Bodmer_Publication

There, he belongs within the story of the American Sublime. (As in Tableau 40.)
From a European perspective, his use of the sublime places him next to a number of
painters of mountain scenes and seascapes, all of which give vent to a desire for the
holistic experience of the overwhelming, quasi-divine power of Nature – a desire
that is “romantic” in the most general sense of the word. Within this context, he can
also be seen as one who satisfies the European nostalgia for an American utopia. 22
4. Character
Alongside the concept of a pleasurable science, there occurs in Wied the notion
of character and the characteristic – thus, for example in Brasilien: Nachträge, 23
published after the Travels and thus showing that this concern is a lasting one.
Wied is looking for characteristic individuals, and one reason why he takes Bodmer
along is that he trusts in his ability to represent them correctly.
The notion of character recurs in the entire nineteenth century’s discourse on
“other” peoples. It is shaped to an extent by the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt,
Alexander’s brother. Wilhelm’s influence on nineteenth and twentieth century
linguistics is well-known and can be described in very general ways as a further
development of Herder’s views, according to which a people’s character has always
already found expression in its language. Here originates Wilhelm’s influence on
American ethnolinguistics, including the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which says that
the world view of a linguistic community is not only mirrored in its language, but
is shaped by it. In other words, language, culture and ethnic group become a unitary
entity that can only be called organic. What is at work here is the concept of an
“inner form” in which such organicism becomes concrete.
That Alexander was familiar with these ideas of his brother, is certain: one of
our sources for the theory is a text that connects the two brothers: “In his 1812
Essai sur les langues du Nouveau Continent, originally drafted for a project by his
brother Alexander but never published during the author’s life-time, Wilhelm von
Humboldt noted that ‘le monde dans lequel nous vivons est [...] exactement celui
dans lequel nous transplante l’idiôme que nous parlons’.” 24 It is quite possible that
Maximilian knew Wilhelm’s text, or that he heard of it via Alexander. For our
purposes, neither of these direct influences is indispensable; it suffices that we
have a philosophical tradition here that was alive for a couple of centuries and
which provides us with a meaningful context for the notion of character and the
characteristic in Wied. (It is a welcome by-product that it also explains why he has
linguistic interests, and why there are long lists of words from various tribal
languages in the Travels.)
In order to apply this to Bodmer, one has to make the transition from language,
as object and medium of analysis, to painting, which, after all, has to do with
objects and surfaces. Here, “character” will necessarily manifest itself differently,
and it does so in various ways and combined with aspects that have already been
addressed. In the “didactic” images of landscapes, the precision of line and the
structure of the object, which acquires expressive value, make visible what is characteristic
in and of a landscape. The morphology of formations becomes apparent,
but so does also the well-nigh tactile appeal of a surface that the eye can scan. The
notion of character combines both aspects. In similar ways, the ethnographic
objects become icons of the cultures that produced them and of which they are
characteristic. In the landscape images proper, it is less the precision of the line
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