To Die In The Story. A Study Of The Aesthetics Of Death In The Short Story

TEZĂ DE DOCTORAT

To die in the story. A study of the aesthetics of death in the short story

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/CPP107/DMI1.5/S/78421, Project ID 78421 (2010), co-financed by the European Social Fund – Investing in People, within the Sectoral Operational Programme Human Resources Development 2007 – 2013

Această lucrare a fost finanțată din contractul POSDRU/CPP107/DMI1.5/S/78421, proiect strategic ID 78421 (2010), cofinanțat din Fondul Social European – Investește în Oameni, prin Programul Operațional Sectorial Dezvoltarea Resurselor Umane 2007 – 2013.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1. Dying in the Story

1.1. The Short Story – The Development of a Genre 14

1.2. Death and Dying through Centuries and Cultures

2. A Theoretical Journey towards an Aesthetics of Death

2.1. A Glimpse of the Eighteenth Century Aesthetics

2.2. Aesthetics and the Experience of the Sublime

2.3. From an Aesthetics of the Sublime to an Aesthetics of Death

3. The Aesthetics of Death in the Romantic Short Story

3.1. E. T. A. Hoffmann – the Aesthetic Function of the Grotesque in “The Sandman”

3.2. Edgar Allan Poe – Delightful Terror in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

4. Aesthetics of Death versus Society

4.1. Sublime Visions of Life and Death in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” 133

4.2. Remembering the Past in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

5. Liminal Aesthetics in the Modernist Short Story

5.1. Hidden Myths and Initiation Rituals in Mircea Eliade’s “With the Gypsy Girls”

5.2. The Song of Death. Joycean Epiphany in “The Dead”

5.3. A Case of Spiritual Exhaustion: The Death of the Self in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Shakespeare’s Memory”

Conclusions

Bibliography

Introduction

When asked to comment on their choice to bring their contribution to world literature in the form of short prose narrative, many practitioners talk about the elusive nature of the short story, about the sense of relationship it creates between the reader and the writer, and about its capacity to show glimpses of man’s limitless imagination. Although none of the writers asked to define the genre they work with is able to provide an accurate definition, all of them agree that the short story is the most condensed literary creation, an active form of artistic expression that “screams its definition as it writes its own story.”

Ever since the nineteenth century, when a handful of writers decided to embrace the ‘minor’ genre, as it used to be called, which was becoming increasingly popular in magazines and periodicals, the short story has been a ‘space’ of experimentation with language, narrative structures and unconventional themes. If some writers regarded short story writing as a secondary occupation, their short stories containing but elements of their longer fiction in a concentrated, polished form, there have been others, however, who chose the genre to represent them. Nevertheless, authors belonging to both of these categories have proved that the short story, even in its most confounding form, offers an aestheticized version of an even more puzzling reality. Through short story writing the artist reaffirms his/her presence and attempts to reconstruct his/her own identity by breaking the boundaries of language and instilling in it a sense of intimacy and immediacy between the author as creator of a fictional version of the world and the reader.

From Bakhtin’s perspective, in the process of creation language in its totality becomes the discourse of an author-creator who exists both outside and inside the text. The author-creator is not, however, the individual whose existence is inscribed within the coordinates of historical time and space, but an artistic, creative self that makes his presence felt throughout the whole work. Thus, the fictional world the author creates in his writing is based on a subjective perception of the external world, but it nevertheless contains “parts of one and the same objective world, seen and portrayed from one and the same authorial position.” Likewise, the literary text becomes a “double-voiced discourse” in which the author’s expectations, disappointments, anxieties, etc., are rendered with great aesthetic sensibility. It is no wonder, then, that man’s greatest tragedy – death – has become one of the main preoccupations of artists of all times.

From Antiquity to modern times death has been represented by artists in the most various ways. In late Antiquity, for example, death was evoked in the visual arts by the idea of repose and insensibility. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, the artes moriendi either illustrated the rituals that needed to be performed for the salvation of the soul, or relied on the macabre images of the human skeleton and decomposing bodies. The Renaissance came with yet another change. The rituals performed for the salvation of the soul continued to be represented, especially in the visual arts, but this time the ceremony that took place in the bedchamber of the dying was represented as a confrontation of the supernatural forces that claim possession over the soul of the dying man. In Renaissance literature death becomes part of the artistic discourse more than ever before and death symbolism and erotico-macabre themes are often used to express man’s anxieties over the uncertainties of human existence.

Starting with the eighteenth century, art and literature showed an increased interest in the association of love and death. Death was no longer perceived as a subtle presence, but as a mighty force “which tears man from his daily life, from rational society, from his monotonous work, in order to make him undergo a paroxysm, plunging him into an irrational, violent and beautiful world.” In the artistic representations of the individual confronted with the inevitability of his own death, Eros and Thanatos are presented as complementary, yet opposing forces whose battle for sovereignty is so violent that the individual starts to perceive his own death as a desirable end. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the characteristics of death were more or less reduced to beauty in literary representations. Death was still portrayed as a painful experience, especially for the observer, but the horrors of physical death and decomposition were given an extraordinary aesthetic value.

As we may notice, there is no standard way to represent death in literature, but, as Philippe Ariès suggests, there is an intimate connection between man’s attitude towards death and the way it is represented in art. Thus, while also taking into account the idea that the finished product of an artist is an expression of an inner need that “has been met by creating something that can be shared with others,” we have endeavoured to comment on seven short stories from different cultures and centuries in order to show how the theme of death has always been revisited and reinvented across cultures and through time. Nevertheless, because the modern short story came into existence in the early nineteenth century, we have chosen three short stories from the nineteenth century, namely E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” and four belonging to representative authors of the twentieth century, such as William Faulkner with his anthologized short story “A Rose for Emily,” Mircea Eliade and “With the Gypsy Girls,” James Joyce and his famous short story “The Dead,” and Jorge Luis Borges with “Shakespeare’s Memory.”

According to E.D. Hirsch Jr., there are two distinct moments in the interpretation of a literary text. The first one is divinatory, for it relies on intuition and sympathy, but it nevertheless opens the path towards the second one, the critical moment, in which the ideas grasped in the first moment are submitted to “high intellectual standards by testing [them] against all the relevant knowledge available.” Obviously, most of the short stories selected for interpretation have received a considerable amount of critical attention, but it is also true that, although the meaning of a text may not suffer substantial changes from one reading to another, its significance, however, depends on the reader’s cultural and historical background. Moreover, given the evolution in time of literary trends and philosophical perspectives, new and challenging ways of perceiving and interpreting a literary text may always arise.

The idea of commenting on memorable short stories, belonging to different centuries and cultures, but which have become ‘immortal’ through the theme of death, has led us to consider the aesthetic ‘mode’ as more suitable for our endeavour. Aesthetics as a philosophical discipline sprang at full speed in the eighteenth century and quickly became a subject of major interest for philosophers belonging to the most various schools of thought. A permanent connection between aesthetics and literary theory, however, has not been established until the last decades of the twentieth century, when the importance of discussing the aesthetic value of a literary text has finally stopped being a subject of debate among critics.

In its narrowest sense, aesthetics is a philosophical discipline that deals with the nature of beauty, art and taste. The term was first introduced by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. In his vision, aesthetics was meant to solve the conflict between taste and philosophical contemplation, and yet, his idea of aesthetics is far from the current understanding of the term as a theory of art based on the concepts of beauty and ugliness. The philosopher states that “aesthetics (as the theory of liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking and as the art of thinking analogous to reason) is the science of sensual cognition,” but fails to demonstrate that the theory of arts emerges from sensual cognition. He nevertheless succeeds in deviating his peers’ attention from the pure rational cognition endorsed by Descartes. He rejects the idea that reality consists of series of objects that can be categorized and generalized according to strict, rational rules, and claims that one can fully grasp the richness and the complexity of reality and, therefore, of the individual, through sensual perception.

The next philosopher who dedicated a great amount of time to the development of an aesthetic theory is Johann Gottfried von Herder. He, like many of his contemporaries, saw the lack of artistic genius in the eighteenth century Germany and exerted himself to elaborate a comprehensive theory of art which would work towards understanding the nature of art and the necessary conditions for it to thrive. He recognized the value of the new philosophical principles advanced by Baumgarten for a reconsideration of art, but he showed a strong discontent with Baumgarten’s fondness for standards, which originates in the latter’s rationalist formation. Baumgarten’s aesthetic principles were more or less meant to lead to a standardization of beauty and taste, in which case, Herder argues, aesthetics could no longer be what it declares to be – a science of the feeling, relevant for the eighteenth century philosophical framework, but relying on the simplicity of Greek philosophy:

“I desire […] a Greek aesthetics. And such an aesthetics – how it would fetch everything from the depths of our feeling, how it would draw on sensation and from it extract the glorious spirit. It would philosophize within the human soul like a swimmer half submerged beneath the sea. Home’s Principles of Criticism […] augmented by the psychology of the Germans and then returned to that nation which has remained, in its doctrines of the beautiful, whether in art or in letters, most true to the feeling for Nature, then hellenized in line with this people’s feeling for Nature – now that would be aesthetics!”

If Baumgarten placd by Baumgarten for a reconsideration of art, but he showed a strong discontent with Baumgarten’s fondness for standards, which originates in the latter’s rationalist formation. Baumgarten’s aesthetic principles were more or less meant to lead to a standardization of beauty and taste, in which case, Herder argues, aesthetics could no longer be what it declares to be – a science of the feeling, relevant for the eighteenth century philosophical framework, but relying on the simplicity of Greek philosophy:

“I desire […] a Greek aesthetics. And such an aesthetics – how it would fetch everything from the depths of our feeling, how it would draw on sensation and from it extract the glorious spirit. It would philosophize within the human soul like a swimmer half submerged beneath the sea. Home’s Principles of Criticism […] augmented by the psychology of the Germans and then returned to that nation which has remained, in its doctrines of the beautiful, whether in art or in letters, most true to the feeling for Nature, then hellenized in line with this people’s feeling for Nature – now that would be aesthetics!”

If Baumgarten placed empirical psychology at the core of the new philosophical discipline, without disregarding its rationalist roots, Herder applied a historical and cultural approach to aesthetics, arguing against the idea that art can be interpreted in terms of pre-established standards. Obviously, the aesthetic principles advanced by both of them aroused many other philosophers’ interest, but it was Immanuel Kant the one who successfully combined all these principles into a theory of taste that shifts the attention from the object to be judged to the judging mind, and therefore to the judgment about the object.

In his Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant sets the principles for different kinds of aesthetic judgments according to the types of pleasure they generate. He distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime as aesthetic categories that may become the object of pure aesthetic judgments and claims that the satisfaction in either of the two must be disinterested, with respect to its quality, accompanied by a claim of universal validity, with respect to its quantity, consentaneous with the principle of subjective purposiveness, as concerns its relation, and it must be regarded as a necessity in order the fulfil the criteria of modality.

Kant’s third Critique has been a highly influential work ever since its publication and with the advancement of the idea that the value of an artistic representation does not depend on its capacity to illustrate beauty, but on the artist’s capacity to beautifully illustrate “things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing,” Kant laid the foundation of modern aesthetics.

Although nowadays aesthetics has come to be understood as a theory of arts based on the concepts of beauty and ugliness, and although death has been approached by various philosophers, the principles of the aesthetics of death have not been clearly delineated by any philosopher, which is why we have taken the liberty to shape an aesthetics of death by combining the principles exposed by Kant in his third Critique with those advanced by Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful, as well as with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s debate on dreadful descriptions of death in artistic representations, included in his essay “How Ancients Represented Death.”

Despite the many similarities between Kant’s and Burke’s ideas on the sublime and the beautiful, Burke’s approach to aesthetics is empirical, in the manner of John Locke and David Hume, but also psychological and physiological. Both Kant and Burke emphasize the superiority in point of intensity of the feelings generated by the sublime, claiming that the beautiful simply pleases, whereas the sublime is that “which pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.” They both agree that the sublime culminates in a state of absolute delight with more or less negative connotations, but if Kant claims that it is precisely the faculty of reason that which is activated whenever the human mind is confronted with something as immeasurable and powerful as the experience of the sublime, Burke focuses on the physiological response to the sublime and on its subsequent effect upon the mind of the observer.

Starting from the idea that there is nothing more intense than the feelings caused by pain, danger, sickness and death, Burke introduces these instances as potential sources of the sublime, insisting on the fact that the sublime emerges only from the ideas of such instances, and not from their physical equivalents. And yet, in an aesthetic experience the ideas of pain, danger and death cannot be apprehended as an objective reality, but as concepts subjectively attached to man’s consciousness, for only in this situation can they lead to a sort of gratification through sympathy, which is in fact the result of a special disposition of the mind that allows us to put ourselves in the place of the man affected by the actual instances of pain, danger or death.

Sympathy, as a means of substitution, is the principle upon which literature and other arts become sources of delight even when they dwell on terrible passions. In literature, for example, satisfaction is derived either from the comfort we take in thinking that the story we read is fictional, or from the feeling of independence we momentarily experience when we understand that our own condition is much better than the one of the characters we are reading about. Pain, danger and death, the “king of terrors,” as Burke calls it, thus become sources of pleasure and, consequently, they and their artistic representations can be treated as objects of pure aesthetic judgments.

For Lessing, on the other hand, death is nothing more than an interruption to life, a conceptual end, devoid of subjectivity, and therefore with no aesthetic values. And yet, the progressive action towards death, towards non-existence, becomes a source of the sublime if we were to judge sublimity according to the level of terror generated by the idea of dying: “Only to die thus and thus, at this moment, in this mood, according to the will of this or that person, to die with shame and agony, may be terrible and becomes terrible.”

The aforementioned ideas reflect the various ways in which an aesthetic value can be assigned to death. The purpose of our doctoral dissertation is to apply the same ideas advanced by Kant, Burke and Lessing in our interpretation of the aesthetics of death in the short story, while also transcending the aesthetic dimension by relying on Gadamer’s Truth and Method in order to decide whether the aesthetic representations of death are relevant for the authors’ historical and cultural background, for, as Gadamer claims, art is more than an object of an aesthetic consciousness:

“The transcendental function that Kant ascribes to the aesthetic judgment is sufficient to distinguish it from conceptual knowledge. […] But is it right to reserve the concept of truth for conceptual knowledge? Must we not also acknowledge that the work of art possesses truth? We shall see that acknowledging this places not only the phenomenon of art but also that of history in a new light.”

Divided into five chapters, the thesis relies on treatises on death (Vladimir Jankélèvitch, Philippe Ariès), philosophical works (Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Paul Ricoeur), anthropological studies (Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner, Nicu Panea), works belonging to psychology, psychoanalysis and psychiatry (Carl Gustav Jung, Otto Rank, Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross), literary theories and criticism (John Barth, Mikhail Bakhtin,, Hans-Georg Gadamer, I. A. Richards, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., etc.), as well as other works relevant for different parts of the thesis.

The methodological approach employed in each chapter responds to the central interest of our paper, allowing us to progressively move towards a concluding section. Thus, in the first subchapter we follow the development of the short story by referring to a few very important practitioners and theorists of the genre and by exemplifying the ideas presented through a few works that help us record the evolution of the short story. In the second subchapter we endeavour to present different attitudes towards death and dying, relevant for the purpose of our thesis, starting with those we discover in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, and concluding with those we encounter in the North-American and South American society.

The second chapter is a progressive, theoretical journey towards an aesthetics of death that incorporates the Kantian and the Burkean notions of the beautiful and the sublime and Lessing’s ideas on artistic representations of death, while relying on the artist’s talent to beautifully represent things, emotions, and phenomena that would normally terrify the observer, as well as on man’s capacity to emotionally respond even to the greatest horrors of mankind. This chapter opens the path towards the analytic part of the thesis, divided in three sections in which the seven short stories previously mentioned are grouped according to their aesthetic function. Thus, the third chapter brings into discussion the aesthetic quality of death in the Romantic short story. The first subchapter focuses on the aesthetic function of the grotesque in the representation of death, as exemplified in E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” while the second subchapter relies on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” to portray terror and death as aesthetic experiences, beginning with Poe’s own ideas on death and beauty, expressed in his essays and reviews, and relating them to the aesthetic principles established in the second chapter of our doctoral thesis.

The fourth chapter follows the social function of the aesthetics of death. The short stories included in this section are Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” two masterpieces that may seem completely different, but are nevertheless brought together by the idea that in both of them the authors try to give a meaning to death itself.

The last chapter deals with the liminal condition of death as a threshold between a material and an immaterial world. The first short story selected for interpretation is Mircea Eliade’s “With the Gypsy Girl,” a short story in which the rational and the irrational, the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the profane collide in order to create a world in which the idea of death is no longer frightening. For the second subchapter we have chosen James Joyce’s “The Dead” to focus on the revelatory quality of death, as well as on Joyce’s treatment of the theme of death as a literary device used to symbolically represent the general paralysis of an entire society. The final subchapter brings to the fore a short story in which the idea of death is only implied through a series of transformations that strip the main character of his own identity – Jorge Luis Borges’s “Shakespeare’s Memory.”

1. Dying in the Story

1.1. The Short Story – The Development of a Genre

Storytelling is probably one of the oldest recreational activities of mankind. Fairytales, myths, parables, ballads and legends have all existed ever since language itself was invented and they are all to be traced in the oral tradition of all cultures, passed down from generation to generation. In written form, stories are to be found in the literature of the Greek Antiquity, of India and of medieval France and Arabia, but the modern short story, which is in fact the main topic of our discussion, came into existence in the early nineteenth century. Of course, the modern short story finds its origins in the biblical parables, in Boccaccio’s Decameron and in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and yet we owe the birth of this new genre to Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Nikolai Gogol, the writers whose short narrative prose attracted the attention of a significant number of literary theorists and even forced them to find a name for this new and exceptional way of storytelling.

The emergence of this new genre was not, however, steady and smooth. Many authors before Poe and Hawthorne wrote short stories, but since this type of prose fiction was mostly meant for magazines and periodicals, its development was conditioned by the popularity of this type of publications. Luckily, the mass middle class literacy of the nineteenth century also brought with it an increased interest in literature, and, given the expansion of magazine and periodical market, combining the two seemed like a very good idea. With this combination in hand, by the mid nineteenth century the number of this type of publications escalated, the writers began experimenting with this new literary form, and the readers’ need for literature was satisfied.

Many critics recognize Washington Irving as the first short story writer. With the publication of The Sketch Book in 1819, Irving seems to have turned storytelling into a quite particular mode of expression. The nineteenth century writers had already manifested a special interest in everything that stands beyond man’s rational capacity, but it was Irving the one who successfully combined the non-rational with the realistic detail. In his stories, told from the narrator’s point of view, the main character often falls under the rule of the dramatized narrator who “becomes a subjective presence – a particular consciousness through which the tale filters.” Thus Irving makes the first steps towards the creation of the modern short story, but the abundant descriptions included in his stories are more compatible with the longer narratives, which is why his tales cannot be considered authentic short stories.

The importance of Irving’s tales in the development of the new genre should not be dismissed, but despite their popularity among the American, as well as the international audiences, his tales did not actually manage to enhance the value of the short story in the literary circles of the early nineteenth century. Many authors regarded short story writing merely as a means of providing for their families and supporting their passions for other types of literature. Poe, for example, despite being one of the most prolific practitioners of this new genre and also one of the first critics who introduced a theory regarding the composition of the short story, still enjoyed thinking of himself primarily as “a poet in the Romantic tradition, especially in the fantasies of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Nevertheless, his theory regarding the composition of the short story, introduced in his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales, established him as one of the founders of this new genre.

According to Poe, Hawthorne’s volume, Twice Told Tales, provides the pattern for a well-written tale (the name under which the short story was known back then). We discover in them not only a mixture of mythical and romantic elements, set in motion in a realistic environment, but also a harmony between the character’s inner state and the construction of the external setting:

“A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentences tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction. The idea of the tale has been presented unblemished, because undisturbed; and this is an end unattainable by the novel. Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue length is yet more to be avoided.”

As we notice from the above paragraph, style and brevity are the first important characteristics of the short story. If in that which concerns brevity Poe argues that a well-written tale should be longer than a poem, but short enough to be read in a sitting, in matters of style he militates for the unity of effect or impression, which can only be achieved when an author’s power of creation, inventiveness, imagination and originality work together at full capacity and which can be rendered only through a condensed prose composition, full of imagery and symbols, such as the short story.

Of course, in his appraisal of Hawthorne’s short stories, Poe was in fact demarcating “an ideal genre – a fantasy field for discourse, where uncertain assumptions about readership and authorship were accepted as facts of human nature, […] in the context of a set of personal ambitions, which existed in symbiosis with his vision of the short story.” In other words, he was advocating for the genre he would also embrace. Perhaps constrained by financial difficulties, Poe partially gave up his ambitions of aesthete and poet and adopted the same mercantile culture he once rejected. During the Depression of 1837 he realized that magazines, rather than lengthy volumes, had become “the appropriate expression of American culture,” and therefore he accepted the prevailing trends and turned them into propagation mechanisms for his own philosophy of art.

In that which concerns the structure of a short story, Poe does not impose significant restrictions. His short stories follow the traditional plot structure. In the opening section the setting, the situation and the characters are introduced to the reader. Next, the reader is familiarized with the complications that turn the situation presented in the opening section into an exceptional one. The action then is moved towards the climax, which is the point of greatest tension, while the end of the story leads to some sort of resolution. Both Poe and Hawthorne made extensive use of this traditional plot structure and they both distinguished themselves from other short story writers through their choice of themes, bizarre protagonists and unconventional situations.

As is so often the case with romantic writers, in their short stories fantasy almost always overrides reality and the reader is carried into a world that defies logic and rational experience. And yet, Poe never imposes a pre-established pattern in that which concerns the choice of themes. He advocates instead for a careful choice of words to support the predetermined design, which is exactly what Hawthorne does in his short stories. Hawthorne also resorts to descriptions, like Irving, but the difference between the two is that the former seeks to explore a “psychological reality through symbolic details making up the surface of his stories,” while the latter’s intention was to create perfectly balanced tales in which humour and simplicity are perfectly intertwined with mystery and restrained pathos in the eighteenth century fashion. Consequently, Hawthorne’s tales, with their disposition towards introspection, with their attention to some of the greatest problems of humanity and with their focus on single extraordinary incidents instead of some misfortunate chain of events that lead to some bizarre circumstances, are more close to the modern short story than Irving’s elaborate, yet overworked tales. As Fred Lewis Pattee puts it, Hawthorne:

“did four things for the short story: he turned it from its German romantic extravagances and frivolity and horrors into sane and moral channels; he made of it the study of a single intense situation; he deepened it and gave it beauty; and he made it respectable even in New England, a dignified literary form, admitted as such even by the most serious of the Transcendentalists. After Twice – Told Stories and Mosses From an Old Manse the short story had no longer to apologize for its existence and live a vagabond life in the corners of weekly papers and the pages of lady’s books and annuals: it had won so secure a place that even before Hawthorne had died The Atlantic Monthly, the constituted mouthpiece of the Brahmins of New England, could print seventeen specimens of it in its first volume.”

Poe, in his turn, despite being the greatest defender of the style embraced by Hawthorne, was not as critically acclaimed during his life as his peer. Even though they both lived in the same period, worked within the framework of romanticism and contributed to the same periodicals, their life experience and their personality traits could not have been more opposed, and perhaps this is the reason why their careers took such different turns. Poe’s love for the bizarre and the extravagant, manifested in his writing, often prevented him from having his work published in anything else but magazines and periodicals. He was often suggested to “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality, […] to apply his fine humor and his extensive acquirements to more familiar subjects of satire,” and to cut back the degree of obscurity in his writing.

Of course, if Poe had neglected the mystical tendencies of his mind, if he had softened the mystery and the macabre in his short stories, and if he had reduced their gravity, he would actually have ignored who he really was – a young American author with an English education, endowed with artistic excellence and driven by the desire to gain worldwide recognition for his work. Some years before him, Irving’s triumph on the English literary scene made it clear that the American literature needed to become internationally famous, and who else could have done this better than Poe? After all, he was the writer who had borrowed some of the most popular themes among the German romanticists, passed them through the filter of his own consciousness and turned them into expressions of his own soul. Nevertheless, we cannot accuse him of having embraced the German thought simply because of its popularity, for that would be just as wrong as to deny any German influence over his work. As Canby suggests, Poe’s preference for the themes that have a great impact on man’s sensibility finds its origins somewhere in his educational background, as well as in his personality:

“He seems, indeed, to have read as a young man much that the Germans have been reading, cultivated an introspective and intensely mystical view of his own personality in a fashion very characteristic of them, and, furthermore, familiarized himself with the stories of Hoffmann and Tieck, wherein mysticism, complexities of the mind, terror of the soul, had been made to pay dividends through the agency of moderately good narrative. To say that Poe was a creature of German influence would be absurd. To say that German thought and fancy were sympathetic to his genius, would be putting it too mildly. Between these extremes the truth must lie.”

The role of this dissertation is not, however, to determine the amount of German influence in Poe’s work, but to establish his contribution to the development of a unique American literary style, especially in that which concerns the short story. As we have already discussed, Poe militates for a clear design of the short story, but also for the use of myths and archetypes. Of course, his tendency to rely on myths and archetypal symbols is romantic in nature, as Northrop Frye puts it, for his stories are not concerned with gods and demons or any other mythical creatures, but with real people in extraordinary situations. And yet, he builds his stories around an almost plausible incident, but he also instils mystery and almost always a hint of terror into them in order to “suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience.”

Another central figure in the development of the short story is Nikolai Gogol. In his famous short story, “The Overcoat,” recognized by many critics as one of the earliest examples of modern short story, the realist elements that build the initial atmosphere of the story are eventually replaced by supernatural and mythical patterns. According to Frye, such a transition from realism to myths is meant to redirect the reader’s attention from the shape of story, from what it appears to tell us, to its content and representation. Now, if we return to Gogol, a first reading of “The Overcoat” would not have such a great impact upon us. After all, the story focuses on one character, Akaky Akakievich, a poor copyist who, at some point in his life, is compelled to buy a new coat. He initially tries to have his old coat mended, but since even his tailor refuses to add any new patches to that shredded rag, he reluctantly agrees to buy a new one. Of course, the main character realizes that it would take an almost supernatural effort to gather the money, but a series of small fortunate events facilitates the purchase. For the first time in his life the poor copyist finds himself in a better situation. However, the prospect of an improved life quickly vanishes when the coat is stolen. On his way back home from the party thrown by his colleagues to celebrate the new coat, Akaky is attacked by two thieves who steal the coat and leave him lying down in the snow. He desperately tries to get it back, but the authorities refuse to help him. He then seeks help from a very important person, but instead he receives insults and mockery. Extremely humiliated, discouraged and injured, he falls ill and dies. The end of the story shows Akaky’s ghost wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, stealing people’s overcoats. His quest for justice, which “to a poor copying clerk has never meant much more that a warm overcoat,” ends when he finally takes the coat of the same very important person that once refused to help him. From that moment on, Akaky’s ghost is never seen, but other ghosts continue to haunt other areas of the city.

As ordinary as the story may appear, if we place it in its historical context, we realize that Gogol does not tell us the story of a certain clerk from a certain department, but the story of every man trapped in the claws of mediocrity, a man who loses his individuality in his attempt to become part of the bigger picture and who never manages to transgress the boundaries of his own condition in the real world. With its shuddering realism, with its focus on the tragic and the absurd in the human condition and with a style that is neither satiric, nor heroic, Gogol’s “The Overcoat” reflects the ambiguity and contradictions of a psychologically pressured reality, one in which there is no place for compassion, generosity, or acceptance. As O’Connor points out, there is no real hero in Gogol’s story, for “there is no character here with whom the reader can identify himself,” and “there is no form of society to which any character in it could possibly attach himself and regard as normal,” because the short story was not meant to show the perks of living and working in a society that functions according to well-established principles, but to emphasize the absurdity and the paradoxes that usually govern it.

This brief reassessment of some of the short stories written by the founding fathers of this new literary genre has helped us understand the nature of the nineteenth century short stories. As we already mentioned, there is a general movement towards mythical pattern, archetypes and the supernatural not only in the works of Poe and Hawthorne, but also in the work of Gogol, despite the latter’s almost extreme faithfulness to reality. However, the twentieth century short story seems to have given up much of the mythical influence, and it appears that the first steps towards a more realistic dimension were taken by Herman Melville.

Melville was, of course, a nineteenth century writer, and his 1865 volume, The Piazza Tales, proves that the form of the short story was still open to experimentation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Melville appreciated Poe as a writer, but he did not embrace the latter’s theory regarding the short story. In his short fiction there is an obvious shift towards realism, with a strong emphasis on the real problems of society. Of course, every story can be considered an expression of the culture that produced it, but with Melville the short story took a direction never envisaged by Poe, Hawthorne, or Gogol. Most of his stories consist of realistic descriptions of settings and characters, subtle variations in point of view, as well as odd incidents that have nothing to do with the external world, but find their roots in man’s inner nature. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” for example, the story in which the main character would prefer not to work, eat, or live, Melville addresses the “question of human coercion and human responsibility” in order to bring to light the theme of the self-conscious alienated subject who cannot find a place for himself in a world in which the true values of mankind have been crushed under the weight of social regulation and capitalism.

In Melville’s story the narrator, an elderly Wall Street lawyer, is both observer and participant in the action. As he recounts the witnessed events that led to his employee’s death, the narrator realizes that Bartleby’s tragic journey through life has become an incentive for introspection, for self-reflection. If Bartleby’s gradual withdrawal from everything that he is supposed to do confuses and even irritates the narrator at first, his polite refusal to comply with his employer’s requests somehow throws the responsibility on to the narrator, who begins to feel sympathetic towards his disobedient employee. He even tries to justify Bartleby’s erratic behaviour, but any attempt to reason with him is eventually suppressed because of his unresponsiveness. However, the narrator is willing to do anything necessary in order to maintain the illusion of a normal working environment, but since the idea of firing Bartleby does not please him either, he decides to move his office and leave his employee behind. This decision, as absurd as it may seem, shows how far the modern society can go in order to keep up appearances, and yet, the narrator’s final words “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” suggest that the scrivener’s death has not been in vain. Although a man had to die so that another can wake up to reality, the alarm signals regarding the paths imposed by society have been fired.

Through “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” as well as the other five short stories included in The Piazza Tales, Melville points to various disturbing aspects of the nineteenth century society, among which we discover the unnecessary sacrifices of humanity, the inefficiency of ideological and political trends, the dangers of industrialization, the deceitful nature of religious doctrines, and many others. However, Melville does not bluntly expose any of these aspects, but instead he creates memorable stories, full of symbols and resonant imagery, that encourage the reader to perceive the differences between what one believes to be real and what is actually real.

The rigorous pursuit of reality we discover in Melville’s work became a regular theme in the late nineteenth century short story. As the new genre was becoming even more popular, so its practitioners were becoming more aware of their surroundings. Soon enough many American writers began to place “their characters in mimetic fictional worlds where conflicts and complexities arise from the interactions with the external realm, especially social forces.” In Europe, too, the new genre was beginning to receive a significant amount of attention, but the dynamics of the development of the European short story were quite different. In England, for example, most writers preferred longer narratives, but there were still a few who chose to experiment with short fiction as well. Among them, we can mention Robert Louis Stevenson, the writer who embraced Poe’s idea related to the pre-established design of the short story, as well as themes that remind of Hawthorne, despite of his French affiliation in matters of expression. As Canby suggests:

“Stevenson is the great polisher of the short story. He finally elevates the modern short narrative above the suspicion of triviality. Hawthorne had given it dignity without flexibility, Poe beauty without a solid basis, and a generation replete with hasty writers had followed. The services of a stylist were needed and, in Stevenson, secured. Furthermore, he set the impressionistic story upon its feet in England, and upon a firmer base in America.”

Other important nineteenth century English writers who tried their pen in the “minor” genre are Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling. Both of them took advantage of the periodicals’ increasing popularity, embraced the conventions of the regular magazine stories, but also allowed themselves to practice with unconventional narrative structures. This way, Kipling wrote an impressive number of 350 stories and established himself as one of the most prolific English writers. Andrew Rutherford, for example, considers him “an innovator and a virtusoso in the art of the short story” and claims that Kipling’s contribution has turned the new genre into a major one. Nevertheless, the inconsistency in his style is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries. Moving back and forth, from the traditional narrative techniques, to the elliptical, yet complex, forms of short fictions, he managed to continually reinvent himself and gained a position among the precursors of modernism:

“Embodying simultaneously the spirit of oral-telling tradition while breaking new ground in narrative technique, for example by mimicking cinematic devices, his stories look both forward and back. Moreover, they straddle the divide between popular ‘middlebrow’ entertainment, and high literary experimentalism, a divide that […] was fundamental to modernism and its self-definitions.”

In Conrad’s work, too, we discover elements that enable us to think of it as a bridge between psychological realism and modernism. His semi-mythical narratives that serve as a platform on which to investigate the psychological realities of the century, his use of the frame-narrator device that allows the omission of important information and compels the reader to put his own imagination to work, and his preference for ambiguity and multi-layered narrative, turned him into one of the avant-garde writers of his day who challenged and successfully reinvented the techniques of short story writing.

Conrad, like Stevenson, was a great admirer of French literature. In that which concerns the short story, Guy the Maupassant distinguishes himself from the other French short fiction writers through his objective narrative style, through his ability to artistically represent banality, and through a gentle, yet obvious irony. As Bloom suggests, de Maupassant was probably the most popular story writer, and yet, he does not owe such popularity to his innate creative genius, but rather to a talent gradually acquired under Flaubert’s guidance: “many of Maupassant’s simplicities are merely what they seem to be, yet they are not shallow. Maupassant had learned from his teacher Flaubert, that “talent is a prolonged patience” at seeing what others tend not to see,” and this is precisely what he focused on in his writing. Nevertheless, his carefully constructed stories, drawn from the author’s own experience and filled with realistic detail, are considered relatively unsatisfactory when compared with Chekhov’s and even Turgenev’s short-stories. Frank O’Connor, for example, criticizes de Maupassant for having become what he chose to write about – the image of the “submerged sexual population of nineteenth-century Europe: “Others had treated [this subject] before him, undoubtedly, but he was the man who put his seal on it, who identified himself publicly with the prostitutes, the girls with illegitimate children, the children themselves.” And yet, de Maupassant has to be given credit for having decided to approach in his writing precisely that obscure part of the society so much ignored by the writers of the age.

Another important figure in the development of the modern short story is the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. As a man, Turgenev thought of himself as a “weak, ineffectual figure,” driven by his admiration for practical men. He lived in a political climate in which oppression and persecution were common practices among the artists, and yet, he did not remain indifferent to the social and political realities of his age. His work, in which he overtly celebrated the natural beauty of the Russian countryside, is often interspersed with details that may seem irrelevant at first, and yet, they manage to bring to light “all the human agony.” In his collection of short fiction, A Sportsman Sketches, he returned to the conventional narrative devices employed in prose writing (dramatic irony and antithesis), he simplified the action and he compressed it in single episodes that happened in a relatively small amount of time, concurrently recalling the events of several years through flashbacks and indirect narration, thus establishing a tradition which would later be challenged by Kafka and Borges.

Turgenev’s contribution to the renewal of the short story in that which concerns the form is quite significant, and yet, the one who is credited for having revolutionized the form, as well as the content of the short story, is Anton Chekhov. In his short stories we discover de Maupassant’s tendency to represent banality and his submerged population groups, Turgenev’s compassion for the human suffering, Gogol’s truthfulness to reality, and Poe’s ideas regarding the brevity and the unity of effect. And yet, de Maupassant seems to have inspired Chekhov the most. His work is filled with recognizable people, similar to those we find in de Maupassant’s short stories, but treated in a personal manner and forced to act and react in a more realistic environment. His characters’ traits are not overemphasized, the plot is simplified to its minimum, and the end of the story usually presents the characters as being haunted by the same uncertainty they were dealing with in the beginning.

Taken separately, Chekhov’s stories seem to cover multiple subjects, and yet, there is one idea that prevails in every story he ever wrote – the uncertainty of human life. He seems to have understood that life is nothing more than a series of random experiences, impossible to anticipate and difficult to deal with, and this is precisely what he depicts in his writing. He drags his characters through all sorts of unusual, yet lifelike, situations and he closely follows their reactions, but at the end of the crisis nothing really changes, or if it does, the change is only temporary, and after that life goes “on as before, uninteresting, miserable, and sometimes even agonising.”

According to Chekhov, the construction of a successful short story must follow six basic principles: “absence of lengthy verbiage of political-social-economic nature,” “total objectivity,” “truthful descriptions of persons and objects,” “extreme brevity,” “audacity and originality” and “compassion.” A memorable short story in which Chekhov applies these principles and also underlines the unexpectedness of human life is “A Story without an End.” In it the author gives up the conventional structure of a plot that requires an opening section, a climax and a resolution and carries the reader straight to the most intense part of the story – the moment when the main character attempts suicide after the death of his wife. The narrator, who happens to be a short fiction writer as well, describes the episode in detail, with the ability of a painter, using almost grotesque image patterns instead of colours, and lyrical tones and symbols instead of shades:

“the picture I saw […] could have only been drawn by death. […] A coffin was standing on two tables in the middle of the little room. […] Billows of muslin were mingled in disorder from the face to the tips of the two shoes, and from among the billows peeped out two pale motionless hands, holding a wax cross. The dark gloomy corners of the little drawing-room, the ikons behind the coffin, the coffin itself, everything except the softly glimmering lights, were still as death, as the tomb itself.”

The end of the story reveals the narrator’ astonishment at the sight of his friend, the same man who a year before was about to commit suicide and who was now laughing and playing the piano for some ladies. He is interrupted by the narrator who asks him to read his new story – obviously, the one revealed to the reader at the beginning – and to provide an end for it. The reading brings back painful memories, and yet, the main character eventually bursts into a fit of laughter and, after commenting on the absurdity of life and on the suffering a man has to endure, he suggests that the story should end on a humorous note, for not even the most terrible experience could make an everlasting imprint on a man: “that imprint wears out as easily as a pair of cheap boots. There is nothing left, not a scrap. It’s as though I hadn’t been suffering then, but had been dancing a mazurka. Everything in the world is transitory, and that transitoriness is absurd! A wide field for humorists!”

The end of the story provides no resolution, no sense of closure, and instead it remains open to a multitude of possibilities, triggering the reader’s imagination. Of course, one might argue that every story puts the imagination to work, and yet in Poe’s or Hawthorne’s or even Gogol’s stories the reader knows exactly what happened or what is going to happen to the protagonist in the end. In their short fiction there is no other alternative than the one presented by the narrator, but in Chekhov’s stories, besides a less definite plot, we have an even more indefinite ending. The author offers no solution to the problems exposed; he simply raises the right questions and allows the reader to find his own answers. Through an objective account of the “subjective uncertainties and anxiety” of the modern man, Chekhov opens the path towards a complete transformation of the short story in point of technique, structure and subject matter, a path that will be followed by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, and again reinvented by writers like Francis Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges and many others.

1.2. Death and Dying through Centuries and Cultures

For the sake of clarity, any study should begin with a definition of the concepts brought into question. And yet, when death and dying are the topics to be discussed, providing a definition becomes quite a challenge. Generally speaking, death is a predetermined and predictable phenomenon for every species. People are aware of its existence, and yet, death almost always manages to take us by surprise. We know that nothing is eternal and that we are all born to die, but we still think of death primarily as a part of our past and we deny the imminence of our own death. We see it directly related to the history of humanity and the past, in general, and most of the times we fail to accept that it is also part of our future, for everything that is ever born is also meant to die someday.

Nevertheless, death and dying have always aroused man’s curiosity from ancient times to the present days. Philosophers have sought to explain it, anthropologists have investigated the manners of dying, psychologists have tried to discover the means to deal with it, theologians have provided all sorts of explanations regarding its meaning and its necessity, writers have confronted it in their work, and everybody will have to experience it at some point. Medically speaking, death manifests itself in the same way for everybody: the heart stops pumping blood and any brain activity ceases, but in that which concerns people’s attitude towards it, it appears that time and cultural backgrounds are the factors that determine a major change in the way one perceives death.

The historical perspective on death and dying is comprehensively articulated in the works of French social historians, such as Philippe Ariès, who endeavoured to illustrate not only the dying man’s attitude towards death, but also “the lived experience of dying,” which actually refers to the impact the death of the other has upon the observer. Starting with a series of lectures on death and dying, gathered under the name Western Attitudes toward Death, Ariès presents a sequence of attitudes towards death that have arisen progressively since the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The first one is exposed in the section called “Tamed death” and corresponds to the late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when death was perceived as something both familiar and near. The dying man, being aware of the closeness of his own death, prepared himself for it. First, he lay in bed facing east, he uttered his regrets over the end of his life, he pardoned the ones who surrounded his deathbed, he blessed the family left behind, he confessed his sins to the priest, he was granted absolution, and then he peacefully waited for his own death.

Another important aspect regarding death in the early Middle Ages is that dying was a public ceremony. Everybody needed to be near the dying man in the final hours of his life. Relatives, friends, neighbours and even children attended the ceremony. Everything was very simple and everybody, including the dying, performed the rituals calmly, without any great emotional display. Moreover, people were so familiar with death that they started to think of the cemetery as an asylum of a refuge that could nevertheless be used for non-funeral purposes, such a meeting place for musicians, merchants, and even gamblers; this attitude lasted until the end of the seventeenth century.

In the second section, called “One’s Own Death,” Ariès presents an attitude that corresponds to the second part of the Middle Ages. Starting with the eleventh century, death was seen as “one of the great laws of the species and [man] had no thought of escaping it or glorifying it.” People continued to think of the death of the other in the same way they thought of their own death, but if the man of the early Middle Ages believed in the collective destiny of all species, the twelfth century man was more concerned with the individuality of each person. Thereafter the church became a unifying institution whose role was to take charge of the rituals involving the body, as well as of those performed for the salvation of the soul. Thus, the artes moriendi, such as engravings, paintings and even texts that spoke of the rituals to be performed for a good death, started to illustrate the dying man’s salvation as an individual trial. There was a general preoccupation with death and this manifested itself in the arts as well. Artists showed an increased interest in the macabre and images of the human skeleton and decomposing bodies filled with maggots soon became omnipresent in poetry, dramatic works, jewellery and engravings.

The Renaissance came with yet another change in that which concerns man’s attitude and the artistic representations of death. The ceremony that took place in the bedchamber of the dying started to be represented quite unusually in the arts. The dying was no longer surrounded only by his relatives and friends, but also by supernatural beings which offered a “spectacle reserved for the dying man alone and one which he contemplates with a bit of anxiety and a great deal of indifference. […] On one side are the Trinity, the Virgin and the celestial court; on the other, Satan and a monstrous army of demons.” Such a representation suggests not only an increased anxiety over one’s death, but also over one’s way of living. If the man of the late Middle Ages believed that a good death redeemed everything, the seventeenth century man began to acknowledge the importance of morality. A good death was no longer enough for the salvation of the soul; a moral way of living was also necessary.

Another shift in attitude is to be noticed in man’s apprehension of the horrors of physical death and of decomposition. As Ariès points out, the decomposition of the body was no longer considered only a post-mortem transformation, but it was also related to illness and old age and perceived as a sign of man’s failure. Such failure was attributed to the presence of corruption in the human body, but also in everything related to life and nature: “The worms which devour cadavers do not come from the earth, but from within the body, from its natural liquors. Each conduit [of the body] / Constantly produces putrid matter / Out of the Body.”

The third section of Western Attitudes toward Death, called “Thy Death,” covers the eighteenth century mentality, one that thrives with only slight changes until the first half of the twentieth century and which seems to find its roots sometime in the fifteenth century, when the themes concerning death were given an erotic dimension. From that moment on, death was no longer represented as a subtle presence, but as a mighty force “which tears man from his daily life, from rational society, from his monotonous work, in order to make him undergo a paroxysm, plunging him into an irrational, violent and beautiful world.” Moreover, in art and literature death was often associated with love; Eros and Thanatos were brought together and functioned as complementary, yet opposing forces, for in their continual struggle for supremacy man has always played the part of the victim, tormented by desire and threatened with annihilation.

In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century the erotico-macabre themes were quite common and death was often represented as a desirable end in literature and arts. Such an attitude was also valid in the real world, but in the eighteenth century another major change occurred. Death was still familiar and tamed, but it was no longer met with calm and indifference, or even desire as before. The solemn ceremony that took place in the bedchamber of the dying still had the dying man in the leading role, but the bystanders were no longer as emotionally detached as in the old days. In literature, death “lost its erotic characteristics, or at least they were reduce to Beauty. Death was no longer desirable, as in the macabre novels, but it was admirable in its beauty.” It became a painful experience for the observers, but it is precisely the painfulness that which rendered death’s romantic quality and turned it into one of the most popular themes among the eighteenth century writers.

Another important transformation occurred in the nineteenth century, and it concerns the purpose of mourning. If from the end of the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century the period of mourning was either meant to protect the ones left behind from the excesses of their grief or to constrain those who did not suffer too much to pay their respect to the deceased for at least a while by imposing a certain social conduct upon them, in the nineteenth century people began to disregard most social conventions in the period of mourning. At this point, however, it is important to make a clear distinction between mourning and grief. According to Therese A. Rando, grief “refers to the process of experiencing the psychological, behavioural, social, and physical reactions to the perception of loss.” The response to such loss usually takes many forms, relying especially on the subject’s cultural background. Nevertheless, this response always manifests itself as one or a combination of four things: the mourner’s feelings (sorrow, depression, etc.), his protests at the loss, usually accompanied by the wish to undo the loss, a series of stress-related effects that can even manifest in the physical realm, and “the mourner’s personal actions stimulated by any of the previous three (e.g., crying, social withdrawal, increased use of medication or psychoactive substances).” Of course, this classification reflects the contemporary perception of grief, and, as we shall see, there are not major differences between the way grief manifested itself in the nineteenth century and the way it is expressed nowadays.

