Performing On The Beaches of The Mind An Essay (Greg Dening)

Wesleyan University
Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay

Author(s): Greg Dening
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 1-24
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3590841
Accessed: 25-03-2017 06:51 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Wesleyan University, Wiley are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
History and Theory
This content downloaded from 103.229.203.250 on Sat, 25 Mar 2017 06:51:36 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
History and Theory 41 (February 2002), 1-24 ? Wesleyan University 2002 ISSN: 0018-2656
PERFORMING ON THE BEACHES OF THE MIND: AN ESSAY*
GREG DENING
ABSTRACT
History-the past transformed into words or paint or dance or play-is always a

mance. An everyday performance as we present our selective narratives about w
happened at the kitchen table, to the courts, to the taxman, at the graveside. A quit
performance when we present it to our examiners, to the collegiality of our discip
whenever we play the role of "historian." History is theater, a place of thea (in the
a place of seeing). The complexities of living are seen in story. Rigidity, patter, and
will always destroy the theater in our history performances. That is because we ar
modem. The novelists, the painters, the composers, the filmmakers give us the tr
our day, alert us to the fictions in our non-fiction, and give us our freedoms.
How do I persuade anyone that the above theory is true? By thea, by seeing its
By performing. I have a true story to tell about beaches and those who cross them
Gauguin, Herman Melville, and I.
I.THE FLIGHT OF THE YOLLA
Every year in late September, if I am lucky, I can look down from the desk wh
I do much of my writing, across the tops of eucalyptus trees, over the beach a
rocky coastline, and see for hours a long black procession of birds snaking i
way south around the headlands and into bays.
"Kaoha!" I say to them. "Welcome home!" They are the yolla-the shearw
ters, the "short-tailed shearwaters," "slender billed puffins," Puffinus tenuirostr
"moon-birds," "mutton-birds." They are on the last leg of their 30,000-km circ
of the Pacific. Their line ripples and rolls as one living body. In their hundreds
thousands, they look to be in direct, determined, and undistracted flight. They a
flying home to nest where they nested last year, and who knows how many ye
before that.
I see hundreds of thousands of yolla in a stream maybe ten meters deep a

fifty meters wide. Matthew Flinders from the thirty-three-foot longboat, Norfo
in which he charted these southern Australian waters in 1798, calculated that
saw a 100 to 150 million of them in a stream fifty to eighty meters deep and
This essay was presented in part originally as the keynote address to the "Past Performan
Conference at Wesleyan University, April 25-27, 2001. The author wishes to thank the Center for
Humanities and especially the convenor of the conference, Tavia Turkish, for their support and
pitality. He is happy to record, as well, how much he learned from the other participants in the c
ference. For quotations and references, see the Endnotes.
2 GREG DENING
meters or more wide. Civilizat

of the perhaps two million ye
The birds sustained convict se
off in uncontrolled frenzy. The
thousand years at least, the fir
where the yolla are my neighb
James Cook saw these yolla in
ern summer on the last voyag
first images of these "short-t
exquisite drawings of them in
winged shearing, arcing flight
up the weather side of the w
food, they are as part of the g
painting. But they are not reall
summer warms the northern w
bring to the surface the krill,
Cook had first seen the yolla
as she approached the coast of
April. The yolla were on the s
will drive them northeast abo
the first leg. There they will v
and drive north to the Japan S
north as 710. If all conditions
over a month, more than 300
skimming, diving. The warm
will force a fast on them. The
America and across the vast Pacific east of the Tuamotus will be more life threat-
ening. In the years in which the cool waters of the Humboldt Current up the west
coast of South America do not reach out into the Pacific-during El Nifio-the
yolla are likely to falter and die in huge numbers.
These remarkable birds soar and scythe and knife their way over a vast space
of sea and islands. They have time and space imprinted in their bodies. They
have ways of interpreting signs that they have never seen before, in ways I can-
not explain to you, nor science to us all.
I will call that vast space they circuit "Oceania." It has had other names these
past four hundred years-"South Seas," "Pacific," and currently "Sea of
Islands." The peoples who lived on its islands for the two thousand years before
that would call the great ocean in their different dialects "Moana."
I'll keep to the name Oceania. Oceania is a lived-in space as much as a natur-
al vastness. It is a tracked-on space. The wakes of ships and canoes that have
crossed it have left no permanent mark on its waters. But if we voyaged in a New
20,000 Leagues under the Sea, looking up to the canopy of the sea's surface
above us and had a sort of time-exposure vision, we would find the tracks a
closely woven tapestry of lines. Very few of these lines would be random. They
PERFORMING ON THE BEACHES OF THE MIND 3
are all directed in some way by systems of knowledge: of stars, of

tance -and of purpose: of trade, of empire, of science, of way-findi
many other tracks, too, of whales in seasonal migration, of tuna, o
too, more mysteriously, are directed by systems of knowledge.
I call this enveloping of space with knowledge, "encompassing."
Encompassing is imprinting this island-seascape with spirit and life-human,
animal, vegetable. For nearly fifty years now, I have dreamed of Encompassing
Oceania. It is my current project, my current performance. I want to see, hear,
write, and reflect the double space and time of Oceania. The flight of the yolla is
my metaphor for encompassing Oceania. The yolla encompass Oceania every
year in their twelve-year life span. I would like to do it just once in my mind.
II. PERFORMING
The past I visit-the two-hundred-year past that I visit-is on paper. Mo

Sometimes it is in things with human creativity encapsulated in them- sh
ornaments, art, buildings, landscape. A two-hundred-year past is beyond ex
ence and memory, though, and beyond the radar of our various electronic re
ing systems. There are no voices from two hundred years ago, no smells,
touches, no movement.
No, the two-hundred-years past I visit is stilled onto paper, millions of pi
of paper. Written-on paper. One-off pieces of paper, mostly without copy
printed paper. Hand-written paper. Script. The first mark of my history is a
a pen's or a pencil's. My first performance as a historian is to be a reader.
those first readings I make are always shaped by the transience of the mome
which they were made. The hand that writes them is still trembling with ang
fear or sorrow. Or it is scribbled in a hurry. Or it is flourished with power.
stained or burnt on its edges, or blotted. It is corrected and erased. It belon
times that are as long or short or broken or continuous as the human exper
that sustains it.
To visit my two-hundred-year past, I read. I read to write. Actually, I rea

live. Reading for me is life. I love the dance on the beaches of the mind that
ing is. I read fast and slow. I slow-read poetry. I slow-read the sacred texts in
life. I soak up the timelessness of their words. These sacred texts look like t
are bound to time but they are not. Their meaning stretches out to me beyon
meanings their writers ever had. I easily fly over their contradictions and e
and know what truth they hold for me.
I read fast most of the time. That is because reading books, as distinct f
reading the written-on pages of my two-hundred-year past--reading books i
conversation with the world. My eyes are ahead of my mind when I read fa
gobble sentences, paragraphs, pages whole. There is a white noise in the back
my mind as I read. It is the babble of worldwide conversations that affect
thinking. I'm in conversation with novelists, philosophers, anthropologists,
torians, critics in this sort of reading. It is full of erotic, ecstatic moments
4 GREG DENING
I think that what they are say

