Local Knowledge (Text Only)

The confusion of high artistry and high cruelty he thus confronts, a confusion Baudelaire would have relished and Artaud later on in fact did, is to him so shaking that it leaves him uncertain as to what sort of beings these gorgeously decorated pyrophiles marching about clanging gongs and waving pennants really are: “they looked little enough like savages”; “the surroundings bore an impress of plenty, peace and happiness, and, in a measure, of civilization.” His aesthetic sensibility, an extremely powerful one, going one way, and his moral, more than its match, the other, he has great difficulty deciding what properly to feel: the women are deluded, their courage magnificent; the preparations are ghastly, the silent plunges breathtaking; the rite a cruel superstition, the spectacle one never to be forgotten; the crowd is kindly, gay, graceful, polite, and unmoved by the sight of three young women burned living to a crisp. All the familiar predicates seem to be getting in one another’s way. Whatever relations beauty, truth, and goodness might have to one another in this cloud of smoke and sacrifice, they are, surely, not those of post-Napoleonic Scandinavia.

They are not those of post-World War II America either, or not at least those of the right-thinking part of it. In a twist any true connoisseur of the modern earnestness led in beyond its depth must surely savor, Helms (having both drawn us toward the ritual by dwelling on its grace and propelled us away from it by dwelling on its terror) turns it, via an outcry against the oppression of women, into an argument for imperialism. It is in extirpating such foul plagues—foul and splendid—as this that the West earns its credentials to conquer and transform the East. The English in India, the Dutch in Indonesia, and presumably the Belgians, the French, and the rest where they are, are right and justified in replacing ancient civilizations with their own, for they are on the side of mercy and emancipation, against deception and cruelty. In the space of a few paragraphs, we get some of the most thoroughly entrenched tropes of the liberal imagination (an imagination, I’d best confess, I more or less share)—the cultural integrity of “simpler” peoples, the sacredness of human life, the equality of the sexes, and the coercive character of imperial rule—struck off against one another in a way that can only leave us at least unsettled. To have moved from the magic garden of the dreaming Orient to the white man’s burden, Gauguin’s world to Kipling’s, so rapidly and with such fine logic is but the last imbalancing blow the text delivers. It is not only the Balinese and Helms who seem morally elusive when we finish this remarkable account. So, unless we are willing to settle for a few embroidery mottoes of the eating-people-is-wrong variety, do we.

The case is general. For all the peculiarities here involved, the decentering of perception the Balinese cremation generates as it is worked through first, second, third, and nth order interpretations, coming from all sorts of directions and going all which ways, is characteristic of any imaginative construction powerful enough to interest anyone beyond its immediate audience. (And, indeed, if it is not powerful enough to do that it probably will not have an immediate audience.) Such a construction has a career, and one itself imaginative, for it consists of a set of encounters with other such constructions, or rather with consciousnesses informed by them. Whatever role it comes to play in the lives of individuals and groups removed in either space or time from the social matrix that brought it forth is an outcome of that career. The truth of the doctrine of cultural (or historical—it is the same thing) relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough, at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses that connect us to it but through them. Professor Trilling’s nervousness about the epistemological complacency of traditional humanism is not misplaced. The exactest reply to it is James Merrill’s wrenching observation that life is translation, and we are all lost in it.

II

Whatever use the imaginative productions of other peoples—predecessors, ancestors, or distant cousins—can have for our moral lives, then, it cannot be to simplify them. The image of the past (or the primitive, or the classic, or the exotic) as a source of remedial wisdom, a prosthetic corrective for a damaged spiritual life—an image that has governed a good deal of humanist thought and education—is mischievous because it leads us to expect that our uncertainties will be reduced by access to thought-worlds constructed along lines alternative to our own, when in fact they will be multiplied. What Helms learned from Bali, and we learn from Helms, is that the growth in range a powerful sensibility gains from an encounter with another one, as powerful or more, comes only at the expense of its inward ease.

What I have called “the social history of the moral imagination,” and announced to be the common enterprise of a critic of Trilling’s ilk and an anthropologist of mine, turns out to be rather less straightforward than some current views in either of our disciplines take it to be. Neither the recovery of literary intentions (“what Austen wished to convey”) nor the isolation of literary responses (“what Columbia students contrive to see in her”), neither the reconstruction of intra-cultural meaning (“Balinese cremation rites as caste drama”) nor the establishment of cross-cultural uniformities (“the theophanous symbolism of mortuary fire”) can by itself bring it to proper focus. Austen’s precisian view of feminine honor, or the modernist delight in her reflexive fictionality; the Balinese conception of the indestructibility of hierarchy in the face of the most powerful leveling forces the world can muster, or the primordial seriousness of the death of kings: these things are but the raw materials of such a history. Its subject is what the sort of mentalities enthralled by some of them make of the sorts enthralled by others.

