From One Shore to Another:
Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
From One Shore to Another:
Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
Edited by
Sanda Badescu
CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge, edited by Sanda Badescu
This book first published in 2007 by
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2007 by Sanda Badescu and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN 1-84718-176-7; ISBN 13: 9781847181763
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction..........................................................................................................1
On the Symbolism of the Bridge
Sanda Badescu
PART I
SAILING ACROSS THE SEA: HISTORY AND LITERATURE
Chapter One .......................................................................................................12
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
Terry Cochran
Chapter Two.......................................................................................................26
Tiphys on the Bridge: the Argo in Paris Public Festivals during the Reign
of Henry II
John Nassichuk
Chapter Three.....................................................................................................43
Between Two Worlds: the Sea and the Imaginary in the Eighteenth Century
Chris Roulston
PART II
PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGES: BILINGUALISM AND CREATION
Chapter Four ......................................................................................................58
Maternal Latin, Domestic French: on Montaigne's Bilingualism
Angela Cozea
Chapter Five.......................................................................................................72
An (In)Visible Bridge: from Mental to Interlingual Translation
Georgiana Lungu-Badea
vi
Table of Contents
PART III
SEARCHING FOR IDENTITY: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ENJEUX
Chapter Six.........................................................................................................88
The Bridging Experience of Trans-Migration: Reflexive Sociology/ies
from a Migrating Sociologist
Godfrey Baldacchino
Chapter Seven ..................................................................................................104
Sentimental Bridges Between Trinidad and India
Faiz Ahmed
Chapter Eight ...................................................................................................115
The State as a Catachresis in Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les Soleils des
indépendances and Allah n’est pas obligé
Donald Sackey
Chapter Nine ....................................................................................................129
Just Fine: The Bridge to the Non-Space from the Petitcodiac to the Deltas
Carlo Lavoie
PART IV
PASSING OVER: ANTHROPOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY
Chapter Ten .....................................................................................................142
Bridges and Ritual Values: A Case Analysis: Brodice
Otilia Hedesan
Chapter Eleven.................................................................................................151
Diving Off the Bridge: Madame Guyon and the Social Torrents
of Late 17th Century France
Agnès Conacher
PART V
REFLECTIONS OF BRIDGES: ARTS AND CULTURES
Chapter Twelve ................................................................................................164
Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet: An Interfacial Conjunction
Rocky Penate
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
vii
Chapter Thirteen ..............................................................................................177
Time Is (The Matter): Communication of Presence in Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries
Rodica Ieta
Chapter Fourteen..............................................................................................192
Bridges Across Culture and Imagination
Aurélia Hetzel
Contributors .....................................................................................................205
INTRODUCTION
ON THE SYMBOLISM OF THE BRIDGE
SANDA BADESCU
To cross a bridge, a river or a border is to leave behind the familiar, personal and
comfortable and enter the unknown, a different and strange world where, faced
with another reality, we may well find ourselves bereft of home and identity.
—Jean-Pierre Vernant
This collection of essays entitled From One Shore to Another: Reflections on
the Symbolism of the Bridge is the product of a multi-disciplinary conference
hosted by the University of Prince Edward Island in August 2005. The starting
point for a reflection on this topic resides in the fact that this university is
situated on Prince Edward Island—one of the ten Canadian provinces—and that
this island has been linked physically to the continent by the Confederation
Bridge since 1997. This particular geography was the source of inspiration for a
group of professors and graduate students from several universities. Using
various literary, anthropological, sociological, historical and philosophical
approaches, the conference participants contributed to a complex picture of the
symbolism of the bridge.
It is clear that the bridge, together with water and land, is an ancient symbol and
a continual presence in our lives. One cannot think about land (continents,
islands) without thinking about water (seas, oceans, rivers), and without
considering the opposition and complementarity of land/water, solid/liquid,
stable/unstable, safe/unsafe and so on. Imagining bridges is a primary attempt to
join what is separated, to connect A and B, binaries which otherwise remain
irreconcilable.
The history of bridges is so old that it is difficult to trace it back in time. Each
bridge has its own stories: stories of building or of demolishing, stories of
considerable effort or of subsequent uncommon events. The bridge can be actual
or abstract; it can be a voyage between two worlds, a sentimental link between
two communities, a passage between life and death. The bridge as a symbol
2
Introduction
may signify a passage from earth to sky, from human to super-human, from
terrestrial life to paradise. It can also be a boundary space where the soul of the
deceased engages in order to arrive at its final destination. Still surviving in
remote areas and communities of Europe, this popular belief circulates as a
legend in parts of Serbia:
[The legend] recounts that in the beginning the earth was one and undivided and
people could come and go as they pleased. However, with the arrival of death,
the earth split in two: this world and the hereafter. In despair, human beings
prayed day and night to God, begging Him to bring these two parts together. God
took pity on the just and blew on the earth to create a bridge between the two
worlds. (Djuric 1999, 43)
The bridge appearing as a dangerous symbolic passage in numerous medieval
stories is the bridge separating two kingdoms. A courageous knight is to cross it
in order to rescue an “other”, usually a princess1. For example, in the 12th
century, Chrétien de Troyes in his Le Chevalier de la Charette (The Knight of
the Cart, better known as Lancelot) tells the story of the two knights, Lancelot
and Gawain, who are led into a long and extremely perilous journey to save
queen Guinevere, detained by Maleagant. After numerous and exciting
adventures, the knights have to choose between two bridges in order to enter
into the kingdom of Maleagant’s father:
It is possible to enter by two highly dangerous roads and by two most
treacherous crossings; one is called the Water Bridge, because the bridge runs
under the water, of which there is as much below it to the bottom as there is
above, neither more nor less, the bridge being precisely half-way up … The
other bridge is worse and far more perilous; and it has never been crossed by any
man, for it’s just like a sharp sword, which is why everybody calls it the Sword
Bridge. (Chrétien de Troyes 1988, 193-194) 2
Both ways of access are dangerous: the Water Bridge, a narrow bridge situated
under the water, and a more terrifying bridge, The Sword Bridge, which is no
wider than the blade of a sword. These symbolic bridges are a means of
separation; they exist to build up a barrier. They are, theoretically,
insurmountable but, at the same time, are meant to be vanquished by a knight
possessing the appropriate qualities. Gawain chooses the former bridge and his
mission is bound to fail, while Lancelot crosses the more dangerous Sword
Bridge:
At the end of that very dangerous bridge, they get off their horses to see the
treacherous water thundering swiftly past, black and turbid, as horrid and
terrifying as if it were the Devil’s river, and so perilous and deep that there is
nothing in the whole world which, having fallen into it, would not vanish as into
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
3
the salt sea. The bridge across the cold water consisted of a polished, gleaming
sword. (Chrétien de Troyes 1988, 225) 3
The Sword Bridge is unique because of the obvious peril. Once engaged on the
passage there is no turning back and a fall off the bridge is inevitably fatal.
