Ordering Empire The Poetry of Camoes, Pringle and Campbell

The Poetry of Camões, Pringle and Campbell

vonNicholas Meihuizen

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Ordering Empire The Poetry of Camoes, Pringle and Campbell – Meihuizen

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Inhaltsverzeichnis: Ordering Empire The Poetry of Camoes, Pringle and Campbell – Meihuizen

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Introduction What, in the Southern African context, is the relationship between empire, its representations in poetry, and the principal ways of order-ing the world at certain key historical moments? To consider a detail from one such moment – from 1567 to 1569 Luis Vaz de Camões worked on his epic of Portuguese empire, The Lusíads, on Moçam-bique Island, one of the way-stations of the Indian trade route. He thus became the first European poet to engage, physically and textually, with Southern Africa. In a significant convergence of biographical and historical facts, he was also one of the first poets to work within and react to the new political, economic and administrative organisation of the world (‘new’, at least, since the demise of the Roman Empire), centred in a shift in influence from that of the local city-state to that of the territorial state or extensive empire (Braudel 2000: 295), which followed the so-called ‘voyages of discovery’. Imperialism has a long history, and the crass subjugation and exploitation of others is in-evitably the central burden of this history. Even the Christianising of the world, despite its sincere adherents, was more or less a front for material exploitation. A.J.P. Taylor, in his essay ‘The Meanings of Imperialism’, notes:

The Imperial Power possessed superior strength and also superior civilisation –

or thought it did. The Imperial people exploited those over whom it ruled and yet at the same time thought it was doing them good. No Empire without a

mission and no Empire without a profit, in reality or in imagination. (Taylor in

Louis, 1976: 197)

But in the sixteenth century what underlay intertwined ‘profit’ and ‘mission’ was a world-perception which viewed everything in terms of the same, and so sanctioned the inescapable spread of sameness. Camões wrote from within this sixteenth century ordering system (or episteme) of ‘similitude’ (Foucault, 1970: 17). The first part of the present study examines the relation of this system to imperialism as

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Camões knew it and presented it in his epic. What can we make of the poet’s version of the imperial enterprise from the point of view of similitude? As an outcome of sameness, empire for Camões (once embarked upon) was existentially inevitable. It involved a constitutive and defining act of consciousness which linked perception with truth, and hence with a type of self-corroborating destiny based on the world-wide repetition of a European perspective. The repetition is both temporal (through the antique imperium) as well as spatial (through the contemporary voyages of discovery).

Given this basis, what was Camões’ attitude towards imperial praxis, so to speak, to the activities and attitudes involved in carrying out the imperial mission? The matter is not straightforward. Malvern van Wyk Smith writes that William Mickle (the eighteenth century English translator of Camões) ‘pronounced the Lusíads the “Epic of Commerce”, and because his poem is an unabashed paean of the advantages of European trade extended to the third world, first and rather ineffectively by the Portuguese and then much more efficiently by the British, his da Gama becomes a heroic merchant venturer’ (Van Wyk Smith, 1988: 15). However, Mickle also understood commerce to be a civilising force which delivered Western man from the darkness of previous ages: ‘While this thick cloud of mental darkness overspread the western world, was Don Henry, prince of Portugal, born; born to set mankind free from the feudal system, and to give to the whole world every advantage, every light that may possibly be diffused by the intercourse of unlimited commerce’ (in Camões, 1877: n.xlvi). His views reflect a wide-spread attitude of his own time and of previous centuries which, as here, might as easily be linked with the emergence of democratic individualism as with mere cynical opp- ortunism; or, in more general terms, with ameliorative ends rather than selfish ones. Camões was certainly aware of the dual nature of the imperial project, where (in its essential form, in his eyes) honour contests with dishonour. Thus when the material and spiritual motives of empire are contaminated by the lust for wealth and power Camões’ ideal imperium is dishonoured, and he becomes outspoken in his criticism of the actions of his compatriots. His critique of empire is not always directly related to this issue, and might at first seem unexpected, even unacceptable, to us today. For instance, at one

