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FAR FETCHED FACTS: THE LITERATURE OF TRAVEL AND THE IDEA OF THE SOUTH SEAS. By Neil Rennie. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. vii + 330; 8 plates. $55.
A 1777 engraving titled "A Young Woman of Otaheite, Dancing" furnishes the visual interest for the cover of Far-Fetched Facts: a Europeanized woman, hair dressed around her ears, body arrayed in heavy silks and tassels, arms swaying, with one bare foot peeking out from the hem of her dress, and what appear to be coconuts, or some sort of fringed round vegetable, modestly covering her breasts. The engraving re-represents history by bowdlerizing the actual dance and the dancer in such a way that denies cultural difference. Yet despite her domestication at the hands of the artist, the woman remains exotic enough to have titillated an eighteenth-century European audience greedy for ever more sensationalized accounts of "salvages," noble and ignoble, and all too ready to suspend their disbelief about the Other. Like a tattooed face or a carved statue of a god, the young woman functions as a metonym for "Tahiti," the reality of which was lost in a sea of classicizing convention, outright fiction, and misunderstood fact.
Far-Fetched Facts documents the "desire of men to locate the imaginary historical past in the real geographical present" (p. 6). As Rennie argues in his Preface, history does not exist on a chronological plane only; it has a spatial dimension as well. During the great Age of Exploration, "literary commonplaces were repeatedly displaced and relocated in geographical space, repeatedly exposed as literary fiction and discovered as geographical fact."...