Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept

Culture, 1922

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Culture, 1922

THE EMERGENCE OF A CONCEPT

Marc Manganaro

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2002 By Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Control Numer: 2002106616 ISBN: 0-691-00136-7 ISBN: 0-691-00137-5 (pbk.) British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. This Book has been Composed in Times with Trump Mediaeval Display Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ www.pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents, Ross and Alice Manganaro

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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INTRODUCTION Culture, Anthropology, and the “Literary” Modern

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CHAPTER 1 Making Up for Lost Ground: Eliot’s Cultural Geographics

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CHAPTER 2 Malinowski: Writing, Culture, Function, Kula

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CHAPTER 3 Malinowski, “Native” Narration, and “The Ethnographer’s Magic”

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CHAPTER 4 Joyce and His Critics: Notes toward the Definition of Culture

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CHAPTER 5 Joyce’s Wholes: Culture, Tales, and Tellings

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CHAPTER 6 Patterns of Culture: Ruth Benedict and the New Critics

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CHAPTER 7 Hurston, Burke, and the New Critics: Narrative, Context, and Magic

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AFTERWORD Culture’s Pasts, Presents, and Futures

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN a long time in the making, and its completion was made possible by more people than can be named here. I do want to thank the English department of Rutgers University-New Brunswick for its consistent support, and especially Barry Qualls and Cheryl Wall, who expertly chaired the department in the years during which I worked on this book. I also want to thank colleagues in the department whose advice on this project over the past several years proved invaluable: mainly, Brad Evans, Marjorie Howes, George Levine, John McClure, Richard Miller, Bruce Robbins, and again Cheryl Wall. And to my graduate students I owe gratitude for the insights and generosity they have brought to me both inside and outside of the classroom: Eric Aronoff, Michael Goeller, Anthony Lioi, and Katherine Lynes, to name but a few. For intellectual support outside of Rutgers, I’d like to extend my thanks to friends and colleagues Jim Boon, Clifford Geertz, Richard Handler, Susan Hegeman, and Michele Richman. I am also grateful to Joanne Allen, whose copy editing of the manuscript I am sure improved it immeasurably, and to Princeton University Press for its support: special thanks of course goes to Mary Murrell for her expertise and patience. And I would like to thank James Joyce Quarterly for its publication (in its Summer/Fall 1998 issue) of Joyce material that appears in chapter 4, and Michael Bell for the part he played in the publication of my essay on Eliot in the volume Myth and the Making of Modernity (Rodopi, 1998). I would like to express my great thanks to my many siblings—Toni, Ross, Steve, Ann, Joe, and Andrea, and their families—for helping to get me through these past years, and for simply being fun to be around. And so many thanks to my children, Anthony, Thomas, and Rania, for their great great love, their inspiration, their compassion and wit and warmth, and their knowing and trusting that I am always there for them. To my wife Nicole, utterly, for her love, her support, her patience, her knowing me and being with me and her sharing with me all good things. Finally, this book is dedicated to my parents Ross and Alice Manganaro, who this year celebrated fifty years of marriage—for their love, and giving me whatever those things are that got me wherever I am.

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Culture, 1922

Introduction

CULTURE, ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE “LITERARY” MODERN

IN THE 1987 VOLUME Critical Terms for Literary Study Stephen Greenblatt opens his entry on culture with the Victorian anthropologist Edward Tylor’s famous founding definition (1871) of the anthropological concept of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” Greenblatt then follows with the question whether culture as a “concept” is “useful to students of literature.” “The answer,” Greenblatt quickly responds, “may be that it is not.”1 The problem with culture, Greenblatt continues, is that “the term as Tylor uses it is almost impossibly vague and encompassing, and the few things that seem excluded from it are almost immediately reincorporated in the actual use of the word.” Culture as a term, Greenblatt asserts, “is repeatedly used without meaning much of anything at all”; hence the multiple possible meanings for the term “are scarcely the backbone of an innovative critical practice” (225). Greenblatt follows with the question “how we can get the concept of culture to do more work for us” and then introduces two opposing terms, constraint and mobility, that will constitute a more specific model for what culture is and how it works and will prove helpful in understanding the relation of literary study to the social processes ambiguously labeled “culture.” The purpose of this volume is not to apply Greenblatt’s model, or in fact anyone’s, to come to terms with what culture as concept definitively is or ought to be. Rather, I hope, through selected readings from some seminal architects of the culture concept, to trace the intellectual and institutional development of the concept through the first half of the twentieth century in England and America, and more specifically to interpret the concept as it surfaces in the interrelated fields of anthropology and literary study. Greenblatt’s definition, or redefinition, of the concept is especially appropriate not because it is an especially useful model for culture (though he does generative work with it as he applies it to literary works) but because it effectively rehearses the very rhetorical position that has compelled writers since Tylor, including T. S. Eliot, Clifford Geertz, and Greenblatt himself, to continue to work with the term: that the term culture is too loose and large and needs “definition.” Indeed, each of the abovementioned authors attempts to give definition or discipline to the term to make it disciplinarily useful and usable and in fact

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does so by attempting to cordon off the popular usages of culture and giving the term a privileged because limited professional character.2 And, paradoxically, while the battening of the term to a fixed institutional meaning becomes necessary for the legitimacy of the profession—for example, culture as a “complex whole” of institutions, manners, and mores that can then be discretely studied by the anthropologist—it is precisely the multifariousness of the concept, its capacity for ambiguity, slippage, and transfer, that makes the “disciplining” of the term not only desirable in the first place but also institutionally productive or disciplinarily rich, as will be witnessed in the ensuing debates in the early twentieth century over the nature and constitution of culture. It is equally true that culture, defined as “elite” or “common,” becomes posited as desirable and even necessary through the very argument that it is in the process of collapse—in one sense the very definition of the concept becomes premised upon its decline. Bruce Robbins, alluding to Eliot and others, rightly points to a “professional logic” that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legitimated the humanities, a “narrative of ‘culture’ dying in a modern wasteland where only a few select misfits still recall and preserve its fast-fading glories.”3 Recalling James Clifford’s conception of the allegory of salvage at work in anthropology, wherein the discipline of anthropology perpetuates and expands itself through the claim, what Clifford calls the “rhetorical construct,” that “cultures” are becoming extinct and need saving, Robbins notes that “the profession is sustained by protest against this repetitious disappearance, which it thus has an interest in sustaining or constructing” (173). Robbins then, significantly, ties the profession of anthropology to the humanities, asserting “the continuity” of anthropology’s professional rationale “with the humanist decline narratives” and pointing to “the logic,” shared by the two fields, “that links professionals to the disappearance of their objects” (173). No one more definitively linked culture and its professional imperatives to the premise of its collapse than that formative architect of the concept, Matthew Arnold. Indeed, in the very title of his seminal culture work of 1869, culture and its obverse, anarchy, are henceforth inextricably and redolently welded. Gerald Graff makes the astute observation that once culture as concept was articulated by Arnold and those who followed him, it was already necessarily indicating its own absence: “Once the rationale of a community arises as a question for self-conscious reflection and debate, the unreflective commonality that Arnold desired has been lost. A really common culture would simply be lived, with no need for its presuppositions, foundations, and beliefs to become an issue for discussion.”4 In this respect, the very pronouncement of culture is only possible through the articulation of anarchy. One significant problem with Greenblatt’s treatment is the absence of reference to Arnold. Culture as famously defined by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy—“the best which has been thought and said in the world”—has conventionally been interpreted as the formative aesthetic and humanist definition of

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the term, as distinguished from Tylor’s founding anthropological definition, and it has often been noted that Arnold’s statement in Culture and Anarchy preceded Tylor’s by a mere two years.5 Throughout the twentieth century Arnold’s “humanistic” definition generally was viewed, especially though not exclusively by anthropologists, as an “elite” definition, in the sense that Culture (with a capital C) resides in or can be obtained through superior works of intellect and artistry. “Culture” as such, according to Arnold, “is, or ought to be, the study and pursuit of perfection” (8), whereas the “anthropological” employment of the term came importantly to mean not that which is limited to the “best” but that which embodies and represents the “complex whole” of a society. Tylor’s definition galvanized the creation of a discipline—anthropology—that came to assume, by the midtwentieth century, that a culture was, ipso facto, whole, integral, working, functional (in the Malinowskian sense), and made up of a “complex” array of parts or features that in fact cohere into a “whole.” And yet there is a difference between how a discipline chooses to narrate its history and how that discipline actually came to be shaped, a difference between the materials the field might say it adopted and those it actually borrowed and put into practice. And of course the narrative of a discipline’s institutional genealogy can change significantly as later interpreters reshape the narrative of the field’s development. In this regard, the preeminent historian of anthropology, George Stocking, observed well over thirty years ago that the division between the humanistic and anthropological conceptions of culture, as propounded by Arnold and Tylor, respectively, was less tidy than it might appear.6 Indeed, Stocking asserted, as Christopher Herbert approvingly paraphrases, that Arnold’s conception of culture “is in some ways closer to the anthropological sense of the term than is Tylor’s own use of it.”7 Herbert goes on to speculate, in fact, that Arnold’s famous invocation of “right reason,” defined by Arnold as “the nation in its corporate, collective character,” looks forward to the anthropological notion of culture as “that body of thought which supposedly emanated from the collectivity as a whole.” What in “right reason” most closely contributes to, or at least approximates, the anthropological conception of culture is, Herbert holds, “that [right reason] is wholly produced by society and has no transcendental point of reference” and that “it refers not to any particular norms but to the unity, the complex wholeness, of all a society’s constituent norms” (54–55). Furthermore, Arnold is famous for his articulately resonant divisions of societal tendencies and social classes, taxonomies that would come to have crucial anthropological possibilities. There is Arnold’s division of Western culture and, specifically, British society into the forces of the Hebraistic, emphasizing morality, uprightness, “conduct and obedience,” and the Hellenistic, stressing “sweetness” and “light,” beauty and intelligence, and the impulse, as Arnold put it, “to see things as they really are” (88). While Arnold emphasized that

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each Western society contains strains of both the Hebraistic and the Hellenistic, his description of these aspects of culture, the one originating and epitomized in Judeo-Christian attitude, the other in classical Greek predilection, tends toward the personalized, as though the Hebraistic were a personality type: the relation between Arnold’s taxonomy and the early-twentieth-century anthropological and sociological debate on culture as personality is tantalizing. And perhaps even more anthropologically and sociologically suggestive is Arnold’s division of British society into “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), “Philistines” (the middle class), and “Populace” (the lower class).8 Both of these taxonomies work as formative ways of mapping Western societies that in themselves put into question any firm distinction between a humanist and an anthropological approach to culture. Further, one charge often leveled at Arnold’s concept is that Arnold was attempting a stockpiling of high cultural products. According to this reading of Arnold, being cultured means acquiring or possessing superior things— poems, music, paintings. Raymond Williams notes that fairly or not, “hostility to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnold’s views” and that this animosity consistently “has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge . . . refinement . . . and distinctions between ‘high’ art (culture) and popular art and entertainment.”9 In this respect, Arnold’s definition has been perceived, especially by anthropologists, as fundamentally at odds with what Williams calls “the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural” (92). And yet Arnold’s argument is not simply about acquiring cultural products; it is complexly concerned with attaining a state of mind that those works can facilitate. After all, Arnold’s famous definition in its fuller context reads, “The pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,” and, importantly, the sentence continues, “and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” (5, my italics). Those cultural products, in other words, are a means toward an end, and a socially beneficent end at that, for “culture,” according to Arnold, necessarily must ramify outward, toward the general social good: “Culture, which is the study of perfection,” Arnold claims, “leads us to conceive of the true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society.”10 Finally, attaining culture is facilitated by high cultural products but is not granted exclusively through them: Arnold importantly qualifies that “if a man without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture” (5). On Tylor’s part, while his definition of culture as “complex whole” provides the template for anthropology’s central and defining concept, his work is semi-

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nally evolutionary in aspiration and method: on the opening page of Primitive Culture Tylor asserts that “the various grades” of “civilization” in fact “may be regarded as stages of development or evolution, each the outcome of previous history.”11 Tylor’s evolutionary argument and methodology were in fact squarely opposed by the modern anthropologists—most prominently Franz Boas and his followers, and Bronislaw Malinowski—in their successful attempts to professionalize the discipline. Tylor, James Frazer, and other evolutionists essentially studied “primitive cultures” as exempla of the lower rungs of the human evolutionary scale (civilized Englishmen being at the top of that ladder). Boas as early as the 1880s specifically attacked Tylorian assumptions concerning backward peoples and argued for an anthropological method that worked toward answering questions about the diffusion of cultural traits in local contexts rather than about clarifying the chains of the evolutionary ladder or finding the original human “primitive” type.12 And later Malinowski, though he pays his own homage to the evolutionist Frazer’s research and writing style, argued for a new economy of anthropological method based upon the close participant observation of a single people in a single place in order to arrive at what makes that particular culture cohere or “function.”13

When Greenblatt says that the fuzzy usages of culture are “scarcely the backbone of an innovative critical practice,” he neglects to register that Arnold largely made modern literary critical practice possible, largely through the articulation of culture (along with its opposite, anarchy). In a general sense, both Arnold’s and Tylor’s definitions of culture not only explain the concept for their respective disciplines but also function as charters for the fields of literary study (most prevalently located in English departments) and anthropology. In Arnold’s case, his famous founding definition of culture first appeared in 1864, five years before the publication of Culture and Anarchy, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” an essay whose subject is specifically literary criticism. There, Arnold’s definition of culture is made to refer specifically to what literary criticism can do: the “business” of “criticism,” he states, is “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world.”14 While Arnold emphasizes that “the critical power is of lower rank than the creative” (10), he says that the “exercising” of the “free creative activity” epitomized in the creation of great literature can be obtained through “criticizing” as well. In language that would be reformulated some seventy years later by Eliot,15 Arnold presses for the “cultural” legitimacy and even necessity of literary criticism, but he does so in rhetoric that presumes the very decline of that culture, for he assumes that the days of great literature are over and so the best way to preserve and articulate culture is through the act and art of literary criticism:

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The epochs of Aeschylus and Shakspeare [sic] make us feel their pre-eminence. In an epoch like those is, no doubt, the true life of a literature; there is the promised land, towards which criticism can only beckon. That promised land it will not be ours to enter, and we shall die in the wilderness; but to have desired to enter it, to have saluted it from afar, is already, perhaps, the best distinction among contemporaries; it will certainly be the best title to esteem with posterity. (30)

In a sense the decline and fall of literature, as fashioned by Arnold, makes the profession of literary criticism possible, much as modern anthropologists construct, according to James Clifford, “the disappearance of their objects,” those “primitive” tribes whose survival, at least in the words of ethnography, depends upon and hence legitimates the anthropologist.16 In both cases the saving mechanism is culture itself, whether conceived as an elite product or pursuit or as a common, shared system of values. Importantly, as this book illustrates, neither of these formulations is exclusive to literary study or anthropology; rather, they complexly intermingle, trafficking between the disciplines, and shift their meanings as they do so.

This project functions as a reading of Anglo-American modernism broadly conceived—that is, crossing disciplinary lines to embrace literary, literary critical, and anthropological writing—with primary attention given to how models of culture are created, employed, elaborated upon, transformed, resisted, and ignored. Beginning with the important Victorian architects of culture, Arnold and Tylor, the book follows several main figures, schools, movements, and genealogies from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1940s: the anthropologist Boas and his disciples (Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston); the modernist literary artists T. S. Eliot and James Joyce; Malinowski, founder of the functionalist school of anthropology; and modernist literary critics, including Eliot, I. A. Richards, the New Critics (Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, and John Crowe Ransom), and Kenneth Burke, among others. Critical to this book is the traffic between then emerging intellectual/artistic movements, professions, and disciplines, most importantly that between cultural anthropology and modernist literature and literary criticism. While I focus on culture as the central idea or term that mutually informs and animates these movements, I also study other key words or concepts—among them myth (and mythical), metaphor, narrative, irony, function (and functional)—in their development and deployment between and within the disciplines. I illustrate how these terms operate not only as attendants to but as displacements of and even versions of culture. In this respect, they do important “culture work”; though often they may apparently function as discipline-specific and ideologically

INTRODUCTION

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neutral, like culture itself they collectively and individually propel quite varied and powerful social and political possibilities and limits. As Raymond Williams has amply demonstrated, Victorian discourse gave rise to conceptions of culture that were artistically as well as broadly socially oriented, elitist as well as tending toward the egalitarian. Williams, however, tends to read the rise of culture as an unbroken train of intellectual development, and in this regard Christopher Herbert rightly refers to Williams’s treatment of culture as “sacred” (22, 26). This book, on the other hand, works upon the premise that the key Victorian texts on culture, Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy and Tylor’s Primitive Culture, themselves each problematically, confusedly, and generatively mixed artistic, social, elitist, and egalitarian elements and implications in their versions of culture. Following this premise, I analyze how Anglo-American anthropological and literary texts of the modernist era (roughly 1915–40) mobilized culture in forms ranging from literal uses of the word culture to adoptions of institutionalized cultural models or templates. Culture, as well as and through the use of its attendant terms (myth, metaphor, etc.), significantly transmutes as it moves across and within the disciplines, so much so that rubrics designed to divide or classify the functions or uses of culture, such as Williams’s articulation of the “artistic” and the “anthropological” (Keywords, 92), can be used only with the understanding that they require redefinition with each recontextualization (i.e., as they move from discipline to discipline, from decade to decade). And yet this project is not just a study of variousness. The traffic in culture inaugurated by Arnold and Tylor and made seminal to institutional revolution and consolidation by Malinowski and Eliot has a common ground in Tylor’s founding anthropological definition, that is, culture as a “complex whole” of human institutions, customs, and practices. Though the terms or their meanings may shift as they shuttle across the disciplines and the decades, complexity and wholeness become integral to the prevailing conceptions of modernism that unite early-century anthropology, literature, and literary theorizing. The generativeness of Tylor’s founding definition, what enables culture’s mobility in effect, is the necessity of the interworking of its parts: complexity necessitates wholeness, and wholeness makes possible complexity. In a consequent and common (though significantly variable) institutional turn, tribes and poems get read as complex wholes whose meaning, as decoded by institutionally based specialists, resides in the interrelation of their intricate parts.

This book finds its center of gravity in 1922, the year posed by historians of both literary modernism and modern anthropology as dating the “revolution” in each. Nineteen twenty-two saw the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses, as well as Argonauts of the Western Pacific and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s

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first monograph, The Andaman Islanders, all of which effectively remapped the discourse of their fields. As George Stocking notes, 1922 also saw the death of the prominent British anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers, more than symbolically marking Malinowski’s victory as the leading light in British cultural anthropology.17 And the literary historian Michael Levenson notes that 1922’s preeminence for literary modernism probably owes less to the publication of The Waste Land than to Eliot’s founding in the same year the extremely powerful periodical Criterion, which more than any organ was responsible for articulating, in highly particular ways, modernism as movement.18 These observations are meant not to argue for either the highly coincidental or the intrinsically significant nature of 1922 but rather to underscore, retrospectively, the significance of institutional control and consolidation at the point of the long-regarded “revolution” in each movement. As Eliot’s efforts were bent toward channeling the reading of the new literary scene known later as the modernist movement, so Malinowski was involved in quite deliberately shaping the “functionalist school.” While T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is, according to Raymond Williams, the most important twentieth-century disquisition upon the word culture (Culture and Society, 227), in The Waste Land, published twenty-five years earlier, Eliot never mentions the word. After analyzing the diverse cultural models that Eliot in Notes incorporates, wrestles with, or rejects in his effort to limit, bind, or give definition to the term, I then cast back twenty-five years to consider the role played by these and other cultural models in Eliot’s highly influential poem. The Waste Land is grounded in arguments or assumptions on the origin, configuration, transmission, and disintegration of culture that are variously and deeply Arnoldian and also rooted in the comparative-evolutionary anthropology of Tylor and Frazer. But this project also assesses the poem’s relation to the modern, and for Eliot contemporary, ethnographic definitions of and models for culture, including those of Boas and Malinowski, and proposes reading not just The Waste Land but also the history of its interpretation as a complex palimpsest of culture models, comparative as well as ethnographic, metaphoric as well as metonymic, spatial as well as historical. This book considers the cultural arguments inhering in Eliot’s important call, in his 1923 review of Ulysses, for a “mythical method” that would replace traditional “narrative” method and thus “make the modern world possible for art.”19 In this vein the history of reading Ulysses, and by extension modernism in general, is itself read as a contest between the comparativist mode of reading it mythically and the more modern (Malinowskian) ethnographic mode of reading it culturally, that is, as a narrative about the history of a particular people— a culture—in a particular place and time. I also analyze Joyce’s own literal use of culture words (culture and its derivates) in Ulysses as well as in Dubliners

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and discover there ironically rendered versions of the word’s complex historical usage, with especially rich commentary on Arnoldian debate on the term. The late-nineteenth-century anthropological debate on collecting and exhibiting culture (or cultures: the difference in number is itself part of the debate), as seen most visibly in the early professional activities and writings of Boas, provides a very generative template through which to view the architecture, implications, and impact of both The Waste Land and Ulysses. While evolutionists argued that cultural artifacts ought to be arranged according to levels of technical development and use, Boas argued for their arrangement according to tribe or locale, with attention to the distinctiveness of each culture and the diffusion or spread of cultural traits from one neighboring cultural area to another. This conflict in the way of reading culture is itself read into the arrangement and critical reception of The Waste Land and Ulysses. While the discursiveness of modern cultural anthropology becomes a predominating concern of this project, I do not simply read classical anthropological texts as literary or as simply influencing, or being influenced by, the literary modernist movement. In this respect, Malinowski’s groundbreaking ethnographic work is read in terms of its narrativity, which, importantly, does not amount to noting Malinowski’s narrative tendencies or his ethnographies’ literary and discursive origins or nature; rather, it means working with Malinowski’s own disquisitions upon narrative, upon the perils of the interpretation of native languages, and upon the nature of language itself. Central to this discussion is Malinowski’s classic Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), as well as his important linguistic study “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In Argonauts and in works such as Myth in Primitive Psychology Malinowski overtly positions the departure from “narrative” in his own texts as the synchronous plunging into the “mythical” and “magical” realities of “native” life. Many of Malinowski’s digressions in Argonauts, in fact, suspend narrative in order to expound upon the manner by which the “natives” themselves suspend the narrative-historical realm through the “magic” that links the ancient realm of myth and modern tribal life. Thus reading “primitive culture” narratively, that is, reading it merely through its stories or through a narrative format, becomes associated with amateurism; and the suspension of narrative time and recourse to magical-mythical realities as unconsciously practiced by the “native” and consciously used as an interpretive template by the anthropologist is firmly and powerfully bound to modern professional practice. Malinowski’s own discussion of the quandaries and promises of the translation (in the fullest ethnographic sense) of “native” languages is in conversation with, as well as in anticipation of, modernist theories of semiology. This treatment brings to the fore functional anthropology’s filiations to the linguistic theories of I. A. Richards and, by extension, the New Critics, as well as to the writings of Kenneth Burke. (In fact, Malinowski’s tying of “primitive” language use to “action” rather than to “thought” looks forward strikingly to

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Burke’s argument in “Literature as Equipment for Living” [1937] for literature and literary forms as “strategies for dealing with situations.”)20 Modern anthropology’s involvement with modern theories of signification, this treatment hopes to illustrate, is hardly limited to or even epitomized by Continental Saussurian and structuralist legacies.

The fifteen or so years following 1922 saw a struggle to make the “revolution” in each field orthodox, and the latter part of this book chronicles in good part the variegated “progress” of this consolidation, along with the significant areas of methodological difference as well as commonality: between the British functionalist scene and the American Boasian school, for example, and between the New Critics and their adversaries. However, a key figure or model common to all of these movements—that is, Boasian and functional anthropology, modernist literature and literary criticism—is culture itself, complexly various in its discipline-specific forms and yet, certainly by the 1930s, commonly regarded and used as a multifaceted, organic whole, the relation of whose parts generate a comprehensive meaning that is, significantly, held to be greater than the sum of its parts. It is not difficult to see the cultural holism animating Ruth Benedict’s famous Patterns of Culture (1934) or Edward Sapir’s earlier, enormously influential “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924). What this project does, however, is to put these works in conversation with their “literary” counterparts in terms of the models for culture that they employ. In this respect Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” is read alongside Eliot’s The Waste Land (they were published one year apart, and in the same periodical) as postwar works that, premised upon the notion of cultural ruin, construct taxonomies of cultural authenticity and a new civilizational order out of the “fragments” or “bits” of “culture.” Similarly, Benedict’s Patterns of Culture and the New Criticism are read as analogous in their employment of cultural models—for Benedict, the anthropological notion of discrete social groups termed cultures; for the New Critics, a more elite/aesthetic autonomous construct, the modern poem. Both were said to “function” as complex holistic structures bursting with a meaningfulness arrived at only relationally (by reference to its parts) and eminently accessible to the disciplined (disciplinary) reader (anthropologist, critic). In this light Benedict is read as congruent with her fellow Boasian Hurston in terms of the arguments each makes for an aesthetically oriented anthropology, which means, among other things, a social science that emphasizes the aesthetic nature and motivations of anthropological culture. (For example, Benedict asserts that “cultures” function like, rise and fall like, the styles of high art.) At the same time, Hurston’s corpus is read as at variance with Benedict’s, as attempting a more hybridic—literary and anthropological—kind of text and

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embodying and arguing a conception of both text and culture as less whole and more ragged, as perhaps giving full-bodied form to what Lowie, another fellow Boasian, in another time (1920) and another context (postwar) hazarded as “that planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches.”21 Finally, Hurston, like Malinowski (and Burke, for that matter) argues for the legitimacy of magic (in her case, “hoodoo”) in the functioning of a culture. However, Hurston “goes native” in ways unprecedented in Malinowskian, or for that matter Boasian, anthropology: her narration of becoming a hoodoo practitioner in the second part of her classic Mules and Men marked the text at the time as unprofessional, in ways that made her work interesting and enabling in the late twentieth century.

The 1920s and 1930s saw concerted, highly successful efforts to professionalize the disciplines of both cultural anthropology and literary criticism. While Boas had worked within the university system since the turn of the century, it was his disciples who, beginning in the early twenties, made up the first cadre of university-trained and university-based anthropologists in America. In Britain, the twenties saw Malinowski solidly institutionalize his brand of participant observation and functionalist method. For both the Boasians and Malinowski, a premium was placed upon rigorous training and disinterested, scientific, systematized modes of analysis that set the modern anthropologist apart from the Victorian armchair anthropologist and his lesser counterpart, the “man on the spot” fieldworker. Modernist literary critics from the 1920s well into the 1940s argued as well for a thorough revamping of the activity of criticism that emphasized discipline, equivalence (or analogousness) to scientific research, objectivity (often termed impersonality), and, like modern anthropology’s fieldwork method, a careful, close analysis of its object, in this case the literary text. The emphasis, inaugurated principally by Eliot, upon a classical, hard, technical criticism eschewing the Romanticism and impressionism of much prevailing criticism at the time bears significant affinities to modern anthropology’s call for more systematized fieldwork produced by professionals rather than by amateur and interested missionaries or sundry travelers. It is precisely in this respect that Ransom in his essay “Criticism, Inc.,” published in 1938, proclaims it the “business” of “Professors of English” to build and maintain within the academy “intelligent standards of criticism.”22

The models modernist critics articulated as inhering in, structuring, or animating the literary text not only resemble the anthropological concept of culture

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but actually operate as displacements of, replacements for, the anthropological concept, now shuttled to the literary realm (and often, as in the case of Allen Tate, used as a tool against the influence of science in the modern age). Eliot’s “objective correlative,” Richards’s “system of delicately poised balances,” and Cleanth Brooks’s famous “well wrought urn,” all discussed herein, are notable cases in point, each functioning as an exteriorized system that marshals diverse, often clashing, and at times otherwise incomprehensible human emotions into a harmonious whole. For Eliot and especially the New Critics, poems in particular become the sites for sustained interpretation and as such fulfill the role of displaced cultures—satisfyingly compact (to the point of being made miniature); like the “cultures” of the modern monograph, interpreted with relatively little regard for their diachronic-historical contexts; eminently readable and hence ultimately made sensible and controllable; and, like Benedict’s notion of configurational culture, created through the careful selection of specific sounds/styles from the almost infinite “arc” of linguistic possibility. The political ramifications of this displacement are varied and quite significant, perhaps nowhere so clearly (and yet complexly) as with the New Critics, who argue for a nonpolitical literature and criticism and yet whose interpretations do “culture work” that in fact vouches for the maintenance of certain traditional social orders. Finally, modernist criticism in this project refers not only to the principal Anglo-American criticism written within the modernist period (1915–40) but also, and more specifically, to the trains and schools of criticism that seminally interpreted modernist literature and, indeed, shaped modernism itself as an idea. I pay attention here not only to the history of the criticism of such major modernist works as The Waste Land and Ulysses but also to the arguments within modernist criticism for revision of literary history (i.e., the literary canon). In both cases, special emphasis is placed upon the models of culture that are employed, and not employed, in the influential readings of works proclaimed, in a modernist sensibility, as “masterpieces” ancient and modern.

My historicization of “culture” is put forward as anything but a seamless genealogy of the concept. In fact, like at least one version of culture that developed, the history of the term itself can often seem a thing of “shreds and patches” that over time gets one rag or tatter of an idea attached to another. There is, in other words, no necessarily inevitable, linear or unitary logic to the development of “culture.” Nonetheless, I hope to demonstrate in the history of the concept some important common lines of descent or at the least some significant filiations of ideas both within and between the professions of anthropology and literary study. In addition, I attempt to show how “culture” itself became not only

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transformed but actually transmuted—one might even hazard to say distorted—as it moved between disciplines and eras, and that important work on culture was done through the employment and development of attendant terms and concepts, both literary and anthropological in origin or orientation. Most generically, and most prominently, the notion of culture as a complex whole that ought to, and can be, profitably, professionally “read” gets variously worked out within and between the disciplines. And a subspecies of that professional logic is the important argument that such reading is most professionally enabling when it works against the grain of “simple” diachronic analysis and instead works synchronically to delve into the realms of the mythical and the magical, whether Malinowski’s conception of myth as charter or Eliot’s “mythical method.” As such, magic becomes both a province or area of study—what people from other places and times do—and a mode of analysis. And yet these shared ideas, of complex wholeness and myth as a newly professional way of reading, are embattled and even within themselves contain ambivalences and contradictions, as seen perhaps most clearly in Malinowski’s complex relation to Ogden and Richards’s positions on language and myth. Such sets, or bundles, of contradictions and ambivalences are complicated and overlapping as they shift in time and transpose from discipline to discipline (as will be seen in Burke’s adoption of Malinowski’s theories of language). An analysis of the development of the modern culture concept might seem ambitious in the extreme, but this project has limits, as set by me, and some deliberate (and I hope not too many undeliberate) omissions. The historical purview of this book is roughly the first half of the twentieth century. While I deal with cultural theories of the second half of the twentieth century, those theories are not the focus of the book; rather, cultural architects ranging from Raymond Williams to Clifford Geertz and James Clifford are used more to illumine the ways in which cultural theories of the first half of the century came to take on significance. And as far-reaching as this project’s aspirations are in terms of authors covered, it is not meant as a comprehensive history of the culture concept in the first half of the twentieth century. For one thing, it is restricted to Anglo-American literary study and anthropology. And even within that (admittedly large) compass, emphasis is put upon certain kinds of writing, namely, selective seminal texts, gravitating around the year 1922, and the history of the readings of those seminal texts. Given more space, attention could be given, for example, to the fiction of Virginia Woolf, or to the poetry of Ezra Pound, or to the cultural poetics of the Harlem Renaissance that extends beyond Hurston (to, say, Jean Toomer or Langston Hughes). Nor does this book treat an important cluster of American culturalist critics, most prominently Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, Randolph Bourne, and Constance Rourke, whose specifically Americanist agendas for various reasons fall outside of the central focus of this study (but who are well treated in Hegeman’s Patterns for America).

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Even within the schools or movements selected, more could have been done. For instance, though I bring into the discussion Malinowski’s functionalist rivals, such as Radcliffe-Brown, I do not put emphasis upon the heirs of the British functionalist school through the 1950s, such as E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes, and Raymond Firth. The book’s latter section admittedly favors what I see as the more generative and interesting Boasian school in that period, and that is in part because of the far more interesting cross-disciplinary traffic that the work of Sapir, Benedict, and Hurston exhibits. This book tends to deal with what I consider the more interesting work being done on culture. And yet the book’s basically chronological organization is not meant to suggest that even the more interesting treatments or theories of culture were getting culture right or that such theories were necessarily better. While the book concludes with the clearly complex and fascinating formulations of Hurston and Burke, that does not mean that they articulated models of culture that were closer to the truth, or got anywhere nearer necessarily to the heart of culture. But as the concluding chapter is meant to suggest, Hurston’s and Burke’s treatments would prove more generative, more useful, and more useable in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the last quarter of that century. This is primarily a book on the culture concept, but it is also, secondarily perhaps, a book on the period and movement, or set of movements, known as modernism, both in a literary and an anthropological vein. In a sense this book examines what those seminal modernist texts meant but also, and more importantly, how they came to be regarded as the leading works in their disciplines, works, especially The Waste Land, Argonauts, and Ulysses, that came to define their respective fields within a given period, the years following 1922. Again, this book is less about what those texts intrinsically mean than it is about how they came to be read, how they took on meanings as they came to be interpreted over the course of the remaining years—and they were many— of the century.

The body of the book is divided into seven chapters. The chapters are ordered in a rough chronological sequence, though often they work recursively, looking back to consider figures and works treated in earlier chapters. Chapters 1 through 5 focus on what are treated as key founding texts of modern anthropology and modernist literature. Chapter 1 centers on Eliot’s The Waste Land and his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, though Eliot’s other work—poetry, literary and social criticism—is considered and the cultural theories of others, such as Boas and Sapir, also are treated. Chapter 2 and 3 focus on Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, but attention is also paid to Malinowski’s other work of the period, including “The Problem of

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Meaning in Primitive Languages” and Ogden and Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning. Chapters 4 and 5 focus primarily upon Joyce’s Ulysses but also treat Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Emphasis is put upon the treatment of culture in the fiction itself and upon the history of interpreting Ulysses, and indeed Joyce’s entire corpus, and, by extension, literary modernism itself. Chapters 6 and 7 center upon work done from 1930 through the early 1940s. Chapter 6 focuses upon Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) and the rise of the New Criticism. Chapter 7 centers upon the ethnographic work of Hurston, primarily though not exclusively Mules and Men (1935), putting her work in conversation not only with that of fellow Boasian Benedict but also with the New Criticism as well as the iconoclastic but seminal criticism of Kenneth Burke.

Chapter 1

MAKING UP FOR LOST GROUND: ELIOT’S CULTURAL GEOGRAPHICS

THE FOLLOWING treatment of the work of perhaps the century’s preeminent architect of the culture concept, T. S. Eliot, operates essentially backwards, beginning with Eliot’s relatively late (1948) disquisition on the culture concept, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, and progressing back to his poetic masterwork of 1922, The Waste Land. This perhaps counterintuitive move back in time is made quite deliberately, in the hope that demonstrating where Eliot ultimately arrived in his wrestling with complex models for culture can make us better appreciate where he started and what his start, with The Waste Land and the early literary criticism, helped to make conceptually possible. The pairing and ordering of the two works also is meant as an assertion that The Waste Land, no less than the later work of social criticism, operates as a formative piece of social criticism and that we simply cannot realize the extent to which the poem (and the early literary criticism) does important work on culture before understanding where Eliot ultimately took the concept. In this regard we can apply Eliot’s notion of tradition to his own corpus: in Notes Eliot knows more about “culture” than he did in The Waste Land, but the poem is that which he knows.1 Like Notes, The Waste Land functions as an argument on culture, though as I hope to illustrate in this chapter, it is an argument that moves in at least a few directions at once, dealing with culture rendered on the one hand as geographically bounded and essentially metonymic (in the tradition of Boas) and on the other hand as comparative and essentially metaphoric (in the tradition of Frazer). One could say that the richness of both of Eliot’s texts arises in part from the confluence and collision of the competing models at work. Finally, throughout this chapter the stable and static text of the poem is emphasized less than the varying yet ultimately systemic ways in which the poem gets read, by Eliot himself (e.g., in the “Notes” to the poem as well as in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses) and by generations of critics, whose responses also figure, significantly, as argument on culture.

Eliot had a significant investment in the culture wars of his times. Those times stretch out to some sixty years, and that investment contributed significantly

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to his being a chief architect of literary modernism, modern literary criticism, modern professionalism, and, one could say, late modernity itself. By 1948, when he published Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot had long since consolidated his gains as a literary artist, critic, and editor; indeed, it had been a full twenty-six years since he published The Waste Land and become editor of the influential journal Criterion. And by 1948 he was already beginning to make a name for himself as a social critic (he had published his first full-length sociological treatise, The Idea of a Christian Society, in 1939).2 In Notes Eliot, like Arnold before him as well as Raymond Williams and Clifford Geertz after him, calls attention to culture as a much-debated and powerfully deployable concept. Like Geertz, who twenty-five years later complained that the term culture had come to mean “everything” and hence “it is necessary to choose,”3 Eliot straightforwardly admits that his “ambition” is to “rescue this word” from abuse. “I have observed with growing anxiety the career of this word culture,” Eliot confesses, and then he proceeds to try to whittle the word down to more precise proportions.4 The epigraph to Eliot’s volume, indicatively, is the Oxford English Dictionary definition, not of culture, but of definition: “the setting of bounds; limitation” (79). Five years after the appearance of Notes, the anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn in their definitive review of the anthropological roots of culture mistook Eliot’s definition of definition as “another (rare) meaning” of culture.5 And yet this mistake is intellectually understandable, given the tendency in formative usages of culture toward containment—for Arnold, of anarchy; for modern anthropologists, of the disparate acts, practices, and mentalities of a people into a comprehensible “complex whole.” Despite Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s real differences with Eliot (see below), they could not but unwittingly reproduce the notion that the development of culture as word and term was intimately tied to the setting of limits. It would be easy enough to personalize Eliot’s motive as a perverse rage for order. There is no doubt, for one thing, that Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism (he had converted in 1926, to the dismay of many) to a large extent fueled his social criticism, and indeed in Notes he explicitly criticizes Arnold for trying to prize apart religion and culture and declares his own intent “to expose the essential relation of culture to religion” (87). Kroeber and Kluckhohn in fact explicitly, and quite disapprovingly, note Eliot’s argument that, in their words, “religion is the way of life of a people and in this sense is identical with the people’s culture” (33). However, Eliot’s religious motives do not in any complete sense explain where Eliot takes culture, or what or whom he takes from in getting there. More specifically, those motives, or other social political filiations and efforts, do not thereby divorce his conception of culture from previous or then current anthropological theorizing.

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Eliot’s treatments of culture in Notes are strongly tied to the legacy of institutional beliefs and practices within the field of anthropology at the time, such as when Eliot asserts that the reader must constantly remind himself, as the author has constantly to do, of how much is here embraced by the term culture. It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale Cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list. (104)

Eliot’s enumeration, emphasizing in this case material culture, embraces both elite and broadly anthropological conceptions of cultural materials, and his offer to the reader to create one’s own “list” speaks to the quite apparent multifariousness of cultural representativeness: anyone’s “list,” he is suggesting, in its variousness and seeming idiosyncrasy will illustrate and argue for cultural wholeness and integrity. Williams in Culture and Society rightly points to the broadly anthropological nature of Eliot’s discussion of culture as “a whole way of life”6—indeed, Eliot himself in Notes states that “culture is not merely the sum of several activities, but a way of life” (114)—and yet Williams traces the evolution of that sense of culture quite generally from the “rise of industrialism” and in that vein views Eliot as a genealogical heir to Coleridge and Carlyle (227–33). While the debt to Coleridge and Carlyle is there, clearly Eliot’s impulse to delimit culture, to give culture “definition,” owes a more immediate debt to modern anthropology’s efforts to articulate a culture—and usually this means a primitive culture—as an autonomous social group having its own functionally distinct set of rules. Williams’s comment that Eliot, “like the rest of us, has been at least casually influenced” by the disciplines of anthropology and sociology (233) is, to say the least, insufficient. Any scholar of Eliot knows that he was a voracious reader of anthropology and that his anthropological interests surface in the various genres and phases of his career. In graduate school at Harvard he wrote an essay titled “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” which assessed the interpretive capabilities of a range of evolutionary anthropologists, including Tylor, Frazer, and Jane Harrison. Later he reviewed, in journals such as the Egoist, emerging volumes by social scientists such as Emile Durkheim and Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl, and in his literary criticism he referenced, commented upon, and provided literary analogies to the work of anthropologists ranging from Frazer to E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Most notoriously, he planted anthropological “sources,” principally Frazer, in his “Notes” to The Waste Land, and in later years he solicited and published work by anthropologists (such as Le´vyBruhl) and reviews of anthropological publications (such as Robert Graves on Malinowski) in the Criterion.7

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Given the extent to which Eliot was familiar with, and worked within, an anthropological culturalist frame, it is hardly surprising to find him referring, in the first chapter of Notes, to “the general, or anthropological, sense of the word culture as used for instance by E. B. Tylor in the title of his book Primitive Culture” (94). Perhaps less noticeable, though more anthropologically specific and significant, is the second of what he terms the “three important conditions for culture,” namely, “the necessity that a culture should be analyzable, geographically, into local cultures” (87). This passage is likely to be rapidly glossed over; however, what would appear through most of the twentieth century as a self-evident assertion really needs to be contemplated as a once arguable proposition that grew into a set of specific social-scientific practices. Without the contributions of Tylor, Boas, and a host of other formative modern social scientists, would it have been possible even to assert that a culture as a discrete system is “analyzable” or interpretable;8 that it is “geographically” based, that is, readable in terms of its ties to a plot of earth; and finally, that it needs to be contemplated in a minimal compass known as the “local”? In a general but easily overlooked sense Eliot’s conceptualization of the “local” unit indeed would not have been conceivable without the by then powerful anthropological legacy of Boas. It needs to be remembered that in 1887, one year before Eliot’s birth, Boas argued vehemently in the journal Science for Adolph Bastian’s conception of the “geographical province” as the basis for anthropological study, precisely because it required arguing at the time, and strongly asserted in his debate with Otis Mason over the proper display of ethnological artifacts that “by regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings . . . we cannot understand its meaning.”9 While Eliot’s seemingly commonsensical imperative to read cultures locally—on the ground, so to speak—owes much to the Boasian culturalist template, it also makes possible, or puts into motion, a number of the sociopolitical arguments that modern cultural anthropology, thanks mainly to Boas, would find, and indeed did find, repellant. Kroeber and Kluckhohn, in fact, note that “anthropologists are not likely to be very happy with Eliot’s emphasis on an elite,” and to bolster their own critique they add that “the literary reviews have tended to criticize the looseness and lack of rigor of his argument” (33). In Notes Eliot does generally read local culture (i.e., rural English culture) much as the evolutionary anthropologists Tylor and Frazer described primitive culture: distinguished from cosmopolitan culture by its simplistic social arrangement, on the whole making for an ignorant bliss. The elitism inherent in Eliot’s arguments for the “preservation of local culture” has been criticized since the essays making up the volume were first published—a former colleague of mine once referred to Eliot’s “let them sing folk songs” approach10— and indeed it is hard to read passages like “it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place in

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which they were born” without conjuring up that infamously, hauntingly prescient fascist modernist moment in 1934 when Eliot, in praise of local white Virginian attachment to the soil, advised against the existence of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” in any given local culture.11 Much in Eliot’s Notes was being contained, and yet Eliot’s professed intention to delimit culture hardly succeeded in keeping it within bounds, either linguistically or anthropologically. In fact, and this was largely deliberate on Eliot’s part, his effort produced a complex, highly variable, surprisingly elastic (if no less “elitist”) formulation of the term that kept debate on the term rolling. Raymond Williams, the most assiduous and brilliant of Marxist critics on culture, noted that regardless of one’s politics, one had to concede that Eliot, “in his discussion on culture . . . has carried the argument to an important new stage, and one on which the rehearsal of old pieces will be merely tedious.” If one did not take on Eliot’s formidable pondering upon the term, his insistence that culture be considered on several complex interpenetrating levels, Williams remarked, one might as well “retire from the field” (Culture and Society, 227). Eliot in fact opens his first chapter by dividing his discussion of “culture” under three headings—of the “individual,” of the “group or class,” and of the “whole society”—and then notes that “the difference between the three applications of the term can best be apprehended” by asking what meaning “the conscious aim to achieve culture” (94) has for each. While Eliot notes that the “general, or anthropological sense” of the term “has flourished independently of the other senses” (94)—which should be read as an assessment, not of the anthropological concept’s lack of impact, but of its generativeness within the now secure, autonomous institutional framework of cultural anthropology—he also describes the relation between the anthropological sense and his three senses as transitional in nature: in the study of “highly developed societies, and especially our own contemporary society,” the triadic relation between individual, group, and whole society needs to be considered, and in the process “anthropology passes over into sociology” (94). Eliot then proceeds to demonstrate what he terms the “thinness” of Arnold’s use of the term: Arnold cleaves to the culture as individual model, which, Eliot notes, rather simplistically assumes that culture is only consciously aimed at. Arnold makes the mistake, common “amongst men of letters and moralists,” Eliot claims, of considering “culture in the first two senses, and especially the first, without relation to the third” (94). Arnold’s argument, Eliot rather shrewdly notes, lacks a certain “social background” (94). What Eliot challenges his readers to do is to keep at least three notions of culture in mind at the same time. Crucially, he notes that no one individual can possess all the aspects of culture at the same time: it is only society as a whole that can do that. And it is for that very reason that culture as an allinclusive, integrative activity cannot be directed, particularly in a more “highly

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developed” society, which “develops toward functional complexity and differentiation.” In “the more primitive communities,” says Eliot, the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven. The Dyak who spends the better part of a season in shaping, carving and painting his barque of the peculiar design required for the annual ritual of head-hunting, is exercising several cultural activities at once—of art and religion, as well as of amphibious warfare. As civilisation becomes more complex, greater occupational specialisation evinces itself . . . [and] it is only at a much further stage that religion, science, politics and art become abstractly conceived apart from each other. (96–97)

Here Eliot deploys both evolutionary and modern anthropological culturalist assumptions. While the phrase “functional complexity and differentiation” could not have been penned before the 1930s, when functionalism as method became orthodox within the field of professional anthropology, Eliot’s societal gradations, from the cohesion of primitive Dyak ritual on one end to civilized separation of cultured activities on the other, could have been pulled right out of Tylor’s Primitive Culture or Frazer’s Golden Bough. Now, Eliot’s attitude toward “primitive” culture is hardly that of Frazer, who considered it to be the product, overall, of bad thinking. However, it remains significant that in 1948, in a benchmark volume on the culture, Eliot would pen the term “primitive communities” at all. While one could say that Eliot is a proponent of what he terms “advanced civilization,” qualifiers must immediately follow. First, in the “development” of any society, “loss” is all we can count on for sure: “gain or compensation is almost always conceivable but never certain” (98). And more specifically, Eliot notes that the increased differentiation that goes along with “development” leads inevitably to cultural disintegration, which is in fact where Eliot sees himself living: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human sciences.” Looking ahead, Eliot points to the probability of “a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture” (91). Williams makes the important point that the strength of Eliot’s volume— the variability of the definitions of culture—often turns to weakness, in that one discerns a “sense of sliding of definitions.” At one moment Eliot argues on the basis of the anthropological notion of culture as a whole way of life, at another moment on the basis of culture as leisure activity, and at still another moment on that of art (234). And in fact, though Williams does not note this, that is basically the argument Eliot uses against Arnold: when Arnold, or anyone for that matter, argues for the inculcation of culture, Eliot notes, “there are several kinds of attainment which we may have in mind in different contexts,” among them “urbanity,” “philosophy,” and “the arts” (95). Like Kroeber and

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Kluckhohn, apparently Eliot cannot but replay the logically weak and yet powerfully alluring tendency to generate multiple, seemingly contradictory significations of culture. Kroeber and Kluckhohn also object to Eliot’s “sliding of definitions.” While on the one hand they state that “Eliot speaks of culture in the quite concrete denotation of certain anthropologists” and “accepts the contemporary anthropological notion that culture has organization as well as content” (here they quote Eliot’s definition of culture as not just the “sum of several activities, but a way of life”), on the other hand they fault Eliot for defining culture evaluatively, quoting Eliot’s remark that “Culture may even be described as that which makes life worth living” (32–33). What fundamentally bothers Kroeber and Kluckhohn, however, is not that Eliot is confused but that, and they are quite explicit here, he “attempts to bridge the gap between the conception of the social sciences and that of literary men and philosophers. He quotes Tylor on the one hand and Matthew Arnold on the other” (32). Noteworthy here is the assumption that there has been, is, and ought to be such a gap. On one hand, Kroeber and Kluckhohn straightforwardly hold that there is no intimate or even substantive connection between the humanistic and anthropological developments of the culture concept. The close proximity of the publication of Tylor’s book and Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy is considered sheer coincidence: “Curiously enough,” they write, “ ‘culture’ became popularized as a literary word in England in a book which appeared just two years before Tylor’s” (29). One could interpret Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s insistence upon the fact of and need for this gap as a quite explicitly defensive disciplinary move: bridging that gap would cost anthropology an ethos of distinctiveness, and indeed they note that one of the things “anthropologists are not likely to be happy with” in Eliot’s Notes is precisely “his reconciliation of the humanistic and social science views” (33). From another perspective, this refusal to reconcile can be read as an understandable resentment on the part of anthropologists over treatment received at the hands of the humanists. For example, Kroeber and Kluckhohn underscore that the original Oxford English Dictionary, of 1893, made no mention of Tylor’s famous and founding definition of 1871 and that it was not until 1933 that “this meaning was finally accorded recognition, sixtytwo years after the fact” (33). At the same time, the refusal to reconcile with the humanists can be said to reflect quite simply the commitment to cultural relativism, which, rightly or wrongly, Kroeber and Kluckhohn feared would be muddied or compromised by any brokering with humanism, and most certainly with Eliot’s brand. And it is a fair question, after all, to ask how and why a culture could be at one and the same time the “way of life” of an entire people and possibly not “worth living.” That question was asked not only by anthropologists but by humanists as well. Williams, in fact, comments that if one were to assume that Eliot was

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relying upon the anthropological definition of culture when he looked forward to a period of “no culture,” then “it amounts to saying that there could be a period in which there was no common life, at any level” (234). And yet Williams does not note that in another generation and genre, in a poetic register written twenty-five years earlier, and like Notes in the wake of a world war, Eliot’s rhetorically flawed proposition was wrought into a powerful image of cultural-geographical devastation, a “heap of broken images” labeled “waste land.” Nor does Williams, with his penchant for literary-intellectual history and slighting of the history of anthropology, consider the anthropological legacies that could make the notion of “no common life, at any level,” not only thinkable but even alluring.

The 1920s, as George Stocking notes, saw a virtual explosion of usage of the culture concept in social-scientific speculation: “Culture burst into flower,” he proclaims, and for proof cites Kroeber and Kluckhohn, the concept’s “analytic bibliographical chronologists,” who demonstrate that “this was the moment when the citations burgeoned.”12 Stocking’s authoritative history notes that the students of Boas, “building on Boas’ critique of evolutionary culture . . . joined forces in fashioning and making fashionable culture, which has come to be called ‘the foundation stone of the social sciences’ ” (285). In discussing the dramatic and important rise of the “cultural criticism” in the early 1920s, Stocking cites as “most notable” the work of Edward Sapir, who, Stocking notes, ranks third in the number of citations in the Kroeber and Kluckhohn volume and whose essay “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” became “a major document in the development of the anthropological culture concept” (288). Eliot’s The Waste Land first appeared, without its famous “Notes,” on the opening pages of the November 1922 issue of the Dial. Also in that issue was a review by Edward Sapir entitled “A Symposium of the Exotic,” an assessment of an anthology of writings on North American Indian tribes edited by his colleague Elsie Clew Parsons. Sapir’s appearance in the Dial, a magazine that in fact published a good number of the leading intellectuals and artists of the period, was not unusual, nor was Eliot’s: between 1917 and 1922 Sapir published sixteen essays and reviews in the Dial, six in 1922 alone,13 and aside from The Waste Land, Eliot between 1920 and 1923 wrote the “London Letter,” a semiregular feature of the magazine. In back-to-back issues in 1920 there appeared an appreciative assessment of Arnold by Eliot (in which he said of Arnold that “if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again”) and Sapir’s review of Robert Lowie’s Primitive Society.14

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In 1919 Sapir published in the Dial a piece called “Civilization and Culture,” which would become part 2 of “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” which appeared in final form in the American Journal of Sociology in 1924.15 In the Dial essay Sapir established his famous distinction between a “genuine culture,” characterized as “not of necessity either ’high’ or ’low’ ” but rather “merely inherently harmonious, balanced, self-satisfactory,” and “spurious Cultures,” which lack the “harmonious synthesis” of the “genuine” but like the latter “are just as easily conceivable in conditions of general advanced enlightenment as in those of relative ignorance and squalor” (232). The “genuine culture,” Sapir adds, “is, ideally speaking, a culture in which nothing is spiritually meaningless” and one that is “free of spiritual discords, of the dry rot of social habit, devitalized” (232–33). Sapir then proceeds by example to contrast members of “genuine” and “spurious” cultures. On the spurious side, there is the contemporary “telephone girl,” who “for economic reasons, lends her capacities, during the greater part of the living day, to the manipulations of a technical routine . . . that answers to no spiritual needs of her own.” On the genuine side, there is the “American Indian,” who “solves the economic problem with salmon-spear and rabbit”; as such, the Indian is “operating on a relatively low level of civilization,” and yet “represents . . . an incomparably higher solution than our telephone girl.” While cautioning that his valuation is made on the basis neither of “the effective directness of economic effort, nor of any sentimentalizing regrets as to the passing of ’natural man,’ ” Sapir concludes that the Indian’s salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type of activity than that of the telephone girl or mill hand because there is normally no sense of spiritual frustration during its prosecution, no feeling of subservience to tyrannous yet largely inchoate demands, further because it works in naturally with all the rest of the Indian’s activities instead of standing out as a desert patch of merely economic effort in the whole of life. (234)

Three years after the publication of the Sapir essay the Dial would again publish a piece explicating the “dry rot” and “desert patch” of “spurious culture,” a “waste land” in which culture is rendered unregenerate, a literalized topography of culture “where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water.”16 Again the dissociation of modern labor is signified—“at the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (lines 215–17)—and again through the figure of a working woman, not a “telephone girl” but a “typist,” who, “home at teatime,” prepares her pathetically rendered flat for the “expected guest,” the “young man carbuncular” whose “exploring hands encounter no defence” and who thus “makes a welcome of indifference” (lines 230–42). Again spuriousness functions as evaluative measure—rapist “young man carbuncular” is figured

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as one “on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire” (lines 233–34)—and even the assault is rendered as something other than “genuine” rape: “Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: / ’Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over’ ” (lines 251–52). While Eliot would not feature an American Indian as the “genuine” foil to the typist, ancient civilizations are featured as structural polarities to contemporary society, most prominently that of the subcontinent of India, whose Upanishads furnish the three DAs—Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata (“give,” “sympathize,” “control”)—which function near the poem’s end as prospective spiritual guides to the recovery of culture. Also present as contrastive counterparts to contemporary society are Ancient Greece, whose Sibyl is featured as the opening cautionary voice and whose Tiresias oversees and perhaps narrates the entire poem, and Elizabethan England, whose queen provides a plaintive and authoritative voice in the poem and whose authors—Shakespeare, Kyd— are alluded to and borrowed from. Sapir in his Dial essay in fact specifically cites both “the Athenian culture of the Age of Pericles and . . . the English culture of Elizabethan days” as “great cultures, those that we instinctively feel have been healthy spiritual organisms” (234). While Eliot’s poem confounds any easy reading of ancient culture as genuine and contemporary culture as spurious, clearly in the main Eliot’s thinking, both in the literary criticism leading up to the publication of The Waste Land and in the Notes of a generation later, was characterized by a schema of cultural development closely akin to Sapir’s. In his essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” published one year before The Waste Land and two years after Sapir’s Dial essay, Eliot’s famous critical phrase “dissociation of sensibility” in fact is dependent upon just such a reading of Renaissance genuineness and post-Renaissance spuriousness: Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.17

As with Sapir’s conception of genuineness, the integrative wholeness of experience is primary; Donne’s mind functions not only within but as synecdoche of a culture that, in Sapir’s words, is “inherently harmonious, balanced, selfsatisfactory,” and “in which nothing is spiritually meaningless, in which no important part of the general functioning brings with it a sense of frustration” (233). What is important for both is not the quality of the parts or components of the given culture that Sapir’s Indian and Eliot’s poet live within and produce

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from but rather the “harmonious synthesis” (Sapir) or creation of “new wholes” (Eliot) that can be made from them. In Notes, published twenty-five years after “The Metaphysical Poets,” the integration of cultural components remains key: for the Dyak, “the several activities of culture are inextricably interwoven,” whereas “at a much further stage,” approximating that of Eliot’s own civilization, “religion, science, politics, and art become abstractly conceived apart form each other” (96–97). Now Eliot, like Sapir, is hardly the sentimental primitivist, and clearly for both the median stage of complex and yet not overdeveloped abstraction and specialization typified by ancient Athens or Elizabethan England is much to be preferred. However, the Dyak, like Sapir’s Indian tribe, is meant to represent a healthier cultural climate than that of the “further stage”: the “cultural disintegration” that “may ensue upon cultural specialisation,” Eliot underscores, “is the most serious and the most difficult to repair” (98). Eliot’s “cultural disintegration” and Sapir’s “spurious culture” share a common problematic that results, importantly, from a varied and yet similar intellectual legacy: both argue for the primacy of the functionality of culture and its products over any content necessary to that culture, yet in so doing they produce an evaluative schema by which to judge “culture” and its products. Such a logic says, in effect, that in content all cultures and their products— poems, say—are equal, but in terms of their functionality some cultures and cultural products are more equal than others. For both, culture is generic, the “way of life,” while at the same time it can disappear, as Eliot makes clear with his concept of dissociation and as Sapir attests in the Dial essay when he asserts, “Civilization, as a whole, moves on; culture comes and goes” (237). Sapir argues both culture’s disappearance and its appearance precisely through the claim that “the maxima of culture have been frequently reached in low levels of sophistication” (237); this claim attests to Sapir’s culturally relativist motive and yet underscores the hierarchical dimension of his important argument. In this respect Sapir himself is attempting—as Kroeber and Kluckhohn accused Eliot of doing—to “bridge the gap” between anthropological and humanist conceptions of culture; he is arguing for the generic existence of culture while assessing the worth of a particular culture. And while Sapir can be said to be Arnoldian in his assertion that culture must be cultivated, given that it can disappear, we must remember that he also was drawing from Boas’s conception, as borrowed from German theorizing, of the “genius of a people.” In other words, the hierarchical component of Sapir’s argument, and Eliot’s for that matter, cannot be simply traced to a “humanist” origin. The point here is not simply to establish Sapir’s influence upon Eliot (though there may have been such an influence) but to illustrate the common lines of argument and, most importantly, to bring to the fore the shared legacies of the anthropological and humanistic conceptions of culture that histories of the

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disciplines—such as Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s—did not recognize or would have us forget. The problem of the simultaneous generalizability and valuativeness of culture, present in the pages of both Arnold and Tylor, is significantly tied to the notion of the concept’s wholeness, which in itself grants respect to anything that is whole but uses that very wholeness as an evaluative criterion. The notion of the synthesized whole has important ramifications for other key literary critical concepts of Eliot. His enormously important “impersonal theory of poetry,” appearing in his 1919 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” precisely argues that “it is not the ’greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts” (Selected Essays, 8). “Great poetry,” Eliot notes, “may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several,” or, in fact, “may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever”: what matters is the “proper combination,” the formation of the “new compound,” that occurs within the “receptacle” that is the “poet’s mind” (8). As in the case of Sapir’s “genuine” Indian culture, what determines the greatness or “genuineness” of the poem is determined not by the kind of, quality of, “high” or “low” nature of, the parts but rather by the totality that results from the particular combinations of cultural components. Eliot’s strategy of reading a poem as a combinatory and hence contained whole in effect functions as a literary critical equivalent to the anthropological concept of cultural relativism as developed by Boas and his disciples, in particular Sapir. Poems, like primitive cultures, are self-contained, made up of particular combinations of elements. As such they should be regarded according to the standards of their own combinatory wholeness rather than the critic’s evaluation of the quality of their parts.18 It is according to this principle that Eliot in “Hamlet and His Problems” proclaims that in approaching a work of art—in this case Shakespeare’s Hamlet—the critic needs to focus upon “the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the leading character” or, for that matter, any other single distinguishing element. In fact, Eliot asserts that Hamlet fails as a play because it fails as a “whole”: it lacks the externally perceivable structure that give its “emotion” formal expression in art. Hamlet the play does not function as a whole because it lacks what Eliot claims other Shakespeare plays, and all great art, possess, that is, an “objective correlative,” famously defined here as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”19 To function as art, according to Eliot, a work must demonstrate a structure that makes it readably, signifiably, whole. This formidable formalist argument, soon to become an unarguable literary critical assumption, closely parallels

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what Renato Rosaldo sees as modern anthropology’s interpretive bias toward whatever is formalistically, ritualistically expressed in a culture. Anthropology in the main, Rosaldo observes, “favors interpretations that equate analytical depth with cultural elaboration” and thus tends to focus on “visibly bounded areas” that have “definite locations in space” and are temporally bound.20 Focusing in particular on grief over the death of a loved one, as felt both by himself and by Ilongot tribal members, Rosaldo questions the assumption within anthropology that “the greatest human import resides in the densest forest of symbols” and asks, “Do people always in fact describe most thickly what matters most to them?” (2) Eliot, like the modern anthropologists of Rosaldo’s reading, insists that in the world (or culture) of a literary work the actors must signify, describe most thickly, elaborate upon, what is troubling them. Otherwise one is not making good art, just as doing otherwise in orthodox cultural anthropology, according to Rosaldo, results in deficient social science. According to Eliot, Hamlet the play fails precisely because Hamlet the character will not elaborate upon the grief for his father: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (125). The objective correlative in this sense is an important analogue to the modern anthropological concept of ritual: both, importantly, function as closed, holistic, externalized structures that require and enable reading by professionals, and as such both contain implicit evaluations of what is recognized as culture (in or as literary artworks or peoples). Obviously, Eliot’s critical relativism is not simply and completely relative, in the sense that all poems, or plays, ought to be equally regarded. Though Eliot establishes no simple evaluative formula for literary art, it is clear that for a poem to be meritorious, a readable wholeness is required. In addition, the more intense the creative process of transmuting diverse and complex cultural materials into a whole, the more admirable the effort and hence the more admirable the artistic product. (Despite Eliot’s attempted severance of the author’s feeling or intention from the result or product, the authorial process or “labor” seems to creep in as an evaluative measure.) Eliot effected in the twentieth century a major reconsideration and consequent canonization of the Metaphysical poets precisely through this argument. In “The Metaphysical Poets” he attacks Samuel Johnson’s pejorative observation that in Metaphysical poetry “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” (Selected Essays, 243). Eliot responds first by asserting that “a degree of heterogeneity compelled into unity is omnipresent in poetry” (243), in effect achieving for these poets a kind of equity with other poets; but then, in his statement on “dissociation of sensibility,” Eliot actually makes the case for the superiority of Metaphysical poetry, whose practitioners “possessed a mechanism of sensibility that could devour any kind of experience,” for whom, importantly, “experiences are always forming new wholes.” As with

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Sapir, then, the capability of a poet (for Sapir, read “tribal member”) to shape complexly various cultural material into utter coherence becomes the fundamental criterion for cultural evaluation.

A major argument of this volume is that the integrative wholeness that came to characterize, indeed qualify something as, a work of art in modernist criticism does not merely resemble the holism of the culture concept but in fact is a version of it. Eliot was probably the chief architect of that modern criticism, and so it is especially significant that his conception of holism extended to characterize and complexly animate not only a specific work of art like a poem but collocations of works, grouped as those by a given author, by a given nation, or by the entire Western tradition, the latter of which becomes, in Arnoldian terms at least, a definition of culture itself. For example, in 1930, in the introduction to G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire, Eliot spelled out the imperative “to take Shakespeare’s plays as a whole, no longer to single out several plays as the greatest,” and went on to applaud Knight for his effort “in pursuing his search for the pattern below the level of ‘plot’ and ‘character.’ ”21 And in a more extensive application of holism, in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot, again famously, states that “no poet, no artist, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism” (Selected Essays, 4–5). Eliot’s claim here that any artist cannot be assessed without considering the tradition, or traditions, with which he is affiliated is deeply anthropological, Boasian in its insistence that cultural products cannot be shorn from their original contexts: note, again, Boas’s late-century statement that “by regarding a single implement outside of its surroundings . . . we cannot understand its meaning” (Stocking, Shaping, 62). Significantly, the injunctions of both Boas and Eliot are directed not toward their subjects—tribes, poets—but toward the practitioners in their respective culture-reading disciplines—anthropologists and literary critics. Looked at in this light, Eliot’s argument becomes a debate on the proper and profitable mode of exhibiting cultural artifacts. And as such Eliot’s assertion is eminently historical in a Boasian sense; that is, it is based upon conceptions of geographical-cultural boundaries, contact, diffusion of influence, and adaptation.22 Eliot’s position here is also deeply relativist in that the assessment of any individual work of art, even within an “aesthetic” critical frame, needs to consider the relation of the work to perhaps several concentric wholes (author, nation, Western culture). Eliot’s argument that criticism must realign itself is dependent upon the claim that groups of writers form dynamic but, impor-

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tantly, cohesive integrative wholes, which he spells out and epitomizes when discussing “what happens when a new work of art,” through critical appreciation, enters into the canon’s mainstream: The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work or art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. (Selected Essays, 5)

The italics on whole are, significantly and appropriately, Eliot’s, for whatever specifically happens to artworks in their singular as well as their collective sense in Eliot’s schema (and much critical debate has ensued over that question), it is the wholeness of the “ideal order,” both before and after “the introduction of the new,” that remains intact. Now, while the conception of wholeness remains stable—and it needs reminding that Eliot is articulating here an interpretive ideal, not an actual mystical transport of literary works—the whole itself can be considered in an extended as well as a narrowed range, concentrically, from country, say, to continent. It is necessary to grasp, Eliot says, that “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Selected Essays, 4). As in Notes, written almost thirty years later, Eliot is demanding that the (literary or social) critic keep at least two levels, ranges, of tradition or culture in mind at one moment. In “The Function of Criticism,” published two years after The Waste Land, Eliot reiterates the argument made in “Tradition”: I thought of literature then, as I think of it now, of the literature of the world, of the literature of Europe, of the literature of a single country, not as a collection of writings by individuals, but as “organic wholes,” as systems in relation to which, and only in relation to which, individual works of literary art, and the works of individual artists, have their significance. (Selected Essays, 12–13)

Recalling his own words on literature as a “whole existing order” (here he is quoting from “Tradition”), he asserts that “the function of criticism seems to be essentially a problem of order too” (Selected Essays, 12). Here Eliot is only following upon the argument for the necessity of criticism made in “Tradition,” where he stated that “every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but also its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than those of its creative genius” (3). In “The Function of Criticism” he follows not only upon “Tradition” but, in argument and title, upon Arnold’s “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” as well (so much so that Eliot steps into Arnold’s

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very shoes, having to perform all his labor over again), for Eliot, like Arnold, centers his attention upon the national, or perhaps more accurately, the national as tribal, and thereby makes his argument for the value of and need for literary criticism. In a broad racial-sociological sweep Eliot then goes on to compare the French critical mind with the English, much as Arnold had some fifty years earlier, in order to make the point that the English ought to regard criticism, not as a “less spontaneous” superfluity, but rather as a natural part of the cultural experience, “as inevitable as breathing” (3). Less overt than the Arnoldian influence but perhaps as significant and as intimately related to it is the Boasian legacy. The notion that a “nation” or “race” has its own “creative” as well as “critical turn of mind” bears significant relation to Boas’s notion of the “genius of a people,” which itself is a deeply Herderian notion. In this respect Eliot is working within a Boasian frame when he articulates that “genius” or “turn of mind” through the careful cultivation of what he calls “the historical sense,” a diachronic assessment of tradition centered upon a geographically bounded unit. And yet for Eliot the “historical sense” does not involve the mere chronological-serial cataloguing of literary artifacts; indeed, when he locates his method as “aesthetic” and “not merely historical,” he is downplaying, not historicism itself, but rather the orthodox historical literary criticism of his own day. Eliot was of the generation of the students of Boas rather than of Boas himself, and in that respect the traditional historical criticism to which he alludes and against which his criticism wars, in its complex formalist and evaluative dimensions, shares important features with the work of Boas. Though he articulated the notion of the “genius of a people,” Boas, as Stocking observes, was content to undertheorize it—in this regard Stocking refers to Boas’s anthropology as a “spare discipline” (Shaping, 15)—and indeed Boas never fully reconciled the relation of his belief in culture as an “accidental accretion of individual elements” to that “genius,” referred to by Stocking as that “integrated spiritual totality that somehow conditioned the form of its elements” (Shaping, 5–6). Boas’s belief in cultural accretion, it could be said, encouraged a methodology of accretion, of the slow and deliberate collection of the distribution of a given folk item within a given geographically bounded unit, with the aim of arriving at a historical trajectory or chronological routing of that item (where it began, and from there by what routes and in what order it traveled). As Stocking notes, as early as 1887 Boas argued for the imperative of “tracing the full history of the single phenomenon” in part on the grounds that ultimately the collection and comparison of such “histories of growth” might result in discovering the “general laws” of human culture (Shaping, 12). However, the process of accumulating such histories could be arduous and tiresome. It was with this method that Sapir, in his early years of research, began to grow impatient.

