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VINCENT CRAPANZANO
story, Turnbull is deeply upset by his experience with the Ik.
The
Mountain People
reads also like a keen. Turnbull's response to the Ik
is to render them figures in an allegory of modem man. There must
be meaning after all. Such, I suppose, is demanded by the quest, espe–
cially the quest of a romantic looking for yet another savage paradise.
The allegory is, of course, the weakest part of the book.
It
has been at–
tacked by critics.
It
is too facile a response; it is too much the product
of a society that asks for and extols easy answers. The Ik were once
nomadic hunters who roamed the rich Kidepo valley. Now they are
farmers confined to a barren wasteland between the Kenya-Uganda
escarpment and Mount Morungole - confined in order to make room
for a game preserve. There is no reason to see in the Ik an allegory for
modem man. There is, if one bothers to think about it, no reason to
find any meaning in the experience at all. Turnbull does not learn the
lesson of his first experience with the Ik. He shakes hands, good-bye,
with a starving old man who weighs no more than sixty pounds and
discovers that he has accidentally lifted the man off the ground. The
old man's grip weakens, and he fall back, laughing. He tells Turnbull
that he hasn't eaten in three days, and he and his companion dissolve
into laughter again.
I have written elsewhere that the laugh is the laugh of death, but
I see now that that, too, is a facile answer. I would describe it now as
one of the three laughs that Arsene tells Watt about in Beckett's novel
- laughs that are, strictly speaking, not laughs but modes of ululation.
It
is not the bitter laugh, the ethical laugh, that laughs at what is not
good; it is not the hollow laugh, the intellectual laugh, that laughs at
what is not true; it is perhaps the mirthless laugh, "the dianoetic laugh,
down the snout." "It is the laugh of laughs, the
Tisus PUTUS,
the laugh
laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting the highest joke, in
a word, the laugh that laughs - silence please - at that which is un–
happy." There is, you see, no revelation, and this comes especially hard
to the seeker. Turnbull was surprised, shocked, and disappointed, when,
with the pygmies, he discovered that their most sacred, secret instru–
ment, the
malimo,
was not an extraordinary wooden trumpet but an
ordinary piece of piping.
There is something dangerous in Turnbull's allegorical vision of
the Ik. He argues that if the Ik did once possess the virtues that they
are now lacking - and he finds evidence for this - then these virtues,
kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, com–
passion, charity, and love, are not "necessary" human qualities. They
