Exploring the Interior Essays on Literary and Cultural History KARL S. GUTHKE EXPLORING THE INTERIOR Exploring the Interior Essays on Literary and Cultural History Karl S. Guthke https://www.openbookpublishers.com © 2018 Karl S. Guthke. Copyright on the translations of chapters one, seven and eight are held by the translators. The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes, providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that he endorses you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information: Karl S. Guthke, Exploring the Interior: Essays on Literary and Cultural History. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2018. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// www.openbookpublishers.com/product/650#copyright Further details about CC BY-NC-ND licenses are available at https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Updated digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/650#resources Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. The publication of this volume is supported by a grant from the Anne and Jim Rothenberg Fund for Humanities Research at Harvard University. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-393-3 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-394-0 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-395-7 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-396-4 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-397-1 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0126 Cover image: Louis Brion de la Tour, Mappemonde philosophique et politique, où sont tracés les voyages de Cook et de la Pérouse (Paris: chez Basset M[d] d’estampes et fabricant de papier peints, 1801). Courtesy of Harvard Map Collection, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- 3:FHCL:2092175. Cover design: Anna Gatti. All paper used by Open Book Publishers is SFI (Sustainable Forestry Initiative), PEFC (Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification Schemes) and Forest Stewardship Council(r)(FSC(r) certified. Printed in the United Kingdom, United States, and Australia by Lightning Source for Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) Contents Preface 1 Introduction: From the Interior of Continents to 3 the Interior of the Mind I. “THE GREAT MAP OF MANKIND UNROLLED” 1. Faust and the Cannibals: Geographical Horizons in the 19 Sixteenth Century 2.“Errand into the Wilderness”: The American Careers of 57 Some Cambridge Divines in the Pre-Commonwealth Era 3. At Home in the World: Scholars and Scientists 77 Expanding Horizons 4. In the Wake of Captain Cook: Global versus Humanistic 101 Education in the Age of Goethe 5. Opening Goethe’s Weimar to the World: Travellers from 117 Great Britain and America 6. In a “Far-Off Land”: B. Traven’s Mexican Stories 153 II. WORLDS IN THE STARRY SKIES 7. Nightmare and Utopia: Extraterrestrials from Galileo 183 to Goethe 8. Lessing’s Science: Exploring Life in the Universe 205 III. THE UNIVERSE WITHIN 9. A Saint with Blood on her Hands: Schiller’s Joan of Arc 239 10. The Curse of Good Deeds: Schiller’s William Tell 263 11. Revelation or Deceit? Last Words in Detective Novels 289 12. Genius and Insanity: Nietzsche’s Collapse as Seen from 319 Paraguay Acknowledgements 337 Selective Bibliography for Further Reading 339 Index 343 Engraving by F. Schönemann of Leipzig, frontispiece of the periodical Der Reisende Deutsche im Jahr 1744 (“The Travelling German in 1744”). Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Preface The essays assembled here were previously published but scattered in specialized scholarly journals and volumes of contributions by various authors where they could not find the wider audience that a collection like the present one may reach. They have now been arranged in a pattern of thematic coherence outlined in the introduction. Repetitions have been kept to the necessary minimum in order to avoid cluttering without sacrificing signals of communication from one text to the other. Most of these essays address aspects of themes that have been prominent in my scholarly writing for several years. They do so in a way that is more accessible as well as more succinct and more suggestive of further exploration than the elaborate examination of the wider reaches offered in my German-language books, which are mentioned where appropriate. The majority of the texts were either written in English or adapted from German versions and revised stylistically and otherwise for the present volume. Wherever the earlier versions did not provide English equivalents of German quotations, I have paraphrased or translated them, leaving the German text in place, or relegating it to a note, or eliminating it entirely, as readability or the significance of the original wording might warrant. Some of these texts started their life as lectures; I have weeded out most though not all traces of this genesis. Three of the essays (nos. 1, 7, and 8) were translated by colleagues: James van der Laan, Alexa Alfer, and Ritchie Robertson, respectively. I am greatly indebted to them for allowing me to recycle their work. I have introduced a few minor revisions with a view to modifying or clarifying points made, without quibbling about the translators’ choice of words. Their style of referencing was changed slightly to conform 2 Exploring the Interior to that of the rest of the essays. (British spelling was left untouched in the essays of Section II.) Unless stated otherwise, English versions of quotations are those of the translators. In none of the twelve texts was there any need for substantial changes in the light of recent scholarly publications. I am grateful to the publishers listed in the “Acknowledgements” for permission to reprint these essays. The frontispiece is used by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, the cover image by permission of Pusey Library, Harvard University. I am much indebted to Open Book Publishers for preparing the selective index with some help from me. I thank Harvard University for a printing subsidy from the Anne and Jim Rothenberg Fund for Humanities Research. Introduction: From the Interior of Continents to the Interior of the Mind The essays assembled here view literature and literary life in the cultural contexts that emerged after the waning of the Middle Ages and the rise of the intellectual emancipation that culminated in the European Enlightenment. Prominent among these contexts is what the Swiss historian Ulrich Im Hof called “the grand opening-up of the wide world.”1 This was the sea change that Edmund Burke envisioned in a much-quoted remark in his letter of June 9, 1777 to William Robertson, the author of a just-published History of America: “Now the great Map of Mankind is unrolld at once.”2 This observation is all the more remarkable in that it revealed a keen sense of what followed from it: the realization that “we possess at this time very great advantages towards the knowledge of human Nature.” The implication was that the distant lands on this map of the world — he ticked off China, Persia, Abyssinia, Tartary, Arabia, North America and New Zealand — were now being explored with a view to their indigenous populations. Of course, the Age of Discovery had begun to widen the horizon of Europeans two hundred and more years earlier, ever since Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus, when explorers were driven by the yen for precious metals, spices, and other luxury goods, by the urge to save souls, by the national 1 Ulrich Im Hof, Das Europa der Aufklärung (München, 1993), ch. 6: “Die große Öffnung in die weite Welt.” 2 The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas W. Copeland, III, ed. George H. Guttridge (Cambridge, 1961), 350–351. © Karl S. Guthke, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0126.13 4 Exploring the Interior ambition to plant flags on no-man’s-lands, or by the lure of adventure. (The first two essays in this collection focus on neglected aspects of that age.) However, by the second half of the eighteenth century, this period of world history was already drawing to its close, with the remaining blank spots on the map largely limited to the interior of the continents beyond Europe. What was dawning “now” was what oceanic historian John H. Parry described as the Second Age of Discovery.3 Its explorations of the interior, rather than the coastal regions more commonly frequented or taken over by traders, missionaries, planters, settlers, and empire-builders, continued well into the nineteenth century and beyond, with Alexander von Humboldt travelling in the Andean countries, Mungo Park along the Niger River, Carsten Niebuhr in Arabia, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and John Franklin in North America, Richard Burton and John Speke in search of the source of the Nile, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley in central Africa, Friedrich Wilhelm Leichardt in the outback of Australia, and Claude Lévy-Strauss in Brazil, to mention just a few of the many making their mark between Captain Cook’s voyages and Bruce Chatwin’s forays into Patagonia. Unlike the first Age of Discovery, this age was spurred on by the desire to explore the non-European continents with a view to the advancement of science: not only their natural history was to be studied but, most emphatically, the nature of their inhabitants, their cultures and beliefs — their “humanity”, in short, which had been acknowledged by the Pope as early as the sixteenth century.