Drinking the Silence: Notes on the Case of Georg Trakl

Georg Trakl: Self-Portrait (1913)

I.

You should probably read more Trakl, says Simon. And, yes, I probably should ...

For even if his work isn't quite my cup of tea, there are elements within his lyrical expressionism to which I'm sympathetic; such as his fascination with the blueness of twilight and his love of silence. No one can deny that there are many arresting - and disturbing - images in his work, as he fully exploits the often uncanny ambiguity of German. 


II. Wer war Georg Trakl? 

Georg Trakl was a typical Romantic figure; a depressed drug fiend, who engaged in an incestuous relationship with his younger sister, Greta, and received generous financial support from wealthy patrons, including the philosopher Wittgenstein, who, like Heidegger, was a huge fan (see section III below).

A pharmacist by profession, Trakl liked to hang around with the avant-garde artists involved with the well-known literary journal Der Brenner, edited by Ludwig von Ficker. The latter was also an avid supporter of the young poet and not only regularly printed his work, but attempted to find a publisher for his first collection.

Unfortunately, Trakl overdosed on cocaine in the autumn of 1914 and became an early member of what is now known as the 27 Club. There's a very strong possibility of suicide. In a letter written in 1913 he confessed:

"I long for the day when my soul shall cease [...] to live in this wretched body polluted with melancholy, when it shall quit this laughable form made of muck and rottenness, which is all too faithful a reflection of a godless, cursed century."


III. Philosophical Readings of Trakl

As mentioned above, both Wittgenstein and Heidegger were keen readers of Trakl. But, perhaps not surprisingly, they responded very differently to his poetry ...

The former, for example, wrote that whilst he didn't understand the verses, their tone - one of true genius - made him very happy. The latter, on the other hand, claimed that Trakl's work made perfect sense, once it had been situated and unified as a single rhythmic wave within his own thinking.

Derrida would later question this rather outrageous attempt by Heidegger to co-opt Trakl's work - what we might describe as an act of philosophical Anschluss - though, to be fair, it's something we've all done is it not; to read an author in light of one's own ideas and obsessions (indeed, it might be argued that every reading is an act of violation, as the reader seeks out their textual pleasure).


Thanks to the poet and literary scholar Simon Solomon for suggesting this post.

Chaos Reigns (Memento Mori)

Stephen Alexander: Chaos Reigns (2018)

I.

A sparkling ice-cold morning in December: but even beneath cloudless blue skies, and just days before Christmas, chaos reigns ...


II.

Danish film-director and screenwriter Lars von Trier is right: grief, despair, and - above all - pain are ever-present in this world and fundamentally determine the tragic (if extremely rare and unusual) phenomenon that people term life; something they not only value, but desperately cling on to, despite the three beggars.  

In one of the most memorable scenes of his 2009 movie Antichrist, Von Trier presents us with a malevolent-looking fox slowly disembowelling itself. As it does so, it looks up at a startled Willem Dafoe (playing the male character known simply as He) and utters the diabolical phrase: Chaos reigns.

This became an instant internet meme and many people thought it was funny: but it isn't funny. Those who find it so are just imbeciles whistling in the dark and if there's one thing I hate it's optimistic bravado; you can laugh at the bloody horror that lies beneath the surface, but don't ever think that in doing so you can laugh it away, or make yourself immune.

Ultimately it's good to show courage in the face of death and evil (which are synonyms for life), but this requires a certain honesty and an acknowledgement of one's own anxiety, not mocking stupidity.


Click here to watch the chaos reigns scene from Antichrist (dir. Lars Von Trier, 2009), starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg. 

Thanks to Simon Solomon for suggesting this post and reminding me of the above scene in Von Trier's film.    

On Poetry and Plagiarism (with Reference to the Case of Ailey O'Toole)

America's most wanted: Ailey O'Toole
poet and convicted plagiarist 

The poem-as-text is a "multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, 

blend and clash [...] a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."  - RB 

Ho hum, another week, another plagiarism scandal in the ridiculously small and self-absorbed world of poetry ... The young offender being hauled over the coals this time by moralists who police the above and zealously enforce intellectual property rights, is prize-nominated American poet Ailey O'Toole.

There's no question that Ms O'Toole paraphrased lines in her poem 'Gun Metal' from a work by Rachel McKibbens - she even contacted the latter to admit as much. But whether we describe this as theft or borrowing, inspiration or intertextuality, isn't quite so straightforward.

