The problem is that this information quoted in the catalogue is largely untrue. I can confirm this because in these last few days I have come across the recent volume entitled Freaks, by Leslie Fiedler, which, apart from chapters on dwarves, giants, bearded women and hermaphrodites, contains about thirty pages on Siamese twins which are full of essential information. From this source it turns out that Giovanni Battista and Giacomo Tocci, who were baptized as two separate people even though from the seventh rib downwards they were just one person, had to put up with another severe handicap: their single pair of legs was unable to support them or to walk. (In fact in Dr Spitzner’s wax model we see them leaning on a railing.) This immobility severely limited their possibilities in exhibitions of ‘living phenomena’, and as a result, after a rather brief but exhausting international tour, they were forced to give up their circus career and retired to Italy, where they sadly died (I can’t find the date, but presumably at a young age).
The news about the marriage with two sisters probably derives from the fact that the account has been contaminated with another story, a true one (the only one of its kind that can be considered as having in some sense a ‘happy ending’). This was the story of the eponymous Siamese twins (in other words the twins whose fame is the reason we call ‘Siamese’ all twins who have one part of their body attached to the other twin). Chang and Eng were born in 1811 in Siam into a poor Chinese family and died in the United States in 1874. They quickly fell into the hands of unscrupulous impresarios, who transported them to America, thinking they could use them as their own goods and chattels, but Chang and Eng were able to become independent and to manage their own fortune without being exploited even by the grasping Barnum, in whose circus they appeared until 1839.
The story of Chang and Eng represented the triumph of both Chinese shrewdness and the American belief in overcoming adversities and prejudices: in fact they managed to retire to the North Carolina countryside and to gain the respect of the closed world of white farmers, so much so that they married two sisters, daughters of a wealthy landowner who was also a pastor in the Baptist Church. With their wives they had twelve and ten children respectively, all of them healthy, so their descendants nowadays amount to a thousand or so American citizens.
The image of the Tocci brothers on the wall-posters struck the imagination of Mark Twain, who drafted a story inspired by their case, just as the fortunes of Chang and Eng provided him with material for another story. (The theme of the ‘double’ is a recurrent motif in his oeuvre.) Fiedler’s book, whose subtitle is Myths and Images of the Secret Self, records and blends historical facts with literary and cinematographic inventions and with evocations of mythical archetypes. The most interesting pages of the book are the true stories: the lives of ‘living phenomena’ in the world of the circus, almost all of them very sad tales.
However, the starting-point for this volume by Fiedler is a reflection on the alternating cultural fortunes of the term freaks, which at one time was associated with fascination and horror, and which now has been appropriated ‘as an honorific title by the kind of physiologically normal but dissident young people who . . . are otherwise known as “hippies”, “longhairs”, and “heads”’ (Leslie Fiedler, Freaks. Myths and Images of the Secret Self, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978, p. 14). From this premise Fiedler sets out to conduct research into the value that forms of physical ‘diversity’ have had in various cultures, as an examination of the confines and roles that define human existence. Seen from this perspective, Dr Spitzner’s waxwork museum may offer food for further thought.
[1980]
The Dragon Tradition
Like so many other things, the study of dialects in France began in the Napoleonic era. In 1807, the office of statistics in the Ministry of the Interior launched an inquiry throughout all the Prefectures of the country. The task was to put together a collection of versions of the parable of the prodigal son in the different patois and dialects spoken in France. They decided on this base-text after considering other alternatives (for instance a collection of Sunday sermons) and in the end they opted for that particular episode since, as recounted in the verses of St Luke’s Gospel, it offered the prerequisites of simplicity and universality as well as a typical, everyday lexis. When the Restoration came, the office of statistics was suppressed, but the research was continued by the Société royale des Antiquaires until they had assembled 300 versions.
These details alone are enough to give an idea of how questions concerning the study of popular culture in France are framed differently from in Italy. In France the multiplicity of local cultures lies almost hidden behind the massive hegemony of the linguistic and cultural unity of the nation (whereas in Italy these proportions are inverted), and the urge to gain knowledge of this world starts with the realization that they are in the process of disappearing. (What is different in France and in Italy is the pace of historical survival: in my own country it seemed as if up to yesterday traditional customs and mentalities were ineradicable, but then they suddenly disappeared overnight, whereas in France they quickly became marginalized but as such they have enjoyed a very lengthy period of survival.)
The exhibition mounted at the Grand Palais, entitled Yesterday for Tomorrow: Trades, Traditions and the Nation’s Legacy, traces the origins of the ‘ethnographical’ discovery of France in the period of the Enlightenment, when the Encyclopédie valorized and catalogued the tools and operations of the ‘mechanical arts’. Alongside the stalls dedicated to artisan trades the exhibition features an authentic loom from the period, a loom for making stockings, along with beautiful embroidered silk stockings also from the eighteenth century. ‘The loom for making stockings is one of the most complicated and rigorously logical machines that we have,’ is the philosophical comment offered by Diderot. ‘One could consider it as just one single piece of reasoning whose conclusion is the making of the stockings.’
