Uncanny Encounters at Angkor

By Joanna Wolfarth

Alpine Fellowship 2021 – Academic Writing Prize Runner-Up

Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchers and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments—sublime contemplations (Volney, 1799, 9).

In the two hundred years since orientalist C.F. Volney wrote those words, notions of sublimity still haunt the temples of Angkor, in northwest Cambodia. The late 19th-century period of French colonial expansion in Southeast Asia occurred decades after Romanticism had swept across Europe, promoting the connections between nature and man. And the temples at Angkor, where nature sprang from carved rock, became a potent symbol for the sublimity of the so-called ‘ruin’ and justification for French colonialsm. Perfectly poised between survival and destruction the ruin could represent man’s achievements as well as the potential for downfall.

As a scholar, I cannot pretend to be immune to the romantic allure of the ruin. My decision to pursue research on Angkor was sparked by a moment of uncanny fascination, where any sense of academic objectivity was overcome by an embodied response to what lay before me. I remember it with distinct clarity. The feel of reddish dust mixing with sweat on my brow. Tiny black ants running back and forth on the ground. And above me, three giant sandstone heads gazed out across the tops of the trees (fig.1). I was momentarily rooted to the ground by the tingling sensation running up and down my spine. What was this? Moments later, I walked through the gateway beneath the heads towards another monument of this once pulsing city: the Bayon temple (fig.2).

The Thrill of Romanticism

Angkor Park is still home to around 80,000 Cambodians and it still pulses; with the itchy cries of crickets, the muffled thuds of a drum being struck in a small temple, the sound of an approaching moto and convoys of tour buses, each tourist in a private fantasy of exploration and discovery. At its height the city of Angkor was the largest urban metropolis in the world. According to inscriptions written two hundred years after the event, the Angkorian Empire was founded in 802 C.E., when Jayavarman II performed a ritual ceremony at Phnom Kulen, a mountain range north of the area that would become Angkor’s capital. This ceremony announced the unification and sovereignty of the Kingdom of Kambuja and, with his magical rites, Jayavarman II instituted the cult of the devarāja, a term commonly translated as ‘god-king’. While the precise meaning of this Sanskrit term is ambiguous, it suggests a cult founded on a strong association between the king and the divine.

Today, Angkor is best known for its predominantly Hindu temples, built by successive kings to associate themselves with the divine through architectural imitations of the heavenly realms. These temples are concentrated in the central Angkor region of northwest Cambodia, but are also scattered across mainland Southeast Asia, testament to the political, artistic and economic power Angkor commanded. Standing majestically at the very centre the empire’s capital is the Bayon, a late 12th-century masterpiece of sculpture-cum-architecture, which marks the arrival of the first Buddhist king of Angkor as well as the beginning of the end of the Angkorian Empire. It is a spectacular finale to Angkor’s quest to wrestle god and the heavens from earth and stone.

Unique among the hundreds of temples that dominated the Angkorian landscape, the Bayon takes the anthropomorphic forms which were traditionally concealed as statues within the temple complex and makes hundreds of human faces the very form of its structure. The temple is composed of towers with two-metre-high faces, each looking to the cardinal directions. The precise identity of these faces - if there ever was one - is still unknown. Their iconography is unusually ambiguous for Angkorian art and no textual evidence has been found which gives an indication of who they might be (Wolfarth, 2014).

By the 14th century the empire faltered and the Cambodian capital moved south. Yet the temples were never wholly abandoned. Some, like Angkor Wat, remained important religious sites, modified to suit a shift to Theravada Buddhism. Inscriptions attest to the royal and international significance of the site and the earliest photographs of Angkor, taken in the 1860s, clearly show monastic communities living within the temple compound. Other temples were also occupied and maintained over the centuries. Yet the decrease of activity in the Angkor region meant that nature was often allowed to overrun many of these attempts to meld the divine world to our own. Trees took root between sandstone slabs and vines encircled statues.

