bridges.pdf

From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge


Edited by

Sanda Badescu

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING

From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge, edited by Sanda Badescu

This book first published in 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2007 by Sanda Badescu and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN 1-84718-176-7; ISBN 13: 9781847181763

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction..........................................................................................................1 On the Symbolism of the Bridge Sanda Badescu PART I SAILING ACROSS THE SEA: HISTORY AND LITERATURE Chapter One .......................................................................................................12 The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity Terry Cochran Chapter Two.......................................................................................................26 Tiphys on the Bridge: the Argo in Paris Public Festivals during the Reign of Henry II John Nassichuk Chapter Three.....................................................................................................43 Between Two Worlds: the Sea and the Imaginary in the Eighteenth Century Chris Roulston PART II PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGES: BILINGUALISM AND CREATION

Chapter Four ......................................................................................................58 Maternal Latin, Domestic French: on Montaigne's Bilingualism Angela Cozea Chapter Five.......................................................................................................72 An (In)Visible Bridge: from Mental to Interlingual Translation Georgiana Lungu-Badea

Table of Contents

vi

PART III SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ENJEUX Chapter Six.........................................................................................................88 The Bridging Experience of Trans-Migration: Reflexive Sociology/ies from a Migrating Sociologist Godfrey Baldacchino Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................104 Sentimental Bridges Between Trinidad and India Faiz Ahmed Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................115 The State as a Catachresis in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances and Allah n’est pas obligé Donald Sackey Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................129 Just Fine: The Bridge to the Non-Space from the Petitcodiac to the Deltas Carlo Lavoie PART IV PASSING OVER: ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY Chapter Ten .....................................................................................................142 Bridges and Ritual Values: A Case Analysis: Brodice Otilia Hedesan Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................151 Diving Off the Bridge: Madame Guyon and the Social Torrents of Late 17th Century France Agnès Conacher PART V REFLECTIONS OF BRIDGES: ARTS AND CULTURES Chapter Twelve................................................................................................164 Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet: An Interfacial Conjunction Rocky Penate


vii

Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................177 Time Is (The Matter): Communication of Presence in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries Rodica Ieta Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................192 Bridges Across Culture and Imagination Aurélia Hetzel Contributors .....................................................................................................205

INTRODUCTION

ON THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BRIDGE

SANDA BADESCU

To cross a bridge, a river or a border is to leave behind the familiar, personal and comfortable and enter the unknown, a different and strange world where, faced with another reality, we may well find ourselves bereft of home and identity. —Jean-Pierre Vernant

This collection of essays entitled From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge is the product of a multi-disciplinary conference hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island in August 2005. The starting point for a reflection on this topic resides in the fact that this university is situated on Prince Edward Island—one of the ten Canadian provinces—and that this island has been linked physically to the continent by the Confederation Bridge since 1997. This particular geography was the source of inspiration for a group of professors and graduate students from several universities. Using various literary, anthropological, sociological, historical and philosophical approaches, the conference participants contributed to a complex picture of the symbolism of the bridge. It is clear that the bridge, together with water and land, is an ancient symbol and a continual presence in our lives. One cannot think about land (continents, islands) without thinking about water (seas, oceans, rivers), and without considering the opposition and complementarity of land/water, solid/liquid, stable/unstable, safe/unsafe and so on. Imagining bridges is a primary attempt to join what is separated, to connect A and B, binaries which otherwise remain irreconcilable. The history of bridges is so old that it is difficult to trace it back in time. Each bridge has its own stories: stories of building or of demolishing, stories of considerable effort or of subsequent uncommon events. The bridge can be actual or abstract; it can be a voyage between two worlds, a sentimental link between two communities, a passage between life and death. The bridge as a symbol

Introduction

2

may signify a passage from earth to sky, from human to super-human, from terrestrial life to paradise. It can also be a boundary space where the soul of the deceased engages in order to arrive at its final destination. Still surviving in remote areas and communities of Europe, this popular belief circulates as a legend in parts of Serbia:

[The legend] recounts that in the beginning the earth was one and undivided and people could come and go as they pleased. However, with the arrival of death, the earth split in two: this world and the hereafter. In despair, human beings prayed day and night to God, begging Him to bring these two parts together. God took pity on the just and blew on the earth to create a bridge between the two worlds. (Djuric 1999, 43)

The bridge appearing as a dangerous symbolic passage in numerous medieval stories is the bridge separating two kingdoms. A courageous knight is to cross it in order to rescue an “other”, usually a princess1. For example, in the 12th century, Chrétien de Troyes in his Le Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of the Cart, better known as Lancelot) tells the story of the two knights, Lancelot and Gawain, who are led into a long and extremely perilous journey to save queen Guinevere, detained by Maleagant. After numerous and exciting adventures, the knights have to choose between two bridges in order to enter into the kingdom of Maleagant’s father:

It is possible to enter by two highly dangerous roads and by two most treacherous crossings; one is called the Water Bridge, because the bridge runs under the water, of which there is as much below it to the bottom as there is above, neither more nor less, the bridge being precisely half-way up … The other bridge is worse and far more perilous; and it has never been crossed by any man, for it’s just like a sharp sword, which is why everybody calls it the Sword Bridge. (Chrétien de Troyes 1988, 193-194) 2

Both ways of access are dangerous: the Water Bridge, a narrow bridge situated under the water, and a more terrifying bridge, The Sword Bridge, which is no wider than the blade of a sword. These symbolic bridges are a means of separation; they exist to build up a barrier. They are, theoretically, insurmountable but, at the same time, are meant to be vanquished by a knight possessing the appropriate qualities. Gawain chooses the former bridge and his mission is bound to fail, while Lancelot crosses the more dangerous Sword Bridge:

