9 Turner, Frederick. Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. Frederick Turner's Beyond Geography offers a jarring view of Europe's Discovery process in the New World as a symptom of radical separation of Europeans from their mythical, natural selves. This separation causes both inward- and outward-directed aggression and fated the contact with the New World to be destructive. Although the distorting effects of an exaggeratedly rational culture had been discussed before, Turner turns this lens specifically to the Spanish and English encounters with the New World. 1 Because Turner describes the encounter of the Old World with the New as essentially a "spiritual story" and because at the end of it all he considers the New World ruined and the Old World yet unredeemed, the tone of Beyond Geography is that of a lament.2 This makes Turner susceptible to a certain Romantic bias in favor of the mythically-oriented indigenes. European mass killing of buffalo is bad ("Their big, heavy, soft bullets caused terrific damage as they flattened into and slammed through the innards of the animals"), while Amerindian "deep blood kettle" is part of "a heroic human journey".3 In both cases the animals die and some suffer but the tone of the Amerindian description is certainly different. In another example, Amerindians are coerced "alcoholics" while the Europeans are more prosaic drunks given to bouts of "great drunkenness on Castilian wine and other forms of debauchery."4 A bias against the Old World destroyers is particularly vehement when their religiosity (or lack thereof) is discussed. In the "Notes on Sources", Turner remarks that the reader should read Augustine's City of God, "whatever one thinks of Christianity and the history it has made."5 The author seems unwilling to soften (or even acknowledge) the perceived harshness of his analysis of Christianity as an ultimately-damning religion originated from a crisis cult.6 He will make few converts among contemporary non-academic Christians. Turner also limits his audience with his heavily literary and philosophical approach.7 The first words in the book are a quote from Melville's Moby Dick, and that structure ("Extracts") is an allusion to that same work. The association of Captain Ahab's relentless, driven pursuit of the great whale with the European obsession with intensional expansion and sometimes unwitting desecration is the first among a plethora of literary references. In a later chapter, "Things of Darkness", Turner turns to Shakespearean plays to describe the spiritual dangers of being civilized in a wild land. This willingness to use literary sources may disconcert the reader who expects an orthodox history. Turner harpoons this criticism early by indicating he is "offering poetry as history."8 A better description might be philosophy or comparative religion offered as history. Turner applies the urban critiques of Lewis Mumford, the sociological critiques of Max Weber and Freudian/Jungian psychology to infuse them with a literary and Transatlantic awareness. There are primary sources included (Amerindian myths to be discussed below, and first-person accounts of Las Casas, etc) but Beyond Geography remains an synthetic application of existing thought to the New World experience. The body of the work is divided into three major sections. In the first section, "Loomings", Turner lays the groundwork necessary to understand his later discussion of the New World encounter. The author discusses his realization of his own isolation from the American lands and their mythic context. His country, North America, is a special case, created (from the European point of view) ex nihilo, in a brutally short time frame. Because of this, American is "the epitome of whatever it was that moved the civilization of the West in its long push outward."9 Turner describes the necessity of achieving a middle path between mythological life and civilized life. This mode might inherently be balanced but we are afraid to interact with the mythic at all out of fear of losing our civil natures. This single-minded insistence on the rational has made American culture over-achieving but misshapen "as a weight lifter's biceps."10 Only when this culture has built up sufficient margin over nature (by aid of technology) can it afford to spend time in regret for its lost mythic nature. Turner points to Israelite experience, recorded in the Old Testament, as the primary influence on this road to rationality. Adamic stories of dominion, and intolerance, and Jehovian intolerance to the geographically-specific sacerdotal locations (with their attendant gods) cause the Christians to be intolerant. The needs of an expanding cult of personality and crisis dictate a dissociation from that personality if it is to survive into churchhood. Routinization and traditionalization defeat esotericism and gnosticism, while at the same time historicism supplants mythic cyclic