Framing 'India': The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture 0804739706, 9780804739702

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Lavery Library St. John Fisher College Rochester, New York

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Colonial

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SHANKAR

Imaginary

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RAMAN

Stanford University Press Stanford, California 2002

Culture

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

© 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Raman, Shankar. Framing ‘India’ : the colonial imaginary in early modern culture / Shankar Raman.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8047-3970-6 (alk. paper) 1. India—In literature.

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CoNTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

ix

xi

INTRODUCTION: LOOKING FOR “INDIA”

Part

One

The

Tue Amsicuous

1

Jimits of the ‘World

Cosmos: Epic AND VOYAGE IN

Luis Vaz pe Camégs’s ‘Os Lusfapas’ RE-VIEWING THE WoRLD:

CARTOGRAPHY

PRODUCTION OF COLONIALIST SPACE

Part Two

29 AND THE

89

Staging the €ast

Imacinary IsLanps: THE CoLoNIAL FANTASIES OF JOHN FLeTCHER’s “THE IsLAND PRINCESS’ 155 “TRADE... LIKE BLOOD SHOULD CIRCULARLY FLOW”:

CoLontAL ComPETITION IN JOHN Drypen’s ‘AMBOYNA’ Part

Three

Upstaging

the

Gast

INDIAN Boys AND BuskIN’D AMAZONS:

[HE OEDIPAL

ExcHances oF ‘A Mipsummer Nicut’s DREAM’ AFTERWORD:

Notes

293

Bibliography Index

REAL AND IMAGINED INDIAS

377

353

280

239

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Framing “India”’s journey to publication has been a long, and often arduous, one. With each version of the manuscript, the list of people upon whose support and generosity I have relied has grown. It is indeed a pleasure at last to have the opportunity to thank them—even if the expression of gratitude is bound to fall short of what is owed. To those whose names I have not had the space to record, my silent thanks. This book had its inception in a doctoral dissertation, most ably and generously directed by Stephen Orgel. David Riggs, Patricia Parker, Kate

McLuskie, Lowell Gallagher, Jyotsna Singh, Jim Siemon, and Akhil Gupta were patient and careful readers, unstinting of time and energy. (Indeed, af-

ter having read so many versions, David and Patricia must be almost as

heartily relieved as I am to see the book in print.) My colleagues and friends at MIT, too, have helped in no small measure:

Diana Henderson,

Mary

Fuller, Pete Donaldson, Ruth Perry, and Wyn Kelley have enriched this book through discussion, comments, and suggestions. In particular, Diana's careful

readings of the manuscript to improve both its argument and its readability have contributed enormously. (If the prose sometimes remains difficult or unwieldy, it is not for want of her efforts.) My gratitude also extends to those who reviewed the manuscript—of those, I can name Ania Loomba—whose

fair yet exacting comments lent this book its final shape; to Helen Tartar, Norris Pope, and Santhosh Daniel of Stanford University Press for making it a reality; and to Joyce Henderson for her eagle eye and almost fanatical devotion to the cause. The research culminating in Framing “India” has received generous support, both financial and intellectual, from numerous institutions. Early in the project, grants from the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and x1

Acknowledgments

Xi

the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University enabled me to complete much of the preliminary research. Later, a productive research affiliation with the Literatur und Anthropologie Sonderforschungsbereich at the Universitat

Konstanz in Germany provided a congenial and stimulating environment to bring the book nearly to conclusion. I am especially grateful to Professors Aleida Assmann, Gerhard von Graevenitz, and Renate Lachmann, and to fellow travelers at Konstanz (especially Wolfgang Struck, Neil Roughley, and

Miltos Pechlivanos) for advice and animated discussions. There are many others without whose friendship and inspiration the difficult moments along the way could not have been negotiated. In the book’s early incarnations, Gillian Ramchand helped me in more ways than I can detail. Subsequently, Miriam Butt, Jennifer Cole, Tracy King, Jehanbux Edulbehram, my sister Tara and nephew Mihir, Janice Ellertsen, Julie Saun-

ders, and Briony Keith provided encouragement and aid—from returning library books to running small errands to talking about life, the universe,

and everything else.

John Dryden begins the dedicatory preface of his Amboyna by spelling out the exchange within which his own dedication is perforce caught. All acknowledgments of gratitude, Dryden says, “bear the face of payment.” But the “face” conceals—and this is Dryden's point—the unpayability of the specific debt, the impossibility of converting it into an equivalent. If Dry-

den responds to the paradox of gratitude by spelling out its generally invisible conditions (and thus translating the acknowledgment of unpayability into his payment), as a literary critic I can do no better than cite Dryden in order to make his solution also my own.

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Chapter

One

INTRODUCTION:

LOOKING FOR “INDIA”

The history of European colonialism is a history of silences. Just as the casual phrase “the New World” silences the ancient worlds of native “American” populations, so too the history of the New World assigns to its graveyard the histories of other worlds. In so doing, this history mistakes itself,

and it is therefore fitting that it originated in a mistake. Columbus believed,

after all, that the land he had sailed to was India. Although colonialism in the early modern era has undoubtedly been shaped by his (mis-)discovery, the

significance of that misattribution tends to be passed over in silence. Following in the wake of Columbus's accident, literary critical studies of colonialism and its effects continue to focus on the discovery and conquest of the Americas. Often lost among their proliferations is what was not found: India. Yet the figures of India and the East that took shape in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not only directed the outward expansion of Europe but played a crucial role in its emergence. Nor has the legacy of that expansion passed away with Europe's empires, as ongoing conflicts in Indonesia and social ills in other former colonies have made all too clear. Consequently, preoccupation with that single monumental voyage westward falsely

deflects attention from both the early history of encounters in the eastern hemisphere and the ways in which complex images of India functioned to effect the formation of “West” and “East.” One might say that, rather than

exposing Columbus's mistake, such an exclusive focus on his voyage perpetuates it. This book seeks to discover India anew. In pursuing this goal, however, one must be wary of over-hastily granting “India” the status of a stable, already-given object defined by the geo-

INTRODUCTION

G2

graphical boundaries that we see when we turn our eyes to a modern map. Let us set aside the fact that the independent nation of that name only came into existence on August 15, 1947; that even’since then its putative boundaries have remained unstable; that the nation today precariously holds together al-

most a billion people divided and subdivided along linguistic, ethnic, religious, sectarian, legal, class, and gender lines. Even if one were to bracket all

these considerations and hold fast to the ostensible fact of a defining cartographic demarcation, a quick glance at a Renaissance map suggests that an-

swering the simple question “Where is India?” presupposes a later relation to the world that was only then beginning to emerge. Where exactly was India? John Fletcher's 1620-21 drama The Island Princess, to which a chapter of this book is devoted, begins by telling us that its

“scene” is “India.” Yet the play unfolds in two Moluccan islands in presentday Indonesia, Ternate and Tidore. What was conceptually designated by “India” in the early modern era therefore does not coincide with the political boundaries of the modern nation. The differing geographical regions described in colonial documents reflect, rather, competing European claims: In-

dia for the English East India Company was not in practice equivalent to the place referred to by the Portuguese Estado da India. Although certainly indicating from European antiquity onward a loosely defined region of Asia somewhere between the Levant and China, “India” equally marked the site of a series of allegorical operations, which impressed upon an ill-defined space an

imagined content. These endowed it with a reality complexly distanced from and yet related to actual engagements with lands and peoples (in) differently indexed by the name. There was, to adapt Gertrude Stein's famous phrase, no “there” there. | Like Columbus, Framing “India” reaches out towards the absent presences of “India” and the “East.” But rather than assume that what is meant by these signifiers is simply and stably there, I am interested in how “India” and the “East” were made productive (in all senses of the word) for the nation states of early modern Europe. Framing “India” does not therefore offer a narrowly and systematically archival account of the ways in which, for instance, trade with the East or particular Indian social formations were represented in contemporary historical documents. Although it draws on such representations, it endeavors primarily to identify some of the key historical frames shaping early modern encounters with “India” and the “East.” It is therefore

3

Looking for “India”

not about India per se but about European discursive formations through whose framing “India” and the “East” emerged as objects of colonial knowledge and practice. The book thereby reveals what the subtitle calls a “colonial imaginary”: enmeshed habits of thought and modes of behavior that have asymmetrically shaped (and continue to shape) the lives and histories of people and places on different sides of the globe. Framing “India” concerns itself, further, with how such a colonial imaginary became real, organizing the perception of the “real” India (whatever that was) and influencing the ways in which diverse geographical regions were actually encountered or addressed. Europe's journeying eastward seemed both new and not new. As Jerry Brotton has pertinently observed, since cultural encounters with the East “had been ongoing for centuries before the discovery of America,” the narratives surrounding the New World “resonated within the western imagination in a manner disproportionate to its apparent impact on the culture of early modern Europe.”! By not simply pitting those ongoing eastern encounters against the new American experience, Framing “India” aims at a more textured understanding of the different, interconnected, and interdependent modes

through which colonial domination came to be exercised and represented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It shows how diverse modes of thought, representation, and behavior—often quite removed at first glance

from the particulars of European colonial needs—were combined and redirected in unexpected, contradictory ways within the eastern colonial sphere, serving not only to establish a particular distribution of power and authority, but also to generate new forms of conceiving, seeing, and acting. The book’s concern with larger framing structures is balanced by an interest in literature and literary texts.” Like all cultural documents, literary

texts bear the impress of the material world from which they originate; but

they also reshape the elements upon which they draw. Reading them closely enables one both to identify these elements and to think through the significance of their combination. In this sense, imaginative literature provides an ideal place to investigate forms of mediation among different planes of analysis. Framing “India” therefore juxtaposes conceptual histories—that of cosmology, for instance—with the specific practices and literary representa-

tions (for example, of colonial voyaging) that make use of and refer to these histories. The intent is to articulate disjunctions and connections among

INTRODUCTION

4

these, and to make visible their consequences. To this end, each chapter brings discourses of different fields to bear upon a text (or set of texts) in order to establish those constellations through which its “meaning”—and the dependence of that “meaning” upon colonialism—emerges. The selection of texts here traces a twofold path. Most obviously, they have been chosen because of their relevance to an understanding of “India” and the “East” in early modern culture. Not only do they reflect real distinctions among different forms of colonialism in different domains, but they refer back to and emerge from shared and relatively autonomous historical conditions prevailing in early modern Europe.” Yet, even as the texts examined here focus on colonial activity eastwards, they also deflect attention away from the East, away from the place with whose representation they are ostensibly concerned. To comprehend the rationale that in each case motivates and simultaneously elides the focus on the East, I have found it necessary to conduct a broader inquiry concerning the cultural place and historical consequences of colonial activity in the East. Social and cultural conditions goyerning the emergence of the literary text always mediate and shape the uses to which the figures of “India” and the “East” are put. Each text allows access to the particular exigencies to which it responds, and lets us see how “India” and the “East” were mobilized to address anxieties not always restricted to the colonial sphere. The contribution of Framing “India” thus lies, on the

one hand, in the particular conceptual and material constellations it reveals, and, on the other, in the textual readings themselves, in the resurrection of

noncanonical texts (John Fletcher's The Island Princess and John Dryden's Amboyna) and the reexamination of canonical ones (Luis Vaz de Camées’s Os Lusiadas and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream).

Competing Frames

The word colonialism inevitably tends to reify what is in fact a varied, internally differentiated, and divided set of practices. Indeed, even narrowing our scope to early modern Europe still requires us to acknowledge the existence of certain kinds of eastern imperialism loosely assimilated under the rubric of colonialism.* The very formation of western Europe occurred, Marc Bloch

points out, at a moment when it faced a triple threat: “[Europe] was attacked from three sides at once: in the south by the devotees of Islam, Arabs or their

5

Looking for “India”

Arabized subjects; in the east by the Hungarians; and in the North by Scan-

dinavians.” The first of these incursions was especially significant. Until the twelfth century, the Moslem and Byzantine world “exercised a true economic hegemony over the West: the only gold coinage still circulating in... Europe came from Greek or Arab mints.’® European colonialism (and, to an extent, “Europe” itself) grew out of a perceived need to defend against various Islamic powers and to recover lands ceded in the preceding centuries. Hence, the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by Portugal and Castile fused into a move outward, first into North Africa and later into sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, to snatch further territory from the Arab colonizers. The emergence of Europe and the establishment of its internal national boundaries were “simultaneous with a transgression of those boundaries.”® The term colonialism is used here as a shorthand for the various discourses and practices generated by the European colonial enterprises—which partook of a shared set of epistemic assumptions and orientations. The particular relationships among colonial centers and colonized peripheries that formed from the sixteenth century onward seem peculiar to European expansionism. The colonized lands and people were not directly incorporated into the colonial empire—as was largely true of even Turkish and Moorish occupations. Rather, in various forms, relationships of difference were established: production in the peripheries was reconfigured and redirected for and towards geographically distant imperial centers.’ Such relationships were not the inevitable result of being able to exercise

domination. As the work of Janet Abu-Lughod, Joseph Needham, and others makes clear, even as late as the fifteenth century European superiority was by no means an uncontested fact, insofar as the civilizations of China and South Asia seemed equally well if not better placed to extend their dominions.® And yet apparently none of these civilizations showed signs of wishing to do so. Hence, even Europe's inaugural gestures to legitimate usurpation have a different feel. For Francis Drake, cruising up the west coast of America with a minuscule fleet, it seemed self-evident that any landing upon the continent must be accompanied by a “legal” appropriation, by the right to conquer on behalf of his mother country: “|W Jherefore in the name, and to the use of her Majestie, he tooke the scepter, crowne, and dignitie of the said Countrey into his hands, wishing that the riches and treasure thereof might so conveniently be transported to the inriching of her kingdom at

INTRODUCTION

6

home.”? Consider, as its converse, the heavily armed Chinese fleet of Zheng

He (1371-1435), grand eunuch and admiral in the early Ming dynasty. Zheng He sailed the considerable distance from Nanjing to the Straits of Hormuz between 1431 and 1433 in order simply to display power, to show the superiority of China embodied as the unexercised potential for conquest. The fleet stopped briefly at some Asian ports to trade peaceably with the native merchants before returning home.'° There were no battles fought, no claims staked. Zheng He displays the self-sufficiency of Chinese might without immediately moving to exercise it as material domination. To understand the cultural frames through which “India” and the “East” were represented requires suspending the assumption that Renaissance expansionism resulted inevitably from an innate European superiority.'’ There is no doubt that European technological prowess, for instance, played an important role—especially in Africa and the Americas—in consolidating colonial domination. But a teleological reading based on that primacy cannot sufficiently describe the diversity of early modern colonial enterprises, and certainly fails to come to grips with how the East was won. At best, such a reading deflects one’s gaze from understanding the circumstances under which technology shifted from merely being available to actually being used. At worst, it uncritically universalizes culturally specific structures of Enlightenment thought that naturalize the idea of technological advancement. Notions of progress, of rationality and science, of modernization and democracy, are thereby granted a priori validity as universal principles. European colonialism then reduces to either a necessary evil (bringing backward parts of the world “up to date”)!? or an epiphenomenon in the grand march of Reason. Without denying their power, or even one’s own unavoidable complicity with them, such narratives should be distrusted. We have to explore the possibility that these ostensibly universal frameworks in part depended upon, and to a lesser or greater degree perpetuated, colonial domination. And indeed early modern documents supply ample grounds for such suspicion. For instance, not only the naming but even the apparently neutral cartographic representation of Fletcher's “India,” the so-called Spice Islands or the Moluccas, is shot through with colonial politics. For Europeans, the location of these islands had always been problematic: although their geographical place in the world was no doubt stable, their representational location stubbornly refused to accord with that physical immobility. In 1527,

oF

Looking for “India”

Robert Thorne, a merchant in Seville, wrote to “Doctour Ley, Lord ambas-

sadour for King Henry the eight,” about Spain's and Portugal's colonial possessions and of “the way to the Moluccaes by the North.” His letter, which includes a world map depicting newly discovered connections between Europe and the rest of the world, discusses quite extensively the cartographical

problem of figuring out where places are: And your Lordship must understand that this Card, though little, conteineth the universall whole world betwixt two collaterall lines, the one in

the Occidentall part descendeth perpendicular upon the 175 degree, & the

other in the Orientall on the 170 degree. ... And that which is without the two said transversall lines, is only to shew how the Orientall part is joyned with the Occident, and Occident with Orient.’

Following an extended exposition on how to read his “Card,” Thorne turns to the dispute over “Spiceries of the [Spanish] Emperour [upon which the Portingals and he be at variance” in order to settle the question of possession (albeit with an eye towards the English interests in that region). The problem of deciding possession was a thorny one because the famous Treaty of Tor-

desillas (1494), which had divided the “discovered” world into a Spanish and a Portuguese half, rested upon a notion of longitude that could not be accu-

rately quantified. The treaty had provisionally allocated Portugal and Castile their respective spheres of territorial influence, drawing a line of demarcation

370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. However, the agreement only postponed an inevitable diplomatic dispute regarding where the line should fall in the eastern hemisphere, were it to be drawn right around the globe.'* Science at the time was not equal to the task. Although latitude could be calculated reasonably accurately, the discovery of the appropriate way of computing longitude lay in the future. As Thorne puts it, “in measuring, all the Cosmographers of both partes... cannot give certaine order to measure of the longitude of the worlde, as they doe of the latitude” (225). As a result, the two groups of “Cosmographers and Pilots coulde not

agree in the situation of the sayde Islandes (for the Portingals set them all

within their 180 degrees, and the Spaniards set them all without)...” (225). Where these islands are and to whom they belong remains undecidable: “So none can verely tell which hath the best reason” (227). And yet, having spent well over two pages establishing the uncertainty,

INTRODUCTION

8

Thorne summarily dismisses the problem in a couple of lines by supporting (arbitrarily, but in the name of reason) the Spanish claim: But without doubt (by all conjectures of reason) the sayd Islands fall all without the limitation of Portingall, and pertaine to Spaine, as it appear-

eth by the most part of all Cards made by the Portingals, save those they

have falsified of late purposely. (227)

Falsification there had indeed been, but the charge of having distorted the

world’s shape ought rather to have been laid at Castile’s door. In April 1524, three years before Thorne’s account, the two Iberian powers had convened for the second time to thrash out anew the question of the ownership of the Moluccas. The Portuguese claimed that the islands lay 137 degrees east of the dividing line in the Cape Verdes, putting them squarely in their domain. The Spanish, on the other hand, massively exaggerating the extent of the Indian Ocean, insisted that the islands lay 183 degrees east, which would place them (just barely) in that part of the world to which the Castilians laid claim. Neither side was able to make its case decisively, and the resolution was postponed for another five years. After dispatching numerous futile Spanish voyages in the interim to annex the Spice Islands forcibly, Charles V finally bowed

to the Portuguese in return for a compensation of 350,000 gold ducats—albeit reserving the right to reclaim the islands (upon return of the money)

were new geographical evidence to support his claim. The resulting 1529 Treaty of Saragossa drew a new demarcation line seventeen degrees east of the islands, thereby ceding them to the Portuguese King Joao III. :

A draft of the 1529 agreement reveals its dependence upon cartographical representation and navigational practice: In order that it may be known where the said line falls, a model map shall at once be made on which the said line shall be drawn in the manner aforesaid, and it will thus be agreed to as a declaration of the point and place through which the line passes. This map shall be signed by the said lord Emperor and King of Castile, and by the said lord King of Portugal, and sealed with their seals. In the same manner, and in accordance with the

said model map, the said line shall be drawn on all the navigation charts whereby the subjects and the natives of the kingdoms... shall navigate. ... When the map has thus been made, the said lord Emperor and King of Castile and the said lord and King of Portugal shall sign it with their

9

Looking for “India”

names, and shall order it to be sealed with the seal of their arms; and the

said marine charts shall be made from it as aforesaid, in order that subjects and natives of the said lord kings may navigate by them so long as the said lord King of Castile shall not redeem and buy back the said right."°

For the colonial powers, the Spice Islands become real through the representation of space. The treaty assumes that applying the royal seals to the map determines the question of power and ownership. Only new geographical evidence produced by Spain can affect the specific colonial claim to these lands, and the treaty presents their possible “redemption” as the mercantile exchange of an already objectified and commodified territory. Of the claims by other “subjects and natives” already tilling the land, cultivating the spices over which the European powers squabble, there is, of course, no mention.

As this anecdote suggests, far from being a neutral description of where places are, cartographic representation in the early modern period is implicated from the outset in the assumption that “discovered” lands (and peoples) are objects of legal possession, automatically subject to alien legal discourses and practices. Indeed, Robert Thorne’s awkward defense of the Spanish claim touches equally upon England's colonial interests. As a merchant resident in Seville, he sees a potential trade.advantage in furthering the

privileges English traders enjoyed in Spain, even if this meant interloping on the Portuguese claim. But the potential gains from cartographic manipulation are perhaps greater still. The cartographical location of this dreamedof space, the utopia of Fletcher's “India,’ might well be uncertain, but such an uncertainty had its uses. Placelessness could be utilized to call into question the possession of that space, and ultimately to reinscribe its possession by another. In the case of the Moluccas—then under Portuguese control— it was arguably also in the English interest to assign their legal possession to a nation that did not effectively possess them, so that the claim could subsequently be challenged. Appeals to reason and science, when viewed as part of this overwrought political context, no longer appear disinterested. The complex links between colonial discovery and possession—and between reason and self-interest—may be illustrated by another example, educed this time from the western arm of the English imperial project. Re-

sponding in 1580 to Spanish complaints regarding English encroachment in the “Indies” (Americas), Queen Elizabeth bluntly told the Spanish ambas-

sador that

INTRODUCTION

10

[s]he understood not why her or any other Princes Subjects should be debarred from the Indies, which she could not perswade herself that the

Spaniard had any just title to by the Bishop of Rome's donation, . .. nor yet by any other Claim, than as they had touched here and there upon the Coasts, built Cottages and given Names

to a River or a Cape: which

things cannot entitle them to a Propriety... this imaginary Propriety, cannot hinder other Princes from trading to those Countreys, and... from

transporting Colonies into those parts thereof where the Spaniards inhabit not (forasmuch as Prescription without Possession is little worth)."®

By labeling it “imaginary,” Elizabeth nullifies Spanish “propriety” (both what is proper or legitimate and what is owned). The Spanish territorial claim is empty because it cannot be backed by a demonstration of real occupation of the land. As John Juricek has argued, Elizabeth’s statement points to the

emergence in the Renaissance of two—not entirely congruent—legal codes governing territorial acquisition: possession by virtue of discovery (the preemptive code) and effective possession (the dominative code).'” The former represented discovery as an instantaneous act appropriating the entirety of the discovered land—tregardless of its size—upon enactment of the proper symbolic rites of possession. The dominative code, by contrast, refused to

separate such “prescription” from effective possession, requiring some form of real occupation—such as colonies, forts, or recognition from natives—to undergird the territorial claim. The weakness of the Spanish “title” derives, in Elizabeth's argument, not from cartographic instability but from the lack of an effective colonial presence. In a sense, she renders the Spanish “Indies” legally unowned (“which things cannot entitle them to a Propriety” )—and hence fair pickings for all comers. The notion of “voluntary” native compliance as a legal basis for effective possession informs Sir Francis Drake’s counterclaim to the American territory of “New Albion” on Queen Elizabeth’s behalf. He interprets the gestures of native inhabitants (which apparently included setting a crown upon his head and placing chains around his neck) as sufficient indication of their desire to abdicate sovereignty: . When they had satisfied themselves, they made signes to our General to sit downe, to whom the King, and divers others made several orations, or rather supplications, that he would take their province & kingdome into

ll

Looking for “India”

his hand, and become their king, making signes that they would resigne to him their right and title of the whole land, and become his subjects.

Although Drake's recognition of the inhabitants’ agency seems to contrast with the Spanish claims based more exclusively on discovery, in fact he skillfully merges the dominative code with a preemptive one. Without investigating any further the geographical extent of his new dominion, he simply sets up, as proof of Elizabeth’s entitlement, “a plate, nailed upon a faire great poste, whereupon was ingraven her Majesties name, the day and yeere of our arrival there, with the free giving up of the province and people into her Majesties hands, together with her highnes picture and armes, in a peece of

sixe pence of currant English money under the plate, where under was also written the name of our Generall.”!® On the basis of a culturally predetermined reading of native wishes—note the curious slippage from “orations” to “supplications” above—Drake symbolically produces the discovered land within the legal codes of Renaissance Europe as the colonial space of “New Albion.” His act of recognition is thus simultaneously an act of redefinition and appropriation. This kind of legalized usurpation was subsequently carried over into cartographic representations of the Americas to provide visible proof of England's claim to what is today California.

Theoretical Frames As is perhaps fitting for a book on early modern colonialism, Framing “India” syncretically combines different—and indeed not always compatible—theoretical perspectives, playing them off against one another in the attempt to bring into view (and be commensurate with) its objects of inquiry. In the field of early modern studies, a renewed and emphatic historicism bearing the influence of post-structural theory now stresses local knowledges and the materiality of history, generally rejecting the grands récits of earlier generations for micrological studies of historical phenomena. This work situates itself between these two methodological end points. In particular, it looks at how theoretical frameworks relate to the historical conditions in which they emerge and, conversely, at how ideas shape concrete representations and reality, having material effects.

The most productive engagement with this dynamic in recent years seems

INTRODUCTION

12

to me Hans Blumenberg’s persuasive rethinking of Begriffsgeschichte, the philosophical genre usually termed intellectual history or history of ideas. In “Observations on Metaphors,” Blumenberg draws.attention to the tension inWest-

ern thought between, on the one hand, a still-dominant Cartesian intellectual

tradition emphasizing the possibility of a clear, systematic, and unambiguous understanding of the world through the concept, and, on the other, a histor-

ically oriented philosophy dependent upon sources and evidence lacking the formal clarity of concepts. To address the implied dualism between models of the world (Weltmodell’) and the existential world (Lebenswelt), Blumenberg proffers the need for a “metaphorology,’ a mode of excavation capable of bridging the gap between theoretical concepts and the lived, historical world in

which concepts are formed and used." Blumenberg’s earliest writings on metaphorology uncover a substructure of conceptual thinking he calls “absolute metaphors,” figures that both shape concepts from within and invisibly establish their limits. These paradigmatic representations (such as light as a metaphor for truth or the sea voyage as a metaphor for life) provide pragmatic guides for behavior and thought, “lend[ing] structure to a world, represent{ ing] a reality that can never be experienced or seen as a whole.’”” To cite Blumenberg, “absolute metaphors ‘answer’ those ostensibly naive, essentially unanswerable questions, whose relevance lies simply in the fact that they cannot be eliminated because we do not pose them, but rather find them already posed in the existential world |Daseinsgrund |.’*! Tracing these “answers” illuminates what evades the concept but upon which concept formation (necessarily) depends. Hence, in his subsequent writings, metaphorology comes to represent a special case of an overarching theory of “unconceptuality” or “non-conceptuality” (Unbegrifflichkeit). The task of metaphorology is not simply to extend conceptual understanding of the world, but rather to relate concepts back to the historical processes

underlying their formation. Although not achieving the clarity and precision demanded of concepts, the genetic structures of metaphors ultimately enable the recognition that such unambiguity itself signals a lack, an impoverishment with regard to the imaginative background and guiding principles of lived existence.”” Even this brief résumé of the aims of metaphorology reveals perhaps unexpected consonances with colonial or postcolonial studies. Like the field of absolute metaphors in relation to concepts, colonialism occupies diffuse

3

Looking for “India”

and hard-to-define spaces that abut, surround, and inhere in the dominant

histories of European civilization. These narratives tend to posit themselves as closed and self-sufficient, as if their “truth” could be written indepen-

dently of European colonial interaction and domination. As with Columbus’s voyage to “India,” however, the West misunderstands itself to the degree that it overlooks what it discovered. To put the case polemically, postulating

the European world as a closed system that can be understood without more than a passing reference to those historical relationships that have most profoundly shaped the identities of both “West” and “East” over the last 500 years reifies and promulgates precisely those relationships.” In looking “East,” I am not advocating a return to some imagined precolonial paradise. Colonialism has so radically altered the lives of people across the globe that no such return is possible (and neither would it necessarily be desirable). One cannot simply break with ways of seeing, speaking, and representing that developed in tandem with the expansion of Europe and of Western civilization. Along with deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism, metaphorology is useful for the continuing task of thinking about the uses and limits of in-

herited conceptual frames. It enables us to question dominant modes of representation and to expose the ways in which their closure expresses an ideological force linked to the lived histories and existential forms from which they emerged.” Like the ineliminable questions that absolute metaphors “answer,’ colonialism both informs and deforms dominant paradigms of thought

and behavior. This brief description of metaphorology may prompt the question of whether it affords insights beyond those made available by deconstruction. In this regard, metaphorology’s strength lies in its uncompromising focus on historical conditions of possibility. For Blumenberg the conceptual aporias uncovered through absolute metaphors are never narrowly logical or structural; rather, they express historically specific connections between concept formation and the lived or existential world. Thus, absolute metaphors necessarily also imply an anthropological and ethical dimension: a pre- or nonconceptual sense of self and world, of what it means to exist in time, to en-

dure, to be human. Even though metaphorology shares with deconstruction a concern with how what is excluded persists in what takes shape through that exclusion, its emphasis on the historical functions of metaphors further reveals what is at stake in their use (and abuse), what kinds of anxieties and

INTRODUCTION

14

cultural pressures they express, and which logical aporias become consequential in a given historical moment. For instance, I argue that from antiquity

onwards “India” functioned as an important boundary through and against which Christian Europe constructed distinctive forms of identity and belief. Such a claim would seem to follow almost directly from a deconstructive reading in which boundaries “always already” mark the ideological separation of an “inside” from an “outside,” both establishing and confounding the opposition of within and without.”* Although compatible with this argument, metaphorology requires the further recognition that the logical possibilities indexed by a figure need not be congruent with what is historically possible. As we shall see, the figure of “India” does not simply mark an always present structural fault line. It only becomes historically effective in relation to specific transformations of medieval notions of selfhood and world. By bringing the boundary, so to speak, inside, India’s “discovery” in the early modern era impelled a radical reconfiguration of self and world, triggering a different understanding of the human subject in terms of an assertion of self against the world. At the same time, the conditions enabling this selfassertion also produced (and concealed) other consequential discontinuities,

specifically those separating the newfound Western subject from the colonial others it “discovered.” The peculiarity of the European equation of discovery with colonial possession needs to be understood in terms of the peculiarity of Europe itself. The opening section of the book, “The Limits of the World,” examines this connection. It relates the process of European “discovery” to theological, institutional, and practical structures of late medievalism, which not only

constituted colonialism’s conditions of possibility, but also regulated its effects and shaped its characteristic relations of domination.° This section brings out the significance of “India” by examining intersecting aspects of two absolute metaphors that organize and orient the early modern European world: the cosmos and the voyage. From antiquity through the late medieval period the cosmos provided a powerful metaphor for locating the human subject in relation both to divinity and the material world, taking up numerous different (and often conflicting) significations: It named the totality of all that existed; it provided an astronomical model for the celestial world; it functioned as a theologized symbol of order and perfection; it provided reassurance about the human

15

Looking for “India”

being’s place in and suitedness for the world. The range of “answers” this paradigmatic figure provided made it a vital source upon which the classical epic and its early modern successors drew to develop distinctive notions of subjecthood and reality. My reading of the Portuguese national epic, Os Lu-

siadas, shows how Camées’s grandiose account of Vasco da Gama’s inaugural voyage to “India” attempts to harness the theologically weighted metaphor of the cosmos to legitimize Portugal and its colonial project. However, the material and conceptual crises of late feudalism had eroded the classical cosmos as an explanatory model. Thus, Os Lusfadas also exposes—unwittingly —the extent to which the inherited understanding of the cosmos had become incoherent, vitiating its function as a necessary image of stability and/

or divine dispensation. At this historical juncture, a new importance accrues to the metaphor of the voyage, and particularly to the fateful voyage to “India.” The early colonial voyages were responsible in large measure for undermining the figure of the cosmos in that they revealed the vast difference between the world as the ancients had known it and the world that was. In producing a knowledge that the ancients had not possessed, the voyages expressed a practical transformation of the relationship between human subject and world. As a consequence, the metaphor of the voyage came to represent a reconfigured understanding of the subject as an active producer of truth and knowledge. The unresolved contradiction between the different forms of being-in-theworld that the (epic) cosmos and the voyage embodied shapes Camées's colonial representation. And the tension between these figures equally governs the changing function of “India” in the early modern period. As the name for both physical and metaphysical limits to the European world, “India”

comes to mark the boundary between the epistemological frames indexed by “cosmos” and “voyage.” The vexed relationship between metaphysical and physical limits, cos-

mology and geography, yields the point of departure for the succeeding chapter, “Re-viewing the World: Early Modern Cartography and the Production of Colonialist Space.” Here the astronomical aspect of the cosmic metaphor becomes central: its particular implications regarding scientific knowledge of the world. By deriving man’s metaphysical position from his ability to produce true, verifiable knowledge about the physical cosmos, Copernican as-

tronomy resolves received tensions 1n a manner that has profound conse-

INTRODUCTION

16

quences for colonial history. I coordinate three primary strands of new activity—the Renaissance rediscovery of Ptolemaic geometry, the astronomical innovations of Copernicus, and the empirical practice of voyaging—to argue for the emergence of, on the one hand, a changed understanding of space and, on the other, a viewer, Western man, adequate to that space. The socalled portolan charts—maps drawn by sailors of the period to navigate over relatively short distances, generally in and around the Mediterranean and beyond—constitute a semi-autonomous empirical practice that emphasizes the material activities of the human agents who attempt to control geographical space. Initially designed to meet the local needs of sailors and navigators,

these charts take on greater significance upon being integrated with the new conceptualization of space. They provide the first step through which that reconceptualization is materially instantiated, thereby realizing the abstract subject of Ptolemaic geometry and Copernican astronomy as the actual participants in the voyages of discovery. Out of this historical conjuncture comes a new figure: the abstract, geometrized spatial grid, itself allied with an understanding of Western reason as

the universally valid form of rationality. Against the background of an ostensibly neutral and homogeneous space, “India” and the “East” take shape as places, as geographical regions “produced” by concrete practices in accordance with specific needs. But this transformation is predicated from the outset upon a hierarchical relation between discoverer and discovered. Thus, early modern cartography also articulates colonial domination, strengthening a

crucial opposition between an active colonial rationality and a passive colonized non-rationality. The spatial grid is the doubled figure for this operation: emerging historically out of colonial practice, it covers up its genealogy by presenting space itself as objective, neutral, and homogeneous. Through their cartographical representation, “India” and the “East” become “real,” visible,

and thereby ultimately controllable. In that they can be mapped, they become potentially subject to those with the power to map the physical world. Actual encounters with the lands and people of the eastern hemisphere certainly render India and the East more tangible. “Staging the East,” the second section of this book, concerns itself with how these specific Indias become imaginative sites for performing and shaping different European colonial identities. For after all, the putative homogeneity of the “Western subject” (sketched in the Opening section) was from the outset an alibi for

17

Looking for “India”

its fractured formation. Riven along lines of statehood, class, gender, and religion, colonialism in the early modern era cannot ultimately be treated as

a monolithic entity. The internal divisions come to the surface in conflicts over specific eastern territories.

Moving away from general conditions, “Staging the East” focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English colonial activity. Its two chapters investigate the multiple and contradictory formation of English colonialism in the lands of the East and draw out, in a dialectical countermovement, its corresponding construction of colonized subjects and their worlds. The choice of England for these case studies is motivated by both historical and generic considerations. As is well known, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England became the preeminent power in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Although its meteoric rise may in hindsight seem inevitable, from an earlier perspective the English situation was anything but rosy. English imperialism was crucially shaped by its belatedness: England took the European colonizing powers that preceded it in the East as models both to follow and to define itself against. The first four chapters of this book therefore also chart the historical progression of European colonialism in the eastern hemisphere: from the early Portuguese “discovery” of India to England’s rivalry with the Dutch, which created the conditions for England's

spectacular expansion in the eighteenth century. This historical motivation is complemented by a shift in genre from the epic to drama. While Camées’s epic constitutes the single most important literary text through which the Portuguese came to define their identity as nation and colonial power, the enduring cultural form for England was its

drama. The seventeenth-century stage saw an explosion of plays and masques —by Ben Jonson, William Davenant, John Dryden, and others—which in-

volved or drew upon the eastern arm of English colonial activity. The theater “bodied forth” “India” and the “East,” endowing these places and their peoples with a visible presence. But what was this presence named “India,’ and

towards whom was it directed? I suggest that by staging the East, the English theater imaginatively responded to tensions and contradictions internal to England and its colonial enterprise. What masqueraded as “India” was England itself: Upon the stage, one might say, England created its colonial identity, projecting an uncertain domination whose promise history would only later redeem.

INTRODUCTION

18

The metaphors governing these two chapters are those of the stage and

the market. John Fletcher's The Island Princess allows us to see how the early modern stage utilized England's real absence from the colonial arena to appropriate for England the history of Portuguese exploits in the East. Yet the construction of an English colonial identity through an imaginative affiliation with Portugal remains marked by a series of interlocking differences threatening that project. The theatrical production of “India” as a no-place, a u-topia, both expresses and manages internal fractures on the levels of “nationhood,” class, and religion in order to project “India” as a place intended for the English—who themselves were distinguished by their lack of a (colonial) place and a (colonial) position. Further, exploiting the spatial

separation between audience and stage, The Island Princess objectifies the relationship between colonizer and colonized, forcing the audience to reflect upon that objectification. This process not only brings the audience to “see” the colonized world and its inhabitants, but also makes visible how one sees

and what one’s seeing accomplishes. The play thus produces English colonialism as an object of knowledge, and its audience as the subject of this knowledge—potentially, a colonizing subject. By the time John Dryden's Amboyna appears on the Restoration stage, England's colonial presence in the East stands on more secure ground. Yet,

the English find themselves contending with another European power, the

Dutch, with whom they had cooperated to displace the Portuguese from much of their “Indian” possessions.”” Reviving a historical incident, the 1623 Dutch “massacre” of twelve Englishmen on the East Indian island of Amboyna, Dryden re-envisions England as a nation and colonial power. The metaphor of the market, and, specifically, of “India” as a source of commodities to be apportioned among European competitors, provides the vocabulary through which the play distinguishes England from the Netherlands. English national identity implies for Dryden a social world structured and valued in terms of patronage relationships. Its distinguishing marks are gratitude, honor, heroism, and true religious faith. By contrast, the Dutch incarnate a commercial ethos that excludes all forms*of faith, justice, and

reciprocity. The colonial practices of the two competing nations in the play reflect these opposed systems of value and exchange: the civility of English presence versus the brutality and illegality of Dutch hegemony. Yet, a deeper identity between the Dutch and the English as mercantile powers betrays itself

19

Looking for “India”

in how similarly they treat the colonized “native,” the “Indian” woman upon

whose commodified body the play literally marks national and class distinctions. Although Dryden's theatrical operation produces a national difference within Europe, its success depends upon effacing the colonized subject, eliding the colonizer’s “ownership” of the colonized. A reader familiar with Blumenberg’s impressive and wide-ranging oeuvre will have recognized from the descriptions of the first two sections that Framing “India” has already redirected his metaphorology towards very different ends. While Blumenberg believes that concepts cannot exhaust the potential represented by absolute metaphors, he tends nonetheless to emphasize how metaphors act as catalysts for concepts.”8 In his practice, if not his the-

ory, unconceptuality (Unbegrifflichkeit) operates in the more contained sense of pte-conceptuality, ultimately subordinating metaphors to the concepts that draw upon them. But the connection to the existential world (Lebenswelt) cannot be satisfactorily specified if we treat metaphors primarily as elementary representational models that essentially express philosophical (or ontological) concerns. If their “truth” is in a broad sense pragmatic—as Blumenberg often insists—then delineating their uses and functions necessarily demands reconstructing with care their relation to material practices and conditions, to patterns of behavior and action. It is telling, for instance, that Blumen-

berg’s rich discussion of terra incognita and discovery as metaphors for a newly emergent relationship of self to world nowhere explicitly mentions the actual practices of discovery and the material conditions regulating its effects.” Instead, he treats the metaphors as uncomplicated translations of historical

facts into rhetorical figures. Foreclosed as a result are the lived discontinuities and aporia that delimit how the metaphors function, the sorts of “answers” they provide. Like the “Indian woman” in Dryden's text, the complex history

of colonial practice is relegated in Blumenberg’s work to an indifferent background that enables European self-formation and concept-building. Locating the socioeconomic conditions active in shaping early modern colonialism and its representations requires tools other than those made available by Blumenberg’s metaphorology. Counterpointing analyses of conceptual frames, Framing “India” thus relates the absolute metaphors of cosmos, voyage, stage, and market to pragmatic conditions affecting what they

meant and how they were deployed. In reconstructing these dimensions, it

draws both from marxist-influenced narratives of the so-called transition

INTRODUCTION

20

from feudalism to capitalism, and from Pierre Bourdieu's sociologically oriented theories of practice (in particular, his rich discussion of the dynamics of class formation). If the cosmos supplied a model to represent man’s place in the world, the figure also responded to a widespread experiential unease characteristic of late medieval Europe. The voyage both captured a new sense of truth and reality, and also inflected them in ways marked by the actual practices of colonial discovery. While the English stage projected rhetorical spaces to shape a national identity, it was also a material site upon which so-

cial and cultural divisions specific to early modern England were played out. Not only did the market offer a rhetorical schema to define national identity, but it functioned as an economic phenomenon circumscribing the ways in which different early modern nation-states interacted with one another within and outside their colonial domains. Material practice does not, of course, have a fixed relation to the cultural and ideological functions served by absolute metaphors. The early modern resurrection of the cosmic metaphor responded to a world in which familiar structures of lived existence had come under extreme pressure. The Black Death had not only devastated medieval Europe, but had triggered struggles among social groups, in particular between the landed gentry and the peas-

antry. The effects of these conflicts combined with the later theological crises of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation to generate a diffuse yet palpable sense of uncertainty and unease. In this context, the metaphor of the cosmos functioned conservatively, holding up against the anxieties of daily life an older figure promising order and stability. The voyage metaphor, by contrast, grew out of a “forward-looking” dimension of material practice. The proto-colonial voyages initially responded to local problems in late feudal societies, such as the need for alternate sources of bullion, and for additional lands and peoples (slaves) to expand agricultural production. Their practical success in “discovering” new lands, new routes, and new commodities, however, transformed their function: they came to represent a changed relationship of self to world, the voyage reoccupying the place of the cosmic metaphor in the process. In this case, the realm of material practices served less as a conservative recourse to older explanatory models than as a pragmatic space in which different cultural dispositions emerged, providing newer models of understanding and acting within the world.

21

Looking for “India”

The use of marxist narratives to illuminate such connections does not necessarily entail a causal connection between material conditions and theological conceptualizations on the lines of a base-superstructure model. As regards the figure of the cosmos, for example, it lies beyond the ambit of

this book to detail the imbrication of theological concerns with material crises of feudalism, which affected not just the Church but late medieval so-

ciety as a whole. Framing “India” draws on marxist theories of the emergence of capitalist relations of production to delineate this complex in broad terms, without claiming to provide an exhaustive explanation. Pierre Bourdieu’s flexible notion of habitus, “systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ that structure and regulate practices and representations, suggests a powerful means of moving beyond teleological, causally driven explanations of historical change.*? If metaphorology fails to articulate relations to Lebenswelten sufficiently, the notion of habitus addresses this shortcoming by

illuminating the connection between existential structures and their sedimentation in absolute metaphors. Ideally, a habitus negotiates between objective material conditions constitutive of a particular environment and the relative openness of material practices, which—although constrained by the objective conditions—nonetheless allow for different conjunctural possibilities or (limited) deviations from those conditions. In this sense, it helps both to specify the existential concerns to which absolute metaphors respond and to indicate the range of their functions at a given historical moment. Like the voyage in the opening section of the book, the market in Section Iwo represents just such a confluence of metaphor and habitus. As a rhetorical figure it provided the vocabulary (both positive and negative) to express national and colonial distinctions. At the same time, the historical expansion of mercantile exchange objectively transformed the socioeconomic field within which the metaphor functioned. In particular, the increased im-

portance of economic capital and the changing composition of social groups who possessed it made the market a crucial site for class formation. The resulting struggles over social place led to the market metaphor being used both to express newer social dispositions and to contain the disruptive effects attendant upon changing economic circumstances. A historical consequence of particular relevance to Dryden's Amboyna, for instance, was the “commetcialization” of the patronage system. The market's absorption of the patron-client relationship shows itself ex negativo in Dryden's paradoxical

INTRODUCTION

22

attempt to exclude commerce as patronage’s debased “other.” At the same time, Dryden's rejection of a mercantile ethos conflicts with the objective similarity between the commercial aims of Holland and England (revealed in the struggle over the “Indian” woman). The play’s conflicted investment in the market metaphor signals a dynamic, historical relation to the market

as an increasingly dominant habitus providing the principles generating and structuring everyday practice. Taken together, the figures mediating conceptual understanding of the world and the material practices of the lived world project a “colonial imaginary.” “The ‘unconscious, ” as Bourdieu writes, “is never anything other than the forgetting of history, which history itself produces by incorporating the objective structures it produces in the second natures of habitus.”*! The term “imaginary, borrowed from Lacanian psychoanalysis, points to a concern

throughout this book with processes of subject-constitution: the emergence of a (collective) “I” through binary separation from what the “T” is not. Not-

ing its relevance for his political project, Fredric Jameson astutely identifies the register of the “Imaginary” with an ideological positioning of self: Imaginary thought patterns persist into mature psychic life in the form of what are generally thought of as ethical judgements—those implicit or explicit valorizations or repudiations in which “good” and “bad” are simply positional descriptions of the geographical relationship of the phenomenon in question to my own Imaginary conception of centrality. . ..

The Imaginary sources of passions like ethics may always be identified by the operation of the dual in them, and the organization of their themes around binary oppositions; the ideological quality of such thinking however must be accounted for . . . by its substitutions of the categories of individual relationships for those—collective—of history and of historical, transindividual phenomena.”

5

Appropriating metaphorology and such marxist-influenced theories of prac-

tice as Jameson's, Framing “India” endeavors to uncover how early modern colonialism shaped (and continues to shape) Western notians of subjecthood, ethics, and the world.

Reconstructing a colonial imaginary also reveals its ideological limits: how it depends upon foreclosed histories and comes into being by forgetting the very histories that European colonialism produced.** By simultaneously

23

Looking for “India”

invoking and forgetting “India” and the “East” early modern Europe constructs itself as a positive and full identity. The first two sections of the book examine some of the different “I’’s that take shape through the eastern colonial missions: by positing “India” as a limit to be transgressed and place to be occupied, the West emerges as Subject or agent of history. By staging “India,” the English colonial subject carves out its niche within the conflictual space of European imperialism. The final section/of Framing “India”, “Upstaging the East,” carries the

historical progression of the first four chapters further in that it looks ahead to notions of the subject that were consolidated in the nineteenth century and beyond. From this perspective, it shares the preceding section's concern not only with staging the East, but with the market and forms of identity bound up with commodity exchange. From another vantage point, though,

the final chapter (and the afterword that follows) marks a necessary break from the implied historical narrative. This necessity is motivated in part by the historical and disciplinary situation of postcolonial studies. Gayatri Spivak opens her recent A Critique of Postcolonial Reason with a timely injunction: Postcolonial studies, unwittingly commemorating a lost object, can be-

come an alibi unless it is placed in a general frame. Colonial Discourse studies, when they concentrate only on the representation of the colo-

nized or the matter of the colonies, can sometimes serve the production of current neocolonial knowledge by placing colonialism/ imperialism securely in the past, and/or by suggesting a continuous line from that past to our present.**

Spivak’s remarks speak to the double bind that contemporary analyses of colonialism cannot avoid, and Framing “India” is no exception. On the one hand, its critiques of colonial reason rely throughout on texts and theories of a mainstream Western intellectual tradition. On the other, its arguments reveal the complicity of that tradition as a whole with colonial practices and discourses. “Upstaging the East” seeks to bring this paradox to the fore by illuminating how the critical models we use to interpret the world tend to replicate in a displaced form their own enabling conditions. This turn not only illustrates the inescapable conditions framing (indeed, limiting) colo-

nial and postcolonial appropriations of Western theory, but also underscores the need for such appropriations in carrying out what Spivak aptly

INTRODUCTION

24

calls “a persistent dredging operation” upon “the apparently crystalline disciplinary mainstream.” As the first two sections of Framing “India” demonstrate, theoretical paradigms have their own histories that depend upon the structures and practices from which they emerged. The “neutral” geometrical surface of the late Renaissance map, for instance, implicitly preserved hierarchical relations of colonial difference out of which early modern cartography had developed. In Chapter 5 we look at a different kind of theoretical framing. Rather than reconstructing historical frames that made “India” and the “East” productive in the early modern period, “Indian Boys and Buskind Amazons” ad-

dresses the methodological problem of literary critical frames by examining the use of Freudian /Lacanian psychoanalysis as an explanatory model. The choice of psychoanalytical reading as the exemplary case also follows from the choice of the literary text at the chapter's center: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Indian Boy of Shakespeare’s play, over whom Titania and Oberon struggle, emblematically supplies a figure for the absent presence of “India” around which Framing “India” circles: he never appears in the play despite the fact that he causes a dissension whose effects destabilize the entire natural world. Like the unconscious, the Indian Boy is felt everywhere through his effects but is nonetheless absent as an actual presence. This analogy suggests an affinity between psychoanalytic theory and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I show, however, that an unreflective adoption of psychoanalytic reading practices repeats metacritically the very forms of erasure that the text performs. The historical emergence of the Oedipus complex as a paradigm depends upon structures of colonial and patriarchal domination. Understood thus, it universalizes precisely those culturally specific notions of subjectivity and personhood that Shakespeare’s play engages with and establishes in its own relationship to history: In overcoming a fantasized matriarchal order, a version of the patriarchal family is erected. In the erasure of the Indian Boy, the proto-capitalist ideals of the market and contractual exchange are solidified. Consequently, psychoanalytic readings potentially rehearse the movement described in this book's earlier chapters: a doubled trajectory wherein “India” is simultaneously constituted and effaced as object—indeed, effaced at the

very moment when the critical discourse would seem to have brought it into view. Uhrough such framings and re-framings another history is written: the history of the victors, the history of “civilization.”

25

Looking for “India”

The Limits of Resistance Framing “India” ends with a caution. Throughout, “India” and the “East” as

absolute metaphors mark disturbances or resistances that are written over to produce the ostensibly self-sufficient frames of Western thought and histoties. They name sites upon which such closures have been enacted. But they also repeatedly escape representation, thereby enabling investigation of the terms and limits of histories produced through their foreclosure. As Blumenberg writes, “that [such] metaphors are termed absolute signifies only that they turn out to be resistant against terminological claims, that they

cannot be dissolved into conceptuality....”*° “India” itself ultimately functions as such a metaphor. The resistance expressed through these absolute metaphors has its limits, however, insofar as colonial texts of early modern Europe can only fleetingly reveal the possibilities and modes of resistance to colonial incursions in the East. Stephen Greenblatt has argued that the legal rituals of possession in Columbus’s colonial inauguration opened for the natives a formal domain of autonomous subjectivity—tregardless of whether the colonizer’s interpretation of what the natives desired corresponded to its “truth.” The very form of legality signals, as he puts it, “an ethical reservation . . . [which] may not have been conscious . . . but nevertheless exists, so deeply entrenched in the judicial procedure that it could not be simply forgotten or eliminated.”*° But we also need to recognize that this formal space of subjectivity, however important, is also heavily compromised. Given that Columbus's actions were shaped by and intended for an audience elsewhere, they partic-

ipate in specific legal discourses—and their attendant notions of subjecthood, property, and ownership—whose true point of reference only early modern Europe can provide. The persistence of an abstract ethical reservation that can counter the conscious aims of those who invoke such discourses does not, however, validate these discourses or substitute for examining resistance articulated from positions outside their domains.*” The term absolute does not mean, Blumenberg elaborates, “that a metaphor cannot be replaced or represented by another, or corrected by a more exact one.’”*® For there do exist texts—though unfortunately very few—that document European encounters with Eastern peoples from indigenous perspectives, thereby opening up related metaphors whose functions cannot be

INTRODUCTION

26

gleaned from European texts alone. The chronicle of Malay kings, Sejarah

Melayu, describes, for example, how the people of Melaka reacted to the 1509 arrival of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia, “crowd|ing| round to see what

the Feringgi looked like,’ twisting their beards, knocking their heads, grasping their hands, exclaiming that “[t]hese are white Bengalis!”*? Anthony Reid suggests that in likening the Portuguese to Bengalis, “an insult may have been

intended” since Bengali merchants were “more numerous and more resented in Melaka” than the Arabs. As the Portuguese traveler Tomé Pires informs us, when the Melakans “want{ed] to insult a man, they call[ed] him a Bengali,” because “these were a mercantile rather than a military people, alleged to be sharp-witted but treacherous.’*° Noting the curious identification of the Europeans with familiar Indian traders leads to rethinking representations surrounding “India” in terms of identities and categories derived from a non-European perspective. Although not necessarily any “truer” than European representations, such figures enable a different understanding of the possibilities and modes of resistance to European colonial depredation. This equally necessary project goes beyond the scope of this work, which focuses on how Western frameworks inseparably binding together knowledge and power in the colonial East came into being. Even as the contexts and domains described here gradually, but increasingly, circumscribed the forms na-

tive resistance took, they cannot in themselves fully account for those forms.*! I am aware, too, that asserting the complicity between knowledge and power renders uncertain the grounds upon which any critique can adequately legitimize its own choices, or its own implicit or explicit positions vis-a-vis the groups and movements with which it allies itself.” The epilogue briefly re-

turns to this problem, suggesting that the contradiction is theoretically irreducible, since it is embedded in the material conditions that make the world

what it is. But if approaching such contradictions demands intervention in the “real,” we nevertheless only gain access to the “real” mediatedly: through the compromised ways in which we represent and understand the world. Intervention finds a necessary precondition in the attempt to comprehend those modes of representation and action through which we mediatedly gain access to our historical being. Reading the history of colonialism against the grain,

Framing “India” pursues traces of “India” and the “East” in the wake of West-

ern imperialism in the hope that, through them, alternative histories can emerge: histories attentive both to silences and to speech.

Part

One

The limits of Sree Wana

ear

-n =

Te

.

At stake is the authority or legitimacy of the historical narrative. Unlike the classical epic, history eschews a privileged relationship to the Gods (through

the Muses). Hartog emphasizes this shift in terrain entailed by the histo-

Limits oF THE WoRLD

32

rian's assessment of points of origin “solely in terms of his own knowledge.” In the place of the Muses, historical writing such as Castanheda’s installs “a new regime of authority”: that of the histér who speaks in the name of history.° Similarly, rather than relay the song of the Muses, Cam6es insists that his voice replaces theirs. In contrast to those “foreign muses” (estranhas musas),

who extol “empty deeds / Fantastical and feigned and full of lies” (vasfaganhas, / Fantasticas, fingidas, mentirosas), his epic celebrates a historical truth that exceeds such fictions (_fabulosas): “the great and true” acts of the Portuguese adventurers (verdadeiras vossas sao tamanbas) (1.11.1-8). His song shall “spread” (espalharei) the glorious deeds of the Portuguese far and wide, his “genius and art” (engenho e arte) (1.2.6—8) will make us forget all “the Muse sang in ancient days.”’ Absorbing the historian’s task within the epic frame, CamGes appears

to transform national, colonial history into a mythic enterprise. Historical memory is eternalized in order to unveil the existing Portuguese nation as a living embodiment of the “Lusian spirit bright and bold, / that Mars and

Neptune equally obeyed” (1.3.5—7). In Camées’s imaginary, Portugal appears to have conquered India and the ancients simultaneously.

Whose Gods Are These Anyway? The fraught nature of this conjugation of historical discourse with the classical epic surfaces, nevertheless, most forcefully in relation to theology. For Camé6es's insistence on Os Lusiadas's veracity and historical accuracy sits uncomfortably with his extensive use of classical deities in what is ostensibly a Christian epic. The incompatibility between the classical device and the poem’s religious frame has been a point of some critical preoccupation—with good reason, for the epic self-consciously thematizes the disjunction. Frank Pierce states the problem succinctly: “Camées envisages his theme from the comprehensive standpoint common to his age; ... he sees human history as including and being ultimately justified by a divine plan, but this plan manifests itself through a whole pagan supernatural scheme inserted between Vasco da Gama and the Christian God. What does Camées mean by this unusual combination not found in any of his contemporaries in the epos?”® And, we might add, what does it tell us about the difficulties involved in pursuing and representing the colonial movement eastward as a divinely sanctioned one? Camées himself explicitly addresses this oddity in representation twice.

