The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices 2009029770, 020386039X, 0415999065, 9780415999069, 9780203860397

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The Idea of the Antipodes

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURES Edited in collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Cantebury, this series presents a wide range of research into postcolonial literatures by specialists in the field. Volumes will concentrate on writers and writing originating in previously (or presently) colonized areas, and will include material from non-anglophone as well as anglophone colonies and literatures. Series Editors: Donna Landry and Caroline Rooney. The series will also include collectionsof important essays from older journals, and re-issues of classic texts on postcolonial subjects. Routledge is pleased to invite proposals for new books in the series. Interested authors should contact Lyn Innes or Rod Edmond at the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury, or Routledge’s Commissioning Editor for Literature. The series comprises three strands.

Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures is a forum for innovative new reasearch intended for a specialist readership. Published in hardback, titles include: 1 Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye by Brenda Cooper 2 The Postcolonial Jane Austen edited by You-Me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan 3 Contemporary Caribbean Women’s Poetry: Making Style by Denisede Caires Narain 4 African Literature, Animism and Politics by Caroline Rooney 5 Caribbean–English Passages: Intertextuality in a Postcolonial Tradition by Tobias Döring 6 Islands in History and Representation edited by Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith 7 Civility and Empire: Literature and Culture in British India, 1822–1922 by Anindyo Roy 8 Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939: ‘A Hot Place, Belonging To Us’ by Evelyn O’Callaghan 9 Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the body by Michelle Keown 10 Writing Woman, Writing Place: Contemporary Australian and South African Fiction by Sue Kossew 11 Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence by Priyamvada Gopal 12 Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire by Terry Collits 13 American Pacificism: Oceania in the U.S. Imagination by Paul Lyons 14 Decolonizing Culture in the Pacific: Reading History and Trauma in Contemporary Fiction by Susan Y. Najita 15 Writing Sri Lanka: Literature, Resistance and the Politics of Place by Minoli Salgado 16 Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary by Vijay Mishra 17 Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English by Neelam Srivastava 18 English Writing and India, 1600–1920: Colonizing Aesthetics by Pramod K. Nayar 19 Decolonising Gender: Literature, Enlightenment and the Feminine Real by Caroline Rooney 20 Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography by David Huddart 21 Contemporary Arab Women Writers by Anastasia Valassopoulos 22. Postcolonialism, Psychoanalysis and Burton: Power Play of Empire by Ben Grant 23. Transnationalism in Southern African Literature: Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture by Stefan Helgesson 24. Land and Nationalism in Fictions from Southern Africa by James Graham 25. Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization: Exploiting Eden by Sharae Deckard 26. The Idea of the Antipodes: Place, People, and Voices by Matthew Boyd Goldie

The Idea of the Antipodes Place, People, and Voices

Matthew Boyd Goldie

NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published 2010 by Routledge, 270 Madison Avenue, NewYork, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX144RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2009. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. © 2010 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now know nor hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Goldie, Matthew Boyd. The idea of the antipodes : place, people, and voices / by Matthew Boyd Goldie. p. cm.—(Routledge research in postcolonial literatures ; 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Geography in literature. 2. Place (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Postcolonialism in literature. I. Title. PN56.G48G66 2009 809'.9332--dc22 2009029770 ISBN 0-203-86039-X Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-99906-5 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-86039-X (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-99906-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-86039-7 (ebk)

To the Antipodeans: Rosemary, Charles, Vicky, Dawson, Olivia, David, Michael, Pam, Richard, Theo, Harry, and Phoebe

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Beside the Antipodes 1

2

3

4

5

ix xiii 1

Spots in Time: Antipodean Place, Habitation, and Communication in the Ancient World

15

Earthly Motions: The Antipodes in Medieval Geography and Cartography

36

Returning Monsters: Gender, Sex, and Child-Getting in Early Modern Britain

71

Britain in the Antipodes, Huahine in Britain: Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century Encounter Correspondence

97

Island Laughter: Twentieth-Century Antipodean Literature

136

Afterword: Global Antipodes in a Virtual World

165

Notes Bibliography Index

173 205 221

Figures

I.1

Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem (Hannover, 1607). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

13

1.1, 1.2 Crates of Mallos (ca. 150 BCE ) and the fi rst constructed globe.

21

1.3 1.4

2.1

2.2

Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis expositio (Brescia, 1485). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

22

Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia, trans. Jacopo d’Angelo, ed. Nicolaus Germanus (Ulm, 1482). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

26

Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Ghent University Library, Ms. 92, fol. 19r. Reproduced by permission of the Ghent University Library.

42

Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 11695 (Silos), fols. 39v–40r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library, © British Library Board. All rights reserved.

44

2.3

Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fols. 69v– 70r. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek. 45

2.4

Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fol. 69v detail. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

2.5

47

Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fols. 59v– 60r. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek. 52

x 2.6

2.7 2.8

2.9

3.1

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4

4.5

4.6

Figures Saint Augustine, City of God. Nantes, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms. 181, fol. 163v. Reproduced by permission of Nantes, Bibliothèque municipale.

56

Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. XV 4, fol. 118r. Reproduced by permission of The J. Paul Getty Museum.

59

William Caxton, The Mirrour of the World, or Thymage of the Same (Westminster, 1481), 61. Courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

68

William Caxton, The Mirrour of the World, or Thymage of the Same (Westminster, 1481), 62. Courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

68

Thomas Cross the Elder, Richard Brome (1653). London, National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery.

79

Captain James Cook, Chart of the Southern Hemisphere Shewing the Track and Discoveries made by the “Resolution” under the Command of Js. Cook. London, Public Record Office, MPI1/94 (1774–1775). Reproduced by permission of The National Archives Image Library, Richmond, Surrey.

100

Frontispiece, “An Epistle from Mr. Banks, Voyager, Monsterhunter, and Amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite” (London, 1773). Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

105

Omai: Or, A Trip Round the World, playbill (London, 1786). Canberra, National Library of Australia, S6538B. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

110

The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (London, 1794). Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2065859. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

112

Johann Jacobé, Omai, a Native of the Island of Utietea [sic. for Ulietea] (London, 1780), after Joshua Reynolds. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2036481. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

121

John Cleveley, View of Huaheine, One of the Society Islands (London, 1787). Canberra, National Library of Australia, 510504. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

128

Figures 4.7

A.1 A.2

xi

John Rickman, “Omai’s Public Entry on His First Landing at Otaheite,” Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean on “Discovery,” Performed in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 (London, 1781), plate facing 131. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 4084055. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

131

40°S 64°W: Boca de la Travesía, Río Negro, Argentina. Photograph by Sergio Monetti.

169

40°N 116°E: Shangweidian, Beijing, China. Photograph by Ray Yip.

169

Acknowledgments

Several individuals and institutions have helped me with this project. Thank you to the members of the Saturday Medieval Group—Steve Kruger, Glenn Burger, Jenn Brown, Valerie Allen, Michael Sargent, and Sylvia Tomasch— who read and commented in detail on drafts. Thanks also for encouragement and guidance from David Gerstner, Mario DiGangi, and Vanessa Smith. I am grateful to the organizers and participants at conferences and invited talks where I presented parts of this project; your questions and feedback undoubtedly strengthened it. I wish to express thanks to Rider University for fi nancial support and to my colleagues for their encouragement. The staff at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the New York Public Library were very helpful, and thank you also to the institutions that supplied images and permissions. Kia ora Rod Edmond and Lyn Innes, editors of The Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures series, and to the readers for Routledge, who offered helpful suggestions. Thank you Dave Driver for designing the images in Chapter 1. Two of my key writers and thinkers passed away during the writing of this project: Eve Sedgwick and Epeli Hau‘ofa. They are missed. Thank you most to Paula, who advised and graciously encouraged me through it all.

Introduction Beside the Antipodes

Introduction On beaches and in backyards around the world, children dig holes to China. On afternoons at Brighton Beach on the southern coast of England, at Brighton Beach on Coney Island in New York, and at Brighton-le-Sands in Sydney, China is the promised or threatened destination if they dig deep enough. China is antipodal to these children regardless of where they begin to burrow. It’s only a daydream, but if it were possible to tunnel holes through the earth’s core, none of the young people would end up in China. The English child would come up southeast of New Zealand in the Southern Pacific Ocean; the young New Yorker would emerge southwest of Australia in the Indian Ocean; and the Australian would surface west of Morocco in the Atlantic. On the other hand, a Chinese child, digging furiously from Beijing, would appear northwest of Viedma, Argentina, which is south of Buenos Aires. 1 The passageway to China is a fantasy of geographical dualism, but it indicates how difficult it is to think about the other side of the earth (not that the earth has sides) and about presumed geographical opposites that turn out to be not quite so opposite. Indeed, the difficulty of imagining the largest community—a global one—in this way almost invariably attends the idea of the antipodes, a misapprehension that has a long history. One way to begin to explore this disorientation is by considering the etymology of the word antipodes. The meaning of the Greek word αντίποδες, first recorded in Plato’s Timaeus, is “opposite feet,” a plural noun that designates a relative place. It signifies those who at any moment happen to be standing on the opposite side of the earth.2 The Oxford English Dictionary, with uncharacteristic ambivalence, defines antipodes as “Places on the surfaces of the earth directly opposite to each other, or the place which is directly opposite to another.”3 This plurality and relativity suggest some of the difficulties in locating global counterparts. An early example of the confusion that accompanies the antipodes is the fourth-century CE Christian rhetorician and teacher Lactantius (who wrote in present-day Turkey). Lactantius is rare even among early thinkers for disputing the roundness of the globe and the existence of antipodes, yet his conception is part of a continuum of disorientation that accompanies many

2

The Idea of the Antipodes

who address the South.4 In his Divine Institutes, Lactantius sets out to ridicule visions of the earth as round with the antipodes on its underside. He writes: [I]s there anyone so foolish as to believe that there are men whose footprints are higher than their heads? Or that the things which lie straight out with us hang upside down there; that grains and trees grow downwards; that rain and snow and hail fall upwards upon the earth? Does anyone wonder that hanging gardens are related among the seven wonders, when philosophers make fields and cities and seas and mountains “hanging”? People hold these absurdities, he explains, because of a fault in logic. They take a false premise—in this case that the heavens are round—and, with a kind of obsessional delusion, run with this premise regardless of the errors that follow. He reasons that if these misguided people think that the earth is round, then “it is necessary that it bear the same appearance into all parts of the sky, that is, that it put up mountains, stretch forth plains, spread out seas.” 5 High mountains, great plains, majestic seas: Lactantius objects, but almost gives way, via a certain slipperiness, to envisioning an antipodal space. Once a person begins to imagine movements, gestures, and directions in the antipodes—footprints, lying along the earth, hanging upside down, falling, growing mountains, expanding skies, plains, and seas—he or she is likely to conclude that the whole world is somehow antipodal, relative, each part not hierarchical nor recognizably different. Through the ages, the antipodes increasingly came to be referred to in the singular, as a region, a location, and they also came to designate not just any place that is relative to one’s present position. In 1549 we have the singular, “The place that is direct contrar til our zenyth is callit antipodes”; and in 1879, we fi nd “New Zealand, almost the antipodes of Britain.” 6 That is, they also connote specificity, and in more recent times are accepted as in the Pacific. As the British began to dominate the Pacific Ocean after millennia of aboriginal habitation and at least a millennium of indigenous island habitation, the antipodes became places approximately opposite England. The Antipodes Islands off the southeast coast of New Zealand are named thus because they are the landmass most nearly converse to London. (If taken exactly, they are antipodal to near the town of Saint-Lô in Lower Normandy). Are the antipodes and the Pacific therefore dominated by oppositionality and inversion throughout their long history? Is there more than “men whose footprints are higher than their heads?” The characteristics of the antipodes from the earlier to more recent moments of European and British history certainly include the attribute of the world upside down, but other features also exist. Oppositionality and inversion are only part of the complexity of a space that has only recently been named the Pacific, but has been the Great Sea and is now being termed Oceania. Consider, for instance,

Introduction

3

Pacific space: Does the ocean dominate and are the antipodes mainly an immensity of salt water, or are the antipodes a combination of continents and islands, or is it more accurate to think of them as a constellation of archipelagos and atolls? Also, can inversion be the most prominent characteristic of inter-island relations within the Pacific? The present study traces the discourses about the antipodes from Greek and Roman writings to recent Pacific Island literature and into the twentyfi rst century.7 My focus on “discourses” draws on Michel Foucault who, we remember, describes a “discursive formation” as “a space of multiple dissensions; a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described.” He emphasizes that a study of discourse will be of “transformations” in the sense that the aim is “to describe, for each discursive practice, its rules of accumulation, exclusion, reactivation, its own forms of derivation, and its specific modes of connexion over various successions.” 8 This investigation of antipodean discourse embraces the ambiguity of the word antipodes in the sense of the initial contingency about where exactly the other side of the world is and the relatively undetermined topography of the antipodes. It also takes up other “dissensions” and “oppositions.” The antipodes are, at times, singular, and, at other times, they are in the Greek sense of “opposite feet,” plural. They sometimes exist in the Northern Hemisphere though they come to be associated with the Southeast. They are one or more islands (part of the sea); they are a continent and islands (they dominate the sea); or they are principally the sea itself. They are our opposites, and yet beyond the question of who and where “we” are, the relationships one might have with the antipodes are not so clearly oppositional. One can travel to them, one can be near them, one can remain in them, and one can leave from them. One can imaginatively reach out to them and physically reach them along a number of very different routes, and the antipodes can also reach us. They correspond to us, but they also correspond with us. It is this rich texture of the antipodes that I explore—their quizzical as well as their comical appearances—in a way that might come near them even if they are evanescent and disorienting. At times their opposite feet will touch the bottoms of our feet in a bodily and uncanny fashion. At other times peoples of the antipodes might walk upright in our midst so that it seems to be we who are on uncertain footing. At still other times we will sail within antipodean waters and set up house on an antipodean beach to look out at other places across the earth. Many approaches to the antipodes—analogies as well as contrasts with Europe—are cosmological and cartographical. However, spatial discourses commonly turn into anthropological ones: antipodes (or antipodeans) as people who exist (or not) out or down there. In his discussion, Lactantius continues to trace the lack of logic in others’ thinking, arguing that if the lands in the South have the same relation to the sky, then a “last point also would follow, that there is no part of the earth which is not inhabited by men and other animals.” He explicates that unreasonable people then have to devise

4

The Idea of the Antipodes

another ridiculous law to account for animals and people being able to exist in the antipodes on a round earth and for why “all things do not fall into that lower part of the sky”; they might come up with an absurdity such as “that weights be borne into the middle” of the earth. 9 For Lactantius, it is as though paying attention to the antipodes inexorably leads to imagining a human presence there that is so like one’s own that it beckons for still more analogies, and it thus rewrites or creates new physical principles. These absurd logical extensions are too much for him, and he rejects them. Yet, whereas he is somewhat anomalous in the history of antipodal speculation, he points to two of the overarching topics that recur in antipodean discourse: place and habitation. He suggests that the antipodes reveal something important about the shape and physical make-up of the earth, and he raises questions about where exactly antipodal areas are and whether the antipodes are continental or insular. He also indicates that habitation will be important for the topic in the sense of whether antipodeans live in the region, whether they are human or not, and ultimately whether all humans might in some sense be antipodal to each other. Place and habitation comprise two of three topics of focus in the following study. The third is correspondence, a word I mean in two senses: reflection and communication. In terms of reflection, I explore whether the antipodes and antipodeans correspond to us in the sense of being similar to us or opposite to us. That is, can we look at the antipodean lands and creatures as a reflection of us, or are they the mirror in which we might see ourselves more clearly? A comparative approach such as this therefore gives rise to the question of whether their inhabitants and their societies are the same, better, or worse than ours. Correspondence in terms of communication also suggests communication in a physical sense, such as how the antipodes came to be inhabited. Do antipodeans therefore correspond with us in the sense of being similar to us because they traveled there from here, or are they different because they have forever, or for a very long time, been cut off? Then, to take communication in the historicolinguistic sense, as well as the political and literary sense, we can explore the challenges of communicating with people on the other side of the earth and the methods and modes they use to communicate with us. My general approach to these peripatetic subjects of the place, habitation, and correspondence of the antipodes draws on Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “beside.” In Touching Feeling, Sedgwick seeks to avoid “the topos of depth or hiddenness, typically followed by a drama of exposure, that has been such a staple of critical work in the past four decades.” Rather than attempt “to expose residual forms of essentialism lurking behind apparently nonessentialist forms of analysis,” or “to unearth unconscious drives or compulsions,” or “to uncover violent or oppressive historical forces”—all of which Sedgwick characterizes as critical approaches to what is “beneath” and “behind”—she offers the prepositional–adverbial “beside.” The term beside

Introduction

5

is one that eschews dualisms for more affective associations. “Beside comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” 10 We have already seen that the word antipodes suggests opposites and inversions, but as I have suggested, the Western or Northern relation to the region is more than one of simple inversion and, whereas the antipodal response to the Northwest has historically included—and continues to include—resistance against European and American hegemonies, other forms of contact have also been important. I therefore pay attention to the upside-down and other characteristics of the antipodes. However, the ways that the antipodes have corresponded and failed to correspond with European conceptions of the space and its peoples are more complex and more challenging than clear oppositionality. Sedgwick’s notion of “beside” makes available a vocabulary for addressing these other approaches to the antipodes. For instance, the antipodes are opposite, but they don’t only (and certainly don’t necessarily) oppose or always clearly differentiate themselves from Europe or the United States. Antipodal correspondences can therefore become troubling, for to fi nd oneself beside the antipodes might not seem at fi rst sight to make sense. Can one have a relation of “beside” to the antipodes when they also appear at times to be on an opposite side of the earth? Can one in such a study orient oneself towards the antipodes when orientation is traditionally a motion or gesture towards the East (hence the term Orient)? What kind of different—beside-antipodes—relationships are implied in a confluence such as antipodal orientation? Answering these questions about the antipodes with an approach of beside contributes to postcolonial scholarship. The antipodes bring up and complicate familiar aspects of postcolonial theory, such as One–Other binaries, center–periphery models, mimicry, and local versus global approaches. At the outset we might recognize that the antipodes are different from the West–East binaries repeatedly and complexly articulated in European literature, and also addressed as East–West narratives in American discussions of Manifest Destiny. It is as though in order to consider the antipodes, the West–East line of latitude needs to be turned forty-five degrees, pivoting somewhere so that we might also look historically at a North–South longitudinal dynamic. Yet antipodean discourse suggests that even such a newly oriented One–Other binary will not suffice because, as the Greek ideas of plural and relative antipodes suggests, the antipodes are not always exactly south.11 They seem to be Europe’s opposites, but even those who reside in the South Pacific appear unsure about where they are. (They’re “almost the antipodes of Britain.”) This integral ambiguity about their location means that they have never quite been a peripheral Other against which Europe— or, increasingly, England—has defi ned itself as the central One.

6

The Idea of the Antipodes

I have invoked Edward Said’s Orientalism, the text that brought into focus the constitutive quality of the West’s attitudes towards the East. Said defi ned Orientalism as the West’s “battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections” about the East, and like many studies of the Pacific, my examination takes into account the history of European imperialism and colonialism.12 The earliest surviving discourse about the antipodes is European; the place, peoples, and cultures are antipodal to Europe—fi rst Greece, then Rome, and then other European countries, especially Britain. The antipodes are therefore like Said’s orient in that they have been objects of northern imaginations and were Spanish, Dutch, British, French, and American sites of exploration and exploitation. An adapted term, tropicalism, might therefore be fitting to describe this set of “desires, repressions, investments, and projections,” at least about the later history of the antipodean Pacific.13 Tropicalist attitudes toward the South Seas share some features with narratives about the tropics generally, whether it be the tropics and their southern reaches in Africa, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Tropicalism as it pertains more specifically to Oceania remains in the popular and scholarly imagination as a set of projections, representations, and condensations: palm tree idylls, anthropological primitives, desert islands in an unpopulated ocean, and the fatal, tragic impact of European contact.14 The Samoan writer Albert Wendt has been one of the most explicitly critical writers on the subject. He describes the majority of palagi (European, American, etc.) representations of the Pacific as ranging from the noble-savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings-of-age, Somerset Maugham’s puritan missionaries, drunks and saintly whores, and James Michener’s rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light.15 However, this study also turns in another direction from analysis of northwestern tropicalisms.16 It seeks to identify a range of features of the understudied antipodes, beginning with the earliest Australist and insular speculations and continuing with an investigation of how the tropes change through time. The body of critical literature on the earlier and often unexpected aspects of the antipodes is not large, but one important work is Armand Rainaud’s Le continent austral: Hypothèses et découvertes. Published in 1893, Rainaud’s volume is a comprehensive and insightful examination of the earliest speculative literature on an Australian continent up until the time of Captain James Cook in the eighteenth century. Rainaud proposed that the antipodes are “one of the greatest historical and geographical problems” to face modern scholars.17 This inquiry extends chronologically further than Rainaud’s in that it ends in the South with authors who meet antipodal expectations in the way antipodeans have often met visitors from the North: not head-on, but feet-on. In addition, although I employ a chronological organization of the

Introduction

7

chapters and emphasize spatial relations, I try to keep in mind the “besideness” of the antipodes in a temporal sense, in that their ambiguous location and ontology, as well as their complicated correspondences, seem to punctuate time in uncanny ways in Roland Barthes’ sense of the punctum.18 These ways can, for instance, seem prescient even in a very early chronological period and banally old-fashioned in the most recent times. My research into the affective features of antipodean discourse, rather than more familiar characteristics, has the potential to contribute to postcolonial studies in two more ways. First, it adds to the growing body of scholarship that extends the chronological boundaries of postcolonial histories further than the high points of European global imperialism and colonialism in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. For example, the editors of the 2005 anthology, Postcolonial Studies “and Beyond,” suggest that the current field will be most invigorated by insights gained from older periods. The present inquiry might be read as another response to such a call in that I examine antipodean tropes through the ages. In addition, the editors of the anthology call for scholarship on different kinds of texts. Rather than traditional postcolonial subject matter, they urge the examination of, for example, empirical, scientific, and other writings.19 A study of the antipodes necessitates investigating works from a variety of disciplines. The written texts that discuss the antipodes include poetry, prose, and drama, but they also include works from other disciplines: philosophy, geography, and physics. The prose takes a variety of forms: essays, letters, and travel writings. The antipodes and antipodeans also appear on maps and in artworks such as paintings, illuminations, book illustrations, and drawings, which are therefore also crucial to take into account when considering their geography, habitation, and correspondences. Second, it is not my intent to ignore recent postcolonial theory, but instead to offer the antipodes as one way to stand to the side of—beside—potential impasses in postcolonial studies. For example, consider mimicry and hybridity, two key (related) postcolonial features. Many critics have begun to grow impatient with the simplistic identification of these tropes in (primarily) nineteenth- and twentieth-century non-European literature because to point out mimicry and hybridity in the literature implies that all postcolonial literature is somehow similar and perhaps only texts that include a hybrid character or moment of colonial mimicry are worthy of study. In a related vein, the editors of Postcolonial Studies “and Beyond,” for instance, take to task many of the premises of what is now called “global studies” for overlooking important distinctions among cultures and specific differences in terms of access to power, and they posit the term postcolonialism as having a more antagonistic relation to hegemony.20 Some postcolonial analysis has responded to these and other critiques of global studies by turning to increasingly local studies of national literatures or cultural groups in order to point out their specific and subtle articulations of difference. However, my attempt is to look for other relations

8

The Idea of the Antipodes

beside this newly emergent dialectic in postcolonial “cultural geography,” a binary of, on the one hand, transnational global studies, and on the other, materialist and local histories.21 Throughout its history, antipodean discourse has disallowed one or the other approach because of the oddly unsettled, dislocated aspects of antipodean location, the continual wondering about habitation, and the repeating facts and questions about correspondences between the antipodes and elsewhere. In terms of the chronological scope of this study, I examine Greek and Roman texts, such as those of Plato and Cleomedes; medieval writers and mapmakers like Roger Bacon and Lambert of St. Omer; texts and artworks from the Early Modern period; travel and related literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; twentieth-century texts written in the antipodes; and twenty-fi rst century antipodean discourses. That is, this study considers both those who write from outside the antipodes and those who write from them, the latter including writers from the Pacific Islands such as Wendt and Epeli Hau‘ofa. The significant difference between these two groups is more to do with tropes than place, perspective, or even the strategies they employ in their writings and artworks. The history of discourses about the antipodes, whether written from outside or inside, can in part be seen as a history of different genres: mathematical and geographical in the early era, cartographical and kinetic in the medieval period, social and sexual in the Early Modern period, sartorial and littoral in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, bodily and humoral in the twentieth century, and some combination of these in the most recent era. On the other hand, the antipodes also tend to flout classificatory models of chronological history and to cross genre boundaries. My focus therefore is more an analysis of tropes, of how the presentations come about and are articulated aside from generic distinctions. That is, it is closer to Foucault’s project to analyze “a set of different oppositions whose levels and roles must be described,” the purpose of which is “to map, in a particular discursive practice, the point at which [oppositions] are constituted, to defi ne the form that they assume, the relations that they have with each other, and the domain that they govern.” 22 Chapter 1 examines Greek and Roman conceptions of antipodes. In this early European history, the term antipodes refers fi rst to a place, then a people—an example of geography quickly leading to anthropology. Greek and Roman discourse is seemingly logical; scientists and others reason that the antipodes would simply be places or a place opposite the Northwest and, when they consider the Temperate Zone in the South, inhabited. However, writers such as Plato, Strabo, and the astronomer Cleomedes immediately fi nd the place and people fi lling with imaginary phenomena. It is as though the very logic at the basis of their speculations about the antipodes, combined with that wholly imaginary space, breed multiplicities: places, humans, and voices, the latter nevertheless failing to speak back to their Greek and Roman projections and plosives. The antipodes therefore can call

Introduction

9

into question the nature of those who address them, sometimes threatening to reveal the wholly speculative nature of the discourses about them, and at other times questioning the very nature of the difference between the European speculators and their objects. Chapter 2 examines the medieval period, which continues many of the ancient conjectures. However, Christianity and new forms of scientific knowledge from the Middle Ages introduce three novel elements. The fi rst is a kind of quandary for the northern thinkers. If people exist down there, where did they come from, and has the Word of God reached them? How could this correspondence have occurred? If God’s Word has not made it there, can it be possible that people exist there at all? Second, writers in the Middle Ages tell the initial narratives of travel to the antipodes, including stories of tunnels through the earth and strange genealogies and stories whose beginnings and futures are the antipodes. Third, just as Jeffrey Cohen has written of “medieval identity machines” principally in relation to the rhizomic body, medieval antipodal bodies are hybrids, gesturing beyond themselves and turning themselves backward, inside out, and upside down.23 In order to analyze, in terms of beside, these three features of medieval antipodal orientation, I examine the still-understudied field of medieval geographical theory to show the fundamental nature of medieval conceptions of place, area, and world. For many writers and artists during the period, such as the twelfth-century encyclopedist Lambert of St. Omer, Albertus Magnus in the thirteenth-century, and the fourteenth-century author of The Book of John Mandeville, the antipodes embody a mobile potential and therefore extend and alter their metageographical preconceptions in ways that set the world into disorienting motion. The Early Modern period involves a complicated return to both classical and medieval tropes. The third chapter focuses on the first titular reference to the southern land and peoples, a 1638 drama by the English playwright Richard Brome. Brome’s play The Antipodes centers on a character who has been reading Mandeville’s travels and has developed an obsessive madness with the antipodes. The cure? The illusion of travel to the most distant land, thanks to the careful manipulation of a doctor, family members, and friends. The play’s narrative aims toward a restorative end, but it is ultimately more complicated when seen in the context of other plays that respond to William Shakespeare’s late comedy The Tempest. The Antipodes imagines an assemblage of sexual, spatial, and bodily forces, forces that redirect the genre of antipodal satire in which the play participates away from simple critique to imagining possibilities that are beside, in Sedgwick’s senses of that word, the expected. The play proposes that the antipodes have already returned to London and have altered the Early Modern sense of British bodies, relationships, and sexualities. Physical travel to and from the Southern Hemisphere in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is the subject of Chapter 4. Here I consider travel writing, which includes ship logs, epistolary poems, and a pantomime. The

10

The Idea of the Antipodes

antipodes, inhabitants, and correspondences change again in this period, but the transformation is not one in which fictional or imaginary encounters suddenly become rendered only in realist or empirical terms. Indeed, ever since the ancient era, speculative but nevertheless empirical writings about the antipodes have been customary, so the change in discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is more subtle and complex. Also, rather than an examination of only European projections about the antipodes, Chapter 4 includes analyses of narratives that begin and end in the antipodes for the fi rst time in the history of the subject. It looks particularly at Mai, from islands west of Tahiti, who in 1774 went to London and, in the company of the renowned naturalist Joseph Banks, met King George, the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the novelist Fanny Burney. His two-year stay in Britain reconfi rmed some Europeans’ ways of thinking about the New World, but others had their worlds enlarged. Mai was the fi rst antipodean to survive the return voyage to the Society Islands, and when he arrived back, he rode a horse along the beach wearing motley clothing of Tahitian, Tongan, and English influence, and in the end, he moved to another island where he lived in a small English-style house fi lled with English goods, which was itself covered by a Tahitian structure. The transformations and adaptations of these items of clothing and goods suggest further unexpected effects of antipodean habitation and correspondence. Where Mai’s narrative begins and ends in the antipodes, the fi nal chapter analyzes select twentieth-century antipodal texts from within the antipodes. After an introduction to what we might call island theory, I focus on places, people, and correspondences within the antipodes, networks principally inside or among the antipodes rather than with locations outside the region. One notable tone of this principally later twentieth-century literature is nostalgia. This tone arises out of an interest in the past, and rather than a nostalgia for, say, England, it expresses an attitude of regret in the face of European and American influences and a desire for a former home within the antipodes. Many authors write of an antipodal region that is subject to neo-colonial derogations, but other causes contribute to a generally sorrowful tone. Soon, however, a lighter attitude toward the places, peoples, and their history appears. An antipodal chuckle communicates itself in short works, mainly stories and poems, which not only make comic inversions and parodies of northwestern expectations about Oceania, but also poke gentle fun at objects and attitudes within the antipodes. The afterword looks to the future of the antipodes. It includes a discussion of the Degree Confluence Project, an electronic archive that contains photographs and accounts of people’s visits, with the aid of global positioning systems, to places on land that are the exact intersection of latitude and longitude without minutes or seconds.24 The most curious part of the site is its antipodean feature. One may see a photograph, for example, of a rough hillside just outside Beijing and another of a flat, shrub-covered field in the

Introduction

11

province of Río Negro in Argentina. A global readymade, the site demonstrates one potential future for the antipodes that turns them away from a relationality to England and towards a kind of strict relativity, like the mathematical defi nition in the earliest Greek writings. Let me close with two brief examples of the topics that arise in this study. While they are not strictly about the antipodes but rather about the South more generally, they stand at a historical turning point of discourse when the antipodes are starting to be associated with the southern Pacific Ocean. One is a late-sixteenth-century text by a Spanish Jesuit in Lima, Peru, and the other an early-seventeenth-century fictional work by England’s self-proclaimed fi rst satirist. The Spanish Jesuit José de Acosta, chair of theology in Lima, published his massive Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590 in Seville. It was an international success and was soon translated into English. Francis Bacon used it as a principal source for his 1627 utopian tract New Atlantis. Acosta writes about the new South with astonishing amplification: “there is a fi rme Land on this Southerne part, as bigge as all Europe, Asia, and Affricke. . . . [w]hereof the Ancients might stand in doubt, and contradict it for want of experience.” 25 Acosta’s text explicitly addresses the legacy of European literature about the Southern Hemisphere, including the antipodes, yet it is also one of the fi rst to indicate that the South can have a role that is not just to reflect Europe. Several conjoined discourses enable him to do so: the known and as-yet unknown help him to comprehend the world, the ancients and his contemporary experience in Peru allow him to consider the earth in new ways, and in his writing he notes that reason and imagination need to work together to address the new sense of the world. Acosta’s view is expansive rather than contrastive, where he couples European ideas about the Southern Hemisphere with experiences of the new South. Acosta begins the Historia natural y moral by looking upward at the southern sky. He describes the expansiveness of the Milky Way in contrast to the stars in the Northern Hemisphere. He also notes that the sky in Lima provides so much comfort that “the desire to returne into Spaine doth nothing trouble us, being as neere unto Heaven at Peru, as in Spaine.” In several chapters that follow, he discusses the antipodes fi rst by disagreeing with St. Augustine and affi rming that there is land in the South “under the Pole Antarticke,” noting that his own southern continent extends from the “Straight of Magellan, to the Cape of Mendoce” (present-day Mendocino in California). He also looks out from the West Coast of South America to the Solomon Islands and New Guinea in the northwestern part of what he calls the “South Sea” and speculates that “it is likely, a good parte of the world is not yet discovered.” 26 Acosta also dispels Lactantius’s assertions about the impossibility of upside-down existence in the antipodes, noting that “wee that live now at Peru, and inhabite that part of the world which is opposite to Asia and their Antipodes (as the Cosmographers do teach us) fi nde not our selves to bee hanging in the aire, our heades downward, and our feete on high.” With

12

The Idea of the Antipodes

reference to Augustine and Lactantius, he wonders at how marvelous it is that the imagination is so necessary in perceiving these new things that they failed to envisage, an imagination that nevertheless needs guidance from the “rationall soule.” 27 Acosta does not choose one place over another and isolate the New World from the Old. Nor does he consider the antipodean spaces as better in the present or in the past, in that they might offer another path that Europe might have taken or might take towards a superior future. Instead, his evaluations of Augustine, Lactantius, and others as he looks out from the West Coast of South America point Acosta to a different future, something that is to the side of Old World–New World narratives, beside a Spain–Indies dichotomy, and beside other binaries such as known–unknown, ancient– contemporary, and ratio–imagines. Meanwhile, the title of Joseph Hall’s Mundus alter et idem, published in Latin in London in 1605 or early 1606 (and later compiled with Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun), also suggests similarities, continuities, and amalgams rather than difference. The most important word in the title of this work by Hall—bishop, polemicist, and satirist—is the conjunction and because he presents another world that is also the same world. Like Acosta’s text, Hall’s title puts this other world directly beside, “idem,” the same world. In the vein of the Historia natural y moral, Hall’s writing takes off into the future, imagining a wildly fantastical world. Like Acosta, he appears interested in something other than comparison with and satire of European conventions and mores, even though satire comprises the majority of the work. In places, Mundus alter et idem presents a startlingly imaginative world that radically adjusts one’s image of the earth. A map included in the text (fig. I.1) that radically reproportions landmasses initially prompts this change in the viewer’s global perception. In the narrative of Mundus alter et idem, an English traveler appropriately named Mercurius Britannicus boards a vessel called The Phantasia and travels south along the coast of Africa, rounds the Cape of Good Hope, and takes a different route from all previous seamen by continuing south instead of turning north along the African coast and heading to India or the Indies. Soon he reaches the Cape’s opposite landmass, which he discovers from its inhabitants is called “the Black Cape of Crapulia”—Crapulia meaning “drunken.” The region he has encountered soon turns out to be one of several that belong to a vast southern continent, which contains a profusion of grotesqueries, many of which are clearly satirical of contemporary London society. For instance, he comes across the region of Pamphagonia, or glutton, where “those who grow their paunch to a certain size are promoted to be full citizens.” He then moves on to the East, to the region of Viraginia, or New Gynia, where he is captured. Women rule Viraginia and its various provinces and islands: Aphrodysia, Hermaphroditica Island, and Amazonia or Gynandria.28 Mercurius escapes to Moronia and its provinces, some of which are explicitly or implicitly comparisons with Hall’s Britain: Variana (or Moronia

Introduction

13

Figure I.1 Joseph Hall, Mundus alter et idem (Hannover, 1607). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Mobilis), Moronia Aspera (“hopeful fool”), Orgilia (from the French word meaning “pride”), Moronia Fatua (“simple fool”), Moronia Felix (“happy fool”), and Moronia Pia (“devout fool”). The region of Moronia is called “the largest, the most uncultivated, and the most populous region.” The narrator says that even China, which he estimates has seventy million people, is “nothing but a desert if one were to compare its population to the extremely dense population of Moronia.” 29 However, for the most part, the book is free of explicit comparisons and contrasts with Britain. Even implicit ones, though prevalent, do not dominate so that while the book is a satire of Catholicism, women, and nations, it is only gently ironic about human vices. Besides, in Mundus alter et idem, a great deal of the “discoveries” are not satires. Instead, we are presented with a parallel world that is the same in which the narrator wanders and wonders over the attributes of its vast lands. For example, consider the laws of Pamphagonia, which include: “Whoever shall omit a meal by sleeping a whole four hours and thus defraud the deity shall be obliged to eat twice.” Or take a law

14

The Idea of the Antipodes

of Zouffenberga, the principal metropolis in the region of Yvronia (Zouffenberga means “to carouse” and Yvronia means “drunkard”): “A sober man who strikes a drunken one shall be disabled from ever being witness by reason of misconduct; whoever drunken strikes a sober man shall be acquitted.” The narrator has the good fortune to witness a funeral in Yvronia in which “The body was not laid on a bier or a pyre but was placed in a huge, half-full wine cask and then in a well fi lled with wine—not so much buried as submerged.” In Moronia Fatua, the people do not know how to build houses, “partly, in truth, because they dare not enter buildings made by others, lest they be crushed by the heavy roof falling down.” In Fripperia, a neighborhood in the city of Bolsecium (“cutpurse”) in the region of Lavernia (“thieves”), “since each [person’s] face, and clothes, and voice, and manner change daily, it is useless to complain today of yesterday’s imposture.” 30 Each of these places therefore follows a kind of logic, yet their institutions and customs are excessive. Laws, rites, sumptuary, habitation, expression, all arise out of something about the place yet end up exceeding what is strictly inherent to it. Also, a kind of radical flatness characterizes the cultures: the world of this southern continent is in some sense the same as Europe. It is as though it is continuous with the place where Mercurius Britannicus starts out. For example, another of the continent’s novelties arises in Variana. The narrator comes across a tomb inscription. It reads: PASSERBY: Stay, Read, Walk. Here lies Andrew Vortunius, neither a slave nor a soldier, nor a doctor, nor a fencer, nor a shoemaker, nor a thief, nor a lawyer, nor a moneylender, but all these. Who lived his life not in the city, not in the country, not at home, not abroad, not on the sea, not on the land, not here, not anywhere, but everywhere. Who died not from hunger, nor from poison, nor from the sword, nor from the noose, nor from sickness, but from all. I, H.I., of that man not a debtor, nor an heir, nor a kinsman, nor a neighbor, nor a friend, but all of these, erected this, not a monument, not a stone, not a tomb, not a castle of sorrow, but all of them; wishing not ill, not good, but both, not to you, not to him, not to me, but all to everyone. 31 Like Acosta, we fi nd Hall through his narrator looking out to a whole other world where places, peoples, and correspondences are not only inverted but also different and the same in other, unexpected ways. This is the antipodean promise, a promise of something dissimilar, oddly similar, and more.

1

Spots in Time Antipodean Place, Habitation, and Communication in the Ancient World

Spots in Time

The earliest Western discussions of the antipodes primarily occur within philosophical and scientific writings. They address the place of the antipodes in the sense of their location and their landmass; the habitation of the antipodes in terms of whether habitation is possible and the nature of their population if it is possible; and, lastly, communication with the antipodes in physical terms, meaning the ability of people or news of people to reach the antipodes or knowledge of the antipodes to reach Europe. The discussion that follows begins with a brief exploration of the tropological, that is, the constitutively discursive features of Greek and Roman thought about the antipodes. The subsequent main body of the chapter is structured around the topics of antipodean place, habitation, and communication. All three topics—place, habitation, and communication—take place, as it were, under the sign of correspondence. First, in terms of location, Greek and Roman writers consider the antipodes as correspondent in the sense of a region that is opposite geographically from their “podes,” or where they set their feet. They reason that the antipodes are simply mathematically relative to where one is in space at a given moment. Therefore, they begin by noticing that the terrain, flora and fauna, and everything else in the antipodes could be the same, the inverse, or something else completely. However, because the antipodes correspond with Europe in the sense of being its opposite, the strict relativism of the initial geographical image gives way to envisioning the antipodes as mirroring Greek and Roman places. That is, the discussions proceed beyond ideas of mere relativity, and the authors apply their general observations of the earth around them to the other side of the globe so that they conjecture further about the location and the physical features of the antipodes. Their discourses develop through simile to deduce that the geography of the antipodes corresponds to European geography in the sense of being like it. The second aspect of correspondence involves ideas about habitation. Nothing within the cosmological–geographical premise of the existence of the antipodes and the conclusion that the region is terrestrially similar to Europe necessarily indicates whether people exist or not out there. Nevertheless, the

16

The Idea of the Antipodes

question of habitation instantly intrigued Greek and Roman writers and, following on from the fi rst speculations about the region, they sought to answer it. Again, analogies and correspondences advance the ideas, leading several writers to say that because people exist in the North, people exist in the South. The antipodes might be—indeed, most likely are—inhabited. The third aspect of correspondence is its other meaning, namely communication or lack of communication with the antipodes. If the place exists and if people exist in the region, might it be possible for us to communicate with them or them with us? The answer to this question arises out of speculation that if people exist there, then those in Europe might have heard from them or about them in some empirical way. However, the question of communication also arises out of the very logic of mirror existences: philosophers speculate that the land exists, they speculate that it is inhabited by people like us, so they reason that they must have communicative tools like ships and a desire to explore and conquer like us. Correspondence in terms of communication with the antipodes also introduces the fi rst hint of a temporal–epistemological element and doubt in the discussions. Have we heard from the antipodeans in the past? Might we hear from them in the future? And what do these questions imply about our present state of knowledge?1 Each of these three inferences about the geography of the antipodes, its people, and communication is linked in a paratactic manner so that one initial observation to be made about early antipodean discourse is that attention to the region implies or even compels connections between ideas. The existence of the antipodes, their anthropology, and communication with them elicit and lead to each other. The structural device, in addition to correspondence, therefore, is continuity—a transference from one idea to another to create a plane of connection.2 As subsets under the overarching notions of geographic correspondence, analogous habitation, and communication, as well as the related notion of continuity, lie four specific ideas in Greek and Roman texts that structure the antipodean ground, actively generating or constructing it in enduring and sometimes permanent ways. Plato is the earliest named author to use the word antipodes in the Timaeus, his essay on necessity in a universe subject to an organizing intelligence and on the distinction between being and becoming. The Timaeus contains these four ideas, so it will serve to illustrate each of them. The fi rst idea, already indicated but worth exploring further in Plato’s reasoning, suggests that the antipodes are geographically opposite to where one is, yet they are similarly composed. Greeks and Romans commonly propose that the antipodes are necessarily unknown, yet they are not able to leave the place as largely unknown because it is exactly cartographically opposite and therefore familiar in its strangeness. Their fi rst conclusion is that everything there is not inverted but is, rather, like Europe. The relevant passage in

Spots in Time

17

Plato’s Timaeus appears in the context of his discussion of the nature of the human body before he depicts the nature of the soul. In the section on the body, he discusses the difference between light and heavy objects, and to do so he must dispense with the idea of up and down. He says that no absolute above and below exist in a spherical universe by reasoning that the center of the universe is the center and not even really “down”; the periphery is the periphery and not “up.” He says, “the center of the world cannot be rightly called either above or below, but is the center and nothing else,” and he continues, “Such being the nature of the world, when a person says that any of” the points around the earth (the earth at the center of the cosmos) “is above or below, may he not be justly charged with using an improper expression?” With above and below relative to the center of the earth, the “circumference” of the world “has in no one part of itself a different relation to the center from what it has in any of the opposite parts.” Having dispensed with absolutes of up and down, and places being categorically different, he moves on to question another pair of binaries about the earth. Indeed, when it is in every direction similar, how can one rightly give to it names which imply opposition? For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the center of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar.3 With this schematic in mind, we see the fi rst suggestion that each place on the earth is analogous and (at least) mathematically identical to each other. Each locus is merely relative rather than unconditional, and Greece is antipodal to the antipodes. The second Greek and Roman antipodean idea is that of the linked series, a series that also purports to describe antipodean location. This brings into focus another clearly identifiable antipodean discourse, namely polysyndeton or parataxis, the employment of repeated conjunctions—and, and, and, and— so that there’s an uninterrupted, undifferentiated series from place, to people, to communication. It is likely that this feature arises because of the grammatically plural nature of the word antipodes, in that the Greeks and Romans fi nd multiplicity within the concept of the place; this appears to lead them to say that the antipodes are unknown and similar. Nothing within the fi rst idea of the antipodes as unknown necessitates the second conclusion of similarity, yet antipodean thinking sees the unknown as already more than unknowable. In the Timaeus, Plato follows his delineation of the center and periphery of the world with an illustration of a person walking. Here is the fi rst recorded use of the word antipodes. All places on the globe are “perfectly similar, and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below.” 4 The mention of the traveler follows as if naturally from the discussion of antipodal global points. This is fairly typical in writings about the antipodes

18

The Idea of the Antipodes

in that we will see that the unknown location’s similitude often extends fi rst to the climate, then to the people, and then to a population that is alike. That is, each assertion elicits another, and another, with habitation appearing early in the string of observations. Plato’s polysyndetonic steps from place to people reminds us of the metonymic nature of Jacques Lacan’s “chain of signifiers,” which is not merely an endless search for the subject, but also a search for “where I am not,” or what Lacan calls “the self’s radical eccentricity to itself.” 5 We might apply his observations about the individual to Plato’s descriptions of Europe and its opposite. We might also add to this a note about another important feature of Plato’s description of the globe: global travel. He proposes, “if a person were to go round the world in a circle.” That is, the philosopher doesn’t quite conceive of people existing simultaneously on opposite sides, but instead imagines a person circling round the surface of the earth. This vision suggests the third aspect of antipodean discourse. The third feature is somewhat paradoxical and, like the previous two, it has to do more with the form than the explicit content of texts that address the antipodes. In Greek and Roman writings about the antipodes, two types of expression adjoin. The antipodes give rise to conceptual writing, such as mathematics, yet they also induce a species of realist literature.6 In the fi rst kinds of analysis of the antipodes, the region is a place that is diametrically, even diagrammatically, at an opposite point on the earth to where one is at the present moment. In the second case, the antipodes have to do with the feet, standing, travel, and the ground; that is, they are tied to the earth and are less conceptual. In the Timaeus, the antipodes are a proposition, a multitude of mathematical–geographical points that Plato uses to make clearer to readers the shape of the earth, and indeed of the cosmos, and the relativity of positions on or in them. However, as with the word antipodes, the example he gives of the walking circumnavigator is a concrete, grounded illustration not of a geometric nature, but of a person walking around the earth and standing on its surface with his podes, his feet. Abstraction is contiguous with realism, the two modes of expression here reinforcing each other. Also, as part of this third compound feature of antipodean discourse, the climate and often the weather become prominent, as though meteorological speculations fi ll up the space between cosmo-mathematical abstraction and earth-bound realism, the space between the sky and the ground. Looking ahead, the weather will play a significant role in later texts of exploration, empiricism, and colonialism.7 The fourth major antipodean feature that characterizes the epistemologies about the ground, the sky, the air, and the people returns all these discussions to an originary, foundational uncertainty. This lack of surety is an acute version of what the Romans identified as dubitatio. It exists to call all assertions about the place, habitation, and correspondences into question. Where are the antipodes? How big are they? Are they in fact inhabited? The antipodes might correspond to where we are, but why do we not hear from their inhabitants? Why is there no communication? In this sense, the antipodes are like the object

Spots in Time

19

of apostrophe, the Other who is evoked—spoken out of—the opposite side of the earth. They are summoned so much that eventually they speak. Yet it is a curiously hollow, always potentially too-reflexive language in the search for “where I am not.” There is merely a hint of this uncertainty and latently baseless speech in the Timaeus, but it is a disturbing murmur. It is also one that has to do with time. Recall that Plato says that the person, “when standing at the antipodes of his former position,” “would often . . . speak of the same point as above and below.” Is the person fickle so he or she would only “often” speak of that former place where he or she stood? Is he or she unsure of whether the point where he or she stands now is a point antipodal to the former place of standing? Or does he or she only think of it at times for some unknown reason? The lack of surety in Plato’s articulation and the slight hesitation in the antipodean’s voice as he or she speaks from his or her new position about a former self adds a distinctly provisional and somewhat arbitrary element to every place being antipodal to another, including the place where Plato writes, Greece. It seems paradoxical, therefore, that the effect of this ambiguity drives the narratives about the antipodes forward, its sense of uncertainty impelling. This effect might initially strike us as odd, but ideology is contradictory (there is an ideological dimension to Plato’s discourse; the Timaeus follows on from discussions about the state), and contradictions can perpetuate ideology. At the same time, the uncertainty also threatens the points of connection, the similes, within the other three antipodean tropes: the spatial analogy, the spatial and habitational polysyndeton, and the conceptualist–realist filling in of the space between sky and earth. I mentioned Lacan, and other modern ways of thinking about the Greek and Roman ideas of the antipodes come to mind. The sense of the unknown and the similar antipodes suggests Freud’s unheimlich. After all, the unheimlich is something that is an “addition” to what is novel or unfamiliar, an addition that is “concealed and kept out of sight” and has a “familiar and congenial” quality.8 Moreover, while inversion has been identified as one of the distinguishing features of postcolonial writing, as Homi Bhabha and others have pointed out, among Greek and Roman writers we see that the antipodes are not inverted but are opposite and alike. Inversion will be part of the later history of writing and thinking about the antipodes and might even be our fi rst impulse in thinking about the region today. However, even here we see that the uncanny similitude of the antipodes hints at Bhabha’s sense of imitation and mimicry instead. The constitutively unknown—even unknowable— nature of the antipodes is nevertheless analogous to Europe and therefore has the potential to be a copy and supplement of Europe. The difference from the modern ideas is that rather than the antipodes being something repressed, they are on the same surface plane as the podes. Openly discussed, their relation is one of analogous similitude. Yet doubt accompanies the associations. Indeed, the antipodes mirror Europe, but that mirror reflects back an isolated region, indeed a fragmented world that has a remarkably tenuous history and appears as though it will have an uncertain future.

20

The Idea of the Antipodes

Antipodean Location In addition to the complications that the plural word antipodes and the uncertainty about a person “often” speaking of the “same point as above and below” indicate, the term antipodes in Greek and Roman usage is ambiguous about location in another sense, but one that is eventually resolved. The problem of location arises because it is possible for someone to be antipodal to someone else yet in the same hemisphere; that is, along the same latitude but on the other “side” of the globe. This goes to the question of the exact location of the antipodes and whether the center of the earth is necessary for determining opposites. In the opening section of Strabo’s Geography, the encyclopedic work he wrote in the fi rst century BCE , Strabo says, for instance, that someone in India and someone in Spain are “antipodes to each other.”9 (Incidentally, note here that, unlike Plato, Strabo conceives of people simultaneously on opposite sides of the earth, albeit in the same hemisphere or latitude; that is, he does not imagine travel but independent existence.) However, others used specialized terminology in an attempt to clarify the location of the antipodes. One contribution to the discussion about antipodean location is the concept of the oikoumene. For Aristotle, the oikoumene encompasses the land from the Pillars of Hercules to the Far East of India. He and many others, including possibly Pythagoras before him, thought of this landmass as completely surrounded by water, a belief that would become increasingly important. Whereas Aristotle claims that regions beyond the known one could be inhabited, he does not say they are.10 It wasn’t until later that we have a record of Crates of Mallos in the second century BCE who speculates that the oikoumene—occupied by Europeans, Asians, and North Africans—is one of four bodies of land separated from each other by two oceans. The reconstruction of his globe in figures 1.1 and 1.2 show one ocean encircling the earth east to west in the Torrid Zone, and the other north to southwest of Europe, the same ocean as at the distant end of Asia, an idea with which Columbus traveled. Hence, the world was thought to contain four large landmasses separated like four quadrants on the earth. Crates also suggested that the four lands were inhabited.11 Later writers picked up this idea; for example, James Romm, in his study The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought, discusses Macrobius and his contemporary, Martianus Capella, both of whom write in the Christian era but in the tradition of Greek and Roman science, who have a similar idea about landmasses as Crates.12 The astronomer Cleomedes also clarifies Strabo’s claim about the location of the antipodes. Writing at the same time as Strabo, Cleomedes says: To explain: the footprints of all who walk the Earth must face directly toward the center (that is, the exact center) of the Earth, given that the exact center of the Earth, because of its spherical shape, is downwards. Hence it is not our circumhabitants who become our antipodes, but inhabitants of the contratemperate zone in the region below the Earth—the

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Figures 1.1. & 1.2 Crates of Mallos (ca. 150 first globe.13

BCE)

21

is believed to have constructed the

22

The Idea of the Antipodes ones who are located directly opposite us, with their footprints directly opposite ours.14

Another contemporary, Geminus of Rhodes, concurred, noting that the antipodes are “diametrically opposed to the world we inhabit.” He says that everything is pulled towards the center of the earth, and if that direction is followed through, the region on the other side is the antipodes where the seasons are reversed.15 Another important basis to thinking about the location of the antipodes in the South and in the opposite quadrant from Europe is the idea that the earth is divided into zones as in figure 1.3. Martianus mentions this idea, but Parmenides, Eratosthenes, and Aristotle are credited with developing this global image.

Figure 1.3 Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis expositio (Brescia, 1485). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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In this scheme, five zones ring the globe. In the center is the Torrid or Fiery Zone, a band that is also occupied by an ocean or two oceans. At the two poles are the frigid regions. Between the torrid and the frigid are the temperate bands. Aristotle and others assert that the temperate zones are the only habitable ones, the others being too hot or cold for human survival.16 In the tradition that follows, the antipodes are not in the far South, but instead are found in the Temperate Zone. Discussions of the zonal regions on the earth, which arise in the context of determining the location of the antipodes, mix discourses just as Plato did in his discussions of the antipodes. The zones are described with an amalgam of abstract and realist modes. That is, the zones are bands that form geometric shapes with mathematical, calculable areas and volumes, and they are also described in terms that vividly evoke the human senses: searing heat and piercing cold or an even temperance between the two. In this second mode, the zones are either habitable or not. The climate is again an important determining factor in deciding on the location and (then) the characteristics of antipodal space. Despite scientific discussions of antipodean location and landmass such as these, Africa, part of the oikoumene, is the area that gives rise to extended discussions about a territory in the South with the potential to be antipodean.17 “Libya” or “Ethiopia” were the names often given to Africa. Herodotus, in his Histories, describes Ethiopia as “Where south inclines westwards, the part of the world stretching farthest towards the sunset.” 18 Polybius, who in the second century BCE divides the world into three parts—Asia, Libya, and Europe—says that Asia and Libya are separated by the Nile and share the area below the Mediterranean. However, when it comes to land in the South, Polybius is cautious, saying only that where Asia and Libya approach each other in the neighbourhood of Ethiopia, whether the continent is continuous to the South, or is surrounded by the sea . . . none of us as yet knows . . . and anything we can ever know must be the result of future exploration; and those who rashly venture by word of mouth or written statements to describe [such an area] must be looked upon as ignorant or romancing.19 Polybius sounds an early note of caution and also moralizes about southern speculations. He suggests that analogies with Europe ultimately arise out of a lack of knowledge, a lacuna that is then often projected onto the antipodean regions. For example, in about 43 CE in Rome, Pomponius Mela writes that the sea encircles the earth on all sides and that the earth may be divided into two hemispheres and five zones, and yet, because of “the heat of the intervening expanse,” the southern band is unknown. However, he does not hesitate to describe Africa as bounded in the South, probably in the Torrid Zone or farther south, by the “Aethiopian Sea.” Elsewhere he asserts that

24

The Idea of the Antipodes

an ocean divides the northern from the southern area so that the Nile, which originates in southern lands, goes through a tunnel to reach the North.20 Strabo expends considerable energy discussing his most important source for geography on Ethiopia, Homer’s Odyssey, and Homer’s statement that Ethiopians occupy two lands as though Ethiopia is divided into East and West. 21 In doing so, Strabo almost inadvertently introduces the fi rst extended note of realism in a description of southern lands; yet again we see the mixing of two tones—here, realist depiction woven into or arising out of scientific speculation. He takes issue with two other commentators on Homer—Aristarchus and Crates—who imply that Homer was inaccurate in his statement that the Ethiopian land is divided into eastern and western parts. He fi nally refutes them by pointing out that the Arabian Gulf divides the East from the West of Ethiopia. However, along the way he entertains Crates’ idea that Ethiopia, extending to the South, might be divided into two land masses: rather than East and West, a North Ethiopia and South Ethiopia. Here, Crates has picked up on the zonal concept that the torrid belt was taken up with the ocean, so for him Ethiopia is a divided land. Strabo states: Now, just as [the] Ethiopians on our side of Oceanus, who face the south throughout the whole length of the inhabited world, are called the most remote of the one group of peoples, since they dwell on the shores of Oceanus, so too, Crates thinks, we must conceive that on the other side of Oceanus also there are Ethiopians, the most remote of the other groups of peoples in the temperate zone, since they dwell on the shores of this same Oceanus.22 Although this region is not an antipodal place, but one on the same north–south longitude as Europe, Crates of Mallos appears to be the fi rst to imagine something fi rm in the other Temperate Zone, a southern continent separate from the northern one, yet retaining continuity with the North. As Strabo points out, Crates’ thinking appears to be based on an anthropological hypothesis as though gained from empirical knowledge. That the landmass is peopled is another feature of antipodal discourse, speculative realism about the earth immediately evoking population. Another global concept, which was to persist all the way into the eighteenth century, underpins ideas about the potential existence of an antipodean land. In contrast to the idea that sea surrounds the outer edge of the known world, in the fi fth century BCE Herodotus posits that the outer edge is instead ringed by land. In a digression from a discussion of North Europe, he says that, “the most distant parts of the world . . . enclose and wholly surround all other lands.” 23 Ptolemy, in his Geography and Almagest of the fi rst century CE , also writes that the edge of the earth is bounded not by sea but by land. In Ptolemy, Asia’s Far East “turn[s] south and then west, eventually to join the east coast of Africa, thereby making the Indian Ocean a vast

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enclosed sea unconnected with the Atlantic Ocean.” 24 Land “encloses the Sea of India” and joins Asia to Africa (“Libya”). The Indian Ocean “is contained by land on all sides. Hence, of the three continents, Asia is connected to Libyē both by the land-strait at Arabia . . . and by the unknown land that surrounds the Sea of India.” Where does this land extend its ring along from Africa to Asia? “The southern limit of the known world is bounded by the parallel 16 5/12˚ south of the equator.” This limit is anti-Meroē, the opposite of Meroē in Africa but farther north. Most maps based on Ptolemy’s projections, such as figure 1.4, show the southern boundary of the Indian Ocean beginning at about this latitude.25 Later in the Geography, Ptolemy critiques earlier mapmakers for having the land turn south in Eastern Asia only because they had got to the edge of the page.26 Ptolemy instead extends the eastern boundaries of Asia farther out, to present-day China, and southeast, possibly as far as Burma, Vietnam, and Malaysia. The land then continues south from there until it turns westward to join Africa.27 In this world vision, the boundaries of the oikoumene extend into the Southern Hemisphere. Yet on the features or inhabitants of the presumably huge land that covers the majority of the Southern Hemisphere from China or Malaysia to Africa, Ptolemy says nothing. His is a theoretical, mathematical geography, and the land merely exists in those latitudes. Antipodean Habitation To turn now from discussions of antipodean space to discussions of antipodean habitation, some of which we have seen mentioned already, we can note that ideas about antipodean habitation appear early. Some five hundred years before Ptolemy, for example, Plato names the antipodes, but there is some uncertainty whether he was the fi rst writer to use the word to designate a place. It may have been the Pythagoreans, or even Pythagoras himself. 28 The Pythagorean mention of the antipodes comes to us, like so many discussions, third-hand. Diogenes Laertius, in his Lives of Eminent Philosophers (ca. 300 CE ), one of the principal sources for early philosophers on diverse topics, tells of Alexander Polyhistor (ca. 105–35 BCE ), a Greek scholar who wrote on so many historical subjects that he was named after his great learning. Alexander had a particular interest in geographical history, so his interest in the Pythagoreans makes sense. While his works haven’t survived, Diogenes mentions at one point that Alexander talks about the Pythagoreans and their concepts of the origins of the world: “The principle of all things is the monad or unit; arising from this monad the undefi ned dyad or two serves as material substratum to the monad, which is cause.” The Pythagorean “unit” at the origin gives rise to duality, and in the Pythagorean theory, the duality in turn induces numbers, eventually fi gures, then solid fi gures, the elements, the earth, habitation “round about,” and the antipodes. In a sense, the end point

Figure 1.4 Claudius Ptolemy, Geographia, trans. Jacopo d’Angelo, ed. Nicolaus Germanus (Ulm, 1482). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

26 The Idea of the Antipodes

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in the progression here, the antipodes, nicely encapsulates the Pythagorean logic. They are antipodal and therefore opposite to the places where people set their podes, their feet, and thereby a manifestation of the early “dyad.” On the other hand, they are a sign of the more originary “monad” because they simply exist “round about.” 29 Going back far enough in Pythagorean reasoning, everyone is antipodal if the earth is indeed inhabited everywhere. Pythagorean thinking is the earliest example of Cleomedes’, Strabo’s, and Martianus’ tropes that the antipodes are inhabited simultaneously with the oikoumene rather than only potentially reachable by the Platonic hypothetical traveler. Yet we might also notice that the progression from cosmological universe to an anthropological, peopled one is mere syndeton, joined by an “and” in the account that has come down to us. The earth is spherical because the universe is, but why is it inhabited? The Pythagoreans don’t answer, each part in the series—land, people—merely calling each other into being. With the picture of the five zones in mind, Posidonius, head of the Stoic School in Rhodes at about 100 BCE , claims much more about habitation of the Southern Temperate Zone (and an idea that will be important in the Middle Ages). He reasons that earth is inhabited because “Nature loves life” and “abhors a vacuum.” In his discussion, Posidonius says that the people are “‘dwellers opposite,’ who may be called Ethiopians, and Antipodes, who can walk on the earth below us, since all heavy bodies are attracted towards the center of the globe.” 30 Cleomedes, who wrote on Posidonius, uses the traditions of mathematical analogies to describe how many people live in the antipodes: “the regions of the Earth that are equally temperate are necessarily inhabited to an equal extent.” He also states that the sun is the same for “cohabitants,” but we have nothing in common with the antipodes. Instead, everything is reversed: we occupy one another’s lower regions of the Earth, and their seasons, that is, their daytimes and nighttimes, in terms of the lengthening and shortening of daytimes, are the reverse of ours. They “have nothing in common” yet are analogically opposite in terms of land, occupation, and seasons, time also inverted there. In a remarkable passage, Cleomedes goes so far as to look at the sets of oppositions from the other side: “[W]e become circumhabitants of our circumhabitants, antipodes of our antipodes, and similarly contrahabitants of our contrahabitants.” Moreover, he asserts that the antipodeans, like those on the other side of the earth in the same latitudes (“circumhabitants”), “resemble those [relations] of friends and brothers, rather than those of fathers and children, or slaves and masters.” 31 The circumhabitants, contrahabitants, and antipodes are everywhere; the globe peopled all about in fraternal similitude.