timelessness. This has foreboding ramifications: Christians are bound to the anxiety of a separate or special destiny, they experience a "slow starvation of the soul"11, and an exacerbation of violence against the Other. Inward hostility (hair shirts and heavy chains) get transferred to external activities with the instatement of the Crusades. The natural and physical knowledge gained in missionary and Crusading work are critical in abetting Western technology. In the darkest Christian hours, the Inquisition reveals a brutal formalism that has replaced any fiction of spiritual health: "Gold, silver, and stones . are pathetic substitutes for a lost world, a lost life."12 The second major section, "Rites of Passage" describes the Spanish and English adventures in the New World. The underlying thrust of this section is to illustrate the essential identity of the two European experiences, especially viewed from the Amerindian point of view. This, if true, would support Turner's contention that Western expansion issued from a unified culture European monoculture. Turner begins this section by demonstrating that the New World was not "empty or demonic"13 (desert?) land suitable for Christian dominion, but rather a rich land, lushly populated with content, mythically-oriented people.14 He lists "extracts" again, as in the front matter, but here the extracts are indigenous myths. This structural parallel suggests to the reader that one is, spiritually and culturally speaking, fulfilling the same function as the other. It also suggests that the mapping of an area is not to fully understand it. How would a tribal myth-system appear on a map? Turner sees a standardized hero myth, a la Joseph Campbell, in these stories. Since the hero myth involves a temporary submersion to the unknown Other, and subsequent growth of the community, it is ironic that the European invaders again separated themselves from the source of their own salvation, the myths contained the pattern for confronting new, wild things and integrating them rather than destroying them. "The hero's task is to see these guardians for what they are and not mistake them for adversaries."15 The Europeans were unwilling to undertake the external or internal heroic journey. Turner then turns to his first discoverer, Columbus. As with subsequent Spanish and English discoverers to follow, the Cristoforo ("Christ-bearer")16 struggles under the weight of his retrograde religion. Turner marks him as contaminated not only for his Christian background but also by marriage relationship to the despoiler of Perestrello, introducer of rabbits to Porto Santo. The entire situation was contaminated, as Spanish culture was in a black mood: longstanding racial animosities the moors, the supernumerary men-at-arms left over after the Moorish expulsion, and intolerance for the Jewry was the background noise during Columbus' first Spanish Voyage. First contact was foreshadowing: native Arawaks cut themselves handling Columbine swords, and the captain duly noted that the indigenes would make fine servants. Instead of experiencing the local "mystic groves" and "cycles of simple contentment"17, Columbus was looking for riches. Earliest colonies did themselves in with their own hands; greed and aggression against the natives caused the settlement of La Navidad to fail (and seemingly disappear). The Europeans responded with widespread violence. This will parallel the English experience later. It was not impossible to consider the Indians human, however, as the enlightenment of Las Casas demonstrates. The penetration of the Aztec cities demonstrates again the willingness of the Discoverers (Cortez, in this case), to pillage and destroy in the pursuit of religion. As Turner points out, Cortez repeatedly sacrificed military expediency to religious conversion. Force could be combined with missionary activity, though. The Spanish requiermiento was an ultimatum to locals (in Spanish) demanding immediate acceptance of Christian dominion or face destruction. Turner will use this device later to draw a comparison with the English experience. The taking of Tenoctitilan sums up the Spanish experience in the New World: encounter with the naive indigenes, denigration and destruction of their rituals and accoutrements, and plunderous spoiling of what cultural artifacts the natives had built on that spot. This will later be echoed in the destruction of the Ghost Dancers by the Anglos. Turner opens discussion of the Anglo encounter with a discussion of the ill-fated early colony (Roanoake here) that fails because of undiplomatic handling of relations with the Amerindians. The European Christians seem to continually refuse to benefit from the promise inherent in the human, mythic, and natural resources of the New World. Turner then moves on to a discussion of The Tempest as a gauge of European attitudes about the New World at that time. What happens to civilized peoples sequestered in