New Orleans Review Summer 1991 Editors john Biguenet john Mosier

Managing Editor Sarah Elizabeth Spain

Design Vilma Pesciallo

Contributing Editors Bert Card ullo David Estes )acek Fuksiewicz Alexis Gonzales, F.S.C. Andrew Horton Peggy McCormack Ra iner Schulte

Formding Editor Miller Williams

Advisory Editors Richard Berg Doris Betts joseph Fichter, S.J. john Irwin Murray Krieger Wesley Morris Herman Rapaport Robert Scholes Miller Williams

The New Orlemrs Review is published by Loyola Univers ity, New Orleans, Louis iana 70118, United States. Copyright © 1991 by Loyola University. Critical essays relating to film or literature of up to ten thousand words should be prepared to conform with the new MLA guidelines. All essays, fiction, poetry, photography, or related artwork should be sent to the New Orleans Review, together with a self-addressed, stamped envelope. The address is Nl!'ll.l Orleans Revil!'ll.l, Box 195, Loyola Univers ity, New O rl eans, Louisiana 70118. Reasonable ca re is taken in the ha nd li ng of material, but no responsibility is assumed for the loss of unsolicited material. Accepted manuscripts a re the property of the NOR. Rejected manuscripts without self-addressed, stamped envelopes will not be returned. The New Orlemrs Review is published in February, May, August, and November. Annual Subscription Rates: Ins titutions $30.00, Individuals $25.00, Foreign Subscribers 535.00. Contents listed in the PMLA Bibliography and the Index of American Periodical Verse. US ISS 0028-6400 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW CONTENTS SUMM ER 1991 VOLUME 18 NUMBER 2

The Problems of the Picturesque: Nineteenth-Century American Travelers in Britain Benjamin Goluboff 5 Old Chimney Umberto Saba/lr. Will Wells 17 Framing the Authentic: The Modern Tourist and The Innocents Abroad RichardS. Lowry 18

The Italy Not in the Travel Brochures David Berry 29 The Travel Writer and the Text: "My Giant Goes with Me Wherever 1 Go" Heatl1er Henderson 30 Still Praying Cai Qi-jiao/tr. Edward Morin and Fang Dai 41

Bearing Witness: Explorations in Central America Martlm Dimes Toher 42 Stony Brook on Long Island Tomasz jastrun/lr. Daniel Bourne 52 A Voyage into the World of V. S. aipaul: "The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro" Harveen Sacl!deva Mann 54 I Have o More Time Desanka Maksimovit:jtr. Richard Bums and fa sna Misit: 66 Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia: Traveling in Textualized Terrain David C. Estes 67 The Fire Tommaso Landolfi/fr. Lawrence Venuti 78 Pandora Bogomil Gjuzeljtr. Mary Crow and Bogomil Gjuzel 80 The Fountain Emique jarnmillo-Levi/tr. Samuel A. Zimmerman 81 When a Child Dies Duska Vrl!ovac/tr. Richard Burns and Vera Radojevit 83 Thus Were Their Faces Silvina Ocampo/fr. Daniel Balderston 84 Au bade Aleksandar Petrov/lr. Richard Burns and Aleksandar Petrov 88 Viator juan Benet/lr. Leland H. Chambers 89 The Blessings of a Bad Reputation Herbert Eisenreich/tr. Renate Latimer 94 Benjamin Goluboff

THE PROBLEMS OF THE PICTURESQUE: NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN TRAVELERS IN BRITAIN

"Ifthe picturesque were banished from the perpetrating what had become a very well-worn face of the earth," Henry James wrote in literary cliche? 1875, "I think the idea would survive in some James and many of his predecessors on the typical American heart."' Nowhere is this British scene also recognized that to examine the connection between the picturesque and the country through the picturesque eye was to American heart more plainly revealed than in enact a sentimental reduction of British reality. the tradition of nineteenth-century American American travel literature on Britain is travel writing on Britain. James's own collection permeated with a distinctive cultural of British travel essays, published in 1905 as ambivalence. In his Gleanings: England (1837) English Hours, meri ts particular attention as a James Fenimore Cooper described this work that both convincingly records the ambivalence as a feeling of "longing and beauties of the British landscape and distr ust" -a longing, that is, for a sense of acknowledges how highly problematic the connectedness with the cultural traditions of the picturesque was for American travelers of the Old Home, and a republican distrust of Britain's nineteenth century. political traditions.2 This ambivalence was Derived from the debates around Edmund particularly vexing for travel writers committed Burke's theory of aesthetics, and drawing its to the conventions of picturesque description. models from continental landscape painters of To pay tribute to the picturesque merits of the the seventeenth century, the picturesque had British landscape, many of them recognized, become, by the time James was a young man in was to ignore those human and political realities the mid nineteenth century, a somewhat antique of the scene that most inspired distrust in the set of conventions for the arts. In poetry, republican sensibility. painting, landscape gardening, and travel, the It is for these reasons that the picturesque picturesque sensibility sought to create or invites special examination in the tradition of describe the sort of landscapes that might have nineteenth-century American travel writing on . been framed over the signatures of Claude Britain. This tradition, from Irving's sentimental Lorraine or Nicolo Poussin. Sketch Book (1820) to James's urbane English Describing rural landscapes and recording the Hours, embraces a very large number of works emotions and associations connected with them by writers both canonical and deservedly were, of course, a uniform convention in all the forgotten. In virtually all of them, the branches of nineteenth-century travel literature. picturesque appears as a richly problematic But as James was aware, the conventions of the elem ent. To unders tand this element, and picturesque presented to the American traveler especially to understand the broadened sense in in Britain two special problems. The first of which American travelers defined the term these was that as American tourism in Britain itself, it is n ecessary to s urvey briefly the increased with the availability of inexpensive eighteenth-century origins of the term. steamer passages in the 1840s, and as The three most important writers in publishers' lists swelled with each year's new eighteenth-century discussions of the pic­ batch of transatlantic travels, the fashion of turesque were Edmund Burke, Uvedale Price, picturesque description came to seem more and and Richard Payne Knight. Price maintained more trite. How was one to do justice to the very that the picturesque was a tertium quid real attractions of the British landscape without supplementing Burke's categories of the sublime

'Transatlantic Sketches (1875; rpt. Freeport: Books for 'Gleanings in Europe: England, ed. Robert Spiller (London: Libraries Press, 1972) 232. Oxford Univ. Press, 1930) 9.

GOLUBOFF 5 and the beautiful. The sublime, according to and reduced for the traveler's pen and pencil. Burke, is to be found in objects exhibiting the He wrote that "searching after effects ... is the qualities of magnificence, immensity, and general intention of picturesque travel." 6 obscurity. It affects the human instinct for self­ Through his books and prints, Gilpin not only preservation with a "sort of delightful horror, a presented captured effects, but provided a sort of tranquility tinged with terror."3 The detailed set of instructions as to how the beautiful is manifest in objects characterized by picturesque was to be identified and stalked. He smoothness, delicacy, and gradual variation of is minute and voluminous on the values of form and hue. It operates upon the social chiaroscuro and symmetry, on foreground and instinct, exciting feelings of sympathy, ambition, the placement of figures in the landscape to be and imitation (9). According to Price, the encountered. And he provides travelers with an characteristics of the picturesque existed intellectual and emotional protocol for their objectively in a landscape as did the features of reactions to that landscape. the sublime and the beautiful for Burke. The Before the scene, travelers must bring to bear picturesque, as Price identifies it, is manifest in their knowledge of compositional taste: "We roughness, sudden variation, irregularity, and examine what would amend the composition: intricacy. It excites in the observing eye a sense how little is wanting to reduce it to the rules of of curiosity and, embodied in a varied natural our art. ... Or we may compare the objects scene, "corrects the languor of beauty, or the before us with objects of the same kind:-or tension of sublimity."• perhaps we compare them with the imitations of The picturesque for Knight was not so much art. From all these operations of the mind there an objective quality existing in a scene, but a results great amusement." After this amusement manner of seeing nature with an eye educated in Gilpin prescribes a general accession to the compositional principles of seventeenth­ picturesque sentiment: century landscape painting.5 Knight maintained that appreciation of the picturesque involves a We are most delighted when some grand train of association between encountered objects scene, tho' perhaps of incorrect composi­ and the works of art in which they are idealized. tion, rising before the eye, strikes us beyond Picturesque objects "recall to the mind the the power of thought-when the vox imitations, which skill, taste, and genius have faucibus haeret: and every mental operation produced; and these again recall to the mind the is suspended. In this pause of intellect; this objects themselves, and show them through an deliquiurn of the soul, an enthusiastic sen­ improved medium- that of the feeling and sation of pleasure overspreads it, previous discernment of a great artist" (Hipple 261). to any examination by the rules of art. Through this emphasis on association Knight (49) exerted a great influence on subsequent generations of enthusiasts. If Gilpin's enthusiasm for captured effects was One such enthusiast was the Reverend perpetuated by nineteenth-century American William Gilpin, the prototype of the picturesque travelers, the body of his compositional traveler. Through his many books of travel in prescriptions was not. Americans never wrote of rural Britain, Gilpin popularized the figure of the values of foreground, symmetry, and the gentleman aesthete in pursuit of scenic chiaroscuro that occupy Gilpin. They were prospects. Gilpin's aesthetic was that of the concerned only with recording the enthusiastic Claude glass, of landscape composed, framed, sensation those elements were supposed to confer. Neither were the Americans concerned 'A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the with the closely reasoned definitions of the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: picturesque over which Knight and Price Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968) 57. debated, and which still informed British usage of the term during the nineteenth century. •w. J. Hipple, The Sublime, the Beautiful and the Americans used the word broadly and without Picturesque (Carbondale: Southern Jllinois Univ. Press, 1957) reference to any formal system of aesthetics. 204.

•three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty, on Picturesque Travel 'Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of and on Sketching La ndscape, with a Poem 011 Landscape View (London: Putnam, 1927) 69. Painting (London: Cadell and Davies, 1803) 41.

6 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW When the term appears in the same work, even with appropriate allusions to Scott and Burns, on the same page, as the terms "sublime" and before they realized what they were really "beautiful," the American betrays no interest in seeing: the debate about those categories that stimulated so many eighteenth-century minds. So, after all, in these peaceful fires of the When William Dean Howells, for example, iron-works, we got an idea how the country wrote about Sheffield in his Seven English Cities might have looked in the old picturesque (1909), he uses the term to record an impres­ times, when the Highlanders came down sion of the city's valley of foundries and and set the Lowlands on fire .... To be sure, smokestacks: the fires of the iron foundries are much less picturesque than the old beacons, and the It was really like a forest, or like thick-set clink of hammers than the clash of masts of shipping in a thronged port; or the claymores; but the most devout worshiper vents of tellurian fires, which send up their of the middle ages would hardly wish to flames by night and their smoke by day. It change them. was splendid, it was magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque Here, again, the s p ectacle described hardly conforms to what eighteenth-century aesthetics Howells seems to be well aware of the term's would describe as picturesque. But Stowe, like imprecision. He seeks to convey his impres­ many of her countrymen in Britain, uses the sion of the foundries by displaying the term not so much in reference to the character of impoverishment of his vocabulary before them. an observed landscape, as to the overlay of He pretends that he has no word for the scene historic and poetic association suggested by that but the tired, aesthetic catch-all: "picturesque." landscape. The eighteenth-century theoreticians It is also significant that Howells describes believed that association joined with purely an urban panorama as picturesque. The objective elements in rendering a scene picturesque of the eighteenth century was a picturesque. American travelers, on the other vision of rural and wild nature. Gilpin wrote hand, used "picturesque" as a shorthand term that the traveler will always be "disgusted with for the associations that made a scene interest­ the formal separations o f property-with ing regardless of its objective qualities. houses, and towns, the haunts of men, which "Picturesque," then, came to describe those have much oftener a bad effect on landscape p laces where associations to British literature than a good one" (56). At Sheffield, then, and legend were strongest, those places, in other Howells uses the term to describe a scene which words, where encountered Britain conformed Price, Knight, or Gilpin would have designated most closely to the Britain that Americans knew as something between the s ublime and the through books. disgusting. Because "picturesque" could be used by these Another example of the term's doing service travelers as an all-embracing term to convey to describe industrial Britain sheds some light associational interest, it was not confined simply o n just what Americans did mean by to discussions of landscape. In Irving's Sketch "picturesque." An episode from Harriet Beecher Book it occurs less frequently in reference to Stowe's Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854) landscape than to the list of Britis h presents the author and her party approaching experiences-moral, personal, and historical­ Glasgow on a night train from Liverpool. that he took as his material. A characteristic use Through their windows, they saw "what we of the term occurs in the sketch on "Westminster supposed to be a castle on fire-great volumes Abbey," as Irving pauses to examine the tomb of of smoke rolling up, and fire looking out of a crusader there: arched windows."8 The travelers imagined themselves to be witnessing a latter-day conflict . . . one of those military enthusiasts who so among the Scots clans and amused themselves s trangely mingled religion and romance and whose exploits form the connecting 'Seve 11 E~rg lislr Cities ( ew York: Harper's, 1909) 31. link between fa ct and fiction, between the history and the fairy tale. There is •Swmy Memories of Foreig11 Ln11ds (London: Sampson a nd something extremely picturesque in the Low, 1854) 1: 37. tombs of these adventurers, decorated as

GOLUBOFF 7 Enthusiasm." 14 Such a tourist, Hawthorne felt, thoug ht that their carbines are without was to be preferred to one whose enthusiasm ammunition and that their function has been carried him away into stereotyped gushing over rendered ornamental by the telegraph (205). the picturesque. Harriet Beecher Stowe was as much aware as Hawthorne liked to deflate the conventions of Hawthorne of how hollow conventional the picturesque with comedy. Frequently, he raptures over the picturesque had come to sets up scenes apparently ripe for sentimental sound. But while Hawthorne chose to distance rapture, then resumes his guise as the "Tourist himself from the role of the passionate pilgrim, without Imagination or Enthusiasm" by Stowe poked fun at this role by occasionally undercutting them with som e comically posing in it. Touring the country around Eton, mundane detail. On a visit to Lichfield Stowe's party set off in search of Gray's famous Cathedral, Hawthorne watches as the choristers churchyard, a traditional stopping-place in the leave the chancel at the end of their singing. The Americans' sentimental itinerary. Stowe records boys are dressed in long white robes and seem in Sunny Memories an account of the party's to Hawthorne "cherubs ... created on purpose approach to the site, their emotions at the to hover between the roof and the pavement of scenery and associations of the place, and their that dim, consecrated edifice, and illuminate it surprise at learning that they had been directed with divine m elodies." 15 The build-up is to the wrong churchyard: exquisite, preparing us for further enthusiasm on the picturesque merits of the scene: After all, imagine our chagrin on being informed that we had not been to the All at once, however, one of the cherubic genuine churchyard. The gentleman who multitude pulled off his white gown, thus wept over the scenes of his early days on transforming himself before my eyes into a the wrong doorstep was not more commonplace youth of the day, in modern grievously disappointed. However, he and frock-coat and trousers of a d ecidedly we could both console ourselves with the provincial cut. This absurd little incident, I reflection that the emotion was admirable, verily believe, had a sinis ter effect in and wanted only the right place to make it putting m e at odds with the proper the most appropriate in the world. influences of the Cathedral, nor could I (270) quite recover a suitable frame of mind during my stay there. The joke h ere, old as it is, points up the republican critique of the sentimental-aesthetic The "proper influences" of Lichfield Cathedral, approach to Britain: to look for picturesque aesthetic and moral, had been amply described associa tions is to lose sight of where you by scores of travelers before Hawthorne. By actually are. And Stowe, as we shall see, was lingering over this "absurd little incident," most sensitive to the politically reductive Hawthorne avoids adding one more passage of aspects of picturesque vision. In the episode at conventional enthusiasm to an already the churchyard, however, she identifies the overwritten genre. triteness and limitations of the picturesque In English Notebooks Hawthorne similarly vision, without denying herself its pleasures. As imposes the mundane upon the picturesque. At would Henry James, Stowe playfully treats the Stirling Castle he is happy to notice a painted old conventions as a musty literary fashion in "Canteen" sign in the courtyard (525). Outside a which one might still dress up on occasion. government building on Regent street, he notes Throughout English Hours James flirts with a pair of immaculately uniformed redcoats. the sentimental-aesthetic approach without ever Their presence s trikes him as an agreeably quite declaring himself its votary. In the essay "picturesque circumstance," but he enjoys the "In Warwicks hire," for example, he d escribes the prosp ect from a house by the A von-the lawns sloping down to the river, the spire of ""Some of the Haunts of Burns," The Atla ntic Monthly 6 Shakespeare's church against the sky, the noble (1860): 384. trees attending the house. The description closes with the sheep grazing beyond the river: "Our Old Home, ed. William C harvat (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1973) 129. These sheep were by no means mere edible

GOLUBOFF 9 mutton; they were poetic, historic, romantic "the modern feeling of the picturesque, which, sheep; they were not there for their weight so far as it con sis ts in a d e light in ruin, is or their wool, they were there for their perhaps the most suspicious and questionable of presence and their compositional value, and all the characters distinctively belonging to our they visibly knew it. 16 temper, and art." 17 He draws a dis tinction between what he calls the higher and lower The sheep appear to have been reading William picturesque in the visual arts. J.M.W. Turner, an Gilpin. In their self-consciousness, they serve a rtis t of the hig her calling, experien ces a James by exposing the picturesque frame in "communion o f heart" with his s ubject; his which Am erican writers had enclosed the intellect and sympathies are engaged by the Eng lis h landscape . But if these knowing scene before him. The practitioner of the lower creatures tend to reveal the conventional aspects picturesque merely "cas ts his eyes upon it o f James's d escription, they d o nothing to feelinglessly": diminish the fun of the passage. James is exercising a rhetorical sleig ht of hand. He For, in a certain sense, the lower pictur­ acknowledges the weariness of the picturesque esque ideal is eminently a heartless one: the convention if o n ly to excu se himself fo r a lover of it seems to go forth into the world moment's surrender to it. in a temper as m erciless as its rocks. All The same sleight of hand occurs in the essay other men feel some regret at the sight of "Chester." But here James employs a cynical foil disorder and ruin. He alone delights in character to help define his response to the both; it matters not of what. Fa llen picturesque. The essay opens on the city's old cottage-desola te villa-blas ted heath­ Roman wall: mouldering castle-to him, so that they do but show jagged angles of stone and timber, I have been strolling and restrolling along all are sights equally joyful. Poverty, and the ancient wall ... with a certain friend darkness, and guilt, bring in their several who has been treating me to a bitter lament contributio ns to his treasury of pleasant o n the d ecay of his relis h fo r the thoughts. picturesque. 'I have turned the corner of youth,' is his ceaseless plaint; 'I suspected it, Rus kin has in m ind the association, conven­ but now I know it-now that my heart tiona l since the time of Price and Knig ht, beats but once where it beat a dozen times between scenes of ruin and the picturesque. He before, and that where I found sermons in maintains that to d elight in the romance of a stones and pictures in meadows . .. I find Goldsmithian deserted village is to overlook the nothing but the hard, heavy prose of British facts of human dispossession implicit in such a civilization.' scene. (36) While many Americans-Irving, especially­ p erpetuated s uch "h eartlessness" in th eir The passage underscores the kind of political purs uit of picturesque effects, many more of reservations tha t many American trave lers them furthered Ruskin's argument and, in fa ct, experienced in connection with the picturesque recast it in a specifically republican vocabulary. vision. If "the hard, heavy prose of British For them, the pursuit of the British picturesque civilization" could be antithetical to aesthetic was "heartless" precisely because it obscured pleasure in the landscape, then an uncondi­ those facts abo ut the country w ith which tioned appreciation of that landscape was the tra veling republicans mig ht best concern sign of political carelessness on the part of the themselves- the facts of reform, of indus trial traveler. urba n poverty, and of class hierarchy a nd Jn this sense, the American attitude to the aristocratic privilege. James wrote that because picturesque was a specifically politicized Warwick Castle had been opened to the public, version of an argument John Ruskin advanced a to ur of the place "amply satisfies the in Modern Painters (1847). He maintained that imagination without irritating the democratic

1•£ 11glish Hours, ed . Leon Ed e l (London: Oxford Univ. "Modern Pai11ters (1 847; rpt. Philade lphia: Univ. Library Press, 1981) 123. Association, 1949) 4: 25.

10 EW ORLEANS REVIEW conscience" (51). Rarely, though, did Americans latent in even the most beguiling landscapes. find tha t the d emands of the "democratic Near the end of the essay on Chester, James conscience" could be so easily satisfied in their describes the political reductiveness of the travels. At the heart of their experience of Britain picturesque vision with particular clarity. In his was a conflict between aesthetic and political enumeration of the aesthetic "suggestions" of resp onse to the fields and parks and great Chester Cathedral, he considers what a purely houses of the land. aesthetic response to Britain leaves out of the Anecdotes and expostulation revealing this picture: clash became themselves one of the conventions of American travel books on Britain. Nathaniel They suggested too what is s uggested in Parker Willis, foreign correspondent for the New England at every turn, that conservatism York Mirror and author of the fashionable travel here has all the charm and leaves dissent book Pencillings by the Way (1836), resp onded and democracy and other vulgar variations thus to the gardens of Dalhousie Castle: "The nothing but their bald logic. Conservatism labor and tas te of su ccessive generations can has the cathedrals, the colleges, the castles, alone create such an Eden. Primogeniture! I half the gardens, the traditions, the associations, forgive thee."•s On a visit to Blenheim, described the fine names, the better manners, the in Our Old Home, Hawthorne divides his time poetry; Dissent has the dusky brick chapels between genuine enthusias m for Capability in provincial by-streets, the names out of Brown's gardens and invidious speculations Dickens, the uncertain tenure of the h, and about their titled owner. He imagines that the the poor mens sibi conscia recti. "besotted " Duke of Marlborough, "if in a (42) condition for arithmetic, was thinking of nothing nobler than how many ten-shilling Here James states plainly the American version tickets had that day been sold" (177). of the "heartlessness" that Ruskin observed in The clash between the British picturesque and the conventions of the picturesque: a purely the American democratic conscience forms the aesthetic appreciation of Britain could induce point of an episode in Melville's fourth novel, the traveler to a conservative bias of vision. To Redburn (1849), a largely autobiographical work indulge a cultivated taste for the scenic in based on Melville's first voyage as cabin boy to Britain, James recognized, was to fail in one's Liverpool in 1839. Horrified by the starvation duty to the democratic conscience. and beggary among the poor of the Liverpool Much of the interest of nineteenth-century docks, young Wellingborough Redburn decides travel books on Britain comes from following to visit the open country. "Who that dwells in the ways in which different travelers responded America has not heard of the bright fields and to the political dimension of the picturesque. the green hedges of Eng land, and longed to Irving and Cooper responded by strategies of behold them?" 19 In spite of what he had seen at avoidance: Irving avoided the problem, and Liverpool, Redburn believes there is a true "old Cooper avoided the picturesque . In Haw­ England" that he has yet to experience, and after thorne's British writings there is a sharp and a long hike he declares: "I had found it at last­ unreconciled contras t between aesthetic tas te there it was in the country!" But as he goes to lie and political principle. Stowe attempted some down in the grass of a particularly inviting park, reconciliation of these extrem es in Sunny Redburn reads a sign that sends him back to Memories and m et with only partial s uccess. Liverpool in a fit of republican indignation. The James, as we shall see, made the politica l aspect park is presumably the holding of a titled of the picturesque a central concern in his British personage; the sign warns trespassers away with travel writings and succeeded, to a greater the threat of "Man-traps and Spring-guns." For degree than his predecessors, in producing a Redburn, like the travelers who followed him, treatment of Britain both aesthetically con­ the facts of British class privilege were always vincing and politically astute. The transatlantic popularity of Irving's Sketch Book derived in part from the carefully apolitical " Pencillings by tlze Way (Philadelphia: Carey, 1836) 169. tone he maintained throughout. Irving's landscapes were only scenic. His polite Geoffrey Crayon persona confines himself mainly to the ,.Redburn, ed. Harold Beaver (New York: Penguin, 1976) 286. fox hunt, the country church, and the rural

GOLUBOFF 11 wedding. When he does consider the social and complicated, however, by an aesthetic response political associations of the scenery, it is with a to Britain much deeper than Cooper's. Despite cheerful and anglophilic conservatism. In the Hawthorne's presentation of himself as a sketch on "Rural Life in England," Irving writes: "Tourist without Imagination or Enthusiasm," the superlatives in his British writings show The great charm ... of English scenery is how frequently the landscape caught him off the moral feeling that seems to pervade it. It guard. The bridge over the Doon he records in is associated in the mind with ideas of his English Notebooks as "absolutely the most order, of quiet, of sober, well-established picturesque object, in a quiet and gentle way, principles, of hoary usage and reverent that I ever beheld" (510). York Cathedral is "the custom. Everything seems to be the growth most wonderful work that ever came from the of ages of regular and peaceful existence. hands of man" (544). In Our Old Home, he speaks ... All [the] common features of English of the gardens at Nuneham Courtenay as landscape evince a calm and settled "perfect as anything earthly can be" (191). security, a hereditary transmission of home­ Throughout his British writings, Hawthorne bred virtues and local attachments which attempts to analyze and justify these speak deeply and touchingly for the moral enthusiasms. Musing on Westminster Abbey in character of the nation. The English Notebooks, he asserts that the place (70) wears "the glory of a declining empire.... Its beauty and magnificence are made up of ideas It was just these associations of "hoary usage that are gone by" (246). In Our Old Home he and reverent custom" that most exercised the recognizes that the "picturesque effect" of democratic conscience in Britain. But Irving Warwick "is produced by the sudden cropping never allowed his enthusiasm for the up of an apparently dead and buried state of picturesque to be compromised by the questions society into the actual present" (70). If the of class, wealth, and government that occupied picturesque is a sign of Britain's old age and her so many of his successors in Britain. lapse from world power, then the American Cooper was as combative a republican as ever visitor, with his "Western love of change," may came to Britain. Most of his Gleanings: England is indulge a "tenderness for the stone-encrusted devoted to indicting the manners and social institutions of the mother country." His license privileges of the British aristocracy and to comes from "the tendency of these hardened describing the unsavory face of British urban forms to stiffen her joints and fetter her andes, poverty. Despite the strong interest in landscape in the race and rivalry of improvement'' (60). evident in the continental volumes of his But try as he did to make the picturesque Gleanings series, Cooper seems to have taken sentiment a legitimate one for the patriotic pains to exclude the picturesque from his American, Hawthorne still experienced treatment of Britain. Out of the almost four powerfully mixed feelings before the beautiful hundred pages of the British volume, Cooper accumulations of the Britis h establishment. devotes o nly a single chapter to the rural Here, for example, is his response to Hampden beauties that enchanted his contemporaries and Court recorded in the Notebooks: successors. Early in the book, Cooper assures his readers that "I shall not entertain you with ... it is impossible for even a Republican many cockney descriptions of 'sights'" (35). He not to feel something like awe ... for the is as good as his word. His infrequent lapses institutions which are here represented, into the familiar itinerary of the picturesque [and] the Sovereigns whose moral traveler are acknowledged with comic apology. magnificence demand[s] such a residence. He writes to his brother from London: "Perhaps ... If we view the matter in another way, to I ought not to confess the weakness, but we have be sure, we may feel indignant that such actually been to see the Tower" (284). British dolt-heads, scamps, rowdies, and every sightseeing, for Cooper, was a lapse from way mean people as most of the English republican high seriousness. sovereigns have been, should inhabit these Nathaniel Hawthorne s hared Cooper's stately halls, and contrast its splendors with distrust of the conservative political institutions their littleness; but, on the whole, I readily that presented such picturesque fronts to the consented within myself to be impressed American traveler. Hawthorne's situation was for a moment with the feeling that royalty

12 EW ORLEANS REVIEW has its glorious side. By no possibility can Deep down in our hearts we were going we ever have such a place in America. back to English days; the cumbrous, quaint, (286) queer, old, picturesque times; the dim, haunted times between cock-crowing and The passage is tortuous because Hawthorne morning .... While, on the other hand, for reverses himself three times here. Aesthetic the upper current, we were keeping up a enthusiasm and republican principle compete brisk conversation on the peace question, for primacy in his description of Hampden on the abolition of slavery, on the Court, and the result, as throughout Haw­ possibility of ignoring slave-grown thorne's English writings, is an account of the produce, on Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, British landscape that is ambivalent and and, in fact, on all the most wide-awake contradictory. topics of the present day. Harriet Beecher Stowe also understood how (143) politically suspect the emotions of the picturesque could be, and tried to find ways of It should be pointed out that in Sunny M emories, accommodating them to a liberal American at least, Stowe's credentials as a wide-awake sensibility. At a reception given for her by an liberal are not so solid as she makes them out to association of Glasgow laborers, Stowe was be here. In the final portion of the book she surprised to discover that the works of Walter produces a lengthy argument in defense of the Scott were held in less esteem by the Scots Highland clearances, taking up a position quite themselves than by her own countrymen. Stowe inconsistent with the demands of the democratic explains the disparity this way: conscience.20 In the above passage, however, Stowe seeks to reveal herself as a traveler of The fact is, Scott belonged to the past, and liberal politics and to suggest that she may take not to the coming age.... He loved and pleasure in the British picturesque without worshipped in his very soul institutions compromising those politics. Yet Stowe's two which the majority of the common people "currents of thought" -the one alive to the have felt as a restraint and a burden. One aesthetic suggestions of the landscape, the other might naturally get a very different idea of registering its political associations- never a feudal castle by starving to death in the achieve a synthesis in Sunny Memories. The book dungeon of it, than by writing sonnets on it as a whole is characterized by an uneasy at a picturesque distance. Now, we in alteration of tone; Stowe gushes over the America are so far removed from picturesque and then apologizes for the gushing feudalism, that we are at full liberty to by such proclamations of republican virtue as appreciate the picturesque of it. those cited here. Stowe's performance in Sunny (51) Memories is important, h owever, in its anticipation of James's response to the political The passage suggests a disturbing complacency dimension of the British picturesque. Like on Stowe's part. Simply being a good American, Stowe, James always puts before his readers a the passage implies, justifies an unconsidered double response to the scenery, but his response appreciation of Britain. A conscientious has a balance and integrity Stowe never republican could enjoy the landscape from a achieved. "picturesque distance" and comfortably Much of what has been written about James in separate aesthetic and political responses to it. Britain suggests that his was a sensibility Later in Sunny Memories, Stowe offers an immune to the sort of political reservations that approach to the picturesque that is somewhat less characterized by the self-congratulatory republican rhetoric of the above passage. She finds in the thoughts and conversation of her 20Stowe's argument was probably motivated by her party on the road to Stratford an ideal for the friendship for the Duchess of Sutherland, whose father-in­ enlightened American's response to the variety law was involved with the inclos ures of 1811 . Stowe of British experience: describes the clearances as "a great movement that passed through the Highlands of Scotland, when the advancing progress of civilization began to make it necessary to change Our ride along was a singular commixture the estates from military to agricultural establishments" of upper and lower currents of thought. (221).

GOLUBOFF 13 Stowe, Hawthorne, and Cooper experienced. As James consis tently presents himself as the cosmopolitan aesthete, the passio nate struggling with the problem of the picturesque, pilgrim, James is supposed to have sojourned in as trying to achieve a balanced cognizance of the the Old Home without feeling a twinge of the disparate suggestions in the landscapes before democratic conscience. Christopher Mulvey has him. In the process, h e re veals p o litical written that James "believed that the American sentiments inconsistent with the passionate traveler should make it his business to like what pilgrim role in which he has been cast. he fo und in England." The pilgrim who In his magnificent essay "London," Ja mes concerns himself too much with Britain's social considers the editorial problems fa cing the realities "would miss his aesthetic opportu­ writer who would describe the city. London nity."21 Indeed, there are a few passages in presents an embarrassment of riches, a English Hours where James appears quite willing "confusion of brightness"; there is simply too to sacrifice po litical concerns to aesthetic much material for the traveler to master and inte rest. Study ing the g reat houses in the d escribe. James mus t carefully select what he "conservative county" of Warwicks hire, he will present: declares: Inevitably there must be a choice, and I had a feeling, as I we nt about, tha t I know of none more scientific than simply to should find some very ancient and curious leave out what we may have to apologize opinions still comfortably domiciled in the for. The ug linesses, the ' rookeries,' the fine old houses whose clustered gables and brutalities, the night aspect of many of the chimneys appeared here and there, at a s treets, the gin-shops and the hour when dis tance, above their ornamental woods. they are cleared out before closing- there Imperturbable British Tory ism, viewed in are many elements of this kind which have this vague and conjectural fa shion- across to be counted out before a genial summary the fields and behind the oaks and can be made. beeches- is by no means a thing the (18) irresponsible stranger would wish away; it deepens the very colour of the air; it may be The "uglinesses" James mentions here comprise said to be the style of the landscape. the "hard, heavy prose of British civilization" (120) that in the essay on Chester he found to be incompatible with a relish for the picturesque. On a first reading, the passage seems worthy of To produce a "genial summary" of the British Irv ing in its apparent subordination of the scene, these blemishes mus t be cut out. But political to the aesthetic. But the language of the James's elision actually gives an underhanded passage works to qualify the impression that emphasis to the darker aspects of the picture. James approves the political associations of the The "genial s ummary" is sentimental a nd scene. These suggestions of Toryism are only reductive, and Ja mes canno t make s uch a beautiful when rendered vague by distance. summary w ithout forcefully registering those Unlike Stowe, James recognized that the traveler things he is tempted to leave out of the picture. who relishes them even a t a "picturesque In the essay "North Devon," James contem­ distance" is necessarily "irresponsible." plates a staple of picturesque enthusiasm, the james was not such an irresponsible traveler. tha tched cottage, and indulges a familia r either did he simply make it his business to lyricism over the scene. The humble dwelling like what he fo und in Britain. James's "seems to have been stationed there for no more achievement in English Hours was, rather, to obvious purpose than to keep a promise to your register with great self-consciousness the full fancy"- especially if your fancy has had some ra nge of the conflict between the picturesque prompting by Irving and Willis. James cannot eye and the democratic conscience, which so help but acknowled ge, however, tha t the many Americans experienced there. Indeed, this picturesque thatch "covers, I suppose, not a little conflict is a central theme of English Hours. of the sordid side of life which the fancy likes to slur over'' (53). Again, James presents himself as looking away from the ugly underside of the " A11glo-Americn 11 La11dscnpes (London: Camb ridge Univ. picture, only to tell us that he is doing so. By Press, 1983) 117. announcing the omission, James s hows that

14 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW even in picturesque Devonshire there are unsa­ James has advanced a criticism of the "powers vory social realities to be found. What James is that be" at least as disturbing as London's. doing in these passages is calling attention to his It is striking how frequently in English Hours own persona as it seeks to register both what is james returns to images o f the British beautiful and what is politically disturbing in underclass. He gives, of course, a full measure of the encountered la ndscapes. The pretended attention to the cathedrals, gardens, and rural omissions reveal what James calls the Amer­ vistas that made up so much of his itinerary in ican's "imported consciousness" as it tries to Britain. But again and again James shows that make sense of the scenery (90). his focus on these cannot be consistently Elsewhere in the book, James presents this maintained. Having promised us a "genial dilemma through a different sort of pretense. In s ummary" of London, he still lingers over a " Lo ndon at Midsu mmer" he looks quite "vision" encountered there one December: "a squarely at the "underside, the wrong side" of horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying the British scene, but does so in the pretended prone in a puddle of whiskey! She seemed to role of a traveler who cares m ore for scenic assume a kind of symbolic significance and "effects" than for the people in the landscap e almost frightened me away" (75). At Chester, (80). One section of the essay, first published in james turns from description of the Cathedral Lippincott's Magazine in 1877, concerns itself with and the Tudor houses to recall that "[t]he the transients living in London's Green Park- a English landscape is always a 'landscape with subject that would also occupy Jack London in fi g ures'. And everywhere you go you are The People of the Abyss (1902). London's book is accompanied by a vague consciousness of the written in the vocabulary of economics and British child hovering about your knees and class. His description of the sleepers in the park coat-skirts, naked, grimy, and portentous" (40). enables his clearly stated intention "to criticize The "symbolic significance" these portentous the powers that be." 22 Ja mes, I am certain, figures held fo r James is certainly the same as intends a comparable indictment through his that which comparable figures held for Cooper, description of Green Park, but he makes it slyly, Stowe, Hawthorne, and London. Ingrained in by wearing the mask of the sentimental pilgrim. the American traveler's experience of Britain james presents the tramps as if they were was the conviction that the nation's poor were another picturesque feature of the landscape. an indictment of those political norms that, to "Their velveteen legs ... [and] their purple use Cooper's idea, Americans distrusted despite necks and ear-tips" present "rich possibilities" their longing for a connection to the Old World. to the hunter after scenic effects. They lie there For all James's love of Britain and his long with a "romantic attractiveness," like "stage­ residence there, as a travel writer he can villains of realistic melodrama": certainly be included in this tradition of distrust. James saw with particular clarity the difficulty The six square feet of brown grass are their of reconciling political condemnation of Britain present sufficiency; but how long will they with the attractions of the picturesque, both as a sleep, whither will they go next and whence fact of the landscape and as a literary did they come last? You permit yourself to convention . In English Hours he treats the wish that they might sleep forever and go problem of this reconciliation with a rare degree nowhere else at all. of self-consciousness by making his own (92) persona an element of central interest in the book. The figure James presents in the essays is The passage is unsettling because it shams so one very much in the grip of the dilemma that convincingly the "heartlessness" that Ruskin frustrated so m a ny of his predecessors in condemned. By describing the tramps as if they Britain. We see him playing out variations on were only scenery, James effectively caricatures the o ld theme of the picturesque and the the reductiveness of the picturesque traveler's republican sensibility. He weighs political and vision and forces us to reconsider the hard fact aesthetic responses against one another. He tries of the tramps' dispossession. In his urbane way, and fails to keep the "underside" out of the picture, and often emphasizes it by pretended omissions. He poses as a heartless pursuer of " Th e People of the Abyss, ed. Jack Lindsay (London: scenic effects in order to suggest the reductive Journeyman Press, 1977) 53. myopia connected with such a role. Throughout

GOLUBOFF 15 the book he presents himself as fully conscious literary device, a way of describing the of what mus t be e lided when the traveler experience of travel, the picturesque was static, becomes committed to either the aesthetic or the inflexibly idealizing, and simply trite. As an political response to Britain. James dramatizes aesthe tic with an implied social vision, the the full range of the problem in the very figure picturesque was "heartless," in Ruskin's sense, who guides us from one British scene to the next and conducive to the assumptions of and who describes each in vivid and memorable conservative politics. Excited by the beauties of terms. James was a traveler very much aware the Britis h landscape, Americans tested the both of the d emocratic conscience and the conventions of the picturesque and sought, with seductions of the British picturesque. His varying degrees of success, to accommodate achievement in English Hours was to have done them to their own aesthetic and social full justice to both. imperatives. The connection, then, between the Christopher Hussey h as written tha t the picturesque and the "typical American heart" picturesque was "the nineteenth century's mode was, as James knew, a troubled one. Still the of vision" (9). The broad currency of the term term itself, and the conventions of sentiment from William Gilpin's day to Henry James' s and description associated with it, remained an confirms that the conventions of the picturesque indelible aspect of nineteenth-century American were a well-established part of the cultural travel in Britain.O apparatus that nineteenth-century Americans brought with them to Britain. Yet to study the Benjamin Go luboff is Assistant Professor of Euglislr at Lake accounts of their travels is also to become aware Fores t College. His articles on America n travel writing /ra ve of how restrictive those conventions could be to appeared in Ame rican T ranscende ntal Quarte rly and the more thoughtful Americans in Britain. As a American Studies.

