Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

Transkript

Vol. 1
No. 1
Fall 2009
ISSN 1803-7720
The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film is a Czech scholarly journal whose objective is to
be a platform for an intersection of literary and film history, criticism, and theory. The journal
examines literatures and films in any language, thus merging both regional and universal
themes. The journal is published in English, is peer-reviewed, and has two issues a year.
Editor-in-Chief
Associate Editor
Marcel Arbeit
Palacký University, Olomouc
Czech Republic
Michal Peprník
Czech Republic
Managing Editor
Roman Trušník
Tomas Bata University in Zlín
Czech Republic
Editorial Board
Jan Nordby Gretlund
University of Southern Denmark, Odense
Denmark
Stanislav Kolář
University of Ostrava
Czech Republic
Constante González Groba
University of Santiago de Compostela
Spain
Bohuslav Mánek
University of Hradec Králové
Czech Republic
Jakub Guziur
Czech Republic
Tomáš Pospíšil
Masaryk University, Brno
Czech Republic
Nigel Hatton
Stanford University
USA
Luboš Ptáček
Czech Republic
Bernd Herzogenrath
RWTH Aachen University
Germany
Martin Procházka
Charles University, Prague
Czech Republic
Heinz Ickstadt
Free University of Berlin
Germany
Erik S. Roraback
Charles University, Prague
Czech Republic
Josef Jařab
Czech Republic
Werner Sollors
Harvard University
USA
Submissions
The Moravian Journal of Literature and Film welcomes contributions in literary, film, and
cultural studies exploring all aspects of the disciplines. All submissions will be peer-reviewed.
Send essays electronically to [email protected], or, mail printed essays accompanied
by a compact disc with the electronic version to Moravian Journal of Literature and Film,
Department of English and American Studies, Philosophical Faculty, Palacký University,
Olomouc, Křížkovského 10, 771 47 Olomouc, Czech Republic. Essays should conform to the
humanities style (notes and bibliography), as defined in the current edition of The Chicago
Manual of Style. The editors can assume no responsibility for loss of manuscripts. Manuscripts
shall not be submitted simultaneously elsewhere.
Subscription
Individual issues of the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film may be ordered in the
publisher’s e-shop at http://www.e-vup.upol.cz.
Publisher
Křížkovského 8
771 47 Olomouc
Czech Republic
This journal is published within the Research Plan “Plurality of Culture and Democracy”
MSM6198959211, a grant project supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports
of the Czech Republic.
© 2009 Palacký University, Olomouc
[email protected]
www.moravianjournal.upol.cz
ISSN 1803-7720
Reg. no. MK ČR E18802
Table of Contents
Personalia
Marcel Arbeit and Michal Peprník
Living Cultural Plurality: A Tribute to Josef Jařab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Heinz Ickstadt
Josef Jařab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Articles
Marcel Arbeit
Josef Jařab: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1966–2009 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Werner Sollors
Not On Native Grounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Šárka Bubíková
Multicultural Optimism or the Potential Joys of Otherness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55
Stanislav Kolář
Ethnicity and Some Other Aspects of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep . . . . . . . . . . 67
Petr Kopecký
Jazz, Poetry, Ethnicity, and Democracy in the Work of Gary Snyder . . . . . . . 81
Alexandra Hubáčková
Breathing Out the Words of a Different World: American Indian Authors
Writing in English. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .89
Tomáš Pospíšil
Frictions in the City: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing vs. Paul Haggis’s
Crash . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Book Reviews
Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts & Imagined Communities
edited by Martin Procházka and Ondřej Pilný (reviewed by Radek
Glabazňa) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture
of the United States, edited by Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa
Mackenthun, and Theodora Tsimpouki (reviewed by Jan Burda) . . . . . . . . . 116
Living Cultural Plurality: A Tribute to Josef Jařab
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
I
Our maiden issue of this journal is dedicated to Josef Jařab, the leading
European American literature scholar. Those who know Josef Jařab will
agree that he fully deserves our dedication. No other Czech scholar in
the field of American studies has achieved so much, and the range of his
accomplishments is unique even in the European context. Faithful to Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s belief that the American Scholar should learn from Nature,
absorb the best from the Past, link Thought and Action, and inspire Men
and Women, he grasped the opportunity in the historical moment during
the “Velvet Revolution” and became, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, a
leading figure on the campus of Palacký University, Olomouc. Deservedly,
in December 1989 he became the first democratically elected Rector of the
university since 1948 and later was driven by the historical momentum
into politics. When his third term as Rector ended in 1997 (now university
regulations allow only two successive terms), he concurrently held such
prestigious posts as Rector of Central European University in Budapest
(1997–99) and Senator in the Czech Parliament. Let us recall at least some
of his most important achievements as a teacher, scholar, administrator, and
politician.
Teacher
We had the privilege of being Josef Jařab’s students not only in the Ph.D.
program but also during our undergraduate studies in Olomouc in the early
1980s. His courses in American literature were an open window to the exciting
world beyond the Iron Curtain. His were the courses that we looked forward
to. We will always remember especially his legendary Wednesday afternoon
lectures, open to the public, which became a cult event and meeting place for
young intellectuals. Believe it or not, more than one young man would take
his girlfriend to “JJ’s” lecture instead of to a pub or to the cinema. These
Wednesday lectures, like jazz performances, contained a great amount of
joyful and entertaining improvisation and often took us off from the analyzed
text through surprising associative jumps and speedy detours to various sides
of American culture and society. Who ever heard of a lecture that was more
amusing and thought-provoking than the novel that was its subject? Then
reading the actual books was sometimes a sort of disappointment. Josef Jařab
also opened to us the world of ethnic authors, especially African Americans,
Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 1, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 5–12. ISSN 1803-7720.
Josef Jařab
Photo taken by students during the “Velvet Revolution,” appeared for the first time in the
Palacký University samizdat magazine Přetlak on December 18, 1989
7
and made us acquainted with many American poets we had never heard
of before, reading up to then mostly standards by Whitman, Poe, or Emily
Dickinson, and, of course, the rebellious beatniks who enjoyed such extreme
popularity in our country.
Academic Dignitary
Due to his personal contacts at Harvard University established during his
1989 stay, Josef Jařab was able to secure the donation of the entire personal
library of Nathan Huggins, the former director of the W. E. B. Du Bois
Institute, to Palacký University. This collection became a solid basis for
the research of African American history and literature in Olomouc. The
inauguration of the library took place during a colloquium of the Collegium
for African American Research that was attended by Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., Werner Sollors, Lawrence Levine, Berndt Ostendorf, and other notable
American Studies scholars. In 1996 he initiated the establishment of the
Center for Comparative Cultural Studies, funded with the support of the
Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic and the
British Council. Josef Jařab was also the founding member of the Czech and
Slovak Association for American Studies, which survived the separation of
Czechoslovakia, and he became its first President. A clear recognition of Josef
Jařab’s international reputation was his election, in 2000, as the President
of the European Association for American Studies (EAAS)—the first one ever
from a former Warsaw Pact country.
During his stewardship as Rector he did much to make Palacký University
a meeting place for academia and the outside world of cultural life and politics.
He held public talks with the leading figures of the Czech social, cultural and
political life, filling the large ceremonial hall of the Philosophical Faculty. In
those dialogic performances he adroitly used his wide knowledge, great sense
of humor, quick wit, and sense of improvisation and rhythm.
Administrator, Politician and Man of the Public
As the first democratically elected Rector and the leader of the “Velvet
Revolution” at Palacký University he found himself in a unique position to
bring about great changes. He rehabilitated the university teachers who were
dismissed during the communist purges and reinstated them to their original
positions, in some cases promoting them to top academic posts.
He began an extensive expansion of the university. It was his idea to take
over the building of the former armory and change it into a modern university
information center and library, as well as to acquire the former Jesuit College,
an immense but dilapidated three-story Baroque building, and bring it into its
current renaissance as the university Art Center, housing the art, music, film,
and drama departments, and offering spaces for public concerts, conference
receptions, and theater performances. In 1996, he organized a congress
of rectors of European universities in Olomouc. During his term of office,
Palacký University was awarded the prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize as
8
the best academic institution as regards the implementation of educational
reform and research.
Very few people can combine academic careers with administration. Josef
Jařab could do both and still find the energy and time to become a top-level
politician. Because of the revolutionary atmosphere, he was naturally drawn
into the world of regional politics (for instance, he helped to negotiate the
withdrawal of the Soviet army from Olomouc, where the largest Russian
contingent in the Czech Republic was situated). It is difficult enough to be
elected into the Senate of the Czech Republic if one is not a member of one of
the major political parties, and it is even more difficult to be re-elected under
the same conditions. Josef Jařab succeeded, and with no intent to be passive.
In 2001 he became the member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe in Strasbourg, in December 2002 he was appointed Chairman of
the Committee for Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Security of the Czech Senate.
His merits gained official recognition in 2005 when he received the Woodrow
Wilson Freedom Award from the US Embassy in Prague. He was the first
Czech who received this prize, and so far the last.
Scholar
Josef Jařab is author, editor, and co-editor of many books, including
anthologies and volumes of essays. He has written numerous studies, reviews,
and papers, both in Czech and English, on American authors, American
ethnic cultures, cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, as well as dozens
of articles on education reforms and issues concerning the transformation of
higher education. He called for a compatible university education in Europe
that would profit from academic freedoms and institutional autonomy but at
the same time would become more open to the needs of society which would
bring it the desired priority status among funds-distributing politicians.
Among the most prestigious publications in that field to which he contributed
are Transforming Higher Education (1997, ed. Madeleine F. Green) or,
recently, a special issue of Education, Citizenship and Social Justice, a British
scholarly review (2008). In his essay in The New Frontiers of Europe (2005,
ed. Daniel S. Hamilton) he shows that in Europe divided by the Iron Curtain
“culture became alternative politics” and even now, one of the relevant political
goals should be the creation of “a European cultural area”1 with its rich
diversity.
Josef Jařab has been a guest of countless radio and television broadcasts.
Fifty of his conversations with prominent visitors at Palacký University were
collected in the book Večerní rozmluvy (Evening Talks, 1998). In the field
of American Literature and American Studies he contributed, for example,
1. Josef Jařab, “Culture, Knowledge and European Unity,” in The New Frontiers of Europe:
The Enlargement of the European Union – Implications and Consequences, ed. Daniel S.
Hamilton (Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Washington: Center for Transatlantic
Relations, 2005), 94, 98 (italics in original).
9
Josef Jařab with Allen Ginsberg in Olomouc
Photo: Pavel Herynek
to Slovník spisovatelů: Spojené státy americké (A Dictionary of Writers: The
United States of America, 1979, by Zdeněk Vančura and others), Eugene
O’Neill: A World View (1979, ed. Virginia Floyd), Od Poea k postmodernismu
(From Poe to Postmodernism, 1993, ed. Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka),
Spontaneous Mind: Selected Interviews, 1958–1996 (2001, ed. David Carter;
interviews with Allen Ginsberg), and POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses
(2003, ed. Hermann Josef Schnackertz). He edited several anthologies used
by generations of students as well as teachers, translators, and editors, which
have achieved almost cult status. The very first one was the still-famous
American Poetry and Poets of Four Centuries (1976, revised editions in 1982
and 1989). His Masky a tváře černé Ameriky (Masks and Faces of Black
America, 1985), an anthology of African American literature, was nationally
sold out in approximately thirty minutes, keen readers waiting on the day
of publication in queues in front of bookstores from 5 a.m. Four years later,
the situation was repeated with an anthology of modern American poetry
in Czech translation, named after one of Theodore Roethke’s poems Dítě na
skleníku (Child on Top of a Greenhouse, 1989); the anthology was supposed
to be published three years earlier by the Jazz Section, the rebellious branch
of the Czech Musicians Guild, in its extremely popular semi-official book
series Jazz Petit, but the leaders of the organization were arrested by the
Communist secret police and the manuscript was confiscated. Among the
10
volumes Josef Jařab co-edited are Antologie americké literatury (Anthology
of American Literature, 1985, with Eva Masnerová and Radoslav Nenadál),
Race and the Modern Artist (2003, with Heather Hathaway and Jeffrey
Melnick), and America in the Course of Human Events (2006, with Marcel
Arbeit and Jenel Virden), the volume from the 2004 EAAS conference held
in Prague. He prepared two representative selections of Allen Ginsberg’s
translations into Czech: Slovy a dechem (With Words and Breath, 2000)
and Karma červená, bílá a modrá (Karma in Red, White, and Blue, 2001),
complemented with commentaries and an introduction.
The scope of the academic interests of Josef Jařab is truly impressive—he
has published articles and book prefaces on 19th century icons such as Henry
David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allan Poe; on 20th century modern
figures such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Leslie
Marmon Silko, Dee Brown, and Louise Erdrich; on beatniks and experimental
writers, ranging from Ken Kesey, Gary Snyder, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and John
Hawkes to E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, and Raymond Carver. In spite of the
wide range of interest, Josef Jařab’s main concern remains American poetry
and African American literature.
In his literary criticism we can discern several dominant preoccupations:
cultural pluralism and the relation of minority cultures to the dominant
mainstream culture. He addresses these themes in various essays, for
example in “Understanding African-American Culture: A Central European
View” (1997), later reprinted in Americas Abroad, a special double issue of
Annals of Scholarship, and “Modernity, Modernism, and the American Ethnic
Minority Artist,” his introduction to Race and the Modern Artist. In the former
essay, originally a lecture delivered at James Madison College, he points out
that the first author to introduce the concept of cultural pluralism was Horace
M. Kallen, a Jew from Silesia. In the 1920s, Kallen criticized the pressure to
assimilate as antidemocratic and argued that ethnic minorities contribute in
an important manner to the American dream and enrich America. In Jařab’s
opinion, Kallen underrated the relation of ethnic cultures to the dominant
national culture and conceived this relation in static terms, while in reality
it has a dynamic character and involves the process of mutual exchange and
enrichment, fostering “new syncretic forms of existence and performance.”2
There can be no doubt that American culture has always had this character,
even at the times when the intercultural dialogue has not been sufficiently
visible.
It is evident that Josef Jařab does not subscribe to any contemporary
school of theory. He is essentially a literary and cultural historian. His main
attention is to the world of ideas, the relation between the text and its literary,
cultural, social, and political contexts. He is interested in the genesis of text
as well as in the personality of the author. For him, biographical data and the
2. Josef Jařab, “Understanding African-American Culture: A Central European View,” James
Madison College Scene 3, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 4.
11
cultural background come to serve as legitimate tools for the understanding
and interpretation of text. His interest in the authors often springs from
the fact that he has personally met them. Thanks to his personal contacts
we could host in Olomouc such literary celebrities as Robert Coover, Robert
Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder.
In Czech we have a saying: tell me which book you read and I will tell
you what you are like. The same can be said of literary criticism: tell me
what you can see and evaluate in the text, and I will tell you who you are.
When Josef Jařab writes about Toni Morrison, in his 2001 afterword to the
Czech edition of Paradise, that she attempts “an interpretation of a historical
experience which is free from the traditional burden of race, gender, and class,
and avoids a schematic vision of human fate and history,” and when he points
out “the danger of closing up in the worlds, which in their effort to be different
and better, only recycle the old structures of exclusion and discrimination,”3
he, at the same time, speaks about his vision of the world and of the role of
literature, and, therefore, also about himself.
II
This volume has brought together papers of some of Josef Jařab’s students,
now American Studies and American Literature teachers and researchers at
various universities of the Czech Republic, as well as contributions by his
academic friends abroad: a personal recollection by Heinz Ickstadt, whom
Josef Jařab succeeded in the office of the President of the EAAS, and an
essay by Werner Sollors. Sollors, a long-time friend of Jařab’s, addresses
the interesting topic of American writers in Europe, including the two Jařab
befriended, hosted in Prague and Olomouc and translated or at least edited:
Yusef Komunyakaa and Allen Ginsberg.
The topic of this issue reflects Josef Jařab’s main fields of interest: jazz,
poetry, ethnic literature, and democracy. Šárka Bubíková asks whether
people can freely change their ethnic identities, using as examples characters
in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land and Michael Dorris’s and Louise
Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus, as well as two novels by Philip Roth. She
takes an optimistic position, arguing that in these recent Chinese American,
Native American, and Jewish American novels, identity is seen less as a
fierce struggle for survival and more as a mask, performance, and a way of
the creation of the self, which possesses a hybrid nature. Stanislav Kolář in
his analysis of Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep argues that this novel has
outgrown the limits of an ethnic novel and offers a wide pluralistic panorama
of immigrant America that can be the proverbial “Golden Land” as well as
a hostile space where newcomers can easily become lost. Kolář also calls
the book “a multilingual novel,” which, although written in English, creates
3. Josef Jařab, “Ponobelovský román Toni Morrisonové: Iluze ráje, nebo přízrak střetů?” in Ráj
[Paradise], by Toni Morrisonová (Praha: Vyšehrad, 2001), 320. Translated into English by
Michal Peprník.
12
an impression that the story is told in Yiddish. Petr Kopecký has found all
the favorite themes of Josef Jařab in the poetry of Gary Snyder, and looks
for affinities between the works of the two creative men. He shows that
although they may have drawn on different poetic sources and life experiences,
both share an ecopoetical principle of inclusiveness linked with the stress on
democratic openness and heterogeneity, all of this springing from a close,
intensively experienced relatedness to Nature. Alexandra Hubáčková taps
a similar vein in her article about writings of indigenous people in English
but she takes a different turn. Using the hypothesis of Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf that each language shapes the reality it refers to, she
claims that the use of English, “the enemy’s language,” changes thinking and
behavior of indigenous people. However, Native American authors learned
to use English in new, specific ways, at the same time reviving their original
languages and saving them from extinction. Tomáš Pospíšil’s essay also takes
up the ethnic issue in his comparative study of two films by African American
directors, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Paul Haggis’s Crash, arguing
that the color line is far from fading and cultural stereotypes still frequently
come to the surface in emotionally-loaded situations.
The editors regret that space limitations did not allow the inclusion of
many of the fine and thought-provoking essays that flooded in after we
advertised the call for papers to pay tribute to Josef Jařab; most of them
definitely deserve to be published and read. But we hope this is not the final
word of our appreciation—and, which is more important, Josef Jařab is still
here to teach us, inspire us, and open new doors and windows of American
Literature and American Studies for us.
Bibliography
Jařab, Josef. “Culture, Knowledge and European Unity.” In The New
Frontiers of Europe: The Enlargement of the European Union –
Implications and Consequences, edited by Daniel S. Hamilton. Lisbon:
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation; Washington: Center for Transatlantic
Relations, 2005. 93–98.
———. “Ponobelovský román Toni Morrisonové: Iluze ráje, nebo přízrak
střetů?” In Ráj [Paradise], by Toni Morrisonová. Praha: Vyšehrad, 2001.
319–27.
———. “Reforming Systems and Institutions of Higher Learning: Towards
the Creation of a European and Global Higher Education Area.”
Education, Citizenship and Social Justice 3, no. 1 (March 2008): 85–96.
———. “Understanding African-American Culture: A Central European
View.” James Madison College Scene 3, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 1, 4, 7–9.
Josef Jařab
Heinz Ickstadt
Free University of Berlin, Germany
The first time I met Josef was in 1986, at one of the biennial conferences of
the European Association of American Studies in Budapest, the first one ever
to take place in what was then “Eastern Europe.” Werner Sollors pointed him
out to me as one of the foremost European scholars in the field of African
American literature and culture, and a connoisseur of jazz. He looked at me
benignly—as he still looks now (in fact, I remember his face as a constant
beyond change and time, as always having that warm and friendly expression,
no matter what color hair or beard it may now have). A man who trusts,
even though he knows himself to be part of a world that cannot be trusted. If
memory does not deceive me, I met him again some ten years later at Werner
Sollors’s house in Boston—probably in connection with the ASA conference
that took place there in 1996 (or was it in 1994?). I seem to remember, in
any case, a long night of drinking and talking—a convivial unity of souls that
made his benign face a body-feeling of kindred-spiritedness. When he joined
the Board of the EAAS shortly after I had become its president, it dawned
on me that he would be an ideal successor—a symbolic bridge connecting the
newly united but still divided Europe, his presidency marking the symbolic
shift within the European Association to a new center, from Western to
Central Europe. (By then, I had also heard of his heroics vis-à-vis the Russian
army in Olomouc and knew of the extraordinary role that he, an academic for
whom academia was never quite enough, played in the political dramas of
the new Czech Republic.) I was, of course, romanticizing and anticipating a
Europe that even Josef Jařab could not bring about. It will take more time
and patience; and wisdom; and an understanding of differences historically
grown and suffered that can only be overcome in mutual tolerance via patient
and insistent acts of communication. This is what Josef Jařab has always
represented for me: a kindness that knows of hatred; an openness of spirit
that knows the price paid for repression, and a humaneness that knows of
suffering. For me, he is a great communicator and the representative of a
Europe still to come.
Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 1, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 13. ISSN 1803-7720.
Josef Jařab: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1966–2009
Marcel Arbeit
Abstract
This bibliography of Josef Jařab, a leading Czech American literature and American
studies scholar, the former Rector of Palacký University in Olomouc and the Central
European University in Budapest, and the former member of the Senate of the Czech
Republic, lists all his publications in languages other than Czech as well as most
of his Czech works. Besides monographs, anthologies, and studies in peer-reviewed
scholarly journals, it also lists his reviews, prefaces, commentaries, writers’ profiles,
and translations from English.
Keywords
Josef Jařab; bibliography; American literature; American studies; university education;
university leadership; literary translations; American poetry; African American
literature
This bibliography aims at providing a comprehensive list of Josef Jařab’s
publications from the fields of American literature, American studies and
cultural studies in general, and university education and its development. We
also included the literary works he has translated from English, his shorter
articles, reviews, introductions, and memorial pieces, as well as profiles of
American authors that often accompanied the translations of their works
into Czech. With the exception of four items, we have checked every book
or periodical listed in the only Jařab’s bibliography available so far, and
corrected all entries accordingly. We have also added numerous entries, old
and new. If a Czech text was followed by an English summary, we list the
English title as given there, even when the author himself prefers a different
translation now. The entries in each of the ten categories into which we have
sorted them are listed chronologically, starting with the oldest. We did our
best to make our bibliography as complete as possible, still we are sure that
some texts which even their author does not remember must have escaped
our searchlight.
We deliberately omitted interviews of Czech and foreign journalists with
Josef Jařab, conducted mostly at the time when he served as the Rector
of Palacký University and a member of the Senate of the Czech Republic
first for the Olomouc region, and later for the Opava region. As the focus
of this bibliography is on Jařab’s scholarly writings, we decided not to list
his articles in Czech newspapers commenting on various aspects of Czech
domestic and foreign policy, although we did list such articles if they were
written in English. Our bibliography also omits his contributions to the
16
Palacký University weekly Žurnál UP, which mostly deal with local matters
and the daily life of his alma mater. Editors of non-Czech publications give
Jařab’s surname as “Jarab” so often that we take it as a variant, even though
incorrect, and do not comment on it, unless it appears in titles of the articles.
The names of women writers are given as they appear in the texts (in the
Czech language, the suffix -ová is added to the names of women). We provide
English translations of all titles of the articles and books written in languages
other than English: either in parentheses, if they are official translations of
works published in English, or in brackets, if they are “unofficial,” informative
translations.
1. Monographs
Realistické a nerealistické prvky v díle Johna Dos Passose [Realistic and
Unrealistic Features in the Work of John Dos Passos]. Doctoral diss.,
Philosophical Faculty, Charles University, Prague, 1968. – Defended on
March 13, 1968.
Americká černošská próza: Obsah a pojetí pojmu na pozadí historického
vývoje [African American Fiction Against the Historical Background].
Candidate of Science diss., Philosophical Faculty, Charles University,
Prague, 1978. – Defended on June 5, 1978.
2. Editor and Co-editor of Scholarly Books and Anthologies
American Poetry and Poets of Four Centuries. Edited by Josef Jařab.
Olomouc: Rektorát Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci, 1976. – Anthology
of texts in English; also the author of the writers’ profiles and critical
commentaries.
Germanica Olomoucensia IV. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis,
Facultas Philosophica – Philologica 42, 1978. Edited by [Josef Jařab].
Praha: Univerzita Palackého v SPN, 1978.
American Poetry and Poets of Four Centuries. Edited by Josef Jařab. Praha:
Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1982. – The second, revised and
expanded edition.
Germanica Olomucensia V. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis,
Facultas Philosophica, Philologica 48 – 1983. Edited by [Josef Jařab].
Antologie americké literatury [Anthology of American Literature]. Edited by
Josef Jařab, Eva Masnerová, and Radoslav Nenadál. Praha: Státní
pedagogické nakladatelství, 1985. – Anthology of texts in English.
Masky a tváře černé Ameriky [Masks and Faces of Black America]. Edited by
Josef Jařab. Praha: Odeon, 1985. – Anthology of texts in English; also the
author of the writers’ profiles and critical commentaries.
Marcel Arbeit
17
Germanica Olomucensia VI. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis,
Facultas Philosophica – Philologica 54, 1986. Edited by [Josef Jařab].
American Poetry and Poets of Four Centuries. Edited by Josef Jařab. Praha:
Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1989. – The third, newly revised and
further expanded edition.
Germanica Olomucensia VII. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis,
Facultas Philosophica, Philologica 60 – 1989. Edited by [Josef Jařab].
Dítě na skleníku: Výbor ze současné americké poezie [Child on Top of
a Greenhouse: Selection of Contemporary American Poetry]. Edited by
Josef Jařab. Translated by Jaroslav Kořán. Praha: Odeon, 1989. –
Anthology of texts in English; also the author of the preface, writers’
profiles, and critical commentaries.
Race and the Modern Artist. Edited by Heather Hathaway, Josef Jařab, and
Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
America in the Course of Human Events: Presentations and Interpretations.
Edited by Josef Jařab, Marcel Arbeit, and Jenel Virden. Amsterdam:
VU University Press, 2006.
George Steiner a myšlenka Evropy [George Steiner and the Idea of Europe].
Edited by Josef Jařab and Jakub Guziur. Olomouc: Periplum, 2006.
3. Other Books
Večerní rozmluvy s hosty Univerzity Palackého 1991–1996 [Evening Talks
with Guests of Palacký University, 1991–1996]. Edited by Václav Burian
and Tomáš Tichák. Olomouc: Votobia, 1998.
Mezi realitou a literaturou: 6. přednáška z cyklu Vědeckopopulárních
přednášek významných absolventů Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci
pořádaných za podpory statutárního města Olomouce [Between Reality
and Literature: The Sixth Lecture in the Cycle of the Popular Scholarly
Lectures of Distinguished Palacký University Alumni, Organized with
the Support of the Statutary City of Olomouc]. Olomouc: Univerzita
Palackého v Olomouci, 2008.
4. Contributions to Books and Periodicals in Languages Other Than
Czech
“The Drop of Patience of the American Negro: W. M. Kelley: A Different
Drummer (1959), A Drop of Patience (1965).” Philologica Pragensia 12,
no. 3 (1969): 159–70.
18
“The Birth of the New Negro (The Harlem Renaissance Reconsidered).” In
Acta Universitatis Carolinae – Philologica 2 – Prague Studies in English
XV, edited by Vladimír Elznic and Ian Milner. Praha: Univerzita
Karlova, 1973. 37–65.
“James Baldwin’s Essays: An Ordeal of Courageous Honesty.” In Germanica
Olomoucensia IV. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis, Facultas
Philosophica – Philologica 42, 1978, edited by [Josef Jařab]. Praha:
Univerzita Palackého v SPN, 1978. 89–104.
“Josef Jařab, PP. No. 12, 1969, pp. 167–70.” In “Kelley, William Melvin
(1937– ).” In Modern Black Writers, compiled and edited by Michael
Popkin. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1978. 264–65. – Reprinted in 1983.
“The Lasting Challenge of Eugene O’Neill: A Czechoslovak View.” In Eugene
O’Neill: A World View, edited by Virginia Floyd. New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1979. 84–100.
“A. R. Ammons and the Line of Descent from Emerson and Whitman.” In
Traditions in the 20th Century American Literature: A Symposium,
edited by Marta Sienicka. Poznań: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza
v Poznaniu, 1981. 109–17.– Proceedings of the second symposium on
American literature organized by the Institute of English, Adam
Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Kiekrz, December 12–14, 1979.
“Afro-American Culture and Literature Striving for Visibility.” In
Germanica Olomucensia V. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis,
Facultas Philosophica, Philologica 48 – 1983, edited by [Josef Jařab].
Praha: Univerzita Palackého v SPN, 1983. 53–58.
“Racism or Sexism? Some Remarks on Contemporary Black Women
Authors.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin 33, no. 4 (1984): 417–18.
“Black Aesthetic: A Cultural or Political Concept?” In The Origins and
Originality of American Culture, edited by Tibor Frank. Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1984. 631–40.
“Walt Whitman’s Modernism and Its Twentieth-Century Impact.” In
Challenge of the Century: Proceedings of the Third Symposium on
Twentieth-Century English and American Poetry in Its International
Context, Ahrenshoop, October 14–17, 1984. Rostock:
Wilhelm-Pieck-Universität, Sektion Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft,
1985. 14–18.
“Black Aesthetic: A Cultural or Political Concept?” Callaloo 8, no. 3 [25]
(Autumn 1985): 587–93.
“The Gradual Advent of Emily Dickinson.” In Jubilejní ročenka Kruhu
moderních filologů při Československé akademii věd [An Anniversary
Yearbook of the Circle of Modern Philologists of the Czechoslovak
Marcel Arbeit
19
Academy of Science], edited by [Jaromír Tláskal]. [Praha]: Kruh
moderních filologů při Československé akademii věd, 1986. 46–51.
“Early Afro-American Fiction.” In Germanica Olomucensia VI. Acta
Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis, Facultas Philosophica –
Philologica 54, 1986, edited by [Josef Jařab]. Praha: Univerzita
Palackého v SPN, 1986. 51–68.
“W. E. Burghardt DuBois [sic] and the New Negro Movement.” In American
Literature and the Contemporary Ideological Struggle: The Novel Between
the World Wars, edited by Günther Klotz and Heinz Wüstenhagen.
Potsdam: Pädagogischen Hochschule “Karl Liebknecht,” 1986. 61–74. –
Potsdamer Forschungen der Pädagogischen Hochschule “Karl
Liebknecht,” Potsdam, Gesellschaftwissenschaftliche Reihe, Heft 72.
“W. E. Burghardt DuBois [sic] and the Rise of Afro-American Culture.” In
Their Own Words 3, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 135–44. – Special issue, “Essays
on American Ethnic Literature,” edited by William Boelhower.
“Joseph Jarab [sic], University of Olomouc, Czechoslovakia.” In “The
‘Beautiful’ and American Studies: The Significance of Aesthetics Today:
An Unrepresentative Survey,” by Werner Sollors. American Studies
International 26, no. 2 (1988): 17–18.
“The Stories of the New Lost Generation.” In Cross-Cultural Studies:
American, Canadian and European Literatures: 1945–1985, edited by
Mirko Jurak. Ljubljana: English Department, Filozofska fakulteta,
Edvard Kardelj University of Ljubljana, 1988. 157–63. – The proceedings
of the Symposium on Contemporary Literatures and Cultures of the
United States of America and Canada, Bled, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, May
9–14, 1988.
“The Recent Yet Remote War: Vietnam in American Literature.” In
Germanica Olomucensia VII. Acta Universitatis Palackianae
Olomucensis, Facultas Philosophica, Philologica 60 – 1989, edited by
[Josef Jařab]. Praha: Univerzita Palackého v SPN, 1989. 75–84.
“Black American Literature and Cultural Pluralism.” In In the European
Grain: American Studies from Central and Eastern Europe, edited by
Orm Øverland. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990. 88–103. –
European Contributions to American Studies XIX.
“Richard Wright’s Black Boy – Within, Without, or Beyond Blackness?” In
The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writing Between the Wars,
edited by William Boelhower. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990.
