Hallucinatory Empires:

Troping Knowledge in the Early Atlantic World

by

Daniel de Paula Valentim Hutchins

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by Professor John Michael

Department of English

Arts, Sciences and Engineering

School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, NY

2013
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For Frank.
 iii

Biographical Sketch

The author was born in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil. He attended Reed College,

and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He began doctoral studies in English at

the University of Rochester in 2005. He received the Master of Arts in English degree in

May of 2008. He pursued his research in Early American Literature and Culture with

Professor Frank Shuffelton and subsequently with Professor John Michael.

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Acknowledgments

This work owes a substantial debt to the careful and patient feedback of John Michael.

Frank Shuffelton provided valuable insight regarding chapter one. Leah Haught, Dustin

Hannum, and Ryan Harper helped to greatly improve chapters one and two.
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Abstract

This dissertation is a comparative study of travel narratives produced by Europeans about

the Americas during the second half of the sixteenth century. It treats three texts: Michel

de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”; Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of

Brazil; and Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia.

The specific focus of this dissertation is on the conceptual categories of time and space

and their relationship to the problem of producing knowledge. Hallucinatory Empires

argues that the recurrent tropes of modernity and globalization in these three texts must

be analyzed not only for the ways they buttressed European claims of sovereignty and

cultural and moral supremacy – but also as imaginative creations that served as a means

of rereading and questioning their own status as a priori knowledge. In addition to

establishing this “tropic” dimension as an illuminating lens for viewing such imaginative

exchanges, Hallucinatory Empires also points towards the alternative chronologies and

genealogies that may emerge when we begin to consider “troping” as a viable mode for

historiography itself. “Hallucination,” in other words, is not only an observable feature of

my historical and cultural source material, but forms a deliberate aspect of this work’s

critical practice. Accordingly, each chapter of Hallucinatory Empires unfolds a dialogic

encounter between a primary text from the colonial archive and a more contemporary

work of critical theory, imaginative fiction or, in the case of the third chapter, revelation.

These dialogic encounters represent a strategy for accessing – hallucinating – other

modernities left out of the Western knowledge project.

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Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professors John

Michael (advisor) and Ezra Tawil of the Department of English and Professor Rachel

Haidu of the Department of Visual and Cultural Studies. This dissertation was directly

supported by a Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship during the spring semester of 2010 and

also by an English Department Research Grant for participation in Dartmouth College’s

Futures of American Studies Institute in the summer of 2009. Graduate study was

supported by a Dudley Doust Teaching Fellowship in the fall of 2009 and a Dean’s

Teaching Fellowship in the spring of 2008, both awarded by the University of Rochester.

Graduate study was also supported by a Susan B. Anthony Teaching Fellowship awarded

by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies in the fall of 2008 as

well as by a Research Grant, awarded by the Department of English in the summer of

2007, for participation in the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory, and, finally, by a

University of Rochester Doctoral Program Fellowship, first awarded in the fall of 2005.
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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 27

Chapter 2 84

Chapter 3 141

Bibliography 204
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List of Figures

Figure Title Page

1 Chupin Woodcut of Tupínamba 126

2 Sapore Sapere alongside the Florentine Codex 127

3 Sapore Sapere #2 128

4 Adam and Eve 180

5 A true picture of one pict 182

6 A true picture of a woman pict 183

7 A young daughter of the picts 184

8 Man of Nation Neighbor to the Pict 185

9 Woman Neighbor to the Pict 186

 ix

Why waste a line on Achille, a shade on the sea-floor?

Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture

is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor,

deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure,

it will change us with the fluent sculpture of Time,

it will grip like the polyp, soldered by the slime

of the sea-slug. Below him, a parodic architecture

re-erected the earth's crusted columns, its porous

temples, stoas through which whipping eels slide,

over him the tasselled palanquins of Portuguese man-o'-wars

bobbed like Asian potentates, when ribbed dunes hide

the spiked minarets, and the waiving banners of moss

are the ghosts of motionless hordes. The crabs' anabasis

scuttles under his wake, because this is the true element,

water, which commemorates nothing in its stasis.

Derek Walcott, Omero

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Introduction

I. The Aztec Jacobin: Troping as a Style of Thought

In the closing stages of Explosion in a Cathedral, a historical novel by Franco-

Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier originally published in Mexico City in 1962 under the title

El Siglo de las Luces, Esteban, our protagonist, a young idealist who has just returned to

his native Cuba after an eye-opening séjour in Paris and Lyon during the throes of the

French Revolution, darkly muses on the paradox between the excessive violence of the

Terror and his vision of France as an enlightened outpost of rationality:

And then had come the Great Delirium, a delirium all the more

incomprehensible when one considered where it had broken out: in the

very country where civilization seemed to have achieved a perfect

equilibrium, a country of serene architecture and incomparable

craftsmanship, a country where Nature had been tamed, and where

language itself seemed to have been made to fit the measures of classical

poetry. No race could have been more unsuited to the background of

scaffolds than the French. Their inquisition had been mild compared with

that of the Spanish. Their Saint Bartholomew’s Day was a trifle beside the

wholesale slaughter of Protestants ordered by King Philip. From this

distance Billaud-Varenne1 seemed an absurd figure to Esteban, with the

1
Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne was an extreme Montagnard and one of the

chief architects of the Terror. He was a complete zealot – the most feared member of the

committee of public safety. Later, he was exiled to Guiana and spent some time in New

York City before dying of dysentery in Haiti.

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bloody, exotic features of an Aztec priest, raising his obsidian knife on

high, against a background of majestic columns and Houdon statues, in a

garden from which all vegetal exuberance was excluded. (Carpentier 260)2

Esteban reveals his sympathies to all things French by euphemizing the Terror as a mere

“delirium.” Employing the language of humoral theory, he insists that before the events

of the Terror, French civilization “seemed to have achieved a perfect equilibrium” (260).

The healthy body of state, like the healthy eighteenth century human body, is balanced:

Nature has been tamed, language refined, and craftsmanship mastered. As we read on we

find that this excellence in social, scientific, and artistic pursuits (the trifecta of

Enlightenment rationality) is concurrent with an enlightened restraint when it comes to

taking human life. The French people, at least in Esteban’s version of history, have

shown themselves to be less bloodthirsty than their neighbors to the south.

That is, of course, until the final sentence of this passage:

From this distance Billaud-Varenne seemed an absurd figure to Esteban,

with the bloody, exotic features of an Aztec priest, raising his obsidian

knife on high, against a background of majestic columns and Houdon

statues, in a garden from which all vegetal exuberance was excluded.

(260)

2
It is interesting to note that the original title of the novel in Spanish translates to

The Age of Enlightenment. It is also noteworthy that the English translation by John

Sturrock comes by way of the French and not the original Spanish.
3
“Tropic” should be understood here and elsewhere in this work as the adjectival
 3

Here Esteban is no longer comparing one European colonial power to another but, rather,

Western civilization to its imagined other, its caricatured shadow-self. Moreover, this

comparison is realized through the fusion of two completely discrete entities. In other

words, it is a metaphor. Billaud-Varenne metamorphoses into the Aztec priest, poised

with his killing blow in a tableau fit for one of David’s neoclassical paintings. This

syncretic superimposition of old world and new, civilization and savagery, rationality and

superstition, is presented to us against the backdrop of an impeccably manicured garden

that has been tamed of its “vegetal exuberance,” adorned with sculpted representations of

famous men, and framed by Baroque columns.

I begin with this remarkable ekphrasis – an Aztec priest conducting human

sacrifice at Versailles or the Jardin de Tuileries – not because it represents a

chronological beginning in the centuries-long story of Europe and the Americas but

because, quite the contrary, it forges a narrative that foregoes linear chronology

altogether. Rather than a beginning, this image represents a turning; a “turning” because

this image of the Aztec-Jacobin is a trope. In his New Handbook of Literary Terms,

David Mikics offers us a good account of the traditional definition for a trope:

The word tropos has a number of meanings in Greek: turning, way,

manner, custom. In the Odyssey, Homer describes Odysseus as

polutropos, a man of many ways. In literature, a trope is a turn of speech

that also involves the turning, or inventive use of, the sense of a word: a

turning away from proper or literal meaning. (300 – 301, italics in the

original)

Hayden White offers a similar and complementary definition of tropes:

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For rhetoricians, grammarian, and language theorists . . . tropes are

swerves in locution sanctioned neither by custom nor logic. Tropes

generate figures of speech or thought by their variation from what is

“normally” expected, and by the associations they establish between

concepts normally felt not to be related or to be related in ways different

from that suggested in the trope used. (2)

Building on his definition, White goes on to offer a slightly more lyrical account of

tropes. For White the tropic3 is, “the shadow from which all realistic discourse tries to

flee,” and troping is “the soul of discourse” (2). The tropic, in short, is invention; a mode

of expression that involves a turning away from established correspondences and forging

new ones. In the sense provided here by Mikics and White, a trope is an invaluable

component for any travel literature in any era but it is especially indispensable for the

three stories of contact treated in these pages, each attempting the almost impossible task

of representing radical alterity intelligibly. The tropic is the language with which we

compare, with which we process and understand difference in its myriad forms and with

which we construct a continuum of intelligibility linking the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Turning back to Esteban and the Aztec Jacobin with this working definition of the

tropic in mind, what we may come to suspect through the enhancement and transfer of

meaning produced by the image Carpentier creates is that Frenchmen and Aztecs are not

3
“Tropic” should be understood here and elsewhere in this work as the adjectival

form of the noun “trope.” In addition to this usage, I will at certain points use the term

“tropological” to refer to the historical study of tropes with a focus on the dominant

tropes present in the discourse of a certain era.

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different kinds of things. We may come to suspect, moreover, that these two instances of

violence – here we might imagine twinned scenes: in one Billaud-Varenne signs a death

warrant during the Terror; in the other the Aztec Priest removes the heart of a sacrificial

victim – are also the same kind of thing. To resort to Hayden White once again:

[tropes are] always not only a deviation from one possible, proper

meaning, but also a deviation towards another meaning, conception, or

ideal of what is right and proper and true “in reality.” Thus considered,

troping is both movement from one notion of the way things are related to

another notion, and a connection between things so that they can be

expressed in a language that takes account of the possibility of their being

expressed otherwise. (2, italics are White’s)

As we have seen, Carpentier’s metaphor works to suggest a connection (indeed, a

consubstantiality), between “properly” disparate objects; objects that are nominally

separated by time and space, by history and geography. If we accept Mikics’s and

White’s characterizations of tropes as inherently deviant and open to more than one

meaning, then it seems we must consider the possibility that Carpentier’s chimeric

superimposition, with its built-in disavowal of the strictures of time and space which

define our material reality, is nevertheless representing a version of that reality, or hinting

at a reality we have yet to uncover. In other words, if we can meaningfully, that is,

intelligibly, conjoin Carpentier’s two examples of ritualized, collective murder, of human

sacrifice, then they must be pointing to some version of “what is right and proper and true

‘in reality’” (White 2).

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And it seems that rethinking our reality and our history is appropriate in this

context. After all, as we have begun to see, Esteban’s vision of Billaud-Varenne as Aztec

priest invites us to deviate from our understanding of the way in which the cultural and

material history of the French Revolution is almost always conceived as an outpouring of

the Enlightenment project, as an insular European narrative of modernity. Carpentier’s

mise-en-scène persuades us, if only fleetingly (but that, perhaps, is all it takes), to

reconsider the relationship between a civilized Europe and a barbarous New World. It

opens up a space for us to regard the Enlightenment-era executions of the Terror as a

form of ritualized human sacrifice and, conversely, Aztec human sacrifice as a form of

politically expedient and closely calculated execution, one undertaken to keep the Mexica

body politic healthy and unified.

Thus, one possible outlet or expression for this particular trope is an alternative

history of modernity: a cultural history of state-sanctioned executions in the modern era

that makes a case for these executions as a form of human sacrifice.4 But the key point is

4
Giorgio Agamben touches on this very notion in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power

and Bare Life (1998). It appears most notably and most alluringly in Agamben’s

explanation of an interesting paradox in Ancient Roman Jurisprudence. A criminal may

be deemed Homo Sacer or “Sacred Man,” meaning that he may not be executed by the

state or “sacrificed” but he can be killed – effectively, murdered – by anyone without

penalty. There was no difference between politics and religion in Rome so any state-

sanctioned execution had a ritualized component of sacrifice. Consequently, to

“sacrifice” the sacred man through capital punishment was unacceptable because it would

have meant contaminating the body politic. See pages 70 -78.

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that Carpentier’s trope opens a space for a critique of what we might call Occidentalism:

the naturalization of a Eurocentric conception of modernity. More: this figure of the

Aztec Jacobin engages in what Walter Mignolo, building on the critical work of Aníbal

Quijano and Enrique Dussel, has dubbed “epistemic de-linking” (“De-Linking,” 450), a

critical project charged with exposing the “crooked rhetoric that naturalizes ‘modernity’

as a universal global process and point of arrival [and] hides its darker side, the constant

reproduction of ‘coloniality’” (Mignolo, “De-linking” 450).

Coloniality, properly understood here as the “invisible and constitutive side of

‘modernity’” (450), is a term that signals the profound coevality of the modern world-

system and colonialism as well as the continuing concurrence of these conditions.

Glossing Quijano’s work, Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui define

coloniality as:

a global hegemonic model of power in place since the Conquest that

articulates race and labor, thus combining the epistemological dispositifs

for colonial dominance and the structures of social relations and

exploitation which emerged with the Conquest and continued in the

following stages of the history of the Americas. (Moraña, Dussel, Jáuregui

19, their italics)

If we follow the implications of this definition of coloniality, it seems we are in a position

to understand the “colonial period” and “modernity” not as successive stages in the

history of the West but instead as simultaneities coexisting today throughout the world

(Mignolo, Global Histories 50). In attempting to understand the relationship between the

shared past, present, and future of the modernity / coloniality dyad, this critical work of
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delinking5 reveals that hallucinatory realities such as the Aztec Jacobin are the substrate

of reality itself, just as historical analysis is underwritten by the tropic work of discourse.

Though Carpentier’s Explosion in a Cathedral is certainly not part of the colonial

archive, it is undeniably part of what we might call the discourse of postcolonialism. In

addition, Carpentier’s ability to create this fantastical figure of the Aztec Jacobin is not

merely a testament to his talents as a fiction writer but also, of course, to his lived

experience as the well-born Cuban son of a French man and Russian woman, educated in

France and Switzerland but raised mostly in Havana. In this light, the Aztec Jacobin, his

creation, not only emblematizes alternative ways of imagining and telling the story of

modernity in the West but also serves as a marker for reminding us that our access to the

material realities of the colonial experience must be mediated through our own historical

period, through the twinned processes of globalization and imperialism and the reality of

increased interconnectivity that have helped shape and been shaped by those discourses.

While this study of tropes and troping in the colonial archive relies heavily on that

archive, and on the indeterminacies of colonial history, it is important never to forget that

we read and digest this material with twenty-first century eyes and sensibilities.

II. Three Early Atlantic Travel Narratives

This dissertation is a comparative study of travel narratives produced by

Europeans about the Americas in the early modern colonial period. In the pages to come,

I will treat three texts (an essay, a history, a report) produced by three early modern

5
“Desprender,” as Quijano calls it: a word entirely apposite in its orthographic

closeness to “desaprender,” or unlearn (Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity” 172).

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travelers: Michel de Montaigne, Jean de Léry, Thomas Harriot. These three texts –

Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals”; Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land

of Brazil; and Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of

Virginia – are conjoined by three ways of producing, transmitting, and troping

knowledge; three ways of (re)considering the relationship between representation and

reality in both Europe and the Americas during the second half of the sixteenth century.

Of course, they are bound together by certain other qualities as well. They are each travel

narratives written by Europeans about the Americas during a relatively narrow window of

time (1650 -1700) that immediately preceded the large-scale colonization of the

Americas and witnessed the culmination of a gradual, unsystematic shift in the order,

method, and meaning of knowledge production in the West: the dawn of the “modern

world-system” as Immanuel Wallerstein and others have come to understand it.

In its simplest form, this term – the modern world-system – refers to a newly

enlarged perimeter of trade and exchange between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean,

one which eventually led to an international division of labor, what Wallerstein famously

termed a core and a periphery, that determined relationships between different regions as

well as the types of labor conditions within each region (The Modern World-System 38).

As Walter Mignolo points out, however, “the new commercial circuit [of the modern

capitalist world-system] also creates the condition for a new global imaginary built

around the fact that the new ‘discovered’ lands were baptized ‘Indias Occidentales’”

(Global Histories 51). That is to say, in conjunction with this new system, with these new

possibilities for trade, wealth, exploration, expansion, and domination, came a new

Occidentalism: a new way of imagining the world and the place of Europe in that world.
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Other, more specialized, shifts in knowledge production and dissemination were

also in evidence during this time period. Confronted with the challenge of exploring and

conquering (at the very least profiting from) an entirely new world filled with animals,

people, and precious commodities, it is certainly no surprise that early modern Europeans

responded by cataloguing, mapping, charting, measuring, counting, and naming what lay

before them. Once activated, this drive to delineate the world through close, repeated

observation and experience gained momentum not only in the New World, but in the old

one as well.6 Indeed, this new emphasis on empiricism7 and the “scientific method” it

ushered forth became what Michel Foucault might refer to as an épistème: the historical a

priori that grounds knowledge and thus represents the “conditions of possibility” for what

can be knowable in any given epoch (Order of Things xxii). Making use of Foucault’s

preface in The Order of Things, Todd May observes that an épistème is the historical and

not transcendental “positive unconscious” of a particular era (Order of Things xi, qtd. in

May 23), one that “giv[es] rise to its forms without itself becoming transparent in them”

(May 23). Each chapter in this project contains what Foucault might have called a

6
See, for example, Brian Ogilvie’s The Science of Describing: Natural History in

Renaissance Europe and Andrea Frisch’s The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing

and Testimony in Early Modern France.

7
As Alan Salter explains, “during the second half of the sixteenth-century . . .

Observation came to signify scrutiny, or careful regard or painstaking attention to a thing;

its earlier usages included custom, or practice or the performance of a devotional rite”

(Salter 59).
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“signature” of this positive unconscious, a mark revealing the “similitudes” between

different aspects of the épistème (The Order of Things 26-28). 8

Thus, I begin my discussion of Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” (originally written

sometime in the late 1570s) by using Henri II’s royal entrance into the city of Rouen in

1550 to demonstrate the rising prominence of “authenticity” as a discursive category.

Similarly, my reading of Léry’s History in the second chapter pivots on the rising

influence of eye witnessing as a category of knowledge production just as the

prerogatives of trade, exploration, and potential colonization begin to take on a

momentum of their own in Léry’s mission to South America. In the third chapter, my

analysis of Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report takes root precisely at those

moments in which Harriot, recruited to travel to North America as an explorer because of

8
Though I believe there is a strong case to be made for the continuing usefulness

of Foucault’s concept of the épistème, it is important to note that there are some serious

questions attending to this concept as it is initially set out in The Order of Things; i.e. is

every “era” limited to only one épistème and if so how are they parsed? What is the

relationship between épistème and ideology? And how does Foucault understand the

concept of ideology? Some of these questions are explicitly addressed in Foucault’s

follow-up, The Archaeology of Knowledge. For a very lucid critique of Foucault along

these lines, see Chapter One of Nancy Fraser’s Unruly Practices: Power, Gender and

Discourse in Contemporary Social Theory. For a more expansive critique of Foucault’s

methodology in toto, including how it has been appropriated by practitioners of New

Historicism in literary studies, see Chapter Three of James Holstun’s Ehud’s Dagger:

Class Struggle in the English Revolution.

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his talents as a mathematician and scientist, is forced to test the boundaries of his formal

rationalist and empiricist training in his unlooked-for role as Christian missionary.

But though these three texts each evince, in their own unique ways, the épistème

crystallizing in Western Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, my principal

rationale for bringing them together here, harkening back to the Aztec Jacobin, has to do

with how they each trope the knowledge systems and practices within which they are

imbricated. Before detailing how each of these texts can be said to do just that, however,

I first want to foreground the critical methodology I employ in the pages to come and also

begin to provide the sightlines necessary for situating Hallucinatory Empires in a

dialogue with critical works in early American literature, early modern literature, colonial

studies, and postcolonial studies. At this early moment, it is perhaps enough to state that I

understand my three primary texts as inhabiting an early American literary canon (though

certainly not to the exclusion of their place in other overlapping canons), one currently

served by an early American literary studies that needs to continue expanding in two very

important ways.

In the first place, early American literature must continue the work of

transforming itself from a field solely devoted to tracing the literature and culture of those

parts of North America that would one day become the United States to a field of

transatlantic and hemispheric literary studies, which is what a proper, de-colonized

understanding of the adjective “American” and the noun “America” demand. Though

early American literary studies has certainly made great strides in this direction in the
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past twenty years,9 there is still much work to be done in reconfiguring the field.

Accordingly, the Atlantic World, an important category in continuing that work, is

foregrounded in the title of this dissertation. In a short article in Early American

Literature entitled, “Atlantic Practices: Minding the Gap Between Literature and

History” (2008), Elizabeth Dillon offers a very cogent account of the differences between

how historians and literary scholars have approached “The Atlantic World” as an object

of study. Following Bernard Bailyn, Dillon dates historians’ adoption of this term to the

years immediately following the end of World War II. At that time, “political strategies

of Atlantic alliance among Western nations . . . evident in such multinational

organizations as NATO” bolstered a kind of scholarly engagement that, for obvious

reasons, was invested in the idea of a shared history of the western world (206).

However, as Dillon goes on to recount:

Post-World War II politics had a different effect on the field of American

literary studies; the study of American literature, instead of broadening its

focus to include connections with European nations, arguably found its

raison d’être as a discipline in the cultural nationalism attendant on the

United States’ emergence as a world power . . . The nationalistic impulse

intensified and accelerated the role of exceptionalism in the study of

9
See for example book-length studies such as William Spengemann, A New

World of Words: Redefining American Literature (1994) and Ralph Bauer, The Cultural

Geography of Colonial American Literatures (2009). For a comprehensive overview of

this trend see Susan Scott Parrish, “The ‘Hemispheric Turn’ in Colonial American

Studies,” a 2005 Review Essay in Early American Literature.

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American literature and culture, a thesis that emphasized the particularity

of U.S. culture over its embeddedness within the larger historical frame of

the Atlantic world or world systems in general. (206)

The key point here for Dillon is that literary scholars are relative latecomers to the notion

that the Atlantic world can serve as an object of study. This is because literary studies in

the United States (and in most other countries as well) has long served the role of

defining and maintaining national culture. And if this has been true in American literature

generally, it has been especially, poignantly true in the field of early American literature.

After all, the traditional (and for many early Americanists working today, admittedly

outdated) definition of early American literature involves the study of texts that

originated in the thirteen original British North American colonies and the early U.S.

Republic until about 1820. Of course, since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black

Atlantic in 1993 and Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead in 1996, many Americanists have

begun exploring the circum-Atlantic world, as Joseph Roach puts it, as a viable

alternative to a strictly national understanding of this literary history. Hallucinatory

Empires both profits from and continues this trend of reimagining the role of early

American and early modern texts in a hemispheric and transatlantic framework.

The second way this project contributes to the field of early American literary

studies is by promoting its acceptance of more substantive interdisciplinary ties to other

fields of literary studies (especially, in my view, to its most natural auxiliary, early

modern literature) as well as to critical theory.10 That early American literary studies

lacks a substantive interdisciplinarity in these ways is certainly no surprise or shock to

10
See, for example, Ed White and Michael Drexler, “The Theory Gap.”
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early Americanists. In fact, Ralph Bauer levels this same critique at the field by decrying

its lack of dialogue with nineteenth and twentieth century American literary studies.

While lauding the salutary effects of the “hemispheric turn” in Early Americanist

scholarship in a 2010 piece in American Literary History, Bauer nevertheless insists that:

The “hemispheric turn” across the subdisciplines of American literary

scholarship has so far done little to remedy the apparent segregation of

early American studies from American literary studies on later periods, if

the bibliographies and tables of contents of prominent recent monographs

and collections may serve as my indicator. (“Early American Literature

and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn,’” 218)

Doubtless Bauer’s point here cuts both ways: just as Early American literary studies is

insufficiently interdisciplinary with respect to these later periods, nineteenth and

twentieth century American literary studies, while robustly interdisciplinary in other

respects, are also partly to blame for the paucity he finds.11 Nevertheless, Bauer is

himself an early Americanist and, writing in the pages of Early American Literature, the

principal academic journal in the field, it seems reasonable to infer that his comments are

primarily directed at his own field.

Ed White and Michael Drexler offer a different perspective on this same general

plaint. Also writing in 2010, they bemoan the fact that history has enjoyed an outsized

influence in this literary field: “[early American] literary scholars have turned to ‘Early

11
For an example of an early Americanist bridging his own field and other fields

of American literature, see Russ Castronovo’s 2009 article in American Literary History,

“Propaganda, Pre-National Critique, and Early American Literature.”

 16

American History, Inc.’ for access to necessary financial, archival, and professional

resources, while historians have extended their practical hegemony over an increasingly

textually based scholarship” (“Theory Gap” 482). The result of this mutually beneficial

though uneven dependence is that, “early American literary critics have often steered

clear of nonhistoricist theoretical programs considered too outré by historians and their

institutional patrons” (483). Indeed, in extreme cases, White and Drexler suggest, “early

American scholarship simply does not look ‘literary’ to other [literary] scholars” (482).

Following this general line of critique offered first by Bauer and then by White

and Drexler, I would like to suggest that one of the benefits of regarding this archive of

early modern travel narratives through a prism of the tropic is that, while adhering to a

responsible historicizing practice, it nevertheless allows us to ask questions of written

materials that cannot be solely or exhaustively answered by a strictly historicist

understanding of those materials, thus opening some more space for the kind of

interdisciplinary work that Bauer and White and Drexler feel is missing from the field.

To make use of Elizabeth Dillon once again:

Literary formalism has been particularly devalued as lacking in historical

purchase, yet it is precisely in the analysis of form and genre . . . that

signifying practices and their meanings within the Atlantic world and

within modernity as a whole emerge. (208)

I do not mean here to suggest that form and genre are ahistorical categories. Quite the

contrary, my treatment of these three texts (an essay, a history, a report) accounts for the

tropological sediment that they have collected in their four-hundred and some years of

existence: the material history of their creation and dissemination as well as the literary
 17

and discursive histories of their reception. But to go back to and perhaps elaborate

Dillon’s useful parsing of literary formalism above as a key methodology for working

with particular signifying practices, I want to understand the tropic as the form, the

grammar, with which Montaigne, Léry, and Harriot articulate their individual (properly

historicized, to be sure) styles of knowing the world, styles that are in a dialogic interplay

with our contemporary ways of knowing the world and of reading historical documents,

travel writing, essay writing, and literary fiction. I want to understand the tropic as a style

of thought that allows us to countenance alternative realities, alternative ways of thinking,

feeling, and being in the world, alternative ways of imagining the historical past more

richly and fully (and thus alternative ways of embracing the present and future).

But my primary texts by Montaigne, Léry, and Harriot also demand their own

rigor and accountability: they push back against my readings and demand to be

understood in dialogue with their own historical, cultural, and generic contexts. Indeed,

though the tropic, this turning away from convention, logic, and “proper” use, may be an

indispensable tool for distilling alternative versions of the historical past, it comes with

risks. There is the risk, to go back to our exemplum of the Aztec Jacobin, that this

twinned trope, rather than opening up a space for new histories of modernity to emerge,

will instead leave us simply with the sense of a universal, ahistorical human

bloodthirstiness: people kill each other, it happens everywhere in every way, it is only

human nature. There is the risk, in other words, that metaphor, with its capacity for

creating unpredictable samenesses from difference, or metonymy, with its proliferating

chains of contiguous associations, will completely overwhelm any attempt at specificity

or particularity, or that synecdoches’s propensity for collapsing wholes into fragments

 18

and constituting wholes from fragments will lead to the erasure of individual agency or to

the disempowerment of social collectivities.

Indeed, as Daniel Chandler observes, figurative language and its tropic content

can be a way of tamping down and sedimenting different knowledges and practices. Like

any language-scheme, Chandler argues, the tropic is in part a “reality-maintenance

system,” one which, with a camouflage acquired through repeated use, “tends to

anaesthetize us to the way in which the culturally available stock of tropes acts as an

anchor linking us to the dominant ways of thinking within our society” (Chandler 124).

What Chandler is describing here seems to be something of a different order than what

Mikics and White suggest and Carpentier illustrates: not the tropic as a language

constituted by its alteration of given, accepted forms to forge new meanings, but rather as

a language depending on the slow accretion of those forms over time; an archive of

tamed figures that pass by us every day disguised as denotative discourse.

I want to dwell for a moment on this relationship between what we might call the

synchronic newness of tropes as they are defined by Mikics et al. and the unavoidable

diachronicity that begins to adhere to them once they have been brought into being. A

useful analogue for conceptualizing these two temporal modes of the tropic can be found

in William Childers’s introduction to his recent book, Transnational Cervantes. Childers

begins his study of Cervantes by offering an etymological breakdown of the prefix trans.

In doing so, he explains that nearly all uses of trans-, from transportation to translation to

transubstantiation, are connected by a, “literal or metaphorical movement across, over,

through, or beyond” (Childers 1). Moving past these visible uses of trans – visible
 19

because, as the prepositions “across,” “over,” ‘through,” and “beyond” indicate, they are

spatial metaphors – Childers hits on a few roots for this prefix that are more abstract:

Tradition (where trans- is shortened to tra) is etymologically tied to

treason [Old French, trair: betray], for what is carried forward, transmitted

from one generation to the next, changes along the way and turns

imperceptibly into something else. It becomes necessary to retrace the

steps that have led us to where we are now, in order to reach a vantage

point in the past from which to ask after paths that were not taken. (1)

This odd, almost paradoxical compatibility between tradition and treason is worth a

closer look. At first glance, we might remark on how each of these words seems to exist

within a different temporal frame. Treason is synchronic: an act of treason is one instant

in time that necessarily cuts between the before and the after of that act, disrupting their

continuity. Tradition, on the other hand, is diachronic by definition. It is a concept that

relies on our ability to link together and organize successive moments in time. This

seeming disjunction between the two terms, however, gives way a bit when we consider,

as Childers does, the perfectly logical progression that exists in the etymological

definitions of tradition: pass down, hand over or down, transfer, give over, impart,

surrender, betray. To quote Childers again, “what is carried forward, transmitted from

one generation to the next, changes along the way and turns imperceptibly into something

else” (1).

For Mikhail Bakhtin, the term “dialogical” simply refers to a dialogue between a

variety of texts and authors. But in Bakhtin’s theorization, dialogic literature is in

communication with multiple works both synchronically, as a conversation between

 20

contemporary authors and texts, and diachronically, as a conversation that extends both

backwards and forwards in time, with the antedated works of literature as altered by the

dialogue as the contemporary works – again, tradition and treason (Holquist 427).

Keeping all of our interlocutors (and especially Bahktin) in mind, it is crucial at

this early moment to establish that the tropes to be found in these three travel narratives –

the multiple instances of a “turning away” from “proper or literal meaning” in their pages

– not only each exist as figures with an attendant historicity, one comprised of the social

relations, language games, happy accidents, and genealogies that brought them into

being, but also as dynamic forms that are deeply and unavoidably involved in shaping

reality, both theirs and ours. Thus, in addition to treating works by these three early

modern travelers, Hallucinatory Empires seeks to point towards the kinds of alternative

chronologies and genealogies that may emerge when we begin to consider the tropic as a

style of thought that offers us a critical purchase on history and on questions of

historicity. Accordingly, each chapter of this project unfolds a dialogic encounter

between one of my primary texts and a more contemporary work of critical theory,

imaginative fiction or, in the case of my third chapter, revelation. These dialogic

encounters, genealogies in their own right, represent my strategy for hallucinating the

alternative modernities that have been left out of the Western knowledge project.

III. Hallucinatory Empires

My first chapter, “Montaigne, Fronterista: Embodied Knowledge and Border Thinking in

Michel de Montaigne’s “‘Of Cannibals,’” offers a rereading of Michel de Montaigne’s

sixteenth century essay and places this famous text in dialogue with Walter Mignolo’s
 21

concept of “border thinking.” For Montaigne, the social upheaval and chaos of the French

Wars of Religion creates an urgent need to rethink the synecdoche of individual body /

social body; a process that, as we will see, is troped in “Of Cannibals” as an alternative

(bio)politics of knowledge, one that locates the proper object of knowledge inside the

body of the subject, thus liberating him from an epistemology that wants to find all truth

in phenomena exterior to his body. Furthermore, this re-location of the object of

knowledge proferred by Montaigne in “Cannibals” is homologous to yet another

relocation effected in the essay: the presence of the Tupínamba (the cannibals of the

essay’s title, hailing from present-day Brazil) in France. The novel spatial arrangement

created by this geographic transposition – crucially, it is the cannibals who are in France

and not the Frenchmen who are in Brazil – is a fundamental precondition, I argue, for

Montaigne’s ability to offer up “cannibal knowledge” as a viable alternative to the

misfiring epistemology of his contemporaries. As we will see, “Cannibals” is a

particularly fascinating example of Montaigne’s propensity for staging scalar,

synecdochal comparisons between the self and the world, interior and exterior, just as the

concept of border thinking as it has come to us through Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter

Mignolo also exhibits a genealogy based on troping the border on a multitude of different

scales, from a wound on the body to a decolonial global imaginary.

The second chapter of this project, “Eating the Flesh of Jesus Christ Raw (and Other

Interpretive Dilemmas) in Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil (1578),”

builds on the first chapter by continuing to focus on the sixteenth century French encounters with

cannibalism in the New World. For Jean de Léry, the epistemological revolution of Reform

Church Calvinism and its insistence that believers receive Christ’s message individually through
 22

signs (the words of the gospel dutifully read and interpreted by those lucky faithful, the always

already elect) is manifested as a drive to write a “history” of his voyage that transparently

chronicles linear cause-and-effect relationships and “sets the record straight.” However, rather

than producing a pellucid narrative account of his experiences in the New World, Léry relies

more often than not on contiguity, substitutability, and cyclicality for his meaning making: a

field of interrelations powered by tropic exchanges and sustained by the circular, self-validating

authority of the text itself. This circular, insular meaning making (exacerbated by the

displacements and divagations of the physical text itself in its twenty-year journey towards

completion) not only throws over the illusion of a transparent correspondence between text and

world, it also complicates the linear, cause-and-effect temporality inherent in the very act of

writing a history. The passages in Léry’s History that most effectively short-circuit the

epistemological transparency and linearity of the text involve eating, hunger, and the body and

thus this particular tropic circuit functions as a supplement to the discourse of eye witnessing that

Léry seeks to inhabit as our narrator. Accordingly, much of my treatment of Léry’s History is

given over to illuminating a series of dialogues: between Tupínamba ritual cannibalism and the

Christian ritual of the Eucharist; between narrative cause-and-effect storytelling and circularity

and repetition; between Léry’s twinned efforts to describe reality through an epistemology of

witnessing and through an ontology of eating.

Subsequently, I place Léry’s History in conversation with Italo Calvino’s 1986 Sotto il

Sole Giaguaro – a novella that relies on troping eating and hunger in order to tell the story of a

different voyage (this time twentieth-century Italian tourists in Mexico) to the New World. My

wager is that considering Léry’s History, a travel narrative that repeatedly invokes its own

authority as a source of verifiable truth, alongside a postmodern novella acutely aware of its own
 23

status as a work of imaginative fiction, will afford a hallucinatory perspective that not only

underscores the parallel tropic roles of seeing and eating in each text but that also serves to

establish a dialogic rapport between them, an intertextual space where differences between

genre, audience, and time period are transmuted and translated into vectors of association and

contiguity. Ultimately, I utilize this tropic connection between Léry and Calvino to gesture

towards the genealogical connection between the discourses of exploration, ethnography, and

tourism through the early modern, modern, and postmodern eras. By offering a reading of the

relationship between visual images included in the first edition of Léry’s History alongside the

visual images included in the first edition of Calvino’s short story (published as a stand-alone

story in FMR, an Italian art magazine, with images taken from Bernardino de Sahagún’s

sixteenth century Florentine Codex), I trace the contours of this diachronic dialogue between

different ways of knowing and experiencing otherness.

My third and final chapter, “The Land that Bears Fruits Before Flowers: Time as History

and Prophecy in Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia

(1588) and The Book of Mormon (1830),” reveals this same resistance to epistemic closure in

Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report, a text published three times in the last twelve years of

the sixteenth century. Harriot’s written account of his time in North America is extremely

significant for its ethnographic attention to the Carolina Algonquians, a tribe whose language and

customs he became acquainted with over the course of his twelve-month stay (June 1585 - July

1586) on Roanoke Island off the coast of present-day North Carolina. My treatment of the Report

focuses on two intertwined moments that reveal time as a particularly powerful trope: first, a

moment in which Harriot – creating a version of what Myra Jehlen calls “history before the fact”

– unconsciously inverts cause and effect in order to account for the deaths of his Native
 24

American allies (deaths that were in fact caused by communicable disease brought by the

English to North America); second, a prophecy, given voice in the final pages of the Report by

unnamed Algonquians, that uncannily adumbrates future relations between Anglo-American

colonials and the Carolina Algonquians Harriot encounters. In addition to these two moments of

temporal disjunction in the written text of Harriot’s Report, there is yet another mode of

organizing time to be found in the 1590 edition of the Report. This edition was not only the most

widely read and circulated edition of the Report in Europe, it was also produced by the prolific

Flemish engraver and Reform church propagandist Theodor de Bry. Unlike other editions of

Harriot’s Report, this 1590 edition included a de facto appendix of images whose organization

promotes a teleological Christian worldview. Thus, my focus on Harriot’s Report is in explaining

these three overlapping chronographic modes.

