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HiN - Humboldt im Netz

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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

3. “[N]ational remembrances are insensibly effaced”: Tropical Threats to the European Subject

 

If vegetable profusion could obscure the presence of civilization in Central and South America, it also had the power to transform its character. In addition to attributing the culture and personality of indigenous South Americans to the influence of climate, Humboldt repeatedly implies that European colonists—even those who have only recently emigrated—are in danger of losing their distinctive culture if they remain in the tropics. Living in the presence of so much vegetation seems to mark colonists with a “wild and uncultivated” character “which belongs to nature, the primitive type of which has not been altered by art” (III.15–16), overwhelming even settlers with strong European traditions. In fact, cultural continuity seems only to be retained in parts of South America where the climate is temperate (II.290). Those colonists “settled in a zone, where the climate, the productions, the aspect of the sky, and the scenery of the landscape, differ altogether from those of Europe,” repeatedly fail to preserve familiar modes of life.

 

Even when these settlers make conscious efforts to retain familiar habits, they don’t succeed for long. For instance, Humboldt is particularly affected by abortive attempts to build community through acts of naming:

 

“The colonist vainly bestows on mountains, rivers, and vallies [sic], those names, which call to his remembrance the sites of the mother country; these names soon lose their attraction, and have no meaning with the generations that succeed. Under the influence of an exotic nature, habits are generated, that are adapted to new wants; national remembrances are insensibly effaced; and those that remain, like phantoms of the imagination, have neither ‘a local habitation, nor a name.’” (II.287)

 

For subsequent generations of settlers, place names fail to index European experiences and attitudes; rather, they serve only as a vague and melancholy reminder of loss. The anxiety registered in this passage about the health and sustainability of temperate cultures in tropical climates should be placed in the broader context of the discourse of “seasoning” and acclimatization that characterized European writing about the tropics in general and the Americas in particular. To name just one instance, Karen Ordahl Kupperman has documented long-running apprehension about the detrimental physical effects of hot climates—and the cultural price to be paid for acclimatizing—in the writings of English colonists in Virginia and the West Indies.[1]

 

For Humboldt, a series of encounters dramatize the power of tropical verdure to denationalize European settlers. While traveling on the Río Apure, for instance, the Prussian scientist encounters a man who claims recent Spanish heritage. Although the man has pretensions to culture, Humboldt suggests that he has lost all ability to think outside the moment, failing even to “[construct] an ajoupa of palm-leaves” to prepare for the inevitable tropical rains. Humboldt’s penchant for sarcasm shows through as he chides this man who presumes to “[call] his wife and his daughter, who were as naked as himself, donna Isabella, and donna Manuela” (IV.430). That night, as Humboldt had feared, a heavy rainstorm soaks the party. He records that as it “rained in torrents on our hammocks, and the instruments we had landed, don Ignacio congratulated us on our good fortune in not sleeping on the strand, but finding ourselves in his domain, among Whites and persons of rank” (IV.432). Clearly annoyed and bemused, Humboldt concludes that it is a “singular…spectacle, to find in that vast solitude a man, who believes himself of European race” but who “knows no other shelter than the shade of a tree” (IV.432–33). The account suggests that for Humboldt, even in circumstances where the idea of European heritage has been preserved, its constitutive characteristics seemed to have been lost.

 

Some of Humboldt’s criticism of South American colonial culture may certainly be attributed to a generally unsympathetic climate of opinion regarding Spain and Portugal: Kristine Jones has noted, for instance, the frequent appearance of anti-Papal “Black Legend” propaganda in many South American travel accounts during the period.[2] Yet Humboldt’s encounters with expatriates from northern Europe make it clear that Spanish colonists are not the only ones who become subject to an erasure of identity in the tropics. Language retention and loss figure prominently in these examples: for instance, near the towns of Caycara and Cabruta, Humboldt meets a Frenchman who had “forgotten his native language” (V.677). Later, Humboldt meets a fellow Prussian and is surprised to find that he has no interest in “the sight of a man who could talk to him of his country”; in fact, this man can neither remember how to speak German nor “explain himself clearly in Spanish.” Of the encounter, Humboldt drolly notes that “our conversation was not very animated” (VII.441).

 

To these portraits of stateless expatriates, we can add Humboldt’s own experiences as a European exposed to the torrid zone. Passages in Personal Narrative frequently note the power of the tropics to affect a traveler’s memory and state of mind. For instance, Humboldt writes that the “climate of the Indies ” made an impression “so great, so powerful…that after an abode of a few months we seemed to have lived there during a long succession of years” (III.354). This distortion of time is tied to the erasure of familiar memories in the face of excessive stimuli: tropical verdure, acting “upon our imagination by it’s [sic] mass, the contrast of it’s [sic] forms, and the glow of it’s [sic] colours,” has the power to “weaken antecedent impressions” in the mind of the traveler (III.355). Europe is easily forgotten and even a return to Paris or Berlin may not fully renationalize the traveler: Humboldt’s impressions left him with a melancholy longing for the tropics—and a “vague desire to revisit that spot” (III.255)—years after he had returned to Europe.[3]

 

The power of South American nature to efface or transform European identity extends beyond the individual to the larger communities of (mostly Spanish) expatriates and immigrants Humboldt encountered there. The Prussian traveler expresses the connection between plant geography and human civilizations with the following syllogism: “The forms of plants determine the physiognomy of nature; and this physiognomy influences the moral dispositions of nations” (V.52). In the tropics, nature’s “physiognomy” is defined by forms of sensory excess that place national coherence and continuity at risk. And yet, on this point Humboldt’s ideas about the effect of vegetation on civilization embed a paradox—a contradictory position that nevertheless accords with his tendency to both praise and fear tropical wildness more generally. On one hand, highly productive tropical environments allow the high population densities essential to the development of complex societies: civilizations can “[advance] only in proportion as society becomes more numerous, and it’s [sic] connections more intimate and multiplied” (III.15-16). Living in close proximity on small farms with high yields, inhabitants of the tropics should be able to develop the networks of trade and social relations on which a complex society can be built. On the other hand, the very fecundity that enables connectedness also seems to isolate communities and individuals by discouraging contact and travel. For example, in descriptions of settlements encountered between the “Cuesta of Caneyes and the Rio Guriental,” Humboldt stresses the dispersion of the population (III.13–14). For one thing, “dense forests and inundated lands” impede travel and civil association. However, Humboldt also feels that the easy subsistence available in these regions tends to remove those survival pressures that do so much to encourage trade, social organization, and the development of individual intellectual faculties in northern Europe.[4] So while South America appears capable of elaborating complex societies, Humboldt observes that “the force of vegetation, the heat of the climate, and the too lavish gifts of nature, have [in fact] opposed…the progress of human civilization” (V.601).

 

Thus, Personal Narrative encodes a fundamental tension between the advantages presented by thriving, productive plant life and the challenges this fecundity can pose for European modes of life. These competing impulses come into sharp focus when Humboldt describes what is, for him, one of the most compelling South American plants: the milk tree or palo de vaca. When pierced, this tree pours forth “a sweet and nourishing milk”; Humboldt thus yokes tropical vegetation with maternal fecundity: the “impressions we have received in our earliest infancy” are of “that nourishing juice, which the breast of the mother contains” (IV.217). Although little else has “so powerfully affected [Humboldt’s] imagination as the aspect of the cow-tree” (IV.217), he follows his praise for the palo de vaca with an enumeration of the psychic dangers posed by the plant:

 

“If the palo de vaca display to us the immense fecundity and the bounty of nature under the torrid zone, it reminds us also of the numerous causes, which favour in those fine climates the careless indolence of man….In the midst of this lavish vegetation, so varied in it’s [sic] productions, it requires very powerful motives, to excite men to labour, to awaken him from his lethargy, and unfold his intellectual faculties.” (IV.225–26)

 

In Humboldt’s view, “immense fecundity” has the power to disrupt a teleological progression towards civilization and economic development. In keeping with Humboldt’s maternal trope, strikingly productive plants like the palo de vaca almost miraculously feed the population even as they infantilize it by rendering exertion and cultural “progress” unnecessary. According to Personal Narrative, tropical excess can even reverse the process of cultural progression in places where it has already begun. As an example, Humboldt cites the Chaymas of New Andalusia, whose current scattered and feeble state he considers to be “perhaps less owing to a primitive absence of all kind of civilization, than to the effects of a long degradation.” At some point in their history, the Chaymas may have migrated away from the more temperate regions of the continent—Humboldt believed that, originally, South American “natives were collected into large societies only on the ridge of the Cordilleras.” Migration from the temperate zone to the burning plains, “covered with forests, and intersected by rivers,” is figured as a descent into isolation and fragmentation. Humboldt writes that tropical tribes like the Chaymas appear to have been “scattered like the remains of a vast shipwreck” (III.208–9).

