Part Three
This brings us to a point where
we must cite Dif’s synopsis of the attack in which Dutreuil was shot and
wounded. To all intents and purposes, the members of the expedition
were trapped and there was little they could do to save themselves despite
Dutreuil’s supposed bravado at the head of line seeking to leave the enclosure. In the moment, none of the actors on the
expedition side were fully cognizant of how extreme their position was. By behaving as though he had some control
over the situation and therefore in some sort of strategic advantage at least for
the moment, rather than trying to effect an escape when it was still perhaps
possible, according to Dif, Dutreuil de Rhins provoked the final showdown. From
our perspective as disinterested spectators, and with the advantage of
hindsight, both the mistakes the leader of the expedition supposedly made come
into question, meaning that the writer of the primary text had ulterior motives
in putting blame on Durteuil de Rhins; and the local people, the villagers and
the monks in the monastery, were not necessarily as devious, wily and
preternaturally motivated as the writer of the account seems to imply, this being
another ploy to rationalize the fact that European were out-manoeuvred in this
situation. Onn the one hand, the French
leaders assume they are superior to the natives and yet put off their guard in
circumstances where they do not have full information as to the plans and weapons
available to the others, as well as not being familiar with the layout of the
region. On the other, the locals also do
not know the true intentions of the European party and what plans they have,
nor how much the expedition had learned about the villagers and the monks in
the context of Tibetan geopolitics. In other
words, both groups are at a disadvantage strategically and epistemologically:
they are caught but they do not know how impossible it is for them to act.
Au moment où l’expédition quitte le village, le 5 juin 1894, on commence
à lui tirer dessus depuis les maisons.
Comme la caravane chemine sur une corniche exposée, Dutreuil de Rhins
est blesse au ventre, alors qu’il vient de s’arrêter pour riposter aux
assaillants, leur offrant ainsi une cible facile. Grenard, sous une grêle de
balles le met à l’abri derrière un muret.
On essaya en vain de parlementer et d’envoyer chercher des secours. Bientôt, la situation devient
intenable ; Grenard est contraint d’abandonner Dutreuil de Rhins ; ce
dernière a perdu connaissance et est probablement intransportable.
At the moment when the expedition left the village
on 5 June 1894 shooting began from above the houses. As the caravan travelled along road on an
exposed angle, Detrueil de Rhins was wounded in the stomach, just as he stopped
to fire back at his assailants, offering them an easy target. Grenard, under a hail of bullets, pulls him
to the shelter behind a low wall. They
tried in vain to negotiate and to send for help. Soon the situation became untenable. Grenard was forced to abandon Dutreuil de
Rhins who had lost consciousness and was probably immobilized.
This is a difficult situation,
and a morally ambiguous, if not compromising one, to be in; but also for
Grenard to write about. The real knot he
has to untie to save his own face and to satisfy the suspicions of his European
readership in a period of colonial expansion is how to explain away the loss of
Deureuil de Rhins, meaning both the leader’s life and the corpse of a respected
comrade. Grenard was not trained as a soldier or a diplomat and the rules of
combat cannot have applied when he felt compelled to leave his fellow explorer
behind to save his own neck and that of the other members of the team to the
mercy of the Goloks. While he could not suppress
or change all the facts of the case in his text—there are still many witnesses—he
could disguise some of them by playing down some and manipulating others: he was,
in brief, probably putting the best light on his own actions here, without
casting himself unrealistically as a romantic hero. He muddled through the
events of the day without displaying any great valour, and he presents himself
in the text as though he were caught in a nightmare, and nightmares—in fantasy fiction,
as well as in sensationalized accounts of explorers encountering exotic peoples
for the first time were popular fare in the fin-de-siècle:[1]
It will therefore pay to examine
the final sentences in this passage closely, first as rendered by Dif and then
as Grenard himself recounts the episode.
The more Grenard can blacken the character of the Tibetan enemy and the
hopelessness of his own situation, the better it will be for his reputation.
Grenard, un moment à la merci de ses ennemis, leur échappe par
miracle ; il est dépouille de tout objet de valeur, puis chassé a coups de
pierres par des garnements. Il est
recueilli par un fonctionnaire chinois et reste près d’un mois à proximité de
Tom-Boumdu, dans l’espoir de se faire restituer les papiers tombés aux mains
des assaillants. Quant au corps de
Dutreuil de Rhins, il ne faut pas songer à le récupérer : il été précipité
dans une rivière, au fond d’ un ravin, sur l’ordre du lama du monastère voisin.[2]
Grenard, in that moment at the mercy of his enemies,
escaped by miracle. He was stripped of
any concern for valour or glory, then chased away by rogues throwing rocks. He was rescued by a Chinese functionary and
rested for a month near Tom-Boumdu, in the hope to retrieve papers fallen into
the hands of his assailants. As for the
body of Dutreuil de Rhins, he could not dream of getting it back It had been
thrown into a river at the bottom of a ravine by order of the lama of the
neighbouring monastery.
If
Grenard’s survival is due to a miracle, then he may be excused for leaving his
companion behind and not making any effort to retrieve the body thrown into a
mountain torrent; yet he does wait a month to try to get his notes on the
expedition back. It was a few months
later, thanks to the intervention the Chinese authorities in Xinging, who in
turn applied for the aid of the government in Peking (Beijing today) that his
precious papers (les précieux papiers)
were returned and four of the men who attacked the caravan were caught and
punished.
At
this point in the original text—a chapter in the book I am now completing—I deal
with two other seemingly tangential themes, which can only be given here in a
brief synopsis before offering a single example to help explain the questions
surrounding the fate of Dutreuil de Rhins and Greanrd’s moral and ethical
dilemma of reporting on what occurred and why. . One theme
has to do with a series of novels and stories that appeared in the late 19th
and early 20th century that dealt with doppelgangers, split
personalities, mystical survivals of archaic and mythic creatures or personalities
into the modern age; with the presence of these uncanny and disturbing beings
and inner demons seeming to shatter preconceived notions of the natural, the
normal and the rational. The other has
to do with journeys beyond the boundaries of the familiar, the explicable and
the conceivable, where the European traveller, missionary, explorer, scientist or
adventurer loses himself and his humanity on the other side, in the heart of
darkness, a place of ghosts, demons and zombis.
For instance, In Meyrink’s Golem,
we find a pertinent statement, if not relevant or accurate in terms of the
Czech writer’s attempt to manipulate a medieval Jewish legend of the Prague
ghetto, then full of insight as to the psychology being discovered and
discussed in the fin-de-siècle :
“And when I review in my mind all the strange people who live in them, like
phantoms, like people not born if woman who, in all their being and doing, seem
to have been put together haphazardly, out of odds and end, then I am more than
ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths which,
when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images
of nightly coloured fairy-tales” (p. 42).
In a sense, that we hint at in our midrashic readings of the jokes told
by Leon Daudet about the Jews he met in Guernsey and, within that another
hidden text of discovery, of the killing of Dutreuil de Rhin as recounted by
Grenard and the occasion for old man Ignace’s witticism in poor taste, there
are aspects of both the joke and the adventures in Central Asia which are more
dreamlike than recollections of past historical events, the joke being for
Freud, as we have said, another royal road to the unconsciousness along with
dreams, and the tale of mysterious encounters in far-away exotic places as much
a fantasy—individual and collective—as any other discourse subject to what
psychohistorians call fantasy analysis.
There is also
a distant but significant analogy between what Hanneh Arendt sees as the cause
of the Holocaust and its consequences in the post-War world and the events
leading up to the murder of Dutreuil de Rhins in Tibet in 1894. There is
sufficient likeness in the two cases—albeit comparing the small with the great—to
use the late nineteenth-century case as a pivot on which to rotate various
ideas about the relationships between Jews and Jews, as well as Jews and
non-Jews; their will then be implications of another way to look at the problem
of what Arendt calls the conscious pariah status of the Jew, the person who
both steps outside of the traditional rabbinical culture and community and
tries to live in the post-Enlightenment world as a critic both of that
intolerant and hypocritical culture of modernity and accepting the opprobrium
of both as the price for independence of thought and the parvenu type who
deludes himself into believing that paradise has been (re)gained and that is
mortified (or murdered) when the trick is exposed through his own inadvertence
or the connivance of others. Unlike the schlemiel
type of Jew who blunders into situations beyond his control and has only a kind
of wry sense of humour and a bit of native wit to try to grapple with the humiliating,
painful and dangerous situations, so that by good luck, some divine
interference or a benevolent narrator, the worst consequences can be avoided;
the parvenu is too clever by half to understand the mistakes he is making and
his attempts to bluff out the unpleasantness and life-threatening ambush he discovers
too late, there is really no way out, except totally humiliating
obsequiousness, debilitating bribery, suicide or a feeble resignation to the inevitable.
Back into the
Mountains of Central Asia
Jules-Léon Dutreuil de Rhins, géographe précis et de
talent, explorateur du Tibet, est mort comme le dit Edouard Blanc en “martyr de
la géographie.” Il représente assez bien
l’homme de la fin du XIXe siècle : chercheur en bibliothèque,
explorateur du le terrain, dispose à endurer de grandes épreuves et peu
soucieux de sa vie pourvu que cela soit utile au progrès de la science et de la
connaissance des terres inconnues.[3]
Jules-Leon Dutreuil de Rhins,
a talented and exacting geographer, explorer of Tibet, died, in the words of
Edouard Blanc, « a martyr to geography. » He well represents the man of the late
nineteenth century: library researcher, explorer in the field, ready to endure
great ordeals and unconcerned about his comfort provided it can be useful to the
progress of science and knowledge of unknown lands.
In this modern remembrance there is
given the very opposite of what the anti-Semites would characterize as the
typical Jew, a person of uncontrolled and wild thoughts, someone whose
unfocused attention skitters through the real and material world around him, a
non-Aryan who is weak, soft, always whining and complaining, only
concerned about money and the influence
it can purchase. Yet we placed Dutreuil
de Rhins in a positive light when we discussed how was the centre of a
discussion between Marcel Schwob and Leon Daudet. Should we look at him again,
this time with this question in mind? Is he—like the mysterious Tibet around
which “le grand jeu” the Great Powers gambled in the late nineteenth century[4]—a pivotal point around which the ambiguously
Jewish mentality of Schwob turns?
He seemed to come on to the stage
of our discussions of modern Jewish intellectuals—poets, composers, actors,
critics, art historians, and journalists—during a lengthy digression on the
propriety of a categorization of modern
traditional schlemiels or
self-deluded parvenus, as Hannah
Arendt would set the paradigm; and the discussion was sparked when the old Jew
made a bad joke about the murder of the Tibetan explorer Jules-Léon Dutreuil de
Rhins[5] by some Golog tribesmen[6] (whom the old Jew in his
caftan calls anthrophages or
cannibals) in 1894, that is, the piranhas
who swarm out of the flow of history to devour their helpless victim. Though that digression seemed to go on much
too long and its relevance was barely evident and perhaps appeared to many
readers as forced, it kept on demanding attention because I wanted to find out
what prompted Salomon Ignace to turn the killing into a joke when meeting with
the two young friends Marcel Schwob and Leon Daudet on the Isle of Gurnsey, how
these journalists reacted to the inappropriate witticism of the older man, and
why Daudet dwelt so long on the encounter in his rather anti-Semitic book of
memoirs. There seemed to be no end of
misunderstandings and further attempts to score points with other jokes
prompted by the original occasion and subsequent encounters between the two
writers. Just at a crucial point, when
the tracing back of the lines of confusion to the murder in Tibet and the
problems associated with how the killing took place and what were the
responsibilities of other Europeans for the failure to rescue Dutreuil de
Rhins, retrieve his body, and eventually give an accurate account of what had
happened, I felt I could not go on and dropped the issue. Too much else had to be said, especially
about André Suarès about whom the whole chapter was nominally about. Like Marcel Schwob, Suarès was a Jewish
author whose memory had been eclipsed by time, circumstances and prejudice, and
the concern of the chapter sought to discuss how far anti-Semitism and
self-loathing had to do with their slippage out of most literary histories of
France. In other words, words that
suggest answers in Hannah Arendt’s pairing as complementary rather than
contrasting terms, on the one side, the pariah,
and on the other, the parvenu. The pariah
runs the gamut from the rabbinical tam
or intellectual fool through the nineteenth-century Yiddish literary and stage
type of the schlemiel or unconscious
fall-guy and foil to the nebesh or shmegeggie or man without qualities and
without the will to stand up for himself.
As for the parvenu, the
assimilationist, whether he goes so far as to separate himself so far from the
Jewish community and heritage he was born to and fools himself into thinking he
is safely ensconced in the gentile world as an independent, autonomous
individual or to create or discover even greater distance between himself and
the gentile society wherein he is at best accepted as a token Jew, a court
jester, or an informant—well, he is deluded, sometimes right to the end without
ever realizing how much of a nothing he really is, or sometimes to a moment
when catastrophe strikes and he sees himself for what he is, and when it is too
late to save himself; he cannot rectify his position among the goyim, as Marcel Proust’s Charles Swann
realizes thanks to ostracism that pushes him away during the Dreyfus Affair, or
return to the Jewish community, however much he longs nostalgically for the
scenes and tastes of his youth, as happened with Bernard Berenson in his last
years, beginning with the long months of hiding from the Fascists and
continuing into his nineties, with decrepitude and failing memory assailing
him.
We earlier pointed out the double
contrasts between the older generation of Yiddish-speaking Jews personified in this
passage of Daudet’s memoirs by Ignace and the upstarts like Marcel Schwob who
felt uneasy in the presence of this man an embarrassed by his crude humour and
the tensions between Schwob and his friend Leon Daudet who took delight in
watching Marcel squirm and the older man become befuddled by the lack of
respect he was shown. Much of that
analysis was based on what was implied rather than what was actually put into
words in Daudet’s memoirs, and all along we had to be alert to the limitations
of reading too much into the text since there is no other version of the
encounter on Gurnsey at Lord Lockroy’s house.
That was what drove us further and further into a discussion of the way
we had to approach an understanding of the killing of Dutreuil de Rhins. Yet other than the statement that Marcel
Schwob was a friend of the murdered man, there seems nothing at first blush to
associate him with the Jewish jokes within Jewish jokes within Jewish jokes,
and certainly nothing to connect the explorer with the Jews. But is the analogy drawn merely on the basis
of how the interpretation of rewritten, edited and translated texts work?
[1] Syjmbolist writers and psychological novelists
revelled in depicting people and places that teased the limits of European
audience’s sense of what was real, possible to believe in, and entertaining
fancies. The boundaries between these mimetic representations
of the mind grappling with new sensations in the form of journeys out to the
fringes of the known world and inward to the dark regions of unconscious forces also had serious implications. In Meyrink’s Golem, we find a pertinent statement, if not relevant or accurate
in terms of the Czech writer’s attempt to manipulate a medieval Jewish legend
of the Prague ghetto, then full of insight as to the psychology being
discovered and discussed in the fin-de-siècle :
“And when I review in my mind all the strange people who live in them, like
phantoms, like people not born if woman who, in all their being and doing, seem
to have been put together haphazardly, out of odds and end, then I am more than
ever inclined to believe that such dreams carry within them dark truths which,
when I am awake, glimmer faintly in the depths of my soul like the after-images
of nightly coloured fairy-tales (p. 42).
In a sense, that we hint at in our midrashic readings of the jokes told
by Leon Daudet about the Jews he met in Guernsey and, within that another
hidden text of discovery, of the killing of Dutreuil de Rhin as recounted by
Grenand and the occasion for old man Ignace’s witticism in poor taste, there
are aspects of both the joke and the adventures in Central Asia which are more
dreamlike than recollections of past historical events, the joke being for
Freud, as we have said, another royal road to the unconsciousness along with
dreams, and the tale of mysterious encounters in far-away exotic places as much
a fantasy—individual and collective—as any other discourse subject to what
psychohistorians call fantasy analysis.
[2] Dif, “Les voyages de Dutreuil de Rhins et
Grenard”.
[3] Jacques Serre, « La mission de
Dutreil de Rhins en Haute-Asie
(1891-1894) Comtes Rendus de
l’Academie des Insciptions 152 :3 (2008) 1217-1281.
[4] Joëlle Désire-Marchand, « Cartographe
et Exploration : Le cas d’Alexandra David-Neel en Asie » CFC 153 (septembre 1997) 39. This
« great play » for control over the « roof of the world »
was all the more intriguing because Tibet was so remote and unknown, one of the
last remaining blank spots on the map.
It may have also been one of the very few places in the world where any
adventurer expected to find a Jew—even if he or she were one. Yet here in the episode we are giving
background to there are an assimilated Jew, an old traditional Jew, and
anti-Semite, and an explorer who somehow brings them together textually. Like Tibet, where Dutreuil de Rghin is
killed, his body lost, and his would-be rescuer afraid to act, the
anti-Semitism of the fin de siècle was fascinated by the cleverness of the Jews
(Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein), repelled by the image of what
unchecked modernity does to the certainties of mind, family and society (see
Christopher Hitchins, “The 2,000-Yaear-Old Panic” a review ofb Gregor von
Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite,
in The Atlantic (1 March 2008) online
at http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine.archive/2008/03/the-2-000-year-old-panic/306640). For
those French intellectuals who could not make the trip themselves, there was
the Société de Géographie de Paris as a place explorers, travel-writers,
novelists and journalists could meet
(Désire-Marchand, « Cartographe et Exploration” 41).
[5]For a brief biography, see Serre, « La mission de Dutreuil de Rhins
en haute Asie » 1257-1258. After
secondary school in the Loire, he entered the Naval College but turned towards
the merchant navy after graduation. The
earliest shipboard assignments proved rather disastrous for him, and, with the
knowledge he had picked up in Southeast Asia, he turned his mind towards
exploration, first in Indochina and later in Africa, especially his work with
the Brazza expedition. This often involved liaison work with the government in
Paris. He also became well-known for
his cartographic and anthropological publications. By the late 1880s he was
also becoming a scientific journalist which is how he may have come in contact
with Maurice Schwob.
[6] “Golog (ethnie)” in Wikipedia online at
http;//fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golog_%28ethnie%29. The
Gologs or Golok were a people, with a reputation for ferocity, exiled from
various regions Tibet and eventually settled around Tom-Bourndo where the
Dutreuil de Rhins expedition encountered them.
In recent years their numbers have been greatly reduced.
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