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Richard Handler chronicles this dissatisfaction, beginning around 1916, as found in Sapir’s letters to Robert Lowie, a fellow student of Boas. Sapir reports to Lowie that he has “an enormous amount of linguistic and ethnological data on my hands from various tribes, certainly enough to keep me busy for five years of concentrated work.”23 And yet, he confesses, “I don’t somehow feel as much positive impulse to disgorge as I should,” at least compared with his passion, especially in that period, for his music and his poetry. In a revelatory passage, Sapir tries to explain what is lacking in his work: I find that what I most care for is beauty of form, whether in substance, or even more keenly, in spirit. A perfect style, a well-balanced system of philosophy, a perfect bit of music, a clearly-conceived linguistic organism, the beauty of mathematical relations—these are some of the things that . . . most deeply stirred me. How can the job-lot of necessarily unco-ordinated or badly co-ordinated facts that we amass in our field-work satisfy such longings? (214)

Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” published in the Dial version three years later, finds that “beauty of form,” that “perfect style,” in his theorization of “genuine culture.” There, he articulated his own “ideal order” through which the “unco-ordinated or badly co-ordinated facts” of anthropology could be aesthetically literarily fused. While in the span of a few years Eliot defined the good poem just as Sapir articulated a good “culture,” as a “clearly-conceived linguistic organism,” so Sapir defined good cultures as Eliot articulated good poems, as externalized structures in which “experiences are always forming new wholes.” Like Eliot’s Metaphysical poet, Sapir wants and wishes into existence a way of life that “is constantly amalgamating disparate experience,” in which “the noise of the typewriter” and “the smell of cooking” are made whole. What is expressed as personal becomes, for Sapir, important business. Though expressed in the register of personal lack, Sapir’s desires limn felt institutional longings—felt not only by Sapir but by other Boasians as well24—for a theory of culture that could weld the diverse and variegated cultural mate´riel into a theoretically powerful, aesthetically resonant, and socially useful whole. Both Sapir and Eliot, for disciplinary purposes, required and furnished an “order,” holism, or synthesis lacking in the historicism of their respective fields. And yet this arrival at common forms in diverse disciplines is not simply and only a matter of the literary critic finding in the poem what the anthropologist finds in the culture. Indeed, an argument can be made that both Sapir and Eliot in this case conceived similar theories in the arena of literary criticism that were then transposed to social criticism. Drawing from the literary essays Sapir published in that period, particularly “The Twilight of Rhyme,” published in the Dial in 1917, Handler finds Sapir articulating a “theory of art” in which “sincerity of expression” (Sapir’s words) is achieved by the artist through a “delicate balance” between what Sapir calls “self-expression” and

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“perfection of form” (219). Handler rightly notes that this joining of “two seemingly contradictory forces—cultural form and individual expression—” will become critical to Sapir’s “theory of culture” as epitomized in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (219). In this regard, then, an aesthetic conception of “sincerity” transmutes into an anthropological notion of the “genuine.” Now, Sapir’s formulation of “sincerity” undoubtedly tilts more toward the “individual expression” pole than does Eliot’s theory of “individual talent”; Sapir in fact sees as an ultimate end “the arrival . . . at that mode of expression that is best suited to the unique conception of the artist” (219). Eliot’s “Tradition” suggests that there is no such “unique conception,” or in any case that one does not produce great art by pursuing according to such terms. Still, Eliot, like Sapir, argues that the poet mediates between the poles of individual achievement and tradition. In this respect, it is important not to downplay the second of Eliot’s two necessary terms, “individual talent.” Eliot, like Sapir, holds forth on the valence of individual expression but, also like Sapir, asserts that such expression can only be achieved by working with and through traditional, received forms. Both Sapir’s and Eliot’s “literary” arguments make their way into social criticism—in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” and Notes, respectively—and in both cases what results is a transmutation that preserves the oscillations between achievement or attainment, based upon a hierarchical, evaluative norm, and a more broadly social conception of tradition in which the culture, tradition, and history of a people entire must be received and acknowledged. In this sense both writers enact and extend a complex fusion of so-called elite and anthropological cultural models; culture, again, becomes generic, a thing of the people, while at the same time retaining, while complicating, the conception of individual attainment.

In Notes towards the Definition of Culture Eliot holds forth that one cannot be a proponent of culture simply because culture will not have it: it will not do as it is told. In this respect Eliot, like Sapir before him and Raymond Williams after him, functions rhetorically as an eminent social planner of the century who works according to the assumption that culture cannot be planned. Indeed, in Notes Eliot emphasizes that he is not offering “a set of directions for fabricating a culture” because culture, after all—and this is Eliot’s crucial “first condition” of culture—“is organic (not merely planned, but growing)” (87). Thus, Eliot humbly submits, all he can do is state what he discerns to be the “essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture.” Twenty-five years earlier, in “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Sapir, also writing in the wake of a world war, asserted that “we need not be too much astonished if a Periclean culture does not somehow automatically burst into

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bloom.”25 And Sapir prefigures Eliot as well by, importantly, qualifying his argument, stating that while “the war and its aftermath cannot be a sufficient cultural cause”—cannot, in other words, create “culture”—they do constitute “another set of favouring conditions” (331). The destructive aspects of war, in other words, can create the climate for culture growth. Echoing Arnold’s summoning of anarchy as apocalyptic alternative, Sapir borrows heavily from the Arnoldian grammar and rhetoric of the relation between culture and industry: Our victories have been brilliant, but they have also too often been barren for culture. . . . Stretching back opulently in our easy chairs, we expect great cultural things to happen to us. We have wound up the machinery, and admirable machinery it is; it is “up to” culture to come forth, in heavy panoply. (330)

In Eliot’s Notes as well the organic tropes for culture, trailing their Arnoldian legacies, crop up everywhere: “Machinery is necessary, and the more perfect the machine the better. But culture is something that must grow,” Eliot notes; “you cannot build a tree, you can only plant it, and care for it, and wait for it to mature in its due time” (196). A generation earlier Sapir implemented the metaphor of the slow nurture of culture and in doing so assessed its suitability as metaphor: It would be remarkable if a plant, flourishing in heavy black loam, suddenly acquired a new virility on transplantation into a shallow sandy soil. Metaphors are dangerous things that prove nothing, but experience suggests the soundness of this particular metaphor. Indeed, there is nothing more tenuous, more shamelessly imitative and external, less virile and self-joyous, than the cultures of so-called “new countries.” (321–22)

The country Sapir discusses in this context is America, to which he had immigrated and from which Eliot, several years earlier, had fled in search of his English roots. “If signs of a genuinely blossoming culture are belatedly beginning to appear, it is not because America is still new,” Sapir argues; rather, he says, the signs of culture growth are there because America is “coming of age, beginning to feel a little old” (322). While Eliot and Sapir agree on the adolescence and hence the relative lack of genuineness in American culture, Sapir trains his attention on the revitalization of American culture. Writing on the other end of the culture-as-life-cycle spectrum, Eliot in Notes, focusing on Europe generally and England particularly, quite resolutely states that one cannot bring cultures back from the dead: “What is wanted is not to restore a vanished, or revive a vanishing culture under modern conditions which make it impossible, but to grow a contemporary culture from the old roots” (127). Twenty-five years earlier, in 1922, Eliot articulated a less overt but equally significant culturalist argument in arborescent form: “The Burial of the Dead,” part 1 of The Waste Land. Here culture bodies forth as plant/corpse dead, or

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dying, perhaps waiting to be reborn, in its winter, fed “A little life with dried tubers” (line 7). Even a cursory glance at the history of reading The Waste Land shows that to be the suspense of the poem, for all of its multivalent complexities: waiting to see what will come of the old roots. Will the culture, as embodied in the corpse/tree/Fisher King, flourish again from the roots? Important critical work over the decades, such as that by Cleanth Brooks in the 1930s and John Vickery in the 1970s,26 has been performed upon the complex links of mythic vegetation gods, as interpreted mainly by Frazer, and the metaphors of roots, waste land, corpses, and kings that appear to structure the poem. However, that criticism, in its study of the influence of mythic materials upon the literary masterpiece, has tended to naturalize myth as the primary category of analysis: readers have been, in effect, routinized into tracing the evolving stages of myth from its primitive-folk or grand-classical forms to its individualized, ironized modernist literary sculptings. What over the decades has been consistently ignored is the “culture work” being done, in the poem itself and in readings of it, in the form of arguments, or assumptions, concerning the origin, configuration, transmission, or disintegration of social processes we have come to recognize as culture. For one thing, critics working to mine the mythic underground of the metaphors of king, folk, and land in effect have replicated and reinforced a culturalist belief about the isomorphism of a people and the land. However, we must ask why it should be assumed, and toward what consequence, that a “culture” is essentially something rooted in a soil. Contemporary anthropological theory has challenged the unreflective acceptance of the belief that cultures are characterized by, defined by, bounded within, limited to, a stretch of territory. Arjun Appadurai, for one, has observed that such characterizing of tribal peoples by anthropologists has the effect of “incarcerating” those peoples, demeaningly limiting them to a compass of earth from which they have, in a sense, autochthonously sprung. And Liisa Malkki has pointed to the persistence of botanical tropes, in both popular culture and anthropological theory, that channel our thinking of cultural configuration in terms of the bind of particular cultures to particular plots of land. And James Clifford has proposed thinking of culture in terms of “routes,” the constantly negotiated pathways by which people travel, rather than “roots,” the unmoving originary epicenters of dwelling.27 Certainly much of the power of the opening of Eliot’s poem proceeds from his deftness in working the trope of land as culture. This trope, profitably borrowed in part from Frazer’s renditions of mythic-primitive alliances of earth and tribe, assumes, as the anthropologists Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson note, that “solidarity and identity” do indeed depend upon, work through, a social life in which on-the-ground “contiguity and face to face contact . . . are paramount.”28 The intimate association of wasted land and wasted people in the poem is figured, as in Eliot’s later poem “The Hollow Men,” through a

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landscape that intimately blends nature and culture: a land of “stony rubbish” (line 20), where April nonetheless is “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire” (lines 1–3). In this respect the poem can be termed eminently metonymic, at least in Roman Jakobson’s articulation of metonymy.29 One could say that the land is identified with, substitutes for, the culture that rests upon it, the people who are bound to it, who are, in turn, dependent upon (if one chooses to take Eliot’s notes on Jessie Weston seriously)30 the king who lives among them and synechdochically represents them. The trope in this case works precisely because of the assumption of the contiguousness of the cultural unit as it resides upon a piece of earth. The poem itself encouraged readings that in turn naturalized that isomorphism and in the process made it less visible as a concept and more resonant as a feeling. For example, the mythic charting of the poem in Brooks’s enormously influential study of 1939, “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth,” is dependent precisely upon the assertion-claimed-assumption that in the poem land and people, nature and culture, are one: “The plight of the land is summed up by, and connected with, the plight of the lord of the land, the Fisher King, who has been rendered impotent by maiming or sickness” (137). While Brooks’s critique is signal in its refusal to view the poem as simply saying that historical cultures—ancient Greece, Elizabethan England—are healthy and contemporary culture is sick (166–72), his reading nonetheless operates through the register of the sickness or health of land as culture.31 The identification of soil and culture appears so commonsensical, so elemental, so intuitive, but it is nonetheless constructed. And yet the modes by which Eliot constructed the poem do not have to be read pejoratively. Construction in this regard does not have to amount to insincerity, for one cannot assume that there is one right definition of culture, after all. Nor need it be equated with unoriginality. In fact, the anthropologist Michael Taussig, in an attempt to recoup the concept of mimesis as “making,” writes of the “magical” sense of construction, in a spirit of admiring the persistence and power of the invention of figurality. Once we identify something as constructed, Taussig asks, “what do we do with this old insight? If life is constructed, how come it appears so immutable? How come culture appears so natural?”32 Eliot is a wizard at making culture appear natural. At the poem’s finish it is thunder, after all—“Then spoke the thunder / DA” (lines 400–401)—that ends up posing the big life questions, the three DAs (Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata), which elicit the curious profusion of responses, or nonresponses (depending upon one’s reading), that roll the poem toward its conclusion. Eliot’s mythic identification of land and people is a form of magic, after all, and Frazerian magic specifically, one of the two forms of magic for whose articulation Frazer is famous . The “law of contact” is what Frazer termed it, the supposed “primi-

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tive” belief that a sympathy resides between things that are, or once were, in contact, in proximity—peoples and their lands, for instance.33 According to this reading, Eliot becomes a sort of shaman, reproducing, transmuting, in modern mythic form, contact magic, making people long for lost connections.34 While Eliot is replaying an age-old magical-metonymic strategy institutionalized by Frazer, dean of evolutionary anthropology, this identification of a wasted people bound to a wasted land is also concomitant with the Boasian notion that discrete people are bound to discrete places and that these people constitute cultures with their own distinct patterns, their own legitimate ways of knowing. Now, Eliot did not advertise this filiation as he did his debt to evolutionary anthropology: in the notorious “Notes” to The Waste Land he refers to the anthropological works to which he is “indebted in general,” one of which is Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and another of which he says “has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough” (Collected Poems, 70). While Eliot himself in later years would dismiss the “Notes,” and scholars since the poem’s publication have in varying degrees and ways held them askance, it is also true that what Eliot proclaimed as source and precedent significantly determined future readings of the poem. It is worth musing how the history of interpreting the poem might have turned out differently if, for example, one of his fifty notes had made a cursory reference to Boasian diffusion study or Sapir on genuine culture rather than (or alongside), say, to Frazer, Weston, Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, and “the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions” (Eliot’s note adds, “I forgot which, but I think one of Shackleton’s” [75]). This is not to argue, by omission, for a particular anthropological influence upon the poem (which is clearly what Eliot was doing with Frazer) but to say that, in part because of the absence of one of Eliot’s pointers, the history of reading the poem has not focused upon Eliot’s participation in the intellectual conversation that invented culture as separate patterned whole. Eliot’s contribution to that discussion, in The Waste Land in particular, would only make more possible, feasible, arguable, his later culture work. One might say, in a perhaps counterintuitive mode, that in The Waste Land Eliot was laying the ground for the culturalist scaffolding of the later work; the poem is, after all, an early version of Eliot’s argument, in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, that cultures, rooted as they are, must grow or die, an argument that is replayed, in poetic form, in the later poetic sequence Four Quartets, in his invocation of “the life of significant soil.”35 The premise of society as living whole, in other words, was there in the blasted landscape that culminated Eliot’s early career; in that regard Frank Lentricchia is right on the mark when he notes that the Eliot behind The Waste Land “may write in fragments but he doesn’t want to live that way. He wants to live in a culture organically whole.”36

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And yet Lentricchia’s intentionalist language belies the fact that Eliot was working within, in fact contributing to, the history of the concept of culture as organic whole. And there is no doubt that Eliot himself was quite conscious of the development of the term. In his introduction to G. Wilson Knight’s study of Shakespearean drama, The Wheel of Fire (1930), Eliot praises Knight for his attempt “to take Shakespeare’s work as a whole, no longer to single out several plays as the greatest” (xvii), and he goes on to assert that “the genuine poetic drama must, at its best, observe all the regulations of the plain drama, but will weave them organically (to mix a metaphor and to borrow for the occasion a modern word) into a much richer design” (xvii). Given that the “regulations” are thus “organically mixed,” Eliot reasons, it is “our first duty as critics . . . to grasp the whole design” (xviii). Whether or not Lentricchia is right that Eliot’s poem is by a man who wants to live “organically whole,” criticism of The Waste Land from its first publication judged the poem, whether in praise or blame, according to the criterion of wholeness, which, ultimately, rests upon a model of organicity. Louis Untermeyer, reviewing the poem in 1923, the year after its publication, baldly declared that though the poem had “a definite authenticity,” especially as “an echo of contemporary despair,” it fell short as a work of art because it failed to “give form to formlessness”; in art “even the process of disintegration must be held within a pattern.”37 Similarly, in the same year John Crowe Ransom criticized the poem’s “extreme disconnection,” its “discreteness,” which, he claims, performs “as if it were the function of art to break down the usual singleness of the artistic image, and then to attack the integrity of the individual fragments” (Critical Heritage, 176). “It is a species of the same error,” Ransom continues, “which modern writers of fiction practice when they laboriously disconnect the stream of consciousness and present items which do not enter into wholes” (176–77). His fellow fugitive Allen Tate responded directly to Ransom by claiming that what Ransom saw as a failure of integration was actually a species of “irony,” in which, according to Tate, “the incongruous is not always the deformed or ludicrous” (Critical Heritage, 182). Further, Ransom’s “inability to discover the form of the poem” was, in Tate’s mind, Ransom’s problem, for “whatever form may be, it is not,” Tate declares, the “regularity of meter” that Ransom assumes it to be (181). Conrad Aiken, again in the same year, occupied, in turns, both Ransom’s and Tate’s positions, only to go a step beyond them. While the poem works as “a poem of allusion all compact,” Aiken states, it is still questionable whether “the complex material” of the poem is “mastered, and made coherent” (Critical Heritage, 158). Indeed, Aiken is led to reason that the poem is on the whole incoherent, in that Eliot “has not wholly annealed the allusive matter, has left it unabsorbed, lodged in gleaming fragments amid materials alien to it” (160). And yet Aiken ulti-

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mately concludes that “the poem succeeds—as it brilliantly does—by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan . . . its incoherence is a virtue because its ‘donnee’ is incoherence” (161). In the above arguments, waged by four prominent critics within a year of The Waste Land’s publication, though the value (positive or negative) attached to coherence may appear to vary, the poem cannot but be assessed according to its coherence, or lack thereof. Early detractors of the poem, such as Untermeyer and Ransom, asserted that the lack of formal coherence in the poem caused it to fail as art simply because art requires such coherence, even if, as Untermeyer asserts, the poem “has a definite authenticity,” especially “as a picture of dissolution of the breaking-down of the very structures on which life has modelled itself” (Critical Heritage, 151). On the other hand, early defenders of the poem usually argued its success on the grounds that its “failure” to cohere articulated a fit with, and was thus coherent with, the fragmented modern world, or in any case the poet’s vision of it. It is in this respect that Tate holds out for the appropriateness of irony, however seemingly grotesque, and Aiken’s argues that the poem’s “series of sharp, discrete, slightly related perceptions and feelings” are “violently juxtaposed, (for the effect of dissonance) so as to give the impression of an intensely modern literary consciousness which perceives itself to be not a unit but a chance correlation or conglomerate of mutually discolorative fragments” (160). The argument that The Waste Land triumphs as a work of art because it encapsulates, makes into a whole, the incoherent modern world becomes a fundamentally important way of reading not only Eliot’s poem but also a number of other modernist masterworks and, indeed, modernism itself as a movement. Published in the Dial in the same year as the above reviews, Eliot’s own review of Joyce’s Ulysses most famously charts this argument. There Eliot makes the claim that Joyce’s use of the Ulysses myth as a contrastive frame for present-day Dublin constitutes “the mythical method,” which, Eliot proposes, is simply “a way of ordering, of controlling, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.”38 Joyce’s method, “which others must pursue after him,” is, Eliot pronounces, “a step toward making the modern world possible for art” (177). Eliot’s argument for a “mythical method” is, importantly, his own, both in its originality and in its open advertisement for the way his own efforts in The Waste Land—juxtaposing as he does, too, the ancient and the modern—should be read. And yet the imperative of “making the modern world possible for art” by, in effect, displaying, framing, and thus recontextualizing that world’s fragments first finds expression in Edmund Wilson’s 1922 review of The Waste Land (the review was published, in fact, in the issue of the Dial following the one in which The Waste Land appeared). The poem, Wilson pronounces, is “a

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concrete image of a spiritual drought,” and though its “verse” comes off as “too scrappy,” fragmented into discrete bits, those “drops, though they be wrung from flint, are none the less authentic crystals. They are broken and sometimes infinitely tiny, but they are worth all the rhinestones on the market” (Critical Heritage, 142–43). In his conclusion Wilson attaches the poem to a “modern world” that hearkens back to that of Sapir’s telephone girl and charts the way for future readings of the poem as a supreme articulation of the predicament of modern culture: Sometimes we feel he is speaking not only for a personal distress, but for the starvation of a whole civilization—for people grinding at barren office-routine in the cells of gigantic cities, drying up their souls in eternal toil whose products never bring them profit, where their pleasures are so vulgar and so feeble that they are almost sadder than their pains. It is our whole world of shattered institutions. (144)

Wilson asserts that The Waste Land itself makes possible the perception of the wholeness of a fragmented world; in fact, the “whole world of shattered institutions,” the “it” of Wilson’s sentence, refers to Eliot’s “speaking,” which is what makes those fragmentary conditions cohere. I. A. Richards made a similar argument in 1926. Defending the poem against charges of incoherence and obscurity, Richards claims that Eliot’s poem causes “bewilderment” in part because “we have so built into our nervous systems a demand for intellectual coherence, even in poetry, that we find a difficulty in doing without it” (Critical Heritage, 235). The Waste Land provides a coherence of a different order: the “ideas” of the poem, Richards claims, “are arranged, not that they may tell us something but that their effects in us may combine into a coherent whole of feeling” (237). Richards, like Wilson, makes the case that the poem confounds any conventional sense of formal coherence but instead is itself a reconceptualized version of totality, a whole made of fragments: “The poem as a whole may elude us while every fragment, as a fragment, comes victoriously home” (238). And like Wilson, Richards finds that what is received, what “comes victoriously home,” is the recognition of the fit between Eliot’s fragments and the experience of the modern world, a fit that in itself deeply satisfies and may very well make whole what has been torn asunder: readers of The Waste Land, Richards concludes, “find in [Eliot’s] poetry not only a clearer, fuller realisation of their plight, the plight of a whole generation, but also through the very energies set free in that realisation a return of the saving passion” (238). Richards is suggesting that the poem does satisfying work in reconceiving, redisplaying, cultural fragments so as to cause the reader to recognize cultural fragmentariness as such and in so doing make possible a new totality or whole, which in itself can prove to be a “saving passion.” His statement that “every fragment, as a fragment, comes victoriously home” suggests that the

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fragments work upon, win over, the reader by virtue of being fragments, torn from some previous, perhaps originary, contexts. In that respect, they “come home” to the reader through the recognition that they are, being fragments, away from home.

“Authenticity,” James Clifford observes in reference to modern anthropological practices of collection and exhibition, “is produced by removing objects from their current historical situation.”39 In Boasian relativist anthropology, Clifford notes, artifacts were exhibited in series of “synchronous ‘ethnographic presents’ ” that represented “the ‘authentic’ context of the collected objects, often just prior to their collection or display. Both collector and salvage ethnographer could claim to be the last to rescue ‘the real thing’ ” (228). Boas’s successful battle in favor of the exhibition of autonomous cultures in discrete settings gave tribal artifacts value as, in Clifford’s words, “objective ‘witnesses’ to the multidimensional life of a culture” (228). Clifford observes, however, that in other “cultural” contexts an appropriated object can take on other kinds of value or status. An object that had value in an early-twentieth-century ethnographic museum as a “cultural witness”—a tribal mask, say—would in the same period become valued in an art museum as “an aesthetic masterpiece” (228). Clifford observes the importance of these two poles, the ethnographic and the aesthetic, in the fate of other-cultural objects in the modern West and yet notes that since about 1920 “a controlled migration has occurred between these two institutionalized domains. The boundaries of art and science, the aesthetic and the anthropological, are not fixed” (228). The Waste Land is perhaps most museumlike, and most richly interpreted as such, in terms of the fate of the cultural artifacts that are borrowed, torn, stolen from their “original” or at least prior contexts and inserted into, exhibited as, the poem. In a general sense Eliot’s piling up of cultural artifacts— songs, myths, sacred chants, churches, bird books, poems, prophetic paraphernalia, and pub dialogue—rolls toward a powerful collocation of cultural witnesses, amounting to a kind of synecdoche of world culture. And, it can be said, artifacts are inserted as witnesses to specific epochs, cultures, or subcultures: the words of Shakespeare, Kyd, and Queen Elizabeth evoke Renaissance England; pub conversation evokes British working-class life; citations of and commentary on the Upanishads evoke “traditional” Indian religion and culture. And yet those artifacts, inserted as they are with witness value, become components of, and so partial producers of, aesthetic value. For one thing, the aesthetic qualities of many recognized “artistic” artifacts are reinforced by being recontextualized: the rhythms of Shakespeare, Dante, and Webster return but in startling new contexts (in this sense, Eliot’s poem is doubling the efforts

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of his literary criticism, advertising his own version of the best literary “tradition”). As well, the aesthetic value of artifacts not conventionally recognized as “aesthetic” are forefronted: a pub’s last call (“HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” [line 58]), a nursery rhyme (“London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down” [line 427]), the transliteration of a bird call (“Co co rico co co rico” [line 393]). And finally, the ethnographic objects, in aestheticized form, all play their parts in contributing toward the aesthetic whole that comes to be recognized as the poem itself. Eliot’s poem, then, is a museum both aesthetic and anthropological, as clearly all museums are, and it also validates Clifford’s contention that the aesthetic and the anthropological are anything but fixed. Clifford most fully exemplifies the historically contingent mobility of artifacts in his diagrammatic explication of what he terms “The Art-Culture System: A Machine for Making Authenticity.” Displayed as a four-sided diamond, the system has as its poles (or right angles) “authentic” and “inauthentic” (top and bottom, respectively) and “masterpiece” and “artifact” (left and right, respectively). The four faces of the diamond, each represented by a two-pronged line (or arrow) between adjacent poles/angles, designates a zone: the one running from “masterpiece” to “authentic,” zone 1, is described as “connoisseurship—the art museum—the art market”; that from “authentic” to “artifact,” zone 2, as “history and folklore—the ethnographic museum—material culture, craft”; that from “masterpiece” to “inauthentic,” zone 3, as “fakes, inventions—the museum of technology—ready-mades and anti-art”; and, finally, that from “inauthentic” to “artifact,” zone 4, as “tourist art, commodities—the curio collection—utilities” (224). The cultural artifacts in The Waste Land richly and variously inhabit the zones as explicated by Clifford: the literature and fine arts Eliot borrows (lines from Shakespeare, a Christopher Wren church) function as species of zone 1, “authentic-masterpiece” (also referred to by Clifford as “art—original, singular”); nursery rhymes and accounts of prophecy function as examples of “folklore” and the “ethnographic museum,” zone 2 (also denoted by Clifford as “culture—traditional collective”); ragtime, newspapers, and the typist’s apartment at teatime all perform in the province of zone 4, “inauthentic-artifact” (also characterized by Clifford as “not art—reproduced, commercial”); and perhaps most complexly, Madame Sosostris, a suspect contemporary Tarot card reader, and in general all mythic characters “made new” in the poem work as representations of “inauthentic masterpiece,” zone 3 (also referred to by Clifford as “not-culture—new, uncommon”). Though the poem’s borrowed objects exhibit a great variety of levels or kinds of “cultural” status or authenticity, assigning them positions within Clifford’s taxonomy is not the ultimate point. It is more important to register how the artifacts, and the poem that is their collocation, came to be variously interpreted according to, in the terms of, these categories. In fact, reading the history

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of criticism of the poem is like taking a wild ride through Clifford’s art-culture system. The criticism in its variety reads the whole poem, and the artifacts within it, as en route within the art-culture system, as occupying various of the art-culture categories, and in fact combinations of those categories, depending upon the particular reading. Obviously the poem itself came to be regarded by many as belonging to the province of zone 1, “authentic masterpiece,” but the modes by which the poem enters into that zone, and in fact the very meaning of authentic and masterpiece as such, vary from critic to critic. F. O. Matthiessen, in his important full-length study The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935), states that his central purpose is “to evaluate Eliot’s method and achievement as an artist, and in so doing to emphasize certain of the fundamental elements of the poetry which are in danger of being obscured by the increasing tendency to treat poetry as a social document and to forget that it is an art.”40 In effect, Matthiessen is holding out, in Clifford’s terms, for the mutual exclusiveness of zones 1 and 2, asserting the critical mistake of considering an artifact’s status within zone 1, art, on the basis of its possible viability within zone 2, the ethnographic-cultural. What distinguishes Eliot’s poetry as art, Matthiessen claims, significantly, is its “very authenticity,” Eliot’s ability to provide “an exact expression to the thing he has perceived and felt.” Through this quality, Matthiessen holds, “the poet fulfills one of his more primitive functions,” defined as “his skill in finding just the right words,” whereby “the gifted savage was able to exorcise an evil spirit or to propitiate a good one” (97). According to this reading, primitive verbal artifacts (often considered strictly within the province of zone 2, the ethnographic) gain entry into, and in fact become a cornerstone of, zone 1, authentic art. Occupying a diametrically opposed position to Matthiessen’s, some early critics doubted The Waste Land’s aesthetic excellence, its staying power as an enduring work of art, but thought its primary value was as a species of zone 2, “authentic artifact,” thus performing the function of “ethnographic museum”: Untermeyer, for example, argues that The Waste Land fails as art but possesses a “definite authenticity”—the poem’s “value,” he says, is “documentary” (151– 53). On the other hand, a good number of the prominent early readings of the poem, such as those by Wilson, Aiken, and Tate, hold that the poem is a masterpiece precisely because of its status as cultural artifact, and in fact these are the critics Matthiessen is primarily arguing against. Tate asserts that “it is likely that the value of The Waste Land as art is historical rather than intrinsic” (Critical Heritage, 182), a statement that, importantly, does not remove the ethnographic value from the aesthetic but rather makes zone 2, the ethnographic, itself a prime criterion for what qualifies as zone 1, art. Critics who claimed that the poem suffered from an absence of originality and indeed was little more than a patchwork of borrowings from popular and elite culture effectively placed the poem in the category of “not art—reproduced, commercial”—in other words, zone 4, the realm of the “inauthentic

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artifact.” For example, Roscoe’s 1923 review assesses the poem as a mere product of “a sensitive romanticist drowning in a sea of jazz” (Critical Heritage, 170), and F. S. Lucas severely describes Eliot as “one of the commonest” of “the maggots that breed in the corruption of poetry,” the “bookworm” (195), who, “like other deluded modernists,” is attempting “to get children on mandrake roots instead of bearing their natural offspring” (198). And finally, some critics, and they were plentiful, assigned the poem the status of “fake,” placing it in effect in zone 3, “inauthentic masterpiece.” For example, Charles Powell in 1923 assessed the poem as “a mad medley” in which “meaning, plan, and intention alike are massed behind a smokescreen of anthropological and literary erudition” (Critical Heritage, 194). One of the most influential readings of the poem, Cleanth Brooks’s “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth,” makes the case, based very much upon Eliot’s formulation of the “mythical method,” that the poem works fundamentally, and most interestingly, through the very shifts in cultural status of its mythic and contemporary poles or parallels. Contending against a commonly perceived notion that Eliot’s poem is structured to make the reader simply assign low status to contemporary and high status to mythic or traditional characters, motifs, and themes, Brooks asserts that the poem works on the reader through a process of value transfer. The initial response of the reader, according to Brooks, is to devalue the contemporary figure, for example, Madame Sosostris, as a contemporary impostor seer and thus ennoble or raise the cultural legitimacy of her mythic-traditional parallel, the Sibyl. The middle, or second, response amounts to the reader’s recognizing the similarity of Sosostris to Sibyl, thus ennobling Sosostris and lowering the cultural status of the Sibyl. The final response is the recognition that the similarity ennobles both: cultural legitimacy is granted to traditional-mythic and contemporary alike (166–68). Brooks’s reading grants the poem legitimacy as aesthetic artifact—granting it entry into Clifford’s zone 1, the art museum—through the very explication of the ways by which the artifacts within the museum shift back and forth in “cultural” value. The poem, in other words, wins access to high cultural legitimacy by displaying particular objects or characters in their cultural routings— nursery rhymes and ragtime can appear in or become real art. In addition, high art can become sordid precisely because technologized, as when, for example, lines from John Day’s Parliament of Bees, quoted in the original in Eliot’s “Notes”—“When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear / A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring / Actaeon to Diana in the spring” (Collected Poems, 72)—become “modernized,” revised to read, “But at my back from time to time I hear / The sounds of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring” (lines 196–98). Thus the poem is not only judged according to the categories of art-culture and not art–not culture

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but itself becomes a significant confabulation or reconfiguration of art/culture traffic. The poem itself, in other words, helps to make possible or emergent new ways by which the “cultural” and the “authentic” can be constituted. The Waste Land represents, in a “literary” vein, a kind of ultimate salvage operation in which, it could be said, the poem’s orchestrator, posed by Eliot himself as the prophet Tiresias, literally enacts a kind of world destruction that occasions a tour-de-force exposition of world-cultural artifacts. Everything, from the Bible to barroom conversation, is enumerated in the process of chronicling destruction; and in the process, at least if we take the critics at their word, the “fragments” that Tiresias has “shored against” his own “ruins,” the assemblage of wasted, or wasting, cultural products, is given collective coherence. If the poem is a literalized Boasian storehouse of a museum crammed with cultural artifacts, then Tiresias functions, as does Boas, both as the everrecording objective ethnographer-gatherer and as curator; Eliot himself, in his “Notes” describes him as “a spectator and not indeed a ‘character’ ” but nonetheless “the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest” (Collected Poems, 72). Like the Boasian anthropologist, “what Tiresias sees,” Eliot emphasizes, “is the substance of the poem” (72), in effect the stuff that makes up the culture museum. Tiresias’s function and status as the poem-museum’s gatherer-shaper is clarified, given expression, Eliot concludes in the note, by the “passage from Ovid” alluded to in the poem, which, Eliot says, “is of great anthropological interest” (72). The “whole passage,” in the original Latin, is then provided in the remainder of Eliot’s lengthy note, which is Ovid’s version of why the mythical Tiresias is able to comprehend life as both man and woman. Eliot’s “Notes” provide contextualizations of the artifacts on display in the poem, and as such they function much as the interpretive, explanatory labels to museum exhibits, explaining, providing frames for, how the artifacts signaled as such ought to be regarded by the visitor. Poems, one might interject here, are not museums, and what are regarded as normative necessities in the modern culture or art museum—labels—do not find an analogous counterpart in poetry as a rule. Precisely. Especially surprising, in most cases disturbing, to early readers of The Waste Land were Eliot’s “Notes,” seen by some as presumptuous, by many as confusing, and by others as the ultimate proof of the poem’s incomprehensibility. (Even as sympathetic a reader as Aiken found the “Notes” “irritating” [Critical Heritage, 161]). Eliot’s borrowing from exhibitionary contexts beyond those normally implemented by poetry was seen as breaking some generic bounds. The self-referentiality of the poem as manifested especially in the “Notes”— regarded in this sense as an attachment to the poem that talks about, gives pointers on, the poem proper—suggested that the poet was being other than sincere, other than himself, other than honestly expressive. This was, of course,

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wholly in keeping with the imperatives of Eliot’s (in this respect, at least) antiRomantic literary criticism, which said that “individual talent” involves not merely the expression of feeling but the rearrangement and thus transmutation of the literary tradition. In The Waste Land that imperative is manifested, given form, in a persistent borrowing and recontextualization, redisplay, of not only the literal words of the tradition (passages from Ovid, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Goldsmith, etc.) but also the various styles of that tradition; in this regard, A. Walton Litz refers to the poem as a virtual “museum of verse forms.”41 This borrowing too was not taken kindly by many critics of the day. Louis Menand in this regard chastises recent critics for ignoring the aspect of the poem “that fascinated and annoyed its original readers: that it is a tissue of allusions.”42 “Allusion,” as Menand reminds his readers, has usually, in fact, been read as “an affront to sincerity” (94). Edmund Wilson in his 1922 review correctly anticipated this criticism, noting that Eliot “depends too much upon books and borrows too much from other men and that there can be little room for original quality in a poem of little more than four-hundred lines which contains allusions to, parodies of, quotations from, Vedic Hymns, Buddha, the Psalms,” and from there Wilson continues with a catalogue of three dozen more literary-cultural sources (Critical Heritage, 142–44). Lucas’s caustic characterization of Eliot as a maggotbookworm is an especially vituperative example of what Wilson feared, as is Powell’s assessment of the poem as an anthropological “smokescreen.” In 1934 Matthiessen, in The Achievement of T. S. Eliot, still felt the need to defend Eliot from charges of undue borrowing, saying to those who claimed that Eliot, and Joyce too for that matter, has revealed a kind of bookish weakness in turning to literature rather than to life, it should be recollected that Shakespeare himself created hardly any of his own plots, and that by the very fact of taking ready-made the pattern of his characters’ actions, he could devote his undivided attention to endowing them with life. It is only an uninformed prejudice which holds that literature must start from actual personal experience. (45)

Eliot’s “unnatural” strategy of effusive, persistent borrowing draws from, participates in, or at least finds an analogue to then current anthropological “erudition” on the very subject of the role of borrowing in the formation of “culture.” Indeed, Robert Lowie’s landmark anthropological treatise, Primitive Society, first published in 1920 and reviewed by Sapir in the Dial that same year, has as its central contention that “cultures develop mainly through borrowings due to chance contact” and that “our own civilization is even more largely than the rest a complex of borrowed traits.”43 Lowie, following the lead of his teacher Boas, argues that the “cultural resemblances” that “abound between peoples of diverse stock” are in the main “the result of borrowing”

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rather than “due to like causes,” those purportedly similar or identical mental processes or instincts that lead, through common evolutionary stages, to similar cultural products (7). A member of the early generation of Boas’s students, Lowie argues a strong anti-evolutionist line, concluding that “the singular order of events by which [our culture] has come into being provides no schedule for the itinerary of alien cultures” (441). It is in this antideterminist vein that Sapir in his Dial review applaudingly claims that Lowie’s book “brushes away . . . the whole cobweb screen of anthropological law.’ ”44 The point here is not to maintain that Eliot held the same opinion on the predominant importance of borrowing over “independent invention” due to “like causes,” and to be sure Eliot had his own uses for the evolutionary anthropology at which Lowie and Sapir were leveling their. And yet in Notes towards a Definition of Culture a generation later, Eliot’s persistent concerns with the effect of dominant cultures on contiguous subcultures bespeak not only a belief in the importance of cultural adaptation but also a careful working with the concept. However, more to the point here are the similar lines of argument in the fields of cultural anthropology and literary criticism: in this context The Waste Land is not only an embodiment of Eliot’s argument for the importance of “tradition” to individual achievement as discussed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) but also a literary, and literal, version of the anthropological argument that culture (in Eliot’s Arnoldian evaluative aesthetic sense, Culture) comes not as a result of “independent invention” but by the “borrowing” and “adaptation” of prior cultural material. Lowie’s insistence that “transmission has played an enormous part in the growth of cultures” (8) does follow upon the belief that “man suffers from poverty of inventiveness and ever prefers to follow the path of lesser resistance by borrowing” (10). In this Lowie would appear classical, in the modernist Eliotic sense, in roughly the same way that Eliot in his Dial essay of 1920— published in fact in the issue following the one in which Sapir’s review of Lowie’s book appeared—holds out for the recognition of the prevalence, and the prospective use of, “minds of the second order” in any given cultural epoch. Those minds are crucial for literary criticism, Eliot notes, because they perform in precisely diffusionist ways: “they are necessary for the rapid circulation of ideas,” that “ ‘current of ideas’ of which Arnold speaks.”45 Lowie qualifies his own assertion of humanity’s tendency toward “handme-downs” by claiming that individual achievement (“inventiveness”) is not wholly absent in culture building, for “if it were, that admirable adaptation to environment which we occasionally note in widely separated areas could never have taken place” (10). In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and other essays Eliot too holds out for “inventiveness,” or as he terms it, “individual talent,” but like Lowie precisely holds that the “talent” manifests itself not in the promotion of independent invention but through the resourcefulness by which one takes from others. Nowhere in Eliot’s work is this made more clear

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than in his 1920 essay “Philip Massinger,” where the holism created out of the severing of the “borrowed” from its original context becomes a key criterion for aesthetic excellence: One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. (Selected Essays, 182)

The Waste Land was often criticized in much the way that Lowie, and Sapir in his supportive review of Lowie’s book, characterized culture: as arbitrary in genesis and development, as “planless” (Aiken), as a “mad Medley” (Powell), as a species of “formlessness” (Untermeyer), as, in the words of Harriet Monroe, “kaleidoscopic, profuse, a rattle and rain of colors that somehow falls into place” (Critical Heritage, 170). Eliot himself at times supported the notion of the genesis of the poem as less than complexly deliberate, as chancey, as a random response, once describing it, in fact, as “a piece of rhythmic grumbling.”46 And in On Poetry and Poets he asserts that the “Notes” to the poem were arbitrary and circumstantial in their origins, in fact a reaction to charges of theft: he first wrote them out, he claims, “with a view toward spiking the guns of critics of my earlier poems who had accused me of plagiarism.”47 Eliot goes on to make the sensational claim that the “Notes” developed into the “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship that is still on view today” (he is writing in 1957) only because when the poem was published in book form, “it was discovered that the poem was inconveniently short, so I set to work to expand the notes, in order to provide a few more pages of printed matter” (121). “That planless hodge-podge, that thing of shreds and patches,” could well be yet another characterization of Eliot’s poem, plucked from any of a number of the early reviews or from Eliot’s own mouth, but the phrase in fact refers not to Eliot’s poem but to that thing “called civilization” and makes up the final, anthropologically infamous lines of Lowie’s Primitive Society (441). Years later, in 1947, Lowie concluded the preface to the new edition of his book with “a word of explanation concerning the final paragraph of Primitive Society, which has been generally misinterpreted”: The sentence in which civilization is called ‘that thing of shreds and patches’ had no bearing on anthropological theory. It was written in a period of disillusionment after World War I, a sentiment very intelligible at the present moment. I was casting about for something derogatory to say about our civilization, and as an admirer of Gilbert and Sullivan naturally bethought myself of the phrase in question. It is true that I did not believe, nor do now, that all elements of a culture are necessarily

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related by some organic bond; on the other hand, ever since 1915 my treatment of kinship terms ought to absolve me from the charge of viewing culture as only a thing of shreds and patches. (ix–x)

Lowie himself revises his own definition of culture to ensure the concept’s definition, its boundedness and hence its ultimate readability. The reading of culture as preeminently “a thing of shreds and patches” could not stand: it could not be, and in fact had not been, institutionally generative. This is not to claim that Lowie distorts or dissimulates when retracting or recontextualizing his expression of culture’s fragmentariness; rather, he feels the need to defend his concept from charges that it is not systematic (culture, he might be paraphrased, may not be wholly organic, but it needs to be organized enough to be read). It is one thing to claim that the complex of culture in any given manifestation is arrived at through chance borrowings and consequent adaptations, rather than according to an iron law of evolutionary determinism; it is another thing to say that the product does not possess an organizational wholeness. So it is not surprising that Kroeber and Kluckhohn’s inventory of prominent definitions of culture cites, not the notorious thing of “shreds and patches,” but, rather, Lowie’s definition of culture as “the sum total of what an individual acquires from his society . . . not by his own creative activity but as a legacy from the past” (43). Eliot’s configuration of culture in The Waste Land undergoes a similar revision. In one sense, Eliot’s poem too is retrospectively cast as that war-induced product, that thing of “shreds and patches,” that “piece of rhythmic grumbling” that, incidentally, expressively borrows from popular music (ragtime rather than Gilbert and Sullivan) and, more importantly, will, in the trajectory of Eliot’s own intellectual career, require and achieve a firmer (re)definition in the wake of the next world war. But in another sense this “shreds and patches” of a poem, from the moment of its publication, was subjected by critics, including Eliot himself, to a battery of readings that argued for its inclusion in the pantheon of Cultural monuments by virtue of its recognizable wholeness and hence readability. In this regard Litz observes that most critics, at least through the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, “have treated The Waste Land as a sacred text in need of an ordinary gloss, thus delivering a critical model more orderly, more ‘traditional,’ and more moralistic than the poem itself.”48 Eliot himself, of course, had more than a little responsibility for this literary critical tendency toward giving to the poem greater definition as a readable whole. As Litz observes, Eliot’s notes to the poem (like, he adds, Joyce’s schemata of Ulysses) “had a centrifugal effect on most criticism, driving the reader away from the work and into ever-widening circles of source-study and influence-charting” (9). In this respect Eliot’s notes function as signposts of his own borrowings, as a chart, within or attached to the poem, of the poem’s origination. Thus, the notes, importantly, encourage, perhaps initiate, a Boasian

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methodology that is deeply dependent upon assumptions of borrowing and has, as its primary object, a diffusion-based search for origins. Eliot’s poem is read, then, as a Native American tribe interpreted by Boas is read, as a “cultural” product that itself leaves its signs of its own borrowings, signs then traced by the reader in order to arrive at the genesis of that product, a beginning that, inevitably, marks the point of departure for creative, if accidental or arbitrary, cultural borrowing and adaptation. Like Lowie, Eliot and the critics who read him are claiming that although the genesis of the cultural product is chancy and arbitrary, because it is based upon borrowing, it is (creates), nonetheless, a complex product that in its genuineness—that is, in its cultural excellence—is integrative, self-sufficient, and whole. The value judgment built into the anthropological concept of culture, implicit in Boasian diffusionary study and made more blatant in Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” finds an important parallel in the history of the interpretation of The Waste Land and other important, or to become important, modernist literary works: it is a text worthy of study, after all, because its parts—traces of origination, fragments, motifs—can be profitably reconciled into wholes.

Though the assumption of the isomorphism of people to land is fundamental to The Waste Land, again grounding it, as it were, the poem is premised upon cultural breakdown, upon the supposition that modernity is a mess. And in order to capture that sorry state, we need a new poetic form in which antique myths and modern effluvia are juxtaposed at the flurrying heart rate of the poem’s elusive swallow: the Sybil at Cumae, the Grail myth, primitive vegetation ceremonies a` la Frazer, Ecclesiastical voices, allusions to Christ, all shot through with the contemporary reminiscences of rootless decadent aristocracy, Wagnerian opera, a kind of card shark and, later, bar gossip, a homosexual pass, and something called the “Shakespeherian rag” (line 128). The architecture of the poem in this more fragmentary sense is based upon anything but a Boasian metonymic model. Indeed, the supposition of fragmented world—an argument dependent upon the belief in originary metonymy now broken—now makes necessary, as Eliot suggests in his review of Ulysses, a radical metaphoricization that stacks ancient Tereus up against the young man carbuncular, the goddess Diana up against Mrs. Porter, the First Punic War up against the First World War. This is Frazer’s second type of magic, that of similarity, which works precisely through the invocation of like producing like—metaphor, in other words, not the metonymy of Frazer’s first magic, the law of contact. This is not an argument about influence; it is not necessary to demonstrate that Frazer’s definitions of magic precisely propelled Eliot to shape the poem the way he did. More to the point is the confluence of Frazer’s organizing of

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primitive mentality with Eliot’s use of mythic materials for culturalist ends. And Eliot’s poem is an argument about culture, after all. In a rhetoric that proceeds right out of evolutionary anthropology’s contention that the savage is disappearing from our view and thus urgently and immediately requires study, Eliot posits Western collapse, which, as it happens, “makes the world possible for art,” for what we call high modernist art at any rate. Eliot’s argument worked so well, anyway, that for decades Eliot scholars, in heated controversy over whether or how the land and/or people were healed, neglected to question the death of culture that Eliot had so brilliantly figured. As varied and as important as their approaches to the poem have been, critics from Cleanth Brooks to Joseph Franks to William Spanos pretty much assume that the cultural incoherence pieced together in the poem actually happened to civilization. In the first years following the publication of the poem more than a few critics objected to Eliot’s negative vision of modernity’s possibilities; for example, Untermeyer claimed that the poem was a “misleading document” in that it failed to satisfy “the need to believe in something” (Critical Heritage, 153), and Harriet Monroe contended that “there are large areas of mankind” for whom Eliot’s articulation of “the malaise of our time . . . does not apply” (167). And yet few contemporary critics, perhaps only one really, called attention to, and called into question, the models for culture that could make this breakdown conceptually possible. Gorham Munson, writing in 1924, affiliated the mentality behind Eliot’s poem to a “European mind” that, “founded upon classicism,” now possesses “no hope, no vision” (Critical Heritage, 208). The social theorizing of Oswald Spengler, Munson claims, “crystallizes” this European model for culture: Cultures, [Spengler] believes, obey definite biological laws. They are rigidly deterministic. They live out a birth, growth, brilliant maturity, decay, death, and these processes cannot be halted. Decay he calls ‘civilization’: it is the stage of huge cities and their nomadic life, of great wars and dictators, of the advent of formless traditionless masses. We are in it: ‘we must will the inevitable or nothing’: the inevitable is fellahdom. (208)

Munson sees The Waste Land as “a poetic equivalent” to Spengler’s template for culture. Eliot’s poem, Munson notes, “recalls the brilliant apogee of culture” in contrast to the “decay” of “contemporary civilization”; the poet, “before the age, which he has characterized as singularly dull,” is “weary” (208). Munson shrewdly observes that “we are now wholly involved in the poem as a summary of the modern cultural situation,” and “the possibility not allowed for by the mind of Mr. Eliot is . . . the entrance into consciousness of some new factor.” The problem here, according to Munson, is that Eliot’s brand of “rationalism of the determinist type is . . . not rational enough. It does not question its assumptions” (208–9).

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Munson’s reading of the poem as ennobling the ancient and making sordid the contemporary simplifies the values behind the poem, at least according to Cleanth Brooks and later readings. In addition, the “new factor” he posits as a solution to Eliot’s malaise—a turn or return to America, where “the future belongs,” where there is “energy and hope” (211)—itself falls back upon an assumption of cultural energization that the author himself does not question. And yet Munson’s reading is nonetheless novel in its questioning of Eliot’s premise that culture by definition, by its “nature,” breaks down, a determined necessity that the organicism of Eliot’s cultural model makes possible. In this respect, Munson’s reading stands alone in the early history of the reading of the poem and is suggestive of the filiations between Germanic-Herderian, BritishArnoldian, and American-Boasian cultural models, all resting, as they do, upon organic metaphors of cultural growth and decay. Distinguishing Munson’s reading from the normative early-twentieth-century approach to Eliot’s apocalypticism is not to suggest that Eliot got it wrong—that, say, he overestimated the effects of the Great War or other social upheavals of the time upon the European psyche. However, it does mean to register Eliot’s success in managing to make people believe that they were falling off the edge of the earth, and in that respect this reading is meant to give Eliot credit for crafting an emergent structure of feeling rather than merely reflecting an already dominant mood. The poet, after all, makes myths, which in Eliotic terms means that he shapes them actively, suppressively, orderingly, out of cultural material rather than simply expressing or mouthing them. What I am suggesting here is another way to think about Eliot’s brilliant suturing of antique mythic forms to contemporary “reality” bits. The point here is that culture is “made” through the arrangement of mythic and contemporary material into a mosaic of the fragments of dying culture. When Eliot’s ventriloquial persona utters, near the poem’s end, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” (line 431), the pressure of Eliot’s figuration is at high torque, as the metaphorically wrought—old poems, new songs, old rapes, new rapes— get quashed against one another in the ultimate (odd) metonymy (“shored against”). It is a contorted brand of writing culture, to use James Clifford’s term, in which an organized pattern of social unity is metonymically appealed to— Western culture as originary rooted tribe—through the vehicle of the mythical method, which posits metaphoric fragmentation. However, it is more complicated than that, for the metaphors themselves are deftly channeled, selected for their odd fits; there is a sense, after all, to the non-sense of placing the character Stetson in both the Punic and the Great War. We feel a congruence— Eliot puts it there—in the relation of the Sibyl to Madame Sosostris and of Christ to the hanged gods. It is hardly new to note that Eliot’s poem, in reworking mythic materials, creates a new kind of mythopoeia. Nor is it particularly novel to assert that

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Eliot’s juxtaposition of ancient myth to the imagery of modern life changes both our view of modern life and our take on the myths appealed to. Through this new arrangement, a third term is possible: a modern mythmaking that, as Eliot notes in “Tradition in the Individual Talent,” enters the order of existing art precisely by changing what is already in that order. However, it is important to put Eliot’s own famous statement on tradition in a wider and more contemporary “cultural” register, specifically, in this instance, by showing how the poem helped shape what was understood variously as “culture.” For one thing, as Clifford’s art-culture system has helped to illustrate, the addition of The Waste Land to the canon meant a reconfiguration, a significant expansion, of what could count as aesthetic, as Culture with a capital C. Poems, great poems, could now contain footnotes, could point fingers at readers in foreign tongues, could have sex, and sex changes, in them. In this respect Eliot helped open a door that he himself was often too ready to close: this was the man who, as late as the 1950s, insisted that drama be written in verse.49 And one could argue that the poem, in its allusive immensity, provides an ultimately comprehensive definition of and argument for cultural diversity. According to this line of reasoning, the success of the poem in packing together, however erratically and apocalyptically, Greek myth, contemporary pop music, modern French verse, Elizabethan history, tarot cards, the Bible, obscene folk song, and the Grail quest, amounts to a tour-de-force exposition of Western culture, from the elite to the contemporary “folk” to the utterly primitive-anthropological; and in including the Upanishads at the end, Eliot was making the final leap to World Culture itself (as emblematized by the West, of course). A generation later, in Notes, after another world war, Eliot, having already unpacked the complex levels of individual, class, national, and European culture, would tenuously put forward the possibility of World Culture, a concept that, for him, got more interesting and difficult to hold in the mind as it got less overtly unitary.50 And yet the strongest cultural work Eliot’s poem does goes in precisely the opposite direction, that is, toward the waste land as splintered postmodern landscape, as a strongly resonant nightmare-memory of how culture from then on can and will be imagined. Granted that the argument that the metonymic isomorphism of culture to land grounds the poem and in effect makes the nightmare possible (and in this light that culture grounding might be said to function as one of the normative, battening-down features of modernism that, according to Fredric Jameson, separates the classic modernist from the truly free-floating postmodernist),51) and granted that the critiques, proceeding particularly, it seems, from champions of Joyce, that Eliot’s “fitting” of antiquity to contemporaneity is way too tidy and controlling,52 still the secure identities of people with places get profoundly and powerfully confounded. This is what is happening, after all, when, with the aid of the infamous “Notes,” delirious antarctic explorers find themselves eerily bumping up against Christ, when the

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ancient “murmur of maternal lamentation” puts the “hooded hordes” of modern Eastern Europe in your face, when Thunder asks what sound like really important questions, and when you have no idea how you got to India. In The Waste Land, “local” ground, “significant soil,” suddenly, nightmarishly, gapes open, sounding corridors of multiple brutal mythologies. One could say that modern anthropological notions of pristine, bounded cultures did not help Eliot put that together and that one can thank Frazer, with his odd mixings of modern Esthonians and worshipers of the Egyptian sun god Ra, for that, for unwittingly playing a part in what is perhaps even Eliot’s unwitting pulverization of the secure cultural geography of modernity. And yet the modern rhetoric of apocalypse, as James Longenbach illustrates with his filiation of Eliot’s conception of cultural collapse to Arnold’s,53 does not stop at the border of period, genre, or discipline. Indeed, it can be said that the most striking of parallels to Eliot’s apocalypticism can be found, not in the words of Frazer, or Arnold, or any of Eliot’s fellow literary modernists, for that matter, but in the final words of Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious.” As in the conclusion of Eliot’s poem, where the persona asks that most terminal of rhetorical questions, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (line 426), in an effort to salvage the remains that can make cultural revitalization possible, Sapir proclaims, “Sooner or later we shall have to get down to the humble task of exploring the depths of our consciousness and dragging to the light what sincere bits of reflected experience we can find” (331). For both Sapir and Eliot, “sincerity” comes in bits, borrowed, bedraggled, dredged up from a past posed by Eliot as “Tradition” and by Sapir as the “depths of our consciousness.” For both, those “bits,” those “fragments . . . shored against [the] ruins” of spurious culture, become, significantly, exquisitely wrought, fashioned out of their very fragmentariness, wreckage made aesthetic despite and indeed through its very ugliness. These fragments or “bits,” Sapir proclaims in language redolent not only of Eliot’s poem but of those critics defending its fragmentary method, “will not always be beautiful, they will not always be pleasing, but they will be genuine. And then we can build” (331). Eliot’s “method,” call it “mythical,” call it “cultural,” ends up haunting us. Cultural centers cannot hold, home ain’t what it used to be, all kinds of boundary lines get palimpsestically crossed and recrossed: London Bridge collapses in protonuclear simulacrum, the corpses of Syrian fertility gods somehow get into our flower beds, and countesses, once secure in their mountain fastnesses, now act out a nomadism of the postmodern and “read, much of the night, and go south in the winter” (line 18). It is James Clifford’s postcultural culture of traveling rather than dwelling, of routing rather than rooting, where the locus of habitation is no longer the village hamlet but, rather, the hotel circuit.54 Such cultural configurations, Clifford asserts, do not have to be seen as postlapsarian or apocalyptic, as “pure products” of culture gone “crazy,” which is how Eliot’s

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contemporary William Carlos Williams phrased it;55 but for Eliot, as for Williams, Arnold, and indeed Sapir, arguing culture often means tracing that hybridic plunge.56 And that is what sticks with us, that fear of falling. At poem’s end bits of culture, as in much good mythopoesis, are thrown together in an air of artlessness. It comes off as sacred, this spot welding of elite and folk-anthropological—ritual fishing, nursery rhymes, Isaiah, Dante, Algernon Swinburne—and to finish it off, that series of elemental repetitions with the white space of utter holiness effectively in between: Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih (lines 433–34)

Metonymized fragments, ruined towers predicated upon a theory of collapse, indicating where the poet wants the myths to take us back to, to a specific argument about what must be grown again from old roots, to a contention that, thanks to the poem itself in part, our imaginings can never again return.

Chapter 2

MALINOWSKI: WRITING, CULTURE, FUNCTION, KULA

NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO, the stellar literary year that saw the appearance of The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses, also saw the presentation of another paradigm-shifting modernist text, Bronislaw Malinowski’s ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which narrates and provides an impressive theoretical framework for the several years (1914–15, 1917–18) he spent among the Trobriand islanders of the Pacific. For his publication of this book Malinowski has been credited with creating, virtually overnight, the seminal twentieth-century anthropological discourse known as the monograph (though as George Stocking and others have amply demonstrated, its influences and models lie deep in the history of anthropological writing and method).1 In general terms, the institutional and aesthetic novelty of Argonauts—what Malinowski, in Pound’s words, “made new” in anthropological writing—had to do mainly with the book’s particular welding of anthropological experience, research, interpretation, and storytelling: the text is structured around a specific period of time—generally narrativized as now, the “present”—in which the author himself lived among a specific group of “natives” and brings to the fore autobiographical material and systematic research to arrive at what he would coin the “functional” interpretation of a “culture,”2 in this case by focusing upon what he saw as the master key of Trobriand “culture,” the mobile system of native exchange called the Kula. Although Frazer, dean of comparative anthropology, wrote the approving preface to Argonauts (in which he compared Malinowski, significantly, to Cervantes, noting that he “sees man . . . in the round and not in the flat”),3 it can be said that much as Joyce changed the face of the modernist novel in that year, so Malinowski turned the tables on the way cultures were written within anthropology, and in so doing he rendered Frazer’s brand of Victorian armchair speculation defunct.4 Standard writing in cultural anthropology after Argonauts eschewed the Frazerian page style, with its encyclopedic, footnotecrammed enumeration of parallel customs of peoples as various as modern Estonians, ancient Romans, and contemporary Bushmen, and favored instead the more compact, holistic rendering of a particular people—read here “culture”—in a particular time, the “Ethnographic present.” Malinowski, simply put, made it the business of anthropology to tell the story of a people, and in that respect one could say that he created a more narrativistic economy of

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anthropological discourse. And it was a novelist, his fellow Pole Joseph Conrad, whom Malinowski modeled himself after: “W. H. R. Rivers shall be the H. Rider Haggard of Anthropology,” he confided in a now oft-quoted letter from the Trobriand field, “I shall be the Conrad.”5 In 1923 Eliot put his imprimatur on Joyce’s Ulysses, famously noting that Joyce’s novel marked the shift and indeed modernist imperative away from “narrative method” and toward the newly coined “mythical method,” which could “make the modern world possible for art.” Crucial to Joyce’s method, as Eliot argues here and elsewhere, was the mode by which Frazer and other comparative anthropologists made leaps in chronological time a commonplace and organized texts that cut across both the storied lives of particular peoples and any linear conception of epoch, organizing instead according to similitudes of mythic category.6 One tentatively might say that typical of the nonlogic and lag of disciplinary cross-fertilization, just as literary modernism, borrowing from anthropology, was moving from narrative to myth as the organizing discursive principle, cultural anthropology was moving from myth to narrative. One might say that, but matters get complicated the moment one does. For example, Malinowski’s aspiration to become the anthropologist-cum-novelist must be read alongside his deep distrust of fiction as it related to the progress of his actual fieldwork. The publication of his private diaries in 1967, twentyfive years after his death, revealed that Malinowski constantly berated himself for reading modern novels in order to escape from his ethnographic duties and his “savages.” Fiction or narrative as such came to be associated in his mind with dereliction of duty: “Don’t get lured by byways, by a stray novel lying about,” he lectures to himself in May of 1918; “you must not lose one moment of your time on novels.”7 Malinowski’s ambivalent attitude toward modern fiction, however, is but one example of the complexity of the relation between the operative terms— narrative, myth, and others—that not only come to characterize Malinowski’s ethnographic writings but in fact are the stuff of them, are the literal terms that Malinowski meditates upon, adopts, and transmutes. In this light, assessing the relation of myth to narrative requires focusing upon Malinowski’s literal usage of the terms myth and narrative in their complex relation to other key words in the Malinowski corpus—function, functionalism, whole, Ethnographer—and requires careful attention to the shifts of these terms as they move into and out of Malinowski’s anthropology. This process will inevitably flesh out Malinowski’s formidable role in the rich cross-disciplinary conversation that created the modern conception of that most central of key words for Malinowski, culture. In the history of anthropology through the first two thirds of the twentieth century Malinowski’s Argonauts was normatively read as a radical break from the generally amateurish comparative anthropology that preceded it. This narrative was supported, in fact propounded, by Malinowski himself in the years

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following the publication of Argonauts and certainly made some sense in light of the changes Malinowski himself made in the institution of cultural anthropology while at the London School of Economics in the 1920s and 1930s (he died prematurely in 1942, in the United States, after spending several years at Yale University). In 1964, I. C. Jarvie put forth the ultimately histrionic interpretation of Malinowski’s break from Frazerian anthropology, oppositionally and sardonically terming it a “revolution” whose “first battle-cry” was “kill the chief priest (or father) and his gang,” which Jarvie translates as “overthrow the influence of Frazer and his company; purge our new Science of Man of the influence of these Victorian intellectualist evolutionists.”8 In the last quarter-century, however, important historical work has revised the reading of Malinowski’s relation to comparative anthropology: the “revolution” has been recast, primarily by George Stocking, as a complex transition of disciplinary practices that combined methodological, theoretical, and stylistic innovation and borrowing. In fact, Malinowski’s opponents—those with whom he struggled over control of British cultural anthropology beginning in the early 1920s—were for the most part not the comparative evolutionists like Frazer but usually, and more pointedly, Malinowski’s academic mentor Charles Seligman and the British diffusionists Elliot Smith and William James Perry. Smith and Perry, who took up the mantle of neo-diffusionism as inherited from Rivers, who died in 1922, trained their attention upon the area distribution of “key cultural elements.” Perry’s Children of the Sun, published in 1923, in its focus upon the “world-wide spread of culture” from its origins in the Paleolithic Age, epitomizes this version of “cultural” interpretation with which Malinowski found little sympathy and indeed actively fought against.9 It is also well known that Malinowski paid great homage to Frazer, and though he did so in part for self-promotion, until the end of his career he praised Frazerian concepts, such as primitive magic, while at the same time exacting criticism upon them. In addition, Malinowski attributed his conversion, or “turn,” to anthropology to his mother’s reading Frazer to him: in the foreword to Argonauts he notes that “my first love for ethnology is associated with the reading of the ‘Golden Bough’ ” (xviii). And in his dedication to “Myth in Primitive Psychology” (first presented as an address in 1925) he proclaims, in indicatively penal imagery: “For no sooner had I begun to read this great work, than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister-studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.”10 And it is no secret that Malinowski attributed his devotion to fine anthropological writing to his reading of Frazer, for in fact he says as much in a letter to Frazer, written in 1917 while en route to his second “field” stay in the Trobriands:

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Through the study of your works mainly, I have come to realize the paramount importance of vividness and colour in descriptions of native life. I remember how helpful it was to find in your T&E [Totemism and Exogamy] a picturesque account of the country where the respective tribes live. In fact I found that the more scenery and ‘atmosphere’ was given to the account, which you had at your disposal, the more convincing and manageable to the imagination was the ethnology of that district. I shall try to give local colour and describe the nature of the scenery and the mise-en-scene to the best of my ability.11

Robert Thornton has made the useful point that Malinowski shared with and indeed borrowed from Frazer the trope of the “metaphor of the voyage,” which, in its structure of setting out and returning, gives to Argonauts an essentially “narrative” structure (“Imagine yourself,” 10). While the “narrative” aspects of Argonauts will be discussed in the next chapter, Thornton’s observation well illustrates how Malinowski departed significantly from Frazer on certain theoretical issues and discursive practices, for example, evolutionism and the comparativist organization of ethnographic writing, and yet cleaved to him on others. In addition, Thornton’s focus on setting out and returning as structural framing device rightly points toward a narrative arc of expectancy in Argonauts, one prepared for by allusion not only to Frazer but also to the Jason of Greek mythology, whose name is not specifically referred to in the volume itself and yet whose vessel provides the title to Malinowski’s ethnography and is doubled in the Trobriand canoes whose journeys trace the Kula exchange circuit at the heart of Malinowski’s anthropological quest. And yet the setting out and return that creates that narrative expectancy is not what frames Malinowski’s text, at least at its outer edges. With the exception of Frazer’s opening preface, what brackets Argonauts is words portending the disappearance of culture, words that in their sculpting of disintegration call for the salvage job of the culture reader. Malinowski’s opening lines— “Ethnology is in the sadly ludicrous, not to say tragic, position, that at the very moment when it begins to put its workshop in order, to forge its proper tools, to start ready for work on its appointed task, the material of its study melts away with hopeless rapidity” (xv)—recall Frazer’s image of Malinowski as Cervantes, whose Don Quixote, in inimitable comic-tragic fashion, fights the battle to preserve a way of life. Malinowski, like Don Quixote, Frazer, and, significantly, Arnold and Eliot, needs to rescue culture in order to make life worth living. In the penultimate paragraph of Argonauts, as in the conclusions to The Waste Land and Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Malinowski evokes the Great War and its aftermath as proof of the need to get serious about “culture” work. Never before, Malinowski argues, has there been such a need for a widening of perspective, a “tolerance” for “the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding due even to savages,” than at the

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present moment, “when prejudice, ill will and vindictiveness are dividing each European nation from another, when all the ideals, cherished and proclaimed as the highest achievements of civilisation, science, and religion, have been thrown to the winds” (518). While Malinowski’s call for “tolerance” sets him apart from the hierarchies established by Frazer and Eliot, he is affiliated to them both in his insistence upon a wider grasp of what others ways of life can signify—a formulation that, not incidentally, reinforces the evolutionist categories of “savage” and “civilised”—and in the effort to preserve Culture as the best that has been known and thought. Sapir and Malinowski, though they emerge from and create quite different disciplinary positions, methodological and theoretical, both reinforce hierarchical conceptions of culture in the discursive act of creating relativist ones. As in both The Golden Bough and “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” so in the final words of Argonauts the need to erect institutional standards in the face of disciplinary extinction is underscored: “Alas, the time is short for Ethnology, and will this truth of its real importance dawn before it is too late?” (518). The adversary of Malinowski’s urgent closing question, given its allegorical garb, is appropriately ambiguous: time is one form it takes, and ignorance another. However, the preceding sentence clarifies another: “The study of Ethnology—so often mistaken by its very votaries for an idle hunting after curios, for a ramble among the savage and fantastic shapes of ‘barbarous customs and crude superstitions’—might become one of the most deeply philosophical, enlightening, and elevating disciplines of scientific research.” The enemy here, most pointedly, is amateurism itself. Clifford, in his articulation of the structure of “salvage” in ethnographic work, calls attention to “the persistent and repetitious ‘disappearance’ of social forms at the moment of their ethnographic representation.”12 In this regard, the disappearance of native ways of life in Argonauts is most strikingly correlated to—occurs simultaneously with—the downfall of amateurism and the rise of professionalism. In his foreword Malinowski notes, “Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants—these die away under our very eyes” (xv). In the sentence that follows, Malinowski argues not for the validity of extinction— which, like the literal disappearance of culture as we know it in Eliot’s The Waste Land, functions as a given—but for the legitimacy of “the research which has been done on native races by men of academic training,” which demonstrates “beyond doubt and cavil that scientific, methodic inquiry can give us results far more abundant and of better quality than those of even the best amateur’s work” (xv). Probably Argonauts’s greatest impact within the field of cultural anthropology stems not from the knowledge it has imparted about Trobriand Islanders,

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nor from its contributions to the study of exchange systems, nor from its important reformulations of the anthropological cornerstones of myth, magic, and “native” languages, nor even from its manifestation as a new discursive anthropological product, the monograph, but rather from its exposition, accomplished most succinctly in the enormously influential introduction to Argonauts, of the “secret of effective fieldwork,” what Malinowski called the “Ethnographer’s magic,” through which, he notes, the anthropologist “is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life” (6). Echoing Frazer’s filiation of magic and science as modes of agency in which humanity attempts “control” over nature, as opposed to religion, in which humanity petitions for favors from above, Malinowski’s “magic,” his “secret,” is none other than the wielding of basic scientific procedure, the “patient and systematic application of a number of rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles,” which he groups under the headings “scientific aims,” “good conditions of work,” and “special methods of collecting” (6). Malinowski’s repeated injunctions for and explications of the careful transcription of “native” behavior, proper methods of the translation of language, and the construction of charts and tables,13 as mundane or commonsensical as they may appear (both as phrased by Malinowski and retrospectively, thanks largely to him, by those who followed him in the profession), were what made him central to the practice of cultural anthropology after him. And it was precisely the qualities of assiduousness and rigor, coupled with the aspirations of scientism, that would transform literary criticism, at least the form that would prevail in England and America from the 1920s through the midcentury, into a serious professional pursuit. Though Eliot himself did not work primarily in an academic venue, like Malinowski’s his call for a dispassionate and precise practice, an enterprise whose best achievements, as he notes in “The Function of Criticism,” could only be measured against the culling of a few good “facts,”14 made modern literary critical practice possible as an academically based discipline in the twentieth century. The full accession of criticism to the academy required other emphases as well, including the greater stress upon criticism’s practice as a scientific procedure, such as that put into practice by I. A. Richards, as well as the “patient and systematic application” (Malinowski’s words) of the exacting, workaday procedure of the close reading of the literary text, as witnessed in the rise of the New Criticism.

