Alice Minium

“If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce unconceivable Wonders…. What I have mention’d I have taken care shou’d be Truth, let the Critical Reader judge as he pleases….This is a true Story.” ~ Aphra Behn

Where does history end and myth begin? In the “New World” of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Discovery of Guinea,” both 16^th– and 17^th-century works, the lines between fact and fiction seem to blur. To the modern mind, the distinction is clear — a tale begins to break the laws of science, impossible events occur, human emotion colors the plot. To the ancient mind, however, the lines begin to blur. For where, but in myth, can man infuse the magic of history? How, but in prose, can one portray the turmoil of a battle, or the fervor of a victory, or the complicated stream of fluctuating experience that is human life, out of which all our social and historical constructs are formed? And, if history serves the role of documenting the past, would it not be inaccurate to portray that past as soulless, void, reductionist fact? Does not fact require a little bit of fiction to actually imitate life? Is life not always a constant intermingling of both, and through their profusion emerges experience, civilization, wars, passion, and art?

Every literary work is a history. Each account, every creation of an author’s mind, is a snapshot into her world — a very real world she experienced firsthand through the lens of socially constructed beliefs, values, and ideals about the world. Readers may drink in the nectar of literature’s structural and linguistic beauty, as these are also intrinsic goods in and of themselves, but within these constructions we may deduce and define an underlying framework of mind one might call the lens of the author. The lens of the author is the lens through which they write, interpret, create, and understand. The lens of the author is also a microcosm of the lens of society. Every work is a portrait of self. Every work is also a portrait of society — a miniature universe, a self-contained world.

The self, both ancient and modern, is full of dreams. Every mind construes sensory data in the context of ideological illusions and underlying meaning. Imagination is the web through which we connect seemingly meaningless dates, numbers, and images; imagination is how we infuse them with meaning, draw conclusions, and create constructs of reality. Without imagination, constructs of reality fall apart, for where, exactly, does one stop and the other begin? What of “Alice” is real, and what is imagined? What of “The New World” is real, and what is imagined? What of God is real, and what is imagined? What of “slavery” is real, and what is imagined? What of “gold” is real, and what is imagined?

In fact, from our modern perspective, much of Behn’s and Raleigh’s descriptions of the “New World” sound downright fictional. In Behn’s words, on page 52 of Oroonoko, “For ‘tis the nature of that Country to Rust and Eat up Iron, or any Metals, but Gold and Silver.”

Obviously the North American continents are not possessing of some absurd environmental conditions wherein all metals except those directly commodifiable to Europeans magically are rendered inert. Instead, perhaps, “Gold” is more of a concept than a truth — what Behn is saying is the nature of this land is rich, alien, and unlike any of the brute metals that have formed our past civilizations of old. Perhaps what this land possesses is entirely new, and the metals forging ancient wars and societies of Europe now stand as inferior to a newfound tool with which man may forge civilization — the “Gold” of a New World where feudalism did not apply, where social rules could experimentally be broken across the globe quite quietly, where new societies could be created both mythic and dystopian in theme. If the “New World” was anything, it was rich fodder for the imagination. If its soil had any magical properties, it was a fertile bed for every seed of the Enlightenment’s dreams.

These dreams are recurringly embodied in “Gold,” which implies both the lust for capital and commodity as well as the lust for ideological actualization. Every bidder of every schema saw the New World and wanted to cast their bet; every one of them saw their own “Gold.”

The Gold was extravagant, imaginative, and quite literally unbelievable. We know now that, when Raleigh describes tales of the land of El Dorado, he is describing a mythical world that most certainly did not exist, but to Raleigh, or to his reader, this world was as real as Washington, D.C.

His language is extravagant and his description mythical as he writes of it in pages 6-7 of his 1595 account to Queen Elizabeth, entitled “The Discovery of Guinea”:

All the vessels of his house, table, and kitchen, were of gold and silver, and the meanest of silver and copper for strength and hardness of metal. He had in his wardrobe hollow statues of gold which seemed giants, and the figures in proportion and bigness of all the beasts, birds, trees, and herbs, that the earth bringeth forth; and of all the fishes that the sea or waters of his kingdom breedeth. He had also ropes, budgets, chests, and troughs of gold and silver, heaps of billets of gold, that seemed wood marked out to burn. Finally, there was nothing in his country whereof he had not the counterfeit in gold. Yea, and they say, the Ingas had a garden of pleasure in an island near Puna,  which had all kinds of garden-herbs, flowers, and trees of gold and silver; an invention and magnificence till then never seen.

Raleigh’s “Gold” was everywhere. His description is enticing, idyllic, almost Eden-like. The New World was, to Behn, Raleigh, and in many ways the collective European mind in and of itself, the New Eden — it was a chance to start again. It was rich with visions and myth, and these were as formative to the societies thus created as were facts and figures, if not more so.

In fact, it is “Gold,” it is imagination, it is fiction, which fuels everything, which settled the New World, which inspired its authors, which defined its religions, which articulated its dreams. Without imagination, there would be no growth. Without myths and dreams, there could be no history. Without fiction, mankind stands mute, armed with dumb tools of logic and fact. Mythical thinking is not optional. It is older than old for a reason: because it contains the collective consciousness of man, within it are embedded our secrets, our desires, our dreams, our framework for knowing, our placement of self, our sexes, our governments, histories, and gods. Myth is the oldest kind of history, because only in imagination can be fully contained all that which is known to man.

Therefore, of course the New World does not cause bronze to rust, and there are no trees of gold that grow, but does it matter? The “New World” was not a geographical continent or series of islands these European authors describe. The “New World” was also a continent of the mind, an alien world of imagination, a creation of fiction itself and a means for projecting and understanding our desired dreams.

The New World was not this soil, but it was very much real. Stories may incarnate as fiction, but that does not mean they are not fact. History is not dead, and it is mute without imagination. Fact is inert without fiction; the soul of mankind is not contained in flesh and bone. Magic cannot be reduced to data. Art is the mother, not the servant of, her daughter, Science.

History and myth are inexplicably intertwined, for such is the nature of human experience — such is the wonderful mind of man to produce all the art in the world. We could argue for centuries about what it is “real,” whether this is fiction and that is fact. Such a question is cruel, dismissive, and sells the soul short of its birthright. Perhaps a better question is, does it matter? There is no “fact” or “fiction” alone. If we are to be human, we must have both.

Works Cited

 Brehn, Aphra. Oroonoko. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.Originally published 1688.

 Raleigh, Walter. “The Discovery of Guinea.” 1595.