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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

2. “Man no longer appears as the center of the creation”: Excess Verdure and the Traveling Observer

 

Early in Personal Narrative, Humboldt suggests that the “moment of leaving Europe” is transformational: the traveler passes into a fundamentally different realm, “entering in some sort on a new state of existence” (I.31).[1] One of the most distinctive features of this “new state” is the “luxuriousness of the vegetation” (V.441). As Humboldt’s lengthy work progresses, a complex and often contradictory relationship between vegetable (hyper)fecundity and the traveling observer emerges. On the one hand, tropical excess is viewed positively: it is powerful, moving, and unprecedented in Humboldt’s experience. On the other hand, such vigorous plant life is a serious impediment both to the observer’s ability to perceive nature accurately and to the efforts of colonists to preserve a coherent European identity.

 

For instance, Humboldt worries that even his trained vision may not be a reliable servant in South America. In spite of his prodigious capacities as a careful observer, record-keeper, and statistician, spaces that are “overloaded with plants” impede observational accuracy. Humboldt’s description of the banks of the Río Cedeño suggests the irony inherent in observing and describing South American verdure—that is, plant life itself presents the single greatest hindrance to the study of plant geography in the tropics. In a place where tree trunks are concealed “under a thick carpet of verdure” and “lianas” climb from the ground to the tree tops in a “continual interlacing of parasite plants, the botanist is often led to confound the flowers, the fruits, and leaves, which belong to different species” (III.36–37). That an experienced botanist cannot see the tree trunks for the forest, so to speak, suggests the power of tropical fecundity to disrupt even an expert’s sense of nature’s deep structure.

 

Humboldt faces similar problems as a human demographer attempting to quantify the extent of agriculture—and thus the size of the population—in the tropics. Although in Europe the extent of cultivation corresponds in a predictable way to population size, even the “most populous regions in equinoctial America still [retain] a savage aspect” (III.15–16). This insight becomes clear to Humboldt while passing a small, half-hidden settlement near Cumaná. Realizing that he might easily have missed the settlement altogether and finding that he cannot easily determine the area’s population, Humboldt reflects on the power of vegetation to conceal the extent of civilization in South America, “even in the neighbourhood of the most populous cities.” In a climate where agriculture requires only small parcels of ground, “[s]pontaneous plants…predominate by their quantity over cultivated plants, and determine alone the appearance of the landscape.” Here man does not inhabit the landscape as “an absolute master, who changes at his will the surface of the soil, but as a transient guest” (III.15–16).

 

One senses two competing value systems at play in such passages, where Humboldt praises the verdant fecundity of tropical nature even as he signals that such fertility can seriously impede accurate interpretation. On one hand—as Engelhard Weigl has noted—Humboldt stood in the tradition of Buffon and the Forsters in favoring the beauty of a tamed and civilized nature. For instance, in his account of travels with Cook in the South Seas, Johann Reinhold Forster described untended nature as an offensive aggregation of “broken, decaying, and rotting” undergrowth, “petrification and noxious effluvia,” and “dead, motionless, stagnating water.” Cultivation by humans, however, brings beauty and productivity to the confusion: “How beautiful, how improved, how useful does nature become by the industry of man! And what happy changes are produced, by the moderate care of rational beings.”[2] Such a value system—which, incidentally, calls to mind Johnson’s condemnation of Scotland’s “sullen” vegetation—privileges order, visibility and productivity.

 

The civilizing tradition that informs Forster’s comment clearly influenced Humboldt; however, the Prussian naturalist also subscribed to an emerging counter-discourse about nature—one associated, but not co-extensive, with the discourse of Romanticism. This discourse asserted the value of wild untamed spaces, sublime scenes, and unsymmetrical or obscure natural landscapes. Kristian Köchy and others have sketched Humboldt’s complex relationship to German Romanticism.[3] For the nineteenth-century British reader, the key entries in this genealogy would have included Edmund Burke’s influential differentiation of the sublime (“whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects”) from the beautiful; Samuel Johnson’s analogous opposition between the “awefully vast” and the “elegantly little”; and Kant’s more internally oriented categories (the sublime results from a thing’s “limitlessness, yet with a superadded thought of its totality,” while the beautiful is primarily a “question of the form of the object”).[4] This delineation of the “sublime” gave aesthetic value to scenes that were complex, threatening, or difficult to interpret. Barbara Marie Stafford has suggested that scientific travelers played an important role in the development of these two categories by extending the definition of the sublime to include objects that held clues to their own complex history embedded within them.[5] For his part, Humboldt saw value in sublime scenes and also clearly expressed interest in the relationship between form and history.[6]

 

