Category Archives: Conducting Research on the Web

Where Does Caliban’s Name Come From?

John Hamilton Mortimer, Etching of Caliban from Twelve Characters from Shakespeare (1775). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This post was originally published on February 5, 2018.

Listening to Dr. Lewis’s lecture today about who the island belongs to, I was reminded of when I first read Shakespeare’s The Tempest in high school. I couldn’t figure out who or what Caliban was. On a first reading, it seems a little ambiguous whether he is a supernatural creature, a monster, or just as human as Prospero and Miranda. In the cast of characters at the beginning of the book, he is called “a savage and deformed slave,” with no other mention of his inhumanity (2). Yet, in the early illustrations of the play, he is almost always depicted as a fishy monster, probably in response to Trinculo’s description of Caliban as “A strange fish” (II.ii.28). If we continue listening, however, Trinculo goes on to say that “this is no fish, but an islander that hath lately suffered by a thunderbolt” (II.ii.36-38). Even more curiously, in one of those delightful moments of breaking the fourth wall of the stage, Trinculo critiques the audience listening to him, saying that English people wouldn’t give a penny to a poor beggar, but they’ll “lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (II.ii.34). Although most signs point to a small Mediterranean island as the setting of The Tempest, is it possible that we are also meant to read Caliban as an “Indian,” that is, someone from the New World?

We can begin exploring the answers to this question by looking at Shakespeare’s sources. One of the things I’d like to do in this blogpost is introduce you to the enormous wealth of digitized books available on the internet, particularly through a service called Early English Books Online (EEBO), which includes virtually every piece of material published in English between 1473 and 1700. Although the story of The Tempest seems to be original to Shakespeare (unlike most of his other plays), he was inspired by a number of other texts. One source that has begun gaining more attention recently is Peter Martyr d’Anghiera’s early compilation of New World accounts from the early days of colonization. Although this Italian historian wrote in Latin for the Spanish crown, his De Orbe Novo was translated into English in 1555 as Decades of the New World by Richard Eden. It compiles the accounts given by Gonzalo Ferdinando de Oviedo of his time colonizing the Caribbean, the rivalry between King Ferdinand II of Spain and Naples and Alonso King of Portugal (Afonso V), Ferdinand Magellan and his pilot Antonio Pigafetta’s circumnavigation of the globe, the voyages of Sebastian Cabot, and even mentions a “greate devyll Setebos” worshiped in Brazil (219; discussed in Stritmatter & Kositsky 25-34, passim). Do any of these names sound familiar? Although there is no mention of a Prospero or a Miranda, there is a great deal of discussion surrounding cannibals in the “West Indies” and South America, a subject we will return to momentarily.

First page of Sylvester Jourdain’s “A Discovery of the Barmudas” (1610). Full text available on Early English Books Online.

In 1611, when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the British did not yet have any colonies in the Caribbean. They had, however, just discovered an island in the Atlantic under wondrous circumstances involving a shipwreck. As Dr. Lewis noted in her lecture today, The Sea Venture was blown off-course en route to the Virginia colony, and then wrecked off of coast of the Bermudas, where they spent the next nine months (rough life!). They later built two boats and sailed to the Jamestown colony, and the news of their survival was published in 1610 by one of the sailors, Sylvester Jourdain, in A Discovery of the Barmudas. Jourdain claims that “the Ilands of the Barmudas, as every man knoweth that hath heard or read of them, were never inhabited by any Chiftian or heathen people, but ever esteemed, and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather,” and thus they have been shunned by European explorers and settlers of the New World (8). However, as Sommers and his crew discovered, it was “the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land… and merely natural, as ever man set foote upon” (10). As far as I have been able to research, the Bermudas were not inhabited by other people when the English settlers were shipwrecked there. Yet there were both pigs and tobacco on the island when these castaways arrived, neither of which are native to those islands, which suggests that they were brought from somewhere else. In the official True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia, also published in 1610, this was chalked up to God’s providence in providing for the English mission of the new world, for it “increaseth wonder, how our people in the Bermudos found such abundance of Hogs…” (23). Another source often held up as an inspiration for Shakespeare’s play is William Strachey’s account of the Sea Venture Shipwreck, “A True Repertory of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight,” in which he surmises that the pigs came as the result of having “escaped out of some wracks” previous to the tempest that drove Sommers and his crew there. Although this report was not published until 1625 as part of Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas His Pilgrimes, it is possible that Shakespeare had seen a draft of this report prior to writing The Tempest since he was an investor in the Virginia Colony (Vaughan & Vaughan 11-12). (Nerd alert: The digitized copy of Purchas available through archive.org was originally owned by John Adams, second president of the United States, and you can see his signature in the top right corner of the title page.) Dr. Lewis made the case that these convergences of shipwrecks, and a stormy island reputed by most to be inhabited by devils or spirits, (and I would add the apparently providential supply of pigs) might lead us to believe that these accounts of Bermuda shaped the “qualities” of Caliban’s island (I.ii:337).

What of Caliban himself? As Jourdain says, Bermuda was “never inhabited by any Chiftian or heathen people,” so how did this character come to be there? Shakespeare tells us that his mother Sycorax, a witch from “Argier” (Algiers), gave birth to him on the island after she had been exiled there (I.ii. 263-284). Since Alonso and his company have recently come from a wedding in Tunis, these locations in North Africa should bring our attention back to the Mediterranean (II.i.72-74). In the 19th century there was a theory that Caliban’s name came from an Arabic insult, يا كلب [ya kalib], meaning “you dog” (Vaughan & Vaughan 33). Just like today, Arabic was the common language of North Africa, so it is possible that Shakespeare had somehow heard this expression and decided to use it in his play. Whether or not this is true, it is important that Caliban’s name was given by his mother, not by Prospero. Just like the names Sycorax, Setebos, and Ariel, Caliban does not have a clear European origin.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus (1519). From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Another etymology, one I find more convincing, is that Caliban’s name is related to the word “cannibal.” Shakespearean scholars since the late 18th century have noticed that Caliban’s name is an anagram of the Spanish spelling of this word: canibal (Vaughan & Vaughan 26). We can date with precision the day that this word first came into contact with European languages, since it is a loan word from the Caribbean and is first recorded in Christopher Columbus’s journal of his first voyage to the New World. On Friday, November 23, 1492, a little more than a month after first landing in the Bahamas, Columbus was off the coast of Haiti. Some natives of the Greater Antilles who were on board warned him about the men who lived there:

The wind was East-Northeast, and they could shape a southerly course, but there was little of it. Beyond this cape there stretched out another land or cape, also trending east, which the Indians on board called Bohio [Haiti]. They said that it was very large, and that there were people in it who had one eye in their foreheads, and others whom they called canibales, of whom they were much afraid. (English translation by Clements R. Markham, slightly revised)

When Columbus introduced this word to Europe upon his return, it did not yet mean what we usually think of. Instead, it referred to a specific people who lived in the Eastern Caribbean. The men on board who warned Columbus were Taino or Lucayans, groups that spoke closely related Arawakan languages in the Western Caribbean. The neighbors they feared were a different group of people who lived in the Eastern Caribbean islands and on the northern coasts of South America. These people are the Kalinago, called Caribs in English, and in fact, the words ‘Carib,’ ‘cannibal,’ and ‘Caribbean’ all come from their name.

