On Space/Time
Jessica Gildersleeve, John McKeane
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Violence and Non-Violence: French Catholic Writers between the Mimetic Crisis and the Crucified
Brian J. Sudlow
doi:10.59860/wph.a6b4efa

This article explores the hypothesis that using René Girard’s literary and anthropological theories of mimesis, violence, and Christianity to analyse some of the works of the French Catholic literary revival could challenge interpretations which have hitherto characterized such writings as ‘reactionary’. A preliminary exploration of Girard’s theory traces its three main branches. Girardian mimesis redefines desire as essentially imitative in nature; the scapegoat mechanism describes a cathartic process which provides the resolution of mimetic conflict through the religious victimization of some individual or group; the Gospel alternative to the scapegoat stems from Girard’s rereading of the Bible in which he finds non-violent solutions for mimetic conflict. These theoretical tools are then applied to Paul Bourget’s novel Le Sens de la mort (1915) and Georges Bernanos’s political pamphlet Les Grands Cimetières sous la lune (1938). Bourget’s novel presents a clear case of mimetic conflict. Jealous of an apparent rival, an older man tests his young wife’s love in a suicide pact. His apparent rival undermines this hostility by sacrificing his genuine but controlled affection for the older man’s wife. Bernanos’s pamphlet depicts the ills of French and Spanish conservatives, lamenting their mimetic cupidity and attacking the nationalists’ involvement in the Spanish Civil War as an outbreak of mimetic violence. He proposes the espousal of Franciscan poverty as a cure for mimetic cupidity and the rediscovery of evangelical childhood as a cure for mimetic violence. The discoveries made by undertaking a Girardian reading of these works suggest the potential for a more comprehensive Girardian rereading of the French Catholic literary revival to challenge our understanding of their reactionary character. They also point to new sources and perspectives from which to explore Girardian paradigms.

Cells, Recesses, Tombs: Vertiginous Spaces in Bataille’s Le Bleu du ciel
Michael Eades
doi:10.59860/wph.a7c4341

As part of an ongoing PhD project exploring transgressive literary approaches to urban space and the city in twentieth-century Paris and London, this essay examines the writing of space in Georges Bataille’s 1957 work of erotic fiction Le Bleu du ciel [Blue of Noon]. Considered in the light of Bataille’s own early theoretical writings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, as found in articles published in the avant-garde journal Documents, Le Bleu du ciel will be viewed as the staging of an essential conflict, present throughout Bataille’s thought, between transgression and containment, structure and formlessness. Denis Hollier has suggested that Bataille’s recourse to architectural and spatial analogy is tied to a wider impulse to question and transgress structure in general, for which the vocabulary of architecture provides a linguistic base. Drawing upon this argument, my study suggests that in Le Bleu du ciel Bataille’s antistructural impulse is developed, within the inherently structured form of the novel, through the exploration of a network of thematically interconnecting spaces: cells, recesses, tombs. These spaces, it will be suggested, are in a state of vacillation in the novel, constantly enclosed and thrown open, confined and transgressed. Drawing upon theoretical work by Maurice Blanchot, the article considers how these vacillating, unstable, and vertiginous depictions of space might relate to the experience of reading – ultimately considering the status of Le Bleu du ciel as a textual space that induces vertigo in its readers.

The Rebirth of Inherited Memories
Richard Lee
doi:10.59860/wph.a8d3788

Women were arguably the worst victims of the Partition of India in 1947 and endured displacement, violence, abduction, prostitution, mutilation, and rape. However, on reading histories of the division of India, one finds that the life-stories of women are often elided, and that there is an unwillingness to address the atrocities of 1947. This reticence results partly from the desires of the Indian and Pakistani governments to portray the events as freak occurrences with no place in their modern nations. Literature can play an important role in interrupting state-managed histories, and ‘The Rebirth of Inherited Memories’ focuses upon the manner in which Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers (2001) unsettles official versions of Partition. It examines how the novel acts as a counterpoint to ‘national’ accounts of 1947 through its depiction of the gendered nature of much of the violence, and it explores Baldwin’s representation of the elusive concept of ‘body memory’. The possibility of remembrances being passed on physically, or born within people, has found support in the eschatologies of Eastern religions, in Western psychological theories, and in recent scientific investigations into the ‘mind-body’ problem. The transmission of ‘body memories’ between generations serves to disrupt accounts that downplay the brutalities at the splitting of India. This paper draws upon a chapter of my doctoral thesis that investigates issues of memory and the enduring influence of Partition in South Asia.

Did Melville Misplace Santa Maria in Benito Cereno?
Will Slocombe
doi:10.59860/wph.a0594eb

Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) adapted Captain Amasa Delano’s Voyages and Travels (1817) in order to draw out particular subtexts of racial politics and prejudicial attitudes, and thus to resonate with a contemporary antebellum audience. Exploring the rationale for these changes more broadly, this paper proposes that another change has so far gone unnoticed in critical responses to the tale: the transposition of Santa Maria, an island off the coast of Chile. Demonstrating that this is unlikely to be an unintentional slip, given Melville’s familiarity with both the source text and the Chilean coastline, it argues that there were numerous possible reasons for doing this, including a desire to highlight colonial issues and comment on contemporary race relations both north and south of the Equator. As such, this piece utilizes a small array of key texts, rather than the broader biographical and contextually oriented sources that comprise the core of the larger piece of ongoing research to which this belongs. In so doing, it asserts that Melville’s desire to change the source text to fit with his own artistic, political, and æsthetic goals still causes problems for critics today, inasmuch as this geographical mischief is yet another ‘knotty problem’ in the ongoing debate about Melville’s motives for writing Benito Cereno.

Museums and the Narrative Representation of the Nation: Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Arte
Elaine Luck
doi:10.59860/wph.a168932

This paper examines Mexico City’s new Museo Nacional de Arte [National Museum of Art], addressing the implications of establishing a national museum, a form closely associated with nineteenth-century nation- building processes, in a global era in which the role of nation-states is said to be reduced. This study, which forms part of my wider research on Mexican visual culture in relation to state discourses, argues that the establishment of this new museum should be viewed in the context of the economic and political changes that began to take place during the 1980s as a result of International Monetary Fund restructuring policies. Focusing on the internal organization of this museum as a form of narrative, I approach it as a contemporary repositioning of the nation which constitutes a departure from the model of national identity developed during the seventy-year period of Partido Revolucionario Institucional [Institutional Revolutionary Party] rule. I propose that unlike the Museo Nacional de Antropología [National Museum of Anthropology], which embodied official identity constructions by emphasizing the pre-Hispanic origins of Mexican culture, MUNAL emphasizes its modern European foundations, attempting to inscribe it into a ‘universal’ narrative of Western civilization.

Mobile Narrative, Spatial Mediation, and Gaskell’s Urban Rustics in North and South
Abigail Dennis
doi:10.59860/wph.a277991

Addressing the (hitherto relatively neglected) question of spatial relations in Elizabeth Gaskell’s industrial novel North and South (1855), this essay draws on Raymond Williams’s concept of the ‘knowable community’, as well as nineteenth-century notions of the æsthetics of the picturesque (as elucidated by Linda Austin and Nancy Armstrong), to examine Gaskell’s construction of class and social space. I employ close reading of the text and critical synthesis to demonstrate that Margaret Hale, posited as a ‘spatial mediatrix’ and ethnographer of the nascent industrial metropolis of Milton/Manchester, progresses from a conception of working-class life as essentially picturesque – æsthetically stimulating, but lacking in material substance – to an appreciation of the complexity and materiality of social spaces. Margaret is a flâneuse, who attempts an active identification with the urban environment and its inhabitants. By enabling Margaret to view her own position in society relative to that of others, Gaskell makes visible the ‘knowable community’ of the industrial urban poor, and demonstrates the importance of moving beyond an æstheticized mode of comprehending this community’s material concerns and conditions. Paradoxically, however, a consistent lack of subjectivity and interiority in Gaskell’s representations of the members of this community testifies to their status as ‘urban rustics’, a term the author uses to describe a version of the deindividuated choral mode that Williams identifies as characterizing George Eliot’s 1859 portrait of rural life, Adam Bede. While Gaskell’s novel succeeds in introducing its heroine and its reader to the private spaces of the industrial working classes, it ultimately stops short of bestowing fully formed and individualized consciousnesses on the knowable community it renders visible, thus negating its social and literary effectiveness. Significantly, however, Gaskell’s novel comes to terms with the loss of an idealized rural past, and the ascendance of the urban, in a way that Eliot’s seems, finally, unable to countenance.