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The first comment occurs immediately after the famous episode of Adamastor, the autochthonous son of Earth (Fui dos filhos aspérrimos da Terra, 5.51.1), who rears up as the Portuguese round Africa’s southern tip. Arising in the shape of a black cloud at the geographical midpoint and symbolic boundary of both da Gama’s voyage and the epic narrative, Adamastor prophesies the evils that are to beset present and future colonial voyages. On the heels of this fabulous moment, however, Cam6es reasserts his claim to historical truth, dismissing the-creatures of classical epic as pretensions (fingindo) and

feigned representations that exaggerate (encaregeram) or refine (afinem) actual events (5.88—89).” A second—and more drastic—tevision occurs in the epic’s acclaimed final cantos, which narrate the events of the journey homeward. As a just reward (prémio) for their heroic exploits, Vasco da Gama and his men are entertained by Tethys and her nymphs on the Island of Love. The episode is famous for its elaborate, sensual scenes of desire and seduction. But these are undermined by CamGes's explanation of their “true” meaning, since he proceeds to unmask the pagan gods as poetic fictionalizations of mortal he-

roes and their virtues (see 9.89—91 and 10.81—84). At the close of his epic, then, Camées largely disowns his pagan supernatural scheme, apparently in

order to harmonize the epic’s classical antecedents with the dictates of Christianity. He transforms the gods into personifications of an ethical fiction: the fame that attends upon heroic exploits (honras que a vida fazem sublimada). The apparent reality of nymphs and gods is negated in order to recreate the deities as fables feigned by “mortal and blind illusion” (10.82.4) (fingidos de mortal e cego engano). Such euhemerist retractions, however, do not adequately account for the agency imputed to the gods in the epic: the poet depicts the gods not merely as allegorical representations of moral virtues or human achievements but as active and direct influences on human destiny. They impede, for example, Vasco da Gama’s entry into Quiloa and later calm Neptune's storm when it threatens to wreck the Portuguese ships.'° David Quint’s discussion of the ideological function of Camées’s pagan deities in shaping the Portuguese colonial project would seem to provide a more convincing account of the tension between history and myth in the epic. As regards Adamastor, for example, Quint locates Camées’s mythic figure in an epic tradition of repre-

senting and containing the voices of those who resist the epic project (such

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as Virgil's Dido). Using such generic archetypes as templates, Camées creates

Adamastor out of specific historical incidents that signified resistance to the Portuguese colonial project.'! However, by'explicitly drawing attention to his own myth-making, Camées then demystifies these classical originals (and symbolically overcomes contemporary doubters). A similar paradox regarding human agency holds for the ideological work the Adamastor episode performs in representing the “native”: it assimilates the autochthonic god to nature (thus depriving him of a connected narrative history) while suppressing the Portuguese aggression that kindled his resistance in the first place." For all its strengths, however, Quint’s intertextual analysis of how the pagan gods function ideologically within the narrative cannot on its own terms illuminate the text's desire to relate the emergent discourse of “voyage material” or “voyage narratives” (with their claims to historical veracity) to the constellation of received literary forms such as the epic and the romance. Nor can it explain the felt need expressed by Camées's text to harness the very different world of the classical epic to Christian Portugal's colonial cause. To put it another way: although Quint provides a coherent and perceptive account of how and to what end Cam6es uses the pagan gods in Os Lusiadas, his analysis cannot speak to the incoherence attendant upon having had to resort to the gods in the first place." The incoherence evident in the appearance of the pagan gods opens on the larger issue with which this chapter is concerned: the manifest difficulty from Os Lusiadas's normative Christian standpoint of reconciling colonial history with epic myth-making. To account adequately for this early modern disjunction we need to move beyond genre alone and focus on certain major ideas and social changes that intervened between Camées’s text and the Virgilian model he claims to supersede. To this end, this chapter traverses an arc connecting Camées's medieval legacy to the historical consequences of the Portuguese discovery of India. Following Vasco da Gama’s epic voyage, its ultimate destination is “India.” But, echoing the twisting course of the epic, the journey to that far-off place will necessarily be an involved one: to grasp what “India” meant to Camées and his Portuguese readers requires that we comprehend first the anxieties to which his “India” responds, that we be-

come familiar with the conceptual and material problems confronted through that name. As we shall see, Cam6es’s troubled evocation of the pagan deities symp-

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Voyage

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Lusiadas’

tomatically reveals the desire to combine two different modes of understanding and experiencing the world. In Os Lusiadas this attempt involves conjoining two absolute metaphors that express distinct epistemological standpoints: the cosmos and the voyage. Their interrelation seems to me crucial to understanding the place of colonialism—and particularly of the European desire for “India”—in early modern culture. Through the pagan gods Os Lusiadas revives a crucial connection to the antique cosmos (a figure guaranteeing the place of the human subject in an ordered universe). The epic in turn uses the metaphor of the cosmos to reinscribe the inaugural voyage to India as the sign of a new, self-assertive relation between the Portuguese subject and the world, in effect attempting to create a new world order. In relying on epic tropes to represent the Portuguese “discovery and conquest” of India, Camées draws upon a still-vital connection between the form of the classical epic and the antique cosmos. The opening sections of this chapter present an intellectual history of the cosmic metaphor in order to show how Camées refashions it to legitimate the Portuguese colonial project. Although early Christianity increasingly distanced itself from its pagan roots, it nonetheless preserved the antique cosmos as a sign or guarantee of

a divinely ordained order circumscribing the place of human knowledge. Even as the cosmos configured the relationship between the individual, God,

and the created world, it had to be continually re-thought in order to remain compatible with the shifting frameworks of Christian theology.'° Camées’s resurrection of the link between the epic form and the cosmos reaches back to the Scholastic thought of Aquinas and Bonaventure, in which the cosmos exemplified divine perfection and dispensation. But there remains an incoherence built into Camées’s recourse to this Christianized cosmos. By the late sixteenth century the cosmos had been radically undermined in two intertwined ways. For one, from the late thirteenth century onwards, nominalist insistence on theological absolutism had sertously challenged the place of the antique cosmos in Christian thought."® This gradual loss of an internal cogency was exacerbated by—and to some extent a consequence of—material crises across feudal Europe. The Black Death, peasant rebellions, and the practical challenges posed by the Reformation combined to undermine the structured vision of the world offered by the figure of the cosmos. There is therefore a vexed conservatism in Camées’s emphasis on the connection between epic and cosmos: he reaches back to the

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cosmos to avail himself of a stability it seems to promise, but precisely at a moment when that figure has been hollowed out from within. The metaphor of the voyage becomes important in relation to this anterior epistemological problem. The early Iberian voyages were extensions of the medieval universe, undertaken in response to the needs of a feudal economy in crisis. But the discovery of lands unknown to the ancients transformed their significance. The colonial voyages of discovery came to embody a new relationship to the world and ultimately to offer a different kind of stability. The new configuration becomes apparent in the ways in which early seventeenth-century philosophical thought mobilized the figure of the voyage. The exemplary positions in this regard are those of Bacon and Descartes. Although they differ in their sense of how one reaches truth and certainty, both thinkers take as given a world in which travel and voyaging have a privileged metaphoric relationship to understanding selfhood and human action. For them, the figure of the voyage implies a rejection of the assumption that knowledge and truth need an external guarantee. Rather, these are to be gained through human mastery; they are produced by asserting the self

against the world. From this perspective, the early colonial voyages contribute to an understanding of knowledge and truth as possessions that the (Western) subject wrests from the world through discovery and conquest. Camées's epic holds together the contradictory modes of understanding imaged through cosmos and voyage: it tries to coordinate the cosmos’s guarantee of an already given and ordered world with the yoyage’s promise of an earth to be remade and possessed by the colonizing subject. But the incoherence of Camées’s use of the epic cosmos—expressed in the poem’s ambivalence towards the pagan deities—nevertheless arises from this juxtaposition, or rather, this functional substitution, whereby the figure of the voyage “reoccupies” the place of the cosmos. . Here “India,” the constantly deferred goal of that voyage, at last comes into view. For the name marks the seam joining these two competing epistemological frames. Through “India” their conflicting impulses are managed. In particular, the final section argues, the figure of “India” that beckons the European voyager—whether he sails West (Columbus) or East (Vasco da Gama) in response to its call—functions as a boundary condition: the transgression of this hitherto unreachable limit transforms the very nature of a world that had partly constituted itself in relation to that limit. Vasco da

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

Gama and Columbus, in their own ways, draw “India” into the realm of the

real, of what can be experienced. And even if these “discovered” realities are necessarily fictions, the very act of bringing the boundary inside transforms

the reality of early modern Europe, radically altering its picture of the world.

Camées’s Cosmos “An antinomy in the early history of the European consciousness that may still be with us,” Hans Blumenberg writes, “is contained in the fact that the Greeks discovered |erfanden] the cosmos and tragedy.’!” The term kosmos seems to have originated in the context of the Greek city-state, initially to denote a sense of order and correctness. It was antithetically paired with akosmia, meaning chaos or disorder: as a verb, kata kosmon meant to act correctly or to

behave properly, while its adjectival use with reference to people indicated that they lived in an orderly manner. The more technical use of cosmos to signify the physical universe implied a shift from an earlier, more general applicability to all areas of social life.'* The Greek “discovery”’—the German erfinden includes the idea of invention—of the cosmos brought to the fore a connection, the emergence of something like a sense of an empathy between human endeavor and the grandeur of the universe. The world implied by the epic, to follow Georg Lukacs's interpretation, derives from just such an affinity between man and cosmos;!? Blessed are the times for which the starry heaven is a map of the paths which are [both] passable and to be followed, and whose journeys the light of the stars illuminate[s]. For them, everything is new and nonetheless

trusted, adventuresome and nonetheless [in their] possession. The world is wide and yet like one’s own home, because the fire which burns in the soul is of the same nature as [that of | the stars; they diverge sharply from one another, the world and the I, the light and the fire, and will nonetheless

never be eternally alien to one another,””

For Lukacs, the epic connection of self and world is not predicated upon their absolute identity or merger; rather, the epic articulates a totality based

on the non-identity of its elements. Yet the difference falls short of a radical disjunction since the two terms—like the light of the stars and the fire in the human soul—echo and interpenetrate each other.

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The strained unity of the epic cosmos becomes evident, though—as Blumenberg’s remark suggests—through its relationship to another literary form: tragedy. Given their shared origins in the social thought of the Greek city-state, tragedy no less than epic was bound toa conception of order epitomized by the cosmos, as well as to a belief in a metaphysical bond between

the human world and the cosmos. But tragedy brought this shared essence to life not as a positivity but as loss or absence, in the form of a reality divided

against itself. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet aptly describe the domain of tragedy as a “border zone where human actions are hinged together with the divine powers, where—unknown to the agent—they derive

their true meaning by becoming an integral part of an order that is beyond man and that eludes him.” Here the human and the divine are seen as distinct in a way that allows them to be opposed while still appearing inseparable.” If the classical epic denied a radical opposition between man and cosmos, it nonetheless spoke to an unvoiced fear, implicitly expressing an alienation that, tragedy suggests, had already taken place.” From tragedy’s perspective, the

epic attempt to make manifest life’s essence testified instead to an irrevocable falling away of the human from the divine.”* The dialectic of epic and tragedy outlined above brings into relief a fundamental ambiguity marking the metaphor of the cosmos in classical antiquity. If the cosmos presented a divine spectacle to which the heavens daily bore witness, its very grandeur bespoke an immense power lying behind it, in the face of which man’s insignificance and his unfitness potentially stood revealed. Against this threat, the classical epic emphasized a perceived connection between human and cosmic realms, tenuously reproducing that link through a focus on central characters and actions. It lifted these out of the mythic substrate in order to convey in concrete fashion the human experience of mythic transcendence. For Theodor Adorno, such material concreteness (which he terms “epic naiveté”) contains a negative critical potential: the contradictoriness and impossibility of the epic’s task momentarily brings the “real” into view.” “The impulse that drives Homer to describe a shield as though it were a landscape and to elaborate a metaphor... until it becomes autonomous and ultimately destroys the fabric of the narrative” produces through the insistence on the object’s materiality an imitation of its pure being-there, before its subjection to the violence of representation.”° Lukacs’s vision of a primordial word-less belonging to the cosmos seems to

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Lusiadas’

me fundamental to the epic’s “rigid fixation on its object” (in Adorno’s phrase) through which it attempted to merge human subjectivity with the objective world—or better, to produce an experience of a moment where

that distinction itself does not hold.” Camées's adherence to the classical epic in Os Lusiadas revives at a new historical moment both the epic cosmos and its constitutive tensions. His direct impetus would seem to come from the sixteenth-century theological revival of ancient cosmology, as part of the dogmatic re-imposition of an early strand of Scholastic thought.”’ As is well known, the threat of the Reformation triggered a strongly conservative reaction on the part of the Roman Church. In response to the religious schisms of the preceding thirty-odd years, the Coun-

cil of Trent (1545—63) reasserted Thomism as Church orthodoxy, re-invoking the authority of Aquinas to stabilize and regularize all theological thinking. Os Lusiadas is a post-Tridentine work, written in a country whose religious culture was deeply influenced by both the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the rise of the Jesuit Order, which played an important role in the Portuguese

colonial world. Not only was Scholastic theology central to the curriculum in Jesuit colleges on the Iberian Peninsula,”* but the order explicitly reinstated the authority of Aristotle in all matters pertaining to natural philosophy: “In Logica, et Philosophia Naturali et Morali, et Metapbysica doctrina Aristotelis sequenda est.’”° It is therefore not surprising that Os Lusiadas aligns itself ideologically with the Church in adopting the particular coordination of theology, cosmology, and

anthropology aspired to by such thinkers as Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure. The generic affiliation between Os Lusiadas and the classical epic intersects thereby with that other genealogical line that was making the Aristotelian cosmos once again useful for a Christian theology.*° To be precise, CamGes’s cosmos evidences a renewed concern in the six-

teenth century with a crucial variant of Aristotelian astronomy: the Ptolemaic system.*! The epic’s cosmological underpinnings become visible in its opening canto, where Camées follows up his dismissive evocation of the epic

tradition with a description of the departure of the gods for Jupiter's “consilio

glorioso” on the future of the Orient (“Sobre as cousas futuras do Oriente,” 1.20.3-4): Deixam dos Sete Céus 0 regimento,

Que do poder mais alto lhe foi dado, Alto Poder, que s6 co pensamento

_ Governo o Céu, a Terra e o Mar irado. (1.21.1-4)

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Of all the seven heavens they left the reign, Granted to them by Higher Sovranty,

Vast Power, Which by thought alone maintains The rule of Heaven and Earth and wrathful Sea. {translation modified |

C. M. Bowra has perceptively noted that Jupiter cannot be the “poder mais alto” since the poem assigns him control over one of the seven spheres. This implies

that the “Higher Sovranty” above Jupiter is the Christian God, whose description follows closely the terms in which Thomism had appropriated the Aristotelian notion of the “Unmoved Mover,” the vast power (Alto Poder) who

maintains rule over the world “by thought alone.”** Canto z further clarifies Jupiter's position with respect to this system of cosmic circles when Venus sets off to complain to him about Bacchus’s treatment of the Portuguese: Ja penetra as Estrelas luminosas, Ja na terceira Esfera recebida,

Avante passa, e 14 no Sexto Céu,

Pera onde estave o Padre, se moveu. (2.33.4—8) The shining circle of the stars she gained, Passing onward to the third sphere of the sky. And thence to the Sixth Heaven she took the road,

Until she came unto her sire’s abode.

These instances are part of a leitmotiv of cosmological references that look ahead to the detailed elaboration of the Camonian cosmos:in the poem's final canto. There, speaking on behalf of Wisdom Supreme (Sapiéncia Suprema), Tethys reveals to Vasco da Gama the structure of the universe. On the Isle of Love, he beholds “with corporal eyes /What the vain science of the erring race / Of wretched mortal men cannot desery.’”* Tethys’ description of the cosmos runs an extended course of fourteen verses (10.77—90) before shading into an equally rich prophetic geography of the vast spaces that the Portuguese are to open up for the Western world.

Vasco da Gama and his men are led to the top of a mountain where they see a freely suspended globe, designed in such a way that “o seu centro esta evidente /

Como a sua superficie, claramente.’*° Into the small space of this copy, Tethys tells the voyagers, she has “reduced” (reduzido) the world in order to place before their eyes the image of God's creation; uniform, perfect, upheld by itself, it

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reflects the nature of “o Arequetipo que o criou” (the Archetype Who made it, 10.79.2). God, the unmoved Mover, brings the “grande maquina do Mundo” into being and envelops it:*° Quem cerca em derredor este rotundo Globo e sua superficie tao limada, E Deus; mas o que é Deus, ninguém o entende,

Que e tanto o engenho humano nio se estende. (10.80.5—8) He, in His circle sét eternally,

The whole sphere’s well-smoothed surface, hedging round Is God, Whose nature none can comprehend,

For human wit cannot so far extend.

Camées’s description of the encircling orb—that of the empyrean—emphasizes the absolute self-referentiality of divinity and underscores the radical gap between the celestial realm and the human world. Upon this sphere live the “pure souls” (puras almas) whose existence is dedicated to the adoration of God: “[r]ejoicing in that Goodness infinite, / Which Its own mys-

tery understands alone, / Nor upon earth is Its resemblance known.’*’

In declining order of power follow the remaining celestial spheres, which surround the visible cosmos and directly exert their influence upon human existence: Debaxo deste circulo [the empyrean]... Outre corre, t4o leve e tao ligeiro,

Que nfo se enxerga: € o Mobile primeiro. (10.85.5—8) Com este rapto e grande movimento Vio todos os que dentro tem no seio;

Por obra deste, o Sol, andando e tento,

O dia e noite faz, com curso alheio. Debaxo deste leve, anda outro lento,

Tio lento e sojugado a duro freio. (10.86.1-6) Below this Heaven... This other, so light and swift that none can see, Speeds on. It is the Primum Mobile. Compelled by speed thus vehement, whatso’er Dwells in its bosom drives along with it,

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Wherefore the sun, moving with anxious care,

Makes day and night whose course is opposite. Below the second slowlier doth fare A third sphere, subject to the obdurate bit.

Below this circle, the Second Mobile, or Coelum aequeum, revolves the heaven of the zodiac and its constellations (also called the firmament of the fixed stars), succeeded finally by the lunar and planetary spheres, which Camédes associates with the individual pagan deities. Debaxo deste grande Firmamento,

Vés o céu de Saturno, Deus antigo; A : Jupiter logo faz o movimento, E Marte abaxo, bélico inimigo; O claro Olho do céu, no quarto assento, E Vénus, que os amores traz consigo,

Merctrio, de eloquéncia soberana;

Com trés rostos, debaxo vat Diana. (10.89.18) And underneath this spacious firmament, The Heaven of Saturn, that old god, you see.

Near circles Jove. Below armipotent Mars hath his seat, the common enemy. And fourth, the eye of Heaven, magnificent,

Comes Venus leading loves’ company. And Mercury sweet-spoken hath his place This side Diana of the three-fold face.

The pagan deities are here contained by absorbing them into the structure of the antique cosmos. Identifying the gods with heavenly circles transforms them into functionaries of God. Cam6es's miniaturized cosmos corresponds meticulously to the structure of the Aristotelian universe as it had been revived by certain Scholastics. The hierarchically ordered stability of Camées’s “grande maquina do Mundo” resonates, for example, with Saint Bonaventure’s description of the universe: Concerning the existence of material nature the following points are to be held: the entire material world comprises a heavenly and an elementary nature. The heavenly nature is mainly divided into three heavens: the empytean, the crystalline heaven, and the firmament. Within the firmament

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(the starry heavens) there are seven planets: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. The elementary nature is divided into

four spheres: fire, air, water, and earth. From the highest point in heaven to the centre of the earth there are in all ten celestial and four elementary spheres. Thus the whole material world machine is constructed in a distinct, perfect, and ordered manner.**

As Max Wildiers notes, Bonaventure’s picture of the world is remarkable for its complete lack of “any hesitancy or reserve. He presents the structure of the “whole material world machine” as if it were an absolute fact, its validity beyond all question. On this point at least, Camées’s more elaborate exposition appears at first glance to be in accord. The Portuguese voyage, which his epic extols, receives its ratification through the divinely inspired vision of the universe unfolded in the final canto. The cosmos serves, thus, both as divine origin and telos, as both the ideological guarantee for the voyage (as the epic’s opening canto suggests) and the end to which the text is directed. The symbolic interpretation is led back to and localized in the material structure of a cosmos that it had never, it seems, left behind.

The temporal distance separating a thinker like Bonaventure from Cam6es betrays itself, however, in the problem of how and where the earth—

and by extension, humanity—fits into the structure of the cosmos. Rejoicing at the beauty of creation, Bonaventure sees microcosm and macrocosm so perfectly attuned to one another that, to cite Wildiers, “the cosmos un-

dergoes man’s fate and man in his turn takes his cue from the cosmos.’*? The perfect adjustment envisaged here is indeed what Camées’s cosmology projects, but its attainment remains uncertain and far from assured. For at the center of the cosmos, subject to the instabilities of land and sea, lies the earth, the unstable home of man. To man’s daring and pride (humanos . . . ou-

sados, 10.91.12), Camdes—following an Augustinian tradition—attributes humanity's uncertain condition, his division by the “raging” sea that has “dissever|ed]” the earth into “the various nations, whose several kings their reign if With different customs, different laws, maintain”: Veras as varias partes, que os insanos

Mares dividem, onde se apousentam Varias na¢gGes, que mandam varios Reis,

V4rios costumes seus e varias leis. (10.91.5—8)

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The repetition of adjectival forms of vario; the emphasis on division (dividem, partes); the metonymic association of madness (insanos mares) and changeabil-

ity (instabil ) (10.91.4.) with the human condition: all highlight the contrast between the immutable nature of the divine cosmos and the ceaseless fluctuations of the material world. At the heart of the ordered, perfect, and stable

cosmos lies that which does not partake of its coherence, that which constitutes its contradiction. The physical and metaphysical distance of the deity from the center of the system he has created surfaces in the radical instability of that center. Even the geographic survey of the world that succeeds this transitional stanza cannot entirely escape the shift in registers. The careful unity that had marked Camées’s description of the divine world-machine seems always on the verge of dispersing into a chaotic list, moving abruptly between the naming of places, the description of peoples and topographical features, and sketchy historical narratives (see, for example, stanza 10.93).

The peculiar logic and the limits of Cam6es’s symbolic universe will become clearer once we attend both to the complex ways in which cosmology and theology were coordinated within the Christian tradition and to the material conditions finally responsible for their deracination. While the Catholic Reformation reasserted the validity of High Scholastic thought, it could not resurrect the quiet certainty with which Bonaventure and Aquinas had accepted the structure of classical cosmology. Their optimistic faith in a divine order no longer rings fully true in Camées’s epic world, which wrestles instead with a radical separation between the divine and human realms. Consequently, the earlier conviction that the human world, or the microcosm, was part of—and indeed, the most important component of—the cosmos remains effective in Os Lusiadas not as an uninterrogated eschatological premise but as an (ultimately unattainable) ideal. Camdes attempts to subordinate this instability by appealing to a divinely ordained colonial history.

Rethinking the Christian Cosmos Camées's sense of disjunction represents a complex histotical response to the latent ambiguity inhering in the figure of the epic cosmos. From St. Augustine onwards, the cosmos had functioned in Christian theology as a sign of divine power, the visible expression of God’s order. But the stability of that vision had long been vulnerable to theological doubts from within the

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

tradition itself. Both strange and familiar, the uncanny cosmos returned to haunt a theology shaped by a continuing struggle against its pagan roots. The recourse to classical antiquity, which has come to define the Renaissance (and, indeed, that name itself), represents, from this point of view, yet another version of that conflict. Broadly formulated, the theological crux underlying Camées’s repre-

sentation concerns the coordination of three terms, what Karl Léwith calls “the metaphysical trinity” of man, the cosmos, and God. The sixteenthcentury conflict between Reformation and Counter-Reformation forces exacerbated a long-standing struggle over the respective places and powers of God and man in relation to the cosmos. Most famously, the rise of Calvinism made the doctrine of predestination and the question of the origin of evil into matters of (quite literally) burning importance. It reanimated dormant issues that had found their original and shaping expression much earlier, in St. Augustine's own fifth-century tussle with Christianity’s pagan roots. The sixteenth-century revival of Thomist thought rests upon that prior, unfinished encounter between patristic theology and the pagan cosmos: the crisis in late antiquity that culminated in the Augustinian attempt to overcome Manichaean Gnosticism. As we shall see, Camédes’s complex reliance

on the Scholastic cosmos revisits that anterior confrontation, albeit with a

difference.*! The eschatological frame of Manichaean and early Christian Gnosticism acknowledged the felt ambiguity of the cosmos within a Christian narrative of salvation and redemption. For the pre-Christian Platonic, Aristotelian,

and Stoic traditions the idea of the cosmos needed no special justification: it simply epitomized an ordered totality that was binding in itself. By insisting upon the ex nihilo creation of the world, early Christian thinkers similarly saw the cosmos’s ordered totality as a manifestation of divine power. Yet, the

Christian salvation narrative required in addition that the omnipotent Christian deity, whose immense power lay behind the spectacle of the universe, di-

rect his energies at destroying the world—at the Last Judgment—ain order to save man. But how could the God of creation make one of his central activities the destruction of the world he had created? Gnosticism responded to this paradox by resurrecting Plato's equivocal differentiation of the perfect Idea from the resisting matter that confronts it. Gnostic dualism radicalized this ambiguous relationship by theologizing

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the former aspect and demonizing the latter. To theologize the power behind the cosmos was unproblematic since one could simply identify it with the Christian God. But dealing with the visible.aspect of the cosmos was more difficult. The logic of Christian salvation insisted that the end towards which man strove utterly transcended the material world; Gnosticism took such logic to the extreme, conceiving the cosmos in absolute opposition to the Christian God. It destroyed man’s trust in the cosmos, negatively marking

ancient cosmology in the process as inimical to the human search for redemption. Hence, the Old Testament God, who had created man and the world, was turned into “an ill-tempered tyrant, who demanded sacrifices and ceremonies.” Opposed to him was the transcendent god of salvation, the “essence of a pure, because unreasoning, love... who brings redemption without in the least owing it to man, whom he did not create.’

It is apparent that Gnostic dualism rendered human existence in the world unimportant and largely inconsequential: the cosmic order no longer supplied a divine guarantee of the Christian subject's place within creation. The need to counter this Gnostic threat drives St. Augustine’s thought from the very outset, and thus the problem of order in the created world lies at the center of his thinking. At the same time, even in his earliest writings, Au-

gustine does not seek to safeguard the ancient cosmos on its own terms. Rather, the cosmos is a means through which God's existence and, above all, the existence of a divine plan for man can be established: But who can be so spiritually blind as to doubt that the rationality in the movement of bodies which is beyond human will and disposition is to be attributed to divine power and temperance? Unless the limbs of even the smallest creature are shaped in all their proportionality and precision by chance! [If not] then one must acknowledge that something which he denies to have been done by chance could not have been done if not by reason. Or, in fits of vain philosophy, we would dare to deny the unfathom-

able plan of divine majesty in all that we admire as ordered in the natural universe, in every single thing upon which human art has no effect.**

Augustine's viewpoint here is finally an aesthetic one: God manifests himself

through the “beauty of the universe” in whose harmonious construction we can read the rationality of the divine will.“* The problem of the cosmos is thereby transposed into the problem of discerning a rational and harmonious order as such.

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lustadas’

Clearly, Augustine’s aesthetic conservation of the cosmos reverses the Gnostic demonization. By turning the Stoic concept of providence into an anti-Gnostic principle, he implies that man has a preordained place within the world created for him. The ambiguity of the cosmos returns, however, in the gap between the rational harmony of the universe and the apparent irrationality of human life. What surfaces, in other words, is the problem of evil

(malum).*° Unlike Plato, for whom the world was made out of preexistent matter, patristic thought insisted on God's power to create the world ex nibilo. Consequently, the all too visible absence of order in human life still had to be adequately accounted for. Even Augustine's early theological writings link comprehension of divine order with the ensuing problem of badness in the world. In the introduction to the De ordine, Augustine insists that there is no question to which men more desire an answer than the following: How is it, on the one hand, that God takes care of human things, and, on the other, that unreason | perversitas| is so widely diffused in things human? [So widely diffused] that not only does it seem impossible to attribute [this unreason] to a divine [power], but we cannot even attribute it to a servile mind, regardless of how much power we ascribe to him. Therefore .. . it is almost necessary to believe either that divine providence does not penetrate to the last and deepest things, or that indeed all evil things have to

be attributed to God's will.*®

The two options with which Augustine concludes here quite accurately indicate the positions against which his Christian standpoint defines itself. The first, which we could call the sin of omission, corresponds to the Stoic

position, according to which evil arises from the fact that God's power simply does not extend far enough. The second explanation—and for Augus-

tine the more objectionable—we could term the sin of commission. It corresponds to the Manichaean /Gnostic account wherein the cause of evil is laid at God’s own door. Of course, neither of these positions is acceptable to Augustine. He in-

stead ascribes the existence of perversitas to man’s misunderstanding of his own essential nature—a lack which can be circumvented, he thinks, through education and the accumulation of knowledge. This solution, however, is not a specifically Christian one: it is no surprise, then, that his subsequent writings—such as the Confessiones and De libero arbitrio—do not develop this early

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assay any further. Nonetheless, even in those mature texts, Augustine does hold fast to a central feature already visible in the De ordine: the transposition of the problem from God onto man. Its modus, though, is a different one:

because of his freely chosen transgression of the divine injunction, his “original sin,” man takes entirely upon himself the responsibility for evil.

It is here that free will enters the theological picture. For to make man responsible for the burden oppressing the world, one must first think of man as a being capable of taking on responsibility. Hence, as Blumenberg argues, Augustine develops the notion of freedom: because man freely chooses evil, God can justly punish him. In this regard, the Augustinian notion of freedom is less a positive characteristic (as it would later be for Milton) than a negative condition, which allows Augustine to shift onto man the onus of the world’s imperfection. In other words, freedom becomes a necessary and constitutive attribute so as to absolve God from the imputation that he created evil. This answer leads, however, to a further—and ultimately intractable—

contradiction: If the lasting corruption of the world originates in human freedom, is not freedom itself evil? And is not its creator, then, responsible for that evil? Against this reappearance of the Gnostic dilemma, Augustine holds up a version of Stoic providence, absolving God by transposing, yet again, the responsibility onto man, this time on the grounds of his universal guilt, his original fallenness. Augustine's doctrine of absolute predestination

conceives of “man’s ‘justification’ as an absolution ... that does not remove from the world the consequences of that guilt.” Moreover, it restricts the act of grace to the chosen, thus leaving “the continuing guilt of the all too many to explain the lasting corruption of the world’*7 | But Augustine's complex logic does not definitively overcome the Gnostic dualism, since the inherent (and, ultimately, arbitrary) division of men into the elect and the condemned can only be God’s doing. Coupling sin with predestination still surreptitiously—if now indirectly—holds God responsible for corruption and evil. To put it another way, Augustine's “solution” merely internalizes the ambiguity earlier attributed to the cosmos: the patristic preservation of the cosmos as positive comes at the cost of man’s epitomizing that very ambiguity. In the doctrine of absolute predestination, in

the arbitrariness of divine selection, the uncertain human relationship to the cosmos finds another resting place.

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

For several centuries that resting place sufficed. Despite its internal problems, Augustine’s attempt to rescue the cosmos as a figure of “order” prepared the path for the thirteenth-century Scholastic re-appropriation of Aristotelian cosmology. Augustine's justification of the cosmos as the expression of divine will (quia voluit) legitimated the later theological move whereby the Christian God was identified with Aristotle’s Prime Mover, the divine force behind a concentric and geocentric universe. However, Scholastic thought embraced the Augustinian rescue of the cosmos in a very special way: as demonstration and manifestation of divine power. Thomism did not primarily grow out of a concern (as had been the case with Augustine) about the reality of the world as it impinged on human existence. Rather, its interest in the cosmos stemmed from an already formed

conviction about divine omnipotence and perfection. Indeed, Aquinas and Bonaventure hardly seem even to acknowledge the problem that had so disturbed Augustine, that of evil or disorder in the world. In the words of Wildiers, “[one] sooner has the impression that [the scholastic theologian’s] treatment of the problem of evil was indirectly intended as an attempt to defend his optimistic view of the world against any possible attack.’”** The cosmos was ultimately important not because it provided reassurance with regard to the human condition, but because it manifested God's absolute power. The identification of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover with the Christian God served above all else to protect God's absolute self-reference. Camées’s own description of God as “that Goodness Infinite, /Which Its own mystery understands alone, / Nor upon earth is Its resemblance known” echoes the Thomist formula of divine self-referentiality. Yet, even in his own day, Aquinas's unification of Aristotelian cosmol-

ogy with Christian theodicy was far from uncontested. In 1277—a scant three years after Thomas Aquinas's death—Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, condemned a series of theological propositions derived from Aristotle, trig-

gering a sustained interrogation of the cosmos. With regard, for instance, to Aquinas’s belief in the world’s uniqueness, Tempier argued that such an assertion in effect denied divine omnipotence by positing an equivalence between the created world and the creative power made actual through it. To claim that the cosmos manifested God’s power was now tantamount to an illegitimate restriction of that power, since a finite creation could never fully express God's infinity. Accordingly, the world should no longer be perceived

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in the terms upon which the tradition from Augustine to Aquinas had insisted: as the epitome of God's creative potential. Neither could the ideological function of the cosmos—that of providing reassurance with regard to the human condition—be taken for granted.” In a sense, Tempier had only drawn into the open what was already implicit in Thomist thought. For the notion of an absolutely self-referential and self-sufficient God, when taken to its logical endpoint, necessarily placed

the creation of the universe beyond human comprehension, denying human beings any insight into its purpose. By expressly articulating theology’s basis in divine absolutism, the 1277 condemnation helped consolidate a categorial divide between divine rationality and the human world, between God's divine perfection and the physical universe—however marvelous its construction. The narrow focus on God's absolute separation from the world brought into view an incompatibility with the substance of the biblical God of salvation,

for whom an interest in humanity and its doings had always been paramount. Thus, the development of Scholastic thought from the late thirteenth century onwards testifies to what Blumenberg terms “the repression of the humanistic element of the Christian tradition by its theoretical ‘rigor’”°° We can recognize in this theological absolutism a resurgence of the Gnostic problematic against which Augustine had argued. As we have seen, the Gnostic opposition between the Old Testament God of creation and the transcendental God of salvation had survived through Augustine's claim that God had created the world not for man in general, but only for those whom he had chosen and redeemed by his grace. In the doctrine of predestination the alleged rationality of the divine order extolled by Augustine hit its limits since “liberation from the cosmos” could no longer be represented as “a divine offering open to all men and authenticated by the possession of knowledge.”*! The late Middle Ages conjured up the old Gnostic specter in a more virulent form, in fact, since unbending insistence upon divine om-

nipotence ultimately undercut an emphasis on the logicof salvation, the one possible avenue of escape. Gnosticism had at least attempted to provide a rational explanation for the conditions under which redemption became possible. In Scholasticism, by contrast, the utter opacity of the divine dispensation of grace blocked even the possibility of an explanation. Hence, man

was faced, as Blumenberg puts it, with “a ‘disappearance of order’ [Ordnungsschwund | ...a general conception of human activity that no longer perceives

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

in the given state of affairs the binding character of the ancient and medieval cosmos.”*” Thus, the cosmos of Aquinas and Bonaventure did not descend to Cam6es unscathed. By the sixteenth century, the unresolved problems of Augustinian theology reemerged as a full-blown crisis, with far-reaching political and material consequences. As is well known, the Augustinian retreat to

the notion of predestination remains vital in the theological debates of the Renaissance, especially,in the writings of Luther and Calvin. The doctrine permeates Protestant writing of the sixteenth century, leaving its impress on genres as wide-ranging as damnation tragedy (Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus), devotional writing, and epic (Spenser's Faerie Queene). Its importance meant, at the same time, that Counter-Reformation theology was not immune to ei-

ther its possibilities or its contradictions. We can indicate the currency of this doctrine by returning to where we left Camées’s Os Lusiadas: the disjunction between the ordered perfection of his divine globe and the instability of the human realm. The relations obtaining between the powers that be and “the inn of humanity” (pousada dos bumanos) to which Vasco da Gama belongs lie very much at the heart of Tethys’ narrative. The canto ideologically supports its promise of an unbounded Portuguese colonial empire through an implicit reference to the eschatological dispensation of grace. Jupiter, for example, is identified with a

“Santa Providéncia” that sustains and governs the whole world by means of intelligent spirits (10.83.1-4).°° The earth’s ambiguous position within the cosmological world picture is controlled by drawing a distinction between those whom Providence has specially selected as worthy of divine dispensation and those around whose “savage neck” the “slave-ring” is to be thrown (“de langar-lhe 0 colar ao rudo colo,” 10.139.6). Together, these visions seek to establish the Portuguese as the elect, the special few chosen by Providence or Divine Wisdom to be immortalized.°* The Portuguese colonial achievements are crucial proof of their special place in the eyes of God, who shows them grace (“Faz-te mercé...a Sapiénca / Suprema,” 10.76.1-2) not only by granting

them knowledge of their future deeds (“concedido / Vos é saberdes os futuros feitos,” 10.142.1-2) but by guaranteeing that these events will come to pass. Camées’s separation of the elect from the fallen echoes the eschatological problem of redemption to which Augustine had given an especially cogent form. As we have seen, this problem was fundamentally linked to the

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ambiguity of the ancient cosmos for Christian thought, and particularly to

the paradoxical position occupied by the earth as at once cosmologically central and yet fallen. The Scholastic celebration of order had pushed this discrepancy into the background, since redemption “was reinterpreted as a return to an original world order, and eschatology was considered to be a definite confirmation of this.’”*° But the deep-reaching religious controversies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries drew the question of redemption back into the center, producing a complex double response. On the one hand, the cosmos remained powerful as a theological metaphor recalling an

earlier time when the world and the power behind it seemed in harmony. To a Church struggling to maintain its authority, the time of Aquinas appeared

to constitute just such a moment: in retrospect at least, Thomist thought represented a theological system that resolved through the figure of the cosmos the conflicts between Christianity and pagan antiquity, or between God and man. On the other hand, the intervening history of conflict and division

meant that a dogmatic return to that vision of unity and stability was as artificial as it was necessary. While the cosmological frame remained alive as the projected image of perfection and harmony, its formal coherence could not be fully believed in. The cosmos expressed the force of a desire that could no longer be met. In the colonial context, such internal dissonance is carefully circumscribed by translating the eschatological problem into a historical one. The impetus behind Tethys’ extended overview (10.92—141) of the diverse regions of the earth lies, she tells the Portuguese voyagers, in the fact that through their endeavors and those of their successors the new Orient is made manifest,

A gift for all the world which you bestow, You who so bravely o’er the waters pressed, Open the gates of the great Sea to throw. Eis aqui as novas partes do Oriente

Que vés outros agora ao mundo dais,

\

Abrindo a porta ao vasto mar patente,

Que com tao forte peito navegais. (10.138.1-4) She thereby subordinates her heterogeneous geographical survey to the ordered progression of a divinely legitimated history, now revealed to the Por-

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

tuguese as their reward. It is a reward earned and acknowledged in this world rather than in the next. Through this subordination, Camées’s epic re-works the metaphysical

ambiguity of the human condition in historical terms. It retains the idealized vision of the cosmos as both source and guarantor of history, but reformulates the eschatological problem of separating the elect from the damned on the basis of two intra-historical distinctions: first, between the Portuguese and past European wanderers; and second, between a Christian, colonizing

West—exemplified by the Portuguese—and a subjugated, heathen “Orient.” Precisely this latter opposition informs the textual movement from the cosmological to the geographical: Vés Europa Crista, mais alta e clara Que as outras em policia e fortaleza.

Vés Africa, dos bens do mundo avara,

Inculta e toda cheia de bruteza. . . . (10.92.1-4) Lo! Christian Europe, fair exalted state,

Excelling all in might and manners meet, Afric, for worldly wealth insatiate, Incult, and all brutality complete.

The adjective clara, used here as an attribute for Christian Europe, echoes its repeated use in the description of the cosmic globe penetrated by clear light (lume clarissimo), establishing a metonymic connection between the idealized

cosmos and those for whom it was intended. This connection between divinity and empire runs deep in the Renaissance. The divine origin of the cosmos in CamGes’s epic legitimates the succession of pagan gods, who in turn designate the elect and guarantee their colonial empire. By seeing the power and glory of the gods as deriving not from their divinity but from their spatial positions within a Christianized cosmos, Camées draws a parallel between mythological genealogy and historical destiny.°° The only people to overcome the limitations of earthly existence are those whom Providence (as the expression of the divine will) has marked out for glory. And as Camées has been at some pains to tell us, the Portuguese are the chosen few to whom it “has been granted... / To know the great deeds of futurity”

(10.142.1-2). For they voyage to India, sent by God to conquer the realms of the unknown. Whereas those to be subjected to the Portuguese colonial

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yoke are the massa damnata, remaining at home, seduced by the wealth they undeservedly possess: dark, naked, avaricious, and brutal, their slender hopes’ of salvation lie with their Christian mastets.

The World in Crisis Since Camées’s Os Lusiadas engages the cosmos in explicitly theological terms, my analysis has thus far privileged the contentious history of that pagan figure within the Christian tradition. The ancient cosmos inherited from Thomist theology not only justified earthly existence but also provided Camées with a frame upon which to erect both the Portuguese colonial project and his epic re-telling of that enterprise. At the same time, we have also seen that the resurgence of an earlier Gnostic dualism expressed the extent to which the image of the antique cosmos was no longer adequate to mediate between the human subject and the Christian God. The reemergence of tensions internal to the cosmic metaphor was not, however, in itself sufficient to undermine reliance upon a divinely ordered world, though it was a necessary precondition for doing so. The difficulty in

reviving the kind of stability embodied by the antique cosmos was as much a result of a widely experienced loss of order as it was of dissonances internal to theology. One can see the theological interrogation of the cosmos as a response to a broad-based uncertainty attendant upon the material conflicts that made up the so-called general crisis of feudalism. As Michael Walzer has argued, radical Protestantism was both a reflex in religious thinking to social and economic transformations and “a creative response to the difficulties [these changes] posed to individual men and women.’*’ The theoretical rigor of the sixteenth-century Catholic Church, no less than the severity of its practice (especially in Spain and Portugal), seems “a creative response” to the experience of a dissolution of the shared and institutionalized beliefs regulating and ordering quotidian life.*® A pervasive sense of living in a state of emergency characterizes the basic eschatological stance of the late Middle Ages. Rather than an unquestioning hope in future events, a fear of the imminent destruction of the world and the final judgment to follow dominated contemporary perception. “The whole of European society, from the depths to the surface,” Henri Pirenne has remarked of the period of crisis dating from the beginning of

55

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and

Voyage

in “Os

Lusiadas’

the fourteenth century, “was as though in a state of fermentation.”*? That this claim holds for the material history of late medieval Christianity is undeniable. Rent by the Great Schism, the quarrels between the popes and the

Council, and the heresies of Wycliffe and Hus, the Church was subject to intense scrutiny in its claim to be the ultimate arbiter of human life. In addition, the political and social conditions in Europe exacerbated the sense of a deteriorating order. Not only was the European world internally fractured by the continued warring among emerging nation-states and houses, but the external boundaries of Christendom were under threat in the wake of

the fall of Constantinople (1453) and Turkish incursions into the Balkan Peninsula. In David Mitchell’s words, “[t]he pace and politics of the Reformation, that explosion of the accumulated grievances of the Middle Ages, and of its counterpart, the Catholic Church’s belated attempt to come to terms with the post-medieval world, were, ironically, both governed by the ebb and flow of Turkish aggression.”* The material signs of an emergent crisis can be pinpointed with reason-

able precision: the Black Death of 1349. The plague that swept in waves across Europe in the mid-fourteenth century—decimating the population by 20 to

40 percent—provided compelling justification for existential uncertainty. It brought individuals face to face with their ineluctable mortality and also led in the long run to a restructuring of established social relationships.” This was certainly true in medieval Portugal. Looking back upon the reign of Dom

Fernando (1367-85), the early fifteenth-century historiographer Fernao Lopes remarked upon the changes Portugal had undergone from an earlier time when “kings... had such a way with the people for their service and profit that all perforce were rich and the kings had great revenues.’ This admittedly rosy picture provides the foil for Fernando’s reign, during which, Lopes continues, “a new world was born very contrary to the old, and the easy years of his father’s time were gone; and afterwards there came redoubled woes, so that many wept their ill-starred misery.’® Attacks of the plague in 1356, 1384, 1415,

1423, 1432, 1435, 1437-38, and 1458 worsened the demographic imbalance and led to a growing shortage of grain. Thereafter, the decline in the rural labor force combined with greater urban demand for goods (given the influx of people to the cities in the wake of the plagues) to contribute to in the historian A. H. R. de Oliveira Marques’s words, “a persisting maladjustment between production and consumption.”

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All across Europe, during this period, internal social pressures boiled over into peasant rebellions, as in the 1357 Parisian revolt of the Jacquerie, the -

English rising of 1381, and the fourteenth-century Iberian uprisings such as the Catalan remensas and the Portuguese sesmarias. There was, Robert Brenner

informs us, “an intense Europe-wide lord/peasant conflict throughout the later fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries, almost everywhere over the same general issues: first, of course, serfdom; second, whether lords or peasants were to gain ultimate control over landed property, in particular the vast areas left vacant after the demographic collapse.’® Although violent conflict between lords and peasants had already become more frequent during the thirteenth century, the process accelerated dramatically in the aftermath of the plague years. The shortage of tenants relative to arable land meant a downward pressure on rents and thus a decline in landed income. Landlords reacted by increasing the financial exactions on their unfree tenants. Furthermore, the chronic shortage of labor led to an increased competition between lords and rich peasants for scarce human resources, exerting an upward pressure on wages.°° On the Iberian Peninsula, the conflict was especially intense due to the

high level of peasant organization and the assembling of mass peasant armies. The Catalan remensas, the bloody and violent confrontations of the later fourteenth century, took shape, to cite Brenner, against “increased legislation by the Corts—the representative body of the landlords, the clergy,

and the urban patriciate—to limit peasant movement and decrease personal freedom.” The 1486 Sentence of Guadalupe attests to the peasantry’s success in resisting feudal demands, granting them “their full personal freedom, full

right in perpetuity to their property ... and, perhaps equally important, full right to those vacant holdings . .. which they had annexed in the period following the demographic catastrophes.’®” In Portugal, the rapid deterioration in the everyday conditions of life also led to a series of conflicts along class lines: between the lower social groups and the landed aristocracy, as well as between the aristocracy and an upwardly mobile urban middle class.°* Peas-

ant revolts there prompted Dom Fernando's promulgation of the 1375 Lei das Sesmarias, which attempted to control the movement of labor and to fix the wages of agricultural laborers.® Despite these regulations, however, the erosion of institutionalized social hierarchies could not be reversed. Not only did the conflicts trigger—as in Spain—a shift towards peasant ownership

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of land, but they also led to greater labor freedom so that by the end of the next century “a significant, if not a decisive, part of all labour was free [from serfdom], and employment [came to be] based on revocable and temporary hiring contracts.””° It needs to be emphasized that this hard-won freedom was inseparable from the dissolution of traditional structures of belief and existence: along with upheavals and challenges to the established order came great fear. Crisscrossing the surface of medieval Europe were the paths of wandering preachers, whose sermons repeatedly played on an almost tangible anxiety about daily life and what lay beyond. When Brother Richard (later to be the fa-

ther confessor of Joan of Arc), after a stint of ten consecutive days of sermons about the Cemetery of the Innocents and the Dance of the Dead, intimated to his Parisian audience that this his tenth sermon would be the last, “the people, important and unimportant, cried so wretchedly and so piteously from the depths of their hearts, as though they were seeing their best friends dragged into the ground, and themselves along with them.” And, as he left Paris, the people left the city en masse, spending the night

in the fields near St. Denis to ensure themselves a good seat the next day.”! Such an anguished fixation on human mortality was a pan-European feature at a moment when death seemed always around the corner. In late medieval Portugal, for example, [f]ree landholders, both of villein and noble descent, left their goods to religious orders, to the parish churches, and to the cathedrals, in a desper-

ate attempt to buy salvation. Such legacies were theoretically forbidden by the law, but no authority would curb them in this troubled period, when

the Final Judgment was expected at any moment and when court members and state officials themselves (including the king and the royal family) were trying to appease God’s wrath and to save their own souls.’”

If the great efforts of Scholasticism, to recall the effusive description of

A.R. Myers, had led to “reform, order, and cohesion in the Church, in organization, in dogma and in philosophy,’ and had given western Europe “a new

sense of devotion and spiritual joy,’ the rebellions of the fourteenth century bespoke a fundamental undermining in daily practice and in belief of these tenets and of religious authority in general.’ In brief, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed the gradual disintegration of the conceptual and

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pragmatic scaffolding upon which early Scholasticism had erected its syncretic universe. On various levels the internal theological crises of Christianity were amplified by an Ordnungsschwund, which constituted a central experiential feature of the late medieval world. The uncertainty of everyday life and the fear of its imminent end nourished both the dogmatic assertion of social hierarchy and attempts to transform it. Ironically, the theological response to material crisis in this period finally aggravated the crisis itself. Amidst these social upheavals, renewed in-

sistence on the validity of the antique /Scholastic cosmos only served to underscore the radical gap between quotidian reality and the rigid image of

hierarchical stability expressed by that figure. The implacable rigor with which Christianity had pursued its pagan ghost had simultaneously undermined its own foundations. In this sense, Thomism functions as Camées’s reference point less on its own terms, as theological truth, than as a means of reach-

ing towards the dependability of the ancient cosmos at a time of great uncertainty—in order to shape anew Portugal's status as nation and as colo-

nial power. The ambiguous status of the ancient cosmos reappears in Os Lusiadas in the further problem of whether or not the human world is to be counted as being part of the cosmos. On a lexical level, the use of mundo (world) to designate either the celestial cosmos (which may or may not include the earth) or the earthly realm epitomizes the tension that Os Lusiadas tries to resolve. In Canto 10, modern editions of the epic tend to adopt an,orthographical distinction, capitalizing the word when referring to cosmological structure

(as in 10.80.1, 10.83.4, and 10.85.2) while retaining the lowercase when its use is clearly restricted to the earth (for example, 10.81.8 and 10.138.2). Moreover, in spite of its diffuseness, Tethys’ extended overview of the earth’s surface

(10.92—141) provides a structural counterpart to her divine cosmography. Through the ordered progression of a geography revealed to the Portuguese as their reward, she brings the earth back under the aegis of ‘a stable cosmos. To the extent that the classical epic bespoke the need to hold together self and world, Camées’s epic takes up the same task in a new historical context,

in the hope that a return to that generic “core” would allay the anxiety that the cosmos had itself, in a manner of speaking, triggered. Camées's reliance on the pagan machinery of the ancient epic signals, then, the desire to reactivate a particular mode of being to which that genre

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Epic and Voyage in ‘Os Lusiadas’

was bound. Ironically, the presence of the pagan gods constitutes a histori-

cally modulated response to an erosion of Christian faith, to the renewed production of that unease that the ancient cosmos had been designed to negate. Embarking with the pagan gods upon this inaugural voyage to India, Os Lusiadas nostalgically merges an imagined past with a desired future in order to confer upon the land of its birth a national unity, a shared sense of purpose, and a colonizing ethos capable of repairing the wounds left by the depredations of a still-vital history.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Camées’s attempt to conjoin pagan mythology with Christianity has elicited a decidedly mixed response from subsequent readers of the poem. Broadly speaking, defenders of his method

adopt a humanist position ultimately indebted to Jacob Burckhardt’s magisterial account of the rebirth of antiquity.”* Burckhardt’s sense of antiquity as a repository of permanent truths resurfaces, for example, in the work of

C. M. Bowra. The pagan gods, he writes, are the “forces which have created the best elements in European life as CamGes knows it... . In their own way and in their own place they are real. ... Free from the theological inhibitions of the Middle Ages and hardly touched by the Counter-Reformation, he works out his own way of bringing the Olympian gods into his poem.’”° The inadequacy of a hermeneutics such as Bowra’s lies above all in its dualistic separation of Renaissance Christianity from antique thought, unreflectively positing a Christian humanism for which antiquity functions solely as the source of ultimate truths about the human condition.’° Recent critics have approached the question of the epic’s organic unity with greater reservations. “Camées is foremost among those Renaissance poets,’ Thomas Greene scathingly remarks, “who were determined to introduce

pagan machinery at whatever cost in coherence. ... The author's blunder is

not really helped by the predictable identification of Jupiter with Christian Providence in the final canto, nor by a Euhemeristic explanation of the lesser gods.’’” Greene’s skepticism is shared by readers such as Quint and Helgerson, for whom the internal tensions of Os Lusiadas demand interpretations

able to account for the literary and historical functions of its supernatural machinery. Epic unity 1s thereby exposed as an aesthetic construction, and

constructedness itself seen as the sign either of aesthetic failure (Greene) or of ideological labor (Quint and Helgerson). Despite their shrewd recognition of the tension between pagan and Christian structures in Os Lusiadas,

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however, these readings also tend to ignore the effects upon the epic of late

medieval theological and material crises. Indeed, curiously enough, the earlier, humanistically oriented readings are the ones that convey—if only implicitly —the sense of historical necessity evoked by Camées’s text, the feeling that CamGes could not perhaps have done other than he did.”* My reading here suggests that CamGes's reaching back to the antique world is itself the symptom of a crisis: a complex and contradictory response to the loss of the stability and order associated with the figure of the cosmos. Camées’s introduction of the pagan gods remains less a determination to introduce them no matter the cost than a necessary response to his historical moment—necessary, that is, given the form of the

only solution that Camées can conceive.” (That this is not the only possible response, and—as Os Lusiadas also demonstrates—ultimately an inadequate

one, will soon emerge.) In 1572, Fret Bertholameu Ferreira, the chief censor of the Board of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, sanctioned the publication of Os Lusiadas,

even as he noted the theological irregularity of Camées’s use of pagan deities. By order of the Holy and Universal Inquisition I have examined these ten cantos of The Lusiads of Luis de Camées, concerning the valorous exploits

in arms which the Portuguese performed in Asia and Europe, and I find

nothing... scandalous or contrary either to the Faith or to good morals [nao achey .. . cousa alg[um Ja escandalosa, nem contraria 4fe & bés costumes]. Only it is necessary to warn readers that the author, in order to impress them with the difficulties of the Portuguese in finding the route and the entrance into India, has made a fictional [figdo] use of the gods of the Gentiles. ... Nevertheless, since this is a poem and pretense [fingimento|, and the author, as a poet, intends no more than to ornament his poetic style, we do not find it improper to introduce this fable of the gods into the work, rec-

ognizing it as such, and without detriment to the truth of our Holy faith,

that all the gods of the Gentiles are demons [todos os Deoses dos G[en ]tios sam Demonios].®°

However, in the infamous “Piscos” edition of 1584, the same censor (along with three others) excised every reference to the offending “Deoses dos Gentios,”

concluding that “assim emendado como agora vai, nao tem cousa contra fé e os bas costumes”’ (thus corrected as it is now, it contains nothing contrary to faith and good morals).*!

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Frank Pierce has suggested that these vagaries in its publishing history signify a misplaced prudishness of which the Church soon rid itself; however,

it is more likely that the expurgations are the legacy of the theological and material crises delineated above. No doubt, Frei Ferreira’s pointed phrase,

“recognizing ... that all the gods of the Gentiles are demons,” absolves the text of heresy by mouthing a central dogma of Church doctrine. But, in a sense, Ferreira misreads the poem to make his case: reducing the pagan gods to mere embellishment may bypass the theological problem of Christianity’s relationship to paganism, but it also ignores the crucial fact that Camées’s epic never stigmatizes the Olympian gods as demons. (That designation the text reserves for the heathen gods encountered by the Portuguese in Africa and India.) On the contrary, it is evident that Camées gives the classical gods a central place (albeit, as Ferreira accurately recognizes, a belatedly “fictional” one) within the Christianized Scholastic cosmos; they are the functionaries of

God, through whom he realizes his divine will. Ferreira’s subsequent bowdlerization bespeaks an awareness that such an engagement exceeds mere orna-

mentation. After 1609 Os Lusiadas was again available in the form in which it first appeared; the implication, however, is not necessarily that the Church

had become less prudish and more tolerant but rather that such grasping at antiquity for a solution to contemporary crises had largely been abandoned. Consequently, allusions to an antique understanding of the world no longer

seemed as threatening. For in the final analysis, Camées’s attempt to revive an earlier relationship to the cosmos could not be sustained. The destruction of the antique cosmos in the late medieval period had been too thorough, too incisive. There could be no return to the reassurance that the ancient cosmos had offered the Greek and early Roman world: the unyielding adherence to an absolutely powerful (and hence absolutely removed) God had finally undermined the figure, which Augustine and the Scholastics had sought to preserve. The difficulty of returning expresses itself in the paradox of its logic: the desire to revivify an ancient cosmos whose shifting place in the Christian tradition had itself underwritten the impossibility of its resuscitation. The emergence from such a double bind would need to be characterized precisely by refusal of the gesture itself, to refrain, as Thomas Browne's 1646 Pseudodoxia Epedemica would put it, from a “prostration to antiquity.’* And yet a turning away from this return to the antique world could not

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easily take place within the systems of late medieval and early Renaissance thought and practice. In the fifteenth-century theology of Nicholas of Cusa, © for example, we find the medieval Christian struggle with its pagan heritage impelled to a logical impasse. The Cusan doctrine of learned ignorance (docta ignoranta) withdraws assent from the truth claims and certainties of Scholastic thought, while recognizing its own inability to assert an alternative theological truth. The possibility of a refusal that could break such an impasse would have to come from outside the closed structure of the medieval universe. And it is to this other space—which has necessarily received short shrift thus far—that we now turn our attention: to the realm of material practice and, in particular, to the practice of voyaging.

