No mode of discourse is more likely to avail itself of the "strange, therefore true" paradox than the travel narrative, one of whose cardinal conventions is to expect the unexpected.⁴⁷ And many of the travel narratives of this period have recourse to this most daring, and most dangerous, claim to historicity. Vairasse d'Allais has his publisher remark that

the Histories of Peru, Mexico, China, &c. were at first taken for Romances by many, but time has shewed since that they are verities not to be doubted of.

It is an idle humour in any of us to despise or reject strange Discoveries … If any thing is here related of this Country or People seemingly beyond all possibility, we must know, that as this People have the advantage of living in the earthly Paradise, they have knowledges of Nature and natural Effects, which look like Miracles.

As this argument implies, the relativizing effects of travel need not lead us to conclude that nature itself is relative to climate and custom. On the contrary (as another writer suggests), "Nature performs its operations in all parts of the World, according to its primitive Fundamental Laws … The Monsters of Africa or the Indies, are no more surprising to the Inhabitants of these parts, than the Beasts that are commonly seen and bred among us are to the Europeans." Rather, it is our own capacity for knowledge that is relative to our concrete physical circumstances and opportunities. "We have taken for Fables what the Poets or the Ancients have told us of the first Inhabitants of the World," remarks a third, yet the natives of America answer well to those descriptions. "They who never saw more than their own Village, never imagin that Steeples are of any other fashion than their own … For of those things which we do not see, we know nothing but by the Report of others. Now Men have not reported to us all things for want of having been upon the Places." But then to dismiss as "romance" what has not yet been seen or reported, or if reported, not yet read, is (says a fourth) beyond foolishness.⁴⁸

These self-defensive efforts by authors of voyages both "real" and "imaginary" find persuasive parallels in the more exotic of Aphra Behn's imaginary "true histories." The well-known claim to historicity that opens Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave. A True History (1688) is echoed, more succinctly, at the beginning of The Fair Jilt … (1696): "I do not pretend here to entertain you with a feign'd story, or any thing piec'd together with Romantick Accidents; but every Circumstance, to a Tittle, is Truth. To a great part of the Main, I my self was an Eye witness; and what I did not see, I was confirm'd of by Actors in the Intrigue, holy Men, of the Order of St. Francis"⁴⁹ Frequent narrative intrusions of this sort occur throughout Behn's third-person Surinam histories, but no tension exists in her dual role as narrator and character, because both roles are dedicated to the single end of physically witnessing, and thereby authenticating, a central character whose personal history is distinct from her own. This authenticating end is also served by Behn's rendition of the "strange, therefore true" formula with reference to Oroonoko: "The Royal Slave I had the Honour to know in my Travels to the other World … If there be any thing that seems Romantick, I beseech your Lordship [Lord Maitland] to consider, these Countries do, in all things, so far differ from ours, that they produce inconceivable Wonders; at least, they appear so to us, New and Strange."⁵⁰

The potential risks involved in this method of claiming historicity are fully actualized in Behn's travel narratives, whose naive empiricism betrays no parodic intent. If, in Vairasse d'Allais's "earthly paradise," natural effects are said at least to "look like miracles," Behn audaciously and unapologetically idealizes her Surinam as a prelapsarian Eden; the royal slave on whose historicity she elsewhere insists is made to fantasize about his beloved in the familiar figures and heightened language of romance; and the lovers, after a separation in the Old World, are reunited in the New with all the miraculousness of a romance discovery (see 2–3, 14, 43–44, 48–49). In the face of such incongruity, we might be tempted to suppose for writers like Behn an especially opportunistic "critical theory": only call your travel narrative a true history, and its historical truth will thereby be empowered to survive the most patent romance fictionalizing. The comparison with a highly self-conscious antiromance like Incognita is instructive, for Behn shares with Congreve the energizing antiromance impulse and the will to pursue questions of truth into the plot itself; yet the pursuit stops short of extreme skepticism even though the logic of that movement into self-parody feels at times quite implacable.

Behn values the Surinam Indians for their natural simplicity, and she derives from their example the precept "that simple Nature … better instructs the World, than all the Inventions of Man." (3). But she also knows that natural simplicity is an invitation to imposture, as one of her kinsmen discovers when the natives seek to deify him for the powers of his magnifying glass: "It were not difficult to establish any unknown or extravagant Religion among them, and to impose any Notions or Fictions upon 'em" (56). In passages like these, Behn is torn between her admiration for the natural receptiveness of credulity and the artful protections of skepticism, and in Oroonoko she creates a hero who embodies these antithetical qualities in recognizably Restoration guise. Schooled in an aristocratic doctrine that enjoins implicit faith in the word of others, Oroonoko falls easy victim to the routine duplicity of the English captain by whom he is enslaved: "And Oroonoko, whose Honour was such as he never had violated a Word in his life himself, much less a solemn Asseveration, believ'd in an instant what this Man said" (34–35). But he can also play the freethinker and make a "Jest" of the gullible "Faith" that Christians have in "our Notions of the Trinity" (46). When Oroonoko learns definitively that "there was no Faith in the White Men, or the Gods they ador'd," he is even obliged to embrace the decadence of literacy and documentary objectivity, resolving "never to credit one Word they spoke" and requiring that all pledges henceforth "should be ratify'd by their Hands in Writing" (66). But something is lost in this rueful conversion to Western skepticism, and Oroonoko's history soon after comes to its violent close in an apotheosis of desperate revenge and self-sacrifice.

The unstable compound that Oroonoko's character exists to mediate is most suggestively expressed by an earlier episode, in which his "great Curiosity" is so piqued by the incredible phenomenon of the South American "Numb-eel" that "for Experiment-sake" he grasps one of them and almost drowns himself (53). Here the blend of skepticism and credulity is conveyed by an engaging, if momentary, glimpse of Oroonoko as gentleman virtuoso of the Royal Society, and it is this same cultural type that his creator enacts in her own epistemological instability. Naive empiricism and the claim to historicity partake both of the skeptical denunciation of "all the inventions of man" and of the credulous faith that human inventions may thus be replaced by immediate perception and experience. As the ready idolatry of the Indians seems to show, however, neither does the absence of skepticism guarantee the absence of invention, which will always intervene in whatever shapes are conditioned by the particular cultural tribe to which we belong. For Behn this is the point at which skepticism becomes self-defeating, for it denies her the capacity to tell the truth; and she never is moved, like Congreve, to disclose the manipulative power of the author "to impose any notions or fictions upon" the reader.⁵¹ Because the parallel between credulous Indians and credulous readers never breaks the surface of narrative self-consciousness, Behn may perhaps be assured that our simple and receptive faith is rewarded not by imposture but by the truth of what really happened. The hope is that antiromance, the negation of the negation, will thus fulfill itself as the true history of travel narrative. The risk is that for skeptical readers it will simply seem the "new romance."

Notes

⁴⁷ E.g., see Spenser's defense of his "voyage" to "Faerie lond" in The Faerie Queene (1590), II, proem. On the paradox see above, chap. I, nn. 73, 100, and chap. 2, nn. 11, 41.

⁴⁸ Vairasse d'Allais, History (1675), sig. A4^r; idem, History (1679), sig. A3^r-v; Dellon, Voyage to the East-Indies, translator's "Preface to the Reader," sig. A6^V; Heliogenes de L'Epy, A Voyage into Tartary … (1689), "The Preface," sig. A7^r-A8^v, A9^V; Father Louis Hennepin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America … (1698), 4.

⁴⁹ Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt; or, The History of Prince Tarquin, and Miranda, in The Histories and Novels Of the Late Ingenious Mrs Behn … (1696), 4. Compare Behn's dedication to Henry Pain: "This little History … is Truth; Truth, which you so much admire … This is Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age … [Part of it] I had from the Mouth of this unhappy Great Man [Tarquin], and was an Eye-Witness to the rest" (sig. A2^V, A3^r). For other claims to historicity see 19, 24, 35, 161. Cf. Behn, Oroonoko, ed. Lore Metzger (New York, Norton, 1973), 1; subsequent citations will be to this edition and will appear in the text. For a summary of the scholarship arguing the fictionality of Behn's experiences in Surinam as recounted in these writings, see George Guffey, "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: Occasion and Accomplishment," in Two English Novelists: Aphra Behn and Anthony Trollope, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975), 5–8.

⁵⁰Histories and Novels Of … Mrs Behn, "Epistle Dedicatory," sig. A5^V-A6^V.

⁵¹ Contrast Congreve's teasing invitation that we discover a "force, or a whim of the author's"; see above, chap. 1, n. 124.