In my view - and I'm saying this as a writer - O'Toole has nothing to apologise for or feel ashamed about. Indeed, if I were her, I would tell those sanctimonious bores who sit in judgement and threaten to derail her career - her publishers have already cancelled her first collection and spoken of their pain and anger - to go fuck themselves.  

For the fact is, very few poets invent neologisms; and even fewer have original thoughts or feelings. They essentially rearrange the words of a shared language and play with the ideas and emotions of the culture to which they belong. It's an art - and it can produce amazing results - but poetry is never a personal or private matter, no matter how idiosyncratic one's writing style.*

As Roland Barthes would argue, the poem-as-text is neither representative of a non-linguistic reality, nor expressive of an author's unique being. It's explainable only through other words that are also drawn from a pre-given, internalised dictionary. Every poem is, in a sense, already a copy of a copy of a copy whose origin is forever lost and meaning infinitely deferred.     

After Ms McKibbens went public with her accusation, several other poets came forward and claimed that they too were victims of a terrible literary crime committed by O'Toole. Some even spoke of being violated, or having their identities stolen and experiences belittled.

In part, this hysterical overreaction is due to the p-word itself, which, etymologically, means kidnapping - thereby encouraging writers to regard words as their precious offspring.** This, however, is a laughable turning of the truth on its head; for it isn't authors who give birth to language; it's language that gives birth to them.  

Ultimately, whatever we might think of her and what she did, O'Toole's plagiarism demonstrated a good deal of art; her selection of lines was clever and she skillfully wove them into her own text, tweaking them as she saw fit.

Surely then, we can, in the words of the Irish novelist, poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith - commenting here on Sterne's cheerful habit of plagiarism - "pardon the want of originality, in consideration of the exquisite talent with which the borrowed materials are wrought up into the new form".  

Notes

*I'm aware, having read several interviews with Ms O'Toole, that she would find the view expressed here anathema. For she subscribes to a conception of poetry as something highly personal and highly political; a therapeutic art form that helps individuals deal with their mental health issues and other traumatic experiences (child abuse, rape, domestic violence, homophobia, sexism, racism, etc.).    

**We have the first century Roman poet Martial, known for his epigrams, to thank for this; he first used the Latin term plagiarius to denote someone guilty of stealing someone else's verses. The word appeared in its modern form in English c.1620 and the Romantics, who valued ideals of originality, sincerity, and authentic feeling etc., regarded plagiarism as the greatest of all literary sins. 

Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author', Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (Fontana Press, 1977), pp. 142-48. I discuss this essay at some length in a post on postmodern approaches to literature that can be read by clicking here. 

Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, (1766), Vol. V, p. xviii.

Readers interested in knowing more about this case, might like to read Kat Rosenfield's piece published on the arts and culture website Vulture (4 Dec 2018): click here. 

Noise Annoys: Notes on Hyperacusis and Associated Conditions

Pretty girls, pretty boys, 

have you ever heard your mummy scream ...? 

I. The Case of Schopenhauer and the Seamstress

As everyone knows, the German philosopher and arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer was found guilty in 1820 of assaulting a seamstress, whom he'd pushed down a flight of stairs after she disturbed him with her incessant chatter on the landing outside his room. 

Having experienced noisy neighbours who just don't know when to shut the fuck up, or simply don't care about respecting the silence that others may find necessary for their own happiness and wellbeing, I can certainly sympathise. 

Inconsiderate bigmouths, or those who bray with laughter like asses in every sense of the word, deserve some form of comeuppance for the irritation they cause to those with heightened sensitivity to noise and/or the base stupidity that so often accompanies it.


II. Hyperacusis, Phonohobia, and Misophonia

Whilst hyperacusis is usually regarded as a debilitating disorder, I would suggest that most highly intelligent and thoughtful people tend to find repetitive noises intolerable and perhaps even painful on the ear. This can understandably result in phonophobia or even misophonia - a term coined by audiologists Margaret and Pawel Jastreboff in order to discuss individuals who are triggered into reacting by certain hateful sounds.

These noises can be mechanical in origin, such as car alarms and ringtones, or made by animals; the incessant barking of a dog, for example. But they can also include the sound of the human voice; an idiot singing along to the radio; a baby wailing its head off. Indeed, one study found that around 80% of trigger sounds were made orally by people; coughing, snoring, slurping, chewing loudly, expressing satisfaction after taking a drink by going aaah! ...

