Atlantis, an Autoanthropology by Nathaniel Tarn (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Atlantis, an Autoanthropology by Nathaniel Tarn Norman Fischer (bio) ATLANTIS, AN AUTOANTHROPOLOGY Nathaniel Tarn Duke University Press https://www.dukeupress.edu/atlantis-an-autoanthropology 344 pages; Print, $25.95 Wikipedia tells me this about "anthropology": Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavior, while cultural anthropology studies cultural meaning, including norms and values. Nathaniel Tarn is an anthropologist who is and has always been a poet. The facts of his biography make him an exemplary subject for anthropological study. He was born in France in 1928 to parents whose Jewish roots were Lithuanian and Ukrainian. The family moved to Belgium and then to England during World War II, where Tarn was educated and began his early writing. In 1970 he immigrated to United States, where he became a post-sixties American poet, active in the aesthetic movements of the period. All of which make him an unusual figure, spanning several cultures and time frames, from whose experience much can be learned. Still active at ninety-four, with two poetry titles published within the last few years, Tarn has been restlessly given to prodigious world travel. He has visited every continent, and lived for lengthy periods of time in Asia and Latin America, sites of his important anthropological work of the 1950s. All in all a rather astonishing life, and one whose recounting is bound to be of interest. Tarn's latest book, Atlantis, an Autoanthropology is such a recounting. As the title indicates, it proposes itself not as memoir or autobiography but rather [End Page 110] as a work of anthropology. And the ways in which the text, because of this, differs from memoir or autobiography are what make it particularly interesting. Tarn's intent, evidently, is not to tell us about himself, though he does do that: it's to study himself through the accumulation of data. While Tarn's book is honestly and intensely self-reflective, it is at the same time a rather exhaustive and even possibly objective recitation of the relevant facts in the cultural history of the times in which he has lived. Contemporary anthropologists understand that they can't feign objectivity—they must reveal who they are, their prejudices and biases, as context for their reportage. So for Tarn's study of Tarn, Tarn must reveal his character. He is, as he writes, a cranky arachnophobe, a childhood bed-wetter who grows up to develop an unusually loud voice, which, he tells us, he uses to demand of travel agents, bureaucrats, and hotel clerks services he ought to be getting and isn't. He is a person given to depression and possible bipolar syndrome, and may be subject to a bit of OCD. The child of overbearing bourgeois parents who insisted that he get a serious career in order to raise a family, he resisted without breaking away and was held back for decades by the connection. (Interestingly, despite his easy willingness to be self-revealing in an almost clinical way, Tarn doesn't go into his marriages and liaisons. As he writes, this is to ensure the privacy of his lovers and wives.) Atlantis: a place that either doesn't exist or that previously existed and is lost and that may reemerge in some mythical future. Is Atlantis real or unreal? Is the subject of this anthropological study, one Nathaniel Tarn, real or unreal? This is a sprawling, eloquent, and full book whose structure rather astonishes. Begun in 1972 or so, and based on extensive journals dating from Tarn's childhood and throughout his life, the text has seemingly been written, revised, and augmented over the years, up till the present, so it is often surprising as you read to notice that the time frame is indefinite—are you reading words from the 1950s, revised in the 1970s, or decades later, and then further commented on in what's now the present? Tarn, as the study's subject, is usually referred to as "Tarn," or "our student," or "our anthropologist," and the text in many places...