Surprise: The Poetics of the Unexpected from Milton to Austen 9780801455780

Citation preview

c SURPRISE

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd i

1/27/15 7:50 AM

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd ii

1/27/15 7:50 AM

SURPRISE

T H E P O E TI CS O F T H E UN E X P EC T E D FR O M M I LTO N TO AUST E N

Christopher R. Miller

CORNELL UNIVERSITY Ithaca and London

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd iii

1/27/15 7:50 AM

Copyright © 2015 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2015 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Miller, Christopher R., 1968– author. Surprise : the poetics of the unexpected from Milton to Austen / Christopher R. Miller. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8014-5369-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Surprise in literature. 2. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. I. Title. PR448.S87M55 2015 820.9'353—dc23 2014030634 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd iv

10

9

8

7 6

5

4 3 2

1

1/27/15 7:50 AM

c Co nte nts

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction 1. From Aristotle to Emotion Theory

16

2. Being and Feeling: The Surprise Attacks of Paradise Lost

38

3. The Accidental Doctor: Physics and Metaphysics in Robinson Crusoe

63

4. The Purification of Surprise in Pamela

89

5. Fielding’s Statues of Surprize

115

6. Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception: Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

141

7. Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise

171

8. “Fine Suddenness”: Keats’s Sense of a Beginning

199

Epilogue

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd v

1

Notes

233

Index

267

223

1/27/15 7:50 AM

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd vi

1/27/15 7:50 AM

c A c k n o w l e d g m e nts

It is no exaggeration to say that the earliest idea for this book took me by surprise. Until I taught a seminar on eighteenth-century British literature at Yale in the spring of 2004, I had considered myself a specialist in Romantic poetry, but in re-reading the novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Austen, I became interested in a new— but not entirely unrelated—field and set of critical questions. I am grateful to have had so many smart and companionable colleagues during the early phases of this exploration: Nigel Alderman, David Bromwich, Bill Deresiewicz, Roberta Frank, Ann Gaylin, Priscilla Gilman, Sara Suleri Goodyear, Lanny Hammer, Blair Hoxby, Larry Manley, Stefanie Markovits, Tom Otten, Claude Rawson, Nicole Rice, Joe Roach, Blakey Vermeule, Elliott Visconsi, and Sandy Welsh. I owe particular debts of gratitude to Leslie Brisman for being a mentor and a mensch in every way; to David Quint and John Rogers for their wise and generous counsel on my Milton chapter; to Nigel Alderman, for his shared passion for Wordsworth’s poetry and his own compelling interpretation of “Two April Mornings”; to Marshall Brown, David Kastan, Charles Rzepka, and Jayne Lewis for their friendly interest and encouragement; and to Gabrielle Starr for being an ideal reader and interlocutor since graduate school. Several of the people I’ve mentioned (they know who they are) offered invaluable moral support during a difficult time. I must also thank several early mentors whose genial influence is implicit in these pages: Jim Engell, who introduced me to the field of eighteenth-century studies; Phil Fisher, who taught me how to read novels; and Helen Vendler, who taught me how to read poems. In more recent years, I have been fortunate in my colleagues at the College of Staten Island, including Ashley Dawson, Alyson Bardsley, Cate Marvin, Steve Monte, Maryann Feola, Katie Goodland, and Lee Papa. This book was written during the past eight years without sabbatical or academic fellowship, but I count myself lucky to have enjoyed the good fellowship of

vii

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd vii

1/27/15 7:50 AM

vi i i

AC K NOW LEDG MENTS

friends outside of academia, particularly John Harpole, Ted Loos, David Matias, and Fred Mogul. I would also like to thank the English departments at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Wesleyan for opportunities to present my work and for the stimulating conversation that ensued. This book contains some previously published material, and it appears here with permission: Chapter 6 includes portions of “Jane Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise,” Narrative (October 2005), 239–61; Chapter 7 includes portions of “Wordsworth’s Anatomies of Surprise,” Studies in Romanticism 46 (Winter 2007), 409–31; and Chapter 8 includes portions of “Fine Suddenness: Keats’s Sense of a Beginning,” in Something Understood, ed. Stephen Burt and Nick Halpern (University of Virginia Press, 2009). I am grateful to several editors for the opportunity to publish my earliest work in these venues—Jim Phelan, David Wagenknecht, Steve Burt, and Nick Halpern—and to Peter Potter at Cornell, who has been a patient and dedicated advocate of this project. Finally, this book is immeasurably better for the rigorous but fair-minded criticism it received from an anonymous reader for the press. Narrative surprises are often saved for last, but in the case of an Acknowledgements page, it can come as no surprise that my ultimate thanks are reserved for beloved family members: Bob and Karen Miller, Rob Miller, Sam and Lillian Friedman, and Aimee Friedman. Finally, deepest gratitude to my wife Natalie Friedman and my children Noah and Margot, all of whom have given me “surprize and delight” in the best possible eighteenthcentury sense.

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd viii

1/27/15 7:50 AM

c SURPRISE

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd ix

1/27/15 7:50 AM

552-58732_ch00_3P.indd x

1/27/15 7:50 AM

Introduction

A twenty-first-century reader shopping for a well-known eighteenth-century novel on Amazon.com can dip into randomly selected pages using a search function called “Surprise me!” If this exercise produces any flicker of feeling, it is likely very far from the species of emotion registered by the title of the novel itself: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719).1 Both forms of surprise can be understood as attention-catching techniques of print culture in its different historical manifestations, but in Daniel Defoe’s era, the word had far deeper resonance. Above all, surprise was conceived of as a fully corporeal emotion: a sudden seizure, a violent physical or sexual attack, a temporary condition of muteness, a petrifaction of the body, an intimation of death. As an experience to be recovered from and articulated, it was often presumed to serve edifying purposes—as a token of providential grace, as a fleeting moment of pleasure, as a lever of moral commentary, or as a reflexive pause over the operations of the mind. At the same time, surprise was also perceived as a problem or danger: a chaotic energy, an animal reflex, a paralysis of rationality, a reaction to be stoically guarded against, and a watchword for mere novelty or diversion for its own sake. In modern narrative media, surprise is perhaps most commonly associated with the kind of unexpected event that the “spoiler alert” is meant to preserve. Today, readers of novels and viewers of films and television dramas 1

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 1

1/27/15 8:01 AM

2

INT ROD UCT ION

expect to be warned lest they be told of a plot development before encountering it for themselves, in “real time.” In this cultural framework, surprise is treated as a precious and volatile substance that can indeed be spoiled through exposure; one signally postmodern way of extending its longevity has been to watch videos of other people reacting to shocking and unexpected television scenes. This sense of surprise as plot secret figures in the literary history that I intend to trace, but it was only one in a network of meanings. This book seeks to recover those meanings and their bearing on several domains: the poetics of allegory, the emerging discourse of aesthetics, the formal realism of the novel, and the representation of experience in Romantic lyric poetry.2 It focuses on the dynamic interplay between what might be called “bad” and “good” forms of surprise—between violence and enlightenment, physical attack and aesthetic pleasure. As a literary and intellectual history of an emotion, this book tells the story of how surprise in the eighteenth century became valued as an experience; and because surprise is by definition an ephemeral response that can be dulled by repetition and familiarity, it also shows how authors sought new ways of representing and eliciting that response. In the simplest terms, I want to focus new attention on a quintessentially eighteenth-century word and its inflections across a broad spectrum of writing. “Surprise” overlaps with several penumbral words—“astonish,” “amaze,” “wonder,” “startle”—but none appears in writing of the period with quite the same frequency and lexical versatility. As J. Paul Hunter has noted, the dyad of the “strange and surprising” was “common on the title pages of both fictional and nonfictional narratives,” one that harked back to the seemingly miraculous coincidences and supernatural happenings of romance.3 In Hunter’s observation, the “surprising” denoted a form of pleasure to be found, in concentrated form, in prose fiction: the sense that life is rich with possibility and full of the unexpected. And yet surprise was not always synonymous with pleasure: at issue is the question of how the jarring or violent surprises of characters are convertible to forms of pleasure or instruction on the part of readers. I argue that surprise acquired a complex set of meanings during this time, and that a thoroughgoing attention to those meanings illuminates important concerns about the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of literature, especially the novel. In both eighteenth-century usage and modern psychology, surprise encompasses several distinct but interpenetrating forms: an emotion (an embodied feeling, an orientation), a form of cognition (a reckoning with a subverted expectation or sudden perception), and an event in the world. It is this last sense, in its sheer contingency and physicality, that I want to em-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 2

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

3

phasize. Surprise is not only a feeling but also something that happens to someone. At its most basic physiological level, it is a reflex common to a wide variety of sensate creatures; and in its higher-order human functions, it can be artfully manipulated and socially performed, enthusiastically courted and stoically guarded against—though never entirely prevented. Unlike other emotions such as anger, wonder, or fear, it cannot be self-willed; it is the essence of the involuntary, and it crystallizes what it means to have a vulnerable body and fallible mind in a world of unpredictable and chaotic events. At the outset, I want to define the salient features of surprise and suggest some of their formal implications. Surprise takes both physical and cognitive form. For all of its associations

with the benign or pleasurable, the word contains a history of violence, one whose reverberations persisted well into the eighteenth century. Derived from the Old French surprendre (to attack or, more literally, overtake), the English word “surprise” first denoted military assault, seizure, rape, or disturbance; by the late Middle Ages it began to acquire a cognitive sense. In later modern usage, the etymologically redundant term “surprise attack” registers that shift: the first word denotes the psychic effect of the second. (A military and political term of recent vintage, “shock and awe,” similarly registers those successive phases.) The lexical history of surprise reflects the Lockean and Viconian premise that words often evolve from physical and material registers to the mental and the abstract. The beginnings of that metamorphosis can be seen in Shakespeare’s plays, where the word denotes battle maneuvers, forcible seizure or sexual assault, and figurative attacks on the senses in tropes of faculty psychology. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, to cite just one example, Boyet warns the Princess and her attendants of the suitors’ approach, in a caveat about love’s rhetoric: “Love doth approach disguis’d, / Armed in arguments—you’ll be surpris’d” (5.2.83–84).4 The beguiling paradox is that even after she has been armed with Boyet’s warning, the Princess will still be caught off guard; the statement serves as more of a prediction than a preemption. This is so because surprise is never wholly neutralized by expectation or foreknowledge. The darker side of Shakespeare’s erotic trope can be seen in Titus Andronicus, and it is apt that this most violent of Shakespearean tragedies features the word “surpris’d” more frequently than any other play. Titus’s cry in the first scene, “Lavinia is surpris’d!” (1.1.285)—in response to Bassianus’s sudden announcement of betrothal to her—is poignantly echoed when the father finds that his daughter has been raped and mutilated: “Lavinia, wert thou thus surpris’d, sweet girl?” (4.1.51). Here, the silence conventionally

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 3

1/27/15 8:01 AM

4

INT ROD UCT ION

associated with astonishment reaches an Ovidian extreme, for Lavinia, like Philomel, literally cannot speak her surprise, and the father’s exclamation serves as both expression of distress and tragic ekphrasis. Shakespeare’s participle has the full force of physical attack behind it: the deictic phrase, “thus surpris’d,” does not merely gesture to a facially legible emotion like sadness or fear; it incorporates the signs of irrevocable harm. As I argue, that sense of permanent change is essential to a full appreciation of what it means to be surprised by sin in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, by an uncanny Other in Robinson Crusoe, and by a would-be seducer in Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Samuel Johnson’s definition of the verb “to surprise” in his 1755 Dictionary registers the evolution from the physical to the cognitive: “1. To take unawares; to fall upon unexpectedly. 2. To astonish by something wonderful. 3. To confuse or perplex by something sudden.”5 In the Dictionary’s series of quotations, the first sense is illustrated by Macbeth’s resolve to squelch an enemy (“The castle of Macduff I will surprise”), the second by a natural marvel in Roger L’Estrange’s translation of Aesop (“People were not so much frighted as surprised at the bigness of the camel”), and the third to Milton’s description of Satan caught by the angelic guardians of Eden (“Up he starts, discover’d and surpriz’d”). L’Estrange’s distinction separates fear from startlement, carving out a space for what might be called spectatorial surprise. Milton’s Janus-faced usage, with its etymological blend of Anglo-Saxon (“starts”) and French (“surprised”), plays on both the older military sense and newer cognitive sense of the word: as an erstwhile commander, Satan is literally ambushed by the enemy; as a fallible creature, he is shocked to be caught under angelic surveillance. As I argue in Chapter 2, the allegories of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost turn on this fulcrum between literal violence and cognitive or emotional shock; later chapters pursue the implications of those dualities. Surprise is a brief, situated emotional response, but it can ramify into sustained states, such as wonder, fear, or indignation. In modern psychology,

surprise is commonly identified as a “primary affect,” an emotional diode opening into stronger states of feeling.6 Antonio Damasio identifies it as one of six “primary” or “universal” emotions—as opposed to “secondary” or “social” emotions, such as embarrassment, guilt, and pride.7 Jerome Kagan has remarked that surprise often eludes more serious study because many of life’s surprises are absorbed or neutralized and thus have no behavioral consequences; and yet while the experience of surprise may be less salient than fear, it is “probably one of the most frequent human emotions.”8 In eighteenthcentury terms, surprise is generally not understood as an emotion of the Sub-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 4

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

5

lime; and yet, in a comic mode, a mundane surprise is sometimes described as if it were an extreme state of astonishment or wonder, as in the mockepic hyperbole of Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. In its sheer brevity, ordinariness, and endless iterability, surprise might be called the signature emotion of the novel. Surprise can be understood as both an involuntary response and as a socially constructed and narratively mediated feeling. In modern emotion theory,

surprise takes the form of both the startle reflex and higher-order expressions of cognitive reaction or judgment. Here, Damasio’s distinction between primary and secondary emotions requires some qualification, for verbal expressions and literary representations of surprise can have obvious social constructions. Likewise, in psycholinguistics, expressions of surprise, like the expression of any emotion, can be ranked on a scale ranging from the iconic (spontaneous reactions such as raised eyebrows, or a shout of “Oh!”) to the conventional (syntactic constructions such as “You don’t say!”).9 In verbalized form, surprise is for the most part retroactive or revisionary—a post facto expression of a fleeting response. When we say, “I am surprised,” the moment has already passed, or we are using the expression as a formula of judgment rather than reporting an internal state. In this way, utterances of surprise differ from expressions of sustained passions like sadness or anger: these can be simultaneous with their verbal articulation. In the grammar of emotions, as Meredith Osmond points out, we say that we are surprised by rather than with something, and the distinction is based on the duration of response: one feels angry with someone because the emotion can be sustained, and its embodied cause continues to exist. But one is surprised only by the sudden or unexpected, after which the emotion vanishes or turns into something else.10 As we will see, the social and performative dimensions of surprise—as an emotion that can be exaggerated or counterfeited, as a lever of judgment—has particular relevance to the satirical commentary in the novels of Fielding and Jane Austen, among others. Surprise denotes both an internal feeling and an external event. In the first

sense, surprise exemplifies the passivity encoded within the classical concept of the passions (from Latin deponent verb patior, to suffer): it involves the sense of being acted upon or seized by an external force. In the second sense, surprise stands apart from emotion words such as “anger,” “fear,” or “grief ”: these denote inner states but not their stimuli. All emotions can be seen as orientations toward the world, but surprise is unusual in its intertwinement of feeling and stimulus: emotions such as anger or grief can be free-floating,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 5

1/27/15 8:01 AM

6

INT ROD UCT ION

self-willed, or open-ended; surprise cannot. (In lexical terms, the closest relative to surprise is “wonder,” which denotes both marvels and the awe that they inspire.) This duality of surprise has several literary implications. In narrative terms, the word describes both a character’s or reader’s reaction and a discrete episode or development. (By contrast, we do not speak of “the anger” or “the happiness” as distinct points on a narrative timeline; we refer to them as emotions that readers or characters might feel on a specific occasion.) Surprise, then, can take two different forms: a dynamic, even ephemeral, response; and a static, structural feature of the plot. In the latter case, we can refer to “the surprise” in a novel long after we have lost, through familiarity, the capacity to register genuine shock at that development. To summarize, these are the governing claims of my book with respect to the following literary domains: Narrative poetics. Chapter 1 begins by addressing what could be called the first narratology of surprise, Aristotle’s Poetics. In essence, Aristotle posited a dramatically mediated form of shock that was related to but different from that feeling as it would be experienced outside the space of a theater. I argue that Aristotle’s claims about the intertwinement of cognitive and affective responses had significant bearing on eighteenth-century criticism and aesthetics. Especially relevant is Aristotle’s insistence that the surprises of a plot must be rationally framed, both by the artist’s design and by the characters’ reckoning. In dramatic poetry, in other words, emotion must be suffused with cognition. The surprise of characters and readers both overlaps and diverges. On the most basic level, this is true of any emotion and its narrative mediation: through an act of sympathetic identification, the reader can participate in the represented emotions of fictional people or have strong feelings on their behalf.11 The simulation of surprise is especially salient to the arts of narrative, because this emotion in particular involves the dynamics of expectation: the sudden revelation of a family relationship or a death can come as a surprise to both characters and readers at precisely the same time. And yet we can differentiate between a character’s situated experience of suddenness and a reader’s mediated engagement with that event. This is true of other emotions, but what distinguishes many kinds of surprise in eighteenth-century fiction is their sheer physicality.12 The relationship between a character’s surprise and the reader’s experience of the “surprizing” can therefore pose an ethical problem in the way that a character’s suffering is received as entertainment—particularly in the case of Pamela, in which the heroine’s shocks might prove merely titillating or diverting to the reader.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 6

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

7

Allegory. The violent and unexpected clash with an adversary serves a variety of metaphorical purposes: to represent the internal response of a character, as in forms of psychomachia; to highlight a prior state of ignorance or inattention; to motivate an act of recognition or thematic elucidation; to crystallize an experience of the passions, in the sense of being seized by a feeling as if it were an external force; to trigger an arresting or potentially disabling moment of wonder. Allegory constantly negotiates between the literal and the figurative, the physical and the cognitive, and surprise exemplifies that balance: it signifies both a fleeting emotion or thought and a permanent condition. In other words, surprise is both a passing state and, at its most extreme, a kind of metamorphosis. Aesthetics. In the early eighteenth century, Joseph Addison’s axiom that art should “surprise and delight” designated surprise as an important element of aesthetic pleasure. This dyad revises Horace’s famous prescription that poetry should ideally “delight and instruct.” This is not to say that Addison’s substitution eliminated instruction from the equation; rather, it carried the implication that surprise could serve instructive purposes. As a sudden blow against the routine or familiar, the experience of surprise was presumed to focus the attention and leave a more indelible mnemonic impression. The aestheticization of surprise can be understood as arising within the cultural matrix that Patricia Meyer Spacks has articulated in her study of boredom: the invention and spread of new forms of popular entertainment, the idea of leisure as a “differentiated psychic space,” the decline in the Christian concept of acedia as moral failing, and increasing interest in the kind of private experience represented in novels.13 The opposite of boredom, in Spacks’s definition, is interest, and by the end of the century, the idea of the “interesting” changed from its older sense (that which touches or affects, that which is important) to its current denotation of that which excites curiosity or engages attention.14 In essence, the modulation of material interest into the affective realm of the interesting parallels the shift from older senses of surprise to the aesthetic category of the surprising. Formal realism. The distinctive nature of surprise has particular relevance to the epistemological claims of the novel. Its basis in empirical truth involves the narration of two sets of facts, which might be summarized in these simple statements: this is what happened; this is how it was felt or perceived by a narrator or character. Surprise stands precisely at that intersection. In Crusoe, for instance, the “surprizing” encompasses several things: a concussive event, a sudden feeling or thought, a qualifier of the unexpected or unbidden, a promise of the new and the extraordinary, and a prediction of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 7

1/27/15 8:01 AM

8

INT ROD UCT ION

a reader’s affective response. In effect, the participle in Defoe’s title both registers a series of events in the narrator’s autobiographical account and anticipates the reader’s imaginative engagement in their recapitulation. Eighteenth-century novels are full of descriptions of shocked or astonished people. As mimetic acts, these set pieces represent pauses in the narrative; and as lived experiences, they represent temporarily halted characters—bodies immobilized and rendered mute. I call these “ekphrases of surprise,” for as in the poetic evocation of an object of visual or plastic art, such descriptions speak for silent figures. Several conventional gestures and tropes mark that moment: the rapt gaze, the measured pause of silence (often said to last a minute or more), and the petrifaction of the body into what Fielding called a “Statue of Surprize.” As I show, Fielding and Sterne, in their acute consciousness of textual mediation, invented mimetic techniques to approximate the immediacy of sudden sights and sounds; and in the gothic mode, Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe developed a perceptual syntax of surprise. Lyric poetry. As both emotion and event, surprise pertains to lyric poetry as well as to prose fiction. Recent scholarship has bridged the divide between these genres: studies of literary affect, particularly regarding the literature of sensibility, have treated emotion as a discursive formation to be found in philosophical discourse, prose fiction, and lyric; and, as G. Gabrielle Starr has demonstrated, eighteenth-century novels both absorbed lyric conventions and bestowed their own innovations on later poetry of the Romantic era.15 While surprise is everywhere in eighteenth-century novels, however, it is almost entirely absent from contemporaneous lyric poetry, such as the mid-century sublime odes of William Collins, Thomas Gray, and Thomas Warton (which favor the passion of wonder), and the late-century poetry of sensibility (which favors the mood of melancholy and tranquil reflection). It was in the Romantic era that surprise emerged as a salient lyric emotion, particularly in the poetry of William Wordsworth and John Keats. In contrast, Percy Bysshe Shelley rarely used the word, and Lord Byron professed to be immune to the feeling.16 In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the great poet of boredom and ennui declares, “I’ve taught me other tongues—and in strange eyes / Have made me not a stranger; to the mind / Which is itself, no changes bring surprise” (4.8.1–3).17 Byron bases this claim on both his cosmopolitan immersion in the world and his fundamentally English, impervious mind. Wordsworth, by contrast, desired an inexhaustible accessibility to the most ordinary of surprises; and Keats, though he sometimes struck a pose of Byronic urbanity, was drawn to record the effect of first experiences, or things experienced as if for the first time. These poets, far more than their

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 8

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

9

contemporaries, were signally interested in the sudden, the unexpected, and the new; and both inherited recognizable elements of the poetics of surprise from novels and romance narrative. In focusing on surprise in the novel, I want to advance an affective corollary to prevailing critical accounts that posit the genre as arising from a tension between Romance and Realism (Ian Watt) or through a discursive dialectic between fact and fiction (Lennard Davis and Michael McKeon, inter alia).18 In eighteenth-century scholarship, recent studies of the passions have illuminated the emotional and psychological dimension that is largely missing from these earlier accounts. As Geoffrey Sill has suggested, the passions should be considered alongside McKeon’s categories of epistemology (questions of truth) and social status (questions of virtue).19 Numerous eighteenth-century writers posited emotion as a form of cognition or knowledge rather than as a purely corporeal or irrational impulse. In Adela Pinch’s argument, early modern thought treated the passions as “innate, natural forces,” whereas British empiricist philosophers “shifted feeling from the realm of volition to the realm of understanding.”20 In eighteenth-century fiction, I argue, surprise occupies that crossroads. More specifically, my claims about the “surprising” are meant to complement McKeon’s emphasis on the epistemological category of the strange. The novel’s claims to fact and historicity were generated by a productive tension that McKeon has memorably summarized in the formula, “strange, therefore true.”21 In focusing on the categories of strange/true, McKeon articulates what might be called the spatial taxonomy of the novel: the mechanism by which the uncanny outlier is brought into the realm of the possible. And yet this formula does not fully account for the temporal dimension of the surprising, nor does it encompass the thoroughly ordinary shocks or turns of event that can be deemed surprises, even after repeated exposure. Strictly speaking, the strange is the unknown or unfamiliar; the surprising is the sudden or unexpected. Whereas the strange can be assimilated, the surprising has the potential to retain its disruptive power; and it pertains more closely to the interiority or subjectivity of characters. For example, in Pamela, the decision of an aristocrat to marry a commoner can, within a horizon of classbased expectations, be classified as strange; but Mr. B’s serial sexual advances are more aptly described as surprising, both in the external fact of sexual assault and the internal experience of disturbance. In objective terms, neither the heroine, nor other characters in the novel, nor Richardson’s audience would precisely call these attacks strange; if anything, they seem all too common. One engine driving the narrative is the fact that Pamela continues to

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 9

1/27/15 8:01 AM

10

INT ROD UCT ION

experience these sallies as surprises—as both physically jarring and cognitively unexpected. In effect, Richardson’s novel and others are often predicated on the repeatability of surprise or a character’s susceptibility to shocks both great and small. I also want to suggest that “surprise” is an important adjunct to William Warner’s formulation of eighteenth-century “entertainment.” This is the term that Warner has advanced to encapsulate several distinctive elements of the early novel: the continuum between theatrical and textual forms of narrative, the act of drawing and sustaining the interest of readers in a train of attention, the contractual relationship between author and audience, and the project of harnessing narrative pleasure to a didactic purpose.22 Though “entertainment”—both word and idea—certainly had currency in the eighteenth century, it serves as more of a macro term to describe a larger discourse, an economy of consumption, and a cultural phenomenon that Warner piquantly calls a “media event.” The word itself, however, does not often appear within the pages of novels to denote a particular character’s experience. To explore Warner’s premise further, then, I would propose “surprise” as a more ubiquitous and pertinent key word, one that allows a finer-grained attention to novelistic mimesis. My account of surprise also complements Ross Hamilton’s philosophical and literary history of the accident. As Hamilton notes, the Lockean association of ideas that goes into the formation of a self is predicated on accident, both external and internal: the randomness of experience and the vagaries of neural organization.23 In Hamilton’s argument, this conception had significant implications for the novel, where accident functions as “a site of self-transformation, and the mutable nature of accidental qualities responded to the new sense that aspects of personal identity can shift over time” (134). By their very nature, accidents can be said to come as surprises, but these two terms are not exact synonyms: even if “accident” implies a subjective judgment about the unexpected or unintended, it still denotes an external event; but “surprise,” as I have observed, can denote both an event and an internal feeling.24 In eighteenth-century fiction, that difference matters in a few ways. First, an intentionally caused event would not be called an accident, but it can still come as a surprise; Mr. B’s assaults on Pamela are a case in point. Second, impulses of thought and feeling in eighteenth-century fiction are typically described as surprises, not accidents. In Robinson Crusoe, for instance, frequent iterations of surprise mark the porous boundary between the internal and external. In describing events on the island, Crusoe typically frames his observation of phenomena in terms of his own affective response to them;

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 10

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

11

and he observes the fluctuating inner weather of his thoughts and emotions as if they were external events. If, in Crusoe’s tentatively Calvinist theory of mind, a thought can be providentially impelled, then it can be treated as something that happens to him—like other natural phenomena that require explanation or interpretation. To put this another way, Crusoe is subject to the Cartesian astonishment that Stanley Cavell has identified in the tradition of philosophical skepticism—the sense of a world that seems to elude one’s grasp, a feeling of the “surrealism of the habitual.”25 Before turning to prose fiction, this book begins with a chapter on the intellectual history of surprise as a dramatic, narrative, philosophical, and aesthetic concept. The next chapter examines how the physical and cognitive duality of surprise informs the moral poetics of Paradise Lost. In essence, I investigate what it means to be, in the phrase made famous by Stanley Fish, “surprised by sin,” and thereby arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Miltonic free will, one that limns its cognitive and affective dimensions. In particular, I mean to shift critical emphasis away from Fish’s generalized reader, who is presumed to respond in a scripted way to the poem’s surprises, and focus instead on Milton’s representations of characters’ states of surprise. Second, I identify the intersection between two forms of poetic surprise—the reversal and recognition at the heart of Aristotelian drama and the plot of unknowing and discovery essential to allegory. In subsequent chapters, I trace the Miltonic permutations of surprise in eighteenth-century novels: the intersection of Aristotelian anagnorisis and allegorical interpretation; the association of surprise with the postlapsarian condition; the adjacency of surprise and wonder, along with the overlap between mere shock and divine miracle; the suddenness and seeming involuntariness of thought and feeling; and the cognitive dynamics of inattention and awareness, forgetfulness and repetition. In this way, I mean to elucidate the allegorical structures of realist fiction, and I pay par ticular attention to the uncomfortably close juxtapositions of surprise as access of providential grace or pleasure and surprise as postlapsarian assault—variously manifest in the technology of modern warfare, the threat of rape, the specter of sudden death, the malicious practical joke, and the gothic conspiracy. I also show how various novelists are concerned with theorizing, overtly or implicitly, the poetics of surprise: in Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, this effort appears in the artfully spontaneous musings and accidental philosophies of their titular diarists; in Joseph Andrews, it takes the form of a neo-Aristotelian defense of ridicule, as well as numerous narrative winks and asides; and in Northanger Abbey, it appears in both the obvious satirical allusions to gothic conventions

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 11

1/27/15 8:01 AM

12

INT ROD UCT ION

and in characters’ conversations about the intertwined issues of morality and aesthetics. I argue that novelists including Eliza Haywood, Richardson, and Fielding deliberately mediated between the violent and pleasurable senses of surprise. I wish to articulate the ways that they addressed the Aristotelian question of how a character’s unpleasant or traumatic experiences are converted into a reader’s pleasurable or edifying engagement—how “surprise” (as assault, seizure, or radical jolt) becomes the Addisonian aesthetic value of the “surprizing.” I show how these and other authors, acutely aware of the mediated nature of their relation to an audience,26 both solicited surprise in their readers and represented it as an embodied state in their characters; how they understood it as both a passing emotion and a lasting condition; how they developed mimetic techniques for representing the experience; how they overtly theorized about it and implicitly reflected contemporary critical discussions on the subject; and how they engaged with its sexual politics. Surprise is deeply inflected by gender: with respect to female characters, it is almost always attended by connotations of sexual assault or moral compromise, and with respect to male characters, it is something to be stoically absorbed or defended against. Consider a midcentury poem in Hudibrastics entitled The Surprize: Or,The Gentleman Turn’d Apothecary (1739).27 The “surprize” of the title refers chiefly to a sexual liberty taken by the male protagonist, but it has several related forms. In what amounts to a dirtier version of The Rape of the Lock, the London spark Timante happens upon Araminta while she is waiting for her maid to administer a routine enema; wonderstruck by the unauthorized sight, he seizes the opportunity to perform the ser vice himself. This is the foundational set of surprises in the story: Timante’s sudden sight and Araminta’s unwitting submission to her visitor’s treatment. The rest of the narrative concerns the embarrassing aftermath of the incident as it unfolds in the town’s gossip and in Araminta’s resentment; but the poem ends with a rapprochement between the accidental “apothecary” and his patient. In the prefatory address “To Our Fair Readers,” the narrator offers a telling assurance about that outcome: “A Fair-one, tho’ surpriz’d, you’ll see / Preserve good Sense and Modesty.” The qualification about Araminta’s surprise has two meanings, one chiefly physical, the other mental: 1) Although she was inappropriately touched by Timante, she could not have known that the hands administering the clyster were unlicensed ones. 2) Although she was later startled to discover Timante’s stratagem, she ultimately maintained her composure and rationality—the “good humour” that eluded the principal figures in Pope’s mock epic about furtive liberty taking.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 12

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

13

With respect to Araminta and other female characters of the period, “surprise” denotes both a transitory state of feeling (regulated by “good sense”) and a permanent state of affairs (the physical preservation or loss of “modesty”). From the male admirer’s perspective, however, “surprise” has an entirely different meaning, evident in the poetic encomium that Timante writes about his beloved’s posterior: “So neat, so plump, so gently rising, / Its Symmetry thro’out surprising” (121–22). In effect, the participle “surprising” both recapitulates Timante’s first ephemeral sight of Araminta’s body and suggests a sustained attitude of connoisseurship, implied by the winking references to proportion and symmetry. Here, Timante gets to speak the emerging language of aesthetics; Araminta does not. Araminta’s and Timante’s experiences of surprise thus differ markedly, but the narrative strives to reconcile them: in its revisionary shift from assault to aesthetic appreciation, the poem gives itself moral permission to convert an embarrassing and predatory “surprize” into a “surprizing” tale. This, I argue, exemplifies a crucial eighteenth-century transformation—what I describe in my chapter on Pamela as a purification of surprise. Surprise, then, has different connotations for men and women of the period; and in elaboration of that premise, I begin Chapter 4 by considering the work of Haywood, whose romances include one entitled, simply, The Surprize. My point here is to show how Haywood deliberately managed “surprize” as both an erotic energy and an instrument of moral instruction in ways that point to the troubled poetics of Pamela. Richardson’s heroine is constantly vulnerable to shock, and the sheer frequency and descriptive abundance of these instances opens the author to the charge of mimetic excess. As his correspondence attests, Richardson was mindful of this pitfall, and I show how these repetitive instances of surprise serve a deeper ethical design: as index of naïveté, as lever of moral expectation and judgment, as providential opportunity for sympathy, as reflection of a fundamentally meliorative faith, and as element of spontaneity in allegorical interpretation. In essence, I argue that the moral rehabilitation of Mr. B and his courtship of Pamela in the second half of the novel accomplishes the transformation of physical shocks into cognitive ones. A related set of transformations is at work in Fielding’s fiction, which I take up in Chapter 5. I make several claims about Fielding’s poetics: that surprise is an essential element in the author’s rationale for comic ridicule; that the author’s ethical defense of ridicule is bound up with an aesthetic justification for surprise; that the two basic forms of surprise—the physical and the cognitive—are interrelated and inflected by differences of class and gender; that Fielding is interested not only in the narrative mechanism of surprise

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 13

1/27/15 8:01 AM

14

INT ROD UCT ION

but also its rhetoric, the ways that extreme emotional states are performed; and that in representing moments of astonishment, Fielding nostalgically harks back to the instantaneity of theatrical spectacle, even as he develops techniques that anticipate the narrative innovations of Tristram Shandy and gothic romance. Austen was among these heirs, and after an examination of several key moments and tropes of astonishment in gothic fiction, I explore her complex relation to her predecessors. My purpose here is twofold: first, to argue that while the most proximate target of satire in Northanger Abbey is the vogue for gothic shock, the novel should be more properly situated within the longer eighteenth-century discourse of surprise, manifest in both novels and critical prose; second, to show the subtler ways that Austen synthesizes the techniques and concerns of gothic narrative. The heroine of Northanger Abbey is the most easily astonished character in all of Austen’s fiction; and in reading the novel through this lens, I wish to challenge critical accounts that either dismiss surprise as a symptom of the young heroine’s naïveté or overlook it in favor of its stronger relative, alarm; and thus to identify in the novel a powerful eighteenth-century idea and narrative device. My final two chapters turn from prose fiction to poetry. Wordsworth’s anecdotes of sudden moods, encounters, and realizations have often been called, in the poet’s own phrase, “spots of time” and, in the terms of modernist aesthetics, “epiphanies.” I argue that they should also be understood in the eighteenth-century context of surprise. I seek to shed new light on Wordsworth’s poetry through reference to the affective vocabulary of Paradise Lost, aesthetic and philosophical discourse, the novel, and latter-day emotion theory. I begin Chapter 8 by showing how Keats in his early poems borrows the perceptual pattern that structures so many of Wordsworth’s “Poems of the Imagination”: a state of inattention or dreaminess punctuated by a sudden sound or “gleam.” For Wordsworth, these anecdotes were meant primarily to illustrate universal principles of mental operation; but for Keats, experiences of surprise served more explicitly as allegories for awakened poetic ambition. Typically, the Keatsian surprise involves an unexpected thing that is somehow expected, an accessibility to novelty grounded in repetition and familiarity. I conclude this chapter with readings of the “Ode to Psyche” and the “Ode on Melancholy,” both of which conceive of surprise—and emotion more generally—in mythological terms. These poems originate in an experience of surprise and work to absorb the shock. In turning, finally, to the “Ode on Melancholy,” I investigate a poetic engagement, unusual for Keats, with what he called, in a Wordsworthian phrase, “moods of my own mind.”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 14

1/27/15 8:01 AM

I N T R O D UC T I O N

15

Keats spent much of his poetic career representing surprises as external stimuli, particularly as experiences that come through the eyes; but in this ode he articulates the feeling of being overtaken by an internal state and cognitively reckoning with it. What is Melancholy? Does it have a locatable cause, or is the notion of a beginning or origin merely imaginary? Does it come as a “fit” that suddenly falls upon the poet, or is it a constant condition, an undertone of all experience? Should it be related as an experiential anecdote or mythologized as a state of the soul? By thinking through Keats’s earlier poetics of surprise, I show how these two conceptions are intertwined. This book ends in the Romantic era but, in an epilogue, I offer a few observations about forms of surprise in later fiction. These remarks are necessarily brief, but I want to point to a few ways that we can begin to understand the deep literary history that lies behind the kind of sentence that opens a well-known novel by Edith Wharton, one that begins in a space of constant, random collisions, both literal and figurative: “Selden paused in surprise.”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 15

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 1 From Aristotle to Emotion Theory

This book explores the premise that surprise is both an emotion and an element of poetics—both an object of mimesis (the situated experience of characters) and a feature of narrative (the mediated experience of readers or viewers). The first and most influential theorist of that intersection was Aristotle, and I begin this chapter by outlining the salient claims of his Poetics. I go on to consider a series of developments in the intellectual history of surprise: the early modern rehabilitation of wonder as valuable emotional attitude; the Cartesian identification of surprise as a pivotal movement in the passions; the emergence of surprise as a key term in the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics; the later role of surprise as rubric in twentieth-century literary criticism; and finally its conceptualization in modern emotion theory. Within this genealogy, several recurring ideas and concerns can be identified: the continuity between the brief jolt of surprise and the sustained state of wonder; a persistent strain of skepticism about these emotions as debilitating forces, as well as the opposite sense that they are fragile and transitory; the framing of surprise in ethical as well as aesthetic terms; the conception of surprise as both physical fact and inner state; and questions about the repeatability of the experience of novelty.

16

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 16

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

17

c Aristotelian Ekplêxis and Early Modern Wonder

The eighteenth-century valorization of surprise has its deepest origins in Aristotle’s Poetics, which posited the desirability of the unexpected and formulated an integral role for emotional response in drama. In ancient Greek thought, as David Konstan has shown, emotions were primarily intersubjective and contextual. In the classical city-state, which demanded “a continuous and public negotiation of social roles,” they were seen as arising from particular social situations and external events rather than coming from within.1 In this way, the Greek word for emotion, pathos, denoted not only a feeling but also an event that befalls a person—often, as Konstan notes, “in a negative sense of an accident or misfortune” (4). Aristotle expressed this narrative understanding of emotion in the both the Poetics and the Rhetoric, defining sudden and drastic turns of event as inspiring a feeling of awe. In the latter treatise, he remarks, “Dramatic turns of fortune and hairbreadth escapes from perils are pleasant, because we feel all such things are wonderful.”2 In identifying such moments as occasions for wonder, he expanded upon Plato’s premise in the Thaeatetus that wonder (to thaumaston) is an essential condition of philosophical inquiry.3 In essence, Aristotle asserted a legitimate place for drama in stimulating the emotion narrowly sanctioned by Plato; and as W.W. Fortenbaugh has remarked, this move reflected a larger reappraisal of the emotions as cognitive events rather than as irrational energies.4 Under Aristotle’s rubric in the Poetics, the ideal form of the complex plot involves both a reversal of fortune (peripeteia) and the hero’s recognition of that development (anagnorisis), and both are said to turn upon surprises. Aristotle’s term for such jolts, as Terence Cave has noted in his study of the Poetics, is ekplêxis: often translated into English as “surprise,” it denotes a sudden shock verging on fear or panic.5 Like purely physical forms of surprise, ekplêxis is an experience of being blindsided or jolted out of oneself; but Aristotle posited that this sudden derangement was only temporary and thus ultimately pleasurable, facilitated by a safe passage between the stage and the viewer’s own world. For Aristotle, the element of rational cognition is indispensable in any dramatic architecture of surprise, in both the design of the plot and the character’s (and viewer’s) discovery of its workings. Anagnorisis is, as Cave has observed, “the epistemological counterpart or corollary to peripeteia” (33). In Aristotle’s hierarchy of recognition, the higher forms engage the faculties of memory or deductive reasoning.6 By implication, Aristotle dismisses what might be called mere surprise—a random shock without redeeming value, a

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 17

1/27/15 8:01 AM

18

CHAPT ER 1

physical jolt without affective or mental mediation. This distinction would later be echoed in neo-Aristotelian English literary criticism. John Dryden addresses the point in The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), insisting that the dramatis personae should never be overwhelmed by the sheer force and accumulation of events, for “the manners never can be evident where the surprises of Fortune take up all the business of the stage, and where the Poet is more in pain, to tell you what hapned to such a man, than what he was.”7 The tradition of disparaging mere surprise has a long history, and can be traced in Alfred Hitchcock’s distinction between surprise and suspense. In the director’s example, surprise would be the detonation of a bomb without warning; suspense would involve a scenario in which “the bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it.” Hitchcock’s axiom: “Whenever possible, the public must be informed.”8 Despite Aristotle’s emphasis on recognition and affective response, the Poetics is fundamentally concerned more with the construction of plot than with the internal states of characters or viewers. In Meir Sternberg’s critique, Aristotle “privilege[s] surprise, the first and virtually the only among poetic system builders to do so,” and yet fails to give a broad enough account of the phenomenon.9 Sternberg argues that Aristotle’s focus on the well-made tragedy results in disproportionate attention to the design of the plot rather than to the aesthetic response to it; a narrow form of surprise (tragic reversal and recognition) rather than a broader spectrum of the unexpected.10 Aristotle’s conception of dramatic time is limited to the unity of a beginning, middle, and end; and in Sternberg’s assessment, that account does not register the temporal substance of narrative itself—the dynamic interplay of the three “master functions” of surprise, suspense, and curiosity. The pure shock of an exclamation such as “A fire!” eludes Aristotelian categories but exemplifies the condition of what Sternberg defines as “narrativity” (520), in that it engages all three functions. Though Sternberg rightly notes the limitations of Aristotle’s exclusive focus on tragedy, the larger implications of that focus should not be overlooked: it was Aristotle who laid the groundwork for the eighteenth-century understanding of surprise as pleasurable and edifying rather than painful or merely shocking. Though Plato and Aristotle both insisted on the intellectual merits of surprise and wonder, these intertwined emotional states went through their own reversal of fortune in medieval scholastic commentary, as Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park have shown in their magisterial study of the subject. Known from the twelfth century onward as admiratio, wonder was treated by thirteenth- and fourteenth-century European philosophers mainly as a “taboo passion”; it was associated with the ignorant or unformed mind (Roger

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 18

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

19

Bacon), likened to the stupefaction and cardiac systole of fear (Albertus Magnus), and described as a disabling of intellect and a kind of mental sloth (Aquinas).11 The subsequent early modern rehabilitation of wonder as a more salutary force can be attributed to two cultural developments: the Renaissance literature of New World exploration and the seventeenth-century rise of natural philosophy. Stephen Greenblatt has traced the trope of wonder that runs through the European literature of exploration and conquest, while Daston and Park emphasize the seventeenth-century scientific context.12 In the first case, the encounter between colonial explorer and native inhabitant was a mutual surprise, but the wonder it inspired was represented in two ways: as the vehicle of investigation into the new and exotic; and as heathen fear of godlike visitors. In later Enlightenment discourse, wonder became valued as a goad to intellectual inquiry rather than anathematized as a disabling arrest. By the mid-eighteenth century, Daston and Park note, the valence of wonder went through another cultural change. In scientific discourse, the disinterested attitude of curiosity supplanted the slack-jawed stance of amazement, which came to be seen as “the hallmark of the ignorant and barbarous” (304), banished from the realm of natural philosophy to take up residence in natural theology (as in the Deistic praise of divine order in all things) and its secular counterpart, the aesthetics of the Sublime (323–24).13

c René Descartes and the Surprise de l’âme It was Descartes who set a precedent in the seventeenth century for treating wonder with philosophical respect, and for scrupulously distinguishing between good and bad forms of it. It has become a critical commonplace that the Cartesian focus on individual experience in the Discourse on Method (1637) and the Meditations (1641) paved the way for both British empiricism and the rise of the novel; after Descartes, as Ian Watt notes, “both philosophers and novelists paid greater attention to the particular individual than had been common before.”14 Descartes’s later work, The Passions of the Soul (Les passions de l’âme), published posthumously in Paris in 1649 and issued in an English translation a year later, should be included in that account, particularly with respect to British aesthetics. Descartes posits wonder as the primary human emotion and the template for the passions in general, defining it as “a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary.”15 It is worth lingering over that phrase, “surprise of the soul”: in Descartes’s seventeenth-century

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 19

1/27/15 8:01 AM

20

CHAPT ER 1

French, surprise is not a term for an emotion in its own right, as it would become in later French and English usage; rather, it denotes a kind of seizure, as in its earliest sense. It is characteristic of Cartesian metaphysics that the notion of a surprise de l’âme is a hybrid one. In Descartes’s French, surprise would be chiefly a physical phenomenon, but it is not clear what part of the immaterial soul could be seized or attacked. Wonder, then, must arise in corporeal experience and somehow ramify into a psychic state: perhaps the point of origin lies in the pineal gland, which Descartes speculatively identified as the nexus between body and soul. In modern terms, it might be analogous to the hypothalamus, where present-day neuroscience locates the startle reflex, or the excitable region of the amygdala, a site of fear conditioning and memory formation. For Descartes, as Susan James has pointed out, the passions are unique to human beings, and all states of the Cartesian soul (as opposed to the Aristotelian) are forms of thinking. In an animal, surprise is purely a startle reflex of the body, an autonomic ner vous response; but in a human being, it takes on cognitive meaning as a passion of the soul.16 The Cartesian complexity of any human emotion thus anticipates the modern neurological and psychological conception of emotion, which describes it as a brain function, a physical response with multiple corporeal sites, an array of facial expressions, and a set of rational appraisals. The primacy of wonder in Descartes’s taxonomy is based partly on the premise that it is an experience of the new, and that unlike other passions, it has no true opposite. Its inverse might be a state of unarticulated indifference and inattention, the absolute absence of passion (but not the later construction of boredom, which involves an attitude toward the world, not a state of neutrality). In the Cartesian scale of feeling, the soul dwells in a default state of dullness until awakened by the new, the sudden, or the unexpected; and that fleeting surprise can lead into one of two sustained emotions: either the moderate state of wonder (l’admiration) or the extreme state of astonishment (l’éstonnement). In French, to be astonished is to be thunderstruck (étonné ), disabled by fear or awe into a state of paralytic muteness; but to be in a state of wonder is to be in a mode of articulate receptivity. Among the emotions, wonder as defined by Descartes in The Passions is only one of the six primary passions (the others being love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness) to be caused and sustained solely by the soul, not the body or animal spirits (61, Art. 76).17 The precipitating “surprise of the soul” might have a physical and corporeal basis, although Descartes does not explicitly say so; indeed, he offers the example of tickling to illustrate degrees of intensity in the surprise of any novelty. Since the soles of the feet are accus-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 20

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

21

tomed to the full weight of the body, he reasons, the relatively light touch of a feather or fingers imparts an utterly new movement to the soul. This example of differential sensation, however, does not account for the fact that we cannot tickle ourselves; the elements of externality and the unexpected surely play another part in this instance of proprioceptive surprise. In any case, Descartes is less interested in ephemeral stimuli per se than in the soul’s capacity to hold them in memory; his main point is that while wonder has a physical dimension, it is a usefully cerebral passion, instrumental in retaining impressions and acquiring knowledge (59, Art. 75). By contrast, astonishment is an extreme state of arrest: in a trope that would be frequently echoed in eighteenth-century writing, Descartes says that this emotion “makes the entire body remain immobile like a statue” (58, Art. 73); and the mind, likewise, is reduced to a dangerous quiescence. In Descartes’s opinion, there is a fine line between the petrifaction of astonishment and the calm repose of wonder; as much as the latter “disposes us to the acquisition of the sciences . . . we should still try afterwards to emancipate ourselves from it as much as possible” (60, Art. 76). If surprise is a gateway to wonder, wonder should be a conduit to knowledge, an experience to be surpassed. In one of the earliest aesthetic interpretations of Descartes’s system, Charles Le Brun, founder of the Académie Royale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture, lectured on the artistic representation of emotion at the Académie in Paris in 1668.18 Posthumously published in 1698, the lecture was translated and published as A Method to Learn to Design the Passions in 1734; and it exerted an influence on English writers and artists including Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, Aaron Hill, and Joshua Reynolds.19 Building on Descartes’s observations on the causes of the passions, Le Brun focuses on their visible effects, or “expressions”; these he illustrates with an extensive gallery of iconic faces. In his terminology, expression is an activity of both faces and the artists who represent them: as an attribute of physiognomy, it is “what stamps the true characters of everything” and “intimates the emotions of the soul”; and as a product of art, it is “a lively and natural resemblance of the things we are to represent” (12). Following Descartes, Le Brun posits admiration at the head of what he calls the “simple passions”; it is “the chief and most temperate of all the Passions,” whose main facial sign is a simple elevation of the eyebrows. Le Brun goes on to offer a more elaborate physical account of the paralysis suggested by his predecessor’s trope of the statue. It is a surprize, which enclines the Soul attentively to consider the objects that seem rare and extraordinary to her; and this surprize has such a power as sometimes to force the spirits towards the Part which receives

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 21

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 1

22

an impression from the Object, and she is so taken up with considering such an impression, that few spirits are left to supply the Muscles: hence the body becomes as a statue, without motion; and the excess of Admiration causes Astonishment; and Astonishment may happen before we know whether such an object be agreeable to us or not. (16) It is understandable that Le Brun, court painter to Louis XIV, would trace a different path of admiration from the one laid out by Descartes: not toward the acquisition of knowledge but toward the aesthetic realm of pleasure and appreciation. In its suspension of motion, the soul is given “Time to deliberate upon what she has to do, and attentively consider the object that presents itself to her; which if uncommon and extraordinary, what was but, at first, a simple emotion of Admiration, then becomes Esteem” (24). Though the body becomes like a statue in this process, it is frozen in an attitude of attention rather than Ovidian petrifaction; the soul is inclined toward the object, like a connoisseur leaning in to inspect a painting or medallion. Surprise and wonder might be called preverbal and precritical, but in the aftermath of the initial arrest, the mind comes to a rational judgment about what it has beheld.

c Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics: The Rise of the “Surprizing”

At the dawn of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse, Joseph Addison locates some form of surprise or astonishment at the heart of three categories of imaginative experience: Greatness, Novelty, and Beauty. (It is thus apt that Samuel Johnson would later use a quotation from Addison in his Dictionary to illustrate the meaning of the adjective “surprising.”) With respect to the earlier Cartesian account of the passions, Addison’s essays on “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (1712) are conspicuously devoid of any denigration of astonishment. In narrow terms, Aristotelian poetics paved the way for Addison’s intellectual move, but it was John Dennis’s commentary on the Longinian sublime in the Grounds of Criticism (1704) that opened up the premise of surprise as an affective component of literary engagement. Dennis here exalts ideas that “Ravish and Transport the Reader, and produce a certain Admiration mingled with Astonishment and with Surprize.”20 In his argument, terror originates in surprise, an agitation of the soul in which the imagination becomes especially receptive to deep impressions; and a poetic image can induce such a feeling as well as an immediate experience.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 22

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

23

With respect to Dennis’s paradigm, Addison expands both the range of surprise (beyond the emotional realm of terror) and its domains of experience (beyond poetry or rhetoric). In essence, he retains some of the language of what Dennis called the “Enthusiastic Passions” but softens the emphasis on terror or trauma. In Addison’s account, which focuses primarily on the visual, the experience of greatness means being “flung into a pleasing Astonishment,” as when we behold “unbounded Views”; and the experience of Beauty is an entirely pleasurable version of Cartesian wonder, in that “the very first Discovery of it strikes the Mind with an inward Joy, and spreads a Chearfulness and Delight through all its Faculties.”21 In effect, novelty is the aesthetic distillation of surprise: “Every thing that is new or uncommon raises a Pleasure in the Imagination, because it fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which is was not before possesst.” Ronald Paulson has speculated that this category might have inspired Addison’s interest in aesthetic matters in the first place; less an object or grouping of objects than a “discursive mode,” it offers an important adjunct to Shaftesbury’s dichotomy of the beautiful and the ugly.22 By insisting on the role of surprise in aesthetic experience, Addison makes a significant revision to Horace’s dictum that poetry should either delight (delectare) or instruct ( prodesse), but preferably do both.23 Addison’s substitution has several implications. First, it marks an important distinction between surprise and delight: though the two terms grew more closely intertwined in the eighteenth century, they were far from interchangeable in 1712; indeed, Addison seeks to explain how surprise can produce delight. Second, Addison’s axiom represents an expanded field of inquiry: his aesthetic principles apply to a range of experience that encompasses both the poetic and visual arts, and both artifacts and natural phenomena. Third, it reflects a turn away from the overt claims of didacticism: it is not that Addison excluded the potential of art to instruct; rather, he shifts his emphasis away from the content of instruction toward the cognitive and emotional experience of viewing or reading. Rather than insisting primarily on moral edification, then, Addison focuses on the process of reception: an agreeable (rather than jarring or frightening) surprise, followed by a spreading sense of pleasure or joy.24 All three categories of experience involve spatial tropes of amplitude: with Greatness, we are “flung into a pleasing Astonishment” and given “an Image of Liberty”; with Novelty, the soul is “filled” with an agreeable surprise; and with Beauty, the object “spreads” delight through the mind’s faculties. Addison’s notions of expanding or filling imply the acquisition of knowledge, but they

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 23

1/27/15 8:01 AM

24

CHAPT ER 1

mainly denote sensory pleasure or intellectual delight. Surprise might be an ephemeral stimulus, but Addison’s metaphors extend its effect along spatial and temporal axes. Finally, instead of banishing the Horatian value of instruction, Addisonian surprise registers a new assumption about it. Under Addison’s empiricist premise, anything surprising is necessarily more memorable (because more strongly imprinted on the sensorium), and therefore instrumental to didactic purposes. In the decade after publication of “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Jonathan Richardson elaborated on Addison’s principles in his Essay on the Theory of Painting (1725)—notably advancing his predecessor’s formula of “surprise and delight.” Like Addison, Richardson asserts the visual faculty as superior to all other senses, for “the pleasures of the Eye are like those of Heaven, Perpetual, and without Satiety”; and he offers instruction on the components of painting by which the artist can best provide those pleasures.25 But his parting advice to the painter goes beyond the formulation of rules to posit an element that eludes codification—indeed, it represents the very antithesis of aesthetic rule-following: “In the foregoing Treatise I have been shewing what I take to be the Rules of Painting, and tho’ Anyone had understood, and practis’d them all, I must yet say One thing is wanting, Go, and Endeavor to attain the Sublime. For a Painter should not Please only, but Surprize” (256). In eighteenth-century aesthetics, as David Marshall has observed, the a priori standards of neoclassical poetics gave way to a new focus on the subjective effects of a work of art on readers or beholders.26 The problem of this turn lay in the potential chaos of individual response, as Marshall notes in alluding to Shaftesbury’s famous caveat that without standards of taste, aesthetic response might be mystified into the “je ne sais quoi to which idiots and the ignorant would reduce everything.”27 Though Richardson’s prescription of surprise risks that gnomic reduction, it also reflects the challenges of any aesthetic theory. Inevitably, it confronts its own explanatory limits—that its formulations are generalized from alreadyaccomplished works of art. To escape from that bind, Richardson gestures to a necessarily unnameable element of the unexpected in any successful painting, as well as to some work of art or artist yet to come. “Who knows what is hid in the Womb of Time!” Richardson exclaims, in hopes of the messianic emergence of a great English painter. In effect, he apostrophizes unknown artists of the future and says, “Surprise us.” Despite the new embrace of surprise in aesthetic discourse, vestiges of the old skepticism about its disabling effects persisted. This strain of thought is discernible in David Hume’s philosophy and in Johnson’s literary criticism: both offered caveats about the flaring emotions excited by the new or strange.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 24

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

25

In Hume’s account, “admiration and surprize” are passions that incline one toward particular beliefs, especially a susceptibility to the marvelous claims of “quacks and projectors”: “The first astonishment, which naturally attends their miraculous relations, spreads itself over the whole soul, and so vivifies and enlivens the idea, that it resembles the inferences we draw from experiences.”28 This analysis of emotion echoes both Addison’s spiritualization of Novelty (the expansion of the soul) and the Aristotelian notion of enargeia (the vividness of an idea); what distinguishes this account is its wariness about the human disposition toward awe and credulity, which Hume deems a “mystery” that would require study beyond the scope of his treatise. Hume, however, is enough of a skeptic and materialist to see this response as an inevitable function of the body in a wholly physical world—surprise as a kinesthetic phenomenon, emotion as literal motion. In its default state, the mind or soul (Hume uses both terms) dwells in an inertial “unpliableness” until something “excites the spirits” and stimulates “surprize,” along with “all the emotions, which arise from novelty” (II.iii.5, 470). There is a coda to this moment, however: in Hume’s longer timeline, any such emotional experience has a cognitive aftermath, the familiarizing effect of custom and repetition: “the novelty wears off,” “The hurry of the spirits is over,” the initial agitation subsides into an “orderly motion” of the mind, and “we survey the objects with greater tranquility” (470). In effect, Hume’s model of cognition—grounded in the accumulation of experience and the generalizing effect of repetition, habit, and association—suggests a gradual waning of the human capacity for surprise and wonder. And yet by the same empiricist premise, nothing is absolutely certain, and the most ordinary expectations of the world are only provisional. “Every past experiment,” Hume remarks, “may be consider’d as a kind of chance,” since the idea of cause and effect is derived from experience rather than a transcendental law; and “there is no probability so great as not to allow of a contrary possibility; because otherwise ’twould cease to be a probability, and ’twould become a certainty” (I.iii.12, 185–86). Hume’s picture of consciousness is a mental landscape of quiescence and inertia occasionally punctuated by surprise, a life of certainty and predictability shadowed at the edges by a void. In a more strongly ethical framing of Hume’s model of consciousness, Johnson in his Rambler essays repeatedly cautions against the disabling effects of surprise and wonder and advises a middle way between quiescence and excitability. On the one hand, he asserts, in a Lockean vein, that “nothing can strongly strike or affect us, but what is rare or sudden,”29 and he laments the deadening effect of custom; on the other hand, he recommends the stoic wisdom of insulating oneself against life’s shocks and disappointments. That

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 25

1/27/15 8:01 AM

26

CHAPT ER 1

desideratum, however, is overshadowed by Johnson’s typically dark view of mortality and the sense that all calculations of probability are tragically flawed when it comes to the survival of the self. On the premise that “No man believes that his own life will be short,” he acknowledges in Rambler 71 that “it often happens, that sluggishness and activity are equally surprised by the last summons, and perish not more differently from each other, than the fowl that received the shot from her flight, from her that is killed upon the bush.”30 In a meditation on the subject of expectation, Johnson’s word “surprised” is inflected by the classic double meaning, denoting both the cognitive frustration of an expectation (I expected to live longer) and the physical ambush of death itself, which Johnson makes ominously visible in his hunting metaphor. In effect, Johnson dissents from Addisonian criticism in his refusal to valorize wonder; and he is perennially suspicious of novelty without edification. In Rambler 4, the famous essay on realist fiction, he argues that the contemporary novelist, in a departure from romance narrative, is obligated “to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder” (19); and in another essay, he suggests that wonder is “a sudden cessation of the mental progress,” ending “when it recovers force enough to divide the object into its parts, or mark the intermediate gradations from the first agent to the last consequence.”31 Johnson was always doubtful that wonder would reliably take this path. In one caveat, he faulted the metaphysical poets for being “wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising” and, in what seems to be a deliberate echo of Addison’s definition of novelty, he adds that “they never attempted that comprehension and expanse of thought which at once fills the whole mind, and of which the first effect is sudden astonishment, and the second rational admiration.”32 Johnson’s criticism, here and elsewhere, harks back to the old suspicion of surprise as a mere physical reflex rather than an edifying mental process, an ephemeral moment rather than a lasting effect. For Edmund Burke, by contrast, surprise is simply not strong enough; it is a few steps short of the Sublime. Echoing Hume’s model of cognitive development, Burke effectively dismisses the experience of novelty as a state associated with childhood.33 From the opening page of his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), surprise is tacitly displaced by the more potent forms of wonder; indeed, the word “surprise” is conspicuously absent from the treatise. Summarily ignoring the category of the Novel, Burke collapses Addison’s triad into the dyad of the Sublime and the Beautiful, completing his predecessor’s transformation of astonishment into an aesthetic desideratum, a constituent of all sublime ex-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 26

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

27

periences. Following Descartes and Hume, Burke proposes that the default attitude of the mind is “indifference,” focusing on the salient categories of experience that transport us out of that state.34 In Burke’s aesthetic vocabulary, surprise is replaced by its stronger cousin, astonishment. Noting the latter word’s French etymology, Burke defines it as “that state of the soul, in which all motions are suspended, with some degree of horror,” and places it above the “inferior effects” of admiration, reverence, and respect. This is a significant reversal of Descartes. Burke does not dispute the Cartesian definition of astonishment as physically and mentally disabling, but he revalues it as a divinely ordered feature of consciousness: the Creator decided that our experiences should not merely be governed by reason but rather by “powers and properties that prevent the understanding” (97). At the same time, he acknowledges that with repeated exposure, even the most extreme experiences might subside into indifference: “the effect of constant use is to make all things of whatever kind entirely unaffecting” (94). In other words, the essential elements in Burke’s political vision of a stable society—custom and habit—are ultimately hostile to the aesthetic experience of the Sublime. The well-ordered state ensures against unpleasant alarms, but in the private experience of the individual, shocks of various kinds are still to be courted and valued. Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) helps us to see what Burke excludes from his account. The astonishment of the Sublime, as Frances Ferguson has observed, is essentially solitary and asocial, an individual confrontation with immensities—alpine mountains, oceanic vistas, celestial panoramas.35 Surprise, by contrast, is a typically social emotion, especially as Smith posits it: a function of our interpersonal relationships and expectations of others’ behavior—the realm, in short, of realist fiction. Smith’s distinction between surprise and astonishment mirrors Burke’s binary of the Beautiful and the Sublime: “The amiable virtues consist in that degree of sensibility which surprises by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and tenderness. The awful and respectable, in that degree of selfcommand which astonishes by its amazing superiority.”36 Such lexical discrimination is typical of eighteenth-century theories of the passions. Smith begins his treatise on “The History of Astronomy” with precise definitions of three affective terms: wonder is the response to “what is new and singular; surprise is a reaction to “what is unexpected,” and admiration arises in the presence of “what is great or beautiful.”37 Hugh Blair would later echo Smith’s distinctions in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), proposing an emotional taxonomy based on categories of stimulus: “I am surprised with what is new and unexpected; I am

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 27

1/27/15 8:01 AM

28

CHAPT ER 1

astonished, at what is vast or great; I am amazed with what is incomprehensible; I am confounded, by what is shocking or terrible.”38 Blair’s main purpose here is to attack vagueness in English usage, but the remark has a political valence: it is grounded in the claim that exaggeration about emotional states should have no place in a stable, civilized society in which there is very little to induce genuine shock. By contrast, “the savage tribes of men are always much given to wonder and astonishment. Every new object surprises, terrifies, and makes a strong impression on their mind; they are governed by imagination and passion, more than by reason.”39 In Blair’s terminology, “surprise” would be the most commonly used word in polite society, and then only sparingly. Blair and Smith agree in emphasizing the unexpected in their definitions of surprise, but in his treatise on astronomy, Smith is more explicit about formulating a surprise of the ordinary: “We are surprised at those things which we have seen often, but which we least of all expected to meet with in the place where we find them; we are surprised at the sudden appearance of a friend, whom we have seen a thousand times, but whom we did not imagine we were to see then” (3). Smith’s mundane illustration of suddenly running into a friend has great relevance to experience in eighteenth-century prose fiction, but it has no place in the paradigm of the Sublime and the Beautiful. That absence highlights what is largely missing from Burke’s account: the intersection of time and place, and the temporality of consciousness. To be sure, Burke factors in temporality when he distinguishes between immediately painful sensations and the diminished or moderated pain that can amount to sublimity. But he tends to abstract the essential features of sublime and beautiful objects or experiences. These features are independent of what animates the experience of surprise—what might be called narrative context. (A person might be considered innately beautiful, but not always surprising.) A notable exception lies in Burke’s famous illustration of the pleasure that people take in certain visceral yet distanced spectacles of horror: a theater would be immediately emptied of spectators, he says, if they suddenly heard of a public execution about to take place in an adjoining square. It is telling that Burke here uses an anecdotal narrative to demonstrate the comparative inferiority of a narrative form: the two spectacles are not merely presented as a set of choices but as one event impinging upon another—the shock of a happening with real consequences breaking in on an artistically designed and mediated one. On the side of benevolence rather than darker human inclinations, Smith also conceived of behavior in terms of reflexes; and like Burke, he stages a kind of surprise to prove a point. This one, however, is entirely internal, a

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 28

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

29

matter of faculty psychology rather than spatially contiguous choices. The inner faculty that Smith personifies in The Theory of Moral Sentiments as a “man within” is not only a judge and spectator but also an agent of morally salubrious shock—one who “calls to us, a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better or other than it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration” (194). In this attack of conscience, the higher moral voice both calls to the self and shamingly calls it out—the better to assert its interchangeability with other selves. Rather than describing this moral pang as a species of passion in its own right, Smith suggests that it is a kind of Archimedean lever against all passions of self-interest, capable of “astonishing” them into paralysis and proneness to scrutiny. Smith’s interior scene could well serve as ethical sequel to Burke’s drama of spectacular choices: after rushing to the public execution, the subject, suddenly removed from the crowd, is surprised by a pang of guilt over his own schadenfreude. As a dramatic psychomachia, Smith’s illustration reflects what Marshall has identified as the deep nexus between sympathy and theater in eighteenthcentury discourse: while the experience of watching a play enlists the spectator’s sympathetic identification, the act of sympathy involves a complex act of theatrical spectatorship—watching oneself, imagining the perception of others.40 More than theater, however, the passage above evokes the genre of the novel: the trope of sudden shock and subsequent introspection that frequently appeared in prose fiction before and after Smith’s treatise, from the diaristic introspection of Robinson Crusoe to the free indirect discourse of Sense and Sensibility. In the literary vein of Daniel Defoe or Jane Austen, Smith here illustrates what an attack of conscience is supposed to feel like, but in his normative model of education, he seems to imply that such moments should eventually wane, if not entirely disappear. Elsewhere, in a discussion of pain, Smith suggests that “the view of the impartial spectator” would over time become “perfectly habitual” (208–9). Ideally, the editorial voice of conscience should merge with the social voice of the self. It is striking, then, that Smith does not go so far as to claim that the scene of moral astonishment represents only a phase of youth or immaturity. In narratological terms, the anecdote has both diachronic and synchronic aspects: it is a phase in a longer story of moral education, but it is also a moment that can be repeated across a lifetime. With habituation, one perhaps becomes less susceptible to the kind of shock that Smith describes, and yet morally instructive surprise is never truly at an end—especially not in the novel. The judgments and responses that become automatic and subconscious

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 29

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 1

30

in Smith’s philosophical account cannot be taken for granted in narrative representation of internal states.

c Repetition and Surprise Much of the writing on surprise that I have thus far considered addresses the experience of first exposure; but as Smith’s model of the moral conscience reminds us, repetition is an important corollary issue. Do Crusoe’s “surprizing adventures” continue to live up to their titular promise on a second reading? Can the reader step into the same narratological footprint in the same way twice? Not if surprise is strictly determined by prior knowledge and expectation; but in a more robust, eighteenth-century understanding of the term, surprise could have greater longevity. In mimetic terms, the experiences described in the novel are always surprising to Crusoe; and in Smith’s conception of affective poetics, they have the potential to exert the same effect on the reader, over and over. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith argues that even with repeated exposure to a novel or poem, the reader can “enter into the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him” (2). The startling implication is that feelings of surprise and admiration are renewable resources—funds of emotional energy always available to the reader. More profoundly, the phrase “enter into” suggests how that energy is to be used: through an imaginative act of sympathy. Throughout his treatise, Smith returns to this spatial metaphor of intimacy to define sympathy: it means not only creating a mental representation of another person’s feeling but inhabiting it. In Smith’s account, when we reread a novel or a poem, we reenter our earlier experience of the work in the same way that we sympathetically participate in the feelings of another. By implication, in our earlier reading, we were a different person, but by an act of imagination, we can recapture the feelings of that earlier self, just as we can enter into the affective world of someone else.41 What is at stake in Smith’s formulation of aesthetic reexperience and sympathetic imagination comes into even clearer focus when we consider Burke’s contrasting account of novelty in his “Introduction on Taste” (1759) appended to the Philosophical Enquiry: In the morning of our days, when the senses are unworn and tender, when the whole man is awake in every part, and the gloss of novelty fresh upon all objects that surround us, how lively at that time are our sensations, but how false and inaccurate the judgments we form of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 30

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

31

things? I despair of ever receiving the same degree of pleasure from the most excellent perfor mances of genius, which I felt at that age from pieces which my present judgment regards as trifling and contemptible.42 Burke here mourns the loss of original perceptions: the sharpened faculty of judgment has banished—but not entirely compensated for—those first pleasures. His language registers the loss with a Hamlet-like melancholy: though the adult judgment condemns the work, the memory preserves it as an excellent perfor mance of genius. In moral terms, Burke and Smith agree that the faculty of judgment improves with age and experience, but on an aesthetic level they part ways: for Burke, judgment supervenes upon the earlier exposure to “genius,” but for Smith it cannot interfere with the original capacity for enjoyment. In asserting the repeatability of literary surprise, Smith in effect resists the privileging of the first exposure to a work, which has run from the eighteenth century to the present day—with the contemporary “spoiler alert” routinely invoked in reviews of films, television shows, and novels. If you do not wish to ruin the surprise, the reader is advised, avert your eyes from the following paragraph. Notably, Smith confronts questions of rereading more directly than novelists of the period. In general, authors such as Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne were more concerned with the reader’s first engagement with the narrative than with voluntary revisitations, and when they addressed the temporality of reading, they more typically imagined variations on the theme of an endless story. At the beginning of Tom Jones (1749), for instance, Fielding proposes that if he could “hash and ragoo” his narrative fare with enough seasoning, his reader “might be rendered desirous to read on forever,” as a gourmand might desire to eat without cessation.43 In a letter to Aaron Hill, Samuel Richardson grudgingly allowed that his rival had achieved some measure of that culinary mission, mainly by way of acknowledging the rigors of his own recent novel: “While the Taste of the Age can be gratified by a Tom Jones (Dear Sir, have you read Tom Jones?) I can not expect that the World will, bestow Two Readings, or One indeed, attentive one, on such a grave story as Clarissa, which is designed to make those think of Death, who endeavour all they can to banish it from their Thoughts.”44 Banishing or forestalling death was precisely Sterne’s point in having Tristram Shandy propose an ever-expanding novel that would devote two volumes to every year of his life. A few decades later, it is the possibility of an endless story that Austen’s character Catherine Morland fantasizes about in Northanger Abbey. Absorbed

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 31

1/27/15 8:01 AM

32

CHAPT ER 1

in The Mysteries of Udolpho, Catherine exclaims to her new friend Isabella Thorpe, “I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.” Reading, not rereading: Catherine suspects that the novel’s surprises can be experienced only once. Although she admits that she is “wild to know” what is hidden behind a black veil in a key scene, she exercises forbearance: “But do not tell me—I would not be told on any account.”45 The young heroine is wild to know a great many things, both in fiction and in lived experience; but, as she discovers, the novel is no pastoral refuge or inexhaustible delicacy, and the freshness of its surprises will not last. The deeper implication of the novel is that Catherine might eventually grow from an enthusiastic consumer of gothic romance into a discerning reader of Austen’s own novels. Might she also become a rereader of such works, just as all of Austen’s heroines learn the importance of rereading and revising their first impressions of people? Perhaps. And yet in Northanger Abbey, the experience of reading a novel is still presumed to be subordinate to the lifelong activity of reading character; it is a useful medium for learning about the world, but it is not an experience that necessarily demands to be repeated. The practice of rereading becomes indispensable when literary criticism becomes a professional discipline—when a Henry Tilney turns his bellettristic opinions into monographs. And yet, as J. Hillis Miller has observed in Fiction and Repetition (1982), that practice works against the possibility of surprise: the critical interpretation of any work of literature exerts a normalizing effect, in that it identifies repetitions—of motifs, events, words, images, character types—and assimilates them into a structure or pattern. That process of familiarization, Miller suggests, threatens the aesthetic freshness of the work: the language of academic mastery pushes aside the language of novelty, the results of the fifteenth reading supersede the impressions of the first. Nevertheless, each individual work of literary scholarship makes its own claim to novelty; it promises to surprise the reader, in large and small ways, with new interpretations, overlooked contexts, and buried textual connections. In essence, Miller revisits the problem that New Criticism had earlier articulated: the reduction of a literary text (particularly a lyric poem) to a set of ideas or propositions—or what Cleanth Brooks called “the heresy of paraphrase.”46 Like Brooks, Miller argues that what must be preserved is a flexible sense of discovery: “The specificity and strangeness of literature, the capacity of each work to surprise the reader, if he can remain prepared to be surprised, means that literature continually exceeds any formulas or any theory which the critic is prepared to encompass it.”47 Miller’s key words—the related terms of strangeness and surprise—hark back to earlier veins of twentieth-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 32

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

33

century literary criticism: the “defamiliarization” of the ordinary formulated by Viktor Shklovsky and the surprise celebrated by Brooks and other New Critics. And his prescription for the reader’s willed accessibility to surprise recalls Smith’s notion of the reader’s imaginative recovery of a prior experience. The critical difference lies in Miller’s deconstructive conception of textual indeterminacy. For Smith, it is assumed that the self changes through time, so that the act of rereading a text is an act of sympathetic and even nostalgic recovery of a former response; but in Miller’s account, both the self and the text are in constant flux, since the latter is not a stable entity but rather a palimpsest of readings. The Heraclitean premise that one can never traverse the same text twice turns out to be the best defense against overfamiliarity, a preservative of surprise.48 In a related academic context, the art historian Bertrand Rougé has argued that in any engagement with art there is an inattendu attendu: the thing that is at once anticipated and utterly unexpected. This paradoxical phenomenon resides in the viewer rather than in any inherent quality of the object; it depends on a predisposition or openness to surprise.49 The éclat is not necessarily mitigated by repeated viewings or readings. Rougé draws an analogy to a child’s wished-for gift from Santa Claus: the gift itself does not really surprise, nor does the ritual of unwrapping the paper (“on pourrait dire que l’object de la surprise est sans surprise”); and yet there is an “atmosphere” of surprise nonetheless, a pleasurable simulacrum of the utterly unexpected and unbidden (9). Though I devote the majority of this study to prose fiction, an eighteenthcentury musical example can help illuminate the formal issue of repeatable surprise. Joseph Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony (No. 94) offers a useful anecdote about English tastes in the late eighteenth century and an illustration of the claims I wish to make about surprise as a structure of feeling. The first people who heard the piece—composed in 1791 and performed in London the following year—were undoubtedly startled by the loud tutti chord that the composer inserted into a deliberately soporific passage; and it has become part of the symphony’s legend that this was meant as a critique of a complacently dozing English audience—a trick designed, in the phrasing of John Keats, “to startle princes from easy slumbers.” Later scholars have debunked this as wishful myth, however: one has suggested that Haydn added the fortissimo “to please the tastes of the London audience rather than to chide them.”50 In other words, Haydn’s audience paradoxically expected a certain kind of surprise from the maestro. In light of the intellectual history I have been tracing—in which surprise became an aesthetic desideratum—this makes perfect sense. While it might be amusing to imagine the first audience

