I still behold myself in the middle of my camp, surrounded by my people and animals: a plant, a flower, a fragment of rock scattered here and there--nothing escapes my memory, and this spectacle, always affecting, everywhere amuses and follows me.
Travels Into The Interior Parts Of Africa, Vol.1
My first years were thus spent in the deserts and I was born almost a savage. When reason, which in warm climates always precedes age, began to dawn in my mind, my taste was not long in displaying itself, and my parents did everything in their power to assist the first efforts of my curiosity. Under such excellent instructors I everyday tasted new pleasures: I heard them discourse in a manner suited in my capacity on the objects which they had acquired, and on those they hoped to procure in the future. By these means an abundance of ideas was treasured up in my mind--at first, in a confused manner, I must own; but gradually with more order and method. Nature, therefore, was my earliest instructor, because it was towards her that my views were first directed. . . . Everything seemed to whisper to my self-love that I should also attempt to form a cabinet of natural history. (TA ii-iii)
What is true of animals in general is, according to the reports of explorers, true of most savage peoples as well. Thus we should not be surprised that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope sight with the naked eye ships on the high seas at as great a distance as the Dutch see with their telescopes . . . [2]
...I returned, as I may say, to the primitive state of man, and breathed for the first time in my life, the delicious and pure air of liberty. (TA 72)Le Vaillant understands himself to be corrupt, an epigone, yet still possessing, by virtue of his birth, traces of faculties which render Nature visible to him in an unusual manner. This genealogy, for Le Vaillant the only one which can survive a novel landscape without continually misinterpreting it, allows him to approach as close as possible to the horizon of the natural; to the moment when classification can begin with the gesture of having penetrated the natural without succumbing to it. This horizon is revealed in the slightest of rhetorical details--the equivocation of 'as I may say'; the perverse uselessness and usefulness of 'man,' who must be abandoned in order to be reacknowledged; the paradox of being able to describe the manners of completely sequestered peoples; and the intransigent metaphorics of 'approaching near' Nature yet being under Nature's 'immediate protection.'I was now about to withdraw myself from the dominion of man, and to approach a little towards his original condition. (TA 103)
In all countries wherever the savages are absolutely separated from civilized nations, and live sequestered their manners are mild; but they change and become corrupted the nearer they approach to them. (TA 180) [3]
Approaching near to Nature, and under her immediate protection, the savages have no need of our noisy and most harmonious orchestras ... (TA 335) [4]
When I quitted Europe to travel to Africa, it was not part of my plan to enter into any detail respecting the manner and the customs of the inhabitants of the Cape, much less respecting the political, civil, and military forms of the government. This is the subject, I confess, which engaged the least share of my attention, and which I should give an account of with the greatest reluctance even were I interested in doing it. (TA 64)
I had so perfectly succeeded in the construction of this box; my collections were preserved there so well, and they arrived in such good condition. (TA 68)It is this convoluted lineage of self, self-description, and classification that I have chosen to call 'epistemophilia.' Beyond this concatenation, of course, the word has other, more general psychoanalytic connotations; perhaps it is enough to recall that Le Vaillant, in describing his childhood, writes that "Everything seemed to whisper to my self-love that I also should attempt to form a cabinet of natural history" (TA iii).Thus the study of nature engaged my attention, in preference to more pressing wants. Continually inflamed with the powerful desire of robbing her of her treasures, I was dying of hunger, and yet thought of my collections. (TA 115)
Translators {of the names of animals} ought to attend to these small variations, which may occasion errors respecting the proper names of animals, which ought not to be disfigured. (TA 422)
. . . I shut myself up in my tent, and hastened, while my observations were still fresh in my memory, to reduce them to some order. (TA 452)
As for my part, I reviewed my collection, which was far from being in proper order; and this business was a work of no little labour. Everything that I almost had contained birds: my tea-chests, and my boxes for holding coffee and sugar were all filled with them. (TA 521)
This canton, in my opinion, is very improperly named Roye-Sand, or Red Sand, for I observed none of that colour. I remarked, on the contrary, that it was absolutely yellow. (TA 26)We are told from the first pages of the Travels that description is going to exist without invention. The skill of Le Vaillant as a dissector of his environment will ensure this, likewise his conscious attempt to remain the only efficient cause in the landscape he passes through. "Fully resolved to speak only of what I have seen or done, I shall introduce into this work nothing which is not my own; and on this account I shall certainly not be reproached for the faults of those who preceded me" (TA x). Later assertions are as forthright: "People ought to speak from their own experience, and advance nothing more than what they have seen" (TA 350). This emphasis on the singular can be traced throughout the Travels, maintaining the integrity of the classificatory act, an act which we can now re-describe as a literal act. Furthermore, with its emphasis on the singular, we can also describe it as a power-full act, an act not merely empirical, but concerning empire:
Being then entirely abandoned to myself, and expecting no support or assistance but from my own arm...(TA 72) I was certain of meeting with no other traces of labour other than those which I left myself. By the freedom of my will, which commanded them with a sovereign sway, and by my complete independence, I really perceived in man the monarch of all animated beings, the absolute despot of nature. (TA 93-94) It was here that I intended, for a little while to establish my petty empire. (TA 224)Le Vaillant is quite aware of the irony of his status as a ruler without true dominions, and whose subjects, if he is sufficiently untoward, will decamp: "The horde which followed me, without any preamble, told me that they were free, that they no longer considered me their chief; and that they would instantly return" (TA 202). Yet this irony, which inefficiently erases his authority, nevertheless in its repetition affirms the singularity of this irony, its separate moment.
