The Poetics of Otherness

War, Trauma, and Literature

J. Hart

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137482631
• eBook ISBN: 9781137477453
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Using the concept of otherness as an entry point into a discussion of poetry, Jonathan Hart's study explores the role of history and theory in relation to literature and culture. Chapters range from trauma in Shakespeare to Bartolomé de Las Casas' representation of the Americas to the trench poets to voices from the Holocaust.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The poetics of otherness combines two strange and familiar ideas: first, that of making, and second, the other of what is different from ourselves. Poetics is a making of words and also the study of that making. Otherness is alterity, alternative and alienation. Poetry comes from the Greek for making, something I have made much of elsewhere.¹ The etymology of other—which is cognate with forms in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, and various German languages—seems to derive from the Indo-European base of Sanskrit anya and relates to the Latin alter. The Indo-European comparative suffix is, as the Oxford English Dictionary attests, also represented by the Sanskrit -tara, the ancient Greek -τερος , the classical Latin -ter , the English -ther, and the Early Irish equitive suffix -ithir, and it suggests the meaning of that original: “The Indo-European suffix seen in this word originally had a spatial sense, expressing the contrast between two or more things with regard to their location.”² There is, then, in my book a poetics of space, of here and there, as well as a poetics of time, of now and then. This poetics also has some hiddenness of unknown places to explore as well as the unknown of the future.

Otherness includes a comparison in which something or someone is not the self but is compared to the self and thus defines the self. Self and other define and distinguish and are engaged in metaphor, in a yoked comparison. To purge the other is to purge the self. In killing the other, one kills a part of oneself. Otherness provides alter egos, other or possible worlds, choices. Otherness opens up possibility but also, if taken negatively, leads to senses of estrangement and alienation, a kind of second fall and exile from Eden. Language itself can heal the wound by trying through metaphor and image to repair that ruin between humanity and the world in a kind of imaginative atonement or unity. However, in language, people can feel and think of alienation between word and world, a gap of desire and yearning for a past garden or a future heaven. On earth we wander in a ruin of words, but it is all we have. Perhaps all we have is the stoic present and wrapping ourselves in ourselves as a form of self-protection and a way to face the world, or live in the present moment, as Marcus Aurelius suggests.³ Having a sense of self irrespective of others, of looking after what can (that is, one’s words and actions), is one way to live. In a poetics of otherness, one cannot rely on others for happiness, but one should not retreat from the world and others. This question affects the tension between contemplation and good works in the Catholic Church.

“Alienation” in English comes from Latin through Anglo-Norman and Middle French and is a word Wycliffe uses in his translation of the Bible. The Latin word can relate to property, estrangement or madness. Karl Marx, adapting G. W. F Hegel, saw alienation as being also expressed through self-alienation—that is, people’s value being reduced to price and wage in a kind of commodification of self. Entfremdung and Entäußerung differ from Bertolt Brecht’s distancing of the audience in the theatre through estrangement, his Verfremdungseffekt. Can the self relinquish ownership of the self to others or lose a sense of self through a negative othering of the self, or is othering positive by providing critical distance on the naturalization of the self and the environment?⁴ Here, then, in this question lies a tradition in German from Hegel through Marx to Brecht in which there is not a singular answer. Rather than codify any question or response, this book seeks to bring out in analyzing texts, in prose and even more often in poetry, in their very making, what sense of otherness they express. The other provides possibility and understanding and can provoke fear, trembling, and loathing. I am interested in the contours of otherness, as one of the topics of this book. Alternatives (to alter and to alternate) have, in etymology, more to do with change and the ebb and flow than strictly with otherness, but often understanding others and different ways frees up the self to understand or even embrace change.⁵