121–35. – European Contributions to American Studies XVII.
“Úvodem / Foreword.” In Gaudeamus, by Petr Zatloukal. Olomouc:
Univerzita Palackého; Nadace Charty 77, 1990. [7]–[8].
20
“Final Report.” CRE-action, no. 4 [100] (1992): 63–65. – Special issue,
“Missions de l’université en Europe / Missions of the University in
Europe.”
“The Story of the Jazz Section in Czechoslovakia.” In Cultural
Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe, edited
by Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, and Doeko F. J. Bosscher. Amsterdam:
VU University Press, 1993. 209–15. – European Contributions to
American Studies XXV.
“Petites vérités et grand mensonge: l’éducation sous le totalitarisme [Little
Truths and the Big Lie: Education and Totalitarianism].” In La Vérité
vous rendra Libres: Une Culture pour l’Europe; Colloque de Prague,
6–11 Septembre 1993 [The Truth Will Set You Free: One Culture for
Europe; Prague Colloquium, September 6–11, 1993]. [N. p.]: A.C.C.E.;
MAME, 1993. 228–30.
“Higher Education and Research in the Czech Republic.” Policy Perspectives
5, no. 1 (June 1993): 7B–11B.
“Higher Education and Research in the Czech Republic.” Higher Education
Management 5, no. 3 (November 1993): 309–16.
“The Twentieth Century Impact of Walt Whitman.” In Philologica 67 –
Anglica I. Acta Universitatis Palackianae Olomucensis, Facultas
Philosophica, edited by [Marcel Arbeit]. Olomouc: Vydavatelství
Univerzity Palackého, 1994. 67–70.
“Black Stars, the Red Star, and the Blues.” In The Black Columbiad:
Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by
Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1994. 167–73.
“Higher Education Reform in the Czech Republic.” In Changes in Central
Europe: Challenges and Perspectives for Higher Education and Research;
Proceedings of a Symposium Held at the Ford Foundation, New York,
January 28, 1994, edited by Colin G. Campbell and Ralf Dahrendorf.
Wien: Institut für die Wissenschaftlichen von Menschen / Institute for
Human Sciences, 1994. 20–26. – Transformation of the National Higher
Education and Research Systems of Central Europe, vol. 6.
“My Home Is Your Home Provided You Don’t Come on a Tank.” In Alive in
Parts of This Century: Eric Mottram at 70, edited by Peterjon and Yasmin
Skelt. Twickenham; Wakefield: North and South, 1994. 113–15.
“Czech List for Reform.” Times – Higher Education Supplement, February
10, 1995: 14.
“Transforming Czech Higher Education and Research.” Higher Education in
Europe 20, no. 3 (1995): 103–10. – Special issue, “Managing the Balance:
The State, the Market, the Institution and the Individual.”
Marcel Arbeit
21
“Images of America in Eastern Europe.” History of European Ideas 20, no.
1–3 (1995): 583–84.
“Universitäre Forschung und Lehre in der Tschechischen Republik: Die
Entwicklungen der letzten Jahre [University Research and Teaching in
the Czech Republic: The Development in Recent Years].” Translated by
Georg Schuppener. Hochschule Ost 5, no. 2 (1996): 124–29.
“Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci – půl století a dále / Palacký University,
Olomouc – Fifty Years and After.” In Padesát let: Z dějin obnovené
univerzity [Fifty Years: From the History of the Re-established
University]. Olomouc: Vydavatelství Univerzity Palackého, 1996. 5–14.
“A Word of Welcome / Slovo na uvítanou.” In Setkání na Welwyn Street:
11 britských básnířek / Encounters on Welwyn Street: 11 British Woman
Poets, edited by Jitka Herynková. Translated by Jitka Herynková.
Olomouc: Votobia, 1996. 5−8.
“Universities and Social Change: Seven Years After 1989.” In Hannah
Arendt Prize 1996 – Palacký University, Olomouc. Wien: IWM, 1996.
23–26.
“Acceptance Speech.” In Hannah Arendt Prize 1996 – Palacký University,
Olomouc. Wien: IWM, 1996. 48–50.
“Prof. Josef Jarab [sic] – Università di Olomouc [Prof. Josef Jařab –
University of Olomouc].” In La Responsibilità Europea delle Università,
Atti del Convegno, Pisa, 23–26 Novembre 1994 [The European
Reponsibility of Universities: A Volume from the Conference Held in Pisa,
November 23–26, 1994], edited by Elena Rossi. Pisa: Commissione
Europa; Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca Scientifica e
Tecnologica; Università di Pisa, 1996. 73–78.
“This Thing, the Bass Saxophone, Is Anything but Ordinary.” Review of
Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 120–25. – Special issue,
“Maria Vargas Llosa, Josef Skvorecky,” edited by Johnny Payne and Steve
Horowitz, assistant editor James Grove.
“La forza vitale del jazz: Il sax basso di Josef Škvorecký [The Vital Power of
Jazz: Josef Škvorecký’s The Bass Saxophone].” In Jazztoldtales: Jazz
e fiction, letteratura e jazz [Jazztoldtales: Jazz and Fiction, Literature
and Jazz], edited by Franco Minganti. Imola: Bacchilega Editore, 1997.
146–53.
“Understanding African-American Culture: A Central European View.”
James Madison College Scene 3, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 1, 4, 7–9. – 1996
All-University Excellence in Diversity Lecture, March 28, 1996.
“Race Relations in Europe and America.” In Living with America,
1946−1996, edited by Cristina Giorcelli and Rob Kroes. Amsterdam:
22
VU University Press, 1997. 287−94. − European Contributions to
American Studies XXXVIII.
“The Czech Republic.” In Transforming Higher Education: Views from
Leaders Around the World, edited by Madeleine F. Green. Phoenix:
American Council on Education; Dryx Press, 1997. 259–75.
“Words of Welcome, by Josef Jařab, President and Rector.” In Central
European University: 1997–1998 Academic Year Prospectus. [Budapest]:
Central European University, 1997. 16–17.
“Quelle démocratie pour l’Europe? [What Democracy for Europe?]”
Translated by Carole Formánek. In Regards communs sur l’Europe:
Colloque des 1er et 2 avril 1997 organisé à l’occasion de la visite officielle
en République tchèque de Monsieur Jacques Chirac, Président de la
République française [Shared Views of Europe: Colloquium Held on April
1–2, 1997 on the Occasion of the Official Visit of the President of French
Republic, Mr. Jacques Chirac, to the Czech Republic], edited by Jacques
Rupnik. Praha: Centre Française de Recherche en Sciences Sociales,
1998. 39–45. – Cahiers du CeFReS, no. 14f.
“Postscript.” In The Public Role of the University: Vision 20-10; European
University Leaders’ Perspectives on the Future, edited by Bernd Wächter.
Berlin: CRE; Association des universités européenes / Association of
European Universities, [1998]. 61–63. – XIe assemblée générale / 11th
General Assembly, Freie Universität Berlin 1998.
“Letter from the Rector: CEU Taking Further Steps Towards Institutional
Maturity.” CEU Gazette 8, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 2.
“Central Europe Again, Anew and Beyond.” In Zurück nach Europa – wie
geht es weiter? [Back to Europe: What to Do Next?]. Wien: Institut für den
Donauraum und Mitteleuropa, 1999. 14–16. – IDM-INFO, no. 15.
“Baldwin, James Arthur.” In Notable Americans Who Died Between
1986–1990, edited by Kenneth T. Jackson. Vol. 2 of The Scribner
Encyclopedia of American Lives, edited by Karen Markoe. Executive
editor Arnold Markoe. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. 59–61.
“CEU – A Unique Meeting Place.” CEU Gazette 8, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 1, 8.
“Understanding African-American Culture: A Central European View.”
Annals of Scholarship 12, no. 3–4 (1998): 121–128. – Special issue,
“Americas Abroad,” edited by Donald E. Pease and Marie-Rose Logan.
“Die neue akademische Mobilität [The New Academic Mobility].” In
Erwartungen der Beitrittsländer: Erweiterung der Europäischen Union
[The Expectations of Candidate Countries: The Enlargment of the
European Union]. Wien: Institut für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa,
[1998]. 28. – IDM-INFO Sonderheft.
Marcel Arbeit
23
“The Czech Story of American Literature.” In Realism and Moralism in
International Relations: Essays in Honor of Frans A. M. Alting von
Geusau, edited by Willem J. M. van Genugten, Ernst M. H. Hirsch Ballin,
Eric J. Janse de Jonge, and Pieter H. Kooijmans. The Hague: Kluwer
Law International, 1999. 259–70.
“Laudatio / Laudatio.” Translated by Angela Zavettieri. In “Premio / Cena
Nadace Vize 97 [The Foundation Vize 97 Award].” La Nuova rivista
italiana di Praga / Nový italský časopis v Praze 6, no. 2 (2000)–1 (2001):
46–51.
“Acceptance Speech 1996: Josef Jařab, Rector, Palacký University,
Olomouc.” In Universities After Communism: The Hannah Arendt Prize
and the Reform of Higher Education, by Ralf Dahrendorf. Hamburg:
Körber-Stiftung, 2000. 139–42.
“Presidential Report and the Bordeaux Conference.” American Studies in
Europe, no. 46 (May 2001): 1.
“The Bordeaux Conference in Light of the Recent American Catastrophe –
Words of Solidarity from the President.” American Studies in Europe, no.
47 (October 2001): 1–2.
“Foreword.” In Spirituality and Religion in American Culture, edited by
Matthew Sweney and Michal Peprník. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého
v Olomouci, 2002. 7–12.
“Coping with the Past or Shaping the Future?” KOSMAS: Czechoslovak and
Central European Journal 16, no. 1 (Fall 2002): 79–86. – Speech
delivered at the World Congress of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and
Sciences in Plzeň (June 2002).
“Introduction: Modernity, Modernism, and the American Ethnic Minority
Artist.” In Race and the Modern Artist, edited by Heather Hathaway,
Josef Jařab, and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford University Press,
2003. 3–15.
“Literature Is Language Struggling for More Meaning (Words to Hurt and
Words to Heal).” In The Science and Culture Series: Nuclear Strategy and
Peace Technology – International Seminar on Nuclear War and Planetary
Emergencies, 27th Session, “E. Majorana” Centre for Scientific Culture,
Erice, Italy, 18–26 August 2002, edited by R[ichard] Ragaini. Series editor
Antonino Zichichi. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific Publishing, 2003.
249–55.
“Edgar Allan Poe’s Literary Strivings: How to Sell Beauty When Truth is
a Bore.” In POEtic Effect and Cultural Discourses, edited by Hermann
Josef Schnackertz. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2003. 51–60.
“Foreword: How Can We Act (Write and Read) Before We Understand?” In
(Mis)understanding Postmodernism and The Fiction of Politics and the
24
Politics of Fiction, edited by Matthew Sweney and Michal Peprník.
Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2003. 7–14.
“The Political Role of Higher Education in Democratic Societies.” In
Salzburg Seminar: Universities Project Final Report 1997–2002.
Salzburg: Salzburg Seminar; Middlebury, VT: Marble Works, [n. d.].
26–28.
“Welcome to Prague! An Invitation from Josef Jarab.” American Studies in
Europe, no. 51 (October 2003): 1–2.
“World Caring for the People in North Korea.” In Shining the Light of
Human Rights on North Korea: The 4th International Conference on
North Korean Human Rights and Refugees, 2003, Prague, Czech Republic.
Seoul: Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, 2003. 27–30.
“Czech and Slovak American Studies.” In The United States in Global
Contexts: American Studies after 9/11 and Iraq, edited by Walter
Grünzweig. Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004. 72.
“Translating Yusef Komunyakaa into Czech: A Personal Confession.”
Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 691–96. – Special issue, “Yusef
Komunyakaa,” edited by Michael Collins.
“Word of Introduction.” In America: Home of the Brave, edited by Michal
Peprník and Matthew Sweney. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého
v Olomouci, 2005. 7–12.
“Culture, Knowledge and European Unity.” In The New Frontiers of Europe:
The Enlargement of the European Union – Implications and
Consequences, edited by Daniel S. Hamilton. Lisbon: Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation; Washington: Center for Transatlantic Relations,
2005. 93–98.
“Introduction.” In America in the Course of Human Events: Presentations
and Interpretations, edited by Josef Jařab, Marcel Arbeit, and Jenel
Virden. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 2006. 7–9. – As The Editors. –
European Contributions to American Studies 63.
“Academic Freedom and University Autonomy: Report of the Parliamentary
Assembly of the Council of Europe by Josef Jarab, Committee on Culture,
Science, and Education, 2nd June 2006 (Doc. 10943).” In The Politics of
European University Identity – Political and Academic Perspectives:
Proceedings of the Seminar of the Magna Charta Observatory, 14
September 2006. Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2006. 27–62. – Also
“Introductory Remarks,” 21–26, and “Closing Remarks,” 167–69.
“American Studies in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.” European Journal
of American Studies 1 (2006): Article 4. January 20, 2006.
http://ejas.revues.org/document518.html.
Marcel Arbeit
25
“CEU – Three Letters Prompting Good Memories and Firm Faith.” In The
Visegrad Group – A Central European Constellation: Publication on the
Occasion of the 15th Anniversary of the Visegrad Group, edited by Andrzej
Jagodziński. Bratislava: International Visegrad Fund, 2006. 159–60.
“Central Europe: Between Memories and Dreams – Hardly an Encouraging
Reality.” In Does Central Europe Still Exist? History, Economy, Identity,
edited by Thomas Row. Wien: Diplomatische Akademie Wien, 2007.
135–44.
“Preface – ‘New York, New York’: A Magic Incantation.” In New York: Cradle
of America’s Cultural Plurality, edited by Michal Peprník and Matthew
Sweney. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2007. 7–15.
“Greenwich Village–Harlem: A Round Trip.” In New York: Cradle of
America’s Cultural Plurality, edited by Michal Peprník and Matthew
Sweney. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2007. 79–92.
“What Happened in Central Europe?” In Populism in Central Europe, edited
by Václav Nekvapil and Maria Staszkiewicz. Praha: Association for
International Affairs, 2007. 16–19.
“Reforming Systems and Institutions of Higher Learning: Towards the
Creation of a European and Global Higher Education Area.” Education,
Citizenship and Social Justice 3, no. 1 (March 2008): 85–96. – Special
issue, “Engaged Universities for New Times,” edited by Bruce Muirhead,
Catherine Burnheim, and Colin Power.
“Ken Kesey: The Laying of Cuckoo Eggs.” In Cult Fiction & Cult Film:
Multiple Perspectives, edited by Marcel Arbeit and Roman Trušník.
Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2008. 115–31.
“M. Josef JARAB [sic].” In “Faciliter l’accés à toutes les littératures
européennes [To Make All European Literatures Accessible].” In
L’enseignement des littératures européennes: Actes du colloque organisé le
11 decémbre 2007 au Palais du Luxembourg [Teaching European
Literatures: A Volume from a Colloquium Organized on December 11,
2007 in Palais du Luxembourg], edited by Jacques Legendre. Paris:
Sénat; Délégation française à l’Assemblée parlamentaire du Conseil de
l’Europe, 2008. 43. – Les Rapports du Sénat, no. 221 (2007–2008).
“M. Josef JAŘAB, Professeur de littérature, Université d’Olomouc [Mr. Josef
Jařab, Professor of Literature, University of Olomouc].” In “Pédagogie:
L’enseignement de littérature(s), Identification des canons littéraires,
Littératures nationale, linguistique et du monde, Doctorats européens
[Education: The Teaching of Literature, Literary Canons, Languages and
World, European Doctor’s Degrees].” In L’enseignement des littératures
européennes: Actes du colloque organisé le 11 decémbre 2007 au Palais du
Luxembourg [Teaching European Literatures: A Volume from
a Colloquium Organized on December 11, 2007 in Palais du
26
Luxembourg], edited by Jacques Legendre. Paris: Sénat; Délégation
française à l’Assemblée parlamentaire du Conseil de l’Europe, 2008.
62–64. – Les Rapports du Sénat, no. 221 (2007–2008).
“M. Josef JARAB [sic].” In “L’aide à la diffusion: L’apport des nouvelles
technologies, Édition et nouvelles technologies, Prix Littéraires [To Aid
the Distribution: The Introduction of New Technologies, The Publication
and New Technologies, Literary Awards].” In L’enseignement des
littératures européennes: Actes du colloque organisé le 11 decémbre 2007
au Palais du Luxembourg [Teaching European Literatures: A Volume
from a Colloquium Organized on December 11, 2007 in Palais du
Luxembourg], edited by Jacques Legendre. Paris: Délégation française
à l’Assemblée parlamentaire du Conseil de l’Europe, 2008. 78–79. – Les
Rapports du Sénat, no. 221 (2007–2008).
“Up from Invisibility.” In A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil
Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2009. 732–37.
5. Contributions in Czech Books and Periodicals Other Than Reviews or
Introductions to Translations
“Překlad jako převod informace (John Dos Passos: USA, překlad A. J.
Šťastný) [Translation as Information Transfer (John Dos Passos, USA,
trans. A. J. Šťastný].” Česká literatura 14, no. 2 (1966): 141–49.
“O některých problémech teorie moderního románu v anglosaské literární
vědě a kritice [On Some Problems of the Theory of the Modern Novel in
the Anglo-Saxon Literary Criticism].” Česká literatura 15, no. 3 (1967):
243–69.
“Humanismus misantropie a samoty: Romány E. L. Wallanta [Humanism of
Misanthropy and Loneliness: The Novels of E. L. Wallant].” Časopis pro
moderní filologii 49, no. 4 (1967): 205–12.
“Z americké dálnice na osamělou cestu [From an American Highway to the
Lonely Road].” Orientace 5, no. 3 (1970): 89–90.
“O literatuře amerických černochů [On Afro-American Literature].” Čtenář
24, no. 1 (1972): 17–22.
“Joyce Carol Oatesová [Joyce Carol Oates].” Světová literatura 19, no. 5
(1974): 143–44.
“Současný americký román: Několik vývojových kapitol z období posledních
dvou desetiletí [The Contemporary American Novel: Several Chapters on
Its Development in the Previous Two Decades].” Světová literatura 21, no.
4 (1976): 220–56.
“Literární mlčení Tillie Olsenové [The Literary Silence of Tillie Olsen].”
Světová literatura 23, no. 3 (1978): 93–94.
Marcel Arbeit
27
Slovník spisovatelů – Spojené státy americké [Dictionary of Writers: The
U.S.A.], by Zdeněk Vančura and others. Edited by Eva Masnerová. Praha:
Odeon, 1979. – 51 entries.
Bontemps, Arna, 107–08; Brooks, Gwendolyn, 126; Brown, Dee
Alexander, 126–27; Brown, Sterling, 129–30; Brown, William Wells,
130–31; Bullins, Ed, 131–32; Cleaver, Eldridge, 157–58; Cruse,
Harold, 178–79; Cullen Countee, 179–80; Demby, William, 192–93;
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, 210–12; Dunbar, Paul
Laurence, 212–14; Ellison, Ralph, 224–25; Fair, Ronald L., 230;
Fisher, Rudolph, 243; Gaines, Ernest J., 264; Giovanni, Nikki, 271;
Hammon, Jupiter, 210–11; Harper, Michael, 292–93; Hayden,
Robert Earl, 302; Himes, Chester, 323–24; Hughes, Langston,
335–37; Hurston, Zora Neale, 339–40; Chesnutt, Charles Weddell,
345–46; Johnson, James Weldon, 367–68; Jones, LeRoi, 372–74;
Kelley, William Melvin, 378–79; King, Martin Luther, Jr., 387–88;
Locke, Alain Leroy, 413; Marshall, Paule, 441; Mayfield, Julian,
449; McKay, Claude, 456–57; Ottley, Roi, 510; Petry, Ann, 523–24;
Reed, Ishmael, 544–45; Rexroth, Kenneth, 547–49; Seton, Ernest
Thompson, 571–73; Schuyler, George S., 579–80; Smith, William
Gardner, 594–95; Tolson, Melvin B., 632–33; Toomer, Jean, 633–34;
Walker, Alice, 655–56; Walker, Margaret Abigail, 656–57;
Washington, Booker Taliaferro, 661–62; Weidman, Jerome, 665;
Wharton, Edith, 670–72; Wheatley, Phillis, 672; White, Walter,
673–74; Williams, John Alfred, 685–86; Wright, Richard, 710–12;
Yerby, Frank Garwin, 717.
“Návrat zatracovaného syna? [The Return of Condemned Son?].” Světová
literatura 25, no. 1 (1980): 67–69.
“Richard Wright (Ohlasy, ozvěny a dozvuky jeho varování světu) [Richard
Wright: Responses, Echoes, and Distant Sounds of His Warning to the
World].” Světová literatura 25, no. 6 (1980): 49–59.
“Richard Wright a americká černošská próza let třicátých a čtyřicátých
[Richard Wright and the Afro-American Fiction of the Thirties and
Forties].” In Sborník jazykovědných a literárněvědných prací [A Volume of
Essays on Language and Literature]. Acta Universitatis Palackianae
Olomucensis, Facultas Philosophica – Supplementum 26, edited by [Josef
Galík]. Praha: Univerzita Palackého v SPN, 1981. 175–98. – On the cover
wrongly given Philologica 44.
“Leslie Marmon Silko: Obřad [Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony].” Světová
literatura 28, no. 3 (1983): 70–72, 95–96. – Review with excerpts from the
novel.
“James Wright [1927–1980] – básník hlubokých a čirých slov [James Wright:
A Poet of Deep and Clear Words].” Světová literatura 28, no. 6 (1983): 2–4.
28
“Černá renesance: Pohled na nedávnou a současnou americkou černošskou
prózu [Black Renaissance: A Look at the Recent and Contemporary
African American Fiction].” Literární měsíčník 12, no. 3 (1983): 121–27.
“Sto let od narození Sinclaira Lewise [Sinclair Lewis Centennial].” Literární
měsíčník 14, no. 2 (1985): 114–16.
“Galway Kinnell – básnický samorost v nejlepší americké tradici [Galway
Kinnell: The Poetic Selfmademan in the Best American Tradition].”
“O autorech [On Authors].” In Almanach Světové literatury [The World
Literature Review Almanac]. Praha: Odeon, 1986. 506, 510, 511, 515–16.
Gwendolyn Brooksová, 506; John Hawkes, 510; Philip Levine, 511;
Gary Snyder; 515–516.
“Poezie Cynthie Macdonaldové – zkouška jazyka a logiky snů [Cynthia
Macdonald’s Poetry: A Test of Language and the Logics of Dreams].”
“Peter Taylor – ‘americký Čechov’ [Peter Taylor, the American Chekhov].”
Slovník světových literárních děl 1/A–L [Dictionary of World Literary
Classic Works], edited by Vladimír Macura. Praha: Odeon, 1988. –
Reprinted in 1989. – Four entries.
Dreiser, Theodore: Sestřička Carrie (Sister Carrie), 226–27.
Ellison, Ralph: Neviditelný (Invisible Man), 243.
Faulkner, William: Hluk a zuřivost (The Sound and the Fury), 257–58.
Lowell, Robert: Studie ze života (Life Studies), 472.
Slovník světových literárních děl 2/M–Ž [Dictionary of World Literary
Classic Works], edited by Vladimír Macura. Praha: Odeon, 1988. –
Reprinted in 1989. – Three entries.
Roethke, Theodore: Ztracený syn a jiné básně (The Lost Son and Other
Poems), 185–86.
Thoreau, Henry David: Walden (Walden; or, Life in the Woods),
310–11.
Williams, William Carlos: Jaro a tak dál (Spring and All), 378–79.
“Docela dílčí pohled na současnou americkou literaturu [An Entirely Partial
Look at Contemporary American Literature].” Kmen 1 [7], no. 7 (1988):
8–9.
“Vietnam v současné americké literatuře [Vietnam in Contemporary
American Literature].” Literární měsíčník 17, no. 3 (1988): 114–18.
“Tři ženské hlasy z básnického chóru: Helen Lawsonová – Linda
Pastanová – Maxine Kuminová [Three Female Voices from the Choir of
Poets: Helen Lawson, Linda Pastan, and Maxine Kumin].” Světová
literatura 33, no. 5 (1988): 89–93.
Marcel Arbeit
29
“Americká povídka posledního desetiletí [The American Short Story in the
Previous Decade].” Světová literatura 34, no. 1 (1989): 2–8. – Introduction
to the series of the same title, edited by Josef Jařab, nos. 1–6 (1989).
“John Edgar Wideman: Příběh o Doktorovi [John Edgar Wideman: ‘Doc’s
Story’].” Světová literatura 34, no. 4 (1989): 2–3. – The author’s profile
introducing Zuzana Mayerová’s translation.
“James Alan McPherson: Prostor k životu [James Alan McPherson: ‘Elbow
Room’].” Světová literatura 34, no. 4 (1989): 8. – The author’s profile
introducing Jan Starý’s translation.
“Marian Thurmová: Na vodě [Marian Thurm: ‘Floating’].” Světová literatura
34, no. 6 (1989): 24. – The author’s profile introducing Eva Klimentová’s
translation.
“Dítě na skleníku č. 1: Charles Bukowski [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no.
1: Charles Bukowski].” Tvorba, no. 27 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
introducing Jaroslav Kořán’s translation, as jj.
“Dítě na skleníku č. 2: Philip Levine [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 2:
Philip Levine].” Tvorba, no. 28 (1989): 18. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 3: Kenneth Koch [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 3:
Kenneth Koch].” Tvorba, no. 29 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 4: A. R. Ammons [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 4:
A. R. Ammons].” Tvorba, no. 31 (1989): 17. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 5: Gary Snyder [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 5:
Gary Snyder].” Tvorba, no. 32 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 6: Theodore Roethke [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no.
6: Theodore Roethke].” Tvorba, no. 33 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 7: Adrienne Richová [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no.
7: Adrienne Rich].” Tvorba, no. 34 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 8: Frank O’Hara [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 8:
Frank O’Hara].” Tvorba, no. 35 (1989): 17. – The author’s profile
“Dítě na skleníku č. 9: James Wright [Child on Top of a Greenhouse, no. 9:
James Wright].” Tvorba, no. 36 (1989): 16. – The author’s profile
30
“Za Dítětem na skleníku [Following the Child on Top of a Greenhouse].”
Tvorba, no. 37 (1989): 16–18.
“Nanao Sakaki poezii nejen píše, ale i žije. . . [Not Only Does Nanao Sakaki
Write Poetry; He Lives It. . .].” In “Nanao Sakaki.” Tvorba, no. 12 (1990):
12. – Introduction to Jiří Wein’s translation of Nanao Sakaki’s poems.
“Má setkání s Allenem Ginsbergem [My Meetings with Allen Ginsberg].”
Proglas [1], no. 8 (1990): 101–04.
“Úvodem [Introduction].” In J. L. Fischer: Osobnost, dílo, myšlenky [J. L.
Fischer: His Personality, Work, Thoughts]. Olomouc: Univerzita
Palackého, 1990. 7–8.
“Marvin Bell.” In “Ze současné americké poezie [From Contemporary
American Poetry].” Světová literatura 36, no. 1 (1991): 81. – The author’s
profile introducing Jaroslav Kořán’s translations.
“C. K. Williams: Kovbojové a jiné básně [C. K. Williams: Cowboys and Other
Poems].” In “Ze současné americké poezie [From Contemporary American
Poetry].” Světová literatura 36, no. 1 (1991): 84. – The author’s profile
introducing Jaroslav Kořán’s translations.
“E. L. Doctorow.” Světová literatura 36, no. 2 (1991): 4. – The author’s profile.
“Etnický faktor v americké literární historii a současnosti [The Ethnic
Factor in American Literary History and the Present Time].” Svět
literatury, no. 1 (1991): 29–35.
“Poselství Waldenu [The Message of Walden].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu
[From Poe to Postmodernism], edited by Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka.
Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 18–24. – Henry David
Thoreau: Walden aneb Život v lesích (Walden; or, Life in the Woods).
“Saroyanova obhajoba sentimentu a snění [Saroyan’s Defense of Sentiment
and Dreaming].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Postmodernism], edited by Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka. Praha:
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 210–19. – William Saroyan: Lidská
komedie (The Human Comedy).
“Románové rozpočitadlo Kena Keseyho [Ken Kesey’s Novelistic
Counting-Out Rhyme].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 290–95. – Ken Kesey: Vyhoďme ho
z kola ven (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
“Rothův prozaický talent a přízraky pravdy [Roth’s Prosaic Talent and the
Specters of Truth].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 346–54. – Philip Roth: Elév (The
Ghost Writer).
Marcel Arbeit
31
“Věhlasný prozaik z popartového plakátu [A Famous Prosewriter from
a Pop-Art Poster].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 408–13. – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:
Snídaně šampionů – Mechanické piáno (The Breakfast of Champions –
Player Piano).
“Lidská neviditelnost amerického černocha [The Human Invisibility of the
American Negro].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 476–81. – Ralph Ellison:
Neviditelný (Invisible Man).
“Baldwinovy sondy do hlubin amerického svědomí [Baldwin’s Probes into
the Depths of American Conscience].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu
[From Poe to Postmodernism], edited by Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka.
Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 482–88. – James Baldwin:
Beale Street Blues (Go Tell It on the Mountain – If Beale Street Blues
Could Talk).
“Poezie a krutost nečítankové skutečnosti [Poetry and the Cruelty of the
Reality that Cannot Be Found in Primers].” In Od Poea
k postmodernismu [From Poe to Postmodernism], edited by Martin
Hilský and Jan Zelenka. Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993.
489–93. – Toni Morrisonová: Nejmodřejší oči (The Bluest Eye).
“Čarování s identitou [Louise Erdrich: Identity Medicine].” In Od Poea k
postmodernismu [From Poe to Postmodernism], edited by Martin Hilský
and Jan Zelenka. Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 494–99. –
Louis Erdrichová: Čarování s láskou (Love Medicine).
“Znevšedněná všednost dnešní Ameriky v povídkách Raymonda Carvera
[Defamiliarized Familiarity of Contemporary America in the Stories of
Raymond Carver].” In Od Poea k postmodernismu [From Poe to
Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993. 500–07. – Raymond Carver:
Katedrála [Cathedral: Selected Stories of Raymond Carver].
“Imagisté – průkopníci moderní poesie [Imagists, Pioneers of Modern
Poetry].” Světová literatura 38, no. 4 (1993): 91–92.
“Úspěchy a problémy vysokého školství a vědy v České republice
[Achievements and Problems of the Czech University Education and
Scholarship in the Czech Republic].” Alma mater 3, no. 2 (1993): 69–78. –
Paper delivered at the international conference The Structure and Legal
Order of Higher Education and Research in Central Europe, Vienna,
December 11–12, 1992.
“Proč Nobelova cena Toni Morrisonové? [Why the Nobel Prize to Toni
Morrison?].” Literární noviny 4, no. 49 (December 9, 1993): 13.
32
“Čím se dnes zabývají američtí básníci z Whitmanova rodu? [What Do Poets
of the Whitman Line Do Today?].” Literární noviny 5, no. 4 (January 27,
1994): 12–13.
“Stav transformace našeho vysokého školství [The State of Transformation
of Our University Education].” Alma mater 4, no. 6 (1994): 1–9.
“Dvě ztráty současné americké literatury: Charles Bukowski, Ralph Ellison
[Two Losses of Contemporary American Literature: Charles Bukowski,
Ralph Ellison].” Literární noviny 5, no. 22 (June 2, 1994): 12–13.
“Laudatio na Philipa Rothe, přednesené při předávání Ceny Karla Čapka
Philipu Rothovi (zastupoval ho Emmanuel Dongal [sic]) ve Valdštejnském
paláci v Praze dne 10. 11. 1994 [Laudatio on Philip Roth: Delivered on
the Occasion of Awarding Him the Karel Čapek Prize (Given in Proxy to
Emmanuel Dongala) in the Waldstein Palace, Prague, on November 10,
1994].” Literární noviny 5, no. 48 (December 1, 1994): 12.