In the final section of this chapter, I shift forward in time approximately two-hundred and

forty years after Harriot’s Report to consider a different North American text that also involves

the tropes of prophecy and history: The Book of Mormon. According to Mormon belief, this text

was written by different key narrators – Ancient Israelites who came across the sea to the

Americas as well as their descendants – during the one thousand year span between 600 B.C. and

400 A.D. My interest in The Book of Mormon as a companion piece to Harriot’s Report lies in

the way it conflates prophecy and revelation, history and destiny. The Book of Mormon

understands prophecy as both forward and backward looking. Though, for many of its early

devotees, the physical text itself represented proof of the coming Millennium, the multi-layered

narrative created by Joseph Smith outlines a forgotten and sacred ancient history of the

Americas. This apparent paradox, I argue, may be read alongside Harriot’s inversion of cause

and effect in his Report. These two texts, in short, contain reoccurences of a figure of inverted
 25

time, of “history before the fact.” This narrative glitch represents a collusion between past,

present, and future that, in the archive of Anglophone North America, is part of a genealogy of

Manifest Destiny.
 26

Chapter 1

Montaigne, Fronterista: Embodied Knowledge and Border Thinking in Michel de Montaigne’s

“Of Cannibals.”

Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the “center” of a World

History that it inaugurates: the “periphery” that surrounds this center is
consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery . . .
leads the major contemporary thinkers of the “center” into a Eurocentric
fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the
genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a
critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false.

Enrique Dussel, Frankfurt Lectures

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin / White Masks

 27

I. Rouen, 1550

In the summer of 1550, a meadow bordering the Seine and located on the outskirts of

Rouen, in Normandy, was transformed into a Brazilian jungle. The Rouennais charged with this

transformation – a large-scale project funded by the merchant class at the behest of the city

elders – set about their task by painting willow, juniper, and ash trees red to look like the native

South American Pau Brasil (Wintroub 16). In addition to doctoring the native French flora, the

Rouennais relied on the introduction of various kinds of transplanted South American trees and

shrubs: only authentic equatorial verdure, it was reasoned, could properly simulate the density

and lushness of the tropics. In the midst of this artificial jungle-scape, architects erected two

carefully crafted and meticulously detailed native villages, one at each extreme of the meadow

(Félix vii).

In order to stock this tableau, the Rouennais relied on a number of parrots and monkeys

as well as fifty Tabagé and Tupínamba Indians, freshly imported from South America (Mullaney

70). However, fifty genuine Brazilians, as it turned out, were not quite enough to people the two

villages, and so their numbers were supplemented by some two-hundred and fifty Frenchmen

dressed in the native style – “without covering those parts that nature commands” (Mullaney 70)

– and drawn from the ranks of seamen, merchants, and adventurers who had been to Brazil.12 As

Michael Wintroub explains:

12
Though Mullaney makes no mention of this, there is some speculation – based

on recorded observations that list the numbers of men and women in this performance as

roughly equal – that a number of French women might also have taken part in this

spectacle.
 28

Fifty were “true savages” imported from Brazil by a bourgeois merchant of Rouen

. . . the rest [about two-hundred and fifty] were Norman sailors pretending to be

savages. Their portrayal, the King was assured, was entirely authentic. Not only

had these men frequented the coasts of Brazil, but they had also learned to speak

the savages’ language and affect their manners with such accuracy that they were

all but indistinguishable from the “true” savages. (Wintroub 16)

This elaborate tableau vivant was choreographed by the city elders of Rouen to honor the arrival

of Henri II and his Queen, Catherine de Medici. Henri II, who in 1550 had been King of France

for a little over three years, made his entrance into the gates of Rouen alongside a substantial

household, one that might reasonably impress any city. Accompanied by cardinals, bishops, and

ambassadors from major European powers such as Spain, Germany, Venice, England, Portugal,

and the Papal State, Henri strolled through this converted meadow and had the leisure to

contemplate the activities in which these natives, both genuine and counterfeit, were absorbed:

running after monkeys, firing their arrows at birds, reposing in cotton hammocks strung from one

tree to another, chopping wood and carrying it to a fort near the river where a French caravel in

full sail, flying Henri’s colors, was waiting – presumably to trade with the natives, just as French

ships might be doing across the Atlantic at that exact moment.

After strolling about at his leisure, the King ascended a scaffolding which had been

erected at the edge of the meadow and, from this lofty perspective, witnessed what by all

accounts was a fierce mock battle between the two tribes: Tabagé and Tupínamba. 13 According

13
This mock battle between warring native tribes (tribes that, though they

consider themselves wholly distinct from one another, share a common language and

culture) uncannily foreshadows the beginning of the French Wars of Religion – a

 29

to an account we have from the Habsburg Imperial Ambassador, the actors fought furiously with

arrows, clubs, and other warlike instruments until the Tabagé were finally repulsed (McGowan

219). The victorious Tupínamba burned the homes of their opponents to the ground and, as

Margaret McGowan notes, “The show was so arresting that even those who knew the country of

Brazil were constrained to comment on its authenticity” (McGowan 219).

Henri II openly enjoyed the proceedings: he was a King with a well-known martial

disposition and, although some form of sciamachy, or sham combat, was always expected as part

of the festivities during city entrances, no city along Henri’s travel route had yet produced

anything quite so fantastical. Indeed, in contrast to this overt display of exotic otherness, the

combat exercises staged by most early modern European cities in order to welcome their

sovereign usually took the form of a mock siege, one that was almost always a historical

reenactment. For example, when Queen Isabella of Bavaria entered Paris in 1389, it was only

after watching Saladin and his Saracens defend a castle eventually taken by Richard Coeur de

Lion (Anglo 15). At Rome in 1492, in commemoration of the victory at Granada, Spanish troops

stormed a wooden castle occupied by citizens in Moors’ clothing (Anglo 15). As Steven

Mullaney points out when writing about this particular Renaissance practice:

Rather than lay seige to gain entry, the monarch granted an entry [to the city] was

entertained by the comfortably displaced spectacle of a seige, a dramatic

enactment that at once represented the potential for conflict manifested by the

royal visit, and sublimated that potential, recasting it as a cultural performance to

be enjoyed by city and crown alike. (6)

similarly internecine conflict between French Catholics and Calvinist Huguenots which

began in earnest roughly twelve years after Henri’s entrance spectacle.

 30

Mullaney’s point that these mock sieges were orchestrated, in some sense, to ward off the

potential of real sieges is persuasive. After all, a delicate negotiation of power was accomplished

by a monarch’s passage into an early modern city of any size. In keeping with the conventions

and forms of the Roman Triumph as adapted by the Renaissance, it had become quite customary

for a monarch and his procession to pause outside the city gates, on the threshold of the

community, in this liminal space where royal domain blurs into civic jurisdiction. Once again

taking our cue from Mullaney, who reads these rituals of Royal entry as theatrical performances

– what he calls, “the ongoing dramaturgy of city and state” – we can imagine that stopping at the

threshold of the city cast the Royal visitor and his retinue in the role of spectators rather than

actors (Mullaney 72). More than merely defusing any threat to the city’s sovereignty – imagined,

symbolic, or otherwise – these military engagements ostensibly staged for the King’s benefit

momentarily placed him in the position of audience member, of passive observer to an overt

display of local power, agency, and abundance.

Rouen is a case in point. The city was renowned for its generosity in providing

magnificent welcoming shows to greet dukes and monarchs. A long tradition of such

entertainments stretched back to the fourteenth century (Mullaney 70). And as a port city with a

large population of bourgeois merchants, in 1550 Rouen was benefiting from the burgeoning

transatlantic trade in Brazil wood, an extremely valuable commodity used to produce red dye. It

follows that the New World and France’s dealings with it would have been very much in the

minds of the Rouennais, especially the merchant class who largely financed the entry spectacle.

And, indeed, it is important to note that the Rouennais passed over a much more likely candidate

for reenactment in terms of the traditions relating to sciamachy: the siege of Boulogne, a city in
 31

the North of France that Henri had taken back from the English the year before (a fact which was

prominently figured, without the fighting, in other sections of the Rouen entry spectacle).

To tease out a few of these points, we might pay closer attention to the importance of

“authenticity” as a qualitative category in extant written descriptions of the performance. Indeed,

this particular jungle scene not only represents a departure from the reenactment-themed

examples of sciamachy offered up during other entrance spectacles, but its self-conscious

devotion to verisimilitude also provides a sharp contrast to the more traditional non-violent

allegorical tableaux evident in the other major scenes of this same procession: women dressed as

muses in an artificial rock grotto, forty-seven horsemen wearing crowns representing Henri’s

direct ancestors and Neptune handing him a trident to symbolize his dominion over the ocean.14

Strangely enough, however, a summary glance at one of the prints produced to document

the Brazilian-themed segment of Henri’s entrance reveals a King and Queen (we can tell by the

crowns on their heads) lying together on a hammock as well as a group of natives dancing

around what seems to be a maypole. Clearly, this representation of “authentic” Brazilianness

tells us much more about France than it does about Brazil. But despite the indelible symbolism

and allegory deployed here, it is verisimilitude that remains the primary category used to

evaluate merits of this tableau vivant. Accordingly, the startling exceptionality of this set piece

comes not only from its content, but also from the unique way that content was evaluated by its

audience.15 Moreover, though we might imagine that a certain perfunctory realism was always in

14
For a full description of the entire welcome ceremony, see McGowan, “Forms

and Themes in Henri II’s Entry into Rouen,” cited above.

15
Indeed, one way to understand the emphasis given to authenticity in this set

piece is to read it as a marker of how the sixteenth century European imaginary – the
 32

play during historical reenactment-themed siege spectacles (the doomed “Saracens” holding the

castle would have been wearing appropriately baggy costumes and wielding scimitars, for

example), this particular part of this particular spectacle not only marks a first in the depth and

complexity of its attention to realistic detail, but also in its synchronicity with the present time, a

time of early global consciousness. Thus, the events depicted in this artificial jungle were meant

to be experienced as both authentic in every possible way and also simultaneous with the

present.16

épistème, to go back to that useful but troublesome concept – was shifting from its

dependence on allegorical and symbolic forms to represent knowledge practices to

representations generated from eye witnessing, from observation and empiricism.

16
In “Of Cannibals,” Montaigne touches on this same question of authenticity

when he writes of his “man,” his primary source of firsthand information about the New

World: “This man I had was a simple, crude fellow – a character fit to bear true witness;

for clever people observe more things and more curiously, but they interpret them; and to

lend weight and conviction to their interpretation, they cannot help altering history a

little” (Montaigne, Complete Essays, Trans. Donald Frame 184). From what we know of

the Rouen reenactment, it seems that the simple and crude fellows – those who

Montaigne would deem reliable, “true” witnesses – were the Norman sailors who played

the part of the natives. Montaigne’s skepticism here, needless to say, problematizes the

idea of a truly authentic spectacle. If recreation (by clever people) is always already

interpretation and necessarily alters history, we might stop to consider how this recreation

of South America in Europe works within that continuum.

 33

Tracking the relationship between this complex enactment of antipodal otherness and

Western Europe’s economic, cultural, and political interests in the New World, new historicist

literary scholars like Steven Mullaney and Michael Wintroub have read Henri’s leisurely

promenade through this transformed Norman meadow (and, indeed, the transformation of the

meadow itself) as a text chronicling the relationship between knowledge and power in French

attempts to grab a foothold in South America during the sixteenth century. For Mullaney, “The

New World is recreated in the suburbs of the Old and made over into an alternate vision of itself,

strange but capable of imagination” (46). In his reading of this event, the creation and destruction

of the mock native villages not only demonstrates the re-presentation of an “alien culture” but

also its inevitable “erasure” (48). For Michael Wintroub (who begins his book on early modern

French self-fashioning by recounting this tableau, and who refers back to it repeatedly over his

eight chapters), the ceremony at Rouen, much like the Renaissance practice of creating “wonder

cabinets” as spaces charged with arranging and delimiting otherness, constituted “a response to a

world that no longer made sense” (172). He reads this living, breathing diorama along the banks

of the Seine as an attempt to impose order on the world, in the same way that the French king

would impose order on his domain.

Thus, for both of these scholars, this portion of Henri’s entrance epitomizes, at a

relatively early moment in the history of the transatlantic world, the momentum of representation

qua power that is regularly used as a template for deciphering the colonial archive. To use a

critical term that neither Mullaney nor Wintroub employ but that nicely encapsulates their

respective readings, this Rouennais entrance spectacle represents the production of coloniality as

a double of modernity. In other words, the ability to recreate a realistic Brazilian landscape

replete with wildlife, fauna, architecture, and even native inhabitants serves as effective proof of
 34

the success of a French knowledge project in the New World. Indeed, if we can imagine

ourselves sharing Henri’s mini-Olympian perspective after he has ascended his scaffolding at the

edge of the meadow (partaking of something akin to what Michel de Certeau might call “the

scopic pleasure of seeing the whole”), what seems most remarkable in the scene spread out

beneath us is precisely its immersion in detail and the knowledge it demonstrates (or, rather,

wields) of the flora, fauna, and people from la France Antarctique (Certeau, Practice of

Everyday Life 92). We might, therefore, much like Mullaney and Wintroub, understand this

attempt to recreate the New World in the old as a European need to recreate what it does not

know in order to more fully apprehend it, control it, commoditize it, and differentiate itself from

it: a declaration of sovereignty over these newly encountered lands and people. When read with

this inflection, the welcome reception for the King and Queen of France becomes an overt, even

triumphal, display of knowledge and power: a staging ground where empirical observation can

be put on public display and transformed into truth and profit;17 where, in the words of Sara

Castro-Klaren, the coloniality of power is at work, “as an energy and a machine that transforms

differences into values” (Castro-Klaren 132).

Of course, this reading of Henri’s welcome, a reading more or less shared by both

Mullaney and Wintroub, is certainly subject to critique. For example, Carolyn Porter reads

Mullaney’s “Strange Things, Gross Terms, Curious Customs” as an example of how new

historicism as a critical practice runs the risk of dehistoricizing its object of analysis by

17
As Immanuel Wallerstein and Aníbal Quijano have both pointed out, and as

Walter Mignolo reiterates, “the Americas were not incorporated into an already existing

capitalist economy, but, on the contrary, a capitalist economy as we know it today could

not have existed without the discovery of America” (“Logic of Coloniality” 111).
 35

understanding it primarily as a function of power rather than in terms of its unique historicity

(Porter 262). Other scholars assessing new historicism in more general terms have balked at its

widespread (and generically-prescribed, it seems) reliance on the use of colorful and suggestive

anecdotes such as Henri’s entrance to begin essays and books, arguing that these initial

anecdotes stymie genuine attempts to treat history diachronically by overemphasizing a

synchronic frame (Holstun 69), and also that they lend themselves to “literary” analysis too

easily, disregarding material history in favor of plumbing the social text for examples of

uncertainty, tension, irony, and paradox (W. Cohen 34). I state these critiques not to disavow

them: every critical practice has its risks and the risks of new historicism are real. Rather, by

using Henri’s entrance as a set-piece anecdote to establish my own reading of “Cannibals,” I

hope to foreground the points of conjunction between the two while at the same time remaining

canny and clear-eyed about the risks inherent in such an approach.

My principle reason for using Henri’s 1550 Rouen entrance as a way of introducing “Of

Cannibals” is that both of these texts exhibit an inversion with respect to the spatial arrangement

that we might commonly find in the colonial archive of the European presence in the Americas:

instead of Europeans being in America, it is the Native Americans who find themselves in

Europe.18 In Henri’s welcome, as we have seen, Tupínamba and Tabagé were “imported” – like

18
The practice of bringing Native Americans to Europe began with Columbus

displaying an Arawak native in a cage for two years in Queen Isabella’s court. On the

particular aesthetics of these reverse-encounter moments (both voluntary and

involuntary), please see Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead, chapter 4, “Feathered

Peoples” and Coco Fusco and Paula Heredia’s half-hour documentary, The Couple in the

Cage.
 36

so many other commodities – in order to provide a more authentic spectacle for the King.

Similarly, in the third section of “Cannibals,” Montaigne relates an account of his conversations

with a small group of Tupínamba who reside at court of Charles IX in Rouen. When

conceptualized in these spatial, geographic terms, the seemingly transparent correspondence

between representation and power foregrounded by new historicist readings of Henri’s welcome

such as Mullaney’s and Wintroub’s reveals a potentially profound irony: by transforming a

French meadow into a Brazilian jungle and Frenchmen (and possibly women) into Brazilian

Natives, by placing the other within the self, ingesting it, the Rouennais performance effectively

conflates old world and new, local and foreign, Europeans and Americans.

In other words, this attempt to perform the New World in all its variegated detail, a

gesture of dominance and mastery – a means, as we have noted, of declaring sovereignty over

the other – not only tropes geography but, in so doing, effectively complicates the boundaries

between other categories of knowledge: self and other, subject and object. Thus, an alternative

way to understand this tableau, this primal jungle scene, is not through the trope of ingestion but

as an instance of the New World taking possession of the old world, virally, by replicating itself

within it. As Joseph Roach notes when examining public performance traditions within the rubric

of what he calls “circum-Atlantic interculture”: “Even as parody, performances propose possible

candidates for succession. They raise the possibility of the replacement of the authors of the

representations by those whom they imagined into existence as their definitive opposites” (Cities

of the Dead 6). This possibility of replacement, what Roach elsewhere labels “surrogation,”

carries with it its own particular dangers and anxieties. It is no coincidence, after all, that the

mock-up Tupínamba and Tabagé villages created by Rouennais architects were both burned to
 37

the ground by the end of Henri’s visit. Again making use of Roach, we can read the razing of

these villages as a French reaction to, “the deeply seated and potentially threatening possibility

of involuntary surrogation through the act of performance” (6). Reading the events in Rouen

through the optics of performance and “involuntary surrogation” offered here by Roach, it seems

as though French empirical knowledge about Brazil, deployed within the boundaries of this

meadow and ostensibly cordoned off as a stand-alone diorama of exotic otherness, in fact

transgresses those boundaries by offering a symbolic replacement for France itself. Knowledge

of the other, it seems, is not necessarily equivalent to domination or mastery over the other.

Tropes swerve and turn meaning.

In the case of Montaigne’s “Cannibals,” the spatial inversion at work – Native Americans

in Europe as opposed to Europeans in America – also carries with it the possibility of

replacement, of surrogation. Montaigne wants his countrymen to be more like the cannibals. As

we will see, he even alludes to the potential of cannibalism as a means of equitably redistributing

material wealth: if some are too fat and bloated and some too thin and sallow, why not cut the

excess flesh from the former and use it to nourish the latter? Of course, this is one of the many

instances where we need to read Montaigne with caution so as not to be taken in. He is not

suggesting that his countrymen should start eating each other (there was quite enough

cannibalism happening in France at the time – the siege of Sancerre and the St. Bartholomew’s

Day Massacre to name two well-documented examples – without his having to suggest it) as

much as opening a space for thinking about different ways of recasting the relationship between

individual and community as well as reimagining the social bonds that keep communities intact.

In fact, it is precisely the social unity of the cannibalistic Tupínamba, a unity documented and

heralded by Europeans who traveled to the New World such as André Thevet, Hans Staden, and
 38

Jean de Léry, which seems to most compel Montaigne when he writes about them. Certainly, the

strong social bonds found in these written accounts of Tupí culture were a stark contrast to the

chaos of social life in France during Montaigne’s adult years, a chaos which saw its twisted

apotheosis in the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

In my reading of “Cannibals,” I will demonstrate how Montaigne dramatizes the social

problem in his contemporary surroundings as a problem of epistemology. This dramatization

posits the cannibals’ ability to know the world not by taking it in through their senses (a

methodology that necessarily involves observation, interpretation, inference, and deduction), but

by literally consuming it, a process that, because it takes place inside rather than outside the

human body, eschews fallible (exterior) human perception in favor of infallible (interior) human

spirituality; epistemology in favor of ontology.19

19
The Essais contain multiple references to taste or le goût. As Victoria Kahn

points out, “The application of gustatory or digestive metaphors to imply the notion of

practical reason or prudence and to invoke the epistemological assumptions of a certain

rhetorical tradition . . . is something that Montaigne would have found in many of his

favorite classical texts” (131). However, for Kahn, Montaigne is constantly remaking this

metaphor; he is always asking, in different ways, “the question of whether there can be a

reading or judgment that is grounded in the authority of natural reason, a sense of taste

that refers us to common sense . . . [a question] that reads as a gloss on the two meanings

of the word essai: to taste and to judge” (134). As we will see later in my reading of

“Cannibals,” the metaphor of digestion – crucially, not taste per se but what happens to

food once it is already inside the body – becomes a way for Montaigne to address,
 39

Alongside my reading of “Cannibals,” I will place Montaigne in conversation with

Argentinian philosopher Walter Mignolo and, specifically, with Mignolo’s concept of “border

thinking.” 20 Mignolo’s inspiration for adopting “border thinking” as a critical optics comes from

yet another contemporary scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa. In Anzaldúa’s famous exploration of

Chicana cultural theory and border studies, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987),

she understands the U.S. / Mexico border as an epistemic construction encompassing both a

physical border between nation-states as well as an existential marker of historical injustice,

something she terms the colonial wound: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an

open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa qtd. in

Mignolo Darker Side xxi, original italics).

The way Anzaldúa tropes the border as a wound (and, therefore, as embodied), led to a

critical turn in Mignolo’s own thinking about the relationship between modernity and coloniality,

a process that culminated in the publication of his 2000 book, Local Histories / Global Designs.

As Mignolo explains, “at that point, [Anzaldúa’s original concept of] border thinking was

extended to understand all of those places, through the expansion of Western civilization, where

the open wound, the colonial wound, where modernity grates against coloniality and bleeds”

(Darker Side xxi). As this passage suggests (and, indeed, as the title of his book on the subject

through the figure of the cannibal, this important question of the relationship between

individual judgment and the demands or claims of natural reason.

20
The term “border thinking” exhibits a few different permutations within

Mignolo’s work. It is at times used interchangeably with “border gnosis,” “border

epistemology,” and “decolonial thinking.” These different expressions have one overall

meaning. For our purposes here, I will retain the original term: border thinking.
 40

indicates), the shift in Mignolo’s understanding of the concept of border thinking involves a

dilation from one specific border region, the Mexico / U.S. border, to “la herida abierta in its

global dimension” (Darker Side xxi, original italics), a shift inspired by Anzaldúa’s own

understanding of the U.S. / Mexico border as a synecdoche for, on the one hand, the uneven

power relations between the industrialized world and the Global South, including the history of

those uneven power relations (pars pro toto), and, on the other, the psychic and physical wounds

sustained by the bodies of Anzaldúa’s fellow border dwellers (totum pro parte).

Keeping this genealogy of border thinking in mind, and in particular the scalar,

synecdochal troping in Anzaldúa’s work that Mignolo both adopts and adapts, we must also

address an important complementary concept that has emerged in Mignolo’s more recent body of

work:21 the body-politics of knowledge. This concept may be best understood in opposition to

what Mignolo, borrowing from the work of Santiago Castro-Gómez, has called the

“epistemology of the zero point;” that is, an epistemic order that organizes and hierarchizes all

forms of human knowledge on a scale (e.g. “from traditional to modern, from barbarism to

civilization, from community to individual, from orient to occident”) and, in doing so, seeks to

eliminate the coexistence of different forms of knowledge (Castro-Gómez, qtd in Mignolo,

Darker Side 80). Thus, while the epistemology of the zero point presents itself as the “ultimate

grounding of knowledge,” it is paradoxically unmoored from all site-specific and body-specific

21
Here I am referring specifically to two monographs: The Darker Side of

Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (a 2010 update on his very

influential The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 1992) and Learning to Unlearn:

Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia to the Americas (2012, co-authored with Madina

Tlostanova).
 41

knowledge regimes except the ones that created it in the first place (i.e. those from Northwestern

Europe); it is in fact a local knowledge attempting to pass as global knowledge.

The purpose of a “body-politics of knowledge,” then, is to allow us to begin to see

alternatives to this imperialist epistemology of the zero point; alternative knowledge practices

emerging from places and bodies that have heretofore been silenced; bodies that have been

caught between the necessity of employing an epistemology they did not develop and the

disqualification and dismissal of an epistemology they did develop (Darker Side 91-92). Border

thinking emerges in the Global South as a consequence of this body-politics and, as Mignolo and

Madina Tlostanova argue, it emerges in the Civil Rights movement here in the United States

precisely as a body-politics: a way of decolonizing knowledge and being through gender and

ethnic studies (Learning to Unlearn 33).

My goal for this bringing together of “Cannibals” and border thinking is to demonstrate

how Montaigne and Mignolo attempt to address surprisingly similar epistemological problems

from opposite ends of the history of the modern / colonial world system (the sixteenth and

twenty-first centuries, respectively). In doing so, they exhibit a correspondence so acute that it

may be read as a genealogy. The key to unlock this hallucinatory genealogy will be a close

reading of the way Montaigne, in “Cannibals,” tropes the body to critique the existing knowledge

structures of his time and place just as Mignolo, as we have begun to see, deploys the trope of

border thinking in the hopes of reimagining and reinventing Western epistemology as a series of

local, embodied knowledge practices.

Before we can profit from this dialogue, however, some work must be done to

contextualize Montaigne. This will allow us not only to understand him as a French Renaissance

writer, subject to a particular humanist tradition, but will also open the way for us to consider
 42

how, exactly, Montaigne diagnosed the social, political, and theological crises of his time in the

Essais and, specifically, in “Cannibals.”

II. Montaigne and the Essais

I do not find myself in the place where I look.

Montaigne, “Of Prompt or Slow Speech”

Montaigne’s Essais comprises one-hundred and seven total essays, the longest of which,

“An Apology for Raymond Sebond,” spans over two-hundred pages and stands in its own right

as an impressive philosophical disquisition on questions of natural theology and epistemology.

Given the breadth of the subjects, ideas, and themes covered in the Essais, it would be foolhardy

for me to attempt to offer an exhaustive exposition of this work in these pages. Indeed, any such

attempt would also of necessity involve offering an extensive biography of Montaigne himself;

so much in his life changed between 1572 when he began his work and 1588 when the first

three-book edition of the Essais was published in Paris.22 My aims here are considerably more

22
On questions of how Montaigne’s thinking changed over the course of the

composition of the Essais, one of the most influential accounts remains that of Pierre

Villey in his Les Sources et l’Évolution des Essais de Montaigne, 1933. Villey’s

contribution to Montaigne scholarship was establishing that the final version of the Essais

underwent three distinct revisions, which represent its three most important editions:

1580, 1588, 1595 (Michael 110). Tom Conley, writing in 2005, offers a gloss on Villey’s

account that creates a narrative arc for the Essais. In the earliest essays of book one,

according to Conley, “the project of self-portraiture develops slowly,” but over time,
 43

modest. What I hope to achieve in this section is to contextualize Montaigne so as to prepare the

reader for my ensuing treatment of “Cannibals” and its relation to border thinking. Consequently,

in this section I will provide a selective overview of the Essais that focuses on two overarching

themes that will be explored in more detail in my subsequent reading of “Cannibals”; namely,

Montaigne’s skepticism and the recurring synecdoche in his work between human body and

social body or, more broadly, between self and world. I will also begin to stitch together these

themes with border thinking. Along the way, of course, we will have occasion to bring

Montaigne himself further into focus and to understand him as a unique thinker in a very unique

historical context.

Taking “Cannibals” as our provisionary starting point for this delimited exposition of

both Montaigne and the Essais, it is a good idea to begin by noting that, much like Esteban in

Carpentier’s El Siglo de las Luces, in “Cannibals” Montaigne is at a certain remove,

geographically speaking, from his named subject of inquiry. However, unlike Esteban, who at

least spends some time in Revolutionary France before offering us a comparison to the Terror,

Montaigne does not travel to the New World before penning “Cannibals.” But then again, the

essay is not only (or even mostly) given to imparting information about the New World.

Montaigne begins “Cannibals” by quoting Plutarch’s Life of Pyrrhus and Life of Flaminius. In

“[a]utobiographical incursions become more frequent before the essayist succumbs to a

crisis of faith, made clear by the presence of a demonstrative ‘anti-essay,’ the monstrous

‘Apology’ set at the core of the second volume” (Conley 76). In the third volume, written

mostly in 1587 and consisting of thirteen longer and more introspective essays,

Montaigne reveals his “access . . . to mature and extensively self-invested reflections on

life, travel, and experience” (Conley 76).

 44

an essay which spans barely more than ten pages, he references Plato three times; Virgil, Horace,

Seneca, Herodotus and Cicero each twice; and Propertius, Suidas, Sextus Empiricus, Claudian,

Diodorus Siculus and Anacreon each once.

This list of philosophers, poets, political theorists, and historians from both the Greek and

Roman traditions should demonstrate that, though Montaigne does rely on contemporary

eyewitness accounts for his primary sources,23 the texts with which he is truly in conversation are

from classical antiquity, or at least from the French Renaissance understanding of classical

antiquity. When Montaigne receives accounts of the New World from his contemporaries, he

cannot help but compare these accounts to the work of classical thinkers. Accordingly,

Montaigne must be understood within a humanist genealogy of Renaissance intellectual history,

23
It is widely agreed that the three main ethnographic, eyewitness sources for

“Cannibals” are Hans Staden’s The True History and Description of a Country Populated

by Wild, Naked, and Savage Man-Munching People, situated in the New World; André

Thevet’s Singularities of Antarctic France; and Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage to the

Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America. These three sources all share, in differing

degrees and in contrast to what we might expect from Staden’s title, fairly salutary

accounts of their respective authors’ interactions with different tribes of the Tupí-

Guarani: an ethnic / language group which was spread over the coast of southeastern

Brazil, roughly spanning what are today the coastlines of the states of Rio de Janeiro and

Espirito Santo. In addition to these three eyewitness accounts of life among the

Tupínamba, Frank Lestringant also points to Guillaume Postel’s La République des Turcs

(1560), a rather euphoric account of the virtues of the Ottoman Empire, as a close

analogue to and probable influence for Montaigne’s essay (Lestringant, Cannibals, 54).
 45

one which rejected medieval philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and William of

Ockham – all of whom might be considered disciples of Aristotle – in favor of classical models

for both language and behavior: Cicero, Seneca, Plato, Cato, Scipio.

John O’Brien correctly recognizes Montaigne’s relationship to classical antiquity when

he notes that, “[a]mong all his essays, the titles of most of which begin with the word ‘on,’ none

directly deals with this topic” (54). For O’Brien, Montaigne’s omission of “classical antiquity”

or “the great thinkers of antiquity” as subjects for an essay in his collection does not reveal his

disregard for these topics; rather, it reveals their absolute ubiquity in his thought – they are the

very air he breathes. Montaigne’s affinity for the major figures of classical antiquity is certainly

no surprise when we consider the milieu in which he was raised. He was born in 1533 at the

Chateau de Montaigne (about thirty miles east of Bordeaux), the son of Pierre Eyquem, Seigneur

de Montaigne, and Antoinette de Louppes (or Lopez).24 As Ullrich Langer explains:

the social trajectory of Eyquem family is that of many wealthy bourgeois in the

sixteenth century, who enriched themselves in banking, commerce, judicial or

royal administration, bought noble lands and lived off the proceeds from their

lands, sometimes occupying high-level posts in the kingdom, and ensuring for

their children non-commercial careers. (15)

Montaigne’s close intimacy with classical humanism was not only an inevitable consequence of

the education he received as a member of this ascending nobility of the robe, however; it also

represented the firm (and, even for the time, rather eccentric) wish of his father, Pierre Eyquem.

As Philip Hallie explains in a brief paean devoted to Montaigne’s upbringing that is a bit

24
According to multiple scholarly sources, including Donald Frame and Ullrich

Langer, the Louppes family was of Spanish Jewish origin.

 46

reminiscent of Montaigne’s own rather idealistic treatment of the lives of the South American

cannibals, “Pierre saw to it that the only language Michel heard, read, or spoke during his early

years was Latin; he was awakened by the sound of music, heard no threats, felt no punishment,

shed no tears, but quite naturally spoke, read, and wrote in Latin” (Hallie 11).25

Montaigne’s humanistic upbringing shaped him into a man singularly at home in the

classical tradition. He saw the world through the lens of this tradition but he was also a

humanista in a more literal sense – he cared deeply and wrote searchingly about how his

contemporaries lived their lives and used language. In the following passage, John O’Brien

nicely encapsulates this dialectic between Montaigne’s concern with his fellow contemporaneous

man and his use of classical antiquity:

Montaigne’s thought is imbued with classical antiquity, which is present in a

variety of forms throughout his Essays as well as his Travel Journal: thus

antiquity is not of antiquarian interest for him. It is not received as a set of

abstract propositions or an inert corpus of knowledge, but as a body of writing

within a body of writing, woven piecemeal into the texture and text of the Essays

as part of the act of composition; so that each essay will be in an important sense

a fresh start; a new way of approaching antiquity. (O’Brien 54).

O’Brien’s claim that each essay in the Essais may be read as a “fresh start” with respect to the

tradition of classical antiquity is especially penetrating when we consider “Of Cannibals” and

“Of Coaches,” the two essays that explicitly take the New World as their subject matter. After

all, does it not seem inevitable that Montaigne the classical humanist and Montaigne the

25
Montaigne offers his own account of his upbringing in the Essais. See “Of the

Education of Children,” especially pages 128 – 131.

 47

skeptical philosopher will do battle when it comes to the subject of the New World? But no: “I

don’t know if I can guarantee that some other such discovery will not be made in the future,”

Montaigne hedges in “Cannibals,” “so many personages greater than ourselves having been

mistaken about this one” (Frame 150). In this passage, a passage to which we will return in due

time, Montaigne uses his playful, taunting wit as a way out of a potential impasse: Plato, Cicero,

Seneca et al. may have been ignorant of the existence of the New World, but this does not mean

their contributions to knowledge may not be re-read and re-interpreted with the New World in

mind. If Montaigne was beholden to a particular tradition, it was certainly never as a blind

acolyte but, rather, as O’Brien suggests, as someone capable of creating a dialogue between that

tradition and the demands of both his lived experience and a new global imaginary.

Thus, in addition to Montaigne’s classical influences, it is also important to consider that

his generation of the 1530s, one which included his best friend, Etienne de la Boétie, as well as

Jean Bodin and Henri Etienne (a Calvinist), was the first generation with no memory of the

world before the Protestant Reformation (Burke 2-3). That is to say, these men had to make a

choice about their religion. Indeed, though Montaigne always remained Catholic, and his father

was a devout Catholic, his sister Jeanne and brother Thomas both converted to Calvinism. In

addition to cutting across family ties, religious affiliation in the second half of the sixteenth-

century led to much political strife as well as violent armed conflict.26 Indeed, Montaigne began

writing the Essais in 1572, the same year as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and he died in

26
For a short but comprehensive summary of the politics behind the French Wars

of Religion and Montaigne’s role as a public figure during this time, see Ullrich Langer’s

essay, “Montaigne’s Political and Religious Context,” in the Cambridge Companion to

Montaigne, edited by Langer himself.

 48

1592, two years before Henry entered Paris and began to pacify France (Hallie 4). As Philip

Hallie observes:

To read the Essays without looking at the physically and morally suicidal century

in which he lived is to read them ill. To try to understand his notion of personal

philosophy . . . without knowing what he means by such phrases as ‘the strife that

is tearing France to pieces’ is to fail at the important task of seeing the way of life

to which he was reacting . . . Montaigne’s situation was to a great extent a

response to a concrete, particular situation, rather than being only the result of

philosophical analysis. And an important part of that situation was the religio-civil

strife that lasted whole fifty-nine years of his life. (Hallie 4)

We can begin to see how the Reformation and the spread of the Protestant faith might

have created a fertile ground for Montaigne’s staunch belief in the unreliability of human

opinions, manifested as a distinct register of skepticism which pervades his entire oeuvre. He is a

profoundly original philosopher who practiced a version of skepticism that is both indebted to

and also distinct from the skepticism proffered by the classical thinkers with whom he was

always in dialogue. This unique kind of skepticism led Montaigne to question the operating

principles of the discursive and social structures within which he found himself. Montaigne’s

skepticism led him to ask a series of fundamental epistemological and hermeneutical questions

about the nature of knowledge and the process of knowing – Can anything be truly known? Are

there different ways of knowing? Do different ways of knowing lead to different knowledge?