Suggestively depicted by Chrétien de Troyes, the thick black water is similar to
an infernal river or a bottomless sea, and means death itself. Lancelot is meant
to successfully cross to the other shore and, thus, succeed in his mission. The
bridge, as all the other obstacles encountered by the knights in their journey, is
part of a process of initiation, and only the chosen knights may pass across.
Lancelot’s bridge is one powerful example that opens to a series of explorations
on the symbolism of the bridge. Any type of traveling from one place to another
can be seen as a bridge (more or less) connecting two worlds. History offers
powerful examples of voyages by ocean that tried to create a bridge between the
known and the unknown. By sailing on the Atlantic Ocean, the 15th century
Europeans encountered another continent that they saw as a New World. The
French philosopher Michel de Montaigne already noticed that “our world” had
just encountered another, “un monde enfant” (“infant” in the sense of still close
to nature, not yet spoiled by European art/artifices/civilization), and foresaw the
disastrous consequences of an inevitable clash between two contrasting cultures.
“I fear we shall have considerably hastened the decline and collapse of that
young world by our contagion and that we shall have sold it dear our opinions
and our skills” (Montaigne 1993, 342)4 he states, and further on affirms that:
“We, on the contrary, took advantage of their ignorance and lack of experience
to pervert them more easily towards treachery, debauchery and cupidity,
towards every kind of cruelty and inhumanity, by the example and model of our
own manners” (Montaigne 1993, 344)5.
The “export” of mores and manners from one continent to another must have as
effect an expansion of the conqueror’s values, be they good or bad, a
transformation of the unfamiliar into the familiar. This process means that the
conquerors have the possibility to eliminate the other (ness) or to turn the other
into a same (ness) (which is again an elimination of the otherness). Historically,
although often questioned and re-evaluated, the sea voyages undertaken by the
Spaniards to parts of the American continent, represent the beginning of a
process of globalization, which encompassed more or less half of the globe.
This expansion of the “old” world continued to impact on trade, economy,
science, literature, mythical symbolism re-enacted by the Renaissance, on
writings on travel, both documentary and fictional. One notices, especially in the
18th century, an increase of French and English novels about sea voyages,
shipwrecks, exoticism, distinctions between nature and culture, where the bridge
4
Introduction
of communication among nations and countries is again questioned and
examined.
As sciences and technologies have been continuously developing, more travels
at the global level have been challenging us to think and debate more about
migration. Migrating from one territory to another means crossing from one
social and cultural reference point to a new one. Defining home and “homeness” becomes a challenging task and formerly clear oppositions such as
here/there, familiar/unfamiliar, first language/second language become blurred
and difficult to formulate. At some point, choosing neither one shore nor the
other condemns one to a perpetual feeling of not belonging (or belonging
partially to two worlds at the same time), to eternal suspension over a “neverreally-crossed” bridge. Perhaps the most interesting situation of such migration
is the situation of the writer who, by moving to a new place, must tame a new
language. To appropriate another language is to tame the “unheimlich”, which
is, as we know, the Freudian term for the “unfamiliar” or “strange”. According
to the Quebec writer and critic Régine Robin6,
[O]f course, the emigrant writer must deal with his/her country of origin, which
s/he has left for political, economical, or simply personal reasons. S/he needs to
overcome a process of mourning or a memory rearrangement. This is not a
simple job and this is often why one needs to start writing. So that one can bear
oneself in a different space, can dig up in oneself a new otherness, to tame the
nostalgia and to keep away the “unheimlich” of the inside-outside. Who am I
presently and what place can I create for myself in this three-places society
(Canada, Quebec, Montreal) ? What place, and not in the economical sense,
although this problem is not completely secondary, what place in the literary
institution which, as in all literary institutions, has its own traditions, and, above
all, what imaginary place and what identity, or , in other words, how will I
contribute to transform the imaginary from here?7 (My translation)
This questioning, partially autobiographical, is revealed in the title of Robin’s
book. La Quebecoite is definitely not a Québécoise, but a Québécoise and
something else. On the one hand, the suffix “coite” (French) is an adjective
meaning silent, mute, one who does not react or intervene. The Quebecoite is an
immigrant, who would have this strange identity, living in the new country but
voiceless. On the other hand, it is evident that the author is determined to fight
against her chosen title, to have a voice, by the act of writing. A writer (or an
artist for that matter) may have the advantage and the skill to bridge the two
shores, the old and the new, by articulating this complicated and lengthy
process.
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
5
The symbolism of the bridge is a broad topic that can be explored from many
perspectives. Any process of knowing oneself, of discovering oneself and the
world, means to be in touch and to create communication with the other(s). By
connecting people, communities, universes, on the one hand, and by opening
and closing on entire worlds, on the other hand, it remains as a stimulating
symbol in our tradition and history.