“Síla v různorodé jednotě [The Strength in Pluralistic Unity].” In “Anketa:
Provincionalismus, nebo regionalismus? [Provincialism or Regionalism?
A Survey].” Scriptum, no. 14 (November–December 1994): 10–12.
“Úvodní slovo rektora Univerzity Palackého prof. PhDr. Josefa Jařaba, CSc.
[The Introductory Word of Professor Josef Jařab, Rector of Palacký
University].” In Pedagogické dny kardinála Františka Tomáška
[Pedagogical Days of Cardinal František Tomášek], edited by Josef
Krátoška and Helga Zieglerová. Olomouc: Vydavatelství Univerzity
Palackého; Cyrilometodějská teologická fakulta a Pedagogická fakulta
Univerzity Palackého, 1995. 7–8. – Papers from conference held on June
3–4, 1994, at the Pedagogical Faculty of Palacký University.
“Vzdělání – záležitost soukromá či veřejná? [Education: A Private, or Public
Matter?].” In Právo na vzdělání: hodnota pro jedince a společnost; Sborník
materiálů z konference, konané v Kroměříži ve dnech 26.–27. dubna 1995
[The Right to Education: The Value for Individuals and the Society;
A Volume from the Conference Held in Kroměříž on April 26–27, 1995],
edited by Libuše Pospíšilová, Zdeňka Skaličková, and Vladimír Přikryl.
Kroměříž: Regionální klub UNESCO, 1995. 4–7.
“50 let od obnovení Univerzity Palackého v Olomouci [Fifty Years Since the
Re-Establishment of Palacký University in Olomouc].” Alma mater 6, no.
2 (1996): 61–74.
“Udržovat symboliku při životě znamená zalévat kořeny významů / To Keep
Symbols Alive Through Original Meanings Have to Be Tended to [sic].” In
Universitas Olomucensis 1573–1946–1996, edited by [Anežka Šimková
and Milan Togner]. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci; Muzeum
umění Olomouc, 1996. 10–11. – Jařab’s Czech text translated into
English by Jaroslav Peprník.
Marcel Arbeit
33
“První listy do Památníku [The First Pages in the Memorial].” In
Zakladatelé a pokračovatelé: Památník osobností obnovené univerzity
[Founders and Successors: The Memorial of the Personalities of the
Re-Established University]. Olomouc: Vydavatelství Univerzity
Palackého, 1996. 11–13.
“Amerika, amerikanizace a literatura [America, Americanization, and
Literature].” Tvar 7, no. 17 (October 17, 1996): 8.
“Projev prof. PhDr. Josefa Jařaba, CSc., rektora Univerzity Palackého
v Olomouci [A Speech by Professor Josef Jařab, Rector of Palacký
University in Olomouc].” In Spisovná čeština a jazyková kultura 1993:
Sborník z olomoucké konference 23.–27. 8. 1993 [Standard Czech and
Language Culture 1993: A Volume from the Olomouc Conference, August
23–27, 1993], edited by Jana Jančáková, Miroslav Komárek, and Oldřich
Uličný. Praha: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 1995. 17–19.
“Příběh americké literatury [The Story of American Literature].” Literární
noviny 8, no. 31 (August 6, 1997): 1, 3, 8.
“Prozaik amerického Jihu: Sto let od narození Williama Faulknera [The
Fiction Writer of the American South: William Faulkner Centennial].”
Literární noviny 8, no. 38 (September 24, 1997): 8–9.
“Dějiny univerzity jsou dějinami naší civilizace [The History of University Is
the History of Our Civilization].” Aula 5, no. 3 (1997): 15–21.
“Setkání na Welwyn Street: britské básnířky [Encounters on Welwyn Street:
British Woman Poets].” Labyrint Revue [8], no. 1–2 (1997): 65. –
Introduction to Jitka Herynková’s translations.
“Zdravice prof. PhDr. Josefa Jařaba, CSc., rektora Univerzity Palackého
[Greetings from Professor Josef Jařab, Rector of Palacký University].” In
Deset let vzdělávacích aktivit pro seniory: Sborník příspěvků z odborného
semináře se zahraniční účastí, Olomouc, 17.–18. října 1996 [Ten Years of
Educational Activities for Seniors: A Volume of Papers from the
International Seminar Held in Olomouc, October 17–18, 1996], edited by
Anna Petřková. Olomouc: Vydavatelství Univerzity Palackého, 1997. 7–8.
“Jakou demokracii pro Evropu? [What Democracy for Europe?].” In Společné
pohledy na Evropu [Shared Views of Europe]. Praha: Francouzský ústav
pro výzkum ve společenských vědách, 1998. 35–40. – Cahiers du CeFReS,
no. 14.
“Mentoři, redaktoři, autoři. . . [Mentors, Editors, Authors. . .].” Host 15, no. 9
(1999): 53–54.
“Nobelova cena V. S. Naipaulovi [The Nobel Prize to V. S. Naipaul].”
Literární noviny 12, no. 42 (October 17, 2001): 2.
“Forum 2000 v roce 2001 [Forum 2000 in 2001].” Mosty 10, no. 44 (October
30, 2001): 4. – Introduction to participants’ comments.
34
“Iluze ráje, nebo přízrak střetů? Ponobelovský román Toni Morrisonové [The
Illusion of Paradise, or the Specter of Conflicts? Toni Morrison’s
Post-Nobel Novel].” Literární noviny 12, no. 13 (March 23, 2001): 14.
“I svobodě a demokracii je třeba se učit [Even Freedom and Democracy Must
Be Learned].” In Krize, vize a realita české politiky [Crises, Visions, and
Reality in Czech Politics], edited by Zdeněk Zbořil. Praha: Evropský
literární klub, 2002. 27–34.
“Univerzita založená v Praze oslavila své desáté výročí v Budapešti [The
University Founded in Prague Celebrated Its Tenth Anniversary in
Budapest].” Literární noviny 13, no. 3 (January 16, 2002): 3.
“Poezie imagistů 1912–1920 [Imagist Poetry 1912–1920].” Literární noviny
13, no. 48 (November 25, 2002): 14.
“Paměť, imaginace a jazz: Úvod k ukázkám z Yusefa Komunyakaay
[Memory, Imagination, and Jazz: An Introduction to Yusef Komunyakaa’s
Selected Poems].” Aluze 7, no. 2 (2003): 11–13.
“Vzpomínka na Simona Wiesenthala [A Memory of Simon Wiesenthal].”
Listy 35, no. 5 (2005): 80.
“O návštěvách básníků a návratech poezie [On Visits of Poets and
Comebacks of Poetry].” Krok 3, no. 4 (2006): 22–24.
“Pootevřené kolokvium k tématu Evropa [A Half-Open Colloquium on
Europe].” In George Steiner a myšlenka Evropy [George Steiner and the
Idea of Europe], edited by Josef Jařab and Jakub Guziur. Olomouc:
Periplum, 2006. 101–23.
“Spisovatel, který se pomstil kýči: Legendární americký autor Kurt
Vonnegut Jr. zemřel ve středu 11. dubna ve věku 84 let [The Writer Who
Took His Revenge on Kitsch: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a Legendary American
Writer, Died on Wednesday, April 11, at the Age of 84].” Lidové noviny,
April 13, 2007: 11.
“Tři epizody z Olomouce [Three Episodes from Olomouc].” In Moje město
Olomouc: Vyznání, vzpomínky, zamyšlení [My City of Olomouc:
Declarations, Memories, Thoughts], edited by Bohumír Kolář and
Bohuslav Smejkal. Olomouc: Literární klub Olomouc a olomoucká
skupina členů Spolku českých bibliofilů v Praze, 2007. 26–29.
6. Interviews with Writers
“Je to jako exploze (s Allenem Ginsbegem hovoří Josef Jařab) [It Is Like an
Explosion: Allen Ginsberg Interviewed by Josef Jařab].” Revolver Revue,
no. 24 (1993): 259–72. – East Village, New York, May 17, 1989.
“Jsem nemorální moralista. . . : Rozhovor Josefa Jařaba s Arthurem
Millerem [I Am an Immoral Moralist: Arthur Miller Interviewed by Josef
Marcel Arbeit
35
Jařab].” Translated by Šimon Pellar and Milena Pellarová. Literární
noviny 5, no. 51–52 (December 22, 1994): 18–19. – Conversation in the
American Cultural Center, Prague, on November 7, 1994.
“Jsem nemravný moralista: Arthur Miller na 61. kongresu Mezinárodního
PEN klubu v Praze [I Am an Immoral Moralist: Arthur Miller at the 61st
International PEN Club Congress in Prague].” Hosted by Josef Jařab.
Consecutive interpreting of Dana Hábová and Dana Obenbergerová
edited and abridged by Vladimír Hulec. Divadelní noviny 3, no. 21
(December 12, 1994): 9. – Conversation in the American Cultural Center,
Prague, on November 7, 1994.
“Rozhovor Josefa Jařaba s Williamem Gassem [William Gass Interviewed by
Josef Jařab].” Literární noviny 7, no. 13 (March 27, 1996): 9–10.
“O poezii Dalekého západu: S Gary Snyderem rozmlouvá Josef Jařab [On
Far West Poetry: An Interview with Gary Snyder].” Literární noviny 10,
no. 15 (April 14, 1999): 4–5.
“Josef Jařab, May 17–18, 1989, New York City.” In Spontaneous Mind:
Selected Interviews, 1958–1996, by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by David
Carter. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001. 499–520.
“Z rozhovoru s Allenem Ginsbergem o modernismu [From an Interview with
Allen Ginsberg on Modernism].” Translated by Josef Jařab. In Karma
červená, bílá a modrá [Karma in Red, White, and Blue: Selected Poems],
by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Josef Jařab. Praha: Mladá fronta – Klub
přátel poezie, 2001. 293–97.
“When All Met Together in One Room: Josef Jařab Interviews Allen
Ginsberg.” In Race and the Modern Artist, edited by Heather Hathaway,
Josef Jařab, and Jeffrey Melnick. New York: Oxford University Press,
2003. 140–47.
7. Introductions in Books of Translations into Czech or Slovak
“Američtí Indiáni od Jamese Fenimora Coopera k Dee Brownovi [American
Indians from James Fenimore Cooper to Dee Brown].” In Mé srdce
pohřběte u Wounded Knee (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian
History of the American West), by Dee Brown. Translated by Dušan
Zbavitel. Praha: Odeon, 1976. 289–94.
“Románové rozpočitadlo Kena Keseyho [Ken Kesey’s Novelistic
Counting-Out Rhyme].” In Vyhoďme ho z kola ven (One Flew Over the
Cuckoo’s Nest), by Ken Kesey. Translated by Jaroslav Kořán. Praha:
Odeon, 1979. 303–08.
“Fantaskní satirik a moralista [A Satirist and Moralist of the Fantastic].” In
Mechanické piano (Player Piano), by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Translated by
Jaroslav Kořán. Praha: Odeon, 1979. 329–35.
36
“Baldwinovy sondy do hlubin amerického svědomí [Baldwin’s Probes into
the Depths of American Conscience].” In Beale Street Blues (Go Tell It on
the Mountain – If Beale Street Could Talk), by James Baldwin.
Translated by Michael Žantovský. Praha: Odeon, 1979. 371–79.
“Lidská neviditelnost amerického černocha [The Human Invisibility of the
American Negro].” In Neviditelný (Invisible Man), by Ralph Ellison.
Translated by Luba Pellarová and Rudolf Pellar. Praha: Odeon, 1981.
585–91.
“Věhlasný prozaik z popartového plakátu [A Famous Prosewriter from
a Pop-Art Poster].” In Snídaně šampiónů aneb Sbohem, modré pondělí!
(Breakfast of Champions; or, Goodbye, Blue Monday), by Kurt Vonnegut,
Jr. Translated by Jaroslav Kořán. Praha: Odeon, 1981. 235–39.
and Dreaming].” In Lidská komedie (The Human Comedy), by William
Saroyan. Translated by Gustav Bernau. Praha: Odeon, 1983. 9–22.
Reality that Cannot Be Found in Primers].” In Nejmodřejší oči (The
Bluest Eye), by Toni Morrisonová. Translated by Michael Žantovský.
Praha: Odeon, 1983. 203–10.
“Rothův prozaický talent a přízraky pravdy [Roth’s Prosaic Talent and the
Specters of Truth].” In Elév (The Ghost Writer), by Philip Roth.
Translated by Olga Špilarová. Praha: Odeon, 1985. 155–67.
“Moderní básník věčně přirozených pocitů [A Modern Poet of Eternally
Natural Feelings].” In Věci, o kterých s nikým nemluvím [The Things I
Tell to No One: Selected Poems], by Galway Kinnell. Translated by
Antonín Přidal. Praha: Odeon, 1986. 167–77.
“Básnířka, která nepřestává hledat náš svět [The Poetess Who Never Stops
Looking for Our World].” In Já žízeň [I, the Thirst: Selected Poems], by
Denise Levertovová. Translated by Hana Žantovská. Praha: Odeon, 1987.
117–25.
“Niektorí vojaci sú realistickí rojkovia [Some Soldiers Are Realistic
Dreamers].” In Bez opušťáku (Going After Cacciato), by Tim O’Brien.
Translated by Otakar Kořínek. Bratislava: Pravda, 1989. 314–23.
“Nevšední básník měnivých stavů mysli [The Unusual Poet of the Changing
States of Mind].” In Autoportrét ve vypouklém zrcadle [Self-Portrait in
a Convex Mirror: Selected Poems], by John Ashbery. Translated by Pavel
Dominik. Praha: Odeon, 1989. 111–21.
“Protestní, prorocké a elegické zpěvy Allena Ginsberga [Protest, Prophetic,
and Elegiac Songs of Allen Ginsberg].” In Kvílení [Howl: Selected Poems],
by Allen Ginsberg. Translated by Jan Zábrana and Jiří Josek. Praha:
Odeon, 1990. 233–47.
Marcel Arbeit
37
“Poselství Waldenu [The Message of Walden].” In Walden aneb Život v lesích
(Walden; or, Life in the Woods), by Henry David Thoreau. Translated by
Josef Schwarz. Praha: Odeon, 1991. 299–307.
“Saul Bellow novelista a povídkář [Saul Bellow, Novelist and Short Story
Writer].” In Hledání pana Greena [Looking for Mr. Green: Selected Short
Stories], by Saul Bellow. Translated by Eva Kondrysová. Praha: Mladá
fronta, 1992. 368–74.
“Zapomenutý folklór jako živá skutečnost [The Forgotten Folklore as the
Live Present].” In Kejklíř z Lublinu (The Magician of Lublin), by Isaac
Bashevis Singer. Translated by Lucie Lucká. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1993.
219–29.
“Přímé a křivolaké cesty i slepé uličky na Poundově mapě poznání [Direct
and Winding Roads and Blind Alleys in Pound’s Map of Knowledge].” In
Chtěl jsem napsat ráj (Výbor z díla) [I Wanted to Write Paradise: Selected
Works], by Ezra Pound. Edited by Petr Mikeš. Translated by Petr Mikeš.
Olomouc: Votobia, 1993. 7–12.
“Znevšedněná všednost dnešní Ameriky v povídkách Raymonda Carvera
[Defamiliarized Familiarity of Contemporary America in the Stories of
Raymond Carver].” In Katedrála [Cathedral: Selected Short Stories], by
Raymond Carver. Edited by Jiří Hrubý. Translated by Jiří Hrubý. Praha:
Odeon, 1994. 232–41.
“Louise Erdrichová: čarování s identitou [Louise Erdrich: Identity
Medicine].” In Čarování s láskou (Love Medicine), by Louise Erdrichová.
Translated by Alena Jindrová-Špilarová. Praha: Odeon, 1994. 235–44.
“Ten pravý Philip Roth? [The Genuine Philip Roth?].” In Odkaz: Skutečný
příběh (Patrimony: A True Story), by Philip Roth. Translated by Luba
Pellarová and Rudolf Pellar. Praha: Hynek, 1995. 201–10.
Reality that Cannot Be Found in Primers].” In Velmi modré oči (The
Bluest Eye), by Toni Morrisonová. Translated by Michael Žantovský.
Praha: Hynek, 1995. 211–22. – Reprint with Jařab’s newly added “Post
scriptum po dvanácti letech [Postscript Twelve Years Later].”
“Gary Snyder – básník mysli, hor a řek [Gary Snyder, the Poet of Mind,
Mountains, and Rivers].” In Staré cesty: Šest esejí (The Old Ways: Six
Essays), by Gary Snyder. Translated by Alexandra Hubáčková and
Renata Vystrčilová. Praha: Volvox Globator, 1995. 67–71.
Saroyan. Translated by Gustav Bernau. Praha: Maťa, 1996. 5–18.
“Výpověď příběhu, který se nedá vyprávět [The Testimony of a Story that
Cannot Be Told].” In Milovaná (Beloved), by Toni Morrisonová.
38
Translated by Hana Žantovská. Praha: Knižní klub ve spolupráci
s nakladatelstvím Hynek, 1996. 279–83.
“Americká literatura jako výpověď o novém a jiném světě i jako naše zrcadlo
[American Literature as a Story of a New and Different World, as well as
Our Mirror].” In Od puritanismu k postmodernismu: Dějiny americké
literatury (From Puritanism to Postmodernism: The History of American
Literature), by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury. Translated by
Marcel Arbeit, Alexandra Hubáčková, Jan Jařab, Světlana Obenausová,
Michal Peprník, and Veronika Prágerová. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997.
393–407. – Also editor of the translated text and translator of previously
untranslated poems into Czech.
“Intelektuální a estetické carpe diem Susan Sontagové [The Intellectual and
Aesthetic Carpe diem of Susan Sontag].” In Nemoc jako metafora. AIDS
a jeho metafory (Illness as Metaphor. AIDS and Its Metaphors), by Susan
Sontagová. Translated by Jan Jařab and Alena Jindrová-Špilarová.
Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997. 165–72.
“Obřad jako scénář k naplňování životních příběhů [The Ceremony as
a Ritual to Make Life Stories Full].” In Obřad (Ceremony), by Leslie
Marmon Silková. Translated by Alexandra Hubáčková. Praha: Mladá
fronta, 1997. 281–87.
“Znepokojivá vůně zimolezu v jižanském soumraku [The Unsettling Smell of
Honeysuckle in the Southern Dusk].” In Hluk a vřava (The Sound and
the Fury), by William Faulkner. Translated by Luba Pellarová and
Rudolf Pellar. Praha: Odeon; Baset, 1997. 235–44.
“Divadlo je život je divadlo [Theater Is Life Is Theater].” In Oleanna, by
David Mamet. Translated by Julek Neumann. Praha: Národní divadlo,
1998: 18–20.
Saroyan. Translated by Gustav Bernau. Praha: Knižní klub, 1998. 5–16.
“Jak kosmický je dnes Whitmanův barbarský křik? [How Cosmic Is
Whitman’s Barbarous Cry Today?].” In Stébla trávy (Leaves of Grass), by
Walt Whitman. Translated by Jiří Kolář and Zdeněk Urbánek. Hradec
Králové: Cylindr, 1998. 263–73.
“Rothův literární zápas s ‘shylockovským’ dědictvím [Roth’s Literary
Struggle with the ‘Shylock’ Heritage].” In Operace Shylock (Operation
Shylock), by Philip Roth. Translated by Luba Pellarová and Rudolf Pellar.
Praha: Hynek, 1999. 397–401.
“Giacomo Joyce – modernistická romance Jamese Joyce [Giacomo Joyce:
James Joyce’s Modernist Romance].” In Giacomo Joyce, by James Joyce.
Marcel Arbeit
39
Translated by Miloš Sovák in cooperation with Josef Jařab, Pavla
Lidmilová, and Jerome Rothenberg. Praha: Argo, 2000. 31–36.
“Beatnické novátorství a tradice v lyrice Allena Ginsberga [The Beatnik
Novelties and Traditions in Allen Ginsberg’s Lyric].” In Slovy a dechem:
Výbor z poezie [With Words and Breath: Selected Poems], by Allen
Ginsberg. Edited by Josef Jařab. Translated by Jan Zábrana and Jiří
Josek. Praha: Mladá fronta, 2000. 133–47.
“Ponobelovský román Toni Morrisonové: Iluze ráje, nebo přízrak střetů?
[Toni Morrison’s Post-Nobel Novel: Illusion of Paradise, or the Specter of
Conflicts?].” In Ráj (Paradise), by Toni Morrisonová. Translated by
Zuzana Mayerová. Praha: Vyšehrad, 2001. 319–27.
“Autobiografie jako poetická inspirace, literární forma i myšlenkový
manifest [Autobiography as Poetic Inspiration, Literary Form, and
Manifesto of Ideas].” In Vlastní životopis mé matky (The Autobiography of
My Mother), by Jamaica Kincaidová. Translated by Zdena Pošvicová.
Praha: Mladá fronta, 2001. 152–59.
“Co Allen Ginsberg byl a nebyl [What Allen Ginsberg Was and Was Not].” In
Karma červená, bílá a modrá [Karma in Red, White, and Blue: Selected
Poems], by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by Josef Jařab. Translated by Josef
Jařab, Jiří Josek, Josef Rauvolf, and Jan Zábrana. Praha: Mladá fronta –
Klub přátel poezie, 2001. 10–15.
“Kalendárium [Calendarium].” In Karma červená, bílá a modrá [Karma in
Red, White, and Blue: Selected Poems], by Allen Ginsberg. Edited by
Josef Jařab. Translated by Josef Jařab, Jiří Josek, Josef Rauvolf, and Jan
Zábrana. Praha: Mladá fronta – Klub přátel poezie, 2001. 308–13.
“Imagisté – průkopníci moderní poezie [Imagists: Pioneers of Modern
Poetry].” In Imagisté [Imagists], edited by Petr Mikeš and Jitka
Herynková. Translated by Petr Mikeš and Jitka Herynková. Praha: Fra,
2002. 99–107. – Also author of the writers’ profiles.
Amy Lowellová, 7; Edward Storer, 15; Richard Aldington, 19; David
Herbert Lawrence, 31; Frank Stuart Flint, 37; Skipwith Cannell,
43; William Carlos Williams, 45; Ford Madox Ford, 53; Hilda
Doolittleová, 57; Allen Upward, 65; Thomas Ernest Hulme, 69;
Ezra Pound, 79; John Gould Fletcher, 89; John Cournos, 95.
“Postupné oživování zděděných a zapomenutých mýtů v Šalomounově písni
[The Gradual Revival of the Inherited and Forgotten Myths in The Song
of Solomon].” In Šalomounova píseň (The Song of Solomon), by Toni
Morrisonová. Translated by Hana Žantovská. Praha: Euromedia Group;
Odeon, 2002. 7–12.
“Toni Morrisonová (18. 2. 1931).” In Šalomounova píseň (The Song of
Solomon), by Toni Morrisonová. Translated by Hana Žantovská. Praha:
Euromedia Group; Odeon, 2002. 349–51. – As J. J.
40
“Příběhy hledající hloubku už v povrchu reality [Stories Looking for Depth
on the Surface of Reality].” In Už dávno ti chci něco říct a jiné povídky
[Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You and Other Stories], by Alice
Munroová. Translated by Alena Jindrová-Špilarová. Praha; Litomyšl:
Paseka, 2003. 296–302.
“Z louisianské Bogalusy do bezbřehé říše světové poezie [From Bogalusa,
Louisiana, to the Shoreless Realm of World Poetry].” In Očarování: Výbor
z poezie [Charmed: Selected Poems], by Yusef Komunyakaa. Edited by
Josef Jařab. Translated by Josef Jařab. Praha; Litomyšl: Paseka, 2003.
90−99.
“Poetická životní výpověď Helen Lawsonové / The Poetic Life Story of Helen
Lawson.” In Odvaha za úsvitu: vybrané básně / Courage at Daybreak:
Selected Poems, by Helen Lawson. Translated by Jitka Herynková.
Praha: Fra, 2004. 148–59. – Afterword to bilingual edition.
“Poselství Waldenu [The Message of Walden].” In Walden aneb Život v lesích
(Walden; or, Life in the Woods), by Henry David Thoreau. Translated by
Josef Schwarz. Praha; Litomyšl: Paseka, 2006. 297–306.
“Udivující úspěch a popularita ‘kněžny černé poezie’ [The Amazing Success
and Popularity of the ‘Princess of Black Poetry’].” In Houpání na duze
[Swinging on the Rainbow: Selected Poems], by Nikki Giovanniová.
Edited by Jitka Herynková. Translated by Jitka Herynková. Olomouc:
Periplum, 2008. 69–83.
8. Reviews
“John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me.” Časopis pro moderní filologii 51, no. 1
(1969): 50–51.
“Paměti z budoucna Doris Lessingové [Doris Lessing’s Memoirs from the
Future].” Review of The Memoirs of a Survivor, by Doris Lessing. Světová
literatura 23, no. 4 (1978): 247–48.
“Historie jednoho rodu – moderní sága [The History of a Family Clan:
A Modern Saga].” Review of Sometimes a Great Notion, by Ken Kesey.
“Lidské a nelidské důsledky strádání [Human and Inhuman Consequences
of Hardship].” Review of The Third Life of Grange Copeland, by Alice
Walker. Světová literatura 24, no. 3 (1979): 237–39.
“Lidská komedie viděna z Mississippské delty [The Human Comedy from
the Mississippi Delta].” Review of The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora
Welty. Světová literatura 25, no. 2 (1980): 233–36.
“Léčka ambicióznosti [The Trap of Ambitions].” Review of Tar Baby, by Toni
Morrison. Světová literatura 29, no. 1 (1984): 239–41.
Marcel Arbeit
41
“Nejnovější, i když ne nový Vonnegut [The Most Recent, but Not New
Vonnegut].” Review of Deadeye Dick, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Světová
literatura 29, no. 6 (1984): 228–30.
“Téměř magická románová prvotina [An Almost Magical First Novel].”
Review of Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich. Světová literatura 32, no. 2
(1987): 240–41.
“Mistrova rekapitulace učednických pokusů [The Master’s Recapitulation of
Apprenticeship Trials].” Review of Slow Learner, by Thomas Pynchon.
“Beatnik jako moderní klasik [Beatnik as a Modern Classic].” Review of
Collected Poems: 1947–1980, by Allen Ginsberg. Světová literatura 34, no.
1 (1989): 241–44.
“Cit, jenž přichází z pekel [The Emotion Coming from Hell].” Review of Love
Is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974–78, by Charles Bukowski. Lidové noviny,
January 24, 1995: 10.
“Země snů, úspěchů i tragédií: Dějiny USA vyprávěné jako velký příběh [The
Country of Dreams, Achievements, and Tragedies: The History of the
USA Told as a Grand Narrative].” Review of The History of the USA, by
George B. Tindall and David E. Shi. Respekt 6, no. 6 (February 6, 1995):
18–19.
“Výstražná hra s přepisováním dějin [A Warning Game with the Rewriting
of History].” Review of The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. Lidové
noviny, March 4, 2006: Orientace vi.
“Verše jako klíče k našemu světu [Poems as Keys to Our World].” Review of
Věci tohoto světa [The Things of This World: Selected Poems], by Richard
Wilbur. Respekt 18, no. 15 (April 10, 2007): 21.
“Promýšlení věcí do konce: Umírající zvíře Philipa Rotha [Thorough Thinking:
The Dying Animal by Philip Roth].” Review of The Dying Animal, by Philip
Roth. A2 kulturní týdeník 4, no. 8 (February 20, 2008): 31.
“Takové milé lidské dílko [Such a Nice Human Piece of Work].” Review of
Občan Havel (Citizen Havel), dir. Pavel Koutecký. Rozrazil 4, no. 1
(2008): 63.
“Každý náš příběh je součástí dějin [Each of Our Stories is a Part of
History].” Review of Tři tváře anděla [Three Faces of an Angel], by Jiří
Pehe. Lidové noviny, June 13, 2009: 22.
9. Literary Translations
Frazier, Edward Franklin. “Z hlediska praktického s sebou šílenství nese. . .”
(The Pathology of Race Prejudice). In Masky a tváře černé Ameriky,
edited by Josef Jařab. Praha: Odeon, 1985. 95. – Excerpt from the essay.
42
Hawkes, John. “Požár na ostrově” (Island Fire). In Almanach Světové
literatury [The World Literature Review Almanac]. Praha: Odeon, 1986.
363. – Short story.
Hawkes, John. “O násilí” (Notes on Violence). In Almanach Světové
literatury [The World Literature Review Almanac]. Praha: Odeon, 1986.
362. – Essay.
Macdonald, Cynthia. “Pohřbívání nemluvňat” (Burying the Babies). Světová
literatura 31, no. 5 (1986): 65–83. – Poems (with Jaroslav Kořán).
Harrison, Russell. “Meditace na téma Bukowski” (Meditation on Bukowski).
In Náš pomyslný host Charles Bukowski [Our Virtual Guest Charles
Bukowski]. Olomouc: Divadlo hudby OKS, 1988. 2–3. – Program of
Divadlo hudby [The Theater of Music] in Olomouc. – Essay.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Guru” (The Guru). In Obyčejná a nevšední setkání
s Allenem Ginsbergem [Ordinary and Extraordinary Meetings with Allen
Ginsberg]. Olomouc: Divadlo hudby OKS, 1989. 3. – Program of Divadlo
hudby [The Theater of Music] in Olomouc. – Poem.
Macdonald, Cynthia. “Pohřbívání nemluvňat” (Burying the Babies). In Dítě
na skleníku: Výbor ze současné americké poezie [Child on Top of
a Greenhouse: Selection of Contemporary American Poetry], edited by
Josef Jařab. Praha: Odeon, 1989. 225–47. – Poems (with Jaroslav Kořán).
Doctorow, E. L. “Spisovatel v rodině” (The Writer in the Family). Světová
literatura 36, no. 2 (1991): 4–10. – Short story.
Hugo, Richard. “Modrý kámen” (Blue Stone). In Amici amico 2: Prof. Dr.
Ludvíku Václavkovi, CSc. k životnímu jubileu [Friends to a Friend 2: For
Professor Ludvík Václavek on a Special Birthday]. Olomouc: [Filozofická
fakulta Univerzity Palackého], 1991. 66. – Poem in an unofficial
commemorative volume.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Mír v Bosně a Hercegovině” (Peace in
Bosnia-Herzegovina). In “Čím se dnes zabývají američtí básníci
z Whitmanova rodu? [What Do Poets of the Whitman Line Do Today?],”
by Josef Jařab. Literární noviny 5, no. 4 (January 27, 1994): 12. – Poem.
Bukowski, Charles. “teď. . .” (now). In “Dvě ztráty současné americké
literatury [Two Losses of Contemporary American Literature],” by Josef
Jařab. Literární noviny 5, no. 22 (June 2, 1994): 12. – Poem.
Hugo, Richard. “Zelený kámen” (Green Stone). “Šedý kámen” (Gray Stone).
“Červený kámen” (Red Stone). “Hnědý kámen” (Brown Stone). “Modrý
kámen” (Blue Stone). In “Dva básníci amerického Středozápadu [Two
Poets of the American Midwest].” Světová literatura 39, no. 3 (1994):
29–32. – Poems. Also the author of Hugo’s profile.
Carver, Raymond. “Vycházka” (A Walk). “Bonnardovy akty” (Bonnard’s
Nudes). “Jednoduché” (Simple). “Štěstí” (Happiness). “Moje vrána” (My
Marcel Arbeit
43
Crow). “Práce” (Work). “Ve svitu moře nedaleko Sequinu [sic], ve státě
Washington” (In a Marine Light Near Sequim, Washington). In “Dva
básníci amerického Středozápadu [Two Poets of the American Midwest].”
Světová literatura 39, no. 3 (1994): 33–36. – Poems. Also the author of
Carver’s profile.