At the same time, a decisive step was taken by the Société royale d’Agriculture, when the shepherd, a figure who had been made sugary sweet by the pastoral convention in art and literature, became a subject of technical knowledge with manuals such as A Treatise on Wool-Bearing Animals, or the Method for the Rearing and Managing of Flocks (1770) or Instructions for Shepherds and Owners of Flocks (1782). In this case too the Grand Palais exhibition places beside written and artistic documents the objects and tools they actually used: in this case, dog-collars with iron spikes or crooks with spoon-shaped tips for throwing clods of earth at disobedient rams.
The doctors of the Société royale de Médecine were ethnographers without realizing it: they combed the countryside to trace the origin and spread of epidemics and occupational diseases. Their Medical Topographies contain descriptions of the living environments of rural families, and also of the work involved in skills such as lace-making and glass-blowing.
The French Revolution pushed the people to the forefront of history, but did not do much to get to know them in concrete terms, despite the efforts of a curious kind of scholar, the Abbé Grégoire, who decided to use the network of local ‘patriotic societies’ to distribute a questionnaire on the dialects and customs of the countryside. The fact is that the Revolution was forced to acknowledge the cultural divide separating the city populace (the sans-culottes, armed with pikes) from that of the countryside (the Royalist Chouans, armed with sickles), and relegated the ‘savage side of France’ to the vestiges of the past to be eradicated without quarter. In short, as far as the two aspects of Enlightenment culture are concerned—that of linear, unifying progress, and that of a detailed knowledge of the country’s diversities and the rationale behind them—the Revolution appropriated only the first aspect
, consistent with the logic of Jacobin centralization.
The revival would come about in the climate of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, when the ‘Celtic Academy’ resolved to reconstruct the image of an autochthonous civilization, that of Druidic Gaul, in opposition to the Graeco-Roman model so beloved by the revolutionaries. But these ideological contrasts belong more to our schematic way of looking at things than to reality: for the scholars of the Celtic Academy were still people who had been educated in Enlightenment culture, and their inquiries and research methods were models of scientific modernity.
One of the first initiatives promulgated by the Celtic Academy was a census of dragons: in about twenty French cities a papier-mâché dragon was (or is still) carried in a procession once a year. The legend behind the festival is more or less the same everywhere: maidens being offered to the monster, then their rescue by a male or female saint. The dragon has two aspects: a terrifying enemy in the legend, it becomes in the procession a carnivalesque, almost benign presence, with which the city identifies and from which it seeks protection. The readers of Tartarin, who remember how the town of Tarascon was proud of its Tarasque dragon, will find in this exhibition a huge naive painting of the people of Tarascon carrying their ‘Tarasque’ through the streets.
Reproduced in the exhibition posters, this painting promises the visitor a more lively and jovial set of exhibits than is in fact encountered. As we can easily imagine, nothing is more boring than walls full of illustrations of life in the countryside in the nineteenth century. And the photographs of washer-women in Breton costume are no more exciting. The fact is that in nineteenth-century art and literature there was a comforting ideology behind this image of rural life: the countryside was the healthy world of lost virtues as opposed to the town. From such a false and tedious idea could only come false and tedious representations, as the exhibition abundantly proves.
What is interesting, on the other hand, are the exceptions to this picture. For instance, Maurice Sand, son of George Sand (who today is coming back into fashion, being reprinted and read both from a feminist standpoint and in precisely this ‘ethnographic’ way), illustrated his mother’s ‘rustic legends’ with Romantic drawings à la Doré, in a visionary, hallucinatory style, which can also be quite disturbing. And above all there is an ethnographic draughtsman, Gaston Vuillier (1845–1915), who was fascinated by practices of witchcraft and occultism in the countryside, and who possessed both a scrupulous documentary fidelity and a sense of unusual effects. (It turns out that he also visited Sicily and Sardinia, making drawings of magical practices there: it would be worthwhile tracking these down.)
Naturally, it is the objects that speak more than the paintings and photographs and the usual, predictable regional costumes. A large amount of this material comes from the Museum of Popular Crafts and Traditions, which for the last twelve years has been based in the Bois de Boulogne in a site that is a model of museum display. While in its home museum the material is presented using a systematic classification, here in the exhibition (which has been organized by the museum conservator himself, Jean Cuisenier) a historical approach prevails: it presents the history of France’s ‘ethnographic’ interest in itself. As a result, going through the exhibition is a bit like leafing through the History of Folklore in Europe by our own Giuseppe Cocchiara, a book written about thirty years ago but which remains the most useful brief account for contextualizing in historical terms the various types of approach adopted by high culture in studying the areas that are most remote from itself.
