Zsuzsanna Ajtony
Imagology – National Images and Stereotypes in Literature and Culture (download pdf)
(Manfred Beller, Joep Leerssen (eds.) Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007)
Stereotyping is a natural ordering function of the human and social mind. Stereotypes make reality easier to deal with because they simplify the complexities that make people unique, and this simplification reflects important beliefs and values as well. People have a rich variety of beliefs about typical members of groups including beliefs about traits, behaviours and values of a typical group member. Social identity theory (Tajfel 1978) considers that our relation to the different social or ethnic categories is inherently asymmetrical. Categorizing people according to their ethnic or national affiliation affects the judgment of their features. The ethnic group we belong to is experienced to be “ingroup biased”, continuously being overestimated as opposed to the outgroup. This asymmetrical relation leads to the emergence of national or ethnic stereotypes. As a result, it is an old and widespread tendency that different societies, races or “nations” are endowed with certain features or even characters. It seems that different people’s relationship to other cultures is characterised by ethnocentrism, i.e. anything that is different from one’s own patterns, is considered to be “other”, strange, anomalous or unique.
In several languages, the critical analysis of national stereotypes that appear in literature and in other forms of cultural representation is called imagology or image studies. This technical neologism indicates a relatively novel domain of science that studies the national stereotypes as presented in literature and culture. A specialism originally developed in the discipline of comparative literature, imagology studies how certain temperamental characteristics are stereotypically imputed to certain nationalities. As it is an interdisciplinary area of study, it borders on and interacts with several other domains: literary theory, literary history, history of arts, comparative literature, anthropology, history, etc. The Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Amsterdam gives home to a research centre that – for several years now – has dedicated its work to the study of imagology. One of the most outstanding and widely acclaimed results of this research is the encyclopaedic volume entitled Imagology. The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters. The volume was edited by two well established researchers of the field, Professor Manfred Beller and Professor Joep Leerssen. Ever since its publication, this volume has become one of the most credited handbooks on the literary articulation of stereotypes of national characters.
The volume contains both a theoretical overview of this field of research and a vast practical part in which the contributors to this volume define the most essential concepts related to imagology. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part contains five comprehensive theoretical studies outlining the main interest areas of the field, reflecting the nature of cultural representations and “images of national identity,” a survey of the history and method of the critical study of national images, critical studies on pre-modern ethnic and national categories in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as a study on the modern ideology of the myth on “national character”.
The second part of the volume examines, in alphabetical order, the literary, narrative and rhetorical cross-cultural representations/images of nearly all European nations or ethnic groups, starting with the Austrians and ending with the Turks, but also some major regions on the other continents (such as Africa, America, more specifically Native North Americans and Native South Americans, Australia, Central Asia, Indonesia, etc.), as they are represented in European culture and literature. This chapter presents how these nations see themselves (cf. the concept of auto-image or self-image) and other nations (cf. hetero-image) and how this image is reflected in literature. Each entry describes the “national character” of the given nation from a historical perspective, coloured with the stereotypical traits ascribed to it. The descriptions are completed with a rich list of references for further reading.
Part three of the volume gives an insight into the conceptual system of imagology, enlisting the working concepts and their approaches from different academic fields. These concepts, also arranged in alphabetical order, comprising such terms like anthropology, discourse, stereotype and prejudice, the images of North and South, East and West, ethnocentrism, Eurocentrism, Foreigner, Identity, alterity and hybridity, cliché, topos – just to mention a few.
These introductory, foregrounding studies, followed by the chapters on national images and on the concepts related to and employed by imagology, give a clear, transparent structure to the volume, which is easy to handle as well, due to the cross-references indicated by the arrows in the running text. The theoretical grounding is well-prepared and the discussion of the concepts is both comprehensive and accurate. In spite of the fact that the volume claims to be just “a critical survey”, it has an encyclopaedic nature in which both specialists and non-specialist readers can find the entry they are looking for.