going to say it better!
So I agree with a reader like M
lenging reflections in The Pr
Reading, in his view, is a cre
page, imaginary or meditative
paragraph on paragraph, page
My performance as a reader
sive, a mirror to someone else
but my mind is soaring.
I am an observer in my readi
the past. I read to write true st
when I am observing. I cannot
what I see and hear. It is my
observe. I recognize, I understan
is not a word that I read that
which it is used, for the relatio
a part. Nothing I observe is so
in some way, not interconnect
or structure. Nothing is so bo
doesn't jump out of that box i
psychological, that is not also
I read to write true stories, I
respond. Stories need to be ho
nizably human. Even the most
recognizably human. Stories d
to be generically true.
My true stories are somethin
past. If I claim to represent it
own independence. I owe it a g
ry I write will always be mine
part of it that is never mine.
of my knowing that or how i
that I have always something
I write to give back to the p
place to catch that tenuous, tr
paper. I am a pilgrim and init
piece of paper never comes to
housed. Wherever it is housed
to be obeyed to read it-gloves
logs to be signed in and out of
There is always theater and p
Manuscript Rooms. Humbling
eyed librarians. Dissembling r
roles sharpening pencils on a noisy pencil sharpener. Outraged

10,000 miles to see this" roles when denied access to critical mater
plenty of theater in the archives.
Our performance in the archives is marked by two characteristics,
one is our sense of "being there." The other is our performance cons
"Being there" is that feeling for the past that can only be matched by
the days, the weeks, the months, the years I sit at the tables in the
an assurance that my extravagance with time here is rewarded with
that comes in no other way. It is an overlaying of images one on the
realization that knowledge of the past is cumulative and kaleidosco
gantly wasteful of my energy.
The name of our game is persuasion, not domination. Our perfor
let others perform. The extravagance of our engagement in the ar
always give our language richness, our images color and sharpness,
ments conviction, our examples pertinence, our selection an informe
"Being there" where the past leaves itself most particularly is our si
ture in research performance. Without it we are just literary critics.
There are delusions in "being there." Of course there are. The dis
anthropology knows them only too well. "Being there" can too often
on an experience that can't be checked or even shared. A claim of "b
is blind arrogance if it is not accompanied by performance conscio
There is a double quality in performance. Performance is always to
an audience, a reader, self. In the loneliness of research and writing
body else might only be oneself. But when there are others, it is alw
oneself. In performance we research and write in stereo consciousn
formance we are theater critics in the foyer of our minds. We are m
effectiveness of what we are doing against the reception in the audi
always measuring what we do against the ideals and ambitions we ha
it. In performance, we know our own tricks to hide what we don't
know the masks (the persona) of our own person. That stereo cons
our strength. It is our realism in a postmodern world.
I'm a storyteller. A true storyteller. You are true storytellers, too
performance, true storytelling. Sometimes, our performance is live.
An exchanged performance. The audience performs to me, the stor
much as I to them. They perform with their silences and their fidget
polite-but-not-yet-committed seminar faces. I read their signals in t
mance. I calibrate their silences -engaged silences, disapproving sile
ing silences. I measure the spontaneity of their responses. I adjust m
and speed to them. I'll move from my text. I'll catch their eye. I'll i
into my voice to stop their attention slipping away.
This is our performance as true storytellers, as makers of history.
one another, not randomly, but in disciplined discourse. We hear in c
read for ourselves. We write for others. We travel. We lock ourselves in
and archives. We observe. We reflect. We claim authority, but hav
6 GREG DENING
power than to-persuade. We ma

about awful and cruel realities.
We tell our stories, but there is
er sentence to be added to the
another slant on the story that w
inality. That's our pledge: "This
the depths of our own intellectu
Marx, Sigmund Freud, and so m
So is our postmodernity, whe
everyday living performances
ing -how liberated we have been
tors, novelists, and poets on ou
al performers in our own times
body, all the senses, all the em
Performance art has given us a
We know that formulaic mono
convince, change, enter into
way. We have to be artful. We
cepts and words, but from t
mouthing soundlessly, like gold
nity. Not our postmodernism. O
There is art and science in del
for our readers, their enlighten
all certain products of our perf
learned enough about paradigm
twenty years to know that the
be divorced from their content
anymore than they can be all ar
our reviews for the "but" that
she writes well, but. . . ." Pers
ence-in the exhaustiveness of
only our discipline but of the d
the degrees of our certainties a
We know some things about pe
are constantly observers of oth
what confuses us. We know wh
standing. We know that the ene
ualism. Rigidity and patter will
know when we have heard a sto
badly. Perhaps the most impor
suaded by overpowering kno
called this preoccupation a pep
extraneous, uncontexted facts t
we want to know are all the rea
What we really want to know is how the other performer is joining

tion we are already having in our own heads.
Victor Turner, with that linguistic tricksterism that he loved to play
that the *per in words like "experience" and "performance" comes f
European root phrase meaning "to risk," "to venture." There is alway
performance. There is a commitment which cannot be taken back onc
mance has begun, once we step onto the page, once we give our disse
examiners, our book to the reviewers. If only we had another rehears
had 10,000 more words, if only we had another deadline. ... No, there
fection in performance. We have to gamble on what we do in the condit
we do it. The search for perfection only strikes us dumb, only gives us
Our gaze at the moment is on "Past Performances." There is an a
the phrase. Are these past performances in the past? Or are they
mances of the past? I would like to think that they are both.
All my academic teaching life, I taught the past by asking my stud
describe something of their present. It wasn't a surrender to presen
method of teaching my students to recognize what performances
might be. "Ethnogging," they used to call it with affectionate disre
to ask them to "emplot," in Aristotle's word of the theater (mytho
different in their daily living. The different could be large-across
across beliefs, across disabilities, across the ways people ritualize t
Mostly the different was ordinary-across gender, across age, acro
Difference is always hard to see. It always requires a little giving
old, old to young; black to white, white to black; male to female, fe
Seeing difference always requires entering somebody else's metapho
requires catching the interconnectedness between the different part
understand difference, you have to see the system in it.
If difference is hard to see, it is even more difficult to describe.
particular about the ways that my students described difference. Th
a poem about it, or a play. They could paint it, video it, make a tape
whatever they did, they had to make theater of it, and by prologu
put what they thought they were doing into words.
I used to say to them that culture is in the end talk. Talk in all
which meanings are symbolized--in gesture, in color, in style, in sp
is talk in all its symbolized ways, but mostly the talk is in words.
Difference in words is usually in the silence of words, the things
don't say. The "ethnoggers" real problem is a problem of translati
silences. How do they do that? They must use their imaginations. N
tasies, their imaginations. Imagination is finding a word that someo
a metaphor that someone will see. Imagination is taking the clich6 o
thing that has been said over and over again. Imagination is workin
in our non-fictions the better to be read.
Their ethnographies must be art. There is no art in multiplying the

