1.
It is hard to cut through the scrim. While the Jesuits were
trying to impress the Hurons with the latest discoveries in natural philosophy,
in 1677, the police in Paris were arresting Magdelaine de la Grange and
charging her, at that moment, with murder and forging a marriage certificate
between herself and the lawyer she was living with. This was the beginning, it
turned out, of the "Affair of Poisons", in which the highly civilized
nobility of Louis XIV's court were found to be frequenters of fortune tellers,
back ally witches, and implorers, upon the right occasion, of the devil. The
affair was investigated by men who assembled in a room in which all the walls
were shrouded with black cloth, and the testimonies were elicited by torture.
It is the latter culture that historians call the civilized one, as opposed to
the savages of New France. Why? Historians are like shopkeepers in a Mafia
dominated section of Queens – they are overly impressed with guns. Civilization
equals a lotta guns. Savages on the one side, the urban society with books and
guns on the other. In this divide, it is the soft Westerner who praises the
lifestyle of the savages as having any advantage over the civilized. Thus, one
puts down the myth that they were ecologically aware. The myth that they were
gentle. This or that myth. The iconoclasm, however, never gets out of hand –
there is not putting down of the myth that the civilized were civilized. Thus,
contact testimony to the stature of the Indians (a very good indicator of well being),
or the non-hierarchized religious organization of certain Indian nations, or
the political and personal power females in certain Indian nations enjoyed is
ignored. To emphasize these things is to see the savages through a “soft”
focus. It is to lose track of civilization.
Of course, historians of the Americas often are astonishingly ill informed
about the history of the European societies, and view European protagonists as,
of course, agents who have experienced the city, the mechanical philosophy, the
horse, uh, mathematics and all the rest of it. That the Copernican system would
have astonished most of the inhabitants of Paris and certainly most of the
inhabitants of Lahontan – a little region near the Pyrenees – is something
quite beyond the myth of the noble savage argument.
James P. Ronda, in 1977, published a charming article entitled "We Are
Well As We Are": An Indian Critique of Seventeenth-Century Christian
Missions”, in which he quotes testimony that was sent back in the Jesuit
Relations – a sort of newsletter of the missionaries in New France. When the
Jesuits came among the Huron to announce the good news and generally accelerate
the civilizing process, The Hurons listened with the utmost politeness – which
had something to do with the guns, and something to do with wanting allies in
the raids against the Iroquois. This paragraph is so lovely it makes me melt:
“Hurons, both converts and traditionalists, found the doctrines of sin and
guilt confusing. "How . .. do we sin?" asked one man. "As for
me, I do not recognize any sins."'2 When the missionaries attempted to
explain how one could sin even in one's thoughts, they often encountered utter
disbelief. "As for me, I do not know what it is to have bad
thoughts," replied one old man. "Our usual thoughts are, 'that is
where I shall go,' and 'Now that we are going to trade, I sometimes think that
they would do me a great favor when I go down to Kebec, by giving me a fine
large kettle for a robe that I have.' "13 Even among converts the
missionaries met considerable resistance to the ideas of sin and guilt. When a
recently converted Huron came to confess, the missionaries rejoiced: "He
was about to accuse himself," they thought, "of having violated what
the Father had taught." They were soon disappointed, however, for the
convert came rather to accuse another Indian of stealing his cap. He had
assumed that this "confession" would win him another cap from the
Jesuit.”
That one old Huron man neatly sums up a whole line of thought in Beyond Good
and Evil.
