Crucible or Centrifuge? Bronislaw Malinowski's 'A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term'

ABSTRACT: This essay seeks to read Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term in literary-critical terms, broadly under-stood. As such, it supplements the psychological, epistemological, and cultural readings already available from historians and theorists like George W. Stocking, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Chris-tina Thompson. The essay considers the diary as a genre, but also as a variety of moral imposition that extracts patterns from experience by virtue of its unique form. As examples, it considers the patterns in Malinowski’s response to landscape and to the literature he read dur-ing the Diary’s composition, and how these underpinned his episte-mological, ethnographic thinking during the period.

“Man has the choice of stooping in science beneath himself, and striving in science beyond himself; and the ‘Know Thyself’ is, for him, not a law to which he must in peace submit; but a precept which of all others is the most painful to understand, and the most difficult to fulfil.”

—John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest 1

The restraints we place on imaginative writers—as opposed to dis-cursive ones, in the professions—are essentially few, since freedom of expression is in the nature of their pursuit and of their value to society. Tolstoy, for example, argued only that authors should

1. John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford, in Lent Term, 1872 (London: George Allen, 1900).

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Crucible or Centrifuge?

Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary

in the Strict Sense of the Term

Richard Lansdown James Cook University

Configurations, 2014, 22:29–55 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press

and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.

02_22.1_lansdowne_029-055.indd 29 4/30/14 2:21 PM

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choose a subject “important to the life of mankind,” be sincere in their treatment of it, and write well. Private forms of literary expres-sion like letters and diaries may or may not run up against those ex-pectations, but they also involve ethical obligations of a more direct nature. Partners in a correspondence undertake to reply to the com-munications they receive; if the exchange of letters breaks down, one of them is at fault. In diaries, writers give undertakings to them-selves alone. As most diaries are confidential, such promises are easy to break; but precisely because they are promises diary-keepers make to themselves, breaking them can present a peculiarly intimate sense of defection. So diary writing has a particular place in the spectrum of authorship—an undertaking both light and imposing. This paradoxical sense of responsibility has been noted by diarists themselves. “A man cannot know himself better,” Boswell wrote on the first page of his Journal,

than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions. . . . I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal in which I shall set down my various sentiments and my various conduct, which will be not only useful but very agreeable. It will give me a habit of application and improve me in expression; and know that I am to record my transactions will make me more careful to do well. Or if I should go wrong, it will assist me in resolutions of doing better.2

Taking care to do well and resolving to do better are moral pledges, but so is the very act of determining to keep a daily journal. “The habit of application” is an end in itself. Pepys also recognized the disciplinary value of keeping a diary, and keeping it regularly. “Late at the office, entering my Journall for eight days past,” he wrote on 16 October 1665, ‘the greatness of my business hindering me of late to put it down daily; but I have done it now very true and particu-larly, and hereafter will, I hope, be able to fall into my old way of doing it daily.”3

A diary is a form of moral constraint, therefore; but it is also a source of aesthetic freedom: “If you are making daily entries, you have no time to think, you do not want to think, you want to re-member, you cannot consciously adopt any particular artifice; you jot down the day’s doings either briefly or burst out impulsively here and there into detail; and without being conscious of it, you your-

2. Frederick Pottle, ed., Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763 (London: Heinemann, 1950), p. 39.

3. Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 1 (Lon-don: G. Bell, 1970), p. 544.


Lansdown / Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term 31

self emerge and appear out of the sum total of those jottings, how-ever brief they may be.”4

By repressing self-consciousness, diaries liberate their authors from literary artifice. Just as the imaginary presence of a correspon-dent “exercises a restraint on the author and produces a certain sort of self-consciousness which may be entirely absent from the pages of a diary,”5 so diaries “undergo a somewhat disconcerting meta-morphosis” should they be “consciously composed as art.”6 “As self-delineations,” Robert Fothergill argues, diaries “deal directly with people and events which in the novel are subjected to the stresses and conventions of art and design. And in many ways they are the most natural and instinctive product of the art of writing”—“coral-like aggregates of minimal deposits,” in fact.7

Clearly, this is an ideal conception. No piece of writing is actually constructed like coral, instinctively, and artifice is involved with ev-ery act of enunciation. But the diary does remain a less teleological enterprise than either biography or fiction. “As the diarist does not know the future,” Anaïs Nin suggests, “he reaches no conclusion, no synthesis, which is an artificial product of the intellect. The di-ary is true to becoming and continuum.”8 A diary “is only secondarily a text or a literary genre. Like correspondence, the diary is first and foremost an activity. Keeping a diary is a way of living before it is a way of writing.”9 By being a peculiarly open aesthetic structure, short of both hindsight and foresight in narrative terms, the keep-ing of a diary does become a particular kind of experience: “a new stage in self-knowledge and new formulation of responsibility to the self”; an “unusually definite image of oneself” generated “out of the flux of impressions that compose the consciousness,” and therefore nothing less, perhaps, than a “clue to self-mastery.”10 “From the

4. Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 5.

5. Ibid., p. 2.

6. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge / Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 3.

7. Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1974), p. 8.

8. Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 153 (emphasis in original).

9. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: Univer-sity of Hawai’i Press, 2009), p. 153.

10. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (above, n. 6), p. 183; Fothergill, Private Chronicles (above, n. 7), pp. 64, 68.


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wretched compromise of being too literary [to be true] yet not liter-ary enough [to be aesthetically compelling], the diary becomes the reconciler between incompatibles, literary enough [to be engaging] yet not too literary [to stifle spontaneity].” Thus it poses “a vital problem of consciousness—what to do with the human capacity to apprehend aesthetic patterns in experience.”11

* * *

Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term pre- sents these issues in an especially vivid form. It was written in two bouts, between September 1914 and March 1915, and October 1917 and July 1918—the first and last of three pioneering anthropologi-cal trips to New Guinea undertaken while the author (a Pole, and therefore nominally a citizen of Austria-Hungary) was a wartime en-emy alien in Australia, the local imperial power. Existentially, the diary is an intense one, but it is also unusual because of its profes-sional and intellectual circumstance. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term was translated and published in 1967, twenty-five years after its author’s death, and was “received by most Anglo-American an-thropologists with feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, and dismay”12—especially when it was revealed that this founding fa-ther of cultural anthropology habitually referred to his Trobriander subjects as “niggers.”13 Malinowski also agonized at length about his romantic attachments to the daughters of two Australian profes-sors (Nina Stirling, whom he had practically affianced himself to,

11. Fothergill, Private Chronicles (above, n. 7), p. 50.

12. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, “The Ethnographer and His Savages: An In-tellectual History of Malinowski’s Diary,” Polish Review 27:1–2 (1982), pp. 92–98, quote on p. 94.