Art is the dismantling of reifications. In art there is one cultural m
8 GREG DENING
difference has a sameness. Ever

every gesture has a theory. In a
ness of a poet, the discontinuity
If culture is talk, it is not all
dramatics. It has theater. Whe
when they came to inscribe no
ing, but also what they had exp
had to realize that they would
needed to understand that no on
to experience truth in some wa
tions about what they meant. T
same theater that life is itself. T
It will have to dance and sing. I
We are in conference mode to
Performances." We have put b
that we might share each other
Dewey would have called "an" e
sciousness. Experience is someth
flow of things. We humans are
and time to have our experie
time- in-between ordinary l
between other conversations, i
called this hedged-around space
limen, threshold, or in a metap
years, a beach.
I want to say that to perform
want to say that in performing
III. BEACHES
Beaches. My life with all its memories is filled with them. My books are a
ten beside a beach or overlooking one or within the sound of one's wave
write now, the combers on the beach below my window roll into a cont
rush of sound. It is the white noise that separates my mind from my body a
me think to write.
There is hardly a week that I don't walk a beach. These days I can't walk
soft white sand. There is too much pain and reminders of mortality in that.
to cross to reach a beach drains energy and resolve. The beach I walk is th
wet sand at the sea's edge. It is an edge that moves with the tide and each
in the tide, of course. So, unless it is barefoot, the walk meanders just bey
reach of the largest wave in a set-always the ninth, don't the fishermen
This glistening strand between high and low tide is my freedom trail
myself as I walk. I write in my mind. The waves are my worry beads. It i
between space in an in-between space. The last reach of the sea soaks in
sand. On one side, colonies of gulls and terns dry themselves on the
On the other, the sea side, gannets dive into the troughs betwe
Occasionally dolphins are to be seen surfing in the green transpare
waves. In the soak of the sea, life stirs almost immediately as the cra
ble. Worms and pipi wander just below the surface, sucking life fro
seeping into their world. Sandpipers ballet after the retreating wave
This wet stretch between land and sea is the true beach, the true
space. Among the peoples of Oceania about whom I write--the mao
the enata of the Marquesas, the kamaiana of Hawai'i-it is a sacr
space, an unresolved space where things can happen, where things
to happen. It is a space of transformation. It is a space of crossings.
Yesterday, when I felt the need to reflect on what it meant to wr
beach is a "space of transformation," "a space of crossings," I went f
my favorite beach. It was the first day of the southern hemisphere
tide was low. The soak of the sea was a glistening twenty yards wide
curves for five miles in the shelter of hills just a road-width back. Th
ing harbor at one end behind a rock groyne. Squid boats shelter the
lights at night like UFOs on the horizon of the sea. At the other end
the beach ends, as so many Australian beaches end, with a small st
against a rocky headland. That stream is always my walking goal.
This first day of summer was brilliant. Pale blue sky, deep blue
white, white foam. Oceanographers tell us that at any one time 2% o
surface is under sea foam. That is pretty in-between. The breeze beat
green, green hills. The spring rains still hold their effect. It is a steady
right for the hang-gliders who float above my head. That is an in-b
that I haven't dared try.
I'm thinking beaches, of course, as I walk. And crossings. A very
thing happened to me in this last year. Fenuaenata, The People of th
Marquesans, through their Association Eo' Enata, published a French
of Islands and Beaches in a splendid edition. It was a great honor f
humbled to be giving these sad and silent islands a history that they
before read.
Islands and Beaches (1980) was an important book for me. Forty-five years
ago I made a discovery that changed my life. I discovered that I wanted to write
the history of Oceania in a double-visioned way. I wanted to write the history of
Pacific islands from both sides of the beach. I began to read the voyagers -Cook,
Bougainville, Bligh, Vancouver, La Pdrouse--then the whalers' logs, missionary
letters, beachcombers' journals, not so much to tell their stories as to see what
their unseeing eyes were seeing, life on the other side of the beach as the
islanders actually lived it, not as it was framed in the mind-galleries of outsiders.
What attracted me most of all were the beachcombers, those who left their ships
and "went native," those who crossed beaches.
Beachcombers. There were hundreds of them in the years I was interested in-
the mutineers of the Bounty among them. They were a peculiar breed. They were
10 GREG DENING
as varied as humanity itself, and

dal to the societies they left, deem
men (there were no women amon
take. They soon found that their
wise, they did not bring any ma
from them, with their lives if th
was all the cultural and social sup
they were. To survive, they had t
guage first of all. They had to bo
ships. They had to be good mimi
tures and understand the ways in
color or a shape or a look.
So for me, who wanted to see a
more than most. I began to "see"
beachcomber's eyes, Edward Rob
beachcomber, William Pascoe Croo
experiences in the Land. Islands
Islands and Beaches freed me in
in the theater of cross-cultural
allowed me to escape the tunnel
many ways in which there are li
mented structurally in the book,
endeavor, narrative and reflectio
especially by giving back to E
thing of their own identity in ho
more importantly, how they stru
(enata) and stranger (haoe). It was
ties of our cross-cultural gaze.
"Life is a Beach," the tee-shirts
beach, though the truth of that i
imply. Life is the marginal space
afters. All of living is a crossing.
It is the process in these crossing
the change. Not essences and pola
How does one catch creative unfo
the flow of things, and so migh
describes the world as things. "To
Terror wants," Jean-Francois Lyo
slant on the idea: "All reification
by making the petrified world sp
ry that avoids both the Terror and
Poetry might keep my words a
to tell my stories in poetry, or a
more ambitious than that, thoug
even one beach crossing. They are all there--yours, mine--whethe

