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physically while the transportations practice space technically. Both of them create movements and various angles to interpret space. Ways of seeing multiply space.
Consequently, space is altered by the invisible force. The visual makes no marks on space but changes it secretly. Space, as a result, is diverse.
Sounds exist in every day. Various recorded sounds such as the “radio,” the
“television,” and “the phonograph record” are “cut” into pieces and repeat constantly (de Certeau 132). The sound creates “a sonic landscape” or “a site of sounds” which is manipulated and codified by an unknown system (de Certeau 132). Space, therefore, is subjugated not only by the visual domination but also by the invisible propaganda.
Sound combines the far distance and the present site in the same space. It breaks the geographical limitation and juxtaposes the different locations together.
The last spatial practice is in the mental space. The mental space is outside the daily repetition as de Certeau mentions that these mental spaces are “outside of and isolated from daily competition, that of the past, the marvelous, the original” (23). In the mental space, time is the key element to change the present space. Memories, dreams, fantasies, and stories disturb the current temporary and change it into a chaos.
Space can be transformed physically and mentally. The sense of the past, the present, and the future becomes blurred in the mental space.
1.3. Chapter Organization
This paper will focus on spatial practices in Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. This thesis is categorized into three discussions about space: the visual space, the auditory space, and the mental space. In the visual space, first of all, spatial practice is
conducted by both the feet and the various transportations. At the very beginning, I will discuss how Auden creates space. Space is created by the spatial practitioners.
According to de Certeau, the walkers are writing without seeing the space: “[t]hey
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walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers,
Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they
write without being able to read it” (sic) (93). The walkers create the distinct spectacles through various paths. Space is filled with possibilities for takingadventures. Next, I suggest that the transportations are also the spatial practitioners.
Besides walking, Auden also provides various transportations to experience space.
They are: car, train, bicycle, airplane, and boat. Each of them has its certain speed to explore space. By different speeds, theses transportations offer unique spatial
experiences. Moreover, the manifold perspectives offer peculiar angles to see space.
The four characters create their spaces through the transportations. Space is multiple.
Therefore, I will also discuss how space is altered by the transportations.
The next chapter will discuss the auditory space, which include the sound of the radio and the listeners’ interpretations. The radio sound is an anonymous and
impersonal voice which is controlled by an invisible power. As de Certeau has stated that there is “no such ‘pure’ voice, because it is always determined by a system . . . and codified by a way of receiving it” (132). In daily life, the mechanic voice haunts everywhere. However, the listeners can go against the authority through expressing their thoughts. In daily life, the totalitarianism dominates space to create a uniform surface through the designed codes but the listeners can disobey and decode it.
In the last section, I will discuss about the mental space. There are stories and fantasies that allow the four characters break the boundary or the rules of the society in the mental space. The mental space creates a displacement of being here or over-there. These spatial practices resist the established regulations and invent opportunities beneath the dominated society. The confusion about time and space makes the four characters uncertain about the present. Consequently, the sense of
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Space is full of possibilities and multi-facets. Instead of using the Jungian archetypal psychoanalysis, I apply de Certeau’s theory to analyze Auden’s The Age of
Anxiety. Through this methodology, this poem has a new way to appreciate. By
different spatial practices, the characters create their own spaces. Therefore, through the individual interpretations, the ordinary man can find ways to resist the dominated space.‧ 國
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The third section11 of The Age of Anxiety, “The Seven Stages,” is typically interpreted from Jung’s psychoanalysis. Each landscape corresponds to certain human body. For instance, in Jacobs’ note on The Age of Anxiety, he sorts out various
landscapes into a table, that is, the “high heartland” as “heart,” “the hermetic garden ,”
as “ears,” or “desert,” as “back” (131). The journey in “The Seven Stages,” according to Callen, is also an unconscious journey that penetrates every character’s psyche.