Taino and Island Carib Territories map from The Decolonial Atlas

How did this come to be? It is difficult to say much with certainty about the languages of the native inhabitants of the Caribbean in 1492. But using historical linguistics we can make educated guesses about the word Columbus may have heard and why he wrote it down the way he did. In the Kari`nja [or Kali`nja] language spoken by the Kalinago today, the word kari`na means “human being,” and Karinago means “the people.” However, the /r/ used to spell this language does not correspond to the same [r] sound we have. Instead, it refers to [ɽ] a sound made by flicking the tongue very quickly against the alveolar ridge behind your teeth. To someone who doesn’t speak Kari`nja [kaɽiɁnʲa], this might sound like an [r] or an [l], which is why their name is variously transcribed as ‘Carib,’ ‘Kali`na,’ ‘Kari`nja,’ ‘Kalinya,’ ‘Cariña,’ ‘Carib,’ or even ‘Galibi.’ Behrend Hoff, a linguist who specializes in Cariban languages, suggests that this word was originally *kari:pona in prehistory (“Language Contact” 35). After the speakers of this prehistoric language spread apart to different parts of the Caribbean, the word came to be pronounced differently in various dialects, and it was also borrowed into other languages like Taino. This could account for how the word took so many written forms. Thus, in modern Arawak (spoken by the Lokono people in Suriname and neighboring Guyana), the word has become karipna; the Garifuna, descendants of Island Caribs and Africans who live on the eastern coasts of Central America, took the word as their name; in the jungles of southern Venezuela, another Cariban group call themselves the Carihona (Aikhenvald 41-43). The dispersion of Carib groups across present-day Venezuela, Suriname, and Guyana led this region to be labeled Caribana on many early maps of South America (Vaughan 28-29). On Columbus’s ship in November of 1492, the word *karibna may have been pronounced *kanibna because the western dialects of Taino did not have an [r] sound and often replaced it in loanwords with [n]. Thus Columbus wrote “caniba,” “canima,” and “canibal” over the course of his journal. But it is possible that eastern Taino speakers would have said *kalibna, that is, Caliban.

It is often claimed that the word cannibal came to have its more familiar meaning because the Caribs that Europeans encountered in the New World really did eat human flesh. However, there is very little direct evidence that this is true. The first time the charge of man-eating is leveled against the Caniba it is second-hand. On December 17, 1492, Columbus’s records his disbelief when his Taino guides accuse the “canibales” of eating their enemies:

The sailors were sent away to fish with nets. They had much intercourse with the natives, who brought them certain arrows of the Caniba or Canibales. They are made of reeds, pointed with sharp bits of wood hardened by fire, and are very long. They pointed out two men who lacked certain body parts, giving to understand that the Canibales had taken bites out of them. The Admiral [Columbus] did not believe it. (English translation by Clements R. Markham)

Although Columbus never saw Caribs eating other people, this accusation is repeated several times in his journal, and is picked up in the accounts of other early European explorers. What Columbus did not know in 1492, but historians now suspect, is that the Taino felt that they were in competition with Caribs over territory. One reason to suspect this is that the inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles in the late 15th century called themselves Carib, but spoke an Arawakan language called Iñeri. To distinguish them from the Caribs who lived on the mainland of South America, Europeans came to call these people Island Caribs, and they later discovered that the Island Carib men spoke Iñeri in public and to their families, but spoke a reduced version of a Cariban language among themselves. The traditional explanation of this anomaly is that Caribs from the mainland invaded these islands by force, killed and ate all of the men, and then took the women as wives a few generations before Columbus’s arrival, thus creating a gender distinction in language. These same Island Caribs were then encroaching on the islands of the Greater Antilles, such as modern-day Puerto Rico and Haiti.

Roberto Fernández Retamar, Cuban poet and essayist

Whatever the truth might be (and we will return to this later), some strife between themselves and the Carib led the Taino to spread anti-Carib propaganda to their new Spanish “allies.” Although there is no good evidence for the practice of cannibalism among Island Caribs, there is direct evidence from Columbus’s journal and from later adventurers that Island Caribs violently resisted European colonization. And as Philip Bouchard has written, the Spanish found these “grossly distorted charges of man-eating” quite useful in justifying the enslavement and depopulation of Carib people. “Whatever the reality of Island Carib practices, Europeans created the myth of Caribs as ferocious, insatiable cannibals. As with some other peoples who resisted European incursions, Caribs found themselves saddled with this indictment” (7). We might recall here Matthew Restall’s claim that Europeans saw the native inhabitants of the Americas as “cultureless, innocent, or nefarious” (105) and note that these characterizations seem to develop immediately upon contact between Columbus and the people of the New World. Roberto Retamar, a Cuban intellectual, makes this division of nefarious and innocent specific to the Taino and the Caribs in the way they received Spanish colonization.

The Taino will be transformed into the paradisical inhabitant of a utopic world; by 1516 Thomas More will publish his Utopia, the similarities of which to the island of Cuba have been indicated, almost to the point of rapture, by Ezequiel Martínez Estrada. The Carib, on the other hand, will become a caníbal – an anthropophagus, a bestial man situated on the margins of civilization, who must be opposed to the very death. (Retamar 6-7)

In the Fall Quarter we saw how Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the Khoisan (i.e. “Hottentot”) people to frame his rejection of “progress,” but we should also recall that the people he refers to as “the people that until now has wandered least from the state of nature” are Caribs (65). Rousseau might be thinking here of Montaigne‘s “On the Cannibals,” which we read for class today and which depicts the Tupinamba people of the Amazon and their rituals of eating human flesh. Yet it also paradoxically praises the nobility of these cannibals:

It is a nation… that hath no kind of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politic superiority; no use of service, of riches, or of property; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred but common, no apparel but natural, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corn, or metal. The very words that import lying, falsehood, treason, dissimulations, covetousness, envy, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. (qtd. in Shakespeare 103)

If that English translation rings a bell, it is because Shakespeare borrows liberally from it in Gonzalo’s speech about what he would do with Prospero’s island if he were given control of it (II.i.152-61, 164-69). Montaigne’s Essais were translated into English in 1603 by John Florio, one of Shakespeare’s close friends. So we know that Shakespeare was reading Montaigne, and probably also reading Peter Martyr’s account of New World exploration. So when he named Caliban, did he have in mind the noble savage crushed by European colonization, or was he instead thinking of a nefarious man-eater who would kill his neighbors given the chance?

The word “cannibal” does not appear in The Tempest, but Shakespeare does make use of it in some of his earlier plays, each time in reference to a bloody, violent people. In Othello, he makes it explicit, calling them “the Cannibals, that eat each other” (I.iii.473). This is the same way that both Purchas and the English translation of Peter Martyr unambiguously use the term. In the earlier text, there is still an etymological connection observed between the word cannibal and Carib: “The wylde and myschevous people called Canibales, or Caribes, whiche were accustomed to eate mannes flesshe…” (27). Sixty years later when Purchas was writing, this link had been severed, and he could state that Caribs “are certain Canibals, which used inhumane huntings for human game, to take men for to eate them…” (730). This has lead many to see Caliban’s name as an indictment of his character, a not-so-subtle hint that Prospero’s slave, like other cannibals, is “inhumane.”

Joos van Winghe (designer) and Theodor de Bry (engraver), Depiction of Spanish atrocities committed in the conquest of Cuba in Las Casas’s “Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias” (1663). Image from Wikipedia.

