2 - The Immortality of James Cook

Summary

EXPLICITLY or implicitly, representations of celebrity as ephemeral and unstable always define it against an ideal of permanence. Eighteenthcentury metropolitans inherited a long and remarkably consistent European tradition, which insisted that real cultural immortality was exclusive to individuals whose eminence had to be proven by the cumulative judgement of many generations of historians and artists. Works by Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Pope distinguished between false fame, briefly raised by popular talk and thus controlled by ‘the blunt monster with uncounted heads, / The still-discordant wav’ring multitude’, and the immortal status granted by commemoration in written text. Personifications of fama divide into the many-eyed, many-tongued monsters of rumour, and winged messengers bearing trumpets, the latter often elided or confused with Clio, Muse of History, who tends to have a pen in her hand. This dichotomy between false and real fame affirmed the superiority of literate over oral cultures and naturalised the power of elite metropolitan taste, enshrining its avowedly universal but Eurocentric and masculine viewer as alone able to assess merit and produce authentic fame. Yet as writers of the later eighteenth century wrestled with the emergence of celebrity, this discourse of fame was complicated by an increasing sense that written – and especially printed – texts produced not authority and permanence but multiplicity and transience. By disrupting the cultural mechanisms that were supposed to authorise fame, Oceanic-metropolitan celebrity could be seen as threatening the pretensions to authority by which Britain justified its own ‘civilising’ interventions in Oceania. In the figure of James Cook, the metropolis would eventually reassert its own imperial cultural power by imagining a new version of immortal fame in Oceania: that of the colonial British explorer-benefactor-founder, remembered forever by the descendants of converted ‘savages’ and white settlers. Yet early texts about Cook demonstrate that this nineteenth-century colonial repurposing of the rhetoric of immortality was far from straightforward or universal, and that the colonial hero was a product, as well as a symbolic rejection, of ephemeral celebrity culture.

In Joseph Addison's influential 1709 Tatler essay ‘The Table of Fame’, he depicted immortality, ‘that imaginary existence by which men live in their fame and reputation’, as conferred over centuries on a cast of exceptional, quasi-sacred men. For Addison, heroes are ushered into fame by the historians who live after them.