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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

5. An “excess of complexity”: The Nineteenth-Century After-lives of Overload

 

In Personal Narrative, Humboldt implies that tropical profusion (in terms of information and sense impressions) makes it difficult to deploy Western descriptive modes in writing about that region. Although his dedication to a liberal, mercantilist economic system—and to the productive potential of Central and South America—remains clearly in place,[1] Humboldt’s recognition that tropical profusion has power to destabilize his text often threatens this rationalistic and progressive vision. Sensory overload precipitates moments of doubt that manifest themselves as uncertainty about the ability of the European subject to preserve identity and the capacity of the European writer to reconcile the generic conventions of travel narrative with the actuality of the tropics. Having explored these thematic concerns as they appear in Personal Narrative, I would like to discuss the nineteenth-century after-life of these anxieties, particularly as they played out in Britain. I argue that Humboldt’s ideas about geographical determinism and acclimatization—and his tendency to approach nature as both scientist and aesthetician—set the stage for important epistemological developments during and after Humboldt’s own lifetime. 

 

As studies in a number of disciplines have shown, the nineteenth century found Europeans confronting—with equal parts fascination and dread—an ever-increasing volume of information across a wide range of fields. From the increasing data flows returning from exploration and conquest, to the burgeoning size of European cities, to the growing complexity of industrial production processes and economic relations, thinkers in the nineteenth century faced what John Tyndall called an “excess of complexity.”[2] Susan Faye Cannon suggests that in the sciences, increased complexity was paired with a “fascination,” partly inspired by Humboldt, “with the beauty of accumulating more and more detailed information.”[3] Michel Foucault notes an analogous movement towards making more and more data visible, concluding that this tendency exerted its most profound effects in the increasingly sophisticated regimes of surveillance seen in the human sciences and the public sphere.[4] Scholarly attention to developments in nineteenth-century epistemology helps us better understand the aesthetic assumptions at work in attempts to collect, catalogue, and manage proliferating information and commodities during the century. Work in Victorian studies, for instance, has suggested that a diverse set of phenomena—from detective novels,[5] to discussions of Edison’s phonograph,[6] to late-century imperial discourse[7]—become loci for anxiety about uncontrolled proliferation, even as they provide occasions for representational innovation that promises to bring such excess back under control.

 

Furthermore, Victorian efforts to represent an “excess of complexity” in writing only seem to implicate such texts themselves in a dangerous spiral of proliferation. Christopher Herbert makes this case in relation to nineteenth-century ethnographic texts like Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Although Mayhew sets out to bring the “mind-boggling profusion and density of ethnographic detail” visible on the streets of London under control, the task quickly proves to be impossible. Yet like Humboldt’s attempts to write South America, Mayhew’s efforts to be comprehensive only lead him to generate more text; in Herbert’s view, Mayhew’s text just “become[s] more problematical and incoherent the more fully it elaborates itself.” It is this tendency of data-gathering practices to spiral out of control that gives “the text its gigantic power and at the same time, paradoxically, render[s] it next to unreadable.”[8] Like Humboldt, Mayhew tends to inscribe his own recognition of these dangers within the pages of the text itself, expressing a desire to be more “systematic” even while lamenting his inability to ever be truly comprehensive: “I am unable to generalize, not being acquainted with the particulars; for each day’s investigation brings me incidentally into contact with a means of living utterly unknown among the well-fed portions of society.”[9] Mayhew’s task is Sisyphean, since each attempt to describe opens a whole new field of particulars which demands to be recorded and reported. In a way, this proliferation of complex, localized systems calls to mind the fate of Humboldt’s scientific reputation during the second half of the nineteenth century—a period during which a host of highly specialized subdisciplines that were being practiced with increasing degrees of particularity rapidly made the Prussian’s efforts in those areas irrelevant or simply outdated.[10]

 

A similar “excess of complexity” could be found at the peripheries of Empire during the nineteenth century. In the years after the publication of Personal Narrative, missionaries in the Pacific attempted to describe and catalogue Polynesian culture. Although they set out with the explicit purpose of destroying the modes of life they were studying, the missionaries rapidly lost themselves in the complexities of “a project of richly detailed scientific ethnography.”[11] Missionary attempts to represent the complex pageantry of the Cava ceremony and the intricacies of Polynesian language led not to clarity, but to incomprehensible “masses of unrationalized empirical data.”[12] To frame the problem in terms that Samuel Johnson might have used, such a proliferation of sensory impressions made it increasingly difficult to separate sublime “aggregation” from mere “dispersion.”