But other interpretations are possible. Between 1585 and 1604, England and Spain were in a state of constant but undeclared war, and there was a great deal of Anti-Spanish propaganda circulating in London when Shakespeare was writing his plays. One piece in particular, published in 1583, was entitled The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, an English translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias. This book lays out a devastating eyewitness account of the genocide and cruelty perpetrated by the Spanish in the Caribbean. De las Casas was a Dominican missionary sent by the Spanish crown to convert the Taino, and he lamented that although their souls could be saved, most of them were dead by the time he arrived:

Upon these lambes so mecke, so qualified & endewed of their maker and creator, as hath bin said, entred the Spanish incontinent as they knew them, as wolves, as lions, & as tigres most cruel of long time famished: and have not done in those quarters these 40 yeres be past, neither yet doe at this present, ought els save teare them in peaces, kill them, martyre them, afflict them, torment them, & destroy them by straunge sortes of cruelties never neither seene, nor reade, nor hearde of the like (of the which some shall bee set downe hereafter) … We are able to yield a good and certaine accompt, that there is within the space of the said 40 years, by those said tyrannies & devilish doings of Spaniards …into death unjustly and tyrannously more than twelve Millions of soules, men, women, and children. And verily do believe, and think not to mistake therein, that there are dead more that fifteen Millions of soules. (De las Casas 10-11)

Historians dispute the accuracy of these numbers, and this text is very much a part of the Black Legend that we heard about from Restall (118-119). It is undeniable, however, that Spanish diseases, enslavement, and outright slaughter killed the majority of the native peoples of the Caribbean. This is one of the reasons that we will never know if it were Tainos or Lucayans who introduced the word kanibna to Columbus. His first landfall was in the Bahamas, the homeland of the Lucayans, a few of whom he kidnapped and tortured for information about where to find gold. When Columbus returned as the “Governor of the Indies,” he imposed a tax on every Taino man to produce either one pound of gold or twenty pounds of cotton every year. When people refused, he cut off their hands. Further expeditions from Spain to the Caribbean lead to the outright enslavement and deportation of most of the native inhabitants of the Bahamas to be slave laborers on Hispaniola. By the time de las Casas left Hispaniola, the Lucayans had been completely annihilated, and the Taino population was cut in half. De las Casas says that 500,000 people lived in the Bahamas before Columbus’s arrival; after the last eleven people were deported in 1520, the islands were considered “uninhabited” until 1648, when it was recolonized by the British, just like Bermuda. Indeed, another theory for why Island Caribs spoke both Iñeri and Carib is, according to Boucher, that “in historical times Island Caribs received constant infusions of Arawakan-speakers. Some of these were prisoners of war from the Greater Antilles; others, especially those from Puerto Rico, were refugees from Spanish persecution. Island Caribs, their numbers thinned by Old World diseases and by Spanish slave traders, no doubt integrated, especially the Arawakan women.” This is not to suggest that the Spanish were uniquely cruel. After all it was the British who, after taking the independent island of St. Vincent by force in 1796, slaughtered most of the Garifuna and deported the survivors almost two thousand miles away to the coast of Honduras, a journey upon which half of the prisoners died.

The descendants of these people still live today along the coast of Central America. Their music and culture are world renowned, as you can see in this 2013 music video for “Móungulu” by The Garifuna Collective, a group based in Belize who sing in Garifuna.

English brutality towards the residents of St. Vincent began more than a century and a half after Shakespeare died. Perhaps, like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, Caliban represents a problematic, misunderstood, but very human character. In the context of the Anglo-Spanish wars and the Black Legend, it is possible that we are meant to sympathize with poor Caliban suffering under Prospero’s heel (as Dr. Lewis mentioned, Milan in Shakespeare’s day was ruled by the Spanish Habsburgs). Although it is unlikely that Shakespeare knew this, it seems like more than mere coincidence that Caliban’s name means “human being” in the Cariban languages, and that his last words in the play highlight his intention to “seek for grace,” whatever that might entail (V.i.296). For Roberto Retamar, Caliban is the symbol of the Caribbean people and their struggles against European colonialism.

This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same islands where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood… I know of no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, our reality. (Retamar14)

It is not impossible that Shakespeare might have agreed.

Works Cited

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. The Languages of the Amazon. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2012. Print.

Boucher, Philip P. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992. Print.

Hoff, Berend. J. “Language Contact, War, and Amerindian Historical Tradition: The Special Case of the Island Carib,” Wolves from the Sea: Readings in the Anthropology of the Native Caribbean. Edited by Neil Whitehead. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995. 37-60. Print.

Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford, UK: Oxford UP, 2003. Print.

Retamar, Roberto Fernández. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Print.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Basic Political Writings. Translated and Edited by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2011. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Tempest. Edited by Robert Langbaum. Newly Revised Edition. New York, Signet Classics, 1998. Print.

Stritmatter, Roger A. and Lynne Kositsky. On the Date, Sources and Design of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013. Print.

Vaughan, Alden T. and Virginia Mason Vaughan. Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1991. Print.

Ben Garceau is a scholar of early medieval and late antique literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation studies, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His work has appeared in PMLA, Translation Studies, and the Yearbook of Comparative Literature. He has also contributed to the HC Research Blog on the topic of textual criticism and the Aeneid. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops.

Is the Aeneid We Are Reading the Same One That Virgil Wrote?

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r, found at the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Aeneas and Achates entering Carthage, as pictured in the Vergilianus Vaticanus folio 13r. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

This post was originally published on September 29, 2016.

For educated people in the European Middle Ages, the Aeneid was probably the most important piece of literature next to the Bible: it was the greatest epic poem written in Latin which was the standard language of learning across Europe. It is no accident that Dante chose Virgil to lead him through the Nine Circles of Hell in Inferno. As a scholar of Late Roman and Medieval European literature, then, the Aeneid is an important book for me to be pretty familiar with.

One of the most important questions I have to ask myself at the start of any research project – but particularly about such an old text – is whether or not I can trust the edition I am working with. This is obviously a problem when we are reading in translation, but even if we were all reading the Aeneid in Latin in Humanities Core, we would still have to ask… is this really what Virgil wrote? Here’s why.

The version of Virgil’s Aeneid that we are reading is an excellent translation by Robert Fagles. But let me ask you a question: where did he find his text to translate from? The Aeneid was written between 29 and 19 BCE, but printed type was not introduced into Europe until around 1440 CE. How did the poem exist between when Virgil composed it and when Fagles translated it into English for us?

You may be surprised to know that there is no single “original” version of the Aeneid from 19 BCE that all of our printed copies comes from. Virgil, like most Romans, probably wrote his works on papyrus sheets or scrolls. Now in a dry environment like Egypt, papyrus can last a very long time, but in a more humid climate like Italy, a papyrus scroll would begin to fall apart within a century. This meant that scribes had to make new hand-written copies (manu scripta in Latin) of important texts like Virgil’s works in order to preserve them. Almost all of these scrolls turned to dust long ago.

Near the end of the Roman Empire, however, it became more common for scribes to write on a new material made of dried and stretched animal skin called parchment, and to bind these pieces of parchment together into a codex: what we would call a book. The Getty Museum has produced a short but excellent video about how manuscripts were made.

Parchment is far more durable than papyrus, and it is no coincidence that the seven earliest versions of the Aeneid that still exist today are parchment copies from around the year 400 CE, more than four centuries after Virgil’s death (Courtney 13). Thanks to a number of digitization projects at archives and libraries around the world, you can actually look at digitized versions of some of these manuscripts online, like the Vergilius Vaticanus and Vergilius Romanus, both preserved at the Apostolic Library of the Vatican. All of these surviving manuscripts are incomplete, damaged, or compromised in some way. There were in all likelihood many other parchment and papyrus copies from this early date that were completely lost or destroyed during the violent dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Even if we had a totally complete, undamaged copy of the Aeneid from 400 CE, however, it still might be affected by scribal errors. Since each copy was made by hand, it is easy to see how scribal mistakes, mis-readings, and other variations could grow and become compounded in later copies. It is unknown how many copies of copies were made between Virgil’s own text of the Aeneid and these seven “witnesses,” but the text of all seven differ from each other. Some of these variations are clearly mistakes or corruptions of the original text; other differences between the manuscripts are harder to adjudicate, and it takes scholarship known as “textual criticism” to be able to tell which text is closer to the original. Sometimes, mistakes in the manuscripts will not be noticed for more than a thousand years.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate what I mean. Take the scene from Book I (lines 423-29) when Aeneas and Achates have entered Carthage and are marveling at all of the city construction projects as they climb the hill to the top. Fagles translates this as follows:

