Zapf, Hubert. "Triadic Functional Model of Literature as Cultural Ecology.

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 12

Triadic Functional Model of Literature as

Cultural Ecology

As has been seen in the various texts and contexts discussed so far, the function
of literature as an ecological force within culture is both deconstructive and
reconstructive. Literature is a transformative force within cultural discourses
that breaks open ossified forms of language, communication, and thought,
symbolically empowers the marginalized, and reconnects what is culturally
separated. In a more generalized version, the functional model of literature as
cultural ecology which emerges from the dialogue between text and theory,
ecological thought and literary interpretation informing this book, can be
described as a dynamic interrelation of three major discursive functions (Zapf
2002, 2008): the functions of a culture-critical metadiscourse, an imaginative
counter-discourse, and a reintegrative interdiscourse.
Triadic models of describing cultural-historical and aesthetic processes
have been employed in different ways since Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind,
which posits an open-ended dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and new
synthesis as the dynamic principle of both thought and reality (Hegel 1807).
What this implies, and what still appears relevant to an ecology of mind
and culture, is that thought and reality do not consist of isolated ideas or
individual entities but are part of a holistic, relational, dynamic, interactive, and
transformative process in which the Real is dissolved from a fixed and static
essence of Being into a fluid, continuously changing process of Becoming. The
mind is no longer regarded in abstract separation from reality and history but
conceived as an active part and force of historical-cultural evolution. Nature,
however, as well as sensory experience, is still subordinated in this process
to the mind. Nature is the phenomenological externalization of the Absolute
Spirit, which created the material world in order to reach an ever-higher stage
96 Literature as Cultural Ecology

of self-realization in its striving to overcome that material world (Hegel 1807).

Consequently, art and aesthetic experience, which are closely tied in their
signifying practices to material nature and sensory experience, remain inferior
to systemic logocentric thought, since they merely deal with the “sensuous
appearance of the idea” (Hegel 1835), whereas the idea as such is only fully
accessible to conceptual philosophical knowledge.
The way from a phenomenology to an ecology of mind, however, was already
opened up in Hegel’s own time in the nature philosophy of F. W. Schelling and
his revisionary reinterpretation of idealist philosophy. To Schelling, matter
and mind, nature and culture are fundamentally interrelated not in terms of a
hierarchical opposition but of different forms of “potencies,” in which ever new
fusions between traditional opposites such as subject and object, the real and
the imaginary, are achieved. The ecological strand of the German philosophy
of nature culminated in Schelling, to whom “nature was visible mind, mind
invisible nature” (Rigby 2014: 67). It is no longer conceptual knowledge but
the artistic imagination which becomes the supreme faculty and mode of
cultural productivity that continuously contributes to that transformative
fusion of self and other, mind and nature, spirit and matter, which is
necessary for the full realization of the creative potential of human culture
(Schelling 1807).1 This view of the artistic imagination as a central power of
mediation between the real and the ideal, difference and identity, diversity
and unity, has of course had an enormous influence on aesthetic concepts of
British and American romanticism as well, above all on Coleridge’s concept of
the “secondary imagination,” which is an aesthetic activity evolving from the
“primary imagination” of active human perception in a process that is both
deconstructive and reconstructive: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order
to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events
it struggles to idealize and unify” (Coleridge 471). This concept, in turn, has
influenced critics and writers in the Anglo-American world throughout the
nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Hazard Adams comments on Schelling’s theory of art as mediator between natural and cultural
1

creativity as follows: “Schelling rejected Kant’s idea that ‘things in themselves’ are unknowable.
Instead he posited a subject and object that are joined in aesthetic activity. This joining is a creative
act. Further, Schelling saw man’s creativity as analogous to the unconscious creativity of nature”
(Adams 444).
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 97

Another widely received triadic model of interpreting the process of

knowledge and the logic of cultural production is Charles Sanders Peirce’s
semiotics. Peirce was himself indebted to Hegel’s dialectic to a degree.
Even though he criticized the lack of attention to immediate experience
and individuality, he nevertheless considered Hegel’s dialectic as “closely
allied to pragmaticism” in three ways: in its attempt to construct a “non-
dualistic account of thought and action;” in its interpretation of reality in
terms of “evolution;” and in its “triadic structure” (Shapiro 269). In place of
Hegel’s spirit, Peirce posits the sign as the central conceptual premise and
driving force of history and culture, shifting the focus from a metaphysical
to a semiotic notion of evolution but maintaining the triadic structure
of thought and reality as a dynamic, interactive, and creative process, in
which the sign itself is never static or fixed in its meanings but involved in
always shifting relations and interpretations between the referent (the Real),
the sign (the semiotic construct), and the interpretant (the intersubjective
process of interpreting the relation between sign and referent). In this triadic
structure, the sign in Peirce is distinct from the binary concept of the sign in
structuralism and poststructuralism, offering a relational, communicational,
and explorative rather than a merely formal-differential model of linguistic
and cultural semiosis. As Wheeler and others have shown, the Peircean model
can be productively extended toward a biosemiotics that encompasses the
communication of “living signs” both in human and nonhuman forms of life
(Wheeler 2011; Emmeche).
In this latter sense, Peirce’s semiotic conception of the triadic model of
cultural signification has some affinity to the triadic functional model of
imaginative literature proposed here. At the same time, there are two major
points of difference: On one hand, Peirce’s model is highly abstract and general;
it refers to signifying processes across different scales and media in basically
the same way and doesn’t focus enough on the differentia specifica of the
various domains, modes, and genres of cultural communication—in our case
on the generative principles and functional features of imaginative literature
as a distinct discursive-semiotic practice within the larger system of cultural
discourses. On the other hand, his model also strongly relies on individual
agency and interpretive activity while neglecting the systemic aspects of such
interpretations in terms of the larger sociohistorical collectives and discursive
98 Literature as Cultural Ecology