or not, whether we like it or not.
All living is in flow, but our cultural living is sentenced, paragr
tered. In all the passage moments, in all the crossing moments, of
life--in becoming adult, or married, or healthy, or educated--in all
ing moments of roles-gender, age, status, kin-the normal times o
interrupted by times of defining, moments of marking, occasions o
We sometimes call these marking and abnormal times ritual. They
theater: moments of in-between, moments of seeing, moments of
Beaches. Let me be a storyteller of beach crossings of others and ca
of living and telling on the beaches of my own mind.
There is no beach without sea, no sea without sky, no sky withou
curve. In the view from the beach, the forefront is all detail and m
history, one is tempted to say. But the ordered restlessness of the w
the gaze, dissolves attention into reflection. From a beach, things
glim of the horizon and in the shimmer of the mind's eye. From a bea
sible to see beyond one's horizons. Beaches breed expansiveness
do, anyway.
IV. HERMAN MELVILLE AND I
I am flying over an immense ocean. Not shearing, arcing and knifing lik
yolla to be sure. I am sitting nervously behind two gesticulating French
They point to every button on their instrument panel as if it is the subject o
great philosophical or mechanical crisis. It is December 1974. We have just
off from Tahiti's Faa airport in a wet-season storm. We are flying on a nor
tack over 1500 km of open sea to Fenuaenata, the Land of the Native Peo
would not have then called the people Enata or their islands Fenua at that
My visit would give me the cultural courtesy and the academic courage t
them what they called themselves and their land. I would have called the
1974 what the Spanish outsiders called them 400 years ago, the Marquesa
I am apprehensive. The Land and its Natives have already changed my l
But I have been to the Land and met its Natives only in libraries and arch
know that I am Stranger to them, and I know the cost of every Stranger's
sion. The sadness of their story has affected me ever since I began to lea
Inevitably I come with a sense of trespass. Their terrible story and my kno
of it has been the capital of my life. The rewards of twenty years study o
to this time in 1974 have been great. I bring to them in my luggage the p
my academic life to this time, my first book about them. I know all my sh
in that book. I know all its tricks of camouflage for my ignorance. Early
studies of the Land, I had read Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
It had shaken me to my core. In a world of victims, he wrote, there are no
cents. No one can write two-sided history who in some way benefits by
power of the victors. No one can mediate between the disempowered livi
12 GREG DENING
the voiceless dead. All of us writ

or of the Americas or of Africa for that matter-have had to resolve that dilem-
ma for ourselves. No doubt we all do it differently. For me, giving the dead a
voice has been reason enough for my history. I am with Karl Marx, too. The
function of my history is not so much to understand the world as to change it. If
my history by story and reflection disturbs the moral lethargy of the living to
change in their present the consequences of their past, then it fulfills a need. I
have not silenced any voice by adding mine.
It was a near miraculous moment for me when we discovered through a break
in the clouds that we were above the island and the very valley to which I had
been thousands of time in my mind. We touched down on something like the
deck of an aircraft carrier on the island of Hiva Oa.
I remember my emotions as we approached Vaitahu down the straits between

the islands of Hiva Oa and Tahuata, and saw the winds rushing down the valley
to ruffle the waters of the bay. I don't know how many times I have noted that
wind in my notes and how a whaler or a naval vessel dragged its anchors before
it. I stood in sad awe at the place where the Spaniards after celebrating high mass
had recreated a Golgotha scene by placing the bodies of those they had killed on
three stakes and piercing their dead hearts with a spear. I walked about the hill
where the French in 1842 had built their fort from which they had slaughtered
those who had resisted their prostituting the women and enslaving the men and
killing hundreds with their lack of hygiene.
There is a triviality about these places where terrible things have happened
that is mystifying. A place of a massacre becomes a caravan park, a place of sui-
cidal flight becomes a barbecue site. I don't know how one puts history into these
sites, let alone memory, but I am confident that history and social memory will
come to them.
An old man, Teifitu, gave us hospitality. He was a direct descendant of the

haka'iki, or chiefs of the valley. An ancestor of his had been killed by James
Cook's men because he had stolen a halfpenny nail. Another had looked after the
beachcombers I had come to know. Just three generations before, others had
scrawled their signs on the documents giving away their land. The French Ministre
de la Marine insisted the documents should be in triplicate. I had held all three
copies in my own hands in the archives in Paris. I would sit with Teifitu into the
night and in my poor French and poorer Marquesan tried to translate what Edward
Robarts, the beachcomber whose journal I had edited, said to him of his past. I still
have the names he wrote in my field notebook that joined Teifitu to those I knew.
I learned much about crossing cultures from Teifitu on the beach at Vaitahu.
One thing was that I learned to hear the silences within myself. Another thing
was that I learned to discern the continuities that outlive all the discontinuity of
cultural change.
Paul Gauguin lived the last years of his life, 1901-1903, in Fenuaenata. On the
black sand beach at Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa, he had painted Riders on the
Beach. Two hooded riders-death on horseback-lead the other horsemen to an
endless horizon. There is nothing "real" in the painting, no black sand,

bling rocks, no closed bay. Differences are sponged out in his consum
make mythic and universal this art by the last savage of the last sa
doesn't write his beach. He paints it out of his crazy imagination, filled
native myths, shaped by all the art history that flows through his fin
My first ambition on Hiva Oa was to walk the black sand beach
Death had been frequent on that beach. The bay was called Traitor
the boat crews that had been cut off there. But death had come mo
Enata from canoes of their enemies as they came "fishing" for vict
of social crisis or in celebration of some sacred moment in their liv
fishing (e ika) for victims, heana. They would go raiding other islan
leys. They snatched their victims where they could, off the shor
houses. These heana were brought back, sometimes alive, sometim
always in the fashion in which fishermen brought back a catch of t
fish. They were strung on poles, with large hooks in their mouths,
attached to their limbs. When the victims had been killed, their
mocked and played with and parts of bodies were ceremonially eate
were strung up with other sacrifices in the me'ae, the sacred space
Back from the beach-over Gauguin's shoulders as he painted
the dusty roads and up the trails among the silent stone remains. H
a tiki head had been incorporated into a fence. The massive statues
from this valley. You can see them in the museums of the world
eyed and meaningless at the bored crowds. I liked the tiki in the
than all the tiki in the exhibition halls. The tiki in the fences had a
ty. Shadows and flowers gave them a life that spotlights and pedest
Everywhere in the valley of Atuona are empty stone remains. The
platforms on which houses once stood, or stone stages on which pe
danced and feasted, or stone altars in sacred places where sacrific
placed. They were scattered among the trees, overgrown and silent
the valley. They were relics of populations wiped out in the few
their encounter with Euro-American strangers. Diseases for which t
no immunity killed most; but they died more horribly than that
paroxysm in the 1860s, they killed themselves. When they had no
why they were dying in such horrific numbers, they turned to kill
er for the machinations and sorcery they presumed was among th
The missionaries, early in the nineteenth century, hopeless in th
conversion, had focused on destruction of the tapu system, which
was the key to native heathenism. They promised that the native dyin
if the evil of the tapu was broken. They evolved a series of rituals
native gods were challenged to punish broken tapu. Men were
under women's most intimate clothing. Women were asked to walk
sacred objects. The effect was not so much change as emptiness and
lessness. Enata were numb for a while, with liquor as much as cult
14 GREG DENING
Then in the 1860s, here in the v

an old tapu custom, e ika, fishin
1860s, any rebirth of custom w
strous. Whatever balancing prin
of the old ways were now gone.
not across islands and valleys. Th
tic. In a population depleted in fif
sand, they now killed one anothe
The death throes of this valley
place of extraordinary beauty, th
The peak of Temetiu dominates
bends out into the straits towar
sand beach collects the waves
sparkles over a bed of stones. B
Among the silent stones, Gaug
does his playing with the real s
have a monkish feel, enough to
eternal life had brought. The wa
tion of the past will have a drea
never will be voiced.
We paid Gauguin honor. We walked up the hill of Hueakihi to the cemetery.