28

The Idea of the Antipodes

This egalitarian worldview is only one way early writers imagine global community. A populated antipodes could in fact be a mirror or even better— they could then reflect back to Greek and Roman peoples what was deficient about their societies. Romm notes that inhabitants on the “edges” of Western thought in general often had “a unique ethical prerogative,” the licens[e] . . . to mock, preach to, or simply ignore the peoples of the interior. In their eyes, “normal” human values, as defi ned by those who imagine themselves at the privileged center, can appear arbitrary and even laughably absurd.32 Romm traces the developments of this thought about distant peoples in early Greek writings, but the fi rst clear application of this critical mirror function of the antipodes occurs in Cicero’s De re publica, the work he wrote in about 51 BCE. An imaginary dialogue with Scipio Africanus Minor, the most famous passage recounts a dream Scipio had, Somnium Scipionis, in which Scipio is led high above the earth and looks down on all there is. His father (or grandfather) comments on what the younger man sees, including the observation that the land is inhabited only in separate areas, regions which are “very small, while vast deserts lie between those inhabited patches.” He points out the different populations “in parts of the earth that are oblique, transverse, and sometimes directly opposite your own.” These antipodal and other regions are invoked as part of an intention to show how small the whole earth actually is. Moreover, he reiterates that where Scipio and other Romans reside on the diminutive earth is “really only a small island surrounded by the sea.” The point here is that Scipio should set no store by earthly vanities and instead should “only look on high and contemplate this eternal home and resting place,” also ideas that would be attractive to later Christian writers.33 Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) most fully develops the trope of the antipodes as analogous to Europe and as the place and people that can offer metaphysical and moral correction for Europeans. For Pliny, the antipodes bring clearly to the forefront the tenuous and almost existentially shallow nature of human life. He devotes a chapter in his encyclopedia, the Natural History, to the antipodes, where he discusses location and habitation in the same section. He says that humans cover all the earth, which resembles a globe, but that a learned person’s understanding of this concept diverges greatly from the understanding of ignorant people. The educated comprehend that human beings are distributed all round the earth and stand with their feet pointing towards each other, and that the top of the sky is alike for them all and the earth trodden under foot at the centre in the same way from any direction, while ordinary people enquire why the persons on the opposite side don’t fall off—just as if it were not

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reasonable that the people on the other side wonder that we do not fall off. 34 In other words, opposed to the idea of an earth populated all over is the persistent popular suspicion that up and down are absolutes and that the world down under is somehow lesser, illogical, and not comparable to the North. It is not a place that is logically opposite, but somehow logically incorrect. Like Cicero, a large part of Pliny’s object in writing on the antipodes is to provide a commentary on his own time and location and to encourage people to realize how small their place in the world is. The unlearned people’s superstition is a sign of their hubris about geography and earthly occupation, yet later Pliny offers a more poignant idea that applies to all people. He describes the habitable land on the globe as tiny and the earth in turn a “pin-prick” in the cosmos: [T]his is the substance of our glory, this is its habitation, here it is that we fi ll positions of power and covet wealth, and throw mankind into an uproar, and launch even civil wars and slaughter one another to make the land more spacious! And to pass over the collective insanities of the nations, this is the land in which we expel the tenants next to us and add a spade-full of turf to our own estate by stealing from our neighbour’s. 35 Pliny—a former army officer in the Rhine, a witness to Nero’s rise and fall, and an observer of Roman civil war—employs the antipodes in order to point out egotism and myopia. For Cicero and Pliny, the antipodes are a sign of something irreducibly and wondrously Other as against a grasping, petty world. Macrobius employs a similar trope about ignorant people’s beliefs in his response to statements by Virgil and Cicero about the geography of the earth. As we have seen, Macrobius provides a succinct discussion of the five zones or belts ringing the globe, with the northern and southern tips uninhabited because they are “frozen with perpetual cold,” and the middle belt, which is the largest, also unpopulated because it is “scorched by an incessant blast of heat.” The temperate zones alone permit human existence. 36 We know, he says, that the Northern Temperate Zone is inhabited, and he includes all peoples—Romans, Greeks, and barbarians—there. He then elaborates in some detail on the climate of the Southern Temperate Zone, likening it to the Northern. The south wind, called Auster, which, like the north wind, originates at the pole, is initially chilling, but as it passes through the Torrid Zone, it heats up and reaches the North as a warm wind. Likewise, people in the South would feel the north wind as a warm one. The people in that other zone will breathe the same air, the same sun will rise and set but at opposite times, and the people there “will tread the ground as well as we and above their heads will always see the sky.” 37

30

The Idea of the Antipodes

Similarly, Macrobius’ contemporary, Martianus Capella, in The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, describes in some detail the stars antipodeans see and the seasons they experience in that zone: When we are scorched with summer heat, they are numbed with cold; when spring here bedecks the meadows with flowers, the heat of summer there is yielding to the gentle warmth of autumn; when we have our shortest day, they have their longest.38 In addition to both Martianus and Macrobius noting the importance of time in imagining the antipodean world, Macrobius rehearses the idea that we should “have no fear that they will fall off the earth into the sky, for nothing can ever fall upwards.” Up and down are the same for everyone who stands on the earth. However, he takes the imagination a step even further than Cleomedes and Pliny, who thought about the antipodeans’ perceptions of Europeans as antipodal, when he asks his readers to conceive of how the people in the Southern Zone think: I can assure you that the uninformed among them think the same thing about us and believe that it is impossible for us to be where we are; they, too, feel that anyone who tried to stand in the region beneath them would fall. But just as there has never been anyone among us who was afraid he might fall into the sky, so no one in their quarter is going to fall upwards.39 Beyond the existence of an antipodean place, beyond some people’s occupation of that land, Macrobius also now makes a comparison in terms of the internal diversity of that society; different people hold different opinions there. He also invents a sense of antipodean interiority by describing how the people in that place think and what the ignorant think about us. For the uninformed there, our world is upside-down, tenuous, and vertiginous. Antipodean Communication Nevertheless, writers on the subject of habitation—even the same authors who imagine antipodean inhabitants and what they think about us—could be very unsure, speaking tentatively. Still others are unwilling even to go that far. For example, Geminus pulls back from saying that antipodeans inhabit an opposite region. He acknowledges that although there is a Temperate Zone in the South, we do not know whether anyone exists there, and “When we speak of the antipodes, we do not say that the people in fact exist who would be diametrically opposed but only that a habitable place exists on the earth which is diametrically opposed to us.” 40 Such doubts are typical signs of uncertainty that the antipodes invoke. Therefore, a certain weight falls on the question of

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communication, the last topic to be discussed here, for if the Southern Zone, and particularly the antipodes, are inhabited, why then has there been no communication with people there? Could it be that they are uninhabited after all? Or is it simply a matter of lack of knowledge because of insufficient European or antipodean travel and reportage? But why, then, has there been no contact? Such questions lead to assertions beyond mere observations about the current (limited) state of knowledge. Instead, the antipodean silence increases the level of unease in the discussions. The urgent questions give rise to discourses that frantically fi ll up the space between North and South with barriers, fantastical stories, further criticisms of the egotism of Greek and Roman societies, and an urgent sense of ontological–geographical anxiety. Pliny is again interesting here when he describes the oceans as impediments to communication. His fi rst evidence is empirical and his mode of discussion realistic when he recounts narratives about aborted voyages out from and towards the oikoumene. He describes records of sailing expeditions from Europe around to the North, as well as Indians carried north by a storm to Germany (it was thought the Caspian Sea might link to a northern sea), expeditions east, and others to the South around Africa from Cadiz to Arabia and vice versa, and the evidence of “figureheads of ships from Spanish wrecks” in Arabia. For Pliny, the northwestern landmass is not connected to the rest. In one direction from the known world lies a “vast sea”; in another, “localities numb with excessive moisture” because of “a superabundance of the moist element there”; and in still another, “there is now overwhelming proof, leaving no room for conjecture, of the existence of the Maeotic Marsh,” which forbids travel from the East to the North. Overall, he sums up, “there are seas encircling the globe on every side and dividing it in two, so robbing us of half the world, since there is no region affording a passage from there to here or from here to there.” Despite these multiplied impediments or, more accurately, because of them, Pliny writes, this “reflexion serves to expose the vanity of mortals, and appears to demand that I should display to the eye and exhibit the extent of this whole indefi nite region in which men severally fi nd no satisfaction.” 41 Mortal “vanity” and the very “indefi niteness” of the antipodes paradoxically “demands” that he envision it for us. Despite stories of African circumnavigation, Pliny also repeats the idea that the Torrid Zone forbids communication between the northern and southern temperate bands because of the “fiery heat of the temperate body.” First, the poles are “all crushed under cruel frost and everlasting cold,” “perpetual mist prevails,” and there is “a light that the invisibility of the milder stars renders niggardly and that is only white hoarfrost.” Elsewhere, the sky with its heat “has stolen three quarters of the earth,” the Torrid Zone taking up that much space on the globe. In terms of what is left of the known world in the Temperate Zone, the uninhabitable sea and its very “indefi niteness” encroaches back into the known fraction of the Roman world. Pliny writes of “the one portion of land left to us” that the sea extends into bays, “inner seas,”

32

The Idea of the Antipodes

and channels. It continues into rivers, swamps, lakes, and pools. Where land remains, it is taken up with ridges, forests, and deserts. All that is left to us is a “pin-prick” on earth.42 Thus, with the oceans and the Torrid Equatorial Zone forbidding communication because they double up as obstructions to meeting with antipodeans in the Southeast, each place on earth is isolated. In terms of these ideas, the antipodes are the ultimate example of global separation and human limitation, yet the antipodean epitome steals back into the known so that the whole world is amid seas and each inhabited space a tiny, accidental, tenuous island. Cleomedes also imagines multiple barriers in his discussion of the existence of peoples elsewhere on the earth. He distinguishes “circumhabitants” (those in the same zone on the other side of the earth), from “contrahabitants” (those in the Southern Temperate Zone), from antipodeans. In terms of the circumhabitants, two qualities of the ocean forbid traveling to them: it is “unnavigable,” and it is also “infested by beasts.” Next, those in the North cannot reach the “contrahabitants” because of the heat of the Torrid Zone. He does not explicitly state the reasons why there can be no communication with the antipodeans, but the reasons are clear, namely a compounding of obstructions: seas that cannot be navigated and are teeming with monsters along with perishing heat.43 In Cicero the antipodes also become the epitome of isolation and a model for a similar northwestern condition. Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis states that only two zones can be inhabited, and the South “has no connection whatever with your zone.” Indeed, “there can be no communication whatever among the different areas.” 44 Like other authors, Cicero writes on the futility of counting on fame, renown that spreads through human speech and estimation but that the global geographical impediments thwart, with the antipodes the most distant. The elder Africanus asks the younger Scipio about places known to Romans and whether Scipio would “suppose that your fame or that of any of us could ever go beyond those settled and explored regions . . . ? What inhabitants of those distant lands of the rising or setting sun, or the extreme North or South, will ever hear your name?” He follows this passage with discussion of a kind of temporal fragmentation, the past and future standing for “distant lands” in time so that he also asks rhetorically whether Scipio thinks that fame can spread across time, especially when cataclysms wipe out records of whole generations. Therefore, Africanus says, “Let what others say of you be their own concern; whatever it is, they will say it in any case. But all their talk is limited to those narrow regions which you look upon, nor will any man’s reputation endure very long.” 45 Here the antipodes epitomize a world that lessens the spatial and the temporal importance of the self and the known portion of the world. Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s tale of Scipio offers the most extended discussion of problems of communication with antipodeans, and he increases the pressure on the issue. Macrobius draws attention to a fact

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implicit in other authors, namely that Europe will never communicate with the antipodes. Inhabited regions are “widely separated and narrow,” and “vast wastes lie between . . . inhabited spots” so that the “earth’s inhabitants are so cut off that there can be no communication among different groups.” 46 He reiterates later in his commentary that: Since there is no continuous succession of people but waste lands are interposed, preventing communication because of heat or cold, Cicero called the quarters of the earth, which are inhabited by the four populations, the spots [maculae] of habitations.47 This vision of the world leads to an epistemological uncertainty, indeed a statement about the limits of knowledge for all time. That the Southern Temperate Zone is inhabited is “inferred solely from reason” because of its climate, “but by whom it is occupied we have never been permitted to learn and never shall be, since the Torrid Zone lying between denies the people of either zone the opportunity of communicating with each other.” 48 The South and Southeast in particular indicate the limits of knowledge—indeed, appear to be limits on the progress of knowledge. In Macrobius and, to a certain extent, his authority, Cicero, the antipodean analogy seems to explode out so that the other region—separated from Europe by disorienting, writhing waters one way and a blazing ring the other—comes not only to stand as a model for all other lands but also in a sense induces global fragmentation. Each place is separate from one another and separate in time. Communication not only doesn’t take place, but it is not currently possible to communicate with the antipodes, and it never will be. Antipodean correspondence makes the world’s maculae analogous and insular. Spots of earth, spots in time, spots of knowledge—a series of non sequiturs accumulates about the antipodes as though the mystery and familiarity of the place demand explication, elaboration, a fi lling up of the lacuna in knowledge. However, the antipodes correspond with Europe at the same time that they deny correspondence across the ages; they even refuse, or at least complicate, the idea of correspondences across disparate regions within the space of the known world. The antipodes are an uncanny analogy, an unknown yet familiar region. The reasoning goes thus: Where are the antipodes, and what are they like? Mathematical and empirical epistemologies attempt to answer these questions so that the weather—that amalgam of, on the one hand, cartographical directions and, on the other, skin-freezing cold, searing heat, and steady temperance—comes to fi ll up the space between the sky and the earth. But why have we not encountered or heard from the antipodeans? The uncertainty nourishes descriptions of nautical and aerial barriers, and fantastical travels fraught with beasts and wrecks that wash back onto the shores of the known world. The Greek and Roman oikoumene becomes a petty and isolated place, cut off from communication with the

34

The Idea of the Antipodes

antipodes of the present, and indeed, of any time. At the end of the day—a day, incidentally, that does not occur at the same time in all places—when Greeks and Romans look out at the globe, they imagine a disjointed, patchy earth, an earth of islands. It may be argued that Greek and Roman ways of thinking about the antipodes were territorial, even “territorializing.” According to Deleuze and Guattari, space can be territory in that it is subject to a “reterritorializing” process by means of “property, work, and money,” and mechanisms other than processes of the state can also operate in order to “stand for” a “lost territory.” The state and other assemblages perform “the operations of reterritorialization that stabilize the aggregate at a given moment.” The territory is fi rst of all the critical distance between two beings of the same species: Mark your distance. What is mine is fi rst of all my distance; I possess only distances. Don’t anybody touch me, I growl if anyone enters my territory, I put up placards. Critical distance is a relation based on matters of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos knocking at the door. More specifically, Deleuze and Guattari describe Greek conceptions of territory as “a centered space with reversible and symmetrical relations in all directions, striated in every direction in such a way as to constitute a homogeneity.” 49 This description is clearly applicable to Greek and Roman ideas about antipodean space, which become radically relative to where the Greeks and Romans put their feet, but which is still “reversible,” “symmetrical . . . in all directions,” and therefore seemingly an image of a “homogenous” world: stable, an earth of proportioned distances, a planet without disorder. Yet territories can never quite be demarcated and kept separate. Deleuze and Guattari note that reterritorialization and deterritorialization are “always relative,” each other’s “fl ipside and complement.” “Territorializing marks simultaneously develop into motifs and counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup forces. But by virtue of this, the territory already unleashes something that will surpass it.” 50 The excessive deterritorialized space is one of “sequences” and “connections” rather than the distinguishing distances of territory. It is a space of multiples, a kind of flat space rather than one that is crossed with lines of distinction and (even relative) distance: “All multiplicities are flat, in the sense that they fi ll or occupy all of their dimensions.” The result is a “plane of consistency of multiplicities, even though the dimensions of this ‘plane’ increase with the number of connections that are made on it.” 51 Though inclusive of reterritorializing processes, Greek and Roman discourse about the antipodes also describes unleashed deterritorialized space. The evidence suggests that this other form and object of attention arises out of the reflective correspondences and conjunctions of logical thought, whereby an unknown, even unknowable, space is made coherent and populated with

Spots in Time

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people like us. The spots of dry land that remain out there are like all that remains to us here so that the self is “radically eccentric” to the self. The voice that answers from the other side of the earth joins with the voice that is hollow. It is not so much logic that calls the antipodes into being as a discourse that is comprised of tenuousness, an uncertainty integral to antipodean space, habitation, and communication. Also, the connections among subjects slowly appear (though they were always there): place, climate, people, people like us, our place, that place. Meanwhile, the mathematical sky mode and the realist earth mode also connect. The antipodean space ultimately is not reduced to analogy, but rather exceeds it, a multiplication in the chain of signifiers and uncanny similarities.

2

Earthly Motions The Antipodes in Medieval Geography and Cartography

In Greek and Roman science, the antipodes are the most remote location in relation to where one happens to be, a region inhabited by “those whose feet are opposite ours.” The idea of the antipodes encouraged the ancients to imagine a world larger than their tangible experience and to consider fundamental global qualities such as the earth’s symmetry and habitation. Potential communication with antipodean people further suggested the possibility of circumnavigation. The Middle Ages inherited this ancient scientific interest in the antipodes and, in the earlier medieval period, theologians, philosophers, and others compared the ancient texts with passages from the Bible. This additional historical sense complicated ideas about the antipodes because writers attempted to reconcile Biblical depictions of the world with ancient wisdom. Yet it would be a mistake to characterize the entire medieval period’s writings about the antipodes and related imaginings of the globe as a working through of this interpretive tension. After all, Armand Rainaud, in Le continent austral, says of the antipodes that they were “one of the most serious preoccupations of medieval science and theology,” and Alfred Hiatt, in Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600, has argued that they are not so much an “anti-oecumene” as an “ante-oecumene” that “precedes” the known world, “signifying land itself, the fundamental basis of habitation, and the precondition for cartographic representation.” 1 That is, something much more occurs during the period. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, we fi nd a great variety of ideas about the antipodes, and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as with so much other knowledge at this moment in history, people revisited and changed global epistemes. These transformations appear in many different kinds of texts: scientific and encyclopedic writings and artworks, as well as poetry and prose literature. By inheriting the ancient tradition and further thinking through the nature of the earth—inspired, in part at least, by new contact with previously unknown distant regions—medieval writers came to believe more fi rmly that the antipodes existed as a place. They further speculated that it was inhabited by people like us; that is, by varied peoples in different regions. In addition, they thought through the possibility of communicating with these peoples via

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various forms of travel and contact. It would therefore appear that once the location, habitation, and communication were, in a sense, confi rmed, geographical and other epistemes would attain a sense of confidence via symmetry and completeness: The antipodeans would be the complete Other on the opposite side of the earth. However, in the Middle Ages, although the antipodes are thought to exist as a place, they are not quite locatable; they might be identifiable, but they are not established. This geographical– physical dislocation in turn causes disorientation in terms of habitation and correspondence, further epistemological uncertainty about the existence and nature of antipodeans, and more doubts about reaching or hearing about the antipodes. Overall, these misgivings encourage the writers and artists to register other kinds of approaches to the antipodes than simply a One–Other relationship. The antipodes instead are present beside Europe, a relationship that demonstrates an array of associations with the evidently known world, its habitation, and global communication. To suggest that the antipodes appear beside Europe in Eve Sedgwick’s sense of “paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, [and] warping” is to hint at a complication in one of the tenets of postcolonial theory, but the following study builds on what might seem an anachronistic sub-discipline or approach: the postcolonial Middle Ages.2 In recent years, postcolonial medieval studies have made available new ways of thinking about regions, societies, and forms of communication, as well as offering new methods and possibilities for postcolonial studies itself. Most obviously, postcolonial studies—in the sense of a non-temporal term that simply denotes examinations of reflections upon and meetings with ethnically or culturally different peoples—can apply to the period. Thus, scholars have studied imaginary and real degradations of other peoples, actual and imagined violent encounters, and exploitative relations. For example, the crusades against perceived racial, economic, and religious Others in the Middle East and in Europe are a rich historical subject, as are the vast array of interactions among peoples in the Mediterranean, on the Iberian peninsula, and in the British isles. In literary and artistic studies, postcolonialism’s concerns with the representation of peoples and cultures with varying degrees of familiarity and strangeness have also been put to good use in medieval studies in terms of ideas about a quasi-racial purity and hybridity. Moreover, scholarship on the Middle Ages has given rise to fundamentally new ways to think about postcolonial theory itself, fi rst suggesting the dangers of postcolonialism emphasizing a chronological development of ways of thinking about other lands, peoples, and cultures that peaks in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ways of thinking that themselves perpetuate imperialist chronologies that would align non-Western cultures with premodern ones and vice versa. Instead, postcolonial medieval studies encourages fundamental revisions of ideas about non-Western and indeed Western spaces; about who exactly is part of a Christian West and where

38

The Idea of the Antipodes

exactly is an Orient; about how Others might be placed or categorized; and how practices in other cultures were used to think through and challenge Western culture. The idea of the antipodes adds another chapter in this field, another “difficult middle,” as Jeffrey Cohen has described the hybrid geographies and other discourses that arise in the Middle Ages.3 In this chapter, I first examine location and, particularly, medieval geographical theory. I also offer a clear example of a text that contains dislocated antipodes in the sense that they are not physically placeable: an important early twelfth-century map by the encyclopedist Lambert of St. Omer. This map is the first to depict the antipodes as separate from an Australian continent and other carefully distinguished regions, continents, and peoples. The antipodes are insular and singular, and the bounded island is pictorially classed with other islands, yet it is impossible to determine its location; indeed, the antipodes island crosses between hemispheres, among cardinal points, and athwart oceans. Second, and simultaneous with this physical and ultimately epistemological dislocation, the antipodes suggest beside-relations to European ideas about and perceptions of habitation. The very status of the antipodeans nears, diverges from, and challenges categories: they are fully human, they cannot possibly exist as humans, and they are part of the panoply of monstrous creatures that expand the category of the human. Ethical and affective reactions to the putative antipodean inhabitants, whatever their kind, often characterize them as either morally better or worse than Europe, but in fact, the antipodeans often give rise to other kinds of relations. In fact, in a medieval travel narrative by Gerald of Wales, we will see that antipodeans can encourage quite ambivalent feelings. Third, the inability to locate the antipodeans and the trouble with defining antipodeans further complicates the ability to communicate with them. Antipodeans are completely cut off from humans in Europe and are not descended from Europeans at all, but they might also be a continuation of, or at least in contact with, Africans in the South, in communication with the Indian mainland, or culturally connected with Far Eastern islands. In some late medieval images and travel writing by William Caxton and John Mandeville, the antipodes create a sense of global disorientation to such an extent that a person circumnavigating the earth and passing through the antipodes might not be able to find his or her way home. Indeed, even if one is able to return home, one may not be able to recognize it. In sum, the antipodes, which cross perimeters in Lambert’s map, whose inhabitants encourage ambiguous affections, and whose correspondence stimulates endless travel in Caxton and Mandeville, generate disorientation about location (Where are they?), habitation (Who lives there? What is our relation to them? What relation do they have to Christ’s sacrifice?), and interaction (Can we ever reach there and come back?). The outlanders of the outlandish, the antipodes and antipodeans are liminal, and they are interstitial, threatening to slip between epistemes. They challenge preconceptions of the cosmos and the human world at the same time that they develop epistemes beside accepted ones.

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Medieval Geography and Antipodean Dislocation It is tempting to think of medieval cosmography, geography, and cartography—part of the quadrivium in astronomy or geometry—as less important than the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic. Yet on the seemingly specialized discourse of a medieval map, Fra Paolino Veneto, a Minorite Friar of the early fourteenth century, wrote: I think that it is not just difficult but impossible without a world map to make [oneself] an image of, or even for the mind to grasp, what is said of the children and grandchildren of Noah and of the Four Kingdoms and other nations and regions, both in divine and human writings.4 Along these lines, Paolino suggests a hermeneutic and even memorial function to having an image of the world, an idea possibly derived from Hugh of St. Victor’s “De arca Noe morali.” 5 Indeed, what immediately strikes the modern reader of medieval theories of the world is how fundamental geographical discourses were to almost every other kind of thinking during the Middle Ages. The key item in medieval geography was the ability to distinguish one place from another, and therefore to think of places in relation to each other. Locations and relations among them were composite and complicated because the mapmakers combined topographical, political, historical, and other features on one representation of a region or the earth. However, the maker and reader of a medieval map could consider, for instance, the physical as well as historical and even moral relation of Rome to Jerusalem because of the position of Rome below the place of the crucifi xion. In what follows, I explain these kinds of relations and the significance of geography for other discourses before turning to the antipodes specifically. The antipodes, we shall fi nd, complicate the very idea of geographical distinction, in effect troubling European memory and Europe’s ways of recognizing itself. The antipodes, in one sense beside Europe on Lambert of St. Omer’s map, are also strangely impossible to place near Europe or any other region, and thus they dislocate the fundamentals of medieval geography and what the discipline enables. It has to be pointed out, however, that it is difficult to generalize about medieval geography and “metageography” because the discourses about the world do not remain static in the period.6 For instance, geographical ideas changed in the later Middle Ages when more extensive contact with distant lands, peoples, and practices took place. Historians and others have documented this increasing communication, and I can do no more than gesture to the work here. Violence, trade, and travel extended the sheer bulk of geographical knowledge: crusades in the eleventh and twelfth centuries; Mongol conquest and contact in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; Genoese, Castilian, and Portuguese commerce in Africa, the East, and the

40

The Idea of the Antipodes

Atlantic beginning at least as early as the thirteenth century; and missionary activities in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.7 My point, however, is not to offer a chronologically organized, “developmental” history of the antipodes and medieval geography, particulary a history that might reinscribe a medieval–modern divide, with the beginning of the “modern” pushed back to the eleventh, twelfth, or thirteenth centuries. Approaches like these have already been criticized in postcolonial analyses of the Middle Ages. 8 Rather, my goal in this section is to present an explication of how the antipodes encouraged re-envisioning of the globe at the same time that they complicated and even disturbed fundamental geographical epistemologies. For whereas the antipodes might in some cases be thought of in relatively comforting terms—as opposite, inverted, upside-down—they may instead give rise to a number of less clearly oppositional relations and present a challenge to medieval metageography, radically changing the very shape and possibilities of the world it sought to understand and describe. While geography’s significance in the Middle Ages largely derives from Augustine, the scholar Roger Bacon writes extensively on the fundamental role of geographic knowledge in understanding other discourses. 9 In his Geographia, part of his Opus majus of about 1268, Bacon argues for the necessity of knowing about the earth for philosophy, for theology, and for the Church. He describes philosophy in terms of itself; theology in terms of Biblical interpretation and, more generally, Christian knowledge; and ecclesiology with reference to the institutional Church in order to more effectively convert others and to distinguish between believers and non-believers. In all of these areas, medieval geographical theory relies on the discrete topological generation of things, institutions, and interpretations, an acumen that enables judgment for religious–institutional, economic, and memorial purposes. Bacon’s argument regarding philosophy is that place is key in establishing knowledge per se and knowledge of peoples. He cites Porphyry approvingly: “place is the beginning of the generation of things.” Geographical topoi have meaning. Each place is not a blank context with objects, people, customs, and even human understanding and knowledge fi lling it. He elaborates: [I]n accordance with the diversity of places is the diversity of things; and not only is this true in the things of nature, but in those of morals and of the sciences, as we see in the case of men that they have different manners according to the diversity of regions and busy themselves in different arts and sciences. In other words, each place gives rise to its items, which become, to a certain extent, geographical effects.10 Geography also underlies the fi rst step in Biblical exegesis. Bacon says: “[T]he literal sense rests on a knowledge of the places in the world, so that by

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means of suitable adaptations and similitudes taken from things the spiritual meanings may be elicited. For this is the proper way to expound Scripture.” The actual hermeneutics is opaque here, but the beginning of the process is clear. Places are foundational to the literal sense of the Bible. Like Hugh of St. Victor, Bacon suggests that the world is plotted out as a chart of memorial topoi, indexical imagines of information placed on an imago mundi. A person might mentally wander over the earth, placing and later retrieving information in each location. Like memorial schemes, these locations (through “suitable adaptations and similitudes”) produce grammaticae mundi, understandings of the Bible’s spiritual sense.11 The third reason why Bacon argues Christians should know geography is because “knowledge of the places in the world is very necessary to the state of the believers, and for the conversion of unbelievers and for opposing unbelievers and Antichrist and others.” When people are sent out into the world, they have to know in which direction to travel, about habitable climates, and be able to distinguish between regions of the faithful and regions of other religions and degrees of peacefulness. He warns that “the most vigorous men sometimes through their ignorance of the places in the world have destroyed themselves and the business interests of Christians.” Lastly, knowledge of the location of the ten tribes of Israel is important so that Christians will know when Judgment might come.12 Medieval mappaemundi were like visual encyclopedias that included many different kinds of information and could allow the viewer to understand places in the world in a physical or locational sense, as well as in a historico-temporal sense of the important events that occurred there, drawing from classical, Biblical, and other sources. As we saw in Chapter 1, Macrobius had encouraged thinking about the globe as divided into a series of rings or bands—the climate zones that are still with us today—and the Middle Ages inherited this tradition. It also inherited and developed the idea of the earth being divided into distinct landmasses. The maps that draw on this other tradition are now frequently referred to as T-O maps. Where the term mappamundi applies to the Macrobian zonal maps, it is somewhat of a misnomer when applied to T-O maps because T-O maps only show the Northern Hemisphere. Figure 2.1 is an example of a T-O map from Lambert of St. Omer’s Liber floridus. The Liber floridus is an encyclopedia that contains extracts of some two hundred authorities, including the Venerable Bede, Augustine, Macrobius, Isidore of Seville, Martianus Capella, and Hrabanus Maurus. Lambert completed the text at the Benedictine monastery in St. Omer (near Calais) in 1120 or 1121. Copies of his Liber floridus have been called “doubtlessly among the more impressive creations of Northern Romanesque and early Gothic book painting.” 13 The earliest Ghent manuscript is Lambert’s autograph, and ten copies survive with three main redactions. The manuscripts are illustrated, possibly by Lambert himself. Each copy contains about ten different maps.

42

The Idea of the Antipodes

Figure 2.1 Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Ghent University Library, Ms. 92, fol. 19r. Reproduced by permission of the Ghent University Library.

The O of a T-O map describes the overall circular shape of the map—the land outlined by the Great Sea Ocean (from Homer), which was thought to encircle the oikoumene, the known world. Inside the O is a T to represent three waterways—the River Don, the Nile, and the Mediterranean—which separate Asia at the top, Africa to the right, and Europe on the left. Some developments of this basic scheme also picture Earthly Paradise in the East at the top. Thus the Christian map-reader orients himself (hence “the orient”) towards the past paradise, emphasizing his current sinful nature. Many later maps include an image of Jesus at the top outside the landmasses and waters, thus also orienting the penitent towards potential future salvation. Europe, in the Southeast near the bottom of the map, is therefore far from the godhead and godliness, as fallen and far from redemption as possible.

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However, some maps tried to represent the Southern Hemisphere, which complicated the already hard task of representing the round surface of the globe on a flat page. These are a development of or alternative to the Isidore of Seville T-O maps. Beatus of Liebana (fl. ca. 785), a Benedictine abbot of San Martín in Asturias, produced three versions of an extensively illuminated Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John in the late eighth century, of which fourteen copies survive.14 The larger maps are oblong or rectangular in shape and have an ocean around the edge. Earthly Paradise is emphasized at the top in the Far East. Another strip of ocean, in red on the right (often the equatorial sea, but here confusingly the “mare rubrum”) in figure 2.2, separates a fourth continent in the South. The legends in the map in the different manuscript versions vary from one another in their descriptions of the fourth continent, but they all derive, in large part, from Isidore’s Etymologies, which states: “Apart from these three parts of the world there exists a fourth part, beyond the Ocean, further inland toward the south, which is unknown to us because of the burning heat of the sun; within its borders are said to live the legendary Antipodes.” In some manuscripts, as in the Silos manuscript here, the suggestion is simply that the Torrid Zone means the region is “unknown to us,” while in others this heat seems to extend into the southern landmass so that it is not only unknown but also “uninhabitable.” 15 The Beatus map already hints at the dislocation of the antipodes, as well as complications that group around the question of habitation, a point I will return to later. The region, here a continent, lacks any sense of balance, which was important to Greek and Roman cosmographers, and it is already very difficult to tell where the antipodes are, a complication Isidore’s text introduces. They might be in the South, but they are below both Ethiopia and India, not opposite Europe. Also, what is the ocean that separates them from the North? Perhaps most importantly, the orderly schema of the T-O map is “subtly disfigured by the presence of the unknown” but also dislocated in the relational sense that it is difficult to understand whether there is any significance to this landmass relative to the known world and the Biblical and historical sites it contains.16 Moreover, it is nearly impossible to figure out its significance in relation to the Christian viewer. If anything, it seems to represent a potential diversion from the relative order and clear religious narrative of a three-continent model. Even more dramatic, then, is Lambert of St. Omer’s Liber floridus, figure 2.3. Raymond Beazley, in his three-volume study, The Dawn of Modern Geography, says of Lambert’s Liber floridus that “Nowhere else in mediaeval cartography do we fi nd greater prominence assigned to the Unknown Southern Continent.” 17 The map showing the antipodes is missing from the holograph manuscript, so the copy that we will principally be concerned with is from the earliest redaction and the last quarter of the twelfth century, the Wolfenbüttel manuscript.18 It measures 30 cm x 43 cm, and figure 2.3 appears on folios 69v–70r. Danielle Lecoq, in the most extended discussion

Figure 2.2. Beatus of Liebana, Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John. London, British Library, Add. Ms. 11695 (Silos), fols. 39v–40r. Reproduced by permission of the British Library, © British Library Board. All rights reserved.

44 The Idea of the Antipodes

Figure 2.3 Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fols. 69v–70r. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

Earthly Motions 45

46

The Idea of the Antipodes

of this particular map in the Lambert manuscripts, suggests that the map is innovative in the way it combines traditions.19 The image on 69v–70r occurs in Chapter 110, “Spera geometrica.” The map is oriented east like the T-O map, rather than a typical Macrobian zonal mappamundi, which is oriented north. The long glosses outside the circular earth ascribe the map’s authority to Orosius, Ptolemy, and Martianus, while inside, about one hundred forty names identify and sometimes describe locations. Condensed into the left half of the circle is the Northern Hemisphere and a version of a T-O map, the three rivers clearly visible and punctuated with the island of Sicily. Above and to the left of Sicily is Rome. The righthand landmass is equal in size and overall shape to the North. The main area of the region is labeled “Auster”: it is internally undifferentiated by rivers or separate regions, and a schematic wavy line outlines its boundary, unlike those that outline the North with more detailed coastal variations. The extensive passage in it says the area is “unknown to the sons of Adam” and yet “philosophers affi rm it is inhabited.” The Australian terrain is cut off from the Northern Hemisphere, which the sun’s ecliptic (a red diagonal line that runs across the equator) and two equatorial oceans emphasize. Lambert’s map and the Beatus map are the only developed examples of what have been variously called “intermediate,” “fourth continent,” or “quadripartite” mappaemundi.20 After assertions that the Southern Australian Zone on Lambert’s map is “unknown to the sons of Adam” and a description of the barriers to communication, Lambert says of “Auster,” “The philosophers affi rm that it is inhabited. They claim that it is different from us because of the opposite climate, for in summer we are burnt while they are frozen by the cold.” That is, he hesitates; he does not affi rm that the austral area is inhabited, but attributes the idea to others. The far right-hand column of text in the Australian continent is labeled the “Zona australis” (most likely the outermost, that is, most southern, one and not the whole region), which is described as “frozen, uninhabitable, intemperate.” Closer to the equator, the left-hand long script includes the following observation, that “days and nights are experienced at the same time in one longitude. Also, the speed with which the sun approaches the solstice and quickly goes back through the hoarfrost brings them two winters.” The idea behind this passage is fairly common in medieval world thinking, demonstrating the belief that the zone in the South closest to the equator had two winters because of the sun’s eccentric orbit. Whereas Lambert of St. Omer works within a somewhat narrow tradition when he depicts a large southern continent on his mappamundi, he is unique when, in the lower right of the Northern Hemisphere in the sea, he depicts and identifies a large island (fig. 2.4). The island bears the following legend: “Here the antipodes of us live, but they endure a different night and contrary days and summer as well.” 21 A bold red line encloses the antipodean island. The same line only appears in

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Figure 2.4 Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fol. 69v detail. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

select other places on the mappamundi: it borders the whole earth, it designates the ecliptic, and it encircles Earthly Paradise at the top of the map in the Far East. Black lines outline the remaining islands, as well as the edges of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Danielle Lecoq reasons that the line means that the antipodes are “inaccessible,” suggesting that Lambert acknowledges tradition, yet he does not follow any authority in showing an antipodean island.22 And where is the antipodes island? Lambert’s map distinguishes between the sea or seas, which divide continental North from South, and the Great Ocean River, which encircles the globe. The former, as we have seen, is the (double) equatorial ocean, and the left of the equatorial ocean or oceans in the center includes, in the lower middle of the triangular area, the Atlantic

48

The Idea of the Antipodes

off the coast of Africa, which contains the islands of Beata, Godes, Briona, Canaria, and other named and unnamed islands. Within the outer Great Sea Ocean in the North on the far left and extending around the lower left are the islands of Thatania, Anglia, Hybernia, Hyberus, Thyle, and so on. “Thyle” or Thule and “Hyberus” or Hyperborea traditionally signal the most northern lands. Like Earthly Paradise, which also occupies this outer sea, the placement of these islands indicates that their location is separate from the coast of the three continents of Europe, Africa, or Asia. The latter circular ocean is traditional, also designating a disjuncture between the known world and the unknown world. However, the island of the antipodes crosses oceans. It lies just outside the Mediterranean in the Atlantic, west of the columns of Hercules, and it is in the extreme North or Northeast because it appears next to Thule, the most northern island according to medieval lore. It also crosses over from the Atlantic (which joins the equatorial ocean) to the Great Sea Ocean, which encircles the whole earth. It is therefore potentially also in the Southwest, near, though distinct, from the Australian continent, which is what the note about the different days and nights, and opposite seasons suggests.23 On a map that takes great care in specifying locations, Lambert’s antipodes cannot, in the end, be fi xed. This is a synecdoche, if you will, of the troubling role the antipodes play in medieval geographic epistemology. World Habitation and Antipodean Possibilities Given the undergirding role of geographical locations and distinctions in medieval discourses, it is perhaps logical that perceptions of antipodal dislocation would have an impact on writings about antipodean habitation, which would in turn complicate ideas about habitation more generally, including in the West. Most basically, the antipodes add another consideration to notions of habitation and thus extend them. More complicated is the fact that antipodeans appear beside European notions of ontology itself in that they are thought not to exist at all, to exist as monsters, to exist as humans, and perhaps most revealingly, as hybrid creatures, semi-human and semi-fantastical. Also, just as the Australian continent on the Beatus and Lambert maps is sometimes asymmetrical in relation to the Northern Hemisphere, and just as the antipodes island further upsets or stands beside the notion of geographical balance, the antipodeans are not simply European Others who offer a societal and moral mirror in which to compare European mores. Instead, we fi nd the antipodes as much closer—as beside Europe in the sense of discourses that empathize with the antipodeans to the extent that ethical and affective relations are less clear-cut. This attention to the complex relations of the antipodes to Europe allows for a way out of a contradiction in recent scholarly analyses of antipodean habitation. One school of thought emphasizes arguments by theologians and others who claimed that assertions that the antipodes are inhabited are deluded and

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that antipodeans do not exist.24 A second group of scholars notes the prevalence of theologians, philosophers, illuminators, and others who reasoned that antipodeans exist. Michael Andrews might be said to capture something of the two arguments when he says—with some partiality, but with characteristic starkness—that southern lands “were designated as uninhabitable, if the map maker wished to conform with the tenets of the medieval Church, or were represented as the dwelling-place of our Antoikoi or Antipodes if he had a mind more free from dogma.”25 In an effort to understand the latter group of medieval texts and their motivations for believing in the antipodes and antipodeans, as well to explain the presence of antipodeans in manuscript writings and illuminations, critics turn to a psychological rationale. Those who have studied the monsters that populate bestiaries and mappaemundi have suggested that the worlds represented there were “constructions de l’esprit,” or fabrications of the mind, and that writers and artists “sublimated” or “rationalized” “instinctive fears” about distant places and their inhabitants.26 Others, most recently John Block Friedman, offer that illuminators and poets of the period were “greatly struck by the imaginative possibilities inherent in the idea” of the antipodes, even if, at the same time, they also gave “an enormous ethnocentric shrug of distaste” toward monstrous races.27 None of these rationales adequately captures the ways in which antipodeans could be, in a sense, both far and near. They are the ultimate opposite in terms of location and therefore potentially the opposite in terms of habitation, society, and humanity. However, they are also proximate in a physical sense of frequently appearing in Europe and in the mundane sense of logically existing just like us. Part of the cause of the diversity of opinions about antipodean habitation in the Middle Ages, as I have suggested, is attributable to the variety of ideas about the region in classical, Biblical, geographical, and cosmological sources. Another cause was the changing notions of the world brought on by historical developments as I have also mentioned, but also due to disagreements and changes in observations about the nature of the world. We might note, therefore, that there were three competing ideas about whether a southern landmass was inhabited. First, Greek and Roman geography suggested that the Equatorial Zone was impassable, yet the South was inhabited. Such a notion appeared to contradict Christian theology in that the sons of Adam or Noah and the Word of Christ could not have reached people on the other side of the equator. Second, there was disagreement among geographers about whether a landmass existed in the South or whether the whole Southern Hemisphere was covered in water. Finally, cosmologists disagreed about whether, even if there were land in the Southern Hemisphere, it would be uninhabitable because of extreme temperatures—either excessive heat or cold depending on the position of the sun. Each argument is revealing because it speaks not only to the pure fact or denial as to whether antipodeans exist, but also to the relation of the antipodeans to Europeans in

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terms of distance and accessibility and, more importantly, to their physical and spiritual make-up. The physical and climatological barrier of the Equatorial Zone offered scientific evidence for arguing against habitation. Such ideas appear in texts before the millennium, although later writers also acknowledge, and sometimes agree with, these earlier beliefs. Modern criticism has paid most attention to these arguments against the existence of the antipodes, perhaps because they seem to clarify the issue or because they confi rm the imagined “dogmatic” and illogical nature of medieval thinking about worlds. However, we should be clear: The antipodes did not become a heretical concept following the dicta of Augustine and Lactantius, and they were neither studiously ignored nor rejected out of hand. . . . What emerged was not a single uniform response to the idea of the antipodes but ambiguous ones: instead of denial alone, uncertainty, compromise—and fictionalization.28 Augustine is careful in his denial of the existence of antipodeans. He weighs the evidence carefully and emphasizes the limited nature of others’ and even his own knowledge and thinking. In Book 16 of City of God, Augustine writes, “in regard to the story of the antipodes, that is, that there are men on the other side of the earth . . . there is no logical ground for believing this.” Augustine is here criticizing his ancient and classical authorities, mainly Pliny the Elder, because the “authors do not claim that they have learned [about the antipodes] from any historical evidence, but offer it as a sort of logical hypothesis.” As opposed to the speculation of ancient authorities, Augustine’s basis for thinking about the antipodes is Biblical history, which to him has described which peoples have really existed from creation and where they have lived. His analysis derives in part from Genesis 10 and passages about Noah’s sons who, according to lore, each received a continent: Japheth gets Europe; Shem, Asia; and Ham, Africa. There is no mention of a southern continent. Augustine therefore fi nds it “too absurd to mention” that people, even descendents of Adam or Noah, might have sailed to the South from the North because “boundless tracts of ocean” at the equator—if not elsewhere—impede travel. 29 The equatorial ocean or oceans were thought not only to be so treacherous as to forbid passage; the Zone was also thought to be too hot to cross. Bede and Isidore of Seville reiterate this notion, which draws on Greek and Roman ideas. 30 The same thoughts of an impassable equatorial barrier, however, did not offer a solution so much as introduce two potential inconsistencies in interpreting Biblical references to Christ’s word and sacrifice. Paul in Romans 10:17–18 says of Christ’s and the apostles’ words that “their sound hath gone forth into all the earth, and their words unto the ends of the whole world,” so the questions become, “How could Christ

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have died for the antipodeans? How could the Gospel have been preached in ‘the four corners of the earth’ if half of the earth is cut off from our quarter by tropical fi res?” 31 The fourteenth-century philosopher Nicholas Oresme repeated Augustine’s arguments about antipodean habitation: This opinion ought not to be held, and does not agree with our faith, for the Gospel has been preached in all inhabited lands. And according to this opinion, such men would never have heard it nor could they be subject to the church of Rome. 32 Scientific texts also acknowledge this debate, and they sometimes think of other problems that the existence of antipodeans could create. Iohannes de Sacrobosco’s Sphere, composed at the University of Paris, probably in the early thirteenth century, was influential, being one of a handful of required university texts throughout Europe; it has been described as “the clearest, most elementary, and most used textbook in astronomy and cosmography from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.” 33 Several important scientists wrote commentaries on Sphere, including Michael Scot, a thirteenth-century mathematician and astrologer, tutor to Emperor Frederick II, and probably the translator of Aristotle and Averroës into Latin. In about 1230–1235, Scot presents arguments in the scholastic style against habitation beyond the Equatorial Zone in the South and suggests a startling speculation: if they are mortal humans, this is against the faith because the incarnate God and God’s way exist in our region and would for the same reason exist among them. However, that would mean Christ was born and suffered two times, which is false.34 The impassable barrier, combined with a consideration of antipodean existence, now threatens to double Christ. The mappaemundi in Lambert’s twelfth-century Liber floridus confirm these ideas about the equator. Figure 2.5 in the Wolfenbüttel manuscript appears in a chapter on astronomical texts nine pages earlier than figure 2.3. Like the earlier map, this one is oriented east, but here the earth is more clearly divided into five zones. From left to right, they are: a shaded polar region, a temperate region, the Torrid Zone, a second temperate region, and another shaded Polar Zone. Both Polar Zones are labeled as “frigida” and uninhabitable. The central zone is graphically outstanding. The wavy lines of a sea or two seas course down the page along the equator, and they expand out to approximately one-third of the earth’s total area. The area is labeled the Mediterranean Sea and “thoroughly burnt through the middle” because of the sun’s passage through the zodiac.35 Like the map discussed earlier, the sun’s ecliptic also runs diagonally through the Equatorial Zone, the crosshatch pattern showing the sun’s route through the zodiac (the long

Figure 2.5 Lambert of St. Omer, Liber floridus. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Ms. Cod. Guelf. 1 Gud. Lat., fols. 59v–60r. Reproduced by permission of the Herzog August Bibliothek.

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parallel lines correspond to the planets at each end, while the crossing diagonals correspond to stars). The Torrid Zone and the large bands of water emphasize the huge barrier between the North and the South, so it is no surprise that the Southern Zone—half the world’s landmass—has a label that reads: “Austral Temperate Zone unknown to the sons of Adam.” Here the map confuses the distinction the other map makes between the Australian continent and the antipodean island because an additional label states: “The region of the antipodes.” Lambert’s other map, discussed earlier, would also seem to confirm Augustine and others’ denials of antipodean existence if we disregard the presence of the antipodean island and concentrate on the continent. The other map does not have the cross-hatch zodiac down the equator, but the red line of the sun’s ecliptic runs diagonally from one corner of the Torrid Zone to the other, marked with three suns. Two green oceans also run down the page and separate the two landmasses. On the earlier map, the large schematic landmass in the South contains a long legend, which begins thus: The southern region, temperate but unknown to the sons of Adam; nothing suitable to our species. Indeed the Mediterranean [i.e., equatorial] Sea, which from the sun’s rising to its descent in the Occident divides the world’s sphere, cannot be viewed with human eyes because the sun through its heat always illuminates from above through the circuit of the Milky Way, bars human access, and does not permit any crossing of that zone.36 As a third emphasis of the division between the two landmasses, in both images the center of the page is, I would offer, evidence of Lambert’s thoughtful integration of illumination and codex. The inner edge separates the pages along the center of the torrid and oceanic region in both maps. The very structure of the book appears to affi rm the separation of the hemispheres, yet we can also easily see how the center of the page is a mirror reflecting North in South and South in North; moreover, following Michael Camille’s discussion of medieval codicological metaphors and a deluxe copy of a commentary on Dante, we can imagine how the pages, when closed, touch across the divide, North and South not only facing and mirroring each other, but also touching across the equatorial crease.37 Consideration of the antipodes seems to engender this kind of symmetry, or at least contiguity, so that imagining the region cosmologically and geographically leads to thinking about potential similarities between Europeans and antipodeans, and soon to thinking about all the variations of humans. Whereas later medieval writers and artists such as Oresme, Scot, and Lambert acknowledge the authority of Augustine and others, many held opposing opinions about antipodeans based on other evidence about the Equatorial Zone, which would also allow for some reconciliation with the Bible. No less

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an authority than Albertus Magnus, in his thirteenth-century De natura loci, analyzes the nature of the Torrid Zone and suggests that even that Zone can be inhabited. One of his reasons is that because of the symmetry of the sun’s progress and regress, the Torrid Zone will in fact have “the strongest habitation and generation.” He also argues that the Torrid Zone, like other places, has a varied geography and is not the same at all times of the year. 38 Albertus expands on his discussion of the equator by evaluating the evidence for habitation beyond the equator in the Southern Temperate Zone. His touchstone is “radix habitationis est aequalitas et temperamentum,” “the root of habitation is evenness and moderation.” Albertus reasons that, just as in the North, the middle zone in the South is temperate.39 He even alludes to and rejects the idea of humans existing in one hemisphere and not being able to cross to the other—the argument against human existence in the South because of the impossibility of descent from Adam. He points out that Ethiopians exist in the South, and the desert in Africa is the only reason why there is “little communication between people in the southern climes and those who live with us in the northern quarter.” He is not only interested in whether that part of the world (and presumably by extension the rest of the South) can be inhabited, but whether it actually is inhabited or not. It is a “quaestio gravis” whether “it is inhabited or can be inhabited. If indeed it can be inhabited, then it is to no purpose if it were not inhabited by plants, animals, and humans.” If habitable regions lie in the temperate zones, then “all that is temperate for the human body ought to be habitable.”40 In Chapter 12 of De natura loci, “On the Nature and Disposition of the Lower Hemisphere of the Earth,” Albertus first notes that philosophers “commonly enough write and say that nobody has passed from our region to the other one. They have concluded from the evidence of lunar eclipses that no one exists in the South,” and mathematicians concur. The Southern Hemisphere, they say, is submerged. He observes that Pythagoras has said that hell might be located there. Hesiod claims that man was created in the North, and no one has ever gone to the South. However, Albertus counters these arguments to reason that the South is habitable even though the water might possibly forbid crossing. He repeats Pliny’s idea that “vulgaris imperitia est,” it is the ignorance of the common people to believe that people down there will fall off. Down is the center of the earth for everyone (the idea that appears in Plato). He concludes that the lower hemisphere is as variegated as the upper hemisphere. Some regions are hot, others cold, and still others different in climate from others, and they are either inhabited or not accordingly.41 In these ideas we return to similar ancient notions of the earth’s regions as relative, not absolutely different. The scholar Robertus Anglicus, who also wrote an important commentary on Sacrobosco about 1270, voices such an idea.42 Robertus, inspired by Sacrobosco’s discussion of the world, states matter-of-factly, through knowledge based on contact, that India and other places are at the equator and inhabited. If land exists at the equator and all

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or parts of it are habitable, and indeed tangible evidence shows this to be true despite the sun, then it is possible that Adam’s progeny and the Word could have reached into and beyond the zone to the South. It would not be against the faith, therefore, to suppose that people exist down there.43 In the context of these discussions, it is thus remarkable that figure 2.6 illuminates a fifteenth-century French translation of Augustine’s City of God. It shows Augustine preaching on a round earth with people on the underside. In the scroll, Augustine says to a group of doctors and others, “If the earth is round, nevertheless it is not to be believed that the antipodes exist because not all the earth is inhabited.”44 The illumination accompanies City of God 16.9—his denial of the habitation of the antipodes—and it immediately follows an illumination showing monsters. Is the illumination part of a lost tradition of illustrating people on the southern side of the earth in order to demonstrate graphically the absurdity of such notions?45 Or could the illumination be a simple misunderstanding of Augustine? It appears to be more in line with Albertus, Bacon, and Robertus Anglicus in that it is the illuminator’s attempt to reconcile Augustine’s denial of the existence of the antipodes with what was generally believed by the fifteenth century, when the manuscript was illuminated. The qualifying phrase, “If the earth is round,” which opens the illumination’s script and is not a direct translation of Augustine but an abbreviated summary of a chapter, tempers any assertion that would directly contradict Augustine. On the face of it at least, the image exhibits a potential irony in that it clearly shows Augustine preaching to people in the North, the East, and the South. All hear his word, even if Augustine’s actual words deny the possibility of the existence of those who might hear it. The second argument against habitation took a different tack on the geography of the South, though Augustine is again the authority. He states that, even if the earth is round, “it would still not necessarily follow that the land on the opposite side is not covered by masses of water.” 46 Augustine suggests, I believe, as with his discussion of Pliny, that the problem lies more with all such ideas about the Southern Hemisphere because they are mere speculation and not based on fact or Biblical history. However, again, later writers revise his ideas. Albertus Magnus, for example, rejects the idea that the South is covered in water, whereas for his contemporary, Roger Bacon, the key evidence in his discussion of habitable portions of the world is his research into the seas.47 Bacon’s vision of the earth depicts two bodies of water at the poles and a ribbon of ocean extending from pole to pole between Spain and India.48 While he does not explicitly say that unknown regions of the earth—the antipodes included—are inhabited, he strongly suggests that in all likelihood they are, and he reasons away the idea that water might cover other regions.49 The third argument against habitation focused on the climate and the physical properties of the South. The argument ran thus: First, it was observed that the sun, thought to be orbiting the earth (along with all the

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Figure 2.6 Saint Augustine, City of God. Nantes, Bibliothèque municipale, Ms. 181, fol. 163v. Reproduced by permission of Nantes, Bibliothèque municipale.