There are, however, significant differences between the contemporary and the nineteenth century period of mourning. Grief in itself is only one part of mourning. It is an important part because it launches the transition towards the acceptance of loss, but this transition is completed only when all the psychosocial conditions for a successful accommodation of loss have been fulfilled. As Rando suggests, there are three main conditions or operations that need to be performed for a healthy mourning. The first one is internal and it involves a sort of transformation of the psychosocial ties that bound the mourner to the loved one, now physically dead. The second operation is also internal and it refers to the mental processes undertaken by the mourner in order to redefine his own identity and his assumptive world, without relying in any way on the image of the loved one, while the last operation is external and it implies the mourner’s integration in a physical and social world in which the loved one no longer exists.

Now, if nowadays the mental processes involved in mourning are given more attention, in the eighteenth century the social manifestations seemed to be more important. Thus, the mourner was allowed to perform the necessary rituals, but he was also constrained to have a social life. He had to receive visits from friends, relatives or neighbours for it was generally thought that the company of familiar people might ease his pain and it would prevent him from expressing his grief more than it was socially permitted. Mourning in itself was quite peaceful and the grief manifestations were kept to a minimum. In the nineteenth century, however, grief manifestations reached their pinnacle. The usual funeral rites were still being performed, but mourning in itself “was unfurled with an uncustomary degree of ostentation:”

“It even claimed to have no obligation to social conventions and to be the most spontaneous and insurmountable expression of a very grave wound: people cried, fainted, languished, and fasted. […] It was a sort of return to the excessive and spontaneous demonstrations […] of the Early Middle Ages, after seven centuries of sobriety. The nineteenth century is the era of mourning which the psychologists of today call hysterical mourning. And it is true that at times they almost reached the point of madness.”

And yet, such excessive emotional displays only suggest that in the nineteenth century death was no longer tamed and familiar. People stopped identifying the death of the other with their own and began to accept it with greater difficulty. Of course, that also implied a transformation of the arts and of literature in particular, for writers were given newly reconsidered material to work with.

As we have seen so far, the western attitudes towards death have progressively changed from the early Middle Ages until the mid-nineteenth century. However, the twentieth century seems to have brought about some sort of regression. Death is no longer a collective ritual, as in the Middle Ages, nor a familiar experience lived with “passive resignation and mystical trust.” There is no macabre fascination with death as in the seventeenth and the eighteenth century, nor a coexistence of the living with the dead. Instead, by the mid-twentieth century death has become invisible: “Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.”

The idea of a forbidden death, discussed in the last section of Ariès’s work, sprang sometime in the nineteenth century, when the dying person was hidden the gravity of his condition for as long as possible. The reason for telling such a lie was supposedly the desire to spare the dying from the pain that may be caused by the awareness of their impending death. Nevertheless, as we move forward into the twentieth century, this reason was replaced by the necessity to maintain at least the appearance of a happy life:

“one must avoid – no longer for the sake of the dying person, but for society’s sake, for the sake of those close to the dying person – the disturbance and the overly strong and unbearable emotions caused by the ugliness of dying and by the very presence of death in the midst of a happy life, for it is henceforth given that life is always happy or should always seem to be so.”

As we may notice, the key words in the above paragraph are “the ugliness of dying” and “happy life.” So far, death was never described as ugly. The Middle Ages man considered it familiar and ordinary, the Renaissance man thought of it as a desirable end and as a threshold between our world and divinity, the eighteenth century man described it as violent and yet beautiful, despite its ability to cause a great deal of pain to the observer, the nineteenth century man associated it with grief and despair, and the twentieth century man considered it ugly and decided to hide it. With the advancement of science, life expectancy improved as well, so when death still occurs people are inclined to think of it as a failure of science, and, as they tend to do with any kind of failure, they keep it as private as possible.

And yet, this does not mean that the loss of a loved one is any less dramatic and painful. It means instead that the twentieth century man has become too sensitive to the perception of his own vulnerability. It means that resignation does not come as easily as before, that man can no longer find comfort in the religious teachings, in the idea of an afterlife, and that it is easier to simply exclude any reminder of death from the daily life:

“images of death and dying are no longer a part of our current vocabulary. Sorrow and mourning are seldom expressed in everyday discourse. The experience of death and loss, like the presence of our aging population, is often screened off from the affluent life style of the successful middle classes. Not only is death a question that we have not dealt with as a culture, but aging and death are rarely a concern until we are faced with an immediate experience of physical limitation or tragedy. From the physical segregation of the elderly to the avoidance of distress in our present medical format, we have cultivated a type of social anesthesia that does not easily admit the ever-present reality of biological aging or sudden loss.”

If in the past the mourning rituals helped alleviate the sorrow of the survivors, the contemporary man has gone so far as to even deny his right to mourn. He experiences grief, but he abstains from publicly displaying any sign of it. As Gorer points out, death has become pornographic – one of the greatest taboos of the modern age. Up until the nineteenth century children were allowed to be near the dying person and even encouraged to think about death, but they were prevented from finding out the basic information regarding birth and copulation. Nowadays, however, they receive sexuality education, but they are prevented from learning anything about death for as long as possible:

“The natural processes of corruption and decay have become disgusting; […] preoccupation about such processes is (or was) morbid and unhealthy. Our great-grandfathers were told that babies were found under gooseberry bushes or cabbages; our children are likely to be told that those who have passed on […] are changed into flowers, or lie at rest in lovely gardens. The ugly facts are relentlessly hidden; the art of the embalmers is an art of complete denial.”

Ariès argues that denying death has become a common practice in the entire western civilization of the twentieth century. There is a general movement towards a complete annihilation of everything that reminds us of death, but it seems that there are significant variations in the way it manifests itself in the North-American society and in Europe. As we have said before, the denial of death comes from man’s need to preserve happiness, but since it is impossible to escape it, the profit-oriented man of the American society decided to transform it, “to put make-up on it, to sublimate it.” In industrial Europe, on the hand, the middle class man, for example, wants to make it disappear. In the United States the wake, which includes viewing the remains and paying the last respects to the deceased, continues to exist, along with the preference for burial, while in Britain they prefer not to see the remains of the deceased and favour cremation.

In The Hour of our Death Ariès extends the ideas presented in Western Attitudes toward Death, but, as we shall see, the patterned transformations of the attitudes toward death presented in his two books are universally valid only for the western civilization. We may find similarities between the western attitudes and those that are predominant in South-Eastern and Eastern Europe, or even in the South-American society, but there are also many aspects that differentiate them.

From the existentialist point of view, death arrives within the human consciousness as a sort of crisis, perhaps the greatest one for all individuals, regardless of their cultural background, religion, level of education or any other factors. Nevertheless, these factors influence man’s attitude towards this ultimate crisis and determine the way he deals with it. In the Balkan region, or more precisely in Romania, the man of the past seems to have embraced the idea of death and sought to explore its reality through a series of rituals that were meant to facilitate the transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead. We may be speaking, of course, of a sort of tame death, such as the one existing in the western world, but in the Romanian way of dying, represented in some of the oldest folk tales, death was also charged with powerful spiritual vibrations and described as a passing to an eternal reality.

Mircea Eliade claims that such an attitude towards death is most common for the simple, uneducated man of the past, for whom death was nothing more than an experience of initiation, such as birth, which begins man’s life, or the wedding, which is supposed to be man’s first step to the discovery of his own sexuality. But, as it often happens when one is about to enter a new territory, fear begins to take over, and thus, the soon-to-be initiated needs to create some sort of coping mechanisms to ease his voyage into the unknown. The “primitive” man, for example, did not think of death as a normal and necessary phenomenon, but as the consequence of a mythical accident, for only myths could offer an acceptable and comforting description of the unknown:

“Myths, that is, narrate not only the origin of the World, of animals, of plants, and o man, but also all the primordial events in consequence of which man became what he is today – mortal, sexed, organized in a society, obliged to work in order to live, and working in accordance with certain rules. If the World exists, if man exists, it is because Supernatural Beings exercised creative powers in the beginning. But after the cosmogony and the creation of man other events occurred, and man as he is today is the direct result of those mythical events, he is constituted by those events. He is mortal because something happened in illo tempore.”

The mythical dimension attributed to death persisted over the centuries and the Romanian death, if we may say so, finds itself deeply entrenched in the mioritic tradition. The term “mioritic” was first introduced by the Romanian writer Lucian Blaga and used to define the Romanian poetic imagination, which, according to Blaga, finds its roots in one of the oldest Romanian pastoral ballads – Miorița (The Little Ewe). In the ballad a little ewe, Miorița, informs her master that two other shepherds plan to murder him and steal his flock. The shepherd refuses to defend himself and accepts death with complete resignation. However, he tells his favourite ewe where and how he should be buried and asks her to spare his mother from an unnecessary pain and to let her know, not that he was betrayed and killed, but that he had married the daughter of king, that the sun and the moon held his bridal crown, that the mountains were his priests, that the birds of the sky sang for him, and that the stars light up the sky for him.

The association of death and wedding is not entirely Romanian, but the representation of death as a cosmic marriage is. Miorița is the most eloquent example in this respect. As Eliade argues, the symbolic charge of death presented as a wedding provides the framework for the transformation of a meaningless death into something more tolerable, and this sort of transformation would become a definite pattern in the Romanian culture:

“In the Miorița the whole universe is transfigured. We are taken into a liturgical cosmos, in which Mysteries (in the religious sense of the term) are brought to fulfilment. […] one of the characteristics of the peasant Christianity of the Romanians and of eastern Europe is the presence of many religious elements that are ‘pagan,’ archaic, sometimes scarcely Christianized. It is a new religious creation, peculiar to the southeast of Europe, which we have termed ‘cosmic Christianity’ because, on the one hand, it projects the Christological mystery upon the whole of Nature and, on the other, neglects the historical elements of Christianity, only to dwell, instead, on the liturgical dimension of man’s existence in the world.”

In Miorița we discover one of the earliest examples of death represented as an allegorical wedding and, as we shall see, such a representation has much in common with the actual funeral rites performed in Romania for those who die before having married. A traditional funeral ceremony begins with the preparation of the deceased, who is washed, dressed and put in the coffin. Next, there is a memorial service called parastas, which is conducted by priests before taking the coffin out of the house. The deceased is carried by a funeral cortege to church, where another religious ceremony is performed, and then to the cemetery. Here the priests utter various prayers for the deceased before the actual burial, which is followed by a commemorative meal that is repeated over the years according to a well-established schedule, with slight variations from region to region. If the deceased was not married, a series of other rituals are performed, but before discussing them it is important to mention that the idea of a death-wedding of Miorița may originate from the similarities between the wedding and the funeral rituals. As Gail Kligman suggests, both of these rituals include the preparation of the bride or of the deceased, according to the situation, asking for forgiveness from one’s family or from the ones left behind, a religious ceremony at the church, the gift-giving at the wedding and the alms-giving at the funeral, celebratory or commemorative meal, again according to the situation, and a “ritual toasting of the bride and the groom” or a “ritual toasting of the soul of the deceased.”

As we have seen so far, religion plays an important part in the Romanian society. Most of the social conventions respect the religious beliefs, and since religion dictates that man’s duty is to marry when he reaches the proper age, the “social norms insist that the unmarried go to their graves married” as well. However, the actual wedding can no longer happen, so the funeral ceremony is turned into a symbolic wedding. The deceased wears a wedding costume. Girls always wear white dresses, just like the brides and they usually have a bridesmaid as well. The deceased is accompanied by mourners and women’s laments replace the music of the wedding. Of course, this tradition belongs to the man of the past and parts of it are still kept in some of the rural areas of Romania.

According to Mircea Eliade, the twentieth century brought about a strong preoccupation with death among the young Romanian writers. Of course, Eliade himself could be considered the greatest of them all. In one of his works on death he concludes that for all men death can only be seen either as a natural phenomenon, or as a mystery and a paradox, for one can observe death, but cannot understand its reality until he had experienced it, and then it is too late to pass the information to the others. And yet, there are “documents” that reflect man’s attitude towards death and these are, as Eliade points out, the Books of the Dead from various cultures and folklore, for only such documents reflect a collective attitude: “The fantastic presence in an individual is neurosis; the fantastic presence in a collectivity is folklore.” Of course, Eliade does not claim that the representations of death in folklore are more accurate than those included in historical and anthropological works, but he does maintain that they are at least as accurate as the religious ones, and more accurate than those included in the modern literary works, for folklore is the only instrument that can deliver the attitude of an entire nation. Thus, it would not be wrong to say that the folk ballad Miorița expresses an attitude towards death that persisted over the centuries in the Romanian culture, and yet, as we move deeper into the twenty first century, the Romanian death begins to look more and more like Ariès’s forbidden death.

In Eastern Europe, or more precisely in Russia, man’s attitude towards death and dying is quite similar to that of the Romanian people. The Russian culture, like the Romanian one, was built on traditional values and Christian teachings. Nevertheless, it seems that there was also a strong pagan influence that managed to perpetuate itself despite the various attempts to eradicate it, which were either initiated by the church or by the communist regime that wished to destroy both. Now, a lot of things may be said about the Russian culture and history, but in that which concerns man’s attitude towards death, the Russian folk epics are the earliest and the most suggestive works in which the Russian beliefs, customs and myths related to death are expressed.

The oldest Russian works belonging to the oral epic tradition are called bylinas and most of them have been created between the tenth and the fourteenth century. As for their evolution through the centuries, it appears that the first bylinas were based on mythology, while those that were created in the fourteenth century also relied on “factual” history and were “concerned with fighting the enemies” of the old Russian people, which were always defeated in the Russian folk epics. By the nineteenth century the bylinas were gathered and published by Russian ethnographers and folklorists and it was expected that after the Russian Revolution of 1917, under the pressure coming from the communist regime, the supernatural dimension of beliefs and customs would be preserved only in the collections of Russian epics. However, the twentieth century ethnographic research reveals a persistence of the old practices of the past, especially among the Russian peasantry.

Before reviewing the practices and beliefs related to death, it is important to mention that the religion of the old Russian society was Orthodox Christianity and that, despite the seventeenth century schism between the Russian Orthodox practitioners and the Old Believers who refused to embrace the changes imposed by the Patriarch Nikon, the death-related practices were the same for both communities. A traditional Russian funeral ceremony follows the steps of the Romanian one, given the fact that Orthodoxy is the main religion in both countries. There was no fear of death or of the dead in either of these countries, but if the Romanian folklore is dominated by the representation of death as a wedding, in the Russian folk tales the accent is put on the descriptions of unnatural and untimely deaths that are usually followed by a sort of resurrection. Of course, we are not talking about resurrection in the biblical sense, but rather about a rising of the corpses from their graves “to terrify or harass the living.”

The rising of the dead from their grave is also encountered in the Romanian tradition. In the rural areas it was commonly believed that a deceased person who had left behind any unfinished businesses would return to haunt the living. Such beings were called “strigoi.” Nevertheless, if the proper rituals (for example, a symbolic wedding when the person had died before getting married) were performed, such situations would easily be avoided, which is why the allegorical wedding of Miorița remains the central image in the description of the old Romanian attitude towards death. In Russian folklore, however, the recurrent theme was that of the living dead.

Ethnographers of the Russian folk culture divided the dead into two groups. First, there were those who died in old age of natural causes, and in this case it was believed that their souls would go directly to heaven, while their bodies would return to their origins, namely the earth. The other group consists of the living dead and it is further divided into two categories: the unnatural dead, and here we find those who had died accidentally, those who were murdered and even those that were killed by a disease, and the “unclean” dead, and here we are talking about the suicides, the great sinners, unchristened children, those who had not been properly buried, those who had not been granted absolution for their sins, and those suspected of witchcraft. Of all these categories, the suicides seem to have differentiated themselves the most. As Warner explains, suicide was considered one of man’s greatest sins, and such belief remained valid for the Russian peasantry even in the twentieth century. As a sort of punishment for “denying God’s right to determine the time of their death,” the suicides did not receive a Christian burial:

“In addition to lying in unconsecrated ground the suicide should also be denied […] the comfort of prayers for the dead and those traditional occasions, on the fortieth day after the death, the anniversary of the death and the Days of Universal Requiem of the Orthodox Church, when the dead were and are normally “remembered” […] with affection and honour.”

We find a similar attitude towards the suicides in Romania as well and, given the Orthodox influence in both of these countries, we might be tempted to believe that such an attitude is related to religion, especially to Christian Orthodoxy. However, suicide has always been one of the most delicate subjects in all cultures and all time periods. Writers were inspired by it, psychologists were intrigued by it, religious believers were appalled by it, and some of the most influential historians and ethnographers of the twentieth century simply decided to ignore it, since it did not seem sociologically relevant. Going too deep into the history of suicide would not be too relevant for the purpose of this paper, but I must mention that suicide has been a constant presence in the history of mankind, just like death. In Antiquity it was often believed that it is important to leave the world of the living on time. Through the Middle Ages, the western civilization rejected the idea of suicide and even punished those who dared to commit such deeds by hanging their corpses in the market square, by confiscating their assets, or by burning their bodies in public ceremonies. In the Renaissance period such practices were eradicated, but suicide was still reprehended. In the Romantic era, suicide became an intriguing subject for writers and philosophers. In the nineteenth and twentieth century it extended to the psychological sphere and nowadays the views on suicide are so diverse and so reflective of many of the attitudes existing in the past that is would be impossible to accurately describe them. Nevertheless, we may say that suicide is the result of a profound crisis that turns itself into an excruciating psychological pain that tears man apart piece by piece, and that our attitude towards it reveals to some extent the attitude we have towards death itself.

As we have seen so far, change is the only constant in that which concerns man’s attitude towards suicide and death. As we move further into the twenty first century our views on such delicate subjects are more relaxed, and this might be attributed to our increasing confidence in science and our amplified scepticism regarding religious teachings. In Russia, however, man’s attitude towards death and suicide was remodelled under special circumstances. When the Communist Party came to power, its most illustrious members thought of ways of using even the secular rites to advance the ideology of communism. Extravagant ceremonies based on secular funerals were organized for “the heroes of the Revolution or for senior Party leaders, with bands, procession, and speeches at the graveside ensuring a dramatic event,” while promoting at the same time cremation instead of burial. Thus, they hoped to diminish the influence of the Church in the Russian society, and ultimately eradicate any religious practices. Under the guise of scientific development they attempted to turn man against one of the oldest customs of Russian Orthodoxy and make him embrace a ritual strongly disapproved by the Church. Their attempt seems to have succeeded to a great extent, for nowadays cremation is the preferred form of disposal of the body, especially in the urban areas. But then again, the contemporary age has brought about significant changes to the overall perception of death and dying. Some of the old customs and beliefs are still kept, but even the simple man of the rural areas abandoned many of the rigid practices imposed by religion.

The last significant attitude towards death that serves the purposes of our paper is the one we discover in the South-American society, especially in Argentina. However, because the majority of the indigenous population of Argentina has been assimilated into the culture of their conquerors, we will focus on the perspectives on death derived from the Hispanic tradition, seeking to delineate the western heritage, as well as the indigenous influences in the Argentine culture.

Argentina, more than the other South-American countries, seems to have embraced many of the customs and beliefs we discover in the Western society, and this happened mainly because of the massive population of the country with Europeans or people of European descent that started in the nineteenth century and reached its peak in the first half of the twentieth century. The Spanish colonization began early in the sixteenth century and for a long time the indigenous population co-existed with their colonizers. However, this co-existence ended in the nineteenth century when the indigenous communities became the victims of large extermination campaigns that started violently in the 1870’s, when the military campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert led to the killing of more than one thousand indigenous people, and continued over the next centuries through more moderate forms of oppression, if we may say so. The government wished to homogenize the Argentine population and culture without allowing the indigenous customs and beliefs to interfere with the newly instated western tradition. The indigenous population was discriminated, was deprived of their lands, was forced to endure poverty, and was denied even the fundamental human rights, without which a democratic society cannot be constituted. Thus, by the twentieth century, much of the indigenous population had vanished, and those who still exist either deny their origins or continue to face discrimination.

The Argentine people’s attitude towards death is deeply rooted in religion and, since Roman Catholics are predominant, many of the customs and beliefs related to death are similar to those in the western societies where Roman Catholicism was also widely spread. Of course, these customs are part of the country’s Hispanic heritage, for Catholicism was brought there by the Spanish colonizers. The funeral ceremony, for example, follows many of the general rules that are to be found in the western civilization. If the situation allows it, there is a deathbed ceremony conducted by a priest, followed by a wake, a religious service, burial or cremation. Over the last century, however, the Argentine funeral ceremony has begun to look more like those performed in the consumerist societies, such as the North-American one. If in the nineteenth century the funeral services were organized by the family of the deceased, the contemporary society turns to the funeral homes to deal with this task. Apparently, the services they provided were more appropriate for the modern Argentine man who was trying to break away from the Hispanic tradition:

“The idea was to replace a totally backward ceremonial, not appropriate for cultivated people, with solemn and correct practices such as the open casket funeral, the use of condolence cards, lackeys, closed wagons, candelabra and the subscription card service. […] Cards, for example, were used to create distance, in contrast to former rituals, in which condolences were personal and all attending concluded the ceremony by sharing a savory lunch in a relative’s home.”

What we may notice in the above paragraph is that it advocates for distance between the family of the deceased and the other people that attend the funeral, but also for proximity between the living and the deceased. If the modern man of the western civilization has banished death from the social life, the Argentine man embraced it. Given the fact that the Catholic Church professes the idea that man’s soul is eternal, the Argentine man saw death as nothing more than a threshold between our world and eternal life. He feared it, though, and he did not wish for it, but when it happened, he dealt with it in the best possible way, and sometimes he even took advantage of it. Such is the case of Eva Perón, Argentina’s First Lady, who was perceived as “wholly indigenous in origin, formation and spirit,” but European in appearance. During her life she was both contested and worshipped, and when she died, she was granted a state funeral, worthy of a spiritual leader of the Argentine nation. Three million people gathered to pay their respects. They waited for hours in the rain to see their Lady one last time. Small altars with her picture surrounded by flowers were made all over the country, flags were flown at half-mast for ten days, and grief was expressed in all the possible ways. After thirteen days her body was moved from the funeral chapel to the National Congress, and then to the Central Obrera, in an equally grandiose procession:

“[A] gun-carriage bore the body. […] Nine police patrol cars preceded the coffin, while thirty-five men and ten women dressed in white shirts – symbol of the descamisados – and black skirts or trousers pulled the carriage. On either side marched cadets of the military academies in formation with students from the Student City (Ciudad Estudiantil) of Eva’s creation as well as nurses from the Foundation Eva Perón. Along the route followed by the procession, 17,000 soldiers kept back a throng of 2,000 000 waiting to watch the Lady of Hope pass by.”

Though not officially recognized, Eva Perón had been turned into a martyr of the Argentine people. Her body was submitted to a year-long process of embalming and then kept in an open-casket at the headquarters of the General Labour Confederation for two years, until it was stolen by the military and secretly buried somewhere in Italy. The Perónist regime’s opponents have always accused Juan Perón and the First Lady of corruption and opportunism, and blamed them for their expensive tastes, which is why they considered Eva Perón’s funeral ceremony coarse and offensive, and they did not refrain from claiming that her death was charged with a powerful political symbolism, just like that of Lenin in Russia. Her supporters, however, did not see it as an instrument used for political purposes, but rather as a dignified ceremony for an honourable lady.

Eva Perón’s funeral is significant for the purpose of our paper because it allows us to observe the differences of opinion among the inhabitants of a country in which two cultures are forced to coexist. Perón’s supporters belonged to the working class, while her opponents belonged to the upper-classes. The first group embraced the Perónist preference for secular institutions and a secular tradition in general, while the second one, although it did not favour the idea of a society based solely on religious values, still wanted to maintain some of the religious practices. A ceremony for the dead characterized by the simplicity of a traditional Catholic funeral was one of those things, and Eva Perón’s funeral was anything but simple. It was, instead, a pretentious spectacle that lost its religious value – a perfect example of the effects of secularization, which was imposed as part of a “modernization program” and was threatening to destroy the principles on which the Argentine society was built.

As we have seen so far, religion played an important part in shaping man’s attitude towards death and dying. The twentieth century, however, brought about significant changes all over the world, which are described by Gadamer as a “demythologizing of death.” Nowadays we can no longer talk about a collective attitude on the subject, not even in small groups. Starting with the publication of Elizabeth Kübler Ross’s On Death and Dying, death began to be seen an individual matter. Although all men see it as the end of life, their response to it is influenced by a multitude of factors, such as age, cultural background, level of education, religious beliefs or the lack of religious beliefs, as well as personal experience. However, Kübler-Ross identified something that seems to be common to all people when faced with the imminence of death, namely the five stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – which may manifest themselves differently from one individual to another, but they, nevertheless, accomplish the same thing – they help the modern man to accept the reality of death. The way in which man’s attitude towards death and dying is reflected in literature and if Kübler-Ross’s argument is valid for the man of the past as well, will be, however, discussed in the following sections of this paper.

A Theoretical Journey towards an Aesthetics of Death

2.1. A Glimpse of the Eighteenth Century Aesthetics

Aesthetics did not acquire its position in the field of philosophical disciplines until the early eighteenth century, when Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten borrowed the Greek term ‘aisthanesthai’ (to perceive) and used it to solve the conflict between taste and philosophical contemplation. As a successor of Christian Wolff at the University of Halle, Baumgarten fell under the spell of Wolff’s traditional rationalist metaphysics, but sought to move beyond it by recognizing the relevance of sensual perception in the philosophical investigation of art.

In his philosophical system, built on rationalist ideas but immersed into the art of mathematical thinking, Wolff recognizes three levels of knowledge: a historic one, which determines facts and experiences, a mathematical one, which leads to the establishment of exact concepts and conclusions, and a philosophical one, which is a knowledge of reason and therefore of all possibilities.

Wolff’s metaphysics, however, bears the stamp of his theological studies and his work revolves around the idea of God as the “ens realissimum” (a most real being). In his attempt to prove God’s existence he claims that the reason for the existence of all things and beings can only be found in a self-sufficient entity, one which takes its essence from itself, and one whose attributes are expressed in other objects or beings. Therefore, for Wolff the “possible” becomes the “actual,” and God is the highest level of perfection – another key concept in Wolffian rationalism.

Perfection, along with sense perception and conceptual cognition, are the key elements employed in the definition of beauty, which lies in fact at the core of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline. Wolff now makes a distinction between perfect knowledge, which is based on the intellect, and imperfect knowledge, which consists of impressions and emotions. But since God represents the highest level of perfection, man can only strive for it. His duty is that of directing all his efforts towards achieving the highest perfection of oneself and the others and the degree to which one attains it can cause either pleasure or pain. The degree of pleasure, in its turn, sustains the definition of beauty, which means that Wolff’s apprehension of beauty finds its roots in reason, and not in sensory perception.

Baumgarten, on the other hand, saw beauty as sensuous perfection and although both philosophers defined perfection, and therefore beauty, in terms of logic and cognitive faculties, Baumgarten also sought beauty in “the sensitive faculty, in the imagination, in the wits, in the poetic faculty, in judgment, in the power of description, in feeling and in the passions.” Both of them militated for a philosophical investigation of art, but if Wolff had in mind a science of the arts based on pure knowledge and following an almost mathematical pattern, Baumgarten proposes sensibility as main gnoseological faculty.

According to Gregor, Baumgarten’s aesthetics has much in common with Wolff’s logic. Starting from the principle of logic deduction, they both lead to intellectual cognition, but since aesthetics is set in motion by the lower cognitive faculties, it has no difficulty in asserting its self-sufficiency as a philosophical discipline:

“logic concerns itself only with perfecting the intellect, and there is a whole realm on knowledge that it leaves in its crude natural state. If man is not a pure intellect, his complete development requires perfecting the perceptual component in his nature as well. The Aesthetica is the new science that will emend knowledge other than distinct knowledge […] In short, the younger sister of logic [aesthetics] will, as is proper, offer her services to the older sister; but the younger sister is a person in her own right, not a slave.”

Yet, Baumgarten’s aesthetics is far from the current understanding of the term as a theory of art based on the concepts of beauty and ugliness. The philosopher states that “aesthetics (as the theory of liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking and as the art of thinking analogous to reason) is the science of sensual cognition,” but fails to demonstrate that the theory of arts emerges from sensual cognition. He nevertheless succeeds in deviating his peers’ attention from the pure rational cognition endorsed by Descartes. He rejects the idea that reality consists of series of objects that can be categorized and generalized according to strict, rational rules, and claims that one can fully grasp the richness and the complexity of reality and, therefore, of the individual through sensual perception.

Baumgarten does not dismiss the metaphysical truth acquired through an intuitive and adequate cognition generally accepted by traditional rationalism, nor the logical one which is the result of man’s rational insight, but he does advocate for a third type of truth, an aesthetic one, which is the result of confused cognition and situates itself somewhere between certainty and falsehood. Confusion is a term that philosophers accept with great difficulty, but if one accepts that the realm of knowledge consists of both clear and obscure ideas, one must also accept confused cognition as “a method for discovering what is yet unknown.”

In art, more than in other domains, obscure ideas play an essential part. This does not mean that Baumgarten attributes any value to a series of obscure ideas strung together for their own sake, but if obscurity manages to enhance a work’s value, then its importance as an integral part of the big picture should not be disregarded. In literature, for example, the obscure ideas consist mainly of figures of speech and even if without them a work could send the same message and it would meet the brevity and clarity standards so much appreciated by rationalists, it would also lose much of its charm and even its value.

Thus, what Baumgarten actually implies is that perfection, and therefore beauty, is achieved when and if the manifold of sensual perceptions can be reduced to unity by means of rational principles. The next important idea is that aesthetics’ role is to bring man’s lower cognitive faculties as close as possible to perfection, and in order to do so it must establish the principles needed to attain the much desired unity. Of course, their effect upon the individual varies according to one’s inclination towards intellectual or sensory knowledge, and even though Baumgarten intended his aesthetic theory to be a powerful instrument for the perfection of rationality, the former gradually turned into the greatest critic of the latter.

The next philosopher who dedicated a great amount of time to the development of an aesthetic theory is Johann Gottfried von Herder. He, like many of his contemporaries, saw the lack of artistic genius in the eighteenth century Germany and exerted himself to elaborate a comprehensive theory of art which would work towards understanding the nature of art and the necessary conditions for it to thrive. Ever since Baumgarten’s Aesthetica appeared, Herder recognized the value of the new philosophical system set forth for a reconsideration of art. Of course, its novelty is somewhat relative, for we have already established that Baumgarten’s aesthetics finds its roots in Wolff’s rationalist metaphysics. Nevertheless, it also draws on Aristotle’s Poetics, which was rather unusual for the eighteenth century Western thought dominated by Plato’s doctrines.

Herder clearly indicates that the partial Aristotelian influence is welcome in the development of aesthetics, but he does not dismiss Baumgarten’s contribution in any way. He appreciates the simplicity of Greek philosophy, but he also agrees that knowledge improves with time. Advancement in thought occurs only when one takes something already known, examines it and then operates with it until it has been improved, which is why Herder admits that Baumgarten’s aesthetics is preferable to an aesthetics “after the Greek manner:”

“[…] even if we admit what cannot indeed be admitted, that the principle of Aristotle and Batteux is just as true and comprehensive as that of Baumgarten, then we cannot say that it is just as adequate and human, for it is preeminently Baumgarten’s principle that teaches us to become initiated into the profoundest secrets of our soul and to make a psychological discovery with each rule of beauty.”

One must not understand, however, that Herder fully embraced Baumgarten’s aesthetic principles and was more than satisfied with them. Like any philosopher dedicated to his duty, he sought to bring his own contribution to the development of aesthetics, which is why in his analysis of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica he does not refrain from pointing out its flaws together with its merits. For example, he appreciates Baumgarten’s partial reassessment of the Aristotelian principles, in that it looks beyond pure reason when determining the value of an artwork, but he also blames him for having built his aesthetics on too much speculation and “a priori deduction as if plucked from the air.” On the other hand, he acknowledges Baumgarten’s merits of having established poetry as one of the fine arts, for it was him the first to declare that poetry should not necessarily be an imitation of nature, but rather a perfectly sensuous discourse, which does not consist of verse, rhyme and melody, and instead it entwines beauty, impressions, emotions, and images born in one’s soul.

Furthermore, Herder shows a strong discontent with Baumgarten’s fondness for standards, which originates in the latter’s rationalist formation. As we have already discussed, Baumgarten’s aesthetic principles were more or less meant to lead to a standardization of beauty and taste, in which case, Herder argues, aesthetics could no longer be what it declares to be – a science of the feeling. Moreover, he contends that the individual’s cultural and historical background is relative and, therefore, art cannot be interpreted in terms of pre-established standards.

In short, Herder believes that Baumgarten’s Aesthetica incorporates too many strict and often contradictory principles, which is why it fails to fulfil its original purpose. It does, however, advance some important ideas for the development of aesthetics, and if Baumgarten had had more time to perfect it, it would have probably become more similar to the aesthetic discipline envisaged by Herder.

As we have seen so far, aesthetics as a discipline sprang at full speed in the eighteenth century and quickly became a subject of major interest for philosophers belonging to the most various schools of thought. Baumgarten, who invented the term, approached the new discipline in a Wolffian, rational manner in the beginning, and only later in his career did he decide that it is more connected to empirical psychology, since it has sense impressions at its core. Herder, in his turn, applied a historical and cultural approach to aesthetics. Like them there were many others, but the first to successfully combine all these approaches was Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who drove aesthetics to a direction that neither Baumgarten, nor Herder imagined.

Unlike Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, which proposes a theory of art and beauty, Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment attributes less significance to the work of art and introduces instead a theory of taste. Baumgarten too attributed a major importance to the judgment of taste in the aesthetic process, but in his opinion judgments of taste lead to some kind of cognition, whereas for Kant taste and cognition are fundamentally different. Unlike his previous two Critiques in which he makes a clear distinction between intellectual and sensible cognition, Kant’s third Critique avoids dealing with cognition and instead it brings beauty, fine arts, aesthetic ideas and the sublime to the fore. He analyzes one by one the main aesthetic doctrines submitted by his peers and he manages to completely reject or at least question each of them. First of all, he dismisses his predecessors’ rationalistic presuppositions by rejecting the idea that beauty is perfection. Next, he argues that beauty is a matter of taste and taste cannot be governed by rules, thus thus limiting the role of beauty in the development of the new science called aesthetics and rejecting at the same time a major part of Baumgarten’s aesthetic theory.

The most important step taken by Kant in the development of his aesthetics is that he shifts the attention from the object to be judged to the judging mind, and therefore to the judgment about the object. He argues that the judgment of taste in itself is aesthetic. Beauty too plays its part in the act of contemplation of an object, but it also falls under the realm of empirical knowledge, which is why Kant dismisses even the possibility of a science of beauty because judgments of beauty cannot lay the foundation of a new science, as he had already claimed in his first Critique:

“The Germans are the only people who currently make use of the word ‘aesthetic’ in order to signify what others call the critique of taste. This usage originated in the abortive attempt made by Baumgarten, that admirable analytical thinker, to bring the critical treatment of the beautiful under rational principles, and so to raise its rules to the rank of a science. But such endeavours are fruitless. The said rules or criteria are, as regards their chief sources, merely empirical, and consequently can never serve as determinate a – priori laws by which our judgment of taste must be directed. On the contrary, our judgment is the proper test of the correctness of the rules. For this reason it is advisable either to give up using the name in this sense of critique of taste, and to reserve it for that doctrine of sensibility which is true science […] or else to share the name with speculative philosophy, employing it partly in the transcendental and partly in the psychological sense.”

Both Baumgarten and Kant agree that sensations and perception lead to some sort of cognition, in which case we could be talking about a science, but if Baumgarten advocates for a science of the beautiful, Kant insists that a science based on sensation and perception would have sensibility at its core. Turning back to his transcendental aesthetics, he seeks to prove that aesthetics is concerned with feelings of pleasure or displeasure. By applying the principle of the sensus communis he concludes that the contemplation of an object or a mode of representation produces three types of pleasure or satisfaction: the satisfaction in the good, in the agreeable and in the beautiful. Neither the satisfaction in the good nor the satisfaction in the agreeable complies with the principle of disinterestedness which, according to Kant, defines an aesthetic judgment. The first type of satisfaction is actuated by reason, the second type finds its roots in sensations, while the satisfaction in the beautiful, which is a disinterested feeling, is the direct consequence of an aesthetic judgment of taste. Thus, Kant proves not only that taste is a self-sufficient faculty, inferior to pure and practical reason, and yet capable of mediating between the two, but also that aesthetics is not concerned with cognition, as Baumgarten contends, but with a certain type of feeling which can never become cognition: “In order to find something good, I must always know what sort of thing the object is supposed to be […] I do not need that in order to find beauty in something. Flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage, signify nothing, do not depend on any determinate concept, and yet please.”

In the section called “Analytic of the Power of Judgment,” Kant divides his argument into four parts called moments: quality, quantity, relation and modality, which are in fact the aspects that he follows in his analysis of judgments on beauty. If in his first Critique Kant merely admits the possibility of a claim of universal validity in matters of taste, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment he seeks to highlight some normative criteria which can justify it. The “quality” of an aesthetic judgment refers to its disinterested character. This can be explained through an object’s capacity to become the subject of contemplation without serving any additional purposes, which means that “it is not grounded on any interest” but its mere existence “produces an interest.” In dealing with the universal subjective validity of a judgment of taste, Kant applies the same regressive method used in his Transcendental Aesthetics and opens his demonstration with a definition of the beautiful which, in Kant’s opinion, should be elevated to rank of a postulate: “The beautiful is that which, without concepts, is represented as the object of a universal satisfaction.” Having already established that an aesthetic judgment can only lead to a certain type of feeling, namely, the satisfaction in the beautiful, Kant argues that if the person making an aesthetic judgment has no interest in his appreciation of the beautiful, then that person would only assume that everyone else experiences the same feeling. Of course, if that were true, then we would be talking about an objective universal validity, but since an aesthetic judgment triggers a feeling that only reflects the relation of the representation of the object to the subject, then the claim of subjective universality is the legitimate one.

In that which concerns the “quantity” of an aesthetic judgment, Kant applies the same principle of disinterestedness to demonstrate that all judgments of taste are singular. Relying on the idea that an aesthetic judgment is conditioned by the claim of universal subjective validity, Kant insists that if the object of a judgment of taste is compared to a multitude of similar objects that produce the same feeling to the viewer, then the judgment that derives from such a comparison is no longer a pure aesthetic judgment, but an “aesthetically grounded logical judgment.” In this case, however, the object of contemplation becomes a concept, which means that the feeling derived from it is no longer the satisfaction in the beautiful, but the satisfaction in the agreeable or in the good, thus losing its aesthetic value:

“If one judges objects merely in accordance with concepts, then all representation of beauty is lost. Thus there can also be no rule in accordance with which someone could be compelled to acknowledge something as beautiful. Whether a garment, a house, a flower is beautiful: no one allows himself to be talked into his judgment about that by means of any grounds or fundamental principles. One wants to submit the object to his own eyes, just as if his satisfaction depended on sensation; and yet, if one then calls the object beautiful, one believes oneself to have a universal voice, and lays claim to the consent of everyone, whereas any private sensation would be decisive only for him alone and his satisfaction.”

The part dealing with the third moment, called “relation,” brings to the fore the free play of imagination and understanding and the principle of purposiveness. Kant begins his argument with an abstract definition of an end or a purpose. According to this definition, an “end is the object of a concept insofar as the latter is regarded as the cause of the former (the real grounds of its possibility); and the causality of a concept with regards to its object is purposiveness.” Kant’s intention here is to explain how the observation of an object can produce pleasure if the viewer recognizes a purposiveness concerning its form, even if the end or the purpose is not actually fulfilled. Moreover, he actually states that an object can be submitted to a judgment of taste and considered beautiful only if it is supplemented by the mere form of purposiveness without actually becoming a representation of an end or a concept, hereby maintaining its subjectivity. The role of the free play of imagination and understanding here is that they are activated while performing an aesthetic judgment and they are the ones responsible for the way in which an object is perceived. They are the ones acting according to the principle of purposiveness without a purpose, even without rationally reflecting on it, causing a type of self-induced and perpetuating pleasure which cannot be derived from the outer nature.

In the last two sections Kant argues once again against Baumgarten’s idea of aesthetics. Here he puts all his efforts into proving that beauty is not reducible to the concept of perfection, as the rationalists claim. He asserts that perfection is an objective concept which finds its roots in the realm of cognition, whereas beauty as the entity generating a pure aesthetic judgment rests on subjective grounds, as he already proved. However, Kant admits that there can also be impure aesthetic judgments. Thus, he makes a distinction between “free” and “adherent” beauty.” The first type leads to pure judgments of taste, for it “presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be,” while the second type of beauty can only give rise to an impure judgment of taste, for it relies on conceptual knowledge:

“[…] the beauty of a human being (and in this species that of a man, a woman, or a child), the beauty of a horse, of a building (such as a church, a palace, an arsenal, or a garden-house) presuppose a concept of the end that determines what the thing should be, hence a concept of its perfection, and is thus merely adherent beauty. Now just as the combination of the agreeable (of sensation) with beauty, which properly concerns only form, hindered the purity of the judgment of taste, so the combination of the good (that is, the way in which the manifold is good for the thing itself, in accordance with its end) with beauty does damage to its purity.”

According to this classification, we might believe that pure aesthetic judgments are almost impossible in reality, and yet, there are also objects for which we do not need any conceptual knowledge in order to appreciate their aesthetic value. Music, nature or a work of art, are only some of the examples that fall under this category. We can appreciate music even if we do not understand its purpose; we can find a natural object beautiful, although we do not know how it works, and we can get pleasure from admiring a work of art without knowing its creator’s intentions, for the value of an artistic representation does not lay in its capacity to illustrate beauty, but in the artist’s capacity to beautifully illustrate “things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing.” In all this cases we would be talking about free beauty, for the objects put under scrutiny signify nothing by themselves and only the free play of imagination and understanding turns them into an aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, the situation is quite different for the artist who produces a work of art. He knows what the object he creates is meant to be, therefore in his appreciation of his work he is actually making an impure aesthetic judgment, which implies that his art falls under the category of adherent beauty. This means that an artistic creation cannot attain the ideal of beauty that Kant discusses at the end of this section, for such an ideal exists only in the mind of the person who contemplates it. As he puts it, only man is capable of an ideal of beauty because man alone is the only one who can determine his own ends or purposes. Furthermore, he is also the only one who can be endowed with an ideal beauty, but in this case Kant brings together beauty and morality, for he believes that the ideal that lies within the human nature can only be an expression of human morality:

“Now I say that the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good, and also that only in this respect (that of a relation that is natural to everyone, and that is also expected of everyone else as a duty) does it please with a claim to the assent of everyone else, in which the mind is at the same time aware of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere receptivity for a pleasure from sensible impressions, and also esteems the value of others in accordance with a similar maxim of their power of judgment.”

The last moment in Kant’s “Analytic of the Power of Judgment” concerns the modality of a judgment of taste. The main question here is whether the pleasure derived from an aesthetic judgment is possible, actual or necessary. By reiterating some of the principles discussed in the previous “moments,” such as purposiveness without a purpose, the claim for universal subjective validity and the principle of sensus communis, Kant claims that it is possible to obtain pleasure from the contemplation of every object or representation of an object. Next, he returns to the distinction made between the beautiful and the agreeable and he declares that the agreeable actually generates pleasure, while the beautiful is conditioned by the “necessity of the assent of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal rule that one cannot produce.” Such a necessity is called by Kant exemplary, for he assumes that the person making an aesthetic judgment would consider his judging to be correct, and therefore would attribute it to everyone else. In this case, this specific example would become a rule, but this is not what Kant had in mind when he introduced the necessity of an example in an aesthetic judgment, for in his opinion, there cannot be a rule for taste, beauty or even the production of a work of art. Instead, there can be examples to which we can ascribe at least a subjective validity and such examples could serve as models for later artists.

2.2. Aesthetics and the Experience of the Sublime

Another topic that became of major importance in the aesthetic theories of the eighteenth century is that of the sublime. The revival of this concept is attributed to Nicolas Boileau who translated Longinus’ treatise Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime). In Boileau’s translation the sublime “involves the experience of something extraordinary or marvellous as found in a single thought or a striking image.” However, the French poet and critic did not bring a major contribution to the articulation of the sublime, for in his opinion the sublime remains a je ne sais quoi, an irreducible entity with major psychological effects on the person who experiences it.

Boileau’s definition for the sublime complies with the seventeenth century aesthetic doctrines in France, but again, the first to make a clear distinction between the beautiful and the sublime was Kant. His interest in the beautiful and the sublime as the result of aesthetic judgments manifested itself as early as 1764, when he published a work called Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Perhaps influenced by Edmund Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, who introduced terror as the ruling principle of the sublime, Kant gives his account of the differences between these two topics in a playful and captivating manner:

“Lofty oaks and lonely shadows in sacred groves are sublime, flowerbeds, low hedges, and trees trimmed into figures are beautiful. The night is sublime, the day is beautiful. Casts of mind that possess a feeling for the sublime are gradually drawn into lofty sentiments, of friendship, of contempt for the world, of eternity, by the quiet calm of a summer evening, when the flickering light of the stars breaks through the umber shadows of the night and the lonely moon rises into view. The brilliant day inspires busy fervor and a feeling of gaiety. The sublime touches, the beautiful charms. The mien of the human being who finds himself in the full feeling of the sublime is serious, sometimes even rigid and astonished. By contrast, the lively sentiment of the beautiful announces itself through shining cheerfulness in the eyes, through traces of a smile, and often through audible mirth.”

In Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime Kant makes a simple distinction between the terrifying, the noble and the magnificent sublime. He describes the terrifying sublime as unnatural (deep solitude, a long duration, a great height, etc.), he associates the noble sublime with the feeling of admiration, and he calls magnificent that which can be simple, yet brilliant at the same time. This division, however, does not appear to be made according to clear, normative criteria, which is why Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is regarded merely as a precursor of the major work that would clarify the differences between the beautiful and the sublime, namely The Critique of the Power of Judgment, whose second book called “Analytic of the Sublime” presents not only a distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime, but also the formula applied for such a division. But before we elaborate on Kant’s work, it is important to give an account of Burke’s Enquiry, for, after all, it was published long before Kant’s third Critique, and it also highlights the differences between the British and the German aesthetic traditions.

