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Jason H. Lindquist

“Under the influence of an exotic nature...national remembrances are insensibly effaced”: Threats to the European Subject in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent

1. Introduction

 

While traveling near the town of Anoch in Scotland’s Western Isles, Samuel Johnson described the plant life in the area in the following manner: “The appearance is that of matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.”[1] In the midst of this untended profusion, Johnson allows himself to experience a crisis of psychic overload: although he knows there is no real danger, the writer voluntarily entertains a series of “imaginations” that have as their focus the dissolution of the physical and mental self. For Johnson, the region around Anoch evokes the possibility of “want, and misery, and danger.”[2]

 

Samuel Johnson’s dark imaginative response to the vegetative overgrowth of the Western Isles may at first seem irrelevant to a study of Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1818–1827).[3] After all, Humboldt’s descriptions of South America’s highly fecund spaces are often positive. His enthusiasm for tropical profusion leads him, for instance, to revise upward Malthus’s pessimistic carrying capacity estimates for the “New Continent”; such appreciation also prompted him to pioneer new methods for measuring and cataloguing the productivity of the Americas and to call for political and economic development in the region.[4] At its most teleological, Personal Narrative sketches an optimistic—if distinctively European—future for South and Central America: Humboldt imagines a time when “populous cities enriched by commerce, and fertile fields cultivated by the hands of freemen, adorn those very spots, where, at the time of my travels, I found only impenetrable forests, and inundated lands” (I.li). Samuel Johnson, on the other hand, although he ventures no further than the geographic periphery of the British Isles, sees only “matter incapable of form or usefulness” heaping itself up around him at a frightful pace. In fact, when Johnson’s imaginations do turn to the “New Continent,” he becomes positively terrified, admitting to himself that Scottish “spots of wildness” cannot evoke anything like the terror encountered in the vast and threatening “deserts of America.”[5] Where Johnson sees want and lack in natural spaces peripheral to European centers of commerce, Humboldt mostly sees immense potential.

 

And yet, a study of Personal Narrative that stresses only “commerce, and fertile fields” would be incomplete. After all, the overwhelming power of “impenetrable forests and inundated lands” is just as crucial to the portrait Humboldt paints of tropical America. In a number of memorable passages, Personal Narrative foregrounds the capacity of vegetable excess to resist colonization, impede productive enterprise, and overwhelm European modes of psychic and social life. Thus, while he might never have characterized South American vegetation as “sullen” or “useless,” Humboldt’s teeming New World spaces do evoke a kind of Johnsonian anxiety. Like the Western Isles, but to an even greater degree, tropical nature threatens to degrade or fully overwhelm the coherence of the European subject. My analysis calls attention to passages in Personal Narrative that stress the dangers tropical fecundity posed to European identity and modes of civilization; I go on to explore Humboldt’s related worry that South American vegetable (and visual) overload will exert a destabilizing effect on his own aesthetic sensibility and on his ability to create a coherent textual representation of the New Continent. Finally, as my discussion of Samuel Johnson may serve to foreshadow, I sketch some of the most important ways that Humboldtian themes of tropical excess influenced nineteenth-century British cultural thought and literary practice. Investigating the instabilities experienced by the expatriates and colonists that populate Personal Narrative promises to draw out important tensions latent in Humboldt’s own treatment of tropical landscape and to illuminate significant epistemological shifts often precipitated by and worked out within travel narratives during the period. These transformations in the way the world outside Europe was viewed would, in turn, help lay the groundwork for both expressions of faith in and doubts about the colonial enterprise.



[1] Samuel Johnson and James Boswell: A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides . Ed. Peter Levi. New York: Penguin Putnam, 1984, pp. 24–27.

 

[2] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 24–27.

 

[3] I cite here Helen Maria Williams’s translation of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, During the Years 1799-1804, by Alexander De Humboldt, and Aimé Bonpland; With Maps, Plans, &c. Trans. Helen Maria Williams. 7 Vols. 1818–29. New York: AMS Press, 1966. For ease of reference, I cite Williams’s Personal Narrative parenthetically by volume and page. Although Humboldt approved of and was actively involved in Helen Maria Williams’s edition, later translators have argued that her version often varies, particularly in tone, from the French original. They argue that as a significant figure in British Romanticism, Williams brought a distinctive voice to the translation. For instance, Thomasina Ross deemed her own 1851 re-translation necessary because she felt that Williams’s version “abounds in foreign terms of expression”; Jason Wilson, who completed a new translation in 1995, finds that Williams “interpreted and exaggerated” Humboldt’s original French prose (which Wilson characterizes as “curiously flat, scientific, and modern”), particularly in passages where Humboldt waxes enthusiastic. For instance, in Williams’s translation, “wild nature” becomes “wild and stupendous nature,” “dark curtain of mountains” becomes “vast and gloomy curtain of mountains,” etc. See Jason Wilson: Introduction. In: Alexander von Humboldt: Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent. Trans. Jason Wilson. New York: Penguin Books, 1995: xxxv–lxiv, pp. lix­–lx. On Humboldt’s active involvement in Williams’s translation, see Kurt R. Biermann: Zur Vervollständigung des unvollendeten Berichts Alexander von Humboldts über seine amerikanische Forschungsreise. In: Alexander von Humboldt: Reise auf dem Rio Magdalena, durch die Anden und Mexico, Teil I: Texte. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986: 9–26, pp. 11–12.

 

[4] Humboldt’s innovation in gathering demographic and economic information can be seen most clearly in

his monographs on Mexico and Cuba. See, for instance, Alexander von Humboldt: Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain . Trans. John Black. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1811.

 

[5] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 24–27.

 

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