How should different kinds of knowledge and different knowledge practices be organized and

hierarchized? – that reverberate with an entire tradition of skeptical philosophy that succeeds

him, especially with modern anthropology, post-structuralism, and, perhaps most palpably,
 49

border thinking. What these three threads share in common, of course, is the idea that all

knowledge is local and that it develops as a result of historical circumstances in specific cultural

contexts. As Mignolo succinctly puts it, “I am where I think” (Darker Side 91).

Crucially, however, for Montaigne skepticism did not mean immediate, uncompromising

disbelief; instead, as Ann Hartle claims – yet again putting us in mind of “Cannibals” – “the

skeptical moment,” for Montaigne, “[is] precisely the refusal to simply dismiss what is not

familiar, what is not immediately recognized in being like us” (193). As Hartle goes on to write,

“Montaigne’s skepticism, then, is not the doubt of the ancient skeptics but rather an openness to

what is possible and an overcoming of presumption at the deepest level. Montaigne incorporates

the transformed skeptical act into his own mode of thought” (193). This “overcoming of

presumption” in Hartle’s formulation seems very akin to what Lawrence Kritzman wants to

understand as Montaigne’s resistance to the “universalizing ethos of reason” throughout the

essays. For Kritzman, this resistance is motivated by a drive to be “hospitable toward alterity”

(36). He goes on to explain:

The Montaignian subject exempts himself from becoming a self-grounding entity

functioning as a measure of the law. The essayist asks the reader to sustain the

imperative to be hospitable and requests that the latter contribute diversity by

creating a cornucopia of examples that transgress our horizon of expectations.

(37)

The common denominator tying together Hartle and Kritzman’s points about

Montaigne’s skepticism is that its development must be understood alongside his use of the essay

as a practice (even, perhaps, a methodology), for synthesizing doubt and credulity.

Understanding this connection between form and function in Montaigne’s work depends on our
 50

ability to understand the essay as a literary form uniquely suited to not only relating and

defending the author’s judgment but, crucially, to laying bare the process by which the author’s

judgment is reached. Thus, the “essai,” as conceived by Montaigne, reveals its author in the act

of thinking and, in so doing, it opens itself to the very real possibility that the judgments it sets

forth are mutable and contingent rather than eternal and universal. This transparency is precisely

what Hartle and Kritzman, in their separate ways, want to understand as Montaigne’s unique

openness to the other. “Never did two men judge alike about the same thing, and it is impossible

to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in different men, but in the same man at different

times” (995). This passage, taken from the final essay of the Essais, “Of Experience,” typifies

Montaigne’s openness. For him the multiplicity of different customs, beliefs, and laws held by

different nations, as well as their inevitable change over time, is proof that no universal standard

of human behavior can be deduced through human understanding. As Tzvetan Todorov sees it,

Montaigne’s “radical relativism” is the foundation for his “two great politico-ethical options . . .

conservatism at home, toleration for others” (118).

Todorov’s statement here not only puts a punctuation mark, of sorts, on our consideration

of Montaigne’s “open” form of skepticism, it also underscores Montaigne’s penchant for

confusing categories and allowing boundaries to overlap, e.g. the individual body and the body

of state, the self and the other, the inside and the outside of the body, the near and the distant, the

commonplace and the exotic. After all, the two stipulations that make up Todorov’s claim,

“conservatism at home, toleration for others,” are far from mutually exclusive; just as the

boundaries attaining to “home” in the first clause and “others” in the second are far from

delimited: Is “home” in this case one’s house? The whole of one’s estate and lands? One’s region
 51

of France? France itself? Europe? Are “others” one’s family members? Neighbors?

Countrymen? Foreigners? Cannibals?

This is perhaps a good time to note that Essais, taken as a whole, reveal a marked slant

towards what we might think of as “interior knowledge” or self-knowledge. This bias in

Montaigne’s philosophy coincides with Mignolo’s concept of border thinking in some important

ways. As we have begun to see, border thinking emerges as a trope specifically created to lay

open and critique a Western epistemology hypostatized, in part, by a separation between the

mind (or soul or self) and the body. Border thinking and the body-politics of knowledge, its

indispensable complement, are strategies for reimagining and recasting epistemology in terms of

the human body, thus making the human body the subject, rather than the object, of knowledge.

As we will see a bit further on when my focus shifts to a close reading of “Cannibals,”

Montaigne tropes knowledge in terms of the human body, thus creating a corrective for an

epistemology that wants to locate all meaning and knowing outside of the body. I will have

occasion to return to and develop this concept of “embodied knowledge” as a corrective for an

epistemology that both Montaigne and Mignolo, in uncannily similar ways, see as faulty.

For the moment, however, I want to offer some examples of how this feature of

Montaigne’s thinking appears in other sections of Essais. Consider this passage from his short

preface to the first edition of Essais (which only included Books I and II), entitled “To the

Reader,” published in 1580:

If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better,

and should present myself in a studied posture. I want to be seen here in my

simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that

I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far
 52

as respect for the public has allowed. Had I been placed among those nations

which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature’s first laws, I assure you

I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked. Thus,

reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend

your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. (xlvii)

The first thing to notice here is that this preface is very much in correspondence with

“Cannibals.” Not only does Montaigne refer to “those nations which are said to live still in the

sweet freedom of nature’s first laws” but, even more importantly, the way he describes how he

wants to be regarded by the reader: “in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or

artifice” resurfaces much later in the Essais in his description of the cannibals as “alive and

vigorous, most useful and natural, genuine” (185).

Bracketing this correspondence for a moment – I will come back to this same passage

later in my reading of “Cannibals” – let us turn our attention to two key statements from the

preface: “I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked” and “I am

myself the matter of my book.” The second statement nicely thematizes an idea that Montaigne

comes back to again and again – namely, the synecdochal relationship between knowing the self

and knowing the world. Erich Auerbach is quick to point out that this trope is figured as a

particular kind of knowledge, in this case self-knowledge:

Concealed behind self-irony and modesty there is a very definite attitude which

serves his major purpose and to which he adheres with a charmingly elastic

tenacity which is his own . . . he conceives of an “ignorance forte et genereuse”

and values it more highly than all factual knowledge . . . [this strong and generous

ignorance] is not only a means of clearing the way to the kind of knowledge
 53

which matters to him, that is, self-knowledge, but it also represents a direct way

of reaching what is the ultimate goal of his quest, namely, right living. (Auerbach

295)

Auerbach’s emphasis on the inward-looking bent of the Essais is certainly borne out in the text.

Take, for example, the following passage from “Of Repentance”: “You can tie up all moral

philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff. Each man

bears the entire form of man’s estate” (740). From this representative passage we can begin to

understand the Essais not as an investigation of the outer world (this even despite their

multiplicitous subject matter and the wide scope of human experience that they cover), but as,

first and foremost, a reflection of Montaigne’s inner life. Indeed, for Bart Moore-Gilbert, the

Essais, “expresses the emergence of the early Modern European Self in a canonical form . . .

Montaigne is widely regarded as inaugurating modern, or at least early modern autobiography in

the West” (1).27 For Auerbach, as noted above, this emphasis on unique individual interiority is

borne out most forcefully in Montaigne’s repeated celebrations of ignorance; in his depiction of

ignorance as something desirable, even exultant.

27
There is some debate on the question of whether the Essais may be read as an

autobiography. For example, Michel Beaujour distinguishes between what he dubs

“autoportrait” – a better descriptor for Essais, he argues – and traditional autobiography

in the following way: “L’autoportrait se distingue de l’autobiographie par l’absence d’un

recit suivi. Et par la subordination de la narration à un deploiement logique, assemblage

ou bricolaje d’éléments sous des rubriques que nous appelerons provisoirement

“thématiques” (Miroirs D’Encre 8, Beaujour’s italics).

 54

But this “good” kind of ignorance is only applicable when we consider the outside world.

As Montaigne also states in the preface: “I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire

and wholly naked” (xlvii). Ignorance of the true state of the self – the body fragmented as

opposed to “entire” or clothed as opposed to “wholly naked” – cannot be tolerated. In this

synecdoche of self and world (“each man bears the entire form of man’s estate”) the purpose of

knowing the self is not to map the world; rather, anticipating Hegel, the reverse is true: the world

exists so that we may better map the self. As I have already suggested, Montaigne’s treatment of

the cannibals in his essay may be understood as one of the most palpable examples of this

inward-looking movement in his work. As we will see in the following section, by grounding

knowledge ontologically in the body through the trope of cannibalism – the incorporation of the

other into the self – Montaigne opens a path for a different way of writing and thinking about

radical cultural difference.

III. “Of Cannibals”

It is a sign of rawness and indigestion to disgorge food just as we swallowed it. The
stomach has not done its work if it has not changed the condition and form of what has
been given it to cook.
Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children”

It’s a mutual, joint-stock world, in all meridians. We cannibals must help these
Christians.
Queequeg, Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“Of Cannibals” has three discrete parts and it has a very clear thesis statement which is

argued and presented in different ways throughout the essay, but which can be encapsulated

succinctly with the following sentence: “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than
 55

in eating him dead.”28 Here Montaigne’s unabashed “radical relativism,” as Todorov would put

it, presents us with a different kind of trope from Alejo Carpentier’s Aztec-Jacobin. Instead of a

metaphor that fuses two figures into one, this is a side-by-side comparison; instead of

superimposition and transformation, here we are presented with contiguity. And as this

28
The entire passage reads “I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive

than in eating him dead; more barbarity in lacerating by rack and torture a body still fully

able to feel things, in roasting him little by little and having him bruised and bitten by

pigs and dogs . . . than in roasting him and eating him after his death” (189). It might

seem, on the face of it, reductive to gloss Montaigne’s entire essay in terms of the

sentence above. However, this is a self-contained claim that ghosts through the essay,

resurfacing at various points in different contexts. In this specific iteration, Montaigne is

troping the “barbarous” methods of torture employed by the Spanish and Portuguese (i.e.

torturing is “eating a man alive”). Consider, in conjunction to this, that Montaigne ends

the essay by having the Tupí he interviews mention the stark division in French society

between “men fully bloated with all sorts of comforts” and “their halves begging at their

doors, emaciated with poverty and hunger” (193). In this passage it seems as though an

unequal distribution of wealth is another possible way of “eating a man alive.” It is also

very difficult to consider this passage without thinking of the ritual of the Eucharist. The

ontological status of communion was one of the most important theological polemics

between Catholics and Calvinist Huguenots during the Wars of Religion. Of course,

depending on one’s interpretation of this ritual, it is difficult to say whether taking the

sacrament meant “eating a man alive” or “eating him dead.”

 56

comparison indicates, Montaigne’s main object of inquiry is not the New World or the Cannibals

who live there; it is his immediate sphere of influence: sixteenth century France. He chooses the

cannibal as the ideal figure to distinguish from his contemporary, canny surroundings.

This self-conscious troping – the choice to interrogate received meaning and knowledge

through comparison – makes “Cannibals” a unique European text about the New World.

Certainly, it is profoundly useful as a counterpoint for reading other early modern narratives of

encounter with Native Americans. Though the vast majority of these eyewitness, first-hand

reports (e.g. Columbus, Vespucci, de las Casas, Thevet, Staden, Castillo, Smith, Bartram) may,

to varying degrees, alternately express disgust, admiration, pity or ambivalence towards native

peoples, they nevertheless all function to create a closed circuit of knowledge transmission

wherein European cultural truths are vouchsafed and reinforced through an implicit pact of

intelligibility and reciprocity between the first-person narrator and the imagined reader. The

contiguity implicit in this pact and midwifed by the physical text itself functions as a palliative to

the danger presented by the daunting physical distance between the narrator and the reader. That

is to say, most of this early-modern writing about the Americas emblematizes the contiguity

between European narrator and reader, their cultural closeness, by providing a shared space of

intelligibility where anxieties about Otherness can be sublated.

Conversely, these same narratives feverishly foreground the distance, both figurative and

literal, between Native Americans and the European reader. As Michel de Certeau notes, travel

accounts must by definition begin with an outbound journey, a fact which marries the physical

dislocation of the journey itself with what he terms “the search for the strange” (Heterologies

69). The foregone conclusion, in other words, is that the strange is not “here” – not where the

reader is located. For de Certeau, this “a priori of difference” results in a rhetoric of distance in
 57

travel accounts (69). In his reading of “Cannibals,” however, this formal tactic is inverted. The

outbound journey, such as it is:

consists in establishing a distance from nearby representations: first, from

common opinion (which talks about ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’), then from

ancient sources (Plato’s Atlantis and the pseudo-Aristotle’s island), and finally

from contemporary information (the cosmography of the period, Thévet, etc.)

Faced with these increasingly authoritative discourses, the essay only repeats:

that’s not it, that’s not it . . . The critique of proximities places both the savage

and the narrator at a distance from our own lands. (Heterologies, 69)

Not only does Montaigne’s outbound journey not involve the same kind of geographic

dislocation we find in other travel narratives, it very self-consciously casts aside the cultural

closeness shared by European author and reader in favor of what de Certeau astutely labels a

“critique of proximities” (69). Rather than traveling to the New World, Montaigne meets the

cannibals in Rouen at the court of the child-King Charles IX. Rather than protecting the reader

from the alien presence of the cannibals by foregrounding their exoticism, Montaigne narrates

his meeting with them (albeit not without some difficulty) in familiar, unremarkable

surroundings. Rather than utilizing the Natives as a way of cathecting European cultural phobias

and anxieties, Montaigne represents them as privileged interpreters of social reality who are

nevertheless not without their flaws. Rather than, finally, placing himself side-by-side with his

readers at a safe distance from the other, Montaigne posits a necessary and heuristically desirable

contiguity between the cannibals and his countrymen, one that is made manifest in Rouen but

which also pervades the text as a constant comparison and contrast of equals: “each man calls

barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and
 58

reason than the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in”

(185).

Not surprisingly, “Of Cannibals” has often been read as an allegorical social satire which,

through its representation of the cannibal as a civilized, rational figure, enacts a self-reflective

critique of French civilization in the mid-sixteenth century. In my view, Montaigne tropes New

World cannibalism as an alternative system of meaning making and understanding, an alternative

way of interfacing with the phenomenological world. Not only are we encouraged to imagine the

kind of cannibalism practiced by these natives as natural and in some sense beautiful,29 we are

also asked to imagine it as an enlightened, civilized corrective for a France that has turned

savage and wild. As Bart Moore-Gilbert argues when writing about “Cannibals,” “far from using

autobiography to posit binary distinctions between the West and the non-West, in the way

29
According to Certeau, “Montaigne takes his place in a long tradition (which

began before him and continued after) when he transforms these two ‘barbarities’

[cannibalism and polygamy] into forms of ‘beauty’ judged deserving of that name due to

their utility to the social body” (Heterologies, 70). Unfortunately Certeau does not

elaborate on this “long tradition” though we can assume that it extends at least as far back

as Plutarch’s description of the gymnosophists – ascetic wise men who did not wear

clothes and lived in the forest – encountered in India by Alexander’s army in his Life of

Alexander. We can also clearly see Montaigne’s influence on later (mostly eighteenth

century) thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Swift, and Graffigny, all of

whom grapple with the problem of how to articulate alterity so that it might shine a new

light on the familiar.

 59

conventional colonial discourse (especially about “Cannibals”) is characteristically supposed to

do, Montaigne often explicitly undermines ontological differences between these terms” (4).

This chiastic inversion of the typical roles of colonial expansion – the Civilized European

is in fact savage; the Savage Native is civilized – is, as Moore-Gilbert suggests, a theme which

runs through the essay. Take, for example, the following passage:

Those savages are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are

produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit which we have

artificially perverted and misled from the common order which we ought to call

savage. It is in the first kind that we find their true, vigorous, living, most natural

and most useful properties and virtues, which we have bastardized in the other

kind by merely adapting them to our corrupt tastes. Moreover, there is a delicious

savour which even our taste finds excellent in a variety of fruits produced in those

countries without cultivation: they rival our own. (152)

At first glance, this passage seems to be yet another articulation of the Noble Savage conceit (a

trope already established by the late 1570s when Montaigne most likely wrote “Cannibals”).

After all, the Natives are described as true, vigorous, living, natural, useful, and virtuous. They

are in harmony with the nature around them; they issue forth from it just as fruit issues from

trees. Two factors make this gloss seem insufficient, however. First of all, though these natives

are ostensibly the very same cannibals who are the subjects of the essay, Montaigne does not use

the word “cannibal” to describe them. Indeed, up to this point in his essay (about fifteen-hundred

words) he still has not directly addressed cannibals or cannibalism. This ellision – what Frank

Lestringant rather poetically calls an “all-enveloping paraphrasis” – is even more curious when

we revisit the metaphor Montaigne employs in this particular passage: the as-yet unnamed
 60

cannibals are edible fruit “produced by Nature in her ordinary course” and possessing “a

delicious savour” which even our own taste finds excellent (Lestringant, Cannibals 54). So we

have another chiasmus, one buried within the morphology of the trope: the cannibals are the ones

being eaten by the Europeans.

The second reason this passage is noteworthy is best put in the form of a question: why is

Montaigne’s characterization of the French or, more generally, the Europeans, so resolutely

negative? It’s certainly true that the same discourse which creates the Native American as Noble

Savages and the New World as an Earthly Paradise necessarily does so with European foils in

mind but the “we” in Montaigne’s passage does not seem to be simply referring to men led

astray by the artifice and duplicity of civilized living. Using strong language, Montaigne calls

them bastardized and corrupt.30 The tone of the passage – the way it inflates the virtue of the

Natives and caricatures the corruption of the Europeans – seems odd from a writer usually so

reserved, skeptical, and irreverent. My suspicion is that he is amplifying these characteristics for

a reason and that reason is that he is trying to emphasize a contrast not between two groups of

people but between two ways of apprehending the world. In other words, while Montaigne is not

very interested in walking, talking, breathing, human-flesh eating cannibals, he is extremely

interested in the idea of cannibalism. What I want to suggest, then, is that he makes use of the

30
The original here is: “En ceux là sont vives et vigoreuses les vrayes et plus

utiles et naturelles vertus et proprietez, lesquelles avons nous abastardies en ceux-cy, et

les avons seulement accommodées au plaisir de nostre goust corrompu” (Essais, Ed. Jean

Platard, 93). These two words in particular (my emphasis) are very strong, loaded

signifiers for a sixteenth century Catholic. I read Montaigne’s use of them here as, if not

hyperbolic, then adding an uncharacteristic severity to his point.

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tropic charge of this idea – its status as a long-standing taboo, its malleability, its timeliness

given the exploration of the Americas – to create an entry-point for his critique of the pain,

injustice, and brutality to which his walking, talking, breathing contemporaries are subject.

Ultimately what is at stake in this critique, as I have mentioned, is the reinvention of a grossly

deficient European epistemology, one that has left sixteenth century France in the chaos of civil

war and religious polemic.

In his 1998 book, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy, Renaissance scholar David Quint

offers a dissenting viewpoint. Quint’s book begins with the claim (and here he and I are very

much in agreement) that it is impossible to understand the Essais without acknowledging the

centrality of the political and religious violence plaguing France during the time its constitutive

parts – the individual essays – were written. As he states in his preface, “Montaigne responds to

the contemporary crisis of a civil war by propounding in the Essais a new ethics to counter the

model of heroic virtue that prevailed in his culture and his noble class” (Quint xvi). 31

Quint carries this idea of a new ethics, which he will later call an “ethics of yielding,”

through to his reading of “Cannibals.” For him, this particular essay is a cautionary tale of how

French society could self-destruct into “a society of perfect martial virtue and diehard Stoic

constancy when that society has no word for pardon” (xii). By reading parts of “Cannibals”

alongside other essays with similar themes of punishment through violence such as “Of Evil

Means Employed to a Good End” and “Of Drunkenness,” Quint seeks to stabilize the trope of

31
For Quint, the work as a whole can be understood in terms of three major foci:

an ethics of consent and yielding which Montaigne is trying to articulate against the

religious and political strife of his present day, an exploration of skepticism, and, finally,

the development of the author’s self-portrait.

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cannibalism as just another form of gruesome punishment, similar in kind and degree to that

undergone by the Christian martyrs whose exaggerated stoicism Montaigne coyly critiques in

these other essays. For Quint, Montaigne’s depiction of the warlike culture of the Tupínamba is

his way of criticizing the stoic and unyielding nature of a French military ethos bent on

destroying itself. The Tupí, then, are no more than a hyperbolic mirror representing the end game

of such an ethos: perpetual warfare between tribes (Tupínamba and Tabagé or Maraia; Catholics

and Huguenots) who exhibit more commonalities (language, culture, history, tradition,

geography) than differences, but are nevertheless bent on destroying one another. In constructing

his argument, Quint makes use of the final sentence of a key passage in the essay, one in which

Montaigne imagines himself explaining the purity and simplicity of this newfound people to

Plato:

This is a nation, I should say to Plato, in which there is no sort of traffic, no

knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name for a magistrate or for

political superiority, no custom of servitude, no riches or poverty, no contracts, no

successions, no partitions, no occupations but leisure ones, no care for any but

common kinship, no clothes, no agriculture, no metal, no use of wine or wheat.

The very words which signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy,

belittling, pardon – unheard of. (186, italics are mine and represent the line Quint

cites)

Here we might think back to Certeau’s description of the way the essay distances itself from

competing discourses like common opinion, ancient sources and contemporary information.

Indeed, Certeau’s teasing “that’s not it, that’s not it” is echoed above by Montaigne’s repeated

negations: “they don’t have this, or this, or this, or this.” Quint is quite right to identify this move
 63

as dialectical – “they are what we are not” – and, using Rousseau’s noble savage as an example,

to point out that this dialectics of lack will become an important conceit two centuries hence

(Quint 75).32

However, for Quint the most important part of this description is its last word. The

natives are incapable of lying, envy, avarice, but also of pardoning.

Here the unsettling final term, “pardon,” already anticipates the ensuing

description of the central, repeatedly staged event of the cannibals’ culture: the

confrontation of the victorious cannibal with a defeated enemy who lies at his

mercy . . . In this case the cannibals’ single-mindedness, which prevents any

deviation from their goal of vengeance, becomes bloody-mindedness. (Quint 76)

Since the title of Quint’s chapter on “Cannibals” is, “The Culture that Cannot Pardon: ‘Des

Cannibales’ in the Larger Essais,” it is not surprising that the idea of the cannibals being unable

32
One detail Quint fails to note is that this particular dialectics is already long

established by the time Montaigne gives it voice in his essay. Indeed, taking away only

the “no occupations but leisure” stipulation (which is not really applicable to Montaigne’s

cannibals anyway), this description could very well fit in with the citizens of Plato’s

Republic. We may also read it, of course, as another incarnation of the state of nature

myth so prevalent in the European tradition from the gymnosophists encountered by

Alexander the Great to the Garden of Eden. As Tzvetan Todorov points out, when

Montaigne offers this series of negative descriptions, he is following a rhetorical

template: “the golden age is traditionally invoked in negative terms, precisely because it

is only the reverse description of our reality” (122).

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to pardon serves as the lynchpin of his argument. However, Quint is perhaps too hasty in reading

Montaigne’s cannibalism literally and associating it with what he terms “bloody-mindedness.”

Hearkening back to our discussion of Montaigne’s particular form of skepticism and its openness

to the other along with the embodied knowledge of border thinking, what happens if, rather than

thinking of this cannibalistic society he is portraying as a hyperbolic mirror that reflects the

devolution of French civilization into reciprocal stoic slaughter, we consider it as a way of

imagining, of troping, a different system of knowledge; one which eschews an imperial

epistemology in favor of an embodied way of knowing based on a mutual, material, and

reciprocal transformation through the act of incorporation?33

In the first place, the way the essay inverts spatial relationships between center and

periphery, observer and observed, and interior and exterior, problematizes Quint’s understanding

of the natives as a cautionary tale. After all, if “Cannibals,” as Quint claims, is designed to call

attention to a homology between “the reciprocal cruelty of the cannibals’ continual, unyielding

warfare and the civil wars in France, where religious zeal only intensifies the brutality and

stiffens the defiance of warring parties,” then why, we might ask, is this homology not drawn out

in the third section of the essay when Montaigne travels to meet with the Tupí? (Quint 98).

Rather than a conversation in Rouen that revolves around commonalities between these two

“self-consuming societies,” which is what we might expect following Quint’s logic, what we get

instead is a Tupí critical perspective on France which short-circuits any reading of these

worldviews as symmetrical or homologous. The most notable marker of this incommensurability

33
Again, because of the ritual of the Eucharist, Catholics were quite accustomed

to thinking of incorporation as a means of transformation. It is also worth remembering

that transubstantiation is defined by its very indiscernability, its magic.

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is of course the difficulty in translation and memory that Montaigne encounters as he attempts to

relate this conversation.

Before moving to unpack the issues of translation and memory in the third section of

“Cannibals,” however, it is crucial to explain exactly how Montaigne denotes the Tupí’s status as

privileged interpreters (not representatives of an outdated social order)34 earlier in the essay. In

addition to positioning the Tupí cannibals in the geographic center of the French symbolic order

(the King’s court and thus locus of imperial power) and traveling there to meet with them,

Montaigne also foregrounds Tupí insight by constantly troping the body, food, and hunger

alongside problems of knowledge. Take, for example, this passage from the very beginning of

the essay:

34
For Frank Lestringant, in contrast to Quint, Montaigne’s depiction of the Tupí

is not some apocalyptic prophecy of devolution but rather a way of harkening back

nostalgically to chivalric modes of warfare where an ethos of individual valor trumped

political and ideological motivations for going to war. Lestringant points out that the Tupí

are not fighting each other to obtain material wealth or conquer and hold new territory. In

addition, their short, open battles are honorable and courageous, the antithesis of early-

modern European warfare with its protracted sieges. Lestringant hints at this chivalric

nostalgia (a point Certeau also touches upon) when he writes: “L’enjeu de ces luttes

féroces est tout moral. Il n’a rien à voir avec l’accaparement de quelque bien matériel que

ce soit: terres productives que les Indiens n’ont pas à labourer, richesses qu’ils ne

possèdent pas, corps oisifs impropres à tout autre exercise que la chasse, le jeu d’amour

ou la guerre” (“Cannibalisme des Cannibales” 34).

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This discovery of a boundless country seems worthy of consideration. I don’t

know if I can guarantee that some other such discovery may not be made in the

future, so many persons greater than ourselves having been mistaken about this

one. I am afraid that we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity

than capacity. We embrace everything, but we clasp only wind. (150)

If neither scriptural texts nor the writings of the great thinkers of antiquity reveal any knowledge

of the existence of this giant, boundless land mass, then, Montaigne seems to be asking, what

else were they wrong about? Significantly, he represents this gap in accepted knowledge in terms

of the body and hunger: “we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, more curiosity than capacity”

(150). One possible strategy for reading this passage is as a trope that sets up an implicit

comparison between different ways of knowing the world. The explicit subject of comparison is

the European or French method of knowing the world figured as a kind of hysterical overeating:

it wants too much (“our eyes are bigger than our stomachs”) but it can neither ingest nor digest

what it gets (“more curiosity than capacity”) leaving it subject to a breakdown of its knowledge

systems and an evacuation of its truth-claims (“We embrace everything, but we clasp only

wind”).

The implicit subject of this hunger / body comparison is of course the cannibal, who, as

we learn in the second section of the essay, eats the bodies of the prisoners he has taken in battle

“not, as some people think, for nourishment, as of old the Scythians used to do; it is to betoken

extreme revenge” (153). These prisoners are not eaten right away but rather are treated with

kindness and generosity for months after their capture. The hope is that this coddling will make

them appreciate life all the more and beg for mercy when the hour of execution draws near – the

ultimate victory for the captors. However, according to Montaigne, “there is not one [prisoner] is
 67

a whole century who does not choose to die rather than to relax a single bit, by word or look,

from the grandeur or an invincible courage; not one who would not rather be killed and eaten

than so much as ask not to be” (155).

As a point of contrast to European knowledge-as-air, evanescent and ungraspable or,

perhaps, knowledge-as-flatulence, poorly absorbed and assimilated, with malodorous

consequences, consider the following passage, in which Montaigne, in the guise of ethnographer,

explains the prolonged ritual of cannibalism for the Tupínamba:

those prisoners, far from yielding despite all that was done to them during the two

or three months of their captivity, maintain on the contrary a joyful countenance:

they urge their captors to hurry up and put them to the test . . . I have a song made

by one such prisoner which contains the following: Let them all dare to come and

gather to feast on him, for with him they will feast on their own fathers and

ancestors who have served as food and sustenance for his body. “These sinews,”

he said, “this flesh and these veins – poor fools that you are – are your very own;

you do not realize that they still contain the very substance of the limbs of your

forebears: savour them well for you will find that they taste of your very own

flesh!” (155, my emphasis)35

35
In recounting this song, Montaigne is borrowing very closely from André

Thevet and Jean de Léry, both of whom make mention of a similar ritual before the

captive is killed. In Thevet’s account, the captive sings and in Léry’s he delivers a

speech. In either case, this is obviously part of a carefully choreographed ritual, a staged

performance. Montaigne can be credited with adding the conceit that “this flesh and veins
 68

This song seems to contradict the “ultimate revenge” that Montaigne names as the goal of this

ritualized, sacrificial cannibalism. Instead of a closed circuit of retributive violence, we are

presented with an economy of reciprocal feasting in which the enemy captive, through his song,

is revealed as the venerated ancestor. Instead of knowledge that cannot be properly digested – a

faulty epistemology – here we are presented with a knowledge already incorporated into being,

knowledge as substance itself. The claim of the conquered cannibal – these sinews, this flesh,

and these veins are your very own – is an ontological claim: in eating me you are eating

yourselves, I am you. All warring villages are in fact one and the same and these generations-

long feuds simply provide the mechanism for an inverted (and rather perverse) cross-pollination,

one enacted through death rather than birth.

David Quint’s reading of Montaigne’s cannibal song works along very similar lines but,

once again, his interpretation of Montaigne’s intention hinges on an understanding of the act of

cannibalism as inherently (and solely) violent and destructive:

Montaigne [depicts] a cannibal society and larger culture that, even as it directs its

violenc e outwards in war against its enemy, is literally devouring itself. Not only

is the enemy another identical cannibal, not only does the perfect reciprocity of

vengeance between the two enemy tribes reinforce their similarity and promise an

unending chain of violence that turns the victory of today into tomorrow’s defeat.

More, the competition of valor within the society fuels the warfare in the first

place and, even as it seeks to differentiate one cannibal from another, leads them

are your own, poor fools that you are . . . Savor them well; you will find in them the taste

of your own flesh.”

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all to the same end: killed or eaten by an enemy who will be killed or eaten in

turn. (85)

Though Quint quite rightly points out that this particular kind of ritual cannibalism, as we have

noted, creates a reciprocity that makes it impossible to distinguish between members of different

warring tribes, he reads this mechanism as a means of self-destruction, “[cannibal society] is

literally devouring itself” (85). When considered alongside Montaigne’s previous passage in

which he tropes eating as knowledge and European knowledge as an inability to digest what has

been too hastily consumed, however, the eating of the conquered cannibal takes on an entirely

different meaning from the one Quint is suggesting. Instead of simply perpetuating an unending

chain of vengeance through violence, the act of cannibalism – the ritualized and dramatized

apotheosis of the Tupí martial spirit, repeated ad infinitum – rebinds the social body even as it

sees the captive’s body dismembered and eaten.36 As the song of the captured cannibal

demonstrates quite clearly, this anthropophagic incorporation of the other is in fact tantamount to

a rediscovery of the self. How can there be vengeance when what you are eating is in fact your

very own flesh? Cannibalism is here troped as a means of propagation and social cohesion, an

alternative to social death and, ironically, to the self-devouring tendencies of Montaigne’s

36
Lestringant suggests something similar: “Cette société fraternelle, qui obéit

manifestement à un modèle patriarchal, guère inattendu dans ce contexte d’utopie

regressive, se consolide de la circulation continuelle des ses cellules et de ses mots par

voie anthropophagie. Le conflit, contradictoirement, alimente la concord générale, et le

cannibalisme a fonction active de symbole. Il ressoude le corps social dans le culte de

guerriers morts et d’admiration commune pour cette ‘grandeur de courage invincible’”

(“Cannibalisme des Cannibales” 39).

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warring contemporaries in France.37 The antidote for a world that is every day becoming more

unreasonable, insane, and violent is to turn inward, to valorize a different kind of knowledge, one

which is not universal but corporeal and thus can only be accessed by an openness to

contingency, error, and transformation; an openness to different possibilities for being oneself

and different ways of knowing oneself.

This inward-turning movement, of course, brings us right back to the synecdochal

relationship between the human body and the world around it. And as we learned, this scalar

troping is not only one of the governing thematic preoccupations of the Essais but also a feature

in the genealogy of border thinking as it has passed through Gloria Anzaldúa and Walter

Mignolo. Indeed, the substitutability of bodies and selves that is the key message of Montaigne’s

cannibal song finds a potent analogue in the following attempt by Mignolo to articulate border

thinking as an actual practice. In his search for such an example, Mignolo turns to Tojolabal, one

of a group of surviving Mayan languages. Unlike modern European languages, Tojolabal

evinces, “an intersubjective correlation between first and third persons” (Darker Side 226). As

37
As we have noted, the significance of the ritual of the Eucharist (i.e. Christian

ritual cannibalism) was one of the principle sources of objection between Catholics and

Huguenots. And yet here it is precisely cannibalism that is being called upon to help

Montaigne’s countrymen reimagine their social bonds. French religious practices should

lead to social harmony but instead cause violence and brutality. Tupí religious practices

are, at a glance, violent and brutal, but they lead to a social harmony that is out of reach

for the French. This observation seems to consist of equal measures of irony, paradox,

and chiasmus.
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Mignolo explains, “intersubjective” in this sense means, “a code devoid of direct and indirect

object; a code structured in the correlation between subjects”(Darker Side 226).

Thus, in Tojolabal and other Mayan languages, “acts of enunciation . . . not only involve

the co-presence of ‘I’ and ‘you,’ but also the presence of the ‘absent’ third person, ‘she’ or

‘they’” (226). For Mignolo, the importance of this example is in how it reveals the possibilities

of non-Western, non-Eurocentric ways of thinking and being in the world:

Thinking in/from Tojolabal (or any other Mayan language), instead of thinking

from German, French, English, or Spanish (or any modern imperial European

language), would make it difficult or impossible to conceive people as ‘other,’

that ‘nature’ is something outside ‘us,’ and to develop an idea of justice and

equality by defending the ‘inclusion of the other.’ Thinking from Tojolabal there

is no ‘other’ that needs to be included, since there is no object but only interacting

subjects. (228)

This passage certainly illustrates some of the resemblances between the logic of intersubjectivity

ingrained in the grammar of Tojolabal and the logic of the cannibal song in Montaigne’s essay. If

Montaigne’s collection of essays can be understood as a project of self-discovery (presumably,

writing about the world at large in all its multiplicity is a means to this end) then the way

“Cannibals” defines the self through its ultimate indistinguishability from the other – staging, in

a sense, an erasure of the concept of otherness altogether – stands out as a critique of knowledge

practices that would seek to understand the world as something objective and wholly separate

from the self and also, concurrently, the individual self as something separate from other selves.

As Mignolo notes above while describing the morphology of Tojolabal, “there is no object but

only interacting subjects.”

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It is precisely this unique way of knowing the world through incorporation and

transformation that makes the cannibals in the third section of Montaigne’s essay serve as such

privileged interpreters of his social universe, fulfilling the function that, if we were to follow the

discursive momentum of European expansion in the Americas, Montaigne should be fulfilling

for them. As the essay moves into its third and final section, Montaigne directs his reader’s

attention away from the New World and towards his northward journey from Bordeaux to

Rouen. However, this metaphoric “return” from the outbound journey, curiously coupled with an

actual journey through France, does not seem to equip our narrator with an ability to make clear

meaning of his meeting with the Tupí.

Three of these men, ignorant of the price they will pay some day, in loss of repose

and happiness, for gaining knowledge of the corruptions of this side of the ocean;

ignorant also of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin (which I

suppose is already well-advanced: poor wretches to let themselves be tricked by

the desire for new things, and to have left the serenity of their own sky to come

and see ours!) – three of these men were at Rouen, at the time the late King

Charles IX was there . . . They mentioned three things, of which I have forgotten

the third, and I am very sorry for it . . . I had an interpreter who followed my

meaning so badly, and who was so hindered by his stupidity in taking in my ideas,

that I could hardly get any satisfaction from the man. (158 -159)

Now, all of a sudden, Montaigne has a problem with his memory; he does not trust his translator

- meaning becomes difficult and treacherous. Montaigne’s disclaimers (along with his prophetic

prolepsis: “ignorant of the fact that of this intercourse will come their ruin . . . which I suppose is

already well advanced”) stand out in a text characterized in large part by its supremely confident
 73

and straightforward narrator. It seems that effecting this transposition between old world and

new, this inversion of roles between the discoverers and the discovered, is a rather daunting

prospect, one filled with its own particular aporias.