Another requirement of Malinowski’s practice that ties it, generically and historically, to modern literary critical conceptions is what he terms “one of the first conditions of acceptable Ethnographic work,” namely, that such work “should deal with the totality of all social, cultural and psychological aspects

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of the community, for they are so interwoven that not one can be understood without taking into consideration all of the others” (xvi). In much the same way as Eliot’s conception of the poem, the “totality” that Malinowski insists upon is tied integrally to the argument that the various practices of a people (for Eliot, components of a poem) are meaningful, are filled with meaning by virtue of being organized into a whole. And this meaningfulness is exactly what eludes the amateur, who, Malinowski repeats again and again in Argonauts, perceives in his “idle hunting after curios” mere meaningless, because not seen as organized, expression. “Ethnology,” Malinowski proclaims in his introduction, “has introduced law and order into what seemed chaotic and freakish. It has transformed for us the sensational, wild and unaccountable world of ‘savages’ into a number of well ordered communities, governed by law, behaving and thinking according to consistent principles” (9–10).15 Malinowski contrasts the amateur culture reader of the unprofessional institutional past, who, when asked about the “customs” and “manners” of a native tribe, replied “Customs none, manners beastly,” to the “modern Ethnographer,” who, “with his tables of kinship terms, genealogies, maps, plans, and diagrams, proves the existence of an extensive and big organization” (10). Systematic tools and procedures are used to verify the systematicity of a culture, just as culture itself is defined according to the criteria of systematicity. The enemy, again, is the amateur, who in his ignorance fails to replace the seemingly “chaotic and freakish” with “law and order.” Deeply relativist in its granting of systems of intelligibility to native peoples, Malinowski’s reasoning is also fundamentally Arnoldian in its insistence upon anarchy as the feared opposite of culture as system.16 While Malinowski’s notion of cultural totality as expressed in his introduction—cultures are wholes, are organized as such—may appear simple and selfevident, there is in fact more than one model for totality at work, as evidenced in the following passage: The field Ethnographer has seriously and soberly to cover the full extent of the phenomenon in each aspect of tribal culture studied, making no difference between what is commonplace, or drab, or ordinary, and what strikes him as astonishing and out-of-the-way. At the same time, the whole area of tribal culture in all its aspects has to be gone over in research. The consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect make also for joining them into one coherent whole. (11)

From a routine, detail-based methodological perspective, Malinowski demands of the ethnographer a totality of coverage of culture items: thoroughness is critical, as no one thing, strange or familiar, ought to be left out. This notion of the total is essentially enumerative and accumulative. On the other hand, “the whole area of tribal culture in all its aspects” is gone over so that “the

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consistency, the law and order which obtain within each aspect” becomes clear: leaving those “aspects” out would endanger the perception of totality as unity, as the recognition of wholeness. Yet something else is suggested in the final sentence, as the unity of the parts makes possible “joining” them “into one coherent whole.” Here the implicit presence of a doer of the joining, the ethnographer, suggests that it is he who puts together, constructs, the “one coherent whole” that is the “tribal culture.”17 The insistence upon thorough coverage of the field, an eminently metonymic practice, was of course not new to cultural anthropology: Boas in his study of distributional traits had been urging such coverage since the 1880s, as had W. H. R. Rivers in his diffusionary studies. But Malinowski’s call for the active “joining” of “each aspect . . . into one coherent whole” through the “law and order” perceived or “obtained” in each represents a bolder move, a decidedly metaphorical strategy in which totality becomes a theory of how culture operates. And Malinowski was aware that he was entering into such waters, for in the final chapter of Argonauts, after a brief review of how his study of the Kula might benefit those of prevailing theoretical orientations (evolutionist, diffusionist), he tentatively puts forward that “it seems to me that there is room for a new type of theory” (515). Commenting that the “institution” of the Kula “presents several aspects [that are] closely intertwined and influencing one another” and thus “form one coherent whole” (515), Malinowski goes on to hazard the generalization that “the influence of one another of the various aspects of an institution, the study of the social and psychological mechanism on which the institution is based, are a type of theoretical studies which has been practiced up till now in a tentative way only, but I venture to foretell will come into their own sooner or later” (515–16). Thus Malinowskian functionalism as theory was born. In his conclusion Malinowski articulates the ethnographer’s “functional” enterprise as a creatively synchronous plunging into the depths of an altogether different mentality whose aspects and essence are then comprehended (“grasped”) and likened to the ethnographer’s own cultural experience. Ruminating upon his own “real desire to penetrate other cultures, to understand other types of life,” Malinowski decries the inability of amateurs “to grasp the inner meaning and the psychological reality of all that is outwardly strange, at first sight incomprehensible, in a different culture,” and concludes that “these people are not born to be ethnologists. It is in the love of the final synthesis, achieved by the assimilation and comprehension of all the items of a culture . . . that lies the test of the real worker in the true Science of Man” (517). The eminently creative-because-synthetic activity of the ethnographer brings to mind Eliot’s conception of the true (in this case Metaphysical) poet, who has achieved excellence not through the “expression” of the new (in Malinowski’s words, the “outward strangeness”) but through the rigorous imple-

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mentation of “a mechanism of sensibility that could devour any kind of experience” and thus for whom “experiences are always forming new wholes.” For both Eliot’s poet and Malinowski’s ethnographer the process of making “whole” is an artisanal, hard-won activity involving procedures of the “synthesis” or transmutation of ordinary as well as extraordinary human experience (the true poet, Eliot says, “is constantly amalgamating disparate experience”) as opposed to the mere presentation (or, in Eliot’s terms, “expression”) of novel or strange “cultural” material. Both Malinowski’s “amateur” and Eliot’s nonpoet (posed by Eliot as both the “ordinary man” and the mediocre poet) share in their perception of disparate cultural encounters as, in Eliot’s words, “chaotic, irregular, fragmentary,” or, in Malinowski’s words, “chaotic and freakish,” “sensational, wild, and accountable.” Eliot’s emphasis upon the importance of “tradition” in relation to “individual talent” also finds a significant parallel in Argonauts. Like Eliot, who measures “individual talent” not according to its distinctiveness or newness but according to how it is informed by and informs the Great Tradition, Malinowski values the “individual” contribution to “culture” only in how it reflects or refracts the collective “tradition.” “As sociologists,” he notes in his introduction, “we are not interested in what A or B may feel qua individuals, in the accidental course of their own personal experiences—we are interested only in what they feel and think qua members of a given community” (23). Though Malinowski, even more so than many of his contemporary contenders within cultural anthropology, often specifies the names, backgrounds, and particular experiences of native informants, his tendency to introduce individuals as mouthpieces for the expression of “typical” tribal behavior would set a pattern for much cultural anthropology through the twentieth century.18 The modern literary critical tendency, as inaugurated primarily by Eliot, to sever the import of a cultural product (e.g., the poem) from its author, creator, transmitter (e.g., the poet) finds significant correspondence in Malinowski’s work. Now, while Eliot hardly holds that the poet is a mere mouthpiece, his formulation of poetic process emphasizes, one, that the poet, in order to enter the canon, is being shaped by the tradition as well as shaping it (“Tradition and the Individual Talent”), and, two, that often the experience of the poet in process is shrouded in mystery, perhaps at times mysticism, and certainly circumstance. One way or another, Eliot makes it clear that the poet in process does not know exactly what he is about. Similarly, though with a difference, Malinowski insists that the natives in their production of “culture” know not what they are doing: “The natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them” (11). As an anthropological precursor to literary criticism’s intentional fallacy, Malinowski’s claim is that though the native (read “poet”) enacts, produces, even constructs the cultural product (poem), said native (poet) does not grasp the code or set of processes that gives that product significance (as a superior work of art, in Eliot’s case, or a “typi-

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cal,” representative emblem of a “culture,” in the case of Malinowski). In both cases, the expertise to decipher is the province of the culture reader (literary critic, anthropologist).

The possibility of a “new type of theory” as announced by Malinowski in Argonauts in 1922 became more fully explicated in that same year in an article entitled “Ethnology and the Study of Society.” There Malinowski asserts that every item of culture . . . represents a value, fulfills a social function, has a positive biological significance. For tradition is a fabric in which all the strands are so closely woven that the destruction of one unmakes the whole. And tradition is, biologically speaking, a form of collective adaptation of a community to its surroundings. Destroy tradition, and you will deprive the collective organism of its protective shell, and give it over to the slow but inevitable process of dying out.19

The argument for the “biological significance” of “every item of culture” operates, interestingly, through a shift in artisanal and biological tropes: “tradition,” which is the standard-bearer of “primitive” culture, is a human product made so as to be inextricably intertwined. Removing any “strand” destroys the “whole,” and yet the totality that is the “whole” in Malinowski’s passage becomes transposed from the basket itself (“tradition”) to “culture,” figured as “collective organism” shorn of its “protective shell.” This is not a mere rhetorical sleight of hand, nor should it be dismissed as a mixed metaphor. For Malinowski, as for Eliot in The Waste Land of that same year, if culture as concept is to survive, it must be rendered as natural and thus find its characteristic and most telling expression in the urgency of the destruction of traditional forms, of the “dying out” of the best that is traditional “culture.” Stocking points out that the above passage constitutes one of Malinowski’s “earliest published statements of the functional integration of culture” and is, importantly, “expressed in essentially psychobiological terms” (After Tylor, 267). Malinowski’s tendency to treat culture as a biological entity became more pronounced over the years. As Stocking notes, Malinowski’s 1929 encyclopedia article “Culture” develops “a biological theory of culture” that even more dramatically emphasizes the literal applicability of concepts of birth, growth, adaptation, and dying to cultures.20 This organic-adaptive conception of culture would become even more fully developed in essays published posthumously in A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944). It was, in fact, the “psychobiological” aspect of Malinowski’s definition that caused the major fault lines within the functionalist camp in the 1920s and 1930s, ultimately leading to the approach’s decline by the 1940s. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the co-founder of British functionalism, who also published his first ethnography, The Andaman Islanders, in 1922, began, like Malinowski,

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by emphasizing the search for “general laws of cultural process” through the rigorous “scientific analysis of actual reality,” in which the parts (the “institutions”) were interpreted as they informed or made up the whole of “culture.”21 However, by the early 1930s Radcliffe-Brown had fully articulated his own “structural-functionalist” approach, as he termed it, which increasingly diverged from Malinowskian functionalism in its emphasis upon “social structure” over the role of the psychology of individual actors and its preference for the mechanical tropes of “structures” and “system” over the more Malinowskian biological tropes of growth, adaptation, and death.22 In later years Malinowski did assert, as evidenced in his posthumously published Scientific Theory of Culture, that “function” in “culture” was legitimate “primarily as a heuristic device” (169–70).23 And yet this is hardly to claim, as Herbert does, that Malinowski concluded that “ ‘function’ in culture is logically circular” (307), that Malinowski effectively recanted function and culture as empirical entities, and that the trajectory of Malinowski’s model of “culture” thus aimed away from the “biological” and toward the “linguistic” model.24 For one, despite his disavowal of the “physiological” approach, Malinowski would often argue in print for, in Stocking’s words, the “priority of the biological individual” (After Tylor, 366). This argument would become only more insistent in the posthumously published Scientific Theory of Culture, where, alongside his statement that function has “heuristic value,” he holds out for its “descriptive” nature (116) and asserts as well the “essentially physiological basis of culture” (79).25 Similarly, Eliot, despite the complexity and variability with which he handles the term culture, will insist that the “first” of “three important conditions for culture” is that it is an “organic (not merely planned, but growing) structure.”26 Now while Malinowski’s and Eliot’s assertions are not identical in emphasis—the former stresses biological motivation, the latter overall organic form—culture, simply put, must, in all its multivalence, be made to mean nature, a supposition that was in varying ways made to seem eminently commonsensical in their works of 1922.

One of Malinowski’s great accomplishments in Argonauts was his demonstration that culture could be rendered clear and coherent precisely through the exposition of the rigorous skills and intuitive sympathies of the ethnographer. In this sense, the native “culture” as whole is brought to light through the profession of the ethnographer’s “whole” cultural experience with the native other, one that instructs the coming generation of anthropologists in the exacting use of charts and tables while also advising them to take “plunges into the life of the natives,” which, Malinowski intimates, he himself “made . . . frequently not only for study’s sake but because everyone needs human company” (22). Malinowski acknowledges that his own readiness “to put aside

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camera, note book and pencil, and to join in himself and in what is going on” may not be “equally easy for everyone,” and he avers that “perhaps the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans—but though the degree of success varies, the attempt is possible for everyone” (21). With the publication of Malinowski’s private Trobriand diaries in 1967 the anthropological community was sent reeling by revelations of his apparently less than “plastic” relationship with the Trobrianders that were his subject and in effect made his reputation. The man who for years had served as both architect and model of the good ethnographer was suddenly revealed to have exercised professionally impure deeds as well as thoughts: on numerous occasions he becomes exasperated and furious with the local natives, to the point of physical violence, and at one point in the diary, alluding to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he exclaims that “on the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes’ ” (69). Sexual fantasies involving native and Western women regularly appear, and on several occasions he confesses, with great self-loathing, to having “pawed” the local women (256, 282). The Malinowski who emerges from the diary is hypochondriacal, plagued by self-doubt, and guilt-ridden over sexual temptation and the indolence attributed to novel reading and overeating but also resolved to stick to the path of disciplined ethnographic work and moral thinking. He emerges as a split personality, a soul divided between thoughts of work and fantasy (sexual as well as fictional) and thoughts of his present, for the most part miserable life with the natives and his past lives, in Australia and Europe, which tend to be associated with women (his mother and lovers). While the sense of a man determined to work hard and make his way in the world clearly emerges, Malinowski’s characterization of himself is persistently self-deprecating, as epitomized, in fact, in the diary’s sudden last line: “Truly I lack real character” (298). The initial reception of the diary, as later assessed by Raymond Firth, who wrote the original introduction, was mixed, to say the least. A fair amount of outrage was registered, as Firth chronicles in his second introduction to the book (1988), over the very decision to publish what in all likelihood Malinowski himself never intended to see the light of day,27 and a number of defenders of Malinowski came forward noting the sides of his personality that do not emerge in the diary (given the genre’s tendency toward self-scrutiny) and the honesty of the man that the diary exhibits. One friend cast Malinowski as “the hero or the anti-hero” of the book, noting that “no man was ever more brutally frank about his own failings” (xxiii). And some, such as Clifford Geertz, pointed more critically toward the disjuncture between the portrayal of the fieldwork experience as rendered in the diary and that in the Argonauts and meditated upon what this disparity had to say about ethnography as an enter-

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prise. Firth quotes Geertz as stating that “the value of Malinowski’s embarrassing example is that, if one takes it seriously, it makes difficult to defend the sentimental view of rapport as depending on the unfolding of anthropologist and informant into a single moral and emotional universe” (xxv). In this last regard the diary has functioned within the conscience of cultural anthropology as an important signpost of both disciplinary frailty and selfscrutiny: Marcus and Fischer hold it, alongside Le´vi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, to be one of the most important “critiques of anthropology,”28 regardless of its original intention, and Geertz has referred to it as “a back stage masterpiece,” underscoring how the diary “disturbs because of what it says about being there.”29 Firth, who claims to have had great reluctance over his original involvement in seeing the diary into print, notes that since its publication in 1967 the diary has become “part of the literature of the history of anthropology,” at the least help[ing] to elucidate . . . Malinowski’s complex character (Diary, xxvii). The diary, then, became part of the canon of anthropological work by virtue of its warning of the “predicament” cultural anthropology was finding itself in by the 1980s. Perhaps the most illuminating critique of the past generation is that of James Clifford, who, in his important role in the articulation of anthropology’s latecentury identity crisis, sees great significance in the disjunctiveness between the “experience” as expressed in the diary and as rendered in Argonauts. Clifford, alluding to Stephen Greenblatt’s concept of self-fashioning and putting forth the strong parallel between the personal lives and careers of Malinowski and Conrad, holds that an important transition occurred between the writing of the diary (1914–15, 1917–18) and the publication of Argonauts (1922). Noting Malinowski’s insecurities over self-identity, his desire for a “unified personality” as expressed in the diary, Clifford asserts that “one of the ways that Malinowski pulled himself together was to write ethnography” and in effect sees in the writing of Argonauts the creation of “the fashioned wholes of a self and of a culture” (Predicament, 104). Seeing in the novels he regularly consumes “whole narrated worlds that seem at times more real . . . than the day-to-day business of research” (109), Malinowski, according to Clifford, finds his “rescue . . . in creating realist cultural fictions, of which Argonauts is his first fully realized success” (109–10). Clifford contends that Malinowski’s creation of a culture as world, as unified whole, finds a significant parallel in the novelist’s (here, specifically, Conrad’s) making of a “believable world,” a “probable portrait” of “fictional self-fashioning” (110). Firth rightfully points to Clifford’s assumption that the diary and Argonauts can be regarded as “a single expanded text” (Diary, xxx), claiming that in effect Clifford is not attentive to the different purposes of the two—a diary (which, Geertz has claimed, is “a genre addressed to an audience of one”)30 and a monograph. And Firth also notes that Clifford discounts the different circumstances and time frames in which Malinowski wrote them.31 While in-

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deed the diary and Argonauts mark different disciplinary moments and intentions, Clifford’s analysis of the transition from the personal as well as stylistic fragmentation of the diary to the comfortable solidity and wholeness of Argonauts is compelling and generative, especially in his tying of the notion of personal coherence to the emergent conception of culture as whole. In this regard, Clifford sees in Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy a “basic diagnosis” that Malinowski will follow up on in his transition from the diary to Argonauts: “Against the fragmentation of modern life stood the order and wholeness of culture” (106). As expatriate Poles transplanted to England and negotiating among three languages, Conrad and Malinowski are indeed fitting twins as put forward by Clifford in his articulation of the moment—“at the turn of the century”—when, according to him, “a new ethnographic conception of culture became possible” (93). And yet Clifford’s paralleling of the figures tends to suggest too neat a fit, as though anthropologist and novelist were mutual players in the selfsame formation of a constant referred to as “ethnographic subjectivity” (93). The following reading will pose another exile to England, Eliot, as a fitting foil to Malinowski in order to illumine the congruences as well as the divergences in the concepts of culture emerging in the different callings of anthropology and literature. The affinities between Eliot and Malinowski warrant attention even if some might end up seeming merely serendipitous. Each heralded from nobility (each family boasted a coats of arms), and each, as a devoted Anglophile, immigrated to England about the time of the First World War, Eliot just before the war and Malinowski just after. Each published his magnum opus in England in 1922 and immediately thereafter used the occasion to take over his field: in that same year Eliot became editor of the new journal Criterion, which effectively shaped the notion of what would constitute literary modernism, and Malinowski moved to his post at the London School of Economics, where he would create the new British academic anthropology and the functionalist school. Each man became an acknowledged architect of the culture concept, significantly creating new possibilities for what both culture and tradition could constitute. And each confirmed his status as a spokesman for culture by publishing, in the 1940s, a formidable treatise explicitly addressing the redefinition of the term: Malinowski’s posthumously published Scientific Theory of Culture in 1942 and Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture in 1948. And yet the differences between the two, especially in terms of the works that effectively established their accession to professional power in 1922, are telltale. It can be simply, and tentatively, put that whereas Eliot, with The Waste Land, gained the stage as a main player of literary modernism through his articulation of the fragmentation of culture, Malinowski, on the other hand, established his credentials in Argonauts by articulating culture as whole. In this regard, following Clifford’s line, Malinowski limited his articulation of

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cultural fragmentation to his diary, where the experience of the apprehension of the other culture is usually expressed as the alienating and infuriating torpor and stupidity of “savage” living. At one, not untypical point in the diary Malinowski comments, “As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog” (167). Quite simply, what Malinowski found necessary to make whole (and, conversely, impossible to render as incoherent)—culture—Eliot, in the realm of the new literature, found enabling, even necessary, to fragment. Immediate qualifications must follow upon the above proposition. For one thing, Eliot does not simply fragment culture; rather, he fashions fragmentation through the assumption, as embedded in the poem, of cultural wholeness. Conversely, Malinowski does not simply make culture whole. As will be illustrated below, significant ruptures, for example, the threatening differential between civilized and savage ways of life, are posited in order that Trobriand “culture” be ordered. Put in another register, one might say that though Eliot’s poem theorizes culture as incoherent, the poem’s reception tended to center on the question of its formal wholeness: was it or was it not a coherent picture of an incoherent world? Conversely, though Argonauts proposes a theory of cultural coherence where there was thought to be none (i.e., in the tribes of the Trobriand islands), since its publication the work has been cited, for praise or blame, for its incoherence, in the sense that the profusion of cultural material, data, presented does not match or correlate to—and in fact spills over—his thesis. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Malinowski’s pupil and eventual rival in the field, harshly criticized Malinowski for creating in his books a “morass of verbiage and triviality” that ought to have been reduced to match their theses. Clifford, on the other hand, cites Malinowski’s tendency to pile into his books materials “that did not directly support his own all-too-clear interpretive slant” as proof that Malinowski created in each of his major works “an open text subject to multiple re-interpretations.”32 One might venture that though the fields of modern literature and anthropology at that moment had different aims or imperatives—the one promoting wholeness, the other, fragmentation—the casts of characters were essentially the same. On the one hand, there was the role of the fragmented modern subject, as surfacing in Eliot’s multiple portraits of contemporary dilapidated characters (Madame Sosostris, Mr. Eugenides, the pub patrons, and so on) and in Malinowski’s incomplete ethnocentric white man and (implicitly, retrospectively) in his own harried and divided persona in the diary. On the other hand, there is the character of the coherent traditional/primitive, as seen in Argonauts in the Trobriand islander and in The Waste Land as Tiresias and the three DAs as played by Thunder. In each case, however, the “story,” or narrative dynamic, involves the reversal of values attached to each character: traditional/primitives become degraded, take on negative value, as barbarous, violent ancients in The

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Waste Land or as brutish “savages” in Argonauts. Similarly, the modern civilized subject is enabled through his contact with or association to the traditional figure: in The Waste Land Madame Sosostris becomes the venerable Sibyl, and in Argonauts the ethnocentric white traveler, through close contact with the native, becomes the all-knowing ethnographer. Overall, though, one can argue that the aim of Malinowski’s work was to construct a whole “primitive” culture, while Eliot’s purpose involved the deconstructing of the modern cultural order, or perhaps more aptly put, the constructing of a new definition of culture along the fault lines of the modern notion of anarchy. In this respect the “fragments” that Eliot’s persona has “shored against [his] ruins” become a fitting description of the splintered associations and intimations of Malinowski’s diary, wherein various characters, past and present, civilized and primitive, randomly appear and disappear as filtered through the consciousness of the “I” who, in a sense, functions as an all-seeing yet blind Tiresias.33 Obviously Malinowski could not possibly be content with such a rendering, could not, did not, let it go public, even alongside its official counterpart Argonauts. And thus his diary represents a “piece of rhythmic grumbling” as Eliot describes The Waste Land, and perhaps more pointedly as that “thing of shreds and patches” as articulated a few years earlier by Lowie, a model for culture in tatters that would not do in the formation of cultural anthropology but was exactly what would, and did, do as a culture model in what would become known as the flowering of literary modernism. The relation of the diary to The Waste Land connects to the broader issue of the status of appended texts. The relation in this case between Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land and Malinowski’s diary is worth remark, even though the former was “attached” to the poem proper by the author within the year of the poem’s first appearance, while the latter became “attached” to Argonauts through its publication, without permission of the author, close to fifty years after the ethnography first appeared. Apart from the issue of the timing and the authorial role of attachment, however, once the appendages surfaced, the critical reception in the case of each main text tended to circle around the very legitimacy of the attachment—was it a part of the text proper? ought it to be “stuck,” or “unstuck”?—and around the various modes by which the appendage, whether regarded as stuck or unstuck, could be implemented to “read” the text proper. And yet once again significant differences emerge: the notes were interpreted, whether one was drawn to or repelled by them, as an attempt at providing a more or less objective scholarly context to what was usually perceived as an agonizingly personal poem; the diary emerged as a scandalously autobiographical supplement to what had achieved status as a magisterially objective work of rigorous research. Perhaps the more fitting twinning of supplementary texts, however, is that of Malinowski’s diary and the facsimile drafts of The Waste Land, which ap-

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peared in 1971. Both, incidentally, were published posthumously—four years apart, in fact—by the second wives of the respective authors and in each case revealed the impact of the first spouse upon the genesis of the Great Work: in Valetta Malinowska’s case, through the exposure of the role that Elsie Masson, as Malinowski’s Conradian “Intended” (signified in the diary as E.R.M.), played as stabilizing force, censor, and intellectual and sexual inspiration; and in Valerie Eliot’s case, through the exposure of the important role that Vivian Eliot played, alongside Ezra Pound, in the substantive editing of The Waste Land. Each publication also, importantly, exposed literary dependencies—Eliot’s borrowing of sources, Malinowski’s addiction to and contemplation upon novels—that in each revealed a man who, in F. O. Matthiessen’s words, “turned to literature rather than to life.”34 In each case, the publication of the work occasioned a significant retake on the original masterpiece, which, despite some pejorative biographical characterizations (Malinowski as embittered hypochondriacal lecher, Eliot as unacknowledging plagiarizer), resulted in the overall assessment of the man and work as more complex and artful than previously suspected. Both Eliot’s facsimile and Malinowski’s diary promoted (though it did not create) the critical tendency to read the masterwork as a register of personal desire and the forestalling of that temptation through the virtues of hard work and professional dedication. What is important here is not so much whether Malinowski or Eliot really had that desire or gave into it but rather that each expressed the imperative, whether in the more “personal” genre of the diary or the more “fictional” genre of the poem, of overcoming temptation through the artisanal process of making a new kind of text.35 Thus both Eliot’s “awful daring of a moment’s surrender” and Malinowski’s admission in the diary that he “scandalously pawed” the native girl Nopula become wrought into (though they are hardly justified by) a set of rules or guidelines—Malinowski’s “avenues” for proper ethnographic work as set out in his introduction; Eliot’s three DAs in the poem’s conclusion—that create a context through which to perceive, organize, and in effect rescue “culture.” For Malinowski that means the transformation of the amateur’s perception of the “chaotic and freakish” into the “law and order” of Trobriand “culture”; for Eliot, the articulation of the staid and stale Victorian order of modernity into the fracturing disorder of contemporaneity. Desire for both, then, becomes wrought into “culture” or its dire opposite, anarchy, but only through the catalyzing force of the trope of salvage, the momentum of a last-ditch race against temptation and time. Just as the pubkeeper’s call in Eliot’s poem, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME,” functions as an imperative to salvage what can be had from a tottering modern world, so Malinowski warns us at the end of Argonauts that “the time is short for Ethnology” and thus the real work of cultural ordering needs to be done “before it is too

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late” (518). In this respect, Eliot’s rhetorical question at poem’s end, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” can stand as an institutional directive for both literary modernism and cultural anthropology in the year 1922.

The “order” that is to be saved in Trobriand culture finds its essence, as well as its fullest expression, in Malinowski’s articulation of the Kula exchange. The Kula is described by Malinowski as a “route” traced by natives in canoes by which “articles of two kinds”—the soulava, “long necklaces of red shell,” and the mwali, “bracelets of white shell”—“are constantly moving in opposite directions,” the former clockwise, the latter counterclockwise. “Each of these articles, as it travels in its own direction on the closed circuit,” Malinowski explains, “meets on its way articles of the other class, and is constantly being exchanged for them.” And, Malinowski adds, “every movement” of the articles, “every detail of the transactions is fixed and regulated by a set of traditional rules and conventions, and some acts of the Kula are accompanied by an elaborate magical ritual and public ceremonies” (81). It is critical to the integrity of Trobriand “culture” that this central institution is a “closed circuit,” and its “every movement” and “detail” is expressive of what Malinowski calls the “law and order” that the ethnographer discerns in order to demonstrate that “culture” ’s coalescence into “one coherent whole.” In this regard, Clifford has given the Kula as an example in his critique of “the predominantly synechdochic stance of the new ethnography,” in which “parts were assumed to be microcosms or analogies of wholes.”36 And in an earlier moment of anthropological reorientation, Jarvie in 1964 calls attention to “the peculiarities of the Trobriand kula” that encouraged Malinowski to see it as a closed system whose function was to forge social bonds. From this particular approach to a particular institution, Jarvie claims, Malinowski took the leap that each institution of each “culture” functions so as to form the coherent whole that is a “culture”: thus, Jarvie notes, was functionalism as a general theory born.37 As the tour-de-force exemplification of a theory—functionalism—that made imperative the reading of “every movement” and “detail” in order to demonstrate the structure of the “whole,” Malinowski’s Kula serves as a striking analogue to Eliot’s conception of the objective correlative, which, incidentally, saw print three years before Argonauts. Like Eliot’s correlative, Malinowski’s Kula “functions” as a structure or scaffolding by which the reader is able to perceive the unity of the whole: in Malinowski’s case, Trobriand “culture”; in Eliot’s case, the work of art. Every article attached to the correlative that is the Kula is, by virtue of being interpreted according to it, filled with meaning that orients and makes sense of the whole. Thus Malinowski’s Trobriand culture is

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the obverse, structurally, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (which Eliot posits as the failure of integration) and akin to or could be seen as a species of Sapir’s “genuine culture.” And yet Malinowski’s endeavor along these lines is especially striking in that through his explication of “every movement” and “detail” he attempts to create the perception on the part of the reader that this collection of islanders in fact forms a “culture” and that it is the Kula that “welds together” this “considerable number of tribes,” this “vast complex of activities . . . so as to form one organic whole” (83). Jarvie, in his attack on Malinowskian functionalism, makes the case that Malinowski’s credo that one should “study the ritual, not the belief” (Revolution, 186) is in fact the essential message of functionalism and that in its time it worked, as a powerful though ultimately misused tool, to disempower loose evolutionist theorizing upon native mentality. Similarly, one can see in Eliot’s enunciation of Hamlet’s problem an indictment of not only the playwright’s failure to construct the “rite” but also the critic’s failure to read according to “rite”—according to what is actually embodied, inscribed, in the text, as opposed to what the unprofessional critic would impressionistically hypothesize about (or project into) the character. Such conjecturing on the critic’s part solidifies the assumption that Hamlet the character is a person who can have motives ascribed to him, much as the amateur evolutionists who in Jarvie’s reading would assume the existence of a character, Primitive Man, and ascribe motives to him without resorting to observed rites and practices. The Kula, then, as the prime focus of probably the most influential of modern ethnographies, has come to represent an archetypical institution in anthropological writing, one that statically, in the form of a continuing anthropological present, comes to encapsulate and literally give structure to a “culture.” And yet the Kula as expressed by Malinowski is not simply the rooted, unmoving, unchanging epicenter that recent critics have claimed has come, thanks largely to Malinowski, to characterize the modern anthropological culture concept.38 Malinowski’s version of Kula is, after all, mobile: it travels on a “route” and as such might be posited as an example of the alternative concept of culture proposed by Clifford, which, as he says, is characterized by “routing” rather than “rooting” and which finds its contours determined not by the fixed location (i.e., the “village”) that most fully expresses its most typical cultural features but rather by a full range of practices as revealed by the points of its furthest journeying (“Traveling Cultures,” 101). Indeed, Malinowski’s Kula does not characterize one discrete, indigenous group of natives but is, rather, what Malinowski refers to as “an international affair” (33), bringing into contact peoples (e.g., the Dobu, the Trobriands, the Kitava) who, though they share the same language and many social practices and beliefs, are of often startlingly different beliefs and temperaments. This is not to claim that Malinowski’s rendition of the Kula is, full and simple, an illustration of Clifford’s conception of culture conceived as “routed”

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or, more extreme yet, “postmodern” or “hybridic.” Again, the Kula as articulated by Malinowski functions ultimately as an agent that “welds together a considerable number of tribes . . . so as to form one organic whole” (83). Malinowski’s ethnographic authority in this regard is dependent upon the claim that this institution can indeed be read to embrace such “cultural” variety. That the Kula is of such large compass, geographically, politically, and behaviorally, is what gives Malinowski’s demonstration of its coherence such ballast. It is, after all, “an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution” (83). These three terms, it can be said, are a succinct paraphrase of Tylor’s equation of the “complex whole.” The first two, extensive and complicated, are the two varieties of the “complex,” being, respectively, a matter of metonymic range on one hand and metaphoric arrangement and kind on the other; these are what the ethnographer must demonstrate are equal to the well-ordered institution that is the “whole” of Tylor definition. Clearly the diminution of either or both of the first two terms—one could say dimensions—would seriously diminish the extent of Malinowski’s demonstration of the third.39 And the Kula’s being so “extensive” and “complicated” further argues for the necessity of the ethnographer as the sole agent capable of even approaching the challenge of putting the puzzle together, of making the thing the “whole.” For the “savages,” as termed by Malinowski, “have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure.” In fact, Malinowski continues, asking “even the most intelligent native” for a “definition” of the Kula “as a big, organised social construction” would lead nowhere, for “not even a partial account could be obtained. For the integral picture does not exist in his mind; he is in it, and cannot see the whole from the outside” (83).40 Malinowski’s potential accomplishment in bringing off the Kula as one “coherent whole” is also leveraged by his claim that the Kula is, after all, not simply a range of continuous practices that form the whole but, in fact, “a large number of closed circuits, on each of which the same articles would constantly pass” (278). The Kula would be a simple, or simpler, affair, Malinowski explains, if indeed Kula exchange were a matter of tracing the stable metonymic passage of a given article from persons/points “A B C D E F” (278); if such simple consecutiveness were the case, Malinowski notes, then once “an armshell got into the hands of one of them, it could never leave this strand.” But in fact, Malinowski asserts, the Kula ring is nothing approaching this, because every small Kula partner has, as a rule, on one side or another, a big one, that is a chief. And every chief plays the part of a shunting-station for Kula objects. Having so many partners on each side, he constantly transfers an object from one strand to another. Thus, any article which on its rounds has traveled through the hands of certain men, may on its second round come through an entirely different channel. This, of course, supplies a large part of the zest and excitement of the Kula exchange. (278)

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The ethnographer, then, in tracing the exponentially variegated routings of the Kula, has his work cut out for him. Complicating the ethnographer’s task even more is the fact, as articulated by Malinowski, that the Kula “does not run with an even flow but in violent gushes” (489), as when, for example, “a mortuary taboo temporarily holds up the flow of kula goods, and a big quantity of valuables thus dammed up, is suddenly let loose . . . and spreads in a big wave along the circuit” (492). Making even more daunting the accomplishment of demonstrating coherence is the Kula’s permeability by outside forces, what Malinowski calls the “commercial side tracks” (505), that permit “the entry into the ring and the exit out of it of the articles of the Kula proper” (500). The ceaseless movement of articles along the “closed circuit” of the Kula; the constant, necessary, but always delayed nature of the countergift (a native receiving a Kula must later, and always later, give another roughly equal in value [95–96]); the permanent nature of Kula participation (“once in the Kula, always in the Kula,” Malinowski paraphrases a native expression [83]); and the seemingly arbitrary assignment of great value to what Malinowski calls “the acquisition of a few dirty, greasy, and insignificant looking native trinkets” (351) all argue for the similitude of Malinowski’s rendition of the Kula to modern interpretations of the nature of language. Herbert makes this point compellingly in his brief discussion of the Kula as an exemplification of “the principle of the symbolic character of the ‘complex whole,’ of the need to define it as residing in no material substance but in a ramified chain of signifiers binding into a single scheme of expression all the disparate features of the life of a society” (19). In decidedly deconstructionist terms, Herbert, alluding to Foucault, summarizes the modern recognition of “the disconcerting possibility that all the interlinking signifiers of a given culture signify nothing but one another, in an eternal circular or labyrinthine traffic of ‘meaning’ which never attains an authentic signified,” and from there goes on to hazard a generalization on Malinowski’s Kula: “This, or so I guess, is the embedded allegory of Malinowski’s attempt in Argonauts of the Western Pacific to grasp the cultural metaphysics governing the Trobriand kula, a vast circular path of exchange around which a stock of trinkets of no practical utility but charged with intense symbolic and affective value migrates forever, doomed to perpetual displacement” (19). As generative as Herbert’s “guess” is, it immediately calls for some qualification. First, the “doom” of “perpetual displacement” as articulated by Herbert is not registered by Malinowski or by the “natives” as Malinowski characterizes them. In fact, both parties are quite content with the functioning of the Kula as a system, whereas “doom” as such is figured as the threatened destruction of the Kula ring by outside forces, mainly the influence of white colonial mentality. Malinowski, quite fittingly, might claim that Herbert was foisting onto a distinctively different “culture” a system of valuation that had nothing or little to do with it.

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Second, Herbert’s thesis of the general development of the modern culture concept as a “symbolic” force depends upon his assertion that what this signifying process entailed, and in fact necessitated, was “the increasing displacement of the biological model of physical function in the name of the philosophical and linguistic model, a la Foucault, as a ‘system of signs’ ” (19). One problem here is that Herbert’s conception of “displacement” too neatly divides the biological and the linguistic models. Malinowski’s functionalism, as Stocking has demonstrated, moved resolutely toward the biological, and yet Malinowski also expressed function’s function as “heuristic.” One might respond that Malinowski’s figuring of culture as biological was a deception, or delusion, an act of false consciousness on Malinowski’s part: what he posed as biological is in fact linguistic; he just failed to recognize it as such. But such a response would ignore the complexly intertwined negotiation of biological and linguistic models and tropes in the construction of the modern culture concept, especially as evidenced in Malinowski’s arguments on functionalism; it also, in effect, presupposes the manifest truth of “culture as language” and falsity of “culture as organism.” Finally, to the extent that Malinowski’s Kula is about language, Herbert’s assertion of its adherence to a predominantly Foucauldian model of language does not heed the very models of language that Malinowski drew from, implemented, and very much helped make possible in the modern disquisition on culture. Herbert’s treatment tends to regard Malinowski’s discourse on the Kula as an almost unwitting and unrecognized (by Malinowski himself) intuition about language that only later philosopher-linguists—e.g., Foucault— would recognize and develop into a full-bodied theory of language. Malinowski in this case becomes Malinowski’s native, who “cannot see the inside from the outside.” This might be viewed as a fitting punishment for the imperial ethnographer, but, for better or worse, a Malinowskian approach to Malinowski’s treatment of language would insist that we recognize the functionally specific “meanings” at work in the specific “culture” in which the object of inquiry, in this case Malinowski, was working.

Chapter 3

MALINOWSKI, “NATIVE” NARRATION, AND “THE ETHNOGRAPHER’S MAGIC”

AT THE OPENING of the concluding chapter of Argonauts Malinowski effectively closes the book by announcing the completion of the Kula ring itself: “We have been following the various routes and ramifications of the Kula, entering minutely and meticulously into its rules and customs . . . till, arriving at the end of our information, we have made its two ends meet.”1 The purpose of the final chapter, then, is not to acquire new “information” but rather to dispense with “the magnifying glass of detailed examination and look from a distance at the subject of our inquiry, take in the institution with one glance, let it assume a definite shape before us” (509). The “shape” that emerges is the “organic whole” made possible by “genuine scientific research,” as opposed to the amateurism of “mere curio hunting,” which “runs after the quaint, singular and freakish” (509). And yet the closure of the Kula ring, the bringing together of its “two ends,” indicates not only a conceptual close of information but also a narrative one of the completion of a voyage, or, more accurately, a series of voyages that structure the text appropriately entitled Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In a specific sense, the “two ends” that we see “meet” represent the complete rendition or telling of both the clockwise and the counterclockwise sea voyages along the Kula route: chapters 5 through 15 chronicle, with significant interruptions, one direction of the Kula, from the beach at Sineketa to the Dobu and back home; chapter 16, in briefer form, provides an account of the return visit of the Dobuans to Sineketa. In a more general sense, the ambiguity of the closing of the ring at book’s end suggests just how ineluctably Argonauts is bound up with narrative, as both subject matter and mode of discourse. And in fact, much of the power of the book has to do with how the momentum of anthropological knowledge gathering on the one hand and of narrativized voyaging (both of the natives and of the anthropologist) on the other so fittingly and complexly combine. Robert Thornton has made clear how Malinowski learned from Frazer to implement the figure of the voyage so as to give the freight of anthropological writing pace and drama. And Thornton, Stocking, and Clifford all have written insightfully on Malinowski’s writerly aspirations and models, Frazer as well as Joseph Conrad.2

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In the contemporary “linguistic turn” in writing about anthropology critics have focused upon the modern ethnography, and Argonauts specifically as one of its epitomizing texts, as writing, but the take on what kind of writing varies. Stocking, Geertz, and Clifford, in varying ways, focus on Argonauts in essentially narrative terms, emphasizing the creation of the ethnographer as controlling narrator-protagonist, whose first-person, “I was There” perspective powerfully fuses the voices of anthropological theoretical expertise and “field” experience.3 Mary Louise Pratt, pointing to the “well-established habit among ethnographers of defining ethnographic writing over and against older, less specialized genres,” most notably travel writing and journalism,4 interprets Argonauts, as well as several other important ethnographic texts, in terms of a generic, institutionally based tension between “personal narrative” and “objectifying description” (32). Thornton, on the other hand, views Argonauts and in fact all classic modern ethnography as decidedly not distinguished by “narrative” but in fact distinguished by a cluster of characteristic tropes,chief among them classification.5 My purpose here is not to decide exactly which genre of writing Argonauts represents but rather to assess how Malinowski himself, in sculpting the functional concept of culture, calls upon and works with narrative per se, as well as affiliated discursive concepts. What is needed, in other words, is attention to Malinowski’s own treatment of narrative specifically and language generally in the construction of his texts. And here it ought to be remembered that Malinowski himself holds an important place in the history of linguistics. Indeed in 1957 Firth hailed Malinowski as “one of the makers of linguistics” in modern England, noting specifically his “outstanding contribution” of “his general theory of speech functions in contexts of situation” as well as “to the problem of meaning in exotic languages.”6 It is hoped that Malinowski’s own consciousness of discursive forms and his own working with (rather than unconscious adoption of) them will illuminate ways in which Malinowski, as one architect of culture, does not simply create an ethnography that we can read as a text but in fact creates an ethnography that is about the possibilities of narrative itself and in so doing contributes significantly to the formation of modern, and, more specifically, modernist, language theory.

Before proceeding to Malinowski’s own commentary upon narration, it might be helpful to clarify some of the basic models of, or assumptions behind, modern narratology itself as they have been or can be brought to bear, consciously or not, in approaching Argonauts. Ultimately, the purpose here is not simply to apply these basic terms and principles of narratology to Malinowski’s writ-

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ing but, rather, to demonstrate how such terms and principles were in part shaped by Malinowski’s own constructions. While narratology itself, according to Gerald Prince, functions as a “theory of narrative” that “examines what all narratives, and only narratives, have in common” and thereby attempts to arrive at a set of rules common to narratives, it also presumes from the first that “narratives are found, and stories told, in a variety of media” and thus extends the reach of narratological analysis beyond “the bounds of literary studies proper” and into the realm of ethnography.7 A fundamental operative binary within narratology, as Prince notes, is that between story, defined as “the narrated,” the “what” of narrative, “the story presented, independently not only of the medium used [e.g., ethnography] but also of the narrating,” and discourse, “the way in which the medium is used to present the what” (524). This distinction not only serves as a formative way of mapping narrative in narratology proper but also has, in the history of narratology, provided alternative modes of narrative analysis, that is, those that emphasize the narrated, the “what” of a given narrative, as opposed to those theories or readings that favor the narrating, or the “way” the “what” is presented. One fundamental way for a reader or critic to approach Argonauts is to adopt a given narratological method that presumably follows one or the other of the above trajectories and apply it to the text. One such general method in narratology involves the use of models of narrative “functions” or “actants,” such as those of Vladimir Propp and A. J. Greimas, which, according to Prince, focus essentially on the “what” over the “way” in that both “disregard the narrating” in folktales and describe the tales “in terms of the component parts of the narrated” (524). One could easily adopt, for example, Greimas’s six actants— subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent8—to Argonauts, thus reading the anthropologist as subject-hero; who is set on his quest by a sender, the institution of anthropology (or subject’s mentors Frazer and Seligman); in search of the object read as anthropological knowledge of the native (the Grail equivalent); whose receiver can be read as the above sender or, more generally, as a civilized and civilizing humanity; and whose helper can be read as said senders or, more importantly, the methodological principles as evinced in the introduction or, more incidentally, the “natives” themselves; and, finally, whose opponent would make sense as the primitive hardships the sender-hero is to suffer and/or, sadly, as the “primitives” themselves, who, often as not, get in the way of the procurement of knowledge concerning themselves. Part of the point of this at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek rendition of a Greimasian reading is that in its general lines it is hardly new. Clifford, Stocking, and Geertz all have drawn significantly from this template of reading, and for good reason, for Malinowski himself in Argonauts persistently inscribes its elements, especially in his statements on the required criteria of the subjecthero’s anthropological competence; the quest itself as journey to, arrival at, experience in, and return from the fieldwork site; and the success in restoring

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the broken order, in effect the restoration into print of a dying savage culture. According to this reading, the boon the hero brings back with him is his fieldnotes, which are wrought into that ultimate Object sought, the finished product that is the ethnography.9

A key claim of this chapter is that perhaps what most distinguishes Argonauts as ethnographic writing is its very commenting upon, working with, and exploration of “narrative” and “non-narrative” functions and categories. Argonauts, as well as, indeed, other central texts by Malinowski, this argument maintains, both is not only narrative and is itself about narrative (and that which is not narrative). Argonauts is itself, in other words, meta-narratological. First it must be noted that Argonauts is itself organized according to what could be called a narratological (narrative–non-narrative) axis, with clusters of chapters, single chapters, and intrachapter sections divided according to what is narrative and non-narrative. The novelty of this reading is that, in fact, it is Malinowski himself who assigns the rubric of “narrative” (as well as other narratologically significant terms) in his own deliberation over his own discursive practices and that his figuring of “narrative,” as distinct from what is not narrative, has significant implications for his work as a whole. In the foreword Malinowski lays out the goals and plan of his book, noting that “in the present State of Ethnography” each study must demonstrate its “contribution” in “method,” “research,” and presentation—regarding the latter criterion Malinowski’s exact wording is, “it ought to endeavor to present its results in a manner exact, but not dry” (xvii). Malinowski then charts his book for the reader according to the stated criteria: The specialist interested in method, in reading this work, will find set out in the Introduction, Divisions II–IX and in Chapter XVIII, the exposition of my points of view and efforts in this direction. The reader who is concerned with results, rather than with the way of obtaining them, will find in Chapters IV to XXI a consecutive narrative of the Kula expeditions, and the various associated customs and beliefs. The student who is interested, not only in the narrative, but in the ethnographic background for it and a clear definition of the institution, will find the first in Chapters I and II, and the latter in Chapter III. (xvii)

“Narrative” Malinowski equates to “results” or, as we might say in traditional formalist literary terms, content, which he distinguishes from “method,” defined above as “the way of obtaining them [said results],” which we might equivalently refer to as form. But in narratological terms Malinowski’s “consecutive narrative” corresponds quite fittingly to story, which, indeed, Malinowski uses within Argonauts proper to refer to “consecutive narrative,” and the “way of obtaining” corresponds to discourse, which, again citing Prince,

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is “the way” of “the what.” The point here is that he frames his own text as a story that is punctuated by considerations of ways of telling the story. (Incidentally, in this light Malinowski’s equation of “narrative” to “results” does not square with Pratt’s notion of Malinowski’s narrativity, which has more to do with literariness, style, good writing, anything aesthetic that is not the stuff of bloodless scientific work.) Malinowski is essentially telling his readers that the bulk of his book (chapters 4–22) is organized as narrative, and a cursory read of it shows that front and end matters serve essentially to frame the tale of the Kula journey. In this regard, Stocking has noted how Argonauts “has essentially a narrative structure” in that once beyond the methodologically oriented opening sections Malinowski takes us along for the ride that is the Kula, from construction of the canoe to launching to overseas expedition to the actual Kula exchanges to the journey home. But again, Argonauts is not simply, does not simply boil down to, a narrative. Malinowski himself tells us that, and we should listen. And it is not simply that the opening and closing materials mark something other than what he calls “continuous narrative.” Chapters 17 and 18 take us off of the Kula-bearing rout and into disquisitions on Trobriand magic, for example, and in almost every chapter there are sections that serve as methodological or theoretical meanderings, as it were. And they are framed as such by Malinowski, who throughout the book tells us when we are departing from narrative and why: “it seems necessary to make another digression from the straight narrative of the Kula” (166), he notes in chapter 6, as he paddles off into a tributary on the subject of trade and exchange among the islanders.10 In fact, the “narration” of the Kula expedition to Dobu, which, once it gets off the beach (the events preliminary to getting on to the water, concerning the “building” and the “launching,” are covered in chapters 5 and 6), runs from chapter 7 through chapter 14, is persistently being stranded, literally left holding the oars, while the narrator pursues “digressions” on the meanings of magical and mythical rites. At the end of chapter 9, for example, the narrator notes that “as through their connection with shipwreck [the subject of the next chapter], they enter inevitably into our narrative, it will be better to leave our Kula expedition on the beach of Yakum in the midst of Pilolu, and to turn in the next chapter to Kiriwinian ethnography and give there an account of the natives’ belief in the flying witches and their legend of shipwreck” (236). And at the end of chapter 11 he concludes that “we shall return to our Sinaketan expedition, in order to move them a short distance along their route” to “places” that “will suggest a new theme for a lengthy digression, this time into the mythological subjects and legends connected with the Kula” (289). In one sense the Kula is, represents, the ultimate “digression” of the narrative as it develops into the central institution that provides the book’s focus and thesis. And yet the tacking between “narrative” and digression that could

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be said to rhetorically structure Argonauts finds a powerful sympathy with— or one might venture, catalyzes—the route of the Kula itself, which, Malinowski says, “does not run with an even flow but in violent gushes” (489). The movement of the Kula, according to Malinowski, is, again, anything but the simple passing of articles from one person to another; rather, it is characterized by digressions from, breaks out of, the simple consecutiveness of the “one strand.” Indeed, Malinowski’s observation that each “chief” functions as a “shunting-station for Kula objects” means that a chief “constantly transfers an object from one strand to another” (278). In this sense, tracing the route that is the Kula amounts to a careful rendering of the main narrative line of the exchange while being equally attentive to “shunting-stations,” from which proceed the digressions from the straight tale, some of which take the Kula into “commercial side tracks,” characterized late in Argonauts as “leakages out and into the main stream” (505). Malinowski’s “digressions” or forays, significantly, are framed as punctuations that remove us from the diachrony of “straight narrative” or “story” (both terms his)—which can, he says, be but a “superficial registration of details, as is usually done by untrained observers” (19)—and plunge us instead into a synchronous realm of scientific analysis capable of “penetrating the mental attitude expressed in [those details],” which is nothing other than “the real substance of the social fabric,” of which “the important facts of actual life” are but a part (19). In fact, Malinowski resolutely articulates these “digressions” or “pauses” (156) in terms of depth, as, for example, when a narrativized “walk round the village” opens up “to a trained eye . . . deeper sociological facts” (55) or when Malinowski steers away from a simple “narrative” of canoe building and instead lays out “a social organisation underlying the building, the owning, and the sailing of a canoe,” what he refers to as “an outline of the canoe’s sociology” (113). In effect such transitions function as the suspension of “narrative” time in favor of the synchrony or presentism of doing the “deeper” work of “sociology.” These “punctuations” in effect serve as discourse-oriented digressions in which the ethnographer-narrator can move within the meaning of cultural institutions, most prominent among them being “myth” and “magic.” These intertwining terms, in fact, would come to have a preeminent importance in Malinowski’s work, and in fact his conception of myth especially would have fundamental impact within anthropology. In Argonauts Malinowski makes the case that for the Trobrianders, and by extension “natives” generally, “the mythical world is not separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the present world of events,” as it is, presumably, in the modern West, and that it is “magic” generally that “acts as a link between the mythical and the actual realities” (328). Many of Malinowski’s “digressions” in Argonauts, in fact, suspend narrative in order to expound upon the manner by which the “natives” themselves suspend the narrative-historical realm through the “magic” that links the ancient

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realm of myth and modern tribal life. Magic itself is often phrased by Malinowski as just such a suspension, as when, referring to the entire “chain of the Kula performances,” he notes that the “one continuous flow of events, following in regular succession,” is on a regular basis “interrupted and punctuated by magical rites” (124). As a story in itself, myth is defined in Argonauts as “a narrative of events which are to the native supernatural” and yet is “for the native a living actuality, though it has happened long ago and in an order of things when people were endowed with supernatural powers” (303–4). Significantly, the suspension of time through the link that is the “myth” is rendered in “narrative” form, unlike “magical” rites, which, Malinowski claims, have their own non-narrative logic.11 And yet it becomes imperative to Malinowski that myths themselves be regarded as anything but simply and only narratives in a modern sense. In the short volume Myth in Primitive Psychology, published four years after Argonauts, Malinowski asserts that the “myth, as it exists in a savage community . . . is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read to-day in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.”12 As such, Malinowski explains, myth fulfils in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-working active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom. (23)

This concept, known as “myth as charter,” would have important repercussions in the study of myth, within both myth studies proper and cultural anthropology. Critical to this conception is that myth is important “culturally” because it performs a critical “functional” role; unlike modern fiction, which also takes narrative form, it works to keep the “culture” intact and efficient (which of course assumes that “traditional” cultures are, in essence, healthy or working). Myth, then, is anything but the “idle” recreation of contemporary reading and must be accorded a seriousness “culturally” that modern literature does not possess. In this respect, the “primitive” version of “myth” is more essentially cultural and cultured than its more “civilized” narrative counterpart, fiction.13 Thornton has made the case that in Malinowski’s early student essay “Observations on Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy,” written in Polish in 1904, we can see the seeds of Malinowski’s later conceptions of myth and functionalism.14 Indeed, commenting upon Nietzsche’s conception of myth, the young Malinowski asserts that “thought cannot develop in an atmosphere of myth because the events of myth can neither be justified nor explained. This is true because in their basic social function they are themselves the explana-

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tion, justification, or normalization of what is happening in the world” (86). Myth’s centrality is exemplified, as in later functionalist theory, by the assertion that myths cannot be “explained” because “they are themselves the explanation” of what a culture maintains, fortifies, is. Further, Thornton looks to Nietzsche’s Apollonian-Dionysian dialectic as a precursor to and influence upon Malinowski’s conceptions of both cultural holism and myth. Thornton points to Malinowski’s “recognition” that Nietzsche solved the “Greek problem,” which for Nietzsche became the German problem as well, of the uneasy coexistence between the “violence” of myth and the true rational achievement of Greek (and German) culture. Malinowski registered that Nietzsche “solved” the problem through the recognition that, in Thornton’s words, “both the creative/barbaric spirit of Dionysus and formalism and control of Apollo constituted two aspects of a common culture—a whole which contained them both. This achievement was possible only within a new concept: the idea that myth was somehow both constitutive of the present and derived from the past” (21). As a dichotomous taxonomy of traits that have come to encompass and, importantly, articulate the whole of a culture past and present, Nietzsche’s conception, as well as its recognition as attributed to Malinowski, bears striking resemblance to Arnold’s rendition of Western “culture” as the vital resolution between the Hebraic and Hellenistic strains. The point here is not to argue the possible influence of Arnold upon Nietzsche—the latter published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, five years after the appearance of Culture and Anarchy—or even, indirectly, to claim that Arnold influenced Malinowski. Rather, what needs noting is the confluence in historical time of these important protoculturalist taxonomies, both of which, through the articulation of “savage” and “civilized” polarities, bridge the often ignoble present and the glorified but often barbarous past. Malinowski’s early disquisition on Nietzsche’s notion of myth and his own consequent shaping of myth as anthropological concept find significant reverberations in the work of Eliot. For Eliot too, in The Waste Land, created a scenario in which the antinomies of “savage” and “civilized” inhabited both ancient and modern worlds, and in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses he, like Nietzsche and Malinowski, argued “myth” as a “method” by which “narrative” was, or, in his case, could or must be, transgressed by, suspended by, the mythic, which, as Eliot states, could “make the modern world possible for art” precisely by myth’s capacity to travel well. In this regard Eliot’s review of Ulysses as an explicit announcement of a new theory of myth is analogous to Malinowski’s Myth in Primitive Psychology (they were published four years apart); and conversely, The Waste Land and Argonauts (again, published in the same year) function similarly as exemplifications (not, in Malinowski’s term, “explanations”) of the process by which narrative—for both, the “story” of quest—is constantly interrupted by

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the intrusions of “myth” and “magic,” digressions that cause the reader to pause and look elsewhere, in places (footnotes, tables, sociological interpretation) other than the “story,” for the full picture. Like Eliot, Malinowski in Argonauts makes clear that sticking to a “narrative method”—in effect, not digressing from the “story”—spells the end for the possibilities of modern professionalism. In disciplinary terms, Malinowski equates the departure from “narrative” to the functional approach to culture— not departing from the “straight narrative” of the Kula, he says, would be “to give the description of one form of exchange torn out of its most intimate context” (166)—while amateurism amounts to the unimaginative reliance upon the paper-flat dimensionality of “narrative.” In Myth and Primitive Psychology Malinowski blasts orthodox studies of myth on the grounds that in them “myths are treated as mere stories . . . torn out of their life-context, and studied from what they look like on paper, and not from what they do in life” (44). The fieldworker, Malinowski asserts, cannot be content “with the mere writing down of narratives,” for “the functional, cultural, and pragmatic aspect of any native tale is manifested as much in its enactment, embodiment, and contextual relations as in the text” (45). In narratological terms, simply put, Malinowski puts the premium upon the discourse over the story of the text that is Trobriand life; and yet at the same time his own text critically depends upon the “storied” or “straight narrative” of Kula life as the axis that is digressed from. Significantly, Trobriand life itself as posed by Malinowski justifies, legitimates, this way of tacking between story and discourse, for the “chain of Kula performances” that serves as synechdoche for Trobriand culture enacts that tacking, that oscillating between telling straight and digressing from. As Malinowski explains at the start of the sequence of chapters that chronicle the “consecutive narrative of the Kula expeditions” (xvii), “From the moment that the tree is felled till the return of the overseas party, there is one continuous flow of events, following in regular succession” (124). But “as we shall see,” Malinowski adds, looking forward to the pattern that will characterize his rendition of the “culture,” “the technicalities of construction are interrupted and punctuated by magical rites” (124). Indeed, Malinowski’s story-discourse axis structures his figuring of the narratives of the natives themselves, as throughout Argonauts he presents reconstructed native “narratives” or “stories” in terms of their narrativity, commenting, for example, upon the quality of native story as story, as well as upon the degree to which he has deviated from the native version of “story,” and why. Very striking is Malinowski’s positioning of himself as literary critic reading, in an evaluative-formalist mode, native ways of telling according to standards of anthropological readability: after a five-page rendering of one version of “the myth of the flying canoe of Kudayuri,” Malinowski notes that “this story is extremely clear in its general outline, and very dramatic, and all its incidents and developments have a high degree of consistency and psychological moti-

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vation. It is perhaps the most telling of all myth . . . which came under my notice” (316).15 Throughout Argonauts Malinowski puts the premium upon the necessity of preserving native tales in their consecutiveness—getting them straight—while at the same time insisting upon breaking the sequence himself, often to comment upon the significance of native recontextualizations and digressions from the sequence of their own stories. In the chapter on shipwreck he notes, “I shall give this narrative [a native rendition of a shipwreck] in a consecutive manner, as it was told to me,” but then suspends the story proper for two pages in order to contextualize the account’s own contextualization of the “narrative” of the shipwreck. The “account” he is about to provide, Malinowski explains, is not a simple rendition of things experienced; it is, rather, a tale told “with extreme realism . . very much as if he [the storyteller] had gone through one himself” (248). Malinowski adds that “no one alive at present has had any personal experience of such a catastrophe.” Malinowski’s digression, as such, functions as a discursive analysis of the tale-teller’s own discursive strategies, his own abilities to artfully discourse upon “story.” Indeed, Malinowski makes the claim for the ethnographic superiority of the “account”: it is, he claims, “not only a summary of native belief, it is an ethnographic document in itself, representing the manner in which such type of narrative would be told over camp fires” (248). He then redolently provides the setting for the telling of the “story-telling,” in which he comments that the “only deviation here from what would actually take place in such a story-telling, is the insertion of magical formulae into the narrative” (248), which, Malinowski explains, would normally be provided during a daytime telling but in this particular setting—on a ship at night—were omitted. Finally, Malinowski proceeds over the course of ten pages to quote the tale itself, but he continually breaks the “narrative” in order to fit his own contextual/ interpretive commentary. At story’s end he provides the following context: I have given here a reconstruction of a native account, as I have often heard it told with characteristic vividness: spoken in short, jerky sentences, with onomatopoetic representations of sound, the narrative exaggerates certain features, and omits others. The excellency of the narrator’s own magic, the violence of the elements at critical moments, he would always reiterate with monotonous insistence. He would diverge into some correlated subject, jump ahead, missing out several stages come back, and so on, so that the whole is quite incoherent and unintelligible to a white listener, though the native audience follows it quite well. (258)

Malinowski’s own dwelling upon the native “manner” of telling, the ways of the telling that diverge from and play upon the “story” or the “what” of the narrative—the jerkiness, repetition, deletion, jumping ahead, leaving out— looks ahead to modern narratology’s interest in “modes of presentation,” described by Prince as “the kinds of order a narrative text can follow, the various

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speeds it can adopt (ellipsis, summary, scene, stretch, pause), the types of focalization and detailing of events it can feature, the relations that can obtain between the number of times an event happens and the number of times it is recounted,” and so on (“Narratology,” 525). And yet simply pointing to the similarity between Malinowski’s contextual approach to native ways of telling and modern narratological approaches to Western fictional strategies would be to miss the point. What requires emphasis is Malinowski’s own important contribution to the social sciences of the concept of “context of situation,” of the recognition that “native” narration is not only best approached through functional means but is itself characterized by, defined by, the inventive, strategic handling of sociolinguistic contexts. Malinowski drives this point home in Myth in Primitive Psychology when, registering his dissatisfaction with approaches devoted to “the text of narratives,” he claims that “the story is vastly enhanced and it is given its proper character by the manner in which it is told. The whole nature of the performance, the voice and the mimicry, the stimulus and the response of the audience mean as much to the natives as the text; and the sociologist should take his cue from the natives” (30). Malinowski’s reading of the tale-teller’s “account” of the shipwreck illumines this contribution. His praise of the “narrator’s own magic” (Argonauts, 258) in this respect applies not only to the teller’s skillful weaving of the allimportant magical formulae into the “narrative” proper but also to that teller’s overall linguistic strategizing, his ability to artfully discourse upon the story proper, digressing from consecutiveness in ways superlatively appropriate to the native culture and conversely incomprehensible to “the white listener.” The concept of cultural relativism in this context is extended to, or pushed strongly in the direction of, language itself, such that the concept of linguistic relativism is not only articulated but made operational. At the same time, Malinowski’s treatment of the native storyteller’s tacking between story and discourse can be read as a validation of Malinowski’s own such tacking, and in a basic sense the native version is framed by, contained within, the ethnographer’s controlling text. The importance and implications of this become clear with the paragraph that follows the above: It is necessary for an Ethnographer to listen several times to such a narrative, in order to have a fair chance of forming some coherent idea of its trend. Afterwards, by means of direct examination, he can succeed in placing the facts in their proper sequence. By questioning the informants about details of rite and magic, it is possible to obtain interpretations and commentaries. Thus the whole of a narrative can be constructed, through various fragments, with all their spontaneous freshness, can be put in their proper places, and this is what I have done in giving this account of shipwreck. (258)

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Only now in Malinowski’s text does it become fully clear that his account of the “story” is in fact a “reconstructed” or “discoursed upon” version of the native’s discoursed-upon story, a reconstruction made to emphasize its “story” aspects (with all “facts . . . in their proper sequence”), which, of course, make it comprehensible to the “white” listener. This “storied” version of the native’s previously hailed “discoursed” story is designated as the “coherent” and “whole” of a narrative whose contextual-original “fragments” have been “put into their proper places.” In a footnote Malinowski stresses that “such reconstructions are legitimate for an Ethnographer,” though it is his “duty . . . to show his sources as well as to explain how he has manipulated them” (258). In other words, the realignment of the native discoursed story along the storydiscourse axis is legitimated by the ethnographer’s discoursing upon the manner by which the said native discoursed story is made into a “consecutive narrative,” or story. One might say that what Malinowski refers to as the native tale-teller’s “magic” of narration is, must be, subsumed under what Malinowski has more famously called “the Ethnographer’s magic,” that fusion of ethnographic skills and insights, ranging from careful notation of detail to evocations of purple prose and the use of synoptic charts, that provide both the “results” of the “consecutive narrative” and “the way of obtaining them” (xvii). In this respect Argonauts can profitably be characterized less as a “shift” from myth to narrative, or, for that matter, from narrative to myth, than as itself, within itself, enacting a powerful complex of shifts between narratological (story/discourse) modes. And yet, as I hope to demonstrate in the next section, Malinowski’s theorizing upon language takes forms that extend beyond narratology proper and indeed, in conversation with linguistic and literary theorizing, inform the twentieth century’s conception of language itself.