formations in which they are embedded. Of course, all users and interpreters
of signs, as all writers and readers of literature, are first and foremost
individuals who inscribe themselves into existing sign systems in always
singular and unique ways and from their own concrete personal perspective
and horizon. Indeed, the advantage of Peirce’s semiotics is that it does justice to
the irreducible role of individual and intersubjective agency in the signifying
processes of culture, which has been downplayed in poststructuralist and
discourse-analytical models. And a biosemiotic extension of this approach can
help move human beings into focus as both socially and biologically situated
agents within life-sustaining networks of communication, which also enable
and underlie more elaborate forms of cultural and aesthetic communication
(Wheeler 2011).
Nevertheless, it seems helpful to supplement this approach by including
two additional frames of reference for positioning the functional-evolutionary
model of literature proposed here: social systems theory and literary
anthropology, both of which I can only briefly sketch here insofar as they
are relevant to a cultural ecology of literature. In a systems-theoretical view,
the autonomization of the social subsystem of literature in its recent stage of
cultural evolution has resulted from the functional differentiation of modern
society since the late eighteenth century, in which other subsystems, such as
the systems of economy, law, politics, science, religion, or bureaucracy, become
increasingly independent from their former ties to an overarching social
totality and from each other as well. All these subsystems function as closed,
autopoetic systems of self-organized communication, which maintain their
internal stability through constantly reproducing a sharp difference between
inside and outside, between the system and its environment, and between the
internal, psychic worlds of individual human beings and the systemic forms of
social communication (Luhmann 1982). The special function of the subsystem
of literature, and particularly of the novel that emerges as a new form of textual
genre at about that time, is paradoxical: In its pluridimensional forms of
reconnecting the culturally separated domains, literature specializes precisely
in the attempt to overcome the modern specialization of cultural discourses
and subsystems. In reconnecting psychic to social systems, which are alienated
from each other in the functional cycles of a compartmentalized society,
literature aims to redress the damaging effects of functional differentiation for
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 99

the subject and for civic society (Reinfandt 381). What this also means is that
literature not only functions as a medium of critical reflection and symbolic
corrective of the civilizational process but as a metacognitive domain, which
brings together, on always new levels, different forms of cultural knowledge
that are being split up into ever more specialized fields and subdisciplines in
the course of advancing modernization. For this function, Jürgen Link has
coined the term “reintegrative interdiscourse,” which I am adopting as one of
the three subfunctions of literature that I am distinguishing (Link).
While this systems-theoretical view helps to account for the collective,
systemic aspect of social communication that is underrepresented in Peirce’s
semiotics, it neglects what the latter foregrounds, notably its attention
to individuality and intersubjectivity, to agency and interactivity, to
improvisation and creativity as constitutive factors in the process of cultural
and literary semiosis.2 In Peirce, the emphasis on these qualities leads to a
neglect of the forces of collective signification and heteronomous pressures
of discourse, with which individual subjects are faced as both, participating
insiders or alienated outsiders, of the system. In social systems theory, on
the other hand, these collective processes of communication tend to be seen
as closed circles of self-referential signification, which follow completely
depersonalized rules of self-stabilizing reproduction but leave little space
for personal and interpersonal agency and creativity, let alone for the shared
forms of human/nonhuman communication and creativity that move into
view from a biosemiotic recontextualization of Peirce’s semiotics. If both the
social-systemic and the (bio-)semiotic approach are taken into account, it
appears that an additional perspective is gained, in which these two cognitive
frames can be brought to complement each other’s insights to produce a more
complex picture of literary communication. Such a perspective would connect
a historical-systemic with a semiotic-experiential view but would also highlight
the inescapable tension, contradiction, and potential conflict that inevitably
shapes this relation and the process of cultural signification in general—that is,
the tension and conflict between individual and intersubjective constructions
of meaningful, self-determined, vitally interrelated existence on the one hand

For this creative dimension of Peirce’s semiotics, see Susanne Rohr, Über die Schönheit des Findens.
2

Die Binnenstruktur menschlichen Verstehens nach Charles S. Peirce: Abduktionslogik und Kreativität.
Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993.
100 Literature as Cultural Ecology

and the depersonalized, conformist, and automatized forms of systemic

communication on the other, which at once enable and preclude the possibility
of self-determined cultural and personal semiosis.
It seems to be the historically evolved task of literary communication
to open up, in ever new ways, this space of a creative, fully realized (eco-)
semiosis of human existence and communication within and against the
prevailing systems of cultural discourses. This implies a counterdiscursive
element of deconstruction, conflict, and resistance to the validity claims of
existing social, linguistic, and discursive power systems as part of a deeply
inscribed cultural ecology of texts. Russian formalists already pointed out this
aspect in their conception of literary aesthetics as ostranenie, as deviation from
normative speech and defamiliarization of familiar habits of perception and
communication (Sklovskij). They regarded the cultural work of literary texts as
a radical slowing-down of perception and a de-automatization of standardized
communication and argued that only the alienating, deconstructive procedures
of the aesthetic could bring to light the alienating structures of a heteronomous
life. Literature was able to liberate language and signification by counteracting,
subverting, and restructuring the semiotic codes of culture along the lines of
their own imaginative force-fields.
Whereas formalists pointed at this aspect as a phenomenon within the
discourse of literary art itself, theorists of the Frankfurt school emphasized in
more fundamental ways the conflictive, oppositional implications of literary
aesthetics to the totalizing claims of instrumental reason. In this, they still
loosely followed the Hegelian model of dialectic and its various transformations
in Marxism. They applied it to the relationship between art and society in ways
which significantly deviated from classical Marxism, however; they replaced
deterministic conceptions of the base-superstructure relationship by granting
various degrees of relative autonomy to the work of art while still remaining
acutely aware of the inescapable realities of a heteronomous life in capitalist
consumer society. The spectrum ranges from Walter Benjamin’s distrust of
hegemonic generalizing concepts, which were delegitimized by art through
its emphasis on concreteness, singularity, and fragmentary detail, nevertheless
refracting a lost unity of life in the debris of history (Benjamin 1969); to Herbert
Marcuse’s psychomachia between eros and thanatos that was enacted in art as
a form of regenerative therapy for civilizational anxieties (Marcuse 1987); to
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 101

Ernst Bloch’s utopian impulse of hope that could transcend and potentially
change the conditions of alienated existence (Bloch 1995); and to Theodor
Adorno’s negative aesthetics, in which art was merely a broken mirror of
such utopian alternatives (Adorno). For all their differences, these versions of
critical theory shared the belief in the critical-transformative potential of art as
an alternative to the catastrophes of modern history, which was authenticated
by its very exposure of the inauthenticity of the capitalist commodification of
life. They regarded art, especially but not exclusively experimental avant-garde
art, as a transgressive form of resistance within the challenges brought about
by the dialectic of enlightenment and the ambiguities of civilizational progress.
However implicated this oppositional or deconstructive impulse itself may
be in the prevailing discourses and power structures, as postmodernists and
new historicists have been insisting, it still constitutes an irreducible element
of any literary and aesthetic theory that tries to do justice to the full range
and potential of literary communication within culture. A position which has
theorized this in ways that cross the boundaries between the different camps
is Bakhtin’s dialogic and polyphonic concept of art, and especially of the novel,
which grew out of formalist as well as of Marxist traditions but also became
an influential direction of postmodern literary theory. In its emphasis on
embodied experiences within the genres of the grotesque and the carnivalesque,
Bakhtin’s theory affirms semiotic multiplicity and polymorphic liminality as a
counterdiscursive potential of texts and a hallmark of literary communication,
in which the culturally marginalized is foregrounded as a liberating force of
subversion and resistance to monologic structures of thought and discourse
(Bakhtin; Civelekoglu, Redling, Müller 2010, 2016).
Another triadic model that appears helpful in theoretically situating
the functional model proposed below is that of Wolfgang Iser’s literary
anthropology. Iser starts from the observation that the long-inherited
dichotomy between fiction and reality is not tenable because of the mutually
defining interdependency between these poles. While fiction always emerges
as a response to and is thereby intrinsically shaped by problems of cultural
reality, cultural reality itself does not only consist of an external, objective
dimension but also of an internal, imaginary one, without which neither
the cultural world nor the psychological world of individual subjects can be
adequately conceived. The “imaginary” is a shared anthropological feature
102 Literature as Cultural Ecology

