our main focus is on the literature of our time. Yet we are aware that honor and face values have a history as well as a literary heritage which we cannot afford to ignore entirely. Hence in our major sections, as an extension of our core topic, we devote attention also to literary works from earlier periods. Beginning with the focus of Part 1, where many of our main fictional sources originate outside what is commonly known as the “West,” we have made an attempt to give a supplementary and incomplete impression of the ways in which gendered honor has been treated in the development of Western literature, as well as legal codes, citing instances in thematically organized sections. After all, “any history of fiction is simultaneously a history of nonfiction” (Berger 64). We know, however, that both an “easy dismissal” of tradition and its “unquestioned maintenance” are dubious (Mieke Bal, “Zwarte” 140 ff.). Our task requires relating materials to each other, sometimes surprisingly, which are normally considered in quite distinct contexts. ←21 | 22→The overall aim is to offer little more than an introductory glimpse at the range of historical treatments, whether they endorse honor codes or (surely of greater appeal to our present inclinations) turn against them. Authors like Lubna Khalid have briefly spoken of alleged honor killings “around the ancient world,” especially Western cultural or social history, to buttress a claim that “Greeks’ concept of honour wasn’t really different from the [modern] eastern cultures.” Though magazine articles obviously do not claim any scholarly quality, they have a relatively wide circulation. Hence, though we are quite aware of the conceptual risks, for an adequately cross-cultural interface we believe that we cannot wholly avoid at least touching upon this cultural history.32 Researchers have found that there are more substantial links from the distant past to the present: “In the Ancient Near East it was thought (and even still now it is widely thought) that the initiator of any act of adultery was the woman” (Stol 236). Perhaps an authenticated bridge across ages and cultures could even give our topic an added level of relevance.
Does the literary heritage support the idea that the West harbors dignity cultures? For our immediate purpose, this account can hardly do more than suggest the analytical potential. If an alleged Western dignity-culture ←22 | 23→orientation hardly goes back earlier than the later 18th century, it would form only a thin veneer on the larger cultural memory, perhaps even being only loosely attached. Our “Western” glimpse appears mainly in the “Notes toward ‘perceptions of honor through history.’ ” We hope that at least sometimes it will serve to promote a countertext forming a communicative or interactive double voice, with references to pertinent research sources for further in-depth discussions.
The “countertext” deserves a little more explanation. Across the landscape of honor, we should re- (and again re-)encounter each literary work from the discursive formation it has in common with others. It is in this sense that what we read is entangled with previous texts, beyond filiative relations. The honor value like few others is hurled (on more than one level) back and forth “between the poles of innocence and suspicion” (Berger 80), calling for continuous interpretive shuttling. So what does this mean? As we approach the study of our textual corpus, we can assume that a signifiant will characteristically enter a discursive interstice where it associates with a signifié which, beyond providing a tenuous hegemony in its historical moment, is already enfolded in dialogue with other such relations both in space and time – and marks out referentiality. Partly adapting some valuable insights by Harry Berger, we can further suppose that, in any interpretive process, we begin by innocently taking a document on its own terms, a reading “oriented toward the message” and hence toward the sign’s correspondence to a prior referent: s<r (Berger 86, 103). Orientation toward a referent can be complicit, for instance, in allowing human constructs to be “naturalized as objects of reference external to discourse” (Berger 97, see also Fairclough). Yet we should remind ourselves that “art and literature, particularly since the traumas of the twentieth century, never simply document experience” (Charles Laughlin on Mo Yan). What actually happens is that we become involved in a signifying energy beyond the prior reference, a dynamic which discloses the document’s quality as text in activating, among other features, submerged codes and a larger “intertextual network” (Berger 98). This enables a “suspicious” reading which is oriented “toward messages about the message,” the “mischief going on within the signs themselves”: s>r (Berger 87, 103). Along a continuum between the two manners of reading, a shuttle movement is ceaseless, generating a countertext which functions not as a return to “documentary innocence” (Berger 87) but rather a simulacrum, one which not merely adds to but actually identifies the document’s semantic potential, reshaping what used to ←23 | 24→be s<r.33 In this sense, we can surmise that a simulacrum counters the exclusive focus on signifiant/signifié relations. It also counters that initial, unmediated s<r. In all, there lurks a more or less palpable “countertextual imaginary” (Berger 96) – in the process it emerges that documents “are countertexts in disguise” (Berger 87). And for any text, to ignore this would be to curtail or otherwise distort it by shunning a larger load, as we will point out in the following.
In this context Berger favors developing Jonathan Culler’s sketchy postulate “to look at the specific presuppositions of a given text, the way in which it produces a pre-text, an intertextual space” (Culler 118, then Berger 37). Since a text’s own condition as a signifying practice presupposes other discourses, we can gather that “tout texte est d’emblée sous la jurisdiction des autres discours qui lui imposent un univers”; in discursive acts we have a “rapport à l’autre qui est inhérente à leur structure même” (as in Kristeva 337, 339). Documents and texts have porous boundaries – nonetheless for our purposes we would not regard all objects as indiscriminately open to others. We can be more specific than to assume that any text is “made up of multiple writings” (Barthes 146).
When we read each of the fictional works which we analyze in the following Parts as documents or alternatively as texts, what happens is that this maps generic fields and intertexts onto each other, leading into the discursive formation of intertextuality (only) by intersecting extratextuality, the coordinates of ideological configuration and conflicting social interests. Thus it is loaded with enunciated ideology “from specific sites of power” (Berger 40), not without a historical dimension. As Sema Kaygusuz has observed: “Literature is such an important vehicle with which to talk about sociology, history, and so on” (“Sema”). Countertext absorbs the discursive formation and offers it to us for recognition, so as to validate or to violate referential acts. Pace Berger, we find that the entanglement is by no means confined to genre conventions as we will present them in our analysis of certain fictional works.34 The agendas embrace ←24 | 25→pre-existing textualities which are active in cultural memory, and which they subvert or reverse. In turn, these speak to post-existing textual configurations whose hyper-directional journeys are already pre-scribed in them, a temporality which is never unilinear. Indeed, temporal distance between sign structures is not necessarily relevant per se, but rather when conjoined with sociocultural discourses.
Berger himself illustrates riding the shuttle with a striking instance: “the instituted discourse of honor has its own logic, dynamic, and contradictions,” which manifest themselves in “conflictive politics” (41). He suggests that they have correspondences in apparently unrelated literary works across cultures, ones which are many centuries apart, in relation to Homeric epic. We are inclined to endorse Charles Laughlin’s declaration that “all literature has political meanings. No literary accomplishments are purely aesthetic” (on Mo Yan). A work can reflect, but also comment on its society’s ideologies; what is decisive is that the commentary “gains added force” when it is mapped onto a “distanced intertextual commentary on precursors” (Berger 40). This proposition has become relevant for our approach, especially when honor appears as “the ideology of the (power) holding group which struggles to define, enlarge and protect its patrimony