At the end of that very dangerous bridge, they get off their horses to see the treacherous water thundering swiftly past, black and turbid, as horrid and terrifying as if it were the Devil’s river, and so perilous and deep that there is nothing in the whole world which, having fallen into it, would not vanish as into


3

the salt sea. The bridge across the cold water consisted of a polished, gleaming sword. (Chrétien de Troyes 1988, 225) 3

The Sword Bridge is unique because of the obvious peril. Once engaged on the passage there is no turning back and a fall off the bridge is inevitably fatal. Suggestively depicted by Chrétien de Troyes, the thick black water is similar to an infernal river or a bottomless sea, and means death itself. Lancelot is meant to successfully cross to the other shore and, thus, succeed in his mission. The bridge, as all the other obstacles encountered by the knights in their journey, is part of a process of initiation, and only the chosen knights may pass across. Lancelot’s bridge is one powerful example that opens to a series of explorations on the symbolism of the bridge. Any type of traveling from one place to another can be seen as a bridge (more or less) connecting two worlds. History offers powerful examples of voyages by ocean that tried to create a bridge between the known and the unknown. By sailing on the Atlantic Ocean, the 15th century Europeans encountered another continent that they saw as a New World. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne already noticed that “our world” had just encountered another, “un monde enfant” (“infant” in the sense of still close to nature, not yet spoiled by European art/artifices/civilization), and foresaw the disastrous consequences of an inevitable clash between two contrasting cultures. “I fear we shall have considerably hastened the decline and collapse of that young world by our contagion and that we shall have sold it dear our opinions and our skills” (Montaigne 1993, 342)4 he states, and further on affirms that: “We, on the contrary, took advantage of their ignorance and lack of experience to pervert them more easily towards treachery, debauchery and cupidity, towards every kind of cruelty and inhumanity, by the example and model of our own manners” (Montaigne 1993, 344)5. The “export” of mores and manners from one continent to another must have as effect an expansion of the conqueror’s values, be they good or bad, a transformation of the unfamiliar into the familiar. This process means that the conquerors have the possibility to eliminate the other (ness) or to turn the other into a same (ness) (which is again an elimination of the otherness). Historically, although often questioned and re-evaluated, the sea voyages undertaken by the Spaniards to parts of the American continent, represent the beginning of a process of globalization, which encompassed more or less half of the globe. This expansion of the “old” world continued to impact on trade, economy, science, literature, mythical symbolism re-enacted by the Renaissance, on writings on travel, both documentary and fictional. One notices, especially in the 18th century, an increase of French and English novels about sea voyages, shipwrecks, exoticism, distinctions between nature and culture, where the bridge

Introduction

4

of communication among nations and countries is again questioned and examined. As sciences and technologies have been continuously developing, more travels at the global level have been challenging us to think and debate more about migration. Migrating from one territory to another means crossing from one social and cultural reference point to a new one. Defining home and “home-ness” becomes a challenging task and formerly clear oppositions such as here/there, familiar/unfamiliar, first language/second language become blurred and difficult to formulate. At some point, choosing neither one shore nor the other condemns one to a perpetual feeling of not belonging (or belonging partially to two worlds at the same time), to eternal suspension over a “never-really-crossed” bridge. Perhaps the most interesting situation of such migration is the situation of the writer who, by moving to a new place, must tame a new language. To appropriate another language is to tame the “unheimlich”, which is, as we know, the Freudian term for the “unfamiliar” or “strange”. According to the Quebec writer and critic Régine Robin6,

[O]f course, the emigrant writer must deal with his/her country of origin, which s/he has left for political, economical, or simply personal reasons. S/he needs to overcome a process of mourning or a memory rearrangement. This is not a simple job and this is often why one needs to start writing. So that one can bear oneself in a different space, can dig up in oneself a new otherness, to tame the nostalgia and to keep away the “unheimlich” of the inside-outside. Who am I presently and what place can I create for myself in this three-places society (Canada, Quebec, Montreal) ? What place, and not in the economical sense, although this problem is not completely secondary, what place in the literary institution which, as in all literary institutions, has its own traditions, and, above all, what imaginary place and what identity, or , in other words, how will I contribute to transform the imaginary from here?7 (My translation)

This questioning, partially autobiographical, is revealed in the title of Robin’s book. La Quebecoite is definitely not a Québécoise, but a Québécoise and something else. On the one hand, the suffix “coite” (French) is an adjective meaning silent, mute, one who does not react or intervene. The Quebecoite is an immigrant, who would have this strange identity, living in the new country but voiceless. On the other hand, it is evident that the author is determined to fight against her chosen title, to have a voice, by the act of writing. A writer (or an artist for that matter) may have the advantage and the skill to bridge the two shores, the old and the new, by articulating this complicated and lengthy process.