of all human beings, a transgressive impulse of desires, fears, daydreams,

and wish-fulfilling fantasies, which shapes both the individual psyche and
the collective imagination of societies. In its continual tension with existing
external or internal realities, it underlies and pervades all human signification
but remains subliminal in the regulated forms of conscious public discourse.
This dimension of the imaginary, however, is brought into full play in fictional
texts, where it is symbolically articulated in its ever-changing relationship
to sociohistorical realities. Consequently, Iser replaces the dyadic relation
of fiction and reality by a triadic relation between the three modes of the
“real,” the “fictive,” and the “imaginary,” which are interacting in literary
texts. Through its embodiment in fictional narratives, the imaginary takes on
the concrete shape of possible experiential worlds, which stage the conflict
between anthropological needs and systemic realities, generating alternative
scenarios that respond to and simultaneously counteract the deficits and
blind spots of these systemic realities (Iser). In terms of a cultural ecology of
literature, Iser’s model is another useful frame of reference, which can help
to describe the transformative cultural function of texts within the larger
system of cultural discourses. As in the extension of Peirce’s semiotics into
a biosemiotic model of communication, Iser’s triadic functional model of
literary communication can be productively adapted to a cultural-ecological
model of texts, if the anthropological imaginary, that is, an individual- and
subject-centered concept of the imaginary that Iser posits as a driving force of
literary communication, is extended toward an ecological imaginary—which,
as this book argues, has shaped literary texts since the beginning of literary
history.
In the light of such observations, the functional potential of literature
as cultural ecology can be described as a combination of three different
but interrelated discursive functions or procedures—a culture-critical
metadiscourse, an imaginative counter-discourse, and a reintegrative
interdiscourse. Obviously, these procedures do not always occur in the
sequence or schematized form as they are presented below for reasons of
clarity. In fact, they are frequently interwoven; they overlap, compete with,
condition, and modify each other. But they seem to be three major ways in
which the function of literature as an ecological force within its larger cultural
system can be described.
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 103

I would like to illustrate this functional model in the following in a number

of novels which can be counted among the major texts of American literature, in
order to (1) underline the argument that the cultural-ecological function of texts
is intrinsically tied to their artistic power, and (2) to substantiate the theoretical
conceptualization of cultural ecology by providing concrete evidence from texts
themselves. The examples I am referring to are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet
Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. It goes without
saying that I cannot do justice to the intrinsic complexity of the novels but can only
highlight a few selective features, which however can help to demonstrate that the
cultural-ecological dimension I am describing here is vitally relevant to their overall
narrative dynamics and aesthetic function. The fact that in spite of their historical,
stylistic, and cultural diversity, these core novels of American literature share in
common basic features of the triadic model proposed here, serves to corroborate
the plausibility of the theoretical approach of a cultural ecology of literature.

Literature as culture-critical metadiscourse

To call the first of these three functions a culture-critical metadiscourse

first of all implies that literary texts are not only externally but intrinsically
related to the sociohistorical conditions from which they emerge and to which
they respond. The discursive contexts of their real historical genesis are the
starting point and semiotic material of the fictional models of representation
and cultural self-reflection that literature develops. While converging in this
point with new-historical and discourse-analytical assumptions about the
inextricable interdependency of the literary discourse with other discourses of
its time and culture, a cultural-ecological account of the functional potential
of literature simultaneously insists on the generic difference of aesthetic texts,
which manifests itself, on one important level, in its culture-critical and
metadiscursive dimension. This critical dimension is not for the most part
a direct and oppositional form of criticism but an indirect form of critical
discursive energy which motivates a radical self-examination of prevailing
cultural systems from an overarching ecological perspective of individual and
collective survival and sustainability.
104 Literature as Cultural Ecology

In this function of a culture-critical metadiscourse, literature responds to

hegemonic discursive regimes by exposing petrifications, coercive pressures,
and traumatizing effects of dominant civilizational reality-systems that are
maintained and reinforced by those discursive regimes. In the novels presently
to be discussed, these discursive practices are characteristically presented as
pathogenic structures of severe external or internal constraint suppressing
individuality, difference, and multiplicity in the name of totalizing cultural
ideologies, which lead to chronic states of alienation, failed communication,
and paralyzed vitality. They are associated with overpowering demands and
conformist pressures on the individual and are frequently expressed in the
imagery of death-in-life, wasteland, stasis, uniformity, vicious circles, and
psychic or physical imprisonment. The deep-rooted biophobic self-alienation
which these images suggest typically results from exclusionary discursive
constructions of human reality in which the normative becomes the “normal”
and in which prevailing conceptions of cultural identity are based on
hierarchical binaries such as mind vs. body, intellect vs. emotion, inside vs.
outside, self vs. other, human culture vs. nonhuman nature.
These features are manifested in manifold but recurrent ways as part of
a shared generative code in the core texts of American literature mentioned
above. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the puritan system of early America
is presented, from the opening scene of the novel, in the image of a prison-
house of culture, which forms the metadiscursive framework from which
the narrative emerges and to which its complex semiotic processes remain
recursively related. The protagonist Hester Prynne steps out from the door
of the Boston jail, that “black flower of civilized society” (Hawthorne 76),
in which she had been incarcerated for three months with her illegitimate
daughter because of her transgression of the “Puritanic code of law” (80). The
prison, as the narrator explains, is a place where not only common criminals
but “fallen” women, disobedient children, indigenous people, or social and
religious dissenters, are locked away from society, thus institutionalizing the
binaries of inclusion and exclusion that underlie the puritan system in terms
of gender, culture, generation, religion, and politics (76–77). Standing on the
scaffold with her infant child on her arm, and the letter A, for “Adulteress,” on
the breast of her gown, Hester is exposed to a hostile crowd of citizens in the
spectacle of a public trial that excommunicates her from society in an official
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 105

