Dersu Uzala: SLI

"Hm! Like a baby. See nothing, savvy nothing. Live in town. Want to eat — go buy. Live alone in mountains — soon die."

Dersu Uzala (c. 1849 – 1908) was a Nanai (or, possibly Udeghe) trapper and hunter in the taiga of the Russian Far East. He worked as a guide for the officer and explorer Vladimir Arsenyev, who immortalized him in his 1923 book Dersu Uzala, which was later adapted in the 1975 Kurosawa film. The opening quote is Dersu chuckling at Arsenyev for failing to notice a broken branch on the trail. This unmalicious contempt for incompetence in the practical domain, the equation of seeing with understanding ("see nothing, savvy nothing"), and the unsentimental bottom line (in the world that actually exists, the man who can't read the forest dies) is quite SLI. The type judges people by their skills against physical reality, and finds the city-dweller wanting, out of a clear-eyed assessment of who would survive a week in the taiga.

Arsenyev's commentators often describe Dersu's weather-sense and tracking as "prophetic", "mystical", "an intuitive grasp of the land". But his gift is sensory prediction. He looks at a track "that would mean nothing to you and me" and reconstructs the animal's age, health, mood, and intent. He predicts the storm from "the slightest shift in the wind, the pattern of tree growth, the distant call of a bird." None of this is intuition in the sense of "seeing what is not here", or of a lowered barrier between conscious and subconscious. It is inference from physical detail, read off the world and run through practical experience. He is observing the present so completely that the near future becomes obvious. This is Si absorption in the states of the material environment, and the practical competence that flows from reading them correctly. To Dersu himself there is nothing mystical about it at all; the branch is just broken, and it means what it naturally means.

Dersu is portrayed by Arsenyev as the opposite of the accumulator. He takes what the moment requires and no more, his wants have adapted to exactly what the environment can supply. There's no asceticism in it, either, he isn't some sort of renouncer of material pleasures (which would actually be quite alien to the type), it's just the natural equilibrium of a man perfectly fitted to his surroundings. Maybe Dersu comes across as a touch more accepting and "declatimic" (especially in its anti-elitist anti-Qe manifestation) than the canonical Talanov-SLI, although I consider it to be a secondary dichotomy, anyway, and it's not like Dersu is described as being a collectivist, either. His Fe is low enough, and Te is high enough for a SEI typing to be not particularly plausible. And his self-preservation instinct is certainly quite high, not to mention that he does get annoyed at his companions' incompetence quite often.

The other most-quoted moment is when a cossack wants to shoot a seal for sport, and Dersu stops him: "Don't shoot. Cannot take it with us." This reflects both Dersu's ethical (his Fi is not the weakest function), non-possessive, and practical relationship to nature, and his dislike of actions that don't have a practical result: you cannot eat it, you cannot carry it, therefore killing it is pointless, and pointless destruction is the one thing his entire frame of life is organized against. It goes against the homeostasis of nature. His famous animism — the conviction that fire, water, wind, and animals are all "people" worthy of respect — is the same in its spirit. It's more of a working relationship of a man raised in Dersu's culture: everything in the world is a party you deal with, respect, and don't antagonize needlessly. The SLI's evolutionary strategy is simple peaceful-avoidance in a narrow ecological niche, and Dersu's approach to life fits it.

Arsenyev stresses Dersu's "solicitous attitude towards his fellow man," and it shows in deeds, never in declarations. A notable instance is one Kurosawa preserved from the book: Dersu, going away from an abandoned hut, carefully leaves behind a little food, some matches and a pinch of salt, for the unknown stranger who might need them. The act is practical compassion: someone might be cold and hungry here, and these few things might save them. This is the SLI's concrete and unsentimental way of caring, when he does consider it worth to do so.

The whole portrait is level without being demonstrative. He chuckles; he speaks "quietly"; his authority is "unobtrusive." There are no high passions or attempts to create a beautiful image. The Russian explorer, by contrast, is the one whose emotions become more transparent toward the end, while Dersu remains the steady center. Arsenyev called him a man with "a pure soul, who in his whole life did no harm to anyone," and mourned that civilization, which "will give birth to criminals," had murdered him for the rifle on his back.