It is clear that these two philosophical inclinations—one valorizing order, productivity, and visibility and the other favoring complexity, vastness, danger, and historical density—come into tension in Personal Narrative. The conflict manifests itself in Humboldt’s simultaneous attraction to (on aesthetic grounds) and rejection of (on pragmatic grounds) the visually provocative, but dense, messy, and seemingly uninhabited South American landscape. As we have already seen, these contradictory impulses crystallize around the (apparent) absence of human activity in spaces where plants “determine alone the appearance of the landscape.” Humboldt finds himself deeply moved by places where “[m]an no longer appears as the center of the creation,” thrilling at views in which it is only “the conflict of the elements, which characterizes…the aspect of Nature.” Yet in the very same paragraph, Humboldt also laments the melancholy impression conveyed by “[a] country without population.” Unpopulated but obviously arable terrain “appears to the people of cultivated Europe like a city abandoned by it’s [sic] inhabitants” (III.512). Humboldt feels that while it is normal and even desirable to respond with deliciously “strange and sad” feelings to places where humans could never thrive anyway (the ocean or desert, for instance), it is distressing and profoundly disorienting to “seek in vain the traces of the power of man” in a place that is “adorned with eternal verdure” and should therefore be habitable and productive (V.290-91). As we have seen, this problem is only exacerbated when the traveler cannot tell whether an area is, in fact, heavily populated. In this sense, it is the failure of tropical landscape to be easily legible that disturbs Humboldt the most. The result is that the reader is left with a text that seems caught between lamenting and romanticizing the absence of human civilization in the tropics.



[1] Ann McClintock sees psychologically significant boundary crossings as a common feature of European travel narratives. Furthermore, explorers regularly code the “dangerous thresholds of their known worlds” in gendered terms: the  “threshold” is an erotically charged space that generates a set of ritual and fetishistic practices on the part of the traveler (and travel writer) which “[betray] acute paranoia and a profound, if not pathological, sense of male anxiety and boundary loss.” Although I do not address the role gender plays in Humboldt’s text (and significant work remains to be done in this regard), my analysis of Personal Narrative substantiates McClintock’s suggestion that passing into the tropics generates acute anxiety at the possibility of “boundary loss”—in this case national and cultural boundaries are at stake. Ann McClintock: Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 24.

 

[2] Engelhard Weigl: Alexander von Humboldt and the Beginning of the Environmental Movement. In: Alexander von Humboldt im Netz. International Review for Humboldtian Studies (2001), II.2: no pagination. http://www.hin-online.de/, accessed April 10, 2004;

Go to article | Engelhard Weigl in HiN 2

see also Johann Reinhold Forster: Observations Made during a Voyage ‘round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996, pp. 99–100.

 

[3] Kristian Köchy: Ganzheit und Wissenschaft. Das historische Fallbeispiel der romantischen Naturforschung. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1997; see also Kristian Köchy: Das Ganze der Natur. Alexander von Humboldt und das romantische Forschungsprogramm. In: Alexander von Humboldt im Netz. International Review for Humboldtian Studies (2002), III.5: no pagination. http://www.hin-online.de/, accessed October 15, 2003. 

Go to article | Kristian Köchy in HiN 5

Helen Maria Williams’s translation of Personal Narrative can also be said to engage with the epistemology and language choices associated with a certain strand of British Romanticism (see note 3).

 

[4] Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. Adam Phillips. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998 [1757], p. 36; Samuel Johnson: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. Ed. D. J. Enright. Penguin Classics, 1977 [1759], p. 61; Immanuel Kant: Critique of Judgement. Trans. J. C. Meredith. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978 [1790], p. 90 (SS 23). 

 

[5] Working at the junction of the history of visual culture and the history of science, Stafford suggests that versions of the sublime did important intellectual work beyond the realm of the purely literary. For instance, the emergence of a category she names “singularity” provided naturalists an aesthetic justification for the increasingly complex “views” that travelers (like Humboldt) were attempting to record. That is, the scientifically informed observer was prepared to see layers of meaning in the formal complexity of the observed object—whether geological formation or complex plant system. The natural object comes to fully captivate the observer, not because it threatens him or her with “terror” in the face of a literal loss of self as in Burke’s sublime, but because the naturalist may lose him- or herself while confronting and attempting to parse the density of an object’s “history, that is, how it came to have certain of its properties.” Barbara Marie Stafford: Toward Romantic Landscape Perception. Illustrated Travels and the Rise of ‘Singularity’ as an Aesthetic Category. In: Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture (1981), 10: 17–75, pp. 20, 60.

 

[6] Later, in Cosmos, Humboldt explains why he is interested in geological features: such formations “animate the scenery by the associations of the past which they awaken, acting upon the imagination of the enlightened observer like traditional records of an earlier world. Their form is their history.” Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmos. A Sketch of A Physical Description of the Universe. Trans. E. C. Otte. 5 Vols.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1848], pp. 72.

 

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