bontempelliano, dopo aver capito 
che nonostante una vita operosa, d’azione, nella Milano del primo Novecento, gli 
mancavano la riflessione, la scrittura e esercizio intellettuale, pensa a una carriera 
tranquilla da scrittore (Bouchard, 2005: 397).23
La vita operosa di Stendhal, gli anni italiani di “sfrenata socievolezza” (Bou-
chard, 2005: 397) possono essere sintetizzati, secondo Bontempelli, con l’asindeto 
“amò, viaggiò, combatté” (Bontempelli, 1913: 12), il quale è in realtà stendhalia-
no. Nel suo testamento Stendhal vorrà che sulla sua pietra tombale venga scolpito 
«Arrigo Beyle - milanese - visse, scrisse, amò», il che indicherebbe una particolare 
valutazione del verbo vivere, che appare collocato prima del verbo scrivere. Nono-
stante Stendhal sia conosciuto soprattutto come romanziere, egli rifiutava di pas-
sare in primo luogo per tale: “[...] mio Dio, quanto si sarebbe indignato dell’indi-
pendenza a vedersi considerare come uno del clan dei poeti” (Zweig, 2005: 55).24 
Bontempelli a questo punto sembra voler rendere giustizia al desiderio dell’autore 
francese: nella prefazione viene adoperato il nome italianizzato di Henri, Arrigo, 
ma soprattutto amò, viaggiò, combatté implica che per Bontempelli Stendhal è in 
primis un uomo di azione e che la scrittura è di secondaria importanza. 
Quel romanzo di Stendhal, come dice Bontempelli, “è un quadro di tempo” 
(Bontempelli, 1913: 12); narra di una costante tensione tra “la monarchia e l’ari-
stocrazia, la borghesia e il clero, il popolo e i politicanti, la provincia e la campagna 
e la capitale di Francia” (Bontempelli, 1913: 12). Dal punto di vista sociologico e 
storico si tratta di un momento importante per una società come quella francese. 
Il sociologo Alvin Gouldner (1975: 328) osserva che nel periodo in cui era gio-
vane Stendhal, i romantici vivevano in un mondo crepuscolare di transizione, tra 
un presente insoddisfacente e un passato impraticabile, tra la decadente tradizione 
feudale e l’emergente riforma borghese. Vivere in un mondo in cui le mappe so-
ciali convenzionali avevano perso la loro efficacia, ma in cui non ne erano ancora 
state formulate di nuove accettabili, significava per gli intellettuali rivolgersi al sé 
individuale come indicatore di orientamenti piuttosto che alle regole tradiziona-
li. Napoleone, come abbiamo osservato, per i giovani come Henri rappresenta la 
forza ispiratrice che avrebbe formato le basi per un nuovo inizio, un momento di 
transizione. Infatti, emerge che per Bontempelli il disorientamento vissuto dal-
la generazione di Stendhal era paragonabile a quello provato dagli intellettuali 
23 Cfr. anche: Bontempelli, 1921: 192. 
24 Questa ultima volontà di Stendhal prima della morte sarà però volutamente deformata dall’es-
ecutore testamentario, come osserva Stefan Zweig, perché verrà fatto scolpire sulla tomba dello 
scrittore l’asindeto con gli stessi verbi, ma in un ordine diverso da quello voluto da Stendhal, privi-
legiando cioè il verbo scrivere. Sulla pietra verrà inciso: “«Scrisse, amò, visse»” (2005: 55)
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   187 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
188 Dana Božič
d’inizio Novecento durante il periodo delle avanguardie. Entrambe quelle gene-
razioni hanno un ruolo fondamentale, e cioè di rendere possibile l’inizio di una 
nuova epoca, ma non di parteciparvi sempre come protagonisti. Ciò trasparirà an-
che dagli articoli programmatici alla rivista “900” nel 1926: “La nostra generazio-
ne, […] ha il còmpito imponente di aprire le porte alla Terza Epoca dell’umanità 
occidentale [...]” (Bontempelli, 1938: 23). In questo senso, le avanguardie e le loro 
energie giovanili sono importanti affinché nella nuova epoca possano nascere e 
fiorire tendenze come il ‘novecentismo’. 
