Primitivism

Michael Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315412832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972, this books examines the subject of primitivism through the study of the work of a number of major writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. It looks at the variety of definitions and uses of primitivism and how the idea has changed over time as well as with each writer. In doing so, it is argued that primitivism denotes, or arises from, a sense of crisis in civilization and it is born of the interplay between the civilized self and the desire to reject or transform it.

This book will be of interest to those studying modern literature.

1

Primitive Sensibility

I use the term primitive, or mythic, sensibility to refer to the recreation of what many anthropologists have believed to be the most essential qualities of pre-civilized feeling and thought. Since our entire knowledge of early forms of mental life is necessarily inferential and has never been a matter on which all authorities have agreed, the question of its anthropological validity, an important and tricky issue, will have to be considered in more detail later. For the present, however, I will simply indicate those tendencies of feeling and thought whose appearance in works of literature has led to comparison with some of the influential, if not always reliable, anthropological accounts of the primitive world view.

Perhaps the most important point in an anthropological account of primitive man is that mythic sensibility refers to a way of feeling and thought, not to specific ideas or mental objects. We are concerned here not with the mythical objects or stories themselves but with the primary mode of response to the external world and to human nature from which all the particular mythic forms derive. This distinction is of considerable importance since mythic sensibility not only implies therefore the most radical qualities of primitive mental life but in literature something of this ancient mode of thought and feeling can be recreated without necessary recourse to actual primitive objects or beliefs. A writer, in short, may evoke the ancient response to life without being overtly or even consciously primitivist.

The fundamental characteristic of primitive sensibility from which its other features can logically be derived is the absence, from a modem scientific standpoint at least, of a firm and rational distinction between the inner world of feeling and the external order of existence. Ernst Cassirer, who sums up some central tendencies of twentieth-century anthropological thought, puts it as follows:

The linguistic term ‘polysynthetic’ has indeed been applied to the mythical imagination, and the term has been explained as meaning that for the mythical imagination there is no separation of a total complex into its elements, but that only a single undivided totality is represented – a totality in which there has been no ‘dissociation’ of the separate factors of objective perception and subjective feeling.

(The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, II, pp. 45–6)

The implication of this is that primitive man in effect projects the needs and desires of his own nature as objective qualities of the external world. In Cassirer’s words:

Accordingly, the world of mythical ideas, precisely in its first and most immediate forms, appears closely bound up with the world of efficacy. Here lies the core of the magical world view, which is saturated with this atmosphere of efficacy, which is indeed nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous, objective existence.

(p. 157)

One of the most pervasive manifestations of this radical subjectivism of mythic consciousness is primitive animism. To the animistic mentality the external world is pervaded by spirits or powers, sometimes known collectively as ‘mana’; the projection from our point of view of human desires and fears. All attempts to describe this mode of consciousness are bedevilled by the necessity of using modern terminology for a mental world which did not know the distinctions or share the assumptions that such terminology inevitably tends to imply. The mistranslation of the North American Indian term Manitou as ‘Great Spirit’ is a classic exemplification of civilized man’s distortion of the mythic sense by the imposition of what seems the nearest available term. Where the modern term ‘spirit’ generally implies a transcendent supernatural dimension, mythic consciousness appears not to have known our long-standing dichotomy of spiritual and material. ‘Mana’ is not an independent spiritual entity so much as an inherent quality of the concrete objects of the environment and yet it provides the focus for attitudes that we can only describe as religious. Primitive man apparently felt in all aspects of the natural world, such as weather, animals and vegetation, the manifestation of a will and a mentality somehow comparable to his own. While no doubt feeling his environment as frequently hostile, primitive man none the less felt his relation to it as continuous rather than radically transcendent or alien. An insight into the primitive relationship with the natural environment is given in Cassirer’s account of the ‘momentary god’.

Here we have the mythico-religious proto-phenomenon which Usener has sought to fix with the term ‘momentary god’. ‘In absolute immediacy,’ he says, ‘the individual phenomenon is deified, without the intervention of even the most rudimentary class concept; that one thing which you see before you, that and nothing else is the god.’ (p. 280) To this day, the life of primitive races shows us certain features in which this process is almost tangibly clear. We may recall examples of it which Spieth adduces: water found by a thirsty person, a termite mound that hides and saves someone, any new object that inspires a man with a sudden terror – all these are transformed directly into gods. Spieth summarizes his observations with the words: ‘To the mind of the Eve, the moment in which an object or any striking attributes of it enter into any noticeable relation, pleasant or unpleasant, with the life of man, that moment a Trõ is born in his consciousness.’ It is as though the isolated occurrence of an impression, its separation from the totality of ordinary, commonplace experience produced not only a tremendous intensification, but also the highest degree of condensation and as though by virtue of this condensation the objective form of the god were created so that it veritably burst forth from the experience.¹

This passage emphasizes the radical subjectivity of this world view and catches the primitive disregard for a settled and separate supernatural order as the focus of its strong religious instinct.

