Sunrise with Seamonsters (25 page)

Each day, she and her sister-islands looked different. We had seen them from the cliffside of Slea Head, and on that day they had the appearance of sea monsters—high backed creatures making for the open sea. Like all offshore islands, seen from the mainland, their aspect changed with the light: they were lizard-like, then muscular, turned from gray to green, acquired highlights that might have been huts. At dawn they seemed small, but they grew all day into huge and fairly fierce-seeming mountains in the water, diminishing at dusk into pink beasts and finally only hindquarters disappearing in the mist. Some days they were not there at all; on other days they looked linked to the peninsula.

It became our ambition to visit them. We waited for a clear day, and it came—bright and cloudless. But the boat looked frail, a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor. The children were eager; I looked at the high waves that lay between us and Great Blasket and implored the boatman for reassurance. He said he had never overturned—but he was young. On an impulse I agreed and under a half-hour later we arrived at the foreshore on the east of the main island, soaking wet from the spray.

No ruin in Ireland prepared us for the ruins on Great Blasket. After many years of cozy habitation—described with good humor by Maurice O'Sullivan in
Twenty Years A-Growing
(1933)—the villagers were removed to the mainland in 1953. They could no longer support themselves: they surrendered their island to the sneaping wind. And their houses, none of them large, fell down. Where there had been parlors and kitchens and vegetable gardens and fowl-coops there was now bright green moss. The grass and moss and wildflowers combine to create a cemetery effect in the derelict village, the crumbled hut walls like old gravemarkers.

I think I have never seen an eerier or more beautiful island. Just beyond the village which has no name is a long sandy beach called White Strand, which is without a footprint; that day it shimmered like any in Bali. After
our picnic we climbed to Sorrowful Cliff and discovered that the island which looked only steep from the shore was in fact precipitous, "Sure, it's a wonderful place to commit suicide," a man told me in Dunquin. A narrow path was cut into the slope on which we walked single file—a few feet to the right and straight down were gulls and the dull sparkle of the Atlantic. We were on the windward side, heading for Fatal Cliff; and for hundreds of feet straight up rabbits were defying gravity on the steepness. The island hill becomes such a sudden ridge and so sharp that when we got to the top of it and took a step we were in complete silence: no wind, no gulls, no surf, only a green-blue vista of the coast of Kerry, Valencia Island and the soft headlands. Here on the lee side the heather was three feet thick and easy as a mattress. I lay down, and within minutes my youngest child was asleep on his stomach, his face on a cushion of fragrant heather. And the rest of the family had wandered singly to other parts of the silent island, so that when I sat up I could see them prowling alone, in detached discovery, trying—because we could not possess this strangeness—to remember it.

Towards the end of a life he had spent largely in disguise—he was now sixty—Daniel Defoe sat down to write a book he hoped would clear him of debt. In his first novel, perhaps the first real novel in English, he gave shape to the oldest dream of Western man: he created a castaway Adam and marooned him in Eden. Although one must conclude that by the end of the novel Crusoe is a model colonist and has reduplicated in clumsy island artifacts the England he knew, it is also pretty certain that
Robinson Crusoe
contains most of the essential props of the exotic. The mild climate, the wild goats which provide food and clothing, the fruit trees, the fertile soil, and by happy accident a loyal servant willing to renounce cannibalism—it is a dream setting to which Crusoe brings homely skills (one of the triumphant chapters concerns his bread-making). Crusoe prospers in this island world. He ridicules money, he calls his hut his "castle", he has a tremendous sense of power, he is happy. It is the ultimate success story: he has regained Paradise.

The exotic dream, not always outlandish, is a dream of what we lack and so crave. It may be the plump odalisque squinting from her sofa with her hands behind her head, or else a glimpse of palm trees—the palm tree is the very emblem of the exotic: or else power, or riches, fine weather, good health, safety. It is the immediately recognizable charm of the unfamiliar, so the grizzled herdsman with his bullock in stony Kafiristan counts as much as the dancing girl. And something more: the exotic is elsewhere. The word itself implies distance, as far from the world of politics and scheming as Prospero's island is from Venice. It is the magic of travelers' tales, the record of enormous journeys of quest and discovery—the heroism of these returned travelers is the glorious note of enchantment in their stories. The legacy is both fictional (Odysseus and Othello) and historical (Marco Polo and Raleigh). But the notion is more than a bookish conceit. We would have a fairly clear idea of what the exotic means even without the occasions that art offers the imagination.

