Circus 1992

 

In this Quincentennial year, Columbus has become an industry unto himself. Whether one speaks of discovery, invasion, or encounter, whether one considers the man a hero or a villain, a visionary and adventurer or a greedy capitalist responsible for the genocide of native Americans, it has been written, composed, choreographed, scripted, videotaped and staged.

The World’s Fair has opened in Seville, and the Summer Olympics are about to begin in Barcelona. Meanwhile, Universal and Paramount are racing to complete films (each to cost between $40 and $50 million) by October. Universal’s Christopher Columbus: The Discovery directed by Alexander Salkind includes Marlon Brando in the role of Torquemada. Brando received $5 million but wants his name removed from the credits to protest the depiction of the Indians in the film. Paramount’s 1492: The Conquest of Paradise directed by Ridley Scott stars Gerard Depardieu as Columbus, with Sigourney Weaver as Queen Isabella.

Numerous conferences devoted to various aspects of the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyages were held on college campuses, and summer institutes and seminars for educators will continue to contribute to the knowledge of this field. Major funding agencies underwrote pro­jects, and several exhibits focusing on 1492 and its legacies have been mounted or are currently travelling around the country

A musical, Encounter 500 or: How the Italians, Jews, Moslems, Portuguese and Spanish Encountered the Indians 500 Years Ago with book and lyrics by internationally acclaimed playwright and drama critic Mario Fratti, and music by Giuseppe Murolo (Wall to Wall Press for Samuel French, Inc., 1991) begins with two characters, Chris and Isa, who meet in the New York Public Library. This transforms into a Royal Palace in Spain, and later the Santa Maria. The songs include: “I Am a Spanish Woman,” “You’re Our Captain,” and “You Can’t Trust Italians.” Musical offerings to premiere in August include Andre Hadju’s cantata “Dreams of Spain” and composer Frank Abbinanti’s “Come una forza di luce.”

The presses have not been idle, and publications, sourcebooks, maga­zines, catalogs, and special issues continue to be cranked out. Their qual­ity and the point of views they espouse range from the highly implau­sible to the truly enlightening.

Renaissance Characters, edited by Eugenio Garin and translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (University of Chicago Press, 1991) is a timely translation of L’uomo del Rinascimento, a collection of essays on Renaissance man first published in 1988. The Columbus industry notwithstanding, its purpose is twofold, according to the publisher’s preface: to contribute to the understanding of the “formation of the idea of Europe” on the verge of the formation of its common market, and to “attempt to portray a moment decisive for the genesis of the modern mind.” An international team of scholars was assembled to write essays on a number of human types or figures, exemplars who helped to shape this new age. In another attempt to reshape the idea of a modern Europe, historians from twelve nations of the European community col­laborated on a new history of Europe textbook. It will be required read­ing in some Italian schools this fall.

Garin’s types contributed to the profound cultural changes that shaped Renaissance life in many facets of human endeavor: the arts, sciences, politics, religion and economics. Among the exemplars is Columbus, discussed by semiotician Tzvetan Todorov in “Voyagers and Natives.” Todorov concentrates on the years between 1492 and 1552, (Magellan’s circumnavigation) because “Never have any other thirty years changed the face of the globe so much” (250). Todorov’s The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) previously offered a thorough assessment of the conse­quences of the encounter.

Todorov positions Columbus as the first and most famous of the great voyagers, a catalyst rather than an incarnation of the time. His moti­vation was a religious one, and therefore not “modern.” The gold would help in the reconquest of Jerusalem, a religiously rooted and anachro­nistic goal. Columbus’s perception was strongly influenced by preconcep­tion. This influenced how he wrote about his discovery and his first contacts with “Indians.” Columbus’s personality, his skilled observa­tion of nature and his navigational skills contributed to his successful enterprise, but Todorov adds “If he had not lived in the semi-fabulous world of old narrations and prophecies (Mandeville and Pierre d’Ailly), he never would have undertaken the voyage in the first place” (251). A better observer of nature than of people, Columbus dis­tinguished between good Indians, future Christians-in-the making, and bad cannibals. Todorov’s conclusion: “Columbus discovered America, but not the Americans” (257).

Amerigo Vespucci produced the best travel accounts, and his name, not Columbus’s, graces the Western Hemisphere. “It was the writer who was rewarded, not the navigator. With Amerigo, then, we see a new type of voyager, the intellectual and the artist” (258). Todorov fur­ther contrasts the two explorers to support his assertion that Columbus is a man of the Middle Ages, who thinks literally, while Vespucci is a man of the Renaissance, trained in rhetoric, aware of cultural rela­tivism, and whose letters seek to charm and amuse. “Columbus was writing documents: Amerigo, literature” (259).

In Marvin Lunenfeld’s 1492, Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretations (D. C. Heath, 1991) the editor assembles primary and secondary sources to help the reader assess the legacies of 1492. The preface and introductory chapter nicely frame the material that is to come: the preparation for and logbooks of the voyage, the impact of the encounter, and an account of how mutually incompatible civilizations attempted to understand each other. Obviously meant to be used in the classroom—Lunenfeld includes study questions. A selection from Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea (1942) ends with “Never again may mortal men hope to recapture the amazement, the wonder, the delight of those October days in 1492 when the New World grace­fully yielded her virginity to the conquering Castilians.” The study question is guaranteed to capture the amazement of the class as it attempts to answer Lunenfeld’s tongue-in-cheek study question: “Does Morison present the Castilian assault upon the New World as a “rape” or as a “seduction?”