Nevertheless, we do get two observations from the cannibals:

They said that in the first place they thought it was very strange that so many

grown men, bearded, strong, and armed, who were around the king (it is likely

that they were talking about the Swiss of his guard) should submit to obey a child,

and that one of them was chosen to command instead. Second (they have a way in

their language of speaking of men as halves of one another), they had noticed that

there were among us men full and gorged with all sorts of good things, and that

their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and poverty;

and they thought it strange that these needy halves could endure such an injustice,

and did not take the others by the throat, set fire to their houses. (193)

The first observation made by the Tupínamba reveals just how estranged from the natural order

the Europeans have become: a child (Charles IX would have been twelve in 1562) commands

adults. All of the symbolic prerogatives undergirding the status of this child as absolute ruler of

France are set in contrast to Tupí common sense (which, Montaigne fears, is already on its way

to being corrupted). Thus, the Tupí ruler, in sharp contrast to Charles IX, may expect two things

from his position: the privilege of leading his warriors into battle and, during peaceful times, the

convenience of having paths cut for him through the brush as he walks to visit his vassals in

different villages (159).

And it is directly to these egalitarian practices that Montaigne speaks as he begins his

next sentence, which is also the final sentence of “Cannibals”: “All this is not too bad – but
 74

what’s the use? They don’t wear breeches” (159). Here we have one wildly foreign (and possibly

seditious) notion – radically curtailing the King’s privileges vis-à-vis the common man –

rhetorically displaced by Montaigne’s direct appeal to a reader with a more conventionally

foreign and much less dangerous notion. By ending “Cannibals” with this apostrophe, Montaigne

is appealing to a reader on the grounds of conventional wisdom: they do not wear pants, how can

we take anything they say seriously? This direct appeal, ironic though it may be, effectively

insulates him from the radical agenda of social reform that he has hitherto been proposing. And

we should note that this distancing and insulation are accomplished by precisely the same appeal

to common sense and conventional wisdom that is ascribed to the Tupínamba earlier in the

passage.

Quint reads this final sentence as a “spectacular instance” of an old Latin dictum, in

cauda venenum, “the sting is in the tail,” which he connects to the natives’ inability to pardon

(pardoning, we will recall, is the final term in Montaigne’s list of practices the natives lack)

(153). Though this final sentence does indeed function as, at once, surprise ending, ironic

disavowal and punch-line – in cauda venenum – the cauda or ass, the site of expulsion, cannot

but evoke, in an essay filled with chiasmoi, its own chiastic other: the site of ingestion.

Accordingly, this final sentence may also be understood as ouroboros, the serpent swallowing its

own tail. In this final aside to his contemporary French reader – in essence to himself, the proper

subject and object of the Essais – Montaigne not only thematizes the last stage of travel, the

return journey home, but also the reincorporation of the other into the self: the return from

worldly knowledge to the inward knowledge offered by the ritual cannibalism of the Tupínamba.

The chiastic inversion of the first figure he uses for the cannibals – they are uncultivated fruit to

be eaten by Europeans – resurfaces here as a French need for this same symbolic wholeness.
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And it is precisely the lack of wholeness that is foregrounded in the second point the Tupí

make: “they had noticed that there were among us men full and gorged with all sorts of good

things, and that their other halves were beggars at their doors, emaciated with hunger and

poverty; and they thought it strange that these needy halves could endure such an injustice, and

did not take the others by the throat, set fire to their houses” (159). Here we see exactly how it is

that this reciprocal cannibal feasting, when translated and transposed onto Europe, becomes a

kind of social critique that disarticulates governing systems of thought and belief. These systems

are based on a faulty premise; namely, that we are disconnected from each other, that one

person’s suffering and deprivation does not impact society as a whole but is rather contained to

an individual case.

Montaigne’s rejoinder here is firm: just as the Tupínamba reincorporate their ancestors

(and themselves) by eating their enemies (from whom they are, ultimately, indistinguishable), so

too must the social body of the French state be made whole by reincorporating its destitute

halves. The problem, of course, lies in finding the mechanism by which this reincorporation

might take place. And here it is important to note the opposition Montaigne creates above

between “men full and gorged with all sorts of good things” and “halves … emaciated with

hunger and poverty.” In order to balance the scales of justice, so to speak, it seems all we need to

do is cut a portion of meat from those that are bloated with more than their fair share and offer it

to those who are halved and starving. As we have noted, there is a wonderfully perverse irony in

play here: it is the theological debates over the meaning of Christian ritual cannibalism in Europe

that are largely responsible for the disintegration of French society into two opposing camps. Yet

Montaigne believes that cannibalism of the sort practiced ritually by the Tupí is the answer to

these social problems. And though a degree of self-consuming violence is certainly implicit in
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this act of reapportionment, it seems a far cry from the kind of all-consuming violence that Quint

claims Montaigne is denouncing.

But if this cannibal violence, contained and focused by ritual, is to serve as a strategy for

rebuilding a society that has lost its way, we must also take note of the way the passage ends

with an allusion to a very different kind of violence. The visiting natives, we will recall, find it

odd that the destitute halves do not “take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses”

(159). This description of social upheaval cannot help but invoke the very real chaos and

brutality of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, an enormous pogrom enacted by Catholics that

resulted in the deaths of approximately five thousand Huguenots over a period of six weeks from

August to October of 1572.38 And, indeed, it is very tempting to read the third point that the

38
The Massacre began on August twenty-fourth, 1572. Two days before saw the

failed assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the most prominent Protestant in the

country, who was then successfully dispatched on the twenty-fourth by a retainer of the

Duke of Guise. His dead body was beheaded, castrated and otherwise mutilated, dragged

through the streets, burned, and thrown in the Seine. The massacre of Protestants in Paris

went on for three days and was generally perpetrated by civilians. As Mack Holt notes,

“many of the participants in the massacre saw themselves as carrying out clerical roles of

priests and purifiers and magisterial roles of judges and executioners” (Holt 87). The

violence radiated outwards in the following weeks. Cities that had sizeable Huguenot

populations like Orléans, Lyon, Troyes, Rouen, Bordeaux and Toulouse all erupted in

mob violence, with mass lynching accompanied by reports of cannibalism (some

Catholics eating the hearts and livers of their Huguenot victims), the killing of women

(including pregnant women) and children, and the burning of Huguenot businesses and
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natives make, the one that Montaigne forgets, as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre itself, a

site of social trauma so acute that it escapes intelligibility and narrative altogether.

In his 1882 lecture delivered at the Sorbonne entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’une Nation?” (“What

is a Nation?”) Ernest Renan famously invokes the Massacre as an example of the way in which

the modern nation-state is forged by its citizens’ ability to forget rather than remember

communally. Forgetting, for Renan, is:

a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical

studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed,

historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin

of all political formations . . . the essence of a nation is that all individuals have

many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things (Renan

11).

Though our concern here is not with the formation of the French nation, it is significant that

Renan defines this historical event in terms of violence and, more specifically, the St.

Bartholomew’s Day Massacre itself: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an

Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of

Saint Bartholomew” (Renan 11). The Tupínamba in Montaigne’s essay, privileged visitors and

interpreters who employ honorable face-to-face warfare and carefully orchestrated and contained

ritual sacrifice, are free from the taint of such large-scale, chaotic, free-wheeling brutality.

homes. For a good, detailed overview of the massacre in the context of the French Wars

of Religion, see (quoted above) Mack Holt’s The French Wars of Religion, 1562 – 1629.

For a more in-depth study, see Barbara Diefendorf’s excellent Beneath the Cross:

Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris.

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However, as Renan seems to imply, it is precisely this descent into chaotic barbarism, when later

coupled with the communal ability to forget that barbarism, which generates the modern nation-

state. That is to say, this peculiar entity, the nation-state, is engendered by collective trauma; it is

a defensive reaction to dangerous memories that must be repressed.39

It is clear that for Renan the act of forgetting is a selective, self-conscious process. But in

order to forget something, it must first be committed to memory. This paradoxical precondition

of forgetting finds a suggestive, albeit imperfect, parallel in Montaigne’s treatment of the

Tupínamba: before the other can be turned into the self, it must first be chewed, swallowed and

digested; before the other can be absorbed, it must first be remembered and given voice with a

song. The ritual cannibalism of the Tupí, a multi-part performance staged in order to focus tribal

memory, seems designed precisely to avert the kind of communal forgetting on which Renan is

so keen. Here we would do well to recall the song of the captured cannibal: “These sinews . . .

this flesh and these veins – poor fools that you are – are your very own; you do not realize that

they still contain the very substance of the limbs of your forebears: savor them well for you will

find that they taste of your very own flesh!” Though the Tupí may indeed momentarily forget the

significance of this transformation from self to other, their ritual cannibalism consistently

functions to remind them that everyone is literally everyone else. Thus, in contrast to Renan’s

theorization of abject violence and the trauma it produces as a means of binding the imagined

39
The Oxford English Dictionary defines trauma as: “A psychic injury, esp. one

caused by emotional shock the memory of which is repressed and remains unhealed; an

internal injury, esp. to the brain, which may result in a behavioural disorder of organic

origin. Also, the state or condition so caused.” The behavioral disorder here, which is the

result of these repressed memories, may be understood as the nation-state itself.

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community of the nation-state, the violence propagated by Tupí cannibalism is contained and

harnessed into a means of reproducing social relations. Tupí knowledge can never resurface as

trauma; it remains whole from the moment of its incorporation.

The kind of violence enacted by the Tupínamba might also put us in mind of Walter

Benjamin’s 1921 essay, “Critique of Violence,” in which he argues that it is not possible to

separate violence from law; that all violence is either law-making or law-preserving. Conversely,

for Benjamin, all law, however remote it may seem from its origins and from the forces that

maintain it, is latent violence. In the final analysis, then, it is violence itself that decides what

violence is justifiable for what ends. This theorization of violence encompasses both a cyclicality

and containment reminiscent of Tupí cannibal practices. Just as the very real violence used to kill

the sacrificial victim is restrained by the ritual practices accompanying the killing and,

specifically, by language itself – the song of the captured cannibal – so too is violence, in this

Benjaminian sense, delimited by its inscription in law: the substrate upon which it is made to

signify.40 For Benjamin, violence is not an aberrant part of human experience, but rather a self-

40
Both Certeau and Lestringant understand language as the proper subject of

“Cannibals.” For Certeau, there is a direct homology between the sacrificed, “undone”

body of the captive and the text itself. “If speech induces the text to write, it does it by

means of paying the price, just as the warrior’s body must repay the speech of the

challenge and the poem with his death. It is this death of speech which authorizes the

writing that arises [i.e., the essay itself]” (Heterologies, 78). Lestringant makes a similar

move connecting the cannibals’ economy of reciprocal feasting to an economy of speech:

“En recouvrant les actes du cannibale par ses dits, il [Montainge] a substitué à un rituel,

quand bien meme significatif, le discours qui le sous-tend. L’importance laissée à la

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evident means of achieving natural or legal ends. As a contrast to this contained violence, of

course, we need only go back to an episode like the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, a palpable

example of uncontrolled, unnatural, and unsanctioned violence, one which resists signification in

Montaigne’s own text.

IV. Conclusion

As I have argued up to this point, Montaigne, in “Cannibals,” critiques contemporary

social conditions that have led to Civil War and much loss of innocent life. Drawing on a

particular open skepticism instantiated in the essai, a form of writing that reveals its author in the

act of thinking and forming judgments, Montaigne tropes cannibalism as a possible alternative

strategy for knowing the world, one that defines the body of the subject, and not the world

around it, as the proper locus of knowledge. Following the example of the Tupínamba, who

employ the ritual incorporation of the other into the self as a synecdoche for rebinding the social

body, Montaigne wants to employ cannibal knowledge as a strategy for retraining the gaze of his

contemporary epistemic order on the body and, scaling outwards from there, utilizing that new

perspective as a means of reconstituting a fragmented French body politic. As we have seen,

“Cannibals” is but one example – although perhaps one of the most overt examples – of

Montaigne’s propensity for staging scalar, synecdochal comparisons between the self and the

world, interior and exterior, just as the concept of border thinking as it has come through Gloria

Anzaldúa and Walter Mignolo also exhibits a genealogy based on troping the border on a

multitude of different scales, from a wound on the body to a decolonial global imaginary.

parole de l’indigène, rapportée tour à tour au style direct et indirect, est du reste tout à fait

remarquable dans cet essai.” (“Montaigne et la Tradition” 40).

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In addition, this relocation of knowledge from the exterior to the interior of the subject in

Montaigne’s formulation is homologous to another relocation effected in “Cannibals,” namely,

the presence of the Tupínamba in France. I have argued that this spatial, geographic transposition

with respect to the colonial archive – it is the Tupí who are in France and not the Frenchmen who

are in Brazil – is a fundamental precondition for Montaigne’s ability to offer up cannibal

knowledge as form of border thinking; a viable alternative to the proto-Enlightenment

knowledge of his contemporaries. The Tupí presence at the King’s Court in Rouen, along with

Montaigne’s northward journey from Bordeaux to meet them, places these Native Brazilians at

the center of the essay’s imagined geography and thus invests them with the authority of critics

from the periphery of empire who are speaking in and to its center and whose speech, insofar as

it can be understood and assimilated, contests the interweaving, authorizing epistemes of

modernity.

“Cannibals” begins by anticipating many of the problems identified by postcolonial

theory as Montaigne attempts to account for the Tupínamba by using long-established tropes

from classical antiquity. But he soon turns away from this approach. By grounding knowledge

ontologically in the trope of cannibalism, Montaigne opens a new frontier, a new border, for a

different way of writing and thinking about alterity. In reading Montaigne in terms of Mignolo,

we gain a new appreciation for the stakes of such a project not only today but throughout the

four-hundred years that separate the works of these two thinkers. In reading Mignolo in terms of

Montaigne, we gain new insight about how the colonial epistemic order may have been resisted,

rearticulated, and troped from within.

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Chapter 2

Eating the Flesh of Jesus Christ Raw (and Other Interpretive Dilemmas) in Jean de Léry’s
History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil.

When we think of poems “in their historical contexts,” our historicist

biases – even in their “New Historicist” modes – take those “contexts” to
be located primarily in the past, or – if we have read our Nietzche and
Foucault with care – in the present and the past. And when we think more
deeply about such matters we also understand that these historical contexts
are multiple and conflicting: heteroglossial, as Bakhtin would say. But if it
is true that all futures are functions of the past (and the present), then we
must expect to find those futures being carried out in the works that seem
to be speaking and acting only from the past.

Jerome McGann, “The Third World of Criticism”

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, La Physiologie du Goût, 1825

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I. Eating and Witnessing

In Chapter Five of his History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, one of the most detailed

and thoughtfully written accounts to emerge from Europe’s early contact with the Native people

of the Americas, Jean de Léry, a French Calvinist missionary and contemporary of Michel de

Montaigne, relates his first encounter with the Brazilians as his transatlantic ocean voyage comes

to an end. Complicating this encounter, we immediately learn, is the fact that the inhabitants of

the stretch of South American coastline where Léry’s ship first puts to shore sometime in

February of 1557 are of, “the nation called Margaia, allies of the Portuguese, and therefore such

enemies of the French that if they had had us at their mercy, we would have paid no other

ransom except being slain and cut to pieces, and serving as a meal for them” (Léry 25-26).41 So

even as Léry and his fellow travelers marvel at the beauty and fecundity of the land before them,

as green and flourishing in February, “as those of our France are in May and June” (26), they are

also keenly aware of the political realities they now confront, of trading partnerships and military

allegiances that are drawing the map of this new Eden and carving it up into territories.

Political realities notwithstanding, however, Léry and his fellows, after a dire journey of

three months across the Atlantic, are in desperate need of food and fresh water and so, taking

necessary precautions, they trade with the Margaia: “knives, mirrors, combs, and other trifles” in

exchange for, “flour made from a root (which the savages eat instead of bread), hams, and the

meat of a certain kind of boar, with an abundance of other food and fruits that are found in that

country” (26). This initial exchange goes so well that the Margaia, after unsuccessfully

41
Janet Whatley’s translation of Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil,

Otherwise Called America, 130. This is the definitive English translation of Léry’s

History. Every subsequent citation of Léry’s History, in English, will refer to this edition.
 84

attempting to lure the Frenchmen onto shore, offer to come aboard their ship. And this new

proximity results in further opportunities for trade and exchange as well as an amicable parting,

which Léry narrates with his characteristic good humor:

Since they were asking to return to their people who were waiting for them on the

shore, it was a question of paying them what they wished for the food they had

brought us. And because they have no use of currency, the payment we made was

in shirts, knives, fishhooks, mirrors, and other merchandise . . . but here was the

best of it. Upon their arrival these good people, all naked, had not been sparing in

showing us everything they had; and now at their departure, not being in the habit

of wearing undergarments or, indeed, any other kinds of clothes, when they put on

the shirts that we had given them and came to seat themselves in the ship’s boat,

they tucked them clear up to the navel so as not to spoil them, and, revealing what

should be hidden, insisted that we see their behinds and their buttocks as they

took their farewell of us. Were these not courteous officers, and was this not a

fine ambassadorial civility? For despite the proverb that is so common to us over

here, that the flesh is nearer than the shirt, they on the contrary, as if to show us

that they were not of that mind, and perhaps as a display of their magnificent

hospitality, favored their shirts over their skin by showing us their behinds. (27-

28, my italics)

In order not to risk soiling or dampening their newly acquired garments on the brief

journey back to shore, the Margaia wear their shirts in a manner that “reveals what should be

hidden” and invokes, certainly not for the last time in Léry’s narrative, a striking antipodal

contrast between old world and new. For if the purpose of clothing in Europe is to hide the
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human body for the sake of modesty, then here in America, across the ocean and beneath the

equator, the purpose of clothing seems to be precisely the opposite: to reveal what should, by all

accounts, remain hidden. And, indeed, it seems that the members of the Margaia delegation, as a

result of this infelicitous use of clothing, appear somehow more naked to Léry after donning their

shirts than they were when they first came on board. So while Léry and his countrymen do

manage to partly clothe the Margaia, they do not, it appears, succeed in outfitting them with a

corresponding sense of modesty. What should remain hidden, in this case seven Margaia

backsides, is exposed; exposing also, perhaps, the fissures – dare we say cracks? – in a sixteenth

century European view of the world that considers its claims to civilization to be completely self-

evident and unquestionably universal.

I begin with this tableau, however, not merely to point out the provincial naiveté of these

weary French travelers, but because this particular scene foregrounds one of the principle

elements of Léry’s narrative; namely, his status as eye witness narrator; his ability to “hide” and

“reveal” as he sees fit throughout the course of his narrative. Thus, this initial tableau offers us

an entry point for evaluating the status of the History of a Voyage as a repository of material

facts about the New World; one that depends, as evinced by Léry’s description above, on the

category of the visual as its locus of epistemological stability. And in foregrounding the relative

instability and arbitrariness of European cultural, moral, and disciplinary prerogatives vis-à-vis

the sensibilities of the native Brazilians, this opening tableau both continues our exploration of

these same themes launched in the previous chapter and also allows us to begin the work of

imagining an alternative to this governing visual and causal logic of Léry’s History; an

alternative that, as I will argue, pervades and sustains Léry’s History as contiguity, repetition,

cyclicality, and chiasmus – as the tropic logic of re-presentation and performance.

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As we saw in the previous chapter, Montaigne tropes cannibalism as an alternative

strategy for knowing the world, one that defines the body of the subject, and not the world

around it, as the proper locus of knowledge. Montaigne places the members of the Tupínamba

delegation who visited the court of Charles IX in Rouen at the center of the imagined geography

of his essay, thus privileging them as critics and teachers. For Léry this relationship was inverted.

He was tasked with bringing the natives to the true religion. As a Calvinist, he understood the

failure of his ministry in South America – the Tupí would not abandon cannibalism for the

Gospel – as the effect of predestination (Lestringant “Philosopher’s Breviary” 203). But just as

with Montaigne, Léry’s troping of Tupínamba ritual cannibalism reveals the recognition of an

alternative (anticolonialist, subaltern) perspective. And just as with “Of Cannibals,” Léry’s

History is a text concerned in large part with exploring and testing different ways of knowing the

world. But Léry, unlike Montaigne, actually visited the New World. He almost died there. His

History brims with, as Frank Lestringant puts it, “the acuity of his reported sensations” :

“Involuntary memories, whether olfactory, gustatory, or auditory, caused by the starchy odor of

the grated manioc, the intoxicating perfumes of the tropical forest, or the monotonous litany of

dancers” (“Philosopher’s Breviary” 202).

Accordingly, this chapter will put forth a case that Léry’s History, though often cited

along with other early modern travel narratives about the New World as evidence of a new

prominence for the visual in the European imaginary – a prominence that eventually (so the

narrative goes) will lead to the scientific method, the Enlightenment, and modernity – may be

more profitably understood as a text which circulates various strategies for representing alterity

and, in doing so, serves as an exemplum of the complex and fascinating interconnectivity of

these representational strategies in the early Atlantic world. Thus, while seeing and witnessing
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certainly have a substantial role to play in Léry’s History, that role, as we will see, is far from

exhaustive and it is continually displaced by instances in the text that reveal its paucity: the

uncanny resemblances between Christian and Tupí ritual cannibalism, Léry’s penchant for citing

himself as evidence for claims he wishes to prove (as well as, more generally, the interweaving

patterns of cyclicality and repetition that govern the text), and finally and perhaps most

importantly, the way that at times eating trumps seeing in the History as a better way of

experiencing the phenomenological realm.

Before moving forward, however, it is important to expound a key point: the attention

scholars have paid to the way that the visual and writing work together in Léry’s text. After all,

no less a luminary than Claude-Lévi Strauss situates Léry at the beginning of a centuries-long

trajectory of witnessing and writing about the other when he refers to the History42 (with its

meticulous descriptions of the Tupínamba, including chapters on their religious beliefs, their

ceremonial practices and their reasons for going to war) as the “first modern ethnography”

(Tristes Tropiques 8). But unlike Lévi-Strauss, who returned from his fieldwork in Brazil with a

stock of eight-millimeter film fragments and some three thousand negatives (Lestringant, “Léry-

Strauss” 426), Léry, lacking the ability and even the materials to sketch or paint what he sees in

42
Unlike the essay, a genre that, as we learned in Chapter 1, was conceived

around a very particular worldview, a “History” of the kind written by Léry was a fairly

conventional generic form in early modern Europe. Indeed, Léry published a different

history, the Histoire mémorable de la ville de Sancerre, four years before his Histoire

d’un Voyage (Whatley xvii). In the context of American exploration, a History, unlike the

more official beaurocratic genres of Relacíon, Account, and Report, was often written to

provide a personal, often polemic, version of the narrator’s experiences.

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Brazil, can only bear witness through writing. Thus, as Frank Lestringant points out, the

relationship between writing and witnessing in the History is marked by “[a] struggle to restore a

lost presence” (“Léry-Strauss” 418) or, put another way, the “illusion of reality without equal

among Renaissance voyagers” that Léry manages to create “is from the very start marked by

mourning” (Lestringant, “Philosopher’s Breviary” 202).

The crucial point here is that Léry’s only true alibi is his written description of his

experiences. For Lestringant, “the illusion of presence” created by the lack of documentary

evidence in the History is maintained by a “visual reminiscence” that pervades the text (“Léry-

Strauss” 430). Indeed, Lestringant wants to understand this “illusion of presence” in the History

through enargeia, a rhetorical trope that conveys vividness and presence:

By resorting to enargeia – to the “evident” in a rhetorical sense – the text

appropriates all the power of the image. The text actively shows the reader, rather

than presenting a narrative of tales told. Set before the eye is a reality that time

and distance have abolished. Yet this only encourages Léry’s continual

lamentation of the failure of his enterprise. (“Léry-Strauss” 418)

Rather than a narrative built with language and thus subject to a successive temporality, for

Lestringant Léry’s History confronts us with an instantaneous totality or, perhaps, with a series

of synchronic, pointillist tableaux. But as I will argue a bit further on, this ability of Léry’s

writing to “appropriate all the power of the image,” as Lestringant suggestively puts it, depends

on the ability of this writing to vouchsafe itself, to bear testimony to its own accuracy in a closed

loop of signification.

One of the reasons that Léry offers us such a compelling opportunity to re-imagine the

role of the visual as an epistemological practice in his own work is that he is writing as a
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Calvinist, a persecuted minority, in order to defend himself against claims made by Catholics. As

Lestringant suggests a bit further on in this same essay, writing for Léry was a means of

redemption (“Léry-Strauss” 425).43 Thus, though the writing produced by Léry in his History

certainly relies heavily on eye witnessing as a way to describe reality, it nevertheless positions

itself as a minor discourse – a revisionist voice – that, as I will argue, constantly casts about for

an alternative paradigm to the visual; for different categories of cognition and interaction

between our narrator and the world he is narrating. Eating / ingestion is one such alternative.

Indeed, not only is eating (and its natural corollary: hunger) referenced repeatedly in Léry’s text

but, as we will see in the final section of this chapter, which treats Italo Calvino’s story, Under

the Jaguar Sun, eating surfaces once again as a means of evaluating alterity, this time in the

gastronomic adventures of Italian tourists lunching and dining their way through the traditional

historical sites of late twentieth century Mexico.

II. Léry-Ouassou: The Big Oyster44

A contemporary of Montaigne, Léry was born in 1534 in a small village near the city of

Bourges in Burgundy, a part of the country where the Reform church movement was to take firm

43
This of course in contrast to Lévi-Strauss who in his famous “writing lesson” in

Tristes Tropiques states that “writing seems to favor the exploitation of human beings

more than their enlightenment” (qtd in Lestringant, “Léry-Strauss” 422).

44
Not surprisingly, the Tupí had a certain difficulty pronouncing Léry’s full

name. But, in a remarkable phonetic coincidence, the Tupí word for oyster was close to

“Léry” (Leh – hee). The Tupí felt obliged to add the superlative, ouassou, thus dubbing

Léry, “The Big Oyster.”

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hold after the publication of Jean Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536. As Janet

Whatley points out, “Almost nothing is known of his earliest years, and historians disagree as to

whether he was an artisan or a member of the minor nobility” (Whatley xvi).45 Léry departed

France for Brazil in November of 1556, when he was twenty-two years old. 46 His ship made

45
There happens to be quite a bit of disagreement over the details of Léry’s early

life. Géralde Nakam, in her biography of Léry – Au Lendemain de la Saint-Barthélemy –

claims that he was a member of the minor nobility. However, André Thevet

disparagingly called Léry a shoemaker. Neil Kamil, in his Fortress of the Soul: Violence,

Metaphysics and Material Life in the Huguenots’ New World, 1517-1751, has quite a bit

invested in the argument that Léry was indeed a trained artisan, a cobbler and leather-

worker who also knew how to erect structures, fortify defensive positions, dig wells.

Confoundingly, the main piece of evidence Kamil offers for the Léry-as-artisan position

are two endnotes from Whatley’s introduction in which she does not argue this point one

way or the other, but rather lists different sources and objectively explains how they

contradict one another. Léry’s account of departing from Geneva to the French port of

Honfleur (the same salt-water port that received the delegation of Tupínamba that

Montaigne would meet in Rouen some twenty years later) before beginning the voyage to

Brazil does seem to bear out Nakam’s claims that Léry had been studying theology in

Geneva when he was called upon to go to Brazil as a missionary.

46
Léry and his comrades set sail under the protection of Admiral Gaspard de

Coligny, a powerful nobleman with Huguenot sympathies. (Coligny, the first casualty of

the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, had in fact already converted by this time

but did not profess his Reform beliefs openly until Henri II’s death in 1559). Moreover,
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landfall in South America on the twenty-sixth of February of 1557 and, roughly ten months later,

as a “refugee from an abortive colony stranded beyond the furthest outpost [of the French

Transatlantic Empire],” Léry left Brazil for France on the fourth of January of 1558, arriving,

after considerable hardship, in La Rochelle on the twenty-fourth of May (Whatley xxxiv). Léry

was a refugee because he had spent the last two months of his stay in Brazil not on the island

fastness of Fort Coligny, which was controlled by Villegaignon and his retinue of Scottish

(Catholic) mercenaries, but, rather, exiled to the mainland with his fellow Calvinists, where they

lived among the Tupínamba before finding passage back to France.47

they were sailing to Brazil at the request of Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon, a Naval

colleague and fellow nobleman of Coligny’s, who was in charge of the small French

colony in Guanabara Bay. The important point here is that Léry’s mission to America

happens during a very small window of time when French Catholics and Calvinists were

collaborating in the settlement of the New World. Indeed, Léry and his colleagues’

falling out with Villegaignon in America over the course of their 10-month stay serves as

a foreshadowing of the renewed tensions and hostilities that they would encounter upon

returning to France in 1558.

47
Villegaignon, after much resistance, finally let the Calvinists go back to France

on a merchant vessel. But, in a wonderfully vindictive move which corroborates the

claims by Léry and others that too much time in the tropics had made him unusually cruel

and a bit loopy (a sixteenth century Joseph Kurtz, if you will), he gave the captain of the

merchant vessel a letter to be opened only upon their arrival in France containing

instructions that the Calvinists should be burned at the stake as heretics. However, unlike

the unfortunate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who lost their heads in a similar plot, the
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Perhaps the first thing to note about Léry’s History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil is

that the provenance of the text, in some sense its very material existence, is always in doubt: the

narrative Léry first publishes, as he himself explains, is based on journals and notes that vanished

and reappeared, were destroyed and reconstituted, confiscated and, over ten years later, returned.

Indeed, Léry begins his text with a Preface which, though it is mainly given over to laying out

his grievances against Villegaignon’s stewardship of the colony in Brazil and refuting André

Thevet’s libelous accusations, first lists the reasons for this long delay in publication. Though, as

we learn, he had written “a rather full report” based on his journals in 1563, it was confiscated at

the city gates of Lyon. He then recovered and revised a previous rough draft of the work only to

have to abandon it in his flight for safety of Sancerre. Finally, in 1576, with the help of a friend,

Léry was able to recover the original document – written in the red ink made from Brazil wood,

the chief commodity being exported to France from the New World at the time – that had been

confiscated in Lyon.

According to Léry, the reason for his decision to finally publish his text in 1578 is to

contradict the work of André Thevet. Building on his success and instant notoriety by publishing

an abbreviated account of Brazil called Singularités de la France Antarctique (1558), Thevet

published a more detailed follow-up, La Cosmographie Universelle (1575), which drew the

battle lines between Huguenots and Catholics by accusing Léry and his Calvinist brethren of

plotting a conspiracy to kill Villegaignon. Comparing the two explorers, Whatley states:

Calvinists were able to maneuver around this ploy. The state of the surviving crew upon

reaching France after this voyage was such that enacting Villegaignon’s death sentence

could not have been too high on the captain’s list of priorities. (More on this journey

later).
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Thevet was known to be careless and credulous, and Léry, with his meticulous

habits of memory, verification, and logic, demolished Thevet’s garbled

accusations. Nevertheless, a caveat is in order. There are certain areas where

Thevet, a less selective collector of oddments, has given us valuable information

that Léry either disregards or disparages. (xxi)

It is, indeed, precisely Léry’s propensity for verification, logic, and structure that strikes the

reader upon first opening his text. As I have already mentioned, the History is separated into

twenty-two chapters and it is worthwhile here to examine how these chapters are organized.

Consider, for example, the titles of the first two chapters: “The Motive and the Occasion

That Made Us Undertake This Distant Voyage to the Land of Brazil” and “Our Embarkation at

the Port of Honfleur in Normandy, Together with the Tempests, Encounters, Seizure of Ships,

and the First Lands and Islands That We Discovered,” alongside the titles of the final two

chapters: “Of Our Departure From the Land of Brazil” and “Of the Extreme Famine, Tempests,

and Other Dangers from Which God Delivered Us as We Were Returning to France” (vii - x).

Clearly what we have here is a narrative frame structured around chronology. Addressing this

feature of the initial section of Léry’s History, Scott Jual remarks, “In these chapters . . . Léry

provides a sequence of precise dates and geographical measurements that plot out the advance

with remarkable exactitude. The narrative advance through these initial chapters is therefore

powerfully teleological” (Jual 173). It is important to note, however, that this strict adherence to

what we might call narrative emplotment happens only during Léry’s ocean voyages. That is to

say, though the History is certainly organized in this way up to chapter six (which relates the

arrival of Léry’s ship in Guanabara Bay) and also, as we have seen, in its final few sections, in

chapters seven through twenty – “the book’s heart,” according to Whatley – Léry discards this
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logbook approach and, rather than relating his experiences in the New World day by day or week

by week, chooses instead to organize his observations by subject and play the part of the

botanist, zoologist, and ethnographer (xvi). For instance, in relating the different kinds of insects

he has seen, Léry may jump from one of his first nights in Brazil on the island of Fort Coligny to

his time on the mainland with the Tupí months later.

These middle chapters range in focus from geography, as in chapter seven: “A

Description of the Bay of Guanabara Otherwise Called Janeiro in America; of the Island and Fort

Coligny . . . Together with the Other Islands in the Region” (viii) to the natural sciences and

taxonomy, as in chapters ten, “Of the Animals, Kinds of Venison, Big Lizards, Snakes and Other

Monstrous Beasts of America,” twelve, “Of Some Fish That Are Common among the Savages of

America, and of their Manner of Fishing,” and thirteen: “Of the Trees, Herbs, Roots and

Exquisite Fruits Produced by the Land of Brazil” to the famous ethnographic descriptions of the

Tupínamba, which we have already sampled in chapter fourteen “Of the War, Combats,

Boldness, and Arms of the Savages of America,” and which Léry continues in chapters fifteen,

“How the Americans Treat their Prisoners of War and the Ceremonies They Observe Both in

Killing and Eating Them” and sixteen, “What One Might Call Religion among the Savage

Americans” (xi). As we can see from this representative cross-section of headings, though these

central chapters are not organized chronologically, they are nevertheless organized around a

logic that classifies and categorizes different kinds of knowledge, including different

methodologies for acquiring that knowledge, into separate, discrete units.

Perhaps what is most striking about these chapter headings is the way a subject like

cannibalism, invested with the kind of emotional charge it had in the sixteenth century (and still

retains today), could qualify as a category of knowledge that is coeval with knowledge about
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birds, fruit, and plants; that it could be depicted here as just another facet of the New World.

Commenting on the title of chapter fifteen specifically, Kim Beauchesne remarks, “Without a

doubt what is most striking in the tone here is the complete lack of the moral judgment with

which Léry describes the killing and eating of prisoners, a stark contrast to the condemnatory

tradition of the ‘savage cannibal’ that can be traced back to Antiquity” (99, my translation).

Along these same lines, Scott Jual demonstrates how Léry’s selective use of the word

boucaner (some claim this term is the origin of the word “barbecue”) to describe the preparation

of food Europeans would normally eat functions alongside its use as a means of cooking human

flesh:

The image of boucaner reappears throughout Léry’s text as an image of a natural

practice among the Brazilians – and not necessarily a dangerous one. Throughout

chapters V-XIV, Léry constantly mixes the referent boucanez and its various

associations – what Europeans would consider “normal” grilling of vegetables

and non-human meats – with cannibalism. He therefore destabilizes the particular

spaces to which boucaner pertains . . . Léry thus opens up digressive spaces that

present cannibalism among the Tupí in a fairly neutral light. By the time Léry

arrives at an explicit description of cannibalism, we understand that the Tupí are

quite humane, and that the boucaner – the center of the cannibal’s kitchen – is a

natural part of life in Brazil. (178-179)

Not only does Jual provide a very useful example of the way Léry works to naturalize

cannibalism – an example that nicely supplements Beauchesne’s observation about the studied

blandness of the chapter headings that invoke this subject – but he also does this in a way that

foregrounds the careful, deliberate construction of Léry’s narrative. Unlike many of the travel
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narratives written and published during the sixteenth century and perhaps because of its unique

provenance as a text lost and then found, written and rewritten, published and re-published (in

five editions between 1578 and 1611), Léry’s History is almost self-conscious in the way it

repeatedly calls attention to its own constructedness. In this particular case, the “digressive

spaces” offered by Léry, as Jual calls them, do the work of preparing the reader for the

introduction of cannibalism by familiarizing her with concepts contiguous to the actual practice

of eating human flesh, in this case the means of grilling or roasting that flesh.

In her article, “Yguatou: La Politíca del Comer en Jean de Léry,” Beauchesne takes Jual’s

point even further, arguing that Léry borrows the discourse of the early-modern European

kitchen – what she refers to as the textual forms (“formas textuales”) of recipes – in order to

translate cannibalism into an idiom of place and community that he will then be justified in

privileging (103). Citing Léry’s self-confessed excellence at masking unsuitable food with

sauces and elaborate preparations (e.g. the copious boiling and seasoning of leather on his

wayward journey back to France and also his rat fricassée, which during the siege of Sancerre

was apparently regarded as a great culinary success), Beauchesne does make a reasonable case

that Léry was not only fluent in this idiom of the kitchen but also disposed to deploy it, much

like Jual argues he deploys these carefully selected mentions of the boucan, as a means of

intimating his readers, of putting them off their guard.