Uno strumento potente per compiere quell’operazione, ma anche per confron-
tarsi con il futuro, è l’immaginazione. Proprio grazie a una “sfrenata immagina-
zione” (Bontempelli, 1913: 14), il personaggio di Julien riuscirà a scoprirsi nel 
fondo più primitivo nel suo animo: benché la sua vita nel romanzo proceda in un 
modo ben calcolato, grazie alla componente “cerebrale” (Bontempelli, 1913: 14), 
nella sua anima c’è “la passione, c’è la tendenza all’impeto, all’illogico” (Bontem-
pelli, 1913: 14), una sua parte d’“inconsapevole” che egli non è riuscito a elimina-
re (Bontempelli, 1913: 15).25 Tutta quell’energia per Bontempelli rappresenta un 
pregio e una necessità, nonostante essa porti il giovane Julien all’omicidio. E an-
che se quest’ultimo atto è valutato come “luce d’eroismo” (Bontempelli, 1913: 15), 
ciò non significa che l’autore promuova l’atto violento; vuole sottolineare solo che 
esso segna la celebrazione del non-conformismo e lo scoppio delle energie gio-
vanili e dello spirito primitivo. Nel caso di Julien, così come nel caso dei giovani 
sofferenti dell’ordine borghese all’inizio del Novecento, quelle energie che erano 
state soppresse per tanto tempo rappresentano ora la condizione necessaria per un 
rinnovamento. 
La simpatia di Bontempelli per quel personaggio dallo spirito irrequieto è ben 
comprensibile per l’atteggiamento dirompente che egli stesso aveva verso codici 
letterari e culturali irrigiditi, cosa che lo avrebbe avvicinato ai futuristi e alle avan-
guardie. Allo stesso tempo però bisogna sottolineare che quella somiglianza con 
25 A quel punto, la “complicatissima anima” (Bontempelli, 1913: 13) di Sorel, risultato delle tensioni 
del tempo, potrebbe essere paragonata alla figura di Leopardi, così come viene presentata nel saggio 
bontempelliano Leopardi l ’«uomo solo» del 1938 (Bontempelli, 1943: 31-69). Entrambe sono spinte 
dall’immaginazione “sempre sveglia, che precede ogni menomo atto, e frattanto si complica con 
la minutissima analisi del sentimento che esso atto prepara: immaginazione pur di natura cere-
brale” (Bontempelli, 1913: 13). Quello che però distingue fondamentalmente le due personalità è 
la solitudine e come essa viene vissuta. La solitudine di Leopardi è caratterizzata dal tentativo di 
comprendere lo stato dell’uomo nel cosmo che lo porta al superamento della misantropia (Bontem-
pelli, 1943: 59). A quel punto la “delusione [...] non è cupa né irosa [...] È una delusione limpida. 
Qui la passione s’è fatta tristezza anzi dolcezza [...] qui la ragione [...] è diventata immateriale [...]” 
(Bontempelli, 1943: 59-60). Invece, la solitudine di Julien (e di Henri) è alimentata dall’odio e dalla 
delusione sia per il padre sia per la società che lo rappresenta. Bontempelli nota che “Giuliano è 
un condannato al perpetuo isolamento, è un diverso” (Bontempelli, 1913: 14) a causa dell’ambiente 
sociale in cui si trova e che gli si presenta come un’armata nemica per la quale sente fastidio. 
Acta_Neophilologica_2021_FINAL.indd   188 6. 12. 2021   11:36:17
189Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
le attitudini delle avanguardie è solo apparente: il nostro prefatore mostra in realtà 
un approccio bilanciato: non rifiuta la tradizione, ma la intende in termini origi-
nali come “continuità intima, profonda, tra manifestazioni di inaspettata novità” 
(Bontempelli, 1938: 34). In quel senso, i classici rappresentano allora “i valori del 
sovratemporale, sovraspaziale, sovraindividuale” (Farinelli, 2012: 24). 
Julien Sorel è secondo Bontempelli è l’espressione perfetta della fusione di una 
intensità di spirito e di intelletto (Bontempelli, 1913: 14). Ha un’anima compli-
cata che è: 
[…] un miscuglio di sincerità e d’ipocrisia, di logica e di fantasia, di studio e 
d’abbandono; un meccanismo complesso, per cui non sentiamo simpatia quasi 
mai, ma che seguiamo con un interesse intenso e vigile del suo giuoco imman-
cabile (Bontempelli, 1913: 14).
