Gadze Modernism

Abstract

Gadže Modernism Janet Lyon (bio) In April 1908, not long before his career-ending mental breakdown, Arthurs Symons published a notice in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society titled "In Praise of Gypsies."1 Though brief, the essay is freighted with the exoticism characterizing most gypsophilia at the time—indeed, characterizing most ethnographic endeavors of the early modernist period. The occasion for Symons's essay was the impending passage of the Moveable Dwellings Bill, the aim of which was to register, regulate, and provide for the sanitary inspection of the vans and tents of British Gypsies and Travellers, and to mandate the education of their children.2 But Symons's indignation in the face of this proposed legislation—which, he claims, will "shuffle (the 'Gypsies') right off the very earth to which they have the universal human right" (298)—is largely disconnected from the actual social conditions of the Romani populations in England and Wales ("PG," 298). Instead it springs mainly from Symons's investment in the fictional romantic figure of the "Gypsy," a "natural man" whose instinctual drive for freedom leads him away from civilization's gatekeepers along a secret and infinitely receding road limning the outer reaches of modernity. Symons repeats all of the nineteenth-century tropes of orientalism and race, mysticism and ahistoricity: "Gypsies" are "changeless: the world has not power over them. They live by rote and by faith and by tradition which is part of their blood" ("PG," 295); they are "prophets," "our only link with the East, with mystery, with magic"; they are possessed of the "lawlessness, the abandonment, the natural physical grace in form and gesture, of animals; only a stealthy and wary something in their eyes makes them human" ("PG," 296). They are the atavistic [End Page 517] trace of the rural, pre-modern world, and they will remain when "cities and nations have vanished, as the dust vanishes before the wind." 3 The robust, though elusive figure of the "Gypsy" is an elixir for the desiccated spirit of the West, at least in the eyes of this fading avatar of Symbolism; even the well-known "Gypsy faults" of "secrecy," "lying" and "thieving" can be lessons in anti-modern resistance for the perceptive man who will but recognize them ("PG," 297-98). Thus Symons replicates one vector of the multivalent figure of the gadže (non-Romani) creation called the "Gypsy." This is the celebrated Romani "Gypsy," an emblem of natural liberty, unencumbered mobility, communal loyalty and harmony, admirably impervious to manipulation by the state and everywhere subverting the disciplinarity of evolving modern institutions. But of course there were other more dominant and historically entrenched vectors of representation, lingering on from pre-romantic policies of xenophobia and mid-empire racial sciences, heightened by the coalescence of wage labor after the major phase of the industrial revolution, and disseminated in the parallel discourses of national character and social control of the nineteenth century. According to these, the perceived freedoms of the "Gypsy" were in fact manifestations of congenital lawlessness, habitual restlessness, a perversely arrested sense of domesticity, and—perhaps most dangerously—a resolute unwillingness to settle and perform "honest" wage labor. The fabled insularity of "Gypsy" communities was proof of a radical alterity that might be anti-statist or anti-Christian or just plain criminal in origin; in any case it was seen to shelter illiteracy and uncleanliness, and perpetuate itinerant poverty. However divergent the affective force of these positions might have been, both the celebratory and suspicious views of the "Gypsy" shared some important assumptions, as they were largely flip sides of the same ideological coin: the British "Gypsy" (in spite of 500 years of Gypsy-Traveller populations in England) was foreign, or at least fundamentally not-English; it was also, for all of its proud self-sufficiency, notably—even recidivistically—primitive. For both champions and detractors, the figure of the "Gypsy" seemed to reveal something about the leaky valves of modernity: living in the midst of "progress" (in a country where the institutions of modernity had been established especially early) the "Gypsy" somehow—actively—avoided modernity's ineluctable telos. Such a figure could be of great value both to...