13. See Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 2nd ed., trans. Norbert Guterman (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 162, 188, 264, 273, for example. Malinowski’s stated attitudes on this score are sometimes more dis-tressing when direct terms of racial abuse are not employed. For example, “I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog”; or “I understand all the German and Belgian colonial atrocities” (pp. 167, 279; italics indicate Malinowski’s use of languages other than Polish in the original). At other times, language that to modern eyes is powerfully abusive seems almost affectionate. “After I came here,” Malinowski wrote to Elsie Masson, his future wife, on 7 June 1918 when returning to Omakarana, a village in the Trobriands, “I went round the village and it was real fun to see the old niggers again. You know how little sentiment I put into my relations with the niggs and with regard to my whole life here. But coming here . . . was so intensely reminiscent of my time here three years ago that it gave and gives me a thrill.” See Helena Wayne, ed., The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995), 1:151.



and Elsie Masson, whom he would ultimately marry), complained about his health ad nauseam, and confessed to long bouts of novel-reading and a related indifference to the ethnological task in hand. Before the Diary appeared, Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble had paid homage to the Mosaic legend of the scientist who first set up his tent in the native village: “he was intensely curious; he could be tender or nasty, according to his true feelings; he could penetrate the disguised feelings of others; and he was always candid. These traits, together with a sympathy that, as [anthropologist R. R.] Ma-rett puts, it ‘could find its way into the heart of the shyest savage,’ played a large part in his legendary success as a field worker.”14 The Diary seemed to shatter this legend completely. Malinowski was can-did, certainly; but it was his incuriosity that was most at issue in the Diary, where his nastiness seemed practically triumphant, where his own feelings preoccupied him more than almost anything else at hand, where his powers of sympathy were almost completely in abeyance, and where the question of an informant’s shyness hardly arose—because his or her very presence was odious enough.

But the Diary did more than damage Malinowski’s reputation. In George Stocking Jr.’s words, it “helped to precipitate the ‘crisis of an-thropology’” in the years that followed and became “a central thread in a continuing discussion of the ethnographic process by anthro-pologists and interested outsiders” alike.15 Its reception, therefore, was controversial. “What does it tell us about the birth of fieldwork or about Malinowski?” Anthony Forge asked; “In fact, very little of either.”16 Indeed, “the volume holds no interest for anyone,” Ian Hogbin reported, “be he anthropologist, psychologist, student of bi-ography, or merely a gossip.”17 I. M. Lewis offered a more balanced appraisal, but even he conceded that “[m]uch of this . . . makes mo-notonous and tedious reading.”18 For Audrey Richards, although the book contained “poetic flashes,” it would “have been better kept

14. Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (1961; reprint, New York: Mentor, 1963), pp. 140, 146.

15. George W. Stocking Jr., The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 15.

16. Anthony Forge, “The Lonely Anthropologist,” New Society, 18 August 1967, pp. 221–223, quote on p. 221.

17. Ian Hogbin, “Review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term,” American Anthropologist 70:3 (1968): 575.

18. I. M. Lewis, “Review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term,” Man 3:2 (1968): 348–349.


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as a quarry for a biography than published in its entirety.”19 For Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz also, the Diary was “a rather limited type of human document, a series of very private snapshots of an extremely complex person, taken without his permission,” with limited value in terms of Malinowski’s “development as an ethnographer and a theorist.”20 Marvin Harris went much further, calling Malinowski “a hypochondriacal, puritanical, egotistical, ethnographic snob.”21 When Clifford Geertz called Malinowski “a crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme,” labeled the Diary itself gross and tiresome, and its author’s example “embarrassing,” Hortense Powdermaker could only concur, even as she mounted a defense of her erstwhile teacher. The Diary, she ad-mitted, was “tedious in the extreme” and a product of “the current exposé-sensationalism in our culture”—only “this exposé happens to be dull.” Like others, the only point of substance she could raise was that regrettable ephemera like these often accompanied “bold and innovative scientific work,” and that fieldwork was psychologi-cally demanding on those who undertook it.22 The scandal blew up again on the pages of the newsletter of the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAIN) from February to December 1980, in which Francis Hsu and Edmund Leach were eventually joined by numerous other commentators,23 and by 1990, Nigel Rapport could state that “surely everything has already been said about Malinowski’s diary,” before adding further thoughts of his own to the effect that whereas the Di-ary was “tedious and bitty” and “repetitive and hum-drum,” it was also a “very ‘human document’” and a necessary attempt to “pre-serve the home life beyond the field as if in amber, ready to go back to, and thus free Malinowski for those flights of fancy necessary for launching into and apprehending the ethnographic situation.”24

19. Audrey Richards, “In Darkest Malinowski,” Cambridge Review, 19 January 1968, pp. 186–189.

20. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, “Bronislaw Malinowski in the Light of His Diary,” Polish Review 12:3 (1967): 67–72.

21. Marvin Harris, “Review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term,” Natural History 76 (1967): 72–74.

22. Clifford Geertz, “Under the Mosquito Net,” New York Review, 14 September 1967, pp. 12–13; Hortense Powdermaker, “An Agreeable Man,” New York Review, 19 Novem-ber 1967, pp. 36–37.

23. See RAIN 36 (February 1980): 2–3; 39 (August 1980): 4–6; 40 (October 1980): 7–8; 41 (December 1980): 12.

24. Nigel Rapport, “Surely Everything Has Already Been Said About Malinowski’s Di-ary!” Anthropology Today 6:1 (1990): 5–9.



* * *

Out of the gun smoke of the reviews, there emerged three longer-lasting positions on the Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stocking sought to explain it in terms of its psychological context: “not so much a chronicle of ethnographic work,” he suggested, “as an ac-count of the central psychological drama of his life . . . a tale of oe-dipal conflict, of simultaneous erotic involvement with two women . . . and of unresolved national identity, symbolized by his mother back in Poland.”25 The Diary did indeed affront “the association we have become accustomed to make between anthropology and tol-erance,” but it was best seen as part of Malinowski’s need “to cre-ate a kind of internal enclave of European culture,” and must also be interpreted in the light of his formal anthropological writings, which clearly demonstrate “an interaction [with Trobriander peo-ple] which, however emotionally complex, involved, with varying degrees, tolerance, sympathy, empathy and even identification.”26

Geertz had used the original publication of the Diary in 1967 as an opportunity—seized on by poststructuralist intellectuals in other fields besides, not least in literary criticism—Oedipally to unseat one of his discipline’s progenitors—in effect, to deny the existence of giants, while standing on their shoulders. But as time passed, he broadened his assault by switching his attention to the dimly “hu-manist” and scientifically under-scrutinized notion of “rapport,” sympathy, and empathy between fieldworker and subject, anthro-pologist and native, that Malinowski had often been taken to incar-nate. “The myth of the chameleon fieldworker, perfectly self-tuned to his exotic surroundings, a walking miracle of empathy, tact, pa-tience, and cosmopolitanism,” Geertz wrote, “was demolished [al-beit unintentionally] by the man who had perhaps done most to create it.”27

Finally, James Clifford and Christina Thompson took more literary- critical or cultural approaches by analyzing what Malinowski wrote in terms of what he read, and focusing on his relation to fellow-

25. Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic (above, n. 15), p. 251.

26. George W. Stocking Jr., “Empathy and Antipathy in the Heart of Darkness,” in Read-ings in the History of Anthropology, ed. Regna Darnell (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 281–287, quotes on pp. 281, 284, 286.

27. Clifford Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropo-logical Understanding,” in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith H. Basso and Henry A. Selby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), pp. 221–237, quotes on pp. 221–222. For Geertz, therefore, the Diary ultimately revealed itself to be the “back-stage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix”; see Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 75.


