The writer Jeannine Worms (1923-2006) met Roger Caillois—the theorist of mimicry who looms large in Effects 3: Mimicries—in Buenos Aires, where she was exiled after the rise of fascism in France. He became her friend and teacher. After the war, Worms returned to Paris and in the 1960s she conducted a series of interviews with Caillois. They were broadcast on the radio station France Culture in 1970 and later published as a book, Entretiens avec Roger Caillois (La Différence, 1991). The following interview is an excerpt from that book, translated into English for the first time.
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Jeannine Worms: Roger Caillois, we spoke yesterday about the Praying Mantis and the Fulgora laternaria. Among others, these two are mimetic animals. You have been highly engaged with animal mimicry; what about it arouses such a strong interest in you?
Roger Caillois: What first interested me in mimicry was a type of regression of the animal towards the inanimate. One of the characteristics of the mimetic animal, or at least certain ones, is to merge with their background. The chameleon, the sole, or the turbot, take on the color of the base on which they rest. In the same manner the snow fox, or the snow owl, the snowy owl, become white, which is to say that they merge with the background against which they move. This struck me more than usual while looking at a photograph depicting a tiger. You could not see the tiger, because you can only see the tiger when it moves against the background of the bamboo. Moreover, the alternating yellow and black stripes of its coat merge with the bamboo shoots, which the sun alternately highlights or casts in shadow. You can only see the tiger when it moves: when it keeps still, you cannot see it. And this leads to the following problem: the tiger is an animal who fears nothing, except hunters, right? What then is his interest in dissimulation, in blending into the landscape? This is not at all about escaping an enemy. It is to draw in prey. So there are two mimicries: an offensive mimicry and a defensive mimicry. The other aspect we can consider is the one that shocked me and drove me to further engage with these problems. Perhaps mimicry is, as in the case of the tiger—or the case of the chameleon, the sole, the turbot, or the reinette apple (which is green because it grows among the leaves of trees)—a mimicry of camouflage. This mimicry of camouflage is the disappearance of the animal into its background. But it is also a mimicry of disguise, which is to say, when an offensive animal presents itself as a defensive one, or a well-armed animal—such as a wasp, which has a sting, or venom—is inedible, which can leave its predator in a desperate state. This is to say that a disguised animal is another animal, not of its species, but an animal of which it simulates the appearance. Finally, there is the type of animal who presents what would appear to be enormous pincers, menacing appendages, as for example in certain scarabs, like the Hercules beetle, which has enormous mandibles that are, in reality, quite harmless, and with which the insect can do nothing; or, in our climate, the Stag beetle; or, even better, the enormous oculi of many butterflies––the false frightening eyes––in yellow and black, or violently colored, under their wing, which are destined to scare the birds tempted to prey upon them. There is a third type of mimicry, the mimicry of intimidation. You have recalled that, yesterday, when we spoke of the Praying Mantis, I drew a parallel between the automatism of the insect and the conscious and organized methods of people.
JW: That was the theme of our last conversation.
RC: Yes, it was. And so, it seems to me that mimicry offers a broader vision of this same parallel. In the camouflage of the insect that adapts itself to its background, I recognized all sorts of human things: the colored cloaks, the wall of conspirators, etc––all the methods of absconding from view, becoming invisible, found so often in folklore and in mythology: the cloaks and hats that render their wearer invisible. The affinity for invisibility and innumerable tales of invisible men, as for example with H. G. Wells, just to begin with…
JW: Not on the level of the invisible man, but on the level of armament, senselessly developed in our epoch…
RC: …senselessly developed. But they have even further implemented the capabilities of insects.
JW: The same methods.
RC: The same methods. Take the parachutist’s suit for example. These are generally comprised of green and brown spots, which are not at all uniform in color. You notice that when someone paints a snake in green you cannot but see it in the forest. The spots on a snake––which are green, brown, violet, etc.––are those which render it invisible, because they fragment its linear and serpentine form. In a manner of speaking, they break-up the serpent as such. They make of it an ensemble of bright and dark surfaces, which allow it to disappear among the brown, green, or decaying leaves. Whenever someone paints a snake uniformly in green––though these do exist, pythons for example––you see it immediately. You recognize it immediately as a snake in the verdure of the forest. A certain kind of animal mimicry, consequently, is similar to the human affinity for camouflage. The affinity for looking––for being––invisible, and all the mythology that surrounds it. And then there is the affinity for disguise that I call the affinity for travesty. And here we enter an immense sphere, important to festivity and carnival, in which one endeavors to pass as someone other. Men disguise themselves as women, or the inverse; one disguises himself as a nurse, an astronaut, or a policeman, or into anything one wants. And that ––the theme of metamorphosis, the theme of travesty––is a second form of mimicry that we also find in both the realm of people and the domain of animals, which, in this case, appear not only to blend into the background, but to impersonate another, to represent something else, something which is not them.