Consequently, both of these examples demonstrate the way in which Léry goes about

setting traps for his readers, traps that, crucially, depend on a constructed, artificial textual

chronology (barbecuing first fowl, then fish, then tapir, then human beings) replacing a “true”

chronology of events. Once the reader realizes what has happened he is already implicated in the

boucan, has already imagined himself eating an animal prepared on it. Or, taking Beauchesne’s
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example, once the reader realizes that this closely woven sense of place and community in Léry’s

description of the Tupínamba domestic sphere – a sense which, Beauchesne convincingly argues,

is transmitted by Léry’s use of the discourse of food preparation in Europe – is in point of fact

inextricable from cannibalism, it is too late; she has already imagined herself (how could he

not?) partaking in these close rituals of preparing and sharing food. He is implicated.

Moving on from these examples which demonstrate how Léry manipulates his text in

order to naturalize the practice of cannibalism,48 I want to present another example – perhaps the

most forceful of all – that foregrounds the self-consciousness and careful deliberation with which

Léry’s History is written; namely, the way the text repeatedly refers back to itself as both a

source of authority and basis for comparison. As Andrea Frisch notes:

A striking feature of Léry’s account is the repeated use of the conjunction

‘comme’ [like or as] . . . What Léry compares to Brazil, however, is not Europe,

or Paradise, or the fantastic landscapes of romance. Instead, Léry constantly refers

back to what he himself has previously written, or anticipates what he will write

in subsequent chapters, with some variant of the phrase, ‘comme je l’ai dit’ [As I

have said / stated]. Léry’s references to his own text in fact dominate the

ethnographic chapters on the indigenous flora, fauna and people of Brazil, in

48
Of course, the question here is: why is Léry so concerned with naturalizing

cannibalism? Why is this part of his agenda? A tentative answer is forthcoming in the

following section, which concentrates on eating as an alternative to the visual. For now, I

beg your indulgence.

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which ‘je dis’49 [I said] (in one form or another) occurs more frequently even than

‘je vis’ [I saw]. (Novel Histories, 126 -127)

Frisch goes on to offer a number of examples from the text to illustrate this particular feature of

Léry’s writing, none more compelling than Léry’s brief apostrophe in chapter six (“Of Our

Landing At Fort Coligny in the Land of Brazil. Of the Reception That Villegaignon Gave Us,

and of his Behavior, Regarding both Religion and Other Aspects of his Government in that

Country”) where he explains his reasons for not mentioning Thevet in the main body of his text

after having spent so much time refuting him specifically in the Preface: “So again I ask the

readers to note here in passing, that [as / since]50 I have not made, and will not make, any

mention of him [Thevet] in connection with the disputes that Villegaignon and Cointa had with

us at Fort Coligny in the land of Brazil; likewise, he never saw the ministers whom he speaks of,

nor they him” (Léry - Whatley, 45. Also quoted in Frisch, 128, my italics).

49
The French verbs dire and voir, say and see, might seem like they are in the

present tense here as “dis” and “vis” but they are actually in the passé simple, the literary

equivalent of the passé composé. The passé simple is used exclusively (and today with

less and less frequency) in formal writing; writing, in other words, that is self-conscious

about its status as such.

50
These prepositions are not included in Whatley’s translation but the word

“comme” which here could be taken as either “as” or “since” does appear in the original:

“prie-je derechef les lecteurs de noter icy en passant que comme je n’ay fait, ny ne ferait

aucune mention de luy en tout le discours present …” (Lestringant, ed. Editions de

Poche, 185-186, my emphasis).

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As Frisch astutely points out, Léry’s rhetorical strategy in this passage is to offer

representation as proof for reality. In other words, Léry’s evidence for Thevet’s absence from

Fort Coligny when he arrives there with his party of Calvinists is that no mention of Thevet is

made in the earlier account Léry himself has written of this arrival. Frisch expounds on this

circular logic a bit further: “The Histoire itself, taking over for Guanabara [the physical location

where these events took place], becomes the place where the reader will search in vain for

Thevet. Not finding him there, the reader will conclude (according to Léry’s logic) that Thevet’s

claim to have been an eyewitness to the arrival of the Huguenots is unsubstantiated” (Frisch

128). In this moment, then, the text is not only self-conscious, editing and revising itself into a

cohesive whole as we saw with the example of the boucan, but also self-authorizing: encroaching

on the reality it is purportedly documenting by offering itself as proof, as citation, for its own

claims.

At this point, it is impossible to ignore the relationship between this self-authorizing

feature of Léry’s narrative – a feature which reveals the text as a document that authenticates

itself through its own narrative logic of repetition – and the role of performance in the text as an

action which is self-referential, which can and must be repeated. We have already touched on the

role of performance in the History earlier in this chapter. Frisch’s claims offer us an opportunity

to revisit this rubric anew, here with two brief examples from the most prominent performance in

Léry’s History: Tupínamba ritual cannibalism.

The first one takes place near the beginning of the ritual when the sacrificial victim is

first separated from the other members of the tribe, among whom he has been living for an

unspecified amount of time (sometimes years), and presented to the village. He is clad in feathers

and ceremonial body paint and though he is bound around the waist, his arms and legs are free.
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He is brought “stones and shards of broken old pots” and is allowed to avenge himself, in a

manner of speaking, before his life is taken and his body is consumed (Léry 123). “The two who

hold the ropes, protecting themselves with shields . . . say to him, ‘Avenge yourself before you

die.’ So he throws these missiles, hurling them hard at those who are gathered around him”

(123). We might pause here and briefly consider the reversal of causality that this segment of the

ritual entails. The prisoner, after all, is encouraged to indulge in a symbolic act of vengeance for

something that, strictly speaking, has not happened yet.51 When scrutinized in terms of causality,

of course, this episode dovetails nicely with the drama of reciprocal feasting enacted by the Tupí

and their rivals.52 That is to say, the cyclicality of this ongoing struggle – you may eat me today,

but I have eaten your relatives and ancestors in the past, and my relatives and descendants will

eat you and yours in the future – already seems to obviate cause and effect. Therefore, it is

perhaps not surprising that we can find this same erasure of causality throughout the individual

chapters of the ritual performance.53

51
The formal reversal of causality is treated at considerable length in the

following chapter, which concentrates on troping time and prophecy in the Thomas

Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the Newfound Land of Virginia (1588).
52
As noted in the first chapter, Montaigne’s version of the cannibal song, in

which the captured warrior about to be sacrificed reminds those about to eat him that in

eating him they are also eating themselves, is largely inspired by Léry’s account.
53
Recently, when I asked my undergraduate students why they thought this

symbolic, pyrrhic revenge was part of the Tupí ritual performance, one student answered

my question with a particularly deft question of his own: how, he asked, will people five

hundred years from now react when they read about our own society’s rituals for putting
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In our second example, the dimension of public performance encountered above is even

more pronounced. After the captive is brained by his executioner’s Iwara Pemme (large

ceremonial wooden club), his wife – often captives took wives within the tribe that captured

them – “will perform some slight mourning beside the body . . . For as one says of the crocodile,

that having killed a man, he then weeps just before eating him, so too after the woman has made

some or another lamentation, and shed a few feigned tears over her dead husband, she will, if she

can, be the first to eat of him” (125 – 126). This bizarre cathexis reveals a desire the Tupí have to

experience their ritual – a ritual figured in every way as a victory over their enemies – through

the eyes of that same vanquished enemy. In this sense, the newly minted widow’s abbreviated

mourning may be meant as a surrogate for the suffering undergone by the dead man’s other wife

and kin in his home village as well as for the grief experienced in previous instances in this very

same village when its own warriors were captured in battle. Here we encounter another closed

circuit of signification, one in which the public mourning experienced collectively as a

performance by the Tupí connects them to the cycle of warfare just as poignantly as killing and

eating do.

The key point here, however, is that these staged performances of public empathy, as

they come down to us through Léry’s eyewitness account, are self-legitimating and internally

consistent in a very similar way to the manner in which Léry’s writing works to legitimate itself

by citing itself as evidence. In both cases, the authority necessary to sustain the claims or the

ritual must exist within a closed circuit of repetition. In Léry’s case, this closed circuit is citation:

people to death? Specifically, he went on: how will the practice of using an alcohol swab

before and after applying a lethal injection (surely no less of a symbolic ritual than the

Tupí uses of revenge and mourning above) appear to them?

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a repetition of signifiers that mutually reinforce and authorize one another. In the case of the

Tupí, the closed circuit exists as performance itself, as a cycle of action that seems to swallow its

own tail as it blurs the boundaries between representation and reality.

Repetition, cyclicality, self-reference, and self-authentication: these circuits of meaning

convey us to the threshold of Tupí cannibalism itself. If we consider Léry’s description of the

call-and-response necessary in the ritual of cannibal sacrifice practiced by the Tupí we find that

the slain cannibal who is about to be eaten boasts of the enemies he has eaten in his life who are

presumably the kinsmen of those about to kill him. While Léry’s description of this exchange is

never as explicit as Montaigne’s imagination in teasing out the ontological stakes of such an act

or in exalting it into a song rather than spoken words, it does nevertheless ultimately make the

same point: the captured cannibal about to be slain incarnates (literally) all those he himself has

eaten. Here is Léry’s description of the exchange between a captured Margaia warrior and his

Tupí captors:

Do you think he [the captive, about to be sacrificed] bows his head, as our

criminals over here would do? By no means: on the contrary, with an incredible

audacity and assurance, he will boast of his past feats of prowess, saying to those

who hold him bound: ‘I myself, who am valiant, first bound and tied your

kinsmen.’ Then, exalting himself more and more, with a demeanor to match, he

will turn from side to side and say to one, ‘I have eaten your father,’ and to

another, ‘I have struck down and boucané your brothers.’ He will add, ‘Of you

Tupínamba that I have taken in war, I have eaten so many men and women and

even children that I could not tell the number; and do not doubt that, to avenge my
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death, the Margaia, whose nation I belong to, will hereafter eat as many of you as

they catch. (122-123)

What is particularly intriguing about this exchange is, once again, how the internally consistent

logic of this circular consumption finds a parallel in the internally consistent logic of the

performance itself: the rock-throwing, the crocodile tears, and the scripted words (at once

incantation and imprecation) offered by the sacrificial victim. Though the Margaia warrior’s

ritual slaying offers the impetus for further murder in the future (his kinsmen will no doubt

avenge him), he is also, in some sense, born again in the bodies of his adversaries after they

consume him, just as their own ancestors and kinsmen inhabited his body at the moment of his

death.

As we saw in “Of Cannibals,” cannibalism understood in this way represents an economy

of reciprocal eating that continues through the generations; an economy that, ironically, ties the

fiercest of enemies to one another in a very intimate way. For Montaigne, this facet of ritual

cannibalism, with its dependence on incorporation and transformation, speaks directly to a

pressing political and social need to reimagine the boundaries of self and other and to

reconfigure those boundaries with an eye to changing existing knowledge practices.

When we consider this depiction of ritual cannibalism in Léry’s History, however, we

must keep in mind Andrea Frisch’s important observation that, in the text, “je dis” occurs with

more frequency than “je vis.” That is to say, the repetition and cyclicality that constitute

Tupínamba ritual cannibalism must be understood alongside this propensity in Léry’s writing for

circling back on itself, repeating itself, and citing itself.54 What becomes readily apparent in

54
It should also be noted that in his Preface to the History, Léry builds his case

against his two antagonists by using their written words against them, meticulously
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Léry’s History is that first-hand experiential knowledge, related in the form of an eyewitness

account, is simply not enough. There must always be an alibi, whether in visual images attached

to the text or in the words themselves, circling back on themselves, re-porting, citing, and

authorizing one another.

In this sense, it is important to once more underscore the parallels between the

intratextual citationality upon which Frisch insists, a citationality that depends on understanding

Léry’s History as a web of claims, analyses, and observations that work to mutually authorize

one another, and the same citationality inherent in the performances of alterity we have been

tracking. As we have seen, the ritual cannibalism of the Tupínamba depicted by Léry follows a

logic of cyclicality and repetition formally homologous to the text in which it is depicted. Léry’s

reproducing and quoting at length from Thevet’s Cosmographie, Villegaignon’s letters to

Admiral Coligny, the prayers and speeches Villegaignon had written and delivered in

Guanabara and, as we will soon see, even words spoken in conversation with

Villegaignon. This is all to say that Léry’s chosen weapon in the propaganda war

between Calvinists and Catholics (in which his Preface was certainly intended as a salvo)

is exposition and, above all, citation. Most commentators on Léry’s History have

remarked on the stark contrast in tone between the Preface and the rest of the text. Janet

Whatley, for example, writes, “[The] Preface . . . with its long tirades, is uncharacteristic

of the book as a whole, and can be more a stumbling-block than a threshold to the work”

(xix). Though this claim is certainly reasonable given the polemic bent of Léry’s Preface,

I submit that there is one thread that runs consistently through the entire text of the

History (and which, incidentally, ties Léry and Montaigne together): Léry’s propensity

for direct quotation.

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propensity for citing his own writing as witness to his claims, in other words, is not an isolated or

aberrant act; rather, it is precisely how history – Léry’s History as well as history in the broadest

possible sense – comes to exist. As Raja Radhakrishnan puts it, “History as a genre is rather like

the legendary Ganesha of Hindu mythology who transcribes into écriture the orality of Vyasa’s

tale and in so doing inaugurates the time of the between that articulates the time of the telling to

that of the writing in a relationship of epistemological difference” (31, his italics).

In this brilliant allegory about history, meaning making, and historiography, “the time of

the between” is the gap that must be bridged between lived experience and written testimony,

between Vyasa’s oral narration and Ganesha’s transcription. As we have seen, Léry’s attempts to

bridge this gap in his History involve the development of a number of closed, self-referential

loops: instances self-authorizing writing, ritual performance, and cannibal consumption. But the

gap between experience and narration never ceases to return; a return that coincides, as we will

see, with a number of different “returns” throughout the text: the return of the Gospel (for Léry,

the true religion embodied in Calvinist Reform beliefs that, after centuries of Catholic vulgarity

and corruption, was to pave the way for Christ’s return to earth); the contested return of the

blood and flesh of Jesus Christ to the ceremonial bread and wine of the Catholic Eucharist; and

finally, the shipboard return of our narrator to France, a homecoming that marks the beginning of

Léry’s constant return to Brazil in memory. “Even now,” he writes of the Tupí over twenty years

after his repatriation, “it seems to me that I have them before my eyes, and I will forever have the

idea and image of them in my mind” (Léry 67).

III. Eating the Flesh of Jesus Christ Raw

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Now that we have established some parameters for understanding Léry’s History as a

textual artifact, we will take some time to explore the different ways eating is troped in the text.

The purpose of this exploration, as I mentioned earlier, is to find an alternative to and

supplement for the discourse of eye-witnessing, a discourse that, because it understands the

material world as a series of observable phenomena, necessarily favors a kind of historical

understanding that seeks to account for the cause-and-effect relationships between these

phenomena and, just as important, that works in a centripetal fashion to spin competing

narratives into one dominant, normative version of historical events.

We begin this exploration with an example that continues to attest to the way the History,

rather than functioning transparently as a direct chronicle of Léry’s experiences in the New

World, is interwoven with thematic confluences that undercut a sense of linear chronology in the

narrative. This example may be found in chapter six when Léry relates his party’s first

interactions with Villegaignon upon their arrival. Though this chapter is largely given over to

describing the abuses and mistreatments heaped upon the Calvinists by Villegaignon as well as

the latter’s apostasy from the Calvinist faith (more on this later), the passage on which I want to

focus relates the difficulties that Léry and his fellow missionaries find in converting Native

women to Christianity:

It is true that the ordinance permitted that if some of these women were drawn

and called to the knowledge of God, then after they had been baptized it would be

permitted to marry them. But in spite of these remonstrances that we have made

several times to this barbarous people, there was not one of them who would leave

her old skin and confess Jesus Christ as her savior. (Léry 43, my emphasis)
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This particular phrase, “leave her old skin,” has a very specific meaning in the New Testament.

As Janet Whatley points out in an explanatory note, “‘Old skin’ is probably an echo of the

references to the ‘old man’ in St. Paul” (236, FN 9). Of special interest to us here is a passage in

Ephesians: “That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt

according to the deceitful lusts; and be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and that ye put on the

new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness” (King James Bible,

Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, 4.22-24). Indeed, the evidence for Whatley’s claim of influence

here is even more compelling when we consider Léry’s original phrasing in French: “nonobstant

les remonstrances que nous avons par plusieurs fois faites à ce people barbare, il n’y en eut pas

une qui laissant sa vieille peau” alongside this same passage from Ephesians in sixteenth-century

French: “4.22: A savoir que vous dépouilliez le vieil homme, quant à la conversation précédente,

lequel se corrompt par les convoitises qui séduisent. 4.23: Et que vous soyez renouvelés en

l'esprit de votre entendement: 4.24: Et que vous soyez revêtus du nouvel homme, créé selon Dieu

en justice et vraie sainteté” (Bible de Genéve, my italics). Again, Léry’s phrasing when

describing the native women seems to be inspired by a specific idea of old skin from the New

Testament. Crucially, though Léry’s chosen verb here (laisser – to leave) merely suggests a

rather passive divestment of old skin (laissant sa vieille peau), the verb in the bible verse that

Léry is indirectly invoking (dépouilliez – to peel) denotes a more active, perhaps even violent,

stripping off of old skin – an excoriation rather than divestment. The old man, it seems, must be

skinned (dépouillé) in order to be renewed (renouvelé) in the spirit of his understanding.

We cannot, at this point, fail to note that this dépouillement,55 this peeling off of old skin,

is precisely the task assigned to older Tupí women in order to prepare the body of the recently

55
Dépouillement, incidentally, is used in contemporary French as a synonym for
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slain captive for the boucan: “Then the other women, chiefly the older ones . . . come forward

with hot water that they have ready, and scald and rub the dead body to remove its outer skin,

and blanch it the way our cooks over here do when they prepare a suckling pig for roasting”

(126). Accordingly, in these two examples – the passage from Ephesians that Léry indirectly

invokes when he describes the native women as unwilling to leave their old skin and his

description, in chapter fifteen (“The Ceremonies for Killing and Eating Prisoners”), of the ritual

stripping of skin from the body of the sacrificial victim – we can begin to see a conflux develop

around the concept of removing skin, whether literally or metaphorically. Indeed, the image of

old skin, this time not removed, emerges again in the final chapter of Léry’s History as a brief

epilogue to Léry’s interactions with Villegaignon:

And to satisfy those who would like to know what has become of him

[Villegaignon], and what his end has been, we, as has been seen in this history,

left him settled in that land in Fort Coligny, and I have heard nothing else of him

since, except that when he returned to France, after having done his worst, by

word of mouth and by writing, against those of the Evangelical Religion, he

finally died, inveterate in his old skin. (219)

Here, then, in the final few pages of Léry’s text, we find the last piece of this far-reaching trope

in Villegaignon, chief antagonist of the History, who ends his days “inveterate in his old skin”

(inveteré en sa vieille peau). The implications of this figuration are important. As an apostate

from the Calvinist faith, Villegaignon is, understandably enough, associated with the old Tupí

women who have refused to convert to Christianity. But if we continue to follow the internal

examination or analysis.
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logic of the trope we discover that Villegaignon is also being compared unfavorably to the

cannibal who is killed and stripped of his skin. As we have seen, the act of stripping the skin

from the body of the sacrificial victim, gruesome and grotesque though it may be, carries a

secondary meaning here, one that is manifested in New Testament discourse as a fundamental

alteration of the self through renewal and rebirth. According to Léry, this renewal and rebirth are

precisely what continue to elude the “inveterate” Villegaignon to the end of his days.

Much like with Jual’s example of the boucan, where we see metonymic associations

deployed to subtly manipulate the reader by naturalizing cannibalism, here we encounter an

image (“skin peeling / skin shedding”) that constantly resurfaces, each time with a difference,

until the metaphorical shedding of skin and the literal peeling of skin exhibit a distinct co-

terminality: they are overlapping. Put another way, the preparation of the sacrificed body for

consumption – the blanching and stripping of skin by the old women – signifies, in Léry’s text,

alongside the ritual preparation undergone by the convert (shedding of old skin) in order to

accept Christ’s body in the form of the Eucharist.56 However, it is important to point out that this

apparent contiguity, this side-by-sideness, is not the same as an equivalence. Indeed, if we flesh

out (forgive me) this trope of shedding / peeling skin what becomes readily apparent is that its

literal and metaphorical manifestations noted above stand in a chiastic relation to one another:

the cannibals skin the just-dead body so that they may grill it on the boucan and eat it; the

religious convert, on the other hand, peels off her own skin (with the help of the devoted

missionary who is facilitating her conversion) not so that she may be eaten but rather so that she

56
It is precisely this indeterminability between the figurative and literal that Léry

seems to be rehearsing in the trope of shedding / peeling skin that comes to frame the

debate about the role of the Eucharist in Catholicism and Reform Church theology.
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may eat; that is, receive holy communion and thus partake in the (actual or metaphorical, take

your pick) sustenance of Christ’s body, which is also the body of the other communicants.

Of course, the skinning of dead bodies and the sloughing off of one’s old spiritual

carapace is merely a preamble to the main event: eating the body, whether it be the body of the

recently brained Native Brazilian sacrificial victim or the body of the not-so-recently crucified

Messianic sacrificial victim. As we are beginning to see, then, Léry’s writing allows us to situate

French encounters with cannibalism in the Americas alongside the deployment of the cannibal

metaphor in Europe: a trope which by the middle of the sixteenth century (not coincidentally)

had taken center stage in the Reformation polemic over the Eucharist and transubstantiation. As I

have explained elsewhere in this work, one of the most significant repudiations of Catholic doxa

offered by the Protestant Reformation was to consider the ritual of Holy Communion a

metaphor. That is to say, the debate over transubstantiation was (and is) a debate over whether

one is literally or just metaphorically eating Jesus. The Catholics have long held to the former

view. Their idea is that, through a process that is not comprehensible to human beings, the

consecrated bread and wine are changed in substance (though not in physical form) by the Holy

Ghost into the flesh and blood of Jesus. So for Catholics, Christ is truly, really, substantially

present in the consecrated bread and the wine during the ritual.

However, for many other denominations of Christianity, including Calvinists, this ritual

signifies only as metaphor. As Léry explains to an exasperated Villegaignon in chapter six of his

History, Jesus Christ is not in the bread and the wine, he is in heaven, “whence, by virtue of his

Holy Spirit, he communicates himself in spiritual nourishment to those who receive the signs of

faith” (Léry 41, my italics). Léry’s account of this debate continues:

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“Well, however that may be,” said Villegaignon . . . “the words ‘This is my body;

this is my Blood’57 cannot be taken other than to mean that the Body and the

Blood of Jesus Christ are contained therein” . . . I have no notion of what he

meant, and I firmly believe that he didn’t, either; for when he was shown by other

passages that these words and expressions are figures – that is, that Scripture is

accustomed to calling the signs of the Sacraments by names of the things signified

. . . he remained obstinate; to the point that, without knowing how it might be

done, nevertheless he wanted not only to eat the flesh of Jesus Christ grossly

rather than spiritually, but what was worse, like the savages named Ouetaca, of

whom I have already spoken, they wanted to chew and swallow it raw. (Léry /

Whatley 41, my italics)58

57
It should be noted that these are precisely the words (in Latin: “hoc est corpus

meum, hoc est sanguis meus”) that Montaigne blames for igniting the fight between

Catholics and Protestants. As he notes despairingly in “Apology for Raymond Sebond,”

“How many quarrels, and how important, have been produced in the world by doubt of

the meaning of that syllable Hoc!” (Frame 229)

58
I want to invite you for a moment to consider these two Frenchmen living in a

fort built on an island in the middle of a bay which is at the absolute limit of the known

world, right at the boundary line of an inscrutable and limitless tropical wilderness: a real

Heart of Darkness situation. Across the bay Native Brazilians are practicing ritual

cannibalism and these two men are having a debate about the Eucharist. Let us take note

of the contiguous nature of these twinned religious practices: Frenchmen on their island

celebrating the return to life of their sacrificed God of love and the Tupi celebrating a
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The analogy that Léry makes at the end of this passage, comparing Villegaignon to the Ouetaca,

is especially significant. Earlier in his narrative, Léry gives us a description of the Ouetaca as,

“savages so fierce and wild that, just as they cannot live in peace with each other, they wage

open and continual war against all their neighbors as well as against strangers in general” (28).

While this description might be reasonably applied to any number of Native Brazilian tribes,

including the Tupínamba, as well as to most European nations in the sixteenth century, Léry does

go on to offer us some more specific information, “these devilish Ouetaca remain invincible in

this little region, and furthermore, like dogs and wolves, eat flesh raw, and because even their

language is not understood by their neighbors, they are considered to be among the most

barbarous, cruel, and dread nations that can be found in the West Indies and the land of Brazil”

(29). The Ouetaca, it seems, do not have any symbolism or ritual in their cannibalism. They eat

human flesh for physical nourishment and nothing else. In this sense, they are the incarnation of

the deepest European fears and anxieties with respect to cannibalism.59 By comparing

different kind of mass on the mainland, but one also about the mysteries of life and death

and about triumphing over death through proxy-death.

59
And it is important to note that this is the way otherness works in most early

modern travel narratives about the New World starting with Christopher Columbus’s

1493 letter to Luis de Santangel. There always seems to be another other somewhere over

the next ridge or on the next island. Also, one important thing to take note of here with

respect to the Ouetaca is how closely this description figures them (from, of course, the

obviously biased perspective of Léry) as the New World’s very own Catholics. Again,

the atrocities perpetrated during the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which Léry
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Villegaignon to the savage Ouetaca, Léry is accusing him (and, by implication, all Catholics)60

not only of practicing cannibalism but of practicing it in a particularly abject and grotesque

manner: for sustenance only, without any ritual.61 For Léry, as a Calvinist, the connection

lived through before drafting the first edition of this text and which included instances of

Catholics eating the raw hearts and livers of Huguenots, become extremely relevant.
60
What seems to strike Léry as so aberrant about Villegaignon’s religious views –

views developed, again, in the New World – is that Villegaignon has, in effect, developed

his own unique reading of scripture, his own particular kind of Christian worship. And of

course here we can find any number of parallels to religious movements that broke off

from Reform Church teachings (Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson come

immediately to mind) and their usually hasty suppression and exile. Curiously enough,

however, the situation in Fort Coligny is reversed. In the Bay Colony plantation in

seventeenth century New England, it is these “sectarians,” as William Bradford calls

them in Of Plymouth Plantation, who are exiled by the church fathers; but in South

America some eighty years earlier it is the orthodox Calvinists who are imprisoned,

mistreated, and exiled by Villegaignon, the free-wheeling autodidact who considers

himself a visionary.
61
Of course, there is a good deal of irony in this claim. The practice of eating the

body and drinking the blood of the sacrificed god during Catholic mass is, after all, a

particularly dense and elaborate ritual. But the pivot point on which the Catholic and

Ouetaca seem to be connected for Léry, is, again, this image, accurate or not, of Catholics

(because of their insistence on the incontrovertible magic of transubstantiation wherein

the devotee is in point of fact ingesting a part of her God) actually gaining physical,
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between material reality and the spiritual realm must be mediated by interpretation – whether it

is reading holy scripture or the world itself. Catholics, in his view, are deficient in this regard;

they do not read the bible regularly (it is in a language most of them cannot read) and have to

rely on a priest to translate and interpret it for them. Thus, just like the Ouetaca, they are prone to

confuse metaphor and reality, ritual and everyday life. For Léry, Villegaignon’s chief fault as

well as his principle similarity to the Ouetaca is that he has no appreciation for the tropic; he

must have his rituals raw and literal. Put another way, we might say that Villegaignon’s main

character flaw, the reason he ends his days without ever having “shed his old skin,” is that he is a

poor reader, a bad interpreter of texts and, consequently, of the world.

At this point we may begin to have a sense of why Léry is so keen to naturalize the Tupí

practice of ritual cannibalism. After all, if the Catholics and Ouetaca are transatlantic mirror

images of one another, each engaging in acts of abject savagery in France and Brazil

respectively, then the Calvinists and the Tupí, with their ability to interpret and understand ritual

and metaphor, work in Léry’s text as an antonymous pairing that serves to counterbalance the

transgressive misreadings of the other two. As Janet Whatley explains:

[The] orgies of hatred unleashed by the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre may

have had their own laws and rituals that emerge under the analysis of the

anthropologist and historian; but as Léry saw them, they were utterly horrible

because they signaled the utter breakdown of European order – a convulsion, a

rather than spiritual, nourishment from eating the host, just like the Ouetaca who will

(reportedly) eat human flesh just to feed themselves. Again, this parallel between

Catholics and Ouetaca must also always be considered alongside the events of the Saint

Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

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formless, aberrant manifestation of savagery in which neighbor devours neighbor.

Tupí cannibalism, with its containment, keeps categories of friends and enemies

stable; it makes possible large, well-defined areas of trust that will, as we shall

see, be the basis for his relationship with them. (Whatley xxix)

These “well-defined areas of trust” – the spaces that allow Léry and his fellow missionaries to

freely circulate among the Tupí – exist in every facet of Tupí life, including in their ritual

cannibalism.62 Consequently, we may read Léry’s attempts to naturalize Tupí cannibalism, to

make it more palatable both to himself and to his readers, as a symptom of its amazing (and, for

most readers, amazingly counterintuitive) orderliness, its containment and restraint even as it

transgresses boundaries that were considered taboo by Europeans.

I would like to conclude this section on eating in the History with a brief final example.

In one of his chapters documenting the fauna of the New World, Léry remarks upon the

following curious dietary restriction observed by the Tupínamba: “Our poor Tupínamba have

this foolish idea planted in their brains that if they were to eat of an animal that walks too

62
It may be productive to imagine Whatley’s idea of these “areas of trust”

alongside Jual’s conceit of “digressive spaces” in the text. In the first instance, we are

contemplating symbolic spaces that exist within Tupínamba social relations and, in the

second, textual spaces that work against the reader’s expectations and sensibilities by

allowing cannibalism to be naturalized. Both of these spatial metaphors work to ease the

radical alterity of the Tupí vis-à-vis their European readers and, in so doing, they seem to

establish a kind of minor discourse: an underdog discourse of Tupí civilization, restraint,

orderliness, rationality.
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heavily, it would keep them from running when they are pursued by their enemies. It would take

a skilled arguer to make them taste of it. For the same reason, they abstain from all beasts that

move slowly” (86 – 87). As careful readers, we dutifully file this information away with other

numerous ethnographic tidbits and curiosities provided by Léry; that is, at least, until the final

chapter of the history which chronicles Léry’s long and arduous ocean journey back to France.

The ship is slow and leaky and having gone through all their supplies and most of their fresh

water, the members of the crew are forced to begin eating their cargo: first, fruits and plants

brought back as gifts and curiosities; next, animals on board for the same reason; finally, tree

bark and boiled shoe leather. As Léry puts it, “I can testify that during our famine on the sea we

were so despondent and irritable that although we were restrained by the fear of God, we could

scarcely speak to each other without getting angry, and, what was worse (may God pardon us),

glancing at each other sideways, harboring evil thoughts regarding that barbarous act” (213).

Léry’s and the crew’s cannibalistic impulses notwithstanding, the final thing to be eaten

on board, we learn, is a parrot; but not just any parrot: one intended as a special gift for Admiral

Coligny. “However, in spite of this inexpressible suffering and famine, during which all the

monkeys and parrots that we had brought were eaten, I had nevertheless up to that time kept one,

as big as a goose, that uttered words freely like a man, and was of an excellent plumage” (213).63

63
For background on the parrot and its representational history in the West, see

chapter 2 of Bruce Boehrer’s recent book, Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in

Early Moderns Literature. Boehrer traces the symbolic association of parrots with the

Pope by Reform church propagandists (i.e. parrots are mindless imitators and so is the

Catholic laity). However, in Léry’s treatment of parrots here – and Léry, let us remember,

is a Reform church propagandist par excellence – there is no trace of this negative

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But, eventually, “what with the pressure of necessity, and my fear that someone might steal him

from me at night, he had to pass the same way as the others” (213). With the kind of frugality

appropriate in someone slowly starving to death, Léry makes use of almost every part of the

parrot: “I discarded nothing but the feathers, so that not only the body but also the tripes, feet,

claws, and hooked beak served me and some of my friends to keep ourselves alive three or four

days” (213). To his great relief, his ship sights land only five days after the parrot is killed, thus

putting an end to the desperate famine on board, but also leaving our narrator second-guessing

his previous decision: “I regretted it [killing the parrot] all the more in that five days after I killed

him we saw land; so that since this kind of bird needs very little water, I would have only needed

a few nuts to feed him for that time” (213). Our text ends, then, with this image of our

protagonist eating a special kind of animal, a Brazilian parrot “that uttered words freely like a

man,” in order to keep from starving to death on board a ship headed back to Europe from Brazil.

One strategy for reading this episode, I want to suggest, is to understand the ingestion of

this unfortunate parrot through the dietary logic of the Tupínamba. In other words, when Léry

eats the parrot, he absorbs its properties, for better or for worse. Thus, after consuming this

animal that has the gift of speech, Léry is himself imbued with a corresponding gift: the ability to

recount his experiences in the New World. Over the course of twenty years between his arrival

back in France and the publication of his History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Léry is

transformed from a traveler who merely witnesses the other to a storyteller, a narrator, who is

empowered to speak and write about the other.

Catholic association with the animal. After all, this parrot was intended as a gift for the

most powerful Huguenot in France, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny.

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Understood in this way, this act of eating – again, one of the final acts, chronologically,

in the History – circles back to the beginning of the narrative and authorizes all that has come

before it. The ingestion of the parrot is thus the final of Léry’s circular, self-authorizing

strategies; it stamps all the information that has come before it – the epistemology of the visual,

of observation and experience, the ocularcentrism inherent in an eyewitness report – with the

imprimatur of ontology, of an opening of the self to other possibilities of being. Though Léry’s

act of eating the parrot can certainly be read in other ways; for example, as a totalizing gesture of

dominance over the other, one that reveals the discursive momentum of Empire working to turn

the other into the self, or even as a renunciation of Léry’s storytelling abilities in favor of

mindless repetition – parrots, after all, speak like men but not exactly as men do – I want to insist

on other possibilities of transformation and metamorphosis in this example. The other may be

taken into the self but it will not, as we have seen elsewhere, be wholly consumed by it or

circumscribed within it. The other will instead force its own transformations; forge its own

representative logic.

IV. Under the Jaguar Sun: Stalking the Real

In their brief heyday the Aztecs had embellished their own and other human bodies in
flamboyant public display, and then proceeded to the carnal analyses of those bodies we
call human sacrifice, and then to the redistribution and re-use of some of the body parts in
processes we call cannibalism, and others in uses unfamiliar to us.

Inga Clendinnen, The Cost of Courage in Aztec Society

Meanwhile I understood: my mistake with Olivia was to consider myself eaten by her
whereas I should be myself (I always had been) the one who ate her. The appetizingly
flavored human flesh belongs to the eater of human flesh. It was only by feeding
ravenously on Olivia that I would cease being tasteless to her palate.

Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun

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While Léry ostensibly creates an ocularcentric narrative, one that chronicles new

knowledge by forging cause-and-effect relationships between witnessed events, his History, as

we have seen up to this point, may be better understood by paying attention to its frequent

references to cyclical recurrence, cultural substitution, and contiguity. The circuit of

interrelations that these emphases bring into view thus undermines the authority of eyewitnessing

as the primary mode of knowing the world, and relies instead on an experiential circuit

comprised of eating, hunger, and the body. As we saw, the predominance of this circuit of

alternative sensation is never clearer than in Léry’s descriptions of the Native Brazilian practice

of cannibalism, a ritual that effectively bypasses narrative cause-and-effect storytelling and

forces its own non-linear, non-ocular temporality.

In the pages that follow, I will make a case for understanding Italo Calvino’s short story,

Under the Jaguar Sun, as a complement to and hallucinatory double of Léry’s History. My

argument will be that Under the Jaguar Sun may be understood as a thought-experiment

conceived by Calvino in order to explore the ways in which taste might function as a substitute

for the visual within the metaphorics of tourism. Moreover, in much the same way as Léry’s

History, Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun goes beyond the realm of the phenomenological and

the sensible to an ontology of knowledge through the incorporation of the other. Before I can

turn to the story’s content and show exactly how this happens, I want to focus briefly on the

story’s publishing history. I trust that my reasons for doing so will soon become evident.

Under the Jaguar Sun was conceived by Calvino as part of a five-piece narrative project,

one that would eventually illustrate each of the five human senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing,

and sight. Each story in the collection was to have been devoted to a different sense. However,
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Calvino died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985 without ever finishing the series and only three of

the stories (taste, hearing, smell) were completed. Under the Jaguar Sun, which is not only the

title of the story that concerns us (the story in the series that is devoted to the sense of taste), but

also of the three-part collection itself as it came to be released in 1986, relates the experiences of

a middle-aged Italian couple, our male first-person narrator and his wife, Olivia, as they travel

through Mexico early in the decade of the nineteen-eighties.