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Pole Joseph Conrad in general, and Heart of Darkness in particular. Malinowski admired and had met Conrad, and the Diary records his reading Tales of Unrest; Youth: A Narrative, and Two Other Stories (in which Heart of Darkness appears); Romance; and The Secret Agent. In later life, it seems, he announced that “[W. H. R.] Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthropology; I shall be the Conrad,”28 and if that was not enough, he melodramatically identified himself with Con-rad’s Kurtz during his first visit to New Guinea: “On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes.’”29 For Clifford, “[b]oth Conrad in the Congo and Malinowski in the Trobriands were enmeshed in complex, contradictory sub-jective situations, articulated at the levels of language, desire, and cultural affiliation.” The Diary “is an unstable confusion of other voices and worlds,” Malinowski’s “personal truths were to some de-gree fictions,” and his fieldwork experience “is filled with discrepant inscriptions” bearing comparison with those “scraps of worlds” we call novels.30 Thus Conrad and Malinowski helped unveil the mod-ern notion that subjectivity “is not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural artifact” determined by historical contingen-cy.31 Thompson, in parallel fashion, sought to assimilate the novelist

28. Raymond Firth, ed., Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Ma-linowski (London: Routledge / Kegan Paul, 1957), pp. 6, 69. Whether Malinowski ever made this remark, we shall never know. But he did write to the wife of his mentor Charles Seligman, from the Trobriands in 1918 about Rivers and his History of Melane-sian Society (1914): “I see very clearly his limitations, and his mind is not really conge-nial to me. To draw a parallel: it reads like Rider Haggard rather than Joseph Conrad. It is rather a pursuit of fact than of the philosophical importance of fact.” See Michael Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 236–237 (emphasis added).

29. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (above, n. 13), p. 69 (emphasis in original; all subsequent emphases in quotes from the Diary are in the original).

30. James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellerby (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Uni-versity Press, 1986), pp. 140–162, quotes on pp. 150, 151, 157, 158. In certain respects, Argonauts of the Western Pacific is a more Conradian book than the Diary: in particular, the “halo of romance” that Malinowski ascribes to kula and the value he gives to wa-tercraft in general: “a craft, whether of bark or wood, iron or steel, lives in the life of its sailors, and is more to the sailor than a mere bit of shaped matter.” See Bronislaw Ma-linowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London: Routledge / Kegan Paul, 1922), pp. 86, 351, 105. Conrad’s ten-page “Congo Diary” of June–August, 1890—the only such record we have from him—is terse in the extreme.

31. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning” (above, n. 30), p. 142. (Clifford is quoting here from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shake-speare [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], p. 256.) On postmodernist con-



and the ethnographer and “to illustrate the extent to which British imperial adventure fiction . . . provided a charter for British social anthropology in the early years of this [the twentieth] century.”32 I do not think Conrad can adequately be described as a purveyor of imperial adventure fiction, nor should we say that the novels Ma-linowski read in New Guinea in each case “reflected the realpolitik of a world that was overwhelmingly pink, that reconfirmed the ide-ology of empire, that defined the white man’s role.”33 Rider Haggard might have reconfirmed the ideology of empire in an adventure like King Solomon’s Mines, but the “reflections” of imperialism we find in books by Conrad (not to mention Stevenson and Kipling, whom Malinowski also read in New Guinea) are far from naïve: reflection is not confirmation.

What I want to do here is to complement these three avenues with a discussion that impinges on them all. My approach is not strictly psychological (as Stocking’s is), neither is it strictly epistemo-logical (as Geertz’s is) nor strictly cultural (as Clifford’s and Thomp-son’s contributions are). It concerns the perception and integration of patterns in experience as revealed by that “blind watchmaker” among literary genres, the diary, at the mental borderland of the in-tellectual, cognitive, and sensuous. I agree with Malinowski’s review-ers that the Diary tells us little about his “development as an ethnog-rapher and a theorist” as such; but a vital issue in ethnographical theory lay behind and impelled its composition: the urge, as Ernest Gellner puts it, to transform ethnography “from a time-machine into a history-exterminator,”34 and from a sub-Darwinist study of “primitive” cultures as remote-time predecessors of European mo-dernity, into a study of such cultures in their own right and in their own terms. In shedding light on a new idea in ethnology, the Diary cannot help shedding light on the advent of new ideas in general, and the complex way in which they can be bound up with the en-vironment and the emotional state of the thinker concerned. The Diary was an attempt to deal with the intellectual pressures flow-

structions of Malinowski, see Renée Sylvain, “Malinowski the Modern Other: An Indi-rect Evaluation of Postmodernism,” Anthropologica 38:1 (1996): 21–45: “it is often a great deal easier to criticize one’s intellectual heritage than to acknowledge one’s in-heritance” (p. 41).

32. Christina Thompson, “Anthropology’s Conrad: Malinowski in the Tropics and What He Read,” Journal of Pacific History 20:1 (1995): 53–75, quote on p. 54.

33. Ibid., p. 67.

34. Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 140.


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ing from a particular disciplinary issue; but it illustrates, therefore, a general theme of how individuals respond to intellectual pressures, and in what contexts. It is with that theme in mind that I want to reread the Diary, but also the books by authors other than Conrad that Malinowski absorbed during its composition—and also, if pos-sible, to illuminate his comment that “my ethnological work & my diary . . . are well-nigh as complementary as complementary can be.”35

* * *

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term comes down to us in two un-equal halves, from his first and third trips to New Guinea—in par-ticular to Mailu and the Trobriand Islands. The two have so much in common that to treat them as a single object is readily justifiable, but it is the second diary that gives the book its title. On the inside of his notebook Malinowski wrote, presumably around the time he began the journal on the island of Samarai on October 10, 1917, “A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term,” and went on: “Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chrono-logical order.—Every day an account of the preceding day: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.”36 This resolution takes us back to the moral underpinnings of the diary form, as a mirror not just of “events,” but of “the mainsprings of my life,” with what Malinowski called “the goal of adding depth to my life as well as to my work.”37

But that resolution was also undertaken in response to the first diary, which is far from strict and progresses, as often as not, in a sequence of retrospects (generally a week to ten days in length) be-tween its beginning on September 20, 1914 and its conclusion on August 1, 1915. Malinowski’s first entry, for example, looks back from Port Moresby to the “new epoch in my life,” when on Septem-ber 1st he had parted company with the 84th British Association conference in Australia at Brisbane and started work on “an expedi-tion all on my own to the tropics.”38 Ten days later, he had arrived at New Guinea and the leitmotifs of the Diary arrive with him: he records seasickness, “the mistake of reading a Rider Haggard novel,” and feeling “very empty and tired inside.”39

35. See Young, Malinowski (above, n. 28), p. 416.

36. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (above, n. 13), p. 103.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid., p. 3.

