Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1978"

Rappaccini's Garden of Allegory

Abstract: N HIS WRY PREFACE to "Rappaccini's Daughter," Hawthorne inI dulges in a transparent bit of deception, viewing himself in the third person and recounting some objections to his work. The main one has to do with "an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal away the human warmth out of his conceptions." M. de l'Aubepine's work, we are told, has little to do with actuality: he generally contents himself with "the faintest possible counterfeit of real life," though occasionally "a breath of nature, a raindrop of pathos and tenderness, or a gleam of humor, will find its way into the midst of his fantastic imagery, and make us feel as if, after all, we were yet within the limits of our native earth."' Much has been written about Hawthorne's conception of romance, and the various prefaces to his novels have been examined for what light they shed on his practice. Thus we are familiar with the famous passage in "The Custom-House" in which Hawthorne speaks of the artist's need for "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other."2 Yet as far as I know, the preface to "Rappaccini's Daughter" has been more or less ignored, and the relation of the story itself to Hawthorne's problems as an artist uncomprehended.

Real toads in imaginary gardens; Aspelin vs. Lévi-Strauss on Nambiquara nomadism

Abstract: Aspelin5 s recent article in Bijdragen on the question of alleged economic dualism among the Nambiquara (1976) would do much to clarify the place of this people in ethnological perspective, were it not for L?vi Strauss' appended comments, which tend to revive the doubts that Aspelin has laid to rest. Under the circumstances, it may be of interest to the comparativist as well as the student of structuralism for a third Nambiquarist to take a stand on the matter. Reduced to essentials, Aspelin claims that the Nambiquara are not seasonally nomadic, and in consequence, he casts doubt on the whole structure of associated oppositions in terms of which L?vi-Strauss com prehends Nambiquara life. In rejoinder, L?vi-Strauss defends his ethno graphy, asserting that differences between his and Aspelin's accounts must be owing to either 1) a decrease in nomadism between 1938 and 1968, or 2) unusual "political unrest" in 1938, or 3) a difference in the groups studied by the two ethnographers. I will examine these three possibilities in reverse order. The Nambiquara linguistic family may be divided, as L?vi-Strauss perceived, into three languages, which he called a, b and c (1948: 8-13), and which I have called Southern Nambiquara, Northern Nam biquara and Saban? (Price and Cook 1969:688-93). Aspelin worked with the Mamaind?, who are speakers of the Northern language, and I have worked with all of the Southern groups, although most exten sively with the kithaulh?} L?vi-Strauss also worked mainly among the