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crucial point in his epic, when da Gama is about to embark from the Belem quayside on his overseas venture, an old man declaims against the entire enterprise. But what is criticised, in effect, is a disregard for the implications of similitude, not the material and spiritual motives of the expedition – quite the contrary. Resemblance makes it unnecessary to squander wealth and lives abroad – in fact the same material and spiritual benefits to be derived from overseas expeditions are to be had on the very doorstep of Portugal by fighting enemy of the same Muslim faith (The Lusíads, IV.94–104). This disregard for the implications of similitude is actually related to the question of dishonourable imperial practice, so to speak, albeit in a roundabout way. It was an emphasis on the ‘profit’ to be derived from overseas expeditions which would unseat an unquestioned acceptance of the ideals and perceptions associated with ‘mission’ (and the creation of literary works, so deeply indebted to a linguistic sensitivity towards the ideals and perceptions of an era). The epistemic consequences of this will become apparent below. To look at another type of criticism of empire in Camões, at certain moments in the epic (and elsewhere in some lyrics (Campbell, 1960: 124–5; 129–30)) the poet presented empire from the viewpoint of the individual caught up in its toils, and through recounting the hardships involved suggested the shortcomings attached to a colonial lifestyle. I emphasise, then, that nowhere does Camões criticise imperialism’s express motives; nowhere does he criticise imperialism per se.

The whole imperial enterprise of Portugal – dating from the 1386 Treaty of Westminster (basis of the longest established alliance in history) – is linked with England through the marriage of Philippa of Lancaster to João I, of the House of Aviz. For Philippa’s third son was Henry the Navigator (Abshire and Samuels, 1969: 34), an historical aperçu which we might see as acting in a figurative way to sensitise us to the almost familial continuity of the imperial mission – from sixteenth century Portugal to nineteenth century Great Britain. Rich-mond Hodges, the 1877 editor of Mickle’s translation of The Lusíads, writes in a footnote of the ‘great interest we as Britons either do, or ought to, feel in this noble epic. We are the successors of the Por-tuguese in the possession and government of India’ (in Camões, 1877: n.xxxi). From this conceptually extended viewpoint it takes no great

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leap of the historical imagination to posit a European Empire, inheritor of the Roman Empire, which – whatever period it operated in, and whoever took hold of the reins at a particular time, whether Portugal, Spain, Holland, Germany, Belgium, France, or Britain – understood its relation to the world in terms of the imperium; that is, in terms of the almost transcendentally ubiquitous field of socio-cultural influence and power which we will briefly examine in Chapter Two.

Camões cannot have been blind to the pervasive play of similitude in his time, situated by Foucault within a type of societal unconscious (Foucault, 1970: xi), whence its influences permeated conscious levels of society. What need to emphasise the unconscious nature of the play of similitude? It is an understanding of the ‘unconscious’ deployment of the episteme that is at issue, for what is involved is not simply the formulaic application of figures of similitude such as convenientia and aemulatio (to be considered in Chapter One). These consciously applied figures are symptomatic of a deeply embedded tendency to order the world in a particular way. Heinrich Wölfflin, writing in 1888, anticipated Foucault with this passage from Renaissance and Baroque:

What, first of all, determines the artist’s creative attitude to form? It has been

said to be the character of the age he lives in; for the Gothic period, for

instance, feudalism, scholasticism, the life of the spirit. But, we still have to

find the path that leads from the cell of the scholar to the mason’s yard. In fact

little is gained by enumerating such general cultural forces, even if we may with

delicate perceptiveness discover some tendencies similar to the current style in retrospect. What matter are not the individual products of an age, but the fun-

damental temper which produced them. This in turn, cannot be contained in a

particular idea or system; if it were, it would not be what it is, a temper or a

mood. Ideas can only be explicitly stated, but moods can also be conveyed with

architectural forms; at any rate, every style imparts a more or less definite

mood. (1964: 76–7)

Wölfflin’s notion of an asystemic ‘temper’ relates to the ‘uncon-scious’ aspect of knowledge, it seems to me, that which underlies ‘the individual products of an age’. Foucault himself took pains to dis-sociate his notions from ‘particular ideas’ or rigid ‘systems’:

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The Epistemic is not a general stage of reason; it is a complex relationship of

successive displacement in time. Nothing, you see, is more foreign to me than

the quest for a constraining sovereign and unique form. I do not seek to detect,

starting from various signs, the unitary spirit of an epoch [...] something like a

Weltanschauung. (1996: 35)

Clare O’Farrell, in Foucault: Historian or Philosopher?, usefully summarises critical reactions to the idea of the episteme:

There were numerous protests about the episteme. Many critics saw it as a ‘totality’ which excluded history, a ‘static system which does not evolve [...]