His grave is easily seen. Amid white cement tombs open to the sun, his is of red-
dish rocks and shaded by a frangipani tree. Seventy-five years after his death one
of Gauguin's final wishes was granted. The cast of a favorite work, a ceramic
sculpture he had called Oviri, was placed on his grave. Oviri was a favorite of
Picasso, too, and inspired him. Gauguin had sculpted Oviri in Brittany on his
return to France after his first trip to Tahiti, just before that terrible brawl that left
him with a wounded leg for life. Gauguin thought it his finest work of art. He
knew it was enigmatic, mysterious. "Oviri" in Tahitian means "wild," "savage."
The woman of the statue is indeed wild, a mixture of incompatible lore. She has
the head of a mummified Marquesan skull. She crushes a wolf under her feet, just
as those most unwild statues of the Virgin crush a serpent. Gauguin put his cus-
tomary signature on the statue, "PGO." That reads as "pego." It is sailors' slang
for "prick." Oviri's wildness creates a disturbing restlessness over the grave. One
cannot think that Gauguin's bones rest in peace.
We went on to Nukuhiva, a hundred miles to the north, on a World War II land-
ing craft. Herman Melville had called his three weeks beachcombing on
Nukuhiva Typee. A Narrative of Four Months Residence among the Natives of a
Valley in the Marquesas Islands; or, A Peep at Polynesian Life. We came along
the sheer, dark cliffs, passed Taipivai, Melville's valley, looking for the white line
of crystalline rock that had been the sign for hundreds of sailing vessels of the
passage into Taiohae Bay. Then we were through.
November 14, 1851 is a special day for Herman Melville. It is the of

lication date of Moby Dick. On that day Melville drives his horse and
his home in Pittsfield in the Berkshire Mountains to nearby Lenox to
ner with Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Curtis Hotel. Hawthorne has j
The House of the Seven Gables. Melville had dedicated Moby Dic
thorne. "In token of my admiration of his genius." The two friends t
writing. "From my twenty-fifth year I date my life," Melville tells
"Three weeks have scarcely passed at anytime between then and now
not unfolded within myself."
Over the previous seven years Melville had written Typee and its
Omoo. He had felt the genius within himself and wrote Mardi to pr
for the money that the public was prepared to pay, but for all his am
American literature. Mardi was a commercial and literary disaster. In
set himself to write something that the public would buy. He wrote
three weeks; White Jacket in twenty sittings.
Then having done his duty and now quite determined to be the se
unfolded within him, he wrote Moby Dick, or "The Whale," which w
inal title. Now, at the Curtis Hotel, Hawthorne and Melville were talk
deep-down ambitions, away from publishers and reviewers, away fro
rible culture of envy of the literary world. It is "the happiest day
life," his biographer, Hershel Parker, writes.
In his twenty-fifth year, in November 1844 to be precise, in a co
untropical winter, in his lawyer brother's Manhattan Nassau St. offic
of paper whose every space he scrimpingly fills, Herman Melville b
writer. He begins his first draft of Tipi, Tipee, Typee.
He began to unfold the life that was in him. "Unfold." It is the righ
The writer in him is unfolding the layers of experience within him: o
St. Lawrence (a New York to Liverpool packet ship), the Acushnet (a
whaler), the Lucy Ann (a Sydney whaler), the Charles and Henry (a
whaler), the United States (a US naval frigate); of captains--Oliver P
Swede), Vincent Pease (Nantucketeer), Henry Ventome (English
Coleman (Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Nantucketeer), Thomas ap Catesb
fiery Virginian and violently contentious commodore); of beaches -
Tahiti, Maui, Oahu.
Unfolded, too, were all the stories that had dramatized these e
Stories told to him in fo'c'sles, on decks, in the yards, in Seamen's
jails. Stories he told himself-in messes, parlors, at the family ta
whose fictions and dramatics got shaped with every telling. Stories w
ences dictated their tone. Stories to entertain, stories to tease, storie
Stories honed in their telling, in their performance.
Folded, too, into his own life experiences were all sorts of vicarious
his readings. As he sat down to describe his arrival in his "cannibal
June 1842, he knew that he had been there in his mind's eye, sixteen
as a nine-year-old boy. That year he had a happy holiday with his e
16 GREG DENING
old cousin, "Langs." "Langs" was n

friend of Langs's father and H
Langsdorff had visited the Marqu
Langsdorff's book about that visit
World (London: Henry Colburn 1
Langsdorff's story is all of tatto
two beachcombers, Edward Robar
The first thing the two boys w
engraving of one of these beachco
pages and there were engraving
Marquesas forever, front and bac
marks, as full as a later Melville'
Portrait of Jean Baptiste Cabri. From

Various Parts of the World [1813] (
Back view of younger inhabitant. Ibid.,Vol. I: Plate VII, p. 119.
Pahutiki, Enata called their fully tattooed bodies. "Wrapped

Neither the nine-year-old nor the twenty-five-year-old Melville w
the tattoos as anything other than exotic ornamentation of the b
could never enter the life- and myth-cycle the images represented
with a diagonal line Melville would have seen running across
Pi'i'e, "running shit," it was called. It came with a "rubbish name" t
tattoo brought. Here was the shit of the gods and the shit of the h
who sponsored the first tattoos. From that moment, at every occas
al and communal special experience--war, peace, sacrifice, marriag
learned-the tattoos would be added to till there was no part of the
tooed. Not the eyelids, not the lips. The body would be all paka ("
("lid"), po'o ("skeleton"). The skin would then be like a crab shell, li
shell over the soft, boundaryless water-life within. Mythic story, to
enclosed that life. Lightning struck out of the eyespots in the war
18 GREG DENING
when he raised his spear to thro