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planets and stars), had an eccentric orbit. It appeared that the sun would therefore come closer to the earth in the Southern Hemisphere than the Northern for part of the year. Therefore, the Equatorial Zone could be hotter and the South would be, instead of temperate, in fact even more scorching than the Torrid Zone for much of the year. For example, in the early twelfth century, Peter Alfonsi, and later, Robert Grosseteste, argue that the region immediately beyond the circular sea at the equator could not be inhabited because the power of the sun there increases five times because the sun draws near to the region, while the southern region would have a winter too severe for habitation. 50 Another climatological alternative was that the South was in fact colder than the North, thereby again not permitting habitation. Nonetheless, geographic speculation of this sort was subject to debate, and several scholars, including Bacon, disagreed with these observations, again noting the potential for diversity in the South just as there is diversity in the North. For example, Grosseteste’s contemporary, Sacrobosco, affi rms that there could be habitation in the South. Sacrobosco’s commentator, Michael Scot, states that the sun’s rotation is not eccentric and that part of the southern region could be inhabited. Scot elaborates further that habitation could occur in the Temperate Zone just as it does in ours, and the sun does not behave differently, except that the days and nights are of equal length. He even confronts the Biblical arguments directly with regards to habitation. After presenting the idea that the Torrid Zone is uncrossable and therefore that those people in the South are either immortals or descended from Adam (even though to say so is against the faith), he argues against these ideas, also marshalling Biblical evidence—namely that of Mark, Romans, and Psalms—which describes the Word of God having gone throughout all the world. Robertus Anglicus also concurs, saying that he believes the regions past the equator to be habitable even if fewer of them are habitable than in the North because of the sun’s rotation. Within that region, he argued, more regions would be habitable towards the pole than towards the tropic of Capricorn. 51 In the light of this tradition and the debates about antipodean location and habitation, Isidore of Seville and bestiaries are, though influential, eccentric. Isidore discusses climates and inhabitable and uninhabitable zones, and he eventually says that the existence of the antipodeans is not to be believed. However, in a second passage he says that the antipodean region is unknown to us but is inhabited, although this belief is only “fabulose,” “legendary.” 51 (This last contention is the passage that shows up in Beatus maps.) However, still elsewhere Isidore asserts something different. He says that the Antipodes “in Libya” have their feet turned backward. This is an interpretation of the word antipodes, opposite feet, here taken to mean not that their feet are relative to those in the Northeast but are, in fact, opposite as in backwards. 52 Rudolf Wittkower describes this as “a masterstroke of mediaeval logic,” in

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which the name that had survived from the Greeks as referring to the people of a region was reinterpreted as physiognomy. 53 Images of antipodeans of this embodied kind, such as figure 2.7, show up in encyclopedias like Isidore’s and in bestiaries. The antipodeans in the theological, geographical, and encyclopedic texts, therefore, are lifted into the realm of possibility and fiction at the same time that the believability of their existence is based on new discoveries and knowledge. According to Isidore and in bestiaries, the antipodeans are remarkably human-like, their feet only slightly different and turned in a direction opposite to their faces. These “opposite-footed” creatures in the scientific texts are as likely to be as diverse in kind and culture as people in the North. Therefore, rather than being a reliable Other for European thought, the antipodeans reflect, and are, in many cases, geographically, if not racially, continuous with Europeans, who are, after all, also diverse according to their varied regions and their troubled edges. The antipodeans exist beside the Northern Hemisphere, at times separate from the North, at times touching or in touch with the North, and still at other times as similar to northerners as they to each other. Antipodean Contact and Correspondences Where discussions of location and habitation largely speculate about antipodean inhabitants, others articulate more fully correspondences between Europeans and antipodeans. These stories appear in romances, popular lore, poetry, encyclopedias, and travel narratives. Several of the stories about antipodean correspondence may be categorized as comparative-utopian, in which the antipodean realm corresponds with Europe in the sense that it is worse or better than Europe, and I begin with an exploration of narratives of this sort. This type gives rise to one of the most popular and lasting ideas about the antipodes: that the place, people, and their customs provide a mirror for reflection back to Europe. This interpretation is, though important, a limited one because it suggests that the antipodes are only significant in their relationship to Europe. However, there are also several alternative narratives, which posit correspondence in the second sense of the word, in which antipodeans are in touch with Europeans. In these tales, Europeans sometimes travel to the antipodes; in others antipodeans appear in Europe; and in still others, ongoing exchanges occur. The world and epistemologies about it are thereby extended in unexpected ways that move the European corpus beyond itself. These narratives form the focus of the second part of this section. In them, the antipodes destabilize, indeed, set Europe in motion. In some texts, especially those involving circumnavigation, the European traveler’s movement, once he passes through the antipodes, is potentially endless. A gloss on Thomas of Cantimpré’s “De Monstruosis Hominibus,” an Old French poem from about 1290 by the Clerk of Enghien, casts antipodeans in

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Figure 2.7 Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ms. XV 4, fol. 118r. Reproduced by permission of The J. Paul Getty Museum.

a distinctly negative light. Thomas draws on Isidore for his description of the antipodeans when he says that “there are men who have the soles of their feet transposed.” The Clerk says: There are yet other men here ........................ Who have the soles of the feet transposed, Who are terrifyingly ugly to see As you can imagine. Thus I wish to describe them to you. A vile, low people they are And vile and evil their law and customs,

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The Idea of the Antipodes For there is no accord between them, And there are battles between them every day And thus one kills the other Without one crying to the other “merci”! 55

The Clerk’s antipodeans inspire disgust in terms of their physicality, their laws, and their social customs (not fi ghting politely), thus presenting an extreme form of Othering. In other texts, the antipodean region and the antipodeans are less clearly negative or, indeed, positive. Although Dante never uses the word antipodes, his Convivio and Commedia seem to allude to the region and draw on descriptions of it to imagine habitation and a way of reaching the place. In the Convivio, his description of the South is neutral. He doubts that anything but water exists in the Southern Hemisphere, but in a discussion of the seasons, he offers a striking picture of the earth as it may be seen from opposite parts of its surface. Dante envisions the North Pole as 2,600 miles due north of Rome. He asks his readers to imagine the spot and a city there, which he calls “Mary.” He also envisions the South Pole and the distance from Rome to this place to be 7,500 miles, “or a little less.” He then invites readers to imagine another city there, which he calls “Lucy.” He suggests that the distance between the two is 10,200 miles. He asks his readers to imagine how Mary and Lucy observe the sun when it dips into and rises out of the tropics near the equator throughout the year, and he says, Thus we may now see that by divine provision the world is so ordered that when the sphere of the Sun has revolved and returned to its starting place, this globe on which we dwell receives in every place an equal time of light and darkness. 56 In his Inferno, Dante’s descriptions of the last place in hell before the ascent to purgatory, and purgatory itself, suggest Earthly Paradise and the antipodes. This is obviously not a region on the other side of the earth, but within it. Nevertheless, having just descended from Lucifer and gone through a rift in the rock within Cocytus, the ninth circle of frozen waters, Virgil observes to Dante that they have: passed the point to which all weights are drawn from every part. And you are now come beneath the hemisphere opposite to that which canopies the great dry land and underneath whose zenith the Man was slain who was born and lived without sin, and you have your feet upon a little sphere which forms the other face of the Judecca [the innermost zone of Cocytus]. Here it is morning when it is evening there, and this one who made a ladder for us with his hair [i.e., Lucifer] is still fi xed as he was before. On this side he fell down from Heaven;

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and the earth, which before stood out here, for fear of him made a veil of the sea and came to our hemisphere; and perhaps in order to escape from him that which appears on this side left here the empty space and rushed upwards. 57 Dante here draws on several antipodean ideas: the antipodes exactly opposite a northern point (here exactly converse to Jerusalem), the inverse days and nights, and the idea that the area might be covered in water. Although he doesn’t describe any inhabitants in the passage, the fact that this region is closely related to uttermost hell suggests a negative space, whereas the alternate association with purgatory, the earth that fled when Satan fell, suggests something more positive. 58 This more ambivalent attitude towards antipodean contact also appears in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Arthurian literature and in popular lore. Communication with the antipodeans, where English people travel to the antipodes or antipodeans travel to Europe, provides a sense of a global reach to the Arthurian courts. Usually, the antipodes reinforce Arthurian court structures, an antipodean hope that has been interpreted as, at times, ironic on the part of the authors. J. S. P. Tatlock and Roger Loomis have observed that fantasies of antipodean subjugation occur in Norman legends that already mock the Bretons, and that the addition of such a fantastical element as antipodeans only increases the ridicule. 59 Nevertheless, in none of the narratives are the antipodeans wholly monstrous, and in all of them, these creatures, who are an extension of the human, offer another temporal dimension in that the antipodeans offer a past and future for British peoples that it is not always easy to separate from the present. For example, Chrétien de Troyes, in his romance Erec and Enide of about 1168, describes the wedding of the hero Erec to his beloved Enide at Arthur’s court. Arthur has summoned all the royal vassals who hold land under him to attend the wedding. Among others is the “lord of the dwarves . . . Bilis, king of the Antipodes.” Bilis brings with him two rulers who have land under him “[t]o display his power and authority,” and they are also dwarves. Whereas Bilis’ brother, mentioned in the text, is the tallest knight in the kingdom, Bilis is the smallest, a nice suggestion of an inversion of conventions in which the king is marked, but in the opposite way than expected. When Bilis and his two men arrive, they are “very cordially welcomed; at court all three were honoured and served like kings, for they were very noble men.” 60 Even though these men are revered along with other royalty in attendance at the wedding, they are still, like the other lords in attendance, Arthur’s vassals. In Erec and Enide, therefore, a poem that starts with a dwarf attacking one of Guinevere’s ladies and Erec himself, the reappearance of dwarves in the court as men who hold land under Arthur suggests implicitly the re-empowerment or

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restitution of Arthurian hierarchy. In the story, the antipodeans are different, yet clearly men. The antipodeans might correspond with Europeans by coming to Europe, and they might also be a place where Europeans might go themselves. In both cases, the relationship is more than simply to raise antipodeans up or lower them to being evil or bestial. At about the same time as Chrétien, Étienne of Rouen, abbot of Mont-Saint-Michel (?–1169), refers to Arthur residing in and ruling over the antipodes. Étienne wrote a continuation of the life of William of Newburgh’s Historia Rerum Anglicarum, called Draco Normannicus, which chronicles the years 1153–1169, and he recounts how, in 1167, a “Roland,” probably Roland of Dinan, having been subjugated in Brittany by Henry II, writes a complaint to Arthur, who “now resides at the antipodes.” Following the battle in Cornwall against Mordred’s forces, according to the Draco Normannicus, Wounded Arthur searches for the herbs of his sister, Which the sacred island of Avalon holds. The immortal nymph, Morgan, receives her brother here, Treats, feeds, revives, and makes him immortal. The rulership of the antipodes is given to him; he assumes the fated office and, unarmed, He takes up the martial role and fears no battle. In this manner he rules the lower hemisphere, he thrives in arms, And the lower half of the world is given to him. Neither Alexander, nor the love of Caesar, could Thus speak of his rulership of the largest part of the earth. The Antipodeans tremble before his fated right; The lower world becomes subject to him. He flies up to the upper world, and at any time he returns to the bottommost region; In order that they desire his mighty rule, he spends his time everywhere.

Arthur threatens to return to defend the Bretons if Henry does not stop waging war against them. He will come back, the poem says, via the Cyclades, India, Parthia in Southwest Asia, and Arabia.61 Loomis speculates about Chrétien’s and Étienne’s sources, and he conjectures that they got their ideas about the dwarves and Arthur’s rulership over the antipodes from a “light lay tradition” and from Gervase of Tilbury and Gerald of Wales.62 These two authors, along with Dante, provide the fi rst examples of a tunnel into and/or through the earth to reach the antipodes, images that recur later and may contribute to the origins of the myth of China as the constant antipodal location.63 In Gervase and Gerald, the region they describe is not clearly on the opposite side of the earth, but like Dante, the descriptions draw on notions of the

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antipodes. In their texts, the people residing in the region are better than the Europeans. However, in Gerald in particular, the relationship between Europe and the antipodes becomes more complicated than simple contrastive binaries, an association instead that suggests that the antipodes linger beside Europe, always available. Jeffrey Cohen describes a twelfthcentury story from William of Newburgh, Yorkshire, which comes close to this kind of antipodean narrative. In William’s History of English Affairs, a man chances across a joyous gathering of people who are, while not necessarily in the antipodes, defi nitely underground in a strange though familiar mound. The man has the potential to join in the people’s revelry, but instead he rides away on his horse after stealing a golden cup. Cohen wonders: What would happen, though, if the English traveler had joined the celebration inside the tumulus rather than stolen its tableware and fled? Having stumbled across a queer intrusion into his accustomed space, could he have accepted the invitation to conviviality? What would have come to pass had the man risked conversation with the subterranean congregants, if one of these congenial revelers had spoken the tale of who they were and what they honored at their elegant repast? Whose history would this mound-dweller narrate? Whatever the answers to these rhetorical questions, Cohen suggests that the mound, its inhabitants, and the potential narrative it contains runs counter to the main thrust of William’s narrative, which tends to render the English island and its peoples isolated, whole, and unmixed: Had the celebrants of the mound’s underground celebration been invited to speak their history, the narrative they would likely tell might reveal the difference between stories of England and stories of Britain, between the attenuated narrative of a kingdom that masqueraded as the entirety of an island and the histories of a tempestuous world too vast, too motley, too entangled in an archipelago of other worlds to be so reduced.64 The following two stories reveal the ambivalent and ambiguous effects of precisely what happens when these encounters come about. Gervase of Tilbury, whose name is often associated with the creation of the famous Ebstorf mappamundi, notes in one place in his encyclopedia, Otia imperialia (ca. 1211), that the antipodes are said to live in the Torrid Zone. Elsewhere in the same work he recounts a story told to him by a prior, Robert of Kenilworth, about a swineherd of the lord of Peak Castle, Derbyshire.65 Gervase reports that one winter day, the swineherd is said to have lost a good, pregnant sow, and he decides to look in a cave in

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the hillside below the castle. The cave lets out a great wind. He travels into the cave and through darkness for a long time before emerging into light and fields of ripe crops. There he meets an overseer, from whom he retrieves his herd, and he travels back to his homeland. It may be ambiguous whether the swineherd is described as encountering a subterranean world, but it seems that he has traveled all the way through the earth to the Southern Hemisphere and the opposite season. He is amazed to fi nd that upon his return home, “he saw the winter cold uninterrupted in our hemisphere.” The antipodean inhabitants of this other land are, it seems, a good people. The overseer helps the swineherd, and when he leaves the land, there is a “joyful leave-taking.” Indeed, the swineherd’s error in losing the sow, a consequence of his laziness we are told, is redeemed by fi nding the land of the antipodeans, a success that is compounded because the sow had her litter while in that fecund land.66 Gerald of Wales, a writer with, as Cohen has called it, “a hopelessly compound identity,” goes further than Gervase’s account of travel underground to another realm.67 Gerald includes in his Itinerarium Cambriae (ca. 1191) a lengthy narrative and a role for the underground inhabitants that is, in the end, not so clearly nor merely comparative with those in the regular world. Instead, he suggests multiple possibilities for relationships with those from the other land. Gerald tells of an old priest, Eliodorus (alive from 1148–1176), who confessed that when he was twelve, he had run away from the frequent blows of his teacher and found a hole by a riverbank. After days of hiding, two men appeared to him, “no bigger than pigmies,” who say to him, “‘If you will come away with us . . . we will take you to a land where all is playtime and pleasure.’” They lead him through a “dark underground tunnel” before emerging in a verdant land. It seems this land is underground, for it “was rather dark, because the sun did not shine there,” and at night no moon or stars appear there. Nevertheless, there are affi nities with the antipodes. Eliodorus is brought before the king and then put into care with the king’s own child. The people are described as: very tiny, but beautifully made and well-proportioned. In complexion they were fair, and they wore their hair long and flowing down over their shoulders like women. They had horses of a size which suited them, about as big as greyhounds. They eat no meat or fish, only “various milk dishes, made up into junkets flavoured with saffron.” They disapprove of the behavior of humans in the upper hemisphere, only admiring “the plain unvarnished truth.” This utopian text continues with Eliodorus’ recollection of how as a boy, at fi rst accompanied and then by himself, he would often return to his home through the tunnel or “sometimes by another route.” He would only let himself be seen by his mother, and at one point he tells her about

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the land and people there. His mother asks him to bring back some gold, “a substance which was extremely common in that country,” so he steals a golden ball from the king’s son. He is immediately pursued by two antipodeans. He rushes back up to his house but trips at the threshold. The little people take the ball from him, running off and “showing him every mark of scorn, contempt, and derision.” Eliodorus realizes that what he has done is wrong. However, from that time, he is unable to fi nd the underground passage down by the overhanging banks of the river. Over time, the boy learns to settle down and study once more. Gerald reflects on the story that The passing of time helps us to forget our problems more surely than arguing rationally about them can ever hope to do, and our day-to-day preoccupations blunt the edge of our worries. As the months pass by we think less and less of our troubles. Nevertheless, much later in life when Eliodorus is an old man and is questioned (by David II, Bishop of St. David’s and Gerald of Wales’ uncle) about what happened, “he would burst into tears as he told the story.” Moreover, “he still remembered the language of the little folk and he could repeat quite a number of words.” Gerald reproduces several words, such as the word for water and salt, and he uses these examples as an opportunity to speculate about language families, marveling at the correspondences among Greek, Latin, Welsh, Irish, and, it seems, lower world or antipodean. The story complicates any simple contrast between, on the one hand, the Welsh world of Eliodorus’ youth or the present Wales at the time of his recollection, and on the other hand, the lower world and its inhabitants. Correspondence, in two senses of comparative qualities and communicative contact, disturbs neat binaries and proportions. The antipodeans are alike and opposite at the same moment. Just in terms of physicality, Eliodorus, through Gerald, describes them as “well-proportioned” yet tiny. In terms of society, gender is potentially inverted in that the men have women’s hairstyles, but their society appears to have a structure similar to that of a medieval kingdom. On the other hand, these people—they are not monstrous—are better morally than the Europeans. They pursue the truth and are contemptuous of “our . . . ambitions, infidelities, and inconstancies.” Also, their lives are better, with junkets for food and endless playtime. Their language is also different but related somehow to our own. Even meteorologically they are similar and different. Light is present, but there’s no sun. What is most significant is that Eliodorus continues to have a connection to the lower world even after all these years. He has had to learn to move on from that moment, to allow the daily routine to wear away at his fond memory. As a priest, he should be able to read the

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exemplum the story presents in terms of a warning against undue affection for worldly goods and the “playtime and pleasure” the underground people promise him. However, he cannot give up his attachment to the land and its people. Time has not helped him to move on but is instead “punctuated,” in Roland Barthes’ sense, by the other land. He remains achingly nostalgic, crying at the memory when he is old.68 These holes into and through the earth to a land with opposite seasons and inverse societies, therefore, are representative of a genre that sees the other land as an opportunity to think through the issues of the day, usually in some quite particular part of the West. However, as we see, these other lands are also places that disturb correspondence between, on the one hand, ideal or alternate spaces and peoples, and on the other hand, real spaces. Travel literature in the Middle Ages could, like maps and medieval romances, also present an image of the world that distinguished peoples and cultures from each other, or they could subtly extend one’s knowledge in unexpected directions. Circumnavigation provided an opportunity to think through the other “side” of the earth in another way; the traveler could pass through the most distant lands and rediscover his homeland with a culturally and morally refreshed outlook. The antipodes therefore seem poised to offer a confi rming—perhaps the confi rming—mirror for Europeans. Where Greek and Roman writers only sporadically began to imagine circumnavigation of the globe, medieval texts more concretely articulate the possibility of traveling all the way around the earth through the antipodes. However, instead of circumnavigation being a reassuring feature of an imagined global world, the vision of Europeans reaching and passing through the antipodes disturbs global certainties. For example, consider William Caxton’s Mirrour of the World, fi rst published in 1480–1481 and then republished in 1490. The prose Mirrour is a translation from French of a prose redaction of a poem. It is ultimately derived from Honorius Augustodunensis’s Imago mundi and is encyclopedic, with sources that include chronicle histories, itineraries, geographies, and more.69 At one point in the text, Caxton says that the earth is divided into three parts and that “therfor it behoveth by this reson to make an other dyvision,” but he only describes Asia, Europe, and Africa. One of his illustrations, however, shows a fourth continent, yet he labels it “Inhabitabilis”; that is, uninhabitable.70 At another point he conveys that a person could travel all around the earth with one’s feet toward earth and one’s head towards the sky. He also employs vivid imagery, including a now-famous simile, to discuss the earth’s rotundity. He states that if there were neither water nor anything else to hinder a person’s passage: he might goo round aboute therthe, were it man or beste, above and under, whiche parte that he wolde, lyke as a flye goth round aboute a round apple. In like wyse myght a man goo rounde aboute therthe as ferre as therthe

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dureth [extends] by nature, alle aboute, so that he shold come under us. Ande it shold seme to hym that we were under hym, lyke as to us he shold seme under us, ffor he shold holde his feet ayenst oures and the heed to ward heven, no more ne lesse as we doo here, and the feet toward therthe. And yf he wente alway forth his way to fore hym, he shold goo so ferre that he shold come agayn to the place fro whens he first departed. Unsure whether his readers are able fully to imagine exactly how this might happen, Caxton offers another scenario. If two people, one going in one direction and the other in the opposite direction, were both to travel “egally,” meaning in a straight line and at the same rate from each other, they would meet at the opposite point of their starting place, and if they continued, they would return to their starting point.71 To make the point more explicit, Caxton supplies two images (figs. 2.8 and 2.9). The fi rst shows the two men circling the earth and meeting face to face on the other side. A second image on the following page seems redundant or out of order, as though from an earlier moment in the narrative than the fi rst image. Indeed, it seems to be the moment when the two men set out on their voyages. Also, upon closer examination, in the second image, the two bodies appear conjoined.72 It is possible to read the bodies in figure 2.9 in two ways. The fi rst is that the two men are disjointed at their midriffs: The person, who appears to be behind and points left, has a waist and legs that are slid out to the left and come in front of the person behind. The other man, who appears to be in front and faces right, has an upper body shifted to the left of his lower body and legs that recede somewhat behind the person behind. An alternative reading is that the person pointing to the left’s whole body is behind; his lower torso and feet point right. The person in front, who eagerly leans and faces right, has a waist and feet that already move left. This second reading of the image suggests that the round earth prompts impatient circumnavigation through the antipodes people immediately leaving each other for the other side or, having come together, always leaving again. Caxton’s second edition from 1490 repeats the image. The anonymous author of The Book of John Mandeville also describes circumnavigation. Created about 1360, Sir John Mandeville claims in the Book to be an English knight from St. Albans, who left for the East in 1322 and returned in 1356 or 1357. The Book was immensely popular, judging from the two hundred and fi fty manuscripts and many early printed versions that survive. It was also quickly translated into English, Latin, and several other languages.73 In a discussion of Sumatra and an Antarctic star, and in terms of antipodean habitation, Mandeville says that the readers of the book know the following fact welle that thei that ben toward the Antartyk, thei ben streght feet ayen feet of hem that dwellen under the Transmontane [North Star] also wel

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Figure 2.8 William Caxton, The Mirrour of the World, or Thymage of the Same (Westminster, 1481), 61. Courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

Figure 2.9 William Caxton, The Mirrour of the World, or Thymage of the Same (Westminster, 1481), 62. Courtesy of the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

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as wee, and thei that dwellyn under us ben feet ayenst feet. For alle the parties of see and of lond han here appositees habitables or trepassables [navigable] and [yles] of this half and beyond half.74 In five other places he emphasizes, like Caxton, that it is possible to circumnavigate the globe. In fact, he makes a clear distinction between being able to go “alle aboute” or “envirowne” the earth latitudinally and being able to go “aboven and benethen” the earth longitudinally. Both are achievable by ship, he says, and the person who does this, “alleweys he scholde fynde men, londes, and yles als wel as in this contree.” Unlike Caxton, however, Mandeville warns his readers that the chances of getting lost are great. Despite the fact that he discusses astral navigation in the same section as circumnavigation, he says that only one person in a thousand has the chance of returning to the place he leaves because hardly anyone can direct himself in a straight line on the globe. In this capacity, The Book of John Mandeville is darker than the Mirrour of the World’s story of two men being able to meet up again if they go “egally” from each other. Nevertheless, the author of the Book prompts his readers to see the shape of the earth clearly and to envisage it as having lands and peoples. At another point in the same chapter, he repeats a story that he “herd cownted whan I was yong” and that he says he has heard many times since. It is the story of a man who traveled a very long way, passing through many different seasons, until he came upon a land where he heard his own language being spoken. Not realizing that he had circumnavigated the globe, he turned back.75 That is, even if (or is it because?) one can navigate around the world’s dangers, which according to Mandeville may include great oceans fi lled with beasts and scorching heat, and is a one-ina-thousand-chance, it may be impossible to recognize one’s home. “Knowledge of the places in the world” is an enabling epistemology in Roger Bacon’s reasoning, a way of recognizing the world that is dependent upon the maintenance of geographical, habitational, and communicative distinctions. The antipodes are distinct but not marked by an Othering difference, nor are they easily assimilated into early or even later medieval ways of thinking about the globe and one’s position on it. The antipodean continent or island appears in a network of complicated topographical, sociological, and theological relations, particularly on Lambert’s map, but also in the written texts in the sense that it is difficult to say whether the region and its peoples are near or far from Europe or somewhere else spatially, ontologically, and spiritually. In addition, in many texts, one may travel to the antipodes (by inner- or over-land routes?), and antipodeans easily come to the North. In the late-medieval Mandeville and Caxton texts, this perpetual travel and disorientation characterize the world in general. Will one recognize home and know when or where to stop? Will one recognize a home language, especially when the language of the antipodeans might be related to one’s own? It is as though the idea

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of the antipodes also travels in this manner within medieval geographical epistemes. The concept of the antipodes turns back on geographical ways of thinking about the world without quite completing a symmetrical circumnavigation. Instead, when geographical ideas about the world articulate the necessity of distinguishing one place from another for philosophy, theological hermeneutics, and the institutional Church, the antipodes stand opposite yet also beside.

3

Returning Monsters Gender, Sex, and Child-Getting in Early Modern Britain

At the beginning of Richard Brome’s 1638 comic play, The Antipodes—the fi rst titular reference to the region in any language—a doctor learns of a sick patient who contains in his body “news too much . . . / For any homebred, Christian understanding.” The doctor is urged to Play the man-midwife and deliver him Of his huge timpany [swelling]of news—of monsters, Pigmies, and giants, apes, and elephants, Griffins, and crocodiles, men upon women, And women upon men ...................... the kingdom of Cathaya, Of one great Khan and Goodman Prester John ...................... geese that have two heads apiece, and hens That bear more wool upon their backs that sheep.

The doctor, recognizing the man’s burden, cries out, “Oh, Mandeville”!1 Familiarity with Mandeville, world geography, and animal and human curiosities appears elsewhere in the play: the patient holds and consults the Book of John Mandeville; other characters demonstrate that they possess knowledge of the places, creatures, and events in the Book and other sources; and the antipodes literally appear on stage when a lord with a company of theater players puts on a play-within-a-play set in the land of the antipodes.2 Brome’s comedy assumes its audience has in mind the Mandeville text, other travel literature and maps, and, in particular, the antipodes to enjoy the play’s numerous references. However, The Antipodes is more about other forms of possession. It is not so much that the ill man, the doctor, and the other characters hold the Book or know Mandeville. Rather, antipodean creatures and features possess and inhabit the sick man so much that he has yet to consummate his marriage of three years. Furthermore, this possession has generated problems for other characters who are likewise inhabited by antipodes that are too much for “homebred, Christian understanding.”

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In Chapter 2, Lambert of St. Omer’s map, Caxton’s graphic confusion, and Mandeville’s lost circumnavigator contributed to a global epistemology that lacked a basis in identifiable locations and reliable orientations. Now in Brome’s Antipodes, the earlier medieval impressions of the antipodes and the sense of global dislocation are givens, and the play is a depiction of the results. In the Early Modern period, the nomadic, deterritorializing world of the antipodes from the Greeks, Romans, and Middle Ages now inhabits European people’s bodies.3 The character around which the action revolves and spins off is aptly named Peregrine, because he and the other characters are fi lled up with “traveling thoughts” (1.2.27) even though he and the others do not leave London in the play. This chapter on antipodean effects in the seventeenth century begins with an examination of seventeenth-century versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s Sea Voyage, John Dryden and William Davenant’s Enchanted Island, and William Duffett’s Mock Tempest. In contrast to these other texts (including The Mock Tempest, which is wholly set in a prison and brothel in central London), The Antipodes is not a close rendition of The Tempest; The Taming of the Shrew more directly influences its plot. Nevertheless, despite the fact that Brome is more a student of Jonson than he is of Shakespeare, The Antipodes directly echoes The Tempest in a number of key places, a point not made in previous analyses of the play. Indeed, Brome’s text needs to be read in the tradition of plays that interpret and adapt The Tempest in a larger sense, for it meditates upon, and is concerned with, the same themes as Shakespeare’s island comedy and its later renditions.4 The comedies that follow The Tempest indicate that the seventeenth-century fascination with Shakespeare’s play was quite specifically focused on sexuality. The Antipodes offers a different interpretation from The Tempest and its seventeenth-century renditions of how knowledge works in encounters with Other spaces. It considers the significant and radical consequences for epistemological discourses of the already-returned presence of a dislocating and disorienting antipodes in the heart of London, and it fully imagines Prospero’s dread of island knowledge returning to the Old World with disruptive force, a force that fosters monstrous sexual desires and illnesses. Brome’s contemporary, Sir Thomas Browne, would express a distaste for precisely these kinds of incorporations of the antipodes into Europe, amalgamations of bodies, as well as of reason and imagination. In his 1643 Religio medici, Browne strenuously urges: Be not under any Brutal metempsychosis while thou livest, & walkest about erectly under the scheme of Man. In thine own circumference, as in that of the Earth, let the Rational Horizon be larger than the sensible, and the Circle of Reason than of Sense. Let the Divine part be upward, and the Region of Beast below. Otherwise, ’tis but to live invertedly, and with thy Head unto the Heels of thy Antipodes. 5

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The latter part of this chapter offers a new reading of The Antipodes as a play about what it calls “child-getting” and about how the “sensible” and the “Region of the Beast” divert the potential cure of Peregrine, his wife, and others, and impede child-getting. Tempests Shakespeare’s The Tempest, fi rst performed in 1611 and published in the folio of 1623, gave rise to several seventeenth-century rewritings that seem to have been more popular than the original. The chronology of adaptations begins with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, who were the fi rst to adapt Shakespeare’s play in 1622, in The Sea Voyage, which makes extensive use of The Tempest. The next play to adopt parts of it was Sir John Suckling’s The Goblins of 1637, which only echoes The Tempest in one scene and has an Ariel-like character. After Brome’s play in 1638, the next to make use of The Tempest was John Dryden and William Davenant’s The Tempest or The Enchanted Island of 1667, which follows Shakespeare’s play closely; according to an editor, The Enchanted Island quotes or paraphrases thirty-one percent of Shakespeare’s work.6 An opera version of Dryden and Davenant’s Enchanted Island was fi rst performed in 1673 and has been called “the most popular play of the Restoration period.” 7 The opera is closely based on the Dryden–Davenant version, with songs by Thomas Shadwell.8 Finally, the popularity of the opera seems to have inspired Thomas Duffett to write his bawdy Mock Tempest, fi rst performed in 1674, which parodies the combined Dryden–Davenant (and Shadwell) opera. Dryden and Davenant’s The Tempest or The Enchanted Island, and the operatic additions, signal most clearly the seventeenth-century interest in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, even if it does so in a relatively simple manner. In the Preface to the printed play, Dryden writes that anyone who has seen Fletcher and Massinger’s Sea Voyage “may easily discern that it was a Copy of Shakespear’s Tempest.” The Sea Voyage is, in fact, very different from Shakespeare’s play; nevertheless, what is revealing is that Dryden explains which parts of The Tempest most intrigued him—the same parts that are returned to again and again in the seventeenth century: “the Storm, the desart Island, and the Woman who had never seen a Man.” These elements survive in all versions of the play, even Suckling’s Goblins, signaling the strong interest the seventeenth century had in the social upheaval of the stormy New World island and a woman who has never seen a man in that isolated and upset space. Indeed, Dryden goes on to praise his (late) partner’s input in their version for suggesting a particular role they added to Shakespeare’s play: a man who has never seen a woman. 9 The comedy and innuendo in The Enchanted Island arises because of the mutual ignorance between the sexes, as the innocent characters wonder at the opposite sex, the power of love, and the mystery of how relatives, especially children, come about. Prospero

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sternly warns the men in the play that women are “Fatally beauteous” and that “those who once behold ’em, / Are made their slaves for ever,” while he also cautions the women that young men are only dangerous and that any woman who comes in contact with one of them will feel “a pain” in nine months (2.4.46–49, 111–14). These and other comments in the play by male and female characters most often repeat stereotypes about women’s fickleness. At one point, Ferdinand, afraid that Miranda has chosen another man, complains that “like most of her frail Sex, she’s False.” He even suggests that women learn “Change” at a young age because their nurses teach them “with two Nipples,” so “they divide their / Liking,” while at another point the character here called Trincalo says that women want to marry in order to cuckold their husbands before separating from them and suing them for alimony (4.1.106–11, 4.2.163–66). The Enchanted Island directs desires towards heterosexuality and patriarchal dominance. For example, Prospero’s warnings about the opposite sex are scarcely impediments to the young characters who are attracted to each other, but Miranda passively says she is not in love with one of the male characters because he hasn’t fi rst loved her. Prospero adds that men in general have been made a “prop” and “guide” to women. Later he counsels Miranda to keep a distance from each man and “use him ill” so that he will love her more (3.1.19–26, 3.1.141). Even though The Enchanted Island doesn’t go as far as Brome’s play in exploring the consequences of sexuality in an island setting, it suggests something of the generative nature of sexual desire we will see in that play. A description of The Enchanted Island demonstrates quite literally the way that the plot and themes of The Tempest multiplied in its offspring. Nearly all the roles are doubled in Dryden and Davenant’s play. Miranda has a sister called Dorinda, Antonio has a son called Hippolito (who becomes a rival for Ferdinand), Sycorax is Caliban’s sister, and even Ariel has a love in the opera version. Caliban’s threat in The Tempest that he wished he could have “peopled” the island with Calibans is, in The Enchanted Island, transferred and made even clearer through Sycorax, who wishes to get “twenty Sycoraxes” and “twenty Calibans” with Trincalo, her love (3.3.41–42). Nevertheless, despite the presence of these proliferating pairs, and the fact that they have various fallings out in the play, the scenes are usually played for comic effect, and all problems are resolved by the conclusion, with almost every character happily coupled. For instance, although at one point in the play Hippolito’s desire appears to be potentially indiscriminate in his choice of love object, his desire is soon directed toward Dorinda and his former wants described as “small errours” (5.2.127–30). Even Caliban is pardoned and seeks wisdom in the future, and he and Sycorax are left on an island that is to be a “Refuge” for the “afflicted” (5.2.262). While it is potentially interesting that the historical records tell us that actresses—Mary (Moll) Davis and a woman by the name of Gosnell—played a male character in the earliest performances, it seems most likely that the role was Ariel, who is

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relatively unremarkable as a male spirit.10 Dryden notes the fact of this crossdressing in several lines of his verse Prologue, but he does so to assure his readers that the character’s sex will not change at the end of the play and, if anyone is in doubt, he can find out with her “abed” (27–38). John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s earliest adaptation, The Sea Voyage, is similar to The Enchanted Island in that its plot also directs the desires of women and men towards marriage. The play is set on two islands and shows a series of chance encounters between French and Portuguese men and women that ends by resolving the violent confl icts that led to the complications with which the play begins. Along the way, almost all the characters express a desire to return to their homes. If a character is married, he or she also wants to return to his or her husband or wife, and if a character is an unmarried woman, the play makes clear she is a virgin. For example, the play opens with the tempest and with Aminta—the main female character who, at the start of the play, has been kidnapped by a pirate, Albert—desiring to die with her family: “No kindred’s tears upon me? Oh, my country!” 11 She also curses Albert for being responsible not only for her imprisonment but also for what she believes to be the death of her brother and friends. Nevertheless, Albert has fallen in love with Aminta and, after recounting how he has “observed” her honor “sanctimoniously,” and after they abandon ship and he rescues her from the sea, she promises her love to him. She takes back her former curses and says that “So far am I tied and fettered to your service. / Believe me, I will learn to love” (1.1.98, 1.3.14–15). Proper gender roles are strictly described, repeated, and enforced throughout The Sea Voyage. Men, for example, are commanded to “Be men, and rule your minds” (1.3.70). Only the two lovers, Albert and Aminta, suggest any crossing of gender roles when Albert, seriously wounded from an earlier fight, observes, “Sure we have changed sexes: you bear calamity / With a fortitude / Would become a man; / I like a weak girl suffer.” Yet within a few lines, he has “New vigour . . . and a spirit that dares / More than a man to serve my fair Aminta” (2.1.7–9, 2.1.75–76). Women’s roles are generally restricted to sudden love and subservience, but in one important respect, they temporarily occupy masculine roles. The main action of The Sea Voyage occurs on one island, but in a kind of doubling, we learn that close by is another more bountiful island. Women who claim to be Amazons rule this island but are really Portuguese women who have been shipwrecked earlier by the French. Rosellia, the “governess” of the island, seeks revenge when she, her daughter, and the other women on their island capture the French crewmembers. Her anger extends to a general observation about men, observing to her daughter of marriage that “The sovereignty / Proud and imperious men usurp upon us / We confer on ourselves, and love those fetters / We fasten to our freedoms” (2.2.189–92). However, her daughter and the other women on the island repeatedly undo the effects of her want for revenge by what in

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the play is presented as urgently traditional desires. The women desire to marry the men in order to have children; otherwise, the “commonwealth, / Which in ourselves begun, with us must end” (2.2.17–18). And they are just naturally attracted to men. One of them observes that “by instinct, / Though a young maid hath never seen a man, / Touches have titillations and inform her” (2.2.178–80). Like The Enchanted Island, Fletcher and Massinger’s play does not allow for any sustained separation between men and women, let alone same-sex desire. Rosellia is eventually persuaded to allow the women to have sex with the men for a month in order to reproduce. The only alternative she imagines for the women without men is to “place your happiness in cold and chaste / Embraces of each other” (3.221–22). In spite of this, Rosellia’s plans for convenient liaisons for purposes of reproduction alone are soon undone, and the play ends with all revealed and all reconciled, the women married to the men. The idea of marriage being solely for procreation is too bald, and instead the play’s action and lines show how the marriages are actually expressions of opposite-sex desire. Even Rosellia is to be married in the end, to a character who, at the beginning of the play—in one of the few places that echoes the Tempest—commands Aminta not to assist the storm, yelling at her, “Peace, woman! / We ha’ storms enough already—no more howling” (1.1.49–50). Thomas Duffett’s The Mock Tempest, or The Enchanted Castle makes very explicit the sexual tensions of The Tempest that fascinated seventeenth-century playwrights and audiences. It also comments on and plays with the topics of marriage, sexual naïveté, and procreation, drawing out, as it were, the seamy underside of topics that were the central focus of the other plays. As Rebecca Weaver-Hightower has argued, the play satirizes The Sea Voyage, The Enchanted Island, and The Tempest, as well as the culture’s fascination with island isolation.12 The title refers to the Dryden–Davenant–Shadwell version of The Tempest and, like that play, was popular; it was performed in London, Dublin, and elsewhere from 1674 probably until 1682. The play opens in a brothel, where the prostitutes and a pimp are defending the establishment (figuratively referred to as a ship) against an attack by a rabble, which makes “More noyse and terrour then a Tempest at Sea” and demands that the brothel submit to “the least of their Cock-boats . . . and receive a man aboard to search for prohibited Goods, and permit him to romage fore and oft without resistance.” 13 Despite the many prostitutes at the windows being commanded to “make water in their Eyes, and burn ’em out, I’me sure y’are hot enough” and blocking the doors with a cistern and other items, they are about to lose the battle when a constable intervenes and takes them to “the enchanted castle,” Bridewell Prison (1.1.1–9). It turns out that the rabble’s attack is all Ariel’s doing at Prospero’s command, an Ariel, incidentally, who promises to “lye, swear, steal, pick pockets, or cerep [sic] in at Windows” (1.2.75). The emphasis in the play is almost always on sex. Prospero, former “Duke

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of my Lord Mayors Dogg-kennel” (1.2.21–22), has two innocent daughters, Miranda and Dorinda, who throughout the play discuss not what men are but what husbands are and provide much of the comedy because they are ignorant about sex but eagerly desire whatever it may be. Even when they play being a “Lord looky” and a “Citizens Wife” (married to another man), Dorinda and Miranda only talk about sleeping together; the outcome for Miranda playing the wife is that, “And then another [man] should lye with you, and another, so at last you should be catch’d in a Baudy-house” (4.2.29– 54). On the other side are Hypolito, the Duke of Mantua and a young and credulous man, and Alonso’s son Quakero, a bumbling hypocrite. Miranda tells her younger sister that a husband is “a thing like a man (for ought I know) with a great pair of Hornes upon his head,” while Hypolito learns that wives are “inconstant . . . unsatisfi’d, restless and wrigling like an Eel” (2.1.17–20). However, when Prospero says Hypolito must “enjoy none but” one wife when he gets one, Hypolito says that if the object in having wives is to “enjoy” them and be “happy,” “I’le enjoy all the Wives in the World;—For I love to be happy Sir: enjoy!” (4.1.81–111). The sisters espy Hypolito at the same moment in the play and fl ip a coin over who will “go fi rst” with him (4.2.86). Dorinda ends up with him while Miranda is coupled with Quakero, who is the object of several anti-Quaker jokes in the play. Calyban and Sycorax are literally afterthoughts in the play, spirit-characters who don’t appear until the fi nal scene. The Mock Tempest also sustains a focus on getting children, here also making jokes based on the characters’ naïveté. Prospero instructs Hypolito that he must give up playing with his “bowling stones” (also a joke about testicles), turn his attention to women, and instead “learn to play with Children,” while Miranda and Dorinda discuss their father’s suggestion that they “get . . . with Child.” The sisters don’t know what that means, but they both want it, Dorinda saying that “if my Father should send a hundred to get me with Child in a civil way, I wouldn’t be afraid” (4.1.126, 4.2.10). When Dorinda and Hypolito soon meet, they each desire to follow Prospero’s command but don’t know what it means to be wives and husbands, or how to make a child (4.2.103–131). Quakero, when he courts Miranda, also desires children. He says he is like a cat and she a mouse because “when his back is stroaked, he longeth to play with his tail” and asks her to look at him because, like a cat with a mouse and still referring to his “tail,” “I am inflamed, and eager truly.” Second, he qualifies his simile and says he is not like a cat because the cat “seeketh the destruction, and the nothingness of the Mouse, but I thirsteth for the Propogation, look thee, and the somethingness” of it (5.2.56–76). Yet for all its bawdiness, parodies of characters’ simplicity, and Quakero’s overly formal language, The Mock Tempest is not as challenging to the contemporary cultural imperative to have children as The Antipodes. While it certainly plays raucously with the idea, it doesn’t present anything that goes much beyond an entertaining but ludicrous vaudeville. In fact, the play ends

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with several reassurances that the action was all merely for the audience’s pleasure. Prospero commands Ariel to show the other characters and the audience “the pleasures of my enchanted Castle”; the rabble who are banished during a closing scene say to Calyban and Sycorax (Calyban’s “Mopsa dear”), who free all the prisoners of Bridewell, that “wee’l go hence, / For we meant your honours no offence”; and in a fi nal scene in front of the sea, Calyban promises the audience that now the rabble has been banished, “your drink, and your Drabs [prostitutes] you shall safely enjoy” while Sycorax pledges that they will have soft beds and be “pleased” all night. In his closing speech, Prospero wishes, not too subtly, that “beautious Nymphs like little Lambkins play, / While Swains with am’rous Pipes drive care away” and calls the action of the play “harmless mirth.” He closes by requesting the audience, “That our Mock-Tempest, then may flourish long, / Clapp all that would seem beautifull and young.” Miranda fi nally ends it all off with an Epilogue in which she and her sister Dorinda are to be prostitutes at their father Prospero’s request, threatening the audience that after having sex, if their “sinking joyes ne’r rise again,” their “harmless Devils” will “take you all” (5.2). Ideas about the antipodes from The Book of John Mandeville and other medieval literature serve as pretexts for Richard Brome’s Antipodes. The first troubling of sexual, marital, and other matters therefore arises because of the unsettled characteristics of the antipodes it inherits. Second, like The Mock Tempest, The Antipodes is set entirely in London and is about another space than Shakespeare’s island; the setting of The Antipodes is almost a textual space where the tensions and potentialities within the dislocated medieval antipodes combine with the insular experiment of Shakespeare’s play. It therefore also inherits Shakespeare’s interest in first encounters with a previously unknown world, and particularly his concerns with the role and characteristics of European knowledge in the New World. The indigenous power of the island, which Prospero perceives, harnesses, and couples with his European art and books but also forcefully leaves behind in The Tempest, has, at the start of Brome’s play, returned to London. The characters therefore embody the disorienting antipodes and a combined Old World–New World knowledge. These troubling and potent forces come to bear on the same object of fascination as the other seventeenth-century plays, namely sexual naïveté. The antipodean pretexts affect Peregrine, Martha, and other characters, described in the language of disease, so that whereas they are similar to characters in the other versions of The Tempest in that they wonder at sex and desire what The Antipodes calls “child-getting,” here their desires and their problems are intensified and multiplied. Richard Brome was a young man when The Tempest was fi rst performed in London in 1611. Born about 1590 and a servant of, and collaborator with, Ben Jonson, Brome worked for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, and had plays performed at the Globe and Blackfriars beginning in 1628–1629.

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Figure 3.1 Thomas Cross the Elder, Richard Brome (1653). London, National Portrait Gallery. Reproduced by permission of the National Portrait Gallery.

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The Antipodes was fi rst performed in 1638 by Queen Henrietta’s Men (formerly the King’s Revels) at Salisbury Court, a London theater built in 1629, and it was popular, earning over £1,000.14 Brome is most obviously a student of Jonson in that The Antipodes works along a cause–effect–cure model in the style of humoral drama, which Jonson pioneered.15 The plot of The Antipodes revolves around trying to cure Peregrine’s madness and alleviate his lack of interest in sex. Peregrine’s father-in-law, Joyless (so called in part because his fi rst wife is dead), and stepmother, Diana, employ the services of Doctor Hughball to try to cure Peregrine. The play’s principal setting is the house of a lord, Letoy. Letoy helps the doctor, Joyless and Diana, and Martha, Peregrine’s wife. Blaze and Letoy’s other servants are a company of players who also assist. In order to cure Peregrine, the doctor drugs him and sends him to sleep, during which Hughball pretends to travel with him to the antipodes. Using a set and Letoy’s players, the doctor tries to heal Peregrine of his mania, while Letoy, the family, and others watch from on stage, and sometimes intervene in the action. Two of the most explicit allusions to The Tempest occur near the end of Brome’s Antipodes. The Epilogue reiterates Prospero’s closing speech, in which Prospero acknowledges the loss of his power and, in a sense, transfers a theatrical—that is, playful—version of its remnant to audience members when he asks for their applause and praise in order to “release” him from the stage. In Shakespeare’s play, Prospero looks back over what has occurred and says that his “project . . . was to please,” the internal slant-rhyme of the word “please” with “release,” emphasizing the awkward bringing together of entertainment and liberty, the latter a major theme in the play. A few lines later, he asks for the audience’s “indulgence” to “set me free,” again transferring the integral theme of freedom to his own situation as an actor held on the stage by the audience’s attention. Prospero’s authority to subjugate (and kill) Ariel, Sycorax, Caliban, and then the new arrivals from Italy, as well as to conjure storms from the sea, is now turned into mere play and the whole into a mere play. Shakespeare appears to acknowledge that the power the audience members have seen exercised in the insular world is disturbing, and they need reminding that they have, after all, only watched a play.16 Unlike Shakespeare’s Epilogue, which narrows the focus to Prospero and his power and transfers it to an actor and the audience’s exercise of that power, Brome’s Epilogue to The Antipodes ends with a crowded stage that includes Doctor Hughball, Peregrine, and a number of the other principal characters. The Epilogue itself consists of two speeches, the fi rst of which involves the doctor’s appeal to the audience for help in curing Peregrine. He concedes that he is uncertain whether his “cure be perfect yet or no,” and says to the audience in front of him: “Your approbation may more raise the man, / Than all the College of Physicians can; / And more health from your fair hands may be won, / Than by the strokings of the seventh son.” 17 Peregrine follows with the closing speech, which also addresses the audience

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directly. Like Prospero he asks the audience to release the actors: “And from our travels in th’Antipodes, / We are not yet arriv’d from off the seas; / But on the waves of desperate fears we roam / Until your gentler hands do waft us home” (5.12.34–43). Brome’s Epilogue, with its two speeches, many characters on stage, and double appeal—for health and for return home—is like Dryden and Davenant’s Enchanted Island in that it multiplies The Tempest’s characters, actions, and themes. We will return to it later. In another other echo of The Tempest, preceding the Epilogue, Letoy’s players put on a masque in which Harmony, Mercury (standing for wit), Cupid, Bacchus, and Apollo (health) vanquish Discord, Folly, Jealousy, Melancholy, and Madness. In The Antipodes, Harmony’s “proper seat” is said to be the “spheres,” whereas Discord and her followers reign on earth, and Harmony advocates that while she and her companions are on earth and “keep possession of this hemisphere,” they should all “revel it.” Harmony and her companions dance; soon, Discord and her companions join in. Then Discord and her attendants retire, leaving Harmony and her followers there, “Who triumph in their habitation new” (5.12.9–22). The Antipodes’ masque is ultimately more curative than The Tempest’s.18 In Shakespeare’s comedy, the masque follows a discussion of what becomes central in The Antipodes: the topic of children. Francis Barker and Peter Hulme’s influential reading of The Tempest argues that the masque and its ultimate interruption are the key moments in the play.19 Prospero warns Ferdinand not to “break” Miranda’s “virgin-knot” before the formal marriage. Ferdinand responds that he hopes for “quiet days, fair issue and long life, / With such love as ’tis now” (4.1.13–31). The island “rabble,” over whom Prospero has given Ariel power, performs a series of tableaux and speeches, which begins with recounting how a plot—to “have done / Some wanton charm” upon Ferdinand and Miranda so that they might have sex before marriage—has been foiled (4.1.86–101). However, Iris says the main purpose of the masque is merely to “celebrate” Ferdinand and Miranda’s union, “some donation freely to estate / On the blest lovers” (4.1.84–86), but as with all freedom in the play, it is a curiously compelled form of free “donation,” one that never quite achieves the form of an unencumbered gift. Prospero says he has to put on the masque, yet he has not made any such “promise” (4.1.39–42). Later in the scene he breaks off its performance because he is uncharacteristically threatened by Caliban, who, at this stage, is hopelessly drunk along with the comic Trinculo and Stefano (4.1.143–63). After the masque, one is left with a sour taste in one’s mouth and a sense that things are almost out of control rather than an innocent celebration of Ferdinand and Miranda’s “quiet days, fair issue, and long life” (4.1.24). In contrast, the masque in The Antipodes is innocent. Discord is banished, it is not abruptly ended, and the observers, including Peregrine and Martha, are left with Harmony. It appears that Letoy is fi rmly in control.

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What is true of the masque appears true of the whole play-within-a-play set in the antipodes. Letoy’s play sets out to cure Peregrine and the others of the Mandevillean madness, and it appears to work. For example, on various occasions the characters comment that Peregrine’s descent into folly from madness seems to be making him well. At one point, Peregrine asks whether he could get advice from New England rather than “Old England” on how to run his new domain, which would have struck audiences as particularly pointed. David Kastan has similarly read The Tempest as more about the Old World than the New.20 At the time of the play’s performance in 1638, “Old England” was in turmoil. Charles I had declared he would rule without parliament in 1629, and his personal rule would last until 1640; he had also begun religious measures that were hostile to Puritans and reformists in England and Scotland, and that had led to rioting. The doctor responds to Peregrine’s request with an aside that suggests how astute Peregrine is and that he seems cured: “Is this man mad? / My cure goes fairly on” (4.9.40–42). Elsewhere in the play, after Martha (playing the daughter of the former king of the antipodes) “marries” Peregrine and they have retired to a room, the servant Blaze’s wife Barbara comments on their activities, stating (with the key phrase) that they will lead to “child-getting” (5.2.6–10). Therefore, Peregrine’s illness—his grotesque abstinence—appears to have been turned to the main purpose of the narrative. Several scenes from the end, Barbara again notes that while Peregrine and Martha have risen from bed, they are “ready to lie down again. . . . And all their melancholy and his travels [are] pass’d, / And but suppos’d their dreams” (5.8.26–33). It would seem, therefore, that despite contemporary resonances, and like the other versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Antipodes comically handles the topics of sexual naïveté and child-getting. Nevertheless, further examination reveals that the questions the play asks and the answers it offers are worked through but not necessarily worked out in Brome’s drama. Peregrine is at the center of the plot, and his pregnant “timpany” of madness is comical, but it is also a key problem in that his preoccupation with, occupation by, the antipodes means no sex and thus no procreation. More than that, if we think of the Mandeville and Lambert texts as I described them in Chapter 2, we might note that the errant island quality is within Peregrine. However, the effects cannot remain only with or within him, and indeed, Martha is most immediately affected, but the unsettling antipodes also affect nearly all the other characters. The Conceiving Conceit Brome’s The Antipodes provides the clearest example of what we might expect of a comic treatment of the antipodes. One of the most noticeable aspects of the play is its pointed and comprehensive satire, which prominently features inversions of convention. Gender roles, class distinctions, and other social relations

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are exposed as hypocritical. In many cases, the play’s criticisms of contemporary London are drolly shocking, even for present-day readers. Not long ago, for example, one reviewer described “what is certainly the rubbish heap of Brome’s plays. . . . All the coarse and gross and seamy side of human life is shown to us with a prosaic ruthlessness,” while another called Brome a “decadent playwright.”21 We might therefore be tempted to read the play in terms of its satire as subversive of dominant discourses about sexuality and procreation or as pointing out societal faults in order to more fully and effectively reinforce these discourses at the play’s conclusion. Eve Sedgwick’s sense of beside suggests a third way to address these topics, for examining The Antipodes in terms of discourses beside each other points to subversive and restorative aspects of the play, but it also enables analysis of other kinds of relations. First, the intimacy of beside is almost made literal in that the antipodes, from the medieval Mandeville, are already present in London and in characters’ bodies before the play begins, so the region and its attendant monstrosities—characterized by a certain dislocation and disorientation—are now proximate, littoral, and interior. That is, they are not orderly binary opposites, ones that simply allow the mastery of neat relations of satire, subversiveness, inversion, or mimicry, which, to a certain extent, depend upon margin–center or binaric distinctions. Other discourses that interact in such complex ways in The Antipodes include the following: England’s fi rst imperial moment and Shakespeare’s concerns about Old World knowledge in conceptually New World locations; men’s and women gender roles and relationships, particularly marriage; sexual knowledge, desire, and practices; and child-getting and its impediments and diversions. 22 The following section explores the satire but also the more significant and subtler ways these discourses interact before moving on to a further set of complications. First, however, we should note that, in addition to the staging of the play-within-the-play, Brome’s most prominent comic and satirical device is the world upside down. In his 1634 play, The Late Lancashire Witches (written with Thomas Heywood), witches invert the patriarchal hierarchy of a family and overturn other aspects of society. Brome’s biographer Clarence Andrews and the critic Ian Donaldson also point out that Brome fi rst evokes antipodean inversions in this play. In his later Antipodes, the references to another realm are precise and hilarious, and the logic of the other world is carried through in absurd fashion. 23 For instance, the doctor says, in conversation with the ailing Peregrine, that he won’t talk of lands that are “Too near home,” which include Persia and India; indeed, he says that he’ll talk of nothing “nearer than th’Antipodes, / That which is farthest distant, foot to foot / Against our region.” Upon hearing this, Joyless’ wife Diana exclaims, “What, with their heels upwards? / Bless us! How scape they breaking o’ their necks?” The doctor assures her that “They walk upon fi rm earth, as we do here, / And have the fi rmament

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over their heads, / As we have here” (1.6.63–92). Peregrine further asks whether epiphagi are there—creatures with eyes in their shoulders and mouths in their chests that appear in medieval mappaemundi, bestiaries, and narratives. And Diana continues her half-joking wondering, suggesting that indeed the antipodeans are epiphagi because then they “have no neck to break” while upside down. The doctor clarifies: The people through the whole world of Antipodes, In outward feature, language, and religion, Resemble those to whom they are supposite: They under Spain appear like Spaniards; Under France, Frenchmen; under England, English To the exterior show; but in their manners, Their carriage, and condition of life, Extremely contrary. (1.6.98–113)

The play’s satire uses this kind of matching and precise antipodal inversion to provide revealing reflections of and on London society. As several commentators have pointed out, the play’s comic satire is a comprehensive and precise critical allegory of contemporary society, though the target of the critique is diverse.24 It presents a series of tableaux that demonstrates inversions of justice, class, occupation, age, societal roles, a ruler’s relations with London’s bureaucracy, vices such as hypocrisy, fashions, and so on. Gender is one prominent target. In a pair of scenes, a woman fencer, straight from a bloody match, has a husband who “keeps a school, and teacheth needlework, / Or some such arts that we call womanish” (4.4.5–6). Elsewhere, a group of women threaten to duck a “man-scold” in a river until he stops. He complains: Was ever harmless creature so abus’d? To be drench’d under water, to learn dumbness Amongst the fishes, as I were forbidden To use the natural members I was born with, And of them all the chief that man takes pleasure in, The tongue! Oh me, accursed wretch! (4.5)

These inversions are performed in the extensive play-within-the-play before Peregrine, who thinks he is the king of the antipodes. Observing the actions and structures of antipodean society in the tableaux, he admires some and wants to correct others. Even his role as king is a metatheatrical inversion; in the third act, Peregrine, in a fit, goes behind the antipodean scene and ransacks the props. He takes a sword from an earlier production, in which a character had played Bevis of Hampton, “slays” the monsters and devil masks backstage and, dressing himself in a crown and robe he fi nds there, returns to the stage crowned the king of the antipodes (3.6.2–31). Thus

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Peregrine’s mad logic runs its course: a dress-up king believes he is the real king in the play-within-the-play. Nevertheless, although the play contains much satire of human types and institutions, the main point is neither satiric, nor does it only use inversions for conservative effect. Julie Sanders acknowledges that although the play “hits home,” “the fantasy of travel is employed as a trope for many different social needs and desires,” while Miles Taylor categorizes the play as “interrogatory rather than polemical” or satirical.25 Early on, for example, one of Letoy’s players makes the assertion that the play they are about to perform “is a most apt conceit, / The comedy being the world turn’d upside down.” Letoy advises the simple man, “Trouble not you your head with my conceit” (2.2.12, 15). Letoy is an authority figure, the master orchestrator (albeit an eccentric and unhinged one), and his advice is as much directed at the audience as it is at his man. Letoy deflects attention away from a simple reading of the conceit of the play set in the antipodes as merely inverting everything in England.26 First, in contrast to the other versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Brome’s The Antipodes delves more deeply into Shakespeare’s concerns about Old World knowledge and gender. For instance, one might begin a reading of relations of beside in The Antipodes by noting that the presence of monstrous desires in The Antipodes, whether cured or expelled or not, is Prospero’s worst fear come true: that an amalgamated power of his Old World knowledge and the New World climate will make its way back to Europe. The combination of Old World arts and New World meteorology (in the older sense of climate) is what Prospero has to leave behind there on the island. He rids himself of his staff and books as deep in the earth and sea as possible so no one else can use them. That is, the hybrid knowledge is too powerful to take back home, where it could lead to further usurpation or even a kind of rulerless society that Gonzalo envisions in his famous speech on a “brave new world.” In addition, the enhanced power cannot remain on the New World island either, where it could potentially enhance Caliban’s desire to “people” the island with “Calibans” (1.2.352–53). What may have been even more disturbing about the image of a sexually powerful Caliban for Shakespeare’s audiences was that, for the fi rst time in history, accounts of New World encounters, such as William Strachey’s of Virginia (which may have influenced The Tempest), consistently render the new spaces and people in feminine and marital terms. 27 Joan Pong Linton has analyzed the ways that the discourses about Virginia depicted the space and its peoples as feminine, “figuring the land as a nubile virgin and natives as savages” and “colonization as both a lawful marriage and a cultivating of souls.” Drawing on the work of Annette Kolodny, Louis Montrose, and others, Linton’s study of The Tempest and contemporary discourses shows how the new land and people were described as brides to England’s groom. In Linton’s reading, The Tempest “both enacts

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and disrupts the fiction of husbandry through the adversarial masculinity of Caliban, in the process making visible the fiction’s inherent contradictions.” 28 Claire Jowitt observes astutely that Brome’s The Antipodes is largely about “transgressive gender behaviour, specifically in relation to sexual appetite.” However, in calling the discussion of travel in the play “pointless” because the focus is largely on London and not the New World, she overlooks the point that the play examines Prospero’s dread of a return of a knowledge–climate amalgam to the Old World and the husband–bride relationship between the Old World and the New. 29 The Antipodes is like The Tempest in that the New World can lead to usurpations, but in Brome’s play the result is not usurpation of a dukedom, but rather is in part a challenge to the gendered paradigm of a male English state and a feminine New World. The threat The Tempest addresses of Caliban’s replicating proliferation of monsters is also realized in The Antipodes. In Brome’s play it is as though the disturbingly male and fecund Caliban has returned to England, except the outcome is not a spawning in the literal form of hybrid Old World–New World children as it is in Shakespeare’s play. In The Antipodes the outcome of the presence of antipodean knowledge in London is to challenge the increasingly institutionalized links between marriage and procreation. That is, the complicated situation of Shakespeare’s play is doubled in The Antipodes as though Brome’s play poses the following questions: What happens when the disorienting island antipodes have already returned to Europe? If The Tempest both explores and “disrupts” a newly forming gender paradigm of patriarchal English statehood and New World femininity, then what are the consequences when the crucial distance between England and the New World is reduced? What happens when the feminine (but also masculine threat) of the New World, which includes the new and dangerously powerful art– climate amalgam, returns to London? Brome was not the fi rst to pick up on Shakespeare’s and the contemporary culture’s concerns about gender and New World encounters. Outside of drama, Linton has discussed Hic Mulier, the 1620 pamphlet on cross-dressing and customs, which warns that if people accept women looking and acting out of their natural place in England, then “If this bee not barbarous, make the rude Scithian, the untamed Moore, the naked Indian, or the wilde Irish, Lords and Rulers of well governed Cities.” She compares Hic Mulier with William Strachey’s Historie of Travell into Virginia Britannia and points out that the Historie “feminizes” and “presents . . . as naturals” the native Americans, so his description bears an inverse symmetry to the image of the female crossdresser in Hic Mulier as more savage than male savages. In these independent instances, gender and colonial ideologies have reached across two worlds and found each other allies.30

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However, in addition to gender and “barbarous” peoples, The Antipodes focuses on sexual desire, sex, and child-getting. The play’s principal narrative concerns procreation—a conceiving conceit—a plot that, while centering on Martha, Peregrine’s wife, ultimately extends beyond the married couple. Martha is distraught about not having children or indeed any sex in the three years she’s been married. Because of it, she suffers from a kind of hysteria like her husband. Throughout the play, her sole focus is on getting children, and in many ingeniously comic instances, Brome has her interpret nearly all she sees and hears as having to do with sex and impregnation. Indeed, Martha is a Miranda figure who has desire but does not know how to use it, and Peregrine is like a naïve Ferdinand. When the play-within-the-play is announced, Martha says she wants to leave, but Blaze’s wife, Barbara, who has become her friend and helper by this point, tells her she must stay to watch it. Martha responds, “The play? What play? It is no children’s play, / Nor no child-getting play, pray, is it?” Barbara’s closing line in the scene is that she must wait. “You’ll see anon,” she says (2.4.34–37). Brome’s play brings together the focus on gender in these other texts, the sexual naïveté of the other versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a concern with child-getting. As a child-getting play, its aim is to undo or, in the language of the play and the language of the Jonsonian tradition, “cure” antipodean monstrosities. Indeed, the Mandevillean and antipodean monstrosities challenge procreation, and getting children was arguably the most distinct domestic cultural imperative at this time. Historians and literary scholars agree that procreation was one of the most important ways that people thought about relationships between men and women in seventeenth-century England. In his classic study, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, Lawrence Stone describes the “massive shifts” in the family at this moment in history and notes in particular the confluence of two pressures on the landed but also middle classes to produce offspring. One was that mortality rates of the period meant between a quarter and a third of all children died before the age of fi fteen; the plague, smallpox, dysentery, and malaria primarily affected the young (though the elderly and others suffered too). Married couples of these classes were therefore urged to produce as many male heirs as possible so one could survive. 31 This historical situation has a direct connection to Brome’s The Antipodes. A lot is known about the play because of a lawsuit that in part stemmed from Brome’s fi nancial suffering while the theaters were closed because of plague from May, 1636, until October of the following year.32 The second pressure was the fact that men and women were increasingly older when they married (about twenty-one for men and twenty for women); moreover, birth rates outside of marriage were low.33 Women were therefore compelled to have many children—a risky activity in itself—and their time to do so was limited. As we have seen, other texts of this time register anxiety about procreation, often linking their discussions of procreation to discourses about

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Others and other worlds. Critics have pointed out that Brome’s mentor, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher frequently think through gender roles and sexuality in terms of child-getting as well as Otherness. In Mario DiGangi’s reading of Jonson’s Volpone (1606), for instance, the “sodomitical tenor of Volpone’s household . . . becomes especially prominent in allusions to monstrosity, foreignness, and nonreproductive (or prodigiously reproductive) sexuality.” He also interprets Fletcher’s The Mad Lover, written only five years before The Sea Voyage, and the character of Memnon who, like Peregrine, is mad and “seems to speak for sodomitical practices, those that do not lead to the ‘issue’ of children within marriage.” 34 DiGangi draws, in part, on the work of Alan Bray, Gregory Bredbeck, Jonathan Goldberg, and Kristina Staub, who point out the prevalence of discussions about sodomy at this time. Sodomy—in the Middle Ages, any non-procreative practice—in the Early Modern era had become: deployed to stigmatize people who were perceived to threaten dominant conceptions not only of sexuality, but of gender, class, religion, or race. “Sodomy” is not a politically neutral term: it always signifies social disorder of a frightening magnitude. Equally important is the fact that sodomy was perceived specifically as “an assault against reproduction and marriage.” 35 Both Peregrine and Martha’s problems circle around “child-getting,” but their states of desire differ considerably, and Martha is the other character most intimately affected by Peregrine’s antipodean possession and obsession. Peregrine is not interested in sex, a widely recognized medical condition that, while it has pushed Peregrine to madness, has caused Martha to become “furious” in her sexual desire.36 She complains that she has no child and says, with reference to her husband’s physical body and lack of action, “I take no joy in toys since I was married” (2.3.12). Her desire explodes out in a way that is sodomitical in that it moves in other directions than strictly procreative ones. Here the parallel between Peregrine’s and Martha’s madness is quite explicit, but her desire is directed differently. Where he is distracted by far away lands, she has developed a “wand’ring fancy,” as Joyless describes it (1.2.58–65). That is, in both cases, travel and movement oppose procreation by sending desire on a differently oriented journey. The effect of the antipodean pretexts of the play—The Book of John Mandeville and other discourses on the antipodes—is therefore to undermine conventional sexual relations and to bring out the many errant sexualities that ensue in the play. It contains no-sex relationships, extra-marital sex, women on top of men, cuckoldry, anal sex, and men giving birth without women. Even before the characters “travel” to the antipodes in the play-within-theplay set there, sexual and other world discourses are prominent. In the ultimate inversion, the manners and conventions of society are set above what is natural.

