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"I escaped the Thunder, and fell into the Lightning"
George Herbert, Jacula Prudentum
Ours has been a culture that, in George Herbert's words, has "escaped
the Thunder"; or, better, turned a deaf ear to its portentous voices.
The question might be, how long can it also avoid falling into the lightning.
Private Marine Easty was not a good speller, so perhaps it does not
signify when he reports the weather off the east coast of Australia for
January 1st 1788 as "East Dark Clowdy att Night with Scaquals &
Lighting". On the other hand a habit of passing off lightning as theatrical
lighting-a tendency to treat the evolving environment as foreign to our
human drama-has been symptomatic: our intellectual (certainly our Edisonian)
Enlightenment might be characterised as lightning's silent arrest: short-circuiting
its discharge to earth, we have made of it a permanent illumination. In
any case the knowledges we have privileged, the technologies we have designed
to represent them, have always assumed the linearisation of time and space,
the elimination of its curvilinear and non-linear dimensions.
The opening of the woods, the clearing of the ground-these historical activities
are cognate with the process of intellectual enlightenment, the ideology
of progress. To remove the bushes, to render the ground as smooth as a billiard
table, is to enclose the land within a permanent ring of light. The open
field is a rebuke to clouds or other evidences of primitive chiaroscuro:
the colonists' eagerness to remove every vestige of vegetation cannot be
explained simply as a mistaken theory of agriculture; it expresses an overwhelming
need to clear away doubt-not to make the land speak in accents all its own,
but to silence the whispers, the inexplicable earth and sky tremors which
always seemed to accompany colonisation. Progress, it seems, is built on
the ruins of process: in order to stand erect the man must, it seems, stamp
the earth flat, turning it into a passive planisphere.
From the beginning as it were this ideology ran into difficulties: if movement
were suspect, if stasis were king, how was the colonist, let alone the trader
and the traveller, to justify his shifting for himself. He must account
for it psychologically; or else ascribe it to the will of God. In any case,
as Robinson Crusoe repeatedly finds, it takes him into the heart of the
tempest. "All these Miscarriages," he reflects, "were procured
by my apparent obstinate adhering to my foolish inclination of wandring
abroad."And he adds, "I was born to be my own Destroyer"-a
philosophy that has the advantage at least of making the storms and shipwrecks
that litter his life allegorical, evidence of God's hidden, but providentially
guiding, hand. Had he remained at home, as his father bade him, nothing
of this would have happened.
As an introduction to the psychology of the coloniser, Defoe's great book
remains unequalled. What Phillip and his men set about at Sydney Cove, Defoe
had already imagined a century earlier: "My Thoughts were now wholly
employ'd about securing my self against ... Savages"-in which cause
"I resolv'd to find a more healthy and more convenient Spot of Ground".
And Crusoe's manipulation of that ground is instructive. A little plain
with a rocky backdrop disclosing itself, "On the Flat of the Green,
just before this hollow place" he pitches his tent: and his first act
is to turn a disclosure into an enclosure: "I drew a half Circle before
the hollow Place [and] pitchd two Rows of strong Stakes, driving them into
the Ground ..." This gives him a sense of security but, such is the
paranoia at the heart of binary logic, it also creates a little theatre
in which to contemplate his insecurity. The dramatic agent of this sudden
new self-awareness is the storm but "I was not so much surpris'd with
the Lightning as I was with a Thought which darted into my Mind as swift
as the Lightning itself. O my Powder! My very Heart sunk within me, when
I thought, that at one Blast all my Powder might be destroy'd ..."
Defoe's insight is to understand that the coloniser produces the country
he will inhabit out of his own imagining. The coloniser is also a novelist,
making the lie of the land an index of his own fears and hopes. Crusoe heeds
the lightning only because it mimics the operations of his own mind. Likewise
the environment only signifies insofar as it supplies him with a tabula
rasa whereon he can inscribe a hemisphere with himself at its centre. Crusoe
holds no dialogue with his surroundings, only with himself. His island is
of his own making and is conceived concentrically as the distribution of
his own interests. Its very topography answers to the hierarchic command
he claims over it. Nothing here can answer back, unless it is the parrot
imitating his own voice; and certainly there can be no question of entering
into negotiations with the island's other inhabitants.
