Engraving the Savage: The New World and the Techniques of Civilization (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Engraving the Savage: The New World and the Techniques of Civilization Michael Leroy Oberg Engraving the Savage: The New World and the Techniques of Civilization. By Michael Gaudio. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Michael Gaudio’s Engraving the Savage is an exhaustive—and exhausting—analysis of the engraving in Theodor de Bry’s edition of Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia. Gaudio, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, focuses upon a small number of de Bry’s engravings, each of which was based on an original watercolor painted by the explorer John White in 1585. Examining how the engravings were made, and the techniques de Bry employed, Gaudio asserts that these widely reproduced images reveal Europeans struggling to define and understand early America and its peoples. Gaudio provides all sorts of detail on de Bry and his workshop, and readers will learn much about the production of the engravings. Despite this achievement, however, Gaudio’s book is plagued by a number of significant weaknesses. First, it is an extremely difficult and tiresome book to read. Gaudio would have benefited, quite simply, by putting more time and energy into writing clearly and laying out his argument in a more coherent and persuasive manner. The heavy reliance on the passive voice, the frequent redundancies, and the employment of the clunky and turgid style so common in much of the writing of cultural studies, all make his book far less useful than it might otherwise have been, and reduces the appeal of an already narrowly-focused monograph. Another significant problem lies in the author’s use of evidence. In his chapter entitled “Making Sense of Smoke,” for instance, in which Gaudio looks at de Bry’s use of lines to depict smoke in his engravings, Gaudio makes several claims in these pages that need evidence. For early modern viewers “associations between the practices of witches and those of American Indians” may well have carried over “easily to de Bry’s scene of ritualistic incantation around a smoking fire,” as Gaudio claims, but without any evidence to that point, we are left merely with Gaudio’s assertion that this must be so. In his discussion of de Bry’s engraving of the Carolina Algonquians carving canoes, a process that required fire and smoke, Gaudio notes that “this smoke suggests both the productivity of these Algonquians and their promise as a productive people. Thus the sign of de Bry’s own investment in Virginia (the indexical lines of his smoke) is simultaneously the site of Virginia’s potential as an investment.” Perhaps this is so, but we have no way of knowing for sure. De Bry said nothing of the sort, nor did Harriot who wrote captions for the engravings. De Bry was, after all, copying artwork composed by John White. White depicted smoke. It came from Algonquian fires. De Bry’s smoke may represent, as Gaudio claims, a “deferral of meaning” and may serve “an essential semiotic function, establishing the limits on which representation is founded,” but it may have been, quite simply, nothing more than an engraving of smoke. If Gaudio wants his readers to accept his detailed and imaginative readings of de Bry’s work, he must do something more to give us a reason to set aside more simple, straightforward, and plausible explanations and interpretations. His frequent reference to the work of other semioticians, art historians, and critics for support does little to alter the fact that Gaudio asks us to accept much of what he says on faith. There is, of course, a large literature available that analyzes the artwork of John White and the popularization of those images in the work of Theodor de Bry, and there is not much in this work that will be unfamiliar to readers who know this scholarship. Gaudio clearly is a keen observer, with a good eye for subtleties and nuance. One wishes that he had taken more care to present his findings in a more persuasive and graceful manner. Michael Leroy Oberg State University of New York College at Geneseo Copyright © 2009 Michael Leroy Oberg and...