an academic columbian exchange: literature and history marvelous

An Academic Columbian Exchange: Literature and HistoryMarvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World by Stephen GreenblattReview by: Alden T. Vaughan and Virginia Mason VaughanThe William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 362-372Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2947278 .

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An Academic Columbian Exchange: Literature and History

Marvelous Possessions. The Wonder of the New World. By STEPHEN GREEN- BLATT. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, I99I. Pp. XiV, 202.

$24.95.)

"The New World," Representations, Number 33 (Winter 199I), I-226. (Journals Department, University of California Press, 2I20 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, Calif. 94720. $24.00 per year.)

The Quincentennial of i492 has heightened public awareness of the profound interhemispheric exchange of people, plants, animals, and mi- cro-organisms in the aftermath of Columbus's voyage to America. The anniversary is also engendering an exchange in the academic world: the transfer of concepts, perspectives, and methodologies from one discipline to another. Historians and literary scholars, in their rage to create intellectual order out of the confusing mass of information now available about Columbus's presumptive discovery and the subsequent confrontation of New and Old World cultures, are discovering the brave new worlds of each others' disciplines. Until now the exchange has been largely mono- directional: literary scholars avidly mined historical texts and borrowed historical contexts. The recent work of several historians indicates that the exchange may become reciprocal.

The story of the transfer of ideas and methodologies between disciplines begins with Stephen Greenblatt, the Class of I932 Professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. Greenblatt received his training at Yale in traditional formalist criticism-the analysis of a literary text in terms of its inherent properties without regard to social or historical context.1 As his career progressed, Greenblatt rebelled against formalist restraints to found the new historicist school of criticism, originally concerned with the English Renaissance but now applied to many literary periods, including early American. Shaped by the thoughts of Marxist critic Raymond Williams and philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, Greenblatt's new historicism (he prefers to call it "cultural poetics") examines texts in relation to their broad historical milieux, especially to selected historical/literary analogues.

What distinguishes this approach is its emphasis on a text's multivalence and its dynamic relation to the social, political, and economic pressures that flow in and around it; the approach engages a variety of disciplinary

1 Greenblatt describes his intellectual development in the introduction to Learn- ing to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, I990), I-I5.



REVIEWS OF BOOKS 363

perspectives to illuminate a text's full range of literal and metaphoric meanings. A text, for Greenblatt, is a product of disparate discourses; it represents "a subtle, elusive set of exchanges, a network of trades and trade-offs, a jostling of competing representations, a negotiation between joint stock-companies."2 Whereas traditional literary historians outlined a monolithic world picture as a backdrop to literature, new historicists insist that a text is part of the historical process. Instead of privileging the literary work above its historical framework, or vice versa, they try to break down barriers between disciplines. In the words of one commen- tator, "they refuse to apportion the discussion of character, language, and theme to literary scholars, of primitive customs to anthropologists, of demographic patterns to social historians."3 Thus a typical Greenblatt essay ranges from historical anecdote, to painting or statuary, to literary text, and back again. The approach is always eclectic, sometimes ambiguous, and often elusive.4 It is also provocative and heuristic.

New historicists have been particularly fascinated by the literature of exploration published in England during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. Greenblatt's dissertation and first book were on Sir Walter Ralegh, who fashioned as did no other English Renaissance figure a dramatic series of careers and a wide range of literary materials.5 More recently, Greenblatt and others have turned their attention to the travel and exploration accounts by Columbus, Bartolom6 de Las Casas, Richard Eden, George Best, and others (including Ralegh) who occupy a no-man's- land between the traditional territories of historical and literary discourse. In his latest book, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Greenblatt explains why the tools of literary analysis are particularly appropriate for narratives of discovery:

[T]he European encounter with the New World, with its radical displacement of routines, brought close to the surface of non-literary texts imaginative operations that are normally buried deep below their surface (unlike works of literature where these operations are prominently displayed). Consequently, it may be possible to use some of the concerns of literary criticism to illuminate texts written with anything but literary ambitions and actions performed with any-

2Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, Calif., I988), 7.