Chiefs are chosen by the governor, who gives them a large cane, the metal tip of which is inscribed--'Capitein' as a badge of his dignity. Such a chief becomes to the governor a new creature, a new spy, and a new slave, and to his own countryman a new tyrant. (TA 178)The spurious authority of the cane marked 'Capitein', which Le Vaillant cannot countenance; the profit to be gained from concealing a true description of oneself; the erotic nostalgia of replacing a name with another supposedly more natural--these are textual events which speak against themselves. In his attempt to escape from authorities of all kinds, to ensure that "no private hatred, no envy, and no secret displeasure can overbalance in my mind my regard to truth" (TA xiv) and to "never give way when I am certain of the facts, and advance nothing but what is supported by proof" (TA x), Le Vaillant describes for us the connection between literalism, authority, and writing.I avoided explaining what it was prudent for me to conceal from him; and I increased the idea of superiority with which a white man everywhere impresses the savage. (TA 264)
Without wishing to be accounted a sorcerer, I was desirous that he might be convinced, by his own experience, that there is a wide difference between a European and a Hottentot. (TA 269)
I found her name difficult to be pronounced, disagreeable to the ear, and very insignificant according to my ideas; I therefore gave her a new one and called her Narina, which in the Hottentot language signifies a flower. (TA 254)
But with what satisfaction did I observe them unanimously prefer the simplicity of their rural and peaceful life and consider these resources (luxuries) as base and sordid means, for a nation who boast of their superiority over the people of nature! Worthy mortals, who have been painted to us as devouring your fellow creatures, and whom a child might manage! (TA 96)Leaving aside the trail of Le Vaillant never meeting a tribe which had not already tasted tobacco or brandy, his distribution of these goods as inducement, his characterization of the effects of contact with the Dutch ("Some fled, the rest, ruined by a few glasses of brandy and a few rolls of tobacco . . ." (TA 178) and yet his insistent and dramatic use of an 'innocent condition'--let us follow a series of reports which demonstrate how Le Vaillant unfolds a Boshman who can participate in a violent logic of innocence, albeit as perfectly beyond that innocence.Long may they retain their happy ignorance! May I be the last stranger who, with rash steps, shall dare to tread thy native plains; and may thy solitude never be polluted! (TA 269)
In an uncivilized state man is naturally good; why then should the Hottentots be an exception to this general rule? (TA 347)
. . . they told me also that the Boshmen, a kind of vagabond deserter who belong to no nation, and who live only by rapine, took advantage of that moment of disorder to pillage without distinction on the Caffres, the Hottentots and the planters; that nothing but the tyrannical behaviour of these wretches could have made the Caffres include in their general description all the Hottentots, whom they considered as spies attached to the whites, and whom the latter employed to lay snares for them with more dexterity. (TA 189)If a 'State of Nature' is a state of chronic repose, how does one account for any disruptive force in this state? It must, if one's rhetoric is to remain consistent, be an intervention in this state, a transgression. We have already been told who the original transgressors are--the European traders--so it is necessary to derive this transgression, this name 'Boshmen,' from that 'fatal accident'. [7] They cannot constitute a nation on their own, a nation ready to display behaviour that is violent, irruptive and organised. Representing the obverse of the idle and phlegmatic character of the 'conquered' Khoisan that Le Vaillant insists upon, the Boshmen stand for wantonness, nomadicity, and lawlessness--a ceaseless peripheral activity. [8]. . . enemies of every nation, without distinction, and plunderers by profession, from whom we could expect no kind of friendship. (TA 441)
