Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World.

MARVELOUS POSSESSIONS

The Wonder of the New World

Stephen Greenblatt

The University of Chicago Press, $24.95, 202 pp.

Marvelous Possessions is a good book, and I recommend it. But for readers unfamiliar with the literary criticism of the "New Historicists," its language can be formidably theoretical. Greenblatt's subject is how European history, law, anthropology, and politics were used to understand and justify the appropriation of the New World. His larger subject is the kind of travel writing he calls "the discourse of wonder." "Wonder," he says, is "charged...with desire, ignorance, and fear... 'a sudden surprise of the soul'" at what is "at once unbelievable and true." Such confrontations provoke imagination, and Greenblatt turns literary analysis of "the imagination at play" in works of art to analysis of "the imagination at [the] work" of exploitation and plunder.

The European "discourses" of legality and power, commerce and religion, were directed not at native Americans, the victims of European exploitation, but at other European nations, in order to establish competing claims to the new lands. For example, when he asserted that he had made his first claim without "contradiction" from the "Indians," Columbus was trying to meet a formal European legal requirement. The natives found a legal champion in Francisco Vitoria (identified only as the author of De indiis), who in the 1530s found the Spanish claim to the Indies insufficient because the land was already occupied, because the Indians had suffered "fear and ignorance, which vitiate every choice," and because the Spaniards sought title "in armed array from an unwarlike and timid crowd." But disinterested judgments like Vitoria' s--a rounding act of international law--are rare in the Early Modern (mostly fifteenth- and sixteenth-century) sources Greenblatt cites.

Europeans learned to extort what they wanted from their new and "marvelous possessions" without ceasing to invoke the sense of wonder, Greenblatt asserts. By their own account, gold had an obsessive hold on their imaginations:"Montezuma is said to have asked Cortes why the strangers had such a hunger for gold, and Cortes is said to have replied that Spaniards had a disease about the heart, for which the only cure was gold." The "disease" affected imagination so strongly and so "rationally," from the point of view of greed--that the Spanish regularly melted down gold objects of great beauty and expressive power into the more abstractly exchangeable form of ingots. And, as often during the Early Modern period, imagination is strikingly cruel. Greenblatt reproduces a famous image that shows native Americans satisfying a prostrate conquistador's insatiable thirst by pouring molten gold down his throat. From Goya-esque European representations like this Greenblatt draws no conclusions about what native Americans actually did. His method, by confining himself to European "practice" and representations, curiously makes the actions of their victims almost irrelevant to the outcome; it leaves Indian behavior a blank, and implicitly guiltless.

In thinking about Greenblatt's judgments and methods it might help to consider Book 4 of Jonathan Swift's Travels into Several Remote Nations. There, Gulliver describes the rounding of a "moderu colony": "a crew of pirates," driven off course, "go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness, they give the country a new name, they take formal possession of it for the king, they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial, they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by Divine fight. Ships are sent .... the natives driven out or destroyed, their princes tortured to discover their gold...." This passage is both too late and too rhetorically weighted for Greenblatt to cite. Swift's story has its sources among writers who are less conscious of what they are revealing, and where the ironies are unintended. But every detail of Swift s/Gulliver's account can be found in the works Greenblatt examines.

Greenblatt's terms---like Swift's fiction in Travels--make the familiar strange, so that we can see it. Nothing in Marvelous Possessions is made stranger than European religion, and especially Catholicism--"a religious ideology centered on the endlessly proliferated representation of a tortured and murdered god of 1ove...centered on a ritual...in which the god's flesh and blood were symbolically eaten." This "culture" was so confident, Greenblatt notes, that "it expected perfect strangers--the Arawaks of the Caribbeanto .... abandon their own beliefs,...and embrace those of Europe." Greenblatt treats Christianity at work in the New World as a cultural and capitalist imperialism so convinced that it was fight that refusal to accept the gift of Christianity could provoke "murderous rage" in the donors.

Against such religious conviction, Greenblatt praises a skeptical and tolerant curiosity that tempers the excesses of cultural ethnocentrism by imagining the "other" as having a value as great as our Own. Greenblatt has profited from a long-developing tradition of European self-inspection and self-criticism that is not, in his version, religious. It begins with the traveler-writers he identifies as tolerant, and includes Herodotus, Mandeville--a very great liar but a "knight of non-possession"--and Montaigne. (Greenblatt might have added Diderot.) It continues in a tradition (at least partly Protestant) that Greenblatt does not mention: Milton's "Areopagitica" or argument for freedom of speech and publication, and Locke and his justification of the largely bloodless Revolution of 1688. Greenblatt values imagination as much as theory. In his first sentence he speaks of his childhood interest in The Arabian Nights and Richard Halliburton's Book of Marvels. This engaging, unassuming voice opens out and humanizes Greenblatt's sometimes forbiddingly theoretical language. Generous to the native losers and unsparing in its judgment of the European winners who gained the New World we have inherited, Marvelous Possessions reminds us that Amerindians in both North and South America are still losing life and culture, land and power, in spite of the increasing understanding, defense, and support they receive. All three are all too often distant words on a page.