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Review by Alden Mudge
Despite its many and varied blessings, Western civilization has not sustained itself without costs to both the individual and the communal psyche. According to Marianna Torgovnick, professor and chair of the English department at Duke University and author of the intellectually adventurous new book, Primitive Passions, chief among these costs is the tendency "to scant some essential human emotions and sensations of relatedness and interdependence." Our ambivalence toward these emotions -- what Torgovnick and other thinkers have called the "transcendent," the "oceanic," or "the sensation of merging with the universe" -- is at the root of our fascination with the primitive.
That, in a nutshell, is the argument of Primitive Passions. Of course, like most seeds, this capsule summary barely suggests the full fruit -- or the subtlety -- of Torgovnick's thought. Divided into three major sections, Primitive Passions offers a breathtakingly ambitious interpretation of twentieth-century responses to the "primitive." Parts one and two explores the lives of men like Andre Gide, C.G. Jung, and D.H. Lawrence and women like Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, Dian Fossey, and Georgia O'Keeffe to map a range of "complex symbolic linkages between the primitive and the oceanic," as well as the spiritual, sexual, psychological, and cultural responses these linkages engender.
In and of themselves these biographical studies are fascinating to read; the troubling chapter on Fossey is of particular note. And taken together they reveal patterns that speak volumes about some of the underlying tensions of the Western tradition. Among Torgovnick's most interesting contentions is that even for men as sympathetic to the primitive as Jung and Lawrence certainly were, the risk of losing one's identity in the transcendent feelings associated with the primitive was simply too dangerous, whereas for women of the early part of the century the idea of losing one's identity in the oceanic was not nearly so threatening, since it often meant discovering a new and possibly more powerful self.
The early sections of Primitive Passions establish the context for Torgovnick's far more provocative discussion of the "primitive" in such modern movements as the mythopoetic men's movement, the New Age movement, the rather trendy fascination with Native American experience exemplified in such movies as Dances with Wolves and The Last of the Mohicans, and, finally, the gruesome practice of genital piercing.
Torgovnick's exploration of these movements and practices is nimble and intellectually generous. She takes a position of "passionate ambivalence" about New Ageism, for example. But it is difficult not to see a damning critique here, since, as she says, a fault line runs through the book "between those who are open to transcendent experience . . . and those who are just dabbling or playing around."
Ultimately, Torgovnick contends that the oceanic sensibility has always been a part of the Western tradition and that it is time to find ways to more fully accommodate it "within a modern sense of self and consciousness." Primitive Passions is a lucid, fascinating work of cultural criticism. Doubtless its conclusions will stir heated debate in some quarters. Which, of course, is precisely the point.
Alden Mudge is a freelance writer in Oakland, California.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.