39. Ibid., p. 7.



If any particular psychological response emerges in the entries that follow, it is precisely what we would expect: a pronounced de-gree of culture shock. He visited a village near Port Moresby in Feb-ruary 1915, for example:

At low tide, the houses stick up high on their pilings. Small openings, with a high gutter, and something like strange snouts looking out from the furry wrapping; this complete lack of an open “inside” creates a strange stimmung of desertion, lifelessness—something of the melancholy of the Venetian lagoon—a mood of exile or imprisonment. In the dark openings bronze bodies appear, the whites of eyes gleam in the shadow of the rooms, from time to time firm breasts stick out—maire (crescent-shaped pearly shells). . . . I was frightfully tired and had a fit of “pointophobia” (nervous aversion for pointed objects—“stichophobia?”).40

It is a typical (and moodily Conradian) passage: self-preoccupied and hypochondriacal, certainly—almost comically so (“stichopho-bia?”)—but also uncannily evocative. Things stick up or stick out in a random, yet purposeful way; strange snouts look out from the furry wrapping of native huts as if they belonged to suspicious ani-mals, yet the atmosphere is lugubriously Venetian; the residents are broken up into eyes and breasts in a sinister (though spellbinding) fashion; and there is a sense of dread surrounding these ambiguous openings and invitations, drenched in silence. Similar phobias are recorded in the second diary: “strong nervous excitement and in-tellectual intensity on the surface, combined with inability to con-centrate, superirritability and supersensitiveness of mental epidermis and feeling of permanently being exposed in an uncomf. position to the eyes of a crowded thoroughfare: an incapacity to achieve inner privacy”;41 “se-vere nervous tension; a feeling as if hundreds of arms were coming out toward me from the mixed shadows—I felt that something was about to touch me, jump at me out of the darkness. I tried to achieve a mood of certainty, security, strength. I wanted to feel alone, and impregnable.”42

It is in this psychological context that he recorded “a strange dream” a week after arriving in Port Moresby: “homosex., with my own double as partner. Strangely autoerotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side).”43 The

40. Ibid., p. 87.

41. Ibid., p. 253.

42. Ibid., p. 284.

43. Ibid., p. 13.


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closing parenthetical remark might seem the last word in narcissism, but it also has the effect of catching the diarist in mid-pose—even while he poses as himself. Being impregnable and finding “a neck that curves just like mine” are impossibilities in anthropological fieldwork, and Malinowski soon realized that his work would be difficult. He was not doing enough “with the savages on the spot” and he needed to learn their language. Buried in the Times, he ruefully admitted that “nothing whatever draws me to ethnogr. studies”44 “I have finally arrived at Mailu,” he noted, “and I really do not know, or rather I do not see clearly, what I am to do. Period of suspense. I came to a deserted place with the feeling that soon I’ll have to finish, but in the mean-time I must begin a new existence.”45 The sense of being forced to finish before having time to start made his work something quite other than a mere chore; it was both compellingly inescapable and totally unapproachable. “I feel capitis diminutio,” he recorded, “—a worthless man, of diminished value”46

* * *

Under these circumstances, Malinowski turned his back, in the Di-ary at least, on his subjects and immersed himself in the landscape, which became an objective correlative for the dire intellectual strug-gle by which he was faced. “I was unable to concentrate amid this landscape,” he noted on his way from Port Moresby to Mailu in October 1914:

Not at all like our Tatras mountains at Olcza, where you’d like to lie down and embrace the landscape physically—where every corner whispers with the promise of some mysteriously experienced happiness. Out here the marvellous abysses of verdure are inaccessible, hostile, alien to man. The incomparably beautiful mangrove jungle is at close quarters an infernal, stinking, slippery swamp, where it is impossible to walk three steps through the thick tangle of roots and soft mud; where you cannot touch anything. The jungle is almost inaccessible, full of all kinds of filth and reptiles; sultry, damp, tiring—swarm-ing with mosquitoes and other loathsome insects, toads, etc.47

This inaccessibility is as much cultural and intellectual as it is physi-cal and sexual. The Tatras mountains whisper the promise of hap-piness because they are knowable and known—to a Pole. Landscape

44. Ibid., p. 42.

45. Ibid., p. 49.

46. Ibid., p. 29.

47. Ibid., p. 24.



is an analogy to humanity. In the mangroves “you cannot touch anything” or take so many as three steps. The people he has come to study are transformed into “filth and reptiles,” “mosquitoes and other loathsome insects, toads, etc.” “Took a walk amid the sago palms,” he wrote two months later: “Antediluvian forest: ruins of an Egyptian temple: gigantic, or rather colossal, trunks covered with geometric husks, mossy, enclasped in a tangle of various kinds of bindweed and climbing plants, with short stubby arms of leaves—strength, obtuseness, geometric monstrosity.”48 Like the mangroves, these massive trees embody the integral and monolithic appearance of a remote culture: physically blunt and mentally dull-witted, un-gainly, entangled and plated in custom and taboo, and for this rea-son impassively self-reliant. No visitor could ever understand the nature of such beings. If the land and its products appeared inaccessible, the sea and sky were constantly in flux; and surely what Richards had in mind when she mentioned that the “poetic flashes” in the Diary are the nu-merous seascapes that punctuate it, reminiscent of Gauguin’s Poly-nesian pictures by virtue of their polychromatic quality. Soon after his arrival in Port Moresby, Malinowski was referring convention-ally enough to “the lightly rippled sea shimmer[ing] in a thousand tints caught briefly on its continuously moving surface.”49 Within a matter of days, he had developed a language completely free of travelogue cliché: “the sea and the sky blazing with red reflections, in the midst of sapphire shadows”;50 “Sky milky, murky, as though filled with some dirty fluid—the pink strip of sunset gradually ex-panding, covering the sea with a moving blanket of rosy metal.”51 The references to gemstones, metal, and dirty fluids are inherently surrealistic, as are the arresting combinations of color: “Wonderful violet cloudlets in the pale sea-green sky; red sunset, under it glows the narrow belt of the sea.”52 The intensity of these responses is often striking. “Marvellous sunset. The whole world drenched in brick color—one could hear and feel that color in the air,”53 just as the sea manifests “an in-tense, polished, tense blue (something that lies in wait, where you

48. Ibid., p. 53.

49. Ibid., p. 14.

50. Ibid., p. 22.

51. Ibid., p. 40.

52. Ibid., p. 82.

53. Ibid., p. 67.


42 Configurations

feel life, as in the eyes of a living person . . .).”54 The theme comes to a climax on a voyage to Woodlark Island in February 1915, when Malinowski—blaming “the uncreative demon of escape from real-ity”—came on deck with Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills in hand:

What was going on around was marvelous! Sea perfectly smooth, two abysses of blueness on either side. To the right the indentations of Sariba, islands, is-lets, covered with tall trees. To the left, the shadows of distant mountains—the shores of Milne Bay. Farther, the shores move away on either side; to the left only the high wall of East Cape, covered with clouds, forming the threatening point of the horizon; to the right pale shapes loom up out of the eternity of blueness, slowly turning into volcanic rocks, sharp, pyramid-shaped, or else into flat coral islands: phantom forests floating in melting blue space. One after the other comes into being and passes away. The space darkens—brick-colored spots on the clouds—to the east, a flat sheet of coral covered with gi-gantic trees over yellow sand in the cold blueness—strangely reminds me of the islets in the Vistula.55