3 H. Aram Veeser, "Introduction" in The New Historicism. ed. Veeser (New York, i989), ix-xvi, quotation on xv.

4Although widely and highly praised, Greenblatt's work also has been criticized from several perspectives. See, for example, Carolyn Porter, "Are We Being Historical Yet?" in David Carroll, ed., The States of "Theory": History, Art, and Critical Discourse (New York, I990), 27-62, and Garry Wills, "Goodbye, Colum- bus," New York Review of Books. XXXVIII, No. I9 (Nov. 2I, I99I), I2, I4-i 8, esp. I5-I7.

5 Greenblatt, Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, Conn., I973).



364 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

thing but theatrical intentions-texts and actions that register not the pleasures of the fictive but the compelling powers of the real.6

Though literary scholars are trained, in Greenblatt's words, to study "the imagination at play," their expertise in rhetorical analysis equips them also to analyze "the imagination at work."7 Historians, by contrast, are rarely concerned with issues such as an author's choice of tropes, authorial self-fashioning, or the wide array of possible audience responses to a text.

Historians have frequently used travel narratives and diaries as primary sources. Several generations of professional and amateur historians have culled such accounts for factual information about the exploration and early European settlement of the Americas and about early postcontact Amerindian culture. Even when historians have doubted the accuracy of such texts, they have generally treated them as static documents-perhaps true, perhaps false, but in either case expressing their authors' fixed opinions. In the hands of new historicists, these same texts are exception- ally flexible: shaped by the cultural values and prejudices of sixteenth- century minds, mirroring their authors' complex assumptions; motivated by their authors' often devious and sometimes subconscious intentions; and laden with rhetorical paraphernalia that serve the authors' strategic purposes. Despite the different perspectives of the two humanistic disciplines, discovery texts can be an appropriate meeting ground for the historian and the literary scholar.

In the introduction to Marvelous Possessions Greenblatt explains his fascination with travel narratives and argues that the explorers were equally fascinated with the "marvelous" people, places, and events they encountered. The link, he asserts, is wonder, the "quintessential human responses to what De[s]cartes calls a 'first encounter,' . . . an instinctive recognition of difference, the sign of a heightened attention."8 After staking this claim to the significance of discovery literature, Greenblatt discusses Mandeville's Travels, the late medieval text that influenced Co- lumbus in his search for the riches of the East. This fictitious account- plagiarized from a variety of medieval lore-created, Greenblatt suggests, "a sense of estrangement": the price for Mandeville's relative tolerance for the alien customs he described was "never again feeling quite at home anywhere."9

Mandeville did not seek to take possession of the lands he visited; Columbus did. Greenblatt examines the language of Columbus's journals through rhetorical analysis and speech act theory. When Columbus first landed, Greenblatt notes, he performed a ceremony of possession, not for the natives he met but for the audience back home. The set of linguistic

6Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, I99I), 23.

7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 20. 9 Ibid., 48-49. Wills chides Greenblatt for selecting Mandeville's book over

other, more representative Renaissance texts in "Goodbye, Columbus," i8.




acts-declaring, witnessing, recording-constituted a ritual of Christian imperialism, and Columbus's ceremonial language moved "from legal ritual though the experience of the marvelous to the mystical understanding and appropriative power of naming."10 Thus for new historicists, language was a potent weapon in the explorers' arsenal, more powerful perhaps than the superior technology they wielded.1"

Greenblatt considers the explorers' abilities as semioticians: how they interpreted the signs they saw and how they manipulated the signs they made. How, for example, did Martin Frobisher interpret the motions made to him by the Eskimo he captured in his search for the Northwest Passage? Greenblatt contends that "European contact with the New World natives is continually mediated by representations; indeed, contact itself, at least where it does not consist entirely of acts of wounding and killing, is very often contact between representatives bearing representations." 12 These representations are themselves texts, subject to interpretation, which in turn is grounded on linguistic assumptions. When Euro- pean explorers saw a parcel of land or one native, for example, they used the rhetorical device synecdoche, imagining the whole on the basis of the part. After they returned to Europe, they wrote prolifically of their experiences, again using particular rhetorical strategies. Those who sought to establish their credibility used simple language for, having seen the truth, they had no need to embellish it. Others, who had not actually traveled to the New World, sought the semblance of veracity through hyperbole and verbal flourishes.

