Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