act of visible stigmatization. In the central role of the letter A, this initial scene
metonymically highlights the exclusionary semiotics of a repressive society,
whose conformist pressures not only contradict the official self-image of an
ideal human community in a “New World” but paralyze biophilic energies
and cut off vital communicational ties, causing severe traumatic symptoms
of crisis in all main characters. By framing this core narrative of the scarlet
letter within the autobiographical sketch of his Custom House experiences,
Hawthorne reflexively links this diagnosis of deep-rooted civilizational self-
alienation from American society of his own day, which is satirically portrayed
in the microcosm of the Boston Custom House as a similarly calcified and
artistically paralyzing cultural environment.
In Melville’s American epic Moby-Dick, the narrator Ishmael escapes into
his adventures at sea from a bureaucratic life on land peopled by numberless co-
sufferers of Bartleby the scrivener, who are “tied to counters, nailed to benches,
clinched to desks,” (Melville Moby-Dick 23) populating the “great American
desert” (24) of the mind, which puts the narrator into a suicidal mood and
from which he tries to rescue himself by going to sea (“my substitute for pistol
and ball” 23). However, the dream of biophilic self-enhancement through
contact with the “ungraspable phantom of life” embodied in water (24) turns
into an even more disastrous nightmare of civilizational hubris in Captain
Ahab’s crusade of annihilating Moby-Dick, in which a megalomaniac will-to-
power over nature is doomed to lead into the suicide of an anthropocentric
civilization. The whale ship, as a symbol of the global economic expansion and
technological mastery of man over nonhuman nature, becomes itself a prison
which, at the end, is pulled into the abyss with its crew.
In Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, different intersecting aspects of US society
at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century become the object of a
culture-critical metadiscourse and the source of existential alienation, as well
as of subsequent rebellion, for the protagonist Edna Pontellier. The long-term
consequences of her strict Calvinist upbringing represented by her father; the
impersonal rules of the new stockmarket economy dominating the private life
of her husband Léonce Pontellier; the narrowly self-contained conventions of
the Creole community in which Edna remains an outsider; and the restrictive
gender roles of the Victorian Age—all of these influences converge into an
overriding sense of self-imprisonment as a starting-point of the narrative. This
106 Literature as Cultural Ecology

is introduced in the double motif of a parrot and a mocking-bird in a cage, with

which the novel opens. While the parrot endlessly repeats the same phrases
picked up from human conversation, the mocking-bird merges his musical
voice with the elements of nature outside, “whistling his fluty notes out upon
the breeze with maddening persistence” (Chopin 20). A sense of alienation
and tiring repetitiveness in the motif of the parrot, and a complementary
sense of transgressive self-expression in the motif of the mocking-bird, are
connoted in this initial scene, anticipating the conflict between rigidified
conventions and limitless desire in which the heroine finds herself and
which progressively escalates in the course of the novel. The social code of
commodified relationships in which Edna feels trapped and from which she
successively breaks out in the various stages of her “awakening” is exposed
as a conditioning frame of her existence in the novel’s initial scene already
in her husband Léonce’s reaction, who reprimands Edna for her irrational
behavior as she returns with a sunburned face from a noonday visit to the
beach, “looking at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property
that has suffered some damage” (20–21).
In William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the novel begins with a
scene of imprisoned life in the context of early twentieth century Southern
society, presented from the perspective of a character entirely cut off from
vital interrelations with his environment: “Through the fence, between the
curling flower spaces, he could see them hitting” (Faulkner 1971: 11). This
is the perspective of Benjy, the mentally retarded youngest member of the
Compson family, a formerly well-established family of the white Southern
aristocracy, which has long been in steady decline. Again the imagery of a
prison is the metaphorical starting point of a culture-critical metadiscourse.
Benjy, meanwhile thirty-three years old, is looking out through the bars of
the fence that cages him in from the activities of a social world he doesn’t
understand. For the reader as well, these activities only gradually gain contours
because of the highly incoherent and indeterminate texture of the narrative,
which follows Benjy’s chaotic perceptions and stream-of-consciousness,
presenting the normal world as a radically alien place. As it turns out, a
game of golf is being played on the former Compson property, the “pastures,”
where Benjy and the other Compson children used to play. Once a place of
free unsupervised play in wild nature with trees and a creek, it is now sold
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 107

to investors and transformed into a golf course, that is, into a domesticated
and commercialized postnatural space set up for a professionally regulated,
exclusive, and class-identified form of social entertainment. Benjy, who is
unable to speak, is clinging to the fence and starts to bellow in his unarticulated
wailing voice when he hears someone call the “caddy,” which reminds him of
his beloved sister Caddy, for whom he has been waiting at the fence to come
home from school. In fact, however, Caddy is long grown up and has moved
away from the town, having been banished as a black sheep from the family
because of her erotically motivated revolt against the conventions of Southern
society which, in a different way, are also imprisoning Benjy and excluding
him from social recognition and participation. These conventions are strictly
enforced by Jason, the middle brother, who tries to upkeep the façade of
Southern white aristocracy, and by the widowed mother Mrs. Compson. Mrs.
Compson is unable to accept the “family curse” of Benjy’s mental illness and,
on Jason’s insistence, has agreed to the castration of Benjy and to officially
disowning Caddy, forbidding her any further contact with the family in
a cold-hearted act of expulsion which enforces the exclusionary rules of
cultural normativity on her own daughter. Benjy’s older brother Quentin, too,
suffers from the self-destructive implications of this biophobic moral code,
which he has internalized to the degree that he strongly endorses the moral
condemnation of Caddy’s behavior, but also punishes himself for his own
love and secret erotic attraction to her. Like Benjy and the other characters,
Quentin is imprisoned in the long shadow of an inescapable past, which he
still cannot cast off as a student at Harvard. On the last day of his life, which
is covered in the second chapter of the book, he wanders around dressed like
a Southern squire, desperately trying to fight off time and his shadow, and
commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River—in the symbolic
medium of water which had also been the medium of his symbiotic intimacy
with his sister in their childhood days. Even Jason, as the most aggressive—and
most hypocritical—representative of that Southern code, whose perspective
dominates the novel’s third part, suffers from severe symptoms of alienation
and self-repression, manifested in chronic fits of unbearable headache. White
Southern society is presented, throughout the novel, as a coercive system
of cultural (self-) disciplining, which appears as a source of collective self-
alienation and psychosomatic paralysis.
108 Literature as Cultural Ecology

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the system of nineteenth century slavery appears

as a prisonhouse and source of collective traumatization of African Americans,
a system most insidiously personified by the figure of Schoolteacher. Acting on
the authority of education, science, and religion, Schoolteacher represents not
just an aberration from but a perverted manifestation of modern “civilization”
itself. The death-in-life situation which this entails for the characters is
depicted in many interrelated scenes—in the long years of traumatic paralysis
of the female protagonist, the former slave Sethe, who lives on the margins of
Cincinnati in a house on Bluestone Road, isolated from the black community
and haunted by her repressed memories, after her desperate act of killing her
own child to prevent her from being taken back into slavery; in the memories of
Paul D, another former slave and newly found friend of Sethe, of a prison work
camp where he was kept like an animal in a cage, and where his feelings were
locked up in his heart as if in a tin box: “Eighty-six days and done. Life was dead”
(Morrison 134); or in the two-year period of deafness of Sethe’s surviving other
daughter Denver and her nightmares about her mother cutting off her head
and subsequently braiding her hair, by which Denver is afflicted after she hears
about the horrors of her mother’s past and of her crime against her sister. The
characters are caught in vicious circles of mutual alienation and self-alienation,
which is the symptom of the all-pervasive terror of a biophobic civilizational
system that is the starting-point of the novel’s radical cultural critique.