Bosnia-Herzegovina). In Čítanka 4: Alternativní učebnice pro 4. ročník
středních škol [Literature 4: An Alternative Anthology for 4th Grade
High-School Students], edited by Věra Martinková, Pavla Ziegová,
Daniela Fochová, and Lenka Chytilová. Praha: Trizonia, 1994. 27–28. –
Poem. – Reprinted in 1995, 1996, 1997.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Očarování” (Charmed). Lidové noviny, May 27, 1995:
Supplement Nedělní Lidové noviny [i]. – Poem.
Merrill, James. “Pohled seshora” (A Downward Look). Literární noviny 6, no.
36 (September 7, 1995): 1. – Poem.
Bradbury, Malcolm, and Richard Ruland. Od puritanismu
k postmodernismu: Dějiny americké literatury (From Puritanism to
Postmodernism: A History of American Literature). Translated by
Marcel Arbeit, Alexandra Hubáčková, Jan Jařab, Světlana Obenausová,
Michal Peprník, and Veronika Prágerová. Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997. –
Translation of previously untranslated poems throughout the book and
the editing of the Czech translation.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Jak nám padají karty” (The Way the Cards Fall).
“Před zdí” (Facing It). “Poté, co rozpadlo se léto” (After Summer Fell
Apart). “Elegie za Thelonia” (Elegy for Thelonious). “Písně pro mého otce”
(Songs for My Father). “Díky” (Thanks). “Holka, padl na mne smutek”
(Woman, I Got the Blues). In “Řečí neonů [Neon Vernacular].” Literární
noviny 8, no. 47 (November 26, 1997): 9. – Poems.
Snyder, Gary. “Dětem” (For the Children). Literární noviny 10, no. 15
(April 14, 1999): 5. – Poem.
Carver, Raymond. “Smutek” (Grief). “‘Co říkal doktor’” (What the Doctor
Said). “Pozdní fragment” (Late Fragment). In “Smutek [Sorrow].” Host
15, no. 9 (1999): 52. – Poems.
Ginsberg, Allen. In Karma červená, bílá a modrá [Karma in Red, White, and
Blue: Selected Poems], edited by Josef Jařab. Praha: Mladá fronta, 2001.
9, 33, 53, 54, 56, 57, 109, 111, 152–53, 268, 284−85, 299. – Poem, essays,
letters, and excerpts from essays and letters by Eugene Brooks, Jane
Kramer, Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams, Louis Ginsberg,
Clayton Horn, Thomas Parkinson, Julian Beck, Theodore Rozsak, Helen
Vendler, Alan Grossman, Carl Rakosi, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Timothy
Leary, Alicia Ostriker, and Robert Creeley.
44
Bosnia-Herzegovina). – Poem.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Karma: Poznámky k básni ‘Železný oř’ (1966)” (452
Karma:, in ‘Notes to Pages 450–456,’ from Collected Poems:
1947–1985). – Note.
Kerouac-Parker, Edie. “Pamatuji si Allena hubeného, malého
a hladového. . .” (Fond Memories of Allen) – Reminiscence.
Solomon, Carl. “Artaudova kniha, která na mne nejvíce zapůsobila. . .”
(Artaud). – Reminiscence.
Ginsberg, Allen. “Milý Louisi. . .: Dopis otci z Berkeley do Patersonu
(březen 1956)” (Allen Ginsberg, in Berkeley, California, to Louis
Ginsberg, in Paterson, New Jersey, [March 1956]). – Letter.
Trilling, Lionel. “29. května 1956” (Lionel Trilling, in New York City,
to Allen Ginsberg, on board USNS Pvt. Joseph F. Merrell [May 29,
1956]). – Letter.
Ginsberg, Louis. “13. září 1956” (Louis Ginsberg, in Paterson, New
Jersey, to Allen Ginsberg, in Berkeley, California [September 13,
1956]). – Letter.
Mailer, Norman. “Před lety jsem napsal o Allenovi básničku. . .” (That
Little Queer). – Reminiscence.
Ginsberg, Allen. “9. červen 1956, zemřela Naomi – : Zápis z deníku
[1956]” (Death of Naomi June 9, 1956). – Journal entry.
Kerouac, Jack. “Krédo a technika moderního prozaika” (Belief
& Technique for Modern Prose). – Essay.
Ono, Yoko. “Allen je jednou z miliardy hvězd. . .” (A Star). –
Reminiscence.
Albee, Edward. “Když o tobě přemýšlím, vybavují se mi dva obrazy. . .”
(Dear Allen:) – Reminiscence.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Kvetoucí mucholapky” (Venus’s-flytraps). “Cukr”
(Sugar). “Milostné dopisy mého otce” (My Father’s Love Letters). “Chvála
temných míst” (Praising Dark Places). “Holka, padl na mne smutek”
(Woman, I Got the Blues). “Elegie za Thelonia” (Elegy for Thelonious).
“Očarování” (Charmed). “Jaký kraj, takový mrav – Apologia” (When in
Rome – Apologia). “Sútra modrého salónku pro performační básníky
v hotelu Harold Park” (Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance
Poets at Harold Park Hotel). “Poté, co rozpadlo se léto” (After Summer
Fell Apart). “Před zdí” (Facing It). “Díky” (Thanks). In “Chvála temných
míst [Praising Dark Places].” Aluze 7, no. 2 (2003): 14–26. – Poems.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. Očarování: Výbor z poezie [Charmed: Selected Poems].
Edited by Josef Jařab. Praha; Litomyšl: Paseka, 2003.
“Očarování” (Charmed). “Černá šňůra dnů” (Black String of Days).
“Elegie za Thelonia” (Elegy for Thelonious). “Jak nám padají karty”
(The Way the Cards Fall). “Holka, padl na mne smutek” (Woman,
I Got the Blues). “Jaký kraj, takový mrav – Apologia” (When in
Marcel Arbeit
45
Rome – Apologia). “Poté, co rozpadlo se léto” (After Summer Fell
Apart). “Hanka z Hanoje” (Hanoi Hannah). “‘Ty se mnou se ztrácíš’”
(‘You and I Are Disappearing’). “Člověk nikdy neví” (We Never
Know). “Ulice Tu Do” (Tu Do Street). “Díky” (Thanks). “Před zdí”
(Facing It). “Když se samota stane člověkem” (When Loneliness Is
a Man). “Sútra modrého salónku pro performační básníky v hotelu
Harold Park” (Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets
at Harold Park Hotel). “Kvetoucí mucholapky” (Venus’s-flytraps).
“Sršni” (Yellowjackets). “Cukr” (Sugar). “Milostné dopisy mého otce”
(My Father’s Love Letters). “V práci” (Work). “Chvála temných
míst” (Praising Dark Places). “Písně pro mého otce” (Songs for My
Father). “Zpověď Jeanne Duvalové” (Jeanne Duval’s Confession).
“Jeskyně paměti” (Memory Cave). “Óda na buben” (Ode to a Drum).
“Metoda rytmu” (Rhythm Method). “Ta zlobivá dáma blues”
(No-Good Blues). “Ztracenci” (Woebegone). “Anodýn” (Anodyne).
“Říká se” (Hearsay). “Homo erectus” (Homo Erectus). “Lenochod”
(Sloth). “Pás cudnosti” (Chastity Belt). “Ani/ani” (Neither/Nor).
“Pyramus a Thisbe” (Pyramus & Thisbe). “Náhodičky”
(Happenstance). “Doktor Budefajn” (Doctor Feel-Good). “Ďáblova
dílna” (The Devil’s Workshop). “Bláto” (Mud). “Libozvučnost”
(Euphony). “Kacířství” (Heresy).
Hopkins, Gerard Manley. “Buď bohu chvála za strakatost –” (Pied Beauty
[Glory be to God for dappled things – ]). In “Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
Jezuité 3, no. 4 (1994): 10. – Poem.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. “Anodýn” (Anodyne). Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005):
697–98. – Poem.
Collins, Billy. “Vracím se domů pro knížku” (I Go Back to the House for
a Book). Krok 3, no. 4 (2006): 25. – Poem.
10. Miscellanies
“První a jediný zákon Williama Dembyho [The First and Only Law of
William Demby].” Světová literatura 15, no. 3 (1970): 200–16. – Due to
the political situation, the issue was banned by censors and the magazine
temporarily discontinued.
“O dvou mýtech ‘černé estetiky’ [On Two Myths of ‘Black Aesthetics’].” In
Doc. PhDr Idě Rochowanské k sedmdesátinám: Sborník prací moderních
filologů [Commemorating the 70th Birthday of Ida Rochowanská:
A Volume of Essays by Modern Philologists]. Olomouc: [Katedra
germánské a anglické filologie FF UP], 1973. 38–45. – Samizdat
commemorative volume.
“Proč si nelehnout o polednách?: (ne)komický esej s (a)morálním otazníkem
[Why Not to Go to Bed at Noon? (Non-)Comical Essay with an (A)Moral
46
Question Mark].” In Doc. PhDr. Jaroslavu Macháčkovi CSc.
k padesátinám: Sborník prací moderních filologů [For Jaroslav Macháček
on his Fiftieth Birthday: A Volume of Essays by Modern Philologists].
Olomouc: [Katedra germánské a anglické filologie FF UP], 1979.
94–102. – Samizdat commemorative volume, under the pen-name Y. F.
Windmiller.
“V katakombách stále živo (O čem co vlastně je?) [The Catacombs Swarming
with Life (What Is It All About?)].” In Amici amico: Doc. PhDr. Ludvíku
Václavkovi, CSc. k padesátinám [Friends to a Friend: For Ludvík
Václavek on his Fiftieth Birthday]. Olomouc: [Katedra germánské
a anglické filologie FF UP], 1981. – Samizdat commemorative volume,
under the pen-name D. F. Windmüller.
“Na obranu sentimentu a snění Williama Saroyana [In Defense of William
Saroyan’s Sentiment and Dreaming].” In Sborník k 80. narozeninám
DOC. [sic] PhDr. Idy Rochowanské [A Volume Commemorating the 80th
Birthday of Ida Rochowanská]. Olomouc: [Katedra germánské a anglické
filologie FF UP], 1983. – Samizdat commemorative volume.
“Kdo se bojí Virginie Woolfové? [Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?].” In Film
a škola [Film and School]. Olomouc: OKS, 1981. – A mimeographed essay
in a set of educational materials for the participants of Film and School
1981 seminar. Reprinted for another Film and School seminar in 1990.
“A ještě poznámka [And a Note].” In Básnické vzkazy z krajiny duše [Poetic
Messages from the Soulscape], by Emily Dickinsonová. Olomouc: Divadlo
hudby OKS, 1981. [18]–[19]. – Program of Divadlo hudby [The Theater of
Music] in Olomouc.
“Tři z nejzdařilejších spojení amerického divadla a filmu (Lillian
Hellmanová a William Wyler, Tennessee Williams a Elia Kazan, Edward
Albee a Mike Nichols) [Three of the Best Connections Between American
Theater and Film: Lillian Hellman and William Wyler, Tennessee
Williams and Elia Kazan, Edward Albee and Mike Nichols].” In Film
a škola [Film and School]. Olomouc: OKS, 1983. – A mimeographed essay
in a set of educational materials for the participants of Film and School
1983 seminar.
“Smysl imagismu [The Meaning of Imagism].” In Měsíc, hvězdy a moře
[Moon, Stars, and Sea]. Olomouc: Divadlo hudby OKS, 1984. [2]–[3]. –
Program of Divadlo hudby [The Theater of Music] in Olomouc.
“Místo literatury ve vyučování angličtiny [The Role of Literature in
English-Language Teaching].” Olomouc: Krajský pedagogický ústav,
1984. – Mimeographed educational material.
“Poetry in a Foreign-Language Class.” Olomouc: Krajský pedagogický ústav,
1984. – Mimeographed educational material.
Marcel Arbeit
47
“‘Buk.’” In Náš pomyslný host Charles Bukowski [Our Virtual Guest Charles
Bukowski]. Olomouc: Divadlo hudby OKS, 1988. [12]. – Program of
Divadlo hudby [The Theater of Music] in Olomouc.
“Zapomenutý folklór jako živá skutečnost [The Forgotten Folklore as the
Live Present].” In Tovaryšská (po)skládání aneb/oder
Gesellen-(Versatz)Stücke: Eine Festschrift oder/aneb Písmo festovní: Paní
docentce PhDr. Lucy Topoĺské, CSc. k narozeninám [The Apprentices’
(Com)Positing: A Commemorative Volume for Lucy Topoĺská on Her
Birthday]. Olomouc: [Katedera anglistiky a amerikanistiky FF UP;
Katedra germanistiky FF UP], 1993. 45–53. – Unofficial commemorative
volume.
“Allenu Ginsbergovi [For Allen Ginsberg].” Lidové noviny, April 12, 1997:
6. – Poem.
Bibliography
Arbeit, Marcel, ed. Bibliografie americké literatury v českých překladech:
Knihy, neperiodické publikace, periodika s nejvýše dvanácti čísly ročně,
samizdatové a exilové časopisy a fanziny do roku 1997. Bibliography of
American Literature in Czech Translation: Books, Non-Periodical
Publications, Periodicals with up to Twelve Issues a Year, Samizdat and
Exile Periodicals and Fanzines to 1997. 3 vols. Compiled by Marcel Arbeit
and Eva Vacca. Olomouc: Votobia, 2000.
Jařab, Josef. “Bibliografie.” In Mezi realitou a literaturou: 6. přednáška z
cyklu Vědeckopopulárních přednášek významných absolventů Univerzity
Palackého v Olomouci pořádaných za podpory statutárního města
Olomouce. Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 2008. 31–56.
Address
Marcel Arbeit
Department of English and American Studies
Philosophical Faculty
Palacký University
Křížkovského 10
771 80 Olomouc
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Not On Native Grounds
Werner Sollors
Harvard University, USA
Abstract
The paper discusses the significance of foreign experience for American writers.
Differentiating several types of this experience, diplomatic service, expatriate
experience, war service, and academic lecture tours, the paper analyzes the specific
effects of foreign experience on three American writers, William Demby, Allen Ginsberg
and Yusef Komunyakaa.
Keywords
twentieth-century American literature; identity; adjustment; international theme;
cultural ambassadors; William Demby; Allen Ginsberg; Yusef Komunyakaa; Prague
For J. J.
For American writers, crossing the boundaries that enclose the United States
means experiencing changes in identity, as the sense of national, racial,
ethnic, and class belonging undergoes a transformation in places where social
norms are subtly or dramatically different, requiring an adjustment from
previously unquestioned norms of ordinary conduct. Gender roles and racial
and political fault lines differ; beliefs in human perfectibility, in the power
of money or in the power of inherited traits vary considerably; and it is these
variations that have intrigued American writers who chose settings outside of
the United States and tested American norms in contexts where they might
only be partly accepted. Linguistic reorientation, and a rethinking about
what may be specifically American are associated with writing that pursues
the “international theme.” Invisible Men came to be seen in new ways, and
American heretics could perceive their own Americanness in foreign settings.
In the nineteenth century many of the major writers had such experiences.
Looking back, one is surprised to see how many writers spent long years
abroad in the diplomatic service: among them are Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and William Dean
Howells as well as Frederick Douglass and James Weldon Johnson. It is a
tradition that seems to have fallen into oblivion; perhaps Barack Obama will
go back to it?
Since the 1920s writers have gone abroad as Bohemians and expatriates,
taking advantage of good exchange rates for their dollars or going on spiritual
or artistic voyages: Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Anita Loos, Claude McKay, Henry Miller, and Richard Wright are among the
most famous examples here.
50
In the past half-century or so, American writers have gone to other
countries for a great variety of reasons. Ralph Ellison spent the year
1956/1957 at the American Academy in Rome and traveled and lectured in
Europe, an experience that affected his sense of being: “The Africans I’ve met
in Paris and Rome have seen me as an alien,” he commented later. “They
see most American Negroes this way. I never really got into contact. I won’t
have anything to do with racial approaches to culture.”1 William Demby led
an Italian life for more than twenty years, an experience that entered his
novel The Catacombs (1965). The pattern of gender relations he finds (still)
in Italy contrasts with an American or Nordic male ideal as a Master that
manifests itself in misogynous sadism, a “slow and subtle form of killing
one’s woman.” “At the origin of this sadism there is the emancipation of the
woman and the anguished position of the male,” he diagnoses an American
malaise that the Italian setting reveals to him.2 Reading Italian newspaper
reports on the Algerian War, Demby is revolted by terrorism: “Plastic bombs!
The cheap anonymous weapon of cheap anonymous killers. . . . But what
revolution can ever succeed based on the traumatic use of psychological
terror? . . . But, I ask, is such riskless anonymous terrorism really effective
as a political instrument?” In the dystopian fantasy scenario he spins from
this mediated newspaper reflection “here in Rome” in 1962 he imagines a
global terrorist scenario that he takes home to New York in his mind, for
“suddenly all of us can be terrorists—a young woman, verging on insanity
because of disillusionment in love, drops a poisonous pill in a metropolis’ milk
supply center; a thrill-seeking youth, nourished on cheap intoxicating drugs
and comic books, surreptitiously drops a powder in the fuel tank of a proud
Boeing 707 Intercontinental Jet; . . . a disgruntled unemployed electrician,
angry with the light company for cutting off his electricity, secretly cuts a
wire and the elevators of a great skyscraper in New York come to a halt
between the sixty-third and sixty-fourth floors; the plague year is here.”3
One wonders whether perceptions like Demby’s would have emerged in an
American setting.
Rarely were American writers now diplomats, though they did in some
cases serve as “ambassadors of culture,” most especially in visits to the
communist world during the cold war years.
One such writer was Allen Ginsberg whose visit to Czechoslovakia in 1965
had a broad national and international resonance. He was crowned the King
of May in Prague, created a cultural flurry that strengthened the pre-1968
dissidents, and was finally expelled by the authorities who found him an
annoyance. “Prague is lovelier in miniature than Paris almost,” Ginsberg
1. Harold Isaacs, “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors,” in Conversations with Ralph
Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amritjit Singh (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1995), 64.
2. William Demby, The Catacombs (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 62–63.
3. Demby, The Catacombs, 10–11.
Werner Sollors
51
reflected on his experience on numerous occasions, most famously perhaps
in the poem “Kral Majales.”
“Kral Majales” is a poem in Ginsberg’s Whitmanian manner with long
sprawling sentences and anaphoric lines and other forms of repetition that
goes to the kill (in 1965 Prague) right in its opening lines, but seems as
skeptical of Capitalism as it is of Communism:
And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat cheeks and eyeglasses and
lying policemen
and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in green suitcases to the
Naked,
and the Communists create heavy industry but the heart is also heavy
and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret technicians conspire for
their own glamour
in the Future, in the Future, but now drink vodka and lament the Security
Forces,
and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on airplanes but let the Indian brown
millions starve
and when Communist and Capitalist assholes tangle the Just man is arrested
or robbed or had his head cut off. . . .
Soon comes the complaint about Communist Czechoslovakia seen through the
lens of modernist art (Cézanne) and fiction (Kafka).
For I was arrested thrice in Prague, once for singing drunk on Narodni
street,
once knocked down on the midnight pavement by a mustached agent who
screamed out BOUZERANT,
once for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dream opinions,
and I was sent from Havana by plane by detectives in green uniform,
and I was sent from Prague by plane by detectives in Czechoslovakian
business suits,
Cardplayers out of Cézanne, the two strange dolls that entered Joseph K’s
room at morn
also entered mine, and ate at my table, and examined my scribbles,
and followed me night and morn from the houses of lovers to the cafés of
Centrum—
And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth,
and I am the King of May, which is industry in eloquence and action in
amour,
and I am the King of May, which is long hair of Adam and the Beard of my
own body
and I am the King of May, which is Kral Majales in the Czechoslovakian
tongue,
and I am the King of May, which is old Human poesy, and 100,000 people
chose my name, . . .
After an interlude with global-religious chants, Ginsberg returns to the fact
of the arrest and the origin of the poem itself:
And tho’ I am the King of May, the Marxists have beat me upon the street,
kept me up all night in Police Station, followed me thru Springtime
Prague, detained
52
me in secret and deported me from our kingdom by
airplane.
Thus I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid Heaven.4
Almost a decade after the beatnik frisson was at its peak in the United States
the repressive regime of the CSSR gave Ginsberg’s satirical and surrealistic
and at times self-absorbed lines a deep political meaning in Prague, where he
read in the “poetic wine restaurant” Viola. Ginsberg’s poem may have been
hard to get hold off in Eastern Europe after his expulsion from Prague, but
the poem is now available in numerous versions on the world wide web, one
of them even with a sound track of Ginsberg’s own reading of the poem.5
Let me conclude with another reading by an American poet whose big first
foreign experience was the Vietnam War. I mean Yusef Komunyakaa, who
addresses linguistic, cultural, and geographic disorientation in the extreme
context of the war. In his poem “Starlight Scope Myopia,” for example, he gives
an account of Viet Cong fighters who “move under our eyelids.”
. . . What looks like
one step into the trees,
they’re lifting crates of ammo
& sacks of rice, swaying
under their shared weight.
Caught in their infrared,
what are they saying?
Are they talking about women
or calling the Americans
beaucoup dien cai dau?6
The Franco-Vietnamese phrase Dien Cai Dau that also serves as the title of
the 1988 collection in which “Starlight Scope Myopia” appears seems like a
riddle that throws into question the self-understood position of the speaker
of the poem. In 2004, accompanied by his translator’s Czech versions of
the poems, Komunyakaa gave a reading in the very same café Viola where
Ginsberg had recited nearly four decades earlier. Meanwhile, the CSSR had
ceased to exist and Prague was now in the Czech Republic, and the tension in
the room came not from political dissidents but from the pleasure of hearing
the clear phrasings of Komunyakaa’s lines in two languages.
The translator was, of course, none other than the Silesian whom we are
celebrating in this new Moravian Journal of Literature and Film. He had
important personal interactions with Ellison and Demby, a lifelong friendship
with Allen Ginsberg, and his personality was shaped by his own Moravian
4. Allen Ginsberg, “Kral Majales,” in Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1987), 353–54.
5. Allen Ginsberg, “Kral Majales (I am the King of May),” 1965, http://www.sniffylinings.com/
kingofmay.html (accessed November 30, 2008).
6. Yusef Komunyakaa, “Starlight Scope Myopia,” in Dien Cai Dau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press, 1988), 8–9.
Werner Sollors
53
borderlands life and his many border crossings, most especially to the United
States. He was responsible for the 2004 event where he pointed especially to
Komunyakaa’s blues and jazz cadences in such refrains as “but the no-good
blues / come looking for me” which he translated as “ale ta zlobivá dáma blues
/ už mě zase má,” so as to create Czech “bluesy” and “slangy” effect.7 One can
await with interest the Komunyakaa poems that will undoubtedly result from
what must have been for him another forceful experience—hearing his own
poetry read in two languages—an experience that took place, need I add?, not
on his native grounds.
Bibliography
Demby, William. The Catacombs. New York: Pantheon Books, 1965.
Ginsberg, Allen. Collected Poems, 1947–1980. Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1987.
———. “Kral Majales (I am the King of May).” 1965.
http://www.sniffylinings.com/kingofmay.html (accessed November 30,
2008).
Isaacs, Harold. “Five Writers and Their African Ancestors.” In
Conversations with Ralph Ellison, edited by Maryemma Graham and
Amritjit Singh. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 63–69.
Jařab, Josef. “Translating Yusef Komunyakaa into Czech: A Personal
Confession.” Callaloo 28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 691–96.
Komunyakaa, Yusef. Dien Cai Dau. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1988.
Address
Werner Sollors
Harvard University
Barker Center
12 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA 02138
USA
[email protected]
7. Josef Jařab, “Translating Yusef Komunyakaa into Czech: A Personal Confession,” Callaloo
28, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 693.
Multicultural Optimism or the Potential Joys of
Otherness
Šárka Bubíková
University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
Abstract
The essay focuses on the literary reflection of the changing discourse on ethnicity and
race in the second half of the twentieth century. It analyzes two novels of the 1990s that
address the issue of ethnic identity from a humorous point of view. In both Gish Jen’s
Mona in the Promised Land (1996) and Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s co-authored
novel The Crown of Columbus (1991) ethnic identity is no longer a tragic burden but a
mask to be used or discarded, explored, embraced, or modified. Both novels are delightful
and hilarious ways of addressing and challenging serious personal, ethnic, cultural and
historical issues and thus they well document the paradigmatic shift in the acceptance
of ethnicity and the re-interpretations of centrality and marginality in American culture.
Keywords
twentieth-century American novel; ethnicity; postmodernism; Philip Roth; Gish Jen;
Mourning Dove; Michael Dorris; Louise Erdrich
American literature demonstrates that the roads to American national identity have
passed through an uneasy process of coming to terms with ethnic heritage. . . . Ethnicity
and cultural pluralism will undoubtedly remain specific features of American culture
and literature.
—Josef Jařab1
Throughout the history of American literature, the issue of race, ethnicity
and identity has been explored in numerous ways. Very often, literary works
discussing these issues have been, to varying degrees, serious in tone, tragic
in their plot resolutions, or, as Sanford Pinsker puts it, “identity has become
one of those words full of sound and fury. . . .”2 One does not have to look hard
for examples as they are abundant. However, with the changing discourse
on ethnicity and race in the second half of the last century, several works
appeared that address these issues from a humorous point of view. In these
works identity, especially ethnic identity, is no longer a tragic burden but
it rather serves as a mask to be used or discarded, explored, embraced, or
modified. The protagonists of these works have, to borrow David McCrone’s
1. Josef Jařab, “Etnický faktor v americké literární historii a současnosti,” Svět literatury, no.
1 (1991): 34. My translation.
2. Sanford Pinsker, “Thinking about What the ‘Other’ Was, and Now Is,” Tikkun 1, no. 16
(2001): 51.
56
phrase, a kind of “pick’n’mix identity”3 which they consciously claim in the
typically American manner of self-creation and self-identification. On one
hand, these characters work hard at creating and promoting their own ethnic
and cultural identity; on the other hand they “wear [their] identities lightly
and change them according to circumstances.”4 My aim is to discuss two
novels from the 1990s that deal with ethnic identity in precisely this manner.
“Going Jewish”
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, one of the many groups clearly
perceived as different, as the (potentially dangerous) Other, were Jewish
Americans. However, over time, Jewishness has developed from a sign of
marginalized status to the mainstream. Not only are “American Jews no
longer the American Other”5 but Jewishness has even turned into something
desirable, something to be envied, a fashionable identity. This shift is
interestingly depicted in literature.
Philip Roth’s novels can be taken as a good example. In The Plot Against
America Roth imagines a gloomy, dystopic picture of an anti-Semitic 1940s
America where being Jewish is dangerous. The Jewish characters are turned
into lesser, or second-class, citizens as they are reminded that “Christian
character is the true basis of real Americanism.”6 Gaining wide public
support, the novel’s fascist-like government “gradually initiates projects
designed to strengthen American patriotism and to cleanse America of
disturbing, non-American elements.”7 The novel’s juvenile protagonist Philip
witnesses his father being repeatedly called “a loudmouth Jew”; he is
threatened by a passerby: “I’d give anything to slap his face,”8 and even
experiences actual violence: “Shots, screaming, shouting, sirens—the pogrom
had begun.”9 Although the novel is a dystopian warning, an imagined
alternative to real history, it is soundly based on the prevailing anti-Semitic
feelings of a large portion of the American population in the years preceding
American involvement in the Second World War.
On the other hand, Coleman Silk, the black protagonist of Philip Roth’s
novel The Human Stain (2000) in an attempted refusal “to let race define
who he was or could be”10 passes as a white man and quite happily allows
his university colleagues and students to assume he is Jewish, as being
3. David McCrone, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation (London:
Routledge, 1992), 195.
4. McCrone, Understanding Scotland, 195.
5. Pinsker, “Thinking,” 52.
6. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 265.
7. Josef Jařab, “Výstražná hra s přepisováním dějin,” Lidové noviny, March 4, 2006: Orientace
vi. My translation.
8. Roth, The Plot Against America, 65.
9. Roth, The Plot Against America, 298.
10. Pinsker, “Thinking,” 53.
Šárka Bubíková
57
a Jewish intellectual has become, in the post-WWII years, a desirable
identity. Ironically, his less fortunate colleagues describe Silk’s bold and
progressive university management as something “Jews do”11 and after the
initial meeting, even the novel’s narrator Nathan Zuckerman describes Silk
as “the small-nosed Jewish type,” “one of those crimpled-haired Jews of a light
yellowish skin pigmentation.”12 Silk is identified by his surroundings as a Jew
partially because of his name (although Zuckerman points out that it could be
a black name as well) but mostly because he is educated, successful and holds
an important office. This reflects what Jonathan Freedman calls “a Golden
Age of American Jewish social and cultural achievement, one marked by a
remarkable success of Jews in the public sphere.”13
The desirability and attraction of Jewishness is also depicted in Gish Jen’s
Mona in the Promised Land (1996), which, according to Freedman, “offers a
delightfully comic series of riffs on the Asians-as-the-New Jews topos.”14 In
the opening scene, a newly prosperous Chinese immigrant family, the Changs,
is moving into a neighborhood that the realtor implicitly describes as “rich and
Jewish.”15 For the Changs, a Jewish neighborhood is a desirable place and
moving into it is a sign of upward social mobility. They have no doubts whether
they belong, because “they’re the New Jews, after all, a model minority and
Great American Success” (MPL 3).
Although Mona, a second-generation Chinese American teenager, feels at
first that in the new home she is seen as a “permanent exchange student”
(MPL 6), constantly consulted on the specifics of Chinese cuisine, she soon
realizes that her otherness makes her interesting and special:
Once a friend said to Mona that everybody is valued for something. . . . You could be
just glad, she said, that you have something people value. She said it was like having
a special talent, like being good at ice-skating, or opera-singing. She said, You could
probably make a career out of it. (MPL 8)
And in fact, amongst her upper-middle-class Jewish peer group, Mona learns
to make a career out of being Chinese.16 Yet, this is not the end of her quest for
identity as she gradually becomes frustrated by experiencing her Chineseness
as a constant failure to live up to other people’s expectations. While often
feeling too Chinese for the surrounding non-Asian world, she is not Chinese
enough for her parents. For example, in one conversation Mona’s mother
announces that in the event of her daughter having a relationship with a
black man, she would kill herself. Mona protests: “But Mom, that’s so racist.”
11. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (2000; London: Vintage, 2005), 9.
12. Roth, The Human Stain, 15.
13. Jonathan Freedman, “‘Who’s Jewish?’ Some Asian-American Writers and the JewishAmerican Literary Canon,” Michigan Quarterly Review 42, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 234.
14. Freedman, “Who’s Jewish,” 240.
15. Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 3. Hereafter cited
in text as MPL.
16. See Reshmi J. Hebbar, Modeling Minority Women: Heroines in African and Asian American
Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2005), 113.
58
Surprisingly, Mona’s mother responds: “Only an American girl would think
about her mother killing herself and say oh, that’s so racist. A Chinese girl
would think whether she should kill herself too” (MPL 221).
Frustrated by the often conflicting demands of the American and the
Chinese parts of her identity, Mona begins to explore what would happen
if she took the common saying that Asian Americans are the New Jews
at face value. Begoña Simal Gonzáles points out that to be a Chinese Jew
might not, after all, “be so paradoxical” as there is “a notable historical
parallelism between the Jewish and Chinese people, and between the Jewish
and Chinese diasporas. In the United States, the Chinese are called ‘New
Jews,’ because they seem to be the living proof of the American Dream, the
‘model minority.’”17 Both groups value education and hard work, both are
similarly stereotyped and have frequently served as scapegoats in interethnic
tensions and riots. Jen herself admits that she was partially inspired by the
sympathy she sees between the Jewish and Chinese cultures.18
Finally, Mona’s interest in the desirable Jewishness intensifies to the point
of wanting to convert to Judaism. When she eventually receives her optional
mikvah, “she becomes Mona-also-known-as-Ruth, a more or less genuine
Catholic Chinese Jew” (MPL 44). Although she “good-humoredly allows her
peers to call her ‘Most honorable Miss Changowitz,’”19 she paradoxically feels
that her conversion makes her more aware of her own heritage. Thus she
wonders why it is that “now that she’s Jewish, she feels like more of a Chinese
than ever” (MPL 66). From a “permanent exchange student” she proceeds to
being considered “a phenomenon” and “a regular Yoko Ono” (MPL 63).
