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BOOKPRESS

Volume 2, Number 7

September, 1992

Ithaca, New York

Interview with Carl Sagan

COMPLIMENTARY

Science and Human Nature

Kavita Philips

logical research. Could you explain, reality?

for a prospective reader of your bode, K.P. Would you say, then, that we

K.P. In your forthcoming book, why you think an understanding of need to emphasize the importance

Shadows o f Forgotten Ancestors, things like evolution and animal of science education not just because

you describe a personal quest for an behavior is valuable, not just in we want to produce more scientists,

understanding o f the meaning o f itself, but in the context o f those but because this can play an essen­

human existence. You suggest that larger questions?

tial part in the development of human

we come closer to answering fun- C.S. This btxrk is the culmination of consciousness?

damental questions such as "Who a 12-year effort. It’s just the first C.S. Absolutely. I think w e’re all

are we?” and “Why are we here?” step in our attempt to understand born scientists— science is our

only through a richer understanding how w e humans got into our birthright. I think you'd have to be

of our place in nature. You and Ann present mess, and to ask the ques­ made out o f wood not to wonder

Druyan, then, with admirable clar­ tion: Can we get out? To do that we where humans came from, where

ity, elegance, and humor, take the have to look at ourselves squarely in life comes from, where the earth

lay reader through decades of bio- the mirror.

comes from— which are mainstream

INSIDE:

The human species is only a scientific subjects. I’m not just few hundred thousand years old on talking about producing scientists an earth that’s a few billion years and engineers,* but producing

James Bay:

old; w e’ve been around for only 1/ knowledgable citizens who can 10,000th o f the history o f the earth, make intelligent decisions on how

Strangers Devour the Land

o f the history o f life. But we have science and technology ought to be ancestors. In part, we must be the applied. Who makes these decisions? way we are because o f who our How many members o f Congress

page 3

ancestors were, what their evolution have any background at all in sci­ was like, what they had to adapt to, ence and technology? How does it

Ornithological Art

and the nature o f this evolutionary enter into our decisions about who process. So part o f our response to to vote for? Hardly at all. And yet

page 4

your question is: How can we solve every day decisions involving our problems if we don't know who science and technology are made

Narration and Indian Identity

we are? Not just what we pretend, that determine our future. This is not just what we wish we were, not just foolishness— it is surrendering just the myths and fantasies that all the democratic process to a few

page 7

cultures invent about who we are unelected technocrats.

and where we came from, but the

see Sagan, page 9

Carl Sagan

The Ambivalence of Light

Kevin Murphy
AS IF IT MATTERS Eamon Grennan Graywolf, $11.00 paper, 93 pp.
Eamon Grennan’s poetry has great if somewhat paradoxical ap­ peal. He discovers the mysterious and the radiant in what might eas­ ily he passed by on the road, in the house, in the homely relations of family. The familiar, even the familial, increases in value and intensity as Grennan focuses his gaze and, following the advice Van Gogh once gave, pays more attention. In the description o f a walk home through rain, Grennan finds metaphors o f his divided self along the road and in the air (“only the rain is real, the rest/ a dream that leads me— half/ open wings, half stone— home”), or, in recounting an afternoon climbing trek with his son, he discovers his own death.
In terms o f style, he admires

the pure, clear word o f James Wright (to whom he wrote a dedi­ catory poem in his first volume), but not Wright’s austerity. In­ stead, Grennan gives himself over to an abundance o f language and metaphor, especially a rich palette of synesthetic color, which he ap­ plies brilliantly to advance the nu­ ance and shape o f his poems. Where else would one find a bro­ ken cattle skull “ the colour of crushed almonds/ or washed out barley muslin” or a dead animal on a newspaper “the colour o f candlewax and / bleached kid­ ney”? Even those pigments ap­ parently improvised on the spot have complexion and complexity (“tea-brown trapezoids,” “matte vanilla glitter,” “Naples yellow,” “birchleaf green,” “brick-pink”), giving each surface detail a ten­ sion and texture. Grennan em ­ beds these radiant details in a firm narrative line, and, along the way, has a penchant for recycling a common or hackneyed phrase so

that we become aware of subtle­ ties residing on and beneath its ordinary surface (“and, plain as day, the emptiness at last”; “we are brought into the picture, into a kingdom / we might find under our noses”). The result is a po­ etry at once plain and luminous, pedestrian and gorgeous.
Grennan is probably most familiar to American readers in the pages of The New Yorker, where he has been a regular contributor for the past five years or so, but in fact, at least in terms of education and publication, he is something o f a dual national. As I f It Matters, Grennan’s sec­ ond book of poems published in the United States, was first pub­ lished in Ireland by Peter Fallon’s Gallery Press in 1991. (The first American collection. What Light There Is, published by North Point in 1989, contained poems from Wildly fo r Days [Gallery, 1983] and What Light There Is
see Ambivalence, page 5

No, But I Read the Movie

Donald Morton

author believes, posits film as a si

o f interest only as a “text” and coi

SEEING FILMS POLITICALLY sequcntly focuses entirely on “rear

by Mas’ud Zavarzadeh.

ing” the internal movements o f i

State University of New York Press. chain o f signification: the result

Paper $16.95,267 pp.

an inquiry only into how (and m

why) film comes to mean what

Postmodern film theory — with seems to mean. The only “politics

a lot o f help from poststructuralist that is ever discussed in contempt

literary theory — has made “seeing” rary film criticism and theory is thi

films impossible. Instead o f “see­ merely the politics o f rhetoric.

ing,” one now “reads” films.

This notion of politics-as-dis

Zavarzadeh’s book argues that this course is perhaps nowhere mor

shift, which is presented by film clearly at work than in the wa

theorists as a sign o f the increasing postmodern film theory deals wit

com plexity and subtlety o f film the question o f “ideology.” In th

theory, is actually an ideological radical tradition o f Marxism, ideo

alibi. It distracts attention from the ogy is a historical and politic;

ways films serve to produce class practice: ideology mystifies tt

subjectivities and identities — posi­ dominant labor relations and, coi

tions for “seeing” — that are neces­ sequently, the exploitation o f tt

sary to produce a compliant labor workers through the extraction (

force and instead puts the emphasis surplus labor is presented as

on the “formal” and “rhetorical” natural and therefore inevitable ac

a n a ly s is o f the f ilm ic As a result, the worker sees nothir

“text” Postmodern film theory, the

see Movie, page 14

page 2

the BOOKPRESS

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

A Preview of

September, 1992

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Shadows of Forgotten Ances­ tors, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's new book, is subtitled A Search for Who We Are, and is the culmination o f the authors’ 12year quest to arrive at a deeper understanding o f what is human, what is male andfemale, why we are so violent, so prone to unquestion­ ing obedience to authority. Posing such questions as: What is the ori­ gin o fconsciousness? What obliga­ tion, i f any, do we owe to the other animals with whom we share this planet? Is there something within us, some legacy o f our distant past, that threatens the future o f our spe­ cies? Shadows o f Forgotten Ances­ tors integrates the insights o f science into a vision o f where we came from, who we are, and what ourfate might be. Here are two briefexcerptsfrom chapters 15 and 17.
Early in the fifth century B.C., Hanno of Carthage set sail into the Western Mediterranean with a fleet o f 67 ships, each with 50 oars, carrying altogether 30,000 men and women. Or at least this is what he claimed in the Periplus — a chronicle that was posted in one o f the many temples consecrated to the god Baal after his return home. Sailing through the Straights o f Gibraltar, he turned south, establishing cities along the West African coast as he went, in­ cluding present-day Agadir, M o­ rocco. Eventually, he came to a land filled with crocodiles and hippo­ potami and many groups of people, some herders, some “wild men,” some friendly, some not. The in­ terpreters he had brought from Mo­ rocco could not understand the languages spoken here. He sailed by what is now Senegal, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. He passed a great mountain from which a fire reached “to heaven,” and from which, night and day, “streams of fire flowed into the sea.” This is, almost certainly, the Mt. Cameroon volcano just east o f the delta of the River Niger. He

may have gone almost as far as the Congo before returning.
In the last o f eighteen short paragraphs in his Periplus, Hanno describes finding, just before turning back, an island in an African lake,
full o f wild men. Byfar the majority o f them were women with hairy bodies. The interpreters called them “gorillas. ”
The males escaped by climbing precipices and hurling stones. But the females were not so lucky.
We captured three women...who bit and scratched...and did not want to follow. So we killed them andflayed them and took their skins to Carthage
Modem scholars take these beseiged and mutilated beings to be either what we today call gorillas, or chimpanzees. One of Hanno’s de­ tails, the throwing o f stones by the males, suggests to us that they were chimps. The Periplus is the earliest firm historical account w e have o f a first contact between apes and humans.
***
The ancient Mayan authors of the Popol Vuh considered monkeys to be the product o f the last botched experiment conducted by the gods before they finally got it right and managed to create us. The gods meant well, but they were fallible, imperfect artisans. Humans are hard to make. Many peoples in Africa, Central and South America, and the Indian subcontinent thought of apes and monkeys as beings with some deep connection to humans— aspir­ ant humans, perhaps, or failed hu­ mans, demoted for some grave transgression against divine law, or voluntary exiles from the self-dis­ cipline demanded by civilization.

Without exposure to the beasts

most like men, it was difficult to

draw the’connection between beasts

and men. It was easier by far to

imagine a separate creation of each

species, with the less vivid similari­

ties between us and other animals

(the suckling o f the young, say, or

five toes on each foot) understood as

some trademark idiosyncracy o f the

Creator. The ape was as far below

man, it was asserted, as man was

below God. So, when, after the

Crusades, and especially beginning

in the seventeenth century, the West

came to know monkeys and apes

better, it was with a sense of em­

barrassment, shame, a nervous

snigger — perhaps to disguise

the shock o f recognition at the

family resemblance.

The Darwinian idea that mon­

keys and apes are our closset rela­

tives brought the discomfort to the

conscious level. You can still see

the unease today in the conventional

associations with the word “ape”: to

copy slavishly, to be outsized and Photograph: ©Marion Ettlinger brutal. To “go ape” is to revert, to Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, authors o f Shadows o f Forgotten Ancestors. become wild, untamed. When we

In ancient Greece and Rome the similarity o f apes or monkeys with humans was well-known— indeed, it was stressed by Aristotle' and Galen. But this led to no speculations about common ancestry. The gods who had made humans were also in the habit o f changing themselves into animals tcm pe or seduce young women: Like the centaurs and the Minotaur, the offspring o f these unions were chimaeras, part beast,

In India and ancient Egypt, handle something idly, in an ex­ though, there were monkey-headed ploratory way, w e’re “monkeying gods, and in the latter large numbers around.” To “make a monkey” out of mummified baboons — indicat­ o f someone is to humiliate him. A ing that they were cherished if not “little monkey” is a mischievous or worshipped. A monkey apotheosis playful child. A “monkeyshine” is a would have been unthinkable in the prank. To “go bananas” is to lose post-classical W est— in part be­ control — reflecting the fact that cause the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic monkeys and apes, who indeed love religion cam e o f age where bananas, are not subject to the same nonhuman primates were rare or social restraints that we are. In absent, but mainly because the Christian Europe in the Middle Ages

part human. Still, no ape chimaeras worship o f animals (for example, and early Renaissance, monkeys and

are prominent in the myths o f Greece the Golden Calf o f the Israelites) apes were emblematic o f extreme

and Rome._____________________ was singled out as an abomination: ugliness, o f a doomed craving for *“[An ape's] face resembles that of a man in They were pedaling away from ani­ the status o f humans, o f ill-gotten

many respects...[I]t has similar nostrils and mism as fast as they could. Apes wealth, o f a vengeful disposition, of

ears, and teeth like those of man, both front were not widely available for ex ­ lust and foolishness and sloth. They

teeth and molars... [I]t has hands and fingers amination in Europe until about the were accessories — because o f their

and nails like man, only that all these parts are sixteenth century; the so-called susceptibility to temptation — in the

somewhat more beast-like in appearance. Its Barbary ape o f North Africa and “Fall o f Man.” For their sins, it was

feet are exceptional...like large hands... (T]he Gibraltar — which is what Aristotle widely held, apes and monkeys de­

internal organs are found on dissection to and Galen apparently described — served to be subjugated by humans.

correspond to those of man.”

is actually a monkey, a macaque. "

see Shadows, page 10

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Hunter and Hunted

page 3

. ' Joel Ray

sault on Cree culture and land called

what it means to be divorced from a

it a “salutary shock.” When 10,000

relationship with nature based on

STRANGERS DEVOUR

caribou were drowned during the

bedrock survival knowledge and

THE LAND

flooding of the Caniapscau River,

respect for the other forms o f life

By Boyce Richardson

Hydro-Quebec called it an act of

upon which one's own life depends.

Chelsea Green Publishing Co.

God. (Which God? the Crees must

And the other dimensions o f Cree

revised edition, 376 pp.;

wonder.) Recently the Cree have

society that Richardson has learned

paper $14.95

begun to fight back against plans for

about? They include familiar Indian

foreword by W inona LaDuke further dams on the Great Whale,

values that remain alive today in

Kapashesit

Nottaway, Broadback, and Rupert

many places on our continent: a

rivers, and government and business

spiritual and practical apprehension

Journalist and filmmaker Boyce Richardson first visited the Cree Indians o f northern Quebec

groups in the province have assailed them as an “aristocracy,” questioned whether they are true Quebeckers,

o f the interrelation o f humans, ani­ mals, water, and land; a consequent ethic o f sharing and interdepen­

twenty years ago. Though the and attacked them for embarrassing

dency; and a nonproprietary form of

settlements in the southerly areas of Quebec before the world. Hostility

shifting land ownership that looks to

M istissin i, C hibougam au, and toward them right now seems at a

future generations — the very

Waswinipi showed the depressing dangerous pitch.

