Primitive Passions

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 2. FEB. 1997

Since the early 20th century, adventurous white European thinkers have pursued primitive places, cultures and states of mind, observes Torgovnick (Going Primitive) in this lucid, freewheeling interdisciplinary study. Like many literary critics who've branched out into anthropology and cultural studies, Torgovnick, the chair of Duke University's English department, brings considerable critical skills to a wide range of cultural texts, tracing a fascination with the primitive from modernist literature to the New Age. The results are scattershot but always illuminating. In the writings of Carl Jung on North Africa, of D.H. Lawrence on New Mexico, Andre Gide on the Congo and ethnographer Bronislaw Malinowski on Melanesia, she highlights a desire for a kinship with nature, for a sense of the self as part of a larger, "oceanic" cosmos, for a fluid interaction with female energies. Aviator Beryl Markham and writer Isak Dinesen, both pioneers in Kenya, on the other hand, viewed Africa through an aestheticizing, aristocratic lens. Unlike male writers who sought to repress the appeal of the primitive, Georgia O'Keeffe in New Mexico and gorilla scientist Dian Fossey in Africa--among the heroines of this study--displayed a transgressive identification with animal life and the land. In the final section, Torgovnick turns to contemporary primitivism, deconstructing the "idealized, lyrical view" of Native American life presented in films such as Dances with Wolves; treating the craze for body piercing as taboo-violating and ritualistic; and casting a skeptical eye on New Age spirituality and the mythopoeic men's movement. What we seek in other cultures, she compellingly argues, we can, with some effort, find in Western traditions and practices. Photos.