 

The specific kind of overload generated by a proliferation of “spontaneous plants” also had an important nineteenth-century afterlife. For instance, after the Great Exhibition of 1851, in which an unprecedented collection of consumer goods was gathered for display,[13] the “Crystal Palace” was moved to the South London suburbs. In its new location, the exhibition’s collection of plants was greatly increased: this effort to bring the tropical luxuriance of the colonial world before the British public in a controlled and organized manner rapidly grew in popularity.[14] As Rebecca Preston has shown, this standing exhibition was “significant in rendering exotic gardening accessible to the public” during the rest of the century.[15] As one writer for the National Magazine noted in 1851, the exhibition inspired amateur gardeners to create their own “crystal palaces on a domestic scale.”[16] Such developments indicate that the British public did not just consume travel narratives from the tropics; they also wanted to participate in the project of managing the fecund vegetation that was so often a central topic of such narratives.

 

Yet just as the verdure of the tropics had power to overflow the bounds of the artfully created travel text, so too could British attempts to domesticate such vegetation present their own threat to European identity. Gardeners became aware, for instance, that foreign plants could disrupt the “Englishness” of the garden space. As Barbara Campbell would write in her book Garden of a Commuter’s Wife, while the “thrill of oriental suggestion that the lily and iris tribes always bring with them” was much appreciated, these bright and potent foreigners could also overwhelm a garden if not kept under control. “In an old-fashioned garden such as mine,” she writes, such an exotic accent “must be by suggestion only; for if it is allowed to dominate, it becomes incongruous, and would wholly denationalize the garden.” [17]

 

In a sense, the fears expressed in Humboldt’s Personal Narrative come full circle in this suburban gardener’s concern. If travelers and colonists needed to fear the loss of their distinctive European identity while traveling or settling in the tropics, by the end of the century, even “commuter’s wives” had to worry about the power of foreign plants to “denationalize” their spaces. That such a small thing as an iris might symbolically challenge notions of Britishness can perhaps explain the fictive power narratives of foreign invasion (as in fin de siècle horror novels[18]) or denationalization in tropical spaces (as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb Tide or Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) even at the end of the century. In many ways, these fictions are the literary offspring of textual encounters with the tropics such as Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, which suggested, much earlier in the century, that a wild, hyper-fecund, untameable “other” might pose a threat to European subjectivity. In fact, the relationship between Humboldt’s travel writing, which was a major influence on British impressions of South America for much of the first half of the century,[19] and the development of British fiction from Charles Kingsley (Westward Ho lifts many of its locations directly from Personal Narrative) to Joseph Conrad (whose interest in South American political and developmental issues can be seen in Nostromo) has yet to be fully investigated.



[1] Humboldt’s belief in the achievement of progress through economic development can be seen clearly late in Personal Narrative. Humboldt expresses hope for a future relationship between Europe and the Americas in terms that sound familiar even today: he anticipates that a “noble rivalship in civilization, and the arts of industry and commerce, far from impoverishing the ancient continent, which has been so often prognosticated, at the expense of the new, will augment the wants of the consumer, the mass of productive labor, and the activity of exchange.” (VI.116).

 

[2] Tyndall states that he was “struck dumb by an astonishment” when considering the “excess of complexity” evident when looking through the microscope. In: John Tyndall: Essays on the Use and Limits of the Imagination in Science. London: Longman, Green and Col, 1870, p. 41.

 

[3] Cannon, op. cit., pp. 225–26.

 

[4] In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that the turn of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic shift from an epistemic order based on the static classificatory grid (“in which, stripped of all commentary, of all enveloping language, creatures present themselves one beside another, their surfaces visible, grouped according to their common features, and thus already virtually analyzed”) to an episteme that attempted to account for internal as well as external “architecture.” In: Michel Foucault: The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994, p. 131, 231. See also Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books, 1995 [1977].

 

[5]Allan Pritchard argues that Charles Dickens responded to the complexity of the Victorian city by turning to the conventions of the Gothic novel. In Bleak House, published in 1852, the “confusing intricacy” of the Gothic labyrinth is represented “not so much by any single building as by the vast complex structure of the city as a whole.” In: Allan Pritchard: The Urban Gothic of Bleak House. In: Nineteenth Century Literature (March 1991), 45.4: 432–52, p. 439.