In recent times, historical research has been trying to extend this network of relationships backwards in time, in other words to define oppositions and interactions between high culture and popular culture right from the time of the Renaissance, if not indeed from the Middle Ages. This is the direction taken by the most recent work on the subject to come out in Italy, a book by the English historian Peter Burke: Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).
Naturally, also from this perspective, the cusp of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains a crucial period. ‘The discovery of popular culture,’ writes Peter Burke,
took place in the main in what might be called the cultural periphery of Europe as a whole and of different countries within it. Italy, France and England had long had national literatures and a literary language. Their intellectuals were becoming cut off from folksongs and folktales in a way that Russians, say, or Swedes were not . . . It is not surprising to find that in Britain it was the Scots rather than the English who rediscovered popular culture, or that the folksong movement came late to France and was pioneered by a Breton, Villemarqué, whose collection, Barzaz Braiz, was published in 1839. Again, Villemarqué’s equivalent in Italy, Tommaseo, came from Dalmatia, and when Italian folklore was first studied seriously, in the later nineteenth century, the most important contributions were made in Sicily . . . In Germany too the initiative came from the periphery; Herder and Von Arnim were born east of the Elbe. (pp. 13–14)
The English historian’s thesis is confirmed by the dates of the documents in the Paris exhibition: one could say that France was the last nation in Europe to start studying its own popular and rural traditions, so much so that the monumental work in this area, The Manual of Contemporary French Folklore by Arnold Van Gennep, came out (in nine volumes, but incomplete) only in the twentieth century, between 1937 and 1958. But for me the important point is something different: it is always the awareness of something that is about to be lost that brings about the pietas for these humble vestiges. The ‘centre’ only comes to this awareness later on, when its drive towards cultural homogenization is, one might say, complete and there is not much left to salvage; the ‘periphery’ notices this beforehand, seeing it as a threat that comes from the pressure to centralize.
This year is the Year of Heritage in France, and the exhibition is organized in this context, with special attention being paid to the role played first by private collections and the antiques market in valorizing rustic ceramics and wooden sculptures, subsequently by regional museums, and now by the ‘regional parks’ which are planning a wider campaign to safeguard the environment. The word patrimoine (‘heritage, tradition’), which is dear to the old heart of Balzac’s France, of a country that ‘saves’, creates an impression of something solid and substantial, something that can be turned into capital (whereas we Italians talk of beni culturali, ‘cultural goods’, an expression devoid of any connotation of possession or concreteness). Perhaps only this echo of material interest can counterbalance the instinctive gesture of contemporary man: that of throwing things away.
[1980]
Before the Alphabet
Writing first emerges in Lower Mesopotamia, in the land of the Sumerians, whose capital was Uruk, around 3300 BC. This was the country of clay: administrative documents, bills of sale, religious texts or those glorifying kings were engraved with the triangular point of a reed or quill on clay tablets which were then dried in the sun or baked. The surface and the instrument ensured that primitive pictograms quickly became simplified and stylized in the extreme. Pictographic signs (for a fish, a bird, a horse’s head) lost their curves since these did not come out well on clay: in this way the resemblance between the sign and the thing represented tended to disappear; the signs that dominated were those that could be drawn with a series of instant strokes of the quill.
In general these signs had a triangular apex that then prolonged itself into a line forming a kind of nail shape, or forking into two lines like a wedge: this was cuneiform writing (cuneus means wedge in Latin), writing that transmitted an impression of rapidity, movement, elegance and c
ompositional regularity. Whereas in inscriptions sculpted on stone the predominant sequence of signs was vertical, writing on clay tended naturally to extend along horizontal, parallel lines. This linear, tense, sharp movement of the pen which we recognize in cuneiform documents would become the movement made by anyone who uses a fountain pen or biro in our own times.
From that point onwards, writing would mean writing quickly. The real history of writing is the history of cursive handwriting; or, at least we could say that it is to the cursive form of writing that cuneiform owes its fame. Economy of time, but also economy in terms of space: to place as much writing as possible on a surface was a tour de force that was quickly embraced. One tablet fragment that has been preserved is two centimetres by two, and has thirty lines of liturgical lamentations in a microscopic cuneiform.
The Sumerian language was agglutinative: monosyllables were accompanied by prefixes and suffixes. As the signs became detached from the pictograms and ideograms that they originated from, they gradually became associated with syllabic sounds. But cuneiform writing continued to retain vestiges of the various phases of its evolution. In the same text, in the same line even, ideogram signs (the king, the god, adjectives like ‘shining’, ‘powerful’) are followed by syllabic phonetic signs (especially for proper names: the priest Dudu is written with a drawing of two feet since ‘Du’ means ‘foot’) and grammatical-determinative signs (for the feminine they use a triangular sign which originally was the female pubes).