Alterity and Narrative : Stories and the Negotiation of Western Identities [1 ed.] 9780791479513, 9780791472170

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3TORIESANDTHE.EGOTIATIONOF7ESTERN)DENTITIES

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ALT E RI TY AND NARRATI VE

SUNY SERIES, NEGOTIATING IDENTITY: DISCOURSES, POLITICS, PROCESSES, AND PRAXES Ronald L. Jackson II, editor

Alterity and Narrative Stories and the Negotiation of Western Identities

Kathleen Glenister Roberts

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YO RK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2007 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production by Ryan Morris Marketing by Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Roberts, Kathleen 1971– Alterity and narrative : stories and the negotiation of Western identities / Kathleen Roberts. p. cm. — (SUNY series, negotiating identity: discourses, politics, processes, and praxes) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7914-7217-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Social perception—Europe—History. 2. Prejudices—Europe—History. 3. Identity (Philosophical concept)—History. 4. Identity (Psychology)—Religious aspects. 5. Identity (Philosophical concept) in literature. 6. Difference (Psychology)—History. 7. Difference (Philosophy) in literature. I. Title. HM1071.R63 2007 305.09182'1—dc22 2006100372 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Cannon and Cooper Ou te alofa ia te oe. Ou te alofa outou.

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Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Identity, Alterity, and Narrative

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So¯te¯ria, the Mother as Other: Medea in Ancient Greece (and Beyond)

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A Man Cannot Be a Prophet in His Own Country: Saint Paul and Universalism

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The Curses of Medieval Man: Reverberations from the Tower of Babel

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Fierce Warriors: The Other as Comrade in Othello and World War II

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The Enlightenment Noble Savage: Diderot’s Tahiti and Other Imaginary Locales

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Modernity, Industry, and the Fatal Flaw: The Rise of Entropology in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

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The Rhetoric of Possibility: Trickster, the Postmodern Hero

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Conclusion: Intercultural Hope: Alterity Post-9/11

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Notes

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References

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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his book would not have been possible without the support of many, many people. Duquesne University provided a Presidential Scholarship grant and generous support from the College of Liberal Arts. Everyone at SUNY Press was outstanding, especially Series Editor Ronald L. Jackson II. Colleagues in the Department of Communication & Rhetorical Studies sacrificed a great deal to see me through this project; I owe a huge debt to Ron Arnett, Pat Arneson, Cindy Burke, Janie Fritz, Richard Thames, and Calvin Troup. Our wonderful graduate students also contributed to the development of ideas, and several served as research assistants. I especially thank Vasil Tsarev (who provided the cover image as well), Laura Fulmer, Alex Prabaharan, and Laurie Duffy. Officially, this book has been about four years in the making: the writing itself started with a Ph.D. seminar in 2003. But really it is the product of a young lifetime of curiosity about intercultural contexts—and the adventures, mistakes, and friends I made within them. Without those friends and the support of my family, there would have been only grief; instead there is hope. Beverly Stoeltje, Dick Bauman, Pesio Masei, Robert Nelson, Fr. Matthew McClain, and Cem and Yildiz Zeytinoglu deserve special thanks, as do the folklore grads from Indiana University–Bloomington. You have my undying admiration. Besides my husband and son, the greatest thanks go to my large and rather loud family of origin. My father has been a model of cosmopolitan ethics. I especially thank him and my Mom and my brothers Jim, Mike, Dave, and Tim. I’m now mature enough to say (tongue firmly in cheek) that this book is about how right they occasionally are. Above all: Estoy muy alegre que Usted es conmígo.

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Introduction IDENTITY, ALTERITY, AND NARRATIVE

The reason Europe’s historical diversity has brought mankind so much restlessness and suffering till now is exposed in the history of the word [“barbarian”]. When we use it, we betray the way we imagine the individual’s relationship to society, how we see the position of our own society in the community of nations and what we think of the past and future of the human race. Tell me whom you call a barbarian and I will tell you who you are. —Arno Borst, Medieval Worlds (emphasis mine)

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dentity negotiation in the twenty-first century is marked by both globalization and provinciality. Although “identity” should not be confused with identity politics, we live in a moment where “identity” and “culture” are synonymous terms. The very concept of culture has changed within this conflation (Benhabib, 2002, 2004). Culture—perhaps the most significant and simultaneously loaded term of our times—is intertwined with identity. Yet culture is not so well understood as it might be. Most contemporary cultural theory is coming from the United States and defines “cultural difference” primarily as the boundaries between white Americans, African Americans, and Latinos (Eagleton, 2004, p. 6). While American scholars are teaching their white students to get along with Puerto Rican dormitory roommates, across the ocean the chasm between “Jihad and McWorld” grows ever deeper. The current project seeks a different perspective on the divide; it will focus on the negotiation and formation of cultural identities through narrative practices, so as to examine the discourse of identity negotiation and also the cultural biases that emerge out of Western identities. This book studies the roots of Western biases toward the Other, and the recurring historical problems of intercultural contact. Alterity and Narrative 1

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examines narrative motifs. Narrative is a remarkably accessible medium; the stories popular during a given era may have been performed for the elite on the stage, but they were also spoken among the “folk” by the hearth. In its focus on narrative, this book is a study not of literature, or of academic bias toward the Other, but of vernacular attitudes that permeate multiple levels of Western cultures. As communication scholar Brad ‘J’ Hall points out, narrative is also universally performed among human cultures, making it a compelling departure point for the study of identity and intercultural contact (Hall, 1998). Each chapter in this book identifies a particular narrative concerning alterity, or “Otherness,” from a given time period. These “time periods” are those of the Western academy: the classical era; early Christianity; the Middle Ages; the Renaissance; the Enlightenment; modernity; and postmodernism. The impact of history on Western identities is thus interrogated. Each narrative exemplifies attitudes toward alterity that were prevalent during the given time period, from the perspective of Western civilization. Through the narrative and its rhetorical implications, a history of alterity is explored. Most narratives chosen were once part of oral tradition, and were—in the given time period—then set down in some “canonical” written version. In highlighting the tension between orality and literacy in the development of Western civilization, the book confronts that bias as well. The chapters will also explain how these narratives or motifs endure throughout time, tending to reemerge when similar questions about alterity arise in later time periods. For example, I trace the narrative motif of Medea—the foreign wife of Greek hero Jason—and connect her narrated experience to the rhetoric surrounding African slave mothers in America in the nineteenth century. (A full chapter outline is contained in the last section of this introduction.) There are several reasons for advancing this examination of the role of narratives in Western identity negotiation. The project first emerged in a straightforward way when I was asked to teach a Ph.D. seminar in intercultural communication. Based in a rhetoric program rooted in the humanities, the only stipulation given was that the course should be taught in a chronology that followed the time periods of Western civilization. My initial reaction to this stipulation was that it seemed potentially problematic to teach “Rhetoric and Philosophy of Intercultural Communication” with a structure that was situated so firmly within Western tradition. It gave me a little pause. My standpoint has always been that ethical intercultural communication would invite one to step outside one’s own cultural biases. On the other hand, the proposed course structure offered a fascinating opportunity to interrogate those cultural biases. When the course proceeded according to plan, for the first time I found myself not merely acknowledging

Introduction

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the cultural biases of my own worldview and that of the Western academy, but scrutinizing them in detail. The realization emerged that my students and I actually knew very little about how our “cultures” had acquired concepts pertaining to racial, ethnic, and gender-based differences. The reading of philosophy and narratives from each time period also lent an outline to “identity” in a broader sense than initially intended. While specific narratives helped contribute to the formation of Western cultural identities, those specific narratives also gave a “face” to the particular time period. It became possible to understand the formation and negotiation of Western civilization based on the stories told about the “Others” who were not members of Western civilization. As Arno Borst writes, and as quoted in the epigraph: “Tell me whom you call a barbarian and I will tell you who you are” (Borst, 1996, p. 3). One reason our seminar was able to rediscover some aspects of Western cultural identities is that many of us had come of age during a period of revision in American history. Foundational to intercultural communication as a field, for example, is the assertion that Americans often did more damage than good in their study of other cultures (Hall, 1973). Thus, there has been a brief period of acknowledgment among cultural critics that Western history is riddled with sins inflicted upon the Other. And so a period of revisionism in history education marked the last decades of the twentieth century, coming to a pinnacle in the “politically correct” movement of the 1990s. These changes in Western education stemmed from a dire need and arrived with the noblest of intentions. However, the sharp detour in history’s subject matter has not always contributed to the goal of better intercultural understanding. Culture (and therefore identity) is negotiated through mutually contested, dialogic practices—specifically, narrative. Culture (and therefore identity) “presents itself through narratively contested accounts”: first, the accounts of human interactions, and then the accounts of normative attitudes and evaluative stances about those interactions. “What we call ‘culture’ is the horizon formed by these evaluative stances” inherent in narratives (Benhabib, 2002, p. 6). A venture into past and recurring Western narratives of alterity may set ground under the West, opening up possibilities for dialogue. One of the places where those dialogues might occur is within the academy, since this book had its beginnings in a Ph.D. seminar whose purpose was to better educate tomorrow’s teachers in the humanities, identity, culture, and rhetoric. The potential terms of these discussions include the following: 1. Western constructions of a monochronic, linear “history” are themselves biases. a. Nonetheless, the time periods labeled within Western history are necessary components of Western identities and ought to

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Alterity and Narrative be interrogated. Narratives construct identities not merely of people, but also of time in the Western mind. An exemplary narrative from a given Western time period gives a “face” to that time in the construction of identities for Western cultures. 2. Identity construction (and specifically alterity) is a universal activity. a. Nonetheless, narratives about alterity for any given culture are highly significant to identity because alterity construction is typically much more pertinent to Self than Other. The Other that is created through narratives of alterity is imaginary, stereotypical, and biased. But the details of the narratives lend crucial insight into the identity formation of the Self as differentiated from the exaggerated Other. 3. Narrative themes are very similar when traced through spatial, temporal, and “cultural” indices. Narrative “motifs,” as defined within the field of folkloristics, are discrete and identifiable units that recur among highly diverse groups. a. Nonetheless, these motifs are evaluated and accounted for differently from culture to culture. The motifs are worth examining on two fronts: first because they have been engaged in the construction of Western identities; second because they can be (and have been) reclaimed, interrogated, and critiqued by the Other. A study of these evaluative processes must emphasize the hybridity and complexity of “cultures” in this historical moment.

Alterity and Narrative thus strives to examine the vernacular forms and pragmatic implications of narrative contestation. One studies cultural identities when one studies narrative, but only if Benhabib’s “double-hermeneutic” is employed: it is not merely the episodic accounts that matter, but also the meta-accounts—the evaluation and texturing of narratives—that signify cultural identities (Benhabib, 2002, p. 6). One way that narratives are evaluated and textured is through the recurrent use of motifs. Alterity and Narrative is a study of identity negotiation, but also a departure point for understanding the process by which cultures come into dialogue. It provides rhetorical analyses of narratives, but also pragmatic discussions of the discursive practices that construct “culture” in the twenty-first century. In the next sections of this introduction I define the term “alterity” and its implications for cultural identity negotiation, and then discuss narrative theory that underpins the rest of the book.

Introduction

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ALTERITY In a fundamental sense, alterity is simply the consciousness of Self as unique from Other. In the twentieth century, its philosophical study had largely been in phenomenology. The Self is a lived experience; it is necessarily divided from Other, since experience is only capable of capturing the fullness of Self. Phenomenologists argue that one cannot fully experience the Other. However, Self is also dependent on Other: a differential field is required in order to circumscribe the Self. The complexity of this process of circumscription has challenged some philosophers—notably Levinas (1990)—to understand it in ethical terms. For Levinas, the Other calls the Self into existence, but also into a relationship of responsibility. Communication and dialogue are crucial to the successful management of alterity. Recently, “alterity” has transcended general existential and phenomenological realms. Some cultural critics now use “alterity” to describe specifically the boundary between Self and Other as drawn along cultural lines. Alterity is synonymous now with “difference” and with “the exotic.” For cultural critics, the phenomenological experience of alterity is less significant than the political. “Alterity” as employed in this book typically precludes Levinas’s ethical dialogue because it is rhetorically constructed between groups, rather than experienced among individuals. This book addresses the alterity that creates identities in Western “Selves,” with the rest of the world as “Other.” In describing its Self, a Western civilization has modified its preoccupation with various Others according to the demands of a given historical moment. Unlike some phenomenological conceptions of alterity, though, cultural conceptions of the exotic are rarely based on empirical evidence. As Woolf (1992) writes, “Europeans’ images of non-European peoples have shifted over the centuries, probably more according to the cultural lodestars of the European imagination than through the expansion of geographic and cartographic knowledge” (pp. 81–82). These cultural lodestars are interesting because of their simplicity and also their convenience. Western rhetorical appeals to differentiate the Other happened in narrative terms and served to crystallize Western cultures as colonizing economic powers. This fact should not cause one to presuppose, however, that non-European societies do not engage in similar rhetorical processes. Alterity is present phenomenologically, through the delineation of Self and Other. It is a human phenomenon. Alterity based on cultural identity may be a universal human attribute, but a focus on Western concepts of alterity is still worthwhile. Elliott (1997) writes: “It is the alchemy of the elements of Self and Other which provokes the kinds of debate that oblige knowledge systems to change”

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(Elliott, 1997, p. 252). Unfortunately, she continues, this debate has rarely occurred even when accurate information about the Other is available. As this book notes in later chapters, alterity really has far more to do with the Self than with the Other. One can recover Western identity and history— atrocities and all—by recovering alterity. Acknowledging the West’s marginal understanding of the Other, despite all rhetoric to the contrary, crafts a narrative one needs to understand. Several obstacles to intercultural understanding have become entrenched in Western constructions of identity: the revision of history, the enforcement of politically correct discourse, and the American recasting of “whiteness” as a lack of any identity. Said (1979) is correct in stating that “Orientalism” as a Western creation consisted solely of the objectification of non-European peoples. The identification of the East as a subject was no longer possible in Western narratives of alterity as they addressed “the Orient.” Today, however, it seems possible that “subject–object” is too simple a dividing line for discussing alterity and heterology. Badiou (2003) makes the compelling argument that questions of identity cannot result in a viable truth, for identities are necessarily singular and truth is necessarily universal. He points to the aggressive project of cultural relativism, which has its roots in modernity, as hegemonic discourse that disrupts the integrity of cultural identities. In postmodernity, Badiou argues, alterity is no longer cast as a subject–object relationship. Instead we are all divided as equal and separate subjects. While purveyors of multiculturalism maintain that this is the desired result of equality, Badiou accurately asserts that this is a division, a severing of the experiences inherent in the understanding of alterity. The real result is that all subjects are bereft of the ability to discern each other’s humanity (Badiou, 2003). “Contemporary cosmopolitanism,” Badiou writes, “is a beneficent reality” (Badiou, 2003, p. 11). It is no longer a point that needs to be argued. Ironically, perhaps one way to recapture alterity is to examine exactly how it has been argued. Of course, this is not to advocate a return to objectification in Said’s (1979) sense. Instead this book is a possible step in a move toward what Badiou calls “a real web of shifting differences, [not] the uniform dictatorship of what [some mistakenly] take to be ‘modernity’” (Badiou, 2003, p. 11). The next section introduces the role of narrative in the weaving of that web of identity. IDENTITY AND THE NARRATIVE PARADIGM One significant aspect of this book is that it is grounded in narrative theory, not literary theory. Alterity is always produced through narrative and other

Introduction

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discursive forms. Buell (2002) takes a similar approach to alterity in her study of race. She writes: I assume that ethnicity/race and religion are discursively produced as well as socially and historically contingent. That is, instead of assuming that religion and race are either filled with some essential transhistorical content (otherwise known as a primordialist view) or are reducible to self-serving political tools (otherwise known as an instrumentalist view), I treat religion and race/ethnicity as concepts that are formulated, maintained, and revised through argument as well as through social practices and institutions. (Buell, 2002, p. 439) The emphasis on discourse here is clear, and supports the significance of narratives in the construction of alterity. Benhabib (2002) asserts that narrative has a dual role in the formation of cultures. First, people give an account of their actions through narratives, but they also announce their values within these accounts. I argue that narratives about “the Other” are doubly embedded and doubly evaluative because they draw artificial boundaries around our own “culture” and are at the same time culturally constructed. Benhabib calls these evaluations “second-order narratives that lead us to qualify and classify” (Benhabib, 2002, p. 102). Part of what becomes evaluated, qualified, and classified are aspects of identity—especially alterity. Benhabib’s (2002) accounting of narrativity, especially within the negotiation of cultural identity, opens up important issues for alterity. The specific narrative process is not addressed in her work, but Fisher (1989) has provided an apt description of the relationship between narrative and public decisions. Fisher’s work is especially helpful to my project because it is situated in the communication field. Fisher (1989) first formalized the “narrative paradigm” as an alternative conceptual framework for understanding persuasive communication. The narrative paradigm espouses MacIntyre’s (1984) characterization of the human condition in After Virtue: humans are, above all, storytelling animals (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 201). According to Fisher, narrative is paradigmatic when it transcends the basic form of a story. Storytelling is a widespread and perhaps universal phenomenon (Hall, 1998), but Fisher privileges narrative as more than just the recounting of episodic action. A story becomes a narrative when it becomes entrenched in public discourse (Arnett & Arneson, 1999). For Fisher, the persuasive significance of a narrative emerges out of “good reasons.” Good reasons may be tested by two qualities of the narrative: its coherence and its fidelity. Coherence describes how well a narrative “hangs together” or “makes sense” internally and structurally, while fidelity assesses whether a

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narrative “rings true” with its participants (Fisher, 1985a, p. 297). The “good reasons” provided by a public narrative may form the basis for public decision-making. Narrative therefore encompasses identity formation within a group: one way that humans “argue” for public decisions is through the good reasons couched in a narrative. Hall’s (1998) study of narratives about prejudice employs this aspect of Fisher’s narrative paradigm. The risks in employing “narrative logic” while constructing alterity are clear. A challenge in the narrative paradigm lies in its strengths: narrative is appealing because it is perceived as “natural” and contextual. Narratives are rich in character development (Arneson, 2004). Thus their premises are often harnessed as “common sense” or as logic. Often audiences do not recognize the persuasive appeals within the narrative; they are fooled by its entertainment value. They also may internalize the identity suggested by the narrative without even realizing it. In part, the following chapters suggest that these internalizations play a role in identity formation. The resulting alterity continues to impact intercultural communication. Narratives hold an entrenched role in the study of culture. Fisher alludes to the public nature of narratives, as explained earlier. Lévi-Strauss (1992) makes this link more explicit: The major manifestations of social life have something in common with works of art . . . since social phenomena are produced by the public and works of art for the public; it is the public which endows them with a common denominator and determines the conditions of their creation. (p. 124, emphasis in the original) Lévi-Strauss forges a connection between societies and their works of art, and this connection hinges on the concept of the public. Lévi-Strauss thus locates the life of art—including narrative—within the realm of group identity formation. Today the enterprise of narrative analysis has blossomed beyond literary criticism, as my project in this book clearly indicates. Such epistemological efforts may be highly useful. What seems most significant is not a single production of a narrative, but the patterns that surround repeated variations of that narrative. Beyond Lévi-Strauss, Williams (1980) provides theoretical ground for this project in that Williams seeks a historically grounded and contextual reading of narratives. As he writes: These creative acts compose, within a historical period, a specific community: a community visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form. I had become convinced . . . that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where

Introduction

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changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated . . . and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history. (Williams, 1980, pp. 25–26, emphasis mine) Williams’ emphases on historical period as well as change are highly significant to my project. My perspective on narrative and identity negotiation arises from two epistemological steps. First, Fisher and Lévi-Strauss affirm the role of narratives in understanding cultural and social life, and both also equate narrative with public discourse—including cultural identity formation. Through their respective engagements of the correlation between publics and narratives, the identification piece of my project is in place. Second, Williams advances the study of narratives beyond the singularity that tempts typical cultural criticism. Williams espouses the potential for a social history drawn on, as he writes, “more than individual solutions” (p. 26). The power of narrative to achieve this social history is inherent in its communicative processes. Following Williams’s (1980) lead, this book does not seek to study narratives in isolation. Crafting a history of alterity and understanding its role in Western identity formation requires the audience to be conscious of a given narrative’s dynamic qualities. DeMallie (1994) points out that in the study of any culture, change is paramount. Indeed culture, as he writes, “is change” (DeMallie, 1994, p. 127). DeMallie’s point is that in the fluidity of culture we find meaning. And narratives, as productions of culture, are especially fluid. Their malleability and constant flux should not confuse the audience. On the contrary, in the flux is the life of culture and identity. To expound on this point, a closer examination of narrative theory is necessary. NARRATIVE THEORY Narrative theory has burgeoned over the past several decades. Fisher’s narrative paradigm, previously described, is an indication of communication’s role in the study of narrative. It is widely accepted that a single narrative and its relationship to a society can tell us much about identity negotiation. However, there is much more to be discovered, as Williams (1980) notes, in multiple versions of narratives and their changes over time. In this book I seek to study narratives in their multiplicity. While each narrative in this book underscores alterity in a given time period, I will also trace the development of each narrative through history. Most interestingly, many of the narratives become topics of discourse for the “Other” they initially described. This

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book is thus entrenched in narrative (rather than literary) theory because of its attention to narrative change. Elsewhere (2004) I have demonstrated connections between Fisher’s narrative paradigm and folklorists’ emphasis on the dynamics of narrative. Thirty years ago, folklorists were the first scholars to explicitly announce that that the significance of narrative existed not merely in a text itself, but in the performances of that text. These performances help differentiate the significance of similar narratives from culture to culture. In the following chapters, the texts under analysis emerge out of oral tradition and multiple performance forms. Identity formation and alterity are issues raised in the endurance of narratives through time. Perhaps it is an effect of cosmpolitanism that alterity is now at a point where the “Other” is currently “talking back” to these old Western narrative motifs. Performance theory and folkloristics illustrate how storytelling about alterity has become a dialogue of sorts at the turn of the twenty-first century. Making this theoretical turn will require an understanding of folkloristics, which is described next. The philosophical roots of folkloristics extend at least as far as J. G. Herder. However, a clear delineation of the field first emerged in 1846 when English scholar William Thoms coined the term “folk-lore.” In an open letter published in the Athenaeum, Thoms called his fellow scholars to the task of collecting traditional materials from “peasant cultures.” These materials included narratives, proverbs, songs, and other elements of oral tradition. Like his fellow educated Europeans, Thoms seemed to be operating under two assumptions. First, he feared that the “folk” were quickly disintegrating under the influences of the Industrial Revolution. Second, Thoms also wrote at a time when the European states were experimenting with new ways to establish distinctive national identities. One popular solution was to locate national identity within the traditions of the “folk,” as reflected by the Romantic movement in literature. The sublime aspects of Romanticism placed the true identity of a nation with its most earthy, simple “folk” who were uncorrupted by the dullness and restraint of high culture (Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1969). Thoms’s introduction of the term “folk-lore” expressed an affinity for scholarly work that in large part had already been taking place throughout Europe. The Brothers Grimm, for example, had had similar nationalistic impulses in their collection of traditional German fairytales (Peppard, 1971). It seems significant that the impetus for this new field of “folk-lore” studies emerged from nationalism. The question of national identity is, of course, a question of alterity. Understanding how narratives were used to forge national identities serves as a reminder that nationalism does not transcend history. Woolf (1992) warns against the typical classification of Europe as “a purely geographical datum, without consideration of its construction as

Introduction

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a cultural concept” (p. 74). As the above examination of the early formation of folkloristics indicates, narrative was a key element in this cultural construction of “Europe” during the nineteenth century. As later chapters of this book discuss, Europe’s self-identification depended on its separation from exotic “Others.” Particularly during the Enlightenment, imperialism complicated the concept of culture in the European mind. Although much of the modern alterity project was conducted under the aegis of “science,” the results had far more to do with imagination—much of it wild and fantastic. Nonetheless, the sheer amount of raw data available to European scholars in the late nineteenth century spurred the enterprise of anthropology. Together with literature, anthropology is identified as a “grandparent” of sorts for contemporary folklore as a discipline. When applied to stories, folklore attempts to bridge the aesthetic and social effects of narrative (Bauman, 1986, p. 7). Because of its hybrid encapsulation of these fields, folkloristics is a fruitful source of narrative theory pertaining to identity formation and alterity. In folkloristics, narratives announce their rhetorical efficacy in both the social and the aesthetic realms. Narratives are persuasive because of their public nature and because their form appeals to “the whole mind in concert with itself” (Fisher, 1985a, p. 299). Previous attempts to understand the relationship between narratives and cultures have lacked folklore’s gestalt approach to performance and identity formation. The study in the following chapters will integrate the social and aesthetic aspects of narratives for a given time period, highlighting the identifying nature of narratives concerning alterity. The work thus draws from narrative theory found in the roots of the field of folklore. There is another factor to consider in the development of folklore and its relationship to this book. Any given narrative text is just one version of a particular line of communication in the construction of alterity. The narratives chosen for this book are significant because of their recurring nature, even to the point where the “Other” employs the narrative to “talk back” to the West in postmodernity. These concerns are well in line with the folkloristic enterprise. As I explained, the early European folklorists were interested in the narratives of a domestic “Other”: the peasant class. Across the Atlantic, the first American folklorists focused on a different line of inquiry concerning culture and identity. While the salvage operation of folklore defined itself mainly along class lines in Europe (looking to its supposedly anachronistic agrarians for pieces of the past), American folklorists were already inadvertently delineating the concept of “minorities” by visiting them to observe and collect their narratives. In 1888, the academic American Folklore Society held its first convention and featured reports on African American, Native American, and Appalachian folklore. The American scholars approached these “Others” differently than their European

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counterparts. They never saw African-Americans, Native Americans or Appalachians as key to a “national” character in the same way Europeans regarded their peasant folk. But there was one point of agreement for scholars on both continents: they were all concerned that the Industrial Revolution seemed to be making aspects of culture “disappear.” Over the next several decades, their interest in the narratives and traditions of such people was akin to the collection and preservation of butterflies, and indeed they talked about their work as though it were a science. Anthropologists quickly followed suit in the “salvage operation,” hastily collecting as many remnants of lore, language, and narrative as they could scrape together. The more they “collected,” however, the less they could ignore unnerving similarities in narrative forms from very diverse cultural groups. It was not long before these similarities became systematized in narrative theory, specifically in folklore. Thompson (1955) identified recurring episodes, images, and formulas in traditional narratives as “motifs.” A motif is any part of a narrative that is striking, unusual, and memorable. For instance, many readers are no doubt familiar with Charles Perrault’s version of “Cinderella.” The motifs of this folktale are as follows: The heroine manages to meet the hero, despite the treachery of her stepfamily and because of “supernatural” intervention of sorts. The hero falls in love with her, but is prevented from learning her identity. Fortunately she leaves behind a significant object that can serve to positively identify her from among all the women in the realm, and they live happily ever after. When motifs are arranged in such a pattern, Thompson organizes them into folktale “types.” In this way, we could recognize the “Cinderella type” (Thompson identifies types through a numbered coding system) even if there are emic substitutes for the royal ball and the glass slipper. The setting and the object may change from culture to culture, but the audience recognizes the story because of the motifs and their arrangement. The delineation of motifs and tale types is an indication of the persuasive, communicative powers of narrative. Why is it that many stories should be so similar through time and space? The analyses in the following chapters offer specific examples and highlight certain “motifs” or tale types in particular time periods, arguing that particular narratives construct identity for given historical moments. Interestingly, the motifs also endure throughout time, reemerging during periods of mimetic communicative exigency. This recurrence is a pattern that narrative theorists recognize in all artistic communication. For Bogatyrev and Jakobson (1982), appropriation is the essential, dominant element of narrative and communicative dynamics. Appropriation occurs when there is public agreement on the fidelity of a narrative (to use Fisher’s term). A narrative must be resonant or it will not be recounted through time and space (Bogatyrev & Jakobson, 1982, pp. 32–46).

Introduction

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Repeated narratives contain at least a kernel of interest to the hearer that makes it memorable. Labov and Fanshel (1977) called this hook of the narrative the “extraordinary, reportable” element (p. 105). The kernel is the punch line of a joke, the human-interest story on the news, the consistent line of an anecdote, the motif of a folktale, or the indelible image from a film. The kernel is the truly memorable essence of a narrative that captures the human imagination and answers communicative exigency. Because it is public, it impacts identity: it resonates with the group. Narrative motifs thus create recognition in various forms, across time and space. The realization that narratives were so similar from culture to culture had three main repercussions in the study of folklore. First, for a time scholars thought they could reduce the spread of narratives to a science, addressing issues of “ur-forms,” variants, and dissemination. But they discovered that narrative resists easy generalizations. So in a second vein, folklorists began to consider the social and identity-forming exigencies that drive storytelling in the first place. Again they thought there was a fairly straightforward correlation between cultural identity and narratives. Folklorists focused on the pedagogical and unifying aspects of narratives. But, as the field advanced, narratives were subjected to more piercing analysis that revealed the role of storytelling in the communication of alterity. The first two repercussions represent the move from collecting texts to observing more closely the cultures that produced them. The interplay between these diverse enterprises came to a head in the 1960s. The paradigm of “collection” shifted in this historical moment, largely because young folklore scholars were interested in the changing social fabric of the United States as well as performance. They were inspired by the folksong revival of that era. Also, Lord’s (1964) theories about oral tradition and performance resonated with their scholarship and experiences. These factors together inspired a paradigm shift in narrative theory: the text was now understood as art, not mere artifact. Paredes and Bauman (1972) were vanguards of this movement and moved the field from collecting texts to analyzing performance. Bauman’s (1972) work “Differential Identity and the Social Base of Folklore” is particularly useful for understanding this paradigm shift, and for understanding alterity. First, Bauman points out that academic approaches to narrative must change. He calls for a “redirection of attention from folklore as superorganic tradition to folklore as action” (Bauman, 1972, p. 34). This is a watershed moment for all disciplines concerned with narrative and living cultures. Bauman is reacting against an epistemological perspective that dominated early studies of culture—a perspective often termed “superorganic.” The antiquated superorganic approach assumed that culture is an independent entity that exists externally to the people swept up in its allencompassing power. From this outdated perspective the “superorganic”

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nature of culture means it is very slow to change, so early scholars were not very interested in communicative interaction or the formation of cultural identity through narrative. It is no wonder that the superorganic tradition was preoccupied with the collection of texts. Bauman’s reaction against it is a call to observe cultural performances and to see narrative and identity as emergent rather than superorganic. Cultural narratives are created among persons, through public agreement, and in response to questions of alterity. When Bauman (1972) makes this move, he is in league with other scholars of that time who reconceptualized culture and identity. One of these is Geertz (1977) who conceives of culture as a web that we ourselves have spun. From this perspective, culture is neither superorganic nor entirely socially constituted—perhaps it is both. Nonetheless, Bauman’s (1972) work makes an important distinction that applies to identity and alterity. Not only is narrative privileged through performance as having a “place . . . in social relationships [and] use in social interaction” (Bauman, 1972, p. 34). Part of narrative’s place in social relationships pertains to what Jansen (1965) labels the “exoteric factor”: communication about the Other. Cultural expressions that label and define the world outside the group are exoteric. As Bauman (1972) points out, this is not to say that the group itself is monolithic or capable of declaring a single identity for itself. Narrative is used not merely for solidarity, but also for divisiveness—or, at the very least, to demarcate “differential identities” (Bauman, 1972). Richard Bauman’s writings have continued to explore these ideas over the last three decades. His research into performance has brought to light the tremendous social power that fuels narrative dynamics. While emphasizing performance, he has not dismissed earlier narrative theories based on textual comparisons (such as the ones discussed earlier). Bauman is interested in the mimetic qualities of narrative: repeated performances of the same story. Briggs and Bauman (1992) advance notions of narrative type by privileging performance. Their research suggests that the traditional Western idea of “genre” in narrative is problematic and complex. Genres are not discrete categories, especially in non-Western cultures. Instead of maintaining static boundaries, genres tend to “leak” (Briggs & Bauman, 1992). The fact that narratives defy easy categorization means that performers play with narratives rhetorically. There are a multitude of texts present for any given narrative, as Thompson (1955) already proved. The dynamic interplay of these texts is known as “intertextuality.” For storytellers, the constraints and implications of intertextuality are largely contingent on the storyteller’s social power (Briggs & Bauman, 1992). Perhaps it is a mark of the postmodern moment that the “Other” is now central to intertextuality in narrative performance. As Gelo (1999) points out, in the postmodern moment those who have traditionally been “com-

Introduction

15

mented upon” are now free to comment about their commentators (p. 52). The Other has been insidiously proscribed through narratives in the West, but in the following chapters one often finds that the Other is now able to “write back” to those narratives. The same narrative motifs appear in the Other’s discourse on the West. After all, as narrative theorists have pointed out over the last thirty years, “reality” is socially constituted through narrative performance. This includes the “reality” of alterity, the relationship between Self and Other. Gone is the perception of tradition as a superorganic entity to which societies can only respond. Put simply, individuals act in artful performances that have meaning and texture for their social group. They do not simply react to the pressures of a “culture” that exists outside of their agency. So can one achieve what Williams (1980) has called for—a social history told through narratives? It seems fitting to employ folkloristics as a main body of narrative theory for this study. While folklore is today a global discipline, it is significant that its birth took place in Europe. In its beginnings, in Europe and the United States, the fruits of folklore depended on the texts of marginalized Others: country folk, peasants, Appalachians, the illiterate, Native Americans, and African Americans. Contemporary folklorists are still among the scholars most concerned with the relationship between Self and Other (Stoeltje, Fox, & Olbrys, 1999). At the same time, there are a few caveats to consider in crafting this particular “history of alterity” through Western narratives. These are explained in the next section. HISTORY AND NARRATIVE First, there is a danger to viewing history as a “narrative.” Fictional narratives possess their own internal logic; not only do humans understand the sequencing of episodes into a “story” from a very young age, but they also begin to internalize the sense that good narratives “hang together” and “ring true.” The same cannot be said of the actual events of the past. Most of the enterprise of history as a discipline is composed of the search for cause–effect relationships and the attempt to create a linear progression of events. But this, too, has its decidedly Western biases. Many other cultures do not see the past as linear at all; they have a polychronic worldview that allows for circularity in “history” (Hall, 1989). Again one comes to the point where dealing with unreflective Western bias is paramount. It is significant that the West casts certain historical events as “inevitable,” based on a narrative logic (Fulford, 1999, p. 31). For example, the American civil war from 1861–1865 was constructed in my New York elementary and high school classrooms as a battle of good versus evil: the North won, of course, because the North was

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on the side of righteousness and freedom and crushed the immoral, enslaving southerners. This may be partially true, but the narrative has changed and fluctuated over the past 150 years to emphasize state’s rights, the preservation of the Union, or slavery—depending on cultural and political agendas. This is narrative logic at work in the perception of history (Fulford, 1999, p. 31). And because so much of Western history has been about “winners and losers,” it has never fully captured the past. Narrative logic is not real life (White, 1990). Narrative logic is merely a cultural group’s particular constructions of “real life.” Objectively speaking, history is not a narrative, and neither is the Other. However, through their narratives, cultures make them so. This tendency to construct alterity through “natural” or benign narratives is one that bears analysis. That is one of the purposes of this book. But having said that all histories are particular and “hang together” or “ring true” only according to a culture’s own biases, can a history of alterity really be written? Yes, but the key word in the last sentence is “a.” The project is a history, not a master history. The following chapters will by no means be the last word on past constructions of alterity in Western narratives. It is a collection of narrative themes, tied to certain identity-forming moments and philosophical ideas. The narrative themes were all public and intertextual, and, far from representing solidarity, they created differential identities. Taken together, they exemplify the epochs into which the Western academy has typically divided the past: ancient, early Christian, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, modern, postmodern. While each narrative may be exemplary for its given time period, it also lays the foundation for understanding alterity during that moment a bit better—and perhaps spurs further discussion of more narratives of alterity. Of course, it is impossible to cover all of these rather lengthy time periods with one narrative motif each. It is important to keep in mind that these chunks of time are by no means monolithic to historians. The medieval period, for example, has been divided into early, middle, and late ages. Thus what emerges in the chapters is less a chronology than a series of “quantum leaps” through Western history. At the same time there may be a benefit to this arrangement in the book. Borst (1996) undertakes a similarly fragmented study of approaches to language in the West, albeit in a shorterlength exercise. He examines six thinkers throughout Western history on the topic of language, and after summarizing his findings he writes: [These examples] cannot be summarized into a final composite, into the truth about mankind, history or speech. And little would change in that respect if we were to examine several thousand witnesses instead of six. . . . A complete and clear system is most

Introduction

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likely impossible, since history is not self-contained, as language is not, as mankind is not. Man is fragmentary, and for that reason he needs speech and history, for that reason he communicates. (Borst, 1996, p. 33) If Borst is right and human existence is fragmentary, then through its fragmentation one can begin to understand a good deal about the problems of alterity. As Hunt (1993) writes, “The strength and persistence of racism, one might say, actually thrives on incoherence” (p. 341). Cultures have often reached faulty conclusions about Others through incoherent thought processes like fantasy and even narrative. More often their decisions about the Other were based on power struggles than any kind of reasoning. While narratives appeal because of their “coherence,” Fisher (1984) tells us, they also appeal because of their “fidelity”: their ability to “ring true.” They ring true, but this is not the same as being true. If racism thrives on incoherence, one cannot allow Western history and Western biases to remain incoherent to future generations. Abandoning any attempt to understand the past—fragmented though it may be—serves only to perpetuate its problems. If any coherence can be lent to the historical grounding of alterity, then the incoherence of the narrative logic is exposed. Racism on some level can be eroded through this understanding. The erosion will occur “on some level” because there are contemporary battles to fight as well. As Haynes (2002) points out, it is possible but not necessarily fruitful to pinpoint the moments when racism or ethnocentrism tainted particular narratives. In and of itself, this historical study inaccurately mollifies the racism or ethnocentrism of one’s own time (Haynes, 2002, p. 222). Analyzing past narratives presupposes judgment. Reconnecting with history can fall too easily into a condemnation of the past, without considering consequences for the present. This is where narrative theory is particularly helpful. Since there exists the intertextuality of narratives, one can be sensitive to the moments where old narratives reemerge for similar historical moments and intercultural dynamics. Recognizing this, the attempt is to find the ways that previous rhetorical narratives on alterity now inform the present. There are, even now, communicative exigencies regarding identity and the Other, and Western cultures continue to answer these. The communication of alterity is more powerful than ever. Understanding the past is not easy, and some much wiser thinkers than we are have understood this over the past two millennia. Herodotus, Augustine, and even Mark Twain regarded the relationship between time and space as intercultural. They all indicated that it is just as hard to understand the strange customs of the past as it is to understand the practices of one’s contemporaries in faraway lands. This is a main line of inquiry in chapter 6.

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For now, their ruminations may inspire a deeper consideration of history— however flawed. One need not consider oneself superior to the mistakes of the past. On the contrary, one is a product of them. This particular history of alterity proceeds as follows. The first chapter sets the story of Medea against the background of Western democratic ideals in ancient Greece. Medea is cast as a “barbarian witch” first in oral tradition and then in Greek tragedy. Euripides’ play Medea is considered the “canonical version” of her story and provides a text for rhetorical analysis. Departing somewhat from previous critics of the play, this chapter argues that Medea’s “Otherness” emerges due to the theme of exile in ancient Greece and because of her unique position as a marginalized mother. Her story is then linked to the narratives of nineteenth-century African mothers in America who were said to kill their children rather than see them enslaved. The second chapter makes a case for including early Christianity as a significant era in Western history, one that must be included if Western alterity can be understood. Paul is cast as an allegory for the multiculturalism of ancient Rome, but his conversion story is also a “classic” in Western culture. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians, considered the earliest known Christian text, is examined as it pertains to the Roman and Jewish concepts of law. Paul’s narrative concerning universalism and Christianity provided the impetus for much of the acculturation—and perhaps cultural genocide—of the Other in later historical periods. Chapter 3 takes up the topic of medieval mythography. As part of the spread of institutionalized Christianity, the Church fathers glossed many of the myths from biblical primeval history—including Genesis 11:1–9, the “Tower of Babel story.” The Christian version of this story differs from the Old Testament texts. For Christians the canonical interpretation posits Nimrod, the descendant of Ham, as the certain builder of the Tower. Nimrod’s racial identity is then employed to justify all manner of oppression against Africans and their descendants in the history of the West. This chapter concludes that no matter which interpretation one follows, a primary issue of the Tower of Babel concerns limits—a narrative theme that has implications for contemporary Western identity formation as well. Chapter 4 is reflective of the Renaissance shift from Christianity to humanism. Shakespeare’s play Othello is taken from a collected Italian folktale, but, since the Renaissance, Shakespeare’s drama has been rewritten to interpret a variety of intercultural and interracial issues. I agree with a current argument that to apply a modern sense of race to Othello is anachronistic. Instead the chapter focuses on more complex intercultural problems. Othello’s conversion to Christianity and his military prowess highlight the power of public persona during the Renaissance. The chapter offers a new reading of

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the play that connects the stereotype of Othello as a great warrior to the realities that surrounded Native Americans in post–World War II America. Chapter 5 examines a different genre of storytelling. During the eighteenth century, the Bible was displaced in lending libraries throughout Europe by the rising popularity of the travel narrative. This chapter explores the convergence between exploration and philosophy as modes of knowledge during the Enlightenment, focusing on Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s voyage to Tahiti and the subsequent fantasies Denis Diderot wrote about that voyage. The argument in this chapter is that J. J. Rousseau never intended to speak about the “noble savage” as though he still existed in the eighteenth century, but such a figure aptly conveyed the liberty (and libertinism) that Diderot and his fellow philosophes wished to promote. The noble savage has been with us in the West ever since. Chapter 6 captures the Modern Western bias toward “Progress” within the character of Hank Morgan in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s choice of King Arthur as a narrative theme was in response to the Romanticism of nineteenth-century America and also underscores the power of oral tradition. Connecting the previous chapter’s emphasis on the emergence of science to concerns about anthropology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this chapter discusses the motif of the “fatal flaw” in contemporary stories of intercultural contact. Chapter 7 begins from the “entropology” cited in the previous chapter. Entropology is the sense that when the West makes contact with the Other, cultures are bound to disintegrate. This chapter examines the ramifications of this bias through the rise of cultural relativism. In the fragmented postmodern moment, the only cultural hero is one who can tell his audience precisely what they wish to hear. That hero is Trickster, a figure found in the narrative traditions of virtually every culture that has been studied. On the other hand, Trickster can be compelling for ideas on intercultural ethics due to his narrative of possibilities. I argue that Trickster has the cognitive complexity necessary for all students of culture. Cognitive complexity, indeed, is one goal of this work. Scholars have treated the topics in the following pages from specialized viewpoints and with expertise in their respective fields. I am not a biblical or literary scholar; I have been cognizant throughout the writing of these chapters of my own ignorance. What emerges is, ideally, heuristic. That is a second objective: that a close examination of these narrative tropes may break a path for the systematic and serious study of narrative in intercultural communication. Turning to face one’s own ignorance and culpability is unpleasant and arduous, but so is repentance. Americans have a curious ability to forgive—and also, unfortunately, to forget. One cannot have both, or one loses one’s footing, one’s identity, and one’s chance at dialogue. An opening to Western

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identities may begin in the following pages. The opening depends on the recognition that alterity and narrative are universal enterprises that nonetheless are evaluated and interrogated with the biases of history and can be reclaimed through contested narrative practices. Euripides’ Medea offers the first texturing and pragmatic discussion of cultural identity negotiation through the arbitrary “time period,” Ancient Greece, that has come to define Western identities.

CHAPTER ONE

So¯te¯ria, the Mother as Other MEDEA IN ANCIENT GREECE (AND BEYOND)

I

n the introduction, it was noted that “Ancient Greece” is typically a distinct unit within the construction of Western histories. All these biases— linear history, Ancient Greece, and Western Civilization—are integral to the formation of Western identities. Ancient Greece is exemplary of the arguments I laid out in the introduction: it is a narrative (spawning more evaluative accounts) of identity. It is “part of culture,” and because Ancient Greece has been narrated as the Birthplace of Democracy, it is not difficult to perceive its significance for the formation of Western identities. One evaluative account that should be provided about Ancient Greece, however, was written by one of its contemporaries, the playwright Euripides. In this chapter I contest other interpretations of his account of the folkloric figure Medea by interrogating the construction of alterity in Ancient Greece. Among the surviving stories from that time period, perhaps Medea is the character that leaves audiences with the most bipolar reactions. She alternately fascinates and repulses; one vacillates between pity and blame, empathy and disbelief. Her infanticidal actions are so engrained in historical memory that even twenty-first-century mass popular culture invokes her. In just the past decade, journalists have made prominent several infanticidal mothers: Susan Smith, Elizabeth Broderick, and Andrea Yates are just a few. In each case, at least one media market has referenced Medea during its report of the murders (Moroco, 2003). But the overuse of Medea to characterize twenty-first-century women and their postpartum depression is unjustified. The only semblance between Susan Smith and Euripides’ great queen Medea is that they both killed their children. While infanticide in general is too horrific an act to be put in such 21

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simple terms, narratively and specifically there is a deep contrast. The motives behind these actions were much different, speaking to historical as well as cultural diversity. Medea, as depicted by the tragedian Euripides, was driven by a maternal love specifically tuned to her Otherness in Greece. Her story was meant to explore the themes of passion, reason, and barbarism in Athens, at least in the short term for Euripides’ audience. In the long term, one finds a narrative trope that endures—not in spite of is horrifying qualities, but because of the continually grounded sense it gives to woman as Other. This chapter argues that the theme of So¯te¯ria (safety and deliverance) weighed heavily on Euripides’ Medea as she logically constructed her revenge against Jason—and that the outcome of her reasoning offers intriguing insights into Western origins of the Other. To unpack this argument, it will first be necessary to provide some historical and mythical background for Medea. Once this foundation is established, a discussion of Medea as Other is undertaken through the text of Euripides’ play, with special attention to So¯te¯ria. Finally, this chapter addresses the endurance of Medea’s story and the rhetorical uses of her actions in more contemporary time periods. In the end, Medea will be established as one of the first Western narrative tropes on Otherness that, although fictional, remains an important rhetorical metaphor in intercultural contexts. OF ATHENIANS AND ALTERITY Medea is first and foremost a mythical character, looming large in Greek oral tradition. Her mythical origins were set down in literature by Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica, after Euripides had already made key episodes of her narrative famous. But there is some evidence that she may have been a real person (just as many of the Greek gods and goddesses are suspected to be ancient culture heroes). Evidence of this fact is given to us by Herodotus, one of the Western tradition’s finest historians and ethnographers, as he briefly outlines the background to the wars between Persia and the Greek city-states. According to Herodotus’s knowledge, the war began because of resentment over a series of kidnappings. The Phoenicians apparently struck first, stealing Io, the daughter of King Anachus, during a merchant stop in Argos. In retaliation, some Greeks (Herodotus guesses they were from Crete) took the Phoenician princess, Europa: The Greeks sailed in a long warship to Colchian Aea, on the river Phasis. After taking care of the business they had come about, they abducted Medea, the daughter of the king. The Colchian

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king sent a messenger to Greece asking for his daughter back and demanding damages for the kidnapping. The Greeks answered that since the Phoenicians had not given damages for the kidnapping of Io, the girl from Argos, they would not give anything, either. (Herodotus, p. 4) According to Herodotus’s Persian sources, the kidnapping of Medea was Alexander’s justification for abducting Helen of Sparta two generations later. Herodotus does not comment on other details of Medea’s identity at this point, but it seems far too coincidental for the story not to be linked with Jason’s history, and also Euripides’ play. Indeed it is somewhat amusing to consider how Herodotus may be glossing over Jason’s capture of the Golden Fleece with this phrase: “After taking care of the business they had come about, they abducted Medea, the daughter of the king” (p. 4). The present intent is not to argue the fine points of Medea’s identity as an historical figure, but rather as a mythic one—so Herodotus’s arguments may prove moot. It is nonetheless interesting to note the way in which women are at the center of intercultural conflict between the Persians and the Greeks. That characterization of Medea, if nothing else, jibes with the rest of this chapter. As Medea is a famous figure in Greek myth, one is not surprised to find multiple literary versions of her story not only in ancient Greece, but also throughout all of Western history. Nonetheless, Euripides’ play remains “canonical” in discussions of the Medea narrative (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 231)—his version set the standard for all other dramas centered on her character. One reason why his variant of the story is so central may pertain to its ironic application of “appropriately Athenian” virtues. Euripides is considered one of the “Great Three,” with Sophocles and Aristophanes, among the Greek tragedians. In fact, Euripides’ plays were cited by Aristotle as the epitome of tragedy—which Aristotle defined as the purgation of pity and fear through the representation of these very emotions (Pucci, 1980, p. 16). Euripides was known for unsettled and unsettling types of stories; he continues to challenge the “norms” his audience may presuppose through the simultaneous evocation of opposing emotions such as sympathy and shock (Johnston, 1997, p. 9). Perhaps most unsettlingly, many of his characters use self-inflicted pain to their own rhetorical advantage (Pucci, 1980, p. 32). This is certainly the case in his Medea. When Euripides’ Athenian audiences experienced the play, they would have been very familiar with Medea’s story. It is one from that vast body of folklore based in the Heroic Age. In fact, it is quite a remarkable “exploration” story, identifying certain features of the geographic landscape (Burn,

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1965, p. 94), so that even in its humble beginnings the Medea tale is a salient one in the study of alterity. In Greek myth, just as in the historical example previously cited, Medea is a foreigner from Colchis on the far Eastern outskirts of the known world. She is said to be granddaughter to Helios, the sun, whose home is in the East (Graf, 1997, p. 32). Her role in Greek myth does not begin until the arrival of Jason in Colchis, during his quest for the Golden Fleece. Medea, daughter to the Colchian king, defies her father by helping Jason obtain his prize. Worse, she kills her brother Apsyrtus in order to ease her own and Jason’s escape, and then conspires with Jason to cause the death of Pelias of Iolcus (Jason’s place of birth and rightful kingdom). Apollonius reports in the Argonautica that Aphrodite has caused Medea to fall in love with Jason, and overall we might presume the Greek audience concluded that these murders occurred due to the power of eros. In the end, Jason marries Medea and they settle in Corinth, where she bears him two children. It is shortly after this point in Medea’s narrative that Euripides starts the action of his play. Jason is obviously a man of great ambition; his successful quest for the Golden Fleece proves that. But his ambition is also Medea’s undoing. Jason can never be a supreme ruler in Greece, for two reasons: first, he has been involved in murder. Second, and more significant to the argument in this chapter, his wife and sons are “barbarians.” To remedy these difficulties, Jason abandons Medea and secures the hand of Glauce, princess of Corinth, in marriage. Medea’s rage at this is naturally profound, but Jason misreads it as the passionate grief of a lover scorned—not the cunning anger of a marginalized mother. What happens next is one of the most shockingly famous revenge stories in all of oral tradition: after tricking Jason into false complacency, securing her own refuge in Athens, then poisoning Jason’s new wife and father-in-law (implicating her innocent sons in these murders), Medea ultimately kills both the children she bore to Jason. Again, this is a story the Athenians would have known quite well, and yet the suitability of Euripides’ chosen historical moment for setting this myth on stage is almost uncanny. His goal seems to have been an ironic representation of the traditional virtues of Athens. True, shortly previous to the first performance of Medea, Athenians erected the Parthenon, Herodotus penned his histories, and Pericles inspired political advances. Sophocles was writing his masterpieces, and peace reigned. But that peace ended the same year Euripides launched his heroine Medea onto the Athenian stage. And his city was tainted by the fact that, twenty years earlier, Athens had retracted the citizenry of immigrants, decreeing that those without Athenian parents on both sides must be disenfranchised (Burn, 1965, p. 219ff). It was a respectful disenfranchisement, in a way; the “foreigners” had a kind of honored sanctuary in the city. But it nonetheless underscored the significance of

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exile, which I posit as a key theme in Euripides’ tragedy. As this chapter will argue, for a foreigner in Athens, exile is the worst possible alternative to safety and deliverance. Lacking citizenship, if one faces exile, one is cut off from salvation—what the Greeks would have called “so¯te¯ria.” To draw out that theme, and sketch out a possible model of Otherness in Athens, this chapter turns now to an analysis of the play itself. ¯ TE¯RIA AND EXILE SO While it may be difficult to bracket off contemporary interpretations of Euripides’ tragedy (discussed later by means of counterarguments), in order to understand so¯te¯ria and exile as narrative tropes one must bear in mind the historical moment in which Euripides composed his plays. Information about that moment is scarce, of course (Haley, 1995), but even the citizen law of 451 B.C. gives sufficient clues about the political climate regarding alterity— especially Persian alterity—twenty years later. It is significant that it is against this backdrop, the Golden Age of Athens, that Euripides presented Medea to the world in 431 B.C. The significance lies in the fact that as in any performance, even though it may recall episodes from “long ago,” the author/performer cannot help infusing it with traces of his or her own time (Burn, 1965, p. 48). In Euripides’ story, Medea is quite clearly a “barbarian,” worse still an Asian—a representative of the perennial Persian enemy. Jason regards her as less capable of reason, more given to passions, since she is female as well as Colchian. But he is unprepared for the lengths she will go as Colchian, Asian, female, and mother. So¯te¯ria, or salvation, is the one consistent Greek value one can attribute to Medea. It underpins her actions throughout vacillations between passion and reason, maternal love and anger. Literary critics and scholars of ancient Greek offer a rich array of interpretations concerning Medea’s rhetoric throughout the play. As her distinction is horrific—she commits the unthinkable in killing her children—their evaluations of her motives and character development justifiably center on this final act. Their assessments run the gamut of inquiry, from feminist criticism (Sourvinou-Inwood, 1997) to psychology (Pucci, 1980). The psychologizing of Medea, while compelling, will not serve this chapter’s arguments. As a narrative trope, her child-murder must transcend the act of a “real” individual. Granted, one of the reasons she is so fascinating a character is that Euripides paints her realistically through her speech. She second-guesses herself; she falters; she is finally clever and cunning. She loves her children, she hates Jason. All of this is part of her story. And yet Medea cannot be real; she is, especially in her final moments of “triumph,” first and foremost a

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myth (Clare, 2002). If one is to learn from her about the Western construction of the Other, one must do so in narrative terms. The communicative praxis of Medea (especially Euripides’ crafting of her rhetoric) presents her as Other in her motherhood and her striving for so¯te¯ria. To understand this is not to reject other interpretations of Medea, but to texture them. So¯te¯ria is additive as an interpretation of Medea; consequently, traditional readings of Medea cannot be accepted on exclusive terms. In that sense, it is necessary to address some of the canonical ways scholars read Medea, and to make room in the discussion for so¯te¯ria as a specific narrative of the Other in ancient Greece (and beyond). First, the dialectic between passion and reason is highly persuasive in the cultural context of ancient Athens. It is most certainly one of the boundaries that Greeks drew between Greek and Other. At the same time, the tension between passion and reason is too simplistic in the whole of Medea’s rhetoric. Passion’s triumph over reason is only part of her story. She is presupposed to have an affinity toward reckless, unreasonable passion, being both a woman and a foreigner. Jason, in fact, misreads her anger at his new marriage as jealousy, specifically driven by her sexual desires. In this he is quite explicit (568–575). Medea too blames her actions on the anger within (thymos) that supposedly comes to rule her actions. She claims to have no control (1074–1076). But Medea’s voiced hesitations, prior to the act of infanticide, are all that one would expect from a “real” and complex character in a tragedy. Anything less would make Medea a monster, which is not Euripides’ intention. In fact, when Seneca wrote his own version of Medea he did so primarily as an extension of the Stoics’ arguments regarding passion and reason, and Nussbaum (1997) regards this as a failure purely because of Medea’s humanity. Seneca means the audience to judge Medea harshly because she allows passion to rule her reason; instead they are fascinated by Medea and drawn to her complexity. “Stoicism has bitten itself,” Nussbaum writes, for Seneca would never have meant audiences to prefer Medea’s passion, to wallow in her humanity (1997, p. 247). Outside the critical eye, a practiced reading of Medea also indicates that one may judge too quickly the tension between passion and reason. Medea’s oratory is most effective when she is calm and reasoned. Her wildly passionate rhetoric is reserved for three types of exigencies: soliloquy, dialogue with the sympathetic chorus, or deception (first of Jason, then of Creon). As noted, Jason mistakes her deception as typical, addlepated, oversexed, female talk—he thinks she is upset at losing him from her bed. Here is where an interesting irony of character occurs, for Creon does not accept Medea’s deception so easily. The irony lies in the rhetoric of Jason and Creon: Jason is glib, practiced in rhetoric, perhaps even a sophist. Medea certainly accuses him of such:

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To me, a wicked man who is also eloquent Seems the most guilty of them all. He’ll cut your throat As bold as brass, because he knows he can dress up murder in handsome words. He’s not so clever after all. (580–583) But Creon, in contrast to Jason, speaks consistently plainly—and consciously so. When Medea asks why he wishes to banish her, Creon replies, “I fear you. Why wrap up the truth? I fear that you / May do my daughter some irreparable harm” (282–283). Ironic, then, that Jason—who understands sophistry so well—does not recognize it in Medea, while Creon does. When the king of Corinth announces to Medea his official fiat—her banishment from the city—she tries to placate and flatter him, begging for mercy. He responds, Your words are gentle, but my blood runs cold to think What plots you may be nursing deep within your heart. In fact, I trust you so much less now than before. A woman of hot temper—and a man the same— Is a less dangerous enemy than one quiet and clever. (316–320) Note, too, that Creon makes no false judgments of Medea based on her womanhood; a person’s temper is evaluated equally whether man or woman. The issue for Creon is one of sophistry, and also of parental love. He states plainly that he fears for his daughter’s life, and therefore wants Medea removed. And it is this theme of exile itself on which the entire tragedy hinges. Exile must be addressed here, in terms of so¯te¯ria, even more stringently than the passion–reason argument. Even without extensive knowledge of political forces in Corinth, it is clear from Euripides’ clues that exile for foreigners was a fate worse than death. Such sentiments from Medea, a non-Greek, are certainly expected. Yet Euripides makes them repetitive and blatant. First, Jason’s sexism is overshadowed only by his ethnocentrism as he verbally spars with Medea. Herodotus, the great ethnographer of the ancient world, would no doubt consider him a typical Greek: Jason thinks any “barbarian” would consider herself lucky to find refuge in Greece, and tells Medea so quite bluntly. When she recounts all she did for him during his quest for the Golden Fleece, he retorts: But in return for saving me you got far more Than you gave. Allow me, in the first place, to point out That you left a barbarous land to become a resident Of Hellas; here you have known justice; you have lived In a society where force yields place to law.