5

The symbolism of the bridge is a broad topic that can be explored from many perspectives. Any process of knowing oneself, of discovering oneself and the world, means to be in touch and to create communication with the other(s). By connecting people, communities, universes, on the one hand, and by opening and closing on entire worlds, on the other hand, it remains as a stimulating symbol in our tradition and history. The essays collected in this book Part I: Sailing Across the Sea: History and Literature The articles of the first section deal with successive historic periods of openness to new worlds. Starting with Kant’s theory on human understanding, Terry Cochran’s article, The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity, explains how the modern thinking of two interwoven concepts—the land and the sea—has changed and envisaged what we call today globalization. The author explores the early “age of discovery”, the time of Columbus’ travels, as a key moment in human understanding of the finitude of the earth. This bridge between two continents was fundamental for the domestication of the ocean as well as for global unity, which dominates our discourses today. The second article of the section, Tiphys on the Bridge: the Argo in Paris Public Festivals during the Reign of Henry II , also focuses on the age of colonization of the Americas. John Nassichuk dwells on the image of the seafaring voyage in the 16th century and the manner in which this influenced the works of the French Humanists. Chris Roulston closes the first segment with a third article, which deals with the dynamics between geography and culture in the 18th century. Between Two Worlds: The Sea and the Imaginary in the Eighteenth Century examines French and English works of fiction that were influenced by sea travels and by examinations of opposing concepts such as civilisation/ savagery and culture/nature. Part II: Philosophy of Languages: Bilingualism and Creation The second section focuses on the metaphorical bridge of communicating in different languages. Angela Cozea, in her essay Maternal Latin, Domestic French: on Montaigne’s Bilingualism, examines the manner in which the maternal language constitutes the foundation of a second, grammatical, written language, and underscores the distance separating the maternal—the love for speech—and the grammatical—the knowledge of speech— which represent two poles of every speaker’s essential bilingualism. She proposes one possible bridge between these two, and calls it the “domestic language”, such as the one

Introduction

6

Montaigne accomplished in his writing of the Essays. Georgiana Lungu-Badea’s An (In) Visible Bridge: from Mental to Inter-lingual Translation questions the relationship between translation and creation, between personal and inter-linguistic translation. Lungu-Badea studies the case of a novel written in two languages—Romanian, the author’s mother tongue, and French, the language of his new country—and, thus, sheds a new light on the definition of bilingualism and the mutual influence between language and identity. Part III: Searching for Identity: Social and Cultural Enjeux The essays collected in this section move us between different geographical places: from Prince Edward Island, Canada, to Trinidad, to Africa, and back to New Brunswick, Canada. The papers deal with social changes involved in traveling from one space to another and/or from one historical moment to another, and how these impact on human identity. Godfrey Baldacchino discusses in his The Bridging Experience of Trans-Migration: Reflexive Sociology/ies from a Migrating Sociologist a specific situation of a professional sociologist trying to articulate his transition to the status of transmigrant after leaving Malta to take up employment in Canada. Baldacchino’s analysis represents a positivist-rational as well as a self-reflexive exercise in accommodating the decision to migrate. The second essay, Faiz Ahmed’s Sentimental Bridges Between Trinidad and India, presents a historical and political picture of East Indian immigration to Trinidad starting in the mid 19th century. The identity of these immigrants depends on their bond to India; it is a linkage, which has been maintained and developed through religion, language, and Hindu schools, giving space to political affirmation in Trinidad’s heterogeneous society. Donald Sackey’s The State as a Catachresis in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances and Allah n’est pas obligé focuses on the impossibility of reconciling two opposed worlds, “pre-colonial” values linked to tradition and a new kind of colonization established after independence in African countries. As the title suggests, the post-colonial “state-nation” can be seen as a “catachresis”, a concept-metaphor in which the bridge between the concept and its historical or traditional referent is lost. Closing the sociological segment of the collection, in Just Fine: The Bridge to the Non-Space from the Petitcodiac to the Deltas, Carlo Lavoie explores the Acadian community in New Brunswick, Canada, and the way in which the Acadian imaginary has been developing a tormented relationship to the space, due to specific historical events. France Daigle, the novelist examined by Lavoie in his essay, is questioning the social openness and closure of this community to the Anglophones at a regional level, as well as to the Francophones at a global level.


7

Part IV: Passing Over: Anthropology and Philosophy This section comprises two articles, which look at the bridge as a way of crossing to the world beyond. In Bridges and Ritual Values: A Case Analysis: Brodice, Otilia Hedesan presents her anthropological research on actual bridges in Brodice, a village located in South-Eastern Serbia. The existing bridges represent funeral monuments, direct links between here and there, between the living and the dead. Taking a philosophical point of view, Agnès Conacher, in Diving Off the Bridge: Madame Guyon and the Social Torrents of Late 17th Century France considers mystical thought as a sequence of steps across an unfinished bridge that opens to tranquility of the soul, to nothingness, and to nonexistence. In this context, the “torrent” is a metaphor for the soul; the soul abandons itself to God in a tormented journey whose end is the sea representing the world after death. Part V: Reflections of Bridges: Arts and Cultures The closing section of the collection deals with real/present or imaginary/absent bridges in literature and in visual arts such as painting and cinema. In Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet: An Interfacial Conjunction, Rocky Penate reassesses Flaubert’s work in terms of the concept of friendship; contemplating the Venetian bridge Rialto can reveal a different experience depending on the reality of the viewer, on whether he is alone or accompanied by a friend. The artistic bridge is able to highlight a new symbol for friendship, namely the work desk for two people which eventually gives meaning to the characters’ lives. The essay Time Is (The Matter): Communication of Presence in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries explores the attempt of modernist art to (re)capture experience in absentia through the mediation of technological and linguistic devices. Rodica Ieta shows how the absence of bridges for Woolf’s and Bergman’s characters leads to re-inventing connections under an imaginary and dream-like form in order to induce a different kind of communication. Closing the last section of the book, Aurélia Hetzel proposes in Bridges Across Culture and Imagination an overview of bridges as artistic and cultural images. Starting with legends of bridges, the author goes over several representations of bridges in German and French paintings, as well as in literary works by Nabokov, Camus and Balzac, closing with the popular theme of the “suicidal on the bridge” which left its mark on real and fictional existences.