Given such a world view it is natural that primitive man should attempt to come to terms with his environment not through scientific mastery but by appealing to the animistic powers. Elaborate propitiatory observances are to be found, for example, among many primitive peoples when killing their principal means of subsistence, or even their enemies. And this applies not just to the killing of men or even animals, such as bears and whales, but can apply equally to the felling of trees. This relation to the natural environment, spanning a range of feeling from grateful worship to superstitious terror, can be broadly summed up as natural, or cosmic, piety; a term for which two observations are especially relevant for present purposes. Firstly the powers of nature, just as they do not correspond to the Christian supernatural, are not to be seen as morally ‘good’ or beneficent in anything like a Christian sense. The primitive awe is as closely allied to terror as to worship and the natural deities to which it gives rise are as little amenable to moral pressure almost as nature itself. ‘Mana’ is felt as a curious cross between a conscious being and a natural phenomenon like an electric charge. As Frazer points out, the ritual associated with such powers is as much like the literal and scientific practice of insulating an electrical charge as symbolic or religious observance. Indeed it has even been suggested that the sense of ‘mana’ originated in the experience of static electricity.² Natural piety, therefore, does not denote a view of the universe as good so much as an unquestioning submission to its ways.

The second observation follows from this. Since natural piety is not essentially a moral concept it does not militate against bloodshed, or even cannibalism, as our civilized ethical systems, however ineffectively at times, may be said to do. Where we think of conduct in more personal and creative terms as moral responsibility or an effort of self-determination, primitive man thinks in terms of taboos expressing a superstitious awe of the potencies of external nature. Taboo is a way of coming to terms with the mysterious and the ungovernable which still leaves them beyond comprehension or control and therefore accepts the state of things as essentially unchanging. The propitiatory observances of warriors and huntsmen are not expressive of any desire to behave otherwise but only to avoid the possible consequences of offending the natural powers or the spirits of the departed. Fortunately, however, a detailed study of taboo practices and their possible interpretations is not necessary for the present discussion. These remarks are simply intended to indicate that natural piety, whatever its precise manifestations and meaning in primitive life, is a complex of feeling that resists definition in either the religious or the moral terms to which it seems most closely akin in our civilization. It is a mode of feeling and thought that is profoundly at one with the natural world, that accepts human life as part of that world, and therefore does not question the moral propriety of the cosmic order. It does not, or cannot, adopt that kind of philosophic detachment.

For present purposes, then, the three most important features of the primitive world view are animism, natural piety, and the rituals through which they are expressed. Although they obviously have considerable residual life the first two of these particularly have lost their potency in Western civilization as dominant modes of assimilating and ordering experience. They all, however, reappear in certain works of literature in such a way that the inadequacy of religious, moral or psychological formulation to the mode of feeling that is recreated has led critics to draw anthropological parallels. Two major, yet very different, writers for whom such comparisons have been made are D. H. Lawrence and Herman Melville. A consideration of both, therefore, can show very different ways in which these ancient modes of response can be evoked in modern English. We may consider Lawrence first.

For this purpose it is best to leave, for a while at least, Lawrence’s overtly primitivistic works such as his Mexican and American fiction, for some of the best examples of his recreation of the mythic response to life are to be found in my opinion in such works as The Rainbow and some of the short stories set in England. And these works have the added advantage for present purposes that this mode of response can be illustrated more clearly without the further factor of an overtly primitivist intent. Several critics have observed that Lawrence’s exploration of the emotional life frequently evokes a level of feeling and a response to the external world that recreate essential aspects of the mythic world view.¹ The following passage, for example, occurs early in The Rainbow as Lydia Lensky begins to recover from the total emptiness that has followed the death of her husband and her settling in England. After the virtual extinction of her former personality, a process of psychic rebirth takes place starting at a very instinctual level beyond her conscious recognition or understanding. To render this, Lawrence re-establishes the most elemental relatedness between Lydia and the world around her; he reawakes in her that animistic awe by which the individual and his world are made deeply at one.