The Voyages of Discovery The explanatory value of the ancient cosmos was eroded by even more than the conjunction examined above, between contradictions within Christian

thought and the material transformations in European society. It was just as seriously damaged by changes triggered by the so-called voyages of discovery. Without explicitly intending to, the voyagers discovered a truer geography of the world, only to find that the world looked nothing like what they had expected. And if the ancients were so mistaken about the surface of the earth upon which they resided, could one really trust their picture of the universe? Not for much longer, as it turned out. ,

The actual voyages to “India” were not, of course, undertaken with the express intention of destabilizing an existing weltanschauung. Granted, Os Lusiadas seeks to represent the voyage that finally leads the Portuguese to India as an “originary” moment, a break from earlier modes of thought and being. Nevertheless, Vasco da Gama’s voyage was at its inception simply one among others; only its results made it distinct and special. The explicitly stated motives of Portuguese expansionism were, according to C. R. Boxer,

a crusading zeal against the Muslims, the quest for Prester John, the desire for Guinea gold, and the search for oriental spices.** This interdependence of religion, money, and mercantile trade must be explored further if we are to understand how the early colonial voyages responded to felt socioeconomic needs at this historical juncture, and why Portugal and Spain were the two countries that systematically pursued and financed such voyages.*° These

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questions require us to stress the material and cultural conditions that led to Portugal's (and Spain's) colonial investments so that we can establish the connection between Iberian expansionism and the more general crises of feudalism outlined in the previous sections.*® From the outset, the economic motives behind the voyages were closely intertwined with religious impulses generated by schisms within late medieval Christian thought. Take, for example, the Iberian search for alternative sources

of bullion. A shortage of metal currency was a central feature of the European medieval economy, and the little that was available was controlled by Italian traders, especially those of Venice and Genoa.*” European anxiety re-

garding Islam—sharpened by struggles with the Turks in eastern Europe and with the Moorish powers on the Iberian Peninsula—conflicted with Europe's reliance on Arab-controlled trans-Saharan and eastern land trade for acquiring bullion (particularly gold). The means of overcoming this unwelcome dependence seemed to lie in independently reaching the source of the gold. Hence, Portuguese attacks on Morocco, beginning with the 1415 Ceuta campaign, were directed in part at establishing a North African entrepét to secure access to Saharan gold. In turn, the voyages of discovery down the West

African coast were partly motivated by the desire to reach bullion sources outside the Islamic world. By the 1450s these latter endeavors had borne fruit, and the Portuguese had successfully established a traffic in gold (in exchange

for wheat) with the natives of the Guinea coast. In 1457, King Alfonso V minted for the first time a stable Portuguese gold coin—based, significantly,

upon the Italian florin and not upon the Moslem-Castilian dobla. The cruzado was to remain stable for over eighty years, underpinning an intervening period of comparative economic stability between the post-plague turmoil and the renewed crises of the late sixteenth century. Although shaped by economic circumstances, the early colonial voyages were nonetheless represented and experienced as religious crusades backed by the Roman Catholic Church. The Portuguese North African campaigns were seen as extensions of the Reconquista, which had driven the Moorish powers from much of the Iberian Peninsula. For their part, the voyages of discovery, which would take the Portuguese beyond the domains of the Islamic powers, encouraged another religious rationalization. Here the enterprise of saving souls provided the commensurate religious frame. It was, as Marques notes,

“no wonder that the Church approved Portuguese expansion and gave it the

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warmest blessing. Successive Papal bulls ... backed the Portuguese military projects or attainments, labeled them holy “crusades,” invited all the Chris- ’

tian rulers to help, and granted indulgences :and even.a share from church revenues.”*® The messianic dream of establishing a dominant Christian empire —shared by so many of Portugal's monarchs—is reflected in the crusading rhetoric of historical narratives accompanying the early colonial voyages. These texts reveal quite unambiguously a deeply rooted belief that Portugal and Spain—the two countries whose historical existence was inextricably intertwined with the fate of their Moorish neighbors—were Christianity’ champions in an all-embracing struggle against the Islamic powers (see, for example, Cam6es’s exhortation to the other European nations to follow Por-

tugal’s lead in the defense of Christendom, 7.2—14).*” To cite Lyle McAlister, “Spaniards and Portuguese may have been no more devout than other Europeans, but... [they] held a profound conviction that they were especially anointed by God, that they were the most Catholic of all peoples.””°

The claim that the voyage to India was driven by the search for “Christians and spices” has long been a familiar one, as indeed Os Lusiadas's invocation of religion and trade confirms. Upon his arrival in Calicut, Cam6es's Vasco da Gama voices the religious concerns of the period when he tells the

Moor Mongaide that the Portuguese had come forth “the road to clear /... And find where Indus’ giant stream may flow / For thus the Faith of God will wax and grow.’”! He also later raises the question of trade and money with the Zamorin of Calicut at the Portuguese monarch’s behest (even as he disingenuously projects the profit motive onto the Indian ruler): “And if thou wilt with treaty and with pact /... Trade out of superfluity enact / Between his country’s [that is, Portugal’s] merchandise and thine /.. . then there will surely be / For him great glory, and great wealth for thee.”® But, seeking gold and god, the voyagers were motivated by the material crises of late feudalism in other ways as well. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries had seen a massive distortion of existing relations of production and distribution.’* The effort of maintaining existing hierarchies of power in the face of material and ideological upheaval increaséd the pressure to find other exploitable sources of revenue that could help individual European states cope with the changing socioeconomic conditions. The Portuguese dependence on Guinea gold from the 1450s onward had, for instance, an additional effect: Portugal had to increase grain production so that the

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agricultural surplus could be used to obtain gold from West African tribes. The diversity of the socioeconomic considerations leading to the voyages east suggests that trade in spices, though highly visible, cannot sufficiently

account for the early voyages. The fact that the European crisis came from the ground up, so to speak, meant that the necessary geographical expansion

could not primarily be motivated by “the exchange of preciosities [that is, spices and jewels], however large it loomed in the consciousness of the European upper classes.”°* Rather, territorial expansion was dictated by the need for staples—in particular for food and fuel. In purely economic terms, the later emergence of a world-system based upon nation-states required, as Immanuel Wallerstein has argued, that sev-

eral interlinked conditions be met: “an expansion in the geographical size of the world in question, the development of variegated methods of labor control for different products and different zones of the world-economy, and

the creation of relatively strong state machineries in what would become the core states of this capitalist world economy.”®* Of these conditions, the first,

namely, territorial expansion, constituted the key prerequisite for the successful operation of the remaining two factors. Thus, viewed in retrospect it makes sense that the first places to be “colonized” were, to adopt Braudel’s phrase, the “internal Americas” of Europe itself, specifically the Mediter-

ranean plains and the northern forests. However, these measures alone could not sufficiently relieve the financial pressures on the state and the ruling classes. The next step was an expansion at the edges of Europe, directed especially toward the Atlantic islands, which were speedily developed through

“the tetralogy of cereals, sugar, dyes and wine.’”® The growing importance of sugar—a labor and soil intensive crop—motivated in turn the rise of slavery. The limits on exploitation of Europe's own peasantry in a time of feudal crisis necessitated the acquisition of cheap labor from elsewhere, and the coastal tribes of Africa with whom the Portuguese had made contact in their attempt to break into the West African gold trade proved to be a lu-

crative source of manpower.” The Romanus Pontifex of January 8, 1455;—the so-called charter of Portuguese imperialism—not only illustrates the importance of theology as an enclosing frame for the colonial enterprise, but also its imbrication with material exigencies to which the voyages were a response. A substantial portion of the papal bull summarizes the efforts of the Portuguese Prince Henry

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(“the Navigator”), focusing in particular upon his colonization of the uninhabited islands of Madeira and the Azores and his acquisition of numerous Negro slaves, many of whom “have been baptized and |have] embraced the Catholic Faith.” In return for Henry’s religious exertions on its behalf, the Church granted Portugal a monopoly over navigation, trade, and fishing

in not just these regions, but in all subsequently discovered areas south of Capes Bojador and Nun, and as far as the Indies.”* The specific emphasis on the colonization of uninhabited islands and the monopoly over fishing rights and the slave trade indicates that these discoveries were important not primarily to open a sea route to the Indies (which is mentioned only as a subsidiary concern) but to solve internal problems of food supply and labor. Moreover, despite his later renown for having directed the Portuguese maritime expansion, Prince Henry did not even have such a plan. While certainly driven by the desire to “recover” North Africa for Christendom, Henry

—neither the most important nor the richest of Jodo I’s sons—"“primarily regarded |the voyages] as a way of increasing his patrimony and rents, which his political and military undertakings, along with [his] opulent household, constantly depleted.’””” What from our vantage point look like the first steps toward a global colonial empire originated in these faltering and inherently unstable attempts to maintain a social formation that had reached its material and ideological limits. But why Portugal? Because, as Wallerstein puts it, “she alone of the European states maximized will and possibility.’”!°° As elsewhere on the continent, internal colonization in Portugal was nearing its limits by the early fifteenth century. However, in contrast to the rest of Europe, the Iberian Pen-

insula was in a favorable geographical position to encourage venturing out into the Atlantic. Moreover, the medieval Portuguese economy still bore the influence of the trading system it had supplanted: the Islamic Mediterranean zone, a highly monetized eer of exchange, which was already ori-

ented towards long-distance trade.'® } To these quasi-objective considerations we need to add the relative stability of the Portuguese monarchy and the crown’s active support in organizing and financing the early voyages. That Portugal possessed one of the most stable state machineries in early modern Europe was in large measure a consequence of the highly centralized monarchy, which had developed there in response to feudal crises. These crises had benefited a certain strata of Por-

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tuguese society, the urban middle class and small landholders, who were in-

volved with the export and import of commodities in the late fourteenth

century. Moreover, succession struggles in the 1380s pitted Jodo of Avis, supported by the common estate, against King John I of Castile, who was backed

by much of the Portuguese nobility. The former's victory at the 1385 battle of Aljubarrota dealt a severe blow to the established aristocracy. With Dom Jo‘o I's accession, a new-style monarchy was inaugurated in which the older nobility was largely replaced by a new landed aristocracy dependent upon the king.’ In the hands of successive Portuguese rulers, despite occasional setbacks, the process of centralization proceeded apace. Even though the former nobility had regained much of its confiscated domains by the time of the

African and Indian voyages in the reigns of Manuel I (1495-1521) and Jodo III (1521-1557), its relationship to the sovereign had been transformed: the nobles had been forced to accept their subordination to the king (they could not, for instance, resist the entry of the upper bourgeoisie or corregedores into the gentry), and, to survive, they increasingly relied upon royal appointments and temporary subsidies.'°° A similar strengthening of monarchic authority also took place in the religious sphere, especially with regard to the religio-military orders such as the knights of Santiago, Avis, and Christ, which had risen to prominence in

the course of the Reconquista. Following Dom Joao I's victory, these orders had been forcibly allied to the crown, control over the foremost masterships passing into the hands of secular princes. In 1550, the Pope authorized the absorption of Santiago and Avis into the state under the fiction of appointing the king of Portugal as their governor. “For the first time in Portuguese history,” as Marques puts tt, “the royal patrimony covered more than half the country, and surpassed, both in extent and revenues, any other.”!°* Even the politics of the Counter-Reformation in Portugal, so crucial to Cam6es’s

Os Lusiadas, were in large measure the outcome of attempts by successive monarchs to achieve centralization and to consolidate royal control. The introduction of the Inquisition into Portugal was achieved in 1536 only after tntense efforts on the part of Joao III and his advisers, who succeeded (after Charles V’s intervention) in reversing the Pope's earlier refusal.’ Portugal did not in fact really “need” the Inquisition: the Reformation had not taken

deep roots there, and neither the Jews nor the Moots posed a clear menace to the Church’s unity. The forcible reimposition of Catholic dogma and the

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sharpening of religious divisions in sixteenth-century Portugal were, in a sense, the result of the royal desire to seize and to centralize power.

The close intertwining of the Roman Catholic Church and the Portu-

guese state created “the climate in which entrepreneurs could flourish” and encouraged the nobility “to find outlets for their energies other than internal or inter-European warfare.” Indeed, as Wallerstein informs us, “the sta-

bility of the state was crucial ... because it itself was in many ways the chief entrepreneur.’!°° The Church's desire to consolidate and expand its domain remained very much a part of what the voyages hoped to achieve. To turn again to the Romanus Pontifex: when the Pope granted the Portuguese a monopoly over all future domains they might acquire, the arrangement was clearly seen as a quid pro quo. It was hoped that the Portuguese colonial endeavors would result in the voluntary conversion of “entire native populations, or at least many individuals . .. in the near future.’!°’ In return for ex-

tending the Church’s spiritual empire, Portugal received a carte blanche for its own expansionist ambitions. In the short run, then, the Iberian voyages of discovery were tactical ventures governed by fairly well-defined strategic intentions. They functioned pragmatically to address both the religious and economic crises that affected late medieval Portugal. As localized practices that responded to specific material and ideological needs, their achievements could therefore be absorbed into existing epistemological formations. But if the voyages of discovery began as extensions of the medieval universe, as attempts to ensure that the world stayed the way it was, their very “success” meant that in the long run the world would not remain the same. Undertaken within the frame of a geography and a cosmology inherited from antiquity, the voyages unexpectedly uncovered a world radically different from anything that antiquity had known. The desired-for and nonetheless unexpected discoveries of “India” (by Columbus and by Vasco da Gama) exceeded the local circumstances that gave rise to them. The larger impact of these journeys derives from the interaction between their actual outcomes and the wider economic, cultural, and political frames that governed the way in which these outcomes were understood. Conditioned both by the crises of the late medieval world and by what the figure of “India” meant for that world, these contingent voyages of discovery—while similar in form to their predecessors—forced a reexamination of existing epistemological categories and opened up new ways of thinking and acting. Retrospectively, they came

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to represent a radical break from earlier modes of being and comprehending, but a break whose implications unfolded only in relation to those modes.!™ The unexpected consequences of these early colonial voyages may be seen—and this emphasizes once more the anxious conservatism of wishing to reach back to the ancient world—in the attempted “counterproofs” they spawned: doomed attempts to demonstrate that the ancients had known the truth all along, and that any geographic deviation from expectations derived from an inadequate hermeneutics. For instance, in the preface to his transla-

tion of Peter Martyr’s Decades, Richard Eden maintains that Columbus’s “New World” is really none other than the lost “Atlanthides” that Plato’s Timaeus had described.! Eden's curious identification of the New World with Plato's Atlanthides derives from his recognition of a potential contradiction between this project and that of discovering new lands. It is illogical, he avers, to believe that God could have created parts of the world that were not from the very beginning available in some way to man and thus part— even dimly—of man’s knowledge, since proper contemplation of the created world requires such knowledge. Ergo, these lands must already have

been known, our failure to acknowledge them a mere consequence of not having read the ancient texts with the requisite care. Another prevalent response was simply to ignore the discrepancy between the traditional picture (as reflected in, say, Ptolemy's Geographia) and the newer knowledge of what the earth’s surface looked like. Instead, tem-

poral continuity was emphasized. Even the Mercator-Hondius Atlas—a text forced by its very theme to incorporate information made available by the voyages of discovery—prefaces its up-to-date maps with an extended “Booke of the Creation and Fabrick of the World.” The atlas enables man, its preface claims, to fulfil the “first purpose” for his creation in that it “pro-

pound{s] to our contemplation... the true and perfect description of the whole world which we seeke for,’ so that man “might contemplate the works of God, might acknowledge, adore and worship his creator.’!"° Despite these efforts to stress continuity, the metaphor of the voyage becomes especially significant in the early modern period, precisely because it

points towards the emergence of a different notion of subjectivity and a different mode of understanding the human subject's place in the world. Even a text as conservative as Eden's bears the impress of a shift in epistemological frames, which it reveals in the buried anthropocentric premise that God's

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creation is intended for man’s knowledge.""! But the outlines of an emerging episteme are only faintly visible there. To grasp the terms in which this new understanding of the self and the world would ultimately be expressed, we need to look ahead briefly to philosophical thought of the first half of the seventeenth century. The writings of Francis Bacon and Descartes, in particular, bear witness to the changed function of the figure of the voyage in the wake of the discovery of “India” and “America.” For the insurmountable discrepancy now revealed between ancient or biblical geography—with its landlocked oceans, its misrepresentation of the African coastline, and its glaring

omission of the Americas—and the new geography of the earth potentially implied that truth about the world was something to be acquired only through the exertions of modern European man. Further, the knowledge thus attained, being based on actual experience and practice, could be used to refute

incontrovertibly the representations handed down from the ancient world. As Nathanael Carpenter put the case in 1625, “we find a great quantity of Earth

which lay hid and unknown without discovery, in the dayes of Ptolemy, which caused him to curtail the Earth in his geographicall descriptions. Which defect hath been since that time supplied by the industrious travails and Navigations of later times.”!! From their different perspectives both Francis Bacon and Descartes explicitly use the metaphor of the voyage in order to articulate a changed understanding of what constitutes truth and how it is to be achieved. What the voyages of discovery make possible is buried in Carpenter's phrase “industrious travails and Navigations.” In this phrase we can locate an important transformation in the metaphorics of truth: from the power intrinsic to truth (that is, the divine emanation through which truth realizes itself) to the force that man has to bring to bear upon truth in order to wrest it for himself in the form of knowledge. How one reaches this knowledge is the question that unites Bacon and Descartes. Their different answers—privileging empirical and theoretical practice, respectively —epitomize the multiple and far-reaching effects of the colonial voyages on Western thought. To definitively establish the connection between human labor, practical experience, and knowledge constitutes the central endeavor of Bacon's Great Instauration. Clearing the space for a new mode of knowledge, he criticizes the low estimation in which the mechanical sciences are held, for they alone can provide the tools capable of compelling Nature to yield up her secrets:

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“so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of [mechanical] art than left to herself.”!!% Consequently, progress in the sci-

ences becomes dependent upon the rejection of the past because it is “the veneration, the almost spell-bound reverence for antiquity, and the author-

ity of those held to be great figures in philosophy” that has blocked the advancement of knowledge. We owe the possibility of such a rejection, Bacon continues, to the practical achievements of the colonial voyages:

Nor should we ignore the fact that the els which have become frequent in our to us many things in Nature which can And surely it would be disgraceful in a

distant voyages and overland trayday have opened up and revealed throw a new light on philosophy. time when the regions of the ma-

terial globe, that is, of the earth, the seas and stars, have been opened up far and wide for us to see, if the limits of our intellectual world were re-

stricted to the narrow discoveries of the ancients.!!4

The implication that even the truth known to the ancients was a result of discovery points to the fundamental role played by the voyages in overturning hitherto secure assumptions about the relationship between the human subject and the cosmos. Not surprisingly, a parallel set of metaphors gains currency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, representing truth as an unknown land, a terra incognita. Sir Thomas Browne, for example, tells us

that he is “fain to wander in the America and untravelled parts of Truth.”"’® The discovered lands east and west of Europe present themselves as objects of a knowledge laboriously acquired through the “industrious travails and navigations” that have come to embody the new relationship of European man to his world. My turn to the shifting surfaces of such “absolute metaphors” to indicate the larger ramifications of discrete practices is certainly no accident. The tangible residues of an evanescent material practice, the metaphors of voyaging and discovery, form a constellation whose shape expresses the historical transformation under scrutiny here. They indicate a re-formulation of the place of the human subject that draws sustenance in this historical period from the multifarious and transient realm of action. Conversely, such metaphors also look ahead to—and indeed prepare the ground for—a sub-

sequent conceptual consolidation, The most important epistemological model to emerge—at least in terms

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of its impact on the history of Western thought and practice—was undoubtedly that of Descartes. His eminence derives from the rupture he initiated through his call for a laboriosa vigilia, a taxing vigilance manifested above all in his philosophical method of radical doubt. The turn to Descartes here not only illustrates the importance of the voyage metaphor in articulating a new understanding of the human subject. Just as crucially, it shows how his

epistemological break is conditioned by the theological controversies examined earlier, and specifically by the resurgence of Gnostic dualism in late Scholastic thought. That is, even the new ways of thinking spurred by the voyages carry traces of the crises that gave rise to the voyages in the first place. One cannot truly understand the new without the old. Sitting alone in his room, Descartes rigorously meditates on what it is possible to establish as true beyond all doubt. His relentless negation of the given, of that which presents itself to the senses as immediately true, drives him finally to postulate the existence of a genus malignus, or evil genius, intent upon deceiving man.''® With this hypothesis, the apparent solidity of the sensory world—and of man’s faith in what his senses reveal—vanishes. As Blumenberg points out, the careful elimination of all possible certainties by

the labor of the thinking mind creates the impression that Descartes had put aside “as though with one stroke .. . all the traditional opinions and prejudices and by himself had methodically created the authentic radicality for his new beginning.’"!”

The echo in Descartes’s description of the Gnostic belief in an evil demiurge should not escape us here: this enabling fiction projects an exaggerated version of the incomprehensibility of divine will that had constituted the fundamental principle of theological absolutism. Descartes transmogrifies the felt inaccessibility of an omnipotent God into a willfully deceptive spirit whose raison d’étre lies in depriving man of any certainty regarding the world. In its turn the world no longer directly expresses the absolute perfection of God. Since his methodical investigation is indifferent to the moral nature of the world’s origin, Descartes freely accedes to the worst possible case, that of an absolute uncertainty or arbitrariness at the root of human existence. If the Cartesian moment represents for us a radical incision in history, it unveils itself here as a resolute refusal of history; truth and certainty are transformed into the products of an autonomous reason, which knows no past.

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And herein lies its historicity: the resonance of Descartes’s evil genius with the Gnostic demiurge suggests that his denial of history is quintessentially a historical gesture that has been shaped by what it forgets, the medieval crises of faith and being. Crucially, reason now takes up the worst of

all possible worlds freely. Descartes constructively intensifies and “modernizes” the central problematic of the late middle ages by transforming its “crisis of certainty into an experiment with certainty,’ by rewriting the external impositions of history in terms of a set of self-imposed conditions.""® And by so doing he creates the minimum certainty upon which his subsequent philosophical system can be founded: “If it is not... in my power to arrive at the knowledge of any truth, I may at least do what is in my power (e., suspend my judgment), and with firm purpose avoid ... being imposed upon by this arch deceiver, however powerful and deceptive he may be.”?!”

Through the possibility of refusal man establishes for himself the irrefutable fact of his existence: “Let him deceive me,’ Descartes continues, “as

much as he will, he can never cause me to be nothing as long as I think that I am something.’’”° The process of reduction leads to the cogito as the absolute, unshakable basis of epistemological certainty. It establishes, in Blumen-

berg’s pithy phrase, “the anthropological minimum under the conditions of the theological maximum”: the human subject who produces himself qua rational subject independent of history in and through the exercise of this !! minimum freedom. The Cartesian rejection of the individual's historicity projects a different relationship of self to world, a new anthropological configuration for which Blumenberg’s term seems particularly apt: self-assertion. For the self-asserting subject existence is not something imposed upon him from without; rather, it is something he takes upon himself by deciding “how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him, and what use he will make of the possibilities that are open to him.”!”? In this way man becomes the source of authority regarding the world and comes to assume the place of God: we move, as it were, from theological absolutism to a proto-modern humanism.

Descartes’s reconfiguration of epistemological certainty in the 1637 Discourse on the Method avails itself of a metaphor that at first sight seems to contradict the Baconian celebration of the voyage. While rejecting, as Bacon does, the authority of the ancients, Descartes surprisingly denigrates the

utility of travel as well:

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For to converse with those of other centuries is almost the same thing as to travel. It is good to know something of the customs of different peoples in order to judge more sanely of our own..... But when one employs too much time in travelling, one becomes a stranger in one’s own country,

and when one is too curious about things which were practised in past centuries, one is usually very ignorant about those which are practised in our own time.!?%

No doubt, the inversion of the value placed on travel testifies to a real divergence in positions: Descartes’s preference for theoretical reason beats a path quite different from Bacon's espousal of empirical, pragmatic rationality. But their attitude to antiquity demonstrates a shared investment in a form of self-assertion, in the power and autonomy of human reason, be it

theoretical or empirical. In other words, Descartes’s reservations regarding travel similarly derive from a world in which travel has acquired a privileged metaphoric relationship to knowledge and truth. The perceived inadequacy of travel as metaphor for the philosophical method requires the prior emergence of the “natural” connection that Bacon sees between these. And as my remarks on the voyages of discovery imply, the space of material practices furnishes just such a connection. For we have already encountered the “taxing vigilance” of the Cartesian subject in the industrious labor through which man opens up his world for himself. Knowledge becomes available to him as a consequence of his seeing the world in terms of a potentially limitless opportunity. Such an attitude to the world could emerge because the relationship had already been established and internalized through the material practices of the colonial voyages. The Cartesian model thus expresses or externalizes a transformation that has already happened in another place. Descartes’s rejection of antiquity and his denial of the relevance of man’s historicity is predicated upon the practical impossibility of a return to the past for which the voyages of discovery are in great part responsible. As Descartes tells us, to act as if the world were the product of an evil genius is not easy: “This task,” he writes, “is a laborious one, and insensibly a certain lassitude leads me into the course of my ordinary life... . I fall back into my former opinions, and I dread awakening from this slumber, lest the laborious wakefulness which would follow the tranquillity of this repose should have to be spent not in daylight, but in the excessive darkness of the difficulties which have just been discussed.”!* It is

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through a “laborious wakefulness” that the Cartesian subject maintains its grasp on the world and on itself. Truth, Descartes and Bacon alike suggest, has, like the new worlds, to be discovered, realized, explored, and produced

by the human subject. And man’s new-found self-assertion is best figured in the voyages of discovery, the “taxing vigilance” of Columbus sailing west, the “industrious travails” of Vasco da Gama sailing east. The figure of the voyage thus takes on a rich new function in the early modern period. While the voyages were themselves practical responses to late medieval crises, in the wake of the great “discoveries” they cannot be ex-

plained solely in such terms. As the thought of Bacon and Descartes illus-

trates, the figure of the voyage comes to embody a different sense of certainty of knowledge and of the human subject's relation to it. At the same time, this

new understanding remains conditioned by the frames from which it breaks. This doubled relationship is likewise central to Camées’s Os Lusiadas. The epic wrestles with the new energies unleashed by the voyages, attempting to recapture them within an inherited epistemological frame that the voyages have weakened. As we shall now see, voyaging to “India” comes to epitomize this

ambivalent engagement with past and present.

Reaching “India”: “Epic” and “Voyage” Given the conservatism of Camées’s reliance on the world of the classical epic, there is something profoundly paradoxical in his making the subject of his epic a voyage that shares in (and will come to embody) the destruction of that world. In a suggestive study on the emergence of national identity in Elizabethan England, Richard Helgerson highlights the incompatibility between the epic form and voyage narratives by contrasting Cam6es’s construction of Portuguese nationhood to Richard Hakluyt's comparable endeavor in Principall Navigations of the English Nation. Helgerson's reading coordinates the epic/ voyage opposition with a social one, between a (feudal) aristocracy and an emergent mercantile class. The epic genre 1s associated with the “heroic” ideology of aristocracy, while voyage narratives express a baser mercantilist ethos. The main argumentational strand is the following. Although basing his epic on the historical event of Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India, Camées at-

tempts to exclude “the unheroic pursuit of commercial gain” that fundamentally characterizes voyage material; the goal is both to represent “a Por-

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tugal that prefers gloria to proveito |profit]” and “to bring such a nation into existence by showing it an ideal image of its heroic and nonmercantile self.”!?° The ideological deracination of proveito from gloria becomes especially evident when da Gama, as King Manuel’s spokesman, tells the Zamorin of Calicut that trade between their nations would result in “de ti proveito, e dele gloria ingente” (“for you profit and for him great glory,” 7.62.8; emphasis mine). But if we grant the continuity between Camées's nation-building project and the classical epic’s function of dispensing kleos or gloria, it remains unclear why the voyages—with their despised mercantilist associations— should have become the site upon which Camées’s epic unfolds in the first place. The voyage narratives do not, after all, belong to the same generic configuration within which, as David Quint has argued, romance functions as the epic’s “alternative ‘other’”!7° Given their demonstrable incompatibility, why should Camées conceive of epic and voyage as participating in the same discursive set? We need to tread carefully in deciding the extent to which the voyages were in fact to be identified with the ethos of a particular class. The rhetoric of Os Lusiadas may suggest a mutually exclusive opposition of aristocratic and mercantile classes, but Camées’s ideological separation of profit from glory

rests upon a far more fluid and ambiguous sense of what comprised the Portuguese nation. If Camées’s epic stance can be read as “the narration of state-ideology in its putative form as an ‘illusory community’ of social values,”!’” we should not forget the extent to which this state ideology is erected upon the hierarchical structure of royal absolutism rather than aristocratic privilege.'** The Portuguese and Spanish voyages were from the outset royal undertakings, supported, financed, and directed by the respective monarchs and their attendants. As we have seen, the consolidation of royal power in

early modern Portugal went hand in hand with the emergence of a new court nobility (which included the upper bourgeoisie), increasingly dependent upon its relationship to the monarch. It was from this group that the government chose its most highly placed home and overseas officers for diplomacy, the military, and the navy, and crucially for discovery and colonization. And like the monarch himself—the most prominent of the merchants—the nobility invested their revenues in transport and economic exploitation overseas. Unlike in Italy, where “the bourgeois rose to nobility, in Portugal,’ Marques tells us, “it was the nobleman who ‘climbed down’ and took over trade as a means

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of enriching his household.”!”? Camées’s opposition of a mercantile and an aristocratic ethos should consequently be interpreted with reference to a shared practice, a mutual commitment on the part of both the bourgeoisie and the nobility to the voyages, since both groups saw the voyages as a potential solution to crises of revenue and production affecting the absolutist state.!°° In fact, CamGes’s text does not exclusively associate the profit motive with a bourgeois ethos; rather, its affiliation depends upon the context of applica-

tion: because proveito functions as a negative marker of alterity, it can, for example, be used to articulate colonial otherness (Calicut versus Portugal, as in 7-62.8 above) just as well as class position. The problem of class identity and class fractions in the colonial context

is elaborated more fully in Chapters 3 and 4, which deal with the specific construction of English colonial identities. Here I wish to focus on structurally more fundamental attitudes encapsulated by the notion of self-assertion, at-

titudes that manifest themselves in and through historically specific patterns of class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and nationality. The form of subjectivity

embodied by the voyage to India does indeed represent a radical break from an earlier, theologically oriented ethos, which had served the aristocracy well.

But the figure of the voyage only took on this function retroactively, when

the voyages could be seen as pre-figuring or embodying the new notion of the human subject, which they implicitly induced. Until that point, the voy-

ages seemed—and indeed were—compatible with the material and ideological requirements of the earlier episteme. That is to say, what Helgerson identifies as Cam6es’s attack on “mercantile contamination” takes shape at a transitional moment when a felt divergence between epic and voyage has not as yet received explicit articulation. The threat posed by the new, emergent episteme to the order that Camées’s epic strives to preserve produces, as its

reflex, the text’s “exclusive identification of the nation with its aristocratic

governing class, and the equally exclusive identification of that class with a heroic crusading ethos.”!°! Both continuity with and divergence from the late medieval situation can be established by examining the uncertain and unsettling place of the voyage to India in Os Lusiadas. Camées’s doubled and conflicted allegiance to the past becomes most evident in the famous episode of the Old Man of Restelo, who appears at the very moment of Vasco da Gama’s departure for India at the end of the fourth canto. The Old Man delivers a long harangue

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against the “gloria de mandar” (4.94—104). In a characteristically syncretistic manner his attack coordinates the worlds of the Bible and the epic: Mas, 6 tu, géracao daquele insano

Cujo pecado e desobediéncia Nio somente do Reino soberano Te pos neste desterro e triste auséncia,

Mas inda doutro estado, mais que humano, Da quieta e da simpres inocéncia, Idado de ouro, tanto te privou,

Que na de ferro e de armas te deitou. (4.98.1-8) O, but you [are] the true heir of that madman whose sin and disobedience not only drove you forth in exile to remain in sad absence from the supreme realm, but deprived you entirely of that other, more than human

state of simple, tranquil innocence, the Golden Age, giving you over to

the age of iron and instruments of destruction. (My translation)

This episode tends to be read as a moment of imperial doubt, although

opinion remains divided as to whether it actually presents a thoroughgoing and sustained imperial self-critique.'** The echo of the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid in the word armas indicates that the Old Man's critique extends to those human deeds that the classical epic was designed to extol. Thus, even the stability of the ancient world—which was the best that man could hope for given the burden of original sin—comes under threat precisely because of man’s self-assertion, the restlessness that leads him to instrumentalize nature by producing “armas.”

The logical consequence of the Old Man's admonitions would be the condemnation of not only this voyage but all voyages, all attempts to step

beyond the historical bounds within which the Portuguese find themselves. However, the argument is really directed elsewhere: Nao tens junto contigo o Ismaelita,

Com quem sempre teras guerras sobejas? Nao segue ele do Arabio a Lei maldita,

Se tu pola de Cristo sé pelejas? Nao tem cidades mil, terra infinita,

Se terras e riqueza mais desejas?

Nao € ele por armas esforgado, Se queres por vitérias ser louvado? (4.100.1-8)

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Deixas criar as portas o inimigo,

Por ires buscar outro de tao longe, Por quem se despovoe o Reino antigo,

Se enfranquega e se vA deitando a longe! (4.101.1-4) Have you not near you Ismael’s breed with whom there will always be wars left to pursue? If it be for Christ's faith you fight, does he not continue to

follow the false Arabian creed? Does he not hold a thousand cities, infinite territories, if further land and treasures be your desire? And is he not still dedicated to warfare [armas], if praise for victories is what you want?

You allow the enemy to flourish at the gates while you go seek another so far away, through which you depopulate this ancient realm, weaken it

greatly and let it decay. (My translation)

It is, we discover, this voyage to India that must be condemned. Although he does not explicitly mention spices, the Old Man of Restelo accedes to each of the primary motives that were used to justify the voyages of discovery: territorial expansion for arable land, the extension of the spiritual realm of the Church, the acquisition of wealth and bullion, and the achievement of honor or fame. At stake here, however, is the weakening and depopulation of this “Reino antigo.’ The Old Man does not direct his ire at the ends or the goals of the colonial voyages, but at what is implied by the voyage itself: the difficulty of maintaining a wealth of titles—“Lord .. . of India, Persia, Arabia, and Ethiopia”—without damaging the integrity of the Portuguese kingdom.'*’ The real problem is precisely that of upholding the stability of an “ancient kingdom” and an ancient “golden age” against the alleged depredations of Moslem powers. Insofar as the early voyages represent the possibility of honor, wealth, land, and faith, they do not in general contradict the requirements for this stability—in fact, they are even necessary for it. To a point, therefore, the functional equivalence of “voyage” and “epic” produces an identity of aims as well (honor, wealth, land, faith). The Old Man's logic thus suggests the level at which the identity of “voyage” and “epic” can be articulated: in their shared function as responses to the perceived dissolution of existing structures, as attempts to ensure the stability of the world

and its divinely ordained order. But this voyage that will lead the Portuguese to India is different because it has come to embody a radically new content, one no longer commensurate with the conditions for the preservation of the ancient world:

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Trouxe o filho de Japeto do Céu Ofogo que ajuntou ao peito humano,

Fogo que o mundo em armas acendeu, Em mortes, em desonras (grande engano!). Quanto milhor nos fora, Prometeu, Equanto pera o mundo menos dano, Que a tua estatua ilustre nao tivera

Fogo de altos desejos que a movera! (4.103.1—8) Japetus’s child from heaven bore the fire that entered every human breast, the fire that kindled the world to war, to death, to shame. What a grand

deception! How much better it would have been for us, Prometheus, and how much less harmful for the world, had your illustrious image never

known the fire of that vast desire that moved him. (My translation)

The introduction of the Prometheus myth at this juncture strikes me as decisive. An important allegorical interpretation available in the early modern period equated the stolen fire with the faculty of creation and invention. The theft was deemed the precondition for the transformation of matter and nature: breathing fire into the “peito humano,’ Prometheus creates man by instill-

ing in him the capability for self-initiated action. Driven by its flames, he can appropriate the world for himself. Not surprisingly, Francis Bacon later explicitly makes this identification: “Prometheus clearly and expressly signifies Providence,’ he contends in his rereading of the myth in Of the Wisdom of the Ancients, “and the one thing singled out by the ancients as the special and peculiar work of Providence was the creation and constitution of Man.” Similarly, for the Old Man of Restelo, the birth of the capacity for self-

assertion—which will enable the material transformation of the world— amounts to no less than a form of creation. The human being is Prometheus’s “estdtua ilustre;’ and the Promethean fire becomes constitutive of human essence. The Old Man's interpretation, however, is further inflected by the pe-

culiarly Renaissance equation of Adam and Prometheus. In addition to being the result of Prometheus’s transgression, the Portuguese voyagers are

equally the true heirs “of that madman whose sin and disobedience” doomed them to gloomy exile from paradise. Giordano Bruno anticipated that identification when he saw these two figures as united through their relationship to something forbidden: to the forbidden fruit and to the forbidden fire, respectively.'*° It is important to

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emphasize, however, that the loss of paradise consequent upon man's transgression did not for Bruno imply merely a negative loss of innocence, for it was accompanied by the positive gain of knowledge. Bacon takes up the compensatory moment to shape it into a characteristically extreme version of the necessity for human self-assertion. The superiority of man, he asserts in his In Praise of Knowledge, lies solely in knowledge, because it alone preserves things that kings may not buy or command, and whose origin no voyager can discover. Crucially for Bacon, this knowledge is not to be restricted to a theoretical understanding of the world; rather, knowledge is already al-

lied with instrumental reason, for it is directed at the material domination of nature. “Now we govern nature in opinions, but we are thrall to her in

necessity; but if we would be led by her in invention, we should command her in action.’’*° Prometheus’s gift, fire, becomes the symbol of what man can achieve because “in all human necessities and business [fire] is the great minister of relief and help; insomuch that if the soul be the form of forms and the hand the instrument of instruments, fire may justly be called the help of helps and mean of means.”'*” As the epitome of the “forma formarum,’ the “instrumentum instrumentarum,’ fire allows man to transform his dom-

ination by nature into a subjugation of nature. Yet Bacon does not stop here. He moves on to interpret anew both man’s subsequent betrayal of Prometheus, and Zeus's approval of that treacherous act. “For how,” Bacon asks, “should the crime of ingratitude towards their maker ... deserve approbation and reward?” His reply is revealing: The meaning of the allegory is, that the accusation and the arraignment by men both of their own nature and of art, proceeds from an excellent

condition of mind and issues in good; whereas the contrary is hated by the Gods, and unlucky. For they who extravagantly extol human nature as

it is and the arts as received; who spend themselves in admiration of what they already possess, and hold up as perfect the sciences which are pro-

fessed and cultivated; are wanting, first in reverence to the divine nature, with the perfection of which they almost presume to compare, and next in usefulness towards man; as thinking that they have already reached the summit of things, and finished their work, and therefore need seek no further. They, on the other hand, who accuse and arraign nature and the arts... are not only more modest ... in their sentiments, but are also stim-

ulated perpetually to fresh industry and new discoveries. !°*

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The real crime, in other words, is not ingratitude but instead becoming too readily satisfied with what one has been given. To accept as something final an initial gift intended to empower one is.to remain trapped in the ancient world and its finitude. The true meaning of the gift lies in its granting the possibility of man’s breaking the bounds that he has placed upon himself through his reliance upon the heritage of the ancients—a possibility whose realization begins with the shattering of the limits of their world. It is against a presumptuousness of this form that CamGes’s Old Man of Restelo proleptically responds, resurrecting it ex negativo in his charge that the world (“terra infinita”) has become the space of mans self-assertion. His condemnation of Vasco da Gama’'s voyage is directed at it as a figure of man’s overreaching desire (“altos desejos”) that drives him beyond the bounds of the Mediterranean in search of India, and “moves” him to transgress the limits of the known and the proper. Part of the burden of this argument has been to bring to light the logic binding the Renaissance epic to the preservation of the ancient cosmos as it had been incorporated into medieval Christianity, to read the return to antiquity as a forced response to the specific coordination of God, man, and the world undertaken by late medieval theory and practice. Voyage narratives, by contrast, come to embody a refusal of antiquity and thereby provide the new “solution,” as it were, to precisely that crisis which the adoption of the epic expressed. Epic and voyage in the Renaissance appear therefore to be functionally equivalent as attempted solutions to the same problem (one successful in the sense that it introduces a new problematic, the other not). Yet their functional equivalence does not imply an equivalence in content. Quite the reverse: although the epic in its Renaissance shape responds to theological absolutism by resurrecting an earlier configuration of man’s relationship to God and the cosmos, the voyages of discovery produce a self-asserting subject who

takes on the function (once arrogated to God) of providing epistemological certainty with regard to the world. In this short episode preceding da Gama’s departure, the retrospectively visible disjunction between “epic” and “voyage” breaks open the structure of the poem. This particular voyage to India, as the Old Man sees only too well, will come to mark a destruction of the ancient world towards whose preservation the epic form was directed. In the ideological opposition of “proveito” and “ploria,’ we find a symptomatic expression of the impossibility of deriving an historical equivalence of “epic” and “yoy-

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age” from their functional equivalence, the impossibility of constraining the larger effects of the colonial voyages within the inherited frame of the classical epic and its cosmos. What Camées’s Old Man fears, then, would ultimately unravel his own creator's syncretic project, if not his world.

India: The Final Frontier We are finally in the position to see what “India” and the East meant for Cam6es, to grasp what the voyage to those distant places signified in early modern Europe. As should be clear, the deferment of this goal derives from the complex position of the voyage to India in early modern culture. For “India” or the East is less a place than a boundary, a symbolic site upon

which to negotiate the contradictory impulses and energies that shaped Renaissance Europe.

Although the Old Man of Restelo’s imprecations does not seem to impede the epics narrative in any discernible way, the episode in fact figures the central paradox of the journey to “India” around which Camées’s epic is constructed. Its effects are registered elsewhere, most clearly in CamGes’s obsession with the question of limits and boundaries. From the very first verse Os Lusiadas insists upon the fact that the Portuguese have “track[ed] the oceans none had sailed before,’ have run past Taprobane’s (Ceylon’s) “far

limit” (1.1.3-4). The journey eastward is further figured as a voyage that will lead to the source of time as such, to the birth of the day (nasce o dia). Leaving the old ancient (0 velho honorado) standing on the docks, Vasco da Gama speeds from the harbor “to break those oceans through, / Where none be-

fore had ever forced the way.”!? In defiance of the Old Man’s reference to Phaeton’s over-reaching, the Portuguese voyager presses his course beyond the tropic of Cancer, “o lemite aonde chega / O Sol, que pera o Norte os carros guia”

(5.7.1-2).!*° Sailing past the Congo he enters the vast oceans beyond the torrid zones, passing beyond the “termino ardente... Onde 0 meio do Mundo é limitado,’ the “burning bound” of the Equator, which divides the world in two,!4! Camé6es’s concern with limits proliferates through this canto as the intrepid

voyager continues beyond Capricorn’s “meta” (bound) (5.27.2), negotiates Adamastor’s forbidden bounds (vedados terminos, 5.41.4), and arrives at the king of Melinde’s door—all before “India,” the final limit of the East, can be

attacked.

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Reading the metaphor of the boundary or limit in relation to Bacon’s interpretation of Prometheus, it becomes clear that CamGes’s vexed connec- |

tion to antique thought extends to his understanding of the human subject. Whereas Bacon unequivocally celebrates the break from antiquity, Os Lu-

stadas struggles, as we have seen, to resurrect the ancient world and its modes of knowing. But the historical material upon which the epic draws forces Camées to deploy a metaphoric frame that is very much akin to the one Bacon espouses. As the paradigmatic case of Descartes has already made clear, the logic of discovery in this historical period demands that the received boundaries placed upon human actions be broken, that limits be seen not as external necessities imposed by nature but as boundaries internal to human thought and activity. Their function is consequently less to prevent movement than to provoke it. They instill in the voyaging subject a desire to transgress them, since it is through desire and transgression that the human subject remains true to itself. The Portuguese voyagers in turn take up the various systems of limitation that make up the medieval cosmos—the division of the earth into forbidden and accessible zones, the lines of the zodiac, the movement of the sun—not as divine laws that bind them, but as

humanly established boundaries that call for their own overcoming. To respond to that call is, as the opening canto proclaims, to erase the past and by so doing to supplant it: “Of the wise Greek, no more the tale unfold, / or the Trojan, and great voyages they made, / Of Philip’s son and Trajan,

leave untold... / For nobler valor is yet to praise” (1.3.1-8). Despite its efforts to conserve the ancient cosmos, then, Camées’s Os Lusiadas equally represents, through the figure of the voyage east, the undoing of that project, the irruption into the text of a radically different configuration of subjectivity and desire. “India” does not, consequently, so much denote a geographical space as name this complex relationship between desire, knowledge, and subjectivity.

It figures the limit of desire in a double sense: as the ultimate goal to which desire is directed as well as the boundary through which desire constitutes itself. Its identity as a place emerges, one might say, in the act of transgression through which the Portuguese subject constitutes itself. One can easily demonstrate the way in which Camées’s text returns over and over again to those “altos desejos” essential to Portuguese colonial subjectivity. Canto 7, in which the explorers finally set foot in Calicut, begins, for ex-

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ample, by representing the land as the object of universal desire: “Jd se viam chegados junto a terra, / Que desejada jd de tantos fora, vAQue entre as correntes Tndicas se

encerra. 142The verb chegar (to arrive, to attain, to reach) echoes Vasco da Gama’s use of it (cited above) in indicating the limits of the sun’s northward jour-

ney and the Portuguese transgression of that boundary. And if India and the East are traditionally associated with the sun, by reaching this source of

light the Portuguese are metonymically allied with the sun. They thus appropriate for themselves its metaphoric attributes: clarity, wisdom, and knowledge. The passage of the day at the opening of Canto 2 is described as the sun reaching “his far desired bound” (4 desajada e lenta meta, 2.1.3), a character-

ization almost immediately echoed by the description of the “aurifero Levante” (Golden East) as the “end of your [that is, the Portuguese] desire” (0fim a teu

desejo, 2.4.8). The canto further describes their first encounter with a friendly eastern potentate, the king of Melinde, who sees the Portuguese da Gama attired in the richest of European dress, combining Spanish fashion, French

tailoring, and Venetian material (2.97.5—8). This embodiment of European colonial identity is predictably linked to the sun, for his sleeves are bound

with gold studs “whence the sun flashes, dazzling to the eyes” (Onde o Sol, reluzindo, a vista cega, 2.98.2). Indeed, the implicit connection articulated in such moments between

knowledge, the overcoming of limits, and colonial identity prepares the ground for the second mythological comparison employed by the Old Man in his attack on the voyage: the myth of Phaeton. Nido cometera 0 mo¢o miserando Ocarro alto do pai, nem o ar vazio, Ogrande arquitector co filho, dando, Um, nome ao mar, e 0 outro, fama ao rio. (4.104.1-4)

The poor youth had not guided otherwise His sire’s high car, nor would the stripling flee With the great Architect through empty skies, Who famous made a stream and named a sea.

Camées’s term for the Christian God in Canto 10 clearly recalls the phrase “great Architect” employed here to refer to Apollo: Tethys’ representation of the “grande maquina do Mundo” points to “o Arquetipo que o criou,’ the Christian God, who “no beginning has, or mete or bound” (que é sem principio e meta lim-

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itada, 10.80.4). As the Old Man's image suggests, the voyage east is a trans-

gression of the proper bounds of space and time. By reaching India the Portuguese will invert the Old Man's mythic tale: they will become the histortcal realization of the divinity embodied by the sun. Yet, for all its ostensible concern with India, the epic hardly busies itself with its geographical destination when it does get there. India, or more specifically Calicut, occupies fewer than two cantos of the epic and even a sub-

stantial portion of those are dedicated to narrating the mythic history of the Portuguese race in order to edify the emissary from the Zamorin of Calicut. Moreover, the actual encounter with India seems to belie the grandeur of the epic frame. Rather than riches and conquest, India offers the Portuguese treachery and guile. Cleaving surprisingly close to the narratives recounted in voyage logs and subsequent colonial histories, Camédes focuses on what would seem to constitute the mission’ failure: the discovery that the Indians are not Christians but heathens; that the influence of Islam stretches even to this far

shore; that Eastern commodities are not simply there for the taking. India as

destination ultimately reveals itself as something less than what was desired, something other than an epic conclusion. This is perhaps less surprising if we realize that the geographical India was never the place towards which the voyage was directed. That “India” figures the ultimate limit, indeed, leads potentially to a paradox, since its attainment necessarily means the end of all limits. This in turn implies the end of the very desire through which the Portuguese subject articulates its identity. Cam6es explicitly indicates his awareness of this paradox at the very moment of discovery, at the end of the preceding canto, when the Melindian pilot points out the Indian coastline to the Portuguese: “This is, I am certain, the land you seek. / The veritable India appears there. / And if in this world you desire no more, / Then here ends your long travail.”’*° But, qua voyagers, it is precisely the desire to “discover” the world that consti-

tutes the Portuguese. Not to desire in this world, the pilot implies, is tantamount to ceasing to be. Reaching India means crossing the final frontier and thus exiting from the everyday world in which history is made and remade. As if to compensate, the putatively single journey eastward and back is in practice broken up into shorter stretches. It comprises numerous smaller voyages and intermediate stops: to revictual and repair ships; to explore and if possible take pos-

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session of land; or to obtain some idea of the inhabitants. As Timothy Reiss observes about Renaissance voyaging in general: “The steady accumulation

of such small bits and pieces is what will lead to honor and wealth.” In this way, he further points out, the voyage becomes an apt figure for the new ex-

perimental method itself—as we have seen it practiced by Bacon and Descartes—which “must be open-ended and repetitive. The continual voyages, their halts for ‘meditation; the arrival at an empirical knowledge that leads the narrator into another journey, and so ad infinitum, are the very image of

the experimental discourse being elaborated throughout the period.”™* It is precisely through the projection and conquest of limits that the voyager consolidates his identity as subject; actually to reach and to possess “India” would mean to lose oneself. In a sense, as one critic has argued, “the menace

of irreparable loss” inheres in the very structure of travel and voyaging.*° But the task of Camées’s epic is to capitalize, so to speak, on this risk, to convert the potential loss of identity into a stabilization of the self. And to achieve this the text must reproduce desire by reinventing the space in which it can be produced. Thus it is that “India” as the figure of the (unattainable) limit is displaced in the poem's concluding cantos onto the imaginary Island of Love. Venus’s island, Camées informs us, is not a fixed place but rather moves in

accordance with her wishes. It is anchored temporarily for the Portuguese so that upon it they can, one might suggest, consummate the desire that the geographical India could not adequately slake. But the island is nonetheless the simulacrum of a synthesis between the contradictory impulses that drive the epic. On the one hand, it is an eastern paradise, and being allowed upon it establishes that the Portuguese voyagers are indeed God's chosen people. (Camées draws here upon the medieval spatial association of paradise and the East.) Camées further specifies Portuguese religious and national identity in aristocratic terms, by representing their sexual conquests through the genre of the medieval knightly romance. On the other hand, the identification of the epic with the national, religious, and class-based ethos of Cam6es’s Portugal betrays its uncertainty, as we have seen, in the felt need ex-

plicitly to mark the island and the divine powers that sustain it as allegorical fictions. And that fictionality draws attention to the distance separating the imagined “India” from the real Calicut the Portuguese have just left. For it is in their disjunction that the impossibility of returning to the world of the

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classical epic manifests itself. By reaching the geographical India, the Portuguese voyage ensures that the world in which “India” could function as the constitutive spatial trope of (Western) desire cannot endure. In a world now without real limits, that desire can only be preserved as a simulacrum. It can only persist by substituting one imagined space for another. Indeed, the Por-

tuguese cannot even return home, Camées’s epic implies, because the Portugal they left is not the Portugal to which they can go back. This chapter began with Castanheda’s dedication to the Portuguese

King Joio III, which combines a sense of the epic magnitude of Portuguese achievements with an anxiety regarding their impermanence. The concern that without adequate representation the “remembrance of these transactions must have ended to their great dishonor” derives from the implicit realization that all limits and spaces, and the very the face of the world, depend now upon a human agency that expresses itself as the erasure of limits. The belief that one text could contain the history of mankind has been undermined by the proliferation of texts—the voyage narratives. In Camées’s historically belated epic, we see the difficulty of reconciling the implicit content of the colonial voyages with the inherited frames of the classical epic. The voyage narratives become the epics of a world that can no longer sustain the epic. Thus, when J. A. Froude calls Richard Hakluyt’s monumental compilation The Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation “the prose epic of the modern English nation,” his designation does not

so much misname it as give it an identity truer than he could have imagined. Legend (and his own boast) has Camées swimming to safety, clutching

the manuscript of Os Lusiadas, after a shipwreck in 1559 on the Mekong River (in present-day Thailand). Swimming against the historical current, his epic in turn valiantly tries to keep the past alive, but at the cost of the future passing from its grasp.

Chapter

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amées's Os Lusiadas struggles to hold together in a single frame a Christianized cosmology derived from antiquity and an empirical geography made possible by the voyages of discovery. The ideological work necessary to maintain their correlation reveals, however, that the connection between geography and cosmology no longer seems exigent. Their interpenetration seems less a natural result of how the world is than something that has to be laboriously forged. Reliance on voyage narratives forces, as it were, the text to draw on

and to express an emergent relationship of (Western) self to world, one that I have termed self-assertion. But the historical conditions of its emergence mean, too, that the epic approaches this contemporary “content” in terms of a familiar eschatological form, fashioning and legitimating thereby a particu-

lar understanding of Portuguese identity and nationhood. At the end of the last chapter we saw that it is through the representation of “India” as the ultimate boundary or limit that the text sutures together geography and cosmology in the colonial era. In what follows I wish to pursue the geographical and cartographical implications of these early voyages of discovery and conquest in order to specify more precisely how colonial subjectivity is interwoven with what I shall be calling “colonial space,” and specifically with the colonial spaces of India and the East. A recent critical study presents a related analysis of spatial tension during a much earlier historical period of colonization: In order to set boundaries to their empire and to claim to have reached those that were marked out, the Romans needed a certain perception of geographical space, of its dimensions and of the area they occupied. Yet

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this space was forced upon them to the extent that they had to become or remain its master, to dominate its overwhelming distances, to recognize

and exploit its resources, to gather information and to convey orders from one end of the empire to the other, to assemble troops or have them pa-

trol this space. The ineluctable necessities of conquest and government are to understand (or to believe that one understands) the physical space one occupies or that one hopes to dominate, to overcome the obstacles of distance and to establish regular contact with the peoples and their territoties (by enumerating the former and measuring the dimensions, the surfaces and the capacities of the latter).'