Callen also considers that “the psychological and spiritual allegories converge” in the third section (“The Age of Anxiety and The Rake’s Progress” 209). The idea of
landscape as human body is also discussed in Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb’s “Time Tormented.” For Gottlieb, the body is not merely the human body but also a divine body of God. She interprets this work from a religious perspective and sees the journey as a quest for Messiah.
Besides the archetypal perspective to see body as a symbol, Auden’s poetry is full of images. In her article “Auden’s landscape,” Paola Marchetti points out that the landscape in Auden’s poetry is “both real and symbolic” (200). Most discussions tend to study the symbolic meaning in Auden’s work. Nevertheless, the real landscape images also play significant roles to present the kaleidoscope views in Auden’s work.
Auden’s landscape writing is influenced by both Thomas Hardy and T. S. Eliot.
11 For Herbert Greenberg, the stages represent the essence of existence. He suggests that “. . . ‘Stages’
depict, not stages of spiritual progress or stages of a lifetime, so much as modes of being or, perhaps better, of knowing, that we experience and rely on moving from sleep through the course of a normal day, each representing a different level of human resource to be soberly examined and found inadequate as a guide to existence” (“The Failure of Caliban and Ariel” 163). For Beth Ellen Roberts, “The Seven Stages” has religious symbols: “The Age of Anxiety includes several kabbalistic references in addition to the breaking of the vessels. He [Auden] indicated to Ansen that the symbolism of “The Seven Stages”
section of the poem has a kabbalistic origin, explaining, ‘It’s all done in the Zohar’” (“W. H. Auden and the Jews” 102).
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Marchetti mentions that Hardy influences Auden to see reality “from a great distance,” and Eliot teaches Auden to see “reality close up, from a particular, and often squalid, urban viewpoint” (201). In The Age of Anxiety, especially, in “The Seven Stages,” Auden demonstrates the numerous angles to see space. Seeing makes the spectator connect with space without physical touching.
One of the critics, John R. Boly, has pointed out that the purpose of seeing is to search for human inwardness: “all man ever has seen or ever will see is, his own projected inwardness” (145). Boly considers that this inwardness can “recreate the world” (145). However, Boly’s viewpoint is also based on the archetypal
psychoanalysis that this vison corresponds to human unconsciousness and this inwardness represents the human body.
Previous critics mainly discuss this poem from the psychoanalysis perspective.
However, Auden portrays manifold landscapes in this section, including ponds, a messy inn, ports, country scenes, a city, forest, desert, and so on. These spectacles are demonstrated from the individual angles. Moreover, these individual perspectives are ways of resistance to the totalitarianism. In “The Seven Stages,” there are many spectacles that demonstrate how a space is planned by an unknown and invisible power. Therefore, the four characters create their own ways to escape from the totalitarian society.
The four characters take the different transportations to see space. De Certeau expounds that “to read is to wander through an imposed system (that of the text, analogous to the constructed order of a city or of a supermarket)” (169). Seeing is not bound to a certain location or fixed by the limitation. It moves, links, and combines with varieties. De Certeau illustrates that the reader has no place:
his place is not here or there, one or the other, but neither the one nor the
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other, simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together, associating texts like funerary statues that he awakens and hosts, but never owns. In that way, he also escapes from the law of each text in particular, and from that of the social milieu. (sic) (174)
In “The Seven Stages,” the four characters keep moving toward various places and they see space via different angles. They are a group of outsiders and never belong to the local community. They float to elsewhere, especially through the visual changing.
Space and the visual sense are closely connected since space has its meaning only through the readers’ interpretations. Different readers’ responses will invent multiple spaces, which mix the interpretations with the individual experiences. The
relationship between space and the reader is not like the one between a subject and an object. The readers do not always focus on one point; they move. They see space but never possess it. Through seeing, they escape from the present circumstances.
Consequently, in this chapter, I would like to see how the four characters view space through walking and taking transportations and how these individual operations go against the totalitarian strategies. Space oscillates between the visible
manipulations and the invisible tactics. The oscillation makes space uncertain and multiple.