“stewardship,” in a word, that en­

effects o f increased contact with

Strangers Devour the Land,

vironmentalists have insisted is the

white mining and logging interests published by Knopf in 1976 and

path “civilized” society must pursue.

and tourist hunters, the northern­ reissued with a 1991 epilogue by

Underlying this ecological practice

most Crees were still pretty much Chelsea Green o f Vermont last year,

o f life is an organic sense of history

living a centuries-old hunting and is urgent reading for anyone who

— of the culture, the family, and the

fishing life. Before 1972 there were wants to understand how this disaster

individual — reflected in communal

no Cree chiefs, and the scattered but came about. Especially important

stories, and in keen individual

interdependent family groups that are its account o f Cree history and

memories o f past hunting seasons,

moved around the land had never culture in northern Quebec, its close-

past epic journeys. Flowing from

met in formal council. Cree liveli­ up view of the traditional hunting

that sense o f history, and from the

hood depended almost entirely on and fishing life, and — for white

needs o f survival, is a daily atten­

the spring and fall goose hunts, on environmentalists — its implicit

tiveness which in turn sharpens the

summer fishing in the rivers, and on redefinition of the word “environ­

memory. Cree knowledge includes

winter hunting and trapping of rab­ ment,” which has largely been

too a sense of large patterns of space

bits, beaver, caribou, bear, and emptied o f the human. For an in­

and time, and especially an appre­

moose. The winter sojourns on dustrial society struggling to un­

ciation of forces beyond human

traplines — reached by canoe and derstand its own woes, Richardson

control, these apprehensions mani­

on foot — lasted nine months, dur­ offers the example of a people living

festing themselves in as humorous a

ing which time the Cree families today, not many miles from us, who Job Bearskin, "one o f the most impressive men I have ever met," a moral and grasp o f the absurd as that o f any also prepared beaver pelts for sale to understand what living in balance spiritual leader among Fort George/Chisasibi people until his death in 1989. postmodern novelist. Some, puzzled

the Hudson Bay

Company for with nature means and who are

and wanting more aggressive action

supplemental income for provisions. snuggling to preserve a vision of life in a victory that was overturned as played out in politics and eco­ from the Cree against Hydro-Que­

In 1972 this hard but rich sub­ that makes sense.

within a week by a higher court), in nomics; about human experimenta­ bec, call this their “resignation.”

sistence life was profoundly chal­

Richardson came to a confer­ which we hear Indians answering tion; about invidious distinctions Indeed Cree behavior, based on these

lenged when Quebec announced that ence on James Bay at Cornell last puzzling white lawyers’ questions between animals and humans; about values, is so modest of ambition that

it would appropriate hundreds of October, and showed his film about quantities and numbers, and right and wrong action; and about we may see it as passivity; but that is

thousands o f square miles for the “Flooding Job’s Garden,” which outraged scientists detailing the the meanings o f words like “ani­ inherent in a view o f the world as

building erfdams on ten of the largest gave “before” and “after” views of likely effects o f the dams on hu­ mal,” “environment,” and “civiliza­ unpredictable and requiring constant

rivers to generate electricity for the the rivers, the black spruce forests, mans, animals, land, and water. The tion,” and how they are manipulated. alertness — a healthy realism about

southern province and the north­ and the m oss-covered taiga o f court transcripts acquaint us also (White men “break words with their limits that is critical to survival. (But

eastern US. Today, after a tremen­ northern Quebec. During the con­ (thankfully) with skilled and com ­ teeth and spit them on the ground,” then passivity can hardly explain the

dous struggle between the Cree and ference speakers pointed out that the mitted white people who are says an Indian in Bernard Malamud’s Crees’ accomplishment in organiz­

the governments o f Canada and Indians were fighting for all o f us, struggling with the Cree to assure The People.)

ing to stop New York from import­

Quebec, three huge dams are oper­ and while reflex tempted me to marie that their culture can survive. The

Strangers is no treatise or po­ ing further Hydro-Quebec power.)

ating, four more are in progress, five this down as mere activist rhetoric, I alternation o f court transcripts with lemic, however. Rather it is a narra­

The Inuit of northern Quebec

3/4-million-volt power lines carry recalled standing in a field in northern the narrative o f Richardson’s time tive about a city white man who are also threatened by the new

12,000 megawatts o f power south, New York fifteen years ago with in the bash boldly contrasts industrial encounters a foreign and hidden life projects, and in my memory the most

and there are permanent stations o f Mohawk and Seneca Indians who and subsistence world views, and in the wilderness, and discovers powerful counter-image to the

white workers throughout the were trying to help farmers stop the is an effective variant o f the something he must share. He makes headlong electrical life we pursue is Cree territory. Another 15,000 first power line interconnecting with fictional technique whereby modem his view plain in the acknowledg­ a scene from a 1970 Canadian film:

megawatts are planned. In newly built settlements Crees now struggle to survive in a cash economy, some live on welfare, and all contend with

Quebec. It was white farm land these Indians were defending, and several went to jail for it. Good books often don’t teach new things so much as

life is viewed by a completely other intelligence.
“For a white man to penetrate into the world o f a Cree hunter,”

ments: “I will never be able to repay adequately Job Bearskin, o f Fort George, and Sam Blacksmith, of Mistassini, who welcomed me on

an Inuit seal hunter waiting patiendy in disguise next to a seal hole, for the seal to emerge again — and then, sixteen hours later, missing the seal

the medical and social consequences they remind us o f important things says Richardson, “is not easy.” A their land, and looked after me, and when it comes. However much we

o f white encroachment: increased we once knew and have forgotten; notable quality o f this book is its taught me that life has other may agree with Richardson that we

suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism, Richardson’s beautiful and disturb­ humility; Richardson approaches the dim ensions than those I had wouldn’t want to live this way, one

methylmercury poisoning, and the ing book did this — and it stimulated Cree as a respectful observer o f an previously comprehended.”

thing he accomplishes in this book is

overwhelm ing demands o f new further reading that has helped me ethical culture superior in many ways

White men and women have to convince us how well the Cree

bureaucracies imposed as a result o f see the more important patterns that to his own; he stands aside for the often come away from contact with families live during their nine months the 1975 James Bay- Northern Que­ connect native peoples, and that Cree people to speak often and at Indian cultures feeling deep attrac­ in the bush, missed animals and all.

bec Agreement, by which the Cree distinguish them from us.

length about their way o f living. In tion to them, and uncertainty about

were “compensated” for their loss.

The bulk o f Strangers Devour bringing us close to diem, he obliges their own. Some have forsaken white

***

In less than one generation, then, the Land describes three trips that us in turn to examine our own cul­ culture to live in these other dimen­

the Cree people have been forced Richardson made to the Cree terri­ ture, and to consider its decline. He sions o f time, space, and value.

The time is autumn, 1972, at

into ways o f living that for whites tory, culminating in a stay with has us wondering, as w e see the Richardson is not one o f these; in a Lac Trefart north o f the Eastmair

evolved over centuries. Perhaps several families in the bush during wholeness and harmony o f Cree wry assertion o f his “objectivity,” River in northern Quebec. The te­

fanners who have been forced off the winter of 1972-73. He lived on family life in the bush — and its he said at Cornell that he had no pees have been erected, a bear trap

their land in the past two decades the La Grande River and at Lac sheer physicalness — about our own interest in living like the Cree, that has been set, Abraham Voyageui

can appreciate what has happened to Trefart with Crees as they built tepees endurance, patience, and stability. he was neither a canoeist nor hunter, returns periodically with pike, trout,

the Cree, but probably m ost and a large half-timber lodge; as

Continued confrontation o f the indeed had never hunted. With this whitefish, and sturgeon to be smoked

Americans are in the dark about this they hunted and trapped beaver, issues raised by the James Bay de­ he raised, I think, a painfully diffi­ for later use. Once the freeze cranes,

cataclysm. Quebec's attitude toward caribou, rabbit, moose, and bear; as velopment schemes is as important cult question that is important to then will begin the earnest hunting

it all is w ell expressed in Hydro- they gathered for singing and stories, for us as for the Cree. For embedded address: How can we benefit as a for moose and caribou and bear, and

Quebec’s response to the methyl- and for solemn discussion about the in this twenty-year conflict are urgent culture from a society whose life we for small game such as beaver to

mercury poisoning: well, they’ll just-proposed dams. The narrative questions about industrial society’s cannot truly share?

keep the three families (sixteen

have to stop eating fish for a while. o f these visits alternates with tran­ own health and welfare. They are

Certainly the Cree traditional people) alive for nine months.

The government anthro-apologist s a c t s from the (Tee’s 1972-73 court questions about scientific/techno- life as experienced by Richardson

After his first week or so at the

who gave his imprimatur to the as­ challenge to Hydro-Quebec (ending logical impacts on ethics, especially can help white readers comprehend

see Hunter, page 12

page 4
Off Campus
At The Bookery

The "Off Campus at the Bookery" lecture series continued last month with
William H. Gass who read from his forthcoming novel, The Tunnel.

September 13

Paul West will read from and sign copies of his just published novel, Love's Mansion. West will be novelist in residence and visiting professor of En­ glish at Brown University this fall.

October 4

William Goldsmith, will speak on "Politics, Poverty and the City" and will sign copies of his recent book Separate S ocieties: Poverty and Inequality in U.S. Cities. Goldsmith teaches City and Regional Planning at Cornell.

November 15

Dr. Peter W. Nathanielsz w ill read from his up coming book Life Before Birth and A Time To Be Born. Nathanielsz is Director of the Laboratory for Pregnancy and Newborn research at Cornell University

All events are held Sundays at 4 p.m. in Bookery Il's new lecture space.
The Bookery is located in the DeWitt Building,
21 5 N. Cayuga St., Ithaca, NY 14850. For more information call (607) 273 - 5055
r

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Bird Art Takes Flight

Alan Singer

W oodson Art Museum has been duction, leaving us to guess at the

organizing exhibitions and publish­ paintings and prints from Asian

MASTERPIECES OF BIRD ART by Roger Pasquier and John Farrand, Jr. Abbeville Press, NYC about $85.00

ing books and catalogs — most no­ tably the book Birds In Art: The Masters, and recently the catalog Naturally Drawn, drawings from the museum’s own collection. By being involved in this way, the museum

masters who had a deep and abiding love and interest for birds in nature (in particular, the prints of Ando Hiroshige). And given the authors’ Eurocentric point o f view, is there any apparent reason to skip over the

art o f such artists as Albrecht Durer,

BIRDS IN ART:

or Joseph Mallord Turner, among

The Masters by Inga Brynildson and Woody Hagge Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art

B 1R D A R T
.,rgry' Af'/'p ./tft'

others, who have produced brilliant watercolors of birds?
Mostly, Masterpieces o f Bird Art is about the production o f art for

Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

the "plates” o f specialized books,

about $25.00

hence the chapters are grouped ac­

BIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA by Bruun, Robbins, Singer and Zim

cording to a chronological history of printing media: woodcut, wood and metal engraving, lithography, and

Golden Guide by

finally offset lithography. Line art,

Western Printing, NYC about $10.00

printed at first with woodcuts and wood engravings o f birds by such

artists as Thomas Bewick in the

Sprouting up in towns across

1700s, was very popular and inex­

the country is an art movement

pensive to produce. loiter, such art­

bom from the work o f painters and gives important recognition to the ists as Jacque Barraband, Alexander

sculptors, with the support o f an artists, many of whom have devoted W ilson, and Audubon produced

unholy alliance of hunters and con­ their life’s work to the service of art lavish albums printed with copper­

servationists, publishers and politi­ and science.

plate engravings that were all hand-

cians. Because this art movement

The artists featured in the colored. W hen we think o f

exists outside the normal channels museum’s annual "Birds in Art" Audubon’s work, routinely we en­

o f the contemporary art museum exhibitions, demonstrate their ap­ vision the Havell edition prints and

and gallery system, you are not preciation o f the legacy left behind not the original watercolors they are

likely to have read about it unless by the pioneer o f the field, John based upon. It would have been

you subscribe to the glossy publi­ cation Wildlife Art News, or have come upon one o f the traveling shows sent out by the nation’s flag­ ship institution: The Leigh Yawkey W oodson Art M useum of Wausau, Wisconsin.
Wildlife ait, and more specifi­ cally bird art, is not a major move­ ment you might read about in the pages o f the New York Times. However, across the US there is a receptive but decentralized audi­ ence and a number o f publishers willing to promote an interest in nature artists. This is a movement that has gained acceptance from many who would not nonmally have an interest in contemporary art. Perhaps this work fills a need for a subject — a fragment o f nature portrayed with unusual attention to detail and realism that does not threaten, but rather enhances our lives.
While this art movement will not change the course o f history, like, say, Cubism or Impression­ ism, and the names o f the artists may not be familiar, there are paintings and sculptures being made not only in this country, but around the world, that satisfy a growing group o f collectors. Acknowledg­ ing this, and becoming a focal point for this activity, the Leigh Yawkey

James Audubon. In the 19th century, Audubon set the standard, gaining singular international recognition for his work as the explorer and artist whose watercolors were translated into his maximum opus. Birds o f America. Many have come to re­ gard Audubon as something o f a catalyst in the movement toward conservation o f our national wild­ life; he has become an icon — both as an artist and consummate de­ signer, and as an ornithologist with a focus on preservation.
Audubon’s contribution to art belongs to a tradition discussed by Roger Pasquier and John Farrand, Jr. in their recent coffee table book, Masterpieces o f Bird Art. Many of the artists and books included in Masterpieces are relatively obscure, perhaps because collectors and the rare book sections o f museums and libraries have been loathe to bring these jew els into the light. (New interest from collectors helped fuel the heat wave in the art market of the mid-1980’s, driving up the prices of the prints and illustrated books fea­ tured in Masterpieces.) I am not at all sure, however, that the chosen examples in the present volume give the balanced historical overview that might have been hoped for. For example, the authors mention only one Japanese artist in their intro­

instructive for the authors to have made a comparison between the prints and the watercolors as Audubon painted them.
When they were originally is­ sued, the portfolios by artists such as Audubon (1785-1851), John Gould (1804-81), and Edward U a r (181288) were usually sold to wealthy patrons by subscription. However, aside from servicing the tastes of the bibliophile, bird art also had a mis­ sion to accomplish: depicting all the known species of birds to inform the scientific and lay community and fulfill the taxonomic system pro­ mulgated by Linneaus. In addition to describing birds for science, art­ ists were employed to render por­ traits o f birds for the first popular identification guides. Now 150 years later, these tasks are still underway.
The authors’ energies seem to flag in the last section of Master­ pieces o fBird Art, devoted to the 20th century, and lapses in chronology become most egregious. Why the authors choose to spend valuable space on the wooden Allan Brooks, and overlook the work o f C.F. Tunnicliffe, whose watercolors in A Sketchbook o f Birds have grace and life, is a mystery. In the section on the birth of the field guide, the authors give Roger Tory Peterson due credit
see Flight, page 15

