The First Americans American Literature Before and During the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
1 the first americans american literature before and during the colonial and revolutionary periods Imagining Eden ‘America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.’ The words are those of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they sum up that desire to turn the New World into words which has seized the imagination of so many Americans. But ‘America’ was only one of the several names for a dream dreamed in the first instance by Europeans. ‘He invented America: a very great man,’ one character observes of Christopher Columbus in a Henry James novel; and so, in a sense, he did. Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: ‘a Virgin Countrey,’ to quote one early, English settler, ‘so preserved by Nature out of a desire to show mankinde fallen into the Old Age of Creation, what a brow of fertility and beauty she was adorned with when the world was vigorous and youthfull.’ For a while, this imaginary America obliterated the history of those who had lived American lives long before the Europeans came. And, as Emerson’s invocation of ‘America ...a poem’ dis- closes, it also erased much sense of American literature as anything other than the writing into existence of a New Eden. Not that the first European settlers were unaware of the strangeness of America: in October 1492, for example, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) confided to his journals that there were ‘a thousand kinds of herbs and flowers’ in this New World, ‘of all of which I remain in ignorance as to their properties’. His ignorance extended, famously, into areas he was hardly aware of: convinced that he had arrived at the continent of India, he christened the people he encountered Indians. ‘Their language I do not understand,’ admitted Columbus. And their customs he found either odd or abhorrent. The ‘natives’ went about ‘with firebrands in their hands’, Columbus along with other early European explorers observed, ‘these they call by the name of tabacos’. ‘They draw the smoke by sucking, this causes a drowsiness and sort of intoxication’, but, he concluded, ‘I do not see what relish Imagining Eden 1 or benefit they could find in them.’ More seriously, they were ‘without any religion that could be discovered’. An ‘inoffensive, unwarlike people’, ‘without the know- ledge of iniquity’, they were nevertheless strangers to the blessings of religion. This, however, was a problem ripe for the solving, since the ‘gentle race’ in the New World could surely be introduced to the truths of the Old. ‘They very quickly learn such prayers as we repeat to them,’ Columbus reported, ‘and also to make the sign of the cross.’ So, he advised his royal masters, ‘Your Highnesses should adopt the resolution of converting them to Christianity’. Such a project, he explained without any trace of irony, ‘would suffice to gain to our holy faith multitudes of people, and to Spain great riches and immense dominion’. Conversion was one strategy Columbus and other early Europeans had for dealing with America and the Americans they encountered. Comparison was another: the New World could be understood, perhaps, by discovering likeness with the Old. ‘Everything looked as green as in April in Andalusia,’ reported Columbus of what he thought was India but was, in fact, Cuba. ‘The days here are hot, and the nights mild like May in Andalusia,’ he added, and ‘the isle is full of pleasant mountains after the manner of Sicily.’ Naming was another ploy: Columbus was not the first nor the last to believe that the strange could be familiarized by being given a familiar label. The strange people he met seemed less strange once he had convinced himself they were ‘Indians’; the strange places he visited became more understandable once they were given the names of saints. To map the New World meant either to deny its newness, by coming up with a name or a comparison associated with the Old, or to see that newness as precisely what had to be changed. ‘I have no doubt, most serene Princes,’ Columbus reported, that were proper devout and religious persons to come among the natives and learn their language, it would be an easy matter to convert them all to Christianity, and I hope in our Lord that your Highnesses will . bring into the church so many multitudes, inasmuch as you have exterminated those who refused to confess the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Fundamental to this project of mapping the New World was the myth of Eden, according to which the European settlers were faced not so much with another culture as with nature, and not really with encountering a possible future but, on the contrary, returning to an imagined past. ‘These people go naked,’ Columbus observed, ‘except that the women wear a very slight covering at the loins’; and, while he was willing to confess that ‘their manners are very decent’, he could see this only as a sign of their aboriginal innocence. Stripped of culture, as well as clothes and Christianity, they were primitives, a recollection of natural man. In this, Columbus was not unusual; the only difference, if any, between him and many other early European explorers and settlers was that he eventually took the dream of Eden to its logical conclusion and a literal extreme. All his life, Columbus continued to believe he had discovered the Indies and only had to venture over the 2 The First Americans next hill or stream to find the legendary cities of gold and silver described by Marco Polo. When one discovery after another failed to confirm this belief, Columbus consoled himself with the conviction that what he had found was, literally, the Garden of Eden. ‘Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies,’ Columbus recalled towards the end of his life, ‘I reached a point when the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed.’ ‘It was as if the seas sloped upward at this point,’ he remembered; and the odd behaviour of his navigation equipment led him to conclude, finally, that the globe was not round. One hemisphere, he claimed, ‘resembles the half of a round pear with a raised stalk, like a woman’s nipple on a round ball’. ‘I do not hold that the earthly Paradise has the form of a rugged mountain,’ Columbus insisted, ‘as it is shown in pictures, but that it lies at the summit of what I have described as the stalk of a pear.’ ‘I do not find any Greek or Latin writings which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise,’ Columbus wrote, ‘and I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here’ just beyond the strange new world he had found. He did not, he admitted, believe ‘that anyone can ascend to the top’ and so enter the Garden of Eden. But he was firmly convinced that the streams and rivers he had discovered ‘flow out of the earthly Paradise’ and that, accordingly, he had been closer than anyone to the place where ‘Our Lord placed the Tree of Life’. The evidence Columbus adduced for associating the New World with Eden was an odd but, for its time, characteristic mix of scientific and pseudo-scientific argu- ment, Biblical exegesis and imaginative rhetoric. Not of least importance here was his rapt account of the vegetation and the native inhabitants of his earthly Para- dise. ‘The land and trees were very green and as lovely as the orchards of Valencia in April,’ he remembered, ‘and the inhabitants were lightly built and fairer than most of the other people we had seen in the Indies’; ‘their hair was long and straight and they were quicker, more intelligent, and less cowardly.’ This is natural man as innocent rather than savage, reminding Europeans of their aboriginal, unfallen state rather than inviting conversion. The Indian as savage and the Indian as innocent were and are, of course, two sides of the same coin. Both map Native Americans, and the land they and their forebears had lived in for more than thirty thousand years, as somehow absent from history: existing in a timeless void, a place of nature and a site of myth. But, in mapping the New World and its inhab- itants in this way, in trying to accommodate strange sights and experiences to familiar signs and legends, Columbus and other early European explorers were at least beginning a story of American literature: a story, that is, of encounters between cultures that leaves both sides altered. If there is one truth in the history of American writing, it is the truth of process and plurality. The American writer has to write in and of a world of permeable borders and change. Although he was hardly aware of it, Columbus was forging a narrative that was neither precisely Old World (because of the sights he had seen), nor exactly New World either (because of the signs he had used), but a mix or synthesis of both. Telling of meetings between strangers, oddly syncretic in its language and vision, it was in its own way an American tale he was telling. Imagining Eden 3 Native American Oral Traditions If Columbus thought some of his Indians were close to Paradise, then some of those Indians thought they came from heaven. Or so Columbus said. Some of the native inhabitants themselves tell a different story. Among some Native Americans of the Southeast, for example, there was the legend that white people came across the water to visit them.