Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz
which, meeting the eleventh story, connected it with the place of cremation. The body was now placed in the wooden image of the lion; five small plates of gold, silver, copper, iron and lead, inscribed with mystic words, were placed in the mouth of the corpse; the high priest read the Vedas, and emptied the jars containing holy water over the body. This done, the faggots, sticks striped in gold, black, and white, were placed under the lion, which was soon enveloped in flames. This part of the strange scene over, the more terrible one began.
The women were carried in procession three times round the place, and then lifted on to the fatal bridge. There, in the pavilion which has been already mentioned, they waited until the flames had consumed the image and its contents. Still they showed no fear, still their chief care seemed to be the adornment of the body, as though making ready for life rather than for death. Meanwhile, the attendant friends prepared for the horrible climax. The rail at the further end of the bridge was opened, and a plank was pushed over the flames, and attendants below poured quantities of oil on the fire, causing bright, lurid flames to shoot up to a great height. The supreme moment had arrived. With firm and measured steps the victims trod the fatal plank; three times they brought their hands together over their heads, on each of which a small dove was placed, and then, with body erect, they leaped into the flaming sea below, while the doves flew up, symbolizing the escaping spirits.
Two of the women showed, even at the very last, no sign of fear; they looked at each other, to see whether both were prepared, and then, without stopping, took the plunge. The third appeared to hesitate, and to take the leap with less resolution; she faltered for a moment, and then followed, all three disappearing without uttering a sound.
This terrible spectacle did not appear to produce any emotion upon the vast crowd, and the scene closed with barbaric music and firing of guns. It was a sight never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it, and brought to one’s heart a strange feeling of thankfulness that one belonged to a civilization which, with all its faults, is merciful, and tends more and more to emancipate women from deception and cruelty. To the British rule it is due that this foul plague of suttee is extirpated in India, and doubtless the Dutch have, ere now, done as much for Bali. Works like these are the credentials by which the Western civilization makes good its right to conquer and humanize barbarous races and to replace ancient civilizations.
I have little more that is interesting to tell of Bali. . . .
I
This powerful, beautiful, and (not to neglect my own métier, which is supposed to be some sort of science) superbly observed passage was written in the 1880s by a Dane, L. V. Helms.1 As a very young man Helms had apprenticed himself to a white rajah type merchant-adventurer straight out of The Heart of Darkness named Mads Lange—he played the violin, dashed about on half-broken horses cutting down enemies, had various complexions of native wives, and died suddenly, quite likely poisoned, in his late forties—who ran a port-of-trade enclave in South Bali between 1839 and 1856, a time when he and his staff were the only Europeans on the island. I quote Helms at such length not because I intend to go into Balinese ethnography here, or even, very much, into cremation rites. I quote this passage because I want to unpack it, or, better (because it is a bit hermetic and my interests a bit diffuse) to circle around it as a way into what I take to be some of the central concerns of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic, if one can confine so various a man in so cramped a category. These are concerns which, from a somewhat different perspective, but no less cramped a category, I share with him.
If Trilling was obsessed with anything it was with the relation of culture to the moral imagination; and so am I. He came at it from the side of literature; I come at it from the side of custom. But in Helms’s text, portraying a custom which possesses that mysterious conjunction of beauty when it is taken as a work of art, horror when it is taken as actually lived life, and power when it is taken as a moral vision—a conjunction which we associate with such a great part of modern literature, and over which Trilling, in his cadenced way, so conscientiously agonized—I think we can meet. It does not really matter much in the end whether one trains one’s attention on Joseph Conrad or on suttee: the social history of the moral imagination is a single subject.
Single, but of course vast. As any particular work of literature brings out certain aspects of the general problem—How does collective fantasy color collective life?—so any particular ritual dramatizes certain issues and mutes others. This is, indeed, the particular virtue of attending to such exotic matters as the splendid incineration of illustrious corpses and dutiful widows on a remote island some years ago. What is thereby brought to immediate notice is so different from what is brought to immediate notice by attending to what Trilling once called the shockingly personal literature of the talkative and attitudinizing present, that whatever deeper perceptions emerge to connect the two experiences have a peculiar force.
My task in sufficiently focusing matters so that something circumstantial can be said is powerfully assisted by the fact that Professor Trilling’s last published piece—on the problems of teaching Jane Austen to Columbia students in the seventies, a heroic enterprise apparently—addressed itself to what is surely the central issue here.2 It has always been, he says there, “the basic assumption of humanistic literary pedagogy” that the similarities between ourselves and others removed in place or period are so much more profound than are the surface differences separating us from them that, given the necessary scholarship and historical care, their imaginative products can be put at the service of our moral life. Referring to some recent discussions of my own (having to do, among other things, with the Balinese sense of self, which has—as I think you can gather from my text—a certain high peculiarity about it), he wondered how far this basic assumption was in fact valid. On the one hand, he seemed shaken in his confidence that the culturally distant was so readily available and doubted even whether he had, after all, really been able simply to understand, much less put to use, an Icelandic saga about a countryman’s gift of a bear to one king which another king coveted, through the customary device of putting himself in the countryman’s shoes. But, on the other, he seemed resolute, stubborn even, in his faith that however alien another people’s modes of thought and feeling might be, they were somehow connectible to the way we live now. He remained convinced that he could bring those Columbia students at least somewhat closer to Jane Austen, or perhaps more exactly, could expose to them how close, in some things anyway, they already were.
Though this is not precisely the most comfortable position, nor even a wholly coherent one, it is, I think, the only one that can be effectively defended. The differences do go far deeper than an easy men-are-men humanism permits itself to see, and the similarities are far too substantial for an easy other-beasts, other-mores relativism to dissolve. Both literary critics and anthropologists—at least literary critics such as Trilling, still possessed, as he says, of the primitive belief that there is such a thing as life itself; and anthropologists such as myself, who think that society comes to more than behavior—pursue their vocations haunted by a riddle quite as irresolvable as it is fundamental: namely, that the significant works of the human imagination (Icelandic saga, Austen novel, or Balinese cremation) speak with equal power to the consoling piety that we are all like to one another and to the worrying suspicion that we are not.
If we turn back to the Helms text, as well as to the sorts of “life itself it in some way refracts—the indigenous one toward which it reaches, the intrusive one out of which it arises, and the separated one from which we apprehend it—this deep equivocality emerges in virtually every line. As we read it, a series of instabilities—instabilities of perspective, of meaning, of judgment—is set up, the one pressing hard upon the next, leaving us, in the end, not quite sure where we stand, what position we wish to take up toward what is being said to us, and indeed uncertain about just what has been said.
Some of these instabilities are, so to speak, intra-Balinese; they inhere in the structure of the ritual as such, form its theme and comprise its meaning. The conjunction (to which I have already alluded, and Helms, in struck wonder, keeps dazedly remarking) of an extravagant intensification of sensuous drama, an explosion of florid symbols and cabalic images, and a no less extravagant celebration of the quieter beauties of personal obliteration, a chaste