Introduction

8

Notes

1 The symbol is very present in the cinema productions for young audiences and, implicitly, in cultural studies, as for example the successful animated film, Shrek, where again the crossing of the bridge involves exhilarating and thrilling events. 2 In the original text: “Si puet l’en antrer totevoies Par .II. molt perilleuses voies Et par .II. molt felons passages, Li uns a non li Ponz Evages, Por ce que soz eve est li ponz, Et s’a des le pont jusqu’au fonz Autant desoz come desus, Ne deça moins de dela plus, Einz est li ponz tot droit enmi, Et si n’a que pié et demi De lé et autretant d’espés. (De Troyes 1994, 519, verses 653-663) Li autres ponz est plus malvés Et plus perilleus assez, Qu’ainz par home ne fu passez, Qu’il est com espee tranchanz, Et por ce trestotes les genz L’apelent le Pont de l’Espee.” (De Troyes 1994, 519, verses 668-673) 3 “Au pié del pont, qui molt est maux, Sont descendu de lor chevax, Et voient l’eve felenesse, Noire et bruiant, roide et espesse, Tant leide et tant espoantable Con se fust li fluns au deable, Et tant perilleuse et parfonde Qu’il n’est riens nule an tot le monde, S’ele i cheoit, ne fust alee Ausi com an la mer salee. Et li ponz qui est an travers Estoit de toz autres divers, Qu’ainz tex ne fu ja mes n’iert. Einz ne fu, qui voir m’an requiert, Si max ponz ne si male planche.” (De Troyes 1994, 587, verses 3007-3021) 4 “Bien crains-je que nous aurons bien fort haste sa declinaison et sa ruyne par nostre contagion, et que nous luy aurons bien cher vendu nos opinions et nos arts.” (Montaigne 1962, 887). 5 “[N]ous nous sommes servis de leur ignorance et inexperience à les plier plus facilement d’inhumanité et de cruauté, à l’exemple et patron de nos mœurs” (Montaigne 1962, 889). 6 Born of Jewish Polish parents, Régine Robin moved from France to Quebec, where she has been teaching in the Department of Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal.


9

7 Et puis, bien entendu, l’écrivain émigrant est aux prises avec son pays d’origine, qu’il l’ait quitté pour des raisons politiques, économiques, ou tout simplement personnelles. Il lui faut faire un certain travail du deuil, ou un réaménagement mémoriel. Ce travail n’est pas simple et c’est souvent pour cela que l’on se met à écrire. Pour se supporter ailleurs, pour creuser en soi une nouvelle altérité, pour domestiquer la nostalgie et mettre à distance l’inquiétante étrangeté du dedans-dehors. Qui suis-je à présent, et quelle place puis-je me faire dans cette société à trois places (Le Canada, le Québec, Montréal) ? Quelle place, non pas au sens économique encore que ce problème ne soit pas secondaire, quelle place dans l’institution littéraire qui, comme toutes les institutions littéraires a ses propres traditions, et surtout quelle place identitaire et imaginaire, ou pour le formuler autrement comment vais-je contribuer à transformer l’imaginaire d’ici ? (Robin 1993, 209)

Bibliography

CHEVALIER, Jean and Alain GHEERBRANT. Dictionnaire des symboles. 1982. Paris: Robert Laffont/Jupiter.

DJURIC, Rajko. Le Pont de Dieu. In Écrire les frontières. Le Pont de l’Europe. 1999. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.

MONTAIGNE, Michel de. 1962. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1993. The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. London:

Penguin Books. CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES. 1994. Romans. Paris: La Pochotèque. ———. 1988. Arthurian Romances. London: J.M. Dent &Sons. ROBIN, Régine. 1993. La Québécoite. Montreal: Typo.

PART I

SAILING ACROSS THE SEA: HISTORY AND LITERATURE

CHAPTER ONE

THE EARTHLY THINKING OF PLANETARY UNITY

TERRY COCHRAN

<1>

Thinking about the land and the sea poses a number of thorny difficulties because these two concepts are completely interwoven; each is unthinkable without the other. Their relationship, however, goes far beyond the vagaries of abstraction, because it contains at its very core the fundamental problem of knowing that binds human experience with ongoing reflection. Land and sea inevitably mean land and what separates land from other land, it signals a certain stability face-to-face with the unknown, the unpredictable, the life-threatening, and so on, notions that vary according to degrees of superstition, historical understanding or just simple experience. From the very outset of recorded thought, the sea has stood as the outer edge of the horizon of human action; in this sense, prior to the transformations of early modernity, the sea was deeply embedded in a religious worldview, signaling what resists submission to human domination while being no obstacle for the divine will.1 In the characterization of Psalm 93, for example,

Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm, thy throne firm from of old; from all eternity thou art God. O Lord, the ocean lifts up, the ocean lifts up its clamour; the ocean lifts up its pounding waves. The Lord on high is mightier far than the noise of great waters, mightier than the breakers of the sea. (Psalm 93:1-4, The New English Bible 1970)

