Literary Primitivism

Ben Etherington

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781503602366
• eBook ISBN: 9781503604094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book fundamentally rethinks a pervasive and controversial concept in literary criticism and the history of ideas. Primitivism has long been accepted as a transhistorical tendency of the "civilized" to idealize that primitive condition against which they define themselves. In the modern era, this has been a matter of the "West" projecting its primitivist fantasies onto non-Western "others." Arguing instead that primitivism was an aesthetic mode produced in reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism, and that the most intensively primitivist literary works were produced by imperialism's colonized subjects, the book overturns basic assumptions of the last two generations of literary scholarship.

Against the grain, Ben Etherington contends that primitivism was an important, if vexed, utopian project rather than a form of racist discourse, a mode that emerged only when modern capitalism was at the point of subsuming all human communities into itself. The primitivist project was an attempt, through art, to recreate a "primitive" condition then perceived to be at its vanishing point. The first overview of this vast topic in forty years, Literary Primitivism maps out previous scholarly paradigms, provides a succinct and readable account of its own methodology, and presents critical readings of key writers, including Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, D. H. Lawrence, and Claude McKay.

PART I

Primitivism Regained

Chapter 1

PRIMITIVISM AFTER ITS POSTSTRUCTURAL ECLIPSE

A Conceptual Reappraisal

The title of this book might be taken to indicate an intention to survey its subject—a work similar in scope to the monographs, catalogues, and anthologies on primitivism in the visual arts that go back to Robert Goldwater’s Primitivism in Modern Painting.¹ In literary studies it is a surprise to find only one monograph that addresses literary primitivism in general: Michael Bell’s slim 1972 volume Primitivism. Even here the author refuses to be drawn into attempting a survey, choosing instead to concentrate on “critical problems raised by the literature to which this term is commonly used.”² This reticence is connected, no doubt, with his sense that the term refers to a “dauntingly ancient and universal human characteristic with a correspondingly wide range of manifestations.”³

If a survey of literary primitivism were to set its scope according to received usage, a rigorous account would indeed present challenges that could take a career to surmount. Primitivism typically refers to the act of idealizing people, or entities of any sort, deemed “primitive.” It can be used even more broadly to refer to any activity that in some way pertains to the primitive. In both cases the term primitive is conceptually prior to “primitivism”: it is the primitivity of the entity that determines the nature of the primitivist idealization. I will come to the difficult question of what the term primitive might signify shortly. For the moment it is enough to note that its resonances are specific to the material circumstances in which it is used and that it tends to point to a condition in which humans are united with nature. Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement “On Cannibals” contains a comment that is broadly representative: “that blessed state of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities.”⁴ Its conceptualization thus is dialectical, emerging where humans are aware of themselves in contradistinction to nature.

Given the conceptual priority usually assigned to historical notions of the “primitive” in discussions of primitivism, it seems only logical that a competent account, whether in literature, art, music, intellectual discourse, or culture more broadly defined, will need to begin by outlining a history of ideas of the “primitive” before moving to consider the forms of primitivism that correlate to those ideas. When we sketch the expanse that a survey study would reach if it undertook to cover the history of primitivism approached in this way, we can see why Bell found the prospect daunting, especially if it also attempted to synthesize the existing scholarship.

Such a study would encompass the work of an array of eminent thinkers, the most prominent of whom are the focus of scholarly fields in their own right (the likes of Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud), not to mention the history of an entire discipline, anthropology, which was founded on the civilized/primitive distinction.⁵ Current standards of historical research would not admit such an account unless it established the circumstances in which these theorists came to be concerned with the notion. At the very least this would entail a consideration of the history of European colonial expansion that brought those who considered themselves to be civilized into contact with the peoples and objects that they contraposed as primitive.⁶ There are also the related scholarly discussions concerned with the country-city relationship and the question of the origins of humanity.⁷

Before turning to the literature, we would want to note that primitivism flourished in a variety of artistic media,⁸ flagging multidisciplinary aesthetic movements like German expressionism, French surrealism, Italian futurism, and the Soviet avant-garde,⁹ and the work of figures long associated with primitivism, such as Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Igor Stravinsky.¹⁰ Maintaining a rigorous historicism, we would need to keep in frame the historical processes that brought into their paths the objects and texts that catalyzed their primitivism, such as the “discovery” of African masks in prewar Paris.¹¹

Moving to literary texts, the relevant writers and works would need to be demarcated. This is easiest where writers have engaged demonstrably with the history of ideas or representations of the primitive—D. H. Lawrence, certainly.¹² T. S. Eliot’s anthropological interests would require attention,¹³ and, with him, surely W. B. Yeats, taking us to other Irish revivalists and modernists like J. M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and James Joyce.¹⁴ Gertrude Stein’s Melanctha has received attention as a primitivist work,¹⁵ leading us to scholarship on the primitivism of other North American writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner.¹⁶

Thus enlarged, the scope still includes only canonical white Irish, British, and American modernists. There is the question of primitivism in Europe’s “peripheries” such as Poland,¹⁷ and scholarship of the last thirty years has shown repeatedly that the work of Europeans by no means exhausts modernism, leading us to writers whose work displays primitivist tendencies, even if their modes of intention are shaped by vastly different social circumstances and cultural projects.¹⁸ The Jamaican Claude McKay cannot be ignored.¹⁹ Nor can the New Negro movement with which he is conventionally associated, drawing in the likes of Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes: “I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the / flow of human blood in human veins.”²⁰ McKay’s quest for a primal African self was important for the Caribbean and African writers who would form the Négritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, bringing us to the work of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and their peers.²¹

If the currents of influence move back and forth across the Black Atlantic, so, too, do they flow down the Seine.²² We could hardly overlook the primitivist work of Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, and other literary surrealists with whom we might have started had our investigation been bilingual.²³ And it would be hard to maintain a bilingual focus. German expressionist writing is often considered literary primitivism’s fulcrum.²⁴ Worse, we would soon discover that the attempt to limit ourselves to the domain of modernism is futile.²⁵ If we accept the claims of Erik Camayd-Freixas, we could not disregard hispanophone primitivism, especially in Latin America; so our study swells to encompass the writers he discusses, such as Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturius, Juan Rulfo, and even Gabriel Garcia Marquez.²⁶ What of the primitivism of an indigenizing movement like the Jindyworobaks in 1930s Australia?²⁷ Likewise, it would be hard to keep the reins on chronology. Moving forward in time, the word has been used to discuss a number of postwar countercultural figures,²⁸ taking us in the direction of present-day anarcho-primitivism and Deep Ecology.²⁹ Moving backward, Michael Bell considers Moby-Dick to be archetypally primitivist, and there is James Baird’s oft-cited study of Melville’s work in terms of primitivism.³⁰ We would want to understand Robert Louis Stevenson’s attempts to create literary forms that could synthesize Scottish and Polynesian legend.³¹ If we were to follow Frances Connelly in tracing the lineage of primitivizing styles to the moment at which, she argues, the “primitive” comes to designate the binary opposite of Enlightenment Europe,³² we would need to turn the clock back to the early eighteenth century, raising the painful possibility that we would be obliged to discuss the writers of the romantic movement, or at least spend time distinguishing primitivism from romanticism,³³ and perhaps naturalism too.³⁴ Then there is the huge body of scholarship on the “noble savage,” a subject on which debates are hardly settled.³⁵ Diligent historicism would require that we now have in view European colonialism in the longue durée, not just its late-Victorian apotheosis.

How far back, exactly, would we need to go? Nagging at us would be the study that did the most to shift the discussion of primitivism from race to culture and that has remained current in scholarship for eighty years: George Boas and Arthur Lovejoy’s Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (1935). It was the first installment of a projected multivolume work that aimed to index the entire history of primitivism up to their time. Not surprisingly, it remained unfinished.³⁶ Boas and Lovejoy do not consider primitivism a phenomenon solely of the modern era but a constant feature of Western civilization, if not all civilizations. Perhaps the template for our hypothetical survey will not be the authorcentric literary history that we set out with but something more along the lines of Edward Said’s Orientalism. We might be tempted to speculate that primitivism is a transepochal binarizing “discourse” according to which the Civilized, in the very act of constituting themselves, necessarily define themselves against that which they are not, the Primitive, only, in despair at their alienation, to then idealize this Other. Primitivism would not be something confined to a particular civilization but more like a structure of desire inherent to civilized life. Literary primitivism might thus be understood as one kind of manifestation of this broader primitivist “discourse.”³⁷

As useful as such a metacritique of literary primitivism might sound, the present study will not be taking this path. I will argue that the prevailing assumptions that would lead to the ever-widening scope just outlined need to be reassessed and the phenomenon, if there is such a thing as “literary primitivism,” brought newly into the open. My intention is to change the object of primitivism. The title Literary Primitivism thus indicates a conceptual reappraisal rather than a survey of primitivist writing as determined by received usage.

Four Theses

What I hope to establish in this first part of Literary Primitivism is that if we were to embark on the hypothetical study just outlined, we would lose sight of literary primitivism at the first turn—that is, the moment that we accepted that notions of the “primitive” are conceptually prior to primitivism—and that it would therefore be necessary to ground our study in ideas of the “primitive” before moving to consider their various historical idealizations. If we assume that ideas (or representations or discourses or ideologies) of the primitive prefigure primitivizing idealization, we have put the cart before the horse, though this metaphor should not be stretched too far: the surging primitivist yearning that seeks out particular notions of the primitive comes to know that it cannot realize itself through an external vehicle. To reach its destination it must itself become primitive and so break free of any prior primitive concept or representation. It will emerge that it is constitutive of primitivism to be always in the mode of transcending any determinate notion of the primitive.

This is not to say that primitivism has no representational (or ideological) content. As it attempts to make itself primitive, primitivism gropes for concrete evidence that such a condition is or has been possible, and it is through such reaching that primitivism makes itself apparent to us. That which is yearned for, however, is inherently unstable for historical reasons that I will discuss in detail. As such, the aesthetic phenomenon of primitivism is historically specific, coming at a moment when what I will call the primitive remnant was yet believed to be enchanted with an alternate world. To be clear, I am not suggesting that we should disregard historical conceptions of the primitive. Rather, the task is first to identify the circumstances in which the desire to become primitive through the agency of aesthetic experience took hold, before looking to any determinate notions of the primitive that might then have been in circulation. We will discover that “the primitive” is more like a dialectical principle of aesthetic exploration than something that can be nailed to any particular conception.

This may strike some as counterintuitive. In her learned study Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival Sinéad Garrigan Mattar astutely comments that “primitivism cannot be so easily pinned down because it is not a thing, but a process: a process of self-referential idealization that can constitute an ideology, a poetic mode, a form of satire, a social contract, a religious instinct, an intrusive element in a ‘scientific’ discourse, or an instrument of tyranny.”³⁸ Pursuing this insight, she demonstrates that W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory shifted from a romantic into a modernist mode following their encounter with the new discipline of cultural anthropology. Effectively, she divides the process of primitivization into separate moments. First there are the fields of inquiry that produce ideas of the primitive and, subsequently, the thinkers and artists who pursue their idealization.

If it seems self-evident that primitivism must idealize ideas of the primitive, the grammar of such a definition already starts to obscure the idealizing motion at hand. Literary primitivism does not start with the mold of a notional primitive entity into which is poured its idealizing zeal. Primitivism is the shape of the idealization in question. Its source is not an idea or representation but the anguished yearning of discontent that seeks self-transformation toward the primiti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Primitivism Regained
• Part II: Studies
• Conclusion: Primitivism, Decolonization, and World Literature
• Notes
• Index