Il passo è rivelatorio del modo in cui Bontempelli cerca di coinvolgere i lettori 
attraverso l’uso di verbi nella prima persona plurale. La sua presentazione conti-
nua attraverso una struttura sintattica basata sulla paratassi: le frasi sono separa-
te da due punti, dal punto e virgola, dal trattino o dalle congiunzioni (e, ma), in 
cui la congiunzione ma appare anche a inizio frase. Ciò sarebbe indicativo di un 
approccio più informale al linguaggio, orientato appunto verso un pubblico più 
ampio, come quello che legge i quotidiani. La paratassi emerge come modalità di-
scorsiva che permette di velocizzare la narrazione, segnalando al lettore i fatti più 
importanti del personaggio principale. La narrazione guadagna un ritmo ancora 
più incalzante quando il discorso si avvicina a trattare dell’omicidio e dello stato 
d’animo in cui Julien poteva trovarsi in quell’istante. I periodi diventano sempre 
più brevi, le scelte lessicali sono pertinenti all’azione e sono paragonabili a quelle 
che troveremmo in un romanzo poliziesco (Bontempelli, 1913: 15). Inoltre appare 
di nuovo l’asindeto, “più assurdo, più inutile, più illogico” (Bontempelli, 1913: 15), 
strategia che trasmette l’intensità di quanto accaduto. Raggiunto il punto più alto 
di tensione, Bontempelli rallenta la narrazione con un discorso dal ritmo meno in-
calzante e una descrizione dallo sguardo più distanziato (Bontempelli, 1913: 15).
Nella parte conclusiva della prefazione, in cui Bontempelli brevemente men-
ziona il romanzo La certosa di Parma, da lui considerato superiore a tutte le altre 
opere di Stendhal, egli implicitamente apre un’altra questione che gli stava a cuore 
e che ritornerà spesso nei suoi scritti in difesa del novecentismo, come osservere-
mo tra poco. Il romanzo di Stendhal, Il rosso e il nero, “al primo uscire (1831) passò 
quasi inosservato” (Bontempelli, 1913: 15), e solo cinquant’anni dopo guadagnò la 
stima e il riconoscimento sia dei lettori che dei critici. Il problema della ricezione 
di un’opera letteraria rappresenterà una costante nel pensiero bontempelliano: nel-
la prefazione al primo dei dieci romanzi de La Vita intensa del 1919, l’io narrante 
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190 Dana Božič
annuncerà di scrivere il romanzo “per i posteri” (Bontempelli, 2009: 7), il che im-
plica che i lettori non siano capaci di capire l’arte del proprio tempo.26
Bontempelli segnalerà inoltre che l’artista stesso è spesso cattivo giudice del 
proprio lavoro. Così nel 1930, nell’articolo “Passaggio all’architettura”, affermerà 
che “ogni artista (salvo casi rari, di chi sappia sdoppiar bene in sé l’artista dal cri-
tico) sarà cattivo giudice di valori dell’arte che è la sua, perché tenderà a stabilire 
una scala di valori partendo dal preconcetto e dal gusto invincibile del proprio me-
stiere” (Bontempelli, 1938: 93). Non è però questo il caso di Stendhal: lo scrittore 
francese appartiene infatti a quel gruppo di artisti che ebbero la consapevolezza 
di non poter venire apprezzati subito perché nel 1830 “ebbe a scrivere una lette-
ra a Balzac [a proposito del trattato Dell’amore] in cui sosteneva: «Penso che non 
sarò letto avanti al 1880.» Profezia non riuscì mai più miracolosamente esatta di 
questa.” (Bontempelli, 1913: 16). Anticipando così un’altra posizione del novecen-
tismo, e cioè che un’opera riuscita supera il proprio tempo e che spesso non viene 
nemmeno compresa dai contemporanei, Bontempelli chiude così la prefazione al 
romanzo Il rosso e il nero. 
LE LETTURE STENDHALIANE NEGLI ANNI VENTI, TRENTA 
E QUARANTA 
Per appoggiare la pertinenza delle tesi difese in questo articolo, va notato come 
Bontempelli intervenne su Stendhal altre volte nel proprio percorso di critico e 
traduttore. Mentre l’edizione del 1917 dell’opera stendhaliana Dell ’amore, tradot-
ta da Bontempelli, è priva di una nota introduttiva,27 sono invece rivelatori delle 
sue posizioni su Stendhal altri interventi. Se negli articoli raccolti ne L’Avventura 
novecentista (1938) egli appare come uno dei maestri della letteratura mondiale,28 
l’autore francese è poi più specificamente l’oggetto di tre testi di Bontempelli che 
merita presentare almeno brevemente perché non sono ancora mai stati conside-
rati dalla critica: si tratta di due articoli e della prefazione al romanzo Ricordi d’e-
gotismo (Stendhal, 1944): ne parleremo nell’ordine cronologico in cui apparvero. 