In the late 19th century, Europeans came to these monuments and, in acts of willful blindness, felt assured in their role of discoverers of a lost civilisation. To them, Angkor was symbolic of degenerate and decadent civilisations, with the builders of this ancient empire at best in terminal decline or at worst, already extinct. Here was an evocative justification for France’s ‘mission civilisatrice’. The political impetus and the mechanisms by which the image of this ‘abandoned civilisation’ spread and why have been well documented (c.f. Falser, 2019). What has been less discussed is the uncanny feelings these temples provoked, encounters which shaped scholars’ relationships to the temples and the region’s cultural histories. I argue that this uncanny experience contributed to a scholarly focus on giving a single identity to the Bayon faces.

To believe you are discovering is to believe you are facing an unknown. In colonial accounts, we find the desire to unmask and master these temples as well as to paradoxically maintain the mystery and that tingle of trepidation. This desire is especially evident in the materials on the Bayon and in this essay I trace examples from European diary entries, travelogues, memoirs, photographs, and sketches from the French colonial occupation of Cambodia (1863-1953). Descriptions of thrilling obscuration and disorientation characterise these accounts of the Bayon. This is exemplified by recollections from Henri Parmentier, who worked on the Angkorian temples for fifty years, until his death in 1949,

Before our work on [the Bayon], it was an incomprehensible labyrinth, which was even dangerous, but it had the thrill of an extraordinary romanticism (1957, 51).

This quote from one of the foremost scholars on Angkor points to the sense of enveloping jungle preserving yet destroying this forgotten civilization,

Angkor was swallowed up by the green silence of the forest. Yet strangely enough it was to the temples themselves that the tallest trees and the most riotous festoons of creepers paid their last respects, as if even in the grave they preserved their fallen grandeur (Groslier, 1957, 196).

Literary and visual representations of the temples were an additional means by which colonial knowledge was produced, codified and shared in Europe. Reflecting on my own experiences, I argue that scholarly work on Angkor cannot be divorced from the emotive literary and visual accounts of Angkor. I suggest that the quest for knowledge - for ownership through knowledge production - was also tempered to some degree by the romantic fascination that these jungle- covered temples presented. On the one hand, archaeological study literally stripped back the monuments and dug into the earth. On the other hand, clearing the path of nature destroyed the appeal of the unknown and the untamed.

Pulling Back the Impenetrable Curtain

Although many others had travelled there before him, Henri Mouhot was a young French botanist whose travels in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand between 1858 and 1861 planted the evocative allure of Angkor in European minds through publications of his travel diaries. These were replete with sketches, which often included local figures, likely because they were very much part of the landscapes that he was documenting, as well as being a well-known technique to illustrate the scale of the monuments. Although contemporary human figures were routinely depicted at Angkor Wat, they were rarely included in drawings of other temples, possibly because it was not settled in the manner of Angkor Wat, which housed a Buddhist monastery in its complex.

But Mouhot’s lively sketches were notably absent in the 1863 publication of his journal in France. Instead, his account of Angkor was illustrated by etchings made by artists in Paris. These drawings provided a vivid picture of abandoned jungle covered temples but were largely devoid of human life. Penny Edwards argues that this erasure of the presence of local Cambodians – the ‘presence of the present’– situated the temples firmly in the past, which allowed a fixed meaning to be attributed to them and demonstrated that there were no human impediments to the French presence in Cambodia (2007, 20).

Mouhot not only included locals in his drawings but was also very much interested in the people who, to his eyes, had left no historical record aside from the ruined temples. Demonstrating his lack of knowledge over how Angkor had been remembered in the Cambodian context, he lamented the lack of historical immortality for the builders of Angkor. In one passage of his diary, written after his exploration of Angkor Thom, he wrote,

Sad fragility of human things! How many centuries and thousands of generations have passed away, of which history, probably, will never tell us anything: what riches and treasures of art will remain forever buried beneath these ruins; how many distinguished men – artists, sovereigns, and warriors – whose names were worthy of immortality, and now forgotten, laid to rest under the thick dust which covers these tombs! (1966, 97).