Surprisingly, while there are many explicit conversations about issues
of race and identity, about Americanness, Chineseness and Jewishness,
the reasons for Mona’s decision to become Jewish are just implied. At one
moment, Mona asserts that it is important to remember that her family are
not Wasps, that they are a minority. Her parents refute the idea because,
according to their logic, “they were never a minority when they were in China,
why should they be a minority here” (MPL 52). But Mona protests, suggesting
that contrary to her parents’ desire to be a Wasp, she needs to realize she
is a minority, “like it or not” and she sees Jews as a role model: “If you
want to be a minority, there’s nobody better at it than the Jews” (MPL 53).
Thus Mona reveals her disappointment at how easily her parents left behind
their native language and most of their Chinese heritage. Like many firstgeneration Americans, Mona’s parents worked hard to assimilate into the
American mainstream, to turn as quickly as possible from greenhorns into
alrightniks.
17. Begoña Simal Gonzáles, “The (Re)birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and Ceremonies of
Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the Promised Land,” MELUS 26, no. 2
(Summer 2001): 228.
18. See Simal Gonzáles, “The (Re)birth of Mona Changowitz,” 231.
19. Hebbar, Modeling Minority Women, 113.
Šárka Bubíková
59
Mona defends her right to religious freedom, and thus establishes herself
firmly in the tradition of American self-created characters. Quite naturally,
she is reproached by her mother: “How can you be Jewish? Chinese people
don’t do such things” (MPL 45). It is ironic that during the conversation an
old cuckoo clock strikes the hour, but in “the place of the long-broken cuckoo
bird is a glued-on Statue of Liberty pencil sharpener” (MPL 45). Mona tries
to explain that her choice of identity is nothing against her parents:
“You are the one who brought us up to speak English. . . . You said we weren’t pure
Chinese anymore, the parents had to accept we would be something else.”
“American, not Jewish.” . . .
“Jewish is American,” Mona says. “American means being whatever you want, and I just
happened to pick being Jewish.”
“Since when do children pick this, pick that?” (MPL 49)
Yet on a different occasion, Mona’s mother Helen explains why they have no
problems celebrating Christmas: “Oh, well, we are still Buddhist after we are
baptized. We are Buddhist, and Taoist, and Catholic. We do however we want”
(MPL 42). But when it comes to her daughter, Helen is far more reluctant to
grant her the same right to do whatever she wants. When Mona constantly
brings up the fact that they live in a free country, in America, Helen finally
decides that perhaps America is outside, but in her house “no such thing,”
her house is China (MPL 250). Trying to make Mona accept her opinion that
turning Jewish is absurd, Helen argues:
“Tomorrow you’ll come home and tell me you want to be black.”
“How can I turn black? That’s a race, not a religion.” (MPL 49)
However, Mona soon realizes how slippery the slope of identity is when she
“confronts her own sense of inhabiting a racialized body.”20 In a series of
conversations with her parents’ African American employees, she becomes
aware that to the outside world she does not look Jewish: “Grow your nose!
Grow your nose! Once you grow your nose [you will be] a nice Jew-girl indeed”
(MPL 137). The whole scene is turned into a joke when the black cook Alfred
responses to Mona’s accusation that he is stereotyping: “Typing? Stereo?
I’ve never heard of no stereo that could type” (MPL 137). Nevertheless, as
Freedman points out, Mona “begins to think about her nose, skin color, and
breasts as ethnic markers.”21 Ironically, it is Alfred who challenges Mona’s
ideas about ethnicity and race when he tells her:
“White is white, man. Everything else is black. Half and half is black.”
“Are you telling me I’m black?” Mona says. (MPL 155)
Alfred is much more bitter about his position within American society and his
obvious otherness: “Nobody’s forgetting we’re a minority . . . we’re black, see.
We’re Negroes,” he declares when Mona muses about the importance of not
forgetting one’s minority status. Still, as Reshmi Hebbar points out, the whole
60
subplot involving Alfred “hilariously underscores the complexities of race,
religion, class, and nation, in the often futile attempts at ethnic categorization
and a cross-ethnic idealism of pluralistic empathy.”22
Despite the seriousness of the issues involved, Jen maintains a light tone of
comedy throughout the novel. In Hebbar’s words, Mona “shapes her identity
by dint of her superior wit and comedic prowess.”23 Jen uses other means of
comedy as well, such as “a hyperbolic language” and “the comedic present
tense.”24 The novel also has a typically comic plot resolution as it ends with
Mona getting married to Seth Mendel. Again, the complexities of received
and chosen identity surface here as Seth is a young Jewish man interested
in Eastern religious traditions and for most of the novel he lives in a teepee.
There is a joking promise of the issues being carried on by the next generation
as the only thing we learn about Mona’s and Seth’s child is that the “favorite
cuisine of a child part Jewish, part Chinese” is of course “Italian” (MPL 303).
Native American “betwixt-and-between-ness”
In Native American fiction, in-between-ness is often represented by mixedblood characters, i.e. characters of mixed Native American and EuroAmerican descent. Even the first novel by a Native American woman,
Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Description of the Great Montana Cattle Range
(1927) by Mourning Dove, centers on a mixed-blood protagonist, Cogewea,
the daughter of an Okanogan mother and a white father. The novel uncovers
the difficult position of a member of a minority, complicated even more as a
mixed-blood person is fully accepted nowhere. She is perceived as a minority
both within her tribe and in the mainstream society.
Thus Cogewea says about herself: “I am not a full-blood—only a breed—a
sitkum Injun” and laments her fate: “Regarded with suspicion by the Indian,
shunned by the Caucasian, where was there any place for the despised
breed!”25 What the common attitude to people of mixed descent was in
Cogewea’s time is clearly expressed in the observation of the novel’s villain
Densmore, who, upon seeing a ranch full of people of unrecognizable origins,
wonders: “Where were these picturesque Indians . . . ? Instead, he had been
lured into a nest of half-blood, whom he had always understood to be the
inferior degenerates of two races.”26
For Cogewea the dilemma of her double-faceted identity is presented in
the form of a choice between a white and a mixed-blood suitor. Cogewea at
first elopes with the white man Densmore, in the false hope that she can
become part of the mainstream. Nevertheless, she remains ambiguous about
22.
23.
24.
25.
Hebbar, Modeling Minority Women, 118.
Mourning Dove, Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Description of the Great Montana Cattle Range
(1927; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), 26.
26. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 48.
Šárka Bubíková
61
her decision and reveals how split she feels: “My white blood calls to see the
world, even if the Spirit tells me that I am stepping wrong.”27
Cogewea finally uncovers her white suitor’s wickedness, returns to the
reservation, marries the mixed-blood Jim LaGrinder and accidentally comes
into a fortune. Louis Owens sees this as an unsatisfactory ending to the novel,
with the plot reminiscent of pulp fiction and the main issue postponed till
the next generation: “The dilemma of the mixed-blood poised between red
and white worlds remains unsolved. The novel ends on a note of stasis, with
nothing resolved, none of the many questions answered.”28 On the other hand,
Arnold Krupat considers the choice of a happy ending as a positive sign of the
possibility of a future for people of mixed descent. “It may fairly be said that
Cogewea’s irresolution provides an extraordinarily accurate account of the
betwixt-and-between-ness of mixed-bloods in the [time] period.”29 Contrary
to Owens, Krupat appreciates that Mourning Dove refused to fictionalize the
idea of mixed-bloods as a vanishing race. In “holding firm against the advice of
her collaborator/mentor, L. V. McWhorter, who recommended a tragic ending”
we may see “Mourning Dove’s belief in Indian survivance.”30 In any case,
Cogewea clearly named “what was to become the dominant theme in novels by
Indian authors: the dilemma of the mixed-blood, the liminal ‘breed’ seemingly
trapped between Indian and white worlds.”31
Almost seventy years later, two highly acclaimed Native American writers,
Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, co-authored The Crown of Columbus
(1991), “a consciously postmodern novel”32 that accentuates the positive sides
to being a mixed-blood and presents it in “an extremely positive view of the
confluence of two cultures, the ideal achievement, the new American.”33 The
novel does not present much of the “isolation, deprivation, frustration, and
anger that many think being Indian is all about.”34 By focusing on Native
American issues as generally human issues the novel also acknowledges that
almost any American is, in one way or another, a mixed-blood, a descendant
of many cultures and traditions, often conflicting ones.
The novel brings together two characters from very different cultural
backgrounds: Roger Williams, “an upper crust, mildly Episcopalian, Anglo27. Mourning Dove, Cogewea, 6.
28. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 48.
29. Arnold Krupat, Red Matters: Native American Studies (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 95.
30. Krupat, Red Matters, 88.
31. Owens, Other Destinies, 40.
32. Susan Farrell, “Colonizing Columbus: Dorris and Erdrich’s Postmodern Novel,” Critique 40,
no. 2 (Winter 1999): 121.
33. Ann Rayson, “Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris,” Studies
in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 31.
34. Peter G. Beidler, review of The Crown of Columbus, by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich,
Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 49.
62
European”35 scholar and poet from an old New England family, and a mixedblood character, Vivian Twostar, who characterizes her heritage as “a mixed
bag of New and Old Worlds.”36 In the novel, the two characters are brought
together both as lovers and as academics sharing a research interest in
Christopher Columbus, though, obviously, both from different perspectives.
Yet as with Jen’s novel, Dorris and Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus is
a “comic story of humor and survival”37 that can be seen as a “lark of a
novel with a serious attempt to rationalize, accept, and forgive the European
discovery of America by Columbus.”38
While Mona becomes “her own melting pot, her own mosaic,”39 Vivian is
the genuine personification of one. She says about herself:
I belong to the lost tribe of mixed bloods, that hodgepodge amalgam of hue and cry that
defies easy placement. When the DNA of my various ancestors—Irish and Coeur d’Alene
and French and Navajo and God knows what else—combined to form me, the result was
not some genteel, undecipherable puree that comes from a Cuisinart. You know what
they say on the side of the Bisquick box, under instruction for pancakes? Mix with fork.
Leave lumps. That was me. (CC 123)
Just as Mona discovered that her otherness made her special among her
peers, more “marketable” and of better value in the social market, as Hebbar
puts it,40 Vivian, too, is aware of the potential benefits of her situation. For
one, she is the only Native American on the staff of Dartmouth College and
her CV bulges in the section of “community service” as she is “a natural
double bull’s-eye for every college committee that lack[s] either a woman
or a minority” (CC 14). However, she needs more publications in order to
get tenure. Her dean strongly encourages her as “it would be no picnic for
him to fire the only aboriginal assistant professor” (CC 14). But Vivian sees
advantages in her position from a more general perspective as well:
There are advantages to not being this or that. You have a million stories, one for every
occasion, and in a way they’re all lies and in another way they’re all true. . . . There are
times when I control who I’ll be, and times when I let other people decide. I’m not all
anything, but I’m a little bit of a lot. My roots spread in every direction. . . . I’ve read
learned anthropological papers written about people like me. We’re called marginal, as
if we exist anywhere but on the center of the page. Our territory is the place for asides,
for explanatory notes, for editorial notation. . . . But there are advantages to peripheral
vision. Out beyond the normal bounds you at least know where you’re not. You escape
the claustrophobia of belonging, and what you lack in security you gain by realizing—as
those insiders never do—that security is an illusion. (CC 123–24)
35. Farrell, “Colonizing Columbus,” 121.
36. Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus (New York: HarperCollins,
1991), 11. Hereafter cited in text as CC.
38. Rayson, “Shifting Identity,” 28.
39. Catherine Foster, “A Wacky Mosaic of Teenage Self-Discovery,” review of Mona in the
Promised Land, by Gish Jen, Christian Science Monitor, June 27, 1996: B2.
40. Hebbar, Modeling Minority Women, 113.
Šárka Bubíková
63
In the course of their novel Dorris and Erdrich illustrate this assertion on
many levels, uncovering almost any “security” as illusionary, as only one story
out of a multitude of possible interpretations. In a similar way Vivian’s son
explains the character of Navajo storytelling: “Truth was all in the story,
in the way it was told and in who was doing the telling” (CC 362). Just as
in the text personal identity is often changeable, never fixed or closed, so is
the interpretation of Columbus as a historical figure, or, for that matter, the
meaning and implications of the European discovery of America.
Bridging the In-between-ness
As Farrell points out, “ethnic identity for Dorris and Erdrich is always
complicated and shifting because many of their characters play many
different roles in the fragmented, postmodern environment they move in.”41
They “wear their identities lightly,” in which way they may be seen as
variations on the Native American trickster topos. It is not, however, an end in
itself but rather a means to survival. Contrary to Cogewea, who experienced
her position as a mixed-blood as limiting, for Vivian the complex heritage
opens many new possibilities and allows for a broader perspective. In an
interview, Erdrich states that unstable identities enable one “to pick and
choose and keep and discard” cultural values at will and thus one can survive
in a world that is so rapidly changing.42
However, as in Jen’s novel, the act that truly changes the hyphen in the
character’s identity description from an ambiguous sign into a bridge is the
physical act of creation. Vivian’s own complicated and multi-faceted identity
is, similarly to Mona’s, transcended in the next generation. Vivian’s and
Roger’s daughter is seen as “a bridge of [their] intricate genetic possibilities,”
an “ultimate contract” between the New and the Old Worlds (CC 284). Both
novels thus claim survivance and end on a hopeful note connected with the
future.
In Mona in the Promised Land, identities are, on occasions, worn
lightly. It is part of the comic scheme, the truly Shakespearean “rapidfire transformations of costume, identities, and affiliations.”43 As Freedman
states, “what Shakespeare does with and to gender, Mona does to ethnicity.”44
Yet she is aware of her in-between-ness when she talks about “what it’s like
to be not Wasp, and not black, and not as Jewish as Jewish can be; and
not from a Chinatown, either” (MPL 231). Amy Ling sees this as a very
common theme, typical for ethnic women who are living “between worlds,
totally at home nowhere.”45 Jen’s novel explores the comic potential of being
42. Joseph Bruchac, Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1987), 79.
45. Amy Ling, Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry (New York: Pergamon, 1990),
105.
64
in between worlds. The Crown of Columbus is also written in a comic tone
with occasional strokes of “broad, farcical humor”46 and has a typical happy
ending. Both novels are delightful and hilarious ways of addressing and
challenging serious personal, ethnic, and cultural, as well as historical issues.
Both novels illustrate the paradigmatic shift in the acceptance of ethnicity
within American culture, the contemporary celebration of it, the more and
more fashionable “going ethnic.”
Bibliography
Beidler, Peter G. Review of The Crown of Columbus, by Michael Dorris and
Louise Erdrich. Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (Winter
1991): 49–53.
Bruchac, Joseph. Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987.
Dorris, Michael, and Louise Erdrich. The Crown of Columbus. New York:
HarperCollins, 1991.
Hebbar, Reshmi J. Modeling Minority Women: Heroines in African and
Asian American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Farrell, Susan. “Colonizing Columbus: Dorris and Erdrich’s Postmodern
Novel.” Critique 40, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 121–35.
Foster, Catherine. “A Wacky Mosaic of Teenage Self-Discovery.” Review of
Mona in the Promised Land, by Gish Jen. Christian Science Monitor,
June 27, 1996: B2.
Freedman, Jonathan. “‘Who’s Jewish?’ Some Asian-American Writers and
the Jewish-American Literary Canon.” Michigan Quarterly Review 42, no.
1 (Winter 2003): 230–56.
Hebbar, Reshmi J. Modeling Minority Women: Heroines in African and
Asian American Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005.
Jařab, Josef. “Etnický faktor v americké literární historii a současnosti.”
Svět literatury, no. 1 (1991): 29–35.
———. “Výstražná hra s přepisováním dějin.” Lidové noviny, March 4, 2006:
Orientace vi.
Jen, Gish. Mona in the Promised Land. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Krupat, Arnold. Red Matters: Native American Studies. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York:
Pergamon, 1990.
McCrone, David. Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless
Nation. London: Routledge, 1992.
Mourning Dove. Cogewea, the Half-Blood: A Description of the Great
Montana Cattle Range. 1927. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1981.
Šárka Bubíková
65
Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Pinsker, Sanford. “Thinking about What the ‘Other’ Was, and Now Is.”
Tikkun 1, no. 16 (2001): 51–53.
Rayson, Ann. “Shifting Identity in the Work of Louise Erdrich and Michael
Dorris.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 3, no. 4 (Winter 1991):
30–38.
Roth, Philip. The Human Stain. 2000. London: Vintage, 2005.
———. The Plot Against America. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Simal Gonzáles, Begoña. “The (Re)birth of Mona Changowitz: Rituals and
Ceremonies of Cultural Conversion and Self-Making in Mona in the
Promised Land.” MELUS 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 225–42.
Address
Šárka Bubíková
Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
University of Pardubice
Studentská 84
532 10 Pardubice
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Ethnicity and Some Other Aspects of Henry Roth’s
Call It Sleep
Stanislav Kolář
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Abstract
The essay on Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep views ethnicity and cultural diversity
as very significant sources of the novel’s dynamism. It focuses on Roth’s depiction of
ethnic diversity in an American urban ghetto, represented particularly by New York’s
Lower East Side. A detailed analysis of the novel’s Prologue draws on the fact that it
predetermines the nature of the author’s novel, which is seen especially as a story of
redemption. Special attention is paid to language as an important agent of expression of
cultural plurality and to the confrontation of different religions. The essay also attempts
to interpret several central symbols that relate to the protagonist’s life and to the past
of his family.
Keywords
twentieth-century American novel; Jewish American fiction; ethnicity; Jewish
immigration; New York; Lower East Side; modernism; Henry Roth
Originally I intended to name my essay on Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep
“The Novel That Calls for Awakening.” However, I realized that this pun
on the title would not be appropriate for several reasons. It is true that
after its first publication in 1934, in the middle of the Depression years, the
novel was almost forgotten and Henry Roth seemed to sink into oblivion. Yet
thirty years later, in 1964, the novel miraculously awoke from its deep sleep
when it was published in a new paperback edition.1 As a matter of fact, this
resurrection was not that startling because there were always literary critics
who were fully aware of the book’s artistic qualities and regarded the lack of
attention paid to Henry Roth as undeserved. No wonder that Alfred Kazin and
Leslie Fiedler ranked Call It Sleep among the most neglected novels.2 Today
Roth’s novel, together with Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky
(1917), is viewed as a classic of Jewish American literature. Moreover, it has
been translated into numerous foreign languages. Perhaps my original title
would be suited to the situation in the Czech Republic, since for many Czech
readers Jewish American literature is confined to the quartet of well-known
1. It is no coincidence that the novel was reprinted in the 1960s, a decade marked by growing
interest in ethnicity in the United States. In fact, a paperback edition of Call It Sleep was
reissued as early as 1960, but the real revival of this novel was triggered by the 1964 edition.
2. See Walter Allen, afterword to Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth (New York: Avon Books, 1964),
442-47.
68
writers—Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Philip
Roth. For those readers for whom Jewish American literature starts after
World War II, Henry Roth is an obscure name; in addition, his novel still
awaits translation into Czech.3
Call It Sleep is an ethnic chronicle of the life of Jewish immigrants in
the New World, predominantly seen from the perspective of a small boy,
David Schearl. As Sanford Pinsker put it, “If Cahan saw the Lower East Side
through a wide lens, Roth narrowed his vision to the dreams and nightmares
of an individual child.”4 The poverty of the Lower East Side ghetto is not the
only urban setting of the novel, as its first part takes place in Bronzeville.5
Through the eyes of the oversensitive child between the ages of six and nine
we follow his initiation to an unknown and rather terrifying territory where
“lost, bewildered, friendless . . . David scuttles through the streets of the Lower
East Side like a frightened little animal lost in a jungle inhabited by the larger
carnivores.”6 His lostness differs from that of the characters of Singer’s stories
set in America, as the terror of the new environment is magnified by David’s
age and his artistic imagination. He becomes alienated from the world that
“had been created without thought of him.”7
The hostile reception of the immigrant boy and his mother in the “Promised
Land” is already foreshadowed in the Prologue, which narrates the arrival of
David and his mother Genya at Ellis Island, where they are to meet Albert,
Genya’s husband.8 The year is 1907, the period of one of the biggest waves of
immigration to America. Although David and Genya do not look like typical
“greenhorns” and their appearance is unremarkable (except for David’s
outlandish straw hat), their reunion with Albert is odd and draws the attention
of others.9 What is unusual is the cold welcome extended by Albert to his family
members, whom he has not seen for a long time. Roth’s diction when depicting
Albert’s behavior is ominous: this character is seen as “the man staring
with aloof, offended eyes at the water,” as a man with a “grim smouldering
face” whose “voice [is] dangerous” or “harsh” and whose “wrathful glare”
frightens the small boy. The vocabulary associated with Genya’s husband
is telling and includes such expressions as “contempt,” “grunted,” “rebuke,”
“snapped,” “ignoring,” “frowned,” “morosely,” “snarl” etc. (CIS 11–15). The
direct reason for his anger is Genya’s failure to recognize him (because of his
3. Only a short extract from this novel was published in Czech translation in the periodical
Spektrum, no. 33 (1981): 30–31.
4. Sanford Pinsker, Jewish-American Fiction, 1917–1987 (New York: Twayne Publishers,
1992), 8.
5. Bronzeville corresponds to Brownsville, a section of Brooklyn.
6. Walter Allen, afterword to Call It Sleep, 444.
7. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (1934; New York: Avon Books, 1964), 17. Hereafter cited in text as
CIS.
8. Unlike the majority of Roth’s novel, the Prologue is narrated from an omniscient point of
view.
9. David’s straw hat irritates Albert so much that he throws it into the sea.
Stanislav Kolář
69
Americanized appearance); however, the reader soon realizes that Albert’s
ire is aimed particularly at the child. His utterance “He’s [David] the cause of
all this trouble anyway” (CIS 15) adumbrates Albert’s extraordinarily brutal
treatment of the child throughout the novel, the result of his doubts about the
son’s biological paternity and of his uncertain social position in America.
The ominous nature of the adoptive country is suggested not only by
Albert’s threatening behavior but also by the description of the place where
the immigrants arrive. Roth piles up rather dismal images of the New World
that are in contrast to the notion of America as Eden or Eldorado. Similarly to
Cahan’s protagonist David Levinsky who, despite his initial elation after
his arrival in New York, registered “the hostile glamour of America”10
and the unfriendly behavior of the immigration officers in Castle Garden,
and expressed his loneliness “in the midst of a jungle,”11 Roth pictures the
landscape of the new country in a dismal tone. The steamer’s whistle is heard
as a “hoarse warning” (CIS 9) and immigrants are delivered “from the stench
and throb of the steerage to the stench and the throb of New York tenements”
(CIS 9). The newcomers can see “the low drab Jersey coast-line” (CIS 14)
and “grimy cupolas and towering square walls of the city [that] loomed up”
(CIS 16). The Prologue closes with a description of the steamer, whose motion
to the dock is conveyed as reluctant. We can perceive it as an exact metaphor
of Genya’s feelings of uncertainty before her arrival in America.
Underscoring the unkind reception of the immigrants in the American part
of the Diaspora, Roth devotes a part of the Prologue to a description of the
Statue of Liberty. This “Mother of Exiles,” if I can allude to the famous poem
by Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” is presented gloomily.12 Her features
are “charred with shadow, her depths exhausted” (CIS 14). In contrast to
Lazarus’s poem, Roth’s Statue of Liberty is associated with darkness, that
darkness against which David must struggle in his quest for a new identity
throughout the book. The statue’s “spikes of darkness” and “the blackened
hilt of a broken sword” (CIS 14) look sinister, as if they anticipated David’s
future in the new land.13
10. Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917; New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 87.
11. Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky, 90.
12. In my course on Jewish American Literature, I teach the Prologue of Henry Roth’s novel
in connection with Emma Lazarus’s poem in order to contrast the imagery of two literary
texts that both relate to the Statue of Liberty. While Lazarus’s celebratory sonnet links this
essential symbol of the United States with light, Roth portrays the Statue unconventionally,
emphasizing its dark silhouette. The contrast between light and darkness pervades the
whole of Roth’s novel.
13. In the fourth part of the novel, entitled “The Rail,” Henry Roth returns to the motif of the
Statue of Liberty. Here he imbues this symbol with an ironic meaning: “[Y]ou can go all
the way up inside her for twenty-five cents. For only twenty-five cents, mind you! Every
American man, woman and child ought to go up inside her, it’s a thrilling experience” (CIS
415). It is obvious that the American icon is diminished here. Materassi sees in it “a phallic
pun.” Mario Materassi, “Shifting Urbanscape: Roth’s ‘Private’ New York,” in New Essays on
Call It Sleep, ed. Hana Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 50.
70
This dreariness is in contradiction to the introductory motto of Roth’s
novel, which refers to America as the “Golden Land” (CIS 9). This association
with gold implies the fulfillment of the American dream.14 In Roth’s novel
the designation acquires an ironic meaning. It contrasts the myth of America
with the depressing reality of the Schearl family. “And this is the Golden
Land” (CIS 11), says Genya spontaneously, as if she could not believe that
what she was seeing was America. In fact, irony appears in the very first
sentence of the Prologue when we learn that Genya and her son reached the
American continent in a steamer named the Peter Stuyvesant. It bears the
name of the Dutch governor “who attempted to prohibit the immigration of
the ‘deceitful race’ of Jews to New Amsterdam in 1654.”15 By the choice of
the name Roth underscores the status of the newcomers, whose position as
welcome immigrants is a mere illusion.
As has already been stated, Call It Sleep is an ethnic novel with its
focus on Jewish immigrant life in the American urban ghetto, represented
particularly by the Lower East Side. However, from the very beginning
Roth presents America in its ethnic diversity. In the Prologue the narrator
registers immigrants of various nationalities aboard the steamer, ranging
from Russians, Jews, and Slovaks to Armenians, Greeks, and Danes. He
notices the variety of their clothes and costumes, which can be understood
as a synecdoche for the colorfulness of the New World, so characteristic of
Roth’s novel. To underscore the peculiarity of the Schearl family reunion,
he describes the typical habits of several national/ethnic groups in meeting
scenes—of Italians, Swedes, Jews, Poles, and the English. Roth’s depiction of
the strange meeting of Albert with Genya and David in the Prologue makes
the reader suspect that something is wrong in the Schearl family. Its mystery
is gradually revealed in the subsequent four parts of the novel.
The character that pieces the puzzle together from its fragments is David.
The main source of danger for him is his father, despotic beyond compare.
David is terrified by his father’s mere presence and he counts the so-called
“red days” in the calendar, that is, Sundays, when Albert is at home. He fully
realizes the extent of his alienation from his father when walking with him
in the city for the first time:
As far back as he could remember, this was the first time that he had ever gone anywhere
alone with his father, already he felt desolated, stirred with dismal forebodings, longing
desperately for his mother. His father was so silent and so remote that he felt as though
he were alone even at his side. What if his father should abandon him, leave him in some
lonely street. The thought sent shudders of horror through his body. (CIS 24)
Because of his choleric nature Albert has no friends in America. The only
person who often visits him is his employer Luter; however, this friendship is
only simulated, as the real reason for Luter’s visits is his sexual attraction
14. It is worth noting that the Chinese called America the Gold Mountain.
15. Werner Sollors, “‘A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else.’ Language, Nostalgic Mournfulness,
and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call It Sleep,” in New Essays on Call It Sleep, 139.
Stanislav Kolář
71
to Genya. Because of his quick-tempered behavior Albert also easily loses
jobs and becomes unemployed. Actually, the above-quoted passage has an
interesting—and for the son, terrifying—point; we find out that the main
purpose of David’s trip was his visit to Albert’s employer, to whom the boy
is sent to retrieve his father’s personal belongings and to collect money that
the company owes to him. From the employer David learns that his father
nearly killed a man with a hammer after a quarrel. Despite their distance,
Albert and David have one feature in common: both of them are extremely
lonely in America.
By contrast, Genya represents a kind of retreat, the only island of safety
for David. Many critics have interpreted David’s dependence on his mother
and his relationship with his father in Freudian terms and attributed oedipal
features to it.16 It is true that this dependence is almost pathological; however,
it compensates for the frustration in his relationship with his father, who
projects his own social failures onto his son. Roth portrays Genya in the
Yiddish literary tradition of a protective mama who guards David against
all the dangers of the surrounding world.
Besides Albert, the ghetto itself poses a threat to David. The boy is
exposed to various kinds of danger, embodied by individual people but also
represented by inanimate objects. This combination creates a strange mosaic
that achieves poetic qualities, so characteristic of Roth’s novel. The author
systematically builds up an atmosphere of menace that is omnipresent,
regardless of whether the boy is in the streets of the Lower East Side or in
the tenement house where he lives. One of the numerous traumas he has to
face in the new environment is connected with sexuality. His innocence is
shattered when the neighbors’ daughter Annie forces David “to play bad,” a
children’s sexual game that disgusts him. For the same reason he treats Luter
as his enemy because he subconsciously becomes aware of the sexual flavor
of the guest’s visits. Already at his early age he links sexuality with sin and
betrayal. Danger constantly awaits David in the streets, where he experiences
unpleasant moments, including being bullied by a group of boys.
There is another place that plays an important role in the structure of
Roth’s text. It is a cellar which becomes one of the central symbols of the
novel. The fact that “Cellar” is the title of the book’s first part points to its
significance. In Harap’s view, “[t]he dark cellar of his [David’s] tenement, with
his fantasy of rats and the unknown symbolizes his terror.”17 David associates
the darkness of the cellar in his tenement house with death and sexuality.
This association is evoked by his personal experience; death is connected with
his memory of the horrifying moments when he observes the black hearses
16. Allen Guttman labeled Call It Sleep “the most Freudian of the great American novels.” Allen
Guttman, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1971), 50.
17. Louis Harap, Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in Twentieth-century American
Literature, 1900–1940s (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 113.
72
and people wearing black clothes at a funeral, and sexuality is related to the
darkness of a closet where Annie precociously initiated David into sex.
Roth pictures the city from David’s perspective as a strange, barely
comprehensible organism that terrifies him. According to Materassi, “like
most metropolitan settings in twentieth-century literature, Henry Roth’s New
York is a place of division and isolation.”18 In the first part of the novel,
the boy’s feeling of uprootedness is best expressed in the episode in which
David literally loses his way. After an incident with other children he finds
himself in a district far from his neighborhood, and he does not know his
way back home. Eventually he helplessly bursts into tears and even though
passers-by are trying to help him, their good intentions come to nothing
because the boy mispronounces the name of the street where he lives. This
feeling of uprootedness is not, however, limited only to the immigrant child.
In conversation with Luter, David’s mother expresses a similar experience:
“But here I am. I know there is a church on a certain street to my left, the vegetable
market is to my right, behind me are the railroad tracks and the broken rocks, and
before me, a few blocks away is a certain store window that has a kind of white-wash on
it—and faces in the white-wash, the kind children draw. Within this pale is my America,
and if I ventured further I should be lost. In fact,” she laughed, “were they even to wash
that window, I might never find my way home.” (CIS 33)
What is noticeable is the word “pale,” suggesting that Genya lives in a new
form of confinement, even though her confinement in America is incomparable
with that in the old land because this time it is self-imposed.19
The problem of the Schearl family is that it lives in America in galut—in
exile. Unlike many other emigrants who left their country for economic,
religious or political reasons, Albert and Genya came to America to escape
from their past. More precisely, they were forced to leave Austria—Genya
because of her love affair with a goy, the church organist Ludwig, which
resulted in something of a family scandal, and Albert because of his
responsibility for the tragic death of his father. Albert’s father was gored by
a bull, but his life could have been saved if Albert had helped him. Albert,
however, made no attempt to help, in retribution for his father’s despotic
behavior (as we can see in his relationship with David, the family history
repeats itself).
