Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies

Comparative Literature as Textual Anthropology

206 Comparative Literature as Textual Anthropology Antony Tatlow In his study, “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger observes: “The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man” (3) and he asks: What were the secrets of the animal’s likeness with and unlikeness from man? The secrets whose existence man recognized as soon as he intercepted the animal’s look. In one sense the whole of anthropology , concerned with the passage from nature to culture, is the answer to that question. But there is also a general answer. All the secrets were about animals as an intercession between man and his origin. . . . Animals interceded between man and his origin because they were both like and unlike man. Animals came from over the horizon. They belonged there and here. Likewise they were both mortal and immortal. An animal’s blood flowed like human blood, but its species was undying and each lion was Lion, each ox was Ox. This—maybe the first existential dualism—was reflected in the treatment of animals. They were subjected and worshiped, bred and sacrificed. . . . All theories of ultimate origin are only ways of better defining what followed. . . . What we are trying to define, because the experience is almost lost, is the universal use of animal signs for charting the experience of the world. (4–6) Brecht’s Auf einen chinesischen Theewurzellöwen (On a Chinese Tea Root Lion), a private totem, descends from the animals described by Berger (I draw on a discussion of animal signs in art in an earlier study; see Tatlow 1990). The Tea Root Lion also illustrates the universal use of animal signs for charting the experience of the world: “Die Schlechten fürchten deine Klaue./ Die Guten freuen sich deiner Grazie./ Derlei/ Hörte ich gern/ Von meinem Vers” (1967, 997). At first glance, the Tea Root Lion may appear to domesticate the consternation embodied in the earlier animal figures but in its own way this figure speaks to Berger’s anthropological question. We should not be misled by the apparently emblematic figure or by what first looks like the flatly allegorical function of the verse, by the supposition of a one-to-one correspondence in what may then seem an only too easy moral equation, the good and the bad neatly divided from each other like the sheep and the goats. This verse should never be, but invariably is, separated from the artefact to which it is conjoined and such separation greatly facilitates these simplifications. Everything depends upon the level on which we choose to conduct our enquiry. Brecht’s work has suffered enough from being reduced to, and then constrained within, those superficial and convenient perspectives from which its meaning was once socially authorized. It is, therefore, necessary to explore the possibility of further connections between totemic and utopian thought. When the animal’s look is transformed into an animal sign, into an imagined alien Other and located within the structure of a work of art, hidden forces undergo a process of externalization. We therefore approach a potential selfencounter as we are drawn into an interrogation of the work. When representation separates layers of perception, whilst presenting them with visual immediacy, every more or less adequate act of interpretation must put our sense of self into jeopardy or, at the very least, draw attention to how we are engendered and positioned by our culture. In this particular case the utopian reflection contained within the verse cannot dispense with, therefore in some sense derives from and is interwoven with, an engagement with the anthropological other in the form of an intriguing artefact, the representation of an imagined animal from that other culture. This animal sign undergoes, in the newly established juxtaposition that playfully echoes and develops the aesthetics of Chinese painting, a process of acculturation, even as such repositioning provokes, like all anthropological engagements, a potential self-encounter or, to be more accurate, cannot really be interpreted unless such an encounter takes place. “In grasping these truths,” Lévi-Strauss observed of the wider consequences of the anthropological encounter, we are “ramenés à nous-mêmes par cette confrontation ” (1955, 354). The discerning anthropologist can be sure of at least one thing: that he will have to face up to himself if his work is to have any Comparative Literature as Textual Anthropology 207 [3.16.66.206] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11...