Echo
Hannah McIntyre, Hayley O'Kell
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From Multifaceted Mosaic to Disjointed Anthology: The Distorted Castilian Echo of Boccaccio’s Decameron
Emily Di Dodo
doi:10.59860/wph.a8d07ca

The fifteenth-century Castilian translation of the Decameron is nothing more than an echo of Boccaccio’s original text. To understand the level of distortion one must consider the textual transmission of the original, both to understand the author’s intentions and to assess whether this corresponded with what early readers actually read. The Italian tradition certainly included personalisation by scribes, with a significant number of manuscripts containing only extracts from the cornice and individual novelle as part of anthologies. It is through this process that we reach the Castilian translation, transmitted through a manuscript (E) and five printed editions, the earliest of which is S. What is striking is that E, by choice of the compiler or scribe, only contains fifty novelle in a disrupted order, omitting the majority of the cornice; S, on the other hand, contains one hundred novelle but, like E, omits the cornice and reorders the novelle. The text of the Decameron has become so distorted in E and S that they transform Boccaccio’s narrative stratification into mere anthology. The textual similarities suggest that E and S are in fact one translation, despite their drastic structural differences, meaning they were copied from different sources sharing a genealogical ancestor. Thus, they are two different redactions of the same echo of Boccaccio’s text.

Echo Compulsion: Formative Trauma in Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz
Isabelle Jenkinson
doi:10.59860/wph.a056591

This essay argues that the sexuality of Venus im Pelz’s masochist protagonist, Severin, is characterised by what I term the ‘echo compulsion’ of a traumatic, childhood scene. This term is a development of Freud’s notion of the subject’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ traumatic scenes but which emphasises the impossibility of any perfect repetition of such scenes — an echo literally being, in Joan Scott’s words, ‘an imperfect return of sound’. My argument draws on the work of psychoanalytic theorist Jean Laplanche and in particular his account of Copernican (exogenous and traumatic in origin) and Ptolemaic (biological and endogenous in origin) subject formation. This dichotomy of Copernican and Ptolemaic subjectivity plays out at each erotic re-enactment throughout Venus im Pelz. While Severin labours under a Ptolemaic illusion that his masochism is innate, the Copernican truth undermines the illusion as each erotic re-staging exposes his compulsion to echo the formative trauma. The echo compulsion reveals the fallacy of Severin’s claims of sexual autonomy by highlighting the re-enactment’s distortion, but the notion of the echo also highlights a further removal of Severin’s sexual autonomy. An echo is not only a distorted return but it is an externalised manifestation of its own source. Severin may believe he regains control of his sexuality in choreographing restaged scenes of his childhood trauma, but like an echo, the scenes become externalised from him as they are performed and thus removed from his control.

‘You still don’t get it. You never have and you never will.’: Memory as an Echo Chamber in Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending
Elizabeth Purdy
doi:10.59860/wph.a1659d8

Julian Barnes’s 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, begins with a carefully careless list of images that the narrator claims to remember ‘in no particular order’. As the novel progresses, these images are revealed to be significant for the narrator because he associates them with two events from his time at University: a failed relationship and the suicide of his close friend. By the end of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the narrator has falsely attributed significance to these memories and that — within a broader context — there were other moments which could have shed far more clarity on the events of the past. This article closely examines the narrator’s list of memories, in order to demonstrate that they are comparable to a sequence of echoes that reflect the plot of the novel. It argues that this process of echoing enables the reader to consider the distortive effects of memory, by emphasizing certain aspects of the story over others and thus altering the sequence of events, just as echoes distort sound. Through this line of reasoning, it draws upon the work of Peter Brooks and Roland Barthes to consider how memory acts as an echo chamber for the narrator, permitting him to use remembered events to create a false narrative which continually perpetuates itself, even when faced with contradictory evidence. The article goes on to argue that the beginning of the novel even exploits the reader’s own memory, forcing them to become complicit in the narrator’s echo chamber.

Destabilizing the Nineteenth-Century Maidservant Revolt Narrative: Leïla Slimani’s Chanson douce (2016)
Jessica Rushton
doi:10.59860/wph.a274dbb

This paper argues that Leïla Slimani’s novel, Chanson douce (2016), recontextualizes and renews a nineteenth-century French discourse surrounding the literary figure of the feared and rebellious maidservant through the representation of her twenty-first-century avatar: the nanny. By analysing how Slimani’s nanny figure echoes the strategies of revolt used by vengeful maidservant protagonists in nineteenth-century novels, notably Mirbeau’s Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1900), I propose that Chanson douce transforms a discourse that characterizes a genre of nineteenth-century French literature: le roman de la servante (the servant novel). Writers of this genre posit a maidservant protagonist who revolts, seeks revenge and often has a hidden, double life. Fictions in this genre, as shown through Mirbeau’s novel, act as performative texts: they embody and exacerbate the century’s discourse around the feared, rebellious maidservant. By applying Georges Didi-Huberman’s four categories of revolt to Slimani’s protagonist, I investigate how the strategies of revolt implemented by dubious maidservants in nineteenth-century texts, are turned, in the twenty-first century, against the modern employer.

Oaths and Exuviae: Echoes of Credit in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
Emma Venter
doi:10.59860/wph.a384202

Humans are constantly losing pieces of themselves to the world: hair, skin, teeth, breath. Social anthropologist Alfred Gell calls these lost pieces exuvaie and contends they are evidence of humans’ innately ‘distributed personhood’. Although for Gell, exuvaie are physical, I argue that certain types of language — particularly oaths and promises — are fundamentally linked to personhood and can attain exuvial status. These forms of language constitute what John Kerrigan calls ‘binding language’ and function as echoes of those who swear them. Such echoes were particularly important in the economy of early modern England, where exchange was conducted primarily through rhetorical cultivation of reputation and credit rather than hard coin. Oaths could be trusted precisely because of what they echoed: the honour and reputation of the individual who swears. In Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, the line between physical and verbal exuvaie is blurred in the highly rhetorical political economy of the play. The ‘voices’ of Rome, the plebeians, have the power to produce powerful binding language by echoing Coriolanus’ actions as a soldier, putting their ‘tongues into [his] wounds’ to speak for them and commodify them. These echoes of the physical body conceptualize anxieties about dismemberment and dissembling generated by exuvaie. When asked to expose his wounds to the people in exchange for their voices, Coriolanus risks allowing them to construct their own symbolic and economic understanding of his injuries and identity; in commodifying and trading in echoes of his body, he risks becoming signified and constructed by his wounds alone.