At the very least this would entail a consideration of the history of European colonial expansion that brought those who considered themselves to be civilized into contact with the peoples and objects that they contraposed as primitive. 5 Current standards of historical research would not admit such an account unless it established the circumstances in which these theorists came to be concerned with the notion. Such a study would encompass the work of an array of eminent thinkers, the most prominent of whom are the focus of scholarly fields in their own right (the likes of Montaigne, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud), not to mention the history of an entire discipline, anthropology, which was founded on the civilized/primitive distinction. When we sketch the expanse that a survey study would reach if it undertook to cover the history of primitivism approached in this way, we can see why Bell found the prospect daunting, especially if it also attempted to synthesize the existing scholarship. Given the conceptual priority usually assigned to historical notions of the “primitive” in discussions of primitivism, it seems only logical that a competent account, whether in literature, art, music, intellectual discourse, or culture more broadly defined, will need to begin by outlining a history of ideas of the “primitive” before moving to consider the forms of primitivism that correlate to those ideas. Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement “On Cannibals” contains a comment that is broadly representative: “that blessed state of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities.” 4 Its conceptualization thus is dialectical, emerging where humans are aware of themselves in contradistinction to nature. For the moment it is enough to note that its resonances are specific to the material circumstances in which it is used and that it tends to point to a condition in which humans are united with nature. I will come to the difficult question of what the term primitive might signify shortly. In both cases the term primitive is conceptually prior to “primitivism”: it is the primitivity of the entity that determines the nature of the primitivist idealization. Primitivism typically refers to the act of idealizing people, or entities of any sort, deemed “primitive.” It can be used even more broadly to refer to any activity that in some way pertains to the primitive. If a survey of literary primitivism were to set its scope according to received usage, a rigorous account would indeed present challenges that could take a career to surmount. Even here the author refuses to be drawn into attempting a survey, choosing instead to concentrate on “critical problems raised by the literature to which this term is commonly used.” 2 This reticence is connected, no doubt, with his sense that the term refers to a “dauntingly ancient and universal human characteristic with a correspondingly wide range of manifestations.” 3 1 In literary studies it is a surprise to find only one monograph that addresses literary primitivism in general: Michael Bell’s slim 1972 volume Primitivism. The title of this book might be taken to indicate an intention to survey its subject-a work similar in scope to the monographs, catalogues, and anthologies on primitivism in the visual arts that go back to Robert Goldwater’s Primitivism in Modern Painting. Chapter 1 Primitivism After Its Poststructural Eclipse
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