“Indians tended to view the conceptions of heaven and hell with even less
regard. The Huron, Montagnais, and New England native Americans all Indians
tended to view the conceptions of heaven and hell with even less regard. The
Huron, Montagnais, and New England native Americans all anticipated an
afterlife but assumed that it would be spent in morally neutral surroundings,
not in a place of heavenly reward or hellish punishment. The Hurons spoke of a
"village of souls" populated by the spirits of the dead. Life in
those villages was believed to resemble life on earth with its daily round of
eating, hunting, farming, and war-making. Missionary efforts to impress Indians
with the delights of heaven met with disbelief and derision. Because the
Jesuits described heaven in European material terms, the Hurons concluded that
heaven was only for the French. When one Huron was asked why she refused to
accept the offer of eternal life, she characteristically replied, "I have
no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not care to give me
anything to eat.""15 The father of a recently deceased convert child
urged the missionaries to dress her in French garments for burial so that she
would be recognized as a European and permitted entrance into heaven.' Most
native Americans rejected the European heaven, desiring to go where their
ancestors were. The mission compounded this rejection by telling potential
converts that heaven contained neither grain fields nor trading places, neither
tobacco nor sexual activity-surely a dreary prospect. Some Indians resented the
notion that one had to die in order to enjoy the blessings of conversion, while
others observed that an everlasting life without marriage or labor was a highly
undesirable fate.' Missionaries provoked an even stronger negative response
when they preached about everlasting punishment in a fiery hell. The hell the
Jesuits described must have profoundly affected their Indian listeners, for the
Huron and Montagnais were no strangers to the horrors it was said to contain.
The torture by fire of captured warriors was a customary part of Iroquoian
warfare, and Huron and Montagnais men knew that such would be their fate if
they fell into enemy hands. They themselves practiced torture rituals on their
own captives, applying burning brands and glowing coals to the bodies of the
condemned before execution. Men and women who had participated in such events
must have responded emphatically to the idea of hell. But the evidence suggests
that most responded in disbelief. Though the torments of hell were all too
imaginable, they were rejected because they seemed to serve no useful purpose.
In fact, the most common objection to the Christian hell was that it only
lessened the delights of earthly life. "If thou wishest to speak to me of
Hell, go out of my Cabin at once," exclaimed one Huron. "Such
thoughts disturb my rest, and cause me uneasiness amid my pleasures."
Hurons resented what seemed to them a Christian obsession with death and
punishment. This resentment may have sprung from Huron anxiety about death and
about the uneasy relationship between the living and the spirits of the dead.'
Whether or not disturbed by this prospect, one Huron spoke for many when he
said simply, "I am content to be damned.''
Other native Americans went beyond rejecting hell as an unpleasant place to
question the basic Christian assumptions about postmortem punishment. "We
have no such apprehension as you have," said a Huron, "of a good and
bad Mansion after this life, provided for the good and bad Souls; for we cannot
tell whether every thing that appears faulty to Men, is so in the Eyes of
God."20”
Given these responses, it is peculiar that Baron Lahontan’s dialogues with
Adario, in actuality a Huron named Kondiaronk, have been almost unanimously
judged by historians as gross fictions, attributing words to this Huron that
could never have come out of his mouth. After all, the argument runs, many of
those words are sharp criticisms of religion in the vein of Bayle himself – and
the Indians obviously weren’t capable of such complex concepts. Or so say those
who are anxious, very anxious, to use the “myth of the noble savage” to close
down the discussion of the Encounter. If you run the myth of the myth of the
savage to earth, you will find that it arose in a painfully familiar context in
the early twentieth century.
2.