It seems as natural to dream of the exotic as to dream at all. We are born with the impulse to wonder and, eventually, to yearn for the world before the Fall in which we may be the solitary Crusoe (with his bad conscience
he is rather more credible than Adam); and who has not dreamed of being a princeling with a jeweled sword, marching across an eastern caliphate? In a sense, the literature comes later. Because the dream's perfection emphasizes that it is unattainable, man searches for proof that it is not. And whatever fantasy one has reveals one's peculiar hunger. It might be very simple: the island paradise. Or it might be complex: the oriental kingdom of silks and plumes.

And between Tahiti and Istanbul, the pretty island and the fabled city which are two of the exotic's frontiers, there is a middle zone that combines palm trees and riches, the exotic of India and China—
nautch
girls,
howdahs,
the pink palace, the court, and the sahib's pipe-dream of himself in stately repose. The frontiers are actual. It is possible with a model globe and a free afternoon to sketch the geography of the exotic. Isn't it a large rectangle on the other side of the earth, with lines running from Samarkand south to Africa and east through Peking to the Pacific? It is Persia and Egypt, Arabia and Burma, Central Asia and the tropics. Its capital—at its geographical center—is Shangri-La. The cruellest irony is that most of the lands comprise what is commonly known these days as The Third World, but nothing is more valuable than that irony in suggesting that the exotic is partly illusion.

It must be. How else could it contain so much of what we regard as ideal? And the exotic is not Christian—that is undoubtedly part of its appeal; it is not usually religious, it is never political in the harsh rigged-up sense (unless one regards the young chieftain in his silly hat as a political figure). With the Christian element removed, the concept of innocence is unnecessary—the word itself is meaningless. But gentleness is implied, for the exotic very often calls to mind a peaceable kingdom, an aristocracy in which every dream girl is a princess and every man a warrior. The contradiction is that the girls in the seraglio are seen to be virginal and the warriors rather comic and harmless—their antique weapons might be garden tools (it is a fact that in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, weapons—the long knife and the axe—
are
garden tools as well). The exotic image is not explicitly erotic but often subtly sensual, which is perhaps why we seldom associate elderliness with exoticism, and so often, in imagining this world, conceive a mental image of youth, of children and the child-like. Part of the formula which goes to make up this dream relates to time. In the world of the exotic, which is always an old world peopled by the young or the ageless, time stands still.

It goes almost without saying that the exotic notion is a Western dream, a hankering for the East. The ancient Chinese had the nautical skill of the Europeans, and they navigated as far as the East Africa coast. But the Chinese map of the world, in which China was—as it is called even now—
Chung Guo,
"The Middle Kingdom", showed the oceans as filled with tiny islands of no significance, populated by devils and barbarians and hairy monsters. Lord Macartney's embassy to China was regarded by the Chinese as something of a joke; they laughed at Lord Amherst, they laugh still as Americans stumble along the Great Wall. Their dreams are inward. The search-stories, the travelers looking for fabled cities, the dream of a return to desert island simplicity, have a Western, Christian source: the European sought his opposite in imagining the exotic. He needed a word to express a refinement of the foreignness he found attractive; with the word "exotic" (which receives inadequate definition in the dictionary) he nailed it down.

The more I reflect on
Robinson Crusoe
the more convinced I become that it is confusing to deal with the exotic as a literary idea. It is all right to begin with a book—the concreteness of fiction is helpful to provoke thought; but after that the exotic asserts its ambiguity. I think its ambiguity ought to remain smoky and allusive: the image is half vapor anyway and cannot be fixed. And some of it is almost too unbearably detailed to be given fictional form. It seems quite appropriate that after dozing over
Purchas His Pilgrimes,
Coleridge woke and tried to describe his "Vision in a Dream", the city of Xanadu and Kubla Khan's Pleasure Dome. Similarly, his faltering is predictable, for he was stopped like a man dazzled by an overwhelming brilliance and on second thought put the blame on the person from Porlock (who had come to collect a debt: how much further could one be from the exotic than in confronting the plain fact of this intruder?). The exotic is really too beautiful or unlikely for words. It is worth mentioning that Samuel Purchas's book (1613) was partly based on Hakluyt's
Voyages
(also the source of some of Shakespeare's exoticism in
The Tempest
). But dreamers are not always readers, and they are seldom travelers.

