Opening Up Frontiers

(in which we discover that the inhabitants of Formosa get around on hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses)

After having studied the different types of nonjourney and some of the situations which might lead us to talk about them, the time has come to put forward some suggestions on how to acquit ourselves in such situations, which as we’ve seen are more frequent than you might think, and which each of us risks having to face at some moment or other.

Seldom having traveled myself and already having found myself having to talk about imaginary places on many an occasion, I am not badly placed to offer some tips to those who fear being confronted with the necessity of having to reinvent space without being contradicted. And we can see that far from falling victim to the situation, it is possible to profit from it and gain a better knowledge of the places in question and of oneself.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, an inhabitant of Formosa1 called George Psalmanazar appeared in London and was an immediate sensation, rapidly gaining huge popularity.

He said he had been kidnapped from his island by Jesuits who had taken him to France and tried in vain to convert him to Catholicism. He spoke both Latin and English, and the religious persecution he’d suffered immediately won the hearts of the Anglican community in London, who took him under their wing.

Psalmanazar took it upon himself to promote his native island, largely ignored in Europe. He soon became very successful, partly because of his original style of dress—he wore exotic, baroque outfits—and his diet—he ate only raw meat—but above all for the novel information he was able to supply on his home country. His stories were mind-blowing.

His reputation grew even more after the 1704 publication of his work An Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, an Island Subject to the Emperor of Japan. It had been preceded by an autobiography, which had swiftly been reprinted and was translated into several languages. The success of the book, which was due to the revelations it contained, led the author to give lectures to learned societies and increased his fame even more, not only in England but across Europe.

It is true that Psalmanazar furnished a considerable amount of firsthand information on this country about which little was known at the time. He made it known that Formosa, whose capital was Xternetsa, was a dependency of Japan and not of China, as had been incorrectly believed for a long time, and that the ruling regime was a monarchy.

Psalmanazar also provided some original insights into the country’s customs. It was thanks to him that we learned that the inhabitants wore clothes that accurately reflected their social rank, that they were polygamous, that they ate their wives if they discovered them to be unfaithful and that human sacrifice was practiced regularly.2We also discovered through Psalmanazar that the inhabitants of Formosa mainly ate snakes, that they lived underground in circular houses, and they didn’t only use horses and camels to get around but also rode hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.3

But Psalmanazar didn’t content himself with providing precious information on life and customs on Formosa. He also allowed us to study its language.4 Not only was he a fluent speaker, but he could also write it without difficulty. He explained that it used twenty characters, different from the characters used in China or Japan; it had six distinct tenses; and variations were made by using auxiliaries and tones.

In order to improve our knowledge, he was able to provide a translation of the Lord’s Prayer which began with the words, “Amy Pornio dan chin Ornio vicy, Gnayjorhe sai Lory, Eyfodere sai Bagalin, jorhe sai domino apo chin Ornio.” Formosa’s language aroused keen interest among intellectuals, including Leibniz, and because of its rigor, continued to be studied by linguists decades after Psalmanazar’s fraud had been brought to light.

Of course Psalmanazar didn’t come from Formosa. Born in France, he had adopted this ersatz identity after first having passed for an Irish pilgrim in order to travel around Europe more freely. He was happy to explain himself in his Memoirs, a book in which he recounted in detail the circumstances that led him to create this fiction.

Despite the success of his deception and the lack of criticism he received, it seems that Psalmanazar ended up feeling guilty about the way he had made fun of the English intelligentsia. While he didn’t denounce himself during his lifetime, he dedicated himself to the study of theology and became a specialist in issues related to the Hebrew religion. It might be assumed that this was what led him to participate in a dictionary of religions for which he provided the entry on Formosa in which he criticized Psalmanazar’s trickery, writing of himself in the third person.

When you think of the number of improbabilities with which he embellished his stories, it is astonishing that Psalmanazar was able to construct this pretense and maintain it for several years. For example, there was the number of children he claimed were sacrificed each year on Formosa—twenty thousand—which led certain skeptical spirits to remark that at that rate, the population would rapidly become extinct.

Moreover, even if few people visited the island at that time, some Europeans did go there and their accounts were radically different from Psalmanazar’s, who, with great composure, replied that they had only visited part of the island, never having ventured beyond the west coast.

The most surprising thing was that Psalmanazar, who had pale skin and blond hair, didn’t correspond in the slightest to the picture one might have had of an inhabitant of Formosa. But the majority of his interlocutors didn’t seem surprised by this—at that time, the concept of race wasn’t decisive in the perception of otherness. And Psalmanazar explained eruditely that members of the intellectual class on the island were pale skinned because they lived underground.

