Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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rhe nation (like Janowitz, Anderson says
little about what specifically distinguishes A WORLD OF MANY FICTIONS
the nation from other forms of political or-
ganization) what is imagined is a form of
organization that is “limited,” “sovereign,”
and a “community.” i.e., a focus of “com-
radeship” and “fraternity.” Since these are
the elements of a commitment to national
Life. patriotism. for Anderson, is to be
understood psychologically and historically
before any significant claim can be made
for its value. What has produced the pow-
erful varieties of national consciousness,
and what causes have sustained them?-
these are the questions he poses. His re-
sponse sets out from the premise that na-
tionalism is less an ideology than a form of
cultural expression-closer to the phenom-
ena of kinship and religion than to such
political doctrines as liberalism or fascism.
This is an important distinction; it moves
to “naturalize” nationalism, suggesting,
against most accounts. that nationalism has
both an inside and an outside and that we
need to take account of it in the imagination MACUNAIMA
as well as in its extemal causes. by Mario de Andrade
The line of explanation that Anderson translated by E. A. Goodland
follows is at once eccentric and enlight- (Random House; 192 pp.; $14.95)
ening. In a number of places, to be sure,
he acknowledges the standard explanations Philip Sicker
of nationalism as related to changes in the
pattems of commerce and economic de- It is now almost fifteen years since the translation of Gabriel Garcla Mhquez’s
velopment. His own emphasis, however, is One Hundred Years ofSoiOlifudeawakened in English-speaking readers a still-
on language, literacy, and the wide-ranging growing fascination for Latin American literature. Today, works by such
effects of the printing press. These features contemporary fabulists as Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, and Jorge Amado
of social history may seem altogether re- appear almost weekly in newly translated paperback editions and are displayed
mote from questions of political organiza- on bookstore shelves like rows of exotic fruit. The sudden popularity of a
tion, but it is precisely those whose abstract fiction heretofore unknown has engendered the prevailing misconception that
views of historical change assume the ir- the literary tradition of an entire continent begins and ends with these more
relevance of these factors that Anderson recent works. Hence the irony that Mario de Andrade’s 1928 Brazilian fantasy
means to dispute. He thus argues persua- will strike many North American readers as a footnote to Mhquez. Random
sively, it seems to me, for the causal re- House, publisher of the first English translation, contributes to this misap-
lation, singly and then together, of the fail- prehension by describing the work as “a matchless example of magical re-
ing dominance of Latin, the development alism.” Magical this blend of folklore, allegory, and rhapsody surely is. but
of vemacular languages to replace it, and- it isno more a work of realism than is “Rumplestiltskin” and no more a novel
most important-the spread of “print cap- than Petronius’ Satyricon. Rather, Macirnaima stands as the centerpiece of a
italism” as agents in the “imagining” that more circumscribed tradition-Brazilian modernism.
led people eventually to identify themselves Unlike the modemist movement of Spanish-speaking Latin America, which
and others in terms of national affiliation. began in the 1890s under the influence of the French Symbolists and fin de
The evidence he cites for this complex the- sikle decadence in Europe, the modernism of Portuguese-speaking Brazil was
sis is itself complex, moving beyond the a nationalistic response to class realignment. incipient industrialism, and eco-
standard examples of modem European his- nomic growth in the country before and during World War 1. Far from holding
tory to the nationalist movements toward to the doctrine of art for art’s sake prevalent in Mexico and Argentina, Andrade
independence that accompanied the colo- sought nothing less than to define the vastly complex national character of his
nization of South and North America and homeland and to present a symbolic history of Brazil. Drawing upon his
then to recent developments in Southeast studies in anthropology. Andrade located the roots and stryctures of Brazilian
Asia. the area of his own special interest. national life in the myths of its almost extinct Indian population. But Ma-
It would be unlikely that any single hy- cunaima, the titular hero, is not merely an atavistic noble savage. Born of a
pothesis could fully cover such a diversity Tapanhuma Indian in “the virgin forest of the Uraricoera River,” his skin is
of cultures and periods. And indeed there not tawny but “black as calcined ivory.” Later, after washing in the magical
are loose ends to Anderson’s analysis-for waters of St. Thomas’s footprint, he becomes as white as the missionaries
example, the need to account for divergent and conquistadors who began to infiltrate the country in the sixteenth century.
nationalisms within such single-language Picaro, magician. and quester, he is, in Andrade’s words, “a hero without
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groups as English. But the central thread however; and it is evident that trade and alistic grievances in religious terms and
of his argument and the varieties of evi- economics. population shifts. and New generally fuse them with grievances of an
dence he provides are consistently sugges- World exploration, which have figured in irreducibly religious character.”
