Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays

You notice, don’t you, how in the second section of that poem, after the creation of man, we have that phrase “became too proud” coming back again and again like the recurrence of a dominant beat in rhythmic music? Clearly the makers of that myth intended us not to miss it. So it was at the very heart of their purpose. Man is destroyed by pride. It is said over and over again; it is shouted like a message across vast distances until the man at the other end of the savannah has definitely got it, despite the noise of rushing winds. Or if you prefer a modern metaphor, it is like making a longdistance call when the line is faulty or in bad weather. You shout your message and repeat it again and again just to make sure.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French structural anthropologist, has indeed sought to explain the repetitive factor in myth in this way, relating it to general information theory. Our forefathers and ancestors are seen in the role of senders of the message; and we, the novices of society, as receivers.12 The ancestors are sending us signals from the long history and experience of bygone days about the meaning of life, the qualities we should cultivate and the values that are important. Because they are so far away and because we are surrounded by the tumult and distractions of daily life they have to shout and repeat themselves not only in phrase after phrase but also in myth after myth, varying the form slightly now and again until the central message goes home.

If this interpretation is right then the Fulani myth of creation not only delivers a particular message on the danger of pride but also exemplifies beautifully the general intention and purpose of myths.

Let us now look at another short myth from the Igbo people in Nigeria which bears more directly on the question of language:

When death first entered the world, men sent a messenger to Chuku, asking him whether the dead could not be restored to life and sent back to their old homes. They chose the dog as their messenger.

The dog, however, did not go straight to Chuku, and dallied on the way. The toad had overheard the message, and as he wished to punish mankind, he overtook the dog and reached Chuku first. He said he had been sent by men to say that after death they had no desire at all to return to the world. Chuku declared that he would respect their wishes, and when the dog arrived with the true message he refused to alter his decision.

Thus although a human being may be born again, he cannot return with the same body and the same personality.13

It has been pointed out that there are more than seven hundred different versions of this myth all over Africa. Thus, the element of repetition which we have seen in the form of a phrase recurring in time within one myth takes on the formidable power of spatial dispersion across a continent. Clearly the ancestral senders regard this particular signal as of desperate importance, hence its ubiquity and the profuse variations on its theme. Sometimes the messenger is the dog; sometimes the chameleon or the lizard, or some other animal. In some versions the message is garbled through the incompetence of the messenger, or through his calculated malice against man. In others, man in his impatience sends a second messenger to God who in anger withdraws the gift of immortality. But whatever variations in the detail the dominant theme remains: Men send a messenger to their Creator with a plea for immortality and He is disposed to grant their request. But something goes wrong with the message at the last moment. And this bounty which mankind has all but held in its grasp, this monumental gift that would have made man more like the gods, is snatched from him forever. And he knows that there is a way to hell even from the gates of heaven!

This, to my mind, is the great myth about language and the destiny of man. Its lesson should be clear to all. It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere i

ncompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

Address first delivered at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in June 1972; subsequently published in Morning Yet on Creation Day, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1975.

PICASSO once pronounced that all art was false. Since the West gave him credit for something like 90 percent of its twentieth-century artistic achievement, Picasso no doubt felt free to say whatever he liked on the matter! Even so, I believe he was merely drawing attention in the exaggerated manner of seers and prophets to the important but simple fact that art cannot be a carbon copy of life; and thus, in that specific sense, cannot be “true.” And if not true, it must therefore be false!

But if art may dispense with the constraining exactitude of literal truth, it does acquire in return incalculable powers of persuasion in the imagination. Which was why a single canvas, Guernica, by Picasso himself could so frighten the state machinery of Spanish fascism. For how could a mere painting on canvas exercise such awe unless in some way it accorded with, or had a disquieting relationship to, recognizable reality? Unless, in other words, it spoke a kind of truth?

In his “Memorial Verses,” Matthew Arnold put these words into the mouth of the poet and philosopher Goethe:

The end is everywhere

Art still has truth, take refuge there.1

Placed in that grand, apocalyptic setting, art and whatever truth is claimed for it are bound to become unduly remote.

Actually, art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him; an aspiration to provide himself with a second handle on existence through his imagination. For practical considerations, I shall limit myself to just one of the forms he has fashioned out of his experience with language—the art of fiction.

In his brilliant essay The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode defines fiction simply as “something we know does not exist but which helps us to make sense of, and move in, the world.”2 Defining it in this practical way does prepare us not for one but for many varieties of fiction. Kermode himself draws attention to some of them, for example the mathematical fiction of “infinity plus one” which does not exist and yet facilitates the solution of certain problems in pure mathematics; or the legal fiction in certain legal systems which holds that when a man and his wife die at the same time the law, in pursuit of equity, will pretend that the woman dies before her husband, so that excessive hardship may not be brought upon their estate.

In other words, we invent different fictions to help us out of particular problems we encounter in living. But of course these problems are not always as specific and clear-cut, or indeed as consciously perceived, as the lawyer’s or the mathematician’s formulations. When two very young children say to each other, “Let us pretend …” and begin to act such roles as father and mother they are obviously creating a fiction for a less definite, more spontaneous and, I dare say, more profound purpose.

What is the nature of this purpose? I don’t think anyone can say for certain. All that we do know is that judging from the evidence of man’s fiction-making in all places and at all times he must surely have an inescapable need for that activity. No one has yet come upon the slightest evidence that any human group now or in the past managed to dispense with the need to make fictions.

Given the great gulf between being and knowing, between his essence and existence, man has no choice really but to make and believe in some fiction or other. Perhaps the ultimate judgement on a man is not whether he acquiesces to a fiction but rather what kind of fiction will persuade him into that acquiescence, that willing suspension of disbelief which Coleridge spoke about or that “experimental submission,” to quote I. A. Richards.

However, we must not overlook the carefulness displayed by both Coleridge and Richards in their choice of words; and for a very good reason. Coleridge’s disbelief is only suspended, not abolished, and will presumably return at the appropriate moment; and Richards’s submission is experimental, not definitive or permanent.

It is important to stress this point because man makes not only fictions to which he gives guarded or temporary acquiescence like the pretending games of healthy children; he has the capacity also to create fictions that demand and indeed impose upon him absolute and unconditional obedience. I will shortly return to this, but first of all let me extend what I have said about man’s desire for fictions to include the question of his capacity. Man’s desire for fictions goes with his ability for making them, just as his need for language is inseparable from his capacity for speech. If man only had the need to speak but lacked his peculiar speech organs, he could not have invented language. For all we know, other animals in the jungle might be in just as much need to talk to one another as man ever was and might have become just as eloquent had they been endowed with the elaborate apparatus for giving expression to that need. And certainly no one would suggest that the mute is silent because he has no need to speak or nothing to say. If we apply the same reasoning to man’s propensity for fictions we can see that his need to create them would not adequately explain their existence; there must also be an effective apparatus.

This equipment, I suggest, is man’s imagination. For just as man is a tool-making animal and has recreated his natural world with his tools, so is he a fiction-making animal and refashions his imaginative landscape with his fictions.

All attempts to define man neatly must fail because of his complexity. Man is a rational animal; man is a political animal; man is a tool-making animal, man is etc., etc. If you ask me I will add that man is a questioning animal, a highly curious animal. Given his mental and imaginative capacities this curiosity is only to be expected. Man finds himself caught, as it were, in a tiny glow-worm of consciousness. Behind him is the impenetrable darkness of his origin, and before him is another deep obscurity into which he seems headed. What is shrouded by those darknesses? What is the meaning of this tiny, intervening spot of light which is his earthiy existence? In the face of these mysteries man’s capacities are at once immense and severely circumscribed. His knowledge though impressive and expanding will never in all likelihood match what he needs to know. Not even the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of all his species will suffice. The ultimate questions will in all probability remain.

In the 1950s a Nigerian microbiologist, Dr. Sanya Onabamiro, published a book which he entitled, with great perspicacity, Why Our Children Die, echoing what must have been one of the most poignant and heartrending questions asked by our ancestors down the millennia. Why do our children die? Being a modern scientist Dr. Onabamiro gave appropriate twentieth-century answers: disease, undernourishment and ignorance. Every reasonable person will accept that this “scientific” answer is more satisfactory than answers we might be given from other quarters. For example, a witch doctor might tell us that our children die because they are bewitched; because someone else in the family has offended a god or, in some other secret way, erred. Some years ago I watched the pitiful spectacle of an emaciated little child brought out and sat on a mat in the midst of the desperate habitués of a prayer-house while the prophetess with maniacal authority pronounced it possessed by the devil and ordered its parents to fast for seven days.

The point of these examples is to suggest two things: first, the richness, the sheer prodigality, of man’s inventiveness in creating aetiological fictions; second, that not all his fictions are equally useful or desirable.

But first of all I must explain my temerity in thus appearing to lump together under the general rubric of fictions the cool, methodical and altogether marvellous procedures of modern medicine with the erratic “visions” of a religious psychopath. In all truth, the two ought never to be mentioned in the same breath. And yet they share, however remotely it may seem, the same need of man to explain and alleviate his intolerable condition. And they both make use of theories of disease—the germ theory, on the one hand, and the theory of diabolical possession, on the other. And theories are no more than fictions which help us to make sense of experience and which are subject to disconfirmation when their explanations are no longer adequate. There is no doubt, for instance, that scientists in the twenty-first and later centuries will look at some of the most cherished scientific notions of our day with the same amused indulgence that we show towards the fumblings of past generations.

And yet we can say, indeed we must say, that the insights given by Dr. Onabamiro into the problem of high infant mortality, however incomplete future generations may find them, are infinitely more helpful to us than the diagnosis of a half-mad religious fanatic. In conclusion, there are fictions that help and fictions that hinder. For simplicity, let us call them beneficent and malignant fictions.