These introductory remarks from Claude Nicolet’s Space, Geography, and Politics in the Early Roman Empire foreground an understanding of imperialism as a spatial project. Imperialism, on the one hand, attempts an effective domination of geographical space premised upon the recognition that space can be used and exploited. On the other hand, space offers a form of resistance as well: only through and on the basis of a space available in a specific historical and material form can power be exercised.” Furthermore, Nicolet’s emphasis on geographical space posits the separation of an empirical practice of space from its cosmological representation. On the basis of this disjunction the material domination and symbolic appropriation of space were rearticulated to constitute the identity of the Roman imperium. An analogous separation and realignment took place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Obviously, the difference between the two historical periods is a substantial one, but that divide should not deter us from seeing the congruence between the spatial demands of Augustan imperialism and early modern colonialism. The extent to which the later formation remains indebted to the earlier can best be illuminated by turning briefly to the tensions between empirical and symbolic geographies in classical antiquity. The early modern negotiation of spatial boundaries carries with it this prior history of representing limits, and in particular of defining the Western world through a relationship to “India” and the “East.” That history extends back in time even before the Roman imperium. “Perhaps the most fundamental act by which the archaic Greeks defined their worlds,” according to James Romm, “was to give it boundaries, marking off a finite stretch of earth from the otherwise formless expanse surrounding it.” On the macrocosmic scale the boundary (peirar) was geographically embod-

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ied in this early period—and the notion remains alive even in Os Lusiadas— by Ocean, the vast river thought to surround the landmass formed by Europe, Africa, and Asia.* Ocean itself seemed to lack boundaries, stretching limitlessty towards the distant horizon. Its openness made it “a terrifying and inapproachable entity. ... The prospect of sailing in waters so wide that no land could be seen was regarded with great apprehension, and open-sea voyages were attempted only under extreme duress.’”* Ocean further aroused anxiety because of its identification with the primal chaos out of which the orderly cosmos had emerged; it was a trace of the past, monstrous in its disorderli-

ness, and therefore an entity to be approached with equal measures of fear and reverence.° The trepidation occasioned by Ocean persisted well into the Roman imperium. Seneca the Elder's epigrams, collected as part of his Suasoriae in the first century a.D., reconstruct for the purpose of rhetorical practice the horror with which Alexander the Great’s counselors had allegedly greeted his desire to cross Ocean and conquer new worlds. “This is not the river Simois, nor the Granicus,” Glycon tells the conqueror, “if it were not an evil thing, it would not lie here at the world’s edge.” Seconding him, Artemon insists that “this is not the Euphrates nor Indus, but whether it is the endpoint of land, or the boundary of nature, or the most ancient of elements, or the origin of the gods, its water is too holy to be crossed by ships.’” It is no accident that Artemon’s comparison draws in two eastern rivers marking the limits of the known—as if trying to domesticate another fearful boundary even as he concedes the awfulness of Ocean. Indeed Alexander the Great was the one exceptional individual who had apparently embarked upon that terrifying journey to the eastern limits of the world. Often interpreted in terms of the Herculean legends, the figure of Alexander regularly takes on, as we shall see, a quasi-mythic function in the course of its long history, especially productive at times of intense imperialistic activity. Not that the historical Alexander had ever actually attempted the crossing. As is well known, Alexander’s march into India was forcibly halted at the banks of the Hyphasis (the Indus) when his troops rebelled, refusing to share their leader's desire to extend his dominion to the ends of the earth. But the legends that succeed his military campaign rapidly avert their gaze from this failure and “tend to attribute to Alexander the achievement of those very goals that were but projected in real life.’® The

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apocryphal Greek (and later Latin) Alexander Romance, a group of letters os-

tensibly written by Alexander himself, relates his putative journeys to the ends of the earth, including travels through India and China. The letters follow

Alexander through numerous eastern encounters with monstrous nature and finally deposit him at the easternmost point of his voyage, the Oracle of the Sun and Moon. There, divine voices bid him to return and also forecast his impending death. As Romm points out, the coupling of these two divine enunciations turns Alexander's journey to the eastern edges of the world into a quest for divinity: it symbolizes both mankind's attempt to transcend the human condition and the danger inherent in the attempt.’ This aura of sacrality that accrued to the geographical boundaries between the known and the unknown worlds continues to inflect the symbolic modes through which the Roman empire erected itself in Alexander's stead. At the same time, the characteristic interweaving of geographical with cosmological assumptions takes a different shape, since the Roman evocation of Alexander's imperialist desires occurs under changed circumstances. Roman imperialism cannot be separated from the empire's practical concerns with the actual lay of the land, the precise demarcation of boundaries, the indication of directions, and the measuring of distances.!° Thus, while the Roman

orbis terrarum reoccupies the position of the Greek oikowmené, the assertion of Roman domination also draws upon an empirical, information-driven geographical practice that ensures effective control over its domains. From its very first line, Augustus’s Res Gestae asserts Rome’s effective control over the

inhabited world. To cite Nicolet, it demonstrates its reach “methodically, without symbolism, by using a series of topographic lists that correspond to precise geographical knowledge... . [Like Alexander, Antiochus and the Ptolemies| Augustus could boast ‘never before me, never as far’ For him... the empire was a world, almost a new world which had been discovered, explored, and mastered.”"' And also, significantly, measured. But this empiricism too had its limits. For Strabo, the father of descriptive geography,” the consolidation of the Roman empire meant that he could now give a truly accurate account of the Orient since the imperium stretched to its very border. The empire to which he belonged had inherited Alexander's mantle by truly opening the gates to the East.'* And yet Strabo's description of the East is no less fabulous than those of the predecessors he scorns. Despite its concern with physically mastering its dominions, the Roman claim

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to universal empire had to be ultimately more cosmic and symbolic than geographic. “No empire, no universal monarch could in antiquity reasonably wish,’ Nicolet points out, “to dominate the entire terrestrial sphere. Three quarters of it remained literally unattainable in ancient cosmogony, out of reach of all human enterprise. A universal domination could not claim more than the one known oikoumené. Nevertheless, they could claim to fit in the order of cosmic destiny—either they were under the protection of or held a divine covenant with the gods, or they were in some way divine.’™

The intimate connections and tensions between geographical and cosmological boundaries, and the spatial practices of imperialism, resurface in

the early modern period. On his deathbed Marlowe's Tamburlaine calls for a map to see “how much /is left for me to conquer all the world” (5.3.123-24). Poring over the map he traces the spatial course of his glorious military career from Persia eastwards to Asia where he now “stays against [his] will.” But his triumphant progress through the world is destined never to be completed, and in his anguish he rails against his fate: “And shall I die, and this

unconquered?” (5.3.150).!° Behind Tamburlaine’s frustration clearly lurks the tale of Alexander’s encounter with India. But here the attention is directed less at the conqueror’s putative successes than at his failures. If Alexander's momentous campaign had earlier provided a framework to celebrate imperialism’s achievements, the early modern resurrection of this topos pursues, rather, the legendary conqueror's failure truly to subdue the East. What separates Tamburlaine’s failure from Alexander's is, however, the map upon which Marlowe's dying conqueror feasts his eyes. The map allows Tamburlaine to experience the distance between the space he commands and the space he wishes to command as real, as one that would have been superable had not death intervened. The earlier failure seems from this perspective an absolute one—as had been implied by the literary tradition that linked Alexander's transgression of eastern limits with divine punishment. In gontradistinction, Tamburlaine’s situation expresses a contingent failure because, catachrestically, the map has already performed, as it were, the ac-

tion that Tamburlaine’s conquest was intended to enable: the domination of space. In the face of his impending demise, Tamburlaine substitutes a representation of space for the physical space he desires to possess. (See Figure 1.) Tamburlaine’s final lament would have been unimaginable in the closed symbolic world of the Middle Ages. Granted, the mythic separation be-

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tween Europe and the lands beyond had certainly been reduced by the late medieval period.'® In the wake of the Tartar conquests, according to Mary Campbell, the East had become “dangerously palpable. . . . [The] Mongols’ territory was no longer politically neutral, no longer a conveniently blank

screen for imaginative projection.” Further, through the travels in the thirteenth century of Marco Polo to China and the Franciscan friar William of Rubrick to Karakorum, a different sense of the East’s relationship to the oikoumené had developed, a sense “that the two worlds are both different

and susceptible of relation to one another.”!” Nevertheless, the distance between Europe and the East had remained an unreal one, for the exchange of men, commodities, and money had not as yet sufficiently eroded the barrier between the medieval world and that which lay outside it, had not as yet

made the separation mensurable."® The superability of space, unquestioningly asserted in Tamburlaine’s use of the map, signals a transformation in the conceptualization and practice of space itself. As David Harvey succinctly puts it: “The conquest of space first required that it be conceived of as something usable, malleable, and therefore capable of domination through human action.”!? This chapter examines attitudes towards space in early modern Europe against the background of the critical conjuncture in Os Lusiadas discussed earlier: on the one hand, a crisis of the medieval world and its representational systems, and, on the other, the emergence through the colonial voyages of a new relationship between the (Western) subject and his world. The problem of the cosmos has led us, in any case, to the question of cosmology’s convergence with and divergence from geography. Tamburlaine’s reliance on the map suggests that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries cartography becomes the site upon which that awkward relationship was negotiated: early modern cartographical practice could not simply and unproblematically assume the ontological stability of either concepts about or the experience of space. Given that the understanding of space was itself changing, to represent the world meant also to produce it anew. Each representation thus gave the world a shape precisely at a moment when the shape of the world had been called into question. The famous Ebstorf mappamundi provides a paradigmatic instance of what Michel Foucault has called the medieval space of “emplacement.”” At stake here is the particular coordination of cosmology and geography constitutive of high-medieval representations of the world. My interpretation

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of the Ebstorf map delineates in broad terms its systematic interrelation of space and subjectivity within a Scholastic frame. The succeeding sections 1nvestigate developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that resulted in a radical reversal and displacement of medieval spatial assumptions. This transformation followed, I suggest, the historical conjuncture of two different—and hitherto segregated —modes of spatial representation: first, Ptolemaic geography and cosmology, which were “re-discovered” and reinterpreted at the threshold of the early modern era; and, second, the portolan

charts, an indigenous cartographic form that had developed out of the actual practices of sailing. The rediscovery of Ptolemy's Geographia reintroduced, after a long absence, an understanding of space as something uniform, homogeneous, and

independent of human movement. The far-reaching epistemological implication of such a conception only emerged fully, though, through the Coper-

nican reinterpretation of Ptolemaic cosmology. Copernicus’s defense of a heliocentric universe compensated for man's physical displacement from the cosmos’s center by asserting a theoretical centrality, man’s ability to know the truth about the world and its construction. With regard to geography, Ptolemaic cartography implied the possibility of knowing empirically what the aquaterrous world actually looked like. Extending the scope of human knowledge to include the space of the celestial world, Copernican cosmology turned this limited position into a basic anthropological principle. This Copernican turn affected, too, the status and function of the portolan charts. In the

wake of the voyages of discovery, the portolan emphasis on material practice merged with the geometrical neutrality of Ptolemaic space to realize a human subject for whom the physical world was an entity to be known and grasped, a subject capable of treating space as the neutral backdrop for his own exertions.”!

:

However, this apparent neutrality of space dissimulated its links with the

practices of early modern colonialism. Rendered invisible*was the involvement with the myriad ways in which colonialism produced the spaces it “discovered.” Its aura of givenness, of simply being there, ofterrleads us to forget that space too has a history, and that the guise of neutrality it dons is an outcome of that history.” Marlowe's cartographic vision is informed by that varied complex of spatio-temporal practices, colonialism, through which the Renaissance created a well-traversed path of men, textiles, gold, spices, and

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ideas between Europe and the rest of the world. Later in this chapter, we will see two different colonial spaces—the Spanish encomiendas in the New World and the Portuguese control of the trading routes in the Indian Ocean—that demonstrate how colonial “discovery” led to different ways of restructuring existing spatial formations. It thereby produced “India” and the “East” anew, reshaping them in response to European needs and desires. And here, too, cartography had its uses. Early modern cartography served to reify these colonial spaces, naturalizing in the process the expropriatory relations embedded in them. By staging a geometrized and neutralized space, these world maps helped conceal the colonial practices out of which they emerged and to which they contributed.”* Roughly a century after the Portuguese discovery of a sea route to India, Tamburlaine imagines a Renaissance Suez Canal linking the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: “I mean to cut a channel to them both, /That men might quickly sail to India” (5.3.132—3). Locating abstract possibilities on a map, this Renaissance subject conquers the limitations of the given. For him, the space of the world has become both neutral and indifferent—and

thereby something he can manipulate at will.

Space and Subjectivity in the Middle Ages The preceding chapter examined some of the interests and anxieties invested in the figure of the cosmos. Pursuing for a moment the anthropological implications of that investment will set the stage for a discussion of the medieval mappaemundi. As we saw, the Thomist “Christianization” of Aristotelian cosmology exacerbated an uncertainty regarding the earth's status within the celestial world. The wider ramifications of this uncertainty become especially evident in the way medieval theology reinterpreted the movement of the heavens. Aristotelian cosmology had derived the passage of day and night from that of the outermost sphere of the heavens, whose motion was successively transmitted down the various celestial spheres surrounding the earth. Aristotle assigned to the originary cosmic rotation a motive cause: the Unmoved Mover, whom Aquinas, for one, subsequently equated with the Christian God. However, since that movement took place at the outermost reaches of the cosmos, its efficacy was weakest at the center where the earth lay. Characteristically, Thomism reinterpreted Aristotle's physical descrip-

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tion in theological terms, ascribing the imperfection of the human world to its distance from the divine origin.” The anthropological implications of this model were brought to the forefront of theological debate by the Nominalist scrutiny of Thomist cosmology in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The dominant Thomist position had insisted that the ultimate sphere “has [only] ...a movement of rotation, and its fixed center belongs to an absolutely immobile body, the earth.”?> This claim meant that the movement of the heavens depended upon the existence and fixity of the earthly center, a conclusion abhorrent to many theologians because it made—to cite the Summa Philosopbiae attributed to one of Roger Bacon's disciples —“what is lowest and most vile” the cause “of what is in nature most noble and highest.’”° The objection reveals a crucial feature defining the relationship between the human subject and the world he inhabited: the Scholastic cosmos was geocentric but not anthropocentric. Rather, the earth was the place “of man’s temptation, fall, expo-

sure and trials because in its nature and placement in the cosmos it did not embody the pure and direct expression of divine power and of the accomplishment of the divine will.”?” Seeing the earth as “the lowest and most vile” object inverted the basic anthropological assumption of classical cosmology. The distinctive turn taken by the “cosmic religion” of the late Middle Ages comes into sharp relief when compared to the Stoic coordination of cosmology and theology—a representative and influential formulation in both antiquity and the Middle

Ages.”* For the Stoics, geocentrism and anthropocentrism’ were inseparably linked: man’s central position implied that the cosmos had been created for man’s sake. For Seneca, not just the location of the earth, but the very con-

struction of the human body reflected the mutually sustaining relationship of man to cosmos: \

That you may understand how she wished us, not merely to behold her,

but to gaze upon her, see the position in which she has placed us. She has set us in the center of her creation and has granted us a view that sweeps the universe; and she has not only created man erect, but*in order to fit him for contemplation of herself, she has given him a head to top the

body, and set it upon a pliant neck, in order that he might follow the stars as they glide from their rising to their setting and turn and turn his face about with the whole revolving heaven.”

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As Blumenberg has argued, Stoic thought based its theology upon its vision of the cosmos. By contrast, the retention of the antique cosmos within a

Christian framework reversed this relationship by making both human exis-

tence and the cosmos dependent upon and inferior to the divine power that had created them. If geocentricity revealed to Seneca the creation of the universe for the sake of its inhabitants, the Scholastic tradition saw in this physical centrality man’s imperfection and distance from divinity. According to Aron Gurevich, the Scholastic inversion broke the concept of the antique cosmos “into two diametrically opposed concepts: civitatis Dei and civitatis terrena, with the latter bordering on the concept of civitatis diaboli.’*° Consequently, even though the earth’s own hierarchical ordering isomorphically echoed a divine macrocosmic hierarchy, its particularity condemned it to being a pale, fallen imitation.*!

It is important to emphasize that the medieval subordination of earthly to theological space did not result in an objectification or instrumentalization of space. Everyday spatial practice in the Middle Ages suggests indeed quite the reverse. To the extent that the microcosmos, man, reflected the structure of the macrocosmos, his body provided the yardstick to measure

the world: distance was measured in steps, length in terms of the elbow,

arable land in morgens (the area tilled in a day). Further, measurement was not severed from the concrete act of measuring: it was always a particular step, a particular elbow that constituted the scale, a particular farmer who did the measuring. Hence, not only did medieval cadastral measures vary substantially from estate to estate but even the need for uniform and standardized units seems not to have arisen. According to Gurevich, every medieval land measure was specific to the plot of land in question: its dimensions were determined by the work a man could apply to it and his own physical contact with the earth.” Confusion regarding cadastral measures persisted even through the sixteenth century, as is testified to by Edward Worsop’s 1582 Sundrie errours committed by land meaters: When the lands were parted betwene my Mystris and her three systers, there were there certain lawyers, valuers and country measurers, and for

three or four days great controversie was among them and such a stir as I never sawe amongst wise men. Some wold have the land measured one way, some another, some brought long poles, some lines that had a knot

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at the ende of every perch, some lines that were sodden in rosin and waxe to avoid stretching thereof in the water and shrinking in the drought.*°

Worsop’s sense that the description and use of land needs to be rationalized bespeaks a changed relation to physical space. The chaotic situation he mocks points back to a distinctively medieval combination of two seemingly incompatible spatial attitudes: theologically governed abstraction was enmeshed with a direct quotidian involvement in the materiality of space. If dualistically opposed to the divine world of his God, the physical world of the me-

dieval subject nonetheless remained dialectically bound to its The complex relationship of space to subjectivity outlined in the foregoing remarks was given visual expression in the mappaemundi, the highmedieval cartographic representations of the world.** The largest of these maps, most of which have not survived, are generally thought to have been hung in churches, probably behind the altar.°° The mappaemundi were not

geographical representations in the narrow sense. Their point of view was rather that of a universal historiography that located humanity within the

totality of space and time. To quote Juergen Schulz: [The] innumerable mappaemundi, world maps large and small, [are] meant to illustrate the unity and the diversity of creation, not the exact shapes of, and relationships between, ground features. They show, in greater or lesser detail, depending on the availability of space, the continents, seas,

and rivers of the oikoumene, the flora, the fauna, and human races of its different regions, the events of biblical and ancient history that took place in

them, the missionary travels and martyrdoms of saints, and still more. The purpose was to exhibit in one synoptic image the firmly rooted and universally held idea that the events, features, and phenomena of the created world are infinitely many and yet all one, for they are all emanations of one divine principle, links in one great chain of being.”

The mappaemundi were generally based on the T-O schemia inherited from antiquity (so named for its visual appearance, superimposing a T of waterways onto an orb of land). The T-O schema divided the world into three sections—Asia, Europe, and Africa—separated from one another by the Mediterranean, the Nile, the Black Sea, and the Danube, all of which usually flowed into the surrounding Ocean. But the schema was redirected towards a theological end in that the surface of the earth was used to illustrate bib-

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lical history and myth. As van den Brincken has shown, most medieval world maps were designed to accompany written texts, such as encyclopedias, bible

commentaries, or historiographical writings.** In their most developed forms, the mappaemundi could be said to transform the book (or indeed an entire library) into a map.° The well-known Ebstorf mappamundi provides a particularly fine instance of how medieval representation used a theologized geography to exptess the relationship between human and divine space.” (See Figure 2.) The map’s outer frame immediately evokes the symbolic valence of the circle as image of absolute perfection. The time and space of God has its reduced

earthly counterpart in the Holy City, Jerusalem, at the map’s center.*! The relationship of center to margin, which constitutes the Ebstorf map’s fundamental organizational principle, also reveals a peculiarity of the medieval world picture: the paradox that the geographical middle point of its Christian world, that is, Europe, did not coincide with its theological center,

the place of Christ's birth. Ebstorf, the map’s home, is one of the few German towns noted on the map, but it appears only in the bottom left corner,

thrust far away from the divine center towards the world’s edges. The geographical displacement of the Christian world captures nicely the ambivalence already noted regarding the earth’s position at the center of the cosmos.” The projection of the world onto Christ's body functions in part to contain the tension associated with the geographical center of the Christian universe. The theological frame constrains the spatial “play” of the map’s center by anchoring it in Christ’s body and locating him thereby as the condition of possibility of the lived human world. Christ’s head is placed due east at the top of the map (towards the Orient, or the rising of the Son /'sun), while the

holy city, Jerusalem, is placed at Christ's navel, or omphalos. Jerusalem's position is accompanied by a prominent vignette depicting Christ's Resurrection—itself a prefiguration of the Second Coming, The identification strengthens the visual line connecting Christ’s head to the holy city, providing a spatial axis that draws attention to two central moments in the eschatological narrative: the birth and rebirth of Christ, events typologically connected to the creation and demise of the Christian world. This second organizational principle—a directional structure that opposes east to west and top to bottom—consequently provides, too, a spatial

equivalent for the eschatological time into which historical time is to be ab-

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The Ebstorf Mappamundi (c. 1220-50) [BL MAPS‘920 (533)]

(By permission of the British Library, London.)

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sorbed. At the bottom of the mappamundi we see Christ's feet in place of the Herculean Pillars, the usual antiquity-derived markers of the western

edge of the world. The depiction, to take up Harmut Kugler’s suggestion, echoes Revelation 10:2, where it is said that at the end of time an angelus fortis

will descend from heaven and place one foot upon the sea and another upon the land, just as Christ does here.*? In identifying the world with Christ’s body, the Ebstorf map thus also announces Christ's presence as a historical event, marking the active intervention of divinity in human destiny. The intimate connection between geographical and theological space argues the need to conceive the Ebstorf map less as a static object than as a dynamic process, one determining the human subject in a manner both dialectical and analogical. For the map both enunciates and seeks to overcome the separation between the viewing subject and itself as viewed object. In this sense, it functions as theosis: it sets into motion a process that absorbs the viewer into its theological space by establishing the inner connection between the human and divine realms. Stephen G. Nichols’s discussion of the Romanesque logic of representation provides a useful model for understanding the semiology of the Ebstorf map. His theory is predicated upon a dialectical notion of subjectivity that comprises two reciprocal movements of identification and differentiation. Through a first movement the subject participates in the “text” and transforms it into an awareness of his situated-ness in the world.** This movement requires the viewer to situate himself historically, within the “flux

and continuity” of space and time. The inclusion of the church of Ebstorf in the map achieves such a positioning by forcing the intended viewer to visualize the rest of the world in relation to his own place in it. The visualization in turn demands an experiential traversing of the world’s space. Look,

for instance, at the houses on the Ebstorf mappamundi. Only the facades are drawn, and these are positioned in such a way that it is impossible to ori-

ent them correctly unless one imagines oneself actually traversing the relevant thoroughfares. The pictorial presence of animals, trees, and people marks

the areas as inhabited and inhabitable space, while the different types of dwelling (castles, churches, mansions, and so forth) suggest the different orders of human existence. The crisscrossing paths of the map reflect, moreover, the maze-like topography of medieval cities, full of “twisting tiny streets, impasses and courts.”*° .

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The understanding of space as in the first instance immediately experienced signals the map’s indebtedness to the medieval pilgrim itineraries. These first medieval maps were essentially “performative indications” that displayed the stops one was to make in order to pray or to sleep, along with the distances calculated in hours or in days—that is, in terms of the time it would take to travel on foot between the places listed. The resulting “chain of spatializing operations,” in Michel de Certeau’s words, “seems to be marked by reference to what it produces (a representation of places) or to what it implies (a local order). We thus have the structure of a travel story: the stories of journeys and actions are marked out by the ‘citation’ of the places that result from them or authorize them.”*° What is ostensibly an immediately experienced space is nonetheless always already a mediated one. Take for example Egeria’s Peregrinatio (circa fifth century), one of the earliest Christian narratives to recount a pilgrimage to the holy land. Her text is remarkable, as Mary Campbell has shown, for its untroubled use of a double spatiality: the flat description of distances in terms of traveling time and an exuberant “citation” of places that are theologically important.*” The reduction of spatial distance to traveling time implies that the immediacy of experience is communicated not through visual details but through the sheer physical act of the pilgrim’s journeying to the places named. The bare fact of their existing in the world is what matters. But the repetitive listing of place-names signifies that this existence is important only because it brings to light a truth that belongs to a transcendental order: as holy sites, they are important less as places to be seen than as places to be named. The Ebstorf map reveals a similar citationality in its reliance on stereotypical and emblematic markers: the types of houses, for example, index a social and cultural order that authorizes the journey through the space of the world. It is a passage that leads centrifugally to the map’s boundaries, which finally set limits upon human knowledge and experience. Here, at the map’s margins, a second dialectical operation relocates the viewing subject, leading him directly to a recognition of the limits of human discourse and action, and finally to a negation of himself as creator or independent agent. The process is nowhere more evident than in the mappamundi’s fascination with the tales involving Alexander the Great. Across its geographical surface the map distributes the historical events of Alexander's life: his birth in the city of ‘Tyre in Macedonia; the founding of Alexandria;

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and the famous battle with the Persian King Darius. The tales of the Alexan-

der Romance are, by contrast, largely communicated through vignettes arranged around the map’s frame: his sounding of the depths of the Red Sea; the construction of the Alexander altars; his imprisonment of Gog and Magog; his encounter with the Icthyophagi; the oracle at the eastern end of the world prophesying his death. All these and more are ranged along the map’s margins. The size of the vignettes clearly indicates their visual importance. This exhaustive interest in Alexander becomes explicable if we recall his elevation in the Romance to a quasi-divine figure who embodies the desire to go beyond the boundaries prescribed to human existence—and who finally pays the price. Yet, even as the detailed reconstruction of Alexander’s exploits echoes a sense of wonderment at their scope, the Ebstorf map does not finally sug-

gest that these historical actions are repeatable. If Alexander stands for the farthest possibilities of historical action in the world, the evocation of his achievements equally underscores the limits of such action. In the almost seamless transition at the cartographic margins from the Alexander legend to the figure of Christ, the symbolic frame stages the farthest extent of human endeavor in order to replace history with a hierarchical figurative language that can lead the subject to God. The juxtaposition of Adam and Eve before the Tree of Life (located just below the head of Christ in the upper portion of the map) with the oracle of the trees prophesying Alexander's death ideologically connects the two historical moments as forms of transgression, over which God, in the shape of Christ, watches. In other words,

the overlaying of a theological space forces a shift from historical time to biblical time, from human history to a divine history that underpins and orders it. This movement endows the cartographic space with its denseness and complexity. It performs a “symbolical reduplication” that forces the viewer to reinterpret the world (and his position within it) in relation to a divine essence concealed from human sight.” The evocation of biblical history as ultimate referent implies a subordination of space to time. Even if the dialectical movement preserves the geographical space of human action, the latter becomes meaningful only through the Christian narrative of creation and salvation. Consequently, the Ebstorf

map gives visual expression to a fundamental asymmetry between the medieval treatments of time and space. The representation of space remains bound to the forms in which it was immediately available in quotidian life. Tilling the

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field, walking through the narrow streets, measuring one’s land, are all activi-

ties that instill a tangible sense of lived and experienced space. Corresponding to these activities is an agricultural and cyclical sense of time, the time of the sun and the seasons, of recurrent movement through a familiar world. However, this “natural” time is fractured by an eschatological process that or-

ganizes temporality in terms of abstract nodal points: the genesis and the end of the human world. The daily cyclical rhythm is, in Gurevich’s words,

“straightened out’, ‘stretched’, and vectorially directed.” Such an extension transforms cyclical or “natural” time itself by separating it, on the one hand, from an abstract eschatological time, and by assimilating it, on the other, to

the dimension of geographical space—and thereby subjecting it to the contemptus mundi that took shape out of Scholastic views regarding the cosmos.” The copious written narratives and descriptive legends adorning the Ebstorf map’s surface register the equivalence of worldly time and visually experienced space. The viewer's traversal of the map’s surface is not presented as qualitatively distinct from an involvement with the dimension of human history (most fully depicted in Alexander's journey to the ends of the world). Both modes of spatializing time belong to the material world and partake of its limits. Abstract time, by contrast, is projected onto the absolute ground of existence, God. The circle functions from this perspective as the traditional, theological symbol for eternity and immutability; it represents a break from and an overcoming of both everyday and historical time.

Re-discovering Ptolemy The foregoing interpretation of the Ebstorf mappamundi has sought to show how high-medieval representations of the world coordinated cosmology and geography within a broadly Scholastic frame. We turn now to the conditions underlying the reversal and displacement in the early modern period of this anterior interrelation of space and subjectivity. Emergent cartographic forms sparked a drastic reformulation of the medieval coordination of anthropology, cosmology, and geography. A gradual transformation in the uses of and the attitudes towards physical space forced a shift away from the tight theological coupling between individual identity and physical location. Of especial significance in this regard was the historical conjuncture of two different —and hitherto segregated—modes of spatial representation: the Ptolemaic

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geography that was “re-discovered” in the fifteenth century, and the portolan charts, an autonomous cartographic product of the Middle Ages. Their confluence provided the necessary conditions for reformulating both the nature of space and the human subject's relationship to it. The densely symbolic surface of the Ebstorf map is characterized by a functional interpenetration. The different uses and modalities of space are impressed one upon the other: the map is simultaneously a geography and a history of the world, a concretely experienced and an abstract theological world, a world of movement and a world of stasis. However, social and economic developments in the late Middle Ages gradually eroded this idealized fusion of material and theological space. Among the more significant changes were those affecting the shapes of medieval cities. The scholarly consensus indicates that the late Middle Ages saw an upsurge of an urban class “whose economic practice and whose style and rhythm of life marked them off from the way of life of the rural classes of medieval society,”*° a historical process signaling the transition from eschatological time to “the time of the merchants” (in Le Goff’s pithy phrase). Georges Duby has shown that the urban upsurge was a consequence of an increasing centralization of monarchic and civic authority within feudalism at a time when the medieval state began to reconstitute itself.>! In the urban sphere, civic authorities were empowered to intervene more directly in the everyday organization of life and space. Deploring the inconveniences of uncontrolled growth and the concomitant deterioration in living conditions, leaders of church and state pushed for an architectural separation of their residences from the rest of the urban environment. At the same time, they became more directly engaged in restructuring the city as a whole. Underlying the more aggressively interventionist stance was a shift away from a symbolically ordered space based on ideological centricity, towards a functional utilization and organization of space. Not

only, for example, did the prior planning of cities become important—even if actual execution often lagged behind intent—but cities were constructed with wider streets and spacious squares, suggesting a more extensive reliance upon right-angled street grids.” These and other modifications in the practice of everyday life bespeak a changing relationship between space and power. Whereas in the Ebstorf mappamundi, the type and location of a building expressed an immediate relationship to (divine and temporal) authority, power in the early modern

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period becomes more closely allied to the organization and allocation of space. In a variety of pragmatic contexts, the emphasis shifted to the need to manipulate space and subordinate it to the uses to which it could be put.** The internal organization of domestic and urban spaces; the planning of colonial cities; agricultural land use; the aesthetic representation of space;

and, of course, cartographic practice were all spheres in which space was gradually objectified and instrumentalized. Such an objectification of space runs counter to the medieval model, one that begins to appear both increasingly arbitrary and—even more important—uneconomic.™* That the so-called re-discovery of Ptolemy in the Renaissance would induce permanent and far-reaching effects is due in no small measure to the accretion of such changes in the material organization and experience of space. Moreover, tensions within the feudal framework—even if generally contained—ensured receptivity to the cosmological and geographical models elaborated in the Ptolemaic texts. Lost to European thought for over a thousand years and preserved only through the efforts of the Arab philosophers, Ptolemy's Almagest—better known to the Renaissance as the Syntactica

Mathematica—and Geographia became widely available in Latin translation in the fifteenth century.°° Their absorption provided two of the ingredients that would prove indispensable for the Renaissance re-conceptualization of space: first, a geometrization that made it possible for space to be thought of as something uniform and homogeneous, independent (potentially) of human moyement through it; and second, a mathematical method of astronomy and cosmology that was to be intimately linked—through Copernicus and others—to the problem of epistemology, and specifically to claims regarding human knowledge of the physical world. By the middle of the fifteenth century, according to Antony Grafton,

Ptolemy's Geographia (in its Latin editions) “had become a bestseller, as copies newly equipped with colorful maps sailed across the Mediterranean world. ...

[It] reached print in 1475, and many editions, as well as many luxurious manuscripts, attest to its popularity thereafter.’°° Although originally without . maps, the text itself crucially supplied both the quantitative data and the

mathematical methods required graphically to represent the world. Ptolemy described three different ways of projecting the surface of a spherical earth onto the two-dimensional page. The Ptolemaic maps in the 1482 Ulm edition of the Geographia, for instance, used a mathematical transformation based on

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conic sections to convert a three-dimensional world into a two-dimensional image that maintained the proportional distances between the places depicted.

(See Figure 3.) In treating space as if it were a purely geometrical quantity, they expressed the possibility of specifying and representing relationships between places without regard to either human or divine structures. Thus, despite their denotative inaccuracy from the perspective of later maps, these early geometrical maps implicitly made a referential claim. If an accurate geographical representation of the entire temporal world seemed possible, this was because there existed a purely mathematical equivalence between the space of the world and the space of the page. Theoretically at least, such an equivalence was independent of actual movement through space, as well as of the theological superstructures that ostensibly made space meaningful.°” Comparing the indifference of Ptolemaic space to the cosmologically overdetermined geography of the Ebstorf mappamundi reveals a profound shift affecting the position of the viewing subject. For the Ptolemaic maps crucially lack a positioned viewer whose observation of space participates reflexively in its production as representation. Eschewing the mappaemundi’s overwhelming concern with theosis, the newer maps displace or even nullify the position of the individual viewer. Svetlana Alpers offers an illustrative

analogy in her attempt to distinguish Dutch from Italian perspectival techniques. According to her, Renaissance Italian artist-—influenced by Alberti’s work on perspective—posited a viewer who looked through a framed window from a fixed distance at a “putative substitute world.” In contradistinction, Ptolemy and distance-point perspective conceived of the picture “as a flat working surface, unframed, upon which the world is inscribed.” The point is not that these two approaches produce different results: there is, she suggests, no visible geometrical difference between the end products of the two pictorial systems. The contrast concerns rather the differing pictorial conceptions governing their points of departure. “What is called a projection” in the Ptolemaic cartographic context, Alpers says, is never visualized by placing a plane between the geographer and the earth; rather it is achieved by transforming mathematically from sphere to plane. Although the grid Ptolemy proposed and those Mercator later imposed share the mathematical uniformity of the Renaissance perspective grid, they do not share the positioned viewer, the frame, and the defini-

tion of the picture as a window through which an external viewer looks.

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On these accounts the Ptolemaic grid, indeed cartographic grids in general, must be distinguished from, not confused with, the perspectival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere.*®

Ptolemaic cartography induces, in other words, a radical displacement of the

viewer, whose place is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. Whereas the processual space of the mappamundi had demanded the viewer's active participation, the logic of the Ptolemaic map dictates that the viewing subject stand outside the caftographic image, split off from it. The participation of the self in the newer cartographic representation is restricted to the objectification of spatial location, the narrowly geographical knowledge of where “T’ am on the map. This undermining of the viewer's position—indeed his exclusion from the spatial representation—leads potentially to a disintegration of the relationship between subject and world that medieval cosmic geography had underwritten. And yet a different Ptolemaic text would make it possible to overcome this loss. For if Ptolemy's Geographia banished, as it were, the human subject from his world, the Renaissance reinterpretation of Syntactica Mathematica compensated for that loss through what was tantamount, paradoxically enough,

to another form of exile: the displacement of the earth from the universe's center. That, at any rate, is the innovation we usually associate with Copernicus’s De Orbis Revolutionibus, the sixteenth-century reply to Ptolemy’s classic

astronomical text. Copernicus draws on Ptolemy's theoretical apparatus and his astronomical data in order to justify, however, a radically altered under-

standing of the physical cosmos and of man’s place in it.*” Copernicus’s main contribution has generally been identified as the replacement of a geocentric model of the universe with a heliocentric one (in which the earth’s diurnal rotation takes over the movement earlier ascribed to the sun). The opposition to Copernicus’s theoretical breakthrough, by contrast, has often been dismissed as a medieval residue, a regressive fixation on

principle of a stable or static geocentricity. In a powerful revisionist reading of the Copernican oeuvre, Hans Blumenberg dispels this entrenched narrative. He cites a meeting in 1533 between Pope Clement VII and the renowned

lawyer Johann Albert Widmanstadt, at which the latter is supposed to have described Copernicus’s theories regarding the movement of the earth. In acknowledgment, the Pope bestowed upon Widmanstadt an illuminated Greek

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parchment codex, upon which the lawyer noted both the occasion for the gift

and (as a jurist) the witnesses to the event.” Strikingly, neither the codex nor Widmanstadt’s written notes indicate any displeasure on the Pope's part at Copernicus’s “heretical” theory. No doubt, our assessment of the putative encounter depends upon what actually comprised Widmanstadt’s account of the motion of the earth; but the anecdote at least cautions us against accept-

ing too readily the generally bruited account of the “Copernican revolution.” The Pope’s apparent equanimity in the face of the revolutionary thesis suggests the possibility that the astronomical theory was not necessarily objectionable in itself. The subsequent hostility—to which both Giordano Bruno and Galileo fell victim—was therefore perhaps a result of considerations not simply to be deduced from a bald statement of the Copernican thesis. The truly innovative dimension of Copernicus’s De Orbis Revolutionibus, Blumenburg argues, has less to do with the heliocentric hypothesis as such than with the epistemological position from which the text proclaims its truth. Its radicalism resides in how it combines a physical decentering of man with radical anthropocentrism on the level of theory and theoretical cognition. A heliocentric universe requires that the earth (and its inhabitants) be displaced from the center of the cosmos. However, Copernicus’s text implies that the very knowledge of this displacement allows the human subject to be re-centered as a rational being, one capable of discovering—via the medium of mathematical theorizing—the true structure of the universe. The rejection of geocentricity thus grounds a claim for the centrality of human reason, for its ability to understand the logic and the purpose of God's creation. To put it another way: what Ptolemy's Geographia implies with regard to geographical knowledge (the possibility of knowing mathematically the space of the terrestrial world), Copernicus’s rewriting of Ptolemy turns into a constitutive anthropological principle. He extends the scope of the geographical claim to include the space of the celestial world. Despite its radical claims, what is striking about Copernicus’s text is its very reticence.*’ Not only does the overall form of De Orbis Revolutionibus imitate closely the structure of Ptolemy’s Almagest, but Copernicus takes great care to minimize his deviation from the antique source. Furthermore, Co-

pernicus does not begin by presenting the heliocentric doctrine as his own innovation, but emphasizes rather its roots in an ancient hypothesis concerning the nature of the universe:

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I undertook the task of rereading the works of all the philosophers .. . to learn whether anyone had ever proposed other motions of the universe's spheres. ... And in fact I first found in Cicero that Nicetas supposed the earth to move. Later I also discovered in Plutarch that certain others were of this opinion. ... Therefore, ... I too began to consider the mobility of

the earth. And even though the idea seemed absurd, nevertheless I knew

that others before me had been granted the freedom to imagine any circles whatsoever for the purpose of explaining the heavenly phenomena. Hence I thought that I too would be readily permitted to ascertain whether explanations sounder than those of my predecessors could be found for the revolution of the celestial spheres on the assumption of some motion of the earth.

As Hallyn points out, the importance of this passage lies “in the weight it ascribes to a particular form of renovatio based on the liberty to think, which

may in turn lead to innovatio.’** The circumspection with which Copernicus approaches the right even to consider seriously the heliocentric hypothesis testifies to both the tension between epistemic regimes and the syncretic urge characteristic of the early modern period in general. In this sense, Copernicus’s adherence to the form of Ptolemaic cosmology indexes both a larger anthropological claim and the desire to veil its implications by stressing instead the narrowly astronomical consequences of his theory. The actual direction of Copernicus’s thought is established most clearly in the preface dedicated to Paul III. “I began,” Copernicus says, “to be annoyed that the movements of the world machine, created for us by the best and most systematic artisan of all, were not understood with greater certainty by the philosophers.”®° The claim that the world had been created by God for us (propter nos) revives an anthropocentric teleology of the Stoic type. The phrase is crucial, Blumenburg argues, because it shows that the early modern reaction to the medieval cosmos relies upon a distinctive and self-reflexive recasting of Stoic doctrine. Earlier we saw how Scholastic thought inverted the Stoic coordination of cosmology and theology. Stoic anthropocentricity was a result of Stoicism having founded its theology upon cosmology. (For Seneca, for

example, anthropocentricity was guaranteed by the fact that man resided at the universe’s center.) By contrast, this very fact signified to late medieval theologians that the universe had not been made for man, so removed was he from the motive source of the cosmos.

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But despite the inversion, Stoic cosmology shared a common assumption with Thomist thought: both doctrines assumed that mans physical place . necessarily corresponded to his metaphysical status vis-a-vis the power responsible for the world’s creation. The difference lay in how they evaluated the shared correlation. Hence, for the Stoics, geocentrism could not merely

be an element in a calculation. Rather, its truth was necessary to preserve an anthropocentric teleology. So, when Aristarchus of Samos ascribed to the earth both a rotational movement around its axis and a revolutionary move along the elliptic, Cleanthes—a leader of the older Stoa—accused him of impiety on the ground that he was disturbing “the hearth of the universe” by seeking to save the phenomena: his valorization of astronomical phenomena could only be read as sacrilegious because it implied a reversal of an existing cosmological reality upon which Stoic anthropocentrism depended.” Copernicus draws on Stoic anthropocentrism but rejects the metaphysical correlation common to both the Stoics and the Scholastics. His recourse to Stoicism as ammunition against the Scholastic cosmos resembles that relationship to the past that early modern philology had already fashioned: reviving the old in order to transform an existing model. Hallyn remarks of humanist philology that it “began to engage [the original] text as something to be reconstituted in its historical distance from the present.’ The aim was not so much commentary in the Scholastic sense, as a palimpsestic substitution of new content through reference to an established and inherited form.® In a similar vein, Copernicus revives a Stoic formula—that the world was created by the most systematic maker of all for man's benefit:—in order to argue against all epistemological reservations concerning the possibility of true knowledge in astronomy. The realization that “astronomers do not agree among themselves in their investigations”® does not indicate to him the cosmos'’s fundamental impenetrability or that the human faculty of knowledge has to restrict itself to matters regional or terrestrial. Quite the contrary: astronomy’s failure constitutes for Copernicus a “scandal that was to be vividly felt as such.””° Not simply aiming at a narrowly astronomical thesis regarding the earth’s movement, his theory extends the range of human knowledge to include the entire realm of stellar bodies. Grafting onto the Stoic propter nos an anthropology utterly alien both to Stoic and Scholastic cosmology, it supports an unqualified claim for human theoretical cognition—which the De Orbis equates with astronomical cognition.

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With this cognitive claim in mind, we can better understand Copernicus’s sense of where Ptolemy’s Syntactica Mathematica—the book that his own De Orbis Revolutionibus otherwise most closely imitates—falls short. Faced with the question of where to locate the Sun’s sphere—immediately above the spheres of Mercury, Venus, and the Moon, or beneath all the planetary spheres and above that of the Moon—Ptolemy had espoused its theoretical undecidability: because both representations could be made to fit the observed data, one could not really choose between them. But a theory that contented itself with such an irreducible undecidability could not fully uncover the truth of the universe. Rather, its task was the construction of representations through which the observed phenomena might be “saved.”7! In a fundamental sense, Ptolemy regarded stellar objects as beyond human knowledge; it sufficed to devise a model that matched the observational data. He cleaved, thus, to the basic principles of the Aristotle-derived Greek astronomy, for which the “saving of phenomena” meant developing “exclusively mathematical or kinematic theories, and not physical or dynamic ones.””” Such an assumption is untenable within the Copernican theory, and the ostensible undecidability between the so-called inferior and superior conjunctions provides the starting point for his re-analysis of the entire Ptolemaic cosmology. Copernicus argues that there must be a single explanation that corresponds to the real movement of planetary bodies, and that this explanation is available to the rational astronomer. Whereas Ptolemy's models could suitably describe the movements of the individual planets, he did not feel the need to devise an explanation that would unite those into a single, organic body. As Galileo later reports, Copernicus’s response insists upon an aesthetics of symmetry and harmony: “He [Copernicus] adds that, in going about putting together all the structures of the particular orbits, there resulted thence a monster and a chimera, composed of members most disproportionate to [one] another, and altogether incompatible.’”* Against Ptolemy's “monstrous” aggregations, Copernicus asserts the need for a “harmonious linkage between the motion of the spheres and their size, such as can be found in no

other way””* than through heliocentricity. The notion of space underlying the Copernican cosmos is nevertheless closely linked to that which Ptolemy's Geographia expresses, in that the heliocentric theory posits a necessary relationship between the various motions as-

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cribed to the planets. The necessity is conceived of as a mathematical one inasmuch as the Copernican ideals of harmony and symmetry receive their purest expression in a mathematical system of proportional relations. Consequently, the Copernican universe—akin to Ptolemaic cartographic projections—is governed “by quantitative relations in homogeneous space, and not by distinctions between elements or material objects situated in qualitatively differentiated, distinct locations.”’° The Copernican paradigm tended

towards an ideal homogeneity because it led the qualitatively differentiated world back to a basic set of constituents or principles out of which all things were seen as being constructed.”° Of course, Copernicus’s cosmos is not entirely without differentiation. Even if its homogeneous space, in principle, allows every place to be a possible center, the created universe possesses, in fact, an absolute center in relation to which it is symmetrically organized. At rest, however, in the middle of everything is the sun. For in this most

beautiful temple, who would place this lamp in another or better position than that from which it can light up the whole thing at the same time? For, the sun is not inappropriately called by some people the lantern of the universe, its mind by others, and its ruler by still others. The Thrice Greatest [Hermes Trimegistus] labels it a visible god, Sophocles’s Electra, the all-

seeing. [hus indeed, as though seated on a royal throne, the sun governs the family of planets revolving around it.””

The exuberance expressed here echoes the lyricism of Seneca’s celebration (noted earlier) of the perfect match between the human body and the cosmos. The Stoic belief in the unsurpassable beauty and harmony of the cosmos is recaptured in the metaphor of the cosmic temple lit up most perfectly by the sun. But if the Stoic propter nos required that the human subject occupy the cosmos’s physical center, Copernicus’s “Stoicismi” equally consequently demands man's physical displacement from it: heliocentricity voices the claim that human beings can “see” the universe becatise it, like man, is

God's creation, the product of an intelligence that is kindred to man and well-disposed towards him, The temple is lit up by the sun for us. Therefore,

man has to be capable of comprehending the universe as a unity governed by an aesthetic principle—that of mathematical rationality—which is valid throughout. If man intends to remain at the center of the world by virtue of

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his own rational achievements, he has to give up the physical manifestation of his centricity. He has to forgo geocentrism. Copernicus proposes, in Blumenberg’s words, an “idealization of the

concept of the center of the world.’”* He produces an idealized, theoretical centrality disconnected from man’s own physical location in the cosmos. By not correlating anthropology and cosmology, his anthropocentric schema at-

tempts to safeguard itself against subsequent transformations in cosmological understanding. Furthermore, the rejection of physical centricity allows Copernicus to introduce a new correlation, this time between the cosmic center and the idealized position occupied by human reason or human theoretical cognition. The logic of Copernican anthropocentrism demands that every assertion in the science of nature be understood as “true,” that every

scientific explanation be adequate to the observed phenomena, and that it demonstrate its truth through this adequacy. Man, as a universal creature, has

a right to everything. Nothing can be withheld from him because the world is for man.

The Portolan Charts

The “Copernican turn” outlined above significantly reorders the relationship between geography and cosmology. Previously, tension between the earthly and the celestial realms—still operative, as we saw, in CamGes’s Os Lusiadas—

harked back to a basic Aristotelian differentiation of a cognitively available sub-lunar world from a supra-lunar world that was ultimately outside the bounds of human knowledge. Ptolemy's Syntactica Mathematica and Geographia had for the most part assumed just such a frame. The Copernican response to Ptolemaic astronomy implicitly extends the analytico-referential” frame of the Geographia in a way that undermines that Aristotelian distinction. The separation of a homogeneous, geometrized space from a concretely differentiated world of places and things finds its counterpart in an epistemological model that seems universally applicable to both stellar and earthly domains. Like places on the earth, the stars, too, are objects to be discovered, studied,

and known.°*° Extending the cognitive realm to include the celestial world restructures,

too, the earlier constitutive duality of God and the human world insofar as it appropriates for the human subject a position of theoretical centrality. Geog-

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taphy and cosmology can now be separated again, but not along Aristotelian lines, that is to say, not in terms of a delineation of the limits of human

knowledge (the former within, and the latter without). Instead, they constitute two sub-systems, as it were, within the potentially limitless space of human cognition. They are to be differentiated on the basis of the kinds of objects they examine rather than in terms of how they approach those objects.®! Clearly, Copernicus independently (and from a different direction) reaches a position akin to the Cartesian and Baconian ones discussed in the previous chapter. It would be inaccurate, however, to infer from this that Copernicus’s sun single-handedly dispelled the medieval mists. The complexity of his relation to the Ptolemaic texts shows rather that his innovation continued to operate with an inherited problematic—even as it re-fashioned that legacy. “Regressive” interpretations of Copernicus maintained the coordination of physical and metaphysical centers. The geometrized and uniform space of Ptolemy’s Geographia was also often subordinated to a reconfigured theology that took the place of the earlier dualism. Well into the seventeenth century, for instance, the displacement of man from the universe’s center was read as yet another proof of man’s fallen condition: to wander, to follow the paths of error in the way that the planets now strayed around the sun (siderum errare). The syncretic mix of old and new is nicely captured by Petrus Plancius's

world map from the mid-seventeenth century (reissued by Nicolaas J. Visscher in 1657 and De Witt in 1660)—by which time the Copernican cosmos had established the superiority of its astronomical claims. (See Figure 4.) Between the two terraqueous hemispheres Plancius juxtaposes the two competing cosmological models of the universe, Ptolemaic and Copernican. Plancius has no doubts as to which of these is truer, for the legend above the heliocentric system informs us that it alone describes the world as it is. However, the felt need to depict Ptolemy's (discredited) cosmos alongside the “true” picture testifies to the imaginative hold still exerted by the geocentric system, to its continued status as a guarantee of man’s place in the cosmos.

Furthermore, like the mappaemundi, the actual maps accompanying Ptolemy’s Geographia represent the world as a closed one, even though the geographical representation depends upon conceiving space in abstract terms, as geometrized, homogenous, and—in principle—unbounded. Hence, the

world depicted in the 1482 Ulm edition of Ptolemy is both landlocked and

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enclosed by its frame. The known and inhabitable world constitutes for it the experiential limits of human existence. On the one hand, then, such Ptole-

maic maps clearly show a shift from the complex logic of medieval spatial representations. Rather than symbolically reduplicating the natural world, they arise from a transformation of the concept of space itself and through the emergence of a different relationship between man and his physical world. On the other hand, since medieval spatial knowledge constituted the basis upon which the early modern era rediscovered Ptolemy, these early maps still partake of the medieval world’s closedness. It would take the further empirical impetus of the so-called voyages of discovery, and their gradual absorption into European consciousness, to undermine definitively the medieval universe. For the self-asserting subject implied by the new spatiality remains strictu sensu a theoretical subject. The instrumental relation to the world, variously conceptualized by Copernicus, Bacon, and Descartes, still lacked the concrete correlate that only its realization in the world could provide. To put it another way, the abstract geometric space of the Ptolemaic maps called for an accompanying empirical practice if it was actually to deliver what it promised. To represent earth's surface as it truly was demanded an empirical practice that could uncover the spatial relations among places and things. Such a practice did, in fact, exist in a parallel,

relatively autonomous cartographic tradition of the late Middle Ages: the portoplanos or portolan charts. This tradition provided an indispensable link on the level of material practice to ground, as it were, the emerging re-conceptualization of space and subjectivity obliquely expressed in Ptolemaic maps. The portolanos preserved the Mediterranean sailors’ first-hand knowledge of their own seas along with their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean. The maps were originally based upon written descriptions of sailing conditions, tides, and so forth, compiled by medieval sailors traveling be-

tween one European port and another. Out of such navigational instructions evolved a pictorial representation of space in the form of sailing charts, usually drawn on sheepskin either by sailors themselves or from descriptions they provided. Relying on a complex cognitive system built around the sounding lead and the compass rose, they captured the relevant navigational information needed to travel over limited distances, generally along coastlines or within viewing distance of land. The sounding lead was a weight “armed” with wax and lowered into the ocean on a string in order to assess the lie and

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the texture of the seabed. Its use may be gleaned from the following description: “Upon off Penmarche there is 50 fathoms black ooze. Upon the same in 60 fathoms there is sandy ooze and black fishey stones among.” The information derived from diverse and changing physical signs was interpreted through the compass rose, allowing one to draw the requisite navigational

charts. “The compass rose,” to cite Charles Frake, “provided an invariant representation of directions which were, in fact, determined at sea by a variety of means: the sun, stars, winds, swells, landmarks, seamarks, sealife, and, in later times, the magnetic’needle.”** Relying on the observation and measurement

of sea and land signs, the early portolan charts eschewed the use of frames, plotting only coastlines and routes. The written descriptions on these charts indicate their pragmatic everydayness, their emergence out of the tangible practice of negotiating the seas. Their concern with nature and natural space is almost exclusively utilitarian, limited as it is to the forms in which a given space impinges upon human action—tides, winds, ocean swells, harbors, and

so on. They represent, in short, an empirical production of space through direct engagement. Figure 5 shows a representative portolan chart based upon early Portuguese explorations of the Congo. The lack of a frame suggests an openness of space, but one qualitatively different from the abstract openness assumed

(if not actually realized) by the Ptolemaic maps. In this chart, the absence does not imply a conceptual understanding of space as itself open, homogeneous, and uniform. Rather, it indicates, first, the open-endedness of the

activity itself, an understanding of voyaging as an ongoing practice; and, second, the openness of the physical world to the individuals who use the chart.

The map codifies and preserves practical human control over experienced space, one achieved by charting the geographical and topographical restrictions on human activity. At first glance, the portolanos resemble medieval pilgrim itineraries in their concern with the concrete experience of traveling. However, unlike those rudimentary maps, the portolanos lack a sacred telos. The navigational charts represent instead an accumulation of information about an unstable space not immediately marked as part of the social world. Theirs is a space without cities and buildings, where the traces of previous journeys have not been preserved. As the pilot Pedro de Medina’s widely used manual Arte de Navegar notes, it was a mystery “that a man with a compass and a thumb can

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encompass and navigate the entire world.” Nautical cosmography allowed the uncertain space of the sea—“a thing so vague and spacious ... where there is neither path nor trace”—to be mastered.*4 Responding to the unpredictability of the sea voyage, the portolanos try to control the nautical environment by representing it. Their aim is thus a restricted one: to provide a more or less accurate representation of physical features in order to facilitate passage through a variable and untrustworthy natural space, the unreliable and chang-

ing waters. Divorced from a theologically determined telos, the spatial relationships they establish are meaningful only within the context of local and changing material practices such as trade, colonization, and warfare. Products of movement, the portolanos simultaneously map a space that concretely reproduces larger structures enabling and regulating movement (for example, the flow of commodities between trading centers or the relations of power that determine fleet movements). Consequently, they mediate between the

networks of social, economic, and political institutions in space and the forms of practice through which these networks are produced and maintained. Thus, while the portolanos are medieval maps, their tangible and textured

awareness of space need not be immediately subjected to the symbolic coding of the mappaemundi. Granted, such charts were often ideologically absorbed

into larger theological and political structures. Francesco Olliva’s famous 1603 portolan-based world map, for instance, combines nautical outlines with the

characteristic mappaemundi signifiers of secular and religious authority. (See Figure 6.) By depicting animals such as the elephant and the camel, it also iconically reproduces the strangeness of Africa and Asia for the European observer. But the fact that portolanos could be co-opted with such ease indicates rather what one might call their technical neutrality. As products of a citcumscribed and experimental practice, they implicitly detach the lived space from any prior form of conceptual and theoretical incorporation. From this perspective, the significance of the portolan charts lies in their development

as a mode of representation that enacts a practical break from theorizations about space and man. Although affected by the changes in the theoretical frames surrounding them, the portolanos do not themselves reflect upon space as such. They simply produce it in the world of everyday action as functional, usable, and mappable.*°

The early voyages of discovery constitute the most important extension of portolan mapping: they contribute directly to transforming Europe's rela-

FIGURE 6 Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean by Francesco Oliva (1603) [BnF, Cartes et Plans, Rés. Ge C 5093.| (Cliché Bibliothéque Nationale de France, Paris.)

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tionship to the world through the process of transforming its representation of the world. Europe’s encounter with Asia and America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reshapes the known world and, as the preceding chapter has demonstrated, erodes an earlier reliance on cosmographical and geographical “facts” derived from antiquity. No doubt, the openness of portolan space implies a certain flexibility in that the chart could simply incorporate new information derived from the practice of voyaging. But the historical shift under scrutiny here is not simply a matter of quantitative extension, for the absorption of the unknown qualitatively transforms both the already famuiliar world and the process through which one gets to know the world. The apparent technical neutrality of the portolan charts creates the conditions for their reattachment to a different material and ideological model: to the abstract space of the Copernican (and modified Ptolemaic) system. Their reabsorption within an emerging configuration of space makes it possible to pit them against precisely that experience of space out of which they were born. Indeed, their de facto separation from theological superstructures enables, I would suggest, the emergence of the category of “practice” within the

new theoretical frame. Compare, for instance, two new “versions” of the world: the 1490 Henri-

cius Martellus map with Edward Wright's of 1599. (See Figures 7 and 8.) Both maps draw on geographical data supplied discovery. The Martellus map reflects the state somewhere between 1487 and 1492. It does not thus probably antedates Columbus's voyage; but

by the European voyages of of geographical knowledge represent the Americas, and it does delineate the African

coast up to the point reached by Bartholomew Diaz's 1487 voyage. As the accompanying legends corroborate, its depiction of Africa derives from the history of Portuguese explorations down the continent's western coast. However, the map’s eastern portion cleaves to Ptolemaic representations of the world, which are modified only with respect to the Portuguese sub-Saharan voyages. Martellus’s map purports to lay the world before us, but for him the act of representation means accommodating recently acquired information to an established model. As the resemblance between their frames suggests, its

closedness is the closedness of the Ptolemaic maps. Its deviation from Ptolemaic representation indicates a forced departure from a past that nonetheless continues to serve as a guarantee of truth and knowledge. Edward Wright's magnificent map from about a century later similarly

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relies on the most current voyage information. It is, of course, far superior as a geographical document, outlining with great precision both the Americas and the East. The map is exceptional, though, in rigorously excluding any region that has not actually been “discovered.” Hence, it leaves incomplete the outlines of North America and Greenland, and omits the fictitious southern continent of Magellenica. Openness and incompleteness notwithstanding, Wright's map does not, however, express an epistemological humility comparable to Martellus’s final (if perhaps reluctant) deferral to the ancients. Rather, Wright's careful restriction to what is actually known rests upon a confidence that future voyagers will soon fill in the missing details. His assured presentation of a partial world as if it were the whole stems from a presumption that future discoveries will produce true and definitive knowledge of the earth’s surface. If, as Joseph Needham puts it, the Renaissance “discovered the method of discovery,’ this new, resultant epistemological stance derives from discovering the power of human reason to grasp and control the world it describes and, moreover, to see in the act of discovery

evidence of the power of human reason. For Wright, discovery embodies both knowledge of the world and the guarantee of that knowledge. These divergent attitudes towards framing the geographical knowledge derived from the colonial voyages bring into relief the crucial role played by the portolan charts. Their emphasis on a space produced by actual human observation and activity soon combined with the Ptolemaic displacement of the positioned viewer to forge a new subject capable of occupying the “idealized” center of Copernican theory. Their circumscribed attention to practical mastery of the natural world prepared the ground for a new understanding of space and subjectivity, transforming in turn their own use and function. Whereas Copernicus’s reinterpretation of Ptolemy. projected a conceptual break from an anterior episteme, the portolanos—as expressions of ptagmatic control over the lived world—provided the material conditions for, yet only gradually instantiated, that break.

The ensuing shift from a medieval unity of space and subjectivity is thus complexly shaped by the material practices of colonial voyaging. From this perspective, Copernican subjectivity appears ex post facto to internalize theoretically a practical mastery that first receives explicit articulation in a proto-colonial practice. The pragmatic realm undergirds not only the conceptual shifts detailed above but also their absorption into the cultural un-

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conscious of early modern Europe—aultimately transforming the very practices through which space and subjectivity came to be re-conceptualized. We might say that a central condition of possibility for early modern notions of “subjecthood” was the practical realization of subjecthood in and through the voyages of discovery.

Divided Subjects, Divided Spaces The epistemological shifts examined above cannot be divorced from particular forms of colonial appropriation and control. The contexts influencing the formation of early modern subjecthood bound cartographic representation to that other crucial concern of the voyages: to assert dominion over the discovered lands. The newfound ability to represent the world’s “true” shape was involved with viewing the “newly discovered” lands—both east and west—as areas to be reconfigured in terms of the needs and desires of their “discoverers.” In Martellus’s map—or for that matter in the careful delineation of the newly discovered lands on Wright's world map—Portuguese discoveries along the African coast appear to be neutral extensions of human knowledge through human practice. Masked are their equally pragmatic ends, such as the search for Guinea gold and slaves. The new outline of Africa both indexes and conceals emerging political and economic relationships that sustain the enterprise of discovery. The map’s dark lines veil the growth of a socioeconomic system that would not only immediately benefit the discoverers but also contribute to the emergence of a world governed by commodity circulation and capital.*° We are now in a position to discern the broad intuition governing this chapter: the colonial voyages of discovery and conquest compel a structural and historical realignment of Ptolemaic and portolan cartography. As a response to the discoveries, the localized and experiential encoding of space in the portolan charts converges with the abstract geometricity of Ptolemaic space to reconfigure the relation between knowledge and subjectivity. The new geography and the direct experience of hitherto “undiscovered” lands and peoples thus spurs the development of an epistemological frame that resituates and unifies both cartographic traditions. In this sense, the early history of colonialism lies at the heart of the early modern understanding of space and the self.