The nostalgic note reminds us of other dangers in these inter-ludes. Like sirens, they drew Malinowski from human reality into reverie. “Loss of subjectivism and deprivation of the will . . .,” he wrote, combined with “living only by the five senses and the body (through impressions) causes direct merging with surroundings.”56 So it was that what he called the “joie de vivre tropicale” was “at once oppressive and stimulating—broadens horizons and paralyzes you utterly.”57 The “strong zodiacal light” of the tropics58 produced a false intellectual dawn in which responding attentively to light and distance was a substitute for responding attentively to “ethnogr. studies.” Such sea visions were evasive in a second sense also: evoca-tive as they were, they grew toward writing “consciously composed as art,” rather than the “natural disorder and emphasis” on which authentic diary writing depends. They were a writerly addiction, just as reading Kipling’s stories was a readerly one. Only on land could Malinowski escape the zodiacal light of aes-theticism, or convert it into tactile intellectual value. “Here and there you can see the green slopes of the surrounding hills,” he told himself at the end of October 1914, “but otherwise the thickets cover everything”:

54. Ibid., p. 71.

55. Ibid., p. 91.

56. Ibid., p. 33.

57. Ibid., p. 80.

58. Ibid., p. 71.



We crossed a muddy little river. A garden on one slope. I stopped to rest when we came to a little burned patch. It was hot and very humid, I felt fairly well. I began to climb up through the overgrown garden and impassable paths. Slowly a vista opened up: a flood of green; a steep ravine overgrown with jungle; a rather narrow view on the sea. I asked about the division of land. It would have been useful to find out about the old [precolonial?] system of divi-sion and study today’s as a form of adaptation. I was very tired, but my heart was all right and I was not short of breath.59

The thickets slowly give way to a vista, “a flood of green” and a “narrow view,” which prompt genuine ethnographic inquiries. Ma-linowski’s seascapes are overwhelmingly visual spectacles, but the jungle requires a synaesthetic response. “I am beginning to concen-trate and to relax!” he wrote triumphantly in February 1915:

Plans for the future. . . . As I walked I threw enormous shadows on the palms and mimosas by the road; the smell of the jungle creates a characteristic mood—the subtle, exquisite fragrance of the green keroro flower, lewd swelling of the burgeoning, fertilizing vegetation; frangipani—a smell as heavy as in-cense, with elegant, sharply drawn profile—a tree with an elegant silhouette, its green bouquet with blossoms carved in alabaster, smiling with golden pol-len. Rotting trees, occasionally smelling like dirty socks or menstruation, oc-casionally intoxicating like a barrel of wine “in fermentation.” I am trying to sketch a synthesis: the open, joyous, bright mood of the sea—the emerald water over the reef, the blueness of the sky with tiny clouds like snowflakes. The atmosphere of the jungle is sultry, and saturated with a specific smell which penetrates and drenches you like music.60

Only a day or two before, he had played with what he called “liter-ary conceptions”: “in the beauty of a landscape I rediscover woman’s beauty or I look for it.”61 But this passage forgoes that kind of aes-thetic self-indulgence and yokes a genuine realism to a diary-style presentation. His plans are accompanied by an olfactory, visual, and ultimately auditory sequence that is realistic rather than zodiacal. The subtle and the exquisite are penetrated by the lewd: “blossoms carved in alabaster” are “smiling with golden pollen” in a bucolic idyll; dirty socks and menstruation give way to wine in ferment; and everything is intellectually in ferment also, so that the ethnogra-pher can imagine a burgeoning and fertile synthesis of “sea-values” (joyous and bright; visual) with “jungle-values” (sultry and drench-

59. Ibid., p. 32.

60. Ibid., p. 85.

61. Ibid., p. 83.


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ing; musical) that would be lasting and real: “filled with the bliss of direct contact” and a “genuineness of the mood.”62

The last entry in the first diary was written amid the Whitsunday Islands, halfway between Cairns and Brisbane on the Queensland coast. It recuperates New Guinean themes, and it poetically infuses the vision from on board the ship with an intellectual vision of progress and (limited) achievement, requiring further immersion in reality:

Should like to make a synthesis of this voyage. Actually the marvelous sights filled me with noncreative delight. As I gazed, everything echoed inside me, as when listening to music. Moreover I was full of plans for the future.—The sea is blue, absorbing everything, fused with the sky. At moments, the pink sil-houettes of the mountains appear through the mist, like phantoms of reality in the flood of blue, like the unfinished ideas of some youthful creative force. You can just make out the shapes of the islands scattered here and there—as though headed for some unknown destination, mysterious in their isolation, beautiful with the beauty of perfection—self-sufficient.63

Malinowski would require two more terms of fieldwork to chasten such visions of self-sufficiency.

* * *

Painterly escapes into the zodiacal light of the visual were one dis-traction in New Guinea; another was the reading of novels, an activ-ity that Malinowski regarded with deep opprobrium but could not resist. A week after arriving in Mailu in late October 1914, he con-fessed he had spent the time badly: “I was much too disorganized. I finished Vanity Fair, and read the whole of Romance. I couldn’t tear myself away; it was as though I had been drugged”; “Life amid palm groves” might appear “a perpetual holiday,” “yet only a few days of it and I was escaping from it to the company of Thackeray’s Lon-don snobs, following them eagerly around the streets of the big city. . . . I am incapable of burying myself in my work.”64 (The contrast between escape and burial speaks for itself.) “The work I am doing is a kind of opiate rather than a creative expression,” he told himself some days later; “I am not trying to link it to deeper sources. To organize it. Reading novels is simply disastrous. Went to bed and thought about other things in an impure way.”65 “Bogged down”

62. Ibid., p. 85.

63. Ibid., p. 98.

64. Ibid., p. 16.

65. Ibid., p. 31.



in The Count of Monte Christo, “I could not manage to come back to reality.”66

Malinowski’s reading, across the two diaries, is both broad (given the circumstances in which he was living) and compressed (in terms of genre). Most of what he read was fiction, and in the first diary, he records reading Vanity Fair, stories by Gautier (“I felt their hollowness”67) and Maupassant, Victor Cherbuliez’ romance L’aventure de Ladislas Bolski, The Count of Monte Christo (“Dumas, say what you will, has a certain fascination”68), Kipling’s Kim and Plain Tales from the Hills (“A fine artist [naturally not if compared with Conrad]”69), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, Shakespeare (“leafed through”), the poems of “Laurence Hope” (“decidedly they are first-class”), W. W. Jacobs’s stories, H. G. Wells’s New Machiavelli, George Bernard Shaw, and George Moore’s Evelyn Innes—the kinds of books one might expect to find lying around in colonial New Guinea. For nonfiction, we find Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century hagiography The Golden Legend, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, Edmund Candler’s Indian travelogue The Mantle of the East, Ernest Renan (presumably the Vie de Jesus, but Malinowski is not specific), and William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. In the second diary, there is more of what might be called “trash”: Bulwer-Lytton and Arthur Conan-Doyle, possibly; certainly, Maud Diver, George Barr McCutcheon’s Brewster’s Millions, Max Pember-ton’s Wheels of Anarchy, William Locke’s Faraway Stories, The Glory of Clementina Wing, and The Wonderful Year (Locke was clearly appreci-ated by somebody in the Trobriands), Joseph Hocking’s All for a Scrap of Paper, Walter Lionel George’s The Making of an Englishman (which Malinowski calls after its French hero, Cadoresse), Beatrice Grim-shaw’s When the Red Gods Call, and Rolf Bennett’s Captain Calamity (Revolt against the Fates and The Poker’s Thumb seem to have disap-peared from literary history). But Kipling was still there, as was Wells (Kipps and Tono-Bungay), Robert Louis Stevenson (Vailima Papers and Vailima Letters), and George Meredith; so also were Swinburne and Charlotte Brontë, Ford Madox Ford’s fantasy Zeppelin Nights, Gold-smith’s The Vicar of Wakefield, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (which left “a strong, though unpleasant impression”70), and a suite of

