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Fictions of Home: Theoretical Framework
ОглавлениеThe core theoretical assumption of this study is that fictions are home-makinghome-making practices, and we will soon examine this idea more closely. It may be helpful, however, first to say a word or two about the way in which this chapter is structured, as well as to comment on the general trajectory of this study. If, for instance, this first subsection is entitled “Theoretical Framework,” then this is because the ideas developed here will not be discussed explicitly in the main chapters of this study. Instead, they constitute a way of framing the overall argument, and will accordingly be revisited in the concluding chapter. In addition, the discussion of E.T. in the remainder of this introduction is not intended to develop a comprehensive reading of SpielbergSpielberg, Steven’s film. Rather, the aims of the discussion are:
(a) to introduce key ideas and concepts relating to home and belonging, as they have been proposed by various theoretical schoolsschool;
(b) to exemplify the interpretive power of these concepts by applying them to SpielbergSpielberg, Steven’s film;
(c) to indicate, roughly, which of these ideas and concepts are central to which of the six main chapters of this study.
We will also examine briefly the choice of primary texts, as well as some important caveats regarding the scope of the overall argument. The introductory chapter does not, however, summarize the findings of the six main chapters; these will, instead, be presented in the conclusion.
If, in this chapter and the ones that follow, the argument will often have a meandering quality, then this is a matter of conscious choice, for in order to ‘get’ home – in the sense of understanding it – we must be willing to travel wide and far: to explore its connections to the wider world, as well as its complex internal relations. Home-making thus requires a degree of patience, and the style ofstyle the argument is to some extent meant to reflect this fact. At the same time, being patient is not the same as tolerating aimlessness or boredom, so that a plea for the former ought not to be misconstrued as an appeal for the latter.
The key ideas formulated in the remainder of this introductory chapter can be summarized in the form of seven partly overlapping precepts:
1 Even in a secularsecular analysis of home, we must bear in mind the foundational, metaphysicalmetaphysical dimension of questions of belonging. This means to consider, among other things, religious beliefs and motifs (such as the idea of a transcendental home) as well as agnosticagnosticism or atheistatheism accounts of existentialexistential & existential angst/trauma angst or traumatrauma and shell shock (in the sense of a not-being-at-home in the world).
2 References to other texts (especially canonical ones), as well as to established generic traditions, can be understood as home-makinghome-making practices because they add a dimension of familiarityfamiliarity to an unfamiliar text. However, at the same time, we need to analyze carefully the precise way in which these intertextualintertextuality references relate (a) to the text in which they occur, and (b) to each other, as this may alert us to important intertextualintertextuality entanglements, which in fact serve to defamiliarize and critique the traditiontradition.
3 Familiarity, predictability, and a sense of controlcontrol are essential features of homelyhomely homes; they arise, among other things, from habitualhabits and the habitual practices and ritualritual actions, and they constitute ‘energyenergy-saving devices’ that allow humans to focus their limited mental and physical resourcesresources on tasks of their choice (rather than having to expend all their energy on the challenges of everydayeveryday life). However, too much familiarityfamiliarity can constitute an obstacle to understanding and (selfself-)knowledgeknowledge, which is why alienation effectalienation effects and defamiliarizdefamiliarizationing practices are necessary tools for critical inquiry (whether deployed in works of art or by critics, scholars, and other analysts).
4 It is by no means a coincidence that the terms communitycommunity and communicationcommunication are so similar to each other, as communication is central to the establishment and maintenance of a sense of home. One factor that facilitates successful communication is a shared cognitivecognition and cognitive background (established, for instance, through shared experiences), while another crucial factor is the distribution of communicative resourcesresources. As this distribution is unequal, some will find it easier than others to establish and maintain a sense of home (e.g. in the case of diasporicdiaspora communities).
5 Psychoanalysis provides us with powerful concepts for analyzing home – both through FreudFreud, Sigmund’s notion of the uncannyuncanny and, more generally, through complex techniques of decoding that allow us to unearth the unconscious forces that shape personal as well as collective identities, and which influence the very form of works of art.
6 Even the supposedly private home is a site that is permeated by relations of power, and we must always take into account the political forces that help to shape the home (as well as the individual and collective identities associated with that home). These forces include:(a) the marginalization of others on the basis of race or ethnicityethnicity;(b) cultural discourses about ideal homes – including the construction of ‘normal’ as opposed to ‘deviant’ forms of desiredesire – and how they are diffused through various mediamedia, even in the home itself;(c) the gendering of domestic space and how it relates to structures of domination (e.g. patriarchypatriarchy as a social system);(d) classclass relations (e.g. the productionproduction of social stratification through economic inequalityinequality, and how it appears in, and sustains or undermines, particular types of home).