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The result is what I wish to call “colonialist space.” Such spaces bring together at least three different registers through which early modern cartography exerts its effects. The first of these is the complex connection between space and subjectivity that undergirds the “re-discovery”’ of geometric space in early modern Europe. A second dimension concerns the ideological asymmetries, which, from the outset, internally divided that mode of subjecthood

in complex and contradictory ways. Colonial discourses served, as we shall now see, to divide the colonizing subject from the colonized, delimiting in the process the epistemological stance implied by the new spatiality. Cartography played an important role in naturalizing such ideological distinctions. Finally, it will be necessary to address the material practices that produced particular spaces in response to specific needs and desires, The complicity of early modern cartography with the material production of diverse colonial space leads to the complex emergence of “India” and the “East” as places, as geographical regions to be mapped and possessed by European colonial powers. The general contention here is that the so-called re-discovery of neutral, homogeneous space is bound from its very inception to an asymmetry be-

tween the discoverer and the discovered, a difference that neatly modulates into the opposition between colonizer and colonized. The convergence of a practical mastery of space with an anthropocentric teleology may, in principle, lay the world open for all humankind, but in practice the claim does not hold universally true. For its historical genesis restricts its application to those who are seen to fulfil the requirements of rationality, that is, of truly being

“men.” Though an instrumentalized human rationality produces knowledge of the world, both earthly and celestial, this reason does not in practice include all men. Instead, the colonial frame induces a subtle slippage whereby the rational is made the preserve of Western man. Recent work in historical anthropology and cultural studies has emphasized the ways in which the colonization of the New World produced and mobilized such distinctions. In an erudite analysis of the legal structures underpinning European colonial practice in the Americas, Anthony Pagden details the recourse to the category of “natural man” to designate the so-called savages who were seen as close to nature and yet bereft of rational thought. Spanish uncertainty regarding the juridical status of slavery was resolved “by reference to the fact that the slave belongs to a different category of man from the master.” Categorizing the Amerindians as “natural slaves” produced, thus,

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a difference crucial for the exercise of colonial power. And this difference was linked both to the capacity for and the actual exercise of rational thought, exemplified above all by use of language and literacy. “Reason, and from reason the ability to create and to use language,’ Pagden continues, “these were two

things which had raised man from barbarism to civility. To live without the letter, the Spanish theologian Maldonado concluded, employing a well-known Ciceronian topos, was virtually equivalent to not being a man, to a renuncia-

tion of one’s humanity.’*” Even those who avoided a categorical distinction between the “rational” Europeans and the “barbarian” inhabitants of the

New World tended nonetheless to perpetuate a historical version of what Johannes Fabian has termed the “denial of coevalness.”®* If not categorically different, the natives at least belonged to a historical stage that their European masters had left behind. It was the duty of the colonizers to lead these underdeveloped peoples towards civility and Christianity.®” The attention accorded to the Americas has tended, however, towards collapsing these spatial “others” into the spatial “Other.” That is, general-

izations derived from an examination of colonial relations in the “New World” have tended to occlude parallel but qualitatively distinct processes in other parts of the world.” In (British) India, for instance, the denial of coevalness becomes an important feature only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when colonialists posited an analogy between the so-called East-

ern mode of production and Western feudalism.”' In the early modern period, however, eastward expansion could not use literacy as a criterion for

distinguishing between those who really counted as “man” and those who didn’t. While it may have been possible (misguidedly) to see American language forms as primitive, in the case of the potentates and kingdoms of the East—where alphabetic and other writing systems had been entrenched for a considerable time—the construction of “rationality” and “humanity” could not operate with the same set of distinctions. Here the fact that the East was not a new but an old world—whose existence if not actual experience had always been part of the occidental tradition—trequired adapting other models of differentiation. The most important of these was the distinction between “true” and “false” reason, narrowly construed in turn as the chasm between the true Christian faith and the perversion of faith exemplified, above all, by Islam. We have seen that the struggle with the “Moors” shaped the formation of European identity, par-

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ticularly in post-Reconquista Portugal and Spain. In his charter to Vasco da Gama, King Manuel expressed his hope that sailing around Africa would © bring the Portuguese into contact with the “Christian” monarch, Prester John, who would then aid them in their battles against the Islamic foe. And

the Moors provide Os Lustadas with both a model of “otherness” and an excuse for failure: part of problem with “India” concerns the fact that the “Moors” had reached there first. Da Gama’s travel logs make clear that the Portuguese instinctively assumed that non-Europeans were naturally treacherous, thus extending the ideological (mis)representation of their Islamic

foes to other peoples they encountered.” The Portuguese failure to establish peaceful relations was repeatedly blamed upon “treacherous” interventions of Moorish traders who had allegedly suborned the eastern rulers, preventing the Portuguese from attaining their desired ends. The importance of this opposition for the construction of early modern European identity may be illustrated through a famous historical paint-

ing completed by Albrecht Altdorfer in 1529, part of a series executed at the Bavarian Duke Wilhelm IV’s request. (See Figures 9 and 10.) The large canvas depicts panoramically the decisive battle of Issus (333 B.c.) between Alexander the Great and the Persians, a battle commonly understood as having ushered in Hellenism. According to Reinhart Koselleck, for a contemporary Christian viewer, Alexander's victory signified the transition from the second to the third world empire, which was [to be] followed by the fourth and last empire, that of the Roman Im-

perium. In a battle such as this, the heavenly and cosmic forces also took part, ascribed in Altdorfer’s painting to the two kings [in the shape of ]...

the powers of light and shadow. The battle, through which decline of the Persian empire was to occur, was not just any battle, but one of the few events between the beginning and the end of the world which also prefigured the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. ... The Alexanderschlacht [Battle of Alexander] stood outside time as a foreshadowing [Vorspiel], as a

figure or type of the final battle between Christ and the Antichrist; the

combatants were the contemporaries of all those who lived in anticipation of the Day of Judgement.”* ‘

The eschatological pretensions behind such a monumental staging of one

of Western civilization’s “primal scenes” become especially clear when we examine the way in which Altdorfer effaces temporality and temporal dif-

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FIGURE 10 Der Alexanderschlacht (Detail of Darius and the Persian Army) by Albrecht Altdorfer (1529). (By permission of the Bayerische Staatsgemildesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Miinich.)

ference. In order to reconstruct the historical battle, Altdorfer turned to the historian Curtius Rafe, who provided him with figures detailing the sizes of the military units, the number of casualties suffered and prisoners taken. These numbers are inscribed anachronistically on the flags held by the military commanders—some of whom were to fall in the course of the battle,

though the picture shows them alive and fighting. The painting's refusal of temporal difference is testified to by the fact that the welter of numbers omits one crucial figure: the year of the battle itself. For Altdorfer, we might say, the battle is always being fought and won: history is frozen through its

repetition. The typological links established by the painting prevent a specifically historical difference between one temporal instantiation and another from becoming manifest.

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Nevertheless, from our vantage point, the painting betrays its own historical moment through another striking anachronism, this time with re-

spect to the representation of the enemy: the Persians in the painting are

dressed from top to toe like the Turks who in 1529—the very year in which the painting was completed—were beaten back after the failed siege of Vienna.” In other words, not only is the Alexanderschlacht a contemporary event (in that Altdorfer refuses to countenance the roughly two millennia that separate the Turks from the Persians), but the paradigmatic construction of Western civilization takes for him the same form: overcoming an Eastern opponent seen as steadfastly inimical to the (Christian) world. The East cannot be absorbed into the humanist and religiously inflected model of rationality espoused by an emergent European modernity: its undeniable power defines (and, for Altdorfer, has always defined) a radical otherness, a form of unreason and a willful blindness to the truth. In “India,” such a blindness would also often be equated with incapac-

ity. Alessandro Valigniano (1539—1606)—the man responsible for shaping Jesuit experiences in the East after St. Francis Xavier’s away the Society’s limited achievements on the grounds mon to all these peoples (I am not speaking now of races of China or Japan) is a lack of distinction and

demise—explained that “[a] trait comthe so-called white talent. As Aristotle

would say, they are born to serve rather than to command. ... Many...

are

very poor, but even the rich tradesmen have to hide their wealth from their tyrannical rulers. They go half-naked and live unpretentiously. More, they

are all of a very low standard of intelligence.’””* Rather than emphasizing illiteracy, Valigniano links the “natural slavery” of the Indians to skin color,

poverty, and tyrannical systems of Eastern rule. He reworks Aristotelian dis-

tinctions to account for the Jesuit failure to live up to the mission's expectations and to justify the subsequent focus on the “white races” of China

and Japan. These different modes of mobilizing the paradigm of rational subjectivity underscore the historical contingency that affects the actual application of the criterion. The putatively absolute rationality projected by geometric space and Copernican anthropocentricity takes concrete shape within diverse colonial practices directed at producing hierarchical differences and thereby

securing the material exercise of power. The Willem J. Blaeu world map of 1606 usefully illustrates both aspects: the production of differences and their

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shared epistemological basis.»° (See Figure 11.) The frame of the original Blaeu map—now destroyed—conformed to a pattern frequently found in the seventeenth century, It surrounded the narrowly geographical representation with descriptive texts as well as a series of pictures depicting various tmportant cities of the world and the types of peoples associated with those places. The denizens were pictorially differentiated on the basis of costumes, weapons, horsemanship, and the like.*” In a recent discussion of cartographic frames, John Gillies has posed the tension between a classicizing frame and a

new, teferentially oriented geography “as generic of Renaissance world maps.” However, in associating the frame with a resurgence of “ancient poetic geo-

graphic values” he seriously misreads the epistemological assumptions underlying its use.”* Its iconographic agenda is “classical,” rather, in Foucault's

sense of the term in that it asserts the possibility of organizing the entirety of geographical knowledge in a tabular form. Through its pictorial array, Blaeu’s frame arranges the places and peoples of the world in terms of their similarity to and difference from one another. Its aim is not merely to differentiate an Us from a Them, or Europe from what lies without, but to lay out before us the entire range of differences and similarities existing in the

world. Just as the cartographic surface asserts a referential claim with respect to the world’s shape, the frame asserts the possibility of representing the totality of knowledge about peoples and places of the world. At the same time, this epistemological assertion also provides the basis

upon which the Blaeu map does subsequently differentiate Europe from the rest of the world. In the vignette shown in Figure 12, two. figures representing America do homage to Europe, who is seated upon her throne, looking away from them. The Amerindians approach bearing jewelry as a gift, and an

armadillo-like animal bears the weapons that are to be laid down at Europe's feet. From the other side approach Asia and Africa, the former clothed and armed, bearing gifts on a camel, while the latter is almost naked, walking alongside a large lizard-like creature. Europe gazes upon:them benevolently as they raise their arms in supplication. The regal figure of Europe is surrounded by the achievements of reason that made both domination and the slippage from man to Western man possible: at her feet lie a globe, a book of maps, a compass, and a marinet’s astrolabe, along with other books, tools, and weapons.

We can put this originary asymmetry another way: the power to map, to

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produce space and to conceptualize spatial differences through the act of mapping, marks an opposition between those who are capable of mapping and those who are not, between the discoverers and the to-be-discovered.

The instruments and books that surround Europe bear testimony to her mastery of science (and hence of rational knowledge), of navigation, and of

the act of description—the very abilities the colonized were seen as lacking (to a greater or a lesser degree). Even as America, Africa, and Asia are visu-

ally distinguished from one another—Asia, for instance, is the only clothed, armed, and bejeweled figure—that internal distinction is nonetheless sub-

ordinated to the primary relationship of submission to European civilization and its modes of knowledge.” Nor is the claim to superiority a purely conceptual one. The gunned ships that sail the silent surface of the map from Europe to India, Africa, and the Americas silently but effectively remind us of the interpenetration of rational knowledge and raw power. The changes in military technology spurred by early colonial encounters and by wars with the Moors, as well as by intraEuropean warfare, stand in a complex relation to changing notions of space in early modern Europe. To quote Carlo Cipolla, “[e]xchanging oarsmen for

sails and warriors for guns meant essentially the exchange of human energy for inanimate power. By turning whole-heartedly to the gun-carrying sailing ship the Atlantic peoples broke down the bottleneck inherent in the use of human energy and harnessed, to their advantage, larger quantities of power.

It was then that European sails appeared aggressively on the most distant seas. '°°These images of European technological power redirect our understanding of the alleged neutrality of geometrical space, compelling attention to the history of its emergence within the contexts of colonial practice.

Colonialist Spaces The Blaeu map has revealed the mutually enabling relationship between a changing epistemology of space and the ideological distinctions that accompanied such changes. But the abstract notion of “colonialist space” derived from that interplay only becomes concrete when we trace it back to specific

historical practices. Juxtaposing two different colonial spatial formations in the early modern era—those of the Spanish conquest of the Americas and the Portuguese conquest of “India”—7 As a “body politick,” the East India Company was granted the privileges associated with this status, among them the right to determine its own internal regulation. The Company formalized its modus operandi in the form of The lawes or standing orders of the East India Company, published around 1621, shortly before their second joint-stock voyage to

the East. These designate “all the perticular members of the Company, who

have underwritten any Adventures, in the present second Joint Stocke” as the “Adventurers of such stock,’ and develop regulations to systematize the sale and transference of these adventures: “[All adventures of Stocks which shall hereafter be sold by the light of a Candle in open Court, shall be published and put to sale in the names of the Adventurers of such Stock.”

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of ‘The Island Princess’

We should not underestimate this development for, as K. N. Chaudhuri argues, the East India Company was more than just another new company.

It represented a new form of mercantile organization and differed radically (despite a surface resemblance) from its precursor, the regulated company.

The latter was an extension of the medieval guild system; hence, it was “an

association of traders and not a form of ownership,” and “primarily an instrument for the control and proper conduct of a particular branch of overseas trade.” It consisted of independent traders who laid down rules for the smooth running of trade as a whole, while leaving its members to pursue in-

dependently their own investment policies. The East India Company, on the other hand, was “an association of capital,” not people, and the company traded collectively on behalf of its members, thus drawing capital from a wider pool while concentrating leadership—but not membership—in the hands of merchants.*’ To adventure with the East India Company meant, therefore, to adventure capital, and not oneself. If the adventurer who put his person at risk accrued his return in terms of honor, the East India Company adventurer was rewarded with a return in capital or stock. Of course, both gentry and merchant adventured by proxy, but the return for the one

tended to be bound up with a sense of national honor (with profit as an important, well-received supplement), while the return for the other was com-

mercial gain. Not surprisingly, Ruy Dias provides us with a representation of the first position when he responds to Quisara’s intimation that “a fortune” to be chosen “wisely and hansomely” awaits him: “When I grow so cold, and disgrace my nation, / That from their hardy nurses sucke adventures, / Twere fit Iwore a Tombstone” (1.2.86—88). Pyniero’s description of the Portuguese adventurer retains this discourse of national glory, but makes a mercantile undercurrent felt: Ye are worthy Portugals, You shew the bravery of your minds and spirits; The nature of our country too, that brings forth

Stirring, unwearied soules to seeke adventures; ... Where time is, and the sunne gives light, brave countrimen, Our names are known, new worlds disclose their riches,

Their beauties, and their prides to our embraces;

And we the first of nations to find these wonders. (1.3.4ff )

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Pyniero directly links the seeking of adventure to the act of possession: the “new worlds” reveal to this first of nations their riches and offer them up to the “embraces” of the conquerors. Armusia takes up the linking of honor with capital and commodities, converting the light of Pyniero’s sun to a “treasure” embodied in the “immortal fruit” of these islands, the spices. The image of the birth of souls who seek adventures (Pyniero’s “bring forth”), Armusia transforms into the “birth” of “a thousand unknowne gems, and thousand riches” with which the “bowels of the earth swell.’ These riches voluntarily offer themselves to the Portuguese: the rivers throwing up their pearls to “court” them. An investment in national and individual honor thus interweaves itself with an investment in materialist gains, and Soza proclaims the equivalence of these diverse investments with “We are fire already; / The

wealthy Magazine of nature sure / Inhabits here” (1.3.42—44). The commodification of the Spice Islands enacts, thus, the complex insinuation of mercantile capitalism into the representational apparatus of colonialism. The adventuring of capital implies the irrelevance of the physical adventurer to the process of accumulation: to borrow a phrase from Marx, he is nothing more than “the conscious bearer |Trdger|” of the movement of capital, and as such his importance lies solely in his function, in his personification of an abstract driving force. But the facelessness of capital means, too, that it can acquire new qualities and adopt new faces to fit changing conditions. Echoing the self-assertive logic of the Copernican/Cartesian

abstractions described earlier, the concrete commodification of Tidore by Armusia and Pyniero endows abstract capital with a material form through which it comes to speak the borrowed language of knightly honor and national glorification.

Religion But capital speaks yet another language, the language of militant Christianity. And, as ever, Drake is its perfect spokesman, interweaving honor, national glory, and religion to spin the English imperialist web: Who seekes, by worthie deedes, to gaine renowne for hire:

Whose hart, whose hand, whose purse is ptest: to purchase his desire If anie such there bee, that thirsteth after Fame: Lo, heere a meane, to winne himself and everlasting name.

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Who seekes, by gaine and wealth, t’advaunce his house and blood: Whose care is great, whose toile no lesse, whose hope, is all for good If anie one there bee, that covettes such a trade: Lo, heere the plot for common wea|1]th, and private gain is made. Hee, that for vertues sake, will venture farre and neere:

Whose zeale is strong, whose practize trueth, whose faith is void of feere, If anie such there bee, inflamed with holie care. Heere may he find, a readie meane, his purpose to declare:

So that for each degree, this Treatise dooth unfold: The path to Fame, the proofe of zeale, and way to purchase golde.*!

Drake posits an ideal convertibility between honor and capital. Through the ambiguity of such words as worthie, gaine, and venture, he performs a restless

conversion between a semantic field appropriate to the gentry and one suited to emergent mercantile structures. Renown can be hired, desires purchased,

in the fantasy of a fusion of “common wealth and private gain.” Moreover, this convertibility is bi-directional; just as the pressing of the purse purchases desire and fame, the venture for honor and gain “purchases” gold. Drake posits an economy without exhaustion: purchasing gold does not diminish the stock placed in house and blood, while the gaining of renown does not endanger the venturing for private gain. Having obtained both a knighthood and over ten thousand pounds for “encompassing the globe,’ Drake himself embodies the truth of his claim. His substitute in Fletcher's play, Armusia, obtains the Island Princess instead; characteristically, he turns his reward (which is both princess and island) into the language of money,

figuring it as “above my action too by millions” (2.6.142). “Beauty,” he claims, had “set him on, / And fortune crowns me fair, if she receive me” (2.6.156—

57). Shortly after his rescue, the grateful king of Tidore had sharply rebuked Quisara for her reluctance to accept Armusia as her rightful possessor:

“{S]tand as you knew me not, nor what he has ventured?” (2.6.159). But by the play’s end, Quisara herself makes visible the convertibility implied here between the two forms of venture, validating her earlier “confess[ion]” that Armusia “has purchased” (2.6.169) what (according to Pyniero) “he has de-

served ... richly” (2.6.188). Drake’s poem brings into view, however, a third kind of venture—implied in phrases like “holte care,’ “faith... void of feere,’ and “proofe of zeale” —a venture that has at its heart a fantasy of conversion, from Muslim

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or pagan to Christian. Mercantile imperialism is also, we should not forget, Christian imperialism, the achievement of which, Stephen Greenblatt tells us, ” “is to represent desires as convertible and in a constant process of exchange.” The religious venture takes center stage from Act 4, scene 5, onwards, when

Quisara sets before Armusia “the utmost trial of [his] constancy” in her demand that he convert to her religion as a condition for marriage. Armusia begins immediately to rave and rant against Islam (seamlessly equating Islam with polytheistic or pantheistic religious forms). Horrified, he exclaims, “Is this the venture? / The tryall you talkt off?” (4.5.43-44). This venture marks the moment of crisis; it strikes at the very constitu-

tion of the colonizing subject and undermines his relation to the world he hoped to possess. A play that had been proceeding quite smoothly is suddenly derailed and turns into what seems little more than a mouthpiece for Christian propaganda. Armusia accuses the islanders of idolatry, human sacrifice, devil worship, and threatens to destroy them, their temples, and their

religion for having tried to tempt him into self-destruction. The happy marriage of colonizer and colonized that we have anticipated suddenly verges upon disintegration as it faces the absolute irreconcilability of two opposed and mutually exclusive positions. The specific problem raised by the unexpected transformation returns us to an aspect of our earlier discussion of the medieval preconditions of colonialism: the internal contradiction in the constitution of the Christian subject that derives from its exclusion of the “Moor” as its absolute “other.” Such an exclusion functioned as a form of boundary maintenance, demarcating a border whose instability was only too clear to a Europe that had witnessed the overrunning of Hungary by Turkish troops. In the far-removed lands of the East, a significant alteration of the problematic takes place. To recapitulate briefly: the new knowledge of the physical world provided by the voyages of discovery represented an essential component in the formation of the European subject because of the part it played in discrediting the authority of antiquity and the Scholastics. What was discovered through Western practice had to be understood instead as a truth won through the exertions of a human subject who could then legitimately oppose the wisdom of the ancients. But the voyages of discovery also brought the European world face to face with unknown civilizations, which could not be simply subsumed under the existing oppositions of Christian ideology. And here an unavoid-

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able dislocation occurs. Given that the production of a new humanist subject depends upon a universalization of Christian man as the archetype for humanity in general, the theoretical requirements of the category “man” and

the material practice of the self-asserting Western subject come into conflict. While the self-assertion of the Western subject assumes a power imbalance for colonial exploitation to proceed smoothly, the notion of a common humanity removes the basis for legitimating its dominance. The task of conversion is to break through the impasse. Through conversion the “savage” other becomes like the self and can thus be internalized. Yet conversion implies that the incorporated other was initially different (without an original difference there can be no conversion), and the origi-

nary distinction is then preserved in the interests of colonial exploitation. In other words, conversion allows the simultaneous extension of the category to include the colonial other, while ensuring that one excludes the otherness of the other—which the process of conversion then internally preserves.°° The logic of conversion, however, draws the colonial project into an un-

expected trap: venturing forth into the land of the other risks the loss of self because conversion is potentially direction-neutral—it does not protect

against the possibility of “going native.’°* The governor of Ternate, who disguised as a “Moore priest” had persuaded Quisara to demand Armusia’s compliance, explicitly articulates this alternative as a threat: “[ Y Jour repentance must be mighty, / Which is your free conversion to our customes, Mt

Or equall punishment, which is your life sir” (5.2.90—92). For Armusia death is no different from the offered alternative that represents the negation of his status as Christian subject. Have mercy heaven, how have I been wandring? Wandring by the way of lust, and left my maker?... Trod the blinde paths of death? forsooke assurance, Eternitie of blessednesse for a woman? For a young hansome face hazard my being? (4.5.56ff )

Venture and hazard potentially trace the path of error; rather than a directed journey whose terminal points and direction are specified, the colonial ves-

sel loses its way, wanders the sea “like a Corke upon a water” (4.5.58). Such a loss represents the real fortune of numerous ships shipwrecked or sunk without being able to complete the circulation or “encompassing” through

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which the East was to be incorporated into the West. Death constitutes the inalienable obverse of adventuring, and fear of death marks all colonial representations. De Certeau has argued that an obsession with death constitutes the essence of Western historiography, which he defines as an operation that simultaneously posits and denies death “by appropriating to the present the privilege of recapitulating the past as a form of knowledge.’® And surely this, too, is Fletcher’s point: Armusia’s concatenation of rhetorical questions assumes that he has found his way out of the maze of error, that by taking upon himself the knowledge of his error he has rid himself of it. His achievement avails itself of the labor of language by means of which death can be denied, projecting it onto the other who thereby becomes the pure

objectification of death. Armusia fills the void with words and by so doing locates it elsewhere: in Quisara, whose face, once so “young” and “hansome,” now appears as “death it selfe, to which ‘twould lead me”; her eyes “resemble pale dispaire,” and “in their rounds” Armusia sees “a thousand horrid

ruines” (4.5.105—7). [he eruption of words functions both as a sign of death or the negation of the Christian subject, and as a sign of its overcoming, “a labour of death and a labour against death.’® Armusia’s linguistic labor reaps its own reward in that it produces the fiction of reconciliation by forcing the colonial other to “confess” to its own negativity, and thereby to acknowledge the integrity of the Western subject. Such an acknowledgment naturally means conversion, an acceptance of the truth of the other as the truth of one’s self. But conversion here does not adopt the discourse of the marvelous, the operative feature in Greenblatt’s discussion of Spanish colonialism; it does not evoke “an aesthetic response

in the service of a legitimation process.’°” Rather, conversion demands the opposite, a resolute refusal to be seduced by the wonder of the East. As a figure, the East stands ambiguously for the space of the desired or the prom-

ised as well as for the space of the absorption and misdirection of desire. Armusia describes the Spice Islands as a displaced version of “the old Paradice” (1.3.20), “a wonder too, all excellent” (1.3.38), but this displacement

makes them at the same time “a trap .. . laid to catch my life in” (4.5.11). His rejection of the East's seductions elicits from Quisara its complementary response, “a raving on the strangers love and honor” (5.2.36). The legitimation of his “faire constancy” comes from its ability to force Quisara to speak his desires as if they were her own, to make his desire her own, and finally to

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Island

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unite herself with him in death (if necessary): “Which way you go, sir, I must follow necessary. / One life, and one death” (5.5-41—42). Fortunately her demise is not necessary, because, true to his word,

Fletcher's tragi-comedy will “want” deaths even though it brings some near it.° The king of Tidore’s very next line indicates the need for a reconciliation, a harmonious synthesis: “Will you take a truce yet?” (5.5.42). The play produces the required truce when Pyniero exposes the governor of Ternate as the villain, and the king of Tidore stands there unable to speak “for wonder” at the sight. Armusia’s refusal to be seduced by wonder, we might suggest,

has resulted in a transposition of wonder: from object of wonder, the king has now become the subject of wonder who responds to the truth that only the Western subject can reveal. Having legitimated this truth through her own acceptance of it, Quisara can be converted and given to Armusia, while

the king himself remains “halfe precisely the note that has to be onciliation, a gesture by means of the king from the governor's

perswaded . .. to be a Christian.” This half is struck; it stands for the stmulacrum of a recof which Armusia’s “redeem|ing]” (2.6.127)

grasp can be redirected towards Christian re-

demption. As with the questions of nationhood and class, Fletcher seeks to

defuse the tensions inherent in a Christian imperialism by producing a neutral space in which the potential fault lines may be concealed—a strategy suggesting a specific, textual analogue to the cartographic production of a neutral, visual space.

The India of the Stage The projected space of Fletcher's neutralization possesses its own home, the

“India of the stage”®’—to borrow John Danby’s description of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays—which anchors Fletcher's imagined India within the institutional structures of the English theater. Through its anchoring, “India” gains its solidity and becomes the consumable object of knowledge: it becomes real. This reality is not the reality of India, whatever that might be, but rather that of England’s complex and refracted relation to India, masquerading as its truth. It ts the reality of a relation of power in the guise of

a neutral (because neutralized) object. The construction of India as a place in England depends upon the distance that distinguishes the play from the play-text, the space separating stage

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and audience, for it is in the eyes of the English spectator that the virtual

“India of the stage” becomes real, In The Place of the Stage, Steven Mullaney persuasively argues that the concrete, topological location of the Renaissance

playhouses in relation to the city corresponds to a cultural distantiation as well and that their geographical location provides Renaissance drama “with the ideological equivalent of an external vantage point.’”” Drama seems, then, simultaneously within and without ideology. On the one hand, its very taking place is a function of the culture that produced it, and most importantly, a function of the place which that culture has assigned it; on the other, its

placement provides the possibility of an internal distantiation from that culture, one that does not, however, escape its ideological formations. Fletcher's

“India” uses the theatrical distantiation in order to produce an ideological resolution for his culture’s contradictory investment in the colonial enterprise.

The task of Fletcher’s The Island Princess is to constitute a particular history as the object of knowledge, to project the past as an objectified present, transforming colonial history into a place that can be seen, measured, and objectified. To this transformation pertains what Mullaney calls “the rehearsal of cultures,’ and indeed we can locate in Fletcher's representation of the East the simultaneous performance and negation of its otherness. The negation does not, however, simply destroy the object; quite the reverse, it reproduces it in the form of a neutrality to be looked upon, as the “India of the stage.” In the gaze of the spectator India becomes available as an object that can be com-

prehended and possessed.

r

Such a configuration implies a relationship to history and historiography that differs substantially from the one encountered in Os Lusiadas. Camées's task was to produce history, to re-present an origin in history through which both the origin and a history following on its heels could be constituted in absolute terms. The temporal structure of prophecy, so central to the Portuguese representation of its colonial past, projects what was past onto the future, while simultaneously locating the origin of that future in the past. The movement results in a reversible structure of ratification or legitimation. The present of history is defined by the double movement, by the ratification of the future by the past and of the past by the future. To read the Os Lusiadas, then, is to accomplish or to write history. The act of reading the text is simultaneously the act by which, out of the morass of events, a particular history is constituted as structure and as structured. Fletcher's

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The Island Princess, by contrast, represents history; it constitutes a particular his-

tory as the object of knowledge by projecting the past as an objectified present. [he constitutive moment here is the gaze of the spectator who makes real the virtual object. If Vasco da Gama’s Island of Love is the unlocalizable site for the production of one colonial history, Fletcher's stage transforms another colonial history into a site, a place that can be seen, mapped, measured, and objectified. Their respective islands belong, thus, to qualita-

tively different orders, One is a utopia of accomplishment, the terminal point of an epic where past and future embrace to open up the space of a glorious present; the other, a utopia of objectification, wherein a present space makes visible the linking of past to future. One produces the circularity of colonial history in the form of mythic repetition; the other represents colonial history as progressive circulation, as a ptocess of exchanging the past

for the future. The “real object” of English colonial representation comprises not just the colonial lands of the East, but also another colonial relationship to these lands. In representing this object, the play separates the Portuguese from themselves and the East from itself, in order to produce for the spectator a new object, England's India, a new existence that adds to its real object and also functions as its substitute. Following Althusser, we can identify this visual production of India as a form of empiricist abstraction. All philosophies of vision, Althusser suggests, share a crucial operation, that of extracting an essence from the real object. They label this essence—which is

also real— “knowledge,” which is thus understood as contained in the real object from which it has been extracted. But what Althusser emphasizes is less the result of the operation through which knowledge is produced than the special structure that the operation attributes to the real object as the condition for its success. The object is characterized by a relationship between an “inessential real” and an essential real, which stand to one another as “visible surface” to “invisible kernel.” By separating these two, the operation of knowledge brings the invisible to visibility “in order to give us the real presence of the pure essence, knowledge of which is merely sight.” Consequently, the specific problematic of empiricist knowledge lies in its hits vestment of knowledge, conceived as a real part of the real object, in the real

structure of the real object.””! Fletcher’s The Island Princess nicely instantiates the procedure indicated

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above, even as the play assigns its execution to Quisara, the Eastern other.

When Quisara finally sees through Ruy Dias's bluster, she contrasts him ~ with Armusia and finally rejects the Portuguese commander for ... being nothing but a sound, a shape,

The meere signe of a Souldier—of a Lover The dregs and draffy part, disgrace and jealousie,

I scorne thee, and contemne thee. (3.3.155—58) Her use of “sound,” “shape,” and “meere signe” denote her act of knowing

in terms of an opposition between an incidental outer surface and a valuable interior, an operation repeated again in the metaphorical extraction that sep-

arates the gold from the dross or wine from its sediment, the “dregs and draffy part.” Ruy Dias has no interior—he possesses only the external trappings of virtue. Her téte-a-téte with Armusia has, on the other hand, opened

Quisara’s eyes to the latter's “pure soule.’ She now distinguishes that from Ruy Dias’s “fogg’d stil,’ which had prevented her from seeing the truth: “Sure

I was blind when I first lov'd this fellow” (3.3.123). Through Quisara’s gaze Armusia becomes the object of Eastern knowledge, but the act of seeing and knowing makes the East itself “Western” since she adopts voluntarily the epistemological perspective of the colonizer. Consequently, the moment also expresses Quisara's separation from the East. She will soon convert, recognizing that the “truth” contained in Armusia’s faith and religion shares his perfection: “They that can shew you these, must be pure mirrours; / When

the streames flow cleare and faire, what are the fountaines?” (5.2.119—20). The Island Princess abounds in metaphors of sight, emphatically linking vision and knowledge. The eyes are the privileged organ here because for Fletcher only colonial vision produces legitimate knowledge, because only its gaze extracts the truth of the colonized object. The obscuring of vision, by contrast, leads to error and even death (recall Armusia’s representation of his “wandring” as treading “the blinde paths of death”), Thus Armusia asks Quisara to wash off the “mist of ignorance, with water / Pure and repen-

tant, from those eyes” (4.5.88—89). The tears produced by the recognition of her folly will wash away the murkiness of immediate appearance and allow her to see the clarity of the Christian faith, its “cleare and faire” fountains. The contrast between the clarity of colonial vision and the East's blindness culminates in the figure of the governor, who infiltrates Tidore disguised as

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a blind prophet so that he can revenge himself upon Armusia for rescuing the king. The governor's disguise reflects his real blindness to the true knowledge that the colonizers embody.” These metaphors demonstrate the play's metadramatic reflection on its own constitution of English colonialism as an object of knowledge. The central figure here is Pyniero, who plays a crucial role as mediator among Armusia, Quisara, and Ruy Dias, in addition to being the one who makes

the peaceful resolution of the play possible by unmasking the disguised goyernor. Fletcher's Pyniero departs significantly from his original in Argensola’s Conquista de las Islas Malucas, where he is a Portuguese traitor who per-

ishes in the attempt to kill the hero, Ruy Dias. In The Island Princess Pyniero exploits the distance between stage and audience in order to instantiate the visibility of the audience’s own visual production of knowledge. He makes, in Louis Marin’s phrase, “the visibility of its reflection” visible to the audi-

ence.’* By incorporating within the theatrical space the operation through which the seeing subject produces the staged representation as objectivity, Pyniero makes this operation itself visible. For the audience has indeed to be made to look through the surface of signs to locate the English in the Portuguese: Drake in Armusia; England in the Spice Islands; merchant in

gentry; Christian in heathen; past in present; presence in absence. And by seeing on stage a materialization of its own looking-through, its own seeing, the audience can be made to become conscious of what it sees and knows, of what it has produced by its on-looking. It acquires true knowledge, which, as

Hegel has taught us, resides in knowing what and how we know. In fine, the audience becomes the subject of knowledge, and more specifically, the sub-

ject of a colonial knowledge, potentially a colonizing subject. Appropriately enough, Pyniero opens the play with the order “see the watch relievd” and a warning that the guards keep “their vigilant eyes fixt on these Islanders” (1.1.12). As the opening conversation shifts from the capture of the king of Tidore to his sister Quisara, Pyniero insists that her “faire and great” appearance Is deceptive: Things of these natures have strange outsides, Pedro,

And cunning shadowes, set ‘em far from us, Draw ‘em but neare, they are grosse, and they abuse us; They that observe her close, shall find her nature,

Which I doubt mainly will not prove so excellent. (1.1.40)

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Through close observation, henceforth, Pyniero will attempt to sift Quis-

ara’s nature, an attempt that requires him to eschew “strange outsides” and to see through “cunning shadowes’—in short, a careful interpretation of signs so as to attain knowledge of their true referents. He will guess, as he later does with Quisara’s maid, Panura, “by the cast of [her] face, what the

property of [her] place should be” (3.1.138). Pyniero consistently ascribes the site of the production of this knowledge to the eyes. Playing along with Quisara and Ruy Dias’s plot to do away with Armusia, he tells Quisara that

“the faire aspect of those eyes... must direct me” (3.1.216), that she is “the eye / In which all excellence appears, all wonder” (3.1.241-42), and that his uncle “livd in those blessed eyes, and read the stories ¥ OF everlasting plea-

sures figur'd there” (3.1.250—51). Further, by later linking the priest's treachery and falsity to his physical

lack, Pyniero makes certain that we do not miss the identification of Eastern vision with blindness. “Art sure,’ he asks Panura, in order to have her

confirm that the priest had “provok’t” the king with his “lies,” “it was that blinde priest?” The conclusive gesture of the production of colonial knowledge is Pyniero’s final unmasking, which reveals the governor in place of the

“blinde prophet.” By pulling off the beard and hair, Pyniero represents for the audience the power of colonial vision. His unveiling of the truth underscores the true failure of the blind East, which was unable to penetrate the surface and extract the knowledge buried within it. This gesture, which is also quintessentially a gesture of separation or tearing away (“Ile teare him thus before ye”), carries out the separation of the Eastern subject from itself as it eliminates the corrupting, inessential surface of a false religion.

What remains is Quisara, the converted and assimilable essence of the East, produced through Pyniero’s knowing gaze.”* The historical significance of Fletcher's self-reflexive colonial politics emerges most strikingly when we compare Fletcher's 1620 play to Nahum Tate’s alteration of 1669. One of the severest emendations is Tate’s virtual elimination of Pyniero who, as Sprague tells us, “has all but disappeared from a play which sorely needed him.’”> Moreover, Tate's Ruy Dias no longer suffers from a “paralysis of will,”’° but becomes the very representative of active, virtuous honor, losing to Armusia in a fair fight. Motteux’s operatic version based on Tate’s emended text further clarifies the implications of these changes. In the historical context of the Restoration, Fletcher’s The Is-

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land Princess can no longer draw upon the interplay of presence and absence, nor upon the uncertainty of English colonialism that his play helped to overcome, for the English have become active colonizing subjects, and East India Company “adventures” have become the equivalent of gilt-edged bonds. Hence, rather than stage the placelessness of English colonialism, Tate and Motteux instead seek to transform the East into a pure signifier for the exotic, which England already possesses. The East no longer appears as the space of conversion and displacement, but rather as evidence of the English

nobility and heroism that had brought the East home. Indeed, the Restoration version of The Island Princess becomes pure rhetoricity, as Tate himself testifies to: “[T Jhose Defects in Manners, that were too palpable through the Work, must be imputed to the Age in which they Wrote; but still there are so many and transcending Beauties in all their [Beaumont and Fletcher's] Writings.”’” We could say that the age for which Pyniero’s vision would be visible was past, for it had been blinded by its own success.

Conclusion One last displacement: The unmasking of the governor of Ternate may undercut the motives vide the necessary resolution on the level of Fletcher’s play does nothing to undercut the

“Moore priest” to reveal the for his actions and thus proplot, but—oddly enough— visionary truth of what this

“blinde prophet” has to say. “If you could see, marke but with my eyes

pupill,” he begins, and proceeds to narrate to the king of Tidore his version of Portugal’s arrival in the Moluccas: These men came hether... Poore, weatherbeaten, almost lost, starvd, feebled, Their vessels like themselves, most miserable; Made a long sute for traffique, and for comfort, To vent their children’s toyes, cure their diseases:

They had their sute, they landed, and too th’rate Grew rich and powerfull, suckt the fat, and freedome

Of this most blessed Isle, taught her to tremble; Witnesse the Castle here, the Citadell, They have clapt around the neck of your Tidore, This happy town, till that she knew these strangers,

To check her when shee’s jolly. (4.1.45 ff.)

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This is a brief, historically accurate description of Portuguese colonial activity in the East Indian islands, and at the same time an equally accurate de-

scription of the early English attempts to secure their place in the eastern sun. As with the Old Man's imprecations in Os Lustadas, the “blinde” priest's words perhaps make visible the contours of an alternative narrative, one that sees the colonial encounter from a very different vantage point. However, this story is only glimpsed, serving primarily as a fulcrum to redirect attention towards the dominant tale of Western bravery and Eastern guile. For within the play’s frames this prophet remains a sham. Notwithstanding, if the ideological task of The Island Princess is to fash-

ion a displacement, to replace Portugal with England, to absorb this “blessed Isle” into another, then the dream of dispossession and repossession does in-

deed fulfil itself. But, through the irony of history, it does so only in a dis-

placed fashion. Ranged against the Iberian colonial powers was a second rising mercantile power, the Dutch, spearheaded by the Verenigde Oost-Indische Com-

pagnie (the United Dutch East India Company, or the VOC), which was chartered in 1602. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, to which we will now turn, the Dutch were to be the main colonial force thwarting English ambitions. That the era of Portuguese control in the East Indies had drawn to a close was indeed visible to the English from quite early on. With reference to the colonial sphere of the Moluccas, the East India Company

correspondence includes a letter from a factor, dated November 12, 1613, which lists thirteen factories and ten castles belonging to the “Hollanders,” including factories and castles at both Ternate and Tidore. The letter also tells of a factory and a castle at Salor “taken [by the Dutch] this year from the Portingals.””* In the East Indies, at least, the Portuguese were already being displaced, but the substitutes were not to be the English, bat the Dutch.

Chapter

Five

TRADE... LIKE BLOOD SHOULD CIRCULARLY FLOW”: COLONIAL CoMPETITION IN JOHN DrypEN’s ‘AMBOYNA’ 66

The second stanza of John Dryden's poem Annus Mirabilis testifies to a shift in England's preoccupations away from its Iberian competitors, towards the

sudden rise of the Netherlands as a colonial and mercantile force. The unexpected emergence of the Dutch as potential heir to the Iberian colonial empires induces in the Restoration a redefinition of England, not least because

the United Provinces had once been perceived as a potential religious ally in the struggle against Catholic domination. To justify declaring war upon the Dutch, Dryden offers—in Michael McKeon’s irony-laden phrase—“an ar9 J

gument of enlightened internationalism”:

Trade, which like blood should circularly flow,

Stop in their Channels, found its freedom lost Thither the wealth of all the world did go,

And seem‘ but shipwrack’d on so base a Coast.”

The wealth that was to have poured into England once it had successfully displaced Portugal and Spain from their colonial possessions has instead been diverted elsewhere, an injustice that is for Dryden nothing short of a scandal. The life of trade, like that of the body, depends upon the free move-

ment of needed supplies. The “base” coast of the Netherlands threatens the natural course of human existence. Dryden's call to arms in Annus Mirabilis reflects an English anger provoked by the felt need to restore to goods and life a lost freedom, so that these may once again flow to their “natural” destination, that is to say, to England.

How to reshape trade and England's self-image? To fight the Dutch 189

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Dryden turns his gaze east, to an event that happened at some distance from the European center: on the minuscule East Indian island of Amboyna. The now almost forgotten name Amboyna recurs—in a period marked by repeated warfare with the Netherlands—as the site of an early confrontation between the two colonial powers over their shares of the eastern trade. It was

the place where in 1623 roughly a dozen Englishmen had been “massacred” by the Dutch. The alleged torture and killing of the English merchants was the subject of numerous pamphlets, which circulated widely each time the two nations entered into military conflict.°

Even less widely known now is John Dryden's Amboyna (1673), a play that resurrects yet again the tale of Anglo-Dutch rivalry in and over “India.” The history leading up to, and Dryden's retelling of, the “Amboyna Massacre” allows us to reexamine England’s active engagement with another colonial competitor and to pursue its imagined relation to the colonized lands and peoples over whom it asserted superiority. More broadly, the Amboyna incident opens up the specific history of how England's struggle for a share of the eastern spoils took shape in relation to an unevenly constituted and always imbalanced market. The play reveals how the historical phenomenon of the market transformed the conditions under which English national and colonial identity could be articulated.* The claim in Annus Mirabilis that the Dutch had illegitimately diverted commodities and wealth from their natural path raises the questions: How did the “wealth of all the world” get “stop d” in the “channels” dug out by Dutch colonialism in the seventeenth

century? And how did England's attempt to restore trade’s “circular flow” influence its own national and colonial identity? A richly contextualized reading of Dryden's Amboyna will shed light on these issues. The interpretation proffered here relies upon reconstructing the socioeconomic frames that inform this neglected literary work and upon which it comments. But before we turn to Amboyna, it will help to recount briefly the

emergence of the Dutch as a colonial force in the East. Drawing upon this contextualization, the ensuing discussion of Amboyna shows how Dryden deploys the language of patronage to limn a unifying nationalist discourse that will sharply distinguish England from the Netherlands. He imputes to the Dutch a narrow, grasping, and crassly materialistic “interest” in order to demarcate them from the English, who by contrast represent an idealized disinterestedness exemplified by the discourse of patronage. The play traces the

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barbarity and illegality of Dutch colonial behavior to their base commercial ethos, which leads them to contravene all bonds of religion, contractuality, and conscience. Amboyna’s discourse of Englishness rests, however, upon a buried contradiction: the bearer of English virtue in Amboyna is in fact a merchant employed by the East India Company, and thus de facto a representative of the very commercial ethos that Dryden derides. The apparent contradiction is symptomatic of a larger social and cultural shift: a general extension of the market and the principle of commodity exchange in the wake of colonial expansion and trade. One consequence was the “commercialization” of the patronage system itself, upon whose separation from the market Dryden's notion of English identity depends. The historical absorption of the patron-client relationship within a mercantile frame engenders the play’s paradoxical response: to “contain” the effects of an expanding market by fixing it as the debased “other” of the disinterested exchange putatively expressed in the patron-client relationship. This complex articulation of a colonial and national difference within Europe depends, however, upon another constitutive displacement. In closing,

we will see that defining England through its relationship to the Netherlands stages and conceals a further colonial imbalance in the Indies: the effacement of the colonized subject and the elision of the colonizer’s “ownership” of the colonized. In the process of articulating Englishness, Amboyna ensures, thus, that “India” vanishes once more.

The Rise of the United Provinces The year 1621—which saw the first production of John Fletcher's The Island Princess—marked a decisive reorientation of Dutch colonial policy in the East, a renewed and aggressive expansionism as a response in particular to the

vexed relationship between the United Provinces and Spain. The Twelve Years

Truce with Spain, from 1609 to 1621, had offered the Dutch provinces a provisional, de jure recognition of their sovereignty and independence in return for a cessation of attacks on Iberian strongholds. It had provided them also with the breathing room required to expand and consolidate their commercial penetration of overseas markets. For the duration of the truce, the Dutch agreed to limit themselves to colonial possessions they now held and to per-

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mit Iberian shipping and trade to proceed without interference. In return, Philip III promised to lift embargoes on Dutch ships trading out of Spain and Portugal and to suspend his offensive against the northern Netherlands. In effect, the truce represented a substantial victory for the Dutch Republic, since it tacitly acknowledged Spain's failure to realize its own pretensions to European empire and its inability to win back—despite superior military strength and wealth—the territories it had lost over the previous decade in Europe and the colonies. A subsidiary but crucial effect of the long struggle between Catholic Spain and the Protestant United Provinces was the rise of Amsterdam as the most important trading port in northern Europe. Even prior to the fall of Antwerp to Spain in 1585, Amsterdam's geographical location and its defensibility against attacks by land or sea had meant the development there of a substantial trading infrastructure (despite its relative inferiority as a port). As Pieter de la Court was to point out, “if any doubt whether Amsterdam

be situate as well and better than any other City in Holland for Traffick, and Ships let out to Freight, let him but please consider in how few hours .. . one may sail from Amsterdam to all the towns of Friesland, Overyssel, Guelderland and North-Holland. ... And in how short a time, and how cheap and easily one may travel from any of the Towns of South-Holland, or any other adjacent Inland Citys to Amsterdam, every one knows.’° The availability of

an established trade network was supplemented by Amsterdam's legendary openness to foreigners and the relative absence of discrimination. “In an age,” observes Violet Barbour, “when even enlightened communities suppressed religious nonconformity and discriminated against aliens, Amsterdam’s gates stood open to all religions and nationalities. The status of poorter (citizen) could be acquired at a cost of f. 8 until 1622, when it was raised to

f. 14.”° When the Dutch blocked the Scheldt estuary on the Flemish coast to maritime traffic—tetaliating against Spanish inroads into the southern Netherlands—the influx of émigré merchants and industrial workers fleeing religious persecution in Flanders and Brabant transformed the prosperous but still secondary trading city of Amsterdam into “a fully fledged world entrepdt, not just linking, but dominating, the markets of all continents.”’ It is tempting to see Amsterdam in this formative period—as do both Ferdnand Braudel and Barbour—as the last in a line of dominant city-states,

taking over the mantle of Antwerp and Venice, the two great emporiums of

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the preceding centuries. In a convincing counterargument, Jonathan Israel

demonstrates that Amsterdam’s rise was distinctive because of a unique conjunction in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. Firstly, the emergence of a centralized state structure made it possible to protect and support Dutch trade, shipping, and industry. Secondly, a cluster of interdependent depots “strung out along the North Sea, in England, north-west Germany, and else-

where, as well as in the North Netherlands” allowed the Dutch to maintain a near monopoly on the distribution of Baltic grain, textiles, and herring throughout Europe. And this at a time when an emerging, integrated world

trade economy structurally required a central reservoir of goods to minimize risks associated with long distance trade. The combination of state backing and an established trading network ied to the rise of Amsterdam as an “active, controlling entrepét” rather than a passive area where goods were merely cleared for re-export.® Amsterdam’s new status resulted in no small measure from the restructuring of Dutch trade in the truce years. Renewed direct access to Spanish silver and gold; a drastic drop in freight and insurance charges for Dutch shipping; increased state support for mercantile activity in the form of a free supply of guns, munitions, and additional men; and the rise of numerous

highly specialized industries dependent upon the raw materials made available through the entrepét: all contributed to integrating what had initially developed as autonomous trading routes. Thus, for example, the growing

Baltic trade in grain became increasingly tied with the Levant trade tn eastern goods and the bullion trade with Spain, while the net surpluses from these were used to fund direct East India trade in spices. The growth of trade networks is perhaps best evidenced by England's own use of the Dutch bullion market to settle its balances throughout the seventeenth century. English merchants regularly used trade surpluses with Holland to draw bills of exchange on Amsterdam, which were then used in the Baltic ports to pay for a deficit trade there.’ Not only did the Dutch share of Baltic trade grow to three-quarters of the total traffic in these years, but the Dutch also made substantial inroads into the Levant trade, much to the dismay of English,

French, and Venetian rivals. The chartering of the Vereinigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (the United Dutch East India Company, or the VOC) in 1602; the erection of a special

bourse in 1608; the founding of the Wisselbank, or exchange bank, in 1609

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and of a lending bank in 1614—these were all the products of extended negotiations that involved a growing Amsterdam mercantile community (with | its far-flung contacts and trading interests), the city fathers and mintmasters, and representatives of the States General (led by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt).!° Their outcome was the streamlining of credit and exchange mechanisms, enabling an efficient remission, transmission, and clearing of bills, as well as the concentration of storage, transport, and insurance facilities at one

location. Marketing costs were thereby reduced, and a regular and predictable distribution of goods throughout Europe and indeed the world emerged as a realizable possibility." The suddenness of the rise of the United Provinces took all contemporaries by surprise. For Thomas Mun, a prominent English economic writer defending the English East India Company in 1621, it seemed “a wonder to the world that such a small countrey, not fully as big as two of our best shires, having little natural wealth, victuals, timber or any other necessary am-

munitions, either for war or peace, should notwithstanding possess them all in such extraordinary plenty that besides their own wants... they can and do likewise serve and sell to other Princes, ships, ordnance, cordage, corn, powder, shot and what not, which by their industrious trading they gather from all quarters of the world: in which courses they are not less injurious to supplant others (especially the English) than they are careful to strengthen themselves.’!* Their unanticipated prominence in the world was no less visible to the Dutch themselves. Writing to the States of Holland, a group of Amsterdam merchant ship owners enthused: “During the Truce, through our thrifty and shrewd management, we have sailed all nations off the seas, drawn al-

most all trade from other lands hither, and served the whole of Europe with our ships.”!

In 1621, though, the rapidly expanding Dutch commercial empire received a sudden setback following the resurgence of hostilities and economic conflict with Spain and Portugal. In April of that year, the new Iberian monarch Philip IV (1621-65) reintroduced the sweeping embargoes that had temporarily been lifted during the truce and reverted to the policy of encouraging Flemish privateers to harass and raid Dutch shipping and fisheries. In addition, the king established the Almirantzago to serve as a commercial inspectorate over northern European shipping—acting, thus, as a counterpart to the Casa de Contracién, which oversaw Spanish trade with the Americas.

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The Almirantzago quickly evolved into a draconian organization that seized and confiscated all goods suspected of being Dutch-owned or of Dutch origin, regardless of whether or not these had been transported on a neutral ship. It did not even have to prove that the confiscated goods were in fact Dutch." In retaliation the Dutch resumed the naval blockade of the Flemish coast and reinstated war tariffs against textiles from Flanders and the southern Netherlands. If Spanish aggression forced Dutch commerce in Europe into a phase of relative stagnation and even decline, the effects of renewed hostilities proved nonetheless to be just the impetus needed by its colonial operations in the East. The conflict freed the Netherlands from earlier restraints and encouraged a general offensive to drive the Portuguese and Spanish from the Indian Ocean and to enlarge thereby their own share of Asian commerce. However,

the military conflict had also impeded the flow of Spanish-American bullion to the Dutch entrepét, money needed to oil the wheels of world commerce. The price of silver on the Amsterdam exchange rose, and the shortage of specie threatened to strangle the trading empire that the Dutch had so rapidly built. The lack of bullion particularly affected the VOC, which required enormous quantities of silver to sustain its East Indies trade—a problem exacerbated by the fact that “the natives of Indonesia had acquired a well known preference for Spanish pieces-of-eight.”* The Dutch quickly realized the importance of finding a reliable alternative source. A potential alternative supplier of silver in the Asian sphere

was Japan. Consequently, the Dutch East India Company turned to consolidating its colonial bases in the Spice Islands, in the hope of using these to break into the trade network of the Far East that linked together Japan,

China, and the Philippines. The main Japanese import in the seventeenth century consisted of Chinese silks, which were paid for in silver. The silk trade was primarily divided between Chinese and Japanese merchants, on the

one hand, and Iberian traders, on the other. To gain a foothold in Japan, the VOC pragmatically eschewed all attempts to Christianize and convert the

Japanese natives, a policy that distinguished it from other European nations and paid dividends quite rapidly.'® The English factory in Japan was closed down in 1623, the Spaniards were expelled in 1624, and the Portuguese were progressively squeezed out by 1638, leaving the United Provinces as the only European nation granted the Shogunate’s permission to trade with Japan.

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The Chinese silk market proved less amenable to diplomatic persuasion. Chinese merchants preferred to work with Portuguese and Spaniards, who had dealt far less monopolistically with those trading in East Indian pepper and spices. The VOC responded to the impasse, quite characteristically, with military force. After abortive Anglo-Dutch naval blockades and attacks on Iberian strongholds at Macao and the Philippines, the Dutch began to ravage Chinese merchant shipping along the southern China coast, thus paralyzing China’s overseas trade. Finally the Chinese gave in. They allowed the Dutch to supplant the Iberian carriers and permitted them to open a fortified factory on Taiwan. This base—Fort Zeelandia—soon grew to be one of the most flourishing trade depots in the East, replete with stockpiled

supplies of silks, porcelain, and drugs that were sent to Japan, India, and Persia. Japanese silver imports by the VOC rose from 410,000 guilders in 1622 to a peak of 7,496,600 guilders in 1639, before stabilizing at an annual level of about a million and a quarter guilders for the next three decades."” If the line dividing the Dutch from their Iberian enemies was sharp enough, the same could not be said of their ambivalent and equivocal relationship to the English, a more slowly emerging colonial power. Although

initially England also viewed the Iberians as the primary impediment to expansion eastward, its attempts to share in the expanding colonial market were repeatedly hindered by the Dutch desire to monopolize the trade in spices and pepper. Even as early as 1618, an English factor in the Moluccas was complaining that “[these] butterboxes are groanne soe insolent that yf it they be suffred by a whit longer, they will make claime to the whole Indies, so that no man shall trade but themselves or by their leave.”'* The English frustration with Dutch trade policy holds all the way through the second half of the century. Sir George Downing, the English ambassador to the States General, sarcastically responded, for example, tosthe jurist Hugo

Grotius’s defense of Dutch fishing rights in the North Sea. In a 1663 letter to Lord Clarendon, Downing complained with some justification that: “It is mare liberum in the British seas but mare clausum on the coast of Africa and in the East Indies.”!” But let us step back to the colonial situation in the pre-Amboyna years. Nearing the end of the truce and fearing the potential consequences of an escalation of Anglo-Dutch rivalry in the East Indies, the Heren Zeventien, the

general directors of the VOC, concluded in July 1619 a loose collaborative

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agreement that assigned the English East India Company a third of the traffic in spices and half the trade in pepper, in return for contributions towards

the defense costs of Dutch forts and holdings in the East. The reaction of

Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the VOC director-general at Bantam, testified to the treaty's unworkability: If the English laugh for gratitude your [the Heren Zeventien's |labour has not been in vain. Their great thanks are due to Your Lordships, for they

had properly let themselves be thrown out of the Indies, and Your Lord-

ships have set them back in the midst thereof.

... Wherefore the English

have been granted a third of the cloves, nutmeg and mace, we cannot well

understand. They had no claim to a single grain of sand on the coast of the Moluccas, Amboyna or Banda.”

