The Numb Eel
The passages we are to be examining
in Behn’s text are textualized, verbal statements, as there are no visual
illustrations in Oroonoko. Thus what we are dealing with is a
metaphorical emblem, not a real one, and yet the principle and method of
interpretation are closely analogous.
The first brief example will illustrate what we mean. This is the episode in which Oroonoko, the
hero of the romantic component of the emblem, known as The Royal Slave of the subtitle, is stunned by an electric eel,
called a numb eel in the text.[i]
This creature serves as the primary component functioning as a symbolic image.
It consists,
(a) first of all, as the
unnamed narrator’s description of the South American fish itself; it is a
natural phenomenon, something that exists in the wilds of Guyana, and which can
be seen, felt and afterwards discussed;
(b) second it is seen as
something curious and inexplicable, that is, a test of the limits of natural
history as understood in the seventeenth century—that is, to a European system
of knowledge or epistemology; and yet at the same time, as a snake-like
creature of the waters, it fits with a long iconographical tradition of
creatures that are emblematic and signifiers of powers outside of the common
experiences of European men and women –monstrous creatures such as the
crocodiles of the Nile;[ii]
(c) and last, as an effect
that the creature has on persons who are stunned by it when fishing in the
rivers of Surinam; though little was known of electricity in Aphra Behn’s time,
enough was recognized to give the power of this phenomenon fearful
implications.[iii]
The main passage runs as follows:
…[Oronooko]
found we had in that Country a very Strange Fish, call’d a Numb Eel, (an Eel of
which I have eaten) that while it is alive, it has a quality so Cold, that
those who are Angling, though with a Line of never so great a length, with a
Rod at the end of it, it shall, in the same minute the Bait is touched by this Eel, seize him or her that holds the Rod
with benumbd’ness, that shall deprive
‘em of Sense, for a while; and some have fall’n into the Water, and
others drop’d as dead upon the Banks of the Rivers where they stood, as soon as
this Fish touches the Bait. (p. 46)
This cold fish, its electrical
force, and its power to stun any person who comes into physical contact with it
directly or indirectly through the line of a fishing pole challenges the
expectations, common experiences and institutionalized knowledge of the
narrator and other European settlers in the colony. The narrator in the present moment of writing
out the narrative, that is, in her later, mature years from London, seeks to
capture both the surprise and wonder of the period of time in which the action
occurred during her youth in Surinam.
She also attempts to ground the startling and challenging depiction of
the electric eel in her own experience: she claims that she herself had eaten
of this fish. This means that the
passage describing the numb eel is
presented:
(a) as an exotic and
wonderful new piece of scientific information to the assumed reader of Oroonoko, that is, English men and women
in the late seventeenth century, who share the same presuppositions and
curiosity as the young adolescent daughter of the presumptive governor of the
colony who is now grown up and working in London as Aphra Behn, novelist,
playwright, essayist, translator, spy and woman of questionable morals.
(b) With her maturity and
education, however informally and covertly attained both prior to her arrival
in London with a new name, introduction to the theatrical elite of the city,
and contractual agreement to continue her role as “intelligencer” or espionage
agent for the Crown, the narrator attempts to couch the report in a discourse
resonant with the advanced scientific perspective her reading of Continental
and English texts allows. For like her knowledge
of indigenous languages and local natural history which many critics find
confirmed in contemporary travel books and anthropological treatises avant la lettre, Behn’s comments show a
greater familiarity—or at the very least, imaginative grasp—than these kinds of
secondary sources.
(c) Even more, Behn, by reputation known as the
“Black Ace” (or the racial innuendo and misogynist slur: “black ass or arse”)[iv]
and thus too, by covert inference a Crypto-Jew, or, at least, as indicated by
her dedicatory epistle to Lord Maitland, a royalist and Roman Catholic, is the
writer whose reputation must sustain the veracity and validity of the entire
history of the Black romantic hero and his wife Imoinda.[v]
Behn is therefore at once,
ambiguously and paradoxically, the remembered voice of a very young and naïve
girl precariously placed in the colony and, at the same time, the remembering
voice of the educated, worldly-wise and cosmopolitan cynical observer of
English morals and social ethics.[vi]
Her memory of persons, places, things and events, as well as words, voices and
feelings, provide a quality that rhetoricians called enargeia[vii].
Such a vivid rhetorical power to
convince listeners and readers through the medium of language that the images
formed in their mind are more powerful than common experience or personal
memories does need a detailed or extensive description, as is found both in
later scientific and novelistic discourses; but rather a selective, controlled
and informed argument. This enargeia moreover is related to what was
known as ekphrasis, not just in the
rather superficial sense often attributed to it of being a verbal correlative
of some work of art—painting, sculpture, fresco or shield—but far more
incisively as a statement of the emotional state of excitation in the craftsman
in the formation of the objet d’art,
in addition to, and certainly no less important than, the feelings in the
fictional spectator as he or she first encounters the work of art, along with
the conscious and unconscious (without awareness or intention) responses of the
narrator and/or her or his persona—and even the presumptive responses of the
fictional, historical or traditional reader and listener. Her form of writing is thus stunning, or as we might say to keep
with the signifying power of the numb eel
something shocking, with the force to
paralyze someone: to knock them out of consciousness, or out of their commonsense,
traditional way of apprehending the world around them, She (Aphra Behn as fictional author[ity],
historical representation [or representative of history], persona [rhetorical
mask]) breaks down the distinction
between a formal literary mode, a rhetorical genre such as historia, where what is to be known is memorable in terms already
always known, and the emergent species of writing that has verisimilitude, a
truth represented by a fiction that pretends not to be unreal—that shocks
because it defies the paradigms of nature supposedly registered in academic
discourses.
In this complex sense, the image
of the numb eel projects on to the
screen of the textual page a complex symbol of that which is outside of
normative European understanding, a source of a mysterious electrical power,
and a mortal threat to the unwary and the unwise. It weaves together several points of view,
past and present, innocent and mature, imaginative and scientific, not so much
leaving them juxtaposed as integral units of experience as combining them into
a more dialectical, interactive entity: the emblem.
Once the cold fish and its properties
are described, however, the emblem moves into the next component: a prose narrative
of how the African Prince Oroonoko, here known by his slave-name of Caesar,
seeks to experiment with the fish, to test its reputed force, and show off his
own power to resist its deadly shock.
Here is the beginning of the relevant passage:
Caesar
us’d to laugh at this, and believ’d it impossible a Man cou’d lose his Force at
the touch of a Fish; and cou’d not understand that Philosophy, that a cold
Quality should be of that Nature.
However, he had a great Curiosity to try whether it wou’d have the same
effect on him as it had on others, and often try’d, but in vain… (pp. 46-47)
At first, like other outsiders to
the region of the New World known as Guyana, Caesar disbelieves the stories
told about it, doubting that such an extraordinary fish exists and that its
supposed numbing force can disable or kill a strong man. In fact, he laughs at the story, as though it
were a fable (or what we today would
call a myth and not a scientific
statement stripped of almost all its rhetorical (or poetic) paraphernalia.) [viii]
The Black Prince represents both the European education he received from his
French tutor in Africa and the royal upbringing he received at the court of his
grandfather the king, each mode of knowledge and expression presumably superior
to that of the indigenous peoples of Surinam—the natives or savages. The exemplary passage then continues:
…at
last, the sought for Fish came to the Bait, as he stood Angling on the Bank;
and instead of throwing away the Rod, or giving it a sudden twitch out of the
Water, whereby he might have caught both the Eel, and have dismiss’d the Rod, before it cou’d have too much
Power over him; for Experiment sake, he grasp’d it but the harder, and fainting
fell into the River; and being still possest of the Rod, the Tide carry’d him
senseless as he was a great way… (p. 47)
After several failed attempts to
catch the fish on his line, he at last succeeds and then, to his surprise and
shock, the electrical force does stun him and so Oroonoko falls lifeless into
the river, pulled away by the current, as though he were dead. While there is no scientific or mythical
explanation given in the text for the event, the story told by the naïve narrator
confirms the description of the first part, showing the otherwise curious,
unbelievable and epistemologically unsettling information received from local
knowledge.
Here, then, the Black Prince
stands in for the narrator herself and other English colonists as manifesting
an example of cultural arrogance brought down by experience of the hard facts
of the case. Such arrogance is qualified
as “curiosity” and an impulse to “experience” the phenomenon rumored to be at
play in the strange eel.[ix] The young witness considers what the slave
might have done, giving what would be a cautious common sense response, but is
dismissed by Oroonoko because of his pride and curiosity to see if what is true
for others is also true for himself, that he would be unmanned by the
electrical power.
Significantly, there is more to
the episode than this, and thus more to the emblematic composition engaged in
by Aphra Behn. When Caesar floats
downstream unconscious and humiliated in front of the female narrator and other
European witnesses (the colonists he wishes to impress by his royal status and
special qualities as a hero), who have witnessed his boasting and laughter at
the reputation of the numb eel
brought down, he is also seen by several local Indians who are nearby in a
canoe.
…till
an Indian Boat took him up; and
perceiv’d, when they touch’d him, a Numbness seize them, and by that knew the
Rod was in his Hand; which, with a Paddle (that is, a short Oar) they struck away, and snatch’d it
into the Boat, Eel and all. If Caesar
were almost Dead, with the effect of this Fish, he was more so with that of
the Water, where he had remain’d the space of going a League; and they found
they had much a-do to bring him back to Life: But, at last, they did, and
brought him home, where he was in a few Hours well Recover’d and Refresh’d; …
(p. 47)
The Indians in the canoe swing
into action and apply their own knowledge to save the nearly dead slave’s
life. What they do is to pull the
stunned body into their boat, use a wooden paddle to flick away the cord that
they know is the conductor of the electrical power stunning Oroonoko, and,
realizing that he remains unconscious because of the water he has swallowed
while in this state of numbness, perform something we now would call resuscitation—forcing
the water out of his lungs and stimulating his breathing.
It is important to recall that
this is something reported by the young adolescent female narrator who is an
observer of this entire scene. She
repeats many times that, on the one hand, her whole experience of the Royal
Slave and his wife Imoinda is full of wonder and amazement, full of curiosity
and unheard of power and beauty; and, at the same time, that she herself, as
narrator and memorialist of this great man and woman, is inadequate to the task
of preserving his history—and in a convincing manner. What she lacks, she claims, is the heroic
force in the language of Oroonoko and Imoinda: “And ‘twas this powerful
Language alone that in an Instant convey’d all the Thoughts of their Souls to
each other” (p. 21). A little later,
recalling the romantic story of these African lovers in the courtly component
of the whole book, the narrator explains: “He spoke this with such a Tone, that
she hop’d it true, and cou’d not forbear believing it…” (p. 23) “But his [Oroonoko’s] Misfortune was,” the
narrator laments, “to fall in an obscure World, that afforded only a Female Pen
to celebrate his Fame…” (p. 36).
In the actual text, then, where
the scenes and actions are argued to be extremely powerful and moving, very
little is actually written out because, both at the time of the event and even
subsequently some score of years later when Aphra Behn pens this account in
London, there are no adequate words or images to describe electricity organically
stimulated in a fish or the kind of first aid carried out by the Indians. This rescue of Oroonoko, then, is juxtaposed
to the two earlier components of the emblem as something virtually in a foreign
language that can barely be translated into English, something, that is, which
is only seen from afar in space and in the virtually unbridged distance between
two very different systems of knowledge, the European and the indigenous South
American Indian.