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Alterity and Narrative Moreover, here your gifts are widely recognized, You are famous; if you lived at the ends of the earth Your name would never be spoken. (533–540)

These lines are doubly interesting because they do not merely separate out Colchis as a “barbarian” and lawless place. Here Jason situates them “at the ends of the earth,” and his ethnocentrism is value-laden as well as geographical. He certainly refers to values all Athenians espoused: justice and reason. But fame is what Jason—like many Greek men of his time—seeks above all else; fame spurred him toward the Golden Fleece, and fame will no doubt be his hamartia. There seems to be no question in his mind that fame is what Medea would value most as well. Later in his arguments he tries to persuade Medea that his marriage to Glauce is helpful to the whole family; after all, now they will be wealthy and their sons will be brothers to his new, Greek sons. He seems to imply that this is the next best thing to being born Greek. And in his final tirade, after he discovers Medea has killed the children, Jason laments ever having taken her from her “palace in a land of savages” (1329). He declares that no woman in all of Hellas would have committed these murders, and considers himself mad for choosing Medea over a Greek woman. Jason calls her a “Tuscan Scylla,” a redoubled metaphor for barbarian foreignness and geographical horror. In postmodern terms, the intercultural enmity in these passages is profound. In the face of such ethnocentric rhetoric, it is no wonder that Medea even begins to self-identify as a foreigner. Harkening back to her early days in Greece, she recalls “Coming among new laws, new customs” (239–240). The chorus follows this pattern as well (432–445). Medea also links herself closely with metaphors of wandering and travel: “My enemies have spread full sail; no welcoming shore waits to receive and save me” (279–280), and the chorus calls her “Poor Medea! . . . A wanderer, where can you turn?” (357–359). Most significantly, Medea strikes at the heart of the narrative in Euripides’ tragedy when she points out the true reason for Jason’s abandoning her: “But you’re an ageing [sic] man, and an Asiatic wife was no longer respectable” (591–592). Given her Asiatic status, it is narratively plausible for exile to come to the forefront of this tragedy. By this point in the play, she has committed no crime against the polis. But since she is already viewed as a barbaric, lawless foreigner, the hateful words she utters against Jason’s new wife, Glauce, are enough to send the princess’s father Creon into a panic. His action is swift and quite terrible for Medea. As Euripides unfolds the story, the reader is swept up into a series of events in which each one is more astonishing than the last. Thus it is easy to miss the most potent metaphor in the story—that is of exile.

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It is on exile that the whole horrible narrative hinges. At the beginning, when the audience first discovers Medea’s woe in her role of abandoned wife, her only thought is to kill herself. Inconsolable, she repeatedly expresses the wish to die (142–147). “Death is better,” she declares, than an unfaithful husband (245). Yet already we sense Medea’s cleverness and her cunning with words; when she speaks to the chorus she is calm, and her rhetoric is accusatory toward Jason. The Medea we encounter at the beginning of the play has multiple options open to her, and none of them includes infanticide. But again, she is a foreign “witch” feared by the king of Corinth, and, once he banishes her, her options are severely limited. The reaction of the other characters in the tragedy ought to make clear how grave Creon’s pronouncement truly is. Despite her misery at having been abandoned, her children’s tutor tells their nurse that Medea “has not heard the worst” (61). The nurse is shocked that Jason would allow for such a thing as exile to happen to his wife and children (72–73). And she is right to be appalled, for Jason himself understands the pain of exile in ancient Greece. Among his many sophistic attempts to explain to Medea the motives behind his new marriage, he includes the accurate and significant one that when they arrived in Corinth, Jason himself was “a stateless exile, dogged and thwarted by misfortunes” (552–553) and now counts himself lucky to advance his position through marriage to Glauce. Upon the news of banishment, then, Medea’s misery evolves into desperation. Her status has irrevocably reversed, in even worse ways than divorce might present. Before banishment she was a marginal foreigner, but marginality often has its uses (Herrnstein-Smith, 1978). Medea was accorded a certain amount of power and fame through marriage to Jason. She had many admirers because of her intelligence and her skills in magic, and these factors might have afforded her a tolerable life in Hellas. But banishment deprives her of this possibility as well. The momentum of her personal hell begins to build, not unrecognized by the chorus: O my country, my home! May the gods save me from becoming A stateless refugee Dragging out an intolerable life In desperate helplessness! That is the most pitiful of all griefs; Death is better. Should such a day come to me I pray for death first. (642–649) Euripides was an innovator in his use of the chorus; in his plays these characters carry heavy narrative burdens. In this passage, one senses a pivotal

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narrative moment and an essential cultural rhetoric. For the Athenian audience the chorus in this play are women of Corinth. They are more centrally “Greek” than Medea and therefore more credible. If a reasoned Greek voice in the play Medea declares death to be better than exile, no Athenian should be surprised at the murderous turns the character Medea begins to take. This is not to say that exile is the only motive behind Medea’s actions. However, the theme of exile offers a new perspective on the text and on intercultural communication. Critics have not yet paid enough attention to the importance of exile in the narrative or in ancient Greece. At the same time, to suggest that Medea’s desire for revenge, her pride, or even her foreignness itself is less important than exile would be to commit the same error. Here, I am exploring the Otherness of Medea in new ways. I am struggling with the ethnography of a different time and place, imagining what fates would be worse than death for an Asiatic maternal Other in Hellas. For these fates are those that endure. Medea’s fate is part of the beginnings of Western biases toward Others. Exile is a pivot on which Euripides’ tragedy turns because it is a severe limiter of Medea’s choices as a foreigner in Hellas. In this atmosphere of desperation, tragic events are set in motion. Interestingly, Medea’s desperation gives rise to clarity of thought and a narrative logic that ensures her success. After her banishment, she wants so¯te¯ria (salvation, safety, and deliverance) for herself and her sons. This is problematized by her vanity, for she still seeks revenge on Jason. Her wish is to kill Jason, Glauce, and Creon, but she knows that it must be done through devious means or else she may be caught in the act and put to death. This will not do, she tells herself; her sons would be stranded in “enemy land” without her, and her foes would “have the last laugh.” It is safer for her to use instruments of concealment: first poison to do the killing, and finally her unwitting sons to deliver the weapon. She arrives at these plans, however, only after being assured of so¯te¯ria for herself. She achieves the potential for refuge in Athens through an appeal to her friend Aegeus. Euripides thus posits the “open gate” of Athens as the solution to Medea’s exile, and it allows her vengeful plans to go forward. She sends for Jason and pretends to make peace with him, allegedly so that their sons can stay with him in Corinth and be raised as Greeks. “Not that I would think of leaving sons of mine behind / On enemy soil for those who hate me to insult;” she tells the chorus, “But in my plot to kill the princess they must help” (779–780). Medea drenches a golden dress and crown with poison, sets it in a trunk, and proposes to Jason that their boys can bring it to his new bride as a gift. She is acutely aware of the rhetorical devices of gift giving, and uses these to her advantage. Jason tries to dissuade Medea from giving away these valuable things, but she assures him that her gesture will help in buying freedom from exile for her sons. She

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continues this theme of exile in her speech: “To buy my sons from exile I would give life, not just gold” (968–969). Jason apparently accepts Medea’s reasoning, for he goes with the boys to the palace and tells his new wife to take the gifts “and ask / Your father to revoke their exile for my sake” (1154–1155). Jason’s sulking princess finally agrees. Jason and the boys exit Glauce’s chamber, she tries on her new finery, and dies a most gruesome death from the poison. Creon discovers Glauce and falls upon her lifeless body, weeping; he, too, succumbs to the venomous clothing and dies. Now, by the logic of the narrative, Medea assumes that she has no choice but to kill the children: Friends, now my course is clear: as quickly as possible To kill the children and then fly from Corinth; not Delay and so consign them to another hand To murder with a better will. For they must die, In any case; and since they must, then I who gave Them birth will kill them. Arm yourself, my heart: the thing That you must do is fearful, yet inevitable. (1233–1238) Of course, the audience may not be utterly persuaded that the murder is inevitable. Again, my intent is not to suggest that Medea kills the children purely out of maternal love and desire for so¯te¯ria; but she does not kill them purely out of revenge either, and that is where previous interpretations of Medea have been unsatisfactory. There is a keen narrative logic at work here, and while we may accuse Medea herself of putting in motion, it is powerful nonetheless. “The gods, / And my own evil-hearted plots, have led to this,” she weeps (1015–1016). Having implicated the children in Glauce’s murder, after supposedly assuring their security in Corinth, Medea is no doubt correct in assuming they will be punished. And so her revenge on Jason can become total, absolute: he will be left with nothing once she kills their children. All of this is undeniable. And yet there is a deeper narrative logic to Medea’s reasoning that has to do with divine notions of so¯te¯ria and maternal love. For note well that she says to Jason, “To buy my sons from exile I would give life, not just gold.” Never does she say “I would give my life”—only that she would give life, and that means giving up her sons’ lives. We should make no mistake in listening to Medea’s anguish before the actual murder in understanding that the loss of her sons is a terrible hardship. But she means to buy them from exile in any case. “For myself, exile / Is nothing,” she tells Creon earlier in the play; “I weep for them [my sons]; their fate is very hard” (348–349). For indeed, as we have seen, exile is universally understood by Euripides’ characters in this play to be worse than death.1 Jason himself

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(expelled from Iolcus, his rightful kingdom) claims to be motivated by the miseries of exile. And of all the reasons he gives for marrying Glauce, this is probably the most truthful one (especially when juxtaposed with Medea’s perceptive statement that Asiatic wives like herself are unsuitable for ambitious men like Jason). Yet Jason, like the Athenian ostrakon, could go elsewhere in Greece to seek his fortunes, and maintain hopes of returning to his homeland. So¯te¯ria is delayed for an exiled Greek, but for a banished foreigner so¯te¯ria utterly vanishes. So exile in and of itself is only part of the puzzle. Medea’s tortuous decision also stems from the desperation a foreign and exiled mother would feel for so¯te¯ria, the Greeks’ term for safety and deliverance. This is the key to the new reading of Medea. Previous scholarship on Medea sometimes elides the complexity of love as the Greeks understood it. There are multitudes of misunderstandings when ancient Greek is translated for twenty-first-century audiences (Diggle, 1994). I do not propose to solve those problems here or give a final pronouncement on what Euripides “really” meant. But for the sake of intercultural narrative study, it does seem fair to open up possibilities if they will enrich readings. And this is where my argument takes a radical turn: Medea speaks often of love, but does she always mean eros? Might one not learn more about Medea, and thus more about Otherness in ancient Greece, by exploring the complexity of love both during that time and beyond? Some passages from Euripides’ tragedy support the notion that Medea is driven by maternal love, not solely erotic love. For instance, it is a curious exchange between Medea and Creon that occurs during 329–331: CREON: I love my country too—next only to my daughter. MEDEA: Oh, what an evil power love has in people’s lives! CREON: That would depend on circumstances, I imagine. The lines preceding this exchange make no mention, by either speaker, of erotic love. Medea has taken them up, begging Creon not to banish her, and has made a tangential reference to “My home, my country!” (328). Again, exile permeates her words. Creon responds to her patriotic sentiment by introducing his love for his daughter into the conversation. Only then does Medea call love an evil power. So, given the rhetoric preceding her statement, it is a plausible conclusion that the love to which Medea refers is political or filial, not erotic. Jason has not been a topic of conversation for over twenty lines; even then he is a passing referent (Medea says, “I hate / My husband, true; but you had every right to [marry your daughter to him]” [310–312]). And how curious that Creon’s only response to Medea’s assessment of love as an evil power is the line: “That would depend on circum-

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stances, I imagine” (331). Were this to be a dark foreshadowing of events to come, wherein Medea will be so tormented by her scorned lust for Jason that she will go on a murderous rampage, we might expect a statement from Creon somewhat less banal than the one he gives here. It is possible that Medea means a different love altogether that causes pain and perhaps even evil at times. She speaks of the love Creon has for his daughter Glauce, which he has just introduced into the conversation. She recognizes it as akin to the love she has for her sons. From her perspective, paternal love drives Creon to the evil of banishing Medea, and it is true that he gives no other reason than his worry over Glauce. As for Medea, the impossibility of so¯te¯ria means she must kill her children. Love is the “evil power” in the whole equation, set in motion by Creon and carried to its only conclusion by Medea. So while conventional wisdom—along with centuries of literary criticism—states that Medea loses control of her reason because of her extreme passion, it is too tempting to leave the passion untextured and plain. There is no denying that Medea’s love for Jason quickly turns to hate; she admits herself that she takes pleasure in Jason’s pain, especially his anguish over their dead sons. But by the narrative logic of Euripides’ tragedy, erotic passion cannot be the sole reason for its outcome. At the beginning of the story, Jason abandons Medea, and she wants to die. Very soon thereafter, Medea is banished from Corinth—and she wants her children to die. Why? I argue this answer: because there is a grave difference between an exiled Greek and an exiled Other. For Jason, the opposite of exile is fame and power. In his quest for fame and power, exile is the root of all his problems. He is sent into exile as a mere baby by Pelias; he lives in exile until he can bring the Golden Fleece to Iolcus. But he overplays his hand and becomes greedy. The murder of Pelias sends him once again into exile, yet he can still attain fame and power by marrying Glauce. All the while his quests are discursive; he wins many friends with his words. Most important, his fear of exile is circumscribed by the ideal of the polis: he wants to be a man of Greece, and a powerful and famous one at that. Exile denies him the polis. But for Medea, the polis does not constitute the opposite of exile. As a foreigner, she already has to live without its benefits. Instead, one might say that the opposite of exile for her would be love. Were she not exiled from Colchis, she would still have her father and brother during her times of misery—she states this often in Euripides’ drama (the truth notwithstanding that she is responsible for these estrangements). More important, her exile from Corinth would be unbearable for her sons. Either they will stay behind to be persecuted by her enemies or will go into exile with her to be “begging beside the road” (516). Such a life would be worse than death; even the Corinthian chorus admits it. Her response to exile, unlike Jason’s rhetorical strategies, is visceral. It is drawn along the lines of philia. She takes savage

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action to save her sons from exile, grasping for its non-Greek antithesis: love. Once again, an indication of this cultural connection between love and so¯te¯ria, posited against exile, might be found in Medea’s rhetoric. Her final three lines to Jason cut him worse than a sword; she denies his request to touch their dead children, and mocks his tender sentiments, clearly fitting exile and love into a dialectic: Now you have loving words, now kisses for them: Then you disowned them, sent them into exile. (1372–1373) As further narrative evidence of Medea’s move toward murder to avert exile, we might point to the clues Euripides gives us about her sons’ divinity. According to myth, Medea is the granddaughter of the Sun. The Sun is, in fact, the deus ex machina that provides her escape from Corinth: our last glimpse of Medea shows her flying away in Helios’s chariot with the bodies of her sons. Her allusions to the boys’ kinship with the Sun are subtle, but provide support for an argument that the choice to kill the children secured their so¯te¯ria. She addresses them directly before their deaths, and twice describes her love for them through the metaphor of “city” or polis. But the city is not Corinth, or Athens, or any Greek place; broadly construed, she struggles to describe for them the safety they will find in death: O children, children! You have a city, and a home; And when we are parted, there you both will stay for ever. (1021–1022) At this point in the narrative, the boys may believe she is referring to Corinth, since as far as they know she has bargained with Jason and Glauce for them to stay behind while she is exiled. But in a dark allusion addressed to the tutor, just a few lines before, Medea has muttered, “I have others to send home” (1016, emphasis mine)—so the “city” to which she refers is a place to which she must send them, not a place they have been given permission to remain. In a more direct manner, she speaks to her sons again: “Dear sons, my blessing on you both—but there, not here!” (1069). The notion that so¯te¯ria may best be obtained through death is one with which the Athenian audience would identify. The motif is present in other stories, including a fable about Solon (democratizer of Athens) and his visit with Croesus of Sardis. Croesus was a man of great fortune, and enjoyed showing off his wealth to Solon. When his visitor had seen all his riches, Croesus asked Solon if he had met any man he thought to be more fortunate than all others—expecting that Solon would reply, “You, Croesus!” But Solon promptly answered, “Tellus the Athenian.” Croesus was shocked, and

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thought he ought to at least deserve second honor in this “contest,” so he asked Solon to name the next most fortunate man. There, according to Solon, was a tie: Cleobis and Biton were, after Tellus, the most fortunate of men—because, like Tellus, they had great fortune in death. There is no telling who has the greatest fortune until death befalls them, according to Solon. That point was supposed to resonate with the Athenians: “It is better for a man to die than to live” (Herodotus, p. 12). So Medea’s choice of death for her sons has some precedent in Athenian folklore and emerges as a more acceptable option than one may presuppose. Of course there are differences between the stories. Yet, as Herodotus is careful to point out, their story is meant to convey god’s dictum that a good death is more glorious than life. For Medea’s children, this sentiment is underscored by two unique aspects of their existence: First, they are greatgrandsons of Helios, and second—more important—they are non-Greek Others implicated in regicide. They may have lived in Corinth, or even Athens, after the deaths of Glauce and Creon, but living is far different from so¯te¯ria. From one standpoint, her aggressive actions are not so very divergent from Homeric virtue (Burn, 1965, p. 128). Medea chooses divine so¯te¯ria for her sons. Perhaps her real tragedy is that she fails to choose it for herself; Greek myth tells us her life in Athens will turn gravely difficult as well. Perhaps the best assessment of Medea, post-Euripides, comes from the Stoics. For Epictetus, Medea was “a great soul” who fell into failure because she cared about life too much and never gave her fate over to God (Dillon, 1997, p. 217). MOTHER AS OTHER: THE RHETORIC OF INFANTICIDE Epictetus and his fellow Stoics go on to say that Love tears a hole in the self. For Seneca, who wrote his own version of Medea after Euripides, the temperate love Aristotle idealized can never exist. No love can stop short of excess (Nussbaum, 1997, p. 221–222). In making his argument, especially through his play, Seneca is presupposed to refer to erotic love. The same is true of most readings of Euripides. But what love tears a hole in the self— both literally and figuratively—more thoroughly than maternal love? For the Greeks, eros was conceived as more of a life force than a god (Burn, 1965, p. 78). Eros was not a concept easily personified or anthropomorphized. Maternal love, on the other hand, has stood since the dawn of civilization as the foundation on which life is built. I argue that it is maternal love that makes audiences uneasy with Euripides’ Medea, not eros. Eros is amorphous, volatile, and subject to the whims of the gods; maternal love is supposed to be bounded, predictable, set in place by the “normative ideology of the polis”

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(Sourvinou-Inwood, 1997, p. 254). Medea’s reaction to Jason is almost unsurprising in Euripides. Audiences are all too familiar with that story. But her actions toward the children are another matter altogether. Medea makes audiences ponder maternal love, shaking their own so¯te¯ria and then ultimately redoubling it. For as the nurse implies in her soliloquies in the opening stages of Euripides’ Medea, it is the mother who bears the responsibility for ensuring her family’s so¯te¯ria (Pucci, 1980, p. 37). This, I have argued, is the impact of Euripides’ narrative on the history of intercultural contact in Western civilization. It is no surprise that Medea remains a memorable and prominent literary motif, since the horror of a mother killing her children is not easily forgotten. Yet shock is not sufficient to yield appropriation in narrative; plenty of stories—both real and imagined—are too horrible ever to tell again. Instead Medea’s power comes from what the story can tell about identity and alterity in Western thought, both in ancient Athens and beyond. As noted in the introduction to this chapter, contemporary journalists have occasionally referenced Medea in their analysis of American women who have killed their children out of severe depression or because their romantic partners were reluctant to maintain a relationship with a woman who already had children. Any mother guilty of infanticide, by the reasoning of many Americans, is ripe for the label “Medea.” But I hope this chapter has argued effectively against such oversimplified characterizations. Euripides’ Medea is not defined solely by her infanticide. She is defined by her Otherness, and in the course of Western history this complex character has reemerged and been put to use rhetorically in moments of intense intercultural conflict. The most prominent cases when Medea has come forward as a narrative motif concern the plight of slave mothers in nineteenth-century America. In abolitionist literature, the theme of the slave mother killing her children rather than seeing them enslaved is fairly common. Examples range from the fairly obscure, as in John Jolliffe’s Belle Scott (1856), to the well known, such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). It is possible, even probable, that some slave women did kill their infants rather than see them live in bondage—but the number of cases is most likely much lower than the abolitionists might have thought. Part of the reason for the discrepancy is no doubt due to their zealous use of rhetoric in the antislavery fight, but another reason may be purely medical. There was a much higher rate of infant mortality among slave mothers than white mothers during the antebellum period in the American South, but given what is currently known about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), many of the African American slave infant

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deaths might be attributed to poor nutrition and bad living conditions that led to a higher rate of SIDS (Weisenburger, 1998, p. 259). This consideration, of course, does not mitigate the loss of so many African American infants. Whether these children died because of the conditions of slavery or the resistance of their parents to those conditions, the institution of slavery and its perpetrators are culpable. But these nuances of historical accuracy are necessary to understand how the infanticidal slave mother—called the modern Medea after a fashion—was, like the classical Greek Medea, a cultural icon that transcended real people. It was the rhetoric of infanticide that mattered, not immutable fact. This was the case even when a “true” modern Medea emerged in the form of Margaret Garner in Ohio in 1856. Margaret was enslaved on a plantation in Kentucky, wife of Robert Garner and mother to four children. She had two boys and two girls aged infant to six years old when the family— including Robert’s parents—made a run for the free soil of Ohio. Margaret’s “master,” Archibald Gaines, and his posse of men caught up with them just across the Ohio River and surrounded the cabin where the family had sought refuge. Cornered like a trapped animal, apparently knowing she would be severely punished and returned to slavery, Margaret killed her infant girl and attempted to murder the other three children as well. She was unable to complete her mission because the authorities outside burst into the cabin and arrested her (Weisenburger, 1998). A sensational criminal trial followed. In a strange twist, Margaret’s defense lawyer was the abolitionist John Jolliffe who had written Belle Scott just prior to meeting Margaret. His novel, as previously noted, included an episode in which a slave mother murders her child rather than relinquishing her to bondage. Initially, reporters believed that Margaret’s husband Robert was responsible for little Mary Garner’s death because of the amount of blood on his clothes when the family was apprehended. And, interestingly, newspapers still turned to classical myth in delivering the story to their readers: Robert was compared to the Roman Lucius Virginius, who killed his maiden daughter Virginia when her paternity was unfairly questioned by Marcus Claudius. Rather than allow his daughter to be abducted and raped through the ruling of the court, Virginius killed her (Weisenburger, 1998, pp. 87–88). The use of this Roman myth in an 1856 newspaper has great significance. Bauman and Briggs (2003) argue that the rhetorical connection between modern “Others” and the ancients was an important facet of race and ideology in this period. Thus, when it came to light that Margaret had killed little Mary, she became Medea in the rhetoric of multiple parties involved in the case (Weisenburger, 1998).

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In his chronicle of Margaret Garner’s life, Weisenburger (1998) argues that it may be only fitting that Margaret’s story disappeared from national consciousness in the wake of the states-rights arguments that dominated discussions of slavery after the Civil War. Margaret, like Medea, needed to disappear from the stage—any “normal” ending to her life would have lacked narrative logic. One true episode definitely confirms Margaret’s stated intentions in killing Mary: While the Garners were being shipped South on the Ohio River, back to slavery in Kentucky, Margaret jumped overboard with her other daughter, who drowned. It was reported that after Margaret was pulled from the water, she rejoiced, triumphant that now both her daughters would be spared the terrors of slavery (Weisenburger, 1998). But after that, and for over a century, Margaret’s legend was lost. The rhetoric of infanticide was replaced by the rhetoric of the Union until the late twentieth century, when popular perspectives on antebellum America looked once again to the inhumanity of slavery. The polyphony of the postmodern era gave rise to such considerations; perhaps the most famous (and effective) examples of a contemporary Medea are manifested in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987) and the film that followed (1999). Morrison based her book, in a very loose way, on the story of Margaret Garner (New York Times, 1987, p. 17). Once again, the narrative motif of infanticide—to spare the child something worse than death—was revived and settled back into popular Western discourses on the Other. The arguments in this chapter are supported by further cross-cultural comparisons. The Japanese ritual of boshi-shinju, mother–child suicide, often reflects particular values that take precedent over living existence. In such cases shame has proven resolvable only through boshi-shinju. The Japanese mother–child relationship in this context is similar to the expectations of the role of the mother in ancient Greece as well as African American culture. Takahashi and Berger (1996) cite the 1985 case of a Japanese woman in California who sought to commit boshi-shinju out of shame due to her husband’s extramarital affairs. They point out that the woman spoke no English and had no support system in the United States. It is not difficult to perceive the woman as a marginalized and exiled mother in the same vein as Medea.2 In drawing these comparisons with Beloved and the existence of Japanese boshi-shinju, I am not implying that they are dependent on the Medea myth (and therefore the Western canon). One is able to read Morrison’s novel—and be moved by it—regardless of one’s familiarity with Medea or even Margaret Garner, for that matter. The point in making this reference is only that the narrative theme has endured and given expression to those “radical Others”—mothers—who are oppressed. All of the stories are complicated, but all commonly call on universal human experience that cannot be coincidental. In Euripides’ time, it was common for philosophers to make

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“an argument from the poets” that suggested how we ought to live (Dillon, 1997, p. 211). Centuries later, Margaret Garner’s lawyer John Jolliffe summed up his case with an appeal to “commonsense morality,” drawing on the New Testament and English literature for his final abolitionist argument (Weisenburger, 1998, p. 146). The prosecution, it must be noted, resented Jolliffe’s “absurd” insistence on putting the trial “within the humanities”—the prosecuting lawyer used those very terms when objecting to the court (Weisenburger, 1998, p. 159). One might accuse me of having the same bias. The thread of “Medeas” throughout history may be tenuous by scientific standards, but I am interested in plausibility, not proof. Euripides’ Medea opens up alterity because its retellings produce a dynamic intertextual dialogue. Euripides’ drama is a timeless narrative that encapsulates what it means to be barbarian, woman, Other, and mother. In that sense it must be embedded in the humanities, for it tells about the yearning for love, salvation, deliverance, and home. All of these, in the Medea motif, are radically opposite not merely to slavery and death, but to the threat of exile that haunted foreigners in Greece. The marvelous polis of Athens, the first democracy of the Western world, is called into existence in historical memory by the story of a woman—a witch, a foreigner, a mother—who dramatically opposed all of its virtues except for so¯te¯ria. The next chapter’s narrative more directly engages soteriology, placing “early Christianity” within the horizon of significance for the construction of Western identities. The Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians forms a highly contested narrative of alterity in its implications for universalism. I examine this debate in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER TWO

A Man Cannot Be a Prophet in His Own Country SAINT PAUL AND UNIVERSALISM

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he Greek ideal of salvation (so¯te¯ria) discussed in the previous chapter is fairly canonical to Hellas during the time of Euripides. Certainly the notions of safety and deliverance, in opposition to exile, resonated with the Athenians who first experienced the story of Medea. And that same Greek word takes on different shape through the Hellenistic era and in the context of Greco-Roman culture, particularly for readers of a whole new literature in Greek—the letters and works that became the New Testament. Salvation in the early Christian era introduces a complex set of questions about the Other in Western civilization, since alterity in the first centuries A.D. metamorphosed in unprecedented fashion. Initially, the Christians were Others to their fellow Jews, then to “pagan” Romans, and finally transcended the status of “Other” to embody the official religion of the Roman Empire. This rapid turnaround, occurring in less than 300 years, is astonishing—and is given shape through many narrative heroes. Among these, there is a standout figure who exemplifies alterity in ways that even Jesus of Nazareth could not. Paul of Tarsus (popularly known as Saint Paul) provides a rich narrativity that approximates the intercultural complexity of the early Christian era. He provides this through the historical details of his existence, the ubiquitous familiarity of his story, and the communicative documents he left behind. As the “Apostle to the Nations,” Paul is presented in Western history as the first best intercultural communicator. The story of his vision on the road to Damascus is a classic legend. The

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shocking change of heart he experienced in regard to his persecution of the early Christians ranks as one of the best plot twists in Western literature. And the letters he wrote to the budding churches of the Gentiles are still considered pedagogical texts in Christian congregations all over the world. This chapter advances a gestalt view of Paul that incorporates all these factors in the reckoning of alterity in the Western tradition. The particular focus is on the implications of his letter to the Galatians as a foundation for universalism. I argue that Paul’s narrative should be construed as a memorate and this has enduring implications for universalism, the meaning of Galatians, and contemporary identity negotiation. As many commentators throughout the centuries (including Martin Luther) have pointed out, Paul’s letters remain the only “truly doctrinal” documents of the New Testament (Badiou, 2003, p. 33). But choosing Paul as the subject of this chapter does not presume any kind of supernatural faith on the part of the reader. Again, this book is about the center and how it has constructed and regarded the periphery for the last two and a half millennia. Christianity is central to at least half of that time in Western history, and the era of early Christianity must be included in any discussion of the development of Western biases toward the Other. In that sense then, the intentions are purely “secular.” However, the religious nature of this chapter does add an enriching dimension to general aims in this book. Surprisingly, scholars of intercultural issues have not yet paid enough attention to the role of religion in theories about race and ethnicity. This is especially true of early Christian history (Buell, 2002, p. 440). The few sources that can be found on these topics indicate that religion, ethnicity, and civic identity were all intertwined during late antiquity. These interconnections functioned in a number of ways. Sometimes ethnic, cultural, religious, and civic identities were causally connected; they could also be “mutually constituting” (Buell, 2002 p. 440). Both these dynamics are present in Paul’s narrative and communication. Paul’s ultimate legacy to alterity in the Western world stems from universalism. But a few points must be made prior to that argument. First, this chapter briefly reviews Paul’s identity and applies scholarly perspectives to it, discussing the concepts of mission, syncretism, prophecy, and law. Then, Paul’s letter to the Galatians is placed in historical and rhetorical context. The letter to the Galatians is believed to be Paul’s first epistle and the oldest surviving Christian document (Barnett, 2000; Mitchell, 1995). More important, however, events surrounding the Galatian community provide the most significant narrative of alterity in the early Christian era and the letter itself offers Paul’s clearest communication on universalism and “intercultural” religious issues. All these points are taken in turn, beginning with Paul’s background.

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SAULOS, HO KAI PAULOS: THE FIGURE OF PAUL IN THE ROMAN CONTEXT Aside from Paul’s letters and Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, there is no official history of Paul. He lived at a time when “official” written history was scarce, and the scribes of the Roman Empire cared very little about small groups of Christian cults (Badiou, 2003, p. 18). So the history available is somewhat fragmentary, but nonetheless compelling. One reason Paul is so compelling as an “alter-hero” for this time period is that his very being is a metaphor for the mixture of cultural and political forces brought to bear in the Roman Empire. The figure we know as Paul was born in Tarsus to a family of Pharisees, yet he inherited the Roman citizenship of his father. He was named Saul. Saul’s childhood in Tarsus was one that would greatly impress today’s proponents of pluralism. Although the Jewish community in Tarsus was cohesive and kept themselves fairly separate from other groups in social interactions, they were active in the metropolitan commerce of the city. Saul’s family was no exception. His father was a tent-maker, and this fact influenced Saul’s life in two ways. First, his father was respected in the Jewish community for his craft—a cultural subtlety that did not extend to the larger Greco-Roman world. Second, Saul helped in the family business and would have had to know three languages: Aramaic for everyday speech at home, Hebrew for prayer, and Greek (koine, the language of the middle class) for business interactions. Tarsus itself was a great cultural center; its universities surpassed even those of Athens and Alexandria (Pathrapankal, 1987, p. 290). We can assume from Saul’s birth into the Pharisaic tradition that he spent his early years as a student of Jewish law. The Pharisees were those who wanted to “raise the hedge of the law still higher.” Paul himself tells us in Galatians that he was second to none in zeal for the law. As a result, he knew very well from Deuteronomy that God has cursed any man hung on a tree. The crucified Jesus of Nazareth certainly fit this description, and Saul rejected as blasphemous any claim that Jesus was the Messiah. In the years following Christ’s death, Paul was an official appointee of the Sanhedrin in their attempts to wipe out the “Christian” movement. Saul persecuted and arrested Christians. He was present at the stoning of Stephen, first martyr of the Catholic Church. Indeed, tradition has it that he was not only present but oversaw the stoning ritual. He was the Pharisee “in charge.” Following the death of Stephen, Saul obtained permission from Jewish leaders to go to Damascus and investigate the state of Christianity there in order to stop its spread. Any Westerner who has been to Sunday school

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knows what happens next. On the road to Damascus, Saul was suddenly blinded by a light and heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He replied, “Who are you, Lord?” The voice answered: “I am Jesus Christ.” Saul’s companions had heard the voice but not seen the light, and they were very frightened. Saul remained blind, so they led him (as Christ had ordered them) to Damascus, where he could not see for three days. Meanwhile Christ also spoke to Ananias, one of His followers in Damascus, and told him to help Saul. Ananias did as he was told, though he remained suspicious of Saul. How could a man who was coming to arrest Christians suddenly become a Christian himself? Ananias then learned of Christ’s plan for Saul, who was soon to assume the name Paul. Christ himself told Paul that he must go to the Gentiles and bring them the news of the Resurrection. Paul is thus something of a mystical figure, but he was also hardheadedly pragmatic. This is particularly true when it came to issues surrounding Gentile conversion to Christianity and the cultural practices that should be developed in accordance with belief in Christ. These issues concerning cultural practices are discussed later in this chapter. Paul’s faith never wavered despite being stoned nearly to death himself in Lystra, despite ridicule at Athens, and despite long years of disagreement with his fellow Jewish Christians and his anxieties about the new churches throughout Asia Minor. Paul ultimately died a martyr for the Church around age sixty. His impact on the world is almost beyond measure: without Paul, many say, Christianity would likely have remained an offshoot of Judaism, a breakaway sect confined to a particular area of the earth. Believers counter that nothing could have stopped the spread of the Word, the profound Truth that was the Resurrection. But regardless of one’s religious stance, Paul is a narrative character who commands attention and consideration. This would be true even if his narrative is a fiction. Even beyond these remarkable events in the story of Paul, his nature and character present provocative semiotic arguments regarding alterity in early Christianity. Paul’s name in and of itself symbolizes a number of pluralistic concerns. Destined to spend his youth as a student of the holy law, he was named “Saul” at birth (after the first king of Israel). One scholar has suggested that in Greek, “Saulos” is a virtual homonym for “one who waddles”; thus “Paulos” was a more suitable name derived from Rome. The fact that Paul should have concerns for how his name translated into the Greek does indicate the multicultural nature of the society in which he lived and traveled. However, there are more essential points to make about his name change. Certainly it represented a “rebirth,” a shift in allegiance from the Holy Law of Moses to the Resurrection of Christ. Narratively speaking, we are meant to infer in the move from Saul to Paul that the conversion on the

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road to Damascus changed every part of the young Tarsian Pharisee’s identity. He was Saulos ho kai Paulos—“Saul, now called Paul,” according to the author of the Acts of the Apostles. Not coincidentally, either, the name change occurred during Paul’s first mission to Cyprus. The narratives of Acts, together with Paul’s letters, indicate that Paul becomes a leader during this mission and acts solidly of his own accord for the first time. Barnett (2000) invokes recent archaeological evidence suggesting that Saul took the name “Paul” in order to honor Sergius Paulus. The proconsul of Cyprus named in chapter 13 of Acts, Sergius Paulus was the first high Roman official to profess his belief in Christ. “By adopting this name it appears that Sha’ul had now placed himself under the patronage of Sergius Paulus, and by traveling to his region (possibly with a letter of introduction) the vulnerable missionary was seeking the succour and protection of the powerful Sergii family who owned major estates in Pisidia and Lycaonia” (Barnett, 2000, p. 113). Another viewpoint on the name change asserts that “Paul” is derived from gens paulinia, and recall there is also the Greek “one who waddles” argument that may have provoked the name change. These various perspectives on Paul’s decision to change his name add interesting texture to multicultural issues in the Roman Empire, yet none can be definitively proven. It is more significant that the name change “was in harmony with the great truth [Paul] was promulgating: that henceforth the partition between Jew and Gentile was broken down” (Ramsay, 2001, pp. 82–83, emphasis mine). Seen in this particular light, the transformation from Saul to Paul is very profound indeed. It indicates that Paul’s internal metamorphosis was intended for “all the nations.” This is the crux of Paul’s significance as a “hero” in Western alterity, whether or not one subscribes to a theocentric worldview. The next section of the chapter summarizes some of the influences Paul has had in Western conceptions of the Other as well as some of his various points of significance for narrative scholarship. PAUL’S IMPACT ON CONCEPTS OF ALTERITY: SOME PERSPECTIVES AND BACKGROUNDS To understand Paul, one must appreciate the radical nature of bringing Christ “to all the nations” in the era in which he lived. Ironically, it was the Roman Empire itself that made this possible. Early Christianity was an “urban” movement (Meeks, 1986, p. 15). The Roman Empire promoted interdependence between cities in the same way the Greeks (beginning with Alexander) had done before. This interdependence, coupled with the

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outstanding civil engineering projects of the Romans, provided an ease of travel the Western world had never known before (Meeks, 1986, p. 17). More important, The cities were places where changes could occur. The central characteristic of villages, MacMullen [1974] points out, was their conservatism. People living at the edge of subsistence do not take risks. If some extraordinary circumstance impelled a villager to seek change—a lucky inheritance, a religious vision, money saved up—it was to the city that he went. (Meeks, 1986, p. 19, emphasis mine) Paul fits into this rubric quite easily. Both in Acts and his own epistles, Paul is described as someone who has been transformed. Naturally, he embraces this change with movement throughout the empire from city to city. Moreover he is a “city boy” himself and accustomed to urban survival. Even his communicative devices differ from Christ’s in their “urban” rather than natural quality. Knowing the cities as he does, he leads Christians in the ability to connect quickly in urban contexts with other Christians (Meeks, 1986, p. 20). It was an urban movement indeed. The narrative depicts Paul as embracing this aspect of his mission. One of the inquiries I bring to Paul’s mission is the topic of syncretism. This is a process especially useful to persuasion in intercultural exigencies. Syncretic rhetoric utilizes the emic (contextual) terms of a given culture to explain etic (universal) themes. Often the missionic impulse is to “fit” a theological concept into existing epistemological systems of the convert. In the last chapter of this book, for example, I note that in Brazil the Condomblé trickster character named Exu is linked with the angel Gabriel (Williams, 1979, p. 114). This is an example of two religious systems coming together in syncretism. There are some who would criticize syncretic rhetoric in intercultural conversion, however. Paul’s mission addresses these questions, especially in the narrative of his preaching at Athens. I now explain Paul’s initial impulse and his deepening sense of the Resurrection story as a memorate. Recall that the very circumstances of Paul’s birth posit him as a significant figure in alterity for the early Christian period. It is equally compelling to metaphorically examine his name change from Saul to Paul, since it encapsulates so clearly and poetically the transformation from Jew to Christian in a pluralistic Roman world. But more significant than either of these symbolic qualities—birth and name—is the nature of Paul’s communication vis-à-vis his new identity. In taking an overview of Paul’s writings and works, many scholars have been struck by the syncretism present in his struggle to bring the narrative of Christ beyond Jewish communities. I will survey just a few of these in the following paragraphs.

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First, as in all subjects, Paul should be placed against the background of Rome. From his background in a university center, he was most likely aware of the details of Stoic and Epicurean philosophies. His use of Greek proverbs indicates he was very familiar with Greek thought. His hometown of Tarsus was a superb university center in its time, rivaling Athens and Alexandria. At the point in Paul’s narrative when he is able to visit Athens itself (Acts 17), one might only imagine the intellectual attraction Paul could have felt. Despite its decline, Athens was still an academic haven in Paul’s time. Whatever interest Paul may have felt in the academy was quickly displaced, however, by rage when Paul encountered the many idols erected at Athens. Daniel-Rops (1963) suggests that the idols would have been particularly difficult for a Jew to accept, but the author of Acts indicates that Paul overcame his indignant feelings to put the existence of the idols at his advantage when he had the opportunity to address the Areopagus of Athens. Indeed, this event relayed in Acts provides a marvelous example of syncretism in theological rhetoric. Observing the “unknown god” idol at Athens, Paul attempted to persuade the crowd assembled that it was Jesus who was unknown to them. He recounted the events of the Resurrection in describing this Jesus, but was met with laughter. The Stoics in particular found such a story absurd. Paul had perhaps hoped to exploit the fact that “In the pagan world the greatness . . . of a god depended on the greatness . . . of the people, city and shrine dedicated to his cult” (Heschel, 1962, p. 11). Was he discouraged by the ridicule? Undoubtedly. However, the rest of Paul’s ministry suggests that the events at Athens comprised a felix culpa, a happy mistake—for it was there that he realized Christianity was not a philosophy. The Resurrection was unsuitable for metaphysical argument; the power of its rhetoric was felt far more palpably in heavenly voice, in a Damascus-like revelation. “Just as the Resurrection remains totally incalculable and it is from there that one must begin, Paul’s faith is that from which he begins as a subject, and nothing leads up to it” (Badiou, 2003, p. 17). Paul’s knowledge system is then best described as “antiphilosophy.” I suggest that a stronger focus on Paul’s conversion narrative as a memorate may unlock his legacy for Christianity and ultimately for Western thought. In folkloristics, a memorate is defined as a personal narrative with elements of the supernatural contained within it. The narrator is convinced of the “truth” of the supernatural essence of the experience and relates the narrative as a real event. In such a context, Paul’s conversion and his mission to the Gentiles are a common form of narrative experience. By the logic of law and philosophy, Saul rejected Christ as cursed by God, hung on a tree. In the singular and “incalculable” (as Badiou writes) moment of the hearing of Christ’s voice, however, Paul’s only context is belief. As I explain later in this chapter as a central thesis, philosophy and law are no longer of any

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consequence to Paul or to the Christians. Paul describes the encounter with Christ’s voice in a different letter when he writes that he heard things that human lips may not speak (II Cor. 12:2–4). This was the second letter to the Corinthians, in which Paul’s narrative of conversion has been reestablished as the center of his rhetoric in conjunction with the Resurrection. Thus I link the failure of syncretism at Athens with Paul’s vision described in his second letter to the Corinthians. It is a turning point in Paul’s mission when he leaves Athens for Corinth. Corinth-as-epistolaryaddressee provides part of a textual answer to Paul’s attempt to persuade the crowd in Athens, and Corinth-the-city also became the next stop on his itinerary. In his own narrative Paul offers clues that Athens really was a felix culpa that expanded his ministry not just in terms of space but also in genre and field. At Corinth he began to move beyond intellectual circles and the synagogue (Daniel-Rops, 1963, p. 96). In terms of alterity, it was in these arenas that he confronted “the average and the ordinary, who from their ethical standpoint were below average” (Pathrapankal, 1987, p. 297). Athens thus represents a turning point in the narrative. While Paul continues his goal to “be all things to all people” in order to make visible the word of God, he understands perhaps for the first time that his stories about the Resurrection do not constitute a philosophy, or even perhaps a theology. Paul has no theology of his own, he tells us; he has God’s word. He has undergone yet another revelation and transformation to prophet. While the events at Athens do not constitute a key focus of this chapter, the narrative in Acts does help us understand more fully the intercultural rhetoric that Paul employs in the remainder of his mission. He becomes one in a long history of individuals who “said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its waywardness, and syncretism” (Heschel, 1962, p. xv). In other words, his communication is prophetic. The argument turns now to that prophetic quality. As with all aspects of Paul’s character, prophecy and prophetic narrative are best seen in light of the Hebrew tradition into which Paul was born. Once again it is important to emphasize that Paul was a Pharisee. He was born into a group whose primary concern was to keep Judaic law pure and stringent. Thus for Saul the “Hebrew tradition” was not a vague factor in his upbringing, but composed instead the unquestionable center of his education. When we read about Paul’s “break” with Judaic law later in his career, that rift is reified in a startling way by the initial importance of the law in his life as a Pharisee and persecutor of the earliest Christians. In his commitment to the Holy Law, Saul would have been equally influenced by stories of the Hebrew prophets—the ancestral orators who exhorted their people to obedience of God. Prophecy in this context is best defined as “exegesis of existence from a divine perspective,” according to

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Heschel (1962, p. xiv). Stated implicitly from both religious and rhetorical perspectives, Heschel explains that the prophet’s fundamental objective is reconciliation between God and the people who have strayed from him. The reconciliation is necessary because of the evil of humans, not the neglect of God. When Heschel writes of the “deafness” of humans to the word of God, we are reminded of Martin Buber’s (1952) Eclipse of God—it is the human agent who has refused communication, not God who has chosen not to speak. Barnett (2000) agrees that Paul is prophet-like in his privileging of the “call” of God over the approval of his fellow men (Barnett, 2000, p. 123), as I discuss next in relation to Paul’s letter to the Galatians. If Paul like the Hebrew prophets before him made the call of God his highest priority, it is tempting to believe that the prophet in general acts as a mere conduit for the voice of God. The prophet may mistakenly be thought of as a vehicle or a reporter of speech. Heschel emphasizes that this is not the case. God does not talk “through” the prophet. The prophet, instead, is in a unique position to “see” the relationship between God and humans, and to narrate this relationship (Heschel, 1962, p. 24). This ability of the prophet derives from the prophet’s “prophetic sympathy” with divine pathos (Heschel, 1962, p. 26). Yet being in the third position of “narrator” of the relationship between God and God’s people, the prophet is not a “ ‘singing saint’ nor a ‘moralizing poet,’ but an assaulter of the mind” (Heschel, 1962, p. 10). “The prophet seldom tells a story, but casts events. . . . The purpose is not ‘the purgation of emotions,’ but communication” (Heschel, 1962, p. 7). Thus the prophet is more than a messenger, according to Jeremiah 15:19—the prophet “stands in the presence of God.” In terms of the Hebrew tradition, prophets were most prominent in historical moments of intense intercultural contact and conflict. Isaiah speaks in large part from his dismay that Israel has aligned with Egypt against Assyria, for example. Jeremiah emerges out of the Assyrian decline but consequent rise of the Babylonian Empire. As Muilenburg (1965) writes, “One of the most striking [and pervasive] features of the prophetic polemic [is] the denunciation and distrust of power in all its forms and guises” (p. 89). These Hebrew prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah, who helped narrate God’s relationship to Israel in moments when Israel was decidedly “Other” and marginalized in terms of power, jibe with Muilenburg’s observation. Paul is less easily categorized in his prophetic rhetoric, however. As Saul he supervised the stoning of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was said to be hotheaded and explosive in his speech. Little more is known about Stephen, but it is likely that he represents the Hebrew prophetic tradition more than Paul. We can point to divergences in Paul’s messages that break with the communication of the Hebrew prophets. Paul’s journeys were

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consistently guided by supernatural visions and voices; for example; he goes to the Gentiles because Jesus appeared to him and told him that was his purpose. Similar events may be implied in the Old Testament books of the prophets, but in Paul’s narrative they are blatant. Christ’s voice is necessary in direct address to Paul in order for most of his early work to be accomplished. He is not merely converted by Christ’s voice, but continues to heed its direct words throughout the story of the early Church. In terms of alterity, the most significant break Paul has with the earlier prophets in his tradition is that he does not rail against colonial authority in the same way Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others did. The Jews had shaken off colonialists and alliances before—most famously the Mesopotamians through Abraham, and the Egyptians through Moses. While a debate rages all around him concerning religious extremism in the face of Roman pluralism (Cooper, 1996, p. 147), Paul stands alone as the Christian founder who had no qualms whatsoever about invoking his Roman citizenship at times when it seemed suitable to do so. His name after conversion is Roman; his Roman ministry begins because of his rights as a citizen to a trial before imprisonment; and even his mode of execution—beheading—is dictated by his Roman citizenship. In one of the apocryphal texts concerning Paul’s conversion of Thecla, these words are particularly telling: “And Paul was not alarmed, but exercised the right of a citizen to free speech on behalf of the Lord” (Cooper, 1996, p. 51). Nonetheless, both the literal and figurative pluralisms present in the alter-hero Paul remain provocative. Heschel (1962) writes that the Hebrew prophets can be cast quite differently from Roman orators, who accused individuals. For the prophets, “few are guilty, all are responsible” (Heschel, 1962, p. 14). From his letters, it seems that Paul would wholeheartedly agree with this rhetorical departure point. Paul’s God, furthermore, is one who attends to small matters as well as great ones, in contrast to Cicero’s characterization of the gods (De Natura Deorum II, p. 67). Some of the difficulty in characterizing Paul as a prophet may come from the very nature of prophetic discourse itself. Prophecy is not attentive to meta-history or meta-narrative. Its rhetoric is extremely enthymematic, part of a restricted code intended for a given moment and a given people. As Heschel (1962) writes: The prophetic utterance [since it is performed by someone standing in the presence of God, according to Jeremiah, for a particular moment] has no finality. It does not set forth a comprehensive law, but a single perspective. It is expressed ad hoc . . . and must not be generalized. (Heschel, 1962, p. 23)

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Heschel’s scholarly viewpoint on prophecy explains much of the controversies and debates that surround what Paul “really” believed about any given topic: the apocalypse, the law, the significance of orality, the question of female leadership, and so on. At the same time, Paul transcends the prophetic tradition. Paul is different because he is an Apostle rather than a prophet. Some would argue he is no prophet at all. Properly speaking, he “knows nothing,” and is dramatically opposed to the Greek philosopher and the Jewish prophet. He knows only the event of the Resurrection (Badiou, 2003, p. 45). Perhaps the effective way to cast Paul as a figure of alterity against his historical background is to examine his apostolic rhetoric in depth, by analyzing the one letter many have said is the earliest and certainly the most important for understanding the “intercultural” nature of the early Christian community. For these reasons, Paul’s letter to the Galatians will serve as the major text of analysis for this chapter. Galatians is compelling for two reasons: First, it lends a “snapshot” image of Paul’s prophetic-apostolic communication. Second, it addresses issues vital to the intercultural nature of the early Christian period, including the question of whether Gentile converts ought to uphold ancient Judaic law. Before turning to the text analysis of the letter, it is important to highlight the significance of law in the early Christian period and its impact on the beginnings of the Church as well as the decline of the Roman Empire. As Badiou (2003) writes: The State is supposed to assure itself primarily and permanently of the genealogically, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of those for whom it is responsible. . . . How clearly Paul’s statement rings out under these conditions! A genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient world: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female.” (Badiou, 2003, p. 9) Badiou alludes here to the fact that social classes were fixed in the context of the Roman Empire. Heredity was paramount in the figuring of social mobility (Meeks, 1986, p. 18). This fact may shed some light on the understanding of Paul’s letter to the Galatians and his exhortation regarding diversity. Although Paul takes pride in his Roman citizenship, in his texts he declares his adamant stance that no legal category should be used to identify Christians (Badiou, 2003, pp. 13, 42). His letter to the Galatians epitomizes the rhetoric of alterity he builds throughout his mission. A close analysis of that text is now warranted.