Despite the agreement, Coen and the other Dutch continued to make life

difficult for their English partners. As the agreement banned the East India Company's establishing separate, independent factories in the Spice Islands, the new lodges were placed in the Dutch strongholds and surrounded by Dutch garrisons. “The English had their agreed quotas,’ as Israel puts it,

“but the Dutch had the power. It was easy for Coen to manipulate sales and purchases to the advantages of the Dutch. The English factors thus found themselves obstructed and delayed at every turn... . ‘[I]n all places where we are under the Hollanders [some English factors wrote in March 1622]... you purchase nothing but excessive charges and a slavishe subjectione to their insolent wills.” The collapse of the one-sided collaboration came in February 1623 with the so-called Amboyna Massacre. Accusing the English factors of plotting to take over the fort, the Dutch governor extracted confessions under torture before summarily executing some individuals. Although an isolated incident, the massacre was to reverberate through the seventeenth century, functioning as a figure for the larger conflicts between the two nations. Following the massacre, the English withdrew from much of the Moluccan Islands, ceasing to trade at Lantore and Pula Run (while still claiming sovereignty over these), shutting down its factory at Batavia, and precariously hanging on after 1628 only to its much-reduced bases at Bantam, Macassar, and Sumatra.” Given the strategic interests of both England and the United Provinces during the 1620s, it should not surprise us that the “business of Amboyna”

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was initially played down by both sides. Even the East India Company withheld public comment until after the publication in translation of an inflammatory Dutch pamphlet entitled A True Declaration of the News that came out of the East Indies with the Pinnace called the Hare, which arrived at Texel in June 1624. The East India Company was finally forced to counter the Dutch “justification of this barbarous butchery ... dispersed in this Realme itself, to brave and disgrace us at our own doores, and in our own Language.”** The Company’s reply explained its tardiness by citing the “tender” regard for “the ancient amity and good correspondence between this Realme and the Netherlands,” which made it loath to divulge “private injuries” that could “give the least occasion of any distaste or disaffection ... between these two Nations.” To the question of why “our friends” the Dutch should have abrogated the treaty then in effect between the two nations, the Company drew attention to a distinction in the “difference and designe of the English and Dutch companies” that was to figure prominently in later English representations of Dutch mercantile colonialism. The East India Company represented itself as the subjects of a “peaceable Prince,’ who wished to settle forts and

factories peacefully with the native inhabitants of the Indies “for the security only of the Trade, and upon the said Magistrates and peoples voluntary yeelding themselves under the obedience and soveraignty of the Crown of England.” In contrast, the Netherlanders, according to A True Relation, “la-

boured nothing more than the conquests of Countries, and the acquiring of new Dominion.’* As we shall see, these issues remain very much alive in Dryden's rewriting of this early colonial confrontation. “The sole design of the Hollanders,’ William de Britaine later insisted, “is to get the riches, trade,

and dominion of the whole Indies into their own power.’?° Indeed, the Anglo-Dutch colonial relationship was marked by a fundamental contradiction. On the Dutch side, the VOC required English cooperation to oust the Portuguese from their colonial strongholds. At the very least, it could not afford to antagonize the English and risk broadening the camp of its enemies. And yet, the desire to establish what the Dutch called

a “rendezvous” in the East—a central point where authority and administration of trade could be concentrated—was part and parcel of a monopolistic atm to control the entirety of the spice and pepper trade in the Indian Ocean. For instance, in 1610 the Heren Zeventien wrote to Governor General Pieter Both, charging him to “take all possible care that the trade of the

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Moluccas, Amboina and Banda therein included, should remain and be as-

sured to the Company, so that no part of it should fall into the hands of any other nation in the world save to ourselves or to such as we should find good.’ On the English part, too, the consequences of any action against the Dutch had to be cautiously weighed, and not only because of the potential ideological importance of a religious affinity with the United Proyinces. English trade depended upon Holland as the outlet for textiles—England’s major export within Europe—and the East India Company required the state-supported military strength of the VOC to assert its own position against Iberian domination in the colonies. Any precipitate action against the Dutch had therefore to be carefully avoided.”” The upshot of these considerations was numerous conferences between the two powers in the early seventeenth century—both before and after the Amboyna incident. Nine

special embassies from the Republic visited London between 1610 and 1636 to try to resolve the various points of conflict (the herring and Greenland fisheries, the trade of the Merchant Adventurers with Holland, Dutch treat-

ment of the English in the East, the Russia trade, and so forth). These were all, Charles Wilson informs us, “uniformly unsuccessful.’”* The sensitivity of the Amboyna issue itself may be illustrated by turning to the response of the Master of the Revels approximately ten years later to Walter Mountfort’s 1634 play, The Lanchinge of the Mary, or The Seaman’s honest wyfe, an extended and labored panegyric on the East India Company. Mountfort, an East India Company employee who had written the play on his voyage home from India in 1632—33, took as his theme the building and launching of a Company ship, christened the Mary after the queen, Henrietta Maria.”? Sir Henry Herbert licensed the play but imposed certain conditions: If “all ye Oaths [be] left out in ye action as they are crost out in ye book and all other Reformations strictly observed [the play] may bee acted not otherwyse.’*° We are fortunate to have Mountfort’s original draft with the censored passages marked and the corrections written over the original text. Every reference to the Dutch and the incident at Amboyna is marked as unacceptable, including a long discussion among shipbuilders in which the main Dutch perpetrators are named and the manner of torture briefly described.*" Herbert had refused two years earlier to license the first draft of Philip Massinger’s Believe as You List “because it did contain dangerous matter, as the deposing of Sebastian, King of Portugal, by Philip II, and there being a peace

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sworn betwixt the Kings of England and Spain.”°? As F. S. Boas has suggested,

Mountfort’s play came at an equally inopportune moment. Instead of acceding to the East India Company's demands that he exact reparation for Amboyna, Charles I had begun secret negotiations with Spain for an alliance

against Holland and was wary of any public event that could arouse suspicions about English intentions regarding the United Provinces. The Dutch concern that the English stage would popularize the Amboyna Massacre is suggested by Thomas Locke's letter to Sir Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in Holland. He claims that the East India Company would have had the Amboyna incident “all acted in a play, but the Council was appealed to by the Dutch ministers and stopped it, for fear of disturbance this Shrovetide.’** Forty years after Mountfort’s play, however, the relationship between the English and the Dutch had undergone a marked change. In the intervening period had come the English revolution, the first two Anglo-Dutch wars, and the Restoration. In 1672—after the second King Charles had negotiated the secret Treaty of Dover with Louis X1V—the so-called Cabal Ministry followed France into declaring war against the Netherlands. And so, when

Dryden decided in 1673 to dig up once more the “business of Amboyna,’

there was no censor willing to prevent his calculated propaganda against Holland from being staged.

Dryden's Amboyna was entered in the Stationer’s books on June 26, 1673, a little over a year after England formally declared war against the Dutch for the third time in twenty years. Dryden avers in his dedication to Lord Clifford of Chudleigh that the play had been “contrivd and written in a Moneth.” This admission, along with Dryden's transparently propagandist intention—to drum up public support for a doubtful war, no doubt goes some way towards explaining why literary criticism has so eagerly embraced Dryden's own “contrivd” dismissal of his work: “{'T Jhough it succeeded on the Stage, [it] will scarcely bear a serious perusal, . . . the Subject barren, the

Persons low, and the Writing not heightned with many laboured Scenes.” In Boas's opinion, had the Master of Revels refused to permit the performance of Dryden's Amboyna, “as Herbert had deleted the Amboyna passages from Mountfort'’s manuscript, he would have saved Dryden's reputation from its darkest blot.”*4 It is no doubt true, even for a writer as actively involved with the workings of politics and history as Dryden, that Amboyna dissolves only too easily

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into the history out of which it arose. The play ran quite successfully soon after its debut and then quietly vanished once its moment had passed. And while Amboyna shares with Dryden's poetry, prose, and heroic drama a characteristic polemic streak, it must be conceded that the play lacks the insinuating suppleness of his best political work. Yet, if Amboyna left no ripples in the surface of literary history, the same cannot be said of the historical mo-

ment to which it owed its existence and to whose nature and effects it still remains the most eloquent witness. Amboyna allows us to glean the terms in which Restoration England negotiated the equivocal and violent history of its relationship to the Dutch colonial empire. Through the play we can recreate the historical and epistemological frames upon which seventeenthcentury England built a colonial and national identity. As we shall see, notwithstanding his claim to depict the facts disinterestedly, Dryden uses the colonial milieu to stage and disguise an all-too-interested construction of a unifying nationalist discourse.

Shifting Alliances An early scene from Amboyna openly, perhaps even brutally, reflects seventeenth-century shifts in colonial power in the East, unfolding the system of oppositions upon which an English identity is to be built. Given Dryden's patriarchal and masculinist sense of what constitutes Englishness, the scene,

unsurprisingly, uses sexual conflict to represent colonial conflict. At stake is

the possession of the Spanish woman Julia, the wife of the soldier Perez— clearly himself a figure for the remnants of Iberian power in the East Indies. Stumbling upon her husband and the Dutch Fiscal “lovingly talk[ing] in pri-

vate,” Julia immediately assumes that the subject of the close conference must be love and she its object: “If I did not know my Don's temper to be monstrously jealous, I shou’d think they were driving a secret bargain for my

Body” (365). Underwriting Julia’s aside is a variation on the well-established trope that subjugates a passive, female colonized land to the colonizer’s active masculinity. As a Spaniard, Julia is clearly identified with the colonizer,

but as a woman, her body—whose current “master” is the Spanish soldier Perez—functions as a metaphor for Iberian colonial possessions in general. Dryden seeks here to represent a shift in ownership of an already colonized body. His concern lies with its alienation from a present colonial pos-

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sessor rather than an initial appropriation from the “natives.” Consequently, a further modification of the original sexual trope is required, and indeed |

becomes readily available. Julia continues: , If my English Lover Beamont, my Dutch Love the Fiscall and my Spanish Husband, were painted in a piece with me amongst ’em, they woud make

a Pretty Emblem of the two Nations, that Cuckold his Catholick Majesty

in his Indi’s [sic]. (365) As Douglas Bruster has demonstrated, the metaphor of the cuckold is inti-

mately bound in the Renaissance with problems of ownership. It enables the “doubling of the monetary on the plane of the personal, and the articulation on the comedic level of the new intricacies and extensions of the economic.”*° The half-spoken religious opposition of Catholicism to Protestantism helps clarify the new system of relationships between the European colonial powers: it invokes the religious affinity between the English and the Dutch in order to ground their combined opposition to the Iberian monarch, who is to be cuckolded and thereby deprived of what he possesses, the

sole control and ownership of the colonized body. Nevertheless, the shared religious bond connecting the English to the Dutch cannot be taken at face value since it deflects attention from a deeper divergence. Dryden's Prologue to Amboyna had already attacked those Englishmen whose “doteage ...is such / To fawne on those who ruine them; the Dutch.”*° “They shall have all,’ Dryden continues, “rather than make a War / With those who of the same Religion are.’*” Dryden proceeds to target what Steven Zwicker calls “the dislocation of language from meaning’”** in order to transpose the problem from the frame of religion onto that of (national) interest. “Religion,” he tells these conscientious’ objectors, “wheedled you to Civil War, /Drew English Blood, and Dutchmens now woud spare.’ In other words, religion is merely a cipher that can (and does) conceal conflicting interests. And if the Civil War makes it difficult to attribute to the English a stable religious identity, the same holds true in greater measure for the Dutch. Indeed, for Dryden the principle of< divine right means

that a monarchy can at least lay claim to a unifying religious identity. By contrast, purely political entities such as the United Provinces “are Atheists in their very frame.’ He concurs on this point with Andrew Marvell’s sneering description of Amsterdam:

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Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew, Staple of sects and mint of schism grew, That bank of conscience where not one so strange Opinion but finds credit, and exchange

In vain for Catholics ourselves we bear; The Universal Church is only there.*?

For Dryden—as for Marvell—Hbolland’s undeviating pursuit of commercial gain leads it to ignore all moral, religious, or social concerns. The operative category for the Dutch thus cannot be religion, and is rather that of

interest: “Interest’s the God they worship in their State.” And this misplaced zeal makes the Dutch the inveterate enemies of the English: “How they love England, you shall see this day; / No Map shews Holland truer

than our Play.” The word “Interest” names the political and ethical problem at the heart of Dryden's text. England and the English are characterized by an idealized disinterestedness, whose marks are generosity, gratitude, honor, hero-

ism, and true religious faith. The Dutch, on the other hand, incarnate a pure commercial interest that excludes all forms of faith, justice, and reciprocity. The previous chapter demonstrated how Fletcher fashioned a theatrical synthesis in order to accommodate divergent tendencies within English colonialism. For Dryden, by contrast, divergence stands at the center, taking the

form of an irreconcilable opposition between two codes of belief and behavior. The contrast provides him the means of fashioning the difference between English and Dutch colonialism, despite their ostensible similarity on the level of religious faith and colonial practice. In the scene we have been examining, the Fiscal’s legitimation of Dutch colonial policy in terms of “our interest” is immediately pounced upon by Beamont, who castigates the Dutch religion for being “only made up of In-

terest: at home, ye tolerate all Worships, in them who can pay for it; and abroad, ye were lately so civil to the Emperor of Pegu, as to do open sacrifice

to his Idols” (369). The famed Dutch religious liberality —which contributed, as we have seen, to the rise of Amsterdam in the seventeenth century

—is dismissed by the English merchant as simply an unethical means to unsavory ends: the worship of Mammon and the desire for universal economic dominion. Dryden's identification of Dutch policy with a base commercialism was

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not in itself new. The idea was prevalent in the ideological debates occasioned by the Anglo-Dutch wars. For example, in a widely disseminated 1652 sermon, the preacher John Owen declaimed: “Strange! that Ephraim should join with Syria to vex Judah their brother, that the Netherlanders, whose be-

ing is founded merely upon the Interest you have undertaken should join with the great Anti-Christian interest, which cannot possibly be set up again,

without their inevitable ruin.’*° Similarly, although religion might seem to unite the two emergent colonial powers, Dryden emphasizes divisions concealed by the appearance of shared belief. For many, the Dutch pursuit of a commercial empire posed a threat similar to that of Spain's pursuit of its religious empire. Defending the anti-Dutch 1651 Navigation Act, Benjamin Worsely had gone as far as to equate the Dutch with the Spanish: “The design of Spain... is... to get the monarchy of Christendom. Nor is it a thing less true (how little soever observed) that our neighbours [the Dutch]... have, likewise, aimed to lay a foundation to themselves by engrossing the universal trade, not only in Christendom, but indeed of the greater part of the

known world.”*! After all, the central question posed by the struggle for Julia in Amboyna

remains that of just who is to cuckold the Spanish master. And once this question has been raised, the unity conferred by religion turns out to be a spurious one. Reluctant to leave his wife alone with the Dutch interloper, Perez wisely plays off the English lover against the Dutch Fiscal, imploring the East India Company factor, Beamont, to remain with the pair. Julia’s

“Pretty Emblem of the two Nations” serves to fix the meaning of the ensuing verbal tussle between Beamont and the Fiscal. Though yet again the latecomer, the English merchant Beamont immediately and unerringly draws the colonial parallel, sardonically evoking the collaborative agreement between

the Dutch and English East India companies that guaranteed England a third of the traffic in spices: “Now Mr Fiscall, you are the happy Man with the Ladies, and have got the precedence of Traffick here too; you've the In-

die’s in your Arms, yet I hope a poor English Man may come in for a third part of the Merchandise” (367). Furthermore, Beamont implicitly projects an idealized mercantile vision

of an unencumbered “Traffick.” In this he echoes the play’s protagonist, Gabriel Towerson—the commander and primary representative of the English East India Company fleet to India—who had objected in an earlier scene to

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the “endless jars of Trading Nations” that resulted from “Avarice or Ambition.” Colonial trade, Towerson had insisted, was not a zero-sum game: the

“o’erflowing bounties” of the colonized lands ensured that “those who can be pleas'd with moderate gain, may have the ends of Nature, not to want:

nay, even its Luxuries may be supply from her o’erflowing bounties in these parts: from whence she yearly sends Spices, and Gums, the food of Heaven

in Sacrifice” (358). Towerson projects an alternative rhetoric to religion, that of disinterested reciprocity, in order to accommodate both English and Dutch colonial desire, both the Fiscal and Beamont. He seamlessly integrates commerce within an imagined world unproblematically structured in terms of natural and self-evident virtues. At first glance, upholding moderation over greed, the ideals of friendship

and patronage over “bare Commerce,” bounty over mercantile credit, seems to characterize the Dutch as well. Responding to Beamont’s barbed claim to Julia, the Fiscal’s contrived rejoinder equally strategically naturalizes commerce through the discourse of mutual (dis-)interest: “Oh Sir, in these Commodities, here’s enough for both, here’s Mace for you, and Nutmegg for me in the same Fruit” (367). In the natural produce of the Spice Island, the commodity finds its appropriate form. At the same time, the unity-in-divisibility

of the fruit expresses Dryden's vision of an idealized commercial alliance between the two competing European powers. Later, the Fiscal responds to Towerson’s plea for amity with the assurance that “we never can forget the Patronage of your Elizabeth, of famous memory; when from the Yoke of Spain,

and Alva’s Pride, her potent Succors, and her well tim’d Bounty, freed us, and gave us credit in the World” (358). But the subtle displacement voiced in this overt acknowledgment of gratitude should not escape us. The Fiscal lauds patronage, amity, and bounty

less because he shares Towerson’s essentialist belief in these as abstract virtues than because he views them in terms of specific acts that all lead to the same end: “credit in the World.” With the Fiscal’s invocation of credit—and its implied assertion of a specifically mercantile interest-—the line of opposition Dryden wishes to draw between England and the United Provinces

becomes visible.

For the shared mocking of Perez and Spain—in which Beamont and the Fiscal have thus far equally participated —suddenly turns into vicious attack

and counterattack when the Spanish Julia asks the two to “do as much for

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one another, as you have done for our Nation” (368). For his part, the Fiscal

details England’s commercial incompetence: the inability to manage its own fisheries; its economically unwise decision to relinquish control over the towns it had demanded as “payment” for aid against the Spanish; the excessive costs borne by English trade abroad in comparison with Dutch frugality. Beamont’s retort, on the other hand, focuses on the venality of Dutch com-

merce, which transgresses all laws of honor and religion, and the sorry life-

style that is the counterpart of Dutch frugality and thrift. Of central significance in their exchange is the opposition of two different codes, one grounded on the primacy of commerce

and trade, the

other rooted in a notion of propriety and proper conduct as embodied in the gentry and monarchy. “A republic,’ William De Britaine fulminated during the 1672 war with the Dutch, “is nothing but an engine (erected by sedition and treachery to subvert monarchy), and we see that Holland hath been a retreat for all rebels, and a sanctuary to the worst of men.’* Beamont likewise implicitly opposes monarchy to statehood (echoing the formulation in the Prologue). He links the former to nobility and its norms, while attributing to the latter ambition, self-interest, and greed. “| Y Jou shewd your ambition,” he tells the Fiscal, when you began to be a State: for not being Gentlemen, you have stollen the Arms of the best Families of Europe; and wanting a name, you have

made bold with the first of the divine Attributes; and call’s your selves the

HIGH and MIGHTY. (369)

«

As Steven Pincus observes, “supporters of the restored monarchy ... wanted war against the Dutch because they thought the Dutch republican leaders were seeking universal dominion. The point was not to seize Dutch trade routes ... but to prevent the Dutch from monopolizing all the wealth of the Indies.’** Moreover, Beamont continues, the gap between the outward signs of Dutch identity (insignia and name) and its inward essence (self-interest and mercantilism) is testified to by the Dutch lifestyle itself: “[F]or our Merchants live like Noblemen: your Gentlemen, if you have any, live like Bores; you traffick for all the rarities of the World, and dare use none of ’em your selves; so that in effect, you are the Mill-Horses of Mankind, that

labour only for the wretched Provender you eat” (369). It is not hard to see that this opposition between disinterested generos-

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ity and bounty, on the one hand, and self-interest and commercial exchange, on the other, draws on the logic and rhetoric of the patron-client relation-

ship. “A permanent structural characteristic of all early European material high culture,” patronage in Renaissance Europe constituted, according to

Werner L. Gundesheimer, the dominant social process structuring social and political behavior. Its effects were pervasive in such diverse areas as appointment to secular and religious offices; the

conception and creation of the structures and spaces within which people work, pray, and live; the execution of artifacts of material and intellectual

culture; the systems of transactions into which the behavior of social groups . . . is organized, and through which the relations of such groups to

one another are expressed,*°

Patronage was thus a system that not only coordinated the distribution of economic and political capital within a symbolic framework, but determined as well the relative efficacy of each particular form of capital (symbolic, political, or economic). Each act of dispensation evoked a symbolic model of

recirculation or reciprocity, which fixed it within a relatively stable hierarchy of status positions.*° As Linda Peck points out, while representing dispen-

sation as the unidirectional granting of favor, the language of patronage in

Renaissance England was “situated in a theory of mutual, indeed, social benefits.”*” Dryden's dedication of Amboyna to Lord Clifford plays upon this constitutive tension in the language of patronage: between the seemingly discrete and self-enclosed act of exchange and its continuous function in consolidating and maintaining a durable social hierarchy. My Lord, [he begins, ]After so many Favours, and those so great, Conferr'd on me, by your Lordship these many years; which, I may call, more

properly one Continued Act of Your Generosity and Goodness; I know not whether I should appear more Ungrateful in my Silence, or more Ex-

travagantly Vaine in my endeavours to acknowledge them. (348)

The durable material relationship (“so many Favours”) obliges a symbolic return in the form of artistic productions dedicated to the benefactor. But the discrete act into which the sum of such exchanges is telescoped (“one Continued Act”) brings to the fore the incommensurability of gift to return, a

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gap corresponding to the difference in social status between patron and client. The rhetorical sleight of hand lies, of course, in the doubling itself:. by thematizing incommensurability, Dryden underlines both the durability

of their relationship and the conventions of a larger system that assigns even incommensurability its proper place. By noting that “all Acknowledgements bear a Face of Payment,” he sets the patron-client relationship outside commerce, and in so doing also pays his own dues. Dryden recognizes full well that Clifford’s bounty had its limits. “You

Distributed your Masters Favour with so equal hands, that Justice her self could not have held the Scales more even.” However, even this admission is

tempered by an addendum: “with that Natural Propensity to do good, . had that Treasure been your own, the Inclination to Bounty must have ruind

you” (349). Clifford’s fall from grace is equally carefully circumscribed, as it is seen to result from the “Iniquity of the Times.’ Dryden interprets Clifford’s resignation upon being asked to take the religious oath demanded by the Test Act as a disinterested refusal to subordinate his virtue to the avaricious demands of personal desire: “’Tis easie to discover in all Governments those who wait so close on Fortune that they are never to be shaken off at any turne.... But the sober part of this present Age, and impartial Prosperity, will do right, both to your Lordship and to them” (350). Against ambition and selfishness are placed the ideals of disinterestedness and impartiality, which dissociate every individual dispensation from the explicit demand of a return that it implicitly calls for. Dryden's use of the language of patronage represents, in this sense, a specific historical forin ‘of what’ Pierte Bourdieu terms the “sincere fiction of disinterested exchange.” The fiction invests each exchanged object with a symbolic value, enabling the act of exchange to function simultaneously and invisibly in the service of a larger,

surrounding social universe. Through exchange, the always.already interested relations of everyday life are Sdiicateibia into the “freely chosen,” “volun-

tary” relations of reciprocity.** The patronage-infused language of Dryden's prefatory Hédiesnion sets the terms for the play as a whole. Despite the obvious social difference between a captain and a lord, the framing figure of Clifford is doubled within Amboyna in the person of Captain Gabriel Towerson, the East India Com-

pany factor who also functions as the surrogate for England and English colonialism. Refusing to be put out of temper by the dishonorable dealings

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of the Dutch, Towerson insists that he is in Amboyna as “a Publick Person, intrusted by my King and my Employers” (362). Not only does Towerson reflect Clifford as a figure of authority, he embodies the values upheld by the patronage system. To this end the qualities of the public figure are entrusted to the private man. Before we even see Towerson, Beamont singles him out as

a man upon whom “of all mankind... I would rely for Faith and Counsel, or more, whose personal aid I would invite, in any worthy cause to second

me” (356). The qualities of boldness and wisdom for which Dryden had praised Clifford (“Both at home, and abroad, with your Sword, and with

your Counsel, you have servd [King Charles] with unbyass'd Honor and unshaken resolution”) characterize Towerson as well, who is as “daring” as he is “liberal,” and furthermore of such generosity that he not only pardons his

foes but “by his bounty win[s] ‘em to his love” (356). As Linda Peck has shown, an association of bounty with virtue became

increasingly central to the image of monarchical identity and power through

the course of the seventeenth century. Defending in 1610 James I’s liberal overspending before a Parliament more used to Elizabethan frugality, Robert Cecil, for instance, insisted that “[f Jor a King not to be bountiful were a fault.’

The King’s bounty could not, he continued, be evaluated in monetary terms alone, “there being no greater slave than money and not worthy to be accounted among wise men, it being good for nothing but use.’ Later in the play, the destitute Spaniard Perez, hired by the jealous Fiscal to murder Towerson, nonetheless stays his hand when he reads a memorandum, lying beside

the sleeping captain, which promises to bestow five hundred pounds on Perez

“as a testimony of my gratitude for his honourable Service” (371). Couched in terms of honor and reciprocity, Towerson's note elicits from Perez its own grateful return: he praises the “Honourable Englishman” and adds to the note the phrase, “Thy Vertue savd thy life” (372).

;

By linking Towerson's bountiful “gratitude” with “Vertue” Perez remakes the patron-client relationship as a religious bond. The Spaniard projects his own decision not to kill the English factor onto the sleeper who “smiles... in his slumber, as if his Guardian Angel in a dream, told him, he was secure”

(371). The logic of Perez’s simile recalls the fact that royal bounty in particular found its proper function through the principle of divine right, both mir-

roring and confirming the king's godlike nature.*° Embodying the authority of the king in the colonial world of the East Indies, Towerson takes on in

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Perez's eyes the attributes of divinity, for he seems to be protected by God. In the reciprocal relationship between Perez and Towerson, each interchangeably . assumes the positions of patron and benefactor, binding these to the complex of ideals vaunted by the system: honor, generosity, bounty, loyalty, fidelity, di-

vine grace. In this way, Dryden strategically coalesces English national identity with the absolute ideals of court patronage: as a national power it expresses the essence of a social world structured and valued in terms of the patron-client bond. By contrast, the Dutch are characterized by their obses-

sion with “Interest,” a category identified in Restoration England with commercial exchange and money.

Colonial Legitimacy

The opposition developed above does not exhaust Dryden's propagandist

task. Justifying England's colonial project further demands that the legitimacy of its claims over “India” be established through the contrast between the two forms of nationhood. Dryden's Amboyna addresses this issue by introducing a second female body, that of Ysabinda, “an Indian lady bethrothd to

Towerson” (352). If the conflict between the Fiscal and Beamont over the Spanish Julia enacted the arrogation of Spanish colonial claims by an AngloDutch combine, a second sexual conflict over Ysabinda, between Towerson

and Harman Junior, the son of the Dutch governor at Amboyna, reveals an internal fragmentation that the Anglo-Dutch treaty had papered over. That a conflict over the “native woman” should arise ‘at all reveals a salient characteristic of the Dutch, their ingratitude, which signifies a thoroughgoing rejection of reciprocity as a model for social transactions.°! When Towerson enters the stage for the first time, he is accompanied by young Harman. The bystanders’ curiosity as to how these competitors came to be paired is satisfied by Harman's “gratitude” to Towerson for “this late accident at Sea, when you reliev'd me from the Pirats, and brought my Ship in

safety off” (357). Towerson's punctilious reply signals both the expectation of reciprocity and the anti-ideal against which it is cast: You over-rate a little courtesie: In your deliverance I did no more, then

what I had my self from you expected: The common ties of our Religion,

and those yet more particular of Peace, and strict Commerce, betwixt us and your Nation, exacted all I did, or could have done. (357)

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‘Towersons irony-laden use of “over-rate” stresses the inadequacy of the language of commercial exchange to characterize the true “courtesie” that lay behind his rescue of a competitor. Instead, the durable “ties” of religion and

of commercial treaties (indexed by the qualifier “strict” and the verb “exacted”) make up the frame within which such an act of “deliverance” is to be interpreted. “Courtesie” is a gift, but one that nonetheless assumes a reciprocity (“I did no more, then what I had... expected”); it acknowledges and

reinforces—in intention if not in fact—the ties binding the two nations. Harman's gratitude, however, does not extend beyond its verbal expression. Upon beholding Towerson's betrothed Ysabinda, he immediately desires her, revoking without hesitation the friendship he has just pledged. He proposes a commercial exchange: Ysabinda in return for his friendship and support in seeing that the English factories are “no more opprest, but thrive in all advantages with ours” (362). Towerson, of course, immediately refuses Harman’s offer: Hold, you mistake me Harman, I never gave you just occasion to think I woud make Merchandise of Love; Ysabinda you know is mine, contracted

to me e’re I went for England, and must be so till death. (362)

The English Captain's reply contrasts merchandising—a discrete act of buying and selling to satisfy a specific interest—to the indissoluble, reciprocal “contracts” of marriage (“till death”) or of treaties, which imply a universe of reciprocal expectations that they only partially make explicit. Reciprocity demands that expectations be felt rather than enforced, that they function as internalized dispositions guiding action rather than as rules to be followed. Even Towerson’s attempt to make Harman aware of his breach of conduct must therefore take a negative and circuitous form. Rejecting Harman’ offer of a duel, Towerson defends himself against the charge of cowardliness by obliquely recalling his recent martial exertions on Harman's behalf: “You know I durst have fought, though I am not vain enough to boast it, nor woud

upbraid you with remembrance of it” (362). Harman is not slow, though, to realize that the refusal to “upbraid” may function within the reciprocal code as its very opposite. “You destroy your benefit,” he retorts, “with Rehearsal

of it” (362). Dryden spares no pains to show that Dutch colonialism is driven by a base mercantilist ethos, which dissolves the stable ties of reciprocity in much

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the same way that the money-form effaces the commodity’s specificity in a general calculus of price and profit. In the words of Dryden's merchant Van . Herring, bonds of religion and contractual obligations of treaties are “but

a qualme of conscience which profit will dispel” (355). Commercial exchange enslaves everything to money, seeing it not as a mere facilitator of exchange but as a fluid and all-powerful form of valuation. The legitimacy of English colonialism is established by detailing the concrete effects of these opposed transactional modes, differentiating the civility and legality of the English from the brutality and illegality of Dutch colonialism. While Julia, the figure for Iberian colonial possessions in the East,

presented an already mediated relation to the colonized land and its subjects, the “Indian woman” becomes the site of a direct struggle between the two European powers who have taken over the mantle once worn by Spain / Portugal. The struggle between Towerson and Harman for Ysabinda aims, first, to make explicit the qualitative difference between their respective desires, and, second, to establish the ethical superiority of the English position.

Towerson, we may recall, has returned to Amboyna to marry Ysabinda, who had been “contracted” to him even before his departure. This marriage contract evokes in refracted form the colonial myth of the native freely yielding him/herself up to the colonizer’s protection and sovereignty.°” Defending

its claims to the two neighboring Moluccan islands of Pula Run and Banda, the East India Company had claimed that the natives had “voluntarily offerd” to surrender their lands to “his Majesty of England,’ and that “they were never put upon't by the English, but ‘twas entirely their own motion”: All the Orankyes of the Islands being met together ... we first of all demanded, Whether ever they had made contact with the Dutch, or given them any ground for pretensions to those Islands? To this they replied, That there never had been any such thing; that the Dutch were their mortal enemies, never had been, nor never should be their chosen Masters.

We then put the question, Whether they did unanimously, willingly, and without all deceit, and secret reserves, surrender those Islands to the use of the King’s Majesty of England, would stand by the resignation, and

maintain what they had done? To this they answer'd in the affirmative, with

one Consent, declaring they desir'd nothing more, than to be reckon’d a part of the English Empire.

So the Business was concluded, the Writings drawn and solemnly deliver'd into our hands; and in token of their subjection, a turf of earth,

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and a nutmeg-tree presented at the same time; which ceremony also was to be yearly renew'd. We on our parts were obliged to furnish them with Rice, cloth and other commodities, to assist them with our shipping upon occasion, and to treat all their Enemies as our own.

This English claim to “Poleroon” rests upon a formal legal process that has three ptincipal components: first, the priority of England's colonial rights;

second, the voluntary surrender on the part of the natives; and finally, the symbolic confirmation of England’s possession of the island based on the first two counts. These colonial requirements closely parallel Towerson’s claim

to Ysabinda in Dryden's text. The verbal “contract” between the two lovers made “e’re I went for England” asserts the temporal priority of Towerson’s claim, opposing it to Harman's uncivil threat of force. Ysabinda’s voluntary conversion to Christianity satisfies the requirement of a self-willed surrender—an aspect already emphasized in a preceding scene, where the reunion with the English captain drew from the native woman the admission that she “[njow...shall love your God, because I see that he takes care of Lovers”

(359). All that remains, then, is the symbolic confirmation of possession through the marriage ceremony. Appropriately enough, Towerson rebukes Harman by flaunting his prior claim: “[I ]f you are truly Gallant, insult not where you have power, but keep your Quarrel secret, we may have time and place out of this Island: meanwhile I go to Marry Ysabinda, that you shall

see I dare” (363). But Towerson is “condemn,” as he later bemoans, “to be the second

man” (386). Counseled by the Dutch Fiscal (whose name underscores the commercial ethos he embodies), Harman lures Ysabinda into the woods after the wedding, ties her to a tree, and rapes her. For Dryden, the brutality

and illegality of rape represent the logical culmination of a Dutch mercantilism governed solely by the category of self-interest. The Fiscal, for in-

stance, soundly admonishes Harman for the “fits of conscience” he displays after the rape: Those Fits of Conscience in another might be excusable; but, in you, a

Dutchman, who are of a Race that are born Rebels and live every where on Rapine; Woud you degenerate, and have remorse? Pray, what makes any thing a sin but Law; and, what Law is there here against it? Is not your

Father Chief? Will he condemn you for a petty Rape? The Woman an _ Amboyner, and what's less now Marry‘ to an Englishman: Come, if there

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be a Hell, ’tis but for those that sin in Europe, not for us in Asia; Hea-

thens have no Hell. (384-85)

From Dryden's perspective, a generalized economy based on interest stands not only outside the bounds of legality but beyond the bounds of civilization as well, an implication strengthened by associating Dutch barbarity with the mores of the colonized people. Since the heathens have no hell, it holds too, Dryden implies, that they have no heaven: that is, they do not possess the operative distinction that allows a notion of (Christian and Western) law to be formulated. Fits of conscience and pangs of remorse are noble emotions if bound to a code of honor, which makes nobility possible. But in a world where law lies in power (“Is not your Father Chief?”)—and above all in the power over money—the “natural” emotions validated by the reciprocal code can have no purchase. The link between Dutch barbarity and Dutch commercialism is further stressed in the scene that follows young Harman's death at Towerson's hands. Harman Senior's laudable sorrow at the death of a son he “lov'd so well... cannot,” he tells us, “be so soon digested.” However, despite his protestations, he proceeds to shows us that sorrow, although indigestible, may still be profitably exchanged through Towerson's death, which would remove all foreign obstacles to Dutch monopoly over the spice trade: “{ B]ut I consider, great advantages must with some loss be bought: as this rich Trade, which I

this day have purchas‘d with his death” (392). The language of commerce deals, after all, with equivalences, and in money all use-value. dissolves. Death,

sorrow, love, the familial bonds between father and son, are all commodified and thus rendered exchangeable in the “rich Trade” that has just been “purchasd.” If the price Harman Senior must pay is the life of his son, the securing of colonial wealth seems to him ample compensation. The rise of market exchange as the historical mode of self-interested behavior infects,

Dryden suggests, the entire sphere of human interactions, leading to actions that transgress natural, civil, and religious law.

The question of legality is complicated, however, by a difference between the legal status enjoyed by the English and that foisted upon the native population. The treaty between the European powers specifies that the English and the Dutch are sovereign subjects and therefore not bound to the laws of any nation but their own. The natives belong to a different category in that they are subject to the laws of both the colonizing powers. As Tow-

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erson later insists in his own defense: “|WJe are not here your Subjects, but your Partners: / And that Supremacy of power you claim, / Extends but to

the Natives, not to us” (399). If the Dutch claim that the rape was not strictly speaking a crime since Ysabinda was—as the Fiscal reminds us— “but an Amboyner,” on the same grounds the English can dismiss Dutch ju-

risdiction over them. The Fiscal even admits the impossibility of ordaining Towerson's death based upon the rape and its aftermath alone: “[F Jor Towerson ts here a Person publickly Employ'd from England, and if he should ap-

peal, as sure he will, you have no power to Judge him in Amboyna” (394). The distinction in legal status means that to execute Towerson in “publick” requires that he transgress his public role as representative of England and English interests. And it is here that charges of conspiracy become significant. The notoriety from the English perspective of the so-called Amboyna Massacre lay in its manifest injustice. The resident English factors were accused by the Dutch of plotting with the islanders to “seise upon the Fort, to Murther this our Worthy Governor, and by help of your Plantations near... to keep it for your selves” (395). The 1624 Dutch version of events claimed that the suspicion of a plot first originated “from the great licentiousness of the Ternatanes in Moluque and Amboyna’ and from the English refusal to aid the Dutch in their reprisals against the rebellious natives.°° A confession extracted under torture from a Japanese soldier, who had inquired after the strength of the Dutch fort, supplied the putative evidence that the “Japonian soldiers, under our [that is, Dutch] service, had decreed to

make themselves Masters of the Castle, and that they should set upon this by the helpe of the English, who had solicited them unto it.’°° This single confession apparently provided grounds sufficient for the Dutch to question a further twelve resident English factors. After “full examination and confession,’ these unfortunates pointed to Towerson as the mastermind behind the affair, he allegedly being moved to it by “the desire of Honor and Profit.’*” Towerson intended, the Dutch document continues, “presently [to] have advertised those of his Nation being in Batavia, and called for their helpe, who

if they had sent him succour, he would have kept the Castle for his own Company, and if not, he would have held it for himselfe, and have endeay-

oured a peace with the Indians.”*® The English reacted with vehement outrage to the Dutch version of events, and Dryden utilizes the English responses to bolster his case. The

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English arguments, recited in the play by Towerson, attack the Dutch pri-

marily on legal and rational grounds. In addition to arguing the invalidity of the Dutch jurisdiction, Towerson insists that the very thought that a handful of Englishmen would attempt to take over a well-fortified Dutch garrison is hardly credible. In Dryden's play, the Dutch counterresponse to English criticisms addresses the legal challenge by contriving to dissociate

the private crime of killing Harman Junior from the public plan to seize the fort, limiting the scope of the English legal appeal to the former. Coun-

tering Towerson’s refusal to accept the authority of the Dutch court of prosecution,” the governor argues that English accusations of “interested-

[ness]” and “partial[ity]” are applicable to the private crime but not to the public one: Harman Hold yet: because you shall not call us cruel, Or plead I woud be judge in my own cause;

I shall accept of that appeal you make, Concerning my Son’s death; provided first

You clear your self from what concerns the publick; For that relating to our general safety, The judgement of it cannot be deferr‘d;

But with our common danger. (399)

Dryden has, of course, already neutralized the force of the governor's generoussounding declamation (“you shall not call us cruel”) by revealing to us the interest it serves: the ousting of England from Amboyna—at the thought of which Harman Senior “grow|s] young... [and] lose[s] [his] Son’s remembrance” (394). The brutal elimination of English mercantile competition receives its literal representation in the torture and execution of Towerson and most of the English factors. According to the stage directions, the scene “opens... [to] discover... the English Torturd and the Dutch Tormenting them.” The play provides no detailed description of the torture, but the jibes of the

Dutch make it abundantly clear that the action is to follow the gory account in A True Relation. Its description of John Clarke’s torture gives a flavor of what Dryden intended an English audience to see: First they hoised him up by the hands with a cord on a large dore, where they made him fast upon two Staples of Iron.. . haling his hands one

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from the other as wide as they could stretch. Being thus made fast, his feete hung some two foote from the ground; which also they stretcht asunder as far as they would retch.... Then they bound a cloth above his necke and face so close, that little or no water could go by. That done,

they poured water softly upon his head until the cloth was full... so that he could not draw breath, but he must withall suck-in water: which... forced all his inward parts, came out of his nose, eares, and eyes... at

length took away his breath, & brought him to a swoune. .. . In this maner

they handled him three or foure severall times .. . till his body was swolne twice or thrice as bigge as before, his cheekes like great bladders, and his

eyes staring and strutting out beyond his forehead. ... Afterwards they hoised him up againe as before, and then burnt him with lighted candles on the bottom of his feete, untill the fat dropped on to the candles.

And lest the scene take the place of reality in the eyes and minds of the spectators, Dryden cunningly reminds the audience that the barbarity of Dutch mercantilism exceeds even the imitative power of theater, that reality is worse than its visual representation. On seeing his friend Beamont being tortured, Towerson proclaims: “We have friends in England who woud weep to see / This acted on a Theatre, which here / You make your pastime” (402). Explicitly told by the play how to react, the viewer is chastised into

taking up his position as national and colonizing subject, acceding thereby to Dryden's ideological construction of English identity. In so doing, the spectator differentiates himself from the Dutch via the categories that Towerson so explicitly constructs: I coud weep tears of Blood to view this usage; But you, as if not made of the same Mould, See with dry eyes the Miseries of Men, As if they were Creatures of another kind, Not Christians, nor Allies, nor Partners with you, But as if Beasts, transfix'd on Theatres,

To make you cruel sport. (401) To be a creature of the English kind is to be Christian, to be moved by the

“Miseries of Men,” to be an ally and a partner in a colonial project whose task it is precisely to subjugate and civilize the heathen “Creatures of another kind.” By refusing Towerson's appeal, the Dutch, so Dryden's propaganda implies, themselves become creatures of another kind, ruled not by the laws of

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Christian reciprocity, but by the laws of the colonial jungle. And this jungle, as we have seen, is none other than the market.

Mercantile Pretensions There remains, however, a buried tension that has thus far been carefully sidestepped: Gabriel Towerson, who bears the burden of English honor and

the English colonial cause, is as much a merchant as any of the Dutch against whom he contends. The heroism of Dryden's Towerson contrasts strongly with the impression of Towerson one gleans from the minutes of the East India Company. These bureaucratic documents focus almost exclusively on his mercantile capabilities. They worry less about his honor than about the extent to which his pursuing private trade in India had compromised his brief to further the Company’s interests. As a “public person,’ Towerson represents not only the nation, but even more

directly the company he

serves, the English East India Company, whose primary concern is the prof-

itable traffic in commodities. In this respect the distinction between him and the Dutch representatives of the Vereinigde Oost-Indische Compagnie seems vanishingly small. Why does Towerson, the representative of an English national and colonial ethic, incarnate at the same time the very mercantile ethos against

which English colonialism defines itself? Addressing this apparent paradox takes us away from the play and towards the historical problem of the relationship between the two governing codes staged in Amboyna. Formulated more generally, the question concerns the historical conditions impelling an advocate for the code of reciprocity to choose for its figuration precisely that colonial representative most clearly identified with its anti-ideal, the

“debased” and “parasitic” code of commerce. This paradox originates in the extension and transformation of the market in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Underlying social change in the period was the emergence of a world market that brought together in a single structure such otherwise diverse phenomena as the growing European demand for staples and luxuries, forced bullion extraction in the New World, slavery in Africa, and a muscular mercantilism in the East. The increasing dominance of market processes not only affected the quantitative and qualitative composition of capital and its distribution within Europe (and, specifically, within England), but also

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contributed to a heightened efficacy of economic capital with respect to social, cultural, and other forms.®! In England, the increased importance of domestic and international trade had a twofold consequence: the relative decline in the position of the peerage and the nobility—in particular, relative to the middle landowning groups and the mercantile strata—and “the weakening first of the financial resources and later of the prestige and influence of the Crown.’ The recomposition of social space in seventeenth-century England did not, however, suddenly reverse existing status hierarchies in any simple way. The acquisition of fortunes by hitherto subordinate groups resulted in their racing to convert new-found economic wealth into landed estate, economic capital into social and cultural capital. Consequently, while the objective constitution of the social space changed, the immediate result was less its breakdown

than an “overall displacement of the structure of the distribution, between the classes or class fractions, of the assets at stake in the competition.’® These historical transformations disseminated their effects through the dominant ideological forms used to understand and describe social transactions. Dryden's Amboyna symptomatically and strategically intervenes in these symbolic struggles over social place. That Dryden relies so heavily on the thetoric of patronage relationships does not mean—as this analysis has per-

haps unavoidably implied—that the disinterested reciprocity of that code adequately describes the practice of social exchange in Restoration England. Rather, the rise of the market undermined the material basis responsible for

sustaining the patron-client nexus. Throughout the seventeenth century, the

ever-expanding market represented a phenomenon lacking a vocabulary adequate to its complexity. It was felt everywhere through its effects; it was expe-

rienced directly and indirectly in the exchange of commodities and the reconfiguration of the social world. Yet the relationship between the market and its effects remained in a fundamental sense mysterious. The expansion of largely under-theorized and misunderstood market processes meant that the patronage system became the ideological form through which affected participants negotiated their own relationships to a changing and increasingly unfamiliar universe of social exchanges. The apparent paradox incarnated in the figure of Towerson expresses, in other words, the pressures of a real paradox, one located in the changing social circumstances of Dryden's historical world. In his study of markets and theaters in the sixteenth through the eigh-

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teenth centuries, Jean-Christophe Agnew draws our attention to the gradual separation of a market process from the market place. From European antiquity through the medieval period, markets were “situated phenomena,’ localized

in both time and place. The transgressive nature of commercial exchange was contained at earlier moments in Western history by fixing—indeed as threshold—the spatio-temporal limits of the market, and, further, by devel-

oping modes of symbolic mediation able to constrain its disruptive energies. Symbolic forms such as the theater were shaped by the pragmatic need for commodity exchange between isolated and insulated centers of production,

ensuring all the while the subordination of market processes to that localized function. The change in the nature of the English fair epitomizes, Agnew argues, the historical emergence of a “marketing network,’ whereby the localized

marketplace gave way to a generalized market process. The late medieval fairs had originated in traditional fixed marketplaces, held weekly and regulated by ecclesiastical or seignorial authorities. Their rapid expansion in the seventeenth century signals, however, both a transformation of market relations and their extension beyond the narrow limits of local authority. What emerges is a sense of the market as an active force in itself.°° An oft-cited passage from John Wheeler's 1601 A Treatise of Commerce bears eloquent witness to changes in the texture of material life in the early modern era: The Prince with his subjects, the Master with his servants, one friend and acquaintance with another, the Captain with his soldiers, the Husband

with his wife, Women with and among themselves, and in a word, all the

world choppeth and changeth, runneth and raveth after Marts, Markets and Merchandising, so that all things come into Commerce, and pass into traffic... in all times, and in all places: not only that, which nature bringeth forth, as the fruits of the earth, the beasts and living creatures, with

their spoils, skins and cases, the metals, minerals, and such like things, but

further also, this man maketh merchandise of the works of his own hands, this man of another man’s labor, one selleth words, another maketh

t[r]affic of the skins and blood of other men, yea there are some found so subtle and cunning merchants, that they persuade and induce men to suf-

fer themselves to bought and sold.*” Commenting on these lines, Douglas Bruster observes that “notwithstanding the aggravated poverty afflicting a great number of people during this

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period... there may have been more of... ‘everything’ passing into and around in commercial circulation?’®’ No doubt, an older world peeps through the paratactic chain with which Wheeler begins, a world whose operative distinctions are hierarchical (prince and subject, master and servant), patriarchal (husband and wife), and communal (among friends, acquaintances,

and women). But precisely the qualitative distinctions among these sorts of relationships—which all hark back to a different model of exchange—are gradually dissolved by the market process, the fluid logic of money and commodity circulation. Wheeler's exuberant description testifies to the sheer presence of the market in its commodities. The market’s energy resides in an omnivorous absorption of the things in the world through which it makes its presence known and felt. And yet, this heightened visibility depends almost invisibly upon another complex of concealed relationships and exchanges, and ultimately upon a network of colonial transactions. The figure of the subtle merchant, for example, who persuades men

“to suffer themselves to be

bought and sold,” registers the presence of the different forms of coercion upon which the buying and selling of labor-power are predicated, most prominently in the burgeoning slave trade and in the use of forced native labor in American mines: “| T |his man maketh merchandise... of another

man’s labour.’ In other words, Wheeler's celebratory prose also faintly reveals that the growth of the market required a number of material conditions to be met,

conditions crucially part of the complex structure of Europe's needs in the colonial sphere. For understanding the context of Amboyna, one of these conditions in particular ought to be spelt out clearly: a structural demand for a sudden and massive increase in the quantity of money in circulation.” Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the European colonial powers ran a deficit trade with the East. In order to buy eastern commodities they had to enter into already well-developed local trading structures and to pay for goods in gold and silver.’”° But there were no reliable sources within Europe that could sustain a deficit trade over the long term. Thus, the bullion had to come from elsewhere. And it did: from the silver mines in the Americas. The commodities that flowed in from the near and the far East needed this colonial treasure and the labor of enslaved populations in order to be “chopped and changed,” bought and sold. Their visibility and

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presence depended upon the emergence of interconnected trade routes for which the free movement of money was essential. Estimates of how much gold and silver reached Europe in the early modern era confirm the sudden injection of specie. (See Table 1.) The data suggest that while output of gold worldwide remained roughly stable, the supply of silver tripled in the middle of the sixteenth century and continued to rise through the early seventeenth century.’ The discovery of the

American silver mines (and in particular that of Potosi in 1545) boosted metal supplies in Europe. The immediate beneficiaries were naturally Spain and Portugal, but growing internal trade within Europe ensured that bullion flowed from the Iberian countries to France, Italy, Holland, and—last but not least—England. The historical congruence of an expanding market process and the availability of reliable sources of bullion to sustain that expansion allowed the different, hitherto segregated trade networks to be sutured together—not only those joining Europe to its domains of influence in the New World, Asia, and Africa, but those within Europe and Asia as well. The forcible extraction of surplus value in the New World thus became a necessary pendant to colonial expansion in the East, where extraction of value proceeded along the less overtly exploitative path of monopolistically oriented trade. The rapidity of the English transition to a money economy was only possible given the injection of bullion at a time when the diffusion of market processes had begun to break down local restrictions on the exchange and transfer of goods. Conversely, the speed of the transformation demanded vast quantities of liquid capital, spurring in turn the dissolution of tradi-

tional practices governing and containing exchange. Suviranta estimates that there were between twenty and thirty times as much money circulating through England in the seventeenth century as there had been two hundred years earlier, an increase far surpassing the rate of increase in the world as a whole.” A large proportion of English treasure, Artur Attman shows, was used to finance commodity purchases in the Baltic and in the East, Amsterdam functioning, as we have seen, as a crucial intermediary for these monetary transfers.”°

The concentrated injection of wealth had far-reaching implications for social organization in England. In particular, the recomposition of economic capital proved detrimental to social groups whose position and power rested

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TABLE I Average Annual Output of Gold and Silver

(1521-1700) Period

Ke. gold

Kg. silver 90,200

1521-44.

7,160

1545—60

8,510

1561-80

6,840

299,500

1581-1600

7,380

418,900

1601-20

8,520

422,900

1621—40

8,300

393,600

1641—60

8,770

366,300

1661—80

9,260

337,000

10,765

341,900

1681-1700

311,600

source: A. Soetbeer, Materiellen zur Erlauterung und Beurteilung der wirtschaftlichen Edelmetalverhaltnisse und der Wahrungsfrage

(Berlin, 1885), 7.

upon status forms normally associated with landed wealth: the aristocracy and the crown. Since the quantitative increase in specie was closely linked to trade, the redistribution of wealth in England was not arbitrary. Money stuck first in the hands of the mercantile community, contributing also to

the rise of a class of proto-capitalist farmers.’* These groups diverted a substantial proportion of their earnings into capital investments: new ships, the

hiring of seamen, procuring commodities for countries supplying precious metals, producing commodities demanded by the market, and so forth. Al-

though the impact of these endeavors was first expressed in increased competition for already existing commodities and services, the growth of trade enabled, too, an expansion in range and availability of goods, consequently encouraging the production of new needs and new demands.’° The real rise in incomes of merchants and market-oriented farmers was further flattered by the inflationary pressures exerted by the sudden jump in the quantity of money available.’”° Redistribution of wealth under inflationary conditions tends adversely to affect groups whose income is fixed and whose expenditure is variable, while benefiting those class fractions whose outlay is rigid and income flexible. Farmers, merchants, and manufacturers could sell goods

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at higher prices, even if these cost them more, and thereby increase their share

of the total money supply. By contrast, the gentry and the wage-earning classes, whose incomes were far less responsive to shifts in prices, would see their share decline more severely. The research of Lawrence Stone, R. H. Tawney, and others, though chal-

lenged in some particulars, still suggests that the English aristocracy underwent a prolonged crisis in the years leading up to the Civil War, during which

time it temporarily ceded political and social initiative to the squirearchy: [The aristocracy] surrendered its powers of physical coercion to an increasingly powerful state; it permanently alienated much of its capital resources in land; for a period, admittedly not a very long one, its purchasing

power declined absolutely; its subsequent decision to jack up rents and

fines did much to break down old ties of personal allegiance; it was obliged to share more and more of the commanding heights of administrative and political authority with a confident and well-educated gentry; and... it temporarily forfeited much of its influence and prestige.’”

From the last years of Elizabeth's reign onwards, the capital holdings of the

aristocracy declined both in absolute as well as in relative terms with respect to the rising mercantile and agricultural classes, who had profited through the purchase of land alienated by crown and gentry.’ The expansion of market relations led ultimately to the “commercialization” of the patronage system itself, despite (and indeed partly through) its strenuous insistence upon the illegitimacy of commerce as:a model for social interaction. The gradual absorption of the patronage system into the market was signaled in the first place by the increased dependence of the crown and the gentry upon trade and commerce. This occurred in diverse ways. hus, Linda Peck coordinates the rise of corruption in the seventeenth century with increased state regulation of the economy, the fostering of development projects to diversify economic activities, and augmentation in the power wielded by informal agents of the state. Within this frame, she argues, “corruption served to redistribute wealth especially from the merchant community to the gentry and, within the landed elite, to those who had strong court connections.’””

Collusion between merchants and officials was endemic, for example, to trade practice: it enabled individual traders and mercantile combines to im-

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port and export goods without being subject to any real control, while ensuring that a proportion of their (higher) profits was diverted into the hands of the crown agents and the nobility. In this regard, corruption performed a dual function. On the one hand, it protected the patronage system since

each act of corruption effectively reinforced the hierarchical structure of social relations. On the other hand, the very need, as it were, for corruption grew out of a social recomposition consequent upon the proliferation of market forces. As Peck pithily puts it, corruption exploited state regulation

“as if it were part of the market sphere.’®° Certain forms of corrupt trade practice were in fact structurally necessary for the crown, which came gradually to depend upon customs duties as an alternative source of ready money. Unlike the Spanish and French monarchies, the English crown’s ability to meet its costs through taxation was severely constrained by Parliament. Moreover, the bankrolling of foreign wars

in the 1540s and subsequent attempts to balance government deficits by selling royal lands had not only reduced the size of the lands accruing to the crown after dissolution of the monasteries, but had also begun to eat into inherited capital as well. Hence, the maintenance and expansion of foreign

trade became more than just a desired goal in the seventeenth century; it

emerged as an abiding and necessary concern.*! Not that foreign trade could solve all the crown’s financial problems. As Clay points out, among the disadvantages “of heavy reliance on revenue from indirect taxation was that its yield fluctuated... with commercial conditions.” Besides, collecting customs duties called for “an elaborate administrative network ... and it was in practice impossible for the government to ensure that officials... rendered honest and effective service.”*” As early as Elizabeth's reign, the crown began to “farm” out revenue collection to private individuals in return for an annual rent, thereby assuring its income while also relieving it of the need to administer the actual collection. Customs farmers were among the most prominent and successful businessmen of their day, including such figures as the copper concessionaire Thomas Smythe in the 1580s, and Morris Abbot in the 1620s, whose trading concerns ranged from the East Indies to the Levant and the Americas.*’ By granting monopoly rights, the crown asserted its traditional role as the fountain of bounty within the patronage system; but by selling these rights, it revealed

yet again its dependence on the market for its own survival.