uncivilized lands? In the bard's source material, the Bermudan shipwreck found a paradisiacal setting rather than a demonic one. This sets up strange dissonance that still exists: what if civilization is not intrinsically "better?" As with the Spanish, the English had strong Christian- influenced motivation. Turner describes the Pilgrims as surviving on a hard fare of Calvin, Augustine, and Paul.18 The Puritans demonstrated the predictable intolerance, this time beating down unorthodoxy in their own ranks. The shedding of their own Christian blood, as well as that of the natives, finally reveals the horror of their victory: they may have polluted their own Promised Land. The final section, "Haunts", deals with the aftermath of this poisoning of the inherited lands, and the existential situation of the settlers at the edges of the wilderness. Turner examines both the common "captured by Indians" myth, noting that in this model the captive retains an orthodox (and zealous) religious point of view, and emerges from captivity essentially changed. Compare this with the changed and community-changing hero of Campbell's myth. More interesting perhaps is discussion of renegades, those who become Indianized and have no desire to return. Again the Europeans are confronted with the possibility that their system is not perceived as superior by everyone. In "The Vanishing New World", Turner considers the widespread destruction of the New World and the "cancerous" detritus left in its place.19 Here Turner tips his hand to the Transcendentalists (particularly Thoreau) and their keen sense of alienation from the once-rich land they inhabit. The Anglos weren't the only ones aware of the coming extinction of a former way of life; the Ghost Dancers constitute another crisis cult, and "each new religion is the 'Ghost Dance' of a traumatized society.'"20 With nature and the natives successfully emasculated, all that is left is to display the trophy. The token wildness of the New World is trotted out in the form of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Contained and rendered into entertainment, this faux West stands as Proxy for and renders powerless all the Old World might have learned from the New. The ringleader himself (current American culture), Buffalo Bill, degrades into paranoia and lethal intoxication. This work was most satisfying in its first, more theoretical chapters. The middle section's application of religious-social theory to the New World encounter was too anti-European and plodding to be satisfying. One brief chapter (or even a table) could have made the argument for European monoculture, and then either the Columbine or Anglo experience would have sufficed. The Buffalo Bill denouement could have been nicely paired with a similar European experience. In retrospect, what is (or was) the European view of the development of the New World and the Americanizatin of the Europeans that fled their tradition homes to go there? Beyond Geography is probably most similar to Alfred W. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism; both works see the New World ruined (unintentionally) by Europeans and this based on a path unwittingly chosen in the Near East millennia back. Each applies an unorthodox discipline (biology, psychology) to a Transatlantic ecumene. Both are interesting and equally conjectural. Compare this to the self-conscious scientific heroism of the cartographic pioneers in John Noble Wilford's Mapmakers. Their triumph over (Christian, in this case) myth is triumphant and worth of praise. The linear history of Wilford not only leads up to New World civilization and knowledge but out into space. Turner might say that scientific heroism worshipped here (in the text and in America) is insufficient; it is necessary to go beyond geography to a place of equilibrium and contentment. jason carr _______________________________ 1 In Max Weber's "iron cage" of rationality (from The Disenchantment of Modern Life) comes to mind. 2 Page xiii 3 Amerindian slaughter is discussed on page 106 and European slaughter on page 267. 4 Alchoholic Indians are found on page 280, where Turner insinuates the Europeans actually made them alcoholics. The victorious Spanish are found drunken and sexually harassing on pate 169. 5 Page 305. 6 The delightful irony here, though, is that Christianity grew from a Roman crisis cult to instigate a much larger European (and later American) spiritual crisis. 7 "Every more noble spirit and taste selects its audience when it wishes to communicate itself; and choosing them, it at the same time erects barriers against the 'others.'" Mixed Opinions and Aphorisms. Friedrich Nietzsche. 8 Page xiii 9 Page 6 10 Page 15 11 Page 66 12 Page 90 13 Page 113 14 Content in the Lakota sense of equillibrated, rather than subjectively happy. 15 Page 115 16 Page 118 17 130 18 Page 217 19 Page 255 20 Page 56 http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/transatlantic/