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Paul’s authorship of the letter to the Galatians has been well substantiated. In this status it is unlike some other apocryphal texts that scholarly exegesis has excluded from the Pauline canon, even if they remain attributed to Paul in the Christian New Testament (Badiou, 2003, p. 18). Textually speaking, some argue the epistles themselves are not truly narratives, but rather “interventions” (Badiou, 2003, p. 31). This is certainly true of the epistolary form, but again I argue the sense of Paul’s narrative epistemology as memorate is helpful for a holistic understanding of his messages. In content if not in style, Galatians comprises a fascinating narrative motif and is based on the fable of the Resurrection. It springs from Paul’s life as memorate, as I elaborate later in this chapter. Galatians was most likely written around 45 A.D., although some scholars have suggested that it could have been written as late as 53 A.D. A close text analysis seems to support the earlier date, simply because Paul admonishes the Galatians for having lapsed “so quickly” from his teachings about the gospel. Paul also gives some autobiographical details in the letter yet excludes events that occurred after 45 A.D. (Barnett, 2000, p. 114). If the earlier date is accurate, then once again the letter to the Galatians deserves a special place as potentially the earliest Christian document extant (Mitchell, 1995, p. 3). The letter to the Galatians powerfully introduces the twenty-firstcentury reader to some historical details of early Christianity. Barnett (2000) suggests that the details are particularly valuable for two reasons: they are “early,” and they are “independent” (p. 128). It is a precious thing for scholars to regard Galatians as a “newborn” kind of artifact, a glimpse into Christianity’s embryonic stages. The hints of Paul’s story and his communication in this surviving earliest text prove once and for all that the narrative of Jesus takes precedent over Paul’s mission. Intertextually, Galatians also provides an important touchstone against which the narratives in the gospels and in Acts can be measured (Barnett, 2000, p. 128). It has been described as the most passionate of his letters (Barnett, 2000, p. 124), and the most rhetorically powerful. As intercultural communicator, Paul certainly “pulls out all the stops” in Galatians, yet never bends to the syncretism that tempted him at Athens, as explained later. All the early Christian congregations were distinct (Meeks, 1986, p. 22). So my choice to focus on Galatia in this chapter should not be read as a presumption that Galatia somehow exemplifies early Christianity or Paul’s communication in their totalities. Rather, Paul’s letter to the Galatians provides a unique opportunity to focus

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on two of the most important legacies of the Roman Empire: the importance of civic law and the centrality of universalism. Galatia was a Celtic tribal kingdom (Meeks, 1986, p. 16). While this fact surprises many amateur readers of Paul, it has long been the point of departure for many scholarly exegeses. For instance, Lightfoot (1881) considered the Celtic identity of the Galatians to be Paul’s main line of rhetoric in his epistle. Paul rebukes the Galatians because of an “innate racial failing,” according to Lightfoot (1881, pp. 32–33). Fortunately, such modernist racial constructs have been sufficiently dismissed by biblical scholars and laity alike. My point in this chapter is quite different: the “Othering” of Galatians happens not through a rhetoric of difference, but one of universalism. Paul wrote this epistle to the Galatians because of his dismay over the change in their cultural practices and attitudes surrounding their role as Gentiles in Christianity. Some “false brothers”—apparently Jewish Christians—had begun telling the Galatians that they were not true Christians unless they upheld the Jewish law of circumcision. This was a question raised not just in Galatia, but all over the rapidly spreading Christian world. From community to community, the commitment of Gentiles was called into question since they were not subject to Jewish laws. We must remember that, at this point, Christianity was first and foremost a “Jewish” movement. Christ was a Jew, after all; he himself obeyed the laws of Moses. But Paul’s message of the Resurrection is this: by taking the law from Deuteronomy (that anyone hanged on a tree is cursed by God) upon himself, Christ transcended the law and released God’s people from its bonds. According to Paul, before Christ came to live as a man, the Jews were under God’s “bondage” and “tutelage” by the law. They were learning how to live. Christ exploded through those chains by inverting the law in his Resurrection. This is why Paul is dismayed by the mundane attention to ancient laws that the “false brothers” are promulgating. He writes to the Galatians: “If someone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you originally received, let him stand under god’s curse. Do I seek merely to please human beings? If I were still doing that, I would not be a slave of Christ” (1:9–10). From the opening lines of his epistle, Paul insists that his memorate is universal. It is the one Truth. Verse 9 seems straightforward enough, for example, on first reading. Perhaps Paul means to say, “Let God curse those who preach a contrary gospel.” But in the context of memoratic belief, perhaps a more incisive reading is: “Anyone preaching a gospel contrary to the one I preach must prove they are the Christ. Let that person hang on a tree and see if they transcend God’s curse.” Paul’s certainty in the truth of his memorate perhaps means he is prepared to make this rhetorical gamble. But

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more significant to my thesis in this chapter, “Paul is not defending himself against personal attacks in Gal 1 and 2, but is advancing an historical argument for the independence of his Gentile churches from the confines of the Torah covenant” (Verseput, 1993, p. 58). He must now present the narrative motifs that provide a rhetoric of universalism for the early Christians. “[In attachment to] the Jewish religion I outstripped many of my fellows, being far more zealous than they for the traditions handed down from my forefathers” (Gal. 1:14). When he writes this, Paul provides sincerity and proof of his change of heart. If the Galatians cannot trust him, who used to uphold the law with such rigor, whom should they trust? Paul then addresses circumcision directly, and the fact that it has become a controversial issue in virtually all the Christian churches. He relates his recent travels with Titus, a converted Gentile: “But my anxiety proved baseless, for Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, even though he was a Greek” (2:4). It is clear from Paul’s statements that the Galatians had not (yet) undergone circumcision. But he alludes to their observance of the Jewish calendar, which is a potential step down the path toward circumcision (Barnett, 2000, p. 126). Paul stresses to them: not a single person will be rectified by observance of the Law . . . (2:16). Christ redeemed us from the Law’s curse, becoming a curse in our behalf; for it stands written: “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” He did this in order that the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles . . . (2:13–14). Why, then, the Law at all? . . . The Law was our confining custodian until the advent of Christ, in order that we should be rectified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under the power of that confining custodian. For you are—all of you—sons of God through the faith that is in Christ Jesus. There is neither Jew nor Greek; there is neither slave nor free; there is no “male and female”; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 2:19–28, emphasis mine) I emphasize these last verses because the “neither Jew nor Greek” baptismal formula establishes the nexus of Paul’s universalism.3 For Badiou (2003), the construction Jew–Greek is not meant to imply “national” status. Neither does “Greek” automatically translate to “Gentile.” Paul’s primary concern with “Greek” is the connotation of philosophy (Badiou, 2003, p. 40). Jewish discourse represents the law; Greek represents philosophy. Thus the dialectic presents competing discourses, which Paul wishes to reject outright in favor of a “third way” or what Badiou terms a “third discourse” (p. 41). In essence, the “third” discourse erases the first two from significance

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and propels them into oblivion. This process may represent the beginning of Western universalism. That claim is discussed next. IS PAUL THE FOUNDATION OF UNIVERSALISM? The question that forms the title of this section has been debated rather hotly over the centuries. Miller (2002) even suggests that there may be nothing new to say about it, although he follows up this assertion with the rather startling observation that Galatians 3:28—the “there is neither Jew nor Greek” passage—“has been almost universally misunderstood and misappropriated” (Miller, 2002, p. 9). In this section, I offer a number of scholarly perspectives on the letter to the Galatians to balance out any potential misunderstandings or misappropriations. Paul’s letter to the Galatians has been employed in intercultural communication since the time of its writing. Thus I will attempt to place Galatians even further into its historical context by discussing the construction of alterity among early Christians. Then some competing arguments concerning the “egalitarianism” of Paul are introduced, particularly as they pertain to Galatians 3:28. Finally I examine some of the ways Galatians has affected intercultural issues by allegedly introducing universalism to Western thought. There has been a paucity of research into race and ethnicity in the early Christian era. However, what little there is has important implications for a contextual reading of Galatians. The first point to keep in mind is that the Roman Empire was profoundly “multicultural,” and self-consciously so. Many of the ways early Christians constructed alterity mirrored the dynamics of the Roman Empire. These questions about Paul and Galatians thus have a broader context. The Roman “imperial project made extensive use of universalizing rhetoric” (Buell, 2002, p. 462), including claims about religion (Woolf, 1997, p. 55). Buell (2002) provides the most incisive arguments regarding early Christian alterity. She begins by addressing the convention among culture scholars that while race is considered fixed, ethnicity is more flexible. Buell challenges this assumption, stating that mutability does characterize modernist and contemporary ideas about race (Buell, 2002, p. 436; Stoler, 1997, p. 198). The fixed/flexible dichotomy for race/ethnicity is also oversimplified. Early Christians regarded race and ethnicity as both mutable and immutable (Hodge, 2002). For Buell, the key to isolating the importance of race in the midst of its fluidity, is the discourse that affects the construction of alterity (Buell, 2002, p. 439). The text of Paul’s letter to the Galatians provides one such departure point for the early Christian era.

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In presenting her arguments, Buell (2002) utilizes Jonathan Hall’s schema of “two discursive strategies for defining and constructing ethnicity in Greek antiquity”: oppositional and aggregative (p. 441). These strategies are not limited to the early Christian era—nor were they “invented” there. They should seem very familiar, for oppositional and aggregative discourses have been timeless and highly useful rhetorical tropes in the construction of alterity throughout civilization (including in the present historical moment). Nonetheless, Hall and Buell offer compelling reasons to pay attention to opposition and aggregation during the early Christian era. I also argue that these two different strategies made possible the unique paradigm shift that took place in the 300 years following the birth of Christ. For now I will explain the oppositional and aggregative strategies in greater detail. First, the oppositional strategy divides the world into unequal and often binary categories. For example, Medea is labeled a barbarian when set against the backdrop of Greek. Oppositional categories are usually imbalanced in terms of power, as the example of Medea clearly indicates. Exoteric terms are employed for the Other, rather than the esoteric. For example, “barbarian” and “gentile” are not terms any group would use to describe themselves. Medea describes herself as “Asiatic” at one point in the play. “Barbarian” is obviously a Greek construction. Likewise, the Galatians (and all other nonJews) are “Gentiles” when brought under the discursive umbrella of Judaism. The rhetoric inherent in the oppositional strategy is highly indicative of hierarchy and the marginalizing effects of alterity. One needs to foreground this aspect of alterity when considering discursive strategies in early Christianity and in all eras of Western history. The aggregative strategy, on the other hand, “is established through connections more than by distinctions . . . [favoring] geographically-linked ethnoracial terms” (Buell, 2002, p. 442). In Rome, for example, civic identity took precedence over terms provided by ethnicity and race (Buell, 2002, p. 464). The Romans’ deference to legal categories provided umbrella terms for groups gathered under the auspices of the empire. Aggregation is the most common form of discourse leading to the rhetoric of universalism, as we shall see. Thus aggregation and opposition may be equally correlative to power imbalances. In any case, aggregation is as deliberate and calculating a strategy as opposition in the construction of alterity. For instance, the aggregative strategy is sometimes used individually in making claims of a prestigious ancestry. In terms of alterity, aggregation is especially useful for justifying colonizing processes (Hall, 2000, p. 51), which explains its significance for Rome. The Romans were concerned, for example, with establishing “Greek” origins through genealogy. Buell (2002) contributes to the discussion of ancient Greco-Roman aggregation in a highly significant way, moving Hall’s (2000) theories

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beyond genealogy and into the practice of religion. This is not to say that no society before the early Christians employed religion as a means of aggregation. If Hall’s argument concerning “Greek” origins for Rome is extended, one needs to look no further than the Greek and Roman pantheons for evidence of religious significance in aggregation. That every Greek god has a Roman counterpart in the pantheon implies that the Romans intentionally linked their identity with that of the Greeks. However, I argue that this Roman act is a perfect instance of syncretism and not purely aggregative. The Greek gods were given Roman names. The Romans did not try to “share” their gods with the Greeks in a universal way. “Zeus” is not the most powerful god for all humankind—only for the Greeks. But his counterpart is Jupiter in Rome. The syncretic strategy is inherently relative, not universal. Among the early Christians, on the other hand, aggregation is transcendent rather than syncretic. Christ is not “translated” into other cultures, but posited as the One True God. Again, this is why Paul’s felix culpa at Athens is important in the background of universalism. Buell’s (2002) contribution concerning alterity in the early Christian era and the strategies of aggregation indicate that, perhaps for the very first time in history, an “absolutist” or universalist kind of religious communication is used for aggregative purposes. Again we cannot claim that religion was insignificant in aggregation prior to the early Christian era. But I do assert that Christianity offers the first clear instance of nonrelative religious aggregation. In most cases, religious syncretism requires very little acculturation for the quasiconverts who embrace the new belief. The belief in fact is not so “new”: in syncretic movements belief appears in disguise, easily malleable to existing cultural traditions. This is not the case in the rhetoric of mission that surrounds the spread of Christianity in the first 300 years after the death of Christ.4 Those who were converted to Christianity chose not merely new beliefs, but an entirely different way of living. When Paul converted Gentiles, their choices had deep cultural and pragmatic implications. Meeks (1986) agrees that “resocialization” processes, including the initiation of converts into Christianity’s peculiar cultural practices, are equal to beliefs in significance when it comes to the spread of Christianity. He names six unusual aspects of Christianity as a movement or culture: first, the Christian cult was exclusive. Membership in any other was prohibited. Second, Christians used peculiar, passionate, and intimate language. They talked about “love” for each other and in Christ in ways no other religion had before. Third and most obvious were their unusual beliefs, “often stated in characteristic structures of language, like the antithetically parallel formulas about Christ’s death and resurrection” (Meeks, 1986, p. 22). Meeks continues by pointing to a fourth characteristic of Christians—they were remarkably attuned to the hostility of outsiders, and survival against this hostility was

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built into their belief system as well as their practices. Fifth, they were institutionally self-sufficient and communal. Finally, Christians developed highly evocative rituals that once again excluded belief in any other gods and defied simple comparison to existing cultural practices. The empirical data thus suggests that early Christianity presents an entirely new form of aggregation. “Christians” are renamed in a universal term, despite ethnic and racial differences, through religion in its most holistic form. By this I mean that not mere beliefs but also cultural practices constituted “Christianity.” From this totalizing conversion movement, it is but a short step to the rhetoric of universalism. Early Christian apologists quickly espoused this rhetoric, creating universalizing narratives of Christianity and alterity. In one clear example, Clement of Alexandria posits Christians as the “primeval” people of God, whose destiny is now fulfilled through the revelation of religious practices (Buell, 2002, p. 448). It is important to note, though, that aggregation does not always efface differences, nor is it always meant to do so (Buell, 2002, pp. 443–444). Hodge (2002) argues that while “Gentiles” or “Greeks” are granted a better “pedigree” in Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he still considers them part of a hierarchy that is generally ruled by Jews. Robinson (1965) argues that Paul is saying in his letter to the Galatians that the Jews had to be saved first, and only then could they bring the gospel of Christ to the Gentiles. So, their arguments state that Paul is not necessarily trying to equalize the social categories of “Jew” and “Gentile” in terms of earthly reality. In his article “Is Galatians 3:28 the Great Egalitarian Text?,” Miller (2002) sides with Robinson (1965) and Hodge (2002). Miller alters the translation “there is neither” or “there is no longer” in Galatians 3:28, offering a change to “it is not a matter of” Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. Note also Miller’s change from “or” to “and” in these supposed binary opposites. These two subtle alterations make all the difference. Miller asserts that instead of eradicating the divisions between Jew and Greek, Paul is simply stating that these differences are insignificant. Why? Because the Greeks can become like Jews—they can take on the salvation of God through Christ. From this perspective, Gentile converts to Christianity do not join their Jewish counterparts in a kind of transcended Christian identity; they are instead afforded the privileges of a Jewish Christian. As evidence for this reading of Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Miller offers the pragmatic argument that there most certainly would be a division between male and female in “the ordinary, everyday level of practical, social life” (2002, p. 9). Gender and sexuality are not eradicated in practical terms by conversion to Christianity. There are still the pragmatic categories of male and female among Christians. And since Paul has rhetorically linked male/female with Jew/Greek, why should ethnicity be eradicated by the profession of faith? In

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this way, the hierarchy of Jew/Greek has been reinforced rather than eliminated (Miller, 2002, p. 9). Miller’s next step is to point to the cultural norm of “heirs” in Galatians: in the Judaism of Paul’s time, an heir must belong to the categories Jew, free, and male. Miller’s gloss then dictates that the Gentiles to whom Paul writes have “become” Jewish, free, and male through their faith in Christ and are thus legitimate heirs to God’s kingdom. From my perspective, although Miller purports to privilege historical context in his reading of Galatians, he neglects the narrative context completely. Paul argues repeatedly in this letter that the law no longer has meaning. Again, by Christ’s taking the “curse of the law” upon himself, he renders it void. Thus, there should be no argument regarding “heirs” and social hierarchy in regard to the Galatians. Such a custom or law is completely anathema to Paul’s exigency in writing this letter, and to his rhetorical reasoning concerning circumcision. Paul rejects Mosaic law for the Gentiles, but also for the Christian Jews. If at the moment of Christ’s Resurrection the Jews are free from the “bondage” of law, why then should inheritance customs apply to Jews or Gentiles in Paul’s epistle? Read contextually, one may argue that inheritance and circumcision are matters of unequal significance in Jewish law. Once again, however, I emphasize that for Paul the Resurrection is no small event. Christ did not come to change the law; he came to nullify it, for faith provided all the earthly guidance required for the people of God. Miller’s (2002) question “Is Galatians 3:28 the great egalitarian text?” and his own answer seems to spring from an orientation toward the oppositional strategy named by Hall (2000) and Buell (2002). Miller’s argument, previously outlined, reinforces the dyad of Jew and Gentile (Greek). I have attempted to refute his assertions, replacing Miller’s preoccupation with inheritance customs with the reminder that Paul is preaching the dissolution of Mosaic law through Christ. It is not my intent, however, to reject out of hand the oppositional strategy’s relevance in early Christian alterity. On the contrary, all evidence suggests that dyadic dichotomies like Jew–Gentile were highly significant components of the early Christian worldview. For many thinkers of Roman antiquity, these dialectics were the very building blocks of the cosmos. Paul’s denying their existence after the Resurrection of Christ presents Galatians as something of an apocalyptic text: the end of these “elements” in the table of the universe represents nothing less than the end of the universe as the Galatians and all early Christians would have known it (Martyn, 1997, p. 376). Oppositional discourse definitely characterized alterity in the period of the Roman Empire. What interests me here is the extent to which aggregative discourse began to overshadow it. In doing so, aggregation presented possibilities for egalitarianism and universalism. Galatians is the text, perhaps more than any

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other, that took early Christianity in an aggregative—and ultimately universalizing—direction. I will examine Paul’s narrative logic in Galatians in my argument. Paul’s letter to the Galatians has been embraced by some scholars as “the great egalitarian text” because of its aggregative discourse. Their arguments are compelling, but ultimately misleading in an exegesis of Galatians. Earlier, I described Miller’s (2002) negative position on egalitarianism in Galatians. He has been compelled to ask his question about “egalitarianism” in this epistle because the populace has so often read it as proof that Paul wanted a nonpatriarchal, ecumenical church (p. 9). I argue against Miller’s premises, but not his conclusion. I agree that Galatians is not egalitarian. But, much differently than Miller, I believe that Paul’s rhetoric on alterity in this epistle (and elsewhere) elides the subject of equality and instead insists on unity. Martyn (1997) concurs that in Galatians 3:28, “religious, social, and sexual pairs of opposites are not replaced by equality, but rather by a newly created unity” (p. 377). The difference between “equality” and “unity” is vast in this context, but has too often been misread. Paul’s baptismal formula “there is neither Jew nor Greek” implies not that Greeks are now equal to Jews, but that these categories literally do not exist anymore. There is new unity in Christ, a unity that sheds all of these enslaving labels. An examination of Barth’s (1965) exegesis is helpful in explaining the distinction I make. Barth (1965) addresses those who have romanticized Galatians by rewriting it for their own historical moment in the civil rights movement in America. He posits the “false brethren” in Galatians as white liberals in America, and the Galatians are cast as “Negroes.” Barth suggests that when his contemporaries in the 1960s use Galatians as “the great egalitarian text,” they are misappropriating the spirit of Paul’s rhetoric on alterity. Barth asks his reader to consider the intercultural rhetoric of well-meaning whites in America who in an effort toward integration were “willing and eager to receive the Negro [sic] into ‘our’ schools, ‘our’ neighborhoods,” etc. (p. 29). Was their willingness not fueled by a false sense of superiority, of condescension and paternalism? Was their eagerness not mistakenly caused by a presupposition of difference? The whites Barth addresses believed wholeheartedly in the division of the races. Whether such a division exists or not, they were wrong to find in Paul’s Christianizing mission a parallel to their own egalitarian cause. Paul’s purpose in declaring “There is neither Jew nor Greek” is not to describe two different types of people who have now morphed into a third type (Barth, 1965, p. 30). Nor does he suggest that Gentiles now may be “honorary Jews,” as Hodge (2002) and Miller (2002) believe. Neither Jews nor Gentiles were saved before Christ. Now that the Resurrection has occurred, all life before this moment has been cast off like old clothing.

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Baptism occurs ex nihilo, in the same way Paul’s memorate tells us: nothing in his life prior to the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus could ever have suggested that he would convert the Gentiles. His conversion is a complete turnaround. True, Paul has the pluralistic equipment and the advantages of the Roman Empire to help him. But no one could have predicted his change of heart; it appears out of nowhere. The unity between Jews and Gentiles in Christ is similar: none of the former elements of either culture remain. So, in the same way that whites should be criticized for “welcoming” persons of color into “their” schools, neighborhoods, and clubs, we must reject as extracontextual the scholarly argument that Jews welcomed Gentiles into “their” laws and “their” faith. It is worth reminding ourselves at this point that this description of universalism through aggregation may be limited to the writings of the Apostle Paul. Buell (2002) argues that other early Christians, such as Clement of Alexandria, had a more complex reaction to racial and ethnic issues. They did not always see Christianity as “not-race or the transcendence of race” (Buell, 2002, p. 431). Instead Clement asserted that becoming Christian was to change one’s race. From here he develops universalizing claims, according to Buell. Yet Galatians is presented here as one of the “narratives of alterity” affecting Western intercultural rhetoric because of its contrast to Clement and other early Christians. It also seems plausible to suggest that far more Westerners are familiar with Paul than with Clement. This probability suggests the detriment of Western education, not the intellect of Clement of Alexandria. Yet the fact remains that Paul’s “brand” of universalism in the early Christian era continued through the centuries to have an influence on Western concepts of alterity. Thus his letter to the Galatians commands our attention more than do alternative views of race in the early Christian era. Indeed, some scholars have posited Paul as the “founder” of universalism in Western philosophy. Badiou (2003) links Paul to Hegel, Comte, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, and Lyotard (p. 5). Even if one considers the Resurrection a “fable”—as an atheist like Badiou must—the significance of Paul to universalism is still profound. “Paul’s unprecedented gesture,” Badiou writes, “consists in subtracting truth from the communitarian grasp” (p. 5). People, city, empire, territory, social class: all of these are devoid of identity when Paul approaches law as subjective declaration. Again the nature of memorate as a narrative genre brings together my own thesis with that of Badiou. While he calls the Resurrection a “fable” since it cannot be “Real” (2003, p. 4), for Paul the event is “real” and for the legacy of Christianity I argue that it might as well be real. If Paul is posited as an important philosophical figure—despite his “antiphilosophy”—then the nature of his narrative as memorate is important. Paul’s memorate, as I have mentioned, encapsulates the singularity and

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virtual unknowability of the Resurrection and Paul’s subsequent conversion. There is no way to understand Paul without his memorate, and without the understanding of his story as memorate. “The Christian subject does not preexist the event he declares (the Resurrection). Thus, the extrinsic conditions of his existence or identity will be argued against” (Badiou, 2003, p. 14). There was no “Paul” before the conversion on the road to Damascus; before that he was Saul, and Saul is no longer of any consequence. Paul may not have any “Saul” left in him. There are no degrees to the truth he believes. “Either one participates in [the truth], declaring the founding event and drawing its consequences, or one remains foreign to it” (Badiou, 2003, p. 19). The memorate that is Paul’s life forms a parallel with his arguments regarding Christianity and Jewish law. Paul releases Saul from his being through the memorate of conversion, which he tells multiple times in his written “narratives” (epistles) and which he no doubt recounted immeasurable times to his listeners. Similarly, he urges his followers to see the “narrative logic” of the Resurrection. Since Christ took the law upon himself, it no longer has any meaning; if one attributes meaning to the law, one posits Christ’s death as meaningless. The opposite is true: it is circumcision and the law that no longer have any significance. In Galatians Paul means to say that circumcision is not wrong or erroneous, but simply void (Badiou, 2003, p. 19). Indeed, Badiou (2003) provides a provocative departure point for a Western understanding of Paul. He states that Paul’s “neither Jew nor Greek” verse in Galatians obliterates the legal categories of Rome and, by implication, all earthly societies. Such thought may be traced from Galatians through twenty-first-century philosophers. I argue that even if Paul is not the “foundation” of universalism, his statement in Galatians does give us pause and it does introduce a centralized Western bias regarding the role of religion in cultural assimilation. Paul is he who “deciding that none was exempt from what a truth demands and disjoining the true from the Law, provoked—entirely alone—a cultural revolution upon which we still depend” (Badiou, 2003, p. 15). In the remainder of this chapter I offer some examples to suggest that this “cultural revolution” is the real legacy of Paul to Western alterity. If the significance of Paul to universalism is to be believed, one must consider the tangibility of universalism for the early Christians. By joining a local congregation, there was also “a strange sense of being a supralocal fellowship” (Meeks, 1986, p. 22). The fact that the early Christians were simultaneously locally confined and “globally” united is one of their most compelling qualities as a cultural force. Furthermore, Buell (2002) points out, “Religions based in ethnic or racial groups are viewed as ‘fixed’ affiliations, whereas Christianness is portrayed as a voluntary affiliation” (Buell, 2002, p. 435). The early Christian project of so-called universalism is obvi-

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ously conditional. The strategy is oppositional: there are Christians, and then there are Others. The Others need only convert to Christianity, however, in order to “be universalized.” Once the truth of the Resurrection is espoused, local customs become insignificant. This was Paul’s argument regarding Jewish law, but the nature of his rhetoric continued throughout the history of Christianity—and, consequently, throughout the dominance of the West. Indeed, universalism profoundly changed the whole “culture” of Christianity: “Characterizing Christianity as a universalizing movement both encodes a message that universalism equals not-race, and erases the way that Christianity nonetheless gets framed in unmarked racial terms as a ‘gentile’ movement, and eventually as a ‘white’ ‘European’ movement” (Buell, 2002, p. 435). It is this point that I find so compelling about Paul’s variety of universalism. The pernicious commingling of religion and “race” or ethnicity is a narrative trope but also an historical and contemporary reality. As previously noted, scholars of alterity and intercultural rhetoric have largely ignored the interplay of race and religion, especially in the early Christian era. The few exceptions to this ignorance are telling enough even if one stops at the title. Karen Brodkin’s book How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America presents the serious problems that occur when we ignore the manipulation of religious identities. In a more specific sense, the universalistic bias in Christianity has worked more like an ideology or a hegemonic series of claims on the self-definitions of Others. One may never conclusively reveal whether Paul had universalizing intentions or not. Regardless of this fact, one of the biases of alterity with which Westerners must come to grips is this: Christianity’s missionic impulses have not always been as ambiguous as Paul’s; indeed they have led to much violence and cultural genocide (Schwartz, 1997). While scholars may leave the question of effacement of difference in Galatians open, for instance, other cultural critics such as Gomez (1998) reveal the ways in which Africans were grouped under the “cultural” umbrella of Christianity as well as slavery. Both slavery and Christianity equally destroyed the cultural diversity of Africans in America. And the same may be said of many other converted groups since the first century. This is not to say that universalism is inevitably hegemonic or damaging. This is why I point to the “universalizing bias in Christianity,” not of it. Schwartz (1997) writes: “Universalism comes in different shapes, as an ideal of genuine toleration, as an effort to protect universal human rights, and as a kind of imperialism that insists that we are all one and that demands an obliteration of difference” (p. 88). While wholly supportive of this thesis that universalism may be both idealistic and colonizing, once again I point out that the Christian universalist motif has not dissipated. For the most

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part, conversion to Christianity has been the Western “litmus test” of acculturation for non-Westerners. In some cases Christianity was forced on the Other, as it was on African slaves in America. But in other instances Christianity has been manipulated as an indicator of loyalty or assimilation. As discussed in chapter 4, for example, the Christianity of Shakespeare’s Othello complicates his identity as a Moor and virtually ensures his acceptance as a great warrior loyal to the Venetian state. A more recent narrative that encapsulates the Christian universalist trope is the 1998 film The Siege. The film depicts then-present-day New York—in other words, pre-9/11 America. New York is suddenly bombarded with a series of bus bombings committed by a Muslim fundamentalist terrorist cell. The film centers on the work of a group of FBI operatives as they attempt to find the members of the cell, bring them to justice, and put an end to the martial law that has been declared in New York. Meanwhile every young male of Arabic descent has been detained inside Yankee Stadium, made to remain there under guard until the case is cracked. There is one exception to this rule: the Lebanese FBI operative, Frank Haddad. The filmmakers apparently attempted to show Haddad as a “complex” Arab figure, one who is loyal to the United States but also misses his birthplace. Haddad’s family members present themselves as poster children for assimilation: they speak English perfectly, attend American schools, and enjoy American traditions. All of this may suggest a nonthreatening status of acculturation for any other category of immigrant in the United States. But Hasian (2002) argues that as a final step the scriptwriters of The Siege are careful to point out that Haddad is a Christian—a “model Christian Arab” (p. 230). It is easy to see that Haddad’s “Christian” identity potentially effaces his Arab ethnicity and casts him as a loyal American (even if he misses Lebanon). More important, he is diametrically opposed to the Muslim terrorists (even if he is ethnically similar). As Sharif (1998) observed: “Indeed, it is not lost on many that the sympathetic Arab character in this film is not a Muslim” (p. F-3, emphasis mine). A close viewing of the film shows these analyses to be inaccurate: some details on the DVD version reinforce Haddad’s identity as a Shiite Muslim. He is seen embracing his son at a Shiite ceremony, and his supervisor matterof-factly describes Haddad to another agent as Shiite. But the fact that scholars and critics missed these details reinforces the narrative motif of universalism rather than efface it. This is a motif that the Other needs to contest in the creation of cultural identity. Universalism is also underscored within the original narrative of The Siege in that Haddad’s FBI supervisor in the film is an African American (played by Denzel Washington) evidently educated in Catholic schools. “Saint Raymond’s in the Bronx,” he affirms

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proudly. A female operative teasing him about this calls him a “Boy Scout” and emphasizes this Catholic-school element of his character. The audience’s misperceptions of one “ethnic” operative’s religion, and the emphasis on an(O)ther’s Catholicism, indicate the strength of the universalizing bias in Western Christianity. It is the nature of Western imperialism, even in our secular contemporary world, to universalize. There are those who suggest that “democracy” is the new universalizing Western term and that we are ignoring ethnic differences in Iraq, for example, at our own peril. Even when the stakes are lower—when the battle is over consumer dollars rather than the right to govern—the problems of universalizing rhetoric rear their ugly head. Badiou brings Paul into our contemporary space when he observes that for all our talk of “fragmentation” and competing structures, capitalism remains hegemonic: Each time [a new separate identity is declared], a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls. . . . Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of . . . minorities form an articulated whole. (Badiou, 2003, p. 11) These examples are the colonizing and often malicious remnants of the universalizing bias in the West. I do not believe by any means that Paul is culpable for these crimes. If Schwarz (1997) is correct that universalism can be an ideal, Paul deserves the credit and not the blame. And of course, Paul was not the first in the Western world to write about universalism—Diogenes the Cynic, for example, called himself a “citizen of the world” and argued that local customs are meaningless in the context of universal humanity. However, Diogenes was severely marginalized (even ridiculed) by his fellow Greeks and his teachings were never part of the mainstream. In Paul, we find the first acceptable or at least widely considered variety of universalism. Unlike Diogenes’ idealistic philosophizing, Paul’s universalism eventually came in the form of legal fiat under the auspices of Rome. It was a hardcore, real, and tangible tenet of colonialism for Western cultures in the centuries to come.

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Is Paul the foundation of universalism? His writings indicate he did not intend to be—his concerns were for the heavenly city, not the earthly. He wished to transcend the law. But the law eventually appropriated Christianity, and the resultant universalism of Paul became one of the Western biases toward alterity with which we still struggle. He is not the philosophical founder of universalism. Perhaps that unhappy role belongs to Archimedes or Diogenes. But Badiou is right: Paul is the foundation. In his cleaving to the memorate that he saw as his life, Paul presents an absolute turning, a startling ex nihilo narrative as profound as the Resurrection. CONCLUSION Near the very end of his letter to the Galatians, Paul evidently ceased dictating to his scribe and took up the pen himself: “NOTICE THE LARGE LETTERS I AM USING, AS I NOW SEIZE THE PEN TO WRITE TO YOU WITH MY OWN HAND” (6:11). Such was Paul’s urgency regarding the meaning of Christ in regard to the law, and the meaning of cultural, ethnic, and religious identity in the face of belief in the Resurrection. His scrawl was as powerful, it seems, as his memoratic narrative. A century after Paul’s letter to the Galatians, his mission to convert the Gentiles was being carried out with ever-increasing momentum. It would be another 150 before Christianity would become the dominant and protected religion of the Roman Empire. However, soon enough Christianity was sufficiently prevalent to provoke Roman philosophers to comment on the new religion. These Roman writings provided the backdrop for newly converted apologists to expound on the meaning of the faith. One instance of interreligious rhetoric may be represented well by the confrontation between Celsus and Origen. Celsus believed that Christianity was not a new religion at all, or certainly not a legitimate one. In postmodern terms, he deemed the Christians as comprising a form of “cult” that was united by strange new customs. By no means, according to Celsus, had a new belief system been revealed through Christ. The Christians were simply a recalcitrant, uncontrollable group of defiant Jews defined by their practices. Celsus had also stated that “every ethnos has its own religion, laws, and customs and . . . this is as it should be” (Buell, 2002, p. 450). Thus, when the Christians’ cultural practices became known, Celsus rejected the idea of their “religious” identity and instead posited Christians as an artificially constructed “ethnic group.” On the whole, Celsus supported the idea that each cultural group would simply have their own practices and such a reality was entirely natural. He believed that the Christians had sought to disrupt Judaism by simply reversing the process: in adopting different customs, they

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defined themselves as a group. Disobedience had motivated them, not religious revelation. Origen’s response to Celsus is significant for our understanding of alterity in the rapidly changing historical moment of the first through third centuries. In the Contra Celsum Origen asserts that ethnic differences are the result of human error. He rejects Celsus’s claim that diversity is inevitable or somehow “natural.” As Buell (2002) explains: Origen locates this [human] error within a narrative of human degeneration based on Genesis 11 to assert that particular human races were created to correspond to levels of human error; he defines Christianity as the means and site for restoration of original human unity. . . . Origen counters [Celsus] by adapting the biblical story of the tower of Babel [among others] to argue that all ethne¯ except for the Israelite one were created as a punishment for human error. (Buell, 2002, pp. 450–451) Origen continues his argument in the presupposition that one can redeem these errors by rejoining the race originally blessed by God and fulfilled through Christ. Religious and ethnic transformations are one in the same (Buell, 2002, p. 451). Origen also points out that Celsus’s budding cultural relativism is impractical in regard to civic laws. For example, if local customs dictate religious worship—and these customs are entirely “natural” or “right”—then what becomes of the immigrant? What should he do when he arrives in a new locale and is required by law to worship a new deity? Which then is the “right” one, and is it right that the laws should punish him? Origen is concerned, like Paul, with religious conversion and universalism as well as civic law. Thus, in his letter to the Galatians Paul’s rhetoric of alterity does indeed become canonical and paradigmatic. But as the years passed, even Constantine the emperor declared himself a Christian and the mission of Western civilization seemed to change overnight. “Beginning in the fourth century, ethnic reasoning serves to naturalize the equation of Christianness with gentileness, or Romanness, in part through the oppositional construction of non-Jewish non-Christians as ‘pagans’” (Buell, 2002, p. 465). In this historical context, more early Christian apologists took Old Testament texts like Genesis 11 and made them their own. This point is key to our understanding of the shifts of intercultural rhetoric in the early Christian era through the fourth century: “Ethnic discourse based on classical ethnography and biblical ontology became the way in which [Western] civilization explained cultural differences throughout the world, without ever abandoning the perspectives of universalism offered by the Roman Empire and the Church” (Pohl, 1998, p. 2).

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Read in this light, Origen is merely the first in a long line of Christians who adapted Genesis 11 (“the Babel story”) for the purposes of religious and ethnic division. The adaptations and glosses on this ancient legend were in full flower by the medieval period. In the next chapter, I consider the ways in which “Babel” has defined a Western bias in regard to multiculturalism— both then and now.

CHAPTER THREE

The Curses of Medieval Man REVERBERATIONS FROM THE TOWER OF BABEL

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s noted in the previous chapter, the early Christian period in the Western world was one that saw a profound change in worldview. The orientation toward monotheism and the Christian story in general was one that permanently refocused Western alterity, incorporating a rhetoric of mission. At no time is that orientation toward Christianity more stringent than in the Middle Ages, or medieval period. Historians “officially” mark this time as lasting from Saint Augustine’s death (430 A.D.) to the fall of the Byzantine empire to the Ottomans (1453 A.D.) (Marías, 1967, p. 125). Even by this conservative measure, the so-called Middle Ages persist longer than one thousand years. And of course, this considerable chunk of time is by no means monolithic. Yet in terms of narrative and alterity, the potential uniformity of the medieval period is somewhat compelling. The Middle Ages may be best described in narrative terms as the time in which hegemonic Christianity is solidified; some term the medieval period the golden age of Catholic propaganda. The twenty-first-century canon of Christian narratives—whether one holds to a Christocentric religious worldview or not—was established quite deliberately from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries. Indeed, it may surprise some Westerners to learn that the Sunday school tales one takes for granted in childhood often bear little resemblance to their corresponding biblical texts. Rather in a study of narrative and alterity, we often find that the medieval rewriting of Old Testament texts depends once again on the perennial project of Othering. One striking example is a story from chapter 11 of the Book of Genesis that provides the focus for the present chapter: the story of Babel. 69

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No doubt this is a story with which many readers are familiar—and in the ubiquity of Babel lies its significance for this book. Incorporated into the popular versions of the story are highly potent attitudes about not only language, but also earthly cities, “pagan” myths, and struggles of gender. Christian medieval adaptations of the Old Testament text are rhetorically complex, yet I hope to present fluid connections among the medieval metaphors of faith, mythography, civilization, alterity, and language. To accomplish this, I first examine Genesis 11 in context by bringing together scholarly analyses. Second, this chapter explores the ways in which medieval mythographers molded the narrative into a model of Christocentric alterity. Then I focus on the specific questions of alterity and language that converge in the Babel narrative, offering a new metaphor from St. Thomas Aquinas that redeems the medieval linguistic project. Finally, the chapter concludes with some reflections on the endurance of Babel, and its timelessness as a poignant metaphor for intercultural rhetoric.

THE GENERATION OF THE DISPERSAL: BABEL IN BIBLICAL CONTEXT There is a certain ambiguity in referring to “biblical context” because any version of the Babel narrative arrives with its own linguistic bias. Here is one text of Genesis 11:1–9, which encapsulates the Babel narrative: 1Now

the whole world had one language and a common speech. men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. 3They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” 5But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 6The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.” 8So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth. 2As

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A contextual reading of this story begs three questions. First, what was the people’s motivation for building the tower? Second, why did God react— in other words, what sin was committed? And third, what are the implications of these two acts (the building of the tower and the dispersal of its people) taken together? Several interpretations are taken in turn. What was the motivation for this tower? The Babel story is unique in a number of ways, not the least of which is that it depicts quite vividly the potential in human history for mass achievement through communication. As Kass (2003) points out, for the first time in Genesis human beings exhort each other to action through rhetoric (p. 225). They say, “Come, let us make a name for ourselves.” They express detailed plans about how to go about their unified project. Yet Genesis tells nothing about why they wish to build the tower. What possible motivations would they have? One popular answer has become intertwined with the story of Babel beyond dispute. The classic interpretation of the people’s actions has always been their desire to somehow “reach” heaven with their tower. Some scholars search for linguistic cues as evidence for this motivation. For example, one possible derivation of “Babel” is the Akkadian “Bab-ili,” or “gate of the god(s)” (Wilson, 1986, p. 7). This definition leads some to believe that the tower builders wanted some entryway to the divine. But this first answer only leads to more questions: Why did they want to reach heaven? To fight with God? To show they were as powerful as he? Perhaps it was an exercise in self-preservation; a tower that high would protect the people from a possible second flood (Parrot, 1954, p. 36), just in case God went back on his promise never to destroy human beings again. In any of these cases the people believed they could somehow outsmart God. Traditional Christian teaching indicates that this was a grave mistake, and God punished their impudence violently. But another viewpoint on the tower is somewhat revisionist, suggesting a more compassionate reading toward the builders. Archaeologist André Parrot has argued that the tower was not an arrogant piercing of heaven, but rather a humble bridge, an “outstretched hand” (Parrot, 1954, p. 62). As evidence, he argues that a god-dwelling was always included at the top of such towers, which are called ziggurats. Although the particular ziggurat in question is in ruins, Herodotus reported the existence of a god-dwelling at Babylon’s ziggurat after his visit in 460 B.C. (Parrot, 1954, pp. 22–23). Parrot asserts, “That tower raised in the middle of the Plain of Shinar is the focus of the anxious longing of all humanity to pierce the mystery of its destiny”; it is a “cry for help” (Parrot, 1954, p. 11).

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Such is the appeal of narratives: they are open to interpretation. As a scientist, Parrot believes he has hard evidence on his side in the form of ziggurat remains. There is therefore little reason to argue stringently against his stance. However, Harland (1998) does point out that a focus on the “reaching toward heaven” argument—be it positive or negative in its assessment of the tower builders—stems from a Christian exegesis rather than a truly contextual reading of Genesis. Harland points out, in contrast to Parrot (1954), that we cannot be certain the tower was a ziggurat; neither is Babylon meant to be the focus of the narrative. Moreover, the story gives us no reference to any deity in connection with the tower (Harland, 1998, p. 523). Most important, though, Harland argues that interpretations focusing on the “vertical” movement of the people—that is, the building of the tower in order to reach heaven—are misleading. The story is not about movement upwards, but the attempt to elude lateral movement: “On a canonical reading the people build the city and tower not so much as an act of pride or attempt to reach heaven, but as a way of staying in one place. . . . Consequently the effort of the people is seen not in terms of vertical, but horizontal striving” (Harland, 1998, p. 527). The argument for a horizontal rather than vertical focus is echoed by Milgrom (1995) and van Wolde (2000). The most persuasive analyses here are based on contextual readings. For example, van Wolde (2000) argues that the commandment to “fill the earth” can be seen as parallel to God’s directions in Genesis 1:22: the birds must fill the sky, and the fish fill the sea (p. 151). Harland (1998) also bases his argument on narrative and context. The peoples’ exhortation “Come, let us build ourselves a city . . . lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth” is in response to Genesis 1:28 and Genesis 9:1, where in both cases God commands humans to “fill the earth” (Harland, 1998, p. 527). Thus the tower should be seen not as an isolated object offensive to God, but a component of a defensive fortress (Harland, 1998, p. 528). The people thought that by fortifying their city, “making a name for themselves,” they could be self-reliant, remain together, and avoid being scattered. This is why the rabbis of old refer to Genesis 11:1–9 not as “the Babel story” per se, as is customary for Christians. Instead, the Jewish sages know this text as “the Generation of the Dispersal”5 (Beck, 1995, p. 13). And this reading leads to the second question concerning the text, regarding the nature of the mistake made by the people at Babel. What sin was committed? Again it is possible to read the sin of pride into this story, but given the Old Testament context, “pride” is insufficient as an explanation. Passed down

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through centuries of Christian folklore is the vision of a mighty God come to humble the Babylonians in their arrogance: How dare they try to reach heaven; how dare they believe themselves capable of creation merely by erecting a lofty tower? Hertzberg (1992) finds this explanation unsatisfactory. He cites Rabbeinu Nissim’s two points on the “crime” of Babel: If it truly was meant to be a coup d’etat against God, first of all the people would have been innocent by reason of insanity. And second, if it really was their intention to defeat God, the punishments of linguistic confusion and geographic dispersal were much too lenient (Hertzberg, 1992, p. 43). The sin of “pride” is a Western view of the story, mapped onto it for purposes of Christian teaching during the Middle Ages. In its own context, however, the story is quite different from others in Genesis in that the sin is never, indeed, made explicit (Harland, 1998, p. 515). Contextual cues seem more helpful. These cues come in the form of communication, first in the exhortations of the people and then in God’s response. These have to do with “making a name” and the dispersal from the city, both addressed next. First, much has been made of the “let us make a name for ourselves” remark in the story. It accounts, perhaps, for much of the Western emphasis on the “pride” issue. However, and once again, that reading reveals only part of the problem. Taking this view, God views Babel as “idolatry” and “self-worship” (Kass, 2003, p. 219). Not only will the people forget heaven, but also in making a name for themselves they have given no thought to offspring and generational relationships (p. 233)—a theme that is obviously highly potent in the book of Genesis. Building on that theme is Nault’s (2002) assertion that by attempting to establish a permanent and homogeneous community, the people at Babel are “condamnés à la répétition” (Nault, 2002, p. 392). To make a name is basically to (re)make oneself, and to refuse to receive any other (Nault, 2002, p. 394). Like Harland (1998), Nault (2002) cites previous Genesis texts to support his interpretation. For example, refusing the difference of Others is in stark contrast to Adam’s naming of the animals in the first chapter of primeval history (p. 394). Adam’s actions showed his acceptance of the diversity of life. In contrast, the builders of the tower at Babel engage mimesis rather than alterity. Only God is Other to them; they fortify their stronghold on earth and attempt to extend their realm to that of the Other (heaven) (p. 394), and this action is a symptom of their “mimetic crisis” (p. 397). Unknowingly, they hover on the brink of hell; “Misery is when humanity, in his totality, was of a single shore and living a singular history” (Neher, 1969, p. 49). Read in these terms, which reveal a stark contrast to Adam’s Edenic naming, Babel is merely the most abysmal yet in the long history of the Fall. Indeed, one narrative logic presented by Genesis as a whole is that there is a “history of sin”

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beginning with Eden—and Babel is its climax (Childs, 1993, p. 120), or the final stage of degeneration (Dean, 1982, p. 549). It is important to couch Nault’s (2002) exegesis in terms of the city, for he asks the important question: which project was primary—the tower, or the city itself? His own response is based on the text specifically. The tower becomes “eclipsed” by the city even in terms of narrative: after God descends to Babel and confuses their speech, the people stop building “the city”—but no more mention is made of the tower (Nault, 2002, p. 391). Thus a contextual reading might suggest that the “sin” of Babel had far more to do with the city in general. Perhaps the tower merely symbolizes or epitomizes Babel; perhaps the tower stands particularly as a narrative device to redouble the potency of Babel as the paradigmatic “city.” Moving our focus on sin to the city as a whole, rather than on the tower as a singular object, might also be argued contextually. The most obvious juxtaposition in Genesis would point to the story of Cain. Indeed commentators throughout history (including Augustine, discussed later in this chapter) wonder aloud: Is it really a coincidence that the world’s first city was founded by the world’s first murderer? Milgrom (1995) also vividly asks the question: “Why did God tell Abraham to leave Mespotamia, the most advanced civilization of its time, for the backwater region of Canaan?” The context here is what comes after Babel. Abraham will return to the nomadic, “wilderness” lifestyle of the Hebrews that contrasts so strongly with the decadent life of the Canaanites. Although Wilson (1986) asserts that scholarship concerning an “antiurban bias” in the Old Testament is unconvincing (p. 5), even he reads the Babel story as God’s response to problems presented by the idea of a city. Within it, he argues, there is “the potential for a harmonious life but also the divisive tensions which tend to destroy civilization” (p. 8). The city imposes a unity that is “artificial” (p. 7), and this requires God’s intervention. He confuses their speech to underscore the city’s imperfections. While the people may believe that the city will prevent them from being scattered, and will be a testimony to their homogeneity, in reality the city is only “an uneasy association of hostile individuals who cannot communicate” (p. 7). All things considered, the polity as a reality is inevitable for human civilization, but for the people of Babel “the political society became an end and purpose unto itself and not merely an expedient to attain spiritual fulfillment and perfection” (Hertzberg, 1992, p. 44). Thus while the sin may not have been the city per se, given other experiences of urban life expressed in the Old Testament, God’s response shows the complexity of issues surrounding the decision to remain in one place. The city cannot prevent the dispersal, and indeed hastens it.

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It is important to note contextually that the people are dispersed at the hand of God, and not merely as a matter of course. Their resistance to the idea, then, may help to answer the question in this section concerning the sin of Babel. Harland (1998) concurs with B. W. Anderson (1977) when he writes, “The scattering over the earth was part of God’s plan; he did not want an homogenous world” (Harland, 1998, p. 527). So the sin is not so much “pride” or “making a name,” as Christian exegeses have argued. After all, in the chapter of Genesis immediately following the Babel story, God gives Abram a new and great name that will be known to all the generations—so making a name in itself is not a sin. Rather, “the people of Babel erred by using their name in an attempt to preserve unity and avoid being scattered” (Harland, 1998, p. 529). And, I would argue that contextualizing Babel with Abraham further textures the problem of the Babylonians’ disobedience: their actions were against God’s will. It is God who makes the name for Abraham, not Abram himself. Of course, read from a twenty-first-century perspective, perhaps the building of the city of Babel seems a “natural” outcome of social progress. From an anthropological perspective, man moves from the primitive state, to society, to civilization. But God’s will is beyond understanding, answers biblical narratology. Man’s “nature” is not God’s (a point that will be seriously taken up by the medieval mythographers and described later in this chapter). Therefore, God’s nation is not “natural” but providential: it is accomplished only through the intentional uprooting of Abraham (Kass, 2003, p. 222n). Likewise, the people of Babel were deliberately “scattered” by God. He deemed their dispersal necessary. Reflections on why this must be so are taken up with the third question. What are the implications of the dispersal? From the perspective of the twenty-first century, the narrative of Babel may seem to inform a multiplicity of genres. As this section has taken pains to point out, popular Western versions of Babel seem more like frivolous folklore than anything else. The story has receded somewhere back into collective memory: it is a fable about people who were so proud and arrogant they believed if they built their tower high enough, they would be gods. We consider it of no consequence, except to use it as an easy conversational referent for either the multiplicity of languages or the wrath of God. Even academics are not immune; an electronic search for journal articles with “Babel” in the title yields more essays about foreign language education than any other subject. This is one shape the story may take in

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contemporary life. But read contextually, Babel must be regarded as a myth. I use this word not in the vernacular sense, but with consciousness of its definition in the field of folkloristics. Myths are the narratives that tell us why the world is the way it is. The word is not intended to imply dubious qualities or falsehood, but rather cultural significance. As Kass (2003) explains: “First tales in Genesis may be taken as paradigmatic. . . . We expect to learn not how things ought to be but rather how they are” (p. 198). For some, the myth of God’s intervention in the city of Babel presents a theological problem: why would God deliberately sow discord in a peaceful, united kingdom? (Parrot, 1954, p. 69). This represents one position concerning Babel, which connotes its effects for the world as negative. Babel from this perspective represents another episode in the long history of humanity’s falling away from God. It begins at Eden, but finds a climax at Babel (Childs, 1993). As difficult as the Fall might have been at Eden, Babel presents another sorrowful occurrence, another curse of man. It is the root of all our forgetting (Beck, 1995). The division of the nations also apparently means that God’s Chosen People have been named explicitly and exclusively. By one reading of the story, after Babel God must decide to educate one group at a time, and so God focuses on Israel (Kass, 2003, p. 217). The story may be seen as part of a pattern in primeval history, as we have mentioned, concerning man’s recalcitrance. At this point in the history, however, God has promised not to kill mankind again, as he did in the Flood (Sasson, 1994, p. 457). So his better option may be segregation; he calls Abram, and starts anew. In starting anew, however, does God set in motion a divisiveness that is still with us? His command of dispersal “challenges the view of human selfsufficiency. Each nation . . . testifies against the god-like status of every other” (Kass, 2003, p. 237). Moreover, many interpretations focus on the confused nature of language and the futility of communication. As Jacques Ellul writes: “By noncommunication, God keeps men from forming a truth valid for all men. Henceforth, man’s truth will only be partial and contested” (Ellul, 1993, p. 19). From one perspective, the “noncommunication of men” after Babel evokes a certain longing or nostalgia. Loss forms the dominant tone of the story. But recently, scholars have read the implications of dispersal differently. Weber (1992) suggests that the incident at Babel is not a curse at all, but a blessing. The diversity of languages is an equalizing force amid human quests for power. God’s destruction of a universal language, for Weber, reinforces the uniqueness and beauty of disparate cultures and guards against hegemonic discourse. This is a blessing, not a curse: it allows partiality in truth. The interpretation of Babel as “truth” and blessing arises from a decidedly humanist epistemological perspective. Outside the field of theology,

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postmodern criticism on Babel has focused on this humanistic element. These readings are less contextual than the other interpretations surveyed in this chapter, regarding Babel not as part of primeval history but in symbolic isolation. Nonetheless they are highly compelling for the rhetoric of alterity that stems from Babel and extends into the twenty-first century. By considering the Babel narrative’s treatment of diverse languages, postmodern humanists have asserted that Babel is an allegory for postcolonialism. A good deal of recent scholarship focuses on Babel in relation to oppressed peoples. Míguez-Bonino (1999) explores the damage done to language under colonial rule. For him, language loss does not pertain to the “holy language” as a universal, but instead he discusses the loss that occurs when the language of the colonizer is forced on native people. They are bereft of the ability to describe life as they truly experience it (Míguez-Bonino, 1999, pp. 33–34). I include this interpretation of Babel as a “blessing” and as hope against oppression for two reasons. First, it aptly captures the implications of the dispersal for alterity in the contemporary world. Considering how Babel might symbolically apply to linguistic issues in the present prefigures the possibility of the Other “talking back” to the Babel trope. But before that reciprocal element of the narrative is examined, I have a second reason for highlighting this exegesis on the anticolonialist power of Babel: it is highly significant to communication about identity and alterity in the medieval period. Again, postmodern humanists take a positive perspective on Babel because it offers an alternative to linguistic hegemony. As discussed in the next two sections, the medieval period was both monolithic and abstruse in terms of its Latin language (Borst, 1996, p. vii). Later this chapter will focus on the tensions this creates for advances in philosophy about language and the Other. For now, I want to put the humanistic interpretations of Babel in broader historical perspectives by looking more closely at Christian medieval mythography about Babel. It must be stressed that dispersal involves both space and language. Medieval storytellers grappled with the implications of the Dispersal in complex ways, fashioning arguments about identity and alterity whose reverberations are still felt in the contemporary West. ENTER NIMROD: THE CURSE OF CANAAN AND MEDIEVAL MONSTERS The dispersal previously discussed seems to present an apt metaphor for the early medieval period. There is a parallel to be found between the people of Babel and the “scattered” Western world that emerged after the Roman Empire. At this time the culture of antiquity was “all but lost and, above all, dispersed” (Marías, 1967, p. 126). Thus some would argue that during the first

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400 years of the Middle Ages, the philosopher’s task was composed largely of salvage operations. While it is true that a unique brand of medieval thought (Scholasticism) did not emerge until the ninth century, when it comes to alterity one may assert that a common thread of Christianity spins through all of the Middle Ages. Medieval mythography was a far-reaching enterprise, to be sure. But even now, and especially during that time period, the Bible has different “authority” than other texts (Mbiafu, 2002, p. 11). Some materials of the ancient world were “salvaged,” such as the Greco-Roman philosophies. But the Bible had a different influence: the medieval mythographers sought to make it their own, and their imagination was particularly captured by Babel. The most glaring leap from the text of Genesis 11:1–9 to the popular Christian version of the Babel story concerns the figure of Nimrod. Whereas there are vague connotations between Nimrod and the Tower of Babel within versions of the Old Testament, during the medieval period his characterization as builder of the Tower becomes certain and canonical. To explain how this happened I trace the early “hints” from the Genesis texts and other Old Testament materials, through the deliberate recasting of Nimrod as the definite—and rather colorful—tyrant of Babylon. It is in this latter process that Babel emerges as a metaphor for alterity that had its beginnings in the medieval period. Before making these points, however, I will first explain the identity of Nimrod within yet another narrative frame in Genesis. In typical Old Testament fashion, Nimrod is best narratively introduced through his lineage. He is most likely the nephew of Canaan; grandson of Ham; great-grandson of Noah. As the nephew of Canaan, Nimrod may be considered part of the “cursed” line doomed to serve the descendants of Shem and Japheth, brothers of Ham. This curse was placed on Nimrod’s race (directly on Canaan) by Noah, to punish Ham. The story goes like this: after the Flood, Noah cultivated grapes and made wine. He became drunk one night and fell asleep in his tent, unclothed and uncovered. Ham came into Noah’s tent and not only saw his nakedness, but failed to cover his father— and then went out to share the spectacle with Shem and Japheth. Ham, it seems, found the whole episode amusing. Shem and Japheth, however, behaved as proper sons and walked backwards into the tent so as not to see Noah’s nakedness; then they covered him up and never uttered another word about it. Upon awakening, Noah was outraged at Ham’s behavior, and cursed Canaan. While I will not undertake as detailed an account of the curse of Ham in this chapter as I do the story of Babel, the episode is still very significant. Again it serves to put Babel as a narrative trope in the proper context, by lending a picture of Babel’s prehistory. More important, it helps to establish

