Clifford Geertz - Local Knowledge (Text Only)

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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