Under the Jaguar Sun was originally published under a different and very suggestive title

– Sapore, Sapere64 – in the June 1982 edition of FMR, an “elegant, luxurious” Italian-language

art magazine (Biasin 72). Particularly noteworthy for our purposes is the fact that, as Gian-Paolo

Biasin points out, the layout of this first printed edition of Calvino’s story in FMR pairs

Calvino’s fiction with the “stupendous, disquieting images reproduced from the Florentine codex

. . . a sixteenth-century treatise on the life and customs of the Aztecs” (72).65

64
“Sapore, Sapere” has been translated variously into English as “Taste,

Knowledge” (McLaughlin), “Taste Means Knowledge” (Weiss), and “Learning to Taste”

(various). The original title in Italian puns on the orthographic closeness (again,

contiguity) between these two words, only separated by one letter. Of course, the various

attempts at translation (my own would be “To Taste, To Know”) inevitably fail to render

the pun in English. To wit: there is something hidden in this title; doubly hidden, in fact,

because as noted above the title is altogether different in subsequent editions.

65
FMR is named after its creator, Franco Maria Ricci. This art magazine is known

for its large, glossy photographs and drawings and its preference for a black background.

Given its emphasis on the reproduction of visual art and the history of art, FMR is an odd
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We may pause here for a moment and consider the connection between the visual images

taken from Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex66 and placed alongside the first printed

edition of Sapore, Sapere, and the visual images – eight woodcuts, created by Antoine Chupin –

that accompany the first edition of Léry’s History. According to Michael Gaudio, “the structural

value” of this latter set of images, the Chupin woodcuts interspersed throughout Léry’s twenty-

two chapters, is their ability to “[preserve] a visible reality that [for an early modern European

readership] stands prior to the imposition of any cultural schema or preconception . . . the image

[fulfills] its task of serving – simply by virtue of its visibility – as the occasion for Léry’s writing

. . . as the signfier of a savage otherness that has yet to be written, it is the thing against which the

text generates itself” (xi, Gaudio’s italics). Here is an odd double-conceit: on the one hand, as far

as the contemporary readership of Léry’s History is concerned, these woodcuts legitimate the

writing which they accompany by serving as “objective” proof for it. The woodcuts thus fulfill

forum for publishing a short story by Italo Calvino, but a particularly apt forum for

reproducing images from the Florentine Codex.

66
Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590) was a Franciscan monk and missionary

who spent most of his life evangelizing among the Nahua people in the central valley of

Mexico. The Florentine Codex (also known as Historia General de las cosas de la Nueva

España [another early Atlantic history, another double-titled text]), which he finished in

1578 (the same year, incidentally, Léry first publishes his History of a Voyage) but was

not published until the nineteenth century, is a three-volume “bilingual opus” in Spanish

and Nahuatl comprising pictographs and recorded oral testimony; crucially, the

Florentine Codex is the only extant eyewitness account of what life was like in the Aztec

Empire before Cortés’s arrival (Léon-Portilla 7).

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the same function of documentary evidence that a group of photographs attached to a story in a

news magazine might fulfill today. On the other hand, the images also “serve . . . as the occasion

for Léry’s writing,” or, in other words, these images – “simply by virtue of [their] visibility” (xi)

– seem somehow to precede the act of writing. To be clear, Gaudio, an art historian, is concerned

with analyzing the “stylistic influences, iconographic conventions, and ideological assumptions”

that frame the Chupin woodcuts (xi). But in this instance he means to call attention to the early

modern conceit that somehow these images convey an objective reality, free from all adulteration

and ideology.

This curious continuum between reading these woodcut images as proof of Léry’s

experiences in Brazil and understanding them as the very thing that elicits Léry’s writing in the

first place – a feedback loop that should immediately put us in mind of the other closed circuits

of repetition and cyclicality we encountered when analyzing Léry’s History – adheres to an even

more curious continuum when considered alongside Franco Maria Ricci’s editorial decision to

include visual images of Sahagún’s Florentine Codex alongside Calvino’s short story. Though

Ricci never directly addresses the question of why he chooses images from the codex to display

with Sapore, Sapere, he has spoken publicly about his aesthetic vision for FMR. According to

him, before FMR came on the scene in 1982:

there wasn't a good art magazine. All of the magazines were filled with news,

gossip, faces, small photos. Art was humiliated. So I decided never to show

anyone's face. I decided to publish monographic articles, so if I decide to do an

article about the cathedral of Parma, I show 30 pages on the cathedral, not just

two photos and a short article . . . I don't want to teach art history, I want people to

become accustomed to seeing the beauty of art. I wanted my magazine to become

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a sort of school for taste, for showing that the world is full of beautiful things.

(Designboom)

Of course, there is no sense in which the images from the Codex included in FMR are being

asked to serve as documentary evidence for the experiences of Calvino’s characters in Sapore,

Sapere. Indeed, the very idea that Calvino’s fiction could make use of “proof” in the same way

as Léry’s History – a narrative completely given over to making and supporting truth-claims –

verges on the absurd. After all, if Sapore, Sapere could somehow be proven to be “true,” it

would no longer be what it purports to be; its status would immediately change from fiction to

travel / magazine writing, a genre which, as we will see, it very self-consciously incorporates,

mimics, and mocks.

The question remains: if the Florentine Codex images are not meant, as with Chupin’s

woodcuts, to serve as proof for the story or to be understood as the content-matter from which

the story is generated, then why are they are paired with the story? What is the logic behind this

decision? Ricci’s pronouncements above, especially in the final two sentences, certainly give us

a clue as to his editorial prerogatives: “I want people to become accustomed to seeing the beauty
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Figure 1. “Tupínamba Warrior.” Jean de Léry History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil,

Otherwise Called America, translated by Janet Whatley. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1990. As we can see, Chupin’s most famous woodcut, shown above, with its contrapposto

and pre-lapsarian iconography, is anything but a depiction of objective reality. Rather, it is a

palimpsest, a superimposition of one culture on top of another.

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of art. I wanted my magazine to become a sort of school for taste, for showing that the world is

full of beautiful things” (Designboom). Here Ricci identifies himself as a proponent of a

particular set of Romantic-era beliefs concerning the heuristic utility of art in the realm of the

social. Leaving aside the vast implications of this Schillerian model for civic harmony – to learn

to appreciate beauty is to become a better person, a more moral person; an aesthetic education is

the key to stable government67 – what I would like to specifically foreground here is the fact that

for Ricci this education comes not through careful and diligent study – “I don’t want to teach art

history,” as he puts it – but rather through a more “direct” route: the ineffable beauty of art itself.

More to the point: Ricci’s insistence on aesthetic value as a learning tool, manifested here

as his insistence on the status of his brainchild, FMR, as a beautiful aesthetic object, should put

us in mind of a different heuristic mechanism; namely, tourism. Going back to Sapore, Sapere, it

seems that one way to understand the experience of reading the story alongside these Aztec

pictographs is precisely in terms of a kind of readerly tourism: all that these visual images and

Calvino’s text have in common, ultimately, is the fact that they are placed next to one another.

The readerly gaze thus falls on the pages of FMR much as the stereotypical touristic gaze

takes in sights at a museum or archeological site: an attempt to assimilate the contiguity

presented before it (see figures 2 and 3). And it is certainly important to point out that what is

elided in this specific case, both by the contiguity on the pages of this edition of FMR and by the

mainstream touristic apparatus of present-day Mexico, is the entirety of time between Cortés’s

arrival in the Central Valley of the Mexica and the arrival of Italian tourists there almost five

67
See Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of

Letters. Especially letters 4 -7. First published in 1794.

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Figure 2. Italo Calvino, “Sapore, Sapere,” in FMR, 61.

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Figure 3. Italo Calvino, “Sapore, Sapere,” in FMR, 73.

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hundred years later: a period of time that encompasses Mexico’s colonial history as well as the

vast majority of its national history; a period of time rife with genocide, slavery, and manifold

forms of economic and social exploitation, narratives not often thought fit for touristic

consumption.

Of course, to posit the various interlocking discourses known as tourism as somehow

always the enemy of historical accuracy would be a fallacy. In fact, for Chris Rojek and John

Urry, tourism can be described, “as a realist search undertaken by tourists themselves for

evidence that they really were in some particular place” (2). This “realism of popular

representation,” they go on to note: “is most closely associated with the role of photography” and

it functions to “produce a definite narrative and interpellation of the individual subject as a

tourist in a particular place, engaging in apparently touristic activities” (Rojek and Urry 2). The

touristic, photographic gaze revels in reality, in authenticity. However, in hypostasizing a purely

objective and authentic reality, one that can, in principle, be documented via photographic

evidence, this same gaze effaces any and all competing realities and alternative histories.

To consider the visual media of the early modern period as it pertains to narratives of

travel and discovery like Léry’s History, and in particular its attempts and failures to render the

New World as “uninterpreted nature” (Gaudio xi), alongside Rojek and Urry’s definition of

modern tourism as “a realist search” for evidence – a search underwritten not by carved

woodcuts pressed as folio imprints but by photographic and videographic media – places us at

the threshold of Italo Calvino’s Under the Jaguar Sun. I want to begin my reading of the story by

looking at the first paragraph in its entirety:

“Oaxaca” is pronounced “Wahaka.” Originally, the hotel where we were staying

had been the Convent of Santa Catalina. The first thing we noticed was a painting
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in a little room leading to the bar. The bar was called Las Novicias. The painting

was large, dark canvas that portrayed a young nun and an old priest standing side

by side; their hands, slightly apart from their sides, almost touched. The figures

were rather stiff for an eighteenth-century picture; the painting had the somewhat

crude grace characteristic of colonial art, but it conveyed a distressing sensation,

like an ache of contained suffering. (3)

This passage explicitly engages tourism in a number of ways: the first sentence – “‘Oaxaca’ is

pronounced ‘Wahaka’” – could easily double as a phrase in a guidebook explaining the correct

way to pronounce this city’s name. Also, the name of the bar in the hotel, “Las Novicias,” a

reference to the novitiate nuns who lived in the convent before it was converted to a hotel, could

easily also refer to our newly arrived narrator and his wife, thus portraying tourism as the state of

constant initiation, a permanent apprenticeship. The object of contemplation – the object, we

might say, on which the touristic gaze alights – is a painting of a priest and a nun standing side-

by-side and exhibiting “the somewhat crude grace characteristic of colonial art.” This is a

characterization, that, again – more subtly, perhaps, this time – mimics and thus mocks the tone

and content of standard tourist guide-book descriptions. Indeed, Calvino’s deft farcical touch

with respect to the tone and content of tourist guide books cannot help but evoke Roland

Barthes’s masterful critique of the ubiquitous mid twentieth-century French-language Hachette

World Guides in “The Blue Guide” (Mythologies, 74-78).68

68
As Barthes remarks at the beginning of his essay, “The Blue Guide hardly

knows the existence of scenery except under the guise of the picturesque. The picturesque

is found any time the ground is uneven” (74, his italics).

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The painting in question evokes “a distressing sensation” for our narrator which he

explains as “an ache of contained suffering.” Conveniently, the painting is equipped with a built-

in caption, “written in cramped lines in an angular, italic hand, white on black” (3). The figures

in the painting, we learn, were the abbess and chaplain of the convent. “The reason for their

being painted together was the extraordinary love . . . that had bound the abbess to her confessor

for thirty years” (4). This unconsummated love between the priest and the abbess (even on the

painting their hands do not quite touch) puts our narrator and his wife a bit ill at ease.

“Something [about the painting] intimidated us – or, rather, frightened us, or, more precisely,

filled us with a kind of uneasiness. So I will try to describe what I felt: the sense of lack, a

consuming void. What Olivia was thinking, since she remained silent, I cannot guess” (4). Very

important for us is how this “consuming void” is immediately filled: “Then Olivia spoke. She

said, ‘I would like to eat chiles en nogada’ And, walking like somnambulists, not quite sure we

were touching the ground, we headed for the dining room” (4).

Thus, already in this very early stage of the story, descriptions of sensual experience

begin to form a coherent trajectory: the fabled chastity of this ekphrastic priest and abbess

transcends sensuality (and, indeed, physical contact altogether) and this transcendence makes the

all-too-real narrator and his wife very uneasy. They immediately remedy this uneasiness – “fill

the consuming void” of sensual deprivation evoked by the painting – by eating chiles en nogada,

a traditional local dish described affectionately by Calvino on the following page (once again,

mimicking / mocking bourgeois travel writing) as, “reddish brown, somewhat wrinkled little

peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in

creamy, sweetish surrender” (5). If touristic experience itself may be understood as a

“consuming void” which must repeatedly be filled with new physical, sensual experiences, then
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for our narrator and Olivia this void is consistently filled with food or, more specifically, dishes

prepared from traditional Mexican recipes.

Indeed, as the story progresses, taste and flavor become the governing metaphors for

every experience of Mexico. Thus, the “sacred architecture” of the colonial baroque, “was

impelled by the same drive toward the extreme that led to the exacerbation of flavors amplified

by the blaze of the most spicy chiles” (7). Speech and even language itself are put at the service

of gustatory experience. As our narrator explains, Olivia’s chief desire during their meals

together is, “that of communicating with me through flavors, or communicating with flavors

through a double set of taste buds, hers and mine” (9).

Flavor even takes the place of sex, much to our narrator’s chagrin. At first, he expects

this bonanza of new sensual experience brought about by Mexican food to “spread quickly to all

our senses,” but, as he notes: “aphrodisiac this cuisine surely was, but in itself and for itself . . . It

stimulated desires, in other words, that sought their satisfaction only within the very sphere of

sensation that had aroused them – in eating new dishes, therefore, that would generate and

extend the same desires” (10). This feedback loop of gustatory desire should of course remind us

of Léry’s circuits of repetition and cyclicality. Indeed, it seems as though the narrator and his

wife form, between them, an internally coherent closed circuit for evaluating the outside world:

In reality, our complicity could not be more total, precisely because we

experienced the same passion in different ways, in accord with our temperaments:

Olivia more sensitive to perceptive nuances and endowed with more analytical

memory, where every recollection remained distinct and unmistakable, I tending

more to define experiences verbally and conceptually, to mark the ideal line of

journey within ourselves contemporaneously with our geographical journey. In

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fact, this was a conclusion of mine that Olivia had instantly adopted (or perhaps

Olivia had been the one to prompt the idea and I had simply proposed it to her

again in words of my own): . . . (11)

This ability to complement one another’s experiences makes our pair ideal tourists,

Olivia focusing on fully distilling the uniqueness of each experience while her husband, fulfilling

his function as narrator, abstracts and organizes, translating sensation into narrative. However

distinct these abilities may appear, it is important to note that there is also, as we see above, an

indeterminability between the characters that possess them: the narrator cannot tell us who was

the first to articulate this division of labor. This inability to distinguish between self and other, a

loss of coherence that should once again put us in mind of Léry’s History, specifically his (and

Montaigne’s) descriptions of Tupínamba ritual cannibalism, finds a suggestive homology in the

passage immediately following the one above:

. . . the true journey, as the introjection of an “outside” different from our normal

one, implies a complete change of nutrition, a digesting of the visited country – its

fauna and flora and its culture (not only the different culinary practices and

condiments but the different implements used to grind the flour or stir the pot) –

making it pass between the lips and down the esophagus. This is the only kind of

travel that has meaning nowadays, when everything visible you can see on

television without rising from your easy chair. (12)

Taken at face value, this passage underwrites a kind of culinary tourism very much in vogue

today. The best way to “sample” a local culture is by forsaking (though never, of course, fully)

the built-in distance and abstraction of the visual and focusing instead on taste, the sense which

affords the most authentic contact between your body and the surrounding foreign environment.
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But there is also another component at work here. When our narrator speaks of eating above, he

does not limit himself to the flavors in exotic dishes but instead opts for a much more

comprehensive approach. Real travel involves taking in a country’s: “flora and fauna and . . .

culture” (12). Crucially, in this sentence, “digesting” and not “eating” is the active verb. “A

digesting of the visited country,” then, not only involves the faculty of taste but, just as

important, the entire digestive system; one that begins its work alongside taste but continues

functioning long after the food in question has passed “between the lips and down the

esophagus.”

It is certainly no coincidence that after this passage the story immediately changes

direction and engages head-on with the question of cannibalism.69 As the narrator and Olivia tour

69
An important qualifier: the actual practice of cannibalism adheres to its own

robust discourse of taste and sensibility. That is to say, in many writings about cannibals

and cannibalism, the aesthetic qualities of the meat, especially when cooked – its flavor,

texture, fat drippings licked off fingers, etc. – is very much foregrounded. Léry, when

describing the method of cooking the bodies of prisoners taken in battle by the

Tupínamba, notes the special preference of the older women in the tribe for the taste of

human flesh: “While it all cooks according to their style, the old women (who, as I have

said, have an amazing appetite for human flesh) are all assembled beside it to receive the

fat that drips off along the posts of the big, high wooden grills, and exhort the men to do

what it takes to provide them always with such meat. Licking their fingers, they say,

‘Ygatou’: that is, ‘It is good’” (126). Clearly in this example cannibalism, as an actual

practice, falls very much in the purview of the phenomenological and the sensible, even

the sensual.
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ancient Aztec sites in the company of their Mexican friend and native informant, Salustiano, a

modern-day truchement Normande, the question of cannibalism repeatedly surfaces. Later, in

response to Olivia’s pressing questions about the mortal remains of Aztec human sacrifices –

“‘What the vultures didn’t carry off – what happened to that, afterward?’” – Salustiano is

evasive, “These were secret ceremonies. Yes, the ritual meal . . . The priest assumed the

functions of the god, and so the victim, divine food . . . The victim was already part of the god,

transmitting divine strength” (19). Making this exchange even more poignant is the setting in

which it takes place. The narrator, Olivia, and Salustiano are in a hotel at a tea party hosted as a

political event for the wives of important members of Salustiano’s political party. As Kathryn

Hume lucidly notes: “While the couple’s friend discourses upon ancient religious cannibalism,

the ominous sounds of scraping knives nudge us to wonder who might be the victims now. Is it

all those present, or perhaps the few men among the many women?” (Hume 173)

The possibility of cannibalism in the modern world, and especially the possibility of

women eating men, finds its way into our narrator’s thoughts as the story progresses. Sharing yet

another flavorful dinner with his wife, he imagines, “the sensation of her teeth in my flesh” and

feels “her tongue lift me against the roof of her mouth, enfold me in saliva, then thrust me under

the tips of the canines” (23). As he learns from Salustiano, however, “without reciprocity, human

sacrifice would be unthinkable. All [participants in the ritual] were potentially both sacrificer and

victim” (26). The realization of this interchangeability of roles – Olivia, as one of the epigraphs

for this section demonstrates, could just as easily be eaten by the narrator – seems to lend the

narrator a new vigor when it comes to participating in meals. In their penultimate dinner in

Mexico, the dynamic between these two characters seems to undergo a transformation:
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‘What’s wrong with you? You’re odd this evening,’ Olivia said, since nothing

ever escaped her. The dish they had served us was called gorditas pellizcadas con

manteca – literally, “plump girls pinched with butter.” I concentrated on

devouring, with every meatball, the whole fragrance of Olivia – through

voluptuous mastication, a vampire extraction of vital juices. But I realized that in

a relationship that should have been among three terms – me, meatball, Olivia – a

fourth term had intruded, assuming a dominant role: the name of the meatballs . . .

And, in fact, the magic of the name continued affecting me even after the meal,

when we retired together to our hotel room in the night. And for the first time

during our Mexican journey the spell whose victims we had been was broken, and

the inspiration that had blessed the finest moments of our joint life came to visit

us again. (26 – 27)

Here the narrator has somehow created a relay between the “plump girls pinched with butter”

and his wife. By indulging in the figurative cannibalism of this oddly named dish, he is able to

“devour . . . the whole fragrance of Olivia.” Particularly interesting is that this newly forged relay

“breaks the spell” they had been under: as delicately as Calvino puts it, we are still certainly to

infer that the sensual enjoyment of this couple is no longer solely confined to culinary

experience. That is to say, the narrator and Olivia have once again come to “know” one another

and, moreover, this carnal knowledge has been catalyzed not by the taste of the dish but rather by

its name, “plump girls pinched with butter.” As our narrator tells us, “the magic of the name

continued affecting me even after the meal” (56). What we see here, then, is a different logic

taking hold, a logic of incorporation rather than sensation: an alternative to tourism understood

as a temporary and cursory experience of difference. As the narrator remarks in the following
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page when he and Olivia take the final meal of the story among the open-air Temples of

Palenque in the Yucatan Peninsula:

We were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all,

assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal

cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the

lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cruzana, and

enchiladas. (29)

This passage displays yet another example of cyclicality and incorporation parallel to Léry’s act

of eating the talking parrot at the end of his History. This process of mutual ingestion and

digestion goes beyond the epistemologies of taste and sight and offers an alternative in ontology,

an alternative that ultimately reunites the narrator and his wife and, crucially, the foreign land in

which they find themselves. Thus, in the final analysis, just as with Léry and his parrot, it is the

act of eating, the act of ingestion, that proves to be the more authentic strategy for knowing the

world. Eating transforms the eater and, as such, provides an epistemological alternative to

knowing as viewing or witnessing.

Conclusion

This self-conscious shift between two radically different texts and time periods (1578 and

1983, to be exact) has been an attempt to imagine some possible associations between a loose

network of tropes (contiguities, transformations, inversions, repetitions) that may in turn, just as

the figure of the Aztec Jacobin created by Alejo Carpentier, offer possible alternatives for

imagining a history of the European presence in the New World. My strategy for conceptualizing

these tropic exchanges has been to imagine three writing genres superimposed one of top of the
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other like a medieval palimpsest: early modern travel writing / ethnography / postmodern travel

writing (i.e. tourism).70 In invoking this palimpsest of different yet related strategies for

representing otherness, I am not merely suggesting that the idea of tourism in the twenty-first

century should be understood as a result of these precedent discourses of exploration, contact,

and ethnography. I am also claiming that it is impossible for us, in the twenty-first century, to

understand the early-modern exploration of the Americas (with its attendant ethnographic

components) that is documented in Léry’s text (for example), without tourism – the

contemporary discourse we have for experiencing, mediating, and sublating otherness –

functioning as a backdrop. And also (though I will not go into this here) that it is impossible for

us to understand the work of early to mid-twentieth century structuralist anthropology as well as

late twentieth-century poststructuralist anthropology without recourse to the discourses of both

tourism and early modern exploration. Accordingly, the goal of this final section has been to

begin to parse these superimposed experiential registers; to suggest the possibility that they

operate, discursively, in a hallucinatory confluence that constitutes a genealogy, one which links

together ways of encountering alterity across time and space.71 This genealogy represents a field

70
In a similar vein, Frank Lestringant at one point remarks that Léry’s History,

“surfaces as a palimpsest in the modern ethnologist’s [i.e. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s] own

book, Tristes Tropiques” (“Léry-Strauss” 419).

71
Perhaps the most appropriate image, rather than a conventional genealogical

family tree which only grows in one direction, is a Banyan Tree which begins its life in

the crevices and cracks of a host tree and eventually sends roots down to the ground,

sometimes growing alongside the host tree, sometimes encompassing it by growing and

flourishing in all different directions.

 138

of tropic exchanges and interrelations that is intended to produce a supplement to monologic

models of narrative history, models that we have associated with role of the visual in Léry’s text.
 139

Chapter 3

The Land that Bears Fruits Before Flowers: Time as History and Prophecy in Thomas Harriot’s
A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) and The Book of Mormon
(1830).

The New World, existing in those times beyond the sphere of all things known to history,
lay in the fifteenth century as the middle of the desert or the sea lies now and must lie
forever, marked with its own dark life which goes on to an immaculate fulfillment in
which we have no part. But now, with the maritime successes of that period, the western
land could not guard its seclusion longer; a predestined and bitter fruit existing,
perversely, before the white flower of its birth, it was laid bare by the miraculous first
voyage.

William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

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I.

Perhaps the most appropriate place to begin our examination of Thomas Harriot’s (1560-

1621) Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia – a text well known among

scholars of colonial Atlantic history and Early American literature for its account of the first

English settlement at Roanoke in the late sixteenth-century – is with an episode that is not

narrated by Harriot and yet constitutes the boundaries of his account of the New World; an

episode, moreover, that synchs to a persistent motif in each of the three sixteenth century travel

narratives treated in this dissertation: a scene of lost knowledge about the New World. In “Of

Cannibals,” we will remember, Montaigne fails to recall the third observation made by the

Tupínamba he meets in Rouen when he asks them for their views on French society. We will

also recall that Jean de Léry’s original notes and journals, written in the red ink extracted from

the bark of the eponymous Pau Brasil, were seized at the city gates of Lyon soon after his return

to France and not returned for thirteen years, during which time he was forced to reconstitute

much of his experience in South America from memory, later combining these recollections

written in Europe with those originally written in Brazil in order to assemble his History.

With Thomas Harriot we encounter, once again, a scene of lost knowledge. It happens in

June of 1586 as Harriot and his surveying partner, the accomplished painter and illustrator John

White, a well-connected adventurer who would eventually lead his own ill-fated colonizing

mission to the New World, are getting ready to leave Roanoke Island and board Sir Francis’s

Drake’s ship on a journey back to England. At this point, Harriot and White, along with the other

members of Sir Richard Grenville’s 1585 expedition – an expedition popularly referred to as the

Second Virginia Voyage, (the first having been Philip Amadas’s and Arthur Barlowe’s surveying

expedition along the southeastern coast of what is the present-day United States in the summer of
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1584) – had been in North America some twelve months. During that time, Harriot and White

compiled a significant collection of maps, charts, illustrations, and notes pertaining to Roanoke

Island and its surrounding area, including detailed drawings by White of birds, plants, animals,

and the Native-American inhabitants of the area, the Carolina Algonquians.72 As David Beers

Quinn explains, however:

A tragedy occurred as Harriot and White were leaving with their mass of papers

and charts: some were tipped out of a boat, and although much was brought home,

priceless materials were lost. Harriot told later how he and White had planned a

great encyclopaedic work, illustrated by the artist, to give the first complete

survey of one area of North America. This could not now be done, since so much

had been destroyed, but Harriot did manage to write a detailed history of the

colony which has, unfortunately, not survived. (Robert Fox, ed. 21)

In this passage Quinn not only chronicles an unfortunate accident; he notes a double loss. Not

only were a number of these precious papers irreparably soaked in the waters of the (not then yet

72
Here is A.L. Rowse’s characterization of the skills Harriot and White possessed

and of their collaboration: “Thomas Harriot – an Oxford man, like Hakluyt, Gilbert,

Raleigh and Sidney – was the most eminent of Elizabethan mathematicians, and a

ranging scientific mind no less interested in astronomy, physics, meteorology and

anthropology. He was Raleigh’s intellectual adviser. John White, cartographer, is

regarded as the first in the long line of English water-colorists . . . his collaboration with

Harriot was a fruitful one, their work dovetailing in to each other; we hear of no quarrels

between them, they were happy in their work” (7).

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named) Shallowbag Bay but the encyclopedic “detailed history” later written by Harriot has been

lost to us as well, not through accident but through neglect.

It is important to note, therefore, that the document relating Harriot’s experiences in

Roanoke which survives the centuries, The Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of

Virginia, is far from exhaustive and encyclopedic. In fact, it is a short book, originally brought to

press in 1588 by Robert Robinson as an “undistinguished-looking quarto” (Hadfield,

“Ethnography and Ideology” 201). A point not to be overlooked concerning this first edition of

the Report is that it appears one year too late to aid John White’s 1587 expedition to establish the

first Roanoke colony. However, as David Beers Quinn suggests, the 1588 war against Spain led

Sir Walter Raleigh (Harriot’s patron) and Grenville to begin plans for a new settlement in North

America, a privateering base in the Chesapeake Bay. Harriot’s Report could have been published

in 1588 with this effort in mind (Quinn, Man of Science 22).

We can thus situate Harriot’s Brief and True Report in the history of the British

exploration and settlement of North America by understanding it, first and foremost, as a

document written under the patronage of Sir Walter Raleigh, the patents holder73 for the

73
Queen Elizabeth’s original grant to Raleigh allowing him to conduct operations

in Virginia is a fascinating document for its unabashed mix of jurisprudential specificity

and spatiotemporal open-endedness. Raleigh is given license “for ever hereafter, to

discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous lands, countries,

territories . . . to have, hold and occupy to him, his heirs and assigns forever, with all

prerogatives, commodities, jurisdictions, royalties, privileges, franchises and pre-

eminences, thereto or thereabouts both by sea and land” (Corbitt 5). The almost limitless
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colonization of Virginia, and written with the specific purpose of exhorting more support for

permanent settlement at Roanoke after the tragic failure of the first colony, a failure made public

in England only months before the original publication of the Report. Indeed, Harriot’s narrative

is propaganda meant to aid in the future settlement of the colony by assuaging the fears of

prospective colonists while simultaneously bolstering the courage of prospective investors.

But though Harriot’s Brief and True Report was originally published in 1588 as a

pamphlet, a medium intended for quick distribution and dissemination, in these pages I will also

be focusing on its definitive 1590 folio edition, the most important, widely disseminated, and

elaborately produced imprint of the Report (Hadfield, “Ethnography and Ideology” 201).74

Crucially, the 1590 edition was published by Theodor de Bry as the opening chapter of America,

a multi-volume compendium of New World exploration.75 De Bry and Richard Haklyut met in

scope of this grant signals that conceptions of the nature of both space and time are

rapidly changing in Elizabethan England.

74
In addition to its original 1588 publication and its much more elaborate

reappearance in 1590, Harriot’s Brief and True Report was also reprinted with minor

editorial changes in 1600 as a section in Richard Haklyut’s The Principall Navigations,

Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation. The publication of these

different imprints over a short period time indicates that the Report was regarded as a

fundamental work on the Americas by Harriot’s contemporaries (Hadfield, “Ethnography

and Ideology” 201).

75
De Bry and his sons also published sections of Léry’s History in German and

Latin as part of a “lavishly illustrated” rolling collection of American travelogues called

Les Grands Voyages (Whatley 226 FN 10). The De Brys were Protestant Reform
 144

London in 1587 and it is probable that during this meeting Haklyut, at that time the most

influential promoter of a British presence in North America, managed to persuade De Bry to

publish Harriot’s work as part of an ongoing Protestant effort to promote the colonization of the

Americas, thereby curbing Catholic colonization (Hadfield, “Ethnography and Ideology” 201).

The three different editions of Harriot’s Report published between 1588 and 1600 all

feature the same written text. What sets the 1590 edition apart is that it was originally published

in English, German, French, and Latin (Quilligan 2) and also that it contains a series of twenty-

nine illustrations, “amongst the most sophisticated and best-produced in an English text in the

sixteenth century” (Hadfield “Ethnography and Ideology” 202). These illustrations appear after

Harriot’s main written text, forming a de facto appendix at the end of the folio. Twenty-eight of

these twenty-nine images were engraved using original watercolor drawings by John White,

Harriot’s surveying partner. Each of these images is accompanied by an informative caption,

originally written by Harriot in Latin and later translated by Richard Haklyut ahead of the

English-language publication of De Bry’s 1590 edition (Hadfield “Ethnography and Ideology”

202). Expounding on the unique features of the 1590 edition, Paul Hulton notes that, “Though

propagandists and thus tended to publish work that was harshly anti-Catholic and

strongly in favor of Protestant colonization of the Americas, though it is interesting to

note that managing to promote both these positions at the same time was often difficult.

In fact, Harriot’s Report and Léry’s History may be separated precisely along these lines.

Harriot’s Report champions a pro-colonization agenda without ever taking the time to

criticize Catholics while Léry’s History, in part a martyrology of his fellow Calvinists

lost in Brazil, blasts Villegaignon and other Catholics like André Thévet while never

endorsing future Huguenot colonizing efforts in South America.

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the text of that propagandist tract [i.e. the original 1588 edition] remained unrevised, the

illustrations with the notes and the map impressively emphasized the scientific, in particular the

ethnological, discoveries of the English in Virginia. This aspect of the book is even further

enhanced by the high quality of the engraved plates” (viii).

In sections II and III of this chapter, I employ the material history of The Brief and True

Report and the broader history of what I am calling the Roanoke Knowledge Project to track the

different modes of representing and organizing the trope of time that are present in this unique

text. Indeed, we can already appreciate the complex temporality surrounding the production

Harriot’s original 1588 pamphlet if we consider it both as Harriot’s attempt, always-already

belated, to help the original, doomed Roanoke colony founded by John White in 1587 and also as

his attempt to recapture that lost colony by projecting and promoting a new future colony. In the

previous two chapters, I have examined troping as a way of opening problems of understanding

and of establishing alternative ways of imagining the historical past. This chapter’s focus on the

trope of time and its multiple roles in Harriot’s text as well as The Book of Mormon represents an

extension of that discussion. And though the role of time is not my primary concern in the

treatments of Montaigne and Léry offered in previous chapters, it is certainly latent in those

discussions. Indeed, the cannibal song, a self-sustaining loop of signification that resists the telos

of linear, cause-and-effect narrative, finds a suggestive corollary in this chapter with Harriot’s

creation of his own narrative feedback loop. As we will see, Harriot’s representation of the

native Algonquians in the main text of his Report, while mostly adhering to a predictable

formula of promotional exhortation (e.g., the natives are pliant and meek, ready to be converted,

would make strong allies), nevertheless presents us with a key moment of causal inversion, a
 146

particular way of organizing time that, as evinced in the previous chapter on Jean de Léry,

confutes linear, chronological, cause-and-effect narration.

Using Myra Jehlen’s model of “history before the fact” to make sense of this moment of

inverted causality, I will first show how this passage represents a moment of profound

uncertainty for Harriot, one in which the propagandistic and exhortatory prerogatives of the

Report clash with his own scientific training of objective observation. Subsequently, I will

consider how the narrative heterodoxy found in this section of the Report is connected to this

substitution of effect for cause. Ultimately, I want to read this temporal paradox not as an

aberrant moment in the text but rather as an instantiation of its governing logic, as an exemplum

of the way Harriot’s reporting, rather than producing a definitive empirical (and imperial)

account of events, in fact produces alternative, competing versions of reality; thus allowing us, as

with Montaigne and Léry, to imagine the historical past differently.

I will explore the ideological and cosmological significance of this moment alongside

another model for representing time in the main written text of the Report, a model that comes to

us filtered through Harriot’s narration but that originates with the Algonquians and their attempts

to understand the English presence on their lands in terms of the past, present, and future: where

they came from, what they are doing now, and their ultimate purpose. What makes this moment

so intriguing, as we will see, is that this attempt on the part of the Algonquians to situate the

English in a temporal continuum that is intelligible to them reveals a glimpse of an alternative

way of organizing time. Some of these Algonquian voices, speaking through Harriot’s narration,

offer an uncannily accurate prediction of future events. These Algonquian prophets move beyond

the cosmological ken of Harriot’s Report to speak directly to us, to those who have the benefit of
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already knowing the history they are predicting. What happens to history in a world of accurate

prophecy?

De Bry’s twenty-nine engravings, appended at the end of the 1590 edition of Harriot’s

Report (alongside his explanatory captions), will provide us with our third and final template for

how time is organized in the book. I will argue that these engravings are arranged in such a way

as to promote a teleological view of history, one that bears the official mark of the English

Protestant colonizing effort in the Anglophone New World. This group of engravings mostly

consists of portraits of Algonquians going about various daily tasks, but also includes two

detailed maps of the area, an image of Adam and Eve before the Fall (technically speaking, part

of the table of contents for the appendix and not a numbered image), and, oddly enough, some

depictions of Ancient Britons and Picts. Though the engravings depicting the Algonquians were

coeval with Harriot’s present-day, these images are preceded by the image of Adam and Eve and

proceeded by images of Picts and Ancient Britons, thus effectively folding the Algonquians into

a Western, Anglo-Protestant teleology.

Though Harriot’s Report has received considerable attention from literary scholars, both

early Americanists and early modernists, no critical treatment of the Report to date has explored

the different ways that time is figured within the text itself or, indeed, has considered the tropic

dimensions of history and prophecy in Harriot’s representation of the New World. Consequently,

by focusing on these questions, I seek to contribute an additional dimension to the critical

conversation that exists around this text, one that has, for the past twenty-five years, largely

centered around Stephen Greenblatt’s reading of Harriot in his 1981 essay, “Invisible Bullets.”

We will have occasion to investigate Greenblatt’s reading of Harriot in more detail further ahead

alongside a critique of this reading offered by Ed White in his 2005 PMLA article, “Invisible
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Tagkanysough.” For the moment, however, it is sufficient to reiterate my claim that a

concentration on inverted time as well as the roles of history, prophecy, and teleology in the

Report will yield new avenues for the discussion of this text.

In the fourth and final section of this chapter, I will place The Brief and True Report in

dialogue with The Book of Mormon, a North American text published some two-hundred and

fifty years after Harriot’s voyage to the New World. Though (much like Harriot’s Report) a

considerable amount of scholarly attention has been paid to The Book of Mormon, surprisingly

little has been made of the way its putative authors, the prophet-historians Nephi, Mormon, and

Moroni, represent time in their respective fashionings of narrative history. Indeed, this lack of

scholarly attention is especially surprising when we consider that Joseph Smith, the backwoods

autodidact-cum-prophet charged with unearthing the gold tablets upon which the intertwining

narratives that make up The Book of Mormon are said to have been engraved, translated his

revelation from God (via the Angel Moroni) as a backwards-looking prophecy: a sacred narrative

of the ancient Americas in which manifest destiny is already written as history.