16 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Umberto Saba

OLD CHIMNEY

Translated by Will Wells

ld chimney that juts above the roofs O which frame my window-an ashen sky, partly clouded, overhead- you have smoked from the era of the Grand Dukes through all the times that followed: bright banners and deluded hearts. You've also watched a boy return on leave from the war. What a fuss they made all around him! He held his head in his hands, absorbed at length in silent meditations. Sometimes he said, "Mother," and no more. Someone else said, "It's an evil, but it will bear an even greater good." Instead . ..

Old chimney shaped by the hand of a man many centuries ago, so much has passed over you, years and seasons, clouds and sunlight in succession, perhaps you have witnessed nothing sadder than that. One day a futile troupe appeared before you on the roofs, young men fed up with days of siege and crisis, moving-so it seemed- like dancers to a phonograph. And eager to be under fire; they were resistance fighters. It was the end. You could see for yourself in the streets below, the brief, red proof. Today, rendered almost useless by the new discoveries, you send, ever more rarely, a greeting of smoke to the sky. While I choose to hold my tongue among my fellow men, I choose to speak to you because you listen, holding your peace. You are as old as me, a survivor.

"Camino Vecchio" ("Old Chimney") is from Umberto Saba's collection Canzoniere, published by Giulio Einaudi Editore S.p.A. SABA 17 Richard S. Lowry

FRAMING THE AUTHENTIC: THE MODERN TOURIST AND THE INNOCENTS ABROAD

n one of the best known moments in Ma rk Beecher, the flutter became a crescendo on his I Twain's The l nnoce11fS Abroad, he visits what he visit to the painting collection at the Palace de calls " the m ost celebrated painting in the Lu xembourg in Paris. If no t ty pical in its world- 'The Last Supper' by Leonardo Da intensity, his account nonetheless exemplifies Vinci."' Coming as it does in the midst of what the disorienting s hock m a ny fe lt w hen is already, barely a quarter of the way into the encounte ring authentic art. He fel t himself narrati ve, an almost frantic gallop through unde rgo a n " ins ta nt convers ion, if the hotels, ca thedrals, and museums, the episode expression be not irreverent": "to find myself represents just one more s to p o n a hectic absolutely intoxicated- to find my system so itinerary. In Milan a lone, itself sandwiched much affected tha t I could n ot control m y between a few days each in Genoa and Venice, nerves- to find myself trembling and laughing the travelers already have visited the Duomo and weeping, and almost hysterical, and that in and its "7,148 marble s ta tues" (129), the spite of my shame and resolute end eavor to Ambrosian library- where they see, along with behave better,- such a power of these galleries an autograph letter of Lucrezia Borg ia, some over me I had not expected .", Even the more drawings by Michelangelo and Leonardo ("They urbane art critic James Jackson Jarves, who lived s pell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; much of his life amid the European art he loved foreigners always spell better than they and collected, recalled wanderi ng the Louvre pronounce" [1321)- and a public bath, before feeling "oppressed, confused , uncertain, and they find their way to "an ancient tumbledown feverish," struggling "in a convulsive effort to ruin of a church." There, in this anony mous maintain mental equilibrium."• place, they pause to see fo r themselves the In part these accounts record ho nestly "wonderful painting, once so beautiful, always overwhelming experiences of confronting, after so worshipped by masters in art, and forever to years of having access only to reproductions, the be famous in song and story" (136). authentic works th e m se l ves. ~ "1 have seen good The episode opens as a rehearsal of w hat by copies a ll over the world," confessed o ne 1869 had become a fa miliar ritual of viewing art traveler, "but they lose their charm after seeing described time and again in travel literature. so much of h eavenly b eauty and earthly Primed, l ike Twa in, to a hig h pitch of s weetness as this g lorious work of Raphael expectation by guide books, art reproductions, exhibits."• Another attested to "the new sense Iech1res-the whole range of nineteenth-century which is developed by the sight of a cultivated educatio n-previo us travelers approached European art like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, as she mounted the steps of the 'Star Papt•rs; or, Experii!IICI.'S of Art am/ Nat ure ( cw York: J. Louvre, felt a "flutter of excitement and C. Derby, 1855) 59, 57. expectation." 2 For her brother Henry Ward 'The Art Idea, ed. Benjamin Rowland (1864; Cambridge: The illllll<'l'lltS Abroad (1 ew York: ew American Library, Harvard Univ. Press, 1960) 44. 1966) 136.

'See Neil lla rris, The Artist in A merican Society: The 'Sunny Memories of roreign Ln11 ds ( Bosto n: Phillips, Fonunlive Years, 1790-1860 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, Sampson, 185-l) 2: 159. 1966) 124-69.

18 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW masterpiece. It is as if we had always lived in a cabinet that made solid what had only been world where our eyes, though open, saw but a dreamed of. 10 To visit Notre Dame, Shakespeare's bl ank, and were then broug ht into another, home, Florence, Athens was to make literal the where they were sa luted by ... grace and literary, to make authentic the imaginary, to beauty."7 These were Americans finding for divest allusion of illusion: "The Capitol, the themselves, by following a program of leisured Forum, St. Peter's, the Coliseum-what few self-cultivation first codified in the eighteenth­ hours' ramble ever took in places so hallowed century Grand Tour, what many intellectuals by poetry, history, and art?"" Thus it was the had felt their country lacked: a rich tradition of v iewing of art, already consolidated in culture made sturdy by a backbone of canonical impressive collections in Paris, Florence, and masterpieces and ancient monuments. It was above all in Rome, that in many travelers' this expectation that had persuaded Harvard accounts mos t accurately condensed the earlier in the century to send abroad s u ch experience of visiting Europe. prospective faculty members as George Ticknor, In visiting the Leonardo, then, Twain walks a Edward Everett, George Bancroft, and Henry path already well-trod by Americans eager to Wadsworth Longfellow to prepare for their roles open the door to authentic art and culture. In as educators.8 Their experiences in turn helped fact, he figures 'The Last Supper" as the essence inspire Americans to import as much of Europe of Art, "celebrated" not jus t by travelers and as they could for their own edification. Boston's critics, but by other "masters in art"; it is, in Anthology Society Reading Room-later to short, the masterpiece of masterpieces done by become the Athenaeum- was founded on the the original and originating Master. Twain's strength of books travelers brought back from la nguage deftly echoes a tradition of almost Europe.9 Later in the century Jarves, inspired by giddy homage to the picture both by critics and his experience at the Louvre, assembled an travel writers- an earlier traveler visits "This itTtpressive collection of Renaissance Italian art, celebrated painting, a copy of which, in one which Yale acquired in 1868 for its own museum form or another, everybody has seen, and which (Strout 70, 72). Similarly, New York's has been pronounced one of the fines t in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Boston's world." 12 In the ir use of "celebrated," both Museum of Fine Arts both opened their doors in writers in turn echo one of the most powerful 1870 stocked with the products of their patrons' pronouncements of the painting's value by European buying tours. Goethe, whose essay on Leonardo's "Celebrated Thus when Baya rd Taylor, the most popular Picture of The Lord's Supper," publis hed in travel w riter in America after mid-century, English in 1821, cited it as "The picture ... confessed, "I cannot disconnect my early known to all that have ever heard the name of longings for a knowledge of the Old World from art pronounced."'3 According to Mrs. Jameson, a still earlier passion for Art and Literature," he whose Sacred and Legendary Art went throug h merely made explicit what many travel accounts numerous editions, Leonardo, "the greatest took for granted: Europe was for nineteenth­ thinker as well as the greatest painter of his century Americans a vast museum, a collector's age," had with this painting brought forth "a

•john Overton Choulcs, Tire Cruise of tire Steam Yaclrt Nortlr ' By-Ways of Europe (1869; ew York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, Star; a Narrative of tire Excursion of Mr. Vanderbilt's Party 1889) 8. (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1854) 221.

"Bayard Taylor, Views Afoot, or Europe Seerr witlr Knapsack 'W. M. Gillespie, Rorrre: As Seerrl1y a N~'W-Yo rke r in 1843-4 arrtf Staff, rev. household ed. (1855; New York: G. P. Putnc1m, (New York: 1845) 82, as qtd. in I larris 128. 1890) 407.

'Cushing Strout, Tire American Image of tire Old World ( ew ''Rev. John E. Edwards, Random Sketclres anti Notes of York: Harper, 1963) 64. European Travel in 1856 ( ew York: I larper, 1857) 268.

"See Lewis P. Simpson, "joseph Stevens Buckminster: The " johann Wolfgang von Goethe, "Observatio ns on Rise of the ew England Clerisy," Tire Man of Letters in New Leon<~rdo da Vinci's Celebrated Pictme of The Last Supper," England and tire Sorrtlr (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Uni v. trans. G. H. Noehden, in Goethe on Art, ed. John Gage Press, 1973). (Berkeley: Univ. of California Pre!.s, 1980) 166.

LOWRY 19 creation so consummate, that since that time it with the ineffable graces of the first society." has been at once the wonder and the despair of Unburde ned by education (if "one has no those who have followed in the same path."" opportunity in America to acquire a critical Leona rdo was more tha n a great artist, he judg ment in art," then he will parade, rather embodied Art; he was, according to C harles than hide, his "uncouth sentiments" [1 70, 171 )), Eliot Norton, a "great genius, one whose power the Vandal gazes at Art "with a critical eye and all the world recognizes and honors, [one who] says it's a perfect old nightmare of a picture and stands apart from his time, unapproached, he wouldn' t give forty dollars for a million like 1 alone." ' it." II• Twain 's visit to the painting is framed by a Twain's innocent may represent an American whole set of expectations that links the genre in abroad-one English reviewer characteri zed which he writes-European travel literature­ him as "a very o ffens ive s p ecimen o f the w ith a discourse of a rt a ppreciatio n a nd vulgarest kind of Yankee"-but he places more demands his reaction to the painting. Where he emphasis on the Vandal whose uncultivated or had avoided such a confrontation earlier at the "inexperienced eye" underwrites a clear-eyed Louvre with a casual reference to "its miles of skepticism, always quick to expose the Empire's paintings by the old masters," here he faces the new clothes, to dismiss as shams the fruits of d emands o f convention (1 00). And he d oes civilization offered to him by breathless guides regis te r a new v isio n , b ut it is o ne tha t and sanctimonious guidebooks}' If Europe is a d eli bera tely travesties those of othe rs. The museum, he suggests, it resembles more that of painting he describes is "battered and scarred in P. T. Barnum than Charles Wilson Peale: a house every direction, and stained and discolored by of humbug filled with disfigured paintings by time . . . . The colors are dimmed with age; the "Old Mas ters" and buckets of nails from the countenances are scaled and marred, and nearly True Cross. And it is this humbug, distilled in all expression is gone from them; the hair is a the catch-phrased awe of visitors to "The Last dead blur upon the wall, and there is no life in Supper," a nd p erpe tua ted by other travel the eyes" (1 37). Despite the image's writers, that Twain will expose. "This book," he inscrutability, Twain finds himself alone in his posits in his preface, "has a purpose, which is to disappointment. Around him artists assiduously suggest to the reader how he would be likely to copy it onto canvases while touris ts s ta nd see Europe and the Eas t if he looked at them "entra nced before it w ith ba ted breath a nd with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those parted lips," uttering "catchy ejaculations of w ho traveled in those countries before him. I rapture." Gauging their reactions against his make small pretense of showing anyone how he own, he wonders, "How can they see what is ought to look at objects of interest beyond the not visible? ... You would think that those men sea-other books do that, and therefore, even if I had an astonishing talent for seeing things ... were competent to do it, there is no need." which had faded out of the picture and gone a While this bravado led Bret Harte, for hund red years before they were born." Indeed instance, to praise Twain as a "hilarious image­ his eyes lead him to notice "how superior the breaker," Twain's contentious stance is not as copies were to the o rig inal, tha t is, to m y straightforwa rd as his prefa ce suggests. 18 In fact, inexperienced eye" (138). his disappointment about the Leonardo was, by The m oment captures in miniature the 1869, in many ways no less a cliche than the irreverent texture of the text of The Innocents rapture of those who stood around him. "I sat Abronrl as a whole . T wa in vis its "The Last before it for some time," noted one tra veler, Supper" as what h e calls elsewhe re an "and looked at it, and read all the guide-books "American Va ndal," "the roving, independent, free-and-easy character of that class of traveling ••"The America n Va ndal Abroad," Mark Twain Speaking, America ns who are not elaborately educated, ed. Paul Fa tout (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 1976) 27, 29. cultiva ted, and refined, and gilded and filigreed "Unsig ned review, Sat urday Revic.'W 8 Oct. 1870, in Mark "Sacred and Legendary Art, 8 th ed. (1848; London: Twain, The Critical Heritage, ed . Frederick Anderson (London: Longmilns, Green, 1879) 2: 268. Routledge & Kegan Pau l, 1971) 43.

"Notes of Travel and Study in Italy (Boston: Houg hton, Mifflin, 1859) 317. "Overland Monthly Jan. 1870, in Anderson 33.

20 EW O RLEA 5 REV IEW said about it, but was not able to work myself own u se of m edia- that the "orig ina l" up to the point of extravagant admira tio n masterpiece had long since, in Goethe's words, expressed by some travellers in its "almost ceased to exist, in its own subs tance" contemplation" (Edwards 268). Bayard Taylor (166) . To later connoisseurs, the picture was no admitted to a similar reaction in viewing the more than the "wreck of a g lorious presence" comparably admired Venus de Medici: "It may (Jameson 268) in which less educated travelers be considered heresy, but I confess [ did not go could "distinguish Little besid e the composition into raptures, nor at first perceive any traces of and the general sentiment of the picture." '" By superhuman beauty" (Views Afoot 352). Even the nineteenth century the real picture had been Harriet Beecher Stowe's flutter of excitement for centuries known best only through copies; its s ubsided once s h e entered the Louvre and fame and its "beauty" lay solely in its "aura" of experienced "nothing of that overwhelming, authenticity parad oxically attested to by the subduing nature which I had conceived" (23). ubiquity of, if no t always the s kill in, the The persis te nce of s u ch reactions, o fte n reproductions.20 Thus in turning an "impartial" coming as they do hand-in-hand with but "inexperienced" eye from the original to its expressions of g iddy elation, s uggests tha t copies, Twain s u ggests that the rhetoric of disappointment itself was as integ ra l a reverence finds as its true object nothing more component of the rhetoric of authentic culture as tha n the m e nta l image s uch la ng uage has was rapture. Indeed, Twain's purpose is not so shaped beforehand. much to d enig ra te art-he admits to being Art is not the only sight on Twain's itinerary "sati sfied that 'The Last Supper' was a very to disappear behind the flood of images and miracle of art once" (138)- but to explore his, expectations framing it. At virtually no point and by implication his readers', relationship to does his tour elicit an experience "authentic" that art. The narrator's disappointment in ''The enough to exceed his expectations. The issue is La s t Supper" s te ms from the fact tha t the comically foreclosed at one of the earliest stops painting-far from being too cultural for his on his tour at the city of Tangier, "the spot we vulgar taste-is not authentic enough; as merely have been longing for all the time . ... We wanted a scarred piece of history, it cannot deliver the something thoroughly and uncompromisingly pure experience that the conventional rhetoric of foreign- foreig n from top to bottom- foreign rapture leads him to anticipate. In his from center to circumference- foreig n insid e disillusionment, the narrator is as much a victim and outside and all around .... And lo! In of the rhetoric of reverence as are his fellow Ta ng ie r we have found it" (57-58). As the travelers in their illusion. He, too, visits the apotheosis of the authentically foreign, the city's painting to experience in the original w hat he architecture, the exotic dress and customs of its had known only in reproduction and in prose. inhabitants, and its associations with a his tory His "impartial" d escription of the disfigured reaching to the time of ancient Thebes, all lead picture, by virtue of how thoroughly it negates Twain to invest Tangier with an uncanny the ra pturous comments of others, perfectly "foreignness": expresses his disappointed expectations once he is there. Indeed, so caught up is he in his search Here is not the slightest thing that ever we for aesthetic experi ence that he endorses the have seen save in pictures-and we always copies as "superior" precisely because they at mi s trus ted the pictures before-they least help him recall what he came to see. seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. Thus the irony in his carefully worded praise But behold, they were not wild enough­ for the painting: "The Last Supper" is " the they have not told half the story. Tangier is picture from which all engravings and all copies a foreign land if ever there was one, and the have been made for three centuries" (137). This true s pirit of it can never be found in any seemingly naive statement, in fact, points to the fina l s ig nificance o f Twain's s tag ing his '"Grace G reenwood (Sara Jane Lippincott!, HnJIS n 11 d confronta tion with Art with the Leonardo rather Mishaps, or, A Tour ;, Europe (Bos ton: Ticknor, Reed, and than in, for instance, the Louvre. As informed Fi elds, I854) 397. commentators were well aware, in the decades after "The Last Supper" was painted it had '""The Wo rk of Art in the Age of Mechanica l suffered such damage from fl ooding and heavy­ Reproduction," Illllmillntiolls, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah handed restoration- not to mention Leonardo's Arendt ( ew York: Schocken, 1969).

LOWRY 21 book save The Arabian Nights. writers is not a particularly scrupulous (58) veracity-the standard avowal of virtually every writer-but the fact that he travels Europe as a Just as in front of "The Last Supper," Twain's tourist rather than as a cultural pilgrim. In his attention oscillates between the object (the city, irreverent haste he anticipates what Henry the foreign) and its image, as he weighs the James would later characterize as the reality of one against the expectations generated "passionless pilgrims" who evinced "a by the other. At first it seems that Tangier does, disposition, which had perhaps even at most a indeed, exceed its images, which tell only "half comic side, to treat 'Europe,' collectively, as a the story." In citing The Arabian Nights, however, vast painted and gilded holiday toy, serving its Twain finally locates the authentically foreign in purpose on the spot and for the time, but to be a "reality" measured not by its difference from relinquished, sacrificed, broken and cast away, images, but rather by its resemblance to what at the dawn of any other convenience."22 The travelers know beforehand. Tangier, as he sums commentaries Twain offers, the history he up, is nothing less than "an oriental picture," an supplies, the comic comparisons he constructs, image of the foreign best embodied in a book of all serve to fragment "Europe" into a touristic fantasy. collection of interchangeable sights that are then In interpreting the "foreign" or the "authentic" shuffled and reintegrated in a narrative by its image, as he does both in Tangier and organized as much by the contingencies and before "The Last Supper," Twain represents both coincidences of Twain's tour, as well as his encounters in essentially aesthetic terms. Indeed, personal predilections, as it is by the countries under Twain's "ignorant" eye, all of Europe he visits. emerges as a form of art. Whether he visits the While James may have characterized the Vatican, the dungeons of the Castle D'If, the modern tourist as "passionless," Twain's markets of Constantinople, or Notre Dame ("We pilgrim, in fact, emerges as a creature of recognized the brown old Gothic pile in a enthusiastic anticipation riding a cycle of moment; it was like the pictures" [95]), his expectation and consummation or dis­ vision tears each site from any historical or appointment. Far from rejecting aesthetic ex­ social context-any foreign or authentic perience, he revels in it; from the opening pages reality-and transforms it into a "sight" framed he immerses himself wholeheartedly in the by pre-existing images linking it to other levelling vision of tourism, trusting in the very "site/sights."21 The Leonardo, Notre Dame, equivalence of one sight to another to sustain his Rome, Tangier: no matter the scale, everything passion. The excursion, he is sure even before he in Europe is there to be visited, recognized, and sees the itinerary, will be "a picnic on a giant categorized with other images. The result is an scale," a "royal holiday" during which experience that is remarkably uniform, even at passengers would "scamper about the decks by times boring. "What is there in Rome for me to day, filling the ship with shouts and laughter" see that others have not seen before me?" he (17). Nor does the dry language of the asks in mock desolation. "What is there for me prospectus advertising the trip's itinerary-"The to touch that others have not touched? What is undersigned will make an excursion as above there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, during the coming season" -dampen his that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What enthusiasm (18). In fact its catalogue of sights can I discover? Nothing whatsoever. One charm gives shape to the innocent's revel by invoking of travel dies here" (190-91). Like the "twelve a litany of magical names-Lyon, Genoa, hundred pictures by Palma the Younger ... and Correggio, Corsica, Napoleon, Joppa, Jerusalem, fifteen hundred by Tintoretto," much of Europe Caesar: places and names mingle in a soup of leaves Twain "weary with looking" and association linked only by the timetable of incapable of interest, much less enthusiasm (169- travel. Twain opens the list of marvels by asking 70). "who could read the program of the excursion Twain's prefatorial claims notwithstanding, without longing to make one of the party?" (18), what differentiates him from previous travel and closes it by answering emphatically,

-~------"The distinction comes from Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: ""Preface to 'The Reverberator,'" The Art of the Novel, ed. Schocken Books, 1976)_ R P_ Blackmur (New York: Scribner's, 1962) 189_

22 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r "Human nature could not withstand these evaluating the actual place in light of its prior bewildering temptations" (22). image, and comparing it to other sites and The Innocents Abroad opens with the tourist experiences. Geographic places and material already preformed, keyed to a pitch of comic objects are torn from their social context and hyperbole by the anticipation of travel itself. transformed into images of themselves, tourist And in fact, this lust for travel, more than the "sights" framed by the touristic imagination. attraction of any particular site, fuels the Sights for Twain are commodities the cultural pilgrims' trip. Despite their repeated dis­ value of which is established not by any "aura" appointments, indeed despite their growing of authenticity, but by guides and guidebooks, skepticism as to whether these promises can be by the planned activity of tourism as it fulfilled, Twain and his companions time and materializes in the ship's relentless itinerary, again eagerly strain for the first glimpses of and most of all by the act of consumption itself. Gibraltar, France, Milan, and Jerusalem, their appetite whetted by pictures, guidebooks, II religious and historical associations. Once having arrived, no matter how completely each Twain's comic discovery of Europe rode a place may satisfy or disappoint their ex­ mounting tide of American travel oriented more pectations, the pilgrims quickly succumb to a to sightseeing and less to personal cultivation. simple thirst for travel that pulls them to the With the Paris Exhibition, which Twain visited next sight. on his cruise, in full flower in 1867, In this sense, The Innocents Abroad unfolds as a unprecedented numbers of visitors took sustained exegesis of the opening prospectus advantage of lower steamship fare and faster Twain significantly prints in full as "a text for and more comfortable continental travel to visit this book." For if Europe promises a certain kind Europe. Twain himself estimated the number of of "experience," this experience is valid insofar Americans traveling abroad in 1867 as nearly as it recreates and fulfills the promises of the 100,000 per year. 21 More sober judgments set the prospectus. Europe emerges as a metonymic number at mid-century, before the travel boom series of buildings, paintings, streets and vistas; following the Civil War, at around 30,000. 24 like the words in the prospectus, it is linked as a Despite these numbers, however, Europe system of equivalent signs. Indeed, Twain ends remained for most Americans inaccessible: even his text evaluating the success of the excursion a second-class cabin for a return trip between in precisely these terms: "I have no fault to find New York and Liverpool cost no less than $150, with the manner in which our excursion was far beyond the means of even the middle class. conducted. Its program was faithfully carried Their experience of Europe came strictly at home, out. .. our holiday flight has not been in vain­ where they read widely popular travel literature for above the confusion of vague recollections, or viewed stereocards and chromolithographs of certain of its best prized pictures lift themselves famous art works and well-known European 2 and will still continue perfect in tint and outline vistas and monuments. ' after their surroundings shall have faded" (474- Indeed, despite popular travel writing's 75). The "pictures" he has in mind are not those explicit use of the rhetoric of authenticity, it by the "Old Masters" but the very sites, stimulated such vicarious consumption of impressed now as images, vaguely hinted at in culture. Even as authors sought "to make words the prospectus: "We cannot forget Florence­ a substitute for pencil and palette," even as they Naples-nor the foretaste of heaven that is in struggled to "acquire the power of bringing the delicious atmosphere of Greece-and surely not Athens.... We shall remember Baalbek­ the pyramids of Egypt" (475). Twain ends his ''Cited in Dewey Ganzel, Mark Twain Abroad: The Cruise of the "Quaker City" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1968) 3. book where it began, with another prospectus that registers his experience only in the few modifiers with which he surrounds each "Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of "sacred" word. European Travel (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1964) 44. Tourism then is not strictly a form of enlightened travel, but a comically philistine cycle of anticipation and consumption-a "See Peter C. Marzio, The Democratic Art: Pictures for n 19th­ process which entails reading about each site, Century America (Boston: David Godine, 1979).

LOWRY 23 attribute to art itself a power to shape society. only implicit in the writing of others. He joined "Art is the surest and safest civilizer," wrote one the Quaker City cruise as a well-known traveler. "Open your galleries of art to the humorist and newspaper writer whose fare was people [as the Europeans do] and ... you give paid, like that of others on the trip, by two them a refinement to which they would newspapers which printed the letters he otherwise be strangers," a "sense of the beautiful regularly dispatched in the course of his travels. and the sublime" that, when accompanied by "a After returning, he revised his articles into a few salutary lessons on the necessity of book only when publisher Elisha Bliss could submission to authority," will eventually leave promise Twain the extensive profits of Americans "as well-behaved as the people of subscription publishing-an early form of mass France or Italy." 28 publishing whereby huge numbers of books Travel accounts did more than document the were sold door to door by itinerant canvassers. mutation of enthusiasm into evaluation, In signing his first book contract, Twain entered ignorance into knowledge. They stood as its a terrain of culture shaped broadly by values of final result. They offered their readers more than the literary as embodied in and disseminated by secondhand descriptions of culture. They the book, and every bit as codified and suggested a language, a disposition, a set of canonized as was Europe. As when abroad, expectations that allowed readers to maximize Twain traveled this new land as a vandal to their own presumably more meager aesthetic taste. capital in a stance of taste. Thus the pretext of It has been common to characterize Twain's travel writing lay in the pretensions of taste and attention to, and at times obsession with, the hierarchy that lay implicit in virtually every business of writing as separating him from the episode of art viewing, pretensions that linked more literary concerns of his peers. Yet Twain's proper uses of culture with social hierarchies. pursuit of the profits of culture actually placed The meaning of Europe lay not in how texts him at the center of Gilded Age literary represented its cultural wealth, but in how they production, where culture and capital coexisted dramatized travelers' reactions to that wealth. in uneasy union. Even as the marketplace for Twain's consuming vision threatened this reading-shaped by the expanded scale of book rhetoric on a number of different grounds. In publishing, the growth of mass-circulation displacing an aesthetics of appreciation with one magazines, and the emergence of reading as a of recognition, he implied that the acquisition of leisure-time "habit" -seemed to offer greater cultural capital lay not in collecting the authentic prospects for a popular dissemination of culture, but in reflecting the conventional. The values it threatened to transform all writing into a form of his culture lay not in distinction (among art of commerce, and author's names into, to quote works, among connoisseurs) but in indis­ William Charvat, "brand names, to be sold, 3 tinguishability (among originals, and between goods [to] be promoted." " originals and their images). His was, in short, an Bliss could assure his new author of great aesthetics of mass culture, an aesthetics profits because, unlike many of his more genteel potentially outside the realm of taste, peers, he felt relatively free, in the words of one dramatized by the blissfully ignorant tourist critic, to treat "literature and art ... like common vandalizing the hierarchies of culture. merchandise."31 The result, for many in the book Thus it was not in Europe that Twain played trade, was a kind of "false" culture. Subscription the American Vandal most successfully, but at books, fumed another critic, were easily home, where he could align the vision of the identified: "[A] gorgeous binding, usually in "uneducated" or "impartial eye" of the innocent very bad taste, thick but with cheap paper, abroad with "the mercenary eye" of the outrageously poor woodcuts, the largest types practicing author.29 Twain took seriously the connection between capital and culture that lay "'Matthew Brucolli, ed., The Profession of Authorship in America: The Papers of William Charvat (Columbus: Ohio State "Charles Bullard Fairbanks, Aguecheek (Boston: Shepard, Univ. Press, 1968) 273. On the politics of the literary Clark, and Brown, 1859) 127, 128, 129. marketplace, see also Christopher Wilson, The Labor of Words: Literary Professionalism in the Progressive Era (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985). ''Letter to Henry Houghton 12 Feb. 1875, Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers 1867-1894, ed. Hamlin Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967) 83. "Publisher's Weekly 21 June 1880:8.

LOWRY 25 with the thickest leads, add up to a very big, professed to prefer. gaudy book which a glib tongue or persistent Both Bliss and Twain, who eventually became boring cheats folks into buying for five dollars, a subscription publisher himself, recognized the when the reading matter which it contains, if importance of, and realized the profits from, this worth anything, would make about a dollar­ image-making process by offering buyers as and-a-half book in the regular trade." 32 This elaborate a piece of furniture as they could description was by and large accurate: afford. As Bliss instructed his door-to-door subscription books were in fact big, gaudy, agents, "Books are seldom bought for what they ornamental, and expensive. Publishers like Bliss are as a whole, but for some particular feature or worked hard to justify steep prices and high features they contain."" So his agents gave their profits by making sure that the customer customers as many reasons as possible for received as much physical book as possible: in purchasing by showing them ornate, leather effect, the text often served as nothing more than bound prospectuses containing title page, an excuse for the binding. In other words, illustrations, and some representative text. One entrepreneurs like Bliss succeeded because they of the most powerful selling tools was a list of focused on selling images of a culture their prominent local citizens who already had agreed customers could not otherwise acquire. Such to purchase a book. Adding one's name to the books were meant to be put on coffee tables or list allowed the customer to join, quite literally, a displayed prominently on shelves as much as select group of cultural consumers. Done they were meant to be read. correctly, Bliss assured his agents, such tactics As blatantly opportunistic as this marketing would give them "a kind of mesmeric power" strategy was, it did not necessarily represent a and "a tremendous leverage" over the buyer. cynical affront to taste. Rather, it traded on an In effect, agents offered their customers what increasing propensity by the American middle Twain was offered to join the Quaker City class to judge a book-and its owner-by the cruise: an "authentic" image of Culture. Thus cover. Even as genteel critics in dozens of advice when Twain opens his book with the travel books outlined for their readers courses of "prospectus," he literally offers "a text for this reading for improvement, they also charted book," a guide to buying his book translated as a what can be characterized as an etiquette of guide for his trip. Like the customer I reader, book possession, implying that owning books the narrator is mesmerized by a commodity no­ entitled one to similar claims to distinction as table for its discrete features: "Constantinople! reading them. "[B]ooks are the most telling Smyrna! The Holy Land! Egypt and 'our furniture which can be placed in a room," friends the Bermudians'!" And like the cus­ assured one such writer. "[A]n opinion is tomer, he, too, enters a list, "selected by a formed at once, from them of the taste and pitiless 'Committee on Applications,"' which cultivation of the family."" Echoed another, includes celebrities like Henry Ward Beecher "Books are not made for furniture, but there is and General Sherman. Twain's tourist and his nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a reader travel the same terrain of the tasteless, a house. The plainest row of books that cloth or geography shaped as much by the consuming paper ever covered is more significant of pretensions of Culture as any authentic refinement than the most elaborately carved experience. etagere or sideboard."34 Subscription books thus This is not to suggest that in travestying the took their place in the family parlor with the distinctions of taste, in displacing the authentic very copies of the original artwork that Twain with the reproduced, Twain rejects the value of culture altogether. Rather, just as the tourist ------remakes Europe into an image of itself, so too ""The Subscription Book Trade," Publisher's Weekly 23 July 1872: 93-94. does Twain locate the ultimate value of culture in its images. This dimension emerges most powerfully at precisely the moment when Twain "Lyman Abbott, "Suggestions for Household Libraries," grows most weary of the "shams" of tourism: Hints for Home Reading: A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Use (New York: Putnam, 1880) 112.

"The bookselling guide is reprinted in Hamlin Hill, ed., "Charles F. Richardson, The Choice of Books (New York: Mark Twain and Elisha Bliss (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri American Book Exchange, 1881) 164-65. Press, 1964) 170-82.

