Euphoria

Fen is Nell’s Australian husband who grew up on a remote farm in Queensland. He is the only anthropologist to have researched the ruthless Dobu tribe but is not as famous as his wife. Physically, Fen is black-haired and “a broad strapping fellow” (83) who becomes leaner and gaunter on the trail. Fen’s approach to anthropology is more “ontological” than academic, as he seeks less to study the tribe and more to “live without shoes and eat from his hands and fart in public” (106). The thought of writing a book about his time with the tribe is painfully laborious to Fen. He seeks reward for his efforts by searching for a sacred object that can be monetized. In the hunt for this object, Fen selfishly turns his back on the loyalty offered to him by the natives. Rightly, they call him a “bad man” (245) when he sacrifices Xambun’s life in pursuit of the flute.

Fen has a dark side. He is comfortable with “the savageness beneath the veneer of society” (138) that he finds within the violent tribes as well as Western civilization. This dark side finds expression in his sexual abuse of his sister and his sabotage of Nell’s body and her work. His aggression masks his insecurity about playing second fiddle to Nell in the field of anthropology and his erratic modes of sexual arousal, which sometimes result in impotence. In Chapter 1, when he announces that it is “time to procreate,” it is “anger” (11) that stiffens his penis and not his attraction to Nell. When Fen finally impregnates Nell, his violence has taken such a toll on her that she is unfaithful to him with Andrew. Her stressed body hemorrhages to death at sea.

Instead of being interested in his wife, Fen is aroused by notions of strong masculinity. This is shown in his attraction to the tribesmen, with whom he experiences solidarity, and in his affection for Bankson, whom he kisses on the lips.

In Euphoria, Fen’s brand of aggressive, possessive masculinity, which is on the Grid’s Northern temperament scale, is shown to be deeply harmful to life and society. Indeed, Fen’s temperament is the most closely linked to colonialism, the patriarchy, and even Nazism. Fen’s vanishing at the end of the novel is symbolic of the fact that those with the Northern temperament cannot survive when their personalities are not balanced by mitigating characteristics.

Andrew Bankson is an English anthropologist, born into a family of three-generation scientists. Nells views him as “[q]uite possibly taller than the tree” (13). With one of his brothers killed in war and the other committing suicide, Andrew is the only surviving sibling. He is lonely, traumatized by his brothers’ deaths, and on the brink of suicide himself when he meets Nell and Fen. While his mother looks down on anthropology as a second-rate science, Andrew is excited by its possibilities and gifted in the discipline due to his rare insight into its “limitations” (34). He understands that there is much that will remain unknown when one studies a culture so vastly different from one’s own. Of the three anthropologists, he is the one who is most aware of how an anthropologist’s temperament and inclinations influence how one approaches case studies. He is also devastated when the Grid method falls into the hands of the Nazis, who use it in support of their “racial hygiene program” (253).

Andrew is sensitive and in great need of affection and attention by the time he meets Nell and Fen. He is attracted to them both but finds a special affinity with Nell, whom he connects and falls in love with on every level. Rather than immediately setting out to conquer Nell, Andrew hesitates to make a move. He waits for her to initiate sexual contact. Even in this, he takes her direction in how to touch her, conscious that “a woman’s pleasure” was “a mystery, the slightest wisp of a thing you were meant to find” (219), before making love to her voraciously. However, Andrew’s hesitancy means that he cannot protect Nell from the man who breaks her, and he is remorseful for the rest of his life.

Xambun is the owner of the temporary house Nell and Fen stay in. He is described as “a big man, a tall man, a wise man, a fast runner, a good swimmer, an excellent hunter” (80). Although Xambun has been “lured away by blackbirders to work in a mine” (80), he is deeply loved by his tribe, especially his mother Malun, and they all wish to know where he has gone. Nell knows that the gold mine conditions are harsh and that Xambun may have been tricked into indentured servitude. When Xambun returns to the tribe by an unknown means—perhaps he ran away—he appears to have “long deep scars across his bare back, fresher and far cruder than his initiation scarring, lashings without design” (154). He body has “grown fleshy and pear-shaped from the rice and bully beef they fed mine workers” (158), he wears the green trousers of his miner’s uniform, and he addresses Nell in English. Although Xambun’s return is wildly celebrated by the tribespeople, he withdraws from the ceremony, and Nell finds him alone with a cigarette. His solitude is contrary to conventional tribe wisdom, which teaches that “alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies” (158). However, Xambun is traumatized and silent, disorientated by his return. His fellow tribesmen think his soul has separated from his body and that he must leave to find it again.

Xambun is a figure of fantasy for both Nell and Fen, who pin their colonial anthropologist’s dreams on him. Nell can imagine “writing a whole book on him alone” (159), profiting from his perspective on his own culture now that he has been removed from it. Fen uses Xambun more ruthlessly in his quest to capture the flute and gets him killed in the process. All three anthropologists are remorseful that they have gotten one of their subjects killed, but King’s text makes it clear that in the eyes of the law, Xambun’s life is not as valuable as their own. They will face “no recrimination” (230) for his death.

Andrew’s unnamed mother is the benefactor who enables his anthropological research. Physically, Andrew’s mother is an old woman with “a slant of white hair” (253). However, for the greater part of the novel, her presence is felt through “tough, no-nonsense letters, threats of disinheritance” and disapproval over Andrew’s choice of anthropology over “hard science” (253), as per the family tradition. Bereaved by the loss of her husband and the traumatic deaths of her two eldest sons, Andrew’s mother changes from the “soft and sweet” woman who does not want Andrew to grow up to someone “both needy and despotic” (27). She wields her financial power to terrorize him into obedience. His letters to her are full of false professions that his work “was moving swiftly in the right direction” (81) and that he will soon eagerly return to see her. In the end, Andrew’s mother gets her son back, as he lives with her when he is older.

Author of The Arc of Culture, a book which influenced the Grid system, in addition to Andrew’s book on the Kiona, Helen Benjamin is Nell’s friend and one-time lover. Helen is the graduate student of Boas, the man Nell studied anthropology under. Although Helen is married, her feelings for Nell cause her to leave her husband and a comfortable life in White Plains. Helen gives Andrew Nell’s notebooks from Lake Tam, though she keeps the rest of the collection for herself.

Nell is still haunted by her love triangle with Helen and Fen. She feels “still stuck there, going back & forth between the two hotels, trying to split [her]self in half” (94). While Helen leaves her husband Stanley for Nell, Fen approaches Nell, “not giving [her] the time he promised [her] […] leaving no doubt, no room for explanation” (94). Subsequently, Helen wrote Nell “angry letters accusing” (193) her of abandonment. Fen destroys the two women’s personal relationship, though their professional one continues. This earlier love triangle prefigures the one in the novel’s main narrative, between Andrew, Fen, and Nell. Helen is an example of the kind of anthropologist Nell could have become, had she survived. Both women are examples of how anthropology, a relatively young science, makes space for the contributions of women.

Malun is Xambun’s mother. She immediately befriends Nell, offering her coconut cups, cooking pots, and food. With her “head shaved” in the manner customary to Tam women, “she speaks several local languages” and a bit of “pidgin” (77). The two communicate with arm gestures and laughter. Malun misses her son and greatly anticipates his return with “love & fear in her eyes” (80). A wise woman, Malun presides over childbirths and invites Nell to the minyana ceremony where the women pleasure each other. Her fondness for Nell lasts until the end. However, she is traumatized by Xambun’s loss, her face a mask of sadness with “tears that cut dark lines through the dry mud” (245). Malun is a symbol of maternal and tribal endurance in the face of cultural exploitation by a white anthropologist.