The single footprint that marks the breaching of his Eden stimulates an
extraordinary sequence of mental events which, taken together, are a brilliant
anatomy of the colonial mentality and its images. Coming across the mark
in the sand Crusoe at first stood "like one Thunder-struck", and
then "came Home to my Fortification, not feeling, as we say, the Ground
..." Unable to say what the impression signifies, he is filled with
fear; in which condition his fancy projects onto it every fear of his own,
including the image of Satan. This train of thought in turn produces its
opposite: a revival of his Christian faith.
On the single "Print" or signature of presence is built an entire
system of Heaven and Hell. This is the self-absorbed madness of colonial
logic, repeatedly to project onto the environment its own chimeras. This
much Defoe makes brilliantly clear: but in order to achieve this clarity
he has to make a remarkable assumption. The value of the footprint as a
stimulus to the fancy depends in large part on its singularity. Nowhere
in the narrative does Crusoe express any interest in locating the other
footprints that might be logically associated with it. His own train of
thought-his own wildly associative logic-depends on abstracting the print
from the environment and, instead of regarding as the trace of passage,
interpreting it as a supernatural sign.
That footprint, we might say, is already enclosed within the clearing of
the colonial gaze. As a signature, as a sign of absence, as something standing
in for something else, it is not understood in relation to the lie of the
land, as a dialogue of left and right marking the ground, as a historical
passage. It is denied its other foot, its sense of direction, and it is
this prior bracketing of the environment, symbolised by the absence of the
other footprint, that precipitates the extraordinary fantasies that afflict
Robinson Crusoe. There is in other words a direct connection between
the clearing of the land, and the erasure of its natural histories, and
the identification of knowledge with semiosis, the science of signs. The
interpretation of signs, as Christopher Columbus's diary of his first voyage
eloquently testifies, presupposes a world beyond, and its corollary, a deceptive
present. It makes the breaching of the horizon natural. As for the lie of
the land, unless it lies down, it signifies nothing or, worse, the mendacity
of the savage mind.
What would have happened if Robinson Crusoe had found another footprint?
Then he would have found another and another, and a pattern would have emerged,
a track. A system of memorialisation would have come into focus, a different
way of regarding the ground. He would not have needed to invent an explanation;
traces, not signs, the footprints would have ceased to be enigmatic. He
might have grasped that the ground he stood on vibrated to the passage of
other feet, and constituted an open network of social communication. His
hysteria might have died down; he might have relaxed, and instead of seeking
to efface every trace of his own history on the island, he might have contemplated
the arts of diplomacy. Certainly, when at last the man he had been waiting
for ran towards him, their meeting would have been different: "he ...
kiss'd the Ground, and laid his Head upon the Ground, and taking me by the
Foot, set my Foot upon his Head ... in token of swearing to be my Slave
for ever."
This attention to the ground should not be mistaken for reverence. It is
because he has nowhere to stand that the fugitive kneels down. He acknowledges
Crusoe as his master by making away the ground. Ceding it with a kiss, he
enters into the European way of seeing things where signs operate more powerfully
than substances. He submits to allowing Crusoe to be the ground and author
of his own life; what he does not see, at least not yet, is that, by setting
his foot on Man Friday's head, Crusoe makes him the ground of his own mastery...
Paul Carter is an interdisciplinary scholar, writer and performance artist who is currently a Research Fellow at Melbourne University. He is the author of several books,most notably, The Road to Botany Bay. This piece is reproduced with permission from the introduction of his challenging new book, The Lie of the Land, published in March 1996 by Faber & Faber and distributed in Australia by Penguin Books.