 

But it is in relation to recent attempts at European settlement that the torrid zone threatens its most forceful—and worrisome—disruptions. Humboldt’s Personal Narrative suggests that, like the Prussian who could speak neither German nor Spanish, European colonists quickly lose their way between two worlds. Comparing South American settlements unfavorably to Greek and Phonecian colonies in antiquity, Humboldt suggests that these ancient settlers managed to combine the old and the new so as to create a vibrant “intellectual culture” that even “excited the envy of the mother countries” (II.292). This is not the case in the New World, where European colonists fail to forge a unique and superior alloy; instead, they forget what is European and fail to embrace what is American, foolishly “[disdaining] whatever relates to the conquered people.” Humboldt describes the stateless and cultureless colonist in this way:

 

“Placed between the remembrances of the mother country, and those of the country where he first drew his breath, he considers both with equal indifference; and in a climate where the equality of seasons renders the succession of years almost imperceptible, he abandons himself to the enjoyments of the present moments, and scarcely casts back a look on the times that are past.” (II.291-292)

 

National disidentification brings with it temporal dislocation and stasis, effectively removing tropical colonies from the teleological regime of progress that would dominate nineteenth-century views of history.

 

Humboldt’s report on the psychic state of South and Central American colonials couldn’t have been comforting to anyone planning a venture in the tropics. Indeed, such a potentially pessimistic view of tropical settlement introduces a tension into any coherent colonial policy, since progress itself—for the colonizing nation, for the settler, and even for the colony’s land and its people—was often the justification for imperial and mercantile enterprises. Because Personal Narrative was so well received in Britain (and was influential for so long), it is a key text for understanding the complex and often contradictory ideological tangle that came to underlie nineteenth-century colonialism. The question of how foreign climates might affect European expatriates would only grow in importance as the volume of settlers moving from temperate metropole to tropical periphery increased. Recent scholarship has demonstrated, for instance, the importance of the idea of “acclimatization” for Humboldt’s own students[5] and in the nineteenth-century discourse of colonial development more broadly.[6] Travel narratives like Personal Narrative were often the primary source of information about colonial spaces. Therefore, ideas about living and working in the tropics had as much to do with discourse about climate as it was received in European capitals as it did with the physical actualities of weather, disease, or climate-specific farming styles. Scientific travel narratives like Humboldt’s, then, must be considered as textual interventions in a broader nineteenth-century discourse of geographic determinism and acclimatization. With this in mind, I turn to an analysis of Personal Narrative that considers the work as an aesthetic and textual production: Humboldt had much to say about the effect tropical excess had on his aesthetic response to the tropics, on the process of composition, and on the relation of his book to other texts in the genre of travel narrative.



[1] Karen Ordahl Kupperman: Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience. In: The William and Mary Quarterly (April 1984), 41.2: 213–40.

 

[2] While Humboldt was not always kind in his judgments about Spanish rule, neither does he seem interested in the Black Legend practice of simply “[ascribing] all evils of the colonial order to an idea of a pernicious Spanish national character.” Kristine L. Jones: Nineteenth-Century British Travel Accounts of Argentina. In: Ethnohistory (1986), 33.2: 195–211, pp. 197.

 

[3] Of course, Aimé Bonpland’s eventual return to South America is a significant subtext in such a discussion of Humboldt’s statements about the pull of the torrid zone.

 

[4] Humboldt states: “Under so mild and uniform a climate, the only urgent want of man is that of food….and we may easily conceive, why in the midst of abundance, beneath the shade of the plantain and breadfruit tree, the intellectual faculties unfold themselves less rapidly than under a rigorous sky, in the region of corn, where our race is in a perpetual struggle with the elements” (III.15-6).

 

[5] Engelhard Weigl: Acclimatization. The Schomburgk brothers in South Australia. In: Alexander von Humboldt im Netz. International Review for Humboldtian Studies (2003), IV.7: no pagination. http://www.hin-online.de/, accessed February 10, 2004.

Go to article | Engelhard Weigl in HiN 7

 

[6] Warwick Anderson: Climates of Opinion: Acclimatization in Nineteenth-Century France and England. In: Victorian Studies (Winter 1992), 35.2: 135–57.

 

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