Marvelous Possessions by Stephen Greenblatt

Author:Stephen Greenblatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226306575
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

CHAPTER FIVE

The Go-Between

THE native seized as a token and then displayed, sketched, painted, described, and embalmed is quite literally captured by and for European representation. He is caught up in a complex system of mimetic circulation that also includes the pictures etched in lead, the models of men on horseback, the mirrors, and even the representative loaf of bread left behind in the representative house designed to lure the so-called brutes to a so-called courtesy. Everywhere we look in the encounter of the Old World and the New—in Protestant voyages and Catholic, in the squares of Aztec cities and in European palaces—we find an intensive deployment of representations, from the canoeing exhibitions on the Thames in the early seventeenth century to the doll of an English gentlewoman clutched by the Algonquian child in one of John White's drawings, from the Aztec gold sun admired by Durer in Brussels to the innumerable crosses erected by Europeans in the harbor mouths and high places of America, from the Tupi featherwork carried back to France to the sixpence nailed by Drake to a post in California. European contact with the New World natives is continually mediated by representations; indeed contact itself, at least where it does not consist entirely of acts of wounding and killing, is very often contact. between representatives bearing representations. And even the wounding and killing is often bound up with an attack on representations, as the smashing of a 'brutish idol' and the smashing of a 'brutish' human are easily confounded with one another. For throughout the discourse of travel there is very little distance between a representation and a representative: Columbus, with his banners and his cross, stands for something beyond himself, as, in his eyes, do the natives before him.1

Mimetic circulation—the movement and uses of the representational machinery deployed in such voyages as Frobisher's—is double: first, representations and the particular technologies that generate them are carried from place to place, most often moving according to the logic of conquest and of trade though occasionally swerving in unforeseen directions, propelled by perversity or accident; second, those who receive representations from elsewhere themselves move, with greater or lesser freedom, among a range of images and techniques simultaneously available in their culture. The Balinese anecdote with which I began this book—the crowd moving among the various screens in a festive, unconstrained enjoyment of radically divergent representational modes—is obviously a utopian reverie at the furthest extreme from Frobisher's captive forced to contemplate the painting of a dead brother. Utopian but not altogether removed from a lived reality: I, Stephen Greenblatt, saw it with my own eyes. And what I witnessed in Bali, as I have remarked, is a reflection of what we can witness every day at home.

I do not wish to underestimate the forces of domination, constriction, and repression at work in contemporary representational practices, let alone in the practices of the intolerant, aggressive, and rigidly hierarchical cultures of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even in highly mobile cultures

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