A simple look at Burke’s treatise makes us realize that his Enquiry is an elaborate and carefully wrought account of the author’s personal experience and of his reactions to certain situations: “I am convinced,” “I am inclined to imagine,” “I think,” “I have experienced,” etc. Burke’s empirical approach to aesthetics, in the manner of John Locke and David Hume, was not very appreciated by critics and the Enquiry was often called “an interesting but derivative piece of juvenilia.”And yet, despite being considered one of the minor works of Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful still occupies a distinctive place among the eighteenth century philosophical works for it managed to shape the British thought by making the first step towards liberating aesthetics from the social constraints and directing it towards the moral and the contradictions that define human nature.

In his “Introduction,” Burke gives us a personal definition for taste and attempts to prove that, despite the general claim that there are no rules for taste, there must be some principles that affect “all the natural powers in man,” namely the senses, the imagination and the judgment, so that all external objects can be perceived in the same way or with little difference by all men. In order to reinforce his idea, he provides some quite convincing examples. He argues that light and darkness are perceived in the same way by all men, that something sour or sweet would taste the same to everyone, etc., thus thus concluding that an object causing pleasure or pain to one man must cause the same feelings to all mankind. Of course, such an argument is completely opposed to Kant’s theory of taste, but it nevertheless serves Burke’s purpose, for it allows him to make a clear distinction between the natural and the acquired taste, the first type relying on sensations, and the second one “dependent upon a capacity for judgment derived from experience.”

The next controversial idea that Burke advances in his Enquiry regards the imagination. Apparently, the imagination, which is the place where man’s fears, hopes and passions reside, functions according to the same principles that govern the senses. This means that every man is endowed with pretty much the same power of imagination, and only our personal experiences and observations are responsible for the way in which we respond to certain objects or situations. Now the important part is that our personal experiences generate two different types of pleasure or pain when connected to the imagination: one that arises from the properties of a natural object, and one that is perceived from the resemblance of the object we contemplate with another one that we have once seen:

“The mind of man has naturally a far greater alacrity and satisfaction in tracing resemblances than in searching for differences; because by making resemblances we produce new images, we unite, we create, we enlarge our stock; but in making distinctions we offer no food at all to the imagination; the task itself is more severe and irksome, and what pleasure we derive from it is something of a negative and indirect nature.”

After having established that both taste and imagination must be set in motion by the same type of principles in all men, Burke then admits that the contemplation of an object may however generate different responses. And yet, this difference lies in the degree to which the viewer is affected, not in the manner, and it seems to arise “either from a greater degree of natural sensibility, or from a closer and longer attention to the object.” In other words, Burke insists that taste is not a self-sufficient faculty of the human mind, as many aestheticians claim, but a product of sensibility and judgment, and the causes of a wrong taste are in fact the anomalies of sensibility and the defects of judgment, which, in their turn, are determined by personal experience.

As we have seen so far, personal experience plays an essential role in Burke’s Enquiry. Through “bodily representations of experience”, such as tortured face and faces in love, and through “the experience of representation,” for instance literature and the other arts, Burke endeavours to validate the beautiful and the sublime as the causes of passions, and the passions as the primal human drive. Perhaps the most important distinction he makes between the beautiful and the sublime is that he identifies beauty with delicacy and femininity, and the sublime with masculinity and moral truth. Nevertheless, he does not make any discrimination between the two and instead he treats them like two complementary forces without which even the idea of society would be impossible:

“The authority of a father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother’s fondness and indulgence. But we generally have a great love for our grandfathers, in whom this authority is removed a degree from us, and where the weakness of age mellows it into something of a feminine partiality.”

For Burke beauty and sublimity together balance the unstable foundation of society. Whereas beauty is regarded as a clear idea and a positive social tool, for it encompasses a state of relaxation, of positive pleasures and of calmness, the sublime is perceived as an obscure idea and an anti-social tool, for it involves our strongest passions and it determines us to rebel against the common laws on which society functions. The sublime is the necessary ingredient for stepping out of tradition. It is an overpowering experience, one of irresistible violence which forces us into submission, and yet it determines us to transgress our own ignorance: “The mind is hurried out of itself, by a crowd of great and confused images; which affect because they are crowded and confused. For separate them, and you lose much of the greatness, and join them, and you infallibly lose the clearness.”

Both Burke and Kant contend that the beautiful simply pleases, whereas the sublime is that “which pleases immediately through its resistance to the interest of the senses.” But if in Burke’s Enquiry the role of reason in the perception of the sublime is limited, Kant argues that it is precisely the faculty of reason that which is activated whenever the human mind is confronted with something as immeasurable and powerful as the experience of the sublime. For both of them, however, the sublime culminates in a state of absolute delight with negative connotations (yet not entirely negative), but if Burke derives terror, fear, and obscurity from the experience of the sublime by focusing on the physiological aspects and their subsequent effects on the mind, Kant claims that the sublime breaks the limits of imagination and produces a feeling of displeasure that is shut down only when reason steps in:

“the idea of the comprehension of every appearance that may be given to us into the intuition of a whole is one enjoined on us by a law of reason, which recognizes no other determinate measure, valid for everyone and inalterable, than the absolute whole. But our imagination, even in its greatest effort with regard to the comprehension of a given object in a whole of intuition […] that is demanded of it, demonstrates its limits and inadequacy, but at the same time its vocation for adequately realizing that idea as a law. Thus the feeling of the sublime in nature is respect for our own vocation, which we show to an object in nature through a certain subreption (substitution of a respect for the object instead of for the idea of humanity in our subject), which as it were makes intuitable the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive faculty over the greatest faculty of sensibility.”

Both Kant and Burke agree that the sublime involves greatness, but if Burke does not make any clear classification of the objects or experiences that may be labelled as great and instead he only refers to objects that astonish through their vastness or to abstract concepts such as eternity and infinity, Kant does make a clear distinction between the objects that astonish through their size and those that impress through their might. In the “Analytic of the Sublime” Kant applies the same four concepts used in the analysis of the beautiful, namely quality, quantity, relation, and modality, to distinguish between the dynamical and the mathematical sublime. He claims that the feeling of the sublime involves a sort of movement of the mind either to the faculty of cognition or to the faculty of desire. Of course, this movement is mediated by imagination; when cognition is involved we are dealing with the mathematical sublime, and when the faculty of desire is targeted, then we are discussing the dynamical sublime.

The mathematical sublime, derived from concepts of quality and quantity, refers to the aesthetic estimation of magnitude. Now, in order to decide whether the magnitude involved should be submitted to a logical or an aesthetic judgment, we should establish whether such magnitude may be estimated by means of numbers. If that is the case, then the estimation is a logical one and it can be intuitively grasped and used by means of the imagination. For such estimation there would be no greatest, because we have an infinite possibility of numbers, but if the estimation of magnitude cannot be accomplished by means of numbers and if we perceive it as an absolute measure beyond which “no greater is subjectively possible,” then the estimation is an aesthetic one.

According to Kant, the aesthetic estimation of magnitude can also be determined by the effect it has upon the imagination. Thus, the mathematically sublime is the result of a magnitude which can be apprehended by imagination, but it cannot be comprehended:

“[…] the magnitude that is apprehended may grow as large as one wants as long as it can be comprehended in one whole by the imagination. An object is monstrous if by its magnitude it annihilates the end which its concept constitutes. The mere presentation of a concept, however, which is almost too great for all presentation (which borders on the relatively monstrous) is called colossal, because the end of the presentation of a concept is made more difficult if the intuition of the object is almost too great for our faculty of apprehension. – A pure judgment on the sublime, however, must have no end of the object as its determining ground if it is to be aesthetic and not mixed up with any judgment of the understanding or of reason.”

The important aspect that differentiates what Burke calls great or sublime from Kant’s mathematically sublime regards the feeling that emerges from an aesthetic judgment of the sublime. If Burke argues that the sublime in nature causes a certain paralysis of our rational capacities, which in its turn leads to an odd mixture of pleasure and pain, arising from our impossibility to reason on the object submitted to the aesthetic judgment, Kant claims that pain and pleasure occur one after another in this specific order. Whereas Burke describes pain and pleasure as independent yet not opposing feelings, Kant gives an antagonistic and yet complementary depiction of them. Pain or displeasure is the first response to the mathematically sublime, and it is caused by the inadequacy of the imagination in the aesthetic estimation, but this feeling is immediately followed by the pleasure aroused from “the correspondence of this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest sensible faculty in comparison with ideas of reason.” In other words, pain or displeasure arises when our imagination fails us in our understanding of the mathematically sublime, and pleasure emerges when become aware of our limits of understanding.

The dynamical sublime is organized around the other two concepts employed by Kant in his discussion of the beautiful: relation and modality. If in that which concerns the satisfaction in the mathematically sublime Kant argues that it must be disinterested, with respect to its quality, and accompanied by a claim of universal validity, with respect to its quantity, the satisfaction in the dynamically sublime is outlined by the principle of subjective purposiveness, as concerns its relation, and it must be regarded as a necessity in order the fulfil the criteria of modality.

In the section discussing the dynamically sublime Kant contrasts man’s limited physical power with the boundless forces of nature. With nature as the object of an aesthetic judgment, the sublime resides in man’s capacity to resist to the unfolding of natural phenomena of great intensity, such as “thunder clouds towering up into the heavens, bringing with them flashes of lightning and crashes of thunder, volcanoes with their all-destroying violence, hurricanes with the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean set into a rage, a lofty waterfall on a mighty river, etc.” However, such a violent display of natural forces may become the object of an aesthetic judgment just as long as the person making the judgment fears the spectacle unfolding before his eyes without actually being threatened by it. Safety thus conditions the discovery of a new capacity within ourselves that gives us the courage to measure ourselves against the destructive forces of nature. In other words, while recognizing our physical powerlessness, we also realize that the things that define our humanity, namely the faculty of practical reason and the freedom of the will, remain unaltered even when confronted with forces that could easily lead to our physical destruction. Consequently, nature has no dominion over ourselves, and therefore it can be called dynamically sublime because “it raises the imagination to the point of presenting those cases in which the mind can make palpable to itself the sublimity of its own vocation even over nature.”

The effect that an almighty power has over the senses and the necessity to be in a position of safety while experiencing the sublime seem to be the main aspects upon which both Kant and Burke agree. Moreover, they both claim that the sublime must be sought in the mind of the person making an aesthetic judgment and not in the object in nature which merely triggers the aesthetic experience. However, if Kant defends the idea that by experiencing the sublime we bypass the dominion of nature over ourselves, for such an experience leads to an elevation of the mind, Burke insists that the experience of the sublime is one of domination:

“[…] whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him. And though a consideration of his other attributes may relieve in some measure our apprehensions; yet no conviction of the justice with which it is exercised, nor the mercy with which it is tempered, can wholly remove the terror that naturally arises from a force which nothing can withstand. If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at a power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance.”

The analysis of the sublime for both Burke and Kant revolves around the idea of power, but if in his depiction of the sublime Burke focuses on the power exerted by an external object upon the judging subject, and also on the terror which generally accompanies it, Kant believes that the power exercised by all external objects (including nature) is only meant to awaken man’s inner powers, which are the only ones capable of arousing the feeling of the sublime. Thus, Kant professes man’s moral and intellectual superiority over the powers generated by any external object, and yet, he also explains that the degree to which we attain superiority depends on our cultural level as well as on the efforts made to refine our inherent capacity for moral sensitivity.

In that which concerns the satisfaction in the sublime, Kant argues that the feeling aroused by an aesthetic judgment does not reveal itself as pleasure, but as respect. Respect, in its turn, is the result of the projection of free will onto the faculty of practical reason, and it is theoretical when the mathematically sublime is involved and moral when we are dealing with the dynamically sublime.

As we have seen so far, Kant insists on placing the aesthetic judgments within a moral framework, for it “holds out a promise of reconciliation between nature and humanity,” whereas in Burke’s case we might say that the beautiful and the sublime are more effective as tools in the process of reconciliation between society and the individual. In his Enquiry the sublime, with its orientation towards pain and danger, is not only presented as a force that leads to an elevation of the mind, but also as an incentive for physical action, forcing man out of the state of idleness and directing him towards actions related to self-preservation and society. The implications of such confinement of aesthetic judgments within a moral or a social framework will nevertheless be discussed in the following sections of this paper.

2.3. From an Aesthetics of the Sublime to an Aesthetics of Death

In his Enquiry Edmund Burke presents pain and pleasure as states of mind of a relatively positive nature. Starting from the idea that the human mind in its most basic form finds itself in state of indifference, Burke argues that the action of a certain stimulus may induce either pain or pleasure, but the removal of any one of these feelings does not condition the emergence of the other, but instead it throws the mind back into a state of indifference, or rather “into a soft tranquillity, which is tinged with the agreeable colour of the former sensation.” The intensity of the sensation we experience determines nevertheless the occurrence of the sublime experience and, in Burke’s words, there is nothing more intense than the sensations caused by the ideas of pain, sickness, and even death.

While introducing death as a potential source of the sublime, Burke also insists on the fact that the sublime emerges only from the ideas of such instances, and not from their physical equivalents. Considering the strong emotions that the mere ideas of pain, sickness and death inflict upon the mind, Burke argues that an actual threat would hinder even the possibility of a sublime experience, for man’s instincts of self-preservation would immediately override the “appetite” for aesthetic judgments. Nonetheless, we may say that the sublime is a passion that is related to the instinct of self-preservation, but we must remember that its occurrence is possible only if this instinct remains in a latent state:

“The passions which belong to self-preservation, turn on pain and danger; they are simply painful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such circumstances; this delight I have not called pleasure, because it turns on pain, and because it is different enough from any idea of positive pleasure. Whatever excites this delight, I call sublime.”

What is to be noticed in the above paragraph is Burke’s description of the passions which belong to self-preservation. The sublime here is represented by the passions associated with delight, which in its turn occurs only when the actual threat of pain and danger is removed. And yet, delight “turns on pain,” but not on danger, because pain is an actual feeling, awakened by the senses, whereas danger is a potential, yet not really materialized circumstance which endangers our own existence. Moreover, pain is an inner sensory experience over which we do have a degree of control, while danger is an external and unmanageable threat.

For Burke pain and danger in themselves are images of sublimity. They operate “in a manner analogous to terror” and they generate intense emotions within our mind. If we compare them according to the level of terror they produce, we may believe that danger is a more affecting idea than pain, for it activates our instincts of self-preservation more rapidly than pain. And yet, Burke contends, there are instances when pain can become even “more painful,” and that happens when we consider it the emissary of the “king of terrors,” which is death.

Thus, death becomes the supreme image of sublimity. And yet, it can be the object of an aesthetic experience only if it is perceived as a remote concept. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, places death within a temporal framework and argues that we can charge it with aesthetic value if it “comes to us secondhand,” from language or from the observation of others. Kant, in his turn, claims that ideas generate sublimity when they “strive towards something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason, which gives them the appearance of an objective reality.” And yet, in an aesthetic experience the ideas of pain, danger and death cannot be apprehended as an objective reality, but as concepts subjectively attached to man’s consciousness, for only in this situation can they lead to a sort of gratification through sympathy, which is in fact the result of a special disposition of the mind that allows us to put ourselves in the place of the man affected by the actual instances of pain, danger or death.

Sympathy, as a means of substitution, is the principle upon which literature and other arts become sources of delight even when they dwell on terrible passions. If we return, however, to Kant’s theory regarding pure aesthetic judgments, we should establish how an artwork based on horrors may generate that disinterested feeling of satisfaction which emerges naturally as the result of an aesthetic judgment. In literature for example, satisfaction is derived either from the comfort we take in thinking that the story we read is fictional, or from the feeling of independence we momentarily experience when we understand that our own condition is much better than the one of the characters we are reading about. Pain, danger and even death thus become sources of pleasure and, consequently, they can be treated as objects of pure aesthetic judgments.

Burke, however, argues that there is also a form of delight in actual instances of pain and danger, for otherwise we would not investigate them in any way and instead we would even deny their own existence. Sympathy works in the same manner when we witness the pains and sufferings of real people, as well as when we read about some fictional character’s misfortune or about an authentic historical event:

[…] our sympathy is most wanted, in the distresses of others. If this passion [the one animated by the distress of the others] was simply painful, we would shun with the greatest care all persons and places that could excite such a passion; as, some who are so far gone in indolence as not to endure any strong impression actually do. But the case is widely different with the greater part of mankind; there is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes, or whether they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight.”

The next topic we should be debating in our theoretical journey towards an aesthetics of death derived from the investigation of the sublime is imitation. In Edmund Burke’s Enquiry imitation is one of the important passions brought into question in his treatment of the effects of pain, danger and death. As we have already discussed, Burke identifies the sublime in the passions related to self-preservation and the beautiful in those passions belonging to society. And yet, imitation, along with sympathy and ambition, despite their social function, can nevertheless be treated as sources of the sublime. If sympathy is the passion that makes us respond to the misery of the others, imitation comes to extend the effects of sympathy:

“For as sympathy makes us take a concern in whatever men feel, so this affection prompts us to copy whatever they do; and consequently we have a pleasure in imitating, and in whatever belongs to imitation merely as it is such, without any intervention of the reasoning faculty, but solely from our natural constitution, which providence has framed in such a manner as to find either pleasure or delight according to the nature of the object, in whatever regards the purposes of our being.”

Regarding the role of imitation in the moulding of society, Burke claims that it is through this principle that we develop our behavioural traits, we perform our actions, we form our opinions and we live our lives. In arts, the principle of imitation is the one that enables the artist to represent in his work even the most dreadful objects or images without hindering the artwork’s capacity to generate pleasure. In literature, for example, we may be reading about something we do not wish to see in reality, and yet, the delight we take in the reading itself may even be greater than the one generated by a story related to something that we might actually want to see in reality.

Nonetheless, imitation in itself would suffice neither in the shaping of society, nor in the creation of artworks. If imitation were the sole principle on which society and arts function, then we would not be able to talk about any real progress in that which concerns society, for the individuals would not step outside the pre-established behavioural and developmental patterns, while in that which concerns the arts, originality would be completely lost if artists settled to simply imitating the things they already know. But man is known for his predilection for finding pleasure in novelty and getting a certain amount of satisfaction from exceeding the others’ accomplishments and this passion that determines man’s capacity to step out of the ordinary is called ambition.

Ambition, according to Burke, drives man towards something higher than his actual state. The nature of this “higher state,” however, can be positive as well as negative, for ambition is so powerful that it can make miserable men take comfort in the idea that they are dealing with the supreme state of misery, for “where we cannot distinguish ourselves by something excellent, we begin to take a complacency in some singular infirmities, follies, or defects of one kind or another.” Of course, when it comes to the creation of an artwork, ambition cannot operate alone, for an original work of art needs to be infused with sympathy, rely on imitation and exceed conventions by means of ambition.

Now, if sympathy, imitation and ambition can be treated as sources of the sublime and if death is the supreme image of sublimity, why should we not attribute an aesthetic value to an artwork that places death at its core? After all, death has always been a topic of great interest for many writers and philosophers. Burke, for example, in his analysis of Milton’s “universe of death” treats death as the king of horrors, but he still dares to somehow surrender himself to its obscurity. He emphasizes the evocative power of words and he praises Milton’s choice to unite two ideas which, in his opinion, can be expressed only through language: rock, caves, lakes, fens, bogs and shades, on the one side and death on the other. Taken separately they would lose much of their greatness, but when we put them together, although they “present no distinct image to the mind,” they still “move the passions which belong to real objects, without representing these objects clearly.”

Another philosopher who took a great interest in the aesthetic value of the representation of death is Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. In his essay “How the Ancients Represented Death,” written as a defence against the accusation of having wrongfully asserted in his previous work that the ancients did not represent death as a skeleton, Lessing explores the various ways in which death served as subject matter for various artistic representations. He begins his plea with a clear distinction between the image of a skeleton as the depiction of death and Death as the deity of death, still considering only the latter the true subject matter of ancient works:

“The ancient artists did not portray Death as a skeleton, for they portrayed him according to the Homeric idea, as the twin brother of Sleep, and represented both Death and Sleep, with that likeness between them which we naturally expect in twins. On a chest of cedarwood in the temple of Juno at Elis, they both rested as boys in the arms of Night. Only the one was white, the other black; the one slept, the other seemed to sleep; both with their feet crossed.”

In a witty and charming manner, Lessing rejects his opponent’s accusations and, in order to validate his theory, he brings into question Winckelmann’s description of Sleep and Death, as represented on an ancient urn. According to the famous art historian and archeologist, Sleep is depicted as a “young genius resting on a reversed torch, besides his brother Death.” And yet, Lessing argues, when similar representations are to be found on a gravestone or a sarcophagus, it is difficult to deny that the winged boy who extinguishes his reversed torch on the breasts of a corpse, thus removing all affections, could be, in fact, the image of Death: “What can more distinctly indicate the end of life than an extinguished, reversed torch? If it is Sleep, this short interruption to life, who here rests on such a torch, with how much greater right may not Death do so?”

Lessing’s refusal to accept that the ancients may have depicted Death as a skeleton can be interpreted in fact as a denial of the death itself. For him, death is nothing more than an “interruption to life,” much longer than the one caused by Sleep, whereas the deity of Death is an abstract personification of an irreducible entity. For him, as well as for Burke, death should be kept at a theoretical level in order to maintain its aesthetic value, for when death presses too close man’s instinct of self-preservation would make it impossible for him to discover in death a potential source of the sublime.

According to Lessing, death should be evoked in the visual arts by the idea of repose and insensibility, but in that which concerns the representation of death in literature, both Lessing and Burke claim that words grant more freedom than the visual arts. And yet, if Burke posits no restriction to the representation of death in literature and its aesthetic value, Lessing contends that a writer may fill in the pages with dreadful descriptions of death, but in fact those would be descriptions of the moments preceding death, for death in itself has nothing painful, cruel or terrible in it:

“The condition of being dead has nothing terrible, and in so far as dying is merely the passage to being dead, dying can have nothing terrible. Only to die thus and thus, at this moment, in this mood, according to the will of this or that person, to die with shame and agony, may be terrible and becomes terrible. But is it then the dying, is it Death, which has caused the terror? Nothing less; Death is the desired end of all these horrors, and it is only to be imputed to the poverty of language if it calls both conditions, the condition which leads unavoidably to Death, and the condition of Death itself, by one and the same name.”

As we may see from the above paragraph, Lessing makes a clear distinction between death as a conceptual end to life itself, defined by insensibility and the lack of any cognitive capacities, and therefore devoid of subjectivity, and the process of dying, which incorporates the progressive actions towards death, towards non-existence. At this point we might just as well say that Lessing advocated in fact for an aesthetics of dying, and not an aesthetics of death. And yet, he does not dismiss the aesthetic value of any of these concepts. Instead, in his refusal to recognize death as a concrete reality he merely pushes the artist to look beyond what is commonly visible in his representation of death.

As far as the representation of death in literature is concerned, Burke, for example, seems to embrace words’ failure to depict “things of a very affecting nature, which can seldom occur in the reality,” for “thus they have an opportunity of making a deep impression and taking root in the mind, whilst the idea of the reality was transient; and to some perhaps never really occurred in any shape, to whom it is notwithstanding very affecting, as war, death, famine.” Therefore, he praises words’ ambiguity, for, in his opinion, a very polished language, one that is clear and perspicuous, would only diminish words’ influence over the passions. Lessing, on the other hand, militates against linguistic confusion. He acknowledges the evocative power of ambiguous words, but he still contends that a clear language is preferable to one full of pathos, but built on confusions.

The antagonistic views of Lessing and Burke in that which concerns the poetic language can also be noticed in Burke’s preference for Milton’s poetry, and in Lessing’s promotion of the Homeric verse. Burke, for example, argues that Milton’s poetic language, with its “well managed darkness,” compels man’s imagination to break its own boundaries:

“No person seems better to have understood the secret of heightening, or of setting terrible things, if I may use the expression, in their strongest light by the force of a judicious obscurity, than Milton. His description of Death in the second book is admirably studied; it is astonishing with what a gloomy pomp, with what a significant and expressive uncertainty of strokes and colouring he has finished the portrait of the king of terrors.”

Lessing, in his turn, praises Homer’s linguistic preciseness, his choice to describe “nothing but progressive actions,” and his tendency to maintain a temporal framework in his verse through a careful choice of words:

“I find that Homer describes nothing but progressive actions, and that when he paints bodies and single objects lie does it only as contributory to such, and then generally only by a single touch […] I say that Homer has generally but a single characteristic; a ship is for him now the black ship, now the hollow ship, now the swift ship, at most the well-rowed black ship. Farther than this he does not enter into any description of the ship. But of the sailing, the setting out, and hauling up of the ship he draws a detailed picture enough, of which, if the artist wished to transfer the whole of it to his canvas, he would be compelled to make five or six different paintings.”

As we have seen so far, Homer’s description of movement is confined not only in a temporal framework, but also within the language barriers, for if various artists were to transpose his verse into painting, the result would be pretty much the same for all of them. Milton’s description of his universe of death, on the other hand, is neither limited by language, nor hampered by time, which is why the artists who would seek to paint such a universe of death would be allowed to add a personal touch to their work.

According to Adam Wasson, in his depiction of the universe of death Milton brings into play two concepts that reject any specific representation: universe – “the spatially unrepresentable,” and death – “the temporally unrepresentable.” Now, the important fact is that Wasson suggests that this association of terms which defy any imagistic depiction reveals “both the limits of Burke’s sublimity and the sublimity of Lessing’s limits.” And yet, as interesting as Wasson’s assertion may sound, we cannot fully agree with it. It is true that in Burke’s Enquiry we may be talking about limits when it comes to the identification of the sublime in the arts, for, as we have already discussed, the Burkean sublime is “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of,” but let us not forget that this emotion is in fact the response of the body to the external stimuli, and therefore the limits of the Burkean sublime are not imposed by language, but by man’s capacity to emotionally respond to what unfolds in front of his eyes.

In that which concerns the sublimity of Lessing’s limits we should briefly return to the famous claim that brought him a great amount of criticism from some of his peers. In “How the Ancients Represented Death” Lessing tries to maintain Death within a temporal framework without sacrificing its “ontologically constitutive power as a defining negation,” which is why he is persistent in the idea that Death could not have been represented by skeletons in ancient art. In order to make his point, he reminds us of the ancients’ custom to use euphemisms to refer to ideas that might be too sad or too horrible for them to be mentioned with their exact equivalents, and therefore, he implies that it is only natural for them to have likewise used more agreeable representations of death in the arts. Moreover, if skeletons would have been used in the portrayal of death, then we would not be able to speak about a temporal framework of death, for, Lessing insists, it is unsuitable to represent Death through something that materializes itself long after the occurrence of death.

Nevertheless, Lessing’s argument leads to the idea that the skeleton is both the reminder and the remainder of death, and if that is the case, it would probably be wrong to bestow an aesthetic value only upon those representations of death that exclude any image of skeletons, as Lessing suggests. Thus, what we propose in this paper is in fact an aesthetics of death that incorporates the Kantian sublime that challenges our imagination and our power of reason and makes us aware of our own limitations, the Burkean sublime, with its focus on the greatest emotions experienced by man, and the sublime ensued by the limits imposed by Lessing. Such an aesthetics relies at the same time on the artist’s capacity to beautifully represent things, emotions, and phenomena that would normally frighten the observer, and on man’s instinct to emotionally respond even to the greatest horrors of mankind, and since such a theory is meant to be applied to literary texts, it also looks beyond the actual meaning of words.

3. The Aesthetics of Death in the Romantic Short Story

3.1. E. T. A. Hoffmann – the Aesthetic Function of the Grotesque in “The Sandman”

From the Kantian perspective, the sublime involves a sort of movement of the mind, mediated by imagination and directed either to the faculty of cognition, or to the faculty of desire, and it can present itself in two ways. First we have the mathematical sublime, which is the result of an aesthetic estimation of magnitude; the apprehension of this kind of sublime is immediately followed by a feeling of pain, which arises when our imagination fails us in comprehending a thing or a phenomenon unfolding in front of us, but also by pleasure, which emerges as soon as we become aware of the limits of our imagination. Next, we have the dynamical sublime, which is the result of an aesthetic estimation that has nature as its object and which occurs when, while recognizing our physical powerlessness, we also realize that the things that define our humanity, namely the faculty of practical reason and the freedom of the will, remain unaltered even when confronted with forces that could easily lead to our physical destruction.

For Kant, however, becoming aware of our limitations is just another way of attaining moral and intellectual superiority over the forces generated by any external objects. The Burkean sublime, on the other hand, is represented by everything that is capable of affecting the imagination in inconceivable ways, and it is to be found in “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, […] whatever is any sort terrible,” without posing a threat to our physical integrity. Thus, when Kant argues that the sublime resides within the human nature, within man’s capacity to reason with everything he has to deal with, he actually attributes the sublime to the subject making an aesthetic judgment, whereas Burke discovers it in the power exerted by an external object upon the judging subject and in the terror which generally accompanies it.

We are dealing, therefore, with two different views regarding the sublime. And yet, there are things or phenomena capable of generating it, regardless of the angle from which we decide to identify it. The grotesque, with its representations in literature and arts, is one of them. From the Kantian perspective, the grotesque may be submitted to an aesthetic judgment and may generate a sublime response when it is placed within a moral framework, while from the Burkean perspective, the grotesque in itself is a source of sublime. We find it in the arabesque ornaments of the ancient Rome, in the works of the Renaissance decorative painters, in engravings on paper or wood from the sixteenth century to the contemporary age, as well as in literary works, presenting itself as a “class of imagery that has never fit comfortably within the boundaries traditionally set up by either aesthetics or art history.”

The grotesque became a literary category in the sixteenth century, when Michel de Montaigne, a French Renaissance writer, used the term in an attempt to provide a definition for the literary genre he was trying to promote, namely the essay:

“As I was considering the way a painter […] went about his work, I had a mind to imitate him. He chooses the best spot, the middle of each wall, to put a picture labored over with all his skills, and the empty space all around it he fills with grotesques, which are fantastic paintings whose only charm lies in their variety and strangeness. And what are these things of mine, in truth, but grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of divers members, without definite shape, having no order, sequence, or proportion other than accidental?”

The above paragraph leaves us with the idea that the grotesque is something that impresses only though its strangeness and through the various ways in which it can be represented, rather than though its own aesthetic value. And yet, if we consider the Burkean idea according to which even an artwork based on horrors may be submitted to an aesthetic judgment, and it may even become a source of sublimity if it seriously challenges the observer’s imagination, then we may safely assert that the grotesque is an aesthetic category in itself and that it should be submitted to analysis for its own value, and not for the way in which other aesthetic categories may be interpreted when contrasted with it.

The term “grotesque” has been used to illustrate a multitude of things over the centuries. In the Middle Ages, for example, the term illustrated “earthiness, fertility, darkness, and death,” while in the last two centuries it has been used to describe something “horrible, or something horribly exaggerated,” and it has been related to other terms, such as “arabesque, abject, informe, uncanny, bricolage, carnivalesque, convulsive beauty, and dystopia.” All of these aspects (and more) have been explored in literary works, with a greater prevalence in the literature of the nineteenth and the twentieth century, when Kant’s aesthetic theories and Burke’s Enquiry had awakened writers’ interest in the aesthetic potential of the grotesque. Among them we discover E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, Leo Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, and many other writers who endeavoured to approach controversial subjects in their works, such as alienation, feelings of inadequacy, demonic forces that dwell within man’s consciousness, physical deformity, terror, pain, death, etc., in order to describe the reality of their time, one in which the grotesque, in all its forms, can be identified everywhere.

When Romanticism imposed itself in the nineteenth century European society, the grotesque too became a prevailing theme in the European literature. Romanticism, with its taste for delicate subjects, for the irrational and the incomprehensible, and for aesthetic experiences derived from strong emotions like terror and pain, was “a reaction on the part of chivalrous enthusiasm against the icy water of rational calculation and against the [Disenchantment of the World] – leading to an often desperate attempt to re-enchant the world.” Giving an accurate definition of the movement would be a difficult task, for Romanticism stands for so many things and against so many others that it would be almost impossible to summarize them in just a few lines. However, we may say that it embodies Shakespeare’s sensibility and the interplay of “melancholia and obsession, madness and high intellectuality, sublime goodness and grotesque evil” that we find in his work, Byron’s extravagance, Scott’s evocations of savage passions, Pushkin’s satirical distance, Goethe’s rebellion against social rules, Schiller’s warnings regarding the dangers of excessive rationality, Novalis’s mysticism, Musset’s pessimistic pursuit’s of freedom, Chateaubriand’s concepts of nature, Baudelaire’s musicality, Poe’s preference for the supernatural and the occult, Hoffmann’s grotesque imagery of the human body, and so on.

Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann (generally known as E.T.A. Hoffmann) is one of the most influential writers of the nineteenth century Romantic Movement. As a child, he grew up with his mother after his parents’ divorce, in a rather disagreeable household, and constantly felt the lack of a father figure in his life. As a student, he showed a particular interest in classics, piano and drawing, but his various talents were not properly cultivated, which is why he made no significant progress in any of these domains in his youth. However, after he took music lessons he was recognized as an extremely talented artist, and later on he gave music lessons himself, he became a composer and he even held several positions as conductor. When he was only ten years old he met Theodor Gotllieb von Hippel, who became his lifelong friend; they both studied law at the University of Königsberg, where they also attended some of Kant’s lectures. During his studies he fell in love with a married woman, who was also nine years older than him. The affair ended, however, and when he passed his final examination he moved to Posen, where he lived on his own for the first time. Meanwhile, he had become engaged to his cousin Mina Doerffer, he had lived in Berlin for some time, he had tried to make a name for himself as a composer, and he had lost both of his parents. The years in Posen were marked by a complete lack of restraint in personal behaviour. He generated a scandal by distributing caricatures of some influential men in Posen during a carnival, and because of that he was transferred to Plock, in Poland. There he met Maria Tekla Michalina Rorer, whom he married after breaking off the engagement to Mina.

Hoffmann’s literary preoccupations manifested themselves from an early age, and although he was not properly educated in the new trends developing in the German society, he read Goethe, Schiller, Rousseau and many others by himself and began to develop his own literary style. By the age of 28 he already had some of his works published, but he was financially constrained to divide his life between administrative duty and his passions for writing, music and drawing. Nevertheless, he was praised for commitment to his job, as well as for his artistic skills. Thus, we may say that during his life he fluctuated between accepting the reality and submitting himself to it, and a bohemian lifestyle that allowed him to dedicate himself to his artistic vocations.

The years spent in Warsaw seemed to have been the happiest of Hoffmann’s life. He adapted himself rather quickly, he established contacts with the popular literary figures of the day and he had forgotten for a while the misfortunes, the obsessions and the fears that marked his early years. However, this happiness was not meant to last. He lost his job because of the changing political climate and he was practically forced to move back to Berlin, while his wife and his daughter moved to Posen. The life in Berlin proved to be more horrible than he had ever imagined. He had to endure extreme poverty, he was unsatisfied with the social reality, and soon he had to cope with yet another tragedy – the death of his daughter. For all these troubles he seems to have sought solace in alcohol.

And yet, not only the external factors should be held responsible for Hoffmann’s troubled transition through life. His fractured existence, his internal struggle, his constant trespassing of the boundaries between reality and fantasy, as well as his taste for the irrational, the incomprehensible and even the grotesque, reveal the artist’s Romantic formation, which manifested itself in both the personal life and the artistic career. His choices, his inability to adapt to the social reality, his unpredictability, and his non-resistance to the need to satisfy all his desires, should be considered equally responsible.

During his last years he found himself caught in the midst of another series of unfortunate circumstances. He fell in love with one of the students to whom he was giving piano lessons, he became a political target, for he had dared to mock the authorities, and he was forbidden to engage in any other literary activity. Nevertheless, between the frequent relocations, the personal and the collective tragedies he had to face, the aimless wanderings, alcohol, and dealing with a declining health, he still found the time to create an impressive number of musical pieces, two novels and some of the most distinguished short stories ever written.

Hoffmann’s creativity, like that of so many other great writers of all times, comes from an acute existential despair that the author sought to resolve by turning it into art. One of his memorable short stories, “The Sandman,” is perhaps the best example of the way in which pieces of the author’s life are incorporated in his work. By fusing the supernatural with many relevant aspects of an objective reality, Hoffmann engages to present the tragic destiny of a young man, Nathaniel, who lets himself be driven by a lifelong obsession with a “hideous sandman, who is perhaps an evil genius, perhaps the soul’s own weakness viewed objectively.” The story begins with three letters that reveal a great deal of the main character’s personal history, while foreshadowing at the same time his inevitable death. The way in which Nathaniel’s destiny may impress any observer could not be better expressed than in the narrator’s own words:

“Nothing more strange and chimerical can be imagined than the fate of my poor friend, the young student Nathaniel, which I, gracious reader, have undertaken to tell you. Have you ever known something that has completely filled your heart, thoughts and senses, to the exclusion of every other object? There was a burning fermentation within you; your blood seethed like a molten glow through your veins, sending a higher color to your cheeks. Your glance was strange, as if you were seeking in empty space forms invisible to all other eyes, and your speech flowed away into dark sighs. Then your friends asked you: ‘What is it, my dear sir?’ ‘What is the matter?’ And you wanted to draw the picture in your mind in all its glowing tints, in all its light and shade, and labored hard to find words only to begin. You thought that you should crowd together in the very first sentence all those wonderful, exalted, horrible, comical, frightful events, so as to strike every hearer at once as with an electric shock. But every word, every thing that takes the form of speech, appeared to you colorless, cold and dead.”

By addressing the reader directly, the narrator immediately introduces him into the Romantic atmosphere that pervades the entire story. Nathaniel, the main character and apparently the narrator’s friend, is a young man who lives his life in the shadow of a frightening childhood memory. From his first letter, addressed to Lothaire, his fiancée’s brother, we find out that a ghost of his past – a mythical character known as the Sandman – that has caused him to experience unimaginable levels of terror in his childhood, has returned to torment him even more. As he recounts how he came to know the legend of the Sandman and the Sandman ‘in person,’ we realize that Nathaniel was a man who lived his life at the crossroad between imagination and material life – a perfect example of the misunderstood artist of the nineteenth century who struggles to meet the requirements of bourgeois life without sacrificing his artistic vocation.

Brigitte Röder tells us that Romantic aesthetics seeks to transcend the boundaries between imagination and reality and between mind and matter, thus aiming to “capture the Ideal ever more fully and thereby bring the individual into closer contact with the Absolute.” For the artist, the Ideal can be attained through art and most of the times he subordinates his entire existence to the creation of the perfect artwork that mediates between the individual and the Absolute. In the process, however, he risks to remain captive somewhere between the real world and a higher realm of the Ideal to which one reaches by means of the imagination.

Nathaniel, our main character, is the embodiment of the artist who falls prey to the illusion that the tedious reality and the Ideal to which the Romantic artist aspires may be brought together on all levels. In his case, however, we are not really speaking of an artist in a quest for the Ideal, but of a man who becomes the victim of his own aspirations. Endowed with a boundless power of imagination, he refuses to believe that there is nothing more to the world than that which meets the eye. Of course, this tendency manifests itself from early childhood when he chooses not to believe his mother’s simple and reassuring story about the Sandman. Obviously, he continues to investigate, and when his nanny gives him a rather gruesome version of the story, although he realizes that it could not have been entirely true, he becomes quite impressed with it:

“[The Sandman] is a wicked man, who comes to children when they will not go to bed, and throws a handful of sand into their eyes, so that they start out bleeding from their heads. These eyes he puts in a bag and carries them to the half-moon to feed his own children, who sit in the nest up yonder, and have crooked beaks like owls so that they can pick up the eyes of naughty human children.” (“The Sandman,” p. 5)

The further we go into the story, the more we understand the situations that led to the main character’s current condition. We learn from the letter sent to Lothaire about Nathaniel’s happiest memories – those spent with his entire family, listening to the wonderful stories of his father. However, we are also told that some evenings his mother would rush them to bed by simply telling them that she could see the Sandman coming and every time the young Nathaniel would hear the sound of footsteps and assume they were Sandman’s. With a good amount of dread, but also with determination, he decided to satisfy his curiosity regarding the identity of the Sandman. Thus, he soon discovered that the ‘legendary creature’ was no other than Coppelius, the lawyer who frequently visited his father and whom he clearly disliked: “the most hideous form could not have inspired me with deeper horror than this very Coppelius,” a man with penetrating, sparkling green eyes, whose “wry mouth was often twisted into a malicious laugh.” (“The Sandman,” p. 7)

Why Nathaniel disliked Coppelius and why he associated him with the Sandman in his childhood is perfectly obvious now, but why the older Nathaniel would still believe that Coppelius was the most grotesque version of the Sandman, “a hideous spectral monster, who, wherever he appeared, brought with him grief, want, and destruction – temporal and eternal,” (“The Sandman,” pp. 8-9) is a more complex matter. According to Freud, who refers to Hoffmann’s story in his discussion of the uncanny, the way in which the young boy perceives every gesture, every word, and every action of the repulsive old lawyer as a threat to his well-being, as well as his father’s, may be regarded as the “first delirium of the panic-stricken boy.”As Nathaniel himself relates, when he saw his father working with Coppelius on some experiment, he started to recognize in him the features he hated the most in Coppelius. Everything around began to look more and more horrifying, and soon enough a whole spectacle, even more grotesque than the story heard from the nanny, but nevertheless inspired by it, was unfolding itself in front of his eyes:

“Some convulsive pain seemed to have distorted his mild features into a repulsive, diabolical countenance. He looked like Coppelius, whom I saw brandishing red-hot tongs, which he used to take glowing masses out of the thick smoke; which objects he afterwards hammered. I seemed to catch a glimpse of human faces lying around without any eyes – but with deep holes instead.” (“The Sandman,” p. 9)

Of course, at that point Nathaniel lost control over his imagination. He was discovered by Coppelius and he believed he was about to have his eyes pulled out, as it seemed that the wicked man was preparing to throw a handful of red-hot coal into his eyes. He also thought he was allowed to keep “his eyes and do his share of the world’s crying” because of his father’s supplication, which did not save him, however, from the violent examination to which he was submitted: he had his hands and ankles removed and put in various places, then put back on where they fitted best. Or at least he thought so. Obviously, this was nothing more than a fabulous product of a child’s imagination, for when he woke up, after a long period of illness, everything was in its right place.

At some point the older Nathaniel admits that he had suffered from a severe episode of delirium and fever that night, but he never admits that he might have wrongfully interpreted the whole episode. He woke up just as terrified of the Sandman as before, and he asked himself when he would return to torment him even more.

A year after the misfortunate incident, Coppelius returns for the last time. The child observes the power he has over his parents, but, I assume, he never realizes how this final visit would affect him for the rest of life. Later that night Nathaniel’s father is killed in his study because of an explosion. The child, and apparently everybody else, blamed Coppelius, but he was not to be seen for a long time. His image, as well as the memory of his dead father, however, would haunt him for the rest of his life:

“I darted into my father’s room; the door was open, a suffocating smoke rolled towards me, and the servant girl cried: ‘Ah, my master, my master!’ On the floor of the smoking hearth lay my father dead, with his face burned, blackened and hideously distorted – my sisters were shrieking and moaning around him – and my mother had fainted. […] When, two days afterwards, my father was laid in his coffin, his features were again as mild and gentle as they had been in his life. My soul was comforted by the thought that his compact with the satanic Coppelius could not have plunged him into eternal perdition.” (“The Sandman,” p. 11)

At this point the Sandman had vanished from Nathaniel’s life and for some time he remained nothing but a terrifying memory of the past. The interesting fact is that, although Nathaniel’s father was now dead, he still managed to find some sort of comfort in the idea that Coppelius’s interaction with his father had come to an end and now everything might return to normality. Freud gives an interesting interpretation of the events recounted so far and of Nathaniel’s attitude as well. He explains the main character’s obsession with the Sandman starting from the idea that “a morbid anxiety connected with the eyes and with going blind is often enough a substitute for the dread of being castrated,” bringing the discussion back to Oedipus, the mythical character who blinded himself because of the guilt he felt for having killed his father and married his mother.

In psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex refers to the father – son competition for the mother’s love, which generates a castration anxiety that disappears only when the individual had reached the final stage of psychosexual development. If, however, the complex remains unresolved, then the individual’s sexual identity is compromised and, in time, this might take the form of neurosis. Thus, Nathaniel is seen as nothing more than an oedipal character, the Sandman is the substitute of a “dreaded father,” while Nathaniel’s obsession with the Sandman is a reflection of his guilt.

Freud gives all the right arguments for the reinforcement of his theory. And yet, why should we not think of Nathaniel’s obsession with the Sandman as a reflection of his impossibility to accept his father’s untimely death? After all, he does tell the story of the Sandman as an adult and it is well known that time, imagination and special circumstances may alter the way we remember the things of the past. Moreover, why should we not regard his initial account of the Sandman and the circumstances of the death of his father as an attempt to reconcile himself, at least temporarily, with a painful memory of his childhood, even if that implied a retreat into a world of fantasy? Or, given Hoffmann’s own estrangement from his father at an early age, which he deeply regretted, why should we not think of this particular short story as the author’s own attempt to reconcile himself with his past?

As previously mentioned, the Sandman had long been a horrible memory of the past, but, like so many other things of the past, at some point it returned to trouble Nathaniel’s existence. We learn from Nathaniel’s letter that he had identified an optician named Coppola as being the same Coppelius / Sandman that turned his childhood into a nightmare. However, the letter is wrongfully sent to Clara instead of Lothaire. She writes back to him, trying to persuade him that the old Coppelius was nothing more than a repulsive old man whose obvious hatred for children was the real reason why he would perceive him as the Sandman, insisting on the idea that supernatural forces only exist inside the human mind and that any external manifestation of them is nothing more than a product of the imagination:

If there is a dark and hostile power, laying its treacherous toils within us, by which it holds us fast and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say there is such a power, it must form itself inside us and out of ourselves, indeed; it must become identical with ourselves. For it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work. Now, if we have a mind which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by the joy of life, always to recognize this strange enemy as such, and calmly to follow the path of our own inclination and calling, then the dark power will fail in its attempt to gain a form that shall be a reflection of ourselves.” (“The Sandman,” pp. 14-15)

Clara’s argument seems to have been quite convincing, for Nathaniel’s second letter to Lothaire shows us that he no longer believed that Coppola might be the lawyer Coppelius. And yet, we may say that he had chosen to embrace the rational version of the matter not necessarily because he was convinced that the Sandman was nothing more than a childish fantasy, but because he had discovered another object of interest. His professor’s daughter, Olympia, seems to have caused quite an impression on him. She had come to his attention not only because of her angelic countenance, but also because of the strangeness of her eyes. Obviously, Olympia’s unusual appearance had once again awakened Nathaniel’s obsession with the Sandman and, despite his decision to look towards the future, towards his approaching reunion with his dear Clara, he never manages to completely return to reality.