The essays collected in this book
Part I: Sailing Across the Sea: History and Literature
The articles of the first section deal with successive historic periods of openness
to new worlds. Starting with Kant’s theory on human understanding, Terry
Cochran’s article, The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity, explains how the
modern thinking of two interwoven concepts—the land and the sea—has
changed and envisaged what we call today globalization. The author explores
the early “age of discovery”, the time of Columbus’ travels, as a key moment in
human understanding of the finitude of the earth. This bridge between two
continents was fundamental for the domestication of the ocean as well as for
global unity, which dominates our discourses today. The second article of the
section, Tiphys on the Bridge: the Argo in Paris Public Festivals during the
Reign of Henry II , also focuses on the age of colonization of the Americas. John
Nassichuk dwells on the image of the seafaring voyage in the 16th century and
the manner in which this influenced the works of the French Humanists. Chris
Roulston closes the first segment with a third article, which deals with the
dynamics between geography and culture in the 18th century. Between Two
Worlds: The Sea and the Imaginary in the Eighteenth Century examines French
and English works of fiction that were influenced by sea travels and by
examinations of opposing concepts such as civilisation/ savagery and
culture/nature.
Part II: Philosophy of Languages: Bilingualism and Creation
The second section focuses on the metaphorical bridge of communicating in
different languages. Angela Cozea, in her essay Maternal Latin, Domestic
French: on Montaigne’s Bilingualism, examines the manner in which the
maternal language constitutes the foundation of a second, grammatical, written
language, and underscores the distance separating the maternal—the love for
speech—and the grammatical—the knowledge of speech— which represent two
poles of every speaker’s essential bilingualism. She proposes one possible
bridge between these two, and calls it the “domestic language”, such as the one
6
Introduction
Montaigne accomplished in his writing of the Essays. Georgiana LunguBadea’s An (In) Visible Bridge: from Mental to Inter-lingual Translation
questions the relationship between translation and creation, between personal
and inter-linguistic translation. Lungu-Badea studies the case of a novel written
in two languages—Romanian, the author’s mother tongue, and French, the
language of his new country—and, thus, sheds a new light on the definition of
bilingualism and the mutual influence between language and identity.
Part III: Searching for Identity: Social and Cultural Enjeux
The essays collected in this section move us between different geographical
places: from Prince Edward Island, Canada, to Trinidad, to Africa, and back to
New Brunswick, Canada. The papers deal with social changes involved in
traveling from one space to another and/or from one historical moment to
another, and how these impact on human identity. Godfrey Baldacchino
discusses in his The Bridging Experience of Trans-Migration: Reflexive
Sociology/ies from a Migrating Sociologist a specific situation of a professional
sociologist trying to articulate his transition to the status of transmigrant after
leaving Malta to take up employment in Canada. Baldacchino’s analysis
represents a positivist-rational as well as a self-reflexive exercise in
accommodating the decision to migrate. The second essay, Faiz Ahmed’s
Sentimental Bridges Between Trinidad and India, presents a historical and
political picture of East Indian immigration to Trinidad starting in the mid 19th
century. The identity of these immigrants depends on their bond to India; it is a
linkage, which has been maintained and developed through religion, language,
and Hindu schools, giving space to political affirmation in Trinidad’s
heterogeneous society. Donald Sackey’s The State as a Catachresis in Ahmadou
Kourouma’s Les Soleils des indépendances and Allah n’est pas obligé focuses
on the impossibility of reconciling two opposed worlds, “pre-colonial” values
linked to tradition and a new kind of colonization established after independence
in African countries. As the title suggests, the post-colonial “state-nation” can
be seen as a “catachresis”, a concept-metaphor in which the bridge between the
concept and its historical or traditional referent is lost. Closing the sociological
segment of the collection, in Just Fine: The Bridge to the Non-Space from the
Petitcodiac to the Deltas, Carlo Lavoie explores the Acadian community in New
Brunswick, Canada, and the way in which the Acadian imaginary has been
developing a tormented relationship to the space, due to specific historical
events. France Daigle, the novelist examined by Lavoie in his essay, is
questioning the social openness and closure of this community to the
Anglophones at a regional level, as well as to the Francophones at a global level.
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
7
Part IV: Passing Over: Anthropology and Philosophy
This section comprises two articles, which look at the bridge as a way of
crossing to the world beyond. In Bridges and Ritual Values: A Case Analysis:
Brodice, Otilia Hedesan presents her anthropological research on actual bridges
in Brodice, a village located in South-Eastern Serbia. The existing bridges
represent funeral monuments, direct links between here and there, between the
living and the dead. Taking a philosophical point of view, Agnès Conacher, in
Diving Off the Bridge: Madame Guyon and the Social Torrents of Late 17th
Century France considers mystical thought as a sequence of steps across an
unfinished bridge that opens to tranquility of the soul, to nothingness, and to
nonexistence. In this context, the “torrent” is a metaphor for the soul; the soul
abandons itself to God in a tormented journey whose end is the sea representing
the world after death.
Part V: Reflections of Bridges: Arts and Cultures
The closing section of the collection deals with real/present or imaginary/absent
bridges in literature and in visual arts such as painting and cinema. In Flaubert’s
Bouvard et Pécuchet: An Interfacial Conjunction, Rocky Penate reassesses
Flaubert’s work in terms of the concept of friendship; contemplating the
Venetian bridge Rialto can reveal a different experience depending on the
reality of the viewer, on whether he is alone or accompanied by a friend. The
artistic bridge is able to highlight a new symbol for friendship, namely the work
desk for two people which eventually gives meaning to the characters’ lives.
The essay Time Is (The Matter): Communication of Presence in Virginia
Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries explores
the attempt of modernist art to (re)capture experience in absentia through the
mediation of technological and linguistic devices. Rodica Ieta shows how the
absence of bridges for Woolf’s and Bergman’s characters leads to re-inventing
connections under an imaginary and dream-like form in order to induce a
different kind of communication. Closing the last section of the book, Aurélia
Hetzel proposes in Bridges Across Culture and Imagination an overview of
bridges as artistic and cultural images. Starting with legends of bridges, the
author goes over several representations of bridges in German and French
paintings, as well as in literary works by Nabokov, Camus and Balzac, closing
with the popular theme of the “suicidal on the bridge” which left its mark on
real and fictional existences.