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why Nimrod should go from shadow figure to satanic scapegoat in the texts of the medieval mythographers and later literary figures who passed down the Babel narrative. Ham’s sin does not seem minor; neither does the curse seem misdirected, in light of the primeval importance of progeniture. It is has been argued that Ham, in mocking Noah, metaphorically emasculated his father as an authority figure (Kass, 2003, p. 206). Also the paradigm for “racial” diversity set forth in the story of Noah’s sons—even if medieval writers did not employ such terminology—had its uses in the imagination and enactment of alterity. All of this is not to say that Nimrod’s association with the Tower of Babel is merely the product of medieval flights of fancy. He is mentioned as the ruler of Babylon in Genesis 10:8–12. Some versions of this text seem to describe Nimrod’s wish to rule the earth (Kass, 2003, p. 208), but again this is a matter of interpretation. The Plain of Shinar—that is, Babylon—is identified as part of Nimrod’s kingdom, and of course Shinar is specifically identified as the place where the tower of Babel is built. Some scholars have also translated the name of a specific and significant tower in Mesopotamia as “the tower of Nimrod” or attempted to historically identify his real persona (Speiser, 1994). It is also crucial to understand that it was not only Christian scholars who were commentating on the Babel story during the Middle Ages. Indeed, some of the material on which Christian scholars drew came from the midrash (rabbinic interpretations of the Old Testament) written in the early Christian and medieval periods. For the purposes of this book, my focus will remain on the dominant “Western” tradition of the Middle Ages, which was overwhelmingly Catholic. But recognition of the fact that medieval mythography was not an exclusively Christian enterprise does provide insight into the dynamics of human narrative. The early midrash—most notably that of Josephus in the first century A.D.—directly connect Nimrod to the tower, but there is no more “logic” to the rabbis doing this than there is for Christian storytellers. That is simply one of the functions of midrashim: to speculate on omissions or gaps in the Old Testament. As Beck (1995) points out, “Why the sages introduce Nimrod, since he is not mentioned in the text [of the Babel story], only adds to the mystery” (p. 13). Beck (1995) has a point here, but the introduction of Nimrod is only mysterious on the surface. The fact that some medieval midrashim fortify the Nimrod legend speaks to an “anti-Mesopotamian” bias that one can read into Genesis (Kass, 2003, p. 218) and other sections of the Old Testament including the Psalms (Croatto, 1998, p. 209). Several scholars have pointed to the contextual clue in Genesis 11:3 that concerns the necessity of making bricks. These would have been the materials of the Other. Lacking stone and mortar, Mesopotamia was so poor in resources that the tower builders had to

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bake the earth into building-blocks and use bitumen or tar to hold it all together (Croatto, 1998, p. 208). It goes without saying that these materials of the Other were decidedly inferior (Milgrom, 1995, p. 19). One might also look at the simple fact that God dispersed the people from Babel and conclude that He too was “anti-Babylon” (Milgrom, 1995, p. 19). Croatto (1998) even advances the contemporary argument that the Babel story is really nothing more than a “countermyth” to the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, which casts the founding of Babylon in a favorable light. Historically speaking, we know that the Semites and Sumerians battled for control over Mesopotamia, the land of Babel, around 3000 B.C.E. onwards (Parrot, 1954, p. 42). The midrash no doubt operated under the traditional knowledge that this particular struggle did not end well for the Semites. The Babylonian exile of the Hebrews, which lasted for most of the sixth century B.C., most certainly influences Jewish lore and the acts of identification and differentiation. Any bias the Jewish mythographers held against Babel would seem justified against such an historical backdrop; for them Babylon was “the permanent symbol of paganism and oppression” (Parrot, 1954, p. 67). Their resentment could also find an easy focus in Nimrod, since Genesis 10 alludes to his lust for power. In terms of the primeval history, it is important to note that Nimrod can be seen as the first figure to bring such tendencies into the world—in the same way that Cain was the first murderer. Much of the world’s mythology accounts for evil in this way; as Dean (1982) explains: “Nimrod’s lust [for power] was something new in the world, a lust for political dominance over his fellow humans—an appetite that later Babylonians would satisfy by enslaving the Jews” (p. 567). Seen from this perspective, the oral and literary bias of Jewish legend seems reasonable. But of course, since the text of Genesis 11 tells us that “the whole earth” was of one tongue, and the “children of Adam” were the builders of the tower (Dean, 1982, p. 566), the specific “ethnic” Othering of the tower builders is only a medieval gloss. So the midrashic inscription of Nimrod into the myth of Babel is not so mysterious as Beck (1995) presupposes: Nimrod is positively identified as, and indeed epitomizes, the Babylonian enemy of old. Such inscription is typical of the cultural processes of myth; thus it is not surprising that the Christian medieval mythographers shared this undertaking. Indeed, the Jewish sages were so successful in connecting Nimrod to the Babel tower that when a ninth-century scribe at work on Ovid’s Metamorphoses reached the episode where “the giants set their desires upon the kingdom of heaven,” he added the marginalia note “Nebroth’s6 tower” (Schmidt, 1978, p. 304). An insertion such as this underscores the apparent surety of medieval mythographers in their assertion that Nimrod, grandson of Ham, should take the blame for the

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building of the tower—and perhaps is also connected to parallel myths concerning rebelliousness against God. This section primarily surveys the writers who commented on and analyzed the story of Babel. I should reiterate here that my intention in this chapter is not to deconstruct the mythography of the medieval period. I do not pose any particular critique of the literary and pedagogical decisions of the medieval Christian apologists or the later poets, except insofar as they present particular views of intercultural communication. The recasting of myth is an activity for the ages; it is not so much the process as the final outcome—the impact on the human imagination—that propels its power for identity, alterity, and communication. The identifying nature of medieval mythography seems to have had four concerns pertaining to Nimrod. One of these is true of medieval mythography in general: it was important for Catholic commentators to establish “Christian” texts as superior to “pagan” (especially Greek) ones (Chance, 1994). Obviously, a second overall objective in mainstream (read: Catholic) medieval mythography would have been the propagation of Catholic doctrine and admonitions regarding proper Christian morality. The other rhetorical goals are more specific: the addition of Nimrod also lays the foundation for some pernicious and long-lasting attitudes about non-Europeans, and the story of Babel is meant to be highly persuasive regarding linguistic unity. Each of these instruments of the Babel narrative is discussed in the following paragraphs. The first of these four concerns manifests itself quite obviously in the myths regarding Nimrod. As Chance (1994) points out, most medieval mythographers took as a main objective “to shun anything that smacked of the explicitly pagan, or at least non-Christian” (p. 365). Classical myths become naturalized, or categorized as pagan forms of stories related to Christian archetypes. For example, in his study of Boethius, Notker Labeo recasts a narrative of the battle between heaven and the sons of Neptune as an Old Testament fight between the Christian God and Babylonian giants, led by Nimrod (Chance, 1994, p. 368). This is just one example of how the medieval mythographic project sought Christian “ur-forms” or archetypes for pagan narratives, totalizing medieval discourse toward the narrated identity of the Catholic Church. The repelling of any non-Christian narrative is indicative of a second concern of medieval narratives of alterity. Once Catholic doctrine was totalized by the absence of any other (even from such “benign” sources as classical myth), the doctrine could be more actively propagated. This propagation of Catholic teachings and Church power is the second concern of medieval narratives regarding the Other, and the project is straightforward in some

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respects. Augustine’s City of God is the first well-known Christian text to propel Nimrod as the leader of the tower builders, and Augustine’s treatise is also noteworthy in its connections to the theme of “city” in the interpretations of the sin of Babel. Civitate Dei, or City of God, was written broadly in response to the evils occurring in Rome. Augustine puts forth two cities in juxtaposition: the worldly and the heavenly. Part of his argument often includes discussions of exemplary mundane cities—such as Cain’s city of Enoch (p. 607ff). Again, in that instance, it seems far from arbitrary to Augustine that the first earthly city was founded by the first murderer. The heavenly city is directed by God’s will; by contrast, cities on earth are ruled by men, and Babylon is certainly among them (p. 656ff). Augustine relies on Genesis 10 to infer that Babylon is Nimrod’s city, and a place of “arrogant impiety” (p. 657). The sin of Babel, he concludes, is more symbolic than actively rhetorical. The building of the tower (or towers) at Babylon represented the people’s refusal to bow to the will of God. “The safe and genuine highway to heaven is constructed by humility, which lifts its heart up to the Lord, not against the Lord” (p. 657). This last phrase “against the Lord” is particularly indicative of Nimrod from Augustine’s vantage point. While most translations of Genesis 10 cite Nimrod as a “mighty hunter before the Lord”—so skilled in fact that he is the subject of a famous proverb—Augustine points out that the Greek word enantion “before” can also mean “against.” His translation is a watershed moment in what Haynes (2002) calls the “unauthorized biography” of Nimrod. By referring to Nimrod as a hunter against the Lord, Augustine endows the grandson of Ham with the potential for ill intentions and tyrannical tendencies. “Hunter,” Augustine goes on to assert, “can only suggest a deceiver, oppressor and destroyer of earth-born creatures” (p. 658). Most interestingly for the present work, he focuses on the implications God’s punishment has for communication: Since a ruler’s power of domination is wielded by his tongue, it was in that organ that his pride was condemned to punishment. And the consequence was that he who refused to understand God’s bidding so as to obey it, was himself not understood when he gave orders to men. (XVI, 4 [p. 658]) Augustine’s interpretation also jibes with some of the rabbinic glosses. Like the midrash, Augustine is ultimately interested in the dispersal itself as God’s solution to the people’s reluctance to go forth, multiply, and fill the earth. Augustine’s commentary on Babel thus concludes: “Such was God’s design; and he achieved it by ways that are to us inscrutable and incomprehensible” (p. 658). A result is that City of God makes permanent in Chris-

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tian mythography Augustine’s inference that the tower was built by Nimrod, a hunter against the Lord. It would be foolish to map twenty-first-century sensitivities about translation onto Augustine’s fifth-century gloss of the Greek word enantion. The fact remains that after Augustine’s exegesis on Babel, commentators on Genesis 11:1–9 focus their attention on the grandson of Ham as never before. Never again during the medieval period will the tower be extricated from the accused builder, and he becomes a topic of such fascination that he takes on mythical status all his own. The mythography is typical of the medieval period, especially when monstrous aspects of Nimrod’s character are introduced. Perhaps this, too, begins with Augustine and his implication that Nimrod is a giant (City of God XVI), but Haynes (2002) also suggests there is a gloss in a second-century text by Tertullian that may create this allusion (Haynes, 2002, p. 46). Like his physical appearance, there is an emphasis on overall excess, a renunciation of human limits. In the Recognitions, for example, Clement writes that Nimrod led the Hamites beyond appointed bounds, and they consorted with Persians—another important allusion to alterity discussed later. Taken together, the legends of Nimrod’s excess are part of an “extensive medieval tradition that presented tyranny [and] gigantism . . . as intimately related elements of primeval history” (Warner, 1997, p. 85). Indeed, Nimrod may be posited as regressive both physically and morally, representing the “giants” who existed before the Flood (Dean, 1982, p. 566). And in the Glossia Ordinaria, the Venerable Bede links Nimrod with Satan. The characterization of Nimrod as somehow a “perversion” (Dean, 1982, p. 567) is akin to medieval beliefs regarding non-Europeans. The monstrosity of Nimrod seems to climax in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, where Nimrod is depicted as having bred with “the fiends of the underworld” a race of monsters, pagan folk, “and various peoples of the isles of Asia” (Haynes, 2002, p. 49). But more significant to medieval alterity is Nimrod’s conflation with Ham as the progenitor of the “cursed race,” which comes to mean Africans. Ambrose positively identified Nimrod as an Ethiopian, “whose colour signifies the shadows of the soul” (Dean, 1982, p. 568), or “humanity’s dark side” (Haynes, 2002, p. 48). As horrid as it seems in the twenty-first century, it is important to realize that we are not far removed from these prejudices. So complete was the medieval project of alterity in the Babel story that 1,600 years after its initial entextualization, the so-called Curse of Ham was used to justify African slavery in the New World. Haynes (2002) describes an illustration in Josiah Priest’s 1843 treatise Slavery as it Relates to the Negro or African Race: the sketch shows Japheth expressing disapproval of Nimrod’s tower project—the tower “built by the Negroes of the house of Ham, under the direction of Nimrod” (Haynes, 2002, p. 41). The manipulation of this story throughout

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Western history has not been merely vernacular; it was canonical and official. Shamefully close to the present—in 1870—a college of priests at the Vatican Council finally petitioned to lift Noah’s curse off Africa (Mbiafu, 2002, p. 10). And the story persists: it has been used as justification by some American Christian churches, notably in the 1960s, for their anti-ecumenical sentiments (Haynes, 2002, p. 121). It is decidedly not my intention to “blame” the medieval mythographers for continued racism. As stated in the opening paragraphs of this section, the goal here is not to pinpoint the historical moment wherein Babel, Nimrod, and the “curse of Ham” seem to converge into a medieval demonic that dooms Western cultures to predetermined and permanent racism. To do so would, again, undermine present efforts to recognize the contemporary generation as willing and equal perpetrators of social ills. At the same time, religious belief is significant to comprehending current circumstances of alterity (Haynes, 2002, p. 220). An examination of medieval mythography then helps to interpret the intertextuality of those beliefs and their impact on identity negotiation. Tied up in medieval alterity is the fourth issue—linguistic unity—mentioned earlier. The linguistic questions arising from Babel are pertinent for the medieval period, of course, but also for the twenty-first century. Perhaps the generation on the cusp of global cultural homogenization can understand anew the problems of empire and of hegemony in language. In both eras, communication about identity and alterity is crucial to the linguistic project. It is to these issues that the chapter now turns. LETTING GO THE GRASP: BABEL AND THE DIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES Beyond the rewritings of Babel in medieval mythography, the motif of the narrative that endures above all else is the idea that with God’s retribution at Babel, the power of speech to reveal the world is gone (Kass, 2003, p. 235). It is on this motif that I especially want to focus here. The medieval mythographers also were concerned with this element of the Babel text. Augustine follows his commentary on the dispersal with a discussion of God’s heavenly language, in book XVI of the City of God. But, in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville is more explicit in his lamentation of the consequences of Babel: he underscores the misery of human beings when the primary clarity of language is gone. There is no longer any singularity of meaning, or even of the process of meaning. This lamentation, beginning with Isidore, continues through a series of diverse works. In the medieval period, the linguistic issues surrounding Babel culminate in Dante.

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Here the titan Nimrod babbles, alone and anguished, in the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno (Borst, 1992). All told, medieval mythographers suggest that since the moment of Babel, humans have experienced a loss in language of an essential ‘bond’ uniting a thing and its name since Creation. . . . Mankind is no longer capable of maintaining a right relation between knowing subject and known object which the original gift of language made possible. (Jeffrey, 1984, pp. 59–60) Amid this pious funeral dirge for the unconfounded language, however, there were voices of hope—albeit from very diverse perspectives. One of these was St. Thomas Aquinas, thirteenth-century Dominican monk and perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of the Middle Ages. The linguistic turn in philosophy has created a renewed interest in the implications of Aquinas’s theories of semantics (O’Callaghan, 2003). More important, Aquinas presents a complex response to the Latinate unity of the medieval period in the nature of his scholarship and also within the context of Babel. I consider Aquinas to be an “Other” voice from the medieval period that forms a bridge for the Babel narrative between his historical moment and the present one. The metaphor often presented as the antithesis of Babel is Pentecost, and of course there is a Christian narrative logic to this metaphor. Pentecost is the moment when the apostles of Christ are endowed with the ability to speak to anyone, regardless of linguistic diversity, in order to preach the Gospel. For some Christian sects, the miracle at Pentecost recurs and is known today as “speaking in tongues.” Beginning in the Middle Ages, Pentecost is posited as the diametric or antithetical fulfillment of Babel. For Aquinas, in a very basic and literal sense the event of Pentecost redeemed the sorrows of Babel (Jeffrey, 1984, p. 60). Yet like Augustine, Aquinas continued to express his struggle with the existence of foreign languages and the inability of humans to understand each other. While he approaches it indirectly, another redemption of Babel can be found in the philosophies of language presented by St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas represents the medieval philosophical project in interesting ways. He is a remarkable thinker in his own right, yet he is also known for his interpretations (read: salvage) of much of the work of Aristotle. In a general sense, Aquinas is symbolic of linguistic diversity since his understanding of Aristotle required translation from the Greek—a breaking out of medieval insistence on monolithic Latin. More specifically, Aquinas is indebted to Aristotle for the elements of the semantic triangle. Semantics, the study of the relationship between words and their meanings, continues to provoke

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philosophers and linguists alike. But its basic questions are actually quite simple: what is the relationship between words and things? How is it that human beings come to understand this relationship? Why does it seem so impossible to achieve homogeneity in the relationship between a specific thing and specific word? Aristotle’s semantic triangle mapped out the elements of these relationships: the word; the thing (res extra animam, or thing outside the soul); and the concept (passio de anima, or passion of the soul). Of course, of the three elements the most contested and difficult to understand is the passio de anima, the concept. Aquinas’ solution—though obviously more textured and aesthetic than may be captured here—lies in several interrelated ideas. One is quiddity, or the essence of things. Humans achieve quiddity through the obiectum, or cognitive power. Aquinas posits obiectum as akin to the senses: the goal of sight is color; the goal of smell is odor; the goal of intellect is quiddity (the essence of things) (O’Callaghan, 2003, p. 205). It is crucial to understand that the passion of the soul is not an object mediating between word and thing. For Aquinas, it is the process by which we understand the relationship between word and thing. Unlike Aristotle, Aquinas attributes—or at least subordinates—the passio de anima to God. The existence of things is not dependent on the intellect; they are products of God’s creation. However, “the created world is incomplete until it is taken up into the mental life of the human person who dwells within it. This mutual indwelling . . . is the perfection of the created order” (O’Callaghan, 2003, p. 281). Note that for Aquinas—as for Aristotle—the idea of “in” is existential. So the created world that is taken “into” our mental life is not mediated. In other words, it is not a physical property of meaning that is created “in the mind.” The mind is not space per se, but a fact of human creation and one of the senses (like sight or smell). Humans are incapable of “getting it all at once,” which separates their intellect wholly from the divine (O’Callaghan, p. 273). Rather, for Aquinas, it is God’s presence that illuminates humans, from which they derive the truth (McKeon, 1928, p. 437). This metaphor of illumination is essential to my argument here.7 Illumination constitutes the passion of the soul, the concept. Yet note well the point that the passion of the soul is a process—not an object. Illumination is that process. For Aquinas, illumination is always within humans. It does not come “all at once” from God—there is not a “moment of” illumination. Illumination is an aspect of being. It does not mediate the relationship between knower and known, but instead represents the “light” of the intellect that changes the knower and provides quiddity: Finally, inquiry and wonder give place to actual understanding . . . this involves no difference in the phantasm [object] but only in the

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possible intellect, just as the difference between colors in daylight and colors actually seen involves no difference in the colors but only in eyes and sight. (Lonergan, 1997, p. 185) O’Callaghan (2003) is convinced that Aquinas did not subscribe to the “third thing thesis”: the idea that there is some substantial referent or internal process between a word and a thing that allows a human to understand it. O’Callaghan asserts that Aquinas does not consider a “third thing.” Instead the acquisition of meaning is as simple as a hand grasping a pen. There is no intermediary to that act: one’s hand reaches out and takes the object. The human intellect grasps the meaning of words much in the same way. No intermediary is required, no “third thing” between the two elements at work: the intellect and the word. This metaphor of the “grasp” is highly useful for explicating the difference between Aquinas’s theory of language and those of later philosophers, who posited all manner of “third things” that could exist between the human intellect and words. Bracketing off that argument, however, “grasp” problematizes the relationships between humans and languages in fascinating ways. O’Callaghan’s analysis of Aquinas and his role in linguistic philosophy is brilliant. Inadvertently, as a scholar writing in the twenty-first century, he offers a metaphor that unleashes some of the remnants of Babel. I suggest that while “grasp” has its uses in refuting the third thing thesis, it also represents a linguistic bias Aquinas may not have intended. Aquinas’s dominant metaphor, as I discussed earlier, is illumination: a well of God’s light, a fact of human creation, something always within humans that allows them to understand. I argue the metaphor of illumination is helpful for understanding the ability of the people at Babel to understand each other—but “grasp” negates that illumination. The mistrust of the people at Babel and their “grasping” for God means they rejected the illumination that was always theirs. From this perspective, Aquinas is significant in the medieval period for understanding the biases of language passed down through the Babel narrative. Again for Aquinas, the human is by nature a social and political animal. Language is not individualistic. O’Callaghan explains Aquinas thus: if the human were a solitary animal, the passions of the soul would suffice. But since the human is social and political, she or he needs language. This is what Aquinas calls “the more perfect form of existence” (O’Callaghan, 2003, p. 281). Considered in juxtaposition with the Babel narrative, Aquinas reinforces the sense that the tower builders caused yet another Fall away from the Garden of Eden, another deviation from the existence God intended for human beings. It seems illumination was not enough for the tower-builders; they wanted to objectify and concretize God, build a “third thing” in between

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their city and the heavens. As a result, they lost the sense of illumination toward a heavenly tongue. If one engages traditional interpretations of the story, the people at Babel did retain the ability to understand words, but only in an individualistic way. From another perspective, illumination was temporarily yet completely lost. As Croatto (1998) suggests, perhaps it was linguistic confusion, not linguistic diversity, that separated the people at Babel. Their “babbling” was not understandable even to themselves. From either of these interpretations about confusion, though, one may see that the “grasp” beyond human limits negates the “sense” of illumination God had given to humans. Language is the power of an individual; intellect is the habit (O’Callaghan 2003). Yet, for Aquinas, this individual power may only be employed in social and public life. The power is problematic when it turns inward, as in the case of Nimrod. One difficulty with language is the “complacency and pride it tends to produce” (Kass, 2003, p. 237). From one perspective, the medieval insistence on Latinate unity produces just such a complacency: the loss of Greek is the loss of all pre-Christian philosophy. Aquinas is an allegory of the redemption of this loss, taking up Aristotelian questions anew in the “Dark Ages.” Aquinas also aptly circumscribes the individual power of language, asserting that the perfect (and God-intended) form of existence is human life together. Illumination is the habit that must be cultivated; language is not to be “grasped” but practiced. Grace is given rather than concretized or grasped, as the tower toward heaven was meant to do. While the grace of God may not have limits, for Aquinas illumination in the hands of an individual is still limited. I argue this narrative motif concerning “limits” is the one that will bring Babel into the twenty-first century, and I explain this argument next. THE UNEASY LANGUAGE: BABEL AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY There are scholars—both religious and otherwise—who believe that Babel is on the rise again. Some of the arguments are linguistic, as in Mühlhäusler’s (1994) observation that humanity is moving toward English as a “universal” language. Kass (2003) views the linguistic question less literally, but poses the struggle for communicative practices in terms of common knowledge. “God, it seems, forgot about the possibility that a new universal language could emerge, the language of symbolic mathematics” (p. 242). Thus for Kass the Babylonian trope of linguistic diversity is allegorical. The question is one of limits to human knowledge and homogeneity. He goes on to cite more evidence that Babel has returned: the existence of the United Nations, the World Wide Web, and the postmodern idea that “all truth is of human cre-

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ation” all should give us pause in the context of the Babel narrative (Kass, 2003, pp. 242–243). Kass’s allegorical interpretation of the diversity of tongues in Genesis is useful because it points to a common thread running through diverse exegeses on Babel. The paradigmatic trope of Babel ties together several of the interpretations discussed in this chapter: Babel is about willfully rejecting one’s limitations. In building the tower, the people described in Genesis 11:1–9 dismissed any sensitivity toward their own humanity as less perfect than God. This is the case no matter which exegesis one espouses. The high tower traverses all limitations of engineering, physical endurance, and viable relationship with God. The idea of the city rejects the limits of population and space. The motif wherein protagonists overestimate their limitations is blatant in the text of Genesis 11:1–9. Moreover, the “limits” motif is also found in medieval versions of the Babel story. As I have argued in this chapter, these medieval versions have formed some of the Western foundations of alterity. In medieval mythography the Christian writers emphasized the arrogance of humans in building the tower. Their pride led them to believe they could understand and even reject God’s plan. Their knowledge and understanding, from their own perspective, were limitless. Even the physical characteristics that medieval mythographers mapped onto Nimrod and the tower builders suggest a gross disregard of limits. They are marked by their abnormal size—their growth beyond presumed human potential. Nimrod and his followers are often described as giants, and the motif embeds itself further into the Christian version of Nimrod when he and his “cursed race” become conflated with monstrosity. This narrative description of Nimrod and the line of Ham as “monsters” is significant to alterity. As Palencia-Roth (1996) explains, medieval concepts of world geography required boundaries for the “civilized” world in opposition to monsters (such as Gog and Magog, who were placed at the far corners of the earth on the first “reservations”). Regarding Nimrod as “out of bounds” aids the interpretation of the limitations motif in the Babel story. Taking this perspective on Babel accomplishes two things. First, it reconciles the disparate exegeses reviewed early in this chapter by providing a common and more general theme. Second, and more important, the trope of surpassed limits suggests that Babel has meaning beyond religious and Western contexts. While Babel is still understood in the twenty-first century as a “biblical” story, the glosses from the Medieval period and later have opened up issues of alterity that the original text does not. This is why one can begin to think about current conflicts in terms of a Western disregard for human limits. The United States is especially marked by this motif of limitlessness. Shames (1997) suggests that the geological features of America make this

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possible: the idea of the “frontier” as boundless open space has not merely been a physical reality for Americans, but has also become a metaphor for shaping American identity. Shames draws on the nineteenth-century observations of Frederick Jackson Turner, who equated the open space of the frontier with freedom, speculation, and economic opportunity. All these traits became uniquely “American” because, even after Turner declared the frontier “closed” in 1893, the economic growth stemming from the frontier continued to carry the country’s optimism and desire for “more.” Shames, writing in 1989, is concerned about the deceleration of economic growth in America and warns Americans to find some other aspiration than limitless wealth. Those who observed American culture carefully in the 1980s may remember the cultural symbols that must have spurred Shames’s concern. It was the age of Reaganomics, of yuppies, of cocaine and nightclubs, and of outrageous consumption. The stock market crash of 1987 should have been a wakeup call for Americans hell-bent on the “more factor,” and this is precisely how Shames intended his commentary. But in retrospect it seems that Shames’s analogy was just another in a long line of Western exhortations to obey human limitations. Even after the insider traders went to jail and the decade-long yuppie party wound down, Americans moved on to another quest for “more.” For a time, it was found in the Internet. The World Wide Web presents an unlimited amount of information and images at one’s fingertips, and there are now so many opportunities to communicate through technology that humans are said to be (ironically) more isolated than ever. Even after the Internet startup bubble burst and the stock market was shaken once again in the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans maintain their optimism and their desire for more. There is little sense that resources will ever run out, or that one day there will be no frontier to conquer. Today there appears to be no limit to technology. Many humans seem ever in pursuit of faster Internet connections and smaller cell phones. One also wants posterity in technology: data must be saved on DVDs and CDs rather than tapes and diskettes. Tapes can melt and stretch and break, but digital is forever. It is not so different from the Babylonian’s desire to “make a name for themselves.” Contemporary humans may consider their potential boundless, and the desire to preserve knowledge is desperate. It may be insurance against destruction of even a biblical kind. And that is the key: from the perspective of some Others, as they regard the West they see no sign of God in the quest for more. Shames calls his readers in 1989 to recognize two things: first, that they are coming to a point of crisis at which material increase will no longer be possible—and that they must find their purpose in something else. Second, Shames points out that the “more factor” is a much longer part of his readers’ history than 1980s yuppiedom. As he writes:

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It was ironic that the yuppies came to be so reviled for their vaunting ambition and outsized expectations, as if they’d invented the habit of more, when in fact they’d only inherited it as a fetus picks up an addiction in the womb. The craving was there in the national bloodstream, a remnant of the frontier. . . . [They] found themselves, as young adults, in the melancholy position of wrestling with a two-hundred-year dependency on a drug that was now in short supply. (Shames, 1997, p. 37) Embedded in his historical moment, Shames is the right cultural critic for the accurate identification of a real problem. Still, his analysis may fall short historically. The drug dependency is not 200 but perhaps 2,000 years old. It is a warning from the ages. True, the peculiar metaphor of “frontier” is uniquely possible in America today, but it was apparently also palpable for the builders of the tower of Babel. Shames’s analysis seems both too quaint and too modern at the same time. It is too modern because he elides this narrative motif of “limitlessness” I have been trying to delineate in terms of alterity. Yet it is too quaint because, eighteen years later, Americans have already moved on to the next “more.” The crash of 1987 has brought few humans any closer to recognizing limitations. To me, the great tragedy of Babel will always lie in the narrative motif of the loss of the “holy tongue.” A sociolinguist by trade, I would never lament the diversity of languages in real life. But there is a bittersweet poignancy to that fact—not merely because of the reality of sociolinguistic identity, but because somewhere my imagination pains for the people of Babel. The Talmud states, after all, that Babel is the root of all our forgetting (Beck, 1995, p. 15). The tragedy of Babel is that the people once did speak the holy tongue; they had “a way of elevating the mundane to the sacred” (Beck, 1995, p. 15). They had, in short, a tower; a bridge to God; a place to dwell with Him. When they concretized it, insisted on objectifying it instead of letting it live in discourse, it utterly vanished. That was the great sin. It was also read as the planting of the seed of humanism over and against God. While the medieval mythographers attempt to squelch this humanism by employing a rhetoric of alterity in Babel, humanism nonetheless begins to bud in the Renaissance era. The next chapter explores the emergence of the public–private dichotomy in Renaissance Europe, and the facets of identity/alterity that spring from systems of public acculturation for the Other.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Fierce Warriors THE OTHER AS COMRADE IN OTHELLO AND WORLD WAR II

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n excursion into the identity negotiations of any culture, as they have moved through time, often highlights the performances of the best storytellers and narrators. For many Western cultures, the bias toward literacy over orality is a distinguishing element. Yet all cultural groups, in the course of their identity negotiation, do actively engage the performances of even their greatest storytellers—critiquing and questioning, embellishing and changing. Those are the dynamics of oral discourse in general, and storytelling in particular. When one seeks a “face” for the Renaissance period in Western history, one of the first storytellers to emerge may be William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was a master narrator of myth, history, and the most powerful force in the universe: love. These themes combine with alterity to lend a picture of diverse humanity in many of his plays. Certainly, alterity plays a large role in the colonial overtones of The Tempest and the tragic religious prejudice of The Merchant of Venice. Yet no Shakespearean “Other” is so unforgettable as Othello. For centuries Shakespeare’s Moor has been at the heart of discussions about Renaissance alterity. But the drama of Othello, cast against the background of Shakespeare’s other works, is itself unique and “Other.” Of all Shakespeare’s plays, the scopes of time, scene, and characters are narrowest in Othello. The narrow focus “reduces the generalized philosophic comments which characterize plays of more varied situation and looser structure like King Lear and Hamlet, but . . . intensifies the emotional impact” (Bentley, 1985, 23). The alterity construction of Othello is thus 93

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strikingly different from Shakespeare’s other narratives: paradoxically, in its simplicity, Othello perfectly conveys the complexity of Renaissance identity. At first glance, the choice of Othello for this study might seem a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. The play’s Italian characters utter lines rife with insulting stereotypes, calling Othello “the thick lips” (Roderigo act 1, scene 1, line 66), “an old black ram” who is “tupping [the] white ewe” Desdemona (Iago 1.1.88–89), and a “Barbary horse” (Iago 1.1.109–113), just to name a few. Recently, debates have raged in the field of literary criticism as to whether Othello is a “racist” play. Opponents of this view are quick to point out that “race” was not a term (or even a construct) available to the Elizabethans (Baecker, 1999; Draper, 1966; Hunter, 2000), and that to map current problems of race relations onto Shakespeare would be an anachronism. Other opponents accurately point out that Othello’s inherent nobility— which he recaptures at the end despite his weaknesses—is juxtaposed with Iago’s evil, and through this narrative Shakespeare consciously disproves any disdain his audience might have for the Other (Hogan, 1998). Proponents of the view that Othello is a “racist” work, on the other hand, point out that even if we regard Othello the character as noble, he still must answer for his race in ways that are degrading and at least “racialist” (Fernie, 1999). Further, the fact that so many African and Caribbean writers and dramatists have recast Othello shows the play’s significance for marginalized persons of color (Cartelli, 1999; Parker, 1994; Singh, 1994). The point I wish to make throughout this book is that narratives of the past have continued significance for alterity, whether the significance is revisionist or not. The Caribbean playwright George Lamming, for example, describes having recast Shakespeare in light of his own experiences. He says in answer to critics who call such a re-vision an anachronism that this may be a mistake, “but it was a mistake lived and felt by millions of men like me” (Loomba, 2002, p. 5). So where is the student of identity and alterity to begin? I concede virtually all the points that scholars have made on either side of the argument. Othello cannot be determined as either racist or nonracist, given Lamming’s point that alterity is a personal experience. But neither do I sit on the fence. Instead, in this chapter I make a new argument by pointing to dimensions of alterity almost entirely missing from extant criticism of Othello: the Renaissance world of the public, of reputation and honesty, and in particular, of military service. I argue that the stereotype of the Moor as a great warrior underpins all the interactions in the play, that Othello’s weakness is found in domesticity, and that this stereotype of the warrior “Other” has continued to affect intercultural communication from a Western perspective. I bring these points into specific relief through attention to the narrative structure of the play and also through a close analysis of the rhetoric of military service employed by the main characters (especially Othello himself). Before

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moving forward with this thesis, some description of Othello’s historical moment will be helpful. RENAISSANCE CULTURE(S) The time and cultures that frame Shakespeare’s canonical rendering of “Othello” are multifaceted. On the one hand is the continuation of certain ideas from the ancient and medieval periods. There are references to Jove, for example, and Othello blames the moon for his madness (5.2.110–112). But Christianity, for most Europeans, was the dominant worldview during the Renaissance. I will not go so far as some scholars to posit Shakespeare as a “Christian” playwright, as though his religion ought to form the sole point of departure for literary analysis (Hogan, 1998). But Christianity is certainly a dimension of his character sketches and very significant to Othello’s identity as a warrior. The battle between “good and evil” forms a basic element in Elizabethan drama, for example. This is a pre-Christian paradigm, yet scholars are tempted to read this as a “Christian” struggle. In particular, the way “good and evil” is framed as “heaven and hell” in Othello invokes a curious mixture of Elizabethan Christianity and medieval superstition. Goaded by Iago into suspicion that Desdemona is unfaithful to him, Othello conjures up his hatred, blows his love to heaven, and wants black vengeance from hell. The images are of blood boiling (3.3.442–450), not unlike the ancient theory of the four “humours”—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile—which were said to set a person’s temperament (Loomba, 2002, p. 53). The contrast between heaven and hell, and the creatures who were said to inhabit those places, becomes sharper in the final act of the play. Emilia stands outside the bedchamber, described by Othello as keeping the “office opposite Saint Peter,” the gate of hell (4.2.79ff). When she comes inside, she compares Othello to Desdemona with this dialectic: “O the more angel she / and you the blacker devil!” (5.2.132). But perhaps most indelible in the narrative is the pathetic way in which Othello, realizing his wife’s innocence and his ensign’s treachery, looks in vain for Iago’s cloven hoof: I look down towards his feet—but that’s a fable. If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee. (Othello to Iago, 5.2.286–287) Despite these medieval images, Christianity in the Renaissance is anything but a continuation of the old status quo. There is a general sense of Christian goodness that permeates the characterization of Desdemona, to be

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sure: she invokes her Christianity in denial of Othello’s charges, for example. Her faith is something Othello acknowledges even in his intention to kill her; he asks her in this famous line: “Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona?” (5.2.24). But highly significant for this historical moment is the splintering of the Roman Catholic Church prior to the Elizabethan era. The Protestant Reformation and the would-be excommunication of Henry VIII have given rise to divisive sects of Christianity, problematizing the issues surrounding alterity during the Renaissance. Above all, such schisms in Christianity reinforced the emerging lines of nationality. England, it has been argued, was the first to form a true “nation” during this time because an entire class of English citizens emerged whose role it was to write, in English, everything about England (Loomba, 2002, p. 9). It must have been a curious thing for Shakespeare’s audiences to experience his stories set in Venice, the greatest commercial power in the world during the previous century, and a Catholic city to boot. Imagine, for example, the performance of Iago’s drinking song during the second act of Othello, and then his explanation of its origin: I learned it in England, where indeed they are most / potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander— Drink, ho!—are nothing to your English. . . . Why, he drinks you with facility your Dane dead drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almain; he gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled. (2.3.72–80) In Othello, Shakespeare also indicates the rivalries within the countries of Europe. Since the play begins in Venice, Shakespeare’s audience is privy to a host of stereotypes and derogatory references to other Italian cities. He alludes to Naples as a place known for venereal disease (3.1.4), and Cassio the Florentine is not immune to a bit of chauvinism. Like Othello, Cassio is fooled by Iago’s duplicity. Cassio compliments Iago thus: “I never knew [even] a Florentine more kind and honest” (3.1.39–40). Despite these ever-narrowing circles of intercultural rhetoric, however, one fundamental prejudice divides Renaissance Europe—the schism between Christian and non-Christian (Loomba, 2002, p. 41). This divide is complicated by nationalism and the in-group rivalries previously described, but nonetheless remains primary. In the study of history surrounding the Renaissance, one can lose sight of the fact that the “rebirth” of European culture happened largely at the expense of what was then termed the Orient—and in particular through the defeat of the Spanish Moors. The term “Moor” first referred to people of the Islamic faith with mixed Arab and Berber lineage who came to Spain in the eighth century (Loomba, 2002, p. 46). In Spain they established a flowering culture of art and learning. Some

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scholars attribute the European Renaissance to the Catholic crusaders’ sacking of Toledo in 1105, an event that placed the Toledo library holdings back in Christian European hands. From this perspective, the Renaissance was spurred by a “discovery” of classical philosophy that had never been translated into Latin and was therefore lost to medieval European scholars (Burke, 1978, p. 123). Whether one subscribes to this historical emphasis or not is less important than the accurate implication that Renaissance alterity pertained, in large part, to the long history of the Crusades. Othello was first performed in 1604, little more than a century after the blood laws of the Seville Inquisition in 1480. The Seville Inquisition established the Moors as having the “least pure blood” in Spain, behind the European Spanish and the Sephardic Jews (Loomba, 2002, p. 68). Of course, the Moors to whom this Inquisition referred had already converted to Christianity. As for those Moors who retained their Islamic faith, the royals Ferdinand and Isabella expelled them (along with all the Jews) from Spain in 1492. These events no doubt influenced English perception of the Moors, since Protestant England disapproved of the Spanish Catholic Reconquista and hated all things Catholic. There is some indication that the old adage “My enemy’s enemy is my friend” deserves some attention here. But again, the fundamental divide between Christian and non-Christian persists in the interpretation of Renaissance alterity. Against this backdrop, Othello the Moor walks onto the Elizabethan stage. His identification as a Moor would have been very complex for the audience, since by that time the term had become an amalgam of generalized differences in religion as well as “race” or color (Loomba, 2002, p. 46). As notes to the play often indicate, Elizabethan audiences made no clear distinction between Moors and Africans—hence the futility to the race argument described in the introduction to this chapter. There are two general points to make about Othello’s alterity, however. First, the same international dynamics that affected the Renaissance also impact Othello. The fact that he is a “man without a country,” and the only one of “his kind” in Venice, intensifies the play’s antagonists’ viewpoints of him. Roderigo, the fool with designs on Desdemona, calls Othello “an extravagant and wheeling [expatriate and roving] stranger / of here and everywhere” (1.1.135–136). Also, one of Iago’s tactics in planting suspicion in Othello’s mind is to remind the Moor that Desdemona did not choose one of her own “countrymen,” in this passage: Ay, there’s the point! As (to be bold with you) Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,

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Alterity and Narrative Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural— But pardon me—I do not in position Distinctly speak of her; though I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, May fall to match you with her country forms, And happily repent. (Iago to Othello, 3.3.227–238)

Likewise, Emilia asks Othello: “Hath she forsook so many noble matches, / Her father and her country, and her friends, / To be called whore? Would it not make one weep?” (4.2.125–127). Othello himself, so often classified as simply “the Moor” (more so even than Cassio is “the Florentine”), relates to other characters on the basis of nationality. Iago exacerbates Othello’s suspicion of Cassio by inducing Cassio to laughter about his liaisons with Bianca, while the unseen Othello eavesdrops. Othello mistakenly believes Cassio has bedded Desdemona (not Bianca). Othello’s anger rises at Cassio’s laughter, and he mutters: “Do you triumph, Roman? Do you triumph?” (4.1.118). The second inevitable feature of Othello’s alterity—and more significant to my argument—is his Christianity. A curious feature of Shakespeare’s characterization of Othello is that most of the audience’s knowledge about the Moor is inferred. Desdemona has supposedly fallen in love with Othello because of his “life story,” but the audience is privy to very few of the details. Only when Othello distinguishes the Turks as “Others”—especially on the basis of Islamic faith—do we realize his own cultural and religious status. Reprimanding his officers for fighting, he roars, “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? / For Christian shame put by this barbarous brawl!” (2.3.160–162). There are other hints such as the surety from Iago that Othello is so in love with Desdemona that he would even renounce his baptism (2.3.326). Again, awareness of the historical moment—especially the legacy of the Crusades—is helpful for understanding the significance of Iago’s remark. The audience can reasonably assume that Othello would never have reached such a high rank in the Venetian army were it not for his allegiance to the Christian faith. Indeed, it has been suggested that “race” (or any set of categories appropriate for Renaissance Europe) was more flexible during that time because the lines drawn were far more cultural than biological (Loomba, 2002, p. 38). Othello is not purely “Other”; he is accepted on the one hand because he is “culturally” akin to the Venetians and a fighter of the Muslim Turks. Once more, one is reminded that the divide is fundamentally religious. But Othello is still the Moor, racialized on the other hand because his life has largely been one of public war. Othello’s final action in the narrative tragically confirms

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this. To advance this argument further, the next section of this chapter considers the narrative structure and sources of Shakespeare’s Othello. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE IN SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO As noted earlier, Othello is unique among the Shakespearean tragedies in its narrative structure. The simplicity of it is almost unnerving: The action is concentrated in three main characters and takes place over just a few short days. Evil is concentrated in Iago, while goodness is concentrated in Desdemona. Perhaps most significant, all of Shakespeare’s other plays have their narrative basis either in history or myth. Othello, by contrast, has a bounded fictional source, a point significant to its meaning for an Elizabethan audience (Everett, 2000, p. 184). Shakespeare’s tragedy comes from an Italian tale collected in Gli Hecatommithi by Giovanni Baptista Giraldi (a.k.a. Cinthio). First published in 1565, Cinthio’s story is not merely a possible variant; it is certainly the source, for it includes Desdemona’s name, and the episodes of the two versions begin with much the same plot. Differences between them, however, may provide some insight into Shakespeare’s intentions, particularly his view on alterity and the nature of Othello’s character. Explanations for some of the disparities may be immediately satisfied by generic constraints. For example, in Shakespeare’s play Iago induces his wife Emilia to steal Desdemona’s handkerchief, then he leaves it in Cassio’s chamber to provide the “ocular proof” of Desdemona’s infidelity. Cinthio invents this device differently. Iago, Cinthio tells us, has a three-year-old daughter much loved by Desdemona. One day while she hugs the little girl, Iago quietly slips her handkerchief from her girdle (Bullough, 1975). Such a difference in detail may pertain to Shakespeare’s views on women, or the role of wives in doing their husband’s bidding, or any number of postmodern deconstructions. But it seems more likely that Shakespeare’s constraints on the stage were more conducive to Emilia, not a small child, as the culprit. Emilia is a character we already know; her obedience to Iago can serve to underscore our understanding of his diabolical scheme, and her involvement also provides a narrative reason for Iago to be unmasked in the final act. Shakespeare’s change is more logical, narratively speaking, for a theatrical performance. Likewise, his talent for characterization no doubt simply outstrips Cinthio’s. So, while in Cinthio’s story Cassio’s incident with a fellow soldier is random (Bullough, 1975), Shakespeare takes pains to reveal Iago as the instigator of the fight—further confirming Iago’s treachery. Since Shakespeare wrote for the stage rather than the page, I tread lightly on reading “intentions” into Shakespeare’s changes from Cinthio’s

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story. Yet I believe some of his revisions are inevitably significant. As might be expected, these pointed revisions pertain to issues of alterity. The first striking difference is that only Disdemona [sic] is given a name in Cinthio’s story. Othello is simply “the Moor,” Iago is “the Moor’s Ensign,” and so forth. Again, Shakespeare’s skills of characterization give his Moor a name, a soul. Also, Shakespeare’s Desdemona utters only flattering words about her husband, but Cinthio paints Disdemona [sic] as condescending toward “the Moor.” When Othello becomes suspicious of her attachment to his Corporal, Cinthio’s Disdemona says, “He has not committed so serious an offence as to deserve such hostility. But you Moors are so hot by nature that any little thing moves you to anger and revenge” (Bullough, 1975, p. 245). Not only does Shakespeare’s Desdemona not utter such words, but her assessment of Othello’s cultural identity seems quite the opposite. This is evident from her exchange with Emilia: EMILIA: Is he [Othello] not jealous? DESDEMONA: Who? He? I think the sun where he was born/ Drew all such humors from him. (III,iv:30–32) Again, Shakespeare chooses to deepen the contrast between Desdemona and Iago instead. It is Iago who stereotypes the Moors as capricious: “These Moors are changeable in their wills” (I,iii:344–345). Like Othello, Iago has a name in the Shakespearean play. He, too, has a soul, no matter how evil. The continued struggle between good and evil, like the absence of names, is more generic in Cinthio’s story. Indeed, its ultimately banal plot leads some critics to call the tale in Gli Hecatommithi “mediocre” (Bentley, 1985, p. 16). Cinthio’s version begins with the heady emotion of jealousy, the Moor’s self-doubt, and the Ensign’s cunning schemes. But somewhere the narrative begins to unravel, moving from personal intrigue to heavyhanded morality tale. This is particularly blatant when Disdemona says to the Ensign’s wife: I do not know what to make of the Moor. He used to be all love towards me, but in the last few days he has become quite another man; and I fear greatly that I shall be a warning to young girls not to marry against their parents’ wishes; and Italian ladies will learn by my example not to tie themselves to a man whom Nature, Heaven, and manner of life separate from us. (Bullough, 1975, p. 248) The transparent nature of Cinthio’s preaching here may surprise readers, even if they avoid anachronistic criticism and concede the Elizabethan ideal

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of respect for parents (Bentley, 1985). It becomes clear by the end of the story that Cinthio intended not to comment on the complexity and tragedy of alterity in his historical moment, as Shakespeare may have, but to offer a moral: God always punishes the wicked, and the good are glorified. Cinthio’s Moor, a far cry from the “man of action” we expect in Othello, conspires with his Ensign to make Disdemona’s death look like an accident. Only afterwards, discovering that his Ensign lied to him (Cinthio offers no explanation as to how this discovery is made), the Moor punishes the Ensign by discharging him from the army (Bullough, 1975). This leads to more duplicity on the part of the Ensign, who seeks revenge on the Moor and causes more mischief for the Corporal, the Moor, and indeed, all of Venice. He finally dies, as he should by Cinthio’s moral logic. But here the reader sees an interesting inversion in the plot when moving from Cinthio to Shakespeare. Cinthio introduces the Ensign’s motives directly: he is in love with Disdemona [sic] and wishes to have her for himself. His evildoing then continues—even after the Ensign himself kills Disdemona—because of his removal from the Moor’s fighting company. But Shakespeare places Iago’s vocational aspirations first, and his concerns about his love life are a distant second. In fact, he never expresses jealousy of Othello and Desdemona. In his direct soliloquy when he reveals “I hate the Moor” (1.3.380), he also says: “It is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets / H’as done my office. I know not if’t be true” (1.3.381–382). But here he is talking about rumors that Othello has been with Iago’s wife Emilia. Iago’s soliloquy is not meant to imply that Iago should have wed Desdemona. Further, Shakespeare has already privileged a much more important motive for Iago in engineering Othello’s downfall: Othello has announced to the leaders of Venice that Cassio will be his lieutenant, not Iago. Iago is doubly enraged because of the public nature of the decision (Fernie, 1999), and because Cassio has so little experience on the field of battle. In the very first lines of the play, Iago confides to Roderigo that Michael Cassio is no more than a theorist when it comes to war. He is bookish, effeminate, a “spinster.” But Iago, despite having proven himself in Rhodes and Cyprus, against the “heathens,” is only to be “his Moorship’s [ensign]” (1.1.20–33). Such a drastic inversion of motive—from erotic to public concerns—is essential to my argument concerning Shakespeare’s rendering of alterity in Othello. In comparison to Cinthio, perhaps Shakespeare is the better storyteller not merely for his skills in characterization and plot, but also because he recognized the changing societal focus of his audience. Renaissance Europe may have been dominantly Christian and retained some features of the medieval era, but the people of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were moving on a continuum toward secularization. At the very least, humanistic piety was coming to be privileged over Christian piety

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(Fernie, 1999). It is this particular feature of the Renaissance that is so often subordinated in extant criticism of Othello, and with which the rest of this chapter takes issue. In the following section I offer evidence of the emerging sense of “public” life during the Renaissance, including Shakespeare’s use of the public–private dialectic in the narrative of Othello. This idea of public life can be linked in particular to “occupation” and military service, for which a Moor like Othello is deemed especially well suited. This is the dimension of his alterity that I hope to bring into specific relief, not just for the historical moment of the Renaissance but for future intercultural conflicts as well. THE PUBLIC SOLDIER In addition to its narrow focus in terms of character and time, another feature of Othello follows a streamlined structure: Othello involves a domestic, private dispute. It is concerned with the dissolution of interpersonal relationships, rather than the collapse of empires (as in King Lear or Julius Caesar, for examples). This narrowness of focus to the private sphere is deceiving, however. I will argue that the manner in which that private sphere is undermined is predicated almost entirely on public concerns, especially the public concerns of the professional warrior. Shakespeare seems to foreshadow this paradox between public and private domains. First, he sets most of the action in vulnerable Cyprus. The island is an outpost—a far cry from the domestic comforts of Venice. The General Othello is hypersensitive to his soldierly duties there, as is obvious from this continued reprimand of Cassio in his alleged fight with Roderigo: “What! In a town of war, / yet wild, the people’s hearts brimful of fear, / to manage private and domestic quarrel?” (2.3.203–205). Iago uses the tense quality of the military mission to his advantage, explaining his absence from the watch in terms of the public soldier protecting the private citizen. He claims that he was running after Roderigo to stop him from yelling and awakening the people of Cyprus, for instance. Building on these scenes, Shakespeare gives us a glimpse of a Renaissance world in which a man’s public reputation could make the lines between national and private concerns strikingly permeable. There are two crises that open the play. First we learn that Desdemona has eloped with Othello, and then that the Turkish fleet is headed toward Cyprus. The Signiory—the Duke and his council—are busy strategizing about the defense of their outpost, yet Senator Brabantio is able to draw their attention entirely to the elopement of his daughter. It is not merely Brabantio’s public qualities that make this happen, of course; General Othello plans to press

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this dimension to his own advantage as well. He calmly says of Brabantio: “Let him do his spite./ My services which I have done the signiory / Shall out-tongue his complaints” (1.2.17–19). And Othello is right, for the Signiory privilege his worth as a soldier above all. This special quality to his alterity is immediately recognizable and plausible to the audience, as well. After all, Italy was the greatest commercial power in the world the century before Othello was written. Othello’s honored position therefore would be instantly significant in their minds, despite his racial and ethnic marginality. If he is the general of Venice’s army, he is no small man indeed. The Venetian Duke also endorses Othello’s nobility: “Valiant Othello,” he addresses him, “we must straight employ you / against the general enemy Ottoman” (1.2.48–49). The Signiory’s dependence on Othello’s services is evident, but not merely for his brute skills— Othello’s valor also endears him to his superiors. The same qualities have attracted Desdemona’s favors. The audience learns early in the drama that Othello’s “life story” as a warrior has won her heart. Othello’s life experiences are almost exclusively military, and he falls in love with Desdemona because of her admiration for his exploits and pity of his tribulations. Explaining to the Signiory his elopement with Desdemona, Othello answers Brabantio’s charges of witchcraft thus: My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs . . . She wished she had not heard it; Yet she wished That heaven had made her such a man . . . She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. This is the only witchcraft I have used. (1.2.158–169) And once again the just, noble, and reigning voice of the Duke affirms the view to which the audience is compelled. His own daughter would have had the same reaction, the Duke tells Othello, and then turns to Brabantio with this stylistic couplet: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack / your son-in-law is more fair than black” (Duke, 1.2.289–290). Based on Shakespeare’s arguments regarding military service in the Renaissance world, the Elizabethan audience would have accepted Othello’s nobility purely on the basis of his warrior prowess. Time and again throughout Othello, the audience is given glimpses of the public ideals that surrounded such men. In this drama, Cyprus is vulnerable not merely in terms of defense, but also communication: All the letters to the signiors about the encroaching Turkish fleet give wildly divergent accounts of the number of

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ships (1.2.3–6). And, as Desdemona says, wars “must make examples / out of our best” (3.1.65–66). The characteristics of the best during these wars are presumed to be valor and, especially, honesty. Baecker (1999) argued that the key metaphors of Othello are not “black and white,” but “slave” (as in a depraved, base person—as Iago is portrayed) and “honest.” Her point is well taken in terms of public perception of the warrior protectors in Italy. For example, when demanding a report from Iago, Montano cautions him: “If partially affined, or leagued in office, / thou dost deliver more or less than truth, / thou art no soldier” (2.3.208–210). And in a moment of comic relief in the play, Desdemona has this exchange with the Clown: DESDEMONA: Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies? CLOWN: I dare not say he lies anywhere. DESDEMONA: Why, man? CLOWN: He’s a soldier, and for me to say a soldier lies is stabbing. (3.4.1–4) This moment of levity in the play still tells the audience a great deal: it would be wrong to say that soldiers “lie” in the sense that they are untruthful; therefore we can attribute the Elizabethan ideal of “honesty” to public perceptions of the military. “Honest,” in the Elizabethan era, had much the same connotation as it does today—truthfulness, but also honor and high moral character (Baecker, 1999, p. 114). Shakespeare attributes a selfless nature to the honesty of soldiers when Othello’s officers’ fracas rouses him from bed. Once the issue is resolved, he says, “Come, Desdemona, tis the soldier’s life / to have their balmy slumbers waked with strife” (2.3.247–248). He is willing to sacrifice simple comforts the ordinary people enjoy. The audience is well aware, too, by the mere nature of war that he is willing to sacrifice his life to protect “the state” of Venice; his honesty toward the people he serves is total. In his rhetoric, Othello embodies the honesty and integrity of a “gentleman,” much more so than Iago or even Cassio can do. This is ironic, for when we first hear Othello speak publicly, he humbly calls himself “rude [unpolished] in speech,” and blames his lack of sophistication on a life of battle (1.2.81–89). Yet Othello is noble and calm not just in physical battle, but in verbal rhetoric—a true sign of Elizabethan honesty. Othello is thus one of “our best” for the Venetians, despite his marginality in terms of ethnicity. Shakespeare gives his audience virtually no cause to wonder that Othello is as great as Desdemona and the Duke believe him to be. His reputation, at least, is universally admired. The evil Iago “hates the Moor,” but only because he has not been granted the opportunity to serve as his lieutenant. The first scene of the second act sees everyone pray-

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ing for the safe deliverance of Othello during the storm at Cyprus. Montano says, “Pray heaven he be [safe]; / for I have served him, and the man commands / like a full soldier” (2.1.35–37). The concern expressed by multiple characters during this scene—not just Montano but also Cassio, and of course Desdemona—indicates the quality of affection that also seems to permeate the ranks of the military. The play is peppered with voiced love between officers—love that, for my purposes here, seems to correlate plausibly with Elizabethan ideals of honesty, sacrifice, and comradeship. At all times, however, the duty of an officer in the larger order trumps personal affection for comrades. This is why Othello tells Cassio, after Cassio has become drunk and assaulted a fellow officer: “I love thee; but never more be officer of mine” (2.3.239–240). These warrior ideals appeal to the audience in the narrative logic of Othello, so much so that they embody the “natural order” of the world onstage. As a result, the privileging of public life is taken for granted, a hidden subtext in the extant criticism of Shakespeare’s Othello. But I argue that this deference to public life is precisely what marginalizes Othello and ultimately brings about the tragedies of this narrative—for Othello’s alterity is exposed by his compulsion to extend the public soldier’s paradigm to domestic life. He is so well trained in the public life of a soldier that he is naïve to the seamy underbelly of the society in which he seeks acceptance. He is shocked to learn from Iago that people are willing to do evil in private, as long as they are not exposed in public. This is an essential component of Renaissance life that directly impacts Othello’s alterity. The shift is from heavenly reward, to reputation and “glory” (Montaigne, 1993). Fernie (1999) explains: In the medieval world, there is emphasis on the afterlife of the soul, and shame is felt most intensely and most often before God and in fear of his judgment; but in the more secular Renaissance world there is a shift of emphasis towards the afterlife lived here on earth through lingering reputation, and shame is felt equally powerfully and frequently before men and in fear of the judgment of posterity. The unhappy consequence of this is that . . . men and women fear exposure rather than doing wrong. (p. 29) Thus Iago is able to reveal to Othello the shocking “truth” that wives are only presumed to be virtuous. Iago’s rhetoric is of one explaining native customs to the newcomer—for he couches his argument in cultural terms: “I know our country disposition well: / in Venice they do let God see the pranks / they dare not show their husbands; their best conscience / is not to leave it undone, but keep it unknown” (3.3.201–204).