*
As image studies have no such tradition in Hungarian culture, there was a need for a translation of some of the theoretical studies mentioned above, of images of certain European nations and ethnic groups as well as a list of relevant concepts. This selection was published in the volume Imagológia. A nemzeti karakterek kulturális konstrukciói és irodalmi reprezentációi (translated by Zsuzsanna Ajtony), by Scientia Publishing House, Kolozsvár, in 2014. As it is a selective volume, in concordance with the source volume, it reflects the ethnocentric and Eurocentric view of the translator: it enlists the image of exclusively European nations, especially restricted to those nations and ethnic groups which – based on historical, cultural, linguistic resemblance, or simply on similar historical fate – might be of interest and relevance for the Hungarian reader. . For instance, the entry on Hungarians claims that “the Western image and stereotypes of the (Magyar) Hungarians and the Hungarian self-image oscillate between two poles: the negative variant, [describing them] as inferior, backward, plundering Asiatic, barbarian intruders in Europe and the positive variant (…) heroically fighting for the defence of Christian Europe and European liberal values” (p.174), the activation of one pole or the other depending on political circumstances. Representations of both extremes do exist in Hungarian culture and in the culture of neighbouring nations, but today we also witness several self-ironic images of Hungarians shading both poles.
On the other hand, according to Sorin Mitu, the Romanian self-image is characterised by self-denigration deeply rooted in their national culture, the idea originating from Emil Cioran’s 1936 essay, The Transfiguration of Romania, which states that “Romanian qualities are negative ones: their wisdom is an indulgence, their tolerance comes from their good-natured lack of the spirit of contradiction, while their celebrated dor (expressing longing, ‘a mixture of nostalgia, sadness, pain, happiness and love’) is merely laziness.” (p. 224) Due to the fact that this essay was not translated into any modern language at the time, this Romanian self-image could not make way towards western mentality. However, the image of Romanians created in Jules Verne’s Les château des Carpathes and Bram Stoker’s famous Dracula had an enduring impact on the Western mind about Transylvania at the end of the 19th century and this has become the strongest reference point about Romania ever since. The entry on the Romanian image could be completed with some further details related to an ever stronger tendency for objective self-reflection that can be currently traced in contemporary Romanian culture (especially literature and film). This tendency dissociates itself from the above mentioned commonly accepted stereotypical images, guiding the reader/viewer towards a more objective, consequently a less romantic, and less gothic image of Romania and the Romanians.
One more word about the Hungarian translation of the volume: since this is the first Hungarian textbook on imagology, its main aim was to break ground. As there is hardly any imagological terminology in Hungarian, the translation had to rely on the specialised jargon and language use of several sister disciplines imagology is related to. The terminology was taken over from the domains of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, social psychology, anthropology and history of art, which already have a well-established Hungarian specialised language. Some terms were transliterated (e.g. term “hetero-image” was sometimes translated as “hetero-imágó”, but also as “másokról alkotott kép” (image created about others), depending on the context; on the other hand, however, the term “positive affordance” was taken over as a calque word, borrowing the term from English and translated into Hungarian as “pozitív affordancia”).
The main drawback in the translation process was the nature of the source text: a heavily theoretical English text consisting of complex phrases and long, elaborate sentences. For the sake of easier reading in Hungarian, these complex English sentences were, in most cases, split into smaller clauses, still pursuing to keep the scientific language of the original. Besides, English and Hungarian are “unfriendly language pairs” (Kinga Klaudy) in the sense that it is much less difficult to translate an English text into another Germanic language with a similar rigid word order than into Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language with a more flexible word order.
The volume Imagology. The cultural construction and literary representation of national characters can be used as a fundamental work in the domain of its own, both theoretically and methodologically. It emphasises the “perspectival situatedness of national images” (Leerssen), i.e. in the case of each ethnotype or national character one has to ask the question: “yes, but from whose perspective?”, and this could be considered the most fascinating point of the book. Further research in the domain can be followed on the website imagologica.eu, or by clicking on the online Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (ernie.uva.nl).
The volumes Imagology/Imagológia, both in English and in Hungarian, are dedicated to those students and scholars who would like to get acquainted with the historical developments, typology and poetics of national stereotypes but also to those who would like to deepen their understanding and analytical perspective of this fast developing domain of research.