Greenblatt's final chapter highlights the two possibilities open to the explorers after their encounters with the Other: they could recognize the Other's sameness to themselves and therefore the ease of assimilation, or they could pass through identification into estrangement, making the Other an alien who could easily be subdued or destroyed.13 In either case, language is the mediator.

Language is also the key to Prospero's control over the native Caliban in Shakespeare's The Tempest (i6i I). Prospero's language, not Caliban's, is the language on the island; Prospero and Miranda, not Caliban, name the people, places, and things. Caliban's "The red plague rid you / For learning me your language" embodies his frustration at linguistic imperialism. The Tempest reverberates throughout with political and territorial aggression at the very moment of England's first major venture in overseas colonialism. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that a play by the foremost dramatist of

10 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. 83. 11 Greenblatt first articulated the centrality of language to colonialism in "Learn-

ing to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century," in Fredi Chiappelli et al., eds., First Images of America: The Impact of the New World on the Old. 2 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, I976), II, 56I-580.

12 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions. i i 9. 13 The concept of "self" versus "other" was first articulated in Tzvetan Todorov,

La Conqueite de l'Amirique (Paris, i982), published in English as The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. trans. Richard Howard (New York, i 984), 3-5, I85-20I.




the English Renaissance should become the locus of complex negotiations between literature and history.

Although the play is a fictional creation, historian and litterateur alike commonly identify Prospero as a prototype of the colonist and associate Caliban with the natives of the New World.14 For Greenblatt, The Tempest illustrates the Old World's "fundamental inability to sustain the simulta- neous perception of likeness and difference." Europeans who encountered Amerindians for the first time necessarily superimposed medieval images of the bestial wild man onto peoples who seemed to them wholly unciv- ilized and possibly not human. "The Tempest," argues Greenblatt, "exper- iments with an extreme version of this problem, placing Caliban at the outer limits of difference only to insist upon a mysterious measure of resemblance. "15

Greenblatt is the most prominent of a growing band of literary scholars who view The Tempest in this light. Peter Hulme, for example, moves from Shakespeare's play to other accounts of the New World in Colonial Encounters:

Caliban's struggle against Prospero in The Tempest is one moment of a larger discursive conflict in which a Mediterranean discourse is constantly stretched by the novelty of an Atlantic world. Time and again these Caribbean texts are set against or have introduced into them the terms of reference of a classical or Biblical text, and time and again those Mediterranean reference points are rejected or turned back against themselves.16

Hulme, who teaches literature at the University of Essex, proposes a radical history that critiques existing one-dimensional historical accounts of the discovery, using post-structuralist literary analysis to expose the contradictions and multiple meanings latent in European narratives. He applies this new methodology to Columbus's Journal, Shakespeare's The Tempest, John Smith's True Relation of Such Occurrences ... of Noate as Hath Hapned in Virginia (i 6o8), and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (I 7I9).

Eric Cheyfitz, professor of English at Southern Methodist University, similarly analyzes contemporary descriptions of Amerindian culture in terms of translation, showing how Anglo-American discussions of the New World used language to impose their culture on indigenous peoples. His study ranges from, among other European and American texts, Co- lumbus's Journal to The Tempest to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes.17 Cheyfitz proposes that The Tempest, the central subject in his

14 For a discussion of American historians' uses and misuses of The Tempest see Alden T. Vaughan, "Shakespeare's Indian: The Americanization of Caliban," Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXIX (I988), 137-153, esp. 149-15 I.