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The “honest” characters in Othello, Cassio and Desdemona, emphasize public reputation equally as much. After Iago tricks Cassio into drunkenness, and Othello demotes him for fighting, Cassio responds to the loss of face with pathetic intensity. He cries to Iago, “I have lost my reputation, the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” (2.3.253–254, emphasis mine). Again Fernie (1999) places Othello in the context of the Renaissance in his analysis of this scene. Postmodern audiences may believe Cassio is merely overreacting, but Fernie reminds us that “A man is fundamentally master of himself in Shakespeare” and Cassio’s pain “emanates from a more fastidious respect for personal dignity and the sovereignty of reason than we are used to” (Fernie, 1999, p. 30). Furthermore, I argue that his comradely love for Othello makes the public shame of demotion necessary. As a soldier himself, Cassio understands Othello’s inability to temper public duty with private affection, but it is still painful. Desdemona too seems aware of the unbridgeable gap between Othello’s public reputation and the private life he is meant to live with her. Othello’s ensign Iago, by his very military position, is the protector of Othello’s “colors” on the battlefield. This “official” or public relationship makes Othello vulnerable to Iago’s manipulative statements about his personal life (Bloom, 1989). The vulnerability to suggestion occurs because of Othello’s inability to separate his public and private lives. He has been acculturated to Venice because of his baptism and because of heroism in battle, not because he loves Desdemona. Infected with suspicion, Othello begins to lash out at her. Worried about Othello’s behavior toward her in the third act of the play, Desdemona confides in Emilia. Significantly, Desdemona voices the hope that Othello’s behavior is the result of some public affair troubling him (3.x.140–142). But despite Desdemona’s hopes, the audience knows the truth: battle never frightens or angers Othello. As an Other whose societal acceptance has depended entirely on his public ability to physically defend the state, he is treading on entirely new territory in his marriage to Desdemona. Elliott (1988) has undertaken the much-needed task of analyzing Othello on the basis of lexicon in early Modern English, and his arguments on the topic of Othello’s relationship with Desdemona are especially compelling. Since Desdemona loves the soldier Othello—indeed she knows no other aspect of his character—many of her lines can be interpreted as more pertinent to his public soldierly reputation than private erotic attraction. For example, Elliott argues that when Desdemona begs the Signiory to allow her to accompany Othello to Cyprus, she invokes the “rites” that are due her as his wife. Critics with no knowledge or interest of early Modern English have interpreted this word on the basis of “common sense,” that Desdemona requested sexual consummation of the marriage. Elliott finds this interpreta-

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tion tenuous, and links the word instead to the “rites” of war that Desdemona wants to experience, based on his linguistic analysis of Desdemona’s rhetoric (Elliott, 1988, pp. 4–6). Other turns of phrase by Shakespeare bear out this exegesis. For example, Othello and Desdemona are at their most affectionate when Othello calls Desdemona his “fair warrior.” Seen in this light, the pieces of warrior alterity begin to fall into place in Othello’s fate. Elliott goes on to analyze Othello’s famous “occupation” speech and finds further evidence that Othello has used his military career as self-extension (1988, ix). Convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity, Othello laments: I had been happy if the general camp, Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, So I had nothing known. O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue! . . . Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! And o you mortal engines whose rude throats Th’immortal Jove’s dread clamors counterfeit, Farewell! Othello’s occupation’s gone! (3.3.345–357) The barrage of images in this speech is tantamount to a ceremonial. As Elliott (1988) points out, the linguistic style of this speech implies not only that Othello is celebrating the glory of his occupation, but also his departure from it. “Since he can no longer luxuriate in the flinty and steel couch of war, he will luxuriate in an emotional distress” (Elliott, 1988, p. 145). He must lose his occupation, for he can no longer command if his wife’s infidelity is publicly known. Othello views Desdemona, in large part, as a deserter. The first assessable impact of her alleged crime is only on his public reputation, his military career. Seeing as how their love has hinged almost exclusively on his history as a fighting soldier, it is impossible for Othello to remove Desdemona from his public reputation and retreat to some domestic space in order to love her. In one of the more tender moments of the play, he says, “But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / chaos is come again” (3.1.91–92). “Chaos” seems such an extrinsic word here—a commentary on the state of the cosmos or the political order, not the inner space of the human heart. The fact that Othello cannot find an inner, private space is his vulnerability, and by the end of the play even he knows it. One of the most

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wrenching points of the tragedy emerges when he posits the death of Desdemona as yet another civic duty of one who protects the social order. The general will do what must be done in terms of public service; he admonishes Desdemona: “And mak’st me call what I intend to do / a murder, which I thought a sacrifice” (5.2.64–65). The incompleteness of Othello—a man known only as a soldier for the Venetian state—is laid bare in this scene. Not even the horrific strangling of his wife in their own bed can exist in his mind as a private act stemming from personal motivations. He instead describes it in public ritual terms: it is a “sacrifice.” Some critics have argued convincingly that, in killing Desdemona, Othello has done what he most feared: he has “turned Turk” and lost his civilized Christian public persona. This is why he kills himself (Fernie, 1999). It may even be possible to interpret Shakespeare’s earlier narrative episodes in the play as foreshadowing this final act. After all, the Turks on Cyprus are defeated because of the storm at sea—not because of physical combat. And the surety of Othello’s safety in that storm is held at bay in the second act, while all the other Italians (born Christian) arrive quickly and safely on the island (Hogan 1998). The lines leading up to Othello’s suicide are again public and virtually all of them pertinent only to his warrior self. His pain at losing Desdemona is palpable—he calls her a pearl worth more than all his tribe—but begs remembrance on the basis of his valor and duty: I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; . . . Set you down this. And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’throat the uncircumcised dog And smote him—thus. (5.2.339–356) With these final words, Othello thrusts a knife into his chest—killing the Turk within (Fernie, 1999). His entire public life has been carefully constructed to prove his belonging despite being born Other. He seeks to leave behind a good reputation, the immortal part of himself, having accepted the cultural constraints of Renaissance Europe. Elliott’s (1988) and Fernie’s (1999) exegeses support my argument that Othello constitutes

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the narrative motif of a “warrior Other.” Othello was unable to reconcile fighting with domestic life. Was he “Othered” beyond an ability to find security in domestic love? This may be overpsychologizing the case, but enhanced attention to Othello’s public services as warrior—and the stereotypes that may even have led the Venetians to higher warrior expectations—may shed light on alterity in the Renaissance and in other historical moments of war in Western history. Othello’s difficulty in conveying a personal valor toward Desdemona is similar to an important motif in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, for example. Engaged in a guerilla skirmish and returning to camp, the hero Robert meets Maria, who greets him with words that have by now become routine: “I love you.” Robert finds talking difficult and Maria presses him to return the sentiment. Robert tells Maria that he does love her, but explains that it is difficult to kill and love all in the same moment (Hemingway, 1937). On a broader scale, Othello and the complicated dynamics of Renaissance alterity—particularly against the backdrop of tensions between Europeans and Ottomans, and the long history of the Crusades—can unlock the brutality of acculturation when war and peace are at stake. War makes permeable boundaries become solid, and scratches in the sand become deep trenches. Othello’s desire to prove his conversion and loyalty drive him to first neglect his personal identity and ultimately to murder it. The expectations the Venetians have of Othello as a warrior—perhaps based on stereotypical images of a tamed barbarian—are similar to the reported dynamics between white American soldiers in World War II and their Native American counterparts. Curiously, while the armed forces were segregated during that time, Native Americans were integrated into white units—so that segregation applied only to African and Asian Americans. World War II was the first conflict in which Native Americans were recruited to serve, since many of them were not categorized as American citizens until after World War I. Recently, some Native Americans who fought in the war have been the focus of the attention they deserve. This is particularly true of the Navajo code talkers. But juxtaposed with these heroic stories are tragic ones. In the United States, many have not yet overcome the prejudices of alterity that first made Othello capture the imagination of the West. Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, published in 1977, aptly captures the narrative trope of the acculturated warrior and his struggle for a personal, private life beyond war. Silko’s novel is a prime example of the Other “talking back” to narrative and rhetorical motifs. The trope of the assimilated warrior is a complicated one and, like the story of Othello, Silko’s hero Tayo is troubled by the tensions between his public military service and his domestic life. Tayo is a

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Pueblo from Laguna, New Mexico. First his reservation experiences represent the historical context of World War II, as many government programs for Native Americans were reduced or eliminated. Health centers were gutted as doctors and nurses were transferred to military hospitals. With the rationing of gasoline came the cessation of school bus transportation and ultimately the closing of reservation schools (Dale, 1949). But it was the experience of military service that changed many Pueblos’ lives forever. World War II spurred the first draft of Native Americans for military service; they were not drafted during World War I, since about half the Native American population in 1917 was composed of noncitizens. All told, 25,000 Native Americans served in the military by the end of World War II, including 1,500 Pueblos. By order of the War Department, they were integrated into white units, where they achieved a remarkable degree of acceptance and assimilation. Their drinking buddies called them “Chief”— which, in the specific bonding experiences of integrated military units during the war, signified respect rather than condescension. In recent years, “Chief” has been exposed as a derogatory term, but the positive connotations of “Chief” in the context of the war are supported by historian Alison Bernstein (1991) and also by Silko’s narrative Ceremony. Like the stereotype afforded Shakespeare’s Othello, the real-life Native Americans were “admired” for their excellence at basic training. No doubt many Native Americans did excel at military training, and their achievements of decorations and medals for bravery during the war bear out the assumption that they fought well.8 These achievements were highlighted at the expense of war’s reality. Rhetoric surrounding Native Americans, particularly by their white peers in military units, evoked the image of a “bloodthirsty savage” on the “right” side of the conflict. This “positive” stereotype led to camaraderie between Native Americans and whites in the military. Exposed to city life and feelings of “belonging” for the first time, many Native Americans considered their wartime experience the best in their lives (Bernstein, 1991). However, as Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner William Brophy noted in 1945, “The war caused the greatest disruption of Indian life since the beginning of the reservation era” (quoted in Bernstein, 1991, p. 131). The steps toward assimilation—or the desire for assimilation—that the war experience produced were highly disruptive to the Pueblo community. From the perspective of many Pueblos, the impact of the war was the fulfillment of a prophecy (as told by Paul Johnson of Paguate): It has been told that long ago my ancestors prophesied that from the East would come the white man who would conquer us in many ways—that we would eat his food, drink his drink, and after

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we drank his drink and ate his food we would no longer think as an Indian thinks, [of] beautiful things. (Dutton and Marmon, 1936, p. 21) From this perspective of the “Other,” assimilation is a very real danger. The war took most of the young men out of the Pueblos, for up to six years (Collier, 1949). While 25,000 Native Americans served in the military, another 40,000 left the reservations to work in war industries. In addition, by 1944, Native Americans had invested $50 million in war bonds (Dale, 1949). All told, Native Americans were deeply involved in the war. For those young people who left, ceremonial life virtually stopped (Collier, 1949). There may have been some instances of Native Americans employing their traditional rituals to comfort themselves or gain strength for battle (Bernstein, 1991), but the extreme youth of the men who left would suggest that they were not sufficiently versed in the traditional Pueblo rituals to carry them on independently. Instead they received “a heavy dose of American material, ‘standard of living’ values; they were pushed almost irresistibly toward the externalism of life” (Collier, 1949, p. 73). Compounding the negative impact of these experiences, most Native Americans returned home from war or industry to find that the “acceptance” by whites was fleeting. Once the war was over and they were no longer “needed,” Native Americans were returned to the status of second-class citizens. The same U.S. government that had instituted the draft refused to extend to Native Americans the right to vote. Those who had invested in the effort through war bonds found that while the rest of the country prospered in the postwar era, economic prospects were extremely limited on reservations (Bernstein, 1991). Stripped of their uniforms, Native American soldiers were no longer regarded as important or even “American.” This realization manifested itself in some cases through despair. In Ceremony, violence and alcoholism overtake the young men who return from the war. Statistics on actual historical events are vague, but it is widely acknowledged that drinking was a symbol of equality during the war. Further, one can point narratively to the case of the most famous Native American war hero, PFC Ira Hayes. One of the flag-raisers at Iwo Jima, Hayes died of alcoholism just ten years after the war ended, at the age of thirty-three (Bernstein, 1991). In her novel Ceremony, Silko responds both to these historical facts and also to the Western narrative motif of the assimilated “warrior Other.” Her protagonist Tayo experiences all the prejudices of Americans through military recruitment and service. Tayo’s cousin Rocky wants to leave behind the old Pueblo ways and sees military service as a way out of reservation life. He and Tayo enlist with a white recruiter who says, “Anyone can fight for America, even you boys” (Silko, 1977, p. 64). It is quickly evident to Tayo

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that the rest of white society feels the same way. After basic training Rocky and Tayo go to California to await transport to the Pacific, and “The first day in Oakland he and Rocky walked down the street together and a big Chrysler stopped in the street and an old white woman rolled down the window and said, “God bless you, God bless you,” but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed” (Silko, 1977, p. 41). In the course of the war, Rocky is wounded. He and Tayo become prisoners of the Japanese and are taken on the Bataan “death march” where Rocky’s wound becomes infected and he dies. Tayo, who already has a tenuous relationship with Rocky’s mother (she is ashamed at her younger sister for having the “half-breed” illegitimate child Tayo in the first place), had promised that he would bring Rocky home alive. He begins to feel that he is an “accident” of time and space; that he was supposed to die, not Rocky. Worse, during the incessant rains at Bataan, he wishes and prays the rain clouds away and kills the flies around Rocky’s wound. He ignores his Uncle Josiah’s admonishment never to kill flies since they are bearers of rain. Returning home, he finds that Laguna has been in drought since his prayer. He blames himself utterly for the drought and ultimately for all the suffering of his family. Tayo falls into despair, and his growing feeling of culpability for the drought is thought to be a mark of his insanity by the white doctors. Compounding his despair is the realization that the experience of battle in World War II is completely foreign to the old men on the reservation. Ku’oosh tries to perform a healing ritual for Tayo, the same ritual traditionally done for warriors who had killed another human being. But when Ku’oosh asks Tayo if he killed anyone, Tayo replies that he is not sure. Ku’oosh has no comprehension of modern war, when a warrior might not even be close enough to see one that he has killed. Tayo cannot reconcile the things he has seen with the expectations of people at home. Tayo does not recognize it at the time, but he, like the others, is falling prey to witchery. Witchery is the evil that exists beyond all markers of race, difference, time, and space. Witchery is key to understanding the connections between characters in the novel and their responses to military service. The prime example of witchery at work is Emo, another young Laguna in the novel who has returned from the war. Emo tries to lead the other veterans (Tayo, Harley, Leroy, and Pinkie) into falling prey to the witchery. With Emo, they spend their time getting drunk with the money from their army checks. During these episodes their dominant communication consists of storytelling wherein they attempt to relive the “glory days” of the war. While the others talk about the excitement of the cities and the details of their sexual exploits with white women, Emo consistently discusses his

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expertise in battle. “We were the best. U.S. Army. We butchered every Jap we found,” Emo says. Emo even carries a sack containing teeth from each Japanese soldier he killed. Tayo soon notices the way “Emo grew from each killing” (Silko, 1977, p. 138), and realizes that Emo is a witch. The curative rituals Tayo undergoes will be meaningless unless he can “defeat” the witchery—yet the only way to do this is to avoid capitulation to evil. He cannot kill Emo or destroy witchery, but he can let it return to itself. At the climax of this battle, Tayo finds himself fleeing from Emo. He hides in an abandoned mine while Emo tries to lure him out by torturing Harley. Here, Tayo realizes that he is halfway between two significant sites: Los Alamos (where the atomic bomb was created) and Trinity Site, White Sands (where the bomb was first detonated in a test). Silko (1977) writes, “He had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the Earth, had been laid” (p. 246). At last, Tayo understands the nature of witchery and the dangers of fooling with its magic. During the war and on his initial return, he has been haunted by the mixing of Laguna and Japanese voices in his head and tortured by the vision he had in the Philippines of the dead Japanese soldier with his Uncle Josiah’s face. Again, he blames himself for Rocky’s death, for the drought, for everything. Initially, he attributes all this to madness while the white officers and doctors call it battle fatigue. But now, arriving at the completion of his “ceremony,” He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances in time. (Silko, 1977, p. 246) When Tayo first comes home from the war, he fits the stereotype of the warrior Other who has assimilated into the “mainstream” through military service. Once the public persona of the military is gone, his public identity is called into question. He also suffers from despair when he cannot explain what he saw in the war to anyone at home. In other words, Tayo is like Othello in that he cannot reconcile the public and the private. But in other ways Silko’s Tayo “talks back” to Shakespeare’s Othello in that he has seen the pattern: there is no difference between these two spheres of public/private or military/domestic. His belief that he has prayed away the rain clouds in the Philippines yet impacted the weather in New Mexico is not crazy; it is true. Tayo’s relief at understanding this is palpable and, better still, it allows him to overcome evil. He will not fall prey to Emo as Othello was so manipulated

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by Iago. Silko’s story of the postwar era in Laguna is far too complex to treat completely in a few pages. Yet Ceremony is a remarkable example of the warrior Other “talking back” to a very old narrative motif: assimilation through a fierce military public persona. One reason Tayo succeeds at overcoming the gap between his life at home on the reservation and the experiences of war is that he sees himself as part of a collective. His initial despair, and physical and emotional sickness, result from his forgetting that he is part of everyone at Laguna and ultimately everyone in the world. Silko leads Tayo into an understanding that all people, places, and times are connected. Significantly, Silko explores the roots of Tayo’s forgetting that occurred even before the war. The lack of understanding that one is part of a community, Silko implies, comes from the advent of Christianity on the reservation. “Christianity separated the people from themselves; it tried to crush the clan name, encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul” (Silko, 1977, p. 68). Tayo’s return in the novel is to traditional Pueblo beliefs rather than Christianity. He lets go both of the white people’s religion and their war, and stands in stark contrast to Othello. Indeed, when comparing Silko’s warrior to Shakespeare’s, I am struck by one aspect of Othello: his aloneness. He is the only Moor in Venice; he is accepted based on his ability to fight; he is a Christian. He has no one to help him when his private life is in disarray. He is totally self-reliant, as we expect a hero to be. Yet his self-reliance leaves no room for a private life. He is a tragic hero of the Renaissance, that time when the connections even between Christians were broken and embittered. The European Renaissance emphasized humanistic piety and public “reputation.” The warrior Othello falls prey to the preoccupation with reputation that does not exist in Tayo’s world in Ceremony. Yet the connection between them is striking: the motif of the stereotyped, assimilated warrior “Other” endures in the narratives of the West. Fortunately those who are “Othered” can and do tell their own stories. I began this chapter by exploring some of the ways that Othello is different from other works in Shakespeare. The microcosmic nature of the story stands in contrast to epic tragedies like Julius Caesar, in which the historical experience of the fall of empire is laid bare on the stage. Othello is just one man—a fact that perhaps makes his downfall even more significant in the context of the Renaissance. Narratively speaking, Othello embodies this line from Iago’s drinking song: “Tis pride that pulls the country down; / then take thine auld cloak about thee” (2.3.90–91). The Renaissance ideals of pride, secularization, and public reputation gained momentum in Europe, giving rise to the Enlightenment. As we shall see in the next chapter, the country

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is indeed “pulled down” by the philosophical tenets of the French Enlightenment. But these tenets, once again, will depend on the Other as seen through the eyes of the West. Othello, so admired for tempering his “barbarous” nature into military prowess, might be said to be a precursor of the “noble savage.” That fictional character is the focus of the next chapter.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Enlightenment Noble Savage DIDEROT’S TAHITI AND OTHER IMAGINARY LOCALES

I

n the introduction, I emphasized that one of the terms of cultural dialogue—at least as Benhabib (2002, 2004) defines the dialogue of cultures—must be the recognition that alterity is a universal enterprise. All cultures offer accounts of their differentiating actions, claiming the boundaries between “Self” and “Other.” What is most interesting about these differentiating accounts is that while their subject matter appears to be “the Other,” their tacit purpose is really to define the Self. The life of the imagination in the construction of the European Self is particularly blatant in the multivariate narratives about the “noble savage.” The “noble savage” has been part of the Western imagination at least since the time of the Renaissance. An impossibly romantic figure, the noble savage tends to embody Western dissatisfaction with its own civilization and a projection of “freedom” onto a remote persona. At first the noble savage belonged to the distant past. But during the Enlightenment this stereotype evolved into an exoticized contemporary ethnic Other from the “New World.” Through its history, the noble savage motif has undergone many transformations and scholarly studies. The fact that so much attention has been lavished on the noble savage suggests two things: first, the “noble savage” has thoroughly captivated imaginations in the West, in both scholarly and vernacular circles. Second, it is a fluid concept with shifting meanings that defy easy interpretation. In the space of a mere thirty years, for example, the noble savage was revered first for his egalitarianism, and then for his genteel yet dominant kingship over his fellows (Liebersohn, 1994). These contradictory

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connotations suggest that there is still much to study about the impact of the noble savage on identity and alterity. In this chapter, I attempt three things. First I describe the noble savage ideal, then place it against the background of a new genre of storytelling in alterity: the travel narrative. For a case study, I examine Louis Antoine de Bougainville’s scientific expedition around the world as written into narrative by Denis Diderot. Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville becomes the primary focus of this chapter because of its obvious Enlightenment underpinnings, but also because of the unique Others that Diderot identifies among the noble savages in Western alterity. The choice for this chapter of Diderot’s recasting of the voyage of Bougainville serves another unifying purpose. Throughout this book, I examine vernacular narratives whose “evolution” we can trace somewhat uniformly through time. In the move from voyage to narrative, there is an ordered process of historical fact and scientific observation evolving into the fantastic. The vernacular processes that wove fables around travel narratives—and made them into philosophical treatises rather than exploratory reports—provide a clear window into alterity in the age of Enlightenment. These vernacular processes indicate how typically far removed alterity formation is from fact (Woolf, 1992, p. 78). I now examine the particulars of this time period and discuss two of its most important motifs: the noble savage and the travel narrative. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT OTHER In its concern with forms of knowledge more than with philosophical questions per se, the Enlightenment engenders a major shift in the way Europeans formulated knowledge about the Other. It is an historical moment with irrevocable consequences for academic disciplines in particular, leading to the rise of anthropology—which will become central to my arguments throughout the rest of this book. Additionally, unique elements of eighteenth-century French life and thought propelled some major tenets of the Enlightenment—rationality, natural law, equality, and often an anti-Christian bias—far more than the characteristics of any other Western nation (Marías, 1967). The “Enlightenment” of Europe is decidedly French, and this chapter looks there for narratives of alterity that continue to haunt intercultural communication. The French Enlightenment also has been revealed as a “causal prelude” to the Napoleonic revolutionary years in France. This era ushered in a clarified “Europe” as we now know it, epitomizing ideals of the Enlightenment

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and making them permanent in the Western world. Two processes gathered momentum during this time period: First, a European view of the extra-European world was consolidated which drew on earlier perceptions, but transformed them into a radically different unifying concept of European civilization and progress which allowed the classification, and justified the material exploitation, of the rest of the world. Secondly, a distinctive conviction was forged of what constituted the essence of Europe’s superiority, based on the division of its land mass into nation states and the role of the rational state in furthering progress. (Woolf, 1992, p. 74) As Woolf points out, nationalism and other political forces drove Western entries into the extra-European world. European travels reflected certain other ideological realities as well. There was a new emphasis on rationality over religion, of course, during the Enlightenment. Not coincidentally, we find at the time of Bougainville and Diderot a sharp decline in missionary expeditions. It is also important to emphasize that “progress” applied only as a modifier to the Europeans themselves. It was vital in the continuous creation of European “civilization” that there would always exist an uncivilized backdrop to provide contrast. The noble savage provided precisely the alterity that Enlightenment European civilization required. The first recorded use of the term “noble savage” is attributed to fifteenth-century Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci. Struck by the Edenic quality of the Americas, both Vespucci and Christopher Columbus used this term (Nicole, 2001, p. 21). A century later, Michel de Montaigne pondered the habits of Brazilians in his essay “On Cannibals.” He proposed that the “natural” cannibalism of South American natives was of little consequence compared to the civil war atrocities that were being committed in his native France (Montaigne, 1993). Of these two earlier perspectives on indigenous peoples—the childlike innocence espoused by Vespucci and the natural rationality put forth by Montaigne—the latter had the greatest influence on Diderot’s French Enlightenment notion of the noble savage. In between, however, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote his Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité Parmi les Hommes, or Discourse on Inequality. Ever since its publication in 1754, Rousseau has been widely credited with “inventing” the noble savage as a concept. The facts previously listed have already proven that claim inaccurate. Yet even more surprisingly, Rousseau did not employ the term “noble savage” anywhere in his work. In fact, he was less concerned with the “nobility” of native peoples than simply with

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their “natural” qualities (Okin, 1979, p. 106). Rousseau’s attempt is not to delineate an existent “savage nobility” but rather to speculate on what the nature of man9 truly is. Rousseau is similar to Diderot in that his intention was to critique his own society. Rousseau sought to strip away the present trappings of his own civilization and to present an image of humans far in the past before they were corrupted by the arts, competition, education, and civil laws. The emphasis I have added to this statement cannot be stressed enough: Rousseau stated explicitly that in the eighteenth century no such “natural societies” existed anymore, anywhere. As Rousseau described him, natural man of long ago was free from conventions that caused artificial inequalities. Rousseau asserts that while men are born with some natural inequalities, there is always the capacity for selfimprovement. Thus, by far the more evil inequality among men is the imbalance created by societal conventions. Primitive man had no such conventions—not even the family unit constrained him. Man lived as an animal, in a highly simplistic state. Rousseau is key to my argument in this chapter when he writes: “One could say that savages are not wicked precisely because they do not know what it is to be good” (Rousseau, 1984, p. 154). By his assertions one cannot project any “nobility” into the savage state. But this is precisely what Rousseau’s fellow French philosophers began to do in the face of scientific reports from expeditions to the other side of the world. The indigenous peoples Europeans “discovered” from the time of the Renaissance through the nineteenth century continued to be slapped with Vespucci’s label of “noble savage.” And the French philosophes—especially Diderot—conflated Rousseau’s social-scientific exercise in the Discourse with their own ideas about inequality in eighteenth-century France. An example is this exchange between Diderot’s French characters “A” and “B”: A: So you would prefer a state of brutal savage nature? B: Really I cannot say. But this I know. Townsmen have several times been seen to strip themselves and return to the forest. The woodsman has never put on clothes and come to the town. In summing up his views of Tahiti, too, B says simply: “You will not deny, at any rate, that nowhere [than in the savage state] is there less acquired knowledge, less artificial morality, and less imaginary vice and virtue.” In that sense, the basic precepts of Rousseau’s state of “nature” are retained. But that is where the similarities end. Once again, the uncontrollable volatility of narrative motifs becomes clear, particularly in the face of political agendas dependent on alterity. Colonialism and revolution are just two of these agendas, and they deter-

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mined the illogical yet extremely potent development of the metaphor of the noble savage (Elliott, 1997). Eighteenth-century France presents an opportunity to explore this motif against the backdrop of the travel narrative. The first point to emphasize about travel narratives during the age of the Enlightenment is that they were not at all new. It is true that they attained an enormous and rather sudden popularity during the eighteenth century (Hunt, 1993) and that more of them were written during the 1700s than ever before, particularly in France (Elliott, 1997; Liebersohn, 1994). But travel narratives actually have a long history, both scientific and literary.10 I would also assert that we should not allow a Western bias toward written sources to discount the travel narratives that surely existed for millennia within oral traditions. Having acknowledged its longevity even at the time of the Enlightenment, however, it is important to consider the special significance of the travel narrative in eighteenth-century Europe. The travel narrative virtually exploded onto the popular literary scene during this specific era. Perhaps this is because of the preoccupation with epistemology that so characterized Enlightenment thought, especially in France. Changes in travel itself, too, deepened the significance of the travel narrative. There were many more narratives simply because more expeditions actually succeeded. Taken together these two factors contribute to the sense of “the voyage” as a symbolic structure of knowledge during the Enlightenment (Certeau, 1991, p. 222). Historians and critics since that era have pointed out the crucial contributions of this new knowledge. Two of the most important Western scholarly works produced during this general time period—Wealth of Nations (Adam Smith) and the Encyclopédie (Diderot et al.)—owe a great deal of their content to the scientific findings of Enlightenment explorers. The reports coming back from voyages to faraway lands constituted only a small part, however, of what can be considered “travel narratives.” Philosophers and fiction writers provided the vast majority of eighteenth-century works in this genre, and most of these authors embroidered rather strange fancies into voyage records. The idea of a “travel narrative” then becomes a volatile combination of both science and literature, both a “staging (fiction, in the English sense of the term) and an ordering (discourse)” (Certeau, 1991, p. 222). Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville is a prime example, and an analysis of his work will be taken up later in this chapter. As with many persuasive forms in this book, the travel narrative forces audiences to confront prejudice toward the Other in Western identity formation. As Hunt (1993) argues: “To study early modern travel literature is to be confronted by the delusions and self-referentiality of a nation and a class in the making. But it is also to come face-to-face with the very real global consequences of these peoples’ grandiose musings” (p. 357). Racism is

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dominant within the specific combination of the noble savage and travel narrative in Western alterity during the Enlightenment. Hunt (1993) is careful to point out that racism was not “learned” from travel narratives. Yet the narratives made racist beliefs easily accessible and put them in virtual dialogue with one another, making them endemic. Travel narratives formalized vernacular ideas about race, situating them in “an elaborately worked out taxonomy that embraced the entire globe; [travel narratives] made claims to be scientific, and situated Europeans . . . at the pinnacle of the racial hierarchy” (Hunt, 1993, p. 346). Her point about the “science” of alterity is especially significant to my argument in this chapter, since one can identify the eighteenth century as the moment of a paradigm shift in racist thought. Gates (1986) has identified a key element in the rhetoric of racism as an appeal to authoritative sources. Before the Enlightenment, authoritative appeals in racist rhetoric were generally made to Scripture. (Recall my discussion of the “curse of Ham” in chapter 3). But, by the eighteenth century, these appeals are dominated by science (Gates, 1986, p. 5). For this reason and others, the Enlightenment challenges readers to consider the emerging role of science in the rhetoric of alterity. Exploration established the impetus for new epistemologies; indeed, the Age of Discovery created an entirely new discipline in the academy. As I stated earlier, when we trace the concept of alterity in the West, the idea of anthropology becomes increasingly important. I will make this discipline a focus in this chapter and in succeeding ones, beginning with a controversial figure in the field concerned with “the study of man”: Louis Antoine de Bougainville. His seafaring expedition around the world, which led to the “discovery” of Tahiti for France,11 was one of the most wildly popular episodes in scientific exploration during the development of Western alterity. Simultaneously, it is also one of the most misunderstood. The next section of this chapter attempts to shed light on this forgotten thinker and explorer who changed—inadvertently or not—the view of the Other in eighteenth-century France. LOUIS ANTOINE DE BOUGAINVILLE AND THE VOYAGE AROUND THE WORLD I argue that Bougainville is a key figure in the reckoning of alterity during the Enlightenment, especially in terms of the conjunction between philosophy and exploration. The nationalistic impulses driving exploration and colonization—particularly against the background of the Seven Years’ War (Hammond, 1970, p. 4)—are highly significant in understanding France as a particular philosophical leader of “the West” during the age of Enlightenment. France may have been defeated to some extent by that war, but French

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losses to England and Spain in the “New World” did much to fuel the desire for advancement. Taken together with his English counterpart James Cook, Louis Antoine de Bougainville represents only the beginning of colonizing expeditions launched throughout Europe in the late eighteenth century (Woolf, 1992, p. 75). This desire for world dominance actually happened on two fronts: both the philosophical and the geographic. A focus on Bougainville integrates these two elements of Western alterity in remarkable ways, as discussed later in this chapter. Before undertaking this analysis, it will be important to consider a few details of Bougainville’s voyage. Louis Antoine de Bougainville was thirty-seven years old when he set out in 1766 to circumnavigate the globe. This feat would take him three years. By the time he left on this voyage he had become a master mathematician in the academy and served in the French military for ten years. He was the son of nobility and influenced by the intellectual trends of his time. One of these was the political struggle against England, a force that led first to his military service and then to his willingness to claim new lands for the French through exploration. But of course, another intellectual influence was the notion of the noble savage. While some scholars assert that Bougainville projected into Tahiti the romantic notions of his youth (Nicole, 2001), others posit him as “an instructive example of a French eighteenth-century intellectual consciously weighing what he had read against what he was seeing” (Elliott, 1997, p. 239). One pragmatic approach to Bougainville cites his journal from the Pacific and finds that he did not take Rousseau nearly as seriously as other thinkers. In fact he is prone to poke fun at the so-called inventor of the noble savage (Dunmore, 2002). Thus Bougainville’s approach to the Enlightenment ideal of the “noble savage” cannot be unequivocally defined, as Dunmore’s (2002) examination of the Pacific journals makes clear. Neither can there be certainty about his assessment of the “noble savage” by the time he set sail in 1766. His voyage took three years and his attitudes toward the Tahitians and other indigenous peoples likely shifted. Bougainville then becomes a prism out of which a few ambiguities concerning the noble savage throughout the centuries may be refracted. One point must certainly be made, however, when it comes to Bougainville: the intellectual trends affecting him from France included not merely nationalism, not merely the “noble savage,” but also a genuine interest in science (Hammond, 1970, p. 15). The reports from his voyage are highly reflective of this. That is not to say that Bougainville did not afford himself some creativity in his approach to the voyage. In fact, there is a narrative motif specifically associated with Bougainville and the discovery of Tahiti— because he did not name the land “Tahiti” at all, but rather Nouvelle Cythère or “New Cythera.” According to Greek myth, Cythera is the place

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where Aphrodite (goddess of love) first emerged from the sea. As Diderot’s narrative of Tahiti makes evident, the “noble savage” of New Cythera was particularly appealing to the imagination of sexuality. Bougainville himself regarded the people of Tahiti as exceedingly handsome and beautiful; he wrote that Tahitian vahines easily rivaled the women of France. “These islanders are white, and their race is handsome,” Bougainville reported in the first news from his voyage. The initial publication, appearing in 1769, was a brief report—virtually a newsletter—written hastily and with a spot of enthusiasm not seen in Bougainville’s later recountings of his voyage (Hammond, 1970). Yet Bougainville still clings within it to a baseline level of scientific report. Some of his key observations are ones that pertain especially to Diderot’s later romanticization of Tahiti. Bougainville admired the women of Tahiti mostly for their freedom “from any base interest” and their tenderness toward their children. All the wealth on the island was communal, but the people did have a king “whom they obey[ed] blindly” in addition to twelve chiefs. Three main deities constituted a religious system for the Tahitians: the sun was at the pinnacle of this trinity, and then a god of good and a god of evil. The latter god of evil showed his anger through thunder, which the islanders feared in the extreme (Bougainville, 1769). Bougainville’s later book, Voyage Autour le Monde, was more subdued than the original newsletter announcing the discovery of Tahiti. From a postmodern perspective, it is tempting to project onto Bougainville certain theories of acculturation, stemming from the field of intercultural communication. These theories (and many sojourners’ practical experiences) suggest that upon initial contact with a new culture, there is a certain “honeymoon” phase experienced by the traveler. In this stage everything the traveler encounters is idealized. Typically this is followed by a sharp downturn or “disequilibrium” in the traveler’s attitude, but it usually rights itself. Perhaps Voyage Autour le Monde oozes less enthusiasm than Bougainville’s original report from Tahiti simply because he adapted more realistically to his surroundings. More likely, however, the lengthier work represents his desire to observe things scientifically and record every detail of his voyage. He was present during the revolutions in South American missions that ultimately expelled the Jesuits from that continent—a momentous historical event that Bougainville found to be one of the most interesting experiences of his voyage around the world. Hammond (1970) is puzzled as to why Bougainville comments so “laconically” on this significant event (p. 41), but I would argue that few humans ever understand the significance of events as they unfold. With the benefit of over 300 years’ hindsight, the major shift in power in South America appears to us as a meta-narrative, but to Bougainville it probably seemed more like another episode in a series of

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worldly insights during his three-year voyage. Less laconic, however, is his description of the “Pécherais,” a group of impoverished South American Indians who appeared very much removed from the “nobility” eighteenthcentury savages supposedly possessed. Here again there is evidence that Bougainville did not have the level of idealism regarding indigenous peoples that many of his countrymen espoused during the Enlightenment. It is safe to say, however, that Bougainville was culturally attuned to the French eighteenth-century view of women. Even the “Enlightened” were severe in their attitudes toward the feminine Other, be she French or Tahitian. This is a point that will be especially significant to my discussion of Diderot later, but it is also useful here to examine Bougainville’s female Other. Much has been made in the past three centuries, for instance, of the supposed “free love” in Tahiti. In his Voyage autour le Monde, Bougainville described in the manner of a detached observer the greetings he and his men received from the Tahitians upon their arrival at Nouvelle Cythère. The islanders came in dugout canoes to Bougainville’s ships, and the naked “nymphs” among them stood in the boats and made comely gestures to the Frenchmen. Bougainville did detect some shyness or embarrassment among the young vahines, however, “either because nature has embellished women everywhere with a certain timidity, or because, even in countries where the openness of the Golden Age still exists, women pretend not to want what they most desire” (Bougainville, 1771, p. 190). In his journal, Bougainville did suggest that “nature” sufficed as law on the island and also expressed regret at the idea that Europeans would spoil the paradise he had found—taking the Tahitians from the Golden Age into the “iron” one (Martin-Allanic, 1964, pp. 683–685). At points like these, readers can more directly link Bougainville to some of the attitudes of his time regarding alterity. But on at least one score he was very different from his fellow French intellectuals: he treated as an equal the Tahitian whom he brought back with him, who was named Aotourou. All evidence indicates that Aotourou was an eager participant in the adventure, and also a marvelous representative of Tahitian society. The dynamic between Bougainville and Aotourou was different from that between Cook and “his” Other, named Omai, who visited London—although we must not doubt that the impetuses between the two relationships were probably very similar. Upon his historic arrival in Paris, Aotourou was posited as the “son of a Tahitian prince” (Hammond, 1970, p. 51). Bougainville’s journals make it clear that he regarded Aotourou as his equal, and held with disdain his fellow countrymen who regarded Aotourou as a “curiosity” and criticized Aotourou’s inability to speak French. Perhaps most significant, Bougainville reported that Parisians seemed to tire of Aotourou easily and regarded him as a passing “fad”—far from a living representative of the noble savage they had

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so eagerly discussed and admired (Elliott, 1997, pp. 242ff). I argue that this fact reinforces the role of the “noble savage” as a narrative motif in Western alterity, not as a “hero” that any Westerner truly believed to be real. Yet there is a very poignant narrative quality to the life of Aotourou. He loved opera, walked about Paris and shopped as though he had lived there all his life, and seemed to be greatly admired by his friend Bougainville. Bougainville donated one-third of his estate to equip Aotourou’s passage back to Tahiti—yet the young prince died onboard, just three weeks after he set sail from France (Elliott, 1997, p. 244). That narrative quality to Aotourou’s short life presages the rhetorical power of Bougainville’s “discovery” of Tahiti. The facts from Bougainville’s voyage around the world—and in particular the identification of Bougainville with Tahiti—grew into a virtual cottage industry of narrative motifs that he might never have imagined. It is important to reiterate that the narratives of Bougainville’s voyage appealed to multiple levels of French society. The stories simultaneously existed in both academic and vernacular realms. The rhetoric surrounding Bougainville’s travels becomes central to this chapter because, for the first time in European history, travel narratives were widely read by both scholars and the bourgeoisie. The reading tastes of the so-called commercial classes shifted during the eighteenth century “from books about religion to books about travel” (Hunt, 1993, p. 335). For Woolf (1992), it seems reasonable to believe that even the illiterate classes would have been influenced through hearsay by the sheer volume of travel writing (p. 77). Bougainville himself did not always approve of travel narratives, finding them useless for navigation and other practical ends. As he wrote in his journal: “Their only purpose is to make a work agreeable to the effeminate of both sexes, and the only result is the concoction of a book which bores everyone and is useful to nobody” (Bougainville, 1769, p. 173). Indeed, one wonders what Bougainville’s reaction must have been to the narrative of his voyage provided by Philibert Commerson. Commerson was the naturalist assigned to the enterprise and accompanied Bougainville throughout his travels. He was much like Bougainville in his positioning among the intellectual elite of France: both a scientist and an explorer. Yet his public writings, unlike those of Bougainville, evoke a much more blatant exposé of the “noble savage” myth. Commerson described the sexual activity of the Tahitians explicitly and poetically, praising “the gentle impulses of instinct not yet corrupted by reason” (Commerson, 1769, p. 199). Commerson’s version of Bougainville’s voyage was probably more influential on Diderot’s account in the Supplément than Bougainville’s narrative (Hammond, 1970, pp. 53–54). Yet the relationship between Bougainville’s factual voyage and Diderot’s work of fiction has become so entrenched in the Academy as to spawn regu-

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lar inaccuracies concerning Bougainville’s actions toward Aotourou and toward his own future ventures. Cook (1994) and Nicole (2001) in particular seem to conflate with pernicious hindsight the colonial repercussions of Bougainville’s voyage against his own scientific account of it. Elliott (1997) is more balanced in her analysis of Bougainville’s observations, classifying them within the honored realm of ethnography. She quotes Bougainville in his journal as emphasizing that “what We had written about Them had been created by ‘That class of lazy writers [sitting] in the shade of their desks [who] philosophise [sic] to great loss on the world and its inhabitants and imperiously reduce nature to their imaginations’”—and perhaps Bougainville would have included Diderot within this class (Elliott, 1997, p. 236). It must be admitted that Bougainville speaks to his own assumed European superiority at certain points in his writing. Yet most admirable for Elliott is Bougainville’s ability, despite his intellectual and cultural bias toward the myth of the “noble savage,” to “describe social practices of which he disapproved or which his intellectual and cultural background told him would not exist among such people” (Elliott, 1997, p. 238). There are many contradictions between Bougainville’s observations and Diderot’s later fictions. For instance, Diderot insisted on peaceability and gentleness in Tahiti where Bougainville surely saw a highly advanced system of warfare (Elliott, 1997, p. 240). Quotes from Bougainville describe hierarchy’s worst manifestation— monarchy—yet Diderot would expound upon the remarkable equality in Nouvelle Cythère. This brief overview of Bougainville and his voyage serves merely as an introduction to the power of the noble savage motif in identity formation during the Enlightenment. The importance of narrative epistemology comes into specific relief because Bougainville’s expedition is an historical fact. He made scientific observations in his journals, but these facts were waylaid by the dozens of travel stories embroidered by minor writers as well as major philosophers. Of these, the most cunning by far is Denis Diderot and his fictional narrative, Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. As I will argue, the story is cunning not just for its structure, its fantastic subject matter, or its perspective on the noble savage motif. It is also cunning because it seems to mask a wholly different “Other” of the Enlightenment. It is to Diderot’s narrative machinations that I now turn. DIDEROT’S NARRATIVE OF ALTERITY Denis Diderot’s long philosophical career is marked by attention to cultural identity as a curious factor in human life. Like Bougainville, he was particularly preoccupied with national identities; in his Encyclopédie he is specific

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about differentiations among national characters. Yet in Diderot’s time, national character had not yet attained the kind of relationship with political identities that has been so prevalent since the Napoleonic and Romantic eras (Woolf, 1992, p. 98). There are therefore some interesting struggles encountered by Diderot in his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. Cultural identity and narratives of alterity seem drawn along lines that are more emergent than stationary, as we shall see. For Diderot, Bougainville’s voyage provides an apt starting-point for the political process of critiquing his own French culture. Todorov (1993) suggests that this is a typical outcome of narratives of alterity: Diderot has the advantage of using as exemplary a culture not yet well known, so there will be no unfortunate contradictions presented by reality. He is free to project his own fantasies onto Bougainville’s findings, as many of the writers and philosophers of the eighteenth century did with travel narratives. Woolf (1992) suggests that in the case of travel narratives, this process is doubly inevitable because explorers lacked depth in their experiences with indigenous peoples. Their visits were often short and limited to commercial or other relatively superficial concerns; thus their reports could only rhetorically emerge from a comparison with their own European identities (Woolf, 1992, p. 79). But as I noted earlier, the whole of Bougainville’s writings provides a great deal of evidence to suggest that he was in fact a balanced, scientific, and reliable observer. He was not timid about recanting his presumptions. In one instance, as Elliott (1997) points out, he “had thought Tahitian society egalitarian, but ‘I was mistaken, class distinction is strongly marked in Tahiti and the disproportion is cruel’” (p. 154). Nonetheless, Diderot’s Supplément is cleverly constructed so that a kind of seamlessness between the figure of Bougainville and the political agenda of Diderot asserts itself into the text. Not only does Diderot falsely imbue Bougainville’s Tahiti with “savage nobility,” but he also advances the idea of the noble savage far past what Rousseau intended in his Enlightenment invocation of the figure (Elliott, 1997, p. 238). Most important, however, Diderot’s rhetoric in the Supplément can be read in a new contextual way that presents deeper arguments about Enlightenment alterity and how the biases of its age continue to affect intercultural communication. To make these arguments, I first consider the Supplément’s political ramifications against Bougainville’s observations, then discuss its narrative structure, and finally offer a unique argument about alterity and the noble savage during the Enlightenment vis-à-vis Diderot. Diderot began to pen his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville two years after the explorer’s return to France, but it was not published until 1796. The lapse in time only serves to crystallize the rhetoric of the piece, since despite the years’ distance the story becomes firmly entrenched in the

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public mind as an apocryphal “missing link” to Bougainville’s official reports. Diderot provides a narrative frame in which two semianonymous Frenchmen—“A” and “B”—are engaged in dialogue concerning Bougainville’s Voyage Autour le Monde, which B seems to be perpetually reading. When A questions him as to why the text interests him so, B begins to extol the virtues of Bougainville as an observer. The voyage was, according to B, “helpful in three ways. It affords us a better knowledge of our old home and its inhabitants, greater security on the seas he traversed sounding-lead in hand, and greater accuracy in our geographical charts . . . [Bougainville’s qualities include] philosophy, courage, truth, a power of rapid summing-up” (Diderot, 1796). Diderot’s introduction of the character of Bougainville, then, already situates itself in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Recall that Bougainville was by all accounts a brilliant mathematician, which during the Enlightenment “epitomized objectivity and universal knowledge” (Moscovici, 2001, p. 290). B continues to endorse Bougainville’s reliability throughout Diderot’s text. Bougainville “explains nothing. He merely states the fact,” according to B—but of course, there is a profound irony in this. Bougainville’s reports and journals indicate that he “stated the fact” far more than anyone has given him credit. Yet Diderot himself, with his Supplement, has ironically committed most of the besmirching of Bougainville’s reputation as a man of science. Likewise, a pivotal moment in the tale occurs in this exchange: A: Do you want to weave a fable round Tahiti? B: This is no fable: and you would have no doubt as to the sincerity of Bougainville if you knew the supplement to his voyage. With these lines, Diderot introduces the nature of his “supplement” and writes a fictional chapter of Bougainville’s travel narrative. Diderot’s subtitle of his story—“Or, the dialogue of A and B on the inconvenience of attaching moral ideas to physical actions that have none”—should have indicated more broadly his intention to project a political agenda into the narrative. But, since his characters engaged in dialogue introduce the idea of a “supplement” which A is now free to read (for it is lying “on this table,” B tells him), the scene playing out before the reader becomes permanently blurred with the ravaging of popular travel narratives. Diderot seems to understand his audience’s affinity for travel narratives quite well. He does not need to exert a tremendous amount of rhetorical power to introduce his political arguments into the readership of a willing public. As Elliott (1997) points out: “Diderot’s Supplément [makes] it clear that while Bougainville’s account of his travels was immensely popular, the French only wanted to know certain things about Pacific islanders” (p. 240).

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The “certain things” about Tahitians that Diderot expounds upon in his work are all directly bound to his own biases, both political and personal. By the end of his life Diderot’s thought was marked by a pronounced atheism (Marías, 1967), so we read in the Supplément a great deal of antireligious sentiment. Of course, this atheist bias stemmed equally from the French Enlightenment philosophers’ preoccupation with political and social reform, especially their criticisms of the hierarchy of court society in France. As the motif of the noble savage emphasizes, French Enlightenment thinkers espoused more “natural” ways of living in society, and believed that “civilization” had falsely imposed a stagnant and harmful way of life onto human beings. Diderot himself would have also been rather anticolonialist (Hammond, 1970), which may explain some of his butchering of Bougainville’s findings. These were just some of the major strains of thought that provide context for the political agenda of Diderot in writing the Supplément. I will offer examples from his text that illustrate the significance of Diderot’s thought regarding the noble savage as he pertained to Diderot’s aspirations for French society. Understanding these examples may be made easier by Diderot’s own conclusions about them. Toward the end of the Supplément, Diderot’s character B sums up the points argued by the Tahitian named Orou in his dialogue with the Jesuit chaplain. B ticks off the reasons for the decline of French society, stating that Orou has intuitively understood civilization’s corruption By the tyranny of man, who has turned the possession of a woman into a right of property. By manners and customs, which have overweighted the conjugal union with conditions. By civil laws, which have subjected marriage to an infinity of formalities. By the nature of our society, in which difference of rank and fortune have introduced the proper and improper. . . . [Also, for we French the birth of a child is not an increase in wealth, but an increase in poverty; sovereigns with their own personal interest have corrupted society, and religious institutions] have attached the names of vice and virtue to actions not susceptible to moral treatment. How far we are from nature and happiness! Through these lines, Diderot debunks what has been called the diffusionist theory of cultural exchange—in this case, the idea that the French were exploring in order to share their superior culture with the Tahitians (Moscovici, 2001). Obviously, Diderot’s political agenda in the Supplément is to show how inferior the French are, compared to these noble savages. Yet it is still worth examining in detail Diderot’s construction of alterity.

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The first thing Diderot must do to maintain the illusion that there is some “truth” to the Supplément is to refer to Bougainville’s actual findings and simultaneously distance his arguments from the facts. It is an interesting moment in the dialogue, for example, when A suggests that the mention of cannibals in the voyage record is “perhaps . . . a first period of cannibalism which would be very ancient and quite natural, insular in origin.” Diderot thus succeeds in keeping the Tahitians distant both spatially and temporally. Ironically—and perhaps inadvertently—he alludes to Rousseau’s original argument concerning the noble savage that I outlined earlier in this chapter. Recall that the noble savage for Rousseau is a figure from a time long since lost; the noble savage is how human beings used to be. Rousseau did assert that perhaps some peoples in the Caribbean might be the only contemporary beings who vaguely resembled the ancient noble savage. But Rousseau did not believe that any more noble savages existed. Here, Diderot is mapping those “Caribbean” characteristics onto the Tahitians, who were not known to Rousseau. Time and space are thus once again conflated in a Western narrative of alterity (a rhetorical move I point out several times in this book, and one that will be especially important in the next chapter). But while he may have been conscious of Rousseau’s preoccupation with the past as it concerned the noble savage, for Diderot there was no eluding the fact that Bougainville had brought back through vast distances a very real, very present “noble savage.” In a way, Diderot’s textual treatment of Aotourou (the Tahitian living in Paris) parallels the French societal one: he is a curiosity at first, then of no interest once he can no longer fulfill the agenda of the noble savage motif. Diderot dutifully has his dialoguing Frenchmen A and B discuss Aotourou, but once again B is able to sum the matter up rather quickly. B is certain that during his visit Aotourou has understood very little, and will not be able to carry much knowledge of France back to Tahitian society. Even that which he can explain will not be believed: He will find in his own language no terms corresponding to that little of which he has gathered some notion . . . after comparing their own customs to ours, they will rather think Aotourou a liar than believe we are so mad. . . . Savage life is so simple and our societies are such complicated mechanisms. This latter point, voiced by B, represents perhaps Diderot’s worst contribution to the construction of alterity in the Enlightenment. Once again, it continues to inform Western biases toward the Other: one must grapple often in college classrooms with the Western misconception that those from industrially underdeveloped nations are underdeveloped culturally as well. Diderot makes a supremely false statement here that “savage life is so simple,” and he

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must blatantly ignore all of Bougainville’s observations to do so. The paternalistic quality of his bias comes through especially in this statement by the old Tahitian in his “Farewell” monologue of the Supplément: “We are innocent: we are happy; and thou canst not but spoil our happiness.” Of course, Diderot’s bias grows in large part from his assumptions concerning the evils of religion. Speaking again through B, Diderot refers to the historical expulsion of the Jesuits from Paraguay in vituperative and colorful rhetoric: “These cruel Spartans in the black jacket used their Indian slaves as the Lacedemonians did their helots: condemned them to continual toil: made them drink their own sweat; and allowed them no right of property: kept them in degraded superstition.” In the later dialogue between Orou and the chaplain, Diderot attacks religion more directly. Through Orou’s reasoned rhetoric, the chaplain’s beliefs seem positively absurd. Given the narrative logic of the Creation myth, for example, Orou cannot understand why incest is considered immoral in France (it is actually celebrated in Tahiti). After all, Orou points out, if Adam and Eve and their sons were the only humans to populate the earth in the beginning, wouldn’t incest have had to occur in order for the human race to continue? Neither can Orou accept the chaplain’s choices to serve a god who, as Orou describes him, “has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere . . . who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so.” Naturally, as I noted earlier, Diderot has to ignore Bougainville’s observations on Tahitian religion when positing his argument through Orou. No doubt the Tahitians may have differed from the French concerning the free will of human beings. But as for conceiving of the presence of an invisible god: such abstract thinking was at the heart of Tahitian polytheism. Bougainville says as much when he writes about the gods of good and evil in his very first account of the voyage. Diderot, however, makes explicit his stance on religion when he says through Orou: “I do not know what thou meanest by religion, but I cannot think well of it, if it forbids thee to enjoy an innocent pleasure, to which nature, the sovereign mistress, invites us all. . . . Are the morals of Tahiti better or worse than yours?” The portrayed naivete of these lines—“I do not know what thou meanest by religion”—is quickly undermined, however, by the philosophical sophistication with which Orou begins to mock French society. He advises the chaplain to “cling to the nature of things and actions” in order to understand a universal morality. Most tellingly, the Tahitian expounds on Enlightenment inventions such as the public and the private, but again in terms of natural law: “[Nature’s] eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good,” Orou says. In this dialogue, Orou is virtually a satire of the noble savage. He lives according to natural law, but proclaims it with the clever tongue of civilization. In that sense, Orou is certainly part of a class of

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noble savages one might call the “savage critic.” Different from some stereotypical natives, who are exceedingly simpleminded and animal-like, the category of “savage critic” contains literary portrayals of noble savages who critique “civilization” just as Orou does with his reasoning (Pagden, 1983). Even more rhetorically stunning than Orou’s words, however, are his actions. This dialogue between the fictitious Orou and the visiting French chaplain emerges out of the latter’s initial reluctance to accept the offer of sexual intercourse with Orou’s wife and three daughters. Orou is curious when, even in the midst of a night of passion with Orou’s youngest daughter, the chaplain regularly cries out, “But my religion, my calling!” Thus he questions the chaplain about this strange concept, “religion.” And after encountering this graphic episode in the Supplément, twenty-first-century critics need be left with no doubt as to the popularity of travel narratives from Tahiti. As I emphasized earlier in this chapter, Commerson’s reports from Bougainville’s voyage helped create Tahiti’s reputation as the utopia of free love and natural law. Natural law, above all, was equated with natural sexual behavior. Diderot manipulates these stereotypes into a critique of eighteenthcentury French society. His Tahitians in the Supplément are all marked by their attitudes regarding sex, far more so than in the manner of Rousseau’s depiction of the noble savage. The Tahitians are contrasted with the French in their “natural” attitudes toward sex from the moment of Bougainville’s alleged arrival, according to Diderot’s story. In the dialogue between A and B we discover that one of Bougainville’s officers had a servant he thought was a man, but she was actually a woman in disguise. Upon their arrival in Tahiti, the islanders detected her sex immediately and seized upon her. We are to infer from this that their natural attitudes gave them a finely honed sense of sexuality; the French men who had spent all those months with only one female onboard ship were so corrupted by the trappings of “civilization” that their sexuality had been totally diluted. They could no more discern her gender than they could catch the scent of the ocean on a crowded Paris street. But there is more to Diderot’s point concerning natural law and sexuality than the mere titillating aspects that would have captured the imagination of many eighteenth-century Frenchmen. To place sex within the bounds of natural law in Tahiti, he calls again on the “noble savage” to expound upon communal life and the importance of procreation. As Orou questions the chaplain about religion, the exchange continues: CHAPLAIN: The most sacred of [our] vows is to have no dealings with women and not to have any children. OROU: What do you do then?