8
Introduction
Notes
1
The symbol is very present in the cinema productions for young audiences and,
implicitly, in cultural studies, as for example the successful animated film, Shrek, where
again the crossing of the bridge involves exhilarating and thrilling events.
2
In the original text:
“Si puet l’en antrer totevoies
Par .II. molt perilleuses voies
Et par .II. molt felons passages,
Li uns a non li Ponz Evages,
Por ce que soz eve est li ponz,
Et s’a des le pont jusqu’au fonz
Autant desoz come desus,
Ne deça moins de dela plus,
Einz est li ponz tot droit enmi,
Et si n’a que pié et demi
De lé et autretant d’espés. (De Troyes 1994, 519, verses 653-663)
Li autres ponz est plus malvés
Et plus perilleus assez,
Qu’ainz par home ne fu passez,
Qu’il est com espee tranchanz, Et por ce trestotes les genz
L’apelent le Pont de l’Espee.” (De Troyes 1994, 519, verses 668-673)
3
“Au pié del pont, qui molt est maux,
Sont descendu de lor chevax,
Et voient l’eve felenesse,
Noire et bruiant, roide et espesse,
Tant leide et tant espoantable
Con se fust li fluns au deable,
Et tant perilleuse et parfonde
Qu’il n’est riens nule an tot le monde,
S’ele i cheoit, ne fust alee
Ausi com an la mer salee.
Et li ponz qui est an travers
Estoit de toz autres divers,
Qu’ainz tex ne fu ja mes n’iert.
Einz ne fu, qui voir m’an requiert,
Si max ponz ne si male planche.” (De Troyes 1994, 587, verses 3007-3021)
4
“Bien crains-je que nous aurons bien fort haste sa declinaison et sa ruyne par nostre
contagion, et que nous luy aurons bien cher vendu nos opinions et nos arts.”
(Montaigne 1962, 887).
5
“[N]ous nous sommes servis de leur ignorance et inexperience à les plier plus
facilement d’inhumanité et de cruauté, à l’exemple et patron de nos mœurs” (Montaigne
1962, 889).
6
Born of Jewish Polish parents, Régine Robin moved from France to Quebec, where she
has been teaching in the Department of Sociology at Université du Québec à Montréal.
From One Shore to Another: Reflections on the Symbolism of the Bridge
9
7
Et puis, bien entendu, l’écrivain émigrant est aux prises avec son pays d’origine, qu’il
l’ait quitté pour des raisons politiques, économiques, ou tout simplement personnelles. Il
lui faut faire un certain travail du deuil, ou un réaménagement mémoriel. Ce travail n’est
pas simple et c’est souvent pour cela que l’on se met à écrire. Pour se supporter ailleurs,
pour creuser en soi une nouvelle altérité, pour domestiquer la nostalgie et mettre à
distance l’inquiétante étrangeté du dedans-dehors. Qui suis-je à présent, et quelle place
puis-je me faire dans cette société à trois places (Le Canada, le Québec, Montréal) ?
Quelle place, non pas au sens économique encore que ce problème ne soit pas
secondaire, quelle place dans l’institution littéraire qui, comme toutes les institutions
littéraires a ses propres traditions, et surtout quelle place identitaire et imaginaire, ou pour
le formuler autrement comment vais-je contribuer à transformer l’imaginaire d’ici ?
(Robin 1993, 209)
Bibliography
CHEVALIER, Jean and Alain GHEERBRANT. Dictionnaire des symboles.
1982. Paris: Robert Laffont/Jupiter.
DJURIC, Rajko. Le Pont de Dieu. In Écrire les frontières. Le Pont de l’Europe.
1999. Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing.
MONTAIGNE, Michel de. 1962. Oeuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1993. The Essays: A Selection, translated by M.A. Screech. London:
Penguin Books.
CHRÉTIEN DE TROYES. 1994. Romans. Paris: La Pochotèque.
———. 1988. Arthurian Romances. London: J.M. Dent &Sons.
ROBIN, Régine. 1993. La Québécoite. Montreal: Typo.
PART I
SAILING ACROSS THE SEA:
HISTORY AND LITERATURE
CHAPTER ONE
THE EARTHLY THINKING OF PLANETARY UNITY
TERRY COCHRAN
<1>
Thinking about the land and the sea poses a number of thorny difficulties
because these two concepts are completely interwoven; each is unthinkable
without the other. Their relationship, however, goes far beyond the vagaries of
abstraction, because it contains at its very core the fundamental problem of
knowing that binds human experience with ongoing reflection. Land and sea
inevitably mean land and what separates land from other land, it signals a
certain stability face-to-face with the unknown, the unpredictable, the lifethreatening, and so on, notions that vary according to degrees of superstition,
historical understanding or just simple experience. From the very outset of
recorded thought, the sea has stood as the outer edge of the horizon of human
action; in this sense, prior to the transformations of early modernity, the sea was
deeply embedded in a religious worldview, signaling what resists submission to
human domination while being no obstacle for the divine will.1 In the
characterization of Psalm 93, for example,
Thou hast fixed the earth immovable and firm,
thy throne firm from of old;
from all eternity thou art God.
O Lord, the ocean lifts up, the ocean lifts up its clamour;
the ocean lifts up its pounding waves.