Soon enough, Nathaniel begins to show the extent to which his mind had been invaded by a gloomy mysticism that would eventually push him towards suicide. First he becomes gradually estranged from Clara, for he considers her inability to believe in diabolical forces to be the sign of a “cold, unreceptive” mind, with an inferior power of judgment. Nevertheless, he was determined to prove to her that the supernatural exists and that Coppola is indeed the embodiment of pure evil. In his endeavour to take Clara out of her state of “mental drowsiness,” he writes a grim poem about Coppelius in which he presents him as standing in the way of their happiness. In his poem Coppelius is depicted as a “black hand” that occasionally appears into their lives to take away their joy. Of course, this is nothing more than a portrayal of the way in which Nathaniel’s obsessions complicate his relationship with Clara. However, the truly grotesque imagery is yet to come. While Nathaniel and Clara were about to get married, he envisions Coppelius touching Clara’s eyes and then throwing him into a circle of fire from which he is pulled back by Clara soft, gentle voice:

“‘Can’t you see me then? Coppelius has deceived you. Those, indeed, were not my eyes which so burned in your breast – they were glowing drops of your own heart’s blood. I have my eyes still – only look at them!’ Nathaniel reflects: ‘That is Clara, and I am hers for ever!’ Then it seems to him as though this thought has forcibly entered the fiery circle, which stands still, while the noise dully ceases in the dark abyss. Nathaniel looks into Clara’s eyes, but it is death that, with Clara’s eyes, kindly looks on him.” (“The Sandman,” p. 23)

The above paragraph is the perfect example of the Burkean idea of the sublime according to which the highest aesthetic experience is that which activates man’s instincts of self-preservation. The grotesque imagery may appal the reader, but its aesthetic effect cannot be ignored. Even if Kant would probably argue that such gruesome picture resists “to the interest of the senses,” it still manages to break the limits of imagination and create a feeling of astonishment, a combination of terror and delight that emerges as the reader himself begins to recognize the superiority of his own power of reason.

Our characters, too, become more aware of their rational capacities when confronted with such terrifying images, but if Nathaniel finds them sublime in themselves, in Clara’s case the sublime resides in her capacity to recognize them as products of a sick imagination. Of course, she asks Nathaniel to burn the “mad, senseless, insane stuff,” which throws him into a state of frustration and rage that culminates in him calling her “inanimate, accursed automaton.” (“The Sandman,” p. 25) According to Robert Sayre and Michael Löwry, the Romantics were particularly interested in the idea of an automatic puppet that could act and talk like a human, and equally horrified by the thought that mankind could be mechanized as well. Naturally, the use of automata in many Romantic works was interpreted as some sort of protest against the artificiality of the modern world, against the rationalization of nature, and sometimes even against the modern state. However, some critics argue that in Hoffmann’s short story the automatic is identified “with the satanic, the life of modern people being the product of a foul artificial mechanism governed by Satan from within.”

We would not want to interfere with anyone’s religious beliefs, but we must say that we do not find any religious dimension in Hoffmann’s use of automata in this particular short story. Indeed, the automatic is identified with the supernatural, but also with the socially ‘natural.’ The first time Nathaniel mentions this word he refers to the extremely rational Clara, who is well-grounded in reality and who may even stand for the social ideal of the nineteenth century. In this case, Nathaniel’s rejection of automata may be regarded as a rejection of the social system, of excessive rationalization, of the modern world in general. The second time he gets in contact with an automaton, however, he falls in love with it. Olympia was a real automaton and, unlike Clara, she (it) did not have opinions or aspirations of her (its) own. Thus, Nathaniel, the misunderstood young man, was able to project his own thoughts on her without any resistance coming from her side, so in this case Nathaniel’s love for her can be seen as coming from his need to be accepted as he was.

In that which concerns Nathaniel’s feelings for the first ‘automaton,’ the one that stands for the socially natural, we can observe that he is constantly drawn to it, but he always ends up rejecting it. He wants to be with Clara, for she represents stability and domestic happiness, but he lets himself driven by some self-destructive impulses that he can no longer control. As we can imagine, calling Clara an “inanimate, accursed automaton” causes him a lot of trouble. Lothaire challenges him to a duel, but he is once again saved by Clara, whose tears convince Lothaire to stop the fight and, apparently, also bring Nathaniel back on the right path:

“in Nathaniel’s heart, amid the most poignant sorrow, revived all his love for the beautiful Clara, which he had felt in the prime of his happy youth. The weapon fell from his hand, he threw himself at Clara’s feet. ‘Can you ever forgive me, my only – my beloved Clara? Can you forgive me, my dear brother, Lothaire?’ […]all three embraced in reconciliation amid a thousand tears, and vowed eternal love and fidelity. Nathaniel felt as though a heavy and oppressive burden had been rolled away, as though by resisting the dark power that held him fast he had saved his whole being, which had been threatened with annihilation.” (“The Sandman,” pp. 25-26)

Of course, the oppressive burden would resurface as soon as Nathaniel returns to finish his studies. As a consequence of a misfortunate accident, he is forced to move to another house, closer to Professor Spalanzani and his daughter Olympia. From his window he could see straight into Olympia’s room and he was amazed by the fact that she would simply stand for hours in the same place, without making a single gesture. He was inclined to believe that she sat there so that she could look at him, but since he had decided to remain faithful to Clara, he ignored her for as long as he could. But soon enough he would be confronted with yet another major distraction. Coppola returns to sell his “pretty eyes,” as he used to call his spectacles, and although Nathaniel eventually understands that the optician’s ‘eyes’ are nothing but lenses, he is peculiarly drawn to them:

“A thousand eyes glanced, and quivered convulsively, and stared at Nathaniel; yet he could not look away from the table, and Coppola kept laying down still more and more spectacles, while flaming glances were intermingled more and more wildly, and shot their blood-red light into Nathaniel’s heart.” (“The Sandman,” p. 27)

At this point it is rather difficult to decide whether Nathaniel hated Coppelius, Coppola, and even the Sandman, or he simply hated what he himself would become if he stayed long enough around either one of these three characters. As we may notice, he is appalled by the idea of buying ‘eyes,’ but even when he realizes that the eyes are spectacles, he is still inclined to see them as eyes. He nevertheless manages to escape the nightmarish illusion, but it obvious that his childhood obsessions have returned to haunt him again. He buys a telescope from the salesman so that he could get rid of him rather quickly, but soon enough he finds himself caught in yet another troubling activity that would eventually bring him on the verge of madness.

Nathaniel eventually convinces himself that Coppola was just a simple salesman, but he is quickly drawn right back on the path of destruction. He begins to look at Olympia with his recently purchased telescope and begins to realize she was the most beautiful and the most perfect creature he had ever seen. Although her eyes seemed “stiff and dead,” the more he looked at her, the more they seemed to recover their liveliness. Nathaniel, however, began to lose his, together with the determination to fight against his urges:

“He now sat down to finish his letter to Clara; but a glance through the window convinced him that Olympia was still sitting there, and he instantly sprang out, as if impelled by an irresistible power, seized Coppola’s glass, and could not tear himself from the seductive view of Olympia.” (“The Sandman,” p. 29)

A series of special circumstances brings Nathaniel closer to Olympia and soon he completely forgets about Clara. He fails to acknowledge any sign indicating that she was an automaton, but at some point he realizes that in the worst possible way. He overhears Spalanzani and Coppola violently arguing over Olympia. The former claimed that she should remain with him, for it was him who dedicated his entire life to her (its) construction, while the latter contended that she should be his, since it was him the one who stole the eyes from Nathaniel and gave them to her. At this point, the situation could not get any creepier. Nathaniel enters the room and sees Olympia’s “waxen, deadly pale countenance,” with two big black holes where her eyes should have been, and a sparkling pair of eyes laying on the ground and staring at him. (“The Sandman,” p. 37.) Of course, madness took over his mind and he tried to strangle Spalanzani, but fortunately he was stopped at the last moment by his friend, Sigismund, and some other people who heard the noise and rushed in to save the professor.

Of course, after this episode Nathaniel was taken to the mad-house, while the professor left the university so as to avoid criminal prosecution for having introduced an automaton into human society. Nathaniel, nevertheless, recovered from this episode too. He was again reunited with Clara, but just when everyone believed that everything has returned to normality, he tries to throw her off a high tower. As soon as he notices Coppelius heading towards the place where the two lovers were enjoying themselves, he looks at Clara and screams at her “Wooden doll, turn thyself,” and then he grabs her with all his strength and pushes her to the edge of the tower. Fortunately, she is saved by Lothaire. Nathaniel, however, could no longer be saved. He moves relentlessly all along the gallery screaming and crying, he looks down to Coppelius who was watching him from the crowd and he throws himself off the tower yelling out “Ah, pretty eyes – pretty eyes.” (“The Sandman,” p. 42)

Obviously, Hoffmann’s story is also infused with a strong sense of irony. According to Schlegel, the Romantic irony is a “consistent alternation of affirmation and negation, of exuberant emergence from oneself and self-critical retreat into oneself, of enthusiasm and skepticism.” Thus, there are two forces within the creator of a work of art, a self-creative one and a self-destructive one, the first urging the author to express himself freely, the other compelling him to develop any phrase to the point of irony. Of course, in Hoffmann’s case, we are dealing with a master of words with double meaning. If we let ourselves be carried by the story, we find ourselves drawn into a fantasy world in which reason has no dominion: children’s eyes are pulled out and used as food for mythical baby-monsters, bodies are dismembered, limbs are randomly reattached to the body, mechanical devices are turned into human beings, and, of course, human beings become either mythical monsters or automata – a perfectly grotesque spectacle. And yet, when reason steps in, we realize that even in the first gruesome episode presented in the story there is enough evidence that points to the fact that nothing is what it looks like. For example, when Nathaniel hears Coppelius telling his father “Eyes here, eyes!” the boy cannot understand that he was actually saying ‘pay attention,’ and instead he believes that he was asking his father to take some human organs and throw them into the fire. Next, when Coppelius says “Now we have eyes enough – a pretty pair of child’s eyes,” the boy fails to catch the irony in his words and does not realize that he was actually saying ‘now we have enough attention, but from the wrong person.’ Moreover, when Nathaniel’s father says “Master, Master, leave my Nathaniel his eyes,” the child again misinterprets his words and he never understands that his father meant to say ‘let the child go for the fire might hurt his eyes.’ The last example is more deceptive, however, because in written form it lacks the proper punctuation that may give it its definite meaning. However, given the fact that the words are supposedly written by someone who strongly believes in the horror story we are reading, namely Nathaniel, it is quite obvious that this is nothing more than a narrative device meant to create a certain stylistic effect: Nathaniel tries to persuade Lothaire that his story was real, while the narrator wants to maintain a moderate level of uncertainty.

We discover irony in the construction of the story as well. For example, the story is told from the point of view of a self-reflexive narrator who tries to find the best way to place a supernatural story in a natural setting. Of course, we find evidence of this matter right after the letters from the opening section of the story, when the narrator speaks to the reader directly and asks himself whether he had chosen the best way to present such a story:

“[…] no one has really asked me for the history of the young Nathaniel, but you know well enough that I belong to the queer race of authors, who, if they have any thing in their mind, such as I have just described, feel as if every one who comes near them […] is asking them: ‘What is it then—tell it, my dear friend?’ Thus was I forcibly compelled to tell you of the momentous life of Nathaniel. The singularity and marvellousness of the story filled my entire soul, but for that very reason and because, my reader, I had to make you equally inclined to endure oddity, which is no small matter, I tormented myself to begin the history of Nathaniel in a manner as inspiring, original and striking as possible. ‘Once upon a time,’ the beautiful beginning of every tale, was too tame. ‘In the little provincial town of S – lived’– was somewhat better, as it at least prepared for the climax. Or should I dart at once medias in res, with ‘Go to the devil, cried the student Nathaniel with rage and horror in his wild looks, when the barometer-seller, Guiseppe Coppola? – I had indeed already written this down, when I fancied that in the wild looks of the student Nathaniel, I could detect something ludicrous, whereas the story is not comical at all. (“The Sandman,” pp. 18-19)

As we may notice, the narrator reflects not only on the story he presents, but also on Nathaniel’s life. Considering his compulsion to tell a story that filled his heart, thoughts and senses, so as to forget everything else, his compassion for his character, as well as his obvious indecisiveness regarding the conception of the story, we may assume that he identifies himself with Nathaniel to some extent. However, unlike his character, the narrator is well-aware of his condition, whereas Nathaniel never understands whether the events unfolding in front of his eyes are real or just a product of an extended delirium. Thus, we are also dealing with a self-conscious narrator who relies on “the proximity of chaos and the strength of artifice” in his construction of the story, and that, according Garber, is also a trademark of Romantic irony.

Romantic irony also seems to stand in line with humour. As we already know, humour derives from the “contrast of moods, of subjective and objective, of sentiment and wit,” which in Romantic literature takes the form of the double. Hoffmann himself explored the theme of the double intensively, but in this particular short story neither the dualistic nature of some characters, nor the doubling of their self is a source of humour, but of horror. However, we may say that Hoffmann was one of the writers whose works prove that an object’s aesthetic value does not necessarily lie in its beauty, but in the degree to which it reveals the depths of human nature. In that which concerns the theme of the double, we may say that it was precisely Hoffmann’s exploration of it that which inspired Otto Rank to approach the theme from a psychoanalytical point of view, since Rank’s own study begins with a quote from “The Sandman” – “It is the phantom of our own self whose intimate relationship with, and deep effect upon, our spirit casts us into hell or transports us into Heaven.” (“The Sandman,” p. 15)

Otto Rank explains that the idea of the double sprang from man’s need to deny the power of death. Thus the double took the form of man’s soul, which somehow guaranteed man’s existence even after the death of his physical body. In modern times, however, the double also began to assume the form of a reflection in the mirror, a shadow, a twin, or a spirit – most often evil ones. In psychoanalysis, any form of the double is usually the symptom of an underlying pathology that presents itself either as an excessive self-love (narcissism), or as an irrational fear of one’s self. In literature, on the other hand, the double is a theme through which the author explores the duality within the human nature, but if in Ancient literature, for example, the double was represented as a symbol of immortality, in modern literature it became the messenger of death.

In “The Sandman” the theme of the double is explored mainly through the main character. From the beginning we realize that Nathaniel is consumed by two conflicting forces that threaten to take over his mind. He continuously fluctuates between reality and fantasy and he is almost simultaneously drawn by everything that represents either of them. Clara, for example, is the one that almost always brings him back to reality, while Olympia is the one that compels him to surrender to fantasy. He loves Clara with all sincerity, but he cannot resist to Olympia’s charms. Even when he talks about them we can see the opposition between the two, as well as his impossibility to resist to either of them. For example, he compares Clara’s eyes to a lake “in which the pure azure of a cloudless sky, the wood and flowery field, the whole cheerful life of the rich landscape are reflected,” (“The Sandman,” p. 20) and he describes her touch as extremely gentle and warm. Olympia’s touch, on the contrary, was cold as ice and her eyes seemed stiff and dead, but still capable to arouse the strongest emotions. However, he considered Clara cold and unreceptive when she refused to admit the existence of demons among people, while Olympia endorsed his every thought since she had none of her own. If we apply Rank’s theory of the double to the two ladies in Nathaniel’s life, we may say that Olympia is nothing more than Clara’s double in the form of an inanimate twin – a product of Nathaniel’s imagination that could nevertheless give him anything that Clara could or would not.

Freud, however, focuses on other pairs of doubles. The first pair is formed by Nathaniel’s father and Coppelius, which is obvious if we take into account Freud’s theory regarding the main character’s oedipal complex. As we already said, given Nathaniel ambivalent feelings towards his father, he creates Coppelius so that he could cast all his negative feelings on him, instead of on his father. The next pair is formed by Coppola and Professor Spalanzini, the first as the substitute of Coppelius, the second as the substitute of Nathaniel’s loving father. In this case, they would both be created by Nathaniel’s imagination, but there is evidence in the text that the two, as well as Coppelius himself, are real.

Coppelius’s existence outside Nathaniel’s imagination is proved at the beginning of the story, when he is described as a frequent visitor that used to frighten Nathaniel even before identifying him with the Sandman, as well as at the end of the story, when the narrator himself informs us that Coppelius was among the crowd that had gathered to look at the madman who had just tried to hurl a young woman down from the highest gallery of a tower. Of all the people watching him, Coppelius was the only one who kept his calm and simply waited for the madman to come down on his own one way or another. This does not confirm Coppelius’s obscure and mythical origins, nor that the narrator is inclined to believe Nathaniel’s story, but simply that Coppelius was the same cold-blooded man from Nathaniel’s childhood, incapable of showing any compassion for the suffering of another human being. Of course, one might argue that it could not be a coincidence that the narrator brings Coppelius back right when Nathaniel was about to commit suicide. Indeed, it is not. It is instead a narrative artifice through which the initial level of uncertainty is maintained even after the story is finished, thus forcing the reader to continue to reflect on the subjects brought into question throughout the story, and that, nevertheless, is another characteristic of Romantic fiction.

As regards Spalanzani and his daughter Olympia, there is indisputable evidence in the text of him not being just a product of Nathaniel’s imagination. He is a physics professors at the university, he interacts with Nathaniel’s friend, Sigismund, and with pretty much half the university, for he organizes a party in order to introduce his daughter to all those who blamed him for keeping Olympia concealed for so long. Moreover, when Nathaniel reveals that Spalanzani’s daughter was nothing more than a wooden doll, the story causes such uproar that he is forced to leave the university. Of course, nobody understands how he could have deceived so many people, but once the rumour was spread, there was no turning back. The idea that a doll could pass off as a human being was so disturbing and so confusing at the same time that even some of those who attended Spalanzani’s party began to believe in it. As they recalled the event, they nevertheless convinced themselves that some of Olympia’s repeated gestures, such as sneezing, were in fact meant to cover up the sound made by the clockwork. Others, more rational men, recognized the absurdity of the story and tried to dismiss it, but the impression made by such an idea was too big to be dismissed on the account that it defies the laws of logic.

Now that we have proved that Spalanzani and Olympia existed even outside Nathaniel’s imagination, we may naturally believe that Coppola was real too, since Spalanzani himself avouched for him. We learn from the story that he is of Italian origin, that he had known the professor for many years and that he had an obvious Italian accent. His sudden disappearance right after Spalanzani’s exposure is explicable as well. Given the fact that he was an itinerant salesman drawn into a huge scandal, it is quite obvious that his business would have been affected by the suspicion that hovered over him.

Of course, all of the above is entirely true only in the situation that Nathaniel and the narrator are not one and the same person, for in that case every character would be just an invention of someone trying to explore in his writing some personal issues and still maintain a certain level of distance. Just as the rational characters in this story claim in their attempt to defend Spalanzani that Nathaniel’s account of the events is an “allegory – a continued metaphor,” (“The Sandman,” p. 39) so too the reader may perceive the entire story as an allegory of the social reality in which the narrator addresses the problems of the individual in a world to which he does not belong.

Obviously, the narrator’s identity is brought into question because there are subtle clues in the text indicating that Nathaniel may be, in fact, the narrator’s alter ego. Besides the author’s indecisiveness concerning the inception of the story and his reflections on Nathaniel’s tragic destiny, his involvement with all the characters of the story is also questionable. For example, he tells us he has the three letters from his dear friend Lothaire who apparently kept the letters even after Nathaniel tried to kill his sister. Next, he had an intimate relationship with Clara and he might still have some feelings for her, which becomes quite obvious when he writes: “I could proceed in my story with confidence, but at this moment Clara’s image stands so plainly before me, that I cannot look another way, as indeed was always the case when she gazed at me, with one of her lively smiles.” (“The Sandman,” p. 20) Moreover, he ends the story with information about Clara, who was apparently enjoying the perks of domestic life next to a man who could give her everything that the ‘morbid’ Nathaniel could not. And yet, given the narrator’s compassion towards Nathaniel, I doubt that his only intention was to ensure the reader that Clara was not seriously affected by her experience with Nathaniel. A hint of regret can be detected in the narrator’s words when he contrasts Nathaniel with her kind-looking husband, which, of course, might mean that the narrator is in fact an older Nathaniel who decided to let everyone know how his peculiar nature stood in the way of his happiness.

Of course, there is not enough evidence to convince us that only one of these versions is true, but it is precisely this ambivalence that turns this story into a masterpiece of the nineteenth century short fiction. Hoffmann’s craftsmanship in combining the real with the supernatural in order to explore disturbing issues of the social reality reveals itself in all its glory through the complex portrayals of characters, an original construction of the story and a careful choice of words. The grotesque imagery, the words that always signify more than we can fully grasp when we read the story for the first time, the exploration of themes that dazzle and overwhelm us, they all contribute to the creation of one of the most suggestive portrayals of death that reminds us of the frailty of human nature and of our powerlessness in front of the forces that inhabit our own minds.

3.2. Edgar Allan Poe – Delightful Terror in “The Fall of the House of Usher”

Terror, as Burke argues, is the ruling principle of the sublime. It is the strongest human passion that “robs the mind of all its power,” causing an immediate paralysis of man’s rational capacities that subsequently generates an odd mixture of pain and pleasure. Death, in its turn, is the king of all terrors, the supreme image of sublimity, just as long as it is perceived as a remote concept and not as an objective reality, while delight, as a response to terror and death, is a sensory experience on which we have a limited degree of control, whether we are talking about actual instances of terror and death or about artistic representations of them. Obviously, delight does not arise from the contemplation of someone else’s sufferings, be it a fictional character or a real person, but from the feeling of independence we momentarily experience when we understand the superiority of our situation, if we take into account Burke’s aesthetic theory, or from the momentary elevation of the mind, if we rely on Kant’s aesthetic principles. Either way, terror and death may become sources of delight; they can be treated as objects of pure aesthetic judgments, and, of course, any artistic representation of them may capture, to some extent, their aesthetic value.

However, if Burke contends that skilful representations of terror and death may become sources of sublimity in themselves, Kant rejects the idea of sublime art. For him art can only be beautiful, but its beauty does not lie by definition in an artwork’s capacity to represent beauty, but in its creator’s capacity to beautifully represent things, emotions or phenomena that in nature would be considered quite ugly or displeasing. Sublime art, on the other hand, is not possible because the accurate representation of the sublime is not possible. For Kant, the sublime is that which is “absolutely great,” which surpasses every measure of the senses, which can be apprehended by means of the imagination, but it cannot be comprehended, such as the unfolding of the boundless forces of nature or abstract concepts that defy the laws of empirical knowledge, such as infinity and eternity. Nonetheless, Kant accepts the idea that there can be representations of the sublime in art, and even if he claims that they are “always restricted to the conditions of agreement with nature,” it is the artist’s duty to explore the sublime in every possible way, which is precisely what Poe does in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Any discussion on Edgar Allan Poe’s interest in the aesthetic ideas promoted by the eighteenth century philosophers, Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke, must begin with Poe’s own understanding of the sublime, as expressed in many of his critical works. In “The Poetic Principle,” for example, the essay in which he criticizes the didactic nature of art and becomes an advocate of art for art’s sake, or better yet for the creation of a poem “solely for the poem’s sake,” we find evidence of Poe’s familiarity with Burke’s Enquiry and Kant’s third Critique, and implicitly, with their notions of the beautiful and the sublime:

“I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth. […] pleasure which is at once the most pure, the most elevating, and the most intense, is derived […] from the contemplation of the Beautiful. […] I make Beauty, therefore – using the word as inclusive of the sublime – I make Beauty the province of the poem, simply because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring as directly as possible from their causes: – no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation in question is at least most readily attainable in the poem. It by no means follows, however, that the incitements of Passion, or the precepts of Duty, or even the lessons of Truth, may not be introduced into a poem, and with advantage; for they may subserve incidentally, in various ways, the general purposes of the work: – but the true artist will always contrive to tone them down in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem.”

Obviously, Poe does not fully embrace any of the two theories, but he nevertheless shapes his own aesthetic principles according to some ideas exposed by Kant and Burke. For example, Poe maintains that the “Poetic Sentiment” – the pleasure derived from a poem that leads to the elevation of the soul – can more easily be attained through the contemplation of beauty. Both Kant and Burke speak of some sort of elevation of the soul as a result of the contemplation of the beautiful and the sublime, but if Poe makes no clear distinction between the two notions, the two philosophers separate them according to the principles already discussed in the previous sections of this paper. Thus, for Kant the contemplation of the beautiful and the sublime requires a special disposition of the mind that involves the faculty of cognition (pure reason), the faculty of feeling pleasure or displeasure, and the faculty of desire (practical reason), which are set in motion by means of the imagination, whereas Poe excludes reason and duty (which also belongs to practical reason) from the contemplation of the beautiful in the poetic discourse. Burke, in his turn, distinguishes the beautiful and the sublime according to the passions they generate. Of course, by passions he means the primal human drives, and if Poe makes no real distinction between the emotions that arise from the contemplation of the beautiful and the sublime, Burke nevertheless demonstrates the superiority of the emotions generated by the sublime. And yet, if Kant contends that the sublime cannot be achieved my means of language or any other type of representation, both Burke and Poe agree that both the beautiful and the sublime can be successfully achieved by means of language or by any other type of artistic representation.

In another one of his reviews, however, Poe seems to make a distinction that brings him even closer to Burke’s notions of the beautiful and the sublime. In assessing the aesthetic qualities of Sarah Stickney’s volume The Poetry of Life, Poe praises her for her achievements in point of poetic expression, but he criticizes her for failing to recognize and delineate the differences between the beautiful and the sublime:

“What is said, if not always indisputable, is with a simplicity, and a scrupulous accuracy which leaves us, not for one moment, in doubt of what is intended, and impress us, at the same time, with a high opinion of the author’s ability. Miss Stickney’s manner is very good – her English pure, harmonious, in every respect unexceptionable. With a strong understanding, and withal a keen relish for the minor forms of poetic excellence – a strictness of conception which will ever prevent her from running into gross error – she is still, we think, insufficiently alive to the delicacies of the beautiful – unable to appreciate the energies of the sublime.”

As one might expect, a similar description of the beautiful and the sublime can also be found in Burke’s Enquiry, where the beautiful is identified with delicacy and femininity, and the sublime with masculinity and moral truth. Kant too provides an analogous distinction between the two notions in one of his early works – Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime – in which, perhaps influenced by Burke’s ideas, he asserts that “the beautiful charms” and “announces itself through the cheerfulness in the eyes, through traces of a smile, and often through audible mirth,” whereas “the sublime touches” and it is more “serious, sometimes even rigid,” but nevertheless astonishing.

However, if in his earlier reviews Poe seems to have remodelled his aesthetic principles according to those issued by Burke, in a later review of the poetry of Joseph Roadman Drake and Fitz Greene Halleck he finally draws away from the Burkean notions of the sublime and the beautiful. In his description of the “sentiment of Poesy” he introduces the mystical as a separate aesthetic category that completes the effects that the representations of the beautiful and the sublime may have on the very nature of poetry:

“Very nearly akin to this feeling, and liable to the same analysis, is the Faculty of Ideality – which is the sentiment of Poesy. This sentiment is the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical. Thence spring immediately admiration of the fair flowers, the fairer forests, the bright valleys and rivers and mountains of the Earth – and love of the gleaming stars and other burning glories of Heaven – and, mingled up inextricably with this love and this admiration of Heaven and of Earth, the unconquerable desire – to know.”

As we may notice, Poe no longer divides between the beautiful and the sublime, but instead he focuses on the notion of ideality from which he later derives the totality of effects or impressions of the poetic language – a principle that he would also use in the construction of his short stories. Moreover, the last words of the paragraph – “the unconquerable desire – to know” – suggest that Poe’s aesthetic ideas might actually work towards the Kantian notions of the sublime and the beautiful, for they appear to emphasize the role of understanding, and therefore of the faculty of cognition, in the apprehension of the ideal form of the poetic language. However, Poe completely separates the sublime from the mystical on the assumption that “the latter may exist, in the most vivid degree, without giving rise to the sense of the former,” thus moving further away from Kant too. From the Kantian perspective, the mystical falls under the realm of intuitive understanding, which means that it can be grasped by means of the imagination. But, given the fact that the sublime is that which breaks the limits of imagination, then the judgment of the mystical would not be an aesthetic one, but a logical one, and therefore Kant claims that the mystical cannot be included in any aesthetic category.

Nonetheless, this does not mean that, by breaking away with both the Kantian and the Burkean ideas of the beautiful and the sublime, Poe provided an inaccurate description of the ideal poetic language in terms of aesthetic ideas, but rather that he strove towards a transcendental mode of expression. With the beautiful, the sublime and the mystical shaping the “sentiment of Poetry” and with Poetry as “the practical result expressed in language of this Poetic sentiment,” Poe concludes that a poem’s aesthetic value is given by its capacity to arouse the same feeling in others. Thus, he not only emphasized the features of a literary style he would embrace, but he also made a step further towards the German Romantic tradition.

And yet, despite the many German Romantic themes explored in his writing, Poe did not like to think of himself as a follower of German Romanticism, but rather as an initiator of an American literary tradition. We will not focus, however, on his influence on the American poetry, drama or novel, but on his major contribution to the development of the short story. As we have already discussed in a previous section of this paper, Poe was one of the ‘fathers’ of the modern short story, together with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nikolai Gogol. They were the ones that aroused critics’ interest in the short story, but it was Poe the one who engaged to establish a pattern for the construction of a well-written short story. He advocated for clarity and brevity in point of composition, as well as for the unity of effects or impressions, which is achieved through a careful choice of words meant to support the pre-established design of the story. He relied on myths and archetypal symbols, and yet he built his stories around a real, plausible incident, carrying the reader into a world in which the irrational and the supernatural gradually override the rational and the real.

We will not insist on these features of the short story promoted by Poe, but rather we will try to identify them as we proceed with our analysis of one his most popular short stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which not only sums up Poe’s ideas regarding the construction of a well-written story, but it is also a perfect example of Poe’s unique sense of the sublime.

As we have already seen, the sublime explored by Poe is drawn from the Kantian and especially the Burkean notions, but it nevertheless relies on the mystical and the supernatural too much to be regarded as a reproduction of the eighteenth century philosophical theories on this subject. We may not be able to give a simple definition for it, but we can provide an example of an ideal representation of the sublime in literature, which belongs to William Leete Stone and was quoted by Poe himself in his review of Stone’ Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman. Of course, the gory scene illustrated by Stone will not find a perfect equivalent in “The Fall of the House of Usher” specifically, but it nevertheless catches the essence of Poe’s notion of the sublime:

“‘What a moment!’ exclaims the author, ‘what a spectacle for a lover of the sublime and the beautiful! Could Burke have visited such a scene of mingled magnificence and grandeur and terror, what a vivid illustration would he not have added to his inimitable treatise on that subject! The fire raged with amazing fury and power – stimulated to madness, as it were, by the pitch and tar and dried timbers, and other combustible materials used in the construction of the boat. The night-bird screamed in terror, and the beasts of prey fled in wild affright into the deep and visible darkness beyond. This is truly a gloomy place for a lone person to stand in of a dark night – particularly if he has a touch of superstition. There have been fierce conflicts on this spot – sieges and battles and fearful massacres. Here hath mailed Mars sat on his altar, up to his ears in blood, smiling grimly at the music of echoing cannons, the shrill trump, and all the rude din of arms, until like the waters of Egypt, the lake became red as the crimson flowers that blossom upon its margins.’ […] The Ancients would have constructed a beautiful legend from this incident, and sanctified the sanguinary flower.’”

“The Fall of the House of Usher” not only brings to the fore the irrational and the supernatural as means of exploring the greatest emotions that man is capable of, but it also explores one of the themes that seems to have obsessed Poe his entire life – that of premature burial – also used in other stories, such as “The Cask of Ammontillado,” “Berenice,” and “The Premature Burial.” Our story, however, also contains one of the most provocative representations of terror, death and apocalyptic destruction, and although it does not necessarily impress through its evocative powers, as it happens in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” it still manages to affect our imagination in the most remarkable ways through the visual, auditory and olfactory imagery, but also through the network of themes and symbols that emphasize the tragic destinies of every member of the Usher family.

The story follows the traditional plot structure. In the opening section the narrator, who is both an observer and an active participant in the story, familiarizes the reader with the conditions that brought him for the last time to the creepy house of Usher. Thus, we learn that a letter received from a childhood friend, Roderick Usher, in which he complained of some strange illness and also manifested a sincere desire to see his friend, has determined the narrator to pay him a visit and help him through his difficult situation. After many years spent away from Roderick, the narrator reluctantly approaches the Usher domain, not knowing what he was about to discover in the old, peculiar mansion that, despite the passing of time, still seemed to stand quite firm in the middle of the desolate, barren land that held nothing but a few scattered sedges and decayed trees: “No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones.”

Harold Bloom argues that Poe’s literary skills are not really obvious in the composition of this short story, for in this case it is not the text that matters, but the story in itself, which would not lose much of it value if it were to be retold in others words by one reader to another. However, we believe that there is much more to it than just the action it presents. Indeed, the main ideas may be reiterated time and again without losing the general meaning of the story, but we doubt that the suspense and the tension created by Poe would still be maintained. As we may observe, right from the first lines the reader is carried into a gloomy atmosphere, so typical for the Gothic short story, but which is nevertheless masterfully constructed through words carefully selected to sustain the predetermined design of the story. Thus, the unity of effects is achieved and the first suspicions concerning the evolution of the characters involved in the story are awakened in the reader’s mind:

“During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 216)

As we move forward into the story we are told that Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline are the last members of an old family who has always been known “for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,” which manifested itself in their generosity, their modesty, but also in their “passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognizable beauties, of musical science.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p.218) The Ushers, however, seems to have been struck by a terrible misfortune in point of lineage, for each generation has always had only one surviving member. Because of that, their estate has been transferred from generation to generation to the single surviving member, and thus their house has come to be identified with its inhabitants and vice versa. Indeed, over the years the house began to reflect more and more the traits of its inhabitants. With the passing of time it has lost its colour, its vividness and its splendour and with Roderick Usher it seems to have reached the ultimate state of decay:

“Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. […] there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 218)

Roderick Usher and his sister Madeline both suffer from some nervous and inexplicable illnesses that almost turn them into a sort of living dead. Roderick has a strange and cadaverous countenance, he is inconsistent in both his actions and his speech, but he still enjoys spending time around normal people, such as the narrator, which is why we may say that he tries to keep his life in balance despite his nervous affliction, described by the narrator as a “morbid acuteness of the sense,” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 222) which causes him to experience the most unnatural sensations. He is extremely sensitive to the slightest traces of light, he is terrified by all the sounds that do not come from stringed instruments, he cannot tolerate any food, and he is particularly disturbed by the natural odours of flowers. His sister, on the other hand, does not seem to be making any effort to remain among the living. She is always absent throughout the story and we are told that her illness often puts her into a cataleptic state that could hardly be distinguished from death. Nevertheless, up until the arrival of the narrator at the Usher mansion, she had always managed to fight against her malady. We also learn that the narrator never speaks to her directly, nor does he ever see her too clearly, but he catches a glimpse of her before she falls into the deepest cataleptic trance, so similar to death that her brother decides she should be temporarily entombed in a vault:

“lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 223)

Joseph Moldenhauer argues that “The Fall of the House of Usher” may be regarded as a transposition of the dictum “Each man kills the things he loves the most.” Indeed, Roderick Usher’s strange behaviour and physical degradation may be put on the account of his immeasurable fear of losing his beloved sister. She had been his sole companion for so many years and, as the narrator suggests, they have always been bound by “sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 230) Therefore, when she dies, or at least when she seems to have died, Roderick’s entire world falls apart. He cannot exist in a world without her and as soon as he puts her in the coffin he begins to disintegrate a little more every day, as if a part of him had already died with his sister:

“an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue – but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 231)

As might be expected, when Roderick begins to suspect he had buried his sister alive, a terrible madness takes over his mind. He can no longer control himself and, despite his friend’s attempts to calm him and bring him back to reality, he wanders about the house tormented by guilt, until he finally has the confirmation of his abominable deed. In his final hours, as he reassesses the evidence of premature burial, which mainly consists of him hearing his sister’s screaming from the inside of the secured vault, a sickly smile appears on his face, indicating perhaps that he might have known she was not actually dead when he decided to bury her. When she finally appears in front of him, with her white clothes all covered in blood – a sign of her strenuous efforts to escape from her tomb – terror sets upon him and he dies together with his sister who uses her last ounce of strength to come near her brother, and then falls heavily upon him, making him experience “her violent and now final death-agonies.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 237) Thus, we may say that both of them kill the thing / the person they love the most.

Obviously, this whole episode happens in front of a terrified narrator who had seriously tried to remain as rational as possible throughout the whole story. Nevertheless, as he entered the Usher mansion he had been struck by the same apathy that seemed to have taken over the other inhabitants of the house. Soon enough the gloomy, oppressive atmosphere of the house brought him into a state of almost complete numbness which prevented him from understanding what was really happening around him. He helps Roderick bury his sister, although he sees the “faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 230) He convinces himself that Madeline’s blush is just a sign of her disease – the final mockery of a tricky affliction that constantly put her into deathlike trances. Moreover, he ignores her screaming and the strange grating sounds that followed her burial, putting them on the account of the violent storm outside. And yet, he becomes increasingly frustrated with his limited capacity to find a perfectly reasonable explanation for everything that happens. For example, although he manages to give a plausible explanation for the ghost-like whirlwind that hung about the mansion, he is astonished by the fact that strange natural phenomena and awkward noises appear just as he was reading about something similar. Thus, he is constantly only one step away from insanity, just like his friend. And yet, if Roderick has no intention to escape his condition or the consequences of his deed, the narrator flees into the storm as soon as he realizes that his mind cannot cope with the gory spectacle offered by Roderick and his sister as they fall dead to the floor. Right after their death, the house itself crumbles into pieces as the narrator moves further away from it and, perhaps, from his own insanity:

“Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened – there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind – the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight – my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder – there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters – and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” pp. 237-238)

Poe’s whole story is full of vivid and thrilling descriptions of natural and supernatural forces unfolding in all their splendour in front of an overwhelmed narrator who tries to deny their effect on his mind. It is quite interesting to observe how he teaches himself out of the state of astonishment that gradually takes over him, by trying to convince himself that the suffocating atmosphere of the house and of its surroundings could not generate that superior emotion described by philosophers: “There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart – an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 216) And yet, it is precisely this restriction that which encourages the readers to re-enact the sublimity of such atmosphere in their own mind and, as we shall see, the more our narrator tries to regard everything from a rational perspective, the more he sinks into the depths of his own thoughts.

In his assessment of Poe’s notion of the sublime, Kent Ljungquist argues that “the atmosphere of death, enclosure, and gloom” from this particular short story “could not be punctured by the intrusion even of the energetic mixture of Burkean terror and delight,” concluding that the sublime can only the consequence of man’s confrontation with the vastness and the magnificence of natural objects and with the infinity of the universe. And yet, we need to remind ourselves that Burke also discovered the sublime in the magnitude of buildings, in light and in darkness, in colours, in deafening sounds, as well as in absolute silence, in the cries of the animals and in man’s pain, in excesses of power, as well as in powerlessness, in the obscurity of words, in terror, and in death itself, which is why we believe that the claustrophobic setting of Poe’s short story can also be considered a powerful source of sublimity in this case. The narrator’s impossibility to accurately describe the emerging feeling only allows for his imagination to fill in the gaps and, as he continues to search for proofs that might remove the strange feeling, he only manages to intensify it until he can no longer deny its superiority:

“I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment – that of looking down within the tarn – had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition […] served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy – a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity – an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn – a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” pp. 218-219)

Right from the beginning of the story the narrator realizes that the Usher mansion and its surroundings were caught into a state of idleness, a death-like paralysis that, as he later discovers, has taken over the Ushers as well. We are dealing here, thus, with a psychological geography. The “lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling,” the silence that reigned over the house and the dreariness of the landscape create the illusion of a an enclosed space that is “interchangeably physical and mental,” that cannot be disturbed by any external intruder, like the narrator, but which is nevertheless set in a terrible motion when something inside it changes.

Terror, as we may observe, is the main source of sublimity in our story. We recognize it in the narrator’s attitude as he approaches the Usher mansion, in Roderick Usher’s mind, when he thinks of the inevitable death of his sister or when he begins to suspect he had buried her alive, and we find it in both of them when Roderick’s suspicions are confirmed. For Poe, however, terror is also the principle on which he built his notion of pure beauty, which is nothing else than beauty (possibly in the Burkean sense) “heightened into the sublime by terror.” This heightened beauty, thus, is to be found in Roderick’s morbid appearance, in Madeline’s ghostly countenance, in the image of her body lying breathless in her coffin and, most of all, in the image of two corpses, Madeline’s and Roderick’s, reunited into eternity, but physically destroyed as everything around them turns into pieces.

Death, as Poe argues, “is the most melancholy,” and the death “of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” The aesthetic value of this merger between beauty and death has been explored by Poe in many of his works. Obviously, his intention was not to terrify his readers, but to demonstrate how the theme of beauty that perishes in the face of death may trigger powerful emotions that otherwise would have remained buried somewhere in the deepest corner of the human consciousness. With that in mind, we may safely assume that in our story as well death and beauty are not separate entities, but instead they are treated as sources of a dark sublimity that affects the imagination in unconceivable ways.

Jack Voller argues that “The Fall of the House of Usher” can be read as a hostile interrogation of the notion of the sublime as described by both Kant and Burke, whose purpose is to recognize “the fundamental inability of the sublime to address what critics now identify as a Dark Romantic understanding of the human condition.” He claims that the narrator is the “rescuing force of reason” that tries, but fails to reach any sort of elevation as he confronts the inexplicable emotions he experiences throughout the story. Nevertheless, we hardly discover the presence of a superior rationality within our narrator. He is determined to remain as detached as possible from all the inexplicable phenomena that happen around him, but he is just as overwhelmed by the entire situation as Roderick Usher himself: “I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me as my eyes followed her retreating steps.” (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” p. 223)

Voller further claims that Kant’s confidence in man’s rational capacities is incompatible with Poe’s notion of the sublime. Indeed, there is no evidence in the text that might suggest that any of the characters reaches an elevation of the mind. And yet, we believe that Poe’s intention was to make the reader, not his characters, reach that elevation, and even though Poe’s dark version of sublimity is not compatible with Kant’s optimistic perspective on the sublime, we cannot ignore the fact that their effect is pretty much the same.

As concerns the incompatibility between Poe’s and Burke’s understanding of the sublime, Voller begins his argument with the idea that Burke’s aesthetic principles betray the same optimism as Kant’s. Nevertheless, we need to remind ourselves that Burke never presents terror, pain, misery, danger, death or any other sources of sublimity in an optimistic way, but rather he claims that the human mind has the ability to turn them into experiences of a positive nature. Furthermore, even if Voller argues that in Poe’s story none of the characters responds in a positive way to whole situation and that Poe actually created an “anti-sublimity” in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” we maintain our opinion that the reader is supposed to apprehend the aesthetic dimension of the situation, not the characters, and we believe that Poe created in fact a dark sublimity, which is anticipated by both the narrator and the reader, but which acts upon them in different ways. If the way in which this dark sublimity affects the narrator has already been discussed, the way in which the reader responds to it is best described by Blake Hobby:

“In this story, which is emblematic of Poe’s dark Romantic sublime, the sublime is an empty and emptying experience afforded by art that brings us to dwell on the paradox of our mortality. For, we, like Poe, Roderick, and Madeline, are invested with creative powers but are not able to escape the confines of our fate. Led step by step into a Gothic manse where a premature burial takes place, we confront primal fears. Regardless of how we try to distance ourselves, reading this story means delving into the self, that strange region we cannot touch but whose awe, terror, and emptiness we know. As a tale that creates an uncanny sense of being homelike and at once inexplicably foreign, “The Fall of the House of Usher” enshrines the self as a sublime creation, one that yearns to transcend its limits but fails trying, never grasping the true horror of its finitude.”

A lot has been said about “The Fall of the House of Usher” and about Poe himself. Robert Carringer, for example, finds a similarity between the author and his protagonists. He argues that the narrator’s attention to all the details that suggest death and destruction reflect the author’s own “morbid preoccupation with various forms of disintegration,” including the disintegration of the mind. Thus, the Usher mansion may be perceived as an enclosed space of horrors that affects all its inhabitants until they finally surrender to its evil powers. More than simple residents, Roderick, Madeline and the narrator may be considered the prisoners of a house that terrifies them into submission. And yet, it may also be the other way around. The mansion in itself may be regarded as an expression of its inhabitants’ state of mind, especially of its master’s, Roderick Usher. It has often been argued that the relationship between the two siblings may be an incestuous one and that their strange diseases may be put on the account of their forbidden union. Under these circumstances, Roderick buries his sister while she is still alive in an attempt to liberate himself from the guilt of such an abominable deed, but, as it turns out, the thought of living without her becomes even more unbearable than the idea of living in incest.

Benjamin Franklin Fisher explores the psychological depths of the story. He argues that Poe turned the natural landscape and the mansion into a “geography of the imagination” in which he “could manipulate conventions of Gothicism to create fine psychological fiction.” Moreover, he argues that Roderick is a “sick artist” who cannot find any satisfaction in anything that is considered decent and normal. As evidence of his eccentric personality we have his preference for bizarre music and literature, the darkness of his paintings and the strangeness of his literary creations. A more specific example is the poem written by Roderick – “The Haunted Palace” – which, we believe, is a lyrical expression of the Ushers’ transition through life. It begins on a rather cheerful note, recalling the good old days when the surroundings of the Usher mansion were “the greenest” of all, but it nevertheless shows how the “radiant palace” built there was gradually invaded by evil forces that corrupted both the natural landscape and the residents of the palace to such an extent that it all turned into a house of shadows:

“And travellers now within that valley,

Through the red-litten windows see

Vast forms that move fantastically

To a discordant melody;

While, like a rapid ghastly river,

Through the pale door,

A hideous throng rush out forever,

And laugh – but smile no more.”