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The antipodes are described as a place where women “overrule” or “o’ersway” men, not by art, but by nature, for Diana observes that in the antipodes “art’s above nature, as they are under us.” This kind of inversion is at the basis of a vast catalogue of epistemological, gender, sexual, and other reversals. For example, while the men gossip and “do all / The tittle-tattle duties,” the women hunt. Of course, because it’s the antipodes, they hunt with other birds against hawks and use deer against hounds. The doctor says that “I ha’ seen one sheep worry a dozen foxes” and that the antipodeans “keep their cats in cages, / From mice that would devour them else.” Women play vigorous sports on horseback and engage in international commerce while the men stay at home, putting on makeup, selling jewelry to feast their servants, and cuckolding their wives (1.6.124–171). In fact, cuckolding is the only way procreation comes about in the antipodes, so old people invariably marry younger ones, and thus the old people will be cuckolded (1.6.176–82). It’s little wonder, then, that the characters react to the antipodes as too much for “homebred, Christian understanding” and “Monstrous!”, and later, Joyless’ jealousy drives him to imagine his own “curses . . . melting” his wife, Diana, and Letoy together as “one monster” (1.3.3, 1.6.183). Moreover, according to the play’s logic, the “cure” of monstrous sexual inversions is birth, but birthing in the play is not simple. Act Four contains allusions to anal sex between men and tropes of men giving birth (4.7.9–14). Elsewhere, healing is an unusually performative process involving a sexual course of treatment, and an explicitly dramatized one at that. The doctor’s cures are so the patient might “find health,” but of equal importance, we are told, are the “wonder and delight” his cures beget in “observers” (1.1.24–28).37 Of course the main aspect of the attempted cure is the illusory trip to, and the events set in, the antipodes. Much is made of the play-within-the-play, from the proposal, to the description of how the actors will work from a script but will extemporize in order to interact with Peregrine, to Letoy’s and the other characters’ commentary on how the actors act, and to Peregrine’s taking of the title of king of the antipodes by vanquishing and plundering the props backstage. The point of the apparatus is to make Peregrine travel, in a sense, through his madness to sanity, a metaphor explicitly used in the play. Letoy observes to Joyless that Doctor Hughball has made Peregrine “sail” “Beyond the line of madness.” He has transformed Peregrine’s madness into “folly” by making him think he is in the antipodes and is their king (4.9.55–56). This idea echoes that of Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy (published five times from 1621–1638), who said that “Perturbations of the Mind” may be helped by “some fained lye, strange newes, witty device, artificiall invention,” particularly music, singing, dancing, a beautiful woman, and plays wherein the patient is “an actor himselfe.” 38 However, Peregrine’s ultimate cure does not lie in his descent from one type of madness to another nor in a transformation of his real madness into a folly played out on stage, but sex with his wife. Letoy hopes that “his much troubled and confused brain / Will by the real knowledge of a woman / Now opportunely ta’en, be by degrees /

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Settled and rectified” while Diana comments, “’tis the real knowledge of the woman / (Carnal, I think you mean) that carries it” (4.13.3–23). Desire’s Extensions and Symmetries So far then, Richard Brome’s The Antipodes may be read as working along the same narrative trajectory as the Fletcher–Massinger, Dryden–Davenant, and Duffett versions of The Tempest. Like the other plays, The Antipodes centers around gender relations upset by a storm (here a mental one)—around the characters’ lack of knowledge about sex—and the play seems to work to undo and cure largely sexual illnesses brought on by the antipodes. Yet Peregrine’s, Martha’s, and, as we will see, the other characters’ problems are complicated by the fact that the play’s action takes place wholly in London and by the fact that the reasons for their sexual inexperience lies not so much in their naïveté (as it is in the other plays) as in their obsession with the other world. It is, in a sense, therefore logical that while the play suggests bodily and social recovery, in many instances it defers recuperation. Moreover, two subplots—so far not discussed—also fail to resolve themselves quite so neatly, and in fact their implications threaten to undermine the main narrative. Ultimately, instead of demonstrating an effective cure of the antipodean monstrosities, the play describes multiple affective connections among characters and plotlines, a network of alliances and associations that distracts, indeed detracts, from the child-getting narrative, a narrative under considerable pressure given the procreative demands felt in contemporary society. Consider four brief examples where recuperation is deferred or otherwise not completed in the play. At the end of the play, after Letoy has put on the masque as a celebration of Peregrine and Martha’s reunification, although Peregrine says he is “well” and Martha’s innuendo that she will fi nd herself cured “After a few such nights more” with her husband comically suggests both will be satisfied very soon, Letoy responds with a mention of benefice and satisfaction that seem to lie further in the future (5.12.26–33). Second, throughout Peregrine’s and the doctor’s “travels” in the antipodes, Peregrine’s movement toward recovery is anything but clear. For example, when the doctor is trying to have Peregrine “marry” the daughter of the king of the antipodes, that is, Martha, Peregrine hesitates because he has gone back to his Mandeville and remembers a passage describing men called Gadlibriens, who are afraid of sex on their marriage night because they think they might be poisoned; they therefore have another man have sex with their wives. The doctor responds with exasperation, commenting that Peregrine “falls back again into Mandeville madness” (4.11.45). Even later, after Peregrine and Martha have spent the night together, Peregrine doesn’t know his “own condition” (5.10.1–5). Third, even the most explicit allegory of recovery within the play—the masque discussed earlier in which fecund Harmony triumphs— is itself contained within the larger play-within-the-play set in the antipodes,

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which, though intended to cure Peregrine’s malady, doesn’t clearly rid him of his obsession.39 Fourth and most important is the principal child-getting character, Martha. One is tempted to argue that antipodean monstrosities only appear in the play-within-a-play. That is, they are part of the mirror world of the antipodes and not of London itself. Yet Martha’s “problem” of child-getting is both a consequence of her lack of “joy in toys” in the sense of an effect of Peregrine’s madness, and also because of her desires that precede her marriage, for we learn that Martha has had a sexual relationship with a woman before she met Peregrine. Moreover, her same-sex desire continues in the present. She reveals to Blaze’s wife, Barbara, that “A wanton maid once lay with me, and kiss’d / And clipp’d and clapp’d me strangely, and then wish’d / That I had been a man to have got her with child” (1.4.56–58).40 Therefore, because of this past and the fact that Martha’s desire to “get” a child is so strong, she wants now to try it with Barbara.41 She proposes that Barbara now “tell” her how, saying, “I’ll lie with you and practice, if you please. / Pray take me for a night or two.” Such an experience Martha might characterize only as “practice,” and she immediately proposes an alternative, namely that Barbara take Peregrine and “instruct him but one night,” but it is as though the excessive force of her child-getting desire will take as its object a person of any gender, or that anyone will do to help Martha and Peregrine’s marriage (1.4.65–68). Brome, incidentally, was to repeat this scenario in his next play, A Madd Couple Well Matcht (1639), in which a female character pursues three women, probably sleeping with at least one of them.42 To remain for a moment on the topics of same-sex and excessive desires, Valerie Traub has noted of late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth drama that: female–female desire becomes an issue—becomes significant—only when the time comes for the patriarchal imperative of marital alliance, and with it the transmission of property and the reproduction of children, to be enforced.43 Indeed, Barbara’s potential pairing with Martha and her revelation about a former same-sex relationship has quite the opposite effect than a cure that, as Traub observes of other plays in the period, usually “assuages,” “expels,” or “eradicates” nonprocreative desires in order to “resecure the social order.”44 Barbara has already considered the problem of Martha’s “maidenhead” to be not only “insufferable” but also “monstrous! / It turns into a wolf within the flesh, / Not to be fed with chickens and tame pigeons” (1.4.6–8). Barbara here characterizes Martha’s vagina and desire negatively, as auto-cannibal and self-devouring, yet the relief Barbara imagines for this greensickness extends beyond a marital one. She wishes that “maids be warn’d . . . not to marry / Before they have wit to lose their maidenheads,” and a little later she proposes sex outside of marriage (1.4.9–10, 1.4.72–73).45 No wonder then that later on,

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Martha’s desire continues unabated, and she offers to have sex with a “Gentleman” in the play-within-the-play (2.7.63–66). Also, whereas Martha’s sex with Peregrine is eventually discussed as a potential cure for her problem, Martha’s desire immediately after that relief for “a few such nights more” suggests a strong remnant of an unsatisfiable and undirected desire (5.12.29). In the main plot of The Antipodes, therefore, antipodean travel and tempestuous island knowledge complicate and even extend rather than cure nonprocreative desire. However, the subplots in the play become key for the diegesis, adding the most surprising plot twists toward the end of the narrative and further complicating and deepening the sicknesses because the subplots ultimately orient desires in further unanticipated directions. The first apparently secondary plot involves Martha’s father, Joyless, and his new wife, Diana. While Joyless has employed Doctor Hughball to heal Peregrine, Joyless himself is also the object of the doctor and Letoy’s attentions because he is unreasonably jealous of Diana. His name derives from the fact that his first wife has died, but fear is the main cause of his joyless state because he suspects that the young Diana will seek satisfaction with another man because he is unable to perform (1.2.18–25). His and Diana’s condition therefore reflects and refracts the main plot because he is, like Martha and Peregrine, without “joy” since marriage. Toward the end of the play, Letoy steps in to effect a cure and to test Diana: He tempts the young wife to sleep with him while Joyless watches from a hidden location. Joyless witnesses Diana’s resistance to Letoy’s broad advances, and thus should be made well, yet he almost immediately slips back into jealousy. Like Peregrine’s madness, the illusion of a performance does not make clearer any underlying truth about people’s motivations because Joyless suspects that Letoy’s temptation and Diana’s resistance might be “a counterfeit action, / or a false mist to blind me with more error” (5.6.6–20). This suspicion is not simply a setback in the progress of his cure because it gestures towards the play’s central comic device, which we also saw in the contemporary Anatomy of Melancholy: that watching, and indeed participating in, a performance can cure one of one’s sickness and not just exacerbate that sickness. The lack of clarity regarding whether the cure has taken hold in Peregrine and he is no longer mad, and Joyless’ deferred cure and slipping back into insane jealousy, suggest an odd parallel between sickness brought on by the knowledge of the antipodes and jealousy. If the principal narrative attempts to counter monstrous births with heterosexual, married, and child-getting ones, ridding the males of their jealousy is also crucial. That is, the play equates jealousy with travel in that both distract characters from the “patriarchal imperative of marital alliance . . . and the reproduction of children.” It might even be stated that jealousy is an even more important factor than travel. In Act Four, Peregrine, observing how people behave in what he believes to be the antipodes, asks the doctor, “Can men and women be so contrary / In all that we hold proper to each sex?” Hughball responds that “These are / Low things and easy to be qualified,” as though for all the

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moments of inverted and divergent gender and sexuality in the play, they are not the main matter (4.5.31–35). Could something else, such as jealousy, be more difficult to cure and more central, and could the play, with so many inversions, also invert the order of main plot and subplot? Indeed, the major revelation of the play is something related to these suggestions, but in fact evokes quite another set of symmetries. The surprise disclosure is that Joyless’ wife Diana was switched at her birth seventeen years ago, and that she is, in fact, Letoy’s and his late wife’s daughter. Letoy and his wife had their daughter, Diana, at the same time that Letoy’s friend Truelock also had a child but one that died in childbirth. Letoy and Truelock agreed to switch the live for the stillborn child because, at the time, Letoy was so jealous of his wife that he suspected that Diana was not his own child, and he “scorn’d to father it.” However, we learn from Letoy that, on her deathbed, his wife “clear’d herself of all my foul suspicions.” Nevertheless, her affi rmation to Letoy is a truth but, like the incomplete cures and unresolved desires elsewhere in the play, it hasn’t entirely stopped suspicion. Letoy’s wife’s deathbed verification should end his jealous suspicions, but in the plot of the play he wants to test his daughter not only to allay Joyless’ concerns, but also to test Diana herself, the father tempting the daughter with incestuous sex to see whether she is faithful in order to make her truly his daughter, to “make her mine,” as he says (5.7.30–47). Critics have pointed out “the sense of disquiet caused by this disclosure,” which “is especially strong since Letoy’s confession immediately follows an attempted seduction of [Diana] that seems serious in tone,” and that the situation is “obviously not a test of anything except Letoy’s capacity to turn inchoate fears (and possibly illicit desires) regarding women into a plausible plot.” 46 The logic of this subplot and this revelation about Diana’s parentage means that Letoy’s continuing fear of his wife’s infidelity has largely caused the main narrative of the play. Letoy’s initial jealousy meant he tested his wife by giving away his daughter, who has subsequently married Joyless. Then Letoy continues in his jealousy and does not trust his daughter, so he has joined in Peregrine’s cure as a device—to him, a subplot—to test Diana. In this sense Letoy and Joyless are the same: both unsure about their own masculine roles of father and husband, insecurities that they misogynistically project onto Diana (despite her name, which might encourage confidence). That is, his initial suspicions about his wife have not disappeared but metonymically repeat. Like the antipodean madness, whose cure is deferred, fears such as Letoy’s and Joyless’ create more alternate sexualities—in this case, a father trying to tempt his daughter. Jealousy, like Mandevillean madness about the antipodes, is generative; it also begets monstrous desires and actions in its failing effort to restore procreative marital relationships. One could reason that Diana’s stalwart resolution in the play to remain faithful to Joyless closes down these metonymic fears. Against Letoy’s advances, she unambiguously asserts that

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The Idea of the Antipodes . . . the very name Of husband, rightly weigh’d and well remember’d, Without more law or discipline, is enough To govern womankind in due obedience, Master all loose affections, and remove Those idols which too much, too many love. (5.5.52–57)

She will be true to Joyless and thereby also prove that she is her mother’s daughter, and, like her mother, faithful and therefore also Letoy’s “true” daughter. However, we have already seen that Joyless’ jealousy outlasts her claims of her faithfulness. Moreover, another subplot, not commented on in the critical literature, defers if not undermines Letoy’s own credibility and again pushes the narrative away from resolution and on toward extra-marital sexual practices and desires. Almost immediately following Letoy’s explanation of his twin reasons for testing the woman he reveals as his daughter, he lets slip the fi nal twist: that he has slept with his maid Barbara and thus cuckolded Blaze, her husband. When at the end of the play, in the company of Diana, Letoy, and others, Joyless fi nally says he is now “Full of content and joy” and thus lifts the pall from his name, Barbara exclaims “Content! So was my husband when he knew / The worst he could by his wife.” Addressing Diana about Joyless, she says, “if your husband, lady, be cur’d, as he should be . . . / I know what was done fi rst, if my lord took / That course with you as with me—”, but here, and in the other passages where she brings up Letoy’s “cure” of Blaze’s jealousy, Letoy cuts her off. Indeed, the scene starts with Letoy’s boast, which must now be viewed in another light: “Now Mistress Blaze! Here is a woman now! / I cur’d her husband’s jealousy, and twenty more / I’th’town, by means I and my doctor wrought” (5.8.1–19). Jealousy isn’t cured so much as it leads to adultery and simply more sex, casting some doubt onto Letoy and the doctor’s ultimate motivations for attempting to cure Peregrine. Barbara has, in a sense, the last word in this concluding part of the play; her jibes and asides mock Letoy’s hypocrisy in a way that comments on child-getting. She was not on stage when Letoy revealed that Diana was his daughter, so when Letoy says to Diana that she may go and he calls her “daughter,” Barbara responds in an aside, “Daughter! That’s the true trick / Of all old whoremasters, to call their wenches daughters.” Then she says to Letoy that “If I had been a gentlewoman born, / I should have been your daughter, too, my lord.” Her inference is that it is only class that makes a distinction between Diana’s status as a child and her own status since she believes Letoy has slept with them both. Letoy closes the scene once she has left by cursing her to a place of prostitution, “Go with thy flesh to Turnbull shambles!”, but it is a misogynistic outburst that reveals his character and not much more, for Barbara has already made her point (5.8.38–55). Her suggestion is that given the right circumstances—that is, adultery between an upper-class man and upper-class married woman—

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one can “get” a child by making the woman appear to be the man’s child. In a performative sense, if the man calls such a woman “daughter,” she can become so. Adultery between men and women of the same class begets children but not in the usual sense, whereas in the case of upper-class men and lower-class women—that is, in Barbara’s case—adultery leads to children outside of marriage, for we learn she has had two children, a fact, incidentally, that she is sure of, whereas her husband, Blaze, only “but believes he got ’em” (1.4.23–28). The Antipodes contains a contradiction: Joyless is potentially cured by witnessing that his wife is faithful to him when she is tested, and Blaze was cured in the past when he “knew the worst,” namely that his wife had cuckolded him. A wife’s infidelity can be as effective as her constancy in alleviating a husband’s jealousy. Similarly, Letoy was healed by his wife’s fidelity, but the cure did not dispel his fearful desire to test his daughter. Like Peregrine’s passage through madness to potential cure, the parallel cases of male jealousies are left unresolved, and what might cure them is altogether ambiguous. Indeed, jealousy, while apparently retarding relationships, actually engenders them. Letoy is at the center. His earlier fears about his wife’s fidelity and his current doubts about his daughter, we learn near the end, are what really drive the plot of the play. These jealousies might be, in part, resolved when Letoy has learned the truth from his wife and when he is reunited with his daughter. In terms of “child-getting,” he has “got” his daughter, “made her mine” as he says, but jealousy has also led to him begetting children with Barbara, as well as he and the doctor curing “twenty more / I’ th’ town.” The play’s central point, therefore, is not only about gender inversion and sexual errancy into same-sex and other sodomitical acts. It also creates an odd symmetry between the theme of the main plot and the theme of the subplots, whichever way round we perceive them, that is, between madness and jealousy, both intensified by antipodean knowledge. The implication is that madness and fear can produce children. The antipodes ultimately generate monstrous births in England rather than acting to cure people of their maladies; they also direct desires toward a twisted version of society’s desire for children. In Chapter 2, we saw the hybrid body of the world traveler in Caxton’s Mirrour of the World made up of two halves of people, one half already leaving as the other arrives. The Book of John Mandeville also contained twisted metageographical concepts of movement and orientation beside the recognizable and the symmetrical. The discourses change in the Early Modern era from the geographical to discourse more centrally concerned with sexuality and procreation. It is as though the antipodes and their topographical disorientation from the Middle Ages have returned to Europe, and their return has generated sexual proliferation: lesbian, anal, monstrous (without women), potentially incestuous, child-getting obsessional, and the cause and cure of adulterous fears. That is, while antipodean knowledge and other sexualities appear to oppose child-getting, they in

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fact, like jealousy, lead to procreation. These new births in an antipodean England are, however, womenless, anal, extramarital, and obsessively procreative. They are Mandevillean monstrosities, fulfi llments in some form of Caliban’s wish to “people” his island, but here the island is England. It is a realization of Prospero’s fear that the magic power of European knowledge, enhanced by island nature, has returned. The Antipodes ends with Peregrine in Prospero’s role, appealing to the audience for his release from the play: “from our travels in th’Antipodes, / We are not yet arriv’d from off the seas; / But on the waves of desperate fears we roam / Until your gentler hands do waft us home” (5.12.40–43). The dramatic mechanism of this appeal is quite similar to The Tempest’s in that Prospero’s appeal for “freedom” made the topic of freedom one that was merely about a player remaining on stage or not; his speech had the effect of turning the key subject of freedom for Caliban, Ariel, and others, who have been indentured to Prospero, into merely a theatrical topos. In The Antipodes, Peregrine also attempts to theatricalize a central theme of Brome’s play, namely “fear.” Yet The Antipodes’ closing also stands beside Shakespeare’s because of where these speeches are given. Both are on the stage, but Shakespeare shows Prospero leaving the island to return to Italy without the hybrid power he attained in the new land, whereas Brome leaves Peregrine uncured or, at the least, unsure where he is. He has never actually left England, but still believes that “from our travels in th’Antipodes, / We are not yet arriv’d from off the seas.” He may have moved on from his obsession with the antipodes, but only so far as the sea’s waves, his new imaginary place of habitation and potential obsession. The play ends with a return to Caxton and the Mandeville author’s nightmarish suggestion of perpetual travel, here monstrously embodied by English people at sea in their minds.

4

Britain in the Antipodes, Huahine in Britain Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Encounter Correspondence

On Wednesday, March 26, 1800, Captain Henry Waterhouse of HMS Reliance, which was sailing from Port Jackson, New South Wales, to Deptford on the Thames for repairs during “strong gales, and squally” weather, recorded his sightings at 49˚ 51” south and 180˚ 5” east. His log book relates the following: “discovered land on our lee beam about 2 miles distant, hauled to the wind, which proved to be a desolate, mountainous, and barren Island, scarce any verdure to be seen upon it.” The Reliance sighted another small island to the north, but the crew was unable to fi nd suitable harbor anywhere, and they were driven off by the wind. Nevertheless, given their nautical position around the globe from the Royal Dockyards in London, they named the island group The Penantipodes, which would later become The Antipodes Islands.1 The focus of this chapter is on the hybrid performative that appears in British–antipodean encounters in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period in history produced a large amount of literature about contact between cultures in the Pacific, but for the sake of space, I have limited the discussion to British literature and history rather than Spanish, Portuguese, French, American, and other writings. At the risk of abstruseness, I bring together ideas about hybridity and performativity because together they provide a powerful tool for analysis of exploration prose, poems, and plays as well as artworks. I begin with a brief explanation of how hybridity and performativity work together before using them to analyze literary and pictorial reactions to Captain James Cook’s three voyages (1768–1771, 1772–1776, and 1776–1779) in what was called the Great Sea that, together, are a significant turning point in the history of antipodean discourse. For the fi rst time in the history of the antipodes, narratives begin in the region. Men and objects move in opposite directions from before: from the antipodes to Europe and then back to the antipodes. After all, once the world was circumnavigated, the consequence was indeed what had already been imagined in the Middle Ages: People could keep going round and round, with the result that the senses of home, self, and origins were changed. The literary reactions in Britain to Cook’s voyaging were largely bawdy poems

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about Perea (or Purea or Oberea), a Tahitian “queen” (as she is usually called), and about Mai, who had already been displaced by confl ict from his island of birth and who sailed with Cook from Huahine (one of the Society Islands adjacent to Tahiti) to England and back again. He was the fi rst person from Oceania to survive the round trip.2 Discourses about Perea and Mai are initially as expected, in that they reiterate idealizing, tropicalist, and misogynist ideas about Pacific cultures, as well as express a fascination with what was often perceived as degenerate sexuality. The explicit intent of this literature was to use the accounts of Cook’s Pacific voyages in order to criticize English society in a binaric sense, with the Great Sea serving as a mirror for people to reflect on the British culture of the day. Another purpose was scopophilic titillation. Here also, earlier satiric and erotic modes of antipodean discourse are continued. Before we examine the two narratives, fi rst to Britain and then back to the antipodes—or a single narrative loop that starts and ends in the antipodes—it is necessary briefly to address expectations about the empirical and imperial qualities of the period and the materials under discussion. First, physical contact with the antipodes does not simply mean that empirical facts replaced all other forms of representing antipodal locations, inhabitants, and communication. Older, powerful modes of knowledge, as much as new and diverse ones, sailed with Ferdinand Magellan and Alvaro de Mendaña in the sixteenth century, Pedro Fernándes de Queirós and Abel Tasman in the seventeenth century, and John Byron, Samuel Wallis, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, and eventually, Cook in the eighteenth century. David Fausett writes that the “antipodes began to lose their mythical status,” and fictional writings “became increasingly aligned with real voyages of exploration.” However, he argues that “Even so, older, purely fictional themes remained significant.” 3 Indeed, Jonathan Lamb, in Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840, observes that a conglomerate of “discontinuities” existed among explorers, scientists, travel writers, and metropolitan audiences in this period.4 This is not, incidentally, to overlook important differences between earlier and later discussions of the antipodes from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but these differences are perhaps not as attributable to any distinction between fiction and empirical truth as they are to changing audience expectations and developments in British culture over time. Second, it is also a simplification to claim that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European discourses—imperial, scientific, and religious— were simply imposed on the antipodean region and its peoples. As with earlier in history, the antipodes were to give rise to unexpected conjunctions of places, to mixed peoples, and to voices with different inflections that did not answer in expected ways, although it is important to acknowledge at the outset that these voices almost always correspond in an unequal dialogue between imperial subjects and objects. As many British explorers and scientists noted at the time, European contact in the Pacific was devastating for

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the peoples and cultures of Oceania. British motivations were not only never pure, but they were also always, at least in part, for profit. For example, one of the objects that fascinated Sir Joseph Banks, the renowned naturalist and early “natural resource imperialist” who accompanied Cook on his fi rst voyage, was breadfruit. He was interested in and pursued the possibility of transplanting the starch crop to the West Indies and farming it in order to sustain slaves, 15,000 of whom died of starvation in the 1780s. 5 Underlying these expectations about empirical and imperial changes to antipodean discourse is the assumption that a sense of certainty and concreteness replaced speculation about the region. We might presume that physical contact with the Pacific region and its peoples in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries hardened the imaginative flexibility that can be found, for instance, in The Book of John Mandeville and Brome’s play The Antipodes. For example, as early as 1651, Thomas Hobbes was to write with surety that “Our own Navigations make manifest, and all men learned in humane Sciences, now acknowledge, there are Antipodes.” 6 Also, following the Reliance’s discovery of the Antipodes Islands, the term antipodes comes to denote the southern reaches of the Pacific converse to Britain, whereas before they could mean any place opposite oneself on the globe. However, to conclude that a physical encounter with the region and its inhabitants is the most significant development in the history of the idea of the antipodes is to miss an important point. After all, the desolate Antipodes Islands, discovered late in the period, in fact embody the longer history of unsettling imprecision. Captain Waterhouse, unable to land on their dangerous shores, fi rst named them the Penantipodes, literally the Near- or Next-to-Antipodes because they were not quite precisely opposite London. Ancient, medieval, and Early Modern interests in balance and symmetry seem to continue to exert pressure. One clear example of earlier antipodean discourses continuing is the survival of the belief in the existence of a continental landmass opposite Europe. Captain Cook was explicitly sent out into the Great Sea in order to prove or disprove the existence of the Great Southern Continent. It is significant, therefore, that in terms of this object—as Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith, and Nicholas Thomas note of Cook’s second voyage in 1771–1776—his “accomplishment . . . was to fi nd nothing.” Instead, his explorations were “ardours of negative discovery.” 7 Rather than a single, large terra incognita, Cook explored an enormous area of the Great Sea and its peopled islands. In figure 4.1, labor and science therefore support a radically different view of the globe, showing the vast areas Cook covered. That Cook and others did not fi nd a Great Southern Continent is just one example of a moment when people coming to the area encountered what was not expected and therefore had to revise their preconceptions. Indeed, Barbara Stafford has argued persuasively that art, and particularly the illustrated travel account, during the period under discussion attempted “to get at the truth of the phenomenal world without imprisoning it in self-revelatory

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Figure 4.1 Captain James Cook, Chart of the Southern Hemisphere Shewing the Track and Discoveries made by the “Resolution” under the Command of Js. Cook. London, Public Record Office, MPI1/94 (1774–1775). Reproduced by permission of The National Archives Image Library, Richmond, Surrey.

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idiosyncrasy.” Also, historian David Miller emphasizes a dynamic picture of the moments leading up to Cook’s fi rst voyage in the Pacific. Where initially the main British motivation for Pacific exploration was establishing bases and supply stations, and training seamen against French influences, with science as a “‘convenient cover” for a “maritime cold war,’” in the later 1780s, the scientific enterprise was seen “as valuable in itself . . . enhancing Britain’s prestige.” Miller moreover describes encounters with Pacific Islanders as “multifaceted.” Indigenous peoples were not only considered impediments to “European seizure and classification of the environment,” but they were also seen as “collaborators.” Furthermore, “The ‘civilizing mission’ was to a degree tempered by the urge to an empathic understanding,” influenced by Voltaire’s Essais sur les moeurs and the idea of the “noble savage.” 8 Lamb, Smith, and Thomas concur more generally that navigators in the Great Sea experienced “profound uncertainty.” Europeans “were frequently unsure of where they were, who they were, and what they knew.” Enlightenment imperialism in thought—”[t]axonomic, hierarchizing, and universalist habits of mind,” which included opposing a “historicized Self” against “primitive Others” and licentious Pacific culture—existed but “foundered, in many ways, on the high seas as well as on the reefs and beaches of the Pacific.” Instead, writings about the region register . . . the drama and risk of actual encounters. . . . If anything [the Pacific] magnified the contradictions at the heart of civil society; and instead of providing a convenient point of otherness from which to celebrate the consistency of national identity, it held up a distorting mirror to the certainties of the hearth. 9 Hybrid Performativity The term hybridity is useful for analyzing the difference and collaboration, empathy, uncertainty, and risk of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of the antipodes. Where in the Early Modern period, in Brome’s psychosexual drama, the antipodes and antipodeans were still imagined as foreign bodies that disrupted and extended European norms, at this moment in history, bodies and objects begin to appear as composites. However, the antipodeans and the outsiders who encounter them in the Great Sea and elsewhere do not blend in a facile manner; instead, they exhibit a complex sense of what Robert Young calls a “contrafusion and disjunction . . . as well as fusion and assimilation” and a “conjoining of differences that cannot harmonize.” 10 The Pacific Islanders and the British sailors, along with Europeans more generally, mix at the same time that they keep measuring distance and difference between them. So what were the means by which the distance between familiar and foreign was measured? What were the discursive forms and approaches when that distance could not be sustained?

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Homi Bhabha and others have pointed out that the critical force of a hybrid in the imperial and colonial situations is often active because it can point back to the non-singular and already-mixed nature of a supposed original. In this way it shares features with the best-known ideas about the performative, as Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick have described performativity. Their concept argues that a putative original never quite attains or maintains the status of a self-contained whole. It already includes an excessive or eccentric quality, and it must continually (and perhaps obsessively) repeat itself to maintain its authority. According to Butler, performativity is the “productive reiteration” of hegemonic norms, yet it is precisely because performativity is a “discursive production” that social and textual practices are able to diverge from hegemony. As Sedgwick has recently suggested, “feats” of “disinterpellation” “are made possible by the utterance itself, and to that extent it is necessary to understand any” performative iteration “as constituting a crisis in the ground or space of authority quite as much as it constitutes a discrete act.” In more recent work, Sedgwick describes instances of the “periperformative,” which are loci that are not quite performative but in a spatial sense “cluster around” and indicate the performative.11 If we carry over these theories of the performative from discussions about the production of gender and sex to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century hybridity in the Pacific, we might observe reiterations of characteristics that, in Butler’s terms, “produce what they name”; that is, they never arise from extra-discursive truth—whether the reference point be British social strata, British rationality, British humanity, British benevolence, or antipodean isolation, Pacific Islander benevolence, island sexuality, and so on. Instead, they reiterate these hegemonies. Nevertheless, at the same time, as Butler and especially Sedgwick suggest, the performative is not a unitary or monovocal reinstantiation of inscriptions. So what happens when the hybrid appears in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pacific? One aspect of the performance of hybridity in this situation must still include the reiteration of hegemonic norms in the form of tropicalist fantasies, as well as disgust, regret, and contempt towards hybrid peoples and cultures, but in the antipodes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the production of British and antipodean subjects and items is also “contradictory, disruptive, and already deconstructed.” 12 Upon the meeting of British and Pacific cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sometimes no unproblematic or complete situation of one culture over, under, or merging with another takes place. Instead, tense correspondences remain, the situation often as complex as the mixed gesture of Sedgwick’s term beside, a “wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations.” 13 Some of these moments are merely signaled in a periperformative sense, whereas others inscribe a performance that never quite instantiates that which it desires, with the remnant/excess/supplement signaling the incompleteness and derivative qualities of the reiteration.

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The Bawdy Pacific: Tahiti The popular literature that addressed Great Sea encounters has in common a tendency to emphasize Britain’s benevolence, decry foreign influences (especially of venereal disease), and paint a picture of Tahiti and its inhabitants as without a hampering European shame about sex. This literature follows in the footsteps of the great satirists of the beginning of the eighteenth century—Swift, Addison, Pope, and others—and it was part of the rise of popular forms of literature made available in the Tatler, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and many more. Discussions of Perea and Mai appear in voyage accounts, short epistolary poems, a pantomime, informal travel narratives, artworks, and simple bookplates. I concentrate on these more ephemeral media rather than more official narratives (such as those under the imprimatur of the British Admiralty) because rather than being only incidental to imperial enterprises, these popular narratives are continuous with more official accounts. They are revealing, and the tone of the poems is generally playful if at times vitriolic, while in prefaces they often contain a scientific approach to language, claiming to translate any Tahitian accurately. This pseudo-scientific approach reiterates stereotypes about antipodean sexual freedoms with the aim of lampooning British society and titillating readers. While much of the literature therefore is derivative, we should not overlook its periperformative and even its performative aspects, where it creates what it purports merely to describe. Publications of accounts of Cook’s first voyage (1768–1771) include an anonymous 1771 edition, John Hawkesworth’s 1773 compilation of Cook and Joseph Bank’s accounts, and other shorter works. In particular, Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere was both popular and widely criticized because it was unauthorized (even though it was commissioned by Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty). The Account was immediately quoted in the press, and it quickly went through several editions and translations. It gave rise to many forms of popular entertainment that made use of the parts of the text that titillated, heartened, and challenged audiences. Most of these imaginative forms of literature tend to exploit the possibility, raised in the Hawkesworth edition, of romantic attachment between “Opano” (the name Hawkesworth says the Tahitians called Banks) and “Oberea” (“Perea” or “Purea,” the “o” prefix designating a name). These short poems and other texts select physical and sexually explicit episodes from the Account: Banks pays Oberea a visit and catches her in bed with a young man; the Tahitians and Europeans watch as a young man and woman have sex; Banks loses his clothing and Oberea searches for it; people have tattooed buttocks; and a dance called a Timorodee takes place, “consisting of motions and gestures beyond imagination wanton.”14 One such group of poems consists of fictional letters written and exchanged between “Oberea” and “Opano” after Banks has left the island. The earliest, “An Epistle from Oberea, Queen of Otaheite [Tahiti], to Joseph Banks, Esq.” (1774),

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purports to be a translated letter from Oberea to Banks in which she complains about Opano’s lack of attention to and abandonment of her. The epistle consists of 172 lines in couplets, with footnotes drawn from Hawkesworth. The editor claims to be a mere translator, a “T. Q. Z.,” who is “Professor of the Otaheite Language in Dublin, and of all the Languages of the undiscovered Islands in the South Sea” and who has translated the “Epistle” “with all Fidelity.” Oberea accuses Opano of now wooing some “European maid . . . / Of waiste more taper, and of whiter hue.” The poem was popular enough to be copied into the Gentleman’s and London Magazine in 1774, and it ends with Oberea pleading with Banks to see her tears and to “spare one thought from Botany for me.”15 At the same time, “An Epistle from Mr. Banks, Voyager, Monster-hunter, and Amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite” appeared. It is an explicit response to Oberea’s “Epistle.” This time, the selectiveness and hints of the first poem become openly bawdy. The “Epistle from Mr. Banks” suggests that Banks and Oberea had sex and a child. It makes many allusions to genitalia under the pretense of criticizing English audiences for reading Hawkesworth and the “Epistle from Oberea” for salacious reasons. The frontispiece engraving (fig. 4.2) to the second edition imagines, in visual form, a scene in which Oberea’s own epistle was read in Britain; that is, the “Epistle from Mr. Banks” purposely conflates the reception of the “Epistle from Oberea” in Britain with a Polynesian scene from the “Epistle” itself (again, ultimately from Hawkesworth). A Tahitian woman lifts her dress above her waist to reveal her tattoos in front of leering, commenting British gentlemen and ladies. Oberea complains, in part, to King George III: The gallant sons of Britain’s warlike land, In curious crouds around the beauty stand, While, as she turns her painted bum to view, With fronts unblushing, in the public stew, They search each crevice with a curious eye, To find exotics—where they never lie. O shame! were we, great George, thy gallant crew, And had we—damn it—nothing else to do, But turn thy great design to filthy farce, And search for wonders on an Indian’s a—? But then to print our tale! O curse the thought!

The “Epistle from Mr. Banks” goes on to say that the effect of accounts of these and other Polynesian rites are said to “quench,” “With ease” and through masturbation, the “unsubdu’d desire” of the “lustful ’squire” and to “fi re” “the bright maid with more than mortal heat” so that “She sinks at once into the lover’s arms, / Nor deems it vice to prostitute her charms.”16 If this short series of poems casts Oberea as a lovelorn Tahitian and the islanders as sexually naïve and also outraged at European prurience, another fictional poem, “An Heroick Epistle from the Injured Harriot,

Figure 4.2 Frontispiece, “An Epistle from Mr. Banks, Voyager, Monster-hunter, and Amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite” (London, 1773). Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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Mistress to Mr. Banks, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite,” published some eleven years later, is more of an invective against Oberea. The “Harriot” of the title is a reference to the woman Banks was supposed to marry, Harriet Blosset; Banks had apparently promised to marry her when he returned on the Endeavour. Harriot incredulously asks Oberea about Banks/Opano: Think’st thou, audacious creature, he’ll attend Thy Indian lays, and leave his snow-white friend? Think’st thou he’ll leave my European grace For thy daub’d, yellow, dirty tataoo’d face?17

The most explicit example of eighteenth-century erotics appears in the 1779 Nocturnal Revels, or the History of the King’s-Palace and Other Modern Nunneries, which was written by “a monk of the Order of St. Francis”; that is, a member of the notorious Hellfi re Club. The “King’s-Palace” and the “Nunneries” in the title are brothels. In Chapter 24, Charlotte Hayes (a real woman who ran the brothel at King’s Palace) tells the story of how she went to “Register-Offices” (employment centers) and advertised to lure unsuspecting young women to become prostitutes. Having recruited enough, she then hosts a Tahitian dance, and the text quotes from Hawkesworth’s descriptions of the young man and woman having sex in front of others to describe how Charlotte, who “had certainly consulted these pages,” decides that it is only custom and not natural to feel shame about such an act. She also resolves to “improve” the performance. She “engaged a dozen of the most athletic, and best proportioned young men that could be procured; some of them Royal Academic figures” and has them perform sex with the women, “keeping the most regular time,” in front of a crowd of guests. The spectators “could scarce refrain till the end of the spectacle, before they were impetuous to perform a part.” After some two hours, ending in applause for Mrs. Hayes’ “judicious” directions as to “the greatest exactitude and address” of “manœuvre,” the guests paid their generous fees and repeated the performance with the women themselves.18 However, the complex of British imperialism, linguistic pretension, satire, and pornography is best summed up in another poem based on Hawkesworth. “An Epistle (Moral and Philosophical) from an Officer at Otaheite. To Lady Gr*s**n*r” most explicitly addresses the question Hawkesworth raised, Charlotte Hayes resolves, and which several other epistolary poems mention.19 Hawkesworth, after telling the episode of the young man and woman having sex in front of an audience—including Oberea and other women giving the young woman instruction—pauses to wonder “Whether the shame attending certain actions, which are allowed on all sides to be in themselves innocent, is implanted in Nature, or superinduced by custom.”20 The narrator of the “Epistle . . . from an Officer at Otaheite” takes Hawkesworth’s hesitation and turns it toward a more lurid conclusion. He doubts whether “female virtue’s center’d in a spot” when this “Doubly exposed . . . site” can hardly withstand “the

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assaults of man,” “front, and rear.” He then worries that he might have offended his addressee, and pleads that “want of decency shews innocence,” producing the case of Tahitian sex in front of an audience as proof of his ingenuousness. He concludes the debate about nature versus custom by suggesting that “modest instinct proves its source divine,” namely, “An emanation of celestial fire, / Which purifies the heart, and checks desire,” “celestial fire,” here meaning venereal disease.21 This is a comic, twisting reasoning that goes to the heart of the epistolary poems in which the authors introduce purported instances of sexual difference from Hawkesworth with the object of asking a philosophical question, which itself leads to more bawdy content. This conglomerate performs a hybrid tropicalism: ostensible moral questioning together with real imperialist interest, sexual delectation, scientific (botanical, linguistic, geographical, and incipiently anthropological) discourse, and idyllic utopianism.22 And whereas it has been argued that the concept of sexuality was changing at this time from having a natural basis to a societal one, the poems in fact show that these developments were not a source of great anxiety; they squarely address, with bawdy humor, the debate about a natural versus a social basis for sexuality.23 Lament and Ambiguity in Popular Literature Where Hawkesworth’s account of Tahitian culture, Banks’ activities, and Oberea’s actions inspire these kinds of poetic responses largely about women, another set of texts arose about the male Society Islander, Mai, which express a slightly greater sense of ambiguity about cultural encounters. These texts are worth exploring in some detail in order to comprehend fully the modes they employ in their representations of British–Pacific contact. Some of these short texts are hybrid discourses that are periperformative—almost but not quite instantiating the hegemonic—whereas others are effectively performative. On September 7, 1773, during Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, Mai boarded Cook’s companion ship, Adventure, under the command of Captain Tobias Furneaux, and sailed to Britain. Landing at Portsmouth in July 1774, Mai met Lord Sandwich (incidentally one of the “monks of St. Francis”) and then was hosted by Joseph Banks and Daniel Carl Solander, both of whom had traveled with Cook on his first voyage aboard the Endeavour. He was an immediate sensation in London society, where he met Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, Fanny Burney, and many others. A body of texts quickly appeared around not only Hawkesworth’s Account, but also Mai’s actions during and after his two-year stay in Britain. This corpus is large—travel narratives, newspaper accounts, several poems, a large-scale pantomime, artworks—all of which indicate the thrill Mai caused in England in the years following his arrival. The texts, which call him “Omai” and “Omiah” are often similar to the works about or inspired by “Oberea” in that they reiterate tropicalist stereotypes, but like those texts, they also include complications of these representations. A sense of uncertainty and a different tone of disappointment enter the narratives in which hybrid bodies and cultures juxtapose and disjoin, differing from preconceptions.24

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Several of the Mai texts present him as a civilized marvel, someone admired for being able to adopt the manners and appearances of British society. In other places, these texts bemoan the superficial nature of British civilization and its effects on him. They also explicitly use the contrast between Tahiti and Britain to satirize English society. Kate Fullagar reasons that the writings were “polemical commentaries on contemporary moves towards economic expansion and social sophistication,” often “sympathetic to savagery and critical of Britain.”25 One example is “Omiah: An Ode,” an early poetic response to accounts of Mai’s actions. Based on Hawkesworth, the Annual Register, and other newspapers, such as The London Magazine, the ode was published in 1776, the year Mai left to return to the Society Islands. The anonymous poem is the first poetic work to couple Mai’s name with that of Hayes; “Omiah” addresses his ode to “buxom Charlotte Hayes.” It mentions Mai ice skating, playing chess, using a knife and fork, and performing other actions and having other conversations.26 Another work, hymnist and poet William Cowper’s The Task, imagines Mai once he has returned to his island. Cowper is critical of England’s cities and idealizes nature in the poem, but he does not use this contrast to praise Mai’s homeland. Instead, the islanders “Can boast but little virtue” and “inert / Through plenty, lose in morals what they gain / In manners—victims of luxurious ease.” He envisions Mai, who the British “return’d . . . rude / And ignorant, except of outward show,” poking his foot into the sea, wondering whether the waters once bathed England, and vainly searching the horizon for more British ships. His “favor’d isles” are too isolated and “simple,” Cowper imagines, to have received the benefit of science, art, or learning from Britain, or even from other islands.27 Another imaginative account from this time period, published in the weekly magazine, The Loiterer, purports to describe a journal Mai kept while in Britain, and it comically inverts expectations, casting Mai as believing that the Europeans and other peoples around the world are descendants of Tahitians. In this fictional journal, Mai is aghast at many British characteristics, such as their white skin and lack of tattoos, and their practices, including locking houses, which he concludes is because England is a culture of thieves. Having witnessed the dissection of bodies in surgery, he suspects the British are cannibals, and he marvels at the worship the people have for the king because they are so desirous of “little round pieces of Metal . . . particularly . . . the yellow ones” that have an impression of the king on them, but he is puzzled by their even greater reverence for pieces of paper with the queen’s image on them. The “journal” concludes with a discussion of Mai’s impressions of religion in Britain. He witnesses a church service, and the account’s author expresses the hope that “he had at last imbibed some proper notions of the Deity.” However, the author is disappointed to draw the conclusion from the excesses of what Mai witnessed that Mai “pitched upon the Church Organ, the chiming Clock, or the repeating Watch, for the Gods of Great-Britain.” 28

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These and other texts therefore frequently and confidently raise Pacific Island culture above British practices in order to critique British mores, or else they suggest the potential for good British influence on Pacific cultures, but express the regret that this potential is squandered either because of overwhelming British short-sightedness and corruption or because of a congenital weakness among the islanders themselves. Several other texts on a fi rst reading appear to reiterate these ideas, texts that base their narratives less on reports of Mai’s actions in London and more on the kind of anthropological material found in the Oberea epistles and other poems. They also play on admiration for Mai’s character in contrast to the perceived superficial influences of a corrupt British society. A prime example is Omai, or, A Trip Round the World, a pantomime by playwright John O’Keeffe, which was a major production staged at Covent Garden on December 20, 1785, and thereafter performed forty-nine times in the 1785–1786 season. It was popular enough for an abbreviated account to be printed twice in 1785 and for King George III and Queen Charlotte to attend it. The plot of Omai centers around the sovereignty of “Otaheite” (Tahiti), with Omai and a figure based on Hawkesworth’s account, “Oediddee,” in dispute over who will rule the island. Omai and his servant Harlequin subsequently travel from Otaheite to Plymouth and London. At the same time, Don Struttolando (a stock fi gure from contemporary theater) and his servant Clown arrive there. Britannia, “Queen of Isles, the mistress of the main,” has promised the allegorical woman Londina to Omai, but Don Struttolando also wants Londina. Abductions and chases ensue. Omai, Harlequin, Don Struttolando, Clown, and Londina and her maid Colombine leave Britain and travel across Asia before arriving back at Tahiti. There, Oberea, “Regent and Protectress of Oediddee, an Enchantress,” stops the Don’s and Clown’s pursuit and promises Londina to Oediddee. However, Towha, “the Guardian Genius of Omai’s Ancestors, and Protector of the legal Kings of Otaheite,” and Oediddee, now reconciled to Omai’s sovereignty, make her relent. The pantomime ends with Omai installed as king of Tahiti, and all the characters—along with an array of chiefs, men, and women from exotic places around the Pacific—come to attend the ceremony to instate Omai. It concludes with them all mourning the death of Captain Cook (Cook was killed in Hawai‘i six years earlier), who is called “Caesar of Britain.” 29 Omai combines songs, farce, dance, and lavish costumes and sets. The pantomime’s people, events, and places are an innovative interpretation of Hawkesworth’s and possibly Cook’s own accounts, and they periperform or fully perform some telling antipodean gestures to do with place, habitation, and correspondences between Britain and the region. Christa Knellwolf suggests that:

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Figure 4.3 Omai: Or, A Trip Round the World, playbill (London, 1786). Canberra, National Library of Australia, S6538B. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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the pantomime illustrates the importance of the imagination for coming to terms with the historical significance of Cook’s discoveries. In this sense, the dramatic tension is not simply between a real and an imagined world, but between a world of the imagination and a reality, which had become strange. The pantomime, therefore, plays with the boundaries between reality and make-believe.30 The opening scene emphasizes the islanders’ roles as England’s subordinates. Towha appears to Omai’s father and Omai, and promises Tahiti to Omai. Suddenly, Britannia breaks into the rites and, addressing Omai as her “votive Islander” whose “fate is mine,” promises Londina to Omai in “soft alliance bound.” Britannia commands that her “sons, by Cook’s example taught,” will “Thy new-found world protect and humanize.”31 The meaning of this “humanizing” influence of Cook’s “sons”—that is, later captains and sailors—on Tahiti, does not become clear until the end of the pantomime and the eulogy for Cook. The performance of Omai purportedly ended with a large “transparency” unfurling to show The Apotheosis of Captain Cook. On it, Britannia and Fame spirit Cook upward in the clouds of gunfire above the scene of the captain’s death on the beach in Hawai‘i, upon which the etching, figure 4.4, is based.32 In the closing scene, the British captain of the ship that has returned everyone to Tahiti points at the image of Cook and calls on the attendant chiefs: “To prove your humanity, heave a soft sigh, / And tear now let fall for his death!” However, before they can express their sorrow in this requested manner, he interrupts that “the Genius of Britain forbids us to grieve, / Since Cook, ever honor’d, immortal shall live.” 33 Instead, the islanders are to recognize simply that Cook “came, and he saw, not to conquer, but save.” He is the “Cæsar of Britain . . . Who scorned the ambition of making a slave / While Britons themselves are so free.” 34 The pantomime of Omai thereby performs the “Humanizing,” which is sadness over Cook’s slavery-free life and his death, or rather, to be humane is to withhold one’s weeping in order to truly recognize Britain’s (via Cook’s) benevolence. The play tells us that this humanizing of Tahiti will continue with the offspring of the “soft alliance” between Omai and Londina.35 The play’s image of the Pacific and Pacific cultures therefore voices a maternal–paternal hierarchy that all-powerful Britannia and Caesar-like Cook oversee. The people of the region are “scatter’d o’er the wide Pacific Main,” yet are all in service to Tahiti and to Omai, who is himself “softly allied” to Londina and under the rule of both Britannia and Cook’s generosity. In the play, when Omai is installed as king, peoples from all the places Cook visited process before him in Tahiti. The procession of these fi fteen groups was one of the most lavish parts of the performance, with each group containing between three and sixteen actors dressed in ornate costumes to represent indigenous peoples from New Zealand, Tanna, the Marquesas, the Friendly Islands, the Sandwich Islands, Easter Island, coastal Russia,

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Figure 4.4 The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (London, 1794). Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2065859. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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Alaska, and British Columbia. (Elsewhere in the play, magic and the world of the supernatural, useful pantomime stage devices, reinforce the hierarchy and perform an anthropological scopophilia.) 36 The reaction to the scene of Cook’s death complements the tone of disappointment, and even lament, that might be taken as emblematic of many antipodean encounters, a doleful mode in which regret and loss augment British dominance. For how can Mai—or anyone—resist Britannia’s, Londina’s, or the British captain’s offers to rule them when they are not only donated under the sign of love and humanity, but also under the metaphorical sign of Cook’s tragic death and the literal sign of the large banner of Cook’s apotheosis? As Cowper’s and other texts suggest, one concern about Mai was that he didn’t acquire anything useful while in England, where the British sense of utility covered everything from objects, such as farm implements to Bibles; skills, such as farming to using guns; and knowledge of valued subjects from adultery to his own culture.37 Several texts concentrate on cultural utilitarianism, and they are very effective in their performativity in the sense of creating what they purport merely to describe because they discuss of the utility of British objects and practices in the voice of the Other. For example, an anonymous lyric, “Omiah’s Farewell” from 1776, is most effective in this respect, in that it ends by projecting regrets onto the figure of “Omiah,” into his voice, and onto his culture. The Preface at once decries British influence and blames Omiah for its effects. It says that he (along with Richard Sheridan’s play The Duenna, first performed in 1775) “became a very favourite with the public, and people contended who could see them most, not for their intrinsic merits, but to surpass each other in an extravagant absurdity.” The narrator admires Omiah’s legs and forms of address, but he also says he is “dull, for though he has been a long time in England, he can scarce speak the language to be understood, only uttering incoherent words, which do not convey his ideas.” The fault here is not entirely personal, however, because the author repeats a trope found elsewhere—that the Tahitian language has only a few words—which is the illogical rationale given for why Omiah does not have a name for the horse, an animal he had never seen before arriving in England. The Preface writer expresses a lament, that the attention shown this Indian, has not been of the true benevolent sort; for instead of dressing him out in a bag and sword, and leading him forth to all public spectacles, it would have been an act of the most humane nature, to have instructed him in such things as might have rendered him useful to his uninformed fellow creatures upon his return: and when we consider the injustice done to these innocent mortals in a simple state of nature, by introducing some dreadful diseases among them, our attention should have led us to have instructed him to be a service to them in such deplorable situations. The writer concludes by ironically remarking that “Omiah is now returning to his native isle, fraught by royal order with squibs, crackers, and a various

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assortment of fi reworks, to show to the wild untutored Indian the great superiority of an enlightened Christian prince.” Omiah comes to embody the lament while, in an unexpected inversion, England becomes a “paradise”: “[H]e departs melancholy and dejected” because his homeland might be “fertile and healthful, and the women beautiful and numerous, yet he cannot resign this paradise of earth without showing the keenest and severest emotions.” 38 The Preface also criticizes the “illiberal insinuations put upon” Omiah’s associations with women, blaming “scandal” and “the horn of the News-Post,” which can “blast it abroad,” and the poem that follows the Preface is also suggestive.39 The central idea of “Omiah’s Farewell” is whiteness. Omiah wishes to be as white as the lady he addresses, and he deplores his homeland’s desire to tattoo, “To daub ignoble parts” and “adorn—what never came to view” in Britain. Omiah says in the poem that he tried to achieve such whiteness, since it is only the effect of makeup, but “ev’ry art was vain, / No colours hid my dark Nubidian stain.” He wishes to convey this art across the sea to Tahiti, but knows that in his country, women “use their paints with such disgrace, / And give the tail, what they deny the face.” The poem ends with more of this kind of shifting attribution of fault. The fi nal lines have Omiah lamenting the “change” or exchange of white ladies for “Nubidian” ones: “Ye rosy cheeks, and cherry lips adieu, / Alas! what must Omiah change for you! / White teeth, and bright blue eyes, and aubourn hair, / And skin, as whitest ermine soft and fair. / All these, alas! must your Omiah leave.” 40 In other poems, Tahitians lament the European influence on them so that the tragic voice and scene have more authority, simultaneously regretting yet (re)performing the end of Tahitian culture. The Tahitian speech strengthens the articulation of what Lamb identifies as the admired “patriot”: “At the beginning of time and at the ends of the earth, corruption destroys aboriginality, opposed only by the patriot, who recognizes and preserves it, even if it is only in himself.”41 Gerald Fitzgerald’s 1779 work, “The Injured Islanders; or, The Influence of Art upon the Happiness of Nature,” is a complex example of this kind of narrative. Cast in the voice of Oberea and addressed to Captain Samuel Wallis (the first European to encounter Tahiti in June 1767), the Oberea or “Obra” of the poem complains of European influence but depicts Wallis’ effects in positive terms and describes him as the only possible savior for Tahitians in the future. The narrator of the poem’s Preface bewails “The imaginary Value annexed to European Toys and Manufactures,” venereal disease, and “the Instruments of Iron,” and in its lines Oberea sighs over the gifts, such as “piercing Steel” and “dang’rous Wealth” that “may prove our fatal Foes at last.” She continues, pointing out that it is not only in Tahiti that the foreign influence has been detrimental; other “Fleets” sail and “subject Isles” are “Mark’d out for Plunder, Servitude, Despair.” In “The Injured Islanders” Wallis is the one who can help Oberea and her land and, like O’Keeffe’s pantomime, the language of affection alleviates the potential contradiction in her request since the poem

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comes close to explicitly acknowledging that Wallis was one of the Europeans to introduce the very “Foes” of which she complains. Wallis’s visit in 1767 was dominated by violence, but here it is as though he, as the first to visit and not one of the later visitors, will be able to restore Tahiti to its former idyllic state: “O Wallis, haste” and raise “Our drooping Spirits . . . / Till native Joys . . . / Again return, and brighten to the last.”42 In “The Injured Islanders,” an authorial or narratorial voice that might be Fitzgerald’s own is suppressed in favor of speaking as, and for, a Tahitian. This voice almost self-consciously performs the passivity for which the fatal impact and lament traditions have been criticized.43 Through Oberea, the poem makes clear that the only mistake the Tahitians made at the time of Wallis’ arrival was resistance. While Wallis fi red on them with his guns, killing several, they eventually stopped fighting back, and Fitzgerald, in the voice of Oberea, praises the captain for his balancing of “Mercy” with “Sway”: “Your Pity spar’d what Pow’r could take away,” and “Resistance conquer’d saw Resentment cease.” She pleads, “Yes, Wallis, yes, from Thee no Fears alarm, / Whose highest Rage Submission could disarm.” She urges him again to “haste” back and, with a kind of circular reasoning, concludes: “Here shalt thou fi nd each Solace of thy Woes / That Man can ask—if what to ask he knows; / Here, in thy fav’rite, fond Taheitee, still / It’s Sons obsequious, and it’s Laws thy Will.” 44 On the one hand then, British encounters in the South Pacific give rise to imperial motifs of tragic and fatal impact in which Pacific hybridity is discursively produced as regrettable yet inevitable. The earliest British narratives articulate anger and remorse about the perceived introduction of venereal disease (imputed to the French), European products such as iron, and European value systems. Explorers sometimes turn these emotional reactions back on themselves, the upper-deck narrators usually blaming, with disappointment, the lower-deck British seamen in an attempt to isolate and distance themselves from the effects for which they were more authoritatively responsible. On the other hand, the hybrid performative on and off the seas and beaches of Pacific Islands doesn’t quite capture what many British are looking for, such as an essence that pre-exists culture–contact, and often the hybrid threatens to expose, “refuse,” and “deflect” imperial attention, and so the tone of the texts includes uncertainty, uneasiness, and confusion.45 The periperformativity of “The Injured Islanders,” the way its textuality might be said to lie beside a clearer reiteration of British authority and Tahitian dependence, arises because Fitzgerald, in the Preface, acknowledges previous writings about Tahiti and critiques them, offering what he calls a “descriptive Poem” in their place. While some of the Preface, and even the poem itself, center on Oberea’s “Patriotic Feeling for the Fate of her Country,” a patriotism that nostalgically evokes Wallis as savior to “restore” the island, Fitzgerald says that it is the fault of audiences who have only read Hawkesworth that the islanders are “fitter Subjects for Ridicule than Panegyrick.”