Mouhot’s journey was promptly followed by other Europeans, such as French colonial officer, Louis Delaporte, who made his first trip to Indochina between 1866 and 1868 as part of the French Mekong Expedition, investigating possible trade routes into China. Delaporte’s sketches provided a vivid picture of abandoned jungle covered temples which became the foundations for many of the visual representations of Angkor. Delaporte was also chiefly responsible for bringing some seventy statues from Angkor to France.

In the late-19th century, the faces of the Bayon were known to Europeans as ‘Prohm’, which is the Khmer appellation of the Hindu god Brahmā. Yet, their journals record another name that locals gave to the temple, ‘Prea sat ling poun’, which means ‘the pagoda/temple where one plays hide and seek’ (Garnier, 1996, 39). Such a designation is a particularly apt description of the faces, peering out from behind the jungle, which are captured in early photographs of the Bayon. The first photographs, taken by Scottish photographer John Thomson, capture the face towers floating out from the surrounding vegetation, framed by vines.

Thomson left England in 1862 to set up a photographic studio in Penang. In 1865, apparently inspired by Mouhot’s travel diaries, he travelled to Siam with the explicit aim of ‘penetrating’ the interior of Cambodia (White, 1985, 40). Although the coverage of the temples in these photographs is not always as dense as described in contemporaneous writing, it is certainly easy to appreciate the aesthetic awe provoked by these giant stony-still faces shrouded in lush vegetation. Thomson himself acknowledged that his aesthetic and compositional decisions were influenced by Ruskin (White, 1985, 40). These photographs capture the interplay between the verdant forest alive with the sounds and smells of life and the inanimate, lifeless faces which appear to belong to another time.

The Enchanting and Phantasmagorical Unknown

A tension emerges from these materials, between the desire to reveal, know and understand and the allure of the concealed, the unfamiliar, and the other-worldly. This is demonstrated in the recollections of Henri Marchal, from the École Française d’Etrême-Orient (EFEO), who cleared and excavated the Bayon and who was appointed Curator of Angkor in 1919. After his retirement he wrote:

I myself knew the Bayon when it was still submerged in inextricable thickets of [vines] and foliage. It was very impressive […], there was something enchanting and phantasmagorical about it; but the architecture was totally destroyed […] Worse still this cloak of greenery that seems so romantic and picturesque caused terrible disintegration and ruin.(quoted in Clémentin-Ojha, 2007, 88).

European scholarly work had begun in Cambodia in the late 1870s and, in 1901 the EFEO was established to rival similar research institutions founded by the British and the Dutch in their respective colonies. This consolidation of scholars demonstrated French institutional control over the history of Cambodia. The EFEO’s primary objectives were to provide France with knowledge of the peoples of the colonies, to study and conserve the monument, and to widen French scholarship on the orient. Despite these multiple aims, the focus of the EFEO in Cambodia was very much on antiquity, with far less attention given to post-Angkorian studies. This research shifted in the early 20th century from rescuing a ‘vanishing’ culture to recovery of the ‘original’, ‘authentic’ religious, cultural and architectural orientations of the temples.

In the Mekong Exploration Commission Report, French officer Francis Garnier described the ‘impenetrable curtain’ of vegetation which concealed many of the ruins (1996, 30). Thirty years later travel writer Pierre Loti recalled glimpsing the Bayon which appeared to him like a semi- obscured ‘jumble of rocks’ in the forest, where the fig tree was now the master of Angkor (1923, 77). In his novel Four Faces of Śiva. The Detective Story of a Vanished Race Robert J. Casey likens the obscuration by the forest to the opacity of Cambodian history:

The lost kingdom of the Khmers is still in the midst of the twilight that enveloped it when the builders departed long centuries ago. The haze is thinning a little. Strange gods, placid and smiling, are peering out of open spaces among the trees to welcome to inquisitive Pale Ones who have found their hiding-places. Little by little the story of the sons of Kambu is being pieced together from the pictures they carved and the inscriptions they left on the pillars of their temples (1929, 86).

In this passage the appearance of the stone faces hints at the potential historical discoveries lurking beneath the forest, awaiting explication by European arrivals. Clearing the tangle of vines and trees becomes a metaphor for knowledge production, as if clearing a passage through the debris allows for a comprehension of Khmer history. This idea is encapsulated in an engraving signed by Vierge, likely an artist in Paris who was inspired by Delaporte’s original sketches and descriptions. Dozens of Khmer men work to clear an enormous tree, while dozens more hack away the undergrowth, to reveal the foundations of a tower, whose disembodied faces float above the foliage. The jungle to the left surrounds the tower like a dark cloud, while to the right sunlight shimmers through the sparse branches, as if the move from left to right – dark to light – is a metaphor for the illumination of the foreboding temples, and the illumination of their mystery. The work of felling the tree is carried out under the supervision of a bearded colonial administrator, who casually leans against a column. His companion sits astride the roof of a damaged gallery, his white suit set against the blackness of the trees, open notebook in hand, gazing at the faces before him.

The processes of clearing the jungle, taking photographs and removing statuary from these sites can all be understood as key processes of knowledge acquisition. At the heart of this knowledge production is transporting – and attempting to translate – the wonder of these ‘undiscovered’ temples to wider European audiences, smoothing away Angkor’s unknowable, mysterious contours. At the same time, it appears that there was a desire to preserve and contain the unsettling, fantastical feeling provoked by the temples. The increasing numbers of tourists visiting the site from the 1920s onward were permitted to experience the fantasy of the colonialist explorer. Jean Commaille, the first curator of Angkor with responsibilities for the conservation and restoration of the temples, ordered jungle to be cleared from the principal temples, but decided to leave other temples, such as Ta Prohm (the ‘Tomb Raider’ temple) in a semi-ruinous state in order to better preserve the effect of abandonment.

All of a Sudden my Blood Curdled

The Bayon’s face towers provoked unique responses, in contrast to Angkor Wat and other temples. At the Bayon the colonialist scholarly desire to name and to know - to inscribe a chronological history of names and dates - came up against the haunting presence of the half- visible, bodiless, and nameless faces. Like the literal gateways of Angkor Thom which the faces also adorn, they represented a liminal space between two worlds: the known, familiar world which can be mapped and named, and the unknown world, whose precise contours are unfamiliar and indefinable.

In the written and visual materials, the human quality of the Bayon emerges, like a ghostly face from within the forest, yet the humanity presented is unfamiliar and uncanny. Delaporte describes the face towers as ‘human masks, distorted, seeming to wince; yet some have retained their primitive, smiling and placid expression’ (1880, 156). Pierre Loti’s account of his encounter with the Bayon captures the phenomenological embodied reaction to these faces:

I looked up at the tree-covered towers which dwarfed me, when all of a sudden my blood curdled as I saw an enormous smile looking down on me, and then another smile over on another wall, then three, then five, then ten, appearing from every direction. I was being observed from all sides...the “towers with four faces”! [...] they are of such superhuman proportions, these masks sculpted into the air, it takes a moment to understand them; they smile under their large flat noses and keep their eyelids half closed, with an indescribable outdated femininity; they look like old ladies mocking discreetly […] images that, for centuries, neither the slow work of the forest, nor the heavy, dissolving rains could remove their expression, the ironic warmth, even more disturbing than the rictus monsters of China (1923, 79-83).

This description presents a conflicted response to the faces, which are warm and passive, monstrous and threatening. This attitude towards the faces is visually presented in an elevation of the eastern façade of the Bayon which was carried out by an artist in France based upon Delaporte’s drawing. The rendering of the temple architecture is accurate, but the faces bear no resemblance to the actual faces at Angkor Thom. Instead, they have bulging, rounded eyes, Roman noses, bushy eyebrows which more closely resemble caricatures or European Medieval figures than Angkorian imagery.

