works on science and art

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Works on Science and Art Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 by Barbara Maria Stafford Review by: David Lowenthal Isis, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 324-327 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/232662 . Accessed: 09/05/2014 20:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.215 on Fri, 9 May 2014 20:55:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Works on Science and Art

Works on Science and ArtVoyage into Substance: Art, Science, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760-1840 by BarbaraMaria StaffordReview by: David LowenthalIsis, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Jun., 1986), pp. 324-327Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/232662 .

Accessed: 09/05/2014 20:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.215 on Fri, 9 May 2014 20:55:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Works on Science and Art

SPECIAL REVIEW SECTIONS

Works on science and art

Barbara Maria Stafford. Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, and the Illlis- trated Travel Account, 1760-1840. xxiii + 645 pp., illus., bibls., index. Cam- bridge, Mass./London: MIT Press, 1984. $39.95.

This book is a masterpiece of imaginative scholarship. Using contemporary theoretical views about the nature of knowledge, perception, and material real- ity, and accounts by voyagers to all parts of the globe, Stafford suggests that global exploration in the late eighteenth century reflected and achieved new goals: travelers unimpeded by habit or preconception sought to record and com- municate precisely what they saw in an accurate, clear, and unembroidered man- ner. No longer was nature seen largely in metaphysical or emblematic terms, signifying hidden or esoteric meanings. Instead, travelers tried to depict and ex- plain landscapes just as they found them. Their devotion to unadorned reality reflected the epoch's bent, at once experimental and empirical, secular and sci- entific. It also conformed with the travelers' own experiences, for much of what they saw, in previously unvisited corners of the world, was so unlike anything previously encountered that it could be described only in its own terms, not of any preconceived or familiar scene.

Before reviewing the substance and discussing the validity of Stafford's propo- sitions, let me say that reading her book is itself a rewarding if arduous form of exploration. Voyage into Slubstance weighs almost six pounds; simply to hold it soon becomes a heavy task. The text, happily intermingled with 270 splendid illustrations, is almost 500 pages. Readers may easily lose their way, for the pages lack running heads, the titles of chapters and subheadings are gnomic rather than descriptive, and the exploratory accounts that constitute much of the substance are lumped together in long paragraphs that follow no set chronologi- cal or geographical sequence. Beyond the text lie further treasures that demand exploration. Double-columned footnotes, mini-essays in themselves, venture into little-known byways of the mind. The notes evince the extraordinary range of Stafford's scholarship, the excitement of her quest, and her deep engagement with the critical themes she treats. But readers must be content to take the notes as separate treats, for their length and their positioning preclude examining them in conjunction with the text. To locate a particular landfall in this sea of words is made most difficult by the absence of text-page references. Finally, Stafford's esoteric vocabulary and convoluted syntax make their own demands. In order to keep the chain of argument, readers may let what they have not fully grasped slip by unquestioned and accept as demonstrated what may merely be asserted.

Stafford's text divides into three parts. Introductory chapters show how pre- conceptions about the nature of perception and the process of learning changed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The "scientific gaze" came to embody a new criteria for discovery and description; the world of nature came to assume priority over the world of culture. The second part (Chapters 2 and 3) details how explorers saw, explained, and described the scenes they confronted as aspects of a living and vital world: monoliths and mountain peaks, caves and grottoes, coastal landscapes and islands, continental plains and deserts, ice fields

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Page 3: Works on Science and Art

REVIEWS ON SCIENCE AND ART-ISIS, 77: 2: 287 (1986) 325

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Color aquatint from Caspar Wolf, Vues remarquables de la Suisse (1 785), courtesy of the Library of Congress. As reproduced in Voyage into Substance.

and ravines, rain forests and swamps and great bodies of water, as well as natural phenomena no less real because incorporeal or in flux: air and clouds, fog and mist, storms, waterfalls, volcanic eruptions, auroras, whirlwinds, meteors. But- tressing travelers') accounts, Stafford comments on their modes of exploration (sailing ships, balloons), the underlying assumptions, and the stylistic tenets (plain and unadorned writing, plein-air sketches) they used to lend their observa- tions truth and immediacy.

The third part of the book explores the implications of such topographic delin- eation. Chapter 14 ("Landscape Freed of Culture") shows that late eighteenth- century voyagers who set nature above culture at the same time described natu- ral history, "nature's hieroglyphics," in language taken from cultural artifacts. Chapter 5 ("Sectarians of the Unknown") reveals explorers' common modalities, notably their intense desire to see and describe scenes totally unaffected, even never seen, by humans-discoveries described in metaphors of tearing, crossing, immersing, and penetrating the unknown. Chapter 6 ("Hegemony of the Exter- nal") shows how voyagers combined an appreciation of simultaneity with an understanding of sequence and deduced structural history from what was imme- diately present. The conclusion reiterates the significance of raw nature and of novelty for eighteenth-century explorers and voyagers. But once the grand nov- elties of the natural world had been marked out, the humanized landscape of

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Page 4: Works on Science and Art

326 REVIEWS ON SCIENCE AND ART-ISIS, 77: 2: 287 (1986)

culture came to replace the empty wilderness in the nineteenth-century quest for exact depiction, the nearby and even the well-trodden to receive the detailed attention formerly reserved for the remote.

These linked hypotheses serve the author well as a peg for explorers' ac- counts, but her reiterated insistence on the uniqueness and consummate value of the late eighteenth-century enterprise seems to me not wholly warranted. Staf- ford exhibits single-minded devotion to pure empirical inquiry, to unadorned de- pictions of the "facts" of nature, to observation unfettered by previous habit or memory. To be sure, the voyagers she cites often assert their attachment to objectivity, precision, and unmediated firsthand observation. But such claims constitute no proof that they could in fact slough off perspectives based on pre- conceived ideas, many of them in conflict with an empiricist approach to knowl- edge.

Stafford's claims that her voyagers uniquely exemplify the scientific outlook she attributes to them seem to me dubious on at least three counts. One is the absence in her book of materials that would permit comparisons with earlier or with later discoveries. Linguistic conventions and technological skills aside, Louis Antoine de Bougainville's and Sydney Parkinson's eighteenth-century de- scriptions of Tahiti exhibit no greater concern with precise landscape particulars than, say, Christopher Columbus's late sixteenth-century descriptions of the West Indies. Unadorned empirical description informs many scientific accounts of Western explorations in mid- and late-nineteenth-century America. A sense of pioneering wonder may, to be sure, have been especially acute at a time when the whole natural world first came under sustained scrutiny, but the perspectives of Enlightenment explorers featured many of their predecessors and followers in no less marked degree.

Second, far from ensuring objective observation, the very novelty of ex- plorers' missions in fact precluded it. If you see a thing only once, and it is new to you, how can you know it is "only what it seems," as Stafford suggests? One can describe the unknown only in terms of the familiar; the more a feature ap- pears strange or unique, the more it must be domesticated within previous per- ceptions and classifications.

Moreover, the explorers' accounts themselves evince no tablulae rcasae but a host of preconceptions that swayed their observation, selection, and depiction. As Stafford herself points out, explorers concentrated especially on aspects of nature they found "worthy of observation," on things seen for the first time rather than on repeated observations, and on natural grandeur and sublimity in which humanity was absent, inconsequential, or impotent. They used viewing techniques (the camera obscura, the aerial balloon) to exaggerate these compel- ling effects and to screen out their more humdrum surroundings, or to achieve a perspective that, as Denis Cosgrove has recently shown ("Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea," Trainscactions, InstitdUte of British Ge- ographers, 1985, 10:45-62), reflected both distance from the scenes they ob- served and a measure of control over them. They made a fetish of novelty and of marks of origins, both of organic and inorganic forms. Their metaphors of pene- tration into and appropriation of the landscapes they described made for "a lan- guage of almost libidinal antagonism," in Stafford's own words (p. 344), quite unlike the lean, factual, objective accounts she elsewhere credits them with-a language uncannily like the humanist "'sub-reading" of classical vestiges de- scribed by Thomas Greene (The Light in Trov: Imitation and Discovery in Re- naissance Poetry, Yale, 1982). In their passionate zeal to be first, some explorers sought scenes unaffected by human presence, others to describe something ut- terly new, still others to gain insight into nature's original forms: these motives

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Page 5: Works on Science and Art

REVIEWS ON SCIENCE AND ART-ISIS. 77: 2: 287 (1986) 327

were powerful spurs to discovery, but none of them comports with bare descrip- tion of the "facts" of nature.

Third, Stafford is so much a partisan of empirical immediacy and scientific objectivity, so antagonistic toward the subjective and the reflective, that she scants distinctions between claim and performance, expressed desire and under- lying bent. Her explorers emerge as paragons of the progressive discovery of external nature, against the "regressive" and "defeatist" self-consciousness em- bodied in the picturesque, the reveries of Rousseau, and the musings of Words- worth. For her, reverie is the "solipsistic" self-consciousness that "shuns clear thinking in favor of a welter of confused images" indulged in by daydreamers who looked not at phenomena but only at themselves; it reflects "not man's actual contact with nature but his removal from its dominion by means of inter- vening memory" (p. 401), making all sensation chimerical. Her antipathy toward the ancients exceeds that of R. F. Jones, whose conclusions she unquestioningly adopts; in her view, "the self-created cosmos deduced by the ancients and the Scholastics [was] founded on half-truths and imaginative lies" (p. 437). And Staf- ford scores the picturesque aesthetic, "layered over with conventions and mired in the patina granted by the ages" (p. 394), for embodying "a tactic of evasion, the manifest loss of confidence in man's ability to know what lies outside him- self" (p. 439). How unjust to men like William Gilpin and Uvedale Price, whose studies of picturesque scenery drew on their faithful descriptions and compari- sons of the most minutely detailed particulars of landscape.

But it is historians of the human race who bear the brunt of Stafford's harshest animadversions. Set against the great realities of natural history, the mean and trivial "deceptions and vagaries" of the human condition seem to her "despicable or risible." "What a contrast obtains between Buffon's or Erasmus Darwin's fundamental attitude of deepest awe for natural structures . . . and Montes- quieu's or Gibbon's jaundiced panorama of mankind's past!" (p. 54). She is not simply repelled by historians' cynicism, but regards the annals of nature as es- sentially more worthy of exploration-and more conducive to undistorted and elevated recounting-than the history of humanity. And celebrating perception unimpeded by memory, history, or tradition-"with the crutch of memory avoided, on-the-spot perception is accomplished without loss of time" (p. 408)- Stafford advocates the view she attributes to Bernard de Montfauqon that "rude stone monuments, when unmanipulated by man, [are] surer guides to truth than all the deceptive texts of ancient history put together" (p. 314). One would hardly realize that this was an epoch whose historical and autobiographical sensibilities led to insights at least as fruitful as those she credits to geographical exploration.

Nonetheless, Voyage into Substance deserves praise both for its breadth of scholarship-a tripartite bibliography includes some 400 travel works, 250 related scholarly treatises, and 400 secondary sources-and its passionate advocacy of an idee maitresse, however open to criticism. The polemical stance structures the material, lends it excitement, and provokes reflection. Author and publisher are also to be commended for an outstanding job of bookmaking and proofread- ing: the text is virtually impeccable.

DAVID LOWENTHAL Department of Geography

University College, London London WCIH OAP

England

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