The Poetics of Otherness: War, Trauma, and Literature, as the title suggests, is about a number of subjects, including, most centrally, the warlike and traumatic in representations literary and otherwise. As I shall say something about trauma—the wound—in the early chapters, I wish here to point out that the Germanic peoples did not have a word for war in their living language and only in remnants of their poetry, our word coming from late Old English, wyrre, werre, just before the Norman conquest of 1066, and north-eastern old French, werre. For such a warlike group, it was not until modern times that the various Germanic nations on the Continent found words for war. The German krieg and the Swedish and Danish krig, the Dutch oorlog and the Icelandic ófriðr or “un-peace” turn away from the Germanic root werz- and wers- for better or worse. The Oxford English Dictionary also lets us know that there are related words—Old High German werra and Middle High German werre meaning confusion, discord, and strife. The dictionary also notes that the Old Saxon werran is a strong verb that signifies bringing into confusion or discord, a source for the modern German wirren, a weak verb meaning to confuse, or perplex, and observes that the earlier verb persists in verworren, a participial adjective—confused. The Romance languages have a similar word to the late Old English and north-eastern Old French word, from the Central Old French and modern French guerre through the Provençal guerra, gerra, Spanish guerra, and Portuguese guerra, to the Italian guerra (from the medieval Latin werra, guerra ).⁶ There is a complex of related words for war in Western Europe in an earlier period that diverged in modern times when the wars of perceived difference seem to grow in ferocity. I am not implying a causal connection, but observe this relation from the etymological record.

Violence, a key to the book, derives from the classical Latin violentia, which means unreasonable or overwhelming force, and that the English form is closest to the Anglo-Norman and Middle French violence, signifying excessive force.⁷ The wound of violence is at the heart of this study, and what beauty and truth that poets, poet-soldiers, soldiers, and writers can glean in the asymptotic search for expression, for bridging the gap between word and world. The nostalgia for the garden and the yearning for paradise are the ever-changing, ever-tentative, and always provisional nature of human language. Speaker and hearer, writer and reader yearn for unity, wholeness, meaning, and something beyond here and now and the obliteration of death.

Violence itself is a consequence of, or reaction to, that original breach we feel and make in myth. Some lash out as individuals and in groups for the fall into death and sin, into the ruin and broken world after disobedience, and the yearning for the knowledge of the tree of good and evil and then the exile of Cain for his murder of Abel and the forlorn cross, that other tree in Calvary, that other Golgotha or hill of skulls. I state this in Christian terms, but there are equivalents or analogues in other religions and what we sometimes call mythologies, although the original adherents might scoff at such a designation. This book, then, explores mythological truth in the drama of meaning, that liminal and dramatic space between speaker and hearer, writer and reader in which both engage to be more than one of the other, or the sum of the parts. Their interpretation in writing and reading (they are usually now writers and readers just as they were always both speakers and hearers) is invisibly catalytic. Storytellers and their audience both tell and hear stories. Narrative truth and logical, argumentative and dialectical truth meet in what I have long called story-argument, in which, for instance, the analogies of stories and logic share but differ in their characteristics. Story and argument are separate and different, but combine in areas, like those old Venn diagrams we had in school. Stories include persuasion but also the uninstrumental world of myth: poetry is rhetorical, but it also suggests something that does not rest on persuasion, unless sometimes that is love, altruism, and other feelings not for profit or power. Reading is a waste of time in the short-term, at least the reading of fictions, including poetry. The tax code, constitution, or a stock prospectus are other more worldly matters that may share some of the same words.

Poetry and words can try to mend the breach of nature, the ruined natural world and what we have made of the gap between world and word, the nostalgia and yearning in our minds and souls and bodies for unity, truth, and beauty. For soldiers, they try to make sense of a world torn by war, trauma, and violence. Some of the soldiers are poets and are riven themselves between their quest for the right word, for some beauty and truth in a broken world, and how to talk about otherness and alternatives in an impossible world. Some of the writers are not involved directly in violence, trauma, and war, but they record the yearnings of love and gentleness in a hostile environment. Can the uselessness of poetry and literature more generally provide a spiritual but secular healing in a space displaced with the crisis in religion, one of the early languages of nostalgia, and yearning or anticipation? There are also religious traces and representations in this book.