In spite of the traumatic experiences of David’s parents in Europe, they
often return to the land of their birth in their memories and do not perceive
America as their home. On the contrary, their adoptive country is an
alien land for them. They are unable to rid themselves of their nostalgic
approach to their homeland, associated with the rural landscape that forms
a counterpoint with their bleak urban present, scarred by industrialization.
18. Materassi, “Shifting Urbanscape,” 31.
19. The Pale of Settlement was a restricted area in Russia where Jews were allowed to live.
They did not have the same rights as Russian citizens and thus they were not permitted
(with some exceptions) to leave the Pale; this was only allowed under certain conditions that
were determined by law.
Stanislav Kolář
73
Their nostalgic attitude toward their old country is illustrated by the
purchase of two artifacts for the decoration of their apartment—artifacts that
are to remind them of their past. Albert’s icon, a wooden plaque with bull’s
horns, reminds him of his childhood and youth spent on a farm in the AustroHungarian province of Galicia. A picture of a cornfield with tiny blue flowers
is painfully dear to Genya since it relates to her gentile lover Ludwig, whom
she saw for the last time in a similar field with blue cornflowers. Both artifacts
serve not only as mere decorations, but also connect Albert and Genya with
Tysmenicz and Veljish, their birthplaces. Roth presents them as objects veiled
with the family secret. David feels that uncovering this secret means finding
the key to the truth about his family’s past, the truth about himself, his
identity he is so painfully searching for in America. He wants to know because
“[n]ot knowing became almost unbearable” (CIS 197). And even the reader
guesses that the artifacts might explain the strange relationships within the
Schearl family, especially between David and his tyrannical father. To be
sure, both decorative objects suggest the most traumatic events in the parents’
personal history. The bull’s horns mounted on the plaque evoke Albert’s guilt
for his father’s death, a death that can be defined almost as a parricide. But
horns themselves are also associated with cuckoldry,20 which is both Albert’s
nightmare and simultaneously, in his strange marriage, his obsession. His
uncertainty about David’s paternity is expressed in the episode in which he
introduces his family to Luter during the boarder’s first visit to their home.
Pointing to David, he says: “And that over there . . . is what will pray for me
after my death” (CIS 29). Though it is usually the son who is supposed to say
kaddish after a parent’s death, notice that Albert avoids saying the word “son”
and uses the rather derogatory expression (in this social context) “that over
there.”
The picture of a cornfield is of even greater importance.21 For David’s
mother it is a painful reminder of her disappointment in love, as Ludwig
abandoned her to enter into a pragmatic marriage with a wealthy older
woman, although it was Genya whom he loved. Hidden in the green field,
she observed a cart with Ludwig and his betrothed heading to Vienna for
their wedding. In Sollors’s view “Genya has substituted an image of beauty
for an experience of pain and loss and she repeats the substitution when she
buys the picture.”22 Her story reveals that even after several years of living
in America her love romance still hurts, as she has lost the man for whom she
was willing to sacrifice everything, even her family.
Considering Jewish American culture, Elaine M. Kauvar states that
“[a]rriving in this country [the USA], Jews wanted to become Americans as
soon as possible, so they embraced America wholeheartedly and succumbed to
20. See Sollors, “A World Somewhere,” 147.
21. The significance of this key image is reflected in the title of the novel’s second part—“The
Picture.”
22. Sollors, “A World Somewhere,” 149.
74
the lure of American culture.”23 Ethnic literatures confirm that the pressures
to assimilate are immense, but this is not the case with the Schearl family.
Genya in particular remains immune to the assimilative allurement of
America and gives preference to her enclosed world. The language barrier
(her English is very poor), together with her household duties and the need to
look after her small child, condemn her to isolation. Separated from others,
estranged from her husband, her life is restricted to the microcosm of the
Schearls’ apartment, mostly their kitchen. She is like a prisoner, yet she does
not protest and passively accepts all the burdens of her life. Even if Luter
offers the Schearls an alternative to their gray life, regularly inviting them to
the Yiddish theater, Genya does not show any interest. In this respect Albert
is more open to the possibilities of the American lifestyle, but his assimilation
is hampered by his personality, in particular by his rudeness and irascibility.
In Roth’s novel there is another important character, Genya’s sister
Bertha, who comes to America later. She is the exact opposite of Genya.
She is eager to adopt the American mode of life, in other words to become
Americanized. Unlike her modest, meek sister, Bertha is energetic, very
impulsive and at times sarcastic, which is the cause of the conflicts between
her and Albert. In her case it is possible to speak of “push and pull factors”;
she willingly left her country and in America she shows much enthusiasm
for everything new. She does not want to stay on the periphery of the
nation, which she desires to embrace with great fervor.24 Understandably
her view of America and her motherland—for which she finds only words of
contempt—differ entirely from the views of Genya and Albert. In one dialog
with her sister, Bertha confronts both countries: “True I work like a horse
and I stink like one with my own sweat. But there’s life here [in America],
isn’t there? There’s a stir here always. Listen! The street! The cars! High
laughter! Ha, good! Veljish was still as a fart in company. Who could endure
it? Trees! Fields! Again trees! Who can talk to trees? Here at least I can find
other pastimes than sliding down the gable on a roof!” (CIS 153).
Roth reflects the ambivalence of immigrants’ attitude to their homeland
by recording a range of different opinions, mostly in conversations that take
place in the Schearls’ apartment. For example, Luter remembers his native
place in a different (nostalgic) way:
“Each one remembers what appealed to him, and I remember the peasant wenches.
Weren’t they a striking lot, in their tight checked vests and their dozen petticoats? . . .
One never sees the like here. It’s a scanty soil from what one sees of it in Brooklyn and
its women are spare. But in Sorvik they grew like oaks. They had blonde hair, their eyes
blazed. And when they smiled with their white teeth and blue eyes, who could resist
them? It was enough to set your blood on fire.” (CIS 43)
23. Elaine M. Kauvar, “Introduction: Some Reflections on Contemporary American Jewish
Culture,” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall 1993): 338.
24. In this respect she resembles the Jewish American immigrant writer Mary Antin, who
expressed her enthusiasm about America in her autobiography The Promised Land (1912).
On the other hand, Bertha is critical of some negative aspects of American life.
Stanislav Kolář
75
Ethnic diversity, only briefly sketched out in the Prologue, completely
disappears in the text of the first part of the novel. This is not because
of the ethnically homogeneous setting but because Roth concentrates here
on the depiction of Jewish immigrant life in its self-sustained community.
The relative compactness of this “urban shtetl,” where Jews are in everyday
contact with their culture and speak in their own language, may be
comfortable, but it is also treacherous. When David gets lost and steps outside
the borders of his familiar territory, he becomes helpless because he is not
able to spell the English name of the street where he resides. The focus of the
remaining three parts of the novel is also the Jewish world; however, Roth also
introduces characters from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. This
coincides with the Schearls’ move to the Lower East Side, where David meets
street urchins of various national origins, though he mostly plays with Jewish
boys. Tracing the protagonist’s experiences in the ghetto, the reader registers
a Chinese laundryman, a Hungarian janitor, a black stable-boy, an Armenian
peddler or an insensitive Italian street-cleaner who desecrates a Jewish boys’
ritual, the burning of hamez (removal of leavening) in the morning of the
first Passover day.25 David’s neighborhood also includes a strong Irish and
Italian community. Roth’s novel indicates that the interaction among various
ethnic communities is rather problematic, burdened with many stereotyped
prejudices, which is reflected in vocabulary (derogative “sheenies” or “kikes”
for Jews, “wops” for Italians, “micks” for the Irish).
It could be argued that one of the most important agents of the expression
of cultural plurality in Roth’s novel is the language itself. This is especially
evident in Chapter XXI of the final part of the book. This chapter contains
the climactic scene, David’s electrical burn from the short circuit on the
rail, which causes him to lose consciousness. Here Roth presents a medley
of disparate voices or, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, a “cacophony of confused
tongues,”26 partly commenting on the accident, partly expressing the inner
thoughts elicited by the personal experience of the speakers. Emotional
outcries are mostly rendered in Yiddish but also in the dialects of immigrants’
native languages. In the montage of these voices we can even hear an
exclamation in Italian. Hana Wirth-Nesher claims that
[h]ere social and spatial boundaries are transcended as a mass of individuals from
diverse backgrounds fear and grieve for the prostrate child on the city street. With a
minimum of omniscient narration, Roth uses two alternating modes in this climactic
scene—reported speech of witnesses to David’s suffering, before, during, and after the
event and italicized sections which are psycho-narration, rendering David’s perception
in formal and self-consciously poetic language. The former are multi-lingual and multidialectical; the latter are self-conscious literary English.27
25. On the eve of Passover (Pesach), the festival commemorating the deliverance of Jews from
their bondage in Egypt, everything containing leavening must be removed.
26. Leslie Fiedler, “The Many Myths of Henry Roth,” in New Essays on Call It Sleep, 22.
27. Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language: Multilingualism in
Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 307.
76
Call It Sleep is a multilingual novel; the main languages Roth uses in
his book are English, Yiddish, and Yinglish, which is Yiddishized English.
Yinglish is used in the conversation among immigrant children in the ghetto
streets. As the protagonist of the novel lives in a Yiddish-speaking area, the
dominant language is Yiddish. With regard to the reader, Yiddish is, however,
rendered in its English “translation.” As Wirth-Nesher points out, “[i]t is a
book written in the English language but experienced by the reader as if it
were a translation, for David’s main actions and thoughts are experienced in
Yiddish.”28 In order to make the reader realize that the discourses are held
in Yiddish, Roth defamiliarizes the English language. For this purpose he
uses various strategies, ranging from the employment of Yiddish idioms in an
exact translation into English to the use of unusual syntactic structures and
non-standard grammar forms. Here are a few examples: “I’m gonna tell my
modder on you” (CIS 86), “I am losted” (CIS 97), “Nothing fulfills itself with
me” (CIS 136), “my modder’s kinerry flied away” (CIS 292), “[h]ad it been
your own flesh and blood, you would have been there in a wink, no?” (CIS
381), “[y]ou would have asked me, what?” (CIS 390). Only occasionally does
Roth insert into his text Yiddish words without any translation or introduce
direct speech, explicitly stating that it was said in Yiddish. The effect of the
perception of the English text as if it were written in Yiddish is also achieved
by various allusions to Jewish culture.
Apart from the employment of the above-mentioned languages, Roth uses
Hebrew and Aramaic and the languages of the immigrants according to
their nationalities. Hebrew and Aramaic, as sacred languages, appear in
the passages set in the cheder that David started to attend. The languages
are linked with David’s initiation into Jewish culture and with his fervent
desire to be cleansed of his sins. Like the other boys he only memorizes
the texts written in these languages, which are as incomprehensible and
even mysterious to him as Polish, the language to which his mother and
aunt Bertha switch whenever they want to conceal from David the intimate
matters from the family’s past. Accordingly, David hates the Polish language,
for it represents an obstacle on his path to a full knowledge of his family
history. Considering the multilingual nature of Roth’s novel, we can agree
with Wirth-Nesher’s statement that “Call It Sleep is a classic example of
a work in which several cultures interact linguistically, thematically, and
symbolically, and it is also an interesting case of ethnic literature, the JewishAmerican novel.”29
The cultural diversity of Roth’s novel is reinforced by the author’s
confrontation of the Jewish and Christian religions. In the course of the book,
David becomes a kind of religious hybrid, connecting Christian (English)
and Jewish (non-English) cultures. Although his parents are not particularly
observant Jews, Albert decides to enroll David in the cheder “to learn what it
28. Wirth-Nesher, “Between Mother Tongue,” 301.
29. Wirth-Nesher, “Between Mother Tongue,” 297.
Stanislav Kolář
77
means to be a Jew” (CIS 210). David proves to be a very gifted and perceptive
pupil but a religious school, represented by the frustrated and stern rabbi
Yidel Pankower, is hardly satisfactory for the inquisitive child. Roth pictures
the decline of Judaism in America, depicting the pupils in the cheder as
ignorant and unconcerned children who are interested more in skates or
kites than in religion. “And God? Forgotten, forgotten wholly,” Reb Pankower
ruminates, when thinking about the prospects of “[t]his sidewalk-and-gutter
generation” (CIS 374). An undesirable impact of materialistic America on
Judaism is symbolically illustrated in the episode depicting the burning of
hamez. David is looking for a place where he can burn the leavened bread (it
is symbolic that he finds this place near a junk heap) because Jewish boys do
not allow him to put it into their fire if he does not pay them money to do so.
More importantly, coming across three gentile hoodlums who threaten him,
David denies his Jewish identity, claiming that he is Hungarian.
Unlike his parents, David is compliant with assimilation. It is symptomatic
that the first person whom he wants to befriend in his rather unsociable
life is a goy, the Polish boy Leo Dugowka, who “represents Americanization
and assimilation.”30 For David, Leo embodies freedom unbound by parental
restrictions (he does not have a father). He admires Leo’s independence and
lack of constraints, multiplied by his ownership of roller skates which give him
freedom of movement and longed-for speed. David yearns for friendship with
him, even if Leo overtly shows his feelings of superiority and does not hide his
prejudices against other ethnic groups, including Jews.31 What attracts David
most are the objects of Catholic worship in Leo’s house. He is mesmerized by
a crucifix and a rosary and longs to own them. To get a rosary, he fulfills
Leo’s wish “to play bad” with his step-cousin, and he arranges their date even
though he is aware of his unclean conduct. The rosary plays a key role in
one of the most important scenes of the novel; after the revelation of David’s
acting as “procurer” for Leo, he is severely whipped by his father and during
this violent punishment the rosary accidentally falls out of his pocket in front
of the stunned family. Albert takes it as a confirmation of his fixed idea (and
obsession) that David is an illegitimate child, an embodiment of Genya’s past
sin with the gentile organist Ludwig. For him, David is a consummation of
the family curse.
Jewish mythology knows three basic types of stories—stories of creation,
stories of revelation, and stories of redemption.32 David’s story is especially
a story of redemption. The protagonist feels guilty for betraying Jews and
thus he wants to purify himself. On the spiritual level, he finds inspiration
for purification in the sacred texts with which he is acquainted in the cheder
30. Dorothy Seidman Bilik, Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust Consciousness in Recent
Jewish American Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 26.
31. Leo horrifies David when he tells him about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and calls Jews
“Chris’-killers” (CIS 323).
32. See Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007),
81.
78
before Passover, particularly in the biblical story of Isaiah, who had his
unclean lips cleansed by fiery coal to become worthy of speaking to God.33 He
also connects his cleansing with light, which drives him to his almost fatal
deed when he thrusts a milk dipper into a crack between the streetcar tracks.
The enormous electric shock nearly kills David, but its power is redemptive;
even in his state which might be called sleep, he gains a feeling of victory over
his shaken father, who seems to accept him as his own son. At the same time
it is a victory over the fear and guilt that “are the major components of his
experience.”34 The electric light is identified with the cleansing effect of the
coal on Isaiah’s lips.
The artistic power of the final part of Roth’s novel lies not only in modernist
techniques in the mold of James Joyce, as many critics have pointed out, but
also in the amalgamation of various cultures which converge at the point
of David’s purgation, of “sin melted into light” (CIS 248). It is the triumph
of light over the darkness that used to frighten the small boy for such a
long time. The encounter between Jewish and Christian culture is complete:
the protagonist, nurtured by the texts from the Torah and the Haggadah,35
becomes the self-sacrificing Jesus Christ. “Christ, it’s a kid!” (CIS 420), reacts
one of the onlookers, witnessing to David’s suffering. Receiving the electric
shock, David is depicted as an “outstretched figure in the heart of the light”
(CIS 421). The word “kid” points to the Jewish tradition and echoes the
Haggadah, containing the line, “One kid, one only kid . . .” (CIS 233), where
the kid symbolizes an innocent victim—in a broader context, the oppressed
Jewish nation. Obviously, in Roth’s novel, the word “kid” refers to David. Hana
Wirth-Nesher is right when she claims that “the cry ‘Christ, it’s a kid!’ serves
as an intersection of competing narratives, of Passover and Easter, of Judaism
and Christianity.”36
Undoubtedly, ethnic and cultural diversity are important sources of the
novel’s dynamism. However, they are not the only sources; Call It Sleep is a
very complex book, “inclusive rather than exclusive, therefore succeeding in
accounting for more than just one of the textual levels.”37 Depending on which
aspect is emphasized, Roth’s novel can be approached as a Bildungsroman,
a proletarian novel of social protest, a psychological novel, and also an
immigrant novel or ethnic chronicle. Be that as it may, it is evident that Call
It Sleep is one of the most distinguished works of Jewish American fiction
before World War II, and should not be overlooked.
33. Hence the third part of Roth’s novel is called “The Coal.”
34. Tom Samet, “Henry Roth’s Bull Story: Guilt and Betrayal in Call It Sleep,” Studies in the
Novel 7 (1975): 572.
35. The Haggadah (also Had Gadya) is an Aramaic song, chanted or recited in the first two
evenings of Passover. Its text resembles a nursery rhyme.
36. Hana Wirth-Nesher, “Traces of the Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, ed. Michael P. Kramer and Hana
Wirth-Nesher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 124.
37. Materassi, “Shifting Urbanscape,” 40.
Stanislav Kolář
79
Bibliography
Allen, Walter. Afterword to Call It Sleep, by Henry Roth, 442–47. New York:
Avon Books, 1964.
Bilik, Dorothy Seidman. Immigrant-Survivors: Post-Holocaust
Consciousness in Recent Jewish American Fiction. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. New York: Harper
& Row, 1960.
Fiedler, Leslie. “The Many Myths of Henry Roth.” In New Essays on Call It
Sleep, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996. 17–28.
Guttman, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis
of Identity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Harap, Louis. Creative Awakening: The Jewish Presence in
Twentieth-century American Literature, 1900–1940s. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987.
Kauvar, Elaine M. “Introduction: Some Reflections on Contemporary
American Jewish Culture.” Contemporary Literature 34 (Fall 1993):
337–57.
Kepnes, Steven. Jewish Liturgical Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007.
Materassi, Mario. “Shifting Urbanscape: Roth’s ‘Private’ New York.” In New
Essays on Call It Sleep, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996. 29–52.
Pinsker, Sanford. Jewish-American Fiction, 1917–1987. New York: Twayne
Publishers, 1992.
Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. 1934. New York: Avon Books, 1964.
Samet, Tom. “Henry Roth’s Bull Story: Guilt and Betrayal in Call It Sleep.”
Studies in the Novel 7 (1975): 569–83.
Sollors, Werner. “‘A World Somewhere, Somewhere Else.’ Language,
Nostalgic Mournfulness, and Urban Immigrant Family Romance in Call
It Sleep.” In New Essays on Call It Sleep, edited by Hana Wirth-Nesher.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 127–88.
Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Between Mother Tongue and Native Language:
Multilingualism in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep.” Prooftexts 10 (1990):
297–312.
———. “Traces of the Past: Multilingual Jewish American Writing.” In The
Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature, edited by Michael
P. Kramer and Hana Wirth-Nesher. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003. 110–28.
80
Address
Stanislav Kolář
Faculty of Arts
Dvořákova 7
701 03 Ostrava 1
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Jazz, Poetry, Ethnicity, and Democracy in the Work of
Gary Snyder
Petr Kopecký
University of Ostrava, Czech Republic
Abstract
The essay examines one of the key figures of the San Francisco Renaissance, Gary
Snyder. It discusses those aspects of his life and work that have played a crucial role
in the life and work of that pre-eminent personage in American studies scholarship,
Josef Jařab. Jařab can be credited with introducing Snyder’s writings, as well as the
author himself, to Czech (and Czechoslovak) readers. It is not surprising that there are
numerous points of contact between the careers of the two men. As the title suggests, the
essay explores four selected issues. It probes into Snyder’s experiments in combining
verse with jazz forms, some of which took place while the poet was performing in
Prague. It also deals with Snyder’s unique vision of a multi-ethnic America and his
all-embracing view of democracy, which goes beyond the boundaries of the human realm.
Keywords
American literature; jazz; poetry; democracy; ethnicity; Gary Snyder
Having been invited to contribute to the special issue of this journal dedicated
to Josef Jařab, I instantly began to think of all the eminent American writers
who had lectured and read from their writings at Czech universities thanks
to the efforts of Josef Jařab. It did not take long to work out that one of the
authors who have been close friends to Jařab and, at the same time, are close
to my heart is Gary Snyder. Even more importantly, all the notions that figure
in the theme of this issue (jazz, poetry, ethnicity, and democracy) are pertinent
to the life and work of Gary Snyder himself.
Despite the fact that Snyder is predominantly a creative writer, whereas
Jařab is a scholar, they have a lot in common. They were both brought up
on a farm, in direct contact with the soil and the natural environment,
and later gained academic acclaim. In their work, they have explored
(and articulated the concerns of) the silenced and the silent, be they
ethnic minorities or the wilderness. Both Snyder and Jařab, under different
circumstances, have oftentimes represented a countercurrent that refused
to go with the mainstream. Neither of them restricted himself to the
domain of literature. They publicized their beliefs not only through words
but also through (political) action. Undoubtedly, more connections between
the two could be enumerated; however, that is not the objective of this
essay.
82
It does not come as a surprise that Jařab can be credited for introducing
Snyder’s writings, as well as the author himself, to Czech(oslovak) readers.1
Jazz
During his first visit to the Czech Republic in 1998, Snyder’s readers had
a unique chance to hear the poet’s verses accompanied by a musical trio.
Snyder later admitted that this session gave him new faith in the potential
of poetry and music performance and inspired him so much that he promised
himself that he would try it again in the United States.2 It should be noted
that it was at the very start of Snyder’s literary career that he realized
poetry’s capacity to interact with jazz music. The paragon of Snyder’s early
life, Kenneth Rexroth, showed the novice poet the beneficial effects of jazz
inspiration on the sonic quality of verses. In his interview with Jařab, Snyder
admits that jazz forms serve as models for his poems.3 In the spirit of jazz
poetry, Snyder explored new ways of playing with the rhythmic pattern of his
verses through jazz accompaniment.4
In the appendix to his recent translation of Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers
without End (Hory a řeky bez konce, 2007), Luboš Snížek compiled a list
of both audio and video recordings featuring Snyder’s poetry, whose length
took even the poet by surprise. Snyder’s numerous experiments with poetry
recited to the rhythm of music can be attributed to his inclination toward
the oral tradition of poetry as it was practiced in tribal societies. He regards
the position of a poet as close to that of a shaman, who voices the collective
subconscious by means of chanting, singing, and dancing. Still, the word is of
primary importance to Snyder, who has “always held that minimal music is
all that poetry needs.”5
Poetry
The aforementioned shamanistic quality of Snyder’s poetry is arguably the
foremost characteristic of his work, and is one which deserves a deeper
examination. In many of his texts, Snyder reiterates the idea that the poet
should draw creative energy from the archaic traditions, which he commonly
1. The most comprehensive selection of Snyder’s poetry, before his books began to be translated
into Czech, appeared in the anthology of contemporary American poetry Dítě na skleníku
(1989), which Jařab edited and Jaroslav Kořán translated. Jařab also wrote the afterword
to the first book-length translation of Snyder into Czech, which was The Old Ways (Staré
cesty, 1995). Last but not least, Jařab was instrumental in bringing Snyder to the Czech
Republic for the first time in 1998.
2. See Jiří Josek et al., Beatnici v Praze (Praha: Argo, 2001), 9. My translation.
3. See Josef Jařab, “O poezii Dalekého západu: S Gary Snyderem rozmlouvá Josef Jařab,”
interview with Gary Snyder, Literární noviny 10, no. 15 (April 14, 1999): 4–5.
4. The tradition of jazz poetry dates back to the Harlem Renaissance (e.g., Langston Hughes). It
was also important for Snyder’s closest literary friends, Kenneth Rexroth and Jack Kerouac
included.
5. Gary Snyder, “Re: Music,” e-mail to Luboš Snížek, May 9, 2007.
Petr Kopecký
83
describes as “primitive.” As he maintains in Earth House Hold (1969), “Poets,
as few others, must live close to the world of primitive men: the world, in its
nakedness, which is fundamental for all of us—birth, love, death; the sheer
fact of being alive.”6 It is important to add that this “being alive” is firmly
rooted in the physical environment and its biological processes, which is a
quality that the civilized mind has lost to a large extent. Through poetry,
Snyder reconnects the body and the mind, which have been considerably
dissociated in modern America. Poetry has the power to revive the awareness
“of very close correspondences between the external and internal landscape.”7
In his poetry, Snyder soon purged his verses of decorations and ornaments
and developed a poetics that is simple in expression and rich in thought. He
has written poems about living close to the bone, as well as stone. Indeed,
his poetry can be described as rock-solid. His debut poetry collection, Riprap
(1959), draws upon his summer job in Yosemite, where he built mountain
trails. Snyder himself has often referred to this period as a cornerstone in his
literary career. In the poem “Riprap,” he relates the commonly dissociated
physical and intellectual work:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
.......................
each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite. . . . 8
In the 1999 interview with Josef Jařab, Snyder comments on the geological
metaphors that play an important role in his imagery and are an inseparable
part of what might be called ecopoetics.9 During the long years he has
been living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, he has gotten
attuned to the rhythms and cycles of the land, which has left a noticeable
impression on his poetry. In The Real Work (1980), Snyder talks about feeling
the shifting landscape under his foot: “There is a periodicity of ridge, gorge,
ridge, gorge . . . and tributary gorges that makes an interlacing network of, oh,
115-million-year-old geological formation rhythms.”10 It should be pointed out
that the principle of an “interlacing network” is also key to an understanding
of Snyder’s poems. His poetics is inspired by and based on the realization of
the interconnectedness of things, which can be acquired both by intuition and
erudition in ecology. Snyder did not lack either of these.
6. Gary Snyder, Earth House Hold (New York: New Directions, 1969), 118.
7. Gary Snyder, The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979, ed. Scott McLean (New York:
New Directions, 1980), 5.
8. Gary Snyder, “Riprap,” in Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1990), 32.
9. For more on this topic, see, e.g., Josef Jařab, “O poezii Dalekého západu.”
10. Snyder, Real Work, 48.
84
Ethnicity
Not only does Snyder believe in the interrelatedness of ecosystems, but he is
also convinced that interdependence between the different races and ethnic
minorities requires an attitude of cooperation. His inborn tendency is to
search for points of unity rather than disunity. As has been argued above, he
identifies the commonality of all the people in the primitive (or primal) mind,
which still sleeps deep in their unconscious. It follows that the dividing line
between the racial and ethnic groups is porous and can thus be penetrated. In
the introductory note to Turtle Island (1974), Snyder expresses this conviction
quite eloquently:
Anglos, Black people, Chicanos, and others beached up on these shores all share such
views at the deepest levels of their old cultural traditions—African, Asian, or European.
Hark again to these roots, to see our ancient Solidarity, and then to the work of being
together on Turtle Island.11
It is beyond question that cultural plurality has been an important distinctive
feature of American society. As Jařab writes in the anthology of contemporary
American poetry Dítě na skleníku, Snyder “has accepted the ethnic, racial, and
therefore also cultural diversity of America as a historical fact.”12 His poems
are imbued with a spirit of inclusiveness when it comes to the modus vivendi
of the various cultures in America. Snyder is able to synthesize different
cultures and traditions that are seemingly worlds apart. The America (as well
as the world) he envisages is free of rigid definitions of ethnic and national
identity. Looking at the composition of society, Snyder refuses to think in
terms of center and periphery. As Vít Erban cogently notes, he “does not strive
to undermine the fundamental values and erase the Euro-American culture,
but aims at the dissolving of traditional ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism and
establishing an open and creative culture.”13
In the ecopoetical manner, Snyder draws analogies between the diversity
in the human and natural realms. He regards modern civilization as a frail
monoculture which is prone to various diseases. At the other end of the
spectrum are so-called primitive societies, which are commonly characterized
by complexity and maturity. As he contends in The Old Ways (1977), what
is happening around us is an “unparalleled waterfall of destruction of a
diversity of human cultures; plant species; animal species; of the richness
of the biosphere. . . .”14 Snyder perceives the homogenization of cultures and
life in general as the ultimate threat that we are facing, more serious than,
11. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), n.pag.
12. Dítě na skleníku: Výbor ze současné americké poezie, edited by Josef Jařab (Praha: Odeon,
1989), 334. My translation.
13. Vít Erban, “Vize a cesty šamanského pěvce,” Host 19, no. 6 (2003): 68. This article is
extracted from Erban’s remarkable master’s thesis entitled “Kultura a divočina: kultivace
a přirozenost v pojetí Garyho Snydera,” which the author defended at the Department of
Cultural Studies at Charles University in Prague in 2001.
14. Gary Snyder, The Old Ways (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977), 17.
Petr Kopecký
85
for instance, pollution. His “practice of the wild” is intent on the preserving
of both nature and culture. In “Ecology and Aesthetics: Robinson Jeffers
and Gary Snyder,” Allan Johnston correctly observes that “the ‘primary
experiencing’ of nature in art reaches an ideal ‘climax’ condition in cultural
diversity.”15
Democracy
Snyder’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning poetry collection Turtle Island is full of
verses which celebrate diversity and its various expressions. Most frequently,
he writes about the different nonhuman forms of life. Interestingly enough,
he calls them “standing tree people” and “flying bird people,” which cannot
be understood as shallow anthropomorphism but a way of challenging the
instrumental attitude to the nature of humans. The broadening of the
semantic scope of the word “people” underscores the interrelatedness of all
life.
In his writing, Snyder often lends his voice to nonhuman creatures
and even whole ecosystems, rocks and creeks included. He articulates the
interests of what he sees as an under-represented or wholly neglected
constituency—the wilderness, which has no speaker, let alone senator.
His conception of democracy is aimed at decentering the prevailing
anthropocentric paradigm. In Turtle Island, he succinctly notes that “plants
and animals are also people” and should therefore be “given a place and voice
in the political discussions of the humans. They are ‘represented.’ ‘Power
to all the people’ must be the slogan,”16 and criticizes the “mistaken belief
that nature is not as alive as man is.”17 Thus, he opposes the notion that
nature is for human use, which especially the Western world holds so dear.
Indeed, the ramifications of Snyder’s ultimate democracy are revolutionary.
He rejects the dualistic “me-it” perception of the world and proposes what
ecophilosophers label as biological egalitarianism: “[T]here is no hierarchy of
qualities in life—that the life of a stone or a weed is as completely beautiful
and authentic, wise and valuable as the life of, say, an Einstein.”18
Despite the fact that Snyder is known for his radicalism, sometimes even
bordering on anarchism, he has not wholly distanced himself from politics.19
Knowing that the ideal “ultimate democracy” will not materialize in his
lifetime, he has made every effort to approach this ideal. In doing so, he
even accepted the offer of the California Governor, Jerry Brown, to chair
15. Allan Johnston, “Ecology and Aesthetics: Robinson Jeffers and Gary Snyder,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 31.
16. Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), 104.
17. Snyder, Turtle Island, 107.
18. Snyder, Real Work, 17.
19. One of the most remarkable critiques published by Snyder in recent years is “Ecology,
Literature, and the New World Disorder,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and
Environment 11, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1–13.