One of its most influential designers was a historian and
literary critic named Gilbert Chinard. Chinard began writing in France before
World War I, and settled in the U.S. after the war. He was prolific. And, from
the beginning, he was carrying a torch for an essentially reactionary political
philosophy. Chinard’s thesis was that Lahontan created the noble savage myth
which was appropriated by Rousseau, and used to spread a diseased notion of
egalitarianism of which the dire effects were seen in the Revolution. It is
interesting that a thesis which, in 1913, was so obviously attuned to a certain
political current in France. Chinard was basically a reactionary modernist,
with all the identifying marks: the attack on Rousseau as the precursor of a
dangerous romanticism; the nostalgia for a certain image of the ancien regime;
the notion of classicism as clarity; the almost hysterical language about the
French Revolution. From the Action Francais to T.S. Eliot, these were themes of
the radical conservative program. Translated to the U.S., these themes really
became pertinent after World War II, in the Cold War reaction to the 30s
leftist culture. Partly the success of the myth of the savage was due to
Chinard himself, who loomed largely in the study of colonial and revolutionary
Americo-Franco relations between the wars. He published both in French and
English, and was a brilliant scholar of the colonial/Revolutionary period, one
of the few scholars with a grasp of the full trans-Atlantic scene in which the
intellectual history of the Enlightenment unfolded. In this history, certain
testimonies were given weight, and certain were tossed out. Lahontan, whose
works – to give Chinard his due – were edited and republished by Chinard, was
dismissed without, evidently, first hand reading. For instance, this is George
R. Healy in an article from 1958 entitled, The French Jesuits and the Idea of
the Noble Savage, in which one is astonished to read this: “The men most
influential in popularizing the notion of savagery as a condition superior to
contemporary civilization – Lahontan and Rousseau, for example – were surely
more given to the manufacture of titillative paradox than to research among the
hard sociological facts.” As if George R. Healy had ever met a 17th century Huron
or spoken his language, or drank chocolate in an eighteenth century Parisian
salon. If anybody had a comparative sense of ‘civilization’ vs. ‘savagery’ in
1707, it was surely Lahontan, who spent his young adult years in French Canada,
learned a Algonquin tongue, and eventually escaped from duty in French Canada
by bribing a vessel to take him to Portugal, from which he made his way,
avoiding France, to the Netherlands – surely not in a tenured cloud, but
probably paying carriage drivers and staying in flea infested inns where every
night’s sleep was among the hard sociological facts.
3.
“Just look at P…, he continued, when she plays Daphne, and,
chased by Apollo, turns to look at him – her soul sits in the turmoil of the
small of her back; she bends, as though she wanted to break, as a naiad out of
the school of Bernini. Look at the young F., then, when he, as Paris, stands
among the three Goddesses and hands the apple to Venus. His entire soul sits
(it is a shock to see it) in his elbow.
Such mistakes, he added, disconnectedly, are unavoidable,
since we ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Paradise is still locked up and the
Cherub is behind us; we must make a trip around the world, and see whether
perhaps it isn’t still open somewhere in the back.” – Kleist, On the Marionette
Theater.
Once we all talked about Paradise. Now, we hardly ever do. But
in our own miserable moment, as we contemplate dystopia, now is the time to
cast our mind back to paradise and its large influence. Daphne crouches, Paris
extends the apple. Once upon a time, when Eve was not coy, the animals could
talk, and an island floated up to the people, trailing a cloud above it, on
which the Gods were standing. Paradise, of course, it was always a question of
Paradise in the Encounter.
… So what was he thinking, sitting there in 1707. There – in
Amsterdam? In Copenhagen? As he took up the quill, was he thinking that he had
never ceased traveling? That it was all as if he had never gotten out of that
infinite forest, that it was still ceaselessly snowing, as he had first seen it
from the deck of a boat, leaving debts he could hardly understand behind him,
status, college, a dead father tracked down and staked through the heart by the
immovability of a society that knew nothing of progress but everything about
prestige. The ancients feuded with the moderns on the torrents of the Pau. Lom
d’arc, Baron of Lahontan, his father, cleared the Adour River up to Bayonne.
He’d never seen a river like the St. Lawrence. Rivers ran fatally through his
life.
Did he think that the blizzard of snow and the forest were
mirror images one of the other, both wildernesses through which only the most
artful entity, the Manitou, could dodge?
The tricks you learn. Looking at his hand, the souvenir of
the stump where his little finger used to be. Left for the filthy
bottomdwellers at some Wisconsin portage…
According to his biographer and self appointed judge,
Joseph-Edmund Roy, the Baron de Lahontan’s father had exhausted his own
resources and a great part of his life in the work of clearing the river. In
the end, he succeeded, making Bayonne a commercial port. His reward was to be
sued for debt, and to fail, in turn, to collect the debts owed him.
Lahontan. Lahontan was a small village which, at one time,
was comprised in the territory held by Montaigne's family. Montaigne mentions
it as a funny, primitive place. Peculiarly cut off. The story is that the
village kept its own customs, generation after generation, until an outsider
married into the place, and introduced all the modern troubles: lawsuits,
doctors, exchange.