To write on it or to teach it—whether for Bali or Euro-America, and whether as a critic or an ethnographer—is to try to penetrate somewhat this tangle of hermeneutical involvements, to locate with some precision the instabilities of thought and sentiment it generates and set them in a social frame. Such an effort hardly dissolves the tangle or removes the instabilities. Indeed, as I have suggested, it rather brings them more disturbingly to notice. But it does at least (or can) place them in an intelligible context, and until some cliometrician, sociobiologist, or deep linguisticist really does contrive to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx, that will have to do.

For a literary example to parallel and interact with my developing anthropological one of what this sort of analysis comes to in the flesh, and to drive home the similarity of intellectual movement it requires (whether you are dealing with your own culture or somebody else’s, with texts or events, poems or rituals, personal memories or collective dreams) one could do worse than to look for a moment at Paul Fussell’s recent The Great War and Modern Memory.3 There are other possibilities, equally germane—Steven Marcus’s investigations of the precarious intricacies of the Victorian sexual imagination, or Quentin Anderson’s of the development of a plenary view of the self in American writing from Emerson forward, for instance. But Fussell’s work, justly acclaimed (by Trilling among others, who must have felt a kinship between its intentions and his own), is especially useful, not only because it, too, centers on the clouds of imagery that collect about impressive death, but because, set beside the Balinese case as a sort of structural twin, it brings us further toward the question we are struggling to find some researchable way to ask: how do the organs of distant sensibilities work in our own?

Fussell’s book is concerned with the literary frames within which the British experience on the Western Front was first perceived, later recollected in intranquility, and finally expanded, by men whose encounters with systematic social violence took place in other locales, into a total vision of modern existence. His sacrifice scene is the trenches of Flanders and Picardy; his off-balance chroniclers are the memoirists and poets—Sassoon, Graves, Blunden, Owen—who turned it into a labyrinth of ironies; and his latecomer heritors are the nightmare rhapsodists of endless war—Heller, Mailer, Hughes, Vonnegut, Pynchon. There seems to be, he says, “One dominating form of modern understanding; . . . it is essentially ironic; and . . . it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of The Great War” (p. 35).

Whether or not one wants to accept this argument in so unvarnished a form (just as there is more that is interesting to tell of Bali than immolation, rather more has gone into the making of the contemporary imagination, even the absurdist strain of it, than mustard gas and doomed athletes), its logic is of the sort which, once sensed, seems blankly obvious.

Fussell begins by placing the factual iconography of trench warfare—mud, rats, barbed-wire, shell-holes, no-man’s-land, three-on-a-match, morning stand-to’s, moving up, and over-the-top—against the background of the largely literary one of Asquith’s England—playing fields, sunsets, nightingales, Country Life, dulce et decorum est, and Shropshire Lad eroticism. The war thus becomes as much of a symbolic structure—or, more exactly, comes to possess one—as Balinese cremation, though of a rather different kind, with a rather different tone, engendering rather different reflections. It, too, arrives to us across a sequence of clashing imaginations and discomfited sensibilities, an interpretative career that makes it what it is—what, to us at least, it means. And setting the phases of that career in their social frames, bordering them with the tenor of the life around them, is not an exercise in sociological explaining away or historical explaining about: it is a way into the thing itself. What Fussell calls “the Curious Literariness of Real Life” is, if “literariness” be widened to accommodate all the forms of collective fantasy, a general phenomenon, embracing even Passchendaele or The Battle of the Somme.

The literariness of the real life of the men who went to France in the iron autumn after the gold summer of 1914 was largely late Romantic, a pastiche of pastoralism, elegy, earnestness, adventure, and high diction. “There was no Waste Land, with its rat’s alleys, dull canals, and dead men who have lost their bones.” Fussell writes, travestying (I presume intentionally) James’s famous passage on Hawthorne’s America, “. . . no Ulysses, no Mauberly, no Cantos, no Kafka, no Proust, no Waugh, no Huxley, no Cummings, no Women in Love or Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There was no ‘Valley of Ashes’ in The Great Gatsby. One read Hardy and Kipling and Conrad and frequented the world of traditional moral action delineated in traditional moral language” (p. 23).