A filigree of half people that his
on his body. When death came,
power would begin to rub his im
off and consume them. When t
power consumed, it was ready to
unwrapped, free flowing water
first time" again.
So at nine years old, Herman M
bals, and his beachcombers as we
the before and after of Melvill
Reading is a dance on the beach
future looks, backward glances,
No beach in reading is pristine. A
sand of the befores, the wet soa
shapes beyond the dunes. It is d
Most of the crew are on the Ac

coast of Nukuhiva. They are a m
from their home port of Fairh
from the Azores, five blacks
Bostonians, Philadelphians. An
what shall we say? Albany-Du
scribe? Herman Melville.
The Acushnet has 700 barrels of whale-oil in her hold, and had sent back
another 175 barrels by another whaler. At a guess, that is perhaps fifteen whales
at sixty barrels a whale. At a guess again, that is forty-five frenetic days of chase,
capture, cutting, boiling, cleaning up. The other 500 days were search-in the
South Atlantic, up the west coast of South America, around the Galapagos and
along the equatorial line. Days of boredom in which men tested their sufferance
of one another, and the limits of the power and authority over them. Days of ugly
labor, engulfed in greasy black smoke, covered in the blood and slime of death.
Days careless of obligations to family and society. Days that would make men
loners, owing nothing, owed nothing. The generosity of others is always a sur-
prise for them. Generosity of others will be the first surprise of their beach.
The Acushnets come with "strangely jumbled expectations," the only writer
among them says. Their "gams"-their meetings with other whalers; there had
been twenty-two of them--their "gams" had filled their ears with yarns that gave
an extravagance to everything about the beach they were about to visit--its dan-
gers, its pleasures, its otherness.
These anticipations became even more strangely jumbled the moment the
Acushnet turned into Taiohae bay and lost her way in the protected waters. They
were not alone. In that vast volcanic cauldron on their starboard side as they
entered were the ships of a French expeditionary force. Admiral Abel Dupetit-
Thouars on his madcap venture of taking possession of the Marquesas

and Louis-Napoleon had arrived at Taiohae on May 31 1842, just t
before the Acushnet.
1,800 sailors, two infantry and artillery companies, and 400 troops had made
their mark in that short time. The land in the eastern part of the bay was scoured
of all vegetation to the end of the treeline on the slopes. They had forgotten to
bring tents and hammocks. Those ashore were tormented by the mosquitoes and
the curse of the island, the noni, a biting gnat. The smoke of constantly lit fires
was their only repellent. Behind a deep trench, palm-leafed barracks and tiled
warehouses for provisions and gunpowder were beginning to appear.
A small hillock jutted out into the waters of the bay. Its top was shaved flat and
scarred with earthworks. Seven cannons dominated the scene. Fort Collet, the
French called it. Fort Collet divided the bay between a native (enata) west and a
foreign (haoe) east. The natives called themselves Teii. "Mafoi! Oui! Oui!," they
heard the French exclaim, and called these foreigners mafaui for it.
Captain Pease of the Acushnet, no doubt realizing that 2,500 ma-foi-oui-ouis
in the bay meant that supplies would be hard to obtain and expensive, anchored
the Acushnet on the west, or native side. The whaler Potomac was already
anchored there; they were only the latest whalers of more than forty to have
anchored at Taiohae in the previous twelve months. There would have been none
of that Dionysiac welcoming that had become one of the myths about arrival in
the Marquesas. Melville had Dionysiac memories, but he was in a time-bubble
in which somebody else's yesterday experiences had become his own of today.
Probably some young girls and some older women swam out to the Acushnet
and plied their trade. But that trade had become more ugly and violent over the
years. The rapes and kidnappings had become too ordinary, the diseases of the
sailors too public, the brutal transience of the whaler's visits too obvious for the
scene to have much charm. There were politics too. They could not see it from
the decks of the Acushnet, but the beach before them seethed with politics. The
beach was divided over what the intrusion of so many strangers meant and what
it did to native life, and how it was to be managed, if not controlled.
The Acushnet anchored at the extreme western end of the bay, opposite a col-
lection of open sheds that housed a dozen or more canoes. There were war
canoes, with their distinctive Marquesan washstrake and breakwaters. There
were smaller outrigger fishing canoes as well. They belonged to a man called
Vaheketou who was the tuhuna avaiki, the actual and ceremonial fisherman of
the valley. He was to be killed accidentally in the days Melville was on the
island. Melville would feel, unknowingly, the ripple effect of that death in far
away Taipivai. The people of the valley would go "fishing," as they called it, for
human sacrifices. No death in a land so disturbed in all its ordinariness by the
intrusion of strangers and their diseases was ever "accidental." Sorcerers were
always thought to be pointing their finger at those who would succumb.
Across the bow of the Acushnet-for more than two hundred years sailors
have advised one another to anchor fore and aft looking north in Taiohae-the
20 GREG DENING
crew could see an idyllic enough