. . . one should meditate upon all of the following together: writing as the possibility of the road and of difference, the history of writing and the history of the road, of the rupture, of the via rupta, of the path that is broken, beaten, fracta, of the space of reversability and the repetition traced by the opening, the divergence from, and the violent spacing, of nature, of the natural, savage, forest. The silva is savage, the via rupta is written, discerned and inscribed violently as difference, as form imposed on the hyle, in the forest, in wood as matter; it is difficult to imagine that access to the possibility of road maps is not at the same time access to writing. (107-08)Of course to mention the name 'Derrida' at or near the beginning of a 'trail' is also to invoke an authority of a sort, which I wish to distance myself from, at least in part; nevertheless, this passage explores how a linea, however convoluted, must be recognised as carrying a tentative message of origin and destination--that it is tendentious, that it describes an absence--and thereby suggests the intransigent, culpable nature of beginning, of reading beginnings, and of loci in general. Back
It would be easy (and several commentators have found it so) to label Le Vaillant's writings, and especially his deliberations concerning Man, as Rousseauist. But what is interesting is not that Le Vaillant is obviously well versed in the debate of the philosophes and others who sought to explain the nature of contemporary society in terms of a 'State of Nature,' nor that he sides with Rousseau's valorization of this 'State'--but that he is travelling with this debate and attempting to inflict it, often with very little success, on a landscape. That it was (and is) a matter of contention whether or not Rousseau ever envisaged such a journey as having any bearing whatsoever on his theses--there is his infamous line, "Let us begin by leaving aside all the facts" (p. 24), and yet his constant use of examples gleaned from travellers--is a difficulty which Le Vaillant's writing, against its own intentions, displays. Back
Echoing Rousseau, Le Vaillant writes, "The establishment of the Dutch colony was a fatal epoch, which disunited them all, and occasioned those differences by which they (the Gonaquas, or savage Hottentots) are at present distinguished"(TA 176). It must be re-emphasized: the relevance of Rousseau is not to be discerned by discovering 'congruencies' (which are endemic), but by considering Rousseauist idealism in terms of the violent possibilities of nostalgia--by the imposition and fracturing of this idealism. Back
In Rousseau's Letter on French Music, he contrasts the enervated harmonic (the societal) with the energetic melodic (the isolated primitive). Arrangement, or imagination, is opposed to passion. A little later in the Travels Le Vaillant quotes a contemporary writer on dancing and singing: "...the savage has no other instructor but his own passions, his own heart, and nature. What he feels we pretend to feel" (TA 336). Back
I have expanded here on another comment of Derrida's in his writings on Rousseau's Essay on the Origin of Languages: "This permits us [readers of Rousseau] to determine a function of the concept of nature or of primitiveness: it is the equilibrium between reserve and desire. An impossible equilibrium, for desire cannot awaken and move out of its reserve except by the imagination, which also breaks the equilibrium" (185). Although Le Vaillant would hardly characterize his classificatory exercises as acts of the imagination, all depictions which involve the desire for closure are, in however orderly a way, imaginative, in that they are constituted by the structured invention of that which they wish to describe. Back
De Man 140, quoted from Essai sur l'origine des Langues, texte reproduit d'apres l' edition A. Belin de 1817 (Paris, le Graphe, supplement au No. 8 des Cahiers pour l'Analyse) p.506. Back
This notion of the 'primary wrong' is quintessentially Rousseauist, and perhaps his most blatantly metaphysical: "The more we reflect on it, the more we realize that this state was the best for man and the least subject to revolutions; and that man can have left it only as the result of some fatal accident that, for the common good, ought never to have happened" (Rousseau 62). This moment, when imagination and desire replace passion and need, this 'stem,' must take on the status of the entirely exterior ("the fortuitous convergence of several external causes" [53]), the entirely arbitrary, the entirely colonial, if it is to remain a moment at all. It is easy to see how seas between continents could come to represent, in a mundane way, the difficult gap that Rousseau has to "vault over" (38) and which remains properly inconceivable ("it is inconceivable how a man on his strength alone, without the help of communication or the spur of necessity, could bridge so great a gap" [36]), yet essential in order to get a history of degeneration under way. Space becomes a substitute for history, or rather for prehistory. Back
Idleness has been explored at some length by J.M. Coetzee in his essay "Idleness in South Africa" in White Writing. Back