The Lord on high is mightier far
than the noise of great waters,
mightier than the breakers of the sea. (Psalm 93:1-4, The New English Bible
1970)
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
13
Yet once tied to the presumed supremacy of the human mind, the sea becomes
another obstacle to be subjected to human understanding, an essential element in
this historical grounding of human finitude. In other words, contrary to the
ancient notion of divine intervention, the ensemble of land and sea boils down
to a question of land and the in-between; this in-between articulates the lands
among themselves, joining and disjoining them, bridging outcroppings of terra
firma, rendering this in-between traversable, as in a bridge itself. Above and
beyond the empirical, that is, the real encounter of land and water, on a seacoast
where I can stand staring into open waters, the mental association of land and
sea is a figure of thought.
This figure of thought has played a major role in fashioning the global
perspective encroaching on every facet of contemporary existence; it has
provided the means for assimilating, appropriating the earth, the planet as a
whole, for seizing its inhabitants in a collective concept (that is, as a species, as
“humanity”). From its origins as a “non-place,” as a disruptive or disorganized
unknown, the sea has become more and more of a place, more inhabited and
chartered; it has surrendered its destiny to such an extent that it exists only to
give way to landfall, taking on all the characteristics of land itself. It has
metaphorically become as solid as land, subject to territorial claims, the site of
struggle over natural resources, and so on, no longer a mental obstacle in any
way. The figure of thought uniting land and sea has fostered a planetary regime
of understanding, expression of an integral wholeness. Ultimately, I would like
to explore the underpinnings of this configuration of sea and land, of liquid and
solid, in hoping to grasp certain of the figure’s sociopolitical, historical and
philosophical implications and, in particular, as it concerned the notion of global
humanity or the “universal human.” Before delving into the stakes of this
tandem of concepts, however, I would like to try to render more precise the
nature of this configuration, which represents an important nexus of modern
thought.
In this figure, two different planes of thought intersect, each, however,
depending on and deriving from the other. In sketching out these modes of
thinking, as well as their conjunction, I would like to quote Immanuel Kant,
who traced out the general lines of what has come to be known as
“cosmopolitical” understanding. In his Critique of Judgment, he remarks:
Land [Land] and sea contain not only monuments [Denkmäler: what bears
witness for thought] of mighty primeval disasters that have overtaken both them
and all their brood of living forms, but their entire structure—the strata of the
land [Erdlager] and the coast lines of the sea—has all the appearance of being
the outcome of the wild and all-subduing forces of a nature working in a state of
Chapter One
14
chaos.2 (Kant 1978, 90)
In subjecting to reasoned analysis the often violent encounter between land and
sea, Kant seeks to domesticate the chaos, or what seemed to be chaos, and
submit it to human understanding. In a sacred context, this chaos names the
incomprehensibility underlying divine will, force, and action. Yet Kant’s
remarks—uttered two centuries subsequent to the flurry of global exploration
even if long before the age of fractals—proclaim that the mystery of the sea
harboring the unknown or, rather, the unknowable, has been dispelled—in
principle if not entirely in fact. The sea, so unfathomable that it seems to mimic
infinity, takes the form of just another object of knowledge in the process of
being dissected. Bearer of nonhuman history, of cataclysms taking place outside
of human purview, it contains signs to be deciphered by human understanding,
the material grounds for multiple allegories or interpretations generated in the
name of knowledge or “science.”
This overarching interest in founding a new form of scientific thinking, in
enabling the powers of reason to deal with objects still to be constituted and to
unfold, rests upon unprecedented understanding of the globe as a bounded unity
of land and sea. Far from being the sole thinker engaged in this drive to subject
the globe to the human mind, Kant was and has remained exemplary in framing
what has become the hegemonic worldview. The complementary aspect of this
reborn figure of land and sea, transformed in assuming its modern trappings,
concerns attributing to the human mind heretofore unconceivable powers of
projection. Once again, Kant succinctly encapsulates this property of human
understanding, which is
a totally active human faculty; all of its representations [Vorstellungen] and
concepts are exclusively its creations; the human being thinks spontaneously
with his understanding, thus creating his world [Welt]. (Kant 1977, 342. My
translation)
Humans always thought their world, elaborating images and mental projections
of their “space,” of the confines, whether real or imagined, within which they
envisage their existence. But, prior to what is euphemistically called the age of
exploration, this “world” did not and could not correspond to the globe as a
(potentially) knowable locus of human life.
This global question literally permeates the concept of modernity, whose very
basis for existence derives from the presupposed overlapping between the
imaginary of the human world and the globe as an integral planetary whole. Or,
to put it differently, modernity means that the globe belongs to the human
imaginary as the encompassing backdrop of its world; part and parcel of the
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
15
modern projection, the ensemble of land and sea coalesce into a global totality
no longer dependent on the empirical. In the context of a global sphere under the
dominion of the human mind and technology, the sea is no longer the sea, the
land is no longer the land. As the recent study (November, 2004) by the Arctic
Council—the intergovernmental forum on the Arctic region—openly
acknowledges, the gradual depletion of the Arctic’s frozen landmass will in
coming decades make this ocean navigable, thus creating an upheaval in the
circuits of global transport, exploration, and balance of power. In other words, in
the contemporary planetary projection, the opposition between land and sea is
wholly reversible; in this “Arctic” instance, the elimination of land allows for
deeper command of this region, overturning the traditional historical vision of
the sea as the perilous obstacle to territorial mastery. In sum, sea and land,
having lost their specificity, belong to an economy, a regime of understanding
whose primary focus bears on the real and symbolic appropriation of the globe.
<2>
At this juncture, it seems important to reflect on this striving toward
appropriation of the global sphere, which is inextricably bound up with the
relationship between terra firma and its aqueous barriers of separation. Strictly
speaking, the moment when the world became one, when it submitted itself
fully to human understanding, is a historical and, by extension, political issue.