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The infiltration of the market into the very workings of the patronage system becomes especially visible if we recall the “inflation of honors” in — Stuart England, where the desire of subordinate groups for higher status within the patronage hierarchy intersected with the crown’s need for revenue. The sale of titles by the crown demonstrates quite spectacularly the way in which objective crises in aristocratic and royal finances commercialized the strict titular gradations of patronage relationships. Thus, a report by Sir

Robert Cotton in James I’s reign addressed the fiscal crisis by mooting the idea of a new order of knights, the baronets, to be sold at one thousand

pounds each. The sale of honors resulted in an intense scramble by the leading county families for the new title. The promise to restrict the number of baronets to two hundred was, however, not kept: the financial pressures on the crown forced it first to extend the sale of honors to include peerage titles as well, and later, in Charles I's reign, to flood the market with baronets (a decision that drove prices down to two hundred pounds or less).** That the gentry—as a class and as a political force—survived the dark years of the Interregnum was due in no small measure to the pragmatic realization that it could only beat the market by joining it. Not only did the class expand to include individuals whose wealth came from trade but even the older aristocracy became increasingly involved in trade.*° The investment in foreign trade for profit (rather than, as was often the case earlier, for honor) meant that the aristocracy’s survival became increasingly dependent upon mercantilist practice. To cite Robert Shephard’s informative overview, “{1]iberation from the ties of honor and from the local honor community thus led to a situation in which political relationships became relationships of interest and convenience.’*° The reinstatement of the monarchy at the Restoration also reactivated the symbolic code of patronage, despite the fact that it had already been severely undermined by market forces before the war. Ever more forceful insistence upon the validity of aristocratic privilege meant that patronage became the principal frame through which the dominant classes coped with the pervasive presence of a market that had, if anything, tightened its grip upon society in the intervening decades.*” At the same time, the aristocracy tried to mobilize the hierarchical differences through which they defined themselves as a group, distinguishing themselves from those below. And this need took the form of projecting market exchange as the anti-ideal against which a

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“true” aristocratic identity could be formulated—an identity that was then seen to epitomize the essence of England's national and colonial self. The Restoration theater was to be shaped by these requirements— which indeed adumbrated how far theater was to diverge from its interstitial and potentially subversive position in Elizabethan and Stuart England. The predominant notion of “wit” as the privileged mode of self-expression in Restoration comedy relies centrally upon expelling from the stage the nittygritty workings of life, and especially those aspects that address the market

and its functions seriously. The Restoration stage directs at merchants much the same mockery with which Dryden's Beamont scathingly dismisses the Dutch: “| Y Jour Gentleman, if you have any, live like Bores . . . so that in effect, you are the Mill-Horses of Mankind, that labour only for the wretched

Provender you eat” (369). And yet, in a sense, the Restoration stage could not avoid its subyersion by a history over which it had little control. The language of wit—one of whose tasks it was to produce the distinction between nobleman and merchant—was itself thoroughly infected by the language of commerce: profit and loss, debt and redemption, buying and selling,

dominate the metaphors employed in its exercise. The paradoxical relationship between wit and money, one might suggest, echoes the way in which

Amboyna both separates the English from the Dutch and collapses them into one another. The foregoing description suggests that the very projection of commercial exchange as an anti-ideal paradoxically finds its condition of possibility in the “commercialization” of the patronage system. The unfolding of mercantilism made hierarchy itself dependent upon economic capital, thus generating a struggle over the place of economic capital within the ideological frame that purported to contain it. Responding to transformations in material practice, an accelerated and vehement differentiation through non-relational or

substantial properties tried to conserve and reassert existing hierarchical divisions. On the one hand, then, the patronage system constituted the symbolic frame that defined or delimited the assets at stake in the competition. It established what should count as desirable. On the other hand, the absorption

of the patron-client nexus within the surrounding frame of mercantilist practice predisposed these assets to function as the bearers or representatives of a different mode of valuation. The substantial ideals of honor, generosity, bounty, and disinterest vaunted by the reciprocal code—and symbolically em-

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bodied in such status markers as coats of arms, symbolic rights, conspicuous consumption—came to serve as the “form of appearance” of exchange value, that is, of value qua economic capital. In the process, the symbolic language of reciprocity became the representational model to enact conflict between social fractions whose relations had been objectively shifted by the dominance of commerce in everyday life. Both a symptom of historical change and a strategy of response, reciprocity served as the site upon which the Restoration attempted, to modify Bourdieu’s phrase, to ensure permanence by change and

to perpetuate structure by movement.*® Dryden's reliance in Amboyna on the language of patronage thus expresses something like an historical fait accompli: that the reciprocal code has already been absorbed in the “commercial” restructuring of the social world. Yet at the same time, he deploys this language in order to reassert the priority of symbolic over economic capital. The subordination of mercantilism as anti-ideal provides the strategic opposition that distinguishes between the two nation-states. England and the Low Countries are thereby constituted through a positional and hierarchical opposition. But to the extent that the ideals of the patronage system themselves constitute the historical “form of appearance” of mercantilist valuation, this opposition conceals a more fundamental identity, one that finds its outlet in the figure at once English and Merchant: Gabriel Towerson. Dryden's investiture of the merchant Towerson with the garb of reciprocity takes its logic, in other words, from an inverse historical process that has led to reciprocity functioning,

paradoxically, as the outer appearance of a mercantilism that has displaced it. Symptomatically and strategically responding to material transformations of society, his “solution” announces England's identity (qua merchant) with the Dutch in the very attempt to distinguish the Dutch (qua merchants) from the English. Mercantilism connects England and Holland, linking them in a “circle of commerce” whose primary concern is the mutual convertibility of commodities and money.’ And yet, this circle also separates England and the United Provinces as competitors whose respective interests downot coincide. Although the market establishes their shared goal (the treasures of the East) and mediates between them, it also positions them antagonistically with respect to what they desire. If for seventeenth century England—as Patricia Fumerton has suggested—“foreign trade was a problem that could not be

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formulated, let alone solved, in contemporary terms,’ Anglo-Dutch conflict over “India” forces upon Dryden the insolubility of the problem.”

Colonial Violations Given England’s conflicted relation to the market, the English invective

against the Dutch is of a piece with its envious adoption of the Dutch as the

model of commercial and colonial practice. According to Joyce Appleby, the systematic isolation from the larger social context of key variables as economic variables marks the first step in the emergence of economic reasoning as such, The early English economists were pushed to this step by grappling with the problem of Dutch commercial success: “The Dutch example provided the means of observing buying, selling, producing, lending, and ex-

changing, independent of the social and political considerations that had often veiled the purely economic aspects of these activities.”?! The intangibility of the market economy—in which a system of exchanges invisible in its totality exerts a critical influence on the local buying and selling of things— seemed to find its correlate in the United Provinces: a state that visibly lacked all the natural advantages possessed by England and yet one that overflowed with commodities and wealth. The preeminent place of foreign trade in the Dutch economy suggested both the reason for their success and the path that England had to follow.” It is no accident that the paradox of the market becomes most visible in the East Indies, for it was here that the primacy of mercantilism and trade

was most evident, and the competition within and for the market sharpest. Colonial trade posed, we might say, the problem of understanding and countering the market in its purest form. “India” provided, in this sense, the alien scene upon which the market and its relations could be staged. As early as 1601 John Wheeler had claimed that “there was nothing in the world so ordinarie, and naturall unto men, as to contract, truck, merchandize, and trafficke with

an other.’** The history of British economic thought from the seventeenth century onwards translates this idea into practice, ultimately naturalizing it-— most notably in Adam Smith’s monumental Wealth of Nations—as an anthropological principle. Given the centrality of foreign trade, the notion of “trafficke with an other,’ as Wheeler quaintly puts it, has to be given its full weight. For it is

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precisely in their relationship to colonial “others,” to the native populations subjugated in the course of a “natural” and “universal” trade, that the fundamental identity of England and Holland emerges most clearly. As we have seen, even Towerson’s attempt to defend himself against his Dutch accusers

articulates in no uncertain terms his perception of a qualitative difference dividing his European competitor from his Indian provider of wares. The fact that the English are “not here your Subjects, but your Partners” grounds the

subsequent assertion that the “supremacy of power” that the Dutch claim can only be legitimately “extend[ed] to the Natives, not to us” (399). The barbarity of the Dutch lies in their refusal to differentiate between those who are subject to colonialist law and those who are not. But Dryden's task is to produce not just an ideal English identity, but an English colonial identity, and hence to construct an intra-European difference

without jeopardizing the power differential upon which mercantile colonialism rests. In other words, to produce the difference between the English and the Dutch in terms of an opposition between reciprocity and commerce, between legality and illegality, Dryden has to posit a prior identity between the two colonial powers on the basis of a second difference, that obtaining between the colonizer and the colonized. The paradoxical investment that makes the English merchant the bearer of an anti-mercantile reciprocal code can be concealed—if not resolved—via a third term whose invisible mediation enables the simultaneous deployment and suspension of contradictory frames of reference. The Europeans’ implicit difference with respect to the natives allows the simultaneous articulation of identity (as Christians, allies, and partners, to recall Dryden's formulation) and separation (as reciprocity versus mercantilism).

The paradox becomes especially striking if we press further upon the contrast Dryden develops between England's legitimate marriage with the (Christianized and assimilated) Eastern other and her brutal rape at the hands of the Dutch colonialist. For, curiously enough, the marriage also serves—from the interstitial perspective of the sacrificed colonial woman— to underscore the similarity between these two contending powers. In Amboyna, an epithalamium celebrates the lawful English marriage between Towerson and Ysabinda, depicting the union as the dawn of a new day rising

“betwixt the Bride's and Bridegroom’s Eyes” (375). That the union is mutually desired is established in the song's first verse: the dawn marks “that Golden

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day they wish‘ so long,” which “love pickd... out amidst the throng,” Building desire upon desire, the succeeding verse leads from the celebration of the

day to the promise of “a better night,” in whose anticipation even the day seems too long: The day you wish‘ arriv‘d at last, You wish as much that it were past,

One Minute more and night will hide, The Bridegroom and the blushing Bride. The Virgin now to Bed do's goe: Take care oh Youth, she rise not soe; She pants and trembles at her doom,

And fears and wishes thou woudst come. (375) From the mutual “they” we move to a “you,” the bridegroom (“oh Youth”), whose task it is to deflower the virgin (woman, native, land). The identity of

male and female desire that the opening verse had simply assumed is thus rendered unstable. The affirmation of active male desire is answered by the ambivalence of the passive, female object of desire who “pants and trembles at her doom,” simultaneously aroused and afraid, suspended between a desire to be ravished and a fear of the event itself. The violence of the Bridegroom’s “coming” sets the final verse in motion: The Bridegroom comes, He comes apace,

With Love and Fury in his Face; She shrinks away, he close pursues, And Prayers and Threats, at once do’s use,

She softly sighing begs delay, And with her hand puts his away,

Now a loud for help she cryes,

And now despairing shuts her Eyes. (375) In the face of the colonizer’s “Love and Fury,” the initial ambivalence that the song attributes to the hesitant bride is resolved first into fear (“she shrinks away” and “a loud for help she cryes”) and then into resignation (as she “despairing shuts her Eyes ). wi

w

a”

The epithalamium would seem to paint the colonial marriage it celebrates as a form of legalized rape. Consider from this perspective the concluding section of a treaty between the English and the natives of Banda, an-

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other of the East Indian islands over which the Dutch and English struggled. After expressing —in much the same terms as the natives of Pula Run had—their “voluntary” submission to the English colonial yoke, the Bandanese further “desire of his Majesty, that such things as are not fitting in our

Religion, as unreverent usage of Women, maintaining of Swine in our country, forceable taking away of mens goods, misusing of our men, or any suchlike that are excepted against our Laws, that they not be put in practice, being out of use and custom, that they may not prove a blemish unto our religion, and that we may receive no occasion to deal unkindly with the English.”** The Bandanese voice a fear that their laws and mode of existence will be annulled by the colonist’s laws—hence the attempt to preserve a set of core principles. This fear is most evident in the hesitancy of their threat: “that we may receive no occasion to deal unkindly with the English.” The treaty rewrites fear and resignation in terms of voluntary submission, as the desire to place themselves under English sovereignty. But the putative native desire for the English as colonial masters seems born ultimately of the fear of reprisal, which overrides the fear of their women being “unreverently” used, their men being “misused,” their goods being stolen. The treaty hints

at the calculated necessity (expressing here, one assumes, the Bandanese’s ptior experience with the Dutch) behind the decision to turn to the English for succor, while simultaneously overwriting that resignation in terms of affective volition. The closing couplet of Dryden's epithalamium enables us to see that the fear of a masculinist colonial violence and a resignation to that violence are in fact the primary responses expected of (and read into) the colonized subject. As her cry for help goes unheard, the bride accedes despairingly to her fate. From a scene of shared discovery—the mutual opening of eyes—the epithalamium moves to the native woman’'resigned refusal to look upon her violation. The song traces the path of colonization in the East: from discovery to domination, from the rhetoric of contractual marriage to the reality of colonial rape. The marriage-as-rape trope draws in any case upon a well-established literary tradition in Renaissance epithalamia. But why does Dryden use the trope in a play so overtly concerned with opposing (English) marriage to (Dutch) rape? An explanation suggests itself if we focus on the ambivalent dramatic function of the epithalamium. Although the actual rape of Ysabinda takes place offstage, what we do see onstage resembles very closely the

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action of the epithalamium’s last verse. The substitute bridegroom, Harman

Junior, lures Ysabinda away from her companions and then begins to woo her, first with love and then with fury. Beginning with the earnest declaration that he loves her “more than his own Eies, more than the joys of Earth,

or hopes of heaven” (381), Harman “close pursues” his intended victim with prayer and entreaty, behind which lurks the threat of force: [Pray resolve to make me happy by your free consent; I do not love these half Enjoyments, t’enervate my delights with using force, and neither give myself nor you with that full content, which two can never have, but where

both join with equal eagerness to bless each other. (382)

The threat is made real when Ysabinda refuses to yield herself freely to his blandishments. Recapturing her offstage after she breaks from him, Harman bluntly spells out Ysabinda’s options: “Now you are mine; yield, or by force

I'le take it.” From outside our field of vision we hear Harman say that he will “bear her where your crys shall not be heard” and, close upon that, his

victim's cry: “Succor sweet Heaven, oh succor me” (383). Veiling the actual rape from our eyes, the scene accurately reproduces for the audience the victim’s shutting her eyes to her fate, for which the epithalamium had already

laid the ground. For this pertains centrally to the epithalamium’s function: to evoke verbally a rape that we will not see, to provide a surrogate “experience” of the rape while withholding the visual spectacle. The celebration of an English marriage sings of a rape whose actual perpetrator will only later be embodied on the stage in the form of the Young Harman. Such a preposterous identification makes the rape present to us, but in a displaced fashion: only

as the act of the other. It directs our gaze to the colonial competitor who is produced as different by his physically taking up the position that the epithalamium has aurally projected. Thus, the epithalamium conceals the implicit English rape of the colonized by explicitly assigning it elsewhere. It thereby produces the opposition between the English and the Dutch, while

simultaneously concealing their identity vis-a-vis the feminized colonized subject upon whose body this opposition 1s marked. The colonized subject constitutes in this sense the suppressed third term enabling an internally fragmented European colonial subject to stage itself. In Dryden's Amboyna this subject appears only in two forms. Through

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the firsc-—and dramatically less important—form, Dryden “rehearses” otherness in order to establish and make visible the place of the “other” within a structure of mercantilist domination.”° Early in the first act, for example,

a group of dancing Amboyners enter—in Beamont’s words—“from our [the English} factory” to provide “some sudden entertainment . . . designd

for your [Towerson’s] return” (358). These native inhabitants, “Men and Women with Timbrels before them,” exist only as spectacles to be seen and

savored by an English audience and their colonial representatives onstage. They stage themselves “voluntarily” for the colonial master who runs the factory in which they work. In producing an “objective” distance between observer and observed, the performance constitutes the native Indians or Amboyners as objects of observation and analysis, introducing “into the object,’ to borrow Bourdieu’s succinct phrase, “the principles of .. . [the observer's] relation to the object.’”° Both the colonial master’s ownership of the labor power of the native islanders—their objectification for the sake of colonial production and trade—as well as the colonial representation of this relationship (as the voluntary rendering of service) are reproduced in the objectification of the native islanders as performative subjects who display their devotion to and acceptance of the power ruling over them. The second figure is the one we have just examined: the “Indian” woman, Ysabinda, through whose violated body the play differentiates European co-

lonialism into its nationally specific forms. If the Amboyners’ dance expresses and disguises a general colonial domination, the struggle over Ysabinda’s body links this process to the specification of a properly English colonialism. It articulates a difference between the two colonial powers on the basis of their nearly invisible identity with regard to the colonized subject. Nor ought we to miss the intervention of an ideological screen upon which the colonized subject must be projected if it is to be at all visible. Dryden transforms the

Ysabinda of his source text, a Japanese soldier living in Amboyna, into an “Indian” lady, and moreover, one who has already converted to Christianity.

The actual process of conversion that so concerned John Fletcher is for Dryden simply one of the assumed conditions: the colonized land has already and of its own accord accepted both the gender and the religion demanded of it by the colonizer. The only relevant question remains that of who may legitimately claim and exercise colonial domination. As metaphor for colonial aggression, the import of Ysabinda’s rape is

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double-edged, for ultimately the play emphasizes less the brutality of the rape itself than the question of its legality. In distinguishing the two nations, Dryden opposes the extralegal and uncivilized act of Dutch rape to English martiage, the socially sanctioned form of colonial intercourse. But as a form of violence that the Dutch and the English both participate in, the rape has to be subordinated to what really matters: the production of an intra-~European difference. That we do not see the rape effects just such a subordination, so that the “true” brutality of the Dutch emerges in its full visibility only later. It is therefore no accident that the rape takes place offstage: it must not deflect the viewer's attention from the climactic scene of representative English subjects being tortured. As Dryden's epilogue puts it, “A Poet once the Spartan’s [sic] led to fight, /... So wou'd our Poet lead you on this day, / Shewing your torturd Fathers in his Play” (406). The invisibility of the rape ensures that the violence of colonial domination remains concealed, unable to interfere with or detract from the spectacle of national humiliation that is to bring forth an “Age... when an English Monarch / With Blood, shall pay that blood which you [the Dutch] have shed” (405). As the commercial metaphor suggests, trade and blood are intimately

linked in the colonial East. But the question that concerns both Dryden and us is: Whose blood? Dryden's answer is of a piece with the image developed in A True Relation: They [the Dutch] had prepared a cloth of blacke Velvet for Captain Towersons body to fall upon; which being stayned and defaced with his blood,

they afterward put to the account of the English Companie.””

To give a face to English colonialism, to balance accounts by extracting payment in Dutch blood, such is Dryden's project. It is a project that must deny a received payment in the currency of “native” blood by concealing the convertibility of blood and commodities. To such an effacement of the material conditions of English mercantile colonialism the concluding couplet of Dryden's Annus Mirabilis had already borne silent witness: A constant Trade-wind will securely blow,

And gently lay us on the Spicy shore.”®

Through this vision, “India” itself is effaced, along with the “Indian” natives who produce and deal in spices. As Amboyna demonstrates, staging Wtns

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dia” converts it into nature, into the trade wind that is to blow the English colonialists onto eastern shores they alone were destined to possess. Dryden's Amboyna succeeded upon its first performance not just because of the surrounding context of an Anglo-Dutch war, but because the play presented England and its colonial aspirations to the theatergoing public as a unified, national project, making sense of a shifting world and a doubtful wat. Dryden's Amboyna should be seen, then, not as a literary aberration in his

oeuvre, but rather as an important reflex of the way in which an English selfunderstanding was constructed and promulgated at a crucial moment in the nation’s history. That the play vanishes into the history from which it arose signifies less a literary failure than a political success, testified to by the persistence of “honourable commerce” as the ideological basis for English colonialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the play’s neglect by literary criticism perhaps only underscores how seamlessly it has merged into a history it helped produce, a history that equally subtly appro-

priates the East by staging it for English eyes.

Part

Three

Upstaging

the Gast

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Chapter

Six

INDIAN Boys AND BuskIN’p AMAZONS:

EXCHANGES

OF ‘A MipsumMER

THE OEFDIPAL

NiGut’s DREAM’

This book began by tracing a particular genealogy of early modern culture, enquiring after the role of the proto-colonial voyages in the historical formation of European selfhood and world. Of primary interest was the imprint of the past, the important ways in which inherited modes of thinking and behaving shaped the development and effects of European colonial activity in the East. We now turn our focus to the shadows this activity cast upon the future. For early modern colonialism helped establish epistemological frames that invisibly but crucially continue to disseminate their effects in contemporary literary criticism as well as the wider world. Psychoanalysis will be used here as an exemplary case to suggest how critical readings of early modern texts remain haunted by the history of colonialism. The choice of the psychoanalytical paradigm reflects the author's own debt—buried in the book’s title —to categories of Freudian and Lacanian thought. Such theoretical borrowings have a limit, however, in that psychoanalytic theory itself possesses a spe-

cific genealogy caught up in the development of colonialist ideology and its blind spots. In addition, for reasons that will become clearer below, the choice

is motivated by the Shakespearean text under scrutiny here: A Midsummer Night's Dream. A reading of the play and its relationship to the psychoanalysisoriented critical tradition it has spawned will elucidate the complex links that bind early modern texts to our diverse investments in them. Psychoanalytic readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream also bring to the forefront a topic that has surfaced in the two preceding chapters: the interrelation of colonialism and gender. Both Fletcher's The Island Princess and Dryden's Amboyna represent the to-be-colonized land in terms of the female, na259

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tive body, over which European colonial powers struggle. In Sir Walter Ralegh’s often-cited tract on the discovery of Guiana this identification leads to positing rape as the representational model for colonial conquest in the Americas.' The plays we have examined suggest that in the East marriage provides

a privileged metaphor to represent the ideal relationship between colonizer and colonized.” As a trope, colonial marriage assumes a prior assimilation through conversion: the native woman expresses her willingness to enter the colonizer’s world by voluntarily taking up his religion. As we saw, marriage could be likened to a contractual partnership or a treaty, albeit one based

upon a prior ideological ratification of a colonial frame that associated civilization and truth with the (implicitly or explicitly Western) attributes of reason, masculinity, Christian faith, honor, bounty, and so on.?

This chapter focuses on the marriage trope to reveal how it rewrites colonial domination as the anticipation of conjugal bliss. Given the importance of the family and the parental bond to Freudian thought, psychoanalytic concerns usefully converge with the early modern use of marriage to conceive of and represent the “union” between European nation-states and the colonized others they encountered. Nor is it surprising, then, that psy-

choanalytical theory seems well fitted to reconstructing the specific intersection of gender with colonial politics. But examination of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will also serve here to probe the nature of this appropriateness. The aptness of the theory seems to me centrally linked to a metacritical problem: that of the historical relationship between the grounding assumptions of the psychoanalytical paradigm, on the one hand, and the gendered structures of early modern colonialism, on the other.

Oedipal Erasures: Colonial Kidnappings Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with the Duké of Athens, The-

seus, announcing his marriage four days hence to Hippolyta, the Amazon

queen he has recently subdued. This moment of joy and its deferred consummation is, however, immediately disrupted by the introduction of four Athenian lovers—Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius, and Helena—tangled in a

web of amorous confusion that threatens both parental and ducal authority. The fairy world of the forest, where the bulk of the play's action transpires,

echoes the opposition between individual happiness and social order in terms

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of ‘A Midsummer

Night’s

Dream’

of a struggle between Oberon and Titania (the king and queen of the fairies) over the possession of a changeling Indian boy. A similar tension is evoked within the theatrical presentation performed by a group of “rude mechanicals” of the “lamentable comedy” of Pyramus and Thisbe. In other words, A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages homologous crises (and promises their overcoming) on four social levels: those of aristocracy, citizenry, fairies, and (through performance) workers. The dramatic resolution of the play's final scenes, the disentangling of romantic confusion and the celebration of socially legitimated marriage, projects as such a version of history in which individual suffering is overcome by reconciling personal desire with the overarching imperatives of social cohesion. “It is not hard,’ Russell Berman ironically observes, “to recognize .. . [in this] trajectory ... an early version of the Enlightenment narrative of emancipation and progressivist optimism.’* That such “emancipation” and “optimism” have historically always been restricted in scope will soon become apparent enough, but for now we need merely register the broad contours of the play’s ideological world. A brief glance at the authoritative Arden edition confirms how powerfully this incipient Enlightenment narrative has shaped A Midsummer Night’s Dream's critical reception. The central theme of this “festive comedy” (the phrase is C. L. Barber's), according to the Arden editor, is “love and marriage ...: love aspiring to and consummated in marriage, or to a harmonious partnership within it.”° Taking their cue from the young courtier Lysander’s lament that “the course of true love never did run smooth,’ traditional interpretations have seen in the play's dreamworld an expression of the potentially disruptive forces of passion, imagination, and irrationality, which are then harmonized with the putatively rational order of a social world framing the dream in the forest.° While more recent studies have emphasized the play’s ideological intervention in the formation of normative social categories,’ the older strains of literary criticism nonetheless remain strong, persisting not only as frequently cited critical authorities on the play but also

reiterated as theoretical positions in their own right.® Against such models of dramatic closure, we need to stress the twofold resistance that occasions the play’s social crisis: Hermia’s refusal to marry the man singled out by her father, and Titania’s refusal to surrender the Indian

Boy to Oberon. The play’s “dream-work” stages a doubled contest over property, for Hermia and for the Indian Boy. In Act 1, scene 1—where we glimpse

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the Athenian world for the first time—Hermia is responsible for an unresolved conflict affecting the civic order. Titania reveals to us in Act 2, scene 1 (where we first encounter the fairy world), that the “dissension” over the Indian Boy has disrupted the rhythms of the entire natural world: the rivers “overbear” their “continents”; the labor of the ploughman and his oxen yields nothing but “green corn” that rots “ere his youth hath attained a beard”; the grazing fields are “drowned”; the seasons

“change their wonted liveries”

(2.1.90—113). Hermia’s resistance to paternal injunction and Titania's rejection of conjugal demand destabilize the orthodox patriarchal hierarchy, with whose emphatic announcement the play begins and—subject to certain qualifications—ends. Furthermore, A Midsummer Night’s Dream announces a structural homology between Hermia and the Indian Boy through their similar function as tokens of exchange: their transfer into the “right” hands is necessary for the social pact to be reestablished. Thus, the play’s resolution depends, too, upon a doubled deception by Oberon: his drugging Demetrius into transferring his love back from Hermia to Helena, and his tricking Titania into relin-

quishing the Indian Boy to him. Although the parallel between Hermia and the Indian Boy indicates a functional or structural resemblance, this does not imply a theatrical equivalence. Unlike Hermia, the Indian Boy never appears on the stage. Even as

he contributes crucially both as cause and resolution of the play's dramatic action, he is conspicuous only as an absent center. His is an unseen exchange,

one that takes place behind the scenes, despite the fact that the exchange remains indispensable for the restoration of patriarchal hegemony. Nevertheless, Hermia’s greater visibility —within both the play and the critical tradition—should not lead to our bracketing a less obvious—and less noticed —problem: How does the literary representation depend.upon the erasure of a subject who is explicitly cast as different or other? What is the significance of the Indian Boy as absent presence within the dominant structures of this ostensibly proto-Enlightenment narrative? In narrating her reasons for not giving up the Indian Boy, Titania ren-

ders visible both the gendered and colonial frames operative in the play: Set your heart at rest.

The fairy land buys not the child of me. His mother was a votaress of my order

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Night’s Dream’

And in the spiced Indian air, by night, Full often hath she gossiped by my side, And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands, Marking th’embarked traders on the flood; When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and swimming gait

Following (her womb then rich with my young squire),

Would imitate, and sail upon the land To fetch me trifles, and return again, As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.

But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,

And for her sake do I rear up her boy;

And for her sake I will not part with him. (2.1.123-37)

Titania's initially peremptory response to Oberon’s demand for the child shifts into a different register when she recalls the time she spent with the boy’s mother. The short, clipped opening sentences give way to an elaborated and elegiac reminiscence through which she relives her past. As has often been noted, Titania's vision of an autonomous female community independent of the dictates and demands of men (her “order”) resonates with the female-female couplings hinted at in the Athenian plot. The connection to Hippolyta’s Amazon past is clear enough, but Titania's speech also echoes in Helena’s later accusation that Hermia has forgotten “all the counsel we two have shard, / The sister’s vows, the hours we have spent / When we

have chid the hasty-footed time / For parting us” (3.2.198—201).” These resonances motivate Louis Montrose’s astute observation that the play stages “the inversionary claims of matriarchy, sorority, and female autonomy”!° in order to reestablish patriarchal orthodoxy through their overcoming, The reiteration of the matriarchal theme in the play suggests that the “injury” for

which Oberon will later “torment” Titania (2.1.147)—that of refusing to yield the Indian Boy—involves equally her upholding the rights of this idealized female community, while denying him any conjugal right over her body (“I have forsworn his bed and company” [2.1.62]). Counterpointing Titania’s matriarchal fantasy is Oberon’s exclusively male one, in which mothers play no part. If impregnation in the former occurs sans male agency, Oberon responds with a parthenogenetic fantasy of a world inhabited exclusively by fathers and sons. As Puck tells us, for “jeal-

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ous” Oberon, the Indian Boy is a “changeling” “stol’n from an Indian king” (2.1.22), and he wishes to “have the child VAKnight of his train, to trace the

forests wild” (2.1.24—25). Titania’s refusal to repeat Oberon’s description of the boy as a changeling emphasizes the difference between their respective “economies.” For Oberon, the boy must function as a token of exchange, and this function belongs to his essence, as a changeling. Through the enforced exchange of the boy, Oberon’s knightly, imperial order is instituted and stabilized, just as the economy of mercantile colonialism in India itself rests upon the fiction of equal and just exchange. Against Oberon's economy in which the changeling functions purely as a signifier of exchange-value, Ti-

tania proposes an economy of barter based on the “use-values” of female community, memory, and shared pleasure. For her the boy marks a shared past, a history, a set of social relations.

Focusing exclusively on the gender conflict tends, however, to deflect attention from how Titania’s description, too, cunningly instrumentalizes the discourse of mercantile colonialism to justify her ownership of the child. The Indian mother is “rich” with the boy, just as the air of India is rich with spices that the “embarked traders” seek. The votaress’s imitation of a trading ship conflates richness as natural fullness and fertility with colonial richness, a material wealth won through enforced trade. Her pregnant stomach mimics the ship's swelled sail, and she moves upon the shore like a ship on water, returning “as from a voyage, rich with merchandise.” Just as the trading ships bring back to Europe the treasures of the East, she gives to Titania through her own death a distilled essence of the East, the ‘Indian Boy. His absence is nothing less than the immense distance that separates Europe from India, a distance doubly figured as death. His presence is nothing less than a bridging of that distance in the form of Europe’s.consumption of Eastern wares: Titania will not “part” with the boy because she has made him

part of her. : In other words, the colonial enterprise metaphorically provides Titania the measure of value upon which metonymically to ground her claim. If the Indian Boy represents his absent mother and her relationship to Titania, co-

lonial discourse concretely represents his value through the foreign merchandise destined to be consumed by the home country. The East is produced as absence to be filled by the materiality of Western desire, embodied concretely in Eastern commodities. Despite their differences, Oberon’s and Titania’s

245

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Exchanges

of ‘A Midsummer

Night’s

Dream’

economies both rest upon commodifying the East, thereby assimilating its

otherness within structures of Western thought. The conflict between them underscores the significance of the boy’s present absence: it marks a struggle over the form of control. This brief reading of Titania’s speech attempts to make visible the problematic of colonial difference at the moment of its erasure; it tries, as it were, to seize upon the Indian Boy at the crossover between two forms of colonial kidnap. But there remains a danger attendant upon filling in the absent center: that of effacing yet again—albeit on another level—the recovered presence of the colonial subject and its history. The problem may best be posed by examining an interpretation that reinstates the Indian Boy at the play’s center, Allen Dunn's “The Indian Boy’s Dream Wherein Every Mother's Son Rehearses His Part.’"’ Dunn perceptively analyzes the play in terms of “a psychology of dramatic form” that posits sexual conflict as the play’s central concern. The Freudian prototype here is the Oedipal conflict, which consti-

tutes the primal scene of “accession into the adult order of socially sanc-

tioned sexuality” (19). Dunn's insight is a spectacular one: he identifies the dream in the forest as the fantasy of the Indian Boy himself, a defensive response to the trauma

of being snatched away by Oberon (the father-figure representing the normative social world) from the mother-figure, Titania. “In psychoanalytic terms, [the Indian Boy]... is being forced to relinquish his oedipal dependency on his mother, ... and to submit to the father’s law, the law that will

ensure his own guilty masculinity” (21). According to the logic of the Oedipal frame, the physical absence of the Indian Boy from the play expresses his centrality as dreaming subject: precisely because it is his dream, he defensively

displaces his agency onto the other figures within the play, and in particular onto Bottom, the artisan who is “infantilized and nurtured [by Titania] as a stand-in” for the Indian Boy himself.'? The final exchange, which leads to the reconciliation between Titania and Oberon, represents the Indian Boy's accession to the patriarchal social order, signaling acceptance of an assigned

place within the cultural system. Dunns interpretation 1s both astute and seductive in its intelligent use of a theoretical model, that of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to retmagine the absence of the Indian Boy as in fact

the necessary form of his presence. As is often the case, though, the “East” marks a blind spot in an other-

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wise powerful reading of the play. For what is disturbing about Dunn's reading is that he ignores the fact that the boy is Indian. Almost tracelessly, he silences the Indian at the precise moment when the boy is revealed as fantasy’s author. By erasing the play of colonial difference in the constitution of the subject, Dunn's interpretation repeats the logic of the very critics he posi-

tions himself against (C. L. Barber, G. K. Hunter, H. Brooks, and others). While their understanding of the play remained wedded to a universalist Enlightenment version of history, Dunn's displacement of that history in

turn reinstitutes it in a displaced form: in the narrative of the male Oedipal subject as the “true” universal subject of human history. And this reinstatement repeats the erasure of the marginalized, colonial other on whose behalf the interpretation claims to speak, the very other whom the title of Dunn's

essay foregrounds.

The logic of this erasure is indeed announced quite explicitly by James L. Calderwood, who draws in turn upon Dunn’s interpretation of the play."

Calderwood identifies Oberon’s desire for the Indian Boy as exemplifying the Lacanian notion of “demand.” According to Lacan, “[d]emand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions it calls for. ...[{ It] annuls (aufhebt) the particularity of anything that can be granted by transmuting it into a proof of love.’"* In this sense, Oberon’s demand “annuls” “the particularity” of the boy by transforming him into a symbol of what Oberon really desires,

the gift of Titania's love and obedience. The physical absence of the boy from the stage thus—and here Calderwood iterates Dunn's central point—“does to him theatrically what Oberon and Titania do to him rhetorically—transform him into a signifier in a system of communication.”!® Now, the utility of the Lacanian category of demand would seem to lie

in the fact that it restores the Indian Boy’s presence to the play by explaining why his transfer necessarily effaces his particularity. Yet, reyealing that “an-

nulment” itself ends up by annulling—yet again—the boy's Indian-ness, effacing his particularity as the effect of a colonial discourse that the play both expresses and conceals. Moreover, the effacement ends up defending Theseus in a manner very close to the more traditional positions espoused by Brooks and others: the play closes, according to Calderwood, with Theseus “relax-

ing” the “phallocratic tyranny” of the Athenian world in order to rid patriarchy of its most egregious features and to take Hippolyta up in what is in effect a companionate marriage.

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Night’s Dream’

Shakespeare’s erasure of something like “colonial subjectivity” (or what one might be tempted to call “race”) reflects the historical difficulty in the sixteenth century of conceiving the ethnic other except as the filled space of Western, imperialist desire. This attitude served the emergence of the Enlightenment concepts of subject and history, among whose enabling condi-

tions was the material domination of groups marked as different (indeed helping shape the category of “race” in the process). By contrast, the inter-

pretations proffered by Dunn and Calderwood function—against their very intentions, one would imagine—to conserve the universalized (male) subject of psychoanalysis as a displaced version of the Enlightenment subject, just

when the latter appears to have been undermined by challenges involving both “race” and gender. This erasure of “Indian”-ness on the level of “secondary theoretical elaborations” functions in the interest of what Etienne Balibar calls a “racism without race.’!° That is, the theoretical reiteration of a prior historical erasure of colonial differences (and of their gendering) contributes to preserving a Eurocentric (male) subject as “an irreducible methodological presupposition”!”under the guise of a pluralism that putatively acknowledges the historical reality of cultural (and gendered) differences. The significance of this effacement lies in what the act reveals—that such erasures are in fact constitutive of the theoretical models through which we read and understand literary texts. The specific shortcomings I have located in the arguments advanced by Dunn and Calderwood seem far from fortuitous. They open onto the more general problem of the limits placed upon theoretical frameworks by virtue of the genealogy of their emergence (and, in particular, of their historical entanglement in discourses of power).

If canonical readings of literary texts often unreflectively evoke categories that those texts first helped to institute, theoretically informed readings run a related risk when they attempt to displace such canonical interpretations: that of universalizing their own enabling conditions—and thereby of repeating the “original” erasure in a displaced form.

Oedipal Erasures:

The Woman's Part

A Midsummer Night’s Dream tightly interweaves colonial erasure with the question of gender. Indeed, the gender problematic seems at first glance the primarty issue, since the very opening scene of the play establishes an immedi-

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ate concern with female rebellion against the father and the patriarchal family.’ Regardless of whether one treats the dream as the Indian Boy’s (Dunn) or as Theseus’s (Calderwood), asserting the thematic primacy of sexual conflict means also to interpret that conflict in terms of the emergence of the masculine subject. The surreptitious overlaying of the Oedipal subject of psychoanalytic theory onto a relational field comprising different—and not necessarily consonant—dynamics of subject formation thus returns us to the problem of how the play negotiates the “woman's part.’ The most sustained and influential analysis of the play's gender politics is undoubtedly Louis Montrose’s. Reconstructing Dream's specific contextual determinants, his reading combines psychoanalysis with historicism in order to “emphasize the historical specificity of psychological processes, the politics of the unconscious.””? At the heart of Montrose’s argument is the insight that the play stages the insertion of the individual into the social order by interrelating an ontogenetic principle with a phylogenetic one. In the play's opening scene, Egeus bases his right to “dispose” of Hermia as he pleases upon the ontogenetic principle that he has made her. Supporting Egeus’s point of view, Theseus elaborates on what patriarchal orthodoxy demands from its female subjects: To you your father should be as a god: One that composd your beauties, yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax By him imprinted, and within his power

To leave the figure, disfigure it. (1.1.47—51)

“Theseus represents paternity,’ Montrose remarks, “as a cultural act ...: the father is a demiurge or homo faber, who composes, in-forms; imprints himself upon, what is merely inchoate matter.’ Hermia’s subjecthood, Theseus’s Aristotle-derived position avers, lies in her subjecting desire.to duty: her composition as subject derives from Egeus’s power to dispose and to “disfigure” what he has “composed.” The paternal act of creation constitutes the ontogenetic moment that endows the individual with its:meaning, forming the individual qua social subject.

At the same time, though, biological paternity itself refers back to the institution of paternity as a cultural form, a social structure validating the claims a particular father (Egeus) can make upon his daughter. And that legitimat-

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ing structure comes into being through a different, phylogenetic process of overcoming what patriarchy projects as its other: a society constituted solely on the basis of female-female bonds. The institution of patriarchy requires a counter-myth against which it forms itself, that of a matriarchy now expelled to the edges of the known world and the margins of the text. For, as Montrose

further argues, what Theseus’s argument omits “is the relationship between mother and daughter—the kinship bond through which the Amazonian society reproduces itself?’ Theseus’s passing remark directed at Hippolyta as he exits—“what cheer, my love?” (1.1.122)—registers faintly her disengagement

from (or dissatisfaction with) the exercise of patriarchal power she has just witnessed. Her unspeaking presence points to Theseus’s silent effacement of female kinship, of an alternative social ordering that Titania will later explicitly invoke. There remains, however, a tension between the two kinds of explanatory

models evoked by Montrose, recalling a comparable difficulty in Freud’s account of the Oedipus complex. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, the methodological peculiarity of the psychoanalytic narrative can be traced back to the nature of Freud’s monumental “discovery”: “[I]n one stroke... [the Oedipal complex] is revealed both as an individual drama and as the collective fate of mankind, as a psychological fact and as the source of morality, as the origin of neurosis and as the origin of civilization.””! For Freud, the power

of the Oedipus myth derives from its capturing the singular structure of individual desire. Yet, at the same time, the myth itself qua myth shows that

the singular Oedipal experience is in fact universal. This doubled “truth” of the Oedipal—as both the decisive constitution of the individual's libidinal economy and his inescapable social destiny—trepresents, moreover, a double

requirement that the theory has to meet if it is to establish itself as scientific. On the one hand, psychoanalysis has to “extract” the singular structure of individual desire from the social world and its narratives; on the other, it has to show that these narratives themselves in fact correspond to or originate in a primary and timeless structure of desire.” Let us reformulate the problem in terms of the relationship between the ontogenetic and phylogenetic paradigms. The purely economic explanation of how a child “internalizes” restrictions imposed upon his desire through direct interaction with his parents” leads to constructing the parents themselves as the embodiment of a stable principle of authority and valuation. But

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if the ontogenesis of the superego—which we can essentially equate with institutionalized structures of authority and power external to the individual— is to escape the infinite regress by which the child's superego ts constructed on the basis of his parents’ superego (itself transmitted from their prior generation ad infinitum), it has to appeal to a cultural or sociological explanation that locates in the stable, sedimented forms of the external social world the structures that constrain and shape the individual subject. Thus ontogenesis leads, as Freud’s Totem and Taboo demonstrates, to phylogenesis, to “hoping to

find in the institution of the prohibition of incest and in institutions generally the sociological counterpart of the Oedipus complex.’ Montrose’s reading of the sexual politics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes the necessary transition from an ontogenetic to a phylogenetic explanation by locating the latter's necessity in “an overcompensation for the natural fact that men do indeed come from women” and “an overcompensation for the cultural facts that consanguineal and affinal ties between men are established through mothers, wives, and daughters.’””° The normative structures of patriarchy compensate in this sense for a doubled dependence; they

are the symptomatic effects of the natural and cultural vulnerability of men to the powers of women. In terms of Montrose’s historical argument, male vulnerability takes a very specific form in Elizabethan England. The cultural presence of a female figure in a position of absolute power—and, moreover, one who selfconsciously deploys varied patriarchal stereotypes of womanhood—provides an imagined male dependency with its precise historical instantiation. Although itself part of a general compensatory process through which pa-

triarchal norms are instituted, the play's “shaping fantasy” addresses such a dependence through a historically located act of overcoming. To reassert patriarchal control over Elizabeth's cultural presence, it reappropriates Elizabeth’s own complex appropriation of the virginal, maternal, and erotic representations of women within a (patriarchally structured). domestic domain. Restaging the institution of patriarchy via a timeless fantasy of male dependence upon a women-governed world, the play both evokes and subdues a historically specific form of dependence, “symbolically neutraliz[ing] the royal power to which it ostensibly pays homage.’ Such an argument does indeed, as Montrose intends, convincingly demonstrate how the Oedipal complex “is at once a social and a psychological

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phenomenon.””’ But the demonstration succeeds only at a price, and, indeed the very one that Freud pays in Totem and Taboo or in Moses and Monotheism: the psychologization of history and culture. Explaining social phenomena via a recourse to the economy of individual desire succeeds only by psychologizing social phenomena. The moral strictures of the social world are shown to originate in taboos of “primitive” societies that are grounded in the arbitrary, conventional, social structures of totemic kinship (which divide the world into appropriate and inappropriate objects). But these “primitive” kinship structures are themselves seen as a collective Oedipal complex, “an actual event that occurred at the beginning of history” and civilization.” Freud thus falls back upon an ontogenesis that “explains” social authority (away) as a historical and collective Oedipus complex. A similar circularity hovers behind Montrose’s implicit assumption that patriarchy itself is Oedipal male anxiety writ large. Implicit, because despite his careful analysis of the historical form taken by the Oedipal complex in the English Renaissance, Montrose never reflects upon the relationship between the early modern form and the historical emergence of the Freudian theoretical postulate. What he terms an androcentric culture’s “collective anxiety about the power of the female” is less a historically and socially restricted mediation through which the Oedipal complex becomes, as it were, Oedipal than a reactivation of a primary male, Oedipal anxiety—"“a culture-

specific fantasia upon Nature's universal theme.”” The reactivation is bound, as in Freud's theory, to an originary event, the “primal act” in Dream of overcoming a fantasized matriarchal other—once “wooed,” as Theseus proclaims, “with [the] sword” ... but now “wed... in another key” (1.1.16—18).°° Montrose’s historicization of this primal act draws on C. L. Barber's account of the Tudor suppression of the cult of the Virgin Mary. The problematic role of women in Shakespearean drama reflects, according to Barber,

a “loss of ritual resources for dealing with the internal residues in all of us of the once all-powerful and all-inclusive mother.’*! Supplementing this viewpoint, Montrose suggests that the Elizabethan appropriation of “the symbolism and affective power” of the Marian cult provides the historical frame within which male dependence upon maternal figures, both natural and cultural, is staged and managed. Now, to uncover the cultural constructedness of Egeus’s/Theseus’s claim to biological paternity seems to me entirely legitimate. However, in locating the historical emergence of patriarchy in the

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male appropriation of what Carole Pateman has called “mother-right,”*” Montrose also opposes to it a “readily apparent” biological maternity. Consequently, while he sees Shakespeare’s phylogenetic account of overcoming a matriarchal other as a masculinist fiction—and a historical one at that—he grounds its necessity transhistorically in an Oedipal male fear of and desire for the mother. Though the social prohibition of male desire may (and indeed does) generate different fictive forms that shape the culture that begets them,

the structure of desire itself is implicitly assumed to be historically invariant.

What is marked as a critique of the play’s patriarchal politics turns out therefore to repeat the erasure of the female subject through the very process of recounting a history of that erasure. Montrose’s reading implies that the women within the play exist only as figurations of male desire/anxiety. Insofar as he explicitly marks these as fictions, he exposes the play's ideological

construction of patriarchy and male subjectivity. However, such an unmasking also implies the radical autonomy of male subjectivity, which is shaped only by its own projection of what the female subject is, that is, its own (phan-

tasmic) construction of womanhood. Reducing the patriarchal formations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a historical “reactivation” of (male) Oedipal desire, Montrose’s argument tends to place that desire itself beyond history, leaving no room for alternative spaces or sites within or without the play’s dominant ideology. As with the psychoanalytic readings that attend to the Indian Boy, the use of the Oedipal model to explore the play's gendered politics thus redoubles the very effacement it intends to undo. , Where does this leave us, then, in relationship to psychoanalysis and its

paradigms? As Paul Ricoeur—rephrasing Freud’s own dictum—emphasizes, “with the Oedipus complex, psychoanalysis stands or falls. It is a matter of

taking it or leaving it’’*’ My suggestion that psychoanalytically influenced interpretations ultimately cover up the disruptive work of scolonialism and gender in Dream may seem to force the latter option upon us. But let us not

be too hasty. For despite their theoretical flaws, the arguments detailed above are plausible, and even convincing, within their frame of reference. At the

very least, their strength lies in a detailed and flexible artictilation of the different registets—especially sexual and social—upon which the play operates. Indeed if, as Barry Weller claims, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been

much better served by the critics than any of Shakespeare's other early comedies,’** the special congruence of this literary text to its interpretive tradi-

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tion derives in no small measure from the abundance and variety of psychoanalytically informed interpretations, which have detailed the inner logic of

its dream world and their articulation with psycho-social processes.”° Rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we ought instead

to press further on the strange affiliation between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the broad range of psychoanalytic responses to it. We need to raise the question of the uncanny appropriateness of the Oedipal model.*° Why does it seem so accurately to take the measure of the play? The remainder of the chapter will address this problem, and its implications for the play's Eastern others. First, we need to reformulate Ricoeur’s statement cited above in a way

fully in accord with his own attempt dialectically to bind Freud and Hegel,

psychoanalysis and philosophy. Rather than choosing a position for or against psychoanalysis, for or against the Oedipal complex, we can pursue the ques-

tion of its historical and theoretical limits. Such an endeavor reaches towards

what John Brenkman names “a cultural critique of psychoanalysis,” investigating the extent to which the enabling structures of Oedipal subjectivity are

themselves the product of historically specific cultural formations.*” Among the strongest challenges to Freudian orthodoxy is Paul Ricoeur's insistence that the institutional and symbolic processes constitutive of the Oedipal complex are intrinsic to—and not extraneous aspects of—its structure and history. To cite Brenkman’s succinct summary: Ricoeur links the Oedipus complex and patriarchy by showing that fatherhood is a symbolic construct enmeshed in the Western tradition, and he links the Oedipus complex and capitalism by showing that the form of personhood implicit in the Freudian account of the father-son relation is an economical-juridical construct derived from capitalist forms of property and contract.*®

In other words, the very form of the Oedipal complex—which Montrose

and Dunn assume as a methodological basis—depends upon the historical emergence of the “straight, male, modern” Western subject of modern pa-

triarchy and mercantile capitalism. Through the retroactive projection of a historically determinate form of subjectivity upon culture and history the Oedipus complex emerges as a universal model. Approaching the Oedipus complex from this perspective has direct consequences for our understanding of both Shakespeare's play and its literary

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critical reception. For A Midsummer Night’s Dream interweaves the doubled threads of gender and colonial difference, of patriarchal authority and mercantile imperialism, to produce an early version of our own “enlightened” history. Pointing out the interpretive limits of Dunn's re-centering of the absent Indian Boy or Montrose’s focus on an absent English queen serves not only to uncover the play’s intervention in a gendered and colonial history, but also to show how that history informs the structures of Freudian

psychoanalysis. Tracing the steps on the way to the bourgeois family and to mercantile capitalism retraces, too, Oedipus’s path.

Reconfiguring Patriarchy Some notion of patriarchal power is clearly indispensable if we are to grapple with the problem of gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The play begins, after all, with Theseus asserting his masculine authority over the woman he is to marry: “Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword, /...But I will wed thee in another key, /With pomp, with triumph, and with revelling” (1.1.16—19). And it closes with Oberon sanctioning Theseus’s marital and martial conquest: “To the best bride-bed will we, /Which by us shall blessed be” (5.1.388—89). Approvingly identifying Shakespeare with Theseus (and Oberon), an

earlier critical tradition upheld what it saw to be the play's orthodox resolution. Paul Olson argued, for instance, that the play made “luminous a traditional understanding of marriage” as an institution that “maintained the patterned hierarchy of society” and “fulfilled its part in the concord of things when the male ruled his mate in the same way that reason was ordained to control both will and passions.”*? Olson's position is certainly not a fashionable one nowadays. But one need not celebrate with him the play's endorsement of male authority to see that the issue of marriage expresses the play’s emphasis on conflicts with externally imposed, social norms. Thus a rather different sense that the play ought to be characterized in terms of a struggle against dominant formations has led to critics reading in its final scene not patriarchal conservatism but a forward-looking, anti-authoritarian affirmation of romantic love and companionate marriage.” While these two broadly sketched lines of enquiry differ in their conclusions regarding the play's overall “message,” they both nonetheless posit

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the patriarchal order and its idea of marriage as a stable ideological backdrop. In this they distinguish themselves sharply from the kinds of interpretations examined in the preceding section. For Montrose and Dunn, for example, the play does not merely reflect passively the dominant ideology of Elizabethan England, but actively stages conflict in order to reach towards a patriarchal configuration capable of reconciling “duty and desire.” And if they ultimately tend to read the play as supportive of patriarchal authority, mote recent readings—such as Patricia Parker's—emphasize that the play's intervention cuts two ways: it also makes visible the seams and the joins that hold patriarchy together.”! Nevertheless, most readings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream tend to share

a particular understanding of what constitutes patriarchy (regardless of whether the play is seen as finally supporting or undermining it). Patriarchy is interpreted almost exclusively in terms of paternity and paternal right, in terms of what Lacan calls the Law of the Father.4 The shift in, for instance,

Theseus'’s own position from strict upholder of Egeus’s Athenian law— which “by no means we may extenuate”’ (1.1.120)—to one who overrides its dictates—“Egeus, I will overbear your will” (4.1.177)—tends to be interpreted as a generational transference of power within the frame of paternal authority.*? Allen Dunn’s description of the Athenian plot as the enactment of an “Oedipal revenge”—whereby the son usurps the father’s position and establishes himself as the representative of state law—coincides here with Louis Montrose’s suggestion that the play ends upon “the threshold of another generational cycle, in which the procreation of new children will also produce new mothers and new fathers.’*+ Against this univocal understanding of patriarchy,** let us instead pur-

sue the possibility that the generational crisis in Dream is overdetermined by a second transition that involves reshaping the patriarchal order as such: by “overbearing” Egeus’s will, Theseus also transforms the paternal structure of authority, which he, Theseus, usurps. Clearly, such a transformation would affect how we understand the problem of marriage in the play. With regard to the comedies, Shakespeare's dramatic representation of marriage has often been seen as fundamentally progressive. Mary Beth Rose, for example, reads Shakespeare as partictpating in a Protestant idealization of marriage, leading to the emergence of “private experience as a serious center of significance in its own right.”*° By contrast, 1n

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her discussion of lyric in Elizabethan drama, Diana Henderson has argued that Shakespearean marriage functions to usurp female sovereignty, deploying Petrarchanism in the service of patriarchal politics.*7 While my sympathies

generally lie with the latter position, the important distinction still underemphasized in the criticism of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (and Shakespearean comedy in general) concerns the larger form of patriarchy (versus the evaluation of marriage, exclusively). Shakespeare's play seems to anticipate a shift in patriarchal formations consequent upon—to reach bluntly to my conclusion—both capitalism and colonialism. In other words, A Midsummer Night's Dream needs to be located at a moment of a historical and social transition between two related but conflictual models of patriarchy. The play “renews” the paternal contract by superimposing upon it a new social “contract,” one that has everything to do—as we shall see—with the formation of the Oedipus complex. The new contract adumbrated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream becomes clearer if we look ahead to a late seventeenth-century debate that paradigmatically enacts a patriarchal overcoming of patriarchy: the discussion be-

tween Sir Robert Filmer and John Locke about the role of the English state. Defending the monarchical state, Filmer revives the Renaissance doctrine of the divine right of kings, whose central theoretical edifice was a strong homology between familial and social structure. For him, Adam, the ur-identity

of monarch and father, receives from God the original right to rule, confer-

ring his title in turn onto all subsequent fathers and kings. The divine will that made Adam father and king justifies simultaneously the absolutism of monarchical/paternal will. To cite Filmer, “[t]he natural and private dominion of Adam” constitutes “the fountain of all government and propriety.’*® In this sense, Filmer’s father-principle seconds the viewpoint espoused by Theseus/Egeus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s opening scene. There can be no such thing as tyranny because the absolute power of the sovereign or the father is not open to question. Despite his insistence on their inseparability, Filmer’s homology between familial and political spheres in fact responds to an historical separation between them. In the wake of the Restoration, Filmer reasserts monarchical privilege by arguing for an originary unity of family and state. Locke's defense of a contractual civil society through a fictive history of social development also presumes the same historical separation. The important dif-

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ference is that Locke refuses to treat the unity of family and state as a divinely ordained and binding point of departure. The “first Ages of the World” were characterized, Locke informs us, by the pragmatic or “natural”

necessity of forming political structures on the basis of familial patriarchal structures. But the investment of power in the father—his position as familial monarch—derived not from his fatherhood per se, but from the implicit mutual agreement of his sons, for whom “twas easie, and almost nat-

ural... by a tacit and scarce avoidable consent to make way of the Father's Authority and Government’? Since the father-monarch’s power is for Locke an effect of a consensual structure, consent may be withdrawn when circumstances dictate. To cite Pateman’s summary, “the sons, in an act of symbolic, if not actual, parricide,

withdraw their consent to the father’s power and claim their natural liberty. They then make the original contract and create civil society, or political society, which is separated into two spheres,’°° that is, into civil society proper —the realm of freedom, equality, individualism, reason, contract, and law—

and the “private world of particularity” defined in terms of “natural subjection, laws of blood, emotion, love, and sexual passion.”*' Locke replaces

Filmer’s ascriptive patriarchalism with a society structured by universal and conventional bonds of contract, thereby collapsing kinship into the “family,”

which receives its own social location in the private sphere, separated from public “civil” society. Undermining paternal right in this way represents, however, less a permanent overthrowing of patriarchalism than its reestablishment in a modern form— indeed precisely in the guise of contractual relations between “free” and “independent” individuals. Through a literal reading of patriarchy as rule by the father (that is, “father-right”), Locke constructs the fiction of an “original contract” upon whose basis “the conventional, civil, public world of contract and capitalism” is differentiated from “the familial, paternal, nat-

ural private sphere.” The rejection of what Pateman calls “classic patriarchal thought” does not therefore banish patriarchy as such, since even Locke's narrative locates the origins of social life in the historical genesis of the patriarchal family. Rather, Locke’s narrow understanding of patriarchy as paternal right justifies seeing in that older notion the displacement of earlier familial relations onto the political realm. Patriarchal authority ts thus narrowly interpreted in terms of familial, and not political, relationships.°” The seman-

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tic restriction creates the distinction between a public and a private domain, limiting paternal right to the latter. The historical importance of the transition marked by Locke's break from the classic patriarchalism of the Filmer type cannot be underestimated. At the same time, one needs to recognize that both Locke and Filmer ob-

scure what they in fact share: that conjugal subjection is both natural and prior to the social models they defend. This shared heritage becomes especially evident in Freud’s later conjectural revision of the origins of social life. Drawing upon a Lockean understanding of the family as a private space of affect, Freud rearticulates the place of sexuality in the civilizing process. His distinctive point of departure is Darwin's “primal horde,” in which a “violent and jealous father... keeps all the females to himself and drives away his sons as they grow up.’ Eclectically combining Darwin with the “findings” of nineteenth-century ethnology, Freud creates his own mythic narra-

tive of human sexuality and sociality: One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeeded in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. ... Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers: and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one of them ac-

quired a portion of his strength. The totem meal... would’thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things—of social organization, of moral

restrictions and of religion.™

Following the Oedipal parricide, the now guilt-ridden brothers establish what Freud calls “the two taboos of totemism.’ First, they outlaw all further acts of parricide, both real or symbolic (for example, killing the father substitute, the totem). The second law establishes fraternal égalité, by putting

into place the incest taboo. Because each of them “would have wished, like his father, to have all the women to himself,” the brothers “institute the law

against incest, by which they all alike renounced the women whom they desired and who had been the chief motive for despatching their father.’°° The Oedipal revolt of the sons against the father does not stem—as

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with Locke—merely from a desire for natural liberty and self-government. Rather, it expresses the need to regulate access to women.°° Social organization and morality require the additional restriction to avoid their being riven by the sexual rivalry between men. As Pateman underscores, Freud’s formulation is misleading in one crucial respect: it is less that the brothers renounce the women than that they claim equal access to them. Their abstract equality as civil individuals in the eyes of the law depends in the first place on their concrete equality as men who resemble one another in having the same right to women. Marriage—the “natural” basis upon which civil society is erected—is instituted through a social contract by means of which the brothers articulate their political or social identity. Thus, the very separation between civil society (the political realm) and the family (the patriarchal realm) derives from a prior social and political subjugation of women through marital and kinship laws. Moreover, excluding the family from the public realm conceals the displacement of the sexual contract onto marriage. Naturalizing the family veils a transformation of patriarchy: from a system grounded upon the father’s exclusive right to a social formation in which male sexual equality secures the “universal” right shared by all men. Freud’s reconstruction of parricide as an Oedipal act responsible for both civil society and the familial world of kinship pretends—as do Locke and Filmer’s foundational narratives—to a universal account of the origin of human society. But the form of the laws laid down by the brothers reveals that the narrative really concerns the origins of a culturally specific mode of social life, reflecting a historical incompatibility (staged in the Filmer-Locke

debate) between paternal rule and the demands of civil society. What Freud provides is less a reconstruction of an actual event, an originary “wound” that enables history, than the retroactive projection of sociocultural divisions and categories that have been established through a historical process leading up to his time. Intending to locate the universal structure of human desire in the “small letters” of the Oedipus story, Freud reads into the myth the “large letters” of civil society and family, of male socialization and female subjugation, repeating and universalizing the very history to which he is heir.°”

The conflicts of A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s opening scene dramatize these tensions within an already occurring historical transition from paternity to fraternity. On the heels of Theseus’s defense of Egeus’s right to “dispose” his daughter as he will, Demetrius insists that Lysander “yield / Thy

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crazed title to my certain right” (1.1.91-92). Both Lysander and Egeus confirm that Demetrius derives his “certain right” from a paternal model of patriarchy. The former mockingly suggests that Demetrius marry Hermia’s father (whose love he has). Egeus himself—offended by Lysander's flippant disregard for paternal right—immediately associates his love for Demetrius with the transfer of property from father to son: Scornful Lysander, true, he hath my love;

And what is mine my love shall render him; And she is mine, and all my right of her

I do estate unto Demetrius. (1.1.95—98) The language of property and possession (“hath,

dd

66

mine,’ “render,” “estate’’)

coincides here with a structure of patriarchy qua paternal authority. Egeus possesses Hermia by virtue of being her father, a right backed by the weight of Athenian law. To recall Locke’s outraged description of Filmer’s father principle, “he hath an Absolute, Arbitrary Power, Unlimited and Unlim-

itable, over the Lives, Liberties and Estates of his Children; so that he may

take or alienate their Estates, sell, castrate or use their Persons as he pleases they being all his Slaves, and he Lord and Proprietor of every thing.”*® Embodying fatherhood actually and symbolically, Egeus “disposes,” too, of the

paternal right to determine his own son as “Proprietor,” to fix the recipient

of his property and authority. Demetrius’s “certain right” thus includes both the claim to Hermia and the claim to be her father’s heir. Lysander’s response in support of his “crazed title” potentially invokes, however, a different criterion: I am, my lord, as well derivd as he, As well possess'd; my love is more than his;

My fortunes every way as fairly rank‘d, If not with vantage, as Demetrius’; And, which is more than all these boasts can be,

I am belovd of beauteous Hermia. Why should not I then prosecute my right? (1.1.99—105)

The ambiguity of whether Lysander’s “my lord” refers to Egeus or Theseus already foreshadows the projected break between civil law and paternal authority by pointing to a potential disjunction between the symbolic and the

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real father. As commentators have noted, Egeus'’s entrance momentarily raises

the specter of Theseus's father, the Aegeus of mythology. The appearance here of Egeus/Aegeus as the father of another (Hermia/Demetrius) casts, Calderwood suggests, “a ghostly authoritarian gaze” on Theseus, so that by up-

holding the “ancient privilege of Athens” (1.1.41) he “bows to the will of a man who represents, quite literally, le nom du pére.’®? In that Theseus responds to Lysander’s plea, we are given an identification after the fact, but the initial

uncertainty resonates as potentially disruptive.® The direction in which Lysander’s own disruption tends becomes clearer in his subsequent evocation of an impersonal principle of law, which judges the rivals impartially on the ba-

sis of their objective worth. Lysander positions Demetrius and himself as “free equals” (in Locke's phrase) who are to be compared in terms of their respective lineages (“as well deriv as he’), their fortunes (“as well possess”), their prospects (“my fortunes every way as fairly rank’'d”), and, finally, their

relationship to Hermia. Their comparability in the eyes of an abstract civil justice—whose position Theseus consensually occupies—rather than their differentiated positions with respect to a paternal structure of authority constitutes for Lysander the ground upon which he can “prosecute” his “right.” In this sense, his argument draws implicitly upon a notion of a fraternal social

contract, later elaborated upon by Locke and Freud. Nonetheless, Lysander’s very differently marked ethos converges with

Demetrius’s in one important respect: in order that he be “as fairly rank’d” as Demetrius, their relationship has to be mediated by Hermia, the shared object of male desire. Hermia had earlier insisted that she would prefer to die unmarried rather than “yield my virgin patent up / Unto his lordship whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty” (1.1.80—82). The operative phrase here is “unwished yoke.’ Hermia does not refuse to subordinate herself. Rather, she asserts the far more limited privilege of choosing the man to whom she is to be subject. Her “consent” distinguishes between the two primary frames of social organization through which the play constrains and orders female choice: the paternal authority of Egeus/Demetrius versus Lysander’s fraternal model.! As Lysander points out, the strength of his right rests not so much upon the actual comparison of their rank and fortune (which do not distinguish him from Demetrius) but upon that “which is more than all these boasts can be,” that he is “belov'd of beauteous Hermia.’ Lysander stands as Demetrius’s equal (or better) because their relation-

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ship to Hermia produces them as comparable; indeed, it makes the fraternal

contract possible. The emergence of a fraternal model implies, too, a transformation and

appropriation of the patriarchal right over women. Confronting the congruity of father and state, Lysander expresses their divergence. He rewrites paternal jurisdiction over the daughter—which Demetrius has received from Egeus— in terms of a husband’s conjugal right over his wife, thus confining the patriarchal claim to the familial sphere. This restriction simultaneously underwrites the validity of fraternity as political model by locating the lovers’ equivalence as potential husbands, as potential patriarchs within the family. The oftremarked upon undifferentiation of the lovers upon entering the forest appears to me consequent upon this fraternal logic of equivalence.* Fighting in the woods over Helena, Lysander challenges Demetrius to “follow, if thou dar'st, to try whose right, / Of thine or mine, is most in Helena” (3.2.336—37). Not only does Lysander pose the contest in terms of opposed rights, but he locates their opposition in Helena, the shared (and contingent) female object

of desire. Demetrius’s response underscores the primacy of fraternal equivalence at this juncture: “Follow? Nay, I'll go with thee, cheek by jowl” (3.2.338). To follow means to accept that the temporal order of departure corresponds to a hierarchical ordering of their respective “rights.” By contrast, to accompany, “to go... cheek by jowl,” insists upon a positional equivalence. Thus, if the play opens by staging a conflict between two social forms of patriarchy, it subsequently enacts the transition from the one to the other.