 

[6] Writing about the phonograph in The [London] Spectator in 1888, an anonymous reviewer fears “an immense storing up of sounds that it might be better not to store up….Men are becoming so vastly ingenious in finding the means of magnifying and embalming every little ripple of human energy, that we tremble for the consequences. The earth will soon be made a museum of odds and ends of form and speech; and…we may have future generations drowned beneath the accumulated scraps of ancestral voices and expressions.” Echoing Humboldt’s account of the Tamanac attitude toward memorializing, the reviewer speculates that society may “come to regard it as a singular virtue when men obliterate voluntarily traces of themselves which, instead of being useful to posterity, would only serve the purposes of the dust in which useful things are so often smothered[.]” Cited in Ivan Kreilkamp: A Voice Without a Body. The Phonographic Logic of Heart of Darkness. In: Victorian Studies (Winter 1997), 40.2: 211–44, p. 222.

 

[7] Thomas Richards traces the rise and decline of the fantasy of the ideal archive associated with late-century imperial and museum practice. By the end of the century, “[t]he possibility of positive knowledge” had begun to give way in the face of “an explosion of too much positive knowledge.” In: Thomas Richards: The Imperial Archive. Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. New York: Verso, 1996, p. 76.

 

[8] Christopher Herbert: Culture and Anomie. Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991, p. 205.

 

[9] Mayhew quoted in Herbert, op. cit., p. 206.

 

[10] Cannon, op. cit., pp. 158–59.

 

[11] Herbert, op. cit., p. 162.

 

[12] Herbert, op. cit., p. 185.

 

[13] See Andrew Miller on the relationship between writing, Victorian subjectivity, and the culture of display as exemplified by the Great Exhibition of 1851. Andrew Miller: Novels Behind Glass. Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.

 

[14] Tony Bennett deals doubly with the question of ordering excess—first by organizing the objects for display flowing into the new museums, and second by finding strategies to manage an often unsophisticated public that came in large numbers to the new institutions. See Tony Bennett: The Birth of the Museum. New York: Routledge, 1995. Richard Thomas advances a similar argument about late-Victorian efforts to parse the massive and “heterogenous local knowledge of metropolis and empire” gathered by colonial agents abroad and agents of order at home. He suggests that in the face of a kind of imperial data overload, Britons increasingly relied on the idea of total knowledge about that empire. He names this imaginary construct the “Imperial archive” and describes it as “a fantastical representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogenous local knowledge of metropolis and empire” (11). The fantasy of total knowledge provided a crucial “ideological…means for representing the vast and various Empire as a closely organized whole” (13). In Richards, op. cit. (n. 30), pp. 11, 13.

 

[15] Rebecca Preston: The scenery of the torrid zone. Imagined travels and the culture of exotics in nineteenth-century British gardens. In: Imperial Cities. Landscape, Display and Identity. New York: Manchester UP, 1999: 194–211, p. 201.

 

[16] Quoted in Preston, op. cit. (n. 38), p. 201.

 

[17] Quoted in Preston, op. cit. (n. 38), p. 208.

 

[18] Stephen Arata argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula generates terror by unleashing a hyper-fecund, racially marked replicant on the populace of London. Stephen Arata: The Occidental Tourist. Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization. In: Victorian Studies (Summer 1990), 33.4: 622–45.

 

[19] Jason Wilson notes that “Between 1823 and 1840 no foreigner could travel in Brazil. It meant that Humboldt was the sole source of information over a long period, and he conditioned” the way that the British saw that country and the rest of South America. In Wilson, op. cit. (n. 3), p. liii. Similarly, Nicolaas Rupke has used reviews of Humboldt’s work to document several distinct periods of intense British interest in Humboldt’s work, most notably during the periods 1810–1822 and 1845–1855 (this second wave of interest, while sparked by the publication of Cosmos, also saw new translations and successful republication of Humboldt’s South American works). In: Nicolaas A. Rupke: Die kritische Rezeption des Mexiko-Werks von Alexander von Humboldt. In Alexander von Humboldt. Aufbruch in die Moderne. Eds. Ottmar Ette, Ute Hermanns, Bernd M. Scherer, and Christian Suckow. Berlin: Akademie Verlag 2001: 265–273.

 

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