Wonder and Exile in the New World - Alex Nava

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he does so with great frequency and devotion—it reminds us that we are faced with a medieval man. As much as his tenacious and adventurous spirit suggests something modern, his discoveries and dreams, like his language of wonder, are articulated and named with the only vocabulary that he knows and has inherited from his medieval predecessors. We do not need to look much further than the name he ascribes to the New World (the Indies) for evidence of this. When he comes upon the great river in South America, the Orinoco, he imagines that he is stepping on Indian soil and even approaching the Ganges, where many medieval travelers—Marco Polo, William of Rubruck, Sir John Mandeville—had placed Earthly Paradise.

      Columbus, in other words, saw the world with the starry eyes of medieval travelers and was amazed by what he saw and heard in their accounts. Provoked by them, he became a magi of sorts and soon followed the heavenly stars and wonders that enticed his predecessors. And there was plenty to entice him. These travelers, in fact, swam in rivers of wonder and looked to the East as a site where the marvelous was commonplace and the fantastic ordinary. If medieval mystics desired to drown in the sea of God’s love, these figures drowned in a vast sea of marvels and imaginary worlds. For classic and medieval travelers, the border between the West and the East might as well have been the border between the living and the dead because the differences between the two were equally vast—and equally frightening. To venture there would mean facing the dangers and anxieties of the unknown, not to mention the dragons, man-eaters, and other terrifying creatures that made the unknown their home. If one was brave enough to go there, however, the rewards could be immeasurable, like discovering the Fountain of Youth, Earthly Paradise, cities of gold. In medieval representations, the East resembled the “Orient” of later centuries, “a site of dreams, images, fantasies, myths, obsessions and requirements,” to quote Homi Bhabha.2 Never an empirical reality, the East represented what is totally other: the barbaric and strange, the mysterious and irrational. For the men of this age, as in the time of Columbus, the border between fact and fiction is a curious and ambiguous line, permeable and unclear. Passage between the two occurs with regularity to these explorers of the impossible, which is why their discoveries look like the matter of dreams and fantasies.

      It is quite clear that the explorers and travelers to the New World breathed this medieval air, and they certainly craved the stuff of legend and fantasy as much as they dreamed of wealth and glory. When first learning of this discovery, the message to the Old World must have felt like chocolate to a tongue that had only known bland foods, like spices to a palate accustomed to insipid foods. They must have been ravished and thrilled by the news.

      Columbus and his men traveled across the great ocean aroused by rumors of this sort, rumors of fabulous truths, cities like Atlantis and Cibao, women like Amazons and mermaids, one-eyed men, cannibals, men with snouts of dogs, people with tails—and as they returned to Europe, no matter what their experience, they were loose with their reports and extravagant with their pens. One might say that they gathered the ocean winds for themselves and infused their language with it, creating accounts that were tempestuous and bloated like hot air balloons. Call it creative license if you will, but one thing is clear: they drew from a deep well of fantasy and gave their readers a wild sea of stories. Like their medieval predecessors, travel accounts of the New World describe experiences with strange and bizarre peoples, with customs entirely new and unfamiliar, and with a curious and wild diversity of religious beliefs. In tales of this kind, they thoroughly astonished and won over their readers the way Othello would win over Desdemona with the stories of his fantastic adventures.3

      Like Othello, Columbus was a master of wonder’s seductions. He knew how to evoke, stimulate, and nurture it. And stimulate it he certainly did, becoming a powerful spinner of tales and maker of myths. His letters stimulated delight and wonder. If not for gold and silver, pearls and land, Columbus entices Europeans to the New World for a wild adventure, for a romantic experience of an exotic and strange world. The letters are not satisfied with informing, instead seeking to transform their readers and to evoke in them a sense of the marvelous and wondrous. There is something like intrigue involved in Columbus’s letters. They connive more than educate; they tantalize, charm, beguile. Columbus’s designs are to cast a spell over Europeans and to convince them that the colonization of these new lands and peoples is a holy and worthy cause. As Stephen Greenblatt mentions in Marvelous Possessions, in the absence of gold, Columbus offers the marvelous: “The marvelous stands for the missing gold.”4 The appeal to wonder here becomes an instrument in colonial possession. Wonder is colonized and turned into an exotic object that Columbus and other explorers would exploit in the service of conquest.

      Inga Clendinnen explains well the many instances in which wonder and fantasy served colonial purposes, and makes this point in reference to Cortes: “His essential genius lay in the depth of his conviction, and in his capacity to bring others to share it: to coax, bully, and bribe his men, dream-led, dream-fed them. . . . He also lured them to acknowledge their most extreme fantasies; then he persuaded them, by his own enactment of them, that the fantasies were realizable.”5 Or listen to Carlos Fuentes on this same theme: “The two foundations of Buenos Aires clearly dramatizes two impulses of Spanish colonization in the New World. One is based on fantasy, illusion, imagination. The conquistadors were driven not only by the lust for gold . . . but by fantasy and imagination, which at times were an even stronger elixir. As they entered the willful world of the Renaissance, these men still carried with them the fantasies of the Middle Ages.”6

      We might see the play on the names of Columbus as illustrating these two themes. Because of the frequency of Columbus’s appeal to the wonder and marvel of the New World, the King of Spain said that Columbus should be known not as Almirante, the admiral, but as Almirans, the one who wonders. And yet, at the same time, Las Casas once noted that the name he had been born with, Cristóbal Colón, sealed him with the mark of a “colon-izer.”7 Columbus’s capacity for wonder coexisted with his dreams of colonization and possession. He is a wonderer and colonizer at once. We might see this duality as the beginning of a history that will endure for centuries in Latin America and claim the lives of millions: the mixture of dreams of paradise with the history of colonization and violence.8

      How quickly, then, does wonder assume its part in the history of colonization. We should always remain alert to this possibility, especially as we listen to Columbus’s wonder-intoxicated language. Columbus never tires of the word maravilla. The trees, fish, animal life, the varieties of nature’s loveliness, everything is marvelous:

      The fish here are surprisingly unlike ours. There are some the shape of dories and of the finest colors in the world. . . . The colors are so marvelous that everybody wondered and took pleasure in the sight. . . . Flocks of parrots darken the sun and there is a marvelous variety of large and small birds very different from our own; the trees are of many kinds, each with its own fruit, and all have a marvelous scent. . . . Hispaniola is a wonder. . . . This country, Most Serene Highnesses, is so enchantingly beautiful that it surpasses all others in charm and beauty as much as the light of day surpasses the night. Very often I would say to my crew that however hard I tried to give your Highnesses a complete account of these lands my tongue could not convey the whole truth about them nor my hand write it down. I was so astonished at the sight of so much beauty that I can find no words to describe it. . . . But now I am silent, only wishing that some other may see this land and write about it. (C, 65, 70, 83–84)

      It is easy to be seduced by Columbus’s portrait of Hispaniola. He can be dazzling when speaking of its wonders and idyllic beauty. And he sounds like a mystic in suggesting how little these wonders can be described, how much they require personal experience. He says that the New World brings him to silence, that nothing comparable has ever been seen. The beauty is so intense and surprising that it brings his mind and tongue to a pause. His language falters. “My tongue is broken,” as Sappho once remarked.9 Columbus tells us what it must feel like to be filled with such awe and delight. He gives us signs, but then warns us, like so many mystics, that it is ineffable. In moments like this, Columbus tastes beauty in all its splendor and expresses himself in ways that any mystic would understand. For many Christian mystics—perhaps the lesson learned from paganism—beauty is a sign of grace, a kind of icon in which the One discloses itself. And for those with a trained eye for this beauty, revelation comes

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