All’occasione dei cento anni dalla prima edizione del romanzo La certosa di 
Parma, Bontempelli, nel primo articolo “Centenario d’un romanzo”, del 1938, de-
linea un quadro storico-letterario delle circostanze pertinenti ai manoscritti sten-
dhaliani i quali, dopo la morte di Stendhal, furono riuniti sotto il titolo Chroni-
ques italiennes. E se l’articolo potrebbe a prima vista sembrare solo un resoconto di 
26 Cfr. Bontempelli, 1938: 40. 
27 Stendhal, 1917. 
28 Cfr. “Lontananza della tradizione” del 1928 (Bontempelli, 1938: 53-54); la lettera a G.A. Borgese 
del 1930 (“Due lettere” in Bontempelli, 1938: 238); “Confronto” del 1935 (Bontempelli, 1938: 275). 
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191Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
quelle circostanze, in realtà è anche altro: vi traspaiono assieme alla lode del genio 
stendhaliano, anche alcune posizioni poetologiche di Bontempelli, in particolare, 
quelle pertinenti al processo di scrittura che deve essere basato sull’intuizione, vi 
introduce inoltre un ulteriore riferimento al fenomeno della ricezione tardiva del-
lo scrittore francese ovvero del difficile rapporto fra pubblico e scrittori e critici. 
Si tratta di posizioni che egli cominciò a nutrire a partire dagli anni dell’insegna-
mento,29 e di cui sono rivelatori i suoi primi articoli, come ad esempio “Grande 
e piccola critica” del 1908, nonché le prefazioni degli esordi.30 A parte riportare 
alcune informazioni sulle edizioni passate del romanzo, Bontempelli si sofferma 
sulla fortuna dei romanzi stendhaliani, così come aveva fatto nella conclusione 
della prefazione a Il rosso e il nero del 1913, e paragona fra loro il rapporto tra Bal-
zac e Stendhal con quello tra Dante e Cavalcanti e tra Boccaccio e Dante. 
Il secondo testo in questione è la prefazione senza titolo al romanzo Ricordi 
d’Egotismo del 1944. Benché il testo confronti argomenti diversi (osservazioni bio-
grafiche su Stendhal e il suo soggiorno italiano, appunti sul titolo, sul manoscritto 
e sulle ristampe), Bontempelli vi intreccia alcuni nodi principali della sua poetica. 
Più di trentacinque anni dopo i primi articoli e quasi vent’anni dopo il lancio della 
rivista “900”, l’autore indubbiamente dimostra la continuità del suo pensiero.31 Si 
pensi nuovamente al ruolo dell’intuizione e dell’immaginazione nel processo della 
scrittura, inteso come divertimento, e dell’inutilità del pianificare quell’attività. La 
prefazione include anche la lode dell’approccio anticanonico all’autobiografia di 
Stendhal per aver cominciato non dall’infanzia bensì da quando si era trasferito a 
Parigi. La lode vale anche per il filo cronologico della narrazione che in Stendhal 
si spezza continuamente, una tecnica narrativa adoperata dallo stesso Bontempel-
li, ad esempio nel romanzo La vita intensa nel 1920, nonché nella monografia San 
Bernardino da Siena del 1914 (Bontempelli, 1914), in cui il predicatore senese vie-
ne presentato prima per i successi che ebbe con i fedeli e per le sfide imposte dalle 
29 Per un resoconto curioso delle esperienze scolastiche del professor Bontempelli, avverso alle “coazi-
oni e [...] [alle] menzogne istituzionalizzate”, si veda Piscopo 2001: 28-30. 
30 Si pensi alle edizioni scolastiche curate da Bontempelli (la prefazione ai Lirici del 1910, e quella alle 
Prose del 1913), ma anche ai testi prefatori inseriti nelle edizioni dei «Classici italiani» presso la casa 
editrice notariana, Istituo Editoriale Italiano. 