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Instead, he argues that his choice “to look through a different Perspective” (and descriptions of the islanders other than Hawkesworth’s) can offer “several Objects in the Lives and Circumstances of these Fellow-citizens of the World, that even European Grandeur might envy or admire.” He continues by proposing a kind of empiricism, and even rejects the potential comparativist approach he has just invoked. It is not, however, my intention to hazard . . . any invidious Comparison between the Happiness of Natural and Civilized Society, which might lead me into a Deviation from local Images, and that Precision and Perspicuity, which, in a descriptive Poem of this Nature, I think necessary, and have endeavoured to preserve.46 This disingenuous desire simply to describe the local includes an astonishing wish, again in the voice of Oberea. Near the end, having expressed her worries about the fate of her island realm in the face of encroaching imperialism at length, she calls on the god “Tané” to protect her people “Ere Ills like these o’er native Rights prevail.” She urges him to destroy all approaching ships. Failing that, she pleads with him to . . . far remove . . . These injur’d Isles to some sequester’d Spot, Some placid Corner of the boundless Main, Unmark’d by Science, unexplor’d by Gain, Where Nature still her Empire safe may hold From foreign Arts—from all that’s foreign free.47

The surprising invocation of “native Rights” and the even more desperate wish to have the islands moved to some other place on the earth beyond European reach are, however, undercut in the end by her desire to have all this happen only if Wallis “approves.” The last line of the poem ends as it began—by looking to a future restoration of Oberea’s reign—but it also evokes her death; she “expires—a Queen.” This double gesture toward a restorative future for Oberea and Tahiti, albeit one that ends in indigenous expiration, therefore pulls back from a more hybrid performative gesture to reinforce imperial hegemony. Oberea’s voice calls for the restoration of rights while simultaneously depicting Wallis as the sole means and ultimate authority to reclaim them.48 The Return of the Hybrid We have seen that apprehension, disappointment, and lament about Mai’s education, as well as calls from island characters to recover British authority and protection, are three of the principal modes in which these texts enunciate and

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make familiar ideas about the antipodes. The popular forms of entertainment— short poetry, illustration, a Covent Garden show—reveal and make more available the impetus within their main source: Hawkesworth’s rendition of Cook’s voyage, itself based on Cook’s journals and Banks’ papers. The hybrid performatives, such as the moments when the character Omai and other Tahitians are dressed up or speak either in poems or on stage in Britain, form and reprise the correspondence between imperial London and the Society Islands, often in tones of nostalgia over the decline of British and Pacific civilization in the past, present, and future following contact. Sometimes, however, as in Fitzgerald’s Preface, the tone of this iteration is not so assured or persuasive. Moments of periperformativity appear wherein the hybrid voices are not so clearly hegemonic or univocal. A clearer note of what Lamb, Smith, and Thomas characterize as “uncertainty” enters the British narratives, in Sedgwick’s words, “a crisis in the ground or space of authority.” This mode is different from the sense of disappointment we have already seen and comes closer to that moment when Captain Waterhouse sighted and named the next-to and the not-quite antipodes—the Penantipodes—and was rebuffed by the unwelcoming coastline. Here the antipodean objects have a different effect than the corrupting ones that originate in England, which Cowper and others complain about sending out to the islands. Instead, the trajectory is reversed so that the voyage originates in the antipodes and travels to Britain. Again, it is the smaller gestures and everyday items from the antipodes that appear in Britain that reveal hints of resistance from the objects of imperial projects, a “foundering” and “distortion” of stillforming expectations.49 For example, Harriet Guest historicizes some of the tensions within British society that Pacific exploration continued to complicate. She examines Adam Smith’s analysis of society’s desire for “trinkets” and other objects in which he initially criticized the superfluous objects, but ultimately admired them as signs of society’s economic, artistic, and cultural sophistication. However, ornaments also had the possibility of being mere distractions, and the philosopher Adam Ferguson, Smith’s contemporary, read them as signs and agents of corruption. As we have seen, exploration was sometimes thought of in these terms, as potentially indicating the sophistication and utility of British culture, but also denoting decadent foolishness. Guest analyzes Mai and the objects that accompanied him in this context and argues that Mai was himself often seen as: the trinket of frivolous utility which indicates that the labor and contrivance invested in circumnavigating the globe have resulted only in trivial or fantastic gratifications, because he is the representative of a part of the world that seems to offer no profit, no advantage to commerce or trade, and which the British do not intend to improve, colonize, or even plunder.

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His behaviors and possessions while in Britain and upon his return to the antipodes “demonstrate the ambivalence with which English metropolitan society conceived of its own modernity.” Mai’s Anglicization may confi rm the global scope of British imperial ambition, but he also indicates the limitations on the cultural aspiration that desires to see admiration for the organizing principles, the beauty and symmetry of the social economy, reflected from distant places. 50 “Limitations” are, in fact, perceivable in the fi rst reactions to Mai’s arrival from the antipodes in London. On July 17, 1774, three days after arriving in Britain, Banks and Solander took Mai to meet King George III, Queen Charlotte, and courtiers at Kew. A contemporary engraving of the scene survives, and newspapers reported the event. One of the most telling is The Gentleman’s and London Magazine, which reported as follows: The Otaheite man, who came over with Capt. Furneaux, was presented to his Majesty. He had received instructions for his behaviour in addressing the King, but was under so great embarrassment on approaching the royal presence (the manner of salutation being so very different from the usual forms in his country) that he forgot every thing that had been taught him, and only could repeat, How do you do? His majesty very familiarly took him by the hand, and made several kind inquiries concerning him, particularly respecting his health and manner of living. 51 While this brief narrative presents a sympathetic account of British benevolence, along with a hint of disappointment about Mai, it is also possible to discern a note of ambiguity in the scene. After all, the Gentleman’s Magazine’s commentary on the action is incorrect; Mai remembers his lessons in British etiquette. However, he might repeat what he has been taught, but he repeats it in excess, and his words verge on that species of hybrid performativity that goes somewhat toward flattening the hierarchies between those present. It is the king who shakes Mai’s hand, but the form of greeting in the “How do you do?”, and the handshake instead of a bow, are overly familiar and potentially level relations. 52 O’Keeffe’s Omai pantomime also displays some of this ambivalence and mixed gestures. On the surface, at least, it introduces strange costumes, characters, and other elements that are not so easily reducible to mere exotica and might actually challenge European discourses. For example, in addition to the traditional character, Harlequin, the play includes an anonymous “Otaheitean, supposed to have accompanied Omai to England.” He is dressed in Pacific motley, and a footnote to the character list in one edition of the play states that “The idea of his dress was taken from Cook’s Voyages, where it is said, that Omai, to make himself fi ne on his introduction to a Chiefs

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[sic] dressed himself with a piece of the habit of each country he had seen in his several voyages.” Knellwolf suggests that the play “thus projects him as a geographic motley, as opposed to the traditional motley that provokes laughter.” 53 Also, “Tahitian” words are frequently spoken. Names of places, natural elements, foods, people’s titles, and rites are sprinkled throughout the printed edition (with footnotes; the visual spectacle might have made the references clear on stage), and at the start of the procession of Pacific peoples, a “mad prophet” speaks a mock Tahitian, which O’Keeffe recalled in his memoir: Wewitzer, who performed one of these warriors, came out with a kind of grand extempore declaration, as if it was the original language of some of the islands: this had a sham English translation, which was printed in the book of songs. Wewitzer did this piece of state harangue-pomposo wonderfully well. Their Majesties commanded “Omai” often. 54 While it is easy to read these hodgepodge features of the play as mere mockeries of Tahitian and other insular customs, as well as Pacific languages, they are more accurately a complicated pastiche of tantalizing exotica and unexpected Pacific objects that have the potential to introduce challenging ideas. For instance, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, former set designer for David Garrick and Richard Sheridan at Drury Lane, based his sets and costumes on John Webber’s and William Hodges’ drawings; Webber and Hodges had accompanied Cook on his Pacific voyages. Iain McCalman, in his analysis of the set and costumes, cautions that this does not mean that the Loutherbourg drawings (which survive) or the scenes the pantomime describes are accurate representations of island clothing or sights. Instead, Loutherbourg “treated the [Webber and Hodges] voyage plates as a rich menu of possibilities from which he could construct dramatic and hybrid tableaux.” 55 That is, the costumes, variety of peoples, and languages, while appealing to a desire for the tropical among British popular audiences, nevertheless are not only British projections. Instead, they constitute an unequal dialogue, in that they reiterate stereotypes but also introduce new and diverse antipodean elements. Exactly what is performed in terms of the hybrid performative—whether the reiteration or potential exposure of hegemony—is, however, difficult to discern. It is easy to think that the audiences would merely marvel at the “curious and spectacular realism” and enjoy the reaffi rmation of their tropicalist expectations, which the popular press and poems had whetted. 56 Nevertheless, the new elements may also have instantiated, not just surprising elements, but also ones that challenged Anglocentric preconceptions. This potential becomes clearer in other artworks about Mai. The renowned portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds attended the opening night of the pantomime, and he subsequently produced a portrait of Mai, one of approximately twelve portraits, book plates, and other images of Mai to

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survive from the period. Reynolds exhibited his oil painting at the Royal Academy of Art in May 1776, and then it remained in his studio. However, the image became popular through an engraving by a German artist, Johann Jacobé, produced in 1780 (fig. 4.5). 57 Like the costumes and other appurtenances of the pantomime Omai, historians and critics have interpreted the style and content of the painting and other artworks, including the engraving, in ways that either make them out to be examples of fetishizing tropicalisms or challenging indigeneity. Reynolds’ portrait has been described as important in art history in that, “For a memorable moment the classical and romantic tendencies of the eighteenth century are fused in perfect reconciliation, so that the picture becomes a kind of summation.” 58 There are also critiques of the classicizing and romanticizing tendencies of the picture and print. McCormick analyzes Omai’s pose, the palm frond, and the vaguely defi ned background as “idealized . . . in the eyes of European observers—the nobility and dignity of natural man.” 59 Omai in the Reynolds-Jacobé picture might also be seen as an object of scientific and proto-anthropological fascination, which a comparison with another portrait, Benjamin West’s Sir Joseph Banks, makes clear. In West’s painting, the “natural resource imperialist” appears in a Polynesian cloak surrounded by weapons, a headdress, and tools from the Pacific, along with a folio that shows a line drawing of a plant. Much discussion of the European qualities of the Mai portrait has also focused on the clothing of the Mai picture, critiquing it as unrealistic or unauthentic. Conversely, Caroline Turner summarizes the other side of this debate, which concludes that the robes appear to be of the right substance, color, and weight of ones that Mai, or others (for example, Banks), brought to England from the Society Islands or Tahiti. The tattoos visible on Omai’s hands and forearm in the Reynolds-Jacobé engraving, which are also visible in other portraits, lend weight to the objectivity of the Pacific elements in the pictures. If these arguments are true, however, the robes are those that belong to an ari‘i, someone of higher rank than Mai, and Turner writes that Mai himself “may have . . . intended . . . to enhance his claim” to this status. She concludes, “That the costume and pose suited both artist and subject seems unquestionable,” and the “portraits could, as contemporaries conceded, combine truth with fiction, realism with imagination in depicting a subject.” 60 This is closer to the imbricated situation of the painting and subsequent print, for surely the clothing is a meeting of classical and orientalist traditions (for example, the turban) with Mai’s own presumed impersonation of a person of higher rank. That is, nothing is purely authentic nor solely the product of a tradition-bound tropicalist outlook. In terms of the hybrid performative, the picture enacts both the display of an exotic Other (made attractive by the introduction or culmination of familiar artistic tropes: pose, setting, and orientalist headdress), yet also presents an odd amalgam of mixed motivations and effects. In the picture, Omai appears as both a noble savage and an individual of integrity. There is not so much a

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Figure 4.5 Johann Jacobé, Omai, a Native of the Island of Utietea [sic. for Ulietea] (London, 1780), after Joshua Reynolds. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2036481. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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sense of uncertainty here, but the portrait registers some of that unexpected quality of antipodean encounters found in this period. The setting of the painting and engraving presents Omai in a location that is far from Britain. Nevertheless, other portraits, such as the picture of him meeting George III and a William Parry painting of him in Solander’s study, set him in identifi ably English locations.61 Contemporary texts, including the epistles, explicitly discuss the effects of Pacific objects and peoples, including Mai, on England. Several epistles imagine that Britain is already a motley place and that the effect of more Tahitians in Britain will be more motley and disorder. “An Historic Epistle, from Omiah, to the Queen of Otaheite; Being his Remarks on the English Nation” of 1775 is dedicated to Joseph Banks, and with some irony says that it is dedicated to him because of the “unremitting attention you have bestowed on Omiah’s education; attention so wonderfully successful, that perhaps half the town will scarce believe this to have been entirely his own production.” The author (possibly John Scott) links the quality of Banks’ education of “Omiah” with Omiah’s authorship of the “Historic Epistle,” which is entirely fictional. The 746-line poem is substantially a critique of European mores, religion (the poem contains anti-Catholic sentiments), military, legal system, science, arts, women, and politics. It has much in common, therefore, with the other contemporary poems on Tahitian subjects and in Tahitian voices; for example, it mentions tattooed buttocks and laments venereal disease. This epistle from Omiah begins with his complaint to the Queen of Otaheite that the “northern world” is one of “prejudice, where Error rules, / By Folly bred, and rear’d in Fashion’s schools.” It presents Tahiti as idyllic and a model of simplicity for Britain. Omiah says that his fellow islanders “Posess [sic] one art—to live without them all,” and that England should learn from them that the person “who wants nothing lives completely blest.” If British people took Tahiti as its model, then “would they share what nature’s bounty grants / Nor multiply its wants.” To the Tahitian “untutor’d man,” nature has given an “honest heart,” which “no sordid interest fi res, / No fashion sways, no prejudice inspires; / Where nature only rules the lib’ral mind, / Unspoil’d by art, by falsehood unrefi n’d.” 62 What is different about the “Historic Epistle” is that the author, in the voice of Omiah, depicts England as a place that already contains too much hybridity. The poem’s hybrid performativity therefore not only reiterates hegemonic ideas about the antipodean islands and islanders, but the opposition between cultured Britain and untaught Tahiti also makes hybridity itself out to be always negative. The purity of Tahiti and the potential purity of Britain are held out as ideals against the corrupting presence of discrepant mixes that threaten clear distinctions among sex, good and bad morals, and so on. England is critiqued for “Macaronies . . . Whose only care is in ambiguous dress / To veil their sex, that wiser folks may guess”; for “sloth and pride” being “a party colour’d train”; as a place where “Dulness sits

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in Harlequin’s attire”; and for containing scientists who pry too much into nature and confuse her categories by suggesting that “Zoöphyte plants with animals unite.” 63 Omiah concludes, “Sick of these motley scenes, might I once more, / In peace return to Otaheite’s shore,” and the poem ends with him looking forward to traveling back to his native land. However, his rejection of the “motley scenes” of England is slightly complicated by the epistle’s own explicit acknowledgment that it is a poem with a heterogeneous structure. It is as though a combination of Omiah’s own culture and the British society before Omiah’s eyes necessitates an impressionist depiction that is itself cross-bred. That is, the poem, while critiquing Britain’s mixed-up character, is forced into using a mixed technique to depict it. It is a hybrid performance that fails to achieve completely the goals of authenticity and singularity to which it aspires, a contradiction in the “ground or space of authority.” Near the beginning, Omiah asks how he should “paint these scenes” before him when he is “untaught” in the “strains” of this kind of poetry and the elements are governed by “Chaos,” and which are themselves colored by Omiah’s own perception that “we tread on . . . enchanted ground, / And magic wonders flourish all around.” His problem is not limited to his own “culture” (as it is presented in the poem), but is also attributable to the object of his attention, namely Britain. He asks, “say, what rainbow pencil can disclose, / The dubious tint which yon Camelion shows,” and he therefore asks forgiveness from his reader for the “mazy dance” of his composition. How else, he asks, to depict a “Proteus race?” 64 On the one hand, then, a chameleon scene demands a multi-colored pen to describe it, an instance of what Lamb, in a discussion of Robinson Crusoe and other texts, calls “antipodal savagery.” On the other hand, Lamb also observes of these texts that “The question of truth is implicated in the chain of possible conjunctions—nobility and savagery, isolation and community, war and peace, glory and self-loss—imported from the South Seas into the metropole.”65 A further and complicated example of these kinds of “conjunctions” appeared in 1777, when William Preston, a poet and playwright, wrote “An Epistle from a Lady of Quality, in England, to Omiah, at Otaheite.” It is another satire, this time more tightly focused on gender roles. Preston satirizes England’s women for diverging from what he considers to be their proper spheres, and he criticizes the excesses of the court and religious practices. The lyric also provides a commentary on other poems and artworks that register the influx of Tahitian culture in Britain and its effects on English society. The “Lady of Quality” beckons Omiah to return, and this epistle somewhat snidely remarks that the principal effect of his anticipated Tahitian presence will be to rejuvenate England’s societal excesses. In the poem, the lady contrasts Britain’s former glory with its present state, and she ironically calls on Omiah to come back to London, along with his fellow Tahitians, in order to put the final touches on the fripperies of society:

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The Idea of the Antipodes Come, southern youths! . . . New pleasures wait you on Britannia’s shore. ................... Your kind invention shall our taste befriend, And new-born springs to jaded pleasure lend; ................... Haste, gentle youths! to guide our revels haste, Give the last polish to the sons of taste.

England is already a place where societal distinctions and hierarchies are in “chaos mixt,” and the presence of the Tahitians will enhance this state of affairs. The reason for this, the lady argues, is that moral opposites are equivalent in Tahiti, so Omiah and the others who come to England will be able to rid the nation of the final vestiges of any moral opprobrium about its practices. She says of the Tahitians that “The various paths of pleasure, and of fame, / Disjoin’d for others, are for them the same. / Fate leads the moments with auspicious hand, / And rival copies soon shall bless our land.”66 The poem ultimately claims that the presence of Omiah and his fellow Tahitians will “restore” what the narrator perceives as former and proper gender roles (and indeed there will be an exchange of influence between Tahiti and England).67 Because it is traditional about men’s and women’s societal functions, it sees Tahiti’s culture as an opportunity for further sexual license, but it also contains a more critical hybrid move. The mixing of Tahitian and English cultures in Britain in the “Epistle from a Lady of Quality,” and the fact that this mixing accentuates an already-present jumbled English society, are commentaries on the tropicalist expectations of works such as the pantomime and Johann Jacobé’s rendition of Reynolds’ artwork. Where those texts import Tahitian goods and characters in order, at least in part, to voice exoticisms, the effect of antipodean objects and practices in “Omiah” and the “Historic Epistle” is to reveal (while repeating) the deeper societal dubiousness of British morals, intentions, and objects. The Motley Beach On June 24, 1776, nearly two years after arriving in England, Mai boarded the Resolution with Cook. The ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope, visited Tasmania, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Tonga, and other islands, then sailed east to Tahiti. Mai, the fi rst Polynesian to survive Europe and a return voyage to the antipodes, was accompanied by a large quantity of objects. The Resolution carried materials to build and furnish an Englishstyle house: a bed, table, chair, chest of drawers, pewter plates, mugs, glasses, spoons, and a case of knives and forks. The largest expenses for goods were for clothing and other attire: hats, gowns, trousers, handkerchiefs (“with Great Britain printed on them”), shoes, hose, umbrellas, and perfume. Mai was also supplied with a suit of armor and mail, horses, six

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swords, and guns, while chests aboard the ship stored tools, wine, soap, medicine for venereal disease, pictures of the king and queen, and toy models of coaches, wagons, sedan chairs, and other technological artifacts. Saucepans and kettles for cooking were added as an afterthought. Mai traded many items along the way—in Tonga, Tahiti, and other places. Upon arrival in the Society Islands, he continued to trade with crewmembers. Once there, Cook supplied him with additional items, including more arms: a musket, bayonet, cartridge box, fowling piece, two pairs of pistols, swords, and cutlasses. This was despite the fact that Cook was concerned about leaving Mai with the weapons, saying “I was always of the Opinion he would have been better without fi re Arms than with them.” 68 James King, Second Lieutenant of the Resolution, also expressed doubts about Mai’s welfare, and he explicitly distinguished his concerns from the familiar ones already voiced in Britain: Although it was a great satisfaction to us to have brought Omai safe, & landed him in his own country; yet it is a doubt whether we have added to his future ease & happiness, or even left him in a state of security; not that I agree in a very general notion in England in regard to Omai, that his knowledge & enjoyment of a more comfortable & civilized way of life woud [sic] render his return to his former state unhappy. The Gratification of many appetites & passions are equally to a sensual man, & in the same degree, to be had here as in England, but if Omai remains unhappy it arises from his want of some useful Knowledge that might have made him respect’d amongst his Countrymen. 69 King’s journal entry contains the kinds of lamentations we have heard expressed elsewhere, but his focus on the general aspects of Mai’s success balances Cook’s more specific concerns about the guns. However, the fact that King’s musings are embedded within a discussion of the objects they are leaving with Mai (“Crockery Ware, & Kitchen furniture,” “his Coat of Mail, his Muskets, Powder & other Weapons”) demonstrates that both Cook and King were anxious about the after-effect of European objects. When these items, and not just the weapons, are transported to the antipodean islands, what consequence might they have? The focus of this fi nal section is on how Mai’s objects perform once they are in Tahiti. Of particular interest are his clothing and the house the British seamen built him on the shore of Huahine. Greg Dening has drawn attention to the important function of beach spaces throughout history, where everything is relativised a little, turned around, where tradition is as much invented as handed down, where otherness is both a new discovery and a reflection of the old, where expediency is likely to prevail rather than principle.70

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Mai’s possessions are adapted in the antipodes in unexpected ways. They become hybrid conglomerates of English and Tahitian objects, bodies, actions, and locations; however, the English and the Tahitian do not work together seamlessly. Internal points of tension, even at the precise moments of what seem to be the most successful implementations or uses, become apparent.71 In a sense, Mai himself may be included as one kind of object of British imperialism, in that he was transported to England, was taught English language and manners, and was the object of scientific and cultural observation. Even his voyage back on the British ship contributed to these calculations, and it is possible to perceive the British, who took such an interest in his repatriation, imagining the imperial process continuing upon his return. The “useful Knowledge” King and others think Mai might transport back to the antipodes and spread in the Society Islands include Christianity, forms of moral behavior, and English models of economic and social exchange. Most clearly, King and others imagine that he might use his knowledge and possessions to rise in rank and status among his fellow islanders. However, without a larger apparatus of imperial science and force to reiterate British epistemes, the objects remained open to being adapted in Pacific Islands in unforeseen ways. In fact, Mai and the objects move, combine, and recombine with indigenous knowledge, intentions, and other objects. The resulting hybrids turn away, and even turn back on, imperial forms and implementations of knowledge. First, however, a note on two topics having to do with the sources for the following discussion. So far, I have examined European discourses about antipodeans, Mai in particular, and antipodean objects in Britain. Now that we turn from Europe to look within the antipodes, two problems present themselves with more urgency: point of view and agency. Point of view is an important consideration because we have to rely on European depictions of Mai’s and other Tahitians’ actions and possessions. Agency is important because it is vital to think of Mai and others not as passive victims or only as recipients of British benevolence and foolishness. However, point of view and agency are also potentially misleading critical paths because each encourages the historian to sift through and weigh (preferably the most immediate) European accounts in order to approach the elusive originary moment of action. A central assumption behind this approach is the belief that it is possible to get inside Mai’s head and understand his motivations. For example, some recent essays argue that Mai is either a product of the European imaginary and therefore impossible to represent “accurately,” or else he’s his own person with his own reasons for his actions.72 This binary reflects and simply repeats ambivalence in source materials in this regard. It is more useful to consider the performative aspects of the hybrid objects, actions, and locations. The concept of the performative suggests we ask what these objects do, not simply what they represent. Nor does the emphasis fall on their effect on Mai and the Society Islanders, but instead on how they reiterate hegemonies while they reveal incoherencies within authority. The

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focus here is also not on motivations or desires and points of view so much as it is on interactions among objects and ideologies within a particular space. The fact that the accounts, whether written or pictorial, are English means that we need, once again, to analyze the modes of their discourses, for the methods of presentation reveal how the moments on the antipodean beaches and foreshores reiterate but also extend and challenge fantasies about the antipodes. In November, 1777, Captain Cook ordered a house to be built for Mai. It was to be the fi nal chapter in Mai and Cook’s long-standing relationship, and it was an uneasy ending. The narratives about this relationship attempt to bring Mai’s story to a satisfactory close, but instead they betray uncertainty about how the little English house works for Mai within Society Island culture. Cook negotiated with local chiefs for a site, and it was at this time that he was surprised to learn that Mai and the chiefs were hoping to use Mai’s European friends and fi repower to retake ancestral lands on another island. Cook refused to help the enterprise and discouraged them from warring while he was there. He had his men instead prepare a garden with imported plants, but his main reason for building Mai’s small house was “to secure his property in.” As soon as Cook left, Mai, with assistance of the chiefs, planned to build another Tahitian house over it, which would cover the English building.73 In figure 4.6, Mai’s house, its roof in the process of being built, is visible on the left. John Rickman, second lieutenant of the Resolution, records in his journal that, while they were there, they noticed that Mai’s reaction to the house was anything but positive. Instead, this little English home on the antipodean foreshore, soon to be enclosed in a Polynesian fale, had become a problematic space, hybrid in more than its future structure. For one Society Islander with animus against Mai and the British, the house immediately became an object for revenge against the British; he uprooted the garden and tried to burn the place down. Cook had to make it known that he was going to return and would punish anyone who hurt Mai or damaged his house or garden. Rickman writes further that Mai was melancholy about the British leaving and, when he took possession of the house and hosted a small ceremony attended by the British and Tahitians, the difficulty the building posed became clear. Rickman, observing Mai at the ceremony, surmises that, “his aukward situation, between half English, and half Indian preparations, might contribute not a little to embarrass him.” 74 In addition to the (correct) suspicion that Mai might use the secured arms and other objects to try to regain ancestral lands, the items, once transported with Mai back to the antipodes, did not perform the kind of role the British expected of them. In England and on the ships, they thought that their most benevolent act would be to give the house and other objects to Mai, who would be able to use his possessions, including his new British knowledge, to raise his status from a lower stratum to a higher one,

Figure 4.6 John Cleveley, View of Huaheine, One of the Society Islands (London, 1787). Canberra, National Library of Australia, 510504. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.75

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from one class to another. To the seamen and other commentators, the most important benefit they thought they could provide Mai was to help him to ascend or, according to Guest, at least maintain the associations with an upper class that he established in Britain. Their presumption was that Mai wanted to climb in status and that British trinkets and associations made this possible, so when he subsequently failed to act in a manner that might befit this anticipated position, they expressed disappointment about him. They also read the other Society Islander reactions according to this dynamic.76 After a dinner at Mai’s new house, for example, Rickman discusses the Tahitian chiefs’ attitudes toward his house and possessions: They beheld him in the same light as the gentlemen in every country see low-born citizens suddenly rising from indigence to wealth, giving themselves airs, and affecting state; at the same time that they laugh at their folly, they encourage their profusion; and while they partake of their entertainments, they take pleasure in mortifying their pride. Rickman speculates that had Cook not been there, they “would probably have treated him, amidst the splendor of his banquets, with the utmost contempt.” He concludes: Such is the disposition of mankind throughout the world. Men, sprung from the dregs of the people, must have something more than accidental riches to recommend them to the favour of their fellow citizens; they must have superior sense to direct their conduct, and superior acquirements to render the virtue they possess conspicuous. That this was not the case with Omai, every day’s experience furnished sufficient proofs.77 The European objects become hybrid in the simple sense that they are adapted for antipodean purposes—covered with another roof or transported to other islands to wage war—but they are also hybrid in other senses. Most crucially, the Europeans imagine Mai will rise in status, which is important to the British, who have a stake in his success through his association with them. When he does not seem interested in their ambitions for him, they read his life on the island as evidence of his awkward failure rather than of their misdirected and culturally unsuitable expectations. In this way, Mai and his English house on the beach of Huahine are similar to the contemporaneous epistles about Mai being written back in England at the time, in that the character of the Tahitian in those poems is the object of British projections and British disappointment. The circularity of the hybrid performative in Rickman’s and others’ texts—Mai with his European possessions on the antipodean shore inevitably and regretfully failing—reveals the class-based mechanisms within their iterations. That Mai and his objects do not fulfill expectations is frustrating, and they become excessive elements in the texts—an excessiveness that, as analysis of performativity

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tells us, exposes the components that enable iteration. Rickman and others are left with the British objects either as technologies that are transformed by Mai to regain lands (which have a longer history than the British presence in the islands) or else they become empty trinkets, merely gaudy and either extrinsic or inapplicable to raising oneself in one’s class. One spectacular scene captures this potent ambivalence of imperial objects on the antipodean shore. During the building of the house, Mai paraded several times on beaches in full armor on a horse while fi ring weapons into the air. When Rickman’s Journal was published (and republished) in England in 1781, it included figure 4.7. of Mai on the shore of Vaitepiha Bay on the main island of Tahiti. Rickman’s description of the moment reads: On the 17th [August, 1777], Capt. Cook, with Omai took an airing on horseback to the great astonishment of the inhabitants, many hundreds of whom followed them with loud acclamations. Omai, to excite their admiration the more, was dressed cap-a-pee in a suit of armour, which he carried with him, and was mounted and caparisoned with his sword and pike, like St. George accoutred to kill the dragon, whom he exactly represented; only that Omai had pistols in his holsters, of which the poor saint knew not the use. Omai, however, made good use of his arms, and when the crowd became clamorous, and troublesome, he every now and then pulled out a pistol and fi red it among them, which never failed to send them scampering away.78 The pictorial and narrative presentations of the event in Rickman’s Journal are satirical of Mai. The mock-heroic picture and comically poignant simile about the saint’s lack of knowledge about firearms ridicule Mai for wearing the armor; they also depict the credulity and fearfulness of the Tahitians in their reactions to his weapons. Mai is superior to them in terms of his British technology—the weapons, armor, and horse—but he is not as admirable as the other rider. In the illustration, the Englishman who rides next to Mai, whom Bernard Smith determines to be Captain Cook, is unarmed and looks on with equanimity.79 His uniform and placid demeanor contrast with Mai’s armor and the Polynesians’ reactions. In these ways, Rickman’s account and the etching are again similar to the epistolary satires, most of which poke fun at Tahitian culture as much as British society, and they are also like Rickman’s and others’ accounts of Mai, which critique his lack of inner worth and inclinations toward what they perceive to be empty outward show. In terms of the narrative and picture’s performative value, they appear to reinscribe familiar impressions of the Tahitians, British, and Mai. As suggested, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century accounts, as well as more recent analyses, sometimes claim agency for Mai, who seemed to be aware all along of the martial advantages to be gained from riding his horses

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Figure 4.7 John Rickman, “Omai’s Public Entry on His First Landing at Otaheite,” Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean on “Discovery,” Performed in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779 (London, 1781), plate facing 131. Canberra, National Library of Australia, 4084055. Courtesy of the National Library of Australia.

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and wearing his armor on the beaches.80 One account of Mai’s life after the Resolution and Discovery left describes the successful application he made of these European objects: His Arms and the Manner in which he used them made him Great in War, as he bore down all before him, and all who had timely notice fled at his Approach and when accouterd [sic] with his Helmet & Breastplate, & Mounted on Horse back they thought it impossible to hurt him, and for that reason never attempted it, and Victory always attended him and his Party.81 The two sides—Mai as object of British satire (and sometimes Tahitian ridicule), or Mai as fully understanding the situation of his homeland and using his European technologies for the advantage of his tribe—are both present in the sources. A third way lies in a slightly different direction. The lens of the performative encourages a reading of antipodean scenes, not only to discover what the actions did for Mai or the Europeans, but also to consider whether the incidents and their iteration in textual and pictorial sources reveal any excessive supplement in the telling. As suggested, the hybrid can threaten to make apparent the already-constructed nature of an imperial episteme or enunciation. There is certainly something absurd about Mai on the Tahitian beaches in armor on a horse with multiple weapons, an absurdity that implies not only a satire of Mai, but also of the European objects he has and the technologies in which he is clad. Armor was anachronistic in the late-eighteenth century except for having a ceremonial function for the aristocracy, but it failed to signal any aristocratic status because the Society Islanders did not recognize its historical class resonances. The horse and the loud noise and flash of guns were more effective than the armor, and context is also telling here because it seems that this kind of shore action did not take place only once. Cook and the “gentlemen” aboard the Resolution and Discovery rode on the beaches many times—“every day” according to one source—sometimes with and sometimes without Mai.82 This would suggest that Mai is imitating the captain and the gentlemen in the manner that he imitated the manners of people in Europe, and the sources may read this as a personal fault of Mai’s, but their opprobrium is an attempt to cover over a certain anxiety that surrounds the imitation. His mimicry—sartorially archaic, exaggerated, and perhaps meaningless for the Society Islanders—verges upon making apparent the contrived nature of English power, such as Cook and the gentlemen riding on the beach, as well as the transparently class-based motivations for continuing to wear armor. An interesting parallel moment like this arises a little later in Rickman’s Journal where another of Mai’s hybrid exhibitions comes close to revealing the performative quality of British imperial authority. On Sunday, August 24, 1777, Cook arranged to meet with a local “king” or “prince,” as Cook called him,

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named Tu or “Otoo,” a powerful leader he had met with on a previous voyage to the big island of Tahiti who had increased his authority since Cook’s first visit. The captains of both the Resolution and Discovery decided that “their visit should be made with as much state as their present circumstances would admit.” The marines were called out, musicians prepared, and rowers of the pinnaces ordered to be “clean dressed.” The boats themselves were decorated with “silken streamers, embroidered ensigns, and other gorgeous decorations.” The next day at noon, when they arrived on shore, Rickman satisfactorily reports that the Tahitians found that “the grandeur of the procession exceeded every thing of the kind they had ever seen.” Mai was the only potential source of letdown for the Tahitians, a disappointment that also appears in the tone of Rickman’s account. Mai was not on horseback. Rickman says: The road from the beach to the entrance of the palace (about half a mile) was lined on both sides with natives from all parts, expecting to see Omai on horseback, as the account of his appearance on his fi rst landing on the other side of the island . . . had already reached the inhabitants on this. Instead, Mai had chosen, according to Rickman, “to surprize the more” by dressing as a captain, “and could hardly be distinguished from a British officer.” However, Rickman makes no comment about Mai’s disguise working on the Tahitians in the way he perceives Mai intended. Rickman’s tone is quite neutral when he says that “as he appeared to them in disguise, he was not known.” When the parties had entered the “palace,” Mai was revealed to Tu, but Rickman again does not note an extraordinary reaction. In this arrival, Mai may have been trying to impress his fellow islanders by presenting himself in the same manner as the British rather than assume the authority of an exemplary Tahitian and risk insulting or challenging Tu’s real authority. Or Rickman mightn’t have perceived or cared to comment on this, and Mai’s motivations ultimately remain opaque. 83 However, the account provides another clear example of imitation by an imperial subject that is so close to the correct uniform that he passes for an English officer, an imitation that throws the British streamers, flags, and dress into relief as themselves objects in another kind of performance, and objects that can be adopted and adapted in the antipodes for Tahitian and other less predictable ends. It is believed that Mai died of illness in or about 1780, but his objects kept transforming and having different effects.84 Some forty years after Mai rode with his possessions on the antipodean beach, the English missionary, William Ellis, recounted the history of the site of Mai’s house and his arms. Ellis joined the London Missionary Society in 1815, and was a resident in the Society Islands and Hawai‘i from 1816 until 1825. In 1829, he published his twovolume Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, which contain detailed early accounts of the life and culture of the Society Islands. Ellis’ missionary approach complicates his observations,

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but he took an interest in the history of the cultures he observed as much as the present. In one chapter, Ellis describes a new school and chapel erected on the foreshore at Huahine, and he notes the remnants of the goods: The spot where Mai’s house stood is still called Beritani, or Britain, by the inhabitants of Huahine. A shaddock [pummelo] tree, which the natives say was planted by Captain Cook himself while the vessels lay at anchor, is still growing in a spot which was once part of his garden. The animals, with the exception of the dogs and pigs, have all died; and in this instance, the benevolent intentions of the British government, in sending out horses, cattle, &c. proved abortive. The helmet, and some other parts of his armour, with several cutlasses, are still preserved, and displayed on the sides of the house now standing on the spot where Mai’s dwelling was erected by Captain Cook. A few of the trinkets, such as a jack-in-a-box, a kind of serpent that darts out of a cyclindrical case when the lid is removed, are preserved with care by one of the principal chiefs, who at the time of our arrival considered them great curiosities, and exhibited them, as a mark of condescension, to particular favourites. What became of the organ and electrical machine, I never knew. For Ellis, and presumably for his London audience, “Beritani” and the objects displayed there—the helmet, armor, and cutlasses on the side of the house and the toys in the hands of the chief—are signs of the islanders’ child-like fascination with the objects, as well as tokens of the folly and sadness of past imperial enterprises, including the repatriation of Mai himself. Even Cook’s tree is viewed with ambivalence. Ellis says that, upon seeing the imported plant between the indigenous garden and other foliage, it looked “like an inhabitant of another country, in solitary exile.” Ellis recounts the history of Beritani in order to contrast it with the more satisfactory present residents, descendants of Mai’s family. After Mai’s house was built and he had died, missionaries arrived on the neighboring island of Tahiti in 1797, but in 1809, they had been expelled from the big island and moved to Huahine. They built a church and school, which in Ellis’ account have now been replaced, next to Mai’s house. At the front of the site, Ellis reports, live Mai’s heirs, whose neat house and garden, and particularly their “fare bure huna” or “house for hidden prayer,” especially pleases him. Ellis’ history is thus elegiac, yet the site is a redemptive one for his audience; the present religious buddings supersede the earlier history. The arms displayed on the outside walls become, in Ellis’ narrative, relics of former British martial history, and they parallel the Tahitian fascination with the toys in that both are signs of a former and passing age. The earlier tone of lament is now supplemented, at least in this ecclesiastical history, with the hopeful proximity of a Christian future. Ellis takes pleasure in seeing the arms and armor hanging on the walls of the new, potentially Christian, household. They end

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up as mere display items, rusted signs of a necessarily past history in an incipient Christian present. He praises the current inhabitants of “Beritani,” who inherited Mai’s property, for erecting the fi rst church and a school, and, in marked contrast to Cook, he notes that these structures “are very different from the erection of a boarded house merely as a fortress, in which are deposited, as the most valued treasures of its inhabitants, arms and ammunition,” “a place of security for the property.” 85 Fifteen years earlier, in 1773, with Cook commanding the Resolution and Mai on board Captain Furneaux’s Adventure, the two ships had sailed for New Zealand, where storms and subsequent events parted them. The Adventure made for the Cape of Good Hope and Britain while Cook completed another large circuit through the Pacific. At the beginning of this second extensive exploration of the Great Sea, Cook first sailed southeast of New Zealand to put to rest the suspicion that a southern continent existed. On December 7, 1773, at 8:30 PM, they took a sighting, and Cook registered that they were “Antipodes to our friends in London consequently as far removed from them as possible.” William Wales, one of two astronomers on the Resolution, records that they drank “to our friends on that side of the Globe” and joked that “The good People of that City may now rest perfectly satisfied that they have no Antipodes besides Pengwines and Peteralls, unless Seals can be admitted as such; for Fishes are absolutely out of the question.’”86 Wales was able to make fun about there being no landmass exactly antipodean to London. Much of the time, however, the tone about the antipodean islands is only superficially amiable and humorous. Descriptions and discussions of the land and peoples of the antipodes, land and peoples being two of the main subjects of antipodean narratives throughout history, are nearer to Cook’s slightly wistful remark or Captain Waterhouse’s more bleak description of the Penantipodes Islands some seventeen years later. Disappointment, sadness, and regret permeate the delight in island abundance that the British seamen express. These tones in antipodean encounter narratives reiterate and reinforce British epistemes and practices in the Pacific. The seas and islands on the other side of the world were, however, anything but a hermetic or projected whole, and divergences from the expected keep eluding and circumventing these ways of knowing, even disenchanted ways of knowing, the region. Plus, the narrative is not all directed in that way. Mai’s voyage in the opposite direction—out to Britain and back to the antipodes—reverses the orientation of antipodean narratives that had been formed in the Greek, Roman, and later eras. The third element important to the antipodes—correspondence—is altered with these redirections of narrative. Correspondence turns the other way, writing back from the antipodean beach, a writing that performs iterations, adaptations, and diversions of the expected. When the antipodean eventually returns to the Great Sea, the objects that go with him do not easily reflect British anticipations, but instead make apparent the preconceptions and epistemologies that underpin them and, at times, turn the objects aside to other purposes.

5

Island Laughter Twentieth-Century Antipodean Literature

In the twentieth century, antipodean boundaries and contents remain unfi xed. Whereas the Oxford English Dictionary traces the gradual narrowing of the meaning of antipodes to a region in the South Pacific, people who live in the region today still don’t have a specific defi nition as to the boundaries and make-up of the area: Australia, New Zealand, and other Pacific Islands; just New Zealand and other islands; Pacific Islands exclusive of Aotearoa/New Zealand; or only the Pacific Islands in the more southern parts of the Pacific. As we have seen, the antipodes always had these peripatetic and compound qualities. Greek and Roman cosmologists and others reasoned that the antipodes were merely mathematically relative to where one was in space and time. Every point on the earth was potentially antipodal to another point. When they considered the antipodes in terms of a region opposite Athens or Rome, the area was pictured as spatially and temporally isolated. This condition led Europeans to reflect on themselves as also confi ned and solitary with a radically limited temporal and epistemological outlook. In the later Middle Ages, even a merely relative symmetry became undone. The antipodes became itinerant, their podes, or feet, wandering in other directions than a reflective relationship with Europe. When antipodeans appear in medieval manuscripts with their feet turned backward, they often are alongside sciopods, creatures admired for their “wonderful swiftness.” 1 Moreover, a person could travel around the earth or through the earth and to the antipodes, but that action might never lead to rediscovering his or her way back home. This unsettling quality carried over to the Early Modern period, particularly in Richard Brome’s play, The Antipodes, where the disorientation caused unexpected social relations to form, ones that developed beside an increasingly strong imperative to have children. Historical forces in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries shape the antipodes into a place in the South Pacific that is approximately opposite Britain, but the antipodes still don’t quite become fi xed in one place or as one stable entity. The literature of this time often reiterates tropicalisms, but sometimes they enact a sense of the unfi xed, which disturbs contemporary discourses. This period also gives us, not the earliest, but the fi rst extended narrative, featuring Mai, that originates in the

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antipodes, goes to Europe, and returns to the antipodes, an inversion of narrative course that begins new discursive orientations and directions. This chapter builds on these earlier themes and tropes of antipodal literature in which the antipodes have the complex set of relations to Europe that Sedgwick’s sense of beside nicely voices. It continues to focus on the three main areas of antipodean discourse—place, habitation, and correspondence—and it begins with a section on island theory, which, on the face of it, is centrally about space but which immediately takes into account habitation and communication. Like speculative and ideational writings about the antipodes, island theory begins with the Greeks and continues through the twentieth century in the work of writers as diverse as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, fiction writer and theorist Epeli Hau‘ofa, and anthropologist John Terrell. I then look at later twentieth-century antipodean literature by authors such as John Puhiatau Pule, Albert Wendt, and Hau‘ofa’s own short stories in the light of island theory. I also continue to emphasize the discursive formations of place, habitation, and correspondence; that is, how they are articulated. I noted at the outset of this study Foucault’s description of discourse in which he emphasizes that to examine an archive is not simply to look at change in a history of ideas, but instead to investigate moments of disruption and discontinuity, and to discover what brings about discursive transformations. 2 Therefore, I will be seeking to describe not just the facts, as it were, of transformations in antipodean discourse, but the modes of textual shifts and breaks in order to examine the forces in recent antipodean writings. Within the antipodes (however or wherever they are defi ned), place, habitation, and correspondence intertwine in the literature of this period in that narrators and characters voice complex attitudes towards the locations they inhabit. If, however, we separate these topics and make some general comments about place fi rst, the spaces in the literature of the later twentieth century are complicated, hybrid, and are scored by both local and larger political and historical forces. Many of these forces, such as international policies, might appear to be outside influences, but these forces are not really, at this point in history, foreign to the antipodean cultures they affect. The second topic—habitation—suggests the need to examine the celebrations and difficulties of living in the antipodes, as well as the approaches that narrators and characters have toward the historical and contemporary forces that impinge on antipodean lives. How does a narrator or character interact with and shape the spaces he or she inhabits when social, cultural, and spatial disruptions and discontinuities are present? Moreover, what happens when the spaces are themselves multiple within the antipodes; that is, when one’s home is on several islands within the antipodes? Lastly, the topic of correspondence in this study has meant both correspondence in the sense of symmetry with and reflection of (and on) Europe, and letters and epistles sent, or imagined to be sent, between the antipodes and Britain. The important turn in the twentieth century

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is an emphasis on correspondence within the antipodes; that is, among the insular environments of the Oceanic region. Authors reflect on the correspondences and incongruities between where they have come from and where they are now, and the writings examined here might be read as largely epistolary in form, letters that ruminate about already complicated birthplaces and islands governed by other tongues. Spatial relations are important in the articulation of antipodean places, habitation, and correspondence, but in this literature, time also becomes particularly significant in the sense of narratorial attitudes towards the past, present, and future. First, one approach to the past, and even the present, is similar to the trope discussed in Chapter 4, in which lamentation over what is imagined as the fallen nature of antipodean islands evokes a nostalgically articulated return to (paradoxically) an earlier moment of subjection to British paternalism. We will recall, for instance, the end of John O’Keeffe’s pantomime, Omai, in which the pictorial apotheosis of Captain Cook asks all before it—British seamen, as well as Pacific Islanders—to grieve for Cook’s death and simultaneously to look forward to a restitution of Britannia’s dominance. A second, related mode of looking back to Britain appears in Pacific novels, poems, and artworks that express longing for a lost European homeland, a homeland that can belong to the imperialist and the islander alike. William Cowper’s The Task depicts Mai once he has returned to his island, twirling his foot in the sea, pondering the water that has also bathed English shores, and looking out to the horizon in search of more British sails. Some twentieth-century antipodean texts continue in a similar manner, contrasting antipodean life and history to imagined homelands that are represented as familiar, cohesive, aged, cultured, and European. Other texts exhibit variation on these attitudes towards time and place, namely nostalgia for a return to an earlier and purer antipodean life. This nativist yearning is internally oriented rather than directed back toward a European homeland. However, in the literature we will study here, what is most significant is that, even though later twentieth-century island literature plainly continues the theme of looking back to the past—whether in Europe or in the Pacific—another quite different tone emerges alongside these forms of nostalgia, sadness, and regret. There’s a lightening of the antipodean mood. The literature presents the region and its many difficulties in wry, ribald, and risible tones. Its approach is neither celebratory nor dismissive of real troubles, but continues to show that antipodean spaces are riven by powerful forces. However, the texts implicitly draw on the strain of antipodean literature that has been comic and that smiles at the antipodean conceit. The discourse is therefore of a Rabelaisian type of humor that registers crushingly detrimental Western, or rather Northern, attitudes toward the Pacific, intervenes in those discourses, and also plays with them while heading off in new directions that acknowledge other histories and that are not merely subject to harmful discourses.

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Island Theory If insularity is a discernible discipline, it’s because it has a history. The most recent episode of that history is now called island theory, which has appeared in the last thirty years as a group of writings about island locations, characteristics, biologies, inhabitants, and cultures. When Frantz Fanon considered the fraught moments of a newly emerging “national culture,” he characterized cultural production immediately following a nation’s independence as ideally embodying the “fluctuating movement” of the people. Fanon described people as shaping a culture which, if achieved, “will be the signal for everything to be called in question.” 3 The continual questioning that Fanon describes might also be said to exemplify the field of island theory. Island theory consists of, and continues to grow as, a series of provisional gestures characterized by “fluctuating movement” and challenges that immediately “call in question”: its disciplinary boundaries; its choice of historically significant moments; and the relations among its disciplinary, methodological, and theoretical parts. The components of island theory that I distinguish here arise most directly out of considerations of the antipodes and the Pacific, rather than other archipelagic zones (Indonesia, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean, for example). However, I draw, in part, on discussions of other locations, including what J. G. A. Pocock names the “Atlantic archipelago,” that is England, Ireland, and other islands of Northern Europe.4 The last thirty years have seen scholars, creative writers, and others rethink islands: their locations, characteristics, inhabitants, and cultures. This is due to two related impulses. The fi rst is the influence of post-structuralism, whose analyses of epistemes have enabled scholars to identify explicitly the existence and parameters of a discrete discipline in the West that has discussed islands, a discipline that gradually gathers defi nition and force throughout history. The second includes conscious efforts to reassess and reimagine islands. Indigenous and other writers, historians, and scientists have reexamined Mediterranean, Caribbean, Indonesian, Pacific, and other cosmologies, modes of transport, and island interactions in order to challenge earlier insular assumptions and to offer other, perhaps more global, models of island terrains, peoples, and cultures. Historians of literature and science have pointed out that, prior to a recent turn in island theory, scientific, historical, and literary texts tend to reiterate common representation of islands. A recognizable insular discourse in science and literature begins in the Early Modern period and develops into many present-day scientific texts, popular novels, and tourist writings about islands in the Pacific and elsewhere. This we might name continental island discourse. Islands in this discourse are thought of as opposed to the sea, isolated, delimited, conversely paradisiacal or hellish, enclosed habitats, fragile environments, and individuated containers for archaic biologies and cultures. Those studying this history frequently point to touchstones in texts such as

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Thomas More’s Utopia, William Shakespeare’s Tempest, and John Donne’s Meditation 17 as the conceptual origins of these characteristics. Thus, in terms of islands being opposed to the sea, it is often repeated that when Donne famously wrote that “No man is an island, entire of itself” but instead “a piece of the continent, part of the main,” the sea is implicit in Donne’s formulation, the item that potentially makes the island “entire of itself” and separates it in isolation. A later example appears in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, which he based on his travels in the Pacific Ocean. The novel elaborates upon metaphorical enunciations of the relationship between islands and the sea. Its powerful descriptions of the ocean and its semi-hidden creatures emphasize that islands are and should be antithetical to the sea, small refuges amid a vast, largely unknown, and treacherous ocean. The novel also suggests the isolated, paradisiacal, and fragile qualities of islands. Ishmael notes that “No mercy, no power but its own controls” the sea; “the masterless ocean overruns the globe.” Its “most dreaded creatures glide under water,” and it demonstrates a “universal cannibalism” because all its “creatures prey upon each other.” The sea becomes a metaphor for radical doubt and abjection within which the lone island exists: For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed about by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return! 5 While early in this study I evoked Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s writings on “deterritorialization” and the nomad because they have greatly influenced reconsiderations of space and have challenged spatial commonplaces, Deleuze contributes most directly to theorizing island space in one of his earliest essays, “Desert Islands.” 6 His analysis points out but also relies on traditional epistemologies about islands. In fact, his essay is based in large part on Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia from the fi rst century CE. Deleuze expresses his impatience with literature that embodies stereotypes when he describes Robinson Crusoe: “One can hardly imagine a more boring novel, and it is sad to see children still reading it today. . . . Any healthy reader would dream of seeing [Friday] eat Robinson.” However, he retains the traditional oppositional binary between island and sea, and he argues that islands are necessarily deserted. Habitation, he says, is a denial of an awareness of the “active struggle” between earth and sea in which the sea can overwhelm the land or an island can subside back into an ocean. In this sense, “An island doesn’t stop being deserted simply because it is inhabited.” One may arrive on a deserted island, but one also eventually abandons it. Gillian Beer, in an essay on the historical “idea of the island” and habitation, observes of this history: “Castaways come and go: the triumph of most island fiction is, after all is said and done, to leave the island.” 7

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Beer’s essay appears in the collection, Islands in History and Representation, and in the introduction, the editors, Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, succinctly summarize the history of thinking about islands as ends or beginnings, “the detritus of crumbling continents or the seeds of new ones . . . points of ending or of origin.” Their work is important for the way in which they describe a related perception about island space in which islands are presented as isolated and delimited. On the one hand, the representation of isolation can be positive: islands are bounded, fortresses, and can “look like property.” On the other hand, isolation can be negative, where islands can appear as “traps.” 8 In nonfiction and fictional accounts of isolation, an island can be a hell of solitude. A third possibility is that European and American world travelers and writers, especially on the Pacific, tended to develop a more ameliorated image of island isolation—that is, of idyllic and paradisiacal islands. Explorers such as Louis Antoine de Bougainville and James Cook, and people in Europe and America who published, read, and elaborated upon their own and others’ exploration accounts, expressed a desire to preserve island paradises. They describe these spaces as existing outside the rush of modern development and societal ills at the same time that travel and other accounts begin to lament the islands’ inevitable decline following contact with Western/Northern culture. Several geographers, archaeologists, and anthropologists have contributed to the related idea of islands as isolated, enclosed, and therefore fragile ecologies that can be easily destroyed by outside contact. In 1999, Paul Rainbird was one of the fi rst to point out this tendency, common among novelists (his examples include Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Thomas Hardy) and island scientists. His essay is an explicit critique of the unexamined reiteration of continental island discourse in science. He points out that archaeology and anthropology have drawn on Darwinian biological history, in which islands are said to contain eccentric and archaic flora and fauna, ideas that have been subsequently and without examination applied to civilizations. Island peoples and their cultures are represented as existing outside of time. 9 Anthropologist John Terrell describes this “myth of the primitive isolate” as “the notion that ‘savage tribes’ before and after 1492 were circumscribed, timeless societies that had few except hostile dealings with one another.” 10 Arie Boomert and Alistair Bright summarize continental island discourse in the sciences thus: Islands have been seen to be characterized by “(physical) isolation, solitude, containment, boundedness and closure”; they are “strictly circumscribed units,” “symbols of (social) remoteness and exoticism,” “seen as socio-economically and politically quintessentially peripheral,” “less tainted by the ills of modernity,” and “backwaters where life assumes a less frantic pace and people are more sociable.” Anthropology has considered island societies as “bounded, self-contained, and easily manageable units,” while biogeography also

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considers islands as “bounded, isolated, fragile and variable habitats,” “little petri dishes floating in a saltwater medium.” 11 Later twentieth-century Pacific and other island theories challenge these continental representations of insular space, habitat, habitation, and culture. First, theorists of the Pacific describe multiple relations between islands and the sea. One might recall Greg Dening’s study of littoral spaces in which he emphasizes that islands, in relation to the sea, are “not pure,” their beaches are “interactive spaces” and points of transition rather than barriers, or the renowned Samoan novelist Albert Wendt, who further suggests some of the difficulties in approaching Oceania: So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free fl ight can hope . . . to grasp some of her shape, plumage and pain.12 The most extensive reconception of the Pacific in particular and island cultures in general, and a defi ning turn in island theory, appear in the writings of novelist and theorist Epeli Hau‘ofa. Beginning in the 1970s and most succinctly articulated in the 1990s, Hau‘ofa’s analyses envision islander perceptions of the sea, which, unlike continental ideas, do not think of the sea and land as opposites or perceive the sea as a dead, threatening, or uninhabitable place. Hau‘ofa’s phrase “a sea of islands” describes Oceania by taking into account the sea as much as land. Moreover, he describes the ways in which the sea is a source of sustenance and narrative, as well as a medium of communication. Scientists have begun to consider similar indigenous and historical ways of thinking about the sea and about entities such as “seascapes” and “maritime identity.” 13 Second, as we can hear in these newer descriptions of relationships between land and sea, islands in Pacific island theory are not principally thought of as immured. Hau‘ofa looks to a time prior to and even into the earlier moments of contact with European powers and fi nds the Pacific to be a place “in which peoples and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by boundaries of the kind erected much later by imperial powers.” 14 Islands are “linked by networks of exchange,” 15 networks that ultimately have an expansive effect that extends beyond the fi ligree outline of the (open) Pacific Ocean. Hau‘ofa notes that Pacific Islanders today have already moved, by the tens of thousands, doing what their ancestors had done before them: enlarging the world as they go, but on a scale not possible before. Everywhere they go, to Australia, New Zealand, Hawai‘i, mainland USA, Canada and even Europe, they strike roots in new areas, securing employment and overseas family property, expanding kinship networks through which they circulate themselves, their relatives, their material goods, and their stories all across their ocean.16

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Hau‘ofa uses the metaphor of networks, and scientists employ similar metaphors of connectedness in their analytical observations about islands. For example, several have concluded, counter to popular thinking, that “the separation of islands facilitated interaction, leading to the development of long-distance exchange and multiethnic interactions.” Terrell therefore offers a “reticulate model” for thinking about island groups, a net or network of the “ever-shifting dynamics of interaction between people (and all living organisms) over time and space,” a model characterized by “a vital dynamism.” 17 Hau‘ofa and others’ overviews from pre-imperial to postcolonial insular history have, however, been criticized for their generalizations, idealism, and transcendent gestures. Atholl Anderson, for instance, warns about “the danger of the former facile assumption of island isolation becoming replaced by a belief in the universality of interaction that is, I think, equally questionable.” Peter Lape says further that “simply discarding the idea of islands as isolated with islands as connected does not do that much to help us understand an island’s past.” 18 Instead, what appears to be coming into focus is a continuum between extreme forms of insularity, such as happened with Easter Island, and a variety of models of interisland connectedness. As Boomert and Bright point out, “instead of seeing each island as a distinct unity of study,” it might be possible to seek “a balance . . . between understanding its individual cultural development and that of its sphere of regional, often archipelagic, social interaction.” 19 Reflections on these kinds of complications of island theory may be found in Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. This study explicitly cautions against unexamined celebrations of deterritorialization. Such approbation can reflect ongoing imperial denials of indigenous claims to ownership of land, ignore the recent political development of indigenous and nationalist claims on oceanic land and seascapes, reduce the significance of forced migration, and overlook the economically and politically restricted nature of indigenous migrancy. For instance, DeLoughrey notes that today’s acclamations of movement coincide too neatly with multinational and globalizing trends of capital that seek to deny indigenous claims to islands in the Pacific. She also points out that throughout the imperial and colonial periods, “Great Britain is discursively refashioned as a repeating island throughout its colonies.” She concludes that, “Given the entwined histories of institutional and indigenous discourses of ipseity, one cannot simply position a freefloating, deconstructed, and landless indigenous nomadism in the popular vein of academic cosmopolitanism.” 20 Scientists concur on how important it has been for islanders to claim insularity and for historians of all kinds to consider islander agency more generally. Rainbird points out that, for archaeologists, “social factors cannot simply be tacked onto” biogeographical insular models. “The social context has to be the starting point.” And Boomert and Bright note that “insularity is a concept created and manipulated strategically by the islanders themselves.” 21

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In addition, while it is crucial to examine spatial paradigms in island discourse, it is also important to consider temporal factors. Margaret Jolly examines the temporal characteristics often imputed to islands, especially in relation to neocolonialist ideas about development. As Robert Young defi nes it, neocolonialism uses the argument that Western development, presented as modern and progressive, is the only solution to a temporal insularity attributed to “developing nations.” Neocolonialism presents the West as a model always in the future for non-Western cultures who, ironically, are “required to follow the changes in the west’s own ideas of how to achieve further economic development.” In the continental tradition of island theory, as we have seen, islands appear to be not only cut off from other land and people but also “places out of time.” 22 Jolly writes of this discourse: spatial language often transforms into a temporal language whereby Islanders are portrayed as stuck in the past, confi ned by the boundaries of tradition while foreigners are constructed as the agents of change and transformation. . . . Even those theories hostile to colonial and capitalist penetration can portray the process as one of a rapacious mobile capital, engulfi ng Islanders who are imaged as hapless victims, trapped in the closed inertia of community, or lost in nostalgic recollections of times past. 23 I noted at the outset of this project that postcolonialist studies of cultures, histories, and geographies can fall prey to a binary of, on one side, transnational global studies and, on the other side, resistance to largely postmodernist forms of analysis by turning to local, often materialist, investigations. I suggested instead that Sedgwick’s theorization of beside offers another path, one that can lead to approaches that have more affective and critical flexibility. I proposed further that neither a simple globalist nor a narrowly circumscribed approach is adequate to capture the attributes of antipodean discourse. On this topic, James Clifford asks: “Just how expansive can notions of indigenous or native affi liations become, before they begin to lose specificity, falling into more generalized ‘postcolonial’ discourses of displacement?” Instead, he tenders a “jagged path between the seductions of a premature, postmodern pluralism and the dangerous comforts offered by exclusivist self-other defi nitions.” 24 Island theory offers such a “jagged path” as a means to negotiate the too-frequently dichotomous ways of thinking about insular space and time (although it doesn’t always contain the harsh and combative connotations of Clifford’s articulation). It does not settle for an illusory compromise between binaries, but instead it offers the uneasy, yet also potentially empathetic, proximity of beside.