The Tyrians press on with the work, some aligning the walls,
struggling to raise the citadel, trundling stones up slopes;
some picking the building sites and plowing out their boundaries,
others drafting laws, electing judges, a senate held in awe.
Here they’re dredging a harbor, there they lay foundations
deep for a theater, quarrying out of rock great columns
to form a fitting scene for stages still to come.
(Book I, lines 513-19, pp. 61-62)

If we look at our manuscript witnesses from the Vatican, we can see that they disagree about a few of the details. Neither one is totally correct; instead, both have to be compared because they equally point back towards their lost original exemplar. Since it may be difficult to read the manuscripts, I’ve written out a transcription of the two texts:

Image found at the Apostolic Library, http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3225

Detail from  Vat. f13v [MSS Vat. lat. 3225]. Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANTARDENTESTYRIIPARSDUCEREMUROS
MOLIRIQUEARCEM·ETMANIBUSSUBUOLUERESAXA
PARSOPTARELOCUMTECTOETCONCLUDERESULCO
IURAMAGISTRATUSQ·LEGUNT·SANCTUMQUESENATUM
HICPORTUSALIIEFFODIUNTHICLATATHEATRIS
FUNDAMENTAPETUNTALIIIMMANISQUECOLUMNAS
RUPIBUSEXCIDUNTSCAENISDECORAALTAFUTURIS˙

Image from the Apostolic Library, Vatican

Detail from Rom. f89v [MSS Vat. lat. 3867] Image reproduction courtesy of the Apostolic Library, Vatican. All rights reserved.

INSTANT·ARDENTES·TYRII·PARS·DUCERE·MUROS
MOLIRI·QUE·ARCEM·ET·MANIBUS·SUBUOLUERE·SAXA
PARS·APTARE·LOCUM·TECTO·ET·CONCLUDERE·SULCO
IURA·MAGISTRATUSQ:LEGUNT·SANCTUM·Q:SENATU
HIC·PORTUS·ALII·EFFODIUNT·HIC·ALTA·THEATRIS·
FUNDAMENTA·LOCANT·ALII·IMMANIS·Q:COLUMNAS
RUPIBUS·EXCIDUNT·SCAENIS·DECORA·ALTA·FUTURIS

Notice that in the third line Rom. has the word aptare, while Vat. has optare. Fagles (or, rather, the edition of the Latin text that Fagles translated) chose to use optare here, since he translates the line as “some picking the building sites.” If he had translated aptare, it would have said something like “fitting the building sites” instead. Yet he chooses against the Vat. text two lines later: the workers “lay foundations / deep for a theater,” matching alta theatris / fundamenta locant. Had he followed the Vat. text, he might have translated lata theatris / fundamenta petunt as “they seek foundations broad for a theater,” which doesn’t make quite as much sense. Still, some editors choose to read the text this other way (cf. Conington 75). Switching alta for lata is probably the scribal equivalent of a “typo.” Mixing up locant and petunt, on the other hand, is harder to explain. We moderns are not the first to notice this discrepancy, however: if you look closely, an early medieval reader has put a little mark that looks like a percentage sign (%) over the word petunt, and noted a correction “LOCANT” in the left-hand margin.

Even if all the manuscripts agree, however, this still doesn’t mean that we have access to the original text as Virgil wrote it: it just means that all of the manuscripts we have are descended from a common source which may not be Virgil’s original. In this same passage given above about city projects from Book I, you may have noticed something strange. The poem focuses here on the physical work of building a city, except for one line. It may not strike you at first, but the central line about “drafting laws” and a “senate held in awe” doesn’t totally match its surroundings, does it? In fact, even though this line appears in this spot in all seven witnesses, some readers from the classical era to the present day doubt that this line was in the original poem, and believe that it was added by a later scribe.

Why should you care about such minutiae as this? There are at least two reasons, the first more general, and the second more specific for Humanities Core. First, what I have said above about how texts change from manuscript to manuscript does not just apply to the Aeneid, or to ancient literature, or to things written by hand. In fact, all texts are subject to this kind of corruption and variation, even texts that might seem totally modern and well-established, which is why many important books are released in critical editions even if they were written in America in the 20th century. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the interaction between Bilbo and Gollum in the first edition of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien compared to the second edition that came out after he had written The Lord of the Rings. There are also differences between the British and American versions of the Harry Potter series. Needless to say, if there are variations in these texts, there are also variations in the various printings and editions of books like Waiting for the Barbarians, The Tempest, and every other thing you will read this year in Humanities Core.

This brings me to the second reason you should care about textual criticism. Let’s say I was writing a paper about the Aeneid and I wanted to make the claim that for Virgil there was an implicit connection between the physical foundation of a city and the institutional foundation of its laws. I might want to use this passage from Book I, since it shows the senate and the laws coming into being at the same moment, even in the same sentence, as the pillars and stones of the city. If I simply quoted this section, however, and my reader knew that the line about the laws was probably added later (or taken from a different section of the poem, see Campbell 161), they could trash my argument, saying it proved nothing because the line wasn’t original to the poem. If, on the other hand, I incorporated textual criticism into my research, I could argue that constructing the law and constructing the city were tied together in the Roman mind, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that some Roman editor or scribe added the line about the laws and the Senate to the original, and most people after that either didn’t notice it as strange or felt that the poem was better or more interesting this way. My argument has changed and deepened from one about Virgil’s psychology – something that is ultimately impossible to prove – to one about critical reception and the history of the Aeneid within Roman culture.

Works Cited

Campbell, A. Y. “Aeneidea.” The Classical Review 52, 2 (Nov. 1938): 161-63. Print.

Conington, John and Virgil. The Works of Virgil with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Vol. II. London: Whittaker & Co., 1876. Print.

Courntey, E. “The Formation of the Text of Virgil.” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 28 (1981): 13-29. Print.

Virgil. Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Virgil. Edited by J.B. Greenough. Boston: Ginn & Co., 1900. Digital text available online at The Perseus Project. Accessed 30 Aug. 2016. Web.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Translated by Robert Fagles. Introduction by Bernard Knox. New York, Penguin Books, 2006. Print.

Ben Garceau pictureBen Garceau is a scholar of medieval literature with particular interests in early Britain, translation, and critical theory. He received a dual Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and English from Indiana University in 2015. His article “Passing Over, Passing On: Survivance in the Translation of Deor by Seamus Heaney and J. L. Borges” is forthcoming in PMLA. When he isn’t leading seminars in Humanities Core, he likes hiking, working on his science fiction novel, and digging through record shops in Los Angeles.

“sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt”

Aeneas and Achates Outside the Temple of Juno (ca. 1615) Collection of the Louvre. Image and further information available at the Frick Collection.

Sebastiaen Vrancx, Aeneas and Achates Outside the Temple of Juno (ca. 1615). Louvre Collection. Image and further information available at the Frick Collection.

This post was originally published on October 14, 2016.

Close Reading, In Translation, With Readers From The Past

Writing your first essay in the Humanities Core Course, a literary analysis of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid, you will have been reading and re-reading Virgil’s text in Robert Fagles’ translation in order to make claims about the text and find appropriate textual support.

 It might be hard at this point to remember exactly what you knew about Virgil’s Aeneid before you started reading it in the context of the Humanities Core. Some of you may have never encountered Virgil or the Aeneid, while others may have read all of the Aeneid before they started the course. Most students, however, will fall somewhere in between these extremes, and soon after you started attending Professor Zissos’ lectures, you started to accumulate information about Roman culture and society and the structure of the Aeneid that turned your reading experience into an informed, guided reading experience.

You can think of this kind of reading experience as part of a discussion — literally so in your discussion sections, but also metaphorically as a conversation with anyone in the past who has read Virgil’s Aeneid and left us a record of his or her reading. A text as old as the Aeneid has produced many such records of past readings, testimonies of readers that can direct our attention in turn to specific aspects of the text that we would have otherwise missed. Reading such accounts allows us to enter into a virtual conversation with past readers that enriches our present understanding of the text. First, let us recall a scene from Book 1:

…, uidet Iliacas ex ordine pugnas
bellaque iam fama totum uulgata per orbem,
Atridas Priamumque et saeuum ambobus Achillem.
constitit et lacrimans ‘quis iam locus,’ inquit, ‘Achate,
quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris ?
en Priamus. sunt hic etiam sua praemia laudi,
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
solue metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem.’
sic ait atque animum pictura pascit inani
multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine uultum.  (Virgilius Maronis, I, 456 – 465)

Translated by Fagles, in our Penguin edition, as follows:

… — all at once he sees,
spread out from first to last, the battles fought at Troy,
the fame of the Trojan War now known throughout the world,
Atreus’ sons and Priam — Achilles, savage to both at once.
Aeneas came to a halt and wept, and “Oh, Achates,”
he cried, “is there anywhere, any place on earth
not filled with our ordeals?  There’s Priam, look!
Even here, merit will have its true reward …
even here, the world is a world of tears
and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.
Dismiss your fears.  Trust me, this fame of ours
will offer us some haven.”

So Aeneas says,
feeding his spirit on empty, lifeless pictures,
groaning low, the tears rivering down his face … (Virgil 63)

In this blog post I want to focus on one such example of a past reader’s reaction to this specific passage, a remark by Denis Diderot, the editor of the most famous publication during the European Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie, a friend of Rousseau, and one of the first to write evaluative essays about publicly exhibited paintings:

Un des plus beaux vers de Virgile et un des plus beaux principes de l’art imitatif, c’est celui-ci:
Sunt lacrymae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
Il faudrait l’écrire sur la porte de son [i.e. a painter’s] atelier: Ici les malheureux trouvent des yeux qui les pleurent.  (Diderot 392)

One of the most beautiful verses of Virgil, and one of the most beautiful principles of imitative art, is the following:
sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt.
One ought to write it above the entrance to the painter’s studio: ‘Here the unfortunate ones will find eyes that shed tears for them.’ (my translation, O.B.)

The inscription Diderot proposes for a painter’s door as a reminder for the artist that his supreme aim should be to move the beholder is clearly less a translation of the Latin quotation than a metonymical summary of the whole scene.

What seems to be lost in Diderot’s version is the heart-rending conflict in which Aeneas finds himself caught, between grief (hence his own tears) at being confronted with a rendition of his own past, and hope, which he tries to impart to Achates even as he is crying. This hope is also founded on tears: the tears Aeneas assumes the inhabitants of this strange new land to have shed over his fate. It gives him reason to believe that he and his companions will finally meet with a friendly reception, quite unlike the series of encounters with monsters he has just survived, when he re-traced part of Odysseus’ itinerary on his voyage from Troy before landing in Carthage.

Diderot’s metonymy can be resolved in different ways: Diderot may be admonishing the painter to identify with his subject emotionally (the painter’s tears), or he may exhort him to paint so that someone visiting his atelier will be moved to cry. But what is missing from Diderot’s version are tears of recognition, the tears which Aeneas sheds upon recognizing his father and himself (‘se quoque‘, l.488), depicted in their most desperate moment.

Diderot then proposes that the ideal scene of reception for a painting adhering to this criterion would be for a criminal who carries his secret unrecognized in society to dread the steps leading to the public exhibition space for paintings in his contemporary Paris, the Salon, where a painting depicting his crime would have such a powerful effect on him that he would willingly sign his own sentence.

In quoting the line, as Diderot does, a reader re-contextualizes it.  Part of this process is the interruption of the narrative sequence of the original, including its sequence of emotions.

Sebastian Brant, Image of The Mural on Juno’s Temple, Publii Vergilii Opera (Strasbourg, 1502). For more information, see the digitized manuscript at the University of Heidelberg and additional commentary from Dickinson College.

Sebastian Brant, Image of The Mural on Juno’s Temple, Publii Vergilii Opera (Strasbourg, 1502). For more information, see the digitized manuscript at the University of Heidelberg and additional commentary from Dickinson College.

In this particular scene, Aeneas’ conflicted emotions of grief and joy eventually are transferred onto Achates, his companion, who has accompanied him to Carthage from the ships and now stands with Aeneas magically hidden by Venus invisibly before the artwork in Juno’s temple. It is as if Aeneas has brought in the form of his companion Achates his own, representative audience and engages before our very eyes in narrating the temporal sequence of the scene, which most commentators assume to be a mural painting.

And Achates does indeed exhibit the precise mix of fear and hope characteristic of Aeneas’ first reaction: “simul percussus Achates / laetitiaque metuque” (513-4) — Achates was simultaneously shaken both by joy and by fear. But these emotions of Achates are emotions occasioned by Dido, whose appearance with her followers and some of Aeneas’ companions, whom he had left behind at the ships, interrupts Aeneas’ contemplation of the artwork on the wall.

Achates’ reaction might then be described as a delayed emotional reaction that re-enforces the hierarchy separating him from Aeneas — his emotions are slower, he feels only now what Aeneas has felt since he laid recognizing eyes on the representation of scenes from the Trojan War. They also might be described as testifying to the effect of Aeneas’ (and, by extension, Virgil’s) ekphrasis: Aeneas’ re-telling of the scenes that Achates sees in front of him gradually awakens in him the mix of fear and joy Aeneas has been feeling from the very start.

Yet, whatever hierarchical distance between Achates and Aeneas had separated them in their initial reaction is finally effectively closed again in the next line, when both are united in an emotional confusion related to the decision whether or not they should discover themselves to their companions. They both burn with a desire to re-join them, yet they still fear to give up their supernatural disguise for fear that Dido and her people might turn out to be hostile: “auidi coniungere dextras / ardebant, sed res animos incognita turbat” (514-5).

In his commentary on the scene, Lee Fratantuono suggests that Aeneas’ initial mix of fear and joy had to have given way to “increasing horror”:

The pictures follow the story of the fall of Troy to the very point where Aeneas’ story in Book 2 [of the Aeneid] will begin; Aeneas himself will paint the rest of these pictures, as it were, when he tells the story of what happened after the Ethiopian and Amazonian allies came to Priam’s aid.  Aeneas knows that the pictures of Memnon and Penthesilea presage the final chain of events leading to the sacking of the city; the sum total of the pictures, especially in the situational context of Juno’s temple, should not be consolatory to a Trojan. These are images not set up as memorials of human compassion, but as triumphant records of the victories of Juno’s beloved Greeks over the enemies she so hates. In the first excitement of seeing the early scenes from the war that so changed his life … it is as if Aeneas momentarily forgot the dreadful context of the artwork … The scene is one of increasing horror as Aeneas surveys the paintings in their terrible order, before he finally cries out after seeing the desecration of his friend Hector’s body: tum vero ingentem gemitum dat pectore ab imo (1.485) Then indeed he gave a mighty groan from deep in his breast. The pictures might have been fitting to help rouse Carthaginian morale during the Punic Wars; they celebrate the worst degradation of the Trojans. Aeneas stares fixed and agape at these images as Dido finally enters the temple and interrupts the tour of her art gallery. (Fratantuono 19)

Fratantuono’s more detailed and more faithful reading of the scene allows us to see that in quoting and re-contextualizing Aeneas’ initial emotional reaction to the artwork in Juno’s temple Diderot seems to have effectively blinded us to the narrative sequence of pathos that leaves Aeneas much more troubled, and much less relieved, than we might initially assume.

That readers should be tempted to quote and re-contextualize the line like this has in part to do with the difficulty of translating it in a prosaic, straightforward way. In a literal, word-for-word translation we would read for ‘sunt lacrimae rerum / et mentem mortalia tangunt’: “there are tears of – or for – things (rerum) / and human things (mortalia) touch the mind”.