tive. The spread of the vernacular print- more conventional accounts of nationalism, For al-Hajj Muhammad, the paramount
languages of the sixteenth century, he ar- are not excluded by his account, though it fact of political life in Morocco is foreign
gues, had three consequences: ( I ) They is not clear from what he says exactly how domination. “The Christians control this
“created unified fields of exchange.. .below they would be related. Given a historical world. They send men to the moon. They
Latin and above the spoken vernaculars.” phenomenon as massive as nationalism, the build great buildings, great bridges. great
(2) They gave a new “fixity” to language very distinction between causes and effects ships, and great bombs. But when it comes
by slowing the rate of linguistic change. (3) becomes problematic. Yet none of these to the world of God. they are ignorant sav-
They established individual “languages of qualifications alters the fact that both in ages.” Although poor and childless, the Hajj
power.” Together these provided a strong joining the analysis of material conditions is a man of pious dignity who bears his title
common field and a strong exclusionary to historical change as it is lived and in of “pilgrim“ with pride. And although he
principle. Citing such diverse examples as treating language and its representations as views politics as the province of infidels,
the strange, almost artificial career of Mag- agents of social change, Anderson has writ- he sees his faith as ultimate salvation-not
yar nationalism, Ataturk’s romanization of ten an illuminating and provocative book- only in the hereafter, but also in the struggle
Turkish, and the demythologizing of the a good read as well as an occasion for fur- of this world against the tyranny of the
“ s a d languages” by the nineteenth-cen- ther reflection. Janowitz is concerned, but Christians. “Why did God allow the Chris-
tury inventors of philology (who, in turn, his argument is merely special pleading. tians to rule over the house of Islam?” he
it needs to be added, nourished a new, racist Anderson, on the other hand, makes na- asks. “Why did God allow the Jews to take
mythology), Anderson plots the parallel tionalism and patriotism more historically Palestine and holy Jerusalem? Why does
courses of nationalism and language. He intelligible, even more plausible as prin- God allow the Christians to live like sultans
thus adds to other recent work, like that by cipled commitment. in our land, while we are like slaves in their
Elisabeth Eisenstein and Robert Darnton, land? This is God’s punishment. And this
which trace to the growing print-culture of is God’s test. Muslims have left the path.”
the sixteenth century consequences that ex- Here he refers to the Westernized Moroccan
tend far beyond the specific content of the THE HOUSE OF SI ABD ALLAH: elite, who spurn the injunctions of Islam
texts printed. The medium, it turns out, is THE ORAL HISTORY OF A and share the spoils of the Christian dorn-
more than the message. MOROCCAN FAMILY ination of their country.
To be sure, lurking beyond much of An- recorded, translated, and edited The notion that foreign domination and
derson’s analysis is a general conception of by Henry Munson, Jr. social injustice in Muslim lands is the result
language as a decisive element in the imag- (Yale University Press; xxiii + 280 pp.; of religious apostasy should not surprise the
ined life of communities and individuals, $19.95) Westem reader. It is another example of
one by which they establish their identities. what Amold Toynbee called “Zealotism”-
This thesis in its theoretical form-for ex- Sterert Pope a kind of “archaism evoked by foreign pres-
ample, in its presupposition of an intrinsic sure,” whose hallmark is the perceived link
relation between language and thought- AI-Hajj Muhammad, one of the two nar- between political dependence and religious
Anderson hardly touches. But if one grants rators of Henry Munson’s remarkable House dereliction-a theme that has exercised a
only the minimal premise that language is of Si Abd Allah. is a peddler who makes great influence in all three of the Semitic,
a central element in social life, then the his living selling the “garbage of the Chris- monotheistic religions. This tendency is
parallels that Anderson points out between tians” in the flea markets of Tangier. The shared by the Maccabees and the original
the changing forms of language and their Hajj has married nine times, and divorced Zealots of Jewish history, and also by some
organization, on the one hand, and social eight, without children. Unstable and Christian fundamentalists in the United
structure in its other forms, on the other, chronically broke, he is the family bard and States today. To “Zealotism” Toynbee op-
have important implications. Certainly they buffoon but also a man of deep piety. Al- posed what he called “Herodianism,” a form
serve as a useful counterweight to the ac- though al-Hajj Muhammad obtained a pass- of mimetic cosmopolitanism that seeks to
counts of nationalism that take class struc- port to Belgium, where he worked for seven assimilate the methods and culture of heg-
ture and economic development as the sin- years, he has never been able to save money, emonic foreigners. While Herodianism may
gle fulcrum around which everything else except for the large sum he spent on the seem to us a more sensible and effective
in political life generally, and the rise of pilgrimage he made to Mecca at the age of response to political crisis, Toynbee rec-
nationalism particularly, revolves. As both forty-seven (for which he bears the Arabic ognized its shortcomings: Essentially de-
the idealist and Marxist historians have honorific “al-Hajj”). The grandson of Si rivative, Herodianism is rarely creative or
learned to their cost (Anderson neatly points Abd Allah, a prosperous peasant from the emotionally satisfying; and more important,
out that the persistence of nationalism re- Jbalan highlands outside Tangier, the Hajj it can only promise salvation to a small
mains an enigma for the Marxist), historical mirrors the experience of the hordes of Arab segment of the imperiled society. While
effects can also become causes-and how- cultivators who have been forced off the colonialism and modernization have brought
ever one identifies the causes that produced land and now sell their labor in the teeming many members of ruling Arab elites to
the vernacular languages of the sixteenth cities of the southern Mediterranean. And skepticism concerning the revealed truths
and seventeenth centuries or that led to Gu- as Henry Munson notes in his introduction, of Islam, the conversion of these few cos-
tenberg’s discovery, the consequences of the Hajj’s worldview is of great interest to mopolitans has only reinforced the faith of
rhese events quite evidently took on a life Western readers because it graphically the masses, who see their own poverty and
and causality of their own. demonstrates how “Muslim fundamental- the dependence of their countries as the
Anderson does not exaggerate his claims, ists define their socioeconomic and nation- work of infidels and of fellow Muslims in
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