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 33

1/27/15 8:01 AM

34

CHAPT ER 1

jumping up from its collective afterdinner sleep, it must be acknowledged that the trick cannot long remain a secret, and cannot startle subsequent audiences in quite the same way. At the same time, a prior rational expectation does not necessarily drain the piece of its capacity to surprise. In music, a virtual or cognitive surprise—if not an actual narrative one— can be enabled by form: the metrical and dynamic shape of Haydn’s andante is designed to lull the reader into a state of receptivity that allows the shock to be felt as if for the first time.51 The arts of music and theater excel in this capacity of sensory conditioning and physical immediacy; and, as I show, eighteenth-century novelists often sought to approximate it, even as they registered the difference between prose narrative and its sister arts. On the other side of the equation, the legend of Haydn’s symphony could be said to rely on a novelistic understanding of surprise: in the retelling, audience members are recruited as characters in a satirical set piece, subject to a mild form of Fieldingesque ridicule. (Or Hogarthian caricature: it was Hogarth who memorably captured the soporific effect of a compulsory cultural ritual when he depicted a parson putting the laity to sleep with his sermon.) The art of surprise, in other words, occupies the intersection between sensory stimulus and narrative expectation, physical experience and literary imagination.52

c Emotion Theory: From Reflex to Judgment The body–mind dualism in Descartes’s and Le Brun’s accounts of surprise and wonder exemplifies a larger issue in the philosophy and psychology of the passions. As Martha Nussbaum has suggested, this Western intellectual tradition consists of two conflicting accounts of emotion: the Greek Stoic conception of emotions as evaluative judgments about persons and things concerned with the individual’s well-being; and the “adversary” idea of emotions as “unthinking energies” and functions of our animal or mechanistic nature.53 Without denying the corporeal and involuntary element of emotion, Nussbaum insists on the Stoic account; quoting Marcel Proust, she calls emotions “geological upheavals of thought,” in a phrase that captures the transaction between the external world and the act of cognition. Regarding the study of emotion in modern psychology, Paul E. Griffiths has elaborated a similar debate between a “feeling theory” and a “propositional attitude theory”: in the first, emotions are “introspective experiences characterized by a quality and intensity of sensation”; and in the second, they are not merely internal events but phenomena mediated by language and subject to rational analysis and moral examination.54

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 34

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

35

Within the disciplinary framework of developmental psychology, Jerome Kagan effectively conflates these two theories by positing four components of emotion, a cascade of events: 1) a change in brain activity; 2) a consciously processed change in feeling; 3) a cognitive interpretation of that feeling in thought or language; and 4) a behavioral response or preparedness to act.55 With new technologies of neuroscience, emotion has been studied as a brain state, and the Cartesian question thus arises as to whether emotion should be described neurobiologically or psychologically. Must an emotion involve a conscious registration of a feeling state, or can it pass below the psyche’s evaluative radar? Is it useful to posit a set of fundamental human emotions that can be classified and recognized across cultures and periods, or is emotion more properly understood as always culturally constructed and contingent? Mindful of the lack of critical consensus within his own discipline, Kagan insists that no emotion can be solely defined or understood by a brain profile, since neural firings can ramify into a variety of possible responses, depending on the individual. His paradigmatic example is the flash of lightning in the night sky: though it might startle the perceiver and induce alertness for the expected clap of thunder, it does not necessarily cause fear. The event might or might not be described by its perceiver as a surprise, but the degree of its intensity can be described as a function of experience and mental conditioning. The most basic experience of surprise can be located in the neural firings of the amygdala, a section of the medial temporal lobe that makes discriminations between pleasant and unpleasant, safe and dangerous. What the Greeks called thumos (the capacity for intense feeling, akin to the traditional locus of “the heart”) and Descartes called the “sudden surprise of the soul” can be understood partly in neurobiological terms as the excitation of this brain region. The amygdala helps trigger the startle reflex, temporary body immobility, and reluctance to explore an unfamiliar area—in short, a state of anxious caution,56 precisely the paralysis of the spirits described by Descartes. Kagan notes that controlled experiments have shown that amygdalar activity decreases with repeated exposure to an event. “It appears,” he says, “that evolution rendered the amygdala an early component of the brain’s response to unexpected, unfamiliar, or ambiguous events, whether they are safe, pleasant, aversive, or potentially dangerous” (74). In effect, both Descartes and Le Brun described amygdalar functions— Descartes in the neural seat of surprise and Le Brun in its outward expression. Meanwhile, the taxonomies of the latter—and even the word “expression” itself—anticipate the modern work of the research psychologist Paul Ekman, who has made a career of studying feelings as they are

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 35

1/27/15 8:01 AM

36

CHAPT ER 1

reflected in the face. The core of his work is the formulation of a group of basic and universally recognizable expressions, including anger, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise.57 While Le Brun’s project was primarily aesthetic (offering models for visual artists and actors), Ekman’s is scientific and juridical, in that it seeks to locate a fundamental truth in involuntary, spontaneous expression and offers ways of recognizing feelings in the faces of others. In one study, Ekman makes a distinction between forms of surprise—or, more precisely, between the startle reflex triggered by sudden loud noises or physical movements and other responses that are conventionally grouped under the heading of “surprise.” The study involved firing .22-caliber blanks behind seated subjects under various conditions: warned or not forewarned; asked to stifle a reaction or asked to feign a reaction. Ekman and his coauthor conclude that “being startled feels very different from being surprised, much more different in kind than the difference in feelings between terror and fear, or between rage and anger.”58 From a clinical perspective, one cannot convincingly fake the salient experience of being startled, a universal, neurobiological response; but within a social context, one can certainly counterfeit the more amorphous affect of surprise. In this sense, surprise can be called, in Rei Terada’s phrase, a “construct of thought.” As Terada points out, the word “emotion” itself (from the Latin e + movere) suggests the idea of “something lifted from a depth to a surface”; and while detractors fault deconstructionist criticism for discussing representations of things rather than things themselves, she argues that in this expressionist understanding of emotion there is only representation, the projection of some notional interior source, whether that biological origin is called thumos, the heart, or the amygdala.59 In effect, eighteenth-century fiction was fixated on the psychobiological fact of startlement as defined by Ekman but equally interested in the sociolinguistic construction of surprise as elaborated and theorized by Nussbaum, Kagan, and Terada. Moreover, it registered the distance between the two— the translation of immediate sensory and emotional experience into fiction. The primal functions of the amygdala—particularly the operations of stimulus distinction and familiarization—can be recognized in the conventional distinction between unpleasant and pleasant surprises, as well as in the Aristotelian category of poetically induced terror, which produces aesthetic pleasure and edification rather than pure fear and alarm. The novel is at one further remove: without the sensory immediacy of drama, it can only report and approximate visual, aural, and kinetic surprises. This limitation, as we will see in subsequent chapters, became a catalyst for mimetic innovation. The experience of surprise, which had been structurally located at the Ar-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 36

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F ROM ARISTOT L E TO E M OT I O N T HEO R Y

37

istotelian pivot of plot, assumed a new ethical relevance in the eighteenth century, in questions about characters’ and readers’ susceptibilities to shock, as well as their capacities for rational expectation and moral edification. Before novels, however, those human vulnerabilities and faculties were rigorously explored in Paradise Lost, and it is to that work that I now turn.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 37

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 2 Being and Feeling The Surprise Attacks of Paradise Lost

In English literary history, the violent underpinnings of surprise are nowhere more vividly explored than in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This is an inevitable effect of Milton’s attention to etymology and lexical ambiguity, but it also reflects a larger imaginative engagement with a topos of epic, the technology of modern warfare, and the poetics of the passions. Even as Milton invokes the older military sense of “surprise,” he activates—and arguably shapes—the modern denotations of cognitive response and psychological affect. In a poem signally concerned with origins, the éclat of the word reverberates; but in Milton’s vocabulary of psychic and corporeal experience, surprise is also modulated into emotional states such as fear, wonder, pain, confusion, or joy. One is either surprised by these feelings, or surprised into them by some external event or stimulus. In either case, the experience is characterized by what Robert Solomon calls the “myth of the passions”: the idea that emotion is an event that happens to us rather than a current of feeling that originates from within.1 For a poem that advances a rigorously Arminian account of free will as divinely endowed gift, this notion of the passions as unruly forces might pose a problem. To say that Satan, Adam, or Eve are surprised by sin—either in its allegorical uppercase or abstract lowercase forms—is to suggest the possibility of the involuntary or the compelled. The problem can of course be dispelled by grammatical fiat, in the translation of the passive into the active: 38

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 38

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

39

God’s intractable creatures are not really surprised by Sin; they commit sins. There is no external force of evil in the world, only evil acts. In strictly moral terms, Milton adopts what could be called a divine perspective toward surprise: Satan has only himself to blame for the conception and execution of his rebellion; Adam and Eve have been given sufficient warning to recognize sinful temptation when they see it; angels and human beings alike have been endowed with a rational faculty to know the good and shun evil. In short, none of them can legitimately claim to have been surprised by decisive actions or outcomes. And yet the language of surprise in Milton’s poem—in all its violent, demonic, irrational force—is too pervasive to be so neatly reduced and dismissed. While Milton does not subscribe to the myth of the passions as an ethical account of human agency, I argue that he imaginatively adapts it, as he shapes all available mythologies, to his own poetic purposes. In the tradition of allegory, he hovers between the literal and the figurative—between surprise as brute physical force and surprise as emotion or cognition. In essence, he harks back to the classical notion of the passions even as he anticipates the modern understanding of emotions as evaluative judgments and ethical orientations toward the world.2 Above all, the experience of being surprised in Milton’s poem is more than just a passing thought or emotional state; it is a fundamental metamorphosis, a permanent change of body and mind. In the case of the Fall, to have been surprised is to have been irreversibly changed; it is, in the Freudian sense, traumatic. In broad terms, Milton’s inflections of surprise are driven by several concerns: with genre (the revision of classical epic), with allegory (Spenserian models of agonistic learning), with philosophy (conceptions of rationality and free will), and with theodicy (the gulf between divine and human consciousness). In its use of epic conventions, Paradise Lost inevitably features a military surprise attack in the war in heaven, but it focuses more acutely on the cognitive dimension of that assault, and on its repercussions. The war begins with Satan’s nocturnal sortie against an unsuspecting angelic host, but its true beginning can be traced to Satan’s conception of the plan, which is allegorically represented as both a birth and a military assault. In Satan’s grotesque parturition of Sin, as in numerous other episodes, surprise is instrumental to Milton’s project of epic revision, as it is to allegory more broadly. In Angus Fletcher’s formulation, classical allegory takes the form of either the battle (as in psychomachia) or the progress (as in quests or masques).3 Gordon Teskey has argued more broadly that allegory is predicated on violence: not only the physical strife of battle but also the mental turmoil involved in poetic creation and agonistic reading—the torsion between narrative and symbolic

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 39

1/27/15 8:01 AM

40

CHAPT ER 2

levels, the Ovidian transformation of bodies into monstrous, meaning-bearing forms. “The more powerful the allegory,” Teskey remarks, “the more openly violent the moments in which the materials of narrative are shown being actively subdued for the purpose of raising a structure of meaning.”4 I want to suggest that surprise is instrumental to the allegorical violence articulated by Fletcher and Teskey. It signifies a clash between adversaries, in the martial tactics of ambush or sudden assault; and it discloses both the active energy of stealth or anticipation and the passive condition of unknowingness or inattention. Moreover, it marks the slippage between literal and figurative: what looks like a confrontation with a foe must ultimately be decoded as an internal conflict. The physical event of a sudden attack—whether initiated by the hero or suffered by him—can occasion a moment of recognition or didactic clarification; but that moment often belongs more to the alert reader than to the stunned or oblivious hero.5 Teskey has suggested that while Aristotelian tragedy elicits pity and terror in the viewer, allegory “elicits continual interpretation as its primary aesthetic effect” (4). In Paradise Lost, that effect has been described by Stanley Fish as a participatory act punctuated by moments of surprise, which are deliberately set traps and snares for the reader—a reader who is at once both pliable enough to take the bait and sophisticated enough to recognize the error after it has been committed. In this way, Milton both represents the Fall and re-creates it in the mind of the reader.6 By implication, the phrase made famous by Fish—“surprised by sin”—denotes two things: 1) the mimetically presented event of falling and committing a sin within the poem; and 2) the rhetorically produced experience of reckoning with sinfulness in the act of reading. Though we have a good idea of what Fish means by “surprise” and how it functions in his argument about our human susceptibility to error, we have had a less robust sense of what Milton meant by the term. For instance, it can be said that Satan is surprised by the birth of Sin, but in the relevant passage, this is not Milton’s precise wording. Satan is actually surprised by pain, and the sheer corporeality of that feeling should tell us something about the psychosomatic complexity of the experience, and the poem’s oscillations between the literal and the allegorical. (The exact phrase “surprised by sin” is Fish’s own coinage and appears nowhere in the poem, though its meaning is implicit throughout.) Surprise, then, is not only an experience to be recapitulated in the mind of the errant reader; it is also a spectacle to behold, and a military pun dramatized on multiple occasions. In Fish’s paradigm, the poem conditions the reader, formally and semantically, to “fall” along with Milton’s characters; but I argue that it also allows the reader some critical

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 40

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

41

distance, and this is nowhere more evident than in scenes of astonishment, in which the narrative stops to linger over a character’s mental paralysis. I want to emphasize the embodied nature of surprise in Paradise Lost, and its philosophical implications in Milton’s picture of rationality and moral freedom. As a Christian critique of classical epic, Milton’s poem has long been interpreted as asserting the superiority of spiritual struggle over traditional heroic valor, placing the mental over the physical, the internal over the external.7 And yet as an imaginative expression of Milton’s monist materialism, the poem blurs those distinctions. In Cartesian dualism, wonder, the surprise de l’âme, must be a figurative rather than physical seizure—for the soul cannot be arrested in the way that the bodily frame or the animal spirits can. In Milton’s radical philosophy, however, surprise pertains equally to body and soul, since they are part of a single, indivisible entity. As Stephen Fallon has put it, “Spirit and matter became for Milton two modes of the same substance: spirit is rarefied matter, and matter is dense spirit.”8 By extension, Miltonic surprise is simultaneously a physical and mental event, both a thing (a collision, an attack, an embodied passion) and a thought. As a kind of seizure, surprise in Paradise Lost looks like a kind of demonic possession, especially in the birth of Sin from Satan’s forehead. This can be interpreted as ironic conceit rather than doctrinal explanation, and it does not morally absolve Satan of the crime; and yet the trope of possession has serious bearing on Adam and Eve’s fall. In his commentary on the Augustinian doctrine of original sin in the Christian Doctrine, Milton notes, “this evil desire, this law of sin, was not only inbred in us, but also took possession of Adam, after his fall, and from his point of view it could be called original” (389). The locution, “took possession” tempts us to think in Manichean terms of demonic invasion and sacramental exorcism; but Milton is appropriating the idea of possession to articulate one of the more disturbing wrinkles in his conception of free will: that God allows evil to happen, both “by not impeding natural causes and free agents” (1.8.330) and by creating the conditions for its furtherance: “For God does not drive the human heart to sinfulness and deceit when it is innocent and pure and shrinks from sin. But when it has conceived sin, when it is heavy with it, already giving birth to it, then God as the supreme arbiter of all things turns and points it in this or that direction or towards this or that object” (332). These divine pointings might sound like compulsion or necessity but in Milton’s definition they amount not to a positive force but to an absence—the natural pull of a vacuum rather than the arbitrary push of a malevolent deity. In short, God allows the enlargement of sin and its ramification in punishment

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 41

1/27/15 8:01 AM

42

CHAPT ER 2

by “taking away his usual light-giving grace and power to resist sin” (334). Here, an ill will and evil acts can unexpectedly result in good for others and punishment for oneself; and punishment is not so much juridically meted out as it is spontaneously suffered by the malefactor, in the incalculable ripple effect of sin.9 The metaphor of conception and birth in the passage quoted above will spring grotesquely to life in the figure of Sin in Paradise Lost; indeed, the earlier prose explanation can be seen as a proleptic gloss on the allegorical episode. Among its manifold implications: that sin comprises both evil desire and executive action, that its full significance can be neither anticipated nor immediately grasped, and that it comes as a surprise both in the moment of commission (as a kind of demonic possession) and in its incalculable results. In Milton’s theodicy, surprise marks an uncrossable boundary between God and everyone else. Despite his absolute foreknowledge, God does not deliberately surprise his created beings in the way that they surprise each other—as when Satan launches a civil war against his brethren, or when Edenic guardians sneak up on Satan, or when the fallen Eve returns to share her wondrous discovery with Adam. When Satan and his crew resolve to win God’s mount “by fight or by surprise” (6.87), they invoke the classical distinction between heroic confrontation and stealth, and its incarnation as forza and froda in Dante’s survey of sins. In the heroic values of epic, the first ranks higher than the second, but from a divine perspective, the distinctions between the two collapse. Though force might seem more honorable than fraud, they are merely two words for the same act of disobedience. The dyad of “fight or surprise” registers the difference between brute violence and mental strategy, but in Milton’s allegory, one can signify the other. As I show below, Satan’s first conception of the rebellion looks like a physical attack, and the realization of the plan is represented as cognitive disarray: both are inflections of surprise. In the poem’s demotion of martial valor, forza becomes no better than froda; and within the frame of God’s omniscience, froda looks no different from forza—for there can be no surprises, only endless bursts of clumsily applied force. This is yet another way that Milton limns the divide between God and his creatures: in this poetic imagination of divine consciousness, the Creator displays a variety of recognizably human emotions, but never surprise. That experience belongs to all other sentient beings, both angelic and human: it is the emotional vector of action and choice in a world framed by rational expectation rather than omniscient certainty; and it is a function not only of rationality but also of unruly passions.10 Playing on the word’s Latinate meaning, Milton registers the intersection between external conditions and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 42

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

43

moral agency: in the experience of surprise, one feels like both active agent and passive object. That mingled feeling of voluntariness and compulsion does not fundamentally contradict the poet’s conception of free will as a divine gift, but it does add significant nuance to it. As a function of knowledge and expectation, experiences of surprise in the poem elicit the reader’s faculties of judgment, in the articulation of what a character should have known about or anticipated. But as embodied experiences, these moments can elicit what could be called, in eighteenth-century terms, the reader’s sympathy— the capacity to imagine and feel with a character’s affective and perceptual experience. In evoking that experience, Milton is attuned to the unbridgeable distance between divine and human understandings of surprise. When God sends Raphael to deliver instruction on the ways of Satan, he does so lest Adam “pretend / Surprisal” (5.244–45). In divine usage, surprise is purely a function of rationality: once Adam is forewarned, he cannot legitimately claim to be surprised. To “pretend” here bears the sense of both staking a legal or political claim and engaging in a form of deceit or playacting. (Satan plays the role of royal pretender to a nonexistent throne, while Adam and Eve lapse into concealment and pretense.) In the human lexicon, however, a post facto assertion of “surprisal” need not carry this second sense of willful lying. Rather, it registers a complex state of mind and body. To say, “I was surprised”—by Satan, by sin, by the behavior of others, by circumstance, by the course of one’s own thought—is to report an experience that goes beyond the subversion of an expectation. In his fine-grained attention to the emotional, corporeal, and cognitive life of his characters, Milton enables a fuller understanding of surprise than God’s language allows. Since God makes his monitory statement before the Fall, it is tempting to invoke the default distinction between pre- and postlapsarian forms of surprise. In that case, the salient difference might lie in the premise that before Satan’s rebellion, there was no military sense of surprise, since the surprise attack—as concept and as techne—had yet to be invented or deployed. However, insofar as all non-divine beings are fully embodied creatures who think and feel, surprise must have always been around. Milton knows that he is playing on a fallen term of war, but he is also working on deeper etymological levels—on the sense of being overtaken.11 In the compatibilist understanding of Paradise Lost, free will can be reconciled with divine foreknowledge; and though I do not intend to challenge that account, I wish to propose a new picture of Milton’s conception of moral freedom, one that is both active and passive in its contours, one defined by the complex nature of surprise.12 As Milton explains in the Christian Doctrine,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 43

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 2

44

the “subdivisions” of sin are “evil desire, or the will to do evil, and the evil deed itself.”13 In Milton’s conception of rationality, that first phase of sin is freely chosen; but in the poetics of thought that Milton would develop in Paradise Lost, an evil desire is as much something that seems to happen to a rational agent as it is caused by that agent. Surprise, like other passions, originates in the psyche but is also suffered by it. I argue, then, that the idea of being “surprised by sin” has ramifications that extend well beyond the formal experience modeled in Fish’s close readings. In brief, the idea takes several forms: 1) To be attacked or seized by an allegorical adversary called Sin. 2) To be possessed, demonically or cognitively, by the impulse to commit a forbidden act. 3) To be overwhelmed by a feeling. 4) To commit a sinful act that results in incalculable and unexpected consequences. 5) To be astonished or bewildered by the opportunity to commit a sin—a seemingly sudden aperture of possibility. 6) To be retrospectively surprised by one’s own action: the fact that one has committed a sin, or that one is capable of doing so. In doctrinal terms, the first two of these senses can be seen as pagan props— vestigial superstitions, objects of parody, subordinates to a narrative of Christian triumphalism. And yet as metaphors, they powerfully shape the other senses, which might be called cognitive or psychological. In exploring these senses, I focus on several key moments of surprise in the poem: the allegorical birth of Sin from Satan’s head; the invention of gunpowder and subsequent defeat of the rebel angels; the discovery of Satan in the act of tempting a sleeping Eve; Raphael’s monitory instruction and Adam’s internalization of it; and Adam’s reaction to the metamorphic evidence of Eve’s fall. Before turning to these instances, I show how Milton’s Protestant poetics of surprise owes a multiple debt to Edmund Spenser: the problem of recognizing error; the emphasis on constant vigilance in the act of reading and interpretation; the fear of sudden snares and temptations; the allegorical translation of external foes into internal forces; the spiritualization of “force” or violence; and the prominent vocabulary of wonder and amazement, along with an attendant suspicion that such passions impair the senses and disable reason. Milton strongly echoes Spenser’s deep suspicion of wonder as disabling passion, but he also departs from his predecessor in seeing it as an enabling theophanic force; it is indicative of the moral complexity of Milton’s

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 44

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

45

vision, however, that good and bad forms of wonder in the poem are so intertwined. Insofar as Spenser’s heroes function as strenuous readers, The Faerie Queene both elicits the act of interpretation and represents it, but Paradise Lost carries that poetic project even further, in dramatically staging scenes of surprise as both Aristotelian reversal and recognition.

c Spenserian Error Before the Miltonic surprise of Sin, there was the shock of Spenserian Error. In Canto 1 of The Faerie Queene, it becomes strikingly apparent to the reader, though not to the Redcrosse Knight, that a hasty confrontation with Error is itself a form of error. Indeed, an encounter with a beast of this name engages the reader’s expectation of an allegory.14 A darker forerunner of this predicament lies in the grimly funny wordplay at the heart of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale: going on a quest to slay a wicked adversary named Death, three rogues meet their own demise. Although the figures of Death and Error might seem like Platonic abstractions, they function more as viral contagions, noxious on contact. Each encounter is not spectatorial, as in a masque-like procession, but participatory. One cannot seek Death without dying, one cannot fight Error without erring; one cannot be surprised by Sin without sinning. The Redcrosse Knight physically surprises the beast named Error and is violently seized by her in turn, but the true conflict lies within: to say that the hero is surprised by Error is really to say that he is in the grip of an error, that he himself errs in unanticipated ways. Here, as elsewhere in Spenser’s poem, an act of violent surprise carries the symbolic meaning of anticipating and preempting error or sin. But such efforts have what Milton would call, with Latinate import, a redundant effect, with the attempt unexpectedly recoiling upon the hero. In the effort to vanquish a foe, the hero risks being overmastered by his own rage, or struck dumb with amazement. These passions are not inherently sinful, but they are always in danger of running to extremes or leading to ruinous behavior.15 The Bower of Bliss episode in Canto 2 exemplifies this problem. When the Palmer catches Guyon gazing at two naked maidens, he advises the knight on the swift capture of their queen (“Here wonnes Acrasia, whom we must surprise, / Else she will slip away, and all our drift despise” [2.12.69.8–9]). But Guyon has already been smitten by the sight, and the elaborate ekphrasis of the bower and its emparadised lovers (70–80) suggests his total sensory immersion in the spectacle. Before he can surprise Acrasia, he has already been surprised; and though he captures his adversary, he is soon overwhelmed by a different passion, “the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 45

1/27/15 8:01 AM

46

CHAPT ER 2

tempest of his wrathfulnesse” (83.4). In Spenser’s allegory, Guyon’s destruction of the Bower—and other such acts of purgation—are only provisional forms of repression, not definitive eliminations of evil. The hero who would surprise a foe is himself surprised—overtaken by events he has set in motion, disabled by his own unruly passions. In the confrontation with Error, the Redcrosse Knight is overwhelmed— physically and cognitively—despite the warning counsel of Una, who functions as both defenseless ward and knowledgeable guide. When she tells him that they have arrived at a place called “the wandring wood” and “Errours den,” she identifies the spot not only by its monstrous resident but also by the wayward movement that has brought them here in the first place. To call this a wood of Error is to invoke historical past, immediate present, and near future all at once: the schism that was supposed to reveal the error of the Roman Church and the truth of English Protestantism; the ongoing errancy of the ever-imperiled Redcrosse; and the specific mistake that the knight will make when he meets the beast—that of rage without reason or faith. Merely to confront the adversary in its den—as if it could be vanquished once and for all, or as if it demands to be defeated in chivalric protection of Una—is to fall into a conceptual error. Error’s ghastly emergence from the cave incites the knight to retaliate, but he himself has goaded her into that defensive posture; he startles a dormant serpent with her brood before she startles him. And though Redcrosse stuns his adversary, she responds in kind, wrapping him “All suddenly” (18.7) in her mazy grip—a serpentine emblem that is given the motto, “God helpe the man so wrapt in Errours endlesse traine” (18.9). This moral commentary serves as both an idiomatic expression of pathos (may God help such a poor wretch) and as a version of the Protestant ideology of sola fide, which will be amplified when Una urges Redcrosse to “Add faith unto your force” (19.3). None of this signifies to Redcrosse, whose faculties of perception and judgment are just as dazed as Error’s; and in the heat of struggle, he hears Una’s counsel “in great perplexitie” (19.5). Spenser’s Latinate pun suggests that the serpent gives visual form to the metaphorical twists and folds of Redcrosse’s own mind, but the hero cannot see those contortions for himself; like the labyrinthine wood in which she resides, Error is both adversary (a political and religious foe) and internal condition (the activity and predisposition of wandering from the truth). Error, then, is a kind of Möbius strip—with no true inside or outside, only one inescapable and endless surface. Whereas it can be visualized in this allegorical conflict, faith cannot: like sin, error comes in an endless variety of forms and disguises; but faith, like truth, is unitary and not easily ren-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 46

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

47

dered in concrete and tangible form. It is tempting to read Redcrosse’s inherited shield as such an emblem; but in Spenser’s Protestant poetics, even this risks a kind of idolatry or iconographic literalism. Despite his victory over Error, then, Redcrosse will err repeatedly, as when he mistakes Archimago for a kindly hermit, or fails to detect Duessa’s deception. As Jeffrey Dolven has observed, Spenserian heroes are condemned to repeat their mistakes in new ways, always failing to read properly, while the reader interprets the allegorical meaning of their experiences over their heads and “at their expense.”16 In the ongoing flow of the narrative, experience is crystallized into didactic example, but that archetype fails to prepare the hero sufficiently for the next trial.

c The Birth Trauma of Sin The predicament of being surprised by Sin in Paradise Lost is analogous to the experiences of being surprised by Death or Error: all involve being overtaken and engulfed; all turn on an irrevocable choice or action; all feature a putative adversary whose true essence is manifest only in the conflict itself; and none can be reliably generalized to prevent future failure. On the other hand, Milton’s instances of surprise significantly differ from their Chaucerian and Spenserian precedents, for they do not involve teleological narratives of search and conquest. Satan, Adam, and Eve do not attempt to confront or vanquish Sin; rather, sin originates in their separate acts. Moreover, its moments of emergence arise as uncanny repetitions rather than first appearances: Satan’s first narrated confrontation with Sin is really a second encounter, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit echoes a Satanic dream and a divine injunction, and Adam’s participation in that act defies Raphael’s warnings against sinfulness. In their moral blind spots, all three figures can be said to know and not know sin at the same time. In Paradise Lost, the perennial dichotomy in allegory—between characters and readers, action and meaning—is crystallized in the physical and mental senses of surprise: Satan, Adam, and Eve experience attacks of Sin, while the alert reader is presumably startled by its manifestation, before each character can fully reckon with it. And yet in the wake of the initial seizure, all three figures reach an awareness of their fate that their similarly fallible precursors in Spenserian romance cannot achieve. This is where tragedy and allegory intersect in Paradise Lost—in the dramatic recognition scene. Moreover, the experience of being surprised is both fully physical (being overwhelmed, struck down) and vitally cognitive (reckoning with the aftermath).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 47

1/27/15 8:01 AM

48

CHAPT ER 2

Among the many critics who have commented on the tragic dimensions of Milton’s epic, John Steadman has illuminated the Aristotelian elements of peripeteia and anagnorisis with particular acuity. Satan’s confrontation with Sin, Satan’s detection in Eden by an angelic guard, Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, Adam’s revelation of Christ as future redeemer—all of these moments constitute reversals of fortune and recognitions of that reversal.17 I would add that the multivalent word “surprise” names both phases; and I focus on the complex relationship between two narrative stages of surprise in the poem: first Satan’s, then Adam and Eve’s. The violent sense of surprise figures prominently in two passages in which Sin is said to attack its victim: Satan is first surprised by Sin, and Adam is later warned not to be surprised by her (or it). Only the first instance is represented with allegorical personification, whereas the second is more clearly a metaphysical statement, with only a faint linguistic vestige of allegory; what binds the two together is the experience—a sensation, a passion, a cognitive event—of surprise. The ontological status of Sin and Death in a poem that otherwise avoids allegorical apparatus famously vexed eighteenth-century readers like Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson.18 Twentieth-century readers, on the other hand, have interpreted these figures as deliberate rather than clumsy, metaphysically profound rather than symbolically naïve; their sheer alien presence is seen to reflect an unsettling truth about Satan’s uncanny nature or about the act of reading itself.19 We might wonder why allegorical figures appear in Satan’s fall but not in Adam and Eve’s. First, it is fitting that a character who is himself an allegorical figure (in the archetypal role of ha satan, the Adversary) gives birth to another; and since his struggle is represented in terms of classical epic, he merits the antique trappings of personified abstractions. In this way, the introduction of Sin and Death serves as an intentionally overblown foil for Milton’s finer-grained depiction of human choice—as if, in the narrative movement from heaven to earth, allegorical generality had been stripped away, and particular meanings stood revealed. There is yet another possible reason for the difference, which I would like to pursue here: the premise that surprise in the poem cannot happen in the same way twice. Even within Satan’s experience, Sin reappears in new ways, in apt display of what must be a family trait. Her birth can be understood in Freudian terms as an originary trauma that is manifested in a repetition compulsion, an event whose significance can be brought to consciousness and understood only belatedly. In Freud’s definition, the cause of trauma is the “factor of surprise, of fright,” which depends upon a state of unpreparedness; and in Cathy Caruth’s elaboration, it is “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”20

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 48

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

49

The birth of Sin—of evil desire and the willful breaking of divine law—is precisely this kind of event, in that its significance cannot be immediately understood, and its concussive force is registered as accident rather than as wholly deliberate and premeditated action. On his quest to colonize the new world, Satan is startled to find a guardian at Hell’s portal; and his failure to recognize his own daughter ironically recapitulates the moment that she was born. Here, the child must refresh the parent’s memory and narrate her own birth. The passage deserves to be quoted in full, for it not only recounts the trauma but verbally enacts it: Hast thou forgot me then, and do I seem Now in thine eye so foul, once deemed so fair In Heaven, when at the assembly and, in sight Of all the seraphim, with thee combined In bold conspiracy against Heaven’s king, All on a sudden miserable pain Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum In darkness, while thy head flames thick and fast Threw forth, till on the left side opening wide, Likest to thee in shape and countenance bright, Then shining heavenly fair, a goddess armed Out of thy head I sprung? (2.747–56)21 Such a passage demands the kind of rigorous rereading modeled by Stanley Fish, but the effect in this case is not to lead the reader into error or misprision; rather, it is to simulate the disorienting and traumatic experience of the sudden and surprising. The clausal complexity of Sin’s breathtaking rhetorical question—the distance between subject and predicate—calls for a prose translation: “Do I seem so foul now in Hell, I who was once hailed as fair in Heaven, when pain seized you and I sprung out of your head, to the astonishment of your compatriots?” Because of the grammatical delay, the phrase, “All on a sudden” is in itself a syntactic surprise, as is the appearance of “miserable pain,” which would seem to clash with Sin’s putative beauty. Moreover, the phrasing of the passage captures the involuntariness in the experience of surprise. Though the narrative concerns Satan’s conspiracy against heaven and the corresponding delivery of Sin into the world, it is really Sin who serves as the active agent here. Satan’s head throws forth flames and Sin, but in a grammatical contortion, the latter becomes an active subject: “a goddess armed / Out of thy head I sprung.” In that syntactic crossing, Sin narrates herself both in the third person as a surprising event that happened to Satan and as an agent in her own right. With her ready-made

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 49

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 2

50

armor, she is also a military embodiment of surprise, a visual pun: though she appears as an engine of the rebel cause, she has really made a surprise attack on the general himself. The damage, in other words, has already been done; the archdemon has been demonically possessed. The birth of Sin has antecedents in several genres—not only mythological fable (the birth of Athena) but also drama (recognition scenes) and romance (reunions and intersecting paths). The discovery of paternity and family relationships is of course essential to Sophoclean tragedy; but its revelation, as Aristotle observed, is effected by probable accident rather than supernatural machinery. Milton’s variation plays grotesquely on that pattern, in that Sin is both a natural relation and a supernatural being, both the message and the messenger. Though her bizarre appearance breaks the decorum of Aristotelian tragedy, she exemplifies the difference that Aristotle saw between tragedy and epic—the latter genre offering a greater scope for the marvelous, in its freedom from the visual and physical literalism of the stage. The very fact that Sin becomes the bard of her own heroic birth underscores her narrative rather than dramatic properties. In the classical topos of wonder, exemplified in Aeneas’s unwitting encounter with his mother Venus, a mortal beholds a woman and cries, “Dea certe!” (“Surely this is a goddess!”). Satan is too astonished to say this, but the rebels supply that reaction; the scene thus involves a two-part surprise: a character’s stunned reaction and a choric elaboration of it. This duality is significant for the poem’s epistemology of evil. Only Satan can be truly said to recognize Sin, not because he has seen her before but because in beholding her he beholds himself—or, in allegorical terms, the incarnation of his own malicious thoughts. In another sense, however, he entirely fails to recognize Sin for what she is. The rebels, meanwhile, are seeing her for the first time, and it falls to them to name this new manifestation in their world: Amazement seized All the host of Heaven; back they recoiled afraid At first and called me ‘Sin’ and for a sign Portentous held me; but familiar grown I pleased, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thyself in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamored . . . (2.758–65) The naming of the goddess gives a surplus of meaning through a quite literal addition: as fear melts into admiration, “Sin” becomes “sign,” and the sign is taken for a wonder. Precisely what do the rebels think they signify by

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 50

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

51

the name “Sin”? It is impossible to say for sure, but their meaning surely differs from the reader’s lexical understanding.22 Such a discontinuity is symptomatic of the gap between allegorical characters and readers; it is also a difference inflected by history, the manifestations and meanings that have accrued to the word. In the mythological tradition of misinterpreted signs and misunderstood gifts, Satan and the rebels have the experience but miss the meaning. Milton’s ekphrasis of speechless amazement harks back to scenes in The Faerie Queene, where such reactions nearly always pose a danger. In particular, the unveiling of a stealthy Minervan goddess bears a strong resemblance to wonder scenes involving Britomart in Book 3, such as this one, in which the knights in Malbecco’s castle behold the female warrior newly freed of her armor: Which whenas they beheld, they smitten were With great amazement of so wondrous sight, And each on other, and they all on her Stood gazing, as if suddein great affright Had them surprised. At last avizing right, Her goodly personage and glorious hew, Which they so much mistooke, they tooke delight In their first errour, and yet still anew With wonder of her beauty fed their hungry view. (3.9.23) The Spenserian features of dangerous amazement are on display here—the mutual glances of incredulity, the trope of surprise attack, the paralytic gaze, the visual double take, the recovery of equilibrium. Practiced in the courtly arts of Neoplatonic vision, the knights sublimate their lust into a “contemplation of divinitie” (3.9.24.4), redirecting their gaze from beautiful surface to the “chevalree” and “noble prowesse” (3.9.24.5–6) signified by it. And yet this allegorical translation does not entirely banish the problem of insatiability, which is formally enacted in the amplification of the alexandrine’s “hungry vew” in the opening of the next stanza: “Yet note their hungry vew be satisfide, / But seeing still the more desired to see” (3.9.24.1–2). Possibly, the restless sensory act of seeing aspires to a new and entirely metaphysical form of seeing, beyond the eidolon to the Platonic idea; but the trope of hunger keeps the passage grounded in bodily cravings. Wonder in The Faerie Queene is always a perilous lacuna. And so it is in Paradise Lost. As David Hume would later remark in his discourse on the passions, wonder can lead to a disabling credulity or a paralysis of rational thought; and, by Milton’s lights, it verges dangerously close

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 51

1/27/15 8:01 AM

52

CHAPT ER 2

to idolatry. In the rebels’ response to Sin’s dazzling birth, Milton effectively parodies the superstitious belief in marvels. The parthenogenesis of Sin is in itself a wonder: while the rebels gaze at the spectacle of Satan next to his female double, Satan is essentially admiring his own reflection; and it is worth recalling that “admire,” “mirror,” and “miracle” all spring from the Latin verb mirari, “to marvel at.” The intellectual history of wonder is relevant here: as several critics have noted, there are two radically different forms of wonder in Paradise Lost—the true miracles wrought by God (in the form of natural laws and divine intervention) and the false wonders (what Thomas Aquinas called miraculum mendax) associated with Satan (such as his shape-shifting and invention of modern weaponry).23 The birth of Sin is thus many things: a parody of Sophoclean peripeteia and anagnorisis, as well as the Christian annunciation and birth; a figure of dangerous self-absorption and idolatry; a visualized trope for the ethical estrangement of self from action and consequence; and an archetypal enactment of the experience of surprise, as both the total possession by a feeling and the occluded awareness of that state. As an act of doubling, this birth not only suggests Satan’s grotesque self-worship and the self-reproducing nature of evil acts, it also registers Milton’s wary discomfort with the possibility of literalization or fetishization inherent in allegorical personification. Sin is not a creature in the world; it is more elusive—and, indeed, surprising— than that. In rhetorical terms, she can be seen as a function of Aristotelian enargeia: her literal brightness and allegorical clarity give the reader an illustrative picture, while she momentarily blinds Satan himself. Satan’s failure to recognize his own daughter, then, is more Spenserian than Sophoclean, since he cannot achieve the kind of tragic reckoning that Oedipus does: in this respect, he resembles Redcrosse, who sees only a terrifying beast, not a representation of Error and its endless train. Notably, Sin never appears in Raphael’s narration of the war in heaven, and there are several possible reasons for that omission. In practical terms, it can be seen as reflecting a gap in the angel’s knowledge; and yet this cannot be a wholly satisfying explanation, since Raphael gives other details about the dawning of Satan’s conspiracy that he could not have directly witnessed. What distinguishes the episode of Sin’s birth is that it is narrated entirely by Sin herself: Satan, who has no memory of the event, must rely on the testimony of his daughter, who might be an unreliable narrator, a figment of his imagination, a powerful embodiment of rebel ideology (for Satan’s comrades also see her), a demonic dea abscondita, or a kind of Dantean projection designed to torment him. Raphael’s elision of the birth of Sin, then, suggests that the event is, so to speak, all in Satan’s head. There is no question that

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 52

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

53

Satan is surprised by Sin; but as in the Freudian model of trauma, the meaning of that shock is realized only in a later act of narration. Moreover, the absence of the allegorical episode of Sin’s birth from Raphael’s brief epic makes an allegorical point. Endless and unpredictable variety is the essence of surprise: Sin will appear in countless different guises, not just one. Though Satan conceives of Sin, he can only ever reencounter her, at both ends of his round-trip journey from hell to earth. Between those two points, she disappears from the narrative, but as I show below, the moment of her birth is imagistically recapitulated in numerous ways: it is an endlessly renewable surprise. Satan’s plan of rebellion is bound to its immediate physical consequences in a variety of ways. For instance, the wonder inspired by Sin is displaced into the calculated pomp of Satan’s arrival on the field of battle in “sun-bright chariot” surrounded by “flaming cherubim and golden shields” (6.100–102). The massive headache induced by Sin’s birth is recapitulated as Abdiel’s “noble stroke” on Satan’s “impious crest” (6.187–88)—a strike so swift that “no sight / Nor motion of swift thought, less could his shield, / Such ruin intercept” (6.191–92). The blanking of Satan’s mental faculties recalls the momentary blindness induced by Sin; and the rebels’ reaction of “amazement” (6.198) to the sudden blow precisely repeats the impact of Sin’s appearance. In its mind-blurring swiftness, the sword stroke also anticipates the surprise of another, later technology of warfare.

c Shock and Awe: The Invention of Gunpowder With the introduction of firepower into heaven, the genius of Satan’s rebellion returns with a certain alienated majesty. The mingled elements of Sin’s birth—glory and pain, intention and act, illumination and darkness, wonder and terror—are recapitulated in the literal flash and heat of modern battle. Here, I want to emphasize the Spenserian premise that both the surpriser and the surprised—the one who pulls the trigger and the target of attack— are subject to shock. As both a tactical maneuver and an utterly new form of weaponry, Satan’s artillery assault stands at the historical divide between classical epic and what Michael Murrin has identified as the early modern “negative critique of the gun” in poetry that began with Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.24 The introduction of cannon technology in heaven, as Claude Rawson has pointed out, is based partly on the idea that “gunpowder was the invention of the Devil”; but it also enables Milton to “retain the military business and even the martial partisanships of heroic poetry while mounting a massive onslaught on the morality of war and the traditional values of epic”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 53

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 2

54

(119).25 In the war in heaven, the rebels’ secret weapon is a rude shock, but it is soon rebuffed by the good angels’ arsenal of hurled boulders and hills. In the divine physics of Paradise Lost, Satan’s action is met with an opposite and overmastering reaction. As much as the defeat of the rebels depends on that counterassault, however, Milton ultimately represents their rout as an internal phenomenon, one that echoes both the birth of Sin and Satan’s first sense of pain. Once again, a surprise attack becomes an emotional and cognitive event: what stood recoiled O’erwearied through the faint satanic host Defensive scarce or with pale fear surprised, Then first with fear surprised and sense of pain Fled ignominious, to such evil brought By sin of disobedience, till that hour Not liable to fear or flight or pain. (6.391–97) Milton does not ignore the epic données of shivered armor, overturned chariots, and foaming steeds, but his true focus is on psychic consequences. A vestigial personification allegory haunts the scene: this time, instead of fair Sin, it is pale Fear that startles the rebels—the terrified blanching of their faces displaced to the ghostly abstraction that now stalks them. In Milton’s finely calibrated poetics of thought, the odd verbal repetition (“with pale fear surprised,” “first with fear surprised,” “till that hour / Not liable to fear”) syntactically registers an incredulous double take. This is a stop-motion anatomy of surprise: first, the sheer feeling of fear, then the processing of that feeling—the realization of a previously unknown emotion. “Till that hour”: surprise defines a new before and after, a rent in the temporal fabric of heavenly existence. Milton’s narration of the rebellion thus serves as a mythical etiology of the passions: it marks not only the birth of Sin but also the resulting origins of pain and fear. The firstness of these experiences subtly establishes the premise that God has been neither sadistic nor Machiavellian in his rule; rather, his reign is founded on the emotional supports of wonder and joy. These, however, are not constant states, and Milton takes pains to assert that heaven is not an eternally static realm but rather a place of variety and change. This principle of mutability is most obvious in Satan’s case, but it is true of the loyal angels as well, especially in their reaction to their own victory. It is no accident that Milton describes it in the same language that he has used to describe the birth of Sin: “them unexpected joy surprised, / When the great ensign of Messiah blazed / Aloft by angels borne, his sign in

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 54

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

55

Heaven” (6.774–76). In a cathartic cleansing of epic violence, sneak attacks are replaced by a surge of happiness. As in the rebels’ attack of fear, the surprise is twofold: a sudden emotion and a rational processing of that emotion. It is not just a feeling but a function of expectation: in propositional terms, they are surprised that they have achieved this victory. Though they are armed with virtue, the good angels, like everyone but God, cannot predict the outcome of the battle. While downplaying or even parodying the physical trappings of epic, Milton emphasizes the dimension of mental and moral struggle—the reality of choosing a side and fighting for it under uncertain circumstances. Though happiness is a donnée in heaven and the singing of hosannas a daily routine, joy even here has degrees of intensity; and jubilation after the defeat of the rebels is sui generis, another “first” brightly marked in this narrative of origins. The dual nature of surprise in the defeat of the rebels—rebuffed by the heavenly host, seized by fear—is recapitulated in Satan’s confrontation with the angelic guard in Eden. Satan’s attempt to sow rebellion in God’s latest born represents a continuation of war by other means, and Milton’s language reminds us of this. In a kind of Dantean contrapasso, the invention of gunpowder is answered by an incendiary trope. Just as the artillery war in heaven was triggered by the “nicest touch” of flaming reeds (6.582–84), the merest “touch” of Ithuriel’s spear (4.812) causes Satan to jump up from whispering subversion in Eve’s ear: Up he starts Discovered and surprised. As when a spark Lights on a heap of nitrous powder laid Fit for the tun some magazine to store Against a rumored war, the smutty grain With sudden blaze diffused, inflames the air: So started up in his own shape the fiend. Back stepped those two fair angels half amazed So sudden to behold the grisly king; Yet thus, unmoved with fear, accost him soon. (4.813–22) Discovered and surprised: that is to say, detected and caught unawares. In Milton’s materialist imagination, the surprise of Satan is both cognitive (the realization of being found out) and physical (the transformative touch of Ithuriel’s spear). The discovery is comically underscored by a quasi-Ovidian metamorphosis: the angels first find the intruder “squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve” (4.800), but upon being discovered, Satan starts up in his own shape; and the point is reiterated when the allegorically pointed

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 55

1/27/15 8:01 AM

56

CHAPT ER 2

spear of Ithuriel returns Satanic falsehood “to its own likeness” (4.813). While the reference to a toad sounds like metaphor, the archfiend’s return to his own shape implies a real metamorphosis; meanwhile, Milton’s mockepic simile suggests that the inventor of gunpowder is himself a powder keg. This functions as a recognition scene, but a pointedly occluded one: angelic guardians surprise the toad-like spy into becoming an upright warrior, and identify him as one of “those rebel spirits adjudged to hell” (4.823); but they cannot say which rebel they have caught, and the oversight rankles Satan. (“Know ye not me?” the deposed leader asks with Lear-like pique [4.828].) Satan here experiences a particular species of surprise. Before his discovery ramifies into fear (his) and amazement (the angels’), there is the root physicality of the startle reflex—signally triggered by sudden loud noises such as gunfire, and common to human and beast alike. In a grammatical reverberation typical of all things Satanic and reminiscent of the rebels’ fearful double take, Milton repeats Satan’s stunned reaction at being detected: “up he starts” and “So started up.” Satan’s reaction thus mingles the voluntariness of selfprotection and the involuntariness of a reflex. Succumbing to a basic creaturely impulse, Satan lurches like Error cornered in her den, or like a startled toad; but he also explodes like gunpowder. In Milton’s materialist philosophy, the tropes of animal reflex and gunpowder detonation are not so different as they might seem, for both involve the spontaneous action of vital matter; both constitute a surprise mechanism; and both disclose not only an animating principle of life but the energy of rebellion. As John Rogers has argued, seventeenth-century theories of vitalism and corpuscular circulation had implications for revolutionary politics: the scientific picture of a self-regulating body challenged the classic metaphor of a body politic governed by a royal head.26 In what is surely a deliberate echo, Adam later describes his own first coming-to-consciousness as such a spontaneous leap: “raised / By quick instinctive motion, up I sprung” (8.258–59). As gunpowder is kindled by a spark, so Adam is awakened by the sun. As with real firepower, no one—neither shooter nor target—is exempt from the startle reflex: both Satan and the catalytic angel are shocked, the latter stepping back in “half ” amazement. Milton’s qualifier, however, pointedly denies that the blast is a source of true wonder or sign of divinity. In European narratives of colonial exploration, the gun is often beheld by New World inhabitants as a token of godlike power; but no such credulity attends this spectacle. As usual, Milton uses a finely calibrated emotional vocabulary here: the angelic centurions’ reaction might be called a species of wonder,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 56

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

57

but it is colored by neither fear nor awe. A later eighteenth-century term would more precisely characterize the occasion of their surprise: neither the beautiful nor the sublime but what Addison called the Novel—the unusual or never-before-seen.

c Adam and Eve and the Prevention of “Surprisal” The omission of Sin’s birth from Raphael’s narrative could be called a metonymy for a larger epistemological gap: Adam and Eve cannot know that God knows that they will fall.27 In commanding Raphael to instruct Adam of the danger posed by Satan, God is forearming his newest creation, but he articulates the mission with legalistic fatalism: “this let him know, / Lest willfully transgressing he pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned” (5.243–45). The cleavage between human and divine meanings of surprise are nowhere more evident than here. In an ordinary, mortal sense, there is no pretense or fakery in Adam and Eve’s experiences of surprise: they are genuinely astonished, caught off guard, and overmastered by Satan’s infiltration of Eden and its cascade of subsequent events. In God’s supremely normative sense of the term, however, “surprisal” is indefensible: regardless of how they retrospectively narrate their experience, Adam and Eve should not have been surprised; they should have anticipated and resisted. This is so whether they care to name the agent of surprise as an internal impulse or an external “Satan” or “Eve.” The previous figure to pretend surprisal in the poem was the satanic Pretender himself, in both prospective and retrospective senses of that phrase: presuming to attack an unwitting adversary and then claiming that the ensuing punishment was totally unexpected. God’s command effectively declares any repetitions of Satan’s pretense to be inexcusable. Notably, the stated rationale for teaching Adam and Eve is framed in negative terms—as prevention against saying something rather than the encouragement of a particular behavior. Among the many ways that God might have framed Raphael’s charge, he tellingly emphasizes knowledge rather than action, and post facto excuse rather than practical reasoning. That emphasis essentially reflects the ongoing tension between human freedom and divine foreknowledge; the participial modifier “willfully transgressing” is no hypothetical scenario but rather a certain outcome known only to God. In carrying out his divinely ordered mission, Raphael echoes God’s command when he warns Adam to “govern well thy appetite, lest Sin / Surprise thee, and her black attendant Death” (7.548–49). The two main senses of “surprise” are implicit here: in allegorical terms, Sin is a foe that attacks the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 57

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 2

58

victim in a moment of weakness; and in cognitive terms, the sinner is astonished—too late—by what he has done. Sin itself becomes the ghostly afterimage of a completed act, an idea to be brooded over, a pang of conscience. Death, by contrast, cannot be cognitively reckoned with; it is rather, a brute-force surprise that stops cognition cold. Without Sin’s own interpolated tale—the allegory provided to the reader—it is difficult to know what Adam makes of these personifications. In the absence of any actual death in Raphael’s brief epic, they seem to function as apotropaic ciphers, signifiers of very bad things. Since the distinction between the allegorical and the literal cannot fully signify to Adam, the import of Raphael’s warning is chiefly emotional rather than purely semantic. Up to this point in his brief existence, Adam has no referent for Sin or Death; but in the extraordinary sequence of his own birth, loss of consciousness, and discovery of Eve, he has most certainly felt surprise. This, then, is the core experience that drives Raphael’s warning. It is thus apt that when Adam recapitulates Raphael’s warning to Eve, he omits mention of sin or death; only the emotional residue of surprise remains. Jeffrey Dolven has observed that in Renaissance humanist pedagogy, successful learning depends upon repetition, the ability to recite a lesson or to do something in imitation of an original (141). While Adam follows that model in instructing Eve, he tellingly translates his preceptor’s terms. In place of Raphael’s allegorical villains, Adam describes man’s capacities and weaknesses as a struggle between two faculties that he knows more directly—reason and will: Against his will he can receive no harm. But God left free the will, for what obeys Reason is free, and reason he made right But bid her well beware, and still erect, Lest by some fair-appearing good surprised She dictate false and misinform the will To do what God expressly hath forbid. (9.350–56) This account of error adds psychological and ethical inflections to Raphael’s caveat: being surprised by a “fair-appearing good” is a more complicated experience than being surprised by Sin. Rather than naming the true identity of the danger (e.g., “evil” or “sin”), Milton chooses the word “good,” so that the deception of the adjective infects the noun; the diabolical nature of the surprise lies in the ambiguity of substance and accident. For clarity’s sake, we might wish to place the word “good” in scare quotes, but no such assurance is available, either in Milton’s seventeenth-century orthography or

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 58

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

59

in Adam’s ken. It might even be the case that the proscribed or dangerous thing really does constitute a good of sorts, as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge arguably does; but in Raphael’s teaching about overindulgence and excessive curiosity, there can be too much of a good thing. It is also possible that Milton here exploits the dual sense of the nominal form: a “good” is both a thing that is good and a value-neutral property or possession. Since the Tree is part of the world that God has bestowed on Adam and Eve, its fruits could be considered a “good” in that sense, albeit a proscribed one. Meanwhile, Adam’s depiction of Reason and Will unwittingly foreshadows his and Eve’s separate falls: Reason, gendered as female, represents both Eve in her entanglement with the fair-appearing serpent and Adam in his susceptibility to Eve’s surpassing fairness. The other main thrust of Adam’s teaching clarifies a particular kind of freedom: though the will “obeys” reason, it is still free, just as Adam and Eve are free even in obedience to God. Both Satan and his Edenic prey are, in different ways, surprised by Sin; but Adam’s terms of Reason and Will really apply only to the first human beings, not to Satan. There is a fundamental mimetic difference here: Satan’s fall is depicted in a grotesque allegory; but Adam and Eve’s separate and complementary falls are represented in terms of faculty psychology.28

c Sudden Falls: Surprise and Its Human Aftermath

Sin’s surprising birth is finally revisited in the story of Adam and Eve’s fall. Adam’s stricken amazement after Eve’s disobedience bears some resemblance to the rebels’ gaping at the birth of Sin and the guardian angels’ startled discovery of Satan. In Milton’s ongoing critique of idolatrous wonder, the terms of the marvelous in Eve’s breathless report are refracted into the description of Adam’s horror. Eve speaks of a “strange” cause for her absence that is “wonderful to hear” (9.861–62), of a serpent given the faculty of “Reasoning to admiration” (9.872); but Adam’s wonder is of an entirely different sort: On the other side, Adam, soon as he heard The fatal trespass done by Eve, amazed, Astonied stood and blank, while horror chill Ran through his veins and all his joints relaxed; From his slack hand the garland wreathed for Eve

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 59

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 2

60

Down dropped, and all the faded roses shed. Speechless he stood and pale, till thus at length First to himself he inward silence broke . . . (9.888–95) To be astonished is literally to be thunderstruck, but Milton plays on the pseudoetymological commonplace of being turned to stone: the Fall has real and immediate consequences, of which Adam’s Ovidian petrifaction represents an extreme.29 Here, in effect, is the birth of Sin on earth; and, as in the first birth in heaven, a characteristic repetition dilates the moment and registers a kind of double-take. The word “stood” appears twice, in the same syntax (“Astonied stood and blank” and “Speechless stood and pale”); and Adam’s blanching is both mental (psychic blankness) and physical (corporeal pallor). In that paralysis, both hand and rose petals are conjoined in one gravitational fall; in a swift metamorphosis portending the coming of postlapsarian seasons to Eden, a springtime garland succumbs to a wintry chill, and a participle of artistic intent (“wreathed”) gives way to a participle of decay (“faded”). In the revelation of Eve’s sin, a portent of doom is fleshed out, the consequences mapped in miniature. “How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost” (9.900), Adam laments in his unvoiced apostrophe to Eve, using a typical adverb of surprise. Though the narrative anatomizes Eve’s mental and physical steps toward the fall in great detail, the moment itself still seems sudden when it comes, as death itself is inevitably described with this adjective. (“Sudden” is a word with haste and concealment in its history; it comes from the Latin subitus, past participle of the verb subire, to come or go stealthily.) The suddenness of Eve’s fall has partly to do with Milton’s ethical framing of choice, which is never inevitable or fully predictable, and thus always a surprise when it is manifested. It also aptly figures in Milton’s representation of human affect and perception. In the Augustinian distinction, human consciousness is time-bound and subject to fluctuations between obliviousness and acuity, whereas divine attention is atemporal and constant.30 Surprise is a psychic event that pertains to every conscious creature, both human and angel; it is a powerful emotion, a condition of imperfect knowledge, a successive lapse and stab of recognition, a failure of agency, an Ovidian transformation. It is both a physical fall and its cognitive aftermath, the attack and the realization of it. Nothing, finally, that Raphael could say about Satan’s manifestations of surprise—the forza and froda of internecine war— could fully prepare Adam and Eve for the particular set of shocks that visit them; all seem sudden.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 60

1/27/15 8:01 AM

BE I N G A N D F E E L I N G

61

c Milton’s Poetics of Thought The idea of being surprised by sin, as I have hoped to show, takes on extraordinarily complex shadings in Paradise Lost, and in concluding I would like to summarize several of them, in the form of first-person statements that Adam and Eve might make: 1. “I had no idea that eating from the Tree of Knowledge constituted a sin.” This is the self-acquittal that God wants to preempt in sending Raphael to Eden. In a narrow sense, the pretext of “surprisal” is indefensible; but in a larger sense, Adam and Eve do not fully recognize sin until they feel a new and painful sensation of remorse in the aftermath, and the voice of their creator externally confirms that internal change. 2. “I had no graspable concept of ‘sin’ until I did this.” In the moment of the Fall, what had been an empty signifier was filled with previously unknown meaning: this is the kind of surprise that Addison would later associate with the category of Novelty—an expansion of the soul in the presence of new knowledge. 3. “I was warned against this sin, but I never thought that I would commit it.” Here, surprise is a function of rational expectation as it relates to free will; in their fall, Adam and Eve surprise themselves. They discover something in themselves of which they had been unaware. 4. “I was seized by a sinful impulse; I don’t know what came over me.” Milton does not admit the possibility of demonic possession, but he exploits its metaphorical power in his faculty psychology. Moreover, in Milton’s theology, this phenomenon can be understood not as an external seizure but rather as a sudden absence: God’s withdrawal of grace from an agent in the incipient act of committing a sin. 5. “I am now possessed by sin; sinfulness has taken up residence in my being.” This is the trope of possession that informs Milton’s account of original sin. Surprise in this case is a traumatic and irreversible experience whose effects can only be redeemed by Christian salvation. Surprise in Paradise Lost takes a protean array of forms: it is a narratable event, an external provocation, an element of the passions, a bodily state, a rational thought. As a moralist of the passions, Milton was interested in the effect of surprise and its vocabulary: it is a perilous gateway to a more sustained

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 61

1/27/15 8:01 AM

62

CHAPT ER 2

experience of wonder—which variously takes the form of either disabling and idolatrous amazement or curious and reverential awe. As a phenomenologist of the passions, he represents what surprise feels like: the sense of being acted upon or seized from without, the temporal lapse between shock and recognition. Earlier, I mentioned Milton’s philosophical departure from the Cartesian dualism of body and mind; but as Simon Jarvis has reminded us, there are really two bodies in René Descartes’s philosophy—“the objective body, which I may have and which I can myself see and touch,” and “the subjective body, that is to say, the body who I am,” or what Descartes called the res cogitans.31 The Cartesian cogito is not just the act of ratiocination; it is embodied thinking, and includes sensations and emotions such as hunger, terror, desire, and surprise. This sense of the res cogitans is active in Milton’s imagination of what the first human being would say upon waking into the world. “Tell me,” Adam says to all of creation, “how may I know him, how adore, / From whom I have that thus I move and live / And feel that I am happier than I know?” (8.280–82). What Adam gathers that he “has” is not the abstraction “being” or “existence” or “soul” but rather activities or states that can be deictically indicated—moving, living, feeling. The Miltonic acuity of emotional language that can be found throughout Paradise Lost is particularly evident here, in Adam’s distinction between feeling happiness and knowing it. (This is somewhat akin to the Lockean distinction between sensation and reflection, but with the proviso that sensation in Milton’s poetics is a kind of knowledge or wisdom.) The very meaning of happiness takes on different inflections in the presence of these two verbs: one is an emotional state (“I am happy”), the other an ontological one (to be fortunate or blessed, to have good hap); and they are two points on a psychic continuum. The same, as I have hoped to show, can be said of Miltonic surprise: first the feeling, then the cognitive processing of that feeling; first the experience and then the naming of it. It is both an object of thought and the temporal warp of thought itself.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 62

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 3 The Accidental Doctor Physics and Metaphysics in Robinson Crusoe

Surprise is at the heart of one of the earliest English novels; from first to last, it drives the arrhythmic pulse of the narrator’s experiences. The full title of Daniel Defoe’s most famous work is The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719).1 Rather than merely advertising the fantastical, the word “strange” guarantees the veracity of Crusoe’s experiences; in Michael McKeon’s formula for the epistemology of seventeenth-century news ballads and early novels, they are “strange, therefore true.”2 What usually gets overlooked in this phrase, however, is the peculiar role of the “surprizing”: this modifier does not function merely as a synonym for “strange” but rather names its affective register— the emotional response activated by the extraordinary, the inexplicable, or the sudden. The word thus encompasses a wider range of experience, since not everything that is surprising is necessarily strange. The mundane, too, can be arresting. More strongly, it can be perceived as demonic: in the tradition of Milton’s tropes of attack and seizure, Crusoe’s surprise often feels like a form of possession or delusion. Indeed, surprise in Defoe’s novel—in its potent sense of violence, its nexus between gunfire and the satanic, and in its haunted reminders of fallenness—harks back to the world of Paradise Lost. Strangeness could be called a function of literal or figurative space—of things out of place, or not yet conceptually placed within the proper context 63

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 63

1/27/15 8:01 AM

64

CHAPT ER 3

or taxonomy; but surprise is a function of time—of sudden, unexpected events or appearances. A single footprint in the sand is strange in that it was not made by Crusoe but rather left by another person on a putatively desolate island. It is surprising in the way that it ruptures Crusoe’s routine walk to his boat, “one day about noon,” and propels the hero into “a new scene of life” (122); surprising in that it appears not as an inert thing among things but rather as a concussive event, something that happens to the perceiver, who chances to be at the right place at a particular moment in the tidal clock. Surprising, too, in that it betokens a future surprise—the possibility that another body might one day physically attack Crusoe. And since he is the only human perceiver around, the status of the footprint hovers between the real and the hallucinatory; indeed, its appearance on the ever-shifting sand is a ready-made poetic emblem for mutability itself. Finally, the participial ambiguity of the word “surprizing” typifies the presumed intersection of characters and readers in the eighteenth-century novel: both are meant to be jolted out of ordinary patterns of perception and thought. What necessarily distances Crusoe from the reader, however, is the corporeal nature of his surprise. Surprise is, in short, an experience that must be recovered from, a temporary ailment of the passions or bodily spirits; and for Crusoe, the passions are both experiences to be suffered and phenomena to be studied.3 In its most potent form, surprise is a near-death experience, as Defoe’s syntax often implies. It is not only tokens of danger that pose this threat but also sudden rushes of joy or relief—as when Crusoe realizes that he has survived the shipwreck, or when he returns to civilization and discovers his accumulated wealth. Regarding the latter incident, Crusoe says that were it not for a timely draught of spirits, “I believe the sudden surprise of joy had overset Nature, and I had dy’d upon the spot” (224). Recording his experiences on the island, Crusoe is given to describing himself as “like one dead or stupify’d” (65): it is a figurative expression, but never far from the literal. One can really only know what the state of stupefaction looks like in others, so there is an empirical rightness to this formulation. It marks an existential zero-degree—a cessation of life or consciousness, an event horizon that can only be gestured toward. To recover Defoe’s sense of terms such as “surprise” or “astonishment,” consider the way that modern psychiatric diagnoses have become figures of speech: one might be described as “catatonic,” “manic,” or “schizophrenic” without actually suffering from those clinical conditions. Defoe’s novel, then, registers the older, violent senses of surprise in Paradise Lost while anticipating Edmund Burke’s formulation of the Sublime. For Crusoe himself, surprise is seldom pleasant; and yet I also

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 64

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

65

want to suggest that there are a few fleeting glimpses of pleasurable surprise that anticipate concerns that would persist into the Romantic era. In a spiritual context, surprise is essential to the idea of prevenient grace— the premise that God’s divine gift comes before any individual act of will or reason. While Calvinists held that only a small group of the elect would be saved, and radical sects such as the Quakers insisted that grace was available to everyone, Protestants generally agreed that grace was the essential source of good in the world—with the stipulation that the individual could do nothing to make it come. This principle was expressed in what Scott Gordon has called a “rhetoric of waiting”—an openness to the movements of the Spirit.4 That waiting gives rise to a peculiarly Protestant form of negative capability: the believer both expects and does not expect to be saved; one is constantly on the lookout for signs of grace in the world, and yet one is always surprised when they do appear. In that paradoxical situation, surprise can function as both a chastising sign of inattention and an index of authentic humility. In the case of Crusoe, one narrow escape from death does not reassure him that he will always be so delivered; and so each such moment comes as a unique surprise. I am also interested in the adjacency between senses of surprise in the novel: many surprises are taken as legible signs of providence, but still others pose grave threats. The paradox of surprise can be seen in Defoe’s first epiphany of survival: What is Crusoe to make of a surprise of joy that seems to put him into cardiac arrest? If his physical salvation is divinely planned, what would be the purpose in making its duration so brief ? The answer perhaps lies in a kind of existential brinkmanship: surprise can kill, either directly (through physical attack) or indirectly (through emotional response), but Crusoe is repeatedly saved from that fate. I propose that closer attention to the mechanisms of surprise illuminates several salient topics of scholarship on Crusoe. The novel has been read as a crystallization of bourgeois individualism and the rise of industrial capitalism; as a spiritual autobiography rooted in Puritan traditions of introspection and allegory; and, more recently, as a reflection of European imperialism and its forms of exploitation and violence.5 Surprise stands at the intersection of these separate but complementary strands of commentary: in capitalist ideology, it represents an element of the unruly and unpredictable within a regime of regularity and familiarity; in the Puritan tradition, it is the soulshaking jolt necessary for spiritual attentiveness and conversion; and in a Hobbesian world of imperialist adventurism, it is a name for physical ambush and enslavement as well as the mental thrall in which indigenous African and Caribbean peoples are held by modern technologies of domination.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 65

1/27/15 8:01 AM

66

CHAPT ER 3

In the contact between Old World and New, Europeans and non-Europeans can, in different ways, surprise each other. In considering the perennial question of whether Defoe was a “happy secularist” or a more religiously earnest writer, John Richetti has warned that while the application of ideology or intellectual history to the novel can be fruitful, it should not be reduced to a set of ideas or authorial positions.6 Invoking Georg Lukacs’s observation of the “fluctuation” between conceptual system and life as it is lived and represented in literary form, Richetti sees a “dialectic between experience and ideology.”7 The novel as a genre is “committed to the feeling that personal experience is nothing less than some sort of irreducible imponderable,” and it is “uniquely concerned to arrange a kind of participation for its readers in the events being described” (9).8 Surprise is precisely that kind of experience: it is the element of unpredictability and chaos rather than the ideological template or allegorical pattern that Crusoe tries to superimpose upon it. A guiding religious principle that Crusoe adopts might be summarized as “God will provide”; but he continually forgets or doubts this assurance. Indeed, the state of forgetfulness or unawareness enables surprise—which is useful in reminding Crusoe of the religious convictions he thinks he has. In the previous chapter, I identified this structure of feeling as essential to the allegory in The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost. Robinson Crusoe, like that other “R.C.,” the Redcrosse Knight, is vulnerable to perilous but instructive surprise. A wide variety of things, phenomena, and experiences are described as surprises in Crusoe: gunshots; the attack of a Turkish rover; animals (a leopard, a talking parrot, seals, a goat, wolves, a pregnant cat, a bear, and whatever creature eats Crusoe’s grapes); natural occurrences (a thunderstorm, an earthquake, the growth of barley and tree branches); traces of human presence (a footprint, the gory leavings of a cannibals’ feast, a fire, a sail on the horizon); joyful events (the delivery of farm implements, the fact of surviving a shipwreck, a favorable breeze, the arrival of a ship), and even thought itself (self-reproaches, memories of biblical passages, a dream vision). Surprises, then, are both external and internal, both ordinary and extraordinary. I will focus on several emblematic and interrelated species of surprise: the gunshot or detonation of gunpowder; natural phenomena both dangerous (lightning, earthquakes) and benign (the growth and generation of plants and animal life); a single footprint in the sand and the subsequent arrival of a friendly stranger. Finally, I will address the perennial surprise of Crusoe’s own strange—and self-estranging—thoughts. As I have noted in the Introduction to this book, the word “surprise” is unusual in that it can refer to both an interior state and the thing or event that causes

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 66

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

67

that state: we can both feel surprise and describe something objectively as a surprise. That duality is central to my reading of this novel and its poetics of thought: in Crusoe’s narrative, a thought is akin to an external event, shadowed by the same questions of causality. In descriptive language of Crusoe’s surprises, there is a blurring of the boundary between self and world, between the European subject and the non-European other, between the natural and the supernatural, and even between the divine and the satanic.

c The Epistemology of Gunfire In a novel that features numerous forms of combat and capture—slave-trading, kidnapping, piracy, cannibalism—the sense of surprise as violent attack often shadows its sense as affective event. Both meanings, for instance, are active in the episode in which Crusoe sees light from the cannibals’ fire: “I was indeed terribly surpris’d at the sight, and stepp’d short within my grove, not daring to go out, least I might be surpris’d” (144). The repetition of the word registers the turn from a onetime perceptual shock to the hovering fear of being physically overwhelmed; meanwhile, the expectation of an attack drives Crusoe to retreat to his fortification “in a posture of defence,” with his “cannon” loaded (144). The military origins of surprise, then, are not far from Crusoe’s astonishment and ongoing state of alarm. At this point, he has already recoiled from his fantasy of digging a hole under the cannibals’ gathering spot and filling it with gunpowder. In practical terms, he decides that he cannot be sure of “when [the detonation] would surprise them” (134); and in moral terms, he realizes that it is “out of [his] duty” (137) to kill people who have not harmed him. In matters of both omniscience and omnipotence, then, Crusoe decides that he cannot play God. As Claude Rawson has noted, there is a long anecdotal history of gunfire naïvely misconstrued as magic in the literature of colonial conquest;9 but European explorers testified to their own feelings of awe. Columbus’s voyage ushered in what Stephen Greenblatt has called “a century of intense wonder,” in which “European culture experienced something like the ‘startle reflex’ one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole body momentarily convulsed.”10 I would add, however, that as children grow up, they develop psychological defenses against such shocks; likewise, the Europe of Defoe’s time had moved well beyond that earlier moment of infancy. Nevertheless, Crusoe’s narrative, in its twentysix-year arc, could be said to recapitulate the initial wonder of New World encounters. Greenblatt’s metaphor of the “startle reflex” is useful here, for

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 67

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 3

68

the neurological term pertains not only to the experience of infants but also to anyone in the presence of a gunshot. In Crusoe, the sound of gunfire cannot accurately be called a wonder every time it arises, but it always comes as a surprise. As in Milton’s mock-epic analogy between the discovery of a disguised Satan and a nitrous explosion, it is associated with sudden flashes of recognition—and, more broadly, with the postlapsarian condition. The point is not lost on Crusoe, who observes, after shooting a hawk on the island, that his was “the first gun that had been fir’d there since the creation of the world” (44). Like the wonder of New World encounters, the surprise of gunfire has philosophical resonance. It is an aural concussion that bypasses higher cognitive functions; it delivers a jolt even to the one who pulls the trigger. In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) John Locke uses precisely this example to demonstrate what he calls an irreducible “instant”: Let a Cannon-Bullet pass through a Room, and in its way take with it any Limb or fleshy Parts of a Man, ’tis as clear as any Demonstration can be, that it must strike successively the two sides of the Room; it is also evident, that it must touch one part of the Flesh first, and another after; and so in Succession: And yet, I believe, no Body who ever felt the pain of such a shot, or heard the blow against the two distant Walls, could perceive any Succession, either in the pain or sound of so swift a stroke. Such a part of Duration as this, wherein we perceive no Succession, is that which we may call an Instant, and is that which takes up the time of only one Idea in our Minds, without the Succession of another, wherein, therefore, we perceive no Succession at all.11 This illustration, staged in a three-dimensional version of a tabula rasa, shows a distinction between the instantaneous and the successive; but it also exemplifies the mental and physical phenomenon of surprise. In Locke’s example, the perceiver—whether victim or witness—can form no notion of temporal duration, and it is only in calmer reflection that he can spatially map the course of the bullet. In theory, we know that a discharged bullet should strike “two sides” of anything—a wall, a body—but in the moment, we perceive only a single concussion. One chilling implication of Locke’s example is that “succession” might be registered only posthumously, by an outside observer. In effect, the bullet analogy exemplifies the Lockean model of cognition: the sensorium receives an impression of the world, from which the mind forms an idea on which it can reflect. I mention Locke’s example to show how the technology of modern warfare left its mark on a foundational text of Enlightenment philosophy, but