66. Ibid., p. 35.

67. Ibid., p. 59.

68. Ibid., p. 62.

69. Ibid., pp. 40–41 (the bracketed phrase is Malinowski’s).

70. Ibid., p. 190.


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French classics borrowed from a local resident: Montesquieu, Hugo, Chateaubriand, de Lamartine, and Prevost. So also, finally, was The Brothers Karamazov. It is not accurate, then, to conclude that “Malinowski’s novels . . . are decidedly a middle-class-to-mass lot: bestsellers . . . and, in general, materials that a figure like Malinowski classified as ‘trashy novel[s].’”71 There are many random items, but there is also a group of books relating directly to the ongoing war, to which Malinowski’s mother and homeland were directly exposed and in which his fi-ancée’s first lover had been killed, at Gallipoli. Angell’s The Great Illusion, for example, was an idealistic theory on the unnecessary connection between militarism and economic growth, which pre-dicted (in 1911) that “physical force is a constantly diminishing fac-tor in human affairs.”72 Zeppelin Nights is a Boccaccian cycle of his-torical stories told during an air raid; All for a Scrap of Paper rotates around a Quaker pacifist (“A very inferior novel but the patriotic tone moved me”73). The title of a collection of poems, Memorial for Fallen Soldiers, tells its own tale; and Kipling’s A Diversity of Creatures contains his most powerful war stories: “Mary Postgate” and “Swept and Garnished.” The kula cycle might have seemed a long way away from such concerns; but then, perhaps, such “primitive” cultural arrangements prevented warfare and militarism was (pace Angell) a peculiarly modern curse—hardly matters of indifference to an eth-nologist.74

More broadly, many of the books that Malinowski read concern the nature of society, its impermeability to change, and its relation to the individual. It is true that a Romantic historian like Prescott showed little interest in Mesoamerican culture as such (which he refers to in lofty terms as “domestic manners”), but that indifference might itself be a stimulus to an ethnographer who would later say

71. Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 14.

72. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study in the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage, 3rd ed. (London: Heinemann, 1911), p. 144.


74. “Malinowski’s second publication on the Trobriands (1920) was ‘War and Weap-ons,’ and his next article on war (in the New Leader in 1924) was a polemical tilt against militarism. He subsequently published on war in 1936, then every year from 1938 until his death. Freedom and Civilization, his last book, was mainly about the need to fight World War II. In short, Malinowski wrote far more about warfare than any other anthropologist of his time” (Michael Young, personal communication [e-mail] with author, October 20, 2012).



that “history explains nothing.”75 But other writers, particularly of fiction, were fascinated by society and its discontents. Malinowski read novels, for example, about heroes and heroines transforming themselves into social successes—or failing to do so. The hero of Brewster’s Millions has to make that transition on unexpectedly com-ing into a fortune, and the same fate descends on the heroes of Kipps and Tono-Bungay and the heroine of Jane Eyre. The Making of an En- glishman involves a Frenchman aspiring to make that transition. In Vanity Fair and Tess of the D’Urbervilles also, two heroines lift them-selves, or are lifted, from their humble stations in life as govern-ess and milkmaid—for better or worse. Moore’s Evelyn Innes, about a successful though unhappy opera singer who abandons adultery for her native Catholicism, also meditates on the place of an indi-vidual in society. Evelyn “was weary of living in the inhospitable regions outside of prejudice and authority,” Moore tells us. “She felt it was prejudice and authority that gave a meaning, or a sufficient semblance of a meaning, to life as it was; she was a helpless atom tossed hither and thither by every gust of passion as a leaf in the whirlwind, and she longed to understand herself and her mission in life.76 No wonder the novel left a “strong impression”77 on an eth-nologist for whom prejudice and authority were mysteries he was seeking to penetrate. Brontë’s Villette (in which Malinowski found the same “feminine tact, intuition, grasp of inwardness of things and longing for life” that he associated with Pride and Prejudice78) is also a meditation on “inhospitable regions” and the hero’s inability as a Catholic to overcome his anti-Protestant superstition: “What limits are there,” Heger asks Lucy Snowe, “to the wild, careless daring of your country and sect?”79 Between them, these novels suggest that social communities are the most complex objects that individuals can encounter, and that outsiders run grave risks in seeking to ac-quaint themselves with societies into which they are not born or in leaving those in which they have been raised.

Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and the more lowly Letters of a Chinaman (“To English Readers on the English and Chinese Super-stitions and the Mischief of Missionaries”) by “Ah Sin” highlighted cultural differences, as did Candler’s Mantle of the East, the final

75. See Young, Malinowski (above, n. 28), p. 558.

76. George Moore, Evelyn Innes (1898; reprint, London: Ernest Benn, 1929), p. 208.


78. Ibid., p. 200.

79. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Tim Dolin and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2008), p. 418.


48 Configurations

chapter of which (“London”) concerns the inability of an expatri-ate to resettle in what had once been his home. And many of the novels that Malinowski read have an almost manifestly “ethno-graphic” quality, from Fenimore Cooper’s Great Lakes to Thacker-ay’s London, and Hardy’s Wessex to Dostoevsky’s Novgorod. From his correspondence with his future wife, we know that Malinowski noted “a rather weak story of Kipling”—“Regulus: A Stalky Tale”—which, all the same, “is right in showing the necessity of a human-istic education.” (“Balance, proportion, perspective—life,” Kipling’s Latin master lectures a chemistry teacher: “Your scientific man is the unrelated animal—the beast without background. Haven’t you ever realized that in your atmosphere of stinks?”)80 Kim appears to have made a stronger impression: “a very interesting novel, gives a great deal of information about India” (p. 41)—as well it might, given that a central character in the novel is both an ethnologist and a spy. No beast is without a background in Kim, and the texture of the book exists at a border between fiction and a form of Anglo-Indian ethnography:

They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as com-manders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajah’s army; of captains in the Indian Ma-rine, Government pensioners, planters, Presidency shopkeepers, and mission-aries. A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollah—Pereiras, De Souzas, and D’Silvas. Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St Xavi-er’s. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar; lost tea-gardens Shillong-way; vil-lages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona-plantations south of all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy’s hair.81

In 1917, Malinowski sent Elsie a copy of Zola’s La terre, which is even more ethnographically explicit. “You’re a breed that has reached the end of its tether,” the schoolmaster, Aristide Lequeu, tells his village audience in the public house:

80. Wayne, ed., The Story of a Marriage (above, n. 13), 1:135; and Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures, ed. Paul Driver (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 221.

81. Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward W. Said (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 171–172.



You’ve been eaten up by your idiotic love of the land, that miserable bit of land which has got you by the short hair, which prevents you from seeing any further than your noses, which you’d commit murder for! You’ve been wed-ded to the land for centuries and she’s made you into cuckolds. Look at Amer-ica, the farmer is master of his land there. There’s nothing to attach him to it, no family link, no memories. As soon as his field is exhausted, he moves on. If he hears that five hundred miles away they’ve discovered more fertile plains, he ups and settles there. He’s free and he’s making a lot of money, whereas you’re just poverty-stricken prisoners.

“I wonder whether you will see,” Malinowski wrote to Elsie about Zola’s novel, “why it strikes me as somewhat akin in its tendency to my Kiriwinian efforts.”82

The most forthright of these novelists as regards a quasi-ethno-graphical vision is H. G. Wells and his anatomizing of the English class system. Kipps and Tono-Bungay both involve lower-middle-class heroes suddenly thrust into society, the one by inheritance, the other by the profits from a bogus panacea. Both Kipps and Pon-derevo are as sexually undecided as Malinowski himself, pursuing women of different class backgrounds within and outside marriage. In both novels, furthermore, Wells offers up some panaceas of his own. “The fact is,” the socialist Masterman tells Kipps, “society is one body, and it is either well or ill. That’s the law. This society we live in is ill. It’s a fractious, feverish invalid, gouty, greedy, ill-nour-ished.” “The great house, the church, the village and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees,” Ponderevo tells us in his opening chapter, “seemed to me . . . to be a closed and com-plete social system. . . . That all this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry this elaborate social system . . . to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.”83

But it was Wells’s The New Machiavelli that had the profoundest impact on Malinowski, since its hero was a fully blown intellectual rather than a “helpless atom” like Evelyn Innes. “Many statements impressed me extraordinarily,” Malinowski recorded; “moreover, he is very like me in many respects. An Englishman with an entirely

82. Émile Zola, The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmée (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1980), p. 455; Wayne, ed., The Story of a Marriage (above, n. 13), 1:13. See also Young, Ma-linowski (above, n. 28), p. 469.

83. H. G. Wells, Kipps, ed. Simon J. James (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 230; and Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), p. 15.


50 Configurations

European mentality and European problems.”84 The New Machiavelli has not aged well; nowadays, it looks like a latter-day Disraelian fan-tasy in which English social ills can or should be corrected by an intellectual elite that masters what Wells imaginatively calls “con-structive statecraft.” “We imaginative people,” his narrator Richard Remington points out, “are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.”85 The “tough-minded” Reming-ton has “emerged into the new Nominalism” and plans “to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in relation to that man,” just as Malinowski sought “to realise the vision of the world, as it is reflected in the minds of the natives.”86 The post-Fabian fantasy was perhaps something Ma-linowski could take or leave; the desire thoroughly to know a society and see through it to what he called (with Tono-Bungay in mind) the “socio-psychological correspondences”87 underpinning it that was an intellectual intoxicant.88

* * *

The features of the Diary I have described thus far are common to both installments of it. There are fewer seascapes in the second diary, it is true, but they are just as intense. And it is in the second journal that he describes fiction as a “window open on life.”89 But two devel-opments bring the second journal to an unprecedented pitch. The first was his liaisons with Elsie and Nina. (He compared both to Tess Durbeyfield: Nina as Hardy’s maiden; Elsie as the “maiden no more” to whom, like Angel Clare, he was betrothed.90) The second develop-ment was the undertaking, made in its first entry, of 10 November


85. H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, ed. Simon J. James (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 291, 249.

86. Ibid., p. 316, and Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (above, n. 30), p. 298.


88. Later in life, Malinowski wrote to his wife: “I went in the evening to the Realist an-nual dinner, sat next to Rebecca West, with Arnold Bennett on her other side, and Ju-lian Huxley opposite, and was very bored”; see Wayne, The Story of a Marriage, (above, n. 13), 2:142. There would only have been one of these dinners, as this British rational-ist monthly, to which Wells contributed, closed less than a year after its first issue in March 1929.


90. Ibid., pp. 189, 149–50.



1917, to “start keeping the diary with real determination”91—which proved mostly well-founded. There would be few more interrup-tions and retrospects, and to miss an entry even for a day merited the rebuke “very bad!”92 The strictness of the diarist revealed the delinquency of the eth-nographer, however. At the hospital in Samarai, he recorded that “mentally I caressed the ‘matron,’ who seems an attractive dish. . . . I fondled her and undressed her in my mind, and I calculated how long it would take me to get her to bed. . . . In short, I betrayed [El-sie] in my mind.”93 Fantasies of Elsie in propria persona did nothing to counteract these specular temptations. “I wanted to have her near me again. Visions of her with her hair down. Does intense longing always lead to extremes? Perhaps only under mosquito netting.—Woke up a night, full of lecherous thoughts about, of all the people imaginable, my landlord’s wife! This must stop!” The farcical quality of the situation is punctuated by chat the following day about a neighbouring trader: “Ted had gone to Gilmour [the local Method-ist missionary] and told him, ‘I have the clap.’ ‘What is clap?’ ‘Bloody pocks.’ . . . Ted has pustules on his penis.”94 Such “momentary moral disorders”95 produced what Malinowski later called “a strong aver-sion to sloshing in the mud (onanism, whoring, etc.)”96—although such aversions were themselves short-lived: “Resistance to lecherous thoughts weaker.”97

Intermittently and with the passage of time all these elements—landscape, literature, sex, and morality, not to mention his health—began to intermingle and become attached to his recurrent need for intellectual clarification: to see deeper into the life going on around him, and to understand in particular the Trobiander’s “main passions, the motives for his conduct, his aims.” (“At this point we are con-fronted with our own problems: What is essential in ourselves?”)98 The ethnologist would not see in the same way as Hardy, Conrad, or Zola, but he might hope to see as deeply. Clarity of vision, put-ting recreational literature in its rightful place, seeing life with El-

91. Ibid., p. 110.

92. Ibid., p. 129.

93. Ibid., p. 109.

94. Ibid., p. 165.

95. Ibid., p. 110.

96. Ibid., p. 181.

97. Ibid., p. 131.

98. Ibid., p. 119.


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sie as commensurate with life in “this rotten hole,”99 and having the personal discipline to abjure “telesentimental monomania”100 and to integrate all those needs in a deeper understanding of both himself and the Islanders: these aims gradually became centripetal rather than centrifugal. “This morning,” he told himself in January 1918, “it occurred to me that the purpose in keeping a diary and trying to control one’s life and thoughts at every moment must be to consolidate life, to integrate one’s thinking, to avoid fragmenting themes.”101 He could betray himself into irrelevancies on this mat-ter, blaming Elsie’s reluctance to keep a diary herself on the “lack of stratification” in the lives of English people: “They lack reflection, continuous systematization.”102 Or he deluded himself that such a document could only work if it itself was “systematized” and bro-ken up into “external impressions,” “dominant feelings in respect to myself, to my beloved, to friends, to things,” “forms of thought,” and “dynamic states of the organism”—as if he was back studying physics at the University of Cracow. (He tried one entry along such lines, and never repeated the experiment.103) But gradually, even if the forces of intellectual chaos grew little weaker, the forces of intel-lectual clarification grew more potent. Thus in March 1918, he started a sequence of entries in which Elsie was no longer held off in opposition to the work he was doing, but was identified with it: “How wonderful it would be to have her here”104—not for the purpose of self-gratification, but in order that she might see what he was doing: “Thought about E.R.M. and re-ferred material to her.”105 By December 1917, he was already paving the way toward his anti-historical, “cultural” point of view: “Under the mosquito net I thought about relation between the historical point of view (. . . causality as in respect of extraordinary, singular things) and the sociological point of view (in respect of normal course of things, the sociological law in the sense of the laws of phys-ics, chemistry). ‘Historicists’ à la Rivers = investigate geology and geological ‘history,’ ignoring the laws of physics and chemistry.”106