What the mysterious motto or dark
title tells us is that this episode destabilizes European intellectual
arrogance, both in regard to the experience of natural phenomena in the world
and in regard to the practical applications of this knowledge to save a man’s
life. Rather than make any of this explicit
at this point in the narrative, the narrator shifts attention to the way in
which Oroonoko’s bruised ego is soothed:
… and
[he was] not a little Asham’d to find he shou’d be overcome by an Eel; and all the People, who heard his Defiance,
wou’d Laugh at him. But we cheared him
up; and he, being convinc’d, we had the Eel
at Supper; which was of more Value, since it cost so Dear as almost the
Life of so gallant a Man. (p. 47)
If there is a title to this
little episode, it would possibly be, as hinted at the close of what preceded
it, an emblem about how Oroonoko fought with a tiger. Showing off the heart he had cut out of the
beast, the black hero is said to followed this adventure with “many fine
Discourses; of Accidents in War, and Strange Escapes” (p. 46). Such a strange escape seems thus to exemplify
his curiosity and courage, but this title is inadequate to the more complex
emblem we have seen displayed in the text.
The next example will make this more evident.
NOTES
[ii] Norman
Simms, “’Devoured by Wild Animals’:
Jewish Iconography of the Serpent” in Saundaryashri Studies of Indian
History, Archaelogy, Literature & Philosophy (Festschrift to Professor
Anantha Adiga Sundara), 5 vols., ed. P. Chenna Reddy (Sharada Publishing House, 2009).
[iii] “Devoured by Wild
Animals: Trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress in the Children of São Tomé” Revista Lusófona das Religiões 5:9/10
(2006) 164-179.
[iv] Tony Stroobant in his
PhD thesis cites a key authority in his statement that, “’by the mid [19th]
century,’ says Gilman (1994, p. 370), ‘being black, being Jewish, being
diseased, and being “ugly” came to be inexorably linked.’ The idea that Jews were ‘black’ derived from
19th century theories of race…that regarded dark-skinned people as
inferior to white-skinned, commonly in terms of being mentally deficient
(Gilman, 1985, pp. 148-9), and sexually voracious (Gilman, 1985, p. 109). ‘Jews
were quite literally seen as black,’ says Gilman (1994, p. 372). ‘Adam Gurowski, a Polish noble, ‘took every
light-colored mulatto for a Jew’ when he first arrived in the United States in
the 1850s.’” (Stroobant, The Wandering
Jew, p. 134). The identification of
Jews with dark-skinned, negroid peoples is earlier, as Behn’s narrative shows,
and is based on the Mediterranean and Arabic features of Sephardic Jews in
Iberia, North Africa and the Levant.
[v] These points are
discussed in Norman Simms, “The Early Jewish Settlement in Surinam and Aphra
Behn’s Oroonoko as a Converso Novel” Journal of Unconventional History 11:1 (1999) 57-89; and Aphra
Behn: A Conversa from Surinam” in Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and
Guyonne Leduc, eds., Aphra Behn
(1640-1689) Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000)
pp.215-224.
[vi] I first discussed
these points almost twenty-five years ago.
See Norman Simms, "On the Fringes:
Translation and Pseudo-Translation in Intercultural Encounters"
(Aphra Behn, Oroonoko and Daniel
Defoe, The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe) in What Price Glory in Translations, ed. Anne Paolucci (Whitestone,
N.Y.: Griffon House, 1987), pp.13-26.
[vii]
Norman Simms, “Fantasia, Enargeia
and the Rabbinical Midrash: The Classical Way to Read Jewish Texts” Literature
& Aesthetics 19: 2 (December
2009) 10-24.
[viii] These
terms—fable (what is fabulous), mythic (what pertains to supernatural
things) and poetic (what is created
by poesis, verbal making according to
the rules and precedents of literary authorities)—will be discussed later.
[ix] On the
one hand, curiosity is a term much
discussed in Apuleius’s Golden Ass; or,
Metamorphoses, where it imputes to the protagonist—a young student on
holiday in northern Greece on the boundaries with barbarous lands—an impetuous,
foolhardy compulsion to break rules, to try out dangedrous things, and leads
him to a transformed status as an ass, a strange position of being to see and
hear what human beings are usually not privy to. On the other hand, experiment or experience are terms that do not yet distinguish
between personal experience and objective experimentation, yet both terms carry
within them the sense of a trial, a testing, an ordeal that shows what is true
about a person’s character..
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