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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
4. “[The traveler]…can scarcely distinguish what most excites his admiration”: Aesthetic Overload and Textual Excess in Personal Narrative
Late in his travel account, Humboldt pauses to consider the difficulty of preserving written records in Central and South America. In the torrid zone, teeming insects
“devour paper, pasteboard, parchment, with frightful rapidity, destroying records and libraries. Whole provinces of Spanish America do not afford one written document, that dates a hundred years back. What improvement can the civilization of nations acquire, if nothing link the present with the past, if the depositaries of human knowledge must be repeatedly renewed, if the records of genius and reason cannot be transmitted to posterity?” (V.116)
In this passage, the tropics are again a place where the past is quickly lost and future improvement is therefore unachievable. It is striking, though, that Humboldt’s statement about the impermanence of writing appears only after the reader has waded through nearly three thousand pages of text (in the English edition). Although in several dramatic moments Humboldt and Bonpland’s records and collections are in danger of decay or loss, the text of Personal Narrative is its own proof that writing about the tropics can survive. However, Humboldt’s emphasis here on the power of the torrid zone to destroy writing—to literally consume the traces of human discourse—calls attention to the risks inherent in committing representations of the region to paper.
In fact, it is the psychic, rather than the physical, act of writing that seems to be most under siege in South America. Personal Narrative repeatedly registers anxieties about all stages of writing—observation, cognition, and inscription—on a continent where instability and overwhelming fecundity combine to resist representation. Oliver Lubrich, pursuing a different end, has noted the ways in which Personal Narrative foregrounds its own generic instability. Lubrich argues that the text “[undermines] the conventional format of the travelogue” because all the categories which normally “lend the text coherence and make it readable for the recipient”—including the subject, the object, the addressee, and the text itself—“are charged with multiple meanings and become thus destabilized.” By refusing to operate on familiar generic terrain, Personal Narrative resists established interpretive schemas and “de-authorizes imperial forms of colonial writing” in the process.[1] Building on Lubrich’s provocative analysis, I wish to suggest that excessive inputs precipitate a crisis of representation in Personal Narrative; I then discuss how Humboldt’s various strategies for managing this looming incoherence anticipate and prefigure important epistemological shifts in the perception, regulation, and representation of masses of information during the nineteenth century.
Before doing so, however, it is important to review the characteristics of Humboldt’s distinctive philosophical method. Because the development and intricacies of Humboldt’s approach have been dealt with expertly and extensively elsewhere,[2] I cite here only the preface to the English translation of Personal Narrative. Working with Humboldt’s detailed input,[3] Helen Maria Williams states the Prussian observer’s philosophy in terms that would have been familiar to an English readership: “[t]he appropriate character of [Humboldt’s] writing is the faculty he possesses of raising the mind to general ideas, without neglecting individual facts” (I.ix). Operating, as it does, within the binary of the general and the particular, Williams’s statement may have reminded her readers of Samuel Johnson’s assertion that “[s]ublimity is produced by aggregation, and littleness by dispersion. Great thoughts are always general, and consist in positions not limited by exceptions, and in descriptions not descending to minuteness.”[4] Yet in supplementing Williams’s description with Johnson’s statement, the possible tensions between part and whole inherent in such an epistemology already begin to show themselves. For while Johnson’s “sublime” can only be achieved through the “aggregation” of information and effects, this very act of amassing data risks pushing the whole system towards incoherency and “dispersion.”
Humboldt is acutely aware of this tension between the general and particular in his own work. While he wants to fuse “individual facts” into “general ideas” in his writing, he also recognizes that the huge volume of information his writings must present to achieve this end may threaten his goal; in fact, Humboldt commented on the struggle for balance between generality and minuteness in the work of other scientific travelers. At a time when scientists had more and more analytical tools at their disposal, traveling naturalists were producing increasingly cumbersome and difficult texts:
“itineraries have partly lost that unity of composition, and that simplicity, which characterized those former ages. It is now become scarcely possible to connect so many different materials with the narration of events; and that part which we may call dramatic gives way to dissertations merely descriptive.” (I.xli-xlii)
These epistemological and aesthetic tensions between dispersion and aggregation are brought into particularly stark relief in narratives about the tropics, where the traveler is faced with an unprecedented variety and volume of potentially sublime sensory input.
Travel narratives about the old world could maintain coherence by focusing on sites that evoke “great remembrances,” since nations, not nature “[form] the principal figures on the canvas.” Texts that describe the new world are necessarily different, since human civilization cannot play the major role in a place where “man and his productions almost disappear amid the stupendous display of wild and gigantic nature.” The “vast solitudes” of the region do not lend themselves to the traditional, nation-based forms of the travel narrative—or to the other modes of cultural display increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, for that matter. Instead they seem “destined only for the display of vegetable life” (I.xliv). Because overwhelming plant life is the predominant visual fact in South America, Personal Narrative cannot be organized according to the anthropocentric principles that had traditionally defined the genre.