gardenia, coconut, and myrtle s
the waves.
There was a huge banyan tree, fifty meters across. It was alive with birds--the
noisy yellow warbler (komako), green parrots (kuku), blue lorikeets (pihiti), fly-
catchers, kingfishers, pipers, and seabirds, whirling, crying. Perhaps Melville did
not see the birds though. The French officers, under all sorts of delusions about
their length of stay and tropical plenty, already moped over their rancid lard and
vinegared wine. To cope, they had blasted every bird out of the sky in three weeks.
On the foreshore, midway between the canoe sheds and the banyan tree, stood
the most obvious structure in the valley. It was a bastard of a house, an architec-
tural icon of the littered spaces of a beach. It was an "English" house, it was said.
A door and two windows and divided rooms were the mark of its Englishness.
Scavenged materiel from ships and past intrusions were its makings. There was
a flagpole waiting for its flag, which the French were happy to give it.
It was Temoana's house. Temoana was haka'iki of Taiohae. If Temoana had a
beach of a house, Temoana also had a beach of a soul. He used to display it each
evening for the "Acushnets" and anyone else to see. He used to ride the foreshore
on a white stallion that the French had lent him in a red colonel's uniform that
the French had given him. The French had already given him much champagne
and 1,800 francs for the pieces of land on which they were building their bar-
racks and fort. They were offering him 2,000 francs per annum stipend if he
would be their "king" and sign their deeds of possession. He was playing hard to
get. He wanted them to get back his wife first.
Captain Pease had decided that the Acushnet would leave Taiohae on July 11.
Melville was given shore leave with the rest of the starboard watch on July 9. He
knew the opprobrium of "running away." But he knew as well that someone's
"runaway" would easily become someone else's replacement crew. The turnover
in places like the Marquesas was quick. There were eighteen "runaways" at
Taiohae alone in 1842. Melville would lose his "lay," his share of whaling prof-
its, but he probably owed the ship something too. Pease wouldn't just let him go.
There was a beachcomber, Jim Fitch-"Irish Jimmy" - policing the beach for the
French and the whalers. He would return any "runaways" to the ship. Melville,
if he wished to run away from the Acushnet, would have to find some way of
leaving Taiohae.
May through September were Nukuhiva's wet months. The Acushnet's star-
board watch spent a wet shore leave under the canoe hangers. No orgies, no
romance, not much joy. Melville and his mate, Toby Greene, slipped easily away,
some ship's bread, tobacco, and a bolt of cloth for gifts in the folds of their frock
shirts. They would have known that it would have been dangerous to come with
anything else. It was safer for a "runaway" to come near naked to the beach.
Melville and Greene could not follow the four or five paths that led back from
the beach to the interior of the valley and up the slopes to the mountain ridges
around. They went directly up to the ridge behind the canoe hangar and thus had
to move all around the horseshoe ridge to get to the path to a safe va
Taiohae. They missed this in the darkness and rain, and ended up by
the one valley they feared to enter, Taipivai.
Melville did not have to romance the dangerous, slippery trek in th
the edges of the high cliffs, uncertain as they were of where they were
what awaited them when they arrived. An ulcerated tropical sore on h
to the distress of it. His first steps across his beach heighten his fears o
but hunger, pain, discomfort, and disorientation condition his mind
some surrender of self in gratitude to those supposed savages who sav
Melville spends fourteen days among the Taipi, a week of them al
Taipi already had a savage reputation among Melville's future America
Lt. David Porter, commander of the USS Essex, had felt insulted by th
when he made a claim for the first overseas possession of an Ameri
on Nukuhiva, precisely where the French made a claim for theirs. P
defeated by the Taipi ambush and guerrilla tactics when he raided th
punish them. But he returned with a "search and destroy" exercise
ahead of its time, burnt every house of the 2,000-strong population
and killed whom he could. Melville didn't have to elaborate the otherness of the
Taipi. For American readers the "Typee" had the otherness of a native enemy
already known.
Fourteen days of native food, native habitation, native dress, native material
goods. Fourteen days to enter the day and night cycle of native living. Fourteen
days to catch something of the cycle of life and death, of dance and ceremony, of
worship and government. These fourteen days are enough to pepper his story
with reality effects, made the more real as a writer in his brother's Nassau St.
office where he can go back to Langsdorff and even David Porter.
His memory of his beach is like the line drawings of a coloring book. His read-
ing to write gives him the brush to color them in.
Melville has had important experiences of otherness, nonetheless. One was
that difference is a translation. The hospitality, care, and comfort he receives
from these savages is civilization in another dress. It isn't an entry into other peo-
ple's metaphors- not by a long way-but it is a first step in a sense of the rela-
tivity of things.
Another realization for Melville is that if there is civilization on both sides of
the beach, there is also savagery on both sides. He sees the savagery in the
French. He will see it later in missionaries. He sees it in himself. Here is how he
describes his escape from the Taipi.
Even at the moment I felt horror at the act I was about to commit [Melville was escaping
in a whale-boat; Mow-Mow, his perceived captor, was swimming after him] but it was no
time for pity or compunction, and with a true aim, and exerting all my strength, I dashed
the boat-hook at him. It struck him just below the throat, and forced him downwards. I
had no time to repeat my blow, but I saw him rise to the surface in the wake of the boat,
and never shall I forget the ferocious expression of his countenance.
22 GREG DENING
It was the sort of violence, I hav

beaches. It is Melville's surprise t
sees his own violence mirrored in the reflection.
That's my short true story. Since the purpose of our relationship is didactic -here
we are meant to learn from one another-let me play Everyman to my theater.
Let me pull aside the curtains, step out onto the proscenium, and in an Epilogue
tell you what I think you have just read.
Representing the past--re-presenting the past-is always a challenge to per-
form cross-culturally. It always means crossing a beach. It means seeing other-
ness, hearing silences with the same generosity and fluency of spirit, and the
same fullness of experience, that we have in our reading dances. Our perfor-
mance will always be reflective. We always will be mirrored in the otherness, but
it will always be an enlarged self that is reflected, and the more authoritative
because there will be no reflection at all if we have not given something of our-
selves to see and hear otherness. Our performance will always be artful, some-
thing other than the past that we present. Our creativity will always be obliged
by the ideals of truthfulness. Why that should be so, I cannot say. Perhaps I
should end with that declaration and witness. The ultimate performance for a his-
torian is truthfulness.
Centre for Cross-Cultural Research

Australian National University
ENDNOTES
I. THE FLIGHT OF THE YOLLA
The story of the yolla is more remarkable yet. The adult birds begin their flight to
northern hemisphere in mid-April, leaving the young in their nests. After a month
when the young have learned to fly and feed themselves, they too set off as a cohort
out guides on a trip none of them has experienced before. They remain in the
maturing for about four years. Then they return as a cohort to the nest in which they
hatched, mate, and begin the cycle again.
James Cook first saw the yolla in April as he crossed the Tasman Sea between
Zealand and the Australian east coast. He saw them again in July-August 1778 in
Arctic Sea. (The Journals of Captain James Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole [Cambridge
Hakluyt Society, 1967, 1968]: The Voyage of the Endeavor 1768-1771, April 1770
301; The Voyage of the Resolution and Discovery 1776-1780, July-August 1778,
419.)
Cook did not know the story of the migration of the yolla. He just noted where he saw
them. That story was not suspected until the 1860s and not researched and scientifically
told until the 1950s. (Vincent Serventy, The Flight of the Shearwater [Kenthurst, NSW:
Kangaroo Press, 1998]; Patsy Adam-Smith, Moonbird People [Adelaide: Rigby, 1965].)
The yolla acquired the name "moon birds" because they were thought at one time to
have come out of the Pacific, like the moon itself. That theory of the Pacific Ocean's and
the moon's origin was famously, but wrongly, espoused by Rachel Carson, The Sea
Around Us (New York, Mentor, 1954), 19-23.
Ornithological information on the yolla can be found in The Handbook of

