Ears and Father, Ogres and Community: Reply to Guntis Å midchens

Ears and Father, Ogres and Community:

Reply to Guntis Smidchens

Stalin was right when he referred to writers as the engineers of human souls. I have to admit that I too was thus "engineered"—by Andrejs Pumpurs' 1888 Latvian epic poem Lāčplēsis (Bear-Slayer). It is a work whose social meaning scholars still ponder. My schoolteacher reproached me for a critical essay I wrote in which I suggested that the hero was indecisive, a trait that made the poem boring for me to read. At that point in my life, I did not yet know that the business of "making" literary heroes was a task of state ideology. I drew a lesson from this experience: one has to hide real thoughts about matters of public interest. My next important test concerned the protagonist of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, the famous nihilist Evgenii Bazarov, who according to Soviet ideology was a precursor of Russian revolutionaries. This time my essay was not critical, but abundant in ecstatic glorification. Of course, I was convinced that my essay was neither false nor hypocritical but a statement of non-violent resistance to an ideologized educational system. Paradoxically, these teenage memories criss-cross with the social problems I find myself now researching in an "adult" society with no prior democratic experience (forget about liberalism).

Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Analysis

Pumpurs defined Lāčplēsis as an "epic song." Its canonic status as epic was attributed to it by literary critics. Genre here fulfils a transtextual function in two ways defined by Gérard Genette (1982): generic definition wraps the poem paratextually (that is, presenting it as an epic) while the composition imitates epic architextually (that is, in its structure). Recognizing these hints, the reader is encouraged to apply interpretive schemes peculiar to the national heroic epic. Nevertheless, it does not mean that the text itself follows this ancient form of storytelling. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in a society seeking to develop national consciousness, Lāčplēsis had to do more than tell a story. In my view, therefore, the text needs to be analyzed with reference to how it fulfilled both paratextual and architextual functions.

First, as a literary work written in the period of nation building, Pumpurs' epic enabled the reading community to define itself as a political community with shared values and goals. To use Homi Bhabha's terminology, it served as the narration of the nation. As author, Pumpurs consciously remodeled the folk epic genre to connect it to the most important issues of his epoch. He used folklore as a means to prompt readers to reflect on the nation and what the nation had to achieve (Kalninš 1984). The inclusion of Enlightenment ideas about national sovereignty, which are essential to the meaning of the text, precluded the total imitation of the epic form in Lāčplēsis. Secondly, transtextual reference to the epic genre was intended as proof of the longevity of a community whose boundaries coincided with language. The text's status as folklore increases its discursive authority by grounding political claims in historical tradition and providing a sense of the continuity of the "nation."

Guntis Šmidchens applies formal paradigmatic analysis to Lāčplēsis, that is, he seeks to demonstrate the strength of the hero's character by enumerating positively evaluated moves. In so doing, he ignores the syntagm of the story. By extracting events from the context one loses sight of the forest behind the trees. In my approach to Lāčplēsis, I followed Tzvetan Todorov, who encourages scholars to read—and to take into account—the entire text and not only its parts (1971:177). The interpreter is expected to grasp how particular events lead the hero to (or distract him from) successfully accomplishing his final test. In light of the tragic finale of the tribe, it is interesting to think about how Pumpurs would explain the hero...