Royall Tyler's The Algerine Captive, America, and the Blind Man of Philosophy

Royall Tyler's early-republic barbary-hostage tale, The Algerine Captive (1797), owns the distinction of being one of America's first novels and one of its least effective abolitionist texts. The story of a white American's enslavement by African pirates, based on historical events during the Washington presidency, Tyler's narrative has challenged readers desiring to rescue a compelling indictment of slavery's practice in the "Barbary states of America" from a satire that just as enthusiastically targets dueling, medical quackery, and classical education. ¹ The work's reception has reflected its uneven focus. Hailed as the emergence of a "tough-minded realism" in the American imaginary and as proof the national character developed from sensibility, the novel has been criticized for its irreligion and its piety, for its didacticism as well as for its failure to sustain a "moral imperative." And it has been condemned as derivative of Roderick Random, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Rabelais, Candide, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, and Montesquieu's Persian Letters, while lauded for its "intertextuality." ² Some have suggested The Algerine Captive is not a novel at all, a suggestion I want to resist with the claim the text engages period philosophical issues that had great importance for the former colonies, ones the novel as a genre was particularly well suited to address. ³ If Tyler's text suffers from an identity crisis, in other words, it only too accurately mirrors the new nation's struggle to make a place for itself on the world stage.

The Algerine Captive appeared, after all, at a desperate time in American history. Fearing contagion from the French Revolution, re-absorption into the British Empire, and scalping-parties from the natives, Americans also faced internal revolutions, such as the Whiskey Revolt and Shays' Rebellion, which Tyler claimed to have played a role in ending (Tanselle 19-23). In the years leading up to and following the oppressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the American experiment seemed at any moment to come undone, especially along the growing fault-line of slavery. It was in this divisive atmosphere that Barbary-captive narratives, whether factual or fictional (like Tyler's), seized the public imagination like no other subject, supplying a badly needed political cohesion. Indeed, public outcry over Muslim raiders' repeated snatching of American seamen led eventually to the Tripolitan expedition of 1801-05, America's first war against terrorism and an event that catapulted it into the first ranks of global naval powers. Tyler's tale of a young man who grows up during the War of Independence only to become enslaved on Africa's northern coast, published as the "true" story of one Updike Underhill, has been read quite rightly as trading on Americans' concern for their countrymen's distant sufferings. ⁴ In its examination of its audience's unifying interest in viewing such spectacle, however, the novel also explores the consequences of philosophy's and early science's own fascination with distanced seeing, one that has had an inestimable impact on American culture.

Just exactly how early science's techniques of "ocular demonstration" helped shape modern Anglophone society has been the subject of continuing fruitful exchanges between the history of science and literary studies. John Barrell has shown, for example, how the seventeenth-century drive for an "equal, wide survey" of England's population resulted not merely in censuses or art conceived from a "prospect view," but a ruling class that deemed this commanding perspective its political birthright. Likewise, Mary Poovey has traced the way in which the "surveillance system" of double-entry bookkeeping contributed to a British political economy in which an ethical or theological conception of truth and value slowly gave way to an episto-factual one, which subsequent histories have identified as inherently expansionist. ⁵ Further studies have suggested that the creation of a spectatorial subjectivity helped develop an circum-Atlantic bourgeoisie trained in "a universal yet disinterested sympathy" (Baucom 207). According to such a formulation, repeated investment in images of suffering others in sentimental literature as well as visual and...