These, and many additional noises, can solicit murderous thoughts or provoke actual aggression, particularly when performed habitually by a loved one over many years (and again, I'm speaking from experience here). 

Note: unlike phonophobia, misophonia is neither classified as an auditory or psychiatric condition. Thus there are no standard diagnostic criteria and little research on how common it is or what can be done to help. 

Musical bonus: Buzzcocks: Noise Annoys - B-side to the single Love You More (United Artists, June 1978): click here. This post is in memory of singer/songwriter Pete Shelley.

Under the Radiation of New Skies: On the Spirit of Place and the Question of Migration

D. H. Lawrence: Untitled ink sketch (1929)

They walked a new earth, were seized by a new electricity, and laid in line differently. 
Their bones, their nerves, their sinews took on a new molecular disposition in the new vibration.

      They breathed a savage air, and their blood was suffused and burnt. 
A new fierce salt of the earth, in their mouths, penetrated and altered the substance of their bones. 
Their subtlest plasm was changed under the radiation of new skies, 
new influence of light, their first and rarest life-stuff transmuted.

I. Genius Loci

One of the great ironies of Lawrence's savage pilgrimage was that it taught him the importance of a homeland. For it seems that the freedom to wander around the world isn't ultimately as fulfilling as belonging to a people "polarized in some particular locality".

Despite what some ethno-nationalists claim, Lawrence isn't simply subscribing to a völkisch ideology of blood and soil. He is rather affirming the Romantic belief that different places have a different vital effluence and are aligned with different stars.

The British Isles, for example, possess a "wonderful terrestrial magnestism" (over and above "the indisputable facts of climate and geological condition") and it is this which has made the British people what they are. Thus, for Lawrence, race is ultimately more a metaphysical question of spirit, than it is a biological one to be discussed in terms of heredity. 

But the spirit of place doesn't only determine customs, beliefs, behaviours, etc., it also fatally undermines attempts at globalism and the dream of an ideal, homogenised humanity living as one. In this respect it might better be thought of as a kind of malin génie:

"The spirit of place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens ..." 


II. On the Law of Transubstantiation

What, then, of the millions of migrants from Africa and the Middle East who are driven northwards by invisible winds?* Even if they can be assimilated into European society, can they ever feel comfortable subject to a demonic spirit belonging to an alien continent and beneath the radiation of new skies?

Probably not. There is an unthinkable gulf between them and us and crossing the Mediterranean in a little boat isn't the major problem they face (deadly as this journey can prove to be). And it doesn't really matter how they think and feel about things, or what they do, once here.

Ultimately, however, the malevolent reality of Europe will disintegrate their old way of being. Thus, it's not our values and human rights that will triumph, it's the inhuman spirit of place. Uprooted from their native lands, planted in new soil, they can do nothing but become-other.

Become, that is to say, future Europeans, who will be as different to their present selves as their present selves are to us today. This is Lawrence's law of transubstantiation and it offers the hope that from out of Völkerchaos a new order and a new people will slowly emerge, as "through hundreds of years, new races are made [and] people slowly smelted down and re-cast."

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Spirit of Place', Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen, (Cambridge University Press, 2003). I am quoting from both the final version of the essay (1923) and the first version (1918-19); see pp. 13-19 and 167-179. 

D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, ed. Mara Kalnins, (Cambridge University Press, 1997). The paragraph that closes part I of this post is found on p. 57 of this work.

*Although most commentators insist that migrants come in order to escape violence and poverty, Lawrence argues that it is inadequate in times of great crisis and upheaval to accept such a plausible explanation. The desire to improve one's material circumstances is never enough in itself to uproot a people that is strongly attached to its home and way of life. People only migrate en masse when gripped by the vital magnetism of a faraway land, and do so without knowing why or whither: 

"It is our fatal limitation, at the present time, that we can only understand in terms of personal and conscious choice. We cannot see that great motions carry us and bring us to our place before we can even begin to know. We cannot see that invisible great winds carry us unwitting, as they carry the locust swarms, and direct us before our knowledge, as they direct the migrating birds." [SCAL 170]. 

Some readers will almost certainly object to this; seeing it, for example, as a mystical attempt to dehumanise migrants and strip them of their agency. But - with certain reservations - I think there's something in what Lawrence says here and that it behoves us all to make a greater effort at perceiving the inhuman (or daimonic) forces that control us and ultimately shape our fate.  