In the middle of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s very straightforward and fact-filled study, Columbus (Oxford University Press, 1991), the author coyly suggests that the only book left to write about Columbus is one that claims he is gay. Why else would Columbus make such a note of heroes in Plutarch who were susceptible to the “unspeakable lust” (42)? Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus emerges as an untiring and persis­tent man who conceived his plan to please his patrons. In this book, Fernández-Armesto sweeps aside theories based on conjecture, recon­struction and speculation. He presents “the unadorned facts.” He states in his preface: “I have tried nothing which cannot be verified—or in some cases reasonably inferred—from unimpeachable sources. After all, the facts are all there in Columbus’s own writings, in letters and log-books.”

Fernández-Armesto’s Columbus emerges as “the socially ambitious, socially awkward parvenu; the autodictat, intellectually aggressive but easily cowed; the embittered escapee from distressing realities, the adventurer inhibited by fear of failure—is, I believe consistent with the evidence but it would no doubt be possible to reconstruct the image, from the same evidence, in other ways” (vii). This is a highly readable book which very nicely places Columbus in his Genoese context. The Genoese formed a tribal Mediterranean network whose expatriates welcomed and helped one of their own. Their adaptability made them excellent merchants. The statelessness of the Genoese explains much about Columbus the man; the ease with which he approaches foreign sovereigns, the fact that he writes in Spanish rather than in Genoese or Italian, and his desire to establish a dynasty.

Fernández-Armesto warns against “Imaginative reconstructions of what Columbus ‘must’ have been thinking or doing at moments when the sources are silent or ignored are made the basis for vacuous conclu­sions” (preface, ix). Although these charges seemed to be leveled at the likes of Madariaga and Morison, Stephen Greenblatt takes this very tack.

Marvel and wonder form the central images in Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (University of Chicago Press, 1991). This scholarly work focuses on representational practices of the Europeans as they tried to make sense of and describe the New World to their fellow countryman. According to the author, the Europeans felt superior because they had writing. And it was the very lack of writing, as Todorov reminds us, that precipitated the beginning of the end for a people whose history was bound in memory.

Wonder is the initial European response to the New World, and Columbus’s voyage initiates a century of intense wonder. Greenblatt brings the concerns of literary criticism to illuminate texts such as Mandeville’s Travels, and Columbus’s letter to Santangel. We are told that Columbus read Marco Polo and Mandeville, not as a merchant or a pilgrim, but “as an agent on a mission representing a state caught up in the Reconquista” (53). Greenblatt sees Columbus repeatedly reacting with wonder, seeing the marvelous as closely linked in Christian and heroic rhetoric to heroic enterprise. The abundant and often overuse use of the word “maravilla,” however, may be part of Columbus’s limited lexicon, a shorthand that becomes cliché in his accounts. Columbus as rhetorician left much to be admired. Historians agree that Columbus’s Spanish prose was workmanlike. Even Fernández-Armesto points out that Columbus often made laughable errors in his writings. Thus the overdependance on this word and the fact that Columbus repeatedly is frustrated in his descriptions should be taken at face value.

Greenblatt’s book often presents conjecture as history. Speculations such as, “The production of wonder then is not only an expression of the effect that the voyage had upon Columbus but a calculated rhetorical strategy, the evocation of an aesthetic response in the service of a legit­imation process”(73) fill its pages. Two pages later he concludes, “The marvelous functions for Columbus as the agent of conversion: a fluid mediator between outside and inside, spiritual and carnal, the realm of objects and the subjective impressions made by those objects, the recalci­trant otherness of a new world and the emotional effect aroused by the otherness” (75). This book is written for the academic community and presupposes a familiarity with and acceptance of the concepts of new historicism. Any number of conclusions could be derived from such a stance, as Fernández-Armesto reminds us.

A reader seeking an in-depth account of Columbus’s entries, and a treatment which examines not only what Columbus saw in the New World and how he saw it would be better served by reading Jeremy Moyle’s 1985 translation of Antonello Gerbi’s work, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (University of Pittsburgh Press). Gerbi takes into account that what Columbus reports is strongly influenced by his preconceptions, experi­ences, and expectations. Gerbi notes how the flora and fauna of America immediately attracted Columbus’s attention and even managed to dis­tract him from the search for gold, producing reactions in him that already contain in microcosm all the later attitudes of the European in America. We can also see the Admiral’s limited vocabulary and frus­tration at the lack of an appropriate lexicon as he tried to describe flora and fauna. In these entries things are either like they are in Spain, or they are not.

A number of nicely illustrated “coffee table” books have appeared. Zvi Dor-Ner’s Columbus and the Age of Discovery (William Morrow, 1991) is the companion volume to the 7-part series by the same name he produced for PBS. The book’s seven chapters coincide with the program, and its lavishly illustrated pages and readable text convey the full sweep of the adventure and its consequences and continuations. The authors remind us that the naming of the space shuttle Columbia is a symbol of another human quest for knowledge and profit, power and glory.

The Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial Commemoration is a com­panion book to the Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit of the same name and shows how the world became a very different place even after the first contact. This is the story of the transfer of plants, animals, and diseases, and how they changed the world, for better or worse. The exchange includes the cultures and contributions of Africa. The text is nicely illustrated. Steven King and Liliana Campos Dudley, authors of the last chapter, urge the reader to ponder the far-reaching conse­quences of global change in the future, such as AIDS, deforestation, and conservation.

It will be interesting to see how 2092 will be celebrated and how the reputation of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea fares by then.

 

RoseAnna Mueller

Columbia College—Chicago