How did Psalmanazar go about fooling so many people? The first reason he managed to convince so many intellectuals and for such a long period of time was the verisimilitude of his description of Formosa and his own personal investment in the simulation.

With Psalmanazar, we rediscover the play of intertwined places that I noted earlier. For the real country of Formosa, which was difficult to visit at the time, Psalmanazar substituted an imaginary country that he knew how to reinvent in every aspect without ever having been there. But this substitution doesn’t become intelligible until we take into account what I proposed calling the “inner landscape” of the author and the eternally lost “original place” that he never stops searching for in vain through all of his confabulations, just like every one of us.

It is notable in fact that Psalmanazar, by engaging in this deception, isn’t only looking for the tangible social benefits he might gain from describing a virtually unknown land; he also attempts to construct a true romance of his origins by inventing for himself a new identity and a new history, going so far as to develop a new language whose rules he had better know, given that he is the only person in the world who can speak it.

To this end, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is a compromise formation in the Freudian sense, like a dream or a delirium. Psalmanazar recreates himself through an imaginary Formosa that allows him to deploy an infantile fantasy of omnipotence—just as Rosie Ruiz and Jean-Claude Romand did in their own ways. He invents his own origins and those of everyone close to him and creates a comprehensive family saga of which he is the hero.

Psalmanazar’s second quality is the possession of a fertile imagination. In this, he fits into the tradition of authors like Marco Polo and Margaret Mead’s female informants—like them he is capable of inventing a plethora of picturesque elements that capture and retain the public’s attention.

It is impossible to hope to speak with any conviction of places you haven’t been to without a vivid imagination. The capacity to dream and to make others dream is essential to anyone wanting to describe an unknown place and hoping to capture the imagination of their readers and listeners.5

This imagination is deployed in several ways that appear contradictory. First of all, Psalmanazar invents a country to suit his taste, gives it a political system, an economy, a language, customs, and even endows it with a unique animal husbandry. What he constructs is a complete world, capable of functioning, like the imaginary realms that populate travelogues and children’s games.

This imagination relies upon a strong sense of faux realism, or what one might call true detail. Like Chateaubriand, with his detailed descriptions of the flowers and insects of parts of America that he took good care not to explore, Psalmanazar nurtures the tiniest elements of his stories to create a credible illusion of an alternative reality.

But, as specific as it is, the place invented by Psalmanazar cannot clearly be situated in any particular locality. Although it has a determined geographical location, it could just as easily be found anywhere at all. The truth is that Psalmanazar combined several travelogues from different continents, and his montage contains elements from the Aztec and Inca civilizations—starting with human sacrifices—as well as from the Japanese and Chinese.6

It is no trivial matter that Psalmanazar transports hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses to Formosa, anticipating Henri Michaux’s gesture when he added camels to his description of Honfleur.7 Transporting animals or objects from one country to another, prevalent in the accounts of armchair travelers, shows that there is a different kind of space here than the one that prevails in the real world, a place that is much more flexible and mobile than the one in which we operate on a daily basis.

This apparently contradictory mixture of precision and ambiguity is essential to the invention of a haven of refuge conducive to the imagination. The details guarantee the existence of the imaginary place and the veracity of the account; the ambiguity allows the reader or listener to project themselves individually according to a particular hook offered by the account and to find a singular space that chimes with their own inner landscape.

But personal investment and imagination would not have been sufficient to explain—any more than in Margaret Mead’s case—that such an absurd fiction could be sustained for so long and accepted by the scientific community like a realist document. A model of individual compromise, Psalmanazar’s Formosa is also, when you take a closer look, a model of collective compromise.

If you think about it, the description of Formosa is just as much a plural work as a singular fiction. As we have already seen, the conversations we can have about places we don’t know do not only concern the places and ourselves, but also involve the people we are addressing ourselves to, often benevolent accomplices.

