Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause

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 in a competitive arena” (Schneider 2). Consequently, the sign cuts across interfacing referents and extratextual norms; it links literary and legal discourses as well as genres; it traverses language cultures along with social practices and their imaginary dimensions. Each textuality, as we can witness, extends to a global history nourished by as well as influencing local conjunctions. And in each case, these receive their shape from the antagonism of social inequalities: “The act that asserts dignity is any will to power or will against the power of an other” (Oprisko 128). Signifying power is meant, too.

      While we would be inclined to adapt for our purposes the s>r/s<r shuttling and countertextual process as described, we prefer to set it in relation not only to an individual reading and interpreting experience but rather to dialogic “meetings among friends” in a real or virtual space: from the graduate seminar to the encounter group, the private and the collective are not isolated from each other (see Sedo). Members of reading communities, as studies show, have “actively constructed meanings together, sometimes in joint streams-of-consciousness, ←25 | 26→based on such issues as character, identifications, and the moral qualities of the books as they related to the members’ own lives” (Oatley 452).

      What we (within the communities we form) can learn about the rich literary heritage, at any rate, is that it begins with what must be the most stupendous result of a young wife’s dishonorable action in all the world’s literature: a highly ambivalent war lasting no less than ten years, as presented in Homeric epic and in Euripidean tragedy. What is more, the heritage embraces one of literature’s most perplexing problems: the question of Iago’s motive in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. And it draws our attention to the complex psychological ambiguity of Lope de Vega’s dramatic characters. The heritage, in these and other cases, helps us to grow aware of the variety of ways in which Western cultures, too, have grappled with the honor problematic.

Re-examining ourselves

      As we approach our topic, in working together we wish and hope, beyond any single text, to understand better the multiple sources of intercultural conflicts. Like Elif Shafak, we believe that “we need to be exposed to multiple voices, multiple interpretations of reality” (Kok). Sema Kaygusuz underlines a similar aspect:

      I have no objection to the lyrical lexical composition of Turkish literature being compared to Japanese literature, which introduced incomparable literary genres to world literature; or to Chinese literature, the first exponent of prose and essentially regarded at the progenitor of the novel. On the contrary, I see these characterisations as being the key to pluralism and diversity. (“Literature”)

Hence in this book we will focus on a comparative approach to representative works of contemporary literature from countries like Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and others, to contribute to a detailed, cross-cultural analysis of honor, especially honor-related violence, in its various forms. In our globalized age, which is continuously subject to re-conception, the impact of local rituals gains a strongly international and intercultural dimension. The problematic of a “dishonorable defense of honor” has become relevant for foreign policy (see for instance Al-Tamimi as well as Baig). Perceptions of honor-related values can be (mis)used as efficient means to oppress women. Such values tend to be passed on from generation to generation,