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Ambivalence
continuedfrom page 1 [Gallery, 1989].) A native of Dublin, Grennan received both a B.A. and an M.A. from University College Dublin, then continued his studies at Harvard. He began teaching at Vassar in 1974, shortly after finishing his Ph.D., and has ferried back and forth between Poughkeepsie and Ireland since.
As in the poetry of other contemporary Irish poets, such as Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland (who have also taught and published here), there is a deep matrix of family value and nostalgia informing the poems of this volume. But Grennan’s focus on the domestic, if that’s what it should be called, seems to have misled some o f his early admirers. Richard Wilbur’s and J.D. McClatchy’s blurbs on Grennan’s first volume speak about Grennan’s giving us the “fullness” o f the ordinary morning world and providing “some rare and affecting dis­ coveries for us all” (W.S. Merwin’s comments on the first collection were unintelligible; his blurb on the second says only that it contains some o f Grennan’s “most telling work” [??]). This kind o f gloss, while increasing sales in the Sentimentally Uplifting section o f the bookshops at the mall, quickly reduces Grennan to a kind o f bard o f the kitchen and backyard, swooning before his teakettle or compost bin. •
Grennan, however, is unlike his Irish counterparts in some very fundamental ways. Poets like Heaney or Boland, reacting to the exigencies o f Ireland, both political and sexual, have found in an exploration of their respective familial and gender alliances a source o f collective strength and clarifica­ tion. But Grennan has come o f age as much in America as in Ireland. His divorce from his first wife and the subsequent shattering of his family, in ways both direct and oblique, have affected the tone and content of both his American collections. William Carlos Williams once suggested that divorce is the sign o f knowledge in our times, and Grennan continues to school his intelligence through the consequences of that painful insight in this latest bode of poems. In a poem such as “Breaking Points” the image o f a friend splitting logs sets off an inward journey back to the “polished pine floor/ scattered with the bits and pieces/1 was taking with me” after ten years o f marriage. Again, in “Station” Grennan considers the impossibility (as he did in “Traveller'’ in What Light There Is) o f sending his son off yet again to the other house, the mother’s house, and senses the hopeless inadequacy o f words: “What ails our hearts? Mine/ aching in vain for the words/ to make sense of our life together.”
In this sense, always hovering in the background o f the

Cover illustration by Edvard Munch, Moonlight (Night in Saint-Cloud)
familial and sensuous moments that Grennan chooses to illuminate is the large, potentially overwhelming darkness which renders those moments the more brilliant, because the more transitory. This darkscape, if one could call it that, looms behind and over Grennan’s color-radiant creations suggesting that everything he writes is written on water and that any appreciation o f his parents, his children, his home (wherever that may be, as Elizabeth Bishop says) must inevi­ tably lead to an acknowledgment o f his own inadequacy. From this perspective a poem like “Compass Reading,” from which Grennan gleans the sardonic title of the present volume, seems more like an expansion o f James Wright’s famous “I have wasted my life” than a celebration o f the beauties of the backyard (“These days/1 seem as heartless as a lock/ that is all innards and bitter tongue:/ wherever my ears go/ they hear nothing but clocks ticking, each tick/ a distinct penetration of air, a pulsebeat/ greeting its own goodbye”). Along these lines, too, Grennan chooses Edvard Munch’s “Moonlight (Night in Saint-Cloud),” surely one o f the most pensive and brooding artworks o f the past century, as the cover for this collection of light-drenched poems.
There is in this book a tension of another sort as well. A

page 5
few years ago Denis Donoghue, in a scathing review o f one of John Updike’s novels, did what Walt Whitman said you should never do: argue concerning God. Unfurling the skull and crossbones o f an unrepentant Catholic sensibility, Donoghue savaged Updike’s understanding of the deity in his novels as that o f a soothing and convenient psychotherapist, saying flat out that the sensuousness o f Updike’s supple sentences was not and could not be a substitute for asking the hard questions. While Grennan (thank goodness) has neither the critical irascibility of Donoghue nor the stylistic prurience of Updike, there is much in his poems that pits a rigorous (I’m tempted to call it Irish Catholic) drive for moral clarity — inevitably focused on or circling around the shifting notion of home — against a real desire, or more accurately a real need, to capture the repose of the moment and press it to the senses. The section headings o f this volume, “Compass Readings” and “Things in the Flesh,” speak to this counterbalancing of moral orientation and sensual praise. The tension and the ambiguity inherent in these competing urgencies surface most concretely in “Breakfast Room,” a poem appropriately split in half, one part adream in language, the other riveted to the gorgeous details o f Pierre Bonnard’s painting o f the same name.
Rather than move from Bonnard's painting to a broader meditation on experience (the predictable strategy), Grennan takes as his point o f departure the resonance o f the phrase “breakfast room,” as if language itself were the repository o f hope:
The words have always stirred a sudden surge of light, an air o f new beginnings, something neat and simple, a space both elemental and domestic — because, perhaps, they bear a sort of innocent sheen of privilege, a room so set apart for an event so ordinary, a glimmer o f ritual where mostly we know only broken facts, bits and pieces stumbling numbly into one another.
The passage plays out a kind o f modus scribendi for Grennan, limning not only his conscious focus on the elemental and domestic but also his understanding that intimate language, like the intimate nooks o f a house, opens out into a space where one can reconnoiter the stuporous shambles o f an exterior life and recapture, or at least clarify, a yearning for an interior sense o f emotional and moral integrity. The section
see Ambivalence, page 8

Taking Note:
From Poets' Notebooks

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J.D. McClatchy Heather McHugh
Jane Miller Robert Morgan
Lisel M ueller Mary Oliver Gregory Orr Alicia Ostriker M ichael J. Rosen Liz Rosenberg Vern Rutsala Peter Sacks Laurie Sheck William Stafford Eleanor Ross Taylor Rosanna Warren

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page 6

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Tilting the Mirror

Jeanne Mackin

equivalent o f a pianist standing in about Harry and Hilly. Not to say he

mid-concert and reminding the au­ is the narrator — he isn’t. It is a

LO V E’S M ANSION

dience that Bach himself sometimes third-person narration, but it is tak­

by Paul West

faltered with this piece, and then ing place within C live’s imagina­

Random House $22.90

sitting down and resuming play. A tion, a fact that West prefers we do

novice could never get away with it. not forget

I’ve never understood why it

Paul West is as for from being a

Telling the story o f his father’s

was considered derogatory to say of novice as any writer can hope to award-winning childhood essay on

a magician’s work “It is all done get. A Guggenheim Fellow and “Happiness,” the author says, “Clive

with mirrors.” As if trickery and recipient o f several important nodded at the accuracy o f his

illusion were synonymous. They literary awards, he has written more impersonation, or so he saw it;

are not. One is merely a practical than a dozen novels, including Rat writing for Harry he found his mind

joke; die other is an ait that has much Man o f Paris, The Very Rich Hours a sudden erudite blaze of love.” Later

i n u v — «*CV V
cci* c»c* 5- «l«®
. m iv a n k y »• i* «
T* qc*cupr.' ir.com il'
»u* « • — iiTrvvta .to v » u-.n-vta i.f.v* ___
'tUt! «GCU OU tJJC ZCK.CU' ----U-.U..I.T1V"* Atz«ou lii.otii.uuO* nznaijX iM.tpom jaiX to (a q ocniH G U iaa WUi o t to n q q uu g n q io u w u tu tl cou»uio> §terc*y G2t>‘ t u UU X u td.G5Siruti «,!SX "SJ
a — ( m iK Vji* u u i a tO* i, v ' V!

in common with fiction.

o f Count von Stauffenberg, The Place in the novel, imagining his father at

Fiction uses verbal mirrors to in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, and war, handling machine-guns, “Clive

create not the world as it is or was, Lord Byron’s Doctor, in addition to caught his father in the act o f

but as one person has imagined it several books o f nonfiction. He being prudish and smiled, telling

and now wishes us, the readers, to knows his craft. In fact, his work him self sex was much more than

see it. Most writers set for them­ probably helps set standards for merely plunging....” Further yet into

selves a primary goal o f making the contemporary fiction.

the novel, and even more tellingly,

readers forget that this is illusion,

So why, in this latest novel, West writes, “Clive understood how

that it is done with mirrors, so that does this master illusionist set out to Harry had felt, even if he was in­

the reader’s imagination, set free but destroy his own illusion? Trust him. venting it.”

narrowly herded by the writer’s He has his reasons, and excellent

The love story is a complicated

sentences, suspends disbelief, and ones at that. While his other works and courageous one. The compli­

believes fully in the illusion o f have been set in Hitler’s Germany, cations do not arise from manufac­

tv narfe. »te (nar'rat, na ratO, v.r., |*ed, -rat-Ing. 1. to tell (a story
esp. in an interesting way. Id an audio running commei
(a documentary film or teleprogram), usually without be-
bn the screen. — n a r r iv — n a r'ra -to r, n ar'rat er, n.
; describe, recount, relate,
(n a r 'o tiv), n. 1. a story oj
'feriences, etc. 2. the artg
larrating. — ctdj. 3« ratios

the fiction.

postwar Paris, 19th-century Europe tured twistings and turnings o f a

Most writers. But not, in the and other locales, this latest work contrived plot, but from the tension

case o f Love's Mansion, Paul West. is set in England, West’s birthplace, that arises from those moments of

A mature, fully-realized writer o f during his own parents’ lifetime. tilting the mirror. It is not the love

considerable talent, West challenges The creator of fiction is writing very, story of Harry and Hilly, but the love this notion o f fiction as suspended very close to home in this work. story o f Harry and Hilly as imagined

Photograph: Kathy Morris

disbelief in his latest novel. He

Love’s Mansion is, as the title by their son, Clive, and written by fiction writer, in tackling a subject low consummation — those long

invites the reader to participate in suggests, a love story. It’s the story the author, West.

this clo se, this important, is years of day to day — with the eager

the act o f creation, o f illusion, by o f Harry and Hilly, two English

West and Clive have enough in reluctant to create a fiction so anticipations o f courtship. And it

reminding the reader throughout the children from the same village who common that this novel could, to seamless that it obliterates its own neatly balances Harry and Hilly,

novel that this is a creation, not a grow up together, survive World som e extent, be accused o f underlying reality. When the mirror never making one subservient to the

history. At appropriate and w ell­ War I separately, and then spend the committing autobiography. It is, to tilts, we see a son imagining parents other in terms o f storytelling. It is

spaced intervals, he tilts the mirrors, rest o f their lives together, eventually some degree, the story o f W est’s who really existed, who truly, at the story of a couple, of a family, and

as it were, to reveal the conjurer/ hinging into the world two children: own parents and childhood, and that som e earlier moment in time, the fact that West can write as con­

writer behind them. It is an auda­ a daughter, Kotch, and a son, Clive. accounts for the revelation o f the handled machine-guns or played vincingly about music and woman

cious technique — the verbal Clive is the imaginer o f this novel illusionist behind his illusions. The Bach and twined fingers together as about war and man shows the

as they walked side by side. By elasticity o f his im agination

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sacrificing illusion, West gives greater substance to Harry and Hilly. This technique is, ultimately, an act o f homage to a beloved

and skills. Nor does West ignore such tried
and proven attention-getting, page-turning techniques as the

Will Select a New Music

family from the son they created. occasional moment o f humor, hor­ Some writers, when beginning ror, or mystery. There’s the
their careers, stay close to shore, mysterious von Kaiserstein who

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writing about themselves and their immediate surroundings, not daring deep waters and a larger world till they have gained greater

keeps popping up, and Mrs. Featherstonehaugh, who keeps fall­ ing down. There’s the story o f how Hilly, like Penelope, defers other

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experience...or perhaps lost some o f their narcissism. W est’s career has followed a different course. Now that he has successfully written the larger world, he is setting his sights on him self and his own

suitors till Harry returns from the war, and the stray o f how Harry, in all innocence, goes out on war mis­ sions with officers leading, and in­ evitably returns, dragging the remains of the killed officer behind:

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beginnings. He is revealing his own source, his own creation o f himself as son and writer.
Equally important, though, is the fact that the tilting mirrors also remind us that Love’s Mansion

“Wherever he went, with his offic­ ers’-mess calling book enclosing his record o f the Gregorian chant, he met with nothing but courtesy, especially from officers, who re­ fused to accompany him anywhere,

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re-creation. Significantly early in this novel, West writes, “He was reading them, inventing after their example, as if both Hilly and Harry were literature, unable to fight the presumptive inroads o f the reader’s mind. The temptation was to give them a lovelier life than they had had, but the chore was to record their happiness....”
That is the paradox of this novel. The more the illusion o f it is revealed, the stronger the fiction becomes. West has attempted the

thought o f him as a hero, a man likely to become prime minister or something, one who understood like a lion in a zoo how the led felt about their leaders.”
And there is always the West prose, energetic, innovative, caressing, and challenging, to pull us forward. The pacing, especially toward the end when the story becomes that of Clive and Hilly af­ ter Harry’s death, achieves the stately rhythms of a well-played piece of classical music.

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ultimate illusion o f fiction, and he

Love’s Mansion captures and

has carried it off. It is a book, a imprisons us within the story till the

moment in a career, and a goal that illusionist is ready to relinquish us.

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deservingly take great pride in. Beyond that, though, this novel
is a piece o f lovely storytelling. As a love story, it courageously bal­ ances the trials and terrors that fol-

Jeanne M acldnS most recent novel is The Queen’s War (St. M artin’s Press). She lives in Ithaca, NY.

page 7
Narration and Indian Identity

Neil Schmitz

entrance to Letchworth State Park,

was a M esquakie settlement.

