Wonder and Greenblatt
by Matt Stoltz, 2005
With the passage, "wonder remains available for decency as well as domination" in mind, a reader should consider how the author himself makes use of the word. In Marvelous Possessions, Greenblatt goes far outside his jurisdiction in Literature and creeps into the domain of history and cultural studies in an effort to dominate. Greenblatt goes on a journey through old historical texts to discovery new intellectual lands, appropriating the word wonder along the way to advance his claims.
Greenblatt's chapter on "Kidnapping the Language" is ironic because it points to the authors own behavior. To use the expression found in the text by Las Casas 'I don't know whether to laugh or cry' at Greeblatt's kidnapping the term wonder from these texts; I cry because these two words are the ground his argument walks on, and I laugh because he is about five hundred years older than these texts. Language evolves; when I was a kid I use to say righteous and it was not to convey acts of virtue; similarly the term wonder could merely be idiomatic expression. Greenblatt is fully aware of this but it does not slow him down, saying "(Alternatively, it is possible to argue-incorrectly, I think-that Columbus had such an impoverished vocabulary that he could think of no other word to describe his experience.)" In other words, Greenblatt inflates the terms with so much of his own rhyme, rhetoric and theory that he makes us wonder at the terms. For instance, Greenblatt argues that language barriers spur wonder which, in turn, causes the interpretation of signs or gestures to lean towards optimistic conclusions. He says, "The absence of any secure grasp of the native language or culture that... [the Europeans] do not understand, and when they do not understand, they can only continue to entrap, kidnap and project vain fantasies" What makes Greenblatt so secure with the language of a culture that only exists now in books? Is there a difference between living in a language and searching in a language? What makes him so sure he is giving an accurate interpretation of the term wonder in these old texts?
In the same vein of optimism, let us consider how Greenblatt characterized early explorers as making confident assumptions, daring interpretive leaps, and filling in the blanks whenever a sense of wonder was on the horizon. This characterization should ring out loudly not only for the early explorer, but also the modern scholar and, more importantly for us, Greenblatt himself. 'Reckless optimism' Greenblatt calls it. Well, if that's the case than he can choke back on his own poison because he is guilty of the same crimes in fabricating this discourse. The meaning of wonder is Greenblatt's interpretive leap... it is him going back into texts, with optimism, and making old language conform to his scholarship and theories. A good analogy is found in the text where Columbus interprets the signs of the Indian Chief and conceives the whole land to be his. Similarly, Greenblatt, sifting through Columbus' log book, interprets the signs of the text and conceives its contents to be entirely at his disposal. The point of intersection between Greenblatt and Columbus may exist in their expectations. Scholars like Greenblatt go into texts with intellectual expectations in the same way that early explorers went to the new world expecting material gain. Do intellectuals assimilate the past to accommodate their present?
What was frustrating about this discourse in comparison to the other Greenblatt piece we read I found in the sentence, "Literature seemed to me, as to many others, almost infinitely precious because its creators had invented techniques for representing this experience with uncanny vividness, but there were other techniques and other texts, outside the conventional boundaries of the literary that possessed a nearly comparable power." (21/21 Touch of the Real). In Marvelous Possessions Greenblatt goes outside his conventional boundaries to these 'nearly comparable' texts, and they don't seem as powerful as he anticipated. I would have been much more satisfied to read a text by Greenblatt that sought meaningful associations with the Tempest to New World encounters, like he did with the Hamlet to the Bowmen deposition. A question that came to mind was, is this a potential problem for interdisciplinary endeavors?