Incomplete work no. 3: A conte philosophique in reverse

I’ve long wanted to write a philosophical tale, in the style of Enlightenment philosophes describing exotic encounters, but with the protagonists’ roles reversed.

In some of the classic examples, travelers like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver or Voltaire’s Candide wander through exotic lands, which exaggerate Europe’s flaws or reveal virtues that Europe never attains, undermining Europe’s old philosophies and pointing the way to newer, better, freer ideas. In Denis Diderot’s Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, we overhear an imaginary encounter between the explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and native Tahitians, who help the Europeans to rethink their own society and its repressive moral laws.

But for me, instead of depicting a civilized European explorer who is compelled to reflect on his own society, I want the hero to be a Polynesian sailor who reaches the shores of a seemingly untouched and isolated 18th-century Europe, whose customs appear so strange, whose worldview appears so narrow, whose pride and fear of the foreign appears so extreme, that the sailor concludes they must never have been touched by the corrupting influence of civilization. (The hero’s conclusion isn’t changed by the fact that he sees large sailing ships in European ports — no more than European explorers changed their view of Pacific islands as isolated even after they saw Polynesians sailing seaworthy canoes. To our hero, accustomed to his fast, solid boats that zip through the waves, the clunky and rickety constructions of London and Antwerp look like they could barely make it up the rivers and canals without sinking.)

But no, let’s not make it 18th-century Europe. I think the Polynesian Enlightenment would come sooner, maybe in the 16th or 14th century. Also, the Polynesians of this age wouldn’t measure the centuries as 14th or 16th or 18th. And they wouldn’t call it the Enlightenment. They would have their own, better word. But bear with me.

The hero would describe one after another of the Europeans’ customs, considering some of them outlandish, others quaint, others eminently reasonable and good arguments for rethinking the mores of his own over-civilized land. The Europeans’ puritanical but sexually hungry clerics would of course appear to him as barbaric, and the abject poverty and disease suffered by European peasants would shock him, when he compares it with the relative luxury and ease and good health enjoyed by the average Polynesian gardener or fisherman. But perhaps he would be interested in the quaint meanders of European metaphysics, in the peculiar revision of mythology that Europeans enacted when they demoted their old gods to the roles of fairies and demons and made a single god responsible for the whole universe. He might also be fascinated by the energy of heretical peasant movements and the eschatological fervor of the urban riffraff when they leave church taking too seriously the priests’ declarations of the nobility of the poor and the equality of all before the Lord. The hero might wonder at the aristocratic custom of taking thermal baths, necessitated by the fact that their sea isn’t always already thermal, and that some of them don’t even have a sea (and yet they call themselves noble…).

Maybe he’d get involved in the political squabbles of the land he visits, as each faction would call him to its side, appealing to his wisdom, equanimity, and advanced technical knowledge (in seafaring, food provisioning, orderly political organization, and so on). He would be swayed by both sides, earnestly desirous to help them both, perhaps to seek reconciliation, although he would sympathize most of all with the simple folk who — since he is, after all, a philosophe — would appear to him more noble than the nobles, more deserving of power, more central to the harmony of the community and cosmos. He would, necessarily, also fall in love, courted by many, won by only a single intelligent and beautiful soul, perhaps the daughter or son of an artisan, an expert in astrology and the science of navigation, his rare equal among these otherwise rather unlearned folk. His love, most likely, would already be married, probably to his own host.

But just as the fateful moment is about to arrive, when he will be forced to decide which side to help (if he sides with the simple peasants, this might mean betraying the family of his love, but if he sides with the sophisticated faction of his love’s family, this would mean betraying his sympathy for the simple folk, and it would mean renouncing his love in favor of his love’s spouse, which would be honorable and unbearable) — just at this moment, he is out fishing, by himself, hoping the sea will help him decide, and a storm strikes, a terrible storm, which blows him far out into the wild waters and around the world, and when it finally subsides he is just in sight of his home island. He cries for his lost love and his place of refuge, but he cries doubly with joy at seeing his family and friends. And he decides it’s time to do justice to the people he left in Europe by sharing his discoveries with the people at home.

So, a conte philosophique. But actually I wouldn’t really write it in the European Enlightenment style. I would employ the style of a Polynesian poet and tale-master. He would return from this distant continent and, remembering the exotic narrative genres he encountered there, and he would innovate, turning the obscure symbolism of traditional Polynesian poetry into a concrete language of social cosmology borrowed from the Encyclopédistes, and he would string together tales of his adventures with the Europeans into a great epic struggle between philosophical ideas re-embodied in gods. In the course of his storytelling, he would stir up trouble in his homeland, upsetting the order that he meant to finally place and firm foundations — instead, he sets it sinking in seaside sand…

Also, I would write it in an ancient Polynesian language no longer quite understood by anyone alive today. All the words would resemble other known words, but the meanings would be shifted, back to the meanings they occupied hundreds of years ago.

Naturally, because I can’t learn this language, and because I don’t really know what an old Enlightenment-era Polynesian explorer would have thought of Europe, and because I can only speculate the way my Euro-American education taught me to speculate, I can never write this. But I can imagine it.