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Reticular Correspondence The following analysis of twentieth-century antipodean literature explores the tensions within ideas about islands, the resistances to continental island discourse, and the attempts to imagine other forms of island correspondences. The study of the literature looks at dissensions between the locally rooted and regionally fluid, and between acknowledgments of, on the one hand, the effect of historical exploitation in the antipodes and its present-day continuations and, on the other hand, bodies, approaches, and movements that stand beside a history of colonial and neocolonial dominance. This is not meant as a comprehensive study of twentieth-century Oceanic literature; instead, I explore a diverse selection of texts, starting with poems by the Tongan poet Konai Helu Thaman, which insist on the continuing legacy of colonialism and the influences of global economics. I continue with works, such as short stories, poems, and novels by Albert Wendt, Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, and John Puhiatau Pule, which, in diverse ways, explore Thaman’s emphasis on realism to suggest the dangers of uncritically embracing an indigenous past, provide examples of the deeply confl icted and “jagged path” between claims to the local and the influences of larger Pacific and global networks, and hint at ways of negotiating this path. I end with a discussion of select recent texts, including Hau‘ofa’s short stories, that reflect on the temporally and spatially connected nature of insularity without resorting to nostalgic forms of indigeneity that imagine themselves as clearly separate from imposed globalisms. This fi nal set of texts approaches late-twentieth century antipodean space, habitation, and correspondences in complex and comic ways. It is important to note at the outset that we can recognize one significant difference between twentieth-century antipodean discourse and earlier writings, in that global forces run through the poems and stories, but the emphasis does not fall on a center–periphery model in which Europe or America is the colonial center against or to which the authors might be said to “write back.” 25 Britain features in the stories, but the correspondence has become more complicated because the most important networks are among islands (and Australia) in the Pacific. Thaman, Wendt, and Pule emphasize Pacific interisland exchange, Pule making it literal with the section of The Shark that Ate the Sun that contains a series of letters among people in Niue, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, and elsewhere. This is an important development in the topic of antipodean correspondence in that the antipodes are no longer compared to, or—more usually—contrasted with, their global opposite, Britain. Nor is the exchange of ideas solely based on a North–South or, to recall Mai, South–North dialogue. Instead, correspondence moves in anfractuous ways and in multiple directions to make an Oceanic network. Two of Konai Helu Thaman’s poems from the 1970s might be taken as representative of a strain in antipodean literature in which the grim

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realism of present-day insularity explicitly counters and criticizes idyllic representations of Pacific island life. That is to say, the realism presents a stark object lesson for continental island discourse about Oceania, including tropicalisms about deserted and heavenly spaces, and stereotypes about primitive and tragic peoples. Thaman, who has also published studies of education in the Pacific, explores the pernicious effects of palagi (Caucasian) and other influences on indigenous life and culture. In her long poem named after the flowering tree, “Langakali,” the speaker complains that “The masters of our land / Have sold our souls / To the new religion, moneylenders / Experts and the watchdogs of Vegas.” Instead of nature encountering the flower on the island, “Broken beer bottles / Greet the incoming tides.” At the close of the poem, the speaker wishes for a canoe in order to “join / The fi sh of the ocean” so that “together we will weep / For the works of the night,” a desire to unite with Oceania away from the corrupted land, and also a Biblical allusion that references an earlier moment within the poem in which an old man rows out to sea in a canoe on an ominously stormy day. 26 Thaman’s “Sunday Sadness” also expresses bitter regret about the current state of Tongan culture and includes a note of nostalgia, but instead of nostalgia for a real and spiritual space such as the sea, in this case, it is a desire for an unrecoverable past. The lyric “Sunday Sadness” begins and ends with commands, which bracket a descriptive passage between. The poem starts with an exhortation to the reader to “Smell the odour” of the Sunday oven, which is, however, “Empty, the coals smoking / From killer waters,” suggesting the actual water used to extinguish the fi re and also that the “waters” are somehow poisonous because of a specific cause like nuclear testing in the Pacific or some more general pernicious pollutant. The speaker then observes the “day’s haunting eerie idleness” that “Envelopes” her father’s leftover breadfruit crusts, which his “teethless gums” have merely further “Scarred.” The people welcome imported New Zealand mutton because it is better than the “Tinned ‘Ocean’ fi sh,” the ironic quotation marks around “Ocean” further reinforced by the fact that the tinned fi sh is nevertheless the “Saviour of now dormant fi shermen / And statistical farmers.” She continues to note that manioc (cassava) was once resorted to only in times of famine but is now “daily bread.” The present-day, bleak context of need and near-starvation are in sharp contrast, Thaman emphasizes with stressed syllables, to the “The good rich island earth” of the past, “Of yam harvests / And plentiful Sundays.” She concludes with the command to the reader to “look” through the fi re’s smoke “At grandpa’s ghost weeping / Quietly cursing / The forbidding sultry silence!” 27 Like Thaman’s poems, Albert Wendt’s “Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree” includes grim realism. “Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree,” one of Wendt’s earliest and best-known stories, was fi rst published in 1974 and then enlarged and integrated into the novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree, in 1979. Wendt’s narrative

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risks a deep pessimism about the present and a nativist turn to an indigenous past but, unlike Thaman’s poems, it ultimately turns away from seeing the present and the past as temporally and culturally cut off from each other. The fraught difficulties of connecting with people, times, and cultures is indeed a topic Wendt explores in many of his stories, but in Leaves, the tone more than anything else in the story turns the theme to one of inter- and inner-island connectedness rather than insularity. However, Wendt’s island networks are unidealized, “jagged.” The novel tells the story of three generations of a Samoan aiga (family), following the story of father, son, and grandson. “Flying-Fox” is the central fi rst-person narrative and is told in the voice of Pepesa or Pepe, the son. It follows Pepe’s story of leaving his home village and moving to Apia, the capital of Samoa, and in the process struggling to break away from his authoritarian and physically violent father while remaining confl icted about deeper ties to his family, his village, and the fa‘a Samoa, the Samoan way. The novel, and the developed novella within it in particular, excoriate the pernicious effects of colonialism, particularly Christianity, racism, and social snobbery, which dominate Samoan culture in many of Wendt’s stories and poems. Palagis are typically racist and naïve. For example, Mr. Peddle, Pepe’s headmaster at the school he attends, has tropicalist fantasies about Samoans, describing them to Pepe as “a very good people, laughing all the time and happy.” He specifically voices neocolonialist expectations of the sort Robert Young describes, saying that “We are here to help you Samoans fi nd your feet in the modern world.” Pepe challenges him, asking, “Why do you think we cannot rule our own country?” 28 Tourists are not much better. In an example of postcolonial mimicry, Pepe and his friends trick American tourists into pitying them and purchasing “ancient necklaces” they claim are made of turtle shell that come from their ancestors but are actually made from toothbrush handles. Pepe, the narrator, reflects on this moment and bitterly complains that the New Zealand government, which runs Samoa, wants the tourists to come. He foresees a future in which: The tourist trade is going to be the new missionary trade, only this time the Bible is to be the Yankee dollar, and the priests are to be the tourist owners, and the altar of sacrifice is to be our people, and the choirs are to be “natives” in “genuine Samoan dress” from Hollywood, singing “genuine Samoan songs” from Hawaii, and dancing “genuine Samoan dances” like the hula.29 At the same time, it is frequently difficult to perceive the negative influences as wholly separate and imposed on Samoan society because colonial hegemonies are integrated into all the cultures represented within the novel. When, at one point in the story, Pepe is imprisoned for burning a church and

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robbing his father’s store, the palagi police commissioner has him swear on the Bible that he committed the crimes alone. Pepe, wanting to protect his friends and also to claim responsibility for his actions and thus signal his break from his father and all he represents, places his hand on it and says, “I swear by your almighty God and your almighty Book that I robbed your store and bashed your police.” The repetitions of the possessive pronoun reinforce the equivalences among the Bible, his father’s store, the police, and the commissioner. His father, Tauilopepe or Tauilo, is implicitly included in the list in the form of “your store” and is cast as an amalgam of religious hypocrisy, authoritarianism, and violence. Early in the story, Tauilo arranges a marriage between his daughter and an old local minister, recently widowed, which is one of the causes of Pepe’s mother’s deep sadness, and therefore Pepe’s anger and rebellion against his father. The action that follows is about the difficulties of resolving confl icts that Pepe and his family embody rather than any simple binary between indigenous culture and external, palagi, Christian authority. Also, although generational differences are important, they do not wholly account for the confl icts. For instance, after Pepe moves to Apia at the other end of the island, each time he returns to his village, he says, “it seems like I am returning to something less important, like a step back.” When he becomes, by reputation, “the most favoured son of Sapepe,” he does not want to feel or experience separation from his people, but “even my friends treat me differently like someone important and above them, and my loneliness is deeper.” 30 He feels remorse and anger over his mother spiritually dying under the weight of his father and thus commits the crime against his father’s business and church. He eventually claims he is his own god, a position of authority against the Christian god, yet he also despairingly describes himself as a ghost, “the aitu the missionaries banished.” He also claims to embody a past that the majority of his people will not understand, a situation he cannot change. 31 This sense of isolation is common to many of Wendt’s novels and poems. For example, in Pouliuli, Wendt explores a series of binaries: Christian religion versus Samoan religion, the fa’a Samoa versus palagi culture, the dynamics and constraints within an aiga, and disorder and carnival versus civilization. He develops the complications of these opposing topics through the figure of Faleasa Osovae who, at the opening of Pouliuli, wakes up to an overwhelming sense of revulsion at the way the world has become around him, and he leads a rebellion against the established ways with darkly satiric and tragic consequences. Like Pepe, Faleasa gains power and new insights through his outsider status, but the cost is of generalized rebellion, cycles of revenge, existential isolation, and identification with Pouliuli, “the Great Darkness out of which we came and to which we must all return.” 32 However, as Paul Sharrad has written, even though Wendt has “a reputation for unremitting bleakness,” he

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uses the experiential gap opened up in society, culture, and the psyche by modernity (and its particularly abrupt manifestation as European colonialism) to explore possibilities of escape from and resistance to totalising systems of knowledge and power. Yet, he continues, Wendt complicates this idea of a space “outside” hegemony because the seeds for confl ict and decay are dormant in the social fabric long before anyone goes to Apia or meets white people. . . . Western colonial modernity . . . merely exacerbates, beyond levels of communal tolerance, stresses that are inherent in Osovae’s traditional society.33 To return to “Flying-Fox,” which represents this complicated “bleakness,” at points the story holds out a nostalgic prospect for Pepe to escape detrimental hegemonies and to return to his home village. Most important for Pepe in this respect is his connection with Toasa, a friend of his grandfather and father. Toasa is the one who tells Pepe about the god for whom he is named, Sapepe, and, when Toasa dies, Pepe is devastated. He calls him “Father of my life” and “The Sacred Warrior who taught me the ways of the sea and bush and men, who talked of our world as old as Sapepe memory.” Now “He is dead, the Banyan Tree, and I am the shell that will walk the earth like the shadowless moon.” 34 A sinister alternative to being connected to the village of his past is therefore a kind of existential insularity, a separation from everything, and Pepe’s important friend Tagata represents that isolation. Near the end of Leaves, Tagata commits suicide, hanging himself after revisiting an area of Samoa made up of volcanic lava, a barren landscape that, for Tagata, has become “the only true thing left” and the place where he “found the self again.” 35 However, as Sharrad suggests of Wendt’s stories generally, the novel ultimately moves away from proposing a nostalgic or nihilistic solution. Pepe is able to form an alternative aiga with his friends. He eventually has a child and marries, and the child seems to hold out the potential for a Samoan culture that will be different from Pepe’s past and all it represents. The novel is not idealistic; there are hints that Pepe will repeat many of his father’s violent and destructive characteristics. However, he seems to have broken the cycle of guilt and revenge from his past. At one point in the story, he says that he and his father are merely “strangers” and that he does “not hate him any more.” 36 Being a stranger is of course a problem in Leaves. The gestures toward looking nostalgically to the past as represented by Toasa, or to the future in the form of a son, all the while characterizing the present as only existentially a form of self-annihilating isolation, suggest that the story is caught in a familiar bind of devaluing the present and idealizing the past and future. However, one of the most important features of “Flying-Fox” is that it presents its

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story self-consciously, which has the effect of forcing the reader to maintain a critical distance from the main character, the story, and the nostalgic– idealistic approaches to the past and future. This self-consciousness is more than a literary device, and instead has implications for the theme of separation, an awareness and use of literary form for political and historical ends that is typical of much postcolonial literature. “Flying-Fox” and Leaves of the Banyan Tree as a whole are self-conscious about language—here, English, the colonizer’s language. The story initially suggests that language causes the separation Pepe feels from his village. At one point a schoolteacher humiliates him in his classes until he pronounces English in a more standard way. However, Pepe has already mastered language; he and his friends use it as a weapon against their enemies and as a tool to increase their own spirits. Humor is important here. After all, Toasa tells Pepe that his namesake god, Sapepe, is the god of “courage and cunning and humor.” 37 The most complex example of language and humor begins “FlyingFox” and therefore frames the whole story. The narrator paints the bleakest picture of Samoa, for the story of Pepe’s life is told in retrospect in the voice of the older Pepe, who is in hospital dying of tuberculosis. The mature Pepe spends his days looking back over his life, observing the doctor and nurse, and also looking out his window to the crematorium where two members of the hospital staff “throw white parcels” from surgery into the fi re. He describes the “Stink of burning meat, guts, bits and pieces of people,” and at night the sound of dogs who “hang around the urn and rubbish bins and yelp and howl and fi ght over scraps of food and people.” He says, “I wake up in a sweat and remember the two old men and the urn and the fi re and get scared.” Yet within this nightmare landscape, Pepe expresses no regrets, and he links the death he is experiencing with writing. The view out the window, the view back on his past, and the story he tells are linked. In the process he manages to include a humorous, ironic attitude toward what is going on around him. Here at the beginning he jokes that he tried to write a poem, a “ three-line masterpiece,” but failed, so he has decided to write a “ novel about me.” This autobiographical story, he explains, will be in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson and, as “a palagi tourist once told me . . . honest.” This suggestion of a political interaction with literary tradition about the islands and about the present, he says further, means he is a “teller of tall-tales,” and he advises his readers or listeners to read what he calls his “humble testament with fi fteen grains of Epsom salts.” He also asks his readers to “excuse the very poor grammar,” only half-seriously indicating the fact that he didn’t have much formal education. He also expresses a skeptical attitude toward the self-interest of other Samoans who go overseas and return with degrees in “themselves, and more themselves.” He claims instead he is “local-born, local-bred, local-educated” and that he’ll “write this novel about the self” “English-style. Vaipe-style. My style.” 38

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These hyphenated paired words, almost but not quite integrated compounds, leavened with dark humor, are the lens through which the reader perceives the story. The story is in English, but a vernacular that is resistant to English conventions at the same time. Thus, at the end of “Flying-Fox,” when this framing device returns, the narrator also returns to the humorous tone and suggests that he has moved away from the world of Sapepe, “which my father destroyed,” to a space where he has “found laughter.” Almost at death himself, Pepe has the nighttime vision of an apocalypse for all the places and people in his life and of “Tagata laughing as he hung from the freedom tree.” 39 Sharrad writes that, in Wendt’s career, he: has fi rst moved to an individualist position as a result of schooling and expatriation, and then has sought a way back into communal belonging that wouldn’t compromise his freedom to speak honestly nor deny his art. This meant, fi rst, seeking a kind of existentialism that did not mean total alienation or aestheticist isolation and, second, a form that might hold out the prospect of unity while realistically delineating the forces against it. He had to “forge” new myths and imagined worlds in Samoa in order to hold “together disparate aspects of reality without melding them into any false uniformity, social or aesthetic.” 40 Sharrad’s astute observations are perhaps not meant to imply a chronological change in Wendt’s work because here, near the beginning of his career, we already fi nd the author exploring the negatively and yet also helpfully “destroyed” spaces of characters’ lives that connect them to the forces within society. That these forces strain against each other means both confl ict for the characters and also an island space, often a humorous if sometimes sardonic space, where correspondence among parts of society enable personal understanding. John Puhiatau Pule’s 1992 The Shark that Ate the Sun is a novel about a family from Niue who move to New Zealand and their experiences living there amid discrimination and poverty. Pule continues these themes in his paintings, which appropriate features of Niuean hiapo (tapa, cloth) artworks while also referring to growing up in Auckland with its brutal problems. Like Wendt’s writings, Pule’s novel centers on the tensions of negotiating between local and other spaces, but in Pule’s text, the other spaces are not existentially or philosophically isolated places but real islands. The Shark that Ate the Sun is a Niuean epic in which a principal topic is the negotiation between life in the new country and memories and continuing interactions with Niuean personal and national histories. The novel is written in a number of different styles: lyrical, spiritual, epistolary, mythological, and social-realist. It includes sections written in verse and some passages in the Niuean language. The central character and narrator is a boy, Fisi, growing up in Auckland.

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The Shark that Ate the Sun focuses on interisland correspondence in more than one sense, and it is therefore a prime example of recent critical rethinkings, here in narrative form, about islands. After a Prologue, Part One is largely a series of family letters that demonstrate an interisland network among Niue and various suburbs in Aotearoa/New Zealand, a network riven by economic hardship, racism, and more. These letters register the gradual movement of family members to New Zealand. One of the fi rst to move is the father, Puhia, who is representative of a generation of Niueans who relocate and are caught between a Niue of the past that they cannot return to and a New Zealand that is represented as a future to which they do not belong. When Puhia arrives in New Zealand, he arrives almost penniless, having spent most of his savings on alcohol. He gets a job and “His cynicism of the past years about this country [Aotearoa/New Zealand] suddenly vanished, as if wiping the sweat of his forehead could erase the past in one sweep.” 41 This kind of thinking about Aotearoa/New Zealand is idealistic, of course, and Puhia’s disappointment and rage recur throughout The Shark and adversely affect those around him, especially his son, whom he beats: Behind Puhia was a cruel and unkind man, who in his reality was sick of life, what it did to him, bringing him all the way here to this spot, on this vast land, to be housed in a box. So far away from home. The past had caught up with him, entering him slowly and unawares. It buried his mind in a haze of ghosts and curses.42 Pule explores the life of Niueans in Auckland, including the work and pubs on Broadway in the city’s Newmarket section, and this provides him with another opportunity to reflect on Niuean attitudes toward the past: Broadway had one mouth that sucked everything that wanted to forget the past, who were afraid rather than hopeful, as Niue it seemed was a place to leave behind and take on a new identity. Niue was old birth and had felt an early death but yet was not completely dead, just suffering in the new mire and industry, just a name that maybe each Niuean was ashamed to be a Niuean, or a Savage. They hated to be known as Savages, were ashamed of a past that is nothing compared to the structure of another culture or a way of life that would destroy the spirit of Polynesians, the fi rst modern transmigration in the 50s and 60s to work in factories. Toward the end of the novel, the narrator notes that the family has become scattered . . . [b]ecause Niue was forgotten, and those who did well lived a healthy life, and adapted to the new life of the Palagi without too much pain. The old ways of Niue were slowly losing, work and money was the

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main deal in life. Customs were replaced with handshakes. Some just lived and lived for working, buying, and you could see the years carve deep lines in their tired faces. The eyes are the fi rst to look like grey clouds, tiredness surfaces, sinks and resurfaces again when the memory is fi nal and Niue is just a place where one’s umbilical cord is buried; a place where the tupuna [ancestors] lived just to give birth to us, and we don’t look back, because to look back at Niue is to see boredom and poverty.43 The Shark that Ate the Sun contains a tone and themes that are very similar to Thaman’s and Wendt’s sense of despair at the loss of indigenous ways and the exploration of the terrible bind of moving forward into a future of displacement. However, Pule’s novel is also dynamic in the sense that he registers the changing nature of Niue and New Zealand and thereby challenges this kind of problematic nostalgia. Even though the father and others might be, in a sense, the victims of change and pawns in antipodean interisland economics in which people are forced to move to another country while struggling to sustain family life, Pule emphasizes that the past to which they aspire is one they never had. He is also careful to note that the future that they fail to achieve is not closed to everyone. At the beginning in the letters, Puhia addresses his mother and discusses the idea of moving to New Zealand in the context of a longer Niuean history and Niue’s overall community. He says: You know the life cord has been cut, and only the ocean in your heart can remember the old days, the days of white people who told you dancing is the Devil’s way of mocking God, and singing the ancient song that you learned from your mother was considered blasphemy. Where was your voice then. It is too late, another world has you now. Although he expresses nostalgic regret and even anger over the loss of indigenous ways, the statement of fact that ends the retrospection is telling. A little later, Puhia seems again, and with the same sense of unease, to come to accept the process of change. He tells his sister that, although it may be possible to remain in Niue, he can see a future when “the villages will be empty and more will be in New Zealand than Niue. Let it be. Of course I am afraid, but if I have to go to NZ with my family I will, it is a powerful force and unstoppable.” 44 Pule’s narrator mourns the life already seemingly lost in Niue’s past and the traditions that are gradually being replaced by consumerist New Zealand life, but he is also careful not to generalize about all Niueans, and he does not idealize life on Niue. For example, independence for Niue is seen as less than ideal. When Niue achieves independence in 1974, Puhia’s response is that:

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The Idea of the Antipodes Self-government is a habit designed to castrate the indigenous people. When the excitement dies down to a flame, it [Niue] will be drowned by loans from other countries. Then we will become dependent on NZ, a sad fish on a steel hook too ugly to be brought to the surface.45

In addition, the boy character, Fisi, seems different from his father. Though he struggles in many ways, he fi nds connections with some family members, with fellow children, and with a spiritual life that sustains him. The Samoan-American writer Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard’s 2001 Alchemies of Distance also registers the deleterious effects of neocolonialism. However, her autobiographical collection of interconnected poems and prose passages acknowledges the complexly imbricated nature of her life without resorting to a desire for a past that has been lost. Sinavaiana-Gabbard achieves this in an even more resolute manner than Thaman, Wendt, and Pule. Instead, more active politics and a situated feminism informs her Alchemies, an anthology that describes the author’s life as the daughter of parents who, early in their children’s lives in the 1950s, move to Florida because her father was a member of the American military. In her introduction, already merely acknowledged as “a kind of genealogy” rather than a claim to any fully realized whakapapa, Sinavaiana-Gabbard states clearly that “my affi nity for poetry derived mostly as a kind of guerilla action to survive childhood, and come to think of it, everything else since then,” and later in Alchemies, she claims the model of Nafanua, Samoan goddess of war, as a formative discovery in her narrative. She describes some of the struggles she had to go through in an early prose essay in the book, which include growing up “colored” in the South in the 1950s, indicating “colored” in quote marks because she was not really counted as “colored” nor white in the South. Instead, in a thoughtful play on the idea of citizenship and belonging, as well as acknowledging the segregated nature of where she lived, she describes her siblings as “Seven brown kids with uneasy visas to the white side of that Florida town in 1954.” 46 Sinavaiana-Gabbard’s turn to politics and the less singular aspects of her identity can be read as a consequence of growing up Samoan in Florida, moving to San Francisco in the 1960s, and at the end of that decade, moving back to Samoa for thirty years before eventually joining the faculty at the University of Hawai‘i. However, rather than characterizing her move to Samoa as a potentially idealizing journey back toward her roots, Sinavaiana-Gabbard emphasizes the special role of poetry in teaching her, as she says in the prose sections that begin her book, “something about distance.” This idea (along with the opening line of a poem in the collection) provides the title of the book Alchemies of Distance. The “distance” she indicates is the distance from people and places she knows, and while she acknowledges loss and “what is left behind on the familiar shore” in the moments she has voyaged overseas from America and from Samoa, she also embraces a distancing effect that

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enables “perspective” and “opened up this space of distance between us and that left behind.” This space is something the poet can claim as her own, and Sinavaiana-Gabbard thinks of it in terms of the Samoan term vā, “the space between things,” for which she gives the example of a garden, “that patch of ground between us,” which “we cultivate.” 47 Whereas in Wendt and Pule the main characters and their children strive for, but rarely truly inhabit, physical and cultural places in the antipodes, for Sinavaiana-Gabbard, the in-between, unsettled spaces are the poet’s fluid habitat. For example, in the poem “afiafi,” the narrator describes returning home along a road in Apia at sundown, all people and activity slowly retreating until she is left alone with the ancestral ghosts, “only aitu afoot now.” This would seem potentially a moment for reminiscence, but instead the speaker maintains attention on the present, describing the moment as a time that is the ghosts’ “favorite hour & mine / for marginal beings to patrol our borders, / leaving all others to cluster / indoors.” She celebrates the time of the evening when light and activities are not clearly in one place or another, but does so not without some care. The aitu and she still watch over the borders, and the poem in fact ends with an expression of desire for the safety of the “indoors,” which “beckon us hurry into lamplight.” 48 Likewise, the poem “war news,” set in 1988, also pays attention to the in-between space of island life. In the poem, Sinavaiana-Gabbard juxtaposes a domestic scene in Samoa in which the speaker does her washing while a flock of hens and their chicks feed on the ground nearby with the “war news” of the title. While she washes her clothes on the “bowled lava” rocks of the lagoon, a radio announces the U.S. shooting down of the passenger airliner over the Persian Gulf. The radio flatly reports (though Sinavaiana-Gabbard uses all caps to relay the message), “290 PEOPLE DEAD. PRESIDENT REAGAN DECLINES TO COMMENT. VICE-PRESIDENT BUSH DECLINES TO ISSUE APOLOGY.” Here the poem contains the dark undercurrents, and even the bleak imagery, of Thaman’s and Wendt’s work. Soon, attention shifts back to the narrator’s immediate scene, describing that, in the “mangrove swamp, shadowy wings” of a heron, “once / god of war,” “disturb the dark air,” and she concludes the poem with the picture of the heron taking off “to survey the day’s grim business / out across the mudflats, where pigs / love to root at low tide.” 49 However, whereas “war news” does not shy away from acknowledging the realities of current island life, the main question it answers is where this current reality takes place. The central image of the poem might be the local, the chickens and the hens teaching the young to extract coconut from a shell while the chicks “listen rapt,” “one foot each / planted in today’s lesson.” However, like the speaker herself, who is “glad for small discoveries,” the poem’s theme is that one exists in the in-between world—in this case the space between local Samoa and international politics. 50 In an article on Oceanic cultural production, Sinavaiana-Gabbard confi rms this idea, saying

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“Issues of displacement are up close and personal.” 51 She thereby consistently refuses an easy position and concentrates on a present space between local and global without erasing the differences between the two. The feet are both in “today’s lesson,” uneasily straddling two worlds that comprise the “up close and personal” world of immediate surroundings. The immediate antipodean space in Sinavaiana-Gabbard’s poems is concurrently local and global. In terms of temporality, a longing for an irretrievable past exists in her poems, but the narrator insists on the paramount significance of the present. The antipodean networks she explores, therefore, are riven with forces, but ones that do not overwhelm the speaker. She has, at one moment, to “patrol” borders, while at the same time, she is able to inhabit the border zone. The approach to these spaces is one of acknowledgment of living alongside more than one space, a clear-eyed description that suggests a paradoxical uneasy surety. Surety is also the voice of many of Epeli Hau‘ofa’s theoretical and analytical writings. His nonfiction prose includes three books (one an ethnographic study of a village in Papua New Guinea) and many essays. When we turn to Hau‘ofa’s fiction, we encounter additional discursive styles. His fictional texts include a novella, Kisses in the Nederends, and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Tikongs, which will be the main focus here. In Tales, Hau‘ofa examines and exposes the hypocrisies of a fictional antipodean island called Tiko. This setting of a utopian and dystopian insular space means that Hau‘ofa’s short stories may be placed in the tradition of speculative writings about the antipodes like the ancient, medieval, and Early Modern discourses, as well as in the tradition of utopian fiction about islands, including More’s eponymous work and its many descendants. Like them, Hau‘ofa’s creation of a fictional island affords him freedom to explore wonders and to critique continental island discourse. In what follows, we will fi rst explore the space of the fictional Tiko. Hau‘ofa’s representation of insularity is one that, like Sinavaiana-Gabbard’s poetry, insists on the global and the local, the inseparably mixed nature of island life, especially in the sense that the global is transformed within local space. Second, we will examine the methods and multiple targets of Hau‘ofa’s satire, for Tales of the Tikongs is full of ingenious and hilarious mockery. This satire is aimed at continental island discourse that denigrates island spaces, tropicalist fantasies, and islanders’ internalizations of these discourses. Finally, we will look at discourses and tones that stand beside the satirical, interacting with satire’s pointed criticisms and insights. These discourses and tones in Hau‘ofa’s stories do not “transcend” the immediate and bodily, as one critic has suggested. 52 Instead, they remain focused on the local, a local however, that on this fictional island is crossed by international networks. In addition to these spatial and satirical concerns, we will discover that ideas about time, history, and tradition in the short stories suggest that antipodeans would be misguided

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to think of the past as an ideal or somehow pure; consequently, the present is not a fall from this earlier state but requires a different and more “jagged” approach. In terms of location, Tiko might be in Oceania, but the reader of Tales is warned against trying to track down Tiko with any specificity, thus enlargening the target of its satire to include continental ideas about islands in general. We are told that an inhabitant, a Tikong, is “a citizen of a tiny country, so small that mankind is advised not to look for it on a classroom globe for it will only search in vain.” The comic concreteness of the reference to the “classroom globe” suggests limited and predisposed yet ubiquitous and casual ways of thinking about and representing antipodean islands, one of several references in the stories to these kinds of ideologies. Cartographers, we are told, leave Tiko off maps “because they can’t be bothered to look for a dot sufficiently small to represent it faithfully.” That is, the mapmakers and their ways of representing landmasses are the problem, as is a certain continental attitude that smaller islands don’t count. 53 Also, within the space of the mythical Tikong land, ideas and objective realities about islands collide; indeed, the possibility of objectivity on and about an island such as Tiko is called into question. In the context of a discussion of a court case in Tiko, the narrator of the opening story of the collection, “The Winding Road to Heaven,” explains why truth is complicated. Playing on the continental stereotype of insular truth systems being primitive or inscrutable, only what he calls “uninitiated foreigners” suggest that Tiko is a “nation of liars.” On the contrary, on Tiko: [t]ruth comes in portions, some large, some small, but never whole. Like our ancestors we are expert tellers of half-truths, quarter-truths, and one-percent truths. . . . [T]elling less than a one-percent truth is telling lies, which is almost impossible. . . . Those who believe that truth, like beauty, is straight and narrow should not visit our country or they will be led up the garden path or sold down the river. . . . Truth is flexible and can be bent this way so and that way so; it can be stood on its head, be hidden in a box, and be sat upon. One character alone, the narrator continues, “is the only teller of big truths in the island,” and he treads the straight and narrow path, followed by no one because that path exists entirely in his head. Most real roads on our islands are very narrow, very crooked, and full of pot holes. . . . . There are a few straight roads with no pot holes, but they are all in the bush where they serve no good purpose. The Good Book says the honest man walks that straight and narrow path, but alas! our straight roads are much too wide; and

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The Idea of the Antipodes that is why they are used mainly by thieves helping themselves to their neighbours’ gardens.

Even the clergy are not exempt from the problems of Tiko’s geography since: These holy men live in villages with paths so narrow, crooked, and slippery that only one villager at a time can walk safely on them. If on a dark and moonless night two people walk on the same path from opposite directions there is bound to be an accident or something worse. On one such dark and moonless night two travellers of the opposite sex walked on the same path from opposite directions. One was the local clergyman. . . . 54 Tales of the Tikongs’ satire is only in part aimed at continental island discourses about antipodean islands; it also addresses islanders’ attitudes toward their country and culture that often ironically reflect Northwestern tropicalisms. Hau‘ofa uses many satirical techniques to poke fun at both targets: word repetition, syntactical oversymmetry, ironic use of clichés, and the making literal of metaphors (truth can be “hidden in a box” and “sat upon”). Elsewhere he uses exaggeration, alliteration, parodic initial capitalization of people’s ridiculous titles and offices, and a mock high style or a mix of styles so that high and low styles are incongruously brought together. A lot of the humor contains sexual innuendo and borders on the carnivalesque, as in the title of Hau‘ofa’s novel, Kisses in the Nederends, whose plot consists of the main character searching for a cure for an excruciating pain in his ass. Rod Edmond, in a study that uses Mikhail Bakhtin, has called Hau‘ofa’s writing “serious comic” and suggests Hau‘ofa is “laughing seriously.” 55 The most commonly used technique is inversion, with Hau‘ofa playfully, and with a strict logic, returning to the idea of the antipodes and antipodeans upside down that Plato scorned at the outset of ideas about the region and its peoples, but which much continental island ideas still hold as the dominant way to think about literature “down under.” As an example of many of these techniques, for instance, in one story, an absurdly named advisor from England, “Mr. Charles Edward George Higginbotham,” is sent out to help the developing Tiko. He is paid a generous salary, we are told for living away from the sweetness of home, for being deprived of the civilising influence of television, for the inconvenience of having to live with cockroaches, rats, and scrawny dogs, for the exposure of refi ned, sensitive skin to mosquitoes, bugs, and sandfl ies, for risking contraction of such foreign diseases as cholera, typhoid, and the clap and, fi nally, for the danger of being mauled by insatiable native nymphomaniacs. 56

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Colonial administrations and aid groups are also frequent targets of the satire. Hau‘ofa is prescient in comically deriding neocolonialism in its form of foreign investment and aid. Here the various advisors, administrators, and do-gooders are more likely to come from the antipodean region than they are to come directly from Britain. In one place, “Mr. Merv Dolittle” arrives from Canberra, Australia, to try to improve Tikong productivity. Hau‘ofa cleverly plays here and elsewhere on the stereotype of islander laziness. Mr. Merv Dolittle visits one workplace to fi nd the boss, Sione Falesi, and his secretary playing cards. Outraged, he decides his administrative role is to get Tikongs to work more, which only makes the whole population of Tiko turn deaf. 57 In another place, Hau‘ofa shows some of the terrible effects of misplaced ideas about development. The most vicious character in the whole collection is “Alvin (Sharky) Lowe of Alice Springs, Australia,” who is described as “a matey-matey sort of bloke who wanted to be known simply as Sharky,” and who had experience “handling natives in New Guinea, Thursday Island, and in a certain humpy settlement outside his gentle hometown.” Mr. Lowe forces Tikongs to accept development loans while patronizing them with Pidgin English. It turns out that Sharky is helping himself all along, while at the same time pretending to assist the fishermen, and in the end, the Tikongs he “helps” are wise enough to avoid the assistance they’re offered. 58 Many stories satirize the Christian missionary and evangelical presence in the culture. In fact, the collection of Tales of the Tikongs opens with the idea that, despite the injunction to work six days and rest on the seventh, Tiko does the opposite. “The Seventh and Other Days” explores this antipodean inversion to its logical conclusion through hyperbole and comic generalizations. Hau‘ofa also appropriates and answers stereotypes about easygoing Pacific Island life and indolent inhabitants: When Jehovah created the Universe in six days and rested on the Seventh, He said it was good and that Man must so regulate his periods of work and rest. The children of Abraham observed the rule, and Christians everywhere do likewise; everywhere, that is, except in the little land of Tiko . . . This doesn’t mean that Tiko works seven days or even five days a week. No. In order to know its ways of doing things one has to fi nd out fi rst in which direction the Good Lord moves and then think of the opposite of that movement. The Lord moves one way, followed by Christians everywhere, and Tiko goes in the opposite direction, all on its own. Thus if the Lord works six days and rests on the Seventh, Tiko rests six days and works on the Seventh. The narrator explains, helpfully, that this situation has come about because the inhabitants of Tiko work so hard praying on Sunday that they need such a large amount of rest. He concludes that “throughout the Seventh Day the Lord is praised, the Lord is flattered, and the Lord is begged. Though

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perhaps the Lord doesn’t hear if it’s His day off.” Similarly, in the story “Old Wine,” people forgive each other on Tiko in an absurd extension of Christian charity: “everyone forgives everything all the time; and everyone forgives things to come and things that have passed.” Indeed, the narrative concludes with the observations that: not so long ago, when five very, very important men discovered that they had together helped themselves to half a million dollars of public money, to which they had no right to help themselves, they prayed for God’s forgiveness, they forgave each other, and they neither had to resign from their very important jobs nor return any money to anyone. In the same story, the main character, Hiti George VI, at the age of twenty, graduates from high school with the three top prizes: “fi rst in the class, fi rst in goodness, and fi rst in Scriptural knowledge.” Unfortunately (and the repetition of “fi rst” almost prepares us for it), Hiti falls when he sees “the pleasure of things neither so good nor so pure” and begins “tasting forbidden fruits and sowing wild seeds. He tasted and sowed so much that within five years he had sired nine lovely children by seven former virgins.” 59 Tales of the Tikongs also satirizes the process of decolonization and the fetishizing of traditional Tikong culture. As Edward Watts and others have written, Hau‘ofa is critical of “assimilationists” and “neotraditionalists.” 60 The title of one story, “The Second Coming,” alludes, of course, to the Apocalypse, but in Hau‘ofa’s hands, the story is about Tiko gaining independence but eventually being recolonized in a different form. The story’s opening use of high-flown rhetoric, revolutionary clichés, archaisms, and elaborate syntactical structure inflates the prose and the occasion to vertiginous heights: On the day Tiko gained her independence from the shackles of colonialism His Excellency the Paramount Chief proclaimed in no uncertain terms the immediate cessation of all undue exploitation of the citizens of the balmy isles by the running dogs of Imperialism and Capitalism. In the Historical Proclamation, which has since been immortalised in five fi ne songs composed by Tiko’s most eminent wordsmiths, His Excellency also laid down many other wise edicts, but the one which held Sailosi Atiu’s attention, raised his hopes, and has since guided his destiny, as well as that of his beloved country, was the statement that henceforth the direction of National Development towards Tiko taking its rightful place among the nations of the Free World would rest in indigenous hands and no others. The story proceeds by tracing the character Sailosi Atiu’s rise to power after the Proclamation. A former assistant of “the imperial running dog Mr. Eric Hobsworth-Smith,” who is forced to leave the country, Sailosi assumes the

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director’s position of “the Bureau for the Preservation of Traditional Culture and Essential Indigenous Personality.” Unfortunately, Sailosi realizes he has “learned much, nay, too much” from Mr. Hobsworth-Smith from previously working there, emulating him in dress, manners, and speech to such an extent that he was taken for “a cultured English gentleman of impeccable lineage” we are told, “or so the Governor would exclaim in a tone that was only just perceptibly questioning.” He decides he must purge himself of these “pernicious imperial influences” and seek “the restoration and preservation of his essential indigenous personality.” Hau‘ofa paints a portrait of a confused hypocrite, who also forces others to abandon their influenced ways. The story offers, however, a further twist on the absurdity of Sailosi’s attempts to force everyone to get in touch with his or her “essential indigenous personality.” The effect of Sailosi’s efforts is to cause the middle classes to flee the country, so much so that members of “the former imperial countries, having lost the world” (Hau‘ofa casually throws in), start returning to Tiko. Advisors, aid workers, and other experts flock to the island so that “There was no dearth of expatriates ready to descend on the realm to delocalise and deindigenise it.” They have little effect and are therefore tolerated while Sailosi’s efforts continue. Unfortunately, Sailosi has trouble recruiting and retaining a suitable deputy until he goes on vacation, only to return to fi nd Eric Hobsworth-Smith in his office as his new assistant. When Sailosi complains to his superior (the “Chief Thinking Officer”), the latter tells Sailosi that Eric is a “reformed running dog,” and eventually Sailosi suffers a breakdown while Eric returns to running the Bureau.61 The character of Manu appears in nearly all the stories. He is a combination of author-like observer of Tikong activities (sometimes taking on the role of narrator), picaresque outsider, and cynical commentator. The dark tone he sometimes interjects into the stories—a tone prevalent in Thaman, Wendt, and Pule—fi nds expression only in a few places in Tales of the Tikongs. For example, “The Glorious Pacific Way,” which concludes the collection, squarely focuses on aid societies and the processes of getting aid and development. It concerns the appropriately named Ole Pasifi kiwei, a collector of oral traditions who, for the last seven years, has painstakingly recorded the oral traditions of Tiko in numerous exercise books. This character might be another representative of Hau‘ofa himself, given that the author started his career as an anthropologist, worked for various governmental and educational institutions, and founded cultural organizations—most notably the Oceania Centre for Arts and Culture up until his death in 2009. Ole has to learn the arduous and exhaustingly bureaucratic processes involved in getting money, even though all he wants is a typewriter and some fi ling cabinets to store the stories. One of the fi rst lessons Ole learns from one of the officials in the government agency hyperbolically and satirically labeled with the acronym MERCY (the Ministry of Environment, Religion, Culture, and Youth), is to “remember that in dealing with foreigners, never appear

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too smart; it’s better that you look humble and half-primitive.” Eventually, Ole receives funding to attend a training course in Manila and to buy a typewriter in Sydney on his return, only the latter of which is of any use. Unfortunately, while he is away, his aged aunt sells some of his exercise books as toilet paper to her neighbors and makes use of the rest herself for the same purposes. When Ole discovers the tragedy, she defensively exclaims to the shattered Ole that the neighbors might be “poor . . . but they also have to be hygienic.” The story ends on a different note from this ironic comedy, with Ole putting his long period of experience with the government to good use when, for the remainder of his life, he establishes multiple national and international committees and agencies. We learn at the conclusion of the story, and the collection as a whole, that Ole “has since shelved his original sense of self-respect and has assumed another, more attuned to his new, permanent role as a fi rst-rate, expert beggar.” 62 Such a note of bitterness indicates that at times in Tales of the Tikongs, Hau‘ofa engages with something beside satire, but few of the stories contain as much bitterness. The aforementioned “Old Wine in New Bottles” stands out as suggesting another attitude toward the place and culture that is neither purely satirical nor sour. In this story, Hau‘ofa implicitly offers a discussion of Tikong attitudes toward antipodean temporality in which the past is not a place where one can locate a pure, insular culture that precedes overseas influences. It might be said that Hau‘ofa undoes discourses about temporal insularity, the objects of his critique simultaneously encompassing continental ideas about islands being stuck in the past, indigenous romanticisms of precolonial unspoiled culture, and neocolonial imperatives for islands to catch up with, as Robert Young cleverly puts it, the West’s changing perceptions of what economic development and capitalism mean. As in Chapter 4, in which objects come to play an active role in the changing discourses about insular antipodean cultures, objects are the heart of “Old Wine.” The story centers around Hiti George VI, whose father buys a BSA bicycle in 1945 at the end of the War, a time, we are told, “when the good citizens of Birmingham, England, were still a proud, honest folk who built strong, everlasting bicycles each of which could, and did, carry a Tikong family of four: dad, mum, and two little ones.” Hiti has held on to the bicycle—indeed, many old things—for years. Tikongs in general prefer aged items: “Like ninety-nine percent of his countrymen Hiti likes to make new things look very old very quickly before he can love them dearly.” For example, this dear love extends in Hiti’s case to a Toyota he bought brand new eighteen months ago. In a play on the size of islanders, Hau‘ofa writes that when Hiti acquired the vehicle, so made as to carry no more than four short, slight Japanese, Hiti promptly fi lled it with six hefty Tikongs. In a matter of months the Tikongs grew large while the Toyota shrank. Both rear-view mirrors and the hub-caps have disappeared, and most of the paint has

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gone. The seats are torn, a side window is smashed, and the engine is tied and patched with chicken-wire and Band-Aids. The car looks very old and very sick, and Hiti loves it dearly. He takes good care of it now, and the Toyota sedan, like other motor-vehicles in Tiko, will sputter on for the next fi fteen years . . . Not only are objects aged and therefore loved in Tiko, but people are as well. Hiti’s dissolute years after graduating at the top from high school worry his parents so much that they become prematurely old, and we are told that Hiti eventually gave up his bad ways and now loves his parents “most dearly.” He works in a high post in another government department, and Charles Edward George Higginbotham discovers, upon trying to investigate and reform the department, that all of Hiti’s relatives work there, although “work” is an exaggeration. Hiti constantly frustrates Mr. Higginbotham’s efforts and only responds with blithe comments to his outrage over what goes on in the office. Hiti ensures that Mr. Higginbotham is “comfortable,” has “practically nothing to do,” and that “Anything controversial or questionable, which was just about everything, bypassed his desk.” When it is time for Mr. Higginbotham to depart the country, Hiti throws a day-long farewell feast, from which Mr. Higginbotham develops piles, food-poisoning, and diarrhea. All the office workers, including Hiti, see him depart at the airport, looking “so ill, so miserable, and so old that everyone, most of all Hiti, wept copiously as they waved goodbye. It was the most moving send-off at the Tikomalu International Airport.” However, Hiti also has a Peace Corps volunteer in his office who, it turns out, is “a hopeless case.” The volunteer, “raised among the slippery Polynesian emigrants in Oakland, California” “deciphers the South Sea code, and has roundly beaten his fellow-workers at their own games.” He is worse than unpopular: “No one loves him for he remains obstinately youthful despite everything.” 63 “Old Wine in New Bottles” can be read as a parable of one insular response to neocolonialism and its expectation that “developing nations” need to catch up with “developed” ones. In “Old Wine,” the Tikongs appropriate and abrogate neocolonial goods and services, such as the car and Mr. Higginbotham’s development efforts.64 Hau‘ofa’s fictional antipodean island demonstrates a culture that will receive foreign goods and aid, but then turns those goods and services from items that neocolonialist discourse advocates lie in Tiko’s potential future if it only developed enough, to goods and services that are incorporated into Tikong society only when they can become part of Tiko’s past. Hiti’s and all the Tikongs’ love is for objects made old. The sense of attachment and wistfulness that pervades the story only accentuates the comical yet important processes in which Tikongs engage. As Paul Sharrad has written of the stories:

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The Idea of the Antipodes A comic attack on neo-colonialist aid programmes which also exposes local failings not only adds a necessary tartness to the cloying taste of lotus-land sanctimony, but offers some hope of opening up gaps between inside and outside, tradition and modernity, through which new possibilities might be envisaged.65

However, another slightly darker tone enters the story at its conclusion. Hiti, frustrated by the youthful volunteer, turns to riding his old bicycle around the island, “taking consolation in the very sight of shabbiness and decrepitude surrounding him.” He loves the potholed roads that make the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit a joke: “nothing crawls faster than twenty miles an hour on those roads unless it be a new vehicle its owner wants to age in a hurry.” The houses, we are told, though recently built, “have gathered layers of dust and mold and have assumed a look of deep antiquity.” The only thing Hiti sees on his rides that he doesn’t love are “those plots of land in each settlement” on the island “covered with mounds of gleaming sand. Those quiet acres of sandy knolls, the cleanest, whitest, freshest, and only well-maintained things in the whole country . . . the shiny cemeteries of Tiko.” 66 This darker ending, however, serves to emphasize the distinction between the aged items and peoples that Tikongs love so dearly and the newness, cleanliness, and inadaptability that they disdain, qualities that are here associated with death. Epeli Hau‘ofa and the other writers discussed here suggest that the global is part of the local in the antipodes, and that the influence of the world on insular economies, cultures, and peoples is neither fatal nor even tragic. Global trends are internalized within island networks, each global event affecting some of the threads within the networks. That is, insularity is not represented as isolated in space or time. In terms of the latter, the past might threaten to overwhelm and devastate present lives, but it cannot quite achieve this result, as we saw in John Puhiatau Pule’s novel of epistolary correspondence, The Shark that Ate the Sun. The present is a mixed dialogue of the global and local in Sinavaiana-Gabbard’s poetry and prose, which emphasize the spaces “between” places, peoples, and times. And in Hau‘ofa’s stories, colonialist and neocolonialist discourses might stress their own northern culture as a potential future for island lives, but the Tikongs instead take that future and make it a part of their culture and their past. The paths the individuals and the cultures take are never easy. Global and local, individual and collective, future and past exist beside each other, at once resistant and deflecting, mimicking and bending, yearning and incorporating. The tones of these stories and poems are as rich and varied as we might expect of any culture, but to varying degrees, and more in the later works, a difficult comedy compliments the despair, regret, and nostalgia.

Afterword Global Antipodes in a Virtual World

Afterword From Plato’s purely mathematical vision of antipodes as globally opposite points, to Captain Henry Waterhouse’s naming of the Penantipodes Islands in 1800 (later The Antipodes Islands), it might appear that the overall shape of the narrative about the antipodes narrows from a traversing global concept to a region or even a particular point on the earth in the South Pacific. However, although the idea of the antipodes comes to designate an area in Oceania at least by the eighteenth century, in the twentieth century, the antipodes remain unclearly defi ned or clearly undefi ned, sometimes including Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand; sometimes New Zealand and other islands; or sometimes islands without Australia or New Zealand. In a similar manner, rather than a binary relation necessarily existing between Athens or Greenwich and the antipodes, one may have a variety of relations to and from within the antipodes that are best captured by Eve Sedgwick’s polymorphous term beside. This study has traced the multiple associations one might have beside the antipodes, relationships that include “a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivaling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping” and others.1 Greek and Roman philosophy and science were attracted to the idea of the antipodes at the same time that writers of these ages saw themselves as repelled by another isolated land. Some early writers in the Middle Ages tried to rid themselves of the very existence of a rival antipodean land and peoples, but later in the period, philosophers of science, mapmakers, and others saw themselves and their ideas of the earth as dislocated—warped—by the idea of an opposite point or space on the globe. In the Early Modern era, antipodeans are so proximate as to couple with the people of the continent and England, drawing out and extending people’s notions of their gendered and sexed selves. The next period, with its Pacific encounters, finds a new dynamic when the first actual antipodean, Mai, travels to England and back to the antipodean island of Huahine. The narratives about this reversed “out-back” voyage are at first hierarchical and tragic, lowering the Tahitians below Europeans, but

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these discourses nevertheless register contact and are, on a certain level, also unraveled by contact. In the twentieth century, discussions about the antipodes take place within the antipodes rather than in correspondence with Europe. Antipodean insularity signals an expanding network of island peoples who seek and meet each other nostalgically, yet also playfully, and change constructs of Oceanic time and space. Overall, however, these different kinds of relationships with and within the antipodes should not be read as a chronological progression of ideas about the antipodes that supplant or even succeed each other, but rather as modes of address and discourses that uneasily overlap, anticipate, return upon, and echo each other. The antipodes in the twenty-fi rst century are therefore already, in part, imagined and articulated, which makes the shape of their future narratives about place, habitation, and correspondence somewhat discernible. For example, one subject of future antipodean narratives has already begun: the Antarctic. The Antarctic continent has occasionally appeared in written and graphic discussions of the idea of the antipodes whose genres are exploratory, utopian, geophysical, astronomical, and literary. Putting aside older utopian texts, such as Bishop Joseph Hall’s early seventeenth-century Mundus alter et idem, or a later work, such as the anonymous Relation d’un voyage du pôle arctique au pôle antarctique par le centre du monde from 1721, a future study of the antipodes could examine the writings of early Antarctic explorers, including Captain Cook who was, in part, sent out to discover terra incognita in the South and came close to encountering the Great Southern Continent. Or we could examine the writings contained in the Antarctic anthology, The Wide White Page, compiled by the poet Bill Manhire, or indeed Manhire’s own poetry and prose on the Antarctic. Manhire was one of the fi rst to participate in The Artists to Antarctica Programme, which since 1997 has sent artists and writers to the region. In a poem called “Some Frames,” he describes human presence in the region in a bathetic mode that turns from the enthusiastic and awed to the deflated and casual: Antarctica! where a single footprint lasts a thousand years and here we are with our thousand footprints etcetera

Manhire says of writings about the region, “Perhaps some kinds of comedy, even, may be possible.” Or else we could consider the seemingly crazed culture and inhabitants of McMurdo Station interviewed in Werner Herzog’s

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documentary, Encounters at the End of the World (2007). Similarly, we would want to keep in touch with Pacific Island writings that continue to “enlarge” a sense of the region’s space and a sense of the world.2 Or we could look at the increase in pop culture and commerce that evokes the antipodes: water, wine, olive oil, clothing, and skincare products. Another avenue of investigation into twenty-first century antipodean discourses seems as though it might occur in the area of new media. Perhaps the best example of a twenty-first century antipodean idea is contained in the internet resource called the Degree Confluence Project. The Degree Confluence Project is an ongoing website archive of places on the earth where an integer degree of latitude and an integer degree of longitude intersect—for example, the place where 36˚ south and 174˚ east cross each other: 36˚S 174˚E. That is, it excludes geographical minutes and seconds. The website counts 64,442 such intersections either on or very near land. (Its creators exclude places on water that are far from land and some places near the poles.) People, using Global Positioning System (GPS) devices, visit the intersections and record their visits on the site. So far, over 11,000 people have traveled to over 10,000 conceptual global crossroads by foot, bicycle, snowshoe, motorcycle, taxi, rickshaw, snowmobile, helicopter, and submarine. They do so for a number of reasons: curiosity about the area, wanting to make use of their GPS, or as motivation to explore an unfamiliar place. One of the participants has written on the site that “Confluences are interesting to me because they represent randomness that emerges from strict order.”3 Once at the “confluence” of the latitude and longitude lines, travelers record their visit by briefly describing the area along with some account of their travel to the site and by taking photographs of the intersecting point, the surrounding area, and usually the GPS device in place that is registering the “confluence” of degrees. Visitors are then able to submit their facts, narrative, and photos on the website via electronic forms. The site’s “regional coordinators” review the materials and certify their posting on the site. The rules for validity include, among other requirements, using WGS 84, or World Geodetic System 1984, the current protocols for determining one’s position on the earth that were developed and are maintained by the U.S. Department of Defense’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. One of the most curious aspects of the Degree Confluence Project site is that it allows users to view antipodal points on the earth. A visitor can select the “Antipodean Visits” page to see degree confluence measurements and sample thumbnail photographs of two different sites juxtaposed. If the user follows a link to a page of descriptions and pictures of one intersection point, he or she can click on an antipode link to the degree confluence on the exact opposite side of the earth. In the virtual space of the internet, we have returned to something similar to the Greek and Roman idea of purely hypothetical and mathematical antipodes, where any and every point on the globe is antipodal to somewhere else. That is, the twenty-fi rst century perception of antipodal spaces is similar to ancient conceptions. This strictly geometrical

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The Idea of the Antipodes

(and digital) relativity is, however, different from the ancient concept of the world because of the Project’s constraints—intersecting points having to be near land and only counting whole degree integers—but the site’s main difference from the ancient idea is that people physically visit and record one or, in a few cases both, of the antipodal degree integers. The abstract, made apparent by the numbers of the GPS reading, and the empirical, manifested in the narratives and photos, oddly coincide. For example, at “Antipodean Visits,” we can see side-by-side photographs of the antipodal points 40˚S 64˚W and 40˚N 116˚E a (figs. A.1 and A.2). 40˚S 64˚W is a region northwest of Viedma in the area of the Río Negro in Argentina, and from there, we could imagine ourselves as that child on the beach digging to China because the link is available to read about and view 40˚N 116˚E, which is the nearest intersection point to Beijing. Beginning with the Argentinean page, we read about Sergio Monetti, Manuel Rodríguez, and Alejandro Galan, who drove and walked to their point. There we can see the Project’s recommended photographs of views to the North, South, East, and West, as well as the GPS with its reading, and the people at the confluence. At 40˚S 64˚W, the landscape consists entirely of khaki and ashcolored thorny shrubs on an otherwise empty plain. Following the antipodes link to the Chinese page, we read of Florence Bannicq, Ray Yip, C.P. Yip, Ann Yip, and Oreo (a dog), who drove, hiked, and climbed through scratching shrubs to their confluence point. There, in several directions, we peer through darker gray and dun low bushes and see a small hillside and modest dale covered with the same shrubs. These antipodean points are fairly representative. The center of the earth, deduced by the Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s triangulating satellites and other calculations that are accurate to about two centimeters, is key in determining antipodean space. Another example of antipodal confluences, one near the border with Portugal in Galicia, Spain, and the other south of Dip Flat in Marlborough, New Zealand, show an olive green vista in Spain and gray scree slopes in New Zealand. That is, the photos on the Degree Confluence Project site record antipodal space and are singularly unremarkable. The antipodean correspondence of the Project means two things, just as correspondence has meant, at minimum, two things throughout this study: symmetry and communication. Here it can be taken as the correspondent balance of points on a geoidal earth and the writings about the points. In terms of the latter, and in an epistolary sense, the written accounts generally are as plain as the photographs. They tend to stick to a recommended formula that describes the ease or difficulty of getting to the integer intersection point and the landscape at the confluence. For example, the nearest antipode to The Antipodes Islands is probably 49˚N 1˚W, an area of farmland southeast of Saint-Lô, France. The narrative about this confluence tells of Valère Robin and her two sons, who happened to be traveling on an autoroute past the degree confluence in September, 2001. With the aid of their GPS, they

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Figure A.1 40°S 64°W: Boca de la Travesía, Río Negro, Argentina. Photograph by Sergio Monetti.

