Sorrow of the Earth by ERIC VUILLARD

Author:ERIC VUILLARD [Eric Vuillard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782272823
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-11-07T05:00:00+00:00

We’re the audience. It’s us watching the Wild West Show. In fact we’ve always been watching it. We should be suspicious of our intelligence, suspicious of our refinement, and we should be suspicious too of our unscathed lives and the grand spectacle of our emotions. The maestro is there, inside us, standing right next to us. Visible and invisible. With his ideas that are as true they are false, his accommodating rhetoric.

And the spectacle starts again. The cavalrymen spin ferociously round in the arena. The dust turns your eyes red. A soldier tumbles to the ground, dead, then gets up and dusts off his jacket—the show continues. The cavalry surrounds the Indians. The bleachers are packed out with twenty thousand people, more perhaps. Suddenly, a cavalryman leans over, and performs a few acrobatics on his circus horse. Bang! The Indians open fire; the noise is deafening and the air is too thick to breathe. They launch into fierce hand-to-hand combat, knives slash throats, men fall under the horses’ hooves. A ranger advances under a hail of bullets. The audience looks on, mesmerized.

A few Indians ride around the rangers, yelling the way Buffalo Bill taught them to. They slap the palms of their hands over their mouths, Woo! Woo! Woo! And it makes a sort of wild, inhuman whoop. But this war cry was never heard on the Great Plains, nor in Canada, nor anywhere else—it’s sheer invention on the part of Buffalo Bill. And what they don’t yet know is that they will have to produce this war cry, this wonderful circus-act invention, on every stage and on every film set where they are hired as extras in depictions of their own misfortune. Yes, they’re still unaware of the destiny that awaits the circus trick devised by Buffalo Bill, they cannot conceive that all children in the Western world will forever afterwards dance round the fire, flapping their palms over their mouths to produce “Indian war cries”; they can’t imagine the prodigious future that awaits this monstrous thing, the fabulous power to combust the senses by means of spectacle. And yet, they must secretly have felt the full horror of it.

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