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 68

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

69

also to suggest how surprise figures in Lockean epistemology, and how that model is implicit in Defoe’s novel. Crusoe repeatedly finds himself in the sort of situation that Locke describes: both under assault and reflecting upon the significance of the phenomenon. He is also disposed to consider the terrible significance of bullets passing through other bodies—chiefly human bodies, but occasionally animal bodies as well. From the very beginning of the novel, the gunshot serves as a key topos in an empiricist inquiry into cause and effect. The observer hears a crack and wonders where it came from, or sees a person suddenly fall dead and looks around for the killer. It is an event that is at once both terrifyingly audible and, by virtue of the bullet’s imperceptible path, virtually invisible. The shock of gunfire is an affective common denominator in the novel: both Crusoe and the people he meets are subject to similar terror and astonishment, and in the same descriptive terms. This is not to say that Defoe is engaged in a sustained project of sympathetic identification with non-Europeans; but I do mean to suggest that in the novel’s attention to cognitive and emotional response, some connection or analogy is implicit. As an animal reflex, surprise is a basic subject position available to all, and thus performs a leveling function of sorts; in the grip of astonishment, subjectivity itself is momentarily paralyzed or broken down. At the beginning of the novel, the fright that Crusoe feels at the sound of the ship’s distress signal prefigures the episode in which he terrifies a group of Cape Verdeans in the process of shooting a rampant leopard. The gesture of protection is immediately misinterpreted: “It is impossible to express the astonishment of these poor creatures at the noise and the fire of my gun; some of them were even ready to dye for fear, and fell down dead with very terror” (26).12 In the reference to “poor creatures,” the frightened islanders are aligned with Crusoe’s animal quarry, but in the novel’s perceptual syntax of surprise and fear, Crusoe himself is not exempt from a state of creaturely vulnerability. In his characteristic language of cause and effect, Crusoe precisely accounts for the manner of the leopard’s death in a way that prefigures his own struggle after the shipwreck: “he immediately made to the shore, but between the wound which was his mortal hurt, and the strangling of the water, he dyed just before he reach’d the shore” (26). There is not only a reality effect of keenly observed detail here, but what might be called the pathos of the threshold—the fact that the animal expires in the waves a moment before it touches land. Narrating his own experience, Crusoe gives a similarly vivid account of his attempt to reach land, charting the tidal frustrations of alternately approaching and retreating from the shore, mindful that he might be “strangled in the water” and “swallow[ed]” whole (38).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 69

1/27/15 8:01 AM

70

CHAPT ER 3

The leopard’s death and Crusoe’s near-death are recapitulated in a bizarrely comic coda at the end of the novel: on a journey through the Spanish wilderness, Friday kills a bear to protect Crusoe’s traveling party, and does so with the asymptotic logic of the novel’s twists of fate. Just as it is descending from a tree, “and just before he could set his hind feet on the ground, Friday stept up close to him, clapt the muzzle of his piece into his ear, and shot him dead as a stone” (233). The detail of the bear’s location primarily indicates the sprezzatura with which Friday laughs in the face of danger and entertains the group, but it also reflects a larger sense of arbitrariness in the novel: the inscrutability of a Providence for which Crusoe feels a mixture of gratitude and fear. Though the passage does not directly solicit pity for the bear or lament human cruelty, it does make a point about all creaturely death, the metamorphosis of a living being into “stone”—the inert state foreshadowed by all moments of extreme astonishment in the novel. In using a modern instrument of warfare and assuming the role of deliverer that Crusoe had performed in West Africa, Friday demonstrates his conversion to the language, practices, and religion of white Europeans. And yet Defoe hastens to show that the strategy of Friday’s surprise attack is universal: his killing of the bear is represented as a cultural hybrid of modern technology and ancient hunting methods. In structural terms, the precise placement of the blast in the bear’s ear thematically echoes the novel’s long and varied series of aural shocks, which begin with the crack of gunfire on a ship caught in a storm. The narrative of Crusoe’s long and errant journey is ushered in and out by the firing of a gun.

c What the Thunder Said After Crusoe rescues Friday from his captors, the latter describes the effect that his deliverer’s gunfire must have had on them: “they would tell their people they were all kill’d by thunder and lightning, not by the hand of man”—“for it was impossible to them to conceive that a man could dart fire, and speak thunder, and kill at a distance” (191). Crusoe himself is admonished by the voice of thunder, which he associates with the explosion of gunpowder; indeed, thunder and lightning are the natural (or seemingly supernatural) counterparts of gunfire. The etymology of “astonished”—to be literally thunderstruck—was surely not lost on Defoe. In the early days of Crusoe’s arrival on the island, the relationship between meteorology and cognition is signally played out:

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 70

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

71

a sudden flash of lightning happen’d, and after that a great clap of thunder, as is naturally the effect of it; I was not so much surpris’d with the lightning, as I was with the thought which darted into my mind as swift as the lightning it self: O my powder! My very heart sunk within me, when I thought, that at one blast all my powder might be destroy’d (49) It seems gratuitous to mention that thunder follows lightning, but it is an empirical compulsion of the novel to register sequence and causality, with respect to both familiar and strange alike. The observational syntax also prepares the way for a more important surprise: both the external sound of thunder and the internal voicing of a thought follow from the lightning, and strike simultaneously. The scene is, in effect, a case study in the cognitive philosophy of the novel: the idea that thought in itself is a phenomenon, a seemingly involuntary impulse. And in this instance, the thought is about gunpowder—the human approximation of the Jovian thunderbolt. In an ensuing meditation on Providence, Crusoe counts among his blessings the fact that he has survived and that the thought of his “powder being blown up by lightning” has served as a divine warning (52).13 This event is temporarily forgotten and later recalled in a moment of purely mental surprise. In the midst of a self-pitying meditation on “why Providence should thus compleatly ruin its creatures, and render them so absolutely miserable,” Crusoe says, something always return’d swift upon me to check those thoughts, and to reprove me; and particularly one day walking with my gun in my hand by the sea-side, I was very pensive upon the subject of my present condition, when reason as it were expostulated with me t’other way, thus: Well, you are in a desolate condition, ’tis true, but pray remember, Where are the rest of you? Did you not come eleven of you into the boat, where are the ten? (51) A mysterious “something” prevents further despair, perhaps the faculty of “reason as it were.” With that idiomatic qualification, Defoe draws attention to the figurative nature of this anatomy of thought: for lack of a better word, reason is named as the impetus of this train of ideas, and personified as the adversarius that engages Crusoe in dialogue. The phrase “as it were” reminds us that Crusoe has no one to expostulate with, even as it holds out the possibility that there might be some greater power at work that sparks these sudden thoughts. By wishful implication, it is not Reason alone that saves Crusoe, but the hints and warnings that God drops in his path.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 71

1/27/15 8:01 AM

72

CHAPT ER 3

In this case, the back-and-forth debate can be seen as a form of interior narration; but it could also be literally vocalized. Elsewhere in the novel, we are made to know that Crusoe really does talk to himself, to inanimate objects, and to animals. For instance, his apostrophe to the seemingly useless money salvaged from the ship is actually uttered: “O drug! said I aloud, what art thou good for?” (47). Again a few pages later, his calculation of his chances of survival as “an hundred thousand to one,” is said “aloud” (51). In lyric poetry, as Jonathan Culler has observed, the apostrophe has always had an indeterminate status—often naturalized by readers as a form of description rather than appreciated in its peculiarity as a specialized form of poetic speech.14 In the world of Crusoe, it is both a literary convention and a psychological reality.15 It is fitting that the scene of internally recollected lightning and blurted gratitude marks Crusoe’s new determination to double back and begin his autobiographical account anew. It is as if Crusoe’s spontaneous utterance has made the silence and solitude sharper. The temporal adjunct to Crusoe’s journal project—the work of making daily notches on a cruciform post—is another sudden flash of inspiration: “it came into my thoughts, that I should lose my reckoning of time for want of books and pen and ink” (52). “A sudden flash of lightning happen’d”; “it came into my thoughts”: these are interrelated weather reports of external and internal events. In the absence of ritualized prayer, they are substitutes for the voice of God.

c Barley Shoots: The Afterlife of Wonder Like the lightning, sudden growth and generation in the natural world have the capacity to astonish Crusoe and serve as an aperture into a larger providential design. The symbolically related phenomena of gunfire and lightning induce an astonishment that prefigures the Burkean Sublime; but there are also wonders of the earth that would fall under the heading of the Beautiful, though typically attended by a sense of utility. In an emblematic episode, Crusoe comes back to his “country-house” (86) one day to find that the stakes he had made out of trees “were all shot out and grown with long branches.” “I was surpris’d,” he reports, “and yet very well pleas’d, to see the young trees grow” (84). The adversative “and yet” reminds us how often surprises give the opposite of pleasure; but in this case, the discovery of Nature’s assistance in landscape design leads to a moment of genuine aesthetic wonder (“it is scarce credible how beautiful a figure they grew into in

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 72

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

73

three years” [84]) and an appreciation of utility (“it was a compleat shade, sufficient to lodge under all the dry season” [84]). The sudden appearance of barley on the island is a similar moment of astonishment with a more complicated anatomy of cognition. The discovery dawns on Crusoe in perceptual stages, from a mysterious “something” to a weirdly familiar token of home: I saw some few stalks of something green, shooting out of the ground, which I fancy’d might be some plant I had not seen, but I was surpris’d and perfectly astonish’d, when, after a little longer time, I saw about ten or twelve ears come out, which were perfect green barley of the same kind as our European, nay as our English barley. (63) Though nothing could be more ordinary than English barley, it is strange in this context—literally out of place, like Crusoe himself. Crusoe imagines that “God had miraculously caus’d this grain to grow without any help of seed sown” (63), and the upwelling of feeling kinesthetically tallies with the surge of green shoots: “This touch’d my heart a little, and brought tears out of my eyes” (64). What exactly touched him? Perhaps the hand of God, but Crusoe is too tentative to make this claim directly. On a scale of intensity, the experience of being “touched” can be called a milder and more benign counterpart to the often violent or disturbing sensation of being “surprised.” Indeed, Crusoe’s whole experience on the island oscillates between these two extremes—between gentle inspiration and mortal shocks. Notably, both “touched” and “surprised” are participial adjectives that describe internal feelings while implying an external stimulus or agency. The outside force might be natural or supernatural, divine or demonic; and that ambiguity, becomes an important component of the novel’s cognitive poetics and spiritual reckonings.16 The problem raised by the barley episode is that surprise and admiration are passing states of feeling. Some shocks are absorbed into a new and enlarged picture of the world; but the waning of others causes a kind of spiritual forgetfulness. When Crusoe realizes that the barley sprouted from a bag of chickenfeed, he reports with regret, “then wonder began to cease” (64). Sudden appearances are constantly surprising Crusoe, but the childlike wonder of them soon fades; and that process of disenchantment is nowhere more starkly registered than in the “astonishment” of seeing his cat return home with three kittens. The new arrivals grow up and breed more cats, and Crusoe reports that he was forced to kill them (82). It is a bracing symptom of his materialist imagination that Defoe pursues the implications of that first

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 73

1/27/15 8:01 AM

74

CHAPT ER 3

cheering discovery of kittens; he does not rest content with an anecdote about the Edenic multiplication of God’s creatures. Nothing is beautiful or wonderful in itself: people, things, and other creatures exist in complex interrelationships; spontaneous generation has different meanings, depending on whether the living thing is a barley shoot or a cat. In the case of the barley, Crusoe must train himself to recover a sense of the miraculous—a sustained awe replacing a more ephemeral surprise. “I ought to have been as thankful for so strange and unforeseen Providence, as if it had been miraculous,” he reflects, “for it was really the work of Providence to remain unspoil’d” (64). After the disenchantment of natural explanation, Crusoe engages in a willed act of reimagination. The barley has materialized, he says, “as if it had been dropt from Heaven,” like manna, or a thunderbolt; and the poetic torque of the simile opens just enough space for skepticism and faith—the purely random casting of seed on fertile ground and the guidance of an invisible hand. When Crusoe tries to duplicate the miracle by spreading more seed, however, he interprets his subsequent failure not as a divine rebuke but rather as the mishap of a novice who sows just before the dry season. While Crusoe wants to believe that the barley is a providential miracle, Defoe and his hero are pragmatic enough to insist on the contributory role of human planning; in a novel absorbed in faithful temporal reckonings, Crusoe realizes that his error lay in “not observing the proper time” (64). Rational explanation does not, however, dispel the haunting power of Crusoe’s experience. In a novel that is itself a memory book, the barley episode stands out as a salvific experience to be revisited. Later, after Crusoe has become his own baker and marvels at the artisanal process of labor that goes into his literal “daily bread,” he reiterates the marvel of “the first handful of seed-corn, which, as I have said, came up unexpectedly, and indeed to a surprise” (94). Amid seemingly random events, the thunderstorm and the barley are linked in a causal chain: the flash of lightning caused Crusoe’s determination to separate the gunpowder into separate parcels, and to do so by emptying feedbags that seemingly contained only husks and dust; in an echo of Jesus’s parable, Crusoe becomes an accidental sower but tells himself that there are no accidents. His deliberate recollection of the first barley shoots has an obvious religious purpose: it is a spiritual exercise in mindfulness and gratitude for the first promptings toward agriculture. Crusoe’s exercise can also be called proto-aesthetic, in that it discloses what Joseph Addison called “the pleasures of the imagination.” Choosing his modifiers carefully, Crusoe describes the barley as growing “unexpectedly” and “even to a surprise”: the first suggests a function of probability, the second

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 74

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

75

describes an affective response—one of the first surprises in the novel that is not attended by some kind of fear or trembling. By making this point, I wish to qualify a prevailing line of thought about Defoe’s character as a Puritan homo economicus devoid of aesthetic sensibilities. Virginia Woolf famously remarked that Crusoe sees the world through “shrewd, middle-class, unimaginative eyes.”17 Similarly, Ian Watt observes in Crusoe a “blindness to aesthetic experience”: “wherever Crusoe looks his acres cry out so loud for improvement that he has no leisure to observe that they also compose a landscape” (70). But this is to hold Crusoe to a later standard: at the time of Defoe’s writing, the Picturesque was a newly emerging idiom; and since Crusoe keeps his journal in the latter decades of the seventeenth century, it is not surprising that he would not see “landscapes” everywhere. Nevertheless, Crusoe’s recording of experience bears some affinities to Addisonian aesthetics: the attention to surprise and accidental effects, the openness to what Defoe calls “a secret kind of pleasure” (80), the finding of solace in a remembered experience.18 Both Addison and Crusoe believe in the possibility of training the mind in ways of responding to the world. The novelty of finding English barley shoots in the middle of a Caribbean island recalls an anecdote that Addison tells about planting wildflowers within an otherwise formal English garden. Indeed, the anecdotes are mirror images of each other: Crusoe finds a sign of European cultivation within a New World wilderness, while Addison simulates an effect of wildness within a horticulturally plotted space. “When a Stranger walks with me,” Addison writes in an epistolary essay in “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” “he is surprised to see several large Spots of Ground covered with ten thousand different Colours, and has often singled out Flowers that he might have met with under a common Hedge, in a Field, or in a Meadow, as some of the greatest Beauties of the Place.”19 For Addison, the pleasure is mutual: while the Stranger delights in a serendipitous discovery, the Gardener derives satisfaction in witnessing that surprise—thus savoring the aesthetic afterlife of his original design. For Crusoe, however, the pleasure of discovery is solitary—he cannot share his experience with anyone or ask what it means—but its uncanny singularity brings up a similar issue of design. Is the barley accidental or deliberate? A sign of previous human cultivation or divine intervention? Is it somehow intended for Crusoe, and if so, does his response matter to a divine and invisible hearer, in the way that the Stranger’s delight matters to Addison? By drawing this comparison between Crusoe’s and Addison’s anecdotes, I mean not only to identify a similar and contemporaneous interest in the “strange and surprising” but also to highlight a difference between solitary and socialized

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 75

1/27/15 8:01 AM

76

CHAPT ER 3

surprise, between Crusoe’s anxious and haunted imagination and Addison’s ideal of “polite imagination.” The surprise of the barley can be safely explained and tucked away for later enjoyment; but another token of human presence in the novel, one that also seems to spring spontaneously from the ground, cannot be so treated. I turn next to what is undoubtedly the most famous surprise in the novel, the footprint in the sand. It is a visual shock with a different and longer afterlife than the shoot of English barley; and in a world of signs pointing toward God, the source and meaning of this one cannot be so confidently interpreted.

c Surprised by Satan: The Case of the Footprint In the language of Defoe’s title, the footprint that Crusoe finds on the far side of his island is both strange and surprising. In objective terms, it is, like the barley, both familiar and seemingly out of place; and in affective terms, it induces what Crusoe calls a “terror of mind.”20 Surprise, as we have seen, typically jolts Crusoe out of himself, in a two-step process of petrifaction and recovery. In this instance, the effect of estrangement is even more potent, for it makes Crusoe see himself as an Other in relation to whatever creature left its mark; it frightens him into imagining a metaphysical other to God; and it causes him to flee “like one pursued,” as if the merest outline of a foot could conjure up the whole person, and one step could multiply into a predatory sprint. “I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an apparition,” Crusoe says in a proverbial locution, and “after innumerable fluttering thoughts, like a man perfectly confus’d and out of myself, I came home to my fortification, not feeling, as we say, the ground I went on, but terrify’d to the last degree, looking behind me at every two or three steps, mistaking every bush and tree, and fancying every stump at a distance to be a man” (122). The shock of finding the print gives way to the fear of a physical attack, the notion “that the island might be inhabited, and I might be surpris’d before I was aware” (126). Crusoe’s alternation between third-person simile (“like one thunderstruck,” “like a man perfectly confus’d”) and first-person description (“as if I had seen,” “out of myself”) registers this self-estrangement. As the qualifier “as we say” indicates, Crusoe often watches himself resorting to conventional formulae of surprise (being thunderstruck, seeing a ghost, not feeling the earth), knowing all the while that his experience is sui generis. As David Marshall has noted, the footprint is often misremembered by readers as Friday’s, as if to find a reassuring explanation for the uncanny; it could have

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 76

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

77

been made by Friday, but no such causality is ever established.21 Nevertheless, I would like to propose a less obvious, allegorical connection between the footprint and Friday, between physical trace and human subject: the contemplation of satanic agency in a world of divine guidance. In short, the footprint shocks Crusoe into a sense of the demonic, and Friday surprises Crusoe into a theological consideration of Satan. Unlike the thunderstorm, the earthquake, or the barley, the footprint does not get immediately assimilated as a providential sign. “Thus my fear banished all my religious hope,” Crusoe says, “all that former confidence in God, which was founded on such wonderful experience as I had had of his goodness, now vanish’d, as if he that had fed me by miracle hitherto, could not preserve by his power the provision which he had made for me by his goodness” (123–24). The barleycorn literally feeds Crusoe while it nourishes Crusoe’s faith, just as Jesus’s multiplication of loaves and fishes sustained and inspired his followers; but the footprint offers no such sustenance. It is the only surprise in the novel that is speculatively attributed to the work of the Devil, a hostile alien presence rather than a potentially friendly one; and I would like to address why Crusoe is motivated to make that association and how he dispels it. First, its possibly demonic nature is grounded in the premise that Satan is a shape-shifter who can assume human form; and like the surprise of Sin in Paradise Lost, its appearance is associated with the illusory, the deceptive, and the violent; to Crusoe, it feels like a snare meant just for him. And yet it is not immediately obvious what kind of trap this might be. The invocation of Satan’s presence would be more understandable in the scene in which Crusoe discovers a cache of gold coins and apostrophizes it as a drug. Even then, the discovery of gold underscores an irony of the capitalist’s isolation rather than presenting a real prospect of corruption; like the wreckage itself, Crusoe’s epiphany is a reminder of the world he has left behind, a morality tale that has lost its use value. If Satan is chiefly a tempter, what exactly would the footprint be tempting Crusoe toward? It might lead him to seek out the source of the footprint and surprise the imagined foe before the Other can surprise him. In this way, the footprint would be akin to the firelight that frightens Crusoe into contemplating an act of preemptive terrorism against the cannibals. On an epistemological level, the afterimage of the single footprint in the sand causes Crusoe to doubt his own perceptions; and in psychological terms, it leads him into brooding and despair. If it is a satanic device, it might be designed to drive Crusoe to madness and suicide. Though self-murder is never directly mentioned, it surely looms in Crusoe’s darkest moments.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 77

1/27/15 8:01 AM

78

CHAPT ER 3

In other surprising experiences in the novel, rational explanation threatens to dissolve a religious sense of wonder and gratitude; but here, that same faculty has the salvific effect of drawing Crusoe back from an existential brink. More specifically, he resorts to the discourse of probability. First, the footprint can just as easily be framed as a reassuring absence as terrifying presence—a fortunately missed encounter with the foot’s owner. Crusoe thus resolves to be “thankful in my thoughts” for being elsewhere at the time the print was made, probably by “savages of the main land” (123). Second, he realizes that he is not the only one subject to the vagaries of circumstance and the law of probabilities. In considering whether his sighting of the footprint is an accidental, natural evident or a deliberate, demonic one, Crusoe draws a distinction between the actuarial powers of Satan and God: “ ‘twas ten thousand to one whether I should ever see it or not, and in the sand, too” (123). And since Satan is subject to the same odds as everyone else, it is unlikely that he would waste his effort on making a mark so little guaranteed to have the intended emotional impact. The realization that Satan could never have precisely planned this moment—the convergence of footprint and solitary walker in time and space—strangely recalls an earlier epiphany of probability. Crusoe’s decision against trying to massacre the cannibals is predicated on the practical consideration that he could not be certain of the exact placement of a bomb blast, as well as on the moral imperative not to harm those who have not harmed or threatened to harm him. Defoe does not explicitly suggest that killing the cannibals in this way would be a satanic act, but on a subliminal level, it surely is. Defoe himself posited the existence of Satan in various writings, though he was always ambivalent about the attribution of human events to an archfiend. For Defoe, as for Milton before him, the true moral focus ought to be on human inclination and action, not supernatural causes; and this is the ultimate lesson of the footprint episode. Like the illusory figure of Sin in Paradise Lost, the imagined agency of Satan beguiles the beholder; but Satan has not literally caused the footprint; its haunting imprint in the mind only seems diabolical. The problem of Satanic agency so preoccupied Defoe that he had his hero revisit the matter in the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, in an excursus entitled, “A Vision of the Angelic World.” In calm philosophical retrospect, Crusoe looks back on the “apparitions” he perceived on the island as the effect of “hypochondriac delusion.”22 In essence, a metaphysical problem is rooted in a physical explanation: in Crusoe’s self-diagnosis, even after a demonic creature turns out to be merely a goat, “the sudden surprise of my spirits” leaves a residue in the body; “the vapours that were raised at first were never so laid but that on every trifling occasion they returned; and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 78

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

79

I say, nay, I felt apparitions as plainly and distinctly as ever I felt or saw any substance in my life” (252). Similarly, a “distemper” in the leg seems at first like a demon’s seizure of it; and yet here, the medical explanation does not entirely put Crusoe at ease, for a minor ailment opens up the more terrifying prospect of “a dead palsy” (255) that would render him incapable of finding food. In allegorical terms, Satan is replaced by Death, the supernatural by Nature in all its pitiless operations. In the Serious Reflections, Crusoe ultimately tries to reason himself out of his fear of Satan through an appeal to probability: why would the devil consider it to be “worth his while” (255) to come to this particular island to vex him? The implicit assumption here is that Satan, unlike God, can be in only one place at a time; indeed, in an “imaginary journey” beyond the solar system that Crusoe describes here, he finds Satan out in the “boundless waste,” and considers that his “busy restless inclination has posted him there, that he may affront God in His government of the world, and do injury to mankind in mere envy to his happiness, as the famed Mr. Milton says it” (275– 76). It is surely no accident that Satan’s restlessness recalls Crusoe’s own inclination to wander, so that the question about probability could be recast: What are the chances that I, a nomadic voyager randomly washed up on this island, should happen upon the peripatetic Satan? More troublingly, the question comes dangerously close to a related theological problem: Why would God find it worth his while to save Crusoe from death—not once, but several times? Defoe offers no definitive way out of this perplexity. Though Crusoe believes in the existence of Satan, he never definitively attributes any event to demonic agency. Rather, the contemplation of Satan brings a rigor to Crusoe’s ongoing activity of finding providential signs in the natural world; by an act of interpretive will, the troubling possibility is raised and rejected. It is only with the arrival of Friday that Crusoe’s ideas about Satan can be articulated and challenged. It is only in conversation with Friday that Crusoe reveals his belief that Satan has “secret access to our passions, and to our affections” (172); and given that Crusoe’s journal entries offer precisely that access, the disclosure is an unsettling one. In essence, Friday’s answering human presence means that Satan is no longer a secret eavesdropper or ambushing instigator but rather a subject of rational discussion. In that transformation, a human interlocutor becomes the new—and welcome—agent of surprise, and surprise itself turns rhetorical rather than physical. Friday’s simple question catches Crusoe off guard: “if God much strong, much might as the Devil, why God no kill Devil so make him no more do wicked?” (172). “I was strangely surpris’d at his question,” Crusoe admits, “and after all, tho’

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 79

1/27/15 8:01 AM

80

CHAPT ER 3

I was now an old man, yet I was but a young doctor, and ill enough qualify’d for a casuist, or solver of difficulties” (172). As with most surprises in the novel, Crusoe requires some time to be “recovered” from the shock of the query; meanwhile, his claim of being no “casuist” places him in the role of an amateur and everyman merely seeking the truth. In the narrow (and nonpejorative) sense of the term, a casuist follows what G.A. Starr has articulated as “the principle that every ethical problem must be approached on its own terms” rather than under a universal law or principle.23 As Starr has shown, Defoe was deeply influenced by Protestant casuistry, and fashioned his narratives as episodic case studies in matters of conscience; but here, he uses the term “casuist” in a much broader sense, as almost synonymous with “solver of difficulties.” The real difficulty posed by Friday’s Socratic line of questioning does not involve casuistry so much as theodicy; and Crusoe recovers enough from his shock to answer that God will punish Satan severely, and that “nothing but divine Revelation” can form the knowledge of divine redemption (172–73). In asking why God does not kill Satan right now, Friday unwittingly illuminates a distinction between earthly time and eternity. Satan is not like one of Friday’s cannibalistic adversaries, and the appointed day of retribution cannot be notched on Crusoe’s calendrical staff. (The same category mistake is made in Paradise Lost, when Adam presumes that Satan will be vanquished in a kind of Jacobean revenge plot.) Presumably, Crusoe has a metaphysical understanding of time that Friday at this point lacks; but the latter’s question is poignant, for it verges uncomfortably close to another temporal matter: Crusoe’s agonizingly indefinite stay on the island, and the question of when he might be delivered from it. It is no wonder, then, that the surprises of Friday’s questions have a pedagogical serendipity: “in laying things open to him,” Crusoe reflects, “I really inform’d and instructed myself in many things” (173). I have suggested that Friday helps Crusoe to explain his own views about evil and satanic agency, but it could also be said that his companionship enables a kind of exorcism. In the retrospect of the Serious Reflections, Crusoe effectively credits Friday’s appearance as the antidote to his hallucinations. It would have been easy, he says, to continue in the fear that he lived in an enchanted island, “that there were a million of spirits in it, and that the devil was lord of the manor”; but “having company to talk to, the hypo wore off and I did not see any more devils after that” (257).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 80

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

81

c Invisible Directions and the “Converse of Spirits”

Questions about the lone footprint—whether it is satanic or natural, real or hallucinated, accidental or intentional—open a larger and equally vexing set of questions about the source and direction of Crusoe’s thoughts. In several key episodes, surprise is caused by a discrete, external stimulus, but it also has a more mysterious internal component. It is not only an event in the world but also a volatile mental state: Crusoe’s thoughts and feelings have the status of natural facts—phenomena to be recorded, observed, speculated about. Just as he professes to be no “casuist” in the realm of metaphysics, Crusoe says that he is not enough of a “naturalist” to explain the operations of the mind (149). There are limits to his understanding of two invisible realms: both the divinely ordered workings of the world and inscrutable operations of the soul. Both can be subsumed under the category of Nature, and both are associated with the key word “secret.” Crusoe’s stance as nonnaturalist has strategic value: it allows for serendipitous discoveries; it identifies Crusoe as an ordinary sinner subject to error and misprision; and it frees him from claiming to understand God’s design. Here, for instance, Crusoe reflects on the inner perturbation caused by the sudden sight of a Spanish ship in distress: There are some secret moving springs in the affections, which when they are set a going by some object in view, or be it some object, though not in view, yet render’d present to the mind by the power of imagination, that motion carries out the soul by its impetuosity to such violent eager embracings of the object, that the absence of it is insupportable.” (149) This is a fundamentally Lockean, materialist account of emotion as a function of physical motion. Memory, imagination, and desire are activated when “secret moving springs” in the psyche are “set a going” by some external stimulus. Notably, Crusoe’s ambiguous description of those springs as “moving” leaves upon the question of whether they are dormant until impelled from without or always already in motion. In either case, the Prime Mover is not immediately invoked, and the ship on the horizon is not immediately interpreted as a sign of deliverance. It is understandable that the sight of the ship would work so powerfully on Crusoe; he sees it as his deliverance from the island, and he longs for human company. So violent is the wish—so tight the intertwinement of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 81

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 3

82

body and soul—that Crusoe finds himself grinding his hands together and gnashing his teeth, in an extreme state of passion: Let the naturalists explain these things, and the reason and manner of them; all I can say to them, is, to describe the fact, which was even surprising to me when I found it; though I knew not from what it should proceed; it was doubtless the effect of ardent wishes, and of strong ideas form’d in my mind, realizing the comfort, which the conversation of one of my fellow-Christians would have been to me. (149) What more could a “naturalist” add to Crusoe’s account of cognition and causality? Perhaps a hypothesis about the mechanism of transmission—the invisible nexus between thought and physical movement, between thought and matter, and between human plan and providential design.24 By stopping short of such speculation, Crusoe deliberately represents himself as a journalist of his own life, a generalist rather than a specialist. The novel is driven by philosophical, moral, and theological ideas, but they must seem to arise organically, like a barley shoot—by surprise rather than by premeditated design. By professing to be neither casuist nor natural philosopher, Crusoe straddles the line between a wholly materialist account of his experience and a providential one. The disclaimer, “Let the naturalists explain these things,” functions in two ways. In one sense, it suggests that the experts can understand what Crusoe cannot. And yet it also implies a defiant challenge to the explanatory powers of one specialized domain of inquiry: let the naturalists try to explain these things, but there will always be something lacking in their account. The disclaimer also enables Crusoe to avoid making a direct claim for providential intervention or wish fulfillment. For the sudden hint or gift in this episode radically differs from the serendipity of a barley shoot: what Crusoe salvages from the wrecked Spanish galleon are the possessions of dead men. In the path of Crusoe’s thoughts, the desire for human companionship turns into a mission of rescue, which in turn becomes a salvage effort. Crusoe cannot claim outright that the ship’s booty is the reward for his humanitarian impulse, nor does he draw out the implication that if God wants him to survive and prosper, he must do so through the sacrifice of other human beings. Crusoe can only tentatively grasp at metaphysical explanation, as in this explanation of why he felt compelled to sail out to the ship: “I thought the impression was so strong in my mind, that it could not be resisted, that it must come from some invisible direction, and that I should be wanting to my self if I did not go” (149).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 82

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

83

The trope of indelible impression suggests a Lockean account of cognition, but the hint of an “invisible direction”—and the possibility that the mental impression is divinely given—departs from that empirical model. Elsewhere, Crusoe suggests that “secret hints, or pressings of my mind” lead him toward safety and prosperity rather than ruin; and in his time on the island he has learned a sort of wise passiveness, a keener sensitivity to the world, an openness to surprise. Such monitory and salvific “pressure” in the psyche, he concludes, is “proof of the converse of spirits, and the secret communication between those embody’d, and those unembody’d” (139). In the episode of the Spanish galleon, that spiritual converse might imply an occult connection to the souls of sailors in distress, or to some divine or angelic intimation. Whatever the source, the reference to “some invisible direction” spiritualizes Crusoe’s meteorological obsession with wind and currents. As he gazes at the wrecked ship the morning after the storm has passed, Crusoe speculates that it must have met the same calamity that his own ship did many years before, and in the same area where a swift current had later almost carried Crusoe in his little homemade boat out to sea. The shoal on which the ship foundered, he realizes with wonder, is the same one that created the “counter-stream” that brought his boat back to safety (147). Thus, a mass of submerged rock, an emblem of inert thingness, marks a jagged line between two different outcomes; it serves as an emblem for the caprices of fate. Before his explorations of the island, the rocks and currents had been just as invisible to Crusoe as they were to the unfortunate Spanish sailors; and so it is with self-referential poignancy that Crusoe describes the men, “whoever they were,” as “being out of their knowledge” (147). They must have been “hurry’d away by the current that I had formerly been in” (148); but when he launches on his rescue/salvage mission, he fortunately slips into a current that “did not so hurry me as the southern side current had done before, and so as to take from me all government of the boat” (151). Both Crusoe and the strangers on the ship are hurried along by currents that they imperfectly understand. The word “hurry” is especially significant in that it describes both external forces and internal feelings; it denotes the involuntary and unpredictable—the feeling of being surprised or impelled. Early in the novel, “hurry” figures in Crusoe’s description of the mysterious impulse that led him away from home and family. The decision to go on the first fateful voyage is driven by an inexplicable “inclination” (5) which is sustained against the reasoned advice of parents and friends, and the tempest that he encounters on this journey causes a countercurrent of regret and repentance. But it is one that quickly subsides:

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 83

1/27/15 8:01 AM

CHAPT ER 3

84

In a word, as the sea was returned to its smoothness of surface and settled calmness by the abatement of that storm, so the hurry of my thoughts being over, my fears and apprehensions of being swallow’d up by the sea being forgotten, and the current of my former desires return’d, I entirely forgot the vows and promises I made in my distress. The fear of being “swallowed up”—whether by sea or by cannibal—haunts the novel, but in a canny inversion, the idiomatic phrase pertains to the death of the fears themselves. A hurry of fearful thoughts gives way to a prevailing current of desire, and when Crusoe embarks on his next voyage, it is as if the buffetings of the storm had stirred a restlessness in his soul: “I know not what to call this, nor will I urge, that it is a secret over-ruling decree that hurries us on to be the instruments of our own destruction, even tho’ it be before us, and that we rush upon it with our eyes open” (13–14). And exactly eight years from the date of Crusoe’s first departure from Hull, that movement still has not abated: “But I was hurried on, and obey’d blindly the dictates of my fancy rather than my reason” (34). Once Crusoe has arrived on the island, it is the hurried business of survival that keeps him from calmer moments of reflection. Indeed, it is only the abatement of “hurry” that enables the act of beginning a diary: “And now it was when I began to keep a journal of every day’s employment, for indeed at first I was in too much hurry, and not only hurry as to labour, but in too much discomposure of mind, and my journal would ha’ been full of many dull things” (56). Here and elsewhere, “hurry” describes both the body in motion and the mind in perturbation; and neither kind of movement is necessarily boon or curse. On the one hand, Crusoe describes a cry to God in his sickness as the effect of “these hurries of my soul” (73); on the other hand, after the discovery of a footprint induces a fear that banishes all religious hope, Crusoe marvels, “by what secret springs are the affections hurry’d about, as differing circumstances present!” Such, he concludes, is “the uneven state of human life” (124). It is not just life’s circumstances that are uneven; thought itself is impelled by the crosscurrents of a mysterious “something.” That dynamic is epitomized in Crusoe’s early reflections on his survival on the island. First, he rationalizes “that is was possible for me to be more happy in this forsaken solitary condition, than it was probable I should ever have been in any particular state in the world”; and it is with this thought that he prepares to offer a prayer of thanksgiving. But that religious lyric impulse is strangely countered by another kind of mental voicing:

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 84

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

85

I know not what it was, but something shock’d my mind at that thought, and I durst not speak the words: How canst thou be such a hypocrite, (said I, even audibly) to pretend to be thankful for a condition, which however thou may’st endeavour to be contented with, thou would’st rather pray heartily to be deliver’d from.” (91) So disturbing is the critique of religious bromides that Crusoe “durst not speak the words,” and yet he does, “even audibly”—as if the “something” that surprises his thoughts were a chastising external voice that he were merely echoing. It is a silent thought of good fortune that composes Crusoe’s mind for prayer, but it is the supplicant’s own strange voice that rudely supervenes on that intention.

c Risk Management There is no better gloss on the flux of circumstance and thought in Defoe’s novel, its constant pulse of surprise, than Thomas Hobbes’s comment that “there is no such thing as perpetuall Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.”25 That principle of restlessness within and perpetual motion without, evident throughout the novel, is confirmed in the end. It is a coda of random violence that seems designed as a reminder that nature is everywhere red in tooth and claw, and that what Hobbes calls “Felicity” (“Continuall successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth”) is never certain in this world. When Crusoe’s party is “greatly surpris’d” (235) by a bear and a pack of wolves in the wilderness of the Pyrenees, the reader both is and is not surprised. Insofar as Crusoe devotes so many pages to what happens after his deliverance from the island, we expect narratable—that is, surprising—incidents; and yet these encounters are still striking in their sheer excess. One point of these incidents is surely surprise itself: that is, the frustration of Crusoe’s expectation that he will avoid danger by traveling over land rather than risking the peril of another ocean voyage. The horrific sight of a horse carcass and two halfdevoured men represents a return of the repressed, an afterimage of the cannibalism Crusoe glimpsed on the island; and the men’s preemptive slaughter of the wolves with pistols and swords turns the wood into a “field of battle” (237). It is surely no accident that Crusoe describes a confrontation with wild animals in terms that evoke forms of violence in both Europe and the New

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 85

1/27/15 8:01 AM

86

CHAPT ER 3

World. Indeed, it seems a deliberately Miltonic gesture: the rhetorical intrusion of a postlapsarian idea into a putatively Edenic space. Danger is unavoidable, and the flaw in Crusoe’s attempt at risk management is exposed when people in Toulouse declare that the traveling party’s guide should have known better about the wolves. In probabilistic terms that Crusoe himself has used, the worldly-wise strangers say that “it was fifty to one but we had been all destroy’d” and “it had been great odds but that we had been torn to pieces” (237–38). In view of the terrestrial perils he has faced and the odds he has been told, Crusoe characteristically turns with the currents of circumstance: “I think I would much rather go a thousand leagues by sea, though I were sure to meet with a storm once a week” (238). The insoluble land-or-sea dilemma crystallizes the vexed providential plot of the novel, as well as the author’s own theological preoccupations. In a similar vein, Defoe’s narrator “H.F.” in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) worries over whether he ought to stay in London or try to avoid disease by fleeing to the countryside, but he finds himself interpreting the various “disappointments” that delay his departure as providential hints: “if I attempted to secure myself by fleeing from my habitation, and acted contrary to these intimations, which I believe to be Divine, it was a kind of flying from God, and that he would cause his justice to overtake me when and where he thought fit.”26 In this case, the notion of God’s justice is ambiguous: it might be a predetermined fate that arrives in the form of the London plague, or it might be a punishment for the hubris of presuming to outrun that fate; it is either a very specific judgment or another word for the death that awaits us all. In either case, H.F. decides that God will “overtake” him one way or the other—using a verb that means, in its French etymology, to surprise. In allegorical terms, the way around this problem is through a canny metaphorical substitution: instead of fearing God as the agent of surprise, H.F. decides, through an aleatory reading of a passage from the 91st Psalm, that he will be his refuge and fortress instead (34). Land or sea? London or the countryside? Such either/or propositions represent a rational choice to be made and personal responsibility to be taken, but in the quasi-Calvinist fatalism of Robinson Crusoe and the Journal, one will always be surprised by God in the end. Surprise is nearly synonymous with empirical experience, but it discloses brief flashes of a metaphysical realm that fascinated Defoe as a journalist and as artist of the possible. In the retrospect of Serious Reflections, Crusoe demystifies all the strange hauntings and shivers of the uncanny that run throughout his original narrative—effectively continuing the project of rational explanation begun in the earlier autobiography. But while he definitively ban-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 86

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE ACC I D E N TA L D O C TO R

87

ishes the apparitions and demons from his island, he retains a sense of natural wonder by shifting its focus to the operations of the mind. Here, for instance, he revisits the “surprise of my spirits” in the episode of the goat that was momentarily mistaken for a demon: this real surprise left some relics or remains behind it that did not wear quite off a great while, though I struggled hard with them; the vapours that were raised at first were never so laid but that on every trifling occasion they returned; and I saw, nay, I felt apparitions as plainly and distinctly as ever I felt or saw any real substance in my life. (252) This, in the main, dispels the ideas of supernatural visitation and Satanic vexation that haunt Crusoe’s original narrative. As the repetition of the word “real” suggests, this can be read as a case study in the early novel’s formal commitment to epistemology. And yet the first use of the qualifier lends some nuance to that premise: the phrase “real surprise” hedges between empirical and psychological truth. What is a “real surprise”? The duality of the word “surprise”—the denotation of both event and response—is important here. In the simplest terms, the external reality of the surprise is that there really was a goat (not a demon or a hallucination) that startled Crusoe; but the phrase also denotes the reality of a feeling, and the persistence of that feeling in traumatic reverberations. In Defoe’s materialist account, a surprise such as the uncanny bleat of the goat can create a mental atmosphere, an accumulation of “vapours,” that affects the receptivity to further surprises, and the ways that those experiences are interpreted and remembered. Defoe as journalist was interested in debunking superstition, but he did not go so far as to claim that apparitions were precisely nothing. As Jayne Lewis has argued, early eighteenth-century apparition narratives engaged not only matters of epistemology (can the existence of ghosts be verified?) but also the imaginative capacity of print culture to enable readers to “see” what was not really there.27 Imagining a ghost described in prose is not precisely equivalent to “seeing” it in a darkened room, just as a character’s astonishment is not identical to the reader’s; and yet the literary evocation of the “surprising” is an attempt to close that gap. As a matter of feeling as much as fact, surprise has a kind of apparitional status. Surprises never cease, and for Defoe’s authorial purposes, that is a good thing. In the final paragraph of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe effectively inserts an advertisement for a sequel: “All these things, with some very surprising incidents in some new adventures of my own, for ten years more, I may perhaps give a farther account hereafter” (241). Crusoe has already taken to describing his experiences in the aggregate as a “collection of wonders” and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 87

1/27/15 8:01 AM

88

CHAPT ER 3

as “chain of wonders,” telling his story to Friday and a ship’s captain, and realizing that it is a story that demands a rapt audience. At this point, the language of the “surprising” and wonderful is in danger of becoming an attenuated, reflexive formula, and Defoe well knew that the Farther Adventures could not be surprising in quite the same way. As I have hoped to show, however, the “real” surprises in Defoe’s novel are far more profound than the initial promise of “adventures” would have us believe.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 88

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 4 The Purification of Surprise in Pamela

To be surprised by sin is not merely to be astonished to find sinful behavior in the world; it is to be thoroughly engulfed and irrevocably changed by it. That Miltonic peril drives the narrative of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) with particular urgency. To describe the heroine as being “surprised” is to suggest several things: that her would-be seducer Mr. B physically attacks her; that she is so guileless that she fails to anticipate Mr. B’s sexual interest; that even after suffering one unwanted advance, she is astonished to find herself the victim of another. On a cognitive level, she is continually shocked that a gentleman could be so untrue to his word; and on an allegorical level, she is beset by a man who explicitly describes himself as a Vice figure. In Pamela, the ultimate surprise is rape, and this possibility is regarded as terminally metamorphic; in the eyes of the heroine’s father and others, it is a kind of death. In this context, the question of the victim’s mental state ( feeling surprise) would thus be eclipsed by the social fact that she is now and forever ruined (having been, periphrastically speaking, “surprised”). Surprise in Pamela is, above all, a corporeal experience; and it bears the full history of violence attached to the word. From the moment that she writes her first letter home, the heroine suffers shocks both mental and physical—both jolts to her psyche and invasions of her privacy or person. In the midst of finishing a letter reporting the death of her mistress, whose 89

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 89

1/27/15 8:01 AM

90

CHAPT ER 4

dressing room she has sought as refuge, she attests to being “scared out of my Senses” (12) by the sudden appearance of B; she is later “astonish’d, and unable to speak for a while” (19) at the forwardness of B’s gift of his mother’s stockings. In the diary of her subsequent country-house confinement, Pamela records a clash with Mrs. Jewkes that crystallizes the intersection of physical and psychic surprise in the novel. Describing “a deadly Slap upon my Shoulder,” Pamela comments, “I was so scar’d, (for you, my dear Father and Mother, never beat me in your Lives) that I was as one thunder-struck” (126). There are two surprises here, nearly simultaneous: the sheer bodily shock of the blow and the realization that a putatively parental figure has dealt it. The sting of the first is only momentary, but the recognition of the second means a necessary widening of Pamela’s horizon of experience, another realization that the world does not wish her well. As we have seen in Robinson Crusoe, extreme surprise at this time was understood as dangerous or even life-threatening; Pamela’s shocks have the power to provoke fainting fits. These swoons turn out to be providential in their effect of stopping all action. In an incremental series of sexual assaults, Pamela loses consciousness after B kisses her in the summer house; when B invades her bedchamber and tears at her gown; and when he grabs her in bed and fondles her breasts; and in each instance, the attacker backs down in a mixture of shame and sympathy. In B’s own post facto explanation of this emotional economy, “my Passion for you was all swallow’d up in the Concern I had for your Recovery” (206).1 In effect, the spectacle of Pamela’s astonishment startles B out of his designs; it holds a mirror up to his own sexual voracity. There is yet another inflection of surprise, one that troubles Richardson’s morally didactic plan for the novel. It is the possibility that the violent, sexual surprises visited upon the heroine might prove to be merely “surprising” for the titillated reader—or, in a term advanced by William Warner, entertaining.2 That transaction is figured in a telling passage in Pamela’s epistolary journal, in which the heroine marvels at the strange turns of fortune her young life has taken: “Well, my Story surely would furnish out a surprizing kind of Novel, if it was to be well told” (246).3 Here, she unwittingly summarizes the central wonder of her life, one that requires the better part of the novel to test and establish: that a squire would marry rather than rape a commoner, and that a confirmed rake could be morally reformed by his servant. Like a figure in Spenserian allegory, Pamela is necessarily oblivious to several things: that she is both the heroine and narrator of a “surprizing novel”; that her story, in the opinion of every character who reads any part of it, is

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 90

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

91

very well told; and that she might be falling in love with her employer.4 She is thoroughly absorbed in the act of writing, and the tantalizing fiction is that other characters surprise her in that private and often furtive act.5 Pamela is highly vulnerable to shock, and that emotional receptivity has the effect of focusing the reader’s attention, whether it be sympathetic or voyeur istic. In the eighteenth-century vocabulary of sentiment, surprise is an emotional common denominator, a feeling in which character and reader alike can participate; it is spontaneity itself.6 The adjective “surprizing” not only describes the unexpected but also functions as a culturally charged term of art: it evokes the marvelous events of romance or picaresque and the diverting effect of Addisonian novelty. At the time that Pamela is writing, it could be said that there is no other kind of novel but a “surprising” one—a work that promises the kind of adventures in Crusoe or the intrigues in Eliza Haywood’s amatory fiction. In 1740, Pamela occupies a crossroads between the Miltonic sense of surprise—with its shadings of sin, trickery, and assault—and the newer sense of aesthetic pleasure and page-turning diversion. Taken in the aggregate, Pamela’s long string of unpleasant and dangerous surprises accidentally amounts to a modern “surprizing novel,” a source of enjoyment for both characters within the story and Richardson’s readers. I will argue that this conversion is figured in the second half of the novel, when Mr. B becomes an agent of pleasant rather than painful surprises. Even after Pamela glimpses a future of matrimonial happiness, Richardson cannot let go of his narrative donnée; it is simply the nature of the surprise that changes, even as it continues to entertain characters and readers. In this way, the novel accomplishes what I will call a purification of surprise: cognitive pleasure replaces physical threat; the experience of discovering or figuring out replaces the trauma of being caught or seized; the feeling of wonder replaces the feeling of shock. In showing how this purification is accomplished, I will focus on two recognition scenes, both engineered by Mr. B: Pamela’s reunion with her father, and Pamela’s introduction to Mr. B’s illegitimate daughter. In larger terms, I will show that the experience of surprise (the intertwined emotional experience of both Pamela and the reader) serves both aesthetic and ethical functions. My reading of Pamela engages with several critical accounts that posit Richardson’s novel (and eighteenth-century fiction more broadly) as emerging from dialogic contrasts. Margaret Doody argues that Pamela, unlike Clarissa, alleviates the tragic darkness of the “seduction/rape story” with the sunny elements of pastoral comedy.7 In his classic study of the early novel, Michael McKeon has formulated an epistemological contrast between the fabulism

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 91

1/27/15 8:01 AM

92

CHAPT ER 4

of romance and the true history of diaries and letters; and William Warner has articulated a moral dialectic between popular entertainment and edifying fiction. The early English novel, as McKeon and other critics have observed, domesticated the conventions and language of romance within a frame of the real and the verifiable, and Pamela’s remark about writing an accidental novel can thus be seen as an amulet against incredulity: the acknowledgment that her story might seem surprising forestalls the objection that it cannot be true.8 Moreover, as Warner argues, both Richardson and Henry Fielding wrote with the purpose of moral edification, in a way meant to elevate their works above the putatively empty amatory fiction of their predecessors.9 Warner provides an important corollary to McKeon’s account, showing that the foil for the emerging realist novel of the 1740s and its claim to cultural prestige was not only the marvelous and incredible but also the purely entertaining. In Richardson’s and Fielding’s strategies, the scandalously voyeur istic pleasure of “true histories” is reformed by embedded moral commentary and ethically satisfying outcomes. I propose to show how the tensions identified in these critical accounts are played out in the novel’s poetics of surprise, and how they are negotiated in the amatory fiction that preceded Pamela. What Doody describes as Richardson’s experimental mingling of the tragic and the comic (35) can be seen as the two inflections of surprise in the novel—the disturbing and the pleasant. What McKeon describes as an epistemological dialectic has an emotional inflection: the “surprising” marks the incredible or marvelous but also the authentic and accidental, both external event and interior experience. And what Warner describes as the moral reform of narrative entertainment can be understood as a revision or purification of surprise. Even as Richardson represented himself in several letters as an unsophisticated literary debutant who was as vulnerable to surprise as his heroine, he fully registered the moral and aesthetic complexities of the reader’s engagement with his novel. As I argue below, the problem of pleasure in the novel is solved through a homeopathic remedy: in the simplest terms, there are bad and good forms of surprise, and the second kind is designed to exorcise the ghosts of the first. Before articulating this purgative process, I address the author’s own defense of his poetics, which includes a remarkably pragmatic account of reader interest and response; and in order to articulate the erotics of surprise that Richardson both implicitly courts and emphatically rejects, I will briefly consider the fiction of one precursor, Eliza Haywood, and one successor, John Cleland.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 92

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

93

c Richardson’s Apologia Pamela’s vulnerability to surprise is reflected in her creator’s public stance, for Richardson represented himself as an unassumingly accidental novelist, and a naïf startled by his own unanticipated success. In a letter to his friend Aaron Hill, Richardson says that it was only through the “Accident” of writing his book of “Familiar Letters” that he embarked on writing a novel; and, as he puts it, “its strange Success at Publication is still my Surprize!”10 If the gestation of Pamela were well enough told, the narrative might be entitled “the Strange Surprizing Success of Samuel Richardson.” Richardson here describes a Protestant stroke of grace: the discovery of the artistic potential of an anecdote and the approbation and material success that followed the novel’s publication. Like Pamela’s ultimate reward, it is not something that the author expected or sought. While Richardson acknowledged the shocking effects of his narrative, he claimed a didactic use for surprise. Despite the author’s protestations in the Preface that his novel will not excite “a single Idea throughout the Whole, that shall shock the exactest Purity” (31), the repeated spectacle of Pamela surprised by Mr. B surely did have that effect on some readers, as anti-Pamelists insisted.11 Richardson addressed this criticism in a letter to George Cheyne in 1741. While he easily confronts the question of whether there is “so much Grossness in a Kiss between a Man and his Wife” (47), he passes over the unsolicited kiss that Mr. B steals from Pamela in the summer house; what he calls the “tender Scenes” (48–49) of married life thus serve as a convenient metonymy for the “deep Scenes” (50) of sexual aggression to which he only vaguely alludes.12 It is as if Richardson had adopted the novel’s mechanism of sanative forgetting, by which Mr. B’s offenses are forgiven and dispelled; he, like Pamela, skirts the subject of past unpleasantness.13 At the heart of Richardson’s apologia is a normative account of reader response and authorial control, a bait-and-switch strategy in which surprise or intrigue becomes the path to edification: There is a Time of Life, in which the Passions will predominate; and Ladies, any more than Men, will not be kept in Ignorance; and if we can properly mingle Instruction with Entertainment, so as to make the latter seemingly the View, while the former is really the End, I imagine it will be doing a great deal. For when the Mind begins to be attach’d to Virtue, it will improve itself, and outstretch the poor Scenes which I intend only for a first Attractive. And can this be done, Sir, with young Minds, without blending and enlivening the serious Part with some soft and tender Pencillings?

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 93

1/27/15 8:01 AM

94

CHAPT ER 4

Richardson cannot deny that his novel might excite the passions of a young and imaginative reader; but in his argument, they already run high, and can only be managed and tutored, not dispelled. The effort of catching a presumptively “young and airy mind” sounds uncannily like what the predatory Mr. B is up to, but both he and the novel are diverted to a new and redemptive course. In Richardson’s economy of the passions, the energy of sexual curiosity and excitement can be first attracted and then attached—sublimated—to the pursuit of Virtue. In essence, Richardson’s defense of Pamela is a psychologized version of the Horatian mandate that poetry ought to delight as well as instruct. Joseph Addison’s variation on the Horatian dyad is relevant here: “surprise and delight” rather than “instruct and delight.” This new and peculiarly eighteenth-century formula was not meant to exclude the moral or didactic dimension of literature, but it does introduce an important supplement to the notion of aesthetic pleasure. From an ethical standpoint, there is nothing delightful about Mr. B’s gropings in the summer house or in Pamela’s bedchamber (though anti-Pamelist critics implied that these scenes could offer a furtive pleasure); but such episodes are surely meant, as Richardson puts it, to catch and hold the reader’s attention. In the matter of surprising the reader in this sense, Richardson had ample inspiration in the fiction of Eliza Haywood.

c The Erotics of Surprise: Haywood and Cleland In eighteenth-century fiction, Eliza Haywood was an early master of “surprize,” and her popular romances abundantly display the sexual frisson of this distinctly eighteenth-century word.14 Consider the title of a work that Haywood anonymously published in 1724, which strikingly anticipates the title of Richardson’s novel: The Surprize; Or, Constancy Rewarded.15 On a metanarrative level, the two sides of the colon seem to cancel each other out: if the outcome of “constancy rewarded” stands in direct apposition to the main title, then the ultimate plot surprise is nullified. And yet the mobility of the first word cannot be contained by the moralizing frame of the subtitle. It has become a critical commonplace that Richardson disciplined the amatory fiction of his predecessors into an overtly moral framework, but I want to argue that Haywood herself tried to manage the valences of “surprize” in ways that prefigure Richardson’s own strategy.16 Surprise is the emotional engine of Haywood’s tale, beginning with the sexually charged opening scene: in this story of romantic intrigue and misprision, Euphemia catches sight of her former lover Bellamant as he arrives

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 94

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

95

to pay a visit to her wealthier cousin Alinda, who does not return his affection. After falling down in a swoon, Euphemia recovers enough to tell the story of meeting and inadvertently falling in love with Bellamant during a visit to Bath. In effect, the surprise of the present coincidence recapitulates the first accidental—and forbidden—sight of Bellamant as he emerges in nightgown and cap from the baths. In that earlier moment, Euphemia had slipped precipitously from passive surprise into active desire: first, speechlessness and immobility under the demonic possession of “the God of Love,” then a secret appreciation of Bellamant’s attire and physical beauty. “I could have wished to have been all Eye, so greedy, so eager was I to gaze upon his Charms,” Euphemia admits, in a subtle allusion to the hyperperceptual faculties of Milton’s ambisexual angels (9). Her description of the ensuing trysts— lasting till “four or five in the morning” and affording all the “Sweets of Love” (14)—leaves no question about the degree of subsequent attraction and fulfillment. But the initial thrill of desire is soon eclipsed by the shock of Bellamant’s sudden departure, which deals a physical blow to Euphemia’s mental and physical well-being and an even worse one to her custodial aunt, who dies of similarly debilitating symptoms a few days later. The jilting of the heroine seems attributable to a previous attachment or to pure fickleness, but a cascade of narrative surprises—designed by both the author and her female characters—disproves that theory and brings the heroine back to full health. The pivotal plot discovery is that the true motive for Bellamant’s disappearance is financial rather than amatory: once he learns that Euphemia does not possess the fortune he had imagined, his own pecuniary distress seems to render the match unwise; and a subsequent trip to debtor’s prison confirms that misgiving. Ultimately, the virtue that is rewarded in the story is not Platonic fidelity but constancy by default—the result of Bellamant’s failure to win the affections of an indifferent Alinda, and Euphemia’s selfprotective withdrawal from social circulation. In a world of low expectations, however, their de facto monogamy qualifies as constancy; and the revelation of debt rather than libertinism is enough to motivate Euphemia to pay off Bellamant’s obligations anonymously and then reveal herself as the benefactor by arranging two meetings in which she appears in masquerade. In the first, she asks that Bellamant demonstrate his gratitude by agreeing to marry an unnamed woman; in the second, she demands that he give an account of his prior romantic history, “without Disguise” (42). When the ensuing narrative convinces Euphemia of her lover’s “Constancy” (45), she casts off her mask and precipitates what Stanley Cavell has called a Shakespearean “comedy of remarriage.”17

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 95

1/27/15 8:01 AM

96

CHAPT ER 4

The proof of the hero’s constancy is more negative than affirmative, however: before the mask falls, Bellamant disavows any love for Alinda and makes no attempt on the honor of the inconnue, despite the air of amatory intrigue in the cultural practice and literary trope of masquerade. Though it is not overtly framed this way, Euphemia’s risky ploy of donning a disguise and meeting Bellamant in St. James’s Park functions as a test of the hero’s self-control. As Terry Castle has observed, eighteenth-century masquerade balls offered “a unique realm of sexual freedom” and yet multiplied the possibilities for the abuse or rape of female participants; and Haywood herself warned in The Female Spectator that “women of honour” should avoid such entertainments.18 With that danger averted, the scene of unveiling and reunion therapeutically recapitulates the first meeting in Bath, but the gender roles are reversed— for this time it is Euphemia’s turn to surprise Bellamant “who, with the strong Surprize! the sudden Rush of overwhelming Extasy, was for some moments quite uncapable of Speech, or Motion” (45). For once, it is the man who is overwhelmed, in a familiar sentimental trope, to the point of paralysis. The neat emotional symmetry of the scene serves to nullify any lingering doubts about Bellamant: if verbal testimony and the absence of sexual aggression cannot entirely prove romantic constancy, perhaps a spontaneous display of emotion—a feminine vulnerability to surprise—can. Despite the singular form of Haywood’s title, “the surprize” really contains multitudes. The word denotes, among other things, Euphemia’s first sight of a man in deshabille, Bellamant’s release from debt, the coincidental meeting and reunion of the lovers, the discovery of male constancy and its concomitant “reward”—a moralized outcome that is said to “surprise the world” and, by extension, the jaded reader. Ultimately, “surprize” refers to both plot twists and affective responses; it pertains to both characters and readers, men and women; and it invokes both narrative pleasure and moral didacticism. There is yet another inflection of surprise in the tale, only glancingly hinted at: the erotic thrill of novelty and the aesthetic desideratum of variety. Early on, Euphemia and Alinda debate the question of what they call the “motive of Disgust” (22)—that is, sexual satiation and boredom—in the matter of male inconstancy. One side effect of the masquerading ruse is that it forestalls that peril, at least temporarily, in the reinvigoration of Bellamant’s interest. This emotional denouement thus demonstrates not only the ethical fact of male constancy but also the emotional fact of male ardor: the reader has already had access to Euphemia’s erotic interiority, but now Bellamant is shown in the grips of love. As if demonstrating the sheer chanciness of that happy outcome, however, Haywood in the following year gave a fuller and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 96

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

97

franker airing of male “disgust” in Fantomina (1725). Here she explores the erotic possibilities of female masquerade and the pitfalls of repetition and overfamiliarity—the waning of surprise.19 The heroine, a well-born young woman, poses as a courtesan on a lark; but when her aptly named paramour, Beauplaisir, loses interest in her, she adopts a series of aliases and disguises to hold his interest. The charade ultimately collapses when the pseudonymous Fantomina becomes pregnant and her scandalized mother packs her off to a French convent. In this disastrous outcome, the familiar tropes of corporeal surprise describe the unfortunate heroine’s labor pangs (“She could not conceal the sudden Rack which all at once invaded her” [68]) and the mother’s reaction to this turn of events (“Never was Astonishment and Horror greater than that which seiz’d the Soul of this afflicted Parent” [69]). Once Fantomina reveals her stratagem, all blame falls on her, and Haywood’s breezy conclusion witnesses the transformation of traumatic surprise into the thrillingly surprising: “And thus ended an Intreague, which, considering the time it lasted, was as full of Variety as any, perhaps, that many Ages has produced” (71). Whatever impact the novella is supposed to exert as a cautionary tale, Haywood’s language of novelty and aesthetic appreciation belies other authorial designs. Surprise is a volatile emotional substance, quickly flaring into pleasure or sublimating into instruction; and Haywood exploited both possibilities. While the “surprize” of her novella promises intrigue, the subtitle announces a moral; the discovery of constancy is a surprise, but not the only one, and perhaps not the most pleasurable one. Following in the wake of Pamela and picking up where Haywood left off, John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748) even more unabashedly explores the pleasures of surprise.20 Its erotics is also an aesthetics—its language of corporeal experience harking back to the Addisonian categories of beauty and novelty.21 The title character narrates the numerous shocks visited upon her in London when she arrives there as an orphan from the provinces—novelties that will eventually be dulled into the pornographic repetitions of a sex worker. A notable feature of Cleland’s fictional autobiography is that despite retrospective moral framing, the novel recreates the first flushes of initiatory surprise without qualification or guilt: though it lacks the epistolary immediacy of Pamela, it invents its own form of writing to the moment. The novel spins out a dazzling array of euphemisms for male and female sexual organs and sexual acts, and in the early chapters, these serve mainly to re-create the linguistic conditions of youthful inexperience, with its lack of a precise vocabulary to describe what the novice saw and felt. Everything comes as a surprise; everything is novel. Regarding her first sexual initiation, Fanny Hill details how her bedfellow Phoebe’s hands

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 97

1/27/15 8:01 AM

98

CHAPT ER 4

“wander’d over my whole body, with touches, squeezes, pressures, that rather warm’d and surpriz’d me with their novelty, than they either shock’d or alarm’d me” (10). The neat adjectival discrimination registers an aesthetic judgment and a gradation of astonishment (surprised vs. shocked) that sound remarkably like the critical standards of Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination.” Addison’s definitions of the New and the Beautiful might easily be applied to Fanny Hill’s sexual explorations. Indeed, there is more than a hint of the erotic in Addison’s categories: every experience of novelty “fills the Soul with an agreeable Surprise, gratifies its Curiosity, and gives it an Idea of which it was not before possesst”; and Beauty “immediately diffuses a secret Satisfaction and Complacency through the Imagination” (372). Filling, gratification, possession, diffusion, secrecy: for all its idealism, Addison’s language of aesthetic appreciation is unmistakably rooted in the corporeal and libidinal. Under this rubric, Fanny’s first “surprise” with Phoebe—the “strange, and till then unfelt pleasure,” the “insensible gradations,” the “fire that wanton’d through all my veins”—is both novel and beautiful. Imagine my surprise: this is a recurrent invitation to the reader of the Memoirs. “But guess at my mortification and surprize,” Fanny says about being abandoned in the city without guidance or protection.22 “But guess my surprise, when I saw the lazy young rogue lie down on his back, and gently pull Polly upon him,” she says about the voyeur istic spectacle of a prostitute and her client renewing their exertions (33). She even invites the reader to imagine her first client’s discovery of her virginity (“but imagine to yourself his surprize” [40]), in a perspectival twist that reflects both a polymorphous capacity and an authorial nod at a presumptively male audience. By contrast, Pamela never once invites the reader to imagine her surprise. Surely her parents do imagine the events she describes, but in the case of the more lurid encounters, the phrase itself would draw awkward attention to that fact. Imagining another person’s surprise could be turned to moral purposes, but its chief emotional vector is the value-neutral sensation of novelty or unexpectedness. The colloquial currency of this particular phrase reflects a basic narrative principle. Not knowing precisely what is going to happen next, the audience is especially disposed to feel the storyteller’s remembered surprise; it is easier to summon up this feeling than any other. (Contrast this with other emotion statements that would solicit sympathetic participation, such as “Imagine my anger,” or “Imagine my sadness.”) By the same token, Fanny cannot go on being surprised in the same way, and it is a symptom of the novel’s repetitions that the overt command to imagine the heroine’s surprise disappears from the narrative after a while—though the author does manage to spring a few more surprising variations on the sexual act.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 98

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

99

Richardson, however, had figured out a way to sublimate the repetitive surprises of amatory fiction, and it is to that process that I now turn.

c Surprise and Repetition In structural terms, surprise is the necessary condition for the protraction of Richardson’s narrative, the reason that it is as long as it is: for Pamela to remain captive in B’s domain, she must continually renew her faith in the decency of her putative guardians and allies even after shocking disappointments to that faith. No one understands the narrative principle of repetition better than B, whose illicit reading of Pamela’s letters has given him a craving for more, and an awareness of himself as both reader and character with a power to “wind up the Catastrophe of the pretty Novel” (232). It is a peculiar property of the novel’s repetitiousness that only a day later, Pamela makes her own off hand remark about the novelistic character of her experience. It is as if she had never heard B’s suggestion and were innocently discovering the idea for the first time; or as if the idea had a kind of latency before it could be brought fully into consciousness, purged of its lascivious undertone. In a sense, it is a new idea when Pamela expresses it, since she and B inhabit a novelistic world in different ways—Pamela as a character subject to surprising twists of fortune, B as authorial manipulator of such twists. The latter revels in the knowledge that Pamela has cast him in the role of “Lucifer” in an accidental allegory, and that it is entirely in his power to keep the story going. In that role, he playfully excuses his request to read more letters as a minor transgression: “And after I have done so many heinous things by you, as you think, you have no great Reason to judge so hardly of this; or, at least, it is of a Piece with the rest” (234). And yet B manages to surprise both in the manner of his pursuit: as if in adherence to Addisonian aesthetics, the successive scenes of failed seduction offer enough variety and novelty to keep the reader interested. On Pamela’s side, the persistent vulnerability to surprise confirms a virtuous naïveté, a limited knowledge of the world and its most sinister designs and machinations. This is an essential feature of the heroine’s disposition: a fundamental unknowingness about what might happen next, even a providential faith in the happier outcome or in another person’s better nature. Just as Mrs. Jewkes’s earlier cruelties do not prepare Pamela for the affront of being hit, Mr. B’s stolen kiss in a summer house does not predict an attempted rape in a bedroom. At the abstract level of plot, these serial harms follow a deliberate path of escalation; but in the cognitive realm of character

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 99

1/27/15 8:01 AM

100

CHAPT ER 4

consciousness, each event registers as a discrete shock. Pamela has the imaginative capacity for moral emblem making and creative psalmistry, but she is not in the habit of making analytical predictions or ethical connections among disparate events. Her numerous surprises at her master’s hands do not so much reflect an utter ignorance of the worst possibilities as a faith that she will somehow be protected, as well as a meliorative hope that B is capable of reform. Richardson thus explores a psychology that is not limited to obvious naïfs like Pamela: the belief that things will turn out well in the end; the hope of others’ essential goodness or reformability; the sense that the despairs of one day do not necessarily predict the events of the next. This is a still more radical form of negative capability than the one that Richardson would later attribute to Clarissa. Responding to Aaron Hill’s objection that the character of Lovelace was too obviously wicked to make an effective figure in a cautionary tale, Richardson remarks that “All Women flatter themselves, that even the Man whom they know to have been base to others, cannot be so to them; and this from Vanity, as well as good Opinion of the Man they prefer.”23 In the case of Pamela, it is not yet clear, to readers or to herself, that she “prefers” Mr. B, while it is abundantly clear that B has repeatedly mistreated her. Here, the feminine “Vanity” of exceptionalism lies in Pamela’s expectation that she will be kindly treated not by a particular man but rather by Providence. Her latent faith, were she to articulate it, might be expressed by a thinker of the next century: Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth taking or keeping, if it were not. God delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness he draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky. ‘You will not remember,’ he seems to say, ‘and you will not expect.’24 Pamela lacks the critical distance to imagine, as Emerson does, that God would take “delight” in her temporal or spatial “isolation,” or in the overall design of her pleasant and unpleasant surprises; but Richardson surely does. In the memorable scene in which she dons a fetchingly rustic outfit, Pamela for one moment enjoys an approximation of that delight: the rare opportunity, previously indulged in by Haywood’s masquerading heroines, to surprise other people deliberately. It is a moment calculated to demonstrate that Pamela does not need the social affiliation with B’s household to insure her worthiness.25 Here is her satisfied report on Mrs. Jervis’s reaction to the change: “Why you surprise me, said she; what! Pamela! Thus metamorphos’d!” (55). Mrs. Jervis’s choice of words speaks more than she knows, for as in Ovidian

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 100

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

101

metamorphosis, this transformation expresses a fundamental truth—about the dignity of Pamela’s humble origins and upbringing. Pamela uses a similarly Ovidian trope when she rebukes B: “to be sure, you are Lucifer himself in the shape of my master, or you could not use me thus.” Once again, the idea of metamorphosis underwrites the notion of a true essence; Pamela claims to know her master’s fundamental nature. The new garb strikes B and Mrs. Jervis as a charming costume, but Pamela corrects that perception, in phrasing that unwittingly invokes the foundling plots of romance narrative: “I have been in Disguise indeed ever since my good Lady, your Mother, took me from my poor Parents” (57). The ultimate irony of the scene, however, is that the liberatory revelation of Pamela’s true self contributes to her further entrapment; the pastoral dress sexually arouses B more than it instructs him, and the tables are turned on Pamela’s planned surprise. Told by Mr. B that her stay in the household will be extended, Pamela reacts in a way that both models a commonplace trope of astonishment and typifies the paralytic hold of her domestic captivity. “Do you hear what I say to you, Statue! can you neither speak, nor be thankful?” (58). In the allegorical implications of this trope, B will have to learn how to stop turning Pamela to stone and begin to see her as an autonomous subject.

c Plotting Surprise: The Reunion Scene Surprise exerts a cumulative pressure in Pamela. The repetitive assaults upon the heroine in the first half of the novel leave a deep wariness and suspicion in the second half; paradoxically, surprises come to be expected. Regarding the supposedly benign motives of B and Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela remarks, “I have had so many Tricks, and Plots, and Surprizes, that I know not what to think” (222). In this context, “surprize” not only denotes the reversal or frustration of expectation but also overlaps with the meaning of “tricks” and “plots.” A surprise, then, is a deliberately placed snare or trap, both a device of assault or ambush and the mental and emotional effect of it. Pamela is not wrong in her suspicions, for immediately afterward she is visited by the “gypsey-like woman” commissioned by B to deliver a monitory fortune. Pamela’s fearful sense of surprise is thus akin to George Herbert’s Protestant inflection of the word in the sonnet Sin (I), which runs through a litany of life’s pitfalls and dangers: “Afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes, / Fine nets and stratagems to catch us in, / Bibles laid open, millions of surprises” (6–8).26 In its appositive sense, “millions of surprises” refers to the hazards of scriptural

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 101

1/27/15 8:01 AM

102

CHAPT ER 4

interpretation, as if an open book were a trap; and in an additive sense, the phrase complements the inventory of afflictions and kinds of anguish. Surprises are lesser cousins to afflictions—mundane psychic jolts rather than sustained suffering. By the second half of the novel, Pamela is sufficiently wary of the “millions of surprises” that potentially await her—just as the nature of the surprise begins to take a benignly providential turn. The transformation of B’s character and the turn of the novel’s plot are reflected in a fundamental change in the nature of surprise—in essence, from rude shocks to delightful serendipity. The second half of the novel is scattered with pleasant surprises, several of which structurally revise or purify earlier unpleasant ones. A signal example of this mechanism is the greeting that Mrs. Jewkes gives Pamela at the church door after her marriage to B. Here, Jewkes amends the “severe blow” she had earlier dealt in Pamela’s country-house incarceration with a more benign demonstration: “Mrs. Jewkes would have kissed my Hand at the Chapel Door; but I put my arms about her Neck” (346). Both violent and affectionate gestures can be seen as spontaneous expressions of a moment rather than premeditated acts—symptoms of what Margaret Doody calls, borrowing a phrase from Richardson, “a natural passion.”27 In Richardson’s morally rehabilitative vision, Mrs. Jewkes (as wicked as she might have seemed to Pamela in the first half of the novel) can redeem herself in the substitution of one impulsive gesture for another. That is not to say that all surprises in the later comic phase of the novel are happy ones or even wholly accidental or spontaneous. In fact, several of the most significant surprises here are planned and managed by B; even after relinquishing his seigneurial aggression, he asserts a romancer’s mastery of events. And yet the surprise that turns the narrative around cannot be planned or anticipated by B; it is solely in Pamela’s possession, though significantly not in her conscious control. Under the conventions of eighteenth-century sexual politics, Pamela must surprise herself in her latent and growing affection for B.28 This is, to borrow Ruth Yeazell’s term, the “fiction of modesty” that enables her to seem truly virtuous rather than scheming.29 It is not simply a declaration on B’s part that activates her sentiment, but rather a more complex discovery of the heart’s desire through the process of writing things down—a novelistic version of the dramatic soliloquy, in which a character overhears herself in the act of thinking aloud. Richardson’s selfproclaimed invention of the technique of “writing to the moment” has a further ramification here: Pamela’s writing is not only about events as they happen; it is also a temporal and materially constituted event unto itself.30 The affective reversal at the beginning of Volume II has been sparked by B’s decision to allow Pamela to leave his house unscathed, and it is only on the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 102

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

103

occasion of her departure that she feels the desire to remain in what she has elsewhere described as an imprisonment: “I think I was loth to leave the house. Can you believe it? What could be the Matter with me, I wonder!—I felt something so strange, and my Heart was so lumpish! I wonder what ail’d me!” (244). What tethers Pamela to a place of suffering will be named “love” in a subsequent journal entry—and the word itself surprises Pamela in the spontaneous writing of it: “Love, did I say!—But come, I hope not” (248). The opacity of the “something” reflects Pamela’s naïve inarticulacy; and the conversion of “something” into “Love” has the effect of happening upon the solution of an allegorical riddle. For Pamela, however, it is not yet clear that “Love” is the answer—that this is a probative “something” rather than a beguiling nothing. At this point, she sees herself as “a mere Tennis-ball of Fortune” (245), and though she is fated to end up on the winning side, the somethings that dart into Pamela’s mind are not all happy thoughts; the same kind of sudden jolt that brings a clarified knowledge of Love can also take the form of Despair. In a letter to her parents in which she describes a doomed attempt to flee from her captivity, she reports that “a sad Thought came just then into my Head” (171)—the idea of drowning herself in a pond. In the calm retrospect in which she frames the anecdote, she becomes the allegorist of her own experience, reporting that your poor Pamela has escap’d from an Enemy worse than any she ever met with; an Enemy she never thought of before, and was hardly able to guard against. I mean, the Weakness and Presumption, both in one, of her own Mind! which well nigh, had not the divine Grace interposed, sunk her into the lowest Abyss of Misery and Perdition! (170) Pamela is not supposed to be rhetorically gifted, but she stages a clever surprise here, switching the referent of “Enemy” from Mr. B to her own mind—from a self-described demon in a novelistic intrigue to a demonic conception of the psyche and its passions. The ironic self-distancing of that gesture is deftly registered in Pamela’s third-person construction, so that all agents in the drama—heroine, demonically possessed mind, divine Grace— figure in a psychomachia in which the elided Enemy turns out to be Satan himself (in the form of everlasting perdition). The allegorical sophistication of Pamela’s narration is even visible in the way that the physical means of suicide (“What to do, but to throw myself into the Pond” [171]) is symbolically redeemed into a spiritual resolution: “What hast thou to do, distressed creature, said I to myself, but to throw thyself upon a merciful God” (172). Pamela does not go so far as to say that B is not or never was

