The Eating of the Soul

Abstract

EVER SINCE ANTHROPOLOGISTS BEGAN to speak of the cultures they study as textual, and literary critics began to speak of the texts they study as cultural, one of the dreams of cultural poetics has been to link the text of anthropology and the text of literary criticism. Hence, to cite a single famous example, Clifford Geertz writes that if, to quote Northrop Frye . . . we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out what a man, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed, a kind of moral autocosm, feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally low.' Geertz is an intellectual equilibrist whom others, less endowed with an exquisite sense of balance, have tried unsuccessfully to follow. So it is probably worth acknowledging something right from the start: we will never find an adequate fit between the anthropologist's text and the literary critics', between a contemporary culture that has been the subject of anthropological study and a cultural artifact, let us say, from Renaissance England, or between a native practice and a play by Shakespeare. What do I mean by an adequate fit? I mean the full and resonant correspondence, the mutually constitutive and interanimating meanings, quietly conjured up by the structure of the sentence I have just quoted: If we go to Macbeth to learn X, Balinese go to cockfights to find out Y. Geertz is too thoughtful and canny a writer to insist dogmatically upon the correspondence, which hovers just beyond reach. He is not really claiming that we-whoever we are-are just like Balinese villagers, or that Macbeth has the place in our everyday life that cockfighting has in the lives of the Balinese, or that we even know why we go to Macbeth (it is, after all, Northrop Frye who claims to know that, and the claim is delicately recast in the conditional mode). Rather, Geertz's words have a well-crafted rhetorical effect: because of Shakespeare's exalted place in high culture and because of the centrality, complexity, and greatness of Macbeth within the Shakespearean canon (and, for that matter, because of the authority of Northrop Frye's literary criticism), the parallel implicitly confers a higher significance upon cockfights than they might otherwise appear to an outsider to possess. I have seen Balinese cockfights, and I can assure you that a resemblance to Shakespeare's work of art is not immediately apparent. No doubt the losing cock, bleeding in the dirt, feels the tragedy of the occasion-and we might remember that Macbeth likens himself to the animal in another blood sport, bear baiting-