99. Ibid., p. 201.

100. Ibid., p. 181.

101. Ibid., p. 175.

102. Ibid., p. 126.

103. Ibid., pp. 247–248.

104. Ibid., p. 214.

105. Ibid., p. 217.

106. Ibid., p. 161.



“Yesterday,” he wrote on March 21, 1918, “I understood the charm of ‘survey study’ à la Rivers, the encompassing of broad areas as a sin-gle whole. But this projection of space onto time (two-dimensional or rather multi-dimensional entity) is very dangerous.”107 Arguably, history tends to record what gets laid down in time, stratigraphi-cally, rather than what the layers are made of. Some days later came a longer passage that is clearly climactic, oceanic in its clarity, but this time no longer a painterly end in itself: “Distinct feeling that next to this actual ocean, different every day, covered with clouds, rain, wind, like a changing soul is covered with moods—that beyond it there is an Absolute Ocean, which is more or less correctly marked on the map but which exists outside all maps and outside the reality accessible to [observation].”108

This sounds like Platonism, and Malinowski wonders briefly whether he is contemplating the “emotional origin” of that system of thought, before coming back to reality in a way that the diary format compels:

Came back, sat on the beach. Moonlit night. White sand, over it dark shapes squat, in the distance, the sea and the profiles of mountains. Combination of moods: Baia di Napoli and Gumawana “from inside.” Thought about how to describe all this for E.R.M. The moon, the sea, the mood. The moon induces a specific, clearly defined mood, I hum “[Laraisebrue], and then there was Su-zanna, pretty, pale, and virtuous.” Expression of feelings, complementary so-cial milieu, imaginary. Suddenly I tumble back into the real milieu with which I am also in contact. Then again suddenly they stop existing in their inner real-ity. I see them as an incongruous yet artistic and [savage], exotic = unreal, intan-gible, floating on the surface of reality, like a multicoloured picture on the face of a solid but drab wall.109

This is a remarkable revelation. The Trobrianders “squat,” like sago palms, strong and obtuse, but their black shapes complement the white sand and blend with the timeless profiles of the mountains behind them. The Bay of Naples and the tropical village combine, and both are worthy of the ethnologist’s wife-to-be. The reverie, instinct with European cultural archetypes (“pretty, pale, and vir-tuous”) gives way to reality with which the ethnologist is, trium-phantly, “also in contact.” Then the villagers float off again from his concentration, but the effect is not as damaging as it seems: they constitute a multicolored picture, unreal and intangible, certainly—

107. Ibid., pp. 229–230.

108. Ibid., pp. 234–235.

109. Ibid.


54 Configurations

but so do we all; none of us is anything other than a projection on the face of that “solid but drab wall” of socio-psychological cor-respondences that we inscribe and which inscribes us. All we can say is that perhaps Malinowski got his emphasis wrong: that wall is drab but solid, not solid but drab. Back in 1914, the image had been that of “shadows cast on the screen of the fog”110 or, in 1915, “shadows of reality projected on the screen of appearances.”111 Even a few months earlier, he had compared “the reflection of fleeting shimmering gleams on the rippling changing surface” to what he called “the immense smile of the depths.”112 In March, the shad-ows are thrown onto something more substantial and less vertigi-nous; the underlying reality is no longer an invisible, unattainable Platonic ideal, but a manmade structure—utilitarian and obtuse no doubt, but solid and dependable. Earlier, Malinowski had recorded, alongside his “tendency to read rubbish,” that his “thoughts pull me down to the surface of the world”;113 now, the surface of the world is comprehended in much richer terms, whereas “the principles of association by space, time, similarity are just the most external catego-ries, which give hardly any clue at all.”114

* * *

The deaths of two people usher in the resolution of this puzzle and the end of the Diary. On January 24, 1918, Inekoya, the wife of a local informant, died a drawn-out and painful death, probably from tuberculosis, on the very day that Malinowski’s mother died in Po-land. Malinowski prevaricated, emotionally, in response to Inekoya’s demise, noting first that “all my despair, after those killed in the war, hangs over this miserable Melanesian hut,” before confessing that he only pretended to weep in visiting her husband.115 But In-ekoya’s death coincided with a period of depression, illness, and de-cision about Elsie and the sickly Nina (whom he identified with the dead villager) that also coincided with the kula season. Five months later, on June 11th, already assailed by “metaphysical feeling[s] of precariousness of things,”116 he received news of his mother’s death,

110. Ibid., p. 38.

111. Ibid., p. 90.

112. Ibid., p. 186.

113. Ibid., p. 131.

114. Ibid., p. 236.

115. Ibid., p. 196.

116. Ibid., p. 283.



which reconfirmed “the terrible mystery that surrounds the death of someone dear, close to you.”117 The diary broke up by the beginning of July, but not before Malinowski recorded finding himself at a new plane of mental understanding: “Now I often have the feeling of being at ‘the bottom of consciousness’—the feeling of the physical foundation of mental life, the latter’s dependence on the body, so that every thought that flows effortlessly in some psychic medium has been laboriously formed inside the organism. . . . I went for a walk; it was drizzling, night was falling, the damp road glistened in the twilight.”118 The realization here is a complete one, even if for Malinowski it remains only a feeling: “that every thought that flows effortlessly in some psychic medium has been laboriously formed inside the organism.”119 That is true not only of Trobriand island-ers in their dealings with the world, but of anthropologists, and A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term is the exhaustive, occasionally exhausting, but intense record not only of that realization, but also of its own laborious formation amid the patterns of experience it transcribes.

117. Ibid., p. 293.

118. Ibid., p. 294.

119. Ibid., p. 294. The entire discussion presented here has implications, I think, for the case repeatedly made by Clifford Geertz in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Ba-sic Books, 1973) that “[c]ulture is public because meaning is” (p. 12), that “all experi-ence is construed experience” (p. 405), and that “[h]uman thought is consummately social: social in its origins, social in its functions, social in its forms, social in its ap-plications” (p. 360). Diaries in general and Malinowski’s experience in particular sug-gest that the processes of thought, to say the very least, can indeed take place in what Gilbert Ryle dismissively called “a secret ghetto in the head” (qtd. on p. 362).


Crucible or Centrifuge? Bronislaw Malinowski's 'A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term'

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