Longings for the Other, Longings for the Self
On how literature has long yearned for the blank slate of the foreign Other
I have been thinking lately about the romanticization of foreign cultures across different periods of French literary production. In the Renaissance, Montaigne compared the so-called cannibals of modern-day Brazil (the Indigenous Tupi peoples) to Europeans, arguing that the outrage of the latter over the questionable eating practices of the former were hypocritical at a time when Europeans were massacring each other over their religious beliefs. In the end, Montaigne’s cannibals essay is not about South American cannibals, of whom he knows little, but of his society’s tendency to confidently assert the inferiority of other people across the world.
The Enlightenment accelerated the trend of using the foreign Other to critique European culture. Epistolary novels such as the Persian Letters by Montesquieu and Letters from a Peruvian Woman by Françoise de Graffigny, and the philosophical dialogue Addendum to the Journey of Bougainville by Diderot adopted the perspective of outsiders — an Indigenous South American woman, two Persian noblemen, and a Tahitian chief — in order to draw attention to the inconsistencies of Western society. Much like Montaigne’s essay, however, these works are more about the longing of an outsider perspective of Europe rather than about Peru or Persia. The foreign other remains a kind of blank slate that allows for the deconstruction of our own society. Even those who had more experience with foreign lands fell into this pattern. People like the Baron de Lahontan and Jean de Léry, the former spending much time in North America and the latter documenting a failed effort to establish a colony in modern-day Brazil, wrote comparative texts that say much about the expansion of European thought during the Age of Discovery.
In the nineteenth century, the major European powers had accelerated their invasion of lands across Africa, Asia, and Oceania. This invasion required more than ships and weapons; it required a set of ideas that justified European presence there. Religious and scientific discourses about the inferiority of other civilizations and cultures proliferated. To different extents, they molded European involvement in these faraway lands. Literature still offered a chance to dissent from these historical events. In Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Bad Blood,” for instance, the poet inverts this discourse by portraying Western life as disgusting and mediocre, longing for a life elsewhere. To be clear, Rimbaud was far from an antiracist. His poetry does not concern itself in detail with the peoples he talks about, and his stay in Ethiopia involved morally questionable actions. There are still, nonetheless, gestures towards accepting the Other as the solution to Western mediocrity and dullness. In this sense, he is a(n imperfect) heir of Lahontan and somewhat of a descendant of Montaigne.
The dawn of the twentieth century introduces plenty of new Rimbaudesque figures in French art and writing. In the early twentieth century, Paul Gauguin’s fascination with Polynesia led to art mostly portraying Indigenous women of the area that today adorns museum walls all around the globe. Gauguin’s fascination was not just cultural difference per se, but rather the paradigms offered by it. A new way of life could be possible. In the end, however, Gauguin was complicit with the French colonial project in Polynesia. Serene scenes in paintings and philosophical writings do not challenge the colonial establishment head-on.
Gauguin and some of his fellow artists — Breton, Picasso — connected the non-European to the avant-garde. Though this connection led to prolific artworks, it remains an unbalanced transaction focused on Europe; artists from peripheral countries did not get nearly enough credit for their contributions to these works. As the century advances, some efforts are made to remediate this. In the hybrid genre writings of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, the authors praise the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and the Balinese, suggesting that their conception of the world and of art is at times — if not always — superior to the Western one. Later, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s now classic travel book Tristes tropiques displays legitimate marvel for the Indigenous peoples of Brazil, defending the cleverness and complexity of their art and culture. Lévi-Strauss is not more immune to thinking of the Other as an instrument to European backwardness as his fellow thinkers from other historical periods.
In the end, can a white French writer ever write about the Other without turning them into a learning opportunity for Europeans? I am sure somebody will think of an example, but even the most self-aware person cannot remove his upbringing and his position in the world from his perspective. And that’s okay; they do not need to speak for the subaltern, as the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak once pointed out. They need to speak with them, affording them the complexity that they offer to those of their own culture. As French writing begins to reflect the multicultural demographics of France, perhaps this is a change we will see one day.
