Local Knowledge (Text Only). Clifford Geertz
of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable—Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing, they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.4
But it is not all that desperate. Faulkner goes on bringing his volatile and sentient forces together again and again, adding the pieces, filling out the narratives, not only through the couple hundred more pages of this novel, but through his whole work, rendering the history of this particular moral imagination (his, Oxford’s, the inter-war South’s) if not clear at least clearer, if not wholly decipherable at least not wholly inscrutable. One cannot expect more in this sort of effort, but one can expect that. Or to quote directly the lines from James Merrill (his piece, too, is about time, memory, puzzles, and cultural disconnections) I deliberately truncated earlier on:
Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?
But nothing’s lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness).5
III
Found in translation. Like the Great War, the Old South, that controversial Icelandic bear, and the equivocal picnic at Donwell Abbey, Balinese liturgical splendor continues to set off diverging commotions in our minds. Helms was only one of the earliest of its Western unriddlers, as I am only one of the latest. Between us come the soldiers, administrators, and technicians of Dutch colonialism; a multinational assortment of expatriate painters, musicians, dancers, novelists, poets, and photographers; an extraordinarily distinguished group of philologists and ethnographers, from V. E. Korn and Roelof Goris to Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead; various sorts of missionaries, many of whom were also excellent scholars and all of whom had decided opinions; and, of course, one of the great tourist invasions of modern times, a swarm of eager experiencers the New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno caught as well as anyone in his drawing of the man leaning breathlessly across the travel agency counter asking: “Is Bali . . . er . . . still Bali?”
Of course, it still is: what else could it be? And through all the changes that have occurred since 1847 (the population has tripled for one thing; the motor car has come for another; the breasts the gentleman coveted have been veiled for a third), the unnerving confusion of sensory beauty, dramatic cruelty, and moral impassivity Helms caught then has remained the marking character of its life. The Dutch suppressed widow-burning as he expected (though there seem to have been clandestine examples of it as late as the 1930s), but they could hardly suppress the sensibility of which it was an expression, at least not without transforming the society altogether, something its high gorgeousness inhibited them from even considering. The tension between the edenic image of Bali—“The Island of the Gods,” “The Land of a Thousand Temples,” “The Last Paradise,” “The Morning of the World,” and so on—and the ground bass of passionless horror that all but the most sentimental sojourners to the island sooner or later hear moving amid the loveliness persists. And I don’t know that we are, we latecomers with our kincharts and cameras, much more comfortable with it than Helms was stumbling across it curious and unarmed one otherwise ordinary morning in Gianjar—just more conscious of the fascination it has come to have for us, how terribly intriguing, obsessing even, it has, in the meantime, somehow grown.
Since Bali’s imaginative life has become seriously interconnected with that of the West, a phenomenon mainly of this century, it has been through our odd concern (odd in the sense that I know of no other people who share it) with the moral status of artistic genius—Where does it come from? How shall we deal with it? What will it do to us?—that, on our side, the connection has been made. (On their side it is otherwise: their daimon is rank, not creativity, and we disarrange them well enough on that score.) As a trope for our times, the island has functioned as a real-life image of a society in which the aesthetic impulse is allowed its true freedom, the unfettered expression of its inner nature. The trouble is that that image seems to serve equally well the perfection-of-humanity sort of view of art we associate with the German idealists and the flower-of-evil sort we associate with the French symbolists. And it is that Asian coincidence of European opposites, one advancing scholarship seems only to make less easy to ignore, that both unsteadies and absorbs us.
The idealist side is clear enough: the most prominent role the island has played in our imagination has been to serve as an aesthetic Arcady: a natural society of untutored artists and spontaneous artistry, actually existing in appropriate garb on a suitable landscape. The dancing, the music, the masks, the shadow plays, the carving, the breathtaking grace of posture, speech, and movement, the even more breathtaking intricacy of rite, myth, architecture, and politesse, and in the twenties and thirties, an astonishing burst of wildly original easel painting, have induced in us a vision of a profoundly creative popular culture in which art and life, at least, some place, genuinely are one. “Every Balinese,” the most recent of a long line of French livres des belles images assures us, “. . . is an artist, but an anonymous artist whose creative talent is absorbed in that of the community and who has but a faint sense of his own creative power.”6 “The Balinese may be described as a nation of artists,” the English anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer writes in a more school-mastery tone, in 1936, “. . . Balinese art is living, in a constant development.”7 And yet earlier, in 1922, the German art historian, Karl With, is moved to jugendstil by the miracle of it all:
The Balinese language has no word for art and no word for artist. And yet the life of this people overflows with a blossoming richness of festivals, temples, images, jewels, and decorations, gifts that are witness to an extravagant enjoyment in form-making and play. A flood of fantasy, a fullness of form, and a strength of expression wells up out of the hands, hearts, and bodies of this people and inundates everything. Full of immediacy, suffused with a blessed sensuousness, saturated with fecundity, a veritable life-frenzy grows out of the natural artistry of these peasants and continuously renews itself out of itself. . . .
O, the artists of our time, martyrs and isolates who find neither response nor community. Life cripples who turn their solitude and poverty into their wealth; who consume themselves in the coldness of their environment; who all but mutilate themselves in the destructiveness of the life around them; who can find satisfaction and solace not through themselves but only through the object of their creation; who are forced to work, violated into self-expression, exclusively oriented toward a wrenching artistry; who wallow in themselves and lose thereby their strength, their selves, and reality.
Compare to them, now, the fortunate and nameless artists of Bali, where the peasant carves his leisure evening into a figure; where children paint motley ornaments onto palm leaves; where a village family builds up an uncannily intricate multi-colored corpse tower; where women in honor of the gods and out of pure joy in their own persons decorate themselves like goddesses and make offerings into huge and flamboyant still lifes; where the peasant walking in his field is come upon by a god, and is thereupon inspired to chisel the god’s image on the temple or to carve the god’s spirit mask, while the neighbors take full care of his field and his family until he has finished his work and returns as peasant to his field; where out of the nothingness of the festal impulse a transported community arises through ceremony, dance, pageant, and temple building.8
And so on: the figure—Schiller’s dream of a totally aestheticised existence—could be reproduced, in