26 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW during his pilgrimage through the Holy Land. culture is at the same time its most thorough The journey re-enacts with greater intensity his parody, composed of monuments that are pure experience in viewing "The Last Supper." If his images, signs with no referents. The obsequious visit to the painting promised a paradigmatic rituals of pilgrims and monks, the vast encounter with an authentic icon of High ornamentation of the separate chapels, even the Culture, the Holy Land promises contact with Church itself, designate what is essentially an the origins of culture itself. It represents "the image of truth. chief feature, the grand goal of the expedition"; Out of this absurdity, however, emerges an the tourists' imminent arrival elicits "the wildest unexpected epiphany. As Twain did in front of spirit of expectancy" (309). In traveling overland the Leonardo, he shifts his attention away from to Jerusalem, the pilgrims will touch the the source to the image, from the "rock" of the authentic sites of the Bible, the most powerful Church to its "illustrious edifice." This time, text in Western Christendom. They will walk the however, he does so not to initiate a play ground once "pressed by the feet of the Saviour" between image and site, but to locate the and gaze at the same vistas "that God looked authentic in the image itself. Despite "its on.... The situation is suggestive of a reality claptrap sideshows and unseemly impostures of and a tangibility that seem at variance with the every kind," Twain concedes that the Church is, vagueness and mystery and ghostliness that one "in its history from the first, and in its naturally attaches to the character of a god" tremendous associations, [the] most illustrious (339). edifice in Christendom" (414). Adam's grave Almost immediately, however, whatever may be no more "true" than the bushel of expectations Twain entertains are dashed by the fragments of the "true cross" Twain has seen sheer absurdity of translating a text of religious during his voyage. Neither, however, are any of miracles to a bare and ruined geography. No these markers a sham: the Church and its sacred matter how much in disrepair was "The Last filigree have accrued too much meaning Supper," no matter how heavily framed it and throughout history to be dismissed as a fraud: other sights were by either the glib tongue of a guide or the preconceptions of guidebooks, they for fifteen hundred years its shrines have existed materially. In the Holy Land, on the been wet with the tears of pilgrims ... ; for other hand, Twain finds himself often visiting more than two hundred, ... gallant knights sights with no site. Biblical towns survive only ... wasted their lives away in a struggle to as impoverished hamlets or as "shapeless" seize it and hold it sacred from infidel ruins. The Sea of Galilee is a dreary stretch of pollution. Even in our own day a war that water in a harsh landscape bereft of the cost millions of treasure and rivers of blood fishermen of Biblical times. He and his fellow was fought because two rival nations tourists are shown the precise spot where Paul claimed the sole right to put a new dome was blinded on the road to Damascus, or where upon it. History is full of this old Church of Joseph's brothers cast him into the pit, knowing the Holy Sepulchre. full well that the location is not only disputed, (415) but in fact arbitrary. Absurdity reaches its highest point at the In inverting the normal touristic relationship pilgrimage's most sacred destination, the between the site and meaning (the church is not Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, full of history, "history is full of this old where the group enters both "the most sacred Church"), Twain explicitly relocates authenticity locality in Christendom" and a Barnumesque in the historical process that has designated that stage for humbug (405). Under one roof Twain site as worth visiting, a process that as a tourist visits Christ's grave, the hill at Calvary, the Twain affirms. Thus the true site in the Church "true pillar of flagellation," and the spots where of the Holy Sepulchre-indeed, the true origin Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene and to his of historical and touristic authenticity-is the mother after his resurrection. This zealous comically mistranslated sign reading, marking of origins breaks all bounds of the "'Chapel of the Invention of the Cross'-a name believable when Twain also encounters Adam's which is unfortunate, because it leads the grave and, next to it, a pillar marking the center ignorant to imagine that a tacit acknowl­ of the earth, from which the dust was taken to edgement is thus made that the tradition that form Adam. The authentic site of history and Helena found the true cross here is a fiction-an

LOWRY 27 invention" (411). Twain, of course, is one of imposture is The Innocents Abroad-an extended those "ignorant" visitors: in this "invention," prospectus for culture. Thus the book itself which has long since overwhelmed the integrity represents one more marker in the comic cycle of the original, lies the authentic. of expectation and fulfillment that both Twain­ The image here, the designating marker, as tourist and writer-and the consuming reader emerges not as a perversion of "true" culture, reproduce. Just as Twain's parody of travel but as culture itself. If the innocent abroad never rewrites the grounds for tourism, anticipating in really leaves the domain of the mediated, if he is its humor a new form of cultural consumption, caught in an endless deferment of the authentic so too does his text parody prior assumptions of as he visits cities, churches, museums, shrines, cultural value as they were embodied in the and monuments, he nonetheless actively book, initiating a new phase in literary participates in making them "authentic." production.D Moreover, it is in terms of this paradoxical situation that Twain's own text can be understood. Tourism, as he presents it, is an activity of reconstitution, of interpretation, and Richard S. Lowry is Assistant Professor of English at the College of William and Mary. finally of writing. The final product of this

28 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW David Berry

THE ITALY NOT IN THE TRAVEL BROCHURES

-for Memie King

hen all the grapes were in, the blind, half-crazy W old accordionist was let out of the jail. He always was the music for the orgy. Snoring finally out-rattled all the giggles.

Next day the Pope thought best to send a wind to humble (once again) this little hill, though now the hill was silent as a bell, the clapper melted into wedding rings.

The wind went at it, anyway, made limbs catch at each other, moan, scrape and release. Trees bent and swayed like the accordionist wrestling music from his old squeeze-box. This always woke the old accordionist, and it was back to jail another year.

The farmer's daughter handed him his stick and her elbow, and he went gliding back on home to bars and floor, roof, and free meals ... a monk at heart.

First thing he wound his clock. The pendulum, its shape was like a leg, took off force marching for the next festival although last night was now a year away­ same step come winter, summer, spring, or fall.

Sometimes an extra tick was the accordionist speeding things up with his walking stick, although by now he knew by heart the way and seldom rushed. As he saw it, the days got longer, seemed as if a day would never end, but the years came quicker and quicker.

BERRY 29 Heather Henderson

THE TRAVEL WRITER AND THE TEXT: "MY GIANT GOES WITH ME WHEREVER I GO"

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern Fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that 1 fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

he giant that accompanies every travel value of travelers' accounts lies in the Twriter is constructed in part by the books he opportunity travelers have for first-hand or she has read. As the Victorian traveler Eliot observation: they can lend their eyes to the stay­ Warburton tells us, he had read the accounts of at-home reader. But what value do re-seeing and many previous travelers before setting out on re-telling have? As Mark Twain complained: his own journey to Egypt and the Holy Land: "What is there in Rome for me to see that others "notwithstanding which, I found much novelty, have not seen before me?"' For the travel writer, as well as interest, in my own personal the real question is, what is there for me to write experience."' The tentative wording of this about? remark suggests that what he had seen in his In exploring how landscapes are both read imagination, through the words of others, was and written, this essay refers to a range of really more vivid to him than what he had seen works, while examining in some detail three for himself. This curious interplay between British travel books about the East, two from the literary experience and lived experience forms nineteenth century, Alexander Kinglake's Eothen one of the defining characteristics of the genre of (1844) and Warburton's The Crescent and the travel literature. Cross (1846), and one from the twentieth, Philip There are two kinds of travelers: those who Glazebrook's Journey to Kars (1984). 3 For the seek to fill in the "white spaces" on the map, and Victorian traveler to the East, like Kinglake or those who travel to see places that have been Warburton, not only the Bible and the classics previously visited and described. Some are but also previous travel accounts provided a looking to inscribe themselves upon a blank textual framework that largely determined his page, others to reread an already written experience of travel. For a modern traveler like landscape. This essay concerns itself with the Glazebrook, the Victorian adventurers latter, with the complex responses of travelers themselves contribute significantly to this for whom the written word interposes between intertext: Glazebrook undertakes his journey to self and sight. As Warburton acknowledges, Turkey in order to find out why the Victorians texts tend to prevail over the material world of traveled, and he confesses that "besides looking real places, real people: past sight dominates present site. Still further complexities are 'The Innocents Abroad (1869; New York: New American encountered by travelers who then go on to Library, 1980) 190. produce their own travel texts. Theoretically, the 'As should be obvious, I am looking at holiday travelers rather than the explorers, missionaries, and colonizers, 'The Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities of whose exploits have been so well analyzed by Mary Louise Eastern Travel, 2 vols. (1845; New York: Putnam, 1850) Pratt and Patrick Brantlinger in "Race," Writing, and preface. Because there are several editions, parenthetical Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of citations are to volume and chapter, rather than page. Chicago Press, 1986) 138-62; 185-222.

30 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW through my own eyes ... I have been ... in the proves Homer's authenticity and because it company of ghosts, the shades of real travellers, establishes a link between Homer and Kinglake. whose voices I have tried to overhear, and The pleasure of imagining scenes from the whose thoughts I have tried to understand."4 past on the spot where they took place is often Initially, a traveler's previous reading may greater than the pleasure of witnessing scenes of seem relevant only as a motivating factor in the today. Glazebrook's obsession with this aspect decision to travel: it was "the rapturous and of travel makes Journey to Kars one of the most earnest reading of my childhood which made self-conscious and thought-provoking con­ me bend forward so longingly to the plains of temporary travel accounts. He suggests that Troy," Kinglake explains.5 Or, as the prolific only tourists travel to see the present; "real" travel writer Freya Stark puts it, "An travelers search for a glimpse of the past: "The imaginative aunt who, for my ninth birthday, truth is that few individuals have ever travelled, sent a copy of the Arabian Nights, was, I suppose, in modern times, to see what other countries are the original cause of trouble."" The notion of a like nowadays; in general people travel in search bookishly inspired journey crops up again and of traces of past eras" (151). The book opens at again. Sometimes travelers' imaginations are so Belgrade, with the narrator conjuring up visions fired by what they have read that their entire of Victorian travelers for whom crossing the journey attempts to follow in the footsteps of Danube was "the frontier between Christendom another traveler, real or fictional: Jonathan and Islam" (8). Modern Belgrade interests him Raban's Old Glory (1981) follows Huck Finn not at all: "For there to be any point in down the Mississippi, Richard Holmes' Footsteps travelling, you have always to be looking for (1985) traces the route chronicled by Robert things as they were, and dodging things as they Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey (1879), are" (52). and the title of Israel Shenker's In the Footsteps of Glazebrook is explicit about his preference: "It Johnson and Boswell (1982) speaks for itself. was Turkey's past that I was interested in-the But the effects of reading go far beyond 'past' which was the contemporary scene to merely providing the stimulus to travel. For nineteenth-century travellers." His clarification even when the journey is underway, books stresses that of course it isn't really Turkey's past condition travelers' choices and shape their but rather the experience of Victorians in Turkey perceptions. Clearly these literary pilgrimages that attracts him. The same was true, he argues, are examples of mediated desire: the value of a for nineteenth-century travelers: they "didn't scene, landscape, or monument lies not so much come to the East in order to study contemporary in its own intrinsic qualities as in the satisfaction Eastern life or character; the contemporary East of seeing for ourselves what someone else has was just the condition prevailing, like the seen, and described, before us. The observer's weather" (86). As a result, the travelers' relationship to the scene is indirect, filtered perceptions are constantly determined by through the literary representation by which he preconceptions. Warburton, for example, first came to know it. Kinglake marvels at the devotes most of his chapter on "The Nile" to "beautiful congruity betwixt the Iliad and the recounting Nelson's victory over Napoleon: "as material world" for it confirms "that Homer had the traveller paces by these silent and deserted passed along here-that this vision of Samothrace shores ... he lives again in the stirring days ... was common to him and to me" (48-49). when the scenery before him was the arena Seeing this island near Troy is unimportant in whereon France and England contended for the itself, but immensely important because it empire of the East" (1.6). Warburton's knowledge of the past-or rather, of a particular ------past, European and imperialist-colors 'Journey to Kars: A Modern Traveller in the Ottoman Lands everything he sees. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984) 9. Each of these writers privileges the past (Homeric, Napoleonic, Victorian) over the 'Eothen, or Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East, present. In Tristes Tropiques (1955) Claude Levi­ introduction Jan Morris (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982) Strauss captures that sense of belatedness: "I 45. wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full "The Valleys of the Assassins, and Other Persian Travels (1936; splendour of a spectacle that had not yet been London: Century, 1986) 7. blighted, polluted and spoilt." But he recognizes

I HENDERSON 31 I

f I that the "modern traveller, chasing after the goes to Liberia to get in touch with the vestiges of a vanished reality," is succumbing to primordial infancy of the human race: "there are an insidious illusion, for "a few hundred years times ... when one is willing to suffer some hence, in this same place, another traveller, as discomfort for the chance of finding-there are a despairing as myself, will mourn the thousand names for it, King Solomon's Mines, disappearance of what I might have seen, but the 'heart of darkness' if one is romantically failed to see."7 inclined, or ... one's place in time, based on a The pervasive desire to reimagine the past knowledge not only of one's present but of the underlies one of the central preoccupations of past from which one has emerged" (19-20). travel literature, the search for the lost innocence Again, childhood reading-in this case the of a Golden Age. Glazebrook notes that "as novels of Rider Haggard and Joseph Conrad­ persistently as the idea of Eden runs through "maps" a foreign place. 10 There is something human history, the existence, and rare both naive and solipsistic in the way certain attainment, of an Earthly Paradise runs through travelers persistently view others through the the books of Eastern travellers" (126). In Full Tilt: lens of their own literature. 11 Trekking through Ireland to India with a Bicycle (1965) Dervla the Liberian jungle in search of self­ Murphy thinks she's found paradise in understanding, Greene turns Africa into an Afghanistan: imaginative exercise, a literary construct. Greene seems unconscious of the racist I feel I've been privileged to see Man at his implications of his quest, with his assumption best-still in possession of the sort of liberty that "darkest Africa" represents mankind at an and dignity that we have exchanged for earlier stage of development. As Patrick what it pleases us to call 'progress.' Even a Brantlinger argues, "evolutionary thought seems brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to almost calculated to legitimize imperialism. The help to understand what we are. Living in theory that man evolved through distinct social the West, it's now impossible for most of us stages-from savagery to barbarism to to envisage our own past by a mere exercise civilization-led to a self-congratulatory of the imagination, so we're rather like anthropology that actively promoted belief in adults who have forgotten the childhood the inferiority, indeed the bestiality, of the that shaped them.8 African."'2 Furthermore, seeing "Them" as a primitive "Us" enables travelers to overlook Murphy's belief that travel enables us "to "Them" as distinctively and legitimately envisage our own past" assumes, of course, that "Other." Reflecting on his journey, Greene foreigners are like the children we once were (an concludes: assumption Glazebrook shares with his Victorian predecessors). The insidious But what had astonished me about Africa consequence of the Westerner's quest for origins was that it had never been really strange.... is that it negates the foreign present by seeing it The 'heart of darkness' was common to us merely as a version of our own past, an both. Freud has made us conscious as we embodiment of Western myth. have never been before of those ancestral Glazebrook believes not merely that foreigners threads which still exist in our unconscious are like children, but that travel itself is a process of locating sites marked on "a secret map given 'Journey Without Maps (1936; Harmondsworth: Penguin, him in childhood" (149). That map is created by 1986) 93. literature, whether it be the classics or fairy tales, the Arabian Nights or boys' books of adventure. "'In Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars Similarly, in Journey Without Maps (1936), (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), Paul Fussell glosses Graham Greene finds that travel offers a return Greene's title thus: "Childhood is a non-cerebral, thus map less, little journey" (69). to both "a personal and racial childhood." 9 He

"Greene writes, for example, that "Dakar was the 'Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman Baudelaire of L'Invitation au Voyage" and that "Freetown had (1955; New York: Pocket Books, 1977) 33-34. a Bret Harte air" (33, 37-38).

'Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle (Woodstock, N.Y.: "Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830- The Overlook Press, 1986) 94. 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988) 186.

32 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW minds to lead us back. The need, of course, the narrator moves in a climate of expectation­ has always been felt, to go back and begin engendered, usually, by other literature-but again. Mungo Park, Livingstone, Stanley, the potential for disappointment is so great that Rimbaud, Conrad represented only another it becomes virtually a convention of the genre itself. method to Freud's. (248) As Glazebrook observes, "the disappointments are brought about by the mis-preparation of your Thus travel, for Greene as for Murphy, is mind for what really exists; yet it's the mis­ primarily a means to self-knowledge ("more preparation-the treasure trove buried in your costly, less easy" than Freud's), rather than mind under certain place-names in early days­ knowledge of others. Western exploration which draws you on to travel in the first place" becomes merely another form of psychoanalysis. (152). As Glazebrook puts it, what interested the But if this discrepancy between reality and nineteenth-century traveler was "research into literature is not to be fatal to their dreams, his own character and capabilities seen in relief travelers must find a scapegoat. Clearly Homer against a background which had passed away in and the rest of the Western literary tradition Europe" (86). cannot be wrong; such a case would require Into the Heart of Borneo (1984), the title of a travelers to question the entire culture that has work by a more recent British traveler, suggests produced them. Far easier to grumble about the the continuing fascination of the "heart of natives: Turks are dirty and immoral, Africans darkness" metaphor, which associates sensual and savage, Ukits ludicrous and corrupt. "primitive" peoples with "our" buried instincts The need to protect one's literary myths no and half-forgotten past. Noting that "late doubt underlies much of the familiar litany of nineteenth-century men of science took Borneo travelers' complaints. Fanny Trollope, for very seriously as a possible birthplace of example, went to America partly because of her mankind," Redmond O'Hanlon writes: "Joseph friend Fanny Wright's enthusiastic account in Conrad had imagined central Borneo to be the Views of Society and Manners in America (1821). heart of twilight, the home of the 'old mankind'; But disenchanted with America for not being the and a sight of the Ukit, I reflected, might be as democratic Utopia she had read about, Trollope close as we could ever hope to come to those produced Domestic Manners of the Americans imagined ancestors." 13 Like Greene, O'Hanlon (1832), a devastating satire of American reenacts the Westerner's fantasy of discovering vulgarity and provincialism. an uncorrupted people who will provide us The fear of being let down leads the traveler with a glimpse of our lost selves. He to employ bizarre devices in an attempt to romanticizes his native guide, calling him "a salvage the moment. After an elegiac address to Beowulf, or, more accurately, a warrior-king out the Nile because it now has steamers on it of Homer," and he depicts the villagers as ("Unhappy river! ... thy old days of glory are sexually free and unselfconscious, like Adam gone by; thy veil of mystery is rent away"), and Eve before the Fall (45). But as we all know, Warburton comforts himself with the thought you can't go home again, and so the traveler's that when it gets dark he can pretend that reality search for the past is doomed from the start. lives up to his romantic fantasies: "by the time O'Hanlon is dismayed to find that the Ukit the evening and the mist had rendered the speak English and demand to be taught the country invisible [!], we had persuaded latest disco steps. They reject the past he desires ourselves that Egypt was indeed the lovely land to recapture, and he takes revenge for his that Moore has so delightfully imagined in the frustrated nostalgia in his mocking portrayal of pages of the 'Epicurean"' (1.7). The illusion that them as superficial and absurd. has been fostered by reading can only be Inevitably, modern reality clashes with sustained by blotting out the actual landscape. literary evocation: in his own eyes, Eliot Mark Twain resorts to the same psychological Warburton insists, Calypso's isle was "still the sleight of hand in The Innocents Abroad. First he

I enchanted island ... but a fat gentleman in records his disappointment with Venice: "And green spectacles ... declared it was the Botany this was the storied gondola of Venice! ... This Bay of Naples" (1.3). Thus, in travel literature, the famed gondola and this the gorgeous gondolier!-the one an inky, rusty old canoe l "Into the Heart of Borneo (1984; New York: Vintage, 1987) with a sable hearse body clapped onto the I 128-29, 129-30. middle of it, and the other a mangy, barefooted I l HENDERSON 33 guttersnipe with a portion of his raiment on time accomplishes for Kinglake what night exhibition which should have been sacred from achieved for Warburton and Twain, the public scrutiny" (155-56). But although Twain hegemony of the observing subject over sighs that his "cherished dreams of Venice have recalcitrant reality: "One's mind regains in been blighted forever," he soon discovers that if absence that dominion over earthly things he waits until midnight he can preserve his which has been shaken by the rude contact," he fantasy intact. After dark, his imagination soars: reflects (45). Absence makes the traveler's heart grow fonder, allowing the imagination to regain In the glare of day there is little poetry its privileged position of "dominion." Seeing about Venice, but under the charitable things is not as wonderful as dreaming of them. moon her stained palaces are white again Glazebrook's approach to travel provides a ... and the old city seems crowned once modern counterpart. Wandering through quiet more with the grandeur that was hers five backstreets in Turkey he is delighted to find that hundred years ago. It is easy then in fancy "from that view modern Turkey was eclipsed, to people these silent canals with plumed and there existed instead the idea of a fruitful gallants and fair ladies-with Shylocks in and well-watered oasis" (88-89). Once again, the gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans traveler strives to preserve "the idea" he has upon the rich argosies of Venetian arrived with, though it means obliterating the commerce-with Othellos and Desdemonas, modern country to do so. His defense of his with lagos and Roderigos. ignorance of the language reveals his priorities: (158) "if I spoke Turkish would I then be able to maintain my view of Turkey as mysterious and Not only does darkness enable the imagination hostile territory, which is the tint most useful to to transcend mere humdrum reality, but it my imagination in the task of resurrecting the unleashes a specifically literary flow of Turkey of Ottoman rule?" (153). What is striking Shakespearian associations. Even those dingy about these writers is the deliberateness with gondolas and gondoliers are forgiven. Twain which they employ a variety of self-insulating now finds the one "as free and graceful in its strategies designed to keep the contemporary gliding movement as a serpent" and the other "a world at bay; they consciously perform picturesque rascal for all he wears no satin contortions in order to keep their romantic harness, no plumed bonnet, no silken tights" visions alive. (163, 164). The transforming efforts of the The conviction that such mental gymnastics imagination spare Twain any further thought are incumbent upon the educated traveler about contemporary Venice, "decayed, forlorn, oppresses Kinglake at times: poverty-stricken, and commerceless." The desire to see for oneself is, of course, one If one might judge of men's real thoughts of the chief motivations for travel, and having by their writings, it would seem that there done so is one of the traveler's chief claims on are people who can visit an interesting the attention of readers. Thus, Lady Mary locality, and follow up continuously the Wortley Montagu frequently reminds her exact train of thought that ought to be correspondents of the value of first-hand suggested by the historical associations of observation, and Mark Twain prefaces Innocents the place. A person of this sort can go to Abroad with the claim to have "seen with Athens, and think of nothing later than the impartial eyes." But, like Warburton and Twain, age of Pericles .... I am not thus docile: it is travelers often arrive at the paradoxical only by snatches, and for few moments conclusion that not seeing can be preferable. together, that I can really associate a place Kinglake, disappointed by the sight of the river with its proper history. Scamander, happily finds in retrospect that (116) '"divine Scamander' has recovered the proper mystery belonging to him, as an unseen deity." Kinglake's light-hearted tone fails to conceal a "Your feelings," Kinglake explains, "are chilled certain anxiety, evident throughout the book, at and borne down for the time under all this load not being able to work himself up into the of real earth and water, but, let these once pass "proper" frame of mind at sites like Troy and out of sight, and then again the old fanciful Jerusalem, which history and literature have notions are restored" (45-46). The passage of made sacred. Despite his implication that earlier

34 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r ------writers have exaggerated their enthusiasm, with this dilemma, George Packer, author of The Kinglake seems to regret his inability to Village of Waiting (1988), relates the attempts of participate fully in the sublime sensations African entrepreneurs to cater to tourists' desire promised by their accounts. Although he warns for the authentic: "they put on a tribal dance us in his preface that "there will often be found tape, and serve pounded yams with peanut in my narrative a jarring discord between the sauce, and give the traveller their own idea of associations properly belonging to interesting the traveller's idea of them." Can we avoid this sites, and the tone in which I speak of them," he well-intentioned but ridiculous comedy and adheres to the belief that there are in fact discover a world that does not insistently mirror "proper" associations that a gentleman ought to our own? "No one knows the answer," Packer have (3). says. "On every trip I thought I'd left my His meditations on the strange interaction of cultural baggage at home; on every trip it had 1 mind and landscape become a recurrent been forwarded to my destination." " preoccupation in the book. Riding through the Yet where the sophisticated semiotician and Ottoman Empire, he is continually distracted by the politically aware traveler of the 1980s may reminiscences about his schooldays: "As for me despair of ever leaving their baggage behind, the and my comrade," he writes, "we often forgot Victorian gentleman happily carted it all along Stamboul, forgot all the Ottoman Empire, and with him. As Eliot Warburton complacently only remembered old times. We went back, remarks, "What a versatile power our mind loitering on the banks of the Thames ... the 'old possesses of adapting nature to its mood! It is Eton fellow' that wrestled with us in our not what a country is, but what we are, that boyhood" (25). Later, although he struggles to renders it rich in interest" (1.20). Emerson may be suitably impressed in Galilee, his thoughts sigh at not being able to leave Self behind, but again keep flying home: "instead there came to Kinglake frankly acknowledges the "egotism of me a loving thought from over the seas in a traveller ... his habit of referring the whole England-a thought more sweet than Gospel to external world to his own sensations" (5). And a wilful mortal like me" (117). Kinglake's private Glazebrook welcomes the presence of his memories get in the way of literary associations, Victorian forerunners: although he congratulates yet his awareness of the ways in which the· himself for his decision to travel alone-"I landscape is already "written" imposes on him wanted no one interposed between myself and an obligation to think, feel, and see in a the scene" (98)-he is delighted to be traveling particular way. "in the company of ghosts." Not real people but Kinglake's efforts to connect self to scene "real travellers" (that is, dead ones) are his illustrate how the landscape of travel is always companions of choice. For these British mediated. For, as Dean MacCannell puts it in his travelers, mediation is not something to be analysis of the phenomenon of tourism, overcome but rather profoundly desired. Their "usually, the first contact a sightseer has with a ability to quote Homer on the spot invests their sight is not the sight itself but with some travels not only with meaning but with status; it 1 representation thereof." " And, as Jonathan distinguishes them as gentlemen, the possessors Culler points out, "tourists want to encounter of a certain kind of education. (Twain, middle­ and recognize the original which has been class and American, wavers between contempt marked as a sight." 13 Even "getting off the and reverence for the past, between daytime beaten track" is no solution: the very expression debunking and midnight dreaming.)17 has become a cliche. Culler explains: "The But whatever the traveler's attitude toward authenticity the tourist seeks is at one level an mediation, the fact of it is unarguable: no one escape from the code, but this escape itself is can see with innocent eyes. Glazebrook's coded in turn, for the authentic must be marked reaction to Kars captures this inescapable, over­ to be constituted as authentic" (165). Wrestling determined aspect of travel in a nutshell: "I

'""Travelers in a New Age," Boston /{eview Aug. 1988: 27. "Tize Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976) 110. "The phrase "daytime debunking" is Leslie Fiedler's. In '"'The Semiotics of Tourism," Framing the Sign: Criticism his afterword to Tlze Innocents Abroad he writes that "this and Its Institutions (Norman and London: Univ. of Oklahoma doubleness of vision ... has lain deep in the heart of every Press, 1988) 161. run-of-the-mill tourist" (490).

HENDERSON 35

------never was less disappointed with reaching an and institutions: they deal more with men and objective in all my life" (136). Paradoxically, the women in relation to their surroundings. very structure of his sentence introduces the Sometimes, this human interest lies in the idea of disappointment into a context in which pleasant egotism of the traveller."'" Many he claims it was not present. The literate traveler readers have enjoyed this "pleasant egotism": cannot escape the literature that preconditions Jan Morris, for example, remarks that "Eothen is his experience of travel. Wherever he goes, as a thoroughly self-centred book, and that is half Emerson observes in Self-Reliance, the traveler its charm."'" Anita Damiani, however, criticizes carries his "giant" with him. Kinglake and other Victorian travelers for their Travel writers, however, carry an additional retreat into subjectivity and the personal. She burden: the necessity of turning their travel compares them unfavorably with their experiences into a book. They must go from eighteenth-century precursors, who not only being readers of texts to producers of them, thus provided useful information but also took a less entering the literary tradition that has shaped aggressive and imperialistic stance.20 And in them. Given the pressures of this situation-to Orienta/ism Edward Said writes disapprovingly visit places full of associations, to feel the "right that Kinglake "is more interested in remaking thing" when they arrive, and finally to come up himself and the Orient ... than he is in seeing 2 with something new to say-how do travel what there is to be seen." ' writers go about accomplishing their task? Kinglake's approach to travel, however, has Kinglake failed twice in his attempt to recount more to do with feeling than with seeing. "As I his journey to the East. He explains in the have felt," he declares, "so I have written." This preface to Eothen that he only succeeded on his need not make his writing untruthful, he third try, in response to a friend's request. That hastens to assure us: "My excuse for the book is friend was Eliot Warburton, who was on the its truth ... it conveys, not those impressions point of undertaking a similar journey. Instead which ought to have been produced ... but those of setting himself up as an authority, Kinglake which were really and truly received at the adopts a casual and intimate style, quite unlike time" (3). The insistent claim to be telling the that of many earlier travel writers. He admits truth is characteristic of travel literature; as that he has shirked the traveler's duty to Mary Kingsley asserts in the preface to Travels in provide factual information, flippantly avowing West Africa (1897): "if you go there you will find that "from all details of geographical discovery, things as I have said." 22 Travel writers, it is or antiquarian research-from all display of worth noting, are in a singular position: they 'sound learning, and religious knowledge'­ have great license to write what they please, from all historical and scientific illustrations­ since readers can hardly check up on them from all useful statistics-from all political without undertaking arduous journeys (and disquisitions-and from all good moral even then, no one could verify a specific incident reflections, the volume is thoroughly free" (3). or reported conversation, much less a feeling). Instead, he confesses, he has produced "a sadly But their reputations depend on convincing a long strain about Self." skeptical audience, for as Percy G. Adams has Kinglake knows that he has broken with the shown in Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 demands of the genre, and he apologizes for not fulfilling his readers' expectations about what a travel book should be: "My notion of dwelling '""The Literature of Travel, 1700-1900," The Cambridge History of English Literature, eds. Sir. A. W. Ward and A. R. precisely upon those matters which happened to Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1916) 14: 249. interest me, and upon none other, would of course be intolerable in a regular book of '"Introduction, Eothen xi. travels" (4). But only by writing something that was not "a regular book of travels" could he write at all. "'Enlightened Observers: British Travellers to the Near East, Eothen is generally regarded as marking a 1715-1850 (Beirut: American Univ. of Beirut, 1979) 171-78. turning point in the history of the genre. In 1916 - F. A. Kirkpatrick described how, in contrast to "Orienta/ism (1978; New York: Random House, 1979) 193. the travel writing of the eighteenth century, "the better travel-books of the nineteenth century ... "Travels in West Africa (1897; London: Virago Press, 1982) deal less with monuments, museums, churches xxi.

36 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW (1962), travel writing also provides a rich field of into seeing. These nineteenth-century travel opportunity for liars-who, of course, also claim writers all seem confident in the ability of their to be telling the truth. readers to penetrate language, to decode the But Kinglake goes a step further than the literary encoding of an experience in order to re­ usual boast of objectivity ("impartial eyes"). He experience it along with them. To suggest that argues that the traveler's very subjectivity-he reading is not the same as seeing would be to calls it his selfishness-guarantees his break the circuit that binds travel writers to their truthfulness, for "he tells you of objects, not as readers, who in turn become writers for others. he knows them to be, but as they seemed to But however much they may protest that we him" (5). Making a virtue of subjectivity, are "seeing" along with them, our reading is Kinglake's solution to the problem of how to clearly not the same as their seeing. In Journey to write about places that had already been much Kars Glazebrook shows himself to be more seen and described is to turn inward, focusing skeptical about the power of language to capture on the impressions received by "Self." the essence of an experience. "Never mind," he Wildly popular, Eothen had an immediate writes. ''I'm used to wrecking the magic of influence upon the style of other travel writers. things by writing about them: very little of the When Warburton came to write his own book, mystery of a place or an idea survives the he imitated Kinglake's device and wrote as scrutiny required to sort out and to put into though he were having "a sort of imaginary words what it was about that mystery conversation with the reader" (preface). The sufficiently intriguing to have compelled you to reader thus becomes his companion, whom he write about it" (171). addresses at the end with these words: Although Glazebrook relishes the way literary "Reader!-you have been my only fellow­ evocations create mystery in an "empty" traveller through many lands; wherever I have landscape, putting the mystery into words is wandered you have been; whatever I have another matter. On a boat nearing the Turkish learned you have known" (2.20). Warburton's coast, he contrasts himself to an Australian emphasis on the seeing "I" illustrates how the couple who, lacking his own classical intervening presence of the travel writer has background, appear oblivious to the Homeric become the point of the travel book. Just as he associations of the scene. Instead, their attention likes to feel that he has seen through the eyes of is occupied with attending to their baby, and Biblical and classical authors, so Warburton Glazebrook remarks, "I couldn't change the claims that his own readers have seen through baby's nappies out here for fear of storms, his eyes. monsters, waterspouts, rocks hurled by blinded Mark Twain, in contrast, is ambivalent about giants." He adds disdainfully, "I think I the kind of intimate fellowship Warburton probably prefer to travel with my chimeras, and proposes. More antagonistic toward an leave the baby behind" (40). enshrined literary tradition, he wants to But it turns out not to be so easy to leave the demystify travel by suggesting "to the reader baby behind. Glazebrook carries his own how he would be likely to see Europe and the figurative baby-the preoccupation with writing East if he looked at them with his own eyes, a travel book-that hinders his appreciation of instead of the eyes of those who traveled in the foreign adventure. The traveler may want to those countries before him" (15). But of course live for the moment and be content with the this attempt to dispense with literary mediation memory, but the writer is obliged to turn is doomed to failure: Innocents Abroad cannot experience into words: "I spend my life trying to help but show us Europe and the East though squash Spirit into Word, life into sentences, other eyes than our own-Mark Twain's. unruly feelings into orderly syntax, trying to get The travel writer inevitably interposes his the naked kicking baby into its clothes" (51). own text between the sight and the reader, just Fussing with the baby emerges as a metaphor as previous writers interposed their texts for that which occupies and distracts the between him and the sight. Textual mediation is traveling writer. It represents both the inescapable: the writer cannot act as a transparent embryonic quest that brought him on the or self-effacing medium. Warburton's assertion journey and the literary creation to which he that the reader has seen exactly what he did must give birth through writing about it. suggests a faith in the power of language to As a traveler Glazebrook sometimes resents transmute seeing into reading, and reading back and resists the demand that a writer give birth