(“The Fall of the House of Usher,” pp. 227-228)

Considering Roderick’s preferences for the bizarre, his obscure personality, as well as his artistic inclinations, we are tempted to believe that he has many things in common with his creator. Poe too loved the bizarre, the extravagant and the macabre. Like his character, he explored such themes in his writing and because of that he was often criticized and even suggested to “lower himself a little to the ordinary comprehension of the generality, […] to apply his fine humor and his extensive acquirements to more familiar subjects of satire.” Roderick too is advised to focus more on the objective reality, but we nevertheless believe that this is where the similarities between the character and its creator end. If Roderick was too weak, or perhaps too disturbed to be able to fight against his obsession, Poe was strong enough to turn them into good literature.

Arthur Hobson Quinn suggests that “The Fall of the House of Usher explores the theme of identity in all its forms. We have already mentioned that the characters of the story may be identified with the house and vice versa, but Quinn claims that Roderick identifies both himself and his sister with the house, and the house, in its turn, with the Usher race. Thus, when he claims that he fears the death of his sister, it actually means that he fears the disappearance of the entire Usher race, which would be buried in oblivion if both himself and his sister would die and if the Usher house would be completely destroyed by the passing of time. Thus, what Quinn actually claims is that the whole story is not about the loss of sanity or of a loved one, but about the loss of identity. Under these circumstances, Madeline’s premature burial may be regarded as an attempt to prevent her from losing her identity. Her strange disease makes her lose her identity little by little, but her death may allow for it to be restored in another world.

Scott Peeples, on the other hand, parallels the disintegration of the Usher mansion with the entire action of the story. He considers the house to be the central element of the story, for it is not only vital for the plot, but also for the story’s “network of symbolism.” Indeed, every character of the story seems to establish a special connection with it. For the narrator it is a symbol of the Usher race and the place where he vainly struggles to remain rational. For Roderick the house represents his own identity, and for both him and his sister it is a reflection of their disintegrating minds, but also their entire universe. They cannot exist outside it, but they no longer seem to resist inside it either. Under these circumstances, Madeline’s illness may be considered more a blessing than a curse, for it allows her to mentally escape the confinement of the house during her cataleptic episodes without actually being removed from her universe. And yet, for both her and her brother the house represents their destruction as well. If they had been raised anywhere else, perhaps their destinies would have been very different. They would not have been surrounded by so many reminders of their family’s past and probably their anxieties, their strange nature inherited from their ancestors would not have surfaced that quickly and they would not have been buried under the ruins of their own house.

Peeples also suggests that the story “might be read in terms of Poe’s own concerns as a builder of literature,” thus confirming our initial assumption that this particular short story sums up the author’s principles regarding the construction of a well-written tale. As concerns the unity of effects or impression, which was previously discussed, we must also add that Poe identified the Unity of a literary work with Beauty. Of course, beauty must not be understood as a quality of a nice adaptation that simply pleases, but as an effect of the whole composition, which awakens “an immortal instinct, deep within the spirit of man.” The “immortal instinct,” in its turn, is “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above,” to transcend the boundaries of mundane existence, and, according to Poe, it is more present in the poet than in anyone else. Obviously, we believe that this immortal instinct is just as present in the prose writer as it is in the poet, for in Poe’s case both his poetry and his prose fiction are meant to lead to an elevation of the soul.

As already discussed, the elevation of the soul is the immediate consequence of the feelings of pain and pleasure that we also find in Burke’s and Kant’s philosophical systems and which in Poe’s work are generated by the “recurrent and conspicuous convergence […] of the morbid and the beautiful.” Art and death thus become inseparable entities for Poe and, as Moldenhauer suggests, in the process of creation the artists striving for Unity “kills himself” in the sense that he “escapes from the dissonant and fragmented conditions of time and space, […] he becomes God and slays himself as a limited mortal in his perception of formal establishment of aesthetic unity.” Thus, the artist becomes one with his art.

This God complex is obviously explored in Poe’s writing through a character who is endowed with the power of his creator and who, in his turn, kills in the name of art (or at least in the name of something). In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the character with a God complex is Roderick Usher and Madeline is his victim, but also his other self. He may not be the typical artist who murders his victim in his quest for an ideal artistic expression, but he may be considered a troubled man who strives for unity, which in his case should be understood in terms of identity. He and Madeline are the two parts of a whole, and with her constantly taken away from him by her illness, the whole is torn apart and the self is divided. This, of course, is symbolically represented by the fissure in the house that splits it in two equal parts – one for each surviving member of the Usher family.

Roderick yearns for oneness, for completion, but, as it happens with most of Poe’s characters, only death can satisfy his desire. However, he cannot attain that sense of unity because Madeline, his other half, is alive, and yet so absent all the time. Thus, by burying her inside the house, he tries to take control not over her body, but over her soul, so that they could become one again. Nevertheless, there is always a price to pay: “madness and pain are the necessary stages of the protagonist’s progress towards Unity, just as the poet must suffer frustration and anguish in striving to perfect his poem,” and, as it turns out, the Unity is achieved only when the ultimate price is paid; the protagonist must die in order to accomplish his purpose.

Obviously, the multiple interpretations we can provide for a story that can be “read at one sitting” only prove that Poe practised what he preached. While reviewing Hawthorne’s work he provided a pattern for a well-written story and then he wrote his own so as to demonstrate how his principles can lead to the construction of a memorable story that can be read as an aesthetic experience in itself and that can act upon the readers’ sensibility in various and sometimes unimaginable ways.

4. Aesthetics of Death versus Society

4.1. Sublime Visions of Life and Death in Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”

While questioning the universality of man’s subjective capacities, Kant provides a versatile model of the aesthetic as a tool in the process of reconciliation between nature and humanity, but also between the individual and society, for it is only within a social establishment that man’s faculty for judging would arouse any interest. Starting from the idea that the aesthetic is the means by which one can communicate his feelings to everyone else, but also “a means for promoting what is demanded by an inclination natural to everyone,” Kant analyzes the connection between morality and knowledge, between general laws and personal desires, between assumed customs and purity of thought, reaching the conclusion that the aesthetic is a self-sufficient entity that determines the way in which the individual responds when an external object acts upon his cognitive faculties compelling him to explicate the purposes of things. In other words, the aesthetic is not necessarily a reinforcement of reason, but, as Terry Eagleton puts it, it is “the state in which common knowledge, in the act of reaching out to its object, suddenly arrests and rounds upon itself, forgetting its referent for a moment and attending instead, in a wondering flash of self-estrangement, to the miraculously convenient way in which its inmost structure seems geared to the comprehension of the real.” Thus, the aesthetic, from a the Kantian perspective, is that which makes us reflect upon ourselves when confronted to an external object, or, in our case, when reading a literary text, such as Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” a short story that brings into question disturbing aspects of the society by following the individual’s attitude toward death and the collective response to someone else’s tragedy or to the death of the other.

From the Burkean perspective, the aesthetic, with its two subdivisions, the beautiful and the sublime, is not just a question of art, but also a powerful tool that harmonizes the unstable foundation of society. The sublime is perceived as an obscure idea and an anti-social tool, for it involves our strongest passions and it determines us to rebel against the common laws on which society functions, whereas beauty is regarded as a clear idea and a positive social tool, for it encompasses positive pleasures and a state of relaxation and of calmness:

“I call beauty a social quality; for where women and men, and not only they, but when other animals give us a sense of joy and pleasure in beholding them, (and there are many that do so) they inspire us with sentiments of tenderness and affection towards their persons; we like to have them near us, and we enter willingly into a kind of relation with them, unless we should have strong reasons to the contrary.”

Thus, beauty is the necessary ingredient for order as regards the social function of the aesthetic. Order, in its turn, is perpetuated through imitation, but if beauty and imitation were the sole principles on which a social establishment functions, then we would not be talking about any kind of evolution, for the individual would be perfectly satisfied with his condition and he would not have any reason to challenge what is already known. And, yet, as Burke argues, man is endowed with yet another passion, called ambition, which compels him to step out of tradition, to overcome his limitations and to always look beyond what stands in front of him. This passion – ambition – belongs to the sublime and it is much more powerful than any passion of the beautiful: “It is this passion that drives men to all the ways we see in use of signalizing themselves, and that tends to make whatever excites in a man the idea of this distinction so very pleasant. It has been so strong as to make very miserable men take comfort that they were supreme in misery.”

The sublime, as Burke puts it, is an overpowering experience, one of irresistible violence which forces us into submission, and yet it determines us to transgress our own ignorance. With its orientation towards pain and danger, the sublime is not only an experience that leads to an elevation of the mind, but also an incentive for physical action, forcing man out of the state of idleness and directing him towards actions related to self-preservation that may nevertheless restore the social balance.

Obviously, every man responds to the passions related to the sublime and the beautiful in his own way. The man of action would probably respond physically to the passions caused by the sublime, or he would not respond at all to those caused by the beautiful, while the artist would explore them in his art. Of course, if the artist allows himself to be driven only by the passions caused by the beautiful, he risks turning his art into a simple imitation of the external world, with no real aesthetic value. If, on the other hand, he is inspired by the passions caused by the sublime, he may actually create a valuable work of art that may actually function as a source of the sublime and also as an incentive for other men.

We will not discuss here how the Burkean perspective on the beautiful and the sublime has led to the creation of many political ideologies, some of them quite terrible when applied to society, although that was never Burke’s intention, but instead we will focus on the attitude of the artist towards the sublime and the beautiful. Since the artist, in this case, is Leo Tolstoy, and since the story we intend to analyze is a “sustained attack on society,” we will look at the artist’s historical context and reveal the aspects that may have acted as incentives for Tolstoy himself, compelling him to create a work of art which mirrors disturbing aspects of the society and which, in its turn, may function as a source of the sublime as well.

Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, one of the greatest Russian novelists, had always had an ambivalent attitude towards literature and writers. Considering that a writer’s reasons for exploring certain themes in his work may be impure, he often underestimated the value of a literary work and preferred to dedicate much of his time to other types of activities. Nevertheless, the more he tried to ignore his passion for writing, the more life steered him towards it. Eventually, Tolstoy embraced his calling and writing became for him a means of expressing his “most sincere and intimate thoughts,” but also a way of coping with real life problems for which he tried to provide imagined solutions in his work.

According to Tolstoy himself, his life may be divided into four major periods. First there is the “innocent, joyous, poetic childhood” that ended soon after the death of his father when he and his brothers were placed under the guardianship of relatives. The twenty “terrible” years that followed are described by Tolstoy as a “period of coarse dissoluteness, employed in the service of ambition, vanity, and above all, of lust.” As a young noble man, unconstrained by any kind of difficulties, Tolstoy seems to have revelled in everything that his social position and financial situation had to offer. He enrolled at Kazan University, but he never graduated. He first studied oriental languages, envisioning a diplomatic career for himself, but then transferred to the Faculty of Law, which he also abandoned after only one year as well. Meanwhile he tried to lead a healthy lifestyle that included daily physical exercise, but he also indulged his carnal desires, frequently contracting venereal diseases for which he was more than once hospitalized. As Ernest Simmons points out, the Kazan society frequented by Tolstoy during his studies was not exactly a moral one and the young artist was not strong enough to resist to its temptations:

“Fleshly desires were at once alluring and repulsive to the young Tolstoy, but his strong moral repugnance received no encouragement from the dissolute Kazan society that he frequented. Smoking, drinking, gambling, and debauchery were the dress and loose ornament of his dandified comrades, and he admits that much of his waywardness was in imitation of the corrupt behaviour he found on every side.”

Tolstoy nevertheless envisaged a brilliant future for himself. He fancied with a military career, he was nearly killed in a military action in North Caucasus and he engaged in political activities, as he believed he was “born to have great influence over the happiness and well-being of others.” He opened a school for peasant children, he supported the emancipation of serfs, and he even convinced himself he could found a new religion, one that corresponds to the development of mankind: “the religion of Christ, but purged of all dogma and mysteriousness, a practical religion, not compromising future bliss but realizing bliss on earth.” Meanwhile, he had also engaged in ambitious literary projects, he had become aware of the corruption taking over the political system and he had begun to develop his own aesthetic and political ideas. He believed that he could change the government’s way of thinking and he presented various reforms to his superiors during his military career. Obviously, his initiatives were not applicable to the Russian society of the nineteenth century, for they were much more concerned with the idea of “personal duty as revealed by the workings of his conscience and intellect” than with the practical affairs of society.

The dichotomy between Tolstoy’s moral vision and his youthful actions finds its origin in the author’s way of life. His frequent withdrawals into the peacefulness of the countryside whenever the bustle of urban life became too suffocating, as well as his predisposition for introspection, pushed him deep into the abyss of abstract thinking and theorizing and further away from the empty side of life, the one dominated by vanity, unfulfilling entertainment and lust. He constantly searched for a meaning in his life, and for that he first needed to explore the practical side of life. He understood that politics would offer him no satisfaction but only after he witnessed the political problems of the day directly and he perceived the social issues to their full extent only after his attempt to improve the lives of his serfs was misinterpreted by them. Nevertheless, Tolstoy’s disillusionment with the political and social systems helped him understand that morality is the key to personal fulfilment.

The third period in Tolstoy’s life was one in which he “lived a correct, honourable family life.” By then he had resigned from the army, he had become famous among the Russian writers, he had explored “all forms of sensuality, from physiological to aesthetic and musical,” he had begun to perceive politics as a form of oppression and dreamed of a society governed by moral principles, not by political factions. He was a man who cherished his freedom and who, most of all, needed to give himself to others, to help the ones in need, and for a while he had believed that he could do that by actively participating in his country’s political affairs. He enjoyed the social climate from other countries and he hoped that one day his country too would reach the higher standards of some European civilizations. The execution he witnessed in Paris, however, convinced him that as long as the fate of any society lies in the hands of one man or a small group of people, corruption, moral degradation, injustice and social oppression would also exist, therefore anarchy might be the only form of government that would not destroy man’s original state of morality and freedom:

“This spectacle made such an impression on me […] that I shall not recover from it for a long time. I saw many horrors of war in the Caucasus and elsewhere, but if a man were torn to pieces before my eyes, it would not be so repulsive as this dextrous and elegant machine with which in a Bash a powerful, fresh, and healthy person is killed. In the first instance there would be no intelligent will, but the human feeling of passion; in the other, there is a refined quiet and convenience in killing and nothing at all majestic. The insolent audacious desire to fulfil justice, the law of God. […] I understand the laws of custom, of morality and religion… and I feel the laws of art that give happiness always; but for me, political laws are such a horrible lie that I do not see in them anything either better or worse. … I will never again look at such a thing, and I will never anywhere serve any government.”

The image of the execution troubled Tolstoy his entire life, but he nevertheless understood that morality and art are the things he was born for. He realized that man’s life should not be socially or politically correct, but governed by moral instincts, and this is precisely what he promoted in his writing. This episode also made him question the purpose of death itself, and even though he did that with the mind of a young man who was still unaware of his own mortality, he understood its senselessness and he struggled with that idea for the rest of his life.

The deaths of two of his brothers, however, made him question the purpose of life as well and brought him into a state of complete disillusionment with anything that may have seemed significant thus far. He stopped writing for a while for he believed that art too “was a beautiful lie that he could no longer love.” And yet, he found some sort of solace in religious teachings. He had been a religious man his entire life and his faith played an essential role in the shaping of his aesthetic principles, as well as of his own attitude towards life and death. He did not blindly believe in the conventional Christian teachings, but in the idea that there must be a reason for man’s finite existence and that there must be a higher power that can connect man with the infinite universe:

“What kind of meaning can my finite existence have in this infinite universe? In order to answer this question, I studied life. […]Throughout my reasoning I was constantly comparing the finite to the finite and the infinite to the infinite; indeed, I could not do otherwise. […]I realized that I could not search for an answer to my question in rational knowledge. The answer given by rational knowledge is merely an indication that an answer can be obtained only by formulating the question differently, that is, only when the relationship between the finite and the infinite is introduced into the question. I also realized that no matter how irrational and unattractive the answers given by faith, they have the advantage of bringing to every reply a relationship between the finite and the infinite, without which there can be no reply. However I may put the question of how I am to live, the answer is: according to the law of God. Is there anything real that will come of my life? Eternal torment or eternal happiness. What meaning is there which is not destroyed by death? Union with the infinite God, paradise.”

Therefore, we might say that faith is not a given fact for Tolstoy, but a necessity. He was not only a man who constantly needed some glorifying and life-consuming activity so that he could feel alive, but also a man who sought a purpose in life itself, and since death ends man’s existence on earth, death needed to be given a meaning as well. ‘What would that meaning be?’ is a question he answers by the end of his life, the period in which he had accepted his own mortality and even hoped to die. By then he had understood that the meaning of his life was to promote his religious teachings through his art, thus believing that he might help to the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth, just as well as he had realized that the meaning of death was the eternal union with the divinity. Thus, for the last thirty years of his life he had been an artist, a religious thinker and an aesthetician whose entire work places morality above anything else.

“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” published in 1886, is one of the works that proves in the most effective way the real purpose of Tolstoy’s art. It offers us one of the most realistic depictions of man’s attitude towards his own death and towards the death of the other in a society built on traditional values and Christian teachings, but nevertheless corrupted by man’s continuous quest for power, financial security and personal glory. The story was written after Tolstoy’s spiritual conversion that brought about significant changes not only in his lifestyle and religious beliefs, but also in his art. After a long period in which he dedicated himself to religious and philosophical studies, he was finally convinced by close friends and family to return to fiction writing. Of course, there are other tales and fragments that are dated back to the same period, but nevertheless “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is the first serious work written right after Tolstoy’s identity crisis, when he seemed to have turned his back on art, as he no longer considered it a dignifying occupation.

This was not, however, the first time Tolstoy had ignored his passion for fiction writing, but, as always, he ended up embracing his artistic drive, giving literature a whole new meaning. The only thing that remained from his earliest compositional principles is the simplicity of language and style, as he believed that a good fiction work must appeal both to the educated man and to the “most narrow reader, who is seeking nothing in a book but entertainment.” The purpose of his fiction, however, was entirely didactic, for it was meant to carry out Tolstoy’s newly-established religion, “based upon the ethical teaching of Christ,” but accommodated to the needs of the common people.

Tolstoy was inspired to write “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” when he learned about the death of a former judge named Ivan Ilich Mechnikov, but, as we shall soon prove, the main character has so many things in common with the younger Tolstoy that the story may be considered a “semi-autobiographical [dramatization] of lives largely lived on false premises.” Told from an omniscient narrator’s point of view, the story is meant to illustrate the futility and the emptiness of a life lived according to the social standards. It opens with an episode that chronologically stands at the end of the events presented throughout the narrative, when the news of Ivan Ilyich’s death reaches his former colleagues and friends and generates no emotional response among them. They all knew about his illness and expected him to die, but they are not at all impressed by the tragedy of a colleague who was liked by all of them and whose life had ended much sooner than it should have because of an incurable illness. Instead they focus on the legal aspects concerning his death and cannot help but think of the chain of promotions that would naturally happen, given the fact that there was no need to keep his post open now that he was dead.

Right from the first lines we may observe how the news of a man’s greatest tragedy is met with complete detachment. One of Ivan Ilyich’s colleagues briefly expressed his sadness and then asked about the deceased’s properties, another one complained about the distance he would have to cover to attend the funeral and soon enough they all end up discussing the distances between different parts of the city. Nevertheless, they all said to themselves: “Only think! He is dead, but here I am alright,” as if death was something that could only happen to others. Pyotr Ivanovich, Ivan Ilyich’s closest friend from the office, investigates the circumstances of his death as if such a misfortunate event was reserved solely for Ivan Ilyich, thus confirming Jankélèvitch’s theory according to which the man who thinks or talks about death does not include himself in the equation. As aware as he may be of the fact that everything that is born is also meant to die, he stubbornly refuses to think of himself as a simple mortal until some dramatic incident forces him to accept the reality of his own mortality.

While attending the funeral, Pyotr Ivanovich distances himself even more from the tragic event. His attitude is nevertheless similar to that of the other participants in the ceremony. Shvartz, for example, another one of Ilyich’s colleagues, approaches Ivanovich, winks and he looks at him as if he was trying to say “Ivan Ilyich has made a mess of it; it’s a very different matter with you and me.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 81) The other ones simply stood by the coffin, listening to the Church Reader, performing the regular rituals for such an event without showing any sign of real emotion. From time to time each of them was making the sign of the cross, for it was customarily believed that it was safe to do so in such circumstances. Ivanovich himself abused of it as soon as he entered the room and could not help analyzing the corpse in detail:

“The dead man lay, as dead men always lie, in a specially heavy way, his rigid limbs sunk in the soft cushions of the coffin, with the head forever bowed on the pillow. His yellow waxen brow with bald patches over his sunken temples was thrust up in the way peculiar to the dead, the protruding nose seeming to press on the upper lip. He was much changed and grown even thinner since Pyotr Ivanovich had last seen him, but, as is always the case with the dead, his face was handsomer and above all more dignified than when he was alive. The expression on the face said that what was necessary had been accomplished, and accomplished rightly. Besides this there was in that expression a reproach and a warning to the living. This warning seemed to Pyotr Ivanovich out of place, or at least not applicable to him. He felt a certain discomfort and so he hurriedly crossed himself once more and turned and went out of the door – too hurriedly and too regardless of propriety, as he himself was aware.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” pp. 81-82)

This specific moment is very relevant for the story because the strange expression on the deceased’s face not only frightens Ivanovich, but it also intrigues the reader. A certain tension is created right from the opening section when one starts to question why Ivan Ilyich’s death only produces preoccupations with mundane matters instead of sincere regrets and real emotions among his acquaintances. As we move further into the story we understand how insignificant is the death of a man for those who were supposed to be his friends, and even for his family. Shvarts, for example, suggests that he and Ivanovich should not cancel their evening game of cards because of such an incident which, in fact, had nothing to do with any of them. Ilyich’s wife, Praskovya Fyodorovna, is also more concerned with legal aspects than with the grief she should have felt. Right before the service was about to begin she draws Ivanovich aside and asks him how she could obtain more money from the government now that her husband was dead. Of course, she tries to maintain the image of a grieving widow, but every little distraction makes her forget about her pain. When Ivanovich fails to present any strategy to maximize her pension, she gives obvious signs that she no longer needs his company. Moreover, she informs Ivanovich about her husband’s excruciating pain, but more than feeling sorry for her husband, for he was the one who had screamed incessantly for three days because of his terrible pain, she feels sorry for herself: “Oh, awfully! For the last moments, hours indeed, he never left off screaming. For three days and nights in succession he screamed incessantly. It was insufferable. I can’t understand how I bore it; one could hear it through three closed doors. Ah, what I suffered!” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 84)

Nevertheless, Praskovya Fyodorovna’s account of her husband’s death manages to temporarily disturb Ivanovich, who starts to think that such an awful experience might also happen to him. And yet, the sense of immortality is immediately restored in his mind, for he takes all the necessary measures to protect himself from the manifestations of grief, more or less sincere, that happened around him. He briefly offers his condolences to Ilyich’s daughter, who was obviously affected by the death of her father, even though he could not accurately tell whether she was just sad or angry as well, he simply nods to Ilyich’s son, although he might have tried to do more to alleviate his pain, and then he passes into the death-chamber where he tries to ignore as much as possible the disturbing demonstrations of grief: “candles, groans, incense, tears, and sobs. Pyotr Ivanovich stood frowning, staring at his feet in front of him. He did not once glance at the dead man, and right though to the end did not once give way to depressing influence, and was one of the first to walk out.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 86) Thus, he remains ignorant of his own mortality and fails to show any sign of morality as well. The only person who really understands what was happening was Gerasim, Ilyich’s faithful servant, who stood by his master until his last breath and who, despite his youthful age, knows that life and death are part of the natural order of things. Ivanovich, on the other hand, fails to acknowledge the reality of his own death and decides he should not miss the game of cards organized by his friends.

The attitude towards life and death we discover in the young Gerasim is typical for the Russian peasant of the nineteenth century, who feared neither death, nor the dead, for his religious beliefs made him perceive death as a threshold between the material world and the spiritual one in which man reunites with his Creator. Ivanovich’s attitude, on the other hand, is that of the modern man of the nineteenth century, who is too much preoccupied with living by the social standards to pay any real attention to the spiritual part of life. Tolstoy himself, in his youth, was both of these two men. While searching for personal fulfillment, he more than once devoted himself to activities that failed to bring him any real satisfaction, such as politics, but he nevertheless understood that religion was the only thing that could turn both life and death into meaningful experiences.

Tolstoy’s religion is very similar to the one that Mircea Eliade termed as “cosmic Christianity” for “it projects the Christological mystery upon the whole of Nature and […] neglects the historical elements of Christianity, only to dwell, instead, on the liturgical dimension of man’s existence in the world.” Such practices were especially spread among the Russian peasants and were not entirely accepted by the Church because of their pagan influence, but they were more appropriate for the needs of the common man, and Tolstoy understood that better than anyone else. The time spent among peasants made him realize that the religious teachings of the Old Believers, of the simple and uneducated men, were as Christian as “those of the pretentious believers” from his class, but better applied to real life:

“Here too there was much superstition mixed in with the truths of Christianity, but with this difference: the superstitions of the believers from our class were utterly unnecessary to them, played no role in their lives, and were only a kind of epicurean diversion, while the superstitions of the believers from the laboring people were intertwined with their lives to such a degree that their lives could not be conceived without them: their superstitions were a necessary condition for their lives. The whole life of the believers from our class was in opposition to their faith, while the whole life of the believers from the working people was a confirmation of that meaning of life which was the substance of their faith.”

This religion described by Tolstoy is the one that guides the young Gerasim through his life and also the one that Ivan Ilyich would embrace near the end of his life. In the first part of the story the reader begins to suspect that the main character’s death must have some special meaning attached to it, and the second part confirms our initial suspicion. Now the reader is carried some thirty years back in time and announced from the beginning that Ivan Ilyich’s life was “the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 86) It was simple because he had a happy childhood, he formed a family, he built a career and then he died. It was most ordinary because he lived a socially correct, but unfulfilling life, like all the others, and it was the most awful because he focused so much on his career, on gaining financial security and a higher social position that he had completely forgotten the things that mattered the most: his family and the faith in God.

As we argued earlier, Ivan Ilyich reminds us to some extent of Tolstoy himself. He was born in a family belonging to the upper classes like Tolstoy. He was the “phénix de la famille, […] not so frigid and precise as the oldest son, nor so wild as the youngest.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 87) He had studied law, together with his younger brother, but only he managed to graduate and build a career for himself, first as a clerk and then as an examining magistrate. Tolstoy too studied law for a while, but unlike his character he never graduated. We learn from the story that Ivan Ilyich was a cheerful man all his life, very intelligent and sociable, but also very strict in performing his duty, which was “whatever was so considered by those persons who were set in authority over him.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,”p. 87) As a young man he had committed several indiscretions for which he was ashamed, but as he grew older he realized everybody around him had made the same mistakes at some point and he no longer perceived them as shameful. Tolstoy too had a taste for frivolous amusement. His gambling problem and his passion for beautiful women is well known. As a young writer he was perfectly satisfied with his job and with the fame that came along with it, but unlike his character who understood the real purpose of life only when his end was near, Tolstoy realized much earlier that living by the social rule and searching for personal glory was not as fulfilling as most people believed:

“As I now look back at that period and recall my state of mind and the state of mind of those people (a state that, by the way, persists among thousands), it all seems pitiful, horrible, and ridiculous to me; it excites the same feelings one might experience in a madhouse. At the time we were all convinced that we had to speak, write, and publish as quickly as possible and as much as possible and that this was necessary for the good of mankind. Thousands of us published and wrote in an effort to teach others, all the while disclaiming and abusing one another. Without taking note of the fact that we knew nothing, that we did not know the answer to the simplest question of life, the question of what is right and what is wrong, we all went on talking without listening to one another. At times we would indulge and praise each other on the condition that we be indulged and praised in return; at other times we would irritate and shout at each other exactly as in a madhouse.”

These periods in Ivan Ilyich’s life correspond to the first two periods in Tolstoy’s own life – the pleasant childhood and his early youth, when he allowed himself to experience everything that life had to offer. Then, like Tolstoy, Ivan Ilyich too decided to form a family and married “the most attractive, clever and brilliant girl of the set in which he moved,” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 90) the same Praskovya who in the opening section of the story is described as a short, fat, self-centred woman who, instead of mourning her husband, is more concerned with improving her financial situation. We learn from the story that he did not marry her because he had fallen madly in love with her, but because she seemed to be a suitable match for Ivan Ilyich and because their marriage was approved by his acquaintances. She came from a good family, she shared her future husband’s beliefs regarding life and, most importantly, those of higher social standing encouraged their union.

Ivan Ilyich enjoyed the perks of domestic life for a while and he had begun to believe that nothing could destroy his “agreeable, light-hearted life, always decorous and always approved by society, which he regarded as the normal life.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 91) Nevertheless, his happiness ended rather quickly, for his wife’s pregnancy revealed her true nature. She lost her sweetness and her charm and she turned into an irrational, demanding and extravagant woman who constantly abused her husband whenever he failed to fulfil her wishes. He did not know how to deal with their conjugal crisis, so he simply ignored it. At first, he tried to live his life just like before, surrounded by friends, thus avoiding to spend time alone with her, but as she became even more annoying and more demanding, he decided to build a life for himself away from his entire family. His professional ambitions replaced the love he was supposed to have for his family and he soon started to believe that “conjugal life, though providing certain comforts, was in reality a very difficult business towards which one must, if one is to do one’s duty, that is, lead the decorous life approved by society, work out for oneself a definite line, just as in the government service.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 92)

Thus, Ivan Ilyich expected nothing more from his conjugal life than the most basic comforts. If some joyfulness came out of it, even better, but if not his official duties were satisfying enough for him. Tolstoy too had a similar idea regarding marriage and the conjugal life. Ernest Simmons tells us that marriage was suggested to Tolstoy as a remedy for his vices and that the young author “seemed more concerned with the idea of marriage than with marriage itself.” He did not let himself easily convinced to get married, but the idea of a happy marital life pleased him and he soon started to search for a wife that could give him what he needed. When he eventually found her, he fell passionately in love with her and, just like the protagonist of our story, he was very happy and very satisfied with his choice for a while:

“At that time my whole life was focused on my family, my wife, my children, and thus on a concern for improving our way of life. My striving for personal perfection, which had already been replaced by a striving for perfection in general, a striving for progress, now became a striving for what was best for my family and me. […] I gave myself up to [writing] as a means of improving my material situation and as a way of stifling any questions in my soul concerning the meaning of my life and of life in general. As I wrote I taught what to me was the only truth: that we must live for whatever is best for ourselves and our family.”

Tolstoy envisaged a blissful life by the side of his cheerful wife, but as soon as the honeymoon was over, so was the harmony between the two. Nevertheless, the main difference between the author and his character is that Tolstoy needed to focus on his work in order to avoid thinking about the true meaning of life, while Ivan Ilyich turned his official duties into his meaning of life. The former did this in order to maintain the happiness of his family, since he knew that the questions that obsessed him would eventually alienate him from his family, while the latter consciously separated himself from his family so that he could maintain at least the illusion of happiness.

And yet, both of them ended up in the same place. Tolstoy became extremely dissatisfied with his life and returned to the questions concerning the meaning of life and death at the expense of his family’s happiness, and Ivan Ilyich was forced to reconsider his entire perspective on life, death and society while trying to cope with his impending death. Both of them, however, had their wives by their sides for the rest of their lives, but if one lived long enough to exasperate his wife while trying to promote his own ideas, the other one died right after becoming aware of the true purpose of life.

Ivan Ilyich lives his life striving for a better social standing and a satisfying financial situation. He is so determined to achieve these things that he neglects anything else in his life. We are told, however, that most of the quarrels between him and his wife are caused by their precarious financial situation, which might mean that Ivan Ilyich’s devotion to his work is determined by the wish to provide enough for his family so that they could all be happy. And yet, when we learn that the most painful period in his life is that in which he was overlooked for promotion, and not the one in which two of his children died, we realize that his attitude has nothing to do with the happiness of his family, but with his own need to acquire fame, to be praised by friends and colleagues and to comply with the standards imposed by a flawed society.

Ironically, the real tragedy of Ivan Ilyich’s life begins soon after he finally acquires what he wished the most. In a lucky twist of fate he is appointed to the position of judge, which brings along not only financial benefits, but also an improvement of his social standing. He was now in a better position than his former colleagues and that made him “completely happy,” for those who disregarded him in the past “had been put to shame, and were cringing now before him.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 95) The promotion also brought him some domestic happiness. For the first time in many years he and his wife finally agreed on every matter. Before moving into their new house Ivan Ilyich personal supervised the arrangements and was so thrilled with the way everything was progressing that he even became less interested in his official duties. After all, his new house was supposed to be a reflection of himself and of his new social status, and he was determined to turn it into something that would please his family and everybody else. He personally chose the wallpapers, he decorated it with surprisingly cheap antiques and he even helped hanging the curtains. He was so fascinated with the whole process that he completely ignored the injury he suffered when falling of a ladder. Unfortunately, this incident eventually costs him his life but the momentarily satisfaction prevents him from acknowledging the gravity of his injury. The whole situation is even sadder when we think that the house he was trying to turn into something exceptional was nothing more than ordinary:

“In reality, it was all just what is commonly seen in the houses of people who are not exactly wealthy but want to look like wealthy people, and so succeed only in being like one another – hangings, dark wood, flowers, rugs and bronzes, everything dark and highly polished, everything that all people of a certain class have so as to be like all people of a certain class. And in this case it was all so like that it made no impression at all.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 97)

Obviously, our protagonist did not see it that way, but at some point there was nothing more to do to improve the aspect of the house. Everything seemed in perfect order, so all that Ivan Ilyich had to do was to continue with his easy, agreeable and decorous life. In order to do that, he mostly needed to avoid “everything with the sap of life in it.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 98) At home he preferred to spend his time alone, reading some fashionable book or official papers, while at work he never did more than it was absolutely necessary for those who asked for his help, unless they were important people with whom he could establish official relations. Nevertheless, he was not a solitary man. He developed special relations with his colleagues and his superiors and he enjoyed organizing or attending parties where he could surround himself with people of “the very best circle.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 99) Appearances were all that mattered to him and he was able to find satisfaction even in the most insignificant matters as long as they were contributing to the illusion of happiness.

Soon enough, however, the illusion wore off. As he began to experience some discomfort in his left side, he was no longer able to live that agreeable, decorous life he had built for himself. His initial ill-humour eventually turned into blind rage and there was no need for a special circumstance to begin a violent quarrel with his wife, whom he blamed for everything that happened. Nevertheless, he was finally giving her good reasons to say that her husband had a dreadful temper. She had always accused him of making her life miserable and now he was actually making it. She realizes there must be some connection between his violent outbursts and the pain he was complaining about, but instead of pitying him, she pities herself and she begins to think of her as a martyr for being able to put up with his behaviour. She avoids responding in the same way, but she nevertheless wishes him dead. And yet, as she contemplates the future possibilities, she realizes there is nothing that could take her out of her misery:

“She began to wish he were dead; yet could not wish it, because there would be no income. And this exasperated her against him even more. She considered herself dreadfully unfortunate, precisely because even his death could not save her, and felt irritated and concealed it, and this hidden irritation on her side increased his irritability.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 101)

After consulting several doctors who give him contradictory explanations regarding the nature of his illness, Ivan Ilyich becomes even more irritated. He cannot help but reconsider each of their remarks until he convinces himself that his condition is worse than the doctors were willing to admit. He recognizes in their attitude towards him the same professional dignity he ostentatiously displayed in court and this also causes him a great deal of sadness that reaches epic proportion when he realizes that his wife and daughter are too busy with their social lives to pay any real attention to his suffering. Nevertheless, they merely continue to live as they were taught. He too had often been oblivious to other people’s ordeals and now it was time for him to feel what others did when he ignored them or dismissed their concerns.

For a while, Ivan Ilyich tries to return to that agreeable and decorous life he once had, but the pain he feels and the strange taste in his mouth remind him of his inexplicable disease and he is suddenly unable to enjoy any of his regular activities. A regular game of cards with his alleged friends makes him understand how ridiculous it is to aim for the small pleasures of life as if they could make his life more meaningful. He is particularly annoyed by their complaisance and their indulgence towards him and he cannot help but notice how his illness affects everybody around him as some sort of poison that grows inside him, but gradually punctures his whole existence. He tries to fight it and he accepts any remedy recommended by doctors, but nothing alleviates his pain. One night, however, while investigating the nature of his pain, he becomes aware of his inevitable death:

“It’s not a question of the appendix, not a question of the kidney, but of life and … death. Yes, life has been and now it’s going, going away, and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn’t it obvious to every one, except me, that I ‘m dying, and it’s only a question of weeks, of days – at once perhaps. There was light, and now there is darkness. I was here, and now I am going! Where?” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 108)

Ivan Ilyich’s questions are the ones that haunted Tolstoy during his existential crisis, when, according to Ernest Simmons, “the phantom of death seemed to mock [Tolstoy’s] happiness.” Like his character he faced depression, he was angry towards himself and towards his wife, he sometimes became violent and he stopped writing, for he was no longer willing to do anything “out of vanity, self-interest, and pride.” And yet, Tolstoy’s questions were triggered by the pain caused by the death of his brother, not by the contemplation of his own approaching death, as it happens with Ivan Ilyich.

From the moment our protagonist becomes aware of the gravity of his condition, death becomes as present in his life as the pain he constantly dealt with. He cannot understand how his family can be so happy while he struggles with an “awful horror” and his hatred towards them grows proportionally to his pain. His attitude, however, is not a bit different from that of any other man who lives his life according to rules and principles established by others, forgetting about the things that should really matter. And yet, if he was willing to accept that death too is inevitable for everybody, he cannot accept that it could happen to him. While referring to a syllogism that can be applied to all people, he clings to joyful childhood memories in order to prove to himself that such an impersonal syllogism cannot be available in his case too:

“What did Caius know of the smell of the leathern ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that? Caius had not heard the silk rustle of his mother’s skirts. He had not made a riot at school over the pudding. Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside over the sittings of the court? And Caius certainly was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my feelings and ideas – for me it’s a different matter. And it cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too awful.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 110)

While struggling to deny the inevitability of his own death, Ivan Ilyich decides to return to his official duties, believing that they will keep him alive, just like they did thus far. And yet, he has reached the point when nothing can stop him from thinking about death – the constant presence that “looked at him, and he felt turned to stone,” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 111) that “drew him to itself not for him to do anything in particular, but simply for him to look at It straight in the face, to look at It and, doing nothing, suffer unspeakably.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 111) Soon he understands that he will lose his life over a curtain, for it was during the decoration of his house that he got the injury; therefore he dies for trying to live as he considered befitting for a man of his social standing. The physical degradation he further experiences makes it impossible for him to forget even for a second what was about to happen. No one wondered whether he was going to die, but when it will happen. His family becomes rather impatient about it, because he was now a disagreeable presence in their house, while his friends thought of the vacant post he would leave behind.

There is, however, one person who offers him a little bit of comfort in his final days. Gerasim, a cheerful, bright, and gentle young man, Ivan Ilyich’s servant, does not mind performing the tasks that appal the rest of the family. He, unlike the others, is the only one who never lies regarding the gravity of his master’s condition, who offers him his company without expecting anything in return and who treats him with affection and compassion, the two things he longed for the most. He is attended by his wife as well, but she does not seem to do it because she really wants to ease his life, but because she needs to maintain a certain level of agreeableness and to prove the visitors that she is a caring, loving wife who stays by her husband’s side until the end. Nonetheless, she continues her daily routine that includes social calls, going to the theatre, and supervising her daughter and her fiancé.

It is commonly believed that religious beliefs “arise to sublimate mortality,” but for our protagonist, however, sublimity does not arise until he had cried like a child, feeling completely helpless, lonely, abandoned by his family and by God as well. He asks God what he had done wrong to deserve such a torture, and even though he never expects an answer, an inner voice helps him elucidate his situation:

“‘What is it you want?’ was the first clear idea able to be put into words that he grasped.

‘What ? Not to suffer, to live,’ he answered. And again he was utterly plunged into attention so intense that even the pain did not distract him.

‘To live? Live how?’ the voice of his soul was asking.

‘Why, live as I used to live before – happily and pleasantly.’” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 123)

Nevertheless, as he recollects the best moments of his life he realizes that his childhood was the only truly happy period, while the rest of his life has been nothing but a trivial and sometimes disgusting spectacle of someone who was struggling to maintain the illusion of a happy life. And yet, that life does not seem to be his, for he believes that he had lived as he ought, and done everything as he should have, and therefore he did not deserve all the agony of his final days. For the next weeks he went through his memories over and over again, trying to find out whether that voice in his head was right when telling him that his whole life was just a lie, an unfortunate chain of wrongdoings. However, he still could not find a justification for his agony.

“‘But if one could at least comprehend what it’s for? Even that’s impossible. It could be explained if one were to say that I hadn’t lived as I ought. But that can’t be alleged,’ he said to himself, thinking of all the regularity, correctness, and propriety of his life. ‘That really can’t be admitted,’ he said to himself, his lips smiling ironically as though someone could see his smile and be deceived by it. ‘No explanation! Agony, death … What for?’” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 126)

He accepts to see a priest and for a moment he feels relieved, but then his physical and mental suffering return to torment him even more. In his last three days he screams ceaselessly, he struggles to stay out of the “black sack into which he was being thrust by an unseen resistless force,” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 129) but at the same time he wishes he would just get right into it and end his agony. The idea that his life choices were correct still lingered in his mind, but when he sees his son crying at his bedside and the despair on his wife’s face he finally accepts that his life had not been what it should. He understands that he must die in order to end both his pain and his family’s misery and then he is finally able to move on:

“He looked for his old accustomed terror of death, and did not find it.

‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no terror, because death was not either. In the place of death there was light.

‘So this is it’ he suddenly exclaimed aloud.

‘What joy!’ To him all this passed in a single instant, and the meaning of that instant suffered no change after. For those present his agony lasted another two hours. There was a rattle in his throat, a twitching in his wasted body. Then the rattle and the gasping came at longer and longer intervals.

‘It is over!’ someone said over him. He caught those words and repeated them in his soul.

‘Death is over,’ he said to himself. ‘It’s no more.’ He drew in a breath, stopped midway in breath, stretched and died.” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 130)

The peacefulness of this final episode only comes to reinforce Tolstoy’s ideas regarding the meaning of life and death, thoroughly explored in A Confession. Like his character, Tolstoy too was haunted by the idea of death, clung to his writing to feel alive, and searched for a meaning in his life that would not be destroyed by death. He first tried to find it by means of reason, but he reached the conclusion that pure knowledge was not enough for his endeavour. From a purely rational point of view, his personal experience was enough evidence for him to realize that all one ever does is only meant to feed one’s vanity, and therefore all is meaningless. But if that were true, then life itself is meaningless, and therefore death would be a desirable end.

Nonetheless, Tolstoy understood that he was considering the matter from an incorrect angle. He understood that it is within man’s power to make his life meaningful and realized that the necessary condition for that was a blind faith in a higher power, for only when one has the certainty that there is something beyond death can one live a meaningful life. He then took it upon himself to preach these ideas and, by telling us the story of a man who merely existed instead of living, who chose to follow the path imposed by society instead of listening to the voice of his soul, he gives a meaning to death itself so that one can understand that life must also have a meaning. More than being just a story about death, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is a story about life, about the real values of mankind – love, friendship, family, faith – for only these can make life worth living.

4.2. Remembering the Past in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”

William Faulkner, a writer very much rooted in the southern American history and a southerner himself, took the task to carry forth aspects, attitudes and traditions of the southern society during the Reconstruction era. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, he became one of the most appreciated American writers of the twentieth century with the publication of a series of novels and short-stories, most of them set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. This imaginary setting allowed him to explore in his writing the tormented history of the South, highlighting its decline, its impossibility to cope with change, and the individuals’ struggle to accept the new social order imposed on them in the aftermath of the Civil War.

For a writer with such a vast imagination it must have been quite challenging to write short fiction. Nonetheless, given the increasing popularity of the short story in the early twentieth century, as well as Faulkner’s financial difficulties, caused by the fact that the novels he published until the 1930’s did not bring him fame or fortune, he started writing short fiction as a means of paying the bills. Thus, in 1930 he published one of the most anthologized and highly praised short stories – “A Rose for Emily” – widely read and discussed even nowadays, a story that continues to astonish its readers with the various meanings one can find in it.

The story is set in Jefferson, a representative town for the rural area of Yoknapatawpha, the mythical county inhabited by quintessential southerners and used by Faulkner to put in writing pieces of reality that prove the flaws and the deficiencies of the southern American society. On a first approach, “A Rose for Emily” is a story about a spinster who lived the last years of her life in complete isolation. She was known for her controversial behaviour, which made her the subject of gossip and harsh judgments, but she was also admired and respected by the community for what she and her father stood for. An imposing house surrounded by garages and cotton gins, reminding of the old aristocracy, people haunted by the memory of a glorious past, marginalization and self-confinement, a hint of necrophilia, these are all elements that situate “A Rose for Emily” within the Southern Gothic fiction. However, despite the Gothic atmosphere depicted in the story, Faulkner masterfully includes in “A Rose for Emily” topics such as the conflict between North and South, accentuating South’s reluctance to embrace change, the tension between a declining aristocracy and a rising middle class and the loss of identity because of the social constraints imposed especially on women.

The Reconstruction era was a flourishing period for the American society, but it also had negative overtones, especially in the southern American society. This period of readjustment was characterized by disorder, violence, and frequent clashes between whites and African Americans, as the racial issue became even more intense after the Civil War. Nonetheless, besides the concrete difficulties faced by the Southern American society, most of the southerners also had to deal with their own inner conflicts, given the fact that change was practically forced on them. People were reluctant to the new order imposed on them and many sought to keep as much as possible of the old South, even if that meant retreating into nostalgia and feeding with the memory of a glorious past. As a southerner, Faulkner also lived his life in the shadow of a glorious past, but, unlike the characters he creates in “A Rose for Emily,” he was able to detect the wrong premises on which the southern society was built, which is why his work is not an adulation of the southern traditions and values, but a comment on the wrongdoings of a society that is neither ready to embrace the future, not willing to keep living in the past.