15 Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 3 i. 16Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, I492-I797

(London, i986), 3. 17 Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The




analysis, is not a play about individual characters; rather, it "articulates a complex of masculine attitudes [the wish to rape the female land, for instance] toward the British settlement of the New World," attitudes that Cheyfitz finds disturbingly persistent in American history and literature.18

The works we have surveyed above are the products of literary scholars who would find it difficult, if not impossible, to examine essentially historical documents without practicing, to some extent, the historian's craft. Whether they have done it effectively or ineptly is not the issue; they have at least tried. What of the other half of the academic exchange? Have historians reciprocated the indebtedness and the opportunity?

Historians of early America, we suggest, have been noticeably reluctant to glean concepts, methods, and theories from literary criticism.19 Not that historians shun interdisciplinary efforts; their recent borrowings from anthropology, sociology, psychology, epidemiology, ecology, and demog- raphy are abundant and effective.20 Perhaps historians have never been so eager to learn from their fellow academics as in the past two decades. But, as our list of disciplines suggests, historians have turned more to the social sciences than the humanities-to fields that enrich the no-longer new social history with unconventional kinds of evidence or additional oppor- tunities for quantification of traditional historical sources rather than with new readings of old texts. Rare are acknowledgments that literature is one of the disciplines from which the historian can learn.21

Tempest to Tarzan (New York, 1991). See also Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest (Berkeley, Calif., I992).

18 Cheyfitz, Poetics of Imperialism. 7 I. 19 To say that literary scholars have borrowed freely from historians is not to say

that they have borrowed wisely. For a sharp critique see David Cressy, "Foucault, Stone, Shakespeare, and Social History," English Literary Renaissance. XXI (i 99 I), I 2 I-I 33. Cressy's remarks were first presented at the Shakespeare Association of America meeting in Philadelphia in April i990. The other historians on the panel-Susan Amussen and William Hunt-were similarly critical of many Ren- aissance specialists' misuse of modern historical writings. In a somewhat parallel vein, Shakespeare specialist Gail Kern Paster has recently reprimanded "many social historians" for ignoring the richness and relevance of literary scholarship at a time when students of Renaissance literature are not only borrowing but often practicing social history; Shakespeare Quarterly. XLII (Ii99), iii.

20 A few examples of early American historians who have made substantial use of one or more of these fields are Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of I492 (Westport, Conn., I972), John Put- nam Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York, i982), William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians. Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York, i983), Darret B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County. Virginia. I650-I750 (New York, i984), and James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York, I985).

21 "Modern history appears to detach itself from literature in order to associate with the social sciences and, more precisely, with their quantitative sectors," is the judgment of Linda Orr, "The Revenge of Literature: A History of History," New




Two broad exceptions to that generalization must be acknowledged. One is the semiautonomous domain of American studies, where literature and history rub shoulders to the mutual benefit of both.22 (Even there, we contend, the tendency is for litterateurs to use historical materials while historians borrow information and techniques from other fields-art history, film, and popular culture, for example.) The other exception is intellectual history, where, as David Harlan argues, literature has "returned to history, unfurling the circus silks of metaphor and allegory, misprision and aporia, trace and design, demanding that historians accept her mocking presence right at the heart of what they once insisted was their own autonomous and truly scientific discipline."23 That Harlan's position is not universally accepted, even by his fellow intellectual historians, is palpable in other essays in the "AHR Forum" that includes Harlan's lament. But evident throughout that whole issue of the American Historical Review is the influence-profound or superficial-of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and other literary theorists.24

More germane to early American history, the Winter i 99i number of the journal Representations demonstrates emphatically that some historians of the early contact period do look at key documents through new historicist or, more accurately, new literary eyes. Since its inauguration in i983, Representations has been a primary forum for new historicism, especially in the hands of young professors of English and American literature. The issue carries the thematic title "The New World." It is unique in this journal's career not only in its focus on the Columbian theme but also in the disciplinary variety of its contributors-litterateurs, historians, anthropologists, philosophers, and art historians. The intended

Literary History. XVIII (1986), I-22, quotation on i. Orr, an authority on Jules Michelet, is concerned in her essay with European historians; her generalization, we suggest, applies broadly but less precisely to early Americanists.

