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Description
My title conflates only two of the many topics encompassed by Karl Kroeber's extensive competencies and irrepressible curiosities, but they are two of the most salient and long-standing: Romanticism and Native America. In one among his many publications on Native American storytelling--and he is adamant that this material is not to be misconceived as "literature"--Kroeber, in gloriously typical contrarian spirit, opens with a sharp injunction against any prospectively passive consumption: "The form of American Indian storytelling is entirely different from the form of our storytelling .... your conception of what myths are and what practical functions they served for Native Americans is probably wrong" (ed. Native American Storytelling: A Reader of Myths and Legends [2004]1). By way of introducing a book intended for school and college courses, the challenge here offered is admirable and the ethical commitment impeccable: "our most important responsibility is so far as possible not to impose our preconceptions of form and purpose on narratives from peoples whose social, intellectual and religious traditions radically differed--and continue to differ--from ours" (10). In other words, his advice to readers and students is that they begin by assuming that next to nothing is known and that they adopt a policy of the wisest possible passiveness.
Contemporary pedagogic culture is no more at risk of aggressively imposing ethnocentric categories on alien materials than of wallowing in a lazy acceptance of difference itself, the recognition of which is not always a prompt to open-mindedness or discovery; it can also take the form of a bland acknowledgment of everyone's right to do his own thing. The Romantics faced these same questions and others like them. Their acknowledgment of Native American difference took various (and variously imperfect) forms, many of which are well-known: the noble savage, the degenerate primitive, the inspired orator and eloquent singer of the death song, the child of nature, the model for confederated civil society. North America was not the principal site for Romantic interest in the foreign: India, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, France, Germany and Italy all received more attention. Wordsworth, Keats, Byron and Shelley barely mentioned the Americas, although there was a lively pattern of transatlantic crossings during the 1790s and after 1815: Paine, Cobbett and Priestley among others all spent time in the New World. Moore's Poems Relating to America appeared in 1806, and Campbell's Gertrude of Wyoming was a best-seller in 1809. Moore's sequence combines anacreontic sociability and melancholy with a negative view of the new American democracy that Joel Barlow had celebrated, and barely mentions its first peoples. Campbell's address is more complex, and blends an anthropological and ecological curiosity with a contact narrative that both educates the reader into the cultural habits and traditions of the natives while exploring the fateful results of French and British uses of Indian warriors in the wars of 1756-63 and 1776-83.
Campbell's encyclopedic aspiration lends an aura of honest discovery to his poem: its extensive footnotes explain such things as the mocking bird and the Manitou. He is committed enough to the historical record that he retracts in later editions of the poem the harsh picture he had given of the Mohawk chief Brandt, who is at first blamed for the Wyoming massacre but is later deemed to have been "not even present at that scene of desolation" (The Complete Poetical Works ... ed. Robertson [1968] 92). The poet had simply been following the historians, and the historians, he later discovered, got it wrong. But Campbell finesses the violence of that same record, claiming that the details are "disagreeable, and even horrible" (44); their omission allows Gertrude a clean and eloquent death un-disfigured by the scalpings and graphic carnage that characterize contemporary printed images of the event. Hers is a fine and moving death amid a more general "scene of death" (71) that is not described. The death and torture of the defeated American troops and the subsequent massacre of civilians are passed over. As a contact narrative, then, the poem leaves a demonized but later rehabilitated villain, Brandt, and a noble "last of his race" figure in Outalissi, the Oneida chief who first rescued the young male hero and who at the end sets forth with him on a campaign of revenge. Campbell's last word is that "it is, unhappily, to Britons and Anglo-Americans that we must refer the chief blame in this horrible business" (92).
Campbell, then, is a respecter of the otherness of the other in so far as he exonerates the natives from being prime movers in the violence and inhumanity of war, which is now fought on a grander scale and with more far-reaching global consequences than ever before in rural Pennsylvania. But his decorous restraint about the details of the massacre sentimentalizes the natives by consigning them to a more... |
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