22/2/07 - English Literature - The New World

This lecture is interrelated with lectures on Renaissance encounters with other cultures: The Tempest and the relationship in the Renaissance to Jews, Turks and Moors. The lecture framework runs as follows:

• The Renaissance and Discovery
• Encountering/assimilating/possessing the cultural and racial 'Other'
• The Tempest and the New World
• Language and power
• Colonialism: dehumanising/demonising of the savage 'Other'
• Post-colonialism: opposition and resistance to colonial domination.

Notions of the 'discovery' of America

"In traditional interpretations of the Renaissance, re-discovery and discovery have come to be seen as defining characteristics of the movement. In their different ways, both are thought to entail an expansion in consciousness; a broadening of the mental horizons.

"Travel enables one to collect information, to verify rumours, to witness marvels, to distinguish between fables and truth. It represents a willingness to escape from the cultural narrowness that attends only knowing one’s own people. It enables one to place familiar customs in relation to the customs of others and hence to view the ordinary and everyday in a revealing new light. It offers the dream of what Christian Meier calls ‘a multi-subjective, contingency-oriented account."
[Stephen Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, p. 123]

Here is the idea of travel broadening the mind, and seeing oneself in a different light. One's values and customs are not natural any more, when it comes to light that another culture has radically different values and customs.

Columbus may not have had scientific motivations for his excursion to prove that the world was round. In 1492 Columbus sailed to America and Spain forced Jews to convert to Christianity.

"Like the Renaissance as a whole, the ‘discovery’ of the New World has come to be seen as one of the historical moments at which European culture was displaced from the centre of its own universe.

"In the year that Moorish Granada fell and the Jews were driven from Spain, Columbus set sail for the East. On December 26, 1492, moored off Hispaniola, Columbus made an entry in his log-book that Las Casas transcribed with particular care. The Admiral will leave some of his men behind in the hope that when he once again returns to the newly discovered lands these men would have obtained by barter a cask of gold, ‘and that they would have found the gold mine and the spicery, and those things in such quantity that the sovereigns [Ferdinand and Isabella], before three years (are over), will undertake and prepare to conquer the Holy Sepulcher . . . for thus I urged your Highnesses to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem.’"
[Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 51]

So Columbus was concerned about profit. He wanted to search for gold to fund the war in Jerusalem.

Encounter, Assimilation and Possession

There was 'wonder' and 'marvel' at the discovery of America, at the shock of the new, after the 'first encounter'.

"Wonder is, I shall argue, the central European figure in the initial response to the new World.

"Wonder . . . is the quintessential human response to what Descartes calls a ‘first encounter’.

"The marvellous is a central feature, then, in the whole complex system . . . through which people . . . apprehended, and then possessed or discarded the unfamiliar."
[Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions, p. 14, p. 20, and pp. 20-21]

The new and unfamiliar was thereafter translated into familiar terms: those of primitivism versus barbarism, innocence versus corruption and the invocation of Eden. No effort was made to understand this new race in their own terms, but in terms of preconceived modern culture. The New World was considered as something to be possessed, as something female and virginal.

Language and Power

It was reinforced in European accounts that the people of the New World did not have a language. The reality was that they did have language, simply not a European one. In Ferdinand's encounter with Miranda in The Tempest, he is surprised that she speaks his language. There was also the humanist notion of spoken eloquence, which distinguished humans from animals. So Ferdinand makes a statement about his power. He draws on the trope that the land is virginal, hence he asks Miranda if she is a maiden.

Ferdinand Most sure, the goddess
On whom these airs attend. Vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon this island,
And that you will some good instruction give
How I may bear me here. My prime request,
Which I do last pronounce, is – O you wonder! –
If you be maid or no?

Miranda No wonder, sir,
But certainly a maid.

Ferdinand My language! Heavens!
I am the best of them that speak this speech,
Were I but where ‘tis spoken.
[Act 1, Scene 2, 422-31]

Colonisers often claimed that natives were 'brutish' because they could not speak. Miranda also treats Caliban like an animal.

Miranda Abhorred slave,
Which any print of goodness will not take,
Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,
Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour
One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage,
Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like
A thing most brutish. I endowed thy purposes
With words that made them known. But thy vile race –
Though thou didst learn – had that in’t which good natures
Could not abide to be with; therefore wast thou
Deservedly confined into this rock;
Which hadst deserved more than a prison.
[Act 1 Scene 2 Lines 350-61]

The Tempest and the New World

The Tempest is set on an island in the Mediterranean, between North Africa and Italy. But this does not mean that it has nothing to do with the New World. There are allusions to Setebos, a god of the Patagonians. What is new to one person is old to another.

Miranda O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!

Prospero ‘Tis new to thee.
[Act 5 Scene 1 Lines 181-4]

The Tempest as a colonial and post-colonial text

The figures of Prospero and Miranda are the voices of western settlers. They dehumanise and demonise natives. There must be a moral justification for dispossessing others of their land - they must be either animals or devils. Caliban is alternatively called a slave, son of the devil, a fish, a monster, and others.

The play is post-colonial in a sense of discourse that resists colonial domination. Caliban resists domination and questions Prospero's reasons for domination. He uses the word "sty" as a reference to pigs, and references to dehumanisation. Language is used as a justification of domination.

Caliban
You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
[Act 1 Scene 2 Lines 362-4]

Here Caliban uses his master's language to speak out against oppression (this technique is also used in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Caliban even shows lyricism:

Caliban
Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not,
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again, and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
[Act 3 Scene 133-41]

Caliban curses the use of language yet shows great humanity in this poetic speech. He shows a liking for music, also thought to be a humanising quality.