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Note especially here Orou’s denunciation of chastity as “the worst of all forms of idleness.” The chaplain, for his part, is persuaded—again not just in words but in actions, since he ultimately engages in sexual intercourse with every female member of Orou’s family during his stay in Tahiti. The chaplain breaks his vows and also admits he is not alone: his fellow “monks” back home in France have not kept their promises of chastity either. Interestingly he offers the observation to Orou that “female monks” (nuns) suffer even more from their vows of chastity. “They are more hedged in,” he muses. “They wither with grief and perish of boredom.” While we are not led to believe that the chaplain accepts Orou’s offer to bed his wife and daughters purely out of magnanimity or good manners, the chaplain does come to understand through the dialogue that procreation is the end goal of sexuality in Tahiti and is very much valued. As the chaplain notes toward the end of the Supplément: “There is practically nothing in common between the Venus of Athens and that of Tahiti. One is the gallant, the other the fruitful Venus.” In other words, fertility, not mere physical beauty, is more valued in Tahiti. By arranging his exposition of natural law around this theme, “Diderot brought the forms of sexual life in relation to the development of the whole of the social structure” (Honigsheim, 1945, p. 109). But this social structure is in large part imagined by Diderot. He had to reject or ignore most of Bougainville’s key findings in order to propel his own political agenda in writing the Supplément. Even within the logic of the Supplément ‘s narrative, however, one cannot miss the complete lack of regard for the complexity of Tahitian social life. There is no possibility that this society is a “simple” savage one: it is just as complex and overloaded with societal obligations as France is. Diderot may imply that values and hierarchy in Tahiti are based on fertility (Moscovici, 2001), but those values and that hierarchy still exist. More important, I argue that in both cases hierarchy is tied to wealth. Therefore, neither civilization is “natural.” As an example to support my argument, I point to the discussion between Orou and the chaplain concerning “libertinage” in Tahiti. Ben-

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rekassa and Aslanides (1998) refer to the “legend” of libertinage in the eighteenth century as an ideal of sexual freedom that, for Diderot, provoked “all sorts of thoughts on the ‘inconvenience of attaching moral ideas to physical actions that have none’” (p. 51). From the dialogue between Orou and the chaplain, it is apparent that Tahiti has its libertines as well: these would be any people who have sex with a partner they know to be sterile. One cannot suppress a chuckle as the chaplain says: “So you too have your loose women. I am glad to hear it.” But the key here is that libertines in Tahiti have sex in the full knowledge that it will not lead to reproduction. The “full knowledge” of this comes about through public, outward expression. Women past childbearing age in Tahiti, Orou tells us, are marked by veils. Do these veils not create a societal restriction on sex in Tahiti? Of course. The veils are a semiotic limiter to sexual freedom. From one perspective, the fictional noble savages of Diderot’s Supplément are more prudish and more restrictive regarding sexuality than married persons in twenty-first-century America. After all, women in the contemporary United States may enjoy sex long past childbearing age, at no time suffering from the label of “libertine.” Kamdar (1987) has also suggested that “Tahitian libertines are double criminals, for in transgressing social law they equally offend nature” (p. 77, my translation). I argue that Diderot’s depiction of Tahitian society is ironic. For all the “freedom” and “natural law” he allegedly presents in Tahitian society, the social trappings are as complex and restricting as the French. But the problems of alterity in Diderot’s Supplément run even further: the Other is not so much the noble savage as it is the feminine. Perhaps the figure most marginalized in Diderot and in eighteenth century France is woman, whether French or Tahitian (Kamdar, 1987). Moscovici (2001) agrees that even within Diderot’s depiction, there are aspects of Tahitian society certainly worthy of criticism. Both the French and the Tahitians are guilty of the objectification of women, to be sure. Moscovici (2001) argues for a “general equivalent” (or common mode of comparison) in analyzing the Supplément. She argues convincingly that this general equivalent should be “fraternal patriarchy.” That is, “both the French and the Tahitian cultures define ethics in terms of how women are exchanged among men for the purposes of sexual and cultural reproduction” (p. 298). When one employs Moscovici’s (2001) general equivalent of fraternal patriarchy to the two cultures represented in the Supplément, one quickly observes the marginalization of women in both Tahitian and French societies. For example, Diderot’s chaplain is concerned about the exchange of women. While discussing the importance of fecundity, the chaplain muses to Orou: “All this leads me to think that those whom nature has not favoured cannot be very happy in Tahiti.” And Orou replies: “Which shows thou has

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no very high opinion of our young men’s generosity.” It is easy to see here the totalitarian control that men have over sex and women in Tahiti. Furthermore the “children” Orou praises are referred to in exclusively male terms, and the future roles he predicts for them are exclusively male as well (farmer, fisherman, hunter, soldier, husband, father, etc.) (Moscovici, 2001). I argue that true Otherness in the Supplément is represented by femininity, not merely by the noble savage. There is very little to say about alterity when the males of Tahiti—the supposed noble savages—are cast against the background of their male counterparts in France. By setting Orou and the chaplain side by side in dialogue, Diderot does little except to bring their similarities regarding women into specific relief. The only alterity present has to do with a particular concept of supernatural belief (although we know that Diderot was inaccurate in this depiction), and with differences in sexual practices. The sexual mores, or values underpinning sexual behavior, are not different at all: men are in complete control. And in neither case is the man’s respective society “natural” by any means. Patriarchal laws restrict them both. Of course, to say that women are “Othered” at any given time in Western history is to state the overwhelmingly obvious—which is why I have not focused the book solely on femininity in the West. In the first chapter, I argued that Medea is compelling as Other due to specific aspects of her femininity: she is a foreign, exiled wife and mother. Here, in this chapter, it should be no revelation that women were marginalized in eighteenth-century Europe as well as Tahiti. Indeed, Kamdar (1987) has already written a brilliant French essay on this topic. But I stress the point because it helps to reveal the complexity of the noble savage as an Other figure as well. By keeping the role of women in the forefront of this analysis of the Supplément, I pinpoint what it is for Diderot that makes the savage “noble”: it is the noble savage’s intelligence, his reflection on the society in which he lives. No doubt Diderot’s fictional Orou would make a charming sparring partner in the salons of Paris—unlike the living, breathing Aotourou who was not compelled to learn French. This “philosophical” quality to Diderot’s noble savage is underscored by the continual Othering of Enlightenment women as childlike, flighty, uneducated, and dense. Diderot ends his Supplément in a way that is meant to be light and amusing, but it is significant to my purposes here. As A and B conclude their discussion of Bougainville, having read through the old Tahitian’s farewell and the debate between Orou and the chaplain, they begin to consider dinner plans. They realize they should consult their “ladies” before making any decisions, and make a move to go find them when A has a suggestion:

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A: Suppose we read to them the conversation of Orou and the chaplain? B: What do you think they would say? A:I have no idea. B: And what would they think? A: Very likely the opposite of what they said. Within this exchange Diderot reveals that women, too, must be bound by social conventions and mores. Recall Bougainville’s observation that women everywhere pretend to reject that which they most desire. Perhaps this is the only convergence between the minds of Diderot and Bougainville: they were typical of the Enlightenment in their view of women as rather frivolous, silly creatures. Yet it is even more interesting that Diderot produces this Othering view of women through dialogue. It is a clever rhetorical device on which his whole commentary on alterity in the Supplément depends. An examination of the narrative structure of the Supplément enhances the understanding of Enlightenment alterity. It is to this task that I now turn. DIDEROT’S NARRATIVE OF ALTERITY The most significant lines concerning alterity in Diderot’s Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville are presented through dialogue, as the section above indicates. In fact, critics widely regard his use of A and B as an act of genius. In this act he creates for the Supplément a “perfect integration of structure and substance” (Goodman, 1983, p. 137). Yet there are disparate viewpoints on why the dialogue is so compelling in Diderot. Creech (1978) suggests that the dialogue is typical of Diderot’s art. A striving to connect with the absent reader or Other marks virtually all of his written works: “Diderot’s is the mind that found its truth in the ‘parole de l’autre,’ in an ‘alienation consentie,’ in the absolute sundering of himself, always seeking his ground in the absent other” (Creech, 1978, p. 445). From this perspective, the narrative frame of Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville intentionally erases the discrepancies between Diderot and his reader (Kamdar, 1987, p. 75). Such effacement is said to be typical of travel narratives in general (Hunt, 1993, p. 338). But a contrasting viewpoint on Diderot’s use of dialogue may be more satisfactory. This opposite perspective asserts that the dialogue between A and B creates distance between reader and writer, primarily because dialogue by nature is not mimetic. To form dialogue in his narration, Diderot is forced to reflect upon the alleged data from the voyage, not merely to re-create or

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restate it. Dialogue between his characters then becomes a remarkable integration of data and reflection. Ironically, there is enough distance placed in front of the reader and what she or he is experiencing as to suggest more meaning, more “truth,” than the data from the voyage itself (Goodman, 1983, p. 126). Diderot is able to make a case for a “willing suspension of disbelief” by drawing his readers into the narrative process as though a journey were being undertaken. Note B’s statement to A at the beginning of the dialogue, while the subject of Bougainville himself is still being explored: “His vessel is only a floating house. After all, the navigator travels enormous distances, shut up and motionless in quite a narrow space. He makes the tour of the globe on a plank as you and I make the tour of the universe on your floor.” With these lines, Diderot—who had never ventured beyond Europe (Elliott, 1997)—enhances his own credibility by suggesting that it is travel within the mind that is most important (Goodman, 1983, p. 124). Perhaps because Diderot is so self-conscious about creating this imaginary dialogue, the astute reader can perceive the distance created and find the “truth” Diderot desires for the “absent other.” And Diderot is careful to maintain this illusion beyond the initial narrative framing. The textual heart of the Supplément consists of two sections: first, a monologic “harangue” by an old Tahitian chief, which Bougainville supposedly recorded yet left out of his official reports because of the political discomfort it would cause. The second section is yet another dialogue, this time between a Tahitian named Orou and his guest from the voyage, a Jesuit chaplain. In both cases, the Tahitians are quoted at length in a style that is decidedly European, and very “formally” European at that. When A points this fact out to B, Diderot has B explain away the discrepancy: “You must realize that it is translated from Tahitian into Spanish, and from Spanish into French.” This explanation may seem too “convenient” to us, and perhaps even clumsy. But in the context of eighteenth-century France, Diderot’s lines here are reflective of an emergent intellectual observation that was quite astute: the idea that the language of a nation is intimately tied to its culture. He expounds upon this in his Encyclopedie when defining “nation.” In doing this, he picks up some threads of argument from Montesquieu and Herder, who were grappling with similar issues concerning language and culture. All the same, Diderot’s inscribed and imaginary process of translation is also indicative of intertextuality in the “Diderotian universe” he calls us to explore. He invents the idea of multiple translations to account for the stuffy “Europeanness” of style in his Tahitian orators, a wise rhetorical move that alludes to his arguments in the Encyclopédie and also deflects criticism away from his own inexperience and complete lack of knowledge concerning language in Tahiti. But that invention is part of a much larger pattern of inter-

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textuality in Diderot. This intertextuality, I argue, is what creates the “narrative distance” he requires. True, he tells us, the speech styles of the old chief and of Orou cannot be captured on the page; they have gone through two textual transformations and become “European in style.” Similarly, Diderot is making a case for writing a “supplement” to Bougainville’s voyage that is twice removed from the actual experience. And also similarly, Diderot consistently plays on his own texts, having A in the Supplément refer casually to characters from another of Diderot’s stories: Ceci n’est pas un conte. Even the title of the latter—“This is not a story”—ought to give us some hint of the narrative distance Diderot crafts through intertextuality. Diderot crashes through genres, asserting that his short fictional work Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville is actually a travel narrative rooted in truth, and accomplishing this illusion through two dialogic frames and one haranguing public address. Thus, I believe that much of the Supplément’s significance lies in Diderot’s narrative structure. When the spaces between genres and texts are this permeable in a work of art, we can say with certainty that such blurring pertains directly to social power (Bauman & Briggs, 1992). Ironically, by collapsing the lines between genres and texts—and even cultures—Diderot creates what might be called “narrative distance.” Narrative distance is crucial to Diderot’s content, as we shall see, but it is accomplished mainly through structure. I argue that the narrative distance of the Supplément is more essential to Enlightenment alterity than critics of Diderot have yet realized. Even at the turn of the twenty-first century, students of alterity continue to denounce Bougainville as a power-hungry colonizer, and Diderot as a navel-gazing fool (Cook, 1994; Nicole, 2001). Yet both Bougainville and Diderot lived at a time when the primary philosophical question was so simply stated as to be unanswerable: how do we know what we know? I believe that Diderot’s significance lies only partly in his blind mauling of facts about Bougainville’s voyage. For that mangled effort, perhaps he deserves all the criticism he gets. At the same time, Diderot was conscious of his lack of knowledge—he had to have been. Epistemology was the driving force behind his life’s work, and indeed behind most of the philosophy of the French Enlightenment. Diderot knows that the speech he crafts for two imaginary Tahitians cannot possibly “sound” Tahitian on the page. As Goodman (1983) stresses: “It sounds European because it is European” (p. 129). Diderot’s A and B are not anonymous; they are definitely French, and Diderot never takes them out of their society. He consciously situates them there (Goodman, 1983, p. 134). So, Diderot’s primary significance is to be found in a rhetoric of alterity that was entirely imaginary for him. Recall my emphasis above that travel within the mind was most significant for Diderot (Goodman, 1983, p. 124). His writing is a model of the universe of his mind then presented on the

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page. It is a volatile model, replete with contradictions and overstructuring and the blurring of genres. Most troublingly, it is the blurring that creates narrative distance; and “This distance . . . defines the reader’s position as firmly rooted in the real world, where political action can be taken” (Goodman, 1989, p. 142). Unfortunately for Diderot, when we set Goodman’s point here in juxtaposition with the political agenda he actually articulated in the Supplément, we can easily see the inaccurate and problematic nature of his depiction of the noble savage. In advancing his critique of French society, Diderot was compelled to ignore the scientific findings of Bougainville’s actual voyage, promoting a rather absurd caricature known as the “savage critic.” In the end Diderot fell prey to his own harsh biases and in a tragically ordinary way, he Othered women—both French and Tahitian—far more than the noble savage. Yet Diderot’s narrative continues to be compelling for two reasons: his genius as a storyteller, and the pivotal place of his narrative in the long history of the “noble savage.” The former reason is one I have taken pains to explain in the previous paragraphs: Diderot’s narrative construction is nothing short of brilliant. No matter what discrepancies we can point to in Diderot’s presentation of the “facts,” his dialogues and intertextuality effect narrative distance that highlights his political arguments. The sheer originality of his intercultural rhetoric is stunning and perhaps even satirical for its epistemological underpinnings. Readers cannot stop asking with Diderot: how do we know what we know? If in the end it turns out that we, like Diderot, know very little about the “noble savage” at all, we need only wait for the next transformation of the noble savage narrative motif. Orou, the Tahitian hero, is the noble savage of Enlightenment France. More than this, he is the “savage critic” of Western civilization. The very nuance in that label of “savage critic” (Pagden, 1983) ought to remind readers once again that narrative motifs such as the “noble savage” are always fluid. One expects this to be so across the centuries, but even within France—even very shortly after Diderot’s melodramatization of Bougainville—the idea of the “noble savage” was a contentious one. For Diderot and those who fell within the Encyclopedic tradition of the French Enlightenment, as well as others who moved toward Revolution in France, the “savages” were noble because of the natural equity in which they lived. Sexual freedom, unfettered by the trappings of religion, supposedly resulted in a productive, natural, happy society. With the Revolution, the period known in France as the ancien regime ended, accompanied by the rise of the bourgeois class. With the “equalizing” of France and the West, however, there emerged another “Other” within French society: the aristocrat. The Reign of Terror Othered aristocrats in violent and vicious ways, thus diversifying the imagi-

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nary context the “noble savage” actually inhabited. Liebersohn (1994) points out that “from a variety of ideological perspectives, French travelers to North America after 1789 condemned Rousseau’s conception of the savage as a naturally virtuous democrat” (p. 755). Some of these French visitors had been born into displaced French aristocratic families. Notable among them were Alexis de Tocqueville and Adelbert von Chamisso (Liebersohn, 1994). For these two writers in particular, the royalty of Polynesia (ali’i) and America (Native chiefs) provided savage “nobility.” This one example is a remarkable indicator of the malleable quality of narrative tropes. As power identities shifted in the West, so did constructions of alterity. The process continues, and so more intercultural narratives await this elusive figure. The noble savage dominates much of the Romantic period, and he taunts the traditional past in Brave New World as well as the contemporary writings of Sherman Alexie. He is even a caricature left over from an embarrassingly recent decade, as exemplified by the writings of Robert Bly in Iron John. Yet there is a second reason why Diderot’s narrative is important in the construction of Enlightenment alterity. Throughout the transformations noted earlier in the “history” of the noble savage, one communicative schema remains the same: whenever Westerners have employed this motif, the end result has been narrative that tells us far more about the West than about the people “noble savage” supposedly described. Far from praising the realities of indigenous life, the “noble savage” motif instead has represented gross inaccuracies and fantasies generated by disgruntled Western thinkers. Woolf (1992) describes this process: If the Orient was “orientalized,” as Said argues, Europe had been “Europeanized” by the construction of a unifying grid of civilization, against which all other cultures could be measured and classified. European writers and intellectuals had arrived at a definition of what characterized all Europe, beyond its differences, by contrast with the ‘other,’ non-European societies. (Woolf, 1992, p. 89) The process Woolf describes is symbolic of the age of Enlightenment: Europeans differentiated themselves through thought. I argued in this chapter that the projection of Diderot’s imagination onto scientific findings crafted alterity in his supposed “supplement” to Bougainville’s voyage. Diderot valued travel within the mind, but in the end he barely approaches open water. All of his mind-travel, instead, served to critique his own experience. Representative as he is of Enlightenment alterity, one may make of eighteenth-century France the macrocosm of Cartesian thought. As Descartes wrote: I think, therefore I am. Preoccupied as they are with epistemology,

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one finds that when Diderot and others tried to cast their minds into exploration, the end result is only: we think, therefore Europe is. My purpose here has never been to deconstruct the narratives of the past, but rather to confront the biases of alterity that the West carries within it in vernacular and so-called benign ways. At the same time I agree with Elliott (1997) that a great opportunity was lost in the eighteenth century to break through into understanding the Other. The Age of Discovery was the moment that could have made this happen. Perhaps she is right that the French explorers like Bougainville were the real heroes of the eighteenth century: “They were its philosophers and its men of action and it was they who bent the boundaries of existing knowledge systems to produce its first ethnographic writings” (Elliott, 1997, p. 252). More is the pity that Bougainville’s skills were completely unappreciated in his time. All the truth he brought to light was quickly snuffed out; Aotorou was no match for Orou. But this reveals something important as well, something equally human: few things are so powerful in identity negotiation as stories. The eighteenth century was not the moment of discovery or even Enlightenment; it was the age of the travel narrative. As Certeau (1991) writes: “The travel narrative is a text of observation haunted by its Other, the imaginary. In this way it corresponds to its object, a ‘culture’ haunted by its ‘savage’ exteriority” (Certeau, 1991, p. 225). And so even the noble savage continues to bask in the shadows. He fools the audience, he is meant to be a spectre from time immemorial; but in the end he is only a mirror held up to his creator’s bourgeois face. In delineating the savage, Rousseau intended a sort of time-crossing by stripping away his era’s “civilization” from the concept of man. Rousseau’s bias stemmed from the idea of “Progress” in the West. In juxtaposition with this metaphor, the savage makes an apt departure point for the next chapter on modernity.

CHAPTER SIX

Modernity, Industry, and the Fatal Flaw THE RISE OF ENTROPOLOGY IN A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT

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s this book had made clear thus far, alterity is never a singular issue, no matter what the time period. Just as Christianity passed through several metamorphoses of “Otherness” in the period of the Roman Empire, so, too, can we find various intercultural dynamics between the Western nations that emerged fully out of the Enlightenment period discussed in the previous chapter. Technically, the modern period begins with the Enlightenment (Bauman & Briggs, 2003). The ramifications of the Enlightenment were enormous. At the same time, modernity must be seen as a continuation of the philosophical ideas that emerged from eighteenth-century France. One of the greatest of these ideas was equality, and the French Revolution’s sibling movement is found in the rise of the United States of America as an independent nation. The eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revolutions on either side of the Atlantic Ocean will be forever linked in history and in Western concepts of alterity. So, this chapter focuses on identity negotation in the United States during the modern period. There are other reasons why I have chosen the United States for this chapter and for the remainder of this book as a “site” of major Western ideas on alterity. The late nineteenth century seems an apt time to begin the study of identity negotiation in the United States since it is during this period that “American” narratives truly came into their own. As the modern period is dominated by the idea of progress, America as the “New World” is also pertinent to modern narratives. Another important facet of this moment in America is concentrated in American industry, where the seeds of world domination are sown. 143

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Samuel Clemens, writing under the name Mark Twain, epitomizes storytelling during the modern period. George Bernard Shaw once wrote to Twain, “The future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire” (Paine, 1912, p. 1398). Twain held many of the beliefs of modernity in common with his contemporaries both at home and across the Atlantic. He had faith in science and progress, yet he also believed that progress came about through a particularly American brand of capitalism, and science was best combined with good old Yankee know-how (Budd, 1996, p. 3). He was also highly critical of such “European” institutions as Church establishments, monarchy (Royal, 2003), class biases, and restrictions on language. All these influences are particularly salient to his 1889 novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But it is not merely Twain’s positioning as a “product of his time” or a liberated American humorist that make him significant for this chapter’s exploration of alterity in modernity. When it comes to narrative, one finds a kinship with Twain that is invaluable for the present project. In more overt ways than other narrators, Twain connected his ideas to the patterns of stories that emerged out of a long Western narrative past. Indeed, A Connecticut Yankee has Thomas Malory’s La Morte d’Arthur as a primary inspiration. It is also a biting response to Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, which was at the height of its popularity in 1889 (a popularity, Twain felt, that was illdeserved). Once again then, in considering the rhetorical tropes of Western intercultural contact, one finds in King Arthur a motif that has influenced Western culture for centuries: beginning in oral tradition, then set down in multiple versions for retelling. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court accomplishes a great many things in terms of its time period and cultural and social arguments. I wish to add a new reading: I argue that Twain’s 1889 work can be viewed through an intercultural lens. Hank Morgan’s relationships with people in sixth-century England, 1,300 years before his birth, are not merely fanciful and they are more than a plea for social justice. Hank Morgan’s actions constitute a metaphor for intercultural contact in the period of modernity, and they prefigure many of the difficulties “science” brought to the study of human beings. The significance of Twain’s novel for a study of alterity emerges on two fronts. First, the narrative motifs of time and space become intertwined as sites of intercultural contact. Second, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court exemplifies a particular anthropological realization that comes to be known in modernity as “entropology.” This is my argument in this chapter. But I believe this reading of Twain’s story is quite unique, so I unpack viewpoints on the issue of “time travel” first. Then, I discuss general

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issues of alterity in the book, finally moving to a central analysis of anthropological ideas concerning entropology and “the fatal flaw.”

TIME AND A CONNECTICUT YANKEE A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court tells the story of Hank Morgan, a factory supervisor from Hartford living in the contemporary moment of the novel’s 1889 publication. Hank is a typical American worker—practical, driven, and optimistic about the progress of his society. He is enthralled by the technological wonders of his time, especially the telephone. He is solidly grounded in the talents of industry. As Hank’s narrative opens, he is hit on the head at work and knocked unconscious. When he awakens, he finds he has been transported to England in the year 528. Sir Dinadan, a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, quickly apprehends Hank and takes him to his majesty’s court. Hank must use his quick wit and handy mechanical skills to work himself out of several scrapes, but once he does, he is inspired to transport medieval England into the wonders of modern industry. Through Hank’s narration, Twain crafts a witty yet poignant fable about blind progress and the gap that often exists between industrialization and lived experience. It is a uniquely modern look at alterity, once we unlock the connection between time and space. As with all the narratives chosen in this book, A Connecticut Yankee continues to enjoy popularity with everyday readers. However, the academic response to Twain’s 1889 novel was not as rich; its reception has even been a bit chilly (Budd, 1996). And, also in a similar fashion to the other narratives I analyze in this book, the literary critics have often forgotten to consider the historical moment and instead introduced their own (often farfetched) analyses based on postmodern issues. This is the case when Hansen (1973) vilifies Hank Morgan as “Hitler” and compares Arthur’s knights on bicycles to the Nazi “blitztruppen” of World War II. Crews (1992) warns us instead to remember the topics that were important to Twain, and that is what I attempt to do here. Some of the analyses approach significant issues for late nineteenthcentury America yet fall short in their consistency. The book has been called colonialist, for example. But Hank Morgan has no “imperial home” to which he can send the rewards of his plunder, so it is difficult to say on whose behalf he is “colonizing” sixth-century England. A more historically and contextually situated approach requires that we pay more attention to technology and especially to time travel.

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Time travel was a popular narrative theme in nineteenth-century Western storytelling. Placing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in this context accomplishes two things. First, the site of Hank Morgan’s time travel emphasizes the legacy of the Romantic movement. The King Arthur legend was extremely popular in Romanticism, and remains so to this day; its presence in Twain’s novel helps alleviate the gap between the Enlightenment and modern periods. In a way, this chapter is about Romanticism and modernity together through the use of the Arthur legend. Second, and more significant, time travel is an apt metaphor for the modern enterprise. Modernity is very much a “quarrel” with the past, a kind of cultural conflict with the way people once lived and a struggle to be free of the old cultural constraints. When Hank travels back in time he encounters the sixth-century English as vastly alter—even savage— Others. He has the same ethnocentrism for his own time that Westerners often possess about their own space. Twain recognized that A Connecticut Yankee was another in a long line of references to the famous King Arthur’s Court. Yet even within the book he seems to muse with curiosity on narrative motifs that have longevity across time and space. For example, a running joke in the book concerns an old “worm-eaten” anecdote told by Sir Dinadan that Twain’s protagonist Hank Morgan “had heard attributed to every humorous person who had ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to Artemus Ward” (Twain, 1996, p. 112). Hank also relates the story of an Arthurian woman offering her child to a clergyman who overtaxes her: “Why leave me my child, yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?” and notes with amazement that an almost-identical incident occurred in nineteenth-century Wales (Twain, 1996, p. 245). But the most artful narrative connection Twain makes is when he briefly compares A Connecticut Yankee’s protagonist, Hank, with Robinson Crusoe. Again, Hank is a factory foreman in nineteenth-century Hartford. He is struck on the head one day and suddenly awakens to find himself in England in the year 528. As his situation dawns on him, Hank muses: “I saw that I was just another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must do as he did” (p. 85). Relationships between time periods are often posited as intercultural connections, and A Connecticut Yankee illustrates this idea quite well. We have seen it before: for example, Augustine writes in City of God that it should not be difficult for Christians to believe the marvels of the Old Testament since they are so willing to find credibility in accounts of the foreign lands of their contemporaries. Centuries before Augustine, Herodotus wrote as an “ethnographer” traveling the ancient world and took the contrapositive view: why not believe his descrip-

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tions of odd customs from other countries, if the Greek myths and legends of the past are true? Throughout the rhetoric of alterity in the West, the relationship between time and space has been collapsed and conflated into rather artful tropes. In the previous chapter, I explained that Rousseau intended his “noble savage” as a character from the distant past. Yet Diderot capitalized on the physical distance between France and Tahiti to assure his readers that the “noble savage” was alive and well—not lost in time, but only in space. I offer the previous examples and those in this chapter as evidence of the dynamic interplay between time and space in the rhetoric of alterity. The Western sense of time as progressive—so important to modernity in this chapter—means that contemplating history is often an intercultural enterprise. We stereotype the past in the same way we stereotype contemporary Others; we misunderstand them both in the same tragic ways, but perhaps we can connect to their humanity as well. All of these things happen to Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Twain’s rhetoric introduces insight to alterity in his own historical moment. The next section sheds light on intercultural issues in the novel—however subtle—and sets up my main argument regarding the scientific study of human beings. “WHITE INDIANS”: THE CONNECTICUT YANKEE’S VIEWS ON THE OTHER One of the challenges in reading any of Mark Twain’s fictional works is that we are easily drawn into his humor and forget to take his satire seriously. Though most of Hank Morgan’s rhetoric of ethnocentrism begs a laugh rather than condemnation, we must face the ethnocentrism nonetheless. For the most part, it is drawn along broad binary opposites, as is the novel as a whole (Mitchell, 1999, p. 232). Hank Morgan poses his own nineteenthcentury America as securely literate, for example, and he scorns the orality of the sixth century as typical of Arthurian ignorance (Zlatic, 1991, p. 456). This is seen most clearly when the Church dupes Hank into a long stay in France, so they can impose the interdict on England during his absence. Upon his return, his right-hand man, Clarence, explains that he became suspicious when an oral message was delivered, supposedly from Hank, about his long sojourn. Clarence asks rhetorically, “Did you send me that word [about Cadiz]?” and Hank replies with scorn: “Of course not. I would have written, wouldn’t I?” (Twain, 1996, p. 539, emphasis mine). The continuum between orality and literacy is a significant one for modernist understandings of culture. A more common dyadic opposition in A Connecticut Yankee, however—and one more powerfully tuned to alterity—is

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the tension between reason and animal instinct. Hank sees the people of Arthurian England as hopelessly ignorant; they are uncivilized “animals without reason” (p. 64). He alternately uses images of animals and Native Americans to describe them; in either case, they are “savages.” One must remember that A Connecticut Yankee was published during the height of the so-called Indian Wars on the American Plains. Hank Morgan is a stereotypical Yankee, assigning all manner of ills to the Comanches (in particular) in the analogies he draws with King Arthur’s populace (pp. 55–56). For example, of the court he says, “The fact is, it is just a sort of polished-up court of Comanches, and there isn’t a squaw in it who doesn’t stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of scalps at his belt” (p. 176). Yet his most overt comparison of Arthurians to “savages” occurs when he is traveling with Sandy: Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified savages, these people. This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast—and that smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them; and also how to freight up against probable fasts before starting, after the style of the Indian and the anaconda. (p. 153) Equally blatantly, he says they are “white Indians” (p. 40). All of this seems obvious enough. Yet Hank’s rhetoric begins to assert his agency as a civilized, more sophisticated visitor to this primitive land, displaying a latenineteenth-century fascination with travel, exploration, and exoticism. About to be put to death by the court, Hank suddenly remembers that at the set time of his execution there will be an eclipse of the sun—and he recalls too that such events are useful for the manipulation of ignorant savages: It came into my mind, in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now; and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties. (p. 66) There is no denying that Hank’s overall attitude toward the Arthurians is one of condescension. And he admits he has always felt this superiority to Others, since he was a boy and kept his pennies for himself but gave buttons to the foreign missionary fundraisers. In this childhood subterfuge he reasoned that the “ignorant savages” did not know the difference between buttons and coins, so everyone was satisfied (p. 336). As for his present situation, why shouldn’t Hank gloat? The truth is that he has a 1,300-year

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jump on everyone around him, and he contemplates it “just as one does who has struck oil” (p. 96). At first, Hank’s rhetoric also brings self-consciousness to this intercultural enterprise, illustrating Twain’s skill for everyday American speech in the midst of fantastic situations. Hank compares the gaze of the Arthurians to that of visitors watching an elephant in a zoo: “They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious strength; they speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels which are far and away beyond their own powers. . . . But does that make him one of them? No; the raggedest tramp in the pit would smile at the idea” (p. 100). In fact, the keen interest of the commoners in their new “Boss” is unnerving for Hank, as he has been described by Sir Kay as coming from a “land of barbarians, who all wore the same ridiculous garb” (p. 55). Perhaps because of his experience as “Other”—no matter how much power he has—Hank softens at times in his attitude toward the people’s ignorance, at least. He continues to rail against social systems in Arthurian England, and he begins to build a nineteenth-century civilization for himself, as we shall see. But in terms of his intercultural communication, Hank occasionally sees the world from an Arthurian perspective. From the beginning, he finds the people “attractive and lovable” (p. 43); he apologizes to Sandy for his impatience when she does not understand his modern English; he worries that the tone of his newspaper is too flippant and irreverent; and he realizes that his belief in the reality of the telephone and electricity would be considered “impious and criminal opinions” in 578 A.D., in the same way medieval superstitions seem insane to him (p. 252). One must not make too much of Hank’s “learning curve” in terms of culture. He still means to carry out his goals of destroying the Catholic Church and establishing a Republic in England—without a thought to the resistance the “infants” of the sixth century might muster (p. 278). If he softens at all, it seems that he does so because he employs scientific observation in the name of his cause. Soon after Twain’s book was published, anthropologists would come to call this exercise “ethnography”—the writing of culture. Twain seems to prefigure many twentieth-century phenomena in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and ethnography is one of his “predilections.” Hank is startled to find that miracle cures at Astolat, for example, really are occurring under the picture of the Virgin Mary—he sees it for himself, and must “succumb to it” (p. 337). Another episode serves as an example of “ethnography.” On his first “quest,” Hank goes out on a sojourn with Sandy to rescue princesses from an ogre. The princesses turn out to be “enchanted” to appear as hogs, but Hank gives in to Sandy’s pleas and rescues them anyway. Hank, Sandy, and the “hog” princesses stay overnight at a house. The next morning the servants

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voice their plan to scatter rushes over the hogs’ filth, as is the custom when nobility pays a visit. Hank pokes fun at this household custom, translating it into modernist method: “It was a kind of satire on Nature; it was the scientific method, the geologic method; it deposited the history of the family in a stratified record” (p. 256). Such rhetoric is of course intended for humor’s sake, yet one still marvels at Twain’s solid grounding in nineteenth-century observations of culture. And Hank’s other “ethnographic work” in the book is more systematic and intentional. He realizes early on “that if I would govern this country wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life, and not at second hand but by personal observation and scrutiny” (p. 256). He takes what opportunities he can, joining up with pilgrimage processions, for example. He seems to become well trained in the art of observing communication. Toward the very end of the novel, he finds he can “read” the boys who are fighting with him: “I watched my 52 boys narrowly; watched their faces, their walk, their unconscious attitudes: for all these things are a language” (p. 551). Perhaps his observational powers have been honed by the “immersion” approach to the culture he takes when he goes out disguised as a freeman to learn more about their everyday life. King Arthur, for his part, is taken with the novelty of this enterprise and persuades Hank to take him along, leading to all kinds of misadventures. Indeed, one of Hank’s and King Arthur’s misadventures during their “ethnographic fieldwork” includes their arrest and sale to a slave driver. Unable to prove they are the King and the Boss, they find themselves shackled to other men and women and taken to London. A botched attempt at escape finds the lot facing the gallows. This dire situation snaps Hank back from any curiosity about the life of the people; his mission is to dominate them and change their society for what he believes is better. His lament watching his fellow slaves hang is shocking: “Nothing in the world could save the King of England; nor me, which was more important. More important, not merely to me, but to the nation—the only nation on earth standing ready to blossom into civilization” (pp. 483–484). Of course, this self-centered revelation should not surprise us. Hank is, from a postmodern perspective, brazenly open about his goals in the sixth century. He may disguise himself as a freeman, but he is always fully aware of the fundamental difference between freemen and himself: “To be loyal to rags . . . that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut” (p. 159). More significant, he never questions the modern idea that all societies are on a continuum toward progress, science, and technology. As a representative of the best society in existence, his duty is to improve the lot of the Arthurians. As he says, “Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is

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in safe hands” (p. 119), and his faith in his own beliefs borders on narcissism. Indeed, he needs no moral compass but his own convictions, being the only superior being in this culture in which he finds himself. Hank is vituperatively opposed to the Catholic Church, and since this is so he finds that he “had no scruples, but was willing to assail it in any way or with any weapon that promised to hurt it” (p. 191). This is so even when he is confronted with observations that should alter his views—as, for example, when he admits that the vast majority of priests he meets are champions of the poor; they are moral and gentle at heart. Hank’s faith in his own convictions guides all his actions, a modern condition expounded by Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) as emotivism. The only valid moral evaluations, according to emotivism, come from the self. In agency-driven modernity, the doorway is open for narcissism en masse; thus Hank is a product of his time. He modernizes Arthurian England in part for his own pleasure. The telephone allows him to “breathe the breath of life again, after a long suffocation” (Twain, 1996, p. 305), and when he sits down with his first printed newspaper, his rhetoric is almost sensual in its description of personal effect. But he also suffers, as I noted, from the modern malady of progress, and Twain points this out neatly. In this sense, A Connecticut Yankee becomes a poignant plea for social justice. Justice has been done in any number of intercultural situations since the modern era. Some oppression, some suffering has been put right by modernization; yet it is a sticky balance to strike. How much have things come undone, fallen apart, by the very same impulse to modernize? It is the question of our times, and has been since the nineteenth century. Twain knew this all too well. The most common flaw, it seems, is the kind of underestimation of sociocultural systems that Hank Morgan possesses in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and my aim here is to focus on this underestimation. In the next section, I examine my ideas of “the fatal flaw” and entropology in modern intercultural contact. TWAIN’S THEORY OF CULTURE, AND THE PERILS OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE I noted that Mitchell (1999) sees A Connecticut Yankee as a narrative neatly divided into binary opposites. This is significant to my argument later in this chapter. The kind of proto-anthropological undertaking inherent in the novel becomes crystalized half a century later by French structuralism, which is also characterized by binary opposites. In the meantime, however, the notion of dialectic metaphors in Twain’s work is worth closer scrutiny. This is especially true in terms of culture, which he posits in opposition to nature.

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Indeed, “nature versus culture” takes its first steps in A Connecticut Yankee toward becoming the mantra of modern alterity by the early decades of the twentieth century. Within that binary opposite, we find Twain’s main line of inquiry about “cultural identity” (though he may not have used that term). Hank primarily understands culture as “training,” something that must be overlaid on the nature of human beings. The training is so ingrained, so rigorous, that belief for the “savages” is unconscious. In a famous, oft-cited passage from A Connecticut Yankee, Hank explains exactly what he means: We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us . . . from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me. (p. 217) Note the shades of emotivism that permeate Hank’s rhetoric here. He admits to being a mere vessel of custom and “culture,” but the advantage to his nineteenth-century historical moment is that he can recognize he is still his own Self somewhere underneath the centuries of “training.” He pities the poor souls of the sixth century, who do not even realize this has happened to them. The best and the worst of royalty are helpless to stop the march of culture, from Morgan le Fay to Hank’s beloved Arthur: “He was born so, educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that was rotten with this sort of unconscious brutality, brought down by inheritance from a long procession of hearts that had each done its share toward poisoning the stream” (p. 381). Aside from these sporadic passionate tirades on the subject, however, Hank primarily takes a pragmatic view of culture. He is detached, even scientific, about its workings. The kind of “training” he talks about is largely mechanical, as when he expresses concerns about the uncomfortable clothing given to him by the knights upon his arrival: “But habit would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I was aware of that” (p. 83). The ethnographer in him speaks most clearly, too, when he notes that inherited ideas “are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine” (p. 98). This scientific view leads him to a secular stance on religion in the end. While he is violently opposed to the Catholic Church, he proposes to himself that after his

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reforms he will not impose his own religion of Presbyterianism on the English. Hank believes that religion is just another part of the system of culture and does not call for absolutism. Because the Connecticut Yankee understands the mechanical “workings” of culture, he looks for a way to change the “training” of the Arthurians. In this task he is helped most by his English right-hand man, Clarence. In twenty-first-century terms, Clarence is Hank’s VP of Research and Development. Clarence believes that the only way to change society is to start with the young, so he picks fifty-two boys who have grown up in Hank’s nineteenth-century environment and trains them. They form the last bastion of loyalty to Hank and his factories against the interdict of the Catholic Church. At the same time there are remnants of Romantic nationalism in Twain’s depiction of these modern boys. As all England comes marching against them, one of the boys says to Hank: “These people are our people, they are bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, we love them—do not ask us to destroy our nation!” (p. 533). And Hank’s response is crucial to our understanding of his actions: he reassures the boy that only the knights are marching against the revolutionaries, only the knights will be killed—and they are not the nation. Nationhood resides in the common peasant folk, the “freemen” among whom Hank had lived in his grand ethnographic experiment. The vernacular holds sway over the genteel, a powerful line of thought in alterity during the Romantic period. But although the knights do not solely constitute “the nation” in nineteenth-century thinking, they are indeed the linchpin of culture for sixthcentury England. This is Hank’s key calculation about his intercultural position. Again, with a mechanical, scientific view of culture, Hank believes that if he pulls out this “pin,” he can set in motion the revolution he so desires. But he has not considered the thorniness, the humanity of this system—only its mechanics. And this underestimation is his downfall, causing his entire world of progress to fall apart. THINGS FALL APART: A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT Twain begins Hank Morgan’s adventure in an inauspicious way: he has “landed” just outside the Court of King Arthur, and all the knights are highly suspicious of him. They are so suspicious, in fact, that Hank is sentenced to death—and only Clarence, a young page, is sympathetic. But as we have already seen, Hank turns the impending eclipse to his advantage, much in the same way “Columbus or Cortez or one of those people” (p. 66) had done, making the ignorant English believe Hank could block out the sun of his own

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accord. Once Hank is instilled with this “magic,” he is viewed in the kingdom as far more powerful than Merlin and possibly more so than King Arthur. He is thus named The Boss, a title he gives himself following his ambitions as a factory foreman in nineteenth-century Hartford, Connecticut. Although the Boss has no prowess as a knight, he must be fit in that hierarchical entity. Thus, Hank is exposed immediately to the world of knight-errantry. The principal business of the knights in King Arthur’s Court is to search for the Holy Grail, a lengthy and arduous quest. More knights are usually sent out after the initial seekers, too, Twain tells us with tongue-incheek. As they roam the countryside, the knights do fierce battle with creatures and human enemies, returning home to boast of their exploits. Very quickly, Hank is sent off on a quest with the lady Sandy—to rescue some princesses from an ogre (but, as I noted above, the princesses have been “enchanted” to appear as hogs living in a sty rather than an ogre’s castle; Hank pays off the “enchanted ogres” disguised as pigherds to set the hogs free). Yet even on this quest, Hank begins to ruminate on the economic futility of knight-errantry. He compares the system of the knights to the commodities market in the United States, namely, pork futures. During one of their long days searching for the princesses, he muses to Sandy: Knight-errantry is worse than pork; for whatever happens, the pork’s left, and so somebody’s benefited, anyway; but when the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what have you got for assets? Just a rubbish-pile of battered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware. Can you call those assets? Give me pork, every time. Am I right? (p. 235) Having thus discerned the pointlessness of knight-errantry early on, Hank begins his modernization of sixth-century England in secret. In the meantime he has inadvertently insulted a knight who promises to fight him once he returns from his latest quest for the Holy Grail. The quest takes several years, so Hank does not give the knight much more thought. But when he does return, after all that time, Hank has literally remade the English countryside into an industrial wonderland, all hidden from the eyes of the knights. So at long last the time has come, in this battle with Sir Dinadan, to make the final move toward civilization by destroying the institution of knight-errantry: “I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was the champion of hard unsentimental commonsense and reason. I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim” (p. 498).

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Allowed any weapon of his choosing, Hank knows he is useless in jousting, so instead he lassoes Sir Dinadan clear off his horse. He does this to several more knights, as the crowd is carried “clear off their feet with delight” (p. 502). But Merlin has been Hank’s enemy ever since Hank showed his ability to block out the sun, a feat Merlin never managed. So behind his back Merlin steals the lasso, and Hank brings out his other weapon—a handgun, with which he shoots several knights dead. The others run away in fear, and The day was mine. Knight-errantry was a doomed institution. The march of civilization was begun. How did I feel? Ah you never could imagine it. And Brer Merlin? His stock was flat again. Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left. (p. 507) Hank then acts quickly to expose fully his “vast system of clandestine factories and workshops to an astonished world. That is to say, I exposed the nineteenth century to the sixth” (p. 511). He does this not merely out of pride in his initial victory, but also because he has carefully considered the system against which he has done battle. He believes he has to paralyze the knights immediately and show no mercy by resting low for a bit. He even plans to send out an expedition to discover America soon after the defeat of the knights. But his systematic understanding of trained culture means that something had to be done with the knights; they must be put to some use. Hank has a somewhat “hydraulic” view of culture. By this I mean Hank perceives that if one part is removed without a substitute, everything will be out of balance. So he puts the knights to work in very American, very nineteenth-century jobs: baseball replaces the jousting tournaments, and some knights began to travel “in all manner of useful missionary capacities; their penchant for wandering, and their experience in it, made them altogether the most effective spreaders of civilization we had” (p. 513). These latter “missionaries” were really serving as marketing professionals, with advertisements for Hank’s soap and toothpaste painted on their shields like roving billboards. Most significant, however, the knights of the Round Table are turned into the Board of Directors for England’s first stock market. And here, Twain truly turns the legend of King Arthur’s knights on its head: instead of a quarrel over Guenevere to split the men and set Launcelot, Arthur, and Mordred against one another, the fight emerges over Launcelot’s dealings in stock trades. This is the point in Twain’s narrative at which the whole of

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oral tradition in the Arthurian legend comes to the surface. One can read A Connecticut Yankee as just another time-travel satire, but once the old story of Launcelot and Arthur emerges, there is a peculiar poignancy to the tale. The loss of Camelot shrouds Twain’s story in a tragic misunderstanding: Hank’s science cannot fathom how deep runs the culture of the knight. The reader is also swept away by technology and progress and could easily miss the one-paragraph reference (p. 532) to the root of warring troubles in King Arthur’s court. Hank would have done better to listen to the main “informant,” as anthropologists call them, of his ethnography: Clarence knew all too well how slowly the culture would change. “When those knights come,” he tells Hank, “those establishments will empty themselves and go over to the enemy. Did you think you had educated the superstition out of those people?” (p. 538). And Hank realizes, “They will turn our own science against us” (p. 538). Clarence also warns Hank against the rapid turnaround from a monarchy to the republic the Connecticut Yankee envisions. “[Clarence] believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy” (p. 514). Clarence follows up this reasoning with a genuinely funny suggestion that cats could easily replace kings—for one thing, “They would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it” (p. 515)—but the fact remains that Hank has severely underestimated how difficult it will be to topple the cultural system of knighthood. Clarence’s overall misgivings about leveling social hierarchy seem warranted; the class structure is written in cement, if not blood. In just one example, Hank discovers that Morgan le Fay has imprisoned a man for observing that she had red hair. “Well, she had; but that was no way to speak of it. When red-headed people are above a certain social grade, their hair is auburn” (p. 225). Experiences like these ought to have clued Hank in as to what he is up against in terms of social hierarchy. But he is hell-bent on transforming Arthurian England through the wonders of modern science. Again, it is that science that he applies to learning about and manipulating culture. He takes systematic pains to observe the common folk, and believes that he can simply transpose parts of the cultural “apparatus.” The knights can stop killing and run the stock market, can’t they? But the social relationships inherent in Arthurian culture cannot be overcome. The knights relate to one another, and to the commoners, in the same way—whether making a killing with swords or with stocks, it makes no difference. This is the fatal flaw. Hank believes he can remove their principal purpose and the danger will be gone; he can put them to work at some other industrious task and there will be no need for strife. But his failure is really one of humanness: by objectifying the cultural system and seeing it as a machine, he fails to take

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into account such amorphous notions as honor, duty, and belief. He outsmarts the knights in terms of technology, but knows next to nothing about the complex loyalty they espouse. In the end, they come marching on his hideout, the last cave where he and Clarence and their fifty-two fighting boys have access to electricity. In a final episode that Budd (1996) calls one of the most disturbing scenes in American literature, Hank uses that electricity to kill all the knights. For he has warned his boys: “English knights can be killed, but they cannot be conquered” (Twain, 1996, p. 556). By this, of course, he means that he has no alternative but to make sure all the knights are dead. He knows he will not be able to bully them into submission or rule them in any way contrary to their own cultural impulses—he has finally figured that out. And yet, I think there is another interpretation to this phrase as well. By saying they have to be killed rather than conquered, he has come to the accurate realization that knighthood is not merely a pin he can move about the machine. It has to be pulled out completely, and the machine rebuilt with new parts—like those fifty-two young boys who grew up under his influence. Knights as an institution, too, can never be conquered. They are far too much a part of a cultural system that is organic, not mechanical. The institution can only be “uprooted”; reconstruction of mechanical parts is the wrong metaphor for human beings. Yet it prevails narratively, in the face of modern industry and the drive toward scientific progress. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court ends on a melancholy note, because Hank’s one redeeming feature may be that he has fallen in love with Sandy, married her, and become completely smitten with their little daughter. After Hank kills 25,000 knights with one charge of electricity, Merlin comes to the cave and enchants him into a 1,300–year sleep, so that he awakens in the nineteenth century pining for his sixth-century family. I have not focused on this part of the story, choosing instead to examine the mechanics of culture as a trope in the exploration of Western attitudes toward alterity. But it bears emphasizing that Hank’s narrative ends with the horrific mass killing of the knights, a scene that to many critics prefigures the technologically enhanced brutality of World War I. And I believe that Twain’s narrative prefigures other modernist phenomena as well; structuralist anthropology, the sense that cultures are mechanical systems, and especially the agency afforded to the Western researcher. Twain’s narrative illustrates the blatant openness of Westerners concerning their own agency in intercultural contact. The modern period lays bare for the first time the idea that “culture” can be manipulated as a system. It is actually rather galling when one considers the kind of power anthropologists affix to themselves as agents of modernity, in which entire social systems fall apart merely because of their

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entry into them. Like all rhetorical tropes concerning alterity, there is a kernel of truth underlying the modern agency narrative. Since the modern era, Western students of culture have grappled with the metaphor of the Self in ethnography—and for the most part, rightly so. Yet where does this grappling cross the line from conscientious research to pure narcissism? Can we hope for better approaches to alterity as long as we see ourselves as all-powerful agents? If I may be permitted a brief digression, I confess that my own attempts at ethnographic research have been tarnished by the modern legacy of agency. While working as a teacher in the Samoan islands, my Samoan colleagues and I found ourselves without Christmas paychecks. The administrators of the school system announced that our school was bankrupt because we had not done our jobs in berating the students to exhort their parents to pay tuition fees on time. I railed at this job description; as a volunteer, the tuition the families paid was far from my consciousness. Yet it was Christmas and no one had money. As we sat in the lunchroom wondering what to do, I ethnocentrically muttered that this would never happen in the United States; if one did not get paid, one did not go to work. The other teachers thought that was a grand idea and we wrote a letter to the bishop saying we refused to work until we were paid. “Thus,” I would dramatically tell people for years to come, “began the first labor strike in the history of the Samoan islands!” And my grand narrative did not end there. Even in my classes where I supposedly taught students about cultural sensitivity, I wondered aloud what may have become of the patriarchal Samoan social system, now that I had “introduced” the idea of a labor strike into the islands. Were they now living in anarchy? Had Diderot’s free love in Polynesia perhaps now finally emerged? Could feminist critique be far behind? Perhaps the bishop had been deposed in a violent coup composed of elementary school teachers armed only with chalk. The possibilities for the “social system” of Samoa having collapsed seemed endless. Not until a mentor sarcastically remarked that he was disappointed in me for bringing a centuries-old patriarchal tradition to its knees through a two-paragraph letter, did I stop my navel-gazing. I had been trained to expect Things to Fall Apart. I had been warned they might. I just did not expect to enjoy it so much, to revel in the narrative. I should have simply taught the kids and enjoyed Samoan rhetoric, not envisioned myself playing some kind of “cosmic jenga”12 that no real individual agent ever gets to play. The kind of agency I thought I had—and the ethnocentric bias that led me to it—is symptomatic of the narrative motif of entropology. Make no mistake—entropology is real. I am borrowing the phrase “Things Fall Apart” from Chinua Achebe’s magnificent narrative of the same name. Achebe documents the ramifications of ethnocentrism among Western mis-

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sionaries at the point of contact with tribal societies in Nigeria, and the story is an apt warning against the reality of entropology. But the individual researcher has since overestimated her agency—myself included. That is the legacy of the modern period in which anthropology as a science was born. Happily, there is an anthropologist who can bridge that gap between overinflated egos reveling in Things Falling Apart and the true sensitivity that studies of alterity require. That genius is Claude Lévi-Strauss, and his views of entropology will serve in the next section to do justice to the kind of conscientious approaches to culture that are vital if we are to recover from the modern moment. CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS AND THE RISE OF ENTROPOLOGY In the introduction to this chapter, I made a case for choosing an American author as a representative of modernity’s narratology on the subject of alterity. Given the eventual rise of the United States as a superpower, this seems justified. Recall too that I linked the democratic revolution in the United States with that of France, positing the French Enlightenment as the natural older sibling of American nationalism in the nineteenth century. The connection does not stop there. In examining the Western construction of “the Other,” we cannot help being struck by the continued relationship between French and American thought. I am especially interested in the flowering of French anthropology in America. Many scholars have argued that anthropology was “born” during the French Enlightenment (Elliott, 1997). Certainly the Enlightenment’s preoccupation with science and observation provide the ideals necessary for a new discipline of knowledge about the Other. The American academy took up this challenge with enthusiasm, producing “homegrown” anthropologists in the years following Twain’s popularity as a writer. But historical circumstances also propelled European anthropologists into the New World, first as observers of “the natives” but later as scholars-in-residence. Some anthropologists fled Adolf Hitler’s Europe to find sanctuary in America. New York’s New School for Social Research, for example, actively brought European scholars to the United States during the years of the Third Reich. Notable among them was a French Jew named Claude Lévi-Strauss. He chronicles his journeys in and to the “New World” in his book Tristes Tropiques. This is a work that sheds light on the historical moment of the mid-twentieth century and the sorrow of Lévi-Strauss’ expatriation. Yet it also explains the foundations of the structuralist school in anthropology. Most significant to my purposes here, with this work Lévi-Strauss reveals a bittersweet sense of the whole anthropological enterprise—a sense that Things Fall Apart. I offer

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Lévi-Strauss as an additional contextualizing influence for the ideas of modernity. In fact, Lévi-Strauss helps interpret the ramifications of A Connecticut Yankee in powerful ways. First, Twain and Lévi-Strauss offer similar observations on how culture should be understood and studied. The opposition between nature and culture fascinates them both. For Twain, culture is “training” overlaid on nature so heavily that men do not recognize it. Lévi-Strauss sees this opposition at work in the minds of native peoples and anthropologists alike: “The Bororo way of thinking is governed by a fundamental opposition between nature and culture (and in this they resemble anthropologists)” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 234). Indeed, from reading Lévi-Strauss we gain a sense of the constructed anthropological enterprise and see that Hank’s fictional experiences jibe with the emerging discipline of Twain’s time. Hank is definitely biased toward his own culture. As I will discuss, Lévi-Strauss does not approve of such biases, but he does insist that the anthropologist is virtually never neutral about his culture of origin. His observations on foreign travel also lend insight into Hank’s voyage through time as an intercultural journey. Travel to other cultures causes disequilibrium in our sense of social class, according to Lévi-Strauss. We are thrown for a loop by cultural phenomena not so much for its inherent strangeness as for the sense that we have a displaced position in the hierarchy of the culture we are visiting. Indeed, the role of “visitor” is really no position at all, and so the anthropologist finds it difficult to cope. Perhaps Hank Morgan misreads his unfixed status in sixth-century England as a suggestion that the social hierarchy is susceptible to manipulation. Hank Morgan is like Lévi-Strauss in that he privileged observation and life among the natives as the best way to understand culture. Lévi-Strauss was also critical of Europeans in past centuries for their inability to properly observe Others or even themselves. Deficiency in powers of observation has made people in previous historical moments insensitive “to the harmonious arrangement of the universe” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 77). The supposition that the universe is in fact “harmoniously arranged” forms the foundation for Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist arguments. He applies this arrangement to the social lives of human groups, arriving at a new definition of “culture.” Like Twain, Lévi-Strauss considers culture to be constructed by human beings. The pattern of construction is similar in each case, but the forms resulting from the construction are disparate. In other words, all cultures must deal with the relationship between living and dead—that is a pattern. However, some people will eat their dead to honor them; others bury them. Each group may see the other as barbaric in their treatment of the dead, yet the fact remains that the principled pattern of “respect for the dead” is common among all cultures. Lévi-Strauss went on to assert that this