Humboldt recognizes that he cannot follow generic convention and it makes him uncomfortable. For instance, he fears he cannot help but violate a crucial convention of travel narrative: a writer-centered text. Because “the unity of composition can be strictly observed only when the traveler describes what has passed under his own eye….It is the man himself that we continually desire to see in contact with the objects that surround him” (I.xli). One thinks here, perhaps, of Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa—cited at several points in Personal Narrative—in which Park’s adventures drive the episodic and often sentimental narrative forward. Humboldt is aware of this expectation to keep the narrative centered on himself, but he also recognizes the power of the tropics to disrupt first-person, narrator-based accounts.
For instance, Humboldt addresses this question of narrative focus and linearity while writing about how the view from the summit of Teneriffe might best be represented. He argues that, paradoxically, if he were to place himself and his responses to nature at the center of his travel account, the result would not be a clear narrative trajectory, but rather an incoherent series of expressions of wonder in the face of too many varied sensory inputs:
“It is a difficult task, to describe those sensations, which act with so much the more force as they have something undefined, produced by the immensity of the space as well as by the greatness, the novelty, and the multitude of the objects, amidst which we find ourselves transported. When a traveler attempts to furnish descriptions of the loftiest summits of the globe, the cataracts of the great rivers, the tortuous vallies [sic] of the Andes, he is exposed to the danger of fatiguing his readers by the monotonous expression of his admiration.” (I.180-181)[5]
Faced with a “multitude of objects” and aware that he couldn’t make his experiences in the Americas into a coherent linear narrative even if he wanted to, Humboldt opts instead for the massive comparative and analytical project that we now recognize as “Humboldtian science.” In practical terms, this decision allows Humboldt to organize certain portions of Personal Narrative according to scientific theme or the availability of comparative data—a strategy that permits the lengthy digressions and labyrinthine footnotes characteristic of his writing. Although this kind of heterogeneous and comparative approach makes sense in light of Humboldt’s emerging philosophical system, it does seem at odds with his previous aesthetic privileging of the “man himself…in contact with the objects that surround him” as the proper subject of the travel narrative (I.xli). Humboldt does often manage to remain—by sheer force of personality—at the center of a more-or-less linear text. But this apparent contradiction is perhaps the point: Personal Narrative travels uncomfortably between the poles of vivid, first-person incident and comparative, descriptive analysis of “the peculiar character that distinguishes each zone” (I.181). The “multitude of objects” presented by tropical nature precipitates this tension and helps generate Personal Narrative’s often contradictory form.
There is another way in which Humboldt’s text fails to fulfill the expectations of the metropolitan reader. After all, not all late-eighteenth-century travel narratives possessed a dynamic narrator who engaged in a series of exciting incidents: a journey might, instead, be expected to produce a series of aesthetic impressions in the picturesque style. To name just one example from a thriving genre, Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794…presents a series of discrete, carefully framed picturesque scenes calibrated to produce a specific aesthetic effect. This effect—what one critic has referred to as the “subject-centered picturesque”—stresses the use of mediating devices like a coach window or a “Claude glass” in order to establish distance between the “single and unique beholder” of the scene and the landscape itself. Mediation and distance allow the writer to describe the scenery even while carefully managing its effect on the written text.[6] Humboldt is clearly familiar with this scene-based picturesque style, producing it admirably on several occasions—as when he skillfully uses the drifting clouds on Teneriffe (I.82–83) or the mouth of the Cueva del Guacharo (III.127–28) to frame those two picturesque scenes.
But this analytical and aesthetic tool is also strained to the breaking point “on a vast continent, where everything is gigantic.” Humboldt quickly encounters difficulty containing nature within the well-marked borders of the picturesque scene. Instead, multiple worthy scenes present themselves at every turn. Humboldt addresses this threat to picturesque description directly, noting that if a traveler in the tropics “feel strongly the beauty of picturesque scenery, he can scarcely define the various emotions, which crowd upon his mind; he can scarcely distinguish what most excites his admiration” (III.36). Humboldt is left with an unsolvable selection problem: if he describes every interesting scene to his readers, the written text will break under its own weight, descending into incoherence. On the other hand, if he fails to fully describe all the worthy scenes he encounters, his depiction of the aesthetic character of South America will be incomplete and therefore inaccurate. Because tropical excess affects the way Humboldt “pictures” South America, it also influences the final written form of Personal Narrative. Indeed, the naturalist’s full, thirty-volume travel record signals the degree to which only heterogeneity and supplementarity seem appropriate for representing the masses of sensory input to which Humboldt has been sensitized in his aesthetic and scientific training.
In some interesting cases, the representational practices of the societies Humboldt encounters in Central and South America reflect and inform his own difficulties in creating coherent and manageable representations. For instance, Humboldt criticizes the failure of Spanish and Portuguese colonists to construct “memorials” to help them preserve their cultural identity against an onslaught of tropical impressions. This “absence of memorials…[has] something painful to the traveler, who finds himself deprived of the most delightful enjoyments of the imagination”; more importantly, a lack of remembrances makes it extremely difficult to “bind the colonist to the soil on which he dwells” (II.287).
Yet while European settlers fail to retain memorializing traditions, cultures native to South America seem to recognize and even embrace the futility of creating lasting monuments in the “torrid zone.” In fact, according to Humboldt, some tribes incorporate the annihilation of individual subjectivity and cultural memory—the very idea that so terrorizes Johnson and Humboldt—into their cultural practices. The Tamanacs, for instance, practice a set of death rituals that center on erasing “remembrances”: when a tribe member dies, the families “lay waste the fields of the deceased, and cut down the trees which he has planted. They say, ‘that the sight of objects, which belonged to their relations, makes them melancholy.’ They like better to efface than to preserve remembrances” (V.626). Given Humboldt’s repeated observations that tropical plant life has the power to conceal or destroy civilization and rupture links between past and present, his interest in Tamanac practice makes a kind of sense: the tribe seems to feel that the only reasonable and sustainable representational strategy available to them in the face of tropical excess is not the preservation of human culture, but rather the preemptive erasure of the traces that add up to a human life.
Humboldt ultimately retreats from the radical implications of Tamanac ritual, returning the reader to a quantitative and mercantilist frame by noting that such burial practices “are very detrimental to agriculture” and that the monks therefore oppose them (V.626). However, his interest in the scene calls attention to questions of representational coherence and textual permanence and must be read against the power of the tropics to disrupt or even “devour” representation “with frightful rapidity.” This incident, taken together with the other passages I have examined in this section, suggests that Humboldt himself hadn’t solved the problem of how best to process and represent tropical nature. Hyper-fecundity and aesthetic overload present themselves as serious obstacles both to the progress of civilization in the “torrid zone” and to the production of coherent textual representations of the region.
[1] Lubrich views the destabilizing character of Humboldt’s text positively, suggesting that it creates a discourse in which “there are no ‘identities’ and ‘differences’ which can be defined unequivocally from a privileged perspective.” In: Oliver Lubrich: “[M]on extrême répugnance à écrire la relation de mon voyage”: Alejandro de Humboldt deconstruye la relación de viaje. In: Alexander von Humboldt im Netz. International Review for Humboldtian Studies (2003), IV.7: no pagination. http://www.hin-online.de/, accessed April 28, 2004.
Go to the article | Oliver Lubrich in HiN 7
[2] In the rich scholarship on the subject, Humboldt’s philosophical method has been given a variety of names: on Humboldt’s “rational empiricism,” see Laura Dassow Walls: Seeing New Worlds. Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, pp. 69–70; on “Humboldtian science,” see Susan Faye Cannon: Science in Culture. The Early Victorian Period. New York: Dawson and Science History Publications, 1978, pp 82; on “planetary consciousness” and “transculturation” in Humboldt’s work, see Mary Louise Pratt: Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992; on Humboldt and the idea of “Weltbewusstsein,” see Ottmar Ette: Weltbewusstsein. Alexander von Humboldt und das unvollendete Projekt einer anderen Moderne. Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002.
[3] See Biermann, op. cit., pp. 11–12.
[4] Samuel Johnson: The Lives of the Poets. Cowley. In: The College Survey of English Literature. Ed. A. M. Witherspoon. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1951 [1779–1781], p. 594.
[5] For a similar case, see Vol. 5, where Humboldt compares the melancholy effect of a place lacking the visible signs of human culture to the effect his own work may be having on the reader: “I paint the impression produced by the monotonous aspect of those solitary regions. May this monotony not be found to extend itself to the journal of our navigation, and tire the reader accustomed to the description of the scenes and historical memorials of the ancient continent!” (V.290–91)
[6] Ingrid Kuczynski: Reading a Landscape. Ann Radcliffe’s A Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, Through Holland and the Western Frontier of Germany, With a Return Down the Rhine. In: British Romantics as Readers. Intertextualities, Maps of Misreading, Reinterpretations. Eds. Michael Gassenmeier, Petra Bridzun, Jens Martin Gurr, Frank Erik Pointner. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 1998: 241–57, pp. 247.
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