In elaborating the distinct temporal registers to be found in both Harriot’s Brief and True

Report and The Book of Mormon and in making a case for reading them alongside one another,

the fourth section of this chapter also joins a critical conversation centered around what has

recently been labeled the “temporal turn” in early American literary studies.76 Thus, once I have

established a genealogical thread between Harriot’s Report and The Book of Mormon that centers

around their common strategies for organizing time, I will attempt to demonstrate how this

76
See, for example, Holly Jackson’s review essay in the Summer 2012 issue of

Criticism, “The New American Temporality Studies: Narrative and National Times in the

Nineteenth Century.”
 149

thread can serve to expand the current scholarly conversation about the role of time in the

consolidation of national identity in current Early American literary scholarship. I will argue that

it can do this precisely by expanding the horizons of the conversation beyond the temporal

boundaries of the modern nation-state.

Before embarking upon a detailed examination of the disjunctive temporalities present in

Harriot’s Brief and True Report and the BOM, however, I will spend some time laying the

groundwork for this examination. The first step in this regard is to offer an account of the early

settlement history of the Roanoke colony as well as a more detailed overview of Harriot’s

Report.

II. The Roanoke Knowledge Project

First contact with the native people living in and around Roanoke Island is documented

by the Amadas / Barlowe 1584 expedition; although, as Paul Hoffman notes in his study of

European voyages to the Outer Banks before 1584, there were almost certainly earlier contacts

between the Spanish and the coastal-dwelling tribes of that region (Hoffman 1 - 17). After a stay

of a month or so during which reciprocal gifts and visits were exchanged, the men in Barlowe’s

expedition set sail for England loaded down with “dressed deer skins (chamois leather it

seemed), tough leather (buffalo, probably not bison, though this was so called later), and

undressed deerskins” (Fox 35).

Accompanying the English on their voyage home were two Native Americans: Manteo, a

Croatoan whose mother ruled a separate tribe in the Cape Hatteras area and Wanchese, a

Roanoke under the leadership of Wingina, a local chief with whom Harriot and White would

later have extended dealings (Fox 39). Whether Manteo and Wanchese were persuaded to join
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the English voluntarily or by force, we do not know.77 Leaving this question to the side, there is

quite a bit of speculation, especially by Quinn, that Thomas Harriot was present on this first

journey in 1584. There is no way, Quinn insists, that Harriot could have become conversant in

the Algonquian language by 1585 without the shipboard months of practice that having been part

of Barlowe’s expedition would have afforded him (Fox 14). We do know for certain that Harriot

was a major figure in the expedition that arrived on Roanoke Island in June 1585 which was

commanded by Grenville and subsequently Ralph Lane once Grenville returned to England in

search of more supplies. This second Virginia voyage led to the establishment of an English fort

and settlement with more than one hundred men on the north end of Roanoke Island, but this fort

was abandoned the following year (shortly after Harriot and White’s departure in June of 1586)

due to weather, lack of supplies and deteriorating relations with the local tribes.

In 1587 another party of one hundred and ten English colonists, including women and

children, set sail for the New World, reaching Roanoke Island in July of that year. On August 18

of that same year one of the colonists, Eleanor Dare, gave birth to the first English-speaking

child in the New World, Virginia Dare. A week later, the baby’s grandfather, the very same John

White (now Captain John White, leader of this particular expedition) who accompanied Harriot

on the second and possibly the first voyage, was, much like Grenville two years earlier, forced to

return to England for badly needed supplies. Because of the massing Spanish Armada, White

77
This is certainly another good moment to reflect on how little we know about

these fascinating moments of travel by Native Americans to Europe in the colonial

archive. Going back to Montaigne, it seems relatively easy to believe that the Tupínamba

he encounters in Rouen were there voluntarily, but what of the Tupínamba present at

Henri’s 1550 Entrance Spectacle and used to fight a mock battle?

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was waylaid in England for three years, and when he returned to Roanoke Island in 1590 there

was no sign of his granddaughter or the other colonists. Their dwellings were gone and the only

sign of human presence (so the story goes) were the letters “CRO” and “CROATOAN” carved

on two trees. This led some to believe that the colonists had sought the help of the friendly

Croatoan Indians (Manteo’s people) on Hatteras Island, but they were not there and, indeed, to

this day we have no idea what exactly befell the inhabitants of the lost colony. It would be until

the middle of the following century before Europeans made another serious attempt at settlement

on Roanoke Island.

Not surprisingly, given its purpose, the Report’s first task is to establish its own

credibility as a source of verifiable truth. Thus, before the first section of Harriot’s account even

begins – a section which enumerates the “Merchantable Commodities” to be found in this new

land – Harriot goes to some pains to anticipate the many “divers and variable reports, with some

slanderous speeches put abroad by many that returned from [Roanoke]” (108).78 In fact, in the

first edition of Harriot’s text, his title is immediately proceeded by a note of support from Ralph

Lane, “one of her Majesty’s Esquires, and Governor of the Colony of Virginia” which attests to

the truth of the claims that Harriot is making in the document (107). As Lane puts it:

Thus much upon my credit I am to affirm, that things universally are so truly set

down in this Treatise by the author thereof, an actor in the Colony, and a man no

less for his honesty than learning commendable, as that I dare boldly avouch, it

78
Because the main text of all editions of Harriot’s Brief and True Report are

identical, I have chosen to quote from A.L. Rowse’s modern version of the text in his

edition of Haklyut’s Voyages to the Virginia Colonies rather than reproducing Harriot’s

Elizabethan English from the main text of the 1590 De Bry edition.
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may very well pass with the credit of truth even among the most true relations of

this age. (107)

Though testimonial assertions of the sort Lane offers above are not an unusual feature for the

time or the genre, we would nevertheless do well to pause here and scrutinize his insistence on

the truth of Harriot’s text alongside Harriot’s own use of the word “true” in the title to his

Report. Of course, one way of understanding this repeating initial emphasis on truth lies in its

use as a means of fighting back against the “slanderous speeches” directed towards the colony,

an unfortunate side-effect of its recent dissolution in 1586 that could, if unchecked by proponents

of further settlement, immeasurably harm the prospects for funding and manning future

American expeditions.

But it is also important to view this strong insistence on truth in a broader context of

competing truth-claims circulating between Europe and the Americas: a discursive struggle

between fact and fiction, claim and counter-claim, which precedes Harriot’s text (e.g. the various

narratives circulating around Columbus’s imprisonment in 1500 or the trials and hearings

occasioned by de Las Casas’s publication of his Brief Account of the Devastation of the Indies in

1542 or, of course, the propaganda polemic between Léry and André Thevet which serves as the

primary motivation for Léry to publish his History in 1578) and which would also continue well

into the eighteenth-century (e.g. Thomas Jefferson’s famous correspondence with the Abbé

Raynal).

In light of these multiple transatlantic fashionings of fact, I would suggest that one way of

understanding Harriot’s repeated claims at “truth” – a claim foregrounded in the title of his text,

underscored in Ralph Lane’s preface, and repeatedly, almost hysterically, sustained throughout
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the document79 – is not only as an attempt at an empirically-grounded corrective to the late

sixteenth century naysayers of British colonialism in North America but, more alluringly, as a

marker of the desperate need to prop up the Roanoke knowledge project beyond its putative

lifespan; as a marker of the anxiety – indeed, again, almost hysteria – which losing the site of the

settlement represented vis-à-vis the epistemological status of that knowledge project. When the

importance of establishing truth as a rhetorical strategy is viewed along these lines, Edward

Said’s conceptualization of Orientalism becomes a useful optics for evaluating the role of truth-

claims in Harriot’s text. There is an analogy to be made, for example, between the way the

Americas emerge in the sixteenth century as an object of study in texts like Harriot’s and Said’s

idea of “a complex Orient, suitable for study and theoretical illustration” emerging at the end of

the eighteenth-century (7).

Even more useful for our purposes, however, may be Said’s nuanced understanding of

Orientalism as a self-sustaining knowledge project that is internally consistent “despite or

beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a ‘real’ Orient” (5). Thus, Said can come to

view what he calls Orientalism as a more accurate metric of a “battery of desires, repressions,

investments, and projections” about the Orient than of the “brute reality” of the lives, histories,

and customs of people living in the East (5). Of course, to maintain that Harriot’s Report

necessarily filters the land, vegetation, wildlife, and people of North America through a sieve of

79
Indeed, it is interesting to note that each of the final five engravings by Theodor

De Bry in the 1590 edition – precisely the engravings mentioned earlier of Picts and

Ancient Britons rather than Native Americans – also take up this repeated insistence on

truth. Each caption (written by Harriot, let us remember) begins by pronouncing its

accompanying image to be “the true picture of a . . .” (Ed. Paul Hulton 76 – 84).

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Elizabethan England’s social, moral, and economic prerogatives rather than presenting these

objects of study in terms of their own “brute reality” – a phrase, as Said himself would have

likely admitted, not without its own problematic ideological underpinnings – is merely to state

the obvious: Harriot fashions Virginia and Roanoke Island as an internally coherent discourse to

suit his own ends; in the act of documenting fact he is also creating truth.

Now that we have reviewed the historical context in which Harriot’s Report was

originally published, it is necessary to offer an overview of the text itself. Scholars writing about

the Report have disproportionately devoted their attention to the final section of the text, entitled,

“Of the Nature and Manners of the People,” in which Harriot writes about his interaction with

the Carolina Algonquians, the primary Native American group on Roanoke island during

Harriot’s time there. When the Report is anthologized, it is invariably this section which is

included as an excerpt, the part to stand in for the whole. Indeed, perhaps the most curious aspect

of the report’s narrative structure is the way that the section of the text devoted to the Native

Americans – good relations with whom would have been by any measure the single most

important factor for the success of a future colony – is relegated to the end of the written text.

Despite my own inevitable focus on Harriot’s descriptions of inter-cultural contact in this

same final section of the Report (as well as the images that proceed Harriot’s main text in the

1590 edition), it is important to note that most of this short text is given over to describing the

various commodities that may be found in Virginia, a logical direction to take if the goal is to

tempt prospective settlers and investors. These commodities are divided into three categories,

each constituting a distinct section of the text: “Merchantable Commodities” (110), “Such

Commodities as Virginia is Known to Yield for Victual and Sustenance of Man’s Life” (114),

and the very short “Commodities for Building and Other Necessary Uses” (124). In keeping with
 155

a strictly taxonomic rather than chronological ordering of information (here we can think back to

the middle chapters of Léry’s History), Harriot divides these sections into smaller subsections

with names like: “Of Roots,” “Of Fish,” “Of Fowl,” and “Of a Kind of Fruit or Berry in the Form

of Acorns.” The descriptions in these pages are stripped down and spare; as dry as these titles

would lead us to believe. In fact, they are lists rather than robust descriptions.80 Here we would

do well to both remember the already belated nature of the Report and also to imagine Harriot’s

urgency in bringing it to press. We would also do well to keep in mind that, as I mentioned at the

outset of this chapter, Harriot and John White lost a significant portion of their work as they were

leaving Virginia. As Paul Hulton explains, “Of Harriot’s ‘Chronicle,’ which we know he

compiled during his time with the colony, nothing remain[ed] but an abstract – the Report” (ix).

As I explain and evaluate Harriot’s account of his dealings with the Carolina

Algonquians in the final section of the Report, I will be considering one critical text in particular

as a touchstone: Stephen Greenblatt’s essay, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its

Subversion.” 81 For Greenblatt, the key feature of Harriot’s Brief and True Report is the way it

80
Ed White compellingly argues that these lists “reveal an interesting and at times

confused encounter with Native American classificatory systems . . . Harriot’s

assemblage of commercial and scientific information is no simple Old World system,

anticipating a systematic anthropology, but rather a record of the traces of prior and

competing New World systems” (756 - 757).

81
Greenblatt’s essay first appears in the pages of Glyph in 1981. But I will be

working from a revised version of the essay as it appears in Chapter Two of Greenblatt’s

1988 book, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in

Renaissance England. This revised and definitive version of the essay has since been
 156

can be said to depict the relation between orthodoxy and subversion in Elizabethan culture.

However, Greenblatt focuses on the Report not because of its exemplarity in this regard but

rather, as he himself admits, because the way this relation is expressed in the Report is relatively

easy to understand and explain in contrast to how it is expressed in the more central texts of his

working archive. As Greenblatt himself puts it in the first page of his essay, “understanding the

relation between orthodoxy and subversion in Harriot’s text will enable us to construct an

interpretive model that may be used to understand the far more complex problem posed by

Shakespeare’s history plays” (23). Thus, the Report is intended to function as a primer for

Greenblatt; it is a means of preparing his reader, early in his book, for the “far more complex

problem” to be encountered in ensuing chapters. Indeed, Ed White upbraids Greenblatt precisely

for believing that “the heuristic value of A Briefe and True Report comes not from what it tells us

about contact . . . but from its clarification, in the crude context of the New World, of the more

complicated features of greater literary works” (754). Though Greenblatt’s analysis is extremely

incisive; indeed, at times even virtuosic, it ultimately champions a reading of the Report as an

exemplum of broader cultural patterns in Elizabethan England: of the “circulation of social

energy” in that particular time and place, as the title of his book puts it.

Harriot begins the final section of the Report in an off-handed, almost dismissive way: “It

rests I speak a word or two of the natural inhabitants, their natures and manners, leaving large

discourse thereof until time more convenient hereafter” (126). Again, if we are initially puzzled

at the relative unimportance Natives are afforded in this text – certainly an enormous contrast

from most other early American writing – we soon learn the reason for this lack of emphasis: “In

anthologized as a paradigmatic example of new historicist literary criticism. See for

example, Rivkin and Ryan, eds.

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respect of us they are a people poor, and for want of skill and judgment in the knowledge and use

of our things, do esteem our trifles before things of greater value” (127 – 128). In other words,

the way Harriot begins his treatment of the native inhabitants of Roanoke Island is entirely in

keeping with the propagandist and exhortatory bent of the rest of his Report. As this final section

begins, the initial ethnographic observations he offers are framed within a discussion of their

direct relevance for the prosperity of future British colonists. The Natives, we learn, live in small

“towns” mostly by the sea coast, usually with only ten to twelve houses but sometimes as many

as twenty (127). The greatest Weroance, or “chief lord,” only commands about seven to eight

hundred fighting men and “the language of every government is different from any other” (127).

Thus, Harriot presents a reasonable case for why these natives would pose no enduring military

threat to a well-fortified European settlement: “If there fall out any wars between us and them,

what their fight is likely to be, we having advantages against them so many ways – as by our

discipline, our strange weapons and devices else, especially ordnance great and small – it may

easily be imagined” (127).

Pressing his case, Harriot moves from this description of European military superiority to

an emphasis on the soft power of religion and his “special familiarity with some of the priests”

(130). Indeed, Harriot’s sales pitch with regards to the future cooperation of the Natives in the

Colonist’s settlement and profit, such as it is, hinges not on military might – for Harriot and his

British contemporaries, sole reliance on brute force was equated with the well-documented

excesses of Spanish colonialism in the Americas and decried, at least in print – but rather on the

idea of winning the natives over to a voluntary and affable subservience predicated on their

conversion to Christianity:
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By how much they shall find our knowledges and crafts to exceed theirs in

perfection, and speed for doing or execution, by so much the more is it probable

that they should desire our friendship and love, and have the greater respect for

pleasing and obeying us. Whereby may be hoped, if means of good government

are used that they may in short time be brought to civility and the embracing of

the true religion. (128)

This “soft power” approach, not physical compulsion but coercion through other means, is

enacted precisely by Harriot’s attempt to evangelize the native Algonquians. After all, there are

commonalities between the Algonquian religion and the Christianity of the British. Though the

natives worship a pantheon of gods and keep images of them as idols, they nevertheless believe

in the immortality of the soul and also in heaven and hell.

A strange thing happens, however, when Harriot attempts to translate these

commonalities into outright missionary work. First, it should be noted that unlike sixteenth-

century Europeans, whose religion depends on claims of unique truth, the Algonquians are at

least in principle (and, of course, according to Harriot’s self-interested account of them) open to

embracing a new religion. Harriot writes of their “earnest desire to learn more” and their “no

small admiration” of what basic tenets of the Christian tradition as could be conveyed to them

through imperfect translation (130). And it seems to be precisely this problem in translation – a

struggle with the basic building blocks of wildly disparate languages, to be sure, but perhaps

even more a struggle with the difficulties of translating concepts across cultural barriers – that

begins to overwhelm Harriot’s missionary work:

Most things they saw with us, as mathematical instruments, sea compasses, the

virtue of the loadstone in drawing iron, a perspective glass whereby was shown
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many sights, burning glasses, wild fireworks, guns, hooks, writing and reading,

spring clocks that seem to go of themselves and many other things that we had

were so strange unto them. They so far exceeded their capacities to comprehend

the reason and means how they should be made and done that they thought they

were rather the works of gods than of men, or at least they had been given and

taught us by the gods. (130)

As David Beers Quinn aptly notes: “a description of the impact of a well-advanced Iron Age

culture on a Neolithic people has rarely been so sharply expressed” (Fox 19). In this specific

case, Harriot gives voice to a conundrum which crops up in various places within the archive of

early American encounter narratives: a difficulty in navigating the distinction between

admiration and worship, simple wonder and religious reverence. After all, we can imagine how

natural it would have been for Harriot and his fellows to encourage the perception that they were

under divine protection; a perception that does not fall outside the boundaries of Christian

orthodoxy. As Stephen Greenblatt observes, “the English, like virtually all sixteenth-century

Europeans in the New World, resisted or were incapable of provisioning themselves and in

consequence depended on the Indians for food, [thus] we may grasp the central importance for

the colonists of this dawning Indian fear of the Christian God” (29). But practical benefits

notwithstanding, for Harriot to allow the Algonquians to believe that the Europeans were

somehow themselves divine or for him to countenance the worship of man-made gadgets like

compasses, guns, and magnifying glasses, would have meant he was involved in a radical

disarticulation of Christian orthodoxy.

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Indeed, this flirtation with heresy is repeated in another cultural mistranslation which

comes hard on the heels of the first: rather than loving the bible for the divine message it brings,

the natives begin to worship the book itself as an idol:

Although I told them the book materially was not any such virtue as they did

conceive, but only the doctrine therein contained, yet would many be glad to

touch it, to embrace it, to kiss it, to hold it to their breasts and heads, and stroke

over all their body with it, to show their hungry desire of that knowledge which

was spoken of. (Rowse 130)82

In his reading of Harriot’s Brief and True Report, Stephen Greenblatt pays similar attention to

these moments when Harriot seems to walk a fine line between orthodoxy and subversion,

moments that all occur towards the very end of the Harriot’s text. For Greenblatt, these examples

need to be read through a lens of the imputations of atheism and Machiavellianism that hounded

Harriot throughout his public career as mathematician, explorer, and personal science advisor to

Sir Walter Raleigh. Of course, as Greenblatt admits: “charges of atheism leveled at Harriot or

anyone else in this period are difficult to assess, for such accusations were smear tactics, used

with reckless abandon against anyone whom the accuser happened to dislike” (21).

82
For an overview of the long and fascinating material history of the bible in the

exploration, settlement, and expansion of European peoples in North America, see

Charles Cohen’s essay, “Religion, Print Culture, and the Bible before 1876” in Religion

and the Culture of Print in Modern America (2008), edited by Charles Cohen and Paul

Boyer. For an analogous example of the bible’s status as idol eclipsing its role as textual

conduit to divinity, see John Marrant’s eighteenth century, A Narrative of the Lord’s

Wonderful Dealings with John Marrant, a Black, pages 26 – 28.

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However, there was one oft-repeated accusation that Greenblatt finds especially

suggestive in light of Harriot’s interaction with the Carolina Algonquians, an accusation that tells

us quite a lot about the concerns and anxieties of Elizabethans with respect to the amazing leaps

in scientific knowledge made during their lifetimes; namely, the accusation, leveled against

Christopher Marlowe in one well-documented instance, that he believed the miracles ascribed to

or associated with Moses in the Old Testament (e.g. the parting of the Red Sea, the burning bush,

turning a staff into a snake) were not, in fact, divinely inspired, but rather conjurer’s tricks made

possible by Moses’s knowledge of Egyptian magic. Thus, in his damning report of Marlowe’s

impious beliefs, Richard Baines testifies to Marlowe declaring that “Moses was but a Juggler,

and that one Heriots being Sir W Raleighs man Can do more than he” (Bakeless 1:111, qtd. in

Greenblatt 21).83

This specific imputation of impiety becomes very suggestive vis-à-vis Harriot’s

experiences in the New World once we consider, as Greenblatt does, the homology to be found

between Moses’s relationship with the Hebrews and Harriot’s relationship with the Algonquians.

Thus, the argument would be that Moses, the scion of a sophisticated and technologically

advanced culture, is easily able to awe the comparatively unsophisticated, untutored Hebrews, so

recently released from bondage, just as Harriot, the archetypal Renaissance man with his gadgets

and specialist knowledge, is able to inspire the reverence of the comparatively unsophisticated

and untutored Algonquians (Greenblatt 24). Framing this skepticism about Moses’s ability to

perform true miracles in the context of Machiavelli’s writings, Greenblatt notes: “one of the

83
As Greenblatt explains in a footnote: “Juggler [in this early modern context] is

a richly complex word, including in its range of associations con man, cheap entertainer,

magician, trickster, storyteller, conjurer, actor, dramatist” (FN 1, 167, his italics).
 162

Machiavellian arguments about religion that most excited the wrath of sixteenth-century

authorities [was that] Old Testament religion, and by extension the whole Judeo-Christian

tradition, originated in a series of clever tricks, fraudulent illusions perpetrated by Moses, who

had been trained in Egyptian magic, upon the ‘rude and gross’ (and hence credulous) Hebrews”

(24).

Here we come to the crux of Greenblatt’s argument about Harriot’s Brief and True

Report. Nothing Harriot ever wrote, whether letters, scientific papers, or any other documents,

indicates he was an atheist, but, as Greenblatt asserts, “atheism is not the only mode of

subversive religious doubt, and we cannot discount the persistent rumors of Harriot’s heterodoxy

by pointing to either his conventional professions of faith or the conventionality of the attacks

upon him” (23). For Greenblatt, then, one way to read Harriot’s text is as a test of the

Machiavellian hypothesis that the Judeo-Christian religion was created as a means of social

control, “a fraudulent imposition by cunning ‘jugglers’ on the ignorant” (26).

Thus, going back to the conundrum that I explained earlier between, on the one hand,

Harriot’s need to secure the cooperation of the natives and, on the other, the disarticulation of

Christian orthodox belief which securing that cooperation may have entailed, Greenblatt’s

position is that Harriot’s interaction with the Algonquians is radically subversive, but also that,

“[i]n the Virginia colony, the radical undermining of Christian order is not the negative limit but

the positive condition for the establishment of that order” (30). Greenblatt explains this apparent

paradox a bit further:

Harriot tests and seems to confirm the most radically subversive hypothesis in his

culture about the origin and function of religion by imposing his religion – with

its intense claims of transcendence, unique truth, inescapable coercive force – on

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others. Not only the official purpose but the survival of the English colony

depends upon this imposition. This crucial circumstance licensed the testing in the

first place; only as an agent of the English colony, dependent upon its purposes

and committed to its survival, is Harriot in a position to disclose the power of

human achievements – reading, writing, perspective glasses, gunpowder, and the

like – to appear to the ignorant as divine and hence to promote belief and compel

obedience. Thus the subversiveness that is genuine and radical . . . is at the same

time contained by the power it would appear to threaten. (30)

What Greenblatt offers us here is a skillful unravelling of the subversion / orthodoxy binary in

Harriot’s Report. But a question remains as to the nature of the containment mentioned in the

final sentence of this passage. After all, it seems too easy to accept that subversive doubt was

completely contained by the coercive mechanisms of Elizabethan power. As Greenblatt puts it,

with a rather dramatic flair, “[w]e simply do not know what was thought in silence, what was

written and then carefully burned, what was whispered by Harriot to Raleigh” (35).

Greenblatt’s argument, at its root, is that in Harriot’s Brief and True Report it is

ultimately impossible to parse the orthodox and the subversive, the sanctioned and the

transgressive. For example, Harriot’s attempts to convince the Roanoke chief, Wingina, of the

punitive power of a Christian god are both an effect of coercive control and also a necessary

precondition for conversion and eventual salvation. As Greenblatt puts it, “power, even in a

colonial situation, is not monolithic and hence may encounter and record on one of its functions

materials that can threaten another of its functions” and “English power in the first Virginia

colony depends upon the registering and even the production of potentially unsettling
 164

perspectives” (37, his emphasis). In other words, every discourse of authority sows the seeds of

its own subversion and it does this of necessity, as a precondition of its own hypostasis.

I certainly agree with Greenblatt that there is a wonderfully paradoxical logic at work

when we examine the way Harriot attempts to leverage religious authority in his dealings with

the Carolina Algonquians. In fact, one way to gloss Greenblatt’s argument up to this point is to

state that insofar as Harriot’s encounter with the natives is radically subversive, it is so because it

represents a troping of what Greenblatt terms the “Christian order.” To borrow once again from

Hayden White: “troping is both movement from one notion of the way things are related to

another notion, and a connection between things so that they can be expressed in a language that

takes account of the possibility of their being expressed otherwise” (Tropics of Discourse 2). The

potential subversion in Harriot’s text comes from the possibility that he is using Christianity as a

discourse of authority in ways that are different from its sanctioned uses as such (i.e. to baldly

manipulate potential converts or, even more subversively, to test a working hypothesis about the

illegitimacy of its own foundation).

III. Three Versions of Time in Harriot’s Report

It is important to keep in mind that for Greenblatt this entire line of argument about the

Report is ultimately a means to an end – and that end is the ability to “construct an interpretive

model that may be used to understand the far more complex problem posed by Shakespeare’s

history plays” (23, my emphasis). Consequently, as we have seen, Greenblatt wants to read The

Brief and True Report as a particularly apt example of an identifiable (though certainly

counterintuitive, even paradoxical) feature of social life in Elizabethan England; namely, the
 165

mutually constitutive relationship between subversion and orthodoxy within discourses of

authority.

Greenblatt’s reading of Harriot has been most recently and most emphatically critiqued

by Ed White in his 2005 PMLA article, “Invisible Tagkanysough.” White’s chief complaint is

that Greenblatt ignores the Algonquian presence in Harriot’s text. For White, Greenblatt’s

reading forecloses any possibility of learning something about the contact between the

Europeans and the Native Americans, a position that “codifies an agnosticism about Native

Americans, most evident today in the near absence of critical studies of Native American myths”

(756). White insists that just because we do not have a complete view of Algonquian cultural

systems does not mean we should ignore the Algonquian presence in the text altogether. “[For

Greenblatt] [t]o say something about the Native American response [to the English] is out of the

question, for this would imply saying everything about their culture – a possibility for ‘them,’ an

impossibility for the literary critic” (756). White seeks to counteract Greenblatt’s reading by

offering his own scholarly treatment of Harriot’s Report in which he argues that the text reveals

“the occasional intrusion of an Algonkian counterethnography in which [Harriot’s] famous

invisible bullets commentary must be situated” (753).

Though I am not concerned with the circulation of social energy in Renaissance England

but instead with the different ways that the trope of time is organized in Harriot’s text, I

nevertheless remain indebted to Greenblatt’s treatment of the Brief and True Report in “Invisible

Bullets.” After all, both time and power (the Foucauldian trope guiding Greenblatt’s reading of

the Report) are forms for parsing and making sense of reality. But even as I continue to profit

from Greenblatt’s insights about the heterodoxy behind Harriot’s troping of the “Christian order”
 166

in the Report, I will also be making use of the way Ed White locates an Algonquian presence in

the text, a counter-ethnography that reveals a different narrative heterodoxy.

Going back to our primary text, an interesting shift happens as it begins to reach its

conclusion. Up to this point, Harriot is quite didactic in his descriptions of the various fruits,

plants, soil conditions, animals, and building materials available in Virginia that may be turned

into commodities or otherwise used to the advantage of future colonists. Even when Harriot

finally devotes a complete section of his report to describing the Native American population of

Roanoke and its environs, he retains this formula, focusing on subjects of strategic importance

for a future colony like, for example, Algonquian war-making ability, size and layout of towns,

and general disposition of the natives vis-à-vis the Europeans. However, the didactic thread

running through most of the Report loses its cohesion as the challenges of translation and inter-

cultural communication begin to mount towards the end of the text (here we might think of the

difficulties Montaigne encounters in Rouen when attempting to communicate with the

Tupínamba).

We have already touched on the ways in which Harriot navigates (an apt metaphor, given

his mathematical skills and training) the practical needs of his expedition for food and

cooperation from the Algonquians and the borderline heresy which inspiring worship in those

same Algonquians (and thus unequivocally satisfying those material needs) entails. In addition,

as the text nears its conclusion, Harriot consciously departs from his narrative strategy of

supplying useful, practical information in order to relate what he calls a “rare and strange

accident;” an incident that, as he remarks, is but one example of many such strange occurrences

(131).
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This curiosity is observed by Harriot as he travels around the coastal lands and estuaries

of what is today North Carolina. These travels were extensive by necessity: Harriot’s chief

mission during his year in Virginia was to produce accurate maps of its coastline. On most of

these excursions, he would have been accompanied by John White whose precise drawing

abilities were necessary to render the soundings and observations taken by Harriot as well as by a

party of armed escorts, probably six to ten, charged with keeping them both safe in their work.

Here is the way Harriot relates “the rare and strange accident” he observes during one of these

surveying trips:

There was no town where we had any subtle device practiced against us, we

leaving it unpunished or not revenged (because we sought by all means possible

to win them by gentleness) but that, within a few days after our departure, the

people began to die very fast, and many in short space, in some Towns about

twenty, in some forty, and in one six score: which in truth was very many in

respect of their numbers. This happened in no place that we could learn, but

where we had been where they used some practice against us, and after such time.

The disease was also so strange, that they neither knew what it was, nor how to

cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the Country never happened before,

time out of mind. A thing especially observed by us, as also by the natural

inhabitants themselves. (131)

This modern reader will immediately identify the cause of these Algonquian deaths as a result of

their lack of immunity to European diseases. Accordingly, to us Harriot’s intimation that the

disease only afflicted those native villages where there had been some “subtle device” practiced

against the Europeans seems dubious. It seems far more likely, given what we know today about
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communicable disease, that this serious infection would have impacted all native communities

the Europeans came across, albeit perhaps to differing degrees. In light of this conclusion we

come to as modern readers who are aware of the devastating effects that first contact with

Europeans had on the health of many Native American populations, we come to see a history

taking place here that is different from the one Harriot presents. His troubling conflation of cause

and effect – the villages that were hit by illness must have been the ones guilty of deceptive

practices towards the English – has an equally troubling upshot: the natives are suffering because

they deserve to suffer. In fact, Harriot is hinting, if not claiming outright, that the Algonquians

afflicted with this illness have been singled out to suffer by God as punishment for their

(relatively petty, it seems) sins against Christians.

For Greenblatt, Harriot’s use of the Algonquian deaths as proof of the existence of

“secret conspiracies” is nothing more than a testament to “the wonderful self-validating

circularity that characterizes virtually all powerful constructions of reality” (36). And Harriot’s

claims here (much like certain facets of Léry’s History) certainly do possess “a self-validating

circularity;” one in which effect works to validate cause. Moreover, when taken at face value,

these claims neatly correspond to the overarching goals of the rest of the Report. Indeed, it is

easy to imagine the reassuring effect that this anecdote might have had on prospective colonists:

even in distant lands populated by idol-worshipping heathen, the Christian God will take care of

His own. But though Greenblatt is quite correct to point out the “self-validating circularity”

involved in this passage, his characterization of this feature as simply a commonplace in

“virtually all powerful constructions of reality” is perfunctory and unsatisfying.

I want to argue that this example of inverted causality in Harriot’s narrative does

substantially more than merely illustrate the self-authenticating discursive momentum of power
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qua power, as Greenblatt would have us believe. For one thing, Harriot’s providential narrative

above, while offering divine intervention as a possible explanation for Algonquian deaths, is far

from unequivocal in its assertions of such. Leaving aside Greenblatt’s speculations about

Harriot’s atheism, we do know the man was a trained scientist and mathematician; he was a

navigator, astronomer, and algebraist. Taking this background into account, we might notice,

after a second glance, that Harriot constructs the passage above not as the triumphal assertion of

divine intervention we might expect from a true believer extolling the powers of his God, but

rather as a series of measured observations we might expect from a scientist in the midst of

recording his findings. In addition, none of these observations are explicitly linked for the reader.

And though the passage does implicitly suggest a retributory mechanism sustained by divine

providence, it almost seems as though Harriot comes to this explanation because it is the only

one available to him given what he knows.

It is also noteworthy that Harriot attempts to find some precedent for this event in

Algonquian tribal memory – “The disease was also so strange, that they neither knew what it

was, nor how to cure it, the like by report of the oldest men in the Country never happened

before, time out of mind” (131) – but not in European history, a history that was rife with

examples of plagues very similar to the affliction he witnesses as he travels around the Roanoke

area. In fact, the largest recorded outbreak of Bubonic Plague in England happened during

Harriot’s lifetime, in 1665-1666. 84 Of course, as Harriot makes sure to let us know, he and his

fellow countrymen were not susceptible to this mysterious illness. Keeping the ultimate purpose

84
For more information on the sixteenth century Bubonic Plague outbreak in

England, see Charles Mullett’s The Bubonic Plague in England: An Essay in the History

of Preventive Medicine.
 170

of the Report in mind, we might well see why Harriot kept whatever speculations he may have

had on this commonality between plague and what had befallen the Algonquians to himself.

In order to make sense of this passage, I am going to borrow an interpretive model from

Myra Jehlen, who is in turn borrowing it from Bruno Latour’s work on the history of science.

Latour defines the process of scientific discovery in two ways: “science in the making” and

“ready-made science” (Jehlen “History Before the Fact” 690). But it is this first definition that

concerns us. As Jehlen explains:

The first definition describes the process of finding or making scientific

advances fraught with uncertainties, redundancies, and contingencies.

Scientific progress is thus underdetermined: there is never enough

evidence to make certain an exploration of observed phenomena. An

explanation becomes certain only after it is made, at which point it appears

“just enough determined” and seems forevermore the inevitable outcome

of an entirely coherent and meaningful evolution. (Jehlen “History” 690,

her italics)

Jehlen follows up her explanation of “science in the making” by suggesting an analogous mode

of history-making: “history before the fact” (690). As she explains, “Like science in the making,

history before the fact is uncertain, apparently redundant, and contingent; only retrospectively

does it take on direction and determination” (690). Keeping this definition of “history before the

fact” in mind, I would like to suggest that rather than revealing the design of a partisan Christian

God, Harriot’s inversion of cause and effect in his explanation of Algonquian deaths above

reveals, retrospectively, the process of constructing history, a process that depends on the same

false starts, vacillations, and misapprehensions attendant to scientific experimentation but that,
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crucially, is never allowed to indulge in this epistemological uncertainty. Even as Harriot

superadds inconclusive observation upon inconclusive observation, his cautious tone is annealed

– given “direction and determination,” as Myra Jehlen puts it – by an official discourse of

“truth;” a discourse, as we have seen, sustained by a litany of truth claims in the title, primary

frontispiece, prefatory letters, and main written text of the Report. As Jehlen explains elsewhere,

“[i]n the construction of a history, tautology expresses itself as teleology, depicting the past such

that it leads to what we already know to be its future” (“History Before the Fact” 681). What

Harriot’s suturing of effect and cause above reveals, then, is a particular way of organizing time

as “history before the fact,” a narrative in which hypotheses are already certainties and tautology,

redundancy, and contingency are retrospectively subsumed by linear chronology.

Going back to the passage above, this “marvelous accident,” as Harriot calls it, gives his

party a supernatural aura: “Some people could not tell whether to think us gods or men, and the

rather because that all the space of their sickness, there was no man of our known to die, or that

was specially sick” (131). Of particular interest to us is the way in which some Algonquians

interpret these signs of special favor:

Some therefore were of opinion that we were not born of women, and therefore

not mortal; but that we were men of an old generation many years past, then risen

again to immortality. Some would likewise seem to prophesy that there were

more of our generation yet to come to kill theirs and take their places, as some

thought the purpose was, by that which was already done. Those that were

immediately to come after us they imagined to be in the air, yet invisible and

without bodies, and that they by our entreaty and for the love of us, did make the

people to die in that sort as they did, by shooting invisible bullets inside them . . .
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Some also thought that we shot them ourselves out of our pieces from the place

where we dwelt, and killed the people in any such town that had offended us as

we listed, however far distant from us they might have been. (132 - 133)

Though my primary interest in this passage lies in its representation of prophecy, it is important

to begin our analysis of it by noting that it is not entirely given over to predicting the future.