31 È la testi di Emilio Cecchi (1884-1966), scrittore e amico di Bontempelli, che nel 1925 scriverà: 
“[n]ell›arte, come in natura, non si fanno salti” (Cecchi, 1972: 837). A differenza di critici orientati 
a vedere un “primo”, “secondo” e “terzo” Bontempelli, propugnava che questo intellettuale in realtà 
non avesse subito alcuna trasformazione nel corso della sua attività. Anzi, Cecchi parla di “comodi 
travestimenti” (1972: 838) e scrive: “crisi, [di] colpi di folgore, e [delle] esplosioni, [che] nello 
svolgimento degli artisti, quasi sempre sono espedienti descrittivi di critici i quali s’accorsero della 
musica che, da gran tempo, un artista veniva suonando, solo il giorno che, per toccare i loro orecchi, 
egli imboccò il trombone e lasciò il violino” (1972: 837). Dunque, tutti processi sensati e soprattutto 
necessari per lo sviluppo di un artista e della sua poetica.
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192 Dana Božič
autorità clericali, e solo alla fine attraverso osservazioni biografiche concludendo 
con la sua nascita. 
Il secondo articolo, e quindi l’ultimo testo stendhaliano che presentiamo qui, è 
intitolato “Suggerimenti alla storia” e apparve su L’Unità nel 1948. Tale intervento 
è più collegato alla prefazione Stendhal del 1913, oggetto del nostro contributo, e 
ci dimostra un Bontempelli amareggiato che valuta i fallimenti delle sue speranze. 
Quel futuro brillante di rinnovamento culturale, che nella prefazione in questione, 
a partire dalla esperienza di Stendhal, egli auspicava per il proprio presente, non si 
è realizzato. L’articolo prende avvio da una riflessione sulla rivoluzione e su come i 
popoli, in particolare i francesi e gli italiani, ancora non abbiano imparato a veder-
ne l’importanza nel processo del rinnovamento storico e culturale. Il ragionamen-
to bontempelliano parte dalla Rivoluzione francese. Fa osservare come essa aprisse 
una finestra di opportunità attraverso le quali il popolo avrebbe potuto creare nuo-
vi modelli sociali e culturali. Invece, “[c]aduto Napoleone, la gente non ha capito 
che quello che cadeva a buon diritto era il Napoleone diventato antirivoluziona-
rio, e non l’originario” (Bontempelli, 1948). Quindi, al posto della costruzione, alla 
Francia successe la restaurazione che per Bontempelli significava “tornare indietro” 
(Bontempelli, 1948). Lo stesso accadde in Italia in tempi più recenti: la finestra di 
opportunità, ovvero “la nuova piazza pulita” (Bontempelli, 1948), fu un’occasione 
persa. Valutando il momento storico, nota che 
[c]oloro che hanno da tirare le somme di quei 32 anni, [dal 1914 al 1944,] 
devono essere tanto intelligenti da capire [...] che le due guerre [...] di reale e 
diretto non hanno creato niente altro che macerie. Noi non le abbiamo ancora 
spazzate via, noi abbiamo anzi lasciato [...] che si accumulassero in modo da 
individuarle bene. Fatto che avremo la ‘piazza pulita che Stendhal a un secolo e 
mezzo di distanza ci raccomanda, dovremo metterci ad inventare tutto di nuo-
vo. Inventare l’Europa (Bontempelli, 1948). 
Trentacinque anni dopo la prefazione al romanzo Il rosso e il nero, Bontempel-
li valuta ciò che in quel suo testo (Stendhal) ottimisticamente auspicava e che 
sarebbe stato possibile grazie all’impegno rivoluzionario delle avanguardie e al 
dispiego di energie giovanili. In dubbio persino per la propria arte, amareggiato, 
fa capire che la strada verso il rinnovamento della cultura europea è ancora lun-
ga. Ciò viene sottolineato soprattutto nell’ultimo paragrafo dell’articolo in cui 
viene esplicitata appunto la sua delusione per quanto accaduto e per la perduta 
occasione di rinnovamento che si sarebbe potuta attuare un trent’anni prima: il 
nazifascismo sarebbe dovuto essere eliminato appena nato come normalmente si 
fa con i “grumi di sudiciume [...] venuti a galla” (Bontempelli, 1948) dopo averli 
schiumati dal bicchiere. 