Figure A.2 40°N 116°E: Shangweidian, Beijing, China. Photograph by Ray Yip.

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decided to turn off the highway and followed smaller roads, parked, and walked to where the GPS told them was the intersection, which turned out to be a hedge and barbed-wire fence separating a field of mature corn from a paddock. Valère writes, “The corn was about two meters high, sharply limiting the view from the point at the confluence.” The antipodean correspondence on the Project is uncomplicated and unadorned; the narrators are only temporarily engaged with their settings. We could also observe that habitation is less at the center of these antipodean narratives than in the past. It is unusual to see people in a photograph on the website. Actually, the photo requirements request that people not be in the pictures. Nevertheless, we see the three men on the plains of the Río Negro. At the near-antipodes of the Antipodes Islands, Valère Robin’s photographs show a view through the hedge to the paddock, a second picture of the corn quite close up, and a third of a recently planted tree near the confluence. We also see a picture of her sons standing next to the corn, one holding the GPS. Nevertheless, most photographs only depict the confluence’s surrounding landscape. In effect, antipodean habitation has been refi ned and abstracted to traces of the human, a picture of only the GPS system, and sometimes the occasional marker of a visit, usually something modest like a rock or another natural object. The narratives of the visits, the antipodean correspondences, help to imagine the larger area of the degree confluence, but only to a certain extent. Their generally plain descriptions do not fi ll in enough information to imagine the spaces in the photographs as embedded in a larger location. Along with the confluence point, the plains, small hillsides, and plants are isolated from a larger context, and the ordinariness of the descriptions enhances the oddness of the images, especially because we are reading about distances on the earth of greatest extent. We are experiencing antipodean points through the website, as far apart as our earth will afford, yet many of them could be proximate areas. The plain in Argentina could be over the other side of the hill we see east of Shangweidian, Beijing. The mind struggles to grasp the sense that unexceptionally similar places are as far apart as possible. Opposites are uncannily alike, a weirdness that gives the impression that one can be in a place and its antipode at the same time, yet the relation between them—the most extreme terrestrial–spatial relation—is one of proximity, of beside. As a result, despite the banality, or perhaps because of it, the effect of seeing two exact antipodes juxtaposed is startling; it is as though one were looking at a readymade artwork. The objects in the photographs are familiar, yet markedly strange. One part of the effect is undoubtedly because each photograph is of a limited area. The shot only contains a portion of a plain, hill, or crop field. Although we are being told the latitude and longitude bearings, can usually see the measurement on the GPS device, and the place or area is named, we cannot ultimately tell where we are from the pictures.

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When two shots of antipodean locations are side by side, something similar to Marcel Duchamp’s readymades appears. The ordinary is defamiliarized, removed from its context. Duchamp was to insist that his readymades had no significance, ascribing their appearance to “indifference” rather than any motivating force or aesthetic taste.4 The antipodean spaces, traces of habitation, and incidental correspondences of the Degree Confluence Project are global readymades where whole pieces of landscape, samples of the globe that are on the absolute other side of the earth from each other, are side by side. We see the shrubs and bushes of Río Negro, Argentina, beside the shrubs and bushes outside Beijing. Humans appear or not. The narratives of the stories are parallel yet also slant away from each other. “Indifference” appears to characterize the Project and indeed the earth. In addition, the participants and even the originators of the Project may be interested in earth science or even concerned about ecology, but they do not comment on the fact that the United States’ Geospatial-Intelligence Agency enables their surveys of the ground. However, the combination of radical relativity and neoimperialism is not to suggest that we have entered an age of postmodernism or a form of globalism that is oblivious to, or collusive with, Western or Northern industrial and/or military institutions. Instead, the antipodean information (if it can be called information) that the Degree Confluence Project archive makes available has, at most, only a small amount of educational utility and even less military or even geological or ecological purpose. Perhaps the antipodean juxtapositions tell us something about the internet and human interactions via this medium, as well as an urge to explore that has become impassive and cursorily inquisitive rather than sharply interrogatory or interventionist. The pictures and descriptions extend the twentieth-century lightening of the antipodean “mood” and antipodean discourse. The quirkiness of the antipodal juxtapositions offers a relationship of beside that is almost indifferent; two places that do not collapse into sameness but that are nevertheless alike in their compulsive simplicity. The power of the global besideness of the antipodes ultimately lies in how differently they require us to imagine global spaces, peoples, and correspondences. Rather than the relative comparability of antipodean inversion or subversion, the antipodean beside is an intimate one wherein the touch doesn’t only or necessarily undo individuality, but rather extends it like an emotional energy reaching across two bodies. The touch of the antipodean multiplies space, habitation, and correspondence in a succession of differences. The world has not shrunk nor become flat, but the relations of beside, even at their most extremely opposite points, punctuate the time of our perceptions and emotions.

Notes

Notes to the Introduction 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

Henry Thoreau is one of the earliest people to record the myth of tunneling to China. In Walden Thoreau reports, “there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle; but I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made.” Walden; or, Life in the Woods, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, ed. James Lyndon Shanley (1854; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 58. Other early American references include: Rodense, “A Rainy Saturday and a Little Girl’s First Composition,” The Independent 13.667 (1861), 6, APS Online, http://www.proquest.com; “Digging Down to China,” Zion’s Herald and Wesleyan Journal 34.45 (1863), 180, APS Online, http:// www.proquest.com; A.B. Frost, comic, Harper’s Bazaar 16.35 (1883), 560, APS Online http://www.proquest.com. Timaeus, The Collected Dialogues of Plato, including the Letters, trans. Benjamin Jowett, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen 71 (New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1961), 62. antipodes, The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, OED Online, Oxford University Press, May 17, 2006 . The idea of the earth as a sphere can be dated from the time of Pythagoras, about 530 BCE . It was based on the following observations: spherical sky, the spherical shadow of the earth on the moon during eclipses, stars rising and setting throughout the year, and other observations. See Germaine Aujac, J. B. Harley, and David Woodward, “The Foundations of Theoretical Cartography in Archaic and Classical Greece,” vol. 1 of The History of Cartography, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 136; and Woodward, “Reality, Symbolism, Time, and Space in Medieval World Maps,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 75.4 (1985): 517–19. The Divine Institutes, trans. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 228–29. antipodes, The Oxford English Dictionary. The histories of the Antilles, Brazil, and other Atlantic real and mythical islands are quite distinct from those about the antipodes. For a survey of early ideas about Atlantic islands, see William H. Babcock, The Legendary Islands of the

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8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

Notes Atlantic: A Study in Medieval Geography (New York: American Geographical Society, 1922). The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 153–54, 172. Divine Institutes, 229. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 8–9. “Beside” is related to concepts of the “touch” and the “middle” as explored by Luce Iragaray, Caroline Dinshaw, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Iragaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24–29; Caroline Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches/A Queer Touches Chaucer,” Exemplaria 7 (1995): 75–92, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-and Post Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 39–40, and the issue of Journal of the History of Sexuality on Dinshaw’s concept of the touch (10.2, April 2001); Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 293–294. Deleuze and Guattari’s writings influence this study in alternating chapters (one, three, and five). They may be relegated even further to a footnote in the history of empires, colonies, and anticolonial struggle if Robert J. C. Young’s term designating tricontinentalism in the South is preferred over postcolonialism. Young’s work is key to any analysis of colonial and neocolonial power, yet bias toward continents at the potential expense of insular histories appears an unexplained oversight. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 5. Orientalism (New York: Pantheon-Random House, 1978), 8. This use of the term “tropicalism” is not related to the current term that refers to Brazilian music and to Central and South American culture in general, except for some recent manifestations of the term that apply to resistance. For discussions of Central and South American tropicalism, see Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad, ed. Frances R. Aparicio and Susana Chávez-Silverman (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), and Ana Patricia Rodríguez, “Wasted Opportunities: Confl ictive Peacetime Narratives of Central America,” The Globalization of U.S.-Latin American Relations: Democracy, Intervention, and Human Rights, ed. Virginia M. Bouvier (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 227–47. Robert Young explains a difference that applies to distinctions that may be made between tropicalist discourse in places such as the Caribbean and tropicalist narratives in many parts of the Pacific. Caribbean locations were primarily “forms of settlement . . . for economic exploitation,” whereas Pacific locations tended to be “maritime enclaves,” though the latter, he notes often developed into “a variation of a domination colony” (Postcolonialism, 17). Until recently, Disneyworld’s Polynesian Resort named most of its “long houses” or hotel wings after island groups—Tahiti, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga—except for one named “Maori,” and another “Bali Hai,” the former a people and the latter probably from a song in South Pacific. “Towards a New Oceania,” 1976, reprinted in Writers in East-West Encounter: New Cultural Bearings, ed. Guy Amirthanayagam (London: Macmillan, 1982), 213. It does not go “beyond” others’ investigations of imperial or colonial discourses. In the same passage as her descriptions of “beside,” Sedgwick describes the

Notes

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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difficulties of avoiding “beyond,” “in particular the bossy gesture of ‘calling for’ an imminently perfected critical or revolutionary practice that one can oneself only adumbrate” (Touching Feeling, 8). Armand Rainaud, Le continent austral: Hyphothèses et découvertes (Paris, 1893), 1. Translations of this and other works, where a translator is not acknowledged, are my own. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26–27. “Beyond What? An Introduction,” Postcolonial Studies “and Beyond,” ed. Ania Loomba, et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 24–33. “Beyond What? An Introduction,” 8–16. See also John McLeod’s excellent summary and evaluation of postcolonial and global theories in Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 29–35. The literature on “cultural geography” is vast. For an overview of postcolonial studies’ influences on cultural geography, as well as the identification of two trends in the field, see Daniel Clayton’s “Imperial Geographies” and James. R. Ryan’s “Postcolonial Geographies,” in A Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson, and Richard H. Schein (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 449–68, 469–84. Archaeology of Knowledge, 153–54. Medieval Identity Machines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). http://confluence.org/. The Natural and Moral History of the Indies, vol. 1, trans. Edward Grimston, ed. Clements R. Markham (London: Hakluyt Society, 1880), 19. Acosta also disagrees with Aristotle on the “burning Zone,” noting that it is indeed more inhabited than the land south of the Tropics (24–29). Some seventy years earlier, Magellan had sailed the Pacific, but he had gone too far north to encounter large or small lands and Aboriginals or many Pacific Islanders. Natural and Moral History, 15–20. Mundus alter et idem, trans. John Millar Wands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 16–27. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 33, 48, 50, 87, 114. Ibid., 75.

Notes to Chapter 1 1. 2.

Armand Rainaud’s fi rst chapter on Greek and Roman writings in Le continent austral antiquity is a helpful introduction to this period. It is therefore tempting to declare at the outset that Greek and Roman conjecture about the antipodes, without visiting the region, only reveals the structures of Grecian and Roman thinking, even its biases, without saying anything about the region per se. While on the face of it, it is true that we can gain insights into Greek or Roman discursive formations, it is important not to go too far with this kind of argument because it implies that their—and others’— ideas about unvisited antipodes lack objective value. Historically at least this is false, and a contrast between internal discourse and objective proof breaks

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7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Notes down. The significance of examining Greek and Roman understanding, beyond gaining knowledge about the era, is that it shaped what was to come on a deep and enduring level so that observations about the antipodes even today are to a great extent colored by northern and particularly Grecian and Roman outlooks. Writers after these eras consciously and unconsciously followed, responded to, and opposed ideas explored early on. That is, the early writings about the antipodes have value, often hidden value, in bringing to light how people thought and continue to think. Timaeus, 62–63. Timaeus, 63. “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 146–78. Even though The History of Cartography suggests a more theoretical geography among Greek authors than in Roman geographies, which tend towards realism, O. A. W. Dilke’s introductory statement holds true: “It would . . . be an oversimplification to characterize the Greek period of mapping as solely concerned with the larger theoretical questions of the size and shape of the earth, while assuming that Roman maps were exclusively practical.” “Cartography in the Ancient World: An Introduction,” Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward, 105. See also James Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33, n. 68. These early Greek and Roman discussions of the air between the heavens and earth might call to mind, for instance, the character Gibreel’s astute, historically inflected, and deeply ironic observation in Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses that “the problem with the English was their . . . their weather.” Satanic Verses, 1988 (Dover, DE: Consortium, 1992), 354. See Homi Bhabha’s important discussion of this feature of the novel in “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 139–70. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’,” vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), 219–25. The Geography of Strabo, ed. and trans. H. C. Hamilton and W. Falconer (London, 1854), 1.1.13. Meteorologica, trans. E. W. Webster, vol. 3 of The Works of Aristotle, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 362b; De mundo, trans. E. F. Forster, Works, 392b. 20–26. John Kirkland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe, 1925 (New York: Dover, 1965), 18–19. See also Hiatt, Terra Incognita: Mapping the Antipodes before 1600 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 17–18. Romm, Edges of the Earth, 12–17. Figure 1.1. adapted from Edward Luther Stevenson, Terrestrial and Celestial Globes: Their History and Construction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921), Fig. 5. Cleomedes’ Lectures on Astronomy: A Translation of “The Heavens,” trans. Alan C. Bowen and Robert B. Todd (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 35.

Notes

177

15. Introduction aux phénomènes, ed. and trans. Germaine Aujac (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1975), 5.41, 16.1–2. 16. Strabo, The Geography of Strabo, trans. H. L. Jones, Loeb Classical Library, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917), 2.1.1, 2.2.2–3, 2.3.1–2, 2.5.7; Aristotle, Meteorologica, 362b. 17. Taprobane (modern-day Sri Lanka) in ancient texts is about as far towards antipodean land as one gets, but neither the Greeks nor the Romans consider it properly antipodal to Europe. Taprobane’s location in relation to India, or indeed Africa, and its size vary greatly depending on the author. For an overview, see “Taprobane,” Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography, ed. William Smith (London, 1854). Gaius Julius Solinus, writing about 240 CE , asserts that until the exploration of Onesicritus, an admiral under Alexander, proved otherwise, people thought Taprobane was another world where the Anticthones lived. Collectanea rerum memorabilium, ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin: August Raabe, 1958), 53.1–2. 18. The Histories, ed. A. D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 3.114. For an overview of discussions about Ethiopia and Ethiopians, see Romm, Edges of the Earth, 49–60. 19. Histories, trans. Evelyn S. Shuckburgh, 1889 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), 3.38. Polybius seems unaware of narratives of circumnavigation of Africa. Herodotus recounts circumnavigation by Phoenicians under Pharaoh Necho II. Hanno is said to have also circumnavigated in the fi fth century BCE , and Himilco as well. Herodotus, Histories, 4.42; Hanno the Carthaginian, Periplus or Circumnavigation [of Africa], trans. Al. N. Oikonomides and M. C. J. Miller (Chicago: Ares, 1995); Strabo, The Geography, 2.3.4; Pliny, Natural History, 2.67; Martianus Capella, Marriage, 6.617–22. 20. The Chorography, Pomponius Mela’s Description of the World, trans. F. E. Romer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 1.4, 1.21, 1.54. 21. The Odyssey, trans. Richard Lattimore (New York: Harper-Perennial, 1999), 1.22–24. 22. Geography, 1.2.24; this translation comes from Aujac, Harley, and Woodward, “Greek Cartography in the Early Roman World,” Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward, 163. Elsewhere, Crates describes Africa containing Ethiopia to the east and south, and Mauretania west, 17.3.1. Geminus does not think of Ethiopia as divided by an ocean, but he says it is natural to imagine “two Ethiopias,” each on the borders of the two tropics. Introduction aux phénomènes, 16.26. 23. Histories, 3.116. 24. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, Introduction, Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters, trans. Berggren and Jones (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22. 25. Ibid., 7.5. 26. Ibid., 8.1. 27. Ibid., 1.13, 1.14, and see Appendix E. See also O. A. W. Dilke, “The Culmination of Greek Cartography in Ptolemy,” Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward, 184–85. Dilke considers the contention that Ptolemy’s southern turn represents the Americas (199).

178

Notes

28. Pythagoras wrote some hundred years earlier than Plato. The Pythagoreans, to whom the concept of the antipodes is more directly ascribed than their master, were contemporaries of Pythagoras but also continued to develop their philosophies until Plato’s time and perhaps after. J. Oliver Thomson discusses the debate and adds that, “Plato’s mention of Antipodes, and his description of the globe as ‘inhabited round about,’ may come from a” Pythagorean source. History of Ancient Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), 115, 122. 29. Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1931), 8.24–26. 30. Posidonius, qtd in Thomson, History, 214. 31. Lectures on Astronomy, 35–37. 32. Edges of the Earth, 45–48. 33. The antipodes occupy a region opposite Europe in one place in his text, and the whole Southern Zone in another. De re publica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 6.19–23. 34. Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 2.64–65. 35. Ibid., 2.68. 36. Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. William Harris Stahl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952), 2.5.1–15. 37. Commentary, 2.5.20–24. 38. The Marriage of Mercury and Philology, vol. 2 of Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, trans. William Harris Stahl and Richard Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 6.605–606. 39. Commentary, 2.5.25–26. 40. Introduction aux phénomènes, 16.19–20. 41. Natural History, 2.67. The “Maeotic Marsh” is the Sea of Azov, a northern portion of the Black Sea. 42. Ibid., 2.68. 43. Lectures on Astronomy, 34, 37. 44. De re Publica, 6.19–20. 45. Ibid., 6.19–23. 46. Commentary, 2.5.1. 47. Ibid.; Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, ed. Jacobus Willis (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1970), 2.5.34. 48. Commentary, 2.5.17. 49. Thousand Plateaus, 88, 319–20, 489, 508. 50. Ibid., 54, 322; and see 88–89, 489, 508–509. 51. Ibid., 9, 32, 88, 510. On p. 510, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between “conjunction,” which belongs to reterritorialization, and “connection,” which belongs to deterritorialization.

Notes to Chapter 2 1. 2.

Le continent austral, 128; Terra Incognita, 66. Touching Feeling, 8–9.

Notes 3.

179

“Introduction: In Medias Res,” Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 2–3. Some of the works I have found most useful, in addition to the aforementioned text, include: Text and Territory: Geographical Imagination in the European Middle Ages, ed. Sylvia Tomasch and Sealy Gilles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26–27. The Postcolonial Middle Ages, ed. Cohen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Bruce Holsinger, “Medieval Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and the Genealogies of Critique,” Speculum 77 (2002): 1195–227; Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle Warren (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2003); David Wallace, Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Cohen (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008). 4. Trans. in Juergen Schulz, “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” The Art Bulletin 60 (1978): 425–74. See also Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodward, 287. 5. “De arca Noe morali,” Patrologia Latina 176, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1880), 618– 80; Hugh of St. Victor: Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. by a Religious of C.M.S.V. (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 43–153. Mary Carruthers discusses Hugh in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 231–39. 6. Metageography has been defi ned as the “set of spatial structures through which people order their knowledge of the world: the often unconscious frameworks that organize studies.” Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), ix. 7. An overview may be found in J. R. S. Phillips, The Medieval Expansion of Europe, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). On trade, see also R. S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). 8. See, for example, Cohen, “Introduction: Midcolonial,” The Postcolonial Middle Ages, 1–17. 9. Natalia Lozovsky, “The Earth is Our Book”: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West ca. 400–1000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 10–14; A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 7. 10. The ‘Opus Majus’ of Roger Bacon, ed. John Henry Bridges, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897–1900), 300–301; translation, Robert Belle Burke, The Opus Majus of Roger Bacon, 2 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 1.320. This theory is what has been called geographical determinism, which states that environment not only generates but largely shapes people and ideas. Lewis and Wigen, Myth of Continents, 41–46. 11. ‘Opus Majus,’ ed. Bridges, 1.301; Opus Majus, trans. Burke, 1.320.

180

Notes

12. ‘Opus Majus,’ ed. Bridges, 1.301–302, 1.309; Opus Majus, trans. Burke, 1.320– 22. 13. Hanns Swarzenski, “Comments on the Figural Illustrations,” Liber Floridus Colloquium, ed. Albert Derolez (Ghent: Story-Scientia, 1973), 22. 14. John Williams, The Illustrated Beatus: A Corpus of the Illustrations of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, 5 vols. (London: Harvey Miller, 1994), 1.21–26; and Williams, “The History of the Morgan Beatus Manuscript,” A Spanish Apocalypse: The Morgan Beatus Manuscript, ed. Williams (New York: George Brazillier, 1991), 11. 15. Etymologiarum sive originum, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911); The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 14.5.17. Hiatt discusses the obscure nature of the passage’s description of the ocean (Terra Incognita, 84–87). A handful of other maps exist that extend Asia out towards the East or Africa towards the South so that these landmasses might be said to extend into the South. See the anonymous Catalan map (ca. 1450–1460), Modena, Biblioteca Estense: C.G.A.1, in Mappemondes, A.D. 1200–1500: Catalogue préparé par la Commission des Cartes Anciennes de l’Union Géographique Internationale, ed. Marcel Destombes (Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1964), 217–21 and pl. 33. Another fascinating (and tantalizing) example is an anonymous late fifteenth-century map, a development of a Ptolemaic map in that it shows land connecting the Far East of Asia to the South of Africa; the Indian Ocean becomes an enclosed sea. The map only appears in Kamal’s Monumenta geographica Africae et Aegypti, 5 vols. (Cairo, 1926–1951), 5.1.1507 and is identified as a copper engraving “found in the collection of Dr. F. C. Wieder, aux Pays-Bas.” The modern legend says it “combines the medieval image of the world of Chrétien with the Portuguese discoveries, notably those of the Gulf of Benin.” Frederick Caspar Wieder was a librarian at the Leiden University Library and compiled the multivolume Monumenta for Prince Youssouf Kamal of Egypt from 1926 to 1951. 16. Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 87. 17. C. Raymond Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 3 vols., 1897–1906 (New York: Peter Smith, 1949), 2.570. 18. On Lambert’s map, see: Wright, Geographical Lore, 103–104; Destombes, Mappemondes, 111–16, pl. X–XI (Leiden ms.); Swarzenski, “Comments,” 21–30; J. P. Gumbert, “Recherches sur le stemma des copies du Liber Floridus,” Liber Floridus Colloquium, ed. Derolez, 37–50; Lamberti S. Audomari Canonici Liber Floridus. Codex authographus bibliothecae universitatis Gandavensis. Auspiciis eiusdem universitatis in commemorationem diei natalis, ed. Albert Derolez (Ghent: Story-Scientia, 1968); and especially Derolez, The Autograph Manuscript of the “Liber Floridus”: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer, Corpus Christianorum 4 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998). It is reproduced in Konrad Miller, Mappaemundi: Die ältesten Weltkarten, 6 vols. (Stuttgart: J. Roth, 1895–1898), pl. 4; Kamal, Monumenta cartographica, 3.3.777; and in color in Danielle Lecoq, “La Mappemonde du Liber Floridus ou La Vision du Monde de Lambert de Saint-Omer,” Imago Mundi 39 (1987): frontispiece, 9–49; and Hiatt, Terra Incognita, pl. 1, with discussion 106–109. 19. Swarzenski suggests that the variety of the Liber floridus’s illuminations is attributable to the fact that Lambert supplied pictures when his sources contained them. He also suggests that Lambert copied the scientific materials from Macrobius,

Notes

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

181

Isidore of Seville, Bede, and others “with unfailing accuracy” (“Comments,” 23–24). However, none of the extant manuscripts of these sources has the kind of map that appears here in the Lambert. Lecoq says that Lambert never slavishly follows sources but instead integrates the images into his discussions of the world (“La Mappemonde,” 9). Hiatt says the maps “show a considerable degree of innovation” (Terra Incognita, 107). Michael Corbet Andrews, “The Study and Classification of Medieval Mappae Mundi,” Archaeologia 75 (1925–1926): 73; Destombes, Mappemondes, 15–18; Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” 294–99. A handful of other maps exist that extend Asia out towards the east or extend Africa towards the south so that these landmasses might be said to extend into the South. See the anonymous Catalan map, note 15. “Hic antipodes nostri habitant, sed noctem diversam diesque contrarios perferunt etiam et estatem.” “La Mappemonde,” 15–16. For instance, Isidore’s Etymologiarum, 14.5.17, is Lambert’s authority on the supposed habitation of the austral region. Evelyn Edson and Jörg-Geerd Arentzen suggest it is supposed to be in the Southern Hemisphere. Edson, Mapping Time and Space: How Medieval Mapmakers Viewed Their World (London: British Library, 1997), 110; Arentzen, Imago Mundi Cartographica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenekarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild (Munich: W. Fink, 1984), 92–93. John Kirkland Wright, The Geographical Lore of the Time of the Crusades: A Study in the History of Medieval Science and Tradition in Western Europe, 1925 (New York: Dover, 1965), 56–57. Ten years after Rainaud’s 1893 study, Giuseppe Boffito suggested another contradiction between the inheritance of ancient scholarship and a “need to represent distinctly the countries and peoples” known only “vaguely.” “La legenda degli antipodi,” Miscellanea di Studi Critici: Edita in Onore di Arturo Graf (Bergamo: Instituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1903), 583–601. Andrews, “Study and Classification,” 70. R. A. Skelton, Introduction, Mappemondes, ed. Destombes, vol. 1, xv; Rudolf Wittkower, “Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 5 (1942): 159–97, esp. 159, 197. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, 1981 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 37, 48. One example of this attitude may be found in John Trevisa’s fourteenth-century translation of Ranulf Higden’s popular history, Polychronicon. In the Polychronicon, Europeans are better in shape and character than Africans because the climate makes Europeans potentially the most vigorous and morally upright out of all races, a clear example of racial environmental determinism. Polychronicon together with the English Translation of John Trevisa and an Unknown Writer of the Fifteenth-Century, ed. Churchill Babington, vol. 1, Rerum Britannicum Medii Aevi Scriptores, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages 41 (London, 1865), 52–53. Hiatt, Terra Incognita, 65. City of God, trans. E. M. Sanford and W. M. Green, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). The fourth-century CE Christian rhetorician and writer Lactantius also disputed the existence of the antipodes and argued

182

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

Notes against the “logic” of others. The Divine Institutes, trans. Mary Francis McDonald (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 226–230. Bede, De natura rerum, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Venerable Bede, ed. J. A. Giles, (London, 1843), 118–19; Isidore, Traité de la nature, ed. and trans. Jacques Fontaine, 1960 (Paris: Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, 2002), 10.14. Rainaud and Valerie Flint after him describe a case from 748, which involved Archbishop Boniface of Mainz, Pope Zachary I, and a certain person called Virgil or perhaps Fergal. The Pope threatened Virgil/Fergal with excommunication if he did not give up his belief in the existence of antipodeans, and this has been taken as evidence of the end of discussions about the antipodes. Rainaud, Le continent austral, 131–32; Flint, “Monsters and the Antipodes in the Early Middle Ages and Enlightenment,” Viator 15 (1984): 65–70. See also Rudolf Simek, Heaven and Earth in the Middle Ages: The Physical World Before Columbus, trans. Angela Hall (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1996), 39–55. Wright, Geographical Lore, 56. Trans. from French in Friedman, 47–48; see n. 37 for partial citation. An illuminated copy of Oresme’s French Traité de la sphère of about 1377 contains a beautiful image of the earth with the top half divided into the three regions of Europe, Africa, and Asia. The southern half is all water. Paris, Bibliothéque Nationale, Ms. Fr. 7065 (565), fo. 12r. See Kamal, Monumenta cartographica 4.3.1309. Lynn Thorndike, Introduction, Sacrobosco, The Sphere and Its Commentators, ed. and trans. Thorndike (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 1–13, 42. Sacrobosco, The Sphere, 321. Usually the equatorial ocean was called the Alveus Oceani, or Ocean River (as opposed to the Mare Oceanum, or Ocean Sea, encircling the earth). However, the name for the equatorial ocean was particularly unstable; sometimes, as in the Beatus map discussed previously, it is associated with and labeled the Red Sea. “Plaga australis temperata sed fi liis Ade incognita; nichil pertinens ad nostrum genus. Mare namque mediterraneum, quod ab ortu solis ad occidentem defluit et orbem terre dividit humanus oculus non vidit, quem solis ardore semper illustratum, qui desuper per lacteum currit circulum, accessus repellit hominum, nec ulla ratione ad hanc zonam permittit transitum.” Derolez describes Lambert’s care in the construction of his autograph, the Ghent manuscript, and the Wolfenbüttel appears to be put together with equal attention (The Autograph Manuscript, 17–18). Camille, “The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,” Queering the Middle Ages, ed. Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 57–86. De natura loci, ed. Paulus Hossfeld, Opera omnia 5.2 (Aschendorff, Germany: Monasterii Westfalorum, 1980), 9, 11. Albertus’ contemporary, Roger Bacon, comes to similar conclusions in his Opus Majus. A significant part of Bacon’s aim in describing the globe is to show that the habitable portions of the world are larger than had been previously thought, and he does not hesitate to go beyond his authorities, Ptolemy and Pliny, on the possibility of habitation in the Torrid Zone. Like Albertus, he argues that even though the sun might make some places in the tropics too hot, or even too cold, “other accidental configurations of the localities,” such as mountains and valleys, might protect these places from the heat and cold so that they probably

Notes

40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

183

are inhabited. ‘Opus Majus,’ ed. Bridges, 1.289–90, 1.306–307; Opus Majus, trans. Burke, 1.309–10, 1.325–26. De natura loci, 10–14. See also Jean Paul Tilmann’s discussion of Albertus on the antipodes: An Appraisal of the Geographical Works of Albertus Magnus and His Contributions to Geographical Thought (Ann Arbor, MI: Department of Geography, University of Michigan, 1971), 155–58. De natura loci, 20–21. For a brief discussion, see Arthur Percival Newton, Introduction, Travel and Travellers of the Middle Ages, ed. Newton (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1968), 10–11. Sacrobosco, Sphere, 28. Ibid., 239–40. Les manuscrits à peintures de la Cité de Dieu de Saint Augustin, ed. Alexandre de Laborde, 3 vols. (Paris: Société des Bibliophiles François, 1909), 3. pl. 102c and description in 2.443. Such an idea would put this fi fteenth-century book in line with a rare but not nonexistent tradition of illuminations, such as those of Cosmas Indicopleustes (fl. ca. 540). Cosmas was a self-educated merchant from Alexandria whose names means “Indian Sea Traveler.” He wrote three books, of which Christian Topography survives, and it contains diagrams of the cosmos. His conception of the world was not as a globe, but as a box in the shape of a construction site lunchbox, the lower rectangular part being the known human and angelic world, and the upper curved part heaven. In another diagram, he shows four men standing on a circular world in order to disprove the possibility of the existence of antipodeans. O. A. W. Dilke, “Cartography in the Byzantine Empire,” Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. Harley and Woodword, 261–62. City of God, 16.9. De natura loci, 13, 14. India is “quite close to the boundary of Spain,” according to Bacon. This and other passages on the inhabited portions and the seas are famous. Pierre d’Ailly (ca. 1350–1420), cardinal of Combrai and Chancellor of the University of Paris, reproduced them (without acknowledgment) in his Imago Mundi, and Christopher Columbus annotated a copy of the printed edition of 1480. The size of the seas produced the impression that he had encountered India instead of the unexpected continental Americas. Pierre d’Ailly, Ymago mundi, ed. and trans. Edmond Buron, 3 vols. (Paris, 1830), 1.206. ‘Opus Majus,’ ed. Bridges, 1.290–93, 1.310–11; Opus Majus, trans. Burke, 1.310–14, 1.329–30. Interestingly, however, Bacon does not follow his authority, Ptolemy, in describing a southern land that could connect the most southern point of the Far East to the southeastern point of Africa. Instead, he seems to contradict himself on the existence of southern land and his other description of a ribbon of ocean between the poles when he follows Pliny instead of Ptolemy in describing the “the Indian Sea.” Burke, in his edition of Bacon, reproduces a map by Berlinghieri, based on Ptolemy, which is misleading on this point. Dante also mentions the idea of water in the South in his Convivio. See the discussion of Dante’s Convivio below. Alfonsi, Dialogus contra iudaeos, Patrologia Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1854), 157.547, in Wright, Geographical Lore, 162; Grosseteste, De sphaera, Der

184

51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64. 65.

Notes Philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, ed. Ludwig Baur (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1912), 20–24. Grosseteste was a contemporary of Sacrobosco and wrote a work also titled De sphaera, and the two authors’ texts often appear in the same manuscript. Bacon, ‘Opus Majus,’ ed. Bridges, 1.290, 1.294, 1.306–307; Opus Majus, trans. Burke, 1.310, 1.314, 1.325–27; on Sacrobosco, see Thorndike, Introduction, Sphere, 12; Scot’s sources are Mark 16.15; Rom. 10.18, and Ps. 19.4. In Sacrobosco, Sphere, 318–22, 337–38; Robertus in Sacrobosco, Sphere, 241–42. Here Robert is discussing the region below Europe, but his argument applies to the antipodal region. Etymologiarum, ed. Lindsay; Etymologies, trans. Barney, et al., 9.2.133, 14.5.17. Ibid., 11.3.24. “Marvels of the East,” 182. Eine altfranzösische moralisierende Bearbeitung des Liber de Monstruosis Hominibus Orientis aus Thomas von Cantimpré, “De Naturis Rerum,” ed. Alfons Hilka, Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: PhilologischHistorische Klasse 7 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1933): lines 453, 455–68, translated in Friedman, Monstrous Races, 125–28. Dante’s “Il Convivio,” trans. Richard H. Lansing (New York: Garland, 1990), 3.100–102. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. and notes, Charles S. Singleton, Bollingen 80, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), Inferno, canto 34.106–126 (vol. 1, pp. 367–68). On Dante’s topographical ideas and his sources, see Singleton’s commentary on Inferno, canto 34 (vol. 2, pp. 638–43) and his commentary on Purgatorio 1.19–27 (vol. 4, pp. 8–10). See also La Divina Commedia, ed. and anno. C. H. Grandgent, rev. Charles S. Singleton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 311–14. Tatlock, “Geoffrey and King Arthur in ‘Normannicus Draco,’” Modern Philology 31 (1933): 1–18, 113–25; Loomis, “King Arthur and the Antipodes,” Modern Philology 38 (1941): 289–304. Erec and Enide, trans. Carleton W. Carroll, Arthurian Romances, ed. William W. Kibler (London: Penguin, 1991), 61–62. “The ‘Draco Normannicus’ of Étienne of Rouen,” Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages 82, vol. 2, Chapter 18, introduction (precedes 947) and Chapter 20 (London, 1884). Loomis (292, n. 18) notes one more reference to Arthur and the antipodes in the Gesta regum Britanniae, Romania 28 (1899), 330. “King Arthur,” 292, 294–296. For eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stories of a hollow earth and voyages in and through the earth, including Jules Verne, see Peter Fitting, ed., Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). “Introduction: Infi nite Realms,” Cultural Diversity in Medieval Britain: Archipelago, Island, England, ed. Cohen (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008), xx. Otia imperialia: Recreation for an Emperor, ed. and trans. S. E. Banks and J. W. Binns (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2002), 216.

Notes

185

66. Ibid., 642–45. 67. Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain, 77. 68. Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and the Description of Wales, trans. Lewis Thorpe (London: Penguin, 1978), 1.8 (133–36); Barthes, 26–27. 69. Mirrour of the World, ed. Oliver H. Prior, EETS, e.s. 110 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1913), v, x. 70. Ibid., 61–67. Given that the map legends are Latin, “inhabitabilis” means uninhabitable. 71. Ibid., 51–54. 72. Caxton’s edition is a translation of British Library, Royal 19a IX, which is itself a copy of Bibliothèque Nationale, Fonds fr. 574. MS Fonds fr. 574 shows the images in the opposite order and the bodies as distinct from each other (Mirrour, vii–viii). For the image in the French manuscript, see L’image du monde de mâitre Gossouin: Rédaction en prose, ed. O. H. Prior (Lausanne: Pyot, 1913), 95. For a discussion of Caxton’s woodblock prints in the Mirrour, see N. F. Blake, Caxton and English Literary Culture (London: Hambledon, 1991), 110–12, 279–80. 73. Michael Bennett provides an overview of Mandeville scholarship and new evidence about authorship and manuscripts in “Mandeville’s Travels and the Anglo-French Moment,” Medium Aevum 75 (2006): 273–292. 74. Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 134. 75. Ibid., 131–37.

Notes to Chapter 3 1.

2.

3.

4.

1.3.1–25. Quotations from the play are from Ann Haaker’s edition and are cited parenthetically throughout: The Antipodes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966). I have compared this edition with the fi rst printing, The Antipodes: A Comedie (London: J. Okes for Francis Constable, 1640; Ann Arbor: UMI, 1967, 3818), and with Anthony Parr’s edition in Three Renaissance Travel Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 217–326. I want to thank the Folger Shakespeare Library for assistance with Brome and other resources. Thank you also to Mario DiGangi for guidance and advice. For the Mandeville passages in the play, see Haaker’s edition and Clarence Edwards Andrews, Appendix, Richard Brome: A Study of His Life and Works (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 118–21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s study of nomads and “deterritorialization” are contained in Nomadology: The War Machine, trans. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e)-University of Minnesota Press, 1986), esp. 21, 29, 34–37, and 50–62. See also A Thousand Plateaus, 478–82. Other allusions to Shakespeare in The Antipodes, it has been suggested, are to: Hamlet, Henry IV Part II, and The Rape of Lucrece. See Haaker, ed., The Antipodes, xiii; Claire Jowitt, “‘Antipodean Tricks’: Travel, Gender, and Monstrousness in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes,” Consuming Narratives: Gender and Monstrous Appetite in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, ed. Liz Herbert McAvoy and Teresa Walters (Cardiff: University of Wales, Press, 2002), 84–85, reprinted in Jowitt, Voyage Drama and Gender Politics, 1589–1642: Real and Imagined Worlds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 217–18; and Matthew Steggle,

186

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

Notes Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 115–16. Ania Loomba briefly touches on The Antipodes and The Tempest as part of a more general discussion in Gender, Race, and Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 135–41. Christian Morals (1716), 3.14, University of Chicago, 21 July, 2006, . Qtd in Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 95. After “The Tempest,” ed. George Robert Guffey (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library-University of California, 1969), viii. The Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed. George R. Noyes (Boston: Houghton Miffl in, 1950), 1052. Qtd. in Guffey, ed., After “The Tempest,” ix. Guffey fi nds some “likely conscious . . . excision of passages of an indelicate nature, especially some of specific sexual reference,” from the Dryden–Davenant (After “The Tempest,” x). The Tempest or The Enchanted Island, vol. 10 of The Works of John Dryden, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and George Robert Guffey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 1–103. All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically throughout. Ibid., 320, fn 6. The Sea Voyage: A Comedy, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, ed. Parr, 1.1.60. All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically throughout. Empire Islands: Castaways, Cannibals, and Fantasies of Conquest (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 175–78. Three Burlesque Plays of Thomas Duffett: “The Empress of Morocco,” “The Mock-Tempest,” “Psyche Debauch’d,” ed. Ronald Eugene DiLorenzo (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1972), 1.1 6–7. All quotations are from this edition and are cited parenthetically throughout. Steggle, Richard Brome, 10–11, 17, 67–68, 107–109. Andrews, Appendix, Richard Brome, 112, 126; Donaldson, The World UpsideDown, 96–97; Julie Sanders, “The Politics of Escapism: Fantasies of Travel and Power in Richard Brome’s The Antipodes and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist,” Writing and Fantasy, ed. Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White (London: Longman, 1999), 138–40. 5.Ep.9–20. The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998). Quotations cited parenthetically throughout. The latter reference is to a belief in the magical abilities of the seventh son. Ben Jonson’s 1606 Masque of Hymen and other masques most likely influenced both Shakespeare’s and Brome’s masques. See Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 8, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London: Routledge, 1975), 261–65, 329–33. “Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest,” Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (New York: Routledge, 1985), 191–205. “‘The Duke of Milan / And His Brave Son’: Old Histories and New in The Tempest,” Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” ed. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 91–106.

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187

21. J. A. Symonds, “Review of The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome,” Academy 5 (1874): 304–305; Herbert Allen, A Study of the Comedies of Richard Brome, Especially as Representative of Dramatic Decadence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1912), 6. 22. In terms of the New World, note that the East India Company was established by royal decree in 1600 and Company sites were rapidly set up. Bermuda became the fi rst English island territory in 1612, and, of course, various colonies occupied parts of Eastern America. 23. Andrews, Appendix, Richard Brome, 117; Donaldson, The World Upside-Down, 78–80, 95. Heywood also pursued the trope of the world upside-down in his play, The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (1638, but possibly performed in 1604). Jean Howard describes the play thus: “the house of the wise woman . . . becomes a world upside down where women temporarily have control over men, the lower classes over the upper.” The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 1994), 87–88. 24. For example, Martin Butler reads the play as critical of Charles I’s personal rule. Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 215–17. 25. Sanders, “Politics of Escapism,” 143–44; Taylor, “The Permeable World: Travel and Carnival in The Antipodes,” Exemplaria 19 (2007): 438–54. Parr also expresses dissatisfaction with both Donaldson’s reading of the play as conservative and Butler’s notion of its political criticism (Three Renaissance Travel Plays, 38–39). 26. At another point, it is made clear that the action, at least of the play-withinthe-play, is not a satire directed at any one person. The antipodean inhabitants before Peregrine and the onlookers may be “those that foot to foot ‘gainst London be,” but we are explicitly told that the play-within-the-play is not supposed to function like a “satiric timist” (i.e., a satirist), “To tax or touch at either him or thee / That art notorious” (2.5.4–21). Andrews concurs that Brome “is wholly impersonal in his satire” (Richard Brome, 128). Moreover, the play is not only a satire of London manners and playgoers, but may have more national significance. Matthew Steggle, “Placing Caroline Politics on the Professional Comic Stage,” The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era, ed. Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 154–70. Kathleen McLuskie also suggests that references to local places in a play such as The Late Lancashire Witches, like those that occur here and elsewhere in The Antipodes, could be a strategy “to deny or divert attention away from a quite explicit political scandal” and “to obscure a particular reference to current affairs” of a national kind. “Politics and Aesthetic Pleasure in 1630s Theater,” Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625–1642, ed. Adam Sucker and Alan B. Farmer (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006), 55–65. 27. Whereas England during, and especially following, Elizabeth’s reign could be depicted as either male or female, Richard Helgerson has discerned a difference between descriptions of England as a nation, which is depicted in female terms and with reference to common custom; and England as a state, which is “more upper-class and male.” Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992), 297.

188

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28. The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 158. Kolodny studies the “rhetorical strategies that gender the land as feminine” in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 3–25. See also Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1–41. Helgerson also writes, “The discovery of a new world with new opportunities and new demands inevitably threatened the old heirarchy of power” (Forms of Nationhood, 153). 29. “‘Antipodean Tricks,’” 81–93. 30. Hic Mulier, “Custome Is an Idiot”: Jacobean Pamphlet Literature on Women, ed. Susan Gushee O’Malley (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 267; Linton, Romance of the New World, 103. Strachey’s Historie is from 1612; Strachey was also the author of “True Repertory of the Wrack,” one of Shakespeare’s possible sources for The Tempest. Sandra Clark discusses the background for Hic Mulier and the response of Haec Vir and other texts in “Hic Mulier, Haec Vir, and the Controversy over Masculine Women,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 157–83. For some other sources on debates about gender roles, see O’Malley’s edition of Hic Mulier and Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540– 1640, ed. Katherine Usher Henderson and Barbara F. McManus (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Bryan Reynolds, “The Devil’s House, ‘or Worse’: Transversal Power and Antitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England,” Theatre Journal 49 (1997): 143–67. On gender and sexual metaphors in this period, see Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Heidi Hunter, Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 31. Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 8–9, 66–81. 32. Haaker, Introduction, The Antipodes, xi–xii. For a discussion of the case, see also Martin Butler, “Exeunt Fighting: Poets, Players, and Impresarios at the Caroline Hall Theaters,” Localizing Caroline Drama, ed. Sucker and Farmer, 115–20. 33. Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, 46–51, 63. 34. The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 76, 141. DiGangi uses the term “homoerotics” in order to broaden the focus of study from solely disruptive and punished categories. 35. Ibid., 6, 17–18. Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982); Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Staub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 36. Stone writes: “doctors were as much concerned with the dangers of abstinence as with those of excess.” He quotes Thomas Cogan, author of a medical textbook at

Notes

37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

189

Oxford in 1589: “the commodities which come by moderate evacuation thereof [of semen] are great. For it procureth appetite to meat and helpeth concoction; it maketh the body more light and nimble, it openeth the pores and conduits, and purgeth phlegm; it quickeneth the mind, stirreth up the wit, reneweth the senses, driveth away sadness, madness, anger, melancholy, fury.” Cogan’s observations apply to women almost as much as men because women were also thought to produce semen. Cogan, The Haven of Health (London, 1596), 241, 252, cited in Stone, Family, Sex, and Marriage, 497. The idea of the performative comes from Jacques Derrida’s reading of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words in “Signature Even Context,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 321– 27. Some texts include Shoshona Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983); Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre, ed. Sue-Ellen Case (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 270–82, and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Performativity and Performance, ed. Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (New York: Routledge, 1995); and Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 67–91. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. 2, ed. Nicolas K. Kiessling, Thomas C. Faulkner, and Rhonda L. Blair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 2.2.6.2– 2.2.6.3, 111–24. Jowitt states that the masque signals how “correct relations are re-established for the inhabitants of Renaissance London” “superficially at least” (“‘Antipodean Tricks,’” 83; Voyage Drama, 216). Also, Sanders suggests that the “resolution of the fi fth act in The Antipodes is incomplete” (“Politics of Escapism,” 141). Haaker glosses “clipp’d and clapp’d me strangely” as “embraced and fondled me passionately.” Orgel describes the scene as “an occasion for homoerotic bawdy,” demonstrating Martha’s “ecumenical position” on sex. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61. Martha says Peregrine “does not / Lie with me to use me as he should, I fear; / Nor do I know to teach him.” Valerie Traub correctly points out that in the fi rst edition of the play, these lines read, “he do’s not / Lye with me to use me as she should I feare, / Nor doe I know to teach him.” She reads the grammatically anomalous pronoun, amended in the modern printed editions, as a “queering” on the level of the text and appropriate in a context where Martha is thinking of her affair with the maid and her husband at the same time. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61–62. A Critical Old-Spelling Edition of Richard Brome’s “A Mad Couple Well Match’d,” ed. Steen H. Spove (New York: Garland, 1979). On this play, see Denise A. Walen, Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005), 73–77. Renaissance of Lesbianism, 181. See also Howard, Stage and Social Struggle, 17; Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 16; Orgel, Impersonations, 107–109; and

190

Notes

Traub’s earlier work, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), esp. 108–10. 44. Renaissance of Lesbianism, 181. 45. Martha’s situation closely parallels her husband’s, for her condition would have resonated with audiences within the same discourse that was prominent in thinking about sexuality, namely medicine. Barbara pities Martha, seeing her present condition as a kind of illness. Just as the doctor will cure Peregrine, Barbara will “ease” Martha of her “dangerous fits” (1.4.78). Although the play does not allude to any specific condition, audiences would have recognized that Martha’s lack of sexual practice could have serious consequences. In humoral ideas about the body, men and women had to rid themselves of superfluous fluid. Women could do so in part through menstruation but, like men, ejaculation was also considered important. The illness known as “greensickness” occurred if women failed to fi nd release, and pregnancy was considered a kind of cure. It was known as the “virgin’s disease,” and a popular rhyme was “The woman is both wanton and wild / Till she hath conceived a child.” Doctors prescribed sex as the best cure. Otherwise, hysteria, thought of as a wandering womb, would give rise to “wild” behaviors. Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 48–52, 66–68. The saying is from Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum, ed. E. Ashmole (London, 1652), 432. 46. Jowitt, “‘Antipodean Tricks,’” 87–88 and Voyage Drama, 220; and Parr, Three Renaissance Travel Plays, 49. Jowitt’s overall focus on gender and sexuality is important, but her assertion that The Antipodes “is a voyage drama that is indifferent to New World perspectives” only applies if we regard “New World perspectives” only as accounts of actual, physical visits to the New World. Her suggestion that “the bizarre, antipodean patterns of behavior the play represents only function as satiric reflections of several aspects of 1630s London” also seems to take into account only one aspect of the play ( Jowitt, Voyage Drama, 11–12).

Notes to Chapter 4 1.

2.

Wellington, Alexander Turnbull Library, Reliance Log Book, ADM 51. The discovery and naming of the islands is described in Lieutenant-Colonel David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales from Its First Settlement, in January, 1788, to August, 1801, 2 vols. (London, 1802), 2.287, footnote. See also Robert McNab, Murihiku: A History of the South Island of New Zealand and the Islands Adjacent and Lying to the South, from 1642 to 1835 (Wellington: Whitcombe and Tombs, 1909), 123–23; and Michael Crozier, “Antipodean Sensibilities,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 98 (1999): 841–42. I would like to thank Vanessa Smith for her encouragement and support with this chapter. For reasons of space, I limit my discussion here to Mai (whose name may, in fact, have originally been something else.) On the influence of an earlier Tahitian, Ahu-Toru, on French philosophy, including that of Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and others, see a summary in Neil Rennie, Far-Fetched Facts: The Literature of Travel and the Idea of the South Seas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 109–40. Ahu-Toru died on his return voyage from France.

Notes 3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

191

Images of the Antipodes in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Stereotyping (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), 33. On continuities between fictional and factual accounts of antipodean voyages, see also Paul Arthur, “Fictions of Encounter: Eighteenth-Century Imaginary Voyages to the Antipodes,” The Eighteenth Century 49 (2008): 197–210. Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 6, 80–81. Daniel Baugh, “Seapower and Science: The Motives for Pacific Exploration,” Background to Discovery: Pacific Exploration from Dampier to Cook, ed. Derek Howse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 40. For background on breadfruit schemes, see fn 9, 349–50. See also Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration, 108–26. Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1968), 703. Introduction, Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900, ed. Lamb, Smith, and Thomas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), xv; “ardours of negative discovery” is from Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers (New York: Vintage, 1985), 278, qtd. in Exploration and Exchange, xv. Cook just missed encountering Antarctica, which was first identified in 1820. At this point in history, antipodean literature might be said to branch out into a number of potential directions. One suggestion is that when the extent of the earth’s surface became known, antipodean literature turned on its axis from a north/northeast–south/southwest orientation to a vertical one, and the antipodes came to be located within the earth or in the sky. This vertical utopian tradition is large, but I want to remain closer to the historical contexts within which antipodean literature and artworks changed. For the utopian literature of hollow earth and floating worlds, see for example, Fausset, Images of the Antipodes, and Fitting, ed., Subterranean Worlds. Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), 1; David Philip Miller, Introduction, Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. Miller and Peter Hanns Reill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4, 12. Miller quotes Baugh, “Seapower and Science,” 34–39. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savage or natural man as “pre-cultural, prehistorical, and—inevitably—hypothetical,” see Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam, 1755), 4–8, 104, 113–16, 248–49. Exploration and Exchange, xv–xvi, 3. See also, Michelle Hetherington, “The Cult of the South Seas,” Cook & Omai: The Cult of the South Seas, ed. National Library of Australia (Canberra, ACT: National Library of Australia, 2001), 1–7; and Lamb, Preserving the Self, 4, 7, 46–47, 107–108. Several works changed the nature of the discussion of imperial and colonial writing in the Pacific and elsewhere. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986). Recently, Fulford, Lee, and Kitson write: “The acquisition of information about new worlds and new peoples, and the use made of that information back in Britain, did not necessarily assist in the extension of British power across the world. What many writers learned led them to question the utility and morality of colonialism. . . . So powerful were the representations of contact that Britons’ perceptions of their place at home as well as of their role in the world were changed” (Literature, Science, and Exploration, 6–8).

192

Notes

10. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 18; and Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62–66. . Theorization of the term hybridity largely draws on Homi K. Bhabha’s essays in The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bhabha begins to theorize the performative aspects of hybridity in that work. Young cautions about the use of hybridity in Colonial Desire, 27–28, and elaborates more positively on the utility of the word in Postcolonialism, 345–49. 11. Butler, Bodies that Matter, 107; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 68, 70. See also the works cited in Chapter 3, fn 37. I don’t intend to overlook distinctions between these two theorists; note, for example, that Sedgwick’s ideas about the periperformative are in part an attempt to refi ne Butler’s concept of performativity. 12. Young, Colonial Desire, 27 The variety of possible attitudes towards the hybrid is described in Chapter 1. 13. Touching Feeling, 8–9. 14. An Account of the Voyages Undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere and Successfully Performed by Commodore Byron, Captain Wallis, Captain Cartaret, and Captain Cook, 3 vols. (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1773), 2.107, 2.128, 2.133, 2.190, 2.206, 2.232–33. On the publication and reception of the Account of the Voyages, see J. C. Beaglehole, ed., The Voyage of the “Endeavour,” 1768–1771 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1955), ccxlii–liii; and the bibliography in Exploration and Exchange, 91. Cook did not publish his own account until 1777, which sold out in one day. Alan Frost, “New Geographical Perspectives and the Emergence of the Romantic Imagination,” Captain James Cook and His Times, ed. Robin Fisher and Hugh Johnston (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1979), 6–7. On these passages in historical context, see Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 179–98. The short poems and other works also repeat Hawkesworth’s lament about the introduction of venereal disease to the islands. On the topic of venereal disease, Hawkesworth’s text, following Wallis, blames Bougainville and the French (Account of the Voyages, 1.489–90). Many of these poems reiterate sexual metaphors already established in botanical literature from Carl Linnaeus and Erasmus Darwin, and which received new impetus from Banks. See Janet Browne, “Botany in the Boudoir and Garden: The Banksian Context,” Visions of Empire, ed. Miller and Reill, 153–72; and Alan Bewell, “‘On the Banks of the South Sea’: Botany and Sexual Controversy in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Visions of Empire, ed. Miller and Reill, 173–93. Browne mentions Erasmus Darwin (p. 161), who published his The Loves of the Plants in 1789. This botanical poem ends with a scene describing the genus Adonis as a marriage ceremony in Tahiti. In it, he emphasizes the natural state of the Tahitians and their sexual practices rather than the artificial religious binds on European society. Darwin, The Loves of the Plants: A Poem with Philosophical Notes (Lichfield, 1789), canto 4, lines 399–406. 15. “An Epistle from Oberea” (London, 1774), Introduction, 5 and line 15. The authorship of the “Epistle from Oberea” is uncertain. The Gentleman’s and London Magazine: or, Monthly Chronologer 44 (1774) claims it was written by the poet Christopher Anstey (45); the Introduction to “An Epistle from Mr. Banks” (see below,

Notes

16.

