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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 546-549



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Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840. By Jonathan Lamb. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. xii + 345 pp.

Jonathan Lamb has written a rich, engaging, and wide-ranging book that describes both the variety of strategies for preserving the self in eighteenth-century voyages to the South Seas and the core significance of self-preservation in eighteenth-century British literature, philosophy, and culture. Implicit here is a departure from the postcolonial readings of travel narratives offered most prominently by Mary Louise Pratt, who has interpreted such work as part of the Enlightenment project to create vast archives of knowledge by mapping the world, recording languages, describing inhabitants, and cataloging plants and animals. For Pratt, while the voyagers themselves often saw their own stories as "anti-conquest" narratives—that is, as projects of discovery rather than of domination—the creation of knowledge itself constituted a form of colonialism. Through close reading of the journals reporting these voyages, as well as through literature, philosophy, and other documents, however, Lamb finds more chaos than reason in these projects. Voyagers go mad with scurvy; they hallucinate, mutiny, "go native"; they fail to communicate; they gamble away their entire compensation; they void contracts. While for Lamb these voyages certainly took place in the context of Enlightenment ambition, the experience in many cases degenerated into gothic uncertainty.

Lamb begins with a survey of philosophical theories of the self, paying special attention to Hobbes, Locke, Mandeville, and Shaftesbury; he shows "how the grounds of conflict between the self and civil society form a set of anxieties about the pleasure of traveling to strange places, and about the method of communicating it" (25). Throughout Preserving the Self Lamb explores how literary and philosophical reflections on the self invoke travel in general and to the South Seas in particular; he also shows, however, how travelers themselves constantly negotiated threats to their senses of selfhood. Lamb uses the term selfin part to distinguish his project from a study of subjectivity: rather than bring psychoanalytic theories of the subject to bear on this problem, he investigates how people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries conceived of and articulated the problem of selfhood, which in his reading becomes inseparable from the problem of self-preservation. Many philosophers linked self-preservation to some kind of division: for Hobbes, functioning in the social world demanded a "represented and a representative self" (29); for Locke, "the right to what is literally one's own is disembodied and vindicated in laws and contracts that detach the self from [End Page 546] its incorporated part in an exchange for money" (27); Mandeville, arguing against Shaftesbury's view of "the unity of the self as the continuity of its natural and civil sides" (30), relied on "Hobbes's division between a natural and an artificial self" (31). Mandeville, however, also described the mysterious gap between these two selves as a "terra incognita"; like many writers, he found parallels between the exploration of the world and the exploration of the self. What occupies much of this book, then, are the ways that this "terra incognita, the unmapped space of the world and mind, is a habitat of monsters that are the vehicles of an extravagant self-assertion whose only narrative form is romance" (41).

Just as chivalric romance was invented by commercial people in mercantile centers, not in feudal courts, so eighteenth-century narrative romance emerged from the levels of "fantasy in the metropolitan embrace of the whole world" (54, 50). With the inherent difficulty of demonstrating any of their truth claims, travel narratives served as a kind of romance, producing wonder rather than facts. This was partly a result of the homesickness and scurvy-induced emotional instability of the voyagers themselves: "The reason that the terra incognita was so often represented as a utopia or a paradise owed less to the long literary tradition that had located immortal commonwealths in the New World and the South Seas . . . than to this...

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