7 Any critical analysis of home must focus not only on the contentcontent or ingredients of home, but also on their formalform and content arrangement. Indeed, the core theoretical assumption of this study is formalform and content in nature: that the concepts of fiction and home are structurally akin to each other because they involve the same form of fictionalizing negotiation between the two realms of the real and the imaginary. One implication of this assumption is that a better understanding of fiction also contributes to our understanding of home and belonging.
Evidently, each of the subsequent chapters constitutes an attempt to follow these precepts, and they may be judged accordingly.
Two caveats, however, are in order. First, the fact that this study covers only texts from between 1850 and 2000 means that all claims and findings must be treated with due caution when applied to earlier periods. Second, the six primary texts discussed in the main chapters do not constitute anything like a representative sample of fictions of home. One simple reason for this is the sheer number of texts that explicitly make home and belonging their theme. A quick search on Amazon.com, for instance, yields 16,944 titles in the category “Literature & Fiction” that feature the word home in their titles, and this is of course only the proverbial tip of the iceberg, as the theme of belonging can easily be central to a novel that does not announce this fact in its title.3 At the same time, the principle of selection for the primary texts used in this study is not entirely random: three of the texts are English (The Mill on the Floss, Mrs. Dalloway, and Union Street), while the other three are American (Moby-Dick, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Virgin Suicides); three of the texts were written by men (Herman MelvilleMelville, Herman, William Faulker, and Jeffrey EugenidesEugenides, Jeffrey), while the other three were written by women (George Eliot, Virginia WoolfWoolf, Virginia, and Pat BarkerBarker, Pat); and the texts date, roughly, to the beginning, the middle, and the end of the period covered in this study (i.e. 1851 and 1860; 1925 and 1936; 1982 and 1993). There is thus at least some socio-historical breadth to the corpus, though serious limits remain (e.g. all the English authors are women, whereas all the American authors are men; all six authors are white). At the same time, one aim of the six readings presented in the main chapters is to open up each of the primary texts to a wider range of themes, and thus hopefully to make it easier for readers from various backgrounds to discover, perhaps in unsuspected places, a little piece of that place called home.
The fact that home is such a fundamental and complex concept also means that it would be difficult to provide a comprehensive overview of the previous critical literature on the topic. Fortunately, this is also to some extent unnecessary, as Alison BluntBlunt, Alyson and Robyn Dowling’s study Home (2006) constitutes an excellent survey of key concepts and debates (with a particular focus on the fields of geographygeography, sociology, and anthropology, but by no means limited to them). Moreover, it is difficult to think of a more concise definition of home than the one suggested by BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn, who contend that home is “a spatial imaginary: a set of intersecting and variable ideas and feelings, which are related to context, and which construct places, extend across spaces and scales, and connect places” (2; original emphasis). Home, for BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn, is thus neither purely imaginary nor entirely reducible to the places and contexts that form the concept’s material basis.4 Crucially, the phrases “variable” and “related to context” in BluntBlunt, Alyson and DowlingDowling, Robyn’s definition also hint at the temporal dimension of home noted earlier (highlighted as well by SandtenSandten, Cecile and TanTan, Kathy-Ann 3).5 To render this aspect more explicit, we ought perhaps to amend their formula and say that home is a spatiotemporal imaginary.6
The dual quality of home as simultaneously extending into the realm of the imaginary and into spatiotemporal reality, in turn, constitutes the main reason why analyzing fiction can contribute to our understanding of the phenomenon of home as such. In The Fictive and the Imaginary (1991), Wolfang IserIser, Wolfgang rejects the conventionalconventions binarybinary oppositions opposition between fiction and reality, positing instead that we ought to envisage a triadic relationship between the real, the fictive, and the imaginary. According to IserIser, Wolfgang, a fictional text necessarily incorporates aspects of lived reality, but at the same time it is never reducible to this referential dimension. Instead, the act of fictionalizing also involves components and effects that do not form part of the represented reality, and which must therefore stem from some other source. IserIser, Wolfgang suggests that this other source is the imaginary, and in his view the act of fictionalizing constitutes the creative force that negotiates between the imaginary and the real. More precisely, the act of fictionalizing ‘de-realizes’ the real by relating it to the imaginary, just as it gathers or ‘concretizes’ the free-floating impulses of the imaginary into a comprehensible shape or Gestalt (The Fictive and the Imaginary 1–4).7 The fictive, in short, is the result of a dialecticaldialectic confrontation between the real and the imaginary, and as such it is precariously poised between these different realms.
