Anything you would like to add to our discussion today of Montagu and Diderot? Anything you would have like to say but didn't have a chance to? Any questions you didn't have a chance to ask?
Feel free to offer your thoughts here, or respond to a classmate's ideas.
Deadline: Monday (4/11), start of class. Posts before midnight Saturday (4/9) count toward Week 11; posts after that count toward Week 12.
13 comments:
A question that I would ask is how would the people from the foriegn land react if they were to travel to Diderot's home land? I was wondering if they would respect or completly hate the culture if they witnessed and participated in it.
I wonder what the Turks and Tahitians would think if they could read and understand the travel logs written about them by Montagu and Diderot. I wonder how accurate or insightful they would find the logs and what things, if any, they would find inaccurate.
Like Margaret, I've been wondering about accuracy. In my case, my wonderment was sparked by a conversation with a friend who has an art history background. We were talking about Diderot’s tales of Tahiti. My friend mentioned that the artist Gauguin, known for his paintings of Tahitian life, has been accused of imagining what he has portrayed in those paintings. Though Gauguin’s paintings were done near the end of C19, the Tahiti he portrays seems to align with Diderot’s C18 portrayal. I did some searching and found a 2001 article entitled Gauguin's erotic Tahiti idyll exposed as a sham. To quote the article:
'Gauguin seems to have fallen for the myth of Tahiti he created,' said Mathews [the author]. 'He returned [to Tahiti a second time] expecting the erotic idyll that was only ever a figment of his imagination. Of course, he didn't find it and the disappointment was profound: he died a twisted and bitter man, having alienated everyone both at home and in Tahiti. It's a sad story of a man who believed his own fiction.' (linked article, last paragraph)
The above quote does not acknowledge the possibility of Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings being based on C18 Tahitian life. All of this interested me in terms of the fictions the C18 travel narratives sometimes foisted on the public, as well as the inaccurate stories newspapers sometimes publish to this day. Where does the truth about Tahitian life lie, I wonder?
Link to article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/07/arts.highereducation
That's an interesting point about the accuracy of our readings, but we are reading travel narratives instead of first hand accounts, so we are twice removed from the native life (such as Tahitian) that the author witnesses. In addition to learning about a culture new to us, we learn the stereotypes and preconceived notions that the traveler has when coming to a foreign land.
In addition, Diderot's "travel narrative" is fictional, so does it even still fit in that genre? We aren't learning something new and accurate about Tahitians, but witnessing a stage for Diderot to proclaim his ideas in an exotic way to draw more readers. How accurate do you guys think Diderot's 'travel narrative' is? And does it even matter, since he's writing fiction anyway?
When we discussed Diderot’s background, I think it would have been interesting to discuss how Diderot’s daughter would have been affected by his chosen career and interesting lifestyle. How would he be viewed differently by his daughter in today’s society verses during the Enlightenment period in which he actually lived?
I agree with Katie, Diderot's narrative was fictional so does it matter if some of it wasn't accurate? Would the reader's opinion change knowing that is was fictional?
I think Diderot's account isn't meant to be taken as accurate anyway, just by the way he writes the words of Orou; it's even addressed in the dialogue between A and B, where A remarks that the Tahitians and Orou "show a rather European influence". Orou is "translated" in such a way that he speaks in terms Europeans understand (civil law, religious law, and natural law are probably not categories familiar to Tahitians). The importance of this text is the philosophical discussion of morality and where humans should derive morality from.
The footnotes also talk about the accuracy. For example, footnote four on page 435 says that "Diderot casts the Tahitians as atheists, but according to Bougainville they in fact recognized a sun-god and a moon-god and venerated idols, sometimes even with human sacrifices".
As an education minor, I found footnote six interesting, where it mentions that Diderot's idea of returning to humanity's natural state and following natural laws is influenced by Rousseau's ideas as reflected in his novels. Rousseau's philosophical beliefs about children were much the same as his view on adults and morality; he believed that children should be raised in a natural way as much as possible. They should learn about morality from nature. They shouldn't be punished or rewarded for behavior that is morally accepted is disapproved of in society, but should learn about natural consequences and generally the idea was that nature would sort it all out. He believed that children learn good and bad behavior through consequences in their experiences, and not through physical punishment. This relates to the character of the Chaplain, who is denying himself sex, which Orou views as only natural to men, and yet the Chaplain has to punish himself rather than following natural laws.
To the comment above, I think that as a reader, when you know a story is fictional, you expect more to be entertained rather than surprised. For example when you read something out of the ordinary, like a creature no one has ever heard of, when you know its fiction, you are entertained by the thought of it. You do not try to imagine as much as if it were real. If the same thing happens in a non-fiction book, you are all the sudden engrossed in thinking about how cool it would be to see the creature in real life. I could also see where a reader might be upset if they thought they were reading non-fiction and found out it was all fake.
I was actually wondering about whether or not Diderot might have had a conversation similar to the one between person A and person B with an acquaintance. It seems feasible to me that he may have in essence found someone who had read Bougainville and had a discussion about it like the two characters he created. Obviously that wasn't a transcript as some of the answers are skewed towards man B, but is it possible that Diderot was inspired by actual events?
Like many of the above, I am curious as to how those of another culture would respond to the works of Diderot and Montagu. Montagu herself said that the language of other cultures are more passionate as a result of the people being more passionate and alive; if this is true, how would that affect how they read some of the great pieces of enlightenment literature? Would they have some insight that the westerners lacked?
I can't remember who said this, but I remember that someone compare Orou and his people to yahoos. I don't think that the possibility was really talk about. Even though they are humans and have more cognitive thought, they are not all that different from the yahoos on the land of the horses. The people in Tahiti believe it to be "absurd [to...] restrict the most capricious of [their] pleasures to a single individual" (437). They like the yahoos only act base on their pleasures, at the very core they are exactly like the yahoos. The people of Tahiti may be able to explain their way of thinking better than the yahoos, but their ideals are exactly the same to them. They only act based on instinct, with no regard for any rule other than natural law.
I also wonder how other cultures would respond to Diderot and Montagu, but particularely Diderot. I'd like to know how the Tahitians would respond to his portrayal of them, as because it was not true but still written as though it was, those reading may think that that is how Tahitians actually act. Their risque actions and decisions could cause some readers to make untrue judgements about Tahiti and what goes on there, which I can't imagine the Tahitians would much like.
In response to the post directly above, I think it is unquestionable that readers from the Tahitian and Turkish culture would have insight that Diderot and Montagu lacked. In class we discussed a certain biased tone in each of the particular texts that no doubt effected the way the authors viewed and wrote about the cultures that they visited. They each entered the experience with a set of preconceived notions, however subconscious they may have been - it's almost impossible not to have expectations when going into such a completely new and different environment. I think it would be very interesting to know what the Turks and the Tahitians thought about the observations made by their two Western visitors.
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