Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (16 page)

A bloody piece of wood, a stuffed beaver, an elephant's tusk, a siren's hand, a bridal garter,
and a painting by Dürer
—not an untypical trove. Nor is it untypical for the provenance of many of what we today consider Renaissance and Baroque masterpieces to wend their way back through hodgepodge collections such as these.

8.
“… the whole body momentarily convulsed.”

Of course the Americans whom the Europeans were suddenly encountering could have been, for their part, no less startled. In a journal entry describing one of his first landfalls, off the island of Tortuga on December 18, 1492, Columbus describes how a native “king” and several of his “counsellors” canoed out to his boat and participated in an exchange of gifts: “Many [of the] things that passed between them I did not understand,” Columbus confesses, “except that I saw well that they took everything as a great wonder” (quoted in Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions
; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; p. 13). And even though such an estimation
may in part be laid to projection, still, the sense of awe can well be imagined—and
has
been, repeatedly, for instance in the first volume of the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano's
Memory of Fire
trilogy (Vol. I:
Genesis
; trans., Cedric Belfrage; New York: Pantheon, 1985), wherein several such moments are rekindled. For example, when the Molucca Indians first saw the small landing craft being launched from Magellan's galleons, “they thought those boats were small daughters of the ships, that the ships gave them birth and suckled them” (pp. 73–74). Other natives elsewhere suddenly awoke, uncomprehending, barely believing, to the sight of whole floating islands with downy cloudbanks flapping in the breeze, newly bobbing off their shores. And the Aztecs famously took Cortés's men atop their horses for gods.

Curiously, this spirit of wonder—of the astonishment of the world—persisted much longer in Latin America than it did in the North (perhaps, in part, because the native peoples themselves persisted much longer, both as distinct races and through intermarriage). Surely this accounts in part for the continuing Latin American literary penchant for magic realism. Not for nothing is Borges an Argentinean. Or consider, in this context, the discovery of ice at the end of the first chapter of Gabriel Garcia Márquez's
One Hundred Tears of Solitude
(trans., Gregory Rabassa; New York: Harper & Row, 1970; p. 26):

9.
“… my heart trembles.”

“Once ashore, I ambled along the Avenida Rio Branco, where once the Tupinamba villages stood; in my pocket was that breviary of the anthropologist, Jean de Léry. He had arrived in Rio three hundred and seventy-eight years previously, almost to the day.” Claude Lévi-Strauss, recalling his 1934 arrival in Rio in
Tristes Tropiques
(trans., John Russell; New York: Atheneum, 1961; p. 85). A few pages later, Lévi-Strauss refers to Léry's book as “that masterpiece of anthropological literature” (p. 88).

10.
“… emotional center of witness.”

This line of speculation leads toward some of the most engrossing analysis in Greenblatt's book, for he goes on to ask about the
function
of all this marveling. Yes, Columbus was overwhelmed with all the wonder he was experiencing—the word itself recurs in his journals and dispatches so often that the King of Spain himself at one point suggested that Columbus should be called not
Almirante
, the admiral, but rather
Admirans
, the one who wonders (p. 83). But so much wonder was also a useful screen (I'm greatly oversimplifying Greenblatt's argument here) for in his writings “Columbus tries to draw
the reader toward wonder, a sense of the marvelous that in effect fills up the emptiness at the center of the maimed rite of possession.” Greenblatt is referring to that moment, repeated time and again, when, following an exchange of trinkets, Columbus claims title to the respective islands in the name of the King of Spain, and none of the native inhabitants contradict him, which he in turn takes for assent. “But that ritual had at its center … a defect, an absurdity, a tragicomic invocation of the possibility of a refusal that could not in fact possibly occur [if for no other reason than that the two parties didn't even speak each other's language, let alone comprehend each other's conception of property, etc.]:
y no me fué contradicho
” (p. 80).

Admirans (
the one who wonders
) (
illustration credit nts.4
)

In the years after Columbus, the European sensibility's virtual debauch in the wonder of the New World allowed it to disguise, from itself, the unprecedented human decimation that was taking place over there, on the ground, at that very moment. Wonder-besotted Europeans were so bedazzled that they could simply
fail to notice
the carnage transpiring under their very eyes, in their very name. We might say, to borrow Sartre's phrase, that this continent was in bad faith.

In such matters it might also be wise to follow the lead of Walter Benjamin—and if ever there was an intellectual heir to the spirit of the
Wunderkammer
in our
own time, it was he—who famously noted, in an essay reproduced in his
Illuminations
(trans., Harry Zohn; New York: Schocken, 1969) that “a historical materialist views [cultural treasures] with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror.… There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it is transmitted from one owner to another.” This is the passage which culminates with his urging the student of culture “to brush history against the grain” (pp. 256–57).