No exotic dreams in fiction have ever compared with the visual dreams we see in paintings or photographs. Bosch in prose would be as unreadable as the most celebrated dream-fiction of all time,
Finnegans Wake
, a tumultuous obfuscation wherein Joyce's labors only demonstrate that the written word gives us little access to dreams. Language is a thicket: the unpronounceable merely confounds us and turns us away; the thwarted dream becomes nightmare. Defoe suggested a savage exotic, Coleridge wrote the prologue for a lush version, Elizabethan travelers reported on cities of gold and the dramatists they inspired made these cities idyllic; for Milton, the exotic was "the Golden Chersonese" of the Far East, for Kipling it was the stinks and stratagems of the bazaar. Some, like Pierre Loti, wrote about what they saw; others, like Robert Louis Stevenson, had a fantasy of the exotic long before they were able to witness it as travelers. Early in his life, Stevenson wrote:

I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie.

"As an ailing youth in Heriot Row," James Pope Hennessy wrote of Stevenson in Edinburgh, "he had dreamed of an active life in exotic surroundings." It is like Fallen Man, marked with the sin of illness, yearning for a second chance to be Adam. For the last four years of his life, in Vailima, Samoa, Stevenson saw and understood what he had imagined so many years before. He had gone in search of the exotic. But some did not risk the journey. The vulgarity in the Tarzan books of Edgar Rice Burroughs (who never left the United States, but who fuelled his imagination on the work of Henry Morton Stanley) seems an accurate rendering of the jungly exotic because it is complete and, of course, because being wholly imaginary it confirms our stereotype of Africa. Yet the written word is somehow not enough. The exotic image is private and fantastic. It is so hard to share such a vision.

The challenge to fiction is an obvious truth: thought is pictorial. We don't dream gray pages of print; we see faces and landscapes, we are animated by the particularities of light, we think in pictures. And although the exotic is vivid in the reckonings of painters—the mental travelers like Blake, or else actual travelers who made careers for themselves by finding the exotic scenes they were to depict in their paintings, such as Zoffany and the Daniells—it was not until the invention of photography that it was possible to prove to the skeptics and reassure the dreamer that the travelers, the painters and poets had not been fancifully indulging themselves in a private vision.

Photography is alone among art forms in having a birthdate. After 1822, when the Frenchman Niepce made the first permanent photograph, the world was accessible to us in pictures. Almost from the first the exotic was considered an important subject for the camera. And no longer could the exotic be disputed as illusion or dismissed as fantasy.

Here was the evidence: from Samoa, the
matai'
s daughter, in her virgin's head-dress, bare-breasted and pigeon-toed before a hibiscus hedge, modestly clutching at her coconut leaf skirt; or from India, the
nautch
girls in stiff clothes and bangles and nose-jewels, very tiny and serious and young, not voluptuous but bearing a resemblance to painted and written reports; the
fakir
knotted on his mat, his legs twisted in two arches behind his head and his serene chalk-white face; the homely grandeur of the Zulu woman delousing her preoccupied husband with patient concentration; the pudgy Turkish girls in a vaguely vicious room; the Indians with flutes who seem wilfully to ignore the upright cobras they
have charmed (and to the right, one supine snake—perhaps tone-deaf—making for the camera); a dwarf witch from Darjeeling with coins on her palms, the heavily bandaged corpse on a ghat awaiting combustion, a family group of head-hunters posed like picnickers, a donkey cart of shrouded women and children pausing in an Arabian street for their strangeness to be verified; camels and elephants, and landscapes—deserted beaches and steppes, the emblematic palms, water mirroring wilderness, flowers so strange they had yet to be named.