The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity 13

Yet once tied to the presumed supremacy of the human mind, the sea becomes another obstacle to be subjected to human understanding, an essential element in this historical grounding of human finitude. In other words, contrary to the ancient notion of divine intervention, the ensemble of land and sea boils down to a question of land and the in-between; this in-between articulates the lands among themselves, joining and disjoining them, bridging outcroppings of terra firma, rendering this in-between traversable, as in a bridge itself. Above and beyond the empirical, that is, the real encounter of land and water, on a seacoast where I can stand staring into open waters, the mental association of land and sea is a figure of thought. This figure of thought has played a major role in fashioning the global perspective encroaching on every facet of contemporary existence; it has provided the means for assimilating, appropriating the earth, the planet as a whole, for seizing its inhabitants in a collective concept (that is, as a species, as “humanity”). From its origins as a “non-place,” as a disruptive or disorganized unknown, the sea has become more and more of a place, more inhabited and chartered; it has surrendered its destiny to such an extent that it exists only to give way to landfall, taking on all the characteristics of land itself. It has metaphorically become as solid as land, subject to territorial claims, the site of struggle over natural resources, and so on, no longer a mental obstacle in any way. The figure of thought uniting land and sea has fostered a planetary regime of understanding, expression of an integral wholeness. Ultimately, I would like to explore the underpinnings of this configuration of sea and land, of liquid and solid, in hoping to grasp certain of the figure’s sociopolitical, historical and philosophical implications and, in particular, as it concerned the notion of global humanity or the “universal human.” Before delving into the stakes of this tandem of concepts, however, I would like to try to render more precise the nature of this configuration, which represents an important nexus of modern thought. In this figure, two different planes of thought intersect, each, however, depending on and deriving from the other. In sketching out these modes of thinking, as well as their conjunction, I would like to quote Immanuel Kant, who traced out the general lines of what has come to be known as “cosmopolitical” understanding. In his Critique of Judgment, he remarks:

Land [Land] and sea contain not only monuments [Denkmäler: what bears witness for thought] of mighty primeval disasters that have overtaken both them and all their brood of living forms, but their entire structure—the strata of the land [Erdlager] and the coast lines of the sea—has all the appearance of being the outcome of the wild and all-subduing forces of a nature working in a state of

Chapter One 14

chaos.2 (Kant 1978, 90)

In subjecting to reasoned analysis the often violent encounter between land and sea, Kant seeks to domesticate the chaos, or what seemed to be chaos, and submit it to human understanding. In a sacred context, this chaos names the incomprehensibility underlying divine will, force, and action. Yet Kant’s remarks—uttered two centuries subsequent to the flurry of global exploration even if long before the age of fractals—proclaim that the mystery of the sea harboring the unknown or, rather, the unknowable, has been dispelled—in principle if not entirely in fact. The sea, so unfathomable that it seems to mimic infinity, takes the form of just another object of knowledge in the process of being dissected. Bearer of nonhuman history, of cataclysms taking place outside of human purview, it contains signs to be deciphered by human understanding, the material grounds for multiple allegories or interpretations generated in the name of knowledge or “science.” This overarching interest in founding a new form of scientific thinking, in enabling the powers of reason to deal with objects still to be constituted and to unfold, rests upon unprecedented understanding of the globe as a bounded unity of land and sea. Far from being the sole thinker engaged in this drive to subject the globe to the human mind, Kant was and has remained exemplary in framing what has become the hegemonic worldview. The complementary aspect of this reborn figure of land and sea, transformed in assuming its modern trappings, concerns attributing to the human mind heretofore unconceivable powers of projection. Once again, Kant succinctly encapsulates this property of human understanding, which is

a totally active human faculty; all of its representations [Vorstellungen] and concepts are exclusively its creations; the human being thinks spontaneously with his understanding, thus creating his world [Welt]. (Kant 1977, 342. My translation)

Humans always thought their world, elaborating images and mental projections of their “space,” of the confines, whether real or imagined, within which they envisage their existence. But, prior to what is euphemistically called the age of exploration, this “world” did not and could not correspond to the globe as a (potentially) knowable locus of human life. This global question literally permeates the concept of modernity, whose very basis for existence derives from the presupposed overlapping between the imaginary of the human world and the globe as an integral planetary whole. Or, to put it differently, modernity means that the globe belongs to the human imaginary as the encompassing backdrop of its world; part and parcel of the


modern projection, the ensemble of land and sea coalesce into a global totality no longer dependent on the empirical. In the context of a global sphere under the dominion of the human mind and technology, the sea is no longer the sea, the land is no longer the land. As the recent study (November, 2004) by the Arctic Council—the intergovernmental forum on the Arctic region—openly acknowledges, the gradual depletion of the Arctic’s frozen landmass will in coming decades make this ocean navigable, thus creating an upheaval in the circuits of global transport, exploration, and balance of power. In other words, in the contemporary planetary projection, the opposition between land and sea is wholly reversible; in this “Arctic” instance, the elimination of land allows for deeper command of this region, overturning the traditional historical vision of the sea as the perilous obstacle to territorial mastery. In sum, sea and land, having lost their specificity, belong to an economy, a regime of understanding whose primary focus bears on the real and symbolic appropriation of the globe.

<2>

At this juncture, it seems important to reflect on this striving toward appropriation of the global sphere, which is inextricably bound up with the relationship between terra firma and its aqueous barriers of separation. Strictly speaking, the moment when the world became one, when it submitted itself fully to human understanding, is a historical and, by extension, political issue. Contrary to commonplaces about the so-called “age of discovery” and, particularly, about Columbus’s role in it, the globalness of the world has little to do with its being a sphere, and Columbus had no role in establishing the veracity of the world’s roundness. Aristotle and Herodotus had already written about the spherical form of the earth; this theoretical knowledge was well established in intellectual thought. Nor is it a question of encountering the Far East, which from the late Middle Ages entered into European discourse, following accounts by Marco Polo, or, in Middle Eastern context, through the 14th-century narratives of Ibn Battuta, among others. In distinction with the Portuguese Bartolomeu Dias (1485) or Vasco da Gama (1497), however, Columbus closed the circle, and the finitude of the earth became accessible to understanding. The voyages taking place under his command, which were initially far from gratifying financially or territorially, made possible an imaginary that had real, concrete manifestations. In his March 4, 1492 letter to the King and Queen, written from Lisbon, Columbus paints the picture of a tranquil landfall:

Over there, the sea is the calmest in the world for navigating and is less dangerous for caravels and boats of all sorts... There are never storms because I saw, in all the places where I went, grass and trees growing right down to the sea.3 (Columbus 2002, 319. My translation)

Chapter One 16

There is no reason to linger over the touch of hypocrisy in this letter, which aims to lay the groundwork for obtaining finance for voyages still to come. Nor will I insist on the naivety of the belief, rapidly contradicted by further experience, that these distant waters are calm and stormless. Yet once traversed, the deep seas become as land, and the domestication of the ocean translates immediately into a planetary wholeness, a finite dimension ready for investment in all senses, from the financial to the ideological. In this letter, as well as in the numerous reports he penned, Columbus's recounting of his experiences does not constitute theoretical knowledge but the knowledge of understanding in its Kantian meaning, as the faculty where the human world spins out its images, becomes lived imaginary. In the written remnants of this 1492 expedition, experience becomes concept and image, and the world becomes newly whole, spawning the concepts of hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, the constituent elements of the planet. The series of historical accidents making way for the Americas’ entry onto the world stage, stamping this territorial otherness with a global essence, has irrefutably melded Americanism with the globalization it unveiled. In the 21st century when no wilderness hideaway is wholly free from global hegemony, piercing the thick layers of historical sediment to grasp the significance of overseas globalism seems a daunting, if not impossible, task. One of the primary consequences of globalism presents itself in the form of a conundrum: in the wake of global understanding, there can never be, nor can there ever have been a clear-cut first time. This statement apparently defies all logic to the point of being nonsensical. Yet with regard to Columbus, whose globalizing accomplishment has been universally heralded in written historical record, the firstness of his expedition has unceasingly been placed into question. I am referring, for instance, to assertions that the Vikings had already explored these continents or Thor Heyerdahl’s belief that Egyptians had already made the voyage in papyrus vessels, among other diverse claims. Rather than endorsing any one of these various pretenders who might have “discovered” these continents and prefigured global awareness, I would like only to underscore the consequences for global knowing and understanding. Once inscribed in history, the first time immediately loses its precedence; in establishing the global figure of thought, a prism through which history itself becomes visible, the Columbus accounts foreground a regime of historical understanding based on continuous reenactment. In this repetitiveness, this inexorable and endemic secondariness accompanying the global consciousness of modernity, the inability to posit an original moment surfaces in the language itself. In the global frame of reference, the sea of difference severs the old from the new. Like creation from the void, the “new


world,” something “new” that does not duplicate, reflect, or renew the old world, comes into view as the previously unacknowledged rest of the world, as more of the same engulfing known portions. It completes the world, creates the possibility of seeing the world as an integral unit. The old world and the new world compose the planet as a whole, just as the Christian tradition rewrites the relationship between the Greek testament and the Hebrew testament, renaming them the old and new testaments, as if they both belonged to the same sacred text, the same Bible. In sum, what I want to suggest is that the geographical unearthing of this surplus world gives a reiterative foundation to the human mindset. Beyond its obvious metaphorical power, its intrinsic force or representation, the re-naissance signals more than a rebirth of abandoned values, perspectives, and beliefs: it moves into the foreground elements that lay dormant prior to the conjoined physical and ideological seizing of the globe in its wholeness. It creates the effect of a first time that can only be enforced by authority, however implicit or explicit it might be. Whereas the relationship of sea and land coalesce into a figure of thought to undergird global understanding, the global human (or the “universal” human, as it is known in philosophical discourse) becomes its personification, yet another figure of sorts. Real globalization—whether it is designated as conquest, exploration, discovery, decimation or encounters based on supposed reciprocity—underwrites the emergence of this universal human, a fiction bigger than life offering a backdrop to ongoing engagements of the “other.” Today’s proliferation of labels such as the multitude, diversity, and hybridity—fruit of the search for neologisms expressing the “inter,” the “trans,” the “multi,” in addition to the generalized “other”—takes place really and figuratively on this global terrain. These flailing concepts, conveyed by words so often bandied about that they have exhausted their capacity to produce meaning, support the edifice of present-day humanistic knowledge. The modern guise cloaking the incessant rewriting of collective identity rests on an unacknowledged globalism that is much more than the globalization catchword on the breath of every participant in knowledge production. The extension of the earthly horizon to global scale submits itself to representation in the 15th century. These representations—whether histories, logbooks, or speculations—seek to replot the coordinates of the human spirit, melding the previously unknowable, even unconceivable, with longstanding accounts of human reflection. In attempting to come to terms with the irruption of this “new” world, inscriptions assume the firstness of the encounters they describe, as I have briefly tried to indicate. Yet accounts of these pristine encounters are criss-crossed by earlier understandings literally embedded in the

Chapter One 18

psyche of tradition. In whole or in part, faithfully or in free discrepancy, the fundamentals of these early global contentions are reactivated and reiterated at every conquest, at every depiction of conquest. Even benign take-over, the eventual outcome even of encounters between presumed equals, enjoys no exemption from this process of representation in the planetary age christened several centuries ago. At the onset of this old new globalism, no less scientific than political, philosophical, and geographical, no preexistent history eases these jolting experiences into submission. Confrontation takes place across a divide, a sea of difference, if you will, or as a result of unresolvable incomprehensibility between different visions or linguistic and cultural expressions of the “world.” The “many” on this side—the European many who possess the ink and spread it liberally in the wake of exploration—stand against the nameless scores on the other side. The clash of two disparate entities requires a common ground, a global concept, so to speak, to permit their intermingling. After centuries of cosmopolitical linkages and stratification, we have grown increasingly unable to come to grips with the demands of incomprehensibility and how it necessarily inhabits us. What were once absolute incongruities become watered-down variations, more of the same, a sort of regimented dissimilarity holding no surprise, permitting no astonishment.

<3>

Against this broad backdrop, so vast as to be global, in what follows I would like to evoke this set of issues and figures of thought in less abstract fashion. While in the shadow of global modernity, the outset of which cannot be pinpointed, there are early attempts to put into discourse the clashes with absolute otherness (along with the phenomenon of world finitude it implies). Among this select group of writings, whose number is quite small, Bernal Díaz Del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain offers a blow-by-blow depiction of Cortés’s 1519 conquest, which, 15 years after Columbus’s final expedition, was fundamental for European supremacy in the Americas and for Spanish subjugation of what will become Central America. Writing in nonerudite Spanish, excessively vernacular for the epoch, Díaz del Castillo grapples over and over with a foreignness that outstrips his understanding, and the narrator in his historical memoir exhibits traits of the individual striving to rationalize the inexplicable, to render palatable to the mind the prodigious nature of the invasion and its inflicted agonies. Prior to joining Hernán Cortés’s campaign to subdue the new, unknown territory


for the king of Spain, Díaz del Castillo participated in a shortlived “expedition” led by Hernández de Córdoba. In the course of this exploration, Díaz del Castillo’s party was met by a cluster of “Indians” overheard to be repeating what resembled the word “Castilian” even though their speech was wholly unintelligible. Specifically, in the context of a largely nonverbal exchange carried on by extemporaneous signing and gesturing, Díaz del Castillo registers that

they made signs with their hands, [asking] if we came from where the sun comes up, saying “Castilian, Castilian”, and we didn’t pay much attention to that talk about “Castilian”. And after this talking they made us other signs...4 (Díaz del Castillo 1992, 40)

These sounds, given meaning by the small coterie of Spaniards who deciphered them, would be, in any universe of experience, more than unheimlich. After traversing a large chunk of the globe, embarking on unknown land belonging to what to the Europeans seemed mystifying and mysterious peoples, the expedition members detected an indirect, even implicit, evocation of their place of origin, their state of allegiance. Deep in an unexplored territory whose inhabitants speak languages not only incomprehensible but unrelated to European linguistic development, such a verbal apparition would be akin to hallucination. After all, in the early 16th century, monster figures still adorn the unknown or dangerous regions in contemporary cartographic representations of the earth. But Díaz del Castillo wrote about this brief encounter as just one minor event among others, en passant, and the “Castilian” evocation excited little curiosity. Until Cortés, who had not even been present when the event took place, later brought the issue to the fore, this frightening eruption of phonemes received little commentary. In Cortés’s interrogation of those witnessing the event, which included Díaz del Castillo himself, the reception of this strange exclamation takes a different turn altogether. Cortés’s reaction, which at the outset of his own expedition merely tries to wrestle the enigma to reason, suggests a more solemn and masterly regime of knowledge, of understanding, whatever the initial shudders and anxiety this expression might have produced. Writing with full knowledge of all that transpired afterwards, Díaz del Castillo offers to the contemporary reader—and the early 21st century still partakes of that contemporaneity—an account filtering out the stupefaction, even shivering fear, that such an unpredictable burst of self-recognition might entail. Yet, in that account, that “true” rendering, this pre-Cortés episode constitutes an allegorical beginning of a different cosmopolitical understanding, neither kinder nor gentler, whose shadows are projected throughout the history.

Chapter One 20

To Díaz del Castillo and even decades later to his first readers, this evocation of the language of Castile, of the Castilian tongue, went hand in hand with their presence: in addition to the general physical accoutrements, the aboriginal people recognized the conquering soldiers by their way of speaking, by the articulated sounds whose meaning they were incapable of decoding. The entire course of Cortés’s crusade, not its immediate and devastating success but its setting into place a new global economy of conquest, a cosmopolitical universality enduring to buttress even contemporary outgrowths of globalism, depends on the language question. Here, though, the language question concerns the mediating power of language and its conjunction with cosmopolitical understanding, not which language should dominate in which state, at the heart of a given collectivity. In Spain, ultimately a product of the outgrowth of Castilian tentacles, that language was Castilian, which was funneled through the fledgling state institutions. The genius of Cortés, insofar as his actions laid the groundwork for an emergent global domain, derived from the frame of mind he exemplified, both historically and in Díaz del Castillo’s true history. In questioning Díaz del Castillo and his companion, both witnesses of the linguistic apparition, Cortés remarked that he “thought often about it [the mention of ‘Castilian’] and that there might by chance [por ventura] be some Spaniards in that land” (Díaz del Castillo 1992, 79). Above and beyond the calculated rationalism of Cortés’s reflection, which ignored any potential spiritual meaning, whether foreboding disaster or foretelling a glorious destiny, this brief sentence, the product of Cortés’s ruminations, marks a departure that is already second-hand. In retrospect, the import that this remark gives to an uncanny sound transforms the context of the divine as well as secular mission and, at the same time, transcends the circumstances of the Spanish crown’s miserable quest for glory, wealth, and territory. Unbeknownst to its speaker, this utterance, in its implications and subsequent unfolding, cloaks both the imperial desire bound up with globalism and the undercurrent of betrayal coursing through the global mind. I could never do justice to this sentence in all its excruciating exactitude, as much a death sentence for nonglobal thinking as a series of anodyne words voiced on the Central American coast. Armed with the foreknowledge that completing such a task is impossible, I would nevertheless like to consider the consequences that this sentence enables and espouses. In standing firm against the irrational, Cortés reached the just conclusion, thinking it highly likely that subjects of the Spanish crown had already penetrated the area. We are no different from Cortés and easily recognize him as one of our own, a modern globalist. The striking irruption of this European


inscription, of this Castilian word, holds no mystery that is not already dispelled by calculating logic. More importantly, though, this linguistic incident offers banal but irrefutable evidence that there is no first time. The readers of Diaz del Castillo’s history can never ascertain the nature of his own reaction to hearing “Castilian” in Castilian in a place where he thought himself among the first Europeans; he wrote his history too long after the events in question, and his historical record manifests the profound influence of Cortés’s turn of mind, which is resolutely that of a successful globalist. In the cosmopolitical domain, in a world conceived and constituted as an integral whole, nowhere remains untouched, everywhere constitutes a site of potential repetition. Without the possibility of pristine experience, we loop along a predetermined trajectory reiterating what has gone before, drawing impetus from consequences that we misrecognize as originary events. This repetition concerns the conjunction of language and empire, of universal subjects and temporal state allegiance. Cortés understood that the “Castilian” vocalization signaled the presence of Spanish subjects who spoke the Castilian language. No less than the Cortés mission’s spectacular success—that is, the profitable annihilation of global adversaries— the Spanish imperial venture hinges on these Castilian “sleepers,” those lying dormant in global backlands who awaken to provide mediation between asymmetrical ensembles on a planetary scale. Cortés, a practical man, set out to locate the assumed referent of these utterances of “Castilian.” He sent out letters to what he learned were two survivors of a Spanish vessel, lost and shipwrecked eight years earlier, that had originally seventeen passengers, including two women. All being captured and divided among indigenous factions, the others suffered various mortal fates, some being sacrificed to the gods, some dying from fatigue or overwork. Jerónimo de Aguilar was the first to receive Cortés’s communiqué and the beads buying his freedom; he immediately traveled the five leagues separating him from his compatriot survivor. There Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero read the letters together, in a community of two, as it were, but their reception of the presumably good news could not have been more divergent. Of the two Spaniards, Guerrero had irrecuperably “gone native” and refused outrightly to join the ranks of his mother country.5 Aguilar, on the other hand, becomes a recurring presence in the conquest story; his linguistic skills, which include the ability to communicate in the Mayan dialects, became a fundamental component of the Spanish physical and spiritual assault. Initially, though, Aguilar’s shedding of his aboriginal exterior to reassume his presumably underlying Spanishness did not take place without a moment of misrecognition and a fumbling about. One of Cortés’s soldiers,

Chapter One 22

designated to meet the arriving group of nonEuropeans, saw only “Indians (because Aguilar was neither more nor less than Indian)” (Díaz del Castillo 1992, 83). As far as his Spanish onlookers were concerned, the individual who would later be called Aguilar was just another member of a small party of Indians. Judging solely from appearances, it was impossible to call a Spaniard a Spaniard. Aguilar’s hair was trimmed in the same way as his companions, and his tattered clothes could not be distinguished from theirs. He had a sandal on one foot, the other on his belt, with his oar resting on his shoulder. His foreignness was unremarkable. Seeking to cleave his appearance, to express an interior distinct from his outer, completely autochthonous image, Aguilar mouths essentially three words in Spanish, apparently not yet capable of coming up with a complete sentence. Seemingly offered as an introduction, he utters “God and Holy Mary and Seville” (“Dios y Santa María y Sevilla”) (Díaz del Castillo 1992, 84). These are not just any three words. They signal, first, an appeal to transcendence generally, although in the emerging cosmopolitical dimension, invoking God means exceedingly more than religious justification, more than the deceitful cynicism that asserts the most unrighteous acts of colonial barbarism to be expressions of divine justness. The all-seeing God, monotheistic by definition, furnishes the global vanishing point, the abstract perspective from which the world can display its hypothetical unity. The hailing of Holy Mary, whose phantomlike image repeatedly appears in ferocious, protective splendor as the conquest unfolds, evokes the means of God’s human incarnation marking the beginning of Christianity, the universal religion bound up with the cosmopolitical. Just as Christ embodies God in the terrestrial setting, so does Mary, the mother Mary, intercede with the Godhead, in the medieval elaboration of her role that will become entwined with the universal Church itself.6 And, lastly, Aguilar hails Seville, the port of Spain that was the point of departure for Spanish ships heading for what becomes designated as the New World, first embarking on a voyage into the unknown. Enjoying a monopoly on Spanish commerce with the New World, Seville becomes a major global hub in a more figurative sense, as Aguilar’s croaking intimates. He invokes a series of linkages exceeding a mere abstract grid of national identity, for he literally espouses the coordinates of human identity that will be the point of reference, the intangible measure for depicting the floating selfhoods of the cosmopolitical age. In another, more conceptual register, his utterance indicates the transcendent or divine realm that cannot be reduced to an earthly dimension, following it by reference to the moment when a transcendent God manifests himself in terrestrial guise by being born of human flesh, and ending with a global site that serves as a point of transfer between the old and the new worlds, between the

bridges.pdf

Documents

Transcript of bridges.pdf