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COPYRIGHT 1993 University of Illinois Press
By Stephen Greenblatt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. XXIV + 202. $24.95.
Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, an analysis of the function of wonder in the European discovery and appropriation of the New World, is a far better book than many newspaper reviews may have led you to believe. Not that there isn't some substance especially in the complaints of Garry Wills (New York Review of Books, 21 November 1991) and Roberto Echevarria (New York Times Book Review, 16 February 1992). For Wills the problem is one of gratuitous mystification" (p. 16), and it's difficult not to concede that in analyzing wonder, as in analyzing almost anything else, Greenblatt is more than willing to see mysteries, aporias, paradoxes where those of a more prosaic temperament see none. He doesn't simply want to explain the marvelous, he wants to reproduce it. "Why did Columbus, who was carrying a passport and royal letters, think to take possession of anything," Greenblatt wonders, especially "if he actually believed he had reached the outlying regions of the Indies" (p. 53), the realm of the Great Khan? As Anthony Padgen's explanation indicates, this is not quite the radical indeterminacy Greenblatt imagines: had Columbus "in fact discovered a western passage to |Cathay' all he could have hoped to have done was seize whatever off-shore islands he could, and establish a series of trading stations (feitorias), and factories" (Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination [1990], p. 13). This was the method of the Portuguese in Africa and India, and this seems to be exactly...
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