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2. Harmony in New World Nature and Old World Eyes
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58 Chapter 2 Harmony in New World Nature and Old World Eyes His ideas have been lost.The ambient barbarism destroyed or dispersed the manuscripts, which probably were used in grocery stores to wrap candles or cans of sardines. Now we go scrounging to discover a few lines of the many that he wrote. (Perdió sus ideas. La barbarie ambiente destruyó o dispersó los manuscritos, que probablemente sirvieron en las pulperías para envolver velas o latas de sardinas. Ahora nos desojamos por descubrir algunas líneas de las muchas que escribió.) —Rufino Blanco Fombona, “El maestro autonomasia” (1954) The political promises embedded in European conceptions of New World space, that is, the American dream of exploration and rebirth, come inextricably tied to what we might call the American nightmare —the fear of becoming lost in the chaos of that space. Even an early pro-independence newspaper, Bolívar’s own Correo del Orinoco, launches its defiant inaugural issue with an attempt to balance the promise of freedom against the privations of solitude. Apologizing that they come from “a country in which the only books one sees are those the Spanish brought to give the People lessons in barbarity, or, momentarily, those of some traveler , like loefling and humboldt” (un país en que no se ha visto mas libros que los que traian los Españoles para dar a los Pueblos lecciones de barbarie, ó momentaneamente los de algún viajero, como loefling y humboldt), the editors note that the very existence “in the center of the immense solitudes of the Orinoco” (en el centro de las inmensas soledades Harmony in New World Nature and Old World Eyes 59 del Orinoco) of a paper such as theirs is nothing less than “a distinguished deed in the history of human talent” (un hecho señalado en la historia del talento humano) (Correo n.p.). While later issues of the Correo would go on to rehearse the trope of the New World as an ideal space for enacting a set of virtues abandoned by European monarchies, this opening announcement reveals the anxiety behind its promise of American asylum. On the one hand rejecting whatever “culture” might be associated with the Spanish metropolis—these are the books, after all, that give “lessons in barbarity”—the editors nonetheless mention Loefling and Humboldt by name and with some emphasis. These travelers’ works, like the Spanish books, prove an insufficient stay against the physical isolation of living in America, but in their case the problem is less a defect of the books themselves than a complaint of the momentary, exceptional nature of the encounter.The platform occupied by Spanish books is too barbaric; that of the continental European travel writers is too fleeting. Peter Loefling, the botanist who had studied under Linnaeus before journeying to Venezuela, and Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussiantrained mining expert and polymath, occupy an ambiguous space in the text as both insufficient European emissaries and legitimizing voices. The Correo’s editors may not be satisfied that Venezuela’s appearance in their travel books makes it part of Western culture, but they are happy to cite both authorities as proof of their own erudition and the fact that the wilderness they occupy has already been codified and reported by reliable Europeans. Some three years earlier Bolívar had cited Humboldt in his “Jamaica Letter” (Carta de Jamaica) (1815) as a hedge for his own predictions on how the struggle for independence might play out, arguing that even Humboldt, whose 1798–1804 estimates of the population of the New World colonies remained the most reliable source of population figures for the Spanish colonies, would have trouble predicting the outcome of the independence movements already under way in Mexico, Nueva Granada, Buenos Aires, and Venezuela (Doctrina 55). Bolívar suggests that his own efforts should therefore be critiqued not as authoritative pronouncements given from academic repose but as attempts, like those of the editors of Correo, to draw the most logical conclusions possible from the facts at hand—to rationalize a struggle whose very location conjures the entropy that stubbornly resists European desires for classification and mapping. Rodríguez, whom Camila Pulgar Machado has described as “a methodical scientist like Humboldt”(al igual que Humboldt, era un científico metódico) (145), would take on the task of dealing with the physical reality [18.118.120.109] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 12:14 GMT) 60 Tropes of Enlightenment in the Age of Bolívar...