86
the Arts Council. In response to the voices criticizing his engaging with the
establishment, Snyder plainly said: “When a head of state goes so far as to
request a hermit poet to come down from the mountain, then the poet is
obligated to try to do his best.”20 Even in this position, Snyder never gave up
on his principles and ideals. He promoted small-scale projects whose aim was
the fostering of a sense of community and sense of place. He has always seen
the future of democracy in small, decentralized communities which would
be determined by “natural and cultural boundaries rather than arbitrary
political boundaries.”21
Conclusion
The preceding pages have demonstrated that jazz, poetry, ethnicity, and
democracy have been integral parts of the life and work of Gary Snyder, a
writer whom Josef Jařab has helped to introduce to the Czech reader. On
the basis of the personal experience and the reading experience of the two,
one can safely state that Jařab’s fondness for Snyder is not accidental. They
share a profound tendency to connect, rather than dissect and separate, and
accentuate diversity and inclusiveness. In my eyes, Jařab and Snyder have
challenged the way knowledge and, consequently, life is fragmented. Despite
their analytical mindset, they have not lost sight of the roots of the imaginary
tree of knowledge, whose branches have gotten somewhat entangled in the
postmodern world.
Bibliography
Berg, Peter. “Beating the Drum with Gary.” In Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a
Life, edited by Jon Halper. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991.
376–91.
Erban, Vít. “Kultura a divočina: kultivace a přirozenost v pojetí Garyho
Snydera.” Master’s thesis, Charles University, 2001.
———. “Vize a cesty šamanského pěvce.” Host 19, no. 6 (2003): 68.
Jařab, Josef. “O poezii Dalekého západu: S Gary Snyderem rozmlouvá Josef
Jařab.” Interview with Gary Snyder. Literární noviny 10, no. 15 (April 14,
1999): 4–5.
Jařab, Josef, ed. Dítě na skleníku: Výbor ze současné americké poezie.
Translated by Jaroslav Kořán. Praha: Odeon, 1989.
Johnston, Allan. “Ecology and Aesthetics: Robinson Jeffers and Gary
Snyder.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 8, no. 2
(Summer 2001): 13–38.
Josek, Jiří, et al. Beatnici v Praze. Praha: Argo, 2001.
20. Qtd. in Peter Berg, “Beating the Drum with Gary,” in Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life, ed.
Jon Halper (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991), 388.
21. Snyder, Turtle Island, 100.
Petr Kopecký
87
Snyder, Gary. Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions, 1969.
———. “Ecology, Literature, and the New World Disorder.” Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment 11, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 1–13.
———. Hory a řeky bez konce. Translated by Luboš Snížek. Praha: Maťa,
2007. Originally published as Mountains and Rivers without End.
———. The Old Ways. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1977.
———. “Re: Music.” E-mail to Luboš Snížek, May 9, 2007.
———. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks, 1964–1979. Edited by Scott
McLean. New York: New Directions, 1980.
———. Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. San Francisco: North Point Press,
1990.
———. Staré cesty. Translated by Alexandra Hubáčková and Renata
Vystrčilová. Praha: Volvox Globator, 1995. Originally published as The
Old Ways.
———. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974.
Address
Petr Kopecký
Faculty of Arts
Dvořákova 7
701 03 Ostrava 1
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Breathing Out the Words of a Different World:
American Indian Authors Writing in English
Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Abstract
The essay discusses the connection between language and culture in American Indian
literatures. Having found affinities between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis about language
as a tool that shapes reality and the Indian belief in the magic of words, the author
argues in favor of protecting the national (tribal) language and American cultural
diversity because, with the loss of its language, a minority ethnic culture loses its
grounding.
Keywords
American literature; American Indian authors; language and culture; ethnicity
From the psychological point of view, there are as many different worlds upon the
earth as there are languages. Each language is an instrument which guides people in
observing, in reacting, in expressing themselves in a special way.
—Kluckhohn and Leighton
The above remark by the ethnographers Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea
Leighton appeared in their classic study The Navaho. They conducted
extensive research among the Navajo Indians in the early 1940s and apart
from other issues, they were interested in the relationship between language
and culture. Their idea of the existence of different worlds based on speaking
different languages bears a resemblance to the linguistic theory called
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes reality and, therefore,
when one uses another language, one is entering a different reality.1 Sapir
believed that “language and our thought-grooves are inextricably interwoven,
[and] are, in a sense, one and the same.”2 His most provocative statement,
which inspired research for many decades to come, was one part of his
paper delivered at a conference in 1928 attended by both linguists and
anthropologists. He stated that “[h]uman beings do not live in the objective
world alone . . . but are very much at the mercy of the particular language
which has become the medium of expression for their society. . . . The fact of
1. See Edward Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1956), 69.
2. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1921), 232.
90
the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up
on the language habits of a group.”3
Benjamin Lee Whorf, expanding on Sapir’s ideas, wrote that “the grammar
of each language . . . is itself the shaper of ideas. . . . We dissect nature
along lines laid down by our native languages. . . .”4 In his studies he
compared a group of European languages with the Hopi language and came
to the conclusion that differences in the linguistic area are mirrored in
people’s thinking and behavior.5 This theory has been broadly discussed
and much criticized. However, it often seems to be echoed in works dealing
with American Indian cultures. For instance, in their study Kluckhohn and
Leighton assert that “[b]ecause of the structure of their language The People
[Navaho] are bound to have mental processes that are, in some significant
senses, different from those of English-speaking peoples.”6 Similarly, Leanne
Hinton, in her essay about the language of the Wintu tribe from California,
says that our language does not limit us to certain viewpoints “but it
does guide us strongly along particular mental pathways, and from this
perspective, languages . . . are windows to whole systems of beliefs and
values.”7 There are studies suggesting that grammatical categories can
indeed influence non-verbal behavior.8 Could this mean that languages are
indeed the gates to different worlds?
This provocative thought also emerged during my interview with Hope
Coriz (Comanche/Santa Clara Pueblo). She speaks English and two American
Indian languages. She has never heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but
those two must have been very happy somewhere in the linguists’ paradise
when she spoke about her experience. After she learnt two American
languages that do not exist in a written form she learnt English and,
according to her, it changed her way of thinking: “English is so different, so
linear, oriented on a subject, time is precisely specified.” She also mentioned
the belief of many Native people that if they learn English, especially in a
written form, it changes them: “There are certain ceremonies you cannot
practice any longer because your mind changed.”9 The question remains as to
what extent this could be generalized, but in any case it explains why, in the
3. Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality, 209.
4. Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1967), 213.
5. See Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality, 138.
6. Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, The Navaho, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1974), 208.
7. Leanne Hinton, Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages (Berkeley: Heyday
Books, 1994), 69.
8. See, e.g., John B. Carroll and Joseph B. Casagrande, “The Function of Language
Classifications in Behavior,” in Readings in Social Psychology, ed. Eleanor E. Maccoby,
Theodore M. Newcomb, and Eugene L. Hartley (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1958), 18–31; J. A. Lucy, Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9. Hope Coriz, personal interview, April 6, 2001.
91
more traditional pueblos, only the native language can be used for ceremonial
occasions.
Among ethnographers and anthropologists there were only some who took
time to learn the language of the tribe they studied. However, I share the
belief with Gary Witherspoon, who studied the Navajo culture, that the best
entry into another culture is through the language.10 He suggests that “it is
through language that the world of the Navajo was created, and it is through
language that the Navajos control, classify, and beautify their world.”11 To
understand this concept we need to abandon, according to Witherspoon, the
Western metaphysical notions that separate mind and matter, suggesting
that what goes on in the mind is subjective, while that which occurs in the
world of matter is objective. Navajo philosophy assumes that “mental and
physical phenomena are inseparable, and that thought and speech can have a
powerful impact on the world of matter and energy.”12 The Navajo world was
created by Diyin Dine´é (Holy people) who “thought the world into existence”;
their thoughts were realized through speech, song, and prayer.13 According to
the Navajo, thought is the inner form of speech. In order to clarify this idea,
Witherspoon explains that all natural phenomena, such as the earth and sky,
the sun and moon etc., also have inner forms. They are called biiástí—“an
animate being lies within.” These beings have human-like characters and
appearance. People also have inner forms that are called nitchí bii´sizíinii
(in-standing wind soul). As Witherspoon suggests, this in-standing wind soul
is thought to be in control of one’s body, thoughts, and actions.14 The Navajo
believe that the Holy wind is within the individual from the moment of
conception; some differentiate between the female and male parts of the wind,
stating that four months after conception the wind grows and causes the first
movements of the unborn child.15 Like Witherspoon, McNeley also stresses
that the Western reader has to deal with words and phrases that are difficult
to translate, since for some American Indian expressions and phrases there
are no satisfactory equivalents in English.16 Nílchí, meaning Wind, Air, or
Atmosphere, “gives life, thought, speech, and the power of motion to all living
things and serves as the means of communication between all elements of the
living world.”17 From the Navajo point of view breath and wind play crucial
roles. In his study Witherspoon comes to the conclusion that the act of creation
starts with knowledge and culminates in speech: “In the Navajo view of the
10. See Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1977), 7.
11. Witherspoon, Language and Art, 7.
13. See Witherspoon, Language and Art, 16.
14. See Witherspoon, Language and Art, 29.
15. See James Cale McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1988), 33–34.
16. See McNeley, Holy Wind, xi.
17. McNeley, Holy Wind, 1.
92
world, language is not a mirror of reality; reality is a mirror of language. . . .
Ritual language does not desribe how things are; it determines how they will
be.”18
American Indians share a belief not only in the creative power of words
but also in the power of thoughts. At the end of the nineteenth and at the
beginning of the twentieth century ethnographers in the Pueblos recorded
the Keresan Pueblo Creation Myth. It is fundamental to the religious beliefs
of the Keresan people. There are different versions of the myth, but they all
mention Spider Woman, sometimes called Thinking Woman, who is known as
a female creator deity. Some versions of the myth attribute the creation of the
entire universe to her.19 In the Laguna Pueblo she is said to be “the creator of
all.”20 Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko demonstrates this idea in
her novel Ceremony. At the very beginning the reader is confronted with the
creative power of thoughts and words:
Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.
...
Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.21
It is also the power of an Indian witch’s word that creates the whites and
consequently all evil. Once pronounced, the story starts to live its own life;
“[i]t can’t be called back.”22
For American Indians it is of paramount importance to pronounce the
words correctly during the ceremonies, because it is through speech that
things come into existence. The aim of ceremonies is also to change things,
to transform them. One needs to be careful when using words; repetition also
plays a crucial role. When Lakota Indians invited me to take part in the sweat
lodge ceremony, at the beginning the medicine man asked the participants not
to sing songs unless they know the words exactly. Songs are sung to call in
the Holy Beings and the wrong words would confuse them.
However, the notion that language is sacred and that words and thoughts
create reality is not connected only with rituals. It is not just ritual language
that is sacred; everyday speech is sacred too, because it is also endowed
with creative power. Suzanne Benally (Navajo/Santa Clara Pueblo) explained
in a personal interview that it is important to think carefully before one
19. See Carol Patterson-Rudolph, On the Trail of Spider Woman: Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and
Myths of the Southwest (Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1997), 7.
20. Patterson-Rudolph, On the Trail, 8.
21. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977; New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 1.
22. Silko, Ceremony, 138.
93
speaks: “When I speak I change the air around me and you inhale the reality
that I created.”23 Hope Coriz (Comanche/Santa Clara Pueblo) is advocating
the same idea when she asserts that in the American Indian language
everything one pronounces bears a sacred quality: “You need to be careful
about what you think. Even when you start thinking about something, energy
is created that some people can feel.”24 Rina Swentzel from the Santa Clara
Pueblo states that when a person speaks his/her breath merges with other
people’s breath. Then the breath becomes part of the place and influences
those who come after.25 Here is the origin of the opinion, widespread among
American Indians, that one should only think positive things and avoid
negative thoughts. Witherspoon, who spent more than ten years in the
Navajo reservation, describes how he was scolded for thinking about unhappy
possibilities: “I was told that planning for the ‘rainy’ day would bring about
‘rainy days’ and that I had better forget about planning for ‘rainy days’ unless
I wanted it to ‘rain.’”26
Thus, when Patsy Rodenburg asserts, “Most of us, I think, no longer
trust in words. We have forgotten and, in some instances, have lost forever
language’s ancient mesmerizing power,”27 it is obvious that she speaks only
for part of the world. Many anthropologists, linguists, and writers have shown
that words are powerful for Native Americans. The story is a tool of survival
for Indians. According to Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo), it is the oral
tradition that has prevented the complete destruction of the Indian web of
identity in the post-contact period.28 In American Indian cultures words,
as well as stories, retain their ritual power. E. L. Doctorow’s notion that
“literature is less a tool of survival than it once was”29 certainly cannot
be applied to the Native American oral heritage. The importance of having
stories echoes throughout the works of Native American writers. Stories
provide moral guidelines, a sense of identity and belonging; they place people
within the larger pattern, as the stories become a matter of community
knowledge and concern, they prevent a feeling of withdrawal and isolation.
Josef Jařab states in his introduction to the Czech translation of Louise
Erdrich’s novel Love Medicine that the American Indians believe that “in the
beginning was the word” but, unlike Christians, they take this literally.30
For example, in their book The Navaho Kluckhohn and Leighton repeatedly
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Suzanne Benally, personal interview, May 20, 2001.
Hope Coriz, personal interview, April 6, 2001.
Diane Reyna and Conroy Chino, dirs., Surviving Columbus, Videotape, PBS video, 1992.
Witherspoon, Language and Art, 28.
Patsy Rodenburg, The Need for Words: Voice and the Text (London: Methuen, 1993), 4–5.
See Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Traditions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 45.
29. E. L. Doctorow, “False Documents,” in E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, ed. Richard
Trenner (Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1983), 18.
30. See Josef Jařab, “Čarování s identitou,” in Od Poea k postmodernismu, ed. Martin Hilský
and Jan Zelenka (Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství H & H, 1993), 495.
94
stress that words are extremely important for this tribe: “They are things
of power. Some words attract good; others drive away evil. Certain words
are dangerous—only special persons under specially defined conditions may
utter them. Hence there are specialized vocabularies known only to those
who are trained in a craft or ceremonial skill.”31 According to Kluckhohn
and Leighton’s findings, every family had some “good luck songs” that were
believed to protect the family. These songs were regarded as important
property and were passed on from generation to generation.32 Words are
cherished by indigenous people and, even though they might not be used any
longer by the younger generation, they are not forgotten. William Powers, for
instance, writes in his study of the Lakota that the Lakota often talk about old
sayings and phrases and what follows is a long explanation of the situation
in which the word was used.33 As Silko also points out, at the Laguna Pueblo
“many individual words have their own stories. So often when one is telling a
story and is using words to tell the story, each word that one is speaking has
a story of its own, too.”34 It seems that Silko also shares the ritual approach to
words. She explains that, while she was in Alaska writing the novel Ceremony,
she missed Laguna so much that writing became for her a “way of re-making
that place” and words functioned as sand paintings.35 She was like a Spider
Woman, Thought Woman—the Laguna Pueblo creator deity.
Silenced Voice—Loss of Identity
In the course of history American Indian languages have been suppressed,
sometimes to the point of extinction. The claim that the American Indian
languages are primitive came hand in hand with the statement that the
Indians were barbarians who needed to be civilized. The simple aim of these
ethnocentric theories was to justify the colonization of the New World. The
arguments were repeatedly used that the native languages are primitive
because they are simple, concrete, and, like their users, inseparably connected
with nature. Linguist Michael Krauss claims that out of 187 American Indian
languages that are now spoken in the USA and Canada, 149 are no longer
being learned by children and thus they are doomed to extinction.36
Contrary to many immigrants to the USA who decide to teach their
children only English in order to make their social and economic assimilation
easier, the American Indians feel the loss of their native language as a loss
31. Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navaho, 260.
32. Kluckhohn and Leighton, The Navaho, 203.
33. See William K. Powers, Sacred Language: The Nature of Supernatural Discourse in Lakota
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 37.
34. Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American
Life Today (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 50.
35. Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters between
Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright, ed. Anne Wright (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press,
1985), 28.
36. See Michael Krauss, “The World’s Languages in Crisis,” Language 68, no. 1 (1992): 4.
95
of history, a loss of identity. One of the most urgent tasks for them today is
to preserve their culture in a rapidly changing world. In order to keep their
culture tribes feel they need to keep their languages. Pueblo historian Joe
Sando says: “If you want to have religion you have to have the language.”37
Many scholars, teachers, and community members, both Indian and
non-Indian, are working hard to stop the process of the extinction of
the languages. Tribal communities are developing teaching curricula and
programs that would enable children to learn their native language; people
have collected materials, made tape recordings, and published dictionaries.
American Indians are forming tribal language committees, school and afterschool programs, and evening language classes, they are audio-taping and
videotaping elders, and researching tapes and field notes from university
archives.38
That the loss of the native language means the loss of the culture and
identity of people is obvious in Silko’s Ceremony. Auntie, one of the American
Indian protagonists, wants her son Rocky to succeed in the white world but
she is caught in a trap, because “[a]n old sensitivity had descended in her,
surviving thousands of years from the oldest times, when the people shared
a single clan name and they told each other who they were. . . . The people
had known, with the simple certainty of the world they saw, how everything
should be. But the fifth world had become entangled with European names:
the names of the rivers, the hills, the name of the animals and plants—all
of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name.
Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the single
clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone. . . .”39 For the Indians this
is an alien idea and when Auntie’s daughter starts drinking the people feel
that they are losing not only her but, at the same time, also part of themselves.
For Auntie’s daughter there is no way back. Auntie tries at least to reconcile
the family with the people. Following her old instinct, she wants “to gather
the feelings and opinions that were scattered through the village, to gather
them like willow twigs and tie them into a single prayer bundle that would
bring peace to all of them.”40 But it is impossible; it seems that the English
language has materialized and buried the Indian world: “. . . now the feelings
were twisted, tangled roots, and all the names for the source of this growth
were buried under English words, out of reach.”41 The English language is
recognized as a representative of a different, and in this case also enemy,
world that has a destructive impact on the pueblo culture.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
Reyna and Chino, Surviving Columbus.
Hinton, Flutes of Fire, 221–54.
Silko, Ceremony, 68.
96
Enemy’s Language Conquered
“I write in . . . the foreigners’ language. I turn the foreigners’ words against them. . . .”
—Haunani-Kay Trask
Having been involved in learning about and teaching American Indian
cultures has, for me, always meant a search for appropriate words. Since my
interest started with translation, this search was at first literary, the search
for the right words that, in some cases, did not have Czech equivalents. In
the field of literature it soon became obvious that the use of Western literary
terms could in many cases be misleading and obscuring.42 Finding myself
repeatedly caught and entangled in a web of Western perception of reality
and the means of describing it and referring to it has probably been the most
challenging part of this fascinating field of research. However, the issue of
language and the importance of transmitting the agenda correctly seems to
be of paramount importance for American Indians today and, in order to do
justice to American Indian cultures and literatures, it cannot be avoided.
American Indian scholars, teachers, and historians turn readers’ attention
to the topic, writers reflect this in both fictional and non-fictional works, and
even the titles of American Indian conferences often incorporate the issue.
During the Native Voices Symposium held in Tucson in June 2007 all the
speakers addressed the relationship between American Indian culture and
language and it did not matter whether they still spoke the native language.
Some of the contemporary American Indian authors can speak both
their native language and English but the long years of oppression, forced
assimilation, and a prohibition on using the native languages at schools and
the fact that many of the writers come from mixed marriages mean that
nowadays the majority of American Indian writers are writing in English. Yet
this might change in the future and it will definitely be interesting to watch
the development. Sherwin Bitsui, a young Navajo writer, has written that it
was a shame to be a Navajo and speak the language when he was little but that
now the situation is changing. He himself has learnt to speak Navajo and is a
kind of ambassador for the Navajo language, encouraging young people in the
tribe to learn their native language.43 Written forms of indigenous languages
have also resulted in the birth of new art traditions. For instance, the linguist
and poet Ofelia Zepeda uses the O’odham language when writing poetry she
calls cegitoidog—thoughts. Even some of the linguists have started to write
linguistic and lexicographical essays in their native languages as well.44
42. For an example see the debate about linear and circular time in the works of American
Indian writers in Katheleen Sands and LaVonne Ruoff, eds., “A Discussion of Ceremony,”
American Indian Quarterly 5, no. 1 (1979): 63–70.
43. See Sherwin Bitsui, “Indigenous Language and Poetry,” Native Voices Symposium,
University of Arizona, Tucson, June 2007.
44. See Frederick E. Hoxie, ed., Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American
History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1996), 334.
97
A number of writers incorporate their native language into their work, and
some go further—Navajo poet Rex Lee Jim is known for his radical attitude;
he refuses to translate his poems into English. One reason he mentions is
that he wants the Navajo audience to read in their native language, and he
suggests that if he publishes the poems in both languages readers would read
the English version since nowadays it is easier for them. That demonstrates
the paradoxical result of colonization. Another reason he stressed and brought
up during the Native Voices Symposium in Tucson is that some poems in
Navajo could not be translated into English at all. Via the example of a very
short poem, he demonstrated that using a specific Navajo word expects and
even requires the audience to be knowledgeable about the Navajo culture
and language. Should it be translated into English, the translation would,
according to Jim, have to be accompanied by a long explanation and as such
it is not feasible. Jim does not refuse to write in English but he claims that
there are poems that come to him and he can only write them in Navajo, while
he would think about others in English and write them in English.45
The emergence of American Indian writers in the 1960s was seen as a new
cultural phenomenon. As Josef Jařab suggests, there is a cultural tension
in the expression American Indian writer, and it is, in fact, a result of the
colonization of the indigenous people. Even the term Indian writer itself hides
an inner cultural tension and it is a result of the process of the “civilizing” of
the indigenous population. Native American writers who started to publish in
the 1960s were often half-breeds and so, belonging to both worlds, they could
venture to cross the border and they offered in English and in a written form
what used to be only orally transmitted tribal wisdom and life experience.46
However as the American Indian poet Joy Harjo (Muscogee) explains, “to
write is often still suspect in tribal communities”47 because it was through
writing in the colonizers’ languages that the indigenous peoples’ land has
been stolen and their children taken away. Indians feel that they have often
been betrayed by those who first learned to write and to speak the language of
the occupiers of their lands.48 Some writers even challenge the written form,
for instance Grace Boyne (Navajo): “[S]poken words have power. Thus, it is
more meaningful to speak rather than to place the words on paper.”49
Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird edited the long-awaited anthology of
contemporary writings by native women of North America that was published
under the title Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. Writers included in
the anthology are sometimes very radical, using terms such as “war” and
45. See Rex Lee Jim, “Oral Tradition and Reader Response,” Native Voices Symposium,
University of Arizona, Tucson, June 2007.
46. See Josef Jařab, “Obřad jako scénář k naplňování životních příběhů,” epilogue to Obřad
[Ceremony], by Leslie Marmon Silková (Praha: Mladá fronta, 1997), 282.
47. Joy Harjo and Gloria Bird, eds., Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native
Women’s Writings of North America (New York: Norton, 1998), 20.
48. See Harjo and Bird, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 20.
49. Harjo and Bird, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 32.
98
“holocaust” when describing the situation of the American Indians in the
USA today and the history of contact. It is also evident that American Indian
writers in general have not yet come to terms with the languages of the
colonizers, whether English, French, or Spanish. They call them the “enemy’s
languages.” For many decades the language of the colonizer has been forced
on Native Americans but, as Harjo explains, it was when the Native writers
began to create with this new language that they named it theirs, “made it
usefully tough and beautiful.”50 The writers are transforming, “reinventing”
these languages, and turning the images around “to mirror an image of the
colonized to the colonizers. . . .”51 Many admit that they write because in this
way they can control the way the native people are perceived. Paula Gunn
Allen (Laguna Pueblo) feels that “whoever controls the image controls the
population . . .” and that the writers must control the definitions, contexts, and
images of Indians.52 Writers writing in English are, according to their words,
trying to repair the devastating impact of “the language of Christianity.” As
Connie Fife (Cree) confesses: “I write because I believe there are so many of
our stories (personal) that need to be told and celebrated. . . . I write using an
outsider’s tongue hoping that I can do honor to the words themselves, their
value and meaning.”53
Colonization has severed the bonds between the languages of the
indigenous people and their cultural production. What has survived, though,
is their way of perceiving the world. Luci Tapahonso (Navajo) says about the
language of her tribe: “I consider the Navajo language to be the undercurrent,
the matrix which everything in my life filters through. . . . Writing is, at times,
an exhilarating challenge because I must, as near as possible, find the English
version of what are essentially Navajo concepts or expressions.”54 Emma Lee
Warrior (Blackfoot) points out: “Yet though the sounds I hear back home are
more English than Blackfoot, I find the stories told more from a Blackfootlanguage perspective.”55 Similarly, Gloria Bird (Spokane) writes: “In the
long process of colonization, what has survived in spite of the disruption
of native language is a particular way of perceiving the world.”56 When
comparing the works of Indian authors, the Choctaw/Cherokee literary critic
Louis Owens notices that though they “write from very diverse tribal and
cultural backgrounds, there is to a remarkable degree a shared consciousness
and identifiable worldview reflected” in their novels.57 Thus contemporary
American Indian writers, though they often do not speak much of any Indian
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
Harjo and Bird, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 23–24.
Harjo and Bird, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, 22.
Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 20.
99
language any more, and though their Indian heritage may form only part of
their ancestry, write about their conceptions of the universe. In this sense
they are like translators or interpreters who, in the “enemy language,” tell
or, using the Navajo concept of the Holy wind, breathe out the stories of a
different world.
Bibliography
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Benally, Suzanne. Personal interview. 20 May 2001.
Bitsui, Sherwin. “Indigenous Language and Poetry.” Native Voices
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Classifications in Behavior.” In Readings in Social Psychology, edited by
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Coriz, Hope. Personal interview. 6 Apr. 2001.
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Hinton, Leanne. Flutes of Fire: Essays on California Indian Languages.
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by Martin Hilský and Jan Zelenka. Praha: Odeon a nakladatelství
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———. “Obřad jako scénář k naplňování životních příběhů.” Epilogue to
Obřad [Ceremony], by Leslie Marmon Silková. Praha: Mladá fronta,
1997. 281–87.
Jim, Rex Lee. “Oral Tradition and Reader Response.” Native Voices
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MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
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(1992): 4–10.
Lucy, J. A. Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the
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Address
Department of English
Faculty of Education
Palacký University
Žižkovo nám. 5
771 40 Olomouc
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Frictions in the City: Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing
vs. Paul Haggis’s Crash
Tomáš Pospíšil
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Abstract
The essay offers a comparative look at two cinematic responses to the question of
multicultural coexistence in the American urban context, Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing (1989) and Paul Haggis’s Crash (2004). Both films received a variety of prizes
and represented what were, in their day, ambitious efforts to address racial problems
in the USA. The purpose of this comparative analysis is to consider to what extent the
films succeeded in describing the phenomenon of US race relations in their multifaceted
complexity.
Keywords
American cinema; race relations; American urban cinema; African Americans in film;
Spike Lee; Paul Haggis
Introduction
Fifteen years separate the production time of Spike Lee’s Do the Right
Thing (1989) from Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning feature Crash (2004). Several
momentous historical events happened during this time span. Prior to the
traumatic events of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
in September 2001 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Americans
experienced the outbreak of violence in Los Angeles’ Watts district after
the verdict of the Rodney King trial (1992) and they followed with horrified
fascination the day-to-day happenings of the O. J. Simpson trial (1995). These
events reminded them forcefully that regardless of the progress made during
the civil rights era, the troubles of racism were far from settled; on the
contrary, these events signaled that W. E. B. Du Bois’s problem of the color
line was about to make as much difference in the coming century as had been
the case in the century that was about to pass.
In many respects both Crash and Do the Right Thing (henceforth DTRT)
fall within the same film category: both are ensemble pieces crowned with
a variety of prizes, including Academy Awards and nominations for these,
and both represent serious and ambitious efforts to tackle racial problems in
the USA. The films draw attention to the multitude of tensions and frictions
brought about by the coexistence of people of different racial, ethnic and
cultural backgrounds in the American urban context and both highlight
the role prejudicial stereotypes play in interpreting the actions of others.
102
Significantly, both end with a meaningless violent death of a basically
innocent African American male.
Since DTRT represents, in my opinion, a major achievement in the
rendering of the life conditions of the black American urban population for
its generation (as well as being an early pinnacle of Spike Lee’s career), it will
be used as a point of reference against which its more recent counterpart
will be measured. In doing so, several questions will be asked or touched
upon. Do the films succeed equally in describing the phenomenon of US
racism? Do the films help viewers understand the multilayered workings
of various important aspects of the social positioning of raced individuals
such as education, the economy, history, politics, and representation in
the mass media? Are both plots characterized by a comparable amount of
verisimilitude? Do they offer a range of believable, lifelike characters? Do the
filmmakers connect their fictitious film narratives with real-life historical
events and, if so, to what purpose? As judged by their films, what are
the filmmakers’ respective assessments of the nature of American cultural
plurality and democracy? Do the films merely depict the situation or can they
be read as suggesting a possible solution to the United States’ multiple race
problems?
Do the Right Thing
Set in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, the world of Spike Lee’s DTRT is
circumscribed by merely one block. Here a virtual microcosm of urban African
American life is presented. We meet representatives of all generations:
the ageing, whose life experience is formed by the memory of the African
American rural experience and the severe economic hardship of the Great
Depression; the middle-aged, who, sitting on the sidewalk, appear to have
given up on life’s various pursuits, and the young, whose life prospects are
certainly not brighter as a consequence of their second-rate education and the
relocation of traditional factory jobs abroad. Yet, unlike the middle-aged, they
are nevertheless full of energy and enjoy life. It is particularly each other’s
company and African American music that they seem to be savoring to the
full.
At the center of the narrative—and the life of the block—we find Sal’s
Famous Pizzeria. The Italian American Sal enters the world of Bed-Stuy
from the outside every day. He is a kind colonizer, someone who believes in
the beneficial mission of his enterprise (feeding the locals with his pizza),
while at the same time drawing ample profit from his joint. Customers
are always welcome as long as they respect his rules. During an especially
hot summer day Sal’s seeming benevolence gets tested by the complaint
of the local agitator in matters of blackness, Buggin’ Out, that his wall of
fame features only Italian Americans (while all his customers are African
Americans). Matters get even worse in the evening when Radio Raheem, a
giant threatening-looking black youth, enters his place, his powerful boombox blasting Public Enemy’s rap chant Fight the Power. Whereas in the first
Tomáš Pospíšil
103
instance Sal manages to contain his temper and solve the dispute peacefully,
in the later incident he destroys Radio Raheem’s radio with a baseball bat.
In the ensuing fight policemen strangle the youth. A riot breaks out and Sal’s
pizzeria is burnt down.
The pizza delivery boy Mookie—played by Spike Lee—functions as a
connecting link between the whites and their surroundings. Despite acting
as a mediator1 between the two worlds, at the moment when Radio Raheem
is killed, he is the one who starts the riot. It seems that Raheem’s death
reminded Mookie of his proper place in this racially divided context, that in a
world of extreme injustice and meaningless brutality it is pointless to attempt
any kind of mediation with the objective of reaching a reasonable compromise.
Although during the final climactic riot we witness a bipolar confrontation
with an angry multiracial, multiethnic crowd facing Sal and his sons, the film
also captures a whole range of different forms of stereotyping and prejudice
among a variety of groups. There are multiple fissures that run through
the Bed-Stuy community: in this contested space African American music
competes with salsa played by groups of Latinos, a white gentrifier owns
a house in a street that is meant to be inhabited solely by “brothers and
sisters,” and the various African American generations provoke each other.
The successfully operating Korean corner shop represents yet another affront
to the economic deprivation experienced by most local inhabitants.
Crime enters the world of DTRT as though by accident when an angry
spark ignites the fateful fight, which ends in a meaningless conflagration.
Except for this forceful eruption, however, Spike Lee paints a picture of
the inner city as a relatively safe place where the various conflicts and
contestations remain solely verbal (at least until Sal reaches for his baseball
bat). The notable omission of the drug trade and gang violence may be
understood as a very welcome correction of a widely accepted stereotype
associating an inner city address solely with excesses of drug abuse, homicide
and gang violence, when indeed many honest people may spend their entire
lives there without being shot dead or even harassed by doped crack addicts.