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 103

1/27/15 8:01 AM

104

CHAPT ER 4

her enemy and persecutor, or that she has brought on her own misfortunes, but the implication is clear: that B’s mistreatment should be seen as a trial by which Pamela’s virtue is to be tested. More darkly, the cognitive syntax of the episode is such that the suicidal impulse and the providential one look the same: first a sad thought comes into her mind, then a “Ray of Grace” is said to “dart in upon [her] benighted Mind” (172); in this sense, the emotional contours of Pamela’s life amount to, in Emerson’s phrase, a series of surprises. In the allegorical reinscription of “the Enemy,” Pamela is unwittingly preparing the way for her discovery of “Love” for Mr. B. That epiphany is complemented by an elaborate surprise engineered by B in an expiatory and conciliatory gesture of goodwill: the reunion with Pamela’s father. In the course of writing a journal entry addressed to her parents, one half of Pamela’s intended audience arrives at B’s door, on a mission of rescue. Pamela is called downstairs, and when she resumes the entry, she has reunited with her father, but still reports the scene to her absent mother. At this point, Goodman Andrews could easily give an account of the meeting when he returns home, but it is later revealed that Pamela continues to write under the urgings of B—“that this wondrous Story be perfect,” he explains, “and we, your Friends, may read and admire you more and more” (301). In reuniting Pamela with her father, B both meticulously stages a surprise and then sponsors its refinement into art: the shock of reunion can happen only once, but in narrative recapitulation of the heroine’s untutored yet artful prose, it can be savored again and again. Casting off the demonic role of “Lucifer” in which he had reveled, B now becomes a benefactor—the impresario of a sentimental drama.31 In particular, the episode recalls the romance element of Shakespearean reunions, which often involve a feeling of wonder at a kind of resurrection: Hero and Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing, Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night, Hermione and Leontes in The Winter’s Tale. In each case, the sudden appearance of the magical or marvelous must be qualified with a natural explanation. Several features of these scenes are relevant for the purposes of reading the quasi-dramatic episode in Pamela: the artfully planned nature of the revelation; the necessity of amazed bystanders and their choric commentary; the momentary stupefaction of the participants; the frisson of death and resurrection; the practical explanation of the marvelous. In my first chapter, I proposed a genealogy of eighteenth-century surprise rooted in early modern forms of wonder; and the naturalized wonders of Shakespeare’s reunion scenes exemplify that relationship. But it is not the vocabulary of the marvelous that defines the encounter in Pamela; it is the syntax of surprise. Whereas the reunion in The Winter’s

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 104

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

105

Tale serves as a uniquely cathartic and restorative climax, the comparable scene in Pamela takes place within a long series of such shocks, which have been up to this point more typically unpleasant than gratifying. The surprise sponsored by Mr. B is a happy one, and is even intended as a kind of unofficial, public betrothal (“we are all witnesses, that he intends very honorably by her,” one guest says); but it is unavoidably associated with less happy ones, and it effects only a tentative turn in the plot, not a denouement.32 The novel’s epistolary frame allows the episode to be pondered in retrospect, placed within a spectrum of similar moments, and reread both for pleasure or moral edification. At the same time, Pamela’s continuous, scenic representation of the incident, including events that she did not directly experience, aspires to the immediacy of drama; and the spectatorial role of the “witnesses” attests to this. Instead of the Shakespearean flirtation with the miraculous or supernatural, there is the retrospective, Protestant assurance of a divine guiding hand.33 Of the reunion with her father, Pamela writes, “I will take the Matter from the Beginning, that God directed his Feet to this House, to this Time, as I have had it from Mrs. Jewkes, from my Master, my Father, the Ladies, and my own Heart and Conduct, as far as I know of both” (290). What she has chiefly “had” from these people is a detailed factual account of Andrews’s frantic search for his daughter and fortunate arrival at B’s house; but the role of Providence is also included with these circumstances, as if it were a verifiable part of them. Yet another source of testimony is Pamela’s own “Heart and Conduct”—both sentiment and meritorious behavior. It is too early yet in the novel to give it the allegorical subtitle, “Virtue Rewarded,” but this remark offers a premonition of that outcome. That assurance, however, is not certain at the outset of the scene, when Pamela is called away from her letter writing. The serendipitous reunion, with its attendant trepidations and uncertainties, represents in little the unpredictable swerves of Pamela’s story; and all three main participants—Pamela, her father, and even B himself— are subject to surprise. Though this episode lacks the charmed language of romance, it preserves an element of mystery and misprision. At a local alehouse, Goodman Andrews hears about “a young Creature” reputed to be Mr. B’s mistress; and assuming the worst, he is announced at B’s doorstep as coming “on Business of Life and Death” (291). B, in turn, is “much surpriz’d” (291) at the father’s alarm. Indeed, the father’s very appearance reminds B that Pamela has a life and family elsewhere, beyond the confining roles of waiting maid or mistress. To Andrews’s accusation that Pamela has been kept a “severe Prisoner” (291), B responds that “now the sweet Girl has taken me Prisoner;

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 105

1/27/15 8:01 AM

106

CHAPT ER 4

and in a few days, I shall put on the pleasantest fetters that ever Man wore” (292). History is thus spontaneously rewritten as allegory, the literal fact of Pamela’s imprisonment is converted into an erotic metaphor for B’s Petrarchan beguilement, then a trope of marital bondage. The most elaborate—and planned—form of guessing is done by Pamela, beginning with the hypothetical question that B poses: “If you should see Mr. Williams below, do you think, Pamela, you should not be surpriz’d?” (289). To Pamela’s negative response, he tells her to expect a “Stranger,” in a clumsy attempt to regulate her emotion. “Guard your Heart against Surprizes, tho’ you shall see, when you come down, a Man that I can allow you to love dearly, tho’ hardly preferably to me” (289). It is absurd that Pamela could be prepared for just enough surprise but not too much to send her into yet another swoon; and so it is worth asking what purpose the scene serves. On a symbolic level, B’s cryptic description of the visitor offers a riddle through which a truth is revealed; it functions as a kind of oracle by virtue of its ambiguity, or what Michael Wood in his study of oracles calls “amphibology”—a “double speech” that enables more than one possible meaning.34 Rather than guessing her father, Pamela plausibly thinks that the answer to the puzzle is Mr. Williams—understandably so, since he has already been positioned as one who might love Pamela, and he has already made one surprise visit for which she was not suitably prepared. In that earlier episode, Williams had no sooner made his “unexpected Declaration” of love (144) in a letter than he arrived in person to pursue the petition, with a letter of support from B. “You have so surpriz’d me, that I cannot stand, nor hear, nor read!” Pamela rebukes him. “Why did you come up in such a manner to attack such weak Spirits?” (146). Though Pamela does not faint this time, her reference to her incapacities is telling: there is a cognitive dissonance between reading about a possible betrothal and immediately meeting the potential spouse—especially in a novel consisting of letters and journal entries written in solitude. It is a shock for Pamela when the verbal subjects of letters appear in the flesh, from the very beginning of the novel when she literally turns from writing about B as her new master to seeing him face to face. Pamela’s reunion with her father involves precisely this transformation of a textual presence into bodily appearance. Mr. B is not in full control of the meanings of this reunion, but the riddle that he poses, with the ensuing solution to it, performs a symbolic winnowing function: clarifying Pamela’s feelings and exorcising a former suitor, a man whose conjugal hopes had been manipulatively abetted by B himself for his own convenience. Though she takes pains to call Williams a “good man,” she has by now a strong enough affection for B to dread a meeting

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 106

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

107

with an erstwhile rival who must surely remind her of earlier plots and intrigues. In the word game in which Pamela unwittingly participates, a generically “good man” will be supplanted by the person whom B solicitously hails as “Goodman Andrews”—“one of the honestest Men in England” (293). In the setup of the riddle, B asks Pamela alternately to imagine the mystery visitor as Mr. Williams and as a “Stranger”; and while there should be no question that Pamela dearly loves her father, a question might still linger in B’s mind as to whether his intended bride harbors feelings for Mr. Williams. Though Pamela is the one who is kept in the dark in this episode, even B is subject to some epistemological hesitation: we know Pamela’s true feelings as far as she has disclosed them in her journal to this moment, but B does not. Ironically, both Williams and Andrews—the wrong and right answers to the riddle—have been deceived by B at various times: Williams in the encouragement that he marry Pamela, and Andrews in the fiction that B has saved Pamela from a mésalliance with a poor parson.35 Earlier, when Pamela had rebuked B for reading her letters (“what one writes to one’s Father and Mother is not for every body” [228–29]), B protests that he enjoys special status: “ ‘Nor,’ answered he, ‘am I every body’ ” (229). At that point, B is a an authoritarian “somebody” insofar as he is Pamela’s master; but in the reunion scene, he will assume the intimate privileges of a familial “somebody.” B’s other motive for the surprise is surely the prospect of watching for a reaction on Pamela’s face and getting it, as well as gratifying the desires of his assembled guests. While he incompletely prepares Pamela for her father’s arrival, he tells his visitors exactly what is to come. Even Goodman Andrews unwittingly contributes to the theatrical “Suspense” of anticipation by meekly placing himself in a far corner of the room. Despite the joy of the occasion, Pamela sees through to the gratuitousness of the protracted reunion: “But was not this very cruel, my dear Mother? For well might they think I should not support myself in such an agreeable Surprize” (293). Well they might, and the spectacle of Pamela’s dawning recognition and sudden swoon does not disappoint: I knew the Voice, and lifting up my Eyes, and seeing my Father, gave a spring, overturned the Table, without Regard to the Company, and threw myself at his Feet, O my Father! my Father!’ said I, can it be! Is it you? Yes it is! It is! O bless your happy—Daughter! I would have said, and down I sunk. (294) Even if B’s guests did not expect Pamela to faint, their host surely did. “I feared,” he tells people afterward, “that the Surprize would be too much for her Spirits” (294). The last time B witnessed such a scene, it was voyeuristically

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 107

1/27/15 8:01 AM

108

CHAPT ER 4

framed by a keyhole, after his withdrawal from the bedchamber where he assaulted Pamela. In that incident, B caused Pamela to fall into a fainting fit and then lingered outside the door to savor the frisson of his mischief.36 In effect, the later fainting episode corrects the earlier one: B once again causes Pamela’s perturbation but assumes the role of rescuer under the approving glance of others. The guests are instrumental to this episode in several ways: they are spectators whose enjoyment of the planned surprise accentuates the reunion as sentimental vignette; they are people whom Pamela must pass to get to her father, in a further delay of the expected climax; and they are representatives of the social world that will eventually welcome Pamela as worthy wife to B and as successor to his mother. The symbolism of Pamela’s swoon is complex, in that it relates to other scenes of surprise in the novel and represents a lacuna in the consciousness of its central reporting figure. What happens to Pamela in this perilous interval, and how can she be certain of what has happened to her when she goes back to record the experience? In the keyhole scene, we are assured that B has not had his way with her, but the lurid spectacle nevertheless affords a dark glimpse of what could happen. In this scene, B might be said to engage in sexual brinkmanship (assaulting and frightening Pamela but not raping her); and in the reunion scene, he performs a kind of emotional brinkmanship, arranging an unsettling but not ultimately life-threatening surprise. Pamela has a good fainting spell, if such a thing is possible, rather than a bad one. Even the potential embarrassment of losing consciousness in front of strangers is balanced by the private interview that Pamela is allowed to have with her father, during which their utterances of “joyful amazement” and pious gratitude go on for “several ecstatick Minutes” (295). When B returns to them, he is hailed as a benefactor: But how does my sweet girl? I have been in Pain for you!—I am sorry I did not apprize you before hand. O Sir, said I, it was You! And all you do must be good.—But this was a blessing so unexpected! Well, said he, you have given Pain to all the company. They will be glad to see you, when you can; for you have spoiled all their Diversion: And yet painfully delighted them at the same time. (295) It was you: what might sound like reproach for B’s manipulation of Pamela’s emotions is deftly modulated into praise. On a deeper level, the statement reads as delayed reaction to B’s original riddle, a eureka moment: in a sense, the mystery person was B all along—once a stranger, now someone Pamela might love. Ultimately, the conversation registers a narrative ambivalence about

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 108

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

109

the scene as source of both pleasure and pain. To borrow B’s own language, he should have apprised Pamela of her father’s arrival rather than surprised her with it. In ethical terms, one should not toy with someone’s feelings in this way or treat them as general “Diversion”; and yet in the warm regard of Pamela’s affections, B is not just anyone anymore, so whatever he does must be “good.” Urged by both B and her father to record the moment in prose, Pamela approaches the task with none of the rhetorical resources that an author such as Fielding elaborates on his set pieces of astonishment, and yet her treatment is deft in its own way. She herself savors the delay of her reunion by reporting what she could not have known firsthand—what was done and said in the room before her arrival. Her mimesis of the lapse in consciousness manages to be both charmingly guileless and thematically subtle: rather than describing her external affect or demeanor or the reactions of the assembled guests, she typographically represents the blackout as an uncompleted sentence; and the missing word—“daughter”—is replaced by the bodily presence of Pamela herself. It is apt that this first-person epistolary narrative would represent the fainting of its heroine as a verbal lapse—one of innumerable ways in which, as Lennard Davis has remarked, language in the novel cleaves to reality.37 Though this is a “safe” fainting spell, the specter of Pamela’s death lingers over the scene, a revenant from the Andrews’s dire warnings, as well as Pamela’s own thoughts of suicidal martyrdom. Greeting Goodman Andrews at the threshold, B utters an unintentional riddle when he assures the old man that his daughter is “in the way to be happy” (291). Andrews alarmingly construes this in a religiously euphemistic sense to mean that Pamela is at death’s door. Like the solution to the riddle of Pamela’s visitor, B’s correction of the error gives the therapeutic relief of a pleasant surprise, even as it uncovers a deeper and more disturbing truth: that in Andrews’s starkly binary thinking, Pamela would be better off dead than deflowered by her master. Pamela’s swoon, then, performs a safe simulation of that outcome—a picture of a momentary death with a subsequent rebirth into a kind of prenuptial ceremony. What I have called the two riddles of this scene—the mystery of Pamela’s visitor and the question of Pamela’s fate—perform an oracular function in the way that they indirectly reveal fundamental truths in a surprising new light: Pamela loves her father more than any suitor, and even B must strive to merit her equal affection; Pamela’s destined marriage is a happy reward, and despite earlier dire rhetoric, no one ever wanted to see her die. Oracular, too, in the way that these riddles sort out human relationships and frame a recognition scene. Finally, Pamela symbolically awakes into a tableau of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 109

1/27/15 8:01 AM

110

CHAPT ER 4

her past and her future, sitting down between “two of the dearest Men in the World to me, and each holding one of my Hands!” (296) Though Parson Williams is excluded by the answer to Mr. B’s riddle, he nevertheless figures in a later scene of Pamela’s surprise—another one orchestrated by B. Out walking in the countryside with B, she unexpectedly comes upon him. Unlike the scene of paternal reunion, this one is flatly told, without any dramatic flourish or emotional flutter. Its meaning, however, is dramatic in its own way: I was quite astonish’d, when we came into the shady Walk, to see Mr Williams there. See there, said my Master, there’s poor Williams, taking his solitary Walk again, with his Book. And it seems it was so contrived; for Mr Peters had been as I since find, desir’d to tell him to be in that Walk at such an Hour in the Morning. (304) Like the reunion with Pamela’s father, this meeting has been managed by B to make a point. “Contriv’d” with the help of Mr. Peters (304), it stages gentlemanly banter between B and Williams, and a formal relinquishment of Williams’s suit. Earlier, Pamela had the rude surprise of seeing Williams directly after reading his letter; and once again, Richardson’s narrative does not rely on letters alone but insists on corporeal presence. The possibility of Williams’s suit must not be dismissed solely in letters but in a face-to-face social transaction, in the literal light of day, and seemingly by chance. The contrived meeting with Williams is one among numerous social situations by which the match between Pamela and B is aired and finally normalized. The success of this match between social unequals, along with B’s reformation, form the two intertwined surprises at the heart of the novel, and the second half works to neutralize them, to reach a state of the ordinary beyond surprise—both within the marriage and in the social world that surrounds and legitimates it. As B tells his future spouse, “I hope, by degrees to take off the World’s Wonder, and to teach them to expect what is to follow, as a Due to my Pamela” (260). A worthy project, but Pamela’s history with B is so traumatic that she cannot help adding an unvoiced plea: “Dear, dear Sir! said I to myself, as if I was speaking to him, for God’s sake, let me have no more Trials and Reverses” (260). Such obstacles constitute what D.A. Miller has called the “narratable” (“what is possible only within a logic of insufficiency, disequilibrium, and deferral”); by implication, the nonnarratable is the state beyond surprise or wonder toward which the novel, and B’s effort, tends.38 The movement toward that state is epitomized in the conduct-book “lecture” on marriage and family life that B sets down and Pamela dutifully codifies into forty-eight rules. Interpolated amid those items is

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 110

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

111

a sotto voce aside, set apart and italicized, as if in typographical mimesis of a private thought rather than a written statement: “I wonder whether poor Miss Sally Godfrey be living or dead” (448). It is this final surprise—the revelation about B’s ex-lover and the question of her fate—to which I now turn.

c “A Little Suspense”: Pamela’s Final Test Like its predecessor Robinson Crusoe, Pamela ends with a perilous coda, one final obstacle on the path to domestic tranquility. Where Crusoe is beset by wolves and a bear on what had promised to be a comparatively safe overland route, Pamela encounters a spectacularly nasty sister-in-law and a family secret. The single agent of discontent who struggles against a state of happy quiescence is B’s sister Lady Davers, whose vehement and sustained disapproval of Pamela represents a chaotic return of the repressed—the final wildcard element of surprise in the novel. She magnifies the snobbery of B’s social class; she speaks in shocking language that echoes the earlier abuses of Pamela (wondering if she has joined the “Number of Fools” that B has “ruin’d” [383]), and she derails B’s own cautiously managed release of information about his past by darkly hinting at one particular “fool” in B’s past— “Poor Sally Godfrey” (431), with whom he fathered a child. What had seemed fairly obvious early in the novel—that B was a rake, albeit a bumbling one—is confirmed only at the end, after it’s too late to be of any practical use. B’s conduct with Pamela alone would be empirical proof enough of B’s character, but the novel’s coda opens up a past-life regression of prior dalliances. The unspoken question then becomes: How many lovers had Mr. B? The novel ends with a surprise, but it is the management and control of it that demands special attention. In the novel’s gendered economy of information, there can be only one ultimate agent of surprise, and that is B. Despite its shock value, Lady Davers’s revelation has the opposite of its intended effect: rather than merely exposing B’s libertine mendacity, it sets the stage for a sentimental vignette in which two women express sympathetic feeling for a suffering man. It allows the reformed rake an opportunity to display penitence (“I desire Heaven will only forgive me”), mitigation (“I was not then of Age”), and “Concern” (a favorite word) for Pamela’s feelings (432–33). The news, then, proves therapeutic rather than destructive; it inoculates rather than infects the young marriage.39 Once B has admitted his past sin, an implicit gagging order on further revelations seems to silence Lady Davers, who is as sentimentally moved by

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 111

1/27/15 8:01 AM

112

CHAPT ER 4

her brother’s story as Pamela is—to the extent of apologizing that her own “Passion” has carried her “too far” in mentioning Sally Godfrey in the first place (433). (For all of her unruly spite, it will later be revealed that Lady Davers is practiced in the arts of forbearance and withholding: though she always knew the whole secret, she obligingly kept it from the elder Mr. B.) In narrative terms, the information embargo allows the suspense of morbid curiosity to suffuse the conjugal resolution. The epistemological hesitation over Sally Godfrey serves Richardson’s authorial purposes in maintaining the reader’s curiosity; and it suits B’s designs in managing yet another surprise. “I was willing to see how the little Suspence would operate upon you,” B says to Pamela, as if his wife were in need of a further test of devotion; deeming her concern “natural” and praising her “Patience,” he finally tells her what has become of his ex-lover (482). In a turning of the tables that only B could pull off, planned surprise constitutes an ethical stance. As we have seen in the earlier staged reunion with Pamela’s father, B has a taste for building and resolving a “little suspense.” The episode in which he finally answers Pamela’s lingering questions about Sally Godfrey involves yet another deliberately managed recognition scene. B brings Pamela to a “neat” country house where his daughter, little Miss Goodwin, is visiting with her boarding-schoolfellows; and he tacitly gives his wife the task of identifying the girl in a group of four. Asked to name the prettiest, Pamela manages to select the right one, the “genteelest shap’d child”—though, in her diplomatic estimation, “they are all pretty” (477). The disclaimer is telling, for even when being called upon to voice the Brandon Hall ideology of inherited gentility, Pamela asserts an essential equality among the four girls. Intergenerational mirror images of each other, both Pamela and Miss Goodwin play parts in separate but related fairytale situations: Pamela is given a test of her discernment, and the result of that test will magically admit Miss Goodwin into the newly constituted household of Pamela and Mr. B. Like the reunion with Pamela’s father, this scene performs the function of winnowing and selection—answering a riddle (whose answer is “Goodwin” rather than “Goodman”), finding one person in a room full of people. “I had always intended to surprize you into this Discovery,” B says, “but my Sister led the Way to it, out of a Poorness in her Spite, that I could not brook” (479). He cannot tolerate anyone else’s competing claims on his power to surprise, and he insists on going through with his planned éclat even after half of the game has been given away. Both parts of the surprise—B’s partial history of Sally Godfrey and the completion of the tale after the meeting with Miss Goodwin—serve as levers of sympathy. In both cases, B’s measured release of information elicits tenderness and concern from his female

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 112

1/27/15 8:01 AM

T HE PURIF ICAT I O N O F S U R P R I SE I N PAM E LA

113

audience rather than blame; and what would otherwise appear a tawdry episode in amatory fiction is transformed into a sentimental vignette. I have described the surprise of finding Miss Goodwin as performing a fairytalestyle selection; more subtly, the scene reconfirms Pamela’s selection of B. Since B has already won her affections, nothing he does can be wrong, and everything pertaining to him can be recovered through a providential narrative of happy accidents. And so it is with the discovery of Miss Goodwin, which affords Pamela the opportunity to reflect that she has “had the Grace to escape the Unhappiness of this poor Gentlewoman” (Sally Godfrey), and “to shew the Sincerity of my grateful Affection for you, Sir, in the Love I will always express to this dear child” (479). Once again, it is all about B. Why should Pamela and not Sally have been the chosen one? This is beyond the enchanted thinking of the plot to work out; in any case, the latter’s fate is not represented as entirely B’s fault but rather as the result of a set of unfortunate circumstances. Once she has turned the Sally Godfrey story into a usable exemplum, Pamela is willing to forgive her new husband and begin afresh.40 Before and after her marriage, Pamela possesses the negative capability to allow that the past is not necessarily prologue, the willingness to be pleasantly surprised. This is a remarkable thing in light of the sexual history that B confesses, an unspecified number of lovers (“New objects of pleasure danced before my eyes” [486]) between the era of Sally and the present. By the time he takes a fancy to his mother’s servant, he darkly admits, “I doubted not to make my Pamela change her Name, without either Act of Parliament or Wedlock, and be Sally Godfrey the Second” (486). B’s serial phrasing suggests the compulsive repetitions of a libertine, while the dynastic connotation aptly reflects Lady Davers’s obsession with family lineage. Will the heroine turn out to be Sally II or Pamela I—one in a succession of sexual conquests or a rightful part of a family line? Lady Davers zealously concerns herself with both issues, two different scales of history: B’s sexual past and the longer scope of the family’s inheritance and legacy. She assumes that her family history is an unbroken line of gentility, and that Pamela’s entrance on the scene is an unpleasant surprise that disrupts that succession, but Pamela offers a perceptively skeptical rejoinder to this way of thinking: how do these Gentry know, supposing they could trace back their Ancestry, for one, two, three, or even five hundred Years, that then the original Stems of these poor Families, though they have not kept such elaborate Records of their Good-for-nothingness, as it often proves, were not still deeper rooted? And how can they be assured, that one

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 113

1/27/15 8:01 AM

114

CHAPT ER 4

hundred Years hence or two, some of those now despised upstart Families may not revel in their Estates, while their Descendants may be reduced to the other’s Dunghils? (258) Within the fullness of time and the revolutions of Fortune’s wheel, Pamela seems to say, anything is possible; fortunes are made or lost, people achieve greatness or have it thrust upon them; nobility alternates—or coexists—with “good-for-nothingness.” For the purposes of Richardson’s characterization, Pamela cannot appear too acutely informed about political and monarchical history, but her observation surely touches on, among other things, the Reformation and the creation of new estates and titles. In Pamela’s epistemological challenge to the smugness of gentility, people can never be absolutely sure of anything in their heraldic mythology; but by the same token, Pamela’s own recent glimpse of her husband’s history should be warning enough that surprise is not necessarily at an end. And yet for Richardson’s narrative purposes, surprise had come to an end. It is a great irony of the Pamela phenomenon that a year after he wrote the letter to Cheyne defending his novel from the charge that it was too shockingly explicit, Richardson found himself responding to an entirely different criticism: that the last two volumes of the four-volume Pamela (what have come to be known as Pamela II) were “Defective in Incidents”—in short, not surprising enough (54). “I am so great an Enemy of the French Marvellous,” he insists, “that I only aimed to give the Piece such a Variety, as should be consistent with Probability, and the general Tenor of a genteel Married Life. I aimed, as far as my poor Talents wou’d permit, to instruct, rather than to Surprize” (54). As we have seen in Richardson’s defense of Pamela and in his implicit poetics, the author had earlier meant both to surprise and instruct, in precisely that succession. By aligning “surprize” with the purely marvelous or sensational, Richardson amplifies a conventional distinction between edification and entertainment, morals and aesthetics. But he conveniently overlooks his own role in blurring that boundary, as well as larger developments in the eighteenth-century understanding of surprise. Addison had already insisted that instruction and surprise should be intertwined; and whether Richardson wished to admit it or not, Pamela had abundantly demonstrated that point.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 114

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 5 Fielding’s Statues of Surprize

Both Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela reflect the eighteenth-century understanding of surprise as a momentarily debilitating or even life-threatening experience; the first-person reports of its eruptions necessarily reconstruct a sudden halt in the flow of perception and thought. In the Protestant poetics of both novels, such moments reiterate the protagonist’s lack of confident expectation and accessibility to providential hints. Surprise serves, in short, as an index of authenticity, an indispensable element in the emotional vocabulary of formal realism. All of this changes in the famously self-conscious and hyperliterary realism of Henry Fielding’s novels. Surprise here becomes a term of narrative design and aesthetic pleasure; it is overtly theorized as a key element in the poetics of ridicule; it serves unabashedly comic purposes; and it becomes an experience to be vividly enacted rather than a response to be dutifully recorded. Fielding was steeped in the prose of his predecessors, but he also drew more heavily than they did on the emotional vocabulary of dramatic and epic poetry—both the gestural repertoire of theater and the metaphorical elaboration of epic. Through these conduits, Fielding makes surprise eminently visible. More than an emotional datum or narrative fact, surprise in Fielding’s fiction becomes a comic freeze-frame, an overt trope, an occasion for stylistic display, and an instrument of moral commentary.

115

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 115

1/27/15 8:01 AM

116

CHAPT ER 5

Fielding’s fiction incorporates the gendered forms of surprise that Robinson Crusoe and Pamela separately exemplify: both picaresque violence and eroticized shock. In my chapters on Robinson Crusoe and Pamela, I located moments in which surprise is converted, by accident or indirection, into edification or pleasure. Fielding’s fiction marks the pivotal point at which surprise— both its mimesis in characters and its enactment in readers—becomes openly designed and advertised for those purposes. Even as it harked back to its violent precursors, surprise in Fielding’s fiction became almost synonymous with what Joseph Addison called the pleasures of the imagination: both the temporal propulsion of narrative and the visual energy of metaphor and description; both the celebrated twists of plot and the theatrical spectacle of astonished characters. Fielding has been described by critics as godlike artist and as entertaining trickster, and in his complex deployments of surprise, he plays both roles.1 Michael McKeon once observed that “Fielding meets Richardson at the nexus where moral and social pedagogy hesitate on the edge of their transformation into something else entirely, aesthetic pleasure.”2 More recently, he has articulated that nexus as a developmental shift in the novel: from the early “claim to historicity” exemplified by Pamela to a growing appreciation for the particular claims of the literary imagination, an understanding that “the literate arts themselves have a singular capacity to absorb the reader through a singular process of psychological identification.”3 It is an identification generated not by the autobiographical and documentary “transparency” of Pamela or Robinson Crusoe but rather by “an obliquity effect” in which the act of reading is experienced as a kind of mental cinema. I argue that this quality of absorption can be traced in Fielding’s poetics of surprise, which pertains to both the reader’s engagement with plot and the emotional dynamics of excitable characters. Fielding’s scenes of surprise, that is to say, stand in for the reader’s putative reaction, even as they invite the reader to stand apart from a character’s affective response. The aesthetic rewards of Fielding’s fiction were recognized from the very beginning. In contemporaneous criticism, Pamela was not celebrated for the pleasure of its surprises, but Fielding’s fiction was. Indeed, the word “surprize” became nearly synonymous with the widely noted pleasures of Fielding’s plots—especially the Aristotelian engineering of accidents that culminate in the revelation of the hero’s true parentage in both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. In early reviews of the latter novel, we see the beginnings of an eighteenth-century narratology that values suspense and surprise—the art of engaging, frustrating, and satisfying the reader’s expectations. An unsigned article in the London Magazine (February 1748/9) notes that “the reader’s at-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 116

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

117

tention is always kept awake by some new surprizing accident, and his curiosity upon the stretch, to discover the effects of that accident.”4 In his “Essay on a New Species of Writing” (1751), Francis Coventry praises Fielding’s “gradual Narration of Facts” for keeping the reader guessing about Jones’s fate until the end, comparing it favorably with the plot of Alain-René Lesage’s Gil Blas, which gives the reader too much assurance of the hero’s prosperity “to be surpriz’d at it.”5 This is a significant revision of Aristotelian peripeteia—not only because it formulates a positive reversal of fortune but also because it discards the prohibition against arbitrary turns. By implication, the reader should be kept in a state of uncertainty or ignorance for as long as possible. Arthur Murphy, who would become Fielding’s first biographer, called Tom Jones “the perfection of fable,” adding that “no fable whatever affords, in its solution, such artful states of suspense, such beautiful turns of surprise, such unexpected incidents, and such sudden discoveries.”6 By citing fable as a standard, Murphy articulates both the traditional, didactic underpinnings of Fielding’s work and its modernity—its page-by-page engagement with the reader’s affective response. All three commentators agree with Fielding’s conception of a reader whose default state is boredom or inattention: someone who must be kept “stretched” on a rack of anticipation. To varying degrees, they posit the experience of suddenness or surprise as a fundamentally pleasurable experience—in short, an aesthetic good in itself. That move is crystallized in Murphy’s encomium. Addison had associated surprise with the category of Novelty, but Murphy places it squarely under the heading of Beauty. It is as if the “beautiful turn” of narrative temporality were spatialized as the serpentine “line of beauty” formulated by William Hogarth. Such claims cannot be openly made about Pamela; or rather, they were made by anti-Pamelists as criticisms of the novel’s furtive pleasures. From the perspective of defenders, the experience of being on the “stretch” over Pamela’s fate and Mr. B’s conduct was not supposed to be pleasurable; it was supposed to reflect the Christian heroine’s difficult path toward an uncertain reward—an arduous plot that Vivasvan Soni has called the trial narrative. Instead of the aesthetic pleasures of suspense, such a narrative offers what Soni describes as a suspension of the hermeneutic of happiness: the deferral of judgment about an individual’s fortune until the end of an entire life.7 I make several arguments about Fielding’s poetics of surprise. First, I want to emphasize that the author himself conceived of and theorized about his art as explicable through a poetics: a narrative structure, a descriptive mode, and a stylistic practice. I begin this chapter by discussing the author’s metafictional engagement with surprise in two early works (Tom Thumb and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 117

1/27/15 8:01 AM

118

CHAPT ER 5

Shamela) and in the chapter headings of two later works (Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones). Fielding’s manipulation of plot is a well-established critical premise, and I do not intend to dwell on it here. Rather, I want to focus on a less studied matter: the depiction of characters’ experiences of surprise. Fielding’s novels feature an extraordinary number of such scenes: people are stupefied into long bouts of speechlessness, figuratively petrified into statues, and likened to astonished figures in a play; they are literally ambushed by attackers, stunned by sudden visions or revelations, and brought up short by unexpected actions or behaviors. I consider Joseph Andrews as an exemplary case. The hero of the novel could be called a walking surprise: a putative brother to Pamela never mentioned in Richardson’s novel, a young man who adheres to a maidenly code of virtue, and a foundling who turns out not to be related to Pamela after all.8 Beyond these inversions, numerous moments of surprise, both small and large, drive the plot of Fielding’s novel. In terms of modern emotion theory, these moments can be calibrated along a scale ranging from the bodily startle reflex to higher-order states of consciousness. Simple startlement, in Silvan Tompkins’s definition, is a mental “circuit breaker”: in its mild form, it is a turning of attention, and a momentary cessation of speech or action; at its most potent, it is a chaotic and disruptive force.9 At the cognitive level, surprise is an externally displayed event as well as an internal sensation. Its expression is an evaluative judgment with a fundamentally ethical orientation toward the world, and the emotional experience of Fielding’s characters demonstrates that principle.10 In drawing on this premise, I want to assert two things: that the cruder forms of startlement or physical reflex in Fielding’s fiction are intertwined with cognitive forms of surprise; and that Fielding, more than his predecessors, evokes the socially constructed nature of that emotion. In his treatment, surprise is not only an involuntary feeling but also an expressive idiom with its own repertoire of tropes and gestures. It is not only authentically felt or reported (as in Pamela or Robinson Crusoe) but also performed—rhetorically elaborated by a garrulous narrator or a self-dramatizing character. The brief dramatic flair that we see in Pamela’s attempt to recount her shock at reuniting with her father becomes standard practice here; and the urge that other characters display in wishing to read (and reread) Pamela’s narration is given a full airing in Fielding’s unabashedly elaborate descriptions. Whether played for humor, sentiment, or moral commentary, the scene of surprise slows the forward momentum of narrative. The emotion itself is a brief and flaring thing, but Fielding’s descriptions reflect an effort to extend and savor it, as if approximating the immediacy of theater or the stasis

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 118

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

119

of the pictorial or sculptural arts. This archetypal moment can be called an ekphrasis of sorts. For like the traditional poetic description of an artistic object, the portrayal of a surprised character speaks for a silent thing—a person who has been temporarily rendered speechless. In such moments, Fielding seeks to approximate the mimetic capacities of his first artistic medium: the suddenness of sounds and sights, the presence of bodies on stage, the halting effect of silence and cessation, the temporality of viewing and listening. His fondness for the theatrical representation of surprise is nowhere more evident than in his references to David Garrick. On more than one occasion, Fielding likens an astonished character to that celebrated actor’s perfor mance of Hamlet accosted by his father’s ghost—a perfor mance famously assisted by a mechanical fright wig designed to simulate a proverbial effect of astonishment. From his theatrical debut in 1714, Garrick ushered in a new model of acting that shifted the emphasis from rhetoric to physiology, which Joseph Roach has described as reflecting a larger cultural shift in the understanding of the body as site of the passions.11 Fielding’s ekphrases of surprise, with their emphasis on bodily experience, reflect that shift, even as they remain inescapably tethered to rhetorical elaboration. These moments also function as trials or tests. Here, Soni’s paradigm of the trial narrative can help us understand a crucial difference between typical scenes in Richardson’s and Fielding’s novels. Cumulatively, Pamela’s experiences of shock reiterate basic truths about the cruelty of others and about her own virtue and vulnerability; they generally do not elicit new information about the heroine or her persecutors; and their sheer repetitiveness confirms the point that life is a Jobean trial to be endured. They are usually not descriptive set pieces in the way that Fielding’s are—a major exception being the meticulously detailed scene of Pamela’s reunion with her father, which reads as a self-contained anecdote with a strong intimation of ultimate happiness rather than the deferral or suspension to be found elsewhere in the novel. This episode, which is recounted and circulated among characters in the novel for its dramatic pleasures, anticipates the kind of scenes to be found in Fielding’s novels. In essence, the species of trial formulated by Soni undergoes a permutation in Fielding’s fiction. While Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones can be seen as comprising one long trial (whose goal is revelation of the hero’s birth identity and facilitation of marriage to a virtuous woman), they can also be read as a series of micro-trials to which various characters are subjected. By “trial,” then, I mean to emphasize the sense of a test or an experiment: a means by which a character’s response to shock is elicited and assessed. A character harbors a thought, desire, belief, or inclination, which is suddenly exposed

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 119

1/27/15 8:01 AM

120

CHAPT ER 5

or challenged in an accidental or unexpected event. In John Bender’s analogy, the early novel can be seen as a laboratory operating under controlled conditions, in which the author acts as experimenter;12 and in the episodes I examine, surprise functions as the strategic catalyst. The descriptive set piece of a character’s astonishment serves a dual purpose: it solicits or mirrors that effect in the putatively absorbed reader; but it also turns the character into a theatrical spectacle to behold, or a case to scrutinize. I conclude this chapter by showing how Tristram Shandy elaborates on Fielding’s poetics of surprise. While Fielding both invoked and mocked the “surprizing adventures” of romance and picaresque narrative, Laurence Sterne makes a show of dispensing with them entirely. Professing a contempt for the conventional surprises of plot, Sterne nevertheless follows Fielding in treating mundane jolts and accidents in stop-motion ekphrasis; and he develops mimetic techniques to enact or simulate those experiences. Fielding’s touchstone was the dramatic stage and its capacity to halt action and show physical bodies in a state of arrest, but Sterne gravitated more toward rhetoric and philosophy: he frames his scenes of surprise as forms of interrupted speech and failed language, and he treats them as inquiries into the cognitive and emotional response to stimuli. Above all, I want to emphasize that Sterne treats surprise as a kind of Freudian trauma avant la lettre—an experience to be compulsively repeated, both at the level of narrative and at the level of character behavior. It is the ruminative impulse to revisit and redescribe an ephemeral event—the tragicomic attempt to understand it, under the overhanging futility of changing it or its consequences.

c Theorizing Surprise J. Paul Hunter once suggested that Fielding’s art springs from a sense of exhausted genres and rhetorical forms but derives creative energy from that depletion.13 I would like to expand on that premise in articulating the ways that Fielding manipulated the narrative mechanics and rhetoric of surprise. Before he became a novelist, Fielding adopted two satirical stances toward surprise, which could be called exaggeration (in the case of his farce Tom Thumb) and evacuation (in the case of his parody, Shamela). I briefly sketch Fielding’s strategies in these works before turning to Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, novels in which the author overtly theorized the uses of surprise, in the metanarrative apparatus of chapter headings and prefaces. In essence, Fielding cultivates the satirist’s worldly-wise attitude that nothing should be surprising,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 120

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

121

even as he uses surprise as a lever of sympathetic engagement, critical judgment, rhetorical perfor mance, and entertaining spectacle. As a playwright, Fielding mocked the emotional hyperbole of tragic drama in The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the History of Tom Thumb the Great (1731). Part of the play’s comedy is generated by the slippage between the rhetoric of the “surprizing” and the object of description, most obviously in the disproportion between the hero’s minuscule stature and the outsized claims about his greatness. Fielding’s strategy can be seen in characters’ rhetorical performances, as when Queen Dollallolla declares her feeling of abandonment upon waking to find that her husband the king has already quit the bed: Think, O think! What a Surprize it must be to the Sun, Rising, to find the vanished World away. What less can be the wretched Wife’s Surprize, When, stretching out her Arms to fold thee fast, She folds her useless Bolster in her Arms. (3.4.10–15)14 What is lost on the queen is that she is in fact nothing like the sun, for it cannot be surprised in the way that she imagines. For that matter, there is nothing new under the sun: nothing can vanish under the cosmic engine of visibility itself, and nothing can surprise a heavenly body that has seen it all. By implication, the fickleness of husbands, like the solar cycle, should not be surprising at all; and yet the boringly practical truth of the scene is that the king has left the conjugal bed because he could not sleep. Fielding adopts a different satirical strategy toward surprise in his work of prose fiction, the Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741): he eliminates it entirely. By transforming Richardson’s rustic and virtuous heroine into the urban and mercenary Shamela, Fielding devises a character with a total immunity to surprise; indeed, the word itself is conspicuous by its near-total absence from the novel. In effect, it is replaced by the ubiquitous “pretend,” which harks back to a charge that Richardson’s Mr. B raises against Pamela.15 By implication, Fielding suggests that neither Pamela nor Richardson’s readers can credibly claim to be shocked by the behavior of a squire toward his female servant, or by the repeated advances made by a known rake; in his critique, surprise is a strategic pose struck by the heroine or a literary sensation courted by the reader, rather than a purely unsought or involuntary response. In its parasitic relation to Richardson’s original novel, then, Shamela utterly drains away the possibility of serial surprises on the part of the heroine or the reader.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 121

1/27/15 8:01 AM

122

CHAPT ER 5

Surprise becomes a more visible focal point in subsequent novels, where Fielding addresses it in his commentary, subjects his characters to various forms of astonishment, and solicits that response from the reader. In Tom Jones, he proposes an axiom for every writer of fiction: “the more he can surprize the reader, if he keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him.”16 In this formula, Fielding combines the two essential strands of the early novel—both Reality (the credible) and Romance (the charming)—while articulating the emerging genre’s cognitive ambitions to capture and hold the reader’s attention. Quoting Alexander Pope’s aphorism in Peri Bathous, Fielding adds that the great art of all poetry is “to join the credible with the surprizing.” What Pope meant by “surprizing” might be interchangeable with the marvelous or supernatural, but it has other shades of meaning for Fielding’s fiction. “Credible” is an epistemological term, but “surprizing” is an emotional one; the latter connotes not only the unbelievable but also the momentary effect of something that unsettles belief or assent, or even produces delight. The reader’s capacity for surprise is most directly addressed in Fielding’s chapter headings. The ones in Joseph Andrews especially register the kind of generic depletion articulated by Hunter. They apply a picaresque formula to decidedly less exotic material—promising “many surprizing Adventures . . . scarce credible to those who have never traveled in a StageCoach” (1.12), or “a surprising Instance of Mr Adams’ short Memory” (1.2).17 In Fielding’s handling, the promiscuous invocations of “surprise” and “adventure” function as winks at an attenuated donnée. A few years later in Tom Jones, however, Fielding tires of the game and invents a new one. Though he still sprinkles his chapter headings with teasers, he generally avoids the old watchwords, offering utilitarian descriptions (“In which the Thirteenth Book is concluded” [13.12]); proto-Wordsworthian declarations of the ordinary (“Containing a few common Matters” [1.5], “Containing little or nothing” [3.1]); and even a metafictional joke about textual mediation (“Containing five Pages of Paper” [14.1]). One chapter heading renounces surprise entirely: “Containing what the Reader may, perhaps, expect to find in it” (1.12). In the examples I have mentioned, Fielding encourages a reflexive awareness of the mechanism of surprise, but in his preface to Joseph Andrews, he makes a more direct claim for its ethical utility. Here, he distinguishes between mere mockery and ridicule, burlesque and satire. Ridicule, as he defines it, is the exposure of “affectation,” which “always strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure; and that in a higher degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy, than when from vanity: for to discover anyone to be the ex-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 122

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

123

act reverse of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he desires the reputation of ” (29). Echoing Addison’s formula for Novelty, Fielding articulates a distinctly eighteenth-century version of the pity and terror engendered by tragedy. He also elaborates on Aristotle’s distinction between low and high forms of dramatic surprise—between the shock of an arbitrary accident and the cognitive reckoning with a deeply embedded plot reversal. In effect, Fielding replaces an Aristotelian ontology of social station with the rhetoric of social display, and yet the insistence on degrees of surprise is similar. Just as the tragic hero must fall from a great height, the comic figure must stumble from a projected ideal; and both kinds of mishap should arise intrinsically from the frailties of character rather than the artifice of plot. Notably, Fielding’s formulation of the surprise—“to discover anyone to be the exact reverse of what he affects”—effectively collapses the categories of anagnorisis and peripeteia (emphasis mine). It is not necessary that the comic figure suffer a material or permanent reversal, nor that he or she fully reckon with a change; reversal and discovery are conflated and displaced into the mind of the observer or reader. Fielding thus incorporates lower forms of comic humiliation within a high-minded framework of theorized ridicule. This strategy exemplifies what Blakey Vermeule has identified as a pervasive eighteenth-century “fantasy of exposure”: the notion, animated by Enlightenment inquiry and party politics, that knowledge comes from stripping away surface appearances, and that self-interested motives always lie beneath social ones.18 Fielding’s art of exposure is, finally, a temporal process. It is not the instantaneous sketch of caricature but an unfolding movement from appearance to reality. That process comes to the dramatic foreground in descriptions of characters’ surprise; and I next turn to several such moments in Joseph Andrews.

c Surprise and Metamorphosis Surprise, as Pamela abundantly demonstrates, is deeply inflected by gender; and Joseph Andrews (1742) features two key scenes in which the surprise of female characters implies forms of sexual embarrassment. There are obvious differences between Lady Booby, the would-be seducer of Joseph, and Fanny, his destined mate; but I want to focus on a subtler connection between them: both are likened, in their differently motivated scenes of surprise, to statues. The trope was a conventional one, but it bears important implications for Fielding’s fiction. I want to make several claims about Fielding’s deployment

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 123

1/27/15 8:01 AM

124

CHAPT ER 5

of this metaphor: that it registers a prose attempt to approximate the visual immediacy of the sister arts; that it engages the Ovidian thematics of metamorphosis as punishment or allegorical figuration; that it reflects contemporary understandings of the physiological basis of emotion; that it comments on the function of sculpture as a site of aesthetic discourse; and that it marks a lacuna between temporarily immobilized characters and the roving curiosity of narrator and readers. These scenes can be related to two other descriptive inflections of surprise that would emerge in eighteenth-century fiction, the gothic and the sentimental. Both forms are characterized by attitudes of muteness, immobility, and wonder. Often, the moment of surprise is said to last a minute or more—a temporal suspension in the flow of narrative that both underlines the disabling effect of the emotion and defies credulity in its sheer duration. In the gothic, it typically accentuates a moment of horror, as in the iconic opening of Horace Walpole’s seminal Castle of Otranto, in which an enormous fragment of a statue petrifies the stunned beholders. (I have more to say about that novel in my chapter on Austen.) In the sentimental mode, the object of surprise is usually a spectacle of pathos or kindness; and in the emotional dynamics of sensibility, one character’s surprise can trigger another’s. The sentimental mode of surprise is exemplified in the novel that Sarah Fielding published anonymously two years after her brother published Joseph Andrews. In The Adventures of David Simple, spectacles of extraordinary tenderness or cruelty stun witnesses into mute abstraction; characters are constantly recovering speech after bouts of silent astonishment; sudden transports of joy stop the mind and disorder the senses; words are dammed up and then released as tears. In a typical scene, the hero reacts to his landlady’s callousness in hounding a seriously ill lodger, Valentine, and his sister Camilla about their debt. While Camilla laments her situation, “David’s Tears flowed as fast as hers; his Words could find no Utterance, and he stood motionless as a Statue.”19 This sympathetic response gives Camilla an equal surprise at the kindness of a stranger: “The young woman stared for the space of a Minute on David, with a Wildness which quite frightened him” (116). Camilla’s outpouring of gratitude causes further astonishment: “David, who was very much surprized at her Air and manner, had then no time for reflection” (116). Surprise begets surprise; one emotional response becomes the occasion of another. Moreover, there is an erotic element to this exchange, for David and Camilla are destined to fall in love. In effect, the language of sympathy and tenderness substitutes for the language of mutual erotic attraction.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 124

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

125

The episode of Lady Booby’s surprise represents a burlesque variation on that emotional dynamic. Like the joke of turning maidenly Pamela into worldly Shamela, the conceit of giving Mr. B a sexually aggressive sister is predicated on an inversion of roles; but Fielding works a striking variation on that premise. In playing the successive roles of the surpriser and the surprised, Lady Booby incorporates elements of both Mr. B and Pamela. The scene begins with her recapitulating the role of Pamela ambushed in her closet. Calling a levee, Lady Booby allows her servant a glimpse of her bared neck, and at the sight of Joseph’s blush, Lady Booby pornographically narrates the situation: “ ‘La!’ says she, in an affected surprize, ‘what am I doing? I have trusted myself with a man alone, naked in bed’ ” (49). Surprise here is both an affective state (embarrassment) and a state of affairs (the situation of being surprised in bed ). Lady Booby makes a bolder advance on Joseph in an italicized stage direction (“laying her hand carelessly upon his”); and when the latter protests that he has only kissed girls, she replies, “Kissing, Joseph, is as a prologue to a play” (58). The theatricality of the encounter is not lost on Joseph, who in a letter to Pamela reports that his employer “talked exactly as a lady does to her sweetheart in a stage-play, which I have seen in Covent Garden, while she wanted him to be no better than he should be” (50).20 The force of that metaphor recoils upon Lady Booby when her shock at being rejected by Joseph is described in an elaborately theatrical set piece. This genuine (if histrionic) surprise is designed as a direct counterpoint to Lady Booby’s counterfeit emotion. Immediately before this moment, Lady Booby accuses Joseph of impregnating a servant in her household, and Fielding describes the latter’s chagrin with a brevity that reflects his simplicity and candor: “As a person who is struck through the heart with a thunderbolt, looks extremely surprised, nay, and perhaps is so too. – Thus the poor Joseph received the false accusation of his mistress; he blushed and looked confounded” (57). As in Robinson Crusoe, the surprised person is not simply described as such but rather likened to someone in the extremity of astonishment—the state of being thunderstruck. Fielding draws out that etymology in his simile, and his self-correcting distinction between looking surprised and actually being surprised jokingly alludes to the inaccessible subjectivity of the metaphorical victim, who would be stunned beyond the ability to describe the experience—or dead. Fielding’s joke about the iconic speechlessness of surprise swells into mockepic grandeur in the case of Lady Booby, as the narrator rushes in to fill the comic silence with an ekphrasis of emotion:

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 125

1/27/15 8:01 AM

126

CHAPT ER 5

You have heard, Reader, poets talk of the Statue of Surprize; you have heard likewise, or else you have heard very little, how Surprize made one of the sons of Croesus speak tho’ he was dumb. You have seen the Faces, in the Eighteen-penny Gallery, when through the Trap-Door, to soft or no Musick, Mr Bridgewater, Mr William Mills, or some other of ghostly Appearance, hath ascended with a Face all pale with Powder, and a Shirt all bloody with Ribbons; but from none of these nor from Phidias, or Praxiteles, if they should return to Life—no, not from the inimitable Pencil of my Friend Hogarth, could you receive such an Idea of Surprize, as would have entered in at your Eyes, had they beheld the Lady Booby, when those last Words issued out from the Lips of Joseph. – ‘Your Virtue! (said the Lady recovering after a silence of two Minutes) I shall never survive it. Your Virtue!’ (58) The references to theatrical perfor mance serve ambiguous ends. On the one hand, they stand in for the mimetic potency that Fielding lost when he ceased to be a playwright. In theater, an audience member can be startled in precisely the same moment and by precisely the same aural or visual stimulus as a character on stage. Lady Booby’s silence, which on stage would be portrayed physically, is here measured by an extravagant scattering of allusions, as if the two-minute interval of speechlessness could be approximated by the felt duration of reading.21 On the other hand, Fielding’s set piece represents a Bakhtinian truth about the novel’s capacities, its assimilation of other representational media. In Fielding’s prose, the reader is situated not merely as a spectator fully absorbed in the drama but as a connoisseur who sees actors in powder and ribbons rather than ashen and bloodied bodies; and as a Hogarthian observer of audience members’ physiognomy rather than as a participant in cathartic surprise or terror. Surprise is a fleeting emotional experience, but on the page it can be lingered over with a mixture of aesthetic pleasure and critical distance. In alluding to both statues and paintings, Fielding invokes artistic alternatives to the theater; but he also registers the intertwinement of these media in the understanding and representation of the passions. It is possible, as some scholars have suggested, that Fielding has a particular poetic locus in mind when he refers to the “Statue of Surprize,” but he is also drawing on a deep fund of cultural and literary meanings attached to statues.22 Charles Le Brun’s influential treatise on physiognomy invokes the metaphor in defining the passion of “Admiration”: “a surprize, which enclines the Soul attentively to consider the objects that seem rare and extraordinary to her,” such that “few spirits are left to supply the Muscles: hence the body becomes as a statue,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 126

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

127

without motion” (16). Following Le Brun’s plan, Fielding’s friend and fellow playwright Aaron Hill anatomized ten dramatic passions in his Essay on the Art of Acting (1749). One of them is Wonder, which Hill divides into two degrees of intensity: mild amazement, which “suspends, not stagnates, the free motion of the blood and spirits”; and stronger astonishment, a swift “recoil of animal spirits” that tends toward what Hill ominously calls “actual cessation” (35), or at least “an almost total deprivation, for the time, of all powers of sense and motion” (37).23 As in the Dantean contraposso of Paradise Lost, in which Satan, the wouldbe attacker, is himself seized by Sin, Lady Booby is punished for her sexual sally with the Ovidian punishment of petrifaction: having artfully posed herself in partial undress, she becomes an immobile object for the reader’s regard, a Medusa of the beau monde whose freezing gaze is turned against her. As a moment of forbidden contact between a titled lady and her servant, the scene also recalls the story of Actaeon and Diana: Joseph, like the unfortunate hunter, has caught an accidental glimpse of a woman’s naked body, but here it is the goddess who is punitively transformed. Unlike Ovidian metamorphoses, however, this one is only temporary: when Lady Booby recovers speech, she extends the theatrical set piece by way of a soliloquy: “Whither doth this violent passion hurry us? What meannesses do we submit to from its impulse?” (1.8.59). Notably, Fielding accords only Lady Booby the luxury of overdramatizing her emotions, as if in observance of a sumptuary law of description. Both she and Mrs. Slipslop harbor a desire for Joseph, and both are disappointed by him; but it is only the former whose feelings are privileged with such elaborate treatment.24 The sheer grandiloquence of Fielding’s description and Lady Booby’s soliloquy makes surprise look like social indignation in disguise, an ordinary event dressed up as a marvelous occurrence. In effect, the scene enacts Fielding’s poetics of ridicule, in which surprise forcibly peels affectation away from the deeper truth of character and naked human desire. Lady Booby’s botched seduction of Joseph has a violent counterpart in the attempted rape of Fanny by the character commonly known as the “Roasting Squire.” This later episode performs several obvious thematic functions: in terms of class, it shows Fanny and Joseph to be similar objects of aristocratic predation; in terms of gender, it demonstrates the conventional dynamics of sexual aggression, against which Lady Booby’s behavior appears as farcical inversion; and in terms of genre, it creates the opportunity for Joseph to shine as a romance hero. More subtly, the scene can be tracked along a timeline of surprise, from the physical to the cognitive: the violent attack on Fanny, the astonishment of Joseph, the blush of self-consciousness that

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 127

1/27/15 8:01 AM

128

CHAPT ER 5

comes over both, and the titillation of bystanders. More brazenly than Richardson, Fielding represents a scene of sexual surprise as spectacle. It is no accident that Lady Booby and Fanny are both likened to statues, but the difference in the two analogies is instructive: one is statuesque in her shock, the other in her beauty; one stares in astonishment, the other attracts the wondering stares of others. Whereas Lady Booby deliberately arranges her décolletage for Joseph’s eyes, Fanny endures an accidental disrobement: in the melee of her abduction, her kerchief falls away to reveal her underlying “charms.” As Simon Dickie has observed, rescues of virgins in distress were often overtly eroticized in romance and sentimental fiction, and Fielding used such scenes, in both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, to accentuate the sexual allure of his heroines.25 From a moral standpoint, the violent treatment of Fanny registers as a shock, but on a narrative level it amplifies the novel’s interest in her sexuality. In particular, it harks back to an earlier reunion with Joseph, in which the narrator describes Fanny as “bursting through her tight stays, especially in the part which confined her swelling breasts” (2.12.154), and reports that she possesses “a natural gentility, superior to the acquisition of art, and which surprized all who beheld her” (2.12.155). On the surface, the surprise seems like a function of expectation: it is the socially inflected discovery of natural grace where the genteel viewer was not looking for it. But it also serves as a sly synonym for “delighted” or “inflamed.” In essence, Fielding is applying the Addisonian rhetoric of aesthetic appreciation to what amounts to unabashed voyeurism. That response is recapitulated in the scene of Fanny’s rescue. In effect, a physical attack is purified by an aesthetic surprise—wonderment at a spectacle so impressive “that Joseph hath declared all the statues he ever beheld were so much inferiour to it in beauty, that it was more capable of converting a man into a statue, than of being imitated by the greatest master of that art” (4.7.287). While Fanny surpasses the beauties of classical statuary, Joseph is effectively turned into a Statue of Surprize, as he is afforded a preconjugal glimpse of his beloved’s suddenly bared “charms.” Fanny’s genuinely modest embarrassment is meant to be contrasted with Lady Booby’s theatrically “affected surprize” (1.5.49) at the exposure of her nakedness in her impromptu levee; and her minutes-long pause—composed of joy, fear, and sympathy—markedly differs from Lady Booby’s histrionic apoplexy over a single word. This is a two-stage (and two-person) surprise, narrated first from Joseph’s perspective and then from Fanny’s. Each looks at the other, and each becomes aware, to varying degrees, of that reciprocal act. As in the earlier reunion scene, the lovers fall under a spell of mutual enchantment, from which

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 128

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

129

they emerge when they become aware of themselves as spectator and spectacle. Fielding’s psychonarration implies that Joseph is mentally comparing Fanny to statues he has seen. This is not the aesthetic standard that a country boy might be expected to invoke, but Joseph has had a taste of cosmopolitan pleasures: if he became a frequenter of playhouses and a “connoisseur” of opera during his time in London (1.4.46), he might have been exposed to other art forms as well. In effect, the reference to statues affirms Joseph’s sexual innocence: his only basis of comparison is the artistic representation of women’s bodies, not the bodies themselves. The surprise lies in the discovery that life can resemble art, just as Lady Booby’s flirtatious banter reminds Joseph of the dialogue in a play. Though Joseph’s artistically mediated familiarity with the female body indicates innocence of a sort, Fielding is also making a worldly observation about statues: they offer a socially permissible way of gazing at naked and partially draped human forms, even as they recall the theme of sexual gratification in the Pygmalion myth.26 Aaron Hill had exploited the farcical possibilities of that story in his one-act play, The Walking Statue: Or, the Devil in the Wine-Cellar (1710). A gentleman named Sprightly uses his valet to convey billets-doux to Leonora.27 Learning that her father expects the delivery of a statue, Sprightly’s servant commissions Cuttum, the carver’s apprentice, to pose as the expected object, in a ruse to gain entrance to the house. Leonora describes her astonishment at this delivery as a hallucination: “I had forgot the Statue stood upon the Table, and looking that way on the sudden took it for a naked Man” (58). When Sprightly wins Leonora in the play’s swift denouement, he points up the mythological metaphor at the beating heart of his hoax: “O! Sir! Love has been Author of stranger Metamorphoses, than any in Ovid” (64). The implicit joke is that the cultural respectability of Ovid and classical sculpture make it safe to contemplate erotic stories and naked bodies; and Sprightly’s suggestion that love is “stranger” than Ovidian metamorphosis willfully overlooks the fact that such mythological tales are themselves about “love” in all its carnality. The episode of Fanny’s unveiling involves a two-way metamorphosis— bodies turned into sculpture and then returning to flesh and blood. The resemblance of Fanny to a statue is accentuated by the “snowy hue” of fear at the sight of a wounded Joseph, but that color is changed for the redness of embarrassment as her focus shifts from another’s pain to her own exposure. In the Pygmalion tradition, this flush of self-awareness transforms her from a statue of ideal beauty into a fully human presence; the suspended moment gives way to the temporal movement of social interaction. Though Joseph’s shock is experienced as a momentary paralysis of body and speech, it does

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 129

1/27/15 8:01 AM

130

CHAPT ER 5

not stop the healthy operations of Joseph’s sensorium: “Joseph saw the uneasiness she suffered, and immediately removed his eyes from an object, in surveying which he had felt the greatest delight which the organs of sight were capable of conveying to his soul” (4.7.287). Here, Fielding’s narration typically equivocates: it affirms Joseph’s modesty while allowing a furtive peek, and it describes an ephemeral image on the retina yet fixes an Idea in the mind. Fanny’s consciousness, however, remains unknowable. Notably, Fielding does not describe Fanny as surprised, and this may be because the word as it appears in the novel is so suffused with erotic meaning. In both reunion scenes, Fanny is described as recovering from “confusion” rather than surprise. “Confusion” suggests a muddle of feelings that Fanny has not fully articulated or realized, whereas “surprise” might indicate a more sharply focused cognitive reckoning. The supremely deliberate Lady Booby is surprised at her own game; the naïve Fanny is confused. That distinction is important in the nocturnal bed-trick scene toward the end of the novel, when at an inn Joseph discovers Parson Adams unwittingly sleeping with Fanny. When the narrator tells us that “Joseph stood, as the tragedians call it, like the statue of Surprize” (314), it is unclear whether Fielding is carelessly recycling a favorite trope or deliberately recalling the shock of Lady Booby, but the difference between the two scenes is instructive. Under the sumptuary law of description I mentioned earlier, Joseph’s reaction is not accorded the same ostentatious treatment that his employer’s histrionic fit does. As with the description of Fanny, the statue conceit promises the sexual fulfillment of the Pygmalion myth rather than the punishment of the Medusa story; both lovers experience a surprise that first petrifies, then warms and animates.

c Practical and Cosmic Jokes More frequently than any other character in Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams falls prey to surprise, usually of a crudely physical kind. From the time of the novel’s publication, the relentless abuse of the parson has posed a problem of narrative ethics. Fielding’s poetics of ridicule, which justifies the exposure of affectation, cannot explain the rough treatment of the parson, who, for all his foibles, cannot be accused of pretense.28 If surprise is the weapon of ridicule, what does it have to do with the parson? Fielding admitted in his preface that some readers might say “that I have against my own Rules introduced Vices, and of a very black Kind” (10); but he resorts to the satirist’s defense that all human vices and frailties, including the impulse to profit

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 130

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

131

from or find humor in the misfortunes of others, are a legitimate subject of his fiction. In what Stuart Tave has identified as an eighteenth-century intellectual habit of elevating “good humor” over cruel laughter, Fielding draws a confident line between moral ridicule and wanton mockery, the comicepic and the burlesque, rational recognition and reflexive mirth.29 But in practice, that distinction does not always hold up. Consider the trick of pinning a firecracker to the parson’s cassock at the dinner hosted by the “Roasting Squire.” This is an iconic moment of startlement, or what might be called the novel’s baseline moment of surprise; there is nothing cheaper than this thrill. In larger terms, it takes part in a tradition— manifest in Orlando Furioso, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, and Robinson Crusoe—of associating gunpowder with the modern and the demonic. Just as Satan’s invention of the cannon during the war in heaven is represented as a form of antichivalric fraud, the joke on Adams is implicitly framed as a dishonorable form of humor, the opposite of the Olympian ridicule that Fielding claims for himself.30 And yet even if the joke is meant to be on Adams’s persecutors rather than on Adams himself, laughter is not so easily containable by moral framing; as Simon Dickie has demonstrated, the mistreatment of Adams would have been enjoyed by contemporary readers steeped in the culture of jestbooks and anticlerical satire.31 The practical jokes on Parson Adams might be played for laughs, but there is something else going on. A character so committed to providential ideology and Christian stoicism makes himself especially vulnerable to trials of faith and philosophical orientation. Adams has long been recognized as a Quixote figure in his bookish devotion and vulnerability to assaults and indignities;32 he also resembles Quixote in applying a single account of reality to all circumstances, an all-purpose explanation of whatever joys and disappointments are visited upon him. In essence, these accounts differ in where they assign hidden agency: in the face of misfortune, Quixote resorts to the Manichaean plot of an evil Enchanter, whereas Adams relies on his Christian faith in an ultimately benevolent God. Among Fielding scholars, there has long been disagreement over the degree to which the author renounced his earlier Deist leanings and embraced providential theology.33 It may be, as Martin Battestin insists, that Fielding fundamentally shared Adams’s desire to believe in Providence; but I want to argue that as a novelist, he subjected that faith to skeptical scrutiny, and surprise is the instrument of that interrogation. The Roasting Squire’s jests reverberate long after the smoke clears from the banquet. It is surely no accident that it is the squire who later abducts and tries to rape Fanny, and that Parson Adams applies the consolations of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 131

1/27/15 8:01 AM

132

CHAPT ER 5

philosophy to this new calamity. “When misfortunes attack us by surprize,” Adams counsels Joseph, “it must require infinitely more learning than you are master of to resist them: but it is the business of a man and a Christian to summon reason as quickly as he can to his aid” (3.11.250). Though the parson cannot be accused of affectation in offering this advice, his patronizing reference to Joseph’s lack of “learning” makes him ripe for mockery; and his one-size-fits-all approach to misfortune implicitly raises questions about the moral equivalency between different forms of loss and suffering. Can the parson’s acceptance of the loss of a guinea serve as a model for Joseph’s loss of Fanny? Ensuing events seem to confirm Adams’s providential vision when Fanny is rescued, but Fielding’s hyperbolic language tells a different story. The “deity who presides over chaste love” gives her a savior in Joseph, who rushes in “like a cannon-ball, or like lightning, or any thing that is swifter, if any thing be” (4.7.285–86). The sheer metaphorical excess of the scene betrays an authorial skepticism: if true, true here only. At the level of plot, the belief in Providence is continually vindicated in the novel, but at the level of rhetoric, it is subtly mocked. It is challenged in a more rigorous way in another scene of surprise, one that involves nothing more than a simple misunderstanding. Immediately after counseling Joseph on how to confront Fanny’s abduction, the parson is informed that his young son has drowned. The report is quickly retracted, and the son survives his mishap; but in a novel of picaresque adventures, this news is sui generis—a glimpse of a world in which children die. The boy’s tumble into a pond echoes the father’s chair-dunking at the hands of the Roasting Squire, and in this context the news looks like a cosmic practical joke. It also conveniently interrupts the Parson’s sermon to Joseph about the necessity to cool his attachment to Fanny, in case Providence should permanently take her away. Adams does little to recommend that counsel when he succumbs to an outpouring of grief at the death of his own loved one. Neither the putative loss of a son nor the seeming miracle of his rescue definitively proves or disproves Adams’s belief that “no Accident happens to us without the Divine Permission, and that it is the Duty of a Man, much more of a Christian, to submit” (3.11.265). But the news of the boy’s death casts a bright light on the difference between ethos and pathos, between the abstractions of philosophy and the velleities of feeling. Here, surprise serves as an affective lever—a way of making characters vulnerable, of showing the space between theory and practice. By undermining the parson’s sermonic wisdom, Fielding also tests his own ideas on the subject of grief, which he published in the first volume of his Miscellanies, in an essay entitled, “Of the Remedy of Affliction for the Loss

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 132

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

133

of Friends” (1741).34 Fashioning himself a “mental Physician” (214), he harks back to an ancient Stoic practice when he proposes that whereas the body is “liable to be shocked by any Accident, or impulse of Fortune” (213), the mind can be steeled against mortality through prophylactic reflection on the certainty of death, the brief duration of life, and the end of all earthly evils. “Surely no Accident can befall our Friend which should so little surprize us,” Fielding says. “Had not the wise Man frequently meditated on these subjects, he would not have coolly answered the Person who acquainted him with the Death of his Son—I knew I had begot a Mortal” (216–17). By a kind of psychic titration, a habit of mind before the death of a loved one is supposed to affect one’s thoughts after the death. Or so the theory goes: it is not clear whether the mental physician was helped by his own prescription when his daughter Charlotte died a year after the publication of Joseph Andrews. As novelist rather than essayist, Fielding advanced a more psychologically nuanced account of loss. The scene of Adams’s grief is complicated by the clash between two social contexts and two discursive genres: Adams delivers a public sermon to Joseph within an intimate domestic setting; and what might sound noble to the congregation strikes his own wife as a falsification of experience. Though Adams ventures a moral distinction between a son and a lover, his wife trumps his hairsplitting by denying the purported difference in qualities of love and urging Joseph to “be as good a Husband as you are able, and love your Wife with all your Body and Soul too” (4.8.311). The wife’s testimony gives a redemptive picture of Adams as a fond and tender husband, but it also offers an alternative to the parson’s tedious moralizing. Under the rubric of Fielding’s poetics of ridicule, Adams’s sententiae might be seen as a form of affectation when they are transplanted from pulpit to home. Such is the effect of a comic art that thrives on dialogic contrast among characters who are consummately creatures of rhetoric. Fielding does not contradict or overtly ridicule Adams’s providential ideology; rather, he highlights the ideology as such—a form of language that inexactly fits the reality it is meant to describe and comprehend. In scenes such as this, the question of Fielding’s religious ideology is the wrong one to ask. In his fiction Fielding was more of an agnostic than a true believer, less interested in asserting the existence of Providence than in presenting the ways that people talk about that idea. Under John Bender’s conceit of the early novel as a laboratory, we can see the reported death of Adams’s son as a scientific trial, an experiment contrived to pose the question, “What would happen if Adams, the proponent of stoicism in the face of loss, suffered a grievous loss himself ?” Unlike laboratory trials, however,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 133

1/27/15 8:01 AM

134

CHAPT ER 5

this experiment can happen only once: it involves a human emotional response to a specific situation, not a natural phenomenon that can be repeated in endless iterations. In effect, Adams himself poses a challenge to the validity of the trial he has just undergone: by insisting on the moral difference between a lover and wife, he argues that his own Stoic philosophy has not been undermined—that Fielding’s authorial experiment has not disproved the validity of this theory. But this only goes to show the insufficiency of theory itself in the face of human experience: it will not exactly map one individual situation onto another; it will not apply in the same way from iteration to iteration; it will inevitably be subverted. Fielding might well have harbored a personal faith in Providence, but as an artist he believed in Surprize.

c Shock Absorption: Tristram and Trauma In Tristram Shandy, Sterne entirely rejects the narrative formula of “surprizing adventures” that Fielding both mocked and indulged.35 To an even greater degree than Fielding, Sterne resituates surprise at the level of form: sudden interruptions and digressions, truncated chapters, disjointed dialogues, wordeliding asterisks, hypertrophic dashes, squiggly lines, scholarly footnotes, pages of abstract blankness and inky mourning black. The ultimate formal surprise in the novel can only be contemplated rather than enacted. When Tristram declares that he would tear out the next page if he thought the reader could guess its contents (1.25.70), he implies not only a quiet deletion in his own manuscript but also an assault on the reader’s book—and, by extension, the epistemology of Fielding’s fiction, which encouraged the reader to make guesses that would eventually be rewarded with truthful revelation. Rather than withholding information that will be divulged in time, Sterne’s imagined gesture of secrecy would hide the contents of Tristram’s mind, a mystery even to Tristram himself.36 Indeed, Sterne implies a double mystery, a game-theory stalemate over an anticipated surprise: while the reader tries to guess what will come next, the narrator broods over the question of what the reader might be thinking.37 Sterne’s poetics of surprise is predicated on several premises. Above all, it is shaped by an ideology of form—a rebuke to readers who would seek their pleasures in mere plot, out of a “vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things” (1.20.53). More precisely, this is a mock rebuke to a literary straw man of primitive narrative tastes; in contradistinction to this barbarian, the urbane reader can feel superior about appreciating a novel that flaunted, as

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 134

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

135

Thomas Keymer has shown, it modish newness.38 With respect to the experiences of characters, Shandean surprise is imbued with Humean skepticism: nothing about the future—proximate or distant, actual or textual—can be confidently predicted.39 This idea tallies with the Calvinist humility that Sterne propounded in his sermons. If, as he proposed, “a superior intelligent Power did not sometimes cross and overrule events in the world,—then our policies and designs would always answer according to the wisdom and stratagem in which they were laid.” There would be no surprises, in other words, and no need to believe in a providential deity.40 In concluding this chapter, I argue that Sterne represented surprise as a kind of physical and psychic trauma: a congenital vulnerability, a shock to be guarded against, a wound to be treated, an experience to be compulsively repeated. In other words, a narrative technique (surprise and its repetition) becomes a peculiarly Shandean disorder—or, rather, an attempt to impose order on a world of unpredictable shocks. In Tristram Shandy, the Aristotelian transformation of surprise into forms of pleasure or instruction that we have seen in Pamela and Joseph Andrews is modeled in the stoic coping mechanisms adopted by the Shandy brothers, Walter and Toby. By focusing on this pair, I want to explore several ways in which Sterne innovates upon Fielding’s ekphrases of surprise. With even greater elaboration than Fielding, Sterne lingers over his characters’ shocks: Walter’s sexual interruption at the beginning of the novel, Tristram’s perilous birth and accidental circumcision, Dr. Slop’s fall from his horse, Uncle Toby’s battle wound at the siege of Namur, the report of Brother Bobby’s death, Phutatorius’s injury from a hot chestnut, Yorick’s astonishment at Walter’s theory of auxiliary verbs, the climax of Uncle Toby’s unexpected “amours” with the Widow Wadman. So attuned is the novel to emotional nuances of astonishment that it includes, in its taxonomy of shocks, “a wish coming sideways in [an] unexpected manner upon a man” (3.1.141); and “that particular species of surprize, when a man, in looking into a drawer, finds more of a thing than he expected” (2.17.113). It is no accident that the novel begins and ends with oaths of dismay (Walter’s “Good G- -!” and Mrs. Shandy’s “L- -d!”). There are two governing tropes of surprise in the novel. In Walter’s rhetorical lexicon, surprise is a form of aposiopesis, the deliberate halting of a speech for dramatic effect; in Toby’s vocabulary of war, it is a sudden, violent assault on one’s defenses. These two forms are fundamentally connected: utterances are often represented as physical events, and concussions produce sudden speech. Both brothers would agree with the Cartesian premise that surprise is a bodily experience that impinges on the soul: a disturbance of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 135