The movement of the study is from the genocide of the American Natives after 1492 to the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War. The body of the book begins in chapter 2 with Bartolomé de Las Casas’s representation of this destruction in the Americas, particularly in connection with women and children. Besides discussing mimesis or representation, which can be as much about misrepresentation, I call attention to the context for Las Casas that concerns the discovery of otherness, which is found in Herodotus, Christopher Columbus, José de Acosta, Michel de Montaigne, and other “ethnographical” texts. Chapter 3 examines the literary and the other, drawing on the work of Jean Bessière to discuss criticism and theory as means to figure the literary and to explore critical discourse as a place of identity for literature—that is, a figuration of “poetics” and literariness and the sense of the possibility and suggestion that the mythology of literature permits. In that chapter I make Shakespeare the main test case for the connection between mythology and ideology, form and content, story and argument, but I also draw on texts about otherness and difference, positively in the poetry and writings of indigenous and African American poets and writers and negatively in the writing of Adolf Hitler. Here poetics and rhetoric meet in myth and propaganda with different effects. The fourth chapter examines violence in Shakespeare, particularly in connection with war and expansion, in the context of texts, such as The Spanish Colonie (1583), the first English translation of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, and some of the writing that Richard Hakluyt the Younger collects.

After a more general discussion of travel, alterity, and culture, chapter 5 analyzes otherness from another point of view, focusing on Matteo Ricci, as someone from the West looking at China, but not in the way that a native of China might see the country. The journey of Ricci and his editor, of the manuscript, says something about the cultural geography of otherness in this key text in East-West relations at the time of Richard Hakluyt the Younger, the first translation of Las Casas, and Shakespeare. Chapter 6 explores the trauma of war and violence as expressed in poetry, connecting a British poet writing in 1916, during the First World War, with larger contexts that range from the Bible and Homer to poems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from various languages and cultures. Wherever possible, I try to call attention to translation, compare translations or actually translate lines or poems from various languages, something particularly important in a lingua franca like English. This chapter explores a comparison between or typology of then and there, here and now.

In chapter 7, which discusses representations of the Great War or the First World War, I discuss Duncan Campbell Scott, a key poet, and how his work as a civil servant in the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada related to his ideas on empire and war and his poetic representations of these and connected subjects, such as land and wilderness. Scott is an ambiguous and ambivalent figure as someone, consciously or not, who contributed to the overwhelming of indigenous culture while celebrating and commemorating it. The irony is that for settlers, like me, Scott reminds us not only of the importance of aboriginal culture but also of our role or even complicity in doing violence to that culture over so many centuries. Scott brings out the lives of important Natives but not without intricacies and contradictions. We are all human and contradictory, and that is part of the challenge, in the face of war, violence, and trauma, in understanding and respecting others. Poets, and I am also a poet, can be implicated in the instrumentality, propaganda, ideology, and persuasion that the aesthetic of the late nineteenth century into the 1960s and even beyond, in a form of Romanticism and aestheticism, tried to transcend, circumvent, and avoid. That does not mean that we have to throw out the baby with the bath water: poetry involves mythology and ideology, poetics and rhetoric, ideals and the warts of this world. Irony can give us perspective and help us to understand ourselves and others and our commitments or lack of them, our politics and apolitical dreams and abdications. I also call on some Native voices, which present a different point of view, something other than the official history that had traditionally dominated settler schooling. Poetry presents various poetics.

Chapter 8 shifts perspective, which zooms in and out in this book, from chapter 7, which represents soldiers and poets in and about the First World War in Canada, to poets writing in English in that war. The violence and trauma were a shock that is hard to imagine. Coming to terms with war was no easy matter. The traumatic cataclysm for soldiers and countries partly remains in the traces left by the poets, who fought and those who did not. The language of conflict is in conflict with itself. All I can do in s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1  Introduction
• 2  Trauma
• 3  The Literary and the Other
• 4  Trauma in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
• 5  Travel, Alterity, and Culture
• 6  War, Violence, Poetry
• 7  Representing the Great War
• 8  Poetry and the First World War
• 9  Representing the Second World War
• 10  Voices of the Holocaust
• 11  Conclusion
• Notes
• Index