She was sent to Yorkshire, to nurse an old rector in his rectory by the sea. This was the first shake of the kaleidoscope that brought in front of her eyes something she must see. It hurt her brain, the open country and the moors. It hurt her and hurt her. Yet it forced itself upon her as something living, it roused some potency of childhood in her, it had some relation to her.

There was green and silver and blue in the air about her now. And there was a strange insistence of light from the sea, to which she must attend. Primroses glimmered around, many of them, and she stooped to the disturbing influence near her feet, she even picked one or two flowers, faintly remembering in the new colour of life, what had been. All the day long, as she sat at the upper window, the light came off the sea, constantly, without refusal, till it seemed to bear her away, and the noise of the sea created a drowsiness in her, a relaxation like sleep. Her automatic consciousness gave way a little, she stumbled sometimes, she had a poignant, momentary vision of her living child, that hurt her unspeakably. Her soul roused to attention.

Very strange was the constant glitter of the sea unsheathed in heaven, very warm and sweet the graveyard, in a nook of the hill catching the sunshine and holding it as one holds a bee between the palms of the hands, when it is benumbed. Grey grass and lichens and a little church, and snowdrops among coarse grass, and a cupful of incredibly warm sunshine.

She was troubled in spirit. Hearing the rushing of the beck away down under the trees, she was startled, and wondered what it was. Walking down, she found the bluebells around her glowing like a presence among the trees.

(London, Heinemann, 1955, pp. 47–8)

This is a beautiful and characteristic passage. In a basically simple, direct prose that is yet constantly shot through with odd images or turns of phrase Lawrence follows the movement from total dejection to a peculiar emotional culmination. By the end of the passage the hints of a strange ‘otherness’ in the description of the sea, sky and flowers have gathered in the experience of the bluebells glowing ‘like a presence’ among the trees. In this final moment there is the vivid suggestion of an unspecified being or power immanent in the woodland surroundings. The delicacy of the phrase ‘like a presence’ is that it conveys this impression without any explicit hypostatization or personification. It does not enforce a consciously focused image, but simply evokes a feeling. By this troubling indeterminacy of reference the phrase invites the reader to project into it the suggestiveness of the entire passage; it makes him re-enact the emotional projection that suddenly surprises the character herself. The overall effect is that her emotional state is simply felt in the environment as an apparently objective characteristic; a mysterious ‘presence’ among the trees.

Such effects are not, of course, peculiar to Lawrence, they are familiar in romantic literature generally, but he is an especially illuminating example in view of the relation of this, as we shall see, to his later overt primitivism, for it is apparent that this episode concerning Lydia Lensky is an inward recreation of an animistic response that closely parallels the experience of the ‘momentary god’ as described by Cassirer. This is true not only of the final effect but of the way the whole episode is structured to prepare for it. The sudden transfiguration of the outer world of nature by the inner world of feeling is the culmination of an increasing fusion of the two throughout; the environment is assimilated by the woman with growing intimacy as she progressively opens herself towards it. In the opening paragraph the environment is totally external and can be felt only as a hurtful, alien pressure. By the third paragraph, however, the sun’s rays that were hurting her eyes have begun to suffuse her body with warmth. The shift from sight to touch suggests an absorption of the outer world that continues in the final paragraph with the shift to the sense of hearing. She is actively attending now rather than merely reacting mechanically to its insistence. From the passiveness of the opening verb in ‘She was sent to Yorkshire ...’ she moves to an active seeking out of the experience in the final moment among the bluebells: ‘Walking down, she found the bluebells….…’

Even granted the general structure of the episode it is apparent that its peculiar conviction, as has already been suggested, is an effect of Lawrence’s characteristic language. In recreating something of an ancient mode of feeling Lawrence, in this novel at least, does not attempt to reject or deny the civilized mentality. He rather, by subtle and continual displacements of normal usage, feels back as it were through the mental patterns of modern English towards a less rationally developed kind of consciousness. His use of the word ‘presence’ here, his exerting pressure on it to make it yield something beyond its normal meaning, is entirely typical. He leans on words f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 Primitive Sensibility
• 2 Conscious Primitivism
• 3 The Historical Context
• 4 The P1-imitivism of the Critics
• 5 Conclusion and Further Directions
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX