The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom (review)

168 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 I wish Fielding could have been incorporated into this discussion before being introduced as the rather muddle-headed convener of "the disciplinary tribunal of die novel" (p. 222). Bell has a good local grip on the antinomies of Fielding's "not entirely straightforward " blends of law and poetics, but little conceptual grasp of die urgent issues of verisimulitude and exemplarity which overwhelm law-makers and novelists alike in die 175Os. How do you make a satisfactory narrative out of a political platform, ajudicial execution , or the discrete events in a private life? Fielding is struggling to answer diese questions at the same time that politicians like Newcastle (as J.C.D. Clark has shown) and jurisconsults like Blackstone (David Lieberman, The Province ofLegislation Determined ) are making great efforts to refine a plausible narrative out. of the contingencies and particularities of high politics and common law. Fielding's "world of confusions and cross-purposes" is continuous widi this larger world where moral fables are getting harder to tell. If Bell had been able to forego that residual piety of the Left, which is so fertile in narratives of ruling class conspiracy (a temptation forcefully analysed and serenely resisted by E.P. Thompson at the end of Whigs and Hunters), he would have been well placed to advance the discussion of the joint crisis of penology and literature in the eighteenth century, so well begun by scholars like John Bender. It is no longer an easy matter to locate privileged sites of power, or to write histories showing how deliberately power has been exercised by its sinister monopolists. The eighteenth century reveals a puzzling imbrication of the crises of political, legal, and literary legitimation . This is die world of tile legal fiction where, as Bentham impatiently points out in his Of Laws, "all is uncertainty, darkness, and confusion." I wonder if Bell does not at heart share Bentham's impatience widi it. Jonathan Lamb University of Auckland Stelio Cro. The Noble Savage: Allegory of Freedom. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1990. xx + 182pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-88920-983-9. Stelio Cro discusses some of the main documents in the literature of the New World voyagers and traces the impact of dieir anüiropological revelations on me political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "Theorist" here includes imaginative writers as well as historians and philosophers. Shakespeare, Defoe, and Swift figure in die analysis , alongside Charlevoix (die eighteenth-century champion of the Jesuits in Paraguay), Vico, and Rousseau. Cro's theory is that the noble savage idea begins as a literary conceit but is then located and particularized by means of die travel information brought back from the New World and so is deepened into a political symbol. Rousseau is cited as the chief agent in this transformation; he takes the mydi of tile noble savage from Voltaire (for whom it had confirmed the ideal of absolutist politics) and turns it into an allegory of social freedom and of revolution. Cro's focus of interest is early modern, but to set his discussion in its historical context and join the classical with the modern perception he makes out of Columbus a REVIEWS 169 neat connecting point with die morality of die middle ages. When Columbus sailed west he re-enacted Dante's portrayal of Ulysses, heroic but doomed, sailing onwards never to return, consigned to hell by the medieval poet for lack of faith along with the whole of the pagan world. But when Columbus returned he reopened the whole Ulyssean argument. Cro comments: "Dante's Ulysses and Columbus could men be the two faces of tile same coin; its alloy being Humanism. Ulysses, in Ulis new episode, comes back. ... He returns like a hero, a modern hero" (p. 35). Cro from here sketches Montaigne's assimilation and reformulation (itself a profoundly influential document) of Peter Martyr's positive account of Amerindian culture—a culture free of money, magistrates, and deceiving books and thus to be distinguished, on the one hand, from modern European civilization, burdened wim those obstacles to peace, and, on me odier, from the classical mytii ofthe golden age, which for Cro is...