22 Among many recent analyses of American studies see George Lipsitz, "Lis- tening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory, and American Studies," American Quarterly, XLII (i990), 6I 5-636, and, from a very different perspective, Steven Watts, "The Idiocy of American Studies: Poststruc- turalism, Language, and Politics in the Age of Self-Fulfillment," ibid., XLIII (i 99 I), 625-660. A recent book that draws on several strands of American culture to illuminate a heretofore neglected side of the Columbian story is Claudia Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover, N. H., forthcoming).

23 Harlan, "Intellectual History and the, Return of Literature," American Histor- ical Review, XCIV (I989), 58I-609, quotation on 58i.

24 It could be argued that beginning with Perry Miller historians of early America have been profoundly influenced by literary scholars and that the line is almost invisible between professors of early American literature (Miller, Sacvan Bercovitch, Philip Gura, Kenneth Silverman, and Andrew Delbanco, to name a few) and professors of early American history (such as Stephen Foster, David Hall, Michael Hall, and Harry Stout). As the names suggest, this case can best be made for Puritan studies, which form a separate, unique subgenre. A good recent example of interdisciplinary perspective and methodology is historian John Can- up's Out of the Wilderness: The Emergence of an American Identity in Colonial New England (Middletown, Conn., i990).




audience, we presume, is equally wide ranging. Dedicated to the prolific and versatile French social scientist Michel de Certeau, who died in i986 and to whom Luce Giard, the executor of his estate, offers a tribute, this issue encapsulates much of the current interdisciplinary dialogue, focusing on the interaction of Renaissance writings and New World events.

A case in point is the concluding essay, a brief prospectus by de Certeau of the magnum opus on travel literature he never finished. His language epitomizes the multiple approaches to the academic Columbian exchange represented in this journal:

Travel narratives also constitute interdisciplinary laboratories in which categories of analysis, scientific concepts, and taxonomic sys- tems demarcating and classifying observations on social organization, linguistic and juridical formations, technologies, myths and legends, geography, a new experience of the body, as well as biological, zoological, and medical factors, can come into play and interact. These areas of exchange and of scientific confrontation (within the science of that time) are collections set in the form of narratives (in a period when collections of objects and curiosities, like the written collection of information and knowledge theorized, notably, by Fran- cis Bacon, came into being).25

Discovery accounts were written, in other words, in a world without discrete academic disciplines, when knowledge itself was more unified. To recover their meaning, modern scholars must perforce cross disciplinary boundaries and attempt new and varied methodologies.

Inga Clendinnen, reader in history at La Trobe University in Australia, nicely illustrates de Certeau's viewpoint. Her examination of Cort6s's letters after the conquest of Mexico as demonstrations of the "ordering impulse of the imagination" is more concerned with "the subtle, powerful, insidious human desire to craft a dramatically satisfying and coherent story out of fragmentary and ambiguous experience" than with the "inscription of events as they occurred."26 In the clash of Mexican and Spanish culture, she argues, Cort6s confronted conceptions of time, heroism, and military prowess that did not mesh with his own. He could not decipher the Mexicans' signifiers, and as a result he destroyed their culture in the process of comprehending it. Clendinnen elsewhere approaches the meeting of cultures from the natives' perspective: her book Aztecs: An Inter- pretation reconstructs central Mexican society and its signifiers on the eve of Cort6s's invasion, drawing not only on the earliest Spanish accounts but also on the surviving Indian codices.27

25 De Certeau, "Travel Narratives of the French to Brazil: Sixteenth to Eigh- teenth Centuries," Representations. No. 33 (I99I), 22I-226, quotation on 222.

