THE WOODCUTTER AND THE FISHERMAN

When Talleyrand, romantic adventurer and faithless bishop, rode through the American forests on horseback, accompanied by his trusty servant Courtiade, he found it hard to pass the time and distract his thoughts from the grim news brought by every ship from France. A call could sometimes be heard among the dense woodland, far from the beaten track: “Courtiade, are you there?” swiftly followed by a far-off, deferential reply: “Oh Lord, yes, Monseigneur, I’m here.” Talleyrand smiled at his own incongruity, a feudal remnant, now beyond the frontier of société. He gazed about him and had the impression of traveling back down the course of history, of gradually journeying in time and space as he moved slowly away from the cities, the villages, the farms, and the fields, and ended up among the beaver hunters of Connecticut, forded vast swamps and disappeared into the forests. In this sequence, it seemed as though the improbable amalgam of civilization were decomposing before his eyes, returning, little by little, to its simple elements. “At the end of every day,” he noted, “we lose sight of some of those inventions which our wants, as they have increased, have rendered necessary; and it seems we are traveling back in the history of the progress of the human mind.” But that “progress” held many surprises: having reached the point of utmost simplicity, Talleyrand encountered two model characters: the woodcutter and the fisherman. He described them—and the portrait he drew was not of two figures forsaken by history, but the anticipation of two faces that history was about to adopt: they were the silhouettes of the first new men, already anticipating Tocqueville. In their wilderness surroundings, they were about to make their appearance as representatives of the mass. Indeed, they were representatives of those who in an age without irony would be called “mass men.” Talleyrand encountered the odor specificus of the mass not just in the large city but in desolate, unblemished nature. It was a curious detail, worthy of note. Talleyrand included these two portraits, as instructive clinical cases, in his Mémoire sur les relations commerciales des États-Unis avec l’Angleterre, which he would read to the Institut de France on April 4, 1797.

The woodcutter. “The American woodcutter does not interest himself in anything; every idea of sensibility is remote from him. Those branches so agreeably disposed by nature; beautiful foliage; the bright color that enlivens one part of the wood; the darker green that gives a melancholy shade to another: these are nothing to him: he retains no recollection of any place: the number of axe-strokes required to fell a tree fills all his thoughts. He never planted; he knows not the pleasures of it. A tree of his own planting would be good for nothing, in his estimation; for it would never, during his life, be large enough to fell: it is by destruction that he lives. He is a destroyer wherever he goes: so every place is equally good in his eyes. He has no attachment to the spot on which he has spent his labor; for his labor is only fatigue, and is unconnected with any idea of pleasure. In the effects of his toil he has not witnessed those gradual increases of growth, so captivating to the planter; he regards not the destination of his products; he knows not the charm of new attempts: and, when quitting the place where he has lived for many years, provided he does not forget his axe, he leaves no regret behind him.”

The fisherman. “The vocation of an American fisherman begets a careless soul, almost equal to that of the woodcutter. His affections, his interests, his life are on the side of that society to which it is thought that he belongs. But it would be a prejudice to suppose that he is a very useful member of it. For we must not compare these fishermen to those of Europe, and think that the fisheries here are, like them, a nursery for sailors, for creating strong and sturdy men of the sea. In America, with the exception of the inhabitants of Nantucket, who fish for whales, fishing is an idle employment. Two leagues from the coast, when they have no dread of foul weather, a single mile when the weather is uncertain, is the sum of the courage which they display; and the line is the only instrument with whose use they are practically acquainted. Thus their knowledge is but a trifling trick; and their action, which consists of constantly hanging one arm over the side of the boat, is little short of idleness.

“They are attached to no place; their only connection with land is by means of a wretched house which they inhabit. It is the sea that affords them nourishment: hence a few codfish, more or less, determine their country. If the number of these seems to diminish in any particular quarter, they emigrate, in search of another country, where they are more abundant.

“When it was remarked, by some political writers, that fishing was a sort of agriculture, the remark was brilliant, but not solid. All the qualities, all the virtues, which are attached to agriculture, are wanting in the man who lives by fishing. Agriculture produces a patriot in the truest acceptation of the word; fishing can alone succeed in forming a cosmopolite.”

The person talking in these terms to members of the Institut is not a new La Bruyère writing about barbarism but a sociologist in the age of inflation and paramilitary groups. Around him sound the echoes of Walther Rathenau and Adolf Hitler, hoboes clambering onto freight cars and police on horseback. We don’t see majestic tree trunks, but waste paper blowing about Wall Street on a silent Sunday. We remove Talleyrand’s Woodcutter from his exotic woodland setting and we find Jünger’s Worker: we can already see him in the uniform of a soldier and a factory worker, with no need even for the roar of steel. This man is a focal point for technical violence: his place can be any place, because his mind has lost the mnemotechnical loci in which to record images (“he retains no recollection of any place”). His shadow is the parasite, the Fisherman, the man whom society inadvertently includes among its members, but who doesn’t belong to society. His passivity is malevolent and hostile, he is one of the migrant Lumpen, one of the proletarian jellyfish.

Woodcutter and Fisherman will one day find that they are enemies: for now, in the American wilderness, they are united in their hatred for the land that still generously embraces them. It is a hatred for all that grows and, in growing, mellows and fades. Their rhythm is another: the stroke, the thrust, a metaphor for the gambler who rolls the dice. And their cosmopolite mission is to be found in this devotion to striking: the stroke is the same in every place (“he is a destroyer wherever he goes: so every place is equally good in his eyes”), the tree is the flavor of a single place. The garrulous citoyens whom Talleyrand had left in Paris were still good, slow-witted rural patriots, but they now seemed archaic and outmoded in the face of these two new characters beyond the frontier, who were experimenting with history in the making.