Canisteo, in south central New Y ak,

BLACK E A G L E C H ILD , TH E and Tionesta, on the Allegany River

FACEPAINT NARRATIVES in western Pennsylvania, were the

by Ray A. Young Bear

other Mesquakie settlements. In

University o f Iowa Press, 261 pp. 1760, a M oravian m issionary,

$24.95

Christian Frederick Post, glimpsed

the Canisteo Mesquakie at council

with Shawnee and the Iroquois

The Mesquakie, People o f the Mingo. “The Muscocky,” he wrote,

Red Earth, generally known as the “call themselves the Father o f all

Fox, were an avant-garde Algonquin N atiois, some o f their Chiefs I saw

people who steadfastly resisted amongst the French at Fort Du

French expansion into the M issis­ Quesne, their Cloaths were trimm’d

sippi River Valley in the first half of all over with Gold and Silver, & one

the 18th century. Their strongholds of them had a great Star on his Coat;

were in the Fox River Valley of they look’d very angry at me as if

northern Wisconsin, which was then they wood have devour’d me.” In

the expressway from the Great Lakes 1779, the Genesee Mesquakie were

to the Mississippi River. Mesquakie in the field with the Seneca fighting

resistance infuriated the French, who General John Sullivan’s invading

were frontally engaged fighting the American Revolutionary army. The

Iroquois, so in 1701-16, and again in main body o f the surviving

1721-38, the French launched nu­ Mesquakie, after long and arduous

merous genocidal campaigns against conflict with Thomas Jefferson’s

the W isconsin Mesquakie. Louis agents, then Andrew Jackson’s, lost

XV decreed: “His Majesty will re­ their extensive four-cornered terri­

ward the officer who will reduce, or tory (M innesota/W isconsin/Iowa/

rather, destroy them.”

Ilinois) and came finally to hold a

Charlevoix, whose History o f small settlement in Tama County,

New France (1744) is the classic central Iowa.

work on the subject, couldn’t use the

Ray A. Young Bear’s Black

Wisconsin expressway to the Mis­ Eagle Child, The Facepaint Narra­

sissippi and New Orleans in 1720 tives is a Mesquakie text, a collection

because the Mesquakie had shut it o f stories and poems whose con­

down. The Mesquakie, he wrote, nective ligament is the “word jour­

were like vermin, hard to extermi­ ney” o f the narrator to his poetic

nate. In the two so-called Fox Wars, vocation. In the Tama Settlement,

the Mesquakie valiantly endured the principal site o f Black Eagle

epic sieges, suffered massacres, and Child, Edgar Bearchild articulates

still struck back in force, stymieing the glorious Mesquakie past and the

the oncoming French. Long before hard Mesquakie present. Partly

Pontiac and Tecumseh, Mesquakie written in Mesquakie, the text is

leaders were devising a pan-Indian accessible, despite everything that

strategy, spiritual as well as military, is thorny, difficult, obscure, and in­

to meet the European invasion; they explicable about the Mesquakie, for

were in touch with the coastal Anglo-Americans (especially lo-

Abenaki, and had secret compacts wans). With its allusions to complex

with the Iroquois.

tribal divisions and ancient feuding,

In 1712 and 1730, remnant and its underlying mindset informed

M esquakie bands, fleein g the by life in the settlement, Young

French, took refuge in Iroquoia. Bear’s text is turned from us even as

Squawkie Hill, at the Mount Morris it addresses us, bringing to mind

Black Hawk’s 1833 account of the Sauk resistance.
Thomas Forsyth, an eminent Jacksonian Indianist, tried in 1827 to penetrate the inner workings of Mesquakie life. “They hold their meetings in secret, and whatever passes among them at their meetings, is never spoken o f by any o f them elsewhere. I have given myself much trouble to find out the particulars of this society, but have been able to succeed in a very small part only.” Fred McTaggart’s poignant Wolf That / Am, In Search o f the Red Earth People (1976) begins with this admission: “I did not succeed as a collector and scholar o f Mesquakie folklore.” Though respectful and earnestly admiring, McTaggart “was told a few stories...not as examples o f traditional stories but almost as riddles to help me understand something about what I was doing and why.”
Conservative Mesquakie ide­ ology drives Black Eagle Child. “It was a forceful impetus upon the clans to honor the Creator’s ancient wishes,” Edgar Bearchild tells us. “Considering the sacrifices made in order that we may be, it was a seem-

Illustration: Joanna Sheldon ingly small request. The survival of the tribe was contingent on our own adherence to the spectacular Gifts given long ago.” Black Eagle Child positions itself to convey the trans­ ference o f the Principal Belief, the original structure o f authority in Mesquakie life:
The common BEC man or woman/ had no right to define and dictate policy./ They sought the advice o f hereditary leaders/in absentia, and they grew more determined/ than ever that all problems were attrib­ utable/to the lack o f divine lead­ ership./ In their opinion elections were over with./ With divine leadership, the Black Eagle Child/ Nation would grow strong again.
The present flood o f Native American writing constantly re­ minds us how little we know o f the different Indian histories. Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor let us in on that which is Anishinaabe, which we now discover has an extensive literature in English, the literature Henry Wadsworth Longfellow pil­ laged for his Song o f Hiawatha. A lm ost all previous Indian

expressivity in English (or French or Spanish) was forced, extracted, transcribed, and for the most part ignorantly presented, and this might be the first time in American litera­ ture that Indian knowledge reveals itself, not recollectively but dy­ nam ically, in its own terms. Throughout Black Eagle Child, Edgar Bearchild refers to his grand­ mother as “Nokom is,” using the Anishinaabe name Longfellow made so familiar in Hiawatha. It is a little irony that resonates.
Ray Young Bear’s writing poses the question even as it declares the solution: “There had to be an imme­ diate/ return to the Old Ways/ begin­ ning from the bottom/ up.” The question isn’t really given as a ques­ tion, but is implicit. “Throughout the twenty years I have been involved with writing,” Young Bear writes in the Afterword, “I have attempted to maintain a delicate equilibrium with my tribal homeland’s history and geographic surroundings and the world that changes its face along its borders.”
The movement from the first section, “The W ell-O ff Man Church,” to the second section, “Gift o f the Star Medicine,” describes the central action of Black Eagle Child, establishing the two worlds Edgar Bearchild lives in. It begins with a tawdry Thanksgiving party at the W eeping W illow Elementary School, and a grieving analysis of intra-tribal conflict, the “internalized agony” that “led us to hurt/or seri­ ously injure one another for no rea­ son/ other than sheer disgust in being Indians.” Then it takes us that same evening to a Mesquakie peyote cer­ em ony where, in the play o f storytelling, vision, confession, and catharsis, Edgar Bearchild achieves the rapture o f reconnection, and re­ turns to the archaic. What has hith­ erto been humorously reported, the sociable feeling o f tribal together­ ness, suddenly becomes an ecstasy
see Narration, page 15

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Ambivalence
continuedfrom page 5 fills out the scene o f a public breakfast room with its “murmur o f voices” and “discretion’s homely music o f spoons on saucers,” then closes with an imagined interior exchange of first-time lovers meeting in shy visual reunion over this public table, their eyes wording the secret, unspoken hope o f their previous night’s love-making: “Nothing has ever pleased me more/than how your naked shoulders and the small o fyour back/ lay on my spread hands; your earlobe, tongue, wide eyes/ entering half-frightened mine in the dark. ”
The second section of the poem at first sensuously evokes the apparently parallel world o f the Bonnard painting with its “impeccable ordinary order” o f the breakfast room: “teapot, cream pitcher, sugarbowl, china cup/ and scalloped saucer, the half glass o f raspberry juice, / bread in yellow napkins, that heaped dish/ o f purple figs and a peach.” In many ways, the choice o f Bonnard seems peculiarly suited to Grennan’s concerns; Bonnard’s intimate domestic scenes and striking use o f color lend themselves readily to Grennan’s subject and method. But the focus quickly shifts to the woman standing “almost out of the picture” whose posture and attitude suggest, at least to Grennan, rigid accusation: “her eyes and strict lips/ asking directly, You think this/ changes anything?" The italicized quotations from each section enact a psychomachia o f Grennan’s own invention, pitting fragile and pristine sen­ suality against unyielding moral stricture, but the collision of the two produces a kind o f double (or doubling) vision as the focus shifts to the outside:

caul o f wrinkles— / wears an air faintly/ human, almost ancestral.”). Looking closer, he sees the dog has a frayed noose around his neck, which his owner must have used to hang or drown him “until the snapping and jerking stopped.” The sense o f betrayed intimacy proliferates with religious ironies as he notes the implications of the adroit knot: “Such a neat knot: someone knelt/ safely down to do it, pushing those ears back/ with familiar fingers. The drag end/ now a seaweed tangle around legs/ stretched against their last leash.” As Grennan meditates on the death’s head of the dog, he contrasts

John but also, irresistibly, the four fields o f Ireland, still ensnarled in apocalyptic, neighborly murder.
As with the imagery earlier in the poem, Grennan’s saddling the haycocks in penitential sackcloth conjures up yet again an image which asserts and undermines the sanctimo­ niousness that both sides claim in Ireland’s fratricidal struggle. Grennan has noted that he had, among other things, Seamus Heaney’s bog poems in mind when he wrote this poem, and one can quickly see the parallels in presentation. More broadly, though, Grennan shares with Heaney a reliance on

Beyond the window a stone balustrade, and beyond that nature’s bluegreen tangle tangles with the light that’s melting one thing into another — blue, scrubbed green, strawgold, a house with a white and lilac roof at the dead end of a sunstreaked avenue on which the trees are blobs of turquoise.

At poem’s end there is a tentative affirmation of the “ambiva­ lence o f light, its double tongue o f detail and the world at large,” but this acceptance is a “pause” and not a resolution. This is a very rich and deeply conflicted poem, one whose inward antagonisms reveal much about the animus o f Grennan’s poetry.
This intense and interior preoccupation may partly ac­ count for what, given the free-for-all currently taking place in Ireland over literature and politics, seems a curious absence in his work — there are almost no poems explicitly addressed to the “troubles” o f his divided country. He writes with hope of black South Africans in “Colour Shot” and admires the political courage of the Russian poet Evgenii Rein in “Rights.” Closer to Ireland, though, in “One Morning during the Elec­ tions,” Grennan consciously turns away from “Something unspeakable in the state” echoed on the radio to glean on the sunlit hills the more speakable, if more enigmatic, images of cloudshadows and the sudden black hum of flies (this poem is reminiscent o f “A Closer Look” in What Light There Is, addressed to Peter Fallon apparently in explanation o f Grennan’s reluctance to immolate his poetry on the altar o f Irish politics). Still, when this poet turns his focus on his native land, as he does in “Sea D og,” the metaphor is pecu­ liarly Grennan’s, and the effect is devastating.
Using the discovery of a dog’s sea-picked carcass on the beach as his point o f departure, Grennan describes the cadaver before him in eerie precision, saving the telling detail for last (“The skull— /bonnetted, gap-toothed, tapering/ trimly to a

its peace to the “racket world o f feel and fragrance” on the beach where the live dog “throbbing/ with habit” once bent (presumably down to receive the fatal noose) and the quick children now shriek by, both staring at and avoid: before them. The parallel between the fateful ha o f the dog and the innocent fright and defier children at their games engulfs Grennan as he enh (“I go in over my head/ in stillness”) and the lar; tions of the scene ignite in the poem’s final ima;
and see behind the body and the barefoot children how on the bent horizon to the west a sudden flowering shaft o f sunlight picks out four pale haycocks saddled in sackcloth and makes of them a flared quartet o f gospel horses — rearing up, heading for us.
Now it is the entire horizon or country which is “bent,” and he sees over the bones o f the dog and the children at play (Grennan’s familial lens) sunlight illuminating four haycocks to the west, which suggest not only the four horsemen o f S t

Illustration: Fernando Llosa
the imagery and iconography o f a Catholicism that neither poet accepts dogmatically to shape both the meaning and the aspiration o f their poems. (I should add that this is not always successful: at the end o f one poem, when Grennan says that a flock of geese were spread across the sky “like a slung rosary,” I winced.)
For all the political despair of this single poem, though, the organizing matrix o f the collection is Grennan’s focus on family. The book begins with ’T w o Climbing,” an account of ascending and descending Mt. Tully in the west o f Ireland with his son Conor, and closes with “Two Gathering,” a meditation on family, “on all the buried codes/ that bind us in a knot even time/ cannot untangle,” prompted by harvesting shore mussels with his daughter Kate near Grennan’s summer cottage in Ireland. This paternal framing intensifies the poem which is at the volum e’s dead center, an elegy to Grennan’s father, “Walk, Night Falling, Memory of My Father.”
The poem, following the pace and lengthening stanzas o f a meditative walk downhill into town, then uphill home, has as its triggering image a “cairn o f fresh-cut logs” which give off a glow of “broken but transfigured flesh.” The collage which follow s conjures both the image and the anguish
see Ambivalence, page 9

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page 9

Ambivalence
continuedfrom page 8 Grennan retains concerning his father:
My father meeting me years ago off a train at Kingsbridge: greenish tweed cap, tan gaberdine, leaning on a rolled umbrella, the sun in his eyes, the brown planes o f his face in shadow, and all o f a sudden old. The distance between us closes to an awkward, stumbling short embrace. Little left
but bits and pieces: pints in Healy’s before tea; a drive with visitors to the Sally Gap; my daughter making game with his glasses; the transatlantic calls for an anniversary, birthday, or to the hospital before his operations.
The pain contained in the enjambment o f the lines and stanzas is poignant, and Grennan's deft use of the turns in free verse, both here and elsewhere in the book, provides a fertile tension between the integrity o f the isolated line and the ease o f the informal, meditative sentences.
As he recalls his father’s last days in the hospital, he lights on one image, “my hand/ helping his hand/ hold the glass of water,” which introduces the transfiguration o f memory in the poem:
And one memory he kept coming back to: being a child in a white frock

watching his mother and another woman in long white dresses and broad straw hats recline in a rowing-boat on the Boyne near Navan; how the boat rocked side to side, the women smiling and talking in low voices, and him sitting by himself on the bank in a pool o f sunshine, his little feet barely reaching the cool water. I remember how the nurses swaddled his thin legs in elastic bandages, keeping him together for a day or two.
The women in white dresses in his father’s memory and the attendant nurses in Grennan’s show us converging generations: as his father remembered the innocent repose o f his childhood, so Grennan, the child, remembers his father swaddled, vulnerable, transitory.
The poem’s final stanza begins “Uphill again,” but it will always be an uphill climb toward home now, an utterly necessary but utterly unachieveable goal since home (like Gatsby’s light) must remain at some deep interior point in the past. The abundance o f religious imagery in the stanza and the allusion to “the night voices/ at their prayers and panicky conjurations” reveal how deeply Grennan wants this conjuration to take on the weight and specific gravity o f prayer. What remains is to acknowledge, against the flicker o f the night fireflies, “just how large the dark is.” The poem closes on a note o f great yearning and great futility:
And now new moonlight casts across this shaking summer world a thin translucent skin o f snow; on ghostly wings white moths brush by. Indoors again,

I watch them — fallen angels the size and shade o f communion wafers — beat dusted wings against the screen, flinging themselves at this impossible light.
Despite his desire to receive, or to impart, religious consola­ tion in the face o f this loss, for those ghostly wings to break through the screen, he is left with only his and his father’s earthly memory and an implicit sense that he must create the condition o f love from what remains, “this impossible light” For Grennan, that must be in the writing o f poems, to return again and again to wrest moments of meaning, o f connected­ ness, from the inevitability o f extinction.
It is entirely appropriate, then, that the poem which immediately follows this elegy, opening the second half o f the collection, is a meditation on the motives and purposes o f art. In this poem, “The Cave Painters,” Grennan imagines the circumstances that led prehistoric humans to paint their im­ ages on dark stone. Given the range and power o f As I f It Matters— and it must matter— it is only fair to let Grennan have the last word as to what may have driven him to write this stunning collection o f poems.
We know they went with guttering rushlight into the dark; came to terms with the given world; must have had — as their hands moved steadily by spiderlight — one desire w e’d recognize: they would, before going on beyond this border zone, this nowhere that is now here, leave something upright and bright behind them in the dark.
•fr Kevin M urphy is a professor o f English at Ithaca College.

