Nobody's Gold: Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana and the Rise of Fictionality

Abstract

Taking as a case study Sir Walter Ralegh's The Discoverie of Guiana (1596), an account of Ralegh's search for gold in South America, this essay argues that European ventures in early America required a mode of speculative thinking and deployment of nonreferential truth claims that Catherine Gallagher identifies as the hallmarks of "novelistic fictionality." Early American exploration narratives such as Ralegh's, then, perform the "rise of fictionality" over a century before the eighteenth-century British novel takes shape. Ralegh's initial descriptions of El Dorado, which he inherits from second-and thirdhand accounts, would seem to reflect the tradition of "marvellous" New World travel writing that had been present in English literature since Thomas More's Utopia (1516), but as the narrative progresses, Ralegh's description of the Amazon region increasingly draws on financial and sexual metaphors of "credit" intended to make the expedition more imaginable for the reader, and in particular to solicit the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. In several key instances, Ralegh fails to offer proof that gold is present, but nonetheless entertains the existence of gold in Guiana as a way to understand interactions with South American Natives that would otherwise be inscrutable. As a result, Ralegh's descriptions of gold mines he claims to have discovered, and even the ostentatious idea of El Dorado that he inherited from other European accounts, become easier for the reader to accept as a potential future reality. The figure of the gold thus operates much like Gallagher's formulation of the fictional novelistic character, an ontological vacancy which allows the reader to appropriate "nobody's story" as their own.