The separation of the domestic from the space of civil authority is expressed in the withdrawal from Athens into the forest—a site that does not simply represent a make-believe world of fairies, fancy, and magic, but even more crucially naturalizes the emergent power hierarchies governing the domestic and conjugal. The events in the forest world are subject to Oberon’s dictates: he embodies the patriarchy of nature—or perhaps, better, patriarchy as nature. The sorting out of romantic entanglements; the redirection of individual de-

sire; the conversion of rivalry into friendship; the reestablishment of the husband’s power over his wife: these are all aimed at reconstituting the political, paternal right of traditional patriarchy as conjugal, masculine patriarchal right.

Through the magic of nature, the arbitrary workings of the “little western flower,’ a normative libidinous economy confirming the right of men over

women is established as, in Filmer’s phrase, a “Foundation in Nature.’”®

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Certainly, the quarrel between Oberon and Titania that disrupts the natural order of subjection—recall Oberon’s outraged “Am not I thy lord?”— profoundly affects Nature. Titania describes the inversion of seasons, the failure of crops, the spread of disease, and concludes by naming the cause: ... the spring, the summer, The chiding autumn, angry winter, change

Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original. (2.1.111-17)

Titania's refusal to accede to conjugal relations (“I have forsworn his bed and company”) paradoxically gives birth to the “progeny” of natural evils. But if resistance to patriarchal authority—the rejection of Oberon’s demand— breeds the disruption of Nature, the same metaphor also limits patriarchal authority to nature, projecting a separation between political paternity and domestic conjugality. To the extent that “dissension” over patriarchal right (seen here in terms of male authority over the female body and the Indian Boy) results in the inversion of Nature, the claim to patriarchal authority has

also to be located in the natural family, a domestic realm differentiated from the political sphere of civil society. Titania's eventual submission to Oberon can, to borrow Locke’s formulation, “be no other Subjection than what every Wife owes her Husband, . .. can only be a Conjugal Power, not Political, the

Power that every Husband hath to order the things of private Concernment in his Family, as Proprietor of Goods and Land there, and to have his Will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common Concernment.’ This ideological differentiation between spheres of authority does not, of course, preclude their subsequent reconnection. Not only does the

separation between fairy and civic worlds break down when the fairies enter Athens, but Oberon’s regaining control over Titania signals also the intrusion of civil hierarchies into the domestic sphere: witness, for instance, the change from Titania’s earlier dance “in our round” to Oberon and Titania leading

the dances in the final act.°° The complex relationship between Oberon’s fairy world and Theseus’s city-state echoes, in other words, the historical movement from traditional

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to modern patriarchy. Although Oberon’s legerdemain liberates the lovers from parental authority, the freedom they gain is only the freedom to subject themselves voluntarily to an encompassing civil order within and against which the domestic space is constituted. Consequently, “naturalizing” con-

jugal relations of power within the forest enables an overarching patriarchal order to be reestablished in the terms of a fraternal contract. If the emergent structures of civil society (compare Freud’s superego) frame individual desire, providing it with an ultimate destination in marriage, the structure conversely depends upon converting marriage relations into a natural foundation upon which civil society is erected anew. A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems quite aware, moreover, of how arbitrary

even the fraternal model is—a sign, perhaps, of its greater visibility at a moment when its consolidation is only just occuring. If it seems “naturally” superior to or more benign than the threats of paternal authority, it nonethe-

less requires us to overlook the fact that Demetrius must remain under the influence of the magic flower, and that Titania must be humiliated and tricked so that the Indian Boy can be restored, not to the Indian king from whom he had been stolen, but to the fraternal order of Oberon’s knights.°° The return to the city in the play's concluding scenes marks, then, a return to a different Athens, one organized according to a different principle. Theseus’s astonishment at seeing the rival lovers sleeping side by side bears witness to the change: I know you two are rival enemies: How comes this gentle concord in the world, That hatred is so far from jealousy To sleep by hate, and fear no enmity. (4.1.141-44) The movement from rivalry to concord, from hatred to companionship, en-

codes simultaneously a disengagement from paternal authority and a turn to fraternity. Egeus’s attempt to recruit the support of Demetrius for the paternal model of authority (“they would... /... have defeated you and me: / You of your wife, and me / Of my consent that she should be your wife”

[4-1.155-58]) requires him to iterate the congruence between political and paternal power, thereby translating patriarchal authority within the conjugal relationship directly into civil authority. Demetrius’s position as husband depends upon paternal consent aligned with the law (“I beg the law, the law

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upon his head!” [4.1154], Egeus exclaims). Theseus finally rejects precisely this congruence when he “overbears” Egeus. Implicitly denying that Egeus’s will coincides with civil law, Theseus announces, instead, the equality of all the couples: Egeus, I will overbear your will; For in the temple, by and by, with us,

These couples shall eternally be knit... Away, with us, to Athens: three and three,

We'll hold a feast in great solemnity. (4.1.178—82)

The conjunction “for” causally links Theseus’s freeing himself from his ghostly father to his celebration of an equivalence conferred upon the men through marriage. The equivalence of all couples is accentuated by the parallelism of the verse: “by and by,” “with us,” “three and three.’ The “knitting”

of the couples through the marital vow harks back to Theseus’s description of his marriage to Hippolyta as an “everlasting bond of fellowship” in the opening scene. But the valence of that fellowship has subtly changed. If we have left behind an ideological veiling of masculine paternal violence within marriage, we have reached an equally ideological assertion of fraternal equal-

ity on the basis of a “natural” conjugal subjection. The play subtends the arc that Theseus had sketched at the outset: from “woo|ing] with... my sword” to “wed{ding]...in another key.” It is perhaps no accident that neither Hermia nor Helena speak after this scene. Oberon’s final benediction incorporates the potential for intergenerational conflict within the domestic space, thereby both sanctioning that space and defusing any threat it might pose to civil society. By absorbing paternal power into conjugal, masculine sexual right, the potential crisis can be limited to a familial space that has been ideologically severed from the political (which it nonetheless supports and grounds).°” The Freudian differentiation of family and civil society follows similar lines. Freud, to quote Brenkman,

“attributes the building of civilization to male homosocial desire [we could say, to fraternal relations|; he attributes the civilizing reproduction of fam-

ily to the combined power of male heterosexual desire and maternal love [we could substitute male, conjugal right and domesticity|;and he attributes the conflict between family and civil society to the ‘retarding and restraining influence’ of maternal love alone.’ Echoing Theseus’s phrase, Oberon proph-

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esies that “all the couples three / [shall] Ever true in loving be” (5.1.393—94), and then proceeds to assimilate the domestic partnership into the sphere of natural right. Because marriage is part of the natural foundation of society, the “blots of Nature’s hand” threaten to mark its “issue.” But while Nature may mar its own progeny, that de-figuring takes place in its own domain: the blots belong to Nature. They cannot be allowed to spill over into the public world of men, power, and politics. By blessing “each several chamber,” the fairies ensure that the “owner of it blest / Ever shall in safety rest” (5.1.403). Blessing the conjugal chamber also safeguards the synonymous notions of private property, fraternal right, and civil society, notions to which, as we have seen, the Oedipus complex owes its very existence.

And yet A Midsummer Night’s Dream also renders visible what Freud's phylogenetic justification of Oedipal desire silently obscures: that the conjugal relationship is itself predicated upon effacing alternative sites where subjectivity and desire take shape. The movement from paternal to fraternal right is mediated, after all, by forms of “sisterhood.” In particular, Dream relies on

overwriting the female-female bonds that link Hippolyta to her Amazon past, Titania to her votaress, Hermia and Helena to each other. To the extent

that the play establishes the conditions for the emergence of the Oedipal subject, it does so by staging the impossibility of female bonds that compete with marriage.” The persistent affective power of such links is nonetheless communicated by the emotional resonance and depth of Titania’s recollection of the Indian mother; A Midsummer Night’s Dream gives voice to that power without immediately undercutting it. It should thus be possible to see Titania's reminiscences emerging out of an always marginalized, but always present, tradition that includes such figures as Noah’s wife in the Chester Mystery Play, who refuses to enter the Ark because she would rather remain —despite the danger posed by the Flood—with her “gossips”: But I have my gossips everichon One foote further I will not gone;

They shall not drowne, by St. John, And I may save their lyfe. They loved me full well, by Christ;

But thou wilt let them in thy chist, Els rowe forth, Noe, whether thou list, And get thee a new wife.”

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The Wife's refusal parallels Titania’s situation in that her defiance is directed against her husband; Noah’s conjugal right in turn figures the patriarchal right of God the Father. The continuance of the Law demands that Noah’s

wife accede to her husband by acknowledging the superiority of his claim upon her, turning away from the attractions of her fellow women. Moreover, here, too, the representation is radically split. On the one

hand, the scene uses female insubordination in order to reinstate patriarchy qua divinely derived, paternal right. But, on the other, it equally seems a his-

torical remnant of an alternative form of subjectivity and desire. The choral voice of the “good gossoppes” brings this sense of shared companionship out quite wonderfully: And let us drinke or we depart For often tymes we have done soe;

For at a draught thou drinkes a quarte And so will I doe, or I goe. Here is a pottell of malmesy good and stronge, It will reioye both hart and tong;

Thou Noy thinke us never so long Yet wee will drinke alyke. (127)

However distorted by theological imperatives, Noah’s wife lives for us and exudes a force of the “real” in much the same way that Titania's evocation of her companion does. Similarly, Shakespeare's play connects the vehemence of Helena’s sense

of betrayal in Act 3, scene 2, to the ideological function of marriage and the heterosexual bond. When Helena recalls “all the counsel that we two have

shared” (3.2.198), she accusingly points up Hermia’s own reference to their relationship in the play's opening scene: And in the wood where often you and I Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie,

Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,

There my Lysander and myself shall meet. (1.1.214—17) Hermia’s use of deictic markers to describe the trysting place intimates that the heterosexual, conjugal bond will be built upon another site and thus will replace a different model of social interaction. Where Helena and Hermia

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once lay, it is there that Lysander and she will meet. The rhyme connecting “sweet” and “meet,” furthermore, transfers the attributes of the sororal bond onto the heterosexual one that is to replace it. This substitution is under-

scored in Act 3, scene 2, by Helena’s evocation of the language of the Ceremony of Matrimony to characterize her prior closeness to Hermia:’! So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition,

Two lovely berries moulded on one stem; So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; ...

And will you rent our ancient love asunder

To join with men in scorning your poor friend? (3.2.208—16)

The bitterness behind these lines is conveyed in part by the irony of Helena’s reconstructing the female-female relationship in terms of marriage. Her speech brings to mind the other echo in the play of the Ceremony— Lysander’s assertion that he and Hermia are “two bosoms interchainéd with an oath /... two bosoms and a single troth” (2.2.49—50). However, Helena’s use of the Ceremony here ironically co-opts marital discourse: she defends against the rhetoric of conjugality by appropriating it to designate a prior relation of sisterhood that the conjugal bond has overwritten. The complex relationship of conjugal and sororal demands is further indexed by the curious temporality of the play's doubled reference to the Ceremony. Although Lysander’s use of it precedes Helena’s in the order of dramatic presentation, she draws on its language to recall a configuration marked as prior. The ostensible primacy of heterosexual “joining,” Helena implies, proceeds from a dependency upon an anterior female-female “marriage” that the later bond excludes as its antithesis, as its other—for instance, when Hermia “join{s] with men in scorning [her] poor friend.”

The Disappearing Indian A Midsummer Night’s Dream communicates the radical alterity of these sororal and matriarchal relationships above all through another form of alterity. It thereby leads us towards a different, literally invisible, site upon which subjectivity and desire are constructed and effaced. Explicitly indicating the other-

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ness of the sororal bonds by stigmatizing them as Eastern—and, in fact, specifically as Indian—the play establishes an overlap between gender and colonial politics. Besides possessing the Indian Boy, Titania is associated with the East because the play locates her female “order” in India: “His mother was a vot'ress of my order / And in the spicéd Indian air, by night, / Full often hath she gossiped by my side” (2.1.123-25). Hippolyta, too, becomes affiliated with

India by virtue of the play's pointedly associating the Amazons with it, as is made evident in Titania's scornful rehearsal of Oberon’s infidelities: ... but Iknow When thou hast stolen away from fairy land, And in the shape of Corin sat all day, Playing on pipes of corn and versing love To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here, Come from the farthest steep of India? But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, Your buskin‘d mistress and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded, and you come

To give their bed joy and prosperity. (2.1.64—73) If “India” serves to link Hippolyta with Titania, forging a connection be-

tween the matriarchal communities to which they belong, the designation

also joins them together in order to mark them as other—along with the mode of female subjectivity they represent. While Titania's vision of a world without men negatively counterpoints Oberon’s exclusively male world of kings and knights, the former's alterity is further emphasized by its exclusion from the known world of Athens (and Western civilization), and its projection onto the “farthest steep[s]” of a marginal and alien world: India. A Midsummer Night's Dream thus invokes colonial otherness in order to represent and reinforce an alterity whose primary field of emergence is gender. The negatively marked East—this time in a more undifferentiated sense—even faintly infects the fraternal contest between Lysander and Demetrius over Helena. No longer for him “as fair now as [she] was erewhile,” Lysander rejects Hermia by first calling her an “Ethiope” and then dismissing her with “Out,

tawny Tartar, out!” (3.2.263). Here, numerous indices of colonial difference —darkness, the East, and Africa—are collapsed into one another to stress Hermia’s sexual undesirability.

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Overlaying colonial difference onto the gendered opposition creates, however, a curious interference. On the one hand, the strategic use of the East to index the alterity of sororal bonds weaves it into the play's texture. Instrumentalizing colonial otherness conjures the East as an associative aural presence through which a patriarchal politics can be consolidated. On the other hand, the mobilization of the East within what is overtly a struggle over the place of the (Western) female potentially leads us to read the appearance of “India” solely in terms of gender. Indeed, Dream’s critical reception makes abundantly clear that our sense of the play tends to be overwhelmed by a particular sexual politics: the ideological enactment of male Oedipal anxiety (Montrose); a narrative of Oedi-

pal socialization (Dunn); the validation of romantic love and companionate marriage (Brooks); or the expression of the doctrinal reality of Elizabethan conjugal relations (Olson). That the play is fundamentally “about” gender cannot be denied. But reading the evocation of India and the East only in terms of a concern with sexuality and marriage blocks out that other constitutive field, rendering invisible the subterranean effects of Eastern colonialism and its history. For the Indian Boy functions equally as the faint trace of another material history, one that has no place as such in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but which remains nonetheless constitutive of the forms of subjectivity the play instantiates. In this sense, exclusive focus on the issue of gender also covers up the way the effacement and exchange of the Indian Boy refractively register the absent presence of colonial history, both in the play and in the discourses surrounding it.”

For it needs to be reiterated that A Midsummer Night’s Dream pointedly

connects the Amazons to India or the East, whereas sixteenth-century travel narratives tended, in general, as Montrose points out, “to recreate the ancient Amazons of Scythia in South America or in Africa.*’° Although “India” is a variable designation, used in the early modern period to cover a range of “discovered” lands, this terminological looseness does not mean the utter absence by Shakespeare's time of any distinction between the various places to which the colonial traders and conquerors had sailed. Rather, what “India” meant depended upon the specific context in which the name was evoked. Thus, the displacement of the Amazons from the Americas or Africa to India need not signify a perennial European confusion regarding India's location, or a persistent confusion (strategic or otherwise) of different

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colonial discourses. Kim Hall’s suggestion that Titania's description of the Indian mother “may mystify Indian plunder and, possibly, slavery in aligning the young squire with new world merchandise” seems to me for this reason misplaced.”* The play’s concern with exchange and trade implies that neither the colonial plunder characteristic of Iberian practice in the Americas nor African slavery really constitute the relevant contexts governing the use of “India” in Act 2, scene 1. The “spiced” air and Titania’s image of the trading ships “rich with merchandise” make the specific link with the East more plausible, where colonialism proceeded primarily (though not exclusively) through trade. We need, therefore, to pursue further the possibility that the play's numerous references to India have a more specific valence that derives from the histories of mercantile colonialism in the East. As I intimated earlier, Dream

links the Indian Boy with the larger problematic of commodification and trade. We have seen how the Oedipal paradigm of male socialization derives from a historically and culturally specific form of the fraternal contract,

whose emergence A Midsummer Night’s Dream projects. The importance of mercantilism to the play suggests that we now shift our gaze to the economic form fraternity takes, that is, to the contract as a central model to describe how indi-

viduals interact. Egeus’s paternal claim to Hermia linked, as we saw, paternity to property. And the play ends with a different form of property: the male fraternal control over the domestic sphere. The connection between fraternal égalité and property becomes clearer if we recall that the notion of contract assumes a specific form of mutual recognition. “Contract,” to cite Hegel,

“presupposes that the parties entering it recognize each other as persons and property owners.’ While Pateman stresses the “original” separation of family from civil society, Hegel develops a tripartite distinction between

family, civil society, and state. Civil society is associated with the social space of the market, and specifically, with its relations of property and possession. The mutual recognition of the other as a property owner—the basis of contract—is expressed, according to Hegel, in the act of exchanging

property, a conception quite close to Hobbes’s claim that “all contract is mutuall translation, or change of Right.””° Thus, the reconstitution of male paternal right has imprinted upon it notions of property, exchange, and

subjectivity that reflect the historical expansion of the market. We have seen

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the importance of colonial trade for the development of the market in the early modern era. Let us assume the validity of that account in order briefly to consider the form of subjectivity that emerges from the material basis of a market economy. Egeus’s complaint against his child, Hermia, turns out to be directly

a complaint against Lysander, whom he accuses of “interchang[ing] lovetokens with my child.” By singing “with faining voice verses of feigning love,’

Lysander, according to Egeus, “has stol’n the impression of her fantasy” (1.1.29—32). Since possession and paternity are equated by Egeus, what Lysander steals is paternal property, the father’s “impressing” of Hermia’s fantasy—a formulation that Theseus’s description of Hermia as “a form in wax / By him imprinted” later echoes. But what Egeus marks as theft (“thou has filch’d my daughter's heart”) is also, his own complaint betrays, an act of exchange, an “interchanging.” By giving her love songs, Lysander has bought her heart. The whiff of commodity exchange becomes stronger if we recognize that the governing metaphors used by Theseus and Egeus are implicitly metaphors of coinage. If Dream does not explicitly evoke money in Act 1, scene 1, its use of “impression” and “imprinting” nonetheless recalls their place as monetary metaphors elsewhere in Shakespeare's oeuvre (for instance, in Measure for Measure). At stake are two different notions of property, one associated with paternity, the other with the anonymous and impartial world of the market. In claiming Hermia, not only does Lysander reject the paternalistic notion of property espoused by Egeus, Theseus, and Demetrius, but he also relies upon his having purchased her, as it were, on the open market “with bracelets of... hair, rings, gauds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays,

sweetmeats ... ” (1.1.33-34.). If, as her father insists, Lysander has “bewitch'd the bosom of my child,” the spell he has cast is the magic of the commodity, through whose powers the established forms of Egeus’s world are dissolved and recast. The language of the market, as earlier noted, permeates even Titania's elegiac evocation of the female-centered world she once shared with the Indian mother. Most obviously, she attempts to carve out for herself an autonomous space that can withstand Oberon’s assertion of male, conjugal right. The votaress’s mocking feminization of the colonial voyages, for example, undercuts the standard topos linking imperialism with masculinity. In the female-governed world of Titania's India, the sails of the trading ships “grow

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big-bellied with the wanton wind,” but the wind itself is not represented

in masculine terms: Titania's phrase “wanton wind” echoes and destabilizes Oberon’s calling her a “rash wanton” (2.1.63). Yet, paradoxically, Titania

couches her refusal to subordinate her desires to Oberon’s demands in mercantile terms: “Set your heart at rest: /The fairy land buys not the child of me’ (2.1.122—23). While she defies Oberon’s terms of purchase, it turns out, ironically, that precisely the reference to a colonial market allows her to specify the value or worth of the matriarchy she upholds, and that the boy rep-

resents for her. The double movement becomes especially evident in the dizzying exchange of figures in Titania’s speech. The colonial trading ships are emasculated by metaphorically extending the pregnant votaress’s condition onto them. But in reversing the relationship, by imitating the “embarkéd traders... / with pretty and with swimming gait,’ the votaress becomes what she mimics, returning to Titania “as from a voyage, rich with merchandise.” The

struggle between Oberon and Titania is thus over the control of the merchandise, the material products of a colonial economy. And if Oberon represents the masculine principle of Nature, who ultimately (reestablishes the domestic space of the family as society’s natural foundation, the final state

he envisages (where he and Titania are “new in amity” [4.1.86]) has to be brought about by an exchange of property: the transfer of the Indian Boy from Titania's bower to his. By naturalizing the family, he asserts masculine control over the market's operation. Furthermore, Oberon’s counternarrative exposes the fact that the freedom of the market is based upon an original theft: the “lovely boy” has been stolen from an Indian king (2.1.23). The dispossession of the East marks another parallel between the Athenian and fairy plots: to Lysandet's “original” theft of paternal right, which grounds modern patriarchy, corresponds an “original” colonial theft, which grounds the modern market and its fiction

of just and equal exchange. Titania's possession of the boy was itself a form of theft glossed over by her narrative. She gained the boy upon the death of the Indian mother, bringing him back with her to Athens and the fairyland. Her kidnap of the boy serves to preserve a matriarchal world opposed to the familial and civic structures of Oberon’s patriarchal order, generating that conflict between family and civil society that, according to Brenkman, Freud attributes to “‘the retarding and restraining influence’ of maternal love.’’” By

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withholding the boy, Titania deflects the colonial project from its historical

destiny: the reconstitution of society on the basis of mercantile exchange. Indeed, Titania inhibits, one might add, the boy’s full “Westernization”

into an “acceptable”—and perhaps only thereby representable—colonial subject. Unlike Fletcher’s Indian Princess or Dryden's Ysabinda, the Indian Boy has not been made part of the Western world, and by insisting that he is “part” of her past, Titania further impedes the desired colonial trajectory.

“Oberon would have the child,” Puck tells us, “Knight of his train, to trace

the forests wild” (2.1.24—25). Incorporated within the imperial paradigm, the boy will function as “trace,” a pure token or mark of presence whose ex-

change institutes a new social order—an order that will include “India” as an acceptably colonized follower rather than a territory of recalcitrant “others.” Thus, by restoring to the Indian Boy his proper place, Oberon establishes the nuclear family and mercantile exchange as normative forms of social life. And at the same time, the boy’s becoming part of Oberon’s knightly

train encodes an absorption of the East into a nascent colonial empire. What the image of the colonial economy conceals, then, is the form of domination upon which it rests. Oberon's victory, sealed through the vows of marriage and the exchange of the boy, represents a victory for the version of history that he espouses. But Oberon’s authority can establish itself only by controlling the body of the Indian Boy. It needs the boy's transfer to the fairy king's bower for Oberon's vision of the world to come to fruition. In this sense, the exchange registers obliquely a truth about the market in the early modern world: that its rise to prominence depends upon the material domination of the colonized subject through a colonial exchange process. The Indian Boy denotes a moment of difference that has to be acknowledged in order to produce a subject and a history beyond difference. That difference appropriately takes the unspeaking form of an absence: we neither see the boy nor the exchange itself, and yet these resonate in the play through their effects. y The interplay of colonial expropriation and female subjugation reflects the inextricably twofold process through which the “West” emerged. The original dispossession of colonized lands (and their subsequent commodification) consolidates the market process, constituting the (Western) human agent in contractual terms, as property owner. Conjugal domination ensures a concomitant separation of private from public, restricting pater-

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nal authority to the former. When Titania “render[s] her page” to Oberon,

she accedes against her will to the doubled contract it represents. She ensures that the dark presence of the colonial child, “the blots of Nature’s

hand / Shall not in their issue stand” (5-1.395—96). In the movement from stolen object to token of exchange, the Indian Boy indexes a specific historical transition that connects dispossession, domination, and finally, absorption. In another context, Robert Willson has remarked upon the anticli-

mactic nature of an exchange that we never see.’”® That the Indian Boy never materializes appropriately figures the invisibility of colonial history in the East for the early modern world. A Midsummer Night’s Dream writes this history, but only ex negativo, as the “erasure of a history of violence, melancholy

and material oppression.” Locating in the figure of the Indian Boy what Hegel calls “the work of the negative” returns us to Freud’s account of the primal Oedipal act. The focus this final time falls upon its ethnology, and more specifically, upon the

relationship between the place of the “primitive” in Freud’s ethnographic narrative and the form of subjectivity made available by the market. Freud’s image of the “cannibal savages” consuming the violent and primal father is necessary to set up the norm towards which the dissolution of the Oedipus complex tends: the sublimation of primal conflict through the bonds of fraternity. But, as we have seen, the fraternal conflict cannot itself be resolved

until a new, symbolic identification substitutes for the phantasmal wish to murder the father. Precisely at this juncture, by laying down taboos against murder and incest, does culture or civilization truly emerge. To cite Brenkman, fraternity must generate a “symbolization of fatherhood” that “re-

structures the father-son relation on the basis of mutual recognition and reciprocal designation.’®° Mutuality and reciprocity thus indicate the formal conditions for the emergence of civilization and morality, that is, the Law—conditions that the Freudian narrative recasts in terms of an original “event” in history. The notion of “reciprocal designation” illuminates from another angle the set of issues we have already examined (in both the play and in Freudian thought) with regard to the conjugal bond. The reciprocal designation of father and son occurs through the family since the son takes over the father's place and exercises his paternal authority through marriage. To cite Ricoeur,

only with the recognition that the “father is father because he is designated and called father” can the phantasmal wish to murder the father be replaced

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by the expectation of taking his place in the succeeding generation.®’ The redirection of Oedipal desire thus depends upon the historical separation between public and private and upon the restriction of paternal authority to the domestic sphere.” But this redirection, which overcomes the primal rivalry with the father, requires also that a second formal condition be met: mutual recognition. To cite Brenkman, “they have to meet not as father and son but as rights-bearing persons whose desires and wills are mediated by contract and property.’ In other words, to return to the family as husband and father, the son has first to gain his identity as “brother,” to see himself as an autonomous subject in relationship to other autonomous subjects. Here, too, what for Freud is a

transhistorical theoretical postulate corresponds rather to a specific form of subjectivity: mutual recognition is in fact of a piece with the historical form of the fraternal contract, an agreement through which two individuals recog-

nize each other as full subjects. Now, as Hegel suggests, the mutuality of recognition obtaining between equally valid, individual wills produces a juridical relation to things (property)

and a juridical relation between persons (contract in the narrow sense). The equality of the “brothers”—which emerges in the domestic space through mutual access to women—is thus ratified in the public sphere through the juridical relationships of property and contract. But Hegel goes on to argue that this doubled relation is actually first projected by the act of exchange: in order to function, exchange has to assume both the alienability of the thing from its owner (that it is his property) and the mutuality of transferral (that there is a contractual obligation binding on both parties). Thus, the second crucial requirement of the law, which establishes the equality of the “brothers,” reflects a historical condition dependent upon not just the separation between public and private, but also forms of interaction linked to the generalization of mercantile exchange. In and through the market the abstract juridical-economic relationships of property, contract, and right become available as general, constitutive forms of human subjectivity.** Overlaying these two different sites of socialization (the family and the market), the Freudian narrative brings into

being the normative subject of the West.

But the Freudian narrative implies, too, that this subject can only become visible through another subject: the primitive or the cannibal savage. Setting aside the question of ethnographic accuracy—certainly not the strength of

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of ‘A Midsummer

Night’s Dream’

; : Freud's analysis—we are led, thus, to ptess upon the functional status of the “primitive” within Freud’s schema. Ricoeur notes that the Freudian narrative depends upon two postulates: [O]n the one hand, primitive people give us a well-preserved picture of an early phase of our own [that is, Western] development and so constitute an experimental illustration of our prehistory; on the other hand, because of their great emotional ambivalence they are akin to neurotic patients.®°

These presuppositions likewise have a twofold effect: they construct the primitive in relation to a universalized notion of psychic and social normality; and, further, they equate this principle itself with a historically specific

mode of Western subjectivity (to which the savage testifies through his divergence from it). Like the Greek myth from which the complex derives its name, the story of the “cannibal savages” who kill their “violent, primal father” both provides evidence for the psychoanalytical theory and is also reduced to a primeval fantasy that expresses and conceals a historical parricide. The so-called primitive is thereby absorbed into a teleological history of Western civilization: the prehistorical stage whose overcoming makes civilization possible.*° Uncannily enough, the role of ethnography within the Freudian ac-

count echoes the functional status of the Indian Boy within A Midsummer Night’s Dream—not least of all in the way in which Freud, too, strips the ethnographic account of all specificity. Ethnography grounds the theoretical paradigm, validating the forms of subjecthood that Freudian thought posits as its enabling assumptions. In the process, the savages in the ethnographic

account become figures that nonetheless lay claim to historical reality by taking the place of those ethnic “others” (whose varied histories the theory purports to account for). If in Shakespeare's play the Indian Boy becomes a pure signifier whose exchange helps institute a new social order, for Freud

the “primitive” similarly brings into being a particular libidinal economy: through its narrative reconstitution the cannibal savage establishes the untversality and normativity of both the theory and the social formation upon which it rests. Dispossessing the father of his sexual right and sublimating this right in the doubled structure of fraternal law—male conjugal right and the contractual relationship—Freud’s savage enables the emergence of both family and market.

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278

This echo is far from fortuitous. While A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals the first imprints of a history in the making, psychoanalysis remakes that

history by internalizing it, taking it into the self as its constitutive structure. In so doing, it repeats on another site the logic of that earlier history.®” As

we have seen, the colonial dynamic in Shakespeare's play is inextricably intertwined with the politics of gender: as Indian and as boy, the changeling

helps inaugurate the doubled narrative of Western Enlightenment to which Freud’s theory remains bound. Re-doubling the doubled exchange of Shakespeare’s text, the phylogenetic narrative of the Oedipal complex rehearses the other only to exchange it for the identity of the self. The politics of gender and colonialism are thus directed to a single end, that of producing the phantasmal trace of the other through which the Western male subject constructs itself as Western and as male, as the methodological presupposition and the inescapable destiny of human history. Yet the Indian Boy refuses to go away, to disappear from language once he has served his turn. For lest we again erase his particularity by rehearsing a history of erasure, we should recall that what is exchanged is not just boy, but changeling, that is, not just a (unseen) body but afigure, and indeed, as Put-

tenham reminds us, specifically the rhetorical figure of exchange itself, the “vul-

gar” version of what the Greeks called hippalage and Romans submutatio: [ W Je in our vulgar may call him the underchange but I had rather have him called the Changeling nothing at all swerving from his originall, and much more aptly to the purpose, and pleasanter to beare in memory: specially

for our Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a term often in their mouthes, and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries use to steale the fairest chil-

dren out of their cradles, and put other ill favoured in their places, which they called changelings or Elfs: so, if ye mark, doeth our Roet, or maker

play with his wordes, using a wrong construction for a right, and an absurd for a sensible, by manner of exchange.**

The struggle between Oberon and Titania is, consequently, not just over an

(invisible) object but over the exchange process itself, which that object qua figure signifies. To a large extent A Midsummer Night’s Dream establishes identity as the effect of exchange: Hermia’s exchange ensures the normative stability of the family, while the Indian Boy’s transfer ties the domestic unit to

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of ‘A Midsummer

Night’s Dream’

the emergence of the market and the contractual subject. At the same time, however, the play also veils the exchanges upon which its resolution depends. Not only does the boy’s transfer take place off stage, but Hermia can be

given to Lysander only after the fairies convert fact into dream—and the comedy will only be complete if we too “forget” that Demetrius must re-

main drugged. But the muting of the actual exchanges that underlie the narrative’s closure has a paradoxical effect: the proliferation of exchange as a figure, a ghost haunting the play, present everywhere in its effects. As David Marshall notes, “throughout the play, characters are figured as merchandise or stolen goods. (Hermia, Lysander, Helena, Demetrius, Egeus, Oberon, and Titania each

‘steal’ or are stolen from or are stolen in the course of the play.)” To the problem of theft we may add the cluster of words like “transfigurd,” “transformed,’ “translated,” “transposed,” “transported,” and “interchanged,” all of

which point to the textual effects of an economy of exchange. “The figure for these character-commodities,’ Marshall astutely observes, “is the child who rivals Hermia as the most contested ‘property’ in the play: the changeling boy that Titania is accused of having ‘stolen:””° Suppressed as a corporeal presence, the boy takes his revenge by reappearing as a spectral presence,

which haunts the very text from which he has been banished. He makes his presence felt in the seams and slippages of the text, in the gaps between the

text’s normative structures and the dramatic process of their institution. Similarly, he insinuates himself into the interstices of the critical method

through which those normative structures are themselves internalized and universalized. And it is only in these interstices that we can briefly glimpse him before he disappears again.

Chapter

AFTERWORD:

Seven

REAL AND IMAGINED

INDIAS

9 Na the end of Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines the unnamed narrator stumbles upon a tattered old Bartholomew's atlas given him by his now-dead cousin and mentor Tridib. The atlas belongs to the narrator's formative experiences: his own identity, as it emerged from an intricate network of family, community, and nation, had been shaped by places in the atlas Tridib had pointed out to him, and by the accompanying stories that had made

those places real. The atlas signifies the narrator's internalization of space and time as concrete, lived relationships among peoples, cultures, and societies. It stands therefore for the thematic concerns of the novel, an emblem of how the broad crisscrossing strokes of history and culture form and are formed by the circumscribed paths of individual existence. Accidentally discovering a compass, the narrator draws two circles of

the same radius upon the atlas. The first has as its radius the 1,200 mile dis-

tance from Khulna—in what used to be East Pakistan—to Srinagar, the capital of the northern Indian state of Kashmir. “Tt was,” he tells us, “an amazing circle”: [It] cut through the Pakistani half of Punjab, through the tip of Rajasthan and the edge of Sind, through the Rann of Kutch, and across the Arabian Sea, through the southernmost toe of the Indian Peninsula, through Kandy, in Sri Lanka, and out into the Indian Ocean until it emerged to touch upon

the northernmost finger of Sumatra, then straight through the tail of Thailand into the Gulf, to come out again in Thailand, running a little north of Phnom Penh, into the hills of Laos, past Hué inVietnam, dipping into the

Gulf of Tonking, then swinging up again through the Chinese province of 280

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Indias

Yunnan, past Chungking, across the Yangtze Kiang, passing within sight of

the Great Wall of China, through Inner Mongolia and Sinkiang, until with

a final leap over the Karakoram Mountains it dropped again into the valley of Kashmir.!

The choice of the circle’s center, Khulna, and its radius, the distance to Srinagar, were not fortuitous. The theft of a Muslim sacred relic in Kashmir on

December 27, 1963, had caused a massive black-flag demonstration throughout Kashmir in which Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs took part without ani-

mosity. And its recovery a week later was celebrated with a shared public demonstration of joy and thanksgiving. In Khulna, however, despite the tal-

isman's rapid return, riots erupted on January 7, 1964, quickly spreading to Dhaka, and leading first to a flood of Hindu refugees across the border into India, and then to a counter-riot in Calcutta, where Hindu mobs attacked and killed Muslims, burning and looting their shops and houses. The riots in Dhaka had claimed Tridib’s life, and the narrator had himself, as a child,

experienced firsthand the violence that had erupted in Calcutta. Poring over the atlas fifteen years later the narrator is astonished that he had not seen that the riots in Calcutta and Dhaka were connected, responding as much to each other as to a third event 1,200 miles away in Srinagar. In-

deed, Calcutta and Dhaka had historically been part of the same state, Bengal, sharing a language and a culture until the British forcibly divided the

state along religious and ethnic lines in 1905. And yet the narrator had not been able to connect the events occurring in the two cities because an imaginary distance had intervened: the space separating one nation (Bangladesh,

then East Pakistan) from another (India). This revelation finally forces upon him “the meaning of distance.” Chiang Mai in Thailand, he sees, is much

closer to Calcutta than either Srinagar or Delhi; yet he had never heard of the place until now, while Delhi and Srinagar had always been part of his life and knowledge. The objective, geographical distances between places had always been mediated by the imagined lines of nationhood, over which neither words nor information nor thought had crossed. “It is in the logic of states,” the narrator tells us, “that to exist at all they must claim the monopoly of all relationships between people” (226). This perception emerges most forcefully when he turns to the second, “western,” circle, centered on Milan and passing through

AFTERWORD

282

Helsinki in Finland, Sundsvall in Sweden, Mold in Norway, above the

Shetland Islands, and then through a great empty stretch of the Atlantic Ocean until it came to Casablanca. Then it travelled into the Algerian Sahara, through Libya, into Egypt, up through the Mediterranean, whete it

touched on Crete and Rhodes before going into Turkey, then on through the Black Sea, into the USSR, through Crimea, the Ukraine, Byelorussia and Estonia, back into Helsinki. (227-28)

The narrator cannot imagine any event on the circle’s periphery other than war that would bring the people of Milan, its center, onto the street. It thus

appears to him, “that within this circle there were only states and citizens; there were no people at all.” The lines of national demarcation seem to supersede other modes of relatedness, subordinating the identities of individuals living within their confines to citizenship—and, conversely, determining nationhood itself as the embodiment of “a social, intellectual and moral revolution of which the aspirations to democracy and personal freedom are also products.’* And this very logic had made the connection between the events in Dhaka and Calcutta, between Tridib’s death and his own life, literally unthinkable. But the fact that these events were indeed linked returns him to the first circle and the existence of ties and tensions that national boundaries cannot entirely overwrite. “| T |here had really been a time,’ the narrator continues, “not so long ago, when people, sensible people, of good intention, had

thought that all maps were the same, that there was a special enchantment in lines. ... They had drawn their borders, believing in that pattern, in the en-

chantment of lines, hoping perhaps that once they had etched their borders upon the map, the two bits of land would sail away from each other” (228). Suddenly seeing the connection between two opposed Cities equidistant from the border dividing India from East Pakistan, he discovers the irony of a history that has always had real consequences in people's lives. If the theft in Srinagar triggered two radically opposed responses—joyous celebration and violent riot—both reactions shared a logic of distantiation. In Kashmir, an imagined sense of community overrode differences of ethnicity, religion,

and culture. In the rioting in Dhaka and then in the Calcutta riots reacting to those in Hast Pakistan, however, the imagined boundary of nationhood separating and opposing India to Pakistan took on greater significance than did the idea of community. Misidentifying the national “other” with the re-

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Real and Imagined Indias

ligious “other,” the fragile communities unraveled, leading to religious conflicts that pitted neighbors against one other. The very distinctions that na-

tionhood had ostensibly overcome provided the forms through which the imagined separation between the two nations was expressed. Which is why, the narrator continues, “there had never been a moment in the 4,000-yearold history of that map when the places we know as Dhaka and Calcutta were more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines... ; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into

an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free—our lookingglass border” (228). With this realization, the fixed delineations of the

Bartholomew atlas dissolve under the gaze. Riven by the multiple, invisible lines of history, the simple givenness and the obviousness of neatly demar-

cated regions on a map reveals only the force of a desire. When I was growing up in Calcutta, my own atlas was an American one, the Rand McNally World Atlas. In my copy, every page depicting India was disfigured by a rubber stamp (in red) insisting that “[t]he boundaries of India as shown on this map are neither factual nor correct.” The heavy-handed correction concerned Kashmir: the American maps assigned disputed areas on the state’s northeastern and northwestern sides to Pakistan and China, respectively, thereby undoing the Indian claim to those territories. Buried between the stamp’s denial and the map’s assertion lay an entire history of post-independence India: the mixed fortunes of wars with Pakistan and China; the politics of the Cold War, in which India was affiliated with the USSR and Pakistan with the U.S.; and, not least, an Indian bureaucratic apparatus that had ensured that every relevant page of every copy of this atlas be stamped with the “truth” before reaching its user. Although presenting opposed views of India’s geographical limits, the map and the stamp nonetheless shared a belief in what Ghosh calls the “special enchantment of lines,’ presupposing a truth of geography independent of the lived histories out of which geographies arise (the “correct” as distinct from the “factual” boundary). The disjunction between cartographic image and its interdiction thus both betrays and conceals the pressures of the real: in the gap, the shadows of Indias shaped by and yet not reducible to the fixity of either map or stamp become fleetingly visible. Once felt, the complex persistence of colonial histories in the bound-

aries between nations and peoples intrudes wherever one turns. Consider an-

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other “India,” a small geographical section of which this book has examined:

modern-day Indonesia. The recent separation of East Timor from the Indonesian federation of islands reflects, first and foremost, a colonial division, since the island’s eastern half remained for centuries a small Portuguese

enclave in a surrounding Dutch colonial sphere. Matthew Jardine observes that in the first 300 years of colonial rule, Portugal showed less interest in East Timor than in any of its other colonies. Only in the late nineteenth century did the island’s development become a concern—as a way of generating additional income for the “mother country.” In addition to setting up an administrative structure manned by elite natives (trained by the Portuguese colonialists), development entailed forced cultivation of cash crops, forced labor to build infrastructure, and head taxes levied upon the native

populace. These measures resulted in uprisings between 1910 and 1912, which were violently put down by African troops from Portugal's colony of Mo-

zambique. Though its efforts were interrupted by the Japanese occupation of the island during World War II, Portugal resumed the task of “moderniza-

tion” after recovering the island, which led to another serious revolt in 1959.° Despite this rather mixed colonial record, however, the present leader of a now autonomous East Timor, Xanana Guzmio, recently declared Portu-

guese the new nation’s official language—even though it is fluently spoken by only about 10 percent of the native population, mainly the successors of the colonial-era elite. In one of the frequent ironies of postcolonial history,

adopting the former colonizer’s language announces the birth of a new nation, in this case its successful liberation from the brutal Indonesian occu-

pation of the eastern half of the island for the last quarter century (which included the imposition of the Malay language, Bahasa Indonesian, upon the region). Expressed through inherited forms and dichotomies, East Timor's hard-won national identity thus reveals the curious interpenetration of colonial and neocolonial histories: a history of Portuguese occupation intersects the guilty history of Indonesian oppression—to say nothing of the West's blindness to the island's plight in the economic and political interest of sustaining the Suharto regime. What the map delineates simply as a place becomes a palimpsest, its geographical boundaries taking on more than two dimensions. Among its contributions is postcolonialism’s focus on the processes through which boundaries are drawn, on how lines of nationhood and iden-

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tity are made (and unmade) through history, in thought and in practice. The

tensions it identifies are not simply logical incompatibilities between, say, the concepts of nation and state; these tensions are also informed by the concrete effects of colonial legacies, which both structure the global field of transformations and conceal the unevenness of its surfaces.’ In this sense the postcolonial perspective hearkens back to the shifting shapes of Renaissance maps, whose congealing into Amitav Ghosh’s Bartholomew atlas or my own Rand McNally atlas this book has traced. But it does so with different ends in mind, wishing to explain rather

than reenact the logic of imperial domination. Just before he sacks Damascus, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine turns cartographer: I will confute these blind geographers That make a triple region in the world Excluding regions which I mean to trace, And with this pen reduce them to a map, Calling the provinces, cities, and towns,

After my name and thine, Zenocrate. (4.5.71-76)°

Tamburlaine’s pen is, of course, his sword; by “tracing the excluded” regions

he reduces them to constituent parts of his empire. The act of drawing the map merges into the act of possession. The word “trace” in the Renaissance meant not only to draw or sketch, but also “to discover” and “to harness”: thus Tamburlaine effectively combines the roles of cartographer, explorer,

and colonizer. Furthermore, his repeated (and redundant) naming of places not only emphasizes the act of possession, but points at the human agency

involved in the act: Tamburlaine, having just made Jove stoop, establishes himself as the ultimate referent who gives the map its meaning. As Marlowe's complex and contradictory figure for European expansion, Tamburlaine shows that the shift from an earlier state of the world—trepresented in medieval T-O maps “that make a triple region in the world”—to the “modern” age of discovery rested less upon finding a geographical truth to which the past had been blind than upon a practice of colonialism that constructs geography as transhistorical truth. And yet, Marlowe's text hints, too, at the nightmare of empire. The ulti-

mately pyrrhic endpoint to which Tamburlaine strives is the erasure of all difference, in that he intends to call all “provinces, cities, and towns / After my

AFTERWORD

286

name and thine, Zenocrate.” The cartographer-conqueror reenacts an ortgin—and in fact the origin—by reminding us of Adam's naming of animals in the Garden of Eden. But while that originary naming produced difference, Tamburlaine instead razes it: not just by reducing a multiplicity of names to two, but through the act of conquest itself. He maps the land by burning his way across it. Colonial “naming,” the progressive accumulation of territory, ironically becomes an unraveling of history, a movement back to an undifferentiated, unnamed world. And lest this be taken as the imperialist’s ultimate fantasy, the Marlovian text will insist upon Zenocrate's death, and upon Tamburlaine’s inability to reanimate her body, despite his raging conquests over the globe.® For to return to an origin is necessarily to return to a different place, as the often-cited lines fromT. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” remind us: We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

Buried in these lines—and certainly removed from their intent—is a logic of postcolonial return. The belatedness of knowledge ensures that all origins are divided in themselves, indeed that they only become origins through the act of revisiting them. The colonial and postcolonial eras are founded on an oddly similar experience of instability, a skepticism regarding the fixity of objects as they present themselves. Consequently, they both reveal, between the lines or overtly, the paradoxes and dynamic shifts in power and its normalization. From the vantage point of a historical genealogy, the postcolonial present can be traced back to forms of differentiation and relationships of domination first put into place in the early modern era. Thus, since colonialism

equally lent these forms and relationships an aura of naturalness or inevitability, one must read against the grain of Western colonial representations in order to achieve the hermeneutical vantage point of postcolonialism. Only then can we rewrite the histories of colonialism: we discover India anew by rethinking how “India” came to be. The skepticism of postcolonial thought has its roots in the rational skepticism to which Schiller, looking back upon a century of Enlightenment, gave poignant form:

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Indias

Where does this still so universal reign of prejudice and this clouding of minds come from—despite all the light which Philosophy and Knowledge have shed? The Age is enlightened. This means that the forms of knowledge which would be adequate at least to ground our practical principles have been found and publicly ratified. The spirit of free investigation has dispelled the irrationalities which for so long blocked access to the truth, and has dug up the ground upon which fanaticism and deception had erected their throne. Reason has cleansed us of the deceptions of the senses... and Philosophy itself . “. calls us loudly and urgently back into the lap of nature. How is it then that we remain ever barbarians?

Schiller locates a palpable discrepancy between the enlightened rationality of philosophical thought and the dark terror of lived history. The incommensurability forces him to direct his attention to the historical process of the Enlightenment, through which irrationality was to have been overcome. He

poses the question of the relationship between the universalizing claims of conceptual categories and the material historical processes upon which such categories are built. We could say that postcolonialism radicalizes Schiller’s logic. Rather than cleave to the belief, as Schiller did, that Enlightenment and barbarism are fundamentally opposed, it sees that each constitutes the other's condition of possibility. For postcolonial thought, the gap between

concept and reality is not simply a contingent disparity that will eventually correct itself, but represents instead the necessary outcome of the material histories surrounding and invading concepts. Enlightenment’s barbarity, the dark shadows cast by civilization’s light, constitutes its theme. In this sense, Framing “India”’s analysis of forms of colonial differentiation resonates with postcolonial investigations of “race” and ethnicity. I have avoided these terms in discussing the effects of early modern colonialism because it seemed important to formulate the problem of colonial difference in terms immanent to the discursive fields within which such differentiation occurred—rather than projecting backwards notions themselves complexly derived from colonial practice. Nonetheless, there are important connections and parallels between the colonial and postcolonial problematics. Ideas of colonial difference, like “race,” ethnicity, nationhood, and gender, name problems rather than fixed categories about whose existence we are all more or less certain, even as we argue over their precise content. Even if we bracket their historical uses and effects, we cannot avoid the fundamen-

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tal philosophical contradictions that prevent their functioning as neutral, descriptive categories to mark historical differences between peoples. In the case of “race,” for example, Anthony Appiah demonstrates that a noncontradictory, analytically satisfactory concept either in terms of biology and anthropology or in terms of a common history is impossible. The scientific consensus indicates that neither a genetic definition nor one based on kinship or ancestry provides an adequate criterion for locating racial or ethnic difference; alternatively, the notion of a shared history cannot, upon pain of

circularity, provide a serviceable criterion: to identify members as part of a group because they share a common group history, we must first be able “to identify that group in order to identify its history.’’ A similar problem besets the forms of differentiation that stem from early modern colonialism. But we cannot simply let these notions of difference go, as if their internal incoherence justifies their dismissal as purely fictional constructs. For imagined differences have real effects: “Scores of people,’ Henry Louis Gates Jr. reminds us, “are killed every day in the name of differences ascribed only to race.’* To turn away from these differences only condones a kind of amnesia, a forgetting of the historical process by which the words

accrued their contradictory connotations even while the struggles to contain the very real effects of their circulation continue. Instead, the historical sit-

uatedness of these modes of differentiation requires us to try to conceive them in a way that reclaims them as “salient feature[s] in a general process whereby culture mediates the world of agents and the structures which are created by their social praxis.”” Literature plays an important part in this cultural process as the site where their sedimentation onto fixed oppositions occurs, but also as a contestatory field where the instability of such oppositions

becomes visible. We cannot, thus, live with these terms, nor can we live without them. The acceptance of what we today call the postcolonial condition—an epithet designating not simply the condition of the inhabitants of former colonies but indexing rather a general situation—does not imply that we have gone beyond the colonial histories that produced these imagined differences. Rather, we have moved from the explicit forms of domination to their implicit persistence in the lived structures of our social world. A visible consequence of this shift may be seen, for instance, in the substitution of the category of immigration for the idea of race in inflammatory political de-

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bates and governmental policies."! In such telabeling, the wheel has come

full circle. The approach taken here to colonialism’s place in the formation of the early modern world exposes objective gaps between the concept of human history and its colonial realities, and, at the same time, locates disjunctions historically in order to prevent these gaps from being naturalized or essentialized. The former task involves demystifying received discourses that erase the structural and institutional effects of colonial histories. The latter guards against re-naturalizing recovered traces as themselves explanations for “eternal, essential factor[s] of division in society.’!” To take up colonial difference as a critical construct thus means to strive for an interstitial position that remakes history in the form of a persistent critique, “unglamorously chipping away at the binary oppositions that emerge continuously in the... account of the real.”!° This endeavor assumes that cultural space is far from being a neutral domain upon which participants face each other as equals. It requires cognizance of constitutive inequalities inhering in dominant cultural categories, even as we begin to articulate those voices silenced by civilizations barbarism—to hear “the sound of Caliban.’!* As Walter Benjamin reminds us, “whoever has emerged victorious par-

ticipates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the

spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and the historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For,

without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. ... There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In thinking about these oft-cited lines, we need to hold on to their double force: the

spoils are both cultural treasures and material reminders of history's horror. Both poles need to be held in tension, without reducing one to the other.

Nor are these aspects menting the specific barism.” Each act of text, particular forms

autonomous. Rather they inhere in each other, docuand necessary relationship of “civilization” to “barerasure leaves behind historical traces in the cultural of “textual resistance” that allow us to examine how

cultural artifacts depend upon a colonial history, without making of them

simply more evidence of civilization'’s barbarism. To be sure, such resistance remains interwoven with the histories and theoretical categories that colo-

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nialism helped establish: no matter how radically we rewrite Europe's own past and the histories and categories it produced, we cannot thereby encompass the real Indias, whatever they might be. Nor can our rereadings resolve the inescapable contradictions that are the legacies of early modern colonialism. But rediscovering Europe’s “India” remains nonetheless indispensable for understanding how the lived Indias of the present continue to be shaped by the imagined as well as real Indias of the past. Tracing the complex links between the aestheticization of politics and the politics of aestheticization is necessary to participate in and transform the “real,” the field

upon which inherited contradictions ultimately have to be addressed and overcome. Brushing history against the grain, as Benjamin recommends, can-

not undo history, cannot recover the past as an untainted paradise. But neither should it: reading the traces of the past intends, after all, the writing of the future, the possibility of histories different from the ones that made us.

‘Reference Matter

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