Reflections on a Photo of Two Young Punks

Debbie Juvenile and Tracie  O'Keefe
(Seditionaries 1977) 

There are two reasons why I like this photograph ...

Firstly, there are the clothes: McLaren and Westwood's idiosyncratic designs looked fucking amazing back then and they look even more astonishing now. One forgets just how romantic and swashbuckling punk fashion was - and just how queer (using that word in its fullest sense, to mean strange and outlandish as well as sexually deviant in some manner). It was never really a style that came from the streets; it came, rather, from the extraordinary imaginations of Malcolm and Vivienne and made very little sense outside of the world of 430, Kings Road. Clothes for heroes - and clothes for weirdos.         

Secondly, there are the two girls: Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O'Keefe.* They seem unable to contain their pride and joy at looking so fabulous as they pose for the camera lens and actively transform themselves into an image. The fact that each is smiling - such a rare thing for a punk to do - provides the picture with a warmth and a charm that makes me love it and love them.   

If they look so young, it's because they were so young. And their youth - the freshness of faces, the whiteness of hands - also illuminates the image and arouses great affection in me (almost a kind of tenderness). But what gives it a special poignancy is the distressing knowledge that both girls are no longer living.

I look at this photo and see two lovely - if unconventional - young women, dressed in their punk finery; they would appear to have their whole lives ahead of them. But in the back of my mind is the thought: they are going to die ... This, of course, is the challenge and the scandal of every photo. Indeed, it might even be said death is the very essence of photography; that every snap is to some degree or other mortifying: A second of your life ruined for life.

However, as Roland Barthes points out, the photograph also powerfully attests to presence and to the reality of lives that have been. It doesn't merely remind us of the past, or preserve what was abolished by the passing of time. It forms an actual bridge between ourselves and the dead. Thus, you look at Debbie and Tracie and - although they are no longer physically with us - they manage nevertheless to affect those of us who are still here in the flesh; not as ghosts, but as tiny suns that continue to shine long after they have burned out.

To paraphrase Susan Sontag, the presence of the absent being touches me like the delayed rays of a fading star.


Notes

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard, (Hill and Wang, 1981).

*Both girls were early fans of the Sex Pistols and part of the so-called Bromley Contingent; both worked as sales assistants at Seditionaries; and both were arrested during the Sex Pistols' Jubilee gig on a Thames riverboat. Tracie, however, was the only one to be given a prison sentence (for assaulting a policeman), although she was later acquitted on appeal. Shockingy, she died the following year, from cancer, aged 18.

As for Debbie, she embodied the look and spirit of punk: it was Debbie who sold programmes on the Anarchy in the UK tour and it was Debbie who can be seen singing backing vocals on stage with the Sex Pistols auditioning for a new frontman in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Post-punk, she apparently drifted into the world of vice. Then she simply disappeared and is presumed dead.  

Intertextuality: Bert & Amy & Ted & Hannah

According to Hannah Roche, poor old Amy Lowell has been rather hard done by and her poetry unfairly neglected by readers and critics in the 21st century.

For according to Dr. Roche, not one but two of the great white males of English literature - Mssrs. Lawrence and Hughes - both borrowed imagery and ideas from her work. The latter in his much-celebrated poem Pike and the former in the sapphic bathing scene in chapter XII of his astonishing novel The Rainbow.
     

It's an interesting argument and anything that stimulates renewed interest in Lowell and her writing is to be welcomed. Having said that, I don't find the textual evidence Roche supplies in support of her argument particularly persuasive. There are certain similarities and echoes, but to speak of influence and an unacknowledged debt is, I think, going too far.

(Nor do I believe her being an overweight lesbian is the reason Lowell isn't considered a major figure within modernism; it has more to do with the fact that her talent was pretty slender.)   

Besides, even if Hughes and Lawrence - who exchanged many letters with Lowell* and considered her to be a very good friend, if a very bad poet - did plagiarise from Amy (and Roche is careful not to use this word and make such a strong claim), so what? 

To paraphrase Picasso, whilst good poets, like good painters, politely borrow from others and subscribe to a bourgeois etiquette founded upon property rights, great artists steal and make ideas their own without apology.