Literature as imaginative counter-discourse

As a response to the sense of repression, imprisonment, and the paralysis of

vital relationships conveyed on the level of the culture-critical metadiscourse,
however, the texts simultaneously build up a counter-discursive dynamic,
which foregrounds and semiotically empowers the culturally excluded and
marginalized as a source of imaginative energy. In its alternative worlds,
literature articulates what remains unavailable in the prevailing categories
of cultural self-interpretation but nevertheless appears indispensable for an
adequately complex account of the lives of humans and their place in the more-
than-human-world. That way, the culturally excluded is articulated as a source
of literary creativity and is associated with an ecosemiotic agency that builds up
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 109

a kind of “magical” counterforce to the cultural reality system. Staging radical

difference, alterity, and resistance, this imaginative counter-discourse in texts
is simultaneously linked with images of nature, the body, the unconscious,
dreams, flux, change, contact, openness, vision, magic, multiformity, and
biophilic intensity.
Again, this function can be observed in the core texts discussed in this
chapter. In The Scarlet Letter, the imaginative counter-discourse quite explicitly
develops from the exclusions of the signifying practices of the civilizational
system. The letter A, which initially designates only one authoritative
meaning, “Adulteress,” is transformed in the narrative from a cultural signifier
of exclusion into an imaginative counterforce to the systemic dogmatism
from which it originated. This process of creative transformation is already
prefigured in the artistic embellishment of Hester’s self-made letter A:

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate
embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It
was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance
of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel
which she wore … (80)

Hester is the first artist in this narrative archaeology of cultural history, whose
original artwork—the letter A that she has sewed in the form of a highly
elaborate artifact—sets off the imaginative process of critical reflection and
storytelling of the novel. In this process, the letter A loses its initial univocal
determinacy and becomes the medium of always new, changing meanings
(e.g., able, angel, apocalypse, America, or art), which, in the openness of their
constant semiosis, transgress the discursive control of the cultural regime, and
are in turn associated with elemental energies of vitality, eros, and creativity.
Among other motifs from the nonhuman world such as trees, color, or water,
this counterdiscursive force is metonymically associated with the wild rose
bush that grows at the door of the cultural prisonhouse, from which the novel’s
narrative symbolically emerges. The wild rosebush, like the “black flower of
civilized life” with which it is juxtaposed, is an important leitmotif throughout
the text that is also connected to the figure of Hester’s daughter Pearl as a
hybrid being between social exclusion and wild nature. This link between
Hester’s deviation from social normativity and the wild rose bush in the figure
110 Literature as Cultural Ecology

of Pearl is pinpointed in Pearl’s reply to the authorities, when they question her
about her Creator to test her religiously correct education: “…. the child finally
announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her
mother off the bush of wild roses, that grew by the prison-door” (134).
In Moby-Dick, the narrative voice of Ishmael builds up an alternative,
entirely different view to Ahab’s biophobic demonization of the white whale,
arising from the recognition of the human species’ “Siamese connexion with
a plurality of other mortals” (Melville 254). Through Ishmael’s perspective,
the white whale itself becomes the central agency of an imaginative counter-
discourse that undermines and overwrites Ahab’s civilizational will-to-power
over the creation. Moby-Dick’s irreducible co-agency with the human actors in
the narrative, which is conveyed in Ishmael’s account of the events, undermines
Ahab’s civilizational hubris and turns the whale into a signifier of trans-species
connectivity. The whale, as the radical other of Ahab’s anthropocentric ideology,
is presented, in a series of both realist and mythopoetic scenes and images, as
an alter ego of the human actors, which, however, remains inaccessible to any
final interpretation and instead becomes the source of a potentially infinite
semiosis that resists and transcends all forms of discursive appropriation.
This imaginative counter-discourse already emerges early in the novel when
the narrator projects his half real, half dream-like sea journey as a journey
toward his deeper self. This deeper self, however, is not a separate entity but
co-exists with the whale in the shared medium of that “ungraspable phantom
of life” (24) which connects all beings in a continuous process of metamorphic
becoming that is translated into the imaginative process of the text:

The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild
conceits that swayed me to my purpose, two and two there floated into my
innermost soul, endless processions of the whale, and, mid most of them all,
one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. (26–27)

The innermost center of the narrative self is expressed in the imagery of whales.
The “essence” of the self is defined by its relation to a nonhuman other, whose
irresistible presence overflows the boundaries between outside and inside
the self. The influx of elemental forces into the civilized consciousness shapes
the direction of the self ’s becoming. The figuration of the interior world of the
narrator’s mind fuses human and nonhuman domains, chaos and order, solid
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 111

and fluid, wildness and the sacred in such a way that the white whale emerges as
its unavailable ground and highest manifestation. The self ’s encounter with the
whale implies the dissolution of the anthropocentric narrator-subject toward an
“intra-action” (Barad) between inseparable internal and external, material and
mental, cultural and natural forces in the medium of a fluid imagination, in which
the whale signifies an ecosemiotic reality which is co-emergent with the deeper
reality of the human self, and which always also conceals itself in the forms of its
manifold revelations (“one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air”).
The mythopoetic language of the imagination is employed here in such a way that
it envisions the process of the novel as an aesthetic transformation of the same
forces that underlie the shapes and metamorphoses of life itself.
In Chopin’s The Awakening, Edna Pontellier’s resistance to imprisoning
conventions and role patterns takes a twofold form: a conscious, intellectual
form in her withdrawal from the imposed rules of social institutions, as
evidenced in her growing defiance against marriage, monogamy, and the
economic rationalism of her husband’s stockmarket mentality; and an
unconscious, intuitive form in her opening toward the influence of the sea,
which leads her to the discovery of her deeper self in her contact with the
elemental medium of water. As a compositional leitmotif of the text, the “voice
of the sea” becomes the source of an ever-intensifying rhythm of emotional,
bodily, and erotic awakenings that creates a wave-like, “oceanic” (Den Tandt)
form of discourse and undulating flow of the narrative. In an ekphrastic way,
this fusion of elemental rhythms of the sea and the transfiguring effect of art
is illustrated in a performance of Chopin’s music (doubtlessly an ironic self-
reference to the novel’s author) given by Mademoiselle Reisz, to which Edna
reacts in a deeply passionate way that is conveyed in images of intense bodily
experience and immersion in the waves:

The very first chords which Mademoiselle Reisz struck upon the piano sent
a keen tremor down Mrs. Pontellier’s spinal column … [T]he very passions
themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves
daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the
tears blinded her. (44–45)

Again, an analogy is established here between the experience of art as

transformative medium of cultural self-expression and self-exploration,
112 Literature as Cultural Ecology

and the experience of passion and “wild” nature, which is metonymically

associated with the sea. In the artificial order of musical signs and sounds,
an original chaos becomes audible, in which the control of self and world
threatens to be lost but from which both art and life can alone gain the energy
for creating ever new patterns of emergent order ensuring their continued
vitality. This ekphrastic scene can be related to the narrative process of the
novel as a whole, which aims at the “dionysian” reconnection of life and art,
culture, and nature in the paradoxical tension between linguistic articulation
and prelinguistic experience, which Edna encounters in the medial translation
of Chopin’s music.
In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, the perspective of the “idiot” Benjy
(in the terms of the intertextual Shakespeare source)3 has itself a strong
counterdiscursive implication, which sets the tone for the whole novel. As the
reader is immersed in the incoherent but emotionally turbulent inner world
of this voiceless outsider, other characters’ opinions of Benjy, which are merely
based on outward perceptions, appear all the more shallow and reductive, such
as his mother’s frequent bouts of self-pity when she calls him a curse laid upon
her or the cynical invectives of the middle brother Jason when he vilifies Ben
and his black guard Luster as inferior, subhuman caricatures: “Well at least
I could come home one time without finding Ben and that nigger hanging
on the gate like a bear and a monkey in the same cage” (291–292). Above
all, the figure of Caddy becomes the focal point of an imaginative counter-
discourse in which Caddy, as the expelled member of the Compson family,
comes to represent those humane biophilic values which are lacking in the
Compson household—love, eros, emotion, empathy. For all of her three
brothers, Caddy is an absent presence and a center of their emotional life. For
Benjy in particular, who has developed his eerily acute sensory perception into
an almost telepathic form of emotional sensibility, Caddy is the only person
who has ever loved him unconditionally, and the moments he most intensely
remembers is when Caddy took him in her arms and her body “smelled like
trees” (45). In other instances, Caddy is associated with wind, earth, light, and

The passage from Macbeth, from which the novel’s title is taken, also structures the overall
3

composition of the narrative—in the “tale told by an idiot” in the Benjy section, in the motif of “life”
as a “walking shadow” in the Quentin section, in the “poor player that struts and frets his hour upon
the stage,” in the Jason section, and in the “sound and fury” shaping the apocalyptic imagery of the
fourth section. See Zapf 1999.
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 113

water, in a network of sensory impressions which link her role as family rebel
and social outsider to a textual force of ecosemiotic attraction, in which the
life-sustaining interconnectedness of human with more-than-human life, that
has been cut off in the closed circuits of exclusionary social norms and family
conventions, is symbolically evoked.
In Morrison’s Beloved, the imaginative counter-discourse takes on different
forms on the various temporal planes in which the narrative process unfolds.
In a political form, it is represented in the community of ex-slaves that the
aged Baby Suggs, mother of eight children whom she lost in the everyday
catastrophes of slave life, has gathered around her in her new home in Ohio.
From here, support for the Underground Railroad is organized, and here, too,
Baby Suggs gives charismatic sermons during ritual gatherings in a clearing
of the forest about African American liberation. In a psychodramatic form,
the imaginative counter-discourse is personified in the ghost of Beloved, the
murdered child who returns into the present as an incarnation of the repressed
past, initiating a multi-voiced process of “rememory” that shapes the nonlinear
dynamics of the narrative. Beloved makes possible the confrontation and
overcoming of the trauma of slavery in the polyphonic storytelling which is
sparked off by her reappearance and in which Morrison combines postmodern
forms of plural stream-of-consciousness narration with traditions of African
American folklore and jazz (as indicated from the outset in the name of the
“Blues[-]tone Road” on which Sethe’s haunted house on the outskirts of
Cincinnati is located). Beloved is a highly ambivalent figure, representing, on
the one hand, the countless anonymous victims of slavery, but on the other
hand also the return of the power of feelings, of “loving” and “being loved,”
which had been symbolically destroyed in Sethe’s killing of her own child as
her desperate, self-destructive act of resistance against Schoolteacher’s regime.
Beloved reintroduces a sphere of tenderness, longing, and desire as a parallel
world of magic and re-enchantment, in which repressed emotions return, as
indicated in the opening of the metaphoric tin box of Paul D’s heart through his
erotic contact with Beloved. As a force of strange but irresistible attraction, she
counteracts the violence of racial, cultural, and personal separation. Beyond
her role as victim, therefore, Beloved becomes a powerful agency, a catalyst
of radical change and metamorphosis, resembling in some ways the trickster
figure of African American folk tales, which transgresses cultural taboos
114 Literature as Cultural Ecology

in order to liberate subliminal fears and desires of human beings. Having

emerged from water as a spectral hybrid being on the boundary of culture and
nature in a kind of resurrection from the dead (“A fully dressed woman walked
out of the water,” 63), Beloved is a medium of metamorphic contact, which
reawakens Sethe’s ability to love; dissolves Paul D’s inner paralysis through her
erotic desire that leads Paul D “to some ocean-deep place he once belonged
to” (34); and in the end returns into her element of water as a pregnant naked
woman, “with fish for hair” (328). Human and nonhuman agency converge as
water, trees, and the regenerative cycles of more-than-human life contribute
to an ecosemiotic counterdiscourse that is also expressed in another central
recurrent signifier of the narrative, the deep scar on Sethe’s back, which is
the brutal mark of her violent slavery past, but in the course of time assumes
the shape of a blooming tree. The metamorphic blending of the bodily trace
of her trauma with a signifier of possible regeneration is a transformative
process which characterizes the imaginative process of the novel as a whole
(cf. Bonnet 1997).