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one factor of “the dead” in any given culture is inextricably linked to every other constituent element of social life. Structuralism is a grand school of thought whose influence stretches from anthropology to literary theory and back again. I do not presume that I can treat the whole of the theory here. However, Lévi-Strauss’ writings in Tristes Tropiques go a long way in offering basic understanding of his ideas. I consider the following a helpful initial explanation: “The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems . . . one could arrive at a sort of table, like that of the chemical elements” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 178). The analogy Lévi-Strauss draws here between chemistry and culture is particularly telling. It is significant to my observation that anthropology is an outgrowth of Enlightenment ideas and that Western modernity can be linked to both French projects. To extend Lévi-Strauss’ definition, we can consider his example of the religious conversion of the Bororo to Christianity effected by the Salesian missionaries. Interestingly, the Bororo always had a circular arrangement for their huts. The missionaries realized that this arrangement was symbolic of but also constitutive of Bororo social life. Social life could not be separated from religious life; if the missionaries wished to change the Bororo religion, it would have to happen on social terms. Thus, they enforced a system of parallel rows for Bororo village housing. Lévi-Strauss explains: “Once they had been deprived of their bearings and were without the plan which acted as a confirmation of their native lore, the Indians soon lost any feeling for tradition” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, pp. 220–221). After that, the Bororo quickly converted to Christianity. What is most striking about this example from Tristes Tropiques is not the missionaries’ destruction of native social life and lore. Tragically, that is a narrative with which we are by now far too familiar. Instead what commands my attention in the modernist interpretation of the missionaries’ project is the willfulness of such an act, the calculated agency of it. I do not deny the plausibility, even probability, of Lévi-Strauss’s observations concerning culture and structure. Structuralism serves as a springboard for dozens of theories across the disciplines seeking to prove that culture is socially constituted. All these theories are believed to be helpful and descriptive. Yet the fine point of this narrative about Salesian missionaries and their encounter with Brazilian Indians reveals the truly modern sensibility that pervades alterity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Lévi-Strauss assumes in this narrative a self-consciousness and deliberation concerning the manipulation of social structure that seems new in the West. I have no doubt that missionaries and other Westerners had disrupted and destroyed social structures for centuries. But here the tenor of intentionality and agency has changed. The modern view of culture privileges science and structure and “mechanics.” All the

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missionaries had to do was to toy with one aspect of physical structure, and an entire belief system allegedly collapsed. Lévi-Strauss did not invent the agency of the modern period, nor does it appear that he manipulated social systems with which he came into contact. His writings merely reflect on the fact that such manipulation can be done, and he also mourns the disruption caused by European anthropologists in the New World. By the time he published Tristes Tropiques in 1955, the modern biases to which Twain had written A Connecticut Yankee were in clearer focus. Lévi-Strauss thus brings the modern period into specific and conscious relief by reconsidering the realm of science in the study of humanity. I see in Twain the parodic exposé of what happens when the modern obsession with progress encounters the daily life of the Other. I believe Twain intuitively saw the same problems in observation and identification of systems that Lévi-Strauss did. But ethnography was not yet a method, and anthropology was barely a science when A Connecticut Yankee hit American bookshelves. Twain thus offers us the buffoon Hank Morgan and depicts all the mistakes an ethnographer or missionary would make with the Other. Hank is susceptible to the “fatal flaw” thesis: he is so scientifically and technologically minded that he fails to recognize the human element of the culture he is trying to change. The assumption that such cultures should be changed is a purely modern sentiment arising from emotivist agency. By the time Lévi-Strauss became an anthropologist, the damage had already been done, and he begins to question this assumption. Lévi-Strauss’s divergence from Twain thus lies in his calling into account the mistaken “superiority” of the Western scientific enterprise. In another narrative from Tristes Tropiques, he recounts an interesting practice among the indigenous peoples of sixteenth-century Puerto Rico. They reportedly would capture whites, drown them, and then hold twenty-fourhour watch over the bodies to see if they would decompose or not. This was occurring at the same time that European explorers sent back reports to their homes decrying the allegedly animal-like behavior of natives in the New World. From a comparison of these activities, Lévi-Strauss (1992) makes a thought-provoking observation: The whites trusted to social science, whereas the Indians had confidence in natural science; and while the whites maintained that the Indians were beasts, the Indians did no more than suspect that the whites might be gods. Both attitudes show equal ignorance, but the Indians’ behaviour certainly had greater human dignity. (p. 76) For Lévi-Strauss, the major difference between Europeans and the Other is more complex than the “science versus superstition” dialectic. He

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interrogated the relegation of native beliefs as superstitious, asserting that native preferences were actually a kind of wisdom. The real madness, he wrote, was the European rejection of such beliefs and practices: Savages have often succeeded in achieving mental harmony with a minimum of effort. What wear and tear, what useless irritation, we could spare ourselves if we agreed to accept the true conditions of our human experience and realize that we are not in a position to free ourselves completely from its patterns and rhythm! . . . The search for such correspondences is not a poetic game or a practical joke . . . the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental and the only one really common to us all; scientific thought is merely the sharp point—more penetrating because it has been whetted on the stone or fact, but at the cost of some loss of substance. (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 123) The acceptance of such cultural mores and customs would lead, Lévi-Strauss insists, to a more holistic sense of human life. He attributes the bias of modernity partly to science, but also to the West’s refusal to acknowledge that science is nothing more than an attempt—identical to the supposed “savage” one—to make sense of the world. Because the sensemaking activities of humans everywhere are similar in structure, he characterizes human life as “an extraordinarily complex mechanism” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 413). Some of his arguments prefigure the postmodern sense of fragmentation and cultural relativism that I will discuss in the next chapter. But Lévi-Strauss is consistent in his rhetoric when he speaks of “mechanical” and “systemic” culture, as I point out with the previous quote from Tristes Tropiques. He is situated firmly within the modern realm of agency and preoccupation with social structure. There is in his rhetoric an additional element besides the mechanical and structural biases. Above all Lévi-Strauss expresses regret. He is remorseful for the manipulation of systems that were enacted by his fellow anthropologists and European missionaries. The “mechanism” that is human life is plagued with inertia that leads to entropy. I borrow the term “entropology” from him: “Anthropology could with advantage be changed into ‘entropology,’ as the name of the discipline concerned with the study of the highest manifestations of this process of disintegration” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 414). For Lévi-Strauss the role of the European has too often been to effect this process of entropy. Sometimes it has been intentionally accomplished, as in the case of the Salesian missionaries who deliberately manipulated the structure of housing and its integration with religious belief. Perhaps prior to the

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modern period and the advent of structuralist thought, such manipulation was merely intuitive. At his most generous moments Lévi-Strauss may even believe that some European disruptions were accidental. But in all cases the supposed superiority of the West gave sanction to breakdowns that were often horrifying. Things Fell Apart in the modern anthropological enterprise. Lévi-Strauss is a supremely shrewd ethnographer and a writer of striking beauty. He ultimately redeems much of the modernist impulse through his turning toward the humanities and humanization of the “savage.” Yet his mapping of culture as a systemic structure helps us to understand the latenineteenth-century narrative, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Surprisingly, the modernist rhetoric in the narratives of Twain and LéviStrauss occasionally still resonates with Westerners in the construction of alterity. A startlingly recent example is Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel The Sparrow. Despite its turn-of-the-millennium publication date, Russell’s narrative is permeated by entropic despair, authorial agnosticism, and the notion that one fatal flaw makes Things Fall Apart. As a conclusion to this chapter, I examine her work for evidence that the fatal flaw and mechanicocultural studies remain with us in popular discourse, despite our best postpostmodern efforts. THINGS FALL APART: THE SPARROW Mary Doria Russell’s degrees (including a Ph.D.) are in physical, social, and linguistic anthropology, and The Sparrow is strongly reflective of her academic knowledge. In interviews, Russell stated that she conceived of the novel in 1992, at the height of the “politically correct” movement and coincidentally the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the West Indies. In 1992, Russell remembers finding herself surrounded by harsh critics of Columbus’s discovery and of colonialism in general. Russell was dismayed at the false superiority some Americans displayed in their scorn toward Columbus. Her novel The Sparrow is actually an interrogation of attitudes and possibilities toward exploration in our own time. She wonders: would we in the postmodern period really do any better than Columbus and his comrades if we came in contact with a hitherto unknown culture? Would we avoid all the mistakes of those who centuries ago sailed across the Atlantic into strange new worlds? Russell knew that setting would be a problem. She surmised that there is no “New World” left on earth to explore—and so she took her fictional explorers off the earth. Set about twenty years in the future, we meet an expedition party of Jesuits and laypersons at the moment of discovery of life on another planet. The first contact the people on the planet Rakhat make

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with Earthlings is through their music as it comes across a SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) radio. Music enables the researchers to ascertain beyond a reasonable doubt that sentient beings are living on the planet and provides texts for the study of the alien culture. Russell writes that in the course of the early stages of research, Individual singers came to be recognized, after a time. Of these, the most compelling had a voice of breathtaking power . . . the listener hardly noticed its gorgeousness except to think of beauty and of truth. This was the voice of Hlavin Kitheri, the Reshtar of Galatna, who would one day destroy Emilio Sandoz. (Russell, 1996, pp. 146–147) Emilio Sandoz is the novel’s protagonist, and most of my arguments concerning the “fatal flaw” rhetorical trope pivot on his character. Emilio is considered a “living saint.” He spends his life in a search for oneness with God, nearly always describing God in aesthetic terms. One of the most exemplary quotes from Emilio on this topic is when he says to Anne: “You’ve seen what . . . but not why! That’s where God is, Anne. In the why of it . . . the poetry is the why” (Russell, 1996, p. 288). However, the question “why” quickly becomes much more tangible soon after the party’s arrival on the planet Rakhat. For the first few days they do not encounter any of the planet’s inhabitants. Suddenly, one of their party named Father Alan Pace takes ill and dies. Anne, the doctor appointed to the expedition, cannot determine what has caused the death. The event terrorizes everyone in the landing party, to be sure. And it is a foreshadowing of the kinds of “fatal flaws” Russell espouses in her narrative. She states that another of her purposes in writing this book is to tell a cautionary tale: bad things happen when we believe we act with God’s blessing. Readers of The Sparrow learn much later in the book of an even greater loss to the expedition when Alan unexpectedly dies. The other members of the party bring backgrounds of mostly American influence to the expedition and forget to consider the importance of social hierarchy among the groups of people they finally encounter on Rakhat. Alan, however, was aristocratic and English and, Russell tells us, would have been able to discern the problems of social interaction on the planet and proceeded with greater caution. Alan would have understood, Russell writes, “but Alan was dead” (p. 198). Their underestimation of social hierarchy brings the members of the mission to their doom. Again, the idea of culture as a mechanical “system” plays a vital part in this process. The first group of people the Earthlings encounter are rural

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village folk, of a race known as the Runa. The Runa are friendly and immediately welcome the Earthlings. The lack of industry and “progress” among the Runa are rather blatant. Russell places the Runa in a more “nascent” state, living in the country without hierarchical constructs. They trade in flowers and other natural perfumes; scent is the most highly developed sense of the creatures on Rakhat. Over time the Earthlings develop great affection for the Runa, but also find their constant “togetherness” a bit tiresome. Little do they know that the Runa have evolved from savage herds, and still retain their natural instincts for physical closeness. Even more shocking, though, is the revelation that the Jana’ata (the other race on Rakhat) are the predators left over from this savage state and in fact still breed the Runa for food. From an “entropological” perspective, it should not surprise us that the Jana’ata live in the cities, have a strict social hierarchy that marginalizes third-born sons, and must carefully control the breeding of the Runa lest they be outnumbered and succumb to civil unrest. Nonetheless, even as hints of this horrifying social reality on Rakhat begin to unfold, the Earthlings still yearn to meet the “singers” they first heard. They meet a third-born son of a Jana’ata family who is by birth relegated to merchant status. No third-born sons of any Jana’ata family are permitted to marry and reproduce, which undercuts their social power significantly. In the complicated morass of social restrictions based on birth and hierarchy, we come to discover two terrible mistakes that the party from Earth has made. Both pertain to the supposedly delicate social system on Rakhat, but the first concerns the singing itself. They repeatedly ask the merchant to take them to the city, and Emilio in particular only wants to meet the one singer who has the most beautiful voice on Rakhat. He anticipates the conversation with him that will fulfill Emilio’s life mission. Learning that the singer is a third-born son of the ruling class, known as a Reshtar, he plays out his speech in his own mind: There are times, he would tell the Reshtar . . . when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. . . . If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all its unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to its higher truth. . . . When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. And when we heard your songs, we knew that you too had found a language to name and preserve such moments of truth. When we heard your songs, we knew they were a call from God, to bring us here, to know you. (p. 391)

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But Russell conveys that Emilio has made a terrible assumption—that the aesthetics of music must somehow be universal. He attempts a syncretic move—even if only in his mind—to bring God to the Reshtar based on the beauty of music. Instead the music is representative of the most decadent and “Godless” libertinism possible on Rakhat. The Reshtar, we come to find out, bases his songs on the glory of infertile sexual activity—since, as a thirdborn son, he is prohibited from having children. He takes on many concubines instead, raising orgies to an art form, and in the end brutalizes Emilio Sandoz to the brink of atheism. As Emilio is devastated to realize, the music is “not prayer—pornography” (p. 395). The second mistake made by the Earthlings also pertains directly to the mechanistic social balance that has been struck on Rakhat. The Jesuit party is unaware that the Jana’ata control the food supply to the Runa, keeping the Runa females too thin to experience estrus. Innocently, the Jesuits begin to experiment with growing Earth plants in gardens in the Runa villages. The villagers love the practice and begin to grow their own food as well; soon the Runa females enter estrus and many babies are born. From there, Things Fall Apart. I will elaborate on this second mistake, but first it will be useful to consider Russell’s approach to the “fatal flaw” in more detail. Russell plays with time and space just as Twain does in A Connecticut Yankee. In Russell’s case, the reader is held in marvelous suspense concerning what has happened on Rakhat; it is all told in a series of flashbacks. Rescued as the only survivor of the mission, Emilio is brought back to Earth to await hearings. He will say nothing to clear his name of charges of murder and prostitution, which leaves everyone around him compelled to come up with their own speculations. Father John Candotti, called to help Emilio with the internal Jesuit investigation, “had his own theory about how things had gone wrong. The mission, he thought, probably failed because of a series of logical, reasonable, carefully considered decisions, each of which seemed like a good idea at the time. Like most colossal disasters” (Russell, 1996, p. 12). With these musings of John Candotti, Russell introduces the notion that mistakes are made by good people who cannot recognize the fatal flaw. Since she understands our lives together as social beings to be systemic structures, there will always be a fatal flaw, and it is typically recognized too late. Even her musings on history are permeated with this metaphor. Since the book is set twenty years in the future, Earth’s governmental power structure is somewhat different from that of the late twentieth century. The United States is no longer a superpower, having been displaced by Japan and Poland. She sets up this new society again in terms of the fatal flaw: Twice, the United States had attempted to force Japan to play by the West’s rules with a decisive move to block Japan’s access to

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Russell’s anthropological agenda is thus stated fairly clearly from the very beginning of her narrative. Her sense of agency is very modern in its sensibility, to the point that many of her characters become virtual allegories for the kinds of scientific knowledge they espouse. Dr. Anne Edwards is especially wooden in this regard. Like A Connecticut Yankee, The Sparrow is often drawn along binary opposites; passion versus reason is just one. Again the protagonists align themselves like caricatures in this continuum. While Emilio is perhaps the roundest character in the narrative, and certainly drawn the deepest, his struggle is consistently with his feelings, not his reason. In the cosmos Russell creates in her novel, then, a mystical near-saint driven by his emotions stands little chance against the mechanism of culture. He also stands little chance against the seemingly heartless (and very logical) Father Johannes Voelker, a fellow Jesuit who holds deep contempt for Emilio. So when Emilio is finally pushed to tell what happened on Rakhat, he replies: “Yes. There were a lot of babies.” He sat very still but looked steadily at Johannes Voelker. “It was the gardens.” Knowing that he was being addressed directly for some reason but unable to see why, Voelker shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t follow.” “The mistake. What you’ve been waiting for. The fatal error.” (p. 375, emphasis mine) As the reader discovers, the gardens caused the Runa to reproduce, which caused the Jana’ata to fear for their control over the Runa. The Jana’ata marched on the village, sought to seize the Runa babies, and the villagers were inspired by one of the Jesuit party to repel the attack. The Jana’ata immediately began to kill everyone in sight, but Emilio was taken prisoner instead and sold to Hlavin Kitheri as a concubine. In the end the planet stands on the brink of civil war just as two Earthlings arrive to save Sandoz; he is brought home in disgrace to tell his version of how things fell apart on Rakhat. The story is moving and quite elegantly crafted, yet strikingly familiar against the background of modern science. Russell speaks after all from the domain of anthropology; even in her fictional world everything is orderly,

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mechanical, and destined to fall apart through the miscalculations of missionaries. And anthropology, after all, is the discipline whose birth was a glorious result of the French Enlightenment. No wonder we see the vestiges of entropology in the corrupted, decadent agency of the Reshtar in The Sparrow. The end of this book is quite ironic for the reader, particularly for one who brings the inquiry of religious faith to alterity. Russell has two stated intentions in this novel, as I have pointed out. First she wants to question how far we have come in intercultural sensitivity since the time of Columbus. But, second, she wants to chasten those who believe their work on Earth is guided by the divine. I say the ending is ironic because Emilio Sandoz is redeemed by his fellow faithful back on Earth: those who seek the truth from him, and compel him to metaphorically vomit out the poison that keeps him apart from God. His experiences on Rakhat would have destroyed anyone, but interestingly Russell puts Matthew 10:29 into the mouth of one of her redeeming characters—“not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.” In that sense then Russell’s novel is driven by modernist notions, but finally befuddled by postmodern complexity. True, Emilio Sandoz commits an anthropological fatal error by underestimating the constraints and apparently “mechanical” nature of culture—and is changed forever by the consequences. However, through the gift of human relationships, he is able to confess his so-called “sins” to fellow priests and ultimately redeem the fatal flaw. In these ways Russell’s best-selling novel is a relic from the dawn of anthropology: it presupposes that systemic concerns such as hierarchy ought to be privileged over the passions of the human soul. On the other hand, as an anthropologist Russell would have read LéviStrauss. And this quote from him encapsulates the tension between the Russell who is a modernist agent, and the Russell who quotes the gospel according to Matthew. As Lévi-Strauss (1992) writes in Tristes Tropiques: The adventure played out in the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction; and secondly, that there will never be another New World: since the confrontation between the Old World and the New makes us thus conscious of ourselves, let us at least express it in its primary terms—in the place where, and by referring back to a time when, our world missed the opportunity offered to it of choosing between its various missions. (p. 393) “This means looking beyond abuses and crimes to find the unshakable bases of human society” (Lévi-Strauss, 1992, p. 391). There is great danger in the presuppositions of cultural systems, to be sure. Yet my hope is that we are also

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aware of the greater danger: the bias of modernity that overextends the agency of the ethnographer. Such a bias resonates through The Sparrow, a novel that achieved great popular import in America. So let us heed Russell’s initial intention in writing the book and remember Lévi-Strauss’s lessons of history: We have many missions among which to choose. Indeed, one need not fall prey to the modernist move toward entropology, which may lead to a certain hopelessness pervading intercultural contact. Reacting to our sins as researchers is a good thing. But seeing the implications of our manipulations—the ways in which things really did fall apart—judgments are no longer possible. Everything becomes relative, fragmented. These are the qualities of the postmodern era and these are the subjects I take up in the next chapter.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Rhetoric of Possibility TRICKSTER, THE POSTMODERN HERO

I

n the introduction to this book, I stressed that cultures are not discrete wholes. They are complex, hybrid entities that are constructed through discourse, including narrative. While I believe these processes of cultural identity negotiation have been present for as long as human beings have populated the earth, it is possible that my bias toward hybridity is a particular result of the time period the West calls postmodernity. Indeed, this book as a whole is inspired by the struggle to perceive “cultures” within a morass of discourses, political groups, and hybrid identities. Happily, this struggle is conducive to more contestation, more evaluation, and more dialogue. Throughout, I have attempted to identify the spaces where “the Other” has written or talked back to the initial narrative motifs set in motion by Western narratives. The postmodern moment is one of great discursive ferment between Self and Other. Consider the hybridity of the following narrative: The Plains Cree tell the story of how Wisahketchak the Trickster buys some goods at the trading post on credit. Unable to pay for them and being an inept trapper, he decides to use poison to ensure his success. Returning home from the post, he has his wife mix the poison into little round cakes that he sets to harden. When they are hardened, he packs up and sets out to the woods, where, after a good deal of pleading, he convinces a wolf to gather all the other wolves and foxes to hear some “good tidings.” When he has seated them in a semicircle in front of him, he begins to speak and [walks around the circle, placing a cake in each animal’s mouth], all the

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Alterity and Narrative while assuring them that if they eat the cakes and accept religion, they will live a long time. They die before he finishes their first, fatal homily, and with their skins he settles his debt (adapted from Bloomfield, Sacred Stories). (Wiget, 1990, p. 90)

Like all the stories that have inspired this book, the one just quoted obviously emerges from intercultural contact in a particular place and historical moment. The Plains Cree storyteller here quite overtly critiques the fur traders and missionaries infringing on the “natural” order of things in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The story is incisive and even a bit controversial, making it highly contemporary within the context of its time period. Yet the narrative is also positioned in a very traditional storytelling genre: that of the Trickster. Few narrative types are as common as the Trickster. Among the storytelling traditions that have been documented, it is clear that most oral cultures have at least one of these figures. Cultures dominated by literacy also write Tricksters into their most popular and enduring works of fiction. Transcending time and space, Trickster is at once primordial and adaptable, timeless and timely—as the Cree narrative so clearly illustrates. The boundaries of language and civilization do not hinder his significance. Trickster “lurks on the margins of history, carefully evading mortality. . . . He lives best in the ephemeral world of words” (Wiget, 1990, p. 86). But while the significance of Trickster to storytelling is undeniable, his ubiquity has not always advanced scholarship about alterity. The Trickster narrative type is often misunderstood or misappropriated. Any remotely ambiguous or complex figure, it seems, has lately been labeled a Trickster. Using this search term on the Modern Language Association database, for example, would today glean nearly 500 recent articles concerning Trickster, including some that linked the folkloric figure to such diverse personae as St. Peter, Satan, and Bill Clinton. Other discussions of Trickster reduce his essence to the mere tendency or ability to “play tricks” on other characters, to emerge victorious over unsuspecting dupes. Naturally, this happens because of oversimplification, the overuse of literary device, or a vague idea of what Trickster means. To posit Trickster as an important figure for the study of alterity and intercultural ethics, clear criteria from narrative scholarship as to what is meant by “Trickster” are needed. The criteria I have chosen stem from narrative development, rather than character description (Basso, 1996). Once these criteria are explained, this chapter discusses how Trickster can be conceived as a metaphor and a process for better research in alterity—particularly in the postmodern moment. I will allude to major themes pertaining to Tricksters, but, again, these are found in episodic analy-

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sis rather than character analysis. I am especially interested in the ethical positioning surrounding Trickster’s “rhetoric of possibility.” The implications of this positioning for alterity might, in the postmodern era, actually transcend Western perspectives. I begin with an attempt to bring order to diverse perspectives on Trickster. CLARIFYING TRICKSTER: THE LIMINAL MAN Whether one is a dedicated student of Trickster or not, some of Trickster’s diverse forms are probably somewhat familiar. Trickster characters include the Peruvian Guinea pig; Fisi the hyena, from Malawi; the Tlingit Raven; the Maori Maui; Fox in Europe as well as the Middle East; Yogbo in Benin. Most familiar to Americans, Trickster ranges from Puss in Boots to the Gingerbread Man to Wile E. Coyote. These are only a few examples. Trickster, as I noted in the introduction, is a very popular figure in narrative. Trickster variants are not arbitrary; they reflect common themes, as long as one works with narrative logic rather than analyzing Trickster character traits (see Hymes, 1996). Working within the context of oral tradition, folklore, and (to a certain extent) literature, scholars identify common episodic characteristics in most Tricksters. Trickster is typically male in nature, if gender is specified. For this reason I refer to Trickster with male pronouns in this chapter, with the precaution that female tricksters are possible but uncommon. Even more typically, Trickster is usually an animal or supernatural being; at the very least, he is not quite human. Some have described him as living on the margins, between domesticity and the wilds (Abrahams, 1985, p. 22), unbound by social conventions. His domain has been described as “a tolerated margin of mess” (Babcock-Abrahams, 1975). In fact, one of the margins in which Trickster may live is between God/the gods and human beings—he is often charged with delivering messages from deities to their creatures. Hermes, for example, is a trickster of Greek myth (Kerenyi, 1972), and the Brazilian Candomblé Trickster, Exu, is thought by his narrators to be analogous to the angel Gabriel because of his role as messenger (Williams, 1979, p. 114). But the kind of power proscribed by this particular “between,” and others, points to liminality rather than marginality as a defining characteristic for Trickster. As Wiget (1990) explains: Marginality produces what Victor Turner calls communitas, a state independent of roles prescribed by the social structure. On the contrary, it is the misfortune of Trickster to embody two or more social

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Alterity and Narrative and ethical domains (that is, he has a liminal rather than a marginal status) that creates his dilemma and our crisis of interpretation. (Wiget, 1990, p. 92)

Both marginality and liminality can be sites of power (Herrnstein-Smith, 1978; Turner, 1964). The “liminal” moment of ritual, defined by van Gennep (1960), occurs when initiates have been separated out of their current status in society and are about to enter a new one. They are “in between” established categories in society, and they are in transition. Because they cannot be categorized, they are considered powerful to the point of danger (Turner, 1964). As Wiget explains, the Trickster is much the same in his “between” state. He is not marginalized out of a particular status; instead he is caught between two or more. Monsma (2000) defines this quality as Trickster’s “border-crossing spirit” (p. 153), one that may be highly useful for intercultural interaction and the study of alterity. Trickster finds himself in this position for a variety of reasons, aside from possible relation to the gods. Some scholars suggest that Trickster may be a “mixed-blood metaphor” (Elias, 1999, p. 203). In the story related by Wiget that opens this chapter, Wisahketchak is more culturally liminal, finding himself between the categories of trappers and missionaries. Trickster’s liminality as seen through episodic analysis suggests that Trickster tales may be particularly salient in cultures that are themselves “liminal.” There are several examples of research on Trickster tales among such peoples, including the Zande (Evans-Pritchard, 1966), Kalapalo (Basso, 1996), Marshallese (MacArthur, 2002), Native Americans (Elias, 1999), and Africans in the diaspora discussed earlier. For some cultures, the identification transcends vague affinity with Trickster and instead manifests as a much more direct communicative engagement of his liminality. For the Brazilian Candomblé, for example, rituals are said to succeed if the Trickster Exu is invoked during the religious performances (Williams, 1979, p. 114). For such audiences, Trickster is a hero who both embodies and expresses the ambiguity of the liminal state. For some scholars, Trickster’s ambiguity has been problematic. Monsma (2000) points to Trickster’s contradictory behavior and one of his liminal states—that between literal and figurative— that makes determined interpretation difficult, if not impossible. Scholars now recognize contradictions inherent in Trickster, the argument follows, and therefore cannot generalize about him. But others—myself included— suggest that the very contradictions and ambiguities of Trickster narrative developments are what define his meaning. Trickster is contradiction, and that is highly significant. His ambiguous actions do not make each other mutually irrelevant; on the contrary, they reinforce his position and his intercultural rhetoric. As Johnson (1997) reminds us, “there is nothing

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ambiguous about ambiguity” (p. 233ff)—duality and paradox are always carefully constructed within society in order to critique some aspect of culture. For Trickster, “multiplicity is the norm” (Monsma, 2000, p. 159). Drawing on these perspectives, I assert that there is great purposefulness in Trickster’s confusion, and perhaps there is a clear rhetoric in his jumble of nonsense. I am interested in Trickster as a character who announces the rhetoric of possibility. In the next section of this chapter, I examine Trickster in two very different narrative traditions. The two Tricksters, Navajo Coyote and African American Brer Rabbit, have diverse characteristics and also serve very different narrative purposes for their respective audiences. However, both Coyote and Brer Rabbit may be thought of as metaphors for possibility. As I will explain after describing both Tricksters, the rhetoric of possibility could be very fruitful for the way we can teach and conduct research in the study of alterity. DIFFERENT TRICKSTERS, OPEN POSSIBILITIES In this section I discuss examples of Trickster from African American and Navajo traditions. One of the well-known narratives involving an African American Trickster, Brer Rabbit, is often called the tar baby story. The narrative has fallen out of favor in some circles, but I wish to follow Toni Morrison’s (1982) lead in publishing her book Tar Baby by returning to a rational, measured view of Trickster’s significance in intercultural relations. I believe we can acknowledge the pernicious nature of the slur “tar baby” and, at the same time, look at the episodes of the story “tar baby” in a separate light. That is what I attempt to do here. The variants of the “Wonderful Tar Baby Story” from African American tradition follow a basic plot. Brer Rabbit has been stealing (water/cabbages/butter, etc.) from the other animals—most often Fox—or from a white farmer. To trap him, a “baby” figure is made out of tar—sometimes Fox even dresses the baby up to attract Brer Rabbit. Rabbit walks up to the figure (“lickety-split” or “lippity-clip”—these onomatopoetic words vary according to the tale, but are meant to invoke the sounds of a rabbit’s movement). Rabbit speaks to Tar Baby, trying to win her affection, and she naturally does not answer. Rabbit even sneaks up to hear and tries to scare her: “Boo!” (Hughes & Bontemps, 1958, pp. 1–2). Tar Baby does not answer. Rabbit declares her to be “stuck up” and strikes her with his paws, becoming stuck to her. When he kicks her, his legs stick as well. He is so incensed that he is about to butt the baby with his head when the other animals discover him and convene to decide on his punishment. With Rabbit as their audience, they discuss their options aloud. But because his head is free, Rabbit is able

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to use his wits and employs a kind of “reverse psychology” to fool the animals into letting him go. He begs them not to throw him in the briar patch— which they vengefully do, and Rabbit hops away, having been “bred and born in the briar patch!” (Bontemps & Hughes, 1958, pp. 1–2). It is beyond the scope of my project here to thoroughly trace the origins of Brer Rabbit. However, connections to West African folklore are obviously justified, and I will pause to review a few of them. In Africa the most common Tricksters are the characters of Anaanu (spider), Tortoise, and Hare. These animal names are used without a definite article preceding them (as in “the hare”) because in the tales, the animal’s actions are meant to suggest elements of his character. For example, in Bantu, Rabbit is vulnerable (because he is small, covered in soft fur, and lacks natural armor or weapons), sensitive (due to his large ears), and nimble. His ears give him the ability to sense both perils and potentialities. Of course, all these qualities translate easily to the African American Trickster, Brer Rabbit, with the added twist that Brer Rabbit uses his wits to overcome an enemy who is physically stronger. These narrative episodes have led many scholars to find parallels between Brer Rabbit and the experiences of African slaves in America (Abrahams, 1985; Berry, 1961; Brewer, 1972; Gates, 1988; Goss & Barnes, 1989; Peters, 1993; Van Sertima, 1989). In these cases, Trickster’s liminality stems from the “in-between” of slavery and freedom that exists when he strives to overcome other characters allegedly more powerful than he is. There has been much debate in recent years about the role of Brer Rabbit in the narratives told by African Americans as to whether Brer Rabbit always represented the slave and whether he ought to be considered a moral hero at all (Johnson, 1996; Levine, 1993). But one thing is certain: Brer Rabbit and other Tricksters propel, without hesitation, the right of the individual to question inequalities in society (Roberts, 1990). Above all, Brer Rabbit is convinced of unlimited possibilities. He captures the audience’s imagination because he never closes off the option of freedom; he espouses the rhetoric of possibility and perhaps he even inspires it in his listeners. Audiences listen to stories about the Navajo Trickster, Coyote, for very different reasons than those suggested about Brer Rabbit. Yet Coyote, like Brer Rabbit, is compelling because of his “rhetoric of possibility” as well. Some aspects of Navajo Coyote are depicted in Anglo-American popular culture: the spirit of this Trickster is quite similar to Wile E. Coyote. Coyote goes to great lengths to lay elaborate plans and obtain what he wants. For instance, instead of simply hunting for food, he continually creates convoluted schemes to trick the food into walking right into his mouth. His failures are grand and laughable and beg the question: why not just hunt for food? Ironically, listeners draw the conclusion that straightforward hunting would have yielded more direct and even easier results. While Coyote

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episodes are intended to teach Navajo children about right and honest living (Toelken, 1969), Coyote also has cross-cultural lessons to teach, as I explain next. In his seminal article “The Pretty Languages of Yellowman,” Toelken (1969) describes his confusion with the Navajo Trickster Coyote. After listening to one story in particular, where Coyote ends up with eyes made of amber, Toelken innocently asks, “So how can Mai [Coyote] see, then?” Yellowman, the narrator, patiently helps Toelken break through his “scientific,” etiological categories to think in metaphorical terms. Coyote does not “really” have amber for eyeballs; his eyesight is not biologically impacted by this story. Coyote, instead, stands as a symbol for a possibility—in this case, blindness. Again, the rhetoric of possibility is paramount in the Trickster. In relating his conversations with Yellowman, Toelken also provides an example of how Trickster exemplifies the processes of intercultural research. Writing in the late 1960s, Toelken approached his field research with Yellowman’s family assuming that he would find certain genres of folklore performance extant. For example, he expected that Yellowman would work from a repertoire of stories that included the “genre” of Coyote Tales. Toelken was instead amazed to learn that his preconceived schemata of “narrative genres” did not apply to Navajo culture. Coyote is a trickster, Toelken discovered, whose presence is felt in multiple contexts—not merely storytelling. Coyote is a key component in Navajo ritual, for example. More important, Coyote is a dynamic figure who permeates everyday life—part of what Farrer (1996) has termed the “mythic present” in many Native American communities. In the mythic present, “both the Long Ago and the Now are present together in thought, song, narrative, [and] everyday life” (Farrer, 1996, p. 2). It is part of intercultural learning for both Toelken and Farrer that Trickster helps them see beyond categories of “narrative genres” and even “time” as their respective cultures assert them. For Toelken, Trickster enlivened field research. His essay on Coyote constitutes a watershed moment in the methods of culture studies. He calls on researchers to release their preconceived, rigid categories and genres. Many audiences identify rhetorically with Trickster, but the performance of Coyote stories is different within Navajo culture and enriches the understanding of diversity. Toelken’s study challenges us to break out of fixed notions about “texts” and instead to privilege paralinguistics and the texture of performance (1969). Toelken (1969) employs Trickster to urge the ethnographer to eschew oversimplified categories of analysis. I suggest that the student of culture must also stay anchored to the ambiguity of Trickster himself. Again, Trickster is best considered in episodic terms. The ideas about Trickster I have put forth thus far (supernatural/animal, marginal-liminal, presocial, unity of contraries, betweenness, ethical teleology) are not meant to reduce Trickster to

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any form of simplicity. Nor does the listing of these characteristics imply that Trickster is the same in every culture. As the remainder of this chapter illustrates, Trickster’s diversity is one of the reasons he is so conducive to improved intercultural understanding. However, these are some of the qualities common to Trickster across cultures. This phenomenon posits the Trickster narrative motif as a key to intercultural understanding. The key lies in the rhetoric of possibility. I will list a few general observations about that potential rhetoric in the remainder of this chapter. First, the physical qualities of Tricksters suggest possibilities. As I stated in the “Brer Rabbit” narrative, there is a reason that rabbits are popular Trickster figures. Rabbits lack natural weapons and are vulnerable in their soft fur. Brer Rabbit is the perfect example. But because of a rabbit’s long ears, he is keenly aware of potentialities. Like so many other Tricksters, all possibilities seem open to Rabbit—he is ignorant of his own limitations. Not only does he embody ambiguities, but also he performs them through his narratives and speaks explicitly to them in his rhetoric. And again, for many cultures, this makes him a hero. As MacArthur (2002) has written of the Marshallese Trickster Letao: “It is a great social asset for one who knows how to veil one’s speech through metaphor, metonym and inversion” (p. 7). Similarly, the Kalapalo not only accept their Trickster’s ambiguities, they celebrate them. Within their own society, persons who are always “stable . . . lack imagination—[they are considered] excessively compulsive and inflexible” (Basso, 1996, p. 69). It should be noted that Trickster is not a pawn in most narratives, or oblivious to his liminality. He is conscious of his betweenness and engages it heroically (Pelton, 1980). He typically lays these ambiguities bare, so that interpretation of his being—if not his stories—is actually quite simple (Evans-Pritchard, 1966). In his heroism and self-consciousness, he can be described as a “scattered” being (Basso, 1996). More than ambiguous, Trickster is an active agent. There is “a variety of potential in both how he can interpret experience, and his ability to use such interpretations to influence the actions of others” (Basso, 1996, p. 66). Most of all, Trickster finds his variety of interpretations in letting go of societal and cultural restraints. He is the mythic founder of the “think outside the box” phenomenon. He embodies the original energy of “presocial man” and tricks even the gods themselves. Trickster represents (among other things) a longing to break out of civilization’s fixed norms and rituals (Van Sertima, 1989, pp. 103–108). Trickster’s challenge to inequity is one reason why he may be an apt hero for alterity. Henry Louis Gates Jr. once noted that racism represents a profound failure of the imagination (Gates, 1990). Trickster’s abundant imagination thus makes him a hero, and he exhibits this imagination

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through his liminality, narrative action, and rhetoric. Trickster overcomes the categorical thinking that plagues most intercultural interaction, the tendency to think the Other is so different that they are “strange” and unworthy of our communication, or the opposite tendency to reduce the Other to someone “just like” ourselves. Trickster does not take an either/or approach; he is “both/and.” Exu, for example, is the god of both order and disorder (Williams, 1979). Indeed, good and evil are so enmeshed in Trickster that, in some cultures, he is said to make both possible in the world and thereby enable free choice (Toelken, 1969). Stasis and control are anathema to Trickster; instead, he establishes and models cohesiveness in fragmentation (Elias, 1999). This is a useful metaphor for postmodern, global multiculturalism. In this moment we must explode the categories that restrain us. We must stop trying to “fit” all experience into our own previously established schemata. I suggest that in recognizing the breadth of Trickster’s imagination of the world, we begin to approach cognitive complexity. I believe cognitive complexity is an essential element in intercultural understanding. Part of Delia’s (1982) constructivism theory, cognitive complexity is the ability to perceive a wide range of schemata and communicate with others on rhetorical levels (rather than act on emotions or rigid behavioral conventions). Again, Trickster is outstanding in his cognitive complexity and his transcendence of prim cultural categories; he also references an infinite number of human cultural practices. Basso (1996) notes that Trickster’s actions reflect “pragmatic creativity and flexibility, the ability to conceive of more than one kind of relationship with other people, and the ability to fashion or invent a variety of thoughts about one’s capacity as an agent” (p. 69). Trickster is usually slow to lose control over his emotions, a quality that is sorely needed in most practical intercultural interactions. Basso speaks to this as well, asserting that the Kalapalo Trickster Taugi reminds listeners of “the positive aspects of unanticipated consequences and why it may be necessary to be emotionally detached from one’s goals” (1996, p. 68). When unanticipated events do occur, Trickster is always creative and flexible. Trickster’s duality in terms of good and evil may also mean that he has a quality similar to Buber’s evil impulse (1953), taking on aspects of evil in order to achieve good (or, at least, to avert a greater evil) (Van Sertima, 1989, p. 108). Approached from this most basic level, his ethics are teleologically sound. Although I do not want to argue that Trickster always literally does “what is right” (the story of murder that opened this chapter certainly would belie this), Trickster does have his own narrative ethic that textures his usefulness as a metaphor for positive intercultural interaction. First, Trickster is rarely malicious. He is often viewed as innocent, and the

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audience may even feel sorry for him when he fails (Evans-Pritchard, 1966). I have also already noted Trickster’s importance in challenging the status quo—he is a revolutionary hero in many respects. Yet for Trickster’s primary ethical quality, we turn again to his imagination. Trickster’s gift is his ability to perceive a situation from many different viewpoints and consider a variety of possibilities. Again, I do not wish to champion ethical relativism or posit Trickster in this manner, either. But I repeat: Trickster takes on aspects of evil in order to defeat a greater evil. More often than not, this “greater evil” emerges from narrow-mindedness, from a closing off of the human imagination. In Trickster’s imagination, what is culturally or societally “true” may be totally irrelevant to his actions (Basso, 1996). As Wiget (1990) writes, Because what we know is rooted in what we believe, Trickster tales . . . shift the burden of meaning from the cognitive sphere to the moral one. When the crux of interpretation is recognized as a dilemma, the interpretive stance toward the situation changes. Instead of asking, What is the Truth in the matter?—an unanswerable question in a dilemma in which both horns can claim legitimacy—one must ask, What is right? and assess the tale on the basis of the Good. (pp. 92–93) Here, Wiget points to two essential qualities in Trickster’s ethics. First, his capacity of belief is expanded. Trickster does not claim to “know” or possess truth because of his willingness to believe multiple viewpoints. We understand this about Trickster because he exists between multiple social worlds, because he communicates with others based on their own social position, and because his actions depend on multiple possibilities. Second, Wiget reveals one of the most potent features of Trickster narratives in their ability to beg audience participation. Many Trickster stories are part of the larger genre of “dilemma tales,” in which the conclusion of the narrative is left open to debate (Sunwolf, 1999). For example, Abrahams (1985) noted that Brer Rabbit’s adventures are always “’to-be-continued’—not ‘happily ever after’” (p. 3). Rather than evaluating Trickster as an “ethical character,” we must assess whether he can serve as a metaphor for audiences in espousing alterity ethics. In other words, we must evaluate Trickster as an “intercultural narrative” and “intercultural rhetor.” I believe he is a key figure for the future of alterity, in both teaching and research. This is true not because he is remotely noble or pure, but because of his usefulness for audiences and the potential for learning through the actual study of Trickster. The narratives

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are the instruction; the development of narrative, too, as the researcher moves through culture is key to Trickster’s significance. But the key is not merely metaphorical—it demands praxis. The theory must be put to method. It matters little whether Trickster is indigenous or “imported” in a culture; his presence and longevity speak to his significance. There is something about Trickster that represents human experience in a striking, coherent, and salient manner. In that sense, he is like all heroes. But he is a startling one: he explodes the categories and boundaries that restrain us, “rethreading the basic fabric of the inner and outer world” (Van Sertima, 1989, p. 110). The explosion of categories and boundaries means that we can metaphorically meet “in between,” even on the margins, in our intercultural encounters. Through his stories, everything is made possible. Abstractions, good and bad, become real. This is possible in both a philosophical and a practical sense, in both the texts we read and the human lives we engage. To explore these possibilities, I will analyze a contemporary use of the “Brer Rabbit and Tar Baby” Trickster tale type, and then consider the significance of Trickster for the postmodern practice of ethnography. NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: TAR BABY As I described earlier, the variants of the “Wonderful Tar Baby Story” from African American tradition follow a basic plot. Brer Rabbit has been stealing from the other animals or from a white farmer. To trap him, a “tar baby” figure is made, and when she is unresponsive to Rabbit’s affections, he becomes stuck to her. His predators then discover him at the scene of the crime, stuck to the tar baby. Conferring among themselves, they weigh their options concerning Rabbit’s punishment. But Rabbit is able to use his wits and tricks his way into freedom. He begs his enemy not to throw him in the briar patch, which is exactly where he ends up. With no weapons aside from his own nimbleness and rhetoric, he tricks those considered more powerful into giving him what he wants. In her 1982 novel Tar Baby, Toni Morrison is faithful to the characteristics of this folktale as she retells it to a contemporary mass audience, and also sets up her narrative as a dilemma tale. Morrison’s “white farmer” is millionaire Valerian Street, a retired candy tycoon from Philadelphia. Valerian spends his time in the large house he has built for himself, his wife, and his servants on Isle des Chevaliers, an island he owns in the Caribbean. Valerian is sentimental, even emotional, but self-centered to the point of cruelty at times. He is every bit the successful American white businessman: shrewd, calculating, charming, personable, and far too busy to notice the tragedies of

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his own household. Among those living with him is a “tar baby,” Jadine Childs. She is the orphaned niece of Valerian’s trusted African American servants, Ondine and Sydney. Out of kindness to them, Valerian has paid for all of Jadine’s education and upbringing. At twenty-five, she has recently completed her M.A. in art history at the Sorbonne and is emerging as one of the most sought-after fashion models in Europe. Jadine, or “Jade” as her friends call her, is virtually white. Light-skinned, raised in white society, and educated in European universities, she subscribes wholly to the materialism and wealth Morrison associates with “white” America. Jade is a fashion model; her whole purpose in life is modern and commercial, and she is oblivious to any ties to her African past (her “ancient properties”). The central character in this tale is “Son,” a Brer Rabbit figure and African American from rural North Florida. A few years older than Jade, Son’s real name is William Green, but he has used a number of aliases since a crime of passion that resulted in his wife’s murder and his own flight from the law. Since the night he found her in bed with someone else and drove his car through the house, Son has led a journeyman’s existence. Working on a ship in the Caribbean, he jumps overboard off the coast of Isle des Chevaliers and swims ashore, finding himself—out of hunger at first—in Valerian Street’s fine house. He roams the floors at night, eating from the pantry, and discovers Jadine asleep in her room. Overwhelmed with irrational emotion and sudden attachment to her, Son is eventually caught in the house. But for his own whimsical (and perhaps sentimental) reasons, Valerian actually invites him to stay instead of pressing charges. Son’s official arrival in the household soon disrupts the supposedly contented lives of Valerian, his wife and servants, and Jadine. Son is a richly drawn, complex, yet classic Trickster. Like Brer Rabbit, Son is an outlaw and perhaps even a conman. He lives on the outskirts of civilization, always on the run. Once on the island, he takes pains to steal food, and appears at first “in disguise” with overgrown dreadlocks and a ratty beard. He is transformed, by a bath and haircut, into a beautiful figure. More important, as a Trickster, Son is naïve to his limitations. He never worries about being caught in the house, nor does he doubt that he can win Jadine’s love. It is possible at the beginning, and almost certain at the end, that he is touched with supernatural powers. Before he is found in Valerian’s wife’s closet, the reader discovers, Son spent his nights in Jade’s bedroom, And he had thought hard during those times in order to manipulate her dreams, to insert his own dreams into her . . . about yellow houses with white doors which women opened and shouted Come on in, you honey you! And the fat black ladies in white dresses

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minding the pie table in the basement of the church. (Morrison, 1982, pp. 119–120) When he meets her awake at last, Son is afraid of being “stuck” to Jade, but at the same time is too drawn to her to stay away. His fear stems from his sense that “even though she was being still . . . she might talk back or, worse, press her dreams of gold and cloisonné and honey-colored silk into him and then who would mind the pie table in the basement of the church?” (Morrison, 1982, p. 120). Overcome by anxiety, Son responds by insulting Jade, asking her nastily how many sexual favors she had to perform to become a model and appear in movies. He tries to frighten her, just as Brer Rabbit shouts at the tar baby. He speaks from his mind, not his heart, and avoids becoming stuck to Jade. When he takes her to the beach for lunch the next day, he is not so careful. In fact, his emotions overtake him, leading him to bare his past to Jade. She is alarmed by his admission that he killed his unfaithful wife. Unconsciously, Jadine tucks her feet under her skirt, but reveals them again when Son quietly pleads for her to do so. Son puts his forefinger on the sole of her foot, and she can still feel it there after he stops—even after she dons her shoes—as though she were a tar baby growing soft and malleable in the sun. At this moment, Son has irretrievably attached himself to Jadine. Even she cannot elude this reality; as they drive home, Jade sits “quietly going over in her mind the reasons why she was not going to let him make love to her . . . fingerprint or no fingerprint, laughing into the sky or not” (Morrison, 1982, p. 180). All parallels to the folktale aside, the fact that Son so easily and quickly breaks through Jadine’s haughty, rigid snobbery and enters a love relationship with her speaks to his prowess as an intercultural communicator. The brilliance of Morrison’s postmodern novel is that nearly every relationship in the book is singed with the impact of cultural diversity that is drawn along lines much finer than race or ethnicity. Only Sydney and Ondine, both proud “Philadelphia Negroes” and noble servants to Valerian Street, can claim homogeneity and open communication with one another. Valerian’s wife Margaret grew up in a trailer in Maine; Valerian fell for her during a business trip, watching her reign as beauty queen in a small-town parade. He married her when she was only seventeen and extraordinarily naïve about class distinctions in American society. Jade is so different from other African Americans in the novel that she may as well be from another race; she eats dinner with Valerian and Margaret, served by her own uncle, and admits openly to Valerian that she thinks Picasso’s art is far superior to the African masks he used for inspiration. Everyone is “Other” to everyone else in this

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novel, but only Son manages to bridge the gaps. He is a consummate Trickster, a linguistic conman, using accent and gesture to form the kind of communicative styles he anticipates his various audiences will expect. For Valerian he plays grinning, subordinate, country dumb: “It’s sho pretty in here,” he tells Valerian in the rich man’s greenhouse (Morrison, 1982, p. 146). Questioned as to how he ended up in the house, he explains, I uh thought I smelled oyster stew out back yesterday. . . . They done left the kitchen and I thought I’d try to get me some, but before I knew it I heard them coming back. I couldn’t run out the back door so I run through another one. It was a dinin room. I ran upstairs into the first room I seen . . . I was just as scared as your wife was when she opened that door and turned that light on me. (Morrison, 1982, p. 147) Reinforcing this act, though, is Son’s genuine interest in and keen abilities with the plants in Valerian’s greenhouse. He flicks cyclamen stems and the buds burst into bloom; he tells Valerian mirrors will keep out the ants better than thalomide; and the whole scene ends with Valerian laughing heartily after hearing a joke Son introduces as follows: “Did you ever hear the one about the three colored whores who went to heaven?” (Morrison, 1982, p. 148). The minstrel subtly fades for Son’s first conversation with Ondine and Sydney. Here he imitates more literally a “son,” drawing on his genuine experiences in the African American community by affording respect to his “elders.” While he grins broadly with Valerian, he will not allow himself a smile with Ondine until she gives him one first. He tells her, “I didn’t want to leave without making peace with you all. My own mama wouldn’t forgive me for that” (Morrison, 1982, p. 161). Revealing that his mother has actually passed away, Son allows Ondine to “see the orphan in him” (p. 161) and she begins a light conversation with him. Sydney is more difficult. “But [Son] kept calling him Mr. Childs and sir and allowing in gesture as how he was a reprobate, and ended by asking them both if they knew somewhere else he could sleep [instead of upstairs like a guest] while he waited for Mr. Street to get the visa and some identification for him” (Morrison, 1982, p. 164). The problem of the visa he glosses over as “car trouble,” but in true Trickster style, Son has come just close enough to lying without compromising his ethics. “He had told six people in two days all about himself. Had talked more about himself than he had in years and told each of them as much of the truth as he had to” (pp. 163–164). For Margaret, Valerian’s wife, Son’s performance is more nonverbal. He simply asks about her son Michael: “Does he favor you or your husband?”

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“Favor?” “Look like. Does he look like you?” When Margaret responds in the affirmative, describing Michael’s features just like hers, Son says matter-offactly, “He must be good-looking” (p. 198). The flattery is subtle and enhanced by Son’s ability to listen with interest to Margaret’s happy chatter about her thirty-year-old son. Through all his cunning rhetoric, in the back of Son’s mind he has one goal: to be with Jadine. He is pleased that Sydney thinks he is more interested in Valerian’s hospitality, and it is true that he needs a visa and some accommodations, but his trickery supports this one main cause. He does not want Jade to leave, and he does not want to be sent away. He is stuck to her. And yet she is the hardest to convince, perhaps because she is from a “culture” he has yet to encounter in his travels. He does not know what she expects from him, and vice versa. As they sit on the beach, “Jadine looked at him trying to figure out whether he was the man who understood potted plants or the man who drove through houses” (p. 178). In her puzzlement she is not alone; he knows that she has not been fooled, as the others were, by his improved physical appearance. “He had managed a face for everybody but her. . . . He did not always know who he was, but he always knew what he was like” (p. 165). The fact that Son is compelled (as Trickster) to manage different “faces” for individuals who are purported to be culturally familiar to him speaks to the postmodern moment of Morrison’s novel. Again, the boundaries of alterity are drawn minutely in this story, along microcultural lines. Some of these are generational, as when Ondine points out that Jadine’s cohort of young African Americans has options for upward mobility of which she and Sydney would never have dreamed (p. 283). But the more intricately drawn boundaries in Tar Baby pertain to belief, and ultimately to imagination. The final divide in this book has to do with a legend about the island Valerian has bought, Isle des Chevaliers. Certain members of Valerian’s household believe the place is named after the French cavalry. Valerian and Margaret align themselves with this version, as might be expected, but so does Jadine. Valerian tells her the story in passing, and she half-consciously muses on it sometimes, looking out in the moonlight. Ondine and Sydney have not heard the story; perhaps their pragmatic lifestyle precludes such reflections. But there is another possible explanation for the name “Isle des Chevaliers”: the horsemen are not French soldiers of the past, but a group of would-be slaves marooned on the island when their ship foundered centuries earlier. The Africans were struck blind the minute they saw the island, and made their way to shore along with the horses on board. To the characters who believe this version, the question is not one of charming place-names, but of belief in the supernatural—for the same slaves are said to ride over the hills, naked and blind, in the present. Their descendants on the island are called

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the “blind race,” whose members have capacities as Seers. Thérèse, who is employed by Valerian as a washerwoman, is one such descendant. Son is intrigued by this legend when Thérèse and Gideon tell it, but more than that, he is called to be part of the narrative himself. The story is an allegory for his connection to nature and his identity as Trickster, for the blind slaves are entrenched in Turner’s state of communitas described earlier in this chapter. They defy social categories, being creatures both of the past and present. They are maroons, finding it impossible to carve out an African culture in the New World. They are blind, but have knowledge beyond the senses. Morrison aligns her characters on both sides of the divide—soldier or slave, French or African—especially at the moment in her narrative when intercultural communication is at its nadir. Christmas dinner is ill fated from the start, since none of the invited guests can come and the servants are required to fill in at the table. During the tense conversation that ensues, it comes to light that Valerian has fired Thérèse and Gideon for stealing a few apples. For different reasons, Ondine, Sydney, and Son all object to Valerian’s decision. While this is not the most significant revelation made at Christmas dinner, it does point to a moment of clarity as Son and Valerian engage in a face-off at the table: Somewhere in the back of Valerian’s mind one hundred French chevaliers were roaming the hills on horses. Their swords were in their scabbards and their epaulets glittered in the sun. Backs straight, shoulders high—alert but restful in the security of the Napoleonic code. Somewhere in the back of Son’s mind one hundred black men on one hundred unshod horses rode blind and naked through the hills and had done so for hundreds of years. . . . They knew all there was to know about the island and had not even seen it. They had floated in strange waters blind, but they were still there racing each other for sport in the hills behind this white man’s house. (p. 206) Thus “culture” is defined here on the basis of belief. The logic of alterity is derived from the extent of a given character’s imagination; ultimately, Son will side with Gideon and Thérèse, and Jadine with Valerian. This divide is a metaphor for all their relational problems in the novel, and it points toward a final dilemma: since Son is a Brer Rabbit figure, where is he to find his “briar patch”? Jadine leaves him, tired of his abuse and his unwillingness to better himself. Although they have fought for months, he is desperate to find her at the end of the novel, and he believes her to be at Isle des Chevaliers. Will he follow Jadine to Paris? It seems highly unlikely.