In the shadow of the Pyrenees. He was eight years old when
his father died. The son of the second wife.
Baron de Lahontan was
seventeen when he first saw New France. Ten years later, he turned his back on
it for the last time, a convoluted quarrel such as he always seemed to be
getting into. Deserting his post to take sail on a ship that he bribed to drop
him off on the Portugese shore. By then, he was suffering from a bit of
persecution complex about returning to France. Afraid of being seized for debt,
or insubordination. He’d made enemies, god knows. The Sieur de Pontchartrain
paid men to silence the like of small fry nobility.
“On the 23 Jume 1699, the parliament in Paris issued an
arrest – a warrant – in this affair. It is enough to say that the text of the
warrant mentons more than 150 summonses, requests, replies, sustainments,
contradictions, arres and sentences, without counting the production of
supplementary motions. We find more than sixty parties intervening. They come
from Paris, Tours, Rouen and every corner of Bearn. The procedures, which began
in 1664, were continued annually up to 1699 when the warrant on the distribution
of money was issued, but in 1789, the city of Bayonne was still fighting with
the creditors of the Lahontan family.”
Perhaps it is a winter morning. The day is cloudy. He sets
his pen to the foolscape. The expriest will visit him later in the day, and
they will go over the dialogue. Ex-priest, but still a priest – not the kind of
creature he likes. Something about them leaves him breathless with hostility.
And the ex-priest was common, there was no denying it. Some peddler’s boy, he
imagined. He remembers getting out of a tough spot in Spain, no money for the
inn, using the gestures he’d observed used by the Jesuits among the Huron, and
the gestures, too, that the local healer used, setting himself up as a
montebank, paying the bill, getting a coach. The baron-medecin. Out of Moliere
and Don Quixotte. Now, he receives, under a cover name, money from a family
friend, which he invests in bills of exchange, creaming off a certain
percentage for himself.
He’ll last be seen hunting. In a forest on an estate in
Luxemberg. Leibniz mentions him. Leibniz the pious man, Lahontan the libertine
sceptic. What is broken in the network, what we don’t see. Only blind guesses.
The snow comes down day after day. He learns an Algonquin
tongue. Reads Petronious. Lascivious scenes before going to sleep. A priest,
one day, comes into his room, spots the book, seizes it and tears it into
shreds. He will always resent this insult.
Did he dine with Bayle? When Adorio arose before him, the
Huron philosophe. Who had visions of the undoing of his people in every baptism
and ever poxy corpse. Or who was the pious Indian leader who died in Montreal
and was given a Christian funeral. What do you know about people?
Lahontan had once wanted to discover something. The Long
River. A foolish ambition to garner the kind of prestige that LaSalle, that
madman, had gained. His party sailing past a burned out post he never noticed,
a post that had been set up by Lasalle in Missouri, where a trunk was
emblazoned with the words that would continue eternally return to whisper in
select ears in the Artificial Paradise: Nous sommes tous des sauvages.
The Black Robes, impressing the Hurons with the announcement
that the world turned around the sun. Meanwhile, back in Lahontan, a man who
professed to believe that the world turned around the sun, if anyone had been
so foolishly inclined to contradict the evidence of his senses, would have been
visited by the priests and the local authorities and would, assuredly, recant.
Civilization – not a word in general use. Citizen. Not a word in general use.
Subject – ah, subjects. To turn the savages into subjects of the king. That was
the project. A word undergoing some strange rhetorical stress, subject.
The ex priest, they say, added details only a cleric would
know. Citations from Origen – would the 30 year old Lahontan have read Origen?
And of course distance buries everything, even the Huron chief who is
disallowed, as time goes by, his own critique of European civilization. No,
they would speak in childish metaphors. No religion, these people. Cruel
torturers. Will do anything their women tell them to do.
8 Nov. 1710
I hope you will pardon the liberty I take in imposing on
your goodness for a subject about which I am going to speak to you.
My friend Bierling asked me, by a letter expressly for that
purpose, if the Baron de Lahontan with his voyage and his dialogues is
something imaginary and invented ... or if this is a real man who has been in
America and who has spoken to a real savage named Adario. For one judges that
an entire people living tranquilly among themselves without magistrates,
without trials, without quarrels, is something as incredible as those
hermaphrodite Australians. The discourse of Adoria has confirmed these people in
their Pyrrhonism.
You will ask me, Mademoiselle, what relevance does this have
for me, and shouldn’t I address M. de Lahontan himself. I will tell you why.
One wants to know if Lahontan is a real and substantial man. As he was
dangerously ill this summer, he could be dead (God forbid), the gout may have
risen and killed him since, or he could have been saved through the application
of the horns of some dear more savage than the savage animals which are
respected in America.
One may perhaps judge that I have a secret reason and that
the first serves only as a pretext. But say what you will, only be content with
the subject of my letter. If monsieur le Baron of Lahontan is well, as I don’t
doubt, he won’t be angry to have become a problem like Homer or more like
Orpheus…”
- G.W.F. Leibniz
And so he sits there – where? – scratching on foolscape, the
perpetual refugee. As new as the subject, as new as the citizen. Whose home
moved out from under him. An island appeared, it trailed clouds, the gods
disembarked, and they distributed holy objects.
4.
Gabriel Foigny was an underground man of the classical age –
a drunk, a lech, an ex-priest. He fled from a monastery in France, where the
bonds of chastity were evidently too tight for him, to the Protestant freedom
of Geneva, in the 1660s. There he found a job as a teacher – his attempt to go
on preaching under the new dispensation was discouraged when he appeared in
church drunk – and married a low class slut who proceeded to cheat on him.
Being an educated man, he turned his hand to the market for reading matter.
First, he created playing cards of a kind, on which there were prayers – or
perhaps Tarot signs. Then, in 1676, he published a manuscript he had been
‘given”, La Terre Ausrale. Later on, he admitted that he wrote it himself – by
this time he was on the hop again, leaving behind a pregnant maidservant and a
set of angry Genevan ministers. The TA is an account of a colonial Sinbad the
sailor who ends up, after various adventures in Africa and Portugal, cast up on
the Australian shore. Australia, here, is not to be confused with the continent
of that name – it was more like More’s Utopia than Van Dieman’s discovery. The
account of the naturals of Australia is accompanied by a dialogue between the
protagonist and one of their sages. Through this sage, Foigny expressed, as
Geoffrey Atkinson put it, his “open and secret revolt against society and its
institutions.” [39]
Such a revolt, to be radical, must go back to the very root of society. That,
of course, is paradise. Society begins in the annihilation of paradise, as
readers of Genesis know. Or I should say, its annihilation for humans – for it
is part of the magic of the story that the Garden of Eden is not abolished by
the Lord. It exists, but it exists, now, outside of human existence. It is
barred. Thus, no sentence in human history has had the effect of Adam’s
communication to God that he and Eve are naked. For, as God immediately
replies, “who told thee that thou wast naked?” It is one of those moments for
which Joyce, in Finnegan’s Wake, devised his long sentence-words, dividing one
Viconian epoch from another: “The fall
(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonneronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!)
of a once wallstrait oldparr”.
But if we go around the world, as Kleist’s dramaturge suggests, perhaps we can
get in the back way. Foigny’s sage-sauvage is, as Atkinson writes, ‘filled with
horror at the idea of wearing clothes”. He cannot be persuaded that clothing is
an aid to morality – comparing the Europeans to “little children who no longer
know an object as soon as it is covered with a veil.” [63] As without, so
within. The colonial process – or the civilizing process – puts into relief
superstition as its privileged target, while its subjects, the subjected, gaze
with disbelief at the superstitions of the civilizers. Ultimately, what was
this, for the Europeans, but the rejection of that peculiar moment in Genesis,
when God, for once, stops being a politician or a magician – when he makes
clothing of skin for his creatures. As he once made Adam of clay, the act of a
worldmaker, so he now clothes them, the act of a colonizer – but colonizer in
the most intimate sense. There is no more intimate act ever attributed to
Yahweh than this: ‘Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats
of skin, and clothed them.” As though Adam’s announcement made the seals fall
from God’s eyes, too. The intimacy in this act is in its superfluity: after
all, having condemned humans to labor – and the sexes to division of labor –
there’s no reason that Adam and Eve could not have made their own clothes. What
kind of divine necessity is on display, here? What kind of cosmic discomfort?
We know that the Gods, other Gods, can be moved by human nakedness – can be
stirred to desire. Per Ganymede, per Leda, per Daphne, per every metamorphosis,
every skin that goes on and every skin that comes off.
5.
These things are in the background against which Lahontan’s Dialogues was written
and, during the early 18th century, read.
Adario, our representative Indian/savage, is a clown, an
outsider, a sage to the “civilized” European – that comparatively small band
within Europe itself. Innocence speaks “obscenities’ - for Lahontan has his natural sage speak
about the “shameful parts”. The Europeans were very interested in the covering
up or not of the shameful parts – in 1509, in the description of the seven
naturals that were taken to Rouen, either from Newfoundland or from a boat that
was found adrift on the ocean, Eusebius, the chronicler, makes sure to record
that the savages wore a belt, to which was attached a purse like vestment for
covering up the shameful parts.
Yet the Iroquois and Huron boys, to the often expressed dismay of the
missionaries, went about naked. The dialogue between Adario and Lahontan
approaches this topic from the point of view not of the naked boys themselves,
but of the effect of this nudity on the girls. Lahontan, following in the
conventions of the Europeans, connects the power of Huron women to their power
of choice. Adario finds the European objection at once absurd and typical – for
the notion that the fathers should have power over the girls stems, ultimately,
from the power of the mine and thine among the Europeans. Adario’s explanation
of the rules of sexual alliance seems to be confirmed by other writers on the
Hurons. Women were not forced to marry men chosen by their parents, but they
were forced to obey rules against marrying relatives. And the marriage bond was
not indissoluble. Adario remarks that after forty, women don’t marry again, not
wanting, after that, to have children. Lahontan has two things to say about the
Huron system: that the women show cruelty by aborting unwanted children, and
that they must give up nudity: “For the privilege of your boys to go about nude
causes a terrible rapine [ravage] in the hearts of your girls. For , not being
made of bronze, they can’t help it if, at the aspect of members that I dare not
name, they go into rut on certain occasions when the rascals [coquins] show
that nature is neither dead nor ungrateful to them.” [93]
Rise and fall. Adario, while sympathetic to the argument against abortion
[which seems to mean, as well, infanticide], is scornful of the argument
against nude children. Far from being a bad thing, it helps girls decide if
they want the “big thing” which he won’t name or the medium or small – and he
assures Lahontan that the caprices of women are such that the big thing won’t monopolize
all hearts. Some want strength, some want spirit, some want big shameful parts.
But this is his judgment of the Europeans:
‘ I agree that the peoples among whom are introduced the mine and the thine
have good reason for hiding not only their virile parts, but still all the
members of the body. For what would be the good of the silver and gold of the
French, if they don’t employ it to adorn themselves in rich garments? Since it
is only by the clothing that one makes an estate of people. Isn’t it a great
advantage for a Frenchman to be able to hide some natural default under
beautiful clothing? Believe me, nudity is only shocking to those people who
have property in goods. An ugly man among you, a badly built one discovers the
secret of being beautiful and well made with a beautiful wig, and gilded dress,
under which one can’t distinguish the thighs and the artificial buttocks from
the natural ones.”
Thus, briefly, one turns the world around. But the world is moving, all the
time, right face forward, with wig and artificial buttocks in tow. And one day,
the European savages, from the court to the peasant, will be rebaptized. They
will collectively be: the West.
Myself, though, I still hold to the wisdom carved on a tree
stump in a burned out encampment near the Mississippi River. A sentence as enigmatic and manysided as a
pre-socratic maxim : Nous sommes tous des sauvages.
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