Sagan
continuedfrom page 1 K.P. You’ve talked about origins, and the meaning o f life, and the role o f science in understanding these. Do you think, then, that science ought to occupy the social and moral po­ sition that religion once did? CJS. I don’t see how science can appropriate the moral role o f reli­ gion. It can teach us skepticism. It can teach us what constitutes ad­ equate evidence for belief. But it can’t tell us what to do. It can’t convert an “is” into an "ought.” This has traditionally been the role of religion. But all sorts of religions counsel all sorts o f different behav­ ior, and they often contradict one another. Is it plausible that all the precepts o f the past are still valid today, despite the massive changes in the society, demographics, and technology? How do we decide what rules we should obey? Yes, science is essential for everybody to know and it does approach some o f the mythic aspects o f religion. On the other hand, it doesn’t by itself es­ tablish a morality. It’s also not very satisfying to pray to the law o f

gravity, for example. K.P. I’d like to go a little further into your efforts to disseminate scientific ideas. Y ou’ve said about science fiction that "one of the great benefits o f science fiction is that it can con­ vey bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inacces­ sible to the reader.” Isn’t there a danger that scattered, suggestive bits o f information mystify rather than elucidate? Produce awe and wonder at the expense o f clarity and insight? Could a similar charge perhaps be leveled at a television series like Cosmos—that, by giving snippets of scientific information mixed up wih snippets o f the history of western civilization, along with artist’s ren­ ditions and computer simulations of outer space, the effect produced is one o f religious awe rather than scientific curiosity? C.S. We received many thousands o f letters from viewers of Cosmos. Of the many I read, a common re­ sponse— often from women— was something like this: “When I was a child I was interested in science. But in school they taught me that it was beyond me, that I just didn’t have the intellectual capability for it. So I’ve gone and done something else.

In watching Cosmos I was amazed in over 60 countries by well over

to find that I understood what you 400 million people must say some­

were saying. You stimulated that thing about people’s hunger to learn

childhood ambition to science that I science, and how poorly the schools

thought I had lost forever. I’m now and mass media are doing in pro­

going back to college” or, “I’m now viding science at a level that people

reading textbooks; I’ve decided I’m can find interesting.

not going to live my life without K.P. In addition to your writing, you

science.” There are literally hun­ and your wife Ann Druyan have

dreds o f professional scientists, been involved in political activism.

young ones, in the world today who Could you tell us something about

decided to become scientists from the issues?

watching Cosmos. I know this from C .S. In the ‘80s there were many

meeting or being written to by them. issues to be worried about, including

So I don’t think Cosmos hadany the cult o f greed fostered by the

negative influence. It’s not a course Reagan administration. But the

in physics, astronomy, or biology, clearest danger was the threat of

and never pretended to be. But it nuclear war. So we spent a lot of our

does connect the findings of science time on that issue, trying to organize

with deep human aspirations, and some o f the debate on Star Wars,

conveys not just some of the content nuclear winter, and opposing US

o f science, but also some o f its underground nuclear testing, espe­

methods. One o f the things that we cially in the face o f a voluntary

tried to stress in the episode on Soviet moratorium.

Johannes Kepler was the importance

Annie and I were arrested sev­

o f skepticism, and o f believing the eral times at the Nevada nuclear test

data even if they fail to conform to site. We organized three of the largest

your deepest hopes. If Cosmos did acts of nonviolent civil disobedience

nothing but teach a little scientific against US nuclear testing. It was a

skepticism, as we did with astrology, wonderful experience and a great

with UFOs, with several other areas opportunity to meet all sorts o f

of pseudoscience. I’d be quite happy. people, especially physicians who

The fact that Cosmos has been seen were strongly motivated on that is­

sue. My point of view is that it’s just something you do as a citizen. In a democracy the last thing you want to do is to leave such matters to the leaders, especially leaders as incompetent as w e’ve had in the recent past.
There are other issues now that w e’re involved in. The global en­ vironment is the most serious long­ term threat to the largest number of people. These days one of the things that Annie and I are attempting is to bring scientists and religious leaders together on environmental ques­ tions— and that’s going quite well. K.P. Isn’t it difficult to deal with philosophical and ideological con­ tradictions between scientific and religious world views? C.S. We do have deep differences. Scientists believe that claim s o f knowledge have to be subjected to the same standards o f skeptical scrutiny in religion as anywhere else. But we all inhabit the same environment, and the same planet, and have the same goals for preserving it for future generations. So we have no difficulty working together on these issues. Sometimes there are problems with language,
see Sagan, page I I

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page 10

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Shadows

the chimpanzees? And if he did describe it, even
obliquely, did he not run a certain

continuedfrom page 2

risk — that his readers would con­

We seem to have weighed these clude he approved what he was

beings down with a heavy burden of chronicling? Or more than “ap­

sym bols, metaphors, allegories, proved.” What had drawn him to

and projections o f our own fears chimpanzees in the first place? Why

about ourselves,

did he insist on writing about them?

i • ***

Were there no worthier matters de­ serving o f his attention? Perhaps, he

felt obliged to ensure that even a

Before the outside world knew casual reader would note the great

anything o f his long effort to under­ distance separating Thomas Savage

stand evolution, Darwin wrote tele­ from the subjects o f his study.*

graphically in his 1838 “M” notebook: “Origin o f man now

***

proved...He who understands ba­

boon would do more towards meta­

W illiam Congreve was the

physics than [the philosopher John] leading playwright o f the English

Locke.” But what does it mean to comedy o f manners around the turn

understand a baboon?

o f the Eighteenth Century. The

One o f the earliest scientific monarchy had been restored after a

studies o f the chimpanzee in its bloody struggle with the Puritan

natural African habitat was made by religious schismatics who gave their

Thomas N. Savage, a Boston phy­ name to rigidity on sexual morality.

sician. Writing in early Victorian Each age is repelled by the excesses

times, he concluded:

o f the last, so this was a time of

moral permissiveness, at least among

They exhibit a remarkable degree o f the dominant elite. Their sigh o f intelligence in their habits, and, on relief was almost audible. But the part o f the mother, much affec­ Congreve was not their apologist. tionfo r their young...[But] they are His ironical and satirical with was very filthy in their habits... It is a directed at the pretensions, affecta­ tradition with the natives generally tions, hypocrisies, and cynicisms of
here, that they were once members his a g e __but, especially, at the o f their own tribe: that fo r their prevailing sexual mores. Here, for depraved habits they were expelled example, are three fragments o f rul­ from all human society, and, that ing-class dialogue from his The Way through an obstinate indulgence o f o f the World:

their vile propensities, they have

degenerated into their present state [OJne makes lovers as fast as one

and organisation.

pleases, and they live as long as one

pleases, and they die as soon as one

Something was bothering Tho­ pleases: and then, i f one pleases,

mas N. Savage, M.D. “Filthy,” one makes more.

“depraved,” “vile,” and “degener­

ate” are terms o f abuse, not scien­ You should have just so much dis­

tific description. What was Savage’s gust fo r your husband as may be

problem? Sex. Chimpanzees have sufficienttctoicmakeu tyoui relish your

an obsessive, unselfconscious pre­ lover.

occupation with sex that seems to

have been more than Savage could Isa y that a man may as soon make a

bear. Their zesty promiscuity may friend by his wit, or a fortune by his

include dozens o f seemingly indis­ honesty, as win a woman with plain

criminate heterosexual copulations dealing and sincerity.

a day, routine close mutual genital

inspections, and what at first looks Bearing in mind Congreve’s role

very much like rampant male homo­ as daring so c ia l critic o f

sexuality. This was a time when sexual manners, now consider this

proper young ladies were abjured excerpt from a 1695 letter he wrote

not to inquire too closely into the to the critic John Dennis:_________

stamens and pistils — “the private ’ Savage also wrote the first systematic ac­

parts” — o f flowers; the renowned count of gorillas in the wild, and was respon­

critic John Ruskin would later sible for the modem use of the ancient North

harumph, “With these obscene pro­ African word “gorilla.” He took pains to

cesses and prurient apparitions, the repudiate popular notions of gorillas carrying

gentle and happy scholar o f flowers off attractive women for unspeakable pur­

has notliing to do.” How was a poses — the theme echoed a century later to

proper Bostonian physician to de­ enormous public acclaim in the motion pic­

scribe what he had witnessed among ture, King Kong.

I can never care fo r seeing things ten meters or more from branch to

th a t fo r c e me to en terta in branch — that put champion human

low thoughts o f my Nature. / gymnasts to shame. Gibbons are,

don't know how it is with others, but apparently without exception, mo­

I confess freely to you, I could nogamous. They marry for life.

never look long upon a monkey They produce haunting songs heard

without very Mortifying Reflec­ a kilometer or more away. Adult

tions; tho / never heard any thing males often sing long solos in the

to the Contrary, why that darkness just before sunrise. Bach­

Creature is not Originally o f a Dis­ elors sing longer than old married

tinct Species.

males, and at a different time o f day.

Jacket art by Kinuko Craft, Jacket Design by Eyetooth Design Inc.

Somehow, the sexual imbroglios W ives prefer duets with their hus­

o f upper-class twits that he bands. Widows bear their grief in

chronicled did not generate as silence and sing no more.

many Mortifying Reflections as a

Gibbons are also territorial and

visit to the zoo. Plays such as tiieir matins serve to keep intruders

Congreve’s were themselves being away. A nuclear family, typically

criticized as breaking down “the parents and two children, tends to

Distinctions between Man and Beast. control a small turf. Defense of the

Goats and Monkeys, if they could home territory is accomplished not

speak, would express their Brutality so much by throwing stones or rain­

in such Language as This.” Mon­ ing blows as by singing anthems.

keys were beginning to bother Euro­ Perhaps there are cadences, timbres,

peans. And Congreve put his finger frequencies, and amplitudes that

on the problem: What does it say other gibbons, contemplating a little

about us if monkeys and apes are our poaching, find especially impres­

close relatives?

sive and daunting. At least some­

times, an aging father will confer ------------------------* ------------------------ responsibility for territorial defense

on his adolescent son, passing the

Consider the gibbon. Itspreter- patriotic torch on to the younger

naturally long arms permit it to make generation. In other equally poi­

great balletic leaps through the gnant instances, adolescents are

canopy o f the forest — sometimes banished from the home territory by

the parents, perhaps to avoid the temptations o f incest. Adult males and females behave pretty much alike, and have nearly equal social status. Primalologists describe the females as “codominant,” and the partners in a marriage as “relaxed” and “tolerant.”
Gibbon life seems downright operatic. It’s easy to conjure up feverish love solos, duets sung in praise o f marital felicity, and ritual intimidation chants cast into the forest night: “W e’re here, w e’re tough, we sing good songs. Better leave our turf alone.” Perhaps there are gibbon Verdis singing powertransfer arias, rich with pathos, soulful lamentations on the passing o f glory and of time.
Or consider the bonobo. This is a reclusive species or subspecies of chimpanzee that lives in a single group in Central Africa, south of the Zaire River. Bonobos have certain traits that render them convention­ ally ineligible for the local zoo, which may be one reason that they’re not nearly so well known as the common chimp w e’ve described in the pre­ ceding chapters. Bonobos, given the Linnaean name Pan paniscus, are also called pygmy chimpanzees; they’re smaller and more slender and their faces protrude less than the usual variety, Pan troglodytes, which w e’ll here and there continue to de­ scribe simply as chimpanzees." Bonobos often stand up and walk on two legs. (They have a kind of webbing o f skin between their sec­ ond and third toes.) They stride with their shoulders squared and do not slouch as much as chimps do. ‘When bonobos stand upright, “ writes de Waal, “they look as if they had walked straight out o f an artist’s impression o f prehistoric man.”
Unlike chimp females, among whom estrus is advertised and is a time o f pronounced sexual recep­ tivity, bonobo fem ales display genital swellings about half the time; and they’re nearly always attractive to the adult males. We recall that common chimps, Pan troglodytes, like almost all animals, have sex with the male entering the female’s vagina from behind, his front against her back. But in bonobos, about a quarter o f the time, the matings are face-to-face. This is the position the females seem to prefer, probably because their clitorises are large and positioned far forward compared to chimps. Bonobos indicate their mutual attraction by prolonged gaz­ ing into one another’s eyes, a
♦Those who study chimps and bonobos, so
the joke goes, are called panthropologists.
see Shadows, page 11

