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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
6. Conclusion
By looking closely at Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, I have hoped to sketch some of the potential anxieties that a potent and rapidly proliferating tropical geography had the power to generate. Humboldt’s text suggests that even the most optimistic European travelers wondered if efforts to make American spaces profitable—while retaining a distinctive European identity and culture—were sustainable. Furthermore, the rich supply of aesthetic impressions presented by the region also challenged attempts to represent or “write” the tropics using the generic conventions of the travel narrative. I have attempted to sketch these difficulties as expressed by Humboldt in his work and to connect them to broader epistemological shifts occurring in response to similar instances of information overload in other areas of nineteenth-century life. Personal Narrative serves a particularly important function in British intellectual culture because it calls early attention to the challenges inherent in representing a nature that is unstable, mutable, and resists efforts to control its excesses or to make them productive. And because narratives like Humboldt’s were returning from the colonial tropics, fears about overload were often yoked to a whole complex of ideological positions about civilization, progress, and race that would only gather more strength as the century progressed. I have also suggested that proliferation (vegetable and otherwise) is a fundamental issue in nineteenth-century aesthetics. As Harriet Martineau observed in 1838, the knowledgeable traveler was inevitably put under strain by the volume of information he or she was required to process: she laments that “[t]he wearied mind soon finds itself overwhelmed by the multitude of unconnected or contradictory particulars.”[1] As the reading public grew, and as the quantity of published travel narratives increased, the epistemological stresses and strains affecting the informed traveler rapidly became the stresses and strains of the informed reader. Humboldt’s struggle to represent the tropics while working within the generic boundaries of the travel narrative may therefore serve more broadly as a guide to analyzing other literary and social efforts to deal with complexity during the nineteenth century.
[1] Harriet Martineau: How to Observe Morals and Manners. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1995 [1838], p. 16.
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