The critic Richard Ellmann sums this up nicely in a passage written in 1967:

"That writers flow into each other like waves, gently rather than tidally, is one of those decorous myths we impose upon a high-handed, even brutal procedure. The behaviour, while not invariably marked by bad temper, is less polite. Writers move upon other writers not as genial successors but as violent expropriators, knocking down established boundaries to seize by the force of youth, or of age, what they require. They do not borrow, they override."

Notes

Richard Ellmann, Eminent Domain: Yeats among Wilde, Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Auden (Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 3.

Hannah Roche, 'Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism', Modernist Cultures, (Sept. 2017). Click here to go to the University of York Research Database from where you can download a copy of this essay.

For a journalistic spin on this issue, see Alison Flood's article 'Amy Lowell: Ted Hughes and D. H. Lawrence "owe unacknowledged debt" to "uncelebrated" poet', The Guardian, (29 Nov. 2108). Click here to read online. 

*See: The Letters of D. H. Lawrence and Amy Lowell, 1914-1925, ed. E. Claire Healy and Keith Cushman, (Black Sparrow Press, 1985). 

Thanks to Dr. Maria Thanassa for providing me with the quotation from Ellmann's book.

Notes from the Human Zoo 3: The Case of Ota Benga

Ota Benga (c. 1883 - 1916)

If any one individual can lay claim to being the face of the human zoo, it's surely the pygmy Ota Benga ...

Purchased from African slave traders by the missionary and anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner, Benga was taken to the United States and featured in an exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904), before, two years later, becoming a popular sensation at the Bronx Zoo.

Although required to report to the monkey house at showtime, Benga was otherwise given the freedom of the zoological grounds. However, often subject to verbal and physical goading from the crowds Benga would sometimes become aggressive, thereby reinforcing the stereotype of Africans as untamed savages, who were, as a New York Times editorial informed its readers, very low in the human scale.

Whilst campaigners who opposed Benga's treatment petitioned the New York City mayor for his release, defenders of his role at the zoo pointed out that he had, in a sense, fulfilled the American dream by becoming something of star. He even had celebrity friends, including the Apache Indian chief Geronimo.

It was a shit life in some respects - but hey, it was still showbiz and Benga initially seemed to delight in his role and was excited to see his name in the newspapers. He also liked the fact that he was able to charge visitors for photographs and collect tips after a performance, thus making him complicit in his own exploitation.*

Alas, moral crusaders are nothing if not tenacious: and so, in late 1906, the mayor ordered that Benga be taken into custody by Reverend James M. Gordon, supervisor of a church-sponsored asylum in Brooklyn for coloured orphans. Gordon argued that Benga should be fully valued as a human being and condemned the exhibit as not only degrading, but an anti-Christian promotion of Darwinism to boot.

Benga spent four years at the orphanage, before Gordon arranged for him to be cared for by a respectable Christian family in Virginia.

Ota was given a nice new wardrobe of western-style clothes and had his teeth - which had been filed into sharp points in his youth in a traditional manner - capped, so as not to frighten the locals. He was also taught English and given a job at a tobacco factory, where his co-workers called him Bingo and rewarded him with sandwiches and bottles of root beer for regaling them with stories about his life.

To paraphrase Henry Hill, Benga became an average nobody who got to live the rest of his life like a schnook. Thus, when plans of returning to Africa were frustrated due to the outbreak of the First World War, it's little wonder that he fell into a deep depression.

On 20 March, 1916, Benga built a ceremonial fire, chipped off the caps from his teeth, and shot himself through the heart with a stolen pistol. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the negro section of the Old City Cemetery.

* Note: I appreciate this is a controversial claim, but don't see why we should completely strip Benga of his agency and ability to give consent. It's important to note, for example, that prior to taking up his residency at the Bronx Zoo, Benga returned with Verner to the Congo, but quickly discovered he couldn't stand his old way of life and so voluntarily returned to the US. Arguments to do with alienation and false consciousness are interesting, but not entirely convincing (not least of all because, ultimately, I don't subscribe to the fiction of free will). 

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here. 

Part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus) can be read by clicking here.  

Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo (1906)

Notes from the Human Zoo 2: The Case of Sara Baartman (the Hottentot Venus)

Sara Baartman: adding to the gaiety of nations 
and making the Georgian world go 'round

I.

Although more than one black woman was paraded on the stages and exhibited in the zoos of Europe with a sign around her neck reading Hottentot Venus, undoubtedly the most famous of these was Sara Baartman (or Saartjie, as she was often called) ...

II.