In “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner presents the personal history of a southern lady whose life course mirrors the trajectory of the culture that created her. Emily Grierson, the main character of the short-story, is the embodiment of the Old South, a woman educated by her father in the traditional, patriarchal spirit. Because of her father’s influence and oppressive domination, she becomes an old maid and she chooses to isolate herself from the community when everything she knew begins to vanish, when the values on which she was raised are no longer accepted, and when she realizes that there is no place for a woman like her in the constantly changing society.

The unconventional structure of “A Rose for Emily,” the important topics it explores and the compositional complexities turn this particular story into a perfect expression of modern American writing. With an unknown narrator to relate the incidents that lead up to the major discovery at the end of the story, the reader is introduced to the most significant events that make up the tragic biography of the main character. The story begins with Miss Emily Grierson’s funeral and circles back and forth in time, from the opening event to the moment immediately following her death, when a macabre discovery is made: the corpse of Homer Barron, Emily’s former lover is found in one of the upstairs rooms that no one, except Emily, had seen in forty years:

“The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. […]Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”

The attitude of an embrace, the indentation of a head in the pillow next to him and the long strand of iron-gray hair make it clear that Miss Emily slept next to the corpse in her last years of life. Nonetheless, the purpose of the story was not to shock the readers with a more or less unexpected ending, but to reveal serious issues that affected both the individual and the society as a whole. It is well-known that Faulkner was not only a modernist writer, but also a southern regionalist whose work explores disturbing aspects of the American society. In order to do so, he created more than once characters that are at war with the world and with themselves and he charged their biographies with tragedy and death, or, as in our case, with terrible psychological disorders as well. And yet, he sympathised with them, for they are all reflections of an unpleasant social reality, and through them he might have hoped to compel the readers to react to the injustice in their personal lives and in the world. Miss Emily, of course, is no exception to that rule, for she too struggles with an inner “conflict in basic human values” that puts her in line with all the other women in Faulkner’s work that may be considered unpleasant:

“The women that have been unpleasant characters in my books were not created to be unpleasant characters, let alone to be unpleasant women. They were used as implements, instruments, to tell a story, which I was trying to tell, which I hoped showed that injustice must exist and you can’t just accept it, you got to do something about it.”

“A Rose for Emily” relates more than four decades of the main character’s life and it is told by an anonymous and dispassionate narrator who speaks in a collective voice. He relates the townspeople’s point of view, but he does not necessarily share their feelings for Miss Emily, for he or she refrains from revealing any emotional involvement in the events recounted, whereas the townspeople manifest a strong interest in Miss Emily and try to become a part of her life on several occasions. She is the town’s property, a symbol of the glorious past, and she is considered “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 119)

Emily is the product of a faulty society, one in which women are considered mere objects, incapable of taking care of themselves. She is a misanthrope who does not find her place in the world, for she is ceaselessly under observation, and the more she tries to keep her privacy, the more she arouses people’s curiosity and speculations, thus increasing the town’s obsession with her. She is the classic hermit who shuts herself off from the community when she understands that it is too late for her to become a part of it. As a young lady, Emily is under the barbaric domination of a father who “condemns her to the lonely isolation of an unwanted spinsterhood.” The narrator describes them as “a tableau, Miss Emily, a slender figure in white in the background, her father, a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 123). As the description suggests, there is no sign of an emotional involvement between them. She is under her father’s domination for as long as he lives and she remains that way even when he physically dies.

According to the chronology made by Cleanth Brooks in his book William Faulkner: toward Yoknapatawpha and beyond, Emily was born sometime before the Civil War, when the southern aristocracy was flourishing and the social classes were very well established. Emily’s father is an important figure of the community and a wealthy man whose house reflects the opulence that characterized that period: “It was a big, squarish frame house […] white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on […] our most select street” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 119). He is the typical patriarch who takes full advantage of his status as the master of the house, forcing his daughter to comply with his own standards and preventing her from having a normal life. He shows his greatness and wealth not only through the house in which Emily herself is born and raised, but also through his daughter, who is nothing more than an asset, a part of a decorous background. He has no consideration for her needs, he dresses her in white and drives away all her suitors, considering that none of them was good enough for her. And yet, while he is alive, Emily is kept away from the challenges of everyday life, for her only duty is to be Miss Emily Grierson, a member of the upper classes and to act properly for a lady of her rank.

Mr. Grierson dies sometime in the 1880’s, after the Reconstruction era, when much of the South’s glory and richness had already perished. Emily, now in her thirties, is finally free, but also completely alone and confused. She had never been taught how to live on her own and now she also has to face poverty, since the house is the only thing left for her after her father’s death. Nonetheless, this was just the beginning of a long and agonizing battle of survival in a continuously changing world in which there is no place for a woman like her. She was a lady of the old South and now that the old order had fallen, it was time for its symbols, the Grierson house and its landlady, to fall as well:

“garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps – an eyesore among eyesores” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 119).

Emily’s first reaction to her father’s death is a complete and absurd denial. She simply cannot accept the idea that she is left alone, with no one to watch over her. When the townspeople come to offer their help for her father’s burial, they find her dressed as usual, with no sign of sadness on her face, as if nothing had happened. For three days she refuses to acknowledge the death of her father, as if she needed to keep things just the way they were. She drives away doctors and priests who try to convince her to bury her father her and she only gives in when she realizes she cannot stand against it any longer.

Being raised in a patriarchal society, Miss Emily regards her house as her sanctuary, but also as her prison. With her father alive, she was forced to remain in the house, because Mr. Grierson wished so, and when he dies, she chooses to remain there, because she does not know what else to do, as she was never taught to live her life in a different manner. And yet, she proves that she is strong enough to survive by herself, and in order to make a living, she gives china-painting lessons to “the daughters and granddaughters of Colonel Sartoris’ contemporaries” who “were sent to her with the same regularity and in the same spirit that they were sent to church on Sundays” ” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 128). This proves that not only Miss Emily had difficulties in accepting the new order imposed on the society, but also that the entire town was “caught between the old and the new,” a fact that confirms the idea that the main character’s biography doubles the metamorphosis of the southern society, for both of them withstood novelty, and yet they both were forced to undergo radical changes.

Miss Emily’s refusal to bury her father is the first sign that indicates her reluctance to accept any kind of change. Nevertheless, she is convinced to do the proper thing and for a while she even begins to think that she will be allowed to move on with her life. Shortly after her father’s funeral, she meets Homer Barron, the man she would fall in love with, and also the one whose corpse would be found in her house after her death. At first, this romantic affair gives the impression that she had finally escaped her father’s authority. She tries to be happy in her relationship and she completely ignores people’s malicious remarks that come as a reaction against a behaviour that eventually is considered inadequate for a lady. Consequently, her attempt to leave the past behind fails and she must cling on to what she is allowed to have: the memory of her relationship and her lover’s corpse.

Her manner of solving the problem is twisted and awkward, and even macabre, but the pressure she is put under forces her to act this way. Even though everything around her changes, she is compelled to remain the same Miss Emily and to behave according to her distinction, which is why her aberrant behaviour can be considered a defence mechanism against a changing reality to which she does not belong. Thus, the society that produced her is just as responsible for her abominable deed as she is. The townspeople wanted her to remain the same, a product of the traditional values, but also condemned her for her legacy. They first supported her engagement with Homer Barron, but then they denied her the right to do as she pleases. She, like the entire community, endeavours to accept change, but she fails because nobody around her is really ready to accept it. They all give the impression that they live in the present and that they are able to cope with the constantly changing reality, but in fact they continue to reminisce about the past with nostalgia.

Emily’s romance was not meant to last, mostly because the man she chose for herself was “a Yankee – a big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 124), a mismatch for a lady of her status. If in the beginning the townspeople encouraged and approved her romance, as if she needed their approval, once they realized their relationship is unlikely to turn into marriage, they felt that they should do something in order to end it. More than that, there were others, older people, who rejected the idea that a Grierson would seriously think of a Northerner right from the beginning. Because she is a Grierson, and because the Griersons are representatives of the Old Order, she is expected to remain the same though everything around changes. In addition, her being a member of their community is a reason big enough for them to look back at the past and wish for everything to be done in the old-fashioned way. They want to keep their traditional system of values that would not allow a “real lady to forget noblesse oblige” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 124), which proves that they were just as attached to the past as she was. Obviously, their attitude indicates that the entire story is not only an individual drama, but also a comment on a “collective historical paralysis” that occurs whenever a major change is about to happen.

Being left alone after her father’s death, with no one to look after her, the community assumes the role of Miss Emily’s father. She is considered too fragile to be able to take her life into her own hands and, because she is a woman, they do not allow her to make her own decisions. Colonel Sartoris and his contemporaries even take care of her financial situation. The Colonel exempts her from paying taxes and his contemporaries send their daughters and granddaughters to take lessons in china-painting from her. Judge Stevens finds a compromise solution for the problem with the smell coming from her property, and everybody else feels free to interfere in her life whenever they please. Her life is made a public domain that everybody feels free to observe and evaluate without being able to trespass the barrier that virtually separates her from the rest of the community. She generates the townspeople’s grudge for belonging to the old aristocracy and not giving up her distinction despite her actual condition, and their jealousy for being able to take her life into her own hands and to impose the recognition of her rank in a world where the traditional system of values was not of a great significance anymore. She stimulates their curiosity by blocking the access of any intruder into her private life, she gains their admiration for keeping her head high despite being the victim of an unfortunate destiny, and she also encourages their pride, for she is still a symbol of the glorious past and a member of their community. Their disapproval is aroused when she seems to have forgotten a lady’s “noblesse oblige” and she engages into a romantic affair with Homer Barron. When her father died, the townspeople felt entitled to pity her because “being left alone, and a pauper […] she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 123), and they continued to have the same ambiguous feelings for her when she gave the impression that she would commit suicide, when she seemed to have fallen in love with a man unworthy of a lady of her status, but also when they realized that her relationship with the unworthy man was unlikely to materialize into marriage.

Nevertheless, Miss Emily finds enough resources to go on with her life, directing all her energy towards achieving an illusion of immortality by denying death or by considering it an unrestricted progression of life. Her refusal to bury her father is the first action that proves her stubbornness in accepting death as a natural phenomenon, and also the first hint of the psychological disorder that is about to be proven only at the end of the story, after her own death. And yet the townspeople did not perceive her as a madwoman and they considered her actions as a natural follow-up of the events preceding her father’s death:

“We did not say she was crazy. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 124).

The contradictory emotions that Miss Emily triggers are also indicators of her being an emblematic figure of the town: “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly of curiosity to see the inside of her house” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 119). Her death is considered some sort of festival that brings people together, which confirms her importance for the town of Jefferson. If the younger generations believed that Miss Emily should be treated as any other member of the community, and they were willing to make her pay taxes like any other citizen, the elder generation thought of her as a sort of pillar of the community, and as a testimony of their consideration, at her funeral they came to pay their respect dressed in their Confederate uniforms, as if she had been an important leader of the Confederacy, the last reminder of a remarkable period.

When the townspeople realize that Miss Emily has no intentions of ending her affair with Homer Barron, and that there is no chance for the two to get married, they feel it is their duty to intervene. They call her relatives and hope that they would bring Emily on the right path. What they fail to understand is that Miss Emily not only was perfectly capable to make her own choices, but that she had already decided the fate of her relationship with Homer Barron. Nonetheless, in order to avoid any suspicions, as soon as her relatives arrive, she begins the preparations for a wedding. She “ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. on each piece” and she buys “a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 127), all to the townspeople’s delight, for they were convinced that the couple would get married soon.

Miss Emily’s plan, however, was slightly different from what they had imagined. Being forced again to act according to someone else’s wishes, as if her father’s domination had not been enough, she silently rebels against everybody, proving that she had taken “on the traits of her domineering father.” The townspeople’s desire to see her either married or alone, but also her fear that she might be abandoned by her lover, since “he was not a marrying man” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 126), convinced her that killing him was the only way to keep him by her side. Thus, right after she prepares the “macabre bridal chamber,” she buys the arsenic from the druggist and she poisons her lover.

Soon after the disappearance of Homer Barron, an awful smell begins to be felt coming from Emily’s property. During that period, she had already sealed herself off from the community. As the townspeople began to complain because of the smell, the authorities were forced to do something about it. At the meeting they arranged in order to find a solution, four men participated: three of them belonging to the old generation and a younger man. This is the moment when the differences of opinion between the older generation and the younger one become more considerable. The young man, unable to understand Miss Emily’s importance for the community, suggests notifying her about the problem and asking her to take care of it, considering she should not receive any special treatments. Nevertheless, his solution is immediately rejected by the older men whose respect for Miss Emily and for what she stands for prevets them from “accusing a lady to her face of smelling bad” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 122). Thus, they decide to apply a compromise solution to the problem, which involved sneaking onto her property to sprinkle lime, not knowing that their solution would not only protect a lady from the disgrace of being accused of smelling bad, but it would also destroy the evidence of murder, turning them into accomplices to the killing of Homer Barron.

When the four men in charge of solving the problem of the smell without confronting Miss Emily with such an unpleasant situation creep into her property, she sees them from her window and she even turns on the lights in order to make her presence visible: “As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her quiet upright torso motionless as that of an idol” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 123). She appears at the window not only to see them, but also to be seen by them, for at the window she has been seen by many generations. The narrator’s use of the pronoun “we”, which indicates the fact that he was invested with the communal voice, combined with the use of the word idol in his description of Miss Emily, confirm her importance for the town of Jefferson, for she is the last representative of “those august names” that “lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 119)

The chivalrous gestures the men perform in order to help Miss Emily allow us to draw some conclusions about their opinion on women. Not only were they thought to be frail and weak, but they were also believed to be completely out of touch with reality. Moreover, the older generation considered they should be kept that way. Judge Stevens, for example, does not want to confront Emily for the smell, though it is obvious that she was aware of it, since she was the one living in the house, whereas Colonel Sartoris tries to prevent her from being made aware of her desperate financial situation. He comes up with an absurd story that “only a man of his generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 120) and he remits her taxes on the assumption that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, and the town prefers this way of repaying it.

Nevertheless, these men, just like Miss Emily, are products of the Old South and living illustrations of the principles on which the old patriarchal society was founded. Simply because Emily is a lady, she is considered unable to take care of herself without a male figure by her side. She cannot escape her condition as much as she cannot escape her father’s house. She is an outsider in the modern world and any attempt to integrate fails because she has no support of any kind. Therefore, all she can do is to lock herself in her house, “shutting out the world and its changes.” The Grierson house is the embodiment of the Old South. Though it was once a hallmark of luxury and abundance, the house begins to deteriorate after Mr. Grierson’s death, denoting that the glory of the old South had also begun to fade away. Its decadence produces gradually, as its landlady grows older, and it reaches its climax when she dies. Time leaves its marks not only on Miss Emily, but also on her solid and stylish house, which progressively turns into a symbol of decay and misery. Because of its segregation from the rest of the town, and because of Emily’s determination to reject anything that was related to industrialization and progress (like when she refused free postal delivery), her house becomes a microcosm in which the Old South is still alive. In this place, the trajectory of the Old Order is reinstated and the house and Miss Emily become constant reminders of the fading glory of the old aristocracy.

With Miss Emily as a duplicate of her house and vice versa, the decline of the latter points to the physical degradation and emotional breakdown of the former. Just as dust invades every corner of the house, so too does insanity conquer Emily’s mind, whereas time turns her from the “slender figure in white” into the “small, fat woman in black” who seemed “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 121). And because Miss Emily’s lifetime is the temporal dimension and her house is the spatial dimension in which the conversion of the southern society is reiterated, the hint of necrophilia that Faulkner provides in the story is not meant to appal the reader, but to show that injustice is a part of reality.

Under these circumstances, “A Rose for Emily” can be considered the story of a woman who becomes a victim of the patriarchal culture that created her, a culture that imposes a certain behaviour on women, a culture that diminishes women’s strength and capacity to take their lives into their own hands. She is an oppressed lady who finds resources in the system to take revenge for being oppressed without having to pay for it. She thwarts the system that made her a lady and she uses her status in her favour. She murders Homer Barron and she gets away with it in spite of all the clues that point to her being guilty for the disappearance of her Yankee lover because the culture that produced her expects her to be weak.

When Miss Emily buys arsenic, people believe that she is about to kill herself. They never even suspect that she intends to use the poison on somebody else, because a lady’s response to despair is not murder, but suicide. This time her status as a lady also brings her some benefits: it provides the necessary means for her to commit the perfect murder and it creates the perfect circumstances for her to avoid giving any explanation for her actions. She not only bypasses her legal obligations, but she also generates situations in which the people getting in contact with her are forced to break the law. They are never asked to do so, but they somehow feel indebted to correct her wrongdoings or give explanations for all her actions. Thus, when the townspeople begin to feel the smell coming from her property, they immediately blame the Negro, never suspecting that Miss Emily could be responsible for it. Even the druggist, who had the legal obligation to find out how she is going to use the arsenic she buys, is forced to justify her actions since she refuses to answer his question:

“The druggist looked down at her. She looked back at him, erect, her face like a strained flag. ‘why, of course,’ the druggist said. ‘If that’s what you want. But the law requires for you to tell what are you going to use for.’ Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back, in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up.[…]When she opened the package at home there was written on the box, under the skull and bones: ‘For rats.’”(“A Rose for Emily,” p. 126).

In “A Rose for Emily” the persecuted finds a way to turn against her persecutors. Once her father dies, Emily is enabled to take her vengeance on society, and especially on men. The delicate lady in white gradually turns into a fat woman in black, a grotesque figure whose hair is “vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 128) and who assumes her father’s role in society, but also many of his personality traits. When Homer Barron enters her life, he has to deal with the victim of a long-term oppression who turns herself into an oppressor; therefore we may say that Emily’s psychological issues that determine her to murder Homer Barron are the unfortunate consequence of her living in a domineering patriarchal society. Moreover, we learn from the story that she never really breaks away from her father’s domination, for when she dies, her body lies under “the crayon face of her father musing profoundly” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 129). Thus, since she cannot escape his authority as long as she has to remain in his house, where the father’s presence is always felt, her decision to kill her lover and keep his corpse in her father’s house can be interpreted as the supreme act of vengeance that Emily perpetrates against her father, and also against the community, for making her a lady and forcing her to act like one.

Oppression, in all its forms, seems to be one of the main topics of this short story, and since marginalization is also a form of oppression, it is important to consider our story from this perspective as well. As we have already seen, Miss Emily is constantly marginalized, but she is just as responsible for her situation as the entire community, for she is the one who chooses to live in a self-imposed exile. In her behaviour and in the others’ response to it we recognize all sorts of strategies of marginalization and self-marginalization, which is why it is not far-fetched to assert that we are witnessing some sort of convention between the individual and the community: as long as she would not interfere with the good-functioning of the society and she would continue to play the role assigned to her, they would sustain her need to remain unapproachable and they would even enable her to commit the perfect murder.

Obviously, when discussing marginalization it is important to observe the interdependent relationship between the centre and the margins, since one cannot exist without the other, and to establish the physical and psychological framework in which marginalized people act and react. As expected, in our story the physical framework is the community to which Miss belongs, while the psychological framework is determined by people’s response to the changes made in the physical framework. The centre and the margins, in their turn, are described in terms of hierarchical power. If in the nineteenth century American society the distribution of power depended on class, race and gender, once the Reconstruction era began, power became a matter of financial security and it belonged to those who were able to embrace change. Thus, during the transition from the patriarchal society based on traditional values to the industrial society governed by economic performance, when the relocation of power occurs, Miss Emily represents, in turn, both the centre and the margins. Whether she was born before the American Civil War, in a thriving period for the southern aristocracy to which she belonged, or during the Civil War, when the idea of a privileged nobility was already challenged, she and her father represented the centre of the society, while the margins were represented by those who did not have the privilege of having been born into aristocratic families. Of course, she did not earn the right to represent the centre, she inherited it, she used it, she occasionally stood against it and in time she was almost enslaved by it.

Nonetheless, in the interpersonal relationships she develops, Miss Emily is always marginalized. In her case, playing the part of the centre on a community level is a form of oppression as well. As a member of the aristocracy she is expected to act according to well-established principles, even if these principles are in stark opposition to her needs and desires. With her father alive, she was a mere accessory for a dominant patriarch, bound to follow his orders. Being a woman restricts many of her rights as a member of a privileged group, and even her rights as a human being. As already mentioned, her father drove away all her suitors, and yet, if we take into account the fact that the suitors started to come when much of the Grierson fortune had already vanished because of the changes on the social and political level, we may also assume that Mr. Grierson refused to marry his daughter not only because the suitors did not meet his expectations, but also because he needed her around him in order to maintain at least one relationship in which he occupies the dominant position. In the community, he was still a respected member, but with his vanishing fortune, much of his influence vanished as well, and because the domineering patriarch in him needed someone to exert power over, Emily was condemned to remain forever by his side. In this relationship she was the margin and he was the centre, and because “margin and center can draw the meaning only from each other,” neither of them seems willing to change anything.

This father-daughter relationship and Miss Emily’s submission to her father’s influence and her acceptance of her fate may seem quite outrageous, and yet, we should not forget that she was also a product of that patriarchal society, and therefore, she was raised to strongly believe in the values promoted by the old southern American society. At this point, however, another question about the two Griersons emerges: why do they refuse to adjust to change since everything and everyone around them seemed to embrace the changes brought by the Reconstruction era? The answer is quite simple – for the first time their position in society is seriously challenged:

“As historically marginalized groups insist on their identity, the deeper structural invisibility of the so-called centre becomes harder to sustain. The power of the centre depends on a relatively unchallenged authority. If that authority breaks down, then there remains no point relative to which others can be defined as marginal.”

Of course, the above excerpt is significant for most of Faulkner’s fiction. Especially in his novels the idea of marginalization by class, race or gender is constantly revisited. In “A Rose for Emily,” the fervent issues are related to class and gender. In this short story Faulkner grasps the changes brought by industrialization in the southern American society and, in a way, he even militates for the southern American society, for he presents it from the point of view of a writer who belongs to the provincial community he includes in his fiction. If Yoknapatawpha had existed, it would have been at the margins of the American society, and given the fact that Faulkner’s mythical county is a transposition of the southern American society, we may say that, by bringing it into question, Faulkner does not want to show its inferiority, but rather to emphasize the interdependent relationship between the southern and the rest of the American society:

“Faulkner’s South stands over against New York […] Faulkner’s sense of history and his sense of participation in a living tradition have been of utmost importance. Faulkner’s work, like that of [Yeats], embodies a criticism of the prevailing commercial and urban culture, a criticism made from the standpoint of a provincial and traditional culture […] making the provincial society out of which [Faulkner] comes, and with which so much of his fiction deals, a positive resource – an instrument for developing and redefining his meaning.”

Coming back to our story, we must say that in “A Rose for Emily” we are dealing with a female other who represents “the alter ego of the white male protagonist,” in our case Mr. Grierson. With her father alive she cannot fit the pattern imposed by society on women, because he does not allow her to do so. She is neither a wife, nor a mother and despite her attempt to become a wife after her father’s death, the community in which she lives assumes her father’s role and once again denies her right to choose what to do with her life. This is when the clash between her and the community begins, because she too assumes the role of her father. If the townspeople become Mr. Grierson’s substitute in that they help her through her financial difficulties and try to prevent her from making foolish choices, unfit for a lady of her rank, she assumes Mr. Grierson’s role in that she now has the power to choose for herself, decide what to do with her life and deal with her financial situation by herself.

Miss Emily’s transition from being the daughter of the most respected member of the community to being the last symbol of the old southern aristocracy is slow and rather painful, because with this transition she also experiences the shift from the centre to the margins on a community level. Being the last representative of her class she cannot integrate herself in the now dominant group. She becomes as economically insecure as all the other members of the community, or even worse, and from this perspective she is at their level, but because of her aristocratic origins she is never considered one of them.

Obviously, it is quite difficult for Emily to acknowledge and accept the change of position within the social system, which begins with the death of her father. After spending her youth under the strict rule of an egotistic and even tyrannical father, it is a shock for her to suddenly find herself out of a co-dependent relationship. Although she was the victim in a domineering relationship, she seems to have accepted her condition and fails to see herself otherwise, which is why her first reaction to change is to deny the death of her father. And yet, her reaction is quite normal if we think of her as a victim of a long-term abusive relationship. For so long she has defined herself only in relation to her father and with him gone she feels like she had lost her balance. She has always been at distance from the rest of the society, and when the townspeople invade her house to bury her father, she herself feels threatened. She is not ready yet to give up the artificial distance between her and society and she shuts herself in her house for almost two years after her father’s burial, hoping perhaps not be faced with the changing social climate of the southern American society.

At some point, however, Miss Emily recovers the strength to move on with her life. She appears to have acknowledged the relocation of power in society and she seems ready to become just another member of the community. When she meets Homer Barron she is willing to indulge herself with the simple pleasures of marital life. She is now ready to play the part of an ordinary woman in a patriarchal society. And yet, she is not allowed to do so. She is still the symbol of the old aristocracy, “not by what she does, but by what she does not do – in other words, by the frozen state in which she exists,” and she must remain that way as long as the community to which she belongs is not ready yet to completely give up the past. Besides, the man she has chosen as her future husband is considered the worst choice she could have ever made. He is a Northerner and a labourer, which makes him unsuitable for a lady of her rank, and he also has homosexual tendencies, which make him unsuitable for any woman. But despite all that, he is the man she wants. By marrying him she would integrate the society and thus the distance she had previously imposed between her and the community would be considerably diminished. And yet, the society was not ready either for such a change. They whispered whenever they saw them driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy, they made her and her relationship the object of a constant scrutiny and they even called upon her relatives to come and clear things up.

It is very interesting to observe how a single person can cause a wide range of emotions to an entire community. They envied her and then they pitied her, they contested her actions and then they supported her, they sympathized with her and then they were outraged, they would not let her completely shut herself in her world, nor would they allow her to become a part of their world. They needed her to remain the same unapproachable Miss Emily so that they could define themselves in relation to her just like she had previously defined herself in relation to her father. In this awkward relationship, she becomes both the centre and the margin. She is the central figure in the town of Jefferson because of the townspeople’s unhealthy need to cling on to the past for as long as possible, but she is also marginalized for belonging to a different period and a higher social class. It is never clear what the community expects from her, just like it is never clear what kind of feelings they have for her.

In such an absurd situation Miss Emily is left with no other choice than to isolate herself in her house. However, she is not ready to give up Homer Barron because she does not have the community’s approval, nor is she willing to wait for him to leave her, which it would have happened eventually if we take into account her lover’s inclination. Therefore she resorts to a tragic solution – she murders him in order to have him forever by her side. Of course, because of the townspeople’s need to stay at a certain distance from her and despite the obvious clues that pointed to her being a murderer, she manages to commit the perfect murder. From that moment, however, she completely withdraws herself from public life and she only appears on the window from time to time to let people know she is still there:

“Daily, monthly, yearly, we watched the Negro grow grayer and more stooped, going in and out with the market basket. Each December we sent her a tax notice, which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed. Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows – she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house – like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed from generation to generation – dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.” (A Rose for Emily,” p. 128.)

She lives this way for many years and when she finally dies her act of vengeance is complete. By killing Homer Barron she had taken revenge on him for giving her false hopes, by keeping his corpse in the house, she takes revenge on her father for having prevented her from living a normal life, by allowing the townspeople to discover the corpse and the strand of her hair on the pillow next to it she takes revenge on the entire community for not letting her live by her own standards, and by simply dying she destroys the symbol in relation to which the townspeople used to define themselves.

As we may see, we can find multiple meanings in “A Rose for Emily,” but whether we interpret it as a southern gothic story that shocks through its ending, which points to necrophilia, as the biography of a socially unacceptable lady who refuses to embrace the community’s conventions, as an individual drama that reflects the tragedy of an entire community, as the story of a society caught between the memory of a glorious past and the pressure of an uncertain future, or as the story of a pitiful lady who becomes a victim of patriarchy, it is impossible not to notice that death is a constant presence in the story. The story itself opens with the main character’s funeral, a moment of major importance for the community of Jefferson. The entire town attends the ceremony, her status as a symbol of the community being shown right from the beginning. If alive she generated all sorts of antithetical emotions, from admiration to pity, from respect to disregard, from affection to antipathy and dispassion, when she dies, all these emotions are of no importance. Her death is perceived not only as the disappearance of an important member of the community, but also as the downfall of the memory of a glorious past.

Though it is quite difficult to establish an accurate chronology of the story, the five deaths mentioned by the narrator can be easily put in chronological order. The first person that dies is the “old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.125), one of Emily’s relatives. We learn from the story that she passed away when Emily’s father, Mr. Grierson, was still alive, and that all her relatives fought for her assets and thus the two families became estranged. Apparently, her death is less significant than the other four, but the moment when it is mentioned escalates its importance. At that time, Emily was under constant observation because of her ‘outrageous’ relationship with Homer Barron. As already mentioned, the younger generations were ready to accept a union between a northerner and a southerner, as long as this union would respect the social conventions, but the older generations rejected this idea from the beginning. They were convinced that Emily’s involvement with a northerner was simply her way of coping with the pain caused by the loss of her father, and they expected her to end it anytime, because “even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.124). This discrepancy in attitudes suggests that, besides the obvious differences between the North and the South, there is also a major difference between the younger and the older generations of the southern society, and this difference will continue to exist for as long as the reminder of the old past – Miss Emily – would still be a part of their community.

The narrator’s use of the word “crazy” in describing Emily’s relative is not a coincidence, and instead, it is an allusion to the protagonist’s own craziness. Throughout the story the word “crazy” appears three times, and when referring directly to Emily the narrator says: “we did not say she was crazy then” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.124). However, the subsequent uses of this word, along with the fact that she was still single when she turned thirty, imply the idea that dementia is a family trait: “even with insanity in the family she wouldn’t have turned down all her chances if they had really materialized” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.123). Consequently, the townspeople should not be so surprised when they discover the hint of necrophilia that proves to them that years have turned Miss Emily into a clinically insane subject.

The second death that occurs in the story is that of Miss Emily’s father. Mr. Grierson dies sometimes after the Reconstruction era, when the southern society was struggling to adjust to the continuously changing reality. His death has a major significance for the community, in general, because it marks the end of a prosperous and opulent period, and for Emily, in particular, because she is now forced to learn to live on her own. Her refusal to bury him according to tradition, more than being some sort of revenge for all the oppression she was forced to endure, can be considered a fight against death itself, for she must have known that nothing will be the same from now on. Either way, her reaction is a proof of a serious emotional and psychological damage, and an indicator of the nature of her future actions.

When Mr. Grierson dies, Emily becomes the last representative of the old southern society. Besides the fact that she has to learn to take care of herself, she also has to fulfil the townspeople’s expectations. As already mentioned, she becomes the object of their never-ending speculations and continuous monitoring, and she is not allowed to live her life by her own standards. The community takes the role of her father and expects her to comply with their requests. After all, it is not like they ask a lot from her, they just want her to be the same Miss Emily Grierson, a member of the upper classes, and to act according to her rank. And yet, this is the position that makes her the subject of rumours and scrutiny. People do not want her to change, but they do not accept her as she is either. She is an outsider in the community in which she was raised and she will forever remain that way.

Feeling like an intruder in the community that contributed to the development of her identity, Emily starts a romantic affair with Homer Barron. However, this affair can be seen as just another form of isolation, because the man she chooses is also an intruder. He is the product of a culture responsible for all the changes that the southern society was forced to accept, but even so, she chooses him and she is proud of her choice, despite people’s disapproval of her relationship: “as they passed on Sunday afternoon in the glittering buggy, Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reins and whip in a yellow glove” (“A Rose for Emily, p.126).

After Homer’s death, Emily’s quality of life deteriorates. She shuts herself away in her house and she only appears at the window from time to time. If after the death of her father she cut her hair short and looked like a girl “with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows – sort of tragic and serene” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 124), after she murdered her lover she turned into a fat woman, she always dressed in black, and her hair turned “grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron-gray.” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 127).

Colonel Sartoris is another important character of the story and after his death many things change for both Emily and the society. He is the first to assume the role of a father for Emily after Mr. Grierson’s death, and because of him Miss Emily becomes “a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.119). He is the representative of the older generations that shared Emily’s reluctance to embrace change. For him and his contemporaries, Miss Emily is a living monument, and as long as she existed, the remarkable history of the southern society would not have fallen into oblivion either. For these older generations, the memory of the past is not enough, however, and they do whatever they can to keep traditions alive, which is why they send their daughters and granddaughters to Miss Emily to take china-painting lessons and they protect her on several occasions. Nonetheless, as time passes, Colonel Sartoris loses his authority in Jefferson, and thus Emily loses her protector. The younger generations’ interest in china-painting goes adrift and Emily is required to pay her taxes like any other citizen. The new members of the Board of Aldermen believe that Emily should not be given any special treatment, and therefore the authorities pay her a visit in order to convince her to pay her taxes. Anyway, Emily refuses to comply with their request in her own manner and sends them to colonel Sartoris, who “had been dead almost ten years” (“A Rose for Emily,” p. 121). A similar episode also happened many years before, when the Board reunited in order to solve the problem with the smell coming from Miss Emily’s property. At that time, however, the balance was in Emily’s favour, because the committee had three members of the old generation and only one young representative, and although the solution they found was not the legally correct one, at least it was one that would not offend a lady.

The differences of opinion that exist between the younger generations and the older ones suggest that the society is gradually adjusting to the New Order, but, as long as Emily is still alive, the memory of the past will persist. Even though she seals herself off in her house, and blocks any attempt of the townspeople to invade her privacy, she shows herself at the window because she wants people to know that she is still there. Her importance for the town of Jefferson might attenuate as the years go by, but her image at the window is still “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.128) for many generations.

Emily’s house and her status offer her both freedom and captivity. The house, which used to be one of the most elegant in the town, gradually turns into a ruin as its landlady grows older. This is the place where she defies death and tries to stop the passing of time; the place where she hides when she is overwhelmed by people’s inquisitiveness, but also the place she cannot escape as long as she is alive. Despite her efforts to reject any change, she can stop neither the passing of time, nor the transition to a new social hierarchy. And yet, only after her death does the complete conversion of the society become possible. When she dies, the entire town comes to her house to see her for the last time. The older men wear their Confederate uniforms and talk “of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps” (“A Rose for Emily,”, p.129). Though the symbol of the glorious past had passed away, the memory of it still lingers on, because for the older generations “the past is not a diminishing road, but instead, a huge meadow which no winter never quite touches” (“A Rose for Emily,” p.129).

Miss Emily’s death finally allows people to invade her privacy and satisfy their curiosity and what they discover in her house surpasses any of their expectations. Curiously, the narrator does not talk about people’s reaction when they finally realize that Miss Emily had murdered her lover and shared the bed with his corpse. His silence, however, may suggest that the narrator and the community he represents have finally understood how wrongful their attitude towards Miss Emily was, or it may just as well be interpreted as a sign of disillusionment with the symbol of their community. Either way, it is obvious that Faulkner’s intention was to show that there will always be differences among people and that as long as these different people are not allowed to find their place in the society, every culture and every generation will have its own Miss Emily.

5. Liminal Aesthetics in the Modernist Short Story

5.1. Hidden Myths and Initiation Rituals in Mircea Eliade’s “With the Gypsy Girls”

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In Mircea Eliade’s fantastic fiction death is never presented as the end of the personal history of the individual, but rather as a threshold between a material and an immaterial world, between the profane and the sacred. In his famous short story “With the Gypsy Girls” he explores the possibility of passage from one plane of existence to another by creating an allegorical narrative inscribed in the ethos of the Romanian people, but inspired by the author’s scholarly research in the field of religion and mythology. Obviously, in this story as well the main character’s liminal experience, beyond the boundaries of space and time, comes to reinforce Eliade’s assumption that the modern man “still retains a large stock of camouflaged myths and degenerated rituals,” which implies that the sacred manifests itself in the profane as a different kind of reality that can be intuitively grasped by means of the imagination.

The term ‘liminal’ was first introduced by Arnold van Gennep to establish the structure of the rites of passage that determine the transition of an individual or a group of people from one status to another or from one condition to another. According to Gennep, all rites of passage, whether we are talking about birth, marriage, change of social position or occupation, and even death, include three phases: a symbolic separation from a previous condition, which is the preliminal stage, a period of transition marked by ambiguity, which is the liminal stage, and also a symbolic incorporation into a new stable state, which is the postliminal stage that occurs after the completion of a rite of passage.

In Mircea Eliade’s work the liminal stage takes the form of initiation and it is rather related to Victor Turner’s understanding of concept. According to the British anthropologist, liminality “may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise.” Thus liminality is a paradoxical and ambiguous condition, both liberating and confining, that drives the individual out of a previous state of being and helps him to accommodate to unknown and even antithetical conditions.

In our short story the stable state left behind by the main character is life itself, the gypsy house is the place where the sacred manifests itself in the real plane and Gavrilescu’s unusual experiences represent the rites of passage he has to undergo in order to cross the threshold between life and death. As it always happens in Eliade’s fantasy fiction, “With the Gypsy Girls” begins in a realistic time and space but gradually moves beyond the confines of reality, as the main character himself is carried into a mythical, sacred place where the laws of profane existence do not apply.

We may say about Mircea Eliade that he was one of the writers who practised what he preached in the sense that many of the ideas presented in his academic writing became a mode of existence for the author himself, and also show a great potential as keys to interpreting Eliade’s own literary writing. In his academic studies on the nature of religion, he argues that even in the most secularized societies profane existence is never found in a pure state, for “even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces of a religious valorization of the world.” Thus in our story he endeavours to illustrate specifically those traces of religious valorization, or, more precisely, the sacred, mythical dimension of experience in a secularized society, as the author himself suggests:

“Still on ‘With the Gypsy Girls.’ Such a literature as this founds its own universe; just as myths unveil for us the foundation of worlds, of modes of being. […] It is in this sense that one can speak of an extension of myth into literature: not only because certain mythological structures and figures return in the imaginary universes of literature, but especially because in both cases it is a matter of creation, that is of the creation (revelation) of certain worlds parallel to the daily universe in which we move. In my story, as in a Polynesian or North American myth, there is and there is not a ‘real’ world, that is, a world in which everyday man lives or can live. But, as in a myth, ‘With the Gypsy Girls’ […] reveals unsuspected meanings, gives a meaning to everyday life.”

The story opens with an almost ordinary day in the life of Gavrilescu, a 49 year-old artist who makes a living from giving piano lessons. Right from the beginning the reader is carried into the suffocating atmosphere of a hot summer day in the Bucharest of the 1930’s, when our main character takes a tram ride on his way back home from one of his students. The “scorching, stifling” heat inside the tram makes him consider himself a lucky man as soon as he notices an empty seat beside an open window, but at the same time it reminds him of a certain Colonel Lawrence’s Arabian adventure that ended with him being killed by the intense desert heat: “That terrible burning heat of Arabia struck him like a sword. A blow on the top of his head and he was speechless.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 254).

Gavrilescu tries to start a dialogue with the other passengers about the terrible heat they were dealing with and about Colonel Lawrence, but no one seems interested to share their opinions. The conductor interrupts his monologue when he hands him the ticket, bringing into discussion the gypsies’ house as a reference point in Gavrilescu’s tram ride. The simple mentioning of the gypsies’ house triggers malicious comments from the old man standing in front of Gavrilescu and it also directs everyone’s attention to the nice looking house and the magnificent garden that surrounded it. Thus, while the old kept saying that it is a scandal, a shame and crime to allow the existence of such place, Gavrilescu was already captivated by the view:

“‘It’s the talk of the town,’ […] ‘Looks like a fine house, though, and what a garden!… What a garden!’… he repeated admiringly, shaking his head. ‘There, you can just see it,’ he added, stooping somewhat, to see it better. […] ‘Old walnut trees,’ he said, ‘at least fifty years old. That’s why there is so much shade. It’s a blessing in this sultry heat. Lucky they are these people.’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” pp. 254-255)

Thus far it only looks like our protagonist is caught in the whirl of mundane existence, since everything recounted may be attached to the real plane of the story, and yet we are dealing here with a most subtle dialectic of the sacred and the profane. The tram, the polite conductor that tells Gavrilescu they still have got time, for they have not got to the gypsy girls yet, and the gypsies’ house are the first elements that create a connection between the sacred and the profane dimension of existence. Moreover, the city itself constitutes a sacred geography for Eliade, which is why in this short story every trivial matter of everyday life may be regarded as a subtle manifestation of the sacred, which in this case takes the form of the fantastic:

“Every homeland constitutes a sacred geography. For those who have left it, the city of their childhood and adolescence always becomes a mythical city. For me Bucharest is the heart of an inexhaustible mythology. And through that mythology I have succeeded in getting to know its true history. And my own too, perhaps.”

Under these circumstances, we are inclined to believe that Gavrilescu’s liminal experience begins right from the first lines of the story, and therefore his ordinary tram ride may just as well be given a mythological dimension. Thus, the conductor would be Charon, the Greek mythological ferryman who carries the souls of the dead through the underworld, the bill Gavrilescu gives him for the ticket would be Charon’s obol, the tram would be Charon’s boat and the gypsies’ house and its magnificent garden would be perhaps the Garden of Eden. Nonetheless, given the trials Gavrilescu undergoes once he enters the gypsies’ houses, as well as his increasing thirst, for which he is offered hot coffee and cold water, we may say that the gypsies’ house is in fact a limbo where the main character has to detach himself from his human side. His thirst is nothing more than a symbol of the sufferings of the dead, for, as Eliade himself suggests, the dead are always given an “elementary form of existence” in which they atone for their sins before being finally integrated into the cosmic order:

“water ‘appeases the thirst of the dead man,’ it dissolves him, it links him together with the seeds of things; water ‘kills the dead,’ finally destroying their human status that hell may reduce them to a sort of larval state, thus leaving their capacity for suffering unimpaired. In none of the various conceptions of death, do the dead die completely: they are given an elementary form of existence; it is a regression, rather than a total extinction. While waiting to return into the cosmic round (transmigration), or to be finally delivered, the souls of the dead suffer and that suffering is generally expressed as a thirst.”

Gavrilescu’s tram ride thus becomes a journey to another world and the further he goes, the more he withdraws from reality. Even though at times he is drawn back to the real world, like for example when he realizes he had forgotten his briefcase at Madame Voitinovici’s home and decides to turn back, he never really manages to reconnect with reality. He, however, is not entirely unaware of the true meaning of his experience. He may not want to admit it, but the first evidence of his awareness is to be found in his reluctance to get off the tram and wait for one that will take him in the opposite direction: “‘In this heat off you go, Gavrilescu, my son, and catch a tram to Preoteselor street.’ He looked round in despair, as if expecting someone to stop him.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 256)

Obviously, he does not reach his destination just yet. The torrid heat, the smell of melting asphalt, the bench in the sun reminded him of the moment when he met Elsa, his wife. Back then he was a young artist, penniless, but full of dreams, whereas now he is an unfulfilled artist, tired of dealing with the banality of everyday life, and perhaps just as penniless as in his youth. Soon enough he finds himself in front of the gypsies’ house and once he enters, he never really comes back. Nonetheless, he is still much too anchored in reality to be able to understand the mythical dimension of the place he has just entered. The coolness of the garden and the bitter smell of walnut leaves crushed between the fingers trigger yet another memory of his wife. At this point he can no longer control the flow of memories, just as he cannot control himself. He is driven by a young girl to an old lady who asks him three hundred lei for three girls, a Greek, a Gypsy and a German. He refuses the German girl for she reminds him of Hildegard, the woman he loved in his youth, but he accepts a Jewish girl instead.

The episode with the crone is very similar to the one that happened on the tram. Gavrilescu keeps trying to have a conversation with the two women, he justifies his being only a piano teacher, he recounts memories of his past, he has troubles in finding his wallet when he has to pay for the services he is about to enjoy, and he clings to the matters of mundane existence by telling the old woman that the price for admission is the equivalent of three piano lessons. Nonetheless, if in the previous episode there is no concrete evidence that might confirm the mythical, unreal nature of his experience, at the gypsies’ house the clock seems to have stopped just before striking three o’clock. This suggests that our protagonist was no longer in the historical time, “the one constituted by profane personal and intrapersonal events,” but in a mythical, primordial time which, according to Eliade, “belongs to eternity.”

Obviously, Gavrilescu is not ready yet to accept that. He contradicts the old lady, clinging thus to the profane events, and yet he continues to blindly follow her instructions. He is taken by the young girl to an old house where his initiation begins. As soon as he enters the passage, he crosses the threshold between the real and the unreal, stepping thus into a labyrinth that takes on an eschatological dimension:

“It was a room the limits of which you could not see. The blinds were drawn, and in the half-dark, the screens and walls looked alike. He entered stepping on carpets which became ever thicker and softer. It seemed as if he were walking on mattresses. With every step his heartbeats became faster and faster until he was afraid to advance and stopped. That moment he felt suddenly happy, as if young again, on top of the world, as if Hildegard, too, were his own.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” pp. 260-261)

Soon enough memories of his long-lost fiancée, Hildegard, invade his mind, and with them Gavrilescu begins to reconstruct his entire life by remembering only the relevant episodes that brought him in his current state. For Eliade the scholar, memory and forgetfulness move beyond their roles in reconstructing personal and universal history and acquire an eschatological meaning. Memory is the consciousness of one’s own identity and forgetfulness is “the necessary part of the realm of Death.” Each of them, however, has a twofold usefulness. One the one hand the memory of profane existence prevents the soul of the dead to transmigrate, and in this case forgetfulness of earthly life is the necessary condition for immortality, but on the hand, the soul needs to reconnect with the memory of a primordial past in order to become a part of the cosmic cycle. Thus, the soul builds his identity by detaching itself from physical experience, and clings on to the newly built identity until it is ready to forget the “eternal truth” so that it may be “reincarnated and again cast into the cycle of becoming,” in which case forgetting means returning to life.