Considering that fiction’s precarious negotiation between the two poles of the real and the imaginary also applies to the concept of home, we may now propose that home is itself very similar to fiction: not in the sense of being ‘untrue’ or simply opposed to the real, but in the sense that any particular idea of home is the result of a fictionalizing act that intermingles the real with the imaginary (and vice versa).8 Fictions of home are therefore not merely narratives that happen to thematize the dialecticdialectic of alienationalienation and belonging; they are also, as fictions, structurally akin to the mental processes that allow for the construction and maintenance of home in the first place. More specifically – as Franco MorettiMoretti, Franco suggests in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) – fictional texts constitute formalform and content compromises between the real and the imaginary, and as such they train us “without our being aware of it for an unending task of mediation and conciliation” (40).9 Fictions themselves, that is to say, are best understood as symbolicalsymbolical home-makinghome-making practices, in the broadly MarxistMarxism and Marxist criticism sense that they invent “imaginary or formalform and content ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictionscontradiction” (JamesonJameson, Fredric, The Political UnconsciousUnconscious 64).10 Conversely, if fictions are imaginary attempts to reach formalform and content compromises between real-life contradictionscontradiction, then this implies that one important task for literary criticsliterary critics is to unearth the problems that fictions attempt to solve (i.e. to ‘unpack’ the conflicting forces that led to the fictional compromisecompromise in the first place).11
And yet, even though home is structurally akin to fiction, the concepts differ in two important respects, the first of which has to do with different types of truth claimstruth claims. The question of truth in fiction is, of course, a thorny issue (e.g. EagletonEagleton, Terry, The Event of Literature 106–166; Lamarque 220–254), but for our purposes it will suffice to say that fictional texts involve three basic truth claims:
(a) claims about what is true within the fictional world or with regard to the fictional text (i.e. intra-fictional truth claimstruth claims);
(b) claims about the adequate representationrepresentation of types of real-world phenomena, or kinds of real-world experiences (i.e. generalizing truth claimstruth claims);
(c) claims about the correspondence between, on the one hand, information provided in the fiction, and, on the other, a particular state of things in the real world (i.e. truth claimstruth claims of one-to-one correspondence).
Crucially, these three truth claimstruth claims differ with regard to the grounds on which they can be contested. In the case of intra-fictional truth claims (e.g. ‘In ShakespeareShakespeare, William’s play Hamlet, the protragonist marries Ophelia’), the information provided in the fictional text itself forms the only basis on which we may accept or reject such a claim (‘No, the text makes it very clear that Hamlet and Ophelia never get married’). In the case of generalizing truth claims, by contrast (e.g. ‘Jane AustenAusten, Jane is right when she writes: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”’; Pride and Prejudice 5), we must refer to evidence pertaining to the real world when formulating a counter-argument (‘What about men who are attracted to other men?’).12 In the case of fictional truth claims of one-to-one correspondence, finally (e.g. ‘In 1991, ZurichZurich was the capital of SwitzerlandSwitzerland’), readers are free to take note of divergences between the fictional world and real life (‘In fact it was Berne’), but as it is essential to the game of fiction that constraints on truth claims of one-to-one correspondence be playfully suspended, such divergences do not constitutes lies, or even inaccuracies. Instead, counterfactuals in fiction prompt a series of interpretive questions: What is the function of these divergences within the fictional text? Do they contribute to or detract from the text’s aestheticaesthetic and rhetorical effectiveness? And is it morally justifiably to ‘play around’ with the particular facts in question? Even in the case of fiction, in short, truth claims of one-to-one correspondence remain open to critical debate, but they cannot be challenged directly on the basis of their divergence from fact – and this is what distinguishes the fictional compromisecompromise between the real and the imaginary from the structurally analogous compromise of home as a spatiotemporal imaginary. In the case of truth claims about home, constraints on one-to-one correspondence remain in full force, and it is therefore legitimate to challenge any divergences of this kind directly (‘No, DietikonDietikon is not your home because you have no relation to that place and in fact don’t even know where it is’).
If these different rules for how to challenge truth claimstruth claims provide us with one criterion theoretically to distinguish the concept of home from that of fiction, then the second criterion pertains to these concepts’ respective degrees of closureclosure. In the case of fiction, the compromisecompromise between the real and the imaginary is necessarily expressed in a definite shape (i.e. a finished product, such as a written text or a film). By contrast, home as a spatiotemporal imaginary remains, for the most part, implicit, or is expressed piecemeal, either by individuals or by collectives, in evolving communicative situations. Home as a mental structure is thus generally fuzzier, and likely to be less internally consistent, than fiction – which means, conversely, that the pressure to find satisfactory compromises is much higher in the case of fiction, as fiction must give a much more clear-cut form to the compromise between the real and the imaginary than is the case for constructions of home. This, in turn, allows us to speculate that the need for fictions becomes particularly acute precisely in those moments when socio-historical pressures bring to the fore certain contradictionscontradiction in the (usually implicit) spatiotemporal imaginary of home. Fiction’s formalform and content compromise, though perhaps unable truly to resolve such crises, at least serves temporarily to dilute and reduce the contradictory stresses that threaten our sense of home and belonging – which is merely to reiterate, in slightly different form, that fiction itself is a home-makinghome-making practice.