11.
 … the profusion of
Wunderkammern.

And, of course, not just of
Wunderkammern
: European culture across the board was similarly besotted. John Donne, on “Going to Bed” with his mistress (his “Elegy 19,” composed during the same 1590s as Platter's inventory of Cope's collection):

12.
 … not quite so easily debunkable after all.

Two years ago my then five-year-old daughter Sara fervently believed in Santa Claus. Last year she knew he
was make-believe. But this year her belief in him was more passionate, and more ornately buttressed, than ever before.

13.
 … must travel to St. Petersburg.

Rosamond Wolff Purcell did precisely that as part of her marvelous photographic collaboration with Stephen Jay Gould in their book
Finders, Keepers: Treasures and Oddities of Natural History
(New York: Norton, 1992). The first chapter concerns itself entirely with the remarkable relationship between Frederik Ruysch and Peter the Great. The two had in fact first met some twenty years before Peter purchased the collection when, as a teenager, the future tsar had been traveling through Europe, working incognito in shipyards in England and Holland, systematically amassing the hands-on experience he would soon be deploying in his headlong drive to modernize Russia. The purchase of Ruysch's emporium, in 1717, was part of a massive campaign on Peter's part to build up, from virtual scratch, one of the greatest
Wunderkammern
on the continent, an effort in which he was arguably successful, though he died not long after, in 1725. Ruysch outlived him by another six years. (See also Robert Massie's
Peter the Great: His Life and World
; New York: Knopf, 1980; pp. 187, 814.)

Simon Schama's book on Dutch culture of the Golden Age,
The Embarrassment of Riches
(New York: Knopf, 1987), includes a startling 1683 painting by Jan van Neck entitled
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch
in which “a dead infant is the object of the surgeon's
dissection while the anatomist's own son, shown at right, ponders simultaneously the mysteries of mortal flesh and immortal science” (p. 526). That may be Ruysch's son, but it could just as well have been his
daughter
, Rachel, who also assisted her father from an early age (not only attending his anatomical dissections but also sewing the lace cuffs, for example, for some of his most famous infant preparations) and who grew into one of the foremost painters of her own age, a specialist in exactingly observed still lifes, particularly floral arrangements, which were enormously prized and even outsold the works of Rembrandt. Her painting career spanned seven decades; she died at age eighty-six, in 1750.

Jan van Neck
, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Frederik Ruysch (
1683
) (
illustration credit nts.5
)

14.
 … advances in positivist certainty.

There were, of course, exceptions—a counterflow to the undertow. The Ashmolean's Arthur MacGregor gives us the English polymath Henry Peacham complaining, as early as 1611, with regard to the sudden profusion of wonder-cabinets: “Why does the rude vulgar so hastily post in madnesse to gaze at trifles and toyes not worth viewing?” (
Tradescant's Rarities
, p. 17). By this time England was already teeming with enough private collections to attract, as MacGregor goes on, “the attention of less scrupulous dealers and the irony of the skeptical.” He quotes the satirist Thomas Nashe as writing of these gullible magpies that “a thousand guegawes and toyes have they in their chambers, which they heape up together, with infinite expence, and are made beleeve of them that sell them, that they are rare and pretious thinges, when they have gathered them upon some dunghill” (p. 71). Shakespeare, in
The Tempest
(1611), has Trinculo salivating at the prospect of getting the savage Caliban back to England. He is certain he can bring the “holiday fools” out in force to pay for the opportunity to gawk at the monster. “When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian” (II, ii, 30–32).

And for that matter, as we shall presently see, there were a spate of other objections, as well, grounded in the resurgent spirit of a regrouping positivist science. Galileo, for instance, had little use for those “curious little men” who could amuse themselves, like children, in collecting small and insignificant things, “a petrified crab, a desiccated chameleon, a fly or spider in gelatin or
amber, those small clay figurines, supposedly found in ancient Egyptian burial chambers.” His contempt extended to the whole hoarding sensibility, whatever its medium of expression: “Our poet errs as much as would a painter who, purposing to depict a particular hunting scene, were to clutter his canvas with conies, hares, foxes, goats, deer, wolves, bears, lions, tigers, boars, hounds, greyhounds, leopards, and all manner of wild beasts”—a list that sounds uncannily like the almond stone at the MJT—“clustering at will animals of the hunt with every sort of game such as to liken his painting more unto a representation of the entry into the Ark of Noah than unto a natural hunting scene.” (quoted in Lugli, “Inquiry as Collection”;
Res
; autumn 1986; pp. 109–11).