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Thérèse offers him a different option, an unthinkable possibility: he can join the blind horsemen. He is one of them, a “certain kind of man,” and they are waiting for him, or so Thérèse says. In true African Trickster fashion, Morrison leaves the story open-ended as a dilemma tale. Again, as I have argued in this chapter, there is nothing ambiguous about the ambiguity, nothing more rhetorical than Trickster’s confusion. When we leave Son, he is running “lickety-split” like Brer Rabbit, toward his own apparently limitless imagination. His flight is not directionless or futile. It will crystallize the identity upon which he has mapped many faces, but that in the end suggests a significant postmodern stance on alterity. In the starkness of Son’s final run, the ethnographer may feel a sense of familiarity. As I mentioned in the last chapter, ethnography becomes irrevocably intertwined with alterity in the nineteenth century; the study of “man” emerges as an enterprise unto itself, happening for the glory of science—not for polis, nor God, nor even man himself, perhaps. It is important, then, to consider our present postmodern state in the study of alterity and not merely the popular positing of Otherness. Already ethnographers more experienced than myself have identified the Trickster metaphor with their work, and so it is with a note on that enterprise that I conclude this final chapter. LIMINALITY AND ETHNOGRAPHY: THE MARSHALLESE TRICKSTER There is a story about Letao, the Trickster most prevalent in the Marshall Islands, that perfectly conceptualizes Trickster’s importance for intercultural contact. Long ago, Letao welcomed some Americans to the islands. He decided to teach them everything that he knew, but since that would take some time, he was required to return with them to America. He stayed for many years, teaching the foreigners.13 Marshallese Islanders are certain of this, and the proof is in the atomic bomb that was exploded in testing on Bikini atoll—along with the food and friendship Americans have always offered: “Letao is the embodiment of all extremes: he is at once good and bad, possesses all knowledge and all stupidity, all love and all hate, all kindness and all meanness, all truth and all lies—“Isn’t that just like the Americans?” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 6) Letao did return, many years after the Bikini atoll travesty. Oddly enough, the islanders say, he did so in the trunk of an American ethnographer, Philip MacArthur, who is self-consciously and communally a “Letao” Trickster figure himself. “Categorically as ambiguous and slippery as Letao”

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(2002, p. 8), MacArthur has written eloquently of the significance of Trickster figures in the very positioning of ethnography. As with most intercultural contact, the ethnographer and his “native” consultants must move between two worlds—their own and the “Other’s” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 2). In this way, ambiguities become underscored, even celebrated. But it is not merely that the actions they undertake parallel the qualities of Tricksters; more significantly, Trickster narratives may serve as a script through which insider/outsider relations become mediated. The ethnographer, building a relationship with the cultural community to be studied, wavers between the two poles of insider and outsider. From the outside looking in, we yearn; from the inside looking out, we seek to protect (MacArthur, 2002, p. 5). MacArthur’s experiences of—and within—the Trickster “script” are both poignant and astounding. It should be noted first that MacArthur spent a great deal of time building relationships among the Marshallese Islanders, first as a Peace Corps volunteer, then living there with his family, and finally as ethnographer. His involvement with a particular community on the atolls spanned nearly ten years, so my using his story as an example is meant to underscore the importance of long-term intercultural relationships. The pondering of Trickster is not a panacea for uneasy intercultural acquaintances, or for ethnographic studies. It works within the richness of human relationships. In attaining this richness, MacArthur seems to have experienced the most important qualities of Trickster delineated earlier in this chapter. He finds that the Marshallese man he most admires, Kometo, is much like Letao: He was “truly wise because somehow he seemed to know the complexities and ambiguities in everything” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 9). Yet even though the Marshallese often referred to MacArthur as Letao, there were occasions when they desired firm answers without ambiguities. One such case is on a trip to a neighboring atoll, where some men accompanying MacArthur pressed him on his belief in demons. Since their existence is a reasonable, accepted fact to many Marshallese, MacArthur fell to the default ethnographic position in which one seeks not to offend. Making self-admittedly “lame” statements like “Everyone should be allowed to believe what they want,” MacArthur found that his companions soon gave up trying to discover his true stance on the matter. One finally said, a bit scornfully, “Letao isn’t afraid of anything” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 11). When during this trip MacArthur lost his eyeglasses, he found himself teased a great deal about his “offering” to the demons—and was surprised to find that the story became part of the enduring Marshallese body of folklore. In fact, years later, he heard the story retold by “someone who didn’t even know it was I who was the unsuspecting American dupe” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 12).

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From this episode, we are reminded of several things: that the “natives” strive to position ethnographers with the same eagerness and enthusiasm the ethnographers bring to the task; that such positioning is expressed in natural, continuous ways through folklore; and—perhaps most important—only “slippery” figures would hesitate to take a stand on such significant issues as the existence of demons. The ambiguity of Letao, mapped onto MacArthur, makes his rapport with the Marshallese and his ensuing close relationships possible. And the figure of Letao is there to excuse MacArthur’s ambiguous responses to questions of belief, as well. This is fortunate, because conversational exchanges such as these are bound to emphasize—in a potentially uncomfortable or even dangerous way—the separation between ethnographer and “native.” It seems like the perfect Letao trickster tale for MacArthur to lose his glasses to the demons after expressing belief in them that is lukewarm at best. It is a gentle chiding to his ambiguity, his “slipperiness,” but the “natives” recover his ambiguous identity by bringing the story into their performance cycle and elevating MacArthur to the role of Trickster. His initial noncommittal remarks about the existence of demons mark him as “American,” perhaps even as an ethical relativist. He breaks his intimate connection to his companions in this moment. But the lost eyeglasses, supposedly taken by the demons, rebuild the relationship. As Kometo told MacArthur on one occasion, “Letao brought death, but we could also trust that he would return it with life” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 2). Other losses are not so easily mended, even by a Trickster, but MacArthur’s role “in-between” continues to enrich his relationships with the Marshallese. When a good friend from the islands came to study at MacArthur’s university in Honolulu, he and his wife were welcoming hosts and, in a sense, mediators for the woman’s transition to life away from her family in the Marshall Islands. But, in a horrible tragedy, she died before the school year had ended. Writing about his experiences as a liminal “trickster and folklorist,” MacArthur realized that in the events following her death, he “became the location for the intercultural mediation of sorrow” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 15). The loss was boundless, for everyone involved, and doubly poignant for MacArthur who remembered visiting his dying friend, Kometo, for the last time. “Letao brings laughter and tears,” Kometo told him, “we have known both” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 3). There was no laughter in the comfort MacArthur tried to bring to his student’s family, but he did recall the way she would banter and tease him about Letao. Thoughts of these interchanges dominated MacArthur’s grief: “Trickster’s position is to mediate, to take us from sorrow and tears to laughter. And through that laughter we find each other, we break down boundaries, we connect. We heal” (MacArthur, 2002, p. 15).

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The risk of loss often dominates our communication with the “Other.” The loss may be deep and change us forever, in the way the death of a friend does. The loss may cut our relationships, damage our face and our respect. The ethnographer’s loss may mean the abandonment of a study, the defeat of an idea, or merely the misplacement of a pair of eyeglasses. But in all cases the liminality of our own positions as intercultural “Others” means we can heal those losses. The scattered Trickster, moving from a place of yearning to protection and back again, opens up these possibilities. Ethics in alterity only happens in the triumph of the imagination, as Gates (1990) has told us; and to what do we owe this triumph, if not to the human logic of narrative? We keep telling the stories because we know better, see differently: a ragged and road-weary witness to the resilience and indestructibility of the human spirit, which may finally be more a matter of instinct than intellect. . . . [At] the edge of the imagination, where the all too brightly illuminated present merges into the dark overdetermined future, life twitches in his scruffy tail, and Trickster speaks from some unbeaten part of us, change and the possibility of a good laugh. (Wiget, 1990, pp. 94–95)

Conclusion INTERCULTURAL HOPE: ALTERITY POST-9/11

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n the decades to come, it is possible that a new era in “Western” civilization will need to be named and described. It has been suggested that September 11, 2001, was a break-point between the postmodern era and a new emerging historical moment. It is not possible to characterize alterity in the midst of this moment, but this concluding chapter speculates on the role of narratives in the creation of Western identities beyond what has been termed the postmodern era. Several weeks after the attacks of September 11, the Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame held their annual conference. As was typical at many academic conferences that autumn, even where panels and keynote addresses did not directly address terrorism, September 11 was consistently the subtext. One speaker in particular made a profound impact on the audience. His prediction was that September 11 would force a return from the “vacation from history” that scholars have enjoyed in postmodernity. In a way, the previous chapters are a response (however minuscule) to the implications of that speaker’s observation. Perhaps the “vacation from history” had more to do with contemporary cultural relativism than with the past itself. During the postmodern era, as this book argues in chapter 7, the hero is one who crosses boundaries easily and is open to a wide range of possibilities. Trickster does not reject any orientation; everything is possible. No wonder one can feel disconnected from the past in such a context.

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If everything is possible, nothing is impossible; relativism rules the day. So, in many ways the end of the “vacation from history” may mean a turning toward ethical judgment once again. This conference speaker also may have been the first to voice a point that has become rather common lately: perhaps the postmodern era is over altogether. This seems highly plausible. After all, a chapter that speculates on the hero of postmodernity would have been impossible without some kind of finality to the moment, some kind of bracketing process wherein time seems solid and the peculiar characteristics of an historical moment become crystallized. It is easier to perceive epochs in retrospect, rather than as one is living through them. Empirical evidence also suggests that in some pockets of Western society, provinciality is emerging where once there was mere multiculturalism. The rising insularity of some religions, for example, suggests a return to tradition and history on at least a vernacular level. And there is a certain paradox to this return to history. The quests to identify post-postmodernity or to immediately perceive alterity post-9/11 are symptomatic of a particular Western bias pertaining to time and identity. Chapter 6 addressed this bias: it is the assumption that history is progressive and in each era the West improves technology, acquires more wealth, and moves toward a greater destiny. Most Western cultures perceive time as linear and monochronic. Like the other motifs in this book, this perception is tied to an ancient narrative. Lake (1991) points to the classical Greek motif of “time’s arrow” in identifying a root of this Western bias. Recall too that chapter 4 examined some connections between Othello and the Native American veterans that Silko (1977) depicts in her novel Ceremony. Another important lesson from Silko’s book is that the Laguna worldview presents time not as an “arrow” but as a hoop, where everything is interconnected—including past, present, and future events. As Grandma says at the end of the book: “It seems like I heard all these stories before. Only thing is, the names sound different” (Silko, 1977, p. 351). With this casual statement she reinforces a view of “history” as more present than past. As I stated in the introduction, most Western cultures are not quick to perceive the potential circularity of history. The previous chapters attempt to break out of the monochronic worldview somewhat, by illustrating the recurrent nature of narrative motifs and intercultural conflicts. And in many of the analyses, it seems the underlying tenor of the narrative is one of lament and despair. The discussion in chapter 7 about MacArthur’s (2002) experiences of loss among the Marshallese is one example. MacArthur’s response, a collection of meditations on Trickster, is highly meaningful and yet tinged with a sort of helplessness about the liminal place he inhabits as a Western researcher among the islanders. One could presume that MacArthur is simply a product of his time and an inheritor of the legacy of

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“entropology” discussed in chapter 6. Yet discourse on Babel, from chapter 3, reveals that the same meta-narrative of disintegration and decay was present in biblical primeval history. As explained in that chapter, Dean (1982) suggests that Babel represents the final stage in the fall of humankind. The very title of his essay, “The World Grown Old in Genesis,” captures this spirit of dilapidation that seems to affect the current sense of history. It also represents a telling irony. Genesis means the beginning of life, not the end—and yet one cannot escape the narrative motifs in Genesis that betray a preoccupation with failure rather than progress. Every age, it seems, is destined to be the final one in Western civilization. The interlocutors of most historical periods speculate that their own moment represents the worst (or perhaps best) the West can be, and that the final age is upon them. Perhaps in that sense, this book has been about missed opportunities. From the beginnings of Western civilization there have been thinkers who proposed a radical idea: that perhaps differences in customs and traditions were insignificant. Diogenes the Cynic was one of the first philosophers on record to point out the arbitrary nature of differences in cultural practices. But he was followed quickly in every era by such notables as Celsus the Roman, Michel de Montaigne, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others. In some cases the thinkers were rather quickly marginalized; Diogenes was ridiculed and Celsus’s writings were engulfed by the rapid spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire. The West missed those chances to broaden horizons. Will the pattern continue? This pervasive feeling that one’s own historical moment is either a pinnacle or a nadir affects Western perceptions of history and also represents a kind of ethnocentrism. Several times this book has considered the intercultural dynamics of both space and time to be analogous, drawing on thinkers such as Augustine, Herodotus, and Twain. Conceiving of the past is just as much an intercultural struggle as is contemporary travel to exotic places. The past and the future are unknown jungles. No wonder it is tempting to consider the present “the best” or “the worst.” There is a tendency to become “chronocentric” as well as “ethnocentric.” The need to reject ethnocentrism, of course, is at the heart of this book. It has been written to begin the conversation about the role of narratives in constructing Western identities. Various ethnocentric narratives have been presented through seven chapters. But there is a cautionary tale embedded in them as well. Ethnocentrism creates an overinflated cultural ego that is liable to apply to all aspects of social life—both the positive and the negative. Just as it may be “chronocentric” to believe that one is living in the most progressive or the most racist time period, it is even ethnocentric to declare oneself ethnocentric. Ethnocentrism is a given; like multiculturalism itself, ethnocentrism is a reality.

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But ethnocentrism consists essentially of believing one’s own culture is “the best” at everything—including ethnocentrism. For instance, many scholars know and teach students whose arrogance regarding their own cultural superiority can be very high. The students make few apologies for it. However, the ones who apologize too much may be equally dangerous. In hyperconfessing their ethnocentrism, they risk positing themselves as the only world citizens capable of perceiving alterity and reckoning with it in a productive way. This can become condescending toward the Other; the obsession with Self objectifies the Other just as brutally as racism can. Many members of Western cultures have come to believe that the West is the best at exclusion, stereotyping, and exploitation. We cannot deny the facts of the past: the West has done all of this and more to members of other cultures. Yet acknowledging this past does not make the citizens of the West martyrs or saviors. The innocence that is bestowed on the rest of the world when the West declares its sins has the potential to be false and condescending. In worst cases, the Other is seen as a helpless child in the struggles of alterity. For example, such an ethnocentric attitude underpins a statement heard often in academic settings after September 11: “Maybe Osama bin Laden just wants to dialogue with us, and this is the only way he knows how.” In each case, the statement was made with vocalics that suggested a great deal of sympathy and sadness for bin Laden. Such a statement ought to be unpacked in terms of cultural identity and ethnocentrism. First, it is philosophically inaccurate. While the acts of September 11 were highly rhetorical, their place in philosophical communicative “dialogue” was obviously negated by a lack of “invitation” and openness to the Other. However, the statement is more interesting in terms of cultural identity and alterity. When one calls terrorism dialogue, a set of assumptions about the Other have been set in motion and delivered in the language of cosmopolitanism, while simultaneously reinforcing the superiority of the West. The superiority of the West is reinforced because terrorists are posited as “not knowing any better.” This Western speaker’s choices of words and vocalics paint bin Laden as a pathetic figure in need of Western understanding and love. She is ignorant of bin Laden’s political sophistication, assets, and agenda. Her “sensitivity” belittles the facts of the conflict and the seriousness of the terrorists’ desperation, as well as the historical factors that may have set the conflict into motion. She seems to blame her own ethnocentrism for the problem. And for that, she may be tragically ethnocentric. The meta-ethnocentrism emerges because by exposing “ethnocentrism,” one is tempted to think that one is now free from it. Buell (2002) warns against this pitfall in the study of alterity. “Racism persists even when race has been exposed as a construct,” even within our own epistemological perspectives regarding race (Buell, 2002, p. 434). The same is true of ethno-

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centrism. The way any person interprets the world is necessarily embedded in one’s own cultural constructs. So the Western focus on its Self as the sole perpetrator of ethnocentrism dehumanizes and objectifies the Other. Dialogue between and across cultures, as defined by Benhabib (2002), must transcend this focus on the Self. In the introduction to this book I laid out some basic terms on which cross-cultural dialogue would depend: first, acknowledging that alterity is a universal activity, the elements of specific identity negotiations are nonetheless contained within constructions of the Other. The biases inherent in the construction of alterity must first be admitted, but then also carefully scrutinized. This scrutiny is not for the purpose of navel-gazing but is instead conducive to more reasoned openness to the realities of the Other’s experience, rather than the vagaries of the Self’s imagination. Second, while the practice of narrative is equally universal as alterity, narrative themes tend to be specific. And although narrative motifs may cut across cultures and histories, they are employed by a given cultural group for the purpose of identity negotiation. Their use is particular. Naturally alterity is a significant part of identity negotiation, so the engagement of any given narrative motif will pertain to the agendas and evaluative practices of the culture in question. This term of cultural dialogue has been at the heart of the current work. What then might be the narrative motifs of Western identity negotiation vis-à-vis “the Other”? By now the answers are fairly clear. For the purposes of understanding alterity, narrative motifs about the Other are synonymous with Western biases toward the Other. These narrative motifs, resulting in the biases Western cultures still carry, reveal the spheres through which the Other has been engaged. Western cultures tell narratives about acculturation, history, travel, and anthropology. A Western worldview of history, for example, is clearly biased toward “progress.” The narrative motifs in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court illustrated this quite well in chapter 6. In the sphere of anthropology, the motifs of Trickster and entropology have been present since the dawn of time. So have questions of travel and assimilation. A number of the motifs discussed here show plainly that the assimilation of the Other is assumed within the discourses of the West. Although there are a number of “options” through which the Other can assimilate—military service, religious conversion, and the like—this extreme form of cultural adjustment is generally expected. The motifs of assimilation, progress, entropology, and others in this book may not be unfamiliar or even unreflective. Cultural critics have discussed the role of “progress” in Western cultures (especially the United States) for a long time. However, placing them within a particular history that aims at cultural dialogue gives a “face” to the biases and the processes of

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narrative contestation occurring within a given time period. When the motifs are traced through time, and across cultures, the dialogic frame in which the Other can “talk back” offers intercultural hope. The “progress” motif is particularly compelling because it pertains to the third term of cultural dialogue I outlined in the introduction: acknowledging that Western approaches to history are biased toward monochronic worldviews, one should nonetheless recognize history as a crucial part of identity negotiation. One of the most difficult coefficients to change is worldview. So the “time periods of Western history” need to be interrogated. They have been granted a “face,” an identity of their own, through the Western bias toward progress and monochronic time. Paradoxically, in interrogating these time periods, the recurrence of narrative motifs has been revealed. It is clear from the recurrence of historical and narrative themes that the monochronic view of time may be inaccurate. At the very least it is narrow and biased. Given these terms of dialogue and these emphases on biases, this book may help Western cultures see their own identity construction for the circular, complicated, and knotty mess that it is. Recall from the introduction that Badiou (2003) critiques typically Western views on pluralism. He states that these perspectives divide Self and Other into irreconcilable, dehumanized subjects. The premise that these subjects may ever connect and understand one another is rejected. He offers compelling evidence of this chronic disconnect, especially through his observations of current cultural criticism: Where the name of a truth procedure should obtain, another, which represses it, holds sway. The name “culture” comes to obliterate that of “art.” The word “technology” obliterates the word “science.” The word “management” obliterates the word “politics.” The word “sexuality” obliterates the word “love.” (Badiou, 2003, p. 12) All these “repressive” terms, as Badiou labels them, are striking because they seem bereft of hope. They are awful in their ordinariness. They are symptomatic of a kind of defeat that pervades alterity post-9/11. The return from the vacation from history, then, ought to challenge this complacency and this repression. In refusing to confront the past, one turns one’s back on the Other. Intercultural understanding requires not only internalization of the past, but hopeful interaction with the dynamics of identity and alterity. The vacation from history has precluded both. If the vacation from history ends (and it is my dear hope that it does), what then are the next steps toward intercultural dialogue? This study of discursive practices, particularly in light of the recent processes of contestation of narrative motifs, has implications for multiple levels of society. Narratives

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of alterity are significant for the academy, for the public sphere, and for everyday interactions. Within higher education, the uses of this book and others like it may be the most direct. After all, this project had its beginnings in a simple request: to teach intercultural communication according to “time periods.” As I noted in the introduction, while the approach first called forth a bit of skepticism (shouldn’t intercultural communication require that one critique such biased constructs as “time periods”?), the history lessons ended with a great deal of knowledge and satisfaction. Plunging into narratives of alterity demands a scrutinization of history, not mere acknowledgment. It also calls forth a recognition of one’s biased worldview, and the fact that these cultural biases permeate all institutions—including the academy. There have been previous attempts to account for these biases. One of the goals of the “politically correct” moment in history has been inclusive discourse within higher education, but this has at times served to restrict speech rather than open up dialogue. Alterity and Narrative recognizes the academic canon as a cultural construct. But even cultural constructs bear examination or Western cultures run the risk of identifying themselves as acultural, no cultures at all (Gonzalez, 2002). One dangerous implication of this self-identification is the problem of disguised ethnocentrism that I previously discussed. Within the academy, at this moment of dialectic between globalization and provinciality, it is hoped that the present project may spur further research concerning the role of narrative in identity negotiation—especially alterity. The academy is certainly part of the public sphere, but it is hoped that the arguments in this work will have rhetorical currency outside of academic circles as well. Benhabib (2002, 2004) issues two cautions for the role of cultural identity in the public sphere. The first is to remember that politics and identity should not be conflated. At the same time, we live in a moment of increasing provinciality—what some would call the “culture wars”—even in the face of globalization. “Cultural identity” and its other monikers are increasingly employed for political ends (Benhabib, 2004). This leads to Benhabib’s second caution: if identity is to be claimed— particularly by indigenous groups—at the very least these groups must move beyond a modernist view of culture (Benhabib, 2002). The Modernist view of culture as a “discrete whole” must be tempered by the engagement of hybridity as well as change. Change marks the public sphere in the twenty-first century. This site of mediation and narrative contestation constitutes the rhetoric of our times. Film is now a medium for narrative and narrative contestation; in chapter 2 I linked the motif of universalism stemming from Saint Paul to the 1998 Hollywood film The Siege. The rhetorical implications for narratives of alterity in the shifting public sphere can be astounding.

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Of course, the nexus of the public sphere lies in everyday people engaging in discourse. On the private interactive level, there are intriguing possibilities for the study of alterity and narrative. Intercultural communication, by definition, examines the impact of cultural diversity on interpersonal interaction. The roots of intercultural misunderstanding and conflict are found within aspects of cultural identity that are typically unconscious, indirect, and tacit. Worldview is one of these aspects of identity that can be engaged through a study of narratives by and about the Other. Gates (1990) has said that anyone who is sufficiently motivated can understand another culture. My students from non-Western cultures expressed a better understanding of European and North American cultures after reading Alterity and Narrative. They were also intrigued by their own possibilities for “talking back” to the motifs of the narratives contained within. In short, they were prepared for dialogue across cultures. If this seems like a rather lofty goal for everyday life, one must remember that “culture” has always been formed through the engagement of other cultures. That is the business of alterity: to define one’s cultural boundaries vis-à-vis the Other. But if the boundaries are reasonable and based on lived experience rather than the imagination, then these boundaries can also be permeable. The goal of cultural dialogue can also be achieved if one remembers that identity negotiation happens not merely on academic, political and public levels, but also on the private. As Benhabib (2002) writes: we need to have “more faith in the capacity of ordinary political actors to renegotiate their own narratives of identity and difference through multicultural encounters in a democratic civil society” (p. 104). Remember that this book is about vernacular attitudes that permeate multiple levels of society. The narrative motifs in this book, as I discussed throughout, all have strong oral traditions. It is a mark of the Western bias toward literacy over orality that members of Western societies were compelled to cast the oral narratives into written “canonical” versions. In a way that is quite fortunate, since it means the narratives have been reproduced in units that bear analysis. At the same time it is clear that every day people can and do evaluate, critique, and contest these narratives. For many “Others” within the Western worldview, the stories are in fact still part of oral tradition. The narratives discussed in this book may seem unnerving in their raw emotion, and because of that the depictions of the Other seem doubly poignant. They paint the Other in oppressive and dehumanizing ways, yet they also reveal a certain moral emptiness in Western civilization. Nussbaum (1997) is correct when she writes about the failure of Stoicism in Seneca’s version of Medea: audiences will always prefer Medea’s raw passion to Jason’s cold ambition. The same is true of Othello; one weeps for him and condemns Iago. Toni Morrison’s “tar baby” Jadine is a product of Western mate-

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rialism and though one ought to blame Son for the end of their relationship, one may also believe it was doomed from the start. The sensitive reader will point out that all these narratives (and they are just a few examples) are written as tragedies. They are designed to evoke these emotions in their audiences. And yet there is still the sense that the contemporary urge to decentralize, equalize, relativize, and divide cultural identities into separate subjects represents a denial of the tragedy playing itself out in reality. There is no meta-narrative to be found in the fragmented history pieced together through Western narrative motifs in this book. Rather, the point is to recapture a hope that ironically lies in the raw and excruciating engagement of the Other with full cognizance of one’s own sins, shared history, and inescapable ethnocentrisms. There is room for art and narrative in such a space. It is the space where love tears a hole in the self and one is struck blind as on the road to Damascus. It is the moment when one acknowledges one’s limits, divides public and private, and understands nobility. It is the nexus of time and space, yet it crosses boundaries. It holds the tragedy still for a moment so one may see it in its wholeness and thereby transcend it as Self and Other. For we have created this tragedy together, and we will reach the soil of salvation only when acceptance of the tragedy is complete.

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Notes

1. We should not forget that some Greeks believed exile to be a necessary evil. The fifth-century-B.C. practice of ostrakismós in Athens is a case in point. Kleisthenes amended the constitution to include this political practice, wherein the assembly of Athens would meet to decide whether, for the good of the polis, there might be an individual who ought to be temporarily exiled (Burn, 1965, p. 164). It is not clear how often this happened, as an Athenian would need to receive 6,000 votes before he was exiled. His removal from Athens would last ten years, and he would then return without loss of property or status. Even with these provisions, there is no doubt that to be an ostrakon, as the victims of ostrakismós were called, was a devastating experience. 2. I thank Michael J. Brannigan for turning my attention to Japanese boshi-shinju as connected to issues of marginalization and exile in motherhood. 3. Galatians is not the only place we find this “baptismal formula” of “neither Jew nor Greek.” In his letter to the Colossians (3:11) Paul even adds a “barbarian/Scythian” distinction. The formula is also alluded to in some other early Christian texts, notably Clement of Alexandria: “Moreover, the whole Christ, so to speak, is not divided: there is neither barbarian nor Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, but a new human transformed by the holy spirit of God” (Buell, 2002, p. 449). 4. The syncretic method has proved highly useful in missiology of all religions, including Christianity, during the modern and postmodern periods. Missionaries today regularly employ syncretic rhetoric to convert followers. My argument here is specifically focused on the early Christian era in isolation.

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5. I have also given that title to this section of the chapter, in order to emphasize the contextual reading I seek of Genesis 11:1–9. Cassuto (1961) makes a similar rhetorical move in his essay on Babel (p. 226). 6. Translated as “Nimrod.” “Nebroth” is a variation for “Nembrot” or “Nimrod.” 7. I am grateful to the members of my Ph.D. seminar in spring 2004, especially Father Joseph Mele, for helping me connect “grasp” to “illumination” in Aquinas. 8. The warrior motif remains a significant one in Native American communities, but also continues in its relation to “real life.” For instance, of all the groups represented in the U.S. military, Native Americans have the highest percentage of honorable discharges. 9. I use “man” here intentionally, since woman was of no concern to Rousseau except insofar as she unwittingly influenced man’s development in his evolution through savage, domestic, or societal states. 10. Some scholars date the travel narrative back to the medieval period (Certeau, 1991, p. 221). I argue that its distinctiveness as a genre has existed as long as human beings have had freedom to explore and have recounted their experiences. Herodotus, for example, was the great traveler of ancient Greece. He has alternately been called a liar, an historian, and an ethnographer. But no one can deny that he is a stunning storyteller, and we can cast his Histories written during the fifth century B.C. as a remarkable travel narrative. 11. Samuel Wallis made contact with Tahitians first, in 1768. But Bougainville’s arrival in Tahiti had a colonizing purpose endorsed by the government of France and led to the establishment of Tahiti as a French territory. As far as the French were concerned, Bougainville “discovered” Nouvelle Cythère. 12. Thanks to Paul McManus who heard me present these ideas at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture in 2004 and offered the wonderful metaphor of “cosmic jenga.” 13. Similar stories involving Trickster may be found in other cultures. For example, E. E. Evans-Pritchard reported in his 1966 work The Zande Trickster that Ture, the dominant Trickster of the Zande, was thought by the people to be wandering through Europe, teaching his tricks (EvansPritchard, 1966, p. 24).

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Index

9/11, 64, 191, 194, 196 Abraham, 54, 74 acculturation, 18, 57, 63, 195 theories of, 124 through military service, 109 Achebe, Chinua, 158–159 African-Americans, 38, 64, 174 in World War II, 109 See also Africans; trickster Africans and Christianity, 63–64 “curse against,” 18, 83–84 in diaspora, 174 Moors perceived as, 97 and recastings of Othello, 94 slaves in America, 18, 36–39, 63–64, 83–84 Alexander the Great, 45 Alexandria, 43, 47 Alexie, Sherman, 141 Alighieri, Dante, 84–85 alterity aggregation strategy of, 58–59, 60, 61 Babel as metaphor for, 78 in character of Othello, 103 colonialism and, 120 as “exoteric factor,” 14 identity construction and, 4

imagination and, 138–140 oppositional strategy of, 59, 63, 67 Otherness, 2 revolutions and, 143 the Self and, 6, 141–142 science and, 122 scripture and, 122 understanding, 39 as universal activity, 20, 117, 195 Ambrose, 83 Ananias, 44 anthropology, 11, 12, 19, 149, 159–164, 195 Enlightenment and, 122 entropology and, 144–145 perspective on civilization in, 75 rise of, 118, 122 See also structuralism Aotourou. See Bougainville, Louis Antoine de Aphrodite, 24, 124 Archimedes, 66 Argonautica, 22 Aristophanes, 23 Aristotle, 23, 35, 85–86 semantic theory of, 86 Asian Americans, 109 Asians Medea as one of the, 25 Nimrod’s relationship to, 83

217

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assimilation, 62, 64 military service and, 195 religious conversion and, 195 Babel tower of, 18, 67, 82 “crime of,” 73–74 as mimesis, 73 as “self-worship,” 73 significance in relation to city, 74, 89 as ziggurat, 71–72 narrative, 68, 69–91, 193 “anti-Babylon bias” in, 80 as countermyth, 80 as final stage of degeneration, 74 as “generation of the dispersal,” 72 God’s intervention in, 75 impact on biases about language, 87–89 “limitlessness” motif in, 89–90 as metaphor for alterity, 78 in multiple genres, 75 as myth, 75 Nimrod in, 78–85 Pentecost as antithesis of, 85 popularity of, 70 See also Genesis Babylonians, 49 depicted as giants, 81 Hebrew exile by, 80 Nimrod as ruler of, 79 and Tower of Babel, 72–73, 75, 90 Badiou, Alain, 47, 51, 55, 61–62, 65, 66, 196 “barbarians,” 1 ancient Greek definition of, 22, 24, 25, 27 Colchians as, 28 Medea as one of the, 39, 56 Othello “tamed,” 109 Bauman, Richard, 13–14, 37 Benhabib, Seyla, 4, 7, 117, 195, 197, 198 Boethius, 81 Bogatyrev, Petr, 12 Borst, Arno, 1, 3, 16–17

Bougainville, Louis Antoine de, 19, 118, 120–127, 137 Aotourou and, 125–126, 127 nature and, 125 objectivity of, 127 opinion on philosophers of, 127 perspective on women of, 125, 137 scientific perspective of, 123–124 Voyage Autour le Monde of, 124, 125 Brazil, 46, 119, 160, 161, 173 Briggs, Charles, 14, 37 Buber, Martin, 49, 178 Buell, Denise, 7, 55, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 67, 195 Byzantine empire, 69 Canaan, 74 Nimrod as nephew of, 78 Catholic Church, 43, 51 and Crusades, 97, 109 educational institutions, 64–65 and Protestant Reformation, 96 rhetorical projects, 69, 81 and sacking of Toledo, 97 universalism in, 67 Celsus, 66–67, 193 Certeau, Michel de, 8, 142 Christ. See Jesus of Nazareth Christianity, 143, 193 acculturation and, 63 as “anti-philosophy,” 47, 48 Early, 18, 39–69 intercultural, 51 as Gentile or European movement, 63 as a Jewish sect, 41, 46, 66 medieval scholars in context of, 79 Native Americans and, 114 as religion of Roman Empire, 66, 67 in Renaissance, 95, 101 as an urban movement, 46 Christians in American churches, 84 folklore of, 73 initial relationship to Saint Paul, 44 not defined through legal categories, 51

Index perspectives on Tower of Babel, 71 rituals of, 58 “chronocentrism,” 193 Cicero, 50 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark Clement of Alexandria, 58, 61, 83 cognitive complexity, 19 Colchis, 22, 24, 25, 28, 33 colonization, 56, 65, 120, 122, 145 Commerson, Philibert, 126, 133 communication alterity and, 11, 13, 14 common knowledge and, 88 constitutive, 42 dialogue and, 5 discourse, 7 during Renaissance, 103 ethnography of, 150 “futility” of, 76 impact of imagination on, 81 in Medieval period, 77 narrative paradigm and, 7, 9 in prophecy, 49, 51 religious, 57 in Tower of Babel narrative, 71, 73 See also intercultural; communication Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A. See Twain, Mark. Constantine, 67 constructivism, 178 Cook, James, 123, 125 cosmopolitanism, 10, 194 Croesus of Sardis, 34–35 cultural genocide, 18, 63 culture African-American, 38 American, 19 appropriation, 12 Candomble, 46, 173, 174 Caribbean, 94 complexity of, 2, 171 Greco-Roman, 41, 43, 56, 78 Greek, 81 identity and, 1 instrumental view of, 7

219

Kalapalo, 174 mechanical view of, 153–157 nature vs., 151–153 “pagan,” 47 primordialist view of, 7 “wars,” 197 Zande, 174 Cyprus, 101, 102 Damascus, 41, 43–44, 45, 47, 61, 199 democracy, 65 Descartes, Rene, 141 Deuteronomy, 43, 53 dialogue communication and, 5 of cultures, 4, 39, 117, 171, 195–196, 198 misperceptions of, 194 philosophical, 19, 194 terrorism and, 194 in work by Denis Diderot, 136–138 Diderot, Denis, 19, 118, 125, 127–140, 147 anti-colonialism of, 130 anti-religious sentiment of, 130, 132–133 contradicts facts of Bougainville’s voyage, 128–129 as critic of French culture, 128–139 Encyclopedie of, 127–128, 137, 140 as Enlightenment philosopher, 129 epistemology and, 139–140 genius of, 140 language and, 137 libertinage and, 134–135, 158 national identity and, 128 as non-traveler, 137 Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, 118, 125, 127, 128–140 Aotourou in, 131 Frenchmen in, 129–130, 136 illusion of truth in, 131–132 libertinage in, 134 Jesuit chaplain in, 130, 132–134, 135, 137

220

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Diderot, Denis (continued) narrative structure of, 129, 137–138 old Tahitian in, 132, 137 Orou in, 130, 132–134, 135–136, 137, 140 use of dialogue by, 136–138, 140 use of travel narrative genre by, 128–140 views on law of, 130, 133, 135 views on sex of, 133–135 views on women of, 135–136, 140 dilemma tale, 180, 181 Diogenes the Cynic, 65, 66, 193 Discourse on Inequality, 119–120 Ellul, Jacques, 76 emotivism, 150, 152, 162 England, 123 in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 144 See also Twain, Mark; Othello; Shakespeare, William Enlightenment, 11, 19, 114–142, 146, 159 as “Age of Discovery,” 122, 142 as beginning of modernity, 143 Cartesian thought in, 141 epistemology and, 122, 139–140 exploration and, 122, 142 Napoleonic era and, 118 rationality in, 119, 129 religion during, 119 revolution and, 120, 159 scientific ideals of, 129 women in, 135–137 See also Diderot, Denis Enuma Elish, 80 entropology, 19, 144–145, 151, 158–166, 193, 195 epistemology, 76, 122, 127, 139–140, 141–142, 194 eros, 24, 32, 35 ethics cultural relativism and, 6, 19, 67, 163, 180, 188, 191–192 intercultural, 19, 172, 190

at Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, 191 in trickster narratives, 177, 178–181, 188–189 See also dialogue ethnicity, 7, 42, 55, 62, 64–65, 66, 67 as divisive tool, 68 marginalizing, 103–104 of Tower of Babel builders, supposed, 80 ethnocentrism, 27–28, 146, 158, 193–195, 197, 199 of Hank Morgan, 147 ethnography, 30, 67, 142, 146 by Claude Levi-Strauss, 159–164 in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 149–150, 153, 156 trickster narratives in relation to, 181, 187–189 Euripides, 18, 20–36, 38–39, 41 Europeans, 1, 10, 11, 15, 19, 118, 198 alterity and, 5, 117–142 imagination and, 11, 117, 140 imperialism and, 11, 122, 142 medieval beliefs of, 83 New World and, 119, 122 “racial hierarchy” and, 122 rivalries between, during Renaissance, 96 See also Enlightenment; France; Spain exile, 25, 26–32, 41 exoticism, 5, 148 fable, 61, 75, 95, 118, 129 “fatal flaw,” 19, 145, 151, 156, 162 Fisher, Walter, 7, 9, 10, 17 folkloristics, 4, 10, 11, 15, 47, 173, 177 American Folklore Society, 11 definition of myth in, 76 For Whom the Bell Tolls, 109 France, 119–137, 147 Paris, 125–126, 133 reign of Terror in, 140–141 revolution, 140, 143, 159 Seven Years’ War and, 122–123 sexual mores in, 132–134 See also structuralism

Index Galatia, 52–53 Galatians, 18, 39 Garner, Margaret, 37–39 Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, 122, 178, 198 Geertz, Clifford, 14 Genesis, 18, 67, 68, 69–91, 192 as paradigmatic, 76 Cain in, 74, 80, 82 flood in, 76, 83 Garden of Eden in, 74, 76, 87 genre, 14, 48, 99, 139–140, 172, 177 Gentiles, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 51, 56 converted to Christianity, 57, 60–61, 67 Galatians as, 53 Titus as one of the, 54 God, 47, 49, 50, 53, 59, 67 declining influence in Renaissance, 105 illumination and, 86–88 passio de anima and, 86 role in The Sparrow, 167–168 role in Tower of Babel narrative, 71, 74–78, 89, 90 Greece ancient, 18, 20–36, 39 Athens, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 32, 34, 35–36, 39, 41, 43 as birthplace of democracy, 21, 39 Corinth, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33 in early Christianity, 51, 57 Heroic Age of, 23 ostrakon in, 32 polis in, 28, 33, 34, 35, 39 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 10 Hall, Jonathan, 56, 57, 59 Ham, 18 “curse of,” 78–84, 89, 122 Nimrod as grandson of, 82 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 10 Herodotus, 17, 22–23, 24, 27, 35, 193 as ethnographer, 146 visit to Babylon of, 71 history biases in, 20 contextual, 42, 56 in education, 17–18

221

linear, 21 in literature, 93 “as narrative,” 15–17 primeval, 73, 77, 83 relationship to prophecy, 50 revisionism, 3, 6 social, 9, 15 “vacation from,” 191–192, 196 western, as canonical, 84, 193 written form, 43 humanism, 18, 76–77, 91, 101, 114 humanities, 39 hybridity, 4, 171, 197 identity construction, 4 differential, 13–14, 16 and politics, 1 western, 1 Industrial Revolution, 10, 12 infanticide, 21, 25, 26, 29, 36 in Japan, 38 rhetoric of, 37, 38 intercultural communication, 3, 8, 19, 30, 52 in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 148 cognitive complexity and, 178 definition of, 198 French Enlightenment and, 118 impact of Babel on, 81 impact of Galatians on, 55 impact of “noble savage” on, 128 impact of Othello on, 94 teaching of, 197 theories of, 124 “intercultural hope,” 196, 199 intertextuality, 14, 17, 39, 52, 84, 137–140 Islam, 64–68 among Moors, 96 Shi’a, 64 Jacobs, Harriet, 36 Jakobson, Roman, 12 Japan, 38, 167

222

Alterity and Narrative

Jesuits. See Society of Jesus Jesus of Nazareth, 41, 52, 53 apostles of, 85 as Greek “unknown god,” 47 as Messiah, 43 nullifies law, 54, 62 Paul’s belief in, 44–45 speaks to Paul, 50 Jolliffe, John, 36, 37, 39 Judaism heirs to, 59 law of, 18, 53 midrash in context of, 79 Pharisees in, 43, 45, 48 placed in opposition to Gentiles/Greeks, 45, 46, 51, 54–56, 60, 62 rabbis of, 72 in Tarsus, 43 Kass, Leon, 71, 76, 88–89 King Arthur legend, 19, 146. See also Twain, Mark Labov, William, 13 Lamming, George, 94 language Aramaic, 43 as attributed to noble savage, 131 diversity, 84–91 English, 64 Early Modern, 106–107 Modern, 148 French, 138 Greek, 44, 85 Hebrew, 43 Koine, 43 loss, 85–90 postcolonialism and, 77 rhetoric and, 107 semantic theory of, 85–88 Spanish, 138 in Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, 138 “third thing thesis” on, 87

in Tower of Babel, 75–90 unity, 81, 84–91 law civil, as critiqued by Denis Diderot, 130 Hebrew, 18, 43 of Moses, 44, 48, 51, 59 natural, 133–134, 135 religious customs and, 67 Roman, 18 St. Paul’s view of, 42, 59, 63 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 8, 9, 159–164, 169–170, 193 Levinas, Emanuel, 5 liminality, 173–189 literary theory, 6, 10, 42 as applied to Othello, 94 criticism, 8, 33 folklore and, 11 religion and, 95 Lord, Albert, 13 love current cultural criticism and, 196 Early Christian views on, 57 “free,” 133ff, 140 parental, 27, 31–33, 35–36 patriotic, 32 philia, 33 as powerful force, 93 See also eros Luther, Martin, 42 MacArthur, Philip, 178, 187–189, 192 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 7, 151 Malory, Thomas, 144 Marshall Islands, 174, 178, 187–189, 192 Medea, 21–41, 56, 136 as Granddaughter of Helios, 24, 34, 35 narrative of, 18 as Wife of Jason, 2 See also exile Medea, 20, 198 chorus in, 26, 28, 29 Creon in, 26–27, 28, 29, 30–31, 33 Glauce in, 24, 28, 29, 30–31, 33

Index Jason in, 22, 23, 25, 27–28, 29, 30–31, 33, 36 “passion vs. reason” in, 26, 33, 198 Medieval period, 18, 69–91 mythography of, 77–90 philosophy during, 78, 97 standard dates of, 69 superstition during, 148 memorate, 42, 46, 47, 52, 53, 60–62 Mesopotamians, 50, 74, 79–80 middle ages. See Medieval period midrash, 79–81, 82 Modernity, 6, 19, 53, 142–162 agency and, 148, 157–159, 162 approaches to culture in, 159 science and, 147 Montaigne, Michel de, 119, 193 Moors, 64 as having complex cultural identities, 97 English perception of, 97 and Islam, 96 Othello as one of the, 93, 94, 100, 114 stereotyped as warriors, 102 Morrison, Toni Beloved, 38 Tar Baby, 175, 181–187, 198 multiculturalism, 6, 55, 68, 192 myth Babel as, 75–77 creation, 132 definition of, 75 Greek, 123, 147, 173 mythography, 18, 70–78 Roman, 37 Shakespeare’s use of, 93 vs. science, 163 mythic present, 177 Napoleonic era, 118, 128 nationalism, 96, 119, 122, 123, 153, 159 Native Americans, 19, 177, 192 Bureau of Indian Affairs and, 110 characterizations of in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 148

223

Christianity and, 114 Cree, 171–172 “Edenic” stereotype of, 119 Laguna Pueblo, 110–111, 112, 192 Navajo, 109, 175, 176–177 stereotyped as “noble savages,” 119, 141 in South America, 119, 124 in World War II, 109–115 narrative aesthetic and social qualities of, 11 archetypes, 81 “Cinderella,” 12 “Cleobis and Biton,” 35 coherence in, 17 as communication, 2 contestation, 197 contextuality, 72 distance, 139–140 fidelity in, 12, 17 “Gog and Magog,” 89 history, 15–17 kernel of, 13 logic, 15 motifs of, 4, 12, 13, 14, 16, 52, 54, 84 narrativity, 7 “Neptune,” 81 open to interpretation, 72 paradigm, 6, 7–8, 9 personal, 47 as public discourse, 9 structure of, 99 theory, 6, 9, 12, 14, 17 tropes, 25 ur-forms, 13 western identities and, 3 See also dilemma tale; fable; folkloristics; King Arthur legend; memorate; myth; travel narrative; trickster New Testament, 39–69 Acts of the Apostles, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52 epistles, 46 Matthew, 169 Paul’s relationship to, 52 See also Galatians

224

Alterity and Narrative

New World, 117, 123, 143, 159, 169 Nigeria, 159 Nimrod, 18, 78–84 depicted as monster, 83, 89 lust for power of, 88 as one of “cursed race,” 79–80, 89 “noble savage,” 19, 115–141, 147 Aotourou stereotyped as, 125–126 assumed linguistic abilities of, 131 as employed by Denis Diderot, 128–141 Enlightenment intellectual tradition and, 123 falsely attributed to J. J. Rousseau, 119–120 happiness and, 132 innocence and, 132 literary portrayals of, 133 as narrative motif, 126 natural law and, 133–136 religion and, 132–134, 136 “savage critic” in, 133, 139–140 sexuality and, 124, 133–136, 140 as shifting stereotype, 141–142 Tahitians stereotyped as, 128 term first used by Amerigo Vespucci, 119, 120 term used by Christopher Columbus, 119 Nussbaum, Martha, 26, 198 Old Testament, 18, 70–91 Adam, 73 Isaiah, 49, 50 Jeremiah, 49, 50 perspectives on city, 74 prophets, 50 Psalms, 79 Talmud, 91 Torah, 54 See also Genesis oral tradition, 19, 198 orientalism, 6, 96, 141 Origen, 66–67, 68 Othello, 18, 64, 93–115, 198 as Christian convert, 96, 98, 108 differentiates self from Turks, 98, 108

as military hero, 94, 98, 102–109 as Moor, 93, 94 singularity, 114 in Venice, 64, 114 Othello, 93–115 Bianca in, 98 Brabantio in, 102–103 Cassio in, 96, 98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106 Cinthio’s version of, 99–101 Clown in, 104 Desdemona in, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109 in Elizabethan context, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 104, 105 Emilia in, 95, 98, 99, 100 “honesty” motif in, 104–106 Iago in, 94, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 104, 106 Montano in, 104, 105 narrative structure in, 99 “public” motif in, 102–110, 114 race in, 94–95 Roderigo in, 94, 98, 101, 102 Signiory in, 102–103 as unique among Shakespeare’s plays, 94 Ottoman Empire, 69, 97, 102, 103, 109 Ovid, 80 Paredes, Americo, 13 performance, 13, 14, 177 Perrault, Charles, 12 Persia, 22, 25, 83 phenomenology, 5 philosophy Aristotelian, 88 classical, 97 Epicurean, 47 Greek, 51, 54 linguistic turn in, 87–88 medieval, 78 pre-Christian, 88 scholastic, 78, 85 stoic, 26, 35, 198

Index pluralism, 43, 50, 196 political correctness, 3, 6, 164, 197 postcolonialism, 77 postmodernity, 6, 11, 14, 15, 19, 38, 169, 170 condescension toward the past in, 164 fragmentation in, 163 interpretations of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in, 145, 150 interpretations of Babel in, 77, 88 interpretations of Othello in, 99, 106 “progress,” 19, 142, 150, 193, 195–196 as dominant idea in modernity, 143 time and, 147, 192 prophecy, 42, 48 Hebrew, 49–50 Protestant reformation, 96 quiddity, 86 race, 7, 42, 55 as differently conceived during Renaissance, 94–95, 97, 98 in Othello, 94–101, 103 religion and, 63 in story of Noah, 79 travel narratives and, 122 universalism and, 63 vernacular ideas about, 122 viewed as fixed entity, 62 racism, 17, 84, 194 during Enlightenment, 121–122 ethnocentrism and, 194 as failure of imagination, 178 religion, 7, 42, 55, 57 in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 153 as discussed by Denis Diderot, 132– 133 as divisive tool, 68 during French Enlightenment, 119 ethnicity and, 65, 66 monotheistic, 69 as one element in literary analysis, 95 race and, 63, 84 rising insularity in, 192

225

social structure and, 162–164 Tahitian, 124 Renaissance, 18, 90–115, 117 Christianity in, 95 exploration in, 120 ideas about race in, 94–101 importance of public personae in, 94 legacy of Crusades in, 96–97, 98 remnants of ancient and medieval periods in, 95, 101 splintering of Europe in, 96 secular humanism in, 102–109, 114 resurrection, 44, 46, 47, 48, 51, 57, 59, 60, 61–62 viewed as more significant than culture, 63, 66 rhetoric of alterity, 51, 53, 60 of Babel, 81 of Denis Diderot, 132 first used in Tower of Babel narrative, 71 humor and, 150 of infanticide, 37, 38 language and, 107 of Mark Twain, 147, 150 of Medea, 26, 29, 32, 34, 36 of mission, 69 of Othello, 104 of Paul, 51, 63 pertaining to military, 94 prophetic, 48–49 with source in literature, 39 syncretic, 46, 47 of universalism, 54, 55–60 Rhodius, Apollonius, 22, 24 Romans Christianity and, 66–67 considered “pagans,” 41 empire, 41, 43, 45, 51, 53, 55, 77, 143, 193 engineering, 46 law, 18, 53, 56, 65 pluralist, 46, 50, 59, 61 Virginius myth, 37 in writings of Augustine, 82

226

Alterity and Narrative

Romantic movement, 10, 19 nationalism and, 128, 153 noble savage stereotype in, 141 popularity of King Arthur in, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19, 119–120, 123, 131, 133, 141, 142, 147 Russell, Mary Doria, 164–170 Sparrow, The, 164–170 “fatal flaw” in, 165–168 Said, Edward, 6, 141 Saint Augustine, 17 City of God, 82–89, 146 interpretations of city, 74, 82 interpretations of history, 193 mythography on Nimrod, 82–89 role in Medieval period, 69 Saint Isidore of Seville, 84 Saint Paul, 18, 39–69, 197 arguments about law, 62–66 as aspotle, 51 in Athens, 44, 46, 47, 48, 52, 57 conversion of Thecla, 50 in Corinth, 48 in Cyprus, 45 foundation of universalism, 66 in Lystra, 44 letters to Corinthians, 48 mission, 46 as prophet, 48, 51 role in Sanhedrin, 43 as Roman citizen, 47 See also Galatians Saint Stephen, 43, 49 Saint Thomas Aquinas, 70, 85–87 illumination, as understood by, 86–87 quiddity, as understood by, 86–87 salvation. See so¯te¯ria Samoa, 158 Saul. See Saint Paul “savage critic.” See “noble savage” science, 11, 19, 123, 124 exploration and, 126 Louis Antoine de Bougainville and, 126–127 in modernity, 145, 150

semantics, 85–87 Shakespeare, William, 18, 64, 93–109, 114–115 as English playwright, 96 Hamlet, 93 Julius Caesar, 102, 114 King Lear, 93, 102 Merchant of Venice, The, 93 Othello, 93–115 Tempest, The, 93 Shames, Laurence, 89–91 Shaw, George Bernard, 144 Shinar, 70, 79 Siege, The, 64–68, 197 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 109–116, 192 Ceremony, 109–116, 192 See also Native Americans Society of Jesus, 124, 132 as depicted in The Sparrow, 164–168 Solon, 34 sophists, 26, 27, 29 Sophocles, 23, 24 so¯te¯ria, 22, 25, 26, 27, 30–35, 36, 39, 41 South America, 125 Spain colonization and, 123 Moors and, 96 Sephardic Jews and, 97 Seville Inquisition and, 97 Toledo, 97 Stoics, 26, 198 Epictetus, 35 Seneca, 26, 35, 198 storytelling, 7, 13, 14, 19 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 36 structuralism, 151, 159–164 subject-object, 6, 47, 62, 196, 199 Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville. See Diderot, Denis syncretism, 42, 46, 47, 48, 52, 57, 167 Tahiti, 19, 120–137, 147 as described by Louis Antoine de Bougainville, 127 Denis Diderot’s perception of, 120 Tarsus, 41, 43, 47

Index terrorism, 64–66 Tertullian, 83 text, 13 See also intertextuality theology, 76 “things fall apart,” 151–159, 164–168 Thompson, Stith, 12, 14 time monochronic, 3, 192 non-western concepts of, 177 polychronic, 15, 177 space and, 131, 147, 167, 172, 193, 199 time periods, 2, 3, 9, 16, 20, 192, 193, 196, 197 western concepts of, 4 time travel. See Twain, Mark Tocqueville, Alexis de, 141 Toelken, Barre, 176–178 travel narratives, 19, 120–140 as ancient genre, 121 as disruptive of scientific facts, 127 by minor writers, 127 popularity of, 126 Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville as, 127–139 Travels of Sir John Mandeville, The, 83 trickster, 19, 171–190, 195 African-American, 175–176, 178, 184, 186 Brer Rabbit, 175–176, 178, 184, 186 confusion about, 172 Coyote, 175, 176–177 ethics and, 177, 178–179, 186, 188, 190 ethnography and, 187–189 examples of, 173 Exu, 46, 173 Gabriel, 46, 173 imagination in, 178–179 Letao, 178, 187–189 liminality of, 173–190, 192 marginality of, 173–190 as metaphor for cognitive complexity, 178 “possibilities” motif in, 173–186, 191 West African, 176, 186–187 Wisaketchak, 171–172, 174

227

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 90 Turner, Victor, 173–174, 186 Twain, Mark, 17, 144–162 Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A, 19, 195 characterizations of Church in, 147, 149, 150, 152–153 characterizations of Native Americans in, 148 Clarence in, 147, 153, 156 concepts of culture in, 151–155, 156 England in, 145–146 ethnography in, 149, 152 Guenevere in, 155 Hank Morgan in, 144, 145–158, 162 King Arthur in, 144, 145, 150, 152, 154, 155–156 Launcelot in, 155–156 Merlin in, 154, 155 Mordred in, 155 Morgan le Fay in, 152 Sandy in, 148, 149, 154 Sir Dinadan in, 145, 146, 154–155 Sir Kay in, 149 technology in, 145, 156 time travel in, 144, 145–148, 156, 193 critical of European institutions, 144 prefiguration of World War I in, 157 views on progress of, 144, 150, 162 views on science of, 144, 149, 150 United States, 19, 195 abolition in, 36, 39 antebellum era in, 38 Civil War, 15–16, 38 fictional depictions of, 64–68, 154–155, 167 industry, 143, 145 “limitlessness” in, 89–91 material values in, 111 revolution, 143, 159 sexual mores in, 135 universalism, 18, 39, 42–69, 197 as legacy of Roman Empire, 53 Paul as foundation of, 66–67, 69

228

Alterity and Narrative

Venerable Bede, 83 Venice, 96, 97, 98, 101, 104, 105 Voltaire, 144 Wealth of Nations, 121 west, the and higher education, 2, 16

identities of, 1 whiteness, 6 Williams, Raymond, 8–9, 15 worldview, 3, 69, 197, 198 monochronic, 196 polychronic, 15 theocentric, 45, 59, 95

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