1/27/15 8:01 AM

136

CHAPT ER 5

animal spirits, a disrupted train of motion and thought, a passion requiring an expressive outlet. In Sterne’s conception, surprise frequently takes the form of a trauma—both a physical wound in the etymological sense and a compulsively repeated experience in the Freudian sense. Toby’s groin injury from the Seven Years War is an obvious target of Freudian analysis, but I want to call attention to the ways that the shock of injury (in the case of Toby, Tristram, or Phutatorius) and the shock of loss (in the case of Walter) become experiences to recapitulate or linger over. Sterne’s Aristotelian premise is that reenactment of pain, violence, or death—whether in action or in language— offers its own form of perverse pleasure.41 In a hermetic and reflexively misogynistic world of gentlemanly colloquies, it is the male characters who are more conspicuously vulnerable to surprise. Sterne is less interested than Richardson and Fielding in the erotics of feminine shock; if anything, it is women—Mrs. Shandy, the Widow Wadman, the “duchess Fortune”—who are agents rather than victims of surprise. Though Sterne frequently addresses a generalized female reader, he is more interested in the “life and opinions” of men in conversation with each other.42 Moreover, he foregrounds the surprise of his male characters because it is they who strive, like Parson Adams, to avoid or master it—typically through stoic forbearance or strict adherence to habit or ritual. The peril of surprise haunts the novel from the beginning, when Tristram recounts the coitus interruptus that nearly prevents him from being conceived. In discussing the allegorical inflections of surprise in previous chapters, I have emphasized the experience of being attacked, overwhelmed, or engulfed; the peculiar distinction of the surprise that opens Tristram Shandy is that it marks the possibility of never having existed at all. With that existential danger barely averted, surprise becomes a kind of heritable trauma. In the narrator’s speculation, at the moment that Walter is startled by his wife’s question about winding the clock, the spermatic “homunculus” is similarly shaken on its arduous journey, so that for its nine-month sojourn, it becomes a jittery “prey to sudden starts” (1.2.7). Thus is formed a congenital susceptibility to shock—both the internal leaps and stumbles of the mind and the external “cross-accidents” of fortune (1.5.12). In Tristram’s philosophy, these forms are intertwined; and as Ross Hamilton has shown, Shandean accidents become substantial elements of the self.43 Shandean surprise is not only a response solicited in the reader, evoked in characters, or enacted in narrative; it is an affliction that demands palliation or cure. Walter and Toby display the novel’s two main coping mechanisms in the face of the unexpected: one finds scholarly solace in textual authority, the other prefers the nonverbal comfort of whistling “Lillabullero”—“the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 136

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

137

usual channel thro’ which his passions got vent, when any thing shocked or surprised him” (1.21.62). With Toby’s war injury, however, more than a tune will suffice. The retired officer’s obsessive reconstruction of the event—first in narrative, then on a map, and finally on a bowling green—represents a paradigmatic case of shock absorption in the novel: the compulsion to reenact a scene, to consider an event from multiple perspectives, to track a chain of causes. Sterne might have learnt the technique of describing a scene of surprise from Fielding, but he puts his own peculiar stamp on the procedure: in Tristram Shandy, it is not only a mimetic device but also a pathology, a tendency shared among various characters, including the narrator himself. Sterne’s insight is to show that Toby’s neurotic compulsion offers its own form of pleasure. In effect, a wound is converted into a diverting hobby; a military attack is recapitulated as a serendipitous jolt of inspiration. It is telling that Toby is struck by the idea to begin work on his architectural folly in the midst of a consultation with his surgeon; the sudden interruption of medical treatment heralds a new regime of therapy.44 The surgeon is “astonished” at Toby’s sudden decision to quit his care; in a turning of the tables, it is he who must “recover[ ] his surprize” after being rendered speechless by his patient (2.4.82, 2.5.83). An Aristotelian principle of catharsis informs Toby’s hobby: in its mock-epic recapitulation, the original shock of the war injury becomes a form of entertainment. No matter how meticulously Toby duplicates the physical scene of his misfortune, however, he cannot simulate the actual shock of the accident that wounded him—cannot, that is, surprise himself. He can only be overwhelmed by an external force; and this arrives in the form of the widow Wadman’s attempt to seduce him. This, in effect, is a continuation of war by other means: it is no accident that these “amours” are described in explicitly military terms as a surprise attack on an officer in his sentry box. The parallel surprise of Walter takes the form of a deeper wound: the death of his son Bobby. Walter’s first surprise in the novel nearly prevents the conception of his younger son; and this one spells the nonexistence of the elder. Here, Sterne invents breathtaking stylistic innovations on Fielding’s scenes of astonishment. Most strikingly, he graphically renders Fielding’s formulaic minute of silence as a series of long dashes interspersed by spaces. These markings approximate several things: as quasi-musical notations, they represent the sound of Toby’s humming as he absorbs the fateful letter; as blank ciphers, they represent the sheer absorption of a person in the act of reading, as well as his opacity to the observer who witnesses that act; and as cues to Sterne’s audience, they suggest a lapse of time and an ineffable

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 137

1/27/15 8:01 AM

138

CHAPT ER 5

moment of recognition.45 These visual markers are followed by Toby’s verbal interjections (“he is gone!”; “he is dead”); Walter’s questions (Where? Who? What? Without leave?); and a decisive physical act (Walter plunging his compass point into the map that plotted Bobby’s Grand Tour). Cumulatively, they represent a tour de force of cognitive and emotional mimesis; their closest analogue is the dilated moments of shock or horror in gothic fiction.46 While Uncle Toby deals with the shock of his military accident by physical reenactment, Walter processes the cognitive surprise of his son’s death with rhetoric alone. What Sterne calls the “irresistable and natural passion to weep for the loss of our friends or children” (5.3.317) is replaced by a cascade of stoic aphorisms. As Tristram puts it, if the “pleasure of the harangue was as ten, and the pain of misfortune but as five—my father gained half in half ” (5.3.318). Walter’s emotional bookkeeping seems like a parody of the kind of thinking about grief that Fielding had rehearsed in his essay on the death of friends—an exaggeration of the premise that emotions can be quantified and managed. It also resembles Toby’s way of dealing with his war wound, for in both instances, the original trauma is blurred or effaced by the self-perpetuating motions of the hobbyhorse. At the point where Walter launches into an irrelevant peroration on death in battle, Tristram wryly notes that his father “had forgot my brother Bobby” entirely (5.3.321). More than a sign of control, Walter’s speech reads as an involuntary spasm of language, as much symptom as cure—or, as Tristram puts it, a “weakness” as much as a “strength” (5.3.318). As much as Sterne himself might have subscribed to Walter’s stoicism, he also uses this character to inquire into the limits of the Shandean project of inurement against surprise. Sterne questions its effectiveness by placing Walter’s speech in conjunction with alternative responses to loss. Walter’s torrent of sententiae on the subject of death looks like a kind of madness to Toby. Indeed, Toby’s spontaneous prayer (“May the Lord God of heaven and earth protect him and restore him”) does double duty, referring to both the momentarily disordered mind of the father and the permanently departed soul of the son. In both senses, the sotto voce interjection represents an element of Christian piety that the stoic Walter decisively avoids. Corporal Trim serves as yet another foil to Walter’s rhetorical evasions: he is an unlettered “orator” who delivers a spontaneous sermon on mortality to a rapt congregation of servants. Its performative highlight is a visual simulation of the suddenness of death. The gist of Trim’s lesson is, as the narrator says, a self-evident truth, a one-sentence fort/da statement: “Are

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 138

1/27/15 8:01 AM

F IELD I N G ’S STAT UES O F S U R P R I Z E

139

we not here now, and are we not—gone! In a moment!” But Trim delivers it with a pantomime that draws tears from the audience: an upright walking stick rapped on the ground “to give an idea of health and stability” (5.7.325) and a hat dropped to the floor to convey the suddenness of death. Unwittingly, Trim recapitulates the verbal and physical elements of surprise that punctuate the scene in which the news is first delivered: his elegiac “gone!” echoes Uncle Toby’s cryptic exclamation, and the audible thud of his walking stick mimics the decisive plunge of Walter’s compass point. Fielding’s emotional ekphrasis thus takes on an even greater amplitude here. In Sterne’s analysis, the ripple effects of surprise extend in ever-widening circles: from the inaccessible moment of Bobby’s death, to Toby’s silent reading of the letter, to Walter’s oration, to Trim’s impromptu sermon, to the multiplying effect of that sermon on its hearers. The conjunction of Toby’s verbal cry and visual demonstration is but a fleeting moment, but Sterne replays it in slow motion, quoting Trim’s memento mori twice more, each time with different punctuation and commentary. The disproportion between the brevity of the gesture and the wordiness of the narrator’s account drives home a point about forms of mimesis: the instantaneous, kinesthetic impact of a dropped hat trumps prose description, for the eye (as Addison had also insisted in “The Pleasures of the Imagination”) “has the quickest commerce with the soul” (5.7.326). And yet it is that very wordiness—the narrative capacity of dilation—that betrays an underlying faith in the act of reading as a sui generis experience. To conclude, I would suggest that Fielding’s metaphorical statue and Sterne’s dropped hat serve as apt emblems for their respective authors’ poetics of surprise. As Fielding invokes it, the statue trope represents the comic immobilization—even metamorphosis—of the surprised person; but in broader terms, it stands as an allegorical monument to Fielding’s art: its interest in conventional attitudes and postures; its visual poetics; its narrative arrest of experience; its attention to formal shaping; its engagement with aesthetic discourse and conventional sites of beauty; its Ovidian tropes of exposure and punishment. Within the farcical sexual triangle of Joseph Andrews, the statue represents an ethics of ridicule in the case of Lady Booby; but for Fanny and Joseph, it reflects an aesthetics and erotics of surprise. While Parson Adams is exempt from the statue trope, he is highly vulnerable to violently physical and disturbingly cognitive forms of surprise; and as I have hoped to show, the episode of his son’s reported death bears a striking affinities to the very real death of Brother Bobby in Tristram Shandy. In their arbitrary suddenness, both events function as trials of stoic beliefs or catalysts of their expression; both precipitate a cascade of sermonic or rhetorical speech that

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 139

1/27/15 8:01 AM

140

CHAPT ER 5

rushes in to fill a void; and both frame a debate between emotional cauterization and sentimental outpouring. The dropped hat in Trim’s elegiac oration is, like many things in Tristram Shandy (chestnuts, buttons, smokejacks, sealing wax), a mundane object that swells into philosophical or sentimental significance. As with the lexical ambiguity of surprise, it is both a thing and an event—a blur of motion, never to be repeated in the same way again. Ultimately, Trim’s perfor mance foregrounds the novel’s symptomatic obsession with reenactment: the attempt to re-create a past event, the mimetic dilation of a fleeting surprise, the refraction of a moment through multiple perspectives, the attempt to recapture lost time. This effort is part of Sterne’s larger project of reforming fiction, radically carried over from Fielding: purging narrative surprise in favor of representing cognitive and emotional shocks. A dash is not the same thing as a pause of astonishment, and a rhetorical analysis is not the same thing as a dropped hat, but Fielding’s and Sterne’s experiments in form tend toward poetic mimesis—the ways that versification or phrasing can shape the reader’s cognitive engagement. The utterly black page that marks the death of Yorick epitomizes that tendency. As a subversion of the ordinary, it can come as a surprise only once; but as a kinesthetic and visual experience of turning and scanning pages, it can startle the reader over and over again, in the way that a rhyming word in a poem can. What Sterne attempted in prose would be taken up in lyric a few decades later, under the same banner of narrative reform—the emphasis of feeling over incident. Sterne’s simulation of the sudden and instantaneous found new expression in the work of an unlikely successor, someone who was convinced that poetry could not only re-create surprise but also preserve it as a repeatable experience: William Wordsworth.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 140

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 6 Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception Austen’s Aesthetics and Ethics of Surprise

“Surprizes,” George Knightley curtly declares in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815), “are foolish things.”1 He is referring to a specific incident, but nearly a century after the publication of Robinson Crusoe and several decades after the first flush of gothic romance, his comment carries a larger metafictional implication: that the project of plotting surprises is frivolous, and that the readerly susceptibility to them reflects a childish naïveté or delight in passing sensation. Austen’s novels are full of surprising incidents, but they conspicuously lack several familiar eighteenth-century elements: the romance tropes of foundlings and hidden family relationships; the sexual menace and violence in surprise that runs through the fiction of Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney; and the set pieces of astonishment that Fielding flaunts. Instead of borrowing these données, Austen explores the uses and abuses of surprise—its sexual politics, its aesthetic dimensions, its psychic and emotional contours. In many ways, Austen carries on the comic project of Fielding and Sterne: she represents emotion not just as a datum of experience but as a medium of social expression, a rhetorical form, a theatrical perfor mance, and a feeling to be controlled or suppressed. My centerpiece in this chapter is Northanger Abbey, for this early work not only pokes obvious fun at the shock effects of gothic novels, it also serves as a witty dissertation on surprise in all its eighteenth-century inflections. The 141

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 141

1/27/15 8:01 AM

142

CHAPT ER 6

novel invokes the word itself with greater frequency than Austen’s other works, and it features one of Austen’s most easily surprisable characters, Catherine Morland. The young heroine, who leaves the provincial routine of Fullerton for the social intrigues of Bath, is perpetually startled by the books she reads and the people she meets, even as Austen’s narrator archly registers the presumably jaded reader’s familiarity with novelistic conventions and the ways of the world. Between the naïf and the godlike narrator (in winking alliance with the know-it-all audience), Austen creates a reading space of simulated or virtual surprise. In aesthetic terms, I argue that Austen asserts a legitimate place for surprise as a locus of pleasure, both in lived experience and in narrative mediation; that she follows Fielding in both courting the reader’s surprise and reflexively commenting on narrative artifice and the poetics of wish fulfillment; and that she parodies the shock effects of gothic fiction while absorbing their perceptual syntax. In ethical terms, I argue that even as Austen mocks easily surprisable characters, she more keenly scrutinizes the pose of stoic or omniscient resistance to shock, often adopted by male characters; and that she examines the social dynamics of surprise as function of naïveté, secrecy, and the gendered circulation of information. Austen’s heroines are not in danger of the violent, sexual manifestations of surprise that haunt the fiction of Richardson, Haywood, and Burney; but they are nevertheless vulnerable to other forms. Surprises (and the people who fall for them) might on occasion be foolish, but they are never only that. Knightley’s comment about the foolishness of surprise exemplifies the kind of ethical attention that Austen devotes to the subject. While he is referring to the unexpected gift of a fortepiano to Jane Fairfax, his dismissal more broadly applies to the array of guessing games—riddles, charades, word scrambles, gossipy speculations—that absorb the attention of so many characters in the novel. The remark can be construed as making two points. First, the act of planning a surprise is foolish because it requires the artificial suppression of information; it promotes misunderstandings and needless emotional turmoil; and it wastes time in demanding the production of an answer that already exists. (The kind of guessing game that Mr. B imposes on Pamela at the end of Richardson’s novel would be anathema to Knightley.) Second, the vulnerability to surprise indicates a foolish character: it is a sign of moral and intellectual weakness to be caught off guard by anything. For Knightley, the aspersion against “surprizes” is vindicated when the donor of the fortepiano turns out to be Frank Churchill, who represents the height of puppyish callowness and French sophistication. All the elements of Knightley’s social identity—his class, his gender, his age, his reputed sagacity—are braided into

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 142

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

143

his assumption. As someone who has seemingly withdrawn from the hazards of courtship and prides himself on his anticipatory acuity, he purports to be beyond surprise; and in Emma’s assessment of him as a plain-dealing man, he “does nothing mysteriously” (211). Finally, a hint of biblical sermonizing tinges Knightley’s remark: addressed to the woman destined to become his wife, it serves as a Pauline exhortation to put away childish things. Austen undoubtedly sympathized with Knightley’s stance, insofar as she frequently poked fun at naïve or excitable characters who startle at mere coincidence or rhetorically exaggerate their degree of shock. Consider this description of the easily flappable Mrs. Jennings in Sense and Sensibility (1811): “The sudden termination of Colonel Brandon’s visit at the park, with the steadiness in concealing its cause, filled the mind and raised the wonder of Mrs. Jennings for two or three days; she was a great wonderer, as every one must be who takes a very lively interest in all the comings and goings of their acquaintance” (62).2 In the course of a single page, “wonder” conspicuously appears five more times, and through this verbal repetition, the word metamorphoses from an Addisonian term for the emotion of Novelty (“filled the mind”) into a synonym for the restless curiosity of a busybody (“So wondered, so talked Mrs. Jennings”). In effect, Austen echoes Fielding’s strategy of describing ordinary surprise in the grandiose language of the miraculous. Her gentle mockery here reflects a tradition of skepticism about wonder crystallized by Samuel Johnson in a Rambler essay of 1751, where he calls it “the effect of ignorance” and “a pause of reason”: “The awful stillness of attention with which the mind is overspread at the first view of an unexpected effect ceases when we have leisure to disentangle complications and investigate causes.”3 The first gothic romance would not be published for another thirteen years, but Johnson’s description of a mind “overspread” by awful stillness and paralyzed by “sudden cessation” prefigures the trope of mental incapacitation that characterized that emerging genre. For readers of gothic fiction, there was pleasure to be derived from the sensation Johnson describes—a “pause” or epistemological hesitation that Tzvetan Todorov would later value in his formulation of the Fantastic.4 For Johnson, however, there was nothing particularly pleasurable or edifying about it. By his lights, the experience does not belong in a privileged aesthetic category, and the sooner it can be dispelled by rationality, the better. It is easy to appreciate Austen’s gentle mockery of Mrs. Jennings’s “wonder,” but I want to suggest that such passages also reflect the author’s finegrained attention to emotional mimesis. This anatomy of a surprise and its aftermath exemplifies what D.A. Miller has formulated as the neutrality and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 143

1/27/15 8:01 AM

144

CHAPT ER 6

anonymity of “Austen Style.”5 Though it does not quite reach the intimacy of free indirect discourse epitomized in Emma, it goes beyond merely omniscient narration: it hovers between the external (Fieldingesque ridicule) and the internal (a sympathetic mimesis of thought), between the presence of a narrative hand and the illusion of its absence. This style enables a narrative freedom to present surprise as both a foolish thing and an aperçu about the unknowability of others—for regardless of Mrs. Jennings’s excitability, sudden arrivals and departures are surprises in Austen’s fiction, and Colonel Brandon does present a mystery that the plot is designed to solve. Austen surely harbored some doubts, then, about Knightley’s and Johnson’s strong opinions on surprise and wonder. Far from expressing the last word on the subject, Knightley’s pronouncement stakes out an extreme position—one, I argue, that Austen qualified in numerous ways. As unassailable as Knightley seems, he also represents a particularly masculine attitude of resistance to surprise in all its forms; and Austen was just as skeptical toward this pose as she was toward putatively feminine modes of vulnerability. In focusing on the importance of surprise in Northanger Abbey, I want to suggest that it has not previously received the respect it deserves. In critical commentary on the novel, there have been two main accounts of Catherine’s vulnerability to surprise: one dismisses it as a symptom of naïveté, the other conflates it with its stronger relative, alarm. Stuart Tave, echoing Knightley, offers this gloss: “Surprise is a foolish thing; as it offers itself in, for example, the indeterminateness of what is ‘odd’ and as it creates the emotion of an undefined ‘alarm,’ it is dissolved; in its stead is a process of understanding by means of ‘observation’ of what is and a determination of ‘probability.’ ”6 In what is essentially a novel of education, Catherine must abandon her gothic suspicion that her host at the abbey, General Tilney, has killed his wife, and yield to a clear-eyed reckoning of the probable. More recent criticism has reclaimed “alarm” from the realm of the naïve and feeble-minded to assert genuine, lingering concerns that the novel cannot resolve or contain. As Tony Tanner puts it, “ ‘Common life’ has proved to be capable of producing surprising uncommonness; anxiety may be a form of controlled alarm.”7 The patriarchal tyranny of General Tilney, who summarily banishes Catherine from the abbey after discovering that she is not the wealthy catch for his son that he had imagined, is momentarily softened rather than decisively cured; and in Tanner’s punning observation, the ghostly traces of “anger”—snobbery, emotional coldness, patriarchal irritability—still linger. In a similar vein, Claudia Johnson observes that Northanger Abbey is “an alarming novel to the extent that it, in its own unassuming and matterof-fact way, domesticates the gothic and brings its apparent excesses into the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 144

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

145

drawing rooms of ‘the midland countries of England.’ ”8 Echoing Miller’s paradigm of the novel’s anticlosural discontents,9 Johnson argues that “the convention of the happy ending conceals our all-too-legitimate cause for alarm” (48). That cause, in Johnson’s reading, lies in the arbitrary power of paternal figures like General Tilney. It is not at all surprising that Austen’s affective language would be so readily imported into late twentieth-century critical rubrics of anxiety, subversion, interrogation, and critique; and Tanner’s and Johnson’s readings tell a fundamental truth about the novel’s dialectic. These accounts, as well as Tave’s, use the gothic as a reference point: for Tave, a foil to the domestic and ordinary, for Tanner and Johnson, an amplification of issues of gender and power. I would agree with Tanner and Johnson that Austen asserts genuine causes for alarm in the novel, but I also wish to emphasize an often-overlooked emotional correlate, surprise. The difference between alarm and surprise is, in part, a function of time: the former is a state of sustained fear or anxiety; the latter is a briefer flare of feeling, a passage to some other emotional or cognitive state, and an experience that can be a source of either discomfort or pleasure, or both. Many readers have noticed the novel’s stylistic unevenness, the awkward fit between the parody of gothic romance and the Burneyesque narration of a young woman’s entrance into the world; by focusing on surprise, I wish to identify an emotional current that runs through both parts.10 I make several claims about the function of surprise in Northanger Abbey. First, I argue that Austen owes a largely unexamined debt to the perceptual syntax of surprise in gothic narrative. Austen’s engagement with the thematic elements of gothic—her English domestication of the exotic European setting, her adoption of the patriarchal ogre, her representation of an interpretive community—has been well explored. But I want to suggest that Austen also borrows a mimetic vocabulary that goes beyond a set of easily satirized données. (Indeed, Austen’s satirical take on the excesses of gothic astonishment was anticipated by the reflexive and ironizing vein within the gothic itself: both Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe had already registered the potential exhaustion of astonishing spectacle and powerful feeling.) The nature and object of Austenian emotion might be different, but the manner of portraying it harks back to gothic romance; and for this reason, I will begin by considering several representative scenes in Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796) as innovative models for representing sudden impulses of thought and feeling. Gothic fiction offered Austen a narrative vocabulary that she readily adapted: the representation of surprise as both spectacle and interior process, an emphasis on the power

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 145

1/27/15 8:01 AM

146

CHAPT ER 6

of ordinary objects or events to startle, and a grammar of perception and recognition. Turning to Northanger Abbey, I consider the sexual politics of surprise, focusing on the two suitors for Catherine’s affections, Henry Tilney and John Thorpe. It is no accident that these characters display markedly different attitudes to gothic fiction and to novel reading more generally: while Tilney professes enthusiasm and interest, Thorpe affects jaded familiarity and disdain. I will argue that Austen deploys these figures not only as obvious foils in a courtship plot but also as two avatars of masculine resistance to—and control over—the power of surprise. While both characters affect this pose, Tilney’s lively conversations with Catherine enable Austen to assert a positive value for surprise. Even more than in Sense and Sensibility, Emma, or Persuasion, the heroine’s courtship is mediated by eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse: novelty is both a subject of conversation and a name for the cluster of new feelings and thoughts that arise in flirtatious conversation. Discussing the plots and merits of novels, acquiring the language of the picturesque, parsing the lexical nuances of words for the sublime (“shocking”) and the beautiful (“nice”), learning to love a rose—all are alibis (and stimuli) for the growing erotic interest between hero and heroine. These things are, like Henry himself, novelties to Catherine, and it is partly for this reason that surprise figures so prominently in the narrative. It is a both a conversational subtext (what surprises you? what should or should not surprise you?) and a structure of feeling—a psychic element of flirtation, as Adam Phillips has defined it. “In flirtation,” he notes, “you never know whether the beginning of the story—the story of the relationship—will be the end; flirtation, that is to say, exploits the idea of surprise.”11 In related terms, surprise is a function of youth. Notably, the enthusiastic consumers of novels in Northanger Abbey are young people, and the high premium on novelty pertains to both books and people—the recent publication, the new acquaintance, the fresh experience, the narrative twist. Sigmund Freud suggested that only the very young can derive equal pleasure from subsequent repetitions of experiences such as stories or jokes, whereas in adulthood, “Novelty is always the condition of enjoyment.”12 Austen’s heroine, poised between childhood and maturity, desires the gratification of reading a favorite genre of fiction but intuits the fragility and transience of those pleasures. On a metafictional level, surprise reflects Austen’s concern with the reader’s experience of the novel as at once both familiar and new. Austen flatters readers by assuming their powers of narrative anticipation, even as she constructs scenes designed to savor moments of characters’ surprise. Though it

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 146

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

147

is an ephemeral emotion, surprise is not to be hastily dismissed but rather valued as a component of aesthetic experience; it is not only a state to transcend through rational judgment but also a figure of delight. As I argue below, Catherine’s surprises are implicated in Austen’s narrative relationship to her audience: the imagination of what it is like to read this novel, both knowing and not knowing how it will end. To articulate Austen’s poetics of wish fulfillment, I will consider two analogous scenes of interminable waiting, in which a thought—call it a prayer or a wish—is suddenly answered. In each case, I will examine the mechanism of surprise by which Catherine is rewarded, and the rhetoric of stoic resignation, probabilistic thought, and providential design that surrounds each event. I conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of Catherine’s antitype— perhaps the least surprisable heroine in Austen’s fiction, Anne Elliott. A favorite pursuit of Austen scholarship has long been to articulate what changes from the “early phase” to the “major phase,”13 and I would like to contribute to that conversation by suggesting how the novelist rethinks the representation of surprise in the late novel Persuasion, and how she further innovates on the affective conventions of eighteenth-century fiction. My final example in a series of surprising events is very far from the chiaroscuro shock effects of gothic and yet very much in their spirit. It is also a fitting closural punctuation both to Austen’s oeuvre and to a critical consideration of her astonishing effects: the sound of a dropped pen.

c The Startle Reflex: Gothic Narratives of Perception

As the first English gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto stands at the beginning of a new tradition, but its opening scene harks back to an older poetics of astonishment. It begins with a literal statue of surprise: a horrifying object that both signifies petrifaction and induces that state in characters: a gargantuan plumed helmet has just crushed Conrad, the sickly young heir of a fraudulent dynasty, on the morning of his nuptials to Isabella of Vicenza. Companion fragments (an armored hand, a foot) subsequently appear, all of them simulacra of a black marble effigy of a prior ruler, Alfonso the Good. These sightings confirm what Manfred, the usurper of the Otranto title, fears from the start: that his claim to the principality is doomed, and Alfonso’s true descendant will eventually be revealed. Like the “statue of surprize” scene in Joseph Andrews, this is a detailed ekphrasis of shock with all the familiar elements of speechlessness, petrifaction,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 147

1/27/15 8:01 AM

148

CHAPT ER 6

and recognition; but to an even greater extent than Fielding, Walpole represents the perceptual and emotional experience of suddenness—both the shock of the phenomenal world and internal stabs of consciousness.14 Here and elsewhere in the novel, he discovers the expressive possibilities of indirection as a way of creating an atmosphere of dread: not the crash but its aftermath, not the corpse but the casque, not the sound but the ensuing silence. Shock is distributed in stages: rather than beginning by showing us the cause of surprise, Walpole focuses on the organ of seeing, which doubles as a register of emotion: a frantic servant, “his eyes staring,” mutely points toward the courtyard (18). This suspense is accentuated at the level of syntax, in the anticipatory power of a sentence that begins, “The first thing that struck Manfred’s eyes . . . ” (18). The theater can deliver instantaneous forms of surprise that the novel cannot; and yet the novel, as Walpole shows, can dilate and anatomize astonishment in equally spectacular ways.15 In this way, Walpole’s techniques anticipate the temporal grammar of cinema, with its capacities of facial close-up, visual and aural editing, slow-motion pacing, and perspectival variety. Walpole claims in his preface to observe Aristotelian principles, but the reference to classical poetics only serves to remind us of what he flouts.16 Under that rubric, the statue viewing should drive a pivotal moment of recognition; instead, it is the first in a cascade of shocking, symbolically charged events. Anagnorisis ought to be generated by plot and character rather than by artificially imposed tokens, but Walpole defies that rule by liberally scattering his narrative with contrived portents: a portrait, a birthmark, a speaking skeleton, a prophetic quatrain inscribed on a saber. The detailed anatomies of their emotional impact suggest that Walpole cared less about the poetics of plot construction than about the interiority of his characters. In the eighteenth century, as Terence Cave has remarked, anagnorisis became psychologized, and Walpole’s narrative exemplifies that turn.17 Beneath the novel’s bizarre occurrences, there is the shock of consciousness itself: as in the Kantian sublime, the true source of awe lies in the human mind.18 Ordinary objects and happenings can be experienced as extraordinary jolts and as intimations of suprahuman forces. An emblematic scene in Otranto occurs when Isabella, who has fled to a “subterraneous cavern,” is plunged into darkness when a “sudden gust of wind” extinguishes her lamp (28). This is the easiest kind of shock effect to pull off, and an easily parodied one, as Austen would demonstrate in Northanger Abbey, when the same thing happens to Catherine Morland; but it has a paradigmatic force. Rather than disclosing a supernatural agency in the world, such moments reveal a mode of thinking about the supernatural. In counterpoint to Isabella’s

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 148

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

149

plunge into darkness, an equally sudden gleam of moonlight shows the heroine the way to her rescuer, Theodore; and another ray shines directly on a lucky trapdoor (30). Under Manfred’s interrogation, Theodore insists that it is Providence—the startling conjunction of moon and trapdoor, of lock and key—that enabled him to escape with Isabella (32). Though Manfred’s skepticism about that belief seems to be corrected by the novel’s justice-dealing outcome, Walpole’s dialogic approach to the issue of divine assistance allows for the possibility that all intimations of Providence are wishful tricks of the mind—that a surprising gleam of moonlight is no more a heavenly visitation than a sudden gust of wind.19 In Otranto, the supernatural serves as vehicle for states of emotional excitation and as symbolic adjunct for human activity, but in The Italian it disappears entirely; indeed, Radcliffe is best known as a gothic writer of “the supernatural explained.”20 In essence, Radcliffe completed Walpole’s movement from supernatural events to tricks of the mind. When Radcliffe set the frame narrative of her last published novel, The Italian, in 1764, she might have chosen the exact publication year of Otranto as a way of signaling her own contribution to an emerging genre. In any case, she locates astonishment and horror in the recent historical past rather than in a fantastic medieval limbo. In the frame narrative, English travelers visiting Naples acquire the manuscript that forms the bulk of the novel, and the recounted events date merely to 1758. In an encounter that sets the emotional tenor of the novel, visitors to the Church of the Black Penitents startle a mysterious cloaked figure, who suddenly rushes out of sight. A helpful friar explains that the stranger is an assassin who has taken sanctuary in the church; and the ensuing conversation reflects the cognitive structure that undergirds the entire novel. “This is astonishing!” says the Englishman—to which the friar responds that “assassinations are so frequent, that, if we were to shew no mercy to such unfortunate persons, our cities would be half depopulated” (7). The friar’s blasé familiarity thus becomes its own cause for surprise; and so begins the novel’s oscillation between surprise and its rational dissolution. As a stranger in a strange land, the Englishman focalizes shock in the same way that Catherine Morland will do in Northanger Abbey as she learns the ways of an unfamiliar social environment. Like Otranto, The Italian is crowded with episodes of astonishment, but they are all driven by ordinary happenings. Characters are susceptible to fears and superstitions, but these are revealed to have no rational grounding. This is Radcliffe’s Johnsonian assessment of the hero’s state of “interested” passion and “awakened” fancy: “he would, perhaps, have been somewhat disappointed to have descended suddenly from the region of fearful sublimity,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 149

1/27/15 8:01 AM

150

CHAPT ER 6

to which he had soared—the world of terrible shadows!—to the earth, on which he daily walked, and to an explanation simply natural.”21 Like Otranto, The Italian features a vexed love match, buried familial connections, murderous plots, and startled recognitions. The hero, Vincento di Vivaldi, falls in love with the apparently low-born Ellena Rosalba, but his mother the marchesa conspires against the attachment with the help of her Machiavellian confessor, Schedoni. The plot involves dual abductions and sequestrations— Ellena forced into holy orders and Vincento brought before the Inquisition on false charges—both of which are ultimately reversed after it emerges (mistakenly) that in a previous life Schedoni was a dissolute nobleman who fathered Ellena. The narrative rhythm of The Italian is driven by the startle reflex: all characters, both the good and the villainous, are vulnerable to sudden noises and tricks of the mind. Building on Walpole’s attention to perceptual impressions, Radcliffe develops a thoroughgoing narrative phenomenology: scenes of occluded vision and anxious surmise, the spectacle of bodies moving in and out of darkness, the jolt of sounds and voices, the time lapse of fainting or sleeping and returning to consciousness. Walpole delays a shocking sight at the level of narrative syntax, but Radcliffe raises the pitch of anxiety by representing delay within a character’s consciousness, employing the typographical resources of dashes and exclamation points.22 In one scene, for instance, Vincento fears that Ellena has died, and the narrative dramatically registers his surprise and relief when the dead body turns out to be that of her duenna: “Approaching the bed on which the corpse was laid, he raised his eyes to the mourner who hung weeping over it and beheld—Ellena! Who, surprised by this sudden intrusion, and by the agitation of Vivaldi, repeatedly demanded the occasion of it” (53). It is easy to take for granted the modern narrative technique of showing only what a character perceives or gradually figures out, or the intimate description of a character waking from sleep or swoon, or the interjection that serves as perceptual shorthand rather than stagey aside; but Radcliffe deserves credit for developing and popularizing these mimetic données.

c Masculinity and Defenses against Surprise The suitors who vie for Catherine Morland’s affections embody two different eighteenth-century models of surprise—what could be called the sexual and the rhetorical. While the hypermasculine John Thorpe recalls, in more polite form, the physical aggression of Mr B, the witty Henry Tilney pur-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 150

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

151

veys the novel thrill of raillery and flirtation. In short, the prospect of “Pamela surpriz’d” in 1740 has a very different resonance from the scenario of “Catherine surprized” in 1797–98 (when Austen wrote the manuscript) or in 1818 (when the novel was posthumously published). In this early specimen of Austen’s fiction, men wield the power to shock and generally profess immunity to surprise themselves; but in later novels, that imbalance changes with the creation of heroines such as Elizabeth Bennet, whose capacity to stun Lady Catherine is analogous to Joseph Andrews’s pivotal surprise of his social superior, Lady Booby. In Radcliffe’s narrative, as I have suggested, surprise has a gender-based leveling function, in that everyone can be startled. This is not quite the case in the rhetorical world of Northanger Abbey, because Austen is more interested in the poses of unsurprisability that male characters adopt as both attractive plumage and defensive shield. Samuel Johnson’s commentary on the avoidance of surprise can help us think further about this stance in Northanger Abbey. In a locution that anticipates the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, Johnson suggests that resistance to surprise is a mark of stoic survival: It is a maxim commonly received, that a wise man is never surprised, and perhaps this exemption from astonishment may be imagined to proceed from such a prospect into futurity, as gave previous intimation of those evils which often fall unexpected upon others that have less foresight. But the truth is, that things to come, except when they approach very nearly, are equally hidden from men of all degrees of understanding; and if a wise man is not amazed at sudden occurrences, it is not that he has thought more, but less upon futurity. . . . He is not surprised because he is not disappointed, and he escapes disappointment because he never forms any expectations.23 The “wisdom” of such stoic cauterization of the imagination is not easily put into practice, and Johnson surely knew as much. In a letter to her sister Cassandra, Austen seems to parody Johnson’s wisdom, or at least the moral vocabulary that it epitomizes: “Your letter came quite as soon as I expected, and so your letters will always do, because I have made it a rule not to expect them till they come, in which I think I consult the ease of us both.”24 Surely, Austen’s expectations do outstrip the actual pace of the world, and she would like to hear even more frequently from her sister; the comic redundancy of expecting a letter only when it arrives wittily suggests the impossibility of Johnson’s desideratum. In Austen’s world, and perhaps still in our own, there is such a thing as postal surprise, the slight shock of the mundane: though the two sisters corresponded regularly, Austen often began her

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 151

1/27/15 8:01 AM

152

CHAPT ER 6

letters by expressing amazed gratification at receiving another one from Cassandra, or by imagining the surprise of her correspondent. For Austen, a letter is surprising because it arrives either earlier or later than expected; though it is the most common thing in the world, it is still remarkable that it comes at all. As the destined hero of Catherine’s romance, Henry Tilney functions as the heroine’s tutor in the art and avoidance of surprise, and his role is summarized in a single stroke: “His manner might sometimes surprise, but his meaning must always be just: – and what she did not understand, she was almost as ready to admire, as what she did” (83).25 The distinction between a surprising manner and a just meaning is essentially a function of time: the initial impression that Henry makes is superseded by a deeper acquaintance with reason and truth; and even Henry’s enigmas are held in the good-faith expectation of illumination. This, in little, is the principle—a learning curve of sorts—that drives the narrative of Catherine’s entry into the world. It also sounds remarkably similar to Johnson’s model of wonder dispelled by rationality. Austen’s apologia for Henry’s manner, then, is both a poetics and an ethics—an epistemological and moral justification for the Addisonian pleasure of the imagination. Indeed, Henry’s mode of flirtation fits the neoclassical model of wit, which Addison defines as a remark that is not merely funny but “gives delight and surprise to the reader.”26 Catherine’s first conversation with Henry serves as a seminar in the theory and practice of surprise. In much the same way that the narrator bares the devices of the courtship plot, Henry begins by exposing the conventions of small talk. Hearing that Catherine has been in Bath about a week, he exclaims “Really!” with “affected astonishment” (14). In response to Catherine’s question about why he should seem so amazed, Henry concedes that there is not a good reason, “but some emotion must be raised by your reply, and surprize is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable than any other” (15). Surprise is a socially mediated and articulated emotion, and Henry’s aperçu registers this fact. In terms of conversational etiquette, the feigning of surprise maintains the fiction of interest: the friendly interlocutor may not care about the answer to his question, but he must pretend that he does. More broadly, Henry grasps the Austenian point that in social situations, people must have something to say, no matter how inane. By performing a reaction and then retracting it as fake, Henry cunningly elides whatever emotion he might actually happen to feel. In essence, this gambit functions as a pickup line akin to the latter-day cliché, “Do you come here often?” If there is genuine surprise beneath the smokescreen of archness, it might be interpreted as, “Why haven’t I met you yet?” or, in the plot’s providential frame, “Where

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 152

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

153

have you been all my life?” Surprise, then, is an effective cover emotion, even as it generates an erotic spark in the mental friction of question and answer, action and reaction. In his playful but self-protective pose of omniscience, Henry presumes not only to predict how his conversation with Catherine will go but also to say how it will have gone as recounted in Catherine’s diary at the end of the day. The ensuing conversation turns once again on conventionalized expectations, and the genuine surprise to be found within a frame of predictability. In response to Catherine’s reply, “Perhaps I keep no journal,” Henry blurts out, “Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible. Not keep a journal! How are your absent cousins to understand the tenour of your life in Bath without one?” (15). Catherine’s “perhaps” is a polite form of contradiction, but Henry’s theatrical echo modulates the word into a term of probability and Catherine into one item in a large sample of young women and typically female behavior. In Henry’s thinking, there is technically always some chance for deviation from a norm but not a very big one. Henry’s incredulity is matched by Catherine’s equally skeptical response: “ ‘I have sometimes thought,’ said Catherine, doubtingly, ‘whether ladies do write so much better letters than gentlemen. That is –I should not think the superiority was always on our side” (16). At issue are two intertwined forms of knowability: the general knowledge of female behavior and the specific content of Catherine’s thoughts. In both cases, Henry runs the risk of being wrong, and for once Catherine possesses the power to surprise. It is apt—and not at all surprising—that Henry’s antidote to this predicament takes the form of a quintessential surprise: he simply approaches Catherine unawares and asks, “What are you thinking of so earnestly?” (17). Henry characteristically plays on probabilities: Catherine must be thinking about something, and there is a decent chance that she is thinking about him. In any case, the very presence of a questioning observer determines the nature of the answer: even if Catherine were not thinking about Henry, the question forces her to do so now. Responding to her demurral, Henry quips that there will always be this unspoken thing that he can tease her about in the future, and he is fundamentally right: surprise creates memorable experiences by precipitating something out of the ordinary; and it is a power wielded more by men in the novel than by its women. Insofar as Catherine’s true thoughts are as inaccessible to the reader as they are to Henry, this conversation gestures, finally, to Austen’s move away from the devices of the epistolary novel toward the use of indirect discourse to represent the interiority of her characters.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 153

1/27/15 8:01 AM

154

CHAPT ER 6

Within the social script invoked by Henry, then, the element of surprise lies in the mysterious subjectivity of Catherine herself. This is also true of Catherine’s later tête-à-tête with Isabella Thorpe, in which the latter presumes to know how her new friend would have reacted to her growing attachment to James Morland: “You would have told us that we seemed born for each other, or some nonsense of that kind, which would have distressed me beyond conception; my cheeks would have been red as your roses” (50). This scene, which takes place in a theater, reflects a world of prescribed roles and situations, in which an emotion can be spoken about rather than had, and courtships are theoretical constructions. Once again, Catherine is startled to be the subject of an effort of mind reading, and once again she must insist that the attempt has been botched: “Indeed you do me injustice; I would not have made so improper a remark on any account; and besides, I am sure it would never have entered my head” (50). What has or has not entered Catherine’s head is a source of speculation for both characters and readers.27 We might agree with Isabella when she insists that Catherine must have known that John Thorpe was in love with her, and share in Isabella’s incredulity at Catherine’s surprise at the news (105). Indeed, Austen must assure us that the shock is sincere: “Catherine, with all the earnestness of truth, expressed her astonishment at such a charge, protesting her innocence of every thought of Mr. Thorpe’s being in love with her” (104). In defending Catherine, the narrator acknowledges that her professions of ignorance are surprising both to Isabella and to the reader, who has already seen Catherine deflecting Thorpe’s dropped hints of affection. For the reader, the ultimate gratification of surprise lies in the revelation that Catherine is an unwitting virtuoso in the art of the cold shoulder, and for Catherine, it is the new awareness of herself as a sexually desirable woman: “That [Thorpe] should think it worth his while to fancy himself in love with her, was a matter of lively astonishment” (107). Austen overtly marks Thorpe’s unsuitability for Catherine in his boorishness; more subtly, she indicates it in his defense against surprise—a stance of blasé indifference, as opposed to Henry Tilney’s anticipatory control. He might be expected to show some dismay when, in a conversation about novels, Catherine tactfully exposes his ignorance that Ann Radcliffe wrote The Mysteries of Udolpho, but Thorpe instantly recovers from the shock: “ ‘No sure; was it? Aye, I remember, so it was; I was thinking of that other stupid book, written by that woman they make such a fuss about, she who married the French emigrant” (32). Within a single sentence, Thorpe registers a flicker of chagrin, corrects himself, and launches a fresh salvo against another fe-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 154

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

155

male novelist by saying, in effect, “Enough about Radcliffe; you know who I really can’t stand is Burney.” Thorpe’s emotion might almost be called embarrassment, but for the absence of a visible blush. More accurately, it can be called surprise, which is typically registered in a character’s speech: here, in Thorpe’s strange negativeaffirmative glissando, “No sure”— an iconic expression akin to “Oh!” or “Of course!” But Thorpe erases his reaction with remarkable speed: now he knows the author of Udolpho, and only this fact matters. Thorpe fundamentally knows that the contents of his mind are inaccessible to Catherine, and that she must simply take him at his word; in this way, ignorance can masquerade as forgetting. For someone so adept at shock absorption, it is apt that Thorpe professes not to have been surprised by anything in Burney’s Camilla, or at least what he has skimmed: “indeed I guessed what sort of stuff must be before I saw it” (32). Thorpe’s charge of predictability is not based on deep or extensive acquaintance with novels, any more than Henry’s remarks about journalizing are informed by vast knowledge of women; but it nevertheless touches upon the concerns of Austen’s narrator. Indeed, it could be said that Austen is apprehensive of readers like Thorpe—or, more subtly, affects an anxiety about them when she acknowledges, toward the end of the novel, that her readers surely know where events are tending. For a reader like Thorpe, knowing how a novel will end amounts to finding no surprise and thus no pleasure; but Austen’s ideal readers discern finergrained surprises despite—and even because of—narrative convention and predictability. In pitting Thorpe against Henry Tilney as suitors, Austen makes an implicit distinction between two kinds of surprise—between bluster and wit, between unintended comedy and calculated humor. When Thorpe takes Catherine for a ride in his gig, he warns her not to be alarmed by his spirited horse and thus succeeds in thoroughly alarming her. But the melodramatic advisory is belied when the horse goes off “in the quietest manner imaginable” (43). Here again, Catherine’s capacity for bewilderment serves Austen’s satirical purposes. Voicing “grateful surprize” at the horse’s docility, Catherine cannot help wondering why Thorpe would have thought it necessary to scare her, but of course we can: he is a braggart and a “rattle.” And yet while Thorpe’s warning is exposed as masculine bravado, it also has the unintended effect of increasing Catherine’s pleasure, in the sense of passing through a peril unscathed. In the end, Catherine “[gives] herself up to all the enjoyment of air and exercise of the most invigorating kind, in a fine mild day in February, with the consciousness of safety” (44). The emotional

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 155

1/27/15 8:01 AM

156

CHAPT ER 6

contours of Catherine’s ride—the thrill of anticipation, the frisson of danger, the consciousness of safety—are not unlike the dynamics of reading a romance or gothic novel. Thorpe may profess a dislike for such fictions, but he indulges in his own personal romance of equestrian heroism; and Catherine unwittingly participates in the fantasy. I have said that Austen’s defense of Henry Tilney as surprising-yet-just functions as both an ethics and poetics, and the full import of this proposition emerges in a later scene in which Henry dances with Catherine, a flirtation that fluctuates between affected and genuine surprise. Henry suggests that the country dance is itself “an emblem of marriage” (54), but Catherine cannot fathom how a lifelong commitment can be likened to something as frivolous and ephemeral as an evening’s dance. Her unfamiliarity with rattles and their gigs is matched by her puzzlement over the subtleties of tenor and vehicle; and Henry further complicates the matter by spinning his analogy the other way around and comparing “the dancing state” to the marriage state. With feigned alarm, he suggests that if Catherine does not see a dancing obligation as having the solemnity of marriage vow, she risks being perceived as an unreliable dance partner: “Have I not reason to fear, that if the gentleman who spoke to you just now [Thorpe] were to return, or if any other gentleman were to address you, there would be nothing to restrain you from conversing with him as long as you chose?” (55). Henry’s playful question is overshadowed by a larger concern with sameness and variety, in what amounts to a Burkean consideration of the dulling effects of custom. Looking back on her way of life in Fullerton as devoid of surprise (“One day in the country is exactly like another” [56]), Catherine exclaims, “Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?” (56). To which Henry replies, “Not those who bring such fresh feelings of every sort to it, as you do. But papas and mammas, and brothers and intimate friends are a good deal gone by, to most of the frequenters of Bath – the honest relish of balls and plays, and every-day sights, is past with them” (56). Such disenchantment has been described by Jerome Kagan, in psychological terms, as the fading of surprise from life: “The changes in mood that accompany aging are as much a function of fewer surprises and states of uncertainty as they are the inevitable consequence of compromised organs and the wearing away of the ends of chromosomes.”28 In witty illustration of Henry’s reference to disaffected “papas and mamas,” Austen stages the sudden arrival of General Tilney, a widower and a creature of clockwork routine, not to mention the would-be agent against Catherine and Henry’s happiness. And yet the general’s appearance becomes the occasion for a form of mutual surprise. This older man may well have tired of dances, but he finds fresh

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 156

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

157

interest in regarding Catherine; in turn, Catherine is unnerved to find herself watched by a strange man. Perpetually startled by the discovery of familial and social connections, Catherine here voices her reaction to General Tilney’s identity in a single expletive, which the narrator describes as “an ‘Oh!’ expressing everything needful” (57). What is “needful” is left unsaid, but the startled monosyllable can be interpreted as a release of ner vous energy from the banter of the son and the gaze of the father. Everything in this feeling—the intellectual heat of conversation, the erotic thrill of watching and being watched—is coyly translated into a euphemistic “secret remark” that Catherine makes only to herself: “How handsome a family they are!” The physical and mental delight that Catherine has taken in the evening is finally summarized in her departure, in a moment of exhilaration that recalls the ride in Thorpe’s gig: “her spirits danced within her, as she danced in her chair all the way home” (57). In the emphatic repetition of the verb, the evening’s ball has an afterlife as both trope and reenactment; it is a movement of both body and soul. Beyond the delight of novelty, the expression of surprise frequently serves as a judgment of other people’s behavior—whether deliberate, as in the statement, “you surprise me,” or implicit, as in Catherine’s unstudied reactions. When Catherine sees Isabella, recently betrothed to James Morland, dancing with Frederick Tilney, her shock functions as a lever of moral judgment: both a reflection of her naïveté about the flirtatious customs of assembly rooms and a register of her high expectations of Isabella’s behavior. Whereas Henry offered a metaphor of marriage as dance, Catherine insists on a metonymy—the ethical connection between a social engagement and a betrothal. Henry had meant, in an Augustan turn of wit, to surprise and delight Catherine with an instructive trope; but Catherine means to assert real social consequences. Henry’s response to Catherine’s shock is a telling mixture of masculine knowingness and gallant sympathy, of jaded resistance to surprise and vicarious participation in it. First, he says, “I cannot take surprize to myself on that head,” but adds: “You bid me be surprized on your friend’s [Isabella’s] account, and therefore I am; but as for my brother, his conduct in the business, I must own, has been no more than I believed him perfectly equal to” (96–97). Catherine’s fears are confirmed after Isabella jilts James Morland, and this time Henry is genuinely taken aback. Watching Catherine reading the news in a letter from James, Henry shares the éclat, but the sudden arrival of the General conveniently releases him from betraying any emotion: “He was prevented, however, from even looking his surprize by his father’s entrance” (149). In the event, he professes that “my surprize would be greater

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 157

1/27/15 8:01 AM

158

CHAPT ER 6

at Frederick’s marrying her” (150), but then assures Catherine that this will not come to pass, presumably because he knows his brother’s mind. On further reflection, he allows that such a marriage is possible, with the worldweary disclaimer that “Frederick will not be the first man who has chosen a wife with less sense than his family expected” (151). In this way, Henry has it both ways, first claiming knowledge of his brother’s character and then assuming a more jaded knowledge of the world. In a distinctly gendered contrast, his sister Eleanor empathetically expresses her “concern and surprize,” without qualification. Throughout the novel, Henry lectures Catherine on the probable, most memorably in rebuke of Catherine’s gothic fantasy that General Tilney has imprisoned or murdered his wife; and yet as the affair of Isabella and James illustrates, there are limitations to Henry’s language of rational judgment.29 Like other characters, he makes double-sided predictions and professes in retrospect to have seen all possibilities. On the one hand, he declares that his brother will never marry Isabella Thorpe; on the other, he says that such rashness would not be so surprising in the spectrum of human behavior. Under the cover of worldly sagacity, that is, he says precisely nothing. Catherine’s lament, “I never was so deceived in any one’s character in my life before,” might be seen as a reflection of naïveté about the ways of an obvious flirt, and Henry’s tart postscript—“Among all the great variety that you have known and studied” (152)—emphasizes that point. And yet Henry’s purportedly broad acquaintance with human variety merely derives from what he has seen in Oxford and Bath; and the invocation of statistical sampling avant la lettre does not offer a heartening lesson in moral judgment. Much critical attention has been paid to Catherine’s alarm at the Abbey and its aftermath, but it is equally important to see the ethical dimensions of the little moments of surprise that lead up to the novel’s famous climax, in which the heroine’s “visions of romance” are said to come to an end.

c Providence and Surprise: The Poetics of Wish Fulfillment

From the very first sentence of Northanger Abbey, Austen introduces the principle of surprise that will animate the narrative: “No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine” (5). It is telling that Catherine’s putative unsuitability is framed within the form of a prediction, since this is a favorite activity of the novel’s characters; and the question of whether an unremarkable girl will grow up to be

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 158

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

159

a heroine will be mirrored in the question, as the novel hastens toward its conclusion, of whether a disappointed young woman will find happiness. The surprise in each case is rhetorical rather than actual. Indeed, Austen’s opening statement describes a virtual surprise. Within the world of the novel, no one would expect Catherine to grow up to be a “heroine” because the designation would be on no one’s mind; and in the literary marketplace, readers acquainted with middling characters, such as Burney’s Evelina, would not necessarily be surprised by Catherine’s ordinariness. Though Catherine herself never quite becomes the heroine of the gothic romance she imagines for herself, she is, by definition, the heroine of the novel; and Austen telegraphs her awareness that once Catherine is identified as such, her matrimonial destiny will come as no surprise at all. Less surprising than Catherine’s status, then, is Austen’s style of presenting her—through arch commentary that anticipates Lord Byron’s ostentatiously self-reflexive search for a hero in the opening of Don Juan.30 There is nothing startling, then, about the fundamental plot of Northanger Abbey; and yet within the framework of inevitability, the narrative reminds us of the chanciness of the protagonist’s elevation to the status of “heroine.” Ultimately, the person most surprised to find Catherine grow up to become a heroine is Catherine, whose desires are at least partially occluded, both from the reader and from herself. I would like to look at two homologous scenes of deliberate waiting in order to show the indirection of wish fulfillment: the mechanism of surprise by which Catherine is rewarded, and the rhetoric of probability, stoic resignation, and providential design that surrounds each event. Both are scenes of seemingly interminable boredom or languor followed by a sudden appearance: in one, a burst of sunshine; in the other, a person. And both play on the frisson of the providential or supernatural in gothic narratives of perception. The scene in which Catherine anxiously waits out a morning drizzle to keep an engagement to walk with Henry and Eleanor Tilney is emblematic for several reasons. In a novel that so firmly announces the Englishness of its setting and idiom, the ordinary dreariness of morning rain is the tonal counterpoint to the gothic storminess of Catherine’s nocturnal vigil at the Abbey. Rather than making the rain allegorically mean something, Austen is interested in the meanings that her characters attribute to it. The scene, in other words, is a test case in the kind of providential thinking that characterizes both earlier realist fiction and gothic romance. Though weather is the quintessential symbol of chance and unpredictability, it invites the confident talk of probability to which most of the characters in the novel are addicted. Catherine’s unflappable chaperone Mrs. Allen offers empty assurance (“She

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 159

1/27/15 8:01 AM

160

CHAPT ER 6

had no doubt in the world of its being a very fine day, if the clouds would only go off and the sun keep out” [58]) and, as the rain continues to fall, an equally vapid prediction (“If it keeps raining, the streets will be very wet” [58]). These tautologies represent a common desire to fill the tedious space of waiting with speech, to give the semblance of knowledge and control in the face of the inscrutable or unpredictable. Mrs. Allen’s disposition is cousin to Miss Bates’s comic loquacity in Emma, but with a difference. If, as D.A. Miller has observed, Miss Bates’s urge to say everything is at odds with the novelistic structure of withholding and delay (40), Mrs. Allen’s “predictions” offer no factual value but mark the space of waiting and deferral on which the novel thrives. When the sun finally does come out, Mrs. Allen insists that she “had always thought it would clear up” (59); and like Thorpe’s disclaimer that he simply forgot about the authorship of Udolpho, this is a claim that cannot be objectively verified. In essence, Mrs. Allen’s statements are hyperbolic versions of Henry’s probabilistic generalizations; both are defenses against surprise employed by those who must always be right. The effect of the clearing sky on Catherine, meanwhile, recapitulates gothic shock in a benign key: “A gleam of sunshine took her quite by surprize; she looked round; the clouds were parting, and she instantly returned to the window to watch over and encourage the happy appearance” (59). If, as Burke’s etymological observation reminds us, thunder is the figure of astonishment, the gleam of sunshine could be called the objective correlative of surprise. It might seem odd that Catherine could be startled by this, since she has been so ardently waiting for it; but her reaction indicates that she has lapsed into disappointed inattention. As in Austen’s regular correspondence with Cassandra, the most mundane experience of expectation and fulfillment— the shock of the “new” no matter how ordinary—can produce a gratifying surprise. More subtly, an element of the supernatural (albeit in comic form) attends the scene. It is precisely at the moment that Catherine gives up the vigil that her prayer is answered. No prayer has been offered, of course, and no divine intervention is invoked, but Austen’s description of the moment wittily registers a species of magical thinking, a mixture of Catherine’s eager encouragement and the firmament’s participation: “the sky began voluntarily to clear” (59). The diarist of Robinson Crusoe turns the weather into a sermonic emblem of providence, but in Austen’s secular treatment, it is an occasion for wry observation of human impulses to predict and interpret. Austen’s attribution of voluntariness to a natural event cuts two ways. It wittily suggests that the sky decides to clear on its own, independent of what anyone has to say about it; but it also intimates a wishful alignment of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 160

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

161

human volition with the phenomenal world. The ray of sunshine, then, is the daylight counterpoint to the lunar mood lighting in Otranto; but it is also part of Austen’s subtler commentary on providential thinking in the novel, which cuts across the generic boundary between romance and the real. Like Isabella in Otranto, Catherine—trapped in a drawing room rather than a cavern—intuitively feels the surprise of sudden illumination as a response to her desire. It is not only in the most obvious moments of alarm that Catherine shows an affinity to gothic heroines; it is also in these quieter moments. This meteorological set piece is interlaced, causally and symbolically, with ensuing events; and as in gothic narrative, exterior phenomena not only impinge upon thought but represent thought itself. The sun’s reappearance prefigures the unexpected arrival of “the same three people that had surprized [Catherine] so much a few mornings back” (59)—Isabella and John Thorpe, and her brother James. Isabella represents the plan as a sudden flash of inspiration, the mental equivalent of the gleam of sunshine: “it darted into our heads at breakfast-time; I verily believe at the same instant” (60). Their brainstorm exerts the same kind of force on Catherine as the rain itself: it takes her off guard and interferes with her plan of taking a walk with the Tilneys. The two moments aptly represent the frustration of Catherine’s expectations by larger forces. For Catherine, the unannounced appearance of James Morland and the Thorpes is a bolt from the blue, and its coincidence with a standing engagement might even seem like a conspiracy against her growing intimacy with the Tilneys. Indeed, this moment recalls the scene in which Catherine first meets the Thorpes, when she is utterly “surprized” to learn that John knows her brother (20). The natural explanation for the connection is that the two men are university acquaintances, but Catherine’s momentary bewilderment registers the presence of a male social network beyond her field of knowledge. This feeling overcomes Catherine more intensely when she later sees with “surprize” Thorpe talking with General Tilney at the theater; and she feels “something more than surprize when she thought she could perceive herself the object of their attention and discourse” (68). “How came Mr. Thorpe to know your father?” a concerned Catherine asks Henry. The pedestrian answer bespeaks yet another inaccessible masculine sphere: the two met each other at a coffeehouse in Covent Garden. In terms of probability, it is not at all surprising that two men of the same social echelon might discover a mutual acquaintance, but from Catherine’s limited perspective, it is a remarkable coincidence that she happens to know both of them. The name for the darker extreme of Catherine’s surprise at previously unknown connections

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 161

1/27/15 8:01 AM

162

CHAPT ER 6

is paranoia: Why do these people know each other and what could they be talking about when I am not around? Whatever name might be given to the ineffable feeling that is “more than surprize,” the events of the novel justify Catherine’s alarm. Thorpe immediately confesses that he was talking about her (69), and it will later be revealed that he overstated the financial prosperity of the Morland family, thereby inflating General Tilney’s opinion of Catherine and indirectly precipitating her ejection from the Tilneys’ social sphere. The domestic situation that ensues in the wake of that banishment plays as a comedy of humors in which the heroine’s lingering alarm is dialogically counterposed by blithe parental unflappability. Describing her daughter’s sudden return home, Mrs. Morland reports that “Catherine took us quite by surprize yesterday evening” but rounds off her narrative with the pleasant discovery that the young woman has turned out not to be “a poor helpless creature” after all (176). Meanwhile, the language of probability in which Catherine received tutelage under Henry Tilney returns as farce. When her daughter despairs of continuing her friendship with Eleanor (and, implicitly, Henry), Mrs. Morland insists that “It is ten to one but you are thrown together again in the course of a few years; and then what a pleasure it will be!” (175). And yet a few pages later, her mother uses the same locution to say that she should not worry about suffering any further at the hands of the tyrant who banished her: “Then you are fretting about General Tilney, and that is very simple of you: for ten to one whether you ever see him again” (178). As with Mrs. Allen, Austen has a fine satirical ear for the way that people talk about the unpredictable, but something more is going on in these comments. Coming so close to the end of the novel, they speak in probabilistic terms of a chance that has already been determined by the narrator. On the wayward paths of romance, separated characters always meet each other again. The scene of Henry’s one-in-ten arrival at the Morlands strikingly parallels the earlier scene in which Catherine waits out the rain: both are periods of indoor tedium taken up with talk of imminent improvement, broken by a sudden clearing of the literal or figurative skies. And yet the scene at the Morlands’ house represents an objectless waiting, a spell of boredom with no scheduled rendezvous or articulated desire. Austen narrates Henry’s sudden arrival in a notably different manner from the way that she describes other pivotal surprises, such as the arrival of the Thorpes after the rainstorm, the discovery of the linen bill, or the sudden noises that jolt Catherine out of her reveries at the abbey. Henry’s reappearance is reported indirectly: we do not hear the knock on the door or see him enter the room; rather, we see

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 162

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

163

him already in the room, through Mrs. Morland’s eyes. In the quarter of an hour that she has been upstairs looking for an article in the Mirror about “young girls that have been spoilt for home by great acquaintance” (178), Henry has magically arrived. In this splendid coincidence, the verbal consolation of moralistic journalism is supplanted by the physical presence of Henry himself: Her avocations above having shut out all noise but what she created herself, she knew not that a visitor had arrived within the last few minutes, till, on entering the room, the first object she beheld was a young man whom she had never seen before. With a look of much respect, she immediately rose, and being introduced to her by her conscious daughter as ‘Mr. Henry Tilney,’ with the embarrassment of real sensibility began to apologise for his appearance there, acknowledging that after what had passed he had little right to expect a welcome at Fullerton, and stating his impatience to be assured of Miss Morland’s having reached her home in safety, as the cause of his intrusion. (179) The structure of perceptual delay here owes much to the techniques of suspense I have articulated in Walpole’s and Radcliffe’s narratives. In a progressive staging of surprise—Mrs. Morland’s and the reader’s—Henry appears first as a mysterious “visitor,” then a visual “object,” a distinguished-looking “young man,” and finally a “Mr. Henry Tilney” whose awkward prolixity tumbles out in a syntactic tangle of indirect speech. The richly suggestive adjective “conscious” (a word that Burney had often applied to her own thought-laden characters) implies several things: Catherine’s full awareness of the visitor in contrast to her mother’s blithe obliviousness; her recent recovery from the shock of Henry’s unannounced visit; and her social presence of mind to introduce the handsome stranger to her mother. Catherine’s full consciousness, brimming with unspoken things, is analogous to Henry’s “embarrassment of real sensibility”—the feeling of being the subject of conversation, the sense of needing to apologize for “strange” happenings at the abbey. On the home turf of Fullerton, it is Henry’s turn to be on display: Mrs. Morland’s discovery of this new “object” echoes the scene in which General Tilney first gazes at Catherine in the public rooms of Bath. With symmetrical deliberateness, Austen gives two parents in the novel a chance to be instantaneously smitten with their respective children-in-law. In a strangely felicitous way, the sudden entrance enacts the mocking figure of speech with which Henry had banished the possibility of Catherine’s not keeping a journal: “Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 163

1/27/15 8:01 AM

164

CHAPT ER 6

sitting by you. These are points in which a doubt is equally possible.” A moment before Henry’s arrival, however, there was plenty of doubt about whether the two would ever sit in the same room again—whether the chances were ten to one in favor of or one in ten against a reunion. The surprise in this scene is represented entirely by indirection: the perspective of Mrs. Morland, Catherine’s “perplexity of words” in response to Henry, and a summary of Catherine’s reaction to Henry’s declaration of affection. After so many memorable scenes of banter between Catherine and Henry, Austen’s synoptic mode is notable. In part, it allows the narrator to avoid the more overt language of sentimental fiction, but it does more than this. On one hand, it is an elliptical mimesis of Catherine’s speechless surprise; on the other hand, it deftly acknowledges the reader’s unsurprise. Why quote Henry’s declaration of affection at length when we have suspected it all along? Indeed, what the reader knows is what Catherine and Henry have tacitly realized: “She was assured of his affection; and that heart in return was solicited, which, perhaps, they pretty equally knew was already entirely his own” (180). “Perhaps”? The tentative qualifier, used by Catherine when she demurely suggests that she might not keep a journal, here indicates both the inaccessibility of the characters’ secret thoughts to the narrator and the ultimate unknowability of Catherine and Henry to each other. Each has speculated, in probabilistic fashion, that perhaps the other feels a genuine affection. Finally, the surprise that Austen keeps in her narrative quiver is not the news of the affection but its genesis in Henry’s mind: though Henry was now sincerely attached to her, though he felt and delighted in all the excellencies of her character and truly loved her society, I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought. It is a new circumstance in romance, I acknowledge, and dreadfully derogatory of an heroine’s dignity; but if it be as new in common life, the credit of a wild imagination will at least be all my own. (180) The emotion associated with Henry’s discovery of Catherine’s affection is fastidiously identified as gratitude, the shock of revelation bypassed on the way to perfect happiness. In this feint, surprise itself is relocated to the aesthetic realm of the reader’s response, to the mimetic field of novels and romances. Of course, this “new” phenomenon of mediated desire is a regular feature of common life; like the peculiar status of Catherine as heroine, the revealed genesis of Henry’s affection is a virtual surprise. More to the point,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 164

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

165

the peculiar circularity of Henry and Catherine’s romance presents a special exception to the fiction of feminine modesty that Ruth Yeazell has discerned in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conduct books: “Not until young gentlemen ‘declare themselves,’ as the idiom has it, will female consciousness— and sexuality—be awakened.”31 What makes the outcome of Catherine and Henry’s indirect courtship “new” is that Henry does not “declare himself ” in the usual way, nor does Catherine have to play the part of reluctant lover; indeed, according to the narrator’s précis of the conversation, Catherine’s profession of love daringly precedes Henry’s. The mutuality of their affection is, in effect, a simultaneous surprise to both. In a novel that only briefly and satirically flirts with the most obvious conventions of gothic horror, it is surprise—inflected by subtler gothic techniques—that occupies the emotional center. The novel does assert some cause for alarm (about the mercenary nature of marriage matches, about the snobbery and callousness of men like General Tilney), but it is the recurring experience of surprise that drives that narrative—an experience, unlike alarm, that encompasses both discomfort and pleasure. Under the rubric of modern psychology, surprise is an important experience of cognitive development; and in the terms of Augustan criticism, it is a necessary component of wit and novelty. By making her heroine an easily surprised character in a world of jaded ones, it is clear that Austen makes comic light of youthful naïveté; but she also assays the shortcomings of the language of probability and predictability—the defenses against surprise and speechlessness. Catherine’s susceptibility to surprise confirms her naïveté; it is an affective counterpart to the blush or the refusal, even as it reflects a poetic principle underlying the novel itself. In essence, the moral ideology of that susceptibility intersects with Austen’s aesthetic ambition—to surprise the reader with something new (even if that novelty is sometimes placed in inverted commas). The success of both of these things depends on a peculiar mixture of knowing and unknowing. In the manner of Henry Tilney’s lexical discriminations, we might make a distinction between two forms of surprise, the cognitive and the emotional, or the newer and older senses of the word. On the level of probabilistic thinking and narrative convention, the reader, like most of the characters in the novel, can boast of expecting the outcome; but in the more elusive realm of affective response, the reader might feel something like surprise—something like one sister’s letters to another, which are always anticipated precisely when the postman delivers them, and yet always as unexpected as sun on a cloudy day.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 165

1/27/15 8:01 AM

166

CHAPT ER 6

c Partial Immunity: The Case of Persuasion Henry Tilney’s remark about mamas and papas wearied and jaded by experience seems prescient of the mature perspective in Persuasion: at the advanced age of twenty-seven, Anne Elliott does not go to the Bath assembly rooms to meet potential mates; she readily confronts the revelation of unexpected news; she is open to a wider range of human possibility; and the few things that do surprise her she neutralizes through long and determined reflection. It is perhaps inevitable that surprise would take on new inflections in a novel that counts time in years rather than weeks, and that concerns recognition more than first impressions, repetition more than novelty, widowhood more than courtship. I want to conclude with a brief consideration of Persuasion as a foil and complement to Northanger Abbey. The polar opposite of Catherine Morland, Anne seems to share the kind of stoic attitude that Austen’s male characters often claim: there is very little in the way of novelty that can startle or disturb Austen’s older heroine. What does surprise Anne—along with the mimetic techniques by which Austen articulates that reaction— therefore bears close examination. With regard to Northanger Abbey, I have suggested various ways in which we can see the moral and intellectual shadings of Austen’s characters through their capacities for and resistance to surprise. Surprise exists in dialogical relationships, and in Persuasion, I would like to draw a contrast between the shocks that Sir Walter Elliott is disposed to feel and those that his daughter Anne does. A major function of surprise, as we have seen in Northanger Abbey, is to register what seems out of place—previously unknown connections or crossed social boundaries. This can be called naïveté in Catherine’s case, but Persuasion shows us its darker side, snobbery. Sir Walter most acutely reflects the novel’s preoccupation with social change—the fluctuating fortunes of landed gentry, the growing prosperity of the naval and mercantile classes, and the crossings between these spheres. Forced to rent out Kellynch Hall to Admiral Croft and his wife, Sir Walter expresses his own shock at this development by pretending to imagine their surprise: “There are few among the gentlemen of the navy, I imagine, who would not be surprised to find themselves in a house of this description.”32 Even the dead can be shocked by change. At the Great House at Upper Cross, the disorder of the Musgroves and their unruly children startles the ancestors: “The portraits themselves seemed to be staring in astonishment” (67). Austen’s wry aside is a joke on the ancien régime, a witty remark on a style of portraiture, and a visual juxtaposition of eternally frozen sitters and vibrantly living bodies. It is also a witty inversion of the gothic topos of the portrait that causes aston-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 166

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

167

ishment and sudden recognition: in this case, it is the living who haunt the dead. If there are statues of surprise, there are also paintings of surprise. And buildings. When Sir Walter discovers that Anne has been using Lady Russell’s carriage to visit her old governess Mrs. Smith, he sniffs, “Westgatebuildings must have been rather surprised by the appearance of a carriage drawn up near its pavement!” (170). As with his comment about naval officers, Sir Walter displaces his own surprise onto someone else—or rather, something else; like the aside about the Musgrove portraits, the remark tellingly attributes affect and moral judgment to material objects, ciphers for long-settled traditions and hierarchies. These expressions of Sir Walter’s snobbery are comical and inconsequential compared with the deeper surprise that lies in the novel’s prehistory: the father’s stunned and stunning reaction (“great astonishment, great coldness, great silence”) to the idea of a match between his daughter and Captain Frederick Wentworth. Over seven years later, that shock is recapitulated with Wentworth’s return, an occasion to which Anne, forewarned, must “enure herself ” (77). It is an emblematic moment, in that Anne typically either anticipates surprises or absorbs them through determined reflection. In Northanger Abbey, as we have seen, the resistance to surprise is frequently a pose of masculine control or superior omniscience; but with Anne, it is better described as a defensive stoicism schooled by experience. Anne is not entirely immune to surprise, however, and the scenes in which she is genuinely shocked merit special attention. In concluding, I want to make several claims about the implications of these scenes for Austen’s awareness of the capacities of her art: that the conventional language of surprise has become insufficient mimetic shorthand for more complex emotions; that the exact moment of surprise is so instantaneous and fleeting that it can only be represented through indirection and retrospection; and that the experience is best depicted not through reflexive exclamations but through sensory detail. Through Anne’s subjectivity, Austen pays particularly close attention to what these moments feel like.33 Early in the novel, the shock of meeting Frederick again is conveyed in a cubistic array of gestures and perceptions: “Her eye half met Captain Wentworth’s; a bow, a curtsey passed; she heard his voice – he talked to Mary, said all that was right; said something to the Miss Musgroves, enough to mark an easy footing: the room seemed full—full of persons and voices—but a few minutes ended it” (84–85). These pregnant “few minutes” hark back to the durations of stunned, staring silence in eighteenth-century fiction; but Austen articulates that hiatus with a combination of external notation (eyes, bodily angles, voices, social conventions) and a hint of subjectivity (a seeming fullness, a mercifully quick

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 167

1/27/15 8:01 AM

168

CHAPT ER 6

ending). The affective convention of representing surprise as a pause of several minutes in which characters say nothing to each other always risked credibility; and Austen dusts off the cliché by more precisely evoking what such a moment might feel like. Various commentators on Persuasion have noticed a new attention to the velleities of thought and feeling in passages such as this; and in this vein, I would describe the development of Austen’s narrative technique as a phenomenology of surprise—a development that owes something to the forms of interiority and perceptual experience we have seen in Walpole and Radcliffe. Throughout the novel, surprise is an experience that must be recovered from; like a gust of wind, it can only be described through the disturbance it leaves in its wake. During the crisis at Lyme Regis when Frederick proposes that “capable Anne” accompany Henrietta Musgrove back to Upper Cross after Louisa’s concussive fall, the mere verbal gesture is cause for a strangely gratifying frisson. Here, as elsewhere, Austen describes a revival from an ineffable complex of feelings: “She paused a moment to recover from the emotion of hearing herself so spoken of ” (133). The moment itself is a sort of blind spot in Anne’s consciousness, and “recovery” is an apt term for its aftereffects in a novel so preoccupied with convalescence. Later in Bath, when Anne runs into Frederick at Molland’s, the surprise is narrated as a sensory experience (“For a few moments she saw nothing before her”), and as a phenomenon of aftershocks: “All the overpowering, blinding, bewildering, first effects of strong surprise were over with her. Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery” (185). Recovery is precisely at issue in the news of Louisa Musgrove’s engagement to Benwick—in the matter of the former’s restoration from her fall, and in the latter’s emergence from mourning over the death of his fiancée. Just as the report of Isabella Thorpe’s engagement to Frederick Tilney provides an occasion to represent Catherine and Henry’s differing moral reactions, the revelation about Louisa and Benwick serves as a medium through which the feelings of Anne and Captain Wentworth can be partially disclosed, to themselves as much as to the reader. “I confess that I do consider his attaching himself to her, with some surprise,” Wentworth says, adding the self-revelatory remark, “A man does not recover from such a devotion of the heart to such a woman!” (192). Anne, meanwhile, is “struck, gratified, confused, and beginning to breathe very quick, and feel a hundred things in a moment” (193). A single participle for the emotion is not enough, and like the earlier scene of meeting Wentworth, this one is represented perceptually. Anne hears her former suitor’s words “in spite of all the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 168

1/27/15 8:01 AM

NORT HANGER AB BE Y A N D G OT HI C P E R CE PT I O N

169

various noises of the room, the almost ceaseless slam of the door, and ceaseless buzz of persons walking through” (193). These sensory details, we might say, are half noticed by Anne—“half ” is a key prefix in the novel’s affective vocabulary—and half noticed by the narrator. In Anne’s consciousness, they recall the sensory blur (also represented by sounds) of her reunion with Frederick, and from a wide-angled narrative perspective, they represent the numberless goings-on of a world indifferent to the complex emotional adjustments that pass in the minds of a man and a woman talking to each other. The scene is a benefit concert at Bath, the sort of place in which people go to meet and be seen; and the sheer multitude and ceaselessness of this backdrop intimate, in little, the period that Anne and Wentworth have spent apart, the purely mundane and incalculable passage of time. In a novel so focused on the intertwinement of cognition and sensation, the sound of a dropped pen is the ultimate emblem of surprise—analogous to the gleam of sunshine in Northanger Abbey, and reminiscent of the sudden sounds that punctuate gothic narrative. During her conversation with Captain Harville about the relative constancy of men’s and women’s emotional attachments to each other, Anne is shocked to find that Wentworth is within listening distance when she hears him in the act of writing, just after she’s insisted that women continue to love even “when existence or when hope is gone” (238). The sound of the pen, both exclamation point and caesura, has resonance in both temporal directions. It tells Anne that Wentworth has been here all the while writing (while possibly listening), and it tells us that for the moment he cannot continue that activity. As both a physical accident and a signifier of temporary muteness, the dropped pen eloquently discloses Wentworth’s emotion; it exemplifies surprise’s mixture of the involuntary and the deliberate, the affective and the cognitive. Long after Austen parodied the overt shock effects of Walpole and Radcliffe, she has internalized its models of representing states of heightened sensitivity and absorptive attention; the sound of an ordinary implement inadvertently dropped is a literary echo of the rustlings, creaks, and bumps of gothic romance. In the gothic, such sounds are felt as invasive and monitory: they tell a character that someone (or some supernatural agency) might be watching, listening, or looming; and they force both a new self-awareness and a heightened sense of the surrounding world. The same, without the inflection of the supernatural, can be said of the pen-drop in Persuasion. Anne’s reaction to the sound resembles the kind of speechless astonishment that had been invoked in earlier eighteenth-century novels for purposes both comic (Henry Fielding) and serious (Sarah Fielding, Walpole, Radcliffe). Though Austen was frequently on the side of Henry Fielding in

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 169

1/27/15 8:01 AM

170

CHAPT ER 6

her wry depiction of emotional extremes, here she grants dignity to Anne’s stunned silence. In the inadvertent disclosure of her own persistent feelings, Anne essentially surprises herself, and this flush of self-awareness is characteristically somatic: “She could not have immediately uttered another sentence; her heart was too full, her breath too much oppressed” (238). Here, surprise is registered as fullness of consciousness, a sudden sense of the meanings of one’s own words—both the embarrassment of having said too much and the triumph of having said precisely what one wanted to say. Wentworth, meanwhile, reveals himself in the letter that he has been writing to Anne, and its effect on her is characteristically narrated not as surprise or astonishment but as a ten-minute interval of cognitive and emotional processing: “Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from” (240). I have said that Austenian surprise is dialogic, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the contrast between the subtle articulations of Anne’s emotional state and the Musgroves’ noisy intrusion on this reflective solitude: “They then could see that she looked very ill – were shocked and concerned – and would not stir without her for the world” (241). We can even better appreciate the novel’s phenomenology of surprise in counterpoint with the conventional, reflexive language of shock that so many of Austen’s characters speak. And the most fluent speakers of that language are the members of Anne’s own family, who react to the news of William Elliott’s elopement with Mrs. Clay with a predictable form of self-interested astonishment: “It cannot be doubted that Sir Walter and Elizabeth were shocked and mortified by the loss of their companion, and the discovery of their deception in her” (252). These are the noisy outward expressions of shock, expressions that Henry Tilney knows and manipulates so well in Northanger Abbey; but it is the quiet inner movements of feeling and thought— the pleasurable carriage ride, the burst of sun, the apt metaphor, the dropped pen—by which Austen excites, in the best sense of the term, our wonder.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 170

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 7 Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise

William Wordsworth has long been recognized as a poet who wrote about experiences that seemed trivial to many of his contemporary readers but later came to be seen as quintessentially lyric moments. In the poet’s terms, they take the form of either a “strange fit of passion” or a “whirl-blast from behind the hill”—a spontaneous feeling or a natural phenomenon, or often a combination of the two. With respect to lyric tradition, they represent a major revision of the archetypal form of astonishment invented in Dante’s vision of Beatrice in the Vita Nova and Petrarch’s first arresting sight of Laura in the Rime Sparse. How to name the Wordsworthian moment? The poet’s own phrase “spots of time,” which described a few vignettes in The Prelude, has been broadly applied to a range of similar experiences, in the same way that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s term “conversation poem” has been appropriated as a generic category. “Epiphany” has also been an important designation, but despite its descriptive power, it is something of an anachronism: a theological term reinterpreted by modernist aesthetics and applied to Romantic-era anecdotes. In this chapter I propose to explore the explanatory possibilities of a term that Wordsworth did know, and frequently used: surprise. The word “surprise” figures in some of the poet’s most striking phrases of astonishment: the Boy of Winander’s “gentle shock of mild surprise” at the aural jolt of the owls’ silence and the world’s susurrus; the leech-gatherer’s 171

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 171

1/27/15 8:01 AM

172

CHAPT ER 7

“flash of mild surprise” at his questioner’s curiosity; the “strange surprize” that grips the Old Man who listens to Margaret’s story in “The Ruined Cottage”; the child of the Immortality Ode whose “mortal Nature” trembles “like a guilty Thing surprised”; the strange experience of being “surprised by joy.”1 To this list, we could add numerous other experiences of suddenness: unexpected sights or sounds (such as nature’s “ministry” of strange visitations and the chance urban encounters detailed in The Prelude); or attacks of passionate feeling or changes of mood (such as the “sudden happiness beyond hope” in “Nutting,” or the unexpected fall into “dejection” at the beginning of “Resolution and Independence”). I would like to resituate such anecdotes within the eighteenth-century discourse that I have been tracing in previous chapters. In this way, I intend to reframe our sense of two hallmarks of Wordsworth’s poetic originality—the anecdote of ordinary experience and the representation of subjective states of feeling, or what the poet called “moods of my own mind.” In short, I mean to read several exemplary poems in relation to works such as Robinson Crusoe, The Castle of Otranto, and Tristram Shandy; to show how Wordsworth asserted the special powers of lyrical surprise over the novelistic; and, beneath that generic contest, to trace affinities between Romantic poetry and eighteenth-century prose fiction, between a Wordsworthian poetics and earlier philosophical and aesthetic concerns. With the explorations of previous chapters in mind, I mean to make several claims in this one: that despite his assertion of the formal superiority of lyric surprise, Wordsworth absorbed many of the mimetic innovations of eighteenthcentury prose fiction, particularly the perceptual syntax and cognitive analyses of gothic and Shandean narrative; and that even as Wordsworthian surprise discloses experiences of novelty and wonder, it is attended by the older meanings of bodily seizure or mental paralysis, as well as Miltonic association with fallenness—with error and self-correction, forgetting and remembering. Before I pursue this line of inquiry, it is worth considering the capacities and limitations of the epiphany model. In its theological sense, the word “epiphany” denotes a manifestation of the divine, but in its broader modernist inflection (particularly as formulated by James Joyce in Stephen Hero) it involves an intimation of deep significance within the mundane. It is in the latter sense that Robert Langbaum uses the term to account for several features of Wordsworthian experience: the shock of the ordinary, the quasimystical sense of an external power or agency, the intimation of an invisible realm behind the world of appearance, the fleeting perception and its afterlife.2 Beyond describing the Wordsworthian structure of experience, the idea

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 172

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

173

of epiphany locates an affinity between the modern poetics of the ordinary and the Romantic lyric, connecting “spots of time” with the twentiethcentury genre of the short story. This genealogy is not equally illuminating in both historical directions, however. Applied as an interpretive frame and thematic summary, the epiphany model tends to simplify or flatten Wordsworth’s poetry. Langbaum describes “A Night-Piece” as “an epiphany of the distant, silent motion of the stars”; the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude as an “epiphany of the creative imagination”; the “Westminster Bridge” sonnet as “an epiphany of human as distinguished from natural life”; and “It is a beauteous evening” as an “epiphany of deity.”3 So many different terms occupy the space in the synoptic template, “epiphany of,” that the concept risks being thinned into any realization—or, from a critical standpoint, any thematic précis. The formula also promotes a narrowing teleology. Though we can recognize these distillations as possible meanings in Wordsworth’s poems, we might not agree that the climactic realization of “A Night-Piece” is a sense of cosmic movement, or that the “Westminster Bridge” sonnet culminates in a renewed conceptual distinction. While Langbaum’s notion of epiphany is pointedly secular, a trace of monotheism lingers about it: only one crystallizing vision per poem. Critics have proposed a few alternatives to the epiphany model. Emphasizing the prevalence of “non-epiphany” and “a-theologic astonishment” in Wordsworth’s poetry, Paul Fry has formulated “the ostensive moment,” which represents “the sentiment of inexplicably existing”—“disclosing neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but only existence itself.”4 Fry’s new term does not so much replace epiphany as serve as a corrective to New Historicist groundings of the Romantic lyric in material, historically contingent particulars. Ostension is not only “a-theologic” but also stubbornly ahistorical, in that it names a condition of Being that underlies the accidents of time and place. Geoffrey Hartman has argued that Wordsworth’s bursts of the “epiphanic style”—with its dream-vision departures and ecstatic exclamations—are always modulated by a native “conversational” idiom.5 Rather than leaning on the designation of epiphany, Hartman has been more interested in proposing a new generic classification, the narrative archetype of “the Halted Traveller” and what he calls the “poetry of surmise”: a figure is stopped by a sudden perception, and then compelled to linger in a state of abstracted thought.6 His exemplary figure is the speaker of “The Solitary Reaper,” who, arrested by the sound of a field worker’s Gaelic song, falls into a reverie on its meaning. The speaker’s command to “stop here, or gently pass,” Hartman points out, is a rhetorical gesture akin to the epitaph or inscription that commands the traveler to stop and consider (siste, viator).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 173

1/27/15 8:01 AM

174

CHAPT ER 7

Not all of Wordsworth’s poems of surmise make this command, but they do enact that moment of arrest. The halted traveler thus serves as a powerful emblem of Wordsworthian poetics: the replacement of an automatic, unreflexive activity (walking) with a new state of concentration and awareness; the Lockean connection between literal motion and figurative trains of thought; the interruption of a goal-directed progress by the mental drift of reverie. Like Langbaum, Hartman seeks to name a poetic genre, but he does so with reference to genres of writing (the simple epitaph or inscription) and a form of thought (the surmise). I would like now to focus on the impetus of that surmise; and I want to suggest that the mythical archetype of “the Halted Traveller” should be considered alongside the other motifs of halting that I have traced in eighteenth-century prose fiction—its statues of Surprize and moments of speechless astonishment. In this way, I mean to suggest that the Wordsworthian anecdote should be seen not only as a movement away from the epiphanic or ecstatic style of the eighteenth-century sublime ode but also as a response to the narrative poetics of surprise in the eighteenth-century novel. Surprise dwells at the crossroads of lyric and narrative, in that it can be both an emotion and an event—or, in Wordsworth’s terms, “feeling” and “incident.” In this way, it exemplifies a crux in the vocabulary of affect: an emotion can be portrayed as both coming from within and seizing the self from without, and it can be seen as a force beyond our control or as an evaluative judgment. Both play a significant role in Wordsworth’s poetry: the poet was imaginatively disposed to take fleeting jolts and purely physical responses seriously, and to describe their dilation into more sustained states of thought and feeling. As an observer and anatomist of those responses, Wordsworth was interested not only in the sublime extremes of wonder or awe but in the minor modes of startlement. For instance, Wordsworth’s famous credo— “My heart leaps up / When I behold / A rainbow in the sky”—has been traditionally read as an affirmation of the capacity for wonder; but I would argue that the up-leaping of the heart is, more precisely, an impulse of surprise—a psychic leaning-forward, a shift from ordinary preoccupations. The heart’s jump can be read as a trope for excitement or even joy, but it also harks back to the physiological accounts of surprise offered by René Descartes and Charles Le Brun: the concentrated rush of blood toward the new focus of attention. In latter-day physiological terms, the brain’s susceptibility to a stimulus can wane over time and repeated exposure, and it is against that possibility that Wordsworth expresses his devout wish. He makes no claim that he will marvel at or think about the rainbow in the same way from year to year; he simply hopes that he will always find it worth noticing and stopping for.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 174

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

175

In many ways, Wordsworth’s project of recording such ordinary surprises harks back to the kind of spiritual autobiography exemplified by Crusoe’s journal, in which startling phenomena become portals to reflection. The sudden appearance of barley, for example, exerts an effect on Crusoe analogous to Wordsworth’s rainbows: both are natural wonders, but both cannot stay wonders forever. Just as Crusoe laments that his initial surge of exaltation subsides into a “common flight of joy,” Wordsworth observes in the Immortality Ode that the child’s apperception of Heaven’s celestial light eventually will “fade into the light of common day” (76). The word “common,” for both Daniel Defoe and Wordsworth, designates the opposite of wonder; but it is Wordsworth alone who makes it his project to celebrate the common as the wonderful. In a Miltonic mode, he argues in his Preface to The Excursion (1814) that “Paradise and groves / Elysian” can still be imaginatively found as “a simple produce of the common day” (47–48, 55). Though his heart might not leap up in the same way with the appearance of the rainbow, Wordsworth recognizes “A grandeur in the beatings of the heart” (Prelude, 1.414); and he sees in the sun not so much an explicitly religious emblem as “a light / Which we behold and feel we are alive” (Prelude, 2.180–81). In Crusoe’s Calvinist framework, the sheer astonishment of being is not enough, but in his own article of faith, Wordsworth vows to make it suffice. Before turning to Wordsworth’s lyrical anecdotes, I want to show how the poet not only represented surprise but also theorized about it: posing lyrical form against novelistic narrative, he made a fundamental distinction— one I have tracked in previous chapters—between good and bad forms of surprise. Wordsworth’s ideas, I suggest, are recognizable in later New Critical ideas, especially in the framing of lyric as dramatic utterance. I go on to show how Wordsworth adopts the perceptual syntax of gothic narrative, and then address several lyrical anecdotes involving the surprise of death, particularly—in the case of “Two April Mornings” and “Surprised by Joy”—the death of children. I conclude with the latter poem not only because of its chronological lateness but also because it richly illustrates my arguments in earlier chapters about the darker side of surprise: here, surprise is distinct from joy or pleasure; it takes the form of both a sudden fit of passion and a cognitive reckoning; and it is, finally, a Miltonic recapitulation of fallenness.

c Continual Pulses: A Defense of Lyric Form One of Wordsworth’s chief preoccupations in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads is the varieties of mental stimulus: the susceptibility of the mind to “gross

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 175

1/27/15 8:01 AM

176

CHAPT ER 7

and violent stimulants” as opposed to its capacity for subtler excitation; the “degrading thirst for outrageous stimulation” promoted by popular entertainments (“frantic novels,” “sickly and stupid German Tragedies”) as opposed to the quieter, longer-term appreciation of “invaluable works of our elder writers”; and the ephemeral sensations of urban living as opposed to the “great and permanent objects” of nature and human community.7 If, in Joseph Addison’s terms, the experience of novelty gives an “agreeable Surprise” and alleviates the dullness of “satiety,” in Wordsworth’s argument it can also reach its own saturation point—a numbing form of addiction. And yet even as he laments the modern proliferation of shock effects and sensory assaults, Wordsworth cites surprise as an important component of poetry. Rather than disavowing the interest of purely narrative incident, he asserts the superiority of lyric forms of surprise over the novelistic. Indeed, poetic form itself—the metrical, aural, and grammatical properties of poetry— both enables a particular kind of surprise and ensures against its exhaustion. In his account of the representation of painful or disturbing subject matter, Wordsworth finds an antidote of sorts in the “small, but continual and regular impulses of pleasurable surprise from the metrical arrangement” (1:146). A “regular” surprise seems oxymoronic, however: How can a reader be struck by a syllabic accent that comes exactly where she expects to find it? Part of an answer lies in the fact that Wordsworth is describing the little cognitive jolts that prosodic regularity makes possible—the sudden realization, the arrhythmic phrase, the unexpected word. In effect, Wordsworth is claiming for lyric the same power of patterning and repetition that music enjoys. Indeed, he echoes and revises what Alexander Pope said about poetic form and music in the Essay on Criticism. Alluding to John Dryden’s Theban musician in “Alexander’s Feast,” Pope exalts a poetry of metrical and aural malleability: “Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprise / And bid alternate passions fall and rise.” For Pope, variety is a cardinal virtue, and the greatest poetic sin is the expected rhyme, for which he provides an example: “Where’er you find ‘the cooling western breeze,’ / In the next line, it ‘whispers through the trees.’ ”8 Pope did not specifically address the issue of rereading poetry, but Wordsworth does—specifically in contrast with the experience of prose. In his argument, the surprise of poetic novelty is renewable: “the verse will be read a hundred times where the prose is read once” (1:150). By implication, even a predictable rhyme like breeze/trees might give pleasure—both in the reader’s expectation of it and in subsequent encounters. This is where the lapse of a century between the two poets can be keenly felt—for what has happened in the intervening time is the rise of the novel: whereas Pope makes distinc-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 176

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

177

tions between true poets and dunces, Wordsworth is more intent on declaring the superiority of poetry over competing literary forms. To illustrate the distinction, Wordsworth suggests that readers are reluctant to re-peruse what he calls “the distressful parts of Clarissa Harlowe” but are quite willing to revisit “pathetic scenes” in Shakespeare. Samuel Richardson himself might have been inclined to agree, for in a comment that sounds like both lament and boast, he admitted that his novel did not have the same narrative appeal as Tom Jones, and that he could not “expect that the World will bestow Two Readings, or One indeed, attentive one, on such a grave story.”9 On this head, Samuel Johnson sided with Richardson against his archrival: “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”10 Finally, we should recall that in a similar vein Laurence Sterne had lamented readers’ “vile pruriency for fresh adventures in all things” and suggested that his novel should be read for its “erudition and deep knowledge” (1.20.53) rather than its plot. Rather than making a clean break from his predecessors in prose, then, Wordsworth is amplifying their concerns in positing his own aesthetic and moral claims for poetry: that narrative incident should be subordinate to feeling; that external events illustrate internal operations of the mind; that the “moving accident”11 is not the poet’s chief strength; that the real story is cocreated by the reader’s sympathetic imagination. Two different claims about reading are involved in Wordsworth’s distinction between prose fiction and poetry. Like Richardson, Wordsworth proposes that distressing scenes in a novel are difficult to get through upon a first encounter; beyond Richardson, he claims that poetry alone invites multiple readings. Repetition in novel reading is problematic in one way or another: on the one hand, you might not want to reread Clarissa because you know that some of its scenes are too distressing; on the other hand, you might not want to reread The Mysteries of Udolpho because once you have solved its mysteries, you can never again be truly surprised by it again. In poetry, however, meter serves as counterbalance against an excess of surprise, even as it ensures the possibility of its repetition. Wordsworth thus identifies a particular species of literary affect, which we might call “virtual” surprise: the experienced reader is fully prepared for the moment, but she can still be surprised by it, over and over again. The ballad “Strange Fits of Passion” offers a good illustration of Wordsworth’s formal point: in terms of narrative fact, we can only be surprised once by the speaker’s sudden frisson of his lover’s mortality; but in the iambic

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 177

1/27/15 8:01 AM

178

CHAPT ER 7

momentum of the final line, with its inevitable end in the accented word, “dead,” we might feel something like surprise each time we read it. The impact of the rhyme, in other words, is like the ordinary intimation of mortality, or the sudden appearance of the moon from behind trees or clouds: a repeatable surprise.12 The word “life” performs the same function in “To H.C., Six Years Old” (1802, pub. 1807) on Coleridge’s young son Hartley. In the final couplet, the poet contemplates the child’s physical vulnerability: “But, at the touch of wrong, without a strife / Slips in a moment out of life” (32–33). The terminal position of “life” (rather than “dead” or “death”) suggests a deliberate variation on the closural effect of “Strange Fits.” Earlier in the poem, there are dark intimations about the possibility of future pain or violence, so in a thematic sense the conclusion is not at all surprising. Indeed, as soon as Wordsworth likens the child to a dewdrop, the game is up: the metaphor is meant to signify his purity, but the emblem of the ephemeral was always hidden in plain sight; and when the dewdrop is in turn likened to “a gem that glitters while it lives,” the analogy is strained to the breaking point. Gems are neither alive nor dead, and the very wrongness of the verb “lives” sets us up for the lexical fall out of “life.” Finally, the awkwardness of the phrase, “a strife” betrays Wordsworth’s determination to surprise the reader through the completion of a rhyme. The allegorical decoding of gems and dewdrops turns on a formally enacted jolt. As many have observed, the thud of mortality in Wordsworth’s end word in “Strange Fits” echoes the surprise couplet in Goethe’s famous 1782 ballad, Die Erlkönig, which delivers the deathblow to an ailing child with the final word: Erreicht den Hof mit Muh’ und Not; / In seinen Armen das Kind war tot. Moreover, it mimics a recurring feature of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1785), which often deliver Goethe-inflected intimations of mortality in the final couplet. While Smith’s meditative poems do not typically represent the emotion of surprise, they are often designed to deliver a formal surprise—a poetically measured fall into mortality. This effect appears so frequently in Smith’s sonnet sequence that in the aggregate, it risks losing the power to surprise the reader; instead, it comes to represent a deep groove of thought into which the mind continually slips, as if for the first time. A brief sampling: Ah! no! when all, e’en Hope’s last ray is gone, There’s no oblivion—but in death alone! (VIII: “To the South Downs”) Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries, ’Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies. (XII: “Written on the Sea Shore”)

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 178

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

179

Yet may thy pity mingle not with pain, For then thy hapless lover—dies in vain! (XXV: By Werther, “Just Before His Death”)13 Sonnets are traditionally concerned with mutability, but Smith’s poems are striking for their formal approximation of suddenness—the dash used as dramatic pointing, or as psychic lacuna. This technique, which is not to be found in earlier phases of the sonnet tradition, harks back to the typographical renderings of shock that we find in eighteenth-century novels. The impromptu sermon on death that Corporal Trim delivers in Tristram Shandy, with its mimetic typography, offers a master class on the rhetoric of the gesture: ———“Are we not here now;” —continued the corporal, “and are we not”—(dropping his hat plumb upon the ground—and pausing, before he pronounced the word——“gone! in a moment?” (5.7) Death is the ultimate surprise, but from a poetic and rhetorical standpoint, it is also an easy one to convey, especially after Smith and Sterne have shown how it is done in approximations of dramatic immediacy. Though Tristram stands in awe of the unrepeatable, aleatory magic of Trim’s hat gesture, the surprise of “gone!” or “dead” is a portable template. What would a poem that courts and refuses such a jolt look like? It might take the form of “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” in which Wordsworth works against the narrative archetype of earlier Lucy poems: the sudden death of a young woman. Though it witnesses a process of maturation, it advances a poetics of the gradual over the sudden. As in a Petrarchan sonnet, Wordsworth describes his first arresting vision of the girl in the language of supernatural enchantment: she “gleamed” upon the poet’s sight— “lovely Apparition, sent / To be a moment’s ornament” (3–4) an image “to haunt, to startle, and way-lay” (9–10). But rather than dwelling on this moment in memory or pairing the perceptual jolt with the metaphysical shock of death, Wordsworth replaces the sudden glimpse with the temporal perspective of a long and intimate acquaintance, and epithets of the supernatural (“Phantom,” “Apparition,” “Spirit”) with terms of ordinary life (“Being,” “Traveler,” “Woman”). In light of his disparaging remarks about gothic sensationalism, the poem’s work of redescription is especially striking: the phrase “Phantom of Delight” becomes, in the poem’s retrospect, a phrase for ephemeral pleasures and passing moods. At the heart of the poem, there is a chiasmus: the formulation “A Spirit, yet a Woman too” (12) is ultimately inverted into “A perfect Woman . . . And yet a Spirit still” (27–29).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 179

1/27/15 8:01 AM

180

CHAPT ER 7

Though the more extreme terms (“apparition,” “phantom”) are abandoned, the word “spirit” is retrieved and subtly changed to suggest something like the animating soul that persists through time; it is the verbal afterimage of that first arresting surprise.

c Wordsworthian Surprise and New Criticism Wordsworth’s identification of the lyrical properties of surprise both prefigures and shapes the strategies of close reading that twentieth-century New Critics and their heirs would later practice. (Indeed, Wordsworth’s assertion of the superiority of lyric paves the way for the New Critical and deconstructive emphasis on lyric over other literary genres.) William Wimsatt, for instance, elaborates on Wordsworth’s formal premises in an essay on the “reason” in rhyme: “Rhyme theorists have spoken of the ‘surprise’ which is the pleasure of rhyme. . . . Even after the discovery, when the rhyme is known by heart, the pleasurable surprise remains. It must depend on some incongruity or unlikelihood inherent in the coupling.”14 Wimsatt slightly departs from Wordsworth, however, in insisting, with Pope, on “incongruity or unlikelihood” in rhyme, as if to insist on the cognitive vestige of the unexpected in a repeated surprise. Wordsworth, by contrast, seems more comfortable with the paradox of familiarity, regularity, and expectation in the experience of surprise: the verbal pairing might not be especially incongruous and yet still deliver a jolt. Wordsworthian surprise is at the heart of Cleanth Brooks’s seminal account of lyric poetry in The Well-Wrought Urn (1947).15 There are two main ways in which a good poem is said to surprise the reader—the dramatic and the rhetorical. First, insofar as poetry is a temporal art conditioned by the dynamics of expectation, Brooks posits that the reader participates in its turns in the way that a viewer experiences a play. The dilation fostered by the practice of close reading strengthened the analogy, since even the briefest lyric can be read as a drama in miniature. Second, Brooks argues that the language of poetry is the language of paradox, a major form of which is the sudden revelation of the extraordinary in the ordinary, or the unexpected meaning within the plain sense of a word.16 It should be noted that the model of close reading advanced by Brooks involves a single normative reading that arises from multiple rereadings; by implication, the surprises of a poem can be reexperienced, even intensified, across time.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 180

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

181

Among Brooks’s numerous intellectual heirs was Paul de Man, whose essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” attends to the temporal and narrative structuring of lyric, and assumes the repeatability of lyric surprise. One of his chief examples is Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal,” which in his reading re-creates the shock of a death from a perspective of stoic wisdom situated after the initial reckoning with loss. In de Man’s argument, surprise in the poem lies not merely in the event of death but in the seemingly innocuous statement, “She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years,” which becomes “literally true in the perspective of the eternal ‘now’ of the second part.” Such potential for ironic double meaning—a version of Brooksian paradox—gives “the curious shock of the poem, the very Wordsworthian ‘shock of mild surprise.’ ”17 After great pain, as Emily Dickinson’s poem has it, a formal feeling comes; and de Man suggests that this shaping process is inherent in both Wordsworth’s poetic structure and in poetic language itself —“the tendency of the language toward narrative, the spreading out along the axis of narrative time in order to give duration to what is, in fact, simultaneous within the subject” (225). In essence, Wordsworth’s brief lyric both recalls a shock and formally enacts it in the mind of the reader; the knowledge of mortality is narrated as a surprising discovery, or as the recognition of something repressed. Having explored the formal issues involved in Wordsworth’s idea of surprising the reader, I turn now to the mimetic effort of representing the surprise of characters and lyric speakers.

c Perceptual Narration and the Gothic While rhyme and meter enable a special kind of poetic surprise, Wordsworth’s representations of his own or his characters’ surprise owe something to novelistic techniques. Despite his disparagements in the Preface, Wordsworth borrows a particular kind of perceptual narrative introduced in the novel and intensified in gothic romance: the mimesis of startlement. The “strange adventures” putatively experienced by the Idiot Boy, for example, should not be seen solely as a nod to chivalric romance but rather as an allusion mediated by the novel’s use of romance conventions—going back to Robinson Crusoe’s “Strange Surprising Adventures.” The surprise at the heart of “The Idiot Boy” is a scene that recurs throughout eighteenth-century fiction— the reunion of loved ones—and Wordsworth lingers over that speechless moment in much the same way that his predecessors did. The reader should

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 181

1/27/15 8:01 AM

182

CHAPT ER 7

not at all be surprised that Betty Foy finds her errant son: when the narrator rhetorically asks, “Who’s yon . . . ?” (357) we know well enough that “’Tis Johnny!” (366). But like Fielding, Richardson, and others, Wordsworth is intent on approximating the perceptual phases of a character’s surprise, in a lyrical equivalent of what Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration.” In particular, the question, “Why stand you thus Good Betty Foy?”—recalls the strategy of visual delay in the opening of The Castle of Otranto, in which we first see a character’s shocked reaction before we are told the object of it. In essence, Wordsworth attempts the mimesis of a double take and the flurry of emotions that accompany it: “She looks again—her arms are up— / She screams . . . ” It is a critical commonplace that Wordsworth anxiously differentiated himself from the supernatural and ghostly conventions of the gothic and thereby highlighted the ordinariness of his poetic experiences; but the techniques of perceptual narration on display in poems such as “The Idiot Boy” should remind us that Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe preceded him in representing the mind’s self-haunting powers.18 Related to the lunar atmospherics of that poem, Wordsworth’s descriptive fragment, “A Night-Piece” (1798), harks back to a donnée of the gothic, the sudden appearance of the moon. In particular, it recalls the jumpy chiaroscuro effects in The Castle of Otranto, as in the scene in which a imperiled Isabella feels a rush of “momentary joy” when she perceives an “imperfect ray of clouded moonshine gleam from the roof of the vault.”19 In effect, Wordsworth promotes the moon from supporting role to star turn in a perceptual drama of appearance and disappearance; and the gothic architectural “vault” becomes naturalized as the night sky: At length a pleasant instantaneous light Startles the pensive traveller while he treads His lonesome path with unobserving eye Bent earthwards; he looks up—the clouds are split Asunder,—and above his head he sees The clear Moon, and the glory of the heavens. There in the blue-black vault she sails along, Followed by multitudes of stars . . . (8–15) The repeated phrase, “at length,” frames the poem and suggests two temporal dilations—the tedium of the traveler’s “lonesome path” and the sustained pause in which the scene is taken in. Between the two periods, there is the flash of surprise, a reaction that depends upon unawareness—that condition of the traveler’s “unobserving eye / Bent earthwards.” The participle

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 182

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

183

“unobserving” is curious, because before the moon appears, it would seem that the opaque sky seems to offer nothing to observe. In effect, the qualifier retrospectively marks a contrast; the traveler seems unobservant only in the retrospective light of the moon’s sudden appearance. The poem has a larger aesthetic point to make, evident in its concluding generalization of the lone traveler’s experience into a mental operation: “and the mind, / Not undisturbed by the delight it feels, / Which slowly settles into peaceful calm, / Is left to muse upon the solemn scene” (23–26). The Wordsworthian litotes “not undisturbed” is, like the word “surprise,” a term of both cognitive reflection and physical motion (or emotion); it links the turbulence of the heavens (the sky of clouds and the firmament of moon and starts) with the rhythms of thought. What the traveler is supposed to “muse upon,” however, is left unsaid. If he is an amateur philosopher, he might recall David Hume’s observations on the effects of surprise or the subsiding of a perceptual impression into a mental idea; if he is a religious man, he turns the moon into an emblem of divine grace shed upon life’s pilgrimage; and if he is a poet, he transforms it into a trope for poetic election, as Wordsworth later does in The Prelude: But I believe That Nature, oftentimes, when she would frame A favoured being, from his earliest dawn Of infancy doth open out the clouds, As at the touch of lightning, seeking him With gentlest visitation . . . ” (1.362–67) The reference for the figurative clouds seems intentionally vague, suggesting whatever obscures a clear and alert perception of the world. In allegorical terms, the clouds might represent the state of unobservancy described in “A Night-Piece”; but what is more important for the sense of this passage is not the exact translation of the clouds but rather the movement of opening them. The clouds would not even have been perceived but for this sudden opening. Wordsworth’s metaphor of the “touch of lightning” is willfully peculiar in its mingling of the tactile with the visual, the mild with the fearsome; and it is worth remembering that to be astonished is, in its original etymology (the French etonné ) to be thunderstruck. Burke makes this philological point in discussing the emotional component of the Sublime;20 and in this respect, Wordsworth’s language softens a conventional sublimity. In its paradoxical formulation, the almost imperceptible “touch” of inspiration resembles the experience narrated in the episode of the Winander

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 183

1/27/15 8:01 AM

184

CHAPT ER 7

Boy, when the child is surprised by the sudden silence of owls after a prolonged orphic dialogue: . . . and when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind . . . (5.404–9) The rhetorical doubling in Wordsworth’s famous phrase is striking: two overlapping adjectives (gentle, mild), two near-synonymous nouns (shock, surprise), and two seeming oxymorons. The fact that Wordsworth describes a shock of surprise suggests how far the word “surprise” had migrated in common usage from the physical to the cognitive; and like the phrase, “shock of recognition,” Wordsworth’s partitive construction emphasizes the intensity and brevity of a mental process. “Shock” more potently marks a corporeal experience, the body as receptor of stimuli and producer of affective response— both the perception of sound and silence and a shiver along the spine. But why the mitigating qualifiers “gentle” and “mild”? In part, they distinguish the experience from the sensations of gothic haunting that Wordsworth disparaged in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads; and after the owls’ “jocund din,” the adjectives contrastively define the hush of consciousness that follows. Moreover, the strangeness of the two oxymorons emphasizes the peculiarity of the feeling Wordsworth describes; indeed, he does not attempt to articulate precisely what the surprise is. On a perceptual level, it might be described as the sensation of sudden silence, the light of sense going out. On a propositional level, it might mean the instantaneous awareness of the limits of the will, the alterity of the natural world, the intrusion upon a space, or the natural end of all things. It is only in the cessation of the impromptu duet, in which the boy gladly participates on numerous evenings and for as long as possible, that the activity suddenly seems strange. Surprises typically come double in Wordsworth’s poetry,21 and in the Winander episode, the shock of silence precedes (and enables) the discovery of sound; in Wordsworth’s odd phrasing, the first surprise functions as a vehicle that “carries” the “voice” of distant waters into the boy’s heart. By its nature, surprise depends upon unawareness or unpreparedness, but Wordsworth’s adverb “unawares” works a variation on that model: the first surprise (silence) prepares the way for a second one that is not even consciously registered at the time.22

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 184

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

185

Wordsworth originally wrote the episode as an autobiographical vignette in Goslar in the winter of 1798–99, and it is easy to see how the structure of shock and delayed recognition might qualify the episode as a “spot of time,” but it differs from such memories in one important respect: it describes a recurring experience rather than a single event. The boy “many a time” goes out to the owls, in a cacophonous call-and-response that inevitably wanes or stops; and “sometimes” he feels a shock in the midst of the silence. The manic repetition within that dialogue (boy goading owls, owls answering boy, and “redoubled and redoubled” echoes answering both) is mirrored in the boy’s regular habit. And yet within the sway of the habitual, the boy feels this shock—not just once but from time to time. Just as the boy takes continual pleasure in the pastime of hooting at owls, he is struck by their sudden silence on more than one occasion. The specter of that silence is exhaustion, the possibility that the boy (like the owls) might one day tire of the game. Since the anecdote appears in the chapter in The Prelude on “Books,” an extended meditation on aesthetic response and changing literary tastes, it is a pertinent possibility. Will the boy’s heart always leap up when he hears an owl in the woods? Indeed, the habitual nature of the boy’s mimic hootings might be understood as a symptom of boredom, as that state is defined by the psychotherapist and literary critic Adam Phillips. The duet with the owls is a joyful, exuberant activity; but its sheer manic repetition intimates frustration and overexposure; it suggests the typical behavior of a child who sustains any novel activity to exhaustion. In Phillips’s profile, the bored child is in a “mood of diffuse restlessness,” both waiting for something and looking for something.23 At the heart of boredom, Phillips sees the existential question, “What shall we do now?”—a question that implies both negative and positive inflections: both an absence or vacuity (“the mourning of everyday life”) and a sense of possibility or anticipation. The bored child is “preparing for something of which he is unaware, something that will eventually occasion any easy transition or a mild surprise of interest” (72). Though Phillips does not refer directly to the Winander Boy episode, the echo of Wordsworth’s famous phrase is surely deliberate; and his characterization of boredom as a “transitional state” (72) helps us to understand the owls’ silence as sudden opening as much as a closing-down. We cannot know what the “transformational object” (77) to liberate us from that state will be; but any mundane thing, not necessarily an extraordinary event, might suffice to effect the turn. In any case, the possibility of boredom and overexposure is rendered moot by the announcement of the Winander Boy’s premature death. The gentle

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 185

1/27/15 8:01 AM

186

CHAPT ER 7

shock, which might otherwise have held the kind of transitional possibility that Phillips describes, is turned into an intimation of mortality. As de Man suggests, “The boy’s surprise at standing perplexed before the sudden silence of nature was an anticipatory announcement of his death, a movement of consciousness passing beyond the deceptive constancy of a world of correspondences into a world in which our mind knows itself to be in an endlessly precarious state of suspension.”24 The impulse to verbalize the boy’s mute shock is irresistible, and de Man complicates the moment by describing it as a kind of second-order shock: not the surprise of silence but the “surprise at standing perplexed.” This implied consciousness of a state of consciousness is a quintessentially de Manian formulation, and it tallies with Wordsworth’s trope of redoubling; but I would argue that it is not entirely true to the nature of surprise in the episode—its dual nature as corporeal and cognitive, its status as both a moment of experience and a vehicle for yet another perception. We might say that Wordsworth’s epitaphic postscript, “This Boy was taken from his mates, and died / In childhood” (5.414–15) represents an adult effort to give the episode a plangent narrative surprise—the device of many Lucy poems, which the poet pointedly resists in “She Was a Phantom of Delight.” It bears repeating, though, that Wordsworth originally represented himself as the boy. Without the added elegiac frame, the surprise need not be a memento mori. Like the reading of a poem, it is an experience that can be repeated with pleasure, forgotten and remembered; and the limits of its potency are left unsaid. Even if the perceptual jolt of sound into silence does wear thin, it has done its work: through it, the boy has gotten the sounds and sights of the scene, as the language of the passage has it, by heart.

c “The Two April Mornings” and the Shandean Anecdote

It is tempting to say that Wordsworth’s “The Two April Mornings” ends in an epiphany. In the inset narrative, the poet’s old friend Matthew sees a girl that reminds him of his own daughter, long dead, and in that shock of resemblance, he comes to a new and painful awareness of human irreplaceability, in realizing that he does not long for the girl to be his own child. And yet “epiphany” does not adequately describe the circuit of surprise that leads to this moment, nor the narrative éclat that follows it. The poem begins with a peculiar interjection that the speaker hears his friend utter one

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 186

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

187

April morning. After long familiarity with the poem, it is easy to forget how strange and surprising this cry really is: We walked along, while bright and red Uprose the morning sun; And Matthew stopped, he looked, and said, ‘The will of God be done!’ (1–4) Both Matthew and the speaker could be called, in Hartman’s terms, Halted Travelers: Matthew stops walking, the speaker necessarily follows suit, and the rest of the poem concerns the telling of a story that postpones the two men’s unspecified “work.” But I would like to suggest that there is something of the eighteenth-century novel in this anecdote: namely the representation of a character’s astonishment. More specifically, I would suggest that Matthew’s sudden exclamation evokes similar scenes in Tristram Shandy, a novel with which Wordsworth was well acquainted.25 There is something fundamentally Shandean about describing a strange interjection and then tracking the mental route to that utterance— giving, in effect, an anatomy of surprise. Matthew’s exclamation is reminiscent of a chapter in Sterne’s novel which features a psychological ekphrasis of a sudden cry of pain. It is the scene in which the minor character Phutatorius cries, in the company of his associates, “Zounds!”26 Sterne’s narration in this set piece is both a descriptive tableau and a Lockean micro-history of an action and its consequences, the tracing of a path from physical event to conscious awareness. Sterne’s point is that the meaning of this single interjection, uttered in the midst of a conversation about sermonic styles, cannot be easily decoded. Some hear it as an inexplicable sounding of two musical tones; some dismiss it as “no more than an involuntary respiration” that simply sounds like an intelligible word; and still others presume that the oath is a physical thing, “squeezed out by the sudden influx of blood” brought on by a “stroke of surprise” in reaction to Yorick’s unorthodox theory of preaching (287). None of these theories accounts for the true cause, which turns out to be a hot chestnut errantly dropped into an opening in the subject’s breeches. In a parody of both Lockean empiricism and epic inquiry into origins, the narrator assumes the task of explanation: “When great or unexpected events fall out upon the stage of this sublunary world—the mind of man, which is an inquisitive kind of substance, naturally takes flight, behind the scenes, to see what is the cause and first spring of them” (290–91). In his corrective account of Phutatorius’s oath, the narrator describes a spreading “glow of pain,” playing on the old military sense of the word “surprise”: “in the first

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 187

1/27/15 8:01 AM

188

CHAPT ER 7

terrifying disorder of the passion it threw him, as it had done the best generals on earth, quite off his guard,” and thus he utters “that interjection of surprise so much discanted upon” (289). It is a Shandean verbal felicity that this interjection—a contraction of the oath “by God’s wounds”—originally referred to Christ’s stigmata, and thus the connection between physical and cognitive surprise is drawn tighter. The hot chestnut is, like many mundane objects in Sterne’s novel, an objective correlative for any mental irritant and a symbolic nexus between mind and body. Wordsworth’s anatomy of Matthew’s interjection is not comically belabored, of course, but is Shandean nevertheless. I bring up the correspondence between novel and lyric to emphasize the point that the classification of epiphany does not do justice to the poem’s eighteenth-century heritage. Wordsworth’s acquaintance with Lockean empiricism and its ramifications in the associationist psychology of David Hartley is well known, but it is worth considering the mediation of those ideas in eighteenth-century fiction. Like Phutatorius’s oath, Matthew’s utterance is a trivial thing that swells into significance; the origin and meaning of the cry are not immediately obvious, and its explanation requires a similar inquiry into causes. In the first stanza, it would appear that Matthew’s utterance is a greeting of the morning sun as divine symbol, as if the old man were echoing a line from the Lord’s Prayer. It is only in the poet’s puzzled reaction that we see that the statement was not a happy one. Indeed, it strikes the poet as an untimely utterance, a grief that wrongs the season and the day: “from thy breast what thought / Beneath so beautiful a sun, / So sad a sigh has brought?” (14–16). Like the Shandean oath, the utterance is quoted as a verbal statement and represented as an involuntary sound wrenched from the heart—surprise in both cognitive and corporeal forms. Rather than being a self-sufficient lyrical outburst, Matthew’s exclamation demands a narrative elaboration that can be described as novelistic. It will take the rest of the poem to explain the causal connection between the morning sun and Matthew’s interjection; and in tracing that link, Wordsworth becomes, in Sterne’s terms, a “historian” chronicling a Lockean chain of associations. It is not the “bright and red” sun (1) that directly inspires Matthew’s reaction but rather its chromatic refraction in “Yon cloud with that long purple cleft” (21); and not so much the cloud itself as its association with the look of a similar sky thirty years before, on the day that Matthew stood at his daughter’s grave. The difference between sun and sun-lit cloud makes an apt emblem for the indirect path through which Matthew’s story is told. Indeed, the poem works by subtle redescription: statement vs. sigh, red vs. purple, sun vs. cloud. These discrepancies accent the different subjectivities

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 188

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

189

of Matthew and the poet, the gap between the initial surprise and its deep meaning. Like the poem’s narrative frame, the old man’s story has an involuntary exclamation at its heart; both April mornings contain surprises. On the spring day that Matthew visits his daughter’s grave, he is temporarily prevented from turning away from the spot by the sight of a “blooming Girl” (43). The sudden vision elicits “a sigh of pain / Which I could ill confine” (53–54); and like the sigh of sadness that the speaker hears at the beginning of the poem, it is a sound whose meaning needs elucidation. It does not exactly mean, “If only you were my Emma,” or “If only my Emma were alive like you.” Apparently, the girl reminds Matthew of Emma, as his stunned double take suggests: “I looked at her, and looked again” (55). So much is conveyed in that bewildered repetition—the uncanniness of the resemblance, the haunted sense that Emma’s ghost stands over the grave, the verification that this cannot be the dead girl, the stoic observation of the hard boundary between the living and the dead. The stasis of the moment echoes novelistic scenes of surprise, particularly those in which characters stand mute, as if visited by a revenant. The gospel narrative of Christ’s appearance at the tomb also shadows the scene, but the possibility of resurrection is far from Matthew’s mind. Whatever the second look is supposed to take in, it does not prepare us for the pang of disavowal that follows: “And did not wish her mine” (56). The visual impact of the blooming girl is quickly succeeded by the cognitive surprise of renunciation. In essence, that second glance reflects Matthew’s surprise, and its verbalization in the next line is designed to surprise us. Wordsworth’s final stanza deals one further blow, this time the conventional narrative shock of the Lucy poems and other ballads. It is the temporal lurch enacted by an epitaphic postscript: “Matthew is in his grave” (57). No motion has he now, no force; and yet the memory has a ripple effect in the poet’s mind. The final image of Matthew pictures him “with a bough / Of wilding in his hand” (59–60), and the sheer unexpectedness of this visual detail reminds us of the associative paths on which the poem moves. Presumably, it refers to the fishing pole that Matthew held on the April morning of his anecdote: “With rod and line I sued the sport Which that sweet season gave, And, to the church-yard come, stopped short Beside my daughter’s grave. (29–32) The detour at the gravesite is, like the delay of unspecified “work” on the second April morning, a strange interruption; and the participial construction,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 189

1/27/15 8:01 AM

190

CHAPT ER 7

“to the church-yard come,” elides the degree of forethought in the visit, the extent to which Matthew surprises himself in coming here. Wordsworth’s redescription of the moment—in terms that return the fishing implement to its origin in a tree—reflect the poet’s own imaginative absorption of the story. The bough of wilding is, like the peculiar shade of red in the sky, an ordinary thing with private meanings attached to a person. Wordsworth’s postscript might be seen as the easiest and most conventional form of surprise, but the strangeness of its emblem really does deliver a gentle shock—a hallucinatory image that takes us back to the peculiar cry with which the poem began.

c Surprised by Joy Well over a decade after Wordsworth wrote his “Matthew” poems, his sonnet “Surprised by Joy” reprises the theme of “The Two April Mornings” in a new key: this time, it is the poet who loses a daughter, the poet who stands over a grave, the poet who surprises himself. The sudden feeling of joy that sparks the sonnet is never traced to a perceptual cause, nothing akin to the glimpse of sky that begins “The Two April Mornings.” I conclude with this poem because its opening phrase crystallizes the interpretive template I have proposed—“surprised by” rather than “epiphany of ”—and for the way that the poem formally enacts the feeling of surprise for the reader.27 To understand the feeling in Wordsworth’s poem, it helps to recall the duality of surprise as both quasi-physical event and cognitive state, as well as competing psychological accounts of emotion as both feeling and propositional attitude. As I have shown, this duality figures prominently in Paradise Lost, with its exploration of rational choice and physical circumstance, the mental and the material; and Milton’s deployment of the term is important for understanding the verbal nuances in Wordsworth’s sonnet. Indeed, the title harks back to the scene in Milton’s epic when God’s obedient angels realize the decisiveness of their triumph: “them unexpected joy surprised, / When the great ensign of Messiah blazed / Aloft by angels borne, his sign in heav’n” (6.774– 76). This form of surprise serves as a revisionary healing of epic conflict: an attack of happiness instead of the physical assaults that have led to this moment. To be surprised by unexpected joy is to exult in an outcome that might have seemed, in the heat of battle, uncertain; to feel an intensity of emotion previously unknown in heaven’s steady atmosphere of contentment; and to reckon cognitively with the fact that one feels joy.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 190

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

191

In this vein, Wordsworth’s opening clause has two complementary meanings: “struck by a sudden feeling of joy,” and “surprised that I could feel joy.” The poem moves between these senses: it begins with a shock and proceeds to elaborate that moment—to pursue the question of how one could have come to that moment in the first place. In effect, the poem comprises the emotion in its propositional form: Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love recalled thee to my mind— But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore. In June of 1812, Wordsworth’s daughter Catherine died, a few months shy of her fourth birthday. Neither parent was by her side on the night that she was stricken with severe convulsions, William having gone to London and Mary having gone to Hindwell.28 The former did not hear of his daughter’s death until a week later, so the surprise registered in the poem must be a traumatic echo of that initial shock, mingled with the guilt of absence. The second form of guilt, implicit in Wordsworth’s self-accusatory questions, is that of forgetting—temporarily shedding the state of mourning enough to feel joy, and thinking for a moment that he could share that feeling with his daughter. Despite the sudden and unbidden nature of the experience, the concept of epiphany does not well describe Wordsworth’s sonnet. It is not a showingforth of the invisible, nor a perceptual gateway; indeed, it represents not a perception but a feeling, which in turn leads to new feelings and thoughts. The moral inflections of surprise that we have seen in Paradise Lost better characterize the poem. The experience of being “surprised by joy” is akin to Miltonic surprise: it feels like an external force, it catches the subject unaware, it comes as if for the first time, and it indicates a kind of fall. As in the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 191

1/27/15 8:01 AM

192

CHAPT ER 7

case of the angels’ unexpected joy, surprise contrastively defines what had been felt up to that moment—for Wordsworth, a steady state of grief or blankness; for the angelic host, an anxiety over the war’s outcome. These feelings might not have been named but for the surprise, which acts as a kind of precipitant. The surprise of joy contrastively defines a prior state of unhappiness; it enables the poet to name the sadness that had been the background of his life since the loss of his daughter. In other words, the past participle, “surprised,” looks back (to the previous emotional state) as much as it looks forward (to the cognitive processing of the shock). The circuit of surprise and recollection traced by Wordsworth’s sonnet recalls the dynamics of a religious epiphany poem, the Catholic poet Robert Southwell’s “The Burning Babe” (1602); and it is instructive to compare the two. Like “Surprised by Joy,” Southwell’s poem concerns the sudden hallucinatory appearance of a child: As I in hoarie Winters night stoode shivering in the snow, Surpris’d I was with sodaine heate, which made my hart to glow, And lifting up a fearefull eye, to view what fire was neare, A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the ayre appeare . . . (1–4) It will be revealed that the pretty babe is the infant Christ, and the poem recapitulates the Feast of the Epiphany. Two surprises structure this lyric: the sensory jolt of the child’s appearance (felt and subsequently allegorized in the form of heat and light); and, in the last couplet, the realization of its identity. After explaining himself in a painstaking allegorical blazon, the child disappears, leaving the speaker to make the final conclusion: “With this he vanisht out of sight, and swiftly shrunk away, / And straight I called unto minde, that it was Christmasse day” (15–16). Between the poet’s description and the speaking infant’s allegoresis, the reader will not fail to have decoded the mystery before the speaker does. Southwell’s poem, then, enacts a virtual surprise; it delays the moment of revelation the better to emphasize the act of forgetting the full significance of Christmas. (Even believers who easily guess the mystery, and even those who have read the poem before can vicariously feel the shock of recognition.) In that space between inattention and knowing, a secular “Winters night” (described in purely sensory terms as “hoarie” and shiver-inducing) is renamed “Christmasse day”; and time significantly passes from night to morning. It could be said, in the allegorical language of the poem, that the speaker already intuits the Christ child’s presence in the first moment of surprise, when the literal winter chill is driven away by a metaphorical warmth. But in a poem that converts all sensory particulars—heat, cold, fire, tears, smoke, ashes—into abstractions, it is im-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 192

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

193

portant to transform a physical surprise (“sodaine heate”) into a cognitive one (“Christmasse day”). In Wordsworth’s poem, joy results from some unspecified surprise, and it causes a second surprise—that of having felt joy. Here, Joy is purely abstract, a cipher for the kind of experience that would have merited an entire poem in Wordsworth’s earlier career. The motive force of the wind—central to such surprise poems as “A Night-Piece,” “A Whirl-Blast from a Hill,” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—here becomes purely an idiomatic figure for the poet’s impatience. In this restlessness, and in the childlike impulse to find a tallying reaction in Catherine, the father becomes like his daughter, for it is the child who typically demands the validating attention of the parent. Such are “the pretty round / Of trespasses, affected to provoke / Mock-chastisement and partnership in play” (4–6) which Wordsworth had described in a poetic tribute to the living Catherine, “Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old.” That poem celebrates the child’s easy susceptibility to surprise and her ability to startle her elders: Light are her sallies as the tripping fawn’s Forth-startled from the fern where she lay couched; Unthought of, unexpected, as the stir Of the soft breeze ruffling the meadow-flowers, Or from before it chasing wantonly The many-colored images imprest Upon the bosom of the placid lake. (15–21) Surprise here is circular, infectious. The child’s sudden movements are compared to those of a fawn that is roused out of its covert—perhaps by the sounds of the child herself. In turn, her “sallies” startle her guardians, coming upon them “unthought of ” and “unexpected.” The daughter’s spirit so permeates the poem that even when Wordsworth likens the girl to the breeze, the breeze inevitably resembles her, in its blithe “chasing” of lake reflections that it can never catch; as a “character,” the poem gives a portrait in which the girl is charactered everywhere. The dual actions of the breeze, ruffling and chasing, imply both the child’s effects on her elders and her own self-delighting activities. The poem thus values two kinds of surprise, the kinesthetic and the aesthetic: the sheer caprice and animal reflexes of the child, and the continual capacity for delight that the adult takes in her. The latter’s momentary lapse of attention, indicated in the negative participles “unthought” and “unexpected,” represents the necessary condition of the adult’s surprise, a condition that plays a significant part in “Surprised by Joy.”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 193

1/27/15 8:01 AM

194

CHAPT ER 7

In the sonnet, the poet’s word for the feeling he wishes to share, “transport,” serves as a synonym for both surprise and joy. It names the vector from one emotional state (grief or indifference) to another (pleasure); and it describes a moment of ecstatic self-forgetfulness. The poem is built on turns and double takes, punctuated by dashes, question marks, and exclamation points: the initial access of joy; the reflexive movement to share the feeling; the apostrophe to Catherine; the fall into a series of accusatory questions; the Petrarchan volta that marks the renewed awareness of the girl’s death. These turns are grammatically reflected by a trio of words with the “re-” prefix— “recalled,” “return,” “restore.” Two intertwined forms of repetition are implied in these verbs: remembering (the reflexive summoning of Catherine) and reminding (affirming an irrevocable absence). The initial mistake of turning to Catherine is corrected in the sonnet by two formal turns: first to Catherine, then back to the sole self. The event that Wordsworth broods on can be grammatically summarized, in its barest outlines, as “Surprised . . . I turned.” The poem’s opening line is unusual: Wordsworth’s sonnets generally do not begin with a participial phrase. A notable precursor is Sir Philip Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella: “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show . . . I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe . . . ” (1–3).29 Here, the syntax establishes an initial state of mind whose process of verbal expression the rest of the poem will detail. In the same way, Wordsworth’s participle “surprised” marks the emotional pivot on which the rest of the poem will turn, and turn again. Rather than participles, Wordsworth’s sonnets are more likely to begin with vocative interjections, whether to people or things, the living or the dead, the particular or the abstract: “Beaumont!”; “Calvert!”; “O Gentle Sleep!”; “Hail, Twilight”; “Lady!”; “Brook!”; “Haydon!”; “Jones!”; “Milton!”; “England!”; “Oak of Guernica!”30 Some of these apostrophes can be attributed to Wordsworth’s Miltonic use of the sonnet for public themes (especially in “Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty”); but the poet favored this rhetorical device for intimate addresses as well. For Wordsworth’s purposes, the sonnet in its tautness and brevity sustained a fiction of immediate presence, a connection between speaker and audience, self and world. In light of this tendency, we might imagine a different memorial sonnet that would begin, “Catherine!” To do so is to see what Wordsworth pointedly refuses, and to see how important it was to reenact the shock of remembering Catherine’s death. Rather than saying, “I turned to share the transport with thee,” Wordsworth pointedly interrupts that grammatical flow with a dash, an interjection, and a rhetorical question. This irruption approximates the initial surprise, even as it begins a series of introspective queries.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 194

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

195

In essence, the poem is haunted by the specter of two forms of disloyalty, which might be summarized in two rhetorical questions: “Who else but you would I have thought to share this moment with?” and “How could I have been forgetful enough to act as if you were still here?” Or, as declarative statements, they read as: “I was thinking of you,” and “I had not been thinking of you enough.” That double bind of allegiance is present in the ambiguity of the statement, “Love, faithful love recalled thee to my mind.” Is it Love that makes Wordsworth turn to share the transport with Catherine, or is it Love that reminds him that she cannot be found? Both actions, after all, can be reasonably attributed to Love—the body memory implicit in the first turn to Catherine and the deliberate awareness involved in mourning her death. But it is really the second act that Wordsworth attributes to Love, for in this poem he values the cognitive over the instinctual—the propositional statement of surprise over the first quasi-physical stab of joy. To the rhetorical question of what “power” caused the momentary forgetting of Catherine’s death, meanwhile, Wordsworth stays silent, refusing to name a counteragency equal in force to Love. Call it, in the language of Renaissance sonnets, Time or Mutability; like Shakespeare’s poems to the young man, “Surprised by Joy” is haunted by oblivion. Wordsworth’s poem affirms, remorsefully, that a year or so after Catherine’s death it is possible both to feel joy and to stop being constantly aware of that absence. The idea of epiphany, as I have been arguing, does not accurately characterize these surprises. If anything, they amount to a kind of inverse epiphany, a takingaway rather than a showing-forth. Surprise has a deep history in this poem: the daughter’s startling “sallies” affectionately described in “Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old,” the surprise of sudden joy, the shock of introspective guilt over the kind of blithe absorption that Wordsworth had celebrated in the earlier poem. In Hume’s account of the emotions, any surprise is a potentially disturbing mental “commotion,” and so it is with the surprise in Wordsworth’s sonnet. Inevitably, the renewed awareness of Catherine’s death is associatively linked to the first shock of acknowledging her irrevocable absence. That acknowledgment is described as a “thought,” but it returns as a quasi-physical sensation, “the worst pang that sorrow ever bore.” Or rather, not the worst, but the secondworst, next to that first graveside shock. It is the poet, of course, who endures these pangs, but the Miltonic locution of sorrow bearing (or giving birth to) pain suggests the ground of feeling from which the surprise of joy unaccountably sprang; sorrow has taken up residence in the soul. Wordsworth’s qualification of the superlative “worst” is a symptom of the poem’s halting rhythms of self-correction. Here it is a matter of discrimi-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 195

1/27/15 8:01 AM

196

CHAPT ER 7

nating subtle degrees of emotional intensity: in the Humean language of perception, the first impression of death is necessarily stronger than its residual mental idea. The attenuation implicit in Hume’s model of consciousness is precisely what gives Wordsworth pause in this sonnet: memories fade, the exhausted mind turns away from its preoccupations, and grief itself, in Tennyson’s phrase, is mortal. Many years later, after his sister-in-law’s death, Wordsworth wrote an elegiac sonnet in which he prays for precisely this relief: “And let my spirit in that power divine / Rejoice, as, through that power, it cease to mourn.”31 The controlling terms of “power” and “joy” in the sonnet for Catherine return here in a new key. Here, power is not the impersonal mechanism of temporary forgetting, but rather a religious comfort; and unbidden joy is turned into doctrinally deliberate rejoicing. By this contrast, we can still more clearly see the importance of surprise in the sonnet for Catherine: one can be surprised by joy but never by rejoicing. C.S. Lewis, who borrowed the phrase, “surprised by joy,” for his spiritual autobiography, addresses a similar issue in writing about the futile attempt to recapture a feeling of childhood joy: “To ‘get it again’ became my constant endeavour; while reading every poem, hearing every piece of music, going for every walk, I stood anxious sentinel at my own mind to watch whether the blessed moment was beginning and to endeavour to retain it if it did.”32 But Lewis realizes that he “frightened” away the possibility of joy in the act of chasing it. For Wordsworth and Lewis, the surprise of joy, like Protestant grace, can only come unbidden. In purely secular terms, Philip Fisher has posited that “surprise, the eliciting of notice, becomes the very heart of what it means to ‘have an experience’ at all” (20).33 The experience in “Surprised by Joy” is both anterior to the poem and constituted by it: both a sudden feeling activated by an unnamed stimulus and the articulation of that feeling. We can see in the sonnet’s elaboration of its opening phrase many of the salient features of surprise that I have traced in earlier poems: its affective and cognitive dimensions, its external and internal dynamics, its duality as both event and contemplation, its tinge of guilt or self-accusation, its dependence on states of forgetting or unawareness. The surprise in Wordsworth’s sonnet marks a dividing line in the poet’s history; it retrospectively clarifies a prior state even as it defines a new phase of thought. In the self-censoring path of Wordsworth’s imagination, the surprise of joy is a Miltonic fall, but it is nearly impossible not to think of it as a fortunate one. Wordsworthian surprise is in many ways very far from the violent sense explored in Paradise Lost; but it does retain something of Milton’s moral inflections. When Milton’s angels are surprised by joy after their victory in

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 196

1/27/15 8:01 AM

WORDSWORT HIAN SHOCKS , G E N T L E A N D OT HE RW I SE

197

heaven, they confront two historical firsts: not only the outbreak of war but the successful recovery from it. By implication, they experience a feeling different from any previous sense of exaltation they had before, and a new sense of the freedom in which they were allowed to fall or stand firm. Similarly, in Wordsworth’s poetry, the accidental experience of surprise motivates the clarifying recognition of a previous state of unawareness or unknowing. I have chosen to conclude this chapter with “Surprised by Joy” not only for its chronological lateness in Wordsworth’s major phase but also for its crystallizing attention to that salubrious function. In Wordsworth’s vocabulary, as in Milton’s and Defoe’s, “surprised” can mean something like “chastened” or “caught unawares.” The pause of silence, the gleam of moonlight, the death of an unknown girl, the color of a sunrise, the appearance of a rainbow in the sky, the sudden access of joy—such moments enable a bracing self-awareness, or what Wallace Stevens called a new knowledge of reality. They punctuate vacant or pensive moods (“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”), dim sadness and untoward thoughts (“Resolution and Independence”), earthbound unobservancy (“A NightPiece”), and self-enclosing slumbers and sweet dreams (the Lucy poems). To cite another example, Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” sonnet is, as Cleanth Brooks once suggested, predicated on the paradoxical discovery that the City could be so breathtakingly beautiful; but implicated within that surprise is its obverse—an attitude of indifference or oblivious self-absorption.34 “Dull would he be of soul who could pass by / A sight so touching in its majesty” (2–3): such a straw man is not merely the opposite of the sensitive poet; he represents the poet’s prior state of mind and body—blind to such a vista and numb to its peculiar touch. The dullard’s act of passing over—of being merely an urban passerby—signifies the inertial possibility that Wordsworth has rejected by an act of will: not to stop, not to record this moment. The aspersion against the “dull,” in other words, really serves as a self-admonition. A similar reminder is built into one of Wordsworth’s most famous lyrics of surprise, “My Heart Leaps Up”: if there is ever a time when the poet can no longer be surprised by a rainbow, he will not only dull of soul, he might as well be dead. I have argued not only for the centrality of surprise in Wordsworth’s poetry but also for its rootedness in eighteenth-century discourse. Wordsworth pointedly distanced himself from the sensationalism of gothic fiction and from the pleasures and pains of novelistic narrative more broadly, but he was deeply indebted to these literary developments. His concern about preserving an accessibility to surprise, for instance, harks back to the episodes of Crusoe’s journal that we have considered in a previous chapter. His anatomies of cognition, meanwhile, owe something to the perceptual syntax of gothic fiction,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 197

1/27/15 8:01 AM

198

CHAPT ER 7

as well as to the mimetic concerns of Tristram Shandy. Wordsworth’s lasting critical contribution was not only to adapt a novelistic vocabulary for lyrical purposes but also to formulate the lyric’s formal capacity to enact a particular kind of surprise—an inexhaustible aesthetic and affective experience that transcends familiarity or expectation. Wordsworth’s assertion is grounded in an assumption, or perhaps an article of faith, that has informed later practices of close reading—including, it perhaps goes without saying— this chapter.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 198

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Ch apte r 8 “Fine Suddenness” Keats’s Sense of a Beginning

“Nothing,” John Keats once declared in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, “startles me beyond the Moment.”1 Of course: the experience of being startled can only last a moment; indeed, it defines a particular kind of moment. Beyond that tautology, Keats is claiming a capacity to steel himself against surprise, or at least to absorb its effects quickly. Elsewhere, he counsels another friend to adopt that stance: “Why don’t you, as I do, look unconcerned at what may be called more particularly Heart-vexations? They never surprize me—lord!” For all of his assumed defenses against the world’s shocks, however, Keats courted and valued surprise in his own poetry. Among Romantic-era poets, he was the most signally concerned with freshness and novelty—the first encounter, the new experience, the sudden jolt. In this emphasis, Keats most resembles William Wordsworth, though he might have been reluctant to admit that affinity. Where he differed from his predecessor was in the nature of the experience: Wordsworth’s lyrical anecdotes of surprise tend toward novelistic realism in their ordinariness and happenstance; Keats’s tend to be more deliberately framed as occasions of looking or reading, or fantasized about as enchanted encounters. More overtly than his predecessor, Keats posited surprise as the essence of aesthetic experience and the energy driving any progress of poetry. That idea is crystallized in the allegory of art in his late poem Hyperion: the tragic vision and lyrical 199

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 199

1/27/15 8:01 AM

200

CHAPT ER 8

forms of Apollo succeed the old epic sublimity of Saturn; but the deposed Titan poignantly insists that “there shall be / Beautiful things made new, for the surprise of the sky-children” (1.131–33). The locution of “children” aptly pertains to the question of artistic renewal, for it invokes not only the next generation but also the stage of life in which susceptibility to surprise is at its highest pitch. Surprise figured prominently in the aesthetic standards that Keats formulated in epistolary remarks; and like Wordsworth, he made distinctions between better and worse kinds. In one letter, he proposes that poetry “should surprise by a fine excess and not by Singularity—it should strike the Reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a Remembrance.”2 Here, the word does not connote a subversion of expectation; it functions more as an Addisonian synonym for “delight” or “pleasantly overwhelm.” The phrase “fine excess,” meanwhile, states a Keatsian paradox of surfeit and refinement, extravagant waste and judicious selection; and it suggests a cumulative rather sudden effect. It is not exactly clear what Keats means by “Singularity,” but it is perhaps akin to what Samuel Johnson disparaged as mere wit or novelty for its own sake. Keats’s distinction inadvertently harks back to a neoclassical poetics of balance and harmony, as articulated in Alexander Pope’s argument that in the ideal work of art, “No single parts unequally surprize; / All comes united to th’ admiring Eyes.”3 The two poets emphasize tellingly different components of the reading experience, however: while Pope privileges form, Keats focuses on psychic response. The latter’s ideal of poetry as wording the reader’s own highest thoughts is itself a rewording of Pope’s famous axiom that “True wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest” (297–98); but what differs is the dynamic temporality of Keats’s account. For Keats, the poem does not evenly unspool before the reader’s ever-admiring eyes; it surprises and strikes at various moments, in waves of attention and deliquescence. Unlike Wordsworth, Keats made no explicit formal claims about lyrical surprise—no observations about the preservative effects of versification. He was, however, intensely interested in the renewability of surprise in the experience of reading. In a letter to John Hamilton Reynolds in April 1817, Keats asks his friend to share his latest reading impressions, which must necessarily be always changing, always yielding up a fresh insight: “Whenever you write say a Word or two on some Passage in Shakespeare that may have come rather new to you: which must be continually happening, notwithstanding that we read the same Play forty times.”4 This request gives us another sense of what Keats means by the phrase, “surprised by a fine excess”: part of Shakespeare’s abundance is that different phrases or passages will strike

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 200

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

201

the reader at different times; one can never step into the same play twice. It also illustrates what it means for the imagination to be “coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness.” For Keats, the delight of reading involved an experience of rereading; and ideally, its surprises, like “a thing of beauty,” would never end. This is an important distinction for Keats as both a reader and writer of poetry: the idea that surprise is not obviated by previous exposure, that there is a kind of virtual surprise that is heightened by expectation. A few critics have taken passing notice of surprise in Keats’s poetry, but no one has yet addressed the subject in any sustained way.5 In doing so, I want to articulate three inflections of Keatsian surprise, which I will call, for the sake of shorthand convenience, startlement, novelty, and recognition. The first denotes the purely reflexive, fleeting response to a sudden stimulus or an internal jolt; the second pertains specifically to aesthetic or literary experiences of some duration; the third involves acts of memory, recapitulation, and naming. These loosely correspond to three phases of the poet’s brief career—early, middle, and late. By this organization, I do not mean to insist too heavily on the narrative of development or maturation that has often been invoked (and complicated) in Keats scholarship—for the three inflections overlap and interpenetrate. But I do mean to emphasize the salience or predominance of each mode of surprise in its respective phase. The specific language of startlement appears most frequently in earlier poems and noticeably wanes in the odes. This is not to say that the experience itself disappears; rather, I want to show how it finds new expression in later lyrics, and how surprise becomes more tightly woven into the mental act of recognition—of reseeing or renaming a thing or experience. I begin by showing how the experience of startlement figures in the self-portraits of Keats’s early poems; and I suggest that the celebrated intertwinement of sensation and thought in Keats’s poetry is epitomized in this experience. Keats favored the verbs “start” and “startle” to denote both a physical jump and a cognitive event. These words aptly pertain both to the external action of the stimulus and the internal reaction of the perceiver: in a world of constant distraction, things start into the poet’s sight, and the poet, lost in reverie, startles at them. Typically, these moments function as mental circuit breakers, redirecting or focusing attention, or even literally waking the poet up. In symbolic terms, they serve as an enabling fiction for poetic ambition, as well as a trope of modesty and indirection. In effect, Keats echoes Wordsworth’s anecdotes of surprise but turns them toward more overtly vocational—and often eroticized—purposes. The early topographical poem, “I Stood Tiptoe Upon a Little Hill,” contains the sensory ingredients of a Wordsworthian

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 201

1/27/15 8:01 AM

202

CHAPT ER 8

encounter, but it is framed as a deliberate fantasy; rather than recording a surprise, it expresses a recurring desire to be surprised in a forest—to be waylaid in a romance of the poet’s own design. In my second section, I consider a series of poems that concern the novelty of a first exposure to a significant object of attention—one that does not merely startle but cumulatively overwhelms. I show how Keats confronts the imaginative challenge of representing more carefully planned and managed surprises rather than purely accidental or unbidden experience. I turn, finally, to the odes, which seem conspicuously devoid of the language of surprise. I argue that the emotional experience described by that language persists in new forms: in essence, the odes frame surprise in terms of a mental activity that had been implicit or latent in Keats’s earlier poetry: recognition.6 In particular, I focus on two odes that retain some of the familiar vocabulary of surprise: the “Ode to Psyche” (“sudden,” “surprise/ eyes”) and the “Ode on Melancholy” (the “sudden” fit). Both of these poems can be said to originate in surprise, but the nature of that experience differs: “Psyche” presents a self-willed dream vision as an accidental encounter, while “Melancholy” turns an unbidden attack of sadness into a mythological quest into the heart of an emotion. In each case, the experience of surprise or suddenness imposes narrative order—an origin or beginning—on something that resists narration: the mind’s reflection on its own operations in the first case and an all-pervading mood in the second.7 I suggest that the unacknowledged lyrical model for the latter poem is Wordsworth’s representation of what he called “moods of my own mind.” In this ode I show the poet working through a more pointedly interior and more mysterious form of surprise: not the startlement of a thing or event but a feeling of being overtaken and a cognitive reckoning with that emotional state.

c Start(l)ing: The Poems of Apprenticeship The words “start” and “startle” appear with striking frequency in Keats’s early poems, and with good reason. The verb “to startle” contains both active and passive senses, so it aptly reflects the preoccupations of a poet who was acutely aware of both his youthful naïveté and his upstart pretensions: he could be startled by the world and startle other people in equal measure. The word “start” (derived from Germanic forms for “overthrow,” “precipitate,” and “overturn”) acquired the sense of “begin” or “commence” in the early nineteenth century; and although Keats never uses it in this newer sense, I want to sug-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 202

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

203

gest that the experience of startlement is bound up with the poet’s sense of a vocational and lyrical beginning. In his own aesthetic criteria, Keats made stipulations about ideal forms of startlement. In one letter, he proposed the axiom that “Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”8 He applied a similar standard to people. In an earlier letter to his brothers, he complains of some fashionable wits he met at Benjamin Haydon’s “who say things which make one start, without making one feel.”9 To startle is, by definition, to feel something, but Keats’s distinction only underscores the weight that the poet gave to the latter verb: it mingles the sensory and the cognitive, and it lasts longer than a mere jolt. There was nothing wrong with surprise in itself but, in Keats’s terminology, it required a sustained “intensity” to be truly appreciated; poetry had to make the reader start and feel. Though he declares a wholesale rejection of Wordsworth in his letter to Reynolds (“I will have no more of Wordsworth or Hunt in particular”), Keats inadvertently echoes his predecessor’s criticism regarding the contemporary craving for stimulation and the assertion of the importance of sentiment over incident.10 Keats’s medical studies might have had some role in informing his poetic vocabulary of physiological response. Hermione de Almeida has speculated that the poet was imaginatively influenced by John Brown’s Elementa Medicinae (1780), which elaborated a universal “principle of excitability”—the notion of all living bodies participating in a cycle of animation and exhaustion.11 That principle finds mythological visualization in the figure of Pan in Endymion (1818). A benevolent trickster and omnipresent stimulus, he conspires to “surprise / The squatted hare while in half-sleeping fit” (1.264–65), and delights naiads with the serendipity of “fancifullest shells” dropped in watery lairs. In effect, Pan is a precursor to Keats’s later figure of Fancy, and a descendant of Shakespeare’s Puck, with the element of menace banished; his brand of surprise takes the form of only delight and novelty, not ambush or attack. The sheer animal quiescence of the hare stands in for the poet’s own sleepy indolence, so Pan’s surprise can be seen more as a benevolent nudge than as a mean-spirited practical joke. When Keats professed his desire for “a life of sensations rather than thoughts,” he was envisioning just such an existence of pure perception and excitation. He knew, however, that these things were not mutually exclusive; indeed, as Stuart Sperry has noted, Keats often used “sensation” as a synonym for “feeling” or “emotion.” The figure of surprise in his poetry reflects that ambiguity: it is both a sensation and a thought—more precisely, a sensation converted into thought (6).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 203