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193Massimo Bontempelli (1878-1960)
CONCLUSIONI
Dunque, nella prefazione a Il rosso e il nero del 1913 Bontempelli dipana un ra-
gionamento che si basa soprattutto su come Stendhal e allo stesso tempo Julien 
Sorel vivano la realtà in un momento storico di transizione tra classicismo e ro-
manticismo. Bontempelli riesce ad intrecciare un profilo di Stendhal basato, a 
tratti, sull’analisi psicologica, al profilo di Julien Sorel, il personaggio che vive gli 
eventi del romanzo nella sua interiorità. Questa presentazione biografica sareb-
be dovuta al taglio divulgativo che la casa editrice di Umberto Notari e Bontem-
pelli stesso volevano dare al volume. A ciò corrisponde anche la lineare struttura 
dell’articolo, suddiviso in tre parti. Il linguaggio della prefazione è privo di ironia 
e di irriverenza, il che è forse indicativo del rispetto che Bontempelli nutriva per 
un capolavoro come Il rosso e il nero e anche del fatto che in quel contesto non 
aveva ragione di aprire polemiche letterarie con il pubblico di specialisti. Descri-
vendo la realtà stendhaliana, soprattutto quella familiare, adopera un linguaggio 
che esprime l’atteggiamento di Stendhal verso quella realtà. In un modo simile 
affronta la presentazione di Sorel; lo fa servendosi della paratassi e usando nella 
rievocazione delle vicende vissute dal personaggio anche forme del tempo pre-
sente. Cerca dunque una espressione chiara e allo stesso tempo coinvolgente. Il 
fatto che non dia spazio alle osservazioni formali sul testo e alle sue eventuali 
novità riguardo la traduzione conferma le nostre tesi, e cioè che la prefazione 
non era rivolta a un pubblico di specialisti. Inoltre dal testo traspaiono alcu-
ne delle posizioni novecentiste di Bontempelli, come ad esempio l’importanza 
dello spirito avventuroso e delle energie giovanili in un periodo di transizione 
come elementi necessari per il rinnovamento di una cultura, le potenzialità del-
la scrittura dilettantistica, il ruolo dell’ispirazione e dell’intuizione nel processo 
creativo, l’importanza dell’immaginazione, nonché il problema del difficile rap-
porto tra scrittori e pubblico e la necessità quindi di una cultura che li sappia 
collegare meglio. Bontempelli avrebbe intenzionalmente sottolineato il proble-
ma generazionale vissuto da Stendhal per paragonarlo a quello che vivevano 
giovani scrittori e artisti della contemporaneità. Curiosamente, la necessità da 
parte di Bontempelli di un rinnovamento culturale europeo persiste anche negli 
anni Quaranta, quando, amareggiato, constata che l’Europa non si è ancora resa 
conto dell’importanza di opportunità, e quindi di far piazza pulita di quanto del 
passato è superato, che a una società si presenta dopo una rivoluzione, cosa che 
invece Stendhal intravide e capì già nel 1815. 
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194 Dana Božič
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Dana Božič
Univerza v Ljubljani, Filozofska fakulteta
danabozic.uk@gmail.com
Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) kot bralec Stendhala v odnosu do 
množičnega bralstva na prehodu v Tretje obdobje 
V predgovoru k italijanski izdaji Stendhalovega Rdeče in črno (1913) Massimo Bontem-
pelli (1878–1960), prevajalec romana, predstavi svoja opažanja o nujni kulturni in lite-
rarni prenovi, na katerih je kasneje temeljil njegov novecentismo, ki je bil prvič uradno 
predstavljen v literarni reviji “900” (1926–1927). V članku raziskujem, kako Bontempelli 
z opazovanji o Stendhalovem življenju in tragični izkušnji Juliena Sorela zariše implicitno 
vzporednico z lastnim zgodovinskim trenutkom ter v svoje razmišljanje vplete ključno 
komponento - vlogo revolucionarnega duha avantgard v tej prenovi. Kot nujno pa med 
drugim navaja tudi klasično idejo o umetnosti in literaturi, pri čemer je zanj literarna 
tradicija intimna in globoka kontinuiteta manifestacij nepričakovanih novosti. Čeprav 
je Bontempelli kasneje simpatiziral z italijanskim futurizmom, je ravno ravnovesje med 
obema komponentama tisto, zaradi česar njegova kulturno-literarna pobuda za »tretje 
obdobje«, novecentismo, velja za edinstveno v italijanski literarni panorami. Predgovor iz 
leta 1913 v članku obravnavam v kontekstu nastajajoče množičnega bralstva, s tem pa 
tudi uredniške in jezikovne prilagoditve, ki so bile potrebne za izdajo. Prav tako njegovo 
razmišljanje primerjam z zapisi na temo literarne prenove, ki jih je ustvaril mnogo kasneje. 
Ključne besede: predgovor, novecentizem, avantgarde, Stendhal, množično občinstvo
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