Contrary to commonplaces about the so-called “age of discovery” and,
particularly, about Columbus’s role in it, the globalness of the world has little to
do with its being a sphere, and Columbus had no role in establishing the veracity
of the world’s roundness. Aristotle and Herodotus had already written about the
spherical form of the earth; this theoretical knowledge was well established in
intellectual thought. Nor is it a question of encountering the Far East, which
from the late Middle Ages entered into European discourse, following accounts
by Marco Polo, or, in Middle Eastern context, through the 14th-century
narratives of Ibn Battuta, among others. In distinction with the Portuguese
Bartolomeu Dias (1485) or Vasco da Gama (1497), however, Columbus closed
the circle, and the finitude of the earth became accessible to understanding. The
voyages taking place under his command, which were initially far from
gratifying financially or territorially, made possible an imaginary that had real,
concrete manifestations. In his March 4, 1492 letter to the King and Queen,
written from Lisbon, Columbus paints the picture of a tranquil landfall:
Over there, the sea is the calmest in the world for navigating and is less
dangerous for caravels and boats of all sorts... There are never storms because I
saw, in all the places where I went, grass and trees growing right down to the
sea.3 (Columbus 2002, 319. My translation)
16
Chapter One
There is no reason to linger over the touch of hypocrisy in this letter, which aims
to lay the groundwork for obtaining finance for voyages still to come. Nor will I
insist on the naivety of the belief, rapidly contradicted by further experience,
that these distant waters are calm and stormless. Yet once traversed, the deep
seas become as land, and the domestication of the ocean translates immediately
into a planetary wholeness, a finite dimension ready for investment in all senses,
from the financial to the ideological. In this letter, as well as in the numerous
reports he penned, Columbus's recounting of his experiences does not constitute
theoretical knowledge but the knowledge of understanding in its Kantian
meaning, as the faculty where the human world spins out its images, becomes
lived imaginary. In the written remnants of this 1492 expedition, experience
becomes concept and image, and the world becomes newly whole, spawning the
concepts of hydrosphere, lithosphere, and atmosphere, the constituent elements
of the planet. The series of historical accidents making way for the Americas’
entry onto the world stage, stamping this territorial otherness with a global
essence, has irrefutably melded Americanism with the globalization it unveiled.
In the 21st century when no wilderness hideaway is wholly free from global
hegemony, piercing the thick layers of historical sediment to grasp the
significance of overseas globalism seems a daunting, if not impossible, task.
One of the primary consequences of globalism presents itself in the form of a
conundrum: in the wake of global understanding, there can never be, nor can
there ever have been a clear-cut first time. This statement apparently defies all
logic to the point of being nonsensical. Yet with regard to Columbus, whose
globalizing accomplishment has been universally heralded in written historical
record, the firstness of his expedition has unceasingly been placed into question.
I am referring, for instance, to assertions that the Vikings had already explored
these continents or Thor Heyerdahl’s belief that Egyptians had already made the
voyage in papyrus vessels, among other diverse claims. Rather than endorsing
any one of these various pretenders who might have “discovered” these
continents and prefigured global awareness, I would like only to underscore the
consequences for global knowing and understanding. Once inscribed in history,
the first time immediately loses its precedence; in establishing the global figure
of thought, a prism through which history itself becomes visible, the Columbus
accounts foreground a regime of historical understanding based on continuous
reenactment.
In this repetitiveness, this inexorable and endemic secondariness accompanying
the global consciousness of modernity, the inability to posit an original moment
surfaces in the language itself. In the global frame of reference, the sea of
difference severs the old from the new. Like creation from the void, the “new
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
17
world,” something “new” that does not duplicate, reflect, or renew the old
world, comes into view as the previously unacknowledged rest of the world, as
more of the same engulfing known portions. It completes the world, creates the
possibility of seeing the world as an integral unit. The old world and the new
world compose the planet as a whole, just as the Christian tradition rewrites the
relationship between the Greek testament and the Hebrew testament, renaming
them the old and new testaments, as if they both belonged to the same sacred
text, the same Bible. In sum, what I want to suggest is that the geographical
unearthing of this surplus world gives a reiterative foundation to the human
mindset. Beyond its obvious metaphorical power, its intrinsic force or
representation, the re-naissance signals more than a rebirth of abandoned values,
perspectives, and beliefs: it moves into the foreground elements that lay dormant
prior to the conjoined physical and ideological seizing of the globe in its
wholeness. It creates the effect of a first time that can only be enforced by
authority, however implicit or explicit it might be. Whereas the relationship of
sea and land coalesce into a figure of thought to undergird global understanding,
the global human (or the “universal” human, as it is known in philosophical
discourse) becomes its personification, yet another figure of sorts.
Real globalization—whether it is designated as conquest, exploration, discovery,
decimation or encounters based on supposed reciprocity—underwrites the
emergence of this universal human, a fiction bigger than life offering a backdrop
to ongoing engagements of the “other.” Today’s proliferation of labels such as
the multitude, diversity, and hybridity—fruit of the search for neologisms
expressing the “inter,” the “trans,” the “multi,” in addition to the generalized
“other”—takes place really and figuratively on this global terrain. These flailing
concepts, conveyed by words so often bandied about that they have exhausted
their capacity to produce meaning, support the edifice of present-day humanistic
knowledge. The modern guise cloaking the incessant rewriting of collective
identity rests on an unacknowledged globalism that is much more than the
globalization catchword on the breath of every participant in knowledge
production.
The extension of the earthly horizon to global scale submits itself to
representation in the 15th century. These representations—whether histories,
logbooks, or speculations—seek to replot the coordinates of the human spirit,
melding the previously unknowable, even unconceivable, with longstanding
accounts of human reflection. In attempting to come to terms with the irruption
of this “new” world, inscriptions assume the firstness of the encounters they
describe, as I have briefly tried to indicate. Yet accounts of these pristine
encounters are criss-crossed by earlier understandings literally embedded in the
18
Chapter One
psyche of tradition. In whole or in part, faithfully or in free discrepancy, the
fundamentals of these early global contentions are reactivated and reiterated at
every conquest, at every depiction of conquest. Even benign take-over, the
eventual outcome even of encounters between presumed equals, enjoys no
exemption from this process of representation in the planetary age christened
several centuries ago.