Brought to London in 1810, Baartman was presented in shows all over England as an eroticised human freak due to the substantial levels of adipose tissue in her buttocks and thighs producing a provocatively curvaceous figure (a genetic condition known as steatopygia that is common in women of sub-Saharan African origin, particularly those, like Sara, belonging to the Khoikhoi people).

For just a couple of shillings, you could gaze upon her flesh. Those willing to pay a little extra could even poke her with a finger or a stick, as if to confirm that her body must be jelly, 'cos jam don't shake like that!  

Not surprisingly, abolitionists were outraged - particularly as this was taking place shortly after the passing of the Slave Trade Act (1807). They called for her freedom and argued that Baartman's performance was not only indecent, but coerced. The courts, however, found otherwise and it was decided that she was as entitled to earn a living as any other freak.*

Ironically, publicity from the case only increased Baartman's popularity as an exhibit.


III.

In 1814, Baartman was sold and taken to Paris where she amused onlookers in the Palais-Royale. She was also examined by scientists from the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, including Georges Cuvier, the famous professor of comparative anatomy, who was not only searching for proof of a missing link between man and ape, but hoping to find an elongated labia, which earlier French naturalists had observed in Khoisan women.

Sadly, as Baartman's biographers note, her life in Paris was really quite wretched. Not only did she experience extreme poverty, but she was literally treated like an animal (there is some evidence to suggest that at one point a collar was placed around her neck). It's perhaps fortunate, therefore, that she died prematurely the following year, from an undetermined inflammatory disease.

Prior to being dissected, a plaster cast was made of Saarjie's body and this was put on public display at the Musée de l'Homme for over 150 years, along with her skeleton and preserved brain and sexual organs.**  

IV.

It's interesting to note in closing how Baartman lives on in the porno-cultural imagination. In a sense, she's still being exhibited in artworks, scholarly papers and across the media and the exploitation of her body (as symbol and artefact) continues.

The obsession with exaggerated female forms also continues. Bootylicious black performers twerk their hips and arses and trade on their wild or primitive sexuality, whilst Kim Kardashian knowingly celebrates (thereby endorsing) myths of black femininity by balancing a champagne glass on her extended bottom, as if inviting viewers to get love drunk off her hump.

In sum: it's radically mistaken to believe we closed down the human zoos, or that racial and sexual stereotypes are no longer tolerated within our society. The latter remain systemic and, whether we like to admit it or not, they continue to give a great many people pleasure.        

Notes

*According to Baartman's testimony, she was acting of her own free will and subject neither to sexual abuse nor false imprisonment. Some historians have cast doubt on the veracity and independence of this statement, however.

**Readers to whom this kind of thing matters, will be pleased to note that Baartman's remains were finally returned to South Africa for burial in 2002 and she has attained iconic status in the land of her birth.

See: Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus, (Princeton University Press 2009).

Part 1 of this post on the myth of the Great Family of Man can be read by clicking here.

Part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga can be read by clicking here.

Notes from the Human Zoo 1: The Myth of the Great Family of Man

Today, along with freak shows, bear pits, and public executions, ethnological expositions - aka human zoos - have pretty much been consigned to the shameful past on the grounds that they are cruel, degrading, and racist.

Far be it from me to dispute or deny this; for it's true that the displays often emphasized the ethno-cultural superiority of white Europeans over non-white, non-European peoples deemed to be primitive and inferior, if not, indeed, subhuman. But it seems to me that the contemporary myth of universal humanism that posits a single Great Family of Man sharing a unified history is equally pernicious and, in fact, shares a similar logic.     

Roland Barthes explains how this moralised and sentimentalised myth functions in two stages:

"first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism [or what we now like to term otherness] is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest [just as in the human zoo exhibitions] ... Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical 'nature', that their diversity is formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould ... a human essence ..."

This is the lyrical neutralisation of men and women and the suppression of a history wherein we find not merely colourful, superficial differences, but stark injustices.

Thus, whilst it might seem to be an advance to be accorded equality and granted legal rights - it's certainly prefarable to being exhibited in the monkey house - one still needs to exercise caution and constantly look for signs of the ancient imposture exposed by Barthes.

The human zoos may have closed - but the system of values that opened them continues to operate.   

See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, (Noonday Press, 1991), p. 100. A pdf of this book can be read online by clicking here. 

For part 2 of this post on the case of Sara Baartman, click here. 

For part 3 of this post on the case of Ota Benga, click here.