New Zealand and Antarctic Birds. Volume I, Ratites to Ducks, ed. S. March
Higgins (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990). See "Puffinus tenuiro
tailed Shearwater," 632-644.
Matthew Flinders's count of what he called "sooty petrels" is to be fou
Voyage to Terra Australia (London: G. and W. Nicholls, 1814) I, clxx.
The debate on the name "Oceania" is not as exotic nor trivial as it might
peoples' sense of identity is involved in the debate. See A New Oceania: R
Our Sea of Islands, ed. Epeli Hau'ofa (Suva: University of the South Pacifi
II. PERFORMING
For many years I have urged my students to perform their true stories and to discove
performative element in cultures of the past. "Be mysterious," I tell them. Present the m
complicated truths by story. "Be experiential." Observe from within. "Be compassiona
Write with the whole body, not just the mind. "Be entertaining." Hold the reader's a
tion within the creative structures of the writing. "Be reforming." Change the world.
I have made these ideas public over a number of years: Performances (Chic
University of Chicago Press, 1996); "The Theatricality of History-Making and
Paradoxes of Acting," Cultural Anthropology 8 (1993), 73-95; "The Theatricalit
Observing and Being Observed: 'Eighteenth-Century Europe' 'discovers' the ? Cen
'Pacific'," in Implicit Understandings, ed. Stuart B. Schwarz (Cambridge, En
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 451-484.
I performed in the archives with great pleasure recently: "MS 1 Cook, J. Hologr
Journal" in Remarkable Occurrences: The National Library ofAustralia's First 100 Y
1901-2001, ed. Peter Cochrane (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2001), 1-2
As indicated in the text, my debts to the ideas of others are great: Victor Turner, F
Ritual to Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Jou
Publications, 1982), 17-18; Michel de Certeau, "Reading as Poaching," in The Practic
Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 165-176; Roland Bar
"The Reality Effect," in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley: University of Califo
Press, 1989), 141-148; John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Minton, 1934); an
L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor:
versity of Michigan Press, 1995).
If I ask myself where I think key ideas of mine-that we give back to the past its o
present; that we write culture in the present participle: for example, "gendering," not
der, "sciencing," not science; that we eschew polarities and essences and pursue proce
I go back fifty years to when I began to read Joseph Marechal and the process theolog
Karl Rahner that evolved out of Marechal's transcendental neo-scholasticism and became
part of the reforming vision of Vatican Council II. Alfred North Whitehead and Teilhard
de Chardin are there, too, together with all who puzzle over how faith and rationality live
together in the one person.
At present I tease out this sense of process by describing the disappearance of the zero
point in the encounter between intruding settlers and first peoples. See "Afterword: On the
Befores and Afters of the Encounter" in Cultural Memory, ed. Jeannette Marie Mageo
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), 205-215.
In societies such as the Australian and Oceanian of which I write, even the most mod-
em moment is imprinted with the deep time of 40,000 years. Proclaiming the disappear-
ance of the zero point is no idle academic speculation. It is very political. The Terror, as
Lyotard would say, wants the zero point to stay. It banishes aboriginality to the Time
Before.
24 GREG DENING
III. BEACHES
The translation of Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas

1774-1880 (Chicago: Dorsey Press, 1988) is to be found as Marquises 1774-1880:
Riflexion sur une terre muette, transl. Herv6 Cl6ac'h (Papeete: Association 'Eo Enata,
1999).
Anyone interested in pursuing a different perspective on beaches must surely read John
R. Stilgoe's brilliant Alongshore (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Alain Corbin,
The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750-1840
(London: Penguin, 1994); and Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (London: Penguin,
1999).
Lyotard is quoted in de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 165; and Herbert
Marcuse in Michael T. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 154.
IV. HERMAN MELVILLE AND I
Edward Robarts's beachcombing in the Marquesas preceded Melville's in time but

the date of the publication of its story. The Marquesan Journal of Edward R
1797-1824 (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974); Typee, ed. Ruth Blair (Oxford: Ox
University Press, 1996).
Anyone now writing on Melville must first go to Hershel Parker, Herman Melvi
Biography. Vol. I 1819-1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1996.
Bengt Danielsson is to Paul Gauguin what Parker is to Melville: Bengt Danie
Gauguin in the South Seas (London: Allen and Unwin, 1965). But see importantl
Stephen Eisenman, Gauguin's Skirt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997).
The posthumous publication of Alfred Gell's Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in
nesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) will enlighten all who read it.
The detail of my description of Taiohae while Melville and the French occupying
were there comes from "being there" in many archives around the world, but espe
in: Archives d'Outre-Mer de France, Paris: "Oc6anie 1842-82. Rapports et corr
dances d'6tablissements frangais en Oc6anie"; Archives de la Soci6t6 des Sacr6s
(Picpus), Rome. Archival reading is always supplemented by reading of published
rial: Maximilian R6n6 Radiguet, Les Derniers Sauvages: Iles Marquises 1842
(Paris: Editions Ducharte, 1929); Clement Vincendon-Dumoulin, Iles Marquises (P
Bertrand, 1843); George Louis Winter, "Les voyageurs inconnus: Un Vosgien
Nuku'Hiva," Bulletin de la Socijtj de gdographie de l'est, Nancy. 4 (1882), 29
697-702; 5 (1883), 150-159; 6 (1884), 366-374, 451-465; M. Collet, "Iles Marquises,
a juillet 1843," Annales Maritimes et Coloniales 87 (1844), 336-348.
David Porter's own story of his military actions in the Marquesas is to be fou
Journal of a Cruise Made to the Pacific Ocean in the United States Frigate Essex,
(New York: Wiley and Halsted, 1822).

Performing On The Beaches of The Mind An Essay (Greg Dening)

Transféré par

Informations du document

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Performing On The Beaches of The Mind An Essay (Greg Dening)

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

Wesleyan University

Performing on the Beaches of the Mind: An Essay

PERFORMING ON THE BEACHES OF THE MIND: AN ESSAY*

History-the past transformed into words or paint or dance or play-is always a

I.THE FLIGHT OF THE YOLLA

I see hundreds of thousands of yolla in a stream maybe ten meters deep a

meters or more wide. Civilizat

are all directed in some way by systems of knowledge: of stars, of

The past I visit-the two-hundred-year past that I visit-is on paper. Mo

To visit my two-hundred-year past, I read. I read to write. Actually, I rea

I think that what they are say

roles sharpening pencils on a noisy pencil sharpener. Outraged

power than to-persuade. We ma

What we really want to know is how the other performer is joining

Their ethnographies must be art. There is no art in multiplying the

difference has a sameness. Ever

as varied as humanity itself, and

even one beach crossing. They are all there--yours, mine--whethe

IV. HERMAN MELVILLE AND I

the voiceless dead. All of us writ

I remember my emotions as we approached Vaitahu down the straits between

An old man, Teifitu, gave us hospitality. He was a direct descendant of the

endless horizon. There is nothing "real" in the painting, no black sand,

Then in the 1860s, here in the v

We paid Gauguin honor. We walked up the hill of Hueakihi to the cemetery.

November 14, 1851 is a special day for Herman Melville. It is the of

old cousin, "Langs." "Langs" was n

Portrait of Jean Baptiste Cabri. From

Back view of younger inhabitant. Ibid.,Vol. I: Plate VII, p. 119.

Pahutiki, Enata called their fully tattooed bodies. "Wrapped

when he raised his spear to thro

Most of the crew are on the Ac

Thouars on his madcap venture of taking possession of the Marquesas

crew could see an idyllic enough

describes his escape from the Taipi.

It was the sort of violence, I hav

Centre for Cross-Cultural Research

I. THE FLIGHT OF THE YOLLA

Ornithological information on the yolla can be found in The Handbook of

The translation of Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land: Marquesas

IV. HERMAN MELVILLE AND I

Edward Robarts's beachcombing in the Marquesas preceded Melville's in time but

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi