Iconicity as a Doorway to a New Space: Lesser Known East German Women Writers in the Seventies and Eighties
1 About a century ago, two theories of the sign were conceived on opposite sides of the Atlantic. The European semiology of Saussure emerging on one side was "verbocentric," as Saussure saw the arbitrary nature of la langue as the paradigm form of representation. On the other side, Peirce, a systematic philosopher, suggested a much broader epistemological conception of representation: for him, the sign-relation is able to explain comprehensive theorems of knowledge and perception. Iconicity is nested within a complex structure of philosophical, as opposed to linguistic, concepts. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we must acknowledge that Peirce has won the match: our language is not exclusively arbitrary as Saussure postulated, and iconicity is ubiquitous in language and literature, cognition and scientific activities.
2 Broadly speaking, iconicity refers to a specific relation between the form of a linguistic sign and the concept to which that sign refers in a person's understanding of his or her real world. Pierce considers the relations between three basic elements — the representation (sign), the object of the representation (referent or object) and the way the object is represented (interpretant). In his correspondence with Lady Welby dating from 1908, Peirce explains which "path" can be followed between object and interpretant.
I define a Sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its Interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former. (Peirce, Semiotic 80-81)
The logical order of determination is indicated by the direction of the arrows in Fig. 1:
- Fig. 1: The Peircean iconicity, or what is a sign?
3 The correspondence between sign and object can be quite direct, when both share common, intrinsic features. This basic version of iconicity, whose existence Saussure did not reject, is commonly referred to as imagic. A prominent example of this type is the notion of onomatopoeia, which is not limited to words such as the German bang or plumps, but also includes puns like Mauser (in place of Mauer, German for wall). Katja Lange-Müller, an East German writer, chose this name for the main character of the book she published in 1988, four years after leaving the GDR and one year before the East-West German wall came down. In other cases, however, the correspondence between sign and referent is far less direct: in Peirce's taxonomy of signs, this type of iconicity is termed diagrammatic. In this case, there is no overt similarity between the signifier and the signified. Caesar's veni, vidi, vici is a very often used illustration for the iconic diagram. The sequence of individually symbolic words mirrors the sequence of actions it enumerates. There is a third and a last category of iconicity, rarely addressed by Peirce's critics: metaphoric iconicity. Jappy gives an obvious example to illustrate how metaphors operate: "This surgeon is a butcher" (Jappy, Chapter 3). The metaphor, which will be analysed more precisely later on, conveys the idea that this surgeon treats patients as if they were lumps of meat and bone in the butcher's hand. Even if this example might be a metaphoric sign (or hypo-icon), Peirce insists on the point that metaphor is form, and not a piece of figurative discourse such as a sentence.
4 The corpus of works on which this study draws consists of texts written by eight lesser known GDR female authors between 1978 and 1989. Astonishingly enough, the Peircean concepts of iconicity have never been applied to the writing of East German women. This is indeed quite surprising, since the former GDR appears to be a good "substrate" for iconicity, as far as the working and living conditions of female authors were concerned. I would even like to suggest that the three types of iconicity described above (imagic, diagrammatic and metaphoric) are inherent in the writing of women in the GDR, due to the specific features of that country. Geographically, politically, economically and sociologically, East Germany differed a lot from Western Europe: It was virtually impossible to cross the border to the Federal Republic of Germany. The state's doctrine was marked by militarism and nationalism; the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) dominated political life. The SED was based on centralism and on the principle of social unity, which reinforced the standardisation of society, whereas divergent elements were excluded or instrumentalised. The socialist regime ruled over the mechanisms of literary creation and reception: writers, reviewers, publishing houses as well as the channels of distribution were under government control. This state domination had paradoxical consequences on the literary climate, which also benefited from this public support: reading and writing played a bigger role than in other countries. Another specific feature of GDR society is the so-called "proclaimed equality of rights" between men and women. Indeed legislation in the GDR was very progressive (e.g. female access to so-called masculine jobs, equality of wages, divorce, birth control and abortion). Nevertheless the ways of thinking had not evolved as quickly as the politics, and most of the time women were still in charge of the household and the children's education, in addition to their paid jobs.
5 The standardisation of society was an expression of political will. However, this does not necessary mean that all GDR female authors to be dealt with in this paper had the same experiences in their lives as women and as writers. Of course they shared a common denominator, a lack of recognition, but their personal situations might have varied a lot. The following diagram shows how close or distant some lesser known female writers were from the central power. The state machinery treated some in a more or less friendly way than others (Fig. 2).
- Fig. 2: Lesser known East German women writers and their relationship to power
The literary climate in the GDR (i.e. the conditions in which literature emerged) could be tough for one author and yet encouraging for another one, depending on her political acceptance. There may be a strong link between the political acceptance of an author and the use she made of iconic means in her literary works. Can we say, for instance, that the more literary iconicity she used (i.e. the more daring and provocative her writing was), the more difficult it was for her to stay in the GDR and have her works released there? In order to test this intuitive hypothesis, we need to have a closer look at the texts — and at the East German context.