Literature as reintegrative interdiscourse

In its third function as a reintegrative interdiscourse, literature brings together

the civilizational system and its exclusions in new, both conflictive and
transformative ways, and thereby contributes to the constant renewal of the
cultural center from its margins. The alternative worlds of fiction derive their
special cognitive, affective, and communicative intensity from the interaction
of what is kept apart by convention and cultural practice—the different spheres
of a society characterized by institutional and economic specialization and
differentiation, public and private life, social roles and personal self, mind and
body, the conscious and the unconscious, and, pervading them all, the basic
ecological dimensions of culture and nature. It is particularly the process of
bringing together the culturally separated spheres or discourses which, even if
it results in failure and catastrophe on the plot level, often appears as a moment
of regeneration and the regaining of creativity on a symbolic level.
In all of the above-mentioned novels, the reconnection between the
systemic-historical realities, whose limitations are critically exposed in the
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 115

culture-critical metadiscourse, and the various manifestations of their excluded

other, whose rich ecosemiotic potential is actualized in the imaginative
counter-discourse, forms a third, reintegrative dimension in a transformative
dynamics of narrative texts that constitutes a tentative ground for systemic
self-corrections and for potential new beginnings, either in the text itself or
in its interaction with the reader. Complementary to the scientific project
of “consilience” (Wilson), this literary form of integrating separate domains
of knowledge and experience resembles what Greg Garrard describes as the
“‘conciliation’ of polarized perspectives” (Garrard 2016).
In The Scarlet Letter, this bringing together of culturally separated spheres
is already inscribed into the basic conception of the novel in that the spiritual
representative of the puritan community from which Hester Prynne has been
excommunicated is revealed to be the father of the illegitimate child who was
the reason for her punishment. The moments in the text in which this long
repressed tension rises to the surface of action and consciousness, and in
which the separated poles are brought to direct interaction, are clearly marked
as moments of revitalization and symbolic rebirth, even though they lead to
the tragic catastrophe in the end. Thus when Dimmesdale meets Hester again
in the forest after seven years of separation, he feels liberated and reborn: “I
seem to have flung myself, sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down
upon these forest leaves, and to have risen up all anew” (Hawthorne, 219).
And when he returns home from this encounter in nature to his study, the
place of introspection and civilizational enclave from life, he is all at once able
to write the text of his greatest sermon, of which only an uninspired draft
had existed before, and which he now finishes throughout the whole night in
trancelike productivity: “There he was, with the pen still between his fingers,
and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him” (240). This is a
key passage in the novel, a parable of literary creativity, which renews itself
at the very moment in which the culturally separated spheres of mind and
body, self and other, culture and nature are symbolically reconnected. The
words of the sermon, however, which Dimmesdale delivers in the church at
the inauguration of the new governor, are not directly accessible to the reader.
With Hester as focalizer, the reader can only witness their powerful impact
on the community from outside, but the music-like sound of Dimmesdale’s
voice permeates the church-walls and symbolically links inside and outside
116 Literature as Cultural Ecology

through a nonverbal language of excessive emotions, in which the discursively

inexpressible richness and ambiguity of human experience is nevertheless
paradoxically expressed. Dimmesdale’s voice becomes a dionysian force of
connectivity beyond the walls of the civilized order and an aesthetic medium
conveying the music of life itself:

Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or
tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled
as the sound was by its passage through the church-walls, Hester Prynne
listened with such intentness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon
had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable
words. (256)

It is radically ironic that this nondiscursive music of words, whose composition

and creative power is the outcome of Dimmesdale’s erotic reunion with Hester
in the forest, is enthusiastically received by the puritan community, even
though or, rather, precisely because it involves the radical subversion of its
own foundational beliefs. The public sphere is reconnected to the personal, the
spiritual to the erotic, the discursive to the aesthetic, in a complex act of polysemic
re-integration which turns the culturally excluded into a transformative force
both for the cultural system and for human relationships. Dimmesdale’s sermon,
as far as its paraphrased content indicates, envisions the renewal of America
from a spirit of shared rather than divided community life; and it releases
repressed feelings among the characters, which leads to the revelation of their
long-concealed intimacy and interdependence, as epitomized by the public
revelation of the psychosomatic image of the scarlet letter on Dimmesdale’s
breast. The aesthetic process of the novel as a whole is illustrated in the genesis,
composition, and communicative effect of Dimmesdale’s sermon as a creative
process linking nature, culture, and community in a polysemic mode of
narration that moves within, between, and beyond cultural discourses. And it is
this interdiscursive agency of the excluded other, which becomes an irresistable
force of connectivity in the end that overcomes the binary oppositions of the
civilizational system that the initial act of instituting the divisive regime of the
scarlet letter had intended to reinforce.
Similarly, in Moby-Dick, while Captain Ahab’s monomaniacal pursuit of the
white whale moves toward its tragic conclusion, the internal interrelatedness
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 117

of the antagonists of man and whale, culture and nature is increasingly raised
into consciousness by the narrator. Here, too, the two poles are directly
brought together at the end in a highly ambivalent way. On the one hand,
the book ends in death and annihilation, and the indissoluble entanglement
between man and nature which Ahab denies is ironically underlined by the
fact that he becomes ensnared with the white whale through the lines of his
harpoon as he is pulled down into the depths of the ocean. On the other
hand, the book ends with the survival of the narrator Ishmael, who is drawn
toward the vortex of the sinking ship, but is saved by Queequeg’s coffin, which
miraculously emerges at the center of the whirl. Queequeg, a figure of an
indigenous cosmographic knowledge of nature inscribed on his tattooed body
but no longer decipherable by his conscious mind, had built this coffin in a
vague premonition of impending catastrophe. The whole process of the novel
has moved toward this vortex, as it were, which metaphorically blends the
abyss into which the civilizational project of absolute supremacy over nature is
doomed to plunge, with the “cyclical” forces of regeneration that the symbolic
restoration of the broken relationship between humanity and elemental nature
sets free. This is at the same time the condition for the literary creativity of
the novel itself, because Ishmael’s survival makes possible the multi-layered
narration of the borderline experience between culture and nature, conscious
and unconscious, human and nonhuman life which the novel conveys.
In Chopin’s The Awakening, it is Edna Pontellier’s final encounter with the
sea which brings together the exclusionary forces of human society and the
reintegrative forces of elemental, more-than-human life in both tragic and
regenerative ways. The failure of Edna’s quest for human love and belonging
leads into her final awakening as a “newborn creature, opening its eyes in a
familiar world it had never known” (Chopin 136). When she swims out to the
point of no return, the process of individual self-realization and self-discovery
which has characterized one pole of the novel’s dynamics, namely Edna’s
transgressive liberation from the restricting power of social conventions, is
directly blended with the other pole of this dynamics, her self-abandoning
attraction to an elemental life force represented in the “voice of the sea” as
an omnipresent leitmotiv of the narrative. As Edna is losing her strength
and consciousness, her mind returns to her childhood, and her individuality
dissolves in the universal connectivity of all being: “There was the hum of bees,
118 Literature as Cultural Ecology