JW: Camouflage, you say, corresponded with an affinity for invisibility. I believe that it has become, more recently, a necessity of armament.
RC: No, not of armament, but of the art of war. It is not so much necessity that interests me as the great many legends of invisible men, and of dressing in something that makes one invisible. Even the possession of a ring, like that which Gyges wore around his finger: turning the stone inset in it sufficed to render him invisible. So it’s not the necessity of being invisible, in certain circumstances, which has seemed to me to be a human correlate to the protective mimicry of the animal world, but rather the myths of invisibility that occupy me.
JW: Precisely, this is your idea of instinct in the realm of the animal, and of the imagination in the realm of people.
RC: I would not be surprised by such a correspondence––as in the case of the Praying Mantis (an insect with a particular mythology). However, in this case, it’s a triple correspondence.
The first correspondence: the camouflage of insects and the myths of invisibility of men.
The second correspondence: the affinity for carnival, disguise, and travesty in people, and the insect’s affinity for presenting itself as another animal. This, generally, is an offensive animal––a menacing animal, such as the butterfly presenting itself as a wasp––or a small, completely inoffensive scarab presenting itself as an ant, which has its fleet of acids and pincers.
And the third correspondence, which is perhaps the most general––and which seems to me now the most revealing, and the most instructive––in the entire arena of mimicry, is the mask. It is here that we find the Fulgora laternaria, which wears the mask of a crocodile. It is here that we find the butterflies that don oculi (which is to say false eyes, eyes that are destined to fascinate, to petrify, to paralyze the enemy in order to flee) and the use of the mask common to all human societies. I am not aware of a single human society that has not used a mask, always a form of mimicry—but a mimicry destined to frighten, and not to efface those whom it serves.
JW: What is the difference between the mask and the disguise?
RC: In disguise, you seek the appearance of someone in another. I have mentioned the example of representation: the animal that disguises itself takes the form of another animal. With the oculi, however, or with the mask, it absolutely does not represent something well defined, something identifiable. It is simply looking to inspire fright. This is what I call the “mimicry of intimidation,” which provokes an irrational fear. It’s also this that you find in both primitive societies and in very developed societies, as in Greece—where actors, for example, who were the ancient officiants of religious ceremonies, sought to represent, not to disguise themselves as someone else, but to take on the appearance of someone who did not exist, and who, precisely because he did not exist, frightened as something that appeared from nature: this is the supernatural.
JW: What you refer to as the last vestiges of the mask in the contemporary world—is it the uniform?
RC: I do not believe so. I do not think it’s that. I believe the uniform is destined more often to seduce and to reinforce a hierarchy. No, I do not think it is that. There are masks, many masks in the contemporary universe, but often they are utilitarian ones. For example, the mask surgeons wear to protect themselves from microbes. One could think of the deep-sea diver’s helmet as a type of mask… And then there are common masks, or the masks of the carnival, which are destined to allow one person to act as another, and the whole series of masks in the theater. But there we fall back into the necessity of a representation to convince people that someone is other than who they are.
JW: Is there no relation between the concrete and physical masks of theater and carnival and the moral function of the mask?
RC: The moral of the mask is, for me, nearly contradictory. The mask is always something you place in front of yourself, to trick, to withdraw into yourself, to hide yourself, to disappear, or even to inspire fear. In primitive [sic] societies one dons a mask to leave the class of those who are terrified to join the class of those who have the right to terrify others. There are even societies that were founded on the wearing of the mask.
JW: Roger Caillois, would you say that there is a masquerade in our society with the business card of a CEO, which could be a mask, the mask of a sort of competence, more or less assuring—that of a highly placed functionary?
RC: Well, not really. No, I think that everyone is masked, everyone presents an appearance, but that seems to me to be one of the rules of the game in society. That does not seem to me comparable at all to the phenomena of animals presenting themselves, because that is really their body, in the moment, which is modified. Someone dressing in the clothing of an ambassador, for example, is placed in the skin of an ambassador. This is the social game. However, I wanted to go into––I placed myself on the plane of––myth. That of the mask, for example, in which someone is convinced they embody a spirit, that they have been driven by a spirit, that they feel transformed, that they feel possessed by an external force. That appears to me to go much further than the simple social personality who plays his part at every moment like an actor.
JW: I’m disappointed to hear that the Fulgora could not be considered the grandfather of the CEO, or even the customs officer. But it occurs to me now that you have guided us through an entire segment of your work, which has drawn from sociology to do what you have with animal mimicry. Looking forward, there remains a whole other part of your work, just as important, if not perhaps even more interesting, related to literature itself––to poetry, to the novel, to the place of literature in the world and of our own literature, to creation literature. There is so much to say on the subject that I hope we will have time.