HENDERSON 37 to books; indeed, he sometimes despairs of convey. I would have done better to have doing so: "Hardest, because most important, suppressed the Australian baby if I was to was to find words for the certainty of happiness convey the sense of adventure I really felt as which had filled me as I had walked away from we ran along that wild shore. the ruined city in the dusk. I could not­ (41) cannot-crush that kicking baby into its clothes." And so for a time he tries to fool Yet despite this pose of being above or outside himself into believing that he doesn't have to, the conventions, Glazebrook actually takes great that he can find a substitute for words. Speaking pains to evoke danger. He builds suspense by of a precious intaglio he has bought from a describing the unsettled political situation, the Turkish shepherd, he says, "But I had in my recent military takeover, the outbreak of the shirt pocket the gem which expressed it all" (73). Iran-Iraq war, and his own uncertainty about His desire to believe that the intaglio can contain whether or not to break off his journey before the essence of his experience better than any reaching Kars. words could do seems an attempt to evade the Similarly, he contrasts his unsuccessful efforts burden of being a writer. But this is an illusion­ to obtain news with those of the Victorian the "gem" eventually turns out be a worthless traveler, who was "given advice in dramatic fake, expressing nothing, and he throws it away. terms, usually against proceeding, by consuls He wants the easy satisfaction of a tangible and pashas and shocked merchants met by memento-revealing his kinship to the chance in khans after alarming experiences." He souvenir-hunting tourist-but in acquiescing to wonders whether the writer may only have that self-deception, he is himself deceived. recorded "the advice of those who begged him Kinglake overcomes his writer's block by to turn back ... so that the traveller's calm violating some of the conventions of the genre. pursuance of ... his plans should seem all the Glazebrook, in contrast, writes his travel book bolder by light of the perils he has leaked into by commenting on, and tacitly imitating, the the reader's mind by this device." And he conventions of his Victorian models. Aware that suggests that his own situation is quite different: his modern audience is unlikely to be familiar "There was no one on whom I could lay the with their works, he even supplies his own responsibility of deciding" (100). But in fact his frame of reference in the form of lengthy very first chapter alludes to the warnings he's quotations. Although he sometimes pretends to had: "Objections raised by others-thirty people break with earlier conventions, even mocks a day murdered in Turkey that summer, for them outright, he invariably reproduces them. instance-show them not to be practical Thus, the intertext provides not only the travellers" (1 0). In making light of these dire motivation for his journey (to see Turkey as the statistics-while not omitting to mention them great nineteenth-century adventurers did), but to the reader-Glazebrook participates fully in also the structure for his own book (his "re­ the very tradition he has been gently satirizing. writing" of their travels). He solves the problem He makes fun of the vocabulary of the of dressing the baby by using old clothes. Victorian narrator, who writes in order to Glazebrook claims the status of the detached "satisfy the romantic expectations of the critic, analyzing the methods of nineteenth­ armchair traveller": "Here the crags 'beetle', the century travel writers, but not employing their cliffs 'frown', heights are 'dizzy', chasms 'yawn', rather obvious devices himself. For example, he and the rivers are all 'cataracts"' (145). But two points to the way in which it was de rigueur to pages further on we find Glazebrook's own conjure up a sense of danger so that the writer romantic description of a bus ride at top speed would appear brave and heroic: on a winding mountain road: "The scenes of despair were like those between decks in a Travellers mentioned only those like slaver, the captain crowding on sail to escape themselves, who would hold to the the pursuing man-of-war. At last, through mist convention that to reach the spot where and darkness, I saw pine trees lit by the they had met was a bold and hazardous headlights, and shrubs clinging amongst the enterprise, not to be undertaken by mere rocks, and many wild briars" (147). merchants out for profit. They suppressed Glazebrook is astute about the conventions the merchants because they got in the way informing the narratives of Victorian travelers, of the sense of adventure they wanted to but without often admitting it, he himself

38 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r employs precisely the same devices to which he adventures sufficiently eagerly, and to has called our attention. To take a final example, achieve this requires selection and he writes that "it was conventional amongst embellishment, even invention, so long as travellers ... that when they returned home they verisimilitude-dramatic truth-is the aim. closed the door in your face" (33). As a (167, 168) disappointed reader, he bemoans his eviction, saying, "I long to eavesdrop further." Quoting Conspicuously missing from such an analysis Warburton's dismissal of the reader ("I scarcely of how travel literature works are the moral and venture to hope that you will share in the regret political dimensions of the British presence in with which I say-Farewell!"), Glazebrook cries, the Middle East. "Dramatic truth" cannot be the "But I do, Eliot (if I may call you that), I do!" only aim of texts which present themselves as (242). And then Glazebrook closes the door in reliable accounts of foreign places, for they will our faces, observing the convention in the same inevitably influence readers' attitudes, even moment that he deplores it. public policies. As Patrick Brantlinger has This foregrounding of literary convention shown, vividly illustrates the extent to which travel The great explorers' writings are nonfictional writing, though it may present itself as mere quest romances in which the hero-authors factual reportage, is in fact a highly selective and struggle through enchanted, bedeviled self-conscious genre. Although the casual lands toward an ostensible goal: the reader may expect strict truthfulness from discovery of the Nile's sources, the travel writers-why read travel books if they conversion of the cannibals .... The humble aren't "true"?-their works are unavoidably but heroic authors move from adventure to circumscribed by text and tradition. Kinglake' s adventure against a dark, infernal backdrop answer to this question is to proclaim that where there are no other characters of equal subjectivity offers its own kind of truth; stature, only bewitched or demonic savages. Glazebrook's answer is that fiction may be the (180-81) closest approximation to reality: "The impulse to write fiction is felt strongly, I think, by The metaphors chosen by travel writers-quest travellers.... Incidents need to be developed romance, bringers of light-are not as innocent or run together, events shaped, characters as Glazebrook believes. Turning "himself into touched up, drama heightened, if the reader is to the Hero" does not merely liven up a traveler's appreciate what were the traveller's real feelings tale; it also reinforces Western cultural I...- at the time" (167). Yielding to literariness chauvinism. ironically serves as his strategy for overcoming Glazebrook is aware that in constructing the gap between experience and language; his himself as Hero, the nineteenth-century traveler solution is to write a book about writing a book. "employed Asiatics as the crowd of extras and Glazebrook, interestingly, shows how fully he bit-players forming a background of atmosphere has accepted Kinglake' s philosophy: he and Eastern colour whose function was to show automatically assumes that the reader will be off himself as the central figure" (84). He realizes curious about "the traveller's real feelings," that "of the many hundreds of native servants rather than, say, accurate delineations of underpinning these books of travels, very few landscape, monuments, local customs, or surface as individuals" (85). Yet here again political developments. The temptation "to Glazebrook shares the conventional attitudes invent, or at least to embellish, so as to convey to even as he exposes them. Reinscribing Victorian others the force of what you have felt yourself" racial prejudice, he frequently indulges in is perfectly permissible, for the traveler is condescending generalization, remarking, for primarily engaged in the production of a literary example, that "as a race the Turks don't care a text: jot for preserving what is beautiful, or even what is useful" (75), and that "as with their love For the reader's appreciation of the reality of sweets and loud noises, this inquisitiveness of travel, it is more important that the makes Asiatics seem to Europeans like children" book's author should be a born writer, than (111). that the events narrated should be the literal Travel writing is in fact a double-pronged truth .... The narrator must turn himself quest for domination, not only of actual into the Hero, if readers are to follow his experience (foreign lands and foreigners) but

HENDERSON 39 also of literary experience (prior travel texts and nowhere I wished I was stopping, though I their authors). Glazebrook's tactic for dealing peered out at Aksehir with interest, thinking of with his precursors, exposing their foibles and Layard's description of riding into it in 1839"; he tricks, only to re-use them himself, reveals him then quotes Layard at length, rather than get off to be engaged in a power struggle to become as the bus himself (79). Similarly, he waits in the "authoritative" as they. The adversarial nature bus station at Erzurum instead of going out to of the relationship between travel writers and explore the town, "content ... to remember their literary heirs is confirmed by the military Erzurum by the pictures of it painted into my imagery Glazebrook uses to describe it: "By head by Robert Curzon" (141). Such evasions lay buying the man's book of travels you haven't bare the true nature of the genre, a genre in bought access to his confessions, and he doesn't which texts are primary: "new" experiences are show you his weaknesses any more than he not merely conditioned by generic demands and would show them to the enemies he encounters precedents; they are subsumed by them. Russian on his road. That isn't to say that weaknesses formalists regarded the bizarre, self-conscious may not be deduced" (33). Glazebrook puts his literary devices of Tristram Shandy as making it predecessors at the mercy of his narrative, so the most, not the least, representative of novels; that instead of being one more follower in their the same may be said of Glazebrook's flagrant footsteps, he makes them seem like part of his substitution of literature for experience. His tex­ experience--he is the one who gives them new tual pilgrimage takes to its logical conclusion the life. The ambitious travel writer controls his endeavor of travelers to see what they have world by becoming master of the texts that already read about. The travel book substitutes describe it. nicely for the "real" experience by conscien­ Such narrative maneuvers seek ascendancy tiously reinscribing the signs of its authenticity; not only over other peoples, but over one anoth­ literature does more than motivate travel, it er. Thus Glazebrook's approach is not just a replaces it. matter of "selection and embellishment," of ani­ And indeed, when we last see Glazebrook he mating a prosaic narrative. Travel literature is so is writing up his notes and musing about the highly intertextual that at times texts are actual­ book he must produce: "Probably I could have ly substituted for experience itself, and the written it without leaving Dorset, except to attempt to control crucial passages, whether in travel to the London Library." Intertextual to the the Bosphorus or in Victorian prose, represents last, he leaves us with a quotation from an essential strategy in the campaign to make a Tennyson's "Ulysses" ("There lies the port: the place one's own. This appropriation of the texts vessel puffs her sail ...") and the observation of others has its Victorian antecedents: when that "[t]he journey ahead was writing the book" Warburton makes the obligatory pilgrimage to (240). The author's physical journey was in fact a the home of the late Lady Hester Stanhope, he journey through books, an extended trip to the finds he has little to say, so he slots in whole London Library; and now the book itself has passages from Eothen, in which Kinglake relates become a journey. A reader's ticket not only his visit to this unusual woman. Warburton also enables the energetic traveler to explore quotes and thereby recovers from Kinglake a let­ Homeric "realms of gold" by embracing the ter of his own-a letter which Kinglake had words that constitute foreign lands, it also already printed in Eothen-about her death (2.3). grants him dominion over all who have written In later editions Kinglake omitted Warburton's the landscape that he will reframe and rewrite. letter, explaining that "I must now give up the Travel literature, the genre that by rights seems borrowed ornament ... for the rightful owner most likely to take both writer and reader out of has reprinted it in 'The Crescent and the Cross'" their usual surroundings, is actually most at (94n). At this point the narrative has become a home with itself when it reveals how neither has tissue of juxtaposed texts, and almost all ever really left the armchair.D attempts at reporting the actual moment are dropped in the effort to annex whichever pre­ existing words have become, in MacCannell's terminology, markers of "authentic" experience. Heather Henderson teaches English literature at Mount Holyoke Glazebrook even more boldly uses old read­ College. She is the author of The Victorian Self: Autobiography and Biblical Narrative (Cornell Univ. Press, 1989). ing to stand in for new experience: "I saw

40 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Cai Qi-jiao

STILL PRAYING

Translated by Edward Morin and Fang Dai

pray for a breeze in sweltering summer, I A little less precipitation in winter. May the flowers bloom red, purple, or whatever; May love be spared derisive laughter, May someone be available to prop up the fallen. Let me have compassionate people around So that when a man is really down They at least won't increase his pain By turning a cold shoulder and arched eyebrows; Each day of the year, like a cooling spring Gushing forth non-stop, let us have some wisdom, Instead of bans and rulings against this or that. I ask to hear songs welling from the heart Without someone laying down a formula Of prearranged keys for every melody. I pray For the day when people will have no need To pray the way I have had to do here.

CAl Q!-JIAO 41 Martha Dimes Toher

BEARING WITNESS: EXPLORATIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA

n A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion's Politics of Nostalgia I Grace sets herself the task of bearing witness to events in a fictional Central American Travel narratives of journeys into areas of country. The novel ends with Grace concluding, military conflict are as much political excursions "I have not been the witness I wanted to be." 1 as physical ones. The narrative's notion of The idea of bearing witness-and the worry progress from initial preconceptions to ultimate about how one does so effectively-is significant knowledge suggests the dominating force of the in several narratives of travel in Central America traveler, who may actually impose these published in the 1980s. It signals an ideological preconceptions in actions or words upon the shift from exploration as an act of conquest to landscape. Direct financial backing by a political exploration as witnessing; it involves an attempt institution, as Columbus had from the Spanish to understand rather than dominate another crown and Lewis and Clark had from the culture, hence a tacit acknowledgment of Jefferson presidency, only intensifies the issue. pluralism. Too often the place explored becomes an object Joan Didion's Salvador (1983), Christopher of projected hopes, intentions, and fantasies. Dickey's With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds Central America especially, writes one former of Nicaragua (1985), and Charles Clements' foreign service agent, "is Fantasy Isthmus, a Witness to War: An American Doctor in El Salvador region of the American mind, peopled by our (1984)-documents of journeys in El Salvador own political demons, where too often and Nicaragua in the early 1980s-express both expediency rules and rhetoric substitutes for physical and ideological exploration. The reality."3 However well-meaning they may have writers are, in Dickey's words, "witnesses to the been, U.S. policies have indeed become political ... madness" of U.S. involvement there; two demons for many in Central America, journalists and a physician, all are trained to be establishing an unequal relationship between a objective observers.2 They reject the conquestive normative power and weaker, deviant Others. tradition of travel writing: their works These policies have depended upon an outdated undermine the dominating power of the unilateralism bolstered by heroic imagery and traveler-and the culture he or she represents­ rhetoric better suited to nineteenth-century questioning the traveler's ability to comprehend imperialism than to twentieth-century realities. a foreign culture and criticizing the imperialistic The effort to gain knowledge and make impulse. Therefore they subvert, to varying progress often expressed in a travel narrative degrees, the traditional travel narrative's mirrors the conquest of territory that has taken structure, heroic characteristics, and reliance on place in the Americas. Historically, citizens of abstract rhetoric in order to reveal an often the United States have assumed that kaleidoscopic world that cannot be controlled by expansionism would be beneficial for those a politics of nostalgia. The three books self­ whom we considered inferior; we would consciously reveal the traveler's struggle to improve their lot, and ours as well. We understand and witness the unknown. characteristically have had enormous confidence in Manifest Destiny. As John L. O'Sullivan in the 1840s described this vision in the Democratic 'Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer (New York: Pocket Review, Books, 1977) 280. We are the nation of human progress, and 'Christopher Dickey, With the Contras: A Reporter in the Wilds of Nicaragua, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 'Frank McNeil, War and Peace in Central America (New 1987) 16. York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988) 9.

42 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r who will, what can, set limits to our onward differences in policy from administration to march? ... the right of our manifest destiny administration has been the assumption that [is] to overspread and to possess the whole American hegemony is best for Central America. of the continent which Providence has The post-World War II Pax Americana given us for the ... great experiment of advocated peace and world order, but in our liberty: own terms: says Burns, "the model exclusively mirrored American views. Noble as some of O'Sullivan failed to see the irony in an those views might have been, all could not expanding empire of democracy: one cannot at reflect the desires of a complex world" (121). once possess and liberate. The unself-conscious, The power to veto policy, the attempt to keep innocent bravado of traveler-writers who other powers out of the area, the maintenance of approach other cultures to "improve" them troops in the region, and economic assistance becomes a secular mission to impose democracy directed only toward approved purposes on them. continue to reflect Manifest Destiny's ideology Perhaps the post-Revolutionary need for the of liberation through possession. What makes it United States to establish an identity based on a seem palatable are appealing symbols and democratic ideal has also driven its citizens to abstract rhetoric, of which such terms as define others in our own terms, as a means of Manifest Destiny and Pax Americana, as well as reinforcing our values-a defensive move that "freedom fighters," are a part. Historian David becomes predatory. The failure to match cultural Healy points out that although nineteenth­ signs and referents, along with the mistaken century travelers in Central America truly assumption that one has successfully done so, believed in the value of expansionism, by the characterizes the imperialist mission. Self­ late twentieth century we should have learned interest often combines with or masquerades our lesson: "Surely," he says, "our policy as altruism. Furthermore, the written makers can do better than unknowingly repeat representation of such acts is itself political, the errors of the past, while making the same observes Edward Said: "the gross fact [is] that inflated claims for the benefits of a pax [sic] the swathe the United States cuts through the Americana and private enterprise."7 Surely, too, world is considerable, ... heavily dependent on travel writers can avoid the presumption of cultural discourse ... our culture."5 knowledge and the projections of intention that The "altruistic sentiments" and "noble words" in their work may embody a political agenda, in that in Conrad's Heart of Darkness help describe favor of questioning, observing, growing­ the ironies of European expansion in Africa witnessing. continue to describe American efforts in Central America, as Dickey, Didion, and Clements note Bearing Witness in their travel books. Much of the world, says E. Bradford Burns, still has a "romantic vision" of a The efforts of Dickey, Didion, and Clements to "David and Goliath scenario" involving larger bear witness in Central America have important r. powers of empire and smaller, underdeveloped parallels in the epistemological questions I countries. Burns contends that the U.S. addressed recently by both cultural anthro­ government has employed a "politics of pologists and by members of the Witness for nostalgia" toward Central America, policies that Peace movement: How much can one partici­ may have been useful once but that no longer pate, while observing, without violating the apply to current affairs. 6 Beneath particular integrity of the subject? And how much can one understand, given the differences in cultural contexts? 'Qtd. in Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston: In the past, anthropologists and travel writers Little, Brown, 1945) 427. often projected their normative assumptions upon foreign places and peoples.8 What Richard 'Edward W. Said, "Representing the Colonized: A. Schweder calls "the enlightenment approach" Anthropology's Interlocutors," Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 215. to anthropology has assumed that people are

-----·------"E. Bradford Burns, At War in Nicaragua: The Reagan 'David Healy, Drive to Hegemony: The United States in the Doctrine and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Harper & Caribbean 1898-1917 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, Row, 1987) ix. 1988) 290.

TOHER 43 rational and that reason and evidence are stable reality as any text can-the human tendency, across cultures-a universal"naturallaw."9 This writes Edward Said, is to retreat to narrative belief in progress and rational development is a conventions "when the uncertainties of travel in kind of anthropological manifest destiny. The strange parts seem to threaten one's question anthropologists and travel writers now equanimity."13 This is a very human desire to pose is more likely to be, how can we see and make order out of chaos. Consequently, the know this place, these people? For Clifford observed scene is often not so much recorded­ Geertz, anthropology is "the desire to an activity that implies passive, almost understand what it is to be a member of another photographic objectivity-as it is interpreted culture." 10 But Geertz also knows that it is according to received convention: "such texts impossible to "go native" completely-"the can create not only knowledge but also the very myth of the chameleon fieldworker." 11 reality they appear to describe" (Orienta/ism 94). Differences in background keep outsiders from Given this tendency, the writers' deliberate ever fully becoming insiders. Learning facts, effort to get past such conventions also subverts details, or occurrences may produce some the entity that they represent: to renounce the understanding of another culture, but it will conquestive narrative is to renounce conquest remain incomplete, due to ignorance of context itself in favor of a kind of semiotic guerrilla or of the subject's mind. Knowledge of parts warfare. But the traveler often finds it hard does not guarantee synechdochic knowledge of balancing, on one hand, identification with a the whole. Whether information is given freely group sufficient to know it and, on the other, the by the informant or (perhaps more violently) is reporter's detachment combined with the extorted by the observer, the process reinforces outsider's difference. the insider I outsider distinction. "Because The insider I outsider problem is evident in the discourse in global power systems is elaborated mission of the Witness for Peace organization: to vis-a-vis," writes Clifford, "a sense of "get to know local residents in order to better differentness ... can never be located solely in understand the situation" and to remain the continuity of a culture .... Identity is independent of internal politics.14 Begun in 1983 conjunctural, not essential" (11). How can one in response to the U.S.-backed contra war in love (know) another if one does not Nicaragua, Witness for Peace is a nonprofit, acknowledge the difference (selfhood) of the ecumenical movement of U.S. citizens who other? But in acknowledging difference, one advocate nonviolent resistance to the war. tends to assume a hierarchy in selvesY Almost four thousand members have traveled in However "natural" a text a travel book may delegations to rural areas of Nicaragua and be-and it often comes as close to recording Guatemala in order to document civilian conditions. While living with the residents for either two-week or months-long periods, the 'James Clifford equates ethnography with travel and delegations interview civilians, report on imperialism (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century conditions, help with local projects, and Ethnography, Literature, and Art [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988)13). "mobilize public opinion and help change U.S. foreign policy to one which fosters justice, peace, and friendship" (statement of mission). Clearly, 'Richard A. Schweder, "Anthropology's Modern Rebellion the latter goal is not disinterested; witnessing in Against the Enlightenment," in Culture Theory: Essays on this case does have an agenda that assumes the Mind, Self, and Emotion, eds. Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984) 27-66. goals of the delegations coincide with those of the civilians with whom they live. As activists, these witnesses act, not simply record-and 10Robert C. Solomon, "Getting Angry: The Jamesian must, therefore, somehow reconcile the two. An Theory of Emotion in Anthropology," in Culture Theory 253. important issue for the witness is how to maintain a balance between distance and "Clifford Geertz, "'From the Native's Point of View': On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in Culture Theory 123. 13Edward W. Said, Orienta/ism (New York: Vintage, 1979) 93.

"Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) 168. 1'Part of statement of mission, Witness for Peace.

44 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW immersion. I asked a member of Witness for Charles Clements' Witness to War documents Peace if he felt it was possible to find, if not "the the year he spent (1982) as physician in rural El truth," at least a coherent whole. "It's incredibly Salvador. It is, as State Department official complex," he said; "everybody has a different Murat W. Williams notes in the foreword, a story.... You have to have a certain amount of "remarkable memoir of his year in a rebel intelligence to find the logic out of all the enclave twenty-five miles north of ... San stories." Nevertheless, he feels there is a logic to Salvador."17 The length of stay allows Clements be found, based on a series of complex factors to experience and describe in depth the that interact in variable formations: "People are countryside, farming techniques, primitive not rational actors; they are passionate actors."15 living conditions, and medical problems from And being passionate, they will sometimes undernutrition, unsanitary conditions, and war appear to contradict themselves. The witness's injuries. A graduate of the Air Force Academy, task is to discover the underlying logical pattern Clements went to Vietnam in 1969 as a C-130 beneath the details. transport pilot. "An officer and a gentleman," he Credible witnesses must tell the stories in had hoped to become a general; "Instead, I order to validate them, and, says David Apter, became a doctor and a Quaker" (6). The shift they should be both insiders and outsiders.16 The from a military to a pacifist stance, which travel writers discussed here address, in various changed his life, frames the narrative of his ways, these problems: How do we "read" experience in El Salvador. experience as we do a text, and then translate it The narrative in Witness to War seems, at first, into an actual text? How do we get close enough a linear chronological movement, based on to understand yet remain objective? How do we Clements' diaries, but it soon becomes evident locate the patterns? And what if we cannot? to the au thor and to the reader that the How do we bear witness? experiences in El Salvador he records arrange themselves into patterns whose significance is Dickey, Didion, Clements other than chronological. His initial journey from Honduras to the Salvadoran border and While in the past many travel writers, perhaps into the country where he will spend the next reflecting dominant groups to which they year moves from the urban to the primitive. belong, have wanted to see (and mold) others in Journeying from Tegucigalpa, "what settlements their own image, Dickey, Didion, and Clements we encountered grew more primitive in direct "defend the coequality of fundamentally ratio to their distance from the capital" (25). In different 'frames' of understanding" (Schweder this instance, movement into the primitive 48). Whether implicitly or explicitly, they reject echoes Conrad's Heart of Darkness not in the notions of inherent cultural superiority: "right" colonizing impetus but in the dissociation from versus "wrong," the idea of progress toward a the familiar, the isolation, the helplessness of the "proper" state, the desire to discover universal traveler. New to the country, on his way to the truth-and the certainty that such truth exists. front (the Salvadorans having misunderstood They aim, instead, for local truth. Their his mission), and wounded, Clements was narratives show them "going native" to varying "alone, exhausted, and suddenly very degrees, attempting to identify and appreciate vulnerable" (66). The time he needs to ' what they perceive (rather than appropriate it recuperate serves as a break in the narrative r- for use), to learn idioms, and to comprehend movement, a period for reflection; re-reading his signs. Compared to Didion's kaleidoscopic form diary, he sees that "all the wonder and and Dickey's ironic circularity, Clements' randomness of my first days on the Front had narrative comes nearest to conventional travel overpowered my contemplative powers. The r narrative. Furthermore, he has more faith than entries seemed to gallop everywhere, moving r the others in his ability to witness and identifies lickety-split" from impressions to notes to more closely with his subjects. complaints "and questions, questions, questions" (66). Clements' convalescent reflections produce a "Kevin Kresse, personal conversation, 29 Oct. 1990.

17Murat W. Williams, foreword, Witness to War: An "David Apter, "Mao's Republic," Social Research 54 (1987): American Doctor in £1 Salvador, by Charles Clements (New 709. York: Bantam, 1984) ix.

TOHER 45 ' t I second narrative structuring device: the use of Contras is based on interviews and documents his past as parallel to the present. Cut off from from immediate local sources; through them the familiar, "living under a pseudonym­ Dickey attempts to understand the points of Camilo-among people who had no last names, view of the contras and of the United States. The no histories they would talk about," Clements events are dated and arranged chronologically. felt at once not only the submersion of his But what Dickey terms "the randomness of pure individuality but also the need to make chronology" (236) seems to negate any sense of individual and historical sense out of his progression that might be provided by the experience (19). Thus, he interrupts his narrative physical movement through the terrain or of Salvador to reminisce about previous implied by the shifting of focus among experiences in Vietnam and in a psychiatric Commander Zero (code name for Eden Pastora), ward. He relates his initial naivete about the U.S. Krill (Julio Cesar Herrera), and Suicida (Pedro presence in Vietnam and his gradual realization Pablo Ortiz Centeno). Where U.S. leaders find of deception, futility, and betrayal, resulting in continuity in facile historical parallels ( "Haig an "insane" antiwar stance that landed him in began talking about Korea in 1950 and Cuba in psychiatric treatment (the references he makes 1962" [104]), Dickey ultimately finds these to One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Catch-22, and problematic; for him, they do not verify the Don Quixote show a clear inversion of progress that the politicians wish to see in them. "craziness"). Throughout Witness to War, the Dickey's ambivalence is revealed in a scene parallels between the Vietnam and Salvadoran that is central to his experience in Nicaragua­ wars become clear. More significantly, however, his meeting with Suicida. "I began wondering the progression seen in the narrative about the what we were going to say to Suicida when we past-from innocent faith to a saner wisdom of saw him: the first words." When the time came, experience-demonstrates that for Clements " 'Commandante Suicida, I presume,' was all I history is meaningful and historical parallels are could think to say" (201). The allusion here-to cautionary. Whereas in El Salvador people lived Henry Stanley's words upon finding Dr. solely in the present, without identity or history, Livingstone in Africa-has become a trope of Clements attempts to find perspective and western imperialist response in primitive knowledge through history. Just as he grew territories. Beyond that, however, as Marianna from his Vietnam experience into the pacifist Torgovnick points out, Stanley's own words healer who can aid the Salvadorans, he hopes were not extemporaneous but carefully chosen, that the sense he makes of this experience will rehearsed, and controlled in order to maintain be valuable for others. "the dignity of the white man" before the Christopher Dickey, a Washington Post Africans.'8 Thus Dickey's words are a rehearsal reporter who covered Central America from of a rehearsal. Perhaps ironic, perhaps 1980 to 1983, spent a week with the contras in humorous, they certainly conjure the trope; but Nicaragua in the spring of 1983. He set out to the uncertain phrase that ends the passage discover the "odyssey of the men who loved to questions the very enterprise the greeting kill" (16). Through the story of the contra reflects. The presumption implied by Stanley's leaders, he wanted to exemplify the recent expression, which reflects the traveler-as­ turmoil in Central America and the U.S. imperialist, clearly makes Dickey both self­ contributions to it. Sections of his book, With the conscious about his own role and uncomfortable Contras, covering the years 1979 (the end of the about the role of the culture he represents. Somoza regime) through 1982 (the beginning of Dickey also undercuts his narrative's the secret war and the U.S. involvement in it) progressive movement with the presence of and also late 1983 provide a convoluted and various smaller circular structures: for example, bloody sequence of events in Nicaragua's such statements as "Violent rule spawned political struggle. Although this frame violent opposition, and violent opposition was constitutes three-quarters of Dickey's text, his used to justify violent rule" (17). Other personal experience told at the center both compound structures using "but" transform colors and validates the frame. what seems a step forward into a step backward. Dickey places the account of his time with the The regular turnover in leadership through Contras in the heart of a history of events leading up to and away from his experience. The "Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, historical context with which he begins With the Modern Lives (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990) 26-34.

46 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW elections and in family generations at best abandonment of structural progression, like maintains the status quo: "their faces changed Dickey's circular undermining of it, indicates very little, and their names not at all, from father that the U.S. presence in Central America is to older son and then younger son, through neither ideologically nor economically almost half the century: Somoza" (18). The progressive. ruling family exemplified the lack of change or Whereas heroic biography provided models progress experienced by the Nicaraguan people for new empires, Salvador, With the Contras, and up to the Somozas' ouster in 1979. In subsequent Witness to War are all similarly hero-less years, the individual leadership may have according to traditional fashion. These works changed, but conditions remained the same; the suggest no western exemplars by which to code name "El Muerto," for example, was "a civilize the natives, nor do they depict family tradition," used by several members indigenous heroes as traditional "great men." (114). Along with these structures, the frequent Didion, for example, submerges her own mention of "chaos" and "madness" makes perspective beneath the detailed images of progress only illusory and suggests that despite places and people that she describes. Aware that the value of interviews and experience, Dickey's "writing is an act of saying I, of imposing ability to gain knowledge remains limited. oneself upon other people ... an invasion," she Salvador, the result of Joan Didion's two-week reduces references to herself in the text and trip to El Salvador in 1982, was first published refuses to pose as either hero or conqueror.20 Nor (in part) in the New York Review of Books (October does she discover a hero in El Salvador: "This is 1982). Just over one hundred pages long, a national history particularly resistant to heroic Salvador does not claim to be a comprehensive interpretation" (72). Thus, Salvador's people historical or political treatment of the country; merge and recede, achieving only temporary rather, Didion's strategy is to present a series of significance or efficacy. graphic images as an alternative to the Like Didion, Dickey does not want to impose bureaucratic rhetoric of government officials. In himself as a hero upon the narrative. As his title so doing, she conveys what it is like to be in a suggests, he attempts to identify with the strange place, to try to deconstruct what she sees contras so that he will not impose his own views and hears, and to come up short of answers. upon them. He finds that the three potential Didion hopes to find out "la verdad," the roles he might play begin, confusingly, to truth, in detailed experience. She discloses these overlap: To discover information he becomes a details within an impressionistic structure in participant, but in so doing he risks becoming a which scenes, dates, and people appear and less objective observer and even becoming a move at random. Although she divides Salvador hero in the narrative. As Dickey becomes more into six sections, they bear none of the dates, an actor, he is less an observer. places, or names that structure Dickey's and The tension he feels among roles is Clements' narratives, and thus might easily be exemplified in an important scene. When Dickey rearranged. She gives few signs to indicate place becomes physically exhausted and feels he or time. Only well into the book do we discover cannot continue the march to safety, a contra that Didion is in El Salvador in June 1982 for two leader saves him. The experience is almost weeks. Where Dickey and Clements try to place hallucinatory, "the most disturbing sort of current events in historical context, Didion dream" (207). Dickey's physical weakness slows seems to see such efforts as fruitless. The memos down the group, putting it in danger; betrayed she includes at the end of the book, quoted from by his body, then, Dickey becomes subject to the embassy officials and other journalists who group's will. While the hallucinatory effects of comment upon U.S. involvement in El Salvador, the experience are partly due to physical serve only to show the deceptions caused by weakness, Dickey underscores the loss of abstract ideological thinking; they reflect no objectivity it signifies. His immersion into the sense of progress. Time, along with space, becomes distorted, its arbitrary system of "Joan Didion, Salvador (New York: Washington Square divisions rejected as meaningless: "Time itself," Press, 1983) 70. she says, "tends to contract to the here and 9 now."' Didion's rejection of traditional temporal 20Joan Didion, "Why I Write, in Joan Didion: Essays and and spatial order denies any possibility of an Conversations, ed. Ellen G. Friedman (Princeton: Ontario orderly movement toward knowledge. Her Review Press, 1984) 5.

TOHER 47 river at the border marks his relief at being safe. Salvadoran life, if he finds it at all, not in larger­ But as he sinks almost lifeless into the river, he than-life military figures. Unlike Didion, he is realizes what his helplessness entails. His very much a character in his own work, and physical dependence on the contras makes him unlike Didion and Dickey he has no contact with an actor, unwilling and unheroic, not merely an the high political echelons. Just as history helps observer. He discovers his objectivity crumbling. Clements make sense of the present, Dickey does search for other heroes, however, exemplars-real or imagined-help him portray though finally he cannot locate a hero in the for the reader the political situation. The contras. His excursion began, in fact, with an Salvadorans certainly believed in the efficacy of interest in Suicida as a potential hero or exemplars: "A guerrilla had to be more than a exemplar: "in the story of Suicida I had found a fighter, [Ramon] believed. The compaiieros had way of conveying some of Central America's also to be examples to the rest of society" (39). tragedy and some of the contradictions in Leadership was exercised by example. Washington's view of what happened there" (9). To make his readers see (echoing Conrad's Dickey was looking for an exemplar for the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus), Clements place and time. The contras allow Dickey into asks us to imagine, for example, "if the Speaker their circle because "it was important ... to have of the House or the Majority leader of the Senate some heroes and some martyrs. And no one were known to spend his private hours ordering would know about your heroes and martyrs if the murders of opposition congressmen, the you did not allow the press to meet them" (176). leadership of the AFL-CIO, or the hierarchy of His narrative shows several potential the Presbyterian church" (195). With this and heroes--Commander Zero, Suicida, and Krill­ other comparisons-like that of a compaiiero each attempting to identify with idols of their with the U.S. Revolutionary War hero Francis own. Zero (Pastora) allies himself with one idol Marion, for example-he attempts to engender after another. For a time, Fidel Castro "seemed in readers both immediacy and sympathy to be the mythical father" for Pastora (71). But (217). 21 Clements is cautious about such Sandino was for Pastora and others "the perfect comparisons, however: "It would be easy to hero, full of fire and intensity, fighting against romanticize ... the traumatized orphan and the enormous odds and practically on his own, heroic commandante, especially when their defying the power of his nation's armies and principles and dignity are contrasted with the those of the vast and magically powerful United terrorism wrought by the Salvadoran right. But States with a mystical and indefatigable a truer portrait would be of a man and a boy determination. It was not an ideological thing. It caught in the vortex of revolutionary violence" was purely visceral" (33). Now mythic, (40). His statement seems to suggest that Sandino's example became impossible to heroism, when possible, can be found in replicate. His successors' personae were localized groups of people working toward a manufactured, as were their names, to become shared goal, not in the celebrated leaders. While symbols. Bravo "was a creation" intended to in With the Contras these leaders fail as heroes, in parallel Commander Zero (63), and Pastora­ Witness to War they are almost totally absent. Zero-was seen as "a revolutionary-the Clements' professional mission-to provide revolutionary; a Nicaraguan man-the medical care to the Salvadorans and to help Nicaraguan man" (40). All disappoint; none can them care for themselves, "a commitment to live up to the myth of Sandino. Each achieves, heal and to witness" -may be more empathic one after the other, only a fragile fame and than that of the journalists (18). He identifies ultimately fails in both mythical and political almost immediately with the Salvadorans. He purpose. The U.S. politicians' characterization of must, in order to do his work: "Winning their these men by North American cliches­ acceptance meant my total submission" (18); but "paladins of the west," "cowboys," "freedom doing so created a pacifist/ activist dilemma. fighters," and "the revolutionary as poet"­ Clements, a pacifist, would be accepted only suggests a nostalgia for mythic heroes of our when he agreed to carry a weapon, and own past. Perhaps the failure of these men can acceptance was necessary for his job. Living be attributed in part to the impossible demand with the group, carrying a weapon, and learning for them to live up to an ideal that was at least partly imposed from outside their culture. "Significantly, Marion was more a guerrilla hero than a Clements finds heroism in everyday traditional military leader.

48 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW their ways challenged Clements' neutrality (as strength"; conversely, "democracy meant Dickey's is also challenged); he found himself weakness" (10). Government officials obscure writing "we" (campesinos) and "they" (govern­ precise meaning by using vague, abstract terms: ment) in his diary (115). "The tactic of the hard-liners," says Dickey, Despite empathy with and acceptance by the "was to keep everything as vague as possible" guerrillas, Clements confronts the insider I (209). In the midst of the details, experiences, outsider problem. Several times he is stymied by and portraits presented by these writers, his ignorance of local custom and frustrated by rhetorical abstraction seems thin. Says historian the lack of "common points of reference .... The Walter La Feber, "democracy remains a talisman true distance was cultural" (134). He was brandished by U.S. presidents whenever they reminded that despite his identification with the employ military force." 23 guerrillas' politics and lives, this fight was not Didion's conclusion about U.S. intervention in really his: "We do not sing the song for you, El Salvador can apply equally to Nicaragua: gringo" (170). Elsewhere Clements writes that "questions of imperialism and exploitation That we had been drawn, both by a didn't interest me nearly as much as the misapprehension of the local rhetoric and perceived opportunity to alleviate suffering," by the manipulation of our own rhetorical but he discovers that the two are less distinct weaknesses, into a game we did not than he had thought (163). Though he makes no understand, a play of power in a political effort to distance himself or obliterate himself tropic alien to us, seemed apparent, and yet from his narrative, Clements cannot fully there we remained. identify with his subject either. As a witness, he (Salvador 96) must get close enough to see clearly but not so close that he cannot see at all. Misapprehension of rhetoric and plays for The lack of focus upon a hero in these three power combine to produce political nostalgia. r works and the resultant shifting of authorial Invoking "freedom fighters" and "founding perspective also parallel the shifting meaning of fathers" may force us to hearken back to the images and signs that the travelers encounter. American Revolution, but the context of that Each book reflects semiotic disjunction between revolution no longer exists. The Reagan cultures and the difficulty of seeing another doctrine's heroes and symbols remain trapped culture clearly. All three writers find abstract in a nineteenth-century legacy that bears little political rhetoric particularly slippery. Clements resemblance to the complexities of modern asks, "what good were these abstractions in global affairs. "Constructed on faith," Dickey such circumstances" as random attack, torture, writes, "it [the Reagan doctrine] suffered in the starvation? (191). Experience is far more real for face of facts" (11). him than words, reports, expectations. Didion, Clear images, not abstractions, convey too, separates experiential details from the meaning for these writers. Frequently political spin given them by various interpreters. throughout With the Contras and Salvador, The Salvadoran election, she writes, "is a potent images of fiction and theater suggest the lack of symbol for many Americans" (Salvador 89), and possibilities for objective perception. However, "even the fact that the election had resulted in many images cluster around the principal one, what [one diplomat] called 'political disorder' of hallucination. For Didion, El Salvador itself is could be presented, with a turn of the mirror, a "central hallucination ... vision is blurred; eye positively" (90). 22 Likewise, Dickey notes that contact is avoided" (Salvador 13-14). In the midst U.S.-contra policy was one of symbols: The of chaos, details may provide a momentary contras themselves were "a symbol of hope," stay-"details," Didion writes, "on which the and "all the symbols were meant to speak of visitor to Salvador learns immediately to concentrate, to the exclusion of past or future "Edward 5. Herman and Noam Chomsky call these concerns, as in a prolonged amnesiac fugue" "demonstration elections," whose primary function is "to (14). But details provide for her only ephemeral convince the home population that the intervention is well­ meaning: structures and definitions, like the intentioned, that the populace of the invaded and occupied country welcomes the intrusion, and that they are being given a democratic choice" (Manufacturing Consent: The "Walter La Feher, "Four Themes and an Irony," in Central Political Economy of the Mass Media [New York: Pantheon, America: Democracy, Development, and Change, eds. John M. 1988]87). Kirk and George W. Schuyler (New York: Praeger, 1988) 154.

TOHER 49 things they represent, are either opaque or organizations (CIA? KGB? FOR?); perhaps those temporary. The result, Didion finds, is a affiliations change routinely. The mirrored language of obfuscation. The passive voice omits sunglasses of a customs official prevent an actor, so responsibility moves into limbo, Clements from looking into his eyes; he sees unassigned: "Eye contact is avoided. Documents only his own "troubled image" reflected (23). are scrutinized upside down" (14). Words And he finds himself cursing at the indefinite, function in a "tortured code," and their "just general singsong imprecations against the meanings, like people's names, have only idiot cosmos" (65). situational significance (15). For Didion, bearing witness involves "details, When Dickey confronts his physical not just impressions" (Salvador 48). Although she helplessness and dependence on the contras, in never mentions "witnessing" per se, her many the episode discussed above, he is in a images of vision/blindness reveal frustration at dreamlike state. His physical senses have been not feeling able to get at the truth. The early distorted and he expresses his fears of the image of a "body with no eyes" (17) sets the tone forest's unknown as "ghosts," shadowy for the details to follow: people who are blind or projections of the eye (207). The passage's blindfolded; forensic photographs and "facets attention to physical sensation expresses the presented ... as on a stereopticon" (55), which breakdown of Dickey's physical and journalistic capture details but not a complete picture; a independence. As the passage in the book freelance writer who "was last seen" containing the most "I"-the most of Dickey as somewhere, with no syntactical subject doing participant-it colors the rest of the narrative the seeing; and, overall, the "miniature aspect of with an uneasy sense of objectivity's limitations. the country" (40), distorted as if seen through Just as Didion sees documents "upside down," the wrong end of a telescope. These details are kaleidoscopically, Dickey writes that "once supposed to "illuminate the story," but the more again, Central America's world was turned Didion witnesses, the more she discovers that around," the passive voice suggesting a world "this was a story that would perhaps not be adrift among the shadows (75). illuminated at all" (36). Both Didion and Dickey emphasize the Dickey, too, is well aware of those dead eyes, sightless eyes of the dead in the body dumps, but hopes to make some sense of the situation and the blind, shadowy, or fractured vision despite them. His ambivalence about witnessing reflecting the traveler's perception in an alien can be seen in his "Prologue" to With the Contras place. Dickey notes that a soldier "had the in two sentences that appear very close together unsettling feeling he had signed a contract on the page: "The witnesses to the worst printed in invisible ink ... before his eyes the madness were scattered all over Central terms were changing, the guarantees America and the United States." But, as he then evaporating" (172). Dickey reads signs as quotes an informant, "There are times when it is "ghosts," shadowy traces of reality (191). better not to know too much" (16). Much of Hearsay, an equally shaky form of evidence, is Dickey's witnessing is secondhand, in sometimes all he could find; he can only wonder interviews about past events or questioning if it might be true (195). By resorting to the about the present: "Tell me about the passive voice-"Children and old people were Sandinistas" (190). His experience with the tortured" (89); "a veterinarian and an contras-physically and emotionally difficult­ accountant ... were captured ... and their makes him wary. When Sister Lisa Fitzgerald throats were cut" (180)-particularly when leaves Nicaragua, Dickey observes that "[s]he describing atrocities, Dickey acknowledges his had witnessed enough.... By bearing witness failure to attribute responsibility for the acts. she had become, increasingly, a target" (215). Didion's mirror imagery suggests that objects Dickey's own stint as a target, just prior to her are constantly appearing and receding, changing departure, has alerted him to the dangers of aspect and meaning. Instead of a mirror that witnessing. reflects reality, hers, like Hans Christian Clements' understanding of the nature of Andersen's demonic mirror, distorts and finally witnessing is related to his discovery that the fragments Salvador's world, magnifying the evil better he got to know the residents, the more he and chaos in it. The mirror and kaleidoscope are identified with them and, thus, the less significant for Clements, too. At times he finds it independent he became. Dickey's identification impossible to identify individuals with their was less complete and Didion's almost

50 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW nonexistent, suggesting that there may be a What are the alternatives to exploration that direct correlation between the level of the attempts to mold a place and people in another writer's "incorporation" and the sense he or she image? Is altruism without dominance possible? is able to make of the place, people, and politics. Can bearing witness become an effective Clements has more faith in a reliable context of corrective to political nostalgia? Perhaps. signs and details; they form a clearer picture for Nostalgia remakes the present in terms of "the him, the details falling into place. For example, good old days"; it therefore requires distancing while the perhaps temporary names the and creative memory. Didion, in particular, tries guerrillas give themselves may obscure "true" to subvert the tendency toward nostalgia by identities, they are not designed merely for this creating an immediate present in her text, purpose. Taking the names of heroes or martyrs subject to no spatial or temporal order. Even so, of the revolution is a form of "incorporation"­ like Dickey and Clements, she still can only "literally ... to join their body" (30); the recreate immediacy from a distance. Thus, the campesinos thus achieve a kind of permanence impediments to witnessing remain the through solidarity. Mythic heroes survive as subjective tricks of memory and interpretation exemplars through the Salvadoran people who and the impossibility of reconciling insider and bear their names. Where Dickey finds failed outsider. As Edward Said points out, "the exemplars in Nicaragua, Clements sees difficulty ... is that there is no vantage outside successful ones in El Salvador. He finds further the actuality of relationships between cultures" continuity in the enduring, primitive qualities of from which to be objective ("Representing the their lives: the Salvadorans with whom he lives Colonized" 216). The political and the are "deeply tied to the earth's cycles of fertility" epistemological are intertwined. The travel (102). They reckon local time by natural signs narrative, moving squarely into the heart of and they find value in the land itself, more than political matters in Central America, bears some in the political structures imposed upon it. By responsibility for them, historically having both evoking this pre-Columbian state of nature, by documented and reinforced cultural conflict. asserting that heroic exemplars do have value, These three writers, however, attempt a shift even by drawing historical parallels between the from a politics of imperialism to "a politics of Salvadoran and Vietnam wars, Clements limits that respect horizontal social relations­ suggests, far more optimistically than either multiplicity over hierarchy, juxtaposition over Dickey or Didion, that witnessing is possible usurpation, difference over deference." 24 Dickey, because knowledge of another culture is Didion, and Clements have helped bring the attainable by the traveler. Such knowledge travel narrative from a conquesting mission to a comes from distinguishing the natural-land, questioning one. It remains to be seen who will farmers' time, physical health and illness-as provide the answers.D opposed to the bureaucratic-political distinctions, economic structures. The 24 bureaucratic is artificial, imposed, and therefore Todd Gitlin, "Postmodernism: Roots and Politics," in Cultural Politics in Contemporary America, eds. Ian Angus and changeable, unstable, whereas the natural is Sut Jhally (New York: Routledge, 1989) 359. continuous and therefore "true." "Salvador, like Ramon and Raul Hercules, was remarkably free of cant and sloganeering"-the true Salvador of Martha Dimes Toher is Managing Editor of Contemporary the people, not the political structure (159). Sociology. She has written on various aspects of non-fiction.

TOHER 51 Tomasz Jastrun

STONY BROOK ON LONG ISLAND*

Translated by Daniel Bourne

his elderly pair says my eyes T Are the spitting image of my father's My father's eyes are closed

This thought Flutters so quietly Between us unsaid That for the first time I see bone start to show Silence Bleached white By the current of time

They hand me a photo

A young man He has to be my father I recognize The young woman as well

Their legs bare Knees like little mirrors In a dark room

52 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW The blunt edge Of my father's smile Cuts to the bone

The shot captured By a writer still living But in constant migration Between Warsaw and Paris

We discuss who lately died from cancer How his own heart grows weaker Stung into beating By an electronic bug planted in his chest Then saying goodbye his hand rustles Like the page of a poem Crumpled out of failure and despair

And as if this was not enough Today I turned thirty-five Easy as going downhill To the river where as a child I caught fish Their round eyes full of sadness and surprise

I ' *Mieczyslaw Jastrun, father of Tomasz Jastrun, is recognized as one of the most important Polish poets of the twentieth ~ century. He died in 1983. r I JASTRUN 53 r

r r Harveen Sachdeva Mann

A VOYAGE INTO THE WORLD OF V. S. NAIPAUL: "THE CROCODILES OF YAMOUSSOUKRO"

n the Author's Foreword to Finding the Center artist's accomplished text about "the process of I (1984), V. S. Naipaul notes that the two long writing" cast within the tropology of travel that narratives comprising the text-"Prologue to an Naipaul intended it to be. This article corrects Autobiography" and "The Crocodiles of such misreadings of "Crocodiles" as Mickelsen's Yamoussoukro"-are "personal" pieces "about first by reviewing and criticizing representative the process of writing." Both, Naipaul states, political, polarized responses to Naipaul's non­ "seek ... to admit the reader to that process," fiction. The article then analyzes "Crocodiles" as albeit in varied fashion.' In a recent article, a narrative of an exterior voyage intended to be however, David Mickelsen discounts the role of read correctly and more profitably as a voyage "Crocodiles" as a personal narrative and as a through the workings of the writer's craft and segment of Naipaul's autobiographical portrait examines it as an outward account of a of the artist, instead evaluating it as a failed geographical journey that in fact affords the political and sociocultural treatise. Declaring reader a journey into the middle-aged artist's that it "does not provide a very meaningful sensibility. Naipaul's text is, I contend, picture of the Ivory Coast," he dubs the successful "literary I artistic" autobiography, not narrative "hotel ethnology"; asserting that the failed ethnology, anthropology, sociology, essay "is to 'real' culture as [African] airport art history, or even journalism. It is a skillful is to tribal sculpture," he concludes that it aesthetic construct and narrative, not an "perpetuate[s] and reinforce[s] the old erroneous cultural account; an accomplished stereotype of 'dark,' magical, superstitious reflexive and self-reflexive piece about Naipaul Africa." 2 the individual and artist, not flawed scientific Mickelsen's critique is compromised by its discourse. failure both to define a poetics of objective, A brief review of Naipaul's heritage reveals scientific cultural representation and to the promptings behind his extensive travels and delineate the "real" Ivorian society that it faults travel-related writings. Born in 1932 to a family Naipaul for misrepresenting. More importantly, of Hindu immigrants in Trinidad, then a his argument proves faulty because it measures colonial backwater, Naipaul became aware early "Crocodiles" against inappropriate interpretive on of the remoteness and marginality of his criteria, as failed ethnography rather than as the homeland. Because post-World War II Trinidad had little to offer the aspiring writer-few 'V. S. Naipaul, Finding the Center: Two Narratives (1984; literary models, an inadequate publishing New York: Vintage, 1986) viii. "Prologue to an industry, an inconsiderable literate audience, Autobiography" was first published in Vanity Fair (Apr. and even, as Naipaul believed at the time, a 1983) as an independent piece; "The Crocodiles of paucity of subject matter-he left in 1950 for Yamoussoukro" originally appeared in The New Yorker 14 May 1984. Naipaul collected the narratives in a single book London, the mecca of most fledgling artists from in 1984 because, according to him, they were written the British colonies. "Traveling to write," consecutively and because they both examine the themes of therefore, Naipaul gathered what he deemed writing, of sacrifice, and of the search for the philosophical "metropolitan" material, producing a few "center" of one's beliefs (Finding vii; "V.S. Naipaul: 'It Is out imitative, Bloomsburian romances that went of This Violence I've Always Written,"' Interview with Mel 3 Gussow, New York Times Book Review 16 Sept. 1984: 45). unpublished. But when five years later he decided to examine his Trinidadian-Hindu

'David J. Mickelsen, "V. S. Naipaul's 'The Crocodiles of ------~·------~-~ Yamoussoukro,'" World Literature Written in English 27.2 'V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival (New York: Knopf, (1987): 270,269,274. 1987) 124, 135.

54 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW background in Miguel Street (pub. 1959), he Yet most of Naipaul's critics, even as they found his true novelistic metier-the admit that his nonfiction is more about himself colonial/postcolonial worlds "contained within than about the lands through which he travels, himself' (Enigma 147). praise or censure his texts for what they deem to Since his first voyage abroad, Naipaul has be their ethnographic accomplishments or traveled often and far, visiting not only the rest shortcomings. The contemporary politics of of the Caribbean and his ancestral India but also reading are most clearly implicated in South America and Africa, Southeast Asia and assessments of the travel books: the majority of the Middle East, North America and Europe, in "First World" critics commend what they search of a home and of fresh insights into interpret as the writer's clear-sighted appraisals himself and humankind. "Every exploration, of developing countries, and "Third World" every book," he admits, "added to my critics typically condemn what they perceive as knowledge, qualified my earlier idea of myself his colonialist, racist views of all peoples and and the world" (Enigma 154). Travel has also places non-Western. remained for Naipaul intrinsically linked to his What has come to be known as "the Naipaul artistic development, modifying his vision and controversy" took root early with the craft. It is true that "the writer's journey that had publication in 1962 of his first recit de voyage, The begun that day [in 1950] ha[s] not ended" for Middle Passage. Whereas William Walsh praises Naipaul, both literally in terms of geographical Naipaul for his "brilliant ... evocation of place" travel and metaphorically in terms of artistic and "scrupulous accuracy" in portraying the evolution (Enigma 165). Caribbean of the early 1960s, the Guyanese critic A prolific writer, Naipaul has won worldwide Gordon Rohlehr upbraids him for depicting acclaim for his eleven novels, among them the "anarchy and absurdity as the norms of his acknowledged masterpiece A House for Mr. society."" Like Walsh on Middle, a reviewer for Biswas (1961) and the compelling Conradian text The Times Literary Supplement notes the value of A Bend in the River (1979). Yet he believes that in An Area of Darkness (1964), Naipaul's account of a postcolonial world fractured by social, his first visit to India, both as a technical tour de political, and technological change, the art of force and as a sociocultural critique: "With a few fiction is becoming a "curious, shattered thing."4 swift and beautifully calculated strokes, Mr. As fantasy and fabulation, modernist "anti­ Naipaul brings the essence of a social situation novels" and postmodernist experimental fictions so vividly to life that one begins to wonder increasingly replace traditional novelistic forms, whether all the sociologists, anthropologists and Naipaul feels that the world requires "another political scientists who have tried to explain kind of imaginative interpretation" ("The India have not laboured in vain." 7 Conversely, Novelist" 368; emphasis added). He provides such an interpretation in an impressive body of nonfiction-six travel narratives; other 'In a 1979 interview and in the 1981 Foreword to The peripatetic journalistic pieces collected in The Middle Passage, Naipaul once again points out the differences Overcrowded Barracoon (1972) and The Return of between his nonfiction and fiction, noting that "[t]hey come out of two entirely different segments of the brain ... they're Eva Peron (1980); and even a "history," The Loss actually written differently" and "take shape very of El Dorado (1969). As he emphasizes the differently": whereas the nonfiction is "done very carefully centrality of nonfiction writing to his oeuvre, ... by hand, because it's very planned," the fiction, Naipaul underlines its subjective and engaged composed on the typewriter to allow for "a certain speed," nature. "I take my journalism extremely "works towards conclusions of which [the novelist] is often unaware" ("A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul," Interview seriously because I think it's a very fair response with Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Boyers, Salmagundi 54 to my world," he says; "[i]t's very personal and [Fall 1981]: 12; and The Middle Passage [1962; New York: very particular. It's something that can't be Vintage, 1981]5). converted into fiction" because fiction would transmute the personal, "invent," and "convert 'William Walsh, V. S. Naipaul (Edinburgh: Oliver and experience into something else" ("The Novelist" Boyd, 1973) 15; Gordon Rohlehr, "The Ironic Approach: The 367; emphasis added).' Works of V. S. Naipaul," Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, ed. Robert D. Hamner (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1977) 180. '"The Novelist V. S. Naipaul Talks about His Work to Ronald Bryden," Interview with Ronald Bryden, Listener 22 '"Mr. Naipaul's Passage to India," Times /London] Literary Mar. 1973: 368. Supplement 24 Sept. 1964: 881.

MANN 55 r Nissim Ezekiel, the noted Indian poet-critic, The critical reaction to "Crocodiles" further declares that Naipaul, relying upon "reckless demonstrates the historical and political generalization," "grotesque exaggeration," and a contingency of reading as well as the "nagging, irritable manner," appears to "act out persistence, in Naipaul's case, of the polarity of of pure, unreasoned hostility" in recording his opinions regarding his achievements or failures observations of India." as a political and sociocultural analyst. For The schism in critical opinion regarding example, in contrast to Mickelsen's negative Naipaul persisted with the publication of India: appraisal quoted above, a reviewer for The A Wounded Civilization (1977), a study prompted Economist applauds "Crocodiles" as one of by the 1975 national political emergency today' s finest "sustained piece[s] of writing" declared by prime minister Indira Gandhi. about "an African state seen with unsentimental Whereas Margo Jefferson praises the Naipaul of perception and first-world detachment." 12 Such India as an "elegantly precise and exacting evaluations, whether disapprobatory or writer" who "combines reporting, analysis, approbatory, illustrate the continued misreading literary criticism and theory to contrast the of Naipaul's nonfiction as ethnography elaborate mythologies of India's past with the primarily and as personal narrative only intractable realities of its present," Edward Said secondarily, if the latter aspect is considered at castigates him for offering mere "observation" all. and little "real analysis," for resorting to "an In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of almost hysterical repetition of how the place has Ethnography, James Clifford notes that tradition­ no vitality, no creativity, no authenticity" and to ally the "predominant metaphors" in anthropo­ "turgid denunciations of a poor country for not logical research were participant-observation, measuring up."" data collection, and cultural description, all of Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981), which "presuppose a standpoint outside-look­ Naipaul's account, following the Iranian ing at, objectifying, or, somewhat closer, 'read­ revolution of 1979, of the nature of the ing' a given reality."" It is no doubt such fundamentalist religious revival in Iran, "metaphors" that Mickelsen has in mind when Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia, intensified he demands from Naipaul "a very meaningful the divergence in Naipaul criticism. V. S. picture" of the Ivory Coast. Measured against Pritchett declares the author a "remarkable such stringent anthropological/ ethnological cri­ diagnostician"; and Elie Kedourie describes the teria, Naipaul's text undoubtedly appears book as a "faithful report of the real state of flawed. However, in contemporary times even affairs as it exists in the countries Mr. Naipaul ethnology is no longer regarded as objective, sci­ has visited," as "the most notable work on entific discourse. Rather, as Clifford points out, contemporary Islam to have appeared in a very it is "always caught up in the invention, not the long time."'" In evaluations diametrically representation of cultures," predicated as it is opposed to Pritchett's and Kedourie's, such upon "contexts of power, resistance, institu­ critics as Said and Amin Malak respectively tional constraint, and innovation" (2). History denounce the text for its "ridiculous and power relations impinge upon all cultural misinformation" and "potted history," and its accounts, thus making ethnographic "truths" author for his "superficiality ... cynicism, "inherently partial-committed and incomplete" arrogance, [and] ridicule," compounded by his "refusal to try to understand Islam within its 11 Edward Said, "Expectations of Inferiority," New own context."" Statesman 16 Oct. 1981: 22; Amin Malak, "V. S. Naipaul and the Believers," Modern Fiction Studies 30.3 (1984): 566,565. 'Nissim Ezekiel, "Naipaul's India and Mine" (1965), New Writillg ill Indin, ed. Adil Jussawalla (Harmondsworth: "The Economist 5 May 1984: 100. I take issue with the Penguin, 1974) 77, 85. reviewer's use of the phrase "first-world detachment," both for its implicit arrogance and the patronizing attitude evident in such praise for a "Third World" writer. 'Margo Jefferson, Newsweek 6 June 1977: 84; Edward W. Said, "Bitter Dispatches from the Third World," Nation 3 May 1980: 523,524. "James Clifford, "Introduction: Partial Truths," Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, eds. James '''V. S. Pritchett, The New Yorker 4 Jan. 1982: 86; Elie Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Kedourie, The New Republic 4 Nov. 1981: 185. Press, 1986) 11.

56 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW (7). If the ethnologist's account is neither whole with his journalist-writer father, who had earlier nor factual and accurate, we cannot fairly expect instilled in him the ambition to become an artist. the creative writer to produce a "real" and "very Following the publication of "Prologue," meaningful" interpretation of a culture. In addi­ Naipaul declared in an interview that rather tion, just as ethnographers ought not to be con­ than follow up with an autobiography proper, sidered novelists manque, as Clifford notes they he wanted to write a book that would "extract often are, so novelists/travel writers ought not to the truth about all [his] varied life, culturally be judged as failed ethnographers (4). varied, geographically varied" ("V. S. Naipaul" Furthermore, many contemporary ethnol­ 46). The result was Enigma, its narrative, like ogists agree with such hermeneutic that of "Prologue," eschewing Naipaul's philosophers as Wilhelm Dilthey, Martin "personal adventuresn and life of the affections, Heidegger, and Paul Ricoeur that all cultural elucidating principally his development as an accounts are deliberate creations and that all artist, portraying primarily the writer "defined cultural interpreters construct themselves by his writing discoveries, his ways of seeing" through those they study (Clifford 10). A similar (Enigma 344). 14 To examine the "enigma" of his construction of the self through a reconstruction arrival as both artist and colonial/postcolonial of the "other" is evident in Naipaul's travel man, Naipaul once again abandons a narratives. In "Crocodiles," in particular, the chronological retelling of his past, instead articulation of the self is unequivocally arranging the text as a collection of five quasi­ emphasized over the articulation of the "other" independent essays that trace his complex as Naipaul fashions a personal narrative in passage from artistic nascence and emotional which the theme of fiction and fictionmaking naivete to maturity in both spheres. predominates. "Crocodiles," like "Prologue" and Enigma, That "Crocodiles" is not "objective" ethnog­ embodies Naipaul's increasingly contemplative, raphy but an integral part of Naipaul's recent philosophical stance, which in turn induces a subjective texts becomes clear when one personal, not scientific, response toward the examines it within the context of "Prologue" peoples and lands he encounters. An account of and Naipaul's 1987 book, The Enigma of Arrival. Naipaul's 1982 journey to the Ivory Coast, All three narratives readily reveal themselves as "Crocodiles" does not purport to provide an Naipaul's exercises in "finding the center," a exhaustive, objective study of Ivorian culture. phrase that takes on several meanings: finding Rather, it embodies Naipaul's quest for artistic the center of the narrative; finding "the center of development at the same time that it records the the truth of every experience, the philosophical growth of his self-knowledge through his center for one's belief"; and finding that "the understanding, albeit partial, of the "other." center ... does hold," an inverted reference toW. Revealing Naipaul's "method" of literary travel B. Yeats' apocalyptic line ("V. S. Naipaul" 45). and travel writing, it also demonstrates more "Prologue to an Autobiography," as its title clearly than his earlier nonfictional texts his implies, departs from conventional auto­ means of fashioning aesthetically appealing biographical writing: instead of providing a narrative-of gathering material and of chronological transcription of the artist's familial determining structure, theme, and authorial and social past, it presents an account of what voice. Naipaul describes as "something less easily Employing the trope of travel, Naipaul casts seized," of his "literary beginnings" and the "Crocodiles" as another chapter in his "imaginative promptings of [his] many-sided description of "the writer's journey" (Enigma background" (Finding vii). Offering the reader a 344). Yet like "Prologue" and Enigma, the text is glimpse into his compositional process, Naipaul traces in the text the evolution of "Prologue" "Despite its unambiguously autobiographical grounding, from its inception in 1967, through two false Naipaul chose to label Enigma a novel because, as he notes, ~ starts, to its completion in its present form in "the autobiography is elusive ... the 'doing' life, the life of r 1982. In addition to demonstrating the process the affections is not there"; and, he continues, although "the r of his "finding the center" of the present writer, the observer [character] ... is scrupulously myself," narrative and of making the various strands of he is "defined entirely by his writing" ("The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul's Search for Himself in Writing," Interview with the story cohere around this center, Naipaul Mel Gussow, New York Times 25 Apr. 1987: 16). Also see note reconstructs for the reader his hesitant origins as 15 below for Naipaul's views regarding the differences a writer in 1954 and elucidates his relationship between autobiographical and fictional writings.

MANN 57 not "pure" autobiography because, according to Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro" offers the Naipaul, such writing can distort, conceal, and experience of travel and human discovery elide.15 Rather, in hybrid generic form-part for its own sake. All that was added later literary I artistic autobiography, part travelogue, was understanding. Out of that understand­ part fiction, with the emphasis falling more ing the narrative came. upon narration than upon description-Naipaul (xi) shows the reader both narrative in the making as well as the finished product.'" Explicating this Evincing a keen awareness of the subjectivity of twofold artistic intent in "Crocodiles," he "Crocodiles," of its reflexivity-its revelations declares in the Author's Foreword to Finding, about Naipaul the individual-and its self­ reflexivity-its revelations about the com­ I would have liked in "The Crocodiles of position of the narrative-Naipaul steers the Yamoussoukro" to take the reader through reader away from interpreting and assessing the all the stages of my adventure in the Ivory text as a veridical discourse about the history, Coast. I would have liked to begin at the economics, or sociopolitics of the Ivory Coast. very beginning, with the blankness and In a 1981 interview Naipaul explained the anxiety of arrival. But it didn't work as nar­ engaged, personal-political impetus behind his rative. And narrative was my aim. Within travels: that, my traveling method was intended to be transparent. The reader will see how the I have to travel. Unless my imagination can material was gathered; he will also see how be released from all these familiar the material could have served fiction or deadening scenes [in Wiltshire], I will go political journalism or a travelogue. But the stale. My travel is so different from that of material here serves itself alone: "The Graham Greene and others. They're travelers in a world that's been made safe "Dotted through Naipaul's works are several revealing for them by empire .... The primary statements about what he perceives to be the distinction difference between my travel and theirs is between "pure" autobiography and fiction, the former that while they travel for the picturesque, concealing, the latter revealing. Commenting upon the I'm desperately concerned about the eponymous protagonist's autobiographical novel-in­ countries I'm in. 17 progress in "Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad," Naipaul states that "[a]n autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it Naipaul thus hardly professes to engage in his reveals the writer totally" (The Return of Eva Perc5n [1980; nonfiction in the disinterested, objective, and New York: Vintage, 1981] 67). In Among the Believers, he deictic investigation of cultures expected of the partially echoes this sentiment: "People can hide behind ideal ethnographer. All his travels have been direct statements; fiction, by its seeming indirections, can make hidden impulses clear" (1981; New York: Vintage, dictated by his colonial past and prompted by a 1982) 13-14. Even as early as 1965, he remarked to Derek perceptive amateur's intellectual curiosity about Walcott that "[i]n the process of [creative/fictional] writing different peoples, not by a scientist's design to one might discover deeper truths about oneself which might record and interpret a culture. Although be slightly different from day to day truth about one's Naipaul' s original intent in journeying to the reactions" ("Interview with Derek Walcott," Trinidad Sunday Guardian 7 Mar. 1965: 6). Thus, instead of resorting to Caribbean in 1960 was, as he admits, "political­ conventional autobiography and providing a chronological cultural," his travel having been funded by the yet highly selective transcription of his personal past, Trinidad and Tobago government, there was a Naipaul chooses in Finding and Enigma to write "fiction" -in readily apparent disjunction between the the sense of a making or fashioning-in order to elucidate inception and "personal" execution of The his development as an artist and simultaneously to demonstrate the working of his craft. Middle Passage (Finding ix). To resolve the resultant problem of authorial perspective and tone in Middle, Naipaul found it necessary to 1"Drawing upon Janet Varner Gunn's study entitled Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (Philadelphia: "acknowledge more of [him]self," to "define Univ. of Philadelphia Press, 1982), Selwyn Cudjoe describes [him]self very clearly to [him]self" (Enigma 153, 1 "Prologue," "Crocodiles," and Enigma as auto-bio-graphies or 154). " Thus he embarked on the two voyages to Naipaul's "attempts to bring himself [autos] to life [bios] India recounted in An Area of Darkness and India: through language [graphic]," as texts that locate Naipaul's ontological center as a writer through a return to his literary beginnings (V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading [Amherst: 17 "The Dark Visions of V. S. Naipaul," Interview with Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1988]210). Charles Michener, Newsweek 16 Nov. 1981: 109.

58 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW A Wounded Civilization, not so much to explore record what Louis Althusser terms "social India as to explore his Hindu-Indian self. Even formation"-"the economic, political, and his Islamic journey and his 1987 travels through ideological practices that constitute the social the southeastern United States-the latter whole" (Cudjoe 243). Nor does it present what recorded in his latest recit de voyage, A Turn in the E. B. Tylor terms "culture" in its ethnographic South (1989)-divulge his subjective aims: to sense-"that complex whole which includes better acquaint himself with the Muslim ethos knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and which he "had known ... all [his] life" as a any other capabilities and habits acquired by member of the Indian community in Trinidad man as a member of society."20 Neither is its aim (Among 11); and to discover parallels between to provide what the Nigerian scholar-critic the former slave colonies of the Caribbean and Sunday Anozie terms a "true introspection" of the old slave states of America. Africa-whether cultural, social, historical, or "Crocodiles," even more readily than the ethnographic-which can only be accomplished other travel texts, demonstrates the personal by adopting "appropriate paradigms and promptings underlying Naipaul's travel. The models derived from the culture or society 2 narrative, he claims, is intended to show him "in itself." ' Rather, "Crocodiles" is intended to his latest development," going about "one side record another segment of Naipaul' s literary I of his business [writing being the other]: artistic autobiography: here Naipaul can be seen traveling, adding to his knowledge of the world, seeking self-knowledge through social exposing himself to new people and new discovery, plumbing the center of his artistic self relationships" (Finding viii). Eschewing any through discovering the center of Africa, and political or cultural agenda at the very outset, coming to possess the center of his existence Naipaul journeyed to the Ivory Coast to test through a growing comprehension of the what he labels a "private fantasy" based upon colonial/postcolonial worlds that have shaped his boyhood love of the French language: him. Naipaul's engaged, subjective narrative in "African success, France in Africa" -those were "Crocodiles" thus consciously departs from the the "glamorous" ideas that took him to West objective narrative of a formal ethnographic text Africa where he had never before been (Finding which, according to Mary Louise Pratt, is 79). Consequently, "Crocodiles" contains few supposed to "conform to the norms of a ideological pronouncements or authoritative scientific discourse whose authority resides in statements about the country's history, politics, the absolute effacement of the speaking and economics, and social customs. Instead, experiencing subject." 22 repeatedly using himself and his past as Although Naipaul's reasons for traveling to referents, Naipaul filters the country through a the Ivory Coast differ from those underlying his subjective lens, describing only those cultural visits to the Caribbean, India, the Middle East, phenomena that appeal to his colonial/ and elsewhere, his method of investigative postcolonial and Hindu sensibilities: the travel remains much the same. This rootlessness of expatriates, the mythology of serendipitous process which, he says, "could be power created by a once powerless slave society, as creative and imaginative ... as the writing and the spiritual completeness of Africa.'" that came after," Naipaul describes as follows: "Crocodiles," therefore, clearly does not __.. ___ ------'"'You refer to yourself in order to understand other '"'When it came to the writing [of Tile Middle Passage] I people. That's the novelist's gift," Naipaul remarked in a was uncertain about the value I should give to the traveler's recent interview ("The Enigma of V. S. Naipaul's Search" 'I,"' Naipaul admits retrospectively; "[t]his kind of direct 16). participation came awkwardly to me, and the literary problem was also partly a personal one. In 1960 I was still a "'Tala! Asad, "The Concept of Cultural Translation in colonial, traveling to far-off places that were still colonies, in British Social Anthropology," Writing Culture 141. a world still more or less ruled by colonial ideas" (Finding ix). And in Enigma he states, "The fight between my idea of the glamour of the traveler-writer and the rawness of my "Sunday 0. Anozie, Structural Models and African Poetics: nerves as a colonial traveling among colonials made for Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Literature (London: Routledge difficult writing. When ... I went back to London ... to do and Kegan Paul, 1981) 44. the writing [of Middle], the problems were not resolved. I took refuge in humor-comedy, funniness, the satirical reflex, in writing as in life so often a covering up for "Mary Louise Pratt, "Fieldwork in Common Places," confusion" (153). Writing Culture 32.