and the musky odor of pinks was in the air” (Chopin 137). This is the final
sentence of the book, indicating that the ending is also a new beginning. Death
turns into metamorphosis, and individual life in an anthropocentric sense
is not just annihilated but integrated into an always emergent, always new
becoming and biosemiotic fullness of existence. In manifold ways, therefore,
the novel reintegrates what is culturally separated: the enlightenment idea of
personal self-determination with an ecopoetic sense of existential wholeness;
mind and body; reflection and emotion; medium and meaning; art and life.
This also affects the form of the novel in its sophisticated intertextual and
intermedial composition and multiple stylistic coding between naturalist,
realist, romantic, and modernist registers.
In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, a reintegration of the disintegrated
Compson family and the white Southern society that it represents is not possible
on its own terms, but only within an altogether different framework—that of
the old black servant Dilsey, who, initially a marginal figure, emerges as a main
character in the final chapter of the book. In her knowledge of the harsh realities
of survival within a racist society, she is also aware of the larger conditions of
the natural ecosphere to which human life is exposed: “The day dawned bleak
and chill, a moving wall of grey light out of the northeast … [Dilsey] stood in
the door for a while with her myriad and sunken face lifted to the weather …”
(Faulkner 1971: 237).4 Dilsey figures as a counterpart to the Compson world,
of which she has been a part from the beginning, but to whose decadent
self-centeredness she represents a fundamental ethical alternative. As a
representative of the subaltern, who is completely marginalized in the first
three chapters of the novel, she becomes the central figure of the fourth chapter
as the bearer of an existential knowledge and empathetic responsiveness that
overcomes the systemic egocentrism dominating the society surrounding her.
Dilsey is the only person who, in spite of being constantly overworked, also
takes care of Benjy, the outsider tolerated only grudgingly by the whites and
hidden away from the world. In spite of the almost unbearable physical and
mental burden inflicted on Dilsey, she has a stoical capacity for calmness and
composure in the chaotic Compson household. Her joy of life has survived

Susan Scott Parrish points out the importance of weather as a contextual frame of the novel in
4

“Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927.” American Literary History, 24.1 (2012): 34–58.
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 119

despite all exploitation and deprivation, and this links her to the creative
vitality of African American culture—a vitality which has helped black culture
to live through and beyond the darkest years of slavery. This life-affirming
joy is expressed in Dilsey’s singing during work, and especially in the Easter
service she attends with Benjy and her children, which culminates in a sermon
that is a prime example of African American sermon culture as it developed
in the South from folklore and anti-slavery traditions. During the preacher’s
charismatic sermon, Dilsey experiences a spiritual catharsis and an epiphanic
insight into the deeper truths of life and history: “I seed the beginnin, en now I
sees the endin” (264), a vision which applies not only to her personal existence,
but to the Southern culture under whose restrictions she has lived and whose
decline she foresees. Her voice resonates across the sharp cultural divides of
her time and society, even if Jason’s repressive form of conventional order is, at
least outwardly, reinstated at the end of the novel.
In Beloved, the imaginative counter-discourse, which revolves around the
phantom figure of the returned dead daughter, only gains its transformative
potential by being related back to the real cultural world. Sethe, who in her
guilt and self-sacrificing love for Beloved totally withdraws from the external
world, must be readmitted into the black community from which she has
been excluded, before the ghost of Beloved, together with that of the white
slaveholder, can be exorcized and a new beginning for human relationships can
be imagined. This act of exorcism is performed by the community of African
American women, who have come to Sethe’s haunted house to liberate her from
the possessive spectre of the past into which Beloved has turned. Their ritual of
chanting brings alive the spirit of Sethe’s long-dead mother-in-law Baby Suggs,
the shamanist leader of fugitive slaves preaching a new religion of the “flesh,”
a self-confident affirmation of their abused bodies in ritual gatherings in a
clearing in the forest. “Love your flesh” had been the refrain of Baby Suggs’ new
gospel: “This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved” (108).
This conveys, in a postcolonial literary mode, a similar recognition of the life-
sustaining web connecting body, self, and environment that Merleau-Ponty
in his eco-philosophy likewise calls “the flesh” (cf. Westling 2011: 131). The
enchanting sound that accompanies the women’s re-enactment of Baby Suggs’
former ritual at Sethe’s house is a preverbal expression of this communal self-
affirmation of the flesh. It is the search for a deeper, biosemiotic code of living
120 Literature as Cultural Ecology

signs that opens up closed circuits of communication toward an elemental flow

of dionysian energies that bring together the culturally separated in a shared
moment of transformative catharsis.

For Sethe it was as though the clearing had come to her with all its heat
and simmering leaves, where the voices of women searched for the right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back of words.
Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a
wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off
chestnut trees. It broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its
wash (321).

Beloved is standing in the door, and had “taken the shape of a pregnant woman,
naked and smiling in the heat of the afternoon sun” (321). A white man appears
behind the chanting women, whom Sethe mistakes for a slaveholder, but as
she tries to attack him she is prevented from a new act of violence by the
surrounding women, while Beloved mysteriously disappears and is glimpsed
from afar returning to the water from which she had emerged. The women’s
ritual intervention symbolically breaks the vicious circle of trauma and violence
and enables a regenerative experience that reconnects the culturally separated
spheres of mind and body, self and other, culture and nature, and transforms
a traumatic past into precarious new beginnings: politically, in the symbolic
exorcism of slavery; emotionally, in the love between Sethe and Paul D, who
returns to her with a view to a shared future: “‘Sethe’, he says, ‘me and you, we
got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow’” (335); and
socially, in Denver’s leaving home and starting her life as an educated woman in
a United States that is about to be radically redefined by the active participation
of the formerly marginalized groups of African Americans and of women.
Obviously, this symbolic reintegration of the excluded into the cultural
system does not mean any superficial harmonization of conflicts but rather,
by the very act of reconnecting the culturally separated, sets off conflictive
processes and borderline states of crisis and turbulence. As the above-
mentioned examples show, culturally powerful texts are often post-traumatic
forms of storytelling, in which the traces of the unspeakable, unavailable, and
unrepresentable remain present in all attempts to reconstruct the past and to
re-envision the future. But what is historically and realistically unavailable can
 Triadic Functional Model of Literature 121

be symbolically integrated into language and discourse in imaginative texts.

Literature binds back, in ever new ways, the discourses of civilization to the
living memory of those elemental creative energies which are stored in the
history of the literary imagination. Effective works of literature are therefore, in
a radical sense, new and old, modern and archaic, historical and transhistorical
at the same time. Literature keeps alive its productivity by reconnecting, in
ever new forms, the cultural memory to the biophilic memory of the human
species.
In this sense, as this book argues, literary texts are a mode of sustainable
textuality, since they are sources of ever-renewable creative energy (Rueckert).
They are self-reflexive models of cultural creativity, which constantly renew
ossified forms of language, thought, and cultural practice by reconnecting
an anthropocentric civilization to the deep-rooted memory of the biocentric
coevolution of culture and nature, of human and nonhuman life. Literature
here fulfills a function which cannot be fulfilled in the same way by other
forms of discourse but which is nevertheless of vital importance for the
richness, diversity, and continuing evolutionary potential of culture as a whole.
In this sense, literature and art represent an ecological force within cultural
discourses, which is translated into ever new aesthetic practices and which can
be actualized in the creative reception of readers in always new ways across
different historical periods and cultures.