EnterText 4.2 SUSAN GORMAN From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo: Mythology, Modernity and Divine Carcasse What happens to mythology, both theoretically and practically, when it circulates from large European cities to African villages? How does European mythology change when confronted with an unfamiliar landscape? How do cultural markers (continue to) signify meaning in foreign situations? The 1998 film Divine Carcasse1 by Dominique Loreau follows a car as it moves from Cotonou (Benin), to the outskirts of Cotonou, and on to the village of Ouassou, changing from being a mode of private transportation to a taxicab to the statue of an ancestral divinity. Through examining issues of mythology, commodities, fetishes, language and the “afterlife,” present in the works of major European critics of modernity and mythology as well as in this particular film, I examine how mythologies are forced to modify themselves. Critical changes and questions concerning the practice of mythology both in Europe and in Africa interweave among major problems concerning the complexities of urban and non-urban myth. I put the work of Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes into dialogue with the film, Divine Carcasse. An in-depth reading of mythology in Benjamin Susan Gorman: From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo 177 EnterText 4.2 and Barthes would be much too large a project; thus, instead, I firmly ground their theories in the primary text of the film. Divine Carcasse explores what happens when these theoretical European ideas of mythology are moved to an African setting and why that becomes such a productive move. Questions of urban cityscapes and the growing difficulties in conceiving of them, along with the option of movement away from the urban, engage the thought of Rem Koolhaas toward the end of this discussion. What happens when a European urban mythology is confronted with the African village? The film Divine Carcasse was produced in 1998 as a joint production between Belgium and Benin. The “main character” of the film is a car, a 1955 Peugeot, which in the opening shot disembarks from a boat into Benin. The film has been described on the California Newsreel website as “an unusual hybrid, a half fictional, half ethnographic film. It is a study in cultural contrast, between a desacralized materialistic European view of reality and an animist, pre-industrial African one.”2 This work is a fascinating study of ideas of commercialisation, commodities, the fetish and individual/community dynamics. Once the car comes into the harbour and is taken off the boat, it is picked up by Simon, the European expatriate for whom it was imported. He then drives it home to his French community, the members of which deride him for having such an old car. When the car breaks down one time too many, Simon finds a fetish object in the motor and accuses Joseph, a Beninois who works around his house, of putting it there. Fed up with car troubles, Simon gives the car to Joseph, who brings it to his home on the outskirts of Cotonou. When Joseph mentions that the French call such a car, because of its advanced age, an “ancestor,” a friend of his becomes incensed and argues that it is wrong to call a car an ancestor; it is not possible to call a machine an ancestor. Joseph turns the car into a Susan Gorman: From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo 178 EnterText 4.2 taxi and attempts to earn money from his new possession. After troubles of his own with the car, Joseph returns to his employment at Simon’s and explains to him that he was absent from work since he went to a fetisher who told him to make peace with an ancestor, a maternal uncle who was angry with him. Joseph abandons the car at a mechanic’s garage. It is put up on blocks and scavenged—tyres are removed, car doors, the hood, engine parts, etc. Eventually, it becomes evident to the viewer that the car is being used for parts in order to create something entirely different; the car takes shape into an ancestor statue. The sculptor of the statue meets with four men who have commissioned the statue to be a representation of the divinity Agbo. The statue is then taken by canoe to a remote village where it becomes accepted in a festival by means of a song sung by the village, whereupon it takes part in a religious ceremony in its new form. Urban Mythologies and the Voodoo Fetish In this film, myth emanates from the city and thus it begins an exploration into myth with the major commercial city of Benin: Cotonou. Even before the film brings the viewer there, however, the urban mythological is present. The car comes from France; it is an export. This machine was produced in an urban technologised setting, implied by the automobile’s status as a French import. Louis Aragon, in his 1926 text Le paysan de Paris3 proposes the creation of a modern mythology that takes into consideration the urban landscape—buildings, posters, and man-made institutions. He suggests supplanting any earlier mythology that was based in nature with this more modern one. He walks through the city and is struck by the Susan Gorman: From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo 179 EnterText 4.2 imagery and illusion he encounters in his everyday life, his modern mythology. Modernity in this understanding requires and creates its own mythology. However, modernity also is explicitly invested in the idea of exposing mythology as false. Immanuel Kant, the paradigmatic figure of modernism, writes that he wants all men to be “liberated from [others’] tutelage” in his famous “What is Enlightenment?” essay.4 After being released from tutelage—especially that of religion and mythology, men are able to use their intellects freely and judiciously. Aragon elaborates upon the idea of a modern mythology throughout his book. He walks through the city and is prompted towards revelations on imagery, illusion, mythology and the urban. The new urban mythology has the capacity to entirely supplant older, nature-based myths. Aragon does not quarrel with the fact that there may be a mythology in modernity. For him, it is evident simply from walking through the city that mythology exists. The modern myths have the same role and the same purpose as the myths based on nature, but, critically, man-made objects inspire them. This idea sets up a space for an understanding of mythology under modernity—a mythology that works with the products of modernity. The car in Divine Carcasse is made into a sort of fetish from the very moment it is taken off the boat. Beninois men covet the car as soon as they see it and attempt to sway the importer into selling it to them, although he refuses to do so. The car is immediately transformed into a “fetish,” understood as an object to which some value or desire becomes attached. For Benjamin, mythology emanates from commodity culture. In “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” myth is directly linked to the commodity, or, more specifically, to the Susan Gorman: From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo 180 EnterText 4.2 fetishizing of the commodity. Around these specific products, mythology arises in a way comparable to how myth springs out of the urban landscape for Aragon. For both, mythology is linked to the everyday and to the city from which they wrote. Similarly to Aragon, Benjamin highlights that it is because of the changing society—represented in Aragon by the modern cityscape and in Benjamin as cultural product—that new mythology can exist. However, Benjamin does not agree entirely with Aragon’s conception of myth. He is not content simply to remark upon the existence of myth. Benjamin instead wants to shatter the complacency that allows for it. Aragon simply remarks that it exists, how and why. Michael Hollington, in his essay “Benjamin, Fourier, Barthes” included in “With the Sharpened Axe of Reason:” Approaches to Benjamin, claims that “though he admired Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, Benjamin distances himself from its ‘mythical’ approach to the arcade: his own project is to serve as a transition or awakening out of the sleep of capitalist modernity and commodity fetishism.”5 Even though Aragon had first proposed this urban idea of mythology, Benjamin wants to push it further in order to examine how one might escape myth, and, indeed, what one would then find. To further explain his understanding, Benjamin writes in Konvolut: whereas Aragon persistently remains in the realm of dreams, here it is a question of finding the constellation of awakening. While an impressionistic element lingers on in Aragon (‘mythology’)...what matters here is the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history. Of course, that can only happen through the awakening of a knowledge not yet conscious of what has gone before.6 It is this existence of the dream world, created by commodity culture, that creates room for mythology. In “Paris, Capital of the 19th Century,” Benjamin discusses more fully this dream world. He claims that the arcades of Paris are also part of this dream world— Susan Gorman: From (French) Automobile to (Beninois) Agbo 181 EnterText 4.2 they are a prime example of the old mixing with the new. Benjamin writes, “each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives towards the moment of waking.”7 Thus, this dreaming and this goal of waking are linked to history as a process that continually happens and can be a connection between different epochs. On a different level, this fetishizing happens in Benin, a centre for voodoo worship that relies extensively upon fetishes in religious practice.