MANN 59 To arrive at a place without knowing empathizes, seeing the Ivory Coast through their anyone there ... ; to learn how to move foreign eyes. From ambassadors and other among strangers for the short time one embassy officials, displaced divorcees from could afford to be among them; to hold Martinique and Guadeloupe, an English oneself in constant readiness for adventure schoolteacher and an American lawyer among or revelation; to allow oneself to be carried others, he elicits information through Socratic along, up to a point by accidents; and questioning: Are there still slaves in the villages? consciously to follow up other impulses .... What do the President's crocodiles mean? How (Finding x) do people become sorcerers? Why did the Ivorians build the ambitious city of "Crocodiles" furnishes numerous examples of Yamoussoukro if they believe the world is only the "adventurous," "accidental" nature of an illusion? And the question Naipaul finds Naipaul's Ivorian investigation. His interest most engaging-do modern-day Africans, like piqued by a newspaper story about an evil spirit the Caribbean slaves of more than a century ago, believed to be setting mysterious fires, Naipaul live in two realms, a daytime realm of material travels to the settlement of Kilometre 17 to things and a nighttime realm of spirits and investigate the role of magic in Ivorian life; a magic, the latter making more bearable the casual suggestion by some expatriates that he adversities of the former? visit the ancestral village of President Incorporating the respondent's views of the Houphouet-Boigny takes him to Yamoussoukro Ivory Coast into his narrative, Naipaul is to witness the ritualistic feeding of a live chicken constantly aware of the biased nature of such to the totemic crocodiles; and an English information as well as of his inquiries and contact's recommendation leads him to the evaluations. "Ambassadors have to choose their University of Abidjan and to Georges Niangoran­ words," Naipaul writes; "with ambassadors as Bouah, a specialist in "drummologie," with with other expatriates in black Africa, there whom he discusses not only the ancient art of appears ... a kind of ambivalence. To say what drumming but also slavery, burial customs, and they feel they have to say they appear to be the conjunction of Christian and animist beliefs denying or ignoring part of what they know" in West Africa. Such a reliance upon chance (Finding 82, 83). Coming upon a story about encounters to supply material for his narrative sacrificial heads being exported in refrigerated Joan Didion attributes to the writer's instinct in containers, Naipaul is skeptical about its Naipaul for "the possibilities in the apparently veracity, thinking that it and similar sardonic peripheral," a sort of "professional thrift."23 accounts are perhaps expatriate-African jokes. Again Naipaul underscores the creative-as He is aware as well that he does not have access distinguished from the scientific-aspect of his to the "real" or the "whole" Ivory Coast: at the travel when he admits the partiality of his international hotels in Abidjan he is exposed to sources as well as of his narrative: "The the "officially approved 'culture"' of traditional intellectual adventure is also a human one," forest dances performed in "a landscaped Naipaul writes in elucidating his travel garden, electric light playing on the big, bare "method"; "I can only move according to my breasts of dancing, chanting women" (80); and sympathy. I don't force anything; there is no in Yamoussoukro he notes that the visitors are spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely predominantly white tourists satisfying their must interview. The kind of understanding I am taste for magical Africa by witnessing the looking for comes best through people I get to feeding ritual. like" (Finding 90). And in the Author's Foreword Of his own intellectual response to people's he declares that the people he felt drawn to in casual remarks, Naipaul admits, the Ivory Coast were "not unlike [him]self,"

displaced beings searching for "order in their "(ix). "[T]he people I found [in the Ivory Coast], the 24 world." Instead of seeking out indigenous people I was attracted to, were not unlike myself," Naipaul politicians, socialites, or even commoners, admits in the Author's Foreword to Finding. "They too were therefore, Naipaul moves chiefly among trying to find order in their world, looking for the center; expatriates, both white and black, with whom he and my discovery of these people is as much part of the story as the unfolding of the West African background. A writer after a time carries his world with him ... ; and I do "Joan Didion, "Discovery," New York Review of Books 11 believe ... that I would have found equivalent connections Oct. 1984: 12. with my past and myself wherever I had gone" (ix).

60 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r Perhaps, forgetting his [Djedje, his lvorian Omitting the details of his physical journey to guide's] innocence and misled by his and from the Ivory Coast and curtailing the opening statement that the country had descriptions of his three excursions within the taken a wrong turn, I had been looking in country, Naipaul focuses instead upon the his conversation for something that wasn't unfolding of his narrative, paralleling the there: an attitude, a thought-out position. documentation of his birth as an artist in Perhaps-uneducated, unemployed, a "Prologue" and Enigma. As Anthony Burgess villager in Abidjan-he was genuinely notes about Naipaul's "exemplification of 'the confused by the development of the country process of writing"' in "Crocodiles," "[H]ere is 'from the top.' how material is gathered and here is how the (103) imaginative faculty begins to work on it .... What Mr. Naipaul is really doing is practising Finally, aware of the tentativeness of his own his craft, and practising it well."25 conclusions, Naipaul qualifies his remarks, Inviting the reader's participation in his questions his beliefs, and offers for the reader's discovery of the narrative's shape, Naipaul perusal contrapuntal interpretations of events to declares in the text that as the blankness of his underscore the inscrutability and enigma of a first days in a foreign land gave way to a foreign land. For an incident in which a villager hesitant understanding, he began to "discover is mangled by one of the crocodiles, Naipaul themes and people," to "live, as it were, in a considers several explanations-that it was an novel of [his] own making, moving from not accident, that the man had been sacrificed knowing to knowing, with person interweaving against his will, that he had voluntarily with person, incident opening out into incident" sacrificed himself to save his village from evil. (Finding 99, 90). Such human discovery, such a And confirming the "mystery" of the crocodiles, finding out of "how a society works, what he writes, "[T]he symbolism remained elusive, drives the people on," is for Naipaul a necessary worrying" (150): was the feeding ritual a preliminary to the final composition of the remnant of ancient Egyptian earth worship, he narrative ("The Dark Visions" 110). Echoing wonders; or were the lvorians simply appeasing Naipaul, and underlining the creative nature of a universally feared creature? Did the chicken his travels, Edward Hoagland declares in a represent a hapless enemy? Or did it, giving up review of Finding that "[p]art of [Naipaul's] its life so the crocodile might live, emblematize fidelity may be due to his regarding the trips the ruler's drawing of power from his people? In themselves as little novels, each with a set of the end Naipaul admits that "[p]erhaps the characters, risks and dilemmas, which he concepts were not really translatable," that the follows out to see how they're resolved."26 crocodiles "were meant to be mysterious, to be In an interview following the publication of felt as a mystery" (151, 168). "Crocodiles" Naipaul described what for him David Mickelsen, however, uses Naipaul's constitutes "the process of a journey," admissions in "Crocodiles" regarding his simultaneously confirming that his travel predilections and biases, the limited range of his technique approximates his writing technique, informational sources, the subjective nature of that on his peregrinations he is a writer rather his narrative, and even the transparency of his than a traveler, ethnologist, or sociologist: craft to censure him for what he believes are the writer's ethnographic lapses. Had Naipaul When a place begins to hold you, you begin intended "Crocodiles" to be read as an to move like a writer and a traveler. I get unambiguous, objective ethnography, he would awfully wound up. It's like writing a book hardly have been so unsophisticated as to although you're not actually writing it at mention in the text the scientific shortcomings of the moment. You're thinking what to do his discourse. Furthermore, Naipaul's claims regarding his method of travel and composition "Anthony Burgess, "Interior Excursions," rev. of Finding are not "disingenuous," as Mickelsen claims, nor the Centre, by V. S. Naipaul, Times [London] Literary are they excuses for a failed ethnography; they Supplement 22 June 1984: 691. are, rather, the comments of a self-aware writer whose aim it is to implicate the reader in his '"Edward Hoagland, "Staking His Life on One Grand method of literary travel and narrative-making Vision," rev. of Finding the Center, by V. S. Naipaul, New York (27). Times Book Review 16 Sept. 1984: 44.

MANN 61

I I next, how to do it-and you're processing. the latter engage his attention chiefly because The "I" is only an actor in so far as he looks their "mystery," symbolizing the Conradian and arranges the scenes around himself. "mystery" of cultures, speaks to the increasingly What takes all my time is understanding meditative, Hindu aspect of his personality, what happened during those days-to be which he defined in a recent interview: true to one's experience and to be true to what one's learned about it. Making it hold I think [it is] the philosophical aspect­ together. Hindu I would say.... It's the feeling that ("V. S. Naipaul" 45) life is an illusion. I've entered it more and more as I've got older. ... I think it's ... In "Crocodiles," as in "Prologue" and Enigma, accommodating [one]self to reality. Other the reader gleans how Naipaul makes his people from other cultures can become experience and its subsequent articulation in more greedy, more aggressive. I become the narrative form "hold together," how the writer's other, and this chimes with the Hindu's physical journey is transmuted into his journey more contemplative attitude.27 through his composition. Just as Naipaul's chief perplexity in writing the other two texts lay in This older, reflective Naipaul has not finding their narrative "center," so did the fashioned an ethnographic essay but choice of narrative shape, center, and theme orchestrated a personal narrative around initially elude him in the drafting of Yamoussoukro's crocodiles, a narrative that "Crocodiles." Only with the perspective of time sketches his inner geography as it reveals its and a growing insight into his Ivorian own complex themes, authorial personae, and experience did Naipaul realize that a voices. That "Crocodiles" is written against chronological transcription of his travels would Naipaul's background as a Trinidadian Indian not work as narrative, that the heart of his and as an artist becomes quickly evident. To composition lay not in its story line but in the allow for the discursive analysis of his journey discovery of the narrative itself. Only later did as man and writer, Naipaul keeps to a minimum he alight upon the daily feeding of the the details of his Ivorian voyage. Instead, he president's pet crocodiles and Yamoussoukro as employs the trope of the physical journey as the the structural center of his text. structural correlative of the themes embodied in Naipaul's narrative opens with a description the narrative, themes that reverberate through of President Houphouet-Boigny' s ancestral his corpus: the exilic journeys of the modern home of Yamoussoukro as "one of the wonders individual-of expatriates to ex-colonies, of black Africa" (75); circles back constantly to colonials to metropolises, villagers to cities­ its conjunction of ancient and contemporary, that create a state of flux in the whole world; the magic and technology, totemic crocodiles and passage of history from colonial to postcolonial ultra-modern buildings; and concludes with an times and the continuing exploitation of the acknowledgment of the two planes of reality­ Third World by nonnatives and natives alike; the natural and the spiritual-embodied in the the journey of the soul through life to death and very conception of the town. Rather than reveal the spiritual realm; the development of the what Mickelsen describes as Naipaul's artist; and Naipaul's own temperamental "fixation" upon and stereotyping of Africa as a voyage from rejection to acceptance of his "black night-world of magic," the repeated focus colonial past, from cynicism to sympathy in his on and attempt to interpret the crocodiles views of his fellow colonials. illustrate not only Naipaul's organizational By the time Naipaul came to write technique but also his novelist's propensity for "Crocodiles," he had resolved the dichotomy in symbol-making (271). himself between the personal and literary, The "literary," as opposed to the ethnographic, between the engaged colonial/ postcolonial man nature of Naipaul's response to the Ivory Coast and detached metropolitan/Westernized writer 2 is divulged additionally by his apt choice of title that plagued him early in his career. ' for his narrative. Had Naipaul intended to write Consequently, his uncertainty about an an unequivocal sociocultural critique, he would authorial "role" vanished: "a role was not hardly have deflected so much attention away from the scientific study of the country to ""The Elusive Genius," Interview with Andrew Robinson, Yamoussoukro and its crocodiles. As he admits, Illustrated Weekly of India 5 July 1987: 13.

62 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW necessary," he concludes; "I recognized my own ago: along with the Ivorians, he "half [begins] to instincts as a traveler and was content to be see" that the world is an illusion, that the "true myself, to be what I had always been, a looker. life" lies in the realm of magic and spirits, that And I learned to look; in my own way" (Finding the African world, with its emphasis upon the x). In "Crocodiles," therefore, Naipaul adopts "inner" as opposed to workaday reality, is the first person point of view as opposed to the "whole" (141, 174). detached, scientific third person rhetoric of Naipaul's philosophical and temperamental ethnography. But he does not offer his stance in "Crocodiles" thus demonstrates a interpretation of events as privileged. marked change since 1964 when he declared Interspersing his text with dialogue and third that in India "the creative urge [has] failed .... person explanations, he creates a Bakhtinian Shiva has ceased to dance [the dance of life]," polyvocality; incorporating the speech of his that in the "absence of growth and informants, he crafts a collaborative text in development" the only lesson of Indian history 2 which we "hear" the Ivorians: Djedje, the guide, is that "life goes on"; q since 1970 when he announcing that "[ w ]ithou t ci vi liz a tion, described the Caribbean islands as the "half­ everyone would be a sorcerer" (124); the poet, made societies of a dependent people, the Third Ebony's father instructing him, "Remember. I World's third world ... [which] will forever am not sending you to the school to be a white consume ... never create";"' and even since 1980 man or a Frenchman. I am sending you to enter when he concluded that modern Islam has "the the new world, that's all" (140); and Niangoran­ flaws of its origins.... [T]o the political issues it Bouah, the drummologist, intoning, "Le monde raise[s] it offer[s] no political or practical des blancs est reel. Mais-mais-nous avons, solution. It offer[s] only the faith .... This nous autres africains noirs, nous avons tout cela political Islam [is] rage, anarchy" (Among 355). dans le monde de la nuit, le monde des In "Crocodiles," by contrast, the oftentimes tenebres" (162). vitriolic assessments of the younger Naipaul Even within the first person presentation, give way to a new-found objectivity in multiple authorial personae and voices describing and accepting ways of thinking proliferate, confirming the many-sidedness of opposed to his own. Instead of seeking to Naipaul's self. As an ex-colonial from Trinidad, confirm negative preconceptions about the Naipaul notes parallels between the idea of country he is traveling through-a charge that Africa's spiritual "completeness," even among has often been leveled at him in the past and one materially successful modern-day Ivorians, and that Mickelsen also brings against him in the millenarian vision underlying both the slave "Crocodiles" (271)-Naipaul is in search of what revolts and more recent political movements in Edward Hoagland describes as a "balanced the black Caribbean. As an objective observer view of Africa," offering a narrative replete with trained in the Western tradition, however, he is "ameliorating attitudes" and "a wise good initially skeptical about the conjunction of the humor" (44). In sharp contrast to his contemporary and ancient in Africa, of provocative, apocalyptic pronouncement to international hotels and magical arts, wondering Elizabeth Hardwick in 1979 that "Africa has no I whether the "miracle" of the Ivory Coast can future," Naipaul now demonstrates a genuine last. But as a middle-aged, contemplative concern for its fate:'1 r traveler, he sympathizes with beliefs that would have proved antipathetic to him even a decade To the man from outside, whatever his ~ political or religious faith, Africa can often '~At age eighteen, Naipaul naively believed that only seem to be in a state of becoming.... So it r "metropolitan" subject matter-"sophisticated, big-city, like something in a film or play or a book" -could help define him as a writer (Enigma 138-39). Consequently, early in his '"V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (1964; New York: writing career, even as early as his first Pan American flight Vintage, 1981) 229, 213. in 1950 from Port of Spain to New York, there appeared a schism in Naipaul, as he admits in Enigma: "[B]etween the man writing the diary [taking notes for potential stories] and "'V. S. Naipaul, The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other the traveler there was already a gap, already a gap between Articles (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) 271. the man and the writer. Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer's greatest discovery. It took time-and how much writing!-to arrive at that synthesis" ""Meeting V. S. Naipaul," Interview with Elizabeth (110). Hardwick, New York Times Book Review 13 May 1979: 36.

MANN 63 arouses hope, ambition, frustration, bound to perish" (174). Joan Didion believes that irritation. And even the success of the Ivory Naipaul's "changing focus" on the people he Coast induces a kind of anxiety. Will it last? met, his "gradual realization" that the African Will the Africans be able to take over from night world existed for many Ivorians as literal the French and the Israelis and the others reality, not metaphor, and his conclusion that who have built it all for them and still the role of magic in the Ivory Coast could only effectively run it? be described, not interpreted or judged, were for (78) the author "a different way of looking, a narrative in itself" (12). In "Crocodiles" one does not find derogatory Althouth "Crocodiles" reveals a mellower, stereotyping of the sort typical of "Africanist"­ more accepting Naipaul than his readers have imperialist discourse-involving the description come to expect, the novelistic technique of Negroes as physically offensive, sexually underlying the narrative proves familiar, voracious, and spiritually wanting. Nor does supporting Percy Adams' contention that one find a more general hegemonic "colonial" Naipaul's "novels are travel books and [his] discourse which, according to Homi Bhabha, is recits de voyage are novels," that for him "the deeply rooted in ideologies of racial, cultural, travel book and the novel become one form."" It and historical domination and which portrays is Naipaul the novelist who creates revealing the colonized as a "population of degenerate character sketches in a few masterful strokes-of types on the basis of racial origin."'2 Instead, Djedje, his displaced Ivorian guide, whose eyes Naipaul's empathy with the Ivorians grows display either "intelligence, vapidity, a wish to until it culminates in a partial sense of please, or a latent viciousness" (100); of Andree, identification with the "other." After talking to the Antillaise secretary, whose "respectable the residents about African belief in the world of French, respectable West Indian" style of dress spirits and about the predominant mythologies, and talk of malaria tablets and Ivorian marriage he admits, "I began to enter a little into the customs reveal her to be an outsider (105); of African world [they] saw" (98). This Niangoran-Bouah, the nationalistic ethno­ temperamental evolution and participation sociologist, a "big and very black man," with the continue until Naipaul can conclude about a physique of an African chief, a clear and precise West Indian Ghanian living in London that French speech, and "the lecturing manner ... of "probably he didn't know how whole the world the French academic," whose cause it is to of Africa still was" (117); until he can observe educate the world in African art and civilization about Niangoran-Bouah's love for things (156). It is Naipaul the novelist with his eye for African, "I began to understand the richness of telling detail who notices the incongruity of the material he had made his subject and his microphones in a drumming and singing passion to present this material adequately to ceremony, of the big gold digital wristwatch Africans and the world" (166); and until he can worn by a village chief, of the Land Rover internalize the I vorian belief in the driven by the master of ceremonies at the ritual insubstantiality of the material world and note feeding of the crocodiles. And it is Naipaul the about a group of French businessmen that they novelist who paints symbolical portraits of the were "white men sitting at tables, listening to a landscape, interspersing interpretive com­ man lecturing before a board: phantoms, mentary with telling description: preparing plans for things that were one day [T]he great mosque of Yamoussoukro ... in "In his article "The Other Question," Homi Bhabha the North African [Islamic] style .. . defines colonial discourse as "an apparatus that turns on the [indicated that] the African ruler, aiming at recognition and disavowal of racial/ cultural/historical material splendor, had to look outside black differences." It "seeks authorisation for its strategies by the Africa. It was part of the pathos of production of knowledges of coloniser and colonised which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated," he asserts; Yamoussoukro. The mosque, off a wide, "[t]he object of colonial discourse is to construe the colonised unfilled avenue, was in a big yard, open to as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial the sun and the harmattan. Like many other origin in order to justify conquest. ... Therefore ... colonial buildings in Yamoussoukro, it appeared- discourse produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once an 'other' and yet entirely knowable and visible" ("The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial "Percy Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Discourse," Screen 24.6 [1983]: 23). Novel (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1983) 284.

64 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW perhaps wrongly-to await full use. It felt leave. like a shell; it was possible, in the (Finding 90) barrenness of its unwelcoming yard, to see it as a ruin. Commenting upon the creative nature of (151-52) Naipaul's travel, Didion distinguishes his interest in a place from that of a reporter (and, And later, entering into the Ivorian belief of the one might add, that of an ethnologist): world as illusion, he creates a poetic mood piece: What interests a writer like ... Naipaul is The sun was sinking in the haze of dust: the only rarely what interests, in the same harmattan, arrived at last on the coast. The situation, a reporter ... the novelist's lagoon was hazy; the far bank, lost in haze, interest in the situation wanes at that was like a view from the temperate zone. To precise point when the reporter begins to one side of the hotel landscape work was consider himself competent: when the place going on around many of the new houses is understood, when it begins to come clear, built in this fast-rising area. when the remarkable becomes commonplace I said, "Arlette [one of Naipaul's ex­ and the course of a day can be predicted. patriate acquaintances] you make me feel (12) that the world is unstable. You make me feel that everything we live by is built on Whereas a journalist's aim is reportage and an sand." ethnologist's aim is a descriptive anthropology (174-75) of a culture, Naipaul's purpose in "Crocodiles" is, in his words, not so much to "unfold the West Naipaul's voices in "Crocodiles" proliferate African background" as to convey "his own beyond those of a middle-aged ex-colonial and burden of experience, human experience and novelist. Although he is not writing a political literary experience" (Finding ix). In this document, he reveals a rare political acumen as narrative, Naipaul's new-found tranquillity and he contrasts the success of the Ivory Coast with concomitant sympathy for people and cultures the internal chaos of the surrounding nations of color the depiction of his "human experience." Liberia, Guinea, and Ghana. And although his The portrayal of his "literary experience" admits text is not intended to be read as sociology, the reader to the process of narrative writing at anthropology, or ethnography, Naipaul seeks to the same time that it confirms Naipaul's claim comprehend this Ivorian success by determining that travel has "broadened [his] world view" by the "principle of organization that suited the showing him a "changed" world and by taking people" and by inquiring into the prevalent him out of his "colonial shell." Literary travel religious customs, social mores, and and the composition of travel narratives have philosophical beliefs (Finding 81). Most thus become for Naipaul "the substitute for the importantly, however, Naipaul discloses himself mature social experience ... which [his] as a self-aware writer, cognizant of the background and the nature of [his early] life biographical stimulus for and subjective method denied [him]" (Finding x).}.ID of his recent literary travel: "An early version of this paper was presented at the 1989 I travel to discover other states of mind. Northeast Modern Language Association Convention held And if for this intellectual adventure I go to in Wilmington, Del. Research grants provided by The places where people live restricted lives it is Pennsylvania State University Organized Research/ because my curiosity is still dictated in part Scholarship Activities Fund and Research Development Grant Program enabled me to complete the writing of this by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to article. places that, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are Harveen Sachdeva Mann has published and presented papers on no more surprises, the intellectual V. S. Naipaul and other posl·colonial authors. adventure is over, and I become anxious to ------~----·--·-----~---

MANN 65 II Desanka Maksimovic

I HAVE NO MORE TIME

Translated by Richard Burns and Jasna Misic

have no more time for long sentences I and I have no time to negotiate, I tap out messages like telegrams. I have no time to fan the flame, now my hands just scrabble burnt embers. I no longer have time for pilgrimages, all at once my route to the estuary shrinks, I have no time to glance back or turn back, nor have I time for little bits and pieces, now I have to think of the everlasting and the boundless. I have no time to think about crossroads, I can only get to places nearby. I have no time to study anything new, and I've no time for analyses, for me water now is just water as when I drank it from the pure spring; there is no time for me to dissect the sky into bits, I see it just as children see it. I have no time for strange gods, I have not even explored my own properly. There is no time left to adopt new commandments, even the old ten commandments are too much for me. I have no more time for togetherness even with those who keep striving to prove the truth. I have no more time to fight against the hunters. I have no more time to dream, to stroll along.

66 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW r David C. Estes

BRUCE CHATWIN'S IN PATAGONIA: TRAVELING IN TEXTUALIZED TERRAIN

n Buenos Aires, Jorge Luis Borges tried to with the absence of human life, Bruce Chatwin' s I dissuade the professional traveler and author In Patagonia (1977) is filled with people and their Paul Theroux from heading further south to adventures. He tells about twentieth-century Patagonia, about which the nature writer W. H. refugees and contemporary Patagonians whose Hudson had fondly reminisced. Borges ancestors emigrated to establish the sheep cautioned: "Idle Days in Patagonia [1893] is not a industry there, the adventurers who first bad book, but you notice there are no people in explored the nethermost reaches of South it-only birds and flowers. That's the way it is in America, and also the Indians whom these Patagonia. There are no people there .... There Europeans colonized. By showing that "the is nothing in Patagonia. It's not the Sahara, but advancing tide of humanity" did, indeed, arrive it's as close as you can get to it in Argentina. No, in Patagonia, Chatwin undercuts Hudson's there is nothing in Patagonia."1 Indeed, Hudson confident predictions, and hence his idealistic himself acknowledged it to be "a desert cursed portrait of the region. with eternal barrenness."2 Yet there he could feel Chatwin subordinates views of unpopulated "the effect of nature's wildness on the spirit" landscapes to an interest in the social particularly strongly because the terrain gave no consequences of imperialism in this inhospitable promise "that eventually the advancing tide of New World wasteland. Upon crossing the Rio humanity will come with its flocks and herds, Negro into Patagonia, for example, he first and the ancient silence and desolation will be no surveys the village where the public bus stops more" (221). Hudson wrote about his fascination and describes some of the Indians, their shacks, with this place, in part, to explain the and the fields in which these migrants work. puzzlement that Charles Darwin, who visited Only after measuring this unattractive reality there some thirty years before Hudson came in against the renowned ferocity and bravery of the the 1860s, had expressed in The Voyage of the Araucanians a century ago, does he turn to the Beagle (1839): "In calling up images of the past, I desert: "There was no sound but the wind, find the plains of Patagonia frequently cross whirring through thorns and whistling through before my eyes; yet these plains are pronounced dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, by all to be most wretched and useless .... Why, and a black beetle easing over white stones."' then-and the case is not peculiar to myself-have Although such details are in harmony with these arid wastes taken so firm possession of my Hudson's impressions and Borges' warning, just mind?" (qtd. in Hudson 201). To Hudson, the one sentence later Chatwin shifts to his reason was that "the monotony of the plains, or contrasting social and cultural perspective, with expanse of low hills, the universal unrelieved characteristic understatement: "Unlike the grayness of everything, and the absence of deserts of Arabia, it [the Patagonian desert] has animal forms and objects new to the eye, leave not produced any dramatic excess of the spirit, the mind open and free to receive an impression but it does have a place in the record of human of visible nature as a whole" (220-21). experience." His text offers a collection of Despite this region's long-standing association persons and events from the past four centuries that are all part of that record, thereby 'Paul Theroux, The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through deconstructing Hudson's illusory Patagonia. the Americas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979) 377. Chatwin squarely confronts the fact that

'W. H. Hudson, Idle Days in Patagonia (1893; New York: E. 'Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia (New York: Summit Books, P. Dutton, 1917) 203. 1977) 15.

ESTES 67 Patagonia's geography, history, and people have Patagonia emerges. It comes not from a travel been implicated in European imperialism, even book, such as many that have been published, though the colonial Spanish presence in what is devoted to the particular ad ventures of a now Argentina was tiny compared to that in singular traveler. That kind of book provides a Peru and Mexico.< Even after Argentina claimed literary version of a geographic place that is as independence in 1810, Indian attacks as well as idiosyncratic as the writer's personality. Rather, poor terrain continued to make settlement in Chatwin's activity of literary creation depends, Patagonia undesirable for decades. Finally in instead, on frequent silences about his 1879, a military campaign "subdued, drove out, experiences so that readers can hear the voices or exterminated the scattered Tehuelche and of others. Thus, Patagonia emerges from the act Araucanian tribes in the region, stopping at last of reading against each other, as well as against their depredations against the southern Chatwin's adventures, those texts that are his estancias" (Rock 154). By the end of the century, journey's multiple frames. the sheep industry was expanding in Patagonia, Although not a traveler's book, Primaleon of but few of the growing number of inhabitants Greece, a Castilian romance published in 1512, had been born in Argentina. In fact, "many of might be considered the outermost framing text. the landowners of Patagonia, on sheep ranches Among other adventures, Knight Primaleon and fruit farms alike, were British" (Rock 179). sails to a remote island where he overcomes "a As Chatwin notes, the wealthiest of the sheep monster called the Grand Patagon, with the station owners, an Asturian and his Jewish son­ 'head of a Dogge' and the feet of a hart" (96). in-law, "imported ... farm-managers from the This literary work may well be the source of British Army, who stamped the smartness of the Magellan's exclamation "Ha! Patagon!" when he parade ground over the operation. The result landed in 1520 and saw a giant Indian dancing was that the Province of Santa Cruz looked like on the shore. Chatwin questions the familiar an outpost of the Empire, administered by interpretation of "Patagon" as "Big-Foot": Spanish-speaking officials" (91-92). "though pata is 'a foot' in Spanish, the suffix gon In Patagonia focuses on three features of is meaningless" (95). He finds the literary source imperialist thought and activity, each more plausible and has playfully speculated in a considered in this essay, that characterized lecture to The Royal Geographical Society that Europe's colonial ventures: the assumed Primaleon, because of its length, "was the kind of savagery of the native people, the confident book an explorer might take on a long journey journeys of adventurers and settlers into the as we might take away Proust."5 The choice New World, and also the explorations for between these alternative origins of "Patagonia" artifacts and natural curiosities in order to claim is, nevertheless, of significance. On the one them as personal or national possessions. Yet hand, the region's name would be derived from Chatwin does not assume himself to be judging the physical appearance of its indigenous the mistakes of the past from morally high people. On the other, it would be a sign of their ground. Unlike Hudson, he recognizes his own similarity to monsters previously invented and ironic entanglement in imperialist behaviors and conquered in the European literary imagination. values, making the book a narrative of personal Chatwin finds the latter sense of the term more growth as well as a critique of culture. convincing because it suggests Magellan's Chatwin's method is to revise Patagonia as a awareness that naming and possessing are literary text by alluding to, quoting, and related acts. Signifying both moral deficiency extensively summarizing a wide variety of and physical weakness, "Patagonia" thus previous writings, all the while that the justifies imperialist designs and confidently organizing narrative of his own journey heralds the triumph of civilized culture over progresses. Out of this multi-vocal text a new savagery. The encounter with native Indians is one of 'Of the 250,000 Spaniards who came to the New World in the conventions in accounts of exploration. the sixteenth century, only 3,000 were in Argentina. Although the subject of these scenes is the Although as many as 25 million Indians may have been Other, Europeans have generally inscribed in living in central Mexico at this time, there were no more than them a sense of their own superiority. The 750,000 ("and quite possibly only half that number") in Argentina (David Rock, Argentina 1516-1982: From Spanish Colonization to the Falklands War [Berkeley: Univ. of 'Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux, Patagonia Revisited California Press, 1985]1). (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986) 37-38.

68 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW quotations Chatwin selects from several Shakespeare's Caliban in The Tempest (1611). His voyagers call attention to the metaphorically literary ancestors include the Indians captured charged descriptions through which they reveal by Magellan as described in Pigafetta' s account, themselves. For example, Darwin stated that the with which Shakespeare was familiar. Chatwin Fuegians "resembled the devils in 'plays like Der speculates that the great playwright might have Freischutz' ... and confessed he could hardly created Caliban also out of details found in make himself believe they were 'fellow creatures Prima/eon of Greece, the romance from which and inhabitants of the same world'" (128). Magellan could have drawn the name Similarly, Chief Officer Robert FitzRoy of the "Patagonia." The accuracy of this genealogy Beagle, on which Darwin sailed, called the notwithstanding, Caliban is a literary Other Indians "satires upon mankind." They were "the significantly different from his ancestors, even colour of devonshire cattle," and their teeth though similarly captive to a European with an were "flat-topped like those of a horse" (qtd. in art "of such pow'r I It would control my dam's Chatwin 129). In contrast to these views and the god, Setebos, I And make a vassal of him" (qtd. figurative language that conveys them, Chatwin in Chatwin 96). As Chatwin points out, notes that Darwin "read (but ignored) the Shakespeare voiced "all the bitterness of the description by Drake's chaplain of a 'comely and New World" through his character. Caliban harmless people' whose canoes were of fine protested the loss of his land and the institution proportion 'in the sight and use whereof princes of a new language as normative within its might seem to be delighted.'" As Chatwin's borders. Although he threateningly commanded method implies, he is an observer/writer unlike "the red plague [to] rid you for learning me your Darwin, for he refuses to ignore the texts language," he himself had become powerless to produced by others, even when he disagrees avoid the consequences of European conquest. with them. Embedding his journey so deeply In a later age, Voltaire also looked with inside the words of others marks Chatwin as a sympathy rather than horror on these Indians: traveler highly conscious of writing as a public "through him the Araucanians became as well as private act. He is aware of the textual candidates for the Noble Savage (tough dialog into which his account will enter, just as version)" (14). But Chatwin reminds readers that he recognizes that his language of description romantic admiration did not translate into refers not only outward to the Indians but back policies that offered respect. Satirically, he onto himself as well. recounts the mid-nineteenth century mis­ Chronicles of voyages have inspired poets, adventures of Orelie-Antoine de Tounens to dramatists, and novelists, thus giving suggest that literature's noble Indians, no less Patagonia's Indians a place in English literary than their demonic relatives, confirmed history. Chatwin traces the textual lineage of Europe's irrational imperialist projects. Voltaire these characters in several works, emphasizing had met Patagonia's Indians in Alonso de the contrasting depictions of this New World Cercilla's Araucana, and Voltaire, in turn, was Other in order to shed further light on the responsible for Orelie-Antoine' s reading that imperialist mentality. The most demonic sixteenth-century epic. Chatwin quotes these representation is that by Edgar Allan Poe in The lines describing the Araucanians: Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the story of a fictitious journey by ship all the way to the Robust and beardless, South Pole. In James Weddell's Voyage towards Bodies rippling and muscular, the South Pole (1825), Poe had read about the Hard limbs, nerves of steel, barbaric Fuegian Indians, the search for Agile, brazen, cheerful, phantom islands, and the sighting of a Spirited, valiant, daring, '"Nondescribable Animal' with a red face of Toughened by work, patient human form and green hair hanging from its Of mortal cold, hunger and heat. shoulders" (130). These details all find a place (17) on Poe's island of Tsalal, where the black natives "represent the ultimate in bestiality and low The image of Indians both powerful and cunning." Although Poe never went to innocent inspired Orelie-Antoine, and many Patagonia himself, he captured the physical fear others more successful than he, to set these and moral loathing of many Europeans who did. people to work for his own ends. As Chatwin Opposing this picture of savagery is points out, he was aided by the dying Cacique

ESTES 69

---~ ------Maftil, who "prophesied that eternal delusion of language. Mister Lawrence knew our language the Amerindian: the end of war and slavery better than we did. He taught us to speak our would coincide with the coming of a bearded own language" (133). What the old man states white stranger." Orelie-Antoine was convinced simply as facts-the death of his language and that he should become king of the Araucanian its ironic preservation by Europeans-is tribes, and for a brief moment he realized that contextualized by quotations from the Yaghan fantasy, when "he stood within a circle of naked Dictionary. The white Mister Lawrence's attempt horsemen, in a brown poncho, with a white fillet at cultural restoration was doomed not only by round his head, saluting with stiff Napoleonic the epidemic that killed the Indians, leaving gestures." He was, quite naturally, unable to Grandpa Felipe ill and weak all his life. The unify the tribes and amass an army to protect language could not have been revived in any the borders of his state. Soon jailed by the case because its basis was an irrecoverable Chilean government, Orelie-Antoine eventually intimacy between its speakers and their land, found exile back in his native France, where his which had been seized. kingdom lives on in the minds of the heirs to his One Indian man riding a train is likewise title. weak, despite a show of drunken bravado. One final book, also by a sympathetic writer, Chatwin says, "I sat back and watched the furthers Cha twin's literary search for the history of South America in miniature" when Indians of Patagonia. It is the Yaghan Dictionary, the Indian tries to start a quarrel with two a life-long project of the late nineteenth-century mountaineers: "The boy from Buenos Aires took missionary Thomas Bridges, whose 32,000 his insults for half an hour, then he stood up, entries reveal "a complexity of construction and exploded and pointed the Indian back to his a vocabulary no one had suspected in a seat. The Indian bowed his head and said: 'Si, 'primitive' people" (135). By quoting from it, Senor. Si, Senor'" (51). Read alongside the texts Chatwin recovers the voice of the natives whom assembled in In Patagonia, this native is a imperialism silenced and "resurrect[s] the clarity modern-day Caliban, who can speak his of their intellect" (136). He concludes that the impotent rage only in the language of the new language's rich metaphorical associations with masters. The "red plague" Caliban called down their homeland reflect their idea that "a tribe's has yet to touch them, even though the Indians territory, however uncomfortable, was always a have suffered from epidemics and the sickness paradise that could never be improved on. By of alcoholism. In contrast to the denigrating contrast the outside world was Hell and its figurative language of earlier travelers, Chatwin inhabitants no better than beasts" (138). Thus describes the Indians in scenes whose precise Chatwin hears these words speaking a view of details might suggest an objective witness. civilized society that counters western Nevertheless, an underlying sympathy emerges, expansion and cultural colonization. The not from direct statement, but from the textual Yaghan notion is that a truly civilized society interplay within the pages of his book. It is an accepts its location and incorporates into its intertextuality constructed to revise imperialist culture the essential geographic features of that readings of the Patagonian Indians. place. This means of assuring permanence and In Puerta Deseado, Chatwin meets a young continuity is quite at odds with imperialism's ornithologist who "was studying the migration hope of achieving the same ends through of the Jackass Penguin": "We talked late into the conquest and the settlement of an enlarged night, arguing whether or not we, too, have territory. journeys mapped out in our central nervous That Chatwin saw few Indians on his trek systems; it seemed the only way to account for southward is not surprising. The framing texts our insane restlessness" (86). This mechanistic are clear reminders that neither Patagonia's understanding of human migration, which remoteness nor its scanty natural resources rejects human agency, might seem fanciful and, would protect the natives from the ravages that moreover, rather surprising, given Chatwin's overcame tribes throughout the New World. foregrounding of imperialism and its legacy. Central to both the literary frame and Chatwin's One might expect, instead, to hear him put encounters with Indians is that issues of power forward an economic argument that the lure of and powerlessness are yoked with speech and wealth spurred both seafaring adventurers and language. Grandpa Felipe, the last pure-blood the monarchs backing them. Yet Patagonia's Yaghan, recollects that "[w]e forgot our extreme barrenness and poverty demand

70 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW pondering alternative explanations for the lust the names under which Cassidy and his partner for wandering. Chatwin does so by assembling resumed their robberies in Patagonia. Cassidy's historical and literary texts that disclose life and letter testify to the desire for wealth intensely private motivations for avoiding a life as an explanation for human migration, rooted in one geographic place. This human, particularly the desire to amass it through rather than national, perspective also brings into unrestrained plunder. His lawless amorality focus the psychological consequences risked by deconstructs imperialist exploitation advanced those who journey either to explore or to under the ironically high-minded banner of colonize. Chatwin recovers the voices of several "bearing the white man's burden." The swift adventurers from their manuscripts, both thoroughbreds on which Cassidy depended are published and private. These texts, then, frame simply a different means than the colonizing his own observations of Patagonian immigrants armies and laws for assuring the same end­ and their descendants, who cope with the getting away with it. feelings of separation and nostalgia that arise Samuel Taylor Coleridge's imagination wove from their perceived geographic dislocation in the experiences of sixteenth-century navigator the New World. In a study of travel books John Davis into the ill-fated voyage of his written between the two world wars, Paul Ancient Mariner. They have a personal impulse Fussell has argued that they are "implicit for journeying unlike the hopeful enterprise of celebration[s] of freedom" because the narrator exploration and conquest in which many saw "exhibits himself as physically more free than themselves participating. "The Great Malady: the reader."6 The narratives within In Patagonia, Horror of One's Home," as Chatwin calls it, has however, challenge such an observation. compelled many wanderers into travels that Seeking a haven from arrest and a new base of have increased rather than relieved their inner operations, the American outlaws Butch Cassidy distress (90). Whereas Cassidy gained safety and the Sundance Kid moved to Cholila after through a practical, self-chosen departure, leading the Wild Bunch on a string of train others have, uncontrollably and inevitably, robberies between 1896 and 1901. Of the three headed toward peril. texts in In Patagonia composed by adventurers, a Davis, discoverer of the Falkland Islands in letter Cassidy sent to a friend back in Utah 1592, could escape misfortune on neither sea nor appears first. His deceptive pose is a warning to land. The sea and wind were enemies, as readers hunting for clues to wanderlust's source. documented in the account by one of his crew Cassidy says, "[The] U.S. was too small for me about rounding Cape Pilar, which Chatwin the last two years I was there. I was restless. I quotes in its entirety. Likewise, the shore offered wanted to see more of the world. I had seen all no hospitality: his sailors, while bathing, were of the U.S. that I thought was good" (42). murdered by Indians and Portuguese; penguins Implying a curiosity to observe fresh sights, his dried and salted for provisions rotted in the language both conceals and reveals a concern for barrels, breeding "a loathsome worme"; and he personal safety, depending on whether the returned to Devon to discover his wife with a audience knows his alias. One can almost hear "sleek paramour" (qtd. in Chatwin 89). Davis the unstated "for me" at the end of the last and the Ancient Mariner endure similar sentence. The expressed appetite for travel, even disasters: "a voyage to the Black South, the if taken at face value, was apparently easily murder of a bird or birds, the nemesis which fulfilled. Only a few lines later Cassidy follows, the drift through the tropics, the rotting confesses, "this part of the country looked so ship, the curses of dying men" (90). Chatwin good that I located, and I think for good" (43). quotes these lines from "The Rime of the He measures its suitability in the precise Ancient Mariner" (1798) as "particularly number of livestock and horses he possesses, the resonant of the Elizabethan voyage": land's agricultural possibilities, and the distances to markets and cheap supplies. Yet the The many men so beautiful! legal way to wealth did not hold his interest. In And they all dead did lie: the pages following this letter, Chatwin recounts And a thousand, thousand slimy things some of the legends about Evans and Wilson, Lived on and so did I.

'Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Here is a counter to Cassidy's confident Wars (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980) 203. testimony about his journey to Patagonia.

ESTES 71 Coleridge's own life reminds Chatwin of the birds with any hope of winning" (154). "blighted wanderers," such as Cain, the Milward's style is literal, but his albatrosses, Wandering Jew, and "the horizon-struck when read alongside the other texts framing navigators of the sixteenth century." Theirs are Chatwin's travels, become tropes, not simply the the eternal rovings into the nightmares of life's actual assailants of those particular sailors. The dark nights, bringing loss instead of gain. figurative process links them with the Ancient Compulsion rather than free choice sets such Mariner's slaughtered albatross and its real-life travelers off into the wide world, where they inspiration, the "'disconsolate Black Albitross' find no land in which to settle. shot by one Hatley, the mate of Captain George A final adventurer bridges the space between Shelvocke's privateer in the eighteenth century" Chatwin and the framing historical/literary (90). Together, these birds of ill omen figure wanderers, for Charley Milward is his forth a notion that menaces the pleasant conceit grandmother's cousin. While captain of a of a traveler enjoying the freedom of the open merchant ship, he saw much of the world. He road. Rather, they haunt voyagers, dislodging chose to settle in Punta Arenas rather than back illusions of independence and safety. home in England because "the weird magnetism Milward's final journey, motivated solely by of the South held him" (165). As a child, economic reasons, directly inverts the Chatwin imagined him to be "a god among imperialist quest for wealth: he returned to men-tall, silent and strong, with black mutton­ Patagonia, resigned to his predicament of chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes" (1). Yet the ruinous financial losses. After selling his section on Milward near the end of In foundry, in 1919 he had retired to the English Patagonia-at twenty-five pages by far the countryside. The buyers, however, did not lengthiest of the framing narratives-traces a continue their payments and, moreover, ran up quite different reality: the wreck of his merchant debts in Milward's name. His life-long code of ship in the Strait of Magellan in 1897, resulting honesty required him to go back: "He bought a dismissal by the company, moneymaking ticket to Punta Arenas, one way, third class. schemes gone awry, and unforeseen bankruptcy Friends in the first-class saw him gazing in old age. Chatwin pieces together Milward's sorrowfully at the sea" (173). Photos from those years in Punta Arenas "from faded sepia last six years of his life "show a stooping old photographs, purple carbon, a few relics and man in a homburg with huge whiskers and memories in the very old" (171), but the years at wounded eyes." Unlike the comrades of his sea come alive through his own words in "the youth who lost their eyes-and lives-to the unpublished collection of sea stories he wrote as attacking albatrosses, Milward's wounds are an old man" (149). From these Chatwin quotes, spiritual. The "wildness" (170) that impelled letting readers hear the voice of the former him to travel about and then remain in a new captain spinning yarns about the time when life land had a consequence, and he finally seemed most intense. Despite the fact that confronted what he had risked-irrevocable Milward is a young man in them, it is a mature separation. Chatwin's last image of Milward is man who narrates these tales about from 1928: he is "sitting in the tower [of his vulnerability. Even before the shore was out of house] with his telescope, straining to catch the sight on his first apprentice voyage, the ship's last of the steamer that carried the boy [his son] bully "made him hand over his jack-knife and to school in England" (174). Milward was most silver pencil case" (148). A victim of theft rather certainly ignorant that he would ever feel such than a robber, he differs from Butch Cassidy also deep attachment when, as a young seafarer, he by writing of the loss that wanderers risk in penned this dictum in his scrapbook under the foreign lands. title This Freedom: "A man rides away, a tent­ Printed in its entirety in In Patagonia is dweller, an arab with a horse and the plains Mil ward's reminiscence of the unsuccessful about him. Woman is a dweller in a city with a attempt to save a man overboard. Complications wall, a house-dweller, storing her possessions arose because the rescue boat capsized before about her, abiding with them, not to be reaching the ship, and albatrosses attacked the sundered from them" (157). heads and eyes of the defenseless sailors in the The lives of these wanderers-Cassidy, Davis, water: "the poor chaps had willingly untied the and Milward-are the frame within which strings [of their lifebelts] and sunk when they Chatwin inscribes the contemporary Patagonian saw that no help came, for they couldn't fight immigrants and descendants of immigrants

72 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW whom he meets. Although all are without any employing visual symbols to preserve an prospect of leaving Patagonia, they continue to increasingly tenuous cultural continuity in a identify themselves as English, German, or foreign land. Milward's house in Punta Arenas, Russian; Welsh, Scotch, Basque, or Boer; Arab, for example, has "high-pitched gables and Persian, or one of many other nationalities. They gothic windows" as well as two towers, one are acutely aware of being geographically square and the other octagonal. His neighbors dislocated in Patagonia. Yet they are strangers to would comment, "Old Milward can't decide if their ancestral homeland as well. Mrs. Powell's it's a church or a castle" (146). In Rio Pica, a grandfather emigrated from Caernarvon, "but Swede built "the perfect cottage of his native she couldn't say where that was. Caernarvon Malmo, with its intelligent windows and vertical wasn't marked on her map of Wales. 'You can't battens painted red with iron-oxide" (62). Butch expect much,' she said, 'when it's printed on a Cassidy's decaying North American log cabin, tea-towel.' I pointed out where Caernarvon chinked with now-crumbling mortar unlike the should be. She had always wanted to know" log structures more suitable to Patagonia, is (23-24). Similarly ignorant of geography, Jim emblematic of the futility of trying to recreate a Ponsonby poses as "the perfect English geographically and historically distant place. gentleman," dressed in tweed Norfolk jacket, The buildings constructed by newcomers as khaki shirt, and worsted trousers even while at signs of their identity are truly illusions that work on his stud farm. But he gives himself cannot stand for long. away by assuming Gloucestershire to be in the Chatwin pays close attention to interior decor North and then changes the subject "to avoid as well. The Welsh live in whitewashed rooms our geographical conversation" upon learning with "brown painted doors, polished brass Chatwin is from nearby what Ponsonby calls handles and grandfather clocks" brought by the "our place" (32-33). colonists (22). An elderly German's house, a The immigrant groups in Patagonia have had duplicate of those in a South German village a strong desire to maintain their distinct cultural except for its metal roof, has typical "scrubbed traditions and, over the years, have not easily floors, painted panelling, the chandelier of antler mixed with other nationalities. Today the most tines and lithographs of the Rhineland" (63). At clannish are the Boers, descendants of Estancia Lochinver, "a tin of Mackintosh's Afrikaners who arrived in 1903. Their genial toffees was placed reverently under the Lithuanian neighbor in Sarmiento calls them [photograph of the] Queen" (67). An aging Swiss "difficult" and has trouble finding any of them soprano has the most extravagantly nostalgic willing to talk with Chatwin. One family "stared home. Plastic curtains, painted "in trompe 1' oeil with set faces," another person slammed the to resemble the crimson velvet of theatre door, and another "fierce" woman would talk draperies," separate the two rooms that are "for money and in the presence of her lawyer" covered with her own murals: "A yellow sun (71). But separateness has become difficult for rolled over the pampa and into the room. It other Patagonians to maintain. Sharing the played over the sails of yachts drifting on a traditional teas and hymn-singing of the Welsh summer's day; on cafes hung with Japanese on Christmas Day, Chatwin was told, "'When lanterns; on the Chateau de Chillon, mountain Welshmen marry foreigners, they lose the chalets and the Ile des Peupliers" (62). The tradition.' Gwynneth Morgan was unmarried. incongruity of such decoration inside a small, She wanted to keep the valley Welsh, the way it Swedish-style cottage surrounded by the pampa was. 'But it's all going to pieces,' she said" (28). calls attention to the essential theatricality of Although the Welsh arrived in 1865 as the first many of the homes Chatwin visits. He finds the group admitted under a national policy people living with indoor illusions of making encouraging immigration, her proprietary the impossible return to those places from which notion of the valley as Welsh and the other they set out on their journeys. settlers as foreigners is one that Chatwin, Read alongside Milward's anguish in old age, attentive to incongruities, implies cannot be Chatwin's encounters with two young men he much longer maintained if it depends on meets along the way suggest that the acute sense renouncing marriage. of separation haunts not only travelers and first Through the houses in which they live, the generation settlers who remember the homeland Patagonians attempt to resist a sense of for themselves. It is also a tormenting legacy displacement. These are quaint, nostalgic spaces, immigrants pass on to their children. The piano

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~-~ student Anselmo, son of a German and an farm manager who went mad early in the Italian, has "a passion for the culture of Europe, century. Alexander MacLennan earned the the authentic, blinkered passion of the exile" nickname Red Pig because he preferred to kill (25). Through education and single-minded Indian sheep rustlers rather than "round them dedication, he longs to preserve in Patagonia the up and civilize them in the Mission" (117). He music of Europe's great composers. The died in his mid-forties of delirium tremens, but intensity of his commitment, however, has taken as Chatwin hears the tale, "the Indians did get its toll: "He was a thin nervous boy with a the Red Pig, you know" (118). His tea-time drained face and eyes that watered in the wind" informants are two "English spinster ladies . . . (25). In the sound of his music, Chatwin hears with nice ladylike accents" and comparable taste the futility of his desire: "he played the mazurka in make-up and clothes. One night, afraid the that Chopin dictated on his deathbed. The wind Indians he kept seeing in his sleep were going to whistled in the street and the music ghosted kill him, he ran out of the house and "right on from the piano as leaves over a headstone" (26). into the forest. They lost him for days. And then Unlike the educated Anselmo who speaks a a peon found him in a pasture with some cows. little English, the ginger-haired Robbie Ross is a Naked! On all fours! And eating grass! And he laborer who "had no words of English" nor any was bellowing like a bull because he thought he sense of the distinction between England and his was a bull. And that was the end of course." To ancestors' Scotland (78). Yet Chatwin says that these proper matrons, the Red Pig's descent into "he peered at me with milky blue eyes, feeling madness is his nightmare, not theirs. Yet framed out affinities of race and background with a by the multiple narratives of In Patagonia, it mixture of curiosity and pain." Robbie provokes readers to ponder, along with announces the identity that his immigrant Chatwin, whether all voyagers and migrants family has instilled in him, allying himself with risk the nightmare of ultimate displacement the guest: "Si, soy Escoces . ... Mi patria es la from their origins-and themselves. Such Inglaterra misma." In jest, another laborer tells reflections are, naturally, meta-textual in a travel Chatwin to ignore him because he is a drunk. book. In raising them, Chatwin weighs not only Surprisingly, Robbie becomes enraged: "he set the consequences of migrations that advanced his clenched fist on the table.... The colour the dreams of European empires, but also the drained from his face. His lips quivered, and he psychological perils to which his own lunged for the man's throat. ... The others fascination with far-away places may jeopardize overpowered him and he began to cry." This him. brief scene reveals the dilemma of the displaced The narrative thread running through In person who finally awakens to find that he has Patagonia is Chatwin's journey to a cave on Last become an alien, the Other against which his Hope Sound, which he reaches only a few pages own ancestors once measured their supposed from the end, to search for a bit of skin from the cultural superiority. Robbie lacks the language prehistoric mylodon. His grandmother had appropriate for claiming a bond with Chatwin, received a piece as a wedding gift from her and the other laborer mocks the absurdity of his cousin Milward at the turn of the century, when attempting to do so in Spanish. The laughter there was great interest in the discovery of the stings because it forces Robbie to abandon an remains of this beast in Patagonia. Displayed in illusion deeply embedded in his world view: her dining room cabinet, the natural curiosity that Patagonia, rather than Scotland, is the kindled young Chatwin's imagination. When he foreign place. Acknowledging the absoluteness came to ask for it after her death, he was told it of separation is painful, but doing so in front had been thrown out. His trip to replace it is of a "fellow countryman" is unbearably hu­ inscribed within not any additional texts, but miliating. treasure-hunting expeditions sent out by Not surprisingly, Robbie is the only colonial powers and also the curious obsessions Patagonian of European origin for whom of collectors. Chatwin thus exposes his ironic Chatwin's visit brings on a crisis of identity. The predicament: the hunt for an object associated others have well-practiced defenses for with his own childhood innocence entangles disregarding their own transformation. They him in the imperialist motive of appropriation. hold fast to the delusion of a round-trip ticket, Just as the narratives of voyagers and that is, the fallacy that those who go, can also immigrants frame his identity as traveler, he return. A case in point is the story of the Scottish finds himself inside the frame of his cultural

74 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW critique of imperialism. Eberhard's grandson told Chatwin, "You must References to futile searches appear know, this Albert Konrad was most unpopular throughout the book. One is tied explicitly to the in Chile for selling out the mylodon. So he went greed of the Spanish during the colonial period. over the border to live" (193). The report of Trapalanda, a fabled golden city in Like Konrad and Milward, Chatwin carries the Andes, in the early sixteenth century away a prize from the cave. He expects, inspired "a legend that fired human hopes and however, no economic gain. His objective is to human greed until the nineteenth century" (83). keep the skin for himself, a desire In Patagonia Both large expeditions and individuals hunted frames within imperialism's questionable fruitlessly and sometimes fatally for this spot, endeavor to own the foreign. Thus Chatwin's two descriptions of which locate it within social critique is simultaneously self-referential; Patagonia. In 1922, Martin Sheffield, an the indictments directed outward are charges American who suffered from "gold fever" and against himself as well. At the cave he feels who had previously discovered a fossilized "immensely pleased" with his success, but at the dinosaur skeleton in Patagonia, reported same time, he disparages his undertaking: "I sighting a live one. Interestingly, the American had accomplished the object of this ridiculous Museum of Natural History quickly cabled a journey" (194). In reality, the piece of skin is not request for a piece of skin, and the University of the inspiring specimen in his grandmother's Pennsylvania pledged a team of zoologists, cabinet. His find "looked like hairy peanut "adding that if the animal were caught, the brittle" (6). Nevertheless, he could not check his proper place for it was the United States" (40). passion for obtaining this unappetizing Even today, people continue to travel to prehistoric article. Such acquisitiveness Patagonia on similarly hopeless missions. A characterizes several other collectors in In hippie from Haight-Ashbury, whom Chatwin Patagonia with whom Chatwin recognizes an runs across, is rather surrealistically seeking a uncomfortable kinship. Their behavior not coal mine in which to work, because "mines only censures colonialism's seizure and gave him a feeling of security" (54). He has only commodification of the Other, but also suggests an inadequate map of Argentina's mines, torn that such a desire for appropriation is a kind of from an old encyclopedia. It shows "a gold mine madness. at Rio Pica," but a shopkeeper informs Chatwin Early in the journey, Chatwin meets two the gold mine closed fifty years ago. elderly women who are part of "a tight group of Unlike these men, the mylodon hunters did Sarmiento ladies, the archaeologists" (70). From find their prey. In the 1830s, Darwin collected its the surrounding area, they collect such bones on the beach at Punta Alta. Then, in the antiquities as arrowheads, knives, and cave on Last Hope Sound in 1895, Herman boleadora stones. Ironically, "the 'professionals' Eberhard, a German immigrant, discovered a cursed them as looters." Chatwin watches a piece of its skin, measuring four feet by two feet. Lithuanian woman skillfully display her It had been preserved by a coating of salt during collection so as "to feed her rival's jealousy." the ten thousand years since the mylodon's Her Welsh "competitor" looks on "with envious extinction. As soon as archaeologists finished eyes" and sneers at the boast that the Presidenta excavating the cave, Albert Konrad, a German will one day purchase the collection for the gold-hunter, "started dynamiting the stratigraphy National Museum. Chatwin pokes fun at these to bits" (192). Milward went to help retrieve women for using Indian artifacts to enhance "yards of skin and piles of bones and claws, personal status and wealth, but his satire also which, by this time, were a saleable touches the more complex endeavors of colonial commodity." The mylodon became one of the powers, who laid claim to foreign people and many prehistoric treasures, indigenous artifacts, their lands with the same expectations. and ancient works of art that western powers The compulsion of two others for collecting either purchased or stole from around the rocks essentially reduces such ventures to a world, as if museum displays would adorn their form of madness. Chatwin's visit to the isolated imperial image. Milward profited from this mylodon cave appears in between the acquisitive craving by selling his plunder to the descriptions of these insane stone hunters, and British Museum for four hundred pounds, "after an event there hints at his unexpected a tremendous haggle." Any reaction to Milward brotherhood with them. Having just put the because of this transaction goes unrecorded, but mylodon hairs into an envelope, Chatwin is

ESTES 75 shocked to hear a group of nuns singing to the to be heroic while holding something that Virgin Mary at a shrine by the entrance: "Now I resembles "hairy peanut brittle." The heroic self­ too had gone mad," he thinks (194). Konrad, the image that explorers and adventurers inscribed German who dynamited the cave, began in autobiographical accounts of domination gathering ordinary stones, considering them to becomes suspect when read against the reality of be gold, in the last years of his life. By the time Chatwin's adventures. In Patagonia does not he committed suicide, his "cabin was bursting elegize the passing of such valor in the modern with grey stones" (193). At Punta Arenas, world. Rather, it satirizes the claims of heroism waiting to leave Patagonia by ship, Chatwin that have been advanced throughout the history meets another kind of traveler, a traveling of western expansion across the globe. lingerie salesman from Santiago. He is a "big, According to Chatwin, both he and Paul unhealthy man," whose smile reveals "swollen Theroux are literary travelers. By that, he does pink gums" (196). In the morning he places on not mean that they write travel books. He has in each table in the hotel dining room an mind, instead, that "a literary reference or arrangement of stones he has gathered on the connection [to a place we visit] is likely to excite beach. Later in the day, the manager reports the us as much as a rare animal or plant" (Chatwin salesman has been taken to the hospital. "Es and Theroux 7). Their joint lecture to The Royal loco," he apologizes. This salesman does not, like Geographical Society is a collection of such Konrad, consider the stones to be economically references, culled from a wide range of texts valuable, but instead finds in their shapes "the written, for the most part, in English. The two imprint of God" (197). The madness of both lies are, however, distinctly different literary in single-mindedly seeking objects they have travelers in their individual travel books. In The mis-valued. Their piles of stones thus re­ Old Patagonian Express, Theroux gives a strict contextualize the possessions noted throughout accounting of every book with which he passes In Patagonia-from colonies to mylodon hide­ time on the trains from Boston all the way to turning signifiers of the supposed power, Esquel, Patagonia. On the basis of this reading, wealth, or virtue of the owners into markers of he lectures in San Salvador on the topic "Little­ ludicrous delusions. known Books by Famous American Authors." Chatwin structures the narrative of his The flyleaf of one or another of these volumes journey to force a corresponding re-valuing of occasionally serves as a convenient place to jot a western culture's notions of the heroic. In note. The opportunity for literary conversation addressing The Royal Geographical Society, he arises along the way when he meets several acknowledged that his "piece of dung wasn't authors, the most distinguished of whom is exactly the Golden Fleece, but it did give me the Borges. Typically, Theroux's literary references, idea for the form of a travel book, for the oldest despite their frequency, are as fleeting as the kind of traveller's tale is one in which the scenes that pass before his train compartment narrator leaves home and goes to a far country window. Only Boswell and Poe seem to have in search of a legendary beast" (Chatwin and written something that sticks with him as he Theroux 16-17). Chatwin carefully frames his hurries along. trip to the cave so that "the extinct beast merged Chatwin, on the other hand, does not spend with the living beast and the beast of the his time in Patagonia reading, or, at least, he imagination" (189). He refers to legends passed does not confess to d()ing so. Yet he puts before down by Indians and travelers in the region that his audience numerous texts in which Patagonia describe a large animal "with something human has been inscribed. No matter the illusion that about it." Whatever the name by which it was readers are accompanying him on a journey, called, its reputed ferocity caused great terror. they can travel only within a written world. The All of this folklore about an elusive wild multiplicity of texts Chatwin sets alongside each creature, he attaches to the skin of the extinct other forces an act of engaged reading that is mylodon. Thus Chatwin appears to be on a analogous to his own act as a traveler of making quest that duplicates Knight Primaleon's sense out of immediate experience. These texts conquest of the monster Grand Patagon. But, in resist being read linearly, as Theroux does the fact, it is a parodic quest, which repeats with a books he carries along. They are in a dialog with critical difference both that literary text and each other, as well as with Chatwin's more Magellan's vision of Patagonia as well. recent observations, that forces rereadings. Thus Although successful, Chatwin can hardly claim meaning arises, not from a single text, but from

76 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW out of the spaces between them. As a literary many texts within his own is not such an act of traveler, Chatwin is not a collector of texts about appropriation. Rather, it maps the terrain in Patagonia, something his remarks to The Royal which all literary travelers, of whom he is one, Geographical Society might mistakenly suggest. make their own journeys.D Assembling a collection of any sort implies a sense of possession and control thoroughly discredited within the pages of In Patagonia. David C. Estes, Associate Professor of English at Loyola University, publishes on Sou them literature and folklore. Chatwin's method of inscribing Patagonia's

i r ~

ESTES 77

------Tommaso Landolfi

THE FIRE

Translated by Lawrence Venuti

or that Christmas night, I had chosen an and it shuddered, leaped, hurled its tongues Fenormous log with a huge round knot, or higher and higher, howling and snarling. hump, which was slightly pointed on one side. Certainly, it wanted to tell us something we In a word, I immediately perceived that the knot could not hear distinctly, and for this reason, it was a snout, or perhaps an entire head, although was in a fury. Its divine speech was nearly a rather monstrous one. It looked like the head transformed into our wretchedly articulate of a bear or some other merciless animal. language. Resting on the stone floor of the fireplace, the I turned to my companion, frightened. She log seemed chained, as if it were a gigantic remained silent, gazing with burning eyes at the creature that had been imprisoned there up to fire, the monster chained to the stone. At that its shoulders, and only their tops and its head moment, I suddenly perceived that the head did were visible. not resemble a bear's, but mine: it looked like a Yet the woman who was resting her cheek on human head, despite its immensity. The flames my shoulder said: "Here I am in my house, had hollowed out cheeks and shaped an entire sitting by my fire. Be kind, spirit of these places, face. The huge imprisoned creature was and you too, spirit of this hearth, who have my revealed. With a deep ardor in its eyes, amid the beloved in your care. Let him be faithful to me; last flaming veils, the creature looked at the don't let these places be visited by any anguish woman who stared unblinkingly at it. but that which issues from me. No, let us be In a sudden blazing flash, the head was happy forever; let us, and our children, wear out crowned with flames, and the snarl became our time in undisturbed peace near your words. "Lo, I respond to you, lady," said the flaming hair, in the trustful gaze of your burning fire, "and to your invocation. I reveal myself to a eyes, now and after the hour of our death." pure heart, as I have never done until this hour. The woman voiced these and other wishes, I am the spirit of this fireplace, imprisoned here, then fell silent; and we listened intently to the as you see; yet you shall hear sad things. Near fire, as if its most eloquent voice had been joined me is no peace, and your hope is foolish. An with ours. I myself was under this illusion. obscure doom weighs heavy on me-and on Fire is peaceful, and speaks with a familiar whomever approaches me: fatal is my power. Is grumbling, although few people understand its not the bright sun, to whom we all owe protean language. It can be ingenuous or severe, reverence, of the same essence as me? Yet the natter like a child, transmit serious messages. It sun is free to spin through the heavens, and he conjures up flaming villages, ashen villages. who has confined me here is unknown to me. Heavenly and earthly creatures are stirred by it, Am I not, then, a free element, the most noble of or they stand motionless, gazing into its entrails. the elements? And yet I try in vain, with every Eyes dilated, eyes veiled by lids stare into its flicker, every leap, to reach my heavenly heart. But even if, obeying its free nature, it birthplace. My voice should have a different sometimes flicks its viperous tongues, howls like tone, should promise men a better land. But this the wind, roars like a tempest, seems almost to is not so, lady, and whoever among you lives shake its mane, even then it is still a benign intimately with me enjoys a fate like mine in the spirit. end. Just as men are permitted to bend me to the Thus they speak of fire, and I too believed most base purposes-supreme outrage!-so am what they say. But that night I saw it enraged. It I entitled to stir in their hearts a pointless, bitter had challenged an ominous landscape (which anguish. I deafen them to the profound sound of seemed struck by the bloody, burnt moonlight), time, the shrill harmony of the elements. Near

78 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW

------me they will not hear the manifold accent of yourself, if you can. In fact, this vain and sterile nature, the eternal mother of us all, or even my tumult is finally nothing but the play of own death rattle: they will lend their ear only to shadows. If you look carefully, you will see that indecipherable noise. I turn aside their hearts, as the faces reflected by my flames are scarcely I have said, from every glorious enterprise, and I faces, unformed, fleeting faces, witnesses of a lead them to obscure deeds; I distract their terrible nightmare-mine. They were not men, minds from every lofty thought, and subject nor am I one; they are reflections. But their them to dull anxiety. Above all, I unleash from fleeting presence endures forever, just as, their breasts a vain tempest of words, not obliterated by every light but my bloody glow, wicked or violent, just spirited, dark, and your face and your beloved's will attend me in breathless, inglorious and incessant, words they eternity, after the hour of your death. Do you use to torment themselves and one another not hear the chorus of spirits-indeed, the without end. spirits of those who spent their lives in this "And what is sadder than their words? They house-do you not hear how they sing to me? throb inside like corrupt blood; the mind can Ardent and doubtful masquers, they spy on you become confused in their sterile whirl; they can at your shoulders, and they will not easily lead to desperation, or an anguish close to abandon their prey. Nor do I abandon mine, madness: hence, the parent will no longer lady." recognize his offspring, nor the tender child her "You lie," I shouted again, "evil spirit!" At ancestor. Hidden rage, rancor, a concealed this point, however, the fire had resumed its enmity among fellow creatures, perhaps changeable language, whose words once more hatred-this is the kind of benevolence men can we did not quite understand. The woman was expect from me, the noblest of the elements. also quiet, her head bowed. The gigantic And do not earth, water, and air lead their lives prisoner in the stone had lowered its ashen lids freely outside? Nevertheless, they will remain in and no longer gazed at her. In fact, its entire face here, bound to their useless, their barren toil, was becoming covered with those delicate lids prisoners of this air buzzing with human words which tremble and throb at every blaze of the as I am imprisoned by this stone, and thus it will fire and anticipate a horrible decay. always be. Therefore, flee me, lady, and do not The landscape of bloody moonlight was invoke me: now you know that peace will never corrupted, grew more and more dark and thrive near me. Can there be peace when one is deserted. More and more the face of the accused and abandoned in the vast bosom of the immense creature disintegrated and darkened, elements, a peer of the free creatures of earth, the cheeks sank in ash, the pale skin separated. water, and air? Is there any peace among you? No longer was the head crowned gloriously My wish is to return to my heavenly with flames. It had turned to livid parchment, its birthplace-but of this subject I shall speak no substance gradually melting into dust. more. Thus the fire fell completely silent. A cat "Note what I have said, lady: such is my fatal walked by and slowly mounted an andiron, its power. And listen to what I, the spirit of this tail and flanks tracing a soft arabesque on the fireplace, shall tell you: your beloved will never ashen face. be yours, as you would like, since he belongs to I did not then realize what the fire's death me. Here your ancestors lived and died, and might have represented. But I know better, now here he will live and die; just as I am condemned that my companion's face has also become a here, so is he doomed to remain amid the whirl fleeting fiery image, a reflection, in this of words, amid the trivial cares of this venerable inarticulate nightmare that the fire breeds. And house. Nor will his spirit ever be able to rise according to its prophecy, she is dead, as we all from here or trace the features of a perfect shall be, without ever having lived.D beauty." "You lie," I shouted at this point, "whoever you are!" But the fire impatiently shook its "The Fire" is a translation of "II fuoco," which appears in flaming head and proceeded without paying Tommaso Landolfi's collection La Spada© 1976 RCS Rizzoli attention to me: "All the same, lady, console LibriS.p.A., Milan. r r LANDOLFI 79 Bogomil Gjuzel

PANDORA

Translated by Mary Crow and Bogomil Gjuzel

t's only that they won't give me I everything I struggled to earn with my body and mind, blood and sweat

but I've got to try to get it by begging dragging myself from office to office with pleas, lies, threats and blackmail

so that when I finally return home I start crying, cursing and breaking everything I shake from the bottom of my bag

the furies-my children-run out frightened and on the bare floor a worm is crawling my hope, my nothing, my husband ...

80 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Enrique Jaramillo-Levi

THE FOUNTAIN

Translated by Samuel A. Zimmerman

ou were seated with the child in your arms the horrible scene, watching it, breaking into its Yalongside the small, crystal clear fountain essence beyond the sound of the weapon going which was gushing out of the ground in slow off and the explosion of my skull. I was spasms. With her eyes fixed on yours, she beginning to understand the stupidity of the act, seemed to be asking what are you looking for, we were both now realizing that it had been an Mommy, your gaze so absorbed, so far away. absurd thing, rash and senseless, and at that I sprang up from the other side of the fountain moment the child anxiously called you, and began to move toward the two of you, shouting, causing us to move apart. We walked hardly noticing the obstacle of those spurts of hand in hand toward her. water which would soon be in my path unless I Pointing at me, as if speaking for me, could alter my course at the last minute. No expressing my tastes, she told you I wish you matter how hard I tried, the distance always would wear your hair down, Mommy, the way remained the same, preventing me from you used to fix it. You smiled and at once reaching you. You realized this, with your gaze allowed my hands to undo your coal black hair cutting through the water, and turning to her so that it cascaded over your shoulders. At that you said I have to help him be with us again. moment we heard a low delicate sound coming You sat her on the grass, and seeing an from behind us. expression of anticipation on her mouth, you The fountain had begun to gush again from added later you'll understand. The child the earth. But now it shot higher in the air, in murmured yes as she closed her eyes. torrents, and was shining intensely, like a You walked up to the fountain and entered pyramid of juxtaposed sheets of steel whose the jet of water which stopped, crystallizing, in brilliance had been illuminated by the sun. But mid-air. From the other side, without having in this enchanted spot there was no sun. stopped my forward movement, I sensed that at Nonetheless, we had to close our eyes, dazzled. that moment the distance was beginning to Soon thereafter, we decided to move away diminish and that I was finally nearing your from that place. We had said nothing but we side. had begun to walk, as if impelled by the same You were like a willing prey, caught up in a thought, toward the old house, the one which I cylindrical transparency in which I could see the had left abruptly, without any word of warning, reflection of my face. Soon after I had managed weighed down by the certainty of the illness. to ignore my reflection, I sensed the determined The child walked between the two of us, as she persistence with which you were calling to me used to do on our long walks through the from your isolation. You were beckoning with woods, before the certainty and the cowardice. your eyes, with the agitated rhythm of your She accepted my presence as if I had never gone nostrils, with the silent throbbing of lips, away, tacitly denying the separation, seemingly formerly tense, now purple in anticipation. content. I placed both hands on the hardened water You, on the other hand, feared the bifurcation which surrounded you. My flesh slowly passed of time, its fissures. The threat of the past through the crystal and soon was one with your hovered over us and was a presence as real as flesh. We remained that way, united by an my own resurrected presence. I felt that you absorbing warmth, as if it had become a new, sensed some kind of restraint, seemingly compact receptacle, reminiscent of our shared generated by the need to hold on to me now, to good times and misfortune. And then memory save us. Perhaps for that reason, in your anguish stopped in its tracks; it was now hanging over you ordered the child not to look back. Curiosity

JARAMILLO-LEVI 81 made her turn her head. She was not turned into strongly nourished by a shared love. I had to a pillar of salt, but instead she screamed, defend that reality. With wide open eyes and the frightened, causing us to look back also: there new warmth which your hands radiated, you comes Daddy, he's coming again, running and the child were pleading for me to do so. I toward us. saw myself somewhat older in the other You refused to keep looking, and in an absurd presence, destroyed in him forever. He took a gesture you covered your eyes with one of your step toward me to annex me to his defeat, to hands and the girl's eyes with the other. I said fuse with my body made of energy and the will be strong, as I failed to be back then. After a to be. But I suddenly jumped to meet him. It was minute you agreed, and the three of us, hand in I who entered his form and imposed in him my hand, waited for my double to come closer. He mission of permanence. We were once again encountered no obstacles in his path, as I had one, the one who I am now and who is telling earlier. It is for our own good, I said. I noticed this love story. that you were smiling. Then, an instant before Today we live spiritually. We never speak of he stood before us, I kissed the palm of your the past, not even of what happened the hand, which was extraordinarily cold, and with previous day. Daily living flows along without my index finger traced the words "thank you" allowing itself to be buried in routine. You, as on it. before, work during the morning; in the We heard him pronounce your name with my afternoon you tend to the garden and to our voice, a thin thread of blood flowing from his daughter. Nights are a long generous substance lips, his head identical to mine with no trace of which we share and which shares us. I create violence. I understood that with his presence the joys in your being and you are reborn and precise meaning of one identity was affirmed, transfigured. Drawn by my presence, day after the reclaiming of a past which for him was day you honor me with the perfection of your irreversible. I also understood that it would be a beauty. Meanwhile the child is growing, fills duel, not of wills, but of attitudes altered by new clothes, develops new ways of looking, new time in this new space which was taking me in, mischiefs. We chat without measuring time, as if which was disposed to offer me asylum if I finding a light from within. Our home is a would accept it as such. One reality facing source of serene vitality.D another, both made of the same metaphysical substance, that and nothing else was what was "The Fountain" is from the collection Ahara que soy el, occurring. Except that the reality which I originally published in Spanish by Editorial Costa Rica in represented had established itself first and was San Jose, Costa Rica, in 1985.