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page 11

Sagan
continuedfrom page 9 but we manage to work them out. K.P. I’ve heard that you’ve spoken at pro-choice rallies. Would you summarize your position on abortion? C.S. OK, but please bear in mind that this is just the flavor o f the argument, without much of the con­ text and supporting data. Annie and I wrote an article on abortion for Parade magazine which included a 900 number— readers could call to express their opinions. 300,000 people called in, despite the cost of a few dollars to make the call. That’s an indication o f how volatile and impassioned the issue is. Our ap­ proach was to ask if there is such a

thing as a middle ground in the abor­ tion controversy. On the one hand, you might argue that it’s nonsense to claim that one day before a baby is bom it has no claims to life, but the next day— once it’s out o f the uterus— it has all sorts o f rights. It’s the same baby. On the other hand, it is equally specious to claim that a fertilized egg or an embryo or a fetus in the first two or three months o f pregnancy is a human being. Clearly it’s not. What defines us are our higher brain functions that are not developed at two or three months— in fact, you could argue not even 4 or 5 months.
The Supreme Court’s touch­ stone is “viability.” But viability is a technologically dependent state and it cannot be that it’s all right to kill a fetus as long as we don’t have

the technology to preserve it outside of the womb, but that as soon as we do have the technology killing it becomes a moral crime. That just doesn’t make sense. Therefore, we explore the possibility that there is some compromise, which, needless to say, offends the partisans o f both extremes. I think it’s possible that in the long term, the uneasy compro­ mise will have to consider when a fetus develops characteristically human capabilities. K.P. You have suggested, if we use neo-cortical development as a touchstone, that along with a ban on third-trimester abortions should go a right-to-life law for animals of equivalent intelligence, such as dolphins and chimps. Yet, in Shad­ ows, you make numerous references to experiments on animals (such as

one in which rhesus monkeys were rewarded for inflicting electric shocks on other monkeys) without commenting on the ethical choices involved in conducting such experi­ ments. C.S. No, you’re mistaken. We do— in that case we say that our own moral sympathies do not lie with the scientists, but with the macaques who would rather go hungry than hurt their fellow s. Those experi­ ments teach us something very im­ portant, though. K.P. Would you develop the tension between two positions here: one that supports equal rights for animals and people, and the other that sees animal experiments as essential for “scientific progress?” C .S. Yes, there’s no question that there is a tension. What if it were

possible to have a viable cross be­ tween a human aind a chimp? Then does that offspring have all human rights? Half o f human rights? How do we decide? It’s astonishing that 99.6% o f the chimp’s active genes are identical to ours. Identical! So, is there a sharp boundary between whatever it is that makes us worthy o f special legal protection and the rights of chimps, who are our closest biological relatives?
Suppose that the genetic dif­ ference between you and me is ten times less than the genetic difference between me and the chimp. Is that factor o f ten everything that counts as far as legal protection goes? What if it were not a factor of ten— what if it were a factor o f five? Or two? Where is the point when the
see Sagan, page 13

Shadows

for chimps — although these obser­ food or for attractive males; it seems sponse on m eeting unfamiliar gibbons and the bonobos. Indeed, vations are for bonobos in captivity, to be a way o f reducing tension. In hum ans, as w e o u r se lv e s w e’re far more closely related where they may have more time on times o f stress, a bonobo male will experienced, is a very chimp-like, to the apes than to the monkeys.

Continuedfrom page 10

their hands or more need for mutual spread his legs and present his and adequately intimidating, charg­ Chimps and bonobos are certainly

practice which precedes almost all comfort than when they are free. penis to his adversary in a ing display.

members o f the same genus and,

their matings, and which is unknown L ess than a year after giving friendly gesture.

Grooming is m ost frequent according to some taxonomic clas­

among common chimps. The initia­ birth, bonobo females are ready

Despite these differences in between males and females and least sifications, even the same species.

tion o f sexual activity among the to resume their lives o f sexual nuance, bonobos are still chimpan­ common between males and males, Given that, it’s startling how differ­

bonobos is mutual, unlike the chimps abandon; it takes 3 to 6 years for zees. There’s a male dominance the reverse o f chimp practice. The ent they are from one another. Per­

where it is peremptory and nearly chimp females.

hierarchy, although not nearly as grin serves not mainly as a gesture haps many o f the distinctions

always by the males. While in gen­

Bonobos use sexual stimulation pronounced as among common o f subm ission, but performs a between the two — ranging from the

eral, especially in larger social con­ in everyday life for many purposes chimps; dominant males have pref­ range o f functions similar to those frequency increased variety, and so­

texts, m ale bonobos dominate besides mere satisfaction of the erotic erential access to females, although o f the human smile. Male bonding cial utility o f sex to the relatively

females, this is not always the case, impulse — for quieting infants (a males do not always dominate fe­ is much weaker than in chimp higher status o f females — are due

especially when they’re alone to­ practice said once to have flourished males; there are submissive gestures society, and the social position of to the evolution in the bonobos o f a

gether. At night, in the forest canopy, also among Chinese grandmothers), and greetings; the size o f groups is fem ales much stronger. Certain new step: abandoning the monthly

a male and a female will sometimes as a means o f resolving conflict about the same as with chimps, a mothers and sons associate closely badge of ovulation, graduating from

snuggle up together in the same nest among adults o f the same sex, few dozen; adolescent females wan­ until the son becom es an adult; estrus. Perhaps when ovulation is

o f leaves. Adult chimps never do. as barter for food, and as a generic, der over to adjacent groups; the among chimps the relationship not evident at a glance, females can

The sexual activity of common all-purpose approach to social males preferentially hunt animal tends more often to be broken off be viewed as more than sexual

chimps, which by human standards bonding and community organiza­ prey, although apparently not in when the young male reaches ado­ property.

seems obsessive to the point of ma­ tion. Less than a third o f the sexual hunting parties; males are propor­ lescence. Social skills for resolving

The primates are so rich in

nia, is almost puritanical by bonobo contacts among bonobos involve tionately larger than the females by conflicts are much more highly de­ potential that even a small change

standards. The average number o f adults o f opposite sexes. Males about the same ratio as among veloped among the bonobos than in anatomy or physiology may

penile thrusts in an average copula­ will rub rumps together or engage in chimps; and encounters between among the chimps, and dominant provide an aperture to a universe

tion — a measure o f sexual intensity oral sex in ways unheard of among groups sometimes become violent individuals are much more generous never dreamt o f in the rude

that primatologists are drawn to, in the more prudish chimps; females — although groups may also, on in m aking peace w ith their sleeping pallets made each night in

part because it can be quantified — will rub their genitalia together, and encountering one another, behave adversaries.

the low branches o f the once-vast

is around 45 for bonobos, compared sometimes prefer it to heterosexual very peaceably and laid back.

If we feel a certain revulsion at tropical forests.

to less than 10 for chimps. The contacts. Females characteristically Infanticide and all other killing o f having hamadryas baboons as

number o f copulations per hour is engage in genital rubbing just be­ bonobo by bonobo are, so far, relatives, we may take some comfort

2 ‘/jtim es greater for bonobos than fore they’re about to compete for unknown. Their standard initial re­ from our connection with the

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page 12

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Hunter

with it. It is this image o f life that how much could it matter if the required to obtain a living.

5.000 people contains the spatial

Strangers celebrates.

hydro projects, which would pre­

Richardson talks about the maps and temporal memory o f perhaps

“It is a common experience in sumably bring them many more in their heads being far more inter­ 100.000 square m iles. It is this

continued from page 3

many parts of the weald,” Richardson “benefits” of civilization, went for­ esting than the paper maps we have memory, too, that is in danger

Cree bunting camp, soon after writes, “that the mental and physical ward? This argument still nags even made. We look at the maps of Que­ of being wiped out, within a genera­

the men have built a large half­ health of an indigenous people that in the minds o f many whites who bec and see immense space, but that tion or two. And this memory in a

timber lodge, and the women and has come into contact with a power­ believe they are sympathetic to the is all. The mental maps of the Cree large way defines the culture — is

children have made it into a warm, ful technology declines in direct pro­ Cree. If Indians use snowmobiles are made up o f landmarks (rocks, the culture.

clean hom e for the w inter, portion to the degree of that contact” and shop at the store and work in the trees, blazed trails), and watermarks

The religious dimension o f the

Richardson writes:

After his troubling time in the

subsistence hunting life, central to

southern settlements, where this The James B aj Development Project the older generation’s conception

Though the autumn is a quiet contact had wreaked the most havoc,

and practice, is being lost to the

and unspectacular time in a hunting Richardson says “it took me quite a camp, we had seen enough o f the time to leam” that the Indians living men [Sam Blacksmith, Ronnie Jolly, in tents along the northern road were

& Hudson
Bay

younger, even those who go periodi­ cally into the bush after their lengthy sojourns in the south. (Cree youth

Abraham Voyageur] to appreciate not living in squalor but were among

educated in white schools are poorly

their supreme competence....

the richest people in North America.

fitted for either traditional Cree or

We understood that we would The Cree had this vast world in the

modem white culture. If they return

never be able to see theforest as they bush — animals to feed them and

to the bush at all, it is often with a

saw it. We were blind, and would provide materials for snowshoes and

degraded appreciation o f their par­

remain blind, to the many signs o f other necessities, trees to build

ents’ lives, which they have been

life that lay around them as they lodges, to make canoes and rafts.

taught are valueless. Some o f the

walked through the trees. The irony When Richardson enters a warm

most wrenching passages in the book

and tragedy o f their situation was lodge, he smells the pine boughs on

have to do with this loss o f genera­

that the outside world remained the floor and the beaver slow ly

tional continuity.) This is the cen­

ignorant o f their enormous capaci­ simmering over the fire. Later he

tral loss, which makes it profoundly

ties: however masterful the men hears Sam Blacksmith play his sa­

hard to contest white culture — for

might be in this environment, it was cred drum to celebrate the killing of

the sense o f the ecology of land and

obvious...that i f they were to end a moose, and in another place he

water and animals and humans in­

up in a smalt Canadian town or hears Samson Nahacappo tell a hi­

volves a religious obligation to na­

village as government policy would larious myth-story about a great flood

ture through a world o f spirits who

have them do, they would be quali­ — the assembled relatives and friends

control what happens, and who will

fied fo r nothing except perhaps to laughing with pleasure at the long

send trouble if you desecrate the

collect garbage.

impromptu analogy with the

geese, beaver, caribou, and bear

foolishness of Hydro-Quebec.

through some thoughtless act of tak­

Later, standing with his friend and

These families, shy with whites

ing without giving back. Once this

translator Philip Awashish on a river and considered passive by them, are

religious center is gone, and the fa­

miles from the camp, Richardson capable o f feats, Richardson learns,

milial, and the continuity o f genera­

apprehends another critical fact: that whites would consider heroic,

tions, “anything is possible.”

and yet they are simply part o f every­

In turn, for us, once Indian eco­

On that rough day we seemed to day living. Their trips to the traplines

logical knowledge — spiritual yet

be fa r from anyone.... For perhaps involve canoeing upriver and por­

based on a simple and eloquent

the fir st time in my life I was taging with heavy equipment for

bodily equation (are not spirit and

alone...with the elements. That is hundreds o f m iles. One hunter,

body one?) — is lost, white reliance

the normal and desired condition o f Stephen Tapiatic, testified in the

on numbers, exact quantities, takes

life fo r hunters and trappers, those Montreal hearing that he had walked

it place. We admit the folly of this

men who, as Willie Awashish told and canoed from James Bay to the me, live in their totally spiritual Labrador coast (like crossing Eu­

with bitter witticisms — “Nature Map: QDon Marietta bats last,” “You can’t fool Mother

world, and though I was slightly rope in bitter cold and heavy snow)

From Strangers Devour The Land

Earth,” and so forth. Though it may

frightened by the immensity o f the — not once but twice. He had walked

be an embarrassing idea for many

wilderness, the pow er o f the and canoed the 500 miles from Fort summer for the white society and (streams, lakes, bays, rapids), spe­ “civilized” whites to handle (we

winds,...the surge o f the waters,...! George to Caniapscau Lake about send their kids to white schools, cific places on the earth, held in the could stand to rewrite our defini­

was nevertheless awed that such a ten times (not, for the Cree, unusual). why do they need to hunt?

memory for use. It is startling to tions o f “civility” and “civilization,”

place still existed in this overcrowded

For many white Quebeckers the

One might ask, by what right realize how much detail the Crees as well as of “environment”), at bot­

world, and that people were alive utterly different logic and coherence do we ask this question?

must hold in their heads; a trapline, tom survival is a matter o f need

who knew how to survive in it.

and satisfactions o f Cree life seem

Many whites also resent the the territory where two or three balanced with love and reciproca­

intolerable. (Once we erase the Cree, Cree having so much land, without families will hunt for nine months, tion. The Cree know about this

These passages pinpoint two put them in history books and an­ understanding that such large is about 20 by 30 miles, 600 square need, and how it must be met. If the

important themes in this book. First thropological studies, their indepen­ areas in fragile boreal forests and miles. They know this territory inti­ beaver or caribou go away for a few

is white Quebec’s ignorance o f the dence, {Hide, and self-sufficiency can taiga can support only a few mately, because they need to know years, they will return and even stick

Crees, and its refusal to accept Cree no longer trouble our brilliant people. We have imposed our sense it in order to survive. Moreover, around given your willingness to do

knowledge o f their own lives and technodreams.) Indeed the James o f space — the Ungava Peninsula they know not only their own something for them and their gen­

lands (especially plain in the hear­ Bay Developm ent Corporation’s seems limitless to us, whereas to the traplines but those o f friends or rela­ erations — not hunt them for more

ing transcripts, and in Richardson’s lawyers’ strategy in the 1972 hear­ Cree it is finite. They know the land tives who invite them to hunt while than you need, and treat their bones

history o f the increasing incursions ing was primarily to attack the no­ is finite because they are in it all the they let their own hunting land lie with respect (something aesthetic,

o f tourist hunters, miners, and dam tion that the Cree were essentially time — and some years it does not fallow for a year or two. (The Cree something pleasing to the spirit of

w ork ers). S eco n d is that independent o f white culture. If you yield what they need to live. All know the signs o f animal decline, the animal) after the flesh has

“people...were alive who knew how could show that they were already these thousands o f square miles and the injunction not to overhunt is been eaten.

to survive in it,’’ human beings in an corrupted by white technology — are in a critical sense small to a prime tenet o f their religion.) In

The white man who knows the

“environment” who are still living airplanes, outboards, skidoos — then them because so much o f it is the north, then, a group o f less than

see Hunter, page 16

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Sagan

other important issue. K.P. Are you a vegetarian? C.S. No.

doubt part of the reason for its suc­ c o n t e x t u a liz e d , n o t d e - nuclear weapons before “they” do— cess. It’s not absolute; it’s sometimes contextualized. So knowledge from the Americans because of the Nazis, honored more in the breach than in the perspective of women’s lives, or the Soviets because o f the Ameri­

continuedfrom page 11

K.P. Getting back to the question of the observance, but it works. I don’t other marginal groups...

cans, the Japanese, there was even a

protection we ordinarily extend to the scientific method. In Cosmos, know of any more powerful claim to C.S. I don’t understand. I mean, do call to make Yugoslavian nuclear

humans— or claim we do, obviously commenting on the threat o f nuclear know ledge than the scien tific an experiment in elementary phys­ weapons. Everybody believed that

very imperfectly— applies to other war, you said: “We accepted the method.

ics. Tell me how women get differ­ their own nation of course is morally

animals? Put another way, since we products o f science; we rejected its K.P. There are those who are using ent results in the laboratory than superior and should have nuclear

are certainly related to animals— methods.” What is the scientific radical skepticism to critique the men, in the same experiment.

weapons first

we’re all kin— doesn’t even the most method? Is it universal, transcend­ scientific method. I’m thinking of K.P. Evelyn Keller argues that

W e’re humans; we grow up in

humble o f animals deserve some ing historical, cultural, and ethnic fem inist philosophers, such as Barbara McClintock discovered the societies, we’re affected by nation­

degree o f protection? Is that degree divisions?

Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, genetic transposition in com because alism, we have prejudices involving

of protection proportional to its gen­ C.S. I know there are many people and others. Sandra Harding suggests her approach to the subject was our sex and the ethnic group w e’re

eral similarity to us? Why are we the who think that science is merely a that “women and men cannot un­ radically different from men’s.

bom into, and so on. That’s our

touchstone? It’s so characteristically tool of those in power that invents derstand or explain the world we C.S. The males were obsessed with nature. It’s important to understand

chauvinistic o f us to make such a fancy reasons to justify the status live in or the real choices we have as nuclear genes, and she provided one that. If we understand it we can do

definition! I don’t claim to have the quo. There’s no question that sci­ long as the sciences describe the o f the first good pieces o f evidence something about it But none of this,

answer to this. But these are some ence sometimes does that— scien­ world primarily from the perspec­ for cytoplasmic genes. A very im ­ it seems to me, calls into question

o f the ways I would approach tists are human beings, they can be tives o f the lives o f the dominant portant discovery. How is that con­ the skeptical tradition o f science.

the question.

bribed and cajoled just like every­ groups.” What implications does this nected with her being a woman? K.P. So the idea you’re suggesting

On the animal experimentation body else, they grow up in a culture have for your belief in the univer­ Suppose she were a member of some is that scientific experiments give us

issue: on the one hand there is need­ and accep t its assu m p tion s sality o f science, and the scientific other oppressed group, would we data; we, then, as human beings, as

less cruelty— and if it’s truly need­ uncritically as children. At the same method?

then say, “Oh this is a typical Native members o f ethnic groups, genders,

less, then let’s not do it. On the other time, science has some fundamen­ C.S. First of all, I know of no more American insight”? This argument, couch them in metaphors. These

hand, there are essential things we tally powerful methods attached to effective weapon against sexism than I think, is fundamentally tangential metaphors are informed by who we

need to leam about ourselves, es­ it— more powerful than any other science. Second, it’s sort o f a curi­ to how science works.

are, where we stand, but...

sential cures to desperately danger­ field that alleges a claim to knowl­ ous question considering that you

O f course there are gender C .S. Yes, what feels right, what

ous human illnesses, m illions o f edge. The way I look at it, science didn’t invite my co-author to join us perspectives. Take an example we makes sense to us— and all kinds o f **

babies saved because of animal ex­ represents a delicate balance between in this interview. [Kavita Philips talk about in Shadows, the idea of prejudices come in at that point. But

periments. I would not want to be a heroic openness to all ideas and was assigned by the editors to the heroic sperm and the passive science is open to debate; the women

the one who would tell the parents of possibilities and the most rigorous inverview Carl Sagan only.] But egg, which is a view so natural for who saw that failure in the male egg/

a sick baby that I am so opposed to skeptical scrutiny o f all ideas, old apply this “radical skepticism” to male scientists. The sperm are sperm metaphors wrote papers and

animal experiments that I am happy and new. Some people are comfort­ quantum mechanics for me. What “fighting” each other to get to the talked to the people in the laborato­

to condemn their baby to death. You able only with the first approach and does the “lives of dominant groups” egg, the egg is sitting there, hoping ries, and now you can see a transition

have to be very sure before you can others only with the second. Many have to do with quantum mechanics? for a handsome suitor.... And then it in the literature. The men are finally

make such a judgment—and I am by are simply comfortable with what Or any other areas o f physics or was found in some species that the paying attention. And it’s only a few

no means sure.

they’ve been taught, and don’t want mathematics?

egg is calling to the sperm, that it’s years ago, maybe a decade, that the

As on the abortion issue, here is any painful debate.

K.P. Well, Andrew Pickering, in sending out all sorts o f chemical data themselves were obtained. It

a difficult compromise that has to be

Some scientists, for example, Constructing Quarks, a history of messages, that the sperm is loaded doesn’t seem to me a disaster. It’s

made, and both extremes are worried are happy to spend their whole ca­ elementary particle physics, argues with all sorts o f odor sensors, very just that humans are fallible. Who

about the slippery slope— that the reers in finding out what’s wrong that scientific debates in particle similar to those in the human nose, figured otherwise? The important

moment you move one micron off with the ideas o f others. Newton physics were resolved not only on that the egg casts out a line to grab fact is that w e’re able to change our

the ideological position, you will made the famous remark, “If I’ve the basis o f the facts, but that “cul­ the sperm and reel it in, that the minds in response to evidence.

then effortlessly slide all the way to accom plished anything it’s by tural” differences among the groups sperm are in many cases bumbling, K.P. So, language, metaphor, and

the hateful opposing point o f view. standing on the shoulders of giants.” of scientists— (heir access to power, incompetent, and it’s the eggs doing prejudice are just an overlay that we

Yet, as in many human interactions, I have a physicist friend in the to funding— determined the out­ all the hard work. Now that is a impose on scientific fact?

the middle ground is what you have skeptical tradition w hose self- come.

perspective, even when the data C.S. Yes. Of course, the design of

to find

evaluation is: “If I’ve accomplished C.S. Oh, o f course, but that’s not supported it, that many men some­ experiments can involve prejudices,

K.P. Are cows, sheep, goats, and anything it’s by peering over the true to the scientific ideal, that’s just how didn’t see. The words were not especially in the social sciences.

chickens “similar enough” to us so shoulders of dwarfs.” A very hostile human nature. Would we be closer forthcoming to describe the reality There’s no question about that. To

that we ought not to eat them?

and arrogant approach, but still, it’s to the truth if we abandoned the that their own experiments made give you an example from my own

C.S. Are rutabaga, broccoli, carrots, an essential part o f science: the rigor, scientific ideal? Obviously not. evident. It took women to grab them experience: In the first IQ test I ever

and cabbages? How would you de­ the freedom to criticize, the nominal There’s a tension between the by the collar and say, “Hey now, just took, there were sketches o f objects,

cide? We humans have been hunting ethic o f being willing to surrender fallibilities and cupidities o f human a minute, you’re not saying this in and you had to choose from a list

animals for as long as we’ve been on your most deeply held opinions if beings and this grand, sometimes the right way.”

what they were. One o f them was a

earth. The defining phrase that an­ the facts warrant. That is to my mind em otionally difficult to apply,

It’s not that women and men torus, and the correct answer was a

thropologists use for humans in a the key aspect of science, even if it’s counsel o f the scientific method. But performed different experiments to napkin ring. I was a poor kid in

state before civilization is “hunter- imperfectly applied. Max Planck said the fact that humans are fallible look at how the eggs call out to the Brooklyn; I had never seen a napkin

gatherers.” Our interest in meat goes it would take a generation before doesn’t weaken the validity o f the sperm; where our self-interests are ring, so I got that question wrong.

very deep. O f course there have been physicists were willing to accept scientific method; instead it under­ involved, o f course we make mis­ Now, was that a failure of us kids

prominent reactions to it (India is an quantum mechanics— even though scores that the error-correcting ma­ takes, we can be misled, or fool who had never seen napkin rings, or

obvious example), often tied to high it explained aspects of the world that chinery o f science is critical to our ourselves.

a failure o f those who designed the

religious principles. But, you know, nobody could explain otherwise. survival and well-being.

You can see that most easily in test? Was there something wrong

there may even be physiological There is in scientists, as in everybody K.P. But fem inists argue from the scientists who provide weapons with the way the question was asked,

reasons some people want to eat else, a conservative streak, an un­ “partial persectives” for “situated for nations o f the most diverse reflecting the prejudice of those who

meat. On the other hand, what do the willingness to shake the foundations; knowledges” (Donna Haraway’s ideological stripes, every one of them designed the test? I wouldn’t say

cows, sheep, and goats have to say if s part of human nature. But science, terms). Sandra Harding has argued convinced that he or she is doing the conscious prejudice, but it was a

about it? Is it right to raise them in more than any other field, is willing that the very notion o f objectivity right thing. All those people who flawed question. Racist and other

concentration camps for animals so to make those fundamental reex­ needs to be examined— that we need went to their governments in 1939 assumptions in IQ tests are now well

that humans can eat them? It’s an­ aminations and that is without a to talk about objectivity that’s and ‘40 saying “we must develop

see Sagan, page 16

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page 14

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Movie
continuedfrom page 1 unusual about his position in the social division o f labor in fact he is grateful that he has a job! In postmodern film theory — follow­ ing the lead o f such neo- and postMarxists as Gramsci, and Laclau and Mouffe as well as such theorists o f “discourse” as Foucault and Derrida — ideology has come to mean not so much a politico-histori­ cal practice that conceals class re­ lations but simply the means by which culture represents its beliefs and ideas. In other words, in postmodern theory “ideology” is no longer an “explanatory” concept but merely a “descriptive” term o f analysis. To “explain” is to be “nor­ m ative,” and since postmodern theory regards all normative acts as ultimately an appeal to “absolute” truth and therefore a violent form of “totalizing,” explanation itself has to be rejected. This rejection of ideology as an index of social power and difference is a hallmark o f bour­ geois film theory. Zavarzadeh in fact shows how a humanist film critic like D. J. Andrew (Concepts in Film Theory) and his supposed opponent, Stephen Heath, a poststructuralist film theorist (“On Screen, In Frame: Film and Ideology”), actually close ranks, when it cranes to politics, and attack the radical Marxist practice o f ideology (critique).
The social theory behind this weakened postmodern notion of ideology is that advanced Western democracies are already — happily — post-class, post-ideological so­ cieties. Being merely “descriptive” (and not “normative”), ideology is

then ultimately just a mode of repre­ sentation — a species o f rhetoric. Zavarzadeh quotes Marcelin Pleynet as saying that the only radicality that a film can offer is in its “formal research” into the material specificity o f films (meaning their materiality as texts). To analyze ideolbgy therefore, we have to give up the notion o f truth/falsehood and instead pay close attention to the mechanics
of meaning — how truth-effects are
constructed in film and other texts of culture. This reactionary “formal­ ism,” Zavarzadeh argues, blocks any radical form o f “ideology critique” o f film which might demonstrate why (and not simply how truth ef­ fects are produced and allow one to get at the larger class differences — get at, that is to say, the fabric of social relations under capitalism.
Instead o f a radical critique of ideology, postmodern film theory offers an immanent critique o f ideology-as-discourse. In other words, it analyzes the rhetoric of the film as a text and shows how the process of signification — the movement of signs in the film text—not only pro­ duce ideological effects (“truths”) but also, in a self-deconstructive move, dismantle those ideological effects, revealing the undecidability o f the proposed “truths.” In this manner, the form alism o f postmodern film theory negates the film ’s historicity and brackets its political effects in helping to form class identities: the film becomes a self-constituted, transhistorical arti­ fact which narrates its own internal history and allegorizes its own in­ ability to state anything with cer­ tainty. Whatever it says, it also un-says. Film, in other words, is a space o f the sheer playfulness of

signs constantly doing and un-doing themselves: all that the filmic text can tell us is the story of its inability
to communicate coherently and with certainty.
Zavarzadeh argues that this idea of film as a self-reflexive deconstructive activity is complicit with the logic o f wage labor and capital. In part he makes his case by d iscu ssin g an in flu en tial p o stm od ern ist “read in g” o f Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In her discus­ sion Tani Modleski argues that the film ’s seem ingly secure (“decid­ able”) patriarchal ideology actually “exceeds” itself and in an act of selfdeconstfuction becomes differential and “undecidable.” In her view, in Vertigo the “masculine” turns out to

be not “opposed” to the “feminine,” as common sense proposes, but in fact a part o f it. Scotti loses his
Illustration: Benn T.F. Nadelman “identity” as a masculine subject, becomes part o f the otherness o f woman, by discovering that he re­ sembles Madeline in an “intoler­ able” way. This recognition is intolerable because patriarchy’s power depends on it being what it is in an absolutely clear manner, without any doubts or hesitations. Any hesitation in patriarchy reveals the faultlines and discrepancies of its ideology — exposes the very seams, fissures, and folds that undo it.
According to Zavarzadeh, such a “reading” turns Vertigo into a complex “text” in order to divert

attention from its economically ex­ ploitative and politically suppres­ sive character. It treats Hitchcock not as a reactionary director, but as a master self-reflexive filmmaker. This is the kind o f reading that Zavarzadeh calls “subtle” reading — a manuever that introduces so many factors into the act o f under­ standing that it eventually becomes impossible to “conclude” anything about the operation o f economic, political, and cultural processes. In such subtle readings, every process is both identical to “itself’ (Vertigo is patriarchal) and “othef’ than itself (Vertigo is a critique of patriarchy) — which is to say that all social processes are reversible so that it is finally impossible to discern who is the exploited and who the exploiter. Zavarzadeh argues strongly against this form of subtlety by insisting that a form of strategic crudeness is necessary to indicate that in spite of all their complexity and seeming undecidability and heterogeneity, all social practices and processes — such as, for example, patriarchy — are, in a class society, informed by the global logic o f domination and exploitation. He proposes “seeing” films as an act through which the viewer gets hold o f this global logic through ideology critique.
While the “subtle” postmodern “reading” presents itself as “radical,” Zavarzadeh further argues, it is in fact complicitous with the status quo because it denies that there is any ground upon which one can speak about patriarchy with any certainty. If it is nothing other than a “text,” then patriarchy is basically a narra­ tive marked by the contradictions and conflicts that are produced in all
see Movie, page 15

ornell SEPTEMBER calendar series highlight:
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o f Angelopoulos. But such comparisons only help to locale the level of accomplishment; Sokurov’s vision is an entirely distinctive one, andfull o f surprising, exalting inventiveness. I hope this great filmmakerfinds the audience in America that his work deserves."
__ —Susan Sontag OTHER SPECIAL SERIES THIS MONTH
Watching Literature (Mondays) Heterosexism...Not! (Wednesdays) “Never Again’ --Japanese Anti-Nuclear Features
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page 15