At the onset of this old new globalism, no less scientific than political,
philosophical, and geographical, no preexistent history eases these jolting
experiences into submission. Confrontation takes place across a divide, a sea of
difference, if you will, or as a result of unresolvable incomprehensibility
between different visions or linguistic and cultural expressions of the “world.”
The “many” on this side—the European many who possess the ink and spread it
liberally in the wake of exploration—stand against the nameless scores on the
other side. The clash of two disparate entities requires a common ground, a
global concept, so to speak, to permit their intermingling. After centuries of
cosmopolitical linkages and stratification, we have grown increasingly unable to
come to grips with the demands of incomprehensibility and how it necessarily
inhabits us. What were once absolute incongruities become watered-down
variations, more of the same, a sort of regimented dissimilarity holding no
surprise, permitting no astonishment.
<3>
Against this broad backdrop, so vast as to be global, in what follows I would
like to evoke this set of issues and figures of thought in less abstract fashion.
While in the shadow of global modernity, the outset of which cannot be
pinpointed, there are early attempts to put into discourse the clashes with
absolute otherness (along with the phenomenon of world finitude it implies).
Among this select group of writings, whose number is quite small, Bernal Díaz
Del Castillo’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain offers a blow-by-blow
depiction of Cortés’s 1519 conquest, which, 15 years after Columbus’s final
expedition, was fundamental for European supremacy in the Americas and for
Spanish subjugation of what will become Central America. Writing in
nonerudite Spanish, excessively vernacular for the epoch, Díaz del Castillo
grapples over and over with a foreignness that outstrips his understanding, and
the narrator in his historical memoir exhibits traits of the individual striving to
rationalize the inexplicable, to render palatable to the mind the prodigious nature
of the invasion and its inflicted agonies.
Prior to joining Hernán Cortés’s campaign to subdue the new, unknown territory
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
19
for the king of Spain, Díaz del Castillo participated in a shortlived “expedition”
led by Hernández de Córdoba. In the course of this exploration, Díaz del
Castillo’s party was met by a cluster of “Indians” overheard to be repeating
what resembled the word “Castilian” even though their speech was wholly
unintelligible. Specifically, in the context of a largely nonverbal exchange
carried on by extemporaneous signing and gesturing, Díaz del Castillo registers
that
they made signs with their hands, [asking] if we came from where the sun comes
up, saying “Castilian, Castilian”, and we didn’t pay much attention to that talk
about “Castilian”. And after this talking they made us other signs...4 (Díaz del
Castillo 1992, 40)
These sounds, given meaning by the small coterie of Spaniards who deciphered
them, would be, in any universe of experience, more than unheimlich. After
traversing a large chunk of the globe, embarking on unknown land belonging to
what to the Europeans seemed mystifying and mysterious peoples, the
expedition members detected an indirect, even implicit, evocation of their place
of origin, their state of allegiance. Deep in an unexplored territory whose
inhabitants speak languages not only incomprehensible but unrelated to
European linguistic development, such a verbal apparition would be akin to
hallucination. After all, in the early 16th century, monster figures still adorn the
unknown or dangerous regions in contemporary cartographic representations of
the earth.
But Díaz del Castillo wrote about this brief encounter as just one minor event
among others, en passant, and the “Castilian” evocation excited little curiosity.
Until Cortés, who had not even been present when the event took place, later
brought the issue to the fore, this frightening eruption of phonemes received
little commentary. In Cortés’s interrogation of those witnessing the event, which
included Díaz del Castillo himself, the reception of this strange exclamation
takes a different turn altogether. Cortés’s reaction, which at the outset of his own
expedition merely tries to wrestle the enigma to reason, suggests a more solemn
and masterly regime of knowledge, of understanding, whatever the initial
shudders and anxiety this expression might have produced. Writing with full
knowledge of all that transpired afterwards, Díaz del Castillo offers to the
contemporary reader—and the early 21st century still partakes of that
contemporaneity—an account filtering out the stupefaction, even shivering fear,
that such an unpredictable burst of self-recognition might entail. Yet, in that
account, that “true” rendering, this pre-Cortés episode constitutes an allegorical
beginning of a different cosmopolitical understanding, neither kinder nor
gentler, whose shadows are projected throughout the history.
20
Chapter One
To Díaz del Castillo and even decades later to his first readers, this evocation of
the language of Castile, of the Castilian tongue, went hand in hand with their
presence: in addition to the general physical accoutrements, the aboriginal
people recognized the conquering soldiers by their way of speaking, by the
articulated sounds whose meaning they were incapable of decoding. The entire
course of Cortés’s crusade, not its immediate and devastating success but its
setting into place a new global economy of conquest, a cosmopolitical
universality enduring to buttress even contemporary outgrowths of globalism,
depends on the language question. Here, though, the language question concerns
the mediating power of language and its conjunction with cosmopolitical
understanding, not which language should dominate in which state, at the heart
of a given collectivity. In Spain, ultimately a product of the outgrowth of
Castilian tentacles, that language was Castilian, which was funneled through the
fledgling state institutions.
The genius of Cortés, insofar as his actions laid the groundwork for an emergent
global domain, derived from the frame of mind he exemplified, both historically
and in Díaz del Castillo’s true history. In questioning Díaz del Castillo and his
companion, both witnesses of the linguistic apparition, Cortés remarked that he
“thought often about it [the mention of ‘Castilian’] and that there might by
chance [por ventura] be some Spaniards in that land” (Díaz del Castillo 1992,
79). Above and beyond the calculated rationalism of Cortés’s reflection, which
ignored any potential spiritual meaning, whether foreboding disaster or
foretelling a glorious destiny, this brief sentence, the product of Cortés’s
ruminations, marks a departure that is already second-hand. In retrospect, the
import that this remark gives to an uncanny sound transforms the context of the
divine as well as secular mission and, at the same time, transcends the
circumstances of the Spanish crown’s miserable quest for glory, wealth, and
territory. Unbeknownst to its speaker, this utterance, in its implications and
subsequent unfolding, cloaks both the imperial desire bound up with globalism
and the undercurrent of betrayal coursing through the global mind. I could
never do justice to this sentence in all its excruciating exactitude, as much a
death sentence for nonglobal thinking as a series of anodyne words voiced on
the Central American coast. Armed with the foreknowledge that completing
such a task is impossible, I would nevertheless like to consider the consequences
that this sentence enables and espouses.
