Exoticism as the Appropriation of Travail

The Greek-derived word exotic entered into written English (via French) in 1600, in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of His Humor. The turn of phrase that marked its debut was fittingly sensationalist: "Magique, Witchcraft, or other such Exoticke Artes." In 1633, Thomas Johnson's revision of John Gerard's The herball; or, Generall historie of plantes classified the fruit of the clove tree as "Exoticke," in part because of the strange sensations that its English investigator experienced upon putting it inside his mouth. By 1650, exotic was both an adjective and a noun, applied not only to species and customs imported into England from "outside" but also to the resident aliens that were one's neighbors and to foreign authors — both ancient and modern — whose works paved the way for one's own scholarship. As these examples suggest, many early uses of exotic describe phenomena that, in après coup fashion, give rise to the very boundaries that supposedly preexist them and that they allegedly breach.

The rise of postcolonial studies prompted scholars of travel writing to consider how their objects of study participate in such ideologically motivated constructions of "the outside." In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said remarked:

If you were British or French in the 1860s you saw, and you felt, India and North Africa with a combination of familiarity and distance, but never with a sense of their separate sovereignty. In your narratives, histories, travel tales, and explorations your consciousness was represented as the principal authority, an active point of energy that made sense not just of colonizing activities but of exotic geographies and peoples.

According to Said, exoticism is an aesthetic mode that reifies cultural difference in ways that alternately naturalize and dissemble the violent foundations of imperial hegemony: "The exotic replaces the impress of power with the blandishments of curiosity." While Said focused on highbrow exoticism, Anne McClintock subsequently argued that the Victorian marketing of soap, fruit salts, and tea relied on exoticizing tableaux to sell not only household commodities but also nationalist and imperialist ideologies to masses who were not necessarily clamoring to read Flaubert or attend the latest production of Verdi's Aida. Meanwhile, Gayatri Spivak and Graham Huggan have suggested that the literary works of authors from postcolonial countries are commodified by the Anglo-American academy in ways that perpetuate the exoticisms of the nineteenth century.

Like the term exotic itself, postcolonial critiques of exoticism emerge from realities that postdate the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, there was a medieval analogue for the aesthetic mode that modern scholars call exoticism. This chapter focuses on one of medieval exoticism's characteristic expressions: the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge. This term refers to a constellation of symbolic conventions, material practices, and structures of feeling that enabled medieval people to accrue social, political, and economic advantage through their association with the foreign. The travails of the traveler, and the symbolic appropriation thereof, were the foundation of this economy.

Anthropologist Mary W. Helms has shown that, in nearly all preindustrial societies, the field of inquiry that we call geography overlaps significantly with cosmology. For this reason, the act of overcoming geographical distance is charged with the powers of the sacred. Because knowledge of faraway lands attains this mystical character, it proves fundamental to cults of royal and priestly charisma. In some cultures, monarchs and high priests bolster their authority by traveling to distant places in person, returning as what Helms calls "long-distance specialists." In others, elite persons appropriate the mystique of long-distance specialists without ever leaving their native lands, through ensuring their privileged access to foreign visitors and the exotic commodities that accompany them.

Among medieval rulers, this second approach tended to prevail over the first (which might partially explain the ambivalence of medieval attitudes toward the heroic travels of Ulysses and Alexander the Great). Long-distance specialists also stand to profit by making their labors available for appropriation, economically (through financial awards and social promotion) and symbolically (through their prestigious proximity to the powerful).

Just as the critical interrogation of nineteenth-century exoticism cast the era's attitudes toward travel and travel writing in a new light, an appreciation of the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge is indispensable to analyses of the same phenomena in the Middle Ages. This is certainly the case with two frequently compared works of travel writing: the Itinerarium of William of Rubruck (1253) and the Divisament dou monde of Marco Polo and Rustichello da Pisa (1298). Scholars have often treated the Itinerarium and the Divisament as a contrasting diptych. The account of William of Rubruck is generally lauded for its skepticism, its dialogic approach to ethnographic description, and its vivid, personal rendering of its author's experiences. Featuring "a plot and a character," the Itinerarium balances narrative and exoticizing description in a way that conforms to modern expectations of how travel writing should be done. By contrast, the Divisament is faulted for confining its discussion of the Polo family's experiences to a slim preface. The rest of the bulky work is given over to impersonal geoethnographic descriptions of Asia, with occasional anecdotes about Marco's travels scattered throughout. Even Polo's nineteenth-century champion Henry Yule conceded that, in the Divisament, "impersonality is carried to excess." Making matters worse for the Divisament is its allegedly crude style, particularly its penchant for oral-formulaic refrains and its inconsistent use of the first-person narrative voice.

Recent scholarship has softened the tone of such negative comparisons, observing that Polo and Rustichello did not set out to write a first-person travel narrative. However, there is still no consensus about what they actually did intend to write. The unanswered question of why these texts might have adopted the formal and stylistic tendencies that have shaped their critical fortunes is a compelling one. After all, it was not inevitable that William of Rubruck — even though he was writing a letter — would situate his description of the Mongol Empire within the framework of a relatively continuous first-person narrative....