(Please note: scroll down below this essay/lecture to earlier entries to see a discussion of week one assignments and the "What is American?" essay assignment and reading.)
Take a couple of minutes and consider the following, 1507 map of the world. This map of the world--bought by the US a decade or so back and now on display in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress (Extra-Credit filed trip opportunity)--contains the first time the word "America" is applied to the land which was in the early 1500s new to all of Europe. In looking at this map, consider how it is centered on Europe and on how detailed the section on Europe is when compared to the other sections of the world. The level of detail on a map is a good index to what is known and what the map maker can imagine.
Now take a moment to look at how little was known of the Americas in 1507. Getting your head around the fact that America didn't exist in the European imagination until the late 1400s and that the rest of the world was a fuzzy concept will take you a long way toward understanding why and how our own, Euro-centric influenced imagination of America came into existence. America was a new world, seeming to appear out of no where and changing almost everything about Europe in only a couple of hundred years.
Here's an article on this 1507, Waldseemüller map. Follow the link, and you'll be able to see a nice closeup of the section on America.
Now take a look at what was America in 1507. Look closely at what was there; consider all that isn't. What you see is what Europeans thought the Americas were. That narrow strip of land east of Europe. Notice that there are water routes between what would become North and South America. Notice that folks know more about South America than North America. That's because the Portuguese were better navigators than--originally-- the Spanish could hire. Notice how large the what would become Cuba and the Caribbean is in the European imagination of the early 1500s. What you are seeing is something as real to the Europeans of 1500 as our own conceptions of the world and America and Europe are to us today.
It seems arrogant of Renaissance Europeans to make the claim to have discovered America. It is not not as if other people were not here first. I don't know if you've ever traveled or moved to a new city and experienced how the city starts off in your imagination as a vague image nor do I know if you've experienced how how one builds up an increasingly realistic image of the city over a stay. I don't know if you've ever experienced getting lost fewer times or stumbling on a place you've never visited in a city in which you've lived your whole life. If you have, you've had experiences which can help ground your understanding of the process of discovery of America which went on from the late 1400s throughout the period we'll be studying in this survey of Early American Literature.
More than anything else, it is this process of discovering America--the land, the people, and the effect of continual discovery on what would become a distinctly American people and society--that is a back drop which governs everything about the literature, the time period, and the lives of each individual we will be studying. Just like you and me, at every moment along this centuries long journey, most people thought they knew just what America was, but they didn't. At the beginning of this process of discovering, what we think of as America literally didn't exist in any imagination. Through the process of discovering and exploration of the new land--of mapping the land, experiencing it, figuring it in their literature. and (most important) living on the land and among the people of the land--Europe and the whole world would be altered. Thoughts which well may never have been thought by Europeans alone were thought.
The first thing you need to understand is that like maps, literature doesn't represent the actual land; instead, maps and literature represent how we imagine the land and the possibilities most of us allow ourselves to explore and experience. While we try to align our imagination with the actual, what is there is almost always more than we can imagine. Consider this following map. It was produced in the 1780s, the same decade de Creveceour's "What is American?" letter was published.
This map represents the America de Creveceour held as the real and actual America. That was the America de Crececeour wrote about and which we can experience in his writings; yet, when he says, "American," we can't help but understand him using our own imagination of America. When comparing the 1507 and 1780s maps, the first thing a modern viewer notices is how vague the area west of the Rockies is. If one looks closely, one sees the map makers of the 1780s still thought there was a good possibility of a Northwest water route to Asia. Well after 1780 at Monticello, Jefferson had the bones of a mmastodons, and he thought that those who explored the interior of North America were likely to see mastodons in their travels. In the 1780s, the United States did not own this interior. For almost every European and those of European descent, the interior of North America was there, but the details waited to be filled in. This doesn't mean that lives were not lived on the land, but it does mean that--at least in the European imagination--these lives had little impact.
In 1780, the United States of America was an upstart little country of thirteen scrabbling states. What became the United States was only beginning to cast off the idea that these were English colonies, and these newly declared, sovereign states had only the first glimmer of an idea of what it meant to live in a democratic republic where "all men were created equal." In fact, those words were less than a decade old. The nation was just adopting the idea they were of America and not of Europe. This new nation huddled on the east coast of a continent which was still waiting to be fully explored by those of European descent. Twenty years later, when Jefferson was president, the Lewis and Clark Expedition would test his theory that mascadons wandered the west, and they would close down the imagination of a cheap water route between Europe and Asia--allowing other imaginations of this water route (think Panama Canal) to take form. It won't be until the 1890s--three decades past the end of period we'll be studying--when the United States, then coming up on 150 years old, would say the North American Frontier was settled. Even then, they would mean settled by those of European descent.
Discovering what is American was a process which took centuries, and it still goes on. I've stood on on a west Texas US Highway in the wee hours of the early morning and wondered that all I saw were stars. There was not a single car on the road. There was not a single light to be seen from a farmstead. All there was was road, the stars, and the brush. I felt small, and I knew something of the awe with which Americans must have once viewed the land. It was smaller in my own imagination than it proved to be.
To Europeans, America in 1507 was an unexpected strip of land between Europe and trade with East Asia. To Europeans and those of the newly minted United States of America, America in 1780 was a continent full of Native peoples with areas still to be explored and settled, and there was still a possible water route between Europe and Asia; however, by 1780, America had become a place to live for European immigrants, one associated with more opportunity and more civil freedoms than were available to most of the common people of Europe. Most important, the land and the living here had begun to change those who came to experience. I was a different man after than night on that west Texas road than I was the day before. The experienced changed my relationship to America. What I could imagine became larger and more hopeful. America chances us. It challenges us to be bigger than what we once could imagine.
The literature we'll be studying this semester encompasses the period between Columbus's contact with what he thought were the Indies (1492) and the closing of the American Frontier in the 1890s. We'll be looking at the literature produced between 1492 and 1867, and we'll try to explore the notion of the role this literature plays in who've we become and in the possibilities we imagine for ourselves. May our journey be a rich one, and I hope each of us is changed. I hope we can each discover a new found land and a new America.
No comments:
Post a Comment