Nevertheless, the fact that a Nation of Islam unit had to be hired to keep the
drug trade off the block while DTRT was being shot is an ironic reminder that
regardless of such ruthless stereotyping the problems of drug consumption
and trafficking and the related crime do represent an important aspect of
American inner-city existence.2
Crash
The ubiquitous nature of racism also forms the core of Crash, which has
been hailed as “the most authentic, lived-in depiction of today’s multicultural
1. See Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1993), 148.
2. See Tomáš Pospíšil, Sambo tu již nebydlí? Obraz Afroameričanů v americkém filmu 20. století
(Brno: Nadace Universitas Masarykiana, nakladatelství Cerm a Nauma, 2003), 110.
104
America to be released in some time.”3 Paul Haggis’s film confronts the issue
of racism head on: in this cinematic world there are none of the benevolent
façades of tolerance, patronizing assistance, or polite neglect most people
usually project onto their racial others. The viewers are immediately led
behind this public screen and confronted with mutual suspicion, mistrust,
harassment and violence.
If the world of DTRT is enclosed within the confines of one Brooklyn
block, the world of Crash is significantly more spatially extended, like the
city where it is set, Greater Los Angeles. The social scope is also larger,
containing a whole range of ethnic and racial groups: the families of a
white district attorney, a Latino locksmith, and Iranian store owners; a
Chinese couple where the husband turns out to be a people smuggler; a white
racist policeman and his sick father. Similarly, Crash offers a depiction of a
much wider range of the African American experience, not just the innercity population. Here, practically all African American social classes are
represented: two street criminals, a police commander, a police investigator,
and a TV director and his wife.
The filmmakers’ attempt to furnish a possibly all-encompassing crosssection of American urban society is apparent in another telling difference.
Unlike in DTRT, where everything happens in and around Sal’s Famous
Pizzeria and the only household the viewers are shown is the cramped and
cheaply equipped apartment of Mookie’s partner Tina, in Crash we enter
the homes of most of the participating characters. While not significantly
contributing to our understanding of the characters’ actions and their
motivations, this strategy adds a dimension to the film and invites reflection
on questions of racial, class, cultural and economic difference, privilege, and
dominance in society.
Crash cannot be charged with the omission of crime. In its universe
physical violence is as omnipresent as verbal slurs. It does not happen at
exceptional moments under exceptional circumstances, it happens all the
time. One of the film’s multiple plots deals with a homicide investigation; we
see an attempt by the frustrated Iranian store-owner to murder the Latino
locksmith because his shop was broken into and totally destroyed, for which
he blames the innocent craftsman, and finally we witness the killing of a black
hitch-hiker at the hands of a nerve-wracked white policeman off duty. Perhaps
the most disturbing of all the acts of violence is the harassment of the black
director’s wife by a white racist LAPD officer, while her husband is standing
by, unable to help. Two young African American males, one of whom voices
the frequent black grievance of being not properly treated in a diner because
of their skin color, take out their guns and attack the District Attorney and
his wife and carjack their luxurious SUV. It is an interesting twist that a
character who complains of being a victim of racial discrimination based on
3. Josh Larsen, “Messy, Honest Reality on Race,” American Enterprise 16, no. 4 (June 2005):
51.
Tomáš Pospíšil
105
prejudice in one moment acts in a manner that confirms the prejudice a few
seconds later.
Paul Haggis stresses the prevalence of race as the ultimate criterion in
distinguishing among people and their access to power in today’s United
States. In the conflict-ridden world of the American city it is the whites
who have the final say in most arguments. Representatives of the African
American bourgeoisie—here represented by the figure of the well-to-do black
TV director—may have benefited from the political developments of the
second half of the 20th century and may have achieved an enormous rise
in prosperity and class standing. However, this melts down to nothing in
the first quarrel with a white racist police officer. Similarly, in the world
of the media we see the white producer indicating to the black director
that a black lead does not sound “black enough” any more and that the
scene should be redone. Although the director sees no reason for the change,
he complies with the producer’s subtle pressure and thus assists in the
perpetuation of an artificially stressed stereotype. It is no wonder that having
gone through excruciating helplessness and humiliation at the moment of his
wife’s harassment and having been ordered to redo the scene he starts acting
emotionally and violently, nearly getting himself killed by the police.
In another unsettling scene a black police investigator accepts the offer by
a district attorney’s white aide to be promoted and have the criminal record
of his younger brother erased in exchange for presenting an untrue version
of a murder he investigates. The DA hopes that framing an innocent white
detective, who happens to have a racist record, would boost his appeal to the
black electorate in the upcoming election, for he will be able to present himself
as tough on crime, regardless of the race of the perpetrator.
In this corrupt world there are hardly any unblemished heroes: the
white establishment runs society (the police department, the office of the
District Attorney, the media) and members of the black middle class are
forced to accommodate to the situation in order to survive: the competent
African American aide of the district attorney cannot be unaware of the
sinister nature of the deals being made, but she refrains from commenting
or interfering, and only casts a knowing look; other blacks simply accept
whatever dubious parts of the bargain they are offered. At a lower level,
however, we see African Americans as having achieved some inroads into
the local establishment and wielding some power. Yet are they using it to
further interracial solidarity and equality? Are they working toward more
justice? No: they seek revenge. At least this is the impression one gets from
the character of the clerk at the hospital who refuses to admit the father
of the racist police officer despite the old man’s enormous suffering. Only
the dangerous-looking tattooed Latino locksmith is exempt from the overall
hatred, resentment and corruption. He is a role-model family man and an
honest and competent craftsman. His character is meant to suggest that
appearances may be misleading and first impressions can at times be wrong.
106
It is precisely the perpetual motion of prejudice and harassment that sends
the various characters of Crash on their dangerous and deadly trajectories.
The racist police officer cannot achieve the admission of his hurting father
to the hospital, so he goes and harasses the black couple. The Iranian store
owner has his store broken into and thus he attempts to shoot the locksmith,
for he blames him for the burglary. And so it goes. And yet, not all hope is
lost. In the second half of the feature we see an extraordinary reversal in most
characters: those who were introduced as bigots wind up, all of a sudden, on
the positive side. Those who appeared tolerant, moderate and well-meaning
turn into suspicious bigots. The black youth guilty of armed robbery refuses
to sell the vanful of Chinese immigrants into sweatshop slavery and sets them
free in the downtown area, passing up the handsome profit of $500 per head.
The prejudiced white wife of the DA sprains her ankle and seeks consolation
in the arms of her Latina housekeeper. The bad cop risks his own life to
save the woman he had abused the night before, while his more sensitive
colleague shoots the young black hitch-hiker. The tragedy was caused by him
misreading the hitch-hiker’s movement of reaching into his pocket, and yet it
was not a gun the black youth was trying to pull out. . . .
The seriousness with which the authors decided to approach the issue
of intolerance and prejudice led to a significant—and telling—omission:
there is not a single scene in the whole feature with characters relaxing
or simply having fun. In the rare moments when they appear to enjoy
themselves—such as when the black police investigator is making love to
his Latina partner—the issue of racism creeps back within seconds. In this
particular instance the intercourse is interrupted by a phone call from his
mother. Irritated by the interruption and thus trying to annoy his mum in
return, the police investigator claims he is making love to a white woman. . . .
Unlike in DTRT, where we frequently encounter characters just chatting,
biding their time, or simply having fun, happily oblivious of the whole race
issue, the creators of Crash do not allow their viewers a single moment of
rest: watching the film is “hard work” from beginning to end.
The Question of Characters
The world of Crash may be so spatially extended as to encompass the whole
of Los Angeles, but in terms of its cast and their frequent encounters, it is
surprisingly small. The representation of their dramatic conflicts certainly
provides the narrative with suspense, emotional intensity and a strong moral
appeal. Nonetheless, if the viewer abandons the immediate perspective of a
particular thrilling moment and assesses the overall structure of the multiplot narrative and the tight interconnectedness of its individual strains,
he or she can’t help seeing a certain predictable pattern in the narrative’s
frequent coincidences and character reversals, as though a certain degree of
verisimilitude had been sacrificed at the expense of driving home the film’s
skeptical anti-racist message. To suggest that no person can be entirely free
from prejudice and that race is a major determinant of the ways Americans
Tomáš Pospíšil
107
make sense of the world and deal with one another, Paul Haggis has gone
to extremes. The basic points that are made are that: 1) any person is but a
rather fluid set of attitudes arising from the given context one finds oneself
in; 2) no one is ever entirely free from racial prejudice and stereotyping;
3) unfriendly and violent actions provoke even more unfriendly and violent
reactions; and 4) the qualities of affirmation, altruism and sacrifice, as well
as negation, hatred and spite, are variously mixed within each individual. Yet
in order to capture the complexity and inner contradictions within a human
being, Paul Haggis makes some of his characters rotten first, only to make
them exemplary moments later, and vice versa.
Compare this to the way Spike Lee constructs his characters in DTRT.
At the center of the narrative we find two people: Sal, the white pizzeria
owner, and Mookie, his black delivery boy. As far as race and prejudice are
concerned, neither is presented in extreme terms; together they maintain
a mutually advantageous economic partnership and they are capable of
reciprocal respect. Yet at the end of the film, under the spell of circumstances,
these basically tolerant figures become destructive: Sal by smashing Radio
Raheem’s boom-box to pieces, Mookie by starting the looting of the pizzeria.
Like Haggis, Lee shows that generally well-meaning people can act violently
given the right (or rather wrong!) set of circumstances. Unlike Haggis,
however, he does not construct his characters as moving between extreme
positions; these conflicting positions are already present, intertwined with
their affirmative and benevolent attitudes. In the context of the racially
divided society, we are told, prejudice and a danger of erupting violence are
buried within each person, even those who under normal circumstances are
well-meaning and kind. This is, however, not to say that these characters are
hypocrites: Lee presents them as basically unaware of their own destructive
potential, which gets unleashed only in a moment of crisis.
Sal, for instance, is contrasted to the overtly racist member of the family,
his son Pino. Unlike Pino, Sal appears to like his customers. He is proud they
have grown on his pizza. He is amorously attracted to Mookie’s sister Jade. Yet
he explodes when his domination of his territory is contested during the day,
first by Buggin’ Out’s complaint about the pictures of Italian Americans on his
Wall of Fame (here, Sal’s burst of anger could still be contained) and by Radio
Raheem’s aural aggression by means of a militant rap song. His benevolent
attitude is predicated on the condition that whatever happens in the pizzeria
happens on his terms only. Lee’s ingenious construction of Sal’s character
critiques the hidden racism many even well-meaning white Americans display
toward members of the black minority. His syrupy expression of pride (“I
like these people here; I’ve seen them grow up on my pizza”) or sentimental,
fatherly promise to Mookie (“Mookie, there will always be a place for you
here. . . .”) can certainly be interpreted as such, while not being so obvious
to many mainstream (i.e., white) viewers. Moreover, Sal’s benevolence is
immediately forgotten when his space is violated by an uncomfortable aspect
of the culture he pretends to tolerate or even like: Radio Raheem’s rap music.
108
Throughout the film Mookie operates as a middleman between the races
and cultures on the block, negotiating the rising tensions, crossing the
boundaries between variously demarcated spaces. When confronted with
extremists on both sides—such as Pino or Buggin’ Out—he stands for
toleration. His motivation may not be entirely altruistic. In the post-industrial
economy there are hardly any traditional manufacturing jobs available for
people with his educational background. Thus his own economic well-being
depends on his working for Sal. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that in the
racially divided society he stands for acceptance, cooperation and reason.4
Even his decision to throw the trashcan through the pizzeria’s window and
thus start the looting appears to have been made with a clear mind. At the
moment when Radio Raheem was killed by the police patrol and when an
angry crowd full of people of color calls for revenge, occupying the position
of the middleman is no longer a tenable option: Mookie has to choose sides
and he does. One way of reading his action is this: he dissociates himself from
the white establishment that indirectly caused Radio Raheem’s murder and
at the same time hits Sal where it hurts: his property. Another way—not
mutually exclusive—is that by channeling the anger of the crowd toward the
joint he in fact saves Sal and his sons from being lynched by the fierce crowd.
In any case we see a very consistent character, one that does not move between
extreme positions of harassment vs. self-sacrifice, tolerance vs. bigotry, and
greedy recklessness vs. selfless altruism.
Mookie’s consistency as a character can be well illustrated by the following
telling detail: his attitude toward money. Throughout the film we see his
enormous pride at having a job, getting paid and being dressed properly.
Indeed, as Paula J. Massood claims, “[i]n a hyper-materialist consumer
culture in which income and clothing define individuals, Mookie derives
much of his self-esteem from the money in his pocket and the clothes on
his back.”5 And the morning after the riot he goes to the incinerated place
and approaches Sal, who is mourning the loss of his property, and requests
whatever the Italian American owes him. This claim might appear rather
insensitive to viewers, who are likely to empathize with the character who has
just seen his life’s work going up in smoke; doubly so when it is made by the
character who started the destruction. But Mookie knows and stresses that
Sal’s joint was insured so that eventually he will receive his compensation
and flatly demands his weekly wages. Sal’s material loss can be easily
compensated, unlike the loss of Radio Raheem’s life. In Mookie’s attitude
and argumentation one can certainly recognize the same kind of person. The
character’s actions have an inner logic that one cannot fail to notice.
4. See Pospíšil, Sambo tu již nebydlí, 107.
5. Paula J. Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 137.
Tomáš Pospíšil
109
The Use of History
At the moment of the confrontation with the police immediately after the
killing of Radio Raheem, Spike Lee uses a panning shot across the various
people outside of the pizzeria. The camera moves across the faces of Latinos
and blacks, men and women, the old and the young. Then the people start
shouting the names of black victims of white violence, such as Eleanor
Bumpers or Michael Stewart.6 In this manner the author connects this
fictitious event with its real-life counterparts, thus highlighting the fictional
event’s veracity: these things unfortunately happen in society at large and
young African Americans keep dying at the hands of the police.
The way Lee cinematically handles the ensuing riot—where the firemen
fight both the flames and the fierce crowds at the same time—is likewise
informed by recent history.7 The firemen’s hoses aimed at desperate and
angry people are a reminder of the way protesters, demonstrators and rioters
were handled during the years of the Civil Rights Movement in places such as
Birmingham, Alabama, Selma, Alabama, or Watts, Los Angeles. For a person
with at least a minimum awareness of American history it is impossible to
see this particular scene without realizing Spike Lee’s message: what we are
looking at is just a film but the events it depicts are frighteningly real.
Likewise Haggis relies on the audience’s awareness of the history of
American race relations. In one of the most intense and disturbing moments
of the film the white LAPD officer harasses the black director’s wife. Under
the pretext of searching for weapons he touches her intimate parts, while her
husband is unable to intervene. On the contrary, he is forced to apologize.
This double humiliation—of both the wife and her helpless husband—clearly
evokes the history of the sexual abuse of black women by white men, the
symbolic emasculation of black men, who were not in a position to protect
their wives and female relatives, and the absolute power white males wielded
during the times of slavery and the Jim Crow South.
What Is To Be Done?
Various characters in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing answer the question of
what is to be done. Depending on their generation and experience, there is
a whole range of readymade responses to choose from. Mookie’s centrality in
the narrative has been mentioned. Thus it is probably his point of view that
matters most (especially when he is played by Spike Lee himself). Throughout
the whole film Mookie is stressing the fact that he is working and that he is
getting paid. The fact that he has a job—albeit a low-paying, service one—is
a source of pride for him and an important part of his identity.
6. See Spike Lee with Lisa Jones, Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1989), 59. Eleanor Bumpers was an elderly woman fatally shot-gunned by police in
the Bronx in 1984. Michael Stewart was a young graffiti artist killed while in police custody
in Brooklyn in 1983.
7. See Lee with Jones, Do the Right Thing, 65.
110
Another important suggestion is presented by the deejay of the local radio
station, DJ Love Daddy, who functions as an omniscient witness to the events.
The whole narrative is framed by his voiceover, which also suggests authority.
From his commentary one piece of advice stands out: register and vote! What
is understood, of course, is to register as a Democrat and vote against the
then mayor Ed Koch.8 The situation might be bleak and change for the
better seemingly unavailable, and yet despite these enormous odds Spike Lee
suggests it has to be attempted, by the means of economic empowerment and
participation in the democratic process.
Paul Haggis appears to be less certain about what to suggest as a
meaningful course of action. In Crash he presents a picture of a society at
odds with itself, fragmented, irritable, and constantly threatening to explode.
One of its most characteristic features is segregation. Here people of various
cultural backgrounds live apart from each other and a car crash represents
a rare opportunity to meet someone from a different racial or social group.
The film can also be read as a serious indictment of the American political
system, marred by background wheeling and dealing, corruption, and cynical
manipulation of the race issue. Democracy is not working; plurality of cultures
is a frustrating nuisance; racial tolerance seems unavailable, and there is
no way out of this predicament. Crash could be read as a diagnosis, as a
powerful reminder of a burning problem that may not always be apparent to
people who commute from a mainstream job to a mainstream suburb every
day. Yet the film represents less a blueprint for action than an invitation
to reflection: about the ubiquity of racial divisions within us and within
our societies, and about our nature which—despite its benevolent façade—is
never entirely pleasant. The decision as to what concrete steps one should
take to get Americans out of this unhappy situation is left to the viewers.
Conclusion
Both Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and Paul Haggis’s Crash present
American cultural plurality as problematic and highlight the multiple
fissures running across the various sections of society. Both show how
negative stereotypes of the other complicate the daily interaction of the
representatives of the various groups. The films also make use of recent, as
well as more distant, history to connect the diegetic and extradiegetic spaces
and to put more stress on the current relevance of the issue. Beneath the
multifaceted world of racial, ethnic and cultural plurality the films present
one fundamental opposition: that of the mainstream white population, which
wields most power, versus the other racial and ethnic groups. Thus in the
small world of Spike Lee’s film we see the white character of Sal as effectively
running the territory of his pizzeria, and even though he temporarily loses
control over his property during the climactic moments of the riot, it can
8. See Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture,” in Black American
Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (New York: Routledge, 1993), 174.
Tomáš Pospíšil
111
easily be reestablished in the future. In the broader social canvas of Crash a
similar picture can be seen: here the worlds of politics and the media are run
by white authority figures, who manage to maintain their influence by skillful
manipulations of the race sentiments of the electorate and race stereotyping
of minorities in the media. Both films present the police force as prejudiced
and racist, effectively subjugating and—sometimes even killing—innocent
members of the African American population.
Both films can be read as voicing an important social message of warning
about the impasse any society can reach if it ignores the divisions caused
by racial thinking and if it allows its democratic process to be dominated
by skillful manipulators and their unscrupulous aides. In addition to these
timely and universal points, unlike Crash, Spike Lee’s film offers yet another
set of vital cinematic assets: characters with inner logic, consistency and a
significantly higher level of verisimilitude. One can certainly also appreciate
Lee’s portrayal of the various subtle forms of racism. This dimension is
basically missing from the world of Crash, where extreme manifestations of
racial prejudice and violence predominate.
While several characters in DTRT suggest possible avenues of action
for African Americans toward attaining a less disadvantaged social
position—such as the suggestion to find a job and participate in the political
process—the characters in Crash offer us no such vision. This gloomy
narrative can only be used as an example of a road not to be taken: its broad
cast of prejudiced and frustrated characters can only advocate the necessity of
adopting a contrary position: one of ease, tolerance and respect for the other.
Bibliography
Baker, Houston A., Jr. “Spike Lee and the Commerce of Culture.” In Black
American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara. New York: Routledge,
1993. 154–76.
Guerrero, Ed. Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993.
Haggis, Paul, dir. Crash. Film. Bob Yari Productions, 2004.
Larsen, Josh. “Messy, Honest Reality on Race.” American Enterprise 16, no.
4 (June 2005): 51.
Lee, Spike, dir. Do the Right Thing. Film. 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks,
1989.
Lee, Spike, with Lisa Jones. Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint. New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1989.
Massood, Paula J. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences
in Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.
Pospíšil, Tomáš. Sambo tu již nebydlí? Obraz Afroameričanů v americkém
filmu 20. století. Brno: Nadace Universitas Masarykiana, nakladatelství
Cerm a Nauma, 2003.
112
Address
Tomáš Pospíšil
Faculty of Arts
Masaryk University
Arna Nováka 1
660 88 Brno
Czech Republic
[email protected]
Book Reviews
Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts & Imagined Communities, edited by
Martin Procházka and Ondřej Pilný. Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2005.
382 p. ISBN 80-7308-102-4.
In November 2004, Charles University in Prague hosted a conference
on “Myths, Foundation Texts and Imagined Communities” as a part of
an international project studying European cultural memory. The book
under review here, Time Refigured: Myths, Foundation Texts & Imagined
Communities, is a tangible result of the conference.
Taking the seminal study of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities
as its main point of reference, namely Anderson’s claim that “imagined
communities . . . are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness,
but by the style in which they are imagined,” the individual papers approach
the chosen “foundation texts” from a functional perspective, largely ignoring
“their supposedly ‘original’ or canonic forms” (1). The attention of the
contributors is primarily devoted to the role myths and foundation texts have
played in forming a specifically European identity and community.
The book presents academic papers by twenty-three scholars from
distinguished universities and research centres worldwide, with the coeditor Martin Procházka and Ondřej Pilný of Charles University, Prague,
representing contemporary Czech scholarship. The papers in the collection
are organized into four sections or thematic groups according to their
treatment of the chosen topic.
The title of the first section—“Approaches”—suggests that the nine
featured texts will be dealing with questions of methodology and the viability
of various literary theories as applied to problems such as the ambiguity of the
terms “foundation” or “imagined” (Jean Bessière), the underlying structure of
cosmogonic myths (Anna Brzozowska-Krajka), or the role of nostalgia in the
critiquing of the past and construction of the future (Vita Fortunati). All the
papers in the first section deserve to be praised both for their rigorous scrutiny
of existing theories and methodologies, and their attempt to move towards a
sustainable theory of myths for the twenty-first century.
However, the papers by Riccardo Campi and Martin Procházka are truly
outstanding in the context of the first thematic group. The former, a lecturer
at the University of Bologna, has contributed a paper called “Continuity and
Discontinuity in Tradition.” In this paper, Campi juxtaposes Hans Georg
Gadamer’s hermeneutics with Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to the
question of continuity and discontinuity in relation to tradition. After a close
scrutiny of Gadamer’s idea of the fusion of the past and the present as
constitutive of the meaning of a historical object, Campi makes it quite clear
who he sympathizes with: “Discontinuity in Benjamin is not an obstacle to
historical understanding, but the very condition that makes it possible. . . .
114
Therefore, the historian must come to grips with the discontinuity, the
otherness and the distance separating the present from the past” (36).
Martin Procházka’s “Imagined Communities Revisited: Beyond Romantic
and Technological Approaches to Cultural Identity and Diversity” boldly
takes upon itself the task of blurring the boundary “between the traditional
symbolism of myth or ritual on the one hand, and ideologies, advertising
strategies or patterns of pop culture on the other” (106). The merit of
Procházka’s paper mainly lies in his employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s
theory of “desiring machines” and “fuzzy aggregates” to prove that even
“myths function as machines, for instance in the form of historical films,
TV adaptations of well-known novels, travel films and commercials. These
machines do not merely reproduce sentiments, desires or values, they also
produce them” (107). Procházka then goes on to illustrate his point by means
of convincing examples, including TV commercials or Milan Kundera’s novel
Immortality.
“Imagining Europe” is the title of the second section of the collection,
which features four texts studying the delineation of Europe as a cultural and
political entity. That the “cultural” definition of Europe by no means restricts
itself to the “old continent” is clearly demonstrated by Klára Kolínská, who
has contributed an interesting piece on place names in Canada and their
function in the dissemination of European culture and values. The second
part of her essay is a reflection on the current trend of native re-mapping
and re-naming of Ontario and its significance for the contemporary Canadian
drama, as well as its role in the creation of “a freer and more balanced geopolitical space in general” (189).
Of the four texts featured in the second section, Michael C. Frank’s “The
Discovery of Europe in the South Pacific: Travel Writing, ‘Boundary Work,’
and the Construction of European Identity” stands out most. Utilizing the
postcolonial theories of Edward Said or Homi K. Bhabha, Frank convincingly
elaborates on his thesis that Europe as a coherent community was first
imagined outside its geographical boundaries, namely in the southern
seas, where sailors were confronted with an Otherness that made them
imagine their European “identity.” Frank interestingly illustrates this point
by referring to Georg Forster’s travelogue describing James Cook’s voyage
around the globe. The conclusion Frank draws from his observations and
close reading of the aforementioned travelogue is that rather than define
the common European ground in terms of “content” or “substance,” “we
should instead focus on the relational definition of Europe on the grounds
of—varying and unstable—conceptions of the Other” (173).
“Functions and Transformations,” the third thematic group of essays,
analyses the ways in which individual myths have helped to enunciate
European identities, often being radically transformed and appropriated by
different temporal and spatial contexts. A good example of such a myth is
the myth of Medea. In her essay “The Myth of Medea and the Feminist
Imagination in Victorian and Edwardian Britain,” Ann Heilman traces the
Book Reviews
115
transformations of the myth of Medea in the early stages of British feminism
and identifies “five central narrative paradigms in Victorian and Edwardian
feminist literature” (255).
In contrast to the traditional (and sometimes ancient) myths studied
by six of the seven contributions in the third section, Mara Cambiaghi
provides a refreshing account of the transformations of the myth of 1968 in
British, Italian, and German fiction. Her comparative essay mainly succeeds
in stressing the vital role of memory and human psychology in various
interpretations and evaluations of this relatively recent myth.
The three essays that form the collection’s last section, “Mediation and
Originality,” deal with the question of mediation and its function as a
formative principle in the construction of European identities and histories.
Here, Monica Matei-Chesnoiu’s paper “‘The Globe’: Romanian Poetry and
Shakespeare’s Histories” will certainly capture the Czech reader’s attention.
A close reading of an absurdist poem by Ion Stratan, Matei-Chesnoiu’s essay
reveals subversive political power in the most ideologically compromised
adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Communist Romania. As for Stratan’s
poem itself, Matei-Chesnoiu contends that “Stratan’s fractured view of
Shakespeare’s English history, a result of detrimental cultural memory, has
the force to work on the times, with the effect of changing the present through
the re-evaluation of past cultures through corrosive action” (339–40).
Within the context of the continuing process of European integration,
debates about the founding principles of Europe can make a valuable
contribution to a critical re-consideration of the epistemology of “Europe”
as a cultural and political space. Time Refigured is a product of such a
debate and ought to be read by all who are not indifferent to questions
of “identity”—whether political, social, religious, cultural or regional. The
variety of “foundation texts” covered, as well as the amount of approaches
and methodologies employed by the authors to study them, may at times
seem to point to a lack of cohesion in the collection, but, as Martin Procházka
explains in the Introduction, the fragmentary make-up of the collection is
quite deliberate: “Not unlike myths themselves, this volume is a bricolage,
or better—in Deleuzean terms—an assemblage of transversally connected
discourses producing cultural memories of Europe as a set of interlinked
fragmentary experiences, visions, identities, texts, objects and theories” (12).
In conclusion, I would like to say that in spite of their apparent lack of
a common denominator, all the contributions in this collection are highly
relevant, and the fact that some of them provide unorthodox perspectives
on myths, foundation texts or (imagined) communities, only increases the
collection’s intellectual value.
Radek Glabazňa
Silesian University in Opava
Czech Republic
116
Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the Culture of the
United States, edited by Antonis Balasopoulos, Gesa Mackenthun, and
Theodora Tsimpouki. European Views of the United States 1. Heidelberg:
Universitätsverlag WINTER, 2008. 330 p. ISBN 978-3-8253-5479-4.
This collection of essays is the first volume of a new series “European Views
of the United States.” Being an outcome of the EAAS conference of the same
name held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2006, its main focus is to explore the topic
from different perspectives on the basis of an interdisciplinary approach. The
fact that the very first volume of the new series bears this title hints at the
changes American Studies are undergoing both in Europe and in the United
States. As Antonis Balasopoulos points out in his introduction, America has
always, at least to some Europeans, represented modernity in its many forms.
The scholars contributing to the book are trying to recast the traditional views
and interpretations of American culture.
The book is divided into five sections, each dealing with the subject matter
from a different point of view. The first section constitutes a conceptual and
theoretical framework, the second brings in the historical view, the third
refers to contemporary texts, in the fourth there are essays regarding the
visual arts, and the collection is rounded off with a glance at conformity
and non-conformity in the commercial sector. Although all the essays are
autonomous units with original ideas, the whole book appears coherent and
provides a solid insight into the theme. Moreover, as a collection of various
approaches, it is not only balanced, but also readable.
Perhaps the most distinctive and outstanding part of the whole body
of the book is the opening essay by Donald E. Pease. It centers on the
phenomenon of putative American exceptionalism, and it is a contemplation
of the future direction of American Studies. Pease reflects on Djelal Kadir’s
Presidential address delivered at the Inaugural Congress of the American
Studies Association in 2004 and compares it with the response of Amy Kaplan,
who was then the President of the US American Studies Association. After
carefully discussing both views, he suggests that American Studies should be
grounded in a comparativist model of imperial state exceptionalisms.
The rest of the essays are more conventional. The second essay of the first
section is a study in conformism and non-conformity as literary categories by
Heinz Ickstadt. Its focus is on the concept of the transgressive and subversive
functions of literature in relation to set social structures and rules. One of the
main points that Ickstadt argues is that the subversiveness of literature is not
primarily a question of politics, but of aesthetics. In the second section, called
“Regions of the Past,” it is worth mentioning the essay by Albena Bakratcheva,
who insightfully observed the dilemma of being a non-conformist and at
the same time belonging to a group of like-minded people. In her essay she
analyses the topic by discussing the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on the
other Transcendentalists, especially Henry David Thoreau.
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117
The third section, called “Contemporary Textualities,” contains, among
others, essays by Andrew S. Gross and Peter Loizos. Andrew Gross offers a
controversial study that concentrates on the theme of the depiction of terror
and violence in modern literature. He finds parallels between pornography,
melodrama and propaganda, and warns against self-censorship, defending
the author’s right not to give up aesthetic ambitions in order to stay politically
correct. Peter Loizos traces the unconscious inner conformity in the works of
two eminent American Jewish writers—Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Loizos
reveals that, when writing about American culture and issues, both writers
might be considered “non-conformists.” On the other hand, when they address
the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, either by means of personal
accounts of their travels to the region (Bellow) or in the form of a novel (Roth),
they both fail to retain their independent views, and reveal themselves as
determined and bound by their cultural and ethnic roots.
The fourth section, dedicated to the visual arts, includes an essay by
Hilaria Loyo, who studies the disruption of one of America’s most traditional
genres—the Western. She provides a close look at Jim Jarmusch’s Dead
Man, examines the methods he uses to undermine the genre’s clichés, and
subsequently doubts that the Western should be presented any longer as
a bearer of values that are typical for American culture as such. In this
respect it echoes some of the questions posed by D. E. Pease in his essay on
exceptionalism.
Finally, the last section, “Investing in Non-conformity,” introduces a case
study on the influence of advertisements on the culture of the 1960s. It is
a competent analysis of the groundbreaking work of the DDB advertising
company, which, as the author Berndt Ostendorf claims, helped create
the social climate and influenced the aesthetic and moral criteria of the
artistic environment even before all the turbulent changes of the late sixties
happened.
Overall, Conformism, Non-Conformism and Anti-Conformism in the
Culture of the United States is an important contribution to the exploration
of the subject matter. It not only raises new questions regarding the direction
in which American Studies should be heading but it is also a useful
vehicle for novice readers and an inspiring source of ideas and reference for
professionals. Above all, it is an important acquisition that sheds new light
on the never-ending debates about the shape of the American literary canon.
Jan Burda
Czech Republic

Moravian Journal of Literature and Film

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