The responses that encounters with the Bayon provoked suggest that the stony, unfamiliar faces peering from the vibrant jungle evoked in European visitors unsettling, uncanny sensations. In defining ‘uncanny’, Freud focused on the complexity of the German term “unheimlich” – literally “unhomely” – and its antonym, “heimlich”, meaning familiar or belonging to the home. Freud notes that the frightening aspect of the uncanny would come from a place of unfamiliarity, yet not everything unfamiliar is scary (1955, 220). Through study of etymology in a host of European languages, Freud points to overlap between the definition of “heimlich” and unheimlich. The former also means “concealed, kept from sight, withheld from other”, a meaning it shares with “unheimlich” (1955, 220-226). He notes that it is from the slippage between this double meaning of “heimlich” that the notion of the uncanny emerges: that which should have been concealed but nevertheless comes to light, or that which is familiar yet unhomely. Freud also noted that the uncanny is produced by the obliteration of the distinction between reality and the imagination, when that which was thought to only exist in fantasy is apprehended in reality (1955, 244-245).

Far from home, these faces would have been familiar to those Europeans, particularly those who saw them as smiling and welcoming. Yet at the same time, these faces were entirely unfamiliar and foreign for the European visitor. There is a sense in the literature of a paradoxical desire to make the faces familiar and to also preserve their ruined mystery. The literal act of clearing the forest exposed the very foundations of the faces, which had previously appeared to float like ghosts above the undergrowth and fallen masonry. I propose that this project of jungle clearance was not only one of archaeological discovery, but also a project to attempt to remove the unsettling, uncanny experience of these faces.

Despite the clearance of the vegetation and the reconstruction of much of the Bayon, the faces and their smiles are still routinely described as ‘mysterious’ almost one hundred years later. Here the etymology of mysterious intersects with the concealed aspects of the uncanny. “Mystery” has its etymological roots in things which are secret, with reference to secret religious rites. The Greek mysterion comes from mystes “one who has been initiated” and from myein, “to close the eyes”, implying that only those who had been initiated were able to know the secret rites and that they should keep those rites a secret. Freud describes the uncanny as being ‘robbed of one’s eyes’ (1955, 230). While the jungle might have obscured seeing the Bayon, its removal did not allow a clear vision of the temple.

This uncanny, mysterious response is an integral constituent of the Bayon. The visceral, emotive impact of these face towers needs to be acknowledged in order to think about our positioning as researchers; how does this slip into academic discourses? This is particularly pertinent to the Bayon, where the intrigue the face towers inspire is matched by the wealth of art historical scholarship devoted to arguing for a precise, singular identity of the face towers. Despite the well- established ambiguity of the iconography of the face towers, which is highly unusual in the Angkorian context, the project of working towards a singular identity of the faces has been part of an ongoing attempt to contain the limits of the face. At attempt, I argue, at removing the mystery and ‘taking back’ one’s eyes.

Bibliography

Casey, Robert J., Four Faces of Śiva. The Detective Story of a Vanished Race (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1929)

Clémentin-Ojha, Catherine, and Pierre-Yves Manguin, A Century in Asia. The History of the École Française d’Etrême-Orient 1898-2006 (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2007)

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Falser, Michael. Angkor Wat – A Transcultural History of Heritage, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2019.

Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 219–252

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Wolfarth, J., Faces of Cambodia: Buddhism(s), Portraiture, and Images of Kings, PhD Thesis, (University of Leeds, 2014)

About the author:

Joanna Wolfarth

Joanna Wolfarth is a cultural historian, writer, and lecturer. She received her PhD in Art History from the University of Leeds in 2015 and is currently Visiting Lecturer in Southeast Asian Arts at SOAS University of London and an Associate Lecturer at Sotheby’s Institute of Art. She has been published in History Today, Wellcome Stories, Udaya Journal of Khmer Studies, Southeast of Now and theTrans Asia Photography Review, and she also contributed a chapter to the Handbook on Contemporary Cambodia (Routledge, 2016). She is co-editor of Asia-Art-Activism and was a guest editor for SOUTHEAST OF NOW. Her first book, MILK: An Intimate History of Breastfeeding, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2023.