On Friday, perhaps it was even Saturday, I had a telephone call from my son Luke in Montreal. In the course of a sometimes whimsical conversation I asked him if he had read my most recent blog post. I was pretty sure what the answer would be, having long ago been advised by somebody who ought to know that “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.” I was right. He had not read the post; but being a modern man and an adept multi-tasker he started reading it even as we spoke. “Well,” he said, “there’s an egregious error in the first sentence.” Alarmed, I then did a little multi-tasking of my own. He was right! There was a horrible jumble of repeated words in the very first line. Since the burden of the paragraph was a complaint that Americans don’t pay enough attention to their language, this discovery was a double embarrassment. Meanwhile a few hundred people had already read it, all of whom had been too polite to point out the blunder.
We say that seeing is believing, but it often works the other way around. We see what we already believe, that is what we think we see, or in this instance wrote. When we say, “Try to see this from my point of view,” we perhaps come close to acknowledging this. How independent is our vision, actually? Especially when we are seeing unexpected things.
As a poetry lover, I
usually read a few poems during the week; and this week one that I reviewed is
pretty famous, Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” You may well know the poem. Keats, who could not read classical Greek any
more than most of us, came upon the English translation of the Odyssey
by the learned Renaissance poet George Chapman (1616) in 1816.
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
This is a poem about comparative gob-smacking discoveries: Hernan Cortez‘s New World discoveries and Keats’s literary discovery of Homeric epic. Keats’s presentation is rather fanciful, but if poetry cannot be fanciful, I am not sure what actually would qualify. Cortez never stood on a peak in Darien. He entered what is now Mexico on the Atlantic side, naturally, and almost immediately found himself immersed in the desperate intrigues that would soon enough lead to the Spanish conquest of the indigenous Mexica. Much later in his life he did make a memorable trip on which he came upon what is today the Gulf of California and the land that is Baja California. The Gulf of California was long known as the Sea of Cortez, and still is in one of John Steinbeck’s most charming books.
Years ago I did quite a bit of research on Christopher Columbus, a figure mutating at Mach Four speed in our awakened history books. For the famous Columbian Exhibition of 1892/3 he was a universal hero and a proto-Yankee business entrepreneur. By the Quincentenary in 1992 he was a ruthless slaver and kidnapper and a kind of monstrous Typhoid Mary. My objective view as a literary scholar is less portentous: Columbus was an amazing sailor and navigator, but a disappointingly dull travel writer. Here he was in the Americas, seeing for the first time a world new to European eyes. Yet the categories to which he assigned what he was seeing were mainly two: just like what we have in Castile and not like what we have in Castile. He does report seeing some very strange sights, such as retrohumeral (back-to-front) and monocular men . He of course could not possibly have seen them, but he was expecting to find them because he had read all about them in the ancient geographers (Pliny, Strabo, Ptolemy et al.) and medieval fabulists like Jean de Mandeville. Remember: believing is seeing.
In 1992, when I was one of the curators of a large exhibition at the Library of Congress, I gathered together a significant library relating to the topic of Columbus’s voyage. Just by chance, this week I had plucked from my bookshelves the classic work by the eminent historian and diplomat Miguel León-Portilla about The Ancient Mexicans*—meaning the pre-Columbian civilization Cortez encountered, commonly called the Aztec Empire. Trying to find something in it that probably was in some other book—my memory is now rapidly deserting me—I stumbled on something highly relevant to Keats and Cortez. If Keats compared his metaphoric literary cruise through Homer’s Aegean Sea to Cortez’s dazzling view from a peak in Darien, how had Cortez himself viewed things?
Keats’ imaginary panorama of the Pacific as viewed from a peak in Darien was perhaps as vivid in his imagination as the actual prospect would have been to stout Cortez’s corporal sight. As it happens, there was a very good writer accompanying Cortez who recorded some of the things they actually saw. This literary conquistador was Bernal Diaz del Castillo, who late in his life, and some years after the death of Cortez himself, published his famous True History of the Conquest of New Spain. The small fleet of Cortez landed at Vera Cruz in February of 1519. Cortez, who made a speech explicitly comparing himself to Julius Caesar at his point of no return, crossed his Rubicon by intentionally wrecking his ships. Now retreat was physically impossible. There was only one possible direction for the Spanish warriors: west along the Aztec-built highway to the Indian capital, Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), an amazing island conurbation of lakeside suburbs fronting a city of magnificent buildings. In Columbian terms, this would have been very definitely not like what we have in Castile. How must the first sight of the distant city have affected these Spaniards, plotting conquest while outnumbered a thousand to one, sweating in their iron suits upon their magical steeds? Bernal Diaz del Castillo tells us. “It seemed like those magical things that are reported in the Book of Amadís…Some of our soldiers said of what they saw that they must be dreaming….”
The work to
which Bernal refers is the Amadís de
Gaula, an extravagant Iberian prose romance that was the runaway secular
best-seller of the early period of printing, though its obscure origins go back
at least to the fourteenth century.
Anything that can happen to a hero of romance, and many things that
could not happen, occur in this amazing book.
The practically unbounded character of its fabulousness was made famous
by Cervantes. It was Don Quixote’s
favorite work, and its inspiration is everywhere to be seen in the novel of
which the deluded old hidalgo is the eponymous hero. In other words, it was for readers in the
sixteenth century the apogee of the fantastic and the fictional. Keats, when he seeks to memorialize a supreme
encounter with the literary imagination, invokes as a parallel an imagined
historical event in the record of
European discoveries. Bernal Diaz del
Castillo, when he wants to emphasize the transcendental nature of an actual
historical event, invokes a popular work of romantic fable. Such is the power of versatile poetry as it
mediates the fascinating terrain between seeing and believing.
*Miguel León Portilla, Los antigos mexicanos a través de sus crónicas y cantares (México: Fondo de cultura económica, 5th ed, 1989).