26Clendinnen, "'Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty': Cortes and the Conquest of Mexico," ibid., 65-IOO, quotations on 67.

27 Clendinnen, Aztecs. An Interpretation (Cambridge and New York, i99 I).




Two other contributors to Representations are historians especially concerned with literary strategies and nuances. Anthony Pagden of Cam- bridge University applies rhetorical analysis to the works of Las Casas, whose plain style and insistence that he, almost alone, had witnessed key events were meant to create authorial truthfulness. Las Casas had some success, Pagden concludes, but also some failures, for "as Clifford Geertz has noted of the modern ethnographers' not dissimilar dilemma, 'To be a convincing "I" witness one must . . . first become a convincing "I,"' and Las Casas was never a wholly convincing 'I.' His polemical objectives were always too stridently in evidence."28

Sabine MacCormack of the University of Michigan puts Las Casas to a different use. Her "Demons, Imagination, and the Incas," which drama- tizes the wide gap between Andean religious cults and the Christian religion Spain tried to impose on the natives, assesses the contributions of Las Casas and many other European explicators of Inca culture. In true Representations multidisciplinary fashion, MacCormack illustrates native and European beliefs from contemporary paintings and drawings, reading visual signifiers in addition to verbal signs.29

Representations also includes two essays on Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (I 596) by literary scholars. Louis Montrose, a professor of English at the University of California, San Diego, argues that Western European explorers projected their views of gender onto the cultures they discov- ered. Drawing on feminist theory, especially Joan Wallach Scott's, Mon- trose implicates Ralegh through Ralegh's oft-quoted description of Guiana as "a countrey that hath yet her maydenhead" and his frequent use of gender-specific language that subtly undermined his ostensibly disinter- ested recital of Guiana's past and future. Though Ralegh wrote sympa- thetically of some of the native peoples he encountered, the overall effect of his relation was nevertheless to incite others "to conduct that is passionate and rapacious." Elizabethan gender ideology is reflected, Mon- trose suggests, in Ralegh's discussions of "textual spaces of the new found land; the heroic, fecund, and rapacious Amazons; the young, well-favored and naked maidens of Guiana; [and] the pure and dangerous, political and natural bodies of the Queen of England."30

Mary C. Fuller, professor of literature at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, dissects the rhetoric of, the same work to demonstrate Ra- legh's preoccupation with establishing credibility. To Fuller, The Discoverie is an assertion of Ralegh's continence in the aftermath of the Elizabeth Throckmorton scandal: "Deferring or withholding of sexual violence then becomes a figure for Ralegh's general relation to Guiana, his repeated turning away from the arms of his 'discovery': Guiana itself, Manoa, gold

28 Pagden, "lus et Factum. Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolom6 de Las Casas," Representations, No. 33 (1991), I47-I62, quotation on I 58.

29 MacCormack, "Demons, Imagination, and the Incas," ibid., I2I-I46. 30 Montrose, "The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery," ibid., I-4 I,

quotations on 34, 33.



REVIEWS OF BOOKS 37 I

mines, tombs rich with gold gold in general, whether mined, traded for, conquered, or stolen."931

Montrose and Fuller see Ralegh's Discoverie as a literary creation replete with rhetorical devices, figurative language, narrative structure, and authorial self-fashioning. David Damrosch, who teaches literature at Colum- bia University, devotes similar reasoning to non-English texts. In "The Aesthetics of Conquest: Aztec Poetry Before and After Cortez" he contends that the surviving lyrics must be read "bivalently, as if they were products both of I450-I 520 and I 52 I-I 57o-as, given the nature of the oral tradition, many of them probably were."32

In a similar vein, Rolena Adorno, professor of romance languages at Princeton University, treats the Naufragios (I 542) of Alvar Nifiez Cabeza de Vaca as a narration that "reproduces an emerging process of cultural adaptation and, consequently, physical survival."33 The narrative's control- ling theme, Adorno believes, is fear-Spanish fear of the Amerindian Other and native fear of European technology and disease.