In our story too forgetfulness and memory play an essential part in the main character’s eschatological journey. Gavrilescu remembers how much he loved Hildegard, but he experiences certain difficulties in recalling the way he lost her. When he encounters the three girls he had paid for, he is dared to guess which one is the gypsy, but he fails to identify her. Instead he mistakes her for the Greek girl who instantly reminds him of his youthful dream to visit the “eternal Greece” with Hildegard. This memory, however, surfaces only after the three girls perform a ritual dance, which in Romanian folklore is known as the “iele” dance:

“The next moment he was caught by hands. The girls whirled him in a reel, shouting and whistling. The voices seemed to come from afar. […] He tried to come to a standstill, to tear himself away from those hands that were madly wheeling him around is in a fantastic reel; but it was impossible to set himself free. He could smell the hot scent of those young bodies and that exotic, far-distant perfume. He could feel, as an inner, but also outer sensation, the feet of the girls dancing on the carpet. He also felt that the reel was gently carrying him between armchairs and screens, to the far end of the room. Yet after a time he gave up resisting and was no longer conscious of anything.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 265.)

The iele are mythical creatures that remind of the Greek nymphs. They lure young men into the forest with their dance, but unlike their Greek equivalents, the iele are thought to be dangerous and sometimes quite evil, for they punish those who disturb them. In our story, however, the girls’ wild dance restores one of Gavrilescu’s memories, which is why we are inclined to believe that the origins of this episode are to be found in a myth discussed by Eliade himself in Myth and Reality. According to it, a yogi master falls in love with a mortal and completely forgets his true identity. Because of that he becomes a mortal and he is doomed to die. Nonetheless, his disciples find him and restore his memory through dance and enigmatic songs that make him understand that the “mirages of profane life” inevitably lead to death.

Of course, Gavrilescu is no yogi master, but he should be endowed with a superior aesthetic sensibility, for he is a man who considers himself an artist. He tries to justify his current occupation several times throughout the story, but in the end he only proves that he is an ordinary piano teacher who once dreamed to become an artist, but who lost his way somewhere along the line. Eliade tells us that the yogi master lost his identity because of physical love, but Gavrilescu seems to have lost his when he gave up his true love in exchange for the financial stability that Elsa, his wife, was able to provide. Thus, in our story true love stands for the sacred, whereas convenience belongs to the profane, and this is the lesson Gavrilescu has to learn in order to restore his true identity.

The trials to which Gavrilescu is submitted are part of an initiation that eventually strips away his worldly aspirations. The process, however, is slow and painful, because he fails his first trial. The girls’ dance is so bewildering that he temporarily loses his consciousness, and when he wakes up he is even more disoriented than before:

“He looked around him in amazement. It seemed to be a different room, yet he recognized, those screens that drew his attention as soon as he had come in, symmetrically disposed in between armchairs, sofas, and mirrors. Some were very tall, almost reaching the ceiling. You could have taken them for walls if, in certain place, they had not jutted right into the middle of the room, at sharp angles. Others, mysteriously laminated, looked like windows, half covered with curtains, opening onto interior corridors. Other screens were curiously and brightly coloured, or covered with shawls and embroideries. From their disposition, they seemed to form recesses of various shapes and dimensions.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 265)

Gavrilescu, however, continues to remain oblivious to the true nature of his experience. He looks again at the room and understands that everything was just an illusion created by a few screens strategically arranged so that their reflections in the mirror may create the illusion of a labyrinthine space. He looks at the naked girl standing in front of him, trying to remain as rational as possible, but as soon the girl’s nationality is mentioned, he is lost again in the whirl of his own thoughts. He remembers Hildegard, their wedding plans, the dream to go to Greece, but then he remembers the torrid heat, Colonel Lawrence’ story, and the tram he was waiting before coming to the gypsies. Obviously, the memories that include Hildegard belong to the sacred plane, whereas the others belong to the profane. He is not willing to give up either of them and he wishes for a piano to clear his mind. As one might expect, the piano is the link between Gavrilescu’s past and his present, between the sacred dimension of his existence and his perfectly ordinary life, between the artist he should have been and the humble piano teacher he really was.

The girl suddenly interrupts him, takes his hand and drags him through a corridor with screens and mirrors on each side, running faster and faster until they reach a large, sunny room where he sees the other two girls leaning against a piano. When he is offered another cup of coffee he thinks of the artists’ susceptibility to excess and he replies in a defensive manner: “‘No, no,’ he said, ‘I won’t have any more. I’ve had enough coffee. My ladies, though I have an artistic temper, I lead a well-regulated life. I don’t care to waste my time in coffee-houses” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 267). Obviously, he is well aware that his life was not exactly that of an artist, but he seems willing to stick to it, at least until the girls’ discussion reminds him again of Hildegard:

“‘Now I know,’ he repeated over and over again, under his breath. ‘It was much the same as today, one summer. Hildegard had gone with her family to Konigsberg. It was fearfully hot. I was living in Charlottenburg, and was out for a walk under the trees. They were tall, very shade old trees. The place was deserted. It was too hot. No one ventured out. There under those trees I caught sight of a young woman, sobbing dreadfully, crying her heart out, her face in her hands. I was deeply surprised for she had taken her shoes off and her feet were propped against a small suitcase lying on the gravel in front of her. ‘Gavrilescu, my man’ I said to myself, ‘here’s an unhappy creature indeed.’ How could I suspect that… [….] ‘My ladies!’ he pathetically exclaimed, ‘I was young, I was good-looking, and had an artist’s sensitivity. An abandoned woman abandoned was enough to break my heart. I talked to her and tried to comfort her. That was the beginning of my life’s tragedy.’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,”p. 268)

The ‘unhappy creature’ he talks about was Elsa, the young girl who became his wife. As we may notice, the protagonist realizes his life is not as it should have been, but he keeps saying to himself that it is too late to undo what has already been done. He is upset that the girls keep talking among themselves, but he offers to play the piano in order to make them understand as well the tragedy of his life. And yet, the girls seem to know it better than Gavrilescu himself. They are not interested to hear him play the piano; they simply want him to play their game. They ask him to guess the gypsy again, but he is obviously disturbed by their indifference to his misfortune: “‘But my mind is not bent on games,’ Gavrilescu fervently pleaded.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 269)

For Gavrilescu the tragedy of his life was that he was poor and week. Nonetheless, that is only partially true, because he does not realize yet that by marrying Elsa for convenience he also accepted to dwell in mediocrity. He still sees himself as an artist and continues to present himself as one. The girls, however, insist that he should play their game instead of focusing on the past. Eventually, he accepts, but, to everyone’s astonishment, he picks the wrong girl again. At this point we realize that his biggest mistake was that he allowed himself to be influenced by stereotypes in all the choices he made. The first girl he chooses was “very dark skinned, dark haired, and dark eyed,” (“With the gypsy girls,” p. 264) and Gavrilescu has no doubt that she was the gypsy. His second choice is based on the assumption that the gypsy might want to hide her identity, which is why he points to the one wearing a pale green veil. The same thing happened in his youth, when, instead of choosing to remain with the woman he loved, despite all the hardships he had to endure, he chooses Elsa and the easy, agreeable life he might have lived with her.

Gavrilescu’s mistake proves that he is not completely detached from the laws of profane existence, and thus he is not ready yet to overcome his condition. The girls, however, try to show him what he really missed by failing the second trial as well. The red-haired, which was the gypsy, begins to dance like the last time, but more slowly, clapping her hands and singing, while the Greek tells him they would have sung and danced for him, they would have carried him through every room of the house, while “the gypsy’s foot struck the carpet, ever more fiercely, producing a muffled subterranean sound” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 271). What the girls are actually saying is that by failing the trials he did not complete his initiation into a superior mode of existence. At this point Gavrilescu seems to understand them and in order to repair his mistake, he turns to the only thing in the room that connects him, the mortal, the unfulfilled artist, with the sacred, superior dimension of existence – the piano, trying perhaps to prove that he deserves to be recognized as an artist:

“He could hear her coming ever nearer, as if dancing on a gigantic copper drum, and a few minutes later he could feel her hot breath on his back. Gavrilescu stooped down at the piano and pounced furiously with might and main, almost as if wanting to remove the keys, to tear them away, to dig with his very nails into the womb of the piano and then further on, deeper down. His mind was empty of thought, wrapped up as he was in the new unfamiliar melodies that he seemed to hear for the first time, though they started up in his memory, one after another, like reminiscences of old.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” pp. 271-271)

Nevertheless, the songs he plays are not part of his present; they belong to a distant past when he still had a chance to become the artist he always wanted to be, and they might also become a part of the future, if he fulfils his quest for transcendence. But Gavrilescu is not ready to accept that yet. He continues to play, believing that the girls were now convinced of his talent, but soon he realizes nobody was listening. He searches for them around the house, but they were nowhere to be found. Obviously frustrated, he speaks to them as if they were hiding somewhere in the dark, listening to every word he says. He professes his artistic and intellectual superiority, telling them he could have improved their musical education, explained the Lieder of Shumann, but since he gets no answer he becomes angry and insults them:

“Whatever possessed me to take these maids seriously,’ he suddenly burst out, furiously. ‘I am sorry! I said maids out of courtesy. You are something else. You know well what you are. You’re gypsies. No education. Illiterate. Does any of you know where Arabia is situated? Who has heard of Colonel Lawrence?’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 274)

As soon as he finishes his idea, however, a heat even more terrible than the one in the tram came over him, partially restoring his connection with the real world, but at the same time pushing him even deeper into a dreamlike state. Eugen Simion argues that in Eliade’s work the dream is “a disguised mythology, […] the anteroom of another reality.” Thus, Gavrilescu’s rambling through every corner of the house, his increasing confusion, the heat he feels coming from one side and the coolness of the wall on which he desperately clings indicate that he is still at the threshold between the sacred and the profane, and still not knowing what road he must follow. He fails the girls’ trials, but he gains another chance when he decides to keep looking for them instead of leaving the place immediately. As he crawls along the cool wall the heat coming from the other side becomes more intense, so he takes off his shalwars and dries his face and body with it. Soon afterwards he feels something or someone touching him and loses control over his actions. Although he does not actually see anything, he uses the shalwars to defend himself from the unidentifiable object or being, and he eventually loses them. He remains completely naked and helpless, but continues to drag himself through the dark rooms, searching for them. He is unable to recognize the objects that appear in front of him and he begins to fear them. A cool breeze coming from a window terrifies him even more and makes him run randomly through the dark corridors:

“He was frightened by his own uttered shriek and found himself running insanely in the dark, bumping against the screen, upsetting mirrors and all sorts of tiny objects which had been curiously placed on the carpet, slipping frequently and falling, but picking himself up and racing on. He found himself jumping over cases, going around mirrors and screens. Then he realized that he had entered a half-dark zone and was beginning to distinguish contours. At the far end of the corridor, unusually high up on the wall, a window seemed to open, the light of the summer evening filtering through.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 275)

For a moment he thought he had escaped his nightmare, but as soon as he reaches the window he begins to hear voices and laughter, and, realizing he was naked, he tries to pull off a curtain to cover himself. The curtain, however, seems to have come to life and curls around him like a winding sheet, squeezing him against the wall. While trapped in the cocoon-like curtain, the heat and the thirst return stronger than ever before and he realizes he will die if he is not freed quickly.

We mentioned earlier that thirst is a symbol of the suffering of the dead, that the human soul takes an elementary form before reintegrating into the cosmic order, and that the heat of hell reduces the soul to a larval state. These being said, Gavrilescu’s entrapment in the cocoon-like curtain may be interpreted as a sort of punishment for his lack of cooperation in solving the girls’ riddle. Instead of detaching himself from the earthly experience, he clings on to it, practically refusing redemption, and for that he is reduced to a larval state in which he continues to endure physical sufferings. On the other hand, this might be just another opportunity for him to complete his initiation, forget his ordinary life and be reborn on a cosmic, sacred plane. Nonetheless, Gavrilescu soon wakes up and he finds himself talking about his arrival in Bucharest with Elsa. This, of course, means that he had failed his final trial as well, which is also proved by his subsequent depiction of his oneiric experience:

“‘Then we started playing hide and seek.’ He suddenly spoke in a slightly altered voice, somewhat more sternly. ‘Naturally, they didn’t know with whom they were dealing. I am a responsible man, an artist, a piano teacher. I came here simply curious to know. I take an interest in novelty, in things inexperienced before. I said: ‘Gavrilescu, my lad, here’s an opportunity to improve your knowledge.’ I didn’t know it was a matter of innocent, childish games. Just imagine, I suddenly found myself naked and heard voices.’ I was certain that one moment or another, you know what I mean…’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 277)

Thus, Gavrilescu not only fails to understand that his oneiric experience was a hierophantic, liminal manifestation, the dream or the dream-like state in itself representing the dimension in which the homogeneity of space and time is broken, but he also considers the entire situation a childish prank, inappropriate for an artist like himself. And yet, he recognizes it was a terrifying experience that seemed surprisingly real, for the curtain that curled around him was so tight that it could not have been anything else than a real winding sheet. However, he hears the metallic sound of the tram and remembers he has to leave the gypsies’ house and go to Preoteselor Street to recover his briefcase with music scores.

While waiting for the tram, Gavrilescu felt the stifling heat of the pavement and the smell of melting asphalt which seemed to have become more intense than the earlier, although the sun had already got down. The tram arrives and he is surprised to notice that all its windows were open. This time he sits in front of a young man, be begins the same discussion about the torrid weather and about Colonel Lawrence’s adventure in Arabia, which again generates no interests for the man sitting in front of him, and when the conductor arrives he finds his wallet sooner than expected. The gypsies’ house is brought up for discussion, but this time by Gavrilescu, who wonders how he should excuse himself to Madame Voitinovici for disturbing her during dinner hours. The conductor has the same polite attitude towards Gavrilescu, who soon finds himself listening to the conversation of younger couples, ready to intervene and apologize for his profession: “I’m sorry to contradict you. I am unfortunately a piano teacher, but that was not my calling.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 279)

Once at Madame Voitinovici’s address, an unknown woman meets him at the door and informs him that he is at the wrong apartment. He explains to her that he is Otilia’a piano teacher, but he is told that the place now belonged to the Georgescu family. Luckily for Gavrilescu, the same young man he saw on the tram lived at the same address and he is more patient than the woman with our protagonist. He informs him that he has been living at that address for more than four years and he advised him to try the upper levels of the building. Gavrilescu, obviously frightened, goes to the third floor to check the young man’s story and here he learns that Madame Voitinovici left Bucharest right after Otilia’s marriage to Frȋncu, an engineer and an inventor who was apparently quite famous. Of course, he is not convinced that the story is true and decides to return in the morning to check, although he begins to doubt his rational capacity: ““Gavrilescu, my man,’ he uttered to himself as soon as he was in the street, ‘be careful, you’re beginning to grow soft in the brain. You’re losing your memory. You’re mixing up addresses…” (“With the Gypsy Girls, p. 282)

When he gets on the tram, he sits in front of a lady and, as usual, he tries to start a conversation with her, but he merely manages to formulate a sentence when he gets so confused that he no longer knows what he wanted to say. Eliade claims that language expresses “the tremendum, or the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms borrowed from the world of nature or from man’s secular mental life,” which means that language is one of the most powerful tools in shaping man’s identity. In Gavrilescu’s case, however, language almost always expresses the trivialities of everyday life, but for him as well it is a part of his identity. Thus, when he begins to forget his native language, it actually means that he was beginning to leave behind his former identity as he was getting even closer to being reintegrated into the cosmic order of things. He is not quite ready to completely give up on it and he makes one last effort to finish his sentence, but he only manages to mumble a few words, which suggests that his memories are fading away as well: “‘Yes,’ he went on shortly after. ‘I was just talking to a friend and saying that we were almost, practically, in Arabia. Colonel Lawrence, you have heard of him…’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 282) Understanding, perhaps, that he was no longer able to captivate anyone’s attention with his story, he takes some comfort in the idea that it will all be over soon:

“‘One more hour or two,’ Gavrilescu began again, ‘and night shall come. The dark, I mean. The cool of night. However … we shall be able to breathe.’ […] After midnight we shall be able to breath,’ he addressed the conductor. ‘What a long day!’ he added somewhat nervously, unable to find his wallet. ‘Such mishaps!’” (“With the Gypsy Girls, p. 283)

And yet, the real mishaps on the real plane were just about to begin. When Gavrilescu wants to pay for the ticket, the conductor informs him that the bill has been out of use for almost a year. When he justifies himself by saying that the gypsies accepted three identical bills just a few hour earlier, he offends everyone around. He is informed he should not talk about the gypsies, especially in front of a lady, but he defends himself by saying that everybody talks about them. Nonetheless, everybody agrees that it is indecent to mention them, especially now when they were about to have their garden and their house illuminated: “‘It is in all the papers,’ another passenger added. ‘It’s a disgrace’ he spoke, raising his voice. ‘It’s unthinkable.’” (“With the Gypsy Girls, p. 283)

In Gavrilescu’s third tram ride nothing seems to be as in the previous two. The gypsies’ house had become a taboo, the conductor no longer smiles at Gavrilescu when he hears him talking about the gypsies or when he does not have enough money to pay for the ticket, and Gavrilescu himself is no longer able to awaken anyone’s interest through the things he says, but rather through the things he does not do, like formulating a coherent sentence or paying for the ticket, since he cannot accept the fact that the price of the ticked has doubled in just a few hours: “‘The fare is ten lei, no matter where to. Don’t you live in this world?’ the conductor added in stern voice. ‘I live in Bucharest,’ Gavrilescu said proudly looking up. ‘I catch a tram four or five times a day. I’ve done it for years, and I’ve always paid five lei.’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 284)

Gavrilescu eventually accepts to pay the rest of the fare, but he still does not understand how it was possible for such things to happen. He looks at the bill rejected by conductor, the last one he had, and he is disappointed by the fact that the fruit of his labour completely lost its value in just a few hours, although he sacrificed a lot for it. His disappointment with the currency devaluation, however, should be interpreted as a disappointment with his condition, with his entire life and with the surrounding reality. A thing he had worked for had become just a worthless piece of paper in such a short time span, and this, perhaps, reminded him of the worthlessness of his entire existence. He is taken out of the whirl of his own thoughts when someone on the tram offers to exchange his bill and hands him a new one he could use in the present. He studies it carefully, to everyone’s amazement, and he learns that it has been in use for almost three years. He finds the information rather strange, but he thinks he must be unaware of new currency’s existence because of his absent-mindedness, which is an essential trait of the “artist’s temper” to which he still aspires.

As we may notice, all the episodes presented thus far suggest the same thing; the difference lies, however, in the way the message is delivered. The first episode, the one on the tram, happens on the real plane, but the sacred punctures the thick cover of the profane, for the entire episode is charged with powerful symbolism that points towards the protagonist’s demise. The second episode carries us into a strange place, whose sacred dimension is camouflaged on the outside, but in which the sacred manifests itself in all its forms behind the walls of the gypsies’ house, which is nothing but a brothel in the profane world, but also an initiatory maze, a place that mediates between life and death, between the historical and the primordial time, between the sacred and the profane.

The third episode, the one in which Gavrilescu returns more or less to the real plane, is a sort of confirmation of the unreal events that happened in the second episode. Gavrilescu tries to reconnect with reality, but, as we have seen, he was already too anchored in the sacred to be able to return to his ordinary existence. He struggles to do so, but he eventually understands that he should not even wish to go back.

Gavrilescu understands how much time he really had spent at the gypsies when, going back to where he used to live with his wife, he is not recognized by the neighbours, he learns that his house belonged to someone else, that Madame Trandafir, the one who would have recognized him, has been dead for some time, and that Elsa sold all their belongings and has been living in Germany for the past twelve years, ever since her husband’s disappearance. He realizes it is too late to clarify the situation, so he decides to leave, thinking that he will return the next morning.

After wandering through the city for a while, pausing on every bench to catch his breath, Gavrilescu finds himself on the way back to the gypsies’ house. A cab driver passing by offers his services, but Gavrilescu refuses, for he had to save all his money for the entrance at the gypsies. The cab driver, however, follows Gavrilescu at the horse’s slow pace throughout his journey, gradually drawing him back on the path of the dead, which he had avoided thus far: “‘That’s the Nicotiana,’ the driver said taking a deep breath. ‘It’s from the general’s garden. That’s why I like driving this way at night. Customers or no customers, I drive this way every night. I love flowers, something terrible.’” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 289)

Obviously, the idea of a cab driver who drives the same way every night just because he likes the scent of a flower makes us believe that he is more than a simple cab man. Our suspicion is immediately confirmed when he confesses that in his youth he used to be an undertaker who loved horses and flowers: “Something splendid! Six horses in black and gold trappings, and flowers, such flowers, no end to the flowers! Why, youth now gone, everything’s flown. I’ve grown old, a night cab driver with one horse” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 289). He then guides Gavrilescu towards a narrow street, bringing him in front of a church, where they both stop for a while to enjoy the scent of nicotiana, which was almost as powerful in front of the church as in the general’s garden. As one might expect, the church is a hierophany, a sacred place through which different worlds communicate, and since the scent of nicotiana pervading the air near the general’s garden is even stronger than the one from the church, we are tempted to believe that the general symbolizes the divinity and his garden represents the Garden of Eden – an earthly paradise.

The existence of such a garden amidst the bundle of worldly creations suggests that the sacred may also exist in pure form in a secularized society and that man is capable to connect with the sacred dimension of existence even in his physical form. Under these circumstances, it is only natural that Gavrilescu’s journey towards the realm of the dead begins in, or at least near, the earthly paradise, continues at the church, where he establishes a connection with the divine, and then at the cemetery, where the soul frees himself from the physical body, the latter returning to the ground it came from, while the former moves on to a higher place – the cosmic equivalent of the Garden of Eden.

Obviously, Gavrilescu’s journey towards a higher mode of existence is almost identical with a regular funeral procession, which starts with the removal of the deceased from his natural environment (his house, a favourite place, etc.), it usually continues with a religious service, if the deceased does not give specific instructions during his life, and it ends with the burial, which triggers the soul’s transition to another dimension. In Gavrilescu’s case, the natural environment is represented by the city streets, for his previous experience at the gypsies already separated him from his worldly belongings, the religious service and the burial are only symbolically implied, and the transmigration does not happen until he is not ready to liberate himself from the laws of the profane. The cab driver, in his turn, may be considered a simple undertaker, if we stick to the Romanian mythology in our interpretation of the story, or he may also be regarded as Charon, if we relate it to the Greek mythology. Either way, his task is the same, namely to guide the soul of the dead to a superior dimension:

“He stirred up his horse with a sharp whistle, and set out side by side with Gavrilescu. ‘We’re almost there now,’ he said. ‘Why not get in?’ ‘I’m sorry, it’s the money…’ ‘You’ll give me some of that small change. Get in, won’t you?’ Gavrilescu hesitated briefly, then got in with an effort. But as soon as the cab was in motion, he leant against the cab’s cushion and fell asleep.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 290)

The gates of gypsies’ house were closed when Gavrilescu arrives, which means that the gates to the transcendent were also closed, for he did not want to be helped to overcome his mortal condition, but rather to be helped to escape the problems caused by his previous visit to their house. He pays his way into the gypsies’ house, and although he cannot pay his way into the cosmic order, the old lady at the entrance guides him to a room where a German girl was waiting for him and where he would finally find his way to redemption. He has great difficulties in finding the room, but with an almost supernatural effort he randomly opens a door and finds Hildegard there. As always, he apologizes for the errors of the past, he tries to justify himself somehow, but the girl does not care about any of it. She is only happy to see him again.

Gavrilescu, on the other hand, continues to talk about the recent events in his life, fearing once again that he had nothing to offer to her. He had lost his house, his briefcase and his hat, and he had no money and no luck, just like the last time they were together. He clings to the material world and he fails to understand that the years of his life spent away from Hildegard were his greatest loss. And yet, she understands his confusion and his fears and she gently takes him out into the corridor, trying to convince him he no longer needs anything: “Don’t you understand something happened to you recently, quite recently? Is it possible that you don’t?” (“With the Gypsy Girls, p. 293).

Indeed, he does not understand, but her words are enough to make him feel better. She guides him through the garden and they walk out without opening the gates, towards the cab driver that was waiting for them. In the end of the story they are both in the cab, holding their hands, slowly heading towards the woods on a winding road. Gavrilescu is still confused, not knowing for sure whether he was dreaming or not, while Hildegard reassures him that “it all begins [as] in a dream.” (“With the Gypsy Girls,” p. 293)

5.2. The Song of Death. Joycean Epiphany in “The Dead”

Over the last century the term epiphany has come to be identified with the Joycean text and vice versa. In Joyce’s work epiphany, as the author himself describes it through his character in Stephen Hero, is “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” Either way, epiphany is a form of literary expression that retains the quality of spiritual revelation, meant to satisfy the reader’s aesthetic appetite, and drawn from the minute observation of the surrounding reality.

“The Dead” concludes James Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of short stories that provide a progressive perspective upon the life of ordinary people in a city caught in a state of moral, intellectual and spiritual paralysis, which, according to William York Tindall, is also a form of death, more precisely “a living death.” Each of the fifteen short stories focuses on the most ordinary aspects that make up man’s existence, emphasizing the insignificance and the superficiality of Dublin life, and yet, in each of them the characters reach a sort of illumination, gradually becoming aware of their own miserable existence. Thus, the collection becomes a sequence of stories drawn from real sources, meant to create emotions of great complexity which in turn lead to epiphanic revelations for the characters involved in the story, as well as for the reader. Taken separately, the first fourteen short stories are nothing more than accounts of isolated situations, and yet, there is a linear evolution, both in time and complexity, which culminates in “The Dead,” the story in which minor revelatory moments lead to an epiphany of multiple meanings that is meant to force people out of the state of paralysis that had taken over the entire Irish society.

Through the body of work he created, Joyce constantly proved his ambivalent attitude towards the Irish Revival. He agreed with the Revivalist’s idea that Ireland needed to redefine its cultural and literary consciousness, but he refused to accept that the indisputable Irish features were to be found in the ancient past of Gaelic Ireland, as most Irish Nationalists claimed, just as he refused to believe that all that meant novelty in Irish literature was pretty much the effect of British colonization. Thus, in Dubliners, by creating case studies of people caught between a much too idealized image of the past and a tormented present, Joyce turned his antipathy towards the ideas promoted by Irish Nationalists into authentic aesthetic expressions whose modernity emerges from the quarrel between Joyce’s refusal to return to Ireland’s traditional values and him building on the same traditional values in his work, although the final result was always a “progressive mode of cultural critique.”

The stories included in Dubliners generally focus on disturbing aspects of a society determined to revive traditional ideals which, according to Joyce, were no longer adequate for the modern Irish man. Nonetheless, Tindall suggests that, beyond the artistic purpose, they should also be regarded as a sort of justification for Joyce’s self-imposed exile:

“To Joyce, I think, Dubliners was not only moral censure, ambiguous portrait, and charitable vision, but a statement of his reasons for exile and its justification. Not only a picture of what he had escaped, the book is a picture of what, had he remained, he might have become. In this sense it is a collection of private horrors. Many of the characters are possible Joyces – Joyces who, lacking his enterprise and sharing Eveline’s paralysis, have become as corrupt as their city, Joyces who might have been.”

The theme of paralysis takes various forms throughout the stories in Dubliners, but they are all reiterated in “The Dead,” together with the other motifs and symbols employed by Joyce. Obviously, both death as an aesthetic experience and the fusion between the living and the dead as symbolically representing people’s entrapment in the past are the ones that serve the purpose of our paper. The story is told from the main character’s perspective and it can be considered an immersion into the external reality of our protagonist, as well as into his deepest thoughts, meant to reveal the endless conflict within the Irish society and within the individual. Gabriel Conroy is an intelligent, educated man, quite judgmental, but extremely insecure, with pretences of authority and control, which are gradually demolished in the course of one evening.

The beginning of the story shows the extent to which various forms of paralysis have permeated every level of existence. Lily, for example, the first character introduced to the reader, is “literally run off her feet” because of her mistresses’ incessant requests, and yet, she continues to obey their orders without even answering back to them, because, as it turns out, a relation of interdependence seems to have developed between them. As long as she would put up with their requests, she would be able to continue enjoying the sense of security provided by her working for the two fussy ladies.

With Gabriel, however, Lily’s reactions are completely different. He is not a part of her everyday existence, and therefore she has no obligation to indulge his pretences. Thus, when he makes a comment about her love life, she has an unexpected attitude that takes Gabriel out of the state of self-complacency. Instead of responding politely to his friendly remark she snaps at him, saying: “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (“The Dead,” p. 376). Her reaction, nevertheless, is the first thing that threatens Gabriel’s own sense of security during the evening, for it stands against his inferred assumptions regarding the future expectations of a young woman who was bellow his social standing and to which he could not relate. Thus, instead of apologizing, he offers her a generous tip as a Christmas gift so as to avoid any further uncomfortable discussions. This, of course, means that he is unable to face his inadequacy, just like many other characters from Dubliners.

Other self-indulgent characters in “The Dead” are Gabriel’s aunts, Miss Kate and Miss Julia Morkan, who, despite their modest life, “believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout.” (“The Dead,” p. 375). They, likes all characters in “The Dead,” seem to be stuck in the past, but it is precisely their desire to hold on to old traditions that which occasions the dance party during which Gabriel begins to rediscover himself. We learn from the story that Gabriel is the guest of honour to his aunt’s annual dance party, for he is expected to give a speech during the evening, and besides he is the Morkan sisters’ favourite nephew. He arrives at the party with Gretta, his good-natured wife who immediately integrates herself among the other participants, while Gabriel constantly fails to establish a connection with any of them.

In Gabriel’s behaviour we may notice a sense of awkwardness, which at first may be taken for a sign of timidity, but which later reveals itself as the effect of the conflicting values that govern him:

“He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish, listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort. It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning, for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearer. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.”” (“The Dead,” p. 377)

As it may be noticed, Gabriel’s interaction with Lily reveals our protagonist real attitude towards the party he is attending and towards the participants. While he wishes to adjust himself to the other’s expectations, he nevertheless professes his intellectual superiority. He considers himself an open-minded Irishman, who is able to recognize the real values of the Irish culture, but who nevertheless remains open to external influences. Throughout the story, however, a series of incidents shatter his self-confidence and destroys his former beliefs, amplifying the identity crisis he was already experiencing. Such an incident occurs when Gretta makes fun of him when she tells his aunts that he is forcing her to wear galoshes whenever it is raining or snowing. Galoshes are, of course, a symbol of the east, of civilization, as Richard Ellmann points out, and Gabriel’s fondness of them reflects his judgmental opinion on the west of Ireland, which he associates with savagery, “a dark and rather painful primitivism, an aspect of his country which he had steadily abjured by going off to the continent.”

There is a constant east-west interplay throughout the story. Gabriel considers himself a man of the east, but his wife comes from Connacht, a western province, and although he seems embarrassed by her wife’s origins, he still married her, which proves that he was inexplicably attracted by the western side of his country and by all that the west stands for. Nevertheless, he is not ready yet to admit it despite the subtle hints in the text that point towards his spiritual westward journey, such as him coming from the east to attend his aunts’ party, or his decision to spend the night in a hotel instead of taking a cab back to their house, because the cab journey amplified the intensity of the wind and “the east wind blowing” hurt Gretta in a physical way, suggesting nevertheless that Gretta did not belong to the eastern culture.

Music plays an important part in the development of the story, as well as in Gabriel’s apprehension of his real condition. First of all, the episode between Gabriel and Lily happens while the others were enjoying the music in the dance hall. Next, the uncomfortable discussion on the themes of the galoshes between Miss Kate and Gabriel happens during a waltz. Gabriel is already feeling rather uncomfortable because of his aunt’s nodding when she finds out that the galoshes were brought by Gabriel from the continent, but also because of his wife’s criticism of his habit. Nonetheless, he is saved from experiencing further embarrassment when the music stops and people come out off the dance hall, which is why we may associate music with the threats to Gabriel’s sense of authority, and the lack of it with Gabriel’s self-confidence, which, of course is confirmed by the next episodes presented in the story, as well as by Gabriel’s increasing anxiety during the performance of various musical themes:

“Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane was playing her Academy piece, full of runs and difficult passages, to the hushed drawing-room. He liked music but the piece she was playing had no melody for him and he doubted whether it had any melody for the other listeners, though they had begged Mary Jane to play something. Four young men, who had come from the refreshment-room to stand in the doorway at the sound of the piano, had gone away quietly in couples after a few minutes. The only persons who seemed to follow the music were Mary Jane herself, her hands racing along the keyboard or lifted from it at the pauses like those of a priestess in momentary imprecation, and Aunt Kate standing at her elbow to turn the page.” (“The Dead,” pp. 382-383)

While listening to Mary Jane playing her piece, Gabriel’s attention shifts towards a picture of two murdered princes in the Tower of London, made by his aunt Julia, and also one of his mother, which instantly brings back old memories of the past. We are told that she was a “serious and matronly” woman, “very sensible of the dignity of the family” (“The Dead, p. 383). Apparently her careful guidance directed both Gabriel and his brother towards becoming the responsible men they were today, Gabriel a university graduate and his brother an assistant to a parish priest. We also learn that she opposed Gabriel’s marriage to Gretta, because of her provincial origins, which means that she too was against the west, primitive side of Ireland, perhaps even more than Gabriel. Moreover, we are told that she had no musical talent, although she was “the brain carrier of the Morkan family” (“The Dead, p. 383), and this obviously points to the association of the east with the intellect and the lack of interest in music, and the west with the soul, the spiritual side of existence, and with the appreciation of music. Obviously, Gabriel is somewhere in between for various reasons. First of all, he claims that he enjoys some musical themes, which means that he is neither like his mother, a down-to-earth, completely practical man, nor like his aunts, an idealist and a dreamer, a man living with the memory of an excessively idealized past. The next reason that points to his always crossing the borders between the east and the west is that he had married a woman from the west side of Ireland, and despite his attempts to change her by making her wear galoshes or by stopping her from walking around in the snow, it is precisely her provincial, mysterious air that which attracts him the most, as it results from one of Gabriel’s description of her:

“He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terra-cotta and salmon-pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also. But he could hear little save the noise of laughter and dispute on the front steps, a few chords struck on the piano and a few notes of a man’s voice singing. He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.” (“The Dead,” p. 402)

Gabriel’s lack of appreciation for Mary Jane’s interpretation may also be put on the account of the other listeners’ attitude towards it. We are told that while Mary Jane is frantically moving her finger along the keyboard of the piano, nobody bothers to actually listen, and yet, when she ends her performance, she receives a great deal of applause, especially from the four young men who had left the room as soon as she began playing the piano and returned just before the final octaves. Their attitude reveals their superficiality and, perhaps, this is yet another reason why Gabriel does not allow himself to mingle with the other participants in the party. And yet, as we will soon discover, he is just as superficial as any of them, but he has the ability to hide his flaws better than the others.

Gabriel makes an effort to adjust to his current situation and finds himself partnered with Miss Ivors for a dance. This partnership, however, proves to be a pernicious one, for Gabriel’s authority is threatened again because of Miss Ivors criticism of his lack of patriotism. As it turns out, Miss Ivors is a fervent nationalist who proudly flaunts her political convictions through her speech, gestures, and even clothing. We are told that she wears large brooch with the Irish device and motto, that she is a “frank-mannered, talkative young lady, with a freckled face and prominent brown eyes,” and that she does not wear a low-cut bodice, which turns her into a stereotype for the New Woman, as Elizabeth Butler Cullingford suggests. And yet, her accusations are not delivered in a very hostile manner, as one might expect given the effects they have on Gabriel. She speaks bluntly, she accuses him of being a West Briton for writing for a newspaper that sympathized with the Unionist League, but she later reassures him it was only a joke. Gabriel, however, perceives her commentary as a virulent attack:

“He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books.” (“The Dead,” p. 385)

Sensing the tension created by her remark, Miss Ivors tells Gabriel she actually enjoyed his review of Browning’s poems and she invites him to Aran Isles to get in contact with the true Irish essence. Gabriel, however, rejects her invitation, claiming that he had already planned to go to the continent to “keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change” (“The Dead,” p. 385). Then, of course, the young lady’s patriotism resurfaces and she advises him to keep in touch with his own language, visit his own land and be interested in his own people, which triggers an unexpected reaction from her dance partner: “Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language. […] I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (“The Dead,” p. 386). In this case music and dancing serve to hide Gabriel’s nervousness when confronted with accusations that, he believed, lacked any substance. And yet, his efforts to dedicate himself entirely to the dance they were performing in order to avoid dealing with her accusations indicate that her words may have stirred up a sense of doubt in his mind. Nevertheless, Gabriel quickly removes any trace of doubt. He remains oblivious to the depths and the truthfulness of her words and he becomes more concerned with the fact that she had undermined his authority by making him ridiculous before people.

The sympathetic description of Miss Ivors proves that Joyce’s own attitude towards Ireland had changed. If in the previous stories included in Dubliners he focused on the disturbing aspects of a society caught between the past and present, in “The Dead” we have a character who initially refuses to adhere to his peers’ beliefs, but whose circumstances force him to eventually accept that the west side of Ireland stands for more than primitivism and savagery. The process, however, is painful, for Gabriel stands firm in his conviction for as much as possible, since he also belongs to that new generation he speaks about in the speech he so confidently delivers in front of all the participants in the party:

“A new generation is growing up in our midst, a generation actuated by new ideas and new principles. It is serious and enthusiastic for these new ideas and its enthusiasm, even when it is misdirected, is, I believe, in the main sincere. But we are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age. […]. Listening to-night to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age. Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least, that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die.” (“The Dead,” p. 397)

The next relevant song for the development of the story is the The Lass of Aughrim, which is an old Irish ballad about a peasant woman who had been seduced and abandoned by Lord Gregory and who comes to him with a baby in her arms, begging him to let her in his house. According to Ellmann, the ballad “brings together the peasant mother and the civilized seducer,” and this, of course, alludes to Gabriel’s and Gretta’s situation. Gabriel, however, does not listen to the message of the story, for he is too overwhelmed by Gretta’s transformation during Mr. D’Arcy’s performance of this old song that reminded her of her past:

“She was standing right under the dusty fanlight and the flame of the gas lit up the rich bronze of her hair, which he had seen her drying at the fire a few days before. She was in the same attitude and seemed unaware of the talk about her. At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining.” (“The Dead,” p. 403)

Ironically, the song reminds Gretta of a past that did not include Gabriel, while Gabriel’s contemplation of the gracious and mysterious attitude displayed by his wife reminds him of their joyous moments together. As they head back to the hotel, he feels his heart filled with happiness, love and desire, as if their dull existence had already been erased from his memory. At the hotel, however, as he tries to come closer to her, he finds her in a strange mood, so he starts a discussion about some insignificant incident that is meant to temper his longing “to be the master of her strange mood” (“The Dead,” p. 407). Soon enough he discovers that the reason of her nostalgia was Michael Furey, a gentle young man she was in love with in the past, when she used to live in Galway. As Gabriel’s desire gradually turns into blind rage at the thought that his wife loved another man, Gretta plunges even more into the depths of her own thoughts while looking out the window, virtually crossing the threshold that separates her from her distant past: “I can see him so plainly, she said, after a moment. Such eyes as he had: big, dark eyes! And such an expression in them – an expression!” (“The Dead,” p. 409)

Gretta’s confession is the final assault on Gabriel’s sense of authority. He cannot accept the idea that she was ever interested in another man and, out of jealousy, or perhaps because he needs to restore his authority on her, he tries to make her feel uncomfortable by accusing her that she wanted to visit the Aran Isles with Miss Ivors because she hoped to meet with him. Nevertheless, when he finds out that Michael Furey had been dead for many years, he feels humiliated, for his attempts to flaunt his superiority had failed, and the more she tries to gain control over the situation, the more he realizes he cannot compete with a dead man. If up until this moment he had only been able recognize the death-like paralysis in those around him, Gabriel now catches a glimpse of his own paralysis.

“A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.”

As already mentioned, death in all its forms permeates every aspect of existence in our story. Death metaphors are used to describe almost everything from the physical appearances of isolated individuals to the collective attitude towards the disconcerting social reality. Throughout the story the world of the living and the world of the dead are constantly brought together in people’s consciousness, in their speech, in their gestures, in their attitude, and, of course, in the Morkan sisters’ “dark, gaunt house” (“The Dead,” p. 373) where the memory of the dead is more alive than the sisters themselves. The “three mortal hours” that Gretta apparently needs to prepare herself for the dance party, the monks sleeping in their coffins, Miss Julia’s “haggard look,” the ghastly lights in the streets, and the pictures of Gabriel’s dead parents are only a few of the examples where death symbolism leads to minor revelations that imply the idea of physical death, while that of spiritual death is to be found in people’s attitudes and reactions.

Tindall suggests that the annual dance organized by the Morkan sisters is the dance of death and Gabriel’s “graceful tribute, a funeral oration.” We may go even further and assert that Gabriel’s attendance to the dance party may be regarded as an attendance to a spiritual funeral, perhaps his own, as he is the only one who undergoes a series of changes because of the incidents at the party. Under these circumstances, Gabriel’s late arrival at the party may be considered a sign of his reluctance to accept the dead as part of his present, while his blaming Gretta for it, when he claims that it took her “three mortal hours to dress herself” (“The Dead,” p. 375), although she hardly seems like the type of woman who would pay much attention to such insignificant details, indicates that she is, in fact, the most alive presence in his life. She had accepted the world of the dead as part of her present, and because of that she is more grounded in reality than Gabriel, who prefers to live in denial until the events at the Morkan house finally awaken him to reality. Obviously, he puts up a lot of resistance to change. Whenever he gets closer to the apprehension of his own condition, he engages himself in petty conversations or focuses on the most insignificant details, such as his physical appearance, constantly rearranging his cuffs or the bows of his tie. Moreover, he verbally builds up his identity through the speech he gives in his aunts’ honour, while in fact his identity was being crushed under the burden of his superficial existence:

“[There] are always in gatherings such as this sadder thoughts that will recur to our minds: thoughts of the past, of youth, of changes, of absent faces that we miss here to-night. Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours. – Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy moralising intrude upon us here to-night. Here we are gathered together for a brief moment from the bustle and rush of our everyday routine.” (“The Dead,” p. 397)

The events in the Morkan house, nevertheless, may be regarded as parts of an initiation process. Gabriel’s confrontations with Lily and Miss Ivors, as well as his contemplation of Gretta, when she lets herself be carried away in the past by the words of an old song, may be regarded as the preliminal stages, which prepare him for his transition. The Lass of Aughrim becomes here the song of death, a symbol that accompanies him through the liminal stage, which begins when Gretta tells him that she believes her adolescence sweetheart died for her: “A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world.” (“The Dead,” p. 410)

The “vindictive being” that threatens his existence is nothing more than Gabriel’s other self, the one that compels him to accept the dead as part of his life. He begins to reassess his entire life and realizes that he had never been as important as Michael Furey in his wife’s life. This time, however, he was no longer upset or jealous, but rather sensible to the pain she must have felt when she had found out about her sweetheart’s death. Suddenly he realizes that his wife was no longer the beautiful girl for whom Michael Furey sacrificed his life and understands that all of them will join the world of shadows someday. He thinks of his aunt Julia and remembers he “had caught a haggard look upon her face” (“The Dead,” p. 411) when she was singing Arrayed for a Bridal, and imagines himself standing by her deathbed, trying to comfort his other aunt.

Joyce found inspiration for all the characters in the story, as well as for the themes, symbols and motifs employed, in his own life experience. According to Richard Ellmann, Gabriel’s ambivalence towards his country, his jealousy for his wife’s dead lover and his writing for the Daily Express are to be found in Joyce himself, while Gabriel’s style of discourse is to be found in Joyce’s father. Gretta, obviously, represents Nora Barnacle, who also had a lover who risked his life to see her one last time before she left Galway to move to Dublin. He too says his goodbye to her on a rainy weather and soon afterwards falls seriously ill and dies. The list of similarities could go on much longer, and yet, there is one extremely important similarity between the incident that caused Michael Furey’s death and the one that caused the death of Nora Barnacle’s lover, namely the rain. Both of them died because they stood in the rain waiting for their sweethearts, and therefore rain is the only symbol of death as the end of physical existence in “The Dead,” while the snow symbolizes the union between the dead and the living, and therefore it is the symbol of death as a form of life, an idea often utilized by Joyce and drawn from the blend of “romantic imagination” and “a classical strength and serenity,” the necessary ingredients to turn death into the most intense aesthetic experience:

“As often as human fear and cruelty, that wicked monster begotten by luxury, are in a league to make life ignoble and sullen and to speak evil of death the time is come wherein a man of timid courage seizes the keys of hell and death, and flings them far out into the abyss, proclaiming the praise of life, which the abiding splendor of truth may sanctify, and of death, the most beautiful form of life.”

The above paragraph taken from Joyce’s review of James Clarence Mangan is relevant for the purpose of our discussion because we believe that “The Dead” may also be regarded as a praise of both life and death. Gabriel “seizes the keys of […] death,” turning it into “the most beautiful form of life,” when he discovers pure love in Michael Furey’s willingness to sacrifice his life just to see Gretta one last time. He, however, had never experienced such a feeling. Suddenly he understands the futility of his own existence, the superficiality of the material world which begins to fade away together with his identity, as he envisions a young man’s ghost “standing under a dipping tree.” (“The Dead,” p. 412) If the song of the Lass of Aughrim triggers Gretta’s tears, Gabriel’s tears are caused by Gretta’s pain, and through them he liberates himself from the strings that bind him to the material realm. When he allows himself to see with the eyes of the heart he is finally ready for his major personal epiphany, which, we believe, reveals the redemptive powers of the metaphor of death:

“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” (“The Dead,” p. 412)

Given the general atmosphere of Dubliners, our initial assumption that in “The Dead” death may symbolically represent the paralysis of the Irish society was a legitimate one, and if that were the case, then Gabriel’s journey westward would point to his own “hopeless entrapment” in the Dubliners’ “labyrinthine quest for […] revival.” The image of the snow falling all over Ireland creates a sense of unity, which means that Gabriel’s journey is one that reflects the general atmosphere of an entire nation. Nevertheless, for Gretta, for example, the west means happiness, love, and a coexistence of the living and the dead, the first two being features of humanity, the last, a mark of her peasant roots. Gabriel, however, recognizes the superiority of the feelings she and the people of her kind are capable of, which is why we are tempted to believe that his journey westward is, in fact, an adherence to his wife’s spiritual beliefs and a restoration of his own humanity. Moreover, Richard Ellmann, claims that Joyce’s technique in “The Dead” is “to accumulate a large, turbulent scene only to focus at the end on the isolated relation of a man and a woman,” and in this case Gabriel’s willingness to take a journey westward would suggest his desire to gain back his wife. Either way, we are dealing here with a spiritual death and rebirth, for no matter what interpretation we would choose to give to the story, Gabriel still loses a part of who he is.