Narration
continuedfrom page 7 of rapport. "Our collective perspec­ tives became concentric.” Dark Circling Cloud, the ancestor to whom star m edicine was first given, addresses Edgar Bearchild, and speaks through him, the text in this instance absolutely bilingual — Mesquakie first, then English. “These young people are kind for remembering us,” he says, in En­ glish, “you will receive our bless­ ing.”
So intensely is Edgar Bearchild’s vision realized that it unbalances the text. Everything that follows repeats or elaborates on it. The other world, ordinary settlement
Flight
continuedfrom page 4 and they remind us also o f the achievement o f Don R. Eckelberry, whose art has the sensual feeling so close to that o f Louis Agassiz Fuertes. But they totally ignore the contribution made by Arthur Singer, and the many books he has illus­ trated, including the popular field guide, Birds o f North America.
Equally curious is the absence o f any mention o f the art o f Guy Coheleach, or Robert Bateman, to name two painters who have added distinction to the growing corpus of wildlife art. Finally, it would have been useful to have had captions accompanying each illustrated work
Movie
continuedfrom page 14 acts of signification. The most ef­ fective and radical way to combat patriarchy is by pointing to its in­ stability as a text that is, by showing that patriarchy is self-differential, always already at war with itself, alw ays in the process o f self-deconstruction so that there is no need for intervention from “outside” through collective human action.
The aim o f Seeing Films Po­ litically is to go beyond “reading” films subtly and simply analyzing the playfulness o f their signs. The book argues that one should “see” films in their class and historical contexts. However, since the cat­ egories o f “class,” “history,” and “opposition” are among the very ones deconstructed by postmodern theory, Zavarzadeh must move to a broad theoretical level and put the dominant understanding of postmodernism in question. In a long chapter called “Pleasure, Re­ sistan ce and the Ludic Postm odernism ,” instead of deconstructing the terms of postmodernism by showing their epistemological undecidability, he on the contrary demonstrates the political logic that has made postmodernism necessary for sus­ taining late capitalist liberalism. Not

life, Euro-America, is simply op­ as, with classic Mesquakie rigor, it

pressive. Carson Two Red Foot, a challenges the bicultural condition.

kind of modem Dark Circling Cloud, In the peyote ceremony “word

tells Edgar Bearchild: “Often I think songs” can be “switched into En­

that the only true merriment and glish, invoking Jesus Christ.” The

religious strength I underwent elder Facepaint, Ted Facepaint’s

occurred during my youth and early grandfather, who directs the ritual,

manhood. All else has been a long dressed “in a dark blue suit and pants

uncomfortable adjustment to being with gray pinstripes,” looks like

an Indian, E n e note w iy a n i, in the someone “from the notorious A1

world o f the white man.”

Capone era.” Norman Green

It is the purity and splendor of Thunder has an “oily Elvis Presley

that which is Mesquakie that really hairdo” and wears an “Hawaiian

matters in Black Eagle Child. Here, floral-print shirt.” There’s all this

indeed, is a nationalism as fiercely Euro-American stuff: objects, con­

intractable as Irish nationalism, and cepts, tropes, shirts and suits, and it

the same paradox, exquisite alien­ is all nonessential, secondary, alter­

ation in the language o f the native, put on.

conqueror. Ray Young Bear’s text

Ray A. Young Bear is the great-

tries to strike a new balance o f lin­ great-grandson o f Ma mwi wa ni kc,

guistic and formal elements, even the young ch ief who led the

1*7 1i 1;4j i
EXPANDED, revised edition
Cover illustration: Arthur Singer Fine work unmentioned in M O B A.

and indicating where the original works could be viewed, as is standard for most art books.
The fact is that few museums or in stitu tion s have regular exhibitions o f the best ornithologi­ cal art (a couple o f local exceptions are the Laboratory o f Ornithology at Cornell, and the Genesee County Museum, near Rochester). Most m useum -goers m ight find an Audubon, or a hummingbird painting by Martin Johnson Heade, or perhaps the rare inclusion of a work by the Swedish painter Bruno Liljefors — whose work many hold to be the best of the genre. There has also been scant critical appraisal o f ornithological art and its relationship to the larger fields o f painting, sculpture, and

rejecting postmodernism but taking ply undertaking discursive reverse

it as the historical moment in which readings o f the operation o f power

our practices are conducted, in specific localities. Against the

Zavarzadeh opens up a space for a Foucauldian view, Zavarzadeh ar­

different kind o f postmodernism. gues for maintaining the binary,

Following Teresa Ebert, he proposes powerful/powerless, because he

that there is a fundamental differ­ believes binaries are the outcome of

ence between a politically opposi­ social contradictions and not the

tional resistance postmodernism and effects of contradictory textualities:

the dominant ludic porno which is they can be made to disappear not by

only concerned with showing over acts o f deconstruction but only by

and over again that culture is merely changing the social structure that

a language effect.

produces them.

One o f the principal strategies

In order to demonstrate that

o f ludic porno is to focus on the power is produced on a global level,

voluntaristic agency of the individual Zavarzadeh introduces an analytical

and thus to emphasize the impor­ strategy that he calls “renarrating.”

tance of the discursive “resistance” Through the strategy of renarrating,

of the reading subject to mitigate the Zavarzadeh shows how the locally

effects of the domination of existing “meaningful” narrative o f a par­

power relations. In postmodern film ticular film actually suppresses an­

theory, “pow er” is generally other narrative which is a tale of

understood as theorized by global class conflicts and social re­

Foucault, who asserts that there is pression. Renarration points to this

no such binary as the powerful and supressed narrative and its social

the powerless and that power is a logic by demonstrating that the

diffused, dispersed, and readily re­ aesthetic logic (the value most

versible social practice that perme­ privileged in postmodern film

ates all localities o f daily life. The theory) is finally an alibi of ideology.

most effective mode of “resistance” In this way, the book offers a sus­

to such power is to “textualize” it, to tained and comprehensive ideology

show that it is groundless and thus critique not only o f a number o f

unjustified — i.e. unethical. The contemporary “trivial” films, but

Foucaldian imperative then is to just a lso o f postm odernism and

read and to read justly. This, ac­ postmodern film theory as well. The

cording to Zavarzadeh, privileges a em p h asis on the “ tr iv ia l,”

voluntaristic subject who is so pro­ Zavarzadeh explains, is necessary

duced as to believe that one can because it is in the space of the

change the social practices by sim- trivial that some o f the most signifi­

Mesquakie out o f their Oklahoma exile in 1856 back to the midwest river country o f Iowa. He is a poet, whose first major collection, The Invisible Musician, appeared in 1990. Wherever you are in Black Eagle Child, there is poetic clarity. Driving through the Iowa night with Ted Facepaint and visiting Ontario Indians, Edgar Bearchild reflects: “Although we were together as Indians/in the crude automobile and throughout/ the country —related in dialects and customs-W we were like rural farmsteads separated/ from each other by infinite miles.”
+
Neil Schmitz is a writer who lives in Buffalo, NY.
printmaking surveyed by our major museums. Bird art has lingered in a kind o f art historical limbo — thought o f as scientific illustration by the mainstream art world, used as a descriptive appendage in popular guide books, and tolerated by som e ornithologists to grace the pages of their book-length treatises.
Fortunately, bird and wildlife art has an audience and is being collected and appreciated by a wide public who finds its love o f the outdoors enhanced by prints and books that depict nature.
Alan Singer is a writer and artist who lives in Rochester, NY
cant ideological negotiations of culture take place.
In scope alone. Seeing Films Politically is an extraordinary book: its topics range form film and film theory to postmodemity, social theory, and psychoanalysis to Marxism and Marxist cultural stud­ ies. But what is most significant is that the book appeared at all: in an academic market dominated by postmodernist theorists, it has be­ come almost impossible to get books of this kind published. A passionate book, its passion is not that o f Barthesian “jouissance” but rather the passion o f a “partisan” — inseparable from a rational argument for the importance o f the socio-historical “seeing” o f films. To help us “see,”. Seeing Films Politically produces concepts and strategies that are excluded form the mainstream “reading” o f films. It will thus help a new generation o f culture critics and film “see-ers” whose voices are suppressed today by the hegemony o f the postmodern formalism in the academy and elsewhere. Already in its second printing, the book promises to becom e a theoretically and politically invaluable resource in coming years.
Donald M orton is a professor o f English at Syracuse University.

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page 16

the BOOKPRESS

September, 1992

Hunter

, r HjKSSttiess when they talk about the t i '1and. A lso it distinguishes them
from us in a critical way. They know

continuedfrom page 12

they are quite fa r out. They can’t

Cree best, perhaps, is Glen Speers, depend on a plane or snowmobile

the Hudson Bay Company factor for evacuation if they are injured;

who has worked with them for 25 they can’t swim (not that it would

years. He says two important things matter in the cold northern

in the book. First, with an admira­ waters); they know they must pro­

tion that almost embarrasses him, vide food each day. Richardson’s

“you will find no finer people any­ understanding of all this is reflected

where.” Second, “they are very cau in his beginning the book with a

tious, because when they are in the story about a dangerous accident

bush, they know they are quite that is averted by the skill, intelli­

far out.”

gence, and patience o f the hunter

This last comment illuminates Isaiah Awashish (Philip’s father).

the strange (to us) “resignation” of The story of Isaiah and his youngest

the Cree, as well as their generosity, son W illie — they were nearly

the humor o f their stories, and their stranded on an island in the rapids

when they lost their canoe — also emphasizes Speers’ assertion that there is almost never an accident among the Cree when they are in the bush.
(As I read this book I recalled headlines about the deer hunters in New York — shooting them­ selves, relatives, strangers, putting shotgun plugs through nearby houses and cars — a terrible and frightening parody of subsistence hunting culture.)
The struggle over James Bay is a profound test o f our culture’s in­ tentions toward all the Indians o f this continent, and o f our willing­ ness to act on what we admit was a great historical wrong. The alterna­

tive for the Cree, if they lose this battle for full rights to their hunting grounds, and to an undisturbed continuation o f their culture, is res­ ervation life, humiliatin dependency, increased medical and social dis­ tress; it is happening already, has been since the mines and logging and tourist hunting and the first dams. Do we not know well enough about reservation life in this coun­ try? (Those who do not should read, for example, Peter Matthiessen’s In the Spirit o f Crazy Horse.)
Several Cree leaders have put it very directly: “Are the people in your cities willing to change their lives to help us save ours?”
But also: We need to knowthere

are humans presently living on this continent in balance with the land and animals. It is, I think, a far greater psychic necessity than the need — which white environmen­ talism has been shakily built on — to know there is simply wdemess, alone.
We cannot reshape our lives by contemplating wilderness uninhabited by humans. But con­ templating the spiritual economy of a people who take just enough from nature, and who always reciprocate, may give us a living example of great value.
•F Joel Ray is an editor o f the Bookpress and a freelance writer.

Sagan
continuedfrom page 13 known. I doubt that the designers intended consciously to foist erro­ neous data on the public. They’ve certainly been embarrassed by the flaws in the test. They couldn’t help themselves— they grew up in a racist society, and the biased questions seemed reasonable to them. But if decisions on jobs, promotions, or personal worth are based on such tests, a monstrous injustice is perpe­ trated.
How do we approach this question? We point out the defi­ ciencies. And then, they change. I by no means hold any brief for IQ tests as an infallible judge o f intelli­ gence, but they have become less parochial because of such criticism. That kind o f criticism is what

science is about. K.P. Could we pursue the idea o f “difference” a little more? Your writing is part o f what you characterize as a search for our common origins. In a suggestive episode o f Cosmos you remarked that if an extraterrestrial were to visit Earth, it would be struck more by the similarities between cultures than by the differences. You express hope for peace, in your latest work, Shadows, because you feel that we are gradually becoming an “intercommunicating planetary species.” In this vision o f unity and peace, what role do the real differences between cultures play? Or do you believe that once we get to that stage there w ill be no really significant differences between cultures/ethnic groups/ political worldviews? C.S. I think it would be a disaster if

we put all our eggs in one cultural basket— not mainly because o f the ethnic pride that many people have in their own culture, but again because o f human fallibility. We simply don’t know which cultures and traditions may prove to be important for our future.
For example, it is stupid for us to kill o ff the rem aining hunter-gatherers— because they have important insights into not just where we came from and who we are, but also there may be clues to how we should arrange our societies in the future. I don’t say that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is possible on a planet with 6 billion people. But if we spent 99.9% of our tenure on Earth in such a state it’s fantastically stupid to lose access to that information. We need it. Never mind if you don’t have a compassionate bone in your body

for hunter-gatherers. For selfish rea­ sons, you ought to protect them and their way o f life.
Beyond that, there’s the obvious point that people enjoy their cultures and value them. There’s something atrocious about saying, “I’m sorry your culture doesn’t produce weapons well enough, and therefore you must adopt my culture and especially my technology, under threat of extermination.” This has been the trend o f Western culture. You can see it clearly in the case o f the Conquistadores and Aztec Mexico. Aztec civilization collapsed— they had better calendars, Albrecht Diirer was knocked out by their art, but the Spanish had better weapons. So that very rich culture, with all its powers and glories, deficiencies and evils, is gone. And all sorts o f answers that we

might have learned, all sorts o f insights into ourselves that we might have gotten from that society, are unavailable.
There is a tension, as there is in all o f these difficult issues you’ve raised, between making a global community that works, and preserving ethnic diversity on the local level. It’s not impossible to do both. It does mean that you can't be a cultural fundamentalist and say that the global society is sim ply incom patible with diversity. You cannot say that these ethnic groups are irrelevant and therefore should be allow ed to wither away. In a realistic world we must find a compromise.
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Kavita Philips is a writer who lives in Ithaca.

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