Judith Pascoe's "The Hummingbird Cabinet"

Judith Pacoe’s “The Hummingbird Cabinet” begins her book by way of introducing us to Edward Silsbee, an amateur Percy Bysshe Shelley scholar, and how he came to acquire Shelley’s last guitar. This anecdote provides a means for describing the “wonder” and story of why such an object might be important to someone. How did these objects of the romantic era become relics of the poet? How do collectors project themselves around the idea that “objects are imbued with a lasting sediment of their owners” (3) that can be displaced publicly for adornment? Why “possess the material vestiges of the celebrated dead” (3)? Pascoe’s approach seeks to fill in the gaps on the Romantic tradition and aims to focus on the juxtaposition of particular collections and how poets explain collecting via poetry. Her initial anecdote of Silsbee is used to layer meanings on to read objects in different contexts. The worth of Shelley’s guitar persists because of Silsbee’s enthusiasm of it and in turn creates the narrative that Pascoe offers us, the reader. These contexts are offered as fragmentations of objects, to which Pascoe uses to offer a new narrative in relation to her and the reader. She quotes Walter Benjamin, “For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.” Her argument, as she later states in the introduction, is to mimic this summing up of reality to “reveal the entanglement of literary and collecting” (22) by way of dramatizing the fragmented realities under which other collectors were attempting to capture the vestiges of others before them. This idea becomes especially apparent in relation to the story of strongman, pantomime, giant, from Padua, Giovanni Belzoni. Belzoni’s own presence as a curiosity performing in England is interesting on it’s own, but Belzoni sought greater ambitions for himself and his name when he realizing the fickle nature of fame, sought to immortalize himself by collecting the grand works of Egypt. His desire to inscribe his name and insist on the narrative that he be associated with his collections would ultimately prove a failure in his own time. This failure to translate the sublime outside the context is used to comment on Wordsworth’s own sublime failure. Yet, what ends up informing these various narratives is the desire to seek the sublime in grand and their desire to be immortalized by their own created narratives. While the take away from Pascoe’s article seems to warn of the “brutal” memories in which a curator’s attempts to immortalize the self can fail to capture what the curator intended, the narrative of Sarah Belzoni exists because of her desire to recapture her association with her husband. His narrative persists because of her desire to immortalize him in the form of a painting. Pascoe’s narrative of Belzoni is a form of recovery of the status of Belzoni, especially when she returns to the question of the spectator seeking affirmation that Belzoni did indeed engrave his name on his objects. The narrative within the portrait radiates with fragments of himself. The narrative of Belzoni persists in Pascoe introducing us to him and associating him with other major figures of collecting such as Lord Nelson, Haydon, and Wordsworth (despite them never meeting). In turn, the narrative of Belzoni as an Egyptologist exists in addition to his prior life as a performer. With Wordsworth, too, he persists despite her suggestion that “A slumber” may more accurately be describing the sublime. The worth of these two characters seems to subscribe to their desire to document their fear of missing out on the grand parts of the world and how to associate oneself with them. This question of how an audience may sometimes fail to see the sublime that the curator seeks to impress (Belzoni’s “Room of Beauties” or Wordsworth’s book 6 of “The Prelude”) leads me to think about the modern day equivalents that people now use to capture themselves via social media and to create narratives via collections of photographs, status updates, etc. These methods too can fail to capture what the author intends can lead to infamy or fame depending on their audience. In her retrieval of these narratives, how do we further seek to reconcile the narratives of others authors and the various contexts that we, as scholars, seek to reproduce or emulate? Are we seeking to capture the vestiges of what came before us?