1/27/15 8:01 AM

204

CHAPT ER 8

Keats’s favored rhyme of “surprise” and “eyes” captures that duality. The eyes both receive stimuli and register their effect, in the iconic expression that Charles Le Brun formulated in his taxonomy of the emotions: a stretching of the lids and the arching of the brows. In each instance, the rhyme conveys a theatrical affect of mute astonishment, one that is familiar from epic episodes of wonderment and their iterations in novelistic narrative. In Keats’s symbolic vocabulary, the surprise/eyes dyad conveys a feeling of wonder that leads to an awakening or renewal. Such is the effect in the early “Ode to Apollo” (1815), when Homer is pictured as performing his verses in a poetic Elysium: “what creates the most intense surprize, / His soul looks out through renovated eyes” (11–12). Presumably, such a renewal has been enabled by English translations of Homer (Chapman’s and Pope’s) that bring the epic to new audiences. In this sense, “surprize” lies on both sides: in the immortal bard’s discovery that he is still being heard in a time and place far beyond the Achaean shores, and in the modern reader’s delight in discovering the poem in an accessible translation. The surprise/eyes dyad can also emphasize a mutual act of looking, one that dilates the initial shock into an affective feedback loop of wonderment. In the tale that Keats tells at the end of “I Stood Tip-toe” (borrowed from an episode in Lemprière’s Dictionary), the “languid sick” are magically cured, and in reuniting with their lovers, they behold both a miracle of resurrection and a mirror image of their own astonishment. This scene represents both instantaneous starting and sustained feeling, both registered in the eyes: Young men, and maidens at each other gaz’d With hands held back, and motionless, amaz’d To see the brightness in each other’s eyes; And so they stood, fill’d with a sweet surprise, Until their tongues were loos’d in poesy. (231–35) Ocular “brightness” has both physiological and emotional significance here; it reflects both revived health and the state of exultation at that revival. In the suspension of the moment, instantaneous seeing dilates into rapt gazing; and the conjunction of perception and emotion is caught in two couplets— both “surprise/eyes” and “gaz’d/amaz’d.” The eyes might be expected to brim with tears of joy, but that sensation is displaced by a thoroughly figurative, intangible filling with “sweet surprise”—a spontaneous overflow that channels itself into “poesy”—a Keatsian trope for both speech and the alternative language of a kiss. In his early works, Keats sees himself as both an agent and subject of surprise; and both roles inform his sense of poetic vocation. On the one hand,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 204

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

205

he defensively imagines his upstart appearance on the literary stage as a cause for surprise or even dismay; on the other, he represents himself as an easily startled perceiver, a highly permeable membrane. In the early “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem” (1816) he acknowledges his hubris in aspiring to “revive the dying tones of minstrelsy” (32), and speculates that Edmund Spenser himself would be “startled unaware” to hear a young nobody’s footsteps following in his own majestic path. At the same time, he professes to “start with awe at mine own strange pretence” (64).12 If you are surprised by my presumption, Keats says with mock chagrin, I am no less surprised myself. In his vocabulary of poetic ambition, however, surprise was the precisely the point, not the accidental effect. As he put it in an early verse letter to his brother George, he meant to “startle princes from easy slumbers.” Both “I Stood Tip-toe” and “Sleep and Poetry,” the vocational poems that frame his debut volume of 1817, feature pivotal scenes of startling. Here, the poet borrows the perceptual pattern that structures so many of Wordsworth’s “Poems of the Imagination”: a state of inattention or dreaminess punctuated by a sudden sound or gleam. For Wordsworth, these anecdotes were meant primarily to illustrate universal principles of mental operation; but for Keats, surprise was more explicitly an allegory for spontaneously awakened poetic ambition. In “I Stood Tip-toe,” an imagined encounter with a maiden involves a typically Keatsian mutual surprise, for in the same moment that the rustle of the maiden’s dress interrupts the poet, the poet startles the maiden amid her pastoral reverie: “How she would start and blush, thus to be caught / Playing in all her innocence of thought” (99–100).13 The wholly oblivious virgin stands in for the poet’s own maiden ambition, or, alternately, the reading public he presumes to surprise. The vaguely masturbatory scenario of being “caught / Playing” alludes to Keats’s own idea of poetic apprenticeship—of wandering in an innocent, self-delighting daydream until surprised by a vision that calls him to nobler labor. Like eighteenthcentury topographical landscape poems, “I Stood Tip-toe” catalogues endless sensory distractions, but it is freighted with the expectation that any one of them might bloom into poetic inspiration for greater narrative achievements. In “Sleep and Poetry,” Keats brings that fantasy indoors and bares the device: here, the experience that might lead to poetic creation is fed by books in Leigh Hunt’s library. Once again, the trope of pleasant startlement shapes a vocational declaration. It is only when the sunrise jolts him out of his allnight reverie (“the morning light / Surprised me even from a sleepless night” [399–400]) that the poet resolves to stop reading and begin writing. Rather than deliberately announcing his poetic ambition, Keats represents himself

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 205

1/27/15 8:01 AM

206

CHAPT ER 8

as being surprised into it. The sudden morning light functions, literally and figuratively, as a wake-up call. More pressingly, it signals the crucial transition from being a reader or consumer of art to becoming an active producer of it; being startled becomes a charge to start something. For Keats, surprise could be therapeutic in both physical and psychological senses, as in his sonnet “On the Sea.” Those who find their “eyeballs vexed and tired” and “ears . . . dinned with uproar rude” (11) are urged to seek sensory solace at the ocean: “Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth and brood / Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired” (13–14). The poem, which advocates a form of creative indolence, was itself a momentary vacation from the writing of Endymion on the Isle of Wight in 1816. Touristic visits are predicated on sights and experiences that others have enjoyed, and within that frame of predictability, Keats urges the restorative properties of surprise. No particular external event startles the brooding figure of the sonnet; rather, it is the internal phenomenon of falling out of the tidally induced reverie. To “start” is to come awake in what is understood in cognitive science as a “hypnic jerk”—the ner vous spasm of those drifting off to sleep. Though Keats knows this to be a corporeal tic, he proposes a quasi-mythical beginning: the “as if ” supplies a fantasist’s cause for the jolt, a siren song for an Odyssean poet who has strayed off course. Keats might well have learned such a fantasy coda from Wordsworth, who typically imported hints of the supernatural on the wings of metaphor. In particular, the end of Wordsworth’s “A Whirl-Blast from behind the Hill” (1807) strikingly anticipates the end of Keats’s sonnet: here, leaves pelted by hail seem to leap up “As if with pipes and music rare / Some Robin Good-fellow were there” (19–20). Later, in the “Ode to Psyche,” the metaphor of startlement by a supernatural nymph will become, so to speak, literal: the poetic trope of “as if ” is turned into an immediate vision. The emotion of surprise defines a before and after: it not only ramifies into some other affect such as fear or joy but retroactively colors what has preceded it. To start from this hypnotic state is suddenly to realize that one has fallen into it; and to feel that one has been away a long time. Into this gap in consciousness the fantasy of singing nymphs rushes in, the daydream of a split second. In effect, “brood until ye start” means “brood until you stop brooding,” and resume your life with freshened perception and purpose. And so the momentarily stymied poet returns to finish Endymion. The moment certainly left on impression on Keats’s friend Richard Woodhouse, who quotes it in a letter he wrote to John Taylor after hearing the poet read “Lamia”: “You may suppose all these Events have given K. scope for some beautiful poetry: which even in this cursory hearing of it, came every now

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 206

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

207

& then upon me, & made me ‘start, as tho’ a Sea Nymph quired.’ ”14 This is, in effect, Keats’ desideratum for poetry in miniature: the surprise of a “fine excess.” In Taylor’s appropriation of the conceit in Keats’s sonnet, the poet’s voice becomes the lulling tide, and the occasional startling phrase or rhyme jolts him out of his reverie.

c “First Minutes”: Novelty and Expectation “Who, who can write / Of these first minutes?” Keats asks in reference to Venus’s resurrection of Adonis in Endymion (3.531–32). By implication, the mute wonderment that attends the surprise of reunion is reflected in the poet’s own incapacity to describe it adequately. Keats confronts a similar challenge when he records his own first experiences, which include both the initial shock of discovery and the preparation that led to that moment. Before turning to three lyrics of first encounter, I want to consider a brief anecdote about a second encounter, and what it means to be prepared for a surprise. Keats wittily described such a situation in a letter to his brother and sister-in-law in October 1818. Out on a London walk, he runs into a female acquaintance (later identified by Reynolds as Isabella Jones) and accompanies her to Islington: “As we went along, some times through shabby, sometimes through decent Street[s] I had my guessing at work, not knowing what it would be and prepared to meet any surprise.”15 The anecdote is predicated on both recognition and repetition: the initial surprise of the chance meeting is succeeded by the new surprise of how it will turn out. By implication, Keats has already enjoyed a degree of intimacy with Jones, so the question becomes whether he will be gratified by a recapitulation or disappointed by a rebuff; in effect, he dwells in an erotic form of negative capability. In one sense, to be prepared for any surprise is not to be susceptible to surprise at all. This is the Keats who had declared that nothing startles him beyond the moment, who cultivated an attitude of unflappability toward disappointments and heart vexations. In another sense, “surprise” denotes not the unexpected or the unknown but rather the specific delight of a romantic liaison—something akin to the “adventure” sought by knights-errant. (The etymology of “adventure” denotes an experience of coming upon by accident.) “Surprise” connotes a particular feeling, but here it functions as a noun for a genre of experience—a sly euphemism for a stage of courtship. And yet it also allows for the alternate scenario that Jones will disappoint him. Both possibilities, in their own ways, would be startling yet expected:

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 207

1/27/15 8:01 AM

208

CHAPT ER 8

As I had warmed with her before and kissed her—I thought it would be living backwards not to do so again—she had better taste: she perceived how much a thing of course it was and shrunk from it—not in a prudish way but in as I say good taste—She contrived to disappoint me in a way which made me feel more pleasure than a simple kiss would do. Not to repeat the previous kiss is to go back to a time before the two had shared some intimacy.16 And yet “living backwards” also has the sense of repeating the past; and an exact repetition is of course impossible. To kiss again would fail to recover the delectable surprise of that first kiss; and in the semiotics of courtship, as Isabella well knows, the second kiss would mean something different from the first—a deepening of a flirtation and a promise of increasing sexual intimacy. It is reasonable to conclude that the poet would prefer a “fine excess” to a Singularity—more kisses rather than just one unrepeatable and irretrievable moment. In a letter preoccupied with the boundary between gentility and vulgarity, Keats describes his paramour’s chaste forbearance in terms of aesthetic discrimination—a matter of “good taste.” The paradox of “taste,” which Keats’s use of the term ruefully amplifies, is that it denotes both gustatory enjoyment and rational discrimination, both consumption and exclusion. In ethical terms, the surprise of Jones’s response might be bluntly called disappointment, but in aesthetic terms, the encounter can be redeemed as a lesson in the unrepeatability of experience, the powers of expectation, and the strange delights of the unpredictable. This, in essence, is the property of surprise in Keats’s poetry that I wish to explore: the unexpected thing that is somehow expected, an accessibility to novelty grounded in repetition or familiarity. Keats’s poems “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair” concern the occasion of first viewing, reading, or visiting something; in each case, the experience is a kind of gift to a poet of modest means and limited exposure to the world: a loan of Chapman’s translation of Homer from Charles Cowden Clarke, a visit to the Parthenon marbles in the company of Benjamin Haydon, a viewing of a lock of famous hair in the collection of Leigh Hunt.17 Each poem centers on visual perception, but with varying nuances: looking into Chapman’s Homer means pursuing an interest, with the studied casualness of an antiquarian or connoisseur; seeing the Elgin Marbles means deliberately going to see, as a tourist would speak of seeing Mont Blanc; and seeing a lock of Milton’s hair means seeing up close, with the empirical verification of firsthand contact. None of these encounters is entirely

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 208

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

209

accidental. In each, Keats is prepared for some kind of surprise, and the poems register the strain of anticipation: though all three announce their occasions in the title, they take circuitous paths to the event.18 It is one thing to insist that poetry should surprise by a fine excess but quite another to represent that experience in a lyrical anecdote. For surprise is a short, sharp emotion, but the act of spending a sleepless night reading Homer or an afternoon viewing the Elgin Marbles is a cumulative process. These experiences are not, in other words, akin to Wordsworthian moments of suddenly coming upon a field of daffodils or seeing a rainbow in the sky; the poet cannot point to a particular object or phrase as the locus of his emotion. In the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer, Keats solves that aesthetic challenge in his famous climactic trope: reading the English translation of the Odyssey for the first time is like discovering the Pacific Ocean; and the explorer’s “eagle eyes” rhyme, formally and thematically, with the “wild surmise” of his men. Given Keats’s preference for the eyes/surprise dyad, the word “surmise” looks like a deliberate substitution. In essence, it elides the first sensory impact of blue immensity in order to focus on its psychic aftermath. “Wild surprise” would have aptly rendered the first perceptual shock, but “surmise” extends the moment in time and social space. In the subtle bifurcations of his sonnet—Cortez and his men, outward gaze and exchanged glances, surprise and surmise—Keats suggests the intertwined experiences of writing and reading, discovery and rediscovery. Chapman has led Keats to this spot; and while other readers have been similarly led by this seventeenthcentury guide, none has had precisely the same thoughts and feelings about the poem. The private experience of looking into a book imparts the sensation of looking out to a vista; and the momentary surprise of discovery (a word, a phrase, or an image) ramifies into the surmise of imaginative thought.19 In the Elgin Marbles sonnet, Keats begins in the immediate aftermath of astonishment (“My spirit is too weak”) and does not directly acknowledge the source of that reaction until the eleventh line, in a delayed volta, and then only in an off hand way. When Keats finally describes the marbles, he does so in analogy to his emotional state: just as the contemplation of poetic “glories of the brain” afflicts the heart with an “undescribable feud” (9–10), so do the sculptural “wonders” in front of him cause “a most dizzy pain.” It is as if the sight of the marbles gave Keats a shock of recognition: a material, albeit fragmentary, cipher for the immaterial and as-yet unrealized ideas for his own poetry. It is perhaps no accident that this vertiginous shock distinctly echoes the language of another scene involving the progeny of a working brain. “All on a sudden,” Sin tells Satan, “miserable pain / Surprised thee, dim thine eyes, and dizzy swum / In darkness . . . ”20

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 209

1/27/15 8:01 AM

210

CHAPT ER 8

In this conflation of inner mood and external object, the traditional procedure of ekphrasis is turned inside out. Rather than giving a verbal illustration of sculpture, the poet uses sculpture as a trope to illustrate his indolence, ennui, and creative anxiety.21 Unlike the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” the Elgin Marbles sonnet is devoid of narrative curiosity; it is as if the marble fragments were works of abstract rather than figurative art, before which only feelings and personal associations can be articulated. Keats’s first impression of the marbles, then, cannot be treated as a discrete experience, or isolated as an anecdote of surprise; rather, it takes part in an ongoing meditation that precedes the visit to the gallery and stays with the poet after he has left. Keats has come to the museum ready to be overwhelmed, and the pressure of that expectation is keenly registered in his second attempt at addressing the subject, “To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” This poem gives further insight into why the poet might have delayed describing the sculptures directly. “Forgive me, Haydon, that I cannot speak / Definitively on these mighty things” (1–2), Keats begins. The fear of failing to live up to Haydon’s expectations of sublimity is thus formally enacted in the structure of the earlier sonnet. Perhaps the strangest surprise that Keats ever wrote about was the one he commemorated in the “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair.” The titular subject of the poem is unusual for Keats, for although it is a relic, it is not an artistically crafted one; it is, rather, an object of curiosity. For all of its immortal yearnings, the poem is predicated on what amounts to a parlor guessing game; and it labors mightily to turn a surprise of novelty into a shock of sublimity. In the letter to Benjamin Bailey in which he enclosed the poem, Keats explained the circumstances of its composition: “I was at Hunt’s the other day, and he surprised me with a real authenticated lock of Milton’s Hair . . . This I did at Hunt’s request—perhaps I should have done something better alone and at home.”22 Christopher Ricks has located the emotional core of the poem in a feeling of embarrassment, and he is right in two important ways: as the poet’s epistolary disclaimer suggests, there was some awkwardness in being asked to perform under Hunt’s gaze; and the invocation of Milton might bring back uneasy memories of the epic ambition on display in Endymion. And yet while the poem is tinged with social discomfort, I would argue that it is the related feeling of surprise that more accurately names the precipitating event and structuring principle of the poem, and surprise that defines the problem of writing about a lock of hair. It was a surprise that had been planned by Hunt: he set the scene of Keats’s astonishment and then commissioned an enshrinement of that moment in verse.23 Hunt had been given the lock, along with specimens from the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 210

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

211

heads of Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, by his friend Dr. William Batty, and he had already written his own poetry on his prized possession.24 In the project of making a collection, as Susan Stewart has remarked, “the more objects are similar, the more imperative it is that we make gestures to distinguish them.”25 Hunt’s request that Keats write a poem on the lock might spring from the sort of competitiveness in which members of the Hunt circle wrote sonnets on assigned topics, but it also reflects the motive of distinguishing what is, after all, only a piece of hair: to gather other people’s reactions to the literary relic and thus to generate a verbal collection out of a material one. Hunt himself had parlayed the thrill of receiving the gift of the lock into three sonnets, which he published in his 1818 collection, Foliage. The first of these extends the moment into two successive surprises—the marvel of seeing the hair and the further gratification of receiving it as a gift from Dr. Batty: “I felt my spirit leap, and look at thee / Through my changed colour with glad grateful stare” (1–2). The second sonnet, the most wellknown of the three, meditates on the fact of Hunt’s new possession; in theatrical terms, it is a soliloquy that follows a scene of donation. In its dramatic immediacy, the poem recalls Macbeth’s apostrophe to a hallucinatory dagger and Hamlet’s soliloquy on Yorick’s skull: It lies before me there, and my own breath Stirs its thin outer threads, as though beside The living head I stood in honour’d pride, Talking of lovely things that conquer death. Perhaps he press’d it once, or underneath Ran his fine fingers, when he leant, blank-eyed, And saw, in fancy, Adam and his bride With their rich locks, or his own Delphic wreath.26 (1–8) In the fantasy of standing over Milton’s shoulder, close enough to breathe on the poet’s hair, Hunt indulges in a reverie of experiential origins, of being present at the creation of Paradise Lost. To look upon this wisp of hair is to see the literally tangible inspiration that a blind poet took when he described the “rich locks” of his characters. After dwelling on the materiality of the hair, Hunt’s sonnet transmutes it, in the sestet, into an allegorical emblem. In its ability to survive the body, its tactile softness and tensile strength, the lock of hair seems to say that “Patience and Gentleness is Power” (12). Not a memorable aphorism, but one that strikingly anticipates the syntax and abstraction of another utterance attributed to an inanimate object: Keats would later make his Grecian Urn say, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” The

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 211

1/27/15 8:01 AM

212

CHAPT ER 8

gnomic statements of both lock and urn seem to float free of their contexts—not entirely explaining nor explained by their poems. Called upon to record his own first impression of the lock, Keats obligingly supplies a narrative of surprise—in effect, enacting Hunt’s dramatic script. But it is in subtle resistance to that script that he delays the relation of the anecdote, beginning instead with a long overture, as if the encounter with the lock of hair merely confirmed his plan to write a hymn to Milton: Chief of organic numbers! Old scholar of the spheres! Thy spirit never slumbers, But rolls about our ears For ever, and for ever: O, what a mad endeavour Worketh he, Who, to thy sacred and ennobled hearse, Would offer a burnt sacrifice of verse And melody. (1–10) In its jaggedly exclamatory enthusiasm, the poem gives us a glimpse of the Pindaric form that Keats would implicitly reject the following year when he came to write his springtime odes. More subtly, Keats might be making a wry critique of the idolatrous (thus anti-Miltonic) underpinnings of Hunt’s enterprise when he refers to the audacity of raising a poetic “burnt sacrifice.” Pagan burnt offerings, as Keats would surely know from his readings of Homer, included tufts of hair from the sacrificial animal. The surprise of seeing the lock of hair is a similarly flaring and self-consuming thing; and it is not certain that the heat generated from it can sustain a whole poem. It is only in the final strophe that Keats reveals the occasion of the poem, but he empties it of the social particulars of time, place and sponsor. Like Hunt, Keats turns his viewing of the hair into a narratable event. On the other hand, he wants to insist that it is merely a point on a continuum, no surprise at all: For many years my offerings must be hush’d. When I do speak, I’ll think upon this hour, Because I feel my forehead hot and flush’d— Even at the simplest vassal of thy power; A lock of bright hair — Sudden it came,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 212

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

213

And I was startled, when I caught thy name Coupled so unaware; Yet at the moment, temperate was my blood— Methought I had beheld it from the Flood. In quick succession, the lock visually comes upon the poet, without cause or donor; then the name of its bearer is aurally caught, without a speaker. Described more as a ghostly phenomenon than as an inert thing, the lock is inseparable from its emotional impact. In this way, it reflects the dual senses of the word “surprise” as both a discrete event and a feeling. As a feeling, the surprise involves conflicting responses of both heat (“flushed”) and coolness (“temperate”), both a sudden sight and long exposure. That contradiction aptly conveys the mingling of the mundane and the sublime in the lock itself; it is at once both a mere strand of hair and a holy relic. The gap between seeing the lock and hearing the name indicates Hunt’s strategic management of the surprise. The word “unaware” marks this lacuna, and in the ambiguity of its referent, it aptly describes both the hair and its beholder. As animate as it might seem, the hair is of course oblivious to its coupling with a famous name. Like the Grecian urn, the lock is a thing orphaned from its source and unaware of its origins; its only “legend,” so to speak, is a scribbled name in an envelope, and Keats would not have recognized it otherwise. In this sense, he registers the fact that the lock is after all only inert matter; like pieces of the true cross, its authenticity must be taken on faith. The poet, meanwhile, is himself “unaware” in two ways: in the broadest temporal terms, he begins his day not knowing that it will end with a surprise from Hunt’s cabinet of curiosities; and within a narrower band of time, he is at first unaware of the hair’s significance. Keats well knows that the lock is a strand of hair like any other, and yet it gives him a thrill of material connection to the past. As the poem implies, the identification of Milton’s hair—the “coupling” of thing and name—is slightly delayed, the better for Hunt to observe and savor his friend’s reaction, to recapture, if only vicariously, something of his own first feelings upon receiving the gift. Pleasure, as Keats says in his poem on “Fancy,” never is at home. Despite the compulsory nature of this writing exercise, Keats’s biographer Andrew Motion has suggested that it was an invigorating one.27 Indeed, the poem that Keats wrote the following day seems like both coda and antidote to the lines on Milton’s hair. Returning to the sonnet form he pointedly rejected in writing for Hunt, Keats composed “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again.” Here, he marks a deliberate experience rather than an unbidden shock. The language of feverish discomfort and

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 213

1/27/15 8:01 AM

214

CHAPT ER 8

burnt sacrifice is transposed into the controlled fires of voluntary rereading: “once again, the fierce dispute / Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay / Must I burn through” (5–7). This is a different model of reading from the one that drives “Chapman’s Homer,” one based not on discovery or surprise but on recognition. Though the encounter with Milton’s hair elicits and confirms the ardency of Keats’s own ambitions, it is framed by a necessary failure of recognition. Without Hunt’s instruction, it is impossible to know the original owner of the hair; and Keats’s discomfort in this controlled situation is evident in the way that he subtracts Hunt from the scene and makes the surprise an entirely solitary experience of gothic haunting. In the odes of the following year, however, the experience of surprise and recognition would be entirely Keats’s own.

c Shocks of Recognition: Psyche and Melancholy

In turning, finally, to the odes, I want to focus on two that concern the experience of being surprised by a goddess—one borrowed from mythology, the other devised by the poet. Both poems could be described as making detailed prescriptions about surprise, so it is perhaps no accident that both domesticate their deities within the architectural order of temples—even as they register the purely unbidden and aleatory nature of experience. And yet the nature of surprise significantly differs in the two poems: in the “Ode to Psyche,” it comes from without, as a sensory and erotic stimulus, but in the “Ode on Melancholy,” it comes from within. Surprise is something to be courted in “Psyche,” but in “Melancholy” it is something to be avoided, then stoically accepted, and finally embraced. I want to read both poems as imaginative accounts of managing surprise—in deliberate mental acts of preparation, anticipation, absorption, and recognition. Among the odes, the one that Keats probably wrote first in the spring of 1819 most closely resembles the earlier poetic anecdotes I have discussed. In its narrative outlines, the “Ode to Psyche” recalls the poem on Milton’s hair, for both feature strange fits of surprise and recognition, and both move to enshrine that moment in some gesture of commemoration.28 Eighteenthcentury odes had featured encounters with their titular deities, but these were usually deliberate forms of invitation and welcome, not accidental meetings. The experience of surprise, as we have seen in novelistic narrative and its permutation in Wordsworthian lyrical anecdotes, serves as epistemological and emotional verification; but Keats applies that trope to a purely willed

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 214

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

215

dream vision. Though he well knows that he cannot be the bardic originator of myth that he imagines in “I Stood Tip-toe,” he nevertheless revisits that fantasy in “Psyche”: Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see The winged Psyche with awakened eyes? I wander’d in a forest thoughtlessly, And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise, Saw two figures, couched side by side In deepest grass . . . (5–10) To faint with surprise is to lose consciousness just in the moment that the mind has been shocked into a new state of attention. What causes this reaction, however, is not entirely clear. It might be the sight of mythical figures come to life in an ordinary setting; the interruption of a state of reverie and inattention with the jolt of the extraordinary; the voyeuristic frisson of catching lovers in flagrante; the spectacle of Cupid in postcoital repose rather than on the prowl; or the glimpse of the elusive Psyche, like the finding of a rare butterfly in its natural habitat. The figure of Psyche is herself a surprise, a fluke: the “latest born” deity in “Olympus’s faded hierarchy” (24–25), too late for shrines or cults, and a less obvious choice for poetic devotion than Keats’s erstwhile favorite, Apollo. In this respect, the poet’s astonishment at coming upon Psyche might anticipate the reader’s reaction to an ode addressed to a lesserknown deity—and a cultic hymn in the fashion of the previous century’s odes. In their upstart appearances, Psyche and her poet have something in common. As in the poem on Milton’s hair, Keats makes a strenuous effort to dilate a fleeting moment of surprise through various strategies of repetition. Though the poet addresses Psyche in the first line (“O Goddess!”), and directly names her in the fifth (“the winged Psyche”), he nevertheless rehearses the triumph of finding her with her immortal lover: “The winged boy I knew; / But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove? / His Psyche true!” (21–23). Despite the previous identifications, this structure of question-and-answer enacts a virtual surprise, a grammatical recapitulation of the delight of recognition. Notably, only Psyche is recognized by name, never Cupid (save for the oblique reference to “the warm Love” in the poem’s final line). By this omission, Keats recalls Cupid’s own wish in the story not to be seen or recognized by Psyche—even as he observes the monotheistic decorum of hymns (only one deity per poem) and the awareness that the “winged boy” is a poetic cliché that goes without naming. In essence, Keats’s invented scene of surprise reenacts Psyche’s own twofold shock as narrated in Apuleius’s story: being visited by Cupid under cover

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 215

1/27/15 8:01 AM

216

CHAPT ER 8

of night and stealing an accidental (and forbidden) glance of him. The poet’s reference to his own “awakened” eyes pays homage to that episode. The adjective here functions primarily as a qualifier to suggest that the poet has had his vision open-eyed and not in a dream; but as a participle of completed action, the word also implies the cumulative effect of the surprise. It means either “awake,” or “startled into a new state of wakefulness.” In a further iteration, the final strophe of the ode recapitulates the encounter of the first through an act of odal dedication and psychic internalization.29 Here, Keats assumes the role of Psyche, and with it the feminized position of vulnerability to erotic surprise. Meanwhile, Psyche herself is a dea abscondita, present in the first strophe but absent from the last. It is tempting to say that Psyche is internalized at the end of the poem, but in fact, the roving walker in the forest had always represented the restless psyche itself, or what Keats elsewhere calls the spirit or soul. What begins as a narrative event in time is spatialized as a mental “fane,” a “rosy sanctuary,” and a chamber with one window left expectantly open: not an anecdote of surprise, then, but the hovering possibility of one. Depopulated of the ode’s principle actors, the bower becomes a nocturnal bustle of autonomous mental activities: branching, murmuring, working, breeding, winning—in short, thinking. What does the mind look like? How should its characteristic activities be represented? How to narrate the course of a thought? How to recognize the work of one’s own mind in a world of things and other minds? In “Psyche,” Keats’s response to these imaginative challenges is first to narrate an archetypal narrative of startlement and recognition. But in the final image of the poem—the “casement ope at night, / To let the warm Love in”—he symbolizes a frame of mind, a form of perception and thought rather than an object of thought. This opened window makes a perfect emblem for the Keatsian state of being prepared to meet a surprise. The “Ode on Melancholy” bears a strong resemblance to the “Ode to Psyche,” in featuring both an encounter with a goddess and a description of her temple, and in intertwining surprise and recognition. The nature of the surprise in the later poem significantly differs, however: it comes not from a startling vision but from a sudden fit of depression. Such a fit cannot really be expected or prepared for, nor can it be dispelled; it can only be embraced in a series of deliberately Epicurean gestures. The poems I have previously discussed all concern some external object or event, but “Melancholy” poses a notable exception in taking an internal burst of feeling as its subject. In this way, it resembles a sonnet that he wrote a few months earlier, in March of 1819, “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?” I first want to posit Keats’s manage-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 216

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

217

ment of an internal surprise in this poem as a prelude to the more ambitious elaboration of emotion in the “Ode on Melancholy.” In Keats’s oeuvre, “Why Did I Laugh Tonight” is notable for addressing what Wordsworth called, in one section heading of his 1807 Poems, “Moods of My Own Mind.” This phrase, in fact, lodged in Keats’s own mind, for in his verse letter to Reynolds, in which he contemplates his own mercurial feelings, he closes with an apostrophe that echoes Wordsworth: “Away ye horrid moods, / Moods of one’s mind!” (105–6). Around the same time, in a letter to Bailey in May of 1818, in which he profusely describes his own feelings of leaden depression, Keats apologizes for his self-indulgence: “my intellect must be in a degen[er]ating state—it must be for when I should be writing about god knows what I am troubling you with Moods of my own Mind or rather body—for Mind there is none.”30 Whether the mysterious laugh of the sonnet springs from the mind or from the body, the attempt to anatomize it is distinctly Wordsworthian; more specifically, the effort of analyzing a sudden, unbidden emotion resembles Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy,” which first appeared in the 1815 Poems. It is impossible to know whether Keats had Wordsworth’s poem in mind when he wrote his sonnet, but few of Keats’s poems can be described as expressing a mood of the mind in the Wordsworthian way that “Why Did I Laugh” clearly can. “Joy” is too strong a word for the feeling that Keats captures here, but the poem could be subtitled “Surprised by Mirth”: Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell: No god, no demon of severe response, Deigns to reply from heaven or from hell. Then to my human heart I turn at once— Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone; Say, wherefore did I laugh? O mortal pain! O darkness! darkness! ever must I moan, To question heaven and hell and heart in vain! Why did I laugh? I know this being’s lease— My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads: Yet could I on this very midnight cease, And the world’s gaudy ensigns see in shreds. Verse, fame, and beauty are intense indeed, But death is intenser—death is life’s high meed. Like the sudden feeling of joy in Wordsworth’s sonnet, the burst of laughter is an ordinary happening; it is remarkable only for its paucity of motivation. In both poems, the surprise springs from a ground of constant, unspoken

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 217

1/27/15 8:01 AM

218

CHAPT ER 8

sadness, and it occasions a bout of self-questioning: for Wordsworth, an inquiry about the “power” that could allow him to forget, even for a moment, that his dead daughter Catherine is not around to share his joy; for Keats, a more generalized question about how he could laugh when he is “sad and alone.” Keats does not elaborate the exact nature of his sorrow and isolation, but his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana had departed for America, and his brother Tom had died of tuberculosis in December of 1818. The latter loss might be called the poem’s blind spot, the reason why laughter would be surprising in the first place. No answer is given to the poem’s insistently repeated question, but the kind of non-answer changes through the three quatrains. In the first case, the question is asked in an utter vacuum, with neither a response nor an explanation for why the question is asked. In the second case, a reason is given for why the speaker should not have laughed: he is sad and lonely. Finally, the question of why he did laugh is dissolved in the bluff assertion of why he can laugh. The progression might be summarized as “Why? Why? Why not?” Keats’s existential bravado in the conclusion echoes the boast that he had made in his letter that nothing surprises him beyond the Moment; and it anticipates the emotional stance more fully worked out in the “Ode on Melancholy.” The “Ode on Melancholy” can be read as the affective mirror image of “Why Did I Laugh?”: its occasion of “the melancholy fit” is the inverse of the mirth described in the sonnet. If Keats had been thinking mythologically about his laughter, he might have turned from asking god or demon about its motivation to recognizing an allegorical figure (Gaiety, perhaps) as its source—as he does when he installs Melancholy in her shrine, which is spatially and temporally located amidst happiness. This invention explains not the cause of melancholy but rather its nature. A laugh is an event in time and place, and an index of an emotional state; but the melancholy described in the ode is not so much a single affective occasion as an all-pervading mood—a feeling that saturates one’s perceptions of the world, an emotional weather condition. But in its onset, melancholy is also, in Keats’s conception, sudden—and therefore narratable, just as in Wordsworth’s ballad “Strange Fits of Passion” or other lyrical moods of his own mind. In that narrative spirit, Helen Vendler has speculated that the mistress’s anger mentioned in the second stanza is the true occasion of the poem; and she has strong support for this idea in the cancelled first stanza, which depicts a doomed romantic quest launched on a Petrarchan bark. But I want to suggest the possibility that the lovers’ spat could be caused by one person’s incorrigibly gloomy mood, rather than the other way around.31 In short, I propose that the experiential beginning of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 218

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

219

the ode is as mysterious and unaccountable as the strange laughter that motivates “Why Did I Laugh?” The sudden fit that befalls the poet magnifies the traditional sense of involuntariness in the passions; as in Miltonic inflections of surprise, it is experienced as a seizure, something that happens to the individual, a force that comes from without. Instead of being surprised by Sin, the hero of Keats’s ode is surprised by Melancholy; but both Milton’s and Keats’s goddesses ultimately will be found to reside in the mind. In essence, the “Ode on Melancholy” registers both the voluntary and involuntary aspects of emotion. The string of negative commands in the first stanza suggests the voluntary component—urging the listener to avoid both literal and figurative opiates and soporifics, to shun both killing poisons and poisonous thoughts of suicide. These are all stoic recommendations about what not to do in response to a melancholy state—how to manage or cauterize the effects of an unpleasant surprise. But in the binary tradition of Milton’s “L’Allegro,” they also hint at the possibility that this emotion might be chosen or avoided, as if the totemic yew berries and owl were ways of declaring one’s commitment to dejection. Of course, melancholy cannot be magically prevented or rejected, and the second stanza flatly acknowledges this fact. It insists on the involuntariness—the surprise—of melancholy moods: But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hill in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes. (11–20) Not “if ” but “when” the fit befalls—catches you “unaware,” to borrow from Keats’s vocabulary. In a densely chiastic simile, the melancholy fit falls from heaven just as rain falls from a “weeping” cloud; and while “heaven” implies the sky in which the cloud gathers, the figurative “weeping” elaborates the human mood of melancholy. In this way, the weather is a metaphor for a sudden feeling, and vice versa. Weeping hangs in limbo between human affect and natural phenomena; and the phrase “from heaven” crystallizes the poem’s wavering between knowable origin and occult mystery, causation and causelessness. Colloquially, it means “out of nowhere”; but in the poem’s mythological context, it points proleptically to Melancholy’s

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 219

1/27/15 8:01 AM

220

CHAPT ER 8

“sovran shrine,” with its pantheon of “cloudy trophies.” In this latter sense, “from heaven” discloses something like Providence or grace. As a putative origin, then, “heaven” must be read both ways, because the poem itself works to rewrite the precipitous drop into sadness as a fortunate fall; it turns unbidden surprise into focused recognition. Like Psyche, who is both a belated deity and the mind itself, Melancholy is both a goddess and a state of the soul. In the latter, naturalized sense, Keats’s ode is of two minds about how to conceive of melancholy. On the one hand, it is a momentary, narratable event, a “fit” that comes out of the blue and surprises its victim; on the other hand, it is an emotion simultaneous with perceptions of beauty. That simultaneity is spatially represented in the architecture of Melancholy’s shrine, immured as it is within the Temple of Delight. The “Ode on Melancholy” is Keats’s shortest ode, but in that brevity it manages a tight network of association and suggestion. The “weeping cloud” is a purely metaphorical entity, but through a relative clause, it takes on a life of its own as a phenomenon to be appreciated. Keats does not explicitly affirm that the melancholy fit will pass away, or that it will somehow be compensated or balanced, but he does so imagistically: though the cloud weeps, it also “fosters” similarly downcast (“droop-headed”) flowers; and though it is a funereal “shroud,” it only temporarily hides what the poet knows to be a green hill behind. Through a localized metaphorical description of the surprising effect of the melancholy fit, the poet unfolds a series of correspondences between the human realm and natural world: the fit is not only sudden but also short-lived, salubrious, and even beautiful. The self-selecting act of recognizing Melancholy (seeing her in her shrine, being recognized in turn by her as one of the elect), is preceded and undergirded by smaller acts of Keatsian recognition. These involve knowing the names and qualities of things with a connoisseur’s relishing discernment. The highest value in the poem is, quite simply, an alert state of consciousness, and the activity of noticing goes on even in the first stanza of negative commands. For the strict purposes of those commands, it does not matter that wolfsbane is “tight-rooted,” that nightshade is a “ruby grape,” or that the sad owl is also “downy”; but in the descriptive exuberance of these epithets, their fine excess, the poet enacts what he calls the soul’s “wakeful anguish”— noticing beauty even in the midst of cataloguing poisons and opiates and contemplating oblivion. Even before he explicitly prescribes intense aesthetic contemplation in the second stanza, he does so implicitly in the first.32 In the simplest terms, the counsel to enjoy sand waves and peonies might be translated into a proverbial reminder to stop and smell the roses, except that Keats’s recommendation does not entail the act of stopping one thing to do

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 220

1/27/15 8:01 AM

“ F I N E S UD D E N N ESS ”

221

another, but rather simultaneous activities: perceiving beauty while feeling melancholy. Even amidst strife, the mistress’s anger is “rich,” her hands “soft,” her eyes “peerless”—a Renaissance blazon smuggled into a lovers’ spat. In the catalogues of both the first and second stanzas, Keats essentially urges a voracious mindfulness, or what William Hazlitt would have recognized as a form of “gusto” or “power.” The external, fantasized surprise in the “Ode to Psyche” and the internal, directly experienced surprise of the “Ode on Melancholy” both drive acts of recognition—the mental energy that runs through all the odes. This act has several symptomatic valences for Keats: it demonstrates academic or intellectual mastery; it crystallizes a moment in the undifferentiated flow of experience; it expresses affectionate familiarity; and it asserts a stoic inurement to shock or unpredictability. In the “Ode on Indolence,” the poet identifies three allegorical dream figures after chastising himself for initially failing to recognize them (“How is it, shadows, that I knew ye not?” [11]). In the “Ode to a Nightingale,” Keats fluently names the bird’s song by its various genres and historical audiences, asserting an imaginative control over the music’s reception, as both passive listener and discerning scholar. In the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” after failing to identify the urn’s depicted figures, he names the urn itself as “Attic shape” and “Cold pastoral”—a historical object, a poetic genre, a lifeless artifact. In the “Ode on Melancholy,” Keats places himself among the elect who can see the goddess through and through; conversely, in the ode “To Autumn,” he universalizes the act of recognition in the rhetorical question, “Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?” (12). Everyone can easily see and name the season and its stages, and its advent cannot be called a surprise; it is only the lulled bees who will, by implication, be truly taken unawares by the change. But there is a deeper level of recognition in the poem: everyone can see Autumn, but not everyone can appreciatively hear her (even the deity herself must be reminded that she has her own music). To stand in a denuded landscape and hear this is to be, in a phrase Keats once used in a letter, “surprised with an old Melody.”33 As Henri Bergson once remarked on the nature of sensation, “there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.”34 One of Keats’s most heroically stoic—and latest—recorded acts of recognition was the moment in which he was said by his friend Charles Brown to foresee his own death by consumption. “I know the colour of that blood,” Keats was heard to say, “it is arterial blood . . . that drop of blood is my deathwarrant.” The sight might well have made Keats start, but what lingers for

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 221

1/27/15 8:01 AM

222

CHAPT ER 8

posterity in Brown’s anecdote is the act of unflinching recognition. This is the Keats who took pride in knowing the names for things, for inventing precise Homeric epithets, for looking at the world and its heart vexations without shock. In his poetry, however, he gave nuanced accounts of surprise: mixtures of the expected and the accidental, corporeal shock and cognitive reckoning, external stimulus and internal emotion, unknowing and recognition. Nothing, as Keats insisted several years before, could startle him beyond the moment, but his lyrical articulation of such moments was quite another matter.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 222

1/27/15 8:01 AM

Epilogue

When Henry Fielding likened Lady Booby to a “Statue of Surprize,” he was invoking a conventional trope of astonishment; but his phrase inadvertently conjures an allegorical figure by the name of Surprize. Among the vast family of personified abstractions hailed by poets of the period, it is a pity that Surprize never got its own cultic hymn. As I have hoped to show, if such a deity did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it as the presiding spirit of eighteenth-century prose fiction and aesthetic discourse. In fact, it would take a nineteenth-century American writer to give Surprize that apotheosis: in his essay on “Experience,” Ralph Waldo Emerson hails it as one of the “lords of life,” remarking that “Life is a series of surprises, and would not be worth keeping, if it were not.”1 Emerson here harks back to Joseph Addison’s valorization of surprise as an aesthetic good in itself, but he is also advancing a Transcendentalist version of Protestant grace: a serendipitous access to divinity, but one available to all rather than to an elect and mysterious few. In effect, surprise provides an antidote to habit and inattention, which Emerson describes as a kind of somnambulism. In concluding, I would like briefly to suggest a few ways in which we might think about later incarnations of Surprize. Notably, it becomes a less conspicuous verbal presence in novels after Jane Austen; but this is not to say that it ceases to be an important focus of representation or that novelists lose interest in surprising the reader. Rather, the frequent, reflexive use of the 223

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 223

1/27/15 8:01 AM

224

EPILOGUE

word gives way to new ways of representing it as a cognitive and corporeal event. Permutations of scenes that I have examined in earlier chapters can be recognized in later fiction. Consider the famous opening scene of Great Expectations (1861), in which Pip is seized in a churchyard by an escaped convict. Rather than directly stating this fact, Pip-as-narrator depicts his childhood self as lost in a silent reverie on his parents’ tombstones until rudely interrupted by a command: “ ‘Hold your noise!’ cried a terrible voice.”2 From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is easy to overlook what is so striking about this moment: that Charles Dickens inserts this interruption without speech prefix or narrative preparation—so that the aural shock experienced by Pip is enacted by the semantic jolt delivered to the reader. In effect, Dickens builds on Laurence Sterne’s innovation in Tristram Shandy, which begins with a philosophical reflection on causality, then switches abruptly to Mrs. Shandy’s question about clock-winding. In a variation on that shift, Dickens represents what goes on inside and suddenly outside of Pip’s head. The quoted speech of Magwich—the first spoken words in the novel—breaks into Pip’s interior narration without warning, in an abrupt way that draws on the shock effects of gothic fiction and anticipates the techniques of cinema, with its capacities of sound editing and visual montage. “In a film,” Walter Benjamin once observed, “perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle.”3 Dickens’s proto-cinematic cutting between silent meditation and audible speech, and between the visual space of a tombstone and the sudden physical presence of a stranger’s body, anticipates this formal principle. The command to “hold your noise” is especially apt, for it is itself a noisy intrusion; and in a novel concerned with the acquisition of language and cultural fluency, it reduces human expression to raw, preverbal sound. Magwich’s command is both preemptive and descriptive: it warns Pip not to make any sound that would give the escapee away, and it startlingly reminds the reader that the young boy, lost in thought, has just begun to cry. Surprise, here and elsewhere, defines a before and after: it jolts one out of a prior state of absorption and makes one acutely aware of that state. After having the epiphany of locating himself in a graveyard as a descendant of its dead inmates, Pip is shocked into a new awareness—of being at the mercy of a stranger in an otherwise isolated space. As a bildungsroman, Great Expectations has a particular interest in the experience of surprise as register of its hero’s physical vulnerability and mental susceptibility to fear; but it also frames the raw immediacy of the boy’s moments of surprise with the adult narrator’s mature sensibility. In the second chapter of the novel, for example, the narrator describes a haunting repeti-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 224

1/27/15 8:01 AM

E P I LO G UE

225

tion of the opening scene, when he thinks he hears a voice outside the house: “If ever anybody’s hair stood on end with terror, mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody’s ever did?” (13). Perhaps, indeed: the disclaimer serves as witty commentary on both the exaggeration of a familiar trope and the unreliability of memory. The narrator does not deny the authenticity of the psychic jolt to his childhood self; rather, he registers an inexact fit between the original shock and the language that comes readily at hand to describe it. On the larger scale of literary history, Dickens both pays homage to the affective lexicon of the eighteenth century and marks a critical distance from it. Dickens had an abiding fondness for eighteenth-century tropes of astonishment and owed an obvious stylistic debt to Fielding and Sterne. To mention only a few salient instances, I would note the way that Dickens revisits the metaphor of the “statue of surprise,” literalizing the figure of deathly petrifaction. In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the stone figures that guard Monsieur the Marquis’s estate are likened to victims of the Medusa, and when the Marquis is murdered, his face is said to join that gallery: “It was like a fine mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified.”4 In Bleak House (1853), the classical fresco on the ceiling of Tulkinghorn’s office serves a similarly symbolic purpose: after the lawyer is murdered there, the figure of the “pointing Roman” seems to take on new significance, a generalized allegorical figure turned to specifically theatrical purposes. His frozen attitude both reflects and gestures toward the stunned reaction of the human visitors who come upon the body: “It happens surely, that every one who comes into the darkened room and looks on these things, looks up at the Roman, and that he is invested in all eyes with mystery and awe, as if he were paralyzed dumb witness.”5 Here and in A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s icons of surprise tantalizingly hover at a boundary between life and death—either about to speak or just silenced, bearing witness or holding secrets. In the same year that Bleak House was published, a story with a similarly absurdist perspective on the law appeared on the other side of the Atlantic. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” features one of the most memorable scenes of surprise in American literature: a law clerk refuses to perform a routine task for his employer. Bartleby’s immortal refusal, “I prefer not to,” breathes the comic spirit of Fielding: the sudden inversion of a customary relationship between master and servant harks back to Joseph Andrews’s rebuff of his employer’s sexual advances; and, like Joseph’s protestation of “virtue,” Bartleby’s coolly enunciated “prefer” brings the narrative to a halt. The rest of Melville’s tale amounts to the narrator’s attempt to recover equilibrium from that shock, and to understand the silence at the heart of

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 225

1/27/15 8:01 AM

226

EPILOGUE

his employee’s refusal. Bartleby’s behavior represents a seemingly trivial subversion of expectations played out in an unremarkable Wall Street office, but Melville enlarges upon the moment with the dilation that we have seen in the work of Fielding and Sterne. In essence, a seemingly mundane surprise— not an Aristotelian reversal but a thoroughly novelistic incident—becomes an aperture into life’s darker passages. Like Fielding, Melville’s narrator anatomizes the moment in slow-motion detail: inviting the reader to “imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation”; describing a long moment of “perfect silence” and “stunned faculties”; echoing the refusal in an incredulous double take; and likening his impassive clerk, finally, to a statue (“I should have as soon thought of turning my pale plasterof-Paris bust of Cicero out of doors”). We might expect the narrator to liken himself to the plaster bust, but Bartleby’s resemblance to it tells us something about the strange immobility that unnerves his employer, and about the deathly aura that haunts the story. Ultimately, the metaphor anticipates the final encounter between the two characters, when the narrator visits Bartleby in the prison yard of Manhattan’s Tombs and touches his dead hand, with a “tingling shiver” of surprise and belated recognition. Though the incident at the center of Melville’s tale contains all the lineaments of Fieldingesque “surprize,” it also departs from that comic heritage, with a mixture of old-style gothic and urban uncanny. It does not uncover an affectation, or make a morally edifying point, or provoke easy laughter; and though Bartleby might bear some resemblance to the picaresque vagrants of the past, he tells no interpolated story and facilitates no revelation in anyone else’s. For these reasons, a term more closely associated with modernity might better describe the incident and its unsettling aftereffects: shock. Indeed, shock might be called a quintessentially modern inflection of surprise, one that has had ramifications in several domains—the Freudian psychology of trauma, the modernist aesthetics of epiphany, the poetics of defamiliarization, and surrealist experiments in juxtaposition and absurdity. It is beyond the scope of this book to do justice to these developments, but I would begin by noting that “shock,” like “surprise” in the eighteenth century, encompasses a range of different experiences and emotional intensities, variously denoting corporeal injury and psychic disturbance. It is not a word in wide use in the literature I have previously considered; and while it does not exactly replace “surprise” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it does register some distance from its eighteenth-century precursor. In part, it takes up the sense of violence and stupefaction contained in the older sense of “surprise,” but it occupies a different network of meanings,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 226

1/27/15 8:01 AM

E P I LO G UE

227

or what Roland Greene has called a “conceptual envelope.”6 The rise of shock as a concept can thus be seen as reflecting a dilution in the intensity of surprise—its migration into the realm of the benign or pleasing. (The modern bourgeois birthday is celebrated with a surprise party, not a shock party, which would connote an entirely different kind of spectacle.) In purely poetic terms, the curt sharpness of the Anglo-Saxon monosyllable imparts some of the physical force that the Latinate iamb of “surprise” once did. It suggests a direct assault on the sensorium that bypasses higher rationality, it draws on the clinical frisson of trauma, and it often connotes an attack on standards of morality or propriety, as in the catchphrase attributed to Charles Baudelaire, il faut épater le bourgeois. For these reasons, it is an indispensable concept in modern narratives of art history and of the avant garde more broadly—a series of provocative events that involve what Robert Hughes has called “the shock of the new.”7 Shock is also inescapably tied to the Freudian concept articulated in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). In Freud’s quasi-biological model, consciousness itself constitutes the body’s defense against external shocks, and “traumatic neurosis” results from breaches in that psychic barrier—“excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield.”8 The causation of trauma “seems to rest upon the factor of surprise, of fright”— surprise because the subject is in a state of unpreparedness and fright because of the annealing intensity of that emotion (10). Freud was writing in the wake of the Great War and its proliferation of shell-shock cases, so the old military meaning of “surprise” as form of assault has special poignancy. In strategic terms, a surprise attack is a military plan, but at the level of individual experience, any assault, any mortar explosion, comes as a surprise; and the putative state of unpreparedness or vulnerability is articulated only in the aftermath. This is the essence of trauma in Freud’s definition: an event that can be only belatedly recovered (and recovered from), not consciously reckoned with in the moment. In modernist aesthetics, shock has been signally associated with inspiration and receptivity, often with a Freudian inflection. It is a governing motif, for example, in Virginia Woolf ’s “A Sketch of the Past” (1939): here, she suggests that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it.”9 For Woolf, such episodes are “moments of being,” eruptions of consciousness against a ground of “non-being,” which she likens to an insulating (and muffling) layer of cotton wool (71). Woolf ’s notion of “shock” implies not the disclosure of significance but a random collision; not an inflow of meaning but a momentary pause or suspension; not a visionary

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 227

1/27/15 8:01 AM

228

EPILOGUE

gift but a perceptual fragment to be stored for later use. Her choice of the word “shock” rather than “surprise,” indicates, I think, an affinity to Freud’s model of belated recovery, and an emphasis on the random or bewildering— elements that the latter word had begun to lose as it became more associated with discovery or delight. Rather than representing a character’s astonishment or surprising the reader, the modern novel can, as Woolf suggests, arise from the author’s own experience of shock. Henry James and Joseph Conrad both wrote novels about radical politics and urban terrorism in London, but what is more striking about the parallel is that both authors later added prefaces that explained their stories as originating in circumstances of accident and surprise. In both cases, vestigial traces of the violent events related in the novels infect the perceptual grammar of the authors’ accounts of creation. Explaining the genesis of The Princess Casamassima (1886) in the New York edition of 1909, James describes himself as a flâneur akin to his hero Hyacinth Robinson, a walker receptive to endless “impressions”: “Possible stories, presentable figures, rise from the thick jungle as the observer moves, fluttering up like startled game, and before he knows it indeed he has fairly to guard himself against the brush of importunate wings.”10 James’s trope combines artistic deliberation with aleatory surprise: the intentional act of hunting for material is ironized as the reflexive act of protecting against urban overstimulation; and whatever quarry the artist thinks he seeks will be unpredictably changed in the act of finding it. In this urban thicket, the figure of James’s protagonist—part flora (hyacinth), part fauna (robin)—suddenly appears: “I arrived so at the history of little Hyacinth Robinson—he sprang up for me out of the London pavement” (34). In this emphasis on accidental discovery rather than deliberate preparation, James wittily declares an affinity to his own character as aimless city walker accessible to new experiences. Conrad refers to his own urban promenades in recalling the origins of The Secret Agent (1909), but in more pointed and less lighthearted terms of violence and trauma. The idea for the novel, he says, “came to me in the shape of a few words uttered by a friend in a casual conversation about anarchists or rather anarchist activities.”11 The words, concerning an attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory that literally backfired, are these: “Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards” (xxxiv). “These were the only words that passed between us,” Conrad recalls, “for extreme surprise at this unexpected piece of information kept me dumb for a moment” (xxxiv). This state of dumb astonishment is aptly reflected in the fact that Conrad does not pursue the topic with his friend, nor does he say what he thought at the time—for indeed, the point is that he does not

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 228

1/27/15 8:01 AM

E P I LO G UE

229

think anything, he only feels something. In retrospect, the surprise amounts to the shock of a narrative in embryo—a distantly remembered news item swelling into human presence. More than James, Conrad represents the origin of his story as microtrauma, a brief sentence that leaves an “illuminating impression” in the mind, a verbal residue of the bomb’s original shock wave (xxxv). As an “illuminating” experience, it is more a blinding flash than something that sheds explanatory light on something else. And like James, Conrad represents himself as vulnerable to a kind of ambush by urban stimuli: “I had to fight hard to keep at arms-length the memories of my solitary and nocturnal walks all over London in my early days” (xxxvii). Surely these memories are more creatively fecund than destructive, but it suits Conrad’s self-portrait to suggest a vulnerability to distraction and overstimulation. In effect, the climactic violence in both James’s and Conrad’s novels insinuates itself into each author’s preface: the assassination plot is reflected in James’s trope of hunting, and the accidental bomb blast leaves a trace on Conrad’s cognitive vocabulary of illumination and occluded perception. Echoing William Wordsworth’s account of poetic creation, James’s and Conrad’s creation stories are anecdotes of accidental perceptions and seemingly ordinary occurrences; they would have come to nothing without the particular sensibility of the artist—his accessibility to shock. What differentiates these novelists from Wordsworth is that their gestational experiences are not personal in the Romantic way; they arise from no sentimental attachment, sympathetic engagement, or mood of the mind. Rather, they are at once remote and uncomfortably close: chance glimpses and old incidents involving strangers that take the author by surprise. One modern form of surprise, then, takes up residence in the city; and James’s and Conrad’s anecdotes have an obvious artistic lineage in the poetics of Baudelaire. Walter Benjamin famously described the Baudelairean flâneur as “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness” and remarked that the poet “placed the shock experience at the very center of his artistic work.”12 At the same time, Benjamin also warned that with repeated exposure, in life and in art, any shock effect will wane in potency and dissolve into the undifferentiated mass of the ordinary; in this observation, he echoes Edmund Burke’s observation about the potential for attenuation in the sublime.13 As to the matter of overexposure and habituation, it is possible that the notion of shock in urban experience has itself become an overused (and inaccurate) commonplace. In an important dissenting argument, Franco Moretti has asked “whether the category of the traumatic and exceptional event is really the most appropriate for the analysis of the experience of urban life.”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 229

1/27/15 8:01 AM

230

EPILOGUE

To the contrary, he suggests that “city life mitigates extremes and extends the range of intermediate possibilities” (116).14 Moretti makes this point through the example of Honoré de Balzac’s novels, which he argues are not about shock (which “presupposes an irredeemable fracture in the course of experience”) but suspense and surprise: the possibility of sudden turns and counterturns of fortune, predicated on the clock-regulated rhythms of city life, with its business schedules, timetables, and mercantile openings and closings (118). Notably, Moretti rejects the term “shock” in favor of the classic narratological terms of suspense and surprise—words that hark back to the poetics of early English novels. While he does not dispute that Baudelaire’s poetry confronts us with a series of shocks (or what he more precisely identifies as “particularly audacious rhetoric figures”), he insists that the modern realist novel deals more in the temporally based, cognitive dynamics of expectation rather than the merely random and concussive. This qualification helps us to see more clearly that Baudelaire’s form of shock does not primarily involve a rational engagement with city life, but rather a purely sensory and physical one: the experience of being a moving particle within a mass, a face among faces in the crowd. Moretti’s distinction, in other words, turns on the pivotal issues I have tracked throughout this book: the dual senses of surprise as physical assault and cognitive event, and the perennial suspicion about the emptiness or irredeemability of “mere” surprise. I would like to conclude this brief epilogue with a twentieth-century American classic that mingles older and newer forms of novelistic surprise. Its opening scene exemplifies that mixture: it is the kind of situation that might be found in an Austenian assembly room (a man regarding a woman from a distance) and the sort of random event associated with urban modernity (an odd coincidence in a railway station). It is notable not least for its tantalizing use of the word itself in the very first sentence: “Selden paused in surprise.”15 Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) begins with an unexpected encounter between the heroine, Lily Bart, and an acquaintance, Lawrence Selden. The site of the chance meeting, New York’s Grand Central Station, functions as what Mikhail Bakhtin called a chronotope, a spatiotemporal juncture at which characters meet and the plot is advanced.16 This is precisely the kind of surprise articulated by Moretti, an accidental meeting that takes place in the regularizing matrix of city life—train schedules, summer rituals of travel, rhythms of work and recreation. In the course of the novel, Lily will be the unfortunate object of traditionally masculine forms of surprise, but what is so striking about the opening encounter is that she and her male observer each have the choice

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 230

1/27/15 8:01 AM

E P I LO G UE

231

either to “surprise” or to avoid the other. Selden could turn away, and he well knows that if Lily did not wish to be seen in this odd context, “she would contrive to elude him” (1). For Selden, an unexpected glimpse is followed by a pause of thought, and then a second, theatrical version of surprise, when Lily exclaims, “Mr. Selden—what good luck!” The interjection will be echoed a few pages later when Selden and Lily meet her potential suitor Rosendale on the street. Here, it is Rosendale’s turn to perform surprise: “Miss Bart? Well—of all people! This is luck!” (17). The deliberate repetition seems like Wharton’s subtle nod to the engineered coincidences of her plot, and perhaps even a suggestion that such coincidences in a dense city should not be so surprising; and in a novel that crucially turns on the intertwined vagaries of gambling and stock market speculation, “luck” becomes a verbal leitmotif. In one of the most crushing revelations in the novel, the lucky stock dividends that have been showered on Lily turn out to have been shammed by Gus Trenor in the expectation that she will repay them with sex. Wharton’s novel does not believe in surprise as serendipity or grace. The opening scene is one of many moments when Lily is depicted as being theatrically deliberate and acutely conscious of her effect on observers; it prefigures the episode in which she takes part in a tableau vivant, an elaborate spectacle that she herself helps to orchestrate. With that later event in perspective, Selden’s first glimpse of the heroine seems symbolically charged: “Selden paused in surprise. In the afternoon rush of the Grand Central Station his eyes had been refreshed by the sight of Lily Bart.” These two sentences bear the unmistakable imprint of gothic fiction and eighteenth-century aesthetic ideas. The perceptual delay here is unthinkable without the earlier model of gothic narration, in which a character’s emotional reaction precedes the revelation of the source. The notion of a refreshing visual surprise, meanwhile, harks back to Addison’s pleasures of the imagination. Indeed, the sense that Lily is like a painting is accentuated when Selden takes a connoisseur’s secret pleasure in “the modelling of her little ear, the crisp upward wave of her hair” and wonders, “was it ever so slightly brightened by art?” [6]). This is the pull that Lily’s beauty exerts; and yet she is not just a pleasing vision but a puzzling enigma. As in eighteenth-century episodes I have discussed in previous chapters, the pause of surprise offers an aperture into a character’s subjectivity: in this case, it is an occasion for Selden’s speculation about why Lily Bart would be here on this day at this particular hour. The sequence of Selden’s surprise and surmise has the additional function of modeling the reader’s response, for his arresting glimpse is also the reader’s, and the larger implications of his basic question—what is she doing here?—will take the rest of the novel to elaborate.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 231

1/27/15 8:01 AM

232

EPILOGUE

In Wharton’s larger design, the startled pause at the beginning of the novel will find its tragic double at the end, when Selden arrives, too late, to find that Lily has died of an overdose of chloral. Elements of the first scene— silence, aesthetic absorption, temporal dilation—are recapitulated in the final sentence, now framed by an ultimate surprise: “He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees, and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear” (445). This is entirely in keeping with the attitude of remote and sublimated veneration by which Selden relates to Lily Bart. In this context, the very first unit of action associated with him (“paused in surprise”) culminates in the last (“knelt by the bed”). By reading this novel and others through the critical categories I have established in previous chapters, we can recognize the persistence and modulations of surprise: its intertwinement of aesthetic pleasure and violent disturbance, its physical and cognitive nature, its gendered dynamic, its theatricality, its mixture of accident and design. With respect to the history of the novel, the forms of shock that bookend Wharton’s narrative—the chance encounter and Lily’s death—have precedents in earlier episodes of sexually charged surprise and female ruin. But at the turn of the century and in the line of her French realist predecessors, Wharton animates these scenes with the frisson of modernity and the breaking of taboo: the urban settings of a crowded railway station and a shabby rooming house, the encounters between men and women in private rooms, the overdose of chloral. From one perspective, the “shock” of the new is truly surprising; from another, it can strike us with uncanny familiarity—its own strange species of surprise.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 232

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c Notes

Introduction

1. The language of Amazon’s teaser actually implies the opposite of surprise, in its inadvertent allusion to the response that people give when presented with a trivial choice. Do you want the medium or the large? Page 2 or page 200? “I don’t know,” the sarcastic rejoinder goes, “surprise me.” 2. The term aesthetics was coined by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735 and did not gain currency until much later, so in discussing early writings such as Joseph Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” I am referring to aesthetic discourse avant la lettre. 3. J. Paul Hunter, “Novels and ‘The Novel’: The Poetics of Embarrassment,” Modern Philology 85, no. 4 (May 1988), 483 n.7. As Michael McKeon has shown in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987, rpt. 2002), this surfeit of “surprising adventures” became a foil for scientific inquiry. For instance, Thomas Sprat asserted the veracity of the Royal Society’s 1667 proceedings in contrast with the fabulism of romance, “which, by multiplying varieties of extraordinary Events, and surprizing circumstances,” makes Nature seem “dull, and tasteless” (68). 4. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All citations of Shakespeare’s plays refer to this edition. 5. Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language: in which the words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers, 4th ed., 2 vols. (Dublin, 1775), 2. 6. See Silvan Tompkins, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107. 7. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 50. 8. Jerome Kagan, What Is Emotion? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 76. 9. See Barbara Kryk-Kastovsky, “Surprise, Surprise: The Iconicity-Conventionality Scale of Emotions,” in The Language of Emotions, ed. Susanne Niemeier and Rene Dirven (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1997), 156. 10. The “surprise group” of emotional terms, Osmond notes in “The Prepositions We Use in the Construal of Emotion” (in Niemeier and Dirven, The Language of Emotions), “refer only to the experience at the moment of discovery of some situation” (114). 11. For recent cognitive literary studies of sympathetic identification, see Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

233

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 233

1/27/15 8:01 AM

234

NOT ES TO PAGES 6 –9

University Press, 2010); and Lisa Zunshine, Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006). 12. For a study of the ways that neuroscience can help us understand aesthetic response to sites of beauty in the Sister Arts, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Using studies aided by fMRI technology, Starr has shown that exposure to various objects of aesthetic perception activate certain brain assemblies and neural regions in similar ways. 13. See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 24. Spacks does not claim that boredom was invented in the eighteenth century but asserts that “If new feelings arguably never manifest themselves, new concepts unequivocally do” (27). More recently, Sianne Ngai (Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012]) has posited “the interesting” as one of three salient categories of postmodern aesthetic experience. Regarding its origins in eighteenthcentury discourse, Ngai remarks that it is “the only aesthetic category in our repertoire invented expressly by and for literary critics” (15). 14. Barbara Benedict (Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001]) focuses on precisely this inverse of (and antidote to) boredom. Whereas boredom can be seen as the jading effect of surfeit or luxury, curiosity in Benedict’s definition is the transgressive mark of social ambition, the reflection of material or spiritual restlessness (22–23). 15. See G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 16. When Shelley does invoke surprise at a pivotal moment in Prometheus Unbound, it is conspicuous for its denotation of mildness and brevity. The Spirit of the Earth describes the millennial transformation of the wicked into the good as a gently purgative unmasking: “and all / Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise / And greetings of delighted wonder, all / Went to their sleep again” (3.4.70–73). See Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald Reiman (New York: Norton, 2002). Shelley’s phrasing, exemplary of what Harold Bloom has called his “urbane” style, pointedly revises the notion of apocalypse: not divine judgment but rather a psychic renovation in the mode of eighteenth-century aesthetic delight. 17. Byron [The Oxford Authors], ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 150. 18. Ian Watt posits the novel as arising from a dialectic between new Realism and old Romance—the probable and the improbable, the natural and the supernatural. See Watt’s chapter, “Realism and the Novel Form,” in The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 9–34. In a revision of Watt’s paradigm, Lennard Davis (Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996]) describes the novel as an evolving discursive practice rather than a stable entity. 19. In The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), Geoffrey Sill argues that authors such as Defoe and Richardson sought to “cure” or otherwise discipline the passions through the education of their characters. In a similar vein, Jon Mee in Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) studies eighteenth-century anxieties about the unruly effects of religious enthusiasm and articulates the emerging

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 234

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 9 – 1 7

235

notion of literature as “a sphere in which the emotions could be regulated into a natural harmony” (53). 20. See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2, 18. Echoing Pinch’s emphasis on the intersubjective nature of emotion, Julie Ellison (Cato’s Tears and the Making of AngloAmerican Emotion [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]) has argued against the notion that the popularity of the literature of sensibility was a “feminizing” trend, locating it in a longer tradition of masculine tenderness and sentiment (12). 21. This formula, McKeon (Origins of the English Novel) notes, “amounts to the insistence that the very appearance of the incredible itself has a status of a claim to historicity” (47). 22. See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 23. Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Hamilton observes that two different categories of accident were often conflated in Enlightenment conceptions of the self: the unexpected event and, in Aristotelian terms, the mutable or nonessential quality of a thing. 24. For a consideration of early modern ideas of accident, see Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Witmore has argued that sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury discourses of the accidental arose from three matrices: the Calvinist theology of God’s providential intervention in the world; the cultural centrality of the stage as a representation of human experience; and the rise of Baconian scientific inquiry (154–55). 25. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 154. 26. McKeon notes that mediation—which Warner and Clifford Siskin have proposed as a key word in defining the Enlightenment—etymologically signifies both connection or communication and intervention or division. That duality becomes important to McKeon’s argument about the homology between scientific experiment and the novelistic representation of experience: both involve observations of behavior under “controlled” situations, and both generalize from the data given by those observations. See McKeon, “Mediation as Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 385. 27. John Ellis, The Surprize: Or, The Gentleman Turn’d Apothecary. A tale written originally in French prose; afterwards translated into Latin; and from thence now versified in Hudisbrastics (London, 1739). Accessed on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Chapter 1: From Aristotle to Emotion Theory

1. David Konstan, The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), xii, 27–28. 2. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2183.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 235

1/27/15 8:01 AM

236

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 7 –1 9

3. “This sense of wonder,” Socrates says, “is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.” See “Theatetus,” trans. F.M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 860. In his commentary on the dialogue in Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Philip Fisher asserts that “wonder has its elemental existence in surprise”—a feeling induced more typically by the visual than by other forms of perception (19). 4. The ground for Aristotle’s reevaluation of the emotions was prepared in Plato’s Academy, where, as W.W. Fortenbaugh notes in Aristotle on Emotion (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975), participants focused on the cognitive properties of emotion. Arisotelian emotion is “intelligent behavior open to reasoned persuasion” (17). 5. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 44. Cave has argued that “ ‘surprise’ is a tame and in many ways misleading equivalent,” but in the fullness of its etymology and historical inflections, the word does approximate Aristotle’s idea. 6. In Book 16 of the Poetics, Aristotle makes the distinction between discoveries made through the artifice of signs or tokens and those “arising from the incidents themselves.” See The Poetics, trans. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, 2328. 7. John Dryden, “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” (Preface to Troilus and Criseyde), in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 13, ed. Maximilian E. Novak (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 237. For a history of the English reception of Aristotle’s Poetics see Marvin Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930). The first Latin translation published in England appeared in 1623, and the first English translations appeared in the late eighteenth century—Henry James Pye’s in 1788 and Thomas Twining’s in 1789. 8. See François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 52. Hitchcock’s “public” is of course powerless to do anything, and the promotion of suspense is a reminder of that cinematic enthrallment: it is not that simple shock is too manipulative by Hitchcock’s standards, it is that it is not manipulative enough. 9. Meir Sternberg, “Telling in Time (II): Chronology, Teleology, Narrativity,” Poetics Today 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), 507. 10. In Sternberg’s summary, “Aristotle would thus keep surprise in a role that is localized (for pinpointed impact), mimeticized (into fortune-reversing act), contributory (to pity-and-fear), and otherwise dependent (on well-formedness), instead of casting it as a universal narrative force in its own right” (ibid., 520). 11. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 118. 12. See Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 13. In The Beautiful, Novel and Strange (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Ronald Paulson has characterized the eighteenth-century discourse of aesthetics as “an antitheology, essentially deist” (x). In Shaftesbury’s philosophy, God is the architect of a divine order that encompasses both the universe and the individual mind, and the ideal of beauty replaces the notion of the immanence of deity (3).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 236

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 9 – 2 3

237

14. See Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 13, 18. 15. René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, trans. Stephen Voss (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1989), 56 (Art. 70). Descartes’s treatise is divided into articles; references to this work are cited by page number within the modern translation and by article number. 16. See Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 90, 101. James argues that the Cartesian dualism of body and soul has been overstated and that the philosopher actually asserts “the thoroughgoing interconnection” between them (107). Descartes’s main contribution to the discourse of the passions is to posit them as “an integral part of our thinking” (107). 17. Charles Taylor argues in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) that separation of mind from body in Cartesian, Lockean, and Calvinist accounts of the mind radically departs from Renaissance theories of the self. Gail Kern Paster in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) emphasizes the fundamentally embodied nature of emotion in Renaissance thought, arguing that “there was no way conceptually or discursively to separate the psychological from the physiological” (12); but Descartes departed from that habit of thought in collapsing the tripartite division of the soul (rational, vegetative, animal) into one unitary soul (246). 18. See Charles Le Brun, A Method to Learn and Design the Passions (1734), trans. John Williams (Los Angeles: Clark Memorial Library, 1980). Originally published as Conference de M. Le Brun sur l’expression générale et particulière (Paris, 1698). For a discussion of Le Brun’s influence on British writers and painters see Alan T. McKenzie, Certain, Lively Episodes: The Articulation of Passion in Eighteenth-Century Prose (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 6–8. 19. As Joseph Roach has shown in The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), Le Brun’s facial codification of the passions exerted a strong influence on eighteenth-century thinking about drama (72). In his Essay on the Art of Acting (1749), Aaron Hill followed the example of Descartes and Le Brun in formulating the facial expressions and bodily attitudes of six primary passions, which he called “capital dramatics.” As with Le Brun, these gestures were not merely surface appearances but manifestations of the soul: before striking a pose, the actor should fix its motivating passion in mind, as if really experiencing it. 20. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1971), 86. Under Dennis’s premise, “when the Imagination is so inflam’d as to render the Soul utterly incapable of reflecting there is no difference between the Images and the things themselves, as we see for example by Men in Raging Feavours” (92–93). 21. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), No. 412 (23 June 1712). 22. See Paulson, Beautiful, Novel and Strange, 53, 49. 23. See the Ars Poetica in Horace, Satires, Epistles, Art of Poetry, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926): “Aut prodesse volunt

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 237

1/27/15 8:01 AM

238

NOT ES TO PAGES 2 3 –2 9

aut delectare poetae / aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. [Poetry wants to instruct or to delight, / Or, even better, to delight and instruct at once.]” Sir Philip Sidney echoes the point in the Defence of Poesy (1595) when he claims that the end of poetry is “to teach and delight.” 24. G. Gabrielle Starr elaborates on this premise of aesthetic reception as dynamic process in Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). In her argument, “the complex thoughts, sensations, actions, and feelings that make up aesthetic experience are best understood as events” (17). 25. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (Menston, UK: Scolar Press, 1971), 215–16. 26. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 177. 27. Qtd. in ibid., 177. 28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), I.i.10, 169. 29. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, No. 78 (“The Power of Novelty”), ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 2:46. 30. Johnson, Rambler, 71, 2:5. 31. Johnson, Rambler, 137, 2:360. 32. Samuel Johnson, “Cowley,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905). 33. Fisher (Wonder, the Rainbow) describes the “decay of wonder” as an “aesthetic paradox—that wonder depends on first sight and first experience and yet by the time that we are old enough to have the experience of wonder we may have already used up and dulled by repetition all of the most significant potential experiences of the truly wonderful” (19). 34. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 33. 35. See Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 36. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, facs. ed. of 1759 (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 28. 37. Adam Smith, “The History of Astronomy” (1795), in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 3. 38. Hugh Blair, “Lecture X,” in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding, 2 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), 1:197. 39. Blair, “Lecture XIV,” in Lectures on Rhetoric, 1:283. For a skeptical view of Smith’s and Blair’s efforts in clarifying vocabularies of the emotions see Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia,Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). Pfau sees such semantic “policing” as “an increasingly desperate attempt to remedy the inherent ambivalence and waywardness of emotions” (5). 40. Marshall first addressed the topic in The Figure of the Theater: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); see esp. chap. 7 on Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. In The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), he observes a blurred boundary be-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 238