82 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Duska Vrhovac

WHEN A CHILD DIES

Translated by Richard Burns and Vera Radojevic

-For Nikola

hen a child dies W it's wrong to weep every sob and tear are far too loud for the womb it nestled in when a child dies no star falls but climbs higher climbs forever on its damned starry way

VRHOVAC 83 Silvina Ocampo

THUS WERE THEIR FACES

Translated by Daniel Balderston

Thus were their faces: and their wings were stretched upward; two wings were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies. -Ezekiell:ll

ow did the younger children come to know (important moments, because during them H it? That will never be explained. Besides, worries are forgotten), with the same sullen, one would need to clear up what it was that withdrawn look on their faces, their minds, like they came to know, and whether the older ones little machines, spinning the web of one sole already knew it. One assumes, nevertheless, that thought, of one sole desire, of one sole it was a real event, and not a fantasy; only expectation. people who did not know them or their school People who saw them go by in their Sunday or their teachers could deny it without scruple. best, clean and well-groomed, on national or At the hour when the bell was rung uselessly, religious holidays, or on any Sunday, would routinely, ritually, to announce the milk or, a say: "Those children all belong to one family or little later, during recess, when they ran to the to one mysterious society. They are identical! back courtyard, or perhaps, as seems most Their poor parents! They must not be able to likely, when they unconsciously, slowly, recognize their own children! These modern constantly, without distinction of age or sex, times, the same barber must cut all their hair came to know it, and I say came, because (the little girls look like boys and the boys look various signs showed that they were waiting, up like girls): cruel, unspiritual times." to that moment, for something which would In fact, their faces did resemble one another allow them to wait once more, and once and for that much; they were as lacking in expression as all, for something very important. We know for the faces on the badges or the images of the certain that from then on (from that moment to Virgin of Lujan they wore on their breasts. which l am alluding in an imprecise way, but But they, each of them, at first, felt alone, as if which is the subject of thousands of conjectures), an iron skeleton covered them, isolating them, without losing their innocence, but losing that stiffening them. Each one's pain was individual apparent nonchalance which is so characteristic and terrible; happiness also, which for that very of childhood, the children thought about reason was painful. Humiliated, they imagined nothing else. themselves different from one another, like dogs Everything allows one to assume, after long of various breeds, or like prehistoric monsters in reflection, that the children discovered it illustrations. They thought that the secret, which simultaneously. In the dormitories, when they was splitting at that very moment into forty fell asleep; in the dining hall, when they ate; in secrets, was not shared and would never be the chapel, when they prayed; in the courtyards, shared. But an angel came, the angel who when they played tag or hopscotch; sitting sometimes attends to the multitudes; he came before their desks, when they did their with his shining mirror held high, like the assignments or were being punished; in the picture of the candidate, the hero or the tyrant square, when playing on the swings; or in the which is carried in demonstrations, and showed bathrooms, when dedicated to bodily cleanliness them that their faces were identical. Forty faces

84 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW were all the same face; forty minds were all the the day. The shoes, all together, ever more same mind, despite the differences in ages and together, formed a vigorous, organized army; families. they walked as much at night without them as No matter how horrible a secret may be, when with them during the day. An unearthly dirt it is shared it sometimes stops being horrible, clung to their soles. Shoes are already pathetic because the horror of it gives pleasure: the enough when they are alone! The bar of soap pleasure of perpetual communication. was passed from hand to hand, from face to But those who suppose it was horrible are face, from chest to chest, acquiring the form of jumping ahead. In reality we do not know their souls. Bars of soap lost between the whether it was horrible and then became toothpaste and the hairbrushes and tooth­ beautiful, or whether it was beautiful and brushes! All the same! became horrible. "One voice is dispersed among those who When they felt more sure of themselves, they talk. Those who do not talk transmit its force to wrote letters to one another, on different colors the objects that surround them," said Fabia of paper, with lace borders or pictures pasted Hernandez, one of the teachers; but neither she, on. At first they were laconic; later, longer and nor Lelia Isnaga, nor Albina Romarin, her more confused. They chose strategic places, colleagues, could penetrate the closed world which served as post offices, where the others which sometimes dwells in the heart of a could pick them up. solitary man (who defends himself and opens Since they were now happy conspirators, the himself to his misfortune or his joy). That closed normal difficulties of life no longer troubled world dwelt in the heart of forty children! The them. teachers, out of love for their work, with utmost If one of them planned to do something, the devotion, wanted to catch the secret by surprise. others immediately resolved to do the same They knew that a secret can be poisonous to the thing. soul. Mothers fear the effects it may have on As if they wanted to become equal, the shorter their children; no matter how beautiful it may ones walked on tiptoe so as to look taller; the be, they think, who knows what monsters it may taller ones stooped over so as to look shorter. conceal! One might have said that the redheads reduced They wanted to catch them by surprise. They the brilliance of their hair and that the darker turned on the lights in the bedrooms all of a ones lightened the color of their warm bronze sudden, under the pretext of needing to inspect skin. The eyes all shone with the same brown or the ceiling where a pipe had burst, or because grey color characteristic of light-colored eyes. they were hunting down the mice which had Now none of them chewed his nails, and the invaded the main office; with the excuse of a only one who sucked his thumb stopped. need to impose silence they would interrupt the They were also linked by the violence of their recesses, saying that the racket bothered a sick gestures, by their simultaneous laughter, by a neighbor or the celebration of a wake; with the boisterous and abruptly sad feeling of solidarity excuse of having to do their duty supervising which hid in their eyes, in their straight or the religious conduct of the children, they would slightly curly hair. So indissolubly united were go into the chapel, where the heightened they that they would have conquered an army, a mysticism allowed for raptures of love, in which herd of hungry wolves, a plague, hunger, thirst, the children would utter dismembered, but or the earnest exhaustion which destroys noisy and difficult, words, before the flames of civilizations. the candles which lit up their hermetic faces. At the top of a slide, not from wickedness but The children, fluttering like birds, would from excitement, they almost killed a child who burst in on the movie theaters or the playhouses slipped in among them. On the street, in the face of some benefit concert, where they had the of the admiring enthusiasm of all of them, a chance to entertain or distract themselves with flower vendor almost perished with all of his dazzling shows. Their heads turned from right merchandise. to left, from left to right, at the same time, In the dressing rooms, at night, the navy blue revealing the full extent of the pretense. pleated skirts, the pants, the blouses, the rough Miss Fabia Hernandez was the first to notice white underwear, the handkerchiefs were that the children had the same dreams, that they crammed together in the darkness, with that life made the same mistakes in their notebooks, and their owners had endowed them with during that when she scolded them for having no

OCAMPO 85 personality, they smiled sweetly, which was So as to give more importance to the fact that unusual for them. they would be vacationing for the first time, the None of them was troubled by having to teachers, using a pointer, showed them the blue suffer for the mischief of a classmate. None of point on the map, next to the Atlantic, where them was troubled when seeing others given they would be going. credit for his own work. They dreamed of the Atlantic, of the sand: all On various occasions the teachers accused one the same dream. or two of them of doing the assignments for the When the train left the station, the rest of the students, but it was difficult to handkerchiefs waved back and forth in the train explain why the handwriting was so similar, windows like a flock of doves; this is preserved and the sentences in the compositions so in a picture that appeared in the papers. identical. The teachers confirmed that they had When they got to the sea they hardly looked been mistaken. at it; they kept on seeing the sea they had In the drawing class, when the teacher, in imagined before seeing the real one. When they order to stimulate their imagination, asked them got used to the new landscape, it was difficult to to draw any object they felt like, they all, for an control them. They ran after the foam which alarming length of time, drew wings, the forms formed drifts similar to those formed by snow. and dimensions of which varied infinitely But joy did not make them forget the secret, and without taking away, according to her, from the they would go gravely back to the rooms, where monotony of the whole. When they were communication between them was easier. If scolded for always drawing the same thing, they what they felt was not love, then something very grumbled, and finally wrote on the blackboard, similar to love linked them, gladdened them, "We feel the wings, miss." exalted them. The older ones, influenced by the Without falling into a disrespectful mistake, younger ones, blushed when the teachers asked would it be possible to say they were happy? To them trick questions, and answered with a quick the extent that children can be happy, given nod. The younger ones, all serious, looked like their limitations, everything leads one to believe adults whom nothing could bother. The majority that they were, except during the summertime. of them had the names of flowers like Jacinto, The heat of the city weighed on the teachers. At Dahlia, Margarita, Jasmine, Violeta, Rose, the hour when the children liked to run, climb Narcissus, Hortense, Camilla: affectionate trees, roll around on the lawn, or go down the names chosen by their parents. They carved hill doing somersaults, all of these diversions them in the trunks of trees, with their fingernails were replaced by the siesta, the feared custom of which were as hard as a tiger's; they wrote them the siesta. The cicadas sang, but they did not on the walls, with gnawed-on pencils in the hear that song which makes the heat even more sand, with their fingers. intense. The radios made a racket, but they did They set off on the trip back to the city, hearts not hear that noise which makes the summer, bursting with joy, since they would travel by with its sticky asphalt, unbearable. plane. A film festival was starting that day, and They wasted hours sitting behind the they could catch glimpses of furtive stars at the teachers, who held parasols while waiting for airport. Their throats hurt from laughing so the sun to go down or for the heat to subside; hard. From looking so hard, their eyes turned when they were left alone they played bright red. unintentional pranks like calling some dog from The news appeared in the papers in texts like the balcony which, when it saw so many this: The plane in which forty children from a school possible owners all at once, would leap madly for deaf-mutes were traveling, on their way back from into the air to reach them; or, they would whistle their first vacation by the sea, suffered an unforeseen at some lady in the street, who would angrily accident. A door which came open during the flight ring the bell to complain of their insolence. caused the disaster. Only the teachers, the pilot, and An unexpected donation allowed them all to the crew were saved. Miss Fabia Hernandez, when go on vacation by the sea. The little girls made interviewed, assures us that when the children threw themselves modest swimsuits; the boys bought themselves into the void they had wings. She wanted theirs at an inexpensive store, where the to stop the last one, who pulled himself from her arms materials smelled of castor oil, but were of a in order to follow the others like an angel. The scene modern cut, one of those that looks good on astonished her so much because of its intense beauty anybody. that at first she could not consider it a disaster, but

86 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW rather a celestial vision she will never forget. She still rent, nor the closed blinds, dishearten Fabia does not believe in the children's disappearance. Hernandez. With her colleagues, to whom she is "That would be a mean trick from God, to linked as the children were linked among show us heaven while casting us into hell," themselves, she visits the old building and declares Miss Lelia Isnaga. "I don't believe in the contemplates the students' names written on the disaster." walls (inscriptions for which they were Albina Romarin says, "It was all a dream the punished), and some wings drawn with childish children had, wanting to astonish us, just as they skill, which bear witness to the miracle.D did on the swings in the square. Nobody will persuade me they have vanished." From Leopoldina's Dream by Silvina Ocampo, English Neither the red sign which announces that the translation copyright Daniel Balderston 1988. Reprinted by house where the school was located is up for permission of Penguin Books Canada Limited.

OCAMPO 87 Aleksandar Petrov

AUBADE

Translated by Richard Burns and Aleksandar Petrov

eretz Markish in line facing the firing squad. PIndian summer in Siberia. The twelfth of August nineteen fifty two. Dawn spreads its red cloth upwards. The counter-revolution of night is destined to fail.

Peretz Markish in line facing the firing squad. Alongside him: Poets. Novelists. Critics. The Yiddish Anthology waits. To burst into flames at sunrise. Everything is prepared. The bullets. The shovels. The wind. The pliers for teeth.

Peretz Markish in line facing the firing squad. The parrot-prophet opens his envelope. In his beak: a leaden key to unlock the Poem of Life. All the wires are flowering. The stage: a glass-house. This blood: just make-up.

Peretz Markish in line facing the firing squad. He imagines the crib, the donkey, the stable. In the arms of a Jewish girl with eyes of always, wife to a tailor, a cobbler, a carpenter, the child craves the breast's horn.

Peretz Markish at sunrise facing the firing squad. In the north. Before him east and west unfold. The way is clear now. A sandy path, wide open. Toward Moscow. And further. Pointing south.

88 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW Juan Benet

VIATOR

Translated by Leland H. Chambers

he traveler who endeavors to get to Region before 3 in the morning, an hour which the Tby rail-insofar as possible-from any of the conductor of the daily train from Region does neighboring capitals, either getting off in not find himself disposed to experience while Palanquinos to opt for the connection with the awake, though he is quite aware that the Castellanos, or continuing on to Ponferrada in imaginary and disoriented passenger who order to go up the Sil with the Villablino mining aspires to that solution will never be able to find train, or-if he comes from the East-going as a taxi driver to take him to his final destination far as La Robia with the Vascongado, or by at that hour. stretching the railway's resources to the fullest, Consequently, apart from the siestas during to the Macerta terminal via Rafieces-Cabezas del his daytime transfers, the most likely thing is Torce, such a traveler will soon find out how that the traveler may sleep his full seven hours things stand. If you make the journey in on a lath bench, head propped up on a piece of wintertime, any assurance regarding what any travel luggage, because it goes without saying of the routes can provide is not to be expected. If he will need the shelter of his overcoat because you do it by night ... well, it is possible that you of what its name designates. If he manages to might have known or you may yet come to conciliate sleep at all. Huddled up, his knees know worse nights than that. The worst part, almost touching his chin, it will be given to him they say, is not the traveling in itself but the to confirm that one of the few things that go well transfers: the interminable stopovers in in the Cabezas station is the beautiful clock on deserted, filthy, and freezing waiting rooms the wall, a Garnier from Paris, with a Roman (those steamy windows that have not tested face and a large double pulley, proud of its contact with a cleaning rag since the inscriptions mechanism and content with the fulfillment of of the Asturian October were wiped off), the its duty. Observe-it seems to be saying-those lack of faith with which the stationmaster-with of you who are mindful as well as those who, a skepticism proper to the keenest and most preferring silence, would rather not like to hear thoughtful observers of the history of it, observe-! repeat-that I keep watching out contemporary Spain-answers questions about for you and complying with a duty that no one the schedules while attempting to bring the has imposed on me. stove to life. And if you decide to make the trip There are those who affirm that no matter by day, going to the Shanghai, the Portuguese, how great one's weariness and anger, the most or any of those fast locals that seem to be aimed unpleasant thing about such journeys is a at Central Europe, always just ahead of the companion with an urge for conversation in his enemy, then so much the worse for you. Because compartment or the waiting room. It's about as it would be unusual indeed not to find yourself bad as impatience, if not worse. There are even in the wee hours of the morning in one of those those who, swept away by their enthusiasm for towns with no other shelter than the arcade in the human race and their trust in solidarity, do front of the City Hall, or the church porch, or the not hesitate to pull out a deck of cards and, after waiting room. And if you do succeed in making rolling up their shirt cuffs, flexing their fingers, connections at all your transfer points-a rather and shuffling dexterously, hint at the possibility improbable possibility-it's almost certain you'll of a little game, in all probability ignorant of the have to spend the night in Macerta (if not in fears they provoke. There are others more Cabezas), since the 1022-coming down­ reserved who without any desire to interfere in anticipated to arrive at 12:50, rarely gets there the traveler's thoughts know how much an

BENET 89 uplifting word is worth in a moment of We must have been on about the fourth or tribulation. There are those who (differing from fifth hand, sitting in a corner where two benches the card player who once he has gotten a game formed a right angle, when the stationmaster (a together pulls out a leathern flask of cognac and young man, but with a melancholy, absent air, without taking his audience into consideration an insomniac and a birdlover according to what tosses down a swallow and smacks his lips) he told me later on) came into the waiting room when asked their opinion-as men accustomed with a bucket of firewood for loading the dying to such waits-about the possibilities for the stove. My playing companion made a face at me arrival of the mail train from Macerta, their whose intention at that moment did not register. whole reply consists of offering their neighbor a He was finding himself at that point when, half-full bottle of aguardiente, indicating with a having already won a few dollars and been gesture that one is not to observe any other shown his absolute dominion over me, he limitation than his own resistance to the burning understood how necessary it was to make liquor. himself pleasant or else allow me some kind of Upon finishing my course of studies, for ridiculous revenge if he didn't want to see me, several years (or months, I don't remember bored and disheartened, get up from the game which, the one turns into the other when prematurely to go sleep on the other end of the enthusiasm begins to flag) my first job as an bench. engineer consisted of directing the work in But the presence of the stationmaster, who several hand-operation mines which an came over to look on after examining the unscrupulous owner possessed in the Tremor weights in the clock and picking up a pile of basin as well as along the upper Torce. These are newspapers from the floor which he deposited analogous formations-anthracite-about a on his writing desk, must have infused him with hundred kilometers distant from each other, or a a new energy, doubtless to demonstrate the journey of some thirty hours on horseback, train, breadth of his knowledge of cards in front of the and plain old automobile combined; these are stationmaster. Upon observing my flustered, lands where, as the famous opium addict of the ingenuous responses, the latter was unable to last century would say, "for a thousand mile repress a movement of his head with which he stretch a dog isn't able to find shelter against a made clear the pity that a situation as desperate snowstorm, nor will one of those so-called as mine awakened in him. Once he had troglodyte birds find any pretext for breakfast." withdrawn, my companion whispered in a low On one of my first return trips to Region from voice to me, with a tone of complicity and Bierzo, I had to spend the night, naturally, in affected gravity, "He's completely insane." Cabezas, between two versions of differing "Insane?" parity and remotely divergent schedules; "Oh, yes, completely. Everyone knows about Cabezas is a station in the high mountains it, and there's a whole array of stories about him which at that time boasted the highest point going around. You probably haven't been above sea level of the entire rail network except traveling around here very long, young fellow, for La Canada, and it was furnished with large, because otherwise I wonder how you wouldn't filthy windows that, whipped by the nor' easter, have heard about him before this. It's well resounded all night long like a ramshackle bus. known." It was, I believe, one of the first nights on which I couldn't wish for anything more than a I was to come up against that nocturnal conversation that would put the game in entertainer, the experienced traveler who knows suspension or at least would slow down the by heart all the schedules and places on the rhythm imposed by that demon of the cards. route, all the combinations with simple or "Believe it, believe it. But go on, play. Don't double transfers, the best procedures for getting stop. No reason to pay too much importance to tickets without standing in line, always in him. It's nothing new in these latitudes. The second-class but at the price of third, whom age previous stationmaster wasn't in his right mind was fitting out with the face of a bell, and who, either, and apparently the one before that was at the opportune moment, always pulls a deck still crazier than this one. But go on, let's see of cards from his pocket. The sort of man for your card, don't stop now." whom a young fellow just finished with his "What do you mean? Do you realize what studies represents the same as a swamp fly to a you're telling me is absurd? How is it possible to silver spider. put a railway station into the hands of a man

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, •... who has lost his mind?" besides being from Galicia, he is insane, utterly "It's not only possible, but apparently it's insane," while he threw down three trumps and necessary, young fellow. Only someone who has called out, "''ve got this one." partly lost his mind could stand it here, The clock struck three at the very moment the something rather easy to understand. Apart stationmaster took a seat beside me on the bench from the unusual things they say that happen and informed me, with giving it too much and that I don't believe. But play now, let's keep importance, "They won't be long, now." on. As for the superiors you mention, knowing I didn't notice the use of the plural and only the difficulty of the situation, for a long time paid attention to the contradiction, thinking he now they have been determined to choose some was referring to the mail train. That wasn't so; crazy person to take charge of this place. No, when my companion wanted to get it clear and they aren't insane, but quite sensible." then I questioned him about the importance of "Do you mean to say they choose them that this ill-fated date, chosen so imprudently, he way?" drew himself up a little closer and, without "Sure, of course. What else can they do? It's raising his voice, told us the following story, better for them to be crazy than to go crazy here; with a Galician accent and locutions along with that could provoke some catastrophe. Besides, frequent repetitions that I will omit: it's a kind of insanity that doesn't affect his "In times past there was a man in this very professional work in the slightest, for apparently office who despite being considered a little crazy he is irreproachable. A lot of strange things are was so respected by whoever knew him and had said about him, no doubt, but none of them dealings with him that his words were never detracts from their confidence in him or puts in questioned, despite the fact that they frequently question the accuracy of his work. But what's turned out a little more than extravagant, even wrong with you? Why don't you play?" for the many who are accustomed to the He had come in again; with his vacant air, a surprises, misfortunes, and mysteries that beat bit absent, he carried along the reserve of down on this accursed land. Those were the patience for a lengthy wait which-with his turbulent years when (but you are too young to whole life invested in the phlegmatic posture remember, he added, addressing me) the more necessary to make it tolerable-would never provocative and violent a man was, the more lapse. powerful and influential he was believed to be. "What do you know about the mail train?" And especially the miners. You would say that my playing companion asked him. everything depended on them, that our stability "Ah, the mail. Are you waiting for the mail itself could be threatened by the mood of the train?" most devious, blabbermouthed man who The cards remained in the air, and upon their wielded a pick. Nothing ever demonstrated becoming the echo of our astonishment, he itself capable of holding them back, no victory finished by adding: was sufficient to satisfy their appetite for "Oh, the mail. Without a doubt it will get violence. At the least bit of information that here. It will arrive. With some delay, a long came in from outside-and every day some delay, but it'll arrive. No doubt about it. But first piece of news or other was brought in, some things have to happen. Some phone calls, significant or not-they would abandon the from someone, who knows? But a long delay; working face at the mines and, loaded down you've gone and made a bad choice of a date for with cartridges and packages of blasting powder that mail train. You should have thought more and dynamite, they would come out to blow up about it. It's the least propitious date for that whatever, even if it was just a henhouse. But mail train; people all know that. They know it thanks to that providential man, anything that very well. But you mustn't worry, now, because had to do with the railway, believe me, they had it will arrive, I know it will. It is a long delay such respect for that they never got together the because a lot of things have to happen first. But least attack in our canton, not even on the you'll be able to take it-" and he added as a boilers, which were the devices those people colophon-"to your misfortune." hated most. Nonetheless, in the final days of that My playing companion, making the most of fateful October-when the revolution already the fact that the other had turned his back, was appeared to be snuffed out by the forces of copious in his gestures toward me, hinting at order-they decided to go to the aid of their something like, "I already warned you that companions in Macerta, under siege for a whole

BENET 91 week. They came up to the station, and believe it say, 'This is so and so'; no, they will leave it to or not, in the presence of such an imperturbable the hazard of a guess or a habit if not to the man and one haloed with singular nobility, who feeling of respect that their voice awakens. A didn't leave his post even in the face of the small voice that ought to be unmistakable in order to riot they were creating in the waiting room, they know where the fear should begin-but that it decided every one to obtain and scrupulously never is, that's the worst thing. Under those pay for their tickets to Macerta, in order not to conditions, who can get things right all the time? create unnecessary complications with him. You Without a doubt they warned him that night must know that in order to transport explosives that some mishap would occur in El Cornil a permit was required, and that was the only tunnel if explosives were being carried, and a obscure point of an operation organized quite mishap did occur: nothing remained even of legally up to that moment. It was on the third of their bones, which were consumed among the November-! couldn't be mistaken about that­ ashes of some railway cars that had been the same as today, at about three in the morning. constructed not merely of wood but of kindling. No doubt he received several calls, not So much for the dynamite. After that night, this necessarily from the stations along the line. man no longer knew the meaning of rest any When he observed the group gathered on the more, and every anniversary after that, a little platform, a platform empty of all other persons after daybreak, a group of miners would come at such an hour, he only had one warning for up to the ticket window to purchase tickets for them: 'I hope you are not carrying explosives,' Macerta. For some of them he was a demon, for he told them, 'and it will not be I who forbids it, others an angel of salvation, the man who because my jurisdiction does not go that far. But brought the revolt in these lands to an end. But I warn you that if you are, the misfortune will be between the both of them they only managed to terrible; you'll blow up everyone inside the turn him into the flesh of remorse. He ended tunnel, Tunnel Twelve to be more exact, the one badly, very badly. Since then, it happens so called El Cornil.' And, well, he never would say often that on the third of November mysterious nor would it ever be known what his source of telephone calls come in and accidents occur information was, but for those who understood whose causes the engineers are unable to such things, it couldn't have been anything else describe--like the one about two years ago, with but the telephone. You know that in this twenty victims-and delays that are recorded country, there are voices-often voices of neither in the books nor on the clocks, with the lament, but mostly of warning and caution­ result that the people of these parts have opted rising on all sides and at all times, and they for doing without the Macerta mail on this date. don't even have anything to do with the It seems odd to me that you ... " railway's selective voice. I know something-a He never finished the sentence because the lot of things-about these voices; the least telephone rang and he went into his office; we important thing is that they anticipate events, were only able to read his expression through what's normal is that they provoke them. So the ticket window, his half-absent posture, what assurance can a man have whose principle holding the earpiece and watching the ceiling in obligation is to pay attention to those two surprise as soon as the lights initiated their telephones? No, I wouldn't want my worst sudden wavering. "Rafieces? Yes, Cabezas; the enemy to be listening all day for those calls that, 1022 at 3:40, two hours and fifty minutes late." all things considered, no one can tell where they He hit the crank, and the bell rang again: come from. Yes, the telephone. It's a big thing "Macerta? The 1022 anticipated in Cabezas at for someone who can talk with his fellow 3:40, same as always. Nearly empty. Only two creatures in the flesh most of the time and only here." The lights in the waiting room went now and then picks up an announcement from down in intensity, quavered in a headlong the railway, but for someone who has to listen manner, casting those quivering shadows and and talk through these things his whole life long flashes of light characteristic of a candle shaken without ever being given the chance to see the by a current of air, and finally they went out faces of those he is speaking with, how quickly altogether, leaving the waiting room in the the limits of what is real get lost, and how easy it deepest obscurity, the most propitious for the is to fall into the hands of a power with whom station master's words: "Rafieces? Cabezas. he will never have any other contact than That's right, at 3:40. Toward the Cornil tunnel. I through their phone calls. Because they never don't know anything yet, I'm waiting for

92 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW ,-- confirmation. Yes, two passengers, only two that occupied. don't seem to be from here. The list can be put Appearing through the ticket window, together now: twenty-four all told, counting the observing the loneliness of that bare, cold room two from here." "Macerta? Raii.eces tells me decorated with posters of French railways, he twenty-four, counting the two from here; let's threw me a glance, meaningful but not full of say about 3:55 ...." He was still talking at the malice, to tell me: moment the lights came on and there came the "It will be here within fifteen minutes. If it sound of the glass door. My playing companion turns out to be any later, he'll clean you out. He had disappeared with such haste that he even won't leave you the shirt on your back."D left a couple of tickets on the seat he had

BENET 93 Herbert Eisenreich

THE BLESSINGS OF A BAD REPUTATION

Translated by Renate Latimer

n our house, which had been hit by bombs Moreover, she looked as if she were made I during that fateful night and was gutted as far entirely of the dust which she swept away daily as the third floor, there lived twelve families. in the Professor's apartment. And now suddenly More precisely: there were nine families, two everyone said: "Who could have imagined that bachelors and one widow. We had all been of her?" And everyone replied: "Not me." Still living for quite some time in this house, and we others asked: "Do you really believe it?" And all knew each other quite well. We saw each their reply was: "It's obvious that she had other after all not only on the staircase, in the somebody upstairs, now that the Professor courtyard, and in the communal laundry room, happens to be in Italy. And when the alarm but also at the grocer's, in the tobacco shop, in sounded, she naturally didn't want him to go the little pub across the street, on the way to into the cellar with her. She didn't want to church, and of course, as now, in the air-raid reveal her visitor's identity. A soldier no doubt." shelter. For over ten years no tenant had moved Others said: "Of course, we sensed it at once out and no new tenant had moved in, only the from her wailing and blubbering." And still subletters at the widow Siegel's and at the others said: "And the fact that she still doesn't Kowalskis' changed from time to time. At the say anything is, of course, the best proof." (It moment they happened to be an official in the also didn't occur to anyone that no one had Armed Forces and a war-disabled medical actually questioned her.) Naturally, the most student at the widow's, and a machine knitter, absurd speculations abounded: for example, she who had been bombed out and whose husband and the Professor had had a secret child together was at the Front, at the Kowalskis. During all and the charred bones were those of the child these years only two deaths, one marriage, and and not the earthly remains of her lover. These three births had taken place: it was a truly quiet and similar conjectures, however, could not house with nothing but respectable tenants. And prevail for long against the general view that yet, although there was no cabaret dancer in our she had a soldier upstairs. Only the caretakers of house and no hidden Jew, no one living in sin the house, evidently out of professional vanity, and no member of the Reichstag, not even a opposed that view and retorted stubbornly: "It drunkard or an hysterical woman, nonetheless wouldn't have escaped us if she had taken there was constantly a bit of investigating and somebody upstairs." snooping, a bit of meddling and gossiping going The main dissension among the residents on. And actually only Fraulein Klara was totally concerned the question of how this affair was to ignored as an object of curiosity. be judged on moral and human grounds. The That changed, however, after the said night of puritanical Noltes and the Armed Forces official bombing. The person on whom everyone's damned such relationships on absolute attention was now focused was a thoroughly principle: the former alluding to the already honest, modest, pious being in her late forties, a superabundant presence of immorality and the picture book maidservant, who had worked latter, an incredibly ugly human being of since time immemorial for Professor Bierich, an dwarfish proportions, probably acting only out old bachelor on the fourth floor. She never of envy. The machine knitter was outraged that performed her chores reluctantly nor spoke a Fraulein Klara hadn't brought the man into the word too enthusiastically. Even on Sundays her cellar, but the one-legged medical student clothing remained unadorned, nor did it even reminded her that many soldiers at the front intimate a body underneath: she was not a were instinctively reluctant to enter an air-raid woman, she was simply Fraulein Klara. shelter, and that it very well could have been the

94 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW now-deceased person's own wish to remain than I. My losses are of inestimable value." He upstairs. The couple named Gunther, on the had already drawn up a list and mainly wanted other hand, were visibly upset that this to find out from me how high a claim he should "dissolute person in a penitential frock" (Herr make. The list started with his personal worldly Gunther's actual words to the widow Siegel) possessions-quite pitiful for a university had always been held up as a role model to their professor. Then there followed the enumeration only, and not particularly domestic, daughter. of objects which Fraulein Klara had lost in the Frau Siegel, thereupon, was so amused that she fire. The main portion of the inventory consisted spoke of it all over the house and neighborhood of a concise description of his scientific library of and finally revised her originally rather stern approximately eight thousand volumes which judgment of Fraulein Klara to a liberal one. And had all been burned up, with the exception of several others rejoiced more or less openly: about three hundred especially valuable and some, because they saw their thesis strikingly rare pieces which he had relocated in the confirmed-that there was no virtue involved, country shortly before the beginning of the simply a lack of opportunity. Others rejoiced out bombings. The concluding paragraph mentioned of sincere sympathy: "Such a loyal, decent his manuscripts and notes and his other ongoing person-for her especially we should not studies. I gave him advice, without much hope, begrudge the pleasure of also experiencing some however, but according to my best knowledge, moment of joy, even though it ended sadly." and after we had finished we drank a little glass Thus the tenants spoke of Fraulein Klara, who of schnaps. But when I thought he was about to walked untouched and unsuspecting in the take his leave, he asked me, with an apologetic midst of all these rumors and whisperings. Of glance toward my wife, who left the room at course the gossip was fueled by the fact that the once, to assure the privacy of our conference, tenants had to live more closely together than and said: "Of course it was unconscionable, but I ever before, on the undamaged storeys of the was very young, and prehistory was my dream, house and in the cellar. As the tenants' and there were no witnesses. It was in Hallstatt judgments of Fraulein Klara changed, so did and the grave was unusually well-preserved their relationships to her. She, of course, did not and the skeleton and the artifacts completely notice any change at first: that Frau Nolte still undamaged. Of course you can say that it was a returned her greetings, but her words were theft, particularly you as a lawyer, but !-please more abrupt; that the young medical student understand me-for me it was something else: treated her with as much consideration as he the life of my life. And not even my Klara knew would a person grieving and bereft; that the about it. It was in a permanently locked cabinet machine knitter shared with her a letter from the and only when I was completely alone did I Front from her husband; that the caretakers open the chest, and at its sight I rediscovered eyed her suspiciously like a peddler; that the anew the Middle Ages and indeed all the Ages widow Siegel tried to engage her in which had kept written records, instead of­ conversation about her previous marriage; that, quite simply, like this fellow ..." His voice gave in short, they began to discern in this creature of out, the old man collapsed inwardly, as if the dust a human being, a human being of a kind loss of that skeleton had been his own, then he similar to themselves. That they discovered her suddenly rose, gave me his hand, begged my soul. forgiveness, and went to the door. There he And not merely her soul. Puhringer, the turned around once more and said to me: "And foreman, the bachelor from the erstwhile fifth Klara, good Klara, was in total despair because floor, who had now taken up quarters with us all the books had gone to hell." And shaking his down below, followed her with his eyes on the head he walked out. staircase, and henceforth he shaved every And I was also close to walking out and going morning. And in the evenings when he came from door to door to inform the people what home and had washed himself, he put on a tie. kind of bones those had been which they had In the meantime the Professor, after receiving found among the ruins. Meanwhile my wife a telegram from Fraulein Klara, returned from entered the room and I wanted to tell her the Padua, where he had been undertaking story, but I didn't tell her anything nor did I tell historical studies, to view and register the anyone else. The unconsummated experience damage. He turned to me in this matter and with the Celt who had died two and a half said: "You, as a lawyer, know more about this thousand years earlier had transformed Fraulein

EISENREICH 95 Klara in all of our consciences into a woman, knew that I would continue to keep my silence. and it seemed to me that this was a higher truth Later, by the way, the actual circumstances than the facts I had just learned. I wanted to be did become known, allegedly according to a alone for a little while and indulge in my notification by the dwarfish Armed Forces thoughts, and I went to the pub across the street. official; but that could no longer alter anything. And there sat Herr Puhringer and Fraulein Herr Puhringer especially did not permit Klara in front of a large and a small beer. When himself to be distracted and took Klara as his she saw me she blushed a little, but she returned wife and she, with her forty-seven years, still my greeting as unselfconsciously as is possible bore him a child. The godfather was the between members of the opposite sex. Then I Professor, standing proxy for the Celt.D

96 NEW ORLEANS REVIEW