Anthony Madrid Explains the Village Explainer

Anthony Madrid considers Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein in a new installment of his correspondence at the Paris Review Daily. After he rouses the humor from W's deadpan, Madrid asks, "Are we all clear on what a 'village explainer' is? The phrase has been decommissioned; it’s a relic of nineteenth-century anthropology." Well:

A young anthropologist, headed into his or her first round of fieldwork might be cautioned against the phenomenon of the “village explainer.” The idea was that every set of huts contained one garrulous fellow who was overjoyed at the prospect of explaining everything to anthropologists. The culture’s history, language, mythology, political principles, marriage rites—everything. However, this person might be a half-wit, available for all this edification precisely because he is an idler, good for nothing else. And indeed this person would probably rather invent explanations spontaneously than admit he doesn’t know the answers to the anthropologists’ questions. So for heaven’s sake, be careful, young anthropologist in a pith helmet.

Setting aside the question as to how dire a threat “village explainers” ever really were to anthropology, anybody can see how Pound answers the above description. And if Stein had said “He was a village explainer” and left it at that, everyone could go home happy. But it wouldn’t quite be literature yet. It’s the other part of the sentence that does the trick. But what does it mean?

I had a long discussion about this with a friend of mine, who thought the “village explainer” was more or less the village schoolmaster—i.e., the people receiving the explanations were not anthropologists, but the villagers themselves. By that way of looking at it, the meaning would be something like: “Pound was an elementary school teacher; excellent if you were seven; if not, not.”

However, I persuaded my friend that Stein’s understanding of “village explainer” was almost certainly the standard one. He countered by pointing out that Stein could’ve been playfully misconstruing it. To which I said, Always a possibility.

More of this playful piece can be read here.