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 3 0 – 3 3

239

tween art and life in the matter of sympathy (27). Marshall’s title is taken from the subtitle of a play by Marivaux, “Les effets surprenants de la sympathie” (1713). Marivaux’s word “surprenants” likely connoted the delightful and interesting, but Marshall uses it with a different inflection: the play implicitly suggests that “the art of viewing someone as spectacle, and the situation of being turned into a spectacle, may have surprising and undesired effects” (49). 41. For a consideration of the ways that reception theory and histories of reading might be complemented by cognitive science see Andrew Elfenbein, “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading,” PMLA 121, no. 2 (March 2006), 484–502. 42. Philosophical Enquiry, 25. 43. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, ed. R.P.C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 25. 44. To Aaron Hill, 12 July 1749, in Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 171. The first two volumes of Clarissa had been published in December 1747, the next two in April 1748, and the final three in December 1748. In this letter Richardson admits that he has avoided reading Tom Jones and knows it only by reputation. 45. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25. 46. See Brooks’s essay, “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well-Wrought Urn (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1947). 47. J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5. The paradox, acknowledged by Miller, is that by identifying and theorizing patterns of repetition the critic risks promoting the kind of familiarity that he poses as a problem in aesthetic pleasure. 48. The critical vocabulary of surprise persists in the scholarly movement that is usually seen as a reaction against New Criticism. New Historicist scholars of the early modern period often address the cultural affect of wonder and various phenomena described as wonders; and the language of surprise and wonderment—of bafflement and intrigue in the presence of the strange—suffuses their encounters with texts, discourses, and cultural practices. 49. See Bertrand Rougé, ed., La Surprise: actes du sixième colloque du CICADA, “Rhetorique des Arts,” 9–11 mai 1996 (Pau, France: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 1998). I am referring to Rougé’s prefatory essay, “Out of Place: Le Lieu de la Relation et la Surprise du Déjà-Connu,” 7–14. Rougé deliberately uses the English phrase to denote a par ticular quality of surprise—an intersection of the temporal and the spatial: “La surprise, c’est donc quand advient quelque chose que je ne peux très bien connaître, mais là où je ne l’attends pas” (10). In another essay in the collection (“Surprise et Visitation,” 23–31), Raymond Court agrees with Rougé that aesthetic forms of surprise are no mere accident: “notre rencontre avec une oeuvre n’est jamais pure passivité ni la surprise due à un simple hasard”; one rather has an accessibility to experience that Court likens to George Steiner’s definition of cortesia (24). 50. See Gretchen Wheelock, Haydn’s Ingenious Jesting with Art (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992), 17. Giuseppe Carpani, an early Haydn biographer, is partly responsible for the myth; but as Wheelock notes, another early biographer, August Griesinger, disputed that account by reporting that Haydn himself told him that he

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 239

1/27/15 8:01 AM

240

NOT ES TO PAGES 3 4 –3 9

“was interested in surprising the public with something new, and in making a brilliant debut.” 51. The structural inverse of the “Surprise” trick is the musical conceit in Haydn’s string quartet, opus 33, subtitled “The Joke”: the music seems to end, prompting the dutiful audience to applaud—until the music inexplicably resumes. This false ending occurs three times before the real one, so the listener scarcely knows whether to trust the final silence. 52. A telling difference between eighteenth-century British and German culture can be seen in the different nicknames Haydn’s symphony received: the “Paukenschlag” (“drum strike”) in Germany, the “Surprise” in London. The first name emphasizes the effect, the other the cause; the first emphasizes a purely musical property, the second verges on the narrative. 53. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24–25. Insofar as emotions “involve judgments about the salience for our well-being of uncontrolled external objects,” Nussbaum finds that fiction preeminently engages that imaginative act (1). 54. See Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2. 55. Jerome Kagan, What Is Emotion? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 21. Kagan insists on the difference between the unexpected and the unfamiliar, and he identifies four distinct states of feeling: the unexpected but familiar event that is quickly assimilated; the unfamiliar and unexpected; the unexpected but familiar; and the unfamiliar and unexpected phenomenon that eludes the understanding. See Kagan, 63, 68–69. 56. Kagan, What Is Emotion?, 70. 57. For Ekman’s early pioneering work see Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Phoebe Ellsworth, Emotion in the Human Face (New York: Pergamon Press 1972). For more recent work see Ekman, What the Face Reveals: Basic and Applied Studies of Spontaneous Expression Using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 58. See Paul Ekman, Wallace V. Friesen, and Ronald C. Simons, “Is the Startle Reaction an Emotion?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 49, no. 5 (1985), 1424. 59. Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47, 11. “The difficulty of representing emotion,” she remarks, “is the difficulty of knowing what it is, not just for poststructuralist theory but for any theory” (41). Chapter 2: Being and Feeling

1. See Robert C. Solomon, The Passions (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1976), 129–30. Rei Terada (Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001]) similarly observes that emotions are often described as imposed upon the subject, as in expressions such as “seized by remorse.” 2. See Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nussbaum sees emotions as “forms of evaluative judgment” (22) rather than “unthinking energies” (24–25).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 240

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 3 9 – 4 5

241

3. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 150. 4. Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 23. 5. For commentary on the gap between allegorical character and reader, see Susan Lindgren Wofford, The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 220. An extreme example of that gap can be found in Aesopian fable, as James Nohrnberg notes in The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 97. 6. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin:The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967, rpt. 1997), 1. Fish’s study draws an Aristotelian nexus between characters’ and readers’ experiences, and the book’s subtitle, “The Reader in Paradise Lost,” places both groups, so to speak, on the same page. Maureen Quilligan (The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979]) adopts Fish’s strategy in modeling a close reading of the opening tableau of The Faerie Queene (228). 7. Claude Rawson (Satire and Sentiment 1660–1830: Stress Points in the English Augustan Tradition [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, rpt. 2000]) has articulated “the persistent feeling we get in Paradise Lost that Milton was engaged in a critique of the heroic at the same time as writing the last distinguished European poem in the older epic mode” (108). 8. See Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 80. For an exploration of Milton’s heretical dissolution of the soul–body division within the intellectual milieu of seventeenth-century philosophy, see esp. 79–110. 9. This point is driven home in the Christian Doctrine: “Neither does God make an evil will out of a good one, but he directs a will which is already evil so that it may produce out of its own wickedness either good for others or punishment for itself, though it does so unknowingly intending something quite different.” See Milton, Christian Doctrine, trans. John Carey, in Complete Prose Works, vol. 6 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 332. 10. As Leslie Brisman notes in Milton’s Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), “Against the awareness of the weight of human events that separate us from the Fall, the poet works to recreate the feeling of the presentness of the past and the suspension of what has in fact already occurred” (56). 11. Milton’s etymological wordplay on pre- and postlapsarian senses is a wellknown feature of the poem; for a particularly astute account, see Christopher Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 12. For a thorough explanation of Milton’s conception of free will, see Dennis Danielson’s Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). There is an element of passivity in Milton’s idea of prevenient grace, for “free will is unable to begin or to perfect any true and spiritual good without grace” (71); but “man is free either to reject it and use his own innate power to sin, or else accept it, and use the power received from God to refrain from sinning” (87). 13. Milton, Christian Doctrine, 6.388. 14. As Teskey puts it in Allegory and Violence, “Error tells us not only what she means but what sort of book we are reading, what conventions apply” (3).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 241

1/27/15 8:01 AM

242

NOT ES TO PAGES 4 5 –4 8

15. Wofford notes that Spenser’s good knights typically display “chivalric fury”—an impulse that can be channeled to noble purposes but frequently becomes a figure for a demonic possession that seems formally indistinguishable from the representation of sinful states such as Jealousy or Lust (Choice of Achilles, 305). 16. Jeffrey Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 147. Dolven notes that in Humanistic pedagogy, the pupil’s ability to repeat a lesson is a sign of successful learning, but in The Faerie Queene, “repetition is precisely the sign of the failure to learn” (141). Several critics have observed this pattern of fallibility. Isabel MacCaffrey (Spenser’s Allegory:The Anatomy of Imagination [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976]) suggests that Redcrosse’s “entanglement with Error enacts his own blindness” (144), but “the consequences of experience are often manifested as an advance in the hero’s strength, competence or understanding” (39 n.4). Nohrnberg argues that “Redcrosse has slain Error, but understood nothing” (Analogy of The Faerie Queene, 124). 17. See John M. Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure in “Paradise Lost” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 60–72. Steadman notes that such recognition scenes are often more gradual than what Aristotle formulated for tragedy. 18. Most famously, Samuel Johnson condemned Milton’s plot machinery as “unskillful” for its awkward mixture of static abstraction and active agency. See Johnson’s “Life of Milton” in Lives of the English Poets, 3 vols., ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:185. For a survey of eighteenth-century opinion on Milton’s allegorical personifications, see Stephen Knapp, Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 52–65. 19. In The Language of Allegory, Quilligan characterizes allegory as a genre that directly addresses the production of meaning. She further explores this premise in Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 125–28. Here, she argues that Milton’s allegory of Sin and Death is a “fallen literary mode” (127) that deliberately represents fallenness, and that it reminds the reader of the fictive nature of the narrative itself. Wofford similarly argues that “Spenser tells us explicitly that allegory is a fallen mode, appropriate for conveying knowledge in a fallen world” (Choice of Achilles, 303). Barbara Lewalski in “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) suggests that “By portraying Sin and Death as allegorical characters Milton emphasizes their ontological status as concepts, lacking the reality of living beings” (74). Stephen Fallon concurs, arguing that Sin and Death are pointedly not separate beings but rather “the privation of being itself ” (183) and a measure of “the negative ontological distance between Lucifer and Satan” (185). Victoria Kahn (“Allegory, the Sublime, and the Rhetoric of Things Indifferent in Paradise Lost,” in Creative Imitation: New Essays on Renaissance Literature in Honor of Thomas M. Greene, ed. David Quint et al. [Binghampton: State University of New York, 1992], 127–52) suggests that the episode “dramatizes the theological indifference of rhetorical figures, which is a condition of correct interpretation and free will” (128). Kahn posits that the success of the allegory depends upon the discretion and capability of the individual believer. 20. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey (New York: Liveright, 1961), 6. In Freud’s quasi-biological account, “Protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli”

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 242

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 4 9 – 6 3

243

(21); and a traumatic neurosis is “a consequence of an extensive breach being made in the protective shield against stimuli” (25). For Caruth’s commentary, see Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 5–6. 21. Quotations from the poem refer to John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005). 22. Kahn has called the naming of Sin a “forced signification” that leaves no room for the reader’s interpretive free will. In this way, “the episode could be said to perform its own immanent critique of the literary: the claim to unmediated imaginative activity is itself a form of violence, of reification, and of rebellion” (136). 23. For commentary on wonder in Paradise Lost, see chapter 8 of Steadman, Epic and Tragic Structure. On the distinction between diabolical and divine wonders, Steadman notes that Renaissance critics typically invoked “God’s indisputable power to suspend the laws of nature and perform whatever miracles he chose” (115). 24. Michael Murrin, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 123. In Murrin’s premise, “The gun posed a problem for writers of romance and epic that had no parallels in tradition” (123); and its use was considered fatal to the ideal of military glory and associated with the deceitful and unchivalric (130). 25. Rawson, Satire and Sentiment, 119. 26. See John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 27. Wofford sees in Paradise Lost a “disjunction between action and figure,” which “informs and makes possible the central compromise of the poem between free will and God’s (and the poet’s) foreknowledge of what will happen, or between Milton’s Arminianism and his affirmation of predestination” (373). 28. I agree with Fallon that Sin’s narration of her birth is “an alternative vision of the fall” that parallels Raphael’s allegory-free narration of the war in heaven; and the two visions “cannot occupy the same ontological space,” since Sin and Death are purely privative entities (see Milton among the Philosophers, 185). What Fallon does not register, however, is the extent to which Raphael’s narration of the war recapitulates the surprising effects of Sin, and how reverberations are felt in the earthly fall. 29. The pun in the word “astonied” might suggest Ovidian petrifaction, but Barbara Pavlock (Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990]) also sees an allusion to the moment when Aeneas is rendered speechless by Mercury’s warning in Book 4 that he should leave Carthage (206). 30. This insight is famously expressed in Augustine’s meditation on time in Book 11 of the Confessions. See The Confessions, ed. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1961, rpt. 1985), 259. 31. Simon Jarvis, Wordsworth’s Philosophic Song (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 161. Chapter 3: The Accidental Doctor

1. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin Books, 2001). Ian Watt (The Rise of the Novel,

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 243

1/27/15 8:01 AM

244

NOT ES TO PAGES 6 3 –6 7

[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957]), credits Crusoe as the first novel, in that “an ordinary person’s daily activities are the center of continuous literary attention” (74). Since Watt’s seminal study, Aphra Behn’s Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister (1683–85) has often been cited as an even earlier novel; but for a recent caveat about applying a stabilizing genre term to a nascent hybrid form, see G. Gabrielle Starr, Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 50–51. 2. See Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, rpt. 2002), 47. Lennard J. Davis (Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996) sees Crusoe and other early novels as part of “an information-disseminating system” (191), before generic distinctions between “news” and “novel” had solidified. 3. For a study of the eighteenth-century conception of the passions as it pertains to fiction, see Geoffrey Sill, The Cure of the Passions and the Origins of the English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For Defoe, Sill observes, “the passions are a category of instability in human nature that must be addressed before questions of virtue and truth can be raised”; and the central subject of his novels is the “curing” of the passions (7–8). 4. Scott Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34. 5. Watt does not discount the role of Puritan introspection and Calvinist ideology, but he sees Crusoe as a secular figure whose bookkeeping is more entrepreneurial than spiritual. See Watt’s chapter on Crusoe in The Rise of the Novel, 60–92. For studies of the novel as Puritan autobiography, see G.A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); J. Paul Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe’s Emblematic Method and Quest for Form in “Robinson Crusoe” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966); and Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For discussion of the novel’s engagement with European imperialism, see Christopher Loar, “How to Say Things with Guns: Military Technology and the Politics of Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–2 (2006–7), 1–20. 6. Both Richetti (Defoe’s Narratives: Situation and Structure [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975]) and Damrosch argue that the ideologies of capitalism and Puritanism were more complementary than opposed. Responding to Watt’s and Starr’s different accounts, Richetti notes that Crusoe is “neither exclusively a masterful economic individual nor a heroically spiritual slave” (23). Damrosch points out, in a Weberian vein, that “Puritanism was subsiding into bourgeois Nonconformity, no longer an ideology committed to reshaping the world, but rather a social class seeking religious ‘toleration’ and economic advantage” (189). 7. Richetti, Defoe’s Narratives, 12. 8. Here, Richetti seems to echo the claims of Wolfgang Iser’s The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), which was published a year before his monograph on Defoe. 9. See Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver, and Genocide: Barbarism and the European Imagination, 1492–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 66. Christopher Loar has argued that gunfire in Crusoe serves as “a figure for the violence and war-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 244

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 6 7 – 7 5

245

fare that lurk at the foundational moment of sovereignty as well as of the ideology of liberty that makes sovereignty’s violence tolerable” (1). 10. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 14. Greenblatt sees the philosophical discourse on wonder and the literature of New World encounter as mutually influential. In medieval scholastic conceptions, wonder was “a sign of dispossession,” but in the Renaissance, it became “an agent of appropriation”: the state of admiration is prologue to possession and colonization (24). 11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Niditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, rpt. 1987), 185 (II.xiv.10). 12. Loar observes that the gun “created the conditions for ‘peaceful’ negotiations” with easily awed West Africans (“How to Say Things,” 12), but he adds that there was also a politics of intimidation at home, in that “the Whig regime of the early Hanoverian period, with all its rhetoric of liberty, sought to impose its authority through violence direct and indirect” (20). See also Gary Hentzi, “Sublime Moments and Social Authority in Robinson Crusoe and A Journal of the Plague Year,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 26, no. 3 (Spring 1993), 419–34. Hentzi argues that scenes of fear and violence in Crusoe constitute a kind of proto-sublime before Burke and Kant theorized the mode later in the century. 13. For a thorough study of the Puritan tradition of Providence literature, see Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim. In reaction against deistic notions of an impersonal and ahistorical Creator, Christian apologists of the early eighteenth century argued for a benevolent God with an active hand in human affairs (51). As Hunter notes, such writers asserted the orthodoxy of revealed religion rather than the deistical concept of natural religion. On the latter strain of thought in Crusoe, see Ilse Vickers, Defoe and the New Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Vickers argues that Defoe espoused a brand of “natural theology,” which held that the universe was created for man’s benefit, and that studying nature was tantamount to knowing God (112). 14. Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 15. Damrosch has suggested that “a strong lyric impulse underlies the earliest novels”; in particular, he is referring to the genre’s emphasis on the truth of individual subjectivity (God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 209). I would add that Crusoe’s quasi-lyric outbursts and episodes of surprise might be called, in the poetic language of a later era, “strange fits of passion.” 16. Ross Hamilton (Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007]) sees the eighteenth-century interpretation of accidental events as moving in two directions, the empirical and the providential: either causal, scientific explanation or divine intervention. He cites Crusoe’s discovery of English barley as an illustration of this ambiguity (140–42). 17. Virginia Woolf, “Robinson Crusoe,” in The Second Common Reader, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 56. In The Prose of Things:Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Cynthia Wall argues that despite their allegorical significance, things in Crusoe are “emblems reconstituted back into things for their own sake” (110).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 245

1/27/15 8:01 AM

246

NOT ES TO PAGES 7 5 –9 0

18. Damrosch notes that Crusoe often uses “secret” in association with “emotions of self-satisfaction,” and that Defoe might have in mind the sense of the word as Addison uses it to describe the “secret refreshment” that can be taken in a vivid description (God’s Plot and Man’s Stories, 198). But “secret” also denotes both the workings and hints of Providence and the mysterious inner movements of the soul: as Damrosch remarks, “Crusoe learns to identify Providence with his own desires” (198–99). 19. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, vol. 3, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), No. 477, 6 September 1712. 20. Richetti argues that the appearance of the footprint is apt in two ways: in ideological terms, Crusoe’s serenity must be shattered, because bourgeois contentment is inevitably disturbed by the presence and claims of others; in structural terms, the surprise is part of the novel’s dynamic of extremes, the pendulum swing from pastoral isolation to “state of war” (Defoe’s Narratives, 51). 21. See Marshall, “Autobiographical Acts in Robinson Crusoe,” English Literary History 71 (2004). “Terrifying in its literal specificity and its ultimate abstractness, the print signifies simply someone else” (910–11). 22. Daniel Defoe, Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe with His Vision of the Angelic World (Boston: David Nickerson, 1903), 251. 23. G.A. Starr, Defoe and Casuistry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 7. Starr notes that in Crusoe’s dialogue with Friday, casuistry becomes “a heuristic mode,” and that Crusoe is “remarkably free from dogmatism” (4–5). 24. For an investigation of the Enlightenment philosophy of mental causation and its literary implications, see Jonathan Kramnick, Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richardson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 25. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. C.B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, rpt. 1986), 129–30 (I.vi). 26. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Anthony Burgess and Christopher Bristow (London: Penguin, 1966), 31–32. 27. For a rich study of Defoe’s engagement with apparition narratives, see Jayne Lewis, “Spectral Currencies in the Air of Reality: A Journal of the Plague Year and the History of Apparitions,” Representations 87 (Summer 2004), 82–101. Lewis argues that apparition narratives are “self-consciously literary structures, too firmly wedded to the metaphysics of apparition itself to liberate themselves” (90) from a strictly empiricist paradigm. Chapter 4: The Purification of Surprise in Pamela

1. Ruth Yeazell observes in Fictions of Modesty:Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) that Pamela’s swoon after B assaults her in bed not only prevents a rape but also convinces B that she is genuine in her protestations of virtue (90). 2. See William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Warner favors the word “entertainment” as “the most precise general term for what Richardson and Fielding are providing their readers in the 1740s,” in that the word implies “a sus-

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 246

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 9 0 – 9 2

247

taining social exchange” between performer and audience and the notion of a leisurely diversion from more serious concerns (231–32). 3. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; Or,Virtue Rewarded, ed. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). All quotations from the novel refer to this edition, which represents the original 1740 publication. 4. As Robert Alter argues in Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), the eighteenth-century enterprise of literary realism was complicated by novelists’ acute awareness of fictionality (x). 5. The concept of “absorption” as defined by Michael Fried in Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) has pertinent applications to fiction, especially that of the eighteenth century. Warner has argued that Pamela is antitheatrical, in that Richardson uses strategies akin to “absorptive painting” to produce a “realist effect of immediacy and unselfconsciousness” (Licensing Entertainment, 226). 6. In Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745–1800 (New York: AMS Press, 1994), Barbara Benedict notes that “the sensation of surprise itself is an instinctive reaction, which sentimental theory celebrates” (5). As Benedict argues, “Sentimental fiction adheres to a dialectical structure that endorses yet edits the feelings in fiction” (1). This is certainly true of Pamela: while we imaginatively participate in the heroine’s surprises and other emotional reactions, we also stand apart and judge them. 7. See Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 35–36. 8. As J. Paul Hunter has observed in Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), the early novel “tames violence and sexual aberration within a structure of everyday experience very much as it domesticates the surprising, the unexplained, and the wonderful” (37). For a complication of the romance/novel dialectic, see Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, rpt. 2002), esp. 52–64. Already in the seventeenth century, French heroic romance “characteristically justifies itself by reference to the doctrine of vraisemblance, and associating its fictionality with a quasi-Aristotelian ‘probability’ ” (54), and by 1660 this form was supplanted by romans à clef and chroniques scandaleuses, which were quickly translated into English. 9. The moral purposes of both Richardson and Fielding have been well established by critics. As Warner puts it, Pamela “recounts how a young girl with prudential parental warnings and innocent of novel reading nonetheless finds herself within a novel,” while “it casts B. as a reformed novel reader” (186). Warner’s examination of the relation between Pamela and earlier amatory fiction was preceded by Nancy K. Miller’s chapter on the novel in The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 37–59. For another study of Richardson’s ambivalence about the entertaining dimension of his writing, see James Turner, “Novel Panic: Picture and Perfor mance in the Reception of Richardson’s Novels,” Representations 48 (Autumn 1994), 70–96. Turner argues that while Richardson characterized his efforts as a form of “Accommodation to the Manners and Taste of an Age overwhelmed with a Torrent of Luxury,” he was nevertheless “deeply implicated in that culture, not only in his marketing strategy

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 247

1/27/15 8:01 AM

248

NOT ES TO PAGES 9 3 –9 7

and his passionate cultivation of ‘new Impressions,’ but also in his metaphorics of Luxury display and perfor mance” (76–77). 10. To Aaron Hill, 26 January 1746/7, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 78. 11. For a survey of the contemporary reception of Pamela, see Turner, “Novel Panic.” Warner’s chapter on the novel in Licensing Entertainment illuminates the issues at stake in the three anonymously published anti-Pamelist publications of 1741. While Richardson insisted on Pamela’s interiority as sufficient moral framing, antiPamelists asserted the possibility of theatrical exteriority—the broader horizon of the outsider’s titillated imagination. That conflict, Warner argues, represents a larger cultural debate over “what reading for pleasure should be” (223). 12. To George Cheyne, 31 August 1741, in Selected Letters, 47. Richardson had described his intentions in similar terms to Aaron Hill in a letter earlier that year (41). 13. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973]) sees Pamela as exercising “a quality of forgiveness which erases the past and begins moral judgment afresh, provided there is a genuine turning-point of reformation” (68). The relation between the two halves of Pamela has been widely commented on, but for a compelling recent account, see Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 14. One of the most thorough appreciations of Haywood’s art to date has been Warner’s assessment of the author as an innovator of “formula fiction,” which follows familiar patterns and therefore ensures its popularity among readers seeking a repeatable pleasure (112–15). Warner asserts the commercial and artistic value in what John Richetti had earlier dismissed in Popular Fiction before Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) as repetitious variations on “the fable of persecuted innocence” (207). 15. See Eliza Haywood, The Surprize, Or, Constancy Rewarded (London, 1724). (Haywood is anonymously identified on the title page as “the Author of The Masqueraders, or Fatal Curiosity.”) Accessed on Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). 16. Ros Ballaster (Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992]) argues that “The business of Haywood’s amatory plots is to engage the female reader’s sympathy and erotic pleasure, rather than stimulate intellectual judgment” (170). This is certainly true, although Haywood’s alertness to the manifestations of surprise suggests some authorial concern about judgment as well as pleasure. 17. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 18. See Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 44–45. Ballaster draws a parallel between masquerade and amatory fiction such as Haywood’s: both involve an ambiguity between sexual pleasure and sexual predation or abuse, and both involve transgressions of class and gender boundaries (Seductive Forms, 179). 19. See Haywood, Fantomina and Other Works, ed. Alexander Pettit, Margaret Case Croskery, and Anna C. Patchias (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 248

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 9 7 – 1 0 2

249

20. For a reading that emphasizes the similarities between Fanny and Pamela, see Yeazell’s chapter on Cleland’s Memoirs in Fictions of Modesty, 102–21. For another study that aligns the sentimental poetics of Cleland’s Memoirs with Pamela, see Ann Louise Kibbie, “Sentimental Properties: Pamela and Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” English Literary History 58, no. 3 (Autumn 1991), 561–77. 21. For a consideration of Cleland’s novel in the stronger terms of the Sublime, see Mark Blackwell, “ ‘It Stood an Object of Terror and Delight’: Sublime Masculinity and the Aesthetics of Disproportion in John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure,” Eighteenth-Century Novel 2 (2003), 39–63. 22. John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, rpt. 1999), 4. 23. To Aaron Hill, 26 January 1746/7, in Selected Letters, 81–82. 24. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Library of America, 1990), 253. 25. The conspicuous pleasure with which Pamela relates the effect of her pastoral outfit in Letter 24 gave fodder for anti-Pamelists such as Fielding to cast doubt on the heroine’s guilelessness. For a reading of the scene that rescues it from that narrow critique, see Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, 7–19. Under the premise that Richardson’s art is fundamentally dramatic in its capacity to represent or imply multiple perspectives, Kinkead-Weekes argues that the scene allows for an ironization of Pamela’s self-satisfaction. Mr. B’s jibe (“you are a lovelier Girl by half than Pamela”) “aptly punishes the girl’s pleasure in her own reflection” (15). 26. George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London: Penguin, 1991), 40. 27. Doody means love when she refers to “a natural passion” (the phrase is from Grandison), but clearly other passions are also at work in Pamela; and one passionate outburst on Mrs. Jewkes’s part can be seen as balancing another. Within the realm of pastoral comedy that Doody identifies, her description of Pamela as “governed by emotion and instinct” could also be applied to the older and more experienced Mrs. Jewkes. 28. As Miller observes of Pamela, “love made her its victim by sneak attack, and she maintains the alibi of ignorance: literally, she did not see it coming” (Heroine’s Text, 47). While Miller does not address the role of surprise in the novel, her choice of the phrase “sneak attack” aptly catches its aesthetics of shock; elsewhere, she refers to B’s summerhouse seduction in similar terms: “Pamela, clearly, succumbs to the first kiss only because of the violence of the surprise attack” (42). 29. In her reading of Pamela’s scribal discovery of “Love,” Yeazell notes that even this feeling is held at a critical and cautious distance; Pamela marks a psychic division in herself in order to upbraid what she calls her “treacherous heart” (94). 30. In McKeon’s observation, “writing to the moment” is “closely related to the self-reflexive effect by which the narrative incorporates, as its subject matter, the process of its own production and consumption” (Origins of the English Novel, 358). McKeon particularly refers to visible and material elements of formal realism: gaps or interruptions in the text where Pamela leaves off writing; references to the surreptitious acquisition of writing materials and the collection of letters into sequestered packets; and the use of those letters as a canonical “text” or authoritative account by characters within the story.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 249

1/27/15 8:01 AM

250

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 0 4 –1 11

31. For a consideration of the theatrical underpinnings of Richardson’s fiction, see Ira Konigsberg, Samuel Richardson and the Dramatic Novel (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1968). Without denying the importance of the epistolary mode, Konigsberg argues that Richardson “brought to the English novel subject matter and techniques developed in the drama” (2); and he traces themes, situations, and character types from restoration comedy and sentimental tragedy. Kinkead-Weekes echoes Konigsberg’s premise, but he uses the notion of the “dramatic” in broader and less historically specific ways. In essence, the term sponsors the kind of meticulous close reading that he insists Richardson’s scenes merit (Samuel Richardson, 15). 32. Doody classifies Pamela as a pastoral comedy featuring a “sturdy little heroine,” a clumsy country squire with an “adolescent rawness in his openness of motive,” and of course a wedding (Natural Passion, 69). “Richardson loves ritual,” she notes, “and each of the novels moves toward a ceremonial moment” (64); and here I would add that the reunion scene between Pamela and her father serves as an accidental ceremonial moment, a narratable anecdote in prologue to the actual betrothal. 33. It is only in retrospect, of course, that Pamela can inscribe that providential assurance into her narrative. Soni’s characterization of the hermeneutics of the trial is particularly relevant here (Mourning Happiness, 187–210). 34. See Michael Wood, The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). “When the player picks the wrong name, he hasn’t exactly missed the oracle’s meaning. He has chosen one meaning and ceased to look for others,” Wood observes (51). The intended answer to B’s riddle is Goodman Andrews, but both Williams and B himself are other plausible possibilities: in essence, Williams stands for the discarded past and B the hopeful future. As Wood remarks about our experience of oracles and other predictions, we make two assumptions about the future: “that it is unknowable, and that once it’s here we saw it coming” (33). 35. In Warner’s observation, Mr. B, for all of his accusations of Pamela as romancer, “has his own fictions to propound”; and through letters, he manages to deceive both Williams and Andrews, inventively deploying “aristocratic themes of paternalistic care and forced marriages” (Licensing Entertainment, 360). 36. Warner reads this scene as exemplifying the dynamics of interiority vs. external observation at work in the reader’s relation to the text. Whereas Pamela feels fear and anxiety, B (and perhaps the reader) experiences titillation. In the antiPamelist discourse that grew up around the novel, the author of Pamela Censured (1741) argued that the scene could be construed as encouragement to aspiring male lovers who would discompose their mistresses simply to see them swoon (Licensing Entertainment, 214–15). 37. See Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983, rpt. 1996), 185. 38. See D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 265. 39. For a reading of the darker implications of this episode, see Albert Rivero, “The Place of Sally Godfrey in Richardson’s Pamela,” in Passion and Virtue: Essays on the Novels of Samuel Richardson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 52–72. Rivero finds fault with previous critics who have either insufficiently treated the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 250

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 1 3 – 1 1 8

251

episode or accepted the providential logic of the plot—reading “auspiciously” rather than “suspiciously.” For a broader ethical consideration of the ways that the success stories of autobiographical narratives are predicated on the suffering or exclusion of inconvenient characters, see James O’Rourke, Sex, Lies and Autobiography:The Ethics of Confession (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). Though O’Rourke does not consider eighteenth-century fiction, his commentary on the “moral luck” that Jane Eyre enjoys in Charlotte Brontë’s novel has relevance to the providential narrative of Pamela. 40. Kinkead-Weekes notes that the Sally Godfrey episode functions as moral parable that moves well beyond “the simple puritan horror of sexual excess” (Samuel Richardson, 68), expressing instead Pamela’s exemplary capacity of forgiveness and “the sincere wish to break with the past” (69). Chapter 5: Fielding’s Statues of Surprize

1. In God’s Plot and Man’s Stories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), Leo Damrosch observes that Fielding’s narrative persona “acts as the disposing deity of the fictional universe” (263). Michael McKeon surveys the critical tradition of associating Fielding with Providence in The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 407. Robert Alter (Fielding and the Nature of the Novel [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968]) sees Fielding as liberating eighteenth-century English fiction from the constraints of formal realism. William Warner (Licensing Entertainment:The Elevation of Novel-Reading in Britain, 1684–1750 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998]) argues that Fielding, in the role of “trickster-illusionist” (259), goads the reader into becoming a savvy, “self-conscious consumer” (269). 2. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 408. 3. See McKeon, “Mediation as a Primal Word: The Arts, the Sciences, and the Origins of the Aesthetic,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 397–98. 4. “Plan of a late celebrated Novel,” London Magazine, February 1748/9, xviii.51–55, in Henry Fielding: The Critical Heritage, ed. Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 148. 5. Francis Coventry, “An Essay on a New Species of Writing” (1751), in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 266. 6. Arthur Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding, Esq,” in The Works of HF, Esq.: with the Life of the Author (1762), in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 425. For a consideration of Fielding’s engagement with the reader, see Sandra Sherman, “Reading at Arm’s Length: Fielding’s Contract with the Reader in Tom Jones,” Studies in the Novel 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 232–45. Sherman describes Fielding’s authorial persona as that of an “anxious” tradesman worried about whether his readers will buy his product. 7. Vivasvan Soni, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010). 8. As Patricia Meyer Spacks (Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990]) notes, “Lady Booby, Slipslop, and Betty at the inn all attack the hero with traditionally male

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 251

1/27/15 8:01 AM

252

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 1 8 –1 26

directness,” but these comic encounters are still played out against a background of male “operations of power” (61). 9. See Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 107–8. 10. Paul E. Griffiths defines the propositional attitude account and sketches the central debates in emotion theory in What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 2. 11. In his The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), Roach argues that Garrick “renovated theatrical semiotics, founding his vocabulary of expressive gesture on a new order of understanding, a revised concept of what nature is and means” (56). 12. See John Bender, “Novel Knowledge: Judgment, Experience, Experiment,” in Siskin and Warner, This Is Enlightenment, 290–93. 13. J. Paul Hunter, Occasional Form: Henry Fielding and the Chains of Circumstance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 20. 14. Henry Fielding, The tragedy of tragedies; or, The life and death of Tom Thumb the Great; with the annotations of H. Scriblerus Secundus, ed. James T. Hillhouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918). The play was first produced in 1730 as Tom Thumb: A Tragedy, as a two-act afterpiece to The Author’s Farce. It was so successful that Fielding revised and expanded it as a three-act play, with commentary, the following year. 15. Referring to Mr. Booby’s first sexual overture, Shamela confides to her mother that she “pretended to be shy” and “pretended to be angry” (14–15). Later, describing a similar intrusion, she reports that she “pretended” to try to leave (16). See Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela (London: Penguin, 1999). 16. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. R.P.C. Mutter (London: Penguin, 1985), 8.1.328–29. 17. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. R.F. Brissenden (London: Penguin, 1985). All quotations refer to this edition, with citations of book, chapter, and page numbers. 18. Blakey Vermeule, Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 109–10. 19. The Adventures of David Simple, ed. Linda Bree (London: Penguin, 2002), 115. The novel is subtitled “A Moral Romance,” in a possibly deliberate counterpoint to the subtitle of Joseph Andrews, “A Comic Romance.” 20. Brissenden notes in his edition of the novel that the play in question might have been Lillo’s The London Merchant, first produced at Drury Lane in 1731. 21. Critical commentary on this passage has tended to focus on what kind of participation Fielding solicits. In The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), Wolfgang Iser uses the episode to illustrate his argument about the reader’s creative role in “the realization of the text” (35). To the contrary, J. Paul Hunter argues that Fielding “refuses to allow us solitude for our confrontation with fictional worlds, as if he did not trust us on our own” (Occasional Form, 7). Jill Campbell (“Fielding’s Style,” English Literary History 72, no. 2 [Summer 2005], 407–28) notes that Fielding’s use of dashes to set off the digression serves both cognitive and dramatic functions—both marking phrases of thought and acting as performative cues for the translation of text into voice. For commentary on the relation between the

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 252

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 2 6 – 1 3 1

253

deliberately ornate style of this passage and the putatively simpler mimetic idiom of Pamela, see Scott Black, “Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 38, nos. 2–3 (Summer 2005), 150–51. 22. In a note to his edition of Joseph Andrews, Martin Battestin proposes several potential source texts: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 3.418–19, Colley Cibber’s version of Shakespeare’s Richard III (IV.vii), Theobald’s Persian Princess (IV.ii), and Young’s Busiris (IV). More recently, Tom Keymer (“Joseph Andrews, Benjamin Martyn’s Timoleon, and the Statue of Surprize,” Notes and Queries 45, no. 4 [December 1998], 460–61) has traced the exact phrase to Benjamin Martyn’s Timoleon: A Tragedy (1730), in which the character of Timophanes, startled by his father’s ghost, is described as looking like “a very Statue of Surprize.” 23. Aaron Hill, An Essay on the Art of Acting (London: printed for J. Dixwell, 1779), 35, 39. For commentary on Hill’s ideas of perfor mance and the eighteenthcentury stage more generally, see Roach, The Player’s Passion, 79–86. 24. Both Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop are ridiculed for their affectations; and, as Jill Campbell has observed, Fielding tends to associate affectation with the feminine and the hypertheatrical. See Campbell, Natural Masques: Gender and Identity in Fielding’s Plays and Novels (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 25. Judith Frank (Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997]) sees Slipslop’s verbal lapses and Fanny’s illiteracy as ways of keeping the two female servants in their place (54–55). 25. Simon Dickie, “Fielding’s Rape Jokes,” Review of English Studies, New Series, 61, no. 251 (2010), 588. See also Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 26. Lynn Enterline observes in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) that the Pygmalion story served as a pervasive legend for the power of art in the Renaissance; and the animation of a statue “offers an erotic version of a rhetorician’s dream” of moving an audience (203). 27. Aaron Hill, Elfrid: Or, the Fair Inconstant, A Tragedy as it is Acted at the Theatre Royal, by her Majesty’s Servants:To which is Added The Walking Statue: Or, the Devil in the Wine-Cellar. A Farce in One Act (London: printed for Bernard Lintott and Egbert Sanger, 1710). 28. Arthur Murphy made precisely this point: “I apprehend that the Ridiculous may be formed, where there is no Affectation at the Bottom, and . . . Parson Adams I take to be an Instance of this Assertion.” See Murphy, The Gray’s-Inn Journal No. 49, 31 August 1754, in Paulson and Lockwood, Henry Fielding, 375–76. 29. Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 30. For a thorough tracing of the Miltonic echoes in the two encounters with the Roasting Squire in the novel, see Campbell, Natural Masques, chap. 3. Campbell argues that allusions to the rebel angels’ physical and verbal assaults “offer a dark perspective on the ‘masculine’ exercise of satire in which the Roasting-Squire so delights” (108). 31. Simon Dickie, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005), 271–332.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 253

1/27/15 8:01 AM

254

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 3 1 –1 35

32. Summarizing critical consensus, Ronald Paulson in The Life of Henry Fielding: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) calls Adams “the first great comic hero of the English novel” (120), and an English Quixote figure. Paulson suggests that there is just enough ridiculousness and imprudence in Adams to save him from becoming an unreal paragon. 33. Battestin notes that Fielding became interested in deism in the 1730s when he associated with several prominent freethinkers, but he argues that the author later rejected their views. On the other hand, Ronald Paulson argues in his critical biography that Fielding never wholly abandoned deism and always saw Providence as a convenient fiction rather than a theological truth (112–14). For Battestin’s rejoinder, see “Fielding and the Deists,” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction 13, no. 1 (2000), 1–10. Alexander Welsh (Reflections on the Hero as Quixote [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981]) sees Fielding’s novel as allowing a glimpse of the possibility of random circumstance or life’s injustices that later novelists including Sterne and Diderot would more fully elaborate (106–7). 34. Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, vol. 1, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1972). 35. In Preromanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), Marshall Brown observes that both Fielding and Sterne begin in forms of the picaresque: the former aims to “reinvest picaresque with artistic shape,” while the latter “both distills and reduces the old genres” (275). 36. Rather than characterizing Sterne as an antirealist, numerous critics have seen him as a kind of hyperrealist in the effort to represent the play of consciousness. See Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 290–91; Richard Lanham, “Tristram Shandy”: The Game of Pleasure (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 20; Brown, Preromanticism, 268; Elizabeth Kraft, Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 100–101; and Patricia Meyer Spacks, Novel Beginnings: Experiments in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 272. 37. Jonathan Lamb (Sterne’s Fiction and the Double Principle [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]) identifies a “double principle” in the novel: the alignment of the time of writing the manuscript with the time of reading the book. 38. Thomas Keymer (Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002]) argues that Sterne wanted to make the opening chapters of Tristram Shandy “fashionably in the swim” (2). Rather than seeing Sterne’s techniques as proto-modernist anachronism, Keymer places them within an eighteenth-century context of formal experimentation. 39. For recent studies of Hume’s ideas as manifested in Sterne’s novel, see Christina Lupton, “Tristram Shandy, David Hume, and Epistemological Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature 27, no. 1 (April 2003), 98–115; and Jesse Molesworth, Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Lupton reads Sterne and Hume as engaged in similar literaryphilosophical enterprises (99) and Molesworth sees him as expressing “the terrible acknowledgement that one’s life resembles nothing so much as a disorganized jumble of unconnected events” (171).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 254

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 3 5 – 1 4 4

255

40. See Sermon 8, “Time and Chance,” in Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Parson Yorick, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), 1:96. 41. In The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Ronald Paulson has identified another Freudian process at work in Tristram Shandy: the sublimation of sexual drives into Hogarthian lines of beauty (168). 42. Sterne’s world is, as Ronald Paulson observed, a “homosocial” one characterized by “Shandean male bonding” (The Beautiful, Novel, and Strange, 164). In Political Constructions: Defoe, Richardson, and Sterne in Relation to Hobbes, Hume, and Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), Carol Kaye argues that such a world had a political valence: in retreating from Whig polemics into fiction, Sterne creates a model of polite conversation among men of diverse ideologies. 43. See Ross Hamilton, Accident: A Philosophical and Literary History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 152–58. 44. Toby’s attempts to explain his wound can be subsumed under a larger, more vexed enterprise that Ross King identifies in the novel—“the textual compensation for bodily loss.” See King, “Tristram Shandy and the Wound of Language,” Studies in Philology 92, no. 3 (Summer 1995), 293–94. Molesworth (Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel) points out that both Walter’s Tristapaedia and Tristram’s Life and Opinions can also be seen as textual compensations for accidental misfortunes (195). 45. For a consideration of Sterne’s idiosyncratic punctuation as form of mediation, see Roger B. Moss, “Sterne’s Punctuation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter 1981/82), 179–200. Moss notes that the dash “occupies real, linear space, the same route along which the reading eye is traveling, and so it can challenge narrative on its own ground” (195). 46. Brown (Preromanticism) suggests that Tristram Shandy represents a shift from the earlier novel’s “logic of knowledge” to a “logic of the soul”—a “drive toward emotional narrative” (262). Similarly, Molesworth (Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel) finds an “emotional intensity” in Sterne’s novel (192). Chapter 6: Northanger Abbey and Gothic Perception

1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. Fiona Stafford (London: Penguin, 2003), 213. 2. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Ros Ballaster (London: Penguin, 1995), 62. 3. Samuel Johnson, “The Need for General Knowledge,” Rambler 137 (9 July 1751), in The Rambler, 3 vols., vol. 2, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 360. 4. In Todorov’s definition, the Fantastic is a narrative mode that hovers between magical awe and rational explanation. See Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975). 5. See D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Miller distinguishes between Austen’s narrative style (impersonal, neuter, sourceless) and Fielding’s (personal, idiosyncratic, self-referential).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 255

1/27/15 8:01 AM

256

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 4 4 –1 48

6. See Tave, Some Words of Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 37. For another lexical approach, see Norman Page, The Language of Jane Austen (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1972). Before Page and Tave, C.S. Lewis in “A Note on Jane Austen” (in Jane Austen: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ian Watt [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963], 25–34) observed the “hardness” and clarity of Austen’s moral vocabulary, which frames moments of “undeception” and “awakening” (27). 7. Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 73. 8. Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen:Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 42. Before Johnson, Judith Wilt (Ghosts of the Gothic:Austen, Eliot, and Lawrence [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980]) argued that the result of Austen’s use of gothic machinery is “not to make romance ridiculous but to make common anxiety ‘serious’ or ‘high’ ” (126). 9. D.A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). Miller’s premise is that “The narrative of happiness is inevitably frustrated by the fact that only insufficiencies, defaults, deferrals can be ‘told’ ” (3). 10. A. Walton Litz (Jane Austen: A Study of Her Artistic Development [New York: Oxford University Press, 1965]) suggests that the chapters of literary burlesque (1–2 and 20–25) are “detachable units” that might not have been part of Austen’s original design; in any case, he argues that Austen’s techniques “never coalesce into a satisfactory whole” (59, 68). 11. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), xix. 12. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 42. 13. Marilyn Butler and A. Walton Litz, among others, have addressed changes in Austen’s narrative style; more recently, critics have studied changes in the author’s conception of time, memory, and consciousness. In Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) William Deresiewicz attributes changing representations of time and memory to Austen’s exposure to British Romantic poetry; and in Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810– 1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Nicholas Dames places Austen’s novels in the context of cultural constructions of nostalgia and sanative forms of memory and forgetting. In British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Alan Richardson argues for a “concurrence between Austen’s late style and emergent biological notions of the subject” (107). 14. In The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), Marshall Brown sees a direct line between Fielding’s early use of what Dorrit Cohn has called “psycho-narration” and Walpole’s representations of interiority (23). 15. Brown remarks that Otranto reminds us that the novel cannot represent spectacle as well as drama can: “Narrative dissolves bodies and silences spectacle. Its analytic sequentiality compromises the hustle of the stage even though Walpole maintains the dramatic unity of time and the accompanying rapidity of action” (64). 16. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). All quotations of the novel refer to this edition.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 256

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 4 8 – 1 5 8

257

17. In this trend, as Cave notes in Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), recognition scenes are construed to be about “mental states, duplicities of motive, hypocrisy, self-deception, delusion” (149). For a recent study of the psychological dimensions of the gothic, see Brown, The Gothic Text. Brown follows in a critical tradition that casts the gothic as forerunner of Freudian narrative, in its concern with taboo, nightmare, and psychic stress. 18. Connections between gothic fiction and philosophies of the sublime have become a critical commonplace. George Haggerty (Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form [University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989]) sees gothic fiction as reflecting a larger movement in eighteenth-century aesthetics: “the theoretical shift from the object to the subject in discussions of the sublime” (6); and Brown suggests that “the distance from the transcendental of the philosopher to the supernatural of the novelists is not necessarily so great” (The Gothic Text, 12). 19. By invoking Mikhail Bakhtin, I am interested mainly in how Walpole’s narrative allows for skepticism through its representation of multiple perspectives. For an approach to the gothic that applies Bakhtin’s idea of polyglossia to the effects of multiple frame narratives and presentational media, see Jacqueline Howard, Reading Gothic Fiction: A Bakhtinian Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 20. Among gothic authors, Radcliffe was unusual in providing rational explanations; as Karl Kroeber notes (Styles in Fictional Structure: The Art of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and George Eliot [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971]), she was criticized by Walter Scott for doing so (116). 21. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents, ed. Robert Miles (London: Penguin, 2000), 70. 22. For a wide-ranging consideration of temporal dilation in the descriptive passages of eighteenth-century fiction, see Maximilian E. Novak, “The Extended Moment: Time, Dream, History, and Perspective in Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” in Probability,Time, and Space in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. Paula R. Backscheider (New York: AMS Press, 1979),141–66. In realist narrative, putatively simple facts, objects, or events can be treated with sustained attention or dreamlike absorption; and Novak credits Defoe with pioneering this focal technique. 23. Samuel Johnson, “The Folly of Anticipating Misfortunes,” The Rambler 29 (1750), in The Rambler, vol. 1, ed. W.J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 159–60. 24. See Austen, Letters, 3rd ed., ed. Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 18–19 December 1798. 25. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. James Kinsley and John Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). All quotations refer to this edition. 26. Joseph Addison, Spectator 62 (11 May 1711). 27. For an account of novelistic mind reading that incorporates developments in cognitive science, see Lisa Zunshine, “Theory of Mind and Fictional Consciousness,” Narrative 11, no. 3 (October 2003), 270–91. 28. See Jerome Kagan, Surprise, Uncertainty, and Mental Structures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5. 29. The idea of the “probable,” as Douglas Lane Patey has shown in Probability and Literary Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), played an important part in eighteenth-century thought: in Enlightenment philosophy, it denoted

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 257

1/27/15 8:01 AM

258

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 5 9 –1 72

what is judged to conform to our knowledge and experience of the world; and in neoclassical literary criticism, it meant both faithful representation of reality and internal consistency or plausibility within a fictive frame. Mark Loveridge (“Northanger Abbey; Or, Nature and Probability,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46, no. 1 [ June 1991], 1–29) sees Northanger Abbey as exploring the powers and limits of probabilistic thought. 30. “I want a hero,” Byron famously declares in Don Juan (I.i.1–4), using the term—as Austen uses it—in both literary and pedestrian senses: he announces a search for a worthy protagonist even as he laments the lack of real heroes in English public life. See Lord Byron, Don Juan, in Byron [Oxford Authors Series], ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 31. See Ruth Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty:Women and Courtship in the English Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 51. Before Yeazell, Mary Poovey investigated the cultural contradictions and strategies of indirection in conduct books and courtship narratives in The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Poovey articulates a conflict in eighteenth-century conduct books between bourgeois feminine accomplishment and modest self-effacement (29). 32. Jane Austen, Persuasion, ed. D.W. Harding (London: Penguin, 1985), 48. All quotations refer to this edition. 33. For a study of corporeal experience in the novel, see Kay Young’s article, “Feeling Embodied: Consciousness, Persuasion, and Jane Austen,” Narrative 11, no. 1 [ January 2003], 78–92), which describes the reunion of Anne and Frederick as the experience of “feeling embodied together again,” and links that “consciousness of the pain of being alive” with Austen’s sense of her own mortality (89). Chapter 7: Wordsworthian Shocks, Gentle and Otherwise

1. Quotations from Wordsworth’s shorter poetry refer to Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936). Quotations from The Prelude refer to the 1805 version in The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell (London: Penguin, 1972, rpt. 1988). 2. Robert Langbaum first applied the idea of epiphany to Romantic lyric in The Poetry of Experience (New York: W.W. Norton, 1957, rpt. 1963), esp. 46–47. “Epiphany” named the salient feature of what he called the “poetry of experience”: the derivation of meaning from individual perception rather than a preexisting order of values or ideas. Langbaum later elaborated this model in “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature,” New Literary History 14, no. 2 (Winter 1983), 335–58. Ashton Nichols explores the topic in The Poetics of Epiphany (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987). In Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), M.H. Abrams links “the Romantic moment” with the Paterian moment of aesthetic intensity and the Modernist epiphany, but he never describes the Wordsworthian spot of time as an epiphany per se. In “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric” (in Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965]), Abrams examines the poetic structuring of experience around a climactic realization, but he describes this moment more broadly as an insight, a confrontation with loss, a moral decision, or an emotional resolution.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 258

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 7 3 – 1 8 0

259

3. Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode,” 350, 352–53. 4. See Paul Fry, “Clearings in the Way: Non-epiphany in Wordsworth,” in A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). This essay first appeared in Studies in Romanticism 31, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 3–19. The naming of “ostension” as central to literary mimesis is part of Fry’s attempt to get beyond traditional accounts of the occasion of writing as either sensuous pleasure (aesthesis) or Kantian sublimity (“astonishment disclosing transcendental reason to itself ”). 5. Hartman has discussed the epiphanic style and its relation to trauma in Wordsworth’s poetry in an interview with Cathy Caruth conducted in 1994. See “An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading, ed. Helen Regueiero Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 306. 6. See Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). Hartman describes Romantic lyric as “a development of surmise” (11), and he sees Wordsworth’s trope of halting as an imaginative template (17–18). 7. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) The Prose Works, 3 vols., ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) 1:128–30. 8. The Poems of Alexander Pope [the Twickenham text], ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 9. To Aaron Hill, 12 July 1749, in Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 171. 10. See James Boswell, Life of Johnson, 2.173–75, 5 April 1772 (439). 11. Wordsworth twice invokes a phrase from Othello (1.3.135) in disavowing any narrative interest or proficiency in delivering surprising adventures. In “The Ruined Cottage,” the Pedlar says that his “common tale” is “By moving accidents uncharactered” (232); and in “Hart-Leap Well,” the narrator announces, “The moving accident is not my trade” (97). 12. Hartman sees “Strange Fits” as exemplifying a new kind of poetry “in which the passion driving the passion narrative need not be related to the heavens or cataclysm but is as ‘ordinary’ as mind itself: its everyday, imaginative responses to the natural world.” See “The Psycho-Aesthetics of Romantic Moonshine: Wordsworth’s Profane Illumination,” Wordsworth Circle 37, no. 1 [Winter 2006], 12. 13. The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 14. See Wimsatt, “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason,” in The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954). 15. In “The Language of Paradox,” the opening essay in The Well Wrought Urn, Brooks uses the “Westminster Bridge” sonnet as illustration of “the Romantic preoccupation with wonder—the surprise, the revelation which puts the tarnished familiar world in a new light” (7). He suggests that “the structure of the poem resembles that of a play” later in the book, in his essay, “The Heresy of Paraphrase” (186). 16. It is easy to see why Metaphysical poetry in particular appealed to Brooks, for its qualities of theatricality and wordplay offered ample illustration of his argument. Indeed, Brooks’s critical premises hark back to Renaissance poetics. As James

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 259

1/27/15 8:01 AM

260

NOT ES TO PAGES 1 8 1 –1 91

Biester (Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) has shown, the early modern fascination with states of wonder and awe can be seen in commentary on poetry and rhetoric—in an emphasis on the surprise of paradox or riddle, and the sudden illumination of an unexpected metaphor. 17. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Literary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 224–25. 18. For a study of the ways that Wordsworth and Coleridge strategically distanced themselves from gothic modes, see Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. chap. 3, on the Lyrical Ballads. In Gamer’s argument, neither poet could truly renounce the imaginative resources of the gothic, so both attacked reading predilections associated with it instead (103). 19. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, ed. W.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29. 20. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 21. In his reading of “The Solitary Reaper,” Hartman notes a “doubled shock”— the initial surprise of the Highland girl’s song followed by a pensive “inward sinking” (Wordsworth’s Poetry, 7). 22. For a consideration of the word “unawares” in the Boy of Winander episode, “Resolution and Independence,” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” see Steven Lukits, “Wordsworth Unawares,” Wordsworth Circle 19, no. 3 (Summer 1988), 156–60. 23. Adam Phillips, “On Being Bored,” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 68–69. 24. Paul de Man, “Wordsworth and Hölderlin,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 54. 25. As Duncan Wu suggests in Wordsworth’s Reading, 1770–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), the poet had likely first encountered Tristram Shandy at Hawkshead (132–33) but reacquainted himself with it in adult life. In a letter of 1791, he claims to have read only three volumes of the novel (EY 56); but in 1796, Dorothy reports that she has read it entire, and her brother probably shared that pleasure with her. 26. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin, 2003), 4.27.286. 27. Adam Potkay has placed “Surprised by Joy” within a rich intellectual history of joy. See The Story of Joy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For earlier readings of the poem, see David Ferry, The Limits of Mortality (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1959), 64–65; and Carl Woodring, Wordsworth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 171–72. Though both Woodring and Ferry articulate the element of guilt in the poem, neither critic sufficiently appreciates the resonance of the word “surprise.” The feeling of being “surprised by joy” is not purely (as Woodring puts it) “exultation at the sudden discovery of something deeply pleasing” (171–72). 28. The circumstances surrounding Catherine’s death are recounted in Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 286.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 260

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 1 9 4 – 2 0 1

261

29. See Sidney, An Apology for Poetry and Astrophil and Stella:Texts and Contexts, ed. Peter C. Herman (Glen Allen, VA: College Publishing, 2001),128. Wordsworth certainly admired Sidney’s sonnets, as his homage attests: a sonnet published in 1807 begins with Sidney’s own lines from Sonnet 31, “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climbst the sky, / How silently, and with how wan a face!” (1–2), 145. 30. These quotations come from the following poems: “At Applethwaite, Near Keswick” (1804, pub. 1842); “To the Memory of Raisley Calvert” (pub. 1807); “To Sleep”; “Hail, Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour!” (pub. 1815); “To the Lady Mary Lowther” (pub. 1820); “Brook! whose society the Poet seeks . . . ” (1806, pub. 1815); “To B.R. Haydon” (1831, pub. 1832); “Composed near Calais . . . ” (1802, pub. 1807); “London, 1802” (1802, pub. 1807); “England! the time is come” (1803, pub. 1807); and “The Oak of Guernica” (1810, pub. 1815). 31. This poem, simply entitled, “November, 1836,” is collected under the heading, “Miscellaneous Sonnets.” 32. C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955), 160. In Lewis’s memoir, “surprise” becomes almost synonymous with spiritual conversion. Lewis reads Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode as a expressing a tragically unredeemed sense of loss, but from the perspective of his Christian awakening, he cannot subscribe to the notion that a visionary gleam can ever definitively pass away (224). 33. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 20. Wittgenstein, Fisher notes, raised this issue when he asked in his Brown Notebook, “What does the ordinary feel like? Is it a feeling at all?” By implication, the feeling of surprise contrastively distinguishes the ordinary. 34. Brooks reads Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge” sonnet as a poem about the speaker’s “awed surprise” in discovering the beauty of an urban landscape where he expected to find none (The Well-Wrought Urn, 6). Brooks subsumes that feeling under his organizing concept of paradox, a major form of which is simply the discovery of the extraordinary in the ordinary. Chapter 8: “Fine Suddenness”

1. John Keats, Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970, rpt. 1992). To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817. Keats begins the letter by counseling his friend to adopt a stoic stance toward the ways of the world: “What occasions the greater part of the World’s Quarrels? simply this, two Minds meet and do not understand each other time enough to p[r]aevent any shock or surprise at the conduct of either party.” All quotations of Keats’s correspondence refer to this edition. 2. To John Taylor, 27 February 1818. 3. See Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism” (249–50), in The Poems of Alexander Pope [the Twickenham text], ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 4. To John Hamilton Reynolds, 7, 8 April 1817. 5. Stuart Sperry remarks in Keats the Poet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) that “the best of the early verse is characterized by the sudden start of surprise or recognition” (6). Stuart Ende in Keats and the Sublime (New Haven: Yale University

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 261

1/27/15 8:01 AM

262

NOT ES TO PAGES 2 0 2 –2 08

Press, 1976) finds a recurring trope of recognition and renewal in Keats’ poetry. One emotional ramification of surprise is embarrassment, which Christopher Ricks in Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974) has identified as the affective and moral coloring of Keats’s poetry. 6. Paul Ricoeur’s threefold definition of recognition offers further clarification: 1) to grasp an object through thought and to know it by memory; 2) to accept something as true; and 3) to bear witness of gratitude, as in acknowledging an indebtedness or attesting an abiding faith. See The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 12. 7. Helen Vendler has argued that Keats works in each ode to mask or reorder its “experiential beginning,” and that each affords a glimpse of what inspired it. See Vendler, “The Experiential Beginnings of Keats’s Odes,” Studies in Romanticism 12, no. 30 (Summer 1973), 591–606. The seeds of this essay would eventually become The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), which offered “conjectural reconstruction of the odes as they are invented, imagined put in sequence, and revised” (3). 8. To John Hamilton Reynolds, 3 February 1818. 9. To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27(?) December 1817. Though Keats professes to reject startlement for its own sake, Karen Swann sees something like that form of excess at work in Endymion. See Swann, “Endymion’s Beautiful Dreamers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 28. 10. William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), in Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 11. Hermione de Almeida, Romantic Medicine and John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 69. John Brown saw in the cycle of excitation and exhaustion a tendency in all creatures toward dissolution, an inertial momentum which could be only temporarily halted by outside forces, and he saw life itself as a “forced state.” 12. Keats suggests that his presumption lies in following the path of Leigh Hunt, whose Spenserian Story of Rimini had recently been published. It is odd to suggest that Spenser would be taken aback by Keats’s desire to rival Hunt rather than Spenser himself. The suggestion seems both a sincere compliment to and a playful jousting with an early mentor; but in the retrospect of Keats’s career, it also raises the possibility that there might be too many poets crowding the path to Spenserian glory, and that another course might be more worth pursuing. 13. John Keats, Complete Poems, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). All quotations of Keats’s poetry refer to this edition. 14. The Keats Circle, vol. 1, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 94. 15. To the George Keatses, 14–31 October 1818. 16. Ricks (Keats and Embarrassment) has suggested that “the delicate humanity of the letter comes out of embarrassment,” particularly the awkwardness of the nearkiss (220). 17. The poems that Keats wrote on his northern walking tour in the summer of 1818 necessarily record first experiences (e.g., “On Visiting the Tomb of Burns”),

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 262

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 2 0 9 – 2 1 6

263

but they reflect a growing disenchantment with touristic reportage, with its constant readiness to be amazed. The doggerel poem, “There was a naughty boy,” which Keats sent to his sister, comically registers this feeling. 18. This indirection might be described, in Vendler’s terms, as the effect of abstract thought supervening upon the actual; but it can also be seen as a specialized case of Keatsian surprise, with its mixture of the startling and the familiar. 19. In Coming of Age as a Poet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), Helen Vendler sees this poem as “perfecting” Keats’s earlier labors in the sonnet form, and the sign of a new poetic maturity (55). 20. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. David Scott Kastan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005), 2.750–52. 21. For a reading that places the poem within the ekphrastic tradition and the contemporary dialogue surrounding the Elgin Marbles, see Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NJ: University Press of New England, 1994). Scott remarks that the poem “transforms the traditional ekphrastic impulse to narrate the artwork into a desire to narrate the self watching the artwork” (45). 22. To Benjamin Bailey, 23 January 1818. 23. Walter Jackson Bate discusses the circumstances of Keats’s writing of the poem in John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 285–86. 24. John L. Waltman discusses Hunt’s collection in “ ‘And Beauty Draws Us With a Single Hair’: Leigh Hunt as Collector,” Keats-Shelley Memorial Association Bulletin [Keats-Shelley Review] 31 (1980), 61–67. In addition to the samples from Milton, Swift, and Johnson, Hunt acquired locks from Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy and Mary Shelley, Lamb, Carlyle, Hazlitt, and the Brownings, as well as Napoleon and George Washington. Each specimen was mounted on a leaf opposite a print depicting the original bearer and kept in an envelope containing the name and details of acquisition. 25. Susan Stewart, On Longing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 155. For a study of Romantic-era collecting, see Judith Pascoe, The Hummingbird Cabinet: A Rare and Curious History of Romantic Collectors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). Pascoe sees the Romantic fascination with collections as reflecting an acute awareness of the necessarily incomplete recovery of history. 26. The Selected Writings of Leigh Hunt, ed. John Strachan (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), 5:232. Hunt’s three sonnets are respectively titled “To — —, M. D., On his giving me a lock of Milton’s hair,” “To the Same on the Same Subject,” and “To the Same on the Same Occasion.” The second in the series, the octave of which is quoted here, is the one that became known as “On a lock of Milton’s hair” from 1832 onward. 27. Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 225. 28. The “Ode to Psyche” is one of two odes that Vendler excludes from her essay on experiential beginnings (“Indolence” is the other), because its origin is a “selfinduced” vision of two mythical creatures (592). 29. For a detailed consideration of the poem’s structures of recapitulation, see Vendler’s reading of the ode in The Odes of John Keats. Vendler argues that the ode “declares, by its words and by its shape, that the creation of art requires the complete

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 263

1/27/15 8:01 AM

264

NOT ES TO PAGES 2 1 7 –2 29

replacement of all memory and sense-experience by an entire duplication of the external world within the artist’s brain” (49). 30. To Benjamin Bailey, 21, 25 May 1818. 31. Despite her speculation about experiential origins, Vendler allows that if Melancholy is actually “intrinsic to life,” then the poet doesn’t need the mistress’s rage as precipitant (597). 32. David Bromwich (“Keats and the Aesthetic Ideal,” in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial Essays on Keats, ed. Robert M. Ryan and Ronald M. Sharp [Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998], 183–188) has suggested that in Keats’s poetry, sensations are “neither enjoyed nor suffered, but rather are absorbed for the sake of self-concentration or an intensification that changes their character” (185). 33. To Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817. 34. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1991), 33. Epilogue

1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” Essays: First and Second Series (New York: Vintage Books/Library of America, 1990), 253. 2. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Charlotte Mitchell (London: Penguin, 1996), 4. 3. Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 175. 4. See A Tale of Two Cities, ed. Richard Maxwell (London: Penguin, 2003), 134. 5. See Bleak House, ed. J. Hillis Miller (London: Penguin, 1971), 720–21. 6. See Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 9–10. Greene coins the phrase “conceptual envelope” to describe what happens when “a phenomenon known through direct experience moves within several intersecting planes of received knowledge.” 7. See Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf, 1980, 1991). Hughes tells a story of modern art that emphasizes challenges to familiar ways of seeing, but he also insists that even as some developments became conventional, they have retained their power to shock, even on repeated viewings. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), for instance, “is still a disturbing painting . . . a refutation of the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fashion, must necessarily wear off ” (21). 8. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961), 33. 9. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, 2nd ed., ed. Jeanne Schulkind (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1985), 72. 10. Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, ed. Derek Brewer (London: Penguin, 1987), 33. 11. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, ed. Roger Tennant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), xxxiii. 12. Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 175, 163. “Of all the experiences which made his life what it was, Baudelaire singled out his having been jostled by the crowd as the decisive, unique experience” (193).

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 264

1/27/15 8:01 AM

N OT ES TO PA G ES 2 2 9 – 2 3 0

265

13. “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions,” Benjamin (“On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”) notes in Freudian terms, “the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli, the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour of one’s life (Erlebnis)” (163). This is a political as well as aesthetic caveat, in that Benjamin makes a Marxist connection between the urban crowd and the modern factory: “The shock-experience which the passer-by has in the crowd corresponds to what the worker ‘experiences’ at his new machine” (176). 14. Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller (London: NLB, 1983), 116. 15. Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 3. 16. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84–258.

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 265

1/27/15 8:01 AM

552-58732_ch01_3P.indd 266

1/27/15 8:01 AM

c In dex

Accident, philosophical concept of, 10, 136 Addison, Joseph, 7, 12, 22–24, 26, 48, 61, 74–76, 94, 98, 116, 117, 123, 128, 139, 143, 152, 176, 231 Aesthetics, discourse of, 7, 13, 19, 22–24, 26–27, 30–31, 33, 238n24 Alighieri, Dante: trope of contraposso, 55, 127; Vita Nova, 171 Allegory: function of surprise in, 4, 7; in realist fiction, 11; in The Faerie Queene, 45–47; in Keats, 205; in Pamela, 89–90, 99, 103–4, 106; in Paradise Lost, 11, 47–51, 242n19, 243n28; in Wordsworth, 192; theory of, 39–40 Amygdala, function of, 35–36 Aquinas, Thomas, 52 Aristotle, 6, 11–12, 16–18, 22, 25, 48, 50, 52, 117, 123, 135, 137, 148 Astonishment, 20–22, 25, 27–28, 70, 125 Austen, Jane, 14, 31; Emma, 141, 144, 160; letters, 151–52; Northanger Abbey, 11–12, 31–32, 141–42, 144–47, 150–65; Persuasion, 147, 166–70; Sense and Sensibility, 143 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 126, 230 Baudelaire, Charles, 227, 230 Benjamin, Walter, 224, 229–30 Blair, Hugh, 27–28 Boredom, 7, 185 Brooks, Cleanth, 32, 180, 197 Burke, Edmund, 26–27, 30–31, 64, 183, 229 Burney, Frances, 155, 163 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 8, 159 Calvinism, 11, 65, 135, 235n24, 244n5 Casuistry, in Robinson Crusoe, 80 Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Pardoner’s Tale, 45 Cleland, John: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 97–98 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 171 Conrad, Joseph: The Secret Agent, 228–29

Defoe, Daniel: A Journal of the Plague Year, 86; Robinson Crusoe, 7–8, 63–88, 90, 111, 115–16, 125, 160, 175, 197; Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, 4, 10–11, 78–80, 86 De Man, Paul, 181, 186 Dennis, John, 22–23 Descartes, René, 19–21, 35, 41, 62, 135, 174, 237n17 Dickens, Charles, 224–25 Don Quixote, 131 Doody, Margaret, 91, 92, 102 Dryden, John, 18, 176 Ekman, Paul, 35–36 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 100, 223 Emotion: in ancient Greek thought, 17; in Cartesian philosophy, 20; in Hume, 25; in neuroscience, 35; in psychology, 35–36, 118; in Stoic philosophy, 34; in visual art, 21–22 Epiphany, 171–73, 186, 192 Fielding, Henry, 5, 8, 12, 115, 223; Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, 121; Deist beliefs, 131; Joseph Andrews, 11, 122–23, 125–34, 225; Miscellanies, 132; Tom Jones, 31, 116–17, 122 Fielding, Sarah: The Adventures of David Simple, 124 Fish, Stanley, 11, 40, 44 Fisher, Philip, 196, 236n3 Freud, Sigmund: on trauma, 48, 53, 120, 135, 136, 226, 227 Garrick, David, 119 Gender, relation to surprise, 12–13, 89–90, 96–97, 102, 111, 116, 123–24, 125, 128–29, 136, 142, 146, 150–58, 230–31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 178

267

552-58732_ch02_3P.indd 267

1/27/15 7:50 AM

268

IND EX

Gothic fiction, 14, 32, 124, 138, 141, 145, 147–50, 156, 158, 161, 165, 169, 179, 197, 226, 231, 257n18 Gunpowder: moral critique of, 53; in New World encounters, 67; in Lockean anecdote, 68; in Robinson Crusoe, 69–71; in Joseph Andrews, 131 Hartley, David, 188 Hartman, Geoffrey, 173 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 33–34 Haywood, Eliza, 12–13, 91, 94–97, 248nn14,16; Fantomina, 97; The Surprise, or Constancy Rewarded, 94–96 Hazlitt, William, 221 Herbert, George, 101 Hill, Aaron, 100; Essay on the Art of Acting, 127; The Walking Statue, 129 Hitchcock, Alfred, 18 Hobbes, Thomas, 85 Hogarth, William, 117, 126 Horace, 7, 23–24, 94 Hume, David, 24, 51, 135, 183, 195, 196, 254n39 Hunt, Leigh, 210–13 Hunter, J. Paul, 2, 120, 247n8 James, Henry, 228 Johnson, Samuel, 4, 22, 25–26, 48, 143, 151, 177, 200 Joyce, James, 172 Kagan, Jerome, 4, 35, 156 Keats, John: Endymion, 203, 206, 207, 210; Hyperion, 199; “I Stood Tip-toe Upon a Little Hill,” 201, 204, 205; Lamia, 206; Letters, 199, 200, 203, 207, 210, 217; “Lines on Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” 208, 210, 212–13; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 211, 221; “Ode on Indolence,” 221; “Ode on Melancholy,” 201, 214, 216, 218–22; “Ode to a Nightingale,” 221; “Ode to Psyche,” 202, 206, 214–16; “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” 206, 208, 209; “On the Sea,” 206; “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” 208, 209–10; “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” 213–14; “Sleep and Poetry,” 205–6; “Specimen of an Induction to a Poem,” 205; “To Autumn,” 221; “To Haydon with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin

552-58732_ch02_3P.indd 268

Marbles,” 210; “Why Did I Laugh Tonight?,” 216–19 Le Brun, Charles, 21–22, 35, 126–27, 174, 204 Lewis, C.S., 196 Locke, John, 3, 10, 25, 68, 188 Lukacs, Georg, 66 McKeon, Michael, 9, 63, 91–92, 116, 235n26, 247n8, 249n30 Melville, Herman, 225–26 Miller, D.A., 110, 143 Milton, John: Christian Doctrine, 41–42, 43–44; conception of free will, 38–39, 43–44, 241n12, 243n27; “L’Allegro,” 219; materialist philosophy, 41, 56; Paradise Lost, 4, 38–45, 47–62, 127, 190, 196–97, 209, 211 Novel: genre of, 2, 9, 19, 29; as laboratory, 120, 133; as trial narrative, 117, 119–20 Oracles, 106 Orlando Furioso, 111 Ovid, idea of metamorphosis, 4, 22, 40, 55, 60, 101, 124, 127, 129, 139 Passions: concept of, 5, 20, 38, 219; in The Faerie Queene, 45–46; in novelistic mimesis, 9; in Paradise Lost, 38–39, 54; in Robinson Crusoe, 64 Petrarch, 171 Phillips, Adam: on flirtation, 146; on boredom, 185 Pope, Alexander: Essay on Criticism, 176–77, 200; Peri Bathous, 122; The Rape of the Lock, 12 Probability, 26, 78–79, 158–59, 161, 162, 165, 257n29 Protestantism: conceptions of Providence in, 105, 133, 135, 159; idea of grace in, 196, 223 Psycholinguistics, 5 Puritanism, 65, 244n6, 245n13 Radcliffe, Ann, 8, 169; The Mysteries of Udolpho, 154; The Italian, 145, 149–50, 182 Richardson, Jonathan, 24 Richardson, Samuel, 12, 31; Letters, 93–94, 100, 114; Pamela, 4, 10–11, 89–92, 99–114, 115–16, 119, 151; Pamela II, 114, 177 Richetti, John, 66

1/27/15 7:50 AM

INDEX

269

Todorov, Tzvetan, 143 Tragedy, 17–18; in Paradise Lost, 47, 50, 52

Walpole, Horace, 8, 169; The Castle of Otranto, 124, 145, 147–49, 161, 182 Warner, William, 10, 90, 91–92 Watt, Ian, 9, 19, 75 Wharton, Edith: The House of Mirth, 230–32 Wonder: intellectual history of, 18–19; in Burke, 26–27; in Cartesian philosophy, 20–21; in Johnson’s criticism, 26; in Hugh Blair’s rhetoric, 28; in Paradise Lost, 50, 52; in Plato, 17, 236n3; in The Faerie Queene, 51; in Shakespeare, 104 Woolf, Virginia, 75, 227–28 Wordsworth, William, 199, 201, 205, 217, 229; “Characteristics of a Child Three Years Old,” 193, 195; “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” 193, 197; “The Idiot Boy,” 181; “My Heart Leaps Up,” 197; “A Night Piece,” 173, 193, 197; “Nutting,” 172; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 172, 175; Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 175–86, 184; The Prelude, 171, 175, 183–86; “Resolution and Independence,” 172, 197; “The Ruined Cottage,” 172; “She Was a Phantom of Delight,” 179; “Strange Fits of Passion,” 177, 218; “Surprised by Joy,” 190–91, 194–96, 217; “To H.C., Six Years Old,” 177; “The Two April Mornings,” 186–90; “Westminster Bridge” sonnet, 197; “A Whirl-Blast from a Hill,” 193, 206

Vendler, Helen, 218, 262n7, 263n19

Yeazell, Ruth, 102, 165

Shaftesbury, Anthony Astley Cooper, Third Earl of, 23, 236n13 Shakespeare, William, 3–4, 104 Shklovsky, Viktor, 33 Shock: in Aristotle’s Poetics, 6; modern conceptions of, 226–27 Sidney, Sir Philip, 194, 238n23 Smith, Adam, 27; The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 28–31 Smith, Charlotte, 178–79 Southwell, Robert, 192–93 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 7 Spenser, Edmund, 44–45; The Faerie Queene, 4, 45–47, 51, 53 Spoiler alerts, 2–3, 31 Startle reflex, 3, 5, 35–36, 118, 150, 202–3 Sterne, Laurence, 5, 8, 31; sermons, 125; Tristram Shandy, 134–40, 179, 187–88, 224 Stoicism, 25–26, 34, 131, 133–34, 138, 151, 166–67 Sublime, the, 19, 24, 26–27, 148, 249n21, 257n18 Surprise: etymology of, 3, 38, 42–43; as reflection of youth, 146; in Cartesian philosophy, 20; in Johnson’s Dictionary, 4; in lyric form, 176–80, 198; in modern emotion theory, 4–5; in music, 33–34; in New Criticism, 180–81

552-58732_ch02_3P.indd 269

1/27/15 7:50 AM

552-58732_ch02_3P.indd 270

1/27/15 7:50 AM