5.3. A Case of Spiritual Exhaustion: The Death of the Self in Jorge Luis Borges’s “Shakespeare’s Memory”

By the time “Shakespeare’s Memory” was published, Jorge Luis Borges was already at the end of a long and prolific literary career that brought him international recognition and put him on the short list for a Nobel Prize on several occasions. The last stories penned by Borges, however, despite being perfect expressions of their creator’s mature thoughts, received poor and even negative critical reception. The eponymous collection that includes “Shakespeare’s Memory” was often considered below the standards imposed by the author’s previous stories and simply ignored by many critics. Nonetheless, despite the minor stylistic differences between Borges’s early works and the one we have chosen for interpretation, “Shakespeare’s Memory” incorporates many of the subjects that captivated Borges’s attention throughout his life, which is why we do not see any reason why it should not be considered as valuable, challenging and memorable as anything Borges ever wrote.

We may say about Borges that he had a multicultural formation which endowed him with a boundless power of imagination and granted him the freedom to work with a wide range of themes that reveal the intricacies of human existence and the duality of human nature, pointing towards the puzzling construction of reality, knowledge and the self. As a writer constantly in and out of the national Argentine culture, the subjects he approached in his writing find their roots in the international, as well as in the South American culture, which is why he alternately came to be known as an advocate and an opponent of the South American literary tradition, or of any literary and philosophical doctrines for that matter.

Although Borges was quite sceptical about the value of literature and about the writers’ capacity to produce any original piece of work in an “age of ultimacies and final solutions,” he had managed to turn his scepticism into an effective creative tool. He became the exponent of the infinite possibilities of the immediate reality and created a dizzying body of work in which he ingeniously intertwines fantasy and reality, carrying the reader to unfamiliar paths, leading him through stupendous paradoxes for which there is no logical explanation, and forcing him to question the inconsistencies that are to be found in the life experience of the twentieth century modern man.

The international phenomenon, as he came to be known throughout his life, who reinvented the South American literary tradition and contributed to the development of postmodern aesthetics, was born in Buenos Aires in a family with Argentine, Anglo-Saxon, Portuguese and Jewish roots. His parents were intellectuals belonging to the upper-classes and he grew up learning about his ancestors’ contribution to the independence of the Argentine nation. Thus, ever since early childhood his mind would be infused with a peculiar, but strong sense of nationalism, which would later shape Borges’s opinions on the Argentine literary tradition.

After being educated at home in the spirit of English culture, but in a typical Argentine setting that stimulated the young boy’s imagination, Borges was sent to study in Switzerland, mostly because of his father’s fondness for the European culture, but also because of his distrust in the national institutions. The European experience, combined with the Hispanic heritage, the extensive readings of classic works of English literature, which were predominant in his father’s library, contributed to his development as a writer and enabled him to create stories that go beyond any frontiers of time, space, and even imagination.

The many biographies of Borges present him in his childhood as a voracious reader acquainted with the world mostly through books, which, obviously, determined the direction of his literary style. In his work the world and the human mind are often described as a “disparate library, made of books or pages whose reading was a pleasure and which one would like to share,” which is why his stories contain numerous quotations, references and critical opinions on other writers’ works. Thus, his stories become not only an account of the author’s erudition, but also a dramatic, and often ironic, way of communicating contradictory ideas that are meant to expose reality’s glorifying disorder in a world that strives for unity.

The extraordinary appetite for reading manifested by Borges ever since childhood was often considered by biographers a sign of Borges’s awareness of the fact that some day, earlier than one would normally expect, he would be sentenced to darkness because of an eye condition that ran in the family. Block de Behar, however, suggests that the mature Borges perceived his blindness as a gain, for it “has attenuated the world of appearances, approximating it to another interior world, private, doubly deprived by circumstances and peripateticisms, by timelessness and future.” Besides blindness, Borges also inherited from his family, especially from his father, the propensity for writing, an inexhaustible admiration for his ancestors, a special fondness towards English writers, and the need to lead “a dreamy, bohemian way of life,” which awakened in him the desire to wander around the world and learn as much as possible from every culture he had ever gotten in contact with. Nonetheless, despite Borges’s ability to easily adjust to the cultural background of the European countries he had lived in, he was never really engulfed in any of them. Instead, he became more of an observer, trying to get the best out of his international experience, and because of that he created an original system of ideas that he would later incorporate into his creation, ideas which were relevant for both the Latin American and the Western culture.

Although Borges moves back to Argentina after he had already made his debut in Spain with a volume of poetry, his literary career begins to blossom once he is back on Argentine soil. His work is innovative mostly because Borges draws away from traditional narrative boundaries and eliminates from his writing any details that would make it harder to digest. The brevity of his stories might make them seem rather simple, and yet, the ideas he communicates are so complex and sophisticated that it might have been difficult for readers to understand them if they had been delivered in a lengthy narrative.

Willingly or not, Borges took the task to reinvent Argentine literature and he started by reinventing himself. If in the beginning he was invariable in his idea of being a pure Argentine, he later developed an original perspective on culture and writing. He envisaged an Argentine literary tradition that venerates “the capacities of the Argentine mind,” without limiting “the poetic exercise of that mind to a few humble local themes, as if Argentines could only speak of neighborhoods and ranches and not of the universe.” He eradicated the idea of portraying only the local colour of the Argentine society in his work, and, instead, he created what we might call a hybrid of different cultures, an original mixture of subjects that arouse readers’ interest, regardless of race or gender. Throughout his life he never gave up the task to put Argentina on the literary map, and we might even say that it is due to his work that critics’ interest in South-American literature was revived.

The topics that captivated Borges’s attention are so vast and various that it would be impossible to refer to all of them in only a few pages. Nevertheless, a handful of themes are widely used throughout his literary creation and these are death, identity, memory, time and the divided self. Because of them Borges was often considered one of the first postmodern writers of the twentieth century, and yet his original use of them clearly makes him an important representative of magical realism and only a precursor of postmodernism. With the publication of Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Iniquity), he not only offered the first Argentine example of magical realist writing, but he also directed Latin America towards a new phase of literary creation.

Most of Borges’s stories spin around one particular subject – reality. However, he never resorted to a mimetic description of reality but rather to a careful investigation of the unexplainable things that one can experience. Therefore, the reader often detects in his stories fantastical elements, a strong sense of mystery, disorienting details, ambiguity, irony and self-reflection, all of them used as instruments in the process of drawing insight from the surrounding, material world. “Shakespeare’s Memory,” like most of the stories written by Borges, contains fragments of the author’s own experience and personality and examines the way in which memory and imagination work together to build or, in our case, to alter an individual’s identity. In it Borges tells the story of a man who has dedicated his entire life to Shakespeare and, as always, the story is not meant to elucidate any mystery, but to show how the burden of an external influence may lead to the destruction of the self.

Set in a normal, modern world, the story contains authentic descriptions of humans and society, and yet, the thin line between reality and fantasy is immediately blurred, as if in a dream, and the reader is drawn into a magical, but still real setting and forced to acknowledge that reality is a subjective dimension that comprises only those elements that one allows himself to perceive, as Borges himself claims:

“Reality has no need of other realities to bolster it. There are no divinities hidden in the trees, nor any elusive thing-in-itself behind appearances, nor a mythological self that orders our actions. Life is truthful appearance. The senses do not deceive, it is the mind that deceives.”

“Shakespeare’s Memory” tells the story of Hermann Sörgel, a German scholar who has done nothing else in his entire life than studying Shakespeare and writing about the Bard’s literary legacy, as the protagonist himself claims “There are devotees of Goethe, of the Eddas, of the late song of the Nibelungen; my fate has been Shakespeare. As it still is, though in a way that no one could have foreseen.” At a conference on Shakespeare, the protagonist meets Daniel Thorpe, a military physician who offers him a priceless gift – the centuries old memory of the man many people recognize as the most distinguished and exceptional writer in the world – William Shakespeare.

The reader suspects from the beginning that the story he is about to read is intriguing and rather strange, and yet he never expects that such an abstract entity – the actual memory of a man, which comprises the thoughts and emotions that Shakespeare ever had, the places and people he had ever seen, the words he had ever read or the songs he had ever listened to – would be invoked.

Nevertheless, the surprise diminishes when we think that this story comes from Borges, the man for whom the world of ideas was more fascinating than everything else. He chose memory as the main theme for his story and he presented it as the element that defines one’s identity, and he chose Shakespeare as the man whose memory is being conjured up perhaps because of his admiration for the Elizabethan writer. In one of his earlier essays, Borges claims that memory is not an “enduring and tangible granary or warehouse,” but rather “the noun by which we imply that among the innumerable possible states of consciousness, many occur again in an imprecise way.” This idea might be considered opposed to the notion of memory implied in our story, and yet, Borges is far from contradicting himself.

The reality he creates in this particular short story is ‘contaminated’ by dream, and, as John Barth suggests, this allows him to turn “Shakespeare’s Memory” into a “metaphor for his concerns.” As already mentioned, one of Borges’s main concerns is related to the labyrinthine construction of the self. In “The Nothingness of Personality,” for example, by denying the wholeness of the self and claiming that personal identity is not “the sum of successive states of mind,” he actually implies that man’s identity is nothing more than an ephemeral entity that suffers continuous transformations under the pressure of external factors, and therefore it is only a reflection of a single state of mind – the one determined by man’s current circumstances, not by his past experiences, nor by his future expectations:

The thought came over me that never would one full and absolute moment, containing all the others, justify my life, that all of my instants would be provisional phases, annihilators of the past turned to face the future, and that beyond the episodic, the present, the circumstantial, we were nobody. […] We have already seen that any state of mind, however opportunistic, can entirely fill up our attention, which is much the same as saying that it can form, in its brief and absolute term, our essence. Which, translated into the language of literature, means that to try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing.”

Thus, Borges’s short stories become expressions of separate, but successive, states of mind that prove the accelerated transformation of the artist’s identity after a lifetime dedicated to writing, and since “Shakespeare’s Memory” is one of the last stories penned by Borges, we are inclined to believe that the real purpose of the story is not to simply dazzle the reader, but to account for the artist’s identity when old age or any kind of physical impairment takes away his raison d’être, which in this situation is writing.

Memory and its role in the construction of one’s identity were also the subjects of another well-known short story written by Borges – “Funes el Memorioso” (“Funes the Memorious”). In this story, the main character possesses the unique ability to remember everything and forget nothing. His limitless power to store any detail of everything he had ever seen, read or experienced is useless, however, because all he does with his memories is to arrange them in a numbering system that can be used and understood only by him, as no other man exhibits the same ability; therefore, as valuable as this gift may seem, it is actually worthless if its owner cannot accomplish anything with it.

In “Shakespeare’s Memory” Borges reiterates the idea of a gift of infinite value through a story heard by Sörgel from one of the participants in the conference. The ‘story within the story’ is one of the four devices regarded by Borges as essential for the construction of fantastic literature, and in our story it reveals the existence of a magic ring, which belonged to King Solomon and which later came into the possession of a beggar. Apparently, the ring allowed its owner to understand the language of birds, but because no price could be assigned to it, the beggar could not sell it, thus being forced to live in misery for the rest of his life. Obviously, the ring was lost “as that sort of magical thingamajig always is,” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 123) and its owner, much like Funes, never achieves anything due to it. Later that night, Thorpe offers a ring to Sörgel. As expected, the ring is merely a metaphor for the precious memory of the great Elizabethan writer, a gift which would later prove to be as useless as the beggar’s ring or Funes’s ability.

Shakespeare’s memory passes from one person to another after a verbal acceptance that must be uttered out loud. Amazed and even distrustful, Sörgel remains speechless, reflecting upon Thorpe’s offer: “It was as though I had been offered the ocean” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 124). The comparison not only suggests the unlikelihood of being able to give and to receive such a gift, but also the tremendous consequences and the uneasiness that such a situation would cause if it were to materialize. And yet, the transfer is made. Sörgel accepts Shakespeare’s memory, considering it was the right thing to do after spending his entire life “in pursuit of Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 125).

Paradoxes and contradictions are omnipresent in Borges’s fiction. In “Shakespeare’s Memory” nothing extraordinary or awkward seems to happen when the transfer is being made, and yet Sörgel knows that “something happened; there is no doubt of that. But I did not feel it happen. Perhaps just a slight sense of fatigue, perhaps imaginary” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 125). These words suggest that the narrator, no one other then Sörgel himself, is at the same time involved and detached, as if the story related belonged to two different people. This interplay between subjectivity and objectivity introduces another basic device of fantastic literature, namely the double. The narrator, unlike the younger Sörgel , is a man in search for a “unified sense of individual being,” ergo the story belongs to someone who once possessed Shakespeare’s memory, not to the man he was before the related event happened, as it may be noticed from the protagonist’s own description of his current state of mind:

“My name is Hermann Sörgel. The curious reader may have chanced to leaf through my Shakespeare Chronology, which I once considered essential to a proper understanding of the text: it was translated into several languages, including Spanish. Nor is it beyond the realm of possibility that the reader will recall a protracted diatribe against an emendation inserted by Theobald into his critical edition of 1734 – an emendation which became from that moment on an unquestioned part of the canon. Today I am taken a bit aback by the uncivil tone of those pages, which I might almost say were written by another man.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 122)

From the moment Sörgel receives the memory that comes from another man’s experience, he must learn to handle it, but he eventually fails just like the man that offered it to him. He gradually starts to discover it, and he is soon able to possess two different sets of experiences, or rather to be possessed by them. His body turns into an object in which two memories seek to coexist and Sörgel soon becomes simply a vessel for another man’s memory. Consequently, his identity is altered, because when Shakespeare’s memory infiltrates his mind, Sörgel is no longer the man that once heard a story about a magic ring, but the man who once had the magic ring. Even when he liberates himself from the burden of the other man’s memory, he does not turn back to his previous self, because the experience he had was so intense and challenging that it would have been impossible to leave no marks on his identity.

Sörgel is at first delighted by the idea of being in control of Shakespeare’s memory: “I would possess Shakespeare, and possess him as no one ever had – not in love, or friendship, or even hatred. I, in some way, would be Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 126). However, he becomes Shakespeare, the man, not the writer. He does not possess the talent to write what Shakespeare did, but he recalls the moments when the Bard was given the inspiration to write his tragedies and sonnets. He remembers Anne Hathaway like he remembered “that mature woman who taught me the ways of love in an apartment in Lubeck so many years ago” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 126), but he cannot recall the face of any of the two women. Eventually the other man’s memory completely inhibits his own, and even when he technically liberates himself from it, he never goes back to his old self and he becomes a man who lives at the threshold between the present reality and a long-forgotten past.

In his famous essay “The Death of the Author” Roland Barthes condemns critics’ habit of referring to biographical details in the interpretation of a text and asserts that a texts should be analyzed independently of its creator. He purports that “a text’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination,” therefore the reader is the key element in the interpretation of a text, and not the author. However, a curious reader would want to know how an author came up with the idea of writing a certain text. And because Borges is definitely one of those artists whose work makes you want to know more about its creator, after reading his biography it becomes quite difficult not to notice that Borges took pieces of his personality life experience and implanted them in any story he ever wrote and every character he ever created. “Shakespeare’s Memory” is no exception and the story’s protagonist is a transposition of Borges himself, more specifically of the eighty year-old Borges who looks back at his life experience, begins to rediscover himself, and contemplates the condition of the artist who creates an image of himself through his writing, an image that will persist even after the reader will have finished examining his works.

Sörgel, a German scholar, worships Shakespeare, although “Goethe is Germany’s official religion” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 129), and for Borges, an Argentine writer, Shakespeare was supreme as well, for he was one of the writers whose work can be “progressively enriched by the generations of its readers.” Furthermore, the reader learns about Sörgel that he is an old man, partially blind, who was sexually initiated by a mature woman. Borges himself had a similar experience in his youth, when he was taken by his father to his own mistress in Geneva (an unpleasant experience he could not forget for the rest of his life) and he struggled with blindness for more than three decades. And yet the lack of visual perception in Borges’s case was compensated by a powerful imagination and an exceptional talent for writing.

If we consider the similarities between Borges’s life and his writing, we are entitled to believe that Borges’s every significant experience, every intention and every passion he had ever had became an item in his writing. Nonetheless, John Barth tells us that Borges’s protagonists are more than simple transpositions of their creator, for the idea of literature that satisfies the artist’s more or less overt narcissistic tendencies stood against Borges’s idea of literature, which is why Barth claims that Borges’s characters become “readers or authors of the fiction they’re in,” in order to remind of the “fictitious aspect of our own existence.”

In “Shakespeare’s Memory” Sörgel is obviously the author of the story he is in, but we wish to go even further than Barth and add that he may be considered also a reader, not of the story, but of the real author of the story – Borges – for, through his account of a story that is nothing more than a metaphor for the transformation of the artist’s identity during the artistic process, he delivers Borges’s own ideas regarding the condition of the artist, without openly disclosing them. As regards the fictitious side of existence exposed by the story, we believe that it is related to man’s inclination to look at reality from a subjective perspective, which enables him to observe only certain aspects of reality that may somehow influence his existence and ignore everything else.

Now, considering only Sörgel’s way of telling the story of how he lost himself under the burden of another man’s memory, we may assert that he prefers to turn his reality into a fantastic, literary piece, for his reality may be one in which an underlying spiritual exhaustion prevents him from producing a work on Shakespeare that would meet his expectations. We learn from the story that Sörgel is a known Shakespearean scholar who authored a chronology of Shakespeare and several other papers, which he “once considered essential to a proper understanding of the text” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 123). And yet, soon afterwards we notice his disappointment with everything he ever wrote and also with himself, for not being able to complete any of his serious tasks:

“In 1914, I drafted, but did not publish, an article on the compound words that the Hellenist and dramatist George Chapman coined for his versions of Homer; in forging these terms, Chapman did not realize that he had carried English back to its Anglo-Saxon origins, the Ursprung of the language. It never occurred to me that Chapman’s voice, which I have now forgotten, might one day be so familiar to me. A scattering of critical and philological ‘notes,’ as they are called, signed with my initials, complete, I believe, my literary biography. Although perhaps I might also be permitted to include an unpublished translation of Macbeth, which I began in order to distract my mind from the thought of the death of my brother, Otto Julius, who fell on the western front in 1917. I never finished translating the play; I came to realize that English has (to its credit) two registers – the Germanic and the Latinate – while our own German, in spite of its greater musicality, must content itself with one.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” pp. 122-123)

At this point, Sörgel stops being a reflection of his creator, because, if he did not find the right way to deliver his opinions on the subjects he approached in his writing and simply gave up the idea of publishing serious pieces of work, Borges found the perfect way to bring his contribution to world literature. As John Barth points out, by constantly introducing in his work quotations, explanatory notes, references and comments on other authors’ works, Borges “confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.”

The first examples of this practice are to be found in Sörgel’s account of how he came in possession of Shakespeare’s memory, when he mentions de Quincey, whose idea “that our brain is a palimpsest” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 127) appeals to him a lot. Borges, in his turn, was an admirer of the English author, therefore this reference is not arbitrary, and instead it points to Borges’s idea that every new literary text has its roots in previously written texts, because “authors are readers who rewrite what has already been written.” In the story we discover references to various literary figures, a fact that makes us think of the prominent intertextuality that generally pervades Borges’s writing. For example, Sörgel refers to Chapman when he expresses his disappointment with his own creative abilities, to Chaucer when he hears Daniel Thorpe’s story about the beggar’s ring, to Ben Jonson when he begins to be acquainted with the depths of Shakespeare’s memory, and to many others. And because intertextuality is often considered a postmodern technique, Borges’s use of it, along with the presentation of a fragmented reality and the idea of a decentred self in search for unity, enables us to call “Shakespeare’s Memory” a masterpiece that stands at the threshold between postmodernism and magical realism.

As it may appear from our story, memory and personal experience play the leading roles in the process of writing because, while memory allows information to surface when needed, personal experience establishes the way in which the information is transmitted. However, the two are not enough for writing and Sörgel’s experience only confirms our statement. Despite being able to discover details of Shakespeare’s life that cannot be found in any of his biographies, and despite knowing him as no one ever had, he realizes that his possession is as futile and ineffective as Funes’s capacity to remember everything. He decides to write a biography of Shakespeare, but he changes his mind, because he understands that he does not possess the talent for telling a story:

“I realized that the three faculties of the human soul—memory, understanding, and will—are not some mere Scholastic fiction. Shakespeare’s memory was able to reveal to me only the circumstances of the man Shakespeare. Clearly, these circumstances do not constitute the uniqueness of the poet; what matters is the literature the poet produced with that frail material. I was naive enough to have contemplated a biography, just as Thorpe had. I soon discovered, however, that that literary genre requires a talent for writing that I do not possess. I do not know how to tell a story. I do not know how to tell my own story, which is a great deal more extraordinary than Shakespeare’s. Besides, such a book would be pointless.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 129)

If in a previously written story dedicated to Shakespeare’s life and work – “Everything and Nothing” – Borges envisages the Bard striving for an identity, in “Shakespeare’s Memory” the protagonist’s identity is crushed by the memory of a man who had “become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one.” Shakespeare, as Borges describes him, had “no one in him” and yet, “no one has ever been so many men as this man, who like the Egyptian Proteus could exhaust all the guises of reality.” As we may notice, Borges uses antithetical details in Shakespeare’s portrayal. Nevertheless, they are not meant to create confusion, but to reveal Shakespeare’s uniqueness as a man and a writer. And because Shakespeare, just like God, is no one, and yet so many, it becomes quite clear that Sörgel, a man with rather average abilities, would not manage to handle Shakespeare’s memory and this experience would alter his existence for the rest of his life.

Nonetheless, when he is offered the priceless (yet worthless) gift, Sörgel accepts it although he is informed that it would only change his perception of the world, for more than possessing it, he would be possessed by it. Moreover, Thorpe warns him that there is nothing significant to be done with Shakespeare’s memory, because it would not turn him into a better writer or a better Shakespearean scholar, but rather it would bring him critics’ contempt if he tried to use the knowledge he acquires in any of his works, as Thorpe himself did:

“‘I have written a fictionalized biography,’ he then said at last, ‘which garnered the contempt of critics but won some small commercial success in the United States and the colonies. I believe that’s all…. I have warned you that my gift is not a sinecure.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 125)

Obviously, after a lifetime dedicated to Shakespeare, Sörgel considers it is only fair to accept Thorpe’s offer. Although he is reluctant that something would ever happen, he gives a verbal agreement and enjoys his evening as if nothing had ever happened. And yet, he tries to find out whether Thorpe’s story contains some truth in it by engaging into a long discussion with him about one of Shakespeare’s characters, and he is astonished to discover that Thorpe’s opinions were “as academic and conventional” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 126) as his own. This, of course, only suggests that Thorpe is in fact a scholar, like Sörgel himself, a devotee of Shakespeare, who symbolically separates himself from the knowledge acquired in many years of research by offering something that cannot be offered to another man who shared his fascination with Shakespeare. Moreover,

We are then told that Shakespeare’s memory does not begin to manifest itself until Sörgel opens himself up to such an idea. Obviously, a certain uneasiness and a great deal of impatience takes over our protagonist, and after a few sleepless nights pieces of Shakespeare’s memory reveal to him as in dream. This method, obviously, finds its roots in Borges’s own ideas regarding the importance of dreams in the perception of reality:

“Awake, we pass through successive time at a uniform speed; in dreams we may span a vast zone. To dream is to orchestrate the objects we viewed while awake and to weave from them a story, or a series of stories. We see the image of a sphinx and the image of a drugstore, and then we invent a drugstore that turns into a sphinx. We put the mouth of a face that looked at us the night before last on the man we shall meet tomorrow. (Schopenhauer wrote that life and dreams were pages from the same book, and that to read them in their proper order was to live, but to leaf through them was to dream.)”

When Shakespeare’s memory begins to emerge, Sörgel is delighted by the fact the he would come to know the Bard like no one before him, except Thorpe and Shakespeare himself: “I would possess Shakespeare, and possess him like no one had ever possessed anyone before – not in love, or friendship, or even hatred. I, in some way, would be Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 126). Soon enough he finds himself uttering words that puzzle him, whistling simple melodies he had never heard before, and taking imaginary trips to Shakespeare’s whereabouts.

The most peculiar thing Sörgel discovers is that there had never been books in Shakespeare’s house. Thus, if we accept the idea that the entire story is nothing more than a reinvention of a cruel reality that Sörgel cannot accept, the lack of books in Shakespeare’s house might be a sort of message sent by Sörgel’s inner self, meant to inform Sörgel that the path he had chosen for himself was not the right one. If, however, we embrace the idea that the story is an account for the artist’s identity, then, perhaps, Borges’s message, this time, would be that a protean figure like Shakespeare did not need to surround himself with books in order to create a body of work which for Borges is “virtually infinite” and which presents a “facet” of the greatest enigma – the universe, whereas Borges himself simply could not lead a normal life outside his library. Nonetheless, he, like Shakespeare, found a suitable way to deliver his message to the world, and although we could never compare him to Shakespeare, we may say that his works also reveal a facet of the universe, different from that of Shakespeare’s, but relevant for the twentieth century man.

Turning back to our story we discover a protagonist who is eager to reach the depths of Shakespeare’s memory. He thinks of ways to uncover its layers and decides he should begin by reading the books once read by Shakespeare himself. Of course, he already sees himself as Shakespeare, for he considers his first reading of some works to be an act of re-reading. Next, he decides to go through Shakespeare’s sonnets again and, after reading them aloud he “effortlessly recovered the harsh r’s and open vowels of the sixteenth century” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 127). Obviously, this means that our protagonist becomes more and more confident in his ability to go beyond the ‘simple’ possession of another man’s memory and turn into Shakespeare himself. Nonetheless, as one memory strives, the other begins to fade away, and our protagonist begins to forget things he knew and remember things he never knew:

“In an article I published in the Zeitschrift für germanische Philologie, I wrote that Sonnet 127 referred to the memorable defeat of the Spanish Armada. I had forgotten that Samuel Butler had advanced that same thesis in 1899. A visit to Stratford-on-Avon was, predictably enough, sterile. Then came the gradual transformation of my dreams. I was to be granted neither splendid nightmares à la De Quincey nor pious allegorical visions in the manner of his master Jean Paul; it was unknown rooms and faces that entered my nights. The first face identified was Chapman’s; later there was Ben Jonson’s, and the face of one of the poet’s neighbors, a person who does not figure in the biographies but whom Shakespeare often saw.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” pp. 127-128)

The liminal condition has always been a favourite topic for Borges. As we may see, he creates a character that stands at the border between the present and a distant past, he anchors him in the modern world, but constantly pushes him back in the world of the writer he idolizes, he endows him with a rather superior artistic creativity, but he quickly takes it away from him by allowing him to fall into the temptation of too much knowledge, and he practically destroys his identity by implanting in him two sets of memories. Thus, we are witnessing here the play of a god who constructs and deconstructs a man’s self by making him exhaust one by one his regulatory resources. Obviously, the story presents a symbolical death of the self caused by the impossibility to reach the goals one establishes for himself, but it also advocates for a rediscovery of one’s true self when the pressure of external factors is annihilated.

Sörgel’s symbolical death does not occur, however, before experiencing the real pleasures of possessing someone else’s memory, and therefore knowing him better than anyone else. He gradually discovers a Shakespeare whose memory is a “chaos of vague possibilities” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 128), who would make mistakes when reciting Latin and Greek pentameters, and who would feel guilty for some incident he prefers not to remember – a man like all the others, and yet a man who has no equal: “Chance, or fate, dealt Shakespeare those trivial terrible things that all men know; it was his gift to be able to transmute them into fables, into characters that were much more alive than the gray man who dreamed them, into verses which will never be abandoned, into verbal music” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 129). Then, of course, after a “long and studious solitude,” the splendour of the Bard’s memory reveals itself like a monument of its own magnificence:

“I knew states of happiness and darkness that transcend common human experience. Without my realizing it, long and studious solitude had prepared me for the docile reception of the miracle. After some thirty days, the dead man’s memory had come to animate me fully. For one curiously happy week, I almost believed myself Shakespeare. His work renewed itself for me. I know that for Shakespeare the moon was less the moon than it was Diana, and less Diana than that dark drawn-out word moon. I noted another discovery: Shakespeare’s apparent instances of inadvertence – those absences dans l’infini of which Hugo apologetically speaks – were deliberate. Shakespeare tolerated them – or actually interpolated them – so that his discourse, destined for the stage, might appear to be spontaneous, and not overly polished and artificial (nicht allzu glatt und gekünstelt).” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” pp. 128-129)

Obviously, Sörgel’s current state is nothing more than the result of a long and exhausting study of Shakespeare’s life and work, but it took an almost supernatural effort for him to achieve his goal, which is why he continues to present a fantastic, symbolic version of the real story. Soon enough, however, the bliss that Sörgel felt when he was ‘given,’ or, more exactly, when he acquired the ability to know what Shakespeare knew becomes a torture: “Throughout the first stages of this adventure I felt the joy of being Shakespeare; throughout the last, terror and oppression” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 130). Even though the two memories that inhabited his mind initially seem to coexist, granting their possessor the ability to contemplate someone else’s past without being a part of it, Shakespeare’s memory eventually annihilates the protagonist’s own memory. He remembers places and people he had never seen and he forgets the language of his parents. He pronounces words he had never read and he whistles melodies he had never heard, but he fails to recognize the elements that constitute the modern reality:

“I began not to understand the everyday world around me (die alltäglisch Umwelt). One morning I became lost in a welter of great shapes forged in iron, wood, and glass. Shriek and deafening noises assailed and confused me. It took time (it seemed an infinity) to recognize the engines and cars of the Bremen railway station.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 130)

Our protagonist is aware that everyone’s identity alters under the burden of one’s memory of past experiences, but in his case someone else’s memory threatened to annihilate his own, stripping him of his identity, and therefore killing who he was. If at first the two memories Sörgel possessed only intermingled from time to time, creating a mild confusion, when he decides to give away Shakespeare’s memory his confusion was so deep that he felt he no longer belonged to his world. The gift had now become a curse, as “the great torrent of Shakespeare” had already begun to flood Sörgel ‘s “modest stream” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 130). Thus, he decides to give Shakespeare’s memory to someone else. He starts dialling telephone numbers and gives the memory to the first man that has the courage to accept it.

The loss of Shakespeare’s memory awakens in Sörgel contradictory feeling. He is afraid that he might not be able to free himself from the memory he once possessed, but also nostalgic for giving up the opportunity to write Shakespeare’s biography, just like Thorpe himself was back in the days when he was preparing to give up Shakespeare’s memory:

“More important than Daniel Thorpe’s face, which my partial blindness helps me to forget, was his notorious lucklessness. When a man reaches a certain age, there are many things he can feign; happiness is not one of them. Daniel Thorpe gave off an almost physical air of melancholy.” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 123)

Sörgel’s fear, however, surpasses his nostalgia, because he repeatedly utters the words: “Simply the thing I am shall make me live” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p. 131). Paradoxically, the words belong to Parolles, a character from Shakespeare’s play All’s Well that Ends Well, which could indicate that the protagonist does not really escape Shakespeare’s memory when he passes it on to someone else. He invents exercises that should help him get his memory back and he tries to fill his minds with other subjects, such as William Blake’s mythology or Bach’s music. Nevertheless, all his attempts are useless, for they all lead him right back to Shakespeare.

Borges’s story manages to inflict a feeling of anxiety upon the reader, and this feeling persists even when we have finished reading it. In his work, the author always seems to question different things and clarify nothing, as if his writing was meant to stimulate readers’ awareness that reality sometimes comprises things that cannot be rationally explained. The protagonist of his story does not reach any real closure, because in the end he writes: “In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus Hermann Sörgel; I putter about the card catalog and compose erudite trivialities, but at dawn I sometimes know that the person dreaming is that other man” (“Shakespeare’s Memory,” p.130). Bearing in mind that in “Everything and Nothing” Borges imagines Shakespeare as a man who had dreamed his characters just like God dreamed the world, and that in “Shakespeare’s Memory” Sörgel’s dreams are actually Shakespeare’s, perhaps one of the messages of the story is that in every new literary text there is a trace of Shakespeare and, if he had never been born, literature would not have been the same.

Nonetheless, as we have already proved, the story is more than a writer’s way of proving his appreciation for one of the world’s greatest writers. On the one hand, it is the story of man who had burnt himself out, who had spiritually died while trying to reach the goals he had established for himself, and on the other it is the story of an artist at the end of a successful and prolific literary career, when, after contemplating the artist’s condition, he understands that the work he leaves behind will grant him immortality, for it will keep him alive in the memory of the others.

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Conclusions

Any reflection on death and dying is always accompanied by a sense of anxiety that never actually dissolves, but lies buried deep in one’s consciousness, until another unsettling thought triggers it reoccurrence. It is no wonder, then, that artists of all times have endeavoured to show in their work the way death, the most predictable phenomenon for all species, inscribes itself into the fate of the individual and of the entire mankind. Artists have, nevertheless, come a long way from the representations of death through macabre imagery of skeletons and decomposing bodies in the Middle Ages to the meaningful and diverse representations of death of the last two centuries, when the theme of death has become a means to an end – the artist’s way of dealing with pressing matters, either personal, or reflecting a collective tendency.

The short story is a scene of discovery for both the writer and the reader. It is a familiar territory built on parts of an objective reality, but rendered artistically by means of language and unconventional narrative techniques. The seven short stories we have selected for interpretation reveal themselves as literary masterpieces capable of affecting the reader’s imagination in unconceivable ways, if one allows himself to be carried away into the terrible, irrational, fantastical, yet strangely familiar worlds that unfold in all their splendour in each of them. Whether they were written solely for aesthetic purposes, or as means to deliver a message, each of these short stories may be read as an aesthetic experience if we judge according to the intensity of the emotions they generate. Moreover, given the fact that they are brought together by the theme of death, each of them may be considered the writer’s way of taming death in an over-rationalized age in which both life and death have lost their significance.

The end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century finds the artist in a perpetual quest to reaffirm his position in the world and reconstruct his own identity through his art. In the short story the writer finds the perfect way to lay out his most intimate thoughts without turning his creation into a subjective outburst with no aesthetic value. Thus, in the nineteenth century Romantic short story we discover a wide range of controversial subjects, from feelings of inadequacy to complete alienation, from physical deformity to demonic forces that dwell within man’s consciousness, from self-destructive impulses to self-sublimation, all of them explored through the theme of death, while in the twentieth century death becomes a mask of various issues of the modern world.

The Romantics’ taste for delicate subjects, for the irrational, the supernatural and the incomprehensible, for the aesthetic experiences derived from terror, pain, and death, is a reaction to the demystification of the world, a rebellion against a constrictive social reality that threatened to annihilate the idea of individuality. In E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” we discover a character of Romantic formation who becomes the victim of two conflicting forces that threaten to take over his mind. He is a man who lives his life at the crossroad between imagination and material life – a perfect example of the misunderstood artist of the nineteenth century who struggles to meet the requirements of bourgeois life without sacrificing his artistic vocation.

Hoffmann is one of the writers whose works prove that an object’s aesthetic value does not lie only in the artist’s capacity to beautifully represent ugliness and death, but also in the degree to which it reveals the depths of human nature. Through the story of a character who falls in love with an automaton, a mechanical doll, Hoffmann explores the duality of human nature, the Romantic artist’s condition in an excessively rational world, and also a facet of the nineteenth century German reality. The theme of the double is so extensively explored through all the major characters of the story, as well as through the narrator, that it becomes extremely difficult for the reader to realize in the end whether the story belongs to the main character or it is the product of the narrator’s imagination, a means to cope with the troubling and painful aspects of his own existence.

Infused with a strong sense of irony, Hoffmann’s story becomes, in turn, an affirmation and a negation of the author’s self-creative and self destructive urges, the first compelling him to express himself freely, the other, to develop any phrase to the point of irony. Hoffmann is, of course, a master of words with double meaning. By subtly introducing the supernatural into the real plane, without allowing any of them to completely override the other, he draws the reader into an irrational world in which reason has no dominion: children’s eyes are pulled out and used as food for mythical baby-monsters, limbs are disjointed and then randomly reattached to the body, mechanical devices pass for human beings, and, of course, human beings become either mythical monsters or automata – a perfectly grotesque spectacle. The automaton, nevertheless, does not stand only for the supernatural, but also for the ‘socially’ natural, which is why the story may also be read as a protest against the artificiality of the modern world.

The aesthetic category that prevails in the narrative is the grotesque. We discover in Hoffmann’s story the idea of grotesque otherness, suggested through the various pairs of doubles, grotesque imagery that challenges the imagination, and grotesque spectacles in which eyes are thrown into circles of fire, death is seen in people’s eyes, and deadly pale faces and stiff, dead eyes arouse the strongest emotions that man is capable of. All these elements, however, are not meant to terrify the reader, but to create an allegory, a sustained metaphor of the social reality in which the narrator addresses the problem of the individual who no longer finds his place in the world to which he belongs. Moreover, through these elements Hoffmann creates one of the most suggestive portrayals of death that reminds us of the frailty of human nature and of man’s powerlessness in front of the forces that inhabit his own mind.

If in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” the grotesque becomes a source of sublimity, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” terror distinguishes itself as the ruling principle of the sublime. The story is full of breathtaking descriptions of natural phenomena unfolding in front of an overwhelmed narrator who constantly teaches himself out of the state of astonishment that gradually takes over him, by trying to convince himself that the suffocating atmosphere of the house and of its surroundings could not possibly arouse the superior emotion discussed by philosophers, namely the sublime. Both of the stories, however, echo the nineteenth century man’s familiarity with death, but if Hoffmann’s character copes with it by giving it a fantastic and mysterious dimension, in Poe’s story death is almost passively accepted. Roderick Usher bemoans the idea of losing his sister, but he seems more terrified by the thought of living without her than by losing her to death.

Poe’s story is a source of dark sublimity, for although it relies on Edmund Burke’s notions of the sublime and the beautiful, since Poe was quite familiarized with Burke’s Enquiry, it also reflects the author’s own aesthetic ideas. For Poe, terror is the principle on which beauty is heightened into the sublime, while beauty, in its turn, acquires the highest aesthetic value when it is paired with death. Like both Kant and Burke, Poe associates beauty with femininity and the sublime with masculinity and with the violent manifestations of natural and supernatural forces. Thus, in “The Fall of the House of Usher” Poe’s notion of beauty is to be found in Madeline’s ghostly countenance and in the image of her body lying breathless in the coffin, while the sublime is to be found in Roderick’s morbid appearance, in the gory spectacle offered by Roderick and his sister as they fall dead to the floor, as well as in the image of the Usher mansion crumbling into pieces together with the last members of the Usher clan.

It has often been argued that not even the Burkean mixture of terror and delight could puncture the enclosed atmosphere of death that surrounds the Usher mansion. Nevertheless, Burke argues that the sublime is to be found in “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, […] whatever is any sort terrible,” without posing a threat to our physical integrity, and therefore the narrator’s experience may be given an aesthetic dimension. He may try to prevent himself from being overwhelmed by the emotions he experiences, but the more he tries to rely on logic and common sense in his perception of the situation, the more he sinks into the depths of his own thoughts. After all, the sublime is something that cannot be comprehended by means of reason, but grasped by means of the imagination.

Without neglecting the story’s psychological depths, its network of themes and symbols, as well as the visual, auditory and olfactory imagery, we must add that “The Fall of the House of Usher” contains one of the most provocative representations of terror, death and apocalyptic destruction, which may not be perceived as an aesthetic experience by the narrator, but which nevertheless becomes one for the reader.

If Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe illustrated the violence of death in their Romantic short stories, Leo Tostoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” contains one of the most tragic, yet soothing, evocations of death, reminding of the nineteenth century man’s mystical trust in the redemptive power of death. Unlike the first two short stories included in our paper, in which the theme of death is explored mainly for aesthetic purposes, in Tolstoy’s short story death acquires a social relevance and it is explored for didactic purposes.

Inspired by actual events and relying heavily on Tolstoy’s biography, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” is meant to illustrate the futility and the emptiness of a life lived according to the social standards. The main character is a man whose life was “the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most awful” (“The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” p. 86), a man who builds an agreeable, decorous life for himself and who completely ignores the things that should matter the most. Through him Tolstoy explores the questions that haunted him during his existential crisis, when “the phantom of death seemed to mock his happiness.”

In “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” we find one of the most realistic depictions of man’s attitude towards his own death and towards the death of the other in a society built on traditional values and Christian teachings, but nevertheless corrupted by man’s continuous quest for power, financial security and personal glory. The main character lives believing that death was not a part of his future, and dies thinking that he had never lived. After a long period of physical and mental pain, he finally realizes that death was preferable to the decorous, empty life he had built for himself and dies thinking of death as his salvation.

Tolstoy’s story, like William Faulkner’s “A Rose to Emily,” brings into question disturbing aspects of the society by following the biography of a single character whose death becomes a revelatory moment for the other characters of the story, as well as for the reader. If, however, Tolstoy’s story reveals the consequence of a socially correct, but empty life, “A Rose for Emily” explores the personal history of a lady who lives against the social standards. Her life is just as empty as that of Tolstoy’s character, not because she chooses to live this way, but because she is not allowed to live otherwise.

In “A Rose for Emily” Faulkner detects the wrong premises on which the Southern American society was built through a character whose life doubles the transition of the culture that produced her. Miss Emily is both the reminder and the remainder of a glorious past who never finds her place in the community to which she belongs. It is never clear what the townspeople expect from her, just as it is never clear what kind of feelings they have for her. They envy her for belonging to the old aristocracy, and then they pity her for not being allowed to live a normal life. They contest her actions when she takes her life into her own hand, but then they support her in her choices. They do not allow her to completely shut herself in her world, nor do they let her become a part of theirs. They need her to remain the same unapproachable Miss Emily so that they could define themselves in relation to her. Thus, her death comes as a liberation from a life that is simply not worth living.

Another short story in which death is the main character’s way out of a miserable existence is Mircea Eliade’s “With the Gypsy Girls,” a story inspired by the author’s scholarly research in the field of religion and mythology, but inscribed in the ethos of the Romanian people. In Eliade’s work death is not the end of man’s existence, but a threshold between a material and an immaterial world. Throughout the story the sacred gradually punctures the thick cover of the profane, until the main character completes the initiation rituals that are meant to prepare him for his reintegration into the cosmic order.

As it always happens in Eliade’s fantasy fiction, “With the Gypsy Girls” begins in a realistic time and space but gradually moves beyond the confines of reality, as the main character himself is carried into an irrational world in which all his earthly aspirations are torn off one by one through a series of initiation rituals. Starting from the idea that even in the most secularized societies profane existence is never found in a pure state, Eliade illustrates in this story the sacred, mythical dimension of experience in a secularized society by creating a liminal space in which the laws of profane existence do not apply. Thus, the story becomes an eschatological journey at the end of which the main character liberates himself from the strings that bind him to the material world. Obviously, the final episode of the story in which the main character is reunited with Hildegard reminds us of the cosmic marriage from the mioritic tradition, which, according to Eliade, provides the framework for the transformation of a meaningless death into something more tolerable.

Another short story in which the theme of death acquires a special meaning is James Joyce’s “The Dead,” a story which contains several revelatory moments that eventually lead to an epiphany of multiple meanings. In Joyce’s story we enter into a world that fights against secularization, a world in which people are caught between a much too idealized image of the past and a tormented present. Thus, the theme of death is mainly used to symbolically represent the general paralysis of an entire society, revealing at the same time the author’s ambivalent feelings towards the Irish Revival. Although the rich symbolism of the story makes it impossible for the reader to identify one particular way of interpretation as the right one, no one can deny the fact that in Joyce’s story death permeates every aspect of existence. Death metaphors are used to describe almost everything from the physical appearance of isolated individuals to the collective attitude towards the disconcerting social reality. Throughout the story the world of the living and the world of the dead are constantly brought together in people’s consciousness, in their speech, in their gestures, in their attitude, and, of course, in the Morkan sisters’ house, where the memory of the dead is more alive than the sisters themselves.

The last short story selected for interpretation is Jorge Luis Borges’s “Shakespeare’s Memory,” a story in which the idea of spiritual death is suggested through a series of transformations that threaten to destroy the main character’s identity. We discover here a protagonist who stands at a crossroad between the present and a distant past. He is constantly pushed back into a distant past, but he struggles to remain anchored in his own reality. He is endowed with artistic creativity, but he fails to reach the goals he establishes for himself. Through him Borges reveals the intricacies of human existence and the duality of human nature, pointing towards the puzzling construction of reality, knowledge and the self. On the one hand, it is the story of a man who had burnt himself out, who had spiritually died under the pressure of external factors, but on the other, it is Borges’s own story – the one of an artist at the end of a successful and prolific artistic career, when he contemplates his life, his art and his approaching death and understands that the work he leaves behind will grant him immortality, which is the ultimate goal of any artist.

As the seven short stories prove, death is a privileged object of any artistic representation. Each of the seven writers has endeavoured to find a meaning in and beyond death by taking it out of the tiny locker in which the nineteenth and the twentieth century man had sealed it out of fear or out of a need to deny its inevitability, and rendered it artistically in short stories that become memento mori spectacles in which Eros and Thanatos surrender to each other to sustain life. Thus, the writer uses death as a literary device through which he explores aspects of existence, turning art itself into a mediator between life and death and proving that creation, as Lucian Blaga said, is “the only smile of our tragedy.” With death as incentive for creation, the writer produces a narrative of life in which he rewrites his own destiny and through which he secures a place for himself in the Pantheon of literary creation.

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