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Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World

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This is an excellent critical analysis, written by the highly educated, greatly informative Stephen Greenblatt. In this analysis of the motivation behind conquest, in its various shapes and forms in what is now North America, as well as other parts of the world, new light is shed on the driving forces that pushed Middle Age explorers to seek out new, more exoticized territories. The statement is reiterated, time and again, throughout the course of this book that European explorers/colonists were motivated by the vision of the "marvelous" that existed in the indigenous, uncolonized parts of the world. The only way to truly realize the potential of these people and their rich natural resources, was to possess them in some form.

Greenblatt sheds new insight on what was going on in the head of Columbus (one of the many examples presented here), when he set out to conquer what he understood to be India, hence his reasoning behind calling the indigenous people he discovered "Indians." This will definitely make you reconsider what Columbus Day really stands for, as well as ponder how the scope of human relations has been altered, based on the motivation of possession and ownership alone.
Fascinating and cautionary......

Upon reading the title of Stephen Greenblatt's slim book (it consists of just over two hundred pages, of which nearly a quarter is endnotes) one might be tempted to wonder if Greenblatt has taken up a latent interest in Marxist Studies and strayed from New Historicism, an area for which he arguably has become a figurehead (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991. ISBN: 0-226-30625-6). Of course, there is a neat subtitle which rectifies any confusion: The Wonder of the New World. The time period of this project seems right, seeing as the explorations of the Americas occurred roughly at the same time of the beginning and flourish of the Renaissance, which is on par with the preferred time period in which the works in Greenblatt's extensive catalogue tend to discuss; yet, the subject matter seems strikingly different. In the index, there are merely thirteen given page numbers in which Shakespeare or his plays have been mentioned and incorporated into this discussion. This seems scarce, coming from a writer whose other works include Shakespearean Negotiations, Hamlet in Purgatory, and Will in the World, as well as editing The Norton Shakespeare. So what then is the Bard's most prominent aficionado and scholar alive today doing in this book? Greenblatt takes his interest in early Modern English legal documents, court briefings, diaries and logs, and other "miscellaneous" literary sources, and casts an observing eye away from Europe proper, the genesis of the travelers whose explorations make up the content of this book; following the explorers, he focuses on what they focused: the new, frightening and inviting (all at once) world. He abandons his normal region of investigation and instead, chooses to follow Cortés, Columbus and company across the Atlantic, to a world not populated by Shakespearean actors but of conquistadors performing their own unscripted, divinely and royally advocated speeches, cultural rituals and historical histrionics.

The title is slightly misleading; with its promise of an extended discussion of the many "discovered" and usurped commodities and land originally belonging to Native Americans, or Indians, as Greenblatt unapologetically refers to them, ignoring the then-nascent push to diligently apply politically correct monikers to all things tinged with the remnants of "white guilt." The Europeans called them Indians, believed they were Indians; so why, he argues, would we call them anything else in a book that tries to peer from the eyes of those who claimed the New World for their respective crowns? The rejection of this practice, the speech act of renaming, fits in well with one of the book's major topics: the practice of European discoverers and conquerors christening their new possession in their native tongue. But instead of focusing primarily on the mere material objects found in the brave new world of cannibals, headless men with eyes resting squarely in their chests, and gold-plated roads, Greenblatt chooses to discuss other things found on the virginal and wondrous North American continent. He takes the time to discuss those anthropophagic natives and other monstrosities Columbus and others failed to find, much to their surprise and chagrin. But more intensively, he discusses the enslavement of the Indians and Eskimos, the kidnapping and misunderstanding of their languages, and how the Europeans looked at their "possession acts" as a form of ultimate gift-giving: after taking their land, the conquistadors forced upon the Indians Christianity and gave them salvation through a Lord they could not read about for themselves. Of course, he addresses the issue of who legitimately owns the discovered lands. By bringing in Roman law from which many of the conquerors would have based the validity of their claims, Greenblatt exposes the holes in the argument that Columbus, above all the other voyagers, makes. Also, he fleshes out the well-intentioned logic (they were doing the "heathens," the "barbarous" natives a grand favor) of the usurpers who took other's land in the name of their kings and queens and God. Though the reader, after hearing the case, may (and possibly should) still doubt the conclusion of the premises set forth by the conquerors.

Greenblatt's wrote Marvelous Possessions with the same digestible, dare I say, enjoyable tone and style that demarcates his writing from those denser, winding essays and books of other mainstay Continental critics. His personal stories and the quirky accounts of obscure figures in history serve as jumping boards and pivotal points from one thread of thought to another related, but usefully tangential direction. Of this, he says:
It will not escape anyone who reads this book that my chapters are constructed largely around anecdotes, which the French call petites histories, as distinct from grand récits of totalizing, integrated progressive history, a history that knows where it's going (2).
At times, the boundary between the story and the academic intent of the chapter feels vaguely visible, if at all discernible. The dated-infused and fact-rich petites histories weigh in as no less important than the more academically focused parts, as each one continues and augments the discursive and loose flow of Greenblatt's arguments. The only significant borders exist in the book's division into five chapters: "Introduction," "From the Dome of the Rock to the End of the World," (the book's namesake) "Marvelous Possessions," "Kidnapping Language," and finally "The Go-Between."