Complementary to the English and Spanish perspectives on New World discovery is an essay by a French scholar. Frank Lestringant, professor of French literature at the University of Lille, reexamines Jean de Lery's Histoire du Bresil (I 578), showing how its view of the native population led to the works of Theodore de Bry and his sons (I592-i634) and Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (I 58o-I 588), eventually metamorphosing during the Enlightenment into the idea of the Noble Savage.34

The era of exploration and early culture contact is especially fertile for such interdisciplinary cooperation because the sources are sparse. Colum- bus's original diaries may one day be found, though the prospect is slim; other sources (material and visual as well as literary) from both sides of the cultural frontier may also come to light, but the likelihood, at this distant remove, is that finds will be few. The verbal sources, moreover, are international: a disparate assortment of Latin, Portuguese, French, En- glish, Dutch, and other European and, in a few instances, native American texts that demand close exegesis. Each word, in whatever language it was originally written and into which it was subsequently translated, is a seed of potential understanding and misunderstanding for us today as it was to the imperialist and the indigenous peoples of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. By deconstructing the surviving European records and examining their contradictions, literary scholars believe, too, that they

31 Fuller, "Ralegh's Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana," ibid., 42-64, quotations on 59.

32 Damrosch, "The Aesthetics of Conquest: Aztec Poetry Before and After Cortez," ibid., IOI-I20, quotations on io8.

33 Adorno, "The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios," ibid., i63-I99, quotations on i64-i65.

34 Lestringant, "The Philosopher's Breviary: Jean de LUry in the Enlightenment," ibid., 200-21II. See also the influential work of Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry's Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago, 198I; orig. pub. I977).




can detect the voices of Amerindians drowned out by the loud and often misleading cacophony of the European explorers. The process may be a convoluted and difficult method of "speaking with the dead," to use Greenblatt's phrase, but in the view of literature's new historicists and their historian allies, it is all that is left to US.35 Close readings are essential; there is scant opportunity for quantification. The text is (almost) every- thing.

Columbia University ALDEN T. VAUGHAN Clark University VIRGINIA MASON VAUGHAN

35Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiation. I, 20.

Columbus. By FELIPE FERNANDEz-ARMESTO. (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, I99I. Pp. XXViii, 2I8. $22.95.)

Columbus. The Great Adventure. His Life. His Times, and His Voyages. By PAOLO EMILIO TAVIANI. (New York: Orion Books, I99I. Pp. X, 273.

$20.00.)

If you can buy only one book on Christopher Columbus, as of late December i99i the volume of choice is Felipe Ferndndez-Armesto's. It contains the most carefully constructed and compelling biography to appear so far. This Columbus's ideas develop slowly and only take full form after I492; this Columbus cannot remain friends with close collab- orators; this Columbus late in life constructs a past and a persona for himself that do not fit the documentable facts as found in his own earlier writings. Paolo Emilio Taviani's popularized study (it has no notes and only a few titles in the bibliography), although not without scholarly virtues, presents the man in the terms that he himself constructed late in life and that most biographers since have passed along. That man experiences no real intellectual or emotional growth after some point in the I470S when he conceived the great plan and understood his role as Providence's agent for the christianization of the world.

The form of both accounts is the same: a narrative of the life of Columbus from childhood to death, with a brief afterword on the question of his historical role. These afterwards agree that Columbus is properly called a discoverer because his voyage established lines of communication that have continued, whereas the earlier Viking voyages had no similar long-term consequences.

Fernaindez-Armesto and Taviani agree as well that Columbus was above all an expert seaman who preferred experience to book learning and was happiest when engaged in exploration. Taviani claims that his expertise grew not only from considerable experience prior to I492 but also from Columbus's alleged extraordinary sense of smell. Fernaindez-Armesto speaks of his "uncanny intuitive skill in navigation" (p. I 9 I). Both authors note and dismiss many of the legends and dilettante theories that have



an academic columbian exchange: literature and history marvelous

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