Order rules, every link is connection, every correlation, law. Nothing ever

happens’. Others described it as ‘the theory of a system’ or as a ‘structure, a

coherent system’, or even as a ‘transcendental’ notion. Still other commentators

noted ‘certain problems’, such as the problem of why new epistemes occur at all

and why past epistemes remain intelligible to subsequent epistemes. (1989: 56)

But, again, Foucault insists that ‘the Epistemic is not a sort of grand

unifying theory, it is a space of dispersion, it is an open field of relationships and no doubt indefinitely describable’ (1996: 35). To insist is not to prove, of course. The following, perhaps, in which Fou-cault provides an example, is more to the point:

[T]he need to introduce an order among series of numbers, human beings, or values, appears simultaneously in many different disciplines in the 17th

century. This involves a communication between the diverse disciplines, and so

it was that someone who proposed, for example, the creation of a universal

language in the 17th century was quite close in terms of procedure to someone

who dealt with the problem of how one could catalogue human beings. It’s a

question of relationships and communication among the various sciences. (1996: 97)

In simple terms, similar patterns underlie the structuring practices of the different branches of knowledge at a given time. The straight-forward clarity of what amounts to a definition of the episteme by A.N. Whitehead is appealing: he writes of the ‘general form of the forms of thought’, which is ‘so translucent [...] that only by extreme effort can we become aware of it’ (in Bradbury and McFarlane, 1991: 24). But the problem of what does or does not constitute anything as explicit as a form or system in Foucault will remain; what is important for me in general terms (I speak of my more specific sense of the

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practical value of Foucault below) is that a knowledge of underlying ways of ordering the world at given historical moments might enable one to gauge more of fundamental human understanding and its relation to the world than an historical exegesis based on a succession of events, say.

When turning to imperialism in the eighteenth and early nine-teenth centuries we can again draw on Foucault in a general way (as we will do in Chapter Four) to observe a new ordering system which has distinction rather than similitude at its conceptual centre. Such an ordering system is evidenced in the work of the Scottish-born South African settler, Thomas Pringle (the poet whom we will study after Camões, in Chapter Five), with its recourse to scientific footnotes and tabulation.

Is it accidental that once epistemic restructuring has taken place, once Neoclassical paradigms displace Renaissance ones, a trenchant criticism of an aspect of empire is levelled, based exactly on an awareness of distinction? I think (in connection with Pringle, a pas-sionate Abolitionist) of the obvious case of the slave trade. In the time of the early Portuguese this trade, though sometimes interrogated, was too firmly entrenched in the world-psyche to be seriously questioned. Thus, though Sidney Welch points out that by ‘two decrees of the year 1570 the Portuguese government promulgated severe penalties against the enslavement, by hunting, of African or American natives’ (Welch, 1949: 219), similitude ensured that the world’s age-old dependence on slavery remained vested. However, it may well be that the slave trade was finally shaken to its foundations not simply by a growing humanitarianism in the world, but – paradoxically and ironically – by the impetus associated (as indicated above) with the individual opportunism of the imperial profit-mongers in Camões’ era (see Voss, 1990: 61), whose perceptions and values were at odds with the universal idealism associated with aspects of similitude. It was this impetus which helped establish the Neoclassical conception of the carefully articulated distinctness of things in the world, through which all custom (not least religious custom) would be questioned. Working with the conception of distinction, J.F. Blumenbach, for example, could classify racial variety according to climatic differences (though not without bias regarding the racial ‘degeneration’ afforded by

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certain climes), while Anthony Benezet could carefully describe and anatomise the impressive structure (and other aspects) of Guinea society, thereby freeing his subject from the totalising prejudices of the past (where people from other cultures were conveniently seen en

masse as savages) (Kitson, 1998: 19–21). In Pringle’s Abolitionist work morality was his criterion, but

could his moral cause have succeeded without a widely experienced epistemological shift? And, to question again a too easy belief in inexorable moral development in human affairs, if the nineteenth century was at last impatient of the slave trade, it was yet far more cynically opportunistic in the world of general trade and profit-making. This was a time where blatant greed thrived in the name of imperial endeavour, where the spiritual arm of imperialism (never too strong in the first place) only existed in a severely weakened form, as Pringle was all too aware.