Greenblatt clearly declares his mission statement at the beginning of a paragraph nestled neatly in the middle of the first chapter, "Introduction," which is not an introduction in a more traditional sense, something that the reader could skip or skim over without hampering their understanding of the rest of the book: this first chapter is just as necessary as anything else in this book. Greenblatt says, "[m]y book is about early European responses to the New World and hence about the use of symbolic technology" (12). He does this through the examination and explication of the travelogues of European explorers like Columbus' legal proclamation that he makes upon setting foot on the North American continent. He also looks at the interpretation of gestures and hand signs the natives gave to the Europeans and vice versa. Furthermore, Greenblatt draws attention to the obvious language barrier between the conquerors/explorers and the indigenous peoples and the resulting misunderstanding of meaning, mistaking of intention and the Europeans misappropriation of words. For example, Greenblatt shares with his readers a particularly telling story about the Spaniards who "discovered" Central America. When they ask what the land was called, the Indians responded back:
"uic athan, which means, what do you say or what do you speak, that we do not understand you. And then the Spaniard ordered it be set down that it be called Yucatan. The Maya expression of incomprehension becomes the colonial name of the land that is wrested from them" (104).

Each of the five chapters discusses the wonder and awe of the discovery of a cultural other and there land, hence the adjective "marvelous" in the title. In the first chapter, "Introduction," the traveler is Greenblatt, himself. He recounts his romp through the Balinese countryside, and his underwhelming encounter with the native people whom are flocked around a TV. In the next chapter, "From the Dome of the Rock to the Rim of the World," Greenblatt primarily writes about Mandeville, a predecessor of Columbus, and his travels. Mandeville does not possess anything that he finds, though. Set as a point of contrast to later explorers, the chapter on Mandeville "is...a chapter about what it means not to take possession, about circulation or wandering as an alternative to ownership, about a refusal to occupy" (27). Yet, he finds marvelous sights, such as "dog-headed men [and] the Indians whose testicles hang down to the ground" (31). The third chapter, "Marvelous Possessions," builds on Mandeville's travels; but now the explorer in question, Columbus, seeks to possess and what he finds en route awes him. Using much of the original Spanish, Greenblatt shows the "cosas maravillas" (marvelous things) Columbus finds, and the lack of opposition offered to him as he takes them; his mantra becomes "y no me fué contradicho (and I was not contradicted) (58). In the fourth chapter, "Kidnapping Language," Greenblatt focuses less on individual explorers but instead the function and failure of language. He asks the extremely pertinent question: "how is it possible for one system of representation to establish contact with a different system?" (91). The last chapter, "The Go-Between," examines the mediator of linguistic barriers, the interpreter and their usually-unreliable interpretation between the traveler and the other. Greenblatt spends a good amount of the chapter writing about Doña Maria, the central interpreter discussed. The Spaniards see her, not as just a linguistic go-between, but as a marginal figure that exists in between the two cultures. She is an "object of exchange, agent of communication, model of conversion, the only figure who appears to understand the two cultures" (143). After this, Greenblatt writes on Montaigne and his experience with his servant-interpreter. This section of the chapter elaborates the study of the middle man, so that "[w]here we expect to find two terms in Montaigne--subject and object--we find a third: subject, object, and go-between" (150). Finally, Greenblatt ends as he began, inserting himself as the viewer; but instead of presenting himself as the subject, he is himself a go-between. He finds himself in a village church, balanced between wooden effigies of Christ and the Mixtec god of death; in a moment of clarity and perception, he collapses the distinct boundaries between "us" and "them," subject and object, leaving only an innate humanness, a marvelous possession all people share.

Stephen Greenblatt, literary critic, research scholar, and professor at Berkeley shines the spotlight on various historical documents, and speculates that what accounted for the appropriation and colonization of the New World was the fact that Europeans had print literacy. The ethos projected by Greenblatt is a likeable one--a scholar who likes blues bars in Chicago and who was captivated by stories as a child. He weaves his own literacy narrative into his analysis of historical writings produced by the likes of Columbus, Jean de Lery, and others who were at the forefront of colonization. Ultimately, Greenblatt makes the point that the ways in which "wonder" and the "marvelous" circulated in European discourse become the strategies for colonizing practice. To tell his version of the ways in which peoples were conquered, Greenblatt uses the writing that tells of events, focusing especially on anecdote, feeling as he does that anecdote, though sometimes not valued in our fact-laden world, does the lion's share of the work, functions somewhere between what occurred and the formalized history that gets told. The book is a strong argument that "wonder" and more especially, written "wonder" functioned to elevate certain peoples and demonize others. It makes the equally strong point that writing, though in some cases works to the detriment of peoples and cultures, can also be the liberating force as well.

Texts that would work well in conversation with Greenblatt's would be Mary Louise Pratt's Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Also useful would be Walker Percy's essay, "The Loss of the Creature," and Clifford Geertz's essay on Balinese cock-fighting.

A highly interesting and well written account of how the early European explorers claimed the New World as their own. The author's account of ownership was not limited to just the land, and all of its wealth, the natives themselves were considered subjects of the King of Spain-and of the Christian God.
Unfortunately the author is a bit of a "third world-er" describing the Europeans as liars and not allowing himself to speak for or about native cultures. This line of reasoning has only one end and that is the old ideal of the Noble Savage. The author just cannot bring himself to say that European explorers were not practicing anything new under the sun. Some readings of the ancient Akkadians or the Babylonians should remind us that aggressive and superior cultures have always overpowered smaller and weaker societies.