The inadequacy of such an imagination (though Hardy’s wormwood and Housman’s rue helped a little) to funk-holes and firing trenches was so vast as to be comic, and it shattered into a thousand pieces of sour irony; fragments of polished sentiment turned into hell-vignettes and horse-laughs. And it was these fragments—a world view in droplets—that the memoirists of the war tried, through the inversion of one received genre or another, to bring together into a once more graspable whole: Blunden in black pastoral, Sassoon in black romance, and Graves in black farce. And it was, in turn, that whole (half made and still trapped in traditional forms, traditional speech, and traditional imagery) upon which the later, more insurrectionary celebrants of dead men who have lost their bones afterward drew for what, by the time of The Naked and the Dead, Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Gravity’s Rainbow, Fussell can properly call, because it is settled, formal, and obsessively recurrent: the ritual of military memory.

This is how anything imaginational grows in our minds, is transformed, socially transformed, from something we merely know to exist or have existed, somewhere or other, to something which is properly ours, a working force in our common consciousness. In the Balinese case, it is not a matter (not for us at least) of the past recaptured, but of the strange construed. Yet this is only a genre detail—a fiction framed as ethnography rather than history; a complicating matter but not a decisive one. When major cultural lines are traversed in the process of interpretive reworking, a different sense of discovery is produced: one more of having come across something than of having remembered it, of an acquisition than of an inheritance. But the movement from some scene of singular experience (Flanders, 1915; Gianjar, 1847), through groping representations of what went on there raised to figurations of collective life is the same. Nor is the matter seriously otherwise when the originating scene is artefactual rather than, as we say, “real”—Emma or Mansfield Park; or, for that matter, suttee. That but alters vocabulary. The passage is still from the immediacies of one form of life to the metaphors of another.

In charting that passage, purist dogmas designed to keep supposed universes of learning properly distinct are more than obstructive, they are actively misleading. The notions of the self-interpreting text on the literary side or of the material determination of consciousness on the social science side may have their uses, or they may not; but so far as understanding how the constructions of other peoples’ imaginations connect to those of our own, they head us off precisely in the wrong direction—toward an isolation of the meaning-form aspects of the matter from the practical contexts that give them life. The application of critical categories to social events and sociological categories to symbolic structures is not some primitive form of philosophic mistake, nor is it another mere confusion of art and life. It is the proper method for a study dedicated to getting straight how the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity comports with the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility—how the deeply different can be deeply known without becoming any less different; the enormously distant enormously close without becoming any less far away.

Even unburdened by the cleverness that surpasseth all understanding of the more hermetic varieties of literary criticism or by the willed myopia, called realism, of the more hard-nosed varieties of social science, the thing is difficult enough. Faulkner, whose whole work was in some sense centered about it—about how particular imaginations are shadowed by others standing off in the cultural and temporal distance; how what happens, recountings of what happens, and metaphoric transfigurations of recountings of what happens into general visions, pile, one on top of the next, to produce a state of mind at once more knowing, more uncertain, and more disequilibrated—had as exact a sense for just how difficult it is as anyone who has written. In Absalom, Absalom!—that extraordinary interweaving of the manic narratives of various sorts of Sutpens, Coldfields, and Compsons over a century or so—he puts the matter with the sort of despair no one who engages in this sort of meaning chasing can ever entirely shake. Quentin Compson’s father is telling Quentin (who has just come from hearing Rosa Coldfield’s story about the Sutpen saga of miscegenation, near incest, fratricide, and murder) what his father, Quentin’s grandfather, told him, Quentin’s father, that old Sutpen a half-century earlier on told him, Quentin’s grandfather, about it all, when he breaks off in frustration:

Yes, granted that, even to the unworldly Henry, let alone the more travelled father, the existence of the eighth part negro mistress and the sixteenth part negro son, granted even the morganatic ceremony—a situation which was as much a part of a wealthy young New Orleansian’s social and fashionable equipment as his dancing slippers—was reason enough, which is drawing honor a little fine even for the shadowy paragons which are our ancestors born in the South and come to man- and womanhood about eighteen sixty or sixty one. It’s just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that’s it: they don’t explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable—Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing, they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.4

But it is not all that desperate. Faulkner goes on bringing his volatile and sentient forces together again and again, adding the pieces, filling out the narratives, not only through the couple hundred more pages of this novel, but through his whole work, rendering the history of this particular moral imagination (his, Oxford’s, the inter-war South’s) if not clear at least clearer, if not wholly decipherable at least not wholly inscrutable. One cannot expect more in this sort of effort, but one can expect that. Or to quote directly the lines from James Merrill (his piece, too, is about time, memory, puzzles, and cultural disconnections) I deliberately truncated earlier on:

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it

(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness).5

III

Found in translation. Like the Great War, the Old South, that controversial Icelandic bear, and the equivocal picnic at Donwell Abbey, Balinese liturgical splendor continues to set off diverging commotions in our minds. Helms was only one of the earliest of its Western unriddlers, as I am only one of the latest. Between us come the soldiers, administrators, and technicians of Dutch colonialism; a multinational assortment of expatriate painters, musicians, dancers, novelists, poets, and photographers; an extraordinarily distinguished group of philologists and ethnographers, from V. E. Korn and Roelof Goris to Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead; various sorts of missionaries, many of whom were also excellent scholars and all of whom had decided opinions; and, of course, one of the great tourist invasions of modern times, a swarm of eager experiencers the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno caught as well as anyone in his drawing of the man leaning breathlessly across the travel agency counter asking: “Is Bali . . . er . . . still Bali?”

Of course, it still is: what else could it be? And through all the changes that have occurred since 1847 (the population has tripled for one thing; the motor car has come for another; the breasts the gentleman coveted have been veiled for a third), the unnerving confusion of sensory beauty, dramatic cruelty, and moral impassivity Helms caught then has remained the marking character of its life. The Dutch suppressed widow-burning as he expected (though there seem to have been clandestine examples of it as late as the 1930s), but they could hardly suppress the sensibility of which it was an expression, at least not without transforming the society altogether, something its high gorgeousness inhibited them from even considering. The tension between the edenic image of Bali—“The Island of the Gods,” “The Land of a Thousand Temples,” “The Last Paradise,” “The Morning of the World,” and so on—and the ground bass of passionless horror that all but the most sentimental sojourners to the island sooner or later hear moving amid the loveliness persists. And I don’t know that we are, we latecomers with our kincharts and cameras, much more comfortable with it than Helms was stumbling across it curious and unarmed one otherwise ordinary morning in Gianjar—just more conscious of the fascination it has come to have for us, how terribly intriguing, obsessing even, it has, in the meantime, somehow grown.

Since Bali’s imaginative life has become seriously interconnected with that of the West, a phenomenon mainly of this century, it has been through our odd concern (odd in the sense that I know of no other people who share it) with the moral status of artistic genius—Where does it come from? How shall we deal with it? What will it do to us?—that, on our side, the connection has been made. (On their side it is otherwise: their daimon is rank, not creativity, and we disarrange them well enough on that score.) As a trope for our times, the island has functioned as a real-life image of a society in which the aesthetic impulse is allowed its true freedom, the unfettered expression of its inner nature. The trouble is that that image seems to serve equally well the perfection-of-humanity sort of view of art we associate with the German idealists and the flower-of-evil sort we associate with the French symbolists. And it is that Asian coincidence of European opposites, one advancing scholarship seems only to make less easy to ignore, that both unsteadies and absorbs us.

The idealist side is clear enough: the most prominent role the island has played in our imagination has been to serve as an aesthetic Arcady: a natural society of untutored artists and spontaneous artistry, actually existing in appropriate garb on a suitable landscape. The dancing, the music, the masks, the shadow plays, the carving, the breathtaking grace of posture, speech, and movement, the even more breathtaking intricacy of rite, myth, architecture, and politesse, and in the twenties and thirties, an astonishing burst of wildly original easel painting, have induced in us a vision of a profoundly creative popular culture in which art and life, at least, some place, genuinely are one. “Every Balinese,” the most recent of a long line of French livres des belles images assures us, “. . . is an artist, but an anonymous artist whose creative talent is absorbed in that of the community and who has but a faint sense of his own creative power.”6 “The Balinese may be described as a nation of artists,” the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer writes in a more school-mastery tone, in 1936, “. . . Balinese art is living, in a constant development.”7 And yet earlier, in 1922, the German art historian, Karl With, is moved to jugendstil by the miracle of it all:

The Balinese language has no word for art and no word for artist. And yet the life of this people overflows with a blossoming richness of festivals, temples, images, jewels, and decorations, gifts that are witness to an extravagant enjoyment in form-making and play. A flood of fantasy, a fullness of form, and a strength of expression wells up out of the hands, hearts, and bodies of this people and inundates everything. Full of immediacy, suffused with a blessed sensuousness, saturated with fecundity, a veritable life-frenzy grows out of the natural artistry of these peasants and continuously renews itself out of itself. . . .