Indeed, it is a remarkable passage not only because of its famous reference to invisible bullets

but also because it engages with past, future, and present in virtually equal measures. At the

beginning of the passage, some Algonquians guess Harriot and his cohort of fellow Englishmen

to be “men of an old generation many years past.” As the passage continues, the designs of the

Englishmen are projected forward in time: “Some would likewise seem to prophesy that there

were more of our generation yet to come to kill theirs and take their places, as some thought the

purpose was, by that which was already done.” At the end of the passage, it is the Englishmen’s

activities in the present moment that elicit speculation: “Some also thought that we shot them

ourselves out of our pieces . . . and killed the people in any such town that had offended us.”

For Greenblatt, Harriot’s decision to include this Native American perspective at the end

of his report is another compelling example of the interdependence between subversion and

orthodoxy in the Brief and True Report and, more generally, of this interdependence within the

“self-validating, totalizing character of Renaissance political theology” (38). For Ed White, on

the other hand, this passage is noteworthy because it allows us to see a “counter-ethnography”

that reveals:

an Algonkian conviction that, to interpret the deaths, the Indians must first

situate the English with respect to the sexual relations, nonhuman beings,

and the Algonkians themselves; the Indians too must undertake an

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ethnographic analysis, one that also collates such dimensions of European

life as sexuality, warfare, health, and religion. (758)

Thus, according to White, these Algonquian speculations about the English as, at once, long-

lived ancestors, harbingers of a deadly future, and present tormentors are an attempt to situate

them in a familiar social and cosmic framework. It is important to note here that White’s reading

of the Algonquians as ethnographers trying to understand the English reverses the polarity, so to

speak, of traditional, canonical first-contact encounter narratives between Europeans and Native

Americans. Indeed, adapting a critical term from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, White

positions the Algonquians not only as ethnographers in their own right, studying the English in

order to make sense of them, but as bricoleurs, piecing together an interpretation about the

English and their purpose from a host of different cultural resources (758). As he explains:

The power of Harriot’s explication is that it beautifully reveals the processes of

association and revision at work in the Indian accounts: dying is associated with

women and reproduction, which implies a different concept of generations, which

suggests rival sensibilities of time and place, which evokes invisibility and the

habitation of the air, and so on . . . If these native accounts are at places

contradictory or seemingly unconnected, they nonetheless suggest an interpretive

string extending from the English through the bullets to the Indian bodies. (758)

White is quick to admit that this interpretation is necessarily fragmented and incomplete and that

the glimpses of Algonquian culture that we are getting through Harriot’s text are filtered through

the host of Harriot’s goals and prerogatives as writer of the Report. As he insists, “the critical

challenge thus becomes making sense of these fragments without taking on the false burden of

speaking comprehensively for Native American agents” (758). What is especially compelling
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about White’s reading of this incident and, more generally, of Harriot’s Report as a whole, is his

attempt to bring an alternative history to the surface, one that seeks to recover, within limits, a

Native American response to Harriot and his fellow Englishmen.

In his reading of this particular incident, however, White does not account for what

remains, to me, the most titillating and pressing issue in the passage above: how are we to read

this Algonquian response to the English in light of the different temporalities it offers us and,

more specifically, in light of the prophecy contained in it? As modern readers, it is of course the

accuracy of this prophetic message that immediately strikes us. After all, the history of the

European presence in North America is a history of Europeans killing Native Americans and

taking their place. Similarly, “invisible bullets” is an eerily accurate description of exactly how

we have come to understand the spread of communicable disease. Thus, one possible way of

understanding this passage is to take it at face value: some Algonquians were indeed witness to a

prophetic vision, one that foretold the replacement of their tribe by the English.85 Here time is

organized as a future state of events that is already determined. Just as White’s reading of the

85
I do not mean to imply that this particular tribal group of Algonquian-speakers

was exterminated to the last person by contact with the English. But as a palpable

example of how the English have “taken the places” of the Indians, let us consider the

publicly listed names of the tribal elders alive today who trace their ancestors to the

Roanoke-Hatteras and Mettamuskeet Alongonquian-speaking tribes that originally had

contact with Harriot’s expedition: Joseph Berry, William C. Bowser, H. Zack Collins,

Huebert Collins, Izetta Bowser, Delma Meekins, Augusta Collins, John Tillet

(http://www.ncalgonquians.com/).
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Algonquians as bricoleur ethnographers in the final section of Harriot’s Report upends the

unidirectionality of Atlantic world representative practices, this Algonquian prophecy upends

history altogether; as a rational discourse, history can account for failed prophets but not for real

ones.

As we have seen with the previous two examples, time is no longer flowing forward as

cause and effect in this text: we have moved from the “self-validating circularity” of Harriot’s

diffident attempts to explain Algonquian deaths as a function of divine retribution to this

prophecy voiced by unnamed Algonquians; from “history before the fact,” a closed narrative

loop in which the contingencies and inconsistencies of immediate experience are ellided and

absorbed as historical narrative, to an entelechy in which both causes and effects are somehow

already both determined and fulfilled. And though this particular prophetic vision on the part of

some Algonquians effectively marks the end of the main written text of the Report, its 1590

edition continues with a long and detailed series of engravings and captions. Our third and final

example of the different ways the trope of time is represented in the Report is taken from these

engravings.

The majority of these twenty-nine engravings (twenty-three of the twenty-nine, to be

exact) are largely composed of ethnographic depictions of the Carolina Algonquians. Though

these twenty-three images are much more finely drawn and carefully engraved than the images

that accompany the first edition of Jean de Léry’s History of a Voyage, they do represent many

of the same common everyday scenes. Among these are portraits of individuals from different

rungs of Algonquian society, such as image number three, “a weroan or great Lorde of Virginia,”

image number nine, “An ageed manne in his winter garment,” and image number eleven, “The

Coniurer.” This group of engravings also features common scenes of Algonquian life, such as
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image seventeen, “Their manner of prainge with Rattels abowt te fyer.” Finally, we are also

treated to images depicting entire villages from above, such as image nineteen, “The Tovvne of

Pomeiooc” and image twenty, “The Tovvne of Secota,” which is itself intricately labeled with a

letter system and corresponding descriptions.

As I have mentioned, this group of twenty-three engravings, engravings that appear listed

and numbered on a table of contents at the beginning of the appendix, make up most but not all

of the supplementary engravings to be found in the 1590 De Bry edition of the Report. These

twenty-three engravings are effectively framed by six other engravings that are not numbered or

listed on the table of contents. The first of these non-numbered engravings precedes all of the

other engravings and can be found immediately after the table of contents. It is a frontispiece

depicting Adam and Eve at the tree of knowledge just before the fruit is taken (Fig.4).86 In the

foreground of the image, a lion lies next to a mouse and rabbit, emblematizing the harmony of

paradise (Hadfield “Bruited Abroad” 166).

Contemplating the ideological significance of this opening frontispiece, Andrew Hadfield

posits that, “the illustration provides a sense of drama and wonder to the subsequent images,

86
Since these descriptions and corresponding captions only appear in the Thoedor

De Bry 1590 edition of the Report, my quotations now come from Paul Hulton’s 1972

Dover reprint of that edition. Note that the English in this edition is not modernized as it

is in the Rowse edition. Note also that the image numbers come from the original De Bry

edition and are inscribed in a table of contents at the beginning of the appendix. Finally,

also note that while Harriot writes the captions for the numbered engravings, De Bry

himself writes the textual material that accompanies the remaining six unnumbered

images.
 177

relating the European discovery of the Americas to the fall of mankind” (“Bruited Abroad” 166).

But this link between the Fall and the European presence in the Americas is open to a variety of

different interpretations. On the one hand, De Bry’s overall project in his multi-volume work,

America, was to promote and sustain Protestant colonizing efforts in the New World, efforts that

would be fueled in part by missionary zeal. Therefore, it is easy to see how this image might

create a connection between Virginia and Eden, thereby implicitly endorsing the Algonquians as

innocents ripe for conversion. Andrew Hadfield ties this frontispiece image to the larger

promotional goals of the Report (and, less directly, to the even more ambitious promotional goals

of De Bry’s America) when he states that “Algonkian life – and, by an implicitly logical

extension, the life new colonists would be able to enjoy in the Americas – provides mankind

with all the benefits of the simple rural life advocated in biblical and classical literature, even if it

is georgic rather than pastoral” (“Ethnography and Ideology” 204).

Hadfield’s point here is well taken. But we must also keep in mind that the story of the

Garden of Eden is not a happy story. Thus, while appreciating the connections between Eden and

the New World, it is also impossible to ignore the profound ambivalence that this image conveys

about that relationship. Indeed, if this engraving can be said to place the Algonquians in the role

of innocents who have not yet tasted the fruit of knowledge, then it also implicitly figures the

English in the serpent’s role. Part of the ambivalence and indeterminability of this depiction may

be attributed to De Bry’s own competing goals in his New World representations: he was

invested in both decrying Catholic brutality and abuse of power while also promoting Protestant

settlement.87 As we have noted, while these goals were not mutually exclusive they also proved

87
De Bry, it should be noted, much like Jean de Léry, was a direct victim of

Catholic persecution.
 178

Figure 4. “Adam and Eve.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of

Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition. New York: Dover,

1972. 39.
 179

far from mutually inclusive (n.b. FN 75 above). But what I find particularly alluring about this

image is that, read a certain way, it depicts the origins of history; or, at least, a teleological,

Christian version of history. In other words, while Adam and Eve are still in a state of innocence,

there is no call for history, but the moment they are cast forth from the Garden, history has to

begin.

And if this Edenic image represents the origins of a particular version of history while

also preceding the twenty-three numbered images of Roanoke in the material text, then it is

certainly also worthwhile to consider it in conjunction with the five remaining unnumbered

engravings that appear at the very end of the 1590 folio; five engravings that are also originary

images in their way. These five images consist of three “Pictures of the Pictes which in the Olde

tyme dyd habite one part of great Bretainne,” and the two illustrations of “neighbour[s] unto the

Picte,” which conclude the sequence (Figs. 5-9). As Andrew Hadfield explains, “the first point of

note is that the emphasis is placed on the Picts. Their ‘neighbours’, who appear to be

considerably more civilized, are obviously the Britons” (“Bruited Abroad” 166).

Why end this account of New World exploration with images of these different groups of

“natives” from Europe? We may begin an answer to this question by noting that while the

numbered engravings of the Algonquians in Roanoke show them engaged in civilized tasks such

as fishing, agriculture, and prayer, the images of the Picts in particular differ starkly in this

regard. They are ferocious and aggressive, their bodies decorated with tattoos. In the first image

of the set, a Pict warrior holds a severed head. The “neighbours” of the Picts, on the other hand,

are represented in a much more familiar, and thus civilized, manner. Andrew Hadfield sees an

allegory for Scottish and Catholic cultural and moral stagnation in this representation of the Picts

as warlike and savage. As he points out, “[i]t is extremely unlikely that any of those associated
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Figure 5. “True Picture of one Pict.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the New Found

Land of Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition. New York:

Dover, 1972. 77.

 181

Figure 6. “True Picture of a Woman Pict.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the New

Found Land of Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition. New

York: Dover, 1972. 78.

 182

Figure 7. “Young Daughter of the Picts.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the New

Found Land of Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition. New

York: Dover, 1972. 81.

 183

Figure 8. “Man of nation neighbor to the Pict.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the

New Found Land of Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition.

New York: Dover, 1972. 83.

 184

Figure 9. “Woman Neighbor to the Pict.” Thomas Harriot. A Brief and True Report of the New

Found Land of Virginia. Ed. Paul Hulton. The Complete 1590 Theodor De Bry Edition. New

York: Dover, 1972. 85.

 185

with publication of De Bry’s version of Harrot’s Report would have been in favor of a Stuart [i.e.

Catholic, Scottish] claim to the throne” (“Bruited Abroad” 173).

Clearly the parallel intended here is between the Algonquians and the “neighbours” of the

Picts, the Britons. And so we arrive at a full view of the version of history that is embedded

through the organization of both the numbered and unnumbered engravings in the 1590 edition

of Harriot’s Report. Though there is no linear timeline in evidence here, these groups of images

do create a historical narrative. If Eden marks the beginning of history and the Britons mark a

point in history during which the inhabitants of the land that would one day become England

were still progressing towards full development, still in need of conversion and tutelage, then the

images set in Virginia place the Carolina Algonquians along this same historical continuum.

They lag behind the civilized English of Harriot’s day, to be sure, but they are on a path towards

the same future. What better reassurance could a prospective colonist receive?

As we have seen, Harriot’s Report is a heterodox text that unveils glimpses of an

Algonquian counterethnography alongside its determined promotional and exhortatory message.

The primary focus of my analysis has been to demonstrate how the Report reveals multiple ways

of organizing the trope of time. De Bry’s arrangement of the engravings that serve as a de facto

appendix to the 1590 edition of the Report presents a teleological vision of history, with the

English and Algonquians both moving forward in time along the same continuum of progress

and development. But the text also reveals other moments of history-making that contest this

teleological organization of time. When Harriot conflates cause and effect in attempting to

explain the reason many Algonquians are sick and dying, he demonstrates the creation of what

Myra Jehlen calls “history before the fact,” a way of organizing time as history whereby the
 186

indeterminability of immediate experience and observation is retroactively fixed as historical

fact. Harriot’s Report also leaves us with an enigma: how do we read history alongside prophecy

and, in particular, accurate prophecy? Can prophecy, like the ferocious Picts in De Bry’s

engravings whose savage appearance renders the Ancient Britons civilized by comparison, be

understood as history’s own savage other? Indeed, in one sense it seems it is the role of the

engravings and the teleological narrative that they promote to contain the alternative histories in

the main text of the Report, to make sure that Harriot’s version of events is itself retroactively

reconciled with the overarching purpose of the Protestant Anglophone colonizing mission.

IV. The Land that Bears Fruit Before Flowers

The need was never greater of new revelation than now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Divinity School Address, 1838

I want to begin this final section by harkening back to the way this chapter began with a

consideration of how each of my primary texts displays a scene of lost knowledge. Like these

much earlier texts, The Book of Mormon, first published in 1830 by Joseph Smith, a treasure-

digger turned holy man, also offers a scene of lost knowledge: the irretrievable loss of the first

116 translated pages of the text two years before its original publication date. Martin Harris,

Joseph Smith’s early confidant and scribe, persuaded Smith to let him take the first 116 pages of

the Book of Mormon from Susquehanna County in Pennsylvania to Palmyra, NY in June of

1828. Harris wanted to prove to his family that Joseph Smith was a legitimate prophet and

reasoned that there was no better way to do this than to present them with the manuscript.

However, Harris broke his promise to Smith to only show the pages to his family and when

Smith arrived in upstate New York later that summer, the pages had disappeared, never to be
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recovered, and Smith had to begin his work of translating the gold tablets anew. Conveniently

enough, however, Smith received a revelation that told him to begin his work of translation with

a different section of the tablets. Once again we encounter this trope of a text that vanishes and

reappears or is destroyed and then reconstituted.

In beginning with this example, however, it is also important to consider the story of the

book’s original unearthing (as a set of golden plates) and divinely-inspired translation88 by

Joseph Smith. Indeed, if the material history of the book involves lost knowledge, the broader

history of Mormonism is centered around precisely the opposite: the rediscovery of knowledge

that was previously lost. This process of rediscovery began, of course, with Smith’s uncovering

of a sacred history of the ancient Americas inside a hill in Palmyra, New York. As we will see,

the eventual fruits of this excavation, The Book of Mormon, reveals itself to its devotees as both

divine prophecy and accurate historical record.

Before I delve into this question of the roles of past and future in The Book of Mormon, I

want to first posit a connection between one of the versions of time we explored in Harriot’s

Report, the inversion of causality evinced in his creation of “history before the fact,” and

manifest destiny: a United States ideological effect that has always depended on a homologous

inversion of cause and effect for its hypostasis, justification, and naturalization. And if Harriot’s

88
Note the similarity between translation and Hayden White’s definition of

troping as, “both movement from one notion of the way things are related to another

notion, and a connection between things so that they can be expressed in a language that

takes account of the possibility of their being expressed otherwise” (Tropics of Discourse

2). Also, see my reading of William Childers’s use the prefix trans- in the introduction,

pages 19-20.
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Report, written and thrice-published in the late sixteenth century, may be plumbed for the

beginnings of a hallucinatory genealogy of American history-making as manifest destiny, then

Joseph Smith’s The Book of Mormon, a text significantly marked by the political and religious

heterodoxy of the newly constituted United States,89 represents one possible culminating moment

of that genealogy, a moment in which ancient history and national destiny are conflated in the

reemerging figurae of prophecy and the prophet.

Indeed, though “figure” and “trope” may be interchangeable in most contexts, I will use

the term figure in this fourth section very self-consciously and that is because it contains a

temporal element. As David Mikics explains, the term figura refers to “the interpretive process,

especially in scripture, by which a prototype is fulfilled by a later event or character . . . For the

Christian reader, the events of the New Testament must be prefigured in the Old; what was

obscure in the scripture of the Jews has now been revealed” (121). Erich Auerbach adds that,

“Paul and the Church fathers reinterpreted the entire Jewish tradition as a succession of figures

prognosticating the appearance of Christ” (16). The figura, in this sense, is a trope that organizes

89
It is important to note here at this early moment of my engagement with The

Book of Mormon that I will not be reading the text in the same way that Latter Day Saints

do: as a sacred history written and edited by a team of ancient historian-prophets and later

unearthed and translated by Joseph Smith with divine assistance. Rather, my

interpretation of The Book of Mormon depends on understanding it as a “thoroughly

imagined work” (Hardy “Introduction” x) from the mind of Joseph Smith, an individual

who, in the words of Sidney Ahlstrom, “exhibit[ed] an almost uncanny sensitivity to the

yearnings and frustrations that underlay the religious turmoil of his age” (501).
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time as repeating history. In the Christian tradition, of course, this organization has the purpose

of assigning all occurences their proper place in the divine plan.

In what remains of this chapter, I will try to demonstrate that the example of “history

before the fact” that we identified in Harriot’s Report can be reimagined as a figura in precisely

this sense: a temporal trope that reoccurs in the archive of Anglophone North America. I will

begin to trace this reoccurring figure by positing a genealogical thread between Harriot’s Report

and The Book of Mormon. It is important to remember, however, that this figure, as we initially

encounter it in Harriot’s Report, consists of a two-step process. First, as we see in Harriot’s

account of Algonquian deaths, there is the folding of time in on itself, the substitution of effect

for cause. Next, there is the retroactive reconciliation of that temporal incongruity with the linear

narrative and the context that surround it, the creation of a “history before the fact” to account for

those Algonquian deaths.

I will argue that there is something of this two-fold process also present in The Book of

Mormon, a text whose very physical existence was promoted by Smith’s early acolytes as a

palpable sign indicating future events (i.e. the coming Millennium) and yet is itself completely

given over to narrating a sacred, buried history of America’s pre-Columbian inhabitants: the

Jaredites, Nephites, and Lamanites. In addition, if we think back to the work of early Christians

scholars in figuring Christianity as a reform of Judaism and also as its inevitable consummation,

we find a very similar logic at work in Mormonism’s relationship to the Christian tradition. In

the words of Fawn Brodie, “Joseph’s . . . was a real religious creation, one intended to be to

Christianity what Christianity was to Judaism” (qtd. in Ahlstrom 502). After offering some

historical background and an overview of the narrative structure of The Book of Mormon, I will

examine the way Smith constructs his own “history before the fact.” The first part of this process
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can be found in a pattern that Smith establishes in his narrative, a narrative that sustains various

overlapping timelines recounted by various different narrators who are also, at different times,

editors of their own and other storylines. This temporal and perspectival variety allows Smith to

create a series of already-fulfilled prophecies in the book; a series of closed, self-justifying loops

of signification. These already-fulfilled prophecies in the pages of The Book of Mormon were

used to underwrite the sacred status of the book itself as a material object and also Smith’s own

access to divine knowledge in the shape of future revelations that would be instrumental in

shaping the development of the early Mormon Church.

Just as The Brief and True Report and The Book of Mormon exhibit their own versions of

inverted time, so too does the most intoxicating master narrative of United States self-fashioning

– manifest destiny – exhibit a potent narrative glitch lodged in the very fabric of its teleology: a

feedback loop where effect determines cause, where meaning and form preexist the conditions

that have led to their hypostasis. Indeed, one of the many striking features of The Book of

Mormon is the way its version of the history of the ancient Americas effectively erases Native

Americans by re-imagining them as the Lamanites: the profligate darker race who eventually

destroy the more virtuous Nephites. Moreover, according to The Book of Mormon, before the

arrival of the precursors of these two groups around 600 B.C.E.,90 America was completely

90
The third group to populate the ancient Americas was the Jaredites, a pre-

Hebraic people who came to the New World after the fall of the Tower of Babel but who

did not manage to survive until the time when the Lehi’s family, including his son,

Nephi, and his brothers Lemuel and Laman (the progenitors of the Nephites and

Lamanites), arrived in America from Judea, by way of Arabia (Hardy “Introduction” x).

However, the Jaredites were scrupulous record-keepers and the Nephites learned of their
 191

empty of all human population. Thus, if Harriot’s Report contains a prophecy of “replacement”

of one group of Native Americans by the English, Smith’s ancient history of the Americas

contains the comprehensive effacement of all Native Americans and, in time, their substitution

by Ancient Judeans.

As a final preamble before I begin to unpack this figure of “history the fact” cum

manifest destiny, I want to offer a word of caution. It is important to keep in mind that this final

section is neither intended to be an exhaustive survey of the presence of this repeating figure in

North American colonial history and antebellum U.S. history, nor is it intended to represent a

complete investigation of The Book of Mormon in all of its multiplicity and variety, a project that

would be well beyond my scope here. Rather, what I hope to accomplish here, as in the previous

chapters, is to offer an alternative, hallucinatory way of imagining the history of European

contact with the Americas. This chapter is unique because it marks the most substantive

engagement with the category of the nation state in this dissertation. In light of this opportunity, I

will end this chapter by placing the figure we are tracing here within a framework of current

literary scholarship that focuses on understanding the role of time in the context of United States

self-fashioning. In this vein, I will suggest that this figure we have been tracing might allow us to

imagine how this scholarly conversation about hegemonic discourses of time can be extended

beyond the boundaries of the nation state.

existence around 120 B.C.E. Thus, an abbreviated history of the Jaredites is offered by

one of The Book of Mormon’s principal prophet-historians, Moroni, in the book of Ether;

another example of the many ways the narrative of The Book of Mormon works along a

series of alternating historical timelines.

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A good place to begin a discussion about The Book of Mormon is to note that the book is

primarily given over to telling the story of a small group of Ancient Israelites who left Jerusalem

immediately before it was sacked by the Babylonians and proceeded to wander around the

Arabian peninsula for some time before eventually sailing to the New World, where they arrived

some time around 600 B.C.E. The story of this journey and of the civilization founded by these

refugees has three principal narrators: Nephi, Mormon and Moroni.91 As any non-initiated reader

of the text can attest, the key challenge of the story is in parsing and identifying these three

distinct voices. Grant Hardy further illustrates this problem:

Time and again, in trying to discern patterns and organization, I came up against

the narrators, who are quite unlike the anonymous storytellers of the Hebrew

bible. In the Book of Mormon, Nephi, Mormon and Moroni are major characters

themselves, and each has a distinct life story, perspective, set of concerns, style,

sensibility. . . the starting point for all serious readers of the Book of Mormon has

to be the recognition that it is first and foremost a narrative, offered to us by

specific, named narrators. Every detail and incident in the book has to be weighed

against their intentions and rhetorical strategies. (xiv – xv)

91
As noted, Nephi is the progenitor of the Nephites and is alive around 600

B.C.E. Mormon and his son Moroni are the last surviving Nephites and they bury their

chronicles in C.E. 384, almost one-thousand years after Nephi arrived in the New World.

This scheme does leave out a handful of minor narrators in the books of Jacob, Enos,

Jarom, and Omni, but these writers account for only about twenty-five pages of the over

five hundred pages of the original 1830 edition of The Book of Mormon.
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According to its own account, most of The Book of Mormon’s fifteen books were collated and

abridged by the prophet-historian Mormon (Moroni’s father), after whom the book is named. In

addition to having multiple narrators, The Book of Mormon is split into four distinct sections: the

Small Plates of Nephi, Mormon’s explanatory comments, Mormon’s abridgement of the Large

Plates, and Moroni’s additions. Adding further to the potential for confusion, a considerable

portion of the book consists of the revision and reorganization of previous sections. That is to

say, as we have noted, each of the principle narrators is also an editor. Here is how Richard

Bushman describes the multilayered texture of the work:

In his narrative, derived from the available source materials, [Mormon] quotes

other prophets and sometimes quotes them quoting still others. Moroni interjects a

letter from his father, and Nephi inserts lengthy passages from previous

scriptures. Mormon moves in and out of the narrative, pointing up a crucial

conclusion or addressing readers with a sermon his own. Almost always two

minds are present, and sometimes three, all kept account of in the flow of words.

(119)

In addition to the various narrative perspectives and timelines available in this text, there

are also a number of self-fulfilling prophecies. Perhaps the most important of these comes in the

shape of Jesus Christ himself. As we learn in the introduction to the most recent 1982 pocket

edition of The Book of Mormon: “[t]he crowning event recorded in the Book of Mormon is the

personal ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ among the Nephites soon after his resurrection”

(introduction). Mormons believe that the Nephites were practicing Christians centuries before the

birth of Christ. In fact, Grant Hardy observes that:

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There is a double climax to Mormon’s history, both elements of which were

prophesied about extensively. The first is the coming of Jesus to Palestine, with

unmistakeable signs in the New World of his birth and death, quickly followed by

a dramatic postresurrection appearance of Christ to the Nephites. The second

culmination of prophecy appears with the destruction of the Nephites as a people

some four hundred years later. (Hardy, Understanding The Book of Mormon 113)

In addition to these dramatic scenes of fulfilled prophecy, there are also a number of less

significant examples scattered throughout the narrative. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to state

that prophecies and their eventual fulfillment constitute a kind of narrative glue for the story as a

whole. For example, the few instances in which a major city or settlement is destroyed are

always prefaced by prophetic warnings. Also, in some cases prophets accurately foretell military

movements (Alma 16:4, 43:23 – 24, 3 Ne. 3:19 – 21) (Hardy Understanding 113). Focusing

specifically on Mormon’s role as narrator, Grant Hardy observes that, “many of Mormon’s direct

comments point out explicitly where prophecies have been fulfilled, but other features of

Mormon’s editing also reinforce this theme” (Understanding 112).

Given the immense narrative weight that The Book of Mormon brings to bear on the role

of prophecy, it is remarkable that the book contains so few prophecies that would have been

directly relevant to contemporaries of Joseph Smith. In terms of these, the only two examples in

the entire text can be said to be Mormon’s prophecies at 3 Ne. 29 and Mormon 5:8 – 24. Both of

these prophecies are extremely vague; they are not predictions of troop movements or sacked

cities but, instead, obscure pronouncements that seem to imitate, if not plagiarize, Old Testament

prophetic language. Along these same lines, it is also surprising that Jesus’s Second Coming and

the Millennium are almost entirely ignored by Mormon, our chief historian. As Grant Hardy
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notes, “there are only four places in the entire Book of Mormon that directly reference the

Second Coming of the Millennium . . . [these] prophecies are concerned with general conditions

in the last days rather than the culminating event that will bring them to a conclusion”

(Understanding 298 FN 27).

As I have suggested, in the narrative of The Book of Mormon revelation and prophecy are

not forward looking but rather self-contained. The historian-prophets that narrate and organize

the text have almost nothing to say about future events and Joseph Smith interjects nothing of

himself or his present circumstances directly into the text.92 The book reads prophecy backwards

through an invented history in order to create a recurring narrative pattern of fulfilled prophecy,

thereby legitimating its own status as holy scripture. And, indeed, according to many religious

scholars, the most noteworthy feature of The Book of Mormon is not its narrative at all but rather

its ontological status as divine object. As Terryl Givens puts it, “the history of the Book of

Mormon’s place in Mormonism and American religion generally has always been more

connected to its status as signifier than signified . . . [it] is preeminently a concrete manifestation

of sacred utterance, and thus can evidence a divine presence, before it is a repository of

theological claims” (64, his italics). In tracing the history of Mormonism from its beginnings in

the Antebellum United States, we find that it was the fact of having new scripture that set them

apart from the crowded field of heterodox religious beliefs (Givens 65). As Givens goes on to

92
For a reading of The Book of Mormon as a “stirring, if veiled, critique of

Jacksonian America” see Kenneth Winn’s Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in

America, 1830 – 1846, especially chapter two, entitled, “The Book of Mormon as a

Republican Document.”
 196

note, “In 1835 Joseph referred to the publication of the Book of Mormon as one of three signs

that the work of the last days had commenced” (65).

Regarding The Book of Mormon in these two ways – a story with multiple timelines in

which the role of prophecy, in both grandiose and practical ways, is consistently affirmed and

also a material object that was itself physical proof of a prophecy about to be fulfilled – allows us

to understand it in terms of how the figura of “history before the fact” expresses itself as

manifest destiny in the early United States.

Conclusion

What I would like to do now is shift the discussion to an ongoing scholarly conversation

about the role of time and temporality in the early United States. This conversation has mostly

attended to debates concerning the role of print culture in the consolidation of national identity

and consciousness in the first seventy or so years of the United States Republic. As a rule,

literary scholars who have weighed in on this question – scholars such as Dana Luciano, Valerie

Rohy, Thomas Allen, and Lloyd Pratt to name just a few – have sought to challenge the thesis,

familiar to anyone who has read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, that the print

revolution of the late eighteenth century brought about an experience of shared homogeneous

time, a “horizontal comradeship” that was one of the conditions of possibility for the founding of

the modern nation-state (Anderson 7).

For example, in the introduction to his recent book, Archives of American Time:

Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (2010), Lloyd Pratt voices the “increasingly

accepted” view that “the early national and antebellum United States was the site of a conflicted

experience of time characteristic of modernity” (3). Indeed, one way of understanding Pratt’s
 197

argument is to frame it as a fairly blunt rejoinder of Benedict Anderson’s theorization that as

time becomes increasingly “empty” and homogeneous in the late eighteenth century it constitutes

one of the key conditions of possibility for the rise of the modern nation state. For Anderson, this

unique historical occurrence can be traced to the emergence of print as a mass produced medium,

advances in transportation and information technologies, and the consolidation of varying

vernaculars into national languages (Anderson 22 - 46). As Pratt explains, however, this

narrative of homogeneous empty time dates at least as far back as the U.S. Republic itself:

“commentators on both sides of the Atlantic began to argue as early as the late eighteenth

century that the emerging national print culture of the United States would Americanize its

readers by homogenizing time” (4). Moreover, as Pratt argues, despite the momentum of this

triumphalist narrative which would “supply U.S. citizens with a virtual experience of time as

linear progress that they all could share” (4), “[t]he strong counterevidence of form suggest[s]

that this period and its literature articulate a conflicted experience of time working against this

notion of destiny” (4-5).

Relying on Svetlana Boym’s description of modernity as a mode of experience that

allows “multiple conceptions of time,” Pratt goes on to assert that, “American temporality can be

understood ‘not as a teleology of progress or transcendence but as a superimposition and

coexistence of heterogeneous times’” (Pratt 3, quoting Boym, 30). For Pratt, modern time is

“internally differentiated in unprecedented ways that are only now coming to be understood” and

the “print and reading revolutions that distinguish this period did not come close to achieving the

homogenization of time with which they have sometimes been associated” (3-4).

Pratt’s argument about how people experienced time in the early United States Republic

hinges on the way in which he reads different literary genres as palimpsests of accreted
 198

temporalities, positing in this way that at least those who could read and chose to read literature

in the early U.S. experienced “temporal conjunctures,” or, that is, a diversity of temporalities

through their exposure to a variety of genres (Pratt 4). As he argues:

when American writers began self-consciously to quest after a future in which

national and racial identity would reign triumphant over all, the end result was

that time was restructured in such a way as to begin foreclosing on that particular

future . . . this writing’s characteristic formal features – the outlines of its genres

as well as its literary tropes – trace the intermittent interest of American authors in

the extraliterary conflicts between different modalities of time that forbid the

homogeneously linear time whose emergence has sometimes been associated with

early American nationalism. (Pratt 3)

This passage brings us to a question so far unanswered by Pratt: what of those in the antebellum

U.S. who were either illiterate or who knew how to read but simply did not read literature,

newspapers, circulars – anything contemporary? In other words, if a proliferation of literary

genres was responsible for “anachronistic temporalities” (5) that confuted normative, linear,

“American” time, does that mean that the illiterate had a different experience of time than their

literate countrymen and women? Pratt addresses this question obliquely: “Stuart Sherman has

argued that a ‘given narrative will inevitably, by the particulars of its form, absorb and register

some of the temporalities at work in the world that surrounds its making’” (Pratt 5, qtd. Sherman

x). Pratt’s argument, in so many words, is that if the literature produced during the early

Republic and antebellum periods exhibited significant temporal variability, the upshot of the

“untimely chronotypes [of its] conventions and genres” (5), then it must have been because the

subjective, lived experience of time during this period was also variable and plural.
 199

Here we come to crux of Pratt’s investigations of time: he is primarily concerned with

questions of temporality, of the lived experience of time by individual subjects. What were the

orders of time produced by industrial manufacture, slave economies, or Republican virtue and

how did they shape individual perception and experience? How did they shape authorship? Here

I want to underscore this emphasis on temporality in Pratt’s work, an emphasis that makes his

scholarship a good representative example of this “temporal turn” in early United States literary

studies. Pratt’s work marks a trend not only because it focuses on time in the early and

antebellum U.S. but because it focuses on questions about the lived experience of time for

individuals during these historical moments.

I also want to offer a gloss on another recent book in the field to take up this question of

time, Anachronism and Its Others by Valerie Rohy. Unlike Pratt, Rohy is not concerned with

temporality per se. Riffing on nineteenth century theories of modern sexual identity that

conceived of what we now call homophobia in terms of “queer backwardness,” a kind of atavism

wherein homosexuality was figured as a decadent relic of past cultures, Rohy sets herself to the

task of disarticulating the hegemonic, linear, chronological, “straight time” of the nation state –

what Elizabeth Freeman, another queer studies scholar, might call the “chrononormativity” of the

nation state (Time Binds 6). Much of Rohy’s argument is bound up in making a very deft case for

the collusion between scientific racism and nascent theories of sexology and the way these two

pseudo-scientific discourses came together in the postwar nineteenth-century to promote a white,

heteronormative vision of futurity that cast itself against these atavistic “backwards” queer and

colored subjects. Consequently, “anachronism,” as Rohy understands it, is a figure ideally suited

for recuperating these “devalued” queer subjects (xiv). As Rohy explains, “like the Lacanian
 200

Real, anachronism has a contradictory ontology, structured by the prohibition of the impossible:

it cannot exist, but it must also be prevented, punished, or expelled” (xiv).

Though this is an admittedly very cursory snapshot of two approaches employed to

address questions of the role of time and temporality by Early American literary scholars, it does

begin the work of asking a deceptively straightforward question, one that bears significantly on

my investigation of the troped time in both Harriot’s Brief and True Report and The Book of

Mormon: if we grant that temporal variegation inhibits nationalization, are we then conceding to

Benedict Anderson’s argument that nationalism requires homogeneous empty time? For a more

adroit formulation of this question, I turn to Holly Jackson in her review of Lloyd Pratt’s

Archives of American Time:

Does the temporal variety that Pratt identifies constitute an ongoing oppositional

element that disrupts the realization of totalizing social formations, or does it

suggest that temporal simultaneity is not actually necessary for the inception of

durable and politically effectual group consciousness? (Jackson 329)

This question, so aptly set out here by Jackson, takes us to a specific proposition, and, indeed, an

offshoot of my main argument in this chapter already alluded to in its title: the land that bears

fruit before flowers. This phrase represents a possible way to imagine a genealogy of time

figured as Manifest Destiny in the histories of Anglo-American colonization and United States

self-fashioning. Manifest Destiny is not about the future; rather, as we saw in Harriot’s inversion

of cause and effect to create a “history before the fact” and as Smith’s use of self-fulfilling

prophecy to prop up his ideological agenda, it is about seizing control of and reorganizing the

past. Like the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, its close cousin and ideological forbearer,

Manifest Destiny depends on a specific way of organizing time around closed loops of
 201

signification that are self-justifying. We came here, we conquered this land; therefore we were

always-already meant to come here, to conquer.

Holly Jackson’s question above makes clear that despite the convincing repudiation of

Benedict Anderson’s model of national time recently given voice by Lloyd Pratt and others, this

model nevertheless has remained the yardstick for measuring any claim about the role of time in

a national context. But this figura of “history before the fact” cum Manifest Destiny that we have

been tracing evinces the precise opposite of the temporal simultaneity that subsumes the

conversation – even as a negative limit – about national consolidation: it is not forward-looking

but backward-looking. Thus, not only does this figura make it necessary to stretch this

conversation beyond the chronological boundaries of the U.S. nation-state but it also offers us

the hallucinatory possibility of reimagining an early United States self-fashioning dependent

primarily on “history before the fact”: a series of recursive, self-justifying, and ideologically

coherent feedback loops.

 202

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