In 1923 appeared one of the most influential linguistic studies of the early century, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of The Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, the latter of whom was soon to become, next to Eliot, perhaps the preeminent British literary theoretician of his day.16 In this important study the authors take on the project of a new “science of symbolism,” which becomes none other than an analysis of the “meaning of meaning” itself. And at the start, and heart, of their project the authors express their aim of exposing the “primitive conception” that “the name is indicative, or descriptive, of the thing,” what they call the “superstition that words are in some way parts of things or always imply things corresponding to them.”17

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In their first chapter, “Thoughts, Words, and Things,” the authors peg this “once universal theory of direct meaning relations between words and things” as “the source of almost all of the difficulty which thought encounters” (12), on the levels of both common human language use and intellectual theorizing on language. As to the latter, the authors especially target modern linguists and anthropologists, who either reify the assumption of the coherence of word to thing or simply avoid the problem. Ferdinand de Saussure takes the first hit, as a prime example of “how great is the tyranny of language over those who propose to inquire into its workings” (4). Even though Saussure is commonly regarded “as having for the first time placed linguistics upon a scientific basis,” in his assumption that there is “an object at once integral and concrete of linguistics” (Saussure’s words) he falls prey to the primitive impulse “to infer from a word some object for which it stands” (4). In his argument that la langue constitutes, in his words, “a natural order in a whole which does not lend itself to any other classification” Saussure in effect, according to Ogden and Richards, has fallen into the habit of “inventing verbal entities outside the range of possible investigation” (5). In positing an essential linguistic “order” and in the consequent disregard for “the things for which signs stand” Saussure’s theory, in the words of Ogden and Richards, “was from the beginning cut off from any contact with scientific methods of verification” (6). Anthropologists suffer a similar critique. They too are accused of neglecting actual language use in their “misleading” habit of applying “Indo-European grammatical distinctions” to “primitive” languages (6), in their obsession “with recording the details of fast-vanishing languages” (8),18 and in their tendency “to neglect the concrete environment of the speaker and to consider only the ‘ideas’ which are regarded as ‘expressed’ ” (6–7). The words set off by single quotation marks in the above passage are attributed to Franz Boas, whose assumption of the ideational character of “primitive language”—“All speech,” Ogden and Richards tell us Boas says explicitly, “is intended to serve for the communication of ideas”—functions as the prime example of the anthropological and indeed broadly intellectual fallacy that cries out for correction and leads the authors to the comprehensive statement of their project: Ideas, however, are only remotely accessible to outside inquirers, and we need a theory which connects words with things through the ideas, if any, which they symbolize. We require, that is to say, separate analyses of the relations of words to ideas and of ideas to things. Further, much language, especially primitive language, is not primarily concerned with ideas at all, unless under “ideas” are included emotions and attitudes—a procedure which would involve terminological inconveniences.19

To explicate what they consider the tripartite relation between “symbols,” “ideas,” and “things,” the authors provide a diagram, a triangle in which the

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bottom left corner is labeled “symbol,” the top corner “thought or reference,” and the bottom right corner “referent” (or “thing”), “the relations that hold between them,” the authors note, “being represented by the sides” (10). The “relation” or “side” between “symbol” and “thought” is denoted as “symbolizes” and labeled “CORRECT” since the connection between them is considered a “causal relation” regarded as direct and unproblematic; that between “thought” and “referent” is denoted as “Refers to” and labeled “ADEQUATE” since the connection between them is considered as “other causal relations” that can be “also a relation; more or less direct (as when we think about or attend to a coloured surface we see), or indirect (as when we ‘think of’ or ‘refer to’ Napoleon), in which case there may be along chain of sign-situations intervening between the act and its referent” (11). The third “relation” or “side,” between “symbol” and “referent,” is the problematic one, denoted as “Stands for an imputed relation” and labeled “TRUE,” not in the sense that it is such but that it is so powerfully felt to be. For as the authors assert, “Between the symbol and the referent there is no relevant relation other than the indirect one, which consists in its being used by someone to stand for a referent. Symbol and referent, that is to say, are not connected directly (and when, for grammatical reasons, we imply such a relation, it will merely be an imputed, as opposed to a real, relation)” (11–12). The problem as Ogden and Richards see it is in the hold that the third relation—“TRUE”—has upon our thinking. While the authors readily admit that “language if it is to be used must be a ready instrument,” they decry that “such shorthand as the word ‘means’ is constantly used so as to imply a direct and simple relation between words and things, phrases and situation” (12). What is required in the study of language, they assert, is “the rejection of everyday symbolizations and thus the endeavor to replace them by more accurate accounts,” as has been witnessed in “the recent revolutions in physics,” as seen especially in the “theory of Relativity,” wherein “the simple natural notion of simultaneity . . . came to be questioned.” In the study of language, however, especially as evinced in psychology, “no such Copernican revolution has yet occurred” (13). The Meaning of Meaning represents an attempt at such a revolution. In the second chapter, entitled “The Power of Words,” the authors’ argument takes on a profoundly anthropological, specifically evolutionary caste. The “superstition” or fallacy of the powerful and intimate link between words and things is posited as an essentially “primitive” concept that, borrowing from Tylor’s important formulation, has “survived” into modern times. “The power of words,” which Ogden and Richards call “the most conservative force in our life,” is then enumerated with scores of examples of “sacred or secret vocabularies” or “word taboos,” which exemplify the attitude that a word is tied to something sacred or secret and hence can be magically or spiritually enabling or damaging but in either case profoundly powerful. The

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examples given of people who embody this mentality range, in evolutionist fashion, from contemporary peasants and savages to primitive ancients and children, who, the authors note, “are often similarly anxious to conceal their names” (28). Like Frazer, the authors trace this fallacy, referred to at one point as “logophobia” (28), from the deep seats of Western tradition—for example, the Greek conception of the Logos (31) and in fact the whole gamut of what they refer to as “metaphysical language” (41)—through to the twentieth century, which, they claim, “suffers more grievously than any previous age from the ravages of such verbal superstitions,” though “owing . . . to developments in the methods of communication, and the creation of many symbolic systems, the form of the disease has altered considerably” (29).20 The solution to this dilemma, a state Ogden and Richards call, variously, “Verbomania” and “Graphomania” (45), is a “Science of Symbolism,” through which can be attained “a clear realization of the way in which symbols come to exercise such power, and of the various senses in which they are said to have meaning” (47). Toward this end the authors propose a “contextual theory of Signs,” which, they claim, “will be found to throw light on the primitive idea that Words and Things are related by some magic bond; for it is actually through their occurrence together with these things, their linkage with them in a ‘context’ that Symbols come to play that important part which has rendered them not only a legitimate object of wonder but the source of all of our power over the external world” (47). It is not my purpose here to evaluate Ogden and Richards’s program as it proceeds through the whole of The Meaning of Meaning. What does call out for commentary, however, is the relation of their aims, as charted in the opening chapters, to literary theorizing, the concept of culture, the field of cultural anthropology, and more specifically the work of Malinowski. Despite its deep investment in what was fast becoming the dead paradigm of evolutionary anthropology, despite its at times misdirected critique of Saussure (as well as its unacknowledged reliance upon him), and despite what might seem today to be a naive and ethnocentric notion that certain people do not “think” (in the sense of working overmuch with “Thought”), The Meaning of Meaning is an important early-twentieth-century project on language and meaning-making whose contribution to the history of modern Anglo-American literary and cultural theorizing has been roundly ignored in the poststructuralist and post-poststructuralist eras mainly owing to the predominant attention paid to Saussure and his Continental successors as the architects of modern language theory.21 The relation of the arguments of Ogden and Richards to Saussurian and Continental theorizing on language, apart from the relevance to modern Anglo-American theorizing, is worth consideration (even though its full compass is well beyond the scope of this study). For one thing, the argument raised against Saussure in the opening chapter, though highly debatable, certainly is

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not readily dismissible and indeed is tantalizing in its suggestion that Saussure’s concept of la langue suffers from a totalizing quality that removes it from the actual use of language in social settings. And in that respect it looks forward, interestingly, to Bakhtin and other later theorists who weld theories of signification to social contexts. Similarly, Ogden and Richards’s notion of “Logomania,” in its attack on the “metaphysics” or instantiated fusion of word and deed, might be said to presage the Derridean conception of “Logocentrism,” though the former’s critique does not halt at the border between orality and inscription. More relevant, though, to the subject of this study is the filiations of the project to anthropological conceptions of culture. On the one hand, the authors’ critique of Saussure’s definition of la langue as “a natural order in a whole, which does not lend itself to any other classification” (5) certainly bears resemblance to Malinowski’s biologistic conception of culture, which Malinowski ultimately came to define as “a reality sui generis.” And this definition, in fact, is what A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn cite as the epitomizing example of what they call, in words akin to those of Ogden and Richards, “a hazy attitude which sees culture as a special kind of entity or substance.”22 Both pairs of critics, the first writing in 1923, the second in 1952, call attention to the theorist’s elevation of the object of study—language in the first case, culture in the second—to the status of a biologically whole order whose very self-referentiality makes it unassimilable by any other social formation or phenomenon (actual language use in Saussure’s case, historical change in Malinowski’s). While the similarities of these charges—founded or unfounded—could bear further scrutiny, clearly the more striking analogue to anthropological theorizing at the time is Ogden and Richards’s call, at the conclusion of “The Power of Words,” for a “contextual Theory of Signs” that would interpret “Symbols” only through “their occurrence together with things, their linkage with them in a context” (47). This could in fact serve very well as a definition of the Malinowskian functional method, which, through the resolutely empirical emphasis upon the observable details or “Things” of primitive life (as opposed to armchair speculation on “primitive mentality”), arrives at an understanding of the “whole,” but only through the context in which the parts relate—what “Symbols” do, how they perform, what they “mean,” either as cultural or linguistic signifiers, as being utterly dependent upon the “part” they “play.”

The relation of the authors’ project to the work of Malinowski is hardly speculative, for included in The Meaning of Meaning are two supplementary essays, one by F. G. Crookshank, M.D., and the other by Malinowski himself, who in the preface to the first edition is cited for “his many years of reflection as a field-worker in the border-lands of linguistics and psychology.” Malinowski’s

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forty-page essay, entitled “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” represents what may be the most significant cooperative venture of the twentieth century between a leading anthropologist and a prominent literary theoretician (Richards) and is certainly the most ignored.23 As Ogden and Richards note, Malinowski’s contribution indicates a thorough approval of their conclusions, for as he relates in the first section of his essay, “I myself, at grips with the problem of primitive languages from Papua-Melanesia,” upon reviewing the proofs of The Meaning of Meaning “. . . was astonished to find how exceedingly well the theories there presented answered all my problems and solved my difficulties” (298–99). Emphasizing the distinctive differences between “native language” and “our own” on the basis of grammar, syntax, and metaphor, in section 2 Malinowski gives a rough, word-by-word translation of a “native” text—a conversation concerning a canoe competition—precisely in order to illustrate the deficiency of such a method. The translation, resembling modernist versions of haiku in its abrupt juxtapositions— “We run

front-wood

ourselves”

(300)

—Malinowski labels as a “meaningless jumble of words,” at least at first glance. For the “listener” to comprehend the meaning, “he would have first to be informed about the situation in which these words were spoken. He would need to have them placed in their proper context of native culture” (301). On the basis of his own authority among the Trobrianders, he clarifies that the passage is, within the context of the “culture,” “not a mere statement of fact, but a boast, a piece of self-glorification, extremely characteristic of Trobrianders’ culture in general and of their ceremonial barter in particular” (301). Of course Malinowski’s effort here is dependent upon the assumptions that there is such a thing as a discrete, meaning-laden “culture” whose various parts “function” as a working whole and that the Trobriand way of life constitutes one such whole. Accepting these premises, one is led by Malinowski through the now familiar process wherein every “native” word occasions, necessitates, the digression into sociological analysis,24 for indeed every word is tied directly, meaningfully, to broader “cultural” contexts. Doing translation, then, inexorably means doing anthropology or, as it is often termed in Argonauts, “sociology”: All this shows the wide and complex considerations into which we are led by an attempt to give an adequate analysis of meaning. Instead of translating, of inserting simply an English word for a native one, we are faced by a long and not altogether simple procedure of describing wide fields of custom. . . . We see that linguistic analysis inevitably leads us into the study of all the subjects covered by Ethnographic field-work. (302)

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Malinowski then rails against missionary tendencies of simply applying “Indo-European” linguistic categories to a “native” language, as when “the grammatical modifications of verbs have been simply set down as equivalent to Indo-European tenses” (303). The problem here is not simply that the tenses happen to work differently but that “meaning” itself, as Ogden and Richards emphasized as well, cannot be divorced from the practical, social, situational context in which it is presently occurring. Malinowski gives as a negative example of this assertion his own “practical mistake” on one occasion, when wrongly assuming the tense of a Trobriand verb caused him literally to miss the boat, that is, the arrival and departure of a “native” canoe (303–4). This ethnographic lesson, Malinowski notes, “is only an illustration on a concrete example of the general principles so brilliantly set forth by Ogden and Richards” (305). And yet Malinowski’s humility toward the authors of The Meaning of Meaning overshadows an important claim here: for Malinowski, reading language contextually, situationally, means reading language in, as a species of, the larger “cultural” context. This in itself means establishing “culture” as the ground of meaning: “Language,” Malinowski simply but powerfully asserts, “is essentially rooted in the reality of the culture” (305). Language, then, derives meaning contextually from, only out of, the “culture,” but the “culture” itself, as a “reality sui generis,” is the origin and base of meaning; itself refers to nothing beyond itself; is itself, in this respect, the meaning of meaning. In section 3 Malinowski modifies Ogden and Richards’s term sign-situation to context of situation, meant, again, to emphasize the need for any analysis of language to proceed primarily through consideration of the context of a culture. In fact, he notes how “the conception of context must be substantially widened,” and in language that seems to resonate with Ogden and Richards’s critique of Saussure but carries a specifically anthropological caste, proclaims that “it must burst the bonds of mere linguistics” and “be carried out in conjunction with the study of their culture” (306). Arguing against the linguist’s proclivity toward the study of the “written documents” of “dead languages,” Malinowski, in a distinct example of institutional elbowing, asserts, “The Ethnographer’s perspective is the one relevant and real for the formation of fundamental linguistic conceptions and for the study of the life of languages, whereas the Philologist’s point of view is fictitious and irrelevant” (306–7). Presented as “a striking confirmation of Messrs Ogden and Richards’ theories,” Malinowski’s assertion that “neither a Word nor its Meaning has an independent and self-sufficient existence” (309) is, indeed, in keeping with The Meaning of Meaning’s radical contention that not even base linguistic structures (such as those posed by Saussure) function as the receptacles or origins of meaning. Agreeing with Ogden and Richards that “symbolic reference must serve as the basis for all science of language,” Malinowski, however, places the axis of reference squarely in culture as ground: “Since the whole

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world of ‘things-to-be-expressed’ changes with the level of culture . . . the consequence is that the meaning of a word must always be gathered, not from a passive contemplation of this word, but from an analysis of its functions, with reference to the given culture” (309). In section 4 Malinowski pursues the idea of language as essentially, originarily, “a mode of action and not an instrument of reflection” (312). His argument is congruent with Ogden and Richards’s assertion that language is “not primarily concerned with ideas at all” (7). What he calls “speech in action,” as exemplified by those “engaged in practical work” (312), functions as the purest form of language as “mode of action,” as expression that serves to get things done. What he calls “narrative speech,” though it “indirectly” points to a social situation, is still essentially a “mode of action” rather than a “reflection of thought” in that its “meaning depends on the context of situation referred to, not to the same degree but in the same manner as in the speech of action” (313). The distinction is significant: “narrative speech” functions differently, though in degree, in its relation to the functioning of the “culture,” and yet in order for it to be understood by the anthropologist, it “can only be understood from the direct function of speech in action” (313). Malinowski is attempting to demonstrate that even language that appears not to be about doing things is in effect getting things done. His tour-de-force illustration of this principle is his discussion of what he coins phatic communication, the language of “free, aimless, social intercourse” (“chat,” “gossip,” etc.), which on the surface seems to be “deprived of any context of situation” and whose “meaning . . . cannot be connected with the speaker’s or hearer’s behavior, with the purpose of what they are doing.” And yet, Malinowski argues, “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing-room, fulfills a function to which the meaning of its words is almost irrelevant” (313). The function “fulfilled” by the phatic is decidedly not “to convey meaning, the meaning which is symbolically theirs” (315); rather it fulfills the desire “to congregate, to be together, to enjoy each other’s company” (314). And, crucially, though it seems far from language as “mode of action,” it indeed is such when one conceives of the doing in an extended, in fact eminently discursive sense: “The whole situation consists in what happens linguistically. Each utterance is an act serving the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker by a tie of some social sentiment or other. Once more language appears to us in this function not as an instrument of reflection but as a mode of action” (315). In this respect, what is discursive is rendered as pragmatic—gossip is functionally, contextually, getting things done, and what is pragmatic is rendered as discursive—an action, “what happens,” becomes a matter of idle verbiage. And yet Malinowski’s argument is profoundly, not merely, circular, for what the works and words revolve around, their origin point and terminus as con-

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ceived by Malinowski, is culture itself, which binds disparate acts and expressions, ranging from the profound to the trivial, into a functioning whole. In the important fifth section of the essay, Malinowski announces his intention “to interpret the results of our analysis of the earliest stages of meaning” in terms of its relation to Ogden and Richards’s semiotic triangle by constructing “analogous diagrams” that represent those “earlier stages” (323). Malinowski then articulates three “stages” of language development. The “First Stage,” essentially reactive sound, non-speech, is represented simply by a solid line (here “the triangle is reduced to its base”) that connects “SOUND-REACTION” to “SITUATION”; below the line connecting them is the phrase “connected directly with,” which signifies the “real connection” that exists between the situation and the reaction to it. The “Second Stage,” which Malinowski terms “the beginnings of articulate speech,” is also represented by a solid line that connects “ACTIVE SOUND (Semi-articulated or articulated)” to “REFERENT”: below the line connecting them the phrase “correlated with” signifies that though there is not the direct “connection,” the “sound is not a real symbol yet, for it is not detached from its referent” (324). The “Third Stage” is broken down into three parts, which Malinowski calls “the three fundamental uses of language, active, narrative, and ritual” (325). Part A, entitled “Speech in Action,” is represented by a solid line connecting “ACTIVE SYMBOL” and “REFERENT”: under the line, the phrase “Used to handle” suggests the pragmatic “function” or imperative to work that connects the “referent” to what has now emerged as a “symbol,” though an “active” one. In part B, “Narrative Speech,” a triangle first appears: as in the author’s original diagram, the left and right bottom corners are labeled “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT,” respectively, but connecting them is a dotted rather than a solid line, underneath which is the phrase “Indirect relation.” Significantly, the top corner, labeled “THOUGHT OR REFERENCE” in Ogden and Richards’s original diagram, is labeled “ACT OF IMAGERY.” Finally, part C, “Language of Ritual Magic,” again has “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT” at its base corners, but connecting them is a solid line labeled “Mystically assumed relation.” The top corner is labeled “RITUAL ACT,” beneath which appear the words “based on traditional belief” (324). The first and second stages are the two developmental phases of language acquisition described earlier in the section. While Malinowski does not here explicate the third-stage diagrams, in the diagrams for parts A and B he in effect represents his argument in the previous section, on the distinction between “speech in action” and “narrative speech.” The conception behind diagram C, labeled “Language of Ritual Magic,” however, is new, at least to this essay, but it is significantly correlated, as seen in Argonauts and, later, Myth in Primitive Psychology, to the process by which ritual magic works as a “bridge” between present-day realities and the mythical realm; in the latter work, for example, Malinowski, discussing the relation of magic to myth, asserts that “the integral cultural function of magic . . . consists in the bridging-over of

Bronislaw Malinowski’s analogous diagrams to the earlier stages of meaning, from Malinowski’s “Supplement” to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richard’s The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1945), 324.

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gaps and inadequacies in highly important activities not yet completely mastered by man” (Magic, Science, and Religion, 111). In fact, Malinowski says of the authors’ original diagram that “the gulf of meaning, as it could be called,” between symbol and referent “is bridged over only by the Act of Thought—the bent line of the two shoulders of the triangle” (323). Indeed, it is the label “RITUAL ACT” that Malinowski inserts in the place of “THOUGHT OR REFERENCE” at the top corner of Ogden and Richards’s diagram. Malinowski claims that the “final stage of developed language is represented by the triangle of Ogden and Richards,” and, indeed, “the possibility of extending the Authors’ diagram or pushing it backwards into primitive speechuses affords an additional proof of its validity and adequacy” (325). In effect, Malinowski has transformed Ogden and Richards’s synchronic diagram into an overtly developmental, if not evolutionary, diachronically rendered series of three stages precisely to illustrate, he claims, the genesis and development of the persistently problematic relation between symbol and referent that is at the heart of the authors’ project: “The solid nature of almost all the bases of our triangles explains why the dotted line in the final figure shows such tenacity and why it is capable of so much mischief.” It should be noted, however, that the one dotted line in his triangles straddles “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT” in the part called “Narrative Speech.” Presumably, the dotted line signifies that this is the one relation the “savages” themselves hold to be “indirect,” in the sense that they themselves grasp that an arbitrary relationship exists in their own narratives, a relation that, in keeping with Malinowski’s own reading of the authors’ triangle, is mediated through, or “bridged over by,” the “act of imagery.” And in fact his own argument, in Argonauts, of native narration as artfully, discursively, composed and rendered is consistent with this reading: narrative, both primitive and civilized, is inherently laced, shot through with, recognitions of its own narrativity. In the triangle in part C, “Language of Ritual Magic,” on the other hand, the line between “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT” is rendered as solid even though it is a “mystically assumed relation.” Again, from the perspective of the “native,” the relation is true, which may explain why Malinowski renders the line as solid, whereas in the original diagram the authors render their “imputed relation” between “SYMBOL” and “REFERENT” as a dotted line. Malinowski’s diagrammatics make sense in the respect that those things that are so consistently held to be true are thus hard to be rid of, and yet his rendering flies in the face of the authors’ reasoning. The solution to what might seem a highly specific technical inconsistency— representation by a dotted rather than a solid line—is important because it returns to the much larger issues of the definition of culture, functionalism as method, and cultural relativism as ethic. Malinowski, despite the heavy doses of evolutionism in his text, is forced to inscribe the solidity of his final triangle, for doing otherwise would endanger the very notion of culture as a discrete,

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functioning whole. He cannot solely read the institutions of myth and magic, the bulwark of primitive culture as he conceives it, as simply mistaken, for that would endanger the integrity of the concept of culture itself. This argument is not merely speculative—indeed, what Ogden and Richards inscribe as a mistake in the pan-human attitude toward language Malinowski articulates as a necessity, as he relates in the conclusion to the supplemental essay: Their [Ogden and Richards’s] contention is that a false attitude toward Language and its functions is one of the main obstacles in the advancement of philosophical thought and scientific investigation, and in the ever-growing practical uses of language in the press, pamphlet and novel. . . . I have tried to show that such a crude and unsound attitude towards Languages and Meaning must exist. I have tried to demonstrate how it has arisen and why it had to persist. (335)

In one respect the necessity of the “false attitude towards Language” can be explained as a biological instinct to survive and thrive, an avenue by which the “wants of the organism” (329) are fulfilled. Malinowski’s position amounts to arguing for the “false attitude” as a good precisely because that attitude satisfies the “wants of the organism” and, ultimately, the “culture.” Thus biologism becomes a powerful argument for at least one brand of cultural relativism: if it works, and in “primitive” culture it usually does, then it is good. Perhaps more pointedly, the notion of culture itself as a “reality sui generis,” as an ultimately holistic, unprovable, hypostatized entity that embraces all social features, including language, and as such is accountable only to itself, comes to more than resemble the attitude toward language attributed to Saussure; the difference is that what Saussure claimed for language, Malinowski claims for culture. Malinowski’s argument, then, for the “false attitude toward language” produces, and thus is emblematic of, ambivalences that characterize not only Malinowski’s culture concept but also that of much of the modern era: between the diachronic speculation over developmental origins and chronologies on the one hand and methods of synchronous systematization on the other; between comparativist hierarchical evaluation of different peoples on the one hand and the complexity-cum-wholeness attributed to all peoples—here “cultures”—on the other. The point is not that these polarities are overtly at war within each articulation of “culture”; rather, they are deeply imbricated with each other at every turn of the definition of culture as concept. Ogden and Richards work with, and indeed within, the intimate participation of these polarities. Their assertion, apparently in agreement with Saussure, that “words . . . ‘mean’ nothing by themselves” (9) in itself puts forward a profound arbitrariness. If words do “mean” nothing, then, the authors argue, all language configurations are similarly roughly equal, relationally speaking. This version of relativism is further deepened, though complicated, by the insistence upon a “contextual theory of signs,” whereby “meaning” is in fact derived only from relation.

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And yet embedded within Ogden and Richards’s argument is the supposition that those who do not consciously recognize this relationality are in themselves at fault and are thus regarded as on a more rudimentary track (as evidenced by the ample citations of evolutionary anthropologists on the parallels of savages to children and the “illiterate”). The link here to Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924) is significant: notwithstanding Sapir’s anti-evolutionist positioning, he, like Ogden and Richards, posit a functional relativism (a culture’s quality is based, not upon technological advancement, but upon the extent to which its parts work together well) that is integrally shot through with evaluation (in those “cultures” whose parts do not function well, the parts do not work together well, and the “cultures” are categorized accordingly). The ambivalent workings of relationality and evaluation animate as well the literary criticism of I. A. Richards and the critical heritage inspired by him. Richards’s own tropes for the poem as a “system” of “forces” or “tensions” that work toward equilibrium doubtless owe much to Malinowski’s conception of functional forces or aspects that coalesce into the “whole” that is the “culture”; and the “contextual theory of signs” would become a virtual template for Kenneth Burke and a strong equivalent to the New Critical “relational” approach to the poem as self-contained object (Well Wrought Urn or Verbal Icon). And yet this relationalism within Richards’s criticism, like that within Eliot’s criticism, in fact would produce evaluative schemas: good poems, such as those by Eliot, are not good because of their capacity for social commentary but because they work well; similarly, good readings of poems recognize the fullest range of relations, whereas bad readings, as ethnographically evidenced in the commentaries of his Cambridge undergraduates, are so usually because they attach themselves to personal experiences, religious convictions, or anything else not specific to the world of poetics or of the specific poem.25 Marilyn Strathern holds that what is “modernist” about Malinowski, and indeed the very quality that defines “modernist anthropology,” is the “selfconsciousness about creating a distance between writer and reader, and thus about creating a context for ideas that are themselves novel.”26 This “distance” does not simply correspond to a closeness between writer and object, however, for the “new kind of book” that is Argonauts, she claims, is “premised upon a disjunction between observer (subject) and observed (object), a disjunction that made the observer aware of technique and led subsequently to the conceptualisation of anthropological practice as model building. Analytical frameworks became countenanced as deliberate artifice” (99). It is tantalizing to reflect upon the modes by which that “distance” and “disjunction” are themselves refracted, anticipated, transmuted, indeed distanced and disjuncted, in the literature as artifice we call “modernist.” That complex of possibilities and processes is, indeed, part of the project of the next chapter; here it should be noted that what is “modernist” about anthropology according to Strathern, what she terms Malinowski’s “context-crossing” (101),

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is also what Malinowski in significant part develops across disciplinary lines, in tandem, though in tension, with his modernist partners in language and literary theory: a theory, or cluster of theories, addressing the “contextual” nature of the “meaning” of “language” as read through the template of culture. And yet, viewed as a cooperative literary-anthropological venture, The Meaning of Meaning must be seen not simply as a moment when common views on language and culture converge, and still less as an exemplification of Herbert’s notion of the progressive conversion of culture to a linguistic model; in fact, Malinowski’s text could serve as an exemplification of the anthropological conversion of the linguistic model to the cultural. The book is best seen, rather, as a brokering of institutional interests in which varying conceptions or definitions of the operative terms—language, culture, context—combine, separate, are recontextualized, and take on similar as well as divergent valuations. Both Ogden and Richards and Malinowski agree on the need for a “scientific” approach to language and, more importantly, on the need for a contextual theory of “signs,” but Malinowski insists that the ground of “context” is always the “culture.” Both agree on the unsoundness of the primitive view that meaning resides in the word itself, and as such both push for an evolutionary template through which to read that fallacy; indeed, Malinowski furthers that enterprise by “pushing back” Ogden and Richards’s essentially synchronic diagram through a series of diachronic-developmental stages. And yet Malinowski cannot let the fallacy as such fully inhabit, permeate, and evaluate culture, for doing so would give the conception of the primitive fallacy primacy over that of the functionalism of a given culture and in so doing would risk the integrity of the Kula that served as the thesis for the book that made him, that gave him integrity. While Malinowski’s contribution to the concept of cultural relativism must be acknowledged, at the same time his insistence upon reading relationally through the template of culture serves important institutional ends: the context Malinowski insists on reading through is in this sense a disciplinary one. For example, the “three fundamental uses of language” as categorized in Malinowski’s supplemental essay—“active” (“Speech in Action”), “narrative,” and “ritual” (“Language of Ritual Magic”)—have important correlatives to the professional program as evinced in Argonauts. The first of these “uses,” “Speech in Action,” effectively functions as a justification, a raison d’eˆtre, for the ethnographic method as articulated by Malinowski. Words are essentially, originarily, not ideas held in the mind, but real communications (seemingly profound and seemingly trivial) between social members about real activities (customary, held in the hand) in the empirically observable here and now. The necessary presentism of this definition of language and its meaning is succinctly expressed by Malinowski in the commentary following his diagrams: “There can be no definition of a word

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without the reality which it means being present” (325). The full meaning of words, Malinowski states again and again, cannot be arrived at through historical researches; rather, it is arrived at through the rigorous hands-on method of participant observation as driven home by Malinowski in his introduction to Argonauts.27 The second and third uses of language, “narrative” and “ritual,” not only describe the pattern, as enumerated in Argonauts, of “native” tacking between the telling straight of “narrative” and the magical-mythical digressions from it; they also themselves become a primary formal structure through which Argonauts as text operates. The text not only repeats and explains native narration but functions often in the narrative mode; conversely, the “Language of Ritual Magic” surfaces not only in descriptions of such magic but also in or as the professional mode through which the anthropologist does “sociology,” suspending narrative context in favor of interpretation. Again, a hierarchical dimension is added to a generic description of cultural components: while the three uses of language are posed as parallel and equal (they are the distinct but parallel, synchronous components of the “Third Stage” of language development), from an institutional perspective some are more equal, more conceptually advanced, than others. “Speech in Action” functions as the survival, in the purest form, of originary language use: it is the primal material that the ethnographer works with, and its presentism justifies, though it does not describe or encompass, participant observation. “Narrative Speech,” on the other hand, is intimately bound to the unprofessional side of professionalism, as registered, in Malinowski’s diary, in the mischief caused by the reading of modern fiction; in his supplemental essay, in the linking of the “false attitude toward Words” to the contemporary “pamphlet and novel” (335); and in Argonauts and Myth in Primitive Psychology, in the assertion of the naivete of scholars who read native narrative as simply and only narrative. If narrative in this last sense again becomes a way of reading associated with amateurism, then magic again becomes filiated with science. The suspension of narrative time signified by the “Language of Ritual Magic,” Malinowski’s final figure, is firmly (though ambivalently) bound to modern professional practice. In the ethnographic version, that magic, summoned (“savage”like) as a carefully orchestrated synthesis of forces, calls into being bridges— “magical-mythical methods,” they could be called—that link narrative and non-narrative, modern story and ancient myth, primitive tale and civilized interpretation. Magic, then, is not only the overarching, synthesizing “savage” force that gives the Kula and hence the culture its “meaning”; it is also the scientific-authorial power that is the “meaning” of the “meaning” that is the Kula that is the culture. “The Language of Ritual Magic,” that “love of the final synthesis” (Argonauts, 517) summoning worlds old and new, is at one and the same time a “savage” delusion, a system of intricate and effective tribal practices, and

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the hallmark of modern professionalism, and it is registered as all of the above by the anthropologist himself. “The Ethnographer’s Magic” in this regard is an ambivalent complex of shifts not only between narrative modes but in fact about those very modes and the attitudes or evaluations that those modes carry with them. And this problematic discursive reflexiveness, or “context-crossing,” spells Argonauts and its attendant texts as “modernist” much as does that other bit of “Ethnographer’s Magic” of 1922, that discoursed-upon story, made out of (and very much about) words, issuing out of the mouths of the natives, of a day in the life of the “culture” of Dubliners.

Chapter 4

JOYCE AND HIS CRITICS: NOTES TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE

NINETEEN TWENTY-TWO AND WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN LIKE MALINOWSKI’S Argonauts of the same year, and indeed many of the ethnographic monographs that were to follow, Joyce’s Ulysses functions as the record of a particular culture or people, the rendering of a day in the life of Dubliners. That day, 16 June 1904, comes to synechdochically represent all days, or any day, much as Malinowski’s present-tense rendering of Trobrianders is meant to capture the spirit and essence of Trobriand experience. And just as Malinowski’s cast of informants symbolically expands outward to represent the Trobriand way of life, so Joyce’s characters, chief among them Leopold and Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, come to take on import as representative of all Dubliners and indeed Ireland itself as a perceived “cultural” entity. This “ethnographic” reading of Ulysses is not meant as an assertion of the essential meaning of the novel but rather is intended as a way of recontextualizing as ethnographic—and more broadly, as having to do with definitions of or models for culture—what have long been acknowledged as some of the strands in the history of interpreting the novel. Indeed, Malinowski’s imperative that the natives be chronicled and understood, not in terms of the novelties of extreme behavior and strange and savage customs, but in terms of their typicality within the given culture is strongly paralleled in important early critical response to Joyce’s novel. The novelist Arnold Bennet’s 1922 review of the novel calls the day Joyce selected for his exposition “the dailiest day possible,”1 just as Stuart Gilbert’s formative book-length study of Ulysses, published in 1930, opens with claims of the typicality of that day in June: it is, Gilbert says, “a perfectly ordinary day, in fact.”2 And Ezra Pound, writing in 1922, underscored Joyce’s emphasis upon the ordinary, championing Joyce for not going for the extravagant or unusual but remaining “always realistic in the strictest sense, always documented.” Joyce, Pound claims in ultimate praise, “never goes beyond the average” (Critical Heritage, 1:265). That Joyce’s work was characterized by many as “realist” does not in itself mean that Ulysses was considered “ethnographic.” What does filiate Joyce’s purported realism to the anthropological discourse of the time is the critical

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tendency to see Joyce’s fidelity to the “average” as working toward an articulation of a “culture,” as constituting a literary index of what is characteristic of a people: Dubliners, the Irish. Joyce’s early collection of short stories Dubliners, published in 1914, quite understandably became interpreted as being organized according to the rubrics of Irish life, especially given Joyce’s professed intent, as has often been quoted from a 1906 letter to his editor, Grant Richards, “to write a chapter of the moral history of my country” with a focus upon Dublin as “the centre of paralysis.” Further, Joyce comments upon his decision to focus each story upon a particular though quite ordinary Dubliner, and in his sequencing of the stories “I have tried to present [Dublin] to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The stories are arranged in this order.”3 Thus the organization of the volume became read as a representation of the fullest range of the people who were Dubliners and, by extension, the Irish. Joyce’s own motivation as expressed in his personal correspondence indeed has given much ballast to readings of Dubliners as itself making an argument for, and in a sense being about, cultural integrity and comprehensiveness. For example, in a contentious letter to Richards, with whom he argued for some years over the book’s suitability for publication, Joyce in 1904 asserts that “the expression ‘Dubliner’ seems to me to have some meaning and I doubt whether the same can be said for such words as ‘Londoner’ and ‘Parisian’ both of which have been used by writers as titles” (Casebook, 37–38). Much like modern ethnographers, Joyce argues not only that Dublin possesses a “culture,” a set of characteristics that give a populace a distinctive and integrative personality, but also that a smaller civic unit—a provincial city on the margins of Europe— is more appropriately considered a “culture” because it is more readily discernible, mappable, recognizable, than its more complex and heterogenous neighbors (Paris, London). And in this Joyce resembles the Boasians Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, who in the 1930s would strongly assert the need for the study of “simpler” peoples given their aptness as laboratories for the study of human culture. The rich history of criticism of Ulysses has tended to read the novel as being about many things and in fact as being about everything, and yet, though until very recently critics did not approach Joyce’s work as “ethnographic” per se, they have rather consistently regarded the novel’s rich and voluminous detail as building toward the totality that is a way of life or, in a general sense, a “culture.” Mary Colum in her 1922 review makes the case for Ulysses as “a kind of epic of Dublin,” noting of Joyce’s relation to the city that he “can only think in terms of it” (Critical Heritage, 1:232). And David Hayman in the 1950s called Ulysses “a book of Dublin” and, consistent with Joyce’s argument on Dubliners, noted that Dublin worked, in synechdochic fashion, “as anagram for Ireland.”4 And yet it was not until the 1990s that critics began to consider this persistent focus upon the Dublin way of life in an ethnographic vein.5 Ray

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McDermott, in an essay in American Anthropologist comparing Joyce to the anthropologist Conklin, asserts that Joyce in Ulysses constructs a “Dublin ethnography” that, like Conklin’s work, demands “a sensuous engagement with the details of daily life and considerable technical finesse.”6 The image of Joyce as an ethnographer can be gleaned not only in the end products that are the texts of Dubliners and Ulysses but in the legend, established early in the criticism of Joyce’s corpus, of Joyce as a collector of the details of Dublin life, especially in the years after his flight from Ireland in 1904. Well promulgated in the early years of Joyce criticism were the accounts of Joyce writing his “native” Dublin informants with questions on the detailed lifeways of Dubliners. In a 1905 letter written from his residence in Trieste Joyce asks his brother Stanislaus for answers to queries such as “Can a priest be buried in a habit?” “Can a municipal election take place in October?” “Would the city ambulance be called out to Sydney Parade for an accident?” (Casebook, 35). William York Tindall, in his widely read Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, published in 1959, notes that “Joyce observed the city as a naturalist would” and that he even wrote his aunt for “verification.”7 And early critical studies of Joyce told tales of Malinowski-like fidelity to ethnographic detail, as in Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (1934), which, written in cooperation with Joyce, tells that the author wrote the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of Ulysses “with a map of Dublin before him” and that he “calculated to a minute the time necessary for his characters to cover a distance of the city.”8 Joyce required the answers to his queries, required the maps and the synchronization of the novel to actual clock time, because he was literally absent from the field his strategies were attempting to approximate. From an ethnographic perspective, those particular strategies resemble more the Frazerian habit of armchair collecting than the Malinowskian immersion in the field, and in that regard his brother Stanislaus takes on the function not so much of the native informant but of the man-on-the-spot fieldworker who, following the notes and queries, assembles and sends on its way the needed information to the Man in the Metropole.9 What the man on the spot records, and the Man in the Metropole receives and synthesizes into cultural analysis, is not only a passing but a past moment in time, a reconstruction of the way of life of a people as it manifested itself on 16 June 1904. Like The Waste Land and Argonauts, Joyce’s Ulysses functions in terms of the disappearance of the people it brings back to life. The sixteenth of June, 1904, is brought into being by virtue of being gone, wiped off the globe much as the towers of Eliot’s civilizational order are toppled and Malinowski’s Trobrianders day by day are becoming a relic of the “primitive” past. Budgen reported that Joyce told him he wished “to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it would be reconstructed

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out of my book.”10 Joyce’s hypothetical destruction of Dublin can be viewed, then, as a literary but all too real construction of a Dublin as vanishing act. Several critics have noted that the Dublin Joyce re-creates from a metonymical distance is in fact the Dublin on the other side of a diachronic divide, the Dublin that literally no longer existed in 1922. And, in fact, Enda Duffy and others have noted that what occurred between 1904 and 1922 was the Easter Rising of 1916 and the actual destruction of a number of buildings and landmarks that Joyce’s text features and in a sense brings back to life.11 In this regard William Mottolese rightly points to the participation of Joyce’s construction of Dublin in what James Clifford calls the allegory of salvage, the rhetorical practice, prominent in this century, in which “the other” is portrayed as “lost, disintegrated, but preserved in text” (11). According to Mottolese, Joyce through this trope “performs a preservational act” as he “aspires to preserve a more stable, if paralyzed, past” (10–11). It can be said that despite differences in genre and politics, Joyce in Ulysses, like Eliot and Malinowski in that same year, is shoring the fragments of Dublin against his own exiled ruins and thereby sculpting a fragmented self into a whole cultural entity, a “paralyzed” body politic known as Dublin, much as the exile Eliot shapes out of his own publicly riven self a commemorative arrangement of tottering towers (those pyramidally organized monuments of the Great Tradition) and Malinowski collects the pieces of his own splintered expatriate persona as revealed in his diary and shapes them into an integrative but fragile tableau of the native way of life. As with The Waste Land, in the generation following the publication of Ulysses, critics both hostile and friendly often made their case in terms of the destruction or reconstruction of the civic life, or “culture,” that Joyce, they argued, managed to portray, distort, or sordidly fabricate. Whereas Budgen’s recording of Joyce’s desire to reconstruct Dublin argues the novel as a noble and eminently professional act of artisanal salvage, John Middleton Murray in his 1922 review savagely argues against the emerging thesis that Ulysses represents a serious extension and revision of the “European novel.” Joyce, Murray argues, is anything but the savior of the Great Tradition; rather, he is the great cultural destroyer, “the man with the bomb who would blow what remains of Europe into the sky” (Critical Heritage, 1:196). In a not untypical register, Murray limns Joyce as a tasteless and sordid writer who has laid waste to the high cultural landscape. Ezra Pound in 1933 argued that Ulysses was important precisely because of its author’s gift for mimetically capturing the fragile and collapsing state of Europe before the war. Ulysses becomes for Pound a version of his own Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, especially in Pound’s description of Joyce’s novel as “a summary of pre-war Europe, the blackness and mess and muddle of a ‘civilization’ led by disguised forces and a bought press, the general sloppiness, the plight of the individual intelligence in that mess!” (Critical Heritage, 2:596).

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In Pound’s view, Joyce’s fidelity to experience produced a work that validated the assertion, as pronounced by the persona of Mauberly, of a “civilization gone in the teeth,” whose confusions and corruptness resulted in the mortalities of the Great War. Pound’s assessment strongly resonated with Eliot’s famous 1923 review of Ulysses, wherein he made the case that Joyce through his use of parallels to Homer’s Odyssey was implementing a “mythical method” (as opposed to the orthodox “narrative method”) that in its juxtapositions of the contemporary and the ancient would “make the modern world possible for art.”12 Even though Pound in his 1933 review would downplay “the parallels with the Odyssey” as “mere mechanics”—“Any blockhead,” he said, “can go back and trace them” (596)—Pound and Eliot share in the vision of Ulysses as, in the words of Eliot’s review, “giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (177). Eliot, like Pound, is making Ulysses in the image of his own masterwork, The Waste Land, and in so doing reads Joyce’s novel as above all organized13 and accurate. Both read the novel as a powerful reflection of the “anarchy which is contemporary history,” Pound by rendering it as “always realistic in the strictest sense, always documented, always posted on life itself” (Critical Heritage, 1:265). Eliot and Pound in fact defend Joyce’s novel against the charge that it is formless, violent, and itself the Arnoldian cultural (or culture-less) anarchy that is to be feared, a charge not unrelated to the banning of Ulysses in both England and America on charges of obscenity. Perhaps the most prominent of such critical attacks was Richard Aldington’s 1921 argument that Ulysses represented “a tremendous libel on humanity,” “dangerous reading,” and indeed an “invitation to chaos” (Critical Heritage, 1:186–88).14 Both Eliot and Pound, albeit to varying degrees, counter precisely by arguing that Joyce’s method organizes, configures, the cultural chaos that is present and in so doing represents a monument of high cultural achievement. This debate in fact represents the essential conflict over Joyce’s novel in the 1920s and 1930s: should the collapse of culture be characterized as Ulysses itself or as that which Ulysses articulates and thus renders into art? Is Ulysses the great salvager of culture or the Apocalypse Now of the literary order, governed by what Van Wyck Brooks in 1941 would term the “death drive” of Joyce (“the sick Irish Jesuit”) and his nihilist modernist compatriots Eliot and Pound (it was Joyce, Brooks claims, “whom Eliot described as orthodox, and who had done more than Eliot to destroy tradition”).15 In fact, the occasion for Eliot’s famous articulation of the “mythical method” is specifically to refute Aldington’s treatment of Joyce, in Eliot’s words, “as a prophet of chaos” by arguing that Eliot and Aldington agree that what is needed in modern literature is “classicism” but that Aldington is wholly mistaken in assessing Joyce’s gift as a “great undisciplined talent” (Selected Prose, 176); in fact, Eliot argues, Joyce’s “mythical method” reveals the very “classicism”

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that Aldington desires. Aldington and others, Eliot asserts, simply do not perceive “form” and “order” because Joyce’s work does not in fact resemble the novel, which is itself “a form which will no longer serve.” In fact, Eliot goes on to assert that the novel, “instead of being a form, was simply the expression of an age which had not sufficiently lost all form to feel the need of something stricter” (177). Eliot’s and Pound’s arguments for Ulysses are in a very fundamental sense notes toward the definition of modernism itself, contentions that, like Eliot’s later treatise on culture, argue the need to get tough on what qualifies as culture by forefronting the definition of definition as a disciplined “controlling” and “ordering” mechanism. As such, art is saved, not as a mere survival or remnant of old forms (e.g., the novel), but, like Malinowski’s emergent culture concept, as a thorough reconceptualization of the concept that stresses its “definition” in terms of its distinctiveness, orderliness, and readability, traits that make the activity of making and reading art a solid discipline. This powerfully influential emphasis upon the necessity to reconceptualize literary form, from the “narrative” to the “mythical,” strongly links Eliot’s new modernist program to the new anthropology, which was pushing its own program to reconceive “culture” from the comparative evolutionary model to the functional one. However, the anthropological model from which Eliot overtly draws is the one whose death knell Malinowski was sounding: the evolutionary comparativism of Frazer. Indeed, in the conclusion to his review of Ulysses Eliot asserts that it is “ethnology and The Golden Bough,” along with “psychology,” that “have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method” (178). One could say, then, that 1922 saw Malinowski change the face of anthropology and saw Frazer, through Eliot’s powerful reading, change the face of literature and literary criticism. The comparativist concept of culture that was made defunct in one field became galvanizing in the other. Though this might seem an overdramatized reading of what are in fact complex institutional formations, it is meant as a summation of how these fields read themselves from the 1920s well into the 1970s. As Jarvie histrionically asserted and Stocking has more thoroughly demonstrated, modern anthropology under the leadership of Malinowski found it professionally necessary to write Frazer out of its own history,16 whereas literary modernism as supervised by Eliot found it imperative to overtly write Frazer into its own account of itself. It would be a mistake to conclude that Eliot, in his influential reading of Ulysses, simply missed the “culture” that was there. Rather, he chose to bring to the fore a different model for culture—in an anthropological context, a comparative-evolutionary one, through which diverse peoples, categorized as “civilized” and “primitive,” ancient and modern, were dramatically juxtaposed for the purposes of establishing a hierarchy of “cultural” formations (the con-

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temporary British at the top of the ladder, African tribesmen at the bottom).17 Culture here is in the singular, a monolithic principle that in varying degrees of development is articulated across—note Eliot’s argument that Joyce is “manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (Selected Prose, 177)—rather than within specific social units that we have come, since the birth of modern anthropology, to call “cultures.” And yet it is tempting to wonder how Joyce, and modernism itself, could have been read differently at that consequently critical moment. In 1923 it would have been possible for Eliot to interpret Ulysses in a quite different cultural register, for example, as the literary counterpart to anthropology’s emergent-becoming-dominant ethnographic paradigm text. Ulysses as ethnography, as the literary record of a people, a culture, like Argonauts records the events of a day in terms of their typicality, and does so for ethnographically relevant reasons. Eliot could have done that, for he certainly did keep up with his anthropological reading. And he could have worked the Malinowskian parallel and still gotten Frazer, as well as the mythical method, into his interpretation. Eliot might have argued that both Joyce and Malinowski, following Frazer’s lead, put into practice a master trope, structure, or scaffold that organizes, sculpts, the massive, seemingly chaotic array of anthropological detail: Frazer’s literal twig of a golden bough precariously carrying the burden of thousands of pages of widely flung custom; Malinowski’s Kula as comprehensive system of trade and travel that justifies, draws a circle around, makes “functional” in chaptered divisions, the welter of what Malinowski perceived the Trobrianders to be doing; for Joyce, the Odysseus myth itself as giving a shape, a significance, in chaptered form, to the seemingly chaotic ways of a text or a people. Eliot also could have pointed to the continuity of classical referencing, especially evident in the titles—Frazer’s Golden Bough become Malinowski’s Argonauts become Joyce’s Ulysses. And attention to such analogues, to such “classical” organizing principles, need not have discounted the ethnographic work being done in those texts. Instead, because of the way anthropological and literary history has been inscribed through much of this century, the handling of ethnographic material in Malinowski’s texts has been enshrined, that in Frazer’s texts has usually been castigated, and that in Joyce’s texts has largely been ignored. However, what would it mean for there to have been an influential reading (on the level of Eliot’s) of Ulysses as master ethnographic (rather than comparativist) text, as a comprehensive unpacking of a “culture” through various renditions, units of life, that are neatly bounded, contained, a reading of Ulysses as about, in other words, the patterns of a culture? What would it mean to have had a reading that overtly invoked the parallel of modern ethnography to the culture-mapping of Dublin that, according to a long line of Joyce critics, is inscribed in Ulysses? And perhaps (though this is too retrospective, too much

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to hope for) to have read Joyce as the ethnographer who, having done his stint of fieldwork, escaped before the natives could talk back? Again, in a general sense Joyce criticism from the beginning has acknowledged that Joyce’s works, especially Ulysses and Dubliners, are narratives of and about a particular people, Dubliners or the Irish, as circumscribed within a specifically rooted locale, Dublin or Ireland (though, again, this recognition was not inscribed in a specifically anthropological register). More to the point, though, is that Joyce criticism from Eliot’s influential 1923 review onward has been marked by a professional resistance to reading his books as ethnographically mapping and representing a “culture.” Instead, “symbolic” approaches, most prominently Eliot’s “mythical method,” put the premium upon the novel’s comparative and spatial scaffolding, and readings approaching the value of Joyce’s work, especially Ulysses and Dubliners, in its capacity to comprehend a “people” or way of life, have tended to be marginalized as naively and unprofessionally mimetic, literal, or “realist.”18 Tindall, in fact, in 1959 divided approaches to Joyce into the “naturalist” and the “symbolist,” citing in acknowledgment of the former Joyce’s habit of writing relatives with queries on the byways of Dublin. Yet Tindall, in characteristic New Critical fashion, hastens to follow with the mediating observation that Joyce worked those details as a symbolist would, bodying forth symbols that give the cultural particulars a universality and producing, in effect, a “triumph of generality” (129).19 Writing in the 1980s, Anthony Cronin too notes the divide between what he terms “symbol-seeking approaches” and those that focus on the “ordinary surface reality of the book” but takes a more aggressive position in arguing that the persistent critical focus upon the Homeric parallels since Eliot’s review “has turned each page [of Ulysses] into a jungle of symbol and reference,” so that the “living world of the book has been almost completely denatured.”20 Cronin maintains that it is the very professionalism of the modern Joyce critic that is to blame for the distance traveled from the “surface reality” of Ulysses. But in fact Joyce himself contributed in large part to the reading of Ulysses as a complex of symbols that could profitably be unpacked by reference to the Homeric parallels. It was Joyce, after all, who drafted the infamous “schema”—often referred to as the Linati schema—that meticulously diagramed the chapters using Odyssean titles (“Telemachus,” “Nestor,” “Proteus,” etc.) and provided the appropriate “Scene,” “Hour,” “Organ,” “Art,” “Colour,” “Symbol,” “Technic,” and “Correspondence” for each of these titles. And it was Joyce who through the 1920s distributed the schema to a number of friends and admirers and indeed permitted Stuart Gilbert to reproduce it in what became the very influential, first full-length study of Ulysses. Not surprisingly, Gilbert’s study demonstrated the essential parallels between Joyce’s book and Homer’s Odyssey in an overall effort to show, as Patrick McCarthy has documented well, that Ulysses was anything but the formless and chaotic work that

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Joyce’s detractors claimed it to be.21 And, McCarthy well notes, it was Eliot’s argument against Aldington “that Gilbert was to elaborate in his book” (27). Joyce’s schema thus became and remained through the twentieth century a prime document, subject, and interpretive tool of Joyce criticism, and though it, along with its advocates, was sometimes subject to attack,22 it played a formative role in the argument that Ulysses was not only organized but organized according to a complex comparative template that invited a rich and profitable and, importantly, professional symbolic reading. Cronin points to the institutional motivations of this tendency when he claims that the symbolist emphasis upon the “patience, skill and drudgery” that are purportedly required to tackle the novel are part and parcel of “the academic claim to indispensability . . . which has followed in our time as a result of the vesting of academic interests in literature” (87). The professional, or professorial, way of reading Joyce anthropologically became, beginning with Eliot’s 1923 review, a matter of tracing the Frazerian influence or legacy of the comparativizing of scapegoats, sacrifices, and kings to the ways of modern Dublin as sculpted by Joyce. Myth criticism, inaugurated in the 1940s, in particular emphasized the timeless repetitions of ritualmythic patterns as manifested in ancient accounts and modern “primitive” lifeways and as brilliantly given voice, under the impact of Frazer, in Joyce’s masterwork. The Homeric parallels are thus read either as Joyce’s unconscious implementation of mythic patternings or as his more or less conscious and intellectual reworking of Frazerian ideas and comparative strategies. Both of these readings approach Ulysses in a spatial/symbolic/mythic register, and both assume and work within a comparative-evolutionary model of culture.23 And yet Joyce’s schema in particular need not have been read as comparative in the Frazerian sense, for in fact it resembles in some generic but striking ways the organizational scaffolding of functional anthropology as exemplified in Malinowski’s Argonauts. First, both Ulysses and Argonauts announce through the classical referencing of their titles voyages of various arrivals, goings, and returns that, in their complex routings, will proceed to structure and give immense semiological significance to their respective narratives. And, indeed, the “Scenes,” “Arts,” and “Symbols” of Joyce’s schema work as interesting analogues to the rubrics and chapter headings through which Malinowski organizes his Argonauts: stagings of “Scenes” at the beaches of Dublin’s Sandymount and Trobriand Sarubwoyna; Dublin Brothel and Trobriand Boyowan magic; the Economics of Joyce’s “Calypso” and Malinowski’s Kula; Dublin Citizens and Trobriand natives at meeting places; cabs and canoes as modes of transport that burst with semiological implication. Reading Joyce “ethnographically” entails the recognition that Joyce, like Malinowski, in some very complex ways works with words in the very terms of the “things” those words attach, refer, or at least point toward. In other words, much like Malinowski’s disquisitions on language, Joyce’s texts are as

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much about the relations between words and their various correspondences (referential as well as organizational) as they are about anything else. The argument for an ethnographic Joyce, then, is hardly antisymbolic, as is Cronin’s call for a return to the “surface reality” of the text, but it does acknowledge that “symbolical” readings of Joyce, though they reap rich rewards in working Joyce’s semiologically dense texts, are as often about their own particular preoccupations with meaning making and language function. The above charge is not an entirely original observation; in fact it really points toward, as this study tends to do, a moment or tendency in the history of an author’s critical reception. In the late 1970s and 1980s a felt dissatisfaction in Joyce studies began to emerge over the over-readiness with which Joyce studies had for generations read Joyce’s words as always about something other than what they really “referred” to. Cronin’s attack on symbolist approaches, specifically his contention that “the world” of Ulysses that needs grasping is “Joyce’s father’s world” of 1904, “that narrow world of drink and song” (74), is one such register, and Matthew Hodgart’s 1978 complaint that critics approaching Dubliners grasp upon “hidden meanings where most likely none were intended” is another. Buzard rightly views Hodgart in this context as reflecting upon “a critical tradition whose own proponents had come to see it as almost too successful in reading textual surface as symbol.”24 It is no coincidence that these complaints arose in the period in which poststructuralism was having a profound effect upon Joyce studies, just as it is no surprise that complexly nuanced poststructural approaches were finding Joyce’s texts so amenable: indeed, the case can be made that Joyce and the critical tradition he inspired helped make poststructural reading possible. But by the 1980s “world as text” approaches began to be as wearying in Joyce studies as in the world of literary theory and criticism at large. With the rise of cultural studies and postcolonial theorizing, a new kind of Joyce, a “cultural” one, began to be called for. READING JOYCE’S “CULTURE” In 1992 Margot Norris, with particular attention to critical work on Finnegans Wake, noted that though poststructural approaches to Joyce differed significantly from New Critical readings, as seen especially in the poststructural rejection of the New Critical belief in the “coherence” of a literary text, in both schools “the cultural politics gets lost” as “events are collapsed into textuality.”25 Pointing to the “synchronic bias of the prevailing practices of these traditions,” Norris makes the claim, in reference to Finnegans Wake in particular, that these widely separated schools in fact represent one continuous approach, “a nearly unbroken tradition of ahistorical approaches” that largely ignore, among other things, Irish history and politics (356). “To situate the historical and cultural content” of the Joycean corpus, Norris asserts, means

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refuting New Critical autotelic approaches, as well as the “free-floating logopoeia that would assimilate all specific . . . references to language per se.” Instead, Norris notes, quoting Cheryl Herr, attention needs to be paid to “the voices and texts through which [Joyce’s] society carried out its ideological practices” (357). The book Norris cites is Herr’s Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (1986), a key study in the effort to recapture a “cultural” Joyce. And yet while Herr’s book makes useful approaches to the social processes and productions brought to and produced within Joyce’s texts, especially in the realm of the popular press, the music halls, and the theater of the day, in fact little attention is paid to what culture as word, term, and model meant in Joyce’s day and how it historically came to mean, variously, what it did—for example, as Arnoldian national project, social evolutionary dogma, or modern “cultural relativist” principle. In Herr’s book, references to “Irish culture,” “popular culture,” and “Joyce’s culture” unproblematically abound, and theorizing upon culture as concept is limited to the application of Marxist semiotic models of culture, which are all too readily, confidently, put forward as a way of understanding the “world” in Joyce’s texts.26 In an essay published a year later Herr notes that Ulysses is essentially “a model of cultural processes and materials.” Within the context of an argument that Joyce constructed Ulysses through the “grand dichotomies” of “Art and Life, Nature and Culture,” she asserts that “Joyce’s insistent alluding makes clear . . . that thinking, the streaming of consciousness . . . the very shape of the self are woven from the materials of one’s culture.”27 Herr is perceptive in viewing “nature as culture” in Joyce’s texts, but she does not recognize Joyce’s “culture” as culture, as an invented and contested concept that was in the process of being invented and contested in Joyce’s day and, as Virginia Dominguez asserts in her cautionary tale of the loose use of the ideological smoking gun that is culture, remains up for grabs to this day.28 Indeed, in this regard Herr, in the rhetorical act of proclaiming culture’s precedence (for Joyce) over nature, naturalizes culture itself. My purpose in this section is to approach Joyce’s own texts in a “cultural” register. What this does not entail is approaching Joyce’s various works in terms of how they reflect, refract, process, the “culture” to which Joyce was exposed and wrote about. Granted, since the 1980s valuable critical work such as Herr’s has come to light on what are called “cultural” aspects of Joyce’s oeuvre. Too often critics who work on “culture” in Joyce, and indeed in modern literature generally, go far toward committing Dominguez’s “culturalist” fallacy, ignoring culture’s complicated history, assuming that we can agree what culture “means,” and thereby fortifying culture’s seeming solidity as concept. The point here is not simply to dismiss studies that assume the solidity of one culture model or another. Works assessing the world, or “culture,” in or behind Joyce’s texts of course have their purposes and benefits, but those do

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not include assessing the actual use of the term and the intellectual legacies behind those uses or the innovations they propel. This section approaches culture as a generative “thing to think with” in Joyce’s works, and does so precisely by focusing upon the literal use of culture words and related terms in selective Joyce texts, specifically some early nonfictional writings, Dubliners, and Ulysses. In the process, this analysis attempts to begin to answer the following questions: How has culture as term and concept been borrowed, articulated, perpetuated, contested, transformed, by Joyce? What does culture itself “mean” in his writings, how is it used, and what dominant and emergent culture concepts manifest themselves?

The specific sources for culture as model and term that were available to Joyce in the years between 1900 and 1922 were largely those to which Eliot was exposed in the years before the publication of The Waste Land: primarily, though not exclusively, the work of Arnold, to which Joyce specifically refers and alludes; and the comparative-evolutionary anthropology of the fifty years leading up to 1922. As John Vickery notes, though there is no actual record that Joyce read Frazer or Tylor, given his comprehensive reading habits, it is hard to believe he was not exposed to them. According to Vickery, Joyce did read and was influenced by Ernst Renan (whom Vickery regards as “an overlapping predecessor to Frazer in the adaptation of irony and art to the religious history of mankind”), and his personal library contained copies of the Cambridge Hellenist Jane Harrison’s Mythology and two works by Lucien Le´vyBruhl, whom Joyce met in 1936 and to whom he satirically alludes in several passages in Finnegans Wake.29 And yet attention to Joyce’s handling of culture and related terms requires a wider historical purview through which the remarkable range of Joyce’s handling of the term’s broad historical usage in English can be revealed. In this regard the “culture” passages of his corpus can be read, collectively, as a kind of ironized history of the term, a jocular-reflexive, highly skewed, but also highly earnest rendition of what Raymond Williams some fifteen years after Joyce’s death would publish as Culture and Society. Indeed, one might refer to Joyce’s “culture” passages as Joyce’s “Notes toward the Definition of Culture,” a tour-de-force version of literature as etymological and intellectual history, much as his famous (or infamous) “Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses has been read (in praise or censure) as a send-up of the history of English literary styles. Especially relevant to Joyce’s comprehensive handling of culture is in the word’s development as theorized by Williams: from its origins, according to Williams, as a term for “the tending of natural growth,” which, Williams

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claims, then rapidly came to mean “a process of human training,” which in turn, with the rise of industrialism and allied social, political, economic, and aesthetic changes in the nineteenth century, was transformed to mean “culture as such, a thing in itself.”30 The modern formation of the word, as played upon by Joyce, took on the following attributes as chronicled by Williams: It came to mean, first “a general state or habit of the mind”, having such close relations with the idea of human perfection. Second, it came to mean “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole”. Third, it came to mean “the general body of the arts”. Fourth, later in the century, it came to mean “a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual”. It came also, as we know, to be a word which often provoked either hostility or embarrassment. (xvi)

The purpose of the above summation is neither to claim the inherent or total truth-value of Williams’s version of the history of culture nor to limit Joyce’s use of the term to the range that concerns Williams. In fact, while Joyce’s references to culture provide a very good range of definitions available as charted by Williams, they also refer to some usages not specifically delineated by Williams, whose predilection toward British literary-intellectual history (Coleridge, Mill, Arnold) tends to slight the contributions of natural- and social-scientific theorizing. On the other hand, I do not mean to imply, as is too often suggested in Joyce’s studies, that Joyce, as the authorial God paring his fingernails, has magisterially, albeit parodically, comprehended it all. In fact, while Joyce’s notes toward the definitions of culture do amount to an impressive and wide-ranging exposition and critique of the term, I mean to demonstrate that his innovations, his legacy as an architect of “culture,” critically depends upon his own borrowings, fealties to which even he may sometimes not acknowledge, transcend, or master. In 1907 Joyce, then living in Rome, delivered a lecture entitled “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages.” The lecture, which was delivered in Italian but has been preserved in an English version, appealed to the Italian audience’s sense of national-cultural besiegement.31 The lecture opens with the sentence “Nations have their egos, just like individuals,” which hearkens back to Germanic-Herderian conceptions of culture as nation, parallels Boas’s conception of culture as the geographically bound or articulated “genius of a people,” and looks forward to the Boasian-inspired debates of the 1930s over national culture as personality. Throughout the address Joyce, in fact, uses the word culture in the context of Irish nation building in ways that borrow heavily from Arnoldian and evolutionary definitions of culture, while rejecting their social and political legacies, as demonstrated in the following passage: It will seem strange that an island as remote as Ireland from the centre of culture could excel as a school for apostles, but even a superficial consideration will show us that the Irish nation’s insistence on developing its own culture by itself is not

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a demand of a young nation that wants to make good in the European concert as the demand of a very old nation to renew under new forms the glories of a past civilization. (157)

In this passage Joyce cleaves strongly to the general nineteenth-century definition of culture as, in Williams’s words, “the general state of intellectual development, in a society as a whole,” a salient version of which is Arnold’s notion of culture as represented by the “best and brightest” of a people’s intellectual and artistic products. And yet in the assumption of a “centre” of “culture” beyond which the standards of achievement decline, the statement also suggests a filiation to the hierarchies within social evolutionary theorizing, as made overt later in the address when Joyce states that “though the present race in Ireland is backward and inferior, it is the only one that hasn’t sold its birthright” (166). On the other hand, Joyce’s assertiveness of “birthright” and his reference to the Irish desire for “its own culture by itself” implicitly register the Germanic notion of culture as nation, as well as the incipient Boasian sense of culture as geographically bounded and autonomously regulated body. At the same time, his imperative to recognize Ireland as a “very old” rather than a “young nation” looks forward to Eliot’s insistence, in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, of the impossibility of fabricating a “culture” from scratch and the necessity of arguing culture on the basis of ancestral roots. And in general Joyce’s position, combining as it does evaluation (pejorative even) with cultural integrity, looks forward to the ineluctabilities of Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious”: a “culture” is defined by being “its own,” but some “cultures” do better than others at defining themselves as such. Joyce’s conception of national culture that in toto can and does decline recalls the urgency of Arnold’s call to rescue “culture” and also brings to mind Arnold’s own defense of the Irish. Joyce’s own references to Arnold are wincing at best—; for example, in an 1898 student paper he derides Arnold for his argument on the relation of mathematics to language, saying that “Matthew Arnold had his own little opinion about the matter, as he had about other matters.”32 At the same time, Joyce deploys specifically Arnoldian rhetoric toward the achievement of his own ends, as when, drawing upon Arnold’s conception of the Hellenistic as one of two cornerstones of Western “culture,” Joyce asks late in the address, “Is this country destined to resume its ancient position as the Hellas of the north some day?”33 Joyce in his 1907 address puts resolute emphasis upon the effects of imperial power, in this case England, upon a besieged national “culture,” Ireland, and in fact analogizes, in comparative fashion, the formation of Irish national character to that of other imperially inflicted peoples: “A conqueror cannot be casual, and for so many centuries the English have done in Ireland only what the Belgian is doing today in the Congo Free State, and what the Nipponese

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dwarf will do tomorrow in other lands” (166). With English colonization, Joyce declares, “Ireland thereby ceased to be an intellectual force in Europe. The decorative arts, at which the ancient Irish excelled, were abandoned, and the sacred and profane culture fell into disuse” (161). Here Joyce merges an Arnoldian conception of culture as intellectual-artistic achievement with the emergent anthropological category of sacred and profane. Joyce’s usage carries a primitivist tinge, a suggestion that Irish “culture” in its essence and epitome is that which is elemental and untouched by foreign influence. And yet what is perhaps most noteworthy in Joyce’s piece is his insistence upon a conception of Irish nation that is not characterized or defined by racial purity. The “new Celtic race” that arose in Ireland, Joyce claims, was “compounded of the old Celtic stock and the Scandinavian, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman races” (161). Joyce then asserts the absurdity of pure bloodline as a criterion for Irishness and gives as an example the Irish Parliament member who “provoked laughter” in the Irish press for claiming to be descended directly from the “ancient race”: “To exclude from the present nation all who are descended from foreign families would be impossible,” Joyce asserts, giving as an example the Irish political hero Parnell, “in whose veins there was not even a drop of Celtic blood” (161–62). Joyce holds out for some important differences in national character but, importantly, notes that such “differences in temperament” between the English and the Irish are “in part racial and in part historical” (165). In this regard, his definition of national cultural character draws importantly from several anthropological schools: “Our civilization is a vast fabric, in which the most diverse elements are mingled. . . . In such a fabric, it is useless to look for a thread that may have remained pure and virgin without having undergone the influence of a neighboring thread. What race, or what language . . . can boast of being pure today?” Joyce’s definition of “civilization” as “vast fabric” borrows from Darwinian, Tylorian, and Frazerian tropes for species and cultures as fabrics made up of highly complex though readable patterns of threads. However, while the evolutionary trope analogized threads as evolutionary homologies, Joyce’s threads function metonymically to exemplify diffusionary borrowing. Joyce is arguing, in Boasian terms, for the articulation of “civilization” or “culture” in terms of geographical influence and variation rather than evolutionary similarity and essence. Joyce appears, then, to be making the case for a conception of nation as diffusionary in formation and hybrid in makeup. At the same time he not only posits but argues for the consciousness of the active development, or artisanal making or constructing of, nation itself as entity: Irishness is not something one inherits or is born into but is that which is cultivated and developed. Of course, the latter argument is not entirely novel; in fact, it draws from Arnold’s persistent stress upon the active formation or “cultivation” of national “culture” and recalls Boas’s argument for cultural borrowing as opposed to inher-

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ited genetic traits. What distinguishes Joyce’s definition of nation, however, is the very foregrounding of the epistemological predicament of the concept: “Nationality (if it really is not a convenient fiction like so many others to which the scalpels of present-day scientists have given the coup de grace) must find its reason for being rooted in something that surpasses and transcends and informs changing things like blood and the human word” (166). Joyce argues for the pragmatic necessity of the preservation of nation as concept and in so doing underscores the concept’s very tentativeness. His argument for defining nation as “something that surpasses . . . things like blood” is Boasian in its insistent aversion to geneticist (or eugenic) reasoning, and yet the concept of race is in fact one such “convenient fiction” put to the “scalpels of present-day scientists,” chief among them Boas himself. Joyce, in his attempt to preserve nation as category from the scalpels foregrounds its constructiveness while at the same time depending upon the essentialistic stability of other key words, terms, or concepts. Notably, Joyce’s argument for the conscious development of nation as concept, much like Eliot’s (re)definition of culture, argues for the viability, usability, and indeed necessity of the organic and botanical trope. In this regard Joyce asserts the need to conceive of “nationality” as “being rooted,” much as Eliot sees the necessity to intellectually reconceive culture as something that “will have to grow again from the soil” (91). And yet while Joyce’s formulation of nation is, like Eliot’s definition of culture, complex, flexible, and highly reflexive, Joyce does not put the epistemological pressure upon culture as term and concept that he does upon nation. For Joyce the concept of nation, like Ireland itself, is a besieged entity; culture, on the other hand, as illustrated in his literal use of the term, though functioning as an amalgam of Arnoldian and anthropological models, is pretty much an epistemological solid state, a term that can be, and so is, used with assurance of the conveyance of its meaning. It is a term whose very use is not articulated as in jeopardy, and thus it is put to work in the reformulation of another term, nation, whose use is in jeopardy.