Later still, in the twentieth century (to touch on the third era under investigation in this study), empire was riven by crisis, as what Foucault called the ‘analytic of finitude’ gained sway (1970: 217), and a sense of radical existential limitation reduced self and the claims of self, as we will see in Chapter Six. In blunt terms, the profiteering markets of the colonies could no longer be upheld or even sanctioned by the order of the world. The world was understood to be a limited entity, like the self, comprising many limited areas that could not go on being accepted or maintained as colonies contiguous with a motherland. This fact would take a number of decades to play itself out, as country after country in the third world became decolonised. In the case of Roy Campbell, the final poet to be studied in this work (in Chapter Seven), commercial imperialism is, in his youth, still a potent force, and he is severely critical of it. But his seemingly straight-forward criticism of the bourgeois materialism of empire is qualified by an awareness of colonial energy and vigour. Without this energy and vigour (localised by the poet in the adjective ‘equestrian’ (Campbell, 1988 vol.IV: 436)), the world is at the mercy of the diminution of human selfhood consequent upon the insinuatingly pervasive demands of finitude. Thus, though he retreats to the Euro-pean homeland because of his disgust with commercial imperialism, Campbell is yet drawn to the colony, and has to live in parts of Europe

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(Spain and Portugal) that resemble Africa, as if he gains comfort and strength from this (Clouts, 1971: 162–3). (Here is an ironic reversal of the colonial nostalgia for the ‘Home’ country, a nostalgia expressed by many white South Africans through consciously applied acts of resemblance, from the cultivation of English country-gardens in Gau-teng, to the construction of Italian palaces in KwaZulu-Natal.) But for the equestrian man, colonial energy and vigour are not enough; it is of the essence of equestrianism that it turn for deeper nourishment to the forms of tradition. And so Campbell (like other Modernists threatened by the same sense of circumscriptive finitude – Eliot and Yeats come to mind) finds spiritual succour in tradition. He becomes a devout Catholic, but also imbibes the classical Mithraic cult with fervour. The conclusion which we can draw from the above is that Campbell, though a Modernist, is fundamentally dependent on topographical and religious instances of similitude, as if he, like Camões, were also a sixteenth century man. This perhaps unexpected conclusion suggests that we must keep in mind the following important considerations.

The notion of the imperium is the constant in the ensuing narrative, whatever the nature of the changing epistemes encountered within it. Though impressions of the imperium must be determined by successive epistemes, its universal presence in the end overcomes epistemic conditioning. Thus it is that Campbell is able to fuse his vision with that of an earlier era. Does this mean that the influence of underlying traditional patterns outweighs that of contemporary order-ing systems? The matter is complicated by the fact that Campbell’s fusion (reflected in other Modernist writers such as Eliot, Yeats, Pound and Wyndham Lewis) conforms with an epistemically con-sistent pattern of synchronicity. While there is no denying the pervasive strength of the topoi linked with classicism (which are still in evidence in South African poetry today), there is, then, no simple answer to the question. This specific case, however, reflects on a point of general understanding: epistemic perceptions cannot be limited by distinct eras, but might bridge eras, or resurface in much later eras. If we seek corroboration elsewhere, we have but to look at Adorno and Horkheimer’s oppositional tracing of the effects of ‘enlightenment’ reasoning over the millennia, in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1992: 3–42). We might also note Giambattista Vico’s acknowledgment that ‘his

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classification of epochs’ was not absolute; that ‘vestiges of early cultural states [...] linger on in much later periods’ (Auerbach, 1993: 15).