In standing firm against the irrational, Cortés reached the just conclusion,
thinking it highly likely that subjects of the Spanish crown had already
penetrated the area. We are no different from Cortés and easily recognize him as
one of our own, a modern globalist. The striking irruption of this European
The Earthly Thinking of Planetary Unity
21
inscription, of this Castilian word, holds no mystery that is not already dispelled
by calculating logic. More importantly, though, this linguistic incident offers
banal but irrefutable evidence that there is no first time. The readers of Diaz del
Castillo’s history can never ascertain the nature of his own reaction to hearing
“Castilian” in Castilian in a place where he thought himself among the first
Europeans; he wrote his history too long after the events in question, and his
historical record manifests the profound influence of Cortés’s turn of mind,
which is resolutely that of a successful globalist. In the cosmopolitical domain,
in a world conceived and constituted as an integral whole, nowhere remains
untouched, everywhere constitutes a site of potential repetition. Without the
possibility of pristine experience, we loop along a predetermined trajectory
reiterating what has gone before, drawing impetus from consequences that we
misrecognize as originary events. This repetition concerns the conjunction of
language and empire, of universal subjects and temporal state allegiance. Cortés
understood that the “Castilian” vocalization signaled the presence of Spanish
subjects who spoke the Castilian language. No less than the Cortés mission’s
spectacular success—that is, the profitable annihilation of global adversaries—
the Spanish imperial venture hinges on these Castilian “sleepers,” those lying
dormant in global backlands who awaken to provide mediation between
asymmetrical ensembles on a planetary scale.
Cortés, a practical man, set out to locate the assumed referent of these utterances
of “Castilian.” He sent out letters to what he learned were two survivors of a
Spanish vessel, lost and shipwrecked eight years earlier, that had originally
seventeen passengers, including two women. All being captured and divided
among indigenous factions, the others suffered various mortal fates, some being
sacrificed to the gods, some dying from fatigue or overwork. Jerónimo de
Aguilar was the first to receive Cortés’s communiqué and the beads buying his
freedom; he immediately traveled the five leagues separating him from his
compatriot survivor. There Aguilar and Gonzalo Guerrero read the letters
together, in a community of two, as it were, but their reception of the
presumably good news could not have been more divergent. Of the two
Spaniards, Guerrero had irrecuperably “gone native” and refused outrightly to
join the ranks of his mother country.5
Aguilar, on the other hand, becomes a recurring presence in the conquest story;
his linguistic skills, which include the ability to communicate in the Mayan
dialects, became a fundamental component of the Spanish physical and spiritual
assault. Initially, though, Aguilar’s shedding of his aboriginal exterior to
reassume his presumably underlying Spanishness did not take place without a
moment of misrecognition and a fumbling about. One of Cortés’s soldiers,
22
Chapter One
designated to meet the arriving group of nonEuropeans, saw only “Indians
(because Aguilar was neither more nor less than Indian)” (Díaz del Castillo
1992, 83). As far as his Spanish onlookers were concerned, the individual who
would later be called Aguilar was just another member of a small party of
Indians. Judging solely from appearances, it was impossible to call a Spaniard a
Spaniard. Aguilar’s hair was trimmed in the same way as his companions, and
his tattered clothes could not be distinguished from theirs. He had a sandal on
one foot, the other on his belt, with his oar resting on his shoulder. His
foreignness was unremarkable.
Seeking to cleave his appearance, to express an interior distinct from his outer,
completely autochthonous image, Aguilar mouths essentially three words in
Spanish, apparently not yet capable of coming up with a complete sentence.
Seemingly offered as an introduction, he utters “God and Holy Mary and
Seville” (“Dios y Santa María y Sevilla”) (Díaz del Castillo 1992, 84). These
are not just any three words. They signal, first, an appeal to transcendence
generally, although in the emerging cosmopolitical dimension, invoking God
means exceedingly more than religious justification, more than the deceitful
cynicism that asserts the most unrighteous acts of colonial barbarism to be
expressions of divine justness. The all-seeing God, monotheistic by definition,
furnishes the global vanishing point, the abstract perspective from which the
world can display its hypothetical unity. The hailing of Holy Mary, whose
phantomlike image repeatedly appears in ferocious, protective splendor as the
conquest unfolds, evokes the means of God’s human incarnation marking the
beginning of Christianity, the universal religion bound up with the
cosmopolitical. Just as Christ embodies God in the terrestrial setting, so does
Mary, the mother Mary, intercede with the Godhead, in the medieval elaboration
of her role that will become entwined with the universal Church itself.6 And,
lastly, Aguilar hails Seville, the port of Spain that was the point of departure for
Spanish ships heading for what becomes designated as the New World, first
embarking on a voyage into the unknown. Enjoying a monopoly on Spanish
commerce with the New World, Seville becomes a major global hub in a more
figurative sense, as Aguilar’s croaking intimates. He invokes a series of linkages
exceeding a mere abstract grid of national identity, for he literally espouses the
coordinates of human identity that will be the point of reference, the intangible
measure for depicting the floating selfhoods of the cosmopolitical age. In
another, more conceptual register, his utterance indicates the transcendent or
divine realm that cannot be reduced to an earthly dimension, following it by
reference to the moment when a transcendent God manifests himself in
terrestrial guise by being born of human flesh, and ending with a global site that
serves as a point of transfer between the old and the new worlds, between the