- The Explorer in English Fiction Peter Knox-Shaw, M.A. (Cantab.) A Dissertation submitted for the Ph.D. degree at the University of Cape Town, I985 University of Cape Town The copyright of this thesis vests in the author. No quotation from it or information derived from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of the source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non- commercial research purposes only. Published by the University of Cape Town (UCT) in terms of the non-exclusive license granted to UCT by the author. University of Cape Town CONTENTS Preface iii Abstract iv I. The Explorer, and Views of Creation I II. Crusoe, Desert Isle Ventriloquist 45 III. Defoe's ~ilderness: The image of Africa in Captain Singleton 70 "DI. Melville's Happy Valley: Typee and its literary context 95 V. Captain Ahab and the Albatross: Moby Dick in a period context I28 VI. Conrad Dismantles Providence: Deserted idylls in An Outcast of the Islands 156 VII. The Eidden Man: Heart of Darkness, its context and aftermath I87 VIII. The Country of the Mind: Exploration as metaphor in Voss 224 IX. 'rhe Sacramental Wild: A Frinae of Leaves 250 Notes and References 272 BibliogTapby 3I3 Index 330 iii. Preface I should like to express my gratitude to Professor Haresnape who supervised this dissertation and supplied - even when pressed for time - encouragement, counsel and detailed advice. To the librarians and staff at Jagger Library, the South African Library, the British Museum, the Public Record Office, and the University Library of Cambridge my thanks are due for much patience and frequent help. My chief intellectual debts are acknowledged in the pages that follow. Since a number of footnotes have run to some length I have collected all notes and references together at the end of the text. In this, as well as in other respects, I have aimed to comply with the guidelines laid down by the M.H.R.A. Style Book. iv. Abstract Although there have been a number of critical works on the novel given over to topics such as adventure, colonization or the politics of the frontier, a comparative study of novels in which an encounter with unknown territory holds central importance has till now been lacking. My aim in this thesis is to analyse and relate a variety of texts which show representatives of a home culture in confrontation with terra incognita or unfamiliar peoples. There is, as it turns out, a strong family resemblance between the novels that fall into this category whether they belong, like Rohinson Crusoe, Coral Island or Lord of the Flies, to the "desert island" tradition where castaways have exploration thrust upon them or present, as in the case of Moby Dick, The Lost World or Voss, ventures deliberately undertaken. There are frequent indications, too, that many of the novelists in question are aware of working within a particular, subsidiary genre. This means, in sum, even when it comes to texts as culturally remote as, say, Captain Singleton and Heart of Darkness that there is firm ground for comparison. The emphasis of this study is, in consequence, historical as well as critical. In order to show that many conventions which are recurrent in the fiction inhere in the actual business of coming to grips with the unknown, I begin with a theoretical introduction illustrated chiefly from the writings of explorers. Travelogues reveal how v. large a part projection plays in every rendering of unvisited places. So much is imported that one might hypothesize, for the sake of a model, a single locality returning a stream of widely divergent images over the lapse of years. In effect it is possible to demonstrate a shift of cultural assumptions by juxtaposing, for example, a passage that tricks out a primeval forest in all the iconography of Eden with one written three centuries later in which - from essentially the same scene - the author paints a picture of Malthusian struggle and survival of the fittest. And since the explorer is not only inclined to embody his image of the natural man in the people he meets beyond the frontiers of his own culture, but is likely also to read his own emancipation from the constraints of polity in terms of a return to an underlying nature, the concern with genesis is one that recurs with particular persistence in texts dealing with exploration. With varying degrees of awareness novelists have responded, ever since Defoe, to the idea that the encounter with the unfamiliar mirrors the identity of the explorer. Their presentations of terra incognita register tbe crucial phases of social history - the institution of mercantilism, the rise and fall of empire - but generally in relation to psychological and metaphysical questions of a perennial kind. The nature of man is a theme that proves, indeed, remarkably tenacious in these works, for a reason Lawrence notes in Kangaroo: "There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul". Vi. After the introductory chapter I proceed chronologically with the four novelists who have contributed most, in my view, to the genre - Defoe, Melville, Conrad, Patrick White. In each case I deal principally with two texts: Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton; Typee, Moby Dick; An Outcast of the Islands, Heart of Darkness; Voss and A Fringe of Leaves. Wealth of reference is often a mark of literary stature, and in following these books any attentive reader is led from Genesis to Aboriginal myths of creation, from Hobbes to Rousseau and Darwin. Major works have a way, too, of declaring their genetic traits. Allusions to Rasselas and The Ancient Mariner, for instance, spell out Melville's glorious debts to diverse traditions, while his hybrid forms record the impact of a scientific spirit that did much to transform travel writing. I draw on accounts by explorers throughout, not only where immediate sources are concerned (Woodes Rogers, Stanley, Leichhardt, etc.), but so as to trace the correspondence between the non-fictional and novelistic realms. And although my comments on them tend to be brief, novels about exploration by writers other than the principal four come in for discussion when pertinent to the issues at hand: so Verne and Haggard, for example, provide a perspective to Conrad's treatment of recidivism in Heart of Darkness, while Coetzee and Brink supply comparisons with Patrick White's handling of the return to polity in A Fringe of Leaves (I976), a text even more fully receptive than Voss to the culture it penetrates. I The Explorer, and Views of Creation Not far from what he took to be the site of Eden, Columbus turned back. A fierce tide at the Orinoco mouth decided him against sailing up-river to look for Paradise, and to judge from his account of the scene the dangers he faced were real enough: And behind this current, there was another and another which all made a great roaring like that of the sea when it breaks and dashes against rooks ••• This was continuous, night and day, so that I believed that it would not be possible to go against the current, or to go forward owing to the shallows. And in the night, when it was already very late, being on the deck of the ship, I heard a very terrible roaring which came from the direction of the south towards the ship. And I stayeci to watcn, and I saw the sea 1:"rom west to east rising, like a hill as high as the ship, and still 1 it came towards me little by little. Columbus's reading of the situation was, however, far from simply a practical matter. What he saw from the deck of his ship proves to have been shaped by a mental image; and the instance is one among many in a venture which points, as a whole, to the force of the preconceived. The continent that rose out of the sea not only answered his dream of finding land far to the west but continued to be seen through it. So it was that America remained the eastern seaboard of Asia, and in consequence the region of Paradise also. Although a densely tangled skein of reference, 2. ranging from the Apocr~ha to Imago Mundi, coloured Columbus's view of the ~ew iorld, the influences informing his particular impression of the Orinoco can be pin-pointed by ~ing no further afield than to two books which accompanied him on his voyages, 2 the Bible and Mandeville's Travels. The Book of Genesis spoke of four rivers flowing out of Eden, the third of which moved eastward through Asia (2:14); and Mandeville who situated his paradys terres+,re "towards the est at the begynnynge of the erthe", indeed so far east as to occupy the opposite side of the globe, drew his tall story to a close with a description of the torrents that barred its anproach: _:o man that is r:iortelle ne may not approchen to that Paradys ••• be the ryueres may no man go, for the water renneth so rudely and so scharply because that it cometh doun so outrageously from the high places abouen that it renneth in so grate wawes that no schipp may not rowe ne seyle agenes it. And the water roreth so and makett so huge r..oyse ,3.nd so gret tempest that no man may here other in tte schipp, though he cryede with alle the craft that he cowde in the hieste voys that he myghte. '.,lany grete lordes han assayed with gret wille many tymes for to passen be tho ryueres toward Parady3 with fulle grate companyes, but thei myght not speden in hire viage ••• So that no mortelle man may approche to that place withouten specyalle grace of God.