Foucault’s epistemic periodisation nevertheless helps us to look at imperialism and three key aesthetic responses to it which range over four hundred years with, I believe, more understanding. In general (and despite subsequent tailorings and shiftings on his part, where the notion of the dispositif replaces that of the episteme – the dispositif being the network which binds together a heterogeneous body of discourses, propositions, institutions, laws and scientific statements (Macey, 1994: 355)), I perceive a continuing value and usefulness in the original notion of the episteme, as will be demonstrated in subsequent pages. Foucault, of all thinkers, is able to focus certain important conceptual predispositions of an era and dramatise their irresistible and endemic nature. But it is an awareness of the play within these predispositions (corroborating, refuting, and muddling the central traits) which spurs much of this study. My approach thus takes its bearing from the distinction between a general theory and specific practice, as noted, for example, in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa

and the Philosophy of Culture. Though Appiah has literary theory in mind when he distinguishes between ‘general’ ‘discourses’ and those with a ‘text-specific’ orientation, the distinction also applies to my approach in relation to the ‘determined universality’ (Appiah, 1992: 63) (however carefully qualified) of Foucault – throughout the following pages we will see how the ‘general’ is riven by the ‘specific’; of how, as Erich Auerbach puts it, a ‘living awareness of the whole’ enables us to ‘interpret the particulars’ (1993: 17).

Fundamentally, we must be aware of the ‘specific’ nature of the ‘general’ epistemological systems to be discussed. That is, though Foucault’s epistemes may have a comprehensive impact in each era under investigation, it is for me too optimistic to believe that any one of them might totally account for all the intellectual and cultural inclinations of an entire era. To construct a random enough list with-out too much forethought, within a single episteme one might posit ordering systems which both overlap with similitude and yet have their own unique criteria and components, based on any or all of the following – the Old Testament, the New Testament, Platonism, the literature of Classical and Late Antiquity, Medieval Scholasticism,

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Neoplatonism, Ciceronian Humanism, Aristotelian Science, Quintilian Rhetoric. This is to say nothing of the variety of individual per-spectives and external influences attending general human experience. Mary and Jim Tiles point out, in An Introduction to Historical

Epistemology, that Foucault’s account of one episteme dominating in the sixteenth century to be overtaken by another in the seventeenth ‘both oversimplifies the patterns of intellectual domination in these two centuries and fails to situate the contrast in a wider historical context’. But they also concede that ‘his characterisation of the contrast is valuable’ (1993: 142). This perception of almost simultaneous weakness and strength certainly describes my reading of Foucault. Hence, then, my caution: I follow the route laid out by Foucault but am wary of placing monolithic conceptual impositions on the eras under study. I thus regard as being representative of their specific eras similitude, distinction, and the implications of the analytic of finitude.

This book will look at Camões, Pringle and Campbell in chrono-logical sequence, because such a sequence logically complements the periodisation involved in tracing changing ordering systems. A chrono-logical sequence will also help me to present the relational cross- overs among periods (both analeptic and proleptic) referred to above. The three poets will be connected to the key features of each era, as these features can be traced both in Foucault and in a more specialised understanding of the eras in question. The reader will at times find extensively quoted passages from various poems, as the poets under discussion are not that well known, other than to scholars and critics of the fields examined. My habit of engaging in close readings of the poems will, I hope, provide a useful introduction to certain of the works in question, as well as enable me to ‘interpret the particulars’ as they pertain to a ‘living awareness of the whole’.

Finally, why do I consider only the writings of poets? Are there not works by novelists and travel-writers, say, which might prove equally helpful in approaching the questions of epistemic influence and change? Apart from the fact that poetry is the one field in which I as a critic feel qualified to write, what is of foundational consequence to this study is that it was a poet who was the first creative writer to broach the European experience of Southern Africa. If this is so, it

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seems consistent, to my way of thinking, to examine the work of other related poets who also reflect on this experience (extended, in inverse ratio, to the Southern African experience of Europe in the case of Campbell), and who also represent two other key epistemic moments. From this point of view, Thomas Pringle and Roy Campbell serve as useful companions to Camões, and, as we will see, help make up a constructively interacting whole.