17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

193

note 16) claims on page 3 that the translator was Irish (Anstey wasn’t Irish but Courtenay, note 19 below, was); and Eighteenth Century Collections Online suggests the author was one John Scott-Waring (but if the author of “An Historic Epistle, from Omiah,” pp. 122–23, is by a John Scott, then it is more likely the writer John Scott, who wrote for the Gentleman’s Magazine). “An Epistle from Mr. Banks, Voyager, Monster-hunter, and Amoroso, to Oberea, Queen of Otaheite” (1773; 2nd ed., 1774), 12–13. “Trans. A. B. C. Esq.,” the “Epistle from Mr. Banks” claims to be printed at Batavia ( Jakarta) for “Jacobus Opano,” with the frontispiece engraving by “Bramble,” an allusion to Matthew Bramble, the fictional character of Tobias Smollett’s Expedition of Humphry Clinker, which was published three years before the second edition of the “Epistle.” Nauticks; or, Sailor’s Verses, vol. 2 (N.p., 1783), 63. Bewell, “‘On the Banks of the South Sea,’” Visions of Empire, ed. Miller and Reill, 179. Bewell cites James Lee, An Introduction to the Science of Botany, Chiefly Extracted from the Works of Linnaeus 4th ed. (London, 1810). Nocturnal Revels, or the History of Kings-Palace and Other Modern Nunneries, vol. 2, 2nd ed. (London, 1779), 15–28. On the poem, see Christopher B. Balme, “Sexual Spectacles: Theatricality and the Performance of Sex in Early Encounters in the Pacific,” TDR: The Drama Review 44 (2000): 67–85; and Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 186–88. “An Epistle (Moral and Philosophical)” (London, 1774). The author also claims to have written “The Rape of Pomona” and is, therefore, John Courtenay, an Irish politician and London writer who associated with Boswell and Johnson. Lady Harriet (Henrietta) Grosvenor, formerly Henrietta Vernon, married Sir Richard Grosvenor, 1st Earl Grosvenor, in 1764. She was scandalously involved in a public and legal affair with Lord Cumberland. Account of the Voyages, 2.128. “Epistle . . . from an Officer at Otahiete,” 85–118. On venereal disease, see also 259–64. A clear example of the utopian impulse also appears in an anonymous poem to seafarers, “Otaheite, A Poem,” in which the Far South is a barren, cold place of ice, while Tahiti is natural and “wanton” (though it contains cannibalism). The people are shallow: “each happy Day glides thoughtless as the last, / Unknown the future, unrecall’d the past. . . . Thus the fleet Moments wing their easy Way; / A Dream their Being, and their Life a Day” (London, 1774). One text, Transmigration: A Poem, expresses real moral disappointment with those titillated by Tahiti’s charms (London, 1778), 33–34. Bewell suggests that this historical development occurs between 1762 (Rousseau’s Emile) and 1792 (Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women). “‘On the Banks of the South Sea,’” Visions of Empire, ed. Miller and Reill, 173–93. Denis Diderot’s sense of disappointment is perhaps best known. His “Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville” was published in 1772 during Cook’s second voyage. “The Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville,” Political Writings, trans. John Hope Mason and Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31–75. Lee Wallace argues that in sexual, particularly gay, encounters in the Pacific in the eighteenth and later centuries, “the space between metropole and periphery is less than stable when codes of masculine sexual conduct are implicated in the revelations of cross-cultural encounter.” Sexual

194

Notes

Encounters: Pacific Texts and Modern Sexualities (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 16. 25 “‘Savages that are come among us’: Mai, Bennelong, and British Imperial Culture, 1774–1795,” The Eighteenth Century 49 (2008): 217, 220. 26. “Omiah: An Ode. Addressed to Charlotte Hayes,” An Asylum for Fugitives, vol. 1 (London, 1776). Another poem in Mai’s voice, a popular song from 1780, describes the narrator “In my feathers and jackets so airy” at an East London dock tavern accompanied by “buxom Poll.” “Song. Sung by Mr. Edwin, in Omai,” The Festival of Momus, a Collection of Songs, Including the Modern and a Variety of Originals (London, 1780). For an example of one such source of information about Mai, see Apyrexia, “Genuine Account of Omiah, a Native of Otaheite,” The London Magazine: or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer 43 (August 11, 1774), 362–64, which also contains an illustration of Mai. The earliest model for these poems in the voice of Omai or Omiah that I have found is a mock letter, signed by “Otaheite,” which though not in his voice exactly, is presented as though a Tahitian in London wrote it. The putative author says he noticed an announcement, in the same newspaper, of some “barbarians” arriving in London and complains about being labeled a barbarian when England displays more barbarity in its practices and laws. “Otaheite,” The London Chronicle 36 ( July 29, 1774), 101. The most comprehensive biography of Mai is E. H. McCormick, Omai: Pacific Envoy (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1977). 27. The Task, The Poetical Works of William Cowper, 1866, ed. H. S. Milford (4th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 1.623–77. For a discussion of Cowper’s poem, see Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration, 62–66. 28. “Number XXV of the Loiterer: Saturday, July 18, 1789,” The Loiterer: A Periodical Work in Two Volumes, vol. 1 (Oxford, 1789), 3–14. Jane Austen’s brothers, James and Henry, published The Loiterer. The purported journal in this issue is similar but not directly related to American author Philip Freneau’s “The Voyage of Timberoo-Tabo-Eede, an Otaheite Indian.” This comical and insightful satire purports to be drawn from the records of Timberoo-Tabo-Eede, a captain of a Tahitian vessel and subject to the king of Tahiti. It describes the captain’s charge and voyage, which satirize Western ship charges and voyage accounts. The captain is to claim all lands that have “never been favoured with an opportunity to bow their heads in token of their assent to our sublime laws” and to tattoo “the posteriors of such great men and ladies as shall be sincerely willing to be converted to our most holy religion.” The Tahitian craft sails around South America to, presumably, America, where the voyagers are horrified at the barbarity of the inhabitants, who speak another language, have poor houses because they’re completely enclosed, wear shoddy clothes, and hold and maltreat black slaves, among other practices. Of particular concern are their beliefs (“These people seem to be under some indissoluble obligation to believe only what has previously been believed for them by their progenitors”) and their practice of “making little marks and scratches upon . . . a thin white substance, which they call paper.” Upon their return to Tahiti, the Tahitian council decides not to subjugate these people because they are “in the highest degree barbarous, savage, and intractable.” “The Voyage of Timberoo-Tabo-Eede, an Otaheite Indian,” The Miscellaneous Works (Philadelphia, 1788), 204–16. Chris Bongie ascribes a particular process of “exoticism” to the nineteenth century that clearly applies

Notes

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

195

to the eighteenth (if not earlier): Modern Europe posits a place outside of civilization only to fi nd that imperialism and colonialism have already changed those places, so the future is held out as a possibility for the discovery of the exotic until, fi nally, a “pessimistic vision” dominates “in which the exotic comes to seem less a space of possibility than one of impossibility.” Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 1–24. A Short Account of the New Pantomime Called Omai, or, A Trip Round the World (London, 1785). A “new edition” exists from the same year and publisher that contains a slightly different cast and character list, and script. The Plays of John O’Keeffe, ed. Frederick M. Link, vol. 2 (New York: Garland, 1981), N. pag. Thomas Cadell the elder had, with his partner William Strahan, published Hawkesworth’s Voyages (twice) twelve years before, and they reissued the Hawkesworth in the same year as the play. The number of performances in the initial year may be found in The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, and Afterpieces, ed. Charles Beecher Hogan, part 5: 1776–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968), 824. A manuscript of the airs of the pantomime survives. Dated 1785, it is British Library Add. Ms. 38622, fols. 163–87. From a note at the end of the manuscript, it appears to be a slightly earlier copy than the printed text. It provides a different title, Harlequin Omai, and Omai is the harlequin in the play. Also, Columbine is promised to Omai instead of Londina. Christa Knellwolf, “Comedy in the OMAI Pantomime,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 19. O’Keefe, Short Account, 1–5. On the production of the Apotheosis, see McCormick, Omai, 314–18. British Library Add. Ms. 38622, fol. 186. O’Keefe, Short Account, 23–24. A ten-line lyric, “A Tear of Sympathy,” reinforces the idea that sadness and regret were appropriate reactions. It claims to record an “Incident” that “took Place at the Representation” of Omai, “where a Portrait of Captain Cook is introduced. It describes a tough sailor, who sailed with Cook, with wet eyes when he looked on the image of Cook at the end of the play. Poems on Several Occasions, ed. W. Upton (London, 1788), 146–47. On the costumes, see Iain McCalman, “Spectacles of Knowledge: OMAI as Ethnographic Travelogue,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 9–15. A preparatory sketch and watercolor for the Apotheosis reveals that Cook’s hand originally contained a sword rather than the sextant that appears in the etching. See Rüdiger Joppien, “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Pantomime ‘Omai, or, a Trip round the World,’ and the Artists of Captain Cook’s Voyages,” The British Museum Yearbook: Captain Cook and the South Pacific 3 (1979): 89–90 and plates 60, 61. On Mai’s education, including about adultery, see the efforts made by Granville Sharp during Mai’s residence in Britain. Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp, 2 vols., 2 nd ed. (London, 1828), 1.220–27; McCormick, Omai, 165–68. “Omiah’s Farewell; Inscribed to the Ladies of London” (London, 1776), ii, iv. The Preface’s fi nal paragraph contrasts Omiah with the Scots on his regret about leaving the ladies of London.

196

Notes

39. “Omiah’s Farewell,” iii. See also Richard Graves, “On the Tyranny of Custom: An Epistle from Omiah at London, to the High-Priest of Otahieite,” whose complaint is also one that voices frustration with not learning anything useful. Euphrosyne: or, Amusements on the Road of Life (London, 1780), 41–49. 40. “Omiah’s Farewell,” 2–3, 10. 41. Preserving the Self, 213. 42. Fitzgerald, “The Injured Islanders; or, The Influence of Art upon the Happiness of Nature” (London, 1779), Preface 5–6, 69–84, 105–20, 139–44. 43. The descriptive phrase “fatal impact” is from Alan Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: The Invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840 (London: Harper and Row, 1966). Examinations and critiques of the term include Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 36, 44; and Alex Calder, Jonathan Lamb, and Bridget Orr, “Introduction: Postcoloniality and the Pacific,” Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 3–4. 44. Fitzgerald, “Injured Islanders,” 383–96, 461–64. 45. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 71. As Bhabha has also suggested, the hybrid can perform strategic, camoufl aged maneuvers of mimicry and mockery, but we need to be very careful of reading all moments when people and objects come in contact in the antipodes as manifestations of parody. See, for example, Nicholas Thomas’ critique of the emphasis on these modes in Pacific contact narratives. Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” The Location of Culture, 85–92; and Thomas, Entangled Objects, 186–87. 46. Fitzgerald, “Injured Islanders,” Preface 7–8. Fitzgerald’s sources, acknowledged in his footnotes, are in fact Hawkesworth, but his account of Wallis’ voyage rather than Cook’s. He also uses Johann Reinhold Forster’s narrative of Cook’s voyage. 47. Fitzgerald, “Injured Islanders,” 371–82. 48. Fitzgerald, “Injured Islanders,” 382, 465–72. 49. Exploration and Exchange, xv–xvi, 3. See also Hetherington, “The Cult of the South Seas,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 1–7. 50. “Ornament and Use: Mai and Cook in London,” A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840, ed. Kathleen Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 317–44. 51. Gentleman’s and London Magazine 44 (1774): 512. The print is Omiah the Indian from Otaheite Presented to Their Majesties at Kew by Mr Banks & Dr Solander, July 17, 1774, Canberra, National Library of Australia, Rex Nan Kivell Collection NK10666, Pictorial Collection U5390. 52. Other accounts in The London Chronicle describe the courtiers’ amusement at Mai’s actions, but one notes a politically useful aspect to Mai’s asking the king “How do you do?” if it was asked of foreign aggressive rulers. The author proposes that “it might be very well that all petitions and remonstrances for the future should conclude with this familiar question.” See The London Chronicle accounts in volume 36 of 1774: ( July 23), 78; ( July 30), 102; (August 6), 127; (August 11), 143–44. 53. “Comedy in the OMAI Pantomime,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 18.

Notes

197

54. Recollections of the Life of John O’Keeffe, Written by Himself, 2 vols. (London, 1826), 2.113–15. 55. McCalman, “Spectacles of Knowledge,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 11–12. The most detailed analysis of the sets, costumes, and props in relation to possible sources is Joppien, “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Pantomime ‘Omai’”: 81–136. Roger Fiske examines the surviving vocal score and speculates that some of the instruments used in the performance may have been original or copies of Tahitian ones. “A Covent Garden Pantomime,” The Musical Times 104 (1963): 574–76. 56. Joppien, “Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Pantomime ‘Omai’”: 94. 57. Ibid. 105, n. 26; McCormick, Omai, 173–74; Caroline Turner, “Images of Mai,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 23–24. 58. Joseph Burke, English Art, 1714–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 205. 59. McCormick, Omai, 174. 60. “Images of Mai,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 26–27. On the Reynolds portrait, West’s picture of Banks, and other depictions of tattoos, see Harriet Guest, “Curiously Marked: Tattooing, Masculinity, and Nationality in Eighteenth-Century British Perceptions of the South Pacific,” Painting and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art, 1700–1850, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 101–34. 61. William Parry, Sir Joseph Banks with Omai, the Otaheitan Chief, and Doctor Daniel Solander, 1775–1776, oil on canvas, Private Collection. 62. “An Historic Epistle” (London, 1775), iii, 5–6, 45–58, 716–22. See note 15 above on possible authors John Scott-Waring or John Scott. 63. Ibid. 11–14, 124, 232, 239–46. 64. Ibid. 23–35, 707–708. 65. Preserving the Self, 66–67, 75. 66. “Epistle from a Lady of Quality,” Seventeen Hundred and Seventy-Seven; or, a Picture of the Manners and Character of the Age. In a Poetical Epistle from a Lady of Quality (London, 1777), 16–21. 67. Ibid. 25. 68. Canberra, National Library of Australia. Sir Joseph Banks. Correspondence and papers of Sir Joseph Banks, Series 1, Items 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14. The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Discovery,” 1776–1780, vol. 3 of The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1967), 239; McCormick, Omai, 180, 255–56. 69. Appendix III, The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Discovery,” 1386–87. A similar debate about the efficacy of Mai’s goods also occurs between George Forster and William Wales. See George Forster, A Voyage Round the World. Ed. Nicholas Thomas and Oliver Berghof, 2 vols. (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), which contains William Wales’ Remarks on Mr. Forster’s Account and Forster’s response, especially 10–11, 370, 706, 727, 764–65. 70. Dening, Readings/Writings (Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 170. See also Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, Introduction, Islands in History and Representation, ed. Edmond and Smith (London: Routledge, 2003), 7. On the theoretical role of objects at points of culture contact, see Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Appadurai (Cambridge:

198

71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76.

Notes Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. See also Nicholas Thomas’ discussion of the culturally and historically specific ways that objects transform in the Pacific in Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Part of my intention here is to keep in mind postcolonial rather than what are now called global theories about movement and fluidity in the sense that Ania Loomba, John McLeod, and others note, namely a political and historical engagement with difference rather than an uncritical celebration of movement. After all, as David Miller has argued, mobility itself was one of the primary tools of British authority at this point in history. Whether of a spatial, social, or conceptual kind, mobility was harnessed and turned toward imperialist and colonial ends. Miller uses Bruno Latour’s idea of “centers of calculation” to examine Joseph Banks’ influence on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century zoology, particularly plants from other places. Loomba, et al., “Beyond What? An Introduction,” Postcolonial Studies “and Beyond,” 8–16; McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 29–35; Miller, “Joseph Banks, Empire, and ‘Centers of Calculation’ in Late Hanoverian London,” Visions of Empire, ed. Miller and Reill, 21–37; Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire: Open University Press, 1987), 215–57. For examples of each approach, see Alexander Cook, “The Art of Ventriloquism: European Imagination and the Pacific,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 37–41, and Fulford, Lee, and Kitson, Literature, Science, and Exploration, 48, 57, 66–68. Fulford, Lee, and Kitson overemphasize Mai’s agency, but they make useful arguments elsewhere. See also Jocelyn HackforthJones, “Mai,” Between Worlds: Voyagers to Britain, 1700–1850, ed. HackforthJones, et al. (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2007), 45–55. The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Discovery,” 234–39, 1070. The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Discovery,” 236, 1071; Rickman, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage to the Pacific Ocean on “Discovery,” Performed in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, 2nd ed. (London, 1781), 171–73. John Cleveley may have based his paintings on his brother James’ drawings since James Cleveley was a carpenter on the Resolution. However, Rüdiger Joppien and Bernard Smith speculate that John Cleveley could have based his various views on others’ artworks, including those of John Webber. They state that his artworks “are illuminating in that the very problem of authenticity they present underlines the difficulty we face in marking a clear dividing line between the kind of art that seeks to inform and that which seeks to invent in order to reinforce popular interests and popular prejudices.” The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Discovery,” 1776–1780, vol. 3 of The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 216–21; see also 66 and 393, and The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Adventure,” 1772–1775, vol. 2 of The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages (Melbourne, VIC: Oxford University Press, 1985), 127. Guest, “Ornament and Use,” 325. It is tempting to think that the British reactions were inspired in part by the perception that their own class structure was becoming more fluid, since Cook was the fi rst working class man to rise to the rank of captain, but there is no evidence for this. The expectations about Mai’s ambitions appear in the earliest meetings of Mai, through Mai in London, back in the Society Islands, and after Mai’s death. For these later discussions of his

Notes

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82.

83.

84.

85.

199

rank, see also James Morrison, The Journal of James Morrison, Boatswain’s Mate of the Bounty, Describing the Mutiny and Subsequent Misfortunes of the Mutineers, Together with an Account of the Island of Tahiti, ed. Owen Rutter (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1935), 112–13, in McCormick, Omai, 272, 283. Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 174–75. Ibid., 130–31. The engraving’s caption says it is by Royce after Daniel Dodd. European Vision and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 115. Harriet Guest examines Mai’s possessions and his actions on horseback in “Omai’s Things,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 31–35. For a recent interpretation along these lines, see Paul Turnbull, who interprets the armor as a way for Mai to identify with Europeans in order to secure his place at Huahine. “Mai, the Other Beyond the Exotic Stranger,” Cook & Omai, ed. National Library of Australia, 43–49. Morrison, Journal of James Morrison, 112–13, qtd. in McCormick, Omai, 283. By gentlemen, the sources mean men other than the seamen and members of the Navy, in this case people such as John Webber, astronomer William Bayly, and the gardener of Kew, David Nelson. “Samwell’s Journal,” Journals of Captain Cook, 3.1070; Rickman, Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 169. Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, 133–35. On Tu’s reign, see Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas (Auckland: Penguin, 2003), 66, 194, 353–66. Forster also discusses Mai’s status and dress. He perceived him to be “one of the common people . . . as he did not aspire to the captain’s company, but preferred that of the armourer and the common seamen,” because his looks were “ill-favored” and because his “colour was . . . the darkest hue of the common class of people, and corresponded by no means with the rank he afterwards assumed.” He recounts how when Cook dressed Mai in Cook’s clothes earlier at Cape Town, he claimed to be of a higher rank (210–11). However, this does not mean that Mai’s intentions were the same in this different context on the island. The history of Mai after Cook left may be found in John Watts, Voyage of the Governor Phillip to Botany Bay (Dublin, 1790), 277, 279, 283, 288; Captain William Bligh, The Log of the “Bounty,” Being Lieutenant William Bligh’s Log of the proceedings of his Majesty’s Armed Vessel “Bounty” in a Voyage to the South seas, to Take Breadfruit from the Society Islands to the West Indies, ed. Owen Rutter, 2 vols. (London: Golden Cockerel Press, 1937), 1.394, qtd. in Journals of Captain Cook, 2.239, n. 2.; and Douglas Oliver, Return to Tahiti: Bligh’s Second Breadfruit Voyage (Melbourne, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1988), 228. Polynesian Researches, during a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands, 2 vols. (London, 1829), 2.96–99. For a brief biography and bibliography of Ellis, see Lamb, Smith, and Thomas, Exploration and Exchange, 205–207, 277; and Anna Johnston, “The Strange Career of William Ellis,” which reviews recent scholarship on Ellis in Victorian Studies 49 (Spring 2007), 491–501. The goods are not recorded in Banks’ correspondence, but appear in journals and logs; see the Journals of Captain Cook, 3.237, n. 2. Further information about the horses, all of which died except one, and the objects may be found in McCormick’s summary of Bligh (Omai, 275). Lamb provides a different interpretation of the trajectory of European objects in the islanders’ possession: from objects in gift economies,

200

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to commodities in possessive economies, and fi nally “sacred objects, fetishes,” in Preserving the Self, 132–45. Nicholas Thomas says generally that “Missionaries made weapons the evidence for both the barbaric past and the disconnection between it and a new Christian present.” Entangled Objects, 163. 86. The Voyage of the “Resolution” and “Adventure,” vol. 2 of The Journals of Captain Cook, ed. J. C. Beaglehole (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1969), 302, and fn. 1.

Notes to Chapter 5 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

Sciopods only have one leg and a large foot, which they raise above their bodies to shelter themselves from the sun. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum, 11.3.23. Archaeology of Knowledge, 153–54, 172. For an outline of using Foucault for analyzing Pacific literature, see John O’Carroll, “Pacific Literature: A Sketch of a Problematic,” The Mana Annual of Creative Writing 9 (1992): 57–67. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963), 227. I would like to thank Anthony Soares and the participants of the “Postcolonial Islands: Geographic, Theoretical and Human” conference at Queen’s University, Belfast, for their comments and encouragement. Pocock describes the “Atlantic archipelago” as follows: “This is a large—dare I say a sub-continental?—island group lying off the northwest coasts of geographic Europe, partly within and partly without the oceanic limits of the Roman empire and of what is usually called ‘Europe’ in the sense of the latter’s successor states.” His description of an antipodean perspective in his book therefore suggests a view of “the world as an archipelago of histories rather than a tectonic of continents. I see histories both transplanted by voyagings and generated by settlements and contacts, and consequently as never quite at home.” The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3–43. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, ed. Luther S. Mansfield and Howard P. Vincent, 1851 (New York: Hendricks House, 1952), 274–5. Thanks to Nicola Masciandaro for drawing my attention to this passage. Nomadology, esp. 21, 29, 34–37, and 50–62. See also A Thousand Plateaus, 478–82 and 18: “Does not the East, Oceania in particular, offer something like a rhizomatic model opposed in every respect to the Western model of the tree?” Deleuze, “Desert Islands,” Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Michael Taormina (Paris: Semiotext[e], 2004), 9–14. Beer, “Island Bounds,” Islands in History and Representation, ed. Edmond and Smith, 42. Introduction, Islands in History and Representation, 1–3. “Islands Out of Time: Towards a Critique of Island Archaeology,” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 12 (1999): 222–23. A series of responses accompanies Rainbird’s proposals in the same issue of the Journal (pp. 235–60), some of which I discuss in more detail in this chapter. Rainbird draws on Henrika Kuklick, “Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian Biogeography and British Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 23 (1996): 611–38.

Notes

201

10. “Island Models of Reticulate Evolution: The ‘Ancient Lagoons’ Hypothesis,” Voyages of Discovery: The Archaeology of Islands, ed. Scott M. Fitzpatrick (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 206. Terrell quotes Alexander Lesser’s phrase, “myth of the primitive isolate,” from “Social Fields and the Evolution of Society,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 17 (1961): 40–48. For another discussion of scientific stereotypes about islands, see also Atholl Anderson, “Islands of Ambivalence,” Voyages of Discovery, ed. Fitzpatrick, 251. 11. “Island Archaeology: In Search of a New Horizon,” Island Studies Journal 2 (2007): 4–6, and the works cited therein. 12. Dening, Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land, Marquesas 1774–1880 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), cited in Islands in History and Representation, ed. Edmond and Smith, 7. See also Frank Lestringant, who writes that, “The island appears to some degree contaminated by the marine world in which it is located. It thus displays a constitutive ambiguity: formed by land, the island is nonetheless defi ned by the surrounding sea or lake. Its nature is, therefore, essentially hybrid.” “Insulaires,” Cartes et Figures de la Terre (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), 470–75. Wendt, “Towards a New Oceania,” 202. See also Paul Sharrad, “Imagining the Pacific,” Meanjin 49 (1990): 597–606. 13. “Our Sea of Islands,” A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, ed. Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau‘ofa (Suva: School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993), 2–16. See also Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania, 5. “Seascapes” is from Christopher Gosden and Christina Pavlides, “Are Islands Insular? Landscape vs. Seascape in the Case of the Arawe Islands, Papua New Guinea,” Archaeology in Oceania 29 (1994): 162–71; “maritime identity” is from Boomert and Bright, “Island Archaeology,” 16–18. See also the essays in Vaka Moana, Voyages of the Ancestors: The Discovery and Settlement of the Pacific, ed. K. R. Howe (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007). However, Terrell has pointed out that, theoretically, insularity can exist within land and offers an overarching defi nition of islands merely as “habitats surrounded by radical shifts in habitat.” “Comment on Paul Rainbird, ‘Islands Out of Time: Towards a Critique of Island Archaeology,’” Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 12 (1999): 240–41. 14. Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 8. Anderson cautions against imposing the European national, economic, and other barriers onto the history of Polynesian sea voyaging. His research indicates that during the period of European exploration and settlement in the Pacific, sailing technologies went through “phases of technical advance and diffusion.” “Islands of Ambivalence,” 264–66. 15. Edmond and Smith, Introduction, Islands in History and Representation, 5. 16. Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 6, 8–11, and “The Ocean in Us,” The Contemporary Pacific 10 (1998): 391–411. Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen conclude their project to rethink metageographical formulations of the world in The Myth of Continents with a turn to the Pacific. They look forward to the future and suggest that the “debate over how to conceptualize the Pacific community goes to the heart of the challenge before us. . . . [I]t conveys a sense of the immense difficulties entailed in rightly grasping—and naming—the elusive spatial structures of contemporary life.” The Myth of Continents, 204–205.

202

Notes

17. Fitzpatrick, “Synthesizing Island Archaeology,” Voyages of Discovery, ed. Fitzpatrick, 8–9; Terrell, “Islands Models,” 209–10; and see also Boomert and Bright, “Island Archaeology,” 10. 18. Anderson, “Islands of Ambivalence,” Voyages of Discovery, 254–55; Lape, “The Isolation Metaphor in Island Archaeology,” Voyages of Discovery, ed. Fitzpatrick, 224. Lape credits Terrell and others for the suggestion. Terrell, “30,000 Years of Culture Contact in the Southwest Pacific,” Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, ed. James G. Cusick (Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 1998), 191–219. 19. Boomert and Bright, “Island Archaeology,” 14. See also Colin Renfrew’s proposal for using the idea of “peer polity interaction” to analyze island groups, and his concepts of “archipelago intensification” and “main island intensification.” “Islands Out of Time? Towards an Analytic Framework,” Voyages of Discovery, ed. Fitzpatrick, 285–92. 20. DeLoughrey alludes here to Antonio Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 3–4. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), 1–48, 196–228. See also Caren Kaplan’s critique of Deleuze and Guattari to the effect that when they “pose a ‘nomadology’ against ‘history’ they evince nostalgia for a space and a subject outside Western modernity, apart from all chronology and totalization.” She describes their theory as important but “always generalized. The Third World functions simply as a metaphorical margin for European oppositional strategies, an imaginary space, rather than a location of theoretical production itself.” Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 65–100. 21. Rainbird, “Islands Out of Time,” 229; Boomert and Bright, “Island Archaeology,” 13. See also Lape, “The Isolation Metaphor,” 226–29; Anderson, “Islands of Ambivalence,” 255–57. Terrell warns about an over-emphasis on agency in “Island Models,” 209. 22. Young, Postcolonialism, 44–45, 49–56. Young cites the 1980 Brandt report as recognizing a new North–South distinction and terminology. Willy Brandt, et al., North-South: A Programme for Survival. Report of the Independent Commission on International Development Issues (London: Pan, 1980). See also Edmond and Smith, Introduction, Islands in History and Representation, 8. 23. Margaret Jolly, “On the Edge? Deserts, Oceans, Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2001): 417–66. DeLoughrey utilizes Jolly in her work. 24. “Indigenous Articulations,” The Contemporary Pacific 13 (2001): 469–70. For an overview of critiques of simple transnational movement and an argument for continued thinking about mobility, borders, and hybridity, see Cheryl McEwan, “Transnationalism,” Companion to Cultural Geography, ed. Duncan, Johnson, and Schein, 499–512. DeLoughrey also draws on Clifford’s Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) in the title and throughout her work. She also acknowledges Kamai Brathwaite for the term tidalectics in works such as “Caribbean Culture: Two Paradigms,” Missile and Capsule, ed. Jurgen Martini (Bremen, Germany: Universität Bremen, 1983), 9–54; and ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey (Staten Island, NY: We Press, 1999). For a concise discussion of the

Notes

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55.

203

role of the concept of “routes” in postcolonial theory, see McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism, 214–15. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffi n, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (New York: Routledge, 1989), 33. “Langakali,” Langakali (Suva: Mana Publications, 1981), 92–110. “Sunday Sadness,” Langakali. Leaves of the Banyan Tree (London: Penguin, 1981), 183. Ibid., 189–90. Ibid., 174–76. Ibid., 202. Pouliuli (1977; reprint, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1980), 145. Albert Wendt and Pacific Literature: Circling the Void (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 116, 133. Leaves, 203. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 217. Ibid., 172. Ibid., 157–60. “Vaipe” is the name of the neighborhood in Apia, named after the stream, which is also the area lavatory. Ibid., 229. Albert Wendt, 117–18. The Shark that Ate the Sun: Ko e Māgo ne Kai e Lā (Auckland: Penguin, 1992), 55. Ibid., 200. Ibid., 176, 249. Ibid., 44–45. Ibid., 53. “introduction: a kind of genealogy,” Alchemies of Distance (Honolulu, HI: Subpress/Tinfish/Institute of Pacific Studies, University of Hawai‘i, 2001), 11, 14, 22. Ibid., 20. “afiafi,” 32–37. “war news,” 7, 21–23, 24–31. “war news,” 8, 19–20. The article, “Modeling Community: A Response to ‘The Oceanic Imaginary,’” is one of several responses to Subramani’s keynote address, “The Oceanic Imaginary,” given at the Eighth Conference of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in 1999. The Contemporary Pacific 13.1 (2001): 169–77. Michelle Keown, Postcolonial Pacific Writing: Representations of the Body (London: Routledge, 2005), 67–68, 80–83. Tales of the Tikongs (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1983), 68. Ibid., 7–10. “‘Kiss my arse!’ Epeli Hau‘ofa and the Politics of Laughter,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 25 (1990): 142–55. The novel is based on autobiographical experience; Hau‘ofa suffered from a painful fi stula prior to its writing. “An Interview with Epeli Hau‘ofa,” interview by Subramani, Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, ed. Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 39–42. Kisses in the Nederends (1987; reprint, Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1995).

204 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

Notes Tales, 14. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 21–23. Ibid., 1, 10, 13. “The Only Teller of Big Truths: Epeli Hau‘ofa’s Tales of the Tikongs and the Biblical Contexts of Post-Colonialism,” Journal of Literature and Theology 6 (1992): 369–82. Watts acknowledges the groundbreaking work of Subramani, South Pacific Literature: From Myth to Fabulation, 1985 (Suva: University of the South Pacific, 1992). Tales, 48–56. Ibid., 83–93. Ibid., 11–13, 15–16. The idea of postcolonial cultures appropriating and abrogating colonialist discourses can be found in The Empire Writes Back (38–9). “Telling Tales on Tiko: Hau‘ofa’s Satiric Art,” Readings in Pacific Literature, ed. Sharrad (Wollongong, NSW: University of Wollongong, 1993), 133. Tales, 17.

Notes to the Afterword 1. 2.

3. 4.

Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8–9. Manhire, “Some Frames,” Collected Poems (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2001), 263; The Wide White Page: Writers Imagine Antarctica (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2004), 28; Encounters at the End of the World, Discovery Films (2007); Hau‘ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 6, 8–11. Herzog also made The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 2005), which uses Antarctic footage. All quotations are from the Degree Confluence Project site, http://confluence.org/, last accessed on May 24, 2009. Interview with Otto Hahn, “Passport No. G255300,” Art and Artists 1 ( July 1966): 10.

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Index

Note: The numbers in bold refer to figures.

A Account of the Voyages undertaken by the Order of His Present Majesty for Making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (Hawkesworth), 103–104, 106–107 Acosta, José de, 11–12 Africa, 12, 13, 20; Ancient Greece/ Rome on, 23–25; Bible and, 50; Lambert’s map and, 47–48; as oikoumene, 23–25; realism and, 23–24 aiga (family), 147–149 Albertus Magnus, 9, 53–54, 55 Alchemies of Distance (Sinavaiana-Gabbard), 154–156 Alexander Polyhistor, 25, 27 Alfonsi, Peter, 57 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton), 89, 92 Anderson, Atholl, 143 Andrews, Clarence, 83 Andrews, Michael, 49 Antarctica, 166–167 antipodean correspondence, 135; Degree Confluence Project and, 167–171; against development, 159, 161–164; distance in, 154–156; Europe and, 3, 5–6, 11–16, 19, 23–24, 28, 30, 53, 58, 119–120, 129, 136; Europe’s reflection in, 137–138, 145; global v. local in, 155–164; habitation in, 137; humor in, 150–151, 157–163; interisland, 142–145, 147–153; inversion in, 158–159; island theory and, 139–144; lightening in, 138; nostalgia in, 138, 146–147, 153, 164; objectivity in, 157–158;

past and future in, 16, 32, 61, 136, 138, 146, 149–154, 156, 162, 164; reality in, 151–152, 155–156; religion in, 159–160; satire in, 156–161; separation in, 149–150; Thaman and, 145–147; time in, 7, 12, 16, 32, 61, 136, 138, 145; travel to and from in, 3, 58–66, 68–69, 97–99, 100, 101, 103, 107, 113–114, 124–125, 128, 140, 142, 154–155; voice in, 35, 98, 113–115, 117, 122–123; Wendt and, 146–151 antipodeans: communication of, 30–35, 61–63; costumes of, 119–120, 121, 122; gender relations and, 73–76, 83–89, 91–96, 123–124; lamentations and, 113, 125, 138; language of, 119, 122–123; monstrosity of, 48–49, 55, 57–59, 59, 71, 83–84; oppositions of, 27–28, 85–86; patriotism of, 115–116; “child getting” and, 75–77, 82, 87–89, 91, 93–96; religion of, 116, 148, 159–160; sex and, 73–78, 81–82, 85, 87–96, 103–107; sexuality and, 77–78, 81–83, 85–96, 103–107; society, 59–60, 63–65; sodomy and, 88; thoughts of, 30; world habitation and, 48–58. See also Mai antipodes: definition of, 1, 136; beside and, 4–8, 37–39, 48, 58, 83, 165, 170–71; inversion and, 2–3, 5, 10, 19, 28, 61, 82–86, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 114, 136–137, 158–159, 171; location of, 10–11, 20, 21, 22, 22, 23–25, 33–34, 38–48, 167–168,

222

Index

170–171; on maps, 21, 22, 26, 44, 45, 47; people (see antipodeans); physical features of, 168, 169, 170–171; satire and, 12–13, 76, 83–85, 98, 103, 108, 123, 130, 132, 148; similarities of, 170–171; the term/word, 1, 3, 8, 17; theology and, 116; world upside-down and, 1–2, 9, 11–12, 30, 83–85, 158 Antipodes (Brome), 71–73, 83–96; place in, 78; The Tempest v., 80–82. See also Brome, Richard Antipodes Islands, 2, 135; discovery of, 97, 99 Aristotle, 20; on zones, 22–23 Asia, 50; Acosta on, 11; Ancient Greece on, 20, 24–25; Lambert and, 46–47; Polybius on, 23; on T-O maps, 42, 42. See also India Augustine of Hippo, 50–51, 55, 56 Australia, 1, 46, 136, 142, 145, 159, 165 Australian continent, 6, 38, 43, 46, 48, 52, 53

B Bacon, Francis, 11 Bacon, Roger, 40–41, 55, 69 Banks, Joseph, 99, 107, 122; as Opano, 103–104, 105, 106 Barthes, Roland, 7, 66 Beatus of Liebana, 43, 44, 46 Beazley, Raymond, 43 Beer, Gillian, 140–141 beside, 4–7, 70, 83, 102, 137, 144, 165, 174n 10, 174n 16; Europe, 37–39, 48, 63; inversion v., 171 Bhabha, Homi, 19, 102 Bible: Africa and, 50; Christianity and, 36, 40–41, 50–51, 53, 57; colonialism and, 147–148; place and, 40–41 Book of John Mandeville, 9, 68–69, 95, 96; references to, 71–72, 90 Boomert, Arie, 141, 143 Bright, Alistair, 141, 143 Brome, Richard, 9, 73, 79, 80–81, 90; cuckolding/cuckoldry, 74, 88–89; on disorientation, 78; on gender, 84–86; inversions from, 82–86; on jealousy, 92–96; on lesbianism, 91; Mandeville and, 71–72; “child getting,” 82, 87; on relations, 83; on sex, 87–92; on sexuality,

85–96; Shakespeare v., 80–82; sodomy and, 88 Browne, Thomas, 72 Burton, Robert, 89, 92 Butler, Judith, 102

C Camille, Michael, 53 Caxton, William, 38, 68, 95; on circumnavigation, 66–67, 68 “child getting,” 75–77, 88–89, 94; Brome on, 82, 87; in Early Modern era, 82, 87, 91, 93, 95–96 Chrétien de Troyes, 61–62 Christianity, 9; Bible and, 36, 40–41, 50–51, 53, 57; colonialism and, 147–148; missionaries and, 133–134, 147–148, 159; place and, 40–41; satire on, 159–160 Cicero, 28; on communication, 32–33 circumnavigation: Caxton on, 66–67, 68; of earth, 18, 31, 38, 58, 66–67, 68; Mandeville on, 68–69; in Middle Ages, 58, 66–70, 68; orientation and, 38; Plato on, 18 City of God (Augustine), 50–51, 55, 56 Cleomedes, 8, 20, 22, 27, 30; on barriers, 32 Cleveley, John, 128, 198n 75 Clifford, James, 144 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 9, 38, 63 colonialism: Bible and, 147–148; climate and, 18; Hawkesworth and, 103–104, 106–107; neocolonialism, 144, 147, 154, 159, 160–164; Sharrad and, 148–149; Thaman on, 145–146; Wendt on, 147–148. See also postcolonial theory Columbus, Christopher, 183n 48 Commentary on the Apocalypse of Saint John (Beatus), 43, 44 communication: of antipodeans, 30–35, 61–63; Cicero on, 32; Macrobius on, 32–33; Pliny the Elder on, 31; time and, 16. See also antipodean correspondence Le continent austral: Hypothèses et découvertes (Rainaud), 6–7, 36 continental island discourse, 141, 144– 145; islands in, 139–140; satire on, 156–158; Thaman and, 146 continents: myth of, 63–64 continuity, inferences and, 16

Index Convivio (Dante), 60 Cook, James, 6, 113; chart of, 100; death of, 109, 111, 112, 138; Mai’s return with, 124–125, 127, 129–130, 131, 132–135; voyages of, 97–98, 103 correspondence. See antipodean correspondence Cowper, William, 108, 138 Crates of Mallos, 20, 21; Strabo v., 24 Cross the Elder, Thomas, 79

D Dante Alighieri, 60–61 Davenant, William, 73–76 Degree Confluence Project, 10–11; narratives on, 167–168, 170; photos and, 168, 169; value of, 171 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, 34–35, 72, 137; Deleuze on islands, 140 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 143 Dening, Greg, 125, 142 deterritorialization: Deleuze and Guattari on, 34–35, 72, 140 Diderot, Denis, 190n 2, 193n 24 DiGangi, Mario, 88 Diogenes Laertius, 25, 27 directionality: relativity and, 17. See also zonal maps discourse, 3, 8, 137. See also continental island discourse dislocation, medieval geography and, 39–48 disorientation: Brome on, 78; orientation v., 37–38, 136 Divine Institutes (Lactantius), 2–4 Donaldson, Ian, 83 Draco Normannicus (Étienne of Rouen), 62 Dryden, John, 73–76 Duchamp, Marcel, 171 Duffett, Thomas, 73, 76–78

E Early Modern era, 8, 165; Brome in, 9, 71–74, 78, 79, 80–96, 90; Burton in, 89, 92; Davenant in, 73–76; Dryden in, 73–76; Duffett in, 73, 76–78; feminization in, 85–86; Fletcher in, 73, 75–76; gender, 71, 73–77, 85–86; geography, 72, 82–84, 86, 89, 96; inversion

223

in, 83–85, 89, 92–93; lesbianism in, 91; Massinger in, 73, 75–76; “child getting” in, 82, 87, 91, 93, 95–96; sex in, 71, 74, 76–77, 80, 82, 90–92; sexuality in, 73–76, 78, 80–82, 89–95 earth: ancient ideas of, 17–19; circumnavigation of, 18, 31, 38, 58, 66–70, 68; Pliny the Elder on, 28–29; quadrants of, 20, 21, 22; quadripartite model of, 21; “sides” of, 1, 18, 20, 23; Southern Hemisphere, 11, 23–25, 29, 43, 49, 53–55, 57, 64, 100, 103–104, 106–107; terra incognita and, 36, 99, 166; world upside-down and, 1–2, 9, 11–12, 30, 83–85, 158; zones of, 8, 22, 22–24, 27, 29–33, 43, 46, 49–51, 52, 53–54, 57 Earthly Paradise, 43, 48, 60; Lambert on, 46–47; on T-O maps, 42 Edmond, Rod, 141, 158 Ellis, William, 133–135 Enchanted Island (Dryden and Davenant), 73–76 Encounters at the End of the World (Herzog), 166–167 “Epistle from Oberea, Queen of Otaheite [Tahiti], to Joseph Banks, Esq.,” 103–104, 105 Equator/Equatorial Zone: as barrier, 49–50; habitation and, 53–54, 57; on maps, 46, 51, 52, 53 Erec and Enide (Troyes), 61–62 Ethiopia. See Africa Étienne of Rouen, 62 Etymologies (Isidore of Seville), 43, 57 Europe: antipodes beside, 37–38, 63; communication with, 32–33; contact with, 98–99, 114–115; correspondence and, 3, 5–6, 11–16, 19, 23–24, 28, 30, 53, 58, 119–120, 129, 136; critique of, 12, 122; influences of, 114–115; island theory and, 139; travel from, 31; women of, 103–104, 106–107; zones and, 22, 22. See also London

F fa’a Samoa (Samoan way), 147 Fanon, Frantz, 139 Fausett, David, 98

224

Index

feminism, 154 Fitzgerald, Gerald, 114, 117; on Perea, 115–116 Fletcher, John, 73, 75–76 “Flying-Fox in a Freedom Tree” (Wendt), 146–147, 149–151 Foucault, Michel, 3, 8, 137 Freud, Sigmund, 19 Friedman, John Block, 49 Fullagar, Kate, 108

G Geminus of Rhodes, 22; uncertainty of, 30 gender, 65; Brome on, 84–86; in Early Modern era, 71, 73–77, 85–86; inversion and, 88–90, 92–93, 95 gender relations, 73–76, 83–89, 91–96, 123–124 Geographia (Bacon, Roger), 40–41 Geographia (Ptolemy), 24–25, 26 geography: Early Modern, 72, 82–84, 86, 89, 96; in Greek era, 15–25, 36–37; medieval, dislocation and, 39–48; metageography and, 9, 39–40, 95; in Middle Ages, 9, 36–48, 165; in Roman era, 15–25 Geography (Strabo), 20 Gerald of Wales, 38, 62–66 Gervase of Tilbury, 62–64 global positioning systems (GPS), 10–11; Degree Confluence Project and, 167–168, 170 global studies, 5, 139–140, 143–145; local v., 7–8; postcolonial theory v., 7–8, 144 globalism, 118, 143–145, 156, 164–168, 170–171 GPS. See global positioning systems Greek era: on Africa, 23–25; Alexander Polyhistor in, 25, 27; Aristotle in, 20, 22–23; on Asia/Orient, 20, 24–25; Cleomedes in, 8, 20, 22, 27, 30, 32; cosmography/ geography in, 15–25; Geminus of Rhodes in, 22, 30; Herodotus in, 23, 24; Plato in, 1, 8, 16–19, 54; Ptolemy in, 24–25, 26; Pythagoreans in, 25, 27, 54; Strabo in, 8, 20, 24; twenty-first century v., 167–168; uncertainty and, 18–19; on zones, 22–24 Grosseteste, Robert, 57 Guest, Harriet, 117–118

H habitation, 25, 27; in antipodean correspondence, 137; climate and, 55, 57; contradictions about, 48–50; Equator/Equatorial Zone and, 53–54, 57; Macrobius on, 30, 32–33; oceans and, 55; Pliny the Elder on, 28–29; in Southern Hemisphere, 49; of Torrid Zone, 53–54; world, antipodeans and, 48–58 Hall, Joseph, 12–14, 13 Hau’ofa, Epeli: bitterness and, 162–163; against imperialism, 160; on insularity, 156–158; neocolonialism and, 159–160; against neotraditionalists, 160–162; on networks, 142; on past and future, 164 Hawkesworth, John, 103–104, 106–107 Herodotus, 23, 24 Herzog, Werner, 166–167 Heywood, Thomas, 83 Hiatt, Alfred, 36 Hic Mulier, 86 Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Acosta), 11–12 Historie of Travell into Virginia Britannia (Strachey), 86 Histories (Herodotus), 23 History of English Affairs (William of Newburgh), 63 Hobbes, Thomas, 99 Homer, 24 Huahine, 98, 128, 165. See also Tahiti hybrid performativity, 101–102, 122–123; ambiguity and, 107, 111, 113–116, 118–119; inversion and, 108–109; language and, 118–119; of Mai’s possessions, 124–127, 129–130, 132–135; sex and, 103–104, 105, 106–107; of trinkets, 117; utilitarianism and, 113–114 hybridity, 101–102; of clothing, 119–120, 121; of education, 122; inevitability of, 115; as negative, 122–124; in postcolonial theory, 7–8, 146–164; return of, 116–120, 122–127, 129–130, 131, 132–133; of society, 122–124

I imperialism, 6, 171; Hau’ofa against, 160; Mai and, 125–126; Perea against, 116

Index India, 43, 54; antipodes v., 20; Bacon, Roger, on, 55; travels to, 12. See also Asia Inferno (Dante), 60–61 “Injured Islanders” (Fitzgerald), 114–117 internet, confluence on, 167–168, 170–171 inversion: in antipodean correspondence, 158–159; antipodes and, 2–3, 5, 10, 19, 28, 61, 82–86, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 114, 136–137, 158–159, 171; beside v., 171; from Brome, 82–86; in Early Modern era, 83–85, 89, 92–93; England as, 114; gender and, 88–90, 92–93, 95; Hau’ofa and, 158–159; hybrid performativity and, 108–109; of narrative, 136–137 Isidore of Seville, 43, 50, 57 island theory: antipodean correspondence and, 139–144; definition of, 139; Europe and, 139; networks in, 142–143; nostalgia in, 10; and postcolonial theory, 139–144; territorialization and, 139–142; time and, 7, 144 islands: characteristics of, 139–143; in continental island discourse, 139–140; Deleuze on, 140; island theory, 139–144; reticulate model of, 143; sea and, 139–140; time and, 144, 147, 156, 162 Itinerarium Cambriae (Gerald of Wales), 64–66

J Jacobé, Johann, 120, 121, 124 Jolly, Margaret, 144 Jonson, Ben, 80, 88 Jowitt, Claire, 86

K Kastan, David, 82 King, James, 125 Kisses in the Nederends (Hau’ofa), 156 Knellwolf, Christa, 109, 111, 119

L Lacan, Jacques, 18 Lactantius, 1–4, 12; logic and, 2 Lamb, Jonathan, 98, 123 Lambert of Saint Omer, 9, 38; Asia and, 46–47; Liber floridus, maps of,

225

41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52, 53; T-O map of, 41–43, 42 Lape, Peter, 143 Late Lancashire Witches (Heywood), 83 Leaves of the Banyan Tree (Wendt), 146–151 Lecoq, Danielle, 43, 46–47 Liber floridus (Lambert), 41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52, 53 Libya. See Africa linked series, location and, 17–18 Linton, Joan Pong, 85–86 Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Diogenes Laertius), 25, 27 location: of antipodes, 10–11, 20, 21, 22, 22, 23–25, 33–34, 38–48, 167–168, 170–171; dislocation v., 39–48; hemisphere and, 20; linked series and, 17–18; oikoumene in, 20 logic: Lactantius and, 2; Mundus alter et idem and, 12–14 London, 2, 9, 12, 72, 78, 86, 90, 118, 135; Mai in, 109; satire on, 83–84 Loomis, Roger, 61

M Macrobius, 20, 22, 29, 41; on communication, 32–33; on habitation, 30, 32–33 Mai, 10, 98; Britain and, 107–109, 110, 111, 113–114, 117–120, 121, 122–124, 165–166; imperialism and, 125–126; O’Keeffe on, 109, 110, 111, 113, 118–119, 138; possessions of, hybrid performativity of, 125–127, 129–130, 132–135; return of, 116–120, 124–127, 129–130, 131, 132–133; as trinket, 117–118; utility and, 113, 125; whiteness and, 114 Mandeville, John, 38, 68–69. See also The Book of John Mandeville Manhire, Bill, 166 mappaemundi. See maps maps, 36; antipodes on, 21, 22, 26, 44, 45, 47; of Beatus, 43, 44, 46; of Cook, 100; by Crates of Mallos, 20, 21; Equatorial Zone on, 46, 51, 52, 53; in fiction, 157; of Lambert of Saint Omer, 41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52, 53; Liber floridus maps, 41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52, 53; in Mundus

226

Index

alter et idem, 12, 13; oceans in, 45, 47–48; orientation and, 42; from Ptolemy, 26; In somnium Scipionis expositio, 22; Temperate Zone on, 29; T-O maps, 41–43, 42, 46; Torrid Zone on, 29; zonal, 22, 23–25, 27, 29 Marriage of Philology and Mercury (Martianus Capella), 30 Martianus Capella, 20, 22, 30 Massinger, Philip, 73, 75–76 Maugham, Somerset, 6 Mead, Margaret, 6 Melville, Herman, 140 metageography, 9, 39–40, 95, 179n 6 Michener, James, 6 Middle Ages, 165; Augustine in, 50–51, 55, 56; Beatus of Liebana in, 43, 44, 46; Caxton in, 38, 66–67, 68, 95; Chrétien de Troyes in, 61–62; circumnavigation in, 58, 66–69, 68; Dante in, 60–61; geography in, 9, 36–48, 165; Gerald of Wales in, 38, 62–66; Gervase of Tilbury in, 62–64; Isidore of Seville in, 43, 50, 57; Lambert of Saint Omer in, 38, 41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52, 53; mappaemundi/maps in, 21, 22, 41–43, 42, 45, 46–48, 47, 51, 52; postcolonial theory and, 37–38; Sacrobosco in, 51; Thomas of Cantimpré in, 58–60 Miller, David, 101 mimicry, 19, 83, 132, 147; in postcolonial theory, 5, 7–8 Mirrour of the World (Caxton), 66–67, 68, 95 missionaries, 133–134, 147–148, 159 Moby Dick (Melville), 140 Mock Tempest (Duffett), 73, 76–78 Mundus alter et idem (Hall): logic v., 12–14; map from, 12, 13; narrative of, 12–14

N National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, 167–168 De natura loci (Albertus Magnus), 53–54, 55 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 28–29, 140 neocolonialism, 147, 154, 162–164; definition of, 144; Hau’ofa and,

159–160; independence and, 160–161 neoimperialism, 171 New Atlantis (Bacon, Francis), 11 New World: Brome and, 78, 86; climate of, 85 New Zealand/Aotearoa, 2, 165; Niueans in, 151–154 Niue, 145; past and future of, 151–154 nomadism: Deleuze and Guattari on, 34, 140; DeLoughrey on, 143; Pule on, 151–154 nostalgia, 138, 164; from Pule, 153; from Thaman, 146–147

O Oberea. See Perea Oceania. See Pacific Ocean oceans: Atlantic, 1, 24–25, 39–40, 47–48, 139; habitation on, 55; in maps, 45, 47–48; Pacific (Great Sea), 2–3, 6, 42, 48, 97–99, 101, 103, 135, 140; Pliny the Elder on, 31 Odyssey (Homer), 24 oikoumene, 20, 21; Africa in, 23–25 O’Keeffe, John, 109, 110, 111, 113, 118–119, 138 Omai, or, A Trip round the World (O’Keeffe), 109, 110, 111, 113, 118–119, 138 Omia/Omaih. See Mai Opano (Joseph Banks), 103–104, 105, 106 oppositions: of antipodeans, 27–28, 85–86; similarity and, 16–17 Oresme, Nicholas, 51 Orientalism, 5–6, 120 orientation, 5; circumnavigation and, 38; disorientation v., 37–38, 136; maps and, 42

P Pacific Ocean (Great Sea), 2–3, 6, 42, 48, 97–99, 101, 103, 135, 140 parataxis, 17–18 Perea (“Queen of Tahiti”): Banks and, 103–104, 105, 106; Fitzgerald on, 115–116; against imperialism, 116 performativity, 97, 113, 118, 122, 129– 130. See also hybrid performativity; periperformativity periperformativity, 102–103, 107, 109, 115, 117 Pierre d’Ailly, 183n 48

Index place, 47–48, 137, 144; Bible and, 40–41 Plato, 1, 8, 54; abstraction v. realism from, 18; on circumnavigation, 18; global travel and, 17–18; on opposition v. similarity, 16–17; string of observations from, 17–18; uncertainty and, 18–19 Pliny the Elder, 54, 55, 140; on communication, 31; on earth, 28–29; on oceans, 31–32; on Torrid Zone, 31–32 Pocock, J. G. A., 139 Polybius, 23 Polynesian Researches, During a Residence of Nearly Six Years in the South Sea Islands (Ellis), 133–135 polysyndeton, 17–18 Pomponius Mela, 23–24 Posidonius, 27 postcolonial theory, 5–8; global studies v., 7–8, 144; hybridity in, 7–8, 146–164; Middle Ages and, 37–38, 40; mimicry in, 5, 7–8; Orientalism, 5–6. See also neocolonialism Pouliuli (Wendt), 148–149 Preston, William, 123–124 procreation. See “child getting” Ptolemy, Claudius: on Asia, 24–25; boundaries and, 25; map from, 26 Pule, John Puhiatau, 145, 151; dynamism of, 153; on networks, 152–153; on spirituality, 153–154 Pythagoras, 20, 25, 54, 178n 28 Pythagoreans, 25, 27, 178n 28

R Rainaud, Armand, 6–7, 36 Rainbird, Paul, 141, 143 De re publica (Cicero), 28 reality: in antipodean correspondence, 151–152, 155–156; myth v., 98–99, 101–102 relativity, directionality and, 17 Religio medici (Browne), 72 religion: of antipodeans, 116, 148, 159– 160; Christianity, 9, 36, 40–41, 50–51, 53, 57, 147–148, 159–160; missionaries and, 133–134, 147–148, 159; native, 116, 150 Renaissance. See Early Modern era Reynolds, Joshua, 119–120, 121 Rickman, John, 127–130, 131, 132–133

227

Robertus Anglicus, 54–55, 57 Robin, Valère, 168, 170 Robinson Crusoe, 140 Roman era: on Africa, 23–25; Cicero in, 28, 32–33; cosmography/geography in, 15–25; Crates of Mallos in, 20, 21, 24; Diogenes Laertius in, 25, 27; Lactantius in, 1–4, 12; Macrobius in, 20, 22, 29–30, 32–33, 41; Martianus Capella in, 20, 22; Pliny the Elder in, 28–29, 31–32, 54, 55, 140; Pomponius Mela in, 23–24; Robertus Anglicus in, 54–55, 57; twenty-first century v., 167–168; on zones, 22–23, 29 Romm, James, 20, 28

S Sacrobosco, Iohannes de, 51, 57 Said, Edward, 6 Samoa: Sinavaiana-Gabbard on, 154–156; Wendt on, 147–151 Sanders, Julie, 85 satire: in antipodean correspondence, 156–161; antipodes and, 12–13, 76, 83–85, 98, 103, 108, 123, 130, 132, 148; on Christianity, 159–160; on continental island discourse, 156–158; on London, 83–84 Scipio, 28 Scot, Michael, 51, 57 Sea Voyage (Fletcher and Massinger), 73, 75–76 Sedgwick, Eve, 4–5, 9, 37, 83, 102, 117, 137, 165 sex, 73, 75, 78, 81, 85, 93–96; Brome on, 87–92; in Early Modern era, 71, 74, 76–77, 80, 82, 90–92; hybrid performativity and, 103–104, 105, 106–107; sodomy, 88 sexuality, 77, 83, 103–107; Brome on, 85–96; in Early Modern era, 73–76, 78, 80–82, 89–95 Shakespeare, William, 72–73, 78; Brome v., 80–82 Shark that Ate the Sun (Pule), 145, 151–154 Sharrad, Paul, 148–149, 163–64 similarity, opposition and, 16–17 Sinavaiana-Gabbard, Caroline, 154–156 skin color, 154

228

Index

Smith, Adam, 117 Smith, Vanessa, 141 sodomy, 88 Somnium Scipionis (Cicero), 32–33 Southern Hemisphere, 11, 23–25, 29, 43, 53–55, 57, 64, 100; habitation in, 49; Hawkesworth on, 103–104, 106–107 Sphere (Sacrobosco), 51 Sri Lanka, 177n 17 Stafford, Barbara, 99, 101 Stone, Lawrence, 87 Strabo, 8; on location, 20; realism and, 24 Strachey, William, 85–86

T Tahiti, 103–104, 106–107, 128, 131. See also Mai; Perea Tales of the Tikongs (Hau’ofa), 156–164 Taprobrane. See Sri Lanka Task (Cowper), 108, 138 Tatlock, J. S. P., 61 Taylor, Miles, 85 Temperate Zone: Cleomedes on, 32; Crates on, 24; Geminus on, 30; Lambert and, 51, 52, 53; Macrobius on, 22, 23, 29–30, 33; on maps, 29; Martianus on, 30; in North, 29; Posidonius on, 27; in South, 8, 24, 29–31, 54, 57 Tempest (Shakespeare), 72, 80–82, 96; adaptations of, 73–78 terra incognita, 99, 166 Terrell, John, 141 territorialization, 34; deterritorialization v., 34–35; island theory and, 139–142 Thaman, Konai Helu, 145–147 Thomas of Cantimpré, 58–60 Thoreau, Henry, 173n 1 Timaeus (Plato), 1, 16–19 time: in antipodean correspondence, 138, 145; communication and, 16; past and future, 138, 146, 149–154, 156, 162, 164 T-O maps, 41–43, 42, 46 Torrid Zone, 43, 51, 52; habitation of, 53–54; on maps, 29; Pliny the Elder on, 31–32 tourism, 139, 147, 150 Traub, Valerie, 91 travel writing, 8–10, 38, 98, 167–168

tropes, 8 tropicalism, 6, 98, 102, 107, 119–120, 124, 136, 146–147, 156, 158, 174n 13 Turner, Caroline, 120

U uncanny, 19 uncertainty, 33–34; of explorers, 101; of Geminus of Rhodes, 30; Greek era and, 18–19; medieval, 36–37; Plato and, 18–19

V Valpone (Jonson), 88 Veneto, Paolino, 39

W Wales, William, 135 Wallis, Samuel, 114–116 Waterhouse, Henry, 97, 99, 117 Watts, Edward, 160 Weaver-Tower, Rebecca, 76 Wendt, Albert, 6, 8, 142; antipodean correspondence and, 146–151; on colonialism, 147–148; realism from, 146–147; on Samoa, 147–151 Wide White Page (Manhire), 166 William of Newburgh, 63 Wittkower, Rudolf, 57–58 women: of Europe, 103–104, 106–107; feminism and, 154; lesbianism and, 91. See also Perea world upside-down, 1–2, 9, 11–12, 30, 83–85, 158

Y Young, Robert, 101, 144, 147, 162

Z zonal maps, 22, 23–25, 27, 29, 52 zones: Ancient Greece on, 22–24; delineation of, 23; of earth, 8, 22, 22–24, 27, 29–33, 43, 46, 49–51, 52, 53–54, 57; Equator/Equatorial Zone, 46, 49–51, 52, 53–54, 57; Europe and, 22, 22; Roman era on, 22–23, 29; Temperate Zone, 8, 22, 23–24, 27, 29–33, 51, 52, 53–54, 57; Torrid Zone, 29, 31–32, 43, 51, 52, 53–54