Michael Keevak showed in the book he wrote on Psalmanazar that the latter’s success can be explained by the fact that Psalmanazar addressed a disquisition to the English that they wanted to hear, particularly in terms of religion, and offered them an image of themselves that they found recognizable:

Psalmanazar, in short, wasn’t just the perfect response to the start of a period of fascination for exotic chinoiseries, but also the solution to a growing desire amongst Europeans to meet exotic specimens who weren’t overly exotic: as Linda Lomeris wrote, foreigners should function as a kind of mirror of the subjective preoccupations of Europeans. Psalmanazar might have been a stranger who ate raw meat and spoke a completely foreign language, but he didn’t present the slightest menace. After all, he was a noble savage, he was Anglican, and (in particular?) he was white.8

Psalmanazar’s Formosa functioned as a collective compromise in the sense that it allowed an entire community—who weren’t necessarily, on the unconscious plane, as fooled as they led us to believe—to think about their relationship to a remote foreign country. As such, this fiction allowed real psychological work to be done, in the same way that Margaret Mead’s imaginary Samoans offered Americans a transitional place onto which they could project their unconscious desires and be a step ahead in thinking about sexual liberation.

Hence the importance of the spatial jamming that Psalmanazar engages in by presenting a place that is just as specific as it is unsuitable. His rewriting of Formosa is all the more liable to please a vast audience because it isn’t too limited geographically, nor too personal in terms of fantasy, but caters to all. In doing this, he places Formosa in the universalized space of a collective mythology in which numerous readers can find themselves.

The bric-a-brac country that Psalmanazar constructs with the support of his benevolent audience shows that, like numerous armchair travelers, he doesn’t play with the real geographical place addressed by science, but with an aberrant space that is the same as the one literature invents to describe the world.

This aberrant space is resolutely atopic—that is to say, it doesn’t experience the limitations that organize the geography of the real world. It possesses great mobility, like dreams do, dominated as it is in the same way by the primary processes of the unconscious. It is possible to move at full speed from one location to another as Rosie Ruiz did, as though no distance was insurmountable.

It establishes communication between geographical places that are not adjacent to each other in the real world but separated by large distances by renewing the frontiers. It is therefore not surprising that in this space, animals are able to move without difficulty from one continent to another and settle in new territories where one would never come across them normally.

And it is equally likely that, profiting from the mobility of the literary space and this opening of frontiers that disrupts circulation in the real world, the characters of certain works of fiction profit from this by passing from one text to another and settling in a world that seems more hospitable to them.

If we don’t take into account the atopic character of literary space, we cannot hope to understand the extent to which it involves a different space from that of the real world, nor grasp the multitude of discrete events that occur, sometimes without even the writer’s knowledge, and which merit our attention.

Paying attention to the atopic character of literary space is essential when describing places you haven’t been to, since this atopia and the new traffic rules it establishes between worlds encourage a generous opening up of the field of descriptions by no longer limiting them to a single evoked area.

In fact, it encourages supplementing described areas with elements borrowed from other real or imaginary worlds as Psalmanazar does, elements that it might be desirable to have in the story in order to make the descriptions of the place one hopes to have others experience more sensitive and relevant.

1.    UP–

2.    Psalmanazar’s book, published in 1704, was reissued in 1705 in a new version that accentuated the cruelty of Formosa’s morals. See the analysis of the two versions in Richard M. Swiderski’s The False Formosan: George Psalmanazar and the Eighteenth-Century Experiment of Identity (San Francisco, CA: Mellen Research University Press, 1991), 66.

3.    See Swiderski on Formosa’s abundant fauna, which included lions, bears and wolves (ibid., 75).

4.    For a detailed analysis of the language of Psalmanazar, see Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian: George Psalmanazar’s Eighteenth-Century Formosan Hoax (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), 61.

5.    And Psalmanazar does it with enough conviction to win the support of his interlocutors. In his Memoirs, he tells how he had resolved that, once having made an assertion, he would never to go back on it, whatever unlikelihood might be revealed or contradiction made by witnesses (George Psalmanazar, Memoirs of ****. Commonly Known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; a Reputed Native of Formosa. Written by Himself in Order to Be Published after His Death (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Ecco Print Editions, Dublin, 2011), 141.

6.    Formosa’s language is a montage, too. Its articles (oi hic, ey haec, ai hoc) are inspired by Latin (see Swiderski, 75).

7.    “In the past I had too much respect for nature. I placed myself in front of things and landscapes and I let them be.

That’s over, from now on I’m going to intervene.

I was at Honfleur and I was bored. So I resolutely added some camels. It wasn’t really called for. Never mind, it was my idea. Besides, I went about this with the greatest prudence. I introduced them first of all on very busy days, on Saturdays in the marketplace.” Henri Michaux, La nuit remue (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1967). English translation by Michele Hutchison.

8.    Michael Keevak, The Pretended Asian, 53.

Pierre Bayard

How to Talk About Places You've Never Been