In translation, rerum and mortalia take on heightened affective qualities, as they are often generalized to stand in for the fate of being human. Thus, Ronald Austin in his 1971 Oxford edition translates: “even here tears fall for men’s lot, and mortality touches the heart” (Austin n.p.), while Allen Mandelbaum renders rerum in English with “passing things”, and mortalia with “things mortal” (Mandelbaum 17).

But beyond pathos there is also a second aspect that contributes to the temptation to quote and re-contextualize this line and in doing so to disturb its temporality, the temporality it has in the sequence of Virgil’s narrative — and this temptation has to do with the complex temporality of Virgil’s narrative itself, with a structure of prolepsis and analepsis that re-enforces the main themes of his epic, fuses together its parts and shackles those parts in turn to the Homeric tradition.

Inasmuch as Aeneas at first interprets the artwork in Juno’s temple as a sign that he will find refuge on these unknown shores he looks toward the future.  Inasmuch as he draws hope from a representation of his own past, he looks toward that past.  Both past and present are united in this moment.

His interpretation repeats an act of interpretation in which Dido herself engaged when she first arrived at the very same spot with her followers as refugees from the city of Tyre: “Now deep in the heart of Carthage stood a grove, / lavish with shade, where the Tyrians, making landfall, / still shaken by wind and breakers, first unearthed that sign: / Queen Juno had led their way to the fierce stallion’s head / that signaled power in war and ease in life for ages. / Here Dido of Tyre was building Juno a mighty temple, …” (Fagles 63).

For Aeneas, looking at his own representation in the battle scenes from Troy offers an anagnorisis, a literal, pictorial recognition of himself that is part of an emotional crisis: “Aeneas gives a groan, heaving up from his depths, / he sees the plundered armor, the car, the corpse / of his great friend, and Priam reaching out / with helpless hands … / He even sees himself / swept up in the melee, clashing with Greek captains, / sees the troops of the Dawn and swarthy Memnon’s arms.” (Fagles 64).

For Virgil’s Augustan reader, Dido’s interpretation of the stallion’s head as “… power in war and ease in life for ages …” is offered up as a fulfilled prediction, a proleptic description of the power and wealth of the Carthage that was to be Rome’s adversary in its two most desperate, formative wars, the first and second Punic War. Indeed, the Aeneid as a whole is structured proleptically by this conflict, and it has often been faulted for this constraint of imperial flattery, which projects existing history back in time to re-create a founding myth for the Augustan Roman empire, an analepsis that purports to be a prolepsis, a vaticinium ex eventu, a prophecy fulfilled that strains to pretend the outcome could be any different.

It’s now time to interrupt our close reading of this passage and take stock of what we have done.

(1) We have applied techniques of close reading to a sample passage from Virgil’s Aeneid.

(2) We have tried to account for the difference translation makes in our interpretation of this passage.

(3) We have applied technical terms from rhetoric, art and literary criticism (ekphrasis, analepsis, prolepsis, anagnorisis, vaticinium ex eventu).

(4) By taking a closer look at this passage, we have become aware of some important themes and structures of Virgil’s Aeneid that we encounter elsewhere in the poem (e.g., ekphrasis in book 8; vaticinium ex eventu; structures of repetition and imitation that inform the relationship of parts of the Aeneid to each other, and to epic poetry that preceded it).

Where could one go from here?

One could contextualize the passage, either in the context of a reading of Diderot or of reading Virgil, with the ultimate goal of contributing to an interpretation of the work of one of these two authors.  One could also connect this sample reading to larger theoretical concerns.  One such concern that has informed my own approach to literature is reader-response criticism and hermeneutics, another a conscious application of rhetoric to the study of literature.  In order to do so, one would have to take into account more detailed readings of this passage by specialists like the classicist Michael Putnam, who dedicates a chapter to it in his 1998 book Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. One could also engage in an informed visual analysis (Essay #2!) of art work depicting this passage in Virgil, like the works by Sebastian Brant and Sebastiaen Vrancx featured here.

Works Cited

Diderot, Denis.  Oeuvres Complètes.  Gen Ed. Herbert Dieckmann, Jean Varloot,  Herrmann, 1975, vol. XIV.

Fratantuono, Lee.  Madness Unchained. A reading of Virgil’s Aeneid.  Lanham, 2007.

Virgilius Maronis, Publius. Aeneidos. Liber Primus. Ed. R.G. Austin, Clarendon Press, 1971.

Virgil. The Aeneid of Virgil.  Tr. Allen Mandelbaum. University of California Press, 1982.

Virgil. The Aeneid.  Tr. Robert Fagles.  Penguin, 2006.

Further Reading

Putnam, Michael C. J.  Virgil’s Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid.  Yale University Press, 1998.

berghofOliver Berghof received his PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine in 1995.  He taught in the Humanities Core program as a graduate student between 1992 and 1995, and has done so again as a lecturer since 1999. A native of Germany, he specializes in European Literature, Literary Theory and Humanities Computing. In teaching Humanities Core, he particularly  enjoys the challenge of teaching students in UCI’s Honors Program.

Cultural Dissonance in a 19th-Century Newspaper Illustration

The post originally appeared in Surfacing Memory: Seeking the Voices that Inform Me, a multimedia site where seminar leader Susan Morse explores artifacts and heirlooms in an effort to reconstruct her own family’s history. Our gratitude to Dr. Morse for sharing this personal story here in hopes that it will serve as a model for Humanities Core students’ own oral history and artifact-based research projects this quarter.

“Do not judge your neighbor until you walk two moons in your neighbor’s moccasins” (Cheyenne Proverb)

Just above illustrations pictured below was written the date

I’m not sure if this date refers to when the nine panel “funny” was originally published in the newspaper or to when it was pasted in the McNiven (my great great grandmother’s and then Jesse McNiven’s) Scrapbook. There are very few clues to indicate in which newspaper (or in which country) this illustration was even printed. Given my knowledge of the McNiven family time-line, there is a distinct possibility it appeared in a Canadian newspaper prior to the family exodus to the then American territories to the south. Then again, in 1879 they may still have been in Scotland.

What interests me about these possibilities is that the illustration clearly demonstrates a fascination with empire; in particular with the clear demarcation between the old inheritance-based British Empire and the newly expanding American empire making its presence known deep into the “Wild Western frontier.” What’s more, the panels characterize — or even satirize — a clear cultural dissonance between these positions that makes possible a third and more compelling ethnographic reading outside of empire altogether.

So let’s try walking through this illustration wearing different pairs of moccasins to see how each fits beginning with the caption at the end of the illustration which reads:

Given ethnolinguistic references from the 19th century, it is clear from the caption that an American Indian (pejoratively described as a “Red Shirt”) and a cowboy (also referenced negatively as an untamed or wild “Broncho Bill”) have been invited to a hunting event but one that will not align with their expectations. The superior “Master of Hounds” serves as the host for this occasion, and given this final revelation it seems clear that from a socio-cultural context this event would be both foreign and unknowable to the two American men, something that gives satire some legs. Spoiler aside, the caption confirms the medium’s rhetorical design as one that will draw on cultural dissonance to drive a particular narrative.

Our narrative begins with an American Indian traveling together with a fairly stereotypical characterization of an old “Wild West” cowboy. The two ride together in peace and in harmony with each other and in nature; the horses also moving in step. The teepee and war bonnet place the American Indian in a tribe, like the Cheyenne, that hunts and follows the seasons and the movement of big game; bison in particular. Other noteworthy markers — such as the feathers and long war bonnet — situate the American Indian riding in the front as both his tribe’s leader as well as a singularly courageous and prominent member of his tribe.

Traditionally, tribal members earn their first eagle feather to commemorate a rite of passage into adulthood. I witnessed this ritual annually while coaching and living on the Salish-Kootenai Reservation in Arlee, Montana while I was an undergraduate. Tribal elders presented High School seniors with an eagle feather along with their diplomas at the Graduation ceremony. After the presentations were completed, one of the Tribal Elders explained that the American Indians from the northwest and plains region consider the eagle to be the bravest and strongest of all birds. Not only does this spirit travel with the feather, but also anyone who possesses and wears a ceremonial eagle feather carries honor and pride at being one of the First Peoples (feathers were offered to all non-tribal seniors as well). As a final gesture, the Tribal Elder waved his feathers over the crowd as a means of wishing everyone in the community prosperity, peace and happiness.

Additional feathers are then awarded following actions recognized by the tribe as courageous or heroic. The feathered head dress pictured above, for example, conveys much more than this man’s role as the tribal chief. This war bonnet signals a lifetime’s worth of feathers earned through heroic action. Additionally, the warrior’s pole he carries and the horse he rides contain a number of overflow feathers earned. Finally, both the war bonnet and warrior’s pole are ceremonial, reserved for special occasions, and serve as a sign of respect for the coming event –  say, for example, a ritualistic hunt or an invitation to meet with a “neighbor” in the Cheyenne sense of the word.

This ethnographic reading of the two Americans, however, may have been lost on the readers of the time who might have preferred instead to see these men as wild and weak or inferior in comparison to the imperial power whose newspaper they read. The chief, for example, carries his own teepee, a task usually reserved for women in the tribe. This, along with a hyperbolic abundance of ceremonial feathers offers those sympathetic to the British Empire a rhetorical reading of this so-called great and heroic leader as anything but formidable or worthy. The cowboy representative of the American Empire maintains an even weaker position, since he trails behind the chief and rides a paint horse. The paint horse — a mix of Barb, Andalusian and Arabian breeds — was originally brought to the frontier during the Spanish “conquest” of the Americas by Cortez and his Conquistadors. Nineteenth century associations of the paint horse by white colonizers and Europeans were pejorative given its mixed blood, connections with a defeated imperial intervention and its most common association as the “Big Dog” or “God Dog” of the American Indian, in particular with those tribes that hunt and wage war on the plains.

Additionally, although later panels of this illustration clearly name the cowboy as a man, the depiction above not only feminizes him, but it also places him in an even more inferior, weaker position in contrast to the already emasculated chief. His long, free flowing hair characterizes his identity as untamed, wild and therefore “savage” or uncivilized according to beliefs that were widely-held by Europeans (as well as by their descendants living in the established states of America) at this time. As a representative of the American imperial machine, the feminized American stands in sharp contrast to the masculinized British “Master of Hounds” (not yet pictured but named in the closing caption). This man — the “Master” — is a figure with distinction, a man fronting a clear title and legacy bound to a deep, long-standing aristocratic British tradition. Unlike the “Master,” the cowboy bears the name “Broncho Bill.” His identity characterizes him, in part, as a “broncho” (or the more common bronco) which in “Wild West” equestrian circles describes an untamed and untrained “frontier” horse. Interestingly, it is also a term used to denote a mustang, another mixed breed of range pony introduced to the American territories by the Spanish (and which continue to run feral in the hills to this day).  Moreover, this man is identified by first name only and does not garner societal distinction enough to hold a family name; therefore this (Imperial agent) “broncho” represents an uncivilized, culturally mixed emasculated man, but this is not a reliable ethnographic reading. Let’s get back to that…

The second panel in the series reflects — on the one hand — a harmonious, symbiotic relationship between the American Indian and his cowboy companion.  In this frame, the cowboy prepares what is mockingly described as “light refreshment” presumably for both men as the chief smokes a pipe, a ceremonial gesture signaling agreement with a covenant between parties or preparation for a planned ceremonial event.  Perhaps he smokes in this case  to acknowledge the invitation to join “the Hunt.” The horse adorning the teepee elevates this animal to a spirit or totem animal that symbolizes a balance between personal drive and untamed passions, between individual agency and a responsibility to others, quite suitable given the chief’s role in his community.   Harmony extends also to the two horses standing behind the teepee that have been acculturated to two different traditions, and that live and rest comfortably together which parallels the two men who bear markers to clearly different yet compatible ways to exist and to live together.

On the other hand, the designation of this space as a “Wild West Camp” recalls earlier depictions of the American representative of empire as uncivilized and weak. What’s more, the cowboy performs a woman’s labor by preparing the refreshment and probably also by serving the chief who currently smokes alone. I’m partial to the symbiotic and harmonious reading, of course, but as someone who studies this history, I must acknowledge the generosity of such a narrative in hindsight given widespread and systematic atrocities perpetrated against the First Peoples by agents of American imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Negative attitudes about the First Peoples were perpetuated in part through cultural dissonance (through the notion of a “gender frontiers,” for example), the implications of which are clearly depicted in panel three. It appears that a well-dressed local (looks a little “dandy” to me) on an afternoon walk has just happened on the cowboy and the chief engaging in some afternoon teepee relations — so to speak — with the chief having taken a superior position. This interaction sharply mocks American colonizers (represented by our “broncho”) as having succumbed to or been seduced by the so-called “unnatural behaviors” of the “savage” American Indians.

Additionally, the depiction of the chief places him in an overtly sexually aggressive stance counter to the man passing by. This exchange facilitates what might have counted in 19th-century America as a threat to white culture; first, through a mixed race, same-sex relationship and second, through the aggressive encounter triggered by the exposure of, what looks like, a naked and virile “Indian” chief to the startled, unarmed white stranger shown as innocently passing by.  The cultural reality, however, is that heteronormative ideals and constructs didn’t really exist among American Indian tribes until they were imposed on them by European colonizers.  And — as an interesting aside that the illustrator may not have known — American Indian hunters traditionally abstained from intercourse for a few days prior to a hunt as part of a ceremonial practice (abstinence from sex to produce an abundant bounty during the hunt).

The threat of a blended culture to imperial civilization and legacy continues to figure prominently in panel four. Clearly, the sight of the American Indian chief and “Wild West” cowboy seems so strange and “savage” in contrast to the waiting members of the British hunting group, that neither the “civilized” men nor beasts among them including the dogs can control its feelings or “sensation[s]” of desperation. At the same time, and funnily, the two Americans calmly and quietly enter the scene to witness pure chaos as the well-dressed, British fox hunters struggle to sit or to control their mounts and hounds marking a clear dissonance between the cultural groups.

The cultural disconnect depicted in this frame and implied throughout the illustration extends primarily to the differences between what counts as a hunt for each group. The British riders with their hounds are waiting for a Fox Hunt, a sport of leisure (pffft) that goes back to the 16th Century that does not yield any food as bounty for a successful run. The primary objective of this kind of hunt is the performance of human superiority over animals, of wielding control over a pack of trained dogs to chase down and to kill the red fox. These unarmed riders (chasers more than hunters) work together with the “Master” of the hounds to control and to direct their hounds as they search for, chase down, and kill a fox victim. The Master may then choose to reward those hunters who perform most admirably during the event with some trophy from the dead fox — a paw, the mask, or the tail (the biggest honor). The remaining carcass is then tossed to the hounds. Very civilized indeed and then light refreshment follows.

However, one doesn’t have to look beyond the above panel to recognize that the chief and his partner had a much different hunt in mind.  The chief who is positioned as standing and surveying the landscape in front of him, clearly, searches for big game — most likely bison — as the objective of the hunt. This hunt does not describe a mere sport for those in the American “frontier.” The hunt for bison (buffalo where I come from) which may last a single day or several, ideally yields tens of animals all of which are honored, eaten, worn and otherwise utilized by members of the tribe. No part of the animal goes to waste.  In terms of a hunting bounty, the hunter responsible for bringing a buffalo down with his bow and arrow is entitled to claim the hide and some of the choicest meat cuts as his prize.

An even more special prize for American Indians — like the Cheyenne — is marked by a hunter’s first kill, where as his trophy and as an important rite of passage, he will drink some of the blood of his kill. While drinking the blood of a freshly killed animal may seem at first savage (and certainly would for the Fox Hunters), this is in reality a culturally short-sighted position.  American Indians live in harmony with nature, belong to the land and see themselves as brothers to the animals they kill. Blood symbolizes the force that gives life to all beings. The blood, along with the animal that sacrifices it, is a gift that deserves and demands respect (a message my Navajo godfather Jimmy John relayed to me throughout my childhood). A hunter who drinks the warm blood of the animal he has killed demonstrates his deep respect for the animal’s sacrifice. It also symbolizes that the life of this animal will continue in the hunter. In death, the animal’s body (and blood) serves as a gift that will ultimately prolong the lives of many in the hunter’s tribe. Given this naturalist reading of the scene, the calm entry of the two men signifies their harmonious relationship with nature, with their horses and with each other.

The British hounds, however, are not in harmony with this nature but express such a discord at the sight of these two individuals and their horses that the American men must hide until the more “civilized” and trained hounds will no longer be negatively affected (or even influenced) by their presence (which really pushes the “othering” boundaries).

Throughout these panels, the harmony and symbiosis of the two American men persists, despite rhetorical efforts to depict them as weak, emasculated and inferior.  This symbiosis and harmony between the men, their horses and their inner nature or “impulse” continues in frame six as the men are thrown from their mounts. It is unclear what particular impulse led to this unexpected ejection (perhaps it simply mocks them as irrational creatures), but the double stop of the horses and the double flight of the men further illustrates an equity between these two men even though they clearly come from different cultural backgrounds (and from different equestrian traditions). They remain in harmony with each other and with the natural world including with their inner “impulse.” And their horses aren’t getting ready to run away from the men (which you’ll notice on the next frame).

In panel seven the two Americans are back on their mounts and chasing after “information” about some “natives” depicted above that look quite like British citizens, don’t they?  In fact, these “natives” resemble 19th-century bobbies, a police force first put in place in London in the early 19th century to maintain law and order on the British home-front.  Perhaps the spoof here is on the American wanton disregard for the British imperial claim on the western territories.  These two “wild” Americans lack the decorum to perform accordingly at the Fox Hunt.  Their very presence disrupts the event precisely because they are “savage” outsiders or “others” in the context of European Imperialism.  Further taking the above panel into account, they wildly chase these “natives” without control over their own trajectory (or their mounts) at the same time as they fail to recognize the so-called “native” claim to the land as conferred by the panel’s caption. There is a sharp irony that features one of the First Peoples in this fight against the “natives”: one, because he travels with a member of the American Imperial team and two, because the British bobbies claim “native” ownership, which, as we know, was but one of many attempted European interventions on territory already fully populated by a diverse, self-regulating, autonomous indigenous population.

Have you noticed a clear lack of narrative between some of these panels? So have I! Two consistent features, however, seem to be the persistence of satire and the two Americans.  The above scene, for example, satirizes “frontier” scouting techniques, although it is quite unclear what these men are trying to find, and where the third guy came from. Maybe they are still scouting for the “information” they were seeking in the previous panel. The above depiction of “Broncho Bill” mocks his lack of scouting skills as he presumably uses his hand to reach for scat and other tangible clues about the particular “scent” they seek. The illustration pokes further fun by depicting the American Indian as literally utilizing a white man to accomplish this same task (which seems much more practical) and which degrades the white man’s and the cowboy’s ethos. In reality, however, American Indian scouts enjoy a long-standing reputation as quasi-diviners who can detect and read seemingly obscure natural signs, or pick up a trail by vibration and sound, or observe and gather vital knowledge about an enemy without detection.

And so we come to the final frame in the series, which appears to answer a few unanswered questions, offers a clear commentary about the two American riders, and throws an additional means for understanding the “hunt” into conversation. As it turns out, the hunt and the scouting excursion seem, in the last few frames, to have been to locate one of any available run-away horses for the British rider to carry him back home. Although many of these panels have promoted a claim of British superiority, when it comes to real riding, this Brit and his mount look spent. In this panel, the Brit trails behind both American riders who begin and end their journey on their own horses, illustrating that they are both good riders and possess “good riding knowledge,” perhaps a positive nod to having “impulse” that may be akin to sound horse sense. This stands in stark contrast to the Britisher who was dismounted and who lost control of three different horses. It doesn’t appear that he even travels home on his own horse. Also noteworthy is that while there were consistently negative characterizations of the two American men, they are referred to in these final lines as “our Wild West friends” who (you may have noticed) have been riding and working together for some panels now.

“Our Wild West friends” bring me to the final tidbit about this peculiar illustration. According to the caption that follows this final panel (the one we began our discussion with), the hunt was set to meet in Hertfordshire, but there is no Hertfordshire in America or in Canada. The closest is a county located in southern England. After all of this consideration and analysis, in the end, it is possible this illustration may not have been published or set on the North American continent at all but rather took place in the 19th-century British imagination.

Perhaps this illustration nods to early iterations of the “Wild West” spectacles, the most famous of which are the Buffalo Bill Wild West Shows. If you do any digging, you’ll certainly notice a lot of Bills as headliners (Pawnee Bill, Buckskin Bill, Buffalo Bill…Broncho Bill). Smaller versions of these shows began in England in the early 1870s and featured an array of “frontier” types that fed consumer curiosity about “unnatural” oddities of the American “Wild West” including cowboys, American Indians, infamous outlaws, lady sharp shooters, etc. These curious figures were all put on public display and observed and marveled and consumed for their “strange” manners like any number of traveling “freak shows” and other marvels of nature that were popular in Europe in the 19th century.  Is it possible that “Our Wild West Friends” depicted as living in symbiosis and harmony with each other and in nature were actually meant to stand in as marvels of nature in a kind of illustrated “Wild West Freak Show” published in a British newspaper way back on January 1, 1879?  If that was the intention, then the joke is on them for having missed the deeper meaning.  I think I prefer walking around in my neighbor’s moccasins for a few moons…

After Professor Sharon Block’s lecture on Thursday, April 13th, I decided to add a postscript:

The moccasins to the left above are mine and were made in the traditional way.  Men perform the hunt and women perform the remaining labor. They dress the animal, prepare the meat, other animal parts, and hide: scrape, tan, chew (yes, you read that correctly) and smoke the leather. The bead work was done by Jeannie Peak whose mother is very famous in the region for traditional beaded crafts she made for famous people like the Queen of England and Roy Rogers (of old Western Film and Radio Spectaculars). Many members of the area tribes — including many of my Salish friends in Arlee, MT — are descended from American Indians converted in the late 1800s to Catholicism (see the Mission in St. Ignatius, MT). The flower on the two pieces above is the “Salish Rose,” symbolic of femininity, fertile bounty (reproduction), and the natural cycles of life. The Salish Rose also has a second meaning that most outside of the community might not know; it is a symbol of the Catholic Sacred Heart of Christ. The second piece — the necklace featured to the right above — is traditionally worn by Salish women who participate in tribal and intertribal dancing ceremonies and rituals called Pow Wows (during fourth of July weekend in Arlee).  The Shawl Dance or the Traditional Dance are danced by the American Indian woman to celebrate her femininity, her role within the tribal community, and her direct connection to mother nature.

Susan Morse is a continuing lecturer in the Humanities Core Program at UC Irvine, where she has enjoyed teaching for many years. She received her PhD in German Studies from the UCI Department of European Languages & Studies in 2006. She also studied Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Psychology and English at the Universities of Montana and Arizona, which is another reason why she loves teaching in the Humanities. Her research focuses on Holocaust memory and the limits of representation in the Holocaust. In addition to leading seminars in Core, she also enjoys teaching a Romantic Fairy Tales course for the Department of European Languages & Studies and Comparative Literature.