In 1906, one year before delivering “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce wrote his editor Richards another querulous letter, this one answering Richards’s charges that, in Joyce’s words, “those concerned in the publishing of Dubliners may be prosecuted for indecency” (Casebook, 39). Joyce responds by arguing that he has “written nothing indecent in Dubliners” and that in fact the stories exemplify “how witty the Irish are” and that “the Irish are the most spiritual race on the face of the earth” (39–40). On mimetic-ethnographic grounds Joyce states, “It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs around my stories,” and then ends the letter with the following

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heady assertion: “I seriously believe you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass” (40). Here Joyce poses his volume, at least for hortatory purposes, as a transparent representation of Irish culture that, in its presentation of that culture, warts and all, to itself, would substantively raise cultural standards. As in his address one year later, clearly Joyce here puts into play several models of what Tylor famously termed “Culture, or civilization” at once: that of the nineteenth-century conception of culture as (again, in Williams’s words) “the general state of intellectual development,” that of the generically ethnographic notion as what is representative of a people, and that of an evolutionary, hierarchical sequence of steps or stages. The book, Joyce argues, is an ethnographically accurate depiction of a culture that through its reception would effect the improvement of Culture. Joyce makes claims for Dubliners that are, in effect, fairly bald arguments based upon definitions of culture that themselves will be exemplified, complicated, and put into serious question in the book itself. In Dubliners, written from 1904 to 1907 but not published until 1914, three literal uses of culture surface in three different stories, which themselves well cover the range of the volume as stated by Joyce: “The Encounter,” the collection’s second story, representative of “childhood”; “Grace,” the penultimate story, representative of “maturity”; and Dubliners’ final story “The Dead,” representative of “public life.” As the latter rubric has the greatest anthropological implications, and “the Dead” itself is considered the cornerstone and culmination of Dubliners, the treatment of culture in Dubliners will here be limited to its use in “The Dead.”34 In “The Dead,” the one reference to the word culture comes to revolve around the success or failure to recognize, form, or accede to the representative community. Gabriel, the refined and educated protagonist of the story, is in attendance with his less refined and less educated wife Gretta—“country cute,” his mother once derogatorily pegged her—at the annual Christmas Eve party of his two elderly aunts. He is to give the after-dinner speech to the assemblage, and before dinner he wrestles with himself over whether he should include lines from Robert Browning, for, as the third-person narrator notes, “he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers.”35 Shakespeare, or a “quotation” from “the Melodies,” might be more appropriate, the narrator notes, adding that “the indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education” (187). Gabriel’s dilemma, as he perceives it, is that he would put himself culturally out of context. While his recognition implicitly grants legitimacy to “culture” as coherent, cohering, and consensual community, at the same time the “grade”

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that would censure him marks a hierarchical conception of culture characterized by superior refinement, manner, and learning. Gabriel is thus conflating, perhaps confusing, at least two conceptions of culture at once: in order to be part of the “culture” anthropologically conceived, he must temporarily lower his own “grade of culture.” Like Arnold, Gabriel has to battle the prevailing conception of culture as pretension, as a matter of putting on airs, but as with Arnold the effort, as conveyed to the reader, appears to leave only the greater impression of Gabriel’s pretension and narrow-mindedness. Given the biographical parallels that Anthony Burgess cites between Joyce and Gabriel,36 Joyce’s claim to Richards that declining to publish Dubliners would “retard the course of civilization in Ireland” problematically aligns Joyce the author more with Gabriel than with the narrator, who, readers do tend to feel, implicitly recognizes and projects the inadequacy of Gabriel’s definition of culture. Gabriel’s predicament of “culture” is illumined in his provocative conversations with Miss Ivors, the young Irish loyalist and activist. While dancing, she accuses him of neglecting his native language and his native land (he prefers vacationing on the Continent to the trip to Galway she proposes) and pegs him a “West Briton” (196–200). Her accusations of his political complicities with the British (based upon the periodical in which his literary reviews appear) are answered in his own mind (not overtly articulated to her): “he wanted to say that literature was above politics” (197), and he forthwith mentally categorizes her as “an enthusiast” (200). Gabriel’s divorcing of literature from politics is nothing other than the Arnoldian insistence upon the division of “sweetness and light” from the “getting on” of the politicized rabble. Gabriel is, from his own perspective, representative of the “Right Reason” that embodies Culture, while Miss Ivors is among those of whom Arnold said, “In provinciality they abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short.”37 In the Arnoldian terms that Gabriel adopts, she falls short of the “totality” that is “culture.” Miss Ivors quite simply accuses Gabriel of defining culture, and giving it value thereof, as the attainment of hierarchical European norms, habits, and practices, and she insists upon the ideological-political component of such a definition. Gabriel denies, as did Arnold, the political component of his definition of culture—it represents “Right Reason” or the rising above politics. She argues for culture on account of its national-local representativeness, which admittedly entails its own politics. Miss Ivors’s definitions do not fall on completely deaf ears, however, for it is her accusations that serve as the prime catalyst for Gabriel’s fear of revealing his higher “grade of culture” and thus for his reconsideration of the “cultural” content of his speech. In this regard, it can be said that the story is really about Gabriel’s own recognition of other cultural categories and definitions as they impinge upon him over the course of the evening. What ends up moving Gretta, a Galway native herself, is, fittingly, not Gabriel’s speech, replete with its European cultural allusions, but an old Irish song,

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The Lass of Aughrim, as sung by a fine Irish tenor present at the dinner. Mistaking Gretta’s visible emotional response as an unspoken communion between the two of them, Gabriel discovers upon getting ready for bed that what moved her was the memory, as evoked by the Irish song, of a young lover of hers in Galway, Michael Furey, who had died at a young age. This revelation, or better put, anagnorisis, causes Gabriel to reassess the purport of the evening: he is no longer the culture hero, bringing refinement and words of wisdom to the folk, but rather “a ludicrous figure . . . a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians” (231–32). More importantly, this recognition occasions a larger awareness, of “the dead” and of “his own identity” as “fading out into a gray impalpable world,” a perception whose very impalpability begins, in Joycean epiphanic fashion, to make its own kind of sense in the story’s concluding paragraph: A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, further westwards, softly falling into the mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (235–36)

This famous passage, conventionally explicated as the visionary realization of death and the amorphous anti-identity it brings, in fact can profitably be read as an articulation, in epiphanic form, of the congruence and coherence of “culture.” It is Irish “culture,” as opposed to European hierarchical “Culture,” that is realized, and achieved, as in The Waste Land, through the metonymic movement across the literal landscape and the progressive metonymic association of those natural features to a people, the Irish. Gabriel’s “journey westwards” is not merely the broad allegorical sojourn toward aging and death but in fact the journey to the recognition of the Irish as a westward land and people. The “snow” that is “general all over Ireland” functions to articulate, not to dissolve, the unity of Ireland as entity; it dissolves Gabriel, but into the collectiveness of the “culture.” And the recognition of cultural integrity and totality takes perceptibly progressive form in the accruing of cultural to natural forms and the gradual metamorphosis of “nature” to “culture,” to the point, in fact, where the categories themselves begin to lose their hold: a bog is given a human name, the “Shannon waves” become “mutinous,” and the “natural features” weld into the “cultural artifacts” of the hybridic “crooked crosses and headstones.”

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As in The Waste Land, culture is articulated precisely through the absence of the living; whatever integrity is perceptible is read through waste and death. Again, the snow is the metonymic agent that makes possible the visionary realization of wholeness and integrity of a nation or a people and is achieved, in Malinowskian magical-mythical fashion, through the uniting of the “natural” and the “cultural” as well as of the living and the dead. In this regard Joyce’s “mythical method” might more aptly be conceive as that which metonymically enables the perception of the harmony of a people, and does so through the unity of living and dead, past and present, a culture’s contemporaneity and its antiquity: both Malinowski and Joyce, it could be said, provide narratives of that process.

With the aid of Wolfhard Steppe and Hans Walter Gabler’s Handlist to Joyce’s Ulysses, even a cursory “culture” search through Joyce’s masterwork demonstrates that his literal use of culture and its derivations maps in far-ranging and interesting ways a number of trajectories that the term culture had taken on by the early twentieth century. The references to culture and its derivatives, though relatively few—according to Steppe and Gabler, six in all, in the forms of “culture,” “culture,” and “cultured”38—provide a pretty good range of definitions available to Joyce through the intellectual legacy that leads to and beyond Arnold and also point toward specific anthropological conceptions current in Joyce’s day. In all, the uses of culture and its derivates in Ulysses demonstrate an advance in the complexity and reflexiveness of the term’s use; at the same time, Joyce continues to freely exploit the term’s resonant powers, especially regarding the botanical aspects of the culture word. In Cyclops, the narrative of “all those interested in the spread of human culture among the lower animals” (U 12.712–13),39 which leads to the tale of the dog (re)named Owen Garry, who engages in “the recitation of verse,” is a light and deft blending of “culture” as, to quote from Raymond Williams, a “general state or habit,” filiated with “human perfection,” and evolutionary doctrine of the hierarchy of species. What the narrator terms “this really marvelous exhibition of cynanthropy”—meaning, literally, “of a dogman” and referring as well to “a form of insanity in which the patient is convinced he is a dog”40—represents a whimsical evolutionary inversion, or devolution, in which man and his qualities descend to the canine level. Like other late Victorians and modernists, Joyce here not only puts into play evolutionary notions of “human culture” precisely by transgressing them but does so by having the “culture” imprimatur spread—as though through “cultural” diffusion—to and through that most “civilizing” and at the same time most atavistically rooted of human discourses: verse. In fact, primitivist sentiments such as Eliot’s claims, based upon the evidence of current anthropology,

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that the poet is “more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries”41 and that “the pre-logical mentality persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet,”42 seem deliberately tweaked in Joyce’s account of “our greatest living phonetic expert,” who “has left no stone unturned in his efforts to delucidate and compare the verse recited and has found it bears a striking resemblance (the italics are ours) to the ranns of ancient Celtic bards” (U 12.719–23). The researches of comparative linguistics and anthropology, modernist analogizing to “native” states, and Celtic primitive imaginaries all are upended as “human culture” goes to the dogs in recovery of its racial-national origins.43 Several pages later in Cyclops, the nameless narrator summarizes “a most interesting discussion” that had taken place “in the ancient hall of Brian O’Ciarnain’s . . . on the revival of ancient Gaelic sports and the importance of physical culture, as understood in ancient Greece and ancient Rome and ancient Ireland, for the development of the race” (U 12.897–901). Joyce’s use of the term here recalls the relatively ancient notion of culture as a “process of human training” but playfully aggregates to that the intimation of culture’s racial and national filiations: training physical culture as a way to firm up national culture. Also suggested here, and partly responsible for the passage’s impact, is nineteenth-century evolutionism, as well as what was known, previous to Darwin, as developmental theorizing. The tongue-in-cheek implication here is that the slow work of biological and cultural ascendancy, limned by Darwin and others, can be prodded along, in the national interest, with a little body toning. Culture italicized appears in another racial or national vein as spoken by Stephen, in the “FROM THE FATHERS” oration of “Aeolus,” in which St. Augustine is said to recite the query of the ancient Egyptians: “Why will you jews not accept our culture, our religion and our language? You are a tribe of nomad herdsman. We are a mighty people” (U 7.845–46). Besides being an implicit allusion to Ireland as a besieged national and cultural entity, the citation functions as internal ironic commentary upon the supposed “Egyptian” definition of culture as it puts into question the “cultural” integrity of the “race” that, according to Arnold in Culture and Anarchy, forms one of the two pillars of Western culture building, that is, the Hebraic.44 Arnold’s famous Hebraism-Hellenism binary is of course clearly alluded to in “Telemachus,” where Buck Mulligan proposes to Stephen that “if you and I could only work together we might do something for the island. Hellenise it” (U 1.157–58). Here Joyce doubtless refers not only to Arnold’s culture binary as it is sketched in Culture and Anarchy but also to his writings on Ireland, where Arnold asserts that the unremitting Hebraism of England’s “cultural” character (as personified in the caricature of “the genuine, unmitigated Murdstone”) is at a loss to understand or affect the Irish: “The Irish quickwittedness, sentiment, keen feeling for social life and manners, demands some-

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thing which this hard and imperfect civilisation cannot give them.”45 Mulligan derides the attempts of the British Haines to folklorize the island and its people and yet in the process reproduces Arnoldian/British terms of Irish “cultural” (re)vitalization.46 Arnold’s argument for a greater Hellenism largely made possible the practices and attitudes of fin-de-sie`cle aesthetes, who, as Don Gifford and Robert Seidman point out, came to consider as “Philistine” the very man who coined the term (“Ulysses” Annotated, 17). The irony of this turn is reflected in a scene in “Telemachus,” wherein Clive Kempthorpe is being “debagged” (line 171)—having his pants torn off—by his fellow Oxfordians while outside the window “a deaf gardener, aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold’s face, pushes his mower on the somber lawn watching narrowly the dancing motes of grasshalms. To ourselves . . . new paganism . . . omphalos” (lines 172–76). As Seamus Deane notes, the description of Arnold as gardener serves “as an index of his refusal to accept the anarchy, callow and freakish, bred within the walls of Oxford and culture” (“Masked,” 20). And yet Deane’s supposition of an “anarchy” within “culture,” in the culturalist fashion that Dominguez attacks, replicates the terms of Arnold’s own cultural equation. After all, it was Arnold, preeminent among the nineteenth-century architects of “culture,” who enabled his argument for it by assigning it an urgent opposite: “anarchy.” In this regard Gerald Graff notes that “Culture and Anarchy established the categories and the grammar through which we think about cultural crisis.”47 Both the aesthetes of the “new paganism” to which Joyce refers and Deane himself adopt those categories. When we move to cultured as word, we find three citations that significantly expand the range of the term’s use in the novel. In Nausikaa Bloom’s response to Cissy’s asking him the time moves Gerty to observe that the “voice” of her fantasy lover “had a cultured ring in it” (U 13.548). Here the sense of culture as “state of intellectual development” can be limned, though in an apparently Arnoldian use that suggests the cultivation of culture by an individual rather than by society as a whole. Though Raymond Williams makes the case that Arnold in Culture and Anarchy does in fact attempt to call attention to the acquisition of “culture” by society as a whole rather than on a person-by-person basis (Culture and Society, 118), much of what Williams refers to as the “hostility or embarrassment” evoked by the culture word since Culture and Anarchy appeared in 1867 can be traced to the intellectual and popular perception that individuals acquire “culture” by and for themselves and usually in an effort to rise in “social” standing. Again, the sense of culture as leisure-class activity was explicitly what Arnold was fighting to dispel, to replace it with the notion of culture as the process or activity of “Right Reason” that could fight the social anarchy of his time.

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In one sense, Gerty’s use of cultured underlines her own wrongheadedness, as she is caught in a net of sentimental cultural capital to the extent that she cannot recognize Bloom for what he is: a pathetic, middle-aged masturbator. This is, in other words, where reading and practicing “culture” as leisure-class activity will get you. On the other hand, Bloom is “cultured,” in the sense that he is well and broadly read and, clearly, marked by both Arnold’s Hellenism and Hebraism, which finds testimony in Lenehan’s important assessment of him in “Wandering Rocks”: “He’s a cultured allroundman, Bloom is, he said seriously. He’s not one of your common or garden . . . you know. . . . There’s a touch of the artist about old Bloom” (U 10.581–83). Present here is the Coleridgean and generally Romantic notion of the artist as standard-bearer for “cultivation,” which, Williams points out, Coleridge opposes to “civilization,” which by itself, he says, produces a “varnished [rather] than a polished people.” Williams notes that Coleridge’s use of cultivation here marks the first time the term “had been used to denote a general condition, a ‘state or habit’ of the mind,” and he goes on to assert that the word, borrowed from the eighteenth-century adjective cultivated, “was elsewhere, as in Mill, to be called culture” (61). “The idea of culture rests on metaphor: the tending of natural growth” (335), Williams remarks near the end of Culture and Society, and indeed seminal to his genealogy of culture is the assertion that what began as a word denoting “the tending of natural growth” complexly and variously branches out to a term signifying an autonomous human condition or quality either individually or socially possessed but still clinging to its arboreal metaphorical roots. The tendency of the culture word, in other words, is for its routing to take roots. So of course “Bloom” is the perfectly appropriate name for he who would exemplify, contain within himself, the trajectory of the culture word. And to complete Lenehan’s abbreviated description, he is “not one of your common or garden variety” culture bearers48 but has a “touch” of the bloom itself, that is, the “artist” who functions as both source and product of Coleridge’s “cultivation.” Bloom is decidedly not—to quote from Williams quoting from Coleridge—the “ ‘hectic of disease’ of one kind of civilization,” but rather “the ‘bloom of health’ of a civilization ‘grounded in cultivation’ ” (61, 111). This Coleridgean reading of Bloom as arboreally figured cultivator or cultivated tends to cleave to that strand of the culture word that emphasizes culture as an individually attained property as opposed to a quality or state that represents the social whole (though contained in Coleridge’s relatively early discussion is the notion, as fully developed by Arnold, that inner “cultivation” will ramify out, leaf out, to a blooming civilization). Indeed, Williams notes that from the late nineteenth century onward, prizing apart the culture word becomes a matter of “distinguishing between the idea of culture as art and the idea of culture as a whole way of life” (43). The latter notion, which involves, significantly, issues of representativeness (versus individual, atomistic attain-

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ment), as Williams makes clear, owes much to Arnold’s efforts. For even if Arnold asserts that culture is “an inward operation” (Culture and Anarchy, 6) and can be attained through exposure to the classics, culture needs to inform and shape the social whole. What Williams does not stress sufficiently, however, is the role that the emerging discipline of cultural anthropology played in promoting the notion of culture as representative of the whole social fabric versus the notion of culture as the property of the privileged. Crucial here, of course, is Tylor’s definition of culture “in its wide ethnographic sense” as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (1). When, in reading Lenehan’s “cultured allroundman,” we shift the emphasis from cultured to allroundman, the total phrase then modulates its semantic and allusive shading to a reading of culture and Bloom himself as “anthropologically representative of”—in this case, “of” a “complex whole” of social and civil principles and customs that, by Joyce’s day, had been firmly planted in common thinking to spell “culture.” This representativeness, albeit rendered often as satiric, ironic, or hyperbolic by Joyce, is fully consonant with the common Homeric reading, articulated early in the history of reading Ulysses, since at least Stuart Gilbert,49 of reading Bloom as Odysseus, as the “Everyman or Noman” alluded to in “Ithaca” (U 17.2008). Lenehan’s heartfelt admission of Bloom’s status comes, significantly, at the tail end of a tale about a night carriage ride during which he, Lenehan, was feeling up Molly while Bloom was pointing out the stars. Like his predecessor, Bloom is the great navigator, who navigates while his wife is being fiddled with. As such, he is, in the Homeric sense, both exemplary and representative and thus both Homeric and anthropological in his possession of a skill that means something to and thus helps define a people (Dubliners, the Greeks). Bloom’s exemplariness has often been discussed—whether to argue that he fails or succeeds in his attainment—in terms of his relationship with his spiritual “son,” Stephen. “Perfection, as culture conceives it,” Arnold argues, “is not possible while the individual remains isolated. The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled of his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection” (Culture and Anarchy, 21). In the Eumeus episode, Bloom reaches out as father–culture hero Odysseus to Stephen as cultural son Telemachus. Needless to say, the “culture contact,” so long awaited by the reader, is indirect, skewed, oblique, and often wincingly rendered. The narration of the episode, as Marilyn French points out, is strongly marked with “pretension,” with “the ‘elegance’ of a half-educated person trying to appear well educated.”50 Like Gerty, French notes, this narrator “too is fond of ‘elegant’ phrases,” and while French resists simply conflating the narration

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of Eumeus with the mentality of Bloom himself, she is right to note that Bloom attempts to impress Stephen by “trying to sound intelligent” (212). What works upon Gerty—Bloom’s “cultured ring”—does not, it seems, register for Stephen, whose responses to Bloom’s overtures at best are indirect and at worst could be said to manifest that “hostility or embarrassment” that, Williams notes, has increasingly been the response to, and thus has helped redefine, “culture” as that vehicle or activity through which one individually attempts to attain “elegance.” Nonetheless, Bloom is reaching out to Stephen, and in ways that cannot be explained simply as an effort on Bloom’s part to impress. Bloom’s little lecture to Stephen on work and nation (16:1120–86), despite Stephen’s half-hearing and resistant response, can be read as a decided version of culture building that, in this particular Irish context, argues Hebraism as a way to culturalnational improvement: “They [the Jews] are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so” (16.1124–25). “I call that patriotism,” Bloom says of his terms for a good Ireland: “all creeds and classes pro rata having a comfortable tidy-sized income, in no niggard fashion either, something in the neighborhood of 300 per annum” (16.1133–35). Bloom’s terms are decidedly Philistine in Arnold’s schema, and as such argue for Ireland precisely what Arnold, in his essay “The Incompatibles,” maintained that Ireland as Celtic imaginary fortunately lacked and what England unfortunately had too much of: Judeo-Christian rigor (see Deane, “Masked,” 12, 20). And, for that matter, Bloom’s Hebraic blueprint for Ireland is the counterpoint to Mulligan’s Hellenistic one. In any case, Stephen does not respond well to Bloom’s Hebraism: though he is hardly listening, the word work alone prompts a peremptory “Count me out” retort (16.1148). My purpose here is not to argue that Joyce constructs an argument, based upon Stephen’s reaction, in support of Arnold’s disdain of Hebraism. The Hebrew-Irish filiations established throughout Ulysses in themselves clearly argue against any simply anti-Hebraic perspective. Nor is it simply a matter of tagging Bloom Hebraic and Stephen Hellenistic. For, on the other side of the issue, one could equally argue that Stephen’s lack of response to Buck Mulligan’s proposal to “Hellenize” Ireland indicates an opposition to Arnold’s project. In regard to this scene in “Telemachus,” Seamus Deane rightly notes that Stephen “repudiates the solidarity of the new Hellenism, the aestheticized echo of Arnold’s thought, for that leads to the irresponsibility and shallowness of a Buck Mulligan” (“Masked,” 18). More to the point here is to assess, register, how various moments in the novel are inevitably framed, however caustically, in Arnoldian “cultural” terms. As Gifford’s annotation to “Matthew Arnold’s face” reminds us, the categorization of Arnold as Philistine by turn-of-the-century free spirits was possible only by adopting Arnold’s cultural categories and terminology, including “Philistine” itself (“Ulysses” Annotated, 17)! Joyce, however much

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he may spurn Arnold’s “culture” semantics and projects, cannot but choose— and does choose—to reproduce their terms in the act of complicating or repudiating them. Stephen’s reaction against “work” prompts Bloom to define the “W” word “in the widest possible sense” (much as Tylor thirty-five years before Bloomsday defined culture “in its wide ethnographic sense”) as that which in comprehensive anthropological fashion takes in both physical and mental labor, as activity both “done” and thought. Bloom’s inclusiveness assumes the lineaments of his own “Hebraic” argument of a few moments before—“You have every bit as much right to live by your pen in pursuit of your philosophy as the peasant has”—and quickly becomes structurally Arnoldian in its argument that the poles of “culture” (in Arnold’s case, the Hebraic and Hellenistic) must be equally weighted in the effort toward nation building: “You both belong to Ireland, the brain and the brawn. Each is equally important” (16.1157–59). The argument for “brain” is of course wholly in keeping with one of Arnold’s signal contributions, his insistence on the usefulness of the intellectual and scholarly in the service of all society. Predictably, and recalling Gabriel of “The Dead,” Stephen responds to Bloom’s project with derision—“You suspect . . . that I may be important because I belong to the faubourg Saint Patrice called Ireland for short” (16.1160– 61). In fact, Stephen inverts the Arnoldian notion of the cultured individual who must, in a nationalist frame, “carry others along with him in his march toward perfection”: “But I suspect,” Stephen asserts, interrupting Bloom, “that Ireland must be important because it belongs to me” (16.1164–65). Bloom, by now thoroughly muddled by Stephen’s clever retorts, asks for clarification, and Stephen, “patently crosstempered,” adds, “We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject” (16.1169, 1171). Clearly, Bloom as culture father is a long way from successfully delivering “culture” to Telemachus, and yet that is what he is about, and indeed Stephen’s response, as Deane makes clear, accords with historical responses to the inadequacies of Arnold’s “culturizing” as it pertains to Ireland, to England, and to modernity as a whole (“Masked,” 14–16). Though Bloom’s proposal tilts toward the Hebraic and Arnold’s tilts toward the Hellenistic, they share in the inability to hook their solutions to the pressing here-and-now problems of modernity. And yet, as Deane, quoting from Lionel Trilling, also acknowledges, Arnold’s denial of “the sterile, atomic view of the individual” is shared by Joyce, who avoids the pitfalls of the individualist view “by locating the individual in the totality of a communal human life” (“Masked,” 19–20). If such be the case, then Bloom’s efforts with Stephen, as clumsy and anything but elegant as they are, do constitute an effort to argue for Arnold’s “best self,” which is by definition “culture,” wherein we are “united, impersonal, at harmony” (see Deane, “Masked,” 19). Stephen, by contrast, at best can be seen as one of Arnold’s “aliens,” those who, arising out of a social class not amena-

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ble to “the best that has been thought and said,” are in their self-inculcation and ascendancy forever at odds, between two “culture”/class worlds. And if one moves beyond the model of “culture” as individual attainment, as Arnold does, and considers culture as that which moves us into our “best”—our collective—self, then at worst Stephen is the exemplification of “doing what one likes,” which is, for Arnold, the prevailing attitude of “our old untransformed self,” that is, the self that does not know culture broadly conceived. In this best-and-worst-case scenario Stephen suffers, in Le´vi-Straussian structuralist terms, from both a surfeit and a lack of “culture,” both of which emerge from Bloom’s worried contemplation upon Stephen, which, not coincidentally, contains the last of the literal culture words in Ulysses (i.e., the last here treated, as well as the last featured in Ulysses proper). Here Bloom’s fatherly side emerges, as he holds “a touch of fear for the young man beside him . . . the eyes more especially reminding him forcibly of father and sister” (16.1179–82). Stephen’s condition of “cultural” lack and surfeit is emphatically brought to the fore in Bloom’s observation that Stephen “brought to mind instances of cultured fellows that promised so brilliantly nipped in the bud of premature decay and nobody to blame but themselves” (16.1183–85). Stephen, in Bloom’s mind, is both “cultured” and fails “to culture,” as he acquires the accouterments of learning and yet fails to find a place in the social organism. And organism it is: Bloom’s, and by extension Joyce’s, figuration perpetuates the branching of the culture word in the terms of natural growth and “decay”: Bloom’s cultural and cultured son quite simply has failed to bloom. The other “cultured fellows” that failed (according) to Bloom read like a gallery of fin-de-sie`cle aesthetes, eccentrics, and (at the time thought to be) deviants, radical heirs of Arnold’s Hellenism, including one O’Callaghan, the “half-crazy faddist” who when drunk “was in the habit of ostentatiously sporting in public a suit of brown paper (a fact)” (16.1185–89). Doing as one likes, and doing so, much as in the son’s opening episode, in the face of Matthew Arnold, in the mask of the “deaf gardener” of the culture word.

Chapter 5

JOYCE’S WHOLES: CULTURE, TALES, AND TELLINGS

NEAR THE end of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) the protagonist hero-as-artist Stephen Dedalus engages his friend Lynch in a discussion on the universality of the beautiful. When Lynch asks outright “But what is beauty,” Stephen proposes woman as object. “The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the Hottentot,” Stephen opens, “all admire a different type of female beauty.”1 While this difference “seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape,” Stephen asserts that there are “two ways out.” The first of these is the “hypothesis” that “every physical quality admired by men in women is in direct connection with the manifold functions of women for the propagation of the species” (208). Stephen goes on to reject this alternative, for as he explains to Lynch, “it leads to eugenics rather than to aesthetic,” and then goes on to conjure “a new gaudy lectureroom” where a certain MacCann “with one hand on The Origin of Species and the other hand on the New Testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good milk to her children and yours” (209). Stephen’s seriocomic vision functions as a firm rejection of the biocultural evolutionist theorizing of Darwin, Spencer, and Tylor, and its alliance with biblical precedent and purposes marks one manifestation of the intellectual juxtaposition of social-evolutionary theory and biblical study of the turn of the century. Ten years after the publication of Portrait the Scopes trial, in America, would etch in modern memory the rhetorical untenability of having one hand on each book, but Stephen acutely sites a commonality in Darwinian theory and biblical study that he roundly rejects: the origin and purpose of “aesthetic apprehension” as the unwavering teleology of biological determinism. Stephen’s second way out, his own “hypothesis,” holds that “though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all aesthetic apprehension” (209). Stephen’s solution, drawn out over the course of several pages, functions as a version of aesthetic relativism: like the Darwinian-biblical option, it argues for a universalism of aesthetics, but, importantly, along the lines of a cultural-structural integrity rather than a diachronically conceived racial-evolutionist (“eugenic”) logic.

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Like Boas, Joyce’s Stephen relies upon an assumption of unitary thinking that is decidedly divorced from social-evolutionary assumptions, and like Sapir, Joyce’s theorist promotes cultural relativism based upon the implicit argument of the superiority of aesthetic experience. Stephen’s assertion as such is akin to Eliot’s proposal in his literary criticism of the same period, in which equality of cultural content as embedded in art (it is not the attractiveness or novelty of the “cultural” material that matters) is posited upon the superiority of firm aesthetic form (it is how you arrange said material that counts). Now, Stephen’s rhetoric is not without an evolutionary anthropological caste: it resonates with Frazerian comparativism in its juggling of peoples (“Chinese,” “Copt,” “Hottentot”), and it too depends upon the supposition of generalizable “stages.” Still, his argument has strong filiations to modern anthropological efforts to conceive of “cultures”: in its effort to assert the legitimacy of othercultural perception, it readily renders as an object of study a class of human beings (women) and argues the existence of a common formal structure that produces entities of seeming variousness (peoples, things of beauty). Citing Aquinas in the original Latin—“ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas,” Stephen then translates into a simple English what becomes for him the basis of his theory: “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance” (212). These he posits as the essential perceptual “stages” of the “apprehension of beauty,” and shifting his object of disquisition from woman to a specific basket atop the head of a passing boy, he explicates his version of the first stage, integritas: In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An aesthetic image is presented to us either in space or time. . . . But temporal or spatial, the aesthetic object is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas. (212)

Stephen’s reading of basket as “whole” hearkens back to Malinowski’s conception of tradition as “fabric” whose “strands are so closely woven that the destruction of one unmakes the whole.”2 For both the anthropologist Malinowski and the budding literary-creative theoretician Dedalus the perception of the holism of the cultural product (basket, tradition as woven artifact) is paramount, and the object’s aura or luminousness is marked by its emergence out of, its definition against, space and time: Dedalus’s art object and Malinowski’s “culture,” and for that matter Eliot’s “tradition,” are defined not simply by escaping space and time but rather by being perceived primarily as a holistic entity (“selfbounded, selfcontained”) that is foregrounded against a temporalspatial background. Integritas is thus the critical first step of perception, as

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well as the necessary first premise of any theory of aesthetic holism: the thing must be perceived as one. This is not in itself a novel theory; aside from Stephen’s borrowing of its features from Aquinas, it is the necessity of the perception of holism that is implicit in the “whole” of Tylor’s definition of culture as “complex whole.” The second stage of apprehension—consonantia, or “harmony”—is explicated by Stephen as follows: You pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia. (212)

As with Tylor, the primacy of establishing holism, the “whole” of “complex whole,” is followed by the activity recognizing parts, details, and their relations—the perception of the “complex” of “complex whole.” Of course, it was not Tylor, or Boas, but Malinowski who would develop the full-blown anthropological equivalent of this second stage: the theory of functionalism, which argues that the recognition of a “culture,” like the perception of Dedalus’s art object as “a thing,” entails the apprehension of its parts as “complex, multiple, divisible,” and so on, but as ultimately building toward the recognition of their fittingness, their “harmonious” relation, to the whole. Significantly, this stage is characterized as “analysis,” as distinguished by the work of the aesthetician, literary artist, or cultural anthropologist. The third stage—claritas, or “radiance”—Stephen admits to being more difficult to define. Stephen acknowledges but puts aside the possible spiritual overtones and implications of the term as articulated by Aquinas—as the “artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything” (213)— and then proceeds to fashion Aquinas according to his own terms: When you have apprehended the basket as one thing and have then analyzed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and aesthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the aesthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Calvini, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart. (213)

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In Stephen Hero, an earlier version of Portrait, the “radiance” of the “thing” is famously defined as an “epiphany,” and Ian Crump notes that in the transition from Stephen Hero to Portrait Joyce in fact replaced epiphany with “a biological simile,” that of Calvini’s “cardiac condition,”3 a shift that recalls Malinowski’s progressive, though complicated revision of the distinctiveness of a “culture” as a biological entity. For both, the artisanal arrangement of “culture” (art object or tribal organization) is vitally linked to natural process. In the context of Thomist scholarship Maurice Beebe has argued that Joyce substitutes quidditas for claritas “in order to avoid the spiritual connotations of the latter,” but Beebe goes on to make the claim that Joyce in effect transfers the transcendental power of the theological concept into the aesthetic realm: Joyce, he notes, “exalts the art-work . . . as complete in itself, harmonious in itself, and clear in itself, rather than as a fragment or a symbol of a broader, more extensive Unity.”4 This reinvestment is hardly novel on Joyce’s part and indeed marks Joyce, or Dedalus, as distinctly Arnoldian in the effort to give over to the creation of “culture” the formerly overarching imperative and resonance of the spiritual, to which Eliot leveled an objection in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture. Joyce’s filiation to Arnold ties him to Malinowski as well, whose drive to establish culture as a comprehensive entity would later be criticized as an attempt to make of it an amorphous metaphysical substance. The quidditas, or “whatness,” of Dedalus’s artistic process finds important correspondence to Malinowski’s own perception of the unity and functionality of the parts of a “culture.” Stephen’s “only synthesis . . . permissible,” which leads to the epiphany, the “luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” is of a species with Malinowski’s “final synthesis, achieved by the assimilation and comprehension of all the items of a culture.”5 Both function as sheer crowning perceptual moments when the hard-won work of synthesis, as achieved by the modern artist and anthropologist, makes possible a new order, whether in the form of “cultural” product or “culture” itself. In this regard, Joyce’s Portrait and Malinowski’s Argonauts function in their respective fields as critical texts about the very process by which a creative-cultural vocation is made possible in new, modern terms. Both involve, or are about, the substantive reworking of a staid profession. And not surprisingly, in each case much critical commentary has ensued over whether the protagonist is the author himself, a question that became disciplinarily so significant precisely because of the importance of each text as vocational training ground. Malinowski’s Argonauts could easily have been titled Portrait of the Anthropologist as a Young Man, for like Joyce’s Dedalus, Malinowski’s ethnographer is foregrounded as the suffering initiate who carves out of the workaday fieldwork that is experience what Dedalus calls “the aesthetic image” of “life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination” (221). In both texts the protagonist sculpts out of sundry quotidian experience (living among native Dubliners and Trobrianders) triumphant distantiation in the form of exquisitely

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wrought moments of vocational omnipotence in which any ordinary event, person, or object can become filled with revelatory possibility.6 In this way both Malinowski and Joyce act in culturally relativist ways to suggest the potential worth of even the most sordid of objects, but it is a worth read through their own omnipotent visions. Proximity, life enmired, produces distance— Malinowski’s ethnographer becomes Joyce’s “artist,” who, “like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (215). Joyce critics have sometimes gone to great, even absurd, lengths to claim Joyce’s omnipotent distance from his very theory of omnipotent distancing. My purpose here is not to argue that Joyce meant what he said in the character of Dedalus (though the fact that the aesthetic theory first appears in his personal notebooks and then makes it way with revisions to Stephen Hero and on to Portrait does strain the claim of Joyce’s wholly distanced regard for the theory). Rather, my claim here is that the theory does get embodied in the fiction itself (it functions, clearly, as an important thematic and structurally dramatic element in Portrait at the least), and does so in ways that strongly suggest its filiations to the anthropological template of “culture” of the time. In this regard the “epiphanies” that do occur in Joyce’s fictions might be read as renditions of those ethnographic-magical moments when the materials of anthropological inquiry—the low, drab, and ordinary of Malinowski’s insistence—are recognized, through the process of integritas-consonantia-claritas, as welding into a functionally constituting “culture.” Such an approach, in brief, puts Joyce’s God-like epiphanies in a “cultural” register. Indeed, a quick return to the conclusion of “The Dead” provides one such reading. The final paragraph of the story in fact initiates Gabriel’s recognition of the integritas, or “wholeness,” of Ireland itself, a perception made possible by the snow, “general all over Ireland,” which in effect gives Ireland definition as “culture,” functioning, in Stephen’s words, as that “bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended” (236). Gabriel therefore sees Ireland as cultural-geographic entity, as the “one whole” as described by Dedalus. From the recognition of the totality, or integritas, of Ireland Gabriel moves to the “apprehension” of the country, again in Dedalus’s words, “as balanced part against part within its limits.” Gabriel begins to feel “the rhythm of its structure” as the indeed quite rhythmic and metonymic enumeration of the “parts” of Ireland proceeds, from the “dark central plain,” the “treeless hills,” the “Bog of Allen,” the “mutinous Shannon waves,” on to the “lonely churchyard” (236). Thus Ireland is recognized by Gabriel as “a thing” which he can now “apprehend . . . as complex, multiple, divisible, separate, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious.” The consonantia, or “harmony,” is complete when the dead themselves are admitted as one last “part” of the whole that is the country, much as Eliot’s The Waste Land finally argues

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its vision of a “culture” only through the evocations of the dying and the words of the dead. The recognition of the integritas that is the “whole” of Ireland and the consonantia of its fitting, functioning parts results in the perception, apprehension, of the quidditas, or unique “whatness,” of Ireland as “cultural”-national entity. At story’s end Ireland, like Dedalus’s basket, is “that thing which it is and no other thing,” that “clear radiance of the aesthetic image,” of Ireland and its defining agent, the snow, that “is apprehended by the mind of [Gabriel] which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony.” The quidditas is the epiphanic recognition on Gabriel’s part of a country, or “culture,” that harmoniously brings together waves, hills and headstones, living and dead, and in this respect is akin to Malinowski’s rendition of the function of magic in its visionary bridging of organic and inorganic, past and present, living and dead. And finally, in an extrapolated sense the quidditas, that “luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure,” is that which is reproduced in the reader, that very rhythmic heartbeat and fading coal of the exquisitely wrought final paragraph, which functions simultaneously as proof of a “culture” and as a harmonious part of a demonstrably high cultural product.

The above reading is intended to show how Joyce may have reproduced a model of aesthetics that carried with it important presuppositions about culture as a “complex” and “whole” structuring principle. It is certainly not meant as proof that Joyce’s works in fact always “work” as embodiments of harmonious wholeness, though much of the history of Joyce criticism is involved in the effort to demonstrate that Joyce’s works do just that. Gilbert’s influential early study in fact opens with the assertion that Ulysses triumphantly embodies the aesthetic principles as set forth in Portrait: “Ulysses achieves a coherent and integral interpretation of life, a static beauty according to the definition of Aquinas (as abridged by Joyce): ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: integritas, consonantia, claritas.”7 Gilbert goes on to assert that the “attitude of the author of Ulysses” is that of the author as God propounded by Dedalus in Portrait and thus characterizes that author as “a composer who takes the facts which experience offers and harmonizes them in such a way that, without losing their vitality and integrity, they yet fit together and make a concordant whole” (10). Joycean criticism of the 1930s through the 1960s characteristically insisted upon the need to train attention upon the intricate details that build toward the harmonious whole that is any given Joyce text and in so doing bolstered the assumption, so important to the reigning New Criticism, that not only Joyce’s texts but indeed all worthy literary texts were composed of such parts that complexly but harmoniously build toward such wholes. The seeming commonsensicalness of that assumption attested to its very tenability, so that one would

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hardly blink an eye at Harry Levin’s assertion that always, in Joyce’s work, “the part, significantly chosen, reveals the whole”8 or Brewster Ghiselin’s argument, in his important essay of the 1950s, that unremitting critical attention to Joyce’s “systematic use of symbols” in Dubliners reveals a “latent structural unity.”9 The argument for holism extended, importantly, beyond the demonstration of Joyce’s individual works to his entire corpus as itself a mosaic of parts that, in epiphanic fashion, can be recognized as the ultimate characterizing quidditas. Thus David Hayman would say, in his influential Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning, that all of Joyce’s works “form a complex whole.”10 Typically, and indicatively, Hayman did not acknowledge the intellectual and professional origin and trajectory of the term he borrowed to characterize Joyce’s corpus. For that matter, neither did Gilbert, who, forty years earlier, citing Dedalus on “rhythm” as “the first formal aesthetic relation of part to part in any aesthetic whole,” went on to assert that Ulysses represented “a complex of such relations.”11 Tylor’s “complex whole,” like the term it was used to denote—“culture”—had become a given, so that the cultural models behind the critical assumptions adopted to mine Joyce’s texts (often encouraged, it needs adding, by Joyce himself) went unnoticed. This is not to suggest that all assumptions of—or, sometimes, arguments for—the holism of Joyce’s works had specifically anthropological origins; rather, the notion of “whole,” itself not an entirely “whole” phenomenon though certainly a very “complex” one, significantly inhabits the history of Joyce criticism, and its appearance, in various and affiliated forms, is rich in the traffic between anthropological and humanistic concepts of culture. The use of the “organic whole” in Joycean criticism is an important part of that history. Since Coleridge, at least, the analogies of the literary work to the living body had had a prominent place in literary critical vocabulary in English, but the trope gained significantly in currency and purport with the rise of professional criticism in the twentieth century, especially with the emergence of the New Criticism. Again, Gilbert’s important study leads the way: the “unities” of Ulysses, Gilbert claims, “go far beyond the classic triad, they are as manifold and withal symmetrical as the daedal network of nerves and bloodstreams which pervades the living organism” (“Rhythm of Ulysses,” 63). The notion that the complexity and orderliness of Joyce’s masterwork is rivaled only by the unities of the body itself is supported by Joyce’s schema, with its column analogizing body parts to the book’s episodes—“kidney,” “genitals,” “heart,” “lungs,” and so on.12 Indeed, Gilbert, making reference to the “organs” of Joyce’s schema, asserts that “together these compose the whole body, which is thus a symbol of the structure of Ulysses, a living organism, and of the natural interdependence of the parts between themselves” (63). Gilbert and other early Joyceans, as Patrick McCarthy notes, were fighting the hostile take on Ulysses as formless, chaotic, immoral, unnatural.13 Ulysses, Gilbert was essentially answering, is as organized, complex, and “natural” as

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the body itself. And yet we must remember that the analogy to the living body, as forcefully asserted as it is, remained an analogy: the “living organism,” writes Gilbert, is a “symbol of the structure” of the novel; the book’s elements are “as manifold . . . as” the networks of the body (63), not identical to them.

With the dominance of the New Criticism beginning in the 1930s, the notion of the literary work as an organism (or organically derived structure) that, with the aid of the critic, complexly yet holistically unfolds itself in sympathy with the world’s “natural” laws became a conceptual given. By the late 1940s New Critical thinking had so thoroughly permeated all American literary study that it was difficult to think of the New Criticism as a contestable method. Walton Litz notes, in fact, that his first attempt at interpreting Ulysses as an undergraduate at Princeton resulted in “a New Critical essay on a recurring motif— although at the time I was not self-conscious enough to know that I was being New Critical.”14 For Litz and a number of other critics this credulity toward New Critical method persisted well into the 1960s. Indeed, as late as 1961 Litz would argue, much as Gilbert had in 1930, for the natural and naturalizing “order” that is the “design” of Ulysses by calling attention to Joyce’s selective and holistic mode of putting the manuscript together. Litz states that in the later stages of composition (1919–21) Joyce “wrote the intricate later episodes and revised the opening chapters, seeking to fuse the entire work into an organic whole.”15 New Critical habits had turned Gilbert’s analogy to the living organism into a virtual identification: Joyce’s work was literally alive. New Critical assumptions of the organic nature of art and artistic process were not without political aims and ramifications, as critics such as Terry Eagleton have pointed out. The pristine and orderly nature of the poem and the literary critical work of illustrating that nature became for the New Critics of the 1930s and 1940s part and parcel of a fight against an increasingly industrial, nonbodied world.16 In fact, the Southern Agrarian politics of American New Criticism, significantly indebted to Eliot’s political and literary principles, argued a return to an organically organized society, an argument that found an important intellectual model in the anthropological conception of a culture as a natural and harmoniously functioning “whole.” The critical treatment of the concepts of the natural and the cultural in Joyce’s works requires equal attention. Obviously Joyce criticism of the first half of the twentieth century and the New Criticism in general hardly assumed that Joyce’s texts were simply and only modeled upon natural processes. In fact, the hallmark works of the New Criticism and the premiere studies of Joyce greatly emphasized the artisanal nature of authorship: poems became well-wrought urns, as Joyce became the consummate craftsman creating

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worlds. The notion of Joyce as God-author, encouraged by Joyce’s famous depiction of the remote author as God paring his fingernails, became fully fleshed out with the rise of the Joyce industry. Joyce became depicted as a Blakeian creator of worlds-in-themselves, a God or World unto Himself, a literary Prometheus fashioning “culture” out of First Nature. Herr rightly notes that “Joyce’s insistent alluding” in effect interrogates the polarity of “Nature and Culture,”17 but her reading that Joyce treats “Nature as Culture” might benefit from more precision and qualification: What do we mean by Joyce’s “nature” and, of course, his “culture”? What kinds of “nature” are precisely put into play by Joyce? How do those “natural” forms relate to the models for “culture” that were available to Joyce? And perhaps more easily explicated, how have critics tended to read that relation? In this regard Weldon Thornton’s essay “Voices and Values in Ulysses” does good work in focusing upon how Joyce himself, in the famous “Oxen of the Sun” chapter, quite specifically treats the idea of rendering a form of “nature” as a form of “culture,” in this case in Joyce’s treatment of the “theory of language” that “literary structure can meaningfully be grounded upon a physical process, such as evolution or gestation.”18 “Oxen of the Sun” is, of course, the perfectly appropriate vehicle as it works through (and in a sense is about) the analogy between the evolution of English prose styles and, in Joyce’s own words, “the natural stages of development in the embryo and the period of faunal evolution in general.”19 In basic narratological terms, the narrative, or the “what” of the episode, is the discussion, among Stephen and assorted friends and medical students, that centers upon when birth can be said actually to occur (the setting is the hospital during the delivery of a child to a Mrs. Purefoy); the discourse, or “way of the what,” is Joyce’s controversial tour-de-force pastiche of the evolution or growth of English prose styles, from Anglo-Saxon to early-twentieth-century. Embedded within that discourse is Joyce’s rendering of characters as embryological actors. As Joyce reported to Budgen, “Bloom is the spermatozoon, the hospital the womb, the nurse the ovum, Stephen the embryo.”20 The relations between Joyce’s analogy and anthropological “cultural” theory immediately suggest themselves. Joyce’s version of human gestation, rendered in literary-evolutionary form, can be read as a (serious or sardonic) rendition of evolutionary anthropological theory, which represents the development of the “arts” of a people through the diachronically progressive birth-growth cycle of evolutionary theory. While the episode can be read as a kind of functional critique or send-up of evolutionary theory, it might also be read as a more modern anthropological version of a culture as a discrete and developing entity: a culture is born, is nurtured, and healthily develops its own products, the arts among them. In fact, Joyce’s analogy might be read as a precursor (again, sardonically or otherwise) of Malinowski’s later effort to argue culture as organism, as tantamount to biological process.

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These readings are admittedly speculative, and my purpose here is less to pin down what Joyce was trying to do and more to assess how critics have interpreted the nature-culture relation in the episode. In fact, Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun” is perhaps the most heavily criticized chapter in the history of Ulysses criticism (Marilyn French has termed it “the most censured chapter in Ulysses”),21 in good part because of accusations of Joyce’s hubris and consequent failure to take on both the nature-culture analogy and the Great Tradition of English letters.22 Thornton calls attention to early efforts on the part of Gilbert, Budgen, and others to demonstrate “how the structure of the episode is grounded in embryology and evolution,” as well as the ensuing critical attacks that pronounced Joyce’s analogy inappropriate and unsuccessful. However, Thornton argues against what he describes as the “usual assumption that Joyce quite seriously accepted the fetal and evolutionary analogies revealed in his letters and notes” and asserts the divergence between the view of the narrator, or “Presenter,” and Joyce himself: “While the Presenter of the episode takes the theory [i.e., of ”literary structure“ as ”physical process“] literally, Joyce shows that such a theory is not simply mistaken, but that it is ‘idolatrous,’ in that it would substitute some physical process for meaning as the basis of literary form” (“Voices,” 249). Thornton’s assertion of Joyce’s distance from what Harry Levin in 1941 pejoratively termed “Joyce’s cult of imitative form” (254) too easily separates Joyce from the theories that surrounded him and inhabited his work. According to Thornton, Joyce was very much aware of culture-nature theories of the day but stood above them: placed in a time of great intellectual development, “when a great host of theories, models, styles were being bruited about, Joyce wished his novel to subsume many of these” and in effect “show their insufficiency” (250). Now, Thornton’s point is decidedly not that Joyce refuses to take a position but, rather, that he (invariably) takes the right one: the retrospectively mistaken or unfortunate theories of language and “culture” are those of the “Presenter.” The argument as such does tend to fall into the critical tradition that regards Joyce as omnipotent God-author, paring his fingernails while his “actors” embody or give voice to the follies of the moment.

In support of his contention that taking literary form from any natural thing amounts to idolatrousness, Thornton cites as “axiomatic” the following passage from Kenneth Burke: Language, to be used properly, must be “discounted.” We must remind ourselves that, whatever correspondence there is between a word and the thing it names, the word is not the thing. The word “tree” is not a tree. And just as effects that can be got with the thing can’t be got with the word, so effects that can’t be got with the

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word can’t be got with the thing. But because these two realms coincide so usefully at certain points, we tend to overlook the areas where they radically diverge. We gravitate spontaneously toward naive verbal realism. (263)

Thornton asserts not only that Burke is correct regarding language generally but, more specifically, that the “Presenter” of the “Oxen of the Sun” episode, in his identification of organic as literary form, “manifests an attitude toward language that involves ‘naive verbal realism,’ ” that this mistaken theory is “a stylistic equivalent to the simplistic totemism of cow worship or phallus worship” as described by the Presenter in the episode,23 and that it is this mistaken theory, of “imitative form,” that Joyce is “here taking the measure of” (263). While Burke, as commended by Thornton, seems to be simply restating what since poststructuralism has become a Saussurian truism, in fact Burke’s conception of “naive verbal realism” owes much to Ogden and Richards’s 1923 argument against “Logomania,” against, in their words, “the superstition that words are in some ways part of things or always imply things corresponding to them.”24 And there Ogden and Richards, right or wrong, were precisely taking Saussure to task for falling prey to tendency “to infer from a word some object for which it stands” (4). What Burke decries as the “naive verbal realism” that “we gravitate spontaneously toward” bears more than generic resemblance to Ogden and Richards’s condemnation of what they call “the persistence of the primitive linguistic outlook” that “words” and “things” are powerfully, that is, nonarbitrarily, related: Burke on several occasions points to the semiological importance of The Meaning of Meaning and in fact calls attention to the “pragmatic” linguistic orientation of Malinowski’s conception of “phatic” in his “Supplement” to the Ogden and Richards volume.25 Thornton’s conclusion is that his own “true” theory of language and literary form, which he identifies as the one held by Joyce, is also held by Kenneth Burke, whose “axiomatic” expression of it testifies to its “truth value.” However, another way of reading the above parallels, one that accords with Thornton’s citation of Burke (though Thornton does not himself draw the parallel), would be the following: Joyce agrees with Ogden and Richards, and by extension Malinowski, upon the essential untenability of the “primitive linguistic outlook” on the relation of words. And yet this reading, though more historically attentive than the former, still lacks precision and could be recast as follows: Thornton reads Burke on Joyce as Ogden and Richards read Malinowski (both as read by Burke as well); that is, the latter (Thornton, Ogden and Richards) read the former (Joyce, Malinowski) as exemplifying, supporting, the latter’s own views on the fallacy or sin of identifying word with thing. However, both Joyce and Malinowski, while their texts contain the critiques of “primitive” form attributed to them, significantly qualify and complicate the critique of the primitivistic linguistic identification of word and thing.

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Put another way, both Joyce’s Ulysses and Malinowski’s “Supplement” (and by extension Argonauts) contain critiques upon the fallacies of linguistic identification and as such perform as signal meta-linguistic texts, and yet at the same time these texts integrally depend for their success upon their embodiment of the fallacy. And Burke himself says as much when he notes that “these two realms coincide so usefully,” and indeed at other points in his corpus Burke will press for the usefulness of that “primitive identification” (see chapter 7, below). Malinowski need (and does) register an ambivalence toward Ogden and Richards’s wholesale rejection of the “primitive linguistic outlook” on the grounds that the “crude and unsound attitude towards Language and Meaning must exist,” for if it did not, then the “culture” as a discretely defined entity would not come into being: the primitive theory of Language “had to persist,” in Malinowski’s words, in order for the “culture” to “exist.” Similarly, while “Oxen of the Sun” and indeed the whole of Joyce’s corpus registers an awareness of the limitations of the “primitive linguistic outlook,” at the same time Joyce’s texts critically depend upon the supposition of, acceptance of, or indulgence in the “primitive” experiential identifications that Thornton condemns and sees Joyce as arguing against.26 The “word magic” against which Ogden and Richards and Thornton protest too much is, then, in fact what makes Malinowski’s very conception of culture, as well as Joyce’s text as a “Cultural” product, possible. A general reader-oriented argument might here be stated in devil’s-advocate fashion: both Malinowski and Joyce were “read” in the twentieth century, not primarily because they leveled linguistic-epistemological critiques upon the practices of the “cultures” they referred to, described, troped upon, but because they made those cultures come alive through mimetic-identificatory renditions of those cultures’ very practices, habits, feelings, thoughts. One might see Geertz’s general thesis in Works and Lives as working along these lines: Malinowski is often read, not because of the particular theses on social and linguistic formation that his texts contain, but because he leaves us with the readerly conviction that we have “been there.”27 Similarly, we read Joyce, not because his works articulate or concretize important linguistic propositions, but because he leaves us with the conviction that we have “been there,” lived in those “cultures,” roamed those streets, and, in a more interior vein, walked around in those minds. Again, this is hardly an absolute proposition but rather a rendition of one important way that these authors, in parallel fashion, have been approached in the recent histories of their reception, that is, as writers who compel their readers by virtue of narrating them into other cultures or worlds. Now, in a general sense this approach is characteristic of that broad strain of Joycean criticism that William York Tindall in the 1950s called the “naturalist,” as opposed to the “symbolist,” and Anthony Cronin in the 1960s argued for as a return to “the texture of life,” to the “mundanities” of the “Irish life” that had

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been ignored by “symbol-seeking” New Critics.28 More recently, Stanley Sultan has summarized the history of this approach as a “minority tradition” that emphasizes the “tale” or “human drama” of Ulysses rather than the “telling,” “style,” “technic,” or “symbolic structure.”29 Sultan himself in fact argued in the late 1980s for a reinvigoration of the former that strives to get at the “quasireality” or “storyness” of the novel rather than the emphasis upon the “form of embodiment” (275). Sultan and others in effect argue against the most recent discursive, or “symbol-seeking,” approach—the poststructural—which reads, in Sultan’s words, “the whole of Ulysses as essentially its textness” (277). Both Sultan and Denis Donogue have argued interpretations of Ulysses that focus on Joyce’s language use, but in terms that foreground the contextual purport of that language—that is, in Malinowskian terms, the relevance of that language as signals within and for the particular community or “culture” (Dublin, Ireland) through which it circulates.30 Both Sultan and Donogue, in fact, wage critical attacks upon Saussurian notions of discourse precisely along the lines of Ogden and Richards’s 1923 critique (which is, on the whole, very much supported by Malinowski’s “context of situation” theory), saying that Saussurian semiotics pays insufficient attention to the referential context of language use. In this regard Sultan sees Saussure as the culprit responsible for the discursive approach that reads “meaning” in terms of discursive arbitrary signification rather than the social contexts that the words point toward: for Saussure and his descendants, “the linguistic signe has no referential component”; hence, in approaching Ulysses “the reader’s process of approaching meaning in the language excludes—is isolated from—what the language refers to” (277–78). Similarly, Donogue, battling Jameson and Bersani’s Marxist-semiotic arguments that Joyce’s language use boils down to a matter of “personal styles and private languages” (20), points to the limits of Saussure’s “polarization” of langue and parole and recommends instead as a model Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s notion of language as “hearsay” that “always goes from saying to saying” and in fact is based upon, regulated by, the “norms” of the “collective assemblage” (24–25). These “speech acts” are not “knowledge” as such, according to Donogue, “because the linguistic assemblage does not identify being with knowledge but with lore, repetition, and what Deleuze and Guattari call hearsay” (26). Donogue might have added to “lore,” “repetition,” and “hearsay” what Malinowski called the “phatic,” which is indeed formulated as the knowledgeless discourse that serves, not to transfer “meaning,” but in fact to regulate and bind community norms. And Malinowski’s conception of “phatic” is indeed but one component of his larger argument in the “Supplement” that “Language, in its primitive function,” ought to be interpreted as “a mode of action, rather than as a countersign of thought” (296). The notion of language as “mode of action” would come to motivate, indeed organize, one could say, the entire critical corpus of Kenneth Burke.

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Indeed, Malinowski’s argument for “speech in action” as a component of the “speech situation” looks significantly forward to Donogue’s and Sultan’s arguments that Joyce’s language is about, or is up to, matters of social referencing, communication, and context, rather than serving as an exemplification of Saussurian-inspired theorems on the slippages of signifiers from signifieds. The parallel of Donogue to Malinowski is not merely serendipitous, though it may not be a matter of direct influence. An intellectual legacy of reading Malinowski for these purposes exists: Burke, for one, as early as the 1930s pointed to the significance of Malinowski’s “context of situation” for literary critical study, and in fact the possible relevance of Malinowskian contextual theory to Joyce is on record. Anthony Burgess in a 1973 essay that preceded the poststructural Joyce movement avers that Joyce “considers the act of signalling to be more important than the message it attempts to convey,” and he goes on to make the following connection: “It is possible to see his non-linguistic signals as elements in a Malinowskian interpretation of man’s need to communicate. Semiology to Joyce is phatic—a means of making social contact—and these peripheral or totally extra-linguistic signs which . . . he revels in, are legitimate modes of communication.”31 Critics such as Burgess and Cronin presage, as Sultan and Donogue embody, a post-poststructural Joyce whose language is viewed as moving toward the recognition of cultural “wholes.” In Malinowskian terms, even phatic nonsense exemplifies the functioning of the “culture” that is Ireland or Dublin. This argument, broadly considered, reads poststructural readings of Joyce as being involved in making “unwhole,” or making “holes” in, Joyce’s corpus as well as his “culture” since such readings are considered to violate or ignore the social “contexts” that make up the “culture.”32 While one can debate the degree to which Joyce’s work accedes to the specific suppositions of poststructural theorizing, one cannot deny that Joyce’s texts are often very much about the way language works: the meta-discursiveness in which poststructuralists reveled is indeed present in the Joycean corpus. And as Sultan indicates, to argue for a socially contextual Joyce does not necessarily mean to argue for a Joyce who is less about language. In this regard, the 1922 works of Joyce, Malinowski, and Eliot share an important trait: all bring into being a “cultural” whole through the rifts or “holes” that the language exhibits, opens up, and in fact discourses upon.33 “Writing culture” in the twentieth century not only is always involved in but has often been about negotiating the turns of language use, from tales to tellings, tellings to tales. Telling begets and requires talking about that telling, and the talking about it leads to more telling. This proposition is less about the very nature of language than it is about the exigencies and repetitions of modern “culture” modeling. In Joyce’s case, the tales that beget tellings that beget tales, and so on, themselves beget or at least encourage critical arguments over their tale or telling aspects. As the writings of Sultan, Thornton, Litz, and

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others demonstrate, the history of Joyce criticism is characterized by the debate over which has more paramount importance in reading Joyce’s works—attention to the “tales” themselves or the “tellings” of the tales (Sultan, “Adventures,” 272), to the “material” itself or to the “presentation of the material” (Thornton, “Voices,” 248), to “temporal” rather than “spatial” unfolding (Litz, “Ulysses and Its Audience,” 3). The dyads as described of course look back (or forward) to the modern narratological taxonomical division between narrative and discourse as the “what” and the “way of the what.” Again, just as Joyce has not simply supported or verified theorizing on the way narrative works but in fact has helped to make possible such formulations, so too Joyce’s works—and for matter, Eliot’s—, given their semantic richness and meta-leaning tendencies, are as much about the arguments that have subsequently ensued over them as they are about what their own words “truly,” or essentially, say. (It is in this light that Litz rightly observes that “it is difficult to think of Ulysses apart from the critical tradition” that it made possible [Litz, “Ulysses and Its Audience,” 221].) Commenting on this tradition, Karen Lawrence has noted the tendency of the tale-seeking critical camp “to see through the styles to what is ‘going on’ ” in Joyce’s work. Lawrence, however, does not simply argue for the predominance of “style” in Joyce’s work; she characterizes the movement from Dubliners to Portrait to Ulysses as a “transition from fiction interested in plot to fiction in which plot becomes synonymous with digression.”34 Robert Scholes in a structuralist reading holds much the same view of Ulysses but looks specifically to Joyce’s Homeric parallels as functioning to brake the digressiveness, the “tendency of the work to run away in the direction of merely random recitations of Bloomsday.”35 Scholes holds that when the digressive tendency threatens to dissolve the narrative integrity of a given episode, the Homeric parallels are “activated to provide a diachronic schema for the following chapter.” This “structure” Scholes reads as “a function of Joyce’s massive unwillingness to get on with it and tell a simple linear tale” (248–49). Scholes, in proper structuralist method, then goes on to explicate the Saussurian concepts of “syntagmatic”-“diachronic” and “paradigmatic”-“synchronic” in order to make sense of Joyce’s “structure”: the Joyce in Ulysses, he claims, “is often very reluctant to speed along the syntagmatic trail,” for “he cannot bear to part with many of the paradigmatic possibilities that have occurred to him” (250). And yet the paradigmatic “lists,” or “recitations,” that Joyce often compiles (Scholes gives examples from the “Cyclops” chapter) “do become syntagmatic in themselves, and they further relate to other lists and other parts of the narrative in a syntagmatic way.” And they need do so, Scholes argues, or else Ulysses “would be virtually impossible to read” (250). Scholes’s generative reading strongly suggests the parallel between Joyce’s rhetorical strategies in Ulysses and Malinowski’s in that same year, in which

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telling straight and departing from the subject becomes, in James Buzard’s words, a matter of “constitutive effect” rather than excess, accident, or mere compulsion.36 And yet Scholes reads Joyce’s method as a more or less paradigmatic-synchronic exemplification of the “true” nature of the way language works, or works well, or works structurally, rather than as a historically contingent mode that became specifically available to Joyce and consequently made possible readings of Joyce such as that posed by Scholes. Read in a historical or perhaps syntagmatic-diachronic vein, Scholes’s interpretation would not have been possible without, and indeed is a distant species of, the legacy of reading the Homeric parallels as “controlling” the narrative, a tradition begot from the “mythical method” concept of Eliot, who himself may have gotten it from Joyce’s Homeric schema. It is useful to think of Joyce, through his composition, discussion, and distribution of the schema, as enacting the first de-narrativization of Joyce. And yet the narrative order of Ulysses, after all, was never secure—Bloom always meandered too much while Joyce catalogued and troped away, just as Malinowski’s natives never quite got off of the island fast enough but held their oars as they waited for Malinowski’s listings of and synchronic-analytic disquisitions on the significance of myth and magic to end. On the other hand, the narrative was always present, albeit suspended, never wholly giving way to paradigmatic stackings, always there because needed. Litz, asserting the importance to Joyce of the Homeric parallels, “the comfort” that he claims Joyce “derived from the narrative order of The Odyssey,” recalls Joyce’s own comment that the Homer’s original episodes provided him with “ports of call” (“Design of Ulysses,” 54). Now, while Litz insists that this need ought not to be carried into the interpretive realm—what was Joyce’s need ought not be ours in approaching the novel—Joyce’s imperative surely has significance as a definitional effort to give order and significance to, in Eliot’s words, the “chaos and anarchy” that could become the novel, or put another way, that the novel was always under threat of being read as, that is, in Lowie’s (or Gilbert and Sullivan’s) words, a “thing of shreds and patches.”37 Here myth becomes not just the time machine that tears us vividly and shreddingly into another epoch but in fact the medium through which a culture’s “story” is made comprehensible. It becomes, or remains, a tale retold, but a tale whose very retelling involves the labor of putting in context or of discoursing upon, which is itself what digressions are made of. Joyce’s schema and Malinowski’s tables, most specifically his “Table of Kula Magic and Corresponding Activities” (Argonauts, 415–16), are but the most schematized but perhaps also the most telling versions of said tellings and stackings. Like Malinowski’s table, whose left-hand vertical (top to bottom) column registers the diachronic sequence (labeled “Season and approximate duration”) that structures the narrative flow of the book itself, Joyce’s schema displays in its left-hand column the progressive sequence of chapters

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by Odyssean “title” (“1 Telemachus,” “2 Nestor,” “3 Proteus,” etc.). And in both, to the right of left-hand column are vertical columns designating diachronically rendered occasion: in Malinowski’s table, columns labeled “Place” and “Activity” (e.g., “Road,” corresponding to “Pulling the Log [done by all the villagers]”); in Joyce’s schema, columns labeled “Scene” and “Hour” (e.g., in the “Wandering Rocks” entry, “The Streets,” corresponding to “3 PM”). To the right of these columns are the paradigmatic-synchronic registers. In Joyce’s schema, to the right and parallel to the “Hour” column are the following vertical columns (examples in parentheses are from the “Calypso” episode): “Organ” (e.g., “kidney”), “Art” (e.g., “economics”), “Colour” (e.g., “orange”), “Symbol” (e.g., “nymph”), “Technic” (e.g., “narrative [mature]”), and “Correspondence” (e.g., “Calypso—the Nymph: Dlugacz—the Recall: Zion— Ithaca”). In Malinowski’s “Table of Kula Magic,” to the right and parallel to the “Activity” column is a linking verb column (e.g., “inaugurated by,” “helped out by”) and to the right of that a single vertical column entitled “Magic” (e.g., for the first entry, “the Vabusi Tokway [offering and spell] aiming at the expulsion of the wood sprite from the tree [performed by owner or builder],” and for the fourth entry, “the magical act [Kapitunena Duhu] ceremonially inaugurating the work over the canoe”). Explications of the contents of these particular synchronic registers will not follow. For both Malinowski and Joyce, in fact, these charts are meant as schematic versions of arrangements of “cultural” materials set out in detail in the respective books, intended as guides for student referencing. Joyce’s schema and Malinowski’s table had the effect of promoting the idea of the orderliness of each book and, more importantly, of the “culture” to which it referred; and more pragmatically, each relieved the student-reader of the necessity of reading the book entire. Each tells the basic story, or “narrative” (left-hand columns), while attaching an epigrammatic set of significances (right-hand columns) to each point along the narrative. The right-hand columns register in outline form the synchronic-interpretive pauses or digressions (“magic” and “correspondences”) in the stories of the journeys through Dublin and the Trobriands. Cheryl Herr has rightly stated that Joyce’s schema functions as an “anatomy” of Joyce’s “culture”: “each column,” she notes, “suggests a body of knowledge or a frame of reference” that “highlights the conventionalities of Western culture.”38 But again, Herr treats “culture” as a stable, agreed-upon category whose “conventional” characteristics Joyce underscores. In fact, given the emergent state of the modern concept of culture at the time, what Joyce sketches in his schema is both more original and more characteristic of its time: a conception of taxonomical organization that, like Malinowski’s of the same year, attests to the orderliness of an entity—“culture”—that indeed is accessible through the reading of both its narrative (diachronic-syntagmatic) and discursive (synchronic-paradigmatic) axes.

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In this respect both Malinowski and Joyce enact a complexly cross-axial mode of writing “culture” in which the synchronic register (Malinowski’s “Magic,” Joyce’s “Correspondence”) functions not only to pause the narrative but ultimately to become it, but to become it with a difference. Malinowski asserts that his table demonstrates that the “systematic magic,” which has effectively functioned (both in the “culture” and in his text) to stem narrative flow, in fact works narratively: though that “system” breaks narrative through invocations that bring back the mythic past and its dead and indeed breaks the text’s narrative of Kula journeying in its insistence on being explained, in fact it represents “a number of magical formulae, forming one consecutive series” (Argonauts, 419). “A system of magic” in fact functions narratively or consecutively in a “culture,” which the table’s schematization illustrates. For both texts, the charts make the argument that one can read the paradigmatic, or the discoursing upon the subject, consecutively, that is, as a story.39 Both Malinowski and Joyce enact, through their charts, a kind of shoring up of the fragments of their almost ruinous, centrifugal texts by summoning the parallels of narrativized journeying (Homer’s arch-narrative, magic itself as a story). And in this light they are linked to Eliot’s Waste Land, whose always already disappearing world is rendered narratively comprehensible through reference to appended mythic texts: those of Jessie Weston, James Frazer, and indeed Joyce himself are put into play by Eliot as pointers to the poem’s narrative arc of expectations, its functionality as quest-romance. A counterintuitive reading of the key texts of 1922 follows: The Waste Land, Argonauts, and Ulysses function, become professionally innovative, not simply in terms of the movement from narrative to myth, as Eliot’s review of Ulysses has commonly been interpreted to indicate, but rather in terms of the transition from narrative to myth as the latter is itself rendered as narrative. And it is the narrative aspects that make these books readable, in ways that these authors’ later major works would not quite be. Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1942) all were regarded as the long-awaited, voluminous lattercareer masterworks that lacked the narrative arc and urgency of the works that made each author famous and consequently did not register the impact of the distance traveled between story told and story suspended, searched for, or torn apart. Each of these texts effectively abandoned narrative for paradigmatic recitation and analysis. And as such each neglected to perform as a firmly harried definitional register of a “culture” that had come to be recognized through its going.40 In The Waste Land, Argonauts, and Ulysses, “culture” becomes paramount, not as an assumed and solid state, but as a contention whose integrity and functionality requires constant, persistent attention. The activity of culture building in each case is varyingly made through the urgency of the decline or collapse of that very process: Malinowski’s Trobrianders, Eliot’s Western

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Europeans, Joyce’s Dubliners, all disappearing over the edge of the horizons of history and thus imperatively crying out for definition. That articulation is achieved, or at the least aimed toward, through the complex negotiations between, on the one hand, modes of contiguity and consecutivity—peoples rooted to lands, their stories unfolding—and, on the other, fissure and synchronic digression—peoples hung over the abyss of “cultural” apocalypse, their stories suspended, up-ended, while the cultural architect provides the much-needed context.

Chapter 6

PATTERNS OF CULTURE: RUTH BENEDICT AND THE NEW CRITICS

IN 1922, in a graduate course taught by Boas, Ruth Benedict met both Margaret Mead and Edward Sapir, who over the years would become a close friend and colleague. (Also in that year, according to Mead, Boas became known to his students as “Papa Franz.”)1 That year also saw Benedict’s first essay in print, “The Vision in Plains Culture,” appearing in American Anthropologist, a piece that, according to Mead, while it “uses the basic concepts which were to inform all her work,” was nonetheless resolutely within the Boasian diffusionist mode, tracing as it does “the great diversity of the vision-pattern” within “one culture area” (Anthropologist at Work, 16–17). The essay shows the Boasian influence of careful work in a minutely though broadly prescribed area. Nineteen twenty-two was also the year that saw the publication of Early Civilization, by Benedict’s former mentor Alexander Goldenweiser, which Mead called “the first book by an American anthropologist to present cultures briefly as wholes” (Anthropologist at Work, 8). The tendency in American anthropology toward cultural holism would only increase throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” of course marks an early manifestation of interest in cultural as integral whole, and Mead notes that her own dissertation marked the end of Boas’s overriding interest in diffusionary study; in fact, Mead cites a letter to Benedict in which Boas writes, “When I sent Margaret Mead to Samoa [in 1925], I had decided that diffusion was done” (14). While the move toward holism might appear to represent a paradigmatic shift of the Boasian universe, one might posit the focus upon holism as the consequential, inevitable “other” to cultural diffusion. Richard Handler in fact posits Sapir’s and Benedict’s holisms as the “obverse” of the “diffusion of cultural traits”: whereas diffusion marks the spread of cultural items, holism, says Handler, signifies “the absorption of borrowed traits into a preexistent whole.”2 Handler, importantly, places Benedict’s own work with cultural holism in a personal register. Premised upon the assertion that “self-expression and cultural holism require each other in any formulation of the modernist sensibility” (164), Handler asserts that the personal-professional “integrity” that Benedict aspired toward but failed to achieve in her poetry in the teens and twenties— “In her poems she could not achieve the ‘hard,’ polished self that she desired”

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(168)—she did manage to articulate in her later ethnography. Much like Clifford’s thesis on Malinowski, Handler holds that the ethnographer in sculpting a whole people in effect sculpts a successful professional self. The work that made Benedict’s career, Patterns of Culture, published in 1934, became over the years the best-selling anthropological work of all time. As the image of modern anthropology most recognized by the public, with the possible exception of her friend Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa (1927), Patterns of Culture was, interestingly enough, strongly comparative in nature,3 as it focused on three geographically and temperamentally disparate peoples—Northwest Coast American Indians, the Pueblo of the American Southwest, and the Dobu of Melanesia—none of which were intensively studied in the field by Benedict. Indeed, the fifth chapter, on the Dobu tribe of Melanesia, derived its ethnographic material almost entirely from one source, Reo Fortune’s The Sorcerers of Dobu (1932), and the sixth chapter, on the tribes of the Northwest Coast of America, is based mainly upon the ethnographic work of Boas. And though the fourth chapter, on the Pueblos of New Mexico, derives much from her own research on the Zuni, Benedict in fact did relatively little fieldwork there. In fact, as Mead notes in her compilation and commentary upon Benedict’s work and life, Benedict, perhaps because of her partial deafness, did little fieldwork: her dissertation, like most of those written by Boas’s students through the teens and twenties, was library based, and the bulk of her fieldwork was done among the Serrano tribe of southern California in the early 1920s. Despite what might seem a comparative-armchair approach, in fact what distinguishes Benedict’s Patterns is its emphasis upon specifically rendered discrete cultures, cultures rendered so distinctly and vividly that they not only come across as but are posed as personalities. Cultures as such are “configurations” of personality traits. “A culture, like an individual, is a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action,” Benedict argues in her third chapter, “The Integration of Culture.”4 And to give her configurational argument full effect, in Patterns of Culture she describes, not one, but three cultures in all of their variability as personalities, which she puts into play in order to argue for what united all of Boas’s students, the promulgation of the idea of cultural relativism, and what she shares with Mead in particular, the use of a comparative frame to either explicitly or implicitly compare exotic other cultures to our own and thereby to get us to think about the possible variability or less than naturalness of our own cultural values. In these respects, Benedict could not be further from the mentality operating from the Frazerian armchair. In fact, in Patterns of Culture she delivers what is perhaps the most memorable Boasian castigation of Frazerian comparativism, comparing Frazer’s anthropological method to the surgical procedures of Mary Shelley’s famous physician gone awry:

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Studies of culture like The Golden Bough and the usual comparative ethnological volumes are analytical discussions of traits and ignore all aspects of cultural integration. Mating or death practices are illustrated by bits of behavior selected indiscriminately from the different cultures, and the discussion builds up a kind of mechanical Frankenstein’s monster with a right eye from Fiji, a left from Europe, one leg from Tierra del Fuego, and one from Tahiti, and all the fingers and toes form still different regions. Such a figure corresponds to no reality in the past or present. (49)

In his introduction to Patterns of Culture Boas does a historical tracing of anthropology, noting how comparative evolutionism, the “old method of constructing a history of human culture based on bits of evidence, torn out of their natural contacts,” was earlier in the century superseded by the diffusionary method, characterized by “painstaking attempts at reconstruction of historical connections based on studies of distribution of special features” (xv). Boas, however, then goes on to bring out the diachronic commonalty of these two methods, as “both the evolutionary method and the analysis of independent local cultures were devoted to unraveling the sequences of cultural forms.” While the former “hoped to build up a unified picture of the history of culture and civilization,” the latter “saw each culture as a single unity and as an individual historical problem” (xv). These two resolutely temporalizing methods Boas then sets against more recent developments in cultural theory that emphasize “the totality of each culture,” the conception that “hardly any trait of culture can be understood when taken out of its general setting” (xvi). Boas applauds this “desire to grasp the meaning of a culture as a whole,” taking pains to note that this method “is not in any way opposed to the historical approach” (xvi), and then holds that Benedict’s contribution is precisely her articulation of “the genius of the culture, a knowledge of the attitudes controlling individual and group behavior” (xvii), a notion he himself had nurtured but had not developed fully. “Dr. Benedict calls the genius of culture its configuration,” Boas notes, and he then states that “in the present volume the author has set before us this problem and has illustrated it by the example of three cultures that are permeated each by one dominating idea.” Boas then contrasts Benedict’s strategy to the Malinowskian method by asserting that the former is “distinct from the socalled functional approach to social phenomena in so far as it is concerned rather with the discovery of fundamental attitudes than with the functional relations of every cultural item” (xvii). Indeed, Benedict makes clear in Patterns her own methodological debt to, and distinction from, Malinowskian functionalism. Following her depiction of Frazer’s literally monstrous method, she emphasizes the necessity “to study the living culture, to know its habits of thought and the functions of its institutions” (49), and notes that “the necessity for functional studies of culture has

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been stressed over and over again by Malinowski” (50). And yet while she applauds Malinowski’s Argonauts as “one of the best and earliest of the fulllength pictures of a primitive people,” she asserts that Malinowski, however, in his ethnological generalizations is content to emphasize that traits have a living context in the culture of which they are a part, that they function. He then generalizes the Trobriand traits . . . as valid for the primitive world instead of recognizing the Trobriand configuration as one of many observed types, each with its characteristic arrangements in the economic, religious, and the domestic sphere. (50)

Benedict continues to press the shortcomings of the Malinowskian functional approach, noting “the importance of the study of the whole configuration as over against the continued analysis of its parts” (50), and later in the volume argues that “the significant sociological unit . . . is not the institution,” as strongly asserted by Malinowski, “but the cultural configuration” (244). In one respect, Benedict’s critique is like later attacks upon Malinowski, such as those by Jarvie and Edmund Leach, in that Malinowski is faulted for an abstracted sense of coherence. And yet unlike Jarvie and Leach, Benedict solves the problem of abstraction not by questioning the assumption of structural integrity but, rather, by providing a thematic gloss to a particular cultural arrangement. Key to Benedict’s configurational theory is the supposition, at times explicitly and yet subtly argued, that cultural “integration” is itself the result or product of a culture’s overall purpose. While Benedict in a general sense agrees with Malinowski that a culture as such has the integrity of agency or will, or something tantamount to those things, she differs from him in her emphasis upon the overarching and very identifiable “configuration,” or “personality,” expressed by and in the culture. “Mourning, or marriage, or puberty rites, or economics,” she notes, “are not special items of human behavior, each with their own generic drives and motivations . . . but certain occasions which any society may seize upon to express its important cultural intentions” (244). Now, Benedict’s assertion that a “society” has “cultural intentions” is not quite the same thing as saying that the society consciously selects to behave in a certain way. For Benedict, a culture, whether it is working out a societal problem or creating an “art-style,” is working out its preferences, but, importantly, it does not know itself to be doing such. In Patterns, in fact, Benedict asserts that in the development of the Gothic “art-style”(48) “there was no conscious choice, and no purpose”; it is just that “we inevitably use animistic forms of expression as if there were choice and purpose” (48). In her view that cultures through their expressions fulfill their own purposes but do not know themselves to be doing such she does indeed resemble Malinowski. From a poststructural perspective, Benedict’s supposition that a culture has an identifiable set of thematic characteristics may seem naively and confidently content-driven, whereas Malinowski’s more “open” refusal to generalize cul-

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tural personality may strike one as avoiding intentionalist fallacizing as well as refusing to give the definitive “name” to the cultural context. And yet Benedict’s insistence upon giving a culture a “personality” grants an agency to that people that Malinowski’s more strictly functional approach may appear to deny them. For Benedict makes clear that cultures do “express themselves,” that they, at least more straightforwardly than Malinowski would grant, express their wishes. Benedict’s contribution to theorizing on culture as concept demonstrates a mixed yet rich history. As Mead notes, Benedict’s early essay “The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America,” published in 1923, marked Benedict for some as a proponent of culture as chaotic or accidental mishmash. There Benedict makes the controversial claim that “it is, as far as we can see, an ultimate fact of human nature that man builds up his culture out of disparate human elements, combining and recombining them; and until we have abandoned the superstition that the result is an organism functionally interrelated, we shall be unable to see our cultural life objectively, or to control its manifestations.”5 It appears that one year after the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts Benedict was waging her own war against the basic principles of Malinowskian cultural theory. And Mead reports that A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in later years would take Benedict’s words “as representing her ultimate position, namely, that she believed that cultures were made up of ‘rags and tatters’ ” (Anthropologist at Work, 204). Mead’s response to Radcliffe-Brown’s charge is that in fact Benedict “was working steadily to find some integrating principle that would explain both the disparate origins of the elements of which a culture was built and the wholeness which she felt was there in each culture” (204). Indeed, Radcliffe-Brown’s paraphrase of Benedict’s definition of culture strongly resembles Lowie’s later-retracted “thing of shreds and patches”; not surprisingly, Radcliffe-Brown used it to call into question Benedict’s theoretical soundness. Mead’s response to Radcliffe-Brown is more complicated than it might seem. For her argument that Benedict was working toward “some integrating principle” does not amount to arguing simply that Benedict adopted holism as an alternative to culture as accretion or accident. In fact, Mead follows her statement on Benedict’s search for integration with the observation that “when one works with a living culture this wholeness is part of one’s everyday experience” (204) and that this “lived experience” of native life as whole has in the history of modern anthropology dimmed the recognition, or made imperative the need to rationalize, “that human cultures are human inventions, that they are learned anew by each generation, and that one generation can borrow from another” (205). Mead is in fact arguing that living with a culture often produces an affective distortion that cultures are coherent and whole. She observes that “many field workers who in the early twentieth century wrote the first monographs based on the study of living cultures were victims of this illusion of

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‘fit’ ” (205) and then registers the modes by which anthropologists as important as Rivers, Malinowski, and Le´vi-Strauss responded to this “illusion.” Benedict, Mead claims, significantly, never had to deal with the “illusion of ‘fit’ ” simply because she never lived among a tribe that approximated the coherence that others would try to rationalize. According to Mead, Benedict, in her own scant fieldwork, piecing together bits from the old, sometimes vigorous, sometimes dull descriptions of Indians as long dead as the buffalo they once had hunted, or turning from the recitation of tales which had lost their functioning relevance in the Pueblo of Cochiti, faced no such problem. She never saw a whole primitive culture that was untroubled by boarding schools for the children, by missions and public health nurses, by Indian Service agents, traders, and sentimental or exiled white people. No living flesh-and-blood member of a coherent culture was present to obscure her vision or to make it too concrete. (205–6)

In the history of anthropologists writing the history of their discipline Mead’s position is an unusual and ambivalent one. Benedict was able to achieve her own distinctive theory of cultural holism because she was untrained enough not to be fooled into adopting the prevailing template of holistic theorizing based on the ethos of lived experience. Mead in a sense is praising by giving faint blame: like Benedict’s own depiction of a culture expressing itself, Benedict’s work works through ignorance of its own intentions; Benedict, in other words, was able to achieve what she did because she did not know any better. And yet Mead downplays the fact that Benedict in Patterns of Culture quite overtly addresses the question of the organic wholeness of the culture model. In fact, Benedict takes a complexly centrist view on the question “whether society is an organism” (230). First, she explicates the views of, on the one hand, those who believe the “individual mind” is everything and the “group” is nonexistent and, on the other hand, those who assert that “the individual does not exist” and the group is everything—here she alludes to Emile Durkheim on group thinking and references Alfred Kroeber’s conception of the superorganic—but then summarily casts the individual-society debate as “largely a verbal quarrel” (231) and tries to bring out the necessary limitations of each extreme view. And yet while posing her own position as the synthesis of the group and individual arguments, in the end she leans toward a group-oriented “organic” theory: It is obvious that the sum of all the individuals in Zuni make up a culture beyond and above what those individuals have willed and created. The group is fed by tradition: it is “time-binding.” It is quite justifiable to call it an organic whole. It is a necessary consequence of the animism embedded in our language that we

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speak of a group as choosing its ends and having specific purposes; it should not be held against the student as an evidence of a mystic philosophy. (231–32)

Benedict’s conclusion, as smoothly mellifluous and steady as her prose operates, is in fact rich in conceptual ambivalence: we are justified in calling culture organic, but only because the very linguistic nature of the concept demands its naturalness. It is organic, but only in the sense that words force it to be so, just as the “animistic” tendencies of language make it sound as though a culture “consciously” selects its personality. In one sense, Benedict’s conclusion is the obverse of Malinowski’s assertion that the study of language need be anthropological, for she in effect asserts that the study of culture is linguistically based and bound.6 As Geertz points out, while Benedict focuses upon three cultures to prove her point, she brings into play two notable tropes or tools, both rich in linguistic-literary associations and implications.7 The first is the famous “great arc” of human possibilities, from which each “culture” chooses but a few traits: The cultural pattern of any civilization makes use of a certain segment of the great arc of potential human purposes and motivations. . . . The great arc along which all the possible human behaviors are distributed is far too full of contradictions for any one culture to utilize any considerable portion of it. Selection is the first requirement. Without selection no culture could even achieve intelligibility. (237)

Earlier in Patterns Benedict overtly addresses the debt of her concept of the great arc to modern linguistics: “It is in cultural life as it is in speech; selection is the prime necessity” (23). Benedict goes on to note that “the numbers of sounds that can be produced by our vocal cords and our oral and nasal cavities are practically unlimited.” Drawing heavily from the linguistic work of her friend and colleague Sapir, Benedict states that “each language must make its selection and abide by it on pain of not being intelligible at all” (23). Like a language, “a culture that capitalized even a considerable proportion of these would be as unintelligible as a language that used all the clicks, the glottal stops, all the labials, the dentals, sibilants, and gutturals from voiceless to voiced and from oral to nasal” (24). While Malinowski seems to have argued in the 1920s that language as a set of culture must be read contextually, that is, anthropologically, Benedict in Patterns appears to claim that a culture functions like a language and thus can be read as though it were one. Essentially, Benedict analogizes culture to language, rather than arguing, or even assuming, that culture is a subset of language. The distinction is important and underscores the essentially comparative nature of Benedict’s project, in which the premium is persistently put upon the comparison of items to one another rather than upon the overriding “functional” supposition that items works with one another in their shared status as subsets of the larger “whole.” This is not to say, of course, that Bene-

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dict is less involved with holism as a “cultural” category; rather, it is to claim that Benedict’s holistic vehicle is essentially metaphoric, having to do with different though perhaps similar holistic “contexts,” as opposed to Malinowski’s essentially metonymic and specifically synechdochic species of holism. The analogy of culture to language is accompanied in Patterns by a more specific comparison of culture to art. In her chapter entitled “The Integration of Culture” Benedict argues that Gothic architecture began as little more than “a preference for altitude and light” but became “the unique and homogeneous art of the thirteenth century” (47). The Gothic as such developed, as languages do, through selection: “It discarded elements that were incongruous, modified others to its purposes, and invented others that accorded with its taste” (48). In an analogy parallel to that between language and culture, Benedict goes on to assert, “What has happened in great art-styles happens also in cultures as a whole. All the miscellaneous behavior directed toward getting a living, mating, warring, and worshiping the gods, is made over into consistent patterns in accordance with unconscious canons of choice that develop within the culture” (48). Like language and literature, culture expresses purposes, and yet those purposes are not expressed as specifically intended purposes but are in effect “unconscious canons.” In this regard, tribal members and more civilized artisans and artists share in their knowing not what they do. They marshal purposes, but not with the consciousness that they are indeed marshaling purposes. For Benedict, culture is not only “linguistic” but artistic and should be studied as such. Benedict would discuss the link between literary and anthropological approaches in an address entitled “Anthropology and the Humanities,” given on the occasion of her retirement from the post of president of the American Anthropological Association in 1948. There she asserted that “long before I knew anything at all about anthropology, I had learned from Shakespearian criticism . . . habits of mind which at length made me an anthropologist” (Mead, Anthropologist at Work, 467). Benedict went on to recommend the critical writings of A. C. Bradley, whose “canons of good Shakespearian criticism . . . are as good examples of fruitful methods and high standards as a student of culture can desire” (468) and then firmly linked good anthropological work to Bradley’s criticism according to their mutually holistic and even configurational principles: The anthropologist will, of course, use these canons for the study of a cultural ethos, and not for the elucidation of a single character, but he, like Bradley, knows that he will succeed in his work if he takes into account whatever is said and done, discarding nothing he sees to be relevant; if he tries to understand the interrelations of discrete bits; if he surrenders himself to his data and uses all the insights of which he is capable. (468)

The second of Benedict’s two major tropes, the Nietzschean dichotomy of the Apollonian-Dionysian, works as well as a purpose not recognized as such

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by the cultural members who exhibit it. At the opening of chapter 4, on the Pueblos, Benedict asserts that “the basic contrast between the Pueblos and the other cultures of North America is the contrast that is named and described by Nietzsche in his studies of Greek tragedy” (78). In fact, Benedict refers to the Pueblo as the “Apollonian,” who by definition “knows but one law, measure in the Hellenic sense” (79), and refers to a member of any other North American tribe as the “Dionysian,” who by definition “seeks to attain in his most valued moments escape from the boundaries imposed upon him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience . . . to achieve excess” (Patterns, 79).8 Benedict takes pains to point out that “it is with no thought of equating the civilization of Greece with that of aboriginal America” that she draws from “the culture of Greece” to explicate “the cultural configurations” of the American Indian (79). Her purpose in using the Greek “terms,” she reasons, is eminently comparative: “I use them because they are categories that bring clearly to the fore the major qualities that differentiate Pueblo culture from those of other American Indians.” In this she is certainly in keeping with her colleague Sapir, who also compared Native American to Greek “cultures” in order to assert a comparative reading of cultures or, more precisely, culture “types,” in Sapir’s case the “genuine” and the “spurious.” In this respect Benedict is at variance with Malinowski’s early meditations upon the Nietzschean dialectic as expressed in Malinowski’s student essay of 1904. Like Nietzsche, Malinowski was interested primarily in the Dionysian and Apollonian as “two aspects of a common culture.”9 Malinowski found Nietzsche’s dialectic useful (see above, chapter 2) in his conception of cultural holism, just as Nietzsche, as Thornton notes, found the two aspects generative as a way of understanding the seeming variance of barbarous and civilized elements within Greek, and for that matter German, culture. Benedict, on the other hand, puts to work Nietzsche’s categories of Dionysian and Apollonian as articulations of distinct cultures or cultural types. Her use might be posited as more Arnoldian than Nietzschean, more akin to the Arnoldian taxonomy of the Hebraic and Hellenistic, which, though used by Arnold to represent poles of behavior present in all cultures, are primarily, originarily, located in distinct cultures, the Judaic and the Greek, respectively. Importantly, Nietzsche and the Cambridge Hellenists (Jane Harrison especially) so deeply influenced by him were deeply invested in trying to recover the “Dionysian,” “primitive,” or “animistic” roots of the culture in question. Benedict, on the other hand, was not at all trying to recover primitive roots. Early in Patterns, in fact, she asserts that “there is no reason to suppose that by discussing Australian religion rather than our own we are uncovering primordial religion. . . . There is no justification for identifying some one contemporary primitive custom with the original type of human behavior” (18).

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Benedict, rather, was aiming to articulate particular “cultures” as essentially Dionysian and others as essentially Apollonian, in this case the Kwakiutl as the former and the Zuni as the latter, and the Dobu function as a kind of third leg of a stool, as a Freudian-injected paranoid.10 Essential to Benedict’s culture-aspersonality argument, which she in fact shares with Sapir, is the emphasis upon what is essential but not at all necessarily original with that culture. The “configuration” of a culture as such involves development that entails “selection,” “adaptation,” and so on, but the argument for a culture’s configurational coherence does not at all depend upon where or how that culture started. While Benedict does not try to locate primitive origins, the book mourns the loss of primitive essence, and does so through a powerfully elegiac tone. Like Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” Patterns of Culture hearkens after a way of life that is coherent and unitary, a way of life decidedly lost. Mead’s comment that Benedict had never lived among an unfragmented “culture” points toward that loss and in a sense posits Benedict herself as eminently and unfortunately modern, never having known the unriven social condition.11 At the beginning of the second chapter Benedict departs from the ethnographically omniscient third-person point of view that characterizes Patterns in order to focus upon a moment in her own scant fieldwork experience, an encounter with a Digger Indian chief by the name of Ramon. The chief, Benedict notes, was a “Christian” and yet carried intense memories “of the shamans who had transformed themselves into bears before his eyes in the bear dance” (21). Benedict recalls that the chief “talked to me a great deal about the ways of his people in the old days,” and she goes on to “quote” Ramon on cultural origins: “ ‘In the beginning,’ he said, ‘God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life’ ” (21). Benedict then wonders aloud “whether the figure occurred in some traditional ritual of his people” and then concludes Ramon’s elegiac pronouncement: “ ‘They all dipped in the same water,’ he continued, ‘but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away’ ” (22). Based upon Ramon’s mythic utterance, Benedict then stages her own cultural generalization: Our cup is broken. Those things that had given significance to the life of his people . . . these were gone, and with them the shape and meaning of their life. . . . He did not mean that there was any question of the extinction of his people. But he had in mind the loss of something that had value equal to that of life itself, the whole fabric of his people’s standards and beliefs. There were other cups of living left, and they held perhaps the same water, but the loss was irreparable. It was no matter of tinkering with an addition here, lopping off something there. The modeling had been fundamental, it was somehow all of a piece. It had been their own. (22)

Handler is right on the mark when he notes that in Patterns Benedict “wrote into being the holistic genuine cultures that no longer existed in the modernist’s world” (“Ruth Benedict,” 179). And in fact the trope of broken cup is itself

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eminently modernist, as it hearkens back to the lost grail of Eliot’s The Waste Land, as well as to the broken chalice of the disillusioned and dying priest in Joyce’s story “Two Sisters,” and looks forward to Robert Frost’s “broken drinking goblet like the Grail” in his 1947 poem “Directive.” Frost’s grail-cup, like that of Eliot’s more implicit figure, holds the promise for the rejuvenation of a place where a people formerly lived whole, in Frost’s case that “house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm” (lines 5–6). Of course all of these treatments look back to Jessie Weston’s ritualist treatment of Christian grail as primitive survival and to the entire legacy of Frazerian and Cambridge Hellenist exposures of the “savage” roots of “civilized” religion. Benedict’s invocation of the Christian chief’s animistic memories recalls the memorable characters of Eliot and Yeats who are “caught between two worlds”: Benedict’s Ramon, she notes, “straddled two cultures whose values and ways of thought were incommensurable” (22). And like her literarymodernist counterparts, Benedict through her culturally liminal character signals both the end of the world as we have known it or as we have thought it should be and the need (and perhaps impossibility) to recover it whole, whether that be in the form of a literalized rejuvenated world or an anthropological theory—configurationalism—that itself makes possible the systemic conception of cultural holism.

If, according to Benedict, cultures should be studied like art styles, then the New Critics contemporaneous with Benedict held out for an art style, and more specifically a work of art, along the lines of Benedict’s culture. What we have are similar, related cultural models: for Benedict, the anthropological notion of discrete social groups termed cultures; for the New Critics, a more “aesthetic” freestanding construct, the modern poem. Both were said to “function,” significantly, as complex holistic structures bursting with meaningfulness arrived at only relationally (by reference to its parts) and eminently accessible to the disciplined (disciplinary) culture reader (anthropologist, critic). The organicism of the anthropological culture model of course finds its counterpart in the organic nature of the poem as approached by the New Critic. I. A. Richards and Allen Tate, though they vigorously disagreed over issues of subjectivism, the role of cognition in modern linguistic analysis, and the equivalence of science to art and to literary criticism, both found themselves approvingly citing Coleridge on the inherently organic nature of the poem.12 And Richards, as an architect of the New Criticism, reads the poem as both a product and a palliative of the nervous system, for example, in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), where he writes of the mind as “the nervous system,” the importance of “restoring equilibrium to the system,” and how the “pleasure” involved in the reading of a poem fulfills that.13 Thus, in a

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roughly Malinowskian sense, poems emerge out of and satisfy deep human biologistic needs. John Crowe Ransom, in The World’s Body (1938), speaks of the “living integrity of the poem” that is threatened by “the prose core” to which the bad reader or critic “can violently reduce the total object.”14 The poem itself is in effect rescued in its inviolability by the “tissue” that surrounds it and “keeps the object poetical or entire” (348–49). Cleanth Brooks, in The Well Wrought Urn, refers to “the structure of the poem as an organism”15 and calls attention to the very transmutation of models for the poem, from the artisanal to the organic: the “well wrought urn” itself, as exemplified in the urn of Donne’s poem “Canonization,” that which “holds the phoenix-lovers’ ashes” (19), as well as Keats’s urn from the famous ode, becomes the vessel wherein are stored those ashes that will flame into the living phoenix of the poem. “All such urns,” read as well-made poems, “contain the ashes of a phoenix,” Brooks concludes (19). The notion that a poem is autonomous and organized with its own set of rules or system goes back, of course, to Eliot, in essays such as “The Metaphysical Poets,” and to Richards, most notably or characteristically in his Principles of Literary Criticism, where Richards articulates the poet, as does Benedict, as a kind of culture architect. Through the poet’s “superior power of ordering experience,” Richards asserts, the poem is wrought into a structure in which “impulses which commonly interfere with one another, are conflicting, independent, and mutually distractive, in him combine in a stable poise” (191). The poem is made into, to quote from his later work Science and Poetry (1926), “a system of delicately poised balances.”16 The poet as the personality behind the poem gets curiously and variously worked out in the New Criticism proper. While the New Criticism has come to be commonly recognized as an approach that discourages the tracing of personal motive or authorial “intention” to the product that is the poem, even the most New Critical of New Critics tended to cast poetic creation in personalist terms; for example, in The Well Wrought Urn Brooks defines the poem as “the unification of attitudes in a hierarchy subordinate to a total and governing attitude. In the unified poem, the poet has ‘come to terms’ with his experience” (189). This “attitude” finds significant parallel to Benedict’s conception of a people (e.g., the Pueblo) as “coming to terms” with its own experience or “solving its problems” (as Le´vi-Strauss would later term it) through its creation of a system of checks and balances: the “total and governing attitude” that in personalist terms configures the poem is a version of what Benedict considers the resultant “personality” of the “culture.” Like Benedict, however, the New Critics, while granting the personalist caste of poetic (for Benedict, “cultural”) creation, would heavily and very influentially discourage the notion that the poet recognizes or can consciously shape the “purpose” of the poem (“culture”). The poet may have an “intention,” according to W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, but

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it should not be confused with how the poem actually operates, functions, configures.17 In this regard poets, like Benedict’s tribal members, know not what they are doing. The New Critics’ conception of the poem, like Benedict’s version of the “culture,” puts the emphasis upon the ultimately harmonious, resolving, and balancing aspects of culture making, which results in that integrated “personality” of the poem/culture. Like Eliot, Brooks, in Modern Poetry and the Tradition, points to seventeenth-century Metaphysical poetry, wherein “the poet attempts a reconciliation of qualities which are opposite or discordant,” as the paragon of artistic transmutation.18 This reconciling quality, Brooks claims, is also found in the best of modern poetry—Eliot’s, of course, but also the poems of Robert Frost, in which we see “concentrated imagery exhibiting discordant opposites reconciled in art” (113). Following Eliot’s lead, the New Critics look to epochs—like the seventeenth century of the Metaphysicals—for the pre-dissociative equilibrium lost to modern industrial man. For Brooks, Ransom, and Tate the search for poise and order becomes part and parcel of the Agrarian argument against Yankee pragmatism and its consequent industrialization. Thus Tate in 1934, the same year that saw the publication of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture, finds in poetry a sole refuge, the only place where equilibrium still resides: “Poetry finds its true usefulness in its true inutility, a focus of repose for the will-driven intellect that constantly shakes the equilibrium of persons and societies with its unremitting imposition of partial formulas.”19 Like Eliot, Tate draws upon Arnold’s culturalist legacy, especially Arnold’s emphasis of the inherent incompleteness or partiality of the modern political-industrial complex and the fullness, or “Right Reason,” of the poetic or “cultural” enterprise. Though of dramatically different “politics” from the Boasian anthropologists Benedict, Sapir, and Mead, the New Critics (Brooks, Tate, Ransom), like the Boasians, call attention to a better place, a bounded realm in which discordances, apparent discrepancies, or even seeming sordidness resolves into a clear and integrative pattern or personality at welcome variance from the modern world in which the poet/anthropologist works. Thus for the New Critic, the poet—and by extension the critic—like the Boasian anthropologist, is always in the act of cultural salvage, of saving a way of life, to which Ransom attests when he asserts that “the poet perpetuates in his poem an order of existence which in actual life is constantly crumbling beneath his touch” (World’s Body, 348). And yet even the modern industrial world itself can be rescued in art, according to Brooks in his landmark essay on Eliot’s Waste Land. Very much inspired by Eliot’s own criticism and his 1923 review of Ulysses, in “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth” Brooks articulates a “principle of complexity” at work in Eliot’s poem that “give[s] the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole” (Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 137), much as Benedict

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would demonstrate in Patterns of Culture that the apparently chaotic experience of the Dobu or the Northwest Coast tribes is in fact organized, ordered, into a working, harmonious system.

In chapter 3 of Patterns of Culture, “The Integration of Culture,” Benedict makes the case for holistic theory by pointing to “the study of the whole configuration as over against the continued analysis of its parts” in the various fields of “modern science” and in “the field of aesthetics” (50–51). She goes on to cite Wilhelm Worringer on the differences between “the highly developed art of the two periods, the Greek and the Byzantine,” noting how Worringer calls into question “the older criticism . . . which defined art in absolute terms,” that is, along the lines of “classical standards,” and thus “could not possibly understand the processes of art as they are represented in Byzantine painting or mosaic.” Benedict then extrapolates from Worringer’s contrasting of two art styles a powerful generalization: “Achievement in one cannot be judged in terms of the other, because each was attempting to achieve quite different ends” (51). “Art-styles” as such serve as proof of the legitimacy that cultures too, in their status as discrete wholes, need to be evaluated according to their own distinctive patternings. Benedict’s aesthetic example makes the way for, helps make acceptable, the claim, made late in Patterns, that the three cultures under study there—Zuni, Dobu, and Kwakiutl—“are traveling along different roads in pursuit of different ends, and these ends and these means in one society cannot be judged in terms of those of another society, because essentially they are incommensurable” (223). Thus a central articulation of the modern principle of cultural relativism is comprehended through an analogy to art. Benedict gets to “culture” through the province of “art,” but not through the supposition that culture is a species of art, or vice versa. Rather, art theory, like psychological theory—in her discussion of holistic theory Benedict puts emphasis upon Gestalt psychology (51–52)—compels Benedict to evince art, culture, and psychology as analogous, comparable, but discrete systems. As in art criticism and psychology, the anthropologist-practitioner must exert a persistent pressure in order to compel the reading public to adopt and maintain a relativist frame of mind. In her case, Benedict makes explicit to her readers the need for them to become “culture-conscious” (245) so that the relativizing temperament will eventually become habitual. In the concluding paragraph to the book, in fact, Benedict points to “the inevitable cultural lag that makes us insist that the old must be discovered again in the new,” and because of that very human resistance—“tradition is as neurotic as any patient,” she notes earlier (273)—she reasons that relativizing can itself become habitual: “As soon as the new opinion is embraced as customary belief, it will

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be another trusted bulwark of the good life. We shall arrive then at a more realistic social faith, accepting as grounds of hope and as new bases for tolerance the coexisting and equally valid patterns of life which mankind has created for itself from the raw materials of existence” (278). For Benedict, as for Malinowski, “tradition” is a complexly ambivalent matter. On the one hand, it is itself “neurotic” as well as founded upon illusion; a “trusted bulwark” of the social life is, after all, nothing more than what the “culture” has at any given point in time deemed acceptable. On the other hand, it is also, looking backward, that sought-after “cup of clay” that modernity has broken and, looking forward, what a culture can decide it holds dear, and so is fortunately elastic, changeable. The elasticity of “tradition” is nowhere made more clear than in Benedict’s broad-based Boasian critique of arguments for the biological determination of culture: “Culture is not a biologically transmitted complex,” she asserts in her opening chapter, and again: “The human cultural heritage, for better or worse, is not biologically transmitted” (14). Like Joyce in his early address on the Irish, Benedict presses for the complexity of the race-culture relation, and again like Joyce, she maintains above all that national unity is based upon collective practice and consent, not blood relation: What really binds men together is their culture—the ideas and the standards they have in common. If instead of selecting a symbol like common blood heredity and making a slogan of it, the nation turned its attention rather to the culture that unites its people, emphasizing its major merits and recognizing the different values which may develop in a different culture, it would substitute realistic thinking for a kind of symbolism which is dangerous because it is misleading. (16)

The “slogan” of “common blood heredity” could well have come out of the mouth of Joyce’s Irish senator claiming racialist grounds for the right to speak for his people. Yet unlike Joyce, Benedict maintains the need for the straightforward genre of the “realistic” over the dangerous territory of “symbolism.” In this regard Benedict’s rhetoric on rhetoric resembles that of Ogden and Richards, who also aligned the dangers of sloganeering to an atavistically rendered filiation of symbol to the social world. Benedict’s ambivalence toward culture, realistically rendered or no, is especially evident, and significant, in her assertion of tradition’s elasticity, or, in Benedict’s words, its “greater plasticity” (14). For Benedict argues that that “plasticity,” as opposed to blood heredity, is what gives a culture its unique configuration. Elasticity means that cultures make choices, and different cultures make different choices: what one culture deems socially acceptable, another, because of its configurational patterning, deems unacceptable. While Benedict’s “greater plasticity” seems to encourage the notion that cultures have agency (are capable of choice) and are consensually dynamic rather than hereditarily static, the fate of a particular individual depends very

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much upon the apparent arbitrariness of the culture into which an individual happens to be born. Thus, for the Dobu, depicted by Benedict as a misanthropic people (Geertz refers to them in Swiftian terms as Benedict’s “Yahoos” [Works and Lives, 112]), “the individual . . . who was thoroughly disoriented was the man who was naturally friendly” (258), whereas among the Zuni, portrayed as a humble people that “thoroughly distrusts authority of any sort,” a person of “native personal magnetism” was shunned (260). Perhaps most pointedly, Benedict presses home that the “extreme forms of ego-gratification” so distrusted by the Zuni were in fact “culturally supported” in America at the time: those who were “abnormal” for the Zuni were not only “normal” but sanctioned and celebrated in modern America: “They are not described in our manuals of psychiatry because they are supported by every tenet of our civilization” (277). On the other hand, modern America, and “Western civilization” as a whole, “tends to regard even a mild homosexual as an abnormal,” she notes. “We have only to turn to other cultures, however, to realize that homosexuals have by no means been uniformly inadequate to the social situation. They have not always failed to function. In some societies they have even been especially acclaimed” (262). Benedict goes on to suggest Plato’s Republic as “the most convincing statement of the honourable estate of homosexuality” (263) and notes that among American Indians “homosexuals are often regarded as especially able” (263). The pain that accompanies homosexuality, Benedict claims, results from a society’s branding it as unacceptable: thus for the homosexual, “his guilt, his sense of inadequacy, his failures, are consequences of the disrepute which social tradition visits upon him, and few people can achieve a satisfactory life unsupported by the standards of their society” (265). Geertz has noted how Benedict, through her own way of making comparisons, functions as a Swiftian satirist, namely, in her “juxtaposition of the alltoo-familiar and the wildly exotic in such a way that they change places.” As Geertz tellingly puts it, “There confounds Here. The Not-us (or Not-U.S.) Unnerves the Us” (Works and Lives, 106). Geertz’s point reinforces Benedict’s well-deserved reputation as a master architect of cultural critique in anthropological writing,20 and yet Benedict’s brand of cultural relativism works to produce something more, or less, than the one-to-one equivalence of the strange made familiar and the familiar, strange. Indeed, Benedict’s comparativizing sometimes makes some of the “strange” cultures even stranger: true, the “Notus” becomes the “US,” as in the filiation of megalomaniacal Kwakiutl to modern American life, and yet at the same time the “Not-us” is reinscribed as the “Not-us,” as in the idyllically rendered moderation and humility of the Zuni. The shift is one of value judgment rather than identification: the others are still “not us,” but they are what we wish we could be rather than what we are happy we are not.

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Though Benedict criticizes Sapir’s conception of “genuine culture” on the grounds that “sincerity” can result in some very ugly things,21 Benedict’s own conception of cultural relativism, like Sapir’s, is complexly inhabited with judgments of “cultural” value. Each culture is configurationally unique, and thus no one culture can be considered superior to another; on the other hand, some cultures, such as the Zuni, are used to correct or amend or adjust the attitudes of others (our own). While Benedict tells her readers that all cultures must be treated with equal respect through the enforcement of “culture-consciousness,” she registers a tonal distaste for the misanthropy of the Dobu and the megalomania of the Kwakiutl and the modern American and an attitudinal delight in the ways of the Zuni (in August 1925, readying herself to leave Zuni, she wrote to Mead, “When I’m God I’m going to build my city there” [Mead, Anthropologist at Work, 293]). Toleration is the sole universal ethic to emerge from Patterns of Culture, yet it is a quality that none of the cultures presented exhibit to any considerable degree (the North American Indian may, according to Benedict, tolerate certain forms of homosexuality, but other forms of behavior that depart from the particular configurational cultural norms are severely dealt with). Thus tradition is itself both good and evil, the sacred whole cup of clay but at the same time the repositor of inhibiting values. It is the anthropologist alone who grasps the entire range of valuations toward tradition and who fully articulates and inhabits the toleration of cultural expression. Once again, all cultures are equal, yet some are more equal than others. Like Sapir, Benedict applauds cultures that are “oriented as wholes” (Patterns, 223), the Dobu and Kwakiutl along with the Zuni, but in fact she has problems with cultures that, in her words, “lack of integration,” that “like certain individuals . . . do not subordinate activities to a ruling motivation” (223). While this lack of coherence results from many different and often inscrutable reasons—and Benedict laments that the apparently chaotic dynamic of the incoherent culture “gives no clue to activity that comes after” (223)—she notes that the “lack of integration” is “as characteristic of certain cultures as extreme integration is of others” (223). Now, Benedict, like Eliot, is not necessarily propounding that the most extreme form of social cohesion or unity is the most desired, but like Eliot, she is in fact pressing coherence as the sine qua non of cultural legitimacy. While Benedict, as the good Boasian, presses home the important role that diffusion plays in the formation of a culture, like Sapir, she is overbothered by overborrowing; like an imitative art style, the culture that overborrows is less highly regarded and becomes rendered along the lines of Sapir’s “spurious”: Tribes like those of the interior of British Columbia have incorporated traits from all the surrounding civilizations. They have taken their patterns for the manipulation of wealth from one culture area, parts of their religious practices from another,

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contradictory bits from still another. Their mythology is a hodge-podge of uncoordinated accounts of culture heroes out of three different myth-cycles represented in areas around them. Yet in spite of such extreme hospitality to the institutions of others, their culture gives an impression of extreme poverty. Nothing is carried far enough to give body to the culture. (224)

In fact, in its figuration Benedict’s overly imitative culture strongly resembles the “mechanical Frankenstein’s monster” of Frazer’s comparative method: the “right eye” from here and the “left” from there become the “parts” or “bits” a people borrows from its neighbors. In both cases the result is a “mechanical” construction, something other than the real (organic) thing: like Frazer’s Frankenstein, the overborrowing people lack real “body.” Not always the good Boasian, Benedict here in a sense implicitly replaces Frazerian comparativism with traditional Boasian diffusionary study as the diabolical (social) scientific method. The overborrowing tribes in this respect become a version of where Benedict’s cultural theory started: with the diffusionist method that, perhaps in a moment of weakness, dispelled the notion of culture as organic at all and at least apparently promoted the conception of culture as ragtag. In a sense, with the development of Benedict’s theory of cultural holism and the desire of a whole culture fulfilled, the residual theoretics of culture as accretive and accidental have been transposed to mean not bad theory but bad culture. Like Sapir, Benedict holds that it is not the content of a people’s practices that determines their feasibility as a bona fide culture, but their form, and specifically the cohesiveness of their form. But the issue arises—and Benedict, unlike Sapir, raises it explicitly—of what the anthropologist does with a people that lacks such cohesiveness. How can such a people be read? Benedict argues that often the incoherent becomes coherent over time: “Disharmonious borrowing tend to achieve harmony” (225). Lack of coherence then becomes a historical problem with a historical solution. Still, Benedict holds that some disharmonious cultures, especially border peoples—“marginal areas,” she calls them—cannot be explained this way: they remain “conspicuous for apparent dissonance” (225). Like Eliot, Benedict speculates on the possibility of, in effect, a “culture” without “culture.” Eliot’s prospect, in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, of a time when there will be “no culture” stands interestingly alongside Benedict’s hypothesization of a “genuinely disoriented culture” (226), but like Eliot, Benedict presses for the complex interpretation of the culture-less phenomenon over mere generalization of absence (though as in Eliot, what remains at end is an open-ended question): “Probably the nature of the specific conflicts or of the facile hospitality to new influences would prove more important than any blanket characterizations of ‘lack of integration,’ but what such characterizations would be we cannot guess” (226).

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Finally, like Eliot, Benedict reinscribes, though complexly and generatively, the very criterion of cohesion, or “integration,” with which she began. “Cases of cultural disorientation,” she notes, may have different reasons or be of a different degree—for example, they “may well be less than they appear at the present time” (228)—but integration remains the common and governing term. Benedict in fact calls into question not only the reliability of the anthropological account—“There is always the possibility that the description of the culture is disoriented rather than the culture itself”—but the very limits of anthropological method to grasp the principles of cohesion—“Then again, the nature of the integration may be merely outside our experience and difficult to perceive” (228). In either case, integration is not only assumed but strengthened as assumption.

At first, one can hardly imagine a more unlikely twinning than that of the Southern Agrarian New Critics and the liberal, East Coast–based Boasian anthropologists. And yet, as this study generally aspires to indicate, the models and templates of culture, as they themselves move between disciplines (from anthropology to the literary, and vice versa), not only shift political affiliations but in fact compel a reconsideration of the very categories of “political” affiliation. The Boasians thus can be seen in some regards as making possible conservative political-ideological formulations, while the New Critics brought into being incipient progressive possibilities. It is imperative, however, not to rest with labels or assignations—“conservative” and “progressive,” like “culture,” show remarkably elastic properties—but rather, in comparativist fashion, to persistently view each movement (anthropological, literary) in the terms of the other. Thus one can assert that while the New Critics were resolutely mono-graphic in their attention to the poem as a discrete, freestanding object, they rhetorically and methodologically possessed a distinctly Boasian-Benedictine comparativist economy. At the opening of The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks asserts paradox as “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry” and thus poses the poet as antithetical to the scientist, who requires “language purged of every trace of paradox” (3). While this certainly looks forward to several formulations of scientific and humanistic discourse, including those by Le´vi-Strauss and Lyotard, its most historically immediate parallel is to the Boasian anthropologists, who also see their task as making sense out of the seeming nonsense that is the culture. The critic too demonstrates the sense that is the seeming non-sense of the structure that the poet crafts. Another of the New Critics’ keywords also points to the filiation of Benedict to the New Critics. Brooks defines irony as “the most general term . . . for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the

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context” (191). As such, irony functions as a rhetorical equivalent to cultural relativism as the latter operates in Patterns of Culture: as that which qualifies, reconfigures, attitudes but only according to, within, a contextual or relational framework. The “sense” of a poem, then, is that readjustment, “qualification,” or broadening of mind that comes with a resolutely contextual approach. In Modern Poetry and the Tradition Brooks restates this principle, but under the aegis of another key New Critical term, ambiguity, which, Brooks holds, “resides in the poet’s fidelity to the complexity of experience.” Given the necessary qualification or adjustment of attitude that is necessary, it follows, according to Brooks, that a poem, as exemplified in Eliot’s The Waste Land, cannot operate “through didacticism” but rather must “work by indirection” (169–71). The method of Eliot’s poem, Brooks notes, is “violent and radical but thoroughly necessary,” much as one could say Benedict’s text is structured according to a primary radical juxtaposition of unlike cultures, a contrastive device that obviates the use of sheer propaganda. Similar to Geertz’s explication of the way Benedict’s text works, one could say that The Waste Land according to Brooks, and indeed any worthy poem according to the New Critics, is “making difference tell” (Works and Lives, 114), but by telling it aslant. The underlying and necessarily aslant message of Benedict’s Patterns of Culture—that cultural truths are never as true as they may seem and that the culturally unusual can, in a different social configuration, be the usual—is itself an animating principle of the New Critical program. In Modern Poetry and the Tradition Brooks reconceptualizes the eighteenth-century, Addisonian conception of “Wit” in terms highly redolent of Benedict’s ethos, that is, as “a lively awareness of the fact that the obvious attitude toward a given situation is not the only possible attitude” (37). Like Benedict, Brooks promotes and cultivates a disciplining of the intellect, a training for an always comparativizing state of mind. Crucially, Brooks’s statement is part of his larger argument, as laid out in the book’s opening, that metaphor, that keyest of key New Critical terms, needs to be recast as the sine qua non of the poetic enterprise. Addison, Samuel Johnson, and those who followed them downplayed or downgraded devices or habits of mind, variously cast as “Wit” (Addison), “fancy” (Wordsworth), and “caprices of style,” all of which Brooks sees as versions of that most central poetic device, metaphor. Brooks holds that the historical denigration of these devices amounts to the “suspicion of the intellect” at the heart of the Romantic movement (6) and sees as his duty the recovery of the truly poetic status of the activity pejoratively cast by Coleridge as “the juxtaposition and apparent reconciliation of widely different or incompatible things” (6). Metaphor, according to Brooks, is at heart that relentless comparing of “incompatible” things, and that is precisely how poetry should be assessed. Brooks calls for “a radical revision of the existing conceptions of poetry” (xxix–xxx), which, importantly, entails a reconsideration of what qualifies as

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the “tradition” of English poetry (in this case by bringing Metaphysical and modernist poetry fully into the canon). Like Benedict, Brooks in effect redefines what qualifies as culture, and he does so by insisting that what is cultural can only be conceived through the activity of comparing, of assessing how differing contexts relate or function in or as a whole. Indicatively, Brooks himself redefines Wordsworth’s derogatorily regarded “fancy” as “functional” to emphasize that the central work of the poetic imagination, metaphor, works essentially and inherently relationally. Metaphor as such, Brooks centrally argues, is anything but decorative: it is essential, central, and fundamentally contextual. Central to Brooks’s rehabilitation of metaphor as a prime poetic device is the assertion that “nothing is intrinsically poetic” (12). Drawing from that darling of the New Critics, John Donne, Brooks holds that the “compasses” of Donne’s poem “A Valediction, Forbidding Mourning” are “poetic in the only sense in which objects can ever be poetic—they function integrally in a poem.” The metaphor is anything but a decorative add-on, or as Samuel Johnson assessed Donne’s compasses, a grotesque flourish. It is properly and essentially “poetic” because, like a given practice of a specific culture as evinced by Malinowski and Benedict, it is anything but a superfluous activity (and here the “contextualist” approaches of the British and American anthropological schools are more important for their similarities than their differences). Rather, for both poem and culture the feature (practice, ritual, or trope) functions integrally to give meaning to, and express the meaning of, the whole. Following the lead of Eliot, both Brooks and Tate argue that no item—word, trope, image—can be considered unfit for a poem on the basis of content; its fitness or unfitness can only be judged based on its fitness within the context of the poem. In his essay “Understanding Modern Poetry” (1940) Tate bashes the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth, for telling readers “to look for inherently poetic objects, and to respond to them ‘emotionally’ in certain prescribed ways.” The best of modern poetry, Tate argues, “offers no inherently poetical objects, and the Romantics fail to instruct the reader in the ways he must feel about the objects. All experience, then, becomes potentially the material of poetry—not merely the pretty and agreeable” (On the Limits of Poetry, 116). Since the rise of poststructuralism, literary historical readings of the New Criticism have tended to focus pejoratively on the retrograde politics of most of those involved in the New Critical enterprise and have rightly aligned those politics with the largely (though not exclusively) ahistorical tendencies of the New Critical method: the New Critics, it is commonly and on the whole sensibly argued, mystified the conservative politics of their critical enterprise by arguing that criticism should not have a politics. What is often underplayed, however, is the liberatory aspects of the New Criticism. Tate, Ransom, Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and others were, after the inaugural efforts of Eliot, Rich-

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ards, and Edmund Wilson, largely responsible for the reading public’s acceptance of modernist poetry. And as regards the American literary scene, even though they often denigrated the poetry of Walt Whitman, in a general sense they were a critical force in fulfilling Whitman’s call for a poetry embracing all American experience. Critical to the democratic and democratizing aspects of the New Criticism, shared with the modern ethnographic practice, is what one might call the movement’s argument for contextual presentism. Following in the wake of Richards and Eliot, the New Critics powerfully argued that a poem lives in the present as a complex of relations that transcend its content. A poem is its context, not its content or history. Brooks says it perhaps most tellingly in Modern Poetry and the Tradition when, opposing what he sees as the Romantic critical tradition, he argues the need “to shift the matter at issue from a consideration of the truth of the poem’s doctrine to the poem’s structure—from what the poem means to what it says” (47). As a version of Archibald MacLeish’s famously poetic pronouncement on poetics, “a poem does not mean, but be,” Brooks’s statement amounts to an argument for the lived experience of the poetic, much as Malinowski argued for the lived experience of the ethnographer among the natives. In each case what came before the experience itself—the history behind the poet or the cultural circumstances producing the poem; the history of the tribe before the present-tense experience of the ethnographer—has only residual value. The contextual presentism in each case—the anthropological and the literary critical—ought not to be categorized as the spatial, for that term disregards the here-and-now aspect conveyed in each practice; in addition, the spatial commonly regarded as the escape from the dimensionality of time does not address the contextual aspect of the poem or the tribe’s be-ness quality, the sense that what means is what is, but what it is as a complex of relations. The experiential aspect of this presentism most certainly has elitist ramifications. In both ethnography and literary criticism the argument for presentism in effect takes the say away from the producers or authors of the cultural product, be they poets or tribal members. The poem or the culture is not what it says it is: the words of the makers cannot be trusted. The truth comes out of the present-tense relations of elements as read by ethnographer and literary critic. Structure as such is the interpretive province of the culture reader, not of the cultural producer or inhabitant (native, poet, or native-poet). The underside of the democratizing calls of the New Critics also becomes visible in their argument against a preconceived and prescribed aesthetics. Wresting control of the poem from the poet and arguing against the inherently poetical went a long way toward arguing that all poems are equal, but the full New Critical program had the effect of arguing that some poems are more equal than others. The Romantics were roundly criticized for what was perceived as their full-throated emotionalism, and the Metaphysical poets, as well

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as certain modern poets, were forcibly brought into the center of the English canon on the basis of their intelligence and complexity-cum-holism.22 Like Benedict and Sapir, the New Critics argued for a fundamental relativizing of their objects of study: poems and cultures ought not to be judged on the basis of how they appear from our own culture’s perspective. And yet integration itself became a premium for good poems, as it did in the study of cultures: the incomplete or overly complete (overloaded) poem, the Romantic fragment or bursting Whitmanian epic, became emblematic of metaphor as device either ignored or gone awry. In Eliot’s terms, the poem lacked an “objective correlative” firmly giving it aesthetic definition; in Benedict’s terms, the poem “failed of integration,” lacking the clearly discernible pattern that gave it that aesthetically whole effect. Like the incomplete culture, Sapir’s “spurious,” or Benedict’s border people borrowing too much and failing to integrate, the bad poem failed to elegantly, satisfactorily, solve the problem of how to integrate or harmonize heterogenous elements into the whole. The self-willed limits of New Critical relativism are nowhere better exemplified than in Brooks’s first appendix to The Well Wrought Urn, entitled, indicatively, “Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism.” There Brooks engages in a brand of antirelativism by labeling “critical relativism” the quite pejorative tendency among historical critics to argue that the literature of each age or epoch—e.g., medieval, Romantic—ought to be judged on the basis of its own set of culturally and historically specific standards. Brooks decries the absence of “critical precision” implicit in such a practice and argues that such “critical relativism” leaves no room for the evaluation of poems (“every poem is as good as any other” in such a formulation, he notes) and indeed leads to “the whole question of whether we can have any literary criticism at all” (197–99). Brooks’s manifest opposition to parity among poems does not mean that Brooks and the other New Critics are cleanly and simply antirelativist, especially as that term came to be formulated within modern anthropology. In fact, the relativisms of the New Critics on the one hand and the historical critics on the other are distinct, separate and yet related conceptions. The relativism Brooks is battling amounts, for him, to the abandonment of evaluation, critical standards, and a more or less generically powerful institutional method. It is integrally tied to what he sees as institutional separatism, a collocation of pigeon-holing methods that do not add up to an integrative professional method. In this respect Brooks’s argument for critical precision and a single set of standards, and against discretely particular historical methods, is not at all unlike Malinowski’s and Benedict’s arguments promoting their own methods, the functionalist and the configurational, and pointing to the institutional shortcomings of outmoded historical methods. The anarchic visage of “each period” of literary history as “carefully sealed off from possible intrusion from the outside” compels in Brooks a call for “absolute standards” of criticism (206). Brooks is resolutely Arnoldian, as well

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as modern anthropological, in his assertion that standards are urgently needed before culture as such collapses; once one adopts the historicist approach, Brooks maintains, “there can be no stopping short of a complete relativism in which critical judgements will disappear altogether” (212). Thus like Arnold, Brooks presages the anarchy that will ensue without the emergence of a modern professional standard of criticism, and like Eliot and indeed Benedict, he speculates on a time when culture itself, or cultural discriminations at any rate, may altogether cease to exist. While Brooks’s caveat may fall familiarly into the tradition of modern apocalypticism, in fact his warning appears, at the start of the twenty-first century, to have come true, as the powerfully multifaceted critical enterprise seems to lack any vocabulary with which to judge one poem as better than another. One could say that while Brooks was correct in gauging the trajectory of critical evaluation in the twentieth century, ironically—and Brooks and the other New Critics dearly loved their ironies—it was not the traditional historical critics but the New Critics themselves who, in their emphasis upon the interpretation of discrete meaning-making units, paved the way, at least on the Anglo-American scene, for the structural and poststructural flight from aesthetic judgment. Now, while one can certainly argue that the structuralist principles that all but evacuated evaluation in the second half of the century were of predominantly Continental origins, one can at least say that New Critical notions of the singular and systemic poem made the transition to the structuralist system quite amenable and sensible.

Chapter 7

HURSTON, BURKE, AND THE NEW CRITICS: NARRATIVE, CONTEXT, AND MAGIC

SINCE ITS publication in 1934, Benedict’s Patterns of Culture has become an important version of what can be called a literary anthropology. The book’s authoritative voice, stylistic seamlessness, poetic resonance, narrative vividness, and the wholeness of its structure, shot through with that elegiac tone, says of Benedict’s style that, in Geertz’s words, “whatever sort of writing this is, it is all of a piece.”1 Indeed, Patterns of Culture in many respects might be referred to as anthropology’s well-wrought urn, especially in the modes by which its ambiguity or tension is brought into a careful and graceful equilibrium, its paradoxical temper of cultural relativism and its three discordant cultures resolving into one harmonious whole, and that despite Radcliffe-Brown’s interpretation of Benedict’s statement on culture as “rags and tatters.”2 Benedict, one could say, consistently spatialized cultures, so that those cultures come to resemble Keats’s frozen figures on the urn that gave Brooks’s book its title. The well-wrought urn, however, is tempered in the fires of anarchy or apocalypse, brought into existence, as were the ashes of Brooks’s phoenix, as the consummate version of the broken cup, the grail made new, the modern world made possible in art. When we approach the work of Zora Neale Hurston, we come to a related but very different kind of literary anthropology. Hurston’s affinities to Benedict are manifold: both were female students of Boas, publishing their ethnographic masterworks one year apart, Benedict’s Patterns of Culture in 1934 and Hurston’s Mules and Men in 1935—in fact, Hurston asked Boas to pursue the possibility of Benedict’s serving as a reader for her book3; both based their works upon a tripartite structure reflecting the analysis of three cultures—Benedict’s Zuni, Kwakiutl, and Dobu, Hurston’s Eatonville, Florida, the swamp camps, and New Orleans (as depicted in two sections); and the texts of both raised issues about cultural holism and fragmentation, leading to a reader reception that was fraught with tensions over that holism and fragmentation. And yet the differences between Benedict and Hurston are plentiful and significant. Hurston’s text is anything but the well-wrought urn of anthropology; if anything, it suggests the structureless, fragmented, ragged, and overly emotional Romantic poem as figured by the New Critics. In fact, the fragmentariness of Mules and Men is registered, in the history of its readership, both in terms of a less than whole (less than authoritative or trustworthy) methodol-

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ogy and a less than whole textual structure. Benedict’s crystal-clear comparative thesis most explicitly contrasts here to Hurston’s seemingly meandering travels, as she wanders from Eatonville to the swamp camps and, ultimately, to New Orleans in search of the meaning of hoodoo. Deborah Gordon convincingly argues that the “mixed signals” given by Hurston’s ethnographic texts (both Tell my Horse and Mules and Men) severely limited Hurston’s own professional advancement and consequent anthropological and folkloric impact.4 Benedict’s free use of sources and secondhand information was sanctioned, whereas Hurston’s raised questions of methodology and even veracity. Over the years doubts have been cast upon Hurston’s proximity to her objects of study. While it was at least implicitly clear to readers of Patterns of Culture that Benedict had a predilection for the Zuni, Benedict’s stance throughout Patterns is one of distance, the comparative anthropologist–God “paring [her] fingernails”5: there is no mention in Patterns of fieldwork trouble, nor is there much of a sense of the ethnographer’s “being there,” despite Geertz’s claim. Yes, the vivid depiction of native ways makes you feel that you are present, but like Joyce’s author-God, and Joyce himself as the authorial presence (or non-presence) in Ulysses, Benedict’s ethnographer is for the most part invisible. Hurston’s persona Zora, on the other hand, is there in one’s face, often invisible only in the sense of being indistinguishable from the rural madding crowd, of welding into the black folk culture as Toni Morrison would later describe the character Pilate’s return South in The Song of Solomon, saying that she “blended into the population like a stick of butter in a churn.”6 And yet Zora does not only and simply blend; she is also blatantly posed, by her own hand, as the cause of the biggest troubles that transpire. Like Pilate’s nephew Milkman, whose quest down South in an initial search for gold finds him making bad other-cultural choices—unintended insults and the car he makes clear he can so easily afford—Hurston’s persona too makes trouble for herself and her enterprise, decking herself out in a store-bought dress and sporting a nice car. And like Milkman, Zora swaps insults that lead to a knife fight, as the book’s first section concludes in a whirl of destruction, a version of Apocalypse Now, another kind of “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” pulsing with progressive force and rapidity as the book’s first section abruptly comes to its end, the towers of the swamp community toppling as the author-anthropologist, in a sense salvaging what she herself has ruined, makes her great escape: “Curses, oaths, cries and the whole place was in motion. Blood was on the floor. I fell out of the door over a man lying on the steps, who either fell himself trying to run over or got knocked down. I don’t know. I was in the car in a second and in high just too quick. Jim and Slim helped me throw my bags into the car and I saw the sun rising as I approached Crescent City.”7 The things that made Hurston’s account untrustworthy then are precisely those that make her interesting now. And yet this rendition of Hurston’s ethno-

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graphic authority, or lack of authority, as the case may be, runs the risk of discounting the anthropologically authoritative ways in which the text does, and did, operate. For in fact Hurston was working solidly within Boasian anthropological parameters, as evidenced especially in her own discussion of her collection methods and in her taking to heart Boas’s advice to her after her first, less than successful field experience of 1927: “You remember,” Boas said to her, “that when we talked about this matter I asked you to pay attention, not so much to content, but rather to the form of diction, movements, and so on” (quoted in Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston, 91). And the ethic of salvage so characteristic of most Boasian anthropology emerges in the opening pages of Mules and Men, where Hurston explains the concept to a local man, George Thomas. When George asks Zora who she thinks would be interested in “all them old-time tales about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear,” she responds, “Plenty of people, George. They are a lot more valuable than you might think. We want to set them down before it’s too late.” And when George asks, “Too late for what?”—in itself an incisively awry retort to the assumption of the salvage ethic—Zora responds, beeline straight out of the Boasian line, “Before everybody forgets all of ’em” (8). While George’s “Too late for what?” might be read as a playful slap at the assumption of the salvage ethic and as such suggests a tweaking of the Boasian enterprise, it is an oversimplification to say that Hurston was primarily cutting away at the Boasian anthropological project, as some critics, such as Houston Baker, have suggested. Baker, referring to Boas and Mrs. Osgood Mason, respectively, asserts that Hurston “kills the kingly script of a mentor’s and a patron’s power, undoing the official mode of fieldwork through a kind of cultural autobiographical pharmaceutics.”8 At another point Baker notes that “Zora has not simply slipped the yoke or ‘turned the trick’ on a limited anthropology by the conclusion of Mules and Men, for, surely, she has also reclaimed the whole soul of the human enterprise for her conjure” (302). While it is true that Zora’s own participation in hoodoo practices, which include casting spells to kill the rivals of clients and boiling a cat alive, “goes native” in ways unprecedented in the Boasian project, at the same time Boas did put his imprimatur upon Hurston’s brand of participant observation. Boas is not quite the foil that Baker paints him to be, nor does Baker give Hurston credit for her own respect for, and her work with, anthropological traditions. First, as Gordon points out, the authorities of Boas as mentor and Mason as patron represent two very different sets of expectations (“Politics of Ethnographic Authority” 160). And more generally, what are now considered hallmarks of Hurston’s text—its location within the culture, its emphasis upon the “stylistics,” or modes of telling, of the tales—are exactly those aspects that Boas directed Hurston toward. Boas in his preface to Mules notes that in studies of African American folklore previous to Mules “the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro has

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been given very inadequately” (xiii) and that it is precisely this “intimate setting” that Hurston’s book provides for the first time. Critics such as Cheryl Wall, acknowledging Boas’s influence upon Hurston, assert how Hurston here, in her attention to the setting and styles of telling, effectively anticipated contemporary performative or contextualist folkloristics.9 Also, there is the attention Hurston pays to the migration and adaptation of European tales to a specific African American context, a priority that Boas points to in the close of his preface to the book, where he refers to “the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life” (viii–ix). While Mules clearly operates within a Boasian frame, only recently did the book find its way into the registers as a Boasian classic. Before Hurston’s rediscovery in the 1970s Mules and Men was known mainly as a rich repository of primary materials of African American folklore.10 The chief objection was that the book was not a finished product in fellow Boasian Benedict’s wellwrought-urn kind of way. Its two-part division into Florida tale-telling and New Orleans hoodoo, when read in terms of anthropological conceptions of culture of the day (Benedict’s configurational theory among them), comes off as confusion, as ragged juxtaposition, justified by the slim reed, dangerously travelogue-like, that Hurston had been there, that New Orleans was where she went after Florida (a critique leveled even more heavily upon her next folkloric-ethnographic work, Tell My Horse).11 Viewed in these terms, the transition between the Florida and New Orleans sections becomes sheerly metonymic, as something analogous to the migratory cultural trait sketched in Boas’s earlier diffusionist work. As a book giving textual form to a theory of culture, Hurston’s book comes off as a work of shreds and patches, as promulgating a model of culture as “rags and tatters,” which Radcliffe-Brown erroneously claimed Benedict’s to be. Like Malinowski’s diary, this could not stand, could not comfortably stand anyway, as a version of culture. Whereas the diary for that reason alone did not surface, Hurston’s book did. Despite what is truly Hurston’s resolute localism, her text functions to suggest or embody the conception of culture as something other than rooted, as something as mobile and as mixed as Hurston’s own heterodox traveling life (from Eatonville to the swamp camps of Florida and on to New Orleans). In this regard Hurston’s version of “traveling culture” would have been viewed as out of sync with the emergent conception of culture, promoted by Benedict, as stationary, integrated, and configurational. Like The Waste Land, as well as Argonauts and Ulysses, Mules and Men ends up becoming, or being about, the history and sum total of its readings. And in this respect examining the reception of Hurston’s text, like reading that of Eliot’s masterwork, takes us on a kind of tour of the art-culture system. Early reviews of the volume praised it as a voluminous collection of African American tales, in effect, a kind of museum of fast-vanishing verbal artifacts—

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Henry Lee Moon in 1935 called it “a valuable picture of the life of the unsophisticated Negro” (qtd. in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 10)—and yet at the same time Hurston was praised for her narrative abilities, for example, Moon claimed that the folktales were “matched by the author’s own talent for storytelling.”12 At times the book has been criticized for its dearth of proper folkloristic or anthropological documentation and more pointedly for its questionable ethnographic method and consequent unreliability, and at still other times it has been faulted for its lack of a unifying, organic form. In these various cases, the book is characterized, in Clifford’s terms, as good ethnography, good art, bad ethnography, and bad art.13 Sandra Dolby-Stahl tellingly points to Darwin Turner’s 1971 decision to categorize Mules and Men as ethnographic text and then to consider it “‘a disappointingly superficial’ ethnography” (Dolby-Stahl, “Literary Objective,” 45). “Turner maintains that in Mules and Men Hurston offers no evidence of scholarly procedure, fails to classify her material meaningfully, and fails to ask essential, analytical questions,” she writes (46). Dolby-Stahl responds by reversing the argument: citing the recent tendency to view anthropology as literary, she claims that Mules and Men is “literature rather than ethnography” (45) and more specifically that Hurston “has in fact manipulated the grouping of material not toward the scholarly goal of generic classification but rather toward the literary goal of mimesis” (47). Dolby-Stahl concludes that Hurston’s is a “literary goal,” which requires her to win over her readers “by making art appear as reality, by turning ethnographic rawness into art.”14 Part of the point here is to underscore how Dolby-Stahl, like Turner, attempts to place Hurston’s text into one quadrant of the art-culture or literature-ethnography system, that is, good art. And in this regard it ought to be recalled that Clifford’s own explication of that system emphasizes how artifacts can inhabit different locations in that system, depending upon the particular historical juncture or interpreter. Like a Kwaikutl wood carving, or for that matter like The Waste Land, Mules and Men at one turn may be praised as a collection of anthropological artifacts, at another as a finely honed work of art. The more important point, though, is that Mules and Men, both in its very working and in the history of its readership, is actually about the very transmutations between art and ethnography, neither of which, it should be noted, is inherently more “raw,” or, for that matter, more cooked, than the other. Neither is either more stable or more situated: anthropology in the early 1930s, one could argue, was as changeable and changing as art. Indeed, one could argue that Hurston complexly intermingled art and anthropology and in doing so actually unsettled the distinctions between them while at the same time building, upon the foundations of both, a new conception of culture. As several critics, including Dolby-Stahl, have noted, Hurston anticipated contemporary anthropological and folkloristic developments. This was not serendipitous; rather, it might be said that she was working within a set of lineages

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that enabled her to be original. Most prominent among those lineages were, as Cheryl Wall notes, “African-American storytelling and sermonizing” (“Mules and Men and Women,” 56) but they included as well early-century anthropological method and motivation. Her innovations, in other words, need to be read as the creative reshaping of several aesthetic or intellectual histories, anthropology among them. So while during much of the century critics praised her depiction of individual cultures and her collection of what is perhaps the fullest assemblage of African American folklore in one text, they could not make sense of the twopart structure, dealing with Florida and hoodoo. And looking to Boasian theory does not make her structure immediately apparent, except perhaps in the residual diffusionist terms of earlier Boasian anthropology. In all, Hurston’s text seems to smack of amateurism, especially in light of the legitimacy of Benedict and Mead’s strategies and signals; something else, another sort of “cultural functioning,” is needed to account for its working.

Hurston begins Mules and Men with an anthropological permission slip. “I was glad somebody told me ‘You may go and collect Negro folklore,’ ” (1), the somebody being Boas himself. While the first sentence proclaims her fealty to the profession of anthropology, after that initial pronouncement the volume is characterized by both filiations to and differences from the normative anthropological practice at the time. In fact, her second sentence notes that her accession to the field “would not be a new experience” for her, as she had been delivered at birth “into the crib of negroism.” Already she is marking herself as both a cultural insider and an anthropological outsider—the “native” village is her own. From there she goes on to describe the dilemma of being born into the culture she is bound to study: “But it was fitting me like a tight chemise. I couldn’t see it for wearing it.” Solving the problem of seeing oneself is, in effect, the first of a number of out-of-body experiences as registered by, and within, the persona known as Zora: “It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings, that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had to have the spy-glass of anthropology to look through at that” (1). Barbara Johnson, in one of the best-known essays on Hurston, rightly points to the “process of self-difference” of this opening as “the key” to Hurston’s “anthropological enterprise in Mules and Men.”15 Johnson goes on to explicate “Hurston’s multilayered envelope of address,” through which Zora the narrator begins the book as an “outsider” (discoursing upon the “folk”) and then becomes one of those “folk,” becoming in effect “a ‘we’ that addresses a ‘you,’ ” the latter being the white reader, “the new implied outsider” (137). Johnson does well to argue that the book is thus just as much about this process of

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variable identification and othering as it is about the tales and experiences collected. Her compelling argument has to do with how Hurston made the language do certain kinds of linguistic work, and yet Johnson does little to address the specific historical registers in which Hurston, as anthropologistfolklorist as well as artist, was working that language. While Hurston’s anthropological legacy, as well as the resultant method, is most obviously Boasian, especially in its emphasis upon the stylistics of the folklore as urged by Boas himself, the image of the ethnographer, sharply etched and yet ambivalently rendered, is more akin to the ethnographic persona of Malinowski than to that of Boas or Benedict. In a general sense, one could say that what holds both Argonauts and Mules and Men together, what gives each its integrity, is the narrativizing of the ethnographer’s experience as it renders shifts in the understanding of the culture in which that character is placed. Particular points on the Malinowskian plotline are repeated with vividness and originality in Hurston’s Mules and Men. Notable here is Zora’s arrival upon the ethnographic scene. While Malinowski in Argonauts famously arrives by boat, Zora makes her entry by car: “As I crossed the Maitland-Eatonville township line I could see a group on the store porch” (7), the first chapter begins, as suddenly as Malinowski’s “suddenly set down” (both present their arrival scene after a scant few pages of introductory remarks). And Hurston’s rendition of first culture contact—“ ‘Hello, boys,’ I hailed them as I went into neutral,”—like Malinowski’s, registers the need for attitudinal distancing, for a professional objectivity.16 Similarly Malinowskian are Hurston’s ethnographic strategies as they are meta-ethnographically rendered in the opening chapters. Like Malinowski, Hurston does not just assume the need for the salvaging of a culture but overtly discusses the whys and wherefores of the cultural rescue operation, most notably when she embodies the argument for salvage within the dialogue between herself and George Thomas. And much like Malinowski, and considerably less like Boas, Hurston has her persona tell stories of her accession to the “trust” of the tribe, most overtly when in Polk County, after demonstrating her willingness and ability to sing the old songs, Zora notes, “By the time that the song was over, before Joe Willard lifted me down from the table, I knew I was in the inner circle” (65).17 And like Malinowski, and again less like Boas, Hurston inscribes her persona’s own strategies for encouraging the greater participation of the tribe in the collection process, as seen perhaps most dramatically and successfully in her staging of a “lying contest,” which produces a profusion of tale tellings (65). Perhaps the most Malinowskian ethnographic strategy at work in part 1 of Mules and Men (the Florida section, entitled “Folk Tales”) is the oscillation between narratives (in the form of folktales and songs and customs rendered, practiced, dramatized) and the discoursing and contextualizing upon those narratives. Now, while Boas strongly encouraged Hurston’s emphasis upon the

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stylistics of the stories rather upon their content, the discursive patterning of Hurston’s text suggests many more filiations to Argonauts than to anything Boas ever penned. Like Malinowski, Hurston sets the stages for tellings in the form of a personal narrative of accession to the culture’s context (Hurston’s winning the confidence of the swamp community), which leads to the rendering of the tale (or, as is often the case with Hurston, the song), which is then followed by a shift back into the cultural context, in which she sometimes provides an anthropological-folkloric reading of the tale itself or, more characteristically, a contextual background, or pretext, for the next tale or song. For both Malinowski and Hurston the purport of the item presented—myth, tale, song— is completely dependent upon, because immersed within, the anthropological persona’s access to cultural context, which in itself becomes an argument that a culture is indeed a context. One can easily criticize Hurston for the seemingly thin pretexts for tales rendered, and indeed Hurston has sometimes been accused of contriving the transitions, the “between-story conversations,” into and out of the tales.18 For example, one could ask of chapter 2, was there really a church meeting nearby that led to the telling of tales about preachers, which segued into gender talk that was broken by a prayer from the church (exactly textually rendered), followed by the ring of the Baptist church bell, followed by a discussion on the diversity of “denominations” and a debate over whether the church was indeed built on a “solid rock,” followed by, in a sense verified by, a tale of how the Christ “was built it on a rock, but it wasn’t solid. It was a pieced up rock and that’s how come de church split up now,” followed by discussion about the rivalry between the Baptists and the Methodists, which segued into a tale told by a woman named Gold, about “a man as black as Gene” (one of the male tale tellers present), which led into Gold’s rendition of an etymological tale of how God made black people black, which led to an argument between the men and women present over the qualities and attributes of women—George Thomas chimes that “Her tongue is all de weapon a woman got”—which was followed by a brief rendering of another etymological tale chronicling how “She could have had mo’ sense, but she told God no, she’d rather take it out in hips,” which led to the character Mathilda’s rendering of a lengthy etymological tale of “why women always take advantage of men,” and on and on? (20–34). Boas refused to write the introduction to Mules until, according to Hemenway, “he had checked the entire manuscript for authenticity” (“That Which the Soul,” 93). Very possibly he was trying to verify the verisimilitude of such sequences. Indeed, later critics questioned the truthfulness of Hurston’s taletelling sessions—did the conversational pretexts for the tales literally happen, and in the sequences that Hurston places them in? Dolby-Stahl’s response, again, is that since Mules and Men is really essentially “literature” rather than

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ethnography, questions of verisimilitude or ethnographic accuracy do not apply (“Literary Objective,” 45–46). However, an alternative way to approach the question, and one that does not discount Hurston’s accomplishment, is to problematize the very notion of pretext (or better, pre-text): Can we establish with certainty what is the pre-text for what? Is the context (the banter between tales) the pre-text for the text (the tale itself), or is the text the pre-text for the context? (The difficulty of answering these questions makes Mules and Men a narrativefolkloric version of the famous rhetorical question that ends Yeats’s poem “Among School Children”—“How can we know the dancer from the dance?”19—the answer being, of course, that we cannot.) In the opening of his preface to Hurston’s book Boas notes that in previous studies of African American folklore “the intimate setting in the social life of the Negro has been given very inadequately” (xiii). This certainly signals the priority of text as pre-text for context, which in itself is an argument for Mules and Men as a particular kind of ethnographic work, that is, a stylistically oriented or contextualist one. And yet my point here is not to argue one over the other, which again would amount to claiming that Hurston’s text must be seen as either a kind of literature or a kind of ethnography, but rather to regard Mules and Men as a text that is about the very shifts between text and context, that is, like Argonauts, as a meta-narratological text. Finally, like Malinowski, Hurston in part 1 of Mules and Men registers the shifts between narrative as native telling, characterized by unprofessional sequence, and discourse as the authoritative synchronic register of the professional anthropologist. This shift of narrative register (which is what Barbara Johnson discusses in general linguistic terms) regularly occurs within the text of Mules and Men, as when Zora intercedes into the “between-story” conversation at the beginning of chapter 2 the following: But they told stories enough for a volume by itself. Some of the stories were the familiar drummer-type of tale about two Irishmen, Pat and Mike, or two Jews as the case might be. Some were the European folk-tales undiluted, like Jack and the Beanstalk. Others had slight local variations, but Negro imagination is so facile that there was little need for outside help. An’t Hagar’s son, like Joseph, put on his many-colored coat and paraded before his brethren and every man there was a Joseph. (19–20)

Here is clearly marked the shift from Zora as one of the gang to Zora as professional anthropologist; in Malinowskian fashion, the sequence of telling is halted as the anthropologist synchronously discourses upon tale type. The discoursing is especially Boasian in its attention to the migration and adaptation of European tales to a specific African -American context, a priority that, again, Boas points to at the end of his preface when he refers to “the peculiar amalgamation of African and European tradition which is so important for understanding historically the character of American Negro life” (xiv). While

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the paragraph above marks a dramatic departure from the dialect-filled tellings of the tales immediately preceding it, the concluding sentence begins to blend into the anthropological analysis the dialect that will soon resume; significantly, the transition marks not just a change of language but one of narrative persona. While these juxtapositions may come off as quite dramatic, in fact these kinds of discursive shifts of register—from textual narrative tellings to professional discursive asides—are characteristically ethnographic, as seen in the work of Malinowski, Boas, and, for that matter, Frazer. What unifies the differences here, what brings coherence to the apparently incoherent, is the supposition, stated or unstated, that the text total is an exemplification, demonstration, of how culture works and the fact that it works. In this regard the text does not merely provide examples of cultural material but in fact demonstrates that culture coheres and that it works as a context. One could say that Mules and Men works as a counterpart to Eliot’s The Waste Land, as a work that not only is about but is in fact formulating and embodying theories of the dissemination, articulation, and adaptation of culture. In this sense Hurston is working up her own creative “notes” toward the definition of culture, and like The Waste Land, her work is replete with cultural artifacts about to burst collectively into formulae for cultural definition. Hemenway says as much when he refers to Mules and Men as “a storehouse of . . . revelations, a repository of coded cultural messages” (“That Which the Soul,” 92), and yet Hemenway seems to take for granted the ahistoricized stability of the concept of a “coded cultural message.” In fact, such a term would not have been understood before 1922, and in fact Hurston, like Benedict, was helping to make such a term richly comprehendible. However, unlike Benedict, Hurston was putting at the center of her project the perception of cultural context as perceived through intense participation observation, context as perceived by doing, by participation, and as rendered dramatically, as being done. It is along these lines that Hemenway refers to Hurston’s method as “presentational” (94). We could indeed borrow Barbara Johnson’s words and note that it is hard to say whether Hurston in Mules and Men is describing a culture or employing one. Wall, with a sharp historical sense, connects the conception of dramatistic context in Mules and Men to Hurston’s own definition, as expressed in her important literary critical essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” of “Negro life” as “highly dramatized.” Wall also well notes that Hurston, who “both theorized and put into practice the concept of performance,” looks forward to the performative folkloristics of the last quarter of the twentieth century (“Mules and Men and Women,” 56). And yet Hurston was not only anticipating performative folkloristic theory but also building upon Boasian, and especially Malinowskian, conceptions of the orchestrated performance of cul-

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ture as performative, and doing so through theories of language as doing things, as being about getting some pretty powerful things done. One might object that this somewhat unlikely linking of Hurston to Malinowski discounts some real difference between them, and in fact some of these differences really do count. The split between British functionalist anthropology and American Boasian cultural anthropology should be acknowledged, but not to the extent that the doors of communication and influence between these schools need be closed, for indeed they were not. Indeed, both Malinowski and Hurston constructed the enactment of culture as concept, and did so in part through the oscillations between narrative and discursive registers. And yet the differences are very telling. For in fact what distinguishes Hurston’s text from Malinowski’s, and from Boas’s work too, for that matter, is that Hurston’s narrative shifts are not limited to shifts from narrative to discourse, from tales to tellings, but include as well the shift that began this section, from the inside to the outside of the chemise. Hurston’s text is, in a way impossible for Malinowski, about getting inside, about a kind of immersion that Malinowski could never achieve. Her work, in other words, is not about “grasping the native’s point of view” but about inhabiting it.

While the linking of the New Critics to Benedict might seem an unlikely pairing, the joining of the likes of Brooks, Ransom, and Tate to Hurston appears even unlikelier. But a good part of this project is intended to bring out the similitudes of the dramatically dissonant, or a least apparently so, and it should be stated from the outset that Hurston and the New Critics were all in the full flush of their careers in the same decades, the 1930s and 1940s, and that all were involved in characteristically American institutional enterprises: American cultural anthropology on the one hand and American formalist literary criticism on the other. While one might first surmise that the cultural politics of the two camps, Boasian anthropology and the Agrarian New Critics, were entirely dissimilar—the leftism of Boas and Benedict on the one hand and the rightist politics of Ransom and Tate on the other—one can gesture toward the southern regionalist origins, subjects, and political base of each. More specifically, one can point to the problematics of Hurston’s own cultural politics. The prominent African American novelist Richard Wright in 1937 severely criticized Hurston’s writing for its depiction of contemporary blacks: “Hurston’s negroes,” he asserts, “swing like a pendulum in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears.”20 For her part, Hurston attacked the leftist politics of Wright and others by labeling them “the sobbing school of Negrohood”; and ultimately, by the 1950s, Hurston’s own political pendulum would swing to the far right and remain there.21

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Of course, a black conservative Republican and a white southern Democrat represent two very different political positions; thus, it would be absurd to try to argue that the New Critics were arguing for the same political program as Hurston. In fact, the closer one looks at the cultural politics of their respective writings, the more one realizes the need to avoid such fast and loose political labels and insist upon a careful reading of Hurston’s own political positionings in their specific cultural context.22 And in that vein it should be noted that despite their fundamental differences, both Hurston and the New Critics were making the case for the cohesiveness of rural southern culture, and that the arguments of both, working out of their respective disciplines, became ways of formulating something called “culture.” First, both the New Critics and Hurston rendered their objects of study— poems and black folk culture, respectively—as essentially dramatistic. Cleanth Brooks, for example, in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939), reads poetry as drama—he discusses “the poetry of wit as a dramatization of the lyric”23— and more specifically considers Donne’s poetry and in fact all Metaphysical poetry as “dramatic—not only fundamental but on the most obvious level,” particularly its use of “dialogues,” its “swift, abrupt openings,” its “sudden shifts of tone,” and its “use of shock.” And, Brooks notes, “to turn to deeper and more significant characteristics, the poet’s approach to any given subject, however abstract or general it may be, is always made through some concrete situation” (213). Though one hardly thinks of Donne’s poetry and southern folk culture in tandem, in fact in some interestingly variable ways the dramatistic qualities of dialogue, sudden transitions, shock, and, above all, the rootedness in a “concrete situation” all accurately describe how Mules and Men operates as a text. And Hurston herself, in the 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” asserts that the “thing” that “permeates [the ‘Negro’ ’s] entire self . . . is drama,” and pointing to the “rich simile and metaphor” of “Negro expression,” qualities precisely prized by the New Critics, as evidence, she claims that “every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized.”24 Brooks’s assertion of Metaphysical poetry’s rootedness in a “concrete situation” brings to mind the modes by which Hurston in Mules and Men relentlessly contextualizes all of the tales and songs and customs into the social situation of the “between-story conversation.” And both in turn recall the imperative, as expressed by Malinowski a decade earlier, of reading culture in terms of the “context of situation.” For Malinowski, Brooks, and Hurston the concrete dramatics of the lived situation work essentially and intimately through the relationality of the lived contexts: while the apprehension of the vibrant dramatics of the situation is essential, those dramatics can only be comprehended by understanding their “functional” relation to each other and to the “whole” of the social life they are trying to convey or achieve.

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Brooks expresses the conception of the functional contextuality of the poem when he argues that the significance of the poem—that is, the good poem, in this case Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”—can only be arrived at “by its relation to the total context of the poem”; the poem itself, Brooks asserts, is characterized by “the unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinate to a total and governing attitude.”25 In a typical New Critical bifurcation of science and art Brooks argues that “scientific propositions can stand alone” but says that in a poem “the expression of an attitude, apart from the occasion which generates it and the situation which it encompasses, is meaningless” (189). This latter description of how a poem works reads accurately as a paraphrase of Malinowski’s explication, in the “Supplement” to The Meaning of Meaning,26 of how a culture operates and can be read, and it also describes Hurston’s strategy in part 1 of Mules and Men, where the stories are so bound up with the conversation that they can only be understood in juxtaposition to each other. For all three writers, the dramatic details are rendered sensible only through the articulation of the total “context of situation.” Brooks, in his important essay “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” asserts that the “the life and essence of the poem is not in the stated content but in the relations between its elements” and then goes on to characterize this relation as “functional” (The Well Wrought Urn, 182). Malinowskian functionalism’s filiation to and perhaps even influence on Brooks’s conception is here quite overt and comes to characterize, describe, both the methodology and the style of Mules and Men. And yet simply aligning Brooks to Hurston on the grounds that they are “functionalist” runs the risk of discounting some real differences. For one thing, the properties of that “functioning” for the two writers differ quite profoundly. In The Well Wrought Urn Brooks cites a critic, a Mr. Stauffer, who objects that Brooks himself as a critic favors “all things original, spare, and strange” and then states that he would substitute the term functional for spare (201–2). Brooks then proceeds to insist that Mr. Stauffer would surely agree with him that “the opposite of spareness,” as manifested in “the obese poem, the overstuffed poem,” is unacceptable, that “wordiness, mere external decoration, unrelated sentiment . . . are faults,” and that “some kind of relation must obtain between the individual word or incident and the poem as a whole” (202). While the latter assertion as a generalized statement on functionality and holism might find no quarrel with Hurston, Brooks’s assumption of the undesirability and untenability of “external decoration,” would. In fact, in “Characteristics of Negro Expression” Hurston writes that “the will to adorn is the second most important characteristic of Negro expression,” second only to “drama” (50). The lean and hungry look of the ideal New Critical poem has little to do with the “gaudy” Negro aesthetic as articulated and celebrated by Hurston, and though it precedes most New Critical writing, her statement that “perhaps [the ‘Negro’ ’s] ideas of ornament does not attempt to meet conven-

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tional standards, but it satisfies the soul of its creator” (50) sounds much like a retort to New Critical dictum. The Boasian cultural relativism behind this statement—that what “satisfies” the given “soul” is appropriate—is strong. Several pages later Hurston describes a room she saw in Mobile, with its “over-stuffed mohair living-room suite, an imitation mahogany bed and chifferobe, a console victrola,” its “walls . . . gaily papered with Sunday supplements of the Mobile Register,” and its “mantel shelf . . . covered with a scarf of deep home-made lace, looped up with a huge bow of pink crepe paper” (53). It is, in all, a New Critical nightmare, pure gaudiness without reference to the architectonics of functional spareness. Indeed, Allen Tate, in his 1940 essay “Understanding Modern Poetry,” asserts that “certain modern poets offer no inherently poetical objects” and thus demonstrate that “poetry is not a special package tied up in pink ribbon” (On the Limits of Poetry 116–17). The masculinist implications of this language in its attempt to define and limit modernism are clear.27 Hurston’s defense of this extravagance speaks as an implicit critique of American formalist criticism of the period, a defense of her own methodology and style, a feminist redefinition of modernist aesthetics, and an assertion of Boasian cultural relativism in the vein of Ruth Benedict: It was grotesque, yes. But it indicated a desire for beauty. And decorating a decoration, as in the case of the doily on the gaudy wall pocket, did not seem out of place to the hostess. The feeling back of such an act is that there can never be enough of beauty, let alone too much. Perhaps she is right. We each have our standards of art, and thus we are all interested parties and so unfit to pass judgement upon the art concepts of others. (53–54)

While the connections of Brooks to Malinowski’s “context of situation” might appear speculative, there can be no doubt that Kenneth Burke, a contemporary of Brooks and arguably a New Critic in the first phase of his career (through the late 1930s), was directly influenced by Malinowski’s concept.28 Burke, in his important essay “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” published in book form in 1941, like Brooks and Hurston holds out for the preeminence of the “dramatic”: “We propose to take ritual drama as the Ur-form, the ‘hub,’ with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub. That is, the social sphere is considered in terms of situations and act.”29 While the emphasis upon ritual drama as Ur-form borrows heavily from Frazer and the Cambridge Hellenists, the emphasis upon situation is distinctly Malinowskian in the sense that meaning occurs, accrues, in specific social situations. Burke’s debt to Malinowski is evidenced several pages later when, in his famous explication of drama as an “unending conversation” that is in progress as we enter it and continues when we leave, he notes, “Nor is this

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verbal action [of the conversation] all there is to it. For all these words are grounded in what Malinowski would call ‘context of situation’ ” (111). And in his book A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), where he primarily works with “the ingredient of rhetoric in all socialization,” Burke makes the case for what he calls “pure persuasion,” defined as “the saying of something, not for an extraverbal advantage to be got by saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying,” and then makes recourse to Malinowski: “What the anthropologist Malinowski called ‘phatic communication’ might seem close to ‘pure persuasion.’ He referred to talk at random, purely for the satisfaction of talking together, the use of speech as such for the establishing of a social bond between speaker and spoken-to.”30 Burke’s entire critical corpus, ranging over a roughly forty-year period, is centrally concerned with the modes by which literature works in socially dramatistic contexts. Literature for Burke reflects, and is, a way of being in the world; and it not only reflects the world but, in contradiction to Auden’s proclamation in his elegy to Yeats, can and often does “make things happen.” In a move that is centrally anthropological—Geertz makes a point of noting Burke’s anthropological importance, and Boon makes a point of noting the importance of Burke’s dramatism to Geertz31—literature is socially grounded and is all about social grounding, is a way to socially ground. Literature becomes, in a quite Malinowskian manner, what Burke, borrowing from Malinowski’s “Supplement” (Meaning of Meaning, 316), calls a “mode of action.” The notion of literature as a mode of social grounding is in fact the central thesis in Burke’s important essay “Literature as Equipment for Living,” which also appeared in The Philosophy of Literary Form. Discussing the cultural work that folk proverbs do—“they name typical, recurrent situations” and are “designed for consolation,” as well as “for vengeance,” and “have to do with foretelling” (Philosophy, 293–94)—Burke suggests that we “extend such analysis to the whole field of literature” and asks, “Could the most complex and sophisticated works of art legitimately be considered somewhat as ‘proverbs writ large’?” (296). Literary works in Burke’s tentative but tantalizing reading put into play the various ways for a given writer in a given age to “size things up.” Burke opens “The Philosophy of Literary Form” with the following assertion: “Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers” (Philosophy, 1). Burke’s first sentence is eminently Malinowskian in its implicit argument that the only way to understand the works is to grasp the “situations in which they arose,” in other words, their “context of situation.” It is a statement that helps argue for the legitimacy of the organization of Hurston’s Mules and Men as well: the tales themselves, as a form of Ur-literature such as the proverb, must be seen as answers to the

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social context, or “context of situation,” in which they arose. Burke’s second sentence is especially suggestive in relation to Hurston, for it reminds one of Hurston’s argument for the rhetorical and artful—even to the point of “gaudy”—nature of black expression. Burke’s filiation and yet distance from the New Critics is clearly illustrated in Brooks’s commentary upon him. In “The Heresy of Paraphrase” Brooks defines the poem along the lines of a “temporal art” (ballet, music), that is, as “a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal schema”; and in a note he cites Burke on the poem as “a mode of action.” Brooks goes on to say that he has “several rather important reservations with respect to Mr. Burke’s position,” though he does note that there are “large areas of agreement” as well (Well Wrought Urn, 186). The distinction Brooks makes concerning Burke has important ramifications for what ultimately separates Burke from the New Critics. Brooks makes room for the possibility of perceiving poetry as a diachronic rather than a strictly synchronic or spatial art form—the latter interpretation being the one that most readers associate with the New Critics. But while admitting to the possibility of the temporal axis, Brooks draws a line between assenting to the poem’s temporality and Burke’s assertion that the diachronic aspect of the poem means that the poem has human agency, that it does social or cultural work. For the New Critics, the poem tends to form its own special province, a staked-out place where a man, in Arnoldian fashion, can be culturally prepared, not for the direct doing of the world’s work, but for the potentiality of action. This is eminently prepared for by I. A. Richards, one of the most important of the proto–New Critics, when he notes, in a passage that would later be repeated by Allen Tate, that “in a fully developed man a state of readiness for action will take the place of action when the fully appropriate situation for action is not present.”32 Literature, then, prepares one for not acting in the world and in this regard could not be further from Burke’s conception. Richards’s own distinction, as stated in his 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism, between “scientific” and “emotive” language sets the stage for the New Critical separation of poetry from doing or acting. For Richards, scientific language is that of “reference,” while in “emotive” language words are used “for the sake of the attitudes and emotions which ensue.”33 Thus poetry is categorized as “untrue” (215), and “emotive belief,” what poetry obtains, is characterized by “provisional acceptances, holding only in special circumstances.” In this respect scientific language is “different in kind” (219–20). Richards’s distinction is famously carried forward in his concept of “poetic language” as “pseudo-statement” and in his proclamation of the “fallacy” of identifying poetry or any art as science (Science and Poetry, 62, 68). Richards’s severance of poetry from science is reinforced by Brooks, who identifies paradox as “the language appropriate and inevitable to poetry” and opposes the poet to the scientist, the latter of whom requires “language purged

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of every trace of paradox” (Well Wrought Urn, 3). Tate identifies Matthew Arnold as the culprit who confused and conflated poetry and science. In “Literature as Knowledge” Tate points to Arnold’s mistake of equating poetry as “descriptive science,” holding that Arnold “gives the case for poetry away to the scientists” (18, 21). Both Tate and Brooks in effect delimit Arnold’s conception of culture to the aesthetic realm. Their insistence on the separation of the two goes well beyond Richards, who, in Science and Poetry, though he distinguishes poetry from science, is careful to note that poetry should not be regarded as “a denial or as a corrective of Science” (68). The New Critical bifurcation and opposition of poetry or any art and science is precisely the attitude that historically made it difficult to perceive a book like Mules and Men as anything other than failed art or failed science (or social science). The implication is that science cannot aspire toward art, and vice versa, and of course Hurston’s text gives all the signals of the conflation denounced by Tate. Animating Richards’s criticism, however, is that while art is not a science, or more precisely, a social science, the criticism of art can be. Tate would disagree with this contention, and in fact in “Literature and Knowledge” he lambasts Richards’s attempt to arrive, as Tate sees it, at “what poetry would be only if we could reduce it to the same laboratory technique” as that of a field like psychology (42). And yet Richards and Tate do agree on the wrongheadedness of regarding poetry, or more broadly, aesthetics, as wielding or having as its essential nature mystical or magical forces. At the start of Principles of Literary Criticism Richards returns to his opposition (as stated in The Meaning of Meaning one year earlier) to regarding language as driven by “primitive” or animistic principles. Commenting on “the great advance made upon prescientific speculation into the nature of beauty,” he rails at “the paralyzing apparition Beauty, the ineffable, ultimate, unanalyzable, simple Idea,” and refers as well to “a flock of equally bogus entities” (Principles, 12). Richards declares that “this difficulty of the linguistic phantom still lives,” and in his insistence on a professionalized, scientific approach to language he makes the following claim: “Although few competent persons are nowadays so deluded as actually to hold the mystical view that there is a quality Beauty which inheres or attaches to external objects, yet throughout all discussion of art the drag exercised by language toward this view can be felt” (13). In the 1934 essay “Three Types of Poetry” Tate warns against the conflation of the properly aesthetic to the scientific, of the “scientist” and the “Romantic,” both of whom he sees as trying to control nature through the individual will: “The will of science and the will of the romantic poet (the frustrated allegorist) are the same will. Romanticism is science without the systematic method of asserting the will” (On the Limits, 100). Tate’s reasoning in fact makes Romanticism into magic, for following from Frazer’s famous formulation, magic, like science, is an attempt to control nature, but it is an evolutionarily

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prior and hence faulty or mistaken version of science; Frazer distinguishes both magic and science from religion, which represents an obeisance to higher forces rather than an attempt to wield power. Tate’s assertion that “the momentary illusion of individual power is a prime quality of the romantic movement” (101) comes off as suggesting that Romanticism is Frazer’s magic as mistaken science and in effect likens real literature—of say, the Renaissance—to religion. What is important here is not so much Tate’s opinion of the Romantics as the filiation of Richards’s and Tate’s thinking on the relation of magic to aesthetics and the ways in which the aversion to the notion of the magical power of words was rehearsed by both Richards and Malinowski in The Meaning of Meaning. And yet it needs reminding that Malinowski in his “Supplement” heavily qualified Ogden and Richards’s contention on the need to eradicate the belief in the primitive power of language and held out for the necessity of the “extreme vitality of the magical attitude to words” (Meaning of Meaning, 325). The relation of Malinowski to Richards on the magical power of words is quite overtly doubled in Burke’s relation to Richards. Indeed, in the opening pages of “The Philosophy of Literary Form” Burke, in a section entitled “Magic and Religion,” refers to Ogden and Richards’s claim that the biblical “taking the name of the Lord in vain” is magical, is in essence “conjuring for malign purposes by uttering one’s magical decrees ‘in the name of’ the Lord” (Philosophy, 3–4). Like Ogden and Richards, Burke cautions that this magical “device . . . is not so dead, or even so impotent, as one might at first suppose,” but Burke follows this, as did Malinowski in his “Supplement,” with an important qualification: The magical decree is implicit in all language; for the mere act of naming an object or situation decrees that it is to be singled out as such-and-such rather than as something other. Hence, I think that an attempt to eliminate magic in this sense, would involve us in the elimination of vocabulary itself as a way of sizing up reality. Rather, what we may need is correct magic, magic whose decrees about the naming of real situations is the closest possible approximation to the situation named. (4)

Burke not only shares Malinowski’s ambivalence over the desire to eliminate magical vocabulary but, like Malinowski, holds out for the functional legitimacy of magical thinking in “primitive” culture. While he has readily adopted the Frazerian distinctions between magic, science, and religion,34 he emphatically rejects Frazer’s conception of magic as “bad science” precisely on culturally relativist grounds, as the following passage makes clear: Recent emphasis upon the great amount of superstition and error in the beliefs of savages has led us to a false emphasis here. We have tended to feel that a whole collectivity can be “wrong” in its chart of meanings. On the contrary, if a chart

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of meanings were ever “wrong,” it would die in one generation. Even the most superstitious-ridden tribe must have had many very accurate accounts of sizing up real obstacles and opportunities in the world, for otherwise it could not have maintained itself. Charts of meaning are not “right” or “wrong”—they are relative approximations to the truth. (Philosophy, 108)

Burke’s contemplation over the unlikelihood of a culture’s ceasing to exist hearkens back to Eliot’s controversial hypothesization of the entire disappearance of culture, and in this regard Burke’s position is akin to that expressed in Raymond Williams’s critique of Eliot on this point. And Burke’s notion of a “chart of meanings” particular to a tribal culture proceeds right out of Malinowski’s conception of myth as “charter” to a culture’s functionality. Burke in fact acknowledges his debt to modern anthropological theory as applied to magic’s cultural efficacy in A Rhetoric of Motives when he notes that anthropology does clearly recognize the rhetorical function in magic . . . far from dismissing the rhetorical aspect of magic as merely bad science, anthropology recognizes in it a pragmatic device that greatly assisted the survival of cultures by promoting social cohesion. (Malinowski did much work along these lines. . . .) But now that we have confronted the term “magic” with the term “rhetoric,” we’d say that one comes closest to the true state of affairs if one treats the socializing aspects of magic as a “primitive rhetoric” than if one sees modern rhetoric simply as a “survival of primitive magic.” (43)

Burke not only openly acknowledges Malinowski but also makes overt his opposition to the Frazerian view of magic as “bad science” and supports the functionalist orientation toward cultural analysis. The confrontation he creates between magic and rhetoric is not simply a way of prioritizing the latter over the former but in fact grants to magic the status of a pragmatic communicability, vis-a`-vis Malinowski, and at the same time cleaves to a synchronic-functionalist, as opposed to a diachronic-evolutionary, model of culture. Magic in this sense is not a Tylorian “survival” of past forms but, rather, a pragmatic mode of communicability, a “mode of action.” Burke clarifies this point in characteristically Malinowskian terms when he asserts that rhetoric is “not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic” (Rhetoric, 43).

Hurston opens “Hoodoo,” part 2 of Mules and Men, by saying that she had been “gathering and culling over folk tales” for one year and that her financial situation demanded that she move on to the subject of hoodoo and the locale of New Orleans. At this point why hoodoo would be necessary for this study

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proper is not made at all clear. She then goes on to describe the state of hoodoo in America in the highly Boasian language of borrowing and adaptation: Hoodoo, or Voodoo, as pronounced by the whites, is burning with a flame in America, with all the intensity of a suppressed religion. It has its thousands of secret adherents. It adapts itself like Christianity to its locale, reclaiming some of its borrowed characteristics to itself, such as fire-worship as signified in the Christian church by the altar and the candles and the belief in the power of water to sanctify as in baptism. (183)

Wall rightly notes that this paragraph is a greatly condensed version of Hurston’s essay “Hoodoo in America,” published in 1931 in the Journal of American Folklore. This one-hundred-page essay, comparing the hoodoo of the United States to that of the Caribbean, Wall adds, is “written in the dispassionate tones of the social scientist.”35 The objective anthropological tenor of Hurston’s paragraph, however, abruptly turns when Hurston follows a brief paragraph later with a telltale shift in person: “The way we tell it, hoodoo started way back there before everything” (183). The move to the first-person plural broadly signifies the move into the status of anthropological insider, and in Zora’s particular case that of not only believer but, ultimately, hoodoo practitioner; in fact, the whole of part 2 is structured according to Zora’s experiences with her seven successive hoodoo mentors. Hurston follows the shift in person with a mythical folktale about Moses as the first great wielder of God’s words, as “the first man who ever learned God’s power-compelling words and it took him forty years to learn ten words” (184). At the heart of hoodoo, Hurston contends, is the belief in the magical power of words. Wall asserts that Hurston is confirming the “authority” of hoodoo through its “compatibility with Judeo-Christian tradition” (“Mules and Men and Women,” 64), and in this regard Hurston echoes Ogden and Richards’s claim, repeated by Burke, that the biblical “taking the name of the Lord in vain” is “conjuring,” in effect “uttering one’s magical decrees ‘in the name of’ the Lord.” Of course the important distinction between Hurston on the one hand and Ogden and Richards on the other is that Hurston actively promotes preserving and furthering the powers that Ogden and Richards condemn. Thus Hurston is aligned with Burke in claiming that such power inevitably and legitimately exists, and yet Hurston goes well beyond Burke by actually becoming a hoodoo practitioner, a wielder of what she calls the Queen of Sheba’s “gold-making words” (185).36 Like Burke, Hurston essentially holds that words can do things in the world, that they have real human agency, and that those who wield them possess real power. Burke’s emphasis, of course, is upon literary words to work like proverbs, in effect having the power to change one’s world, to equip one for living, and in fact even to change living conditions, whereas for Zora it is hoodoo words and customary practices that change the world by casting out demons,

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causing harm to adversaries, and removing spells. What makes Hurston’s account so very dramatic, startling, less than ethnographically “objective,” and in fact for many outrageous is the vivid rendering of the kinds of hoodoo activities she is willing to engage in, which range from her own lengthy ritual initiations (solitary, nude, and fasting), the killing of sheep, decapitating chickens, and boiling a cat alive in order to obtain “the Black Cat Bone,” the latter of which Hurston strikingly renders: “When he screamed, I was told to curse him. He screamed three times, the last time weak and resigned. The lid was clamped down, the fire kept vigorously alive. At midnight the lid was lifted. Here was the moment! The bones of the cat must be passed through my mouth until one tasted bitter” (221). If the act itself, as orchestrated by the hoodoo doctor Rooster and his assistant Mary, is novel as an attempt, in Malinowskian terms, to get at “the native’s point of view,” the act’s aftermath suggests something new in American ethnographic practice, the arrival at the revelation that cannot be translated, transmuted, into anthropological knowledge, that can, and must, remain ineffable: They [Rooster and Mary] both looked fearfully around the circle. They communicated some unearthly terror to me. Maybe I went off in a trance. Great beast-like creatures thundered up to the circle from all sides. Indescribable noises, sights, feelings. Death was at hand! Seemed unavoidable! I don’t know. Many times I have thought and felt, but I always have to say the same thing. I don’t know. I don’t know. Before day I was home, with a small white bone for me to carry. (221)

The bone as agent is carried away as a signifier of experience gained, but it is an empty signifier, in Le´vi-Strauss’s terms a “floating signifier,” which can signify anything and nothing, and perhaps because of that indeterminacy carries with it great power. In more culturally specific linguistic terms, Henry Louis Gates, in his afterword to Mules and Men, terms this power “the figurative capacity of black language” and refers to what one character in Mules calls “a hidden meaning, ju’ like de Bible . . . de inside meanin’ of words” (292–93). The “hidden meaning” that Hurston’s character discourses upon suggests a proposition on the nature of language that is completely contrary to Ogden and Richards’s central assertion that the “meaning of meaning” is found, not in any inner, hidden content—an idea the authors pose as a naive and dangerous primitive survival—but rather in the recognition that meaning is produced through the complex contextual relations of “Thought,” “Symbol,” and “Referent” (Meaning of Meaning, 11). Houston Baker’s “Workings of the Spirit: Conjure and the Space of Black Women’s Creativity” importantly links the concepts of context and meaning to Hurston’s hoodoo. Baker opens by contrasting meaning and context as, respectively, “enclosure and stability” and “openness, uncertainty, indeterminacy” (281). “The human metaphysical and analytical inclination,” Baker

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claims, “is to conceive ‘context’ as a determinable place that stands in causal relation to an always elusive ‘meaning.’ Context, thus, becomes, out of a bent for certainty, the meaning of meaning” (281). Baker’s overall argument is that Hurston through her conjuring up-ends the search for a stable context by pursuing the deep and powerful meaning that is magic. And in a general sense Baker is right in his assertion that for the architects of the “meaning of meaning,” context is everything. And he is perhaps ultimately, and importantly, right that context serves as an avenue by which to anchor, stabilize, cultural phenomena—poems, cultures—in the twentieth century. And most pressingly he is correct, but only in certain contexts, that arguments from “context” work against the “poetic image” as “a means of liberation”: it is that “poetic image” that he identifies with Hurston’s “conjure.” However, what Baker defines as “the human metaphysical and analytical inclination”—context—is in fact historically shaped and argued. Context as a modern intellectual concept was effectively forged and negotiated in the early part of the twentieth century by literary critics, theoreticians, and anthropologists alike. Indeed, Baker alludes to Ogden and Richards’s title, The Meaning of Meaning, as though it were natural. Indeed, that context has in effect been ignored in the search for meanings is precisely Ogden and Richards’s claim in their critique of Saussure, whose work is foundational to that of the French theorists—Derrida and Bachelard—to whom Baker resorts for confirmation of his own assertions. In fact, Ogden and Richards specifically claim that Saussure is at fault for ultimately buying into the essential meanings of words, whereas they, as well as Malinowski, move forward to press for a contextualist theory that provides what they see as flexibility of interpretation. Baker is in a sense more right than he knows, or lets on that he knows. For in fact it was the very fear of “mythomania” (“Workings of the Spirit,” 284), as he conceives such conjuring, that propelled Ogden and Richards to declaim against the power of the word, what they in fact, preceding Baker’s pronouncement by some seventy years, called “Logomania.” Their term in fact highlights, for them, that the enemy is not context but in fact the fallacy that these things mean. And this is precisely the point at which Malinowski subtly asserts his difference with Ogden and Richards. Thus the split between Malinowski on the one hand and Ogden and Richards on the other is roughly analogous to what Baker sees (wrongly, I believe) as Hurston’s divergence from Boas. Both Malinowski and Hurston, in this regard, uphold their sponsors’ methodologies of contextualism while at the same time refusing to condemn the “native” belief in the magical power of words. Nonetheless, both Baker and Wall rightly point to the importance of conjuring, and specifically women’s conjuring, as a link between what have usually been considered the two dissimilar sections of Mules and Men. Wall holds that Hurston promotes female empowerment through the practice of hoodoo, and

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she points to how the Moses tale at the start of the “Hoodoo” section “functions as a bridge between the two parts of the text; moreover its content, which links the spirit with the word . . . restates a major theme of Mules and Men” (“Mules and Men and Women,” 64). And Baker, emphasizing the “womanly communitas” of conjuring, asserts that the tales of the first part “are contingent upon ‘voodoo practices’ as regulators of Afro-American communal life. Without the outlaw religion of conjure and its powers to cure and ensure bonding, there could be no tales” (“Workings of the Spirit,” 300). Baker’s argument itself, contrary to his position on Hurston’s noncontextualism, is in effect contextual in the best Malinowskian-Boasian-Hurstonian sense. The hoodoo informs and regulates the communitas that is, gives definition to, the “culture.” Hoodoo functions as a facilitator of what brings together black culture, giving unity to the two sections of the text of Mules and Men. Wall says much the same, as, according to her, it is the mythic Moses story that bridges the gap between disparate narratives and ultimately argues for the coherence of black culture (“Mules and Men and Women,” 62–64). Indeed, the stories of the first section, proceeding, Hurston says in her introduction, from “way back in the days when God himself was on the ground and men could talk with him” (3), introduce us to the mythical-magical realm that predominates in the “Hoodoo” section. As Malinowski says in Argonauts, “the mythical world is not separated by an unbridgeable gulf from the present world of events,” and indeed it is “magic,” or in Hurston’s case, “hoodoo,” that “acts as a link between the mythical and the actual realities.”37 That mythical-magical realm is, both Wall and Baker intimate, a way of arguing for the cogency of black culture (much as Malinowski’s treatment of the synchrony of myth and magic would define Trobriand culture). Indeed, Wall asserts that “the most important constant in her career” was “Hurston’s respect for the cultural traditions of black people” (“Zora Neale Hurston,” 77); it is this assertion, she argues, that links, unites, Hurston’s corpus. Hemenway similarly argues that the central thesis of Mules and Men is that the folklore of the black South is “an expressive system of great social complexity and profound aesthetic significance” (“That Which the Soul,” 89). However, Hurston not only conveyed this particular thesis but was, importantly, working at the development and transmutation of these general concepts, especially that of an “expressive system of great social complexity,” and doing so in a way that, through cultural performance, fused the “social” (or anthropological) and the “aesthetic.” Hemenway rightly says of Hurston that “as an anthropologist she understood the word ‘culture’ ” (90), but his comment suggests that by that time the word culture was solidly and coherently defined. More specific and useful is Hemenway’s assertion that Hurston was putting forth the thesis that black folkways represented “an expressive communicative system that fostered self-pride and

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taught techniques of transformation, adaptation, and survival” (90). Hemenway’s comment here suggests Mules and Men’s affiliation to The Waste Land: both are works that not merely present a culture but in fact are themselves formulating and arguing for theories of the dissemination, articulation, and adoption of the term. In fact, Hemenway’s comment that the tales of Mules and Men “prove” that humans need “some sense of cultural cohesion” underscores the proactive and argumentative nature of her text and also affiliates it, based on its argument for the usefulness of apparently idle talk, to the concept of the phatic as argued by Malinowski and extended by Burke. Like Malinowski, Hurston argues for cultural unity through the display of often apparently random and rambling narratives; ultimately, however, Hurston, like Malinowski, delves beneath that diachrony of straight narrative and in fact justifies the cultural coherence of that narrative by recourse to the powerfully synchronous, indeed ultimately metaphorical realm of the mythical-magical. In this respect both Malinowski and Hurston were driven by the imperative of proving the cogency of a culture. Unlike Malinowski, however, Hurston flung herself fully into a people that was hers, or at least partly hers, to begin with. Her filiations, loyalties, to the culture she was attempting to demonstrate separate her from ethnographers who experimented with cultural immersion, prominent among them the latenineteenth-century Frank Hamilton Cushing. Gordon holds that in fact Hurston’s discursive method, especially as evidenced in Tell My Horse and Mules and Men, “harkens back to earlier styles of reporting, in which detailed and extensive listings of folklore and custom are the predominant form”; she then cites for her examples the work of R. H. Codrington and Frank Cushing (“Politics of Ethnographic Authority,” 157–58). Asserting that “to write ethnography in [Hurston’s] period was to document a ‘culture,’ ” the latter “conceived of as a single, unified whole that could be grasped through one of its parts” (157), Gordon essentially argues that Hurston is at variance with the anthropological effort, as personified in this case by Margaret Mead, to record and articulate a culture. An alternative to this view is to regard Hurston as a participant in the formation of the modern concept of culture, but a participant whose real distinction is as an early architect of a conception of culture that would come to predominate in the late part of the twentieth century, that is, culture as porous, as fluid, as mobile, and as less than tidy and wholly synechdochic. In this regard Gordon is correct in her argument that the “authority of Hurston’s text was dispersed, fragmented, and excessive” and that “at a time when anthropology’s literary authority was being institutionalized” (162), these qualities did not win for her a central place in the profession that Mead, or for that matter Benedict, with their more unified and coherent cultural theories, would gain.

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Hurston, it could be said, does not make explicit the definition of culture in tatters but in fact in Mules and Men gives it full form, gives it embodiment. And yet as in The Waste Land, and for that matter Argonauts, the shreds, patches, and fragments, those cultural and cultured bits that make up Mules and Men, come together through an assertion, indeed a performance, of mythicalmagical forces as the diachrony of story and custom is rendered sensible through the synchrony of the magical.

Afterword

CULTURE’S PASTS, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES

THIS HISTORICAL treatment of the culture concept inevitably must and should have some bearing on current uses of the term and debate over its usage. And indeed, such rumination is not limited to (afterword-oriented) post-speculations on where are we now; rather, this project in its insistent reading of readers of earlier “culture” readers suggests that the history of a concept is what we make of it and, echoing Eliot, underscores that we know more than those earlier cultural architects but that they are that which we know. Reading our contemporaries reading earlier readers shows consistently, persistently, that history repeats itself, or rather that roughly contemporary readings of the history of culture repeat, but with important differences, earlier readings of that concept. One such persistent way of regarding culture is to entertain the possibility of abandoning the term altogether, but cultural theorists since Arnold and Eliot have often concluded that despite the ways in which the word gets dangerously bandied about, it is as good or better than anything else (society?) we are left to work with.1 Not only is this position one with which I happen to agree but I see it as precisely one important way that the concept works, or gets worked—that is, as a term that gets propelled, that proliferates, exactly through repeated injunctions of its own (desired) demise. In other words, culture has worked, moved forward theoretically, often precisely through the (presumably failed) attempts to police and or forbid its usage. In her important essay “Invoking Culture: The Messy Side of ‘Cultural Politics,’ ” Virginia Dominguez rehearses another version of this rhetorical move, claiming, like Eliot and Geertz before her, that culture has come to take on too many definitions: “For a much-used word,” she says, “culture has little communicative efficiency.”2 But unlike Eliot, who it is often said embraces a (complexly) elitist version of culture, and Geertz, who can be said to embrace a more egalitarian interpretive-semiological one, Dominguez proposes eliminating the use of the term altogether, especially among anthropologists, on the grounds of its elitist origins. In general one could say that the effect of Dominguez’s attack is to keep discussion on culture proliferating; again, the meaning of culture keeps changing, getting complexly inflected, through various versions of attempts to curtail its usage. And in this vein, it is precisely the term’s lack of “communicative efficiency” that keeps it rolling, spinning off of its opposition. Susan Hegeman

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makes the compelling point that Dominguez in her argument against the word culture is actually “offering a theory of language, one in which terms somehow inherently contain, or import, specific ideas, largely irrespective of content and usage.”3 The culture word’s purported (by Dominguez) origin in racialist nineteenth-century thinking in this regard severely curtails or delimits the possibilities of its usage: Dominguez assumes, according to Hegeman, that a word’s origin thus determines its fate. This project is in keeping with Hegeman’s suggestion (objection), for indeed the culture concept shifts with each usage, and as this volume maintains, some terms come to displace culture or to be used in its stead, and such displacement or transference is not an abandonment of the culture concept but, rather, represents a broadening significance of it. Also, if we were to adopt the theory that terms contain specific ideas irrespective of their usage, as Hegeman suggests Dominguez holds, then one result would be simply that the whole business of culture becomes much less interesting. In this regard Dominguez’s assumption about the importance of culture’s origins is equivalent to the nineteenth-century predilection in anthropological and folklore studies to read and understand cultural material for the purposes of determining its arche-text, its starting point. This project has other purposes, revolving around the use of the term and concept and, more specifically and importantly, how it is the constant employment of the term that defines it and thus gives culture “definition” in complex and at times contradictory ways. A final few words are needed on the underlying logic or rationale behind this book’s purposeful method of bringing out the similarities and difference between what often seem to be dissimilar texts, disciplines, and authors. Admittedly this volume works, in comparativist fashion, on the relations between texts, metaphors, and ideas, but it does not posit any overt or unitary model for the equivalence between, on the one hand, the ideas these authors propounded (and the language in which they expressed those ideas) and, on the other hand, the social, economic, and political worlds in which these authors lived and wrote. Of course there are relations between the world and the texts produced in that world, but the point here is that I do not assume any singular model of that relationship (Marxist or otherwise), and I certainly do not assume that world events in any deterministic sense produced the arguments put forth by Eliot, Malinowski, Joyce, Hurston, and others. However, this study hardly cordons off the world from the texts in ways often typical of more traditional studies in the history of ideas. For example, most certainly the events of the Great War created distinctive, deeply felt, and various anxieties that had significant impact upon conceptions of culture put forth by Eliot, Malinowski, Boas, Lowie, Sapir, and others. And yet this study assiduously refuses to assume that the war and the anxiety it engendered (or complemented) in Eliot produced The Waste Land, or more pointedly that Eliot’s audience responded as it did because he had somehow caught the “spirit

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of the times.” Rather, it grants to Eliot the (partial) power to create a version of modern apocalypse that, as stated above, made people feel as though the world were falling apart. Eliot was able to do this, and here (though not always) I take my cues from him, not by mirroring experience, or by creating worlds ex nihilo, but by juxtaposing contemporaneous and antique ideas, tropes, and world events. Culture itself as model and term in its very variousness, ambiguity, and complexity, this project maintains, prevents the erection or maintenance of any model by which the term and that which it is meant to signify has been or can be put in any stable relation. This is not to say that there are not patterns of influence and usage, or that such patterns are not suggestive of felt human urges in the period in which these authors were writing. It is my hope that this book illumines those patterns, though not at the expense of pointing out the divergences of pattern as well. Certainly the tendency toward articulating culture as “whole” signals a very human urge toward totality, toward “making things whole,” on the part of culture architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, this project does not assume that things were whole previous to then (which would amount to a simplistic reproduction of the very object under study), nor does it adopt a model of motivation to explain why the authors felt and acted as they did (which, to my mind, would amount to an outsized version of the intentional fallacy). Finally, the totality that catalyzes and organizes culture, this project centrally argues, is itself complexly catalyzed and organized by its opposite—the idea, figure, and urge to unmake, to take apart, to render asunder.

Notes

INTRODUCTION CULTURE, ANTHROPOLOGY, AND THE “LITERARY” MODERN 1. Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 225. 2. See chapter 1, below, which opens with a treatment of Eliot’s and Geertz’s attempts to give culture “definition.” 3. Bruce Robbins, Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (London: Verso, 1993), 173. 4. Gerald Graff, “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture,” in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 192. 5. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 5. The anthropologists A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in their important study of the history of the culture concept, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1952), view Arnold as the architect of the conception of culture “as humanistically conceived” (29). 6. George Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1968), 69–90. 7. Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 54. 8. See Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 66–86. 9. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 92. 10. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 8. Raymond Williams in his formidable Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) asserts the complexity of Arnold on these issues, stating that for Arnold “culture, then, is both study and pursuit. It is not merely the development of ‘literary culture’, but of ‘all sides of our humanity’. Nor is it an activity concerning individuals alone, or some part or section of society; it is, and must be, essentially general” (115). 11. Edward Tylor, The Origins of Culture, vol. 1 of Primitive Culture (1871; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 1. 12. See Boas’s arguments, appearing in the journal Science in the late 1880s, against the evolutionary anthropology of Tylor and others as they specifically apply to museum classification and organization; perhaps most notably, see Franz Boas, “Museums of Ethnology and Their Classification,” Science, 17 June 1887, 687–89. George Stocking very usefully reproduces these articles and provides historical context in The Shaping of American Anthropology: A Franz Boas Reader (New York: Basic Books, 1974). See also Susan Hegeman’s insightful treatment of this controversy in Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 32–47.

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13. There are important continuities of ethnographic theory and practice between evolutionary anthropology and British functionalism: see chapter 2, below, as well as George Stocking’s seminal essay “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 12–59. 14. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” in Essays in Criticism (New York: A. L. Burt Co., 1865), 14. 15. See Eliot’s aptly titled essay “The Function of Criticism” (1923) in T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1950), 12–22. 16. Robbins, Secular Vocations, 173. See also James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 112. 17. George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 229. 18. Michael Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 218. Michael North’s recent Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) chronicles and interprets the seminal events and publications of that year and ties literary publications of that year—those by Eliot and Joyce, prominently—to anthropological ones—by Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and Rivers, among others (6–8). 19. T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 178. 20. Kenneth Burke, “Literature as Equipment for Living,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 296. 21. Robert Lowie, Primitive Society (New York: Liveright, 1947 [1920]), 440. 22. John Crowe Ransom, “Criticism, Inc.,” in The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 328–29. CHAPTER 1 MAKING UP FOR LOST GROUND: ELIOT’S CULTURAL GEOGRAPHICS 1. This sentence is a borrowing from Eliot’s own “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1950), 6. 2. T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society, in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 1–77. While The Idea of a Christian Society will not be treated here, it anticipates a number of arguments on culture that Eliot would treat more substantively in Notes towards the Definition of Culture. On the anthropological uncurrent and influences upon The Idea of a Christian Society, see Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 97–99. 3. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.

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4. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, in Christianity and Culture, 85. 5. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1952), 33. 6. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 233. 7. On Eliot’s anthropological reading and influence and his own explicit discussion of anthropological works, see John Vickery, The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); Piers Gray, T. S. Eliot’s Poetic and Intellectual Development, 1909–1922 (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982); Robert Crawford’s The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987; and Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority. 8. On the inherently interpretable nature of the culture concept, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 4–7. 9. Franz Boas, “The Principles of Ethnological Classification,” in The Shaping of American Anthropology: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George Stocking (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 62. 10. Jonathan Morse, personal communication, 1986. 11. See T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (London: Faber & Faber, 1934), 20. 12. George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 285. 13. See Edward Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), 604–7. 14. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” Dial 73 (1922): 481–85; Edward Sapir, “A Symposium of the Exotic,” ibid., 568–71; T. S. Eliot, “The Second-Order Mind,” ibid. 69 (1920): 586; Edward Sapir, “Primitive Humanity and Anthropology,” review of Primitive Society by Robert Lowie, ibid., 528–33. 15. Edward Sapir, “Civilization and Culture,” ibid. 67 (1919), 233–36. A transitional version was published in 1922, the same year as the publication of The Waste Land, in the Dalhousie Review. 16. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 53, lines 22–24. Further references to the poetry will be made by line number within the text. 17. T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in Selected Essays, 247. 18. Richard Halpern makes a similar claim in “Shakespeare in the Tropics: From High Modernism to New Historicism,” Representations 45 (winter 1994): 1–23. Halpern notes that Eliot, in his Elizabethan Essays (1934), “grants the historical alienation of Elizabethan culture, much as ethnographers accept the cultural difference between their own cultures and those they study. All that matters about conventions, [Eliot] argues, is that they form a coherent and consistent totality, not that modern readers share in that totality” (11). 19. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” in Selected Essays, 124–25. 20. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 12.

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21. T. S. Eliot, introduction to The Wheel of Fire, by G. Wilson Knight (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), xvii. 22. Susan Hegeman, in Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), also “links” Boas and Eliot according to their respective treatments of geographical-temporal movement, and she does so in order to articulate early-twentieth-century emergent conceptions of culture. Her conjoining of the two figures is meant to be “provocative” insofar as Eliot and Boas represent two very different sets of cultural politics, and yet she suggests that ultimately Boas and Eliot both participate in “a shift characteristic of modernism generally from conceptions of human history based on a vision of lineal, temporal advancement, to a more complex historical understanding that incorporates the possibility of spatial differences in humanity” (32). 23. Richard Handler, “’The Dainty and the Hungry Man’: Literature and Anthropology in the Work of Edward Sapir,” in Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 214. 24. See ibid., 213–16, on the other Boasians in this regard, especially Lowie. On the parallels to the work and life of Sapir’s friend and colleague Ruth Benedict, see below. As I argue in chapter 2, British functional anthropology, as exemplified in the writings of its prime architect, Bronislaw Malinowski, was also galvanized by such desires. 25. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” (1924), in Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 331; all citations are to this version. 26. Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth,” in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 136–72; and Vickery, Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, 243–67. 27. Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in Its Place,” in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George Marcus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 92; Liisa Malkki, “National Geographics: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (February 1992): 24; James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–112. 28. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (February 1992): 9. 29. For Roman Jakobson’s classic formulation of metonymy (as distinguished from metaphor), see his “Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,” in Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), 105. 30. Indeed Eliot opens his “Notes” to The Waste Land with the prefatory claim that “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do” (Collected Poems, 70). 31. Andrew Ross in “The Waste Land and the Fantasy of Interpretation,” Representations 8 (fall 1984): 134–58, focuses upon what he calls Eliot’s “metaphor of bankruptcy,” which he claims is commonly seen as “an index of cultural infirmity.” Readers, says Ross, have accepted that metaphor as “available to everyday cultured speech” to the extent that “the metaphor, now petrified, no longer functions as such” (134).

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32. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xvi. 33. Frazer’s influential formulation of the “Principles of Magic” as they are divided between “homeopathic” and “contagious” varieties can be found in The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 4th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1963), 12–14. 34. Throughout his career Eliot was very interested in the connections between the poet and the “primitive,” the artist and shaman. In a review of 1918, for example, Eliot asserts that “the artist, I believe, is more primitive, as well as more civilized, than his contemporaries, his experience is deeper than civilization, and he only uses the phenomena of civilization to express it. Primitive instincts and the acquired habits of ages are confounded in the ordinary man” (“Tarr,” Egoist 5 [September 1918]: 106. See also Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority, 90–95). 35. The quotation is the concluding line of “The Dry Salvages,” the third of the four quartets (see Collected Poems, 199). 36. Frank Lentricchia, “My Kinsman, T. S. Eliot,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 11 (spring 1992): 19. 37. Louis Untermeyer, in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, ed. Michael Grant (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), 1:151–52; hereafter cited in the text of this chapter as Critical Heritage. 38. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 177. 39. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 228. 40. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), vii. 41. A. Walton Litz, “The Waste Land Fifty Years After,” in Eliot in His Time, ed. Litz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 7–8. 42. Louis Menand, “T. S. Eliot After His Time,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 8 (spring 1988): 93. 43. Robert Lowie, Primitive Society (1920; reprint, with a new preface, New York: Liveright, 1947), 440. 44. Sapir, “Primitive Humanity and Anthropology,” 530. 45. Eliot, “Second-Order Mind,” 588. 46. T. S. Eliot, quoted from Richard Ellmann, “The First Waste Land,” in Litz, Eliot in His Time, 52. 47. T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1957), 121. 48. Litz, “The Waste Land Fifty Years After,” 5. 49. See T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 132–47. The essay was originally delivered as a lecture at Harvard University in 1951. 50. Eliot, Notes, 136. Sapir’s “Culture, Genuine and Spurious” functions as an interesting, if often contrastive, analogue to Eliot’s contemplation upon the internationalist possibilities of cultural configuration in Notes (see Sapir, Selected Writings of Edward Sapir, 328–30). 51. For the most comprehensive version of Jameson’s rendition of postmodernism, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

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52. See, e.g., Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 127–42. 53. James Longenbach, “Matthew Arnold and the Modern Apocalypse,” PMLA 104 (October 1989): 844–55. 54. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 55. Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 1–7. 56. It is significant in terms of sexual politics that within a few years of each other, Sapir, Eliot, and Williams all embody the hybridic, postlapsarian American product as working-class woman (telephone girl, typist, and the washerwoman Elsie, respectively). CHAPTER 2 MALINOWSKI: WRITING, CULTURE, FUNCTION, KULA 1. On the continuities between Frazerian and Malinowskian anthropology, see George Stocking, “The Ethnographer’s Magic,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 12–59. 2. On the new economy of Malinowski’s participant observation, see James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 21–54; and Stocking, “Ethnographer’s Magic.” 3. James Frazer, preface to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, by Bronislaw Malinowski (1922; reprint, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 9. 4. See Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 18–67, as well as Marilyn Strathern’s “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 80–122. 5. Bronislaw Malinowski to B. Seligman, 21 June 1918, cited in Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Raymond Firth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 6, and discussed in Stocking, “Ethnographer’s Magic,” 51, and Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 96. 6. See Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority, 68–71. 7. Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967; reprint, with a new preface, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 277. The decision to publish the diary, discovered among Malinowski’s working papers after his death, was made by his second wife, Valetta Malinowska. The original diary was in Polish and translated into English. For other examples in the diary of his resentment of reading fiction, see 7, 16, 131, 199, 278, 281. 8. I. C. Jarvie, The Revolution in Anthropology (1964; reprint, Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967), 43. 9. Quotations are from George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 215. Stocking notes that after Rivers’s death Malinowski viewed Smith and Perry as “the chief rival claimants to leadership in British anthropology” and that Malinowski’s own problem was “to define a theoretical position from which to counter their own” (275–76). For a comprehensive discussion of diffusionist tendencies in early-twentieth-century British anthro-

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pology, see ibid., 179–232; on the relationship between Seligman and Malinowski, see 248–59, 274–79. 10. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in “Magic, Science, and Religion” and Other Essays by Bronislaw Malinowski (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1948), 6. See also Malinowski’s “Sir James George Frazer: A Biographical Appreciation,” written after Frazer’s death in May 1941 and appearing in Malinowski’s posthumously published A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 11. Malinowski to James Frazer, 25 October 1917, quoted in Robert Thornton, “Imagine yourself suddenly set down. . . ,” Anthropology Today 1 (1985): 8. 12. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 112. 13. On the importance of charts and tables to Malinowski’s method, see Kenneth Dauber, “Bureaucratizing the Ethnographer’s Magic,” Current Anthropology 36 (February 1995): 75–95. 14. Eliot asserts in “The Function of Criticism” that “any book, any essay, any note in Notes and Queries, which produces a fact of even the lowest order about a work of art is a better piece of work than nine-tenths of the most pretentious critical journalism” (T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, new ed. [New York: Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1950], 21). 15. On the relation of the emergence of the culture concept to the notion of “untrammeled desire,” unrestrained will, or “anomie,” see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 29–73. 16. Stocking too seriously qualifies Malinowski’s version of cultural relativism, noting that “given Malinowski’s commitment to an ethnographically grounded anthropology and his evident appreciation of cultural specificity . . . one might have expected that his anthropology would develop along Boasian lines, as a pluralistic study of the variability of culture and personality.” But in fact, Stocking continues, Malinowski’s ethnographic aim was “to reveal the essential ethnic characteristics of the group he had studied” (as in his search for the “essential Trobriander”). As such, Stocking concludes, Malinowski’s work had “a universalistic thrust,” an “underpinning of evolutionary assumption” (After Tylor, 276–77). 17. Thornton’s discrimination of holisms in ethnography, in “The Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism,” in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George Marcus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 15–33, especially in its distinction between “mereological” and “all inclusive” conceptions of holism (22), made this reading possible. 18. Malinowski’s brand of functionalism allowed for a register of specific “native” experience in ways that other current and developing anthropological approaches did not. Phyllis Kaberry, for example, has noted that the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown, probably the leading methodological contender of Malinowski’s functionalism, in its emphasis upon cultural “structure,” led inevitably “to the neglect of other aspects of social life,” most prominently human experience itself: “The people, in the sense of a group of personalities, are conspicuous by their absence” (Kayberry, “Malinowski’s Contribution to Fieldwork Methods and the Writing of Ethnography,” in Firth, Man and Culture, 88).

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19. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Ethnology and the Study of Society,” as quoted in Stocking, After Tylor, 267. The essay appeared originally in Economica 2 (1922): 208–19. 20. Stocking, After Tylor, 361. Stocking here discusses how Malinowski’s changing conception of culture and function increasingly sets Malinowskian functionalism at odds with Radcliffe-Brown’s structural functionalism. 21. Stocking, After Tylor, 364. The phrase “general laws of cultural process,” quoted from Malinowski’s correspondence of 1938, comments on the commonalities between his and Radcliffe-Brown’s positions. 22. The language and general positions are taken from Jarvie’s Revolution in Anthropology, 189–90. Jarvie, it should be noted, clarifies the differences between the two camps as a way of debunking their authoritative status, which even in 1962 had an at least residual hold. 23. See Herbert’s discussion of the heuristic aspect of Malinowski’s culture concept in Culture and Anomie, 307 n. 3. 24. On the argument that Malinowski ultimately recanted culture as an empirical entity, see ibid., 13, 19, 115–16, 150, 307. 25. In A Scientific Theory of Culture Malinowski also articulates what he terms “functional isolates” as the discernible units of measure in a cultural “institution.” These “isolates,” he asserts, “do exist, and must be made the basis of analysis”; if they did not exist, Malinowski argues, then “functionalism would lead us into a bog” (158). Malinowski takes pains to demonstrate that function is anything but “logically circular,” to use Herbert’s phrase; in fact, Malinowski explicitly defends the concept against charges of “tautology,” of its characterization by detractors as “a logical circle” (169). 26. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, in Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 87. 27. Raymond Firth, second introduction to Malinowski, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, xxii–xxiii. 28. George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 34. 29. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 75. 30. Ibid., 78. 31. Firth, second introduction to Malinowski, Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, xxx. Firth also objects to what he sees as Clifford’s loose application of the term fiction to both ethnography and the novel (xxx–xxxi). 32. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, quoted Geertz, Works and Lives, 80, originally appearing in Evans-Pritchard’s A History of Anthropological Thought (New York, 1981), 199; Clifford, Predicament of Culture, 46. 33. See, in this regard, Stocking’s characterization of the diary as “a Joycean . . . stream of consciousness without an index” (After Tylor, 263). The filiations of Malinowski and Argonauts to the work of Joyce is treated in chapters 4 and 5. 34. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), 45. 35. For another treatment of Malinowski’s diary and what it says about his professional ambitions, see Marianne Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern

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Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 227–35. Torgovnick reads the diary in terms of the “multiple layers of repression” that it exhibits, and she asserts that it was through the “pure ethnographic writing” of Argonauts that Malinowski achieved “ultimate mastery” over himself and his unruly natives (231). 36. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 31. For a more general discussion of the development of wholes in modern ethnography, see Thornton, “Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism.” 37. See Jarvie, Revolution in Anthropology, 40, 183, 188. 38. See esp. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority”; and idem, “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg et al. (New York: Routledge, 1992). 39. My argument here for the parameters of Malinowski’s accomplishment is consonant with Thornton’s general claim, in “Rhetoric of Ethnographic Holism,” that the success of ethnography depends upon convincing the reader “of the existence of an initially unperceived coherence” (22). 40. The hierarchical structure of knowledge accessibility, in which the ethnographer as outsider has the perspective and skills required, and the “natives,” by virtue of insider-perspective and lack of required skills, are closed to the systematizing knowledge of their own practices, is a staple of modern anthropology. Perhaps the other prominent modern anthropologist whose methodology depends as heavily upon this hierarchy is Claude Le´vi-Strauss, whose structural methodology also works according to metonymic (syntactic, consecutive) and metaphoric (paradigmatic, nonconsecutive) poles. CHAPTER 3 MALINOWSKI, “NATIVE” NARRATION, AND “THE ETHNOGRAPHER’S MAGIC” 1. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; reprint, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 509. 2. On Malinowski’s general filiations to the writing of Frazer and Conrad, see George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 233–34, 261, 268; Robert Thornton, “Imagine yourself suddenly set down. . . ,’ ” Anthropology Today 1 (1985); and James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 92–113. 3. See Stocking’s analysis of Malinowski’s “narrative technology of ‘I-witnessing,’ ” in George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 270–73. See also Clifford Geertz’s chapter “I-Witnessing: Malinowski’s Children” in his Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 73–83; and James Clifford’s “On Ethnographic Authority” and “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning,” in Predicament of Culture, 21–54, 92–113. In the former Clifford writes of Argonauts as “a complex narrative simultaneously of Trobriand life and ethnographic fieldwork” (29). 4. Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 27. 5. See Robert Thornton, “On Ethnographic Holism,” in Rereading Cultural Anthropology, ed. George Marcus (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992), 15–17.

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6. See J. R. Firth’s “Ethnographic Analysis and Language with Reference to Malinowski’s Views,” in Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Raymond Firth (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), 94, 118. 7. Gerald Prince, “Narratology,” in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 524, 527. 8. On Greimas’s reformulation of Propp’s “functions” into Greimas’s “actants,” see ibid., 525. 9. See Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority,” 29, 39–40, 45–46. 10. See James Buzard’s excellent “Self-Interrupting Artifacts: On Ethnographic Narrative” (paper presented at the International Narrative conference, Gainesville, Fla., 5 April 1997), which characterizes Argonauts in terms of the “interruptions” that break from the “story” of the text. Buzard claims that these occurrences of “discursive trespassing” are not, should not be seen as, “blemishes” on the ethnographic text but rather represent one of ethnography’s “constitutive effects.” In opposition to Thornton’s claim that Argonauts and indeed ethnography in general are something other than narrative Buzard asserts that it is “not that narrative and ethnography are incompatible, but rather that interrupted narration may be the signature of ethnography’s so-called participantobservation” (5–8). 11. See Stocking, After Tylor, 287, on the distinctions between myth and magic. 12. Bronislaw Malinowski, “Myth in Primitive Psychology,” in “Magic, Science, and Religion” and Other Essays by Bronislaw Malinowski (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1948), 21. 13. On “myth as charter,” see Stocking’s excellent treatment, where he, however, reads Malinowski’s concept of “myth as charter” as being about, or being equivalent to, the construction of the “myth” of ethnographer himself as “hero”: “Long before Susan Sontag used Le´vi-Strauss as the model of the ‘Anthropologist as Hero,’ ” Stocking claims, “Malinowski had created the role for himself” (After Tylor, 272–73). 14. See the introduction to The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Robert Thornton and Peter Skalnick (n.p., n.d.), 16–26. 15. It should be noted that Malinowski frequently argues against the common white notion of “savage crudity”: once one witnesses “savage art” in “its proper, ‘living’ setting,” one is able to perceive the “artistic perfection” that abounds (151). 16. John Paul Russo says that The Meaning of Meaning is recognized as “the bestknown book ever written on semantics” (“I. A. Richards,” in Groden and Kreiswirth, Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 620). 17. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1945), 2, 14. 18. Ogden and Richards’s comment upon the anthropological obsession with preserving dead languages is in a sense an early register or recognition of Clifford’s conception of the “allegory of salvage” at work in modern anthropology (see his “On Ethnographic Allegory,” in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 112–13). 19. Ogden and Richards, in The Meaning of Meaning, concede that “definitions” exist “which include more than ideas,” and they cite Edward Sapir’s 1922 volume Language, which considers an “emotive element” (7).

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20. In fact, Ogden and Richards, as proof of what they call “the persistence of the primitive linguistic outlook” (ibid., 29), quote Frazer on the “survival” of superstitions in the modern world. 21. One recent exception is Michael North’s Reading 1922: A Return to the Scene of the Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). North also aligns Malinowski with Ogden and Richards and focuses as well upon the publication, also in 1922, of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (31–32). 22. A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (New York: Vintage, 1952), 187. 23. There is no full-length treatment of Malinowski’s supplementary essay. Thornton and Skalnick in their introduction to The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski make brief reference to Malinowski’s essay, and Stocking, in After Tylor (283–85), devotes one long paragraph to Malinowski’s contribution, which he characterizes as one of several “functionalist forays” that Malinowski published in the several years following the publication of Argonauts. Most recently, Michael North briefly discusses the significance of the cooperative effort of Ogden and Richards and Malinowski (Reading 1922, 31–33, 43, 45). 24. In a rendition of the narrative/discourse dichotomy, later in the essay Malinowski, referring to his reading of the native text, comments, “Instead of giving a narrative I could have adduced linguistic samples still more deeply and directly embedded in the context of situation” (310). “Narrative,” again, is posited as that which is suspended in order for deep sociology to do its work. 25. See I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism (1929). The language of “tensions” and “balances” first appears in Richards’s important Principles of Literary Criticism, which appeared in 1924, one year after The Meaning of Meaning. See, on this, Vincent Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 36–37. 26. Marilyn Strathern, “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology,” in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 95. According to Strathern, what is “modernist” about Malinowski is also what is decidedly antimodernist about Frazer, as evidenced especially in Frazer’s intimate tie to his (presumed) audience. 27. Indeed, Malinowski discusses as one of three “avenues” of effective fieldwork the filling in of the “imponderabilia of actual life” (Argonauts, 24), which includes such matter-of-fact and practical activities as “the routine of a man’s working day, the details of his care of the body, of the manner of taking food and preparing it; the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires” (18). CHAPTER 4 JOYCE AND HIS CRITICS: NOTES TOWARD THE DEFINITION OF CULTURE 1. See James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1970), 1:220, hereafter cited in this chapter as Critical Heritage, giving volume and page. 2. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Study, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1955), 3.

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3. James Joyce, “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook, ed. Morris Beja (London: Macmillan, 1973), 38, hereafter cited as Casebook. 4. David Hayman, “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning (1970; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 3. 5. Over the last several years the field of Joyce studies has seen a significant increase in work devoted to the notion of an ethnographic Joyce. The annual international Joyce conference had sessions devoted to Joyce and ethnography in 1995 and 1997, and recent graduate work has reflected this interest (see, e.g., William Mottolese’s “ ‘Writing Dear Dirty Dublin’: Joyce’s Ethnographic Impulse and the Problems of Culture and Nation” [Ph.D. diss., Fordham University, 1999]; see also my own “Reading ‘Culture’ in Joyce’s Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 35, no. 4, and 36, no. 1 [summer–fall 1998]: 765–81). 6. Ray McDermott, “Conklin, Joyce, and the Wannaknow,” American Anthropologist 99 (June 1997): 257–60. 7. William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 127. 8. Frank Budgen, quoted from Clive Hart, “Frank Budgen and the Story of The Making of ‘Ulysses,’ ” in Re-Viewing the Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet E. Dunleavy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 122–23. 9. See James Buzard, “ ‘Culture’ and the Critics of Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 37 (fall 1999–winter 2000): 43–61, especially on Joyce as auto-ethnographer and Stanislaus, in relation to Joyce critics, as the unprofessional indigenous informant, lacking expertise. 10. Frank Budgen, “Joyce’s Chapters of Going Forth by Day,” in Critical Essays on James Joyce’s Ulysses, ed. Bernard Benstock (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 67–68. 11. On Joyce’s creation of an already defunct Dublin, see William Mottolese, prospectus for “Writing Dear Dirty Dublin,” 9–11; see also Enda Duffy, The Subaltern “Ulysses” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 2. 12. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 178. 13. Pound’s 1922 review of Ulysses does note that “the scaffold taken from Homer” functions as “a means of regulating the form” (Critical Heritage, 1:264). 14. So zealous was Aldington that he could not wait a year for the publication of Ulysses entire before launching his offensive against the novel. 15. Critical Heritage, 2:743. According to Patrick McCarthy, in “Stuart Gilbert’s Guide to the Perplexed,” in Dunleavy, Re-Viewing the Classics of Joyce Criticism, the first two formative full-length studies of Ulysses, by Gilbert and Budgen, both argued, in the words of McCarthy, for “the rationality, and therefore the respectability, of Ulysses,” and for a “humane (and relatively accessible) Joyce” (25). 16. I. C. Jarvie, The Revolution in Anthropology (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1967 [1964]), 173–76; George Stocking, “The Ethnographer’s Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 26, 40–41. 17. On the rhetoric of comparative evolutionism as manifested in the works of Frazer and Eliot as well as in those of Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell, see Marc Manga-

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naro, Myth, Rhetoric, and the Voice of Authority (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 18. James Buzard, in “ ‘Culture’ and the Critics of Dubliners,” has written insightfully on the commonalities between the professional symbolic-interpretive activities of modern anthropologists and those of Joyce critics, especially as manifested in the history of criticism of Dubliners. Buzard claims that both Joyce critics and anthropologists found it necessary to regard detail as rich in meaning and hence readable by the professional (44–45). 19. It should be noted that approaching Ulysses as both “naturalist” and “symbolist” preceded New Critical approaches. In Axel’s Castle (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931) Edmund Wilson hailed Ulysses as the “one great work of literature” in which “naturalism and symbolism combine to provide us with a vision of human life and its universe” (293). Vincent Leitch, in American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), notes that Wilson “faulted” the “Symbolism” of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature “for its lack of Naturalism” (100). 20. Anthony Cronin, “The Adventures of Bloom,” in Benstock, Critical Essays, 58, 65. 21. The Odyssean titles, significantly, were not inscribed in Ulysses proper but were available only by recourse to the schema itself. As McCarthy has pointed out, given that Ulysses itself was banned through the 1920s and well into the 1930s, Gilbert’s book itself served as a “substitute Ulysses” (“Stuart Gilbert’s Guide,” 26), especially in that it quoted so heavily from the original. The likelihood that more people were familiar with the “substitute” than with the original suggests how firmly the Odyssean parallels generally and the schema specifically had become attached to the novel itself. 22. See, e.g., ibid., on how Gilbert’s use of the Homeric parallels and Joyce’s schema came to be criticized by later critics, such as Hugh Kenner, as a “lead-footed schematization” (24). Yet McCarthy also notes that consistent and significant resurgences of interest in the application of the Homeric parallels have regularly occurred in the history of Joyce criticism (31–32). 23. For the myth-critical approach to Joyce’s work as echoing ritual-mythic realities, see the work of Joseph Campbell, particularly the influential full-length study, co-authored with Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1944). On Joyce as consciously adopting the comparativizing strategies of Frazerian anthropology, see John Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 326–423. Vickery asserts that even though there is no record of Joyce’s ever reading The Golden Bough, one discovers in Joyce’s work “a peculiar congruence with Frazer’s ideas, images, and informing narrative patterns” (326). 24. See Buzard, “ ‘Culture’ and the Critics of Dubliners,” 43. The Hodgart quotation cited by Buzard is from Matthew Hodgart, James Joyce: A Student’s Guide (London: Routledge, 1978), 44. 25. Margot Norris, Rereading the New: A Backward Glance at Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 353. 26. Cheryl Herr, Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 12–15.

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27. Cheryl Herr, “Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses,” in Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 20, 25. 28. Virginia Dominguez, “Invoking Culture: The Messy Side of ‘Cultural Politics,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (winter 1992): 19–42. 29. On Joyce’s reading in anthropology, see Vickery, Literary Impact of The Golden Bough, 326–30. On Joyce’s treatment of Le´vy-Bruhl in Finnegans Wake, see David Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology: Eliot, Joyce, Le´vy-Bruhl,” PMLA 109 ( March 1994): 275–77. 30. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958; reprint, New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), xvi. 31. See James Joyce, “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 154–74. The editors briefly discuss the Italian sociopolitical context of Joyce’s piece. 32. See James Joyce, “The Study of Languages,” in Mason and Ellmann, Critical Writings of James Joyce, 26. 33. Joyce, quoted in Mason and Ellmann, Critical Writings of James Joyce, 172. The editors here refer to Joyce’s use of the term Hellenize in the opening chapter of Ulysses; this passage will be treated in full and in its Arnoldian implications below. 34. For a treatment of the use of culture words in Dubliners entire, see my essay “The ‘Culture’ of Dubliners” (1998), in circulation. 35. James Joyce, Dubliners, intro. Edna O’Brien (1914; reprint, New York: SignetPenguin, 1991), 187. 36. Burgess, in an essay entitled “A Paralyzed City,” sees Gabriel as “a sort of James Joyce—a literary man, college teacher, contributor of a literary column to the Dublin Daily Express, Europeanised, out of sympathy with Ireland’s nationalistic aspirations, aware that his own culture is of a different, superior, order to that which surrounds him in provincial Dublin” (Casebook, 234–35). 37. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 9. 38. Wolfhard Steppe, with Hans Walter Gabler, A Handlist to James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: A Complete Alphabetical Index to the Critical Reading Text (New York: Garland Press, 1986), 63. 39. Quotations from Ulysses are cited by episode and line number from the authoritative Ulysses: The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986). 40. Don Gifford, with Robert J. Seidman, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s Ulysses, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 338. 41. T. S. Eliot, “Tarr,” Egoist 5 (September 1918): 106. 42. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933), 141. 43. For one treatment of how Eliot and Joyce differently handle anthropological texts and versions of the “primitive” those texts generated, see Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology,” 266–80. Spurr’s focus upon the French comparative anthropologist Lucien Le´vy-Bruhl is especially relevant: the quotations I here cite from Eliot, as I discuss

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elsewhere (see Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric, 91–94), are deliberate reworkings on Eliot’s part of Le´vy-Bruhl’s theorizing upon “primitive,” “pre-logical mentality.” 44. Much has been written on Joyce’s own notions of the analogous relation between the ancient Jews and the Irish and on Ulysses itself as, in Joyce’s own words, “an epic of two races (Israelite-Irish)” (see Letters of James Joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert, new ed. [New York: Viking Press, 1966], 1:146). For a stimulating treatment of Joyce’s “two people’s” rhetoric and its relation to Arnold’s concepts of Hebraism and Hellenism, see Maria Tymoczko, The Irish “Ulysses” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 41–43, 134–35. 45. Matthew Arnold, “The Incompatibles,” in Irish Essays, and Others (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1882), 68. 46. On the relationship between Arnold’s approach to the Irish Question and Joyce’s texts and attitudes, see Seamus Deane’s excellent “ ‘Masked with Matthew Arnold’s Face’: Joyce and Liberalism,” in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. Morris Beja et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 9–20, in particular Deane’s observation that “the Hellenization of England and the Celticization of Ireland,” as proposed by both Arnold and Yeats, “are not just allied movements” but “the same movement” (12–13). 47. Gerald Graff, “Arnold, Reason, and Common Culture,” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, 186. 48. Gifford and Seidman also complete the abbreviated description with “variety” (“Ulysses” Annotated, 271). 49. See Gilbert’s James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” especially his treatment of Cyclops. On Bloom-Odysseus as “Everyman or Noman,” see 268. 50. Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 209. CHAPTER 5 JOYCE’S WHOLES: CULTURE, TALES, AND TELLINGS 1. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, New York: Viking Press, 1975), 208. 2. See George Stocking, After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888–1951 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 267; and see above, chapter 2. In Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), Christopher Herbert also points to Henry Mayhew’s explication of a basket as an early example of a relativist articulation of culture. Mayhew’s explication appears in his fascinating, voluminous sociological study of the mid-Victorian lower classes, London Labour and the London Poor, 3 vols. (London: Griffin & Co., 1861). 3. Ian Crump, “Refining Himself Out of Existence: The Evolution of Joyce’s Aesthetic Theory and the Drafts of A Portrait,” in Joyce in Context, ed. Vincent Cheng and Timothy Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 227. 4. Maurice Beebe, “Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Aesthetics,” in James Joyce, “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”: A Casebook, ed. Morris Beja (London: Macmillan, 1973), 165, 168, hereafter cited as Casebook.

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5. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922; reprint, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 517. 6. The power of the author to invest even the most paltry of things with spiritual or spiritual-like epiphanic substance is attested to or advertised by important Joyce critics such as Harry Levin, who in his preface to Dubliners notes that “in calling his original jottings ‘epiphanies,’ Joyce underscored the ironic contrast between the manifestation that dazzled the Magi and the apparitions that manifest themselves on the streets of Dublin; he also suggested that those pathetic and sordid glimpses, to the sentient observer, offer a kind of revelation” (The Essential James Joyce, ed. Harry Levin [1948; reprint, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967], 354). This also well characterizes what Malinowski in Argonauts termed “the Ethnographer’s Magic.” 7. Stuart Gilbert, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Vintage Books, 1955 [1931]), 9. 8. Levin, preface to Dubliners, 354. 9. Brewster Ghiselin, “The Unity of Dubliners,” in Casebook, 100–101. 10. David Hayman, “Ulysses”: The Mechanics of Meaning (1970; reprint, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 15. 11. Stuart Gilbert, “The Rhythm of Ulysses,” in Critical Essays on James Joyce, ed. Bernard Benstock (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 57. 12. Joyce’s schema, as reproduced in appendix 2 of Hayman’s Ulysses: The Mechanics of Meaning (148–49), assigns an “organ” to all but the first three of the book’s eighteen episodes. These run the range of the human body and include “esophagus,” “brain,” “blood,” “ear,” “locomotor apparatus,” “nerves,” “skeleton,” and “flesh.” 13. Patrick McCarthy, “Stuart Gilbert’s Guide to the Perplexed,” in Re-Viewing Classics of Joyce Criticism, ed. Janet E. Dunleavy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 27–29. 14. Walton Litz, “Ulysses and Its Audience,” in James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium, ed. M. Beja et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 221. 15. Walton Litz, “The Design of Ulysses,” in Benstock, Critical Essays, 32. In his introduction to the volume Benstock notes that Gilbert’s early argument for “tightly schematized patterns” in Ulysses is here followed upon by Litz with his emphasis on “internal consistency and harmony” and “principles of artistic selection” (4). 16. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 47–51. 17. Cheryl Herr, “Art and Life, Nature and Culture, Ulysses,” in Joyce’s Ulysses: The Larger Perspective, ed. Robert D. Newman and Weldon Thornton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 19–23. 18. Weldon Thornton, “Voices and Values in Ulysses,” in ibid., 245–70. 19. James Joyce to Frank Budgen, March 1920 (while Joyce was composing “Oxen of the Sun”), quoted in ibid., 253. 20. Ibid. Joyce concludes his description of his analogizing strategies with the cheeky rhetorical question, “How’s that for high?” 21. Marilyn French, The Book as World: James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 168. 22. Van Wyck Brooks in 1941 lashed out most vehemently against Joyce’s send-up of the Great Tradition: “Had he not . . . run through the whole of English literature, depreciating with his parodies its greatest authors, deforming every one of them. . . .

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What fools he made them seem, as he filled his travesties of their styles with trivial and salacious implications!—and all for the glorification of James Joyce. For what a big boy he must be to put all these authors in their places!” (James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, ed. Robert H. Deming [London: Routledge, 1970], 2:743, hereafter cited in this chapter as Critical Heritage). 23. See the authoritative Ulysses:_The Corrected Text, ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 14.345, 14.524, and 14.1169 (episode and line numbers). 24. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1945), 14. 25. For more on the Burke-Malinowski relation, see chapter 7, below. 26. We do not, for instance, read the early sections of Portrait only or primarily as a critique of the child Stephen’s linguistic habits. My argument here is that what Harry Levin refers to as the “magic of names” that the young Stephen is so “Susceptible to” (“The Artist,” in Casebook, 86–87) and in which Joyce’s prose mimetically luxuriates is what in fact makes these sections so arrestingly readable. 27. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 76. 28. William York Tindall, A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce (1959; reprint, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978), 127; Anthony Cronin, “The Adventures of Bloom,” in Benstock, Critical Essays, 58. 29. Stanley Sultan, “The Adventures of Ulysses in Our World,” in Newman and Thornton, Joyce’s “Ulysses,” 272–74. 30. Denis Donogue, “Is There a Case against Ulysses?” in Cheng and Martin, Joyce in Context, 19–20. 31. See Anthony Burgess, Joysprick: An Introduction to the Language of Joyce (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), 24. A similar treatment of Joyce’s application of the “phatic” appears in Burgess’ essay “A Paralyzed City,” in Casebook, 238–39, where he considers “phatic” the “Irish town speech” that inhabits Dubliners. 32. One such poststructural reader, Vicki Mahaffey, in fact uses this very language of holism in her assessment of how Joyce should be read: the “whole” we look for in Joyce’s work, she says, “drops its silent ‘w’ and turns instead into an opposite that is also, phonetically and philosophically, identical” (see Mahaffey, Reauthorizing Joyce [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988], 5). 33. In this light, Mahaffey’s comment, though intended toward different ends, rings true: Joyce’s “whole” and “hole” end up being “phonetically and philosophically, identical,” or put another way, part of the selfsame project. 34. Karen Lawrence, “The Narrative Norm,” in Benstock, Critical Essays, 293. 35. Robert Scholes, “Ulysses: A Structuralist Perspective,” in ibid., 248. 36. James Buzard, “ ‘Culture’ and the Critics of Dubliners,” James Joyce Quarterly 37 (fall 1999–winter 2000): 43–61. 37. Robert Lowie, Primitive Society (1920; reprint, with a new preface, New York: Liveright, 1947), 441. 38. Joyce’s Anatomy of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 29. The schema is often referred to as the Linati or Linati-Gorman Schema, labeled according to the version purportedly given by Joyce to these particular individuals. Such labeling,

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in fact, tends to shift the responsibility for the schema from Joyce to the schema’s recipients. 39. Scholes’s reading of the Cyclops episode indicates a similar kind of magic at work in the “culture” of Ulysses, as Joyce, according to Scholes, constructs lists— recitations of “magical formulae,” Malinowski might say—that ultimately are shown to have their own consecutiveness in other contexts. They become, Scholes says, “syntagmatic in themselves” (250). 40. Qualifications are immediately called for, of course. Eliot’s Four Quartets (whose first “installment,” “Burnt Norton,” was published in the same year as Malinowski’s Coral Gardens, 1935) is by far the most widely read, and reread, of the works in question. Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, is rarely read entire outside of the confines of graduate seminars in English, and recently a cultural anthropologist wondered aloud to me if anyone had ever read the massive two-volume Coral Gardens entire. Still, Eliot’s poetic sequence often has been criticized along the lines of the common critiques of Finnegans Wake, for its eventless repetitive circularities, and along the lines of Malinowski’s Coral Gardens, as a late-career summation of earlier-life fieldwork. Both Four Quartets and Finnegans Wake appeared in successive installment form, Joyce’s work in the 1920s and 1930s, Eliot’s in the 1930s. On the appearance of Malinowski’s “longdelayed ethnographic magnum opus,” see Stocking, After Tylor, 285; and for reviews that characterize Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (entitled before its final publication Works in Progress) as excruciatingly unreadable, redundant, and incomprehensible, see Critical Heritage, vol. 2. CHAPTER 6 PATTERNS OF CULTURE: RUTH BENEDICT AND THE NEW CRITICS 1. Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 9. 2. Richard Handler, “Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility,” in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 172. James Boon claims that Benedict in Patterns of Culture “quivers between diversity and integration to the end” (see Boon, Verging on Extra-Vagance [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999], 25). 3. Handler refers to Patterns of Culture as “fundamentally comparative and hermeneutic” (“Ruth Benedict,” 175). 4. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (1934; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 46. 5. Ruth Benedict, “The Concept of the Guardian Spirit in North America,” Memoirs of the American Anthropological Association 29 (1923): 84–85, quoted in Mead, Anthropologist at Work, 204. 6. See also Patterns, 53, where Benedict, discussing Spengler’s treatment of culture as organism, comments on “the analogy, which can never be more than an analogy, with the birth- and death-cycle of living organisms.” 7. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 111–13. 8. Benedict draws the comparison of the Zuni as Apollonian and all other Southwestern Native American tribes as Dionysian, from her earlier essay “Psychological Types

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in the Cultures of the Southwest,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists (New York, 1928), 572–81. Boon, in Verging on Extra-Vagance, refers to “Nietzsche’s diametric contrast” as notable among Benedict’s “other framing devices for contrastive configurations” (25). 9. See Bronislaw Malinowski, Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski, ed. Robert Thornton and Peter Skalnick (n.p., n.d.), 21. 10. Her first version of this argument, in “Psychological Types in the Cultures of the Southwest” (reprinted in Mead, Anthropologist at Work, 248–61), focused sharply on the Zuni as the Apollonian exception in native North American culture, and of course did not include a “paranoid” third leg as exemplified by the Dobu in Patterns. 11. See John Vickery, “Frazer and the Elegiac,” in Modernist Anthropology, 51–68, which makes the case that Frazer’s pervasively elegiac tone had a heavy impact upon modernist literature. 12. See Allen Tate’s important essay “Literature as Knowledge” in his Collected Essays (Denver: Swallow Press, 1959), 44. Here Tate debates Richards on interpretations of Coleridge’s organicism. 13. See I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; reprint, London: Routledge, 1983), 63–89. 14. John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938), 349. 15. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 199. 16. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: Norton & Co., 1926), 20. 17. W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” in The Verbal Icon (Lexington: University Of Kentucky Press, 1954), 1–18. This important volume functions as a late summation of New Critical method. 18. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967 [1939]), 42–43. 19. Allen Tate, “Three Types of Poetry,” in On the Limits of Poetry: Selected Essays: 1928–1948 (New York: Swallow Press, 1948), 113. 20. On the role of “cultural critique” within anthropology in general, see George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Given their topic, Marcus and Fischer give surprisingly scant attention to Benedict, just two references, in fact (27, 130). 21. See, e.g., a letter from Benedict to Margaret Mead dated 16 October 1932, where Benedict questions Sapir’s conception of sincerity, commenting that “the fact that a society indulged in pretentiousness and hypocrisy might be because it had a most wellcoordinated culture which expressed itself in that form” (Mead, Anthropologist at Work, 325). 22. It was Eliot who was put forward by the New Critics as the quintessential modern poet, but at center stage as well were Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Frost. For another example of the argument for a modern poetic tradition, see Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 69–109, where Brooks argues that the exemplary modern poetry is that of his colleagues Tate, Ransom, and Warren and describes as facile and merely emotional the work of the “poets of the revolt,” such as Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg.

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CHAPTER 7 HURSTON, BURKE, AND THE NEW CRITICS: NARRATIVE, CONTEXT, AND MAGIC 1. Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 110. 2. Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 204. 3. A letter of 20 August 1934 from Hurston to Boas opens: “I am full of tremors, lest you decide that you do not want to write the introduction to my ‘Mules and Men.’ I want you to do it so very much. Also I want Dr. Benedict to read the ms. And offer suggestions. Sort of edit it you know.” This passage is taken from Robert Hemenway’s Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 1977), 163. 4. Deborah Gordon, “The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston,” in Modernist Anthropology, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 162. 5. Handler in fact uses Joyce’s famous description of the artist as God, “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails,” to describe Benedict’s “conquest of a voice and a personality as she moved through biography and poetry to anthropology” (“Ruth Benedict and the Modernist Sensibility,” in Manganaro, Modernist Anthropology, 180). 6. Toni Morrison, The Song of Solomon (New York: Signet, 1978), 339. 7. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1990), 179. 8. Houston Baker, “Workings of the Spirit: Conjure and the Space of Black Women’s Creativity,” in Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, ed. Henry Louis Gates and K. A. Appiah (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), 303. 9. Cheryl Wall, “Mules and Men and Women: Zora Neale Hurston’s Strategies of Narration and Visions of Female Empowerment,” in Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Gloria L. Cronin (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 56. 10. However, Alan Lomax, the prominent early-twentieth-century American folklorist, called Mules and Men “the most engaging, genuine, and skillfully written book in the field of folklore” (see Cheryl Wall, “Zora Neale Hurston: Changing Her Own Words,” in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 79). 11. See, e.g., Elmer Davis’s 1938 review, in which he calls Tell My Horse “a curious mixture of remembrances, travelogue, sensationalism, and anthropology” and labels the “travelogue” “tedious” (reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 25). 12. By far the most common reading of Mules and Men over the years has been as a voluminous collection of African American folklore (see, for a start, Lewis Gannet’s review in the New York Herald Tribune, 11 October 1935, in ibid., 10; and see Sandra Dolby-Stahl’s record of the book as “a collection of folklore” [“Literary Objective: Hurston’s Use of Personal Narrative in Mules and Men,” in Cronin, Critical Essays, 44]. On the book as the product of a fine “storyteller,” see the review by H. I. Brock, in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 14). 13. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 224.

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14. In his afterword to Mules and Men Henry Louis Gates more or less agrees with Dolby-Stahl that the book is essentially literary: he asserts that Hurston is “more of a novelist than a social scientist” (293). 15. Barbara Johnson, “Thresholds of Difference: Structures of Address in Zora Neale Hurston,” in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 136. 16. Wall points to the persona Zora’s shift into “neutral” as indicating “the need to assume the objectivity fieldwork requires” (“Mules and Men and Women,” 55). 17. Zora’s accession to the in-group looks forward to later anthropologists’ rendering of getting inside (see, e.g., Clifford Geertz’s anecdote about gaining the trust of the locals when he ran from a police raid upon a cockfight in his famous essay “Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures [New York: Basic Books, 1973], 412–13). 18. On Hurston’s contriving of her “between-story” contexts, see, e.g., Robert Hemenway, “That Which the Soul Lives By,” in Zora Neale Hurston, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea Press, 1986), 92. 19. Yeats’s poem was published in 1927, the year in which Hurston began her Florida fieldwork. 20. Richard Wright, review of Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, reprinted in Gates and Appiah, Zora Neale Hurston, 17. Wright’s review originally appeared in New Masses, 5 October 1937, 16–17. 21. The word cultural in the phrase cultural politics requires emphasis. Wall states that “the definitions of culture on which [Wright’s and Hurston’s] analyses depended were fundamentally at odds,” noting that “for Wright, the forms of culture had already been fixed, and blacks were shut out of them,” whereas for Hurston “cultural forms were not fixed” and, in Hurston’s own words, African American folklore “is not a thing of the past. It is still in the making” (Cheryl Wall, “On Freedom and Will,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, ed. George Levine [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994], 285–86). 22. George Hutchinson, in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1995), performs just such a careful reading of Boas’s own political positionings, which, Hutchinson stresses, saw some important qualitative shifts in the early decades of the century (62–77). 23. Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939; reprint, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 212–13. 24. See Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in The Sanctified Church, foreword by Toni Cade Bambara (New York: Marlowe & Co., 1981), 49– 68. On the essay’s composition and publication history, see Bambara’s foreword, 11. 25. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 188–89. 26. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1945). 27. Wall similarly views the arguments within the African American literary community of the period, in this case between Wright and Hurston, as a “gendered debate”: for Wright “the beautiful is perceived to be ornamental and superfluous” and as such “ascriptively feminine” (“On Freedom and the Will,” 288–89). In this respect, Wright and Tate are found to be strange, or not so strange, bedfellows.

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28. Vincent Leitch argues that Murray Krieger’s New Apologists for Poetry, of 1956, finally and definitively “drummed Burke out of the New Critical school.” There Krieger complains, says Leitch, that Burke’s “dramatistic theory” ends up erringly “denying any barrier between art and life” (Leitch, American Literary Criticism from the Thirties to the Eighties [New York: Columbia University Press, 1988], 45). 29. Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941), 103. 30. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 269–70. 31. On Burke’s importance to anthropology, see Herbert Simons and Trevor Melia, eds., The Legacy of Kenneth Burke (Madison: University Of Wisconsin Press, 1989), esp. the discussion by and about Geertz, 6–7. In his essay “Blurred Genres,” American Scholar 49 (1980): 165–79, Geertz speaks of Burke’s future influence upon the human sciences rather than his contemporary lineages. 32. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: Norton & Co., 1926), 25, quoted by Allen Tate in “Literature as Knowledge,” in On the Limits of Poetry (Denver: Swallow Press, 1948), 41. 33. I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; reprint, London: Routledge, 1983), 211. 34. For example, Burke states that “it is difficult to keep the magical decree and the religious petition distinct” (Philosophy, 5); Burke adopts Frazer’s categories but puts pressure upon them. 35. Wall, “Mules and Men and Women,” 64. See Hurston’s “Hoodoo in America,” Journal of American Folklore 44 (1931): 317–417. 36. Wall notes that in the “Hoodoo” section of Hurston’s book this word-wielding is characteristically a female African American phenomenon; in the book, Wall claims, “female empowerment” is centered in hoodoo practice, whereas there is a “paucity” of tales told by women in the book’s first section (“Mules and Men and Women,” 63, 56). 37. Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922, reprint, Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1984), 328. AFTERWORD CULTURE’S PASTS, PRESENTS, AND FUTURES 1. This is not entirely unlike Arnold’s 1867 claim, cited in the introduction to this volume, that despite the bad connotations of the word culture, we cannot do without it (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994], 3). 2. Virginia Dominguez, “Invoking Culture: The Messy Side of ‘Cultural Politics,’ ” South Atlantic Quarterly 91 (winter 1992): 29. 3. Susan Hegeman, Patterns for America: Modernism and the Concept of Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 201.

Index

Addison, Joseph, 170 Agrarians, Southern, 139, 163, 169, 185–86 Aiken, Conrad, 38–39, 43, 45, 48 Aldington, Richard, 109–10, 113, 214n14 anthropology: Boasian, 10, 14, 23, 46–47, 50, 152, 163, 169–74, 185; comparative, 11, 57, 133, 152–53, 168; evolutionary, 5, 8, 101, 133, 191–92, 204n13; functional, 6, 8, 10, 14, 185, 209n18, 210n20; institutional history of, 3; Victorian, 11 Appadurai, Arjun, 35 Aquinas, Thomas, 133–34, 137 Argonauts of the Western Pacific: charts and tables in, 61, 66, 147–48, 209n13; relation to Diary, 67–69; digressiveness of, 9, 82– 83, 86–89, 147, 148–49; relation to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, 60; relation to Ulysses, 110–11, 113; on the kula, 56, 59, 63, 73–77, 78, 82–83, 86, 102–03, 113, 149; as modernist, 101–02, 104; as narrative, 9, 59; narrative/discourse dichotomy of, 78–89, 213n24; relation to The Waste Land, 56–57, 65, 69–73, 85; as type of writing, 79. See also Malinowski, Bronislaw Arnold, Matthew: on culture as term, 200, 224n1; on the definition of culture, 2–3, 5, 20, 27, 29, 34, 47, 54–55, 122, 124, 203n6; Eliot on, 17, 20, 21–23; on Hebraism and Hellenism, 3–4, 85, 125–27, 129, 130–31, 159; Joyce’s relation to, 115–16, 119–20, 122, 124, 127–31, 135; Joyce on, 118, 130; on Ireland, 125–26, 217n46; Malinowski’s relation to, 59; and modern literary criticism, 5; Raymond Williams on, 117, 126, 203n10. Works: Culture and Anarchy, 2–4, 5, 7, 20, 27, 29, 34, 47, 54–55, 69, 85, 122, 124–27, 129, 130–31, 159, 200, 224n1; “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 30–31 Auden, W. H., 189 Augustine, St., 125 Bachelard, Gaston, 196 Baker, Houston, 177, 195–97

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 93 Beebe, Maurice, 135 Benedict, Ruth, 6; on the Apollonian-Dionysian, 158–60, 220–21n8; relation to Arnold, 159; on art, 154, 158, 164; Boas on, 153; relation to Boas, 151–53, 168–69; as comparativist, 166; and cultural critique, 166–67; on cultural relativism, 164–68; on cultural selection, 117; on culture: as art style, 161; as biological, 165–66; as configuration, 12, 152, 160, 164; as fragmentary, 155, 168; holism of, 160, 168; as integrative, 167–69; as language, 157–58; as organism, 156–57, 220n6; as personality, 152, 154, 160, 162; relation to Eliot, 161, 168–69; as fieldworker, 155–56; on Frazer, 152–53; on homosexuality, 166–67; relation to Joyce, 106, 161, 165; as modernist, 160–61; relation to Malinowski, 152, 153–54, 155, 156–59, 165; Mead on, 155–56, 160, relation to Mead, 152, 221n21; relation to New Critics, 161–64, 169–71, 173–74; poetry of, 151–52; prose style of, 157, 175–76; relation to Sapir, 151, 157, 159–60, 167–68, 221n21; on tradition, 164–65. Works: “Anthropology and the Humanities,” 158; “The Concept of the Guardian Spirit,” 155; Patterns of Culture, 10, 15, 152–61, 163, 164– 69; “The Vision of Plains Culture,” 151 Bennet, Arnold, 105 Bersani, Leo, 144 Bible, the, 53, 55, 132 Boas, Franz: on Benedict, 153; relation to Benedict, 168–69; collecting culture, 9; on cultural relativism, 27; as cultural theorist, 5, 8, 31; on diffusion, 9; relation to Eliot, 31, 206n22; relation to evolutionary anthropology, 203n12; on “the genius of a people,” 31; on the geographical province, 19; influence upon Hurston, 177–78, 180, 182; relation to Hurston, 177–78, 180, 181–85, 188, 194, 196, 222n3; relation to Joyce, 117–18, 119–20; on museum display, 19, 29, 41; on The Meaning of Meaning, 90;

226

INDEX

Boas, Franz (cont’d) politics of, 223n22; relation to Sapir, 26, 31–33 Boon, James, 189, 220n2, 221n8 Bourne, Randolph, 13 Bradley, A. C., 158 Brooks, Cleanth, 6, 35, 162–64, 170–71, 173–74, 175, 185; on The Waste Land, 36, 44–45, 51–52, 163. Works: Modern Poetry and the Tradition, 170–71, 186–87, 221n22; The Well-Wrought Urn, 12, 101, 169–70, 173–74, 187, 190–91. See also New Critics, the Brooks, Van Wyck, 13, 109, 218n22 Browning, Robert, 25, 121 Budgen, Frank, 107, 140–41, 214n15 Burgess, Anthony, 122, 145, 216n36, 219n31 Burke, Kenneth, 6, 10, 14, 15, 101, 141–43, 144, 145, 188–90, 191–93, 224n31, 224n34; on drama, 188–89; relation to anthropology, 224n31; relation to Eliot, 193; influence of Frazer, 188, 192–93, 224n34; relation to Hurston, 189–90, 194; on language as a “mode of action,” 9–10, 193; on magic, 11, 192–93; relation to Malinowski, 192; on Malinowski, 13, 188–89; on the phatic, 198; relation to Tylor, 193 Buzard, James, 114, 147, 212n10, 214n9 Cambridge Hellenism, 159, 161, 188. See also Harrison, Jane Campbell, Joseph, 215n23 Carlyle, Thomas, 18, Cervantes, 56 Clifford, James, 2, 6, 13, 35, 52–54, 74, 108; on allegory of salvage, 60, 212n18; on the art-culture system, 42, 44, 53, 179; on authenticity, 41; on Malinowski, 68, 70, 73, 78–79, 80, 152, 208n2, 211n3. See also salvage, allegory of Codrington, R. H., 198 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 18, 117, 127, 138, 161 Colum, Mary, 106 comparative method. See anthropology: comparative Conrad, Joseph, 57, 67, 72, 78 Cronin, Anthony, 112–14, 143–45 Crookshank, F. G., 93 Crump, Ian, 135 cultural critique, 221n20

cultural relativism, 132–33, 136, 164–68, 170, 173, 175, 188, 209n16 culture concept: abandonment of, 200–01; ambiguity of, 1, 8; and anarchy, 72; anthropological version of, 3, 4, 7, 11, 136, 138, 140; apocalyptical version of, 150; Arnold on, 2– 3, 5, 20, 27, 29, 34, 47, 54–55, 122, 124, 203n6; as art, 10; biological theory of, 65, 135, 165; comparative model of, 110–11, 113; as “complex whole,” 1, 3, 7, 10, 13; as configurational, 152; evolutionary model of, 110–11, 113, 117, 124; as fragmentary, 10, 11, 12, 50–55, 70–71, 147, 149–50, 168, 199; functional version of, 3, 110–11; as geographically defined, 117, 118; holistic version of, 30, 48, 50, 137, 151, 153, 155–56, 160–61, 175, 202; humanistic definition of, 2–3, 7, 138; organic version of, 10, 34, 38, 49, 66, 156–57,168; solidity of, 115. See also Benedict, Ruth: on culture; Malinowski, Bronislaw: on culture; Tylor, E. B.: on culture; Williams, Raymond: on culture Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 198

Dante, 41, 55 Darwin, Charles, 125, 132 Dauber, Kenneth, 209n13 Day, John, 44 Deane, Seamus, 126, 129–30, 217n46 Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari, 144 Derrida, Jacques, 93, 196 Dial, The, 23–26, 39, 47 diffusion, diffusionist method, 5, 151, 153, 168, 180, 208–09n9 Dolby-Stahl, Sandra, 179, 182–83 Dominguez, Virginia, 115, 126, 200–01 Donne, John, 25, 162, 171, 186 Donogue, Denis, 144–45 Duffy, Enda, 108 Durkheim, Emile, 18, 156 Eagleton, Terry, 139 Eliot, T. S.: on amateurism, 74; Anglo-Catholicism of, 17; anthropological influences upon, 18–19, 205n7; relation to Arnold, 17, 20–23, 34, 47; relation to Boas, 31, 45; on culture: as ambiguously defined, 1, 17, 20– 21; as anthropological, 7; as fragmentary, 50–55, 70, 71; as holistic, 30, 48; as organic, 34, 38, 66; in The Dial, 23–25; on “dissociation of sensibility,” 25; as editor of

INDEX The Criterion, 8, 17, 18, 69; relation to evolutionary anthropology, 18–19, 21, 47, 50– 51, 54; influence of Frazer on, 50, 54; on Frazer, 57, 110, 113; relation to Hurston, 184, 198; on “the impersonal theory of poetry,” 27; on the Jews, 20; on literary criticism, 5, 11; on myth, 85–86; on the “mythical method,” 8, 13, 39, 109–10, 112, 147, 149; relation to the New Critics, 172; on the “objective correlative,” 12, 27–28, 73, 173; on the “primitive,” 21, 124–25, 207n34; as relativist, 29, 53; on Romanticism, 11, 46; relation to Sapir, 23–29, 32– 33; on “tradition,” 16, 30–31, 33, 42, 46– 47, 54, 64, 133; on Ulysses, 39, 57, 147. Works: After Strange Gods, 20; Four Quartets, 54, 149, 220n40; “The Function of Criticism,” 30, 61, 209n14; “Hamlet and His Problems,” 27, 74; “The Hollow Men,” 35; The Idea of a Christian Society, 17, 204n2; “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” 18; “The Metaphysical Poets,” 25–26, 28, 32, 162, 163; Notes toward the Definition of Culture, 8, 14, 16–23, 26, 30, 33– 34, 47, 53, 69, 110, 135, 168, 193, 200, 207n30; On Poetry and Poets, 48; “Phillip Massinger,” 48; Review of Tarr, 124–25; Review of Ulysses, 8, 16, 39, 85–86, 113, 149, 163; “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 27, 29–31, 33, 46–47, 53, 204n1; The Waste Land, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 16–17, 18, 23–25, 34–55, 70–73, 85, 136–37, 149, 170, 176, 178–79, 199, 201–02, 206n30, 206n31, 208n56. See also The Waste Land Eliot, Valerie, 72 Eliot, Vivian, 72 Elizabeth I, Queen, 41 Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 14, 18, 70 Firth, Raymond, 14, 67, 79, 210n31 Fortes, Meyer, 14 Fortune, Reo, 152 Foucault, Michel, 76–77 Frank, Waldo, 13 Franks, Joseph, 51 Frazer, James, 5, 37, 149, 152–53, 168, 184, 188, 213n20; as comparativist, 57, 133; as evolutionist, 8; as influence upon Malinowski, 78; as influence upon modern literature, 221n11; on magic and science, 36–37, 50, 61, 192–93, 207n33; on “primitive” culture, 19; in relation to Eliot, 16, 21, 35, 37, 50;

227

in relation to Joyce, 110–11, 215n23; in relation to The Meaning of Meaning, 92. See also anthropology: comparative; anthropology: evolutionary French, Marilyn, 128–29, 141 Frost, Robert, 161, 163, 221n22 Gabler, Hans Walter, 124 Gates, Henry Louis, 195, 223n14 Geertz, Clifford: as anthropological insider, 223n17; in relation to Eliot, 17; on Benedict, 157, 166, 170, 175–76; on Burke, 189, 224n31; on culture, 1, 13, 200; on Malinowski, 67–68, 79, 80, 143 Ghiselin, Brewster, 138 Gifford, Don, 126, 129 Gilbert, Stuart, 105, 112–13, 128, 137–39, 141, 214n15, 215n21, 215n22, 218n15 Gilbert and Sullivan, 48–49, 147 Goldenweiser, Alexander, 151 Goldsmith, Oliver, 46 Gordon, Deborah, 176–77, 198 Graff, Gerald, 2, 126 Graves, Robert, 18 Greenblatt, Stephen, 1–2, 5, 68 Greimas, A. J., 80 Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson, 35 Haggard, H. Rider, 57 Halpern, Richard, 205n18 Handler, Richard, 32–33, 151–52, 160, 220n3, 222n5 Harlem Renaissance, 13 Harrison, Jane, 116, 159. See also Cambridge Hellenism Hayman, David, 106, 218n12 Hegeman, Susan, 13, 200–01, 203n12, 206n22 Hemenway, Robert, 177, 182, 184, 197–98 Herbert, Christopher: on Arnold, 3; on culture, 3, 7, 102, 205n8, 209n15; on Malinowski, 66, 76–77, 210n23; on Mayhew, 217n2 Herr, Cheryl, 115, 140, 148 Hodgart, Matthew, 114 holism, concept of, 133–34, 136–37, 209n17. See also culture concept, holistic version of Hughes, Langston, 13 Hurston, Zora Neale, 6, 14; relation to aesthetic anthropology, 10; on Benedict, 222n3; relation to Benedict, 175–76, 178180, 184, 188; Boas’ influence on, 177–78, 180, 182, 222n3; Boas on, 177–78, 182;

228

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Hurston, Zora Neale (cont’d) as Boasian, 177–78, 180, 181–82, 183–85, 188, 194, 196; relation to Burke, 189–90, 198; on drama, 186–88; relation to Eliot, 176, 179, 184, 198–99; as folklorist, 178, 184; on hoodoo, 176, 177, 178, 193–98; relation to Joyce, 176; relation to Malinowski, 178, 181–82, 183–85, 186, 187, 195, 197, 199; relation to Mead, 198; relation to The Meaning of Meaning, 194, 196; relation to New Critics, 175, 185–88; politics of, 185–86, 222n21; professional status of, 11, 176, 180, 198; as storyteller, 179, 180. Works: “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” 184, 187–88; “Hoodoo in America,” 194; Mules and Men, 15, 175–85, 193–99; Tell My Horse, 176, 178, 222n11. See also Mules and Men Hutchinson, George, 223n22 intentional fallacy, 162–63. See also Wimsatt, W. K. and M. C. Beardsley Jakobson, Roman, 36 Jameson, Fredric, 53, 144 Jarvie, I. C., 58, 73–74, 110, 154, 210n22 Johnson, Barbara, 180, 184 Johnson, Samuel, 170–71 Joyce, James, 6, 201; relation to Arnold, 115– 16, 119–20, 122, 124, 127–31, 135; on Arnold, 118, 130; relation to Boas, 133; relation to comparative-evolutionary anthropology, 113, 116, 119, 133; use of “culture” words, 116–31; “cultural” approaches to the work of, 114–16; on Dubliners, 106; relation to Eliot, 116, 118, 120, 123–24, 133, 135–37, 145–46, 149–50, 216n43; on epiphany, 135–38; as ethnographer, 113–14, 121, 214n5; relation to Frazer, 107, 116; on imperialism, 118–19; on Ireland, 105–08, 115, 117–20, 122–23, 125–26, 136–37, 145; on the Jews, 129, 217n44; on language, 140– 43; language use of, 144–47, relation to Malinowski, 107–08, 124, 133–35, 137, 140, 143–150; and the modern novel, 56; mythcritical approaches to, 215n23; on nation as concept, 119–20; naturalist versus symbolist approaches to, 215n19; relation to the New Criticism, 112; post-structural approaches to, 114, 219n32; as realist, 114; semiological approaches to, 145; structural approaches to, 146–47; relation to Tylor, 116,

132, 134. Works: Dubliners, 8, 15, 106–07, 114, 120–24, 138, 146; “The Dead,” 121– 23, 130, 136–37, 216n36; “The Encounter,” 121; “Grace,” 121; “Two Sisters,” 161. Finnegans Wake, 114, 116, 149, 220n40; “Ireland, Island of Saints and Sages,” 117–20; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 15, 132–37, 146, 219n26; Stephen Hero, 135, 136; Ulysses, 7, 14, 15, 105–16; 124–31; 137–50, 148; 214n13, 215n 21, 215n22, 218n12, 218–19n22, 219–20n38, 220n39. See also Joyce criticism, history of; Ulysses Joyce, Stanislaus, 107, 214n9 Joyce criticism, history of, 105, 111, 117, 136, 137–41, 143–47, 215n18. See also Joyce, James; Ulysses Kaberry, Phyllis, 209n18 Keats, John, 162–175, 187 Knight, G. Wilson, 38 Krieger, Murray, 224n28 Kroeber, Alfred, 156 Kroeber, Alfred and Clyde Kluckhohn: on anthropological versus. humanistic concepts of culture, 27; on Arnold, 22, 203n5; on Eliot, 17, 19, 21–22, 26; on Lowie, 49; on Malinowski, 93; on Sapir, 23 Kyd, Thomas, 41 Lawrence, Karen, 146 Leach, E. R., 154 Leitch, Vincent, 215n19, 224n28 Lentricchia, Frank, 37–38 Levenson, Michael, 8 Levin, Harry, 138, 141, 218n6, 219n26 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 131, 136, 169, 195, 211n40 Le´vy-Bruhl, Lucien, 18, 116, 216–17n43 Litz, A. Walton, 46, 49, 145–47, 218n15 Lomax, Alan, 222n10 Longenbach, James, 54 Lowie, Robert, 6, 11, 23, 46–50, 71, 147, 201 Lucas, F. S., 44, 46 MacLeish, Archibald, 172 Mahaffey, Vicki, 219n32, 219n33 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 6, 7, 201; on allegory of salvage, 59–60, 72–73; on amateurism, 9, 60, 62–63, 72, 78; and anthropological writing, 56, 78–79; relation to Arnold, 69, 85; relation to Burke, 101, 188–89, 192–93; relation to Boas, 63; relation to compara-

INDEX tive anthropology, 57–58, 100; relation to Conrad, 57, 67–68, 69, 72; on “context of situation,” 79, 88, 95, 144, 145, 186–90; cultural relativism of, 88, 99, 100, 102, 209n16; on culture, 5, 57, 99–100, 103, 143: as biological, 65–66, 77, 93, 100, 140; as holistic, 69–70, 71; as language, 66, 95; as organic whole, 78; as totality, 62–63, 75 ; relation to Eliot, 60, 61, 62, 63–65, 66, 69–73; on “the ethnographer’s magic,” 60; relation to evolutionary theory, 99, 209n16; on fiction, 57; on fieldwork, 213n27; influence of Frazer on, 58–59, 78, 110; on “function,” 77, 79; relation to functionalism, 56, 63, 65–66, 69, 73–74, 93, 99, 134, 135, 153–54, 155, 209n18, 210n25; relation to Hurston, 178, 181–85; as linguist, 79, 93– 103; on linguistic relativism, 88; on magic, 9, 11, 83–84, 88, 97, 99–100, 103, 124, 137, 147, 197–98; on The Meaning of Meaning, 94, 95, 98–100; as modernist, 101–02, 213n26; on myth, 83–86, 89, 97, 99, 147; on “myth as charter,” 13, 84, 193, 212n13; on narrative, 9, 79, 80–83, 198; and narratology, 87–88; on the “native point of view,” 195; on Nietzsche, 84–85, 159; professionalism of, 11, 61, 64–65, 86, 103–04, 135–36; relation to RadcliffeBrown, 14, 65–66, 210n20, 210n21; relation to Sapir, 60; on tradition, 133; on translation, 9. Works: Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 7, 14, 56–77, 78–84, 86–89, 97, 99, 101–04, 135, 181, 199; Coral Gardens and their Magic, 149, 220n40; A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 57, 67–69, 70–71, 103, 178, 208n7, 210n31, 210n33, 210– 11n35; Myth in Primitive Psychology, 9, 84, 85–86, 88, 97, 99, 103; “Observations on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy,” 84–85, 159; “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” (Supplement to The Meaning of Meaning), 9, 14–15, 93–104, 142–44, 187, 189, 192, 213n23; A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays, 65– 66, 69, 210n25. See also Argonauts of the Western Pacific Malinowski, Valetta, 72, 208n7 Malkki, Liisa, 35 Marcus, George, and Michael Fischer, 68, 221n20 Marlowe, Christopher, 46 Mason, Mrs. Osgood, 177

229

Mason, Otis, 19 Masson, Elsie, 72 Masters, Edgar Lee, 221n22 Matthiessen, F. O., 43, 46, 72 Mayhew, Henry, 217n2 McCarthy, Patrick, 112–13, 138–39, 214n15, 215n21, 215n22 McDermott, Ray, 106–07 Mead, Margaret, 151–52, 180; on Benedict, 155–56, 160, 221n21; in relation to Hurston, 198. See also Benedict, Ruth Meaning of Meaning, The, 13, 15, 89–102, 142, 144, 194–96, 212n17, 212n18; on the contextual theory of signs, 92–93; relation to evolutionary anthropology, 91–92, 101; relation to Joyce, 165; Malinowski’s contribution to, 93–104; relation to post-structural theory, 92–93; on the power of “primitive” language, 89, 91–92, 142, 191–92, 213n20; as relativist, 100; relation to Sapir, 101; relation to Saussure, 92–93, 100; semiotic triangle in, 90–91, 97. See also Malinowski, Bronislaw; Richards, I. A. Menand, Louis, 46 Metaphysical poets, the, 28, 172, 186 Mill, John Stuart, 117. See also Williams, Raymond modernism: 7, 14, 57, 101–02, 110–11; history of definition of, 110; anthropological, 213n26 modernist criticism, 11–12. See also Eliot, T. S.; New Critic, the; Richards, I. A. Monroe, Harriet, 48, 51 Moon, Henry Lee, 179 Morrison, Toni, 176 Mottolese, William, 108 Mules and Men: allegory of salvage in, 176 177, 181; as art/ethnography, 179, 182–83, 191, 223n14; history of criticism of, 175– 77, 178–80, 222n12; models of culture in, 178, 180, 184–85, 197–99, 223n21; methodology of, 176, 182, 195; narrative shifts in, 181–82, 183–84, 185, 194; structure of, 178, 180, 182, 197; relation to The Waste Land, 178. See also Hurston, Zora Neale Munson, Gorham, 51–52 Murray, J. Middleton, 108 myth criticism, 113 narrative-discourse relation, 140, 146, 183–84 narratology, 79–81, 140

230

INDEX

New Critics, the, 6, 10, 15, 61, 101, 112, 137– 39, 144, 173–74, 185–88; in relation to Arnold, 163, 173–74; relation to Benedict, 174; relation to Boasian school, 169–74; relation to Burke, 188, 190, 224n28; as comparativists, 170; cultural models of, 173– 74; influence of Eliot upon, 171–73; relation to Eliot, 174, 221n22; on “function,” 186–88; linguistic theories of, 9; relation to Malinowski, 162–72; on the Metaphysical poets, 172; on modern poetry, 171–72, 221n22; on poetry, 12, 161–64, 169–74, 186–88; relation to post-structuralism, 171, 174; on the Romantic poets, 172–73; relation to Sapir, 173; on science/art relation, 187, 190–92. See also Brooks, Cleanth; Ransom, John Crowe; Tate, Allen Nietzsche, Friedrich, 84–85, 158–59 Nineteen Twenty Two (1922), 7–8, 10, 13, 34, 39, 56, 65–66, 110, 145, 149–51, 184, 204n18, 213n21 Norris, Margot, 114–15 North, Michael, 204n18, 213n21 Ovid, 45–46 Perry, William James, 58 phatic, the, 96–97, 142, 144–45, 198, 219n31. See also Malinowski, Bronislaw post-structuralism, 92–93, 142, 144–45, 154 Pound, Ezra, 13, 56, 108–09, 221n22; on Joyce’s Ulysses, 105, 108–10, 214n13 Powell, Charles, 44, 46, 48 Pratt, Mary Louise, 79 Prince, Gerald, 80–81, 87–88 professionalism, 2, 173–74; of anthropology, 11, 149; of literary criticism, 11 Propp, Vladimir, 80 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.: author of The Andaman Islanders, 7; on Benedict, 175, 178; as functionalist, 14; as structuralist-functionalist, 65–66, 210n20, 210n21 Ransom, John Crowe, 6, 11; on the poem, 162–63; relation to Hurston, 185; on The Waste Land, 38–39. See also New Critics, the Renan, Ernst, 116 Richards, Grant, 106, 120, 122, Richards, I. A., 6, 9, 61, 161–62, 190–91; relation to Eliot, 40, 89; on literary criti-

cism as science, 61; on poetry, 12, 101, 162, 171–72. See also Meaning of Meaning, The; the New Critics Rivers, W. H. R., 8, 57–58, 63, 156, 208n9 Robbins, Bruce, 2 Rosaldo, Renato, 28 Ross, Andrew, 206n31 Rourke, Constance, 13 Russo, John Paul, 212n16 salvage, allegory of, 2, 6, 41, 72–73, 81, 163 Sandburg, Carl, 221n22 Sapir, Edward, 6; relation to Benedict, 151, 157, 159–60, 167–68, 221n21; relation to Boas, 26, 31–33; “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” 10, 23–27, 32, 54, 58, 74, 101, 151, 159–60, 167–68, in The Dial, 23–25; relation to Eliot, 33–34, 37, 40, 208n56; relation to Joyce, 118, 133; on language, 212n19; relation to Lowie, Robert, 32, 47; relation to Malinowski, 59 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 10, 90, 92–93, 95, 100, 142, 144–46, 196 Scholes, Robert, 146–47, 220n39 Seidman, Robert, 126 Seligman, C. G., 80 Shakespeare, William, 27–28, 38, 41–42, 74, 121 Shelley, Mary, 152 Smith, Elliot, 58 Spanos, William, 51 Spencer, Herbert, 132 Spurr, David, 216–17n43 Steppe, Wolfhard, 124 Stocking, George, 3, 8, 23, 204n13; on Malinowski’s Argonauts, 56, 59, 65, 78, 79, 80, 82, 211n3; on Malinowski’s cultural relativism, 209n16; on Malinowski’s Diary, 210n33; on Malinowski’s functionalism, 77, 110, 208n9, 210n20; on Malinowski’s concept of myth, 212n13; on Malinowski’s “Supplement” to The Meaning of Meaning, 213n23 Strathern, Marilyn, 101–02, 213n26 structuralism, 131, 174, 211n40 Sultan, Stanley, 144–46 Swift, Jonathan, 166 Swinburne, Algernon, 55 Tate, Allen: relation to Benedict, 185; as New Critic, 6; on poetry, 161, 163, 171, 188; re-

INDEX lation to Richards, 221n12; on the Romantics, 190–92; on the relation of science and literary criticism, 12; on The Waste Land, 38–39, 43. See also New Critics, the Taussig, Michael, 36 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 25 Thornton, Robert, 59, 78–79, 84–85, 159, 209n17, 211n39 Thornton, Weldon, 140–43, 145–46 Tindall, William York, 107, 112, 143 Toomer, Jean, 13 Torgovnick, Marianne, 210–11n35 Trilling, Lionel, 130 Turner, Darwin, 179 Tylor, E. B., 3, 6, 7; on culture, 4, 5, 7, 22, 27, 75, 119, 121, 128, 130, 134, 138; relation to Eliot, 19, 21; as evolutionary anthropologist, 8; relation to Joyce, 121; on survivals, 193 Tymoczko, Maria, 217n44 Ulysses: relation to Argonauts, 110–11, 113; as classical, 109–10; “Calypso” chapter of, 148; “culture” words in, 124–31; “Cyclops,” chapter of, 146, 220n39; digressiveness of, 146–47, 148–49; as ethnographic, 105–08, 111–12; Eliot on, 109–11; relation to Frazer’s The Golden Bough, 111; Homeric parallels in 112–13, 146–47, 215n 21, 215n22; relation to Hurston, 178; as Irish, 143–44; Marxist approaches to, 144; “Oxen of the Sun,” chapter of, 116, 140–43, 218–19n22; relation to Portrait of the Artist, Joyce’s, 137–46; as realist, 110; schema of, 49, 112–13, 138, 147–48, 214n13, 215n21, 218n12, 219– 20n38; as “story” versus “symbol,” 144– 46; “Wandering Rocks” chapter of, 148; relation to The Waste Land, 7, 8–9, 39, 53, 56, 107–08, 145, 149–50. See also Joyce, James

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Untermeyer, Louis, 38–39, 43, 48, 51 Upanishads, the, 41, 53 Vickery, John B., 35, 116, 205n7, 215n23, 221n11 Wall, Cheryl, 178, 180, 184, 194, 196–97, 223n16, 223n27, 224n36 Warren, Robert Penn, 171 The Waste Land: allegory of salvage in, 72– 73; as apocalyptic, 51, 53, 206n31; relation to Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 56–57, 65, 69–73, 85; as art/culture system, 42–45; borrowing in, 46–50; as culture argument, 35, 36, 51–53; facsimile drafts of, 71–72; as fragmented, 38–41; history of criticism of, 12, 37–55; and magic, 36–37; as museum, 41–42; use of myth in, 35, 52–54; Eliot’s “Notes” to, 16, 18, 36, 37, 45, 48, 49, 53, 71, 206n30; relation to Ulysses, 7, 8–9, 39, 53, 56, 107–08, 145, 149–50. See also Eliot, T. S. Webster, John, 41 Weston, Jessie, 36–37, 149, 161, 206n30 Whitman, Walt, 172–73 Williams, Raymond, 4, 7, 13, 33; on Arnold, 117, 126, 203n10; on culture, 8, 18, 20–23, 193; on Joyce, 116–18, 121, 124, 127–29; on Eliot, 8, 18, 20–23, 193 Williams, William Carlos, 54–55, 208n56 Wilson, Edmund, 39–40, 43, 46, 172, 215n19 Wimsatt, W. K., and M. C. Beardsley, 162– 63, 221n17 Woolf, Virginia, 13 Wordsworth, William, 170–71 World War I, 59–60, 69, 109, 201–02 Worringer, Wilhelm, 164 Wren, Christopher, 42 Wright, Richard, 185, 223n21, 223n27 Yeats, William Butler, 161, 189, 221n22