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Dangerous Liaisons in the South Pacific Surfing the Revolution: The Fatal Impact of the Pacific on Europe

2008; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ecs.2008.0013

1086-315X

Andrew Martin,

Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

Introduction:Surfing the Revolution: The Fatal Impact of the Pacific on Europe Andy Martin In Civilization and its Discontents, Freud outlines three reasons why we ought to be depressed: religion, psychoanalysis, and the eighteenth-century voyages of discovery. Each has inflicted a terrible trauma on our psyche. Christianity, with its overestimation of heaven, has engendered an underestimation of everything else. Psychoanalysis, far from offering any hope of salvation, has convinced us that we are all perpetually on (or over) the verge of a nervous breakdown. More paradoxically, navigators, explorers, and proto-anthropologists, like Cook and Bougainville, contributed to our suffering by importing a dangerously contagious theory of happiness, an unalloyed pleasure principle that runs through the concept of the primitive. Cook wrote that the Tahitians would have been better off if Europeans had never set foot on their shores; Freud suggests that the reverse applies too. Currents flow both ways. These three crises or tragedies are broadly interchangeable and interlocking. Thus psychoanalysis is, in part, a transposition of the eighteenth-century anthropological map of the world, with civilized and savage constituencies warring against each other in a struggle for dominion. Conversely, Cook's and Bougainville's itineraries also articulate an immense psychodrama, juxtaposing spiritual yearnings and biological urges that remain equally unsatisfiable, except in the epic, ritualistic, violent mythologies which, between them, Europe and the Pacific conjure up. It was inevitable, moreover, that the collision between Northern and Southern hemispheres, this neurosis of planetary proportions, would entail political and philosophical consequences, as much in Europe as in the Pacific. At the end of the nineteenth century, the last Queen of Tahiti—as articulated in American historian Henry Adams's Memoirs of Arii Tamai—asserted that Tahiti "influenced," "brought about," or "caused" the French Revolution.1 This sense of a continuum, of reciprocity, perhaps of mutual causation between North and South, was already [End Page 141] pervasive in the eighteenth century. I offer three cursory instances in the shape of a doomed poet, an imprisoned novelist, and an Emperor. Camille Desmoulins, journalist, pamphleteer, revolutionary, never ventured into the Pacific but, as he went to the guillotine, condemned by Robespierre, his last thoughts—his final dream—invoked Tahiti, as if this island at the opposite end of the world somehow symbolized everything the Revolution had failed to achieve. "O ma chère Lucile!" he wrote to his wife. "J'étois né pour faire des vers, pour défendre les malheureux, pour te rendre heureuse, pour composer avec ta mère et mon père, et quelques personnes selon notre coeur, un Otaiti!"2 [O my dear Lucile! I was born to write poetry, to stand up for the unfortunate, to make you happy, and, with your mother and my father and a few other kindred spirits, to create a Tahiti!] Tahiti, in 1794, operates as an antithesis to the Terror: to France, prison, blade, blood. Tahiti is all pleasure, Paris is nothing but pain. But not only is Tahiti capable of being internalized by the poet, the implication is that Paris ought to be more like Tahiti. We know that Sade ("Marquis de" or plain "Citoyen") was reading Bougainville and Cook while locked up in the Bastille and cheering on the Revolutionary mob. As with Desmoulins, it is not surprising if Tahiti enters his texts as a synonym of the Other. Sade's early epistolary novel, Aline et Valcour, has the polite Polynesian vegetarian Zamé shrewdly predicting revolution in France at the same time as he announces his mission to "faire le bien, empêcher le mal, rendre tout le monde heureux"3 [do good, prevent evil, and make everyone happy]. What Sade understands, however, is that without violence there is no pleasure. The trouble with utopia is that there is not enough conflict. Like Georges Sorel in the twentieth century, Sade favored means over ends, the heady intensity of insurrection as against the inert undifferentiated steady-state that, conceivably, might follow. His subsequent works represent a partial assimilation of Tahitian eroticism into a Europe in which debauched libertines are also pursuing an elusive bonheur, but one which can only be enjoyed at the expense of others' malheur. Those remote mountainside chateaux...