154 STEPHEN BANNthe other, and then back to the same: the ooty of knowledge� the xperience�gained, is a factor of contact with, and appropriation of, that otherness. The traveller affirms dentity as a subject� but what if that identity was not simply suspended, provisionally, by the act of departure, but already in doubt, or problematized, by the circumstances which led to the departure in the first place What if the identity, to which the traveller returned, were a conflictual identity, which remained in play in the subject relationship to the ooty�accumulated I ask all these questions, confident of not being able to provide wholly satisfactory answers. But the whole issue boils down to one, blindingly clear question: what is a subject, within history Julia Kristeva has tried, in Histoires dmour, to analyse successive states of the Western subject in, and constituted by, representation.5 I would like to envisage a micro-history of the Western subject, since the Renaissance, as it has been inflected by the experience of otherness and objecthoody travel and collecting, the systole and diastole of a certain cultural identity. The first relevant point here involves a pun on the word ubject� John Bargrave was a ubject�of Charles I, member of a staunchly Royalist family whose leading member, the Dean of Canterbury, had been publicly insulted, imprisoned and allowed to die incarcerated at the opening of the Civil War: he starts his continental travels under the impulsion of this dramatic event, and a result of his own expulsion from his College Fellowship at Cambridge. Setting out from the kingdom which is no longer a kingdom, but in a state of flagrant illegality in his view, he projects upon Europe the lineaments of the ideological conflict that is the cause of his exile. Why is the striking frontispiece to the travel book adorned with two figures emblematic of Rome and Venice, who are linked to one another by chains Briefly, because for Bargrave, the Venetian republic suffers in relation to Rome and to the Catholic church the same imposition of tyrannical power as England herself would be suffering, if the Pope could carry out his Machiavellian intention of destabilizing the English Crown and reasserting ecclesiastical control. By contrast, Charles Waterton, born a century after Bargrave death, suffers as a member of an old Catholic, recusant family, from the penal legislation directed at such families from the time of the Reformation onwards: only under the reign of Mary had the Watertons been entitled to hold government office, and Charles himself was to refuse to take the oath enjoined in Peel Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, presumably because of his sense of total alienation from the British political scene. What did he look for, and perhaps go out to seek, in the forests and rivers of South America To a certain extent, he looked for and found the accelerating decay of European colonial empires, which were being overtaken in the new processes of independence and nationhood. But more important to him was the abiding evidence of the civilizing role of the Jesuit fathers, who had
