2001 / 8 Prospero. Rivista di culture anglo-germaniche

In Northern Irish contemporary literature, Belfast is the centre of sectarian violence and hatred, and is one of the most dangerous cities of the whole English-speaking world. In Ciaran Carson’s writings, Belfast has a dream-like quality: it is the shape-shifting city that has to reinvent its own geography day after day, partially because it was a war zone during the ‘Troubles’, but also because of the duplicity of the city’s nature. Belfast is a city that had to accommodate new industries and businesses, and thus continuously changed without logic into something different by encompassing everything that was wrong and rotten in the country during the Eighties. For this reason, Belfast can be represented by both the labyrinth and the map, which symbolise its continuous morphing into something different, and convey a sense of entrapment. Carson’s exploration of Belfast is defined by these antithetical concepts of metamorphosis and enclosure. The essay analyses some of Carson’s poems, focussing on the difference between Carson’s imagery and the romantic nationalist forms as well as the rural world of the Irish tradition. Carson’s concern with language is also taken into consideration, since through language and the choice of a native imagery and a technical innovation, the author overtly discredits the English dominance and dismisses English culture as central.

The prevalence of a topographic interest in the work of Ilse Aichinger stands in a very close relationship with the poetological interests of the writer. The sounding of space incorporates within a tangible perimeter the questioning on the possibilities and limits of language as a form of perception, and on the representation of reality. The predilection for thresholds and boundaries corresponds to the tension towards a radical resemantisation of the literary language, to which Aichinger confers the function of a bridge projected towards those areas of human affectivity that are less representable.

Katherine Mansfield’s extraordinary ability to mould her character depending on the situations and the people she was interacting with is especially evident in her letters. Mansfield’s personality was forged through a string of formative events that initiated her into writing: her stay in London, the influence this had on her cultural growth, and the introduction to the Decadent classics. Mansfield was a tormented woman in search of an identity, a quest that led to the adoption of masks and to role-play. Lytton Strachey described her social mask as “wooden made”, a disguise for which she looked remote, seductive, and dreamy, just like an Oriental doll. On the other hand, she could play the mysterious seductress, the needy, remissive wife or the dominant masculine artist, anxious to break the gender based conventions she felt a strong aversion to. In Mansfield’s work the theme of identity evolves alongside her artistic development, and her characters seem to follow her own life’s path and experiences. Through them, she recreates her own sense of displacement and her dual behaviour. In this reflexion, models of evolution of the characters can be detected, some of which are proposed in the essay as interpretative keys: the meeting with the Shadow, epiphany, multiple voices, the ‘anthropomorphism’ of objects. Mansfield’s search seems to end in solitude. The essay proposes two interpretative hypothesis on this possible result.

Nathanael West is perhaps the only Hebrew-American author to choose a nome de plume that encompasses both his creative self and his personal data. He was born in New York as Nathan Weinstein, son of two affluent parents hailing from Kovno, a Lithuanian village where German-speaking Jews enjoyed freedoms unknown in other parts of the Russian Empire. After the killing of Tsar Alexander and the subsequent wave of anti-Semitism, West’s relatives emigrated to New York where they decided for a radical Americanisation and kept themselves quite removed from the poorer Eastern European Jews. The author’s anxiety over assimilation led West to change his name and marked his attempt at removing his Jewish identity and blend with the WASP society surrounding him. Despite his best efforts, he is still identified as one of the greatest Hebrew-American writers. The essay originates from the belief that a change of identity is a transformation that conditions the way in which world and literature are seen, and it wants to demonstrate that biographical elements, by influencing the compositional technique, “enter the work and thus belong to it”. The essay investigates the extent to which the attempt at letting his origins fall into oblivion may have influenced the textual facts in West’s novels.

The prologue and the digressions of Tristan hold a metapoetic function that aims at assimilating the reader in the process of text construction. While the prologue is developed according to the codes that are proper of the captatio benevolentiae, thereby also retaining a strong pedagogic component close to the ecclesiastic sermon, the digressions have the function to situate the subject matter within the history of its tradition and of clarify for the reader the allegoric meaning of the plot as well as the cultural and ideological relevance of the values at the basis of the work.

Henry James was the quintessential expatriate writer, although his travels did not follow the classical itinerary of the famous Grand Tour, but were rather characterised by an emotional intensity which render him a unique case. His tourism took the form of an interior adventure, a peregrinatio animae which accompanied his travels in the real world. Born to a privileged American family, son of a philosopher that deemed travelling indispensable to form his children’s character and education, James was a pioneer of the re-discovering of Europe and pursuit of European culture, often writing about European culture from the point of view of the American moral consciousness. In March 1871 James published “A Passionate Pilgrim”, a short story of particular importance because it shows how travel was regarded as a spiritual, quasi-religious experience that was meant to enrich, enlighten and change the young, impressionable Americans who found themselves immersed for the first time in the more sophisticated European culture. The essay follows James’s pilgrimage through his works, a voyage which followed a deliberate